Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)

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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).

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IP range blocks

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T243974

User:Vituzzu has blocked multiple ranges, and has not been responding to multiple requests at meta:User_talk:Vituzzu for unblocking, despite reminders at itwiki where he is most active.

These blocks are affecting many editors who use VPNs and cloud services. Some of the IP range blocks include English Wikipedia, while other ranges are only blocked on e.g. Commons, Wikidata & other language Wikipedias.

How can we get someone else to review these blocks, please? – Fayenatic London 14:29, 24 January 2020 (UTC)

Only stewards from metawiki can review them. Asking here is useless. Ruslik_Zero 19:10, 24 January 2020 (UTC)

Note that one can override global blocks locally, at Special:GlobalBlockWhitelist. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 19:26, 24 January 2020 (UTC)

Thank you both. I found meta:Steward_requests/Global which is the place to appeal.

Can the blocking message be changed to link to that page, instead of saying "You can contact Vituzzu to discuss the block" since that has proved fruitless and frustrating for many would-be editors? – Fayenatic London 13:03, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

IP's can't place requests there, Globally blocked or locked users should appeal to stewards(at)wikimedia.org. — xaosflux ^Talk 14:49, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

@Xaosflux: Thanks; I confirm that that email address is displayed in a different message to blocked IP users. The problem remains for logged-in users who are blocked; we see the message that I pasted at meta:User_talk:Vituzzu#Unblock_Puffin_browser, which only refers us to one steward (who may, as in this case, choose not to respond to talk page requests). The message displayed needs to be changed. – Fayenatic London 21:01, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

@Fayenatic london: can you point to the specific MediaWiki: messages that are being shown? — xaosflux ^Talk 21:21, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

LIkely one of these. — xaosflux ^Talk 21:23, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

It was not one of those, but it is now! I checked many on that page, then tried Search, which did not find it; so I tried a Google search, which found a mirror of it, via which I traced this copy: MediaWiki:Globalblocking-ipblocked-range/en. I edited that, but I assume that the original version is the locked one at meta:MediaWiki:Globalblocking-ipblocked-range/en. – Fayenatic London 22:23, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

@Fayenatic london: ok - so your concern is that you don't like the message on meta-wiki, not here. Here is the challenge, meta-wiki is multi-lingual so we don't like to translate those messages directly. I think a good idea may be to request that that message has an additional line, something like {IF X exists: "For additional information see X"} where X is a new message that can point to a page. To request a change like this you can ask at phab by filing a feature request. — xaosflux ^Talk 23:19, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

This complaint has now brought to light a wider problem. Thank you MarcoAurelio for diagnosing this and for the fix in process, and Xaosflux for your help.

For the record, the link above for Steward requests is not the appropriate place to appeal against these blocks, but meta:SRIPBE. – Fayenatic London 12:26, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

Note, SRIPBE is not the place to "appeal" a global IP block, it is the place to request an exemption around all global IP blocks. — xaosflux ^Talk 12:57, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

Disabling the visual editor's find-and-replace

This hot mess drives me nuts. While editing an article, I reflexively type cmd-F (on a Mac) in my web browser to find something on the page. But the visual editor's find-and-replace traps the keystroke. My system-wide find text is not in its field. My system's cmd-E "Use selection for find" command sort of works, but only with cmd-G, find again. Once I use that, then hitting cmd-F opens the browser's find command while the visual editors find-and-replace remains visible but semi-inert.

How do I disable the visual editor's Find command? —Michael Z. 2020-01-25 17:50 z

Visual Editor is still very much in beta. You might have better luck with a different page editor. This search in Phabricator, Mediawiki's bug-tracking site, turns up a couple of bug reports that may describe the behavior you are seeing. I didn't see any feedback from developers about disabling VE's Find command. – Jonesey95 (talk) 18:07, 25 January 2020 (UTC)

Can we just have VE disabled? :-] ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:58, 25 January 2020 (UTC)

Good question. I forgot to mention that option. To disable VE, individual editors can go to Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing and select "Temporarily disable the visual editor while it is in beta". – Jonesey95 (talk) 03:11, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

The visual editor hasn't been in Beta Features on this wiki for a couple of years now.

Michael, I have the same problem. Unfortunately, I don't know of a good solution. I've learned to pay attention to which field is active, and to hit the Undo button when I don't. (I don't consider that to be a good solution.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:53, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

@Whatamidoing (WMF): As Jonesey referenced above, Special:Preferences refers to the VE as being in Beta, even if it's not specifically listed under the "Beta features" tab. --Yair rand (talk) 01:07, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

Changing that means that 300 translators would re-translate that line. The whole section needs to be re-organized (so you can just pick the editing environment you want, and not guess whether this pref secretly overrides that other pref...). I'd rather go straight from "old" to "new" without a temporary re-translation step in the middle. VisualEditor is not Beta software, no matter what that line says. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:20, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

Just a note: before anyone starts ranting about what a piece of **** VE is, the problem of two different programs responding to the same keystroke is not unique to VE. At work I run a KVM program to access servers running Linux on a Windows 10 laptop. When I have a KVM window open to a given server & switch between virtual screens on the server with the F2, F3, F7, etc. keys, whenever I return to my original virtual screen with the F1 key, not only do I return to my original virtual screen inside the KVM window, but I bring up this utility that offers to modify the settings on my monitor. It is annoying, but I don't have the luxury of applying the simplest & best fix -- uninstalling Windows. -- llywrch (talk) 19:37, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Should we be checking for links to the Shlayer trojan horse?

There is an article out today in Wired – The Sneaky Simple Malware That Hits Millions of Macs – about the Shlayer trojan horse that I find disturbing. It says that "The operators behind the trojan reportedly offer website owners, YouTubers, and Wikipedia editors a cut if they push visitors toward a malicious download", with a suggestion this could be done with a "masked link" in a Wikipedia footnote.

Do we have any indications of such links here? Should this be looked into? ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:56, 25 January 2020 (UTC)

If we had examples we could look into users that insert them, or we could check external links that go to flash download pages or site level redirects. All the best: Rich Farmbrough (the apparently calm and reasonable) 17:13, 26 January 2020 (UTC).

What I am wondering about is: should we be proactively looking for instances of this sort? If there were such cases, and someone got tripped up, I don't know that they ("some random reader") would know that it is something we would want to know about. But then, perhaps this isn't something we need (yet?) be concerned about? ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:38, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2020-01-27/In the media has a blurb titled "Beware of malware" in the "In brief" section. That in turn links to a full report on securelist.com. Near the bottom of that report is an old screen capture of the references section of ru:Kodak Black with a link to a taken-over-an-allegedly-poisoned web site kodak-worldDOTcom. I've already fixed the Russian version, the Ukrainian version, and the French version to point to archive.org versions of the page or to the artist's current official web site instead. Someone with the expertise needs to go through all Wikipedias and search for web sites that are known to be poisoned. Of course, this is a game of whack-a-mole: What is a valid reference today may become a "for sale" domain tomorrow then an infected domain the day after. This means as new domains are compromised, new scans will have to be run. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 22:54, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

I gather the broader problem is where an existing, legitimate reference links to a domain that has been compromised, not the malicious addition of fraudulent references. Thanks for the information. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:50, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

Yes, that is the broader problem. I've since found out that the CS1-style citation templates like {{cite web}} have a parameter to handle just such an event: |url-status=usurped or |url-status=unfit. They make the link unclick-able. They are designed to be used alongside archive-url when the original link is irrelevant or toxic. This parameter also takes the values "live" to prefer the non-archive link and "dead" for dead links. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 22:18, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

Interesting. I'll have to take a closer look at that. Thanks again. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:32, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

Earwig Copyright Issues

Hi,

My attempts to use Earwig in the last couple of hours have been unsuccessful - tested on a couple of pages, starting with Draft:DBL Ceramics. I get the following error message when I try:

An error occurred while using the search engine (Google Error: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden). Note: there is a daily limit on the number of search queries the tool is allowed to make. You may repeat the check without using the search engine.

Anyone else getting the same? Or a basic error being made on my side? For what it's worth, I get the same error message if I click on the CSD link or type it in manually. Nosebagbear (talk) 18:11, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

Google only allows so many tries per day, the are used up today. You can follow up at User talk:The Earwig. — xaosflux ^Talk 21:05, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

It's been the same way for a number of days now, continuously so I think. Has the Foundation forgotten to pay the bill or something? If we've really used our 50000 searches per day every day for the last 4–5 days, maybe we should see if the subscription can be doubled or increased in some way? Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 21:25, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

User_talk:The_Earwig#Copyvio_Detector_not_working suggests that this needs a fix from the tool operators. — xaosflux ^Talk 22:18, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

Nosebagbear I have raised phabricator:T243736]. CASSIOPEIA^(talk) 03:29, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

Seems to be ok now, e.g. this check. But still has the update note at the top saying "Update (27 January 2020): We are currently experiencing an issue using Google. You may follow this ticket and my talk page for updates." Martinevans123 (talk) 13:07, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

Should we have a "retroactive URL blacklist" for poisoned domains?

The Shlayer trojan horse thread above (permanlink) got me thinking:

If we know a URL or domain had become compromised either temporarily or permanently and is serving up malware, we should be able to reformat pages that include this URL so the link cannot be clicked on by a user. URLs can be added to the blacklist as needed and removed when they are no longer toxic.

This would require a code change which is why I am proposing it here. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 23:06, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

@Davidwr: that wouldn't be a code-change here on the English Wikipedia, it would require a mediawiki code change. You can request that here: Wikipedia:Bug reports and feature requests. — xaosflux ^Talk 23:59, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

True, but seeing how the English Wikipedia is the largest one, I wanted to get a sense of "is this a good idea" from editors here first. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 00:05, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

I think it sounds like a good idea in principal, but think that any technical implementation would be a huge problem (as those text links are on every cached page for readers). — xaosflux ^Talk 00:10, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

The blacklist is implemented by mw:Extension:SpamBlacklist. The closest request I found is phab:T18326 from 2008: "spam blacklist should replace blacklisted links with a safe special page". It suggests to disable all blacklisted links and not to make an option for individual links. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:16, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

At this point I am skating on a thin layer of knowledge over a deep abyss of ignorance. But proceeding on: how would such blacklisting work at the level of the article? Perhaps revise the url to go to internal link that explains the situation? Or? ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:07, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

@Davidwr: Am I misunderstanding or is this handled by IABot (see WP:URLREQ#clydesite.co.uk for example) and WP:BLACKLIST? —[AlanM1(talk)]— 08:15, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

Thanks, I think that bot is going to be the solution. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 14:39, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

Post 6 million article reflections: What does Wikipedia do "wrong" technically?

Having just passed the 6 million article mark, it's clear that Wikipedia is going to be around for a long time. Maybe it's time for some introspection. What do you think are major technical decisions in the design of Mediawiki, that were mistakes in hindsight? I will mention the two that I think were particular bad:

• Wikitext itself is not defined by a grammar. As for the markup itself, the use of the same character to markup bold and italics, in particular, seems like a mistake.
• Talk pages and the way we use them are a disaster.

With the wikitext, I don't know what the current status is but there have been efforts to define Wikitext. Those should be high-priority efforts by the WMF. As our article count grows, so too does the need for automated parsing. This is an issue where the technical debt will get worse with time and make the encyclopedia harder to maintain. (If my understanding about the current status is out-of-date, please point me to updates.)

As for threads, some sort of threaded implementation is needed. mw:Structured Discussions is our attempt but so far the first implementation, Flow, has been unacceptable. Something more compact and minimal in style like reddit's comment system would have been leaps and bounds better. One of the major complaints I have is that the entire concept of "archiving" or closing discussions, where we tell users to not to add to an older discussion, is a big mistake. One should ALWAYS feel free to add to a discussion even if you are years late to the action. Why? Because people still read those discussions years late too. It doesn't make sense to leave questions unanswered just because nobody arrived in time to answer them or not to post a winning idea because you as a late arrival were the first to have it. Even when the user is still motivated enough to start a new discussion (and not all will be), it often doesn't make sense to fragment the discussion this way because it often leads to pragmatic issues because the new thread doesn't link to the original discussion. Plus too, the rate of discussion is dramatically different depending on the article so it's hard to even define what "late" to a discussion even means. It is normal to wait years for a question to be answered on a very obscure or highly technical article.

I've always felt like our subpage system could be modified to handle talk discussions. (I've been under the impression for a long time that this was one of our Wikipedia:Perennial proposals but maybe not.) Picture this: a new threaded discussion could be started as a subpage of the talk page, replies as sub-subpages to that subpage, replies to replies as sub-sub-pages, and so on. The talk page itself would be generated by Mediawiki to show threads (subpages) with most recent activity. I think this idea could work brilliantly. 1) Threaded discussion (as a tree) is enforced by the storage of the data itself. 2) It would discourage the accidental editing of other's comments while still allowing for it when needed (with isolation of the history of modification to just that particular comment). Subpages NOT intended to be discussions could be marked so they are excluded from auto-generation of the talk page. I think this has HUGE potential for revolutionizing the way we handle discussions. It would also eliminate the need for our clumsy archiving process.

Anyway, those are the top two problems that I'd like to see be fixed so future generations of editors aren't saddled by poor decisions forever. Fixing each of these would require some work but I think the WMF and the community could tackle these. What do you think? What about your own pet peeves? Jason Quinn (talk) 04:36, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

Without comment on the general concept of modifying talk pages, you have pretty much described Flow, which worked on the tree discussion model and each thread as a subpage. Risker (talk) 06:08, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

We did just hold an immensely detailed cross-project talk page consultation on this issue, which seems to have given preference for an improved version of the current setup, designed to be more user-friendly, rather than any whole-hearted shift. Nosebagbear (talk) 09:50, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

The reason I heard why Flow was never adopted (besides being tightly integrated with VE, which was received with a marked lack of enthusiasm) was that no one could figure out how to port all of the old discussions into Flow. IMHO, & speaking from my experience with computers, is that the old discussions should have been left alone & everyone used Flow (or whatever) from a given point on. As long as it worked, after the first few weeks of bitching from one & all, it would have been accepted. (Or maybe the response to VE dissuaded those who made the decisions from implementing Flow, because without the first the second wouldn't work.) -- llywrch (talk) 00:34, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Nope, it just had so many many issues and many people had "showstopper" type issues (and there were many of these) - one of mine is infinite scrolling - YUCK. — xaosflux ^Talk 00:46, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Second the disdain for infinite scrolling. Also second that Flow had more issues than just how to import old discussions. As I said above, the style was far too "fluffy" and not compact enough. As for old discussions, I think my idea of using subpages easily handles this: old discussions are simply moved to a special subpage called "old". Done and done. Jason Quinn (talk) 01:45, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

@Jason Quinn: Also, the parsing of Wikitext has been made much more rigorous with the creation of Parsoid, which is now the definitive parser for Wikitext, and therefore also acts as the de-facto specification for that notation. It has a much cleaner internal architecture than the previous software, and in particular, the low-level tokenizer is now defined rigorously in terms of a Parsing Expression Grammar, making things like the apostrophe ambiguity at least well-defined, if not sensible. -- The Anome (talk) 12:07, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

@Jason Quinn, @The Anome 'pings' notify when the addressee, the text, and the signer are edited in one, unitary message. --Ancheta Wis   (talk | contribs) 12:25, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

Alright, add that to the list: forgetting a ping is so user-unfriendly that people mess it up in a discussion about wikitext parsing. (Edit summary pings have helped in this area though.) --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 12:41, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

Absolutely. If "belated ping" happens this often, it's no longer a user mistake, it's a use case. Just check if the editing user account name matches the account name in the signature (even if it's already there on the page), and if so, trigger the ping event. -- The Anome (talk) 18:12, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

The Anome, A {{#ping:The Anome}} parser function might be a better idea, to explicitly say "Yes, I want to ping this person". If it gets evaluated in the expanded wikitext, send a notification. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 18:36, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

The main reason to require a signed edit is to avoid unwanted pings when you refactor or archive a talk page or copy existing posts, and the diff engine detects a userpage link in your edit. A parser function wouldn't change that problem unless it saved something else (or nothing) to indicate the ping is old and should not be repeated if the saved code is copied later. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:37, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

• Our Main page is in need of some technical upgrades, especially so we can take back control of how it appears to mobile users. This has been challenging to deal with in the past, as efforts to improve technical components often creep in to "content" management - even when they don't have to. — xaosflux ^Talk 12:17, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

  @Xaosflux: I tried to nudge the current TemplateStyles proposal implementer but it didn't pan out. Want to make a go at it with me and see how many millions of people we can scare with our horrid web design? :) --Izno (talk) 01:48, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

• I don't care too much about the talkpages and wikitext - yes, it could be improved but both do properly serve their purpose and do not really pose a problem. I am much more worried by the total neglect of bugs and maintenance on some very old extensions. My pet peeve is there the spam-blacklist extension, but also our AbuseFilter and CheckUser and similar are in a very bad shape (the latter now does get some attention). There are bug reports of more than 10 year old that nonetheless are still utterly ignored. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 12:27, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
  • Yes, considering the scale of the WMF's budget, it would be good to see some more of it spent on software maintenance, rather than just developing new features. -- The Anome (talk) 12:34, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

  +1 to that. It seems that once a WMF team declares a project "good enough for production", all development effort stops. I have noticed that WMF development teams have been starting to be more explicit about their development priorities (or lack thereof). This is a good start, but doesn't actually help anything get fixed. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 12:47, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

  +2. I would much rather see a massive bug-fixing effort than yet another new approach that is then essentially abandoned at the late beta / 1.0 stage with hundreds of unpleasant bugs outstanding. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:16, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

  +3. MER-C 15:32, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

  If we're in the business of spit-balling crazy ideas, I personally don't care for visual editor, and I don't understand edit filters, but it would be super helpful to have a visual editor for edit filters. GMG^talk 15:19, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

  • Yes, and this applies to other tools too. For example, I have a five year old request for a simple feature addition to navigation popups, to make them show Wikidata IDs. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 20:53, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
• The biggest thing in my mind is how we edit articles. Visual Editor is a great step forward, but it's not done yet. Improving VE, and especially citation handling, should be one of the highest priorities. We need to get it to the point where it's the default editor. -- RoySmith (talk) 17:16, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
  • RoySmith, before we could do that, we'd have to have a long discussion about what it means for any piece of software to be "the default editor". There are many Wikipedias at which a majority of editors use the visual editor (i.e., the visual mode, showing rich text, not mw:Extension:VisualEditor's wikitext mode, which we usually call the 2017 wikitext editor) for at least some edits. There are many editors who use it exclusively. Some editors care about what's popular, rather than what's good for a particular purpose. One of the problems we've had in deciding which is more popular is that we don't tag all the editing environments that are used on wiki. Looking at the 500 most recent non-bot changes to articles here, I can tell you that 7 happened in Twinkle, 8 used STiki, 5 used HotCat, 1 used AutoEd, and that at least 40 used AWB ("at least", because only some AWB users tag their edits with that tool). 22 used the visual editor on desktop, 12 used the visual editor on mobile, and 10 the 2017WTE, which is part of VisualEditor. 57 used the wikitext mobile web editor. But how many of the other ~350 edits used the 2010 wikitext editor? Or WikEd? Or the 2003 editor? Or another editing environment? Or didn't really use any editing environment? Nobody really knows. I've heard estimates that around half of edits on this wiki are bots or use scripts (like Twinkle), but we don't know whether, say, WikEd is used for more edits than the 2003 wikitext editor. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:58, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
    • I'm talking about what a brand-new desktop user sees for the first time. Not bots. Not power-users with AWB, Twinkle, etc. Open an incognito window in your browser. Go to Special:Random. Click the edit tab. Right now, you get taken to a "Welcome to Wikipedia" screen, with two buttons: "Switch to the visual editor", and "Start editing". The very first thing a new user is confronted with is the requirement to make a choice that they can't possibly understand the implications of. That's a problem. They should just be immediately dropped into the Visual Editor, but along with that, VE also has to improve. And, yeah, it has to work on talk pages too. -- RoySmith (talk) 20:33, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
      • We could probably get the devs to make that change (newbies at enwiki start in the visual mode, just like they do at many other wikis), but it'd probably take a local RFC, because of the history of individuals making contradictory pronouncements about what The Community™ wants. As for using it on talk pages, see #Eventualities. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:53, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
  • @RoySmith: What improvements to citation handling do you see needed in VE? Just curious :) Sam Walton (talk) 23:40, 29 January 2020 (UTC)
    • I don't know how much of what I'm going to say here is VE per-se, how much is Citoid, and how much is just the design of the {{cite}} templates. But, it's all part of the overall UX, which is really all that matters.
    1. It too often can't find the metadata it needs in automatic mode. That's not an easy one to solve, since it's usually a case of the website having sucky markup. But, maybe we could log every URL it fails on, keep track of what domains it fails on the most often, and use that as feedback to build smarter (perhaps domain-specific) parsers.
    2. Related to the above, it too often mis-categorizes things as web, when they really should be book, or magazine, or whatever. And when it does that, it's not easy to fix.
    3. It can be hard to find the field you want. Some of the templates have way crazy number of fields (last2, last3, last4, etc) and you have to scroll through all of those to find what you want.
    4. It should insert the reference in a human-friendly form, i.e. with one field per line. That way, if you need to go in and fix something in source editing mode, it's possible to find what you need to fix.
    5. References get renumbered weirdly in preview mode under certain circumstances (T207182 and T52474)
    6. It should be smarter about integrating edit filters. Try citing this book, for example. You don't get the warning until you actually publish the page. And then you get a dialog box with inscrutable "Dismiss" and "Continue" buttons (I have no idea which button does what). I tried clicking "Dismiss", then I realized I had lost the error message, so I figured I'd just click "Publish" again to see it. To my surprise, the second publish actually published it. Anyway, the warning should come up immediately as soon as you try to insert the reference. Yeah, I know, that's a messy fix because the filter architecture doesn't support that, but it's all part of a bad UX.
  • Don't get me wrong, what we've got now is pretty cool. It just can be a whole lot better/easier, and it needs to get there to make this really usable for newbies. -- RoySmith (talk) 01:03, 30 January 2020 (UTC)
• Speaking of the 2019 Talk Page Consultation, would you all please go to https://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Talk:Dog and log in (unless you want your IP address exposed) and try out the "Reply" tool. mw:Talk pages project/replying/prototype testing suggests a testing script to follow. Feedback can go on the talk page, or ping me, and I'll pass it along. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:06, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

@Whatamidoing (WMF) I can post my just-now experience on the beta.wmflabs with a blow-by-blow set of hints for just getting to respond on Talk:Dog. Would you like this? I can put these hints on your talk page for now. --Ancheta Wis   (talk | contribs) 21:07, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

@Whatamidoing (WMF):, am I supposed to see something different on the beta Dog talk page? I don't see any options other than the normal "edit" links next to each section. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 22:07, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

@Whatamidoing (WMF) and Ahecht: I guess we found a bug here, the "Reply" tool doesn't work if the discussion page has any comments before first section heading, and that page now does thanks to @Ancheta Wis:'s edit. I filed phab:T243869 and submitted a patch to fix this. Matma Rex talk 00:19, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

In the meantime, I've added a section heading, so the 'Reply' buttons are visible again, and any interested person can try out https://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Talk:Dog . Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:26, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

• We breach the principles of DRY ("Don't repeat yourself"), on a massive scale. For example, by storing citation metadata dozens - sometimes thousands - of times in individual articles rather than one, centrally. And we're currently importing six million subject descriptions from Wikidata, rather than working with the Wikidata community - our colleagues and friends, and in some cases ourselves - to develop common standards, and then transclude them. For a volunteer project with a surfeit of outstanding tasks, such behaviour is self-harming. A professional organisation would prohibit such nonsense. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 20:48, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

  Pigsonthewing, Sigh. WD has, on a massive scale, imported data without any control. Their anti-vandalism (in the broadest sense of the word) is practically non-existing. We need eons to check all the data and get it up to par, including having proper ways of protecting it. At the moment it is a blessing that some of our featured articles are not using the WikiData data as it has been vandalised without anyone noticing. Tell me, what is the use of a massive amount of data if you have no clue what is blatantly and scarily wrong? Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 11:46, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

  More hyperbolic criticism of Wikidata not rooted in facts: "without any control" and "practically non-existing" are the scary words folks keep repeating to spread FUD. Wikidata's quality is ever-increasing, with more and more Wikipedia editions using Wikidata-driven infoboxes, bringing more eyeballs and quality checks. Wikidata does need more technical features to help out, like signed statements, but the future is inevitably going to include massive use of Wikidata. The sooner English Wikipedia wakes up to this, the better. Otherwise it's the same old saw: editors are quick to brush off Wikipedia's significant failures while deeming any problems with Wikidata as fatal. As to what Pigsonthewing said above: if we would only consolidate our citations into a structured database via Wikidata or some other system, that would bring orders of magnitude more efficiency to our references, and provide powerful new capabilities around quality, reliability and fact-checking. Rather than English Wikipedia trying to wing it with manual infoboxes, manual citations and manual short descriptions, it should attempt to join the 21st century and start unifying and collaborating. -- Fuzheado | Talk 02:19, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

  Fuzheado, OK, one of the WikiData items connected to one of our Featured Articles here is heavily vandalised, noted by ORES, no-one is doing anything about it (and the infobox on the only project (not a small one) that is using it is hence .. utterly incorrect .. an no-one eyeballs it). There are spamlinks all around (some more than a 1 year old), no-one does anything about it. Some items get spam-links added over and over, and instead of protecting all wikis from that rubbish only after 5 or so attempts of spamming someone protects it (if it even gets detected). And there are continuous attempts to vandalise up to hundreds of pages on all Wikimedia projects that use the data (of which above Featured article is a successful attempt), and that attempt is related to requests like this (if we would grant more sites like that for sites discussed in that thread the vandalism of the Featured article would have succeeded on an earlier attempt by the same user).

  I totally, completely, utterly agree with user:Pigsonthewing that that would be a major improvement, but you really have to get your data correct, protected. There is absolutely no reason that the 'immutable' data is freely editable (read: vandalisable, because that is the only reason to change it), and that is likely even true for a good portion of the other data. You may very well be right that the reliability of WikiData is improving continuously, but you have no clue if you are currently at 10% mistakes, 1% mistakes or at 1-in-a-million mistakes. That you can confidently say that you are improving however suggests that we are more in the percentages than in the parts per million. (and no, WIkiData is NOT a reliable source, it is just as volatile as any wiki). Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 05:39, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

  I should have added here: now, if WMF had it's antivandalism tools up to date and controlled, then that vandalism would possibly have been detected and reverted (well, ORES did detect it ..). If WikiData had a way to protect correct and immutable data then you at least know that that is good data. At the moment, here on en.wikipedia, and also on WikiData and anywhere else, it is an utter mess. Protect your correct and immutable WikiData data, and you can fully automatically detect that data on en.wikipedia is wrong, and people will trust that data and just re-use the WikiData data. Now, WikiData is just a tool to vandalise up to a couple of hundred of pages across the same number of wikis in one go. --Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 11:55, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

• It was written in PHP [1][2]. This is one of the underlying reasons why WMF software is so crap. There are other, more competently designed programming languages that are better able to handle the level of complexity of MediaWiki currently, and even more. Ducks and runs. MER-C 15:45, 30 January 2020 (UTC)
  • I feel you. I've done a little PHP work (inherited a project). In the few months I was working with it, I developed a deep loathing for the language. But, I've always looked at Wikipedia and said, "On the other hand, if it was possible to write one of the world's largest websites in PHP, that's obviously evidence that it can be a productive tool". Isn't FaceBook also a PHP shop? Same observation there. For that matter, English is a disaster of a language. The grammar, vocabulary, and spelling are all bizarre. I didn't even know that conjugating verbs was a concept until I learned Spanish in junior high school. Yet, we've managed to make effective use of English in transportation, literature, and information retrieval. There's certainly lots of problems with WikiMedia, but I'd be hard pressed to trace them back to the language it's implemented in. -- RoySmith (talk) 16:20, 30 January 2020 (UTC)
    • True, but it takes more effort, stricter discipline and better software engineers in order to do so. Facebook can afford to pay billions to make that happen. The WMF? Not so much. MER-C 17:12, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

      MER-C, mwaagh ... they do have a lot of money to spend and developers to make stuff. See, we have Flow, MediaViewer, Visual Editor ... SuperProtect. We even have sarcasm.php (strangely, onlyrequired once ...). Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 06:51, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

      FYI, mw:Extension:Sarcasm was not developed by and is not maintained by the WMF.^[whoosh] Anomie⚔ 14:49, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

      Anomie, I knew that. <sarcasm>quite a bit of the material that however was developed by the WMF is not maintained by them either.</sarcasm> Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 10:34, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

  MER-C, the crappiness of php as a language is mostly based in it's history. As a language in itself (today, post 7.0) it is not that bad any longer. No, the crappiness now mostly comes from that fact that we have 16 year of accumulated crappiness, no specifications and a gazillion unwritten use cases that need to be supported. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:26, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

• +1 on fixing old bugs, like the >6-year-old phab:T223002 in NavPops. —[AlanM1(talk)]— 08:32, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

  AlanM1, that's a community supported tool, it does not fall under the foundation. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:22, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

Searching template parameter usage

Is there any way to identify pages based on the value of a specific parameter within a template? Ideally, I'd like to get a breakdown by category (results being grouped based on each possible value of the parameter), but being able to search for any page where the template has a specific value for the parameter would also work. A way to design a search string that does this would be fine, though I assume that accounting for all of the template redirects would complicate things.

In this particular case, I'm interested in Template:Expert, so the ideal is being able to identify all uses of the template based on parameter value (in other words, Category:All articles needing expert attention grouped by the type of expert requested). In contrast, the minimum result I'm hoping for is to identify all uses of the template that request a particular type of expert. Thanks! Sunrise (talk) 22:45, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

I was going to suggest trying bambots at wmflabs but that page shows "The bambots tools have been moved to a new server" with a link to non-WMF site. I thought wmflabs tools were kept with source available for others and I would not feel comfortable using a non-WMF site. Johnuniq (talk) 23:45, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

@Sunrise: Using the search box, you can search for hastemplate:"Expert needed" and you get 4867 total results, or just 4492 in mainspace. So at least you know the size of the job you're looking at. If you can manage with just identifying those with a particular value, such as 'Physics' for example, then the search hastemplate:"Expert needed" insource:/expert[^|]*\| *Physics/ finds all 31 of them. I assume, though, that you'd prefer all 4492 articles broken down by parameter value. That's the sort of job that a bot would do easily enough, and your best bet might be to ask at Wikipedia:Bot requests, although it is backlogged. Perhaps a bot operator who watches this page might be happy to do a run for you. HTH --RexxS (talk) 01:31, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

User:Sunrise, are you looking for Category:Medicine articles needing expert attention or one of the other Category:All expert subject categories? WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:11, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Yes, actually! Not sure how I missed that. :-) (Also, @RexxS: if you're interested, Category:Physics articles needing expert attention seems to have quite a few additional entries.) Sunrise (talk) 00:24, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

@Sunrise: you're right. My suggested search only finds the articles that ask for a subject expert in Physics as the first topic. I realise now that the parameters |ex2=, |ex3=, etc. need to be taken account of as well. Cheers --RexxS (talk) 01:04, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

|subscription=yes|

Resolved

Apologies, as I think I've missed something, but has this been deprecated for something else? Thanks all pumpers  :) ——SN54129 10:47, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

I think that nowadays we use other parameters. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 11:34, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Excellent, thanks very much for your help, Jo-Jo Eumerus! ——SN54129 12:10, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Is there a list of Mediawiki extensions which Wikipedia uses somewhere

Hi all

I think there is probably a special page somewhere that lists all the extensions the English Wikipedia Mediawiki installation uses , but can't find it anywhere... Any ideas?

Thanks

John Cummings (talk) 11:45, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Special:Version. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:50, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Determining what level was edited?

Resolved

Is there any technical way, either available to standard users or not, to tell whether an edit was performed by editing the an entire article, or a section? I'm presuming the actual change is the same, so let's say at article just consisted of

abc
==FOO==
def

and was changed to

abc
==FOO==
ghi

In case 1, the entire article was edited to change def to ghi, in case 2, the section for FOO was edited changing def to ghi.

This is just curiousity given that edits of sections are turned into edits of entire articles in the case of edit conflicts , and my guess is that the information as to what level an edit was performed at simply isn't part of the database and thus it is impossible. Still, I figured the people who would know would hang out here.Naraht (talk) 14:16, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

@Naraht: you can use the non-authoritative automatic edit summary as a hint, it may include the section name. This is not stored on the back-end, however there is a similar request to add a tag to "new" sections (phab:T226563) - you could make a similar request to tag "section edits". — xaosflux ^Talk 15:02, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

@Xaosflux: Yes, but that can be easily spoofed, as in my edit. That happens albo when someone changes the section header and the summary retains its previous contents. --CiaPan (talk) 15:41, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

@CiaPan: indeed that is why I called it out as only a "hint". — xaosflux ^Talk 15:50, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Thanx to all, that answered my question. (and thanx for the change to the pre tag)!Naraht (talk) 15:57, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

On discussion pages I often spoof a section edit summary when making a page edit to move a new section to the bottom or combine two sections about the same. It seems helpful to give the section name in such edits and enable a section link in the edit summary. And when I change a heading in a section edit, I often make the same change in the edit summary. In September I added an API method to see the source text of an edit summary to Help:Edit summary#Places where the edit summary appears, but it does not reveal whether spoofing was used. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:56, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Yes, we should automate what User:PrimeHunter already does. If we had very intelligent software, perhaps it could notice that an edit was trying to change the section header, and then place a section link updated with the new name into the draft edit summary. This would help at WP:AN3 where the status of a report goes into the section header (words such as 'Blocked', 'No violation' etc.). This means that in practice, each closed report usually has an out-of-date edit summary. The only way to get a correct edit summary is, if a very picky admin who is in the process of entering the status (whether it is blocked, NV etc) will preview the post before saving, find the new section header in the text of the preview and manually put it into the edit summary field. EdJohnston (talk) 20:20, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Main page technical update proposed

Hello, a technical update for Main Page is being discussed at Talk:Main_Page#Main_Page_January_2020_technical_update, please join in that discussion if you are interested. Thank you, — xaosflux ^Talk 14:53, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Group notices?

I want to create a page notice that appears every time you create a new WP:DRV. Each day gets a new page, something like Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log/2020 January 23. My first thought was to go to Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log, and edit the Group notice for that. But, when I click the Group notice link, I get to "Creating Template:Editnotices/Group/Wikipedia:Deletion review", not "Creating Template:Editnotices/Group/Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log". Is this intentional? If I manually edit the URL to include the trailing "/Log", will Bad Things happen? -- RoySmith (talk) 18:16, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

@RoySmith: This unfortunately won't work. For group notices, the editnotice loader only checks Template:Editnotices/Group/{{FULLROOTPAGENAME}} for a group notice, so a notice placed at "Template:Editnotices/Group/Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log" will not have any effect. ST47 (talk) 18:24, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Hmmm, well, so not Bad Things, but certainly not Useful Things :-) I guess I need to fall back to my zeroth thought, which is that when the empty dailly pages are created by DRVClerk, it should also create a page notice for each one. I'll continue that at WT:DRV. -- RoySmith (talk) 18:32, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

@RoySmith and ST47: While that's true, you could put {{Editnotice subpages|Log|on base=no}} on Template:Editnotices/Group/Wikipedia:Deletion review, which will load Template:Editnotices/Group/Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log on subpages of Wikipedia:Deletion review/Log. Anomie⚔ 05:45, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Global watchlist - Update 5

Updates associated with DannyS712's Global watchlist script:

Future development

• I have requested a grant to fund conversion of this script into an extension, as well as further development. Please see m:Grants:Project/Create a global watchlist extension.
• If anyone is interested in reviewing the code and making suggestions regarding coding style, techniques, or something else, please let me know. See phab:T234507 for more.

Recent additions

• I have added basic tests for the script, so bugs should be less likely to make their way to the deployed versions of the script (both the unstable development version, and the stable release version).
• If there is an error with the script, the user will be notified and and the console will include a stack trace of the issue.

Translations

• Many thanks to those that have contributed translations for the script's messages. Translation takes place at m:User:DannyS712/Global watchlist/Translate, and help is appreciated.
• Newly translated messages are added to the script when I notice them; if you have translated messages that aren't showing up, please let me know at m:User talk:DannyS712.

Next release

• Version 8.0 was just finalized for the development and stable branches of the script.

To subscribe or unsubscribe from future updates, see the distribution list.

Thanks, --DannyS712 (talk) 18:25, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

---

Global watchlist user script: About • Updates • Code

Deleting and reordering parameters using AWB

Is it possible to delete and reorder template parameters using AWB? I can't seem to find that option anywhere. If not, does anyone have any regexes for deleting the content of entire parameters within a template or for reordering existing ones? Thanks, – Srdjan m (talk) 19:47, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

You could do that with regular expressions, though making an expression that would always match every possible parameter value could be tricky. I would not like to give examples, unless I try it out first! Graeme Bartlett (talk) 13:03, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

@Graeme Bartlett: Well, if you can figure out how to do it reliably, do let me know. You can use any example you want for deleting parameters and reordering them. Infobox examples might be best. – Srdjan m (talk) 11:11, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

Srdjan m, I am not sure if it helps. Years and years (and years) ago we ran AWB to convert tables of data into a sectioned infobox. That required the bot to move lines around. I think the trick I used was to put a dummy text in front of each line, with a number for in which section a piece of info needs to go. Then you have a regex that swaps 'line2 (data)' and 'line1 (other data)' and all combinations, and you repeat that swap x-times. At some point, there are no cases where there is a 'line2' before a 'line1' and you are all sorted. The code can be found here: User:Beetstra/Chemicals. It results in edits like diff (note that in the old table there is no 'order' in the information in the old diff, and that in the output the data is put into the correct section. Note that the script is 'buggy' (in that it may miss misspelled stuff, and that it eats other things on the page). Dirk Beetstra ^{T C} 13:35, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

Map not working properly

Can someone tell me why the map widget on Leigh Mall isn't working properly? It's showing an address in Columbus, Mississippi as being out in the ocean by Colombia. Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 22:24, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

TenPoundHammer because 3 degrees is very close to the equator. I guess a digit got dropped. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:38, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Dark mode/skin

Is there an official dark mode or skin in Wikipedia?.--SharʿabSalam▼ (talk) 02:30, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

It's in development I think. But you can enable the script User:Volker E. (WMF)/dark-mode in the meantime. – Ammarpad (talk) 04:13, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

I have it but it's not working well. When I open a page in Wikipedia, it starts with no dark mode then after 2 seconds it changes to dark mode. That's more stressful for my eyes. I hope they develop the dark mode quickly. It sounds very easy to create a dark skin, I don't know why Wikipedia still has not developed a dark skin. It should be available for both readers and editors. People spend a lot of time reading in Wikipedia.--SharʿabSalam▼ (talk) 06:38, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

I found this. It's working, although the colours are not as good as User:Volker E. (WMF)/dark-mode but thats okay. Better than nothing.--SharʿabSalam▼ (talk) 06:51, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

There is the "Use a black background with green text" option (see gadgets tab of preferences). This might do.   Jts1882 | talk  12:05, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Jts1882 thanks. This one looks good.--SharʿabSalam▼ (talk) 16:28, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Help with taking an existing Barnstar and customizing it for my own current needs?

Hello, Never been here before, and I am not sure if the support people here would do that. Would you? Thanks, warshy ^(¥¥) 03:52, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

@Warshy: Wikipedia:Barnstars would be a good place to start, it also has a collection of lots of barnstars you may use. Wikipedia talk:Barnstars would be a good place to ask general barnstar questions if you don't have a specific technical question. — xaosflux ^Talk 14:20, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

@Xaosflux: Thank you very much. This should do it for me here for the time being. I'll take it up from there! Thanks, warshy ^(¥¥) 17:08, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

How to using unstripNowiki in subst: ?

Why {{unstripNoWiki}} notwork in {{subst:}}?

• See Special:Diff/938286178
• In lua console, I try to print the return value returned from mw.text.unstripNowiki, then I got a string like ?UNIQ...-nowiki-00000000-QINU?, so I think mw.text.unstripNowiki notwork in {{subst:}}.

BUT WHY? And How to fix it?--Yu-Fan 宇帆 (talk) 07:42, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Tested it and it does seem to work, the substitution simply places the template parameter in the Unstrip module invocation, so it will look the same but it is actually displayed from the function invocation. --qedk (t 桜 c) 15:29, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

@QEDK:

{{#invoke:Unstrip|unstripNoWiki|<nowiki>[[12]]</nowiki>}} → 12 (work)

but {{subst:#invoke:Unstrip|unstripNoWiki|<nowiki>[[12]]</nowiki>}} → [[12]] (not work)

{{safesubst:#invoke:Unstrip|unstripNoWiki|<nowiki>[[12]]</nowiki>}} → [[12]] (not work)

I think it doesn't work. (see sandbox test Special:diff/938411191)--Yu-Fan 宇帆 (talk) 01:00, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

• Does anyone know how to DELETE <nowiki><nowiki/> tag and keep the inner text in {{subst:}}? --Yu-Fan 宇帆 (talk) 06:57, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

  I think you're misunderstanding the purpose of the template. It displays the text as it is supposed to be displayed without the tags (by invoking the module), it does not substitute and remove the nowiki tags itself. --qedk (t 桜 c) 07:27, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

Discussion about a new selection method for featured articles

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia talk:Today's featured article#the calais entry... um.... about whether future featured articles should be randomized on the Main Page which needs input by people who understand the technical implications of e.g using randomizer scripts on very widely read pages. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 09:48, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Creating a sanitized CSS page

I would like to know how I can generate a page with the content model sanitized CSS. Even if I cannot generate it, please specify a link about how it can be done. Adithyak1997 (talk) 12:26, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

@Adithyak1997: if you create a subpage of a Template: it will do that automatically. If you need one somewhere else (like a usersandbox) you can create a normal CSS page, then leave an edit request to have an Interface Admin adjust the content model for you. If you have a single page you want made, you can ping me and I'll probably make it for you as well. — xaosflux ^Talk 12:44, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

@Xaosflux: Any administrator can change the model (CSS/JS/JSON) but not in someone else's userspace/MW-space, I presume? --qedk (t 桜 c) 12:51, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Right, it requires an interface administrator there as xaosflux said (at least for .js and .css pages). PrimeHunter (talk) 13:30, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

@QEDK: I'd have to check over all the use cases, but any admin should be able to change pages from wikitext to SCSS - however the page may fail to convert if it is not actually marked up in SCSS. — xaosflux ^Talk 14:17, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Thank you all for your valuable replies. Adithyak1997 (talk) 15:30, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

@Adithyak1997: You can also create a sanitized css page in Template: namespace and then move it wherever you want (the content model should stay the same). Or if you just want one to do some sandbox testing, you can create one at Template:TemplateStyles sandbox - Evad37 [talk] 05:29, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

Very erroneous diffs on category edits

When a category page is changed, the diff link given in Watchlist often uses the wrong page for comparison, and makes it look like the text of the category page has been completely replaced with the text of one of the member articles! Compare:

From watchlist: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Linguists_of_indigenous_languages_of_North_America&diff=938320566&oldid=836320439

From history: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Linguists_of_indigenous_languages_of_North_America&diff=938318938&oldid=836320439

Note the different "diff" values in the URLs. Is this a known bug? Is there a Phabricator ticket for it yet? —swpb^{T • go beyond • bad idea} 16:53, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Maybe it depends of what kind of settings you have for your watchlist. Do you have "Expand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent" enabled on your preferences? Stryn (talk) 16:59, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

FYI: I can only reproduce this when both "Category changes" are shown and "Group results by page" is active, then the summary "9 changes" link is as described. It seems it groups all the category membership change entries together with the edit to the category page itself, and winds up diffing between the category page and one of the pages that resulted in a membership change. Anomie⚔ 17:13, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, I think it only occurs with those settings. Still an error though, right? Even when grouping by page, I would expect to see one entry for the changes to the cat page itself, and one for the new members, e.g. "8 pages added to category". —swpb^{T • go beyond • bad idea} 17:46, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

I created a Phabricator ticket. —swpb^{T • go beyond • bad idea} 18:13, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Yes it is still an error. Thanks for filing the task! Anomie⚔ 18:17, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Interrupting parsing at beginning of parameter so wikimarkup at very start of its content is not misparsed

Resolved

Template:Quote and some other block-level templates have an issue such that when a content parameter's value begins with wikimarkup, that markup is often not interpreted correctly. In an article, the fix is to do something like this, with <nowiki />:

{{quote|<nowiki />
'''Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.''' Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
}}

To correctly produce:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

With this example, the output of the parameter – if you leave out <nowiki /> – will incorrectly appear as:

' Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

because the start of the parameter is mis-interpreted as a lone, plain-text ' followed by '' italics markup, then later a mis-matching ''' boldfacing start (not end).

This is a fairly serious issue, since we cannot depend on editors to know that they have to manually prefix <nowiki /> in the local template content. This problem affects things like italics and boldface, as well as parameter content beginning with a "*" or "#" list item. It is not repaired by soft-linewrap changes, like {{quote|'''Lorem ipsum dolor...'''}}; the <nowiki /> is needed regardless of horizontal versus vertical template usage. It also is not fixed by naming the parameter, e.g. with {{quote|1='''Lorem ipsum dolor...'''}} The problem does not affect display: inline elements only block ones (and probably inline-block ones).

Attempting to pre-seed the template with <nowiki /> at the beginning of the parameter output has no effect. Nor does wrapping that <nowiki /> in <includeonly>...</includeonly>. Attempting to break up the <nowiki />, e.g. with <includeonly><no</includeonly><includeonly>wiki /></includeonly> fails even more dismally, just passing the literal ASCII characters and causing the string "<nowiki />" to appear in the visible article text.

Has anyone figured out a way to stop this mis-parsing of the first character of the parameter output? I know this is an old issue, and I figure someone must have nailed it while I was off one one of my extended wikibreaks.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:34, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish:: Testing {{quote}} with unnamed parameter:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

and again with 1= parameter

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

It seems to work fine for me. "Lorem ... aligua." is in bold, the rest is not. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 18:47, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Hmm. Maybe it requires something in particular about the surrounding material to trigger? I had not seen the problem arise much lately, but ran across it again here: Mutant (Marvel Comics)#Omega-level mutants. If you change the block quotation there to remove the nowiki, the problem triggers (or at least it does for me in Chrome on macOS). I just tested it again and did get the problem (just tested with Preview; I didn't save the change into the live article).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:09, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

This is because {{quote}} wraps |1= in {{Trim quotes}}, which trims matched pairs of leading and trailing single (') and double (") quotes and whitespace from a string, per that template's documentation. Stripping matching single quotes appears to be causing the problem. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:26, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Yup, that is it: {{quote|'''Omega Level Mutant:''' A mutant ... ''While Jean Grey... telepath.''}} renders as

Omega Level Mutant: A mutant ... While Jean Grey... telepath.

Adding <nowiki /> to the beginning or end of the first parameter will fix the problem and render it as

Omega Level Mutant: A mutant ... While Jean Grey... telepath.

davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 19:40, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

So why didn't it do that to either of your above tests (the Lorem ones)? Maybe it's only triggered when such a quote char. is also at the end?  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:07, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

That is exactly it: If there is a matching single-quote at the beginning or end, both are stripped. Ditto double-quotes. If there is no matching pair, then nothing changes. I'm not sure what effect the addition whitespace has at the beginning before the quote or at the end after the quote, I didn't examine {{trim quotes}} closely enough. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 21:23, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Is this related to parser bug T18700? It either produces unwanted new lines or errors when newlines are unexpected. I've really no idea as its completely baffling, but it does require <nowiki /> fixes.   Jts1882 | talk  20:31, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

I have submitted a change for Template:Quote to add a new parameter, {{notrim=1}}, which will insert the <nowiki /> at the beginning of the quote automatically. It is awaiting review and approval by someone with template-editor user-rights. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 20:55, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

I'm on it, though this is itself also a kluge; I'm hoping there's a way to just short-circuit this sort of mess. Something in the intervening years has changed, because it used to be a much more common problem.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:04, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Thanks. Unfortunately, there is no way for a computer to know if ''There Be Quotes Here'' is a quote someone copied-and-pasted from somewhere that was typed using two single quotes instead of a double quote, or if it's the title of a book which needs to be in italics. There needs to be a way for the editor using the template to override any trimming, so it will be a kludge one way or the other. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 21:18, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

It's all kludgey indeed if the mission is to prevent users from seeing quotation marks (as proscribed by good block quoting). If one were willing to make the concession, the parent trim marks module might reasonably be set up so that you could select which quotation marks you wanted to strip from beginning and end, such that {{quote}} would only strip double quotation marks rather than double and single marks, but then one would get to see the single quotation marks in each article. I think overriding the trimming at the per-article level makes more sense than overriding the trimming partially at the template level. --Izno (talk) 21:31, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Or it should just not interfere with '' and ''' wikimarkup at all unless forced to do so with a parameter; I've made a Lua-improvement request to this effect over at Template talk:Trim quotes#Wikimarkup interference. The cases where an actual quoted string like "There Be Quotes Here" is using doubled apostrophe/single-quote characters masquerading as double-quote characters is going to be rare (probably just a PDF OCR error). Where such cases exist, retaining them with that incorrect punctuation needs to get fixed anyway, so we have no reason to code around it.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:39, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

SMcCandlish implemented a new parameter, |notrim=1 (also =true, =yes, or anything else) which will insert <nowiki /> at the start of the quote. He also updated documentation and talk pages for Template:Quote. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 22:19, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Testing:

{{quote|'''Omega Level Mutant:''' A mutant ... ''While Jean Grey... telepath.''}}

Omega Level Mutant: A mutant ... While Jean Grey... telepath.

{{quote|'''Omega Level Mutant:''' A mutant ... ''While Jean Grey... telepath.''|notrim=1}}

Omega Level Mutant: A mutant ... While Jean Grey... telepath.

davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 22:21, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Mostly davidwr's work, and thanks also to @Jonesey95: for catching the culprit in the first place. This addl. parameter actually also resolved an earlier issue report at Template talk:Quote, about block quotations with nested (interior) quotations, which caused some of these quotation marks to disappear when the block quote begins with one interior quotation and ends with another). Still, it would be nice to have Template:Trim quotes not interfere with wikimarkup when clearly detectable as such.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:25, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Unfortunately, the problem is intractable without awareness of context. Is There Be Quotes Here a book title or an copy-and-paste of a quote by someone who didn't use proper quotation standards by an editor who didn't correct the poorly-formatted quotation? A computer can't know. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 22:57, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Which is why, IMO, {{Quote}} should not try to enforce MOS by stripping quotes that it cannot possibly understand in all cases. Let's remove the trimming and leave MOS enforcement to human editors, as we do with most of the rest of MOS. (Fork alert: I have made this same argument at the template's talk page. Discussion should probably continue there.) – Jonesey95 (talk) 23:29, 30 January 2020 (UTC)

Too many templates in one article

Not sure if I am right here, but I noticed that in the article Wildlife Photographer of the Year (which contains very long lists) the flag templates stop working after a certain point. Removing a few entries shifts the point where the templates stop to work, so it seems to be caused by overuse. It it were only the flags, it would not trouble me to much, but then also the template {{reflist}} does not work. Is this a known issue? Can it be handled in another way than using less templates? --Lynxbiru (talk) 11:21, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

The article is in the hidden Category:Pages where template include size is exceeded. See Help:Template#Template limits. There is no simple fix. Reduce the template calls, e.g. by splitting the page, or make the templates more efficient. The latter can be hard and require template coding skills. My suggestion in this case would be to split out Wildlife Photographer of the Year#The full list. A list of 3101 winners is too large for a general prize article anyway. The section would still break the template limit by itself so maybe omit the flag icons. Without flag icons it could be in the main article without breaking the limit but it's too long for Wikipedia:Article size. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:23, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

Turning off all those flag icons seems to be the easiest fix that won't take much away from readers. — xaosflux ^Talk 12:47, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

Could the flag icon templates use CSS and templatestyles rather than adding the image code for each template call?   Jts1882 | talk  13:03, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

@Jts1882 and Lynxbiru: the technical issue isn't currently with the number of images, it is the number of templates. I've disabled all the flag icons in the large list for an immediate fix. As PrimeHunter also mentioned, the page itself is also just far to big, highly suggest splitting out the Wildlife_Photographer_of_the_Year#The_full_list section to a standalone list (which may be able to have the flags back on again). — xaosflux ^Talk 15:37, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

@Xaosflux: Usually I don't edit on English Wikipedia, so I am not too familiar with the splitting policies. If someone splits the article for me I can remove the templates by hand. --Lynxbiru (talk) 15:56, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

@Lynxbiru: see Help:List. If you want to split out that list, first make the new list, (copy over the content), then just put a link in the article to the new list there. The flag icons can easily be reactivated on a new page if they won't exceed the limit. — xaosflux ^Talk 16:02, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

@Xaosflux:. I understand that it is not the number of images or for that matter the number of templates. It is the aggregate size of the code returned by the templates. Each flag icon template returns an image tag (or the wikitext for it) with src, srcset, alt and other attributes for each instance of the flag. If the flag icon was handled as a background image in CSS and templatestyles there wouldn't be such repetition of the code. It's not uncommon for a flag icon to be repeated dozens of times in some of the football lists. Anyway, it was just a thought. In general it may just be a sign the articles are too big or overusing illustrations. I've added a comment at the football project about a number of articles with broken coding.   Jts1882 | talk  16:36, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

I have put a notice on at Talk:Wildlife Photographer of the Year#Technical limitations with this page may result in the page splitting. I recommend discussion of what to do about this particular article be moved there, and discussion, if any, about the general limitations of Wikipedia software continue here or in the discussion area appropriate for the specific issue being discussed. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 16:16, 31 January 2020 (UTC)

Most looked-up articles for a specific country

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T207171

I saw (via Signpost) a list of the top 25 EN:WP articles searched worldwide and wondered whether it would be possible to have such a list of most-searched for a specific country or region, or even topic. Thanks. Tony Holkham (Talk) 00:30, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

There's a discussion about this information at phab:T207171. – Ammarpad (talk) 17:10, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

Is it possible to color table cells by value to produce a heatmap?

See this discussion on coloring this table to look like this.

Is there any way to do this automatically? It could either be based on an absolute scale (-100% is red, 0% is white, +100% is blue, and anything in between is shaded in between) or it could be based on the min and max of the actual values, as in the imgur examples above, which were generated with Conditional Formatting in LibreOffice, spanning from min to max value and linearly scaled.

The two solutions I know of are to use javascript to color the cells, as in this example, or turn the whole table into some kind of template that feeds the cell values to Lua to color them, somewhat similar to the heatmaps generated by Template:Weather box.

Does anything like this already exist? Could it be created? The intent is to be able to apply it to all tables of numerical data, like the Conditional Formatting in a spreadsheet. — Omegatron (talk) 06:04, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

I think that WereSpielChequers (talk · contribs) did something like this for the WP:RFA stats. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 10:26, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

See Template:Bureaucrat candidate/expr and Template:Bureaucrat candidate. --qedk (t 桜 c) 11:11, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

So for this solution, the numbers in every cell would need to be replaced by something like | style="background-color: #{{Template:Some_colorizer|76}};" | 76%? Or maybe that could be simplified to something like |{{Some_colorizer|76}} for each row?

With the javascript solution, it could be turned on for any table without editing the table itself, in the same way that sortable tables can be, and it's non-essential information, so it's ok if it doesn't show up for the small fraction of users that don't have javascript. — Omegatron (talk) 14:58, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

The current set of colours used in Wikipedia:RFA_by_month came after a radical reworking to try and avoid colour blindness problems. In the political example you are working on you'd obviously want to avoid either Red or Blue for internal things within a party. The solution we have in Template:Hotcold works for heatmaps of up to 12 shades, and because of the way it is written it can be reconfigured for a wider range of shades if someone can come up with 100 shades that are distinguishable regardless of colour blindness. I would quite like to see a broader range of shades available - the tricky thing is getting the colours right. Get the colours and an expanded version of Template:Hotcold should be easy. So if 12 shades works for you we already have a solution if you need more, the issue is accessible colours. ϢereSpielChequers 15:37, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

Getting the colors right is easy; there are lots of color maps with perceptually accurate gradations available now. (I'd suggest blues to match the other tables on that page, for instance.) I'm just asking about the implementation details of actually coloring in the cells without requiring a ton of manual labor on something that is constantly being updated. — Omegatron (talk) 17:17, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

query help

Hi, i have this query to make List of Wikipedians by article count. I want to add a rank/counter on left side like this one. How can i do that? Need help. --আফতাবুজ্জামান (talk) 17:00, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

Template error

There seems to be a bug with Template:Skip to bottom. On WP:AN, the template seems to overlap with other templates. This mainly happens when I'm logged out. I tried fixing it myself, but I had no luck with it. Can you figure out what's wrong with it and fix it for me please? Interstellarity (talk) 17:06, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

I think that's how it is supposed to work. It stays locked at the top of the page for me, overlapping nothing, but the template's documentation says: A small floating box with "skip to bottom/skip to TOC" links will appear in the upper-right corner. If you're still having trouble, a screen shot might help. Also let us know what browser, version, and operating system you are using. (BTW for other troubleshooters: the template is transcluded via {{Noticeboard links}}.)– Jonesey95 (talk) 17:54, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

File:Error5684947.png

This is what it looks like on my screen.

@Jonesey95: Please see screenshot to the right. I use Firefox 72.0.2 and Windows 10 Home. I tried it on Chrome. I get the same results. Interstellarity (talk) 18:31, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

That looks like it matches the description in the template's documentation. You might need to follow up at Template talk:Skip to bottom if you think that the placement of the floating box could be improved. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:32, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

@Jonesey95: I have copied this discussion from here to Template_talk:Skip_to_bottom#Template_error and asked for help to fix it. Please follow the discussion there. Interstellarity (talk) 20:54, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

Missed word!

Hello everyone! I searched for "jump" at Alkene (by using find in Chrome). While i couldn't found any word (with jump), Chrome founded 'jump' 6 times. I think so, that word (jump) went to the back of interface. Can someone tell me something about it? Thanks! ⇒ AramTalk 18:49, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

I am not sure but I think if you clicked ctrl + U then searched for jump you will find some hidden text like "Jump to search" and "Jump to navigation"--SharʿabSalam▼ (talk) 19:26, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

@Aram: that, in the page source you can see some interface labels that include "jump", like these:

<div id="jump-to-nav"></div><a href="#column-one" class="mw-jump-link">Jump to navigation</a><a href="#searchInput" class="mw-jump-link">

Screen readers and other accessibility tools may make use of this. — xaosflux ^Talk 19:28, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

@SharabSalam: and @Xaosflux: You are right both! But what are their benefits? I founded more pages in Draft namespace about this case. See Draft:Alan Biju. ⇒ AramTalk 19:43, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

Aram, see what xaosflux said, "Screen readers and other accessibility tools may make use of this."--SharʿabSalam▼ (talk) 19:52, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

@SharabSalam: Thank you again! ⇒ AramTalk 19:54, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

Aram You are welcome. I dont know why the editor who created that draft added "Jump to navigation Jump to search" at the top. It was added there by the editor who created the draft.--SharʿabSalam▼ (talk) 20:05, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

SharabSalam, probably indicates it was copied from another page somehow —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:07, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

Is there a way to know who is watching your user page?

I think that editor should be able to know who is watching their user pages, is there a way to know who is watching your user page?--SharʿabSalam▼ (talk) 19:17, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

From Help:Watchlist#Privacy:

No user, not even administrators, can tell what is in your watchlist, or who is watching any particular page. Publicly available database dumps do not include this information either. Only developers who have access to the servers that hold the Wikipedia database could obtain this kind of information.

–Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 19:19, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

That's interesting. I dont know why does the watchlist have privacy. I wouldnt mind if someone saw my watchlist and I can't think of a logical or privacy reason that someone would not want others to see his watchlist. I think it would be cool to have my watchlist public.--SharʿabSalam▼ (talk) 19:37, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

@SharabSalam: some people are readers only, and in some parts of the world people may be persecuted for what they read. Additionally, nothing would stop anyone from watching your userpage without using the watchlist function - they could just load the page in any number of ways and look at the history. — xaosflux ^Talk 19:39, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

Oh, thats why, I didnt think of it that way.--SharʿabSalam▼ (talk) 19:48, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

• I have often wished my alternate account, User:RoySmith-Mobile, could view my main watchlist. It would be nice if there was some way I could share my watchlist with specific other accounts of my own choosing, but I suspect that wouldn't get a high priority as a feature request. But, the main point about privacy is worth repeating. Even in parts of the world where hiding your reading habits from the government isn't the issue, there's lots of reasons why ordinary people don't want everybody to know what they are reading. As some extreme examples, a 14 year old girl may not want her parents to know she's reading Condom or Self-induced abortion, and you may not want anybody to know you're reading Management of HIV/AIDS. We already have far too much of our lives shared without our knowledge and/or consent. It's good that wikipedia works to preserve our privacy, even if it's occasionally inconvenient.

You might try going to https://myactivity.google.com/ to see some of what is known about you. I personally use duckduckgo most of the time to avoid some of that spying, but I just went to myactivity, and was somewhat surprised to see:

duckduckgo.com
Visited what does google know about me at DuckDuckGo
Details
 
Today at 3:12 PM
 
Chrome
 
Mac
Why this activity?
This activity was saved to your Google Account because your additional Web & App Activity setting was on while using Chrome.

in my history. It's hard to get away from. -- RoySmith (talk) 20:22, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

xaosflux doesn’t the Watchlist token serve the purpose RoySmith is looking for? –xeno^talk 20:56, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

Wow, I never knew that existed. Yeah, that mostly looks like what I need. It works, but what I get is a blob of un-stylized XML. I need to figure out how style that to be human-readable. The other problem, of course, is if I do actually make this work, it'll be just another excuse to mess around on my phone at the gym instead of actually working out. First world problems. -- RoySmith (talk) 21:18, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

• Replies to most everything above, I'm not chasing the pings down right now.
  • So public/shared watchlists have been discussed, the concept is basically stalled for over 10 years, and phab:T9467 can be followed to read more about those concepts.
  • Wikipedia:Syndication#Watchlist_feed_with_token talks about how you can read your watchlist else where, using the watchlist token. If you were to disclose your token, others could read your watchlist as well. There is not somewhere on-wiki to put that, but you could use an RSS reader to load watchlists updates remotely, and use an RSS client to view them. I've done a little bit of this when there were some pages I wanted to make sure I always watched - I used a non-editing account to watch them, got that token, and loaded it to an RSS service. Keep in mind, the RSS service provider (the most common way to use RSS) will be able to see your watchlist.
• — xaosflux ^Talk 00:22, 2 February 2020 (UTC)
• Special:EditWatchlist/raw can be used to copy-paste a watchlist at the time between accounts. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:25, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

Wikipedia:The Great Britain/Ireland Destubathon

Hi, I there's an issue with viewing this on mobile phones and ipads, it stretches across the page. Can somebody sort out the coding of the parameters to allow it to adapt to the device? Thanks.♦ Dr. Blofeld 12:43, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

This is more or less impossible with the way the image maps are set up. E.g. Template:Principal areas of Wales imagemap has a 600px width, and the others have ~500 px width. I don't know how <imagemap> responds to template parameters, but you can try making it so the width is reduced by adding a template parameter where the width is set. --Izno (talk) 14:58, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

{{Principal areas of Wales imagemap}} is set up as a 600px image map, plus a second column to the right of the map. You could move the labels to a cell below the map instead of to the right, and add an optional |width= parameter to that template. Also, the percentage bar template only takes width values in pixels instead of allowing percentage widths (see this page for options). It could be adjusted to take any valid value for |width=, though since "px" is fixed text in that template, all transclusions would have to be checked. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:03, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

Dr. Blofeld, I’d start by not using tables for layout purposes. Tables are terrible. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 17:12, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

Feel free to adjust or remove any images which don't conform and change to a non table format. I'll probably create one montage image with map and flags.♦ Dr. Blofeld 17:16, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

Generating lists of UK and Ireland stubs and running a bot like User:Emijrpbot

Can somebody run something to use automation to generate a list of stubs by entity, county and subject for the UK and Ireland in the project space of Wikipedia:The Great Britain/Ireland Destubathon. I know a lot of entries won't be able to be organized that way but something which can identify stubs for settlements and buildings etc by county and something which can read place of birth and organize it by county. And somebody who can code a bot like Emir's for checking resdable prose length of articles to be run to help patrol the entries once submitted. No rush to do this, we have a month, but whatever anybody can do would be appreciated.♦ Dr. Blofeld 15:52, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

May be you could ask at Wikipedia:Bot requests? Keith D (talk) 17:14, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

Dr. Blofeld, what are you looking for that you can't get from the existing category structure? --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 17:37, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

Permissions pop-ups?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T234743
Open

So I'm getting some pop-ups in the upper-right of my screen today. Firstly, I'm an admin. Secondly, I saw a pop-up earlier that said I couldn't use page reviewer tools because I didn't have appropriate permissions or something. I didn't take a screencap, so that's probably of no use to any of you.

Anyhow, I was just at Smita Bansal, which is protected with the Pending Changes setting. I looked at three edits, then made a change of my own, and tried to accept the net result of all four of our pending changes, but got a pop-up notice saying that I wasn't part of the correct permission group. Twice I couldn't approve the changes. Finally, I think I went the back way or something (going into View history, then clicking the pending changes notification, then accepting?) and that allowed me to approve the net changes. Am I imagining this? Cyphoidbomb (talk) 16:16, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

@Cyphoidbomb: these don't sound "standard" - perhaps it is one of your many scipts or a gadget you are running? Perhaps a collision between them - are you perchance using "Yet Another AFC Helper Script" gadget? — xaosflux ^Talk 18:00, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

@Xaosflux: It's possible that I activated Yet Another AFC Helper a few days ago, but after the pop-up notice earlier today, I selected the option to disable it. I can't remember activating any other gadgets recently, and unfortunately there's no history I can check. I haven't touched any of my other scripts since late December, and that was to remove something. I also haven't installed any new software or browser extensions. By far the weirdest thing was the pop-up on the pending changes article telling me I didn't have sufficient permissions. Cyphoidbomb (talk) 18:40, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

@Cyphoidbomb: take a try with any other page at Special:PendingChanges to see if you have this problem still? — xaosflux ^Talk 18:45, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

@Xaosflux: You read my mind. I was able to duplicate it at Padmaavat. The error is: You do not have permission to review revisions, for the following reason: The action you have requested is limited to users in one of the groups: Editors, Pending changes reviewers. Cyphoidbomb (talk) 18:48, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

I got the same permissions error page a while back while trying to accept a pending change, saying I wasn't allowed to do it and only reviewers could, but I accepted a revision now and it seems to work. --qedk (t 桜 c) 18:50, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

I get the pop-up warning, which fades away, then if I click accept again, the change sticks. I also tried logging out and logging back in to see if it was something weird related to my session. Cyphoidbomb (talk) 18:52, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

(edit conflict) On another note, Special:Diff/938845132 shows up as accepted by you, but it should be automatically accepted. --qedk (t 桜 c) 18:56, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

Reported to Phab. --qedk (t 桜 c) 19:07, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

Just made a change at the Ted Kaczynski article. It's marked as pending. Cyphoidbomb (talk) 19:10, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

@QEDK and Xaosflux: I took a screencap in case that helps. File:Cyphoidbomb - Wikipedia pending changes error notice.jpg (file should be deleted when this is all done.) Also, I logged out, cleared Chrome browser cache and cookies, then logged back in, same issue. Cyphoidbomb (talk) 19:17, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

With the PC userright, everything looks OK. I just removed it and now the accept/unaccept box does not even appear! Previously (even without PC) I had that atleast. --qedk (t 桜 c) 19:20, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

OK, looks like this is phab:T234743. — xaosflux ^Talk 20:49, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

Logging of failed actions?

Is there any place where failed actions are logged? A user at WP:TEA reported they could not change a page title. Looking at their contribution history, they're just over the threshold to be autoconfirmed, so I'm guessing the first time they tried it, they weren't yet. Is there any place their first (failed) attempt to move the page might be logged? It's not a big deal, but if I knew for sure that was the case, I could provide a more useful answer for them. -- RoySmith (talk) 17:09, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

Only the edit filter has a log, on "filter log" at the top of user contributions. Permission errors are not logged. The user probably has a move link now but never found or clicked it. The link only appears on pages you have permission to move. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:44, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

"Mark all notifications as read" is broken on mobile

If I click the "mark all notifications as read" button on mobile, the notifications clear on mobile, but on the desktop version I still see unread notifications. I've had this bug for a few weeks now, is anyone else having this problem? Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 00:14, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

It eventually remembers. I have had to click mark all over several sessions before it stuck. At this point, I just click desktop mode on the bottom of wikipedia and clear notifications from there. Slywriter (talk) 14:31, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

Weird issue

On a few pages I notice that the screen is acting weird when I try to look at certain articles on my iPad. The text appears to be zooming in and out in rapid succession making things virtually impossible to read. Strangely this effect doesn’t happen after certain edits are made and even more oddity two edits I found that triggered this on different pages don’t appear to have any common features that would explain why this is happening. The two edits are [[3]] and [[4]]. If anyone has an idea of what is going on I would be thankful since I’m stumped.--69.157.252.96 (talk) 07:15, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

I’m also in desktop mode and using Chrome.--69.157.252.96 (talk) 07:19, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-06

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 February. It will be on all wikis from 6 February (calendar).

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

20:04, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

Is that all? Looks like a boilerplate with no extras. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:19, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

Redrose64, I was surprised too. Is that really it? moonythedwarf (Braden N.) 20:20, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

It appears so from [5]. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:42, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

Pinging BBearnes (WMF), who populated the changelog file for the previous version. Is there a changelog for this version? Sorry to bother you if you are the wrong staffer to ask. – Jonesey95 (talk) 00:11, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

It's complete. There's just not much to say this week. – Ammarpad (talk) 04:44, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

Apologies - we've still got a bug with automatic generation of deploy notes. See T243330: train-deploy-notes Jenkins job fails in conjunction with branch.py for that. We'll get something posted here. - Brennen (talk) 18:46, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

Template question

I've come across a page that's behaving strangely, which I'm not sure how to fix. The page is titled 2019–20 EuroLeague Regular Season, and consists almost entirely of a very long sequence of templates — but beginning with "Round 22", the page stops transcluding the templates and just starts textlinking to them instead — with the result that when I tried to tag the page as uncategorized, that template also just textlinked instead of actually displaying the template or adding it to the appropriate maintenance category. And there isn't anything in the page coding that causes the templates to change how they behave, either.

I have seen a situation like this before, but it was several years ago and I've never come across it again until now — if I recall correctly, the issue was that there's some kind of upper limit on how many templates can be called in a page, so any additional templates stopped behaving normally, and just turned into text links instead of conventional transclusions, once that limit had been crossed. But I have absolutely no recollection whatsoever of what was done to fix it, nor any recollection of what page it was in order to locate the previous discussion in the VPT archives.

In the meantime, what I've done is to move the uncategorized template to the top of the page as a workaround, even though it's normally supposed to be at the bottom, so that it's properly reflected in the categorization maintenance queue — but the page is still broken from a content perspective as well, and needs somebody to look at it. Thanks. Bearcat (talk) 20:56, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

See #Too many templates in one article. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:00, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

I have opened a discussion on this specific page and the 2018-2019 season at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Basketball#Euroleague seasons are getting too big for Wikipedia - time to split or reduce content as the talk pages for the two "season" pages, the talk page for 2018–19 EuroLeague, and the talk page for EuroLeague don't get much discussion. I will post links on all affected pages. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 23:26, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

Articles without Wikidata item

My unanswered TH to HD approach was not approved, this is a new case now skipping HD:

For an album article I assumed that a corresponding WikiData item will be started by bots, but that is not the case: There's a Category:Articles without Wikidata item, populated by various templates needing Wikidata used mostly on BLPs, e.g., birth place. So now I assume that adding articles manually to this hidden maintenance category makes no sense, and I should simply create the item—PoC for the record label item—is that correct? –84.46.52.96 (talk) 00:32, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

Oldest "living people"?

Is there a way to generate a list of the oldest (or, put another way, earliest born) people in Wikipedia listed in Category:Living people? I am thinking that we might have some older articles on people who were listed as living at the time, and have since died. I think the best place to start looking is with people who would be remarkably old if they were in fact still alive. BD2412 T 03:22, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

I'm just spit-balling here, but creating a WikiData entry for each person with their birth year would make creating such a list much easier. We already have categories for people born in certain years. Maybe go through categories like Category:1900 births, Category:1901 births, etc. up to, say, Category:1950 births. For each name, check to see if the person is in a "deaths" category, Category:Living people, or neither, then make your list from there. Slogging through hte resulting list will be a chore though - it will only include people who weren't well-known enough at the time of their death for someone to see an obituary and say "hmm, better check to see if Wikipedia has an article about them." Many newspaper obituaries go behind paywalls after a few days or weeks, making verification more difficult. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 04:01, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

Here's a dumb idea: an insource search for "birth date and age\|18" to (try to) show people born in the 19th century that are allegedly still alive. This will more likely show that the wrong template is being used, or some other error, or commented-out templates. You can do the same thing for birth years starting with 190. There are lots of commented-out templates in the results, but you might see something interesting, like Virginia McLaurin, who is (according to Wikipedia) 110 years old.

Here's how to do a cross-category search with PetScan. Change the year in the Categories box to modify the search. – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:34, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

Our search box can also do this simple case: incategory:"Living people" incategory:"1920 births". PrimeHunter (talk) 04:39, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

d:Q23074256 offers 1909 or 1917. both allegedly imported from enwiki. Very vaguely I recall a rule (on commons?) that nobody can be 130 for the purposes of copyright. –84.46.52.96 (talk) 04:47, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

We seem to have a wealth of techniques. Excellent, thanks! BD2412 T 05:17, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

Throttling of new users

throttling message shown to a Wikipedia editor

For the first time today, I've had trainees throttled while making constructive edits (screenshot above). The only new aspect of is that they created accounts this norming, whereas usually I get them to do in advance (but often some do not). Is that the cause, or has something else changed? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:37, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

@Pigsonthewing: was the only edit they were doing "edit" at the time, or something else? (Perhaps adding external links?). If you have live attendees, you can use your eventcoordinator access to add the +confirmed flag to them (for up to 10 days) to help bypass certain newbie filters. — xaosflux ^Talk 12:43, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

More template troubles, different problem

I'd like some assistance with a template coding problem that's been brought to the attention of WikiProject Canada. Our List of villages in Canada is split up into separate sublists for each province, most (but not all) of which have been made collapsible due to the number of villages in each list. However, in all of the collapsed lists, the template doesn't actually display any column headers to explain what the data in each column represents. But if we attempt to edit the templates, column headers are present in them — which means they're just not displaying to the end user in page view mode.

So I wanted to ask if somebody with more experience in template coding can figure out if there's something in the template coding that can be changed to make the column headers display properly. Thanks. Bearcat (talk) 14:49, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

Before attempting to solve that issue, it should be better to observe MOS:DONTHIDE and rework the layout (or split if needed). --Gonnym (talk) 14:53, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

Just show everything by default. The article is not that long, and you'd be complying with MOS. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:56, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

Connection issues, Feb 4, 2020

Well, here we go again. A few minutes ago there were severe connection problems with all server clusters (At least for me!), and, as of writing this, ESAMS and EQIAD are at 0% ATS backend availability for upload per grafana. Anyone know what's going on? --moonythedwarf (Braden N.) 17:01, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

The Main Page technical layout has gone live

Should there be any issues, please report them to Talk:Main_Page#Tech_update_has_gone_live. Thank you, — xaosflux ^Talk 00:08, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

Xaosflux, thank you —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:38, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

Some cleanup templates are lacking substituted dates

{{More citations needed}}, {{COI}}, {{No footnotes}}, {{Disputed}}, – examples of cleanup templates that have working, functional substituted dates

{{Tone}}, {{POV}}, {{Cleanup reorganize}}, {{Like resume}} – examples of ones that don't

Same thing with inline templates:

{{Citation needed}}, {{Incomprehensible inline}}, {{Clarify}}, {{Who}}, – examples of ones that work

{{POV statement}}, {{Date missing}}, {{Dubious}}, {{Excessive citations inline}}, – examples of ones that don't

When you just insert the template, this is supposed to show up:

Month and year
{{subst:CURRENTMONTHNAME}}
{{subst:CURRENTYEAR}}

I don't know why this does not occur with some of them. I've scoured the source code for all that I could find. I looked long and hard for similarities between the ones that worked and the ones that didn't. Couldn't find any. They all seem to have the code in place to substitute dates, and no other abnormalities.

It has been this way for some years now, I believe. Please can someone investigate this issue so that it can be fixed. Thank you. · • SUM1 • · (talk) 04:33, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

{{Tone|{{subst:DATE}}}} works fine for me. It produces {{Tone|date=February 2020}}. I did the same thing with {{POV}}, {{Cleanup reorganize}}, and {{Like resume}}, and they worked fine. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:27, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

@Jonesey95: Oh, that's not what I meant. The thing I said is supposed to show up when you insert the template does not show up for {{Tone}} and the others. · • SUM1 • · (talk) 05:40, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

@Jonesey95: Don't worry, I've figured it out. Some of them have

== Template data ==

<templatedata>

{

"params": {

"date": {

"label": "Month and year",

"description": "Month and year of tagging; e.g., 'January 2013', but not 'jan13'",

"type": "string",

"autovalue": "{{subst:CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{subst:CURRENTYEAR}}",

"suggested": true

}

},

"description": "a description"

}

</templatedata>

in their documentation, and some of them don't. Perhaps someone could help me with adding this to all of them. · • SUM1 • · (talk) 05:54, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

Good detective work. That is the Template Data programming code used by the Visual Editor. If you insert one of those templates using the Visual Editor, and the template does not have the Template Data programming code in its documentation (please don't ask why template programming code lives in the unprotected documentation page), you won't get the date automatically. Most, or maybe all, of the above templates will have a date automatically added by a bot, so it should not be a problem. – Jonesey95 (talk) 06:00, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

@Jonesey95: Indeed. Though, I was considering mentioning, just like with the {{Unsigned}} and {{Unsigned IP}} templates, I've seen multiple times the bots fail to add the dates at all, years later. I also find out TemplateData is also used for the 2017 wikitext editor, which explains why it works the same way when I edit in source mode while not logged in, as of today. · • SUM1 • · (talk) 06:33, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

There's something wrong with the Harvard cites at Golden plates

I fell down the rabbit hole of trying to fix the Harv error on ref #5 - spent way TOO much time but when I tried to fix it, my so-called "fix" then would cause other refs to fail etc.. I cannot figure out what is wrong. Please someone correct this and post here what caused the Harv error. Thanks, I give up. Good night. Shearonink (talk) 08:36, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

I've fixed one error, only for another error to pop up instead. Please see my comment at Talk:Golden plates. rchard2scout (talk) 15:14, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

P.s.: note for anyone else, in order to see Harv errors, you need this userscript. rchard2scout (talk) 15:14, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

The cascading Harv errors happened to me too - there is something technically wrong with the Harv-cite coding on the article. Shearonink (talk) 19:12, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

After a quick inspection, I don't see that there is anything technically wrong at Golden plates. Rather, it would appear that editors have been careless in writing either the citation templates or the {{harv}}, {{harvnb}}, and {{harvtxt}} templates. (Why does the article use three variants of the harv templates?) This issue is best handled at the article's talk page. If there is anything technically wrong, let me know.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 15:32, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

I see Harv errors quite a bit on articles that use Harv cites (thanks to Ucucha's wonderful script). Usually I can fix the issues myself but whatever is going on with this article is something beyond my poor expertise. I don't know what is technically wrong, I was unable to fix the problem and so was Rchard2scout. I don't know why the article has so many Harv cite variants and, frankly, it is huge and I don't have the time to bring them all into agreement with each other. I just want to know what's wrong so I can learn and fix it the next time I see it. I think the extra eyes and the more robust traffic here at Village pump:technical (3,305 watchers!) will help solve whatever is going on, the article only has about 160 watchers. Even if this post doesn't quite belong here please leave this thread up so we can all figure it out. Shearonink (talk) 19:12, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

What was wrong here was just many, many Harv errors. And Ucucha's script wasn't showing them all at the same time, so I went through them one by one. No actual bugs here, except maybe the fact that the script doesn't show all errors at once. rchard2scout (talk) 16:14, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

THANK YOU. Heh, I've never seen an article that had so many Harv errors that the script (sort of) gave up and only mentioned the first occurrence - that's a new on on me. Shearonink (talk) 20:11, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

Toolforge questions

This is the second time I'm attempting to get my bots set up at Toolforge and failed. Is there anyone who is willing to give me some guidance? Steps I've completed:

• Wikitech account (developer account)
• Created a tool on Toolforge
• Gotten shell access
• Added public key to Wikitech account
• Private key stored in /.ssh w.r.t root
• tools-login.wmflabs.org added to known_hosts

Steps where I'm stuck:

• user@tools-login.wmflabs.org: Permission denied (publickey,hostbased).
• What to do next? --qedk (t 桜 c) 13:35, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

  QEDK, are you trying to log in as user and not qedk? --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 13:44, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

  I feel amazingly stupid, thanks. I added a custom host-user configuration to resolve this. --qedk (t 桜 c) 13:55, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

  @QEDK: Live help is available at #wikimedia-cloud ^connect, so you know :) — MusikAnimal ^talk 19:16, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

  You'll also want to subscribe to the cloud services mailing list -- RoySmith (talk) 20:57, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

Better "n changes since last visit" in Watchlist

Before I ask for this in Phabricator I want to see if anyone besides me supports it.

Special:Watchlist shows the number of changes for each day as a clickable link. This is great for the current day but there is no single link that will show the diff from your last visit until now if there were unseen changes before today.

For example, this is a line in my watchlist from yesterday and today:

5 February 2020

filled dot, expansion triangle, timestamp Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)‎‎(3 changes | history)

4 February 2020

filled dot, expansion triangle, timestamp Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)‎‎ (30 changes | history)

I recommend changing it so it shows the "changes since last visit" so in addition to showing it if either there are a mix of unread and read messages on a given day, it also shows with the total number of unread messages if there are unread messages across more than one day.

This would now look like:

5 February 2020

filled dot, expansion triangle, timestamp Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)‎‎(3 changes | 33 changes since last visit | history)

4 February 2020

filled dot, expansion triangle, timestamp Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)‎‎(30 changes | 33 changes since last visit | history)

Note the "33 changes since last visit" is the same for both days. I could click on either link to "fully catch up" for this page. Right now, I click on History, scroll down to the newest link I have read, and click on the "cur" link to get the same "diff" page.

Would others find this useful enough to suggest at Phabricator? davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 17:29, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

This would be phab:T4877. --Izno (talk) 18:07, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

(See also phab:T10681. --Izno (talk) 18:12, 5 February 2020 (UTC))

Unexpectedly caught by pending changes

I'm autoconfirmed and all my edits should be automatically accepted on pages with pending changes. Bat as food has had pending changes since the end of last month, and I've edited the article many times since then, with all my edits automatically accepted. My most recent edit today was not automatically accepted, however, and had to be accepted with someone with pending change review rights. As far as I can tell, I have not had any rights changed. Any reason why that would have happened? Enwebb (talk) 21:56, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

It's probably because this IP edit had to be accepted first. Graham87 03:05, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

I had an edit since then that was autoconfirmed. If you look at the history, I made an automatically confirmed edit, then another editor did the same. My next edit was then pending, despite being autoconfirmed and no other pending revisions. Enwebb (talk) 16:22, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

Since the PC has expired and there is no way to see the PC history (afaik), I say we can assume it was a one-time glitch. Either way, not a deal-breaker and what Graham87 said has the highest probability (maybe you missed a pending revision somewhere?). --qedk (t 桜 c) 16:47, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

This may be another instance of phab:T234743, which is discussed at #Permissions pop-ups? further up this page. -- John of Reading (talk) 16:53, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

John of Reading, seems probable, thanks. I just wanted to make sure I surfaced this if it was a new bug. Enwebb (talk) 18:05, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

@QEDK: Go to the page history; click View logs for this page, and look for "configured pending changes settings". If there are lots of entries, you can restrict it by clicking the "All public logs" dropdown and selecting "Pending changes log". --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:02, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

@Redrose64: I was referring to the tags added in the page history itself, "automatically accepted", "accepted by xx" and so on, which are permanently lost (again, afaik and as per WP:PC#Pending changes adds highlighting that is lost when disabled) when PC is removed or it expires. --qedk (t 桜 c) 20:09, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

Table sorting fustercluck

I've come across a significant problem with List of Canadian Inuit, which I'd like to solicit some help in cleaning up.

The default sort order in the list is by surname, using the {{Sortname}} template without issue. The problem comes up in the other columns which are using the generic {{sort}} template instead — in order to impose extra control on the specific order in which the entries would be sorted if a reader attempts to re-sort the list on that column, each entry is simply sortkeyed with sequential numbers: the entry that should become first is sortkeyed "001", the entry that should become second is sortkeyed "002", the entry that should become third is sortkeyed "003", and on and so forth. And this is, further, being used to control more than just each column in isolation: for example, in order to ensure that the four people in the list who were born in Manitoba remain in alphabetical order even after the list is re-sorted on the "region" column, those four people are sequentially sortkeyed as 003, 004, 005 and 006 in that column.

What this means, however, is that I can't simply add a new entry for an Inuit person who isn't already in the list, such as the Inuit musician whose article I was attempting to add when I discovered this — each time I want add even one new person, I would also have to undertake an extended project, anywhere between one to three hours long, of manually readjusting every single numbered sortkey in the entire rest of the article to reflect each individual column's new desired sort order. If there's a new Inuit person from Manitoba to add, for example, I would have to manually +1 every sortkey in that entire column for every single entry through the entire rest of the list in the process of adding that one person. Which in turn ends up meaning that the list can't be properly added to or completed at all, because no editor can or should ever reasonably be expected to commit to actually doing that much work. Only one new person has actually been added to this list since 2015, even though there are literally dozens of missing entries for Inuit people who do have articles to add — and I suspect that the opaqueness and dauntingness of this sequential sortkeying system is a big part of the reason for that.

Obviously, we shouldn't be using opaque coding systems like this, or creating this much excess work for editors who try to actually add new entries to the list — the template coding needs to be as transparent and simple as possible, and the only time a column should ever be sorted on numbers is when the visible data in the column is numbers. So is there any way to quick-fix this in an automated manner, or is somebody just going to have to buckle down and manually remove all the numbered sortkeys? Bearcat (talk) 16:48, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

@Bearcat: A search-and-replace from {{sort| to {{subst:P2| will remove the calls to the {{sort}} template, since Template:P2 is a template that outputs its second parameter. The space at the start of the replace string makes sure that the table cells are not completely empty; without that space, the table formatting is damaged. I've tried this at User:John of Reading/X1. -- John of Reading (talk) 18:20, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

Okay, thank you, that worked. I got confused by it for a second and thought it had broken other things, but it actually didn't. Bearcat (talk) 18:33, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

I advice giving Help:Sorting a proper read as well. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:42, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

RegExp rule for changing every Hegira years to Gregorian years

Hello, Can someone write a rule for me? I want to change every Hegira years to Gregorian years. For example: Hegira years + 622 = Gregorian years. I have an incomplete rule. It's /\b\d{4}\b/g. Thanks, ⇒ AramTalk 19:19, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

Sadly, I don't think you can do that with a simple regex. Regexes alone cannot do math. The language you're using may be able to accomplish this in a different way, however. What language are you using?--Jorm (talk) 19:41, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

@Jorm: I speak in Central Kurdish (Sorani) and ckb:دەستپێک is my home Wikipedia. ⇒ AramTalk 20:03, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

{ping|Aram}} I meant the programming language you are using, not your local language.--Jorm (talk) 20:26, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

You might want to look at some of the templates in Category:Date-computing templates. If you can isolate the Hegira year, you can use {{#expr:622+HEGIRAYEARGOESHERE}} Disclaimer: I haven't actually tried this. See m:Help:Calculation for details on #expr. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 20:13, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

It would need to be substituted to work (but yes, it does work): {{subst:#expr:622+HEGIRAYEARGOESHERE}}. So, if you can isolate exactly the year with regex and somehow store it as a variable, it is possible, preferably using pywikibot/AWB. --qedk (t 桜 c) 20:23, 6 February 2020 (UTC)