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[[Template:Archive top]] leaves a huge amount (''multiple'' screens) of blank space (shaded purple by the default background color of the template) between its <code>result=</code> argument and the actual discussion being archived by the template on the [[Chrome browser]] on an [[Google Android|Android]] smartphone (there is no such problem on Chrome when I tested on a [[Microsoft Windows|Windows]] laptop). For an example, see any archived topic (topic to which the template has been applied) in [[Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Archive300]]. —[[User:Lowellian|Lowellian]] ([[User talk:Lowellian|reply]]) 00:32, 2 August 2018 (UTC)
[[Template:Archive top]] leaves a huge amount (''multiple'' screens) of blank space (shaded purple by the default background color of the template) between its <code>result=</code> argument and the actual discussion being archived by the template on the [[Chrome browser]] on an [[Google Android|Android]] smartphone (there is no such problem on Chrome when I tested on a [[Microsoft Windows|Windows]] laptop). For an example, see any archived topic (topic to which the template has been applied) in [[Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Archive300]]. —[[User:Lowellian|Lowellian]] ([[User talk:Lowellian|reply]]) 00:32, 2 August 2018 (UTC)

:I can confirm the same on my device on mobile Android in Chrome. Firefox does not have an issue that I observed (but I wasn't being particularly observant). --[[User:Izno|Izno]] ([[User talk:Izno|talk]]) 01:40, 2 August 2018 (UTC)
:I can confirm the same on my device on mobile Android in Chrome. Firefox does not have an issue that I observed (but I wasn't being particularly observant). --[[User:Izno|Izno]] ([[User talk:Izno|talk]]) 01:40, 2 August 2018 (UTC)
::This has been happening since [[phab:T160946]]. Since we now have template styles, we should get the overrides on quotebox removed and then setting it directly from {{tl|quotebox}}. —[[User:TheDJ|Th<span style="color: green">e</span>DJ]] ([[User talk:TheDJ|talk]] • [[Special:Contributions/TheDJ|contribs]]) 05:28, 2 August 2018 (UTC)
::This has been happening since [[phab:T160946]]. Since we now have template styles, we should get the overrides on quotebox removed and then setting it directly from {{tl|quotebox}}. —[[User:TheDJ|Th<span style="color: green">e</span>DJ]] ([[User talk:TheDJ|talk]] • [[Special:Contributions/TheDJ|contribs]]) 05:28, 2 August 2018 (UTC)

:::{{ping|TheDJ|Anomie}} Thank you, TheDJ, for the preparatory edits made at [[Template:Quote box/styles.css]]. Any idea of a timeline for when the full changes can be made and the spacing fixed? —[[User:Lowellian|Lowellian]] ([[User talk:Lowellian|reply]]) 18:54, 10 August 2018 (UTC)
:::{{ping|TheDJ|Anomie}} Thank you, TheDJ, for the preparatory edits made at [[Template:Quote box/styles.css]]. Any idea of a timeline for when the full changes can be made and the spacing fixed? —[[User:Lowellian|Lowellian]] ([[User talk:Lowellian|reply]]) 18:54, 10 August 2018 (UTC)

::::{{replyto|Lowellian}} the patch to remove the quotebox styling in the server software was merged a day ago. So should arrive in the next deploy train, which for en.wp is on thursday. —[[User:TheDJ|Th<span style="color: green">e</span>DJ]] ([[User talk:TheDJ|talk]] • [[Special:Contributions/TheDJ|contribs]]) 19:40, 10 August 2018 (UTC)
::::{{replyto|Lowellian}} the patch to remove the quotebox styling in the server software was merged a day ago. So should arrive in the next deploy train, which for en.wp is on thursday. —[[User:TheDJ|Th<span style="color: green">e</span>DJ]] ([[User talk:TheDJ|talk]] • [[Special:Contributions/TheDJ|contribs]]) 19:40, 10 August 2018 (UTC)

:::::{{ping|TheDJ|Anomie}} Thursday has passed, but the problem is still there... —[[User:Lowellian|Lowellian]] ([[User talk:Lowellian|reply]]) 14:24, 17 August 2018 (UTC)

:Also {{plain link|url=https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Archive300&mobileaction=toggle_view_mobile|name=in ''mobile view''}} in Chrome, Firefox and Safari on Mac, in case it matters. But not in every archived topic in the example [[WP:Administrators' noticeboard/Archive300]], just some of them. --[[User:Pipetricker|Pipetricker]] ([[User talk:Pipetricker|talk]]) 11:32, 2 August 2018 (UTC)
:Also {{plain link|url=https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Archive300&mobileaction=toggle_view_mobile|name=in ''mobile view''}} in Chrome, Firefox and Safari on Mac, in case it matters. But not in every archived topic in the example [[WP:Administrators' noticeboard/Archive300]], just some of them. --[[User:Pipetricker|Pipetricker]] ([[User talk:Pipetricker|talk]]) 11:32, 2 August 2018 (UTC)

::Ah, okay, thank you, I see. The problem isn't occurring specifically with Chrome for Android, but instead for any browser on the mobile version of Wikipedia. —[[User:Lowellian|Lowellian]] ([[User talk:Lowellian|reply]]) 16:37, 2 August 2018 (UTC)
::Ah, okay, thank you, I see. The problem isn't occurring specifically with Chrome for Android, but instead for any browser on the mobile version of Wikipedia. —[[User:Lowellian|Lowellian]] ([[User talk:Lowellian|reply]]) 16:37, 2 August 2018 (UTC)



Revision as of 14:24, 17 August 2018

 Policy Technical Proposals Idea lab WMF Miscellaneous 
The technical section of the village pump is used to discuss technical issues about Wikipedia. Bug reports and feature requests should be made in Phabricator (see how to report a bug). Bugs with security implications should be reported differently (see how to report security bugs).

Newcomers to the technical village pump are encouraged to read these guidelines prior to posting here. If you want to report a JavaScript error, please follow this guideline. Questions about MediaWiki in general should be posted at the MediaWiki support desk.


Enabling Twinkle on other-language Wikipedia

Hello everybody!

I'm Dr. Sroy , here asking for a help...

I'm interested in developing "small wikis" and currently working on the Tsonga wiki just technically (since I don't know the language).

To my knowledge, Twinkle works on a mediawiki code ...

mw.loader.load(['ext.gadget.Twinkle'])

This is what I have written in my monobook.js there!

But I'm not getting any sign of Twinkle while editing. What to do? How to enable it?

Thanks in advance... ARKA (talk) 06:04, 1 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

No one to help? ARKA (talk) 07:49, 1 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Dr. Sroy: Twinkle doesn't appear to be installed on the Tsonga wiki. See Wikipedia:Twinkle/Localisation. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE
) 14:10, 1 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Hello, Dr. Sroy. I believe that User:Sj did something similar for a small wiki, and I have tried to help out at the Haitian Creole Wikipedia, despite not speaking that language (or French, which would be very helpful there).
Are you sure that you want to do this? Between one thing and another, I've edited dozens of wikis, but I have never missed Twinkle at small wikis. It requires a lot of infrastructure and hassle to copy, translate, and maintain dozens of message templates. Small wikis usually do better with personal messages, limited bureaucratic processes, and few tools. They don't have – or want, or benefit from – three separate processes for deleting articles and further pages for deleting, merging, renaming, or redirecting other types of pages. The number of changes is so small, and the proportion of spammers and vandals is so low, that there really are few uses for Twinkle. Speaking for myself, the only template that I regularly want at a small template is Template:Thank you.
Since you seem technically minded, I'd like to suggest an alternative project that I think would ultimately be more productive. I think that your time would be better spent importing (use Special:Import; it's nearly impossible to do manually) the WP:CS1 citation templates and getting the mw:citoid service set up at that wiki. Ping me if you're interested in trying that out. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:58, 2 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@WhatamIdoing: Thanks for your comments. Yes , like you , I also think importing pages seems to be best alternative! But since importing is limited to the admins and importers, its practically impossible for me to perform importing. The only admin User:Thuvack is very inactive and not responsive as well (I emailed him regarding my willingness last week; getting no response yet ). An inactive admin(and the only admin) might lead to the poor growth of any small wiki.
As you stated,
 ...and I have tried to help out at the Haitian Creole Wikipedia, despite not speaking that language (or French, which would be very helpful there).  
I think we should maintain the language of a particular wiki . As in Tsonga wiki , English would work more than enough. But this hampers Wikipedia moto of "creating an encyclopedia of all human knowledge" gets deprived in that language.
As a possible solution, I requested there for admin rights. Here is the so-called RfA:
Extended content
Candidates for Admin Rights
  • Hello everybody, I am Dr. Sroy, here nominating myself as a candidate for being granted the Adminship in this wiki.
  • ISSUES
    • I am not a native speaker of Xitsonga nor does understand the language. I have a native understanding of English and a native speaker of Bengali.
    • My joining to this wiki is not older than a month!
    • I am experienced on the English wiki and willing to develop this wiki technically. I am very much worried for the fact that this wiki being about 10 years old but have very little development!
    • Perhaps the reason is lack of proper interface and gadgets available. Only 15 active editors hang out in this wiki where the only native editor seems to be Thuvack. But he being the only administrator , might be overburdened with responsibility.
    • If I become another administrator or sysop , the first work that I want to do is importing MediaWiki files and modules from the English Wikipedia.
    • Being a technical helping hand, this might ease the work of Thuvack editing the mainspace articles. Importing the said files might unlock awesome tools like WP:Stiki and Twinkle.
    • Knowing that Thuvack can do the above purposes but if I am allowed to do so ,the work would be quite faster!
    • At last, I wish a great future of this wiki with a rapid growth in the near future!

Hopefully, Dr. Sroy (talk) 15:56, 2 Mhawuri 2018 (UTC)

... I can just hope ARKA (talk) 13:24, 3 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I think that you can ask for help with importing the citation templates at m:Steward requests/Miscellaneous. The instructions about how to make a request are at the top of the page. (I thought I'd read once that you need to be an admin at *both* wikis to be able to use Special:Import.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:57, 6 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@WhatamIdoing: Ok checking it! Although being an admin there has lot more advantages. Thus I am still longing for it. Do you have any advice? Dr. Sroy(aka.ARKA) (talk) 20:12, 6 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
You may want both: someone (experienced) to import those templates, and local admin status to do other things. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:49, 6 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Hello all -- this is a nice thing to do. You can also ask for temporary adminship rather than permanent. Agreed that you should have someone w/ small-wiki import experience to do the templating. I never used Twinkle on small wikis; just did editing work by hand... there are other Small wiki monitoring tools you may find helpful.h – SJ + 20:42, 7 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks all, for your kind support. I'm still missing Twinkle there especially when handling with long Lua modules. I have created a more/less edit friendly technical background with several templates and modules. I have also started article expansion but still require some native support as such there is no way to learn the language . Thuvack: Perhaps The only "active" native speaker has "not been active" since days! Thanks again!

Dr. Sroy(aka.ARKA) (talk) 05:28, 8 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

 Done I'm admin now! Following procedures, advised to me. Dr. Sroy(aka.ARKA) (talk) 13:59, 10 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Template:Archive top huge spacing problem on mobile

Template:Archive top leaves a huge amount (multiple screens) of blank space (shaded purple by the default background color of the template) between its result= argument and the actual discussion being archived by the template on the Chrome browser on an Android smartphone (there is no such problem on Chrome when I tested on a Windows laptop). For an example, see any archived topic (topic to which the template has been applied) in Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Archive300. —Lowellian (reply) 00:32, 2 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I can confirm the same on my device on mobile Android in Chrome. Firefox does not have an issue that I observed (but I wasn't being particularly observant). --Izno (talk) 01:40, 2 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
This has been happening since phab:T160946. Since we now have template styles, we should get the overrides on quotebox removed and then setting it directly from {{quotebox}}. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 05:28, 2 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@TheDJ and Anomie: Thank you, TheDJ, for the preparatory edits made at Template:Quote box/styles.css. Any idea of a timeline for when the full changes can be made and the spacing fixed? —Lowellian (reply) 18:54, 10 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Lowellian: the patch to remove the quotebox styling in the server software was merged a day ago. So should arrive in the next deploy train, which for en.wp is on thursday. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 19:40, 10 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@TheDJ and Anomie: Thursday has passed, but the problem is still there... —Lowellian (reply) 14:24, 17 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Also in mobile view in Chrome, Firefox and Safari on Mac, in case it matters. But not in every archived topic in the example WP:Administrators' noticeboard/Archive300, just some of them. --Pipetricker (talk) 11:32, 2 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, okay, thank you, I see. The problem isn't occurring specifically with Chrome for Android, but instead for any browser on the mobile version of Wikipedia. —Lowellian (reply) 16:37, 2 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Problems with the syntax highlighter (Codemirror)

Pasting text problem

I've had the same problem appear twice in recent days when copying and pasting text into an edit window. The last time (today) was at WP:ANI, but I can't remember where the first was. What happens is that I get an edit conflict, so I go back a page in my browser and copy the text I was trying to add from the edit window. I then visit the page afresh, navigate to and edit the relevant section, and try to paste in the text... but all it pastes is a single red bullet point. I've no idea whether the copy from the original edit window or the paste into the new edit window is the problem - I forgot to try pasting it elsewhere before going back and doing the whole thing again (successfully that time). Has anyone else had this problem? (Mac OSX 10.11.6, Firefox 61.0.1). Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 12:49, 2 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Which mw:editor are you using? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:25, 2 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The plain default text editor. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 17:33, 2 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The plain one is not the default. ;-)
When you created your accout, the default was a gray-ish row of buttons, about a centimeter high and usually extending half or more of the way across the editing window (depending upon screen size, obviously). It is old and creaky and going to be removed, but it is preferred by WPMATH folks because it includes a sup and sub buttons at the main level. This is the 2006 wikitext editor. The current default is the 2010 wikitext editor, which is light blue and has nested menus (e.g., "Advanced"). The plain one is the 2003 editor, and it's the only option if you have Javascript disabled. It has no toolbar.
But none of those three should be causing problems with pasting. Do you have syntax highlighting turned on? (Otherwise, there shouldn't be anything red in a wikitext editor, right?) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:36, 2 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, I didn't know the word "plain" had a special meaning ;-) The editor I'm using appears to be the 2010 wikitext editor, and has a pale blue toolbar with "Advanced" etc. It does show syntax highlighting in colour, but the "Syntax highlighter: color wiki syntax in the edit box for clarity (works best in Firefox and works almost all of the time in Chrome and Opera)" option in Gadgets Preferences is disabled. I can't see any other preferences that might be relevant. I'm remembering enabling it at one time, maybe in Beta Preferences, but I can't see anything there now. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 18:47, 2 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
BsZ, in the edit box toolbar, is there a little marker button, just next to the "Advanced" menu? Try toggling that. ~ Amory (utc) 19:15, 2 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Indeed there is, and yes, that toggles the syntax highlighting, thanks. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 19:26, 2 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

There's a second copy and paste problem, which I've seen a few times though not recently, but it just happened this morning. It's when copying and pasting within the same editor window, and it happens with syntax highlighting switched on (I don't know if it happens with it switched off). I copy a piece of text, for example part of someone else's comment, and then I paste it into my new comment so I can reply to it. I then start typing - and my new words appear in two places, the original place I copied from and the new place I pasted to. There are two cursors and two text insertion positions. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 08:42, 3 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

How do I turn off the new editing screen? / Is anyone else having insert point problems with chrome on Android? [WP only, other apps ok].

Since the new 'intelligent' editing screen came online, I'm experiencing really annoying system behaviour - but only with Chrome on Android tablet, it seems to work fine with Firefox on Windows: for example each time I want to change the insert point [e.g., to go back and revise something i wrote a few sentences ago] I have to dismiss the keyboard, select new insert point, reinvoke keyboard, make the change, rinse, repeat . Sometimes my editing appears ok but then preview shows it as not done or partially done (see Myanmar/Samoa at https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Acre&diff=prev&oldid=852955780 for an example). Selecting a block of text with a view to cut/paste is at best hit-and-misd but usually miss. This experience is unique to Wikipedia, i don't see it with using chrome on any other site.
Has anyone else seen this and more importantly in the meantime how do I turn off this new "enhanced" editing screen. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 19:41, 2 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@John Maynard Friedman: To turn it off, in Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures, remove the checkmark next to "New wikitext mode", and then press the save button at the bottom of the page. You may also want to remove the checkmark next to "Automatically enable all new beta features" before saving.
I have issues editing in it with Firefox on Android mobile right now (though it doesn't look like I am having your issue), but I also get a message saying that platform isn't supported, so who knows. --Izno (talk) 20:53, 2 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, @Izno:. Unfortunately that check-box was (and still is) clear - but my current editing screen looks exactly like the sample shown for "new wikitext mode", exactly as though it is active. I have checked it anyway and saved, no change; cleared it again and saved, still no change. ("Automatically enable" was and still is off). wibble wibble wibble. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 21:37, 2 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@John Maynard Friedman: Did you try WP:BYC? --Izno (talk) 01:19, 3 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, but no effect. Thank you anyway. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 09:11, 3 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
John Maynard Friedman, do you have this symbol in the editing toolbar? If so, click it. --Pipetricker (talk) 08:46, 3 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Yes! That has solved the problem!
So it seems there must be a Chrome/Android-specific bug with that syntax highlighting function. [Philosophically, it seems to me, previous selection of that function ought to be visible somewhere in user preferences, since it is persistent between sessions and across platforms]. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 09:11, 3 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@John Maynard Friedman: Can you, on your Android, with that same browser go to http://www.whatsmyua.info and report back the User agent string? That will help narrow down the range of broken browsers, and then maybe the syntax highlighting mode can be automatically disabled for those devices. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 09:59, 3 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/67.0.3396.87 Safari/537.36

--John Maynard Friedman (talk) 12:46, 3 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Article's first and second paragraph appear in reverse order in mobile view

There is an issue with how the article Lord Byron displays in mobile view. For further information please see Talk:Lord Byron#Technical issue. Thank you, DuncanHill (talk) 15:46, 5 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I fixed the symptom, but not the bug causing it. --Pipetricker (talk) 18:16, 5 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Pipetricker: Kind of unrelated but why in mobile view the infobox is placed between the first and second paragraph? Hddty. (talk) 08:49, 6 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Hddty.: Because WMF research showed that people need an introduction before the infobox. If you think about it, on desktop we also first have the lead paragraph and then the infobox. It's just that axis' sort of flip when we are on mobile. This effect is a bit hard to accomplish with purely styling however, so the mobile website does some serverside reordering. Its not ideal and I think eventually we should get rid of it, but how to do that might require the web to take a few more steps forward. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 09:09, 6 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@TheDJ: I agree with this. Also do you know that the infobox also placed like this in tablet computer, although in tablet the infobox placement similar to desktop? (if you are on desktop try switch to mobile view on desktop). Hddty. (talk) 04:14, 8 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I've found two more pages that show the bug: Bere Regis (tickled by an unmatched parenthesis) and Gordon Brown (tickled somehow by {{postnom}}). Hairy Dude (talk) 12:18, 9 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Inter-template linkages must be documented at both ends

A major frustration when trying to de-lint, debug, or just understand templates is when a <div>, <table>, or {| is opened in one template and not closed there. One wonders whether it is an error or whether some other template closes it. I believe that, whenever a template intentionally has unclosed one or more tags that are closed elsewhere, or one or more closing tags that intentionally close a tag opened elsewhere, there should be a mandatory HTML comment saying that the tag is intentionally missing its pair and where the opening or closing tag is located. Not doing this is worse, for example, than mixing mdy and dmy dates or using bad punctuation, because those, at least, can be trivially fixed, but Wikipedians can study this kind of bad coding for hours. —Anomalocaris (talk) 00:01, 8 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

It would actually help VisualEditor if this was not just a comment, but some kind of machine-readable tag or code, to show that the template contains partial markup. I wonder if Cscott has any thoughts on this — This, that and the other (talk) 02:32, 8 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@This, that, and the other: phab:T114445? :) --Izno (talk) 02:44, 8 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I am pleased that there is some interest in this topic. According to Outstanding linter errors on enwiki, there are 6,825 missing end tag lint errors and 4,404 stripped tags lint errors (closing tags without paired opening tags) in the Template namespace. Here are the lists:
There are numerous very likely careless missing end tags for <p>, <i>, <small>, <font>, but also plenty of intentional missing end tags for <table> and <div>.
A related problem is templates that have table row markup with either or both of <table> and </table> located elsewhere.
Here are some among probably thousands of examples of this problem for templates involving table markup:
<table> <tr> </table>
Portal:Globalization/Header ?
{{S-start}} {{S-break}}
and many others
{{S-end}}
{{AFC statistics/header}} {{AFC statistics/footer}}
{{OntMPP}} {{OntMPP End}}
{{Graphic novel list/header}} {{Graphic novel list}} {{Graphic novel list/footer}}
{{Begin flag gallery}} {{Flag entry}} {{End flag gallery}}
{{Sumo record box start}} {{Sumo record year start}}
{{Sumo record year end}}
{{Sumo record box end}}
The first example is where I started. This template is a sub-template of Portal:Globalization, which is messy and I don't know if all table tags are properly paired and if so where the tags are all located.
I wonder if we should start a separate article somewhere for tracking templates with undocumented external opening or closing tags (or unbracketed table row and cell markup), with a column to note that comments have been duly inserted showing the linkages. —Anomalocaris (talk) 09:04, 8 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
For template pages themselves, you can (and should) apply something list this. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 09:50, 8 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Most end templates don't render something meaningful by themselves and the code can be placed in <includeonly>...</includeonly>. For many start templates we could write <noinclude>{{name of end template}}</noinclude>. That may be more helpful for testing and debugging than to directly add the missing tags in noinclude. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:52, 8 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
On a related note, the person who can find and fix the missing span end tag at the root of {{Userspace linking templates}} and similar templates will fix a couple dozen template pages. – Jonesey95 (talk) 12:22, 9 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Jonesey95:  Done. Easy with lintHint! —Anomalocaris (talk) 22:03, 9 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Template not working for one user but working for others

User Pelmeen10 brought up in a discussion about the {{Olympic events sidebar}} series that they're having problems getting the template to work. They are using the MonoBook skin for Wikipedia, and have stated that they are using Google Chrome, but not which operating system they are using. This is how {{Swimming at the Olympics}} looks when used on the Swimming at the 2000 Summer Olympics on Pelmeen10's end, and on my end, using the MonoBook at 100% zoom on Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox (left to right). On their end, the sidebar overlays and merges with the wikitable in the "Schedule" section, while on my end it simply pushed is to the side without merging at all. I'm not sure how I or Pelmeen can go about fixing it, so we're gonna need a little help here. – PhilipTerryGraham (talk · articles · reviews) 01:59, 8 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I was unable to replicate the problem with Chrome on Windows. However, I made some changes to the schedule table (removed a bunch of unnecessary styling) that maybe will help. --Izno (talk) 12:21, 8 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Pelmeen10: Does the template work fine now on your end, or is it still broken? – PhilipTerryGraham (talk · articles · reviews) 05:40, 9 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Yes works fine and aligning the schedule to left is better. --Pelmeen10 (talk) 09:27, 9 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Pelmeen10: Cool. Thanks for letting us know, and thanks Izno for the help, too! – PhilipTerryGraham (talk · articles · reviews) 09:43, 9 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Other "Swimming at the x Olympics" articles need the same edits though. --Pelmeen10 (talk) 09:52, 9 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Pelmeen10: The edits are not difficult. Either let me know on my talk page which pages and I can take care of them, or you can follow along with the edit I made on the schedule template page. (Which probably should not be a template page--we do not segregate tables, whether complex or not, into their own articles unless we expect reuse.) --Izno (talk) 12:21, 9 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Btw I have Windows8. The page list is not that long: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. --Pelmeen10 (talk) 12:42, 9 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
FYI, this is a known side effect of centering tables next to floating content (browsers only take into account the width of the table when trying to avoid content collision, but not per se the alignment of this table on the page. Especially the older IE browsers used to have this problem if I remember correctly). —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 09:57, 9 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, I was pretty sure it was the margin declaration. I'm a bit surprised Chrome had the issue though. --Izno (talk) 12:21, 9 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Collapsible section with non-suppressed parameters in {{Infobox lunar eclipse}}

I've recently refurbished an unused infobox template, {{Infobox lunar eclipse}} for use on an array of articles, but have run into a problem concerning parameters in a collapsed section of the infobox I've implemented. Basically, I stole an idea from {{Infobox spaceflight}}, where their {{Infobox spaceflight/Instruments}} section uses an {[tl|Infobox}} with a collapsible collapsed bodyclass and active subbox parameter. The collapsed section copied over into {{Infobox lunar eclipse}} works, but the parameters can't be deactivated for some reason. I've had four failed attempts at fixing this problem using the {{#if:}} parser function ([1], [2], [3], [4]). Tomruen even had a crack at it as well. Tomruen's attempt can be seen on {{Infobox lunar eclipse/sandbox}}, isolated from the live template. Is there a better way of getting this collapsed list to work with parameters that can be supressed when no input is made? – PhilipTerryGraham (talk · articles · reviews) 02:26, 8 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

My preference is to remove the collapsible status, but that's not trivially done since User:PhilipTerryGraham repeated indexes 1,2,3 on the labels in the subobject. Tom Ruen (talk) 02:43, 8 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@PhilipTerryGraham and Tomruen: I think the change I made to the sandbox [5] should do what you want. - Evad37 [talk] 02:50, 9 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Evad37: This has resolved the issue as far as I'm concerned! Thanks for your help! :D – PhilipTerryGraham (talk · articles · reviews) 05:42, 9 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Need a Lua script

Hello,

I need a Lua script that returns "local data" as the wiki markup enclosed within the template {{infobox country|...}} On the page "en.wikipedia.org/wiki/"arg_name_country""

Any help? Dr. Sroy(aka.ARKA) (talk) 09:23, 8 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

You’ll need to take another swing at explaining this, i’m having trouble interpreting what you want to achieve. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 18:23, 8 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Switching between visual and source editing makes data appear to be unsaved

I can reproduce this in both Safari and Chrome:

  1. Edit a page using the source editor
  2. Before making any changes, switch to visual
  3. Make a change
  4. Publish the change

You'll now get a warning: "Changes you made may not be saved" in Chrome, "Are you sure you want to leave this page?" in Safari.

It looks like Visual Editor is leaving the page in a state that makes the browser think there's unsaved data. Anybody else noticing this? -- RoySmith (talk) 15:06, 8 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Might be , I'm checking it! Dr. Sroy(aka.ARKA) (talk) 15:10, 8 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Yes I noticed that now...Dr. Sroy(aka.ARKA) (talk) 15:13, 8 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Please wait for a while, I'm checking for a possible reason. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dr. Sroy (talkcontribs) 15:13, 8 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@RoySmith:Here I got a possible explanation: When you edit, the "index.php" program runs with the "action" parameter set to "edit". Again you must have experienced that until you run the "action=submit" parameter the edits you have done are not saved (This can be best explained by opening the page you are editing in another window). Thus as a result, when you switch to "VisualEdit" while editing the source, your revision is not submitted and the "index.php" also switches its parameter: "action=edit veaction=edit". So your edits are not going to exist and you will have to get it again edited.
This is a good issue. Although as expected the browser should think that the switching is the part of the same revision.
Regards,Dr. Sroy(aka.ARKA) (talk) 17:47, 8 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
which source editor (we have half a dozen or so) and was the syntaxhighlighting mode enabled ? —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 18:21, 8 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
It's whatever I get when I click the "Edit" tab: "Version f529762 2018-08-02T19:41:02Z", apparently. Oh, I just noticed something interesting. I kind of mis-reported the repeat-by sequence above. If I switch to visual by using the "pencil" drop-down menu in the upper-right corner, everything works fine. If I switch by clicking the "Edit" tab at the top, then I get the described behavior. Syntax highlighting is turned off in both cases. -- RoySmith (talk) 15:13, 9 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@RoySmith: In the Preferences, under Editing->Editor->Editing mode, what setting do you have there ? —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 15:21, 9 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
"Show me both editor tabs". -- RoySmith (talk) 16:07, 9 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

How is the addition of meta noindex for not yet patrolled pages implemented?

We want to emit meta tags with noindex for articles with no flagged revisions in German Wikipedia but are ignorant as to how this is implemented for not yet patrolled pages in enWP. Can you point me to the relevant sourcecode? --Count Count (talk) 16:15, 8 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Just FYI so noone goes searching: Found it here. --Count Count (talk) 18:02, 8 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Count Count: note that it can take a LONG time for the indexers to pick articles back up. That makes it unuseable in my opinion for features like flagged revisions where it could flip flop between states relatively quickly/often. Its a bad idea ro try to hide stuff from search engines in general honestly. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 18:18, 8 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for your comment! Unflagging (unreviewing) actually happens very, very rarely in German WP. The usual workflow is that an article is created unflagged (unreviewed), eventually a revision is reviewed and then the flagged revision is updated every now and then when someone with the review rights reviews the current revision. Most regular editors are reviewers and their newly created articles and all their edits based on reviewed revisions are automatically also reviewed. So I doubt this will be a problem. --Count Count (talk) 19:12, 8 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Editnotice in mobile view

There is an imposed discretionary sanction on Sarah Jeong and if one is editing on desktop, the Template:Editnotices/Page/Sarah_Jeong is very easy to see in the edit window.

We just had someone blow right past that, which led me to wonder if it is visible when editing on mobile. So i looked at the page in mobile view on my iphone, and the notice does not appear.

You can also (not) see this on desktop if you go to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Jeong and try to edit in mobile view. The edit notice is not there.

How can this be fixed? Jytdog (talk) 17:58, 8 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Hmmm, interesting. Yeah, I can confirm that, but my philosophy of the mobile skin is that you deserve what you get if you use it :-) Somewhat more interesting is that if I use the mobile app on my phone, and log in with my normal account, if I try to edit Sarah Jeong, I get "This page is protected. Sorry, your account does not have sufficient privileges to edit this page at this time". Which is kind of weird because I'm an admin. Do admin rights not have effect in the mobile app? -- RoySmith (talk) 20:00, 8 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I think your login failed. I can edit in mobile while logged in, and just did. Jytdog (talk) 20:06, 8 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
It certainly looks like I'm logged in. I just logged out, logged back in again, and get the same result. -- RoySmith (talk) 20:54, 8 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
That is bizarre. I wonder if it is because your only userright is "admin" and mobile doesn't recognize you as "extended confirmed". Totally guessing. Maybe try giving yourself "extended confirmed" rights and then try again? Jytdog (talk) 00:08, 9 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
This has diverged from the original purpose of this thread. I've opened T201575 in phab. -- RoySmith (talk) 02:10, 9 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The admin who imposed the DS just did a workaround by showing the editing restriction in a comment: diff. That is not optimal. Jytdog (talk) 20:06, 8 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
My main question would be why? As in why doesn’t mobile show that? Do we have any degree fo control over this or is it set in stone that edit notices don’t display on mobile? This would probably explain a lot of nonsense that goes on elsewhere, and more than one time I’ve said to someone “this was explained in the giant edit notice you should have seen when editing this page” but now it seems maybe they didn’t see it at all, which is just stupid. Beeblebrox (talk) 20:16, 8 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I looked for a task in phab and didn't see one. Given the existence of a task for "as close to the same workflow on mobile as on desktop" (CBA to look up the task number), I would guess this is just a "we haven't gotten around to it yet" and not a "we won't be adding these". --Izno (talk) 20:28, 8 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
User:Beeblebrox, I am not the best explainer of this, but its my gleaning that the WMF Reading Team has worked a lot with the software people with the goal of making the presentation of content "light" and clean for people reading on their phones, who are maybe using their cell data. Some stuff "around" the main article content goes away -- no "categories" for example - and there are some different features like "related articles" that I understand are suggested based on articles with similar "description fields" taken from Wikidata.
There is a mission-central aspect to those decisions (making knowledge accessible) but I have been very unhappy with some of their decisions and the way they were made; the most prominent one of those was their decision to stick the "description field" from Wikidata at the top of mobile views (which we got them to stop doing).
I wasn't aware of this particular feature loss until today. I too would like to understand why. Jytdog (talk) 20:32, 8 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I get the idea of making it “light” for mobile, but in this case it’s removing something fairly important and directly contributing to behavioral problems that the edit notices are specifically designed to curb. Beeblebrox (talk) 20:43, 8 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I think simply no one really noticed it was missing until now. (which makes me wonder once more about the usefulness of plastering text in front of people out of an expectation that they will actually read it). What probably also didn't help is that many editnotices are multipage blobs of non-scalable HTML crap. The particular linked notice here would take up two lengths of an iPhone 8 screen before you could even reach the edit screen. That is just insane..... we need to think about different tactics here if we want to move this forward. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 20:58, 8 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry to ask, but you recognize that the editing community wants it to get in the way, right? I hear you that two lengths of iphone 8 is maybe too much but that would still be better for everyone than leaving mobile users with no notice, in my opinion. Jytdog (talk) 00:02, 9 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Jytdog: Oh yes, it's just that the technology was never made to flexibly do this in forms other than Desktop. As such all those components will need to be rebuild every time you want to add it to an app or the mobile website. There is not even an API endpoint able to provide the information that a page has an edit notice. Neither do those notices have any structural information that would allow them to be condensed into a more sensible less noisy medium.
You could say that edit notices are currently a feature of the desktop website, not of the Mediawiki core platform. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 08:54, 9 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Created phab:T201595, phab:T201596, phab:T201597. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 09:32, 9 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@TheDJ: Oh yes, it's just that the technology was never made to flexibly do this in forms other than Desktop. We have TemplateStyles now. You might have to manually wrap the edit notice's content in <div class="mw-parser-output">...</div> for it to apply, as noted at mw:Extension:TemplateStyles#Caveats. Anomie 11:58, 9 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
That's not what I meant for that specific point actually (although yes, that might help with some of the ugly html crap). Edit notices really only exist as a deep stack of interface messages. But if your interface (skin, mobile app, or plain api) doesn't use those specific interface messages, then they will not apply. Edit notices are therefor presentation layer elements instead of core elements. They exist by virtue of the skin that uses them, not by virtue of being attached to a certain page. Additionally, they also aren't really edit notices, but actually namespace notices. And then there are BLP notices, which are yet another technology, protection message, etc etc.. It's a cobbled together mess. ;) —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 12:27, 9 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for posting to phab. I hope a way can be found to provide these notices to mobile users.Jytdog (talk) 13:37, 9 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • User:TheDJ, phab:T201595 was just marked as stalled and if I am correct the trail leads back to this from 2013. I am not sure why one person working on an approach to this, writing "I am not sure, if a rvprop=editnotices is a good idea." and abandoning a patch to do that, is described as a "blocker".... Does this make sense to you? Jytdog (talk) 14:29, 10 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    It is because the one task needs to be done before the other task can be done. The other (older) task 'blocks' progress on the other task. In other times called a 'dependency'. Solving this ticket is a multiweek task across multiple disciplines, touching one of the ugliest pieces of code of MediaWiki (EditPage). It is not currently scheduled for any team, expect it to take months before people will be able to get around to it. Unless a volunteer picks it up. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 14:35, 10 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    Thanks for explaining. Jytdog (talk) 22:57, 10 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Link problem

I wanted to refer in an article to the reading room of the British Museum, with a link to British Museum Reading Room. However, writing [[reading room of the British Museum|British Museum Reading Room]] gives this result: British Museum Reading Room. If I remove the first three words, I get British Museum Reading Room, but if I add any more I get a red link. Why? How can I link "reading room of the British Museum" to the required page? RolandR (talk) 01:26, 9 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@RolandR: [[British Museum Reading Room|reading room of the British Museum]] gives: reading room of the British Museum. — xaosflux Talk 01:28, 9 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
D'oh! Blame the pub and a late night after a long day! RolandR (talk) 01:32, 9 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

History button moving around on user talk pages

Sometimes it's in the dropdown menu under "More", other times it's under "Page". And I expect it to be there at the top by itself, which it still is sometimes. Using Vector. I've had all 3 positions in the last hour. Doug Weller talk 15:04, 9 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Doug Weller: "other times it's under "Page"" this indicates you are using a community (un)maintained Gadget, which is likely to blame for this. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 15:13, 9 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@TheDJ: Sounds possible, you know I use several. It's never been a problem before. Thanks again. Doug Weller talk 15:23, 9 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Doug Weller: Part of what you're talking about indeed is meta:MoreMenu (which is maintained :). The other aspect apparently is your small viewport. Are you on a mobile device, perhaps? What happens is Vector sees if there's enough room for the "View history" tab, and if there isn't it moves it under "More". MoreMenu (the gadget, pardon the confusing nomenclature) tries to be smart and moves the link under Page and remove it from "More". I suspect what's going in a race condition, because MoreMenu uses the "hook" to move the link whenever Vector does. So in theory you should not have your problem, and I'm not sure if I have a solution :( Note that Vector in general does not play that nicely on mobile. You can expect some unwanted behaviour regardless if MoreMenu is turned on. MusikAnimal talk 21:06, 9 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I've seen this too, and it's really annoying. I get that if your screen isn't wide enough, all the tabs won't fit and something has to give. But, at least it should be consistent about where things get hidden. -- RoySmith (talk) 21:20, 9 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Well, to be honest, I don't even remember why MoreMenu was coded to move the "View history" link. I think it was meant to do that then remove the "More" menu entirely if it becomes empty, but I don't see code that does this.
@Doug Weller and RoySmith: What if we always put a "View history" link under "Page"? That way you can reliably find the link. The other link may still switch between the tab and the "More" menu, though. MusikAnimal talk 05:42, 10 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I think you're suggesting that, if the "View history" tab is visible, there will *also* be a history item in the Page tab? No, duplicating things seems wrong. In any case, the Page drop-down is already too long. It's so deep and skinny, I often have to make several attempts to select the bottom item because my cursor slides off the side of the menu and it goes away. -- RoySmith (talk) 14:26, 10 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@MusikAnimal: I suspect my problem is something else considering how large my desktop monitor is. I can live with it. Doug Weller talk 10:41, 10 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I'm using a couple of your scripts[6] do they look allright? I'm asking as I keep having various script related problems. I've deleted a few scripts now. Doug Weller talk 12:29, 10 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I don't see anything in your common.js that would cause this. I'm truly baffled. If your browser window is on the larger-side, there's no reason the "View history" link should be moving around. I will have to blame Vector, because as I said MoreMenu listens to an event that is only fired if Vector decides to move the link.

@RoySmith: Good point, that menu list is pretty long as it is. What do you think about grouping together some links into a "Actions" submenu? So "Change model", "Delete page", "Edit intro", "Merge page", "Move page", "Protect page" and "Purge cache" could all go under Page > Actions. Would that be helpful, or just make it harder to get to those links?

I was almost thinking about adding a timeout to the hover event, such that if your mouse pointer does leave the menu it won't immediately disappear. Maybe a 1 second delay or something. The issue here is MoreMenu is using the native Vector menu functionality. If we change it for MoreMenu we might want to change it for all Vector menus (so "More" and "TW" for Twinkle, etc.). Thoughts? MusikAnimal talk 16:21, 10 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not a fan of submenus, because it makes it hard to find stuff. Scrubbing all the one-deep menus to find what you're looking for is already sub-optimum. Hunting through two-deep menus is even worse. Yeah, I know we do that already for some things (Page/Tools..., etc) but I'd rather not see more of that. Is there some problem with just always putting tabs that don't fit under More? -- RoySmith (talk) 19:33, 10 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Modern skin funky view on coordinates

On my system, this only applies to Modern skin, and just showed up. I tested the other skins, and they look like they normally do. Windows 10, happens on Firefox 61.0.2 and Chrome, but not The Edge browser. Firefox updated a couple of hours ago, but Chrome updates happen in the background, so I have no way of knowing when they last updated. Page coordinates that appear at the top margin of the page, now drop down a few notches to where they're either overlayed behind/in front of the article text, or they're too crowded on top of the infobox where one exists. This just now happened on my system. Is it possibly related to the Firefox update? — Maile (talk) 22:45, 9 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Maile66 I'm fairly certain this is related to phab:T200148. I noticed the change earlier — basically, they fixed the issue of the notification menu (and autofill, if you have that gadget turned on) getting overlapped by the advanced toolbar or visual editor — but I've opened phab:T201663 as a more urgent fix. ~ Amory (utc) 01:44, 10 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. As of right now, it seems to be fixed. — Maile (talk) 10:57, 10 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, I put in a quick stopgap locally last night. ~ Amory (utc) 12:20, 10 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Template parameter

I have a question regarding template parameters. If you wanted to assign two names for a parameter, for example if you wanted to call parameter “no” by “non” as well in a template, you’d go with {{{no|{{{non}}}}}} But what if parameter “no” had a value like this: {{{no|1}}} What should you do in this case? I tried {{{no|{{{non|1}}}}}} but it did not work.--▸ ‎épine talk 13:06, 10 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Épine: You didn't show or link your real test including the call and you have no recent edits. I guess you did something wrong or have a wrong expectation. Regarding {{{no|{{{non|1}}}}}}: If no is set then it produces the value of no, including to produce the empty string for an empty assignment |no=. If no is not set but non is set then it produces the value of non, including to produce empty for an empty |non=. If neither no nor non is set then it produces "1". I'm guessing your unspecified example had an emtpy assignment in the call and you expected to get "1" but got empty. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:12, 10 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Possibility of editable-on-wiki status maps?

We have a lot of "status" maps, where different colored regions indicate transitory status information (example 1, example 2). Currently, when these maps need to be updated, a new image must be generated with off-wiki software and uploaded, greatly limiting the set of users that can maintain the maps.

I created a workaround on National Popular Vote Interstate Compact that allows that map to be updated on-wiki, but it relies on a large number of overlay images – one for each state in each color used. This method does not scale to maps with a large number of colors. Ideally, we could have only one overlay image for each state or region in a map, and change its color when it is called.

The CSS "filter" property seems to allow this, but I'm not able to get it to work in my sandbox. Is it possible, or could it be made possible, to use the filter property on images in Wikipedia? Any remaining browsers that don't support the feature could be presented with a single map image as is done now; that image would simply be less up-to-date, typically, than the overlay version.

I uncovered some related Phabricator tickets, but it's not clear to me what the status of the propert(y/ies) is:

Thanks! —swpbT go beyond 18:04, 10 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Swpb: You are probably looking for things like this: mw:Extension:Graph/Demo#Vega_2.0_interactive_examples. It's not super easy, but definitely doable if you want to invest the time into it. Vega can be pretty powerful. You make a topojson map of the USA, store the data in commons shared tabular data or wikidata and then need to mash it up. Unfortunately this stuff seems like it is a bit 'too' powerful for people and not so many people seem to have taken the effort to really bust out a few graphs. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 18:51, 10 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, I will look into that. —swpbT go beyond 18:57, 10 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

GeoGroup broken again

{{GeoGroup}} is partly broken once again. As in the past, this affects the Google portion, and the OpenStreetMap functionality is unimpaired. For example, given these coords (37°47′21″N 122°24′12″W / 37.78917°N 122.40333°W / 37.78917; -122.40333, WMF headquarters, and 37°47′21″N 122°27′12″W / 37.78917°N 122.45333°W / 37.78917; -122.45333, another site in the same city), click both options: you'll get a normal map in OSM, and immediately Google will give you a 404 error. Back when I first noticed this a couple of weeks ago, I tried Special:RecentChangesLinked for the template, and I found no recent edits; unless I've missed something, this seemingly means that Google's changed something and we need to comply. Nyttend (talk) 00:52, 11 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Nyttend: looks like the wp-world tool is just simply down. Pings to maintainer: @Kolossos:. — xaosflux Talk 01:12, 11 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Possibly phab:T199652. — xaosflux Talk 01:14, 11 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I've disabled the broken wp-world link in the template for now. — xaosflux Talk 01:19, 11 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
It should also be noted that Google is actively restricting the 'free' part of maps tools lately. Even if the tool didn't have a security problem and if it's database hadn't accidentally gone missing, and it was fixed to not accidentally leak your ip address to google without giving you a warning about it (which is now required for wmflabs tools) it still might not work all the time because google would block all of wmflabs after spending the daily quotum (this is why we prefer tools like OSM over google). If people are interested in tools like this, I highly advise you to start learning some programming and understanding these tools. Many of them could use so many more maintainers. Please just learn and dare to ask to be added as a maintainer. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 10:37, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Acme Mapper has changed

There have been changes to Acme Mapper that affect the interface to it. For instance, if I go to LeVeque Tower and click on the coordinates, if I select Acme Mapper - maps, it is OK. If I select Acme Mapper, satellite it shows a mostly blank screen. However, there is a square in the upper right corner - click on it and select "satellite" and it works. Someone can probably make a small change in the interface to make this work, but I don't know how to do it. Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 16:27, 11 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Bubba73: Our coordinates template uses geohack, an external tool, so we can't fix it here on the English Wikipedia. Paging external maintainers: @Magnus Manske: and @Kolossos: who may be able to look in to this. — xaosflux Talk 16:34, 11 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Additionally, it looks like you can file an external issue report here. — xaosflux Talk 16:38, 11 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Also if I go directly to satellite view, it will give me the previous one that I looked at. If I go to maps and then select satellite, it gives the correct place. Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 17:01, 11 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Xaosflux: seems Kolossos (talk · contribs) isn't active as they last edited in November last year. –Ammarpad (talk) 18:03, 11 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Ammarpad: just 2 days ago on dewiki (w:de:Spezial:Beiträge/Kolossos). Perhaps the other maintainer will work on this, there is nothing we can do here at all though (expect for disabling the link to geohack all together / migrate to Kartographer, etc). — xaosflux Talk 18:06, 11 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Bubba73, Xaosflux, and Ammarpad, please don't make any changes now. In the last week or ten days, they've been making lots of changes, and every day it's different. They just restored the site's capability to show the coordinates of the center and to go to the location specified in the URL (for several days, it always went to the location associated with your IP address), and I'm expecting that the problems reported here will be fixed soon. Nyttend (talk) 02:09, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Nyttend: there really isn't anything we can change, this tool is offwiki - most of the other parts of it work so completely disabling it would be a loss to readers - so it should be left up. — xaosflux Talk 04:30, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you, but I know :-) I meant that no changes should be made to the Geohack template. But I see TheDJ found a good change to make. Nyttend (talk) 11:33, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Bubba73, Xaosflux, and Nyttend: Fixed. Geohack uses a locale template for presenting that entire page, which can simply be edited as long as you know the right url. Which I figured out by going to ACME, and getting a 'persistent' (LOL, acme has changed so many times recently) link to a coordinate and comparing it with the same link for a different layer. Turns out they changed the idenfier for their satellite layer (or removed an old one we were still using or whatever). —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 10:29, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not qualified to mess with it. I contacted Acme, and he said that he has had to make changes. He has to use lower resolution images and I also noticed that the street view is gone. He referred me to this: Acme map updates. Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 16:28, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
And this is why Wikimedia doesn't rely on commercial services like Google. ;) As handy as it might be, can be gone or very expensive tomorrow. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 18:22, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Help - Sneaky Vandalism!

Reported at OTRS Ticket:2018081110004267 (and a second one as well). On Empire_State_Building, the map clearly shows the words “Jewtropolis” over Manhattan and the phrase “INSIDE JOB” over lower Manhattan. Where does this data exist? I looked at https://maps.wikimedia.org/ and zoomed in to NY - and there it is. foundation:Maps_Terms_of_Use says if you find an error then go to https://www.openstreetmap.org to fix it - but it not there to be fixed! I've asked at ANI, but no joy there. Ronhjones  (Talk) 18:01, 11 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Chrysler Building has the same problem. Tornado chaser (talk) 18:08, 11 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Note just add | mapframe = no to the infobox to disable this while the third party issues are being looked at. — xaosflux Talk 18:19, 11 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Noting that Template:Infobox building was only recently updated to automatically show these kind of maps. Ping Evad37 since he might have more of an idea where exactly the data is stored, having created the modules and templates behind these maps.. Galobtter (pingó mió) 18:29, 11 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
It's also in 2 World Trade Center and 2 Broadway and possibly others. I found them in the category Office buildings in Manhattan, I didn't check all of them. -kyykaarme (talk) 18:53, 11 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
JW Marriott Essex House - reported at OTRS Ronhjones  (Talk) 19:15, 11 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
It doesn't get any better if you zoom right into the World Trade Center (2001–present). From what I can tell, some large vandalism was reverted on openstreetmap in the last day or so.[7] Perhaps there's a caching issue? Drawing live content from a user-generated site, I don't know... Adolf Hitler Boulevard and Donald Trump Avenue anyone? -- zzuuzz (talk) 18:55, 11 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Good grief, I was walking near Fuck Road last week ..... I'm not sure how WM Maps syncs with OpenStreetMap, but somebody needs to tell the WMF tech team to run a resync ASAP. I've taken data off OpenStreetMap before, you basically have database dumps of planet.osm released weekly that you can grab and extract.Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 19:08, 11 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Since no one seems to have an idea of when this could be fixed on the third-party end, I've just implemented the hackiest hack to disable maps for the vague manhatten area. Feel free to revert if this problem is fixed/the hack causes problems/if it is a terrible idea. Galobtter (pingó mió) 19:38, 11 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@JMatazzoni (WMF): @Quiddity (WMF): @CKoerner (WMF): Tagging WMF employees to check how the syncing works with OpenStreetMap. Daylen (talk) 20:16, 11 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Looking at openstreetmap and trying to follow the history. The user who added the data to NY, Lon, (and Russia, I think - changed to "Commieland"), is called "MedwedianPresident", and I see a comment about "repeat vandal". He seems to know exactly what he is doing, to the point that the edit titles do not always reflect the change - The Russian one was entitled "Cosmetic changes near Auckland, NZ". Looks like the edits survived for around 5 hours before being reverted. User has been blocked for 3 days (https://www.openstreetmap.org/user_blocks/2141). One has to question the use of a map that can cause so much offence to the viewers. Ronhjones  (Talk) 20:25, 11 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Three days? If I saw someone with a named account doing that sort of thing here, it would be an indef. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 21:11, 11 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah I saw that the account had some 2 year old vandalism too, yet didn't get indeffed for that. Galobtter (pingó mió) 21:13, 11 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
In my experience, OSM is a bit more forgiving of users than on the English Wikipedia. It is rare that a user account gets indefinitely banned. —seav (talk) 06:05, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I've created phab:T201772 MusikAnimal talk 21:14, 11 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Wikimedia runs its own copy of the OSM data. A simple refresh should fix this. 96.35.92.95 (talk) 01:26, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The replication frequency is currently once per day, the task for increasing the frequency is phab:T137939 - Evad37 [talk] 02:21, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

SineBot

Just noticed SineBot hasn't been active since 31 July. I've told Slakr, but I know he's not around much to give it a prod these days. Can anyone else help? I really think we need to get these bots in-house, or at least make them all open source so somebody else can take over them if necessary. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 18:34, 11 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Hopefully SineBot returns since it's well developed .. but if not... the new EventStreams can be used get revision ID's of Talk: edits ie.
curl -s https://stream.wikimedia.org/v2/stream/recentchange | grep -F data | sed 's/^data: //g' | grep -F '"domain":"en.wikipedia.org"' | grep -F '"title":"Talk:' | jq .
-- GreenC 21:10, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Ritchie333: SineBot is back, good thing. It does bring up long-term issue of need to open-source bots. -- GreenC 17:45, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

List of active bots

Is there a list somewhere that shows all currently active bots? Special:ListUsers/bot shows all bots, even inactive, and Wikipedia:Bots/Status is not maintained. Home Lander (talk) 00:26, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Special:ListUsers/bot could add 5th checkbox "Sort in descending order by most recent edit date" so the end-user can determine what counts as active or inactive. -- GreenC 00:38, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
If an "active bot" is determined by checking when the most recent edit occurred, Joe's Null Bot (talk · contribs) would fail. But unless Joe Decker (talk · contribs) has decided to stop using the bot, it's very much active. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 07:33, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Joe's Null Bot would be an exception for a lot of tools. User:Xaosflux's tool seems to answer the question though. -- GreenC 13:46, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Home Lander: quarry:query/28907 has a dump. — xaosflux Talk 00:52, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Have you asked at WP:BON if they have lists or tools? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 07:33, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Redrose64: we don't. We generally do a semi-annual cleanup of bots outside the bot activity policy, but the policy considers "operator" activity sufficient as well. @Home Lander: the last bulk cleanup was in May 2018. — xaosflux Talk 19:02, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Jared Kushner is a 1RR page without notice on the Talk page

Does someone know why Jared Kushner does not provide notice on the Talk page that it is a 1RR page. Should the notice be posted there or was this an oversight? JohnWickTwo (talk) 01:45, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@JohnWickTwo: It is mentioned on Template:2016 US Election AE which is displayed on the talk page. Home Lander (talk) 02:02, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for that, although the imbedded message seems to note an exception to 1RR in the "Further Information" tab at the bottom of that same notice box. Can the 1RR notice be put into a more prominent display announcement. JohnWickTwo (talk) 02:06, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I moved Template:2016 US Election AE to the top; that's how it is on Talk:Donald Trump, probably good enough. The irony would be if someone reverts me. Home Lander (talk) 02:30, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Much better now. Nice of you to visit the page. JohnWickTwo (talk) 02:35, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Can't load pages on mobile

Today I repeatedly experienced a surprising inability to load pages on mobile, using a Samsung M400 feature phone with Netfront 4.2. Normal behavior: I run a Google search and click the Wikipedia article link in the results, and it loads within 30 seconds and allows me to read the page. [It's always worked like this, ever since I got the phone in 2012, and as recently as six days ago, the last time I tried to load an en:wp page.] Today, however, I couldn't load anything: I move the pointer over the link, it changes into the pointer that indicates a clickable link, I click the link, it momentarily gives its analogue to the hourglass cursor [so far, this is normal], and then it reverts to the clickable link pointer and does nothing. I've tried this several times today on pages ranging from Stralsund to Tucker Carriage House, and also simple:Stralsund (always clicking links from Google search results), and the result is always the same. It's not a bad connection: I got this result when standing next to the carriage house, which sits at the center of a metropolitan area of 2.2 million people. And I've been able to load non-WMF pages, e.g. this carriage house page and this page from the Stralsund city website: they're both a good deal more complicated than any of the wiki pages I tried to load. Nyttend (talk) 02:31, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

If I were to guess, it might have something to do with the work on the backside to use better encryption (namely, only forward-secret ciphers, as documented on Phabricator. --Izno (talk) 05:08, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Yup, a little way down the blog post links you to some research done about some user agents still using AES128. Netfront 4.2 is one of them. --Izno (talk) 05:13, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Unexplained italics in atop transclusion

Foo bar

Foo second bar

Foo third verse, same as the first

William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene I.

Foo bar

Foo second bar

Foo third verse, same as the first

William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene I.

See the {{atop}} close box here. Note that all of the text after the first paragraph is italicized. You can edit the section and see that there is no obvious explanation for that.

Experimentation shows that the italics are caused by the <p>, but not in open text, as shown by the following <p>.

This behavior is new since 16 July, which is when I created a different {{atop}} here. I'm positive the italics were not present in that box at that time. ―Mandruss  08:02, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Pinging TheDJ, who recently created Template:Quote box/styles.css and switched {{Quote box}} to use those styles on 7 August. – Jonesey95 (talk) 08:40, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Here's a simplified version of the problem. In the first box (the live template), I see straight text in the first line, then italics in the next two. In the sandbox version (the version from before templatestyles were applied), I see three lines of straight text:
I hope that helps. – Jonesey95 (talk) 08:47, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Fixed. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 10:03, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Teamwork! Nice. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:49, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks! ―Mandruss  19:43, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

CirrusSearch – How to stop searching for regex matches at the end of a line?

Per mw:Help:CirrusSearch, there are some notable differences from standard regex metacharacters: The dot . metacharacter stands for any character including a newline, so .* matches across lines.

What if I want to not include a newline, and stop matching at the end of a line? Is there a syntax for that? I tried [^\n]* but that doesn't seem to work either. wbm1058 (talk) 12:34, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Would it be [^\n]*[^\n] ie. match everything but the newline up to a newline not including it. -- GreenC 13:43, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I would love for there to be an answer to this, but I'm fairly certain \n just doesn't work as a metacharacter. --Izno (talk) 14:04, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
That's the conclusion I'm coming to too. wbm1058 (talk) 14:17, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Does .*? work either? If the search is not greedy, it won't keep scanning more lines on the page; it should stop at the first match, which is on the same line. Though I don't see mention of "greedy" in the documentation; I'm not sure the "not greedy" syntax works in the CirrusSearch variant of regex either. – wbm1058 (talk) 14:30, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, the ? works the way you would expect in general. I'm not sure how it interacts with line ends but I'm fairly certain it does capture the line end, which is sadness. --Izno (talk) 14:40, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

" You are now a Reviewer" tt glitch

I'm not sure if this has been reported, or if this is the best place to report it, but over the last few weeks I've noticed several users with oddly formatted text on almost the entirety of their Talk pages, which can be traced back to a missing forward slash in the "You are now a Reviewer" message, presumably added via an automated template (see for instance this edit. The first line is Hello. Your account has been granted the "<tt>reviewer<tt>" userright, when it should read Hello. Your account has been granted the "<tt>reviewer</tt>" userright, with closed syntax. As a courtesy I've been fixing the syntax on user's talk pages when encountered, and haven't received any flak (nor thanks), but I imagine it affects quite a few (hundred? thousand?) talk pages. Is this issue still at work? Has the automessage been corrected? And is it worth running a bot to perhaps fix these messages? Thanks. --Animalparty! (talk) 20:55, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

This has since been fixed. --Izno (talk) 21:17, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
This affects a few thousand user talk/talk archive pages, Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval/Galobot should fix all instances Galobtter (pingó mió) 15:19, 13 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

17:53, 13 August 2018 (UTC)

Notification section displaying funky numbers

Notis on en.wiki randomly deciding to display old messages.

I refreshed a few days ago to notifications saying I had 40 unviewed notis. I actually had only 1. I took a screenshot and forgot about it. Then today I refreshed and saw it displaying the number 16, but when I clicked it was empty, no new notifcations. What is up? Cache? me? the WMF? Thanks, L3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 21:26, 13 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I occasionally get that. Old notifications of 1 months, 2 months and the like. –Ammarpad (talk) 06:30, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Media height and width

Can I specify both a height and width for an image? Something like [[File:Famagusta 01-2017 img10 Carmelite Church.jpg|thumb|right|100px|50px]]? Thanks. SharkD  ☎  03:00, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The only case I know of is Template:Annotated image, which basically lets you dynamically crop and zoom an image. Chris857 (talk) 03:14, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Note that if you set both the height and width, you will mess up the aspect ratio. Bubba73 You talkin' to me? 03:35, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@SharkD: If you always want to preserve aspect ratio, simply use the widthxheight syntax as described Wikipedia:Extended_image_syntax#Size. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 06:45, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
This is the image I want to stretch a little thinner. Breaking the aspect ratio is not a big deal in this case. SharkD  ☎  07:34, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I ended up just uploading a new version. Thanks though. SharkD  ☎  07:49, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@SharkD: The syntax allows us to add a parameter like x100px which sets the maximum height, but we can't alter the aspect ratio like this, as the numbers represent maximum heights and widths, so your work-around is simplest:
[[File:Example.jpg|thumb|100px]] gives an image 100px wide and 108px high, preserving aspect ratio;
[[File:Example.jpg|thumb|x100px]] gives an image 93px wide and 100px high, preserving aspect ratio;
[[File:Example.jpg|thumb|100x100px]] gives an image 93px wide and 100px high, preserving aspect ratio;
Note that using the thumb parameter disables upscaling of jpg images, so
[[File:Example.jpg|thumb|1000x1000px]] only produces an image 275px wide and 297px high, the 'natural' size of the file. --RexxS (talk) 19:00, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Tracker on Wikipedia

Hello. I installed Ghostery extension and it detected a tracker on Wikipedia. As Wikipedia doesn't have ads, I was wondering what is this tracker for? Thanks. Vs6507 07:19, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Don't use Ghostery. Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin (both open-source) each report no trackers for me, so I'm guessing the "tracker" detection might be based on the site setting login cookies or something. Jc86035 (talk) 07:50, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@VS6507: For various reasons people are tracked. From our own analytics, to making it possible to automatically login on all wikimedia properties once you logged into one, to blocking certain IP addresses and keeping track of presented notices. All done with the utmost precautions to guard a persons privacy. It seems that ghostery features a "anti-tracking" intelligence that automatically detects tracking technologies (no matter how they are implemented). Unfortunately it doesn't seem Ghostery actually lets you see WHAT it has detected. Not much we can do therefore. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 08:24, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Edit filter on page moves by admins etc...?

Is there a way of triggering an edit filter, or something like it, on page moves performed by anyone, regardless of user rights?

These reason is that people will move Article Alert pages (e.g. Wikipedia:WikiProject Bradford/Article alertsWikipedia:WikiProject Yorkshire/Bradford/Article alerts) without updating WP:AALERTS/LIST. After such a move, the bot will keep posting alerts at Wikipedia:WikiProject Bradford/Article alerts, and Wikipedia:WikiProject Yorkshire/Bradford/Article alerts will remain stagnant and not be updated. Likewise for Wikipedia:WikiProject Bradford/Article alerts/ArchiveWikipedia:WikiProject Yorkshire/Bradford/Article alerts/Archive. Months can go by before this is detected, projects think they've done things right, but they've actually fucked it up and get no delivery [thinking there's simply no new alerts], and then there's a bunch of pages that need to be merged and histmerged.

Ideally I'd want the edit filter to simply block such moves the first time they are done, regardless of user rights, with a big notice saying If you move this page, make sure to update WP:AALERTS/LIST, otherwise the bot will ignore the page move and keep posting alerts here. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 13:31, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Headbomb: to be clear, you only want this "warning" to get triggered for pages that are:
  1. In the Wikipedia: namespace
  2. During a move action
  3. Where the page title includes "Article alerts"
correct? — xaosflux Talk 14:00, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Correct. Or rather pages with Article (A|a)lert in the title. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 14:05, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Headbomb: that sounds feasible, at can at least get tried with a "log only" mode to see what would get hit. Put the specifics over at Wikipedia:Edit filter/Requested and someone can write it up. — xaosflux Talk 14:07, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Find/replace tool disappeared?

Hi all, three days ago, my edit window had a Find/Replace tool built into it. (Desktop version) It was activated in the upper right corner or the edit window, near the View Source/Visual Editor selector. Any idea where this went? Was this a beta tool or something? I need it! It was useful! Thanks, Cyphoidbomb (talk) 14:09, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Try clicking the "Advanced" button/drop down on the top bar Galobtter (pingó mió) 14:15, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Cyphoidbomb: while in visual editor, with something in the edit window selected, press CNTRL-F , or click on the "three lines" icon on the top right. — xaosflux Talk 14:21, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Aw geez, I'm an idiot. Galobtter saved me. Thanks both of ya! Cyphoidbomb (talk) 14:23, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Hah, I figured it was that because I've often spent way too long trying to figure out the same Galobtter (pingó mió) 14:45, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Blank infoboxes

I don't know why, but I had Multiplexed point-of-care testing on my watchlist. Earlier today Ozzie10aaaa added a blank infobox to the page. This seemed a little odd, so I reverted. In looking at their contribs they had added blank copies of {{Infobox diagnostic}} to a whole bunch of pages. I inquired about this, and getting what I felt was an insufficient reason for adding them I proceeded to remove any blank uses of the infobox. Doc James proceeded to question my actions, reverting all of them (though I will note I stopped removing them after his first post), and since we seem to be at an impasse I figured I would bring the issue here. Additionally, Doc James says it makes it clear that all "medical diagnostics" are part of a category, but my thought is that adding Category would work just as well.

Looking specifically at this template is what brought me here, but I'd like to ask the general question - is it worth adding an entirely blank (minus the "name" field) infobox to an article in the off chance that information can be added in the future? Primefac (talk) 15:57, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The infobox indicates that the article in question is a "diagnostic" so not entirely blank. Many of them also had images. A number of these articles do not mention that the article is about a diagnostic elsewhere.
I keep a number of these topics on my watchlist and found it strange to see the infoboxes being removed. Looked further and found that Primefac had removed like 50 of them.
So yes restored the boxes in question. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 16:01, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I guess that's my question, why not just track with Category:Medical tests, or create Category:Diagnostic tests? If it doesn't say that it's a diagnostic test, why not improve the article to say so? Primefac (talk) 16:07, 14 August 2018 (UTC) (and for what it's worth I'm not at all faulting Doc for reverting my 54 edits, I'm just trying to find a consensus for common practices)[reply]
as Doc James indicated, many of them did have images, additionally many will be filled with information related to each test--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 16:18, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
An image that was already there, and an image which I made sure was kept when I removed the infobox (example). Primefac (talk) 16:27, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The {{authority control}} box is programmed to not show up unless there is at least one meaningful parameter value. I suggest the same approach be followed for infoboxes that are placed without parameter values, and until the time such programming of the box has happened it be removed or commented out. --Francis Schonken (talk) 16:22, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Commenting out doesn't seem to work, so removing it is, for the time being. Also, the infobox in question is apparently Wikidata-enabled, which is ill-advised to place without knowing what's going to be in it. At least not without a broad consensus to do so. Which we're here to discuss: I'd suggest a consensus on not placing empty infoboxes of any kind, that's what I'd think the best solution. --Francis Schonken (talk) 16:29, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The template fetches no data from Wikidata and is not Wikidata-enabled. --RexxS (talk) 17:06, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
My personal preference would be not to have a blank infobox, but I can see some value in having something in the usual place where readers go to get "at-a-glance" information about a topic – even if it is just a link to Medical diagnosis. I suppose it boils down to whether there's any chance that more information may be placed in the infobox, but I'm not sure what else there is to say about many of the articles in question. In the final analysis, I'm pretty sure that the presence or absence of an infobox in those articles doesn't amount to a hill of beans either way. --RexxS (talk) 16:35, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Off-topic discussion about talk page comments and formatting
@RexxS: please don't mess with the layout of my talk page comments: what I said above was in direct response to the OP, so should not be indented as if it was a reply to something else. --Francis Schonken (talk) 16:39, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Francis Schonken: Then please make it clear by using the {{reply to}} template on complicated threads, particularly when you fuck-up the page for the visually impaired by switching from description lists to a bulleted list. You've been here long enough: have you never read Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Accessibility #Lists, or do you just not care about the effect of your edits on those less fortunate than yourself? --RexxS (talk) 16:49, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
A bullet point is clear enough to indicate the start of a new reply to the OP. Indeed, that's how it worked for those that have been around long enough, and for newcomers too. --Francis Schonken (talk) 16:52, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Also, WP:TPG is the applicable guidance: if I object to refactoring my comment, then don't do so for a second time (like you did). Or don't you care about that guidance? --Francis Schonken (talk) 16:56, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
No. There is a clear injunction against switching styles of indentation as I indicated. It makes the page uncomfortable reading for anyone using a screen reader and and so we don't do it. That's one reason why we have the {{reply to}} template. WP:TPG: "Some examples of appropriately editing others' comments: ... Fixing format errors that render material difficult to read ... Examples include fixing indentation levels, removing bullets from discussions that are not consensus polls or requests for comment". So, I'll warn you just once and then it's off to ANI: you are now aware of the problem caused by switching styles of indentation, so don't do it again. --RexxS (talk) 17:05, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Don't change the layout of my replies. Period. WP:TPG. --Francis Schonken (talk) 18:33, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Or for clarity, quoting the guideline: "Cautiously editing or removing another editor's comments is sometimes allowed, but normally you should stop if there is any objection." (emphasis added) – so, please act "normal" and stop refactoring my reply after I objected to such refactoring. Thanks. --Francis Schonken (talk) 18:44, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Request denied. The moment that it was explained to you that you were causing problems for the visually impaired, any objections you might have against anyone fixing the problem you caused are overruled. WP:TPOC. --Guy Macon (talk) 20:01, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Also, for clarity, I meant, reply to the original post (for anyone to read), not reply to the original poster – so no use pinging a specific editor. Sorry I wasn't clear about that by using an abbreviation. --Francis Schonken (talk) 18:57, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I've consequently removed the "edit on wikidata" thing Galobtter (pingó mió) 17:26, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Francis Schonken: Commenting out doesn't seem to work You refer presumably to this edit. Comments cannot be nested, so your newly-added <!-- opens a comment which is terminated by the very next instance of -->, which is at the end of the |DiseasesDB= parameter. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 16:46, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I'm generally pro-infobox, but I don't see the value in empty infoboxes. If you want to add them, why not add the corresponding information to make them actually useful for readers? Natureium (talk) 16:36, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
What Natureium said. ~ ONUnicorn(Talk|Contribs)problem solving 20:14, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I'm also in agreement with Natureium here, but I'm also not opposed to the infoboxes being hidden by default when there's no parameters defined (not including name). Empty infoboxes simply look broken, and clutter up the page with zero value. If you want an infobox, populate it with some information. stwalkerster (talk) 20:18, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Agree with Natureium. Either add an infobox with useful verifiable information or don't add an empty infobox. --Treetear (talk) 20:49, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Blank infoboxes (obviously) provide no useful data and therefor should be removed. {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 21:07, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Okay have added some properties to all the infoboxes in question. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 21:31, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Is there an actual technical question here, or should this discussion be moved out of VPT? One of the stated goals ("trying to find a consensus for common practices") is more appropriate for one of the other village pumps, or at WT:MED, or at the talk page for any of the affected articles. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:19, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

It started out as a technical request, and somewhere along the line I suppose I lost all the "technical" parts of it. I have no issue with it being moved to a more appropriate venue. Primefac (talk) 19:29, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Page curation glitch

For some reason, when Meatsgains (talk · contribs) nominated Digiview Entertainment for deletion via Page Curation, it appended the AFD to the bottom of the previous one from 2009, instead of creating it as a "(2nd nomination)" page. I'm not familiar with how Page Curation works, so is this a known glitch? Ten Pound Hammer(What did I screw up now?) 23:04, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

This is a known issue. (phab:T169441) — JJMC89(T·C) 01:58, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Can we make it easier to move deleted (or non-deleted) edits?

Sometimes edit histories need to be cleaned up, particularly where it is discovered that an article has a lot of edits from an old improperly done cut-and-paste page move, or where an article is deleted, an article on a different topic happens to be written at the same title, and then the deleted article returns under a different title, with content that resolves whatever cause the initial deletion. Whatever the reason, there are sometimes circumstances where a block of edits in the current or deleted history of an article needs to be moved to a different title.

Currently, the way this is usually done is to:

1) delete the existing article, then
2) undelete the portion of the edit history to be moved, then
3) move the page generated by that undeletion to whatever the correct title is, without leaving a redirect then
4) undelete the edit history to be kept with the original title, and possibly
5) undelete any new edit history overwritten by the move of the old edits.

Occasionally all of this is complicated by the existence of deleted edits that need to stay deleted (such as periods when a copyvio was on the page). I can't put my finger on specific examples right now, but I would bet that User:Anthony Appleyard (who frequently cleans up such matters) can. What I would like it to able to just:

1) check off a block of edits in the edit history of an article (whether existing or deleted), and
2) move that block to the edit history of another article (without needing to delete/undelete anything).

Given the potential for some abuse, this would need to be an admin right. bd2412 T 00:38, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

  • @BD2412:
    • Lack of selective delete has been on Wikipedia's bug list for a while now. Always I must delete all edits and then undelete some edits. It wastes link time and Wikipedia's server's time, and as above.
    • Coping with pre-existing deleted edits has complicated my history-merging since I started history-merging.
    • I agree: we need selective move of non-deleted edits, and selective or nonselective move of deleted edits while keeping them deleted.
    • Anthony Appleyard (talk) 04:57, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    • Yeah, it's been on the bug list for nearly nine years. I agree that such a feature would be very, very useful. Graham87 05:26, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Page Previews as a pure JavaScript API for use in external sites

Hello! I have a personal blog that includes many Wikipedia links. I would like to make use of the Page Previews functionality on those links, but the info I found (such as https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Popups) insists on server side php files and control. Since I am hosting my blog on Blogger, I would like the option of an all JavaScript API to use. Is there something like this available?

Thank you! Siderite (http://siderite.blogspot.com) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 188.27.124.98 (talk) 10:03, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Hi there. Popups is written as a PHP and JavaScript extension for MediaWiki, the software that powers Wikipedia. The PHP code in the extension is unrelated to the actual task of displaying page previews; for example, there is PHP code to add a preference to the preferences page that allows wiki users to disable page previews. It is possible to compile all the JavaScript code into one file (see the end result here and instructions in the README), but you would need to manually remove references to MediaWiki-specific JavaScript objects and functions, which could be a substantial task. — This, that and the other (talk) 11:29, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Actually there is a proof of concept of a standalone version (made by WMF engineers) available on GitHub. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 11:51, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Hah, nice! — This, that and the other (talk) 01:07, 17 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

That is exactly what I was looking for. I've implemented the joakin/context-cards project and it works as a charm. Thanks! Siderite — Preceding unsigned comment added by 188.27.124.98 (talk) 20:58, 16 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

template/module output, MediaWiki, and the newline character

At Template_talk:Lang#BUG:_Current_template/Module_does_not_support_multi-paragraph_usage..., and editor complained that {{lang}} creates malformed html when given text that contains paragraphs defined by \n\n because <p>...</p> does not belong inside <span>...</span>. I thought to correct that by detecting the \n\n sequence and using that detection to switch from <span>...</span> to <div>...</div> but the results are perplexing.

In plain text, when we write this:

first line
second line

third line

MediaWiki makes this html:

<p>first line
second line
</p><p>third line
</p>

and it renders like this:


first line second line

third line


So that is what I expect from this (except italicized because the 'text' contains all Latin characters and is 'non-English' per MOS):

{{lang/sandbox|de|
first line 
second line

third line}}

Module:lang/sandbox produces this html:

<div lang="de" title="German language text"><i>first line  second line</i>

<i>third line</i></div>

from which MediaWiki makes this:

<div lang="de" title="German language text"><i>first line  second line</i>
<i>third line</i></div>

and that, renders like this (no line breaks):

first line second line

third line


To make things even stranger, from this (no \n\n sequence):

{{lang/sandbox|de|
first line 
second line
third line}}

Module:lang/sandbox produces this:

<i lang="de" title="German language text">first line 
second line
third line</i>

from which MediaWiki makes this malformed html (<p>...</p> inside of <i>...</i>):

<div style="margin-left:1.6em"><i lang="de" title="German language text">first line
<p>second line
</p>
third line</i></div>

and that, renders like this:

first line

second line

third line

This should have rendered as the first example because no \n\n to imply <p>...</p> shouldn't it?


But then, from this (using \n\n sequences):

{{lang/sandbox|de|
first line 

second line

third line}}

Module:lang/sandbox produces this:

<div lang="de" title="German language text"><i>first line </i>

<i>second line</i>

<i>third line</i></div>

from which MediaWiki makes this html:

<div lang="de" title="German language text"><i>first line</i>
<p><i>second line</i>
</p>
<i>third line</i></div></div>

and that, renders like this:

first line

second line

third line


What is it that I'm not understanding about how newline characters are handled? Is MediaWiki working correctly in all of the above cases?

A simple experiment showed me that I can replace \n\n sequences in the template's text input with <p>...</p> markup and replace single \n characters with a space character to mimic how they are handled in plain text, but should I have to do that?

Is newline character handling in MediaWiki documented anywhere? Is there some fundamental something about html that I'm not understanding?

Trappist the monk (talk) 12:33, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Trappist the monk: How many cases of this problem are there ? What about simply forbidding paragraphs as input for this template ? And have we considered simply always turning them into divs and then always using "display:inline" ? Seems much simpler. These hacks to parse and interpret wikicode are really scary and not what Lua was intended for. I also note a tendency of late to make every template do everything at the same time. That's not a good idea in general. Use different templates for different usecases and then make them share the same Lua core if advantageous. Hell this entirely template is nothing more than a lang="en" attribute for people afraid of HTML rly, we hardly even need it to begin with. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 13:58, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I mean if we need 1180 !!!!!! lines of Lua to properly generate a simple language attribute then we are doing something seriously wrong. We need to step back and reassess, because if we start doing that for all 9 character sequences of the encyclopedia, then soon it will break down under its own weight. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 14:06, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The module is doing work for a series of templates, not just the single template {{lang}} (someone clearly just counted lines instead of reviewing the documentation in the module ;). It also validates the language tag and applies various MOS rules, one of which is italics for certain non-English content--the best HTML tag for which is <i>. However, <i> can only appear in certain places in HTML, so Ttm is attempting to hack around by the craziness of the above. There are a number of cases for block display of non-English languages, especially poetry and lyrics, from what I have observed in the wild (they pop up where {{lang}} is used around e.g. <poem> in the associated Linter category). However, I'm about to the point where we should probably abandon the use of <i> in the block case and have the user explicitly provide a |display=block or similar as the less common use case of {{lang}}. The template can then just error check for as much block content as possible and ask the user to reconsider what he's doing with the template, instead of trying to get it right as above. --Izno (talk) 16:02, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I admit that i was trying to push the exegeration button I bit, but I'm growing tired of having to say "don't parse wikicode with lua". :) —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 19:40, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Just to put some numbers on it: Module:lang directly supports {{lang}}, {{transl}}, and about 700 {{lang-??}} templates. I anticipate that in future, the module will also directly support some 1100 {{ISO 639 name ??}} templates.
Instead of a rant, can I have honest answers to my questions?
Trappist the monk (talk) 13:10, 16 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The problem is fully with your lua module and your misunderstanding of newlines / line breaks and their interactions with html tags / parser, see meta:Help:Newlines_and_spaces. The easiest way to prove that is using the {{1x}} template, and maybe special:expandtemplates. It also seems pretty strange to add a <i> tag to each element. If all items need to be italic, then it makes more sense to add the styling based on the attribute to the parent tag instead of individual tags. Generally speaking, as noted above, it makes very little sense to have a catch all template to add the lang attribute. Also if all items with the lang attribute need to be italic, it might make more sense to use sitewide css to style it instead. 13:10, 16 August 2018 (UTC)— Preceding unsigned comment added by 197.235.100.35 (talk) 13:11, 16 August 2018‎ (UTC)[reply]

I'm not surprised that I don't fully understand newline handling; that is, after all why I posed the questions. Thanks for the link.
You are wrong in your interpretation of what Module:lang does. Please read the documentation; you might even read the comments in the code – there is a reason why I comment my code. Also read the discussions about this module at Template talk:Lang.
Editors complained when we used the font-style=italic attribute so we went back to the <i>...</i> html tags.
Trappist the monk (talk) 13:30, 16 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Ohh, it also does some validation. It still doesn't change the fact that there is 0 need to add italic tags to every line. You're essentially going to have to fight with the parser to get what you want, which is pretty awful considering that lua doesn't have a library to fetch the html parser output. Templates also add a newline whenever they are transcluded, and probably other crazy tools. As far as the problem of having to override it with !important, it is a weak complaint considering that they are already going out of their way to override site css. Either way there are plenty of ways to address such a complaint. The simplest is using css specificity developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/CSS/Specificity. Alternatively, if it is added through good practices like a class or even defined using the lang attribute (developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/:lang), editors should always be able to override it using their css. It can be done using sitewide css, templatestyles, or any number of simpler ways. 197.235.100.35 (talk) 14:07, 16 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Problem accessing Eudora (email client)

I fielded two different inquiries at OTRS from readers with problems accessing an individual article. I'm not yet convinced they are related so I'm going to discuss them separately.

In one case ticket:nnnnnnnnnnnnn they attempted to access a page. The person accessed it indirectly, by first going to:

  • Eudora then clicking on the link to Eudora (email client) on that page

The result was a white screen which they interpreted as an attempt to load but a failure to properly render.

I asked thwm to let some time pass, and to try again to see if it's a momentary glitch.

They are using Safari on a Mac.

I made a complete copy of the article and placed it in my sandbox:

They reported that they can load that article fine, which suggests to me that it isn't anything about the particular code in that particular article. They still have the same problem trying to access from the link at the disambiguation page


Any thoughts on next steps?--S Philbrick(Talk) 13:18, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Sphilbrick: can they get to the page if they input the URL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudora) in to their browser directly? Can they go to other disambiguation pages (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0_series)? Can you verify the browser version? — xaosflux Talk 13:36, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I shared a link to this discussion with them, I will encourage them to answer directly, or get the answers.--S Philbrick(Talk) 13:39, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The problem appears to be solved - from the custoemr:
The Eudora link was always okay, still is, other test dismbiguation link from case record also okay, copy/paste link also okay. Today, everything seems fine in all cases, so I may never understand. I can add that I’ve never had a problem with a wiki article before, like, ever.
I relaunched and dumped cache yesterday, so that should have been consistent too, but I turn my computer off when not in use and don’t know how that single change might have enacted something. TCP/IP was certainly fine for other uses. I wonder if somebody like IP=Shaw is mid-stream caching, and the failed cached got dumped overnight?
But if anyone has any ideas what might have been the problem, please share.--S Philbrick(Talk) 22:07, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The 1 won't go away

Maybe this has been reported. I got a notification (which I shouldn't have) that someone signed in to Wikipedia. Of course I did because I had articles to improve at a library I don't go to that often. I went to the page and the 1 is still there.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 15:23, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Vchimpanzee: try to go to Special:Notifications an see if you can clear it from there. — xaosflux Talk 15:33, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. I may have gotten that response before.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 15:57, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
You mean it isn't normal to have notifications and alerts both saying "99+"? Natureium (talk) 18:34, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Natureium: That is not normal. The normal is to mark them as read and then there shouldn't be any number afterwards. See mw:Help:Notifications/Special:Notifications#Notifications list. Some notifications are automatically marked as read if you click them. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:50, 16 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

A different page load problem

As mentioned in the post above, I also received an inquiry ticket:2018081410008025 yesterday about a page not loading. I felt the facts felt sufficiently different from the case above that I'm writing this is to separate posts.

In this instance the problem was accessing this page:

I thought it was relevant that this is a larger than average page at about 350 K. As a separate matter we might consider urging a subdivision into multiple articles but I'll leave that for others.

My usual response when someone indicates they have trouble accessing an article is to ask them to try again later because it's my experience that we sometimes have momentary glitches and I don't want to ask people to be doing a lot of research if the problems simply goes away by trying again later.

In this particular case they indicated that they had checked with some friends in multiple countries on multiple continents all of whom had the problem. I asked them to try again today and this is the report:

Hi, we tried to load the page today again and here are the results. I can access the page both on pc and mobile from Poland but my Dutch friends still can't see it. NY friend can load both versions of the page just fine but the one in Morocco can only use the mobile version.

I still wonder if the page size is contributing to the problem but any other thoughts?--S Philbrick(Talk) 16:24, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Customer added - Chrome ver 68.0.3440.106 64 bit --S Philbrick(Talk) 17:34, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
There have been attempts to reduce the size of this page by tightening criteria for inclusion, but soon enough new entries get added so it's whackamole. Probably it needs to be split into separate articles by date. -- GreenC 13:16, 16 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Special:BookSources at htwiki

The Haitian Creole Wikipedia has nothing like out Wikipedia:Book sources; it just has a very simple page at Special:BookSources that provides links to four possible places to locate books. These links are dead or otherwise non-functional. See this example: https://ht.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espesyal:SousLiv/2-86741-008-8

I can't find the page that the links are configured on. The sentence at the top is w:ht:MedyaWiki:Booksources-text, but the links themselves don't reveal their location with the mw:qqx trick. Does anyone know how to fix this? WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:54, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The instructions are here: mw:Manual:ISBN. ht:Project:Book sources needs to be created. Ruslik_Zero 19:37, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@WhatamIdoing: See mw:Manual:ISBN referring to Project:Book sources or another page defined in MediaWiki:Booksources. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 19:48, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Add a feature for logged in users in the account preferences to have the system Auto-sign messages.

Hello, I request that in the future there should be a feature implemented for logged in users in their account preferences to be able to enable/disable a setting in order to have the Wikipedia system Auto-sign a person's message with their signatures regardless if it functions as a bot or not. I know nothing about programming so I can't give any specific details on how it could be implemented but if it's possible to add a feature like that. I would appreciate it because I keep frequently forgetting to click on the Signature and Timestamp button or type 4 tildes to sign it since signatures it not something that is my main priority whenever I'm typing a message as I assume the system does it for you as I just type the message. From what i understand, using SineBot by requesting to use the bot yourself by adding programming - or requesting to have someone else do it if you know nothing about programming isn't an infallible solution as it's bound to make lots of mistakes. As long as it's possible to implement, I'd love for that to be added so I don't have to keep seeing "Preceding unsigned comment added by {Username Here}" if I forget to manually sign it. It's just a trivial suggestion for newcomer editors to save time and make it easier I think I recall seeing that happen with many other fandom wikia sites that I used depending on the site and the programming. --Mkikoen (talk) 17:54, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I think the Structured Discussions project kind of covers all or some of that. I know it was trialled here in 2016 to a pretty lukewarm to negative response, and turned off. Scott might have more of an idea on the specifics. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 21:10, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Mkikoen (talk · contribs) had previously been posting on this matter at Wikipedia:Bot requests#Request for someone to run SineBot for me. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 08:12, 16 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Mkikoen: this is not technically feasible to include with edits in general, because there is not a system concept of this is a batch of text where I am discussing something. Even in namespaces where you think it might apply, there are many exceptions. For example, right now we are editing Wikipedia:Village pump (technical). If I just hit save now it might be useful to insert a signature at this point in the text. But if I wanted to go correct a typo, add a template or image to the page, etc it would be inappropriate to insert a signature anywhere. Even on pages like article-talk where a primary activity is discussing, people also make other types of edits like adding project banners that should not be signed. — xaosflux Talk 13:44, 16 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Listas parameter issue

I've noticed this issue on several pages now, but I'll use Talk:Paul Linden as an example. It has the WikiProject Biography tag, but it has no listas parameter within that tag. This means that it should be showing up here, but it's not. Can someone explain why this is the case? I've been working on the backlog in that category for a while, and now I'm concerned that there might be a bunch of other pages that should be in the category but aren't. Lepricavark (talk) 18:32, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I made a null edit and it shows now. Ruslik_Zero 19:40, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Ok. Is there any way of knowing how many other articles need listas parameters but aren't showing up in the backlog? Lepricavark (talk) 19:43, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Lepricavark: There are two issues here. Whether there's any other problem that's preventing them from showing up in the category or whether it is only problem of caching which is now solved with null edit. If it is the former, then we need to have example of a page that's still not showing up despite the null edit. –Ammarpad (talk) 05:12, 16 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Ammarpad: I've been unable to create an example of such a page, so I guess there's not much more we can do. Thanks for your assistance. Lepricavark (talk) 14:44, 16 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Before making a null edit, you can try adding "?action=purge" to the end of the page URL (that is, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Biography_articles_without_listas_parameter?action=purge) in order to force the page to be refreshed. isaacl (talk) 17:39, 16 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Isaacl: A purge will only refresh the page text; it will not rebuild the category table entries. After a purge, the correct categories may be shown at the bottom of the page, whereas the page may not be listed in the category. A null edit will force synchronisation. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 08:43, 17 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39

Hi guys,

In the section "Launch history" of this article, there is a graph about the launches. The figures on the left are the number of launches. It looks very strange that the numbers used are 2.5 then 5 then 7.5 and so on. There will never be 2 launches and a half so I guess it would make sense to use 2, 4, 6 and so on. I don't want to mess up the graph so if anyone is good at it, thanks for doing it! Ericdec85 (talk) 03:00, 16 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Link: Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39#Launch history. It requires a Lua coder for Module:Chart unless you somehow change the largest number in the data to at most 10 (gives intervals of 1) or at least 16 (gives intervals of 5). It's currently 12 for 2017. There are requests at Module talk:Chart#Y scale and Module talk:Chart#Whole numbers in bar chart Y axis. PrimeHunter (talk) 09:21, 16 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm, I remember using that module years ago in a non-wikimedia wiki. It is still just as badly documented as it was back then, considering that it still probably uses an SVG image hack for pie charts, it might be better to use the graph extension. In any event, in its current state that module should just be discontinued especially due to its limited use in ~300 pages. Not only does it insert a massive number of inline styles that will not properly render on mobile devices, it can also cause these overlap problems with labels even on desktop devices.

One could resolve this particular problem in a nuclear way by hiding all Y labels for those particular charts, by replacing line 374, e.g.:

  local modGraphYScales = (val == math.floor(val)  ) and "modGraphyScalesInteger modGraphYScales" or "modGraphyScalesFloat modGraphYScales"
                local div = mw.text.tag( 'div', { style = string.format( valStyleStr, width - 10, y - 10, color ), class = modGraphYScales }, mw.getContentLanguage():formatNum( tonumber( val ) or 0 ) )

Then it becomes a simple matter of hiding it with templatestyles. A more interested lua person could make it work using a template parameter. 12:53, 16 August 2018 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 197.235.100.35 (talk)

Position of help links

On some sets of pages, there is a link to help about using the page towards the upper-right of the page. Some are generated by the WM software, while others are created on-wiki by various templates and standard layout methods. These two approaches give different results, both in terms of placement compared to other displayed content and for visibility for mobile users.

In the first case, we have pages in Special: namespace. These have "◯? Help", where the circled-questionmark is embedded SVG data. Thanks to User:MER-C for tracking down the addHelpLink function and CSS for its layout. In the second case, we have pages at the ref-desks (e.g., Wikipedia:Reference desk/Science) and the other help-desks (e.g, Help:Contents), where custom icons (commons files) are displayed via {{RefDesk help icon}} and {{HelpDesk icon}}. The MW ones are not displayed on mobile view and are not controllable on-wiki. The template ones display on mobile in a way that overlays other elements (see 1 and 2). Both of those are sub-par...we want to have en.wp-centric help available and controllable locally and that is visible cleanly on mobile.

I'm going to unify the two ...icon templates to {{Page help link}} and retain User:PrimeHunter's id= tag to allow hiding via user CSS. Do we want to hide it for all mobile users (via site CSS)? Is there a way to set its class/id to use the MW one's CSS rather than hand-coding a comparable positioning? I tried and couldn't. Is there a way to get the mobile help icon visible and moved a bit to not overlap other things? DMacks (talk) 06:09, 16 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Watchlist only displaying 7 hours

Something happened today, and my watchlist only displays 7 hours worth of edits. I have it set for 3 days. I haven't made any changes. Not sure what happened, is there anything I can do? Work permit (talk) 18:58, 16 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Help:Watchlist#Options can adjust a maximum number of messages to display. I've occasionally had a busy day and increased it. Jim.henderson (talk) 19:01, 16 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you. I did look at that. It's set at 3 days, 250 changes. I haven't touched it. Work permit (talk) 19:44, 16 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I figured it out. I recently had turned off the filter for "latest edit". Some pages I have on my watch list generate a large number of changes. So the 250 change limit kicked in. Work permit (talk) 19:56, 16 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

"C" keyboard shortcut broken on Portal pages

Is the "C" keyboard shortcut (usually alt+shift+c) broken on Portal-namespace pages for anyone else? Enterprisey (talk!) 01:30, 17 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

What is it supposed to do? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 08:43, 17 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Visibility of page issues on mobile view

I think we need better visibility of page issues on mobile view. Compare, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_hypnosis and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_hypnosis -- on desktop view, readers are duly advised that this page may need to be taken with a grain of salt, but on mobile it's too easy to overlook the tiny bit of grey text that opens three screenfuls of warnings. DaßWölf 04:45, 17 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Daß Wölf: What you're seeing now is as a result of huge improvement done by WMF's Reading Team recently. I am not sure whether they're thorough, but you can still give feedback at the project's talk. However, keep in mind that these templates will never be fully expanded on mobile view, like they're on desktop view, for several reasons. –Ammarpad (talk) 09:15, 17 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
If you are seeing a small gray link that says "Page issues", that is being phased out in favour of the newer solution mentioned by Ammarpad above. — This, that and the other (talk) 11:02, 17 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]