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).

Newcomers to the technical village pump are encouraged to read these guidelines prior to posting here. Questions about MediaWiki in general should be posted at the MediaWiki support desk.

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Question about IP talk pages

If I leave a message for an anonymous editor, by creating a new section on the talk page for the IP that edited an article, how will they see the message that I write? When I'm not logged in, I don't have links in the upper right for a user page, notification count, or talk page, so how will the not-signed-in editor know that someone is talking to them, and how will they get to their talk page? — Mudwater ^(Talk) 17:54, 15 August 2015 (UTC)

I think that they get the old-style WP:OBOD. They certainly get something, because this message was responded to. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:40, 15 August 2015 (UTC)

@Mudwater: Yes, they do -

You have a new message (last change).

but it only shows only when they click an "edit" link, not when visiting a page. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:56, 15 August 2015 (UTC)

@Redrose64: Good, thanks. — Mudwater ^(Talk) 19:34, 15 August 2015 (UTC)

@Redrose64: It does show on every page, not just on edit. (tested/confirmed) :-) If you are getting different results, that's a bug. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 23:34, 18 August 2015 (UTC)

@Quiddity (WMF): Good morning. A post was made to an IP editor's talk page and removed by someone else two minutes later. When the IP editor switches on his machine and visits this website will he see the orange message bar - i.e. is its appearance contingent on the message being visible when he visits or does the bar remain activated until he visits regardless of what happens to the message in the meantime?

I was surprised recently when I turned on my computer and clicked on the orange bar to find that it was telling me about a message posted on the IP's talkpage in 2009. In fact that IP had never edited although somebody created a talk page with the 2009 post referring to a previous edit.

My second question is, I believe that if you type ping|12.34.56.78 with double curly brackets at either end (or whatever the IP number is) it will not register an alert - i.e. the only way to get the attention of an IP is to post on their talk page. Am I right? 86.143.23.178 (talk) 12:01, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

Hi. 1) Yes, the orange bar is technically simple, and appears whenever an edit is made to the talkpage. Reverting the edit (or otherwise removing the message) does not (afaik) nullify the orange bar. To remove the orange bar, someone using that IP has to visit the talkpage. 2) Correct, the Mentions feature does not work for IPs. Many IPs change owners frequently (Dynamic IP), also many IPs are shared (Shared IP address), so it's difficult to assume that anyone using that IP will consistently be the same individual. Hence, all messages need to be sent to a public location. Hope that helps (and was technically accurate!). Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 16:39, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

Seems 100% correct from my experience. I believe that, even if someone posts a usertalk message to the talkpage of 12.34.56.78 , and then a few minutes later another person reverts that post, the orange bar still appears (and likely says "messages from two users"). Not sure what happens if somebody posts a message, and then self-reverts. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 00:35, 26 August 2015 (UTC)

Sorry, I may have had something to do with that. Back in 2008-09, I went on a rampage of deleting thousands of old IP talk pages because the messages on them were stale (i.e. unlikely to relate to anyone who would see the pages in the future), or blanking them so that they would be deleted by a bot which used to delete such pages. A consensus of the community later developed that these should not be deleted, but should instead be templated, so that the record of the IP activity remains visible in the edit history. Last week I went back and templated all of the pages I deleted, so that I can restore their edit history and maintain them per the going consensus. These will, for the time being, showing up as pages templated to indicate in edit history, but with no underlying edit history visible to most editors. I am now in the much slower process of restoring those edit histories.

On a completely unrelated note, does anyone know a fast way to restore the edit histories for a set of 2,720 pages? bd2412 T 16:56, 30 August 2015 (UTC)

Update: I have put in a bot request at Wikipedia:Bot requests#Restore edit history for 2,589 IP user talk pages. Barring any issues which may be raised here, this will speed the restoration of the edit histories of the remaining 2,525 pages. Cheers! bd2412 T 01:48, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Barring objections, I think I'll file a BFRA for this, as I have the code ready. Best — MusikAnimal ^talk 04:44, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Page moves marked as minor edits

I recently moved some pages, and I noticed that the moves are automatically marked by the software as minor edits. Specifically, the edit of the old page name is marked as "new" and the edit of the new page name is marked as minor. Both of these descriptions seem to me to be wrong. I think that the changing of the name of a page should, in the default, be considered something that editors might not consider automatically noncontroversial, and therefore should not be a minor edit. --Tryptofish (talk) 01:18, 23 August 2015 (UTC)

On second thought, I do realize how marking the old page as "new" can make sense, in that it becomes a new redirect. However, I think the main point, about it not usually being a minor edit, remains a valid concern. --Tryptofish (talk) 02:11, 23 August 2015 (UTC)

Agreed, those shouldn't be marked as minor edits. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 02:29, 23 August 2015 (UTC)

Every Wikipedia page has two unique identifiers: its name, and its Page ID (visible by clicking "Page information" in the left margin, it's in the fourth row). When you move a page, its name is altered but the Page ID is unchanged; a redirect is created (this action may be suppressed if an admin moves the page), and this redirect gets the old name of the moved page, but it can't be given the old Page ID as well, because those must be unique, and it stayed with the moved page. So it's given a fresh Page ID, and so the redir counts as a new page, hence the N marker. --Redrose64 (talk) 11:41, 23 August 2015 (UTC)

A move does not change content; it is not even an edit. That is why it is marked minor. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 12:45, 23 August 2015 (UTC)

When an administrator protects a page or imports edits, a minor edit is also formed. These, like moves, are not counted in the server count. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 13:36, 23 August 2015 (UTC)

Replying to a couple of editors in one comment, I agree with what Redrose64 just explained about N. I'm also not concerned here with page protection or other administrative tools. I continue to believe that it is a mistake to mark page name changes as minor. Help:Minor edit explains minor edits as those where the editor making the edit reasonably expects that no other editor would question or disagree with that edit. An edit that changes a pagename to a new pagename may occasionally fit this description (as when a spelling error is corrected), but usually such a move means that our readers will find the content under a new title, and the title change can potentially cause quite a large change in meaning. Thus I strongly disagree with Edokter, in that a move does indeed change content, and potentially in quite a conspicuous way. Some editors do not watchlist minor edits, and would miss such changes, even though they might very likely want to discuss it. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:42, 23 August 2015 (UTC)

So perhaps then there should be a minor edit checkbox in Special:MovePage. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 04:02, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

Page moves do show up in the watchlist and recent changes, even with minor edits hidden. You'll see the log entry for the action. Reach Out to the Truth 05:14, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

That's a good point about the log entry still being watchlist-visible. I think the idea of having it as a regular edit, but with a minor edit checkbox is an excellent idea. But it still disturbs me that, currently, someone can rename a WP:BLP to something that violates BLP, and yet have it shown as a minor edit. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:01, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

Let's say hypothetically that there were to be a consensus to change Special:MovePage to default to a regular edit, and offer a checkbox if an editor wants to mark the move as a minor edit. How would the change be carried out? In other words, can it be done locally (at the English Wikipedia), or would it have to be requested at Wikimedia? --Tryptofish (talk) 21:02, 25 August 2015 (UTC)

Anyone? --Tryptofish (talk) 23:57, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

As far as I know it would not be any harder to mark page moves by default as minor edits on enwiki than on wikimedia. To do that in the code would require to create an configuration setting (mw:Manual:Configuration settings) and turning the minor edits off on either wikimedia wikis or enwiki. Getting an checkbox to mark page moves as minor will take more time to implement than an default setting.--Snaevar (talk) 21:32, 30 August 2015 (UTC)

@Snaevar: Thanks for the answer! To do that, does one have to be an administrator, or simply be any editor with the skills to set the configuration? --Tryptofish (talk) 19:13, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

I believe that you have to be a dev, not an admin. Anyone with the skills can become a volunteer dev. See mw:How to become a MediaWiki hacker. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:51, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, Whatamidoing! That answers all of my questions. Myself, I definitely do not have those skills! I think that what I have suggested should only be implemented if there is a clear consensus, so when I get around to it, I'll open an RfC. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:04, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

No images showing, once again

Although a workaround was implemented 4 days ago, the problem is arising once again. I understand that this is an ongoing issue that will a have a proper fix delivered soon, but what has happened to the workaround? Is it a case of it working for those 8 hours and 8 hours only? On Chrome on Ubuntu 15.04, I am unable to see any images. When clicking on a link to an image file, I receive a 404 error. What is occurring? Thanks, ^{My name is}not^dave (talk/contribs) 12:53, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

Image problem mentioned This Thread. The Incident Documentation indicates it is still in progress. — Maile (talk) 13:06, 24 August 2015 (UTC)

@My name is not dave: No images at all? With which browsers does this happen? Any example link/URL for an image that does not load and creates a 404? --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 08:46, 25 August 2015 (UTC)

@AKlapper (WMF): The display of images is highly erratic. One minute I can see all, another I can see some and then they all go. Then, around 15-30 minutes later,images come back. This seems to occur on Chrome for Android as well, on Firefox this didn't occur, but I see it as a matter of waiting. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/Schoenfussroehrling.jpg is an example of where it fails to load, but as said, that depends whether it wants to load or not. ^{My name is}not^dave (talk/contribs) 10:09, 25 August 2015 (UTC)

P.S. The 404 I get is a WMF 404 and not a browser generated one.

The "OCSP Stapling issue" mention above should be unrelated because this is about 404s not showing any OCSP related error messages. Not sure what's going on so I'm curious if other users face the same problem. :-( --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 15:26, 25 August 2015 (UTC)

This appears to happen with all media. File:Alveolar_trill.ogg fails to function. ^{My name is}not^dave (talk/contribs) 21:23, 25 August 2015 (UTC)

No images (yet again, it seems)

This morning when I started browsing, I noted that no images are being displayed on any pages; only the alt-text is shown as a link. If I click on the link, the proper image is shown in the media viewer, but not in the page context. I'm using Firefox 40.0.3 with the Monobook skin. WikiDan61^ChatMe!_ReadMe!! 11:10, 30 August 2015 (UTC)

Never mind. The problem appears to have been resolved. WikiDan61^ChatMe!_ReadMe!! 11:18, 30 August 2015 (UTC)

Is there a better way to illustrate a " --> '' change in the diff view?

Confusing subject heading, eh? Hi there, when we look at diffs, (for instance here) it's really difficult to see whether someone changed a quotation to italics, or what. Even with the improved diff tool, it's still difficult to tell what happened unless you drag your cursor over the change to see if you highlight one or two things. Is there any way to easily improve this? Thanks, Cyphoidbomb (talk) 17:34, 26 August 2015 (UTC)

Some time ago I changed the diff font to monospace in my CSS for the same reason, but have changed it back since. I just wrote this user JS to add some slight padding around apostrophes in diffs, which should help distinguish pairs of apostrophes from double primes without having to change the font. SiBr₄ (talk) 18:57, 26 August 2015 (UTC)

I've improved the script to not affect the diff headers ("Revision as of ...", username, summary, previous/next edit links). It caused visible HTML code in case the headers contained apostrophes within HTML attribute values. SiBr₄ (talk) 13:48, 30 August 2015 (UTC)

The API diff [1] has monospace so it's easy to distinguish " and ''. But it's not meant for human reading so everything else is hard... PrimeHunter (talk) 21:21, 26 August 2015 (UTC)

Content missing in mobile view

The "Electoral history" section of Harold Stassen is missing in mobile view. I expect it is a problem with the electoral history template being hidden; could someone comfortable with template coding take a look? 28bytes (talk) 21:35, 26 August 2015 (UTC)

Confirm this problem, and not just Harold Stassen. Trump'16 also fails in mobile-view,[2] using Template:Endorsements_box for collapsed-by-default-bluebox. I believe all the "Fname Lname presidential campaign, 2016" articles use this very same bluebox trick. Trump'16 works properly in non-mobile-view.[3] Even in mobile-view, you can see the wikitext when you click edit, so the information is not gone, just the bluebox is invisible in mobile-view. Tested in firefox 38. 75.108.94.227 (talk) 00:55, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

Same goes for the WP namespace here; closed/archived discussions on WP:DRV, as well as similarly closed discussions on AN/I do not appear on mobile enwiki. lavender|^{(formerly HMSSolent)}|lambast 04:29, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

Any templates that use the following classes are hidden by MobileFrontend: ambox, navbox, vertical-navbox, topicon, metadata, nomobile. See Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 138#Navboxes in mobile, phab:T55437 and phab:T68747. 185.108.128.19 (talk) 04:49, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

I would say that this is more of an editorial problem. Any time you need to collapse content in order to keep a page readable, sounds like a authoring problem to me. Navboxes is one thing, but to use collapsible inside the actual content is just... bad form —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:14, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

MOS:COLLAPSE actually says you need a really really good reason to use collapsible content in articles. --Izno (talk) 15:38, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

Yes, you need a really good reason, because you are opening yourself up to problems as the one described here. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:47, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

@TheDJ: What change(s) would you recommend that would fix the problem? 28bytes (talk) 18:22, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

I suggest to rewrite the section to actual discuss the electoral history and remove the list per WP:INDISCRIMINATE and possibly move that into wikidata. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:58, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Gallery mode packed

Hello. I am Jack ma, from fr:wiki. Since last year, <gallery> has changed : photographs are smaller, unless we specify "mode=packed". Unfortunatly, mixing upright and landscape photographs gives a horrible result. Could somebody correct this, at least to get smaller margins in standard mode ? Regards, Jack ma (talk) 06:03, 29 August 2015 (UTC)

User:Bawolff probably knows whether this:

<gallery height="300">
File:Reprocessed Mariner 10 image of Mercury.jpg|Mercury
File:Venus globe.jpg|Venus
</gallery>

is supposed to produce something different from this:

<gallery>
File:Reprocessed Mariner 10 image of Mercury.jpg|Mercury
File:Venus globe.jpg|Venus
</gallery>

It seems like it should, but AFAICT, the height parameter is completely ignored (and "widths" only changes the size of the white box, not the size of the image). WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:53, 30 August 2015 (UTC)

According to Help:Gallery tag, the parameter is "heights" not "height". -- John of Reading (talk) 17:49, 30 August 2015 (UTC)

Well, I'm glad that one of us knows how to read the documentation.  ;-) Thanks, John.

Jack ma, if you add heights=300px widths=300px (and set the pixel size to anything you want) then you will get larger images. NB that for square images, you need to set both, because the images will be constrained by the smaller size. However, if you have only wide (landscape) or only tall (portrait) images, you can set one or the other. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:51, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. But I'd like to avoid specifying "heights" parameter (according to WP:IMGSIZE), and use the standard values. My question was: can "gallery" be corrected back to last year, where margins around the thumbnails were thinner, thus giving larger photographs (or is it a matter of .css ?). Regards, Jack ma (talk) 07:08, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

• 
  Town hall of St-Astier
• 
  The church
• 
  War memorial

• 
  Town hall of St-Astier
• 
  War memorial
• 
  The church

be corrected back to last year, where margins around the thumbnails were thinner

I just checked with an old MediaWiki instance running MediaWiki 1.21 and honestly, the margins were not really slimmer as far as I can determine. The captions seem to be a bit further down in the new version. There is also a 1 pixel rounding difference in the width for 3 images, but overall, they are the same. I think you are just noticing more how wide this old style really is.. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:52, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Alt text statistics

dbname	Views/Hr	Size	Articles	Pages without Images	Images	Alt text
enwiki	6,561,878	12.0 GB	4,936,767	56%	6,451,198	1.70%
dewiki	848,184	3.5 GB	1,777,086	54%	2,938,529	0.13%
jawiki	838,101	2.0 GB	945,936	66%	1,029,386	0.25%
eswiki	796,411	2.0 GB	1,115,193	47%	1,886,752	0.10%
ruwiki	793,983	2.3 GB	1,192,669	52%	1,698,936	0.21%
zhwiki	628,241	1.1 GB	797,491	66%	811,159	0.35%
frwiki	567,021	2.8 GB	1,585,562	54%	2,379,061	1.94%
itwiki	314,995	1.9 GB	1,175,512	53%	2,004,815	0.09%
ptwiki	290,880	1.1 GB	863,286	53%	1,229,948	0.17%
plwiki	258,567	1.3 GB	1,086,550	56%	1,457,302	0.04%

I spent Saturday figuring out how much Alt text is in use. I've included other interesting measurements as well. Enwiki has more traffic than the next 30 wikis combined. According to information/compression theory the compressed size should correspond to the information regardless of language or codecs. Surprisingly the majority of articles don't have images and those that do, 25% have three or more (enwiki). Regarding alt text we're only second to the French (1.94% total), although our is more spread out (enwiki 2.39% 1 alt text per pages vs 1.94% for frwiki). Photographs see more alt text at 2.0% than drawing/loss-less image, 1.7%.

Measurements were done on dumps around Jan 2015, except enwiki which used the Aug 2015 dump. Images were detect by file extension (DjVu, GIF, JPG, PDF, PNG, SVG, TIFF) followed by a gallery, template, or link closing character. This is an upper-bound, excluding indirect transcluded images. Any questions? Other numbers you'd like to see? — Dispenser 17:00, 30 August 2015 (UTC)

Dispenser, I'd like to know if it has improved over time. Can you compare it to January 2014 (at least for a couple of the bigger wikis, like the French Wikipedia)? WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:51, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

WhatamIdoing, WMF's snapshot dumps only go back 9-12 months. Finding older dumps is hard, got some for enwiki, but nothing else. The proper way would be parse the complete dump (enwiki: 103 GB compressed), dump it into a database, then we can graph it day-to-day. This is beyond my current needs, but if somebody's willing donate high performance cloud computing or Bitcoins it can be done. — Dispenser 21:47, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

RfC for Navbox colors

There is currently an RfC regarding changes to the default background colors on {{Navbox}} with regard to WP:COLOR. The RfC is located at Template talk:Navbox#RfC: Should the default colors for this template be changed to satisfy AAA level accessibility color contrasts WP:COLOR? If so, to which colors?. Thank you. EvergreenFir (talk) Please {{re}} 18:01, 30 August 2015 (UTC)

keeping Wikipedia's local storage when clearing browser data

I came across an interesting script, Cumbril's IPLabeller, which allows you to add labels/colors to IP addresses. Unfortunately, since I routinely clean up/clear my browser data, those labels would get wiped. Does anyone know of a way to whitelist or create an exception for a particular site's local storage? Or maybe another workaround? I realize this is more of a browser question than a Wikipedia question, but it seems like something that would have come up with other scripts and such. Thanks. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 19:03, 30 August 2015 (UTC)

@Rhododendrites: What browser are you using? GoingBatty (talk) 19:22, 30 August 2015 (UTC)

@GoingBatty: Ah, sorry, should have mentioned that. Chrome (v44...). — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 19:24, 30 August 2015 (UTC)

Fragile template:infobox company

This version of Sepahan Oil Company crashes my copies of Opera and Google Chrome (but not Firefox!). The problem was solved by removing the [[]] around the logo file name. It may also only show if the logo is on Commons. — RHaworth (talk · contribs) 22:04, 30 August 2015 (UTC)

The file has a size of over 10k x 10k pixels at maximum. I guess that the template was calling the full sized file that was too large for your browsers. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 22:11, 30 August 2015 (UTC)

It's because the full resolution logo is enormous. Removing the brackets means it's being parsed by Module:InfoboxImage, which applies the frameless keyword to produce [[File:Sepahan Oil Company's logo.jpg|frameless]]. Alakzi (talk) 22:12, 30 August 2015 (UTC)

• Thank you. I had in fact just worked that out for myself. — RHaworth (talk · contribs) 22:13, 30 August 2015 (UTC)

Edit not displayed

For some reason I still can't see this most recent edit in the article's section for the second day, even though I repeatedly purged the cache and restarted the browser. The wikisyntax seems to be normal and my secondary browser doesn't shows the edit either. Do you see it? Ideas? Brandmeister^talk 08:22, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

There are two sections with the same title. Are you looking at the second one? -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 08:26, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

Yes, haven't noticed, my bad. Brandmeister^talk 08:49, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

Template error: {{Crlf2}}

Something has gone wrong with {{Crlf2}}: it now adds the characters 
 on to any page where it is used, as you can see on the description page itself: Noyster (talk), 09:27, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

Sounds as if something like HTML Tidy is being enthusiastic. Maybe there's a character blacklist, and the CR character has been added to that by a Unix guru who isn't aware of its uses in Windowsy systems. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:08, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

I suspect it has something to do with the following line from the HTML5 spec: "Where character references are allowed, a character reference of a "LF" (U+000A) character (but not a "CR" (U+000D) character) also represents a newline." This refers to content, not to using a CR in general. Somewhere further along it states: "The numeric character reference forms described above are allowed to reference any Unicode code point other than U+0000, U+000D, permanently undefined Unicode characters (noncharacters), surrogates (U+D800–U+DFFF), and control characters other than space characters." So it's no longer valid in HTML5 —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:52, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

What problem does this template solve? The first and last examples both produce a list. Alakzi (talk) 19:17, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

Countytabletop problems

What's up with {{Countytabletop}}? It's displaying &#13; randomly in three of the columns, and I can't figure out what's changed; the page history shows such code as far back as 2010. It wasn't looking like this just a few months ago, so I suspect some change to a transcluded sub-template, but Special:RecentChangesLinked/Template:Countytabletop shows nothing relevant: all the changes are to Wikipedia:Transclusion‎, various documentation pages, and the Borough article. Nyttend (talk) 03:30, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

It's the same issue as #Template error: .7B.7BCrlf2.7D.7D. &#xD; and &#13; indicate the same carriage return character with a hexadecimal and decimal number. It's no longer being rendered as a character by MediaWiki. In [4] User:TheDJ removed it from another template and said "CR no longer exists in html5". PrimeHunter (talk) 05:05, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Pages appearing erroneously in a category

Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Devon/Archive 2 and Wikipedia talk:WikiProject UK geography/Archive 10 both appear in Category:Civil parishes in Devon, which of course they should not do. I cannot see what is making them do this. Can anyone here see what's going on and advise how to fix it? DuncanHill (talk) 14:57, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

The template {{Devon parishes}} was transcluded on both pages. I've removed both instances, it should be OK now. --Floquenbeam (talk) 15:05, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, DuncanHill (talk) 15:13, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

I have used {{main other}} so the category is only added in mainspace.[5] PrimeHunter (talk) 16:32, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

Cool. Item # 4,187 on the list of things I didn't know it was possible to do. --Floquenbeam (talk) 16:56, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

The navbox shouldn't categorise anywhere, see WP:TEMPLATECAT. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:39, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

Measuring the extent that redirects are used

Is there a way that we could do this. At WP:RM editors frequently present request like the one found at Talk:Stupid#Requested move 30 August 2015 on the basis of WP:PRIMARYREDIRECT. It would be helpful to collect data on the use of links from navigation pages. ping Steel1943 GregKaye 17:31, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

The page view statistics tool already provides usage for redirects separately from the target article. Are you looking for something more specific? older ≠ wiser 18:41, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

Thanks Bkonrad. I went to http://stats.grok.se/en/201509/Stupid but didn't see a breakdown. The page "Stupid" contains a hyperlink to the page Stupidity. Is there, can there be, a way of telling how frequently that, and other, links are used? GregKaye 12:55, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

If you're wanting to see how often a particular link on a disambiguation page is clicked separately from traffic directly to the page, you'd need to create an artificial redirect that would only ever be used on the disambiguation page. So for example, you could modify the entry on the disambiguation page stupid to link to the redirect stupidity (redirect). The traffic tool would then be able to track traffic through that redirect. To be of any value though, the experiment would need to be in place for some time to account for any curiosity traffic driven by any current discussions (and minimize potential for gaming the system from parties who might want to bias the results). Also, I suspect there may be some small initial spike in traffic from search engines and other automated web crawlers as they discover the new link. older ≠ wiser 15:47, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-36

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

Recent changes

• VisualEditor will now automatically create a link when you type in or paste an ISBN, PMID, or RFC. [6][7]
• The link editor in VisualEditor is now a bit wider. It's now the same width as the automatic citation tool. [8]
• VisualEditor gadget authors can no longer use the backwards-compatibility module ext.visualEditor.viewPageTarget.init. Use ext.visualEditor.desktopArticleTarget.init instead. [9]
• Gadget writers can now use mediawiki.ForeignApi to communicate between different Wikimedia wikis. [10]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from September 1. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from September 2. It will be on all Wikipedias from September 3 (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on September 1 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The Wikidata API will be updated with breaking changes. This will probably happen on September 9. [11]

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21:37, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

Site notice (banner)

Where is this WikiConference USA site notice coming from? I've been looking for an hour and not finding any info on its provenance. It needs to be edited to include more specific application deadline information (it implies that the deadline is the end of Aug. 31 UTC (which passes within the hour), but it's actually August 31, 2015 at 11:59 PM EDT.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  23:13, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

meta:Special:CentralNoticeBanners/edit/WikiConference USA 2015. Note the display ends in four hours. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:44, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

Thanks anyway. I didn't get to it in time to do anything with it.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  06:09, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

Delete a Draft

I'm sorry, but I couldn't figure out where I can ask for a deletion of a draft of mine. Please delete User:Liadmalone/John Roy Carlson. Thank you. Liadmalone (talk) 00:03, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

I've deleted the draft for you. The fastest way to request deletion of your drafts is normally to place {{db-u1}} at the top of the page. I honestly don't know how those who are unaware are supposed to find this out, aside from reading the entirety of the deletion policy. Someguy1221 (talk) 00:06, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

@Liadmalone and Someguy1221: Wikipedia:User pages#Deletion of user pages - or WP:UP#DELETE for short. --Redrose64 (talk) 07:39, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

@Someguy1221: exactly. I couldn't find myself there! In the Hebrew Wiki it's easier to find... thank you. @Redrose64: Thanks, I'll add the link to my user page. Liadmalone (talk) 09:43, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

Protected pages...

I need to correct a page, please but am warned that it is protected against vandalism. Yet it also says it was amended just 3days ago! How can I unlock this page & 'claim(!)' a correction?

Thanks in advance. :-) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Merseymale (talk • contribs) 05:07, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

@Merseymale: This is really a WP:HD matter, not VPT. You can't "unlock" (or as we say in Wikipedia, "unprotect") a page, that ability is reserved for administrators; but on the talk page of the article concerned, you can describe the edit that you want to make, and request that somebody with the appropriate user right carry it out on your behalf. See Wikipedia:Protected edit requests for information on how to do this. --Redrose64 (talk) 07:45, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

@Merseymale: You didn't name the page so we cannot see whether it's semi-protected or fully protected. If you have an Edit tab which gives a box saying "This page has been semi-protected so that only autoconfirmed users can edit it", then you can edit it. Some users misunderstand the message and think they cannot edit it. If it's fully protected which is rare then it has a "View source" tab and can only be edited by administrators. If you click the tab then it's easy to make an edit request. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:52, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

PASSWORD

How can I find out what my Password is after I logged in? I need to write it down since I forgot it! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dexhu (talk • contribs) 05:23, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

You can't. If you have forgotten your password, see Help:Logging in#What if I forget the password?.--Anders Feder (talk) 05:30, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

Section link malfunction

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T110770

Firefox 40.0.3 maximized. The link Neo-Nazism#United States initially takes me to the right place; about a second later the page scrolls down 5.5 screens worth, to near the end of the Notes section. ―Mandruss ☎ 12:37, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

Sandbox testing shows that the problem is corrected by removing {{Nazism sidebar}}, {{Neo-fascism}}, and {{Antisemitism}}, all of which contain a lot of collapsed content. Is this a known problem? ―Mandruss ☎ 13:03, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

Yes it's a known issue. Wikipedia inserts an anchor in the html of the page. It is then up to the user's browser to go to the right part of the page, but collapsible boxes use JavaScript which may push content around after the browser has decided where to go. In most browsers you can click in the address bar and press Enter to go to the right place afterwards. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:13, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

Chrome is much better at it though. So it might help to push the Firefox people a bit on this problem. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:44, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

Could we just fix our collapsing box code? If location.hash was within x pixels of anchor before collapsing is now at Δy, adjust viewport by Δy. — Dispenser 00:38, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

This is phab:T110770. Legoktm (talk) 06:02, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

New categories

Wikipedia:Categorization does not seem to have instructions on how to propose a new category, for discussion or for a more experienced editor to simply create. If there is a place for doing this, said article should mention it.

I have noticed many disambiguation articles with multiple entries that are chemicals, usually enzymes, for example, HPSE. There is a Category:Science disambiguation pages‎, which seems awfully broad for this and contains only 4 articles, one of which is an enzyme disambiguation page, DHQD. I would like to propose a subcategory of Category:Science disambiguation pages: Category:Chemical disambiguation pages with its subCategory:Enzyme disambiguation pages, but I want a discussion first. If this is to be done, I think templates should be made, or existing templates modified, e.g. {{Disambiguation|chem}} and {{Disambiguation|enzyme}}. Is there a better place for this discussion? —Anomalocaris (talk) 15:10, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

Also note that DHQD has been set up as a member of Category:Enzyme set index pages. This is a possible path for HPSE, but I am not sure if it is the best path. —Anomalocaris (talk) 15:14, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

@Anomalocaris: WT:CAT and WT:CATP are better places than VPT. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:56, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

@Redrose64: Thanks! Readers are invited to continue this discussion at WT:CATP#proposal for Category:Enzyme disambiguation pages. —Anomalocaris (talk) 17:38, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

@Anomalocaris: It appears HPSE uses a template to categorize the page, something that I think is not recommended according to Wikipedia:Categorization#Categorization_using_templates ("it is recommended that articles not be placed in ordinary content categories using templates"). So the first question I would ask here is: how difficult is it to remove the category setting form template:disambig? Ottawahitech (talk) 21:32, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Direct editing of templates

Can we find a means to directly get to a template's edit menu? Example: List of World Championships in Athletics medalists (women) is made up mostly of templates. As we have a new year's worth of data to add, getting into each one of those templates to add the new data requires a multi step process. As much as we had tremendous help in posting information during the event last week, only a few of these were updated because of the difficulty for average editors to get to each template. I obviously know how, but it requires sacrificing your copy cache to copy each complicated title, thus you can't hold the information you could have transported there to post again complicating the process beyond what most editors will go through. Trackinfo (talk) 17:55, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

You could add a {{Navbar}} to each table. Alakzi (talk) 17:58, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

It sounds like you don't know some of the ways to get to the template page. If you click the "Edit" tab then the bottom of the edit window has a list with links to templates used on the page. If you click a section edit link and then preview then the bottom has a list of templates used in the section. If you click "Page information" in the left pane then you get a list of templates used on the page, but it may be cut off after 50 templates. PrimeHunter (talk) 03:20, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

I obviously don't. Please tell me more because from your directions I do not see it. What I am requesting is one or two keystrokes to be able to edit content of the template as viewed from a page using the template. The suggestion above yours is a great deal of legwork for one topical page and clutters the page up. Trackinfo (talk) 03:48, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Option 1: Click the "Edit" tab at top of List of World Championships in Athletics medalists (women). Then look for "Pages transcluded onto the current version of this page" at the bottom of the whole browser window. You may have to click the quoted text it to see the list of templates like Template:World Championships in Athletics medalists in women's 100 metres, but it should then remember your click so you don't have to click it next time. Option 2: Click the section edit link at List of World Championships in Athletics medalists (women)#100 m. Then click the "Show preview" button. This time there should be a shorter list at "Templates used in this preview" at the bottom of the window. If you don't see it then what is your browser, skin and interface language? Option 3: At List of World Championships in Athletics medalists (women), click "Page information" under "Tools" in the left menu to get [12]. The last table "Page properties" says "Transcluded templates" in the first column and has a list in the second column, but it only lists 50 of the used templates.

We could also add an edit notice to List of World Championships in Athletics medalists (women) explaining where to edit the templates and maybe linking to Category:World Championships in Athletics templates. PrimeHunter (talk) 04:14, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Not criticizing your prose, but it took 8 lines of text to explain those. Yes, I eventually found it. Do you expect the average user to know this? How about an inexperienced IP? We are supposed to encourage input. Anybody can edit. But the absence of a convenient edit tool will prevent the majority of the population from attempting to edit. Now, putting information into such a difficult to edit process might be good to make it difficult for vandals to figure out. IP editing does have its drawbacks. Someone like me, who watches a lot of pages that should have stable content (like this, which requires updating usually only every two years--except when a drug cheat is disqualified) would also be discouraged from watching this content. For one simple page like this, it takes locating and watching 21 templates. There should be a way to wholesale group watch all the content resolved onto one page. This is the technical pump, repeating the two as proposals:

• There should be an easy, one step method, from a regular article page, to edit content resolved from templates.
• There should be a way to wholesale watch the content resolved onto a single page (regardless of it being embedded in a template). Trackinfo (talk) 01:50, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Make a list of templates?

Is it reasonably easy to make a list of templates that contain one or more of these classes?

• ambox,
• navbox,
• vertical-navbox,
• topicon,
• metadata, or
• nomobile

Each of these classes cause the template and its contents to be invisible on Wikipedia's mobile website. If we could make a list, then we could spam the /doc pages for each template with a warning that the contents will not be visible to about 30% of our readers. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:08, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

Something like this query seems to get at what you're looking for. You could play with the \=\" to try different syntax various people have used. ^demon^{[omg plz]} 04:32, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

I can't "play with" regex. ;-)

That search only finds five templates with "ambox", but there are 1.1 million pages that transclude {{ambox}} itself—and Template:Ambox doesn't appear in that short list (probably because its contents are in Module:Message box instead. Maybe this will have to be done by hand (ugh). WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:37, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Template:Respell

This template is supposed to generate bold small-cap letters in stressed syllables, so as to not unduly dominate the lead of the paragraph, but it is producing full caps. Can anyone fix?

Thanks — kwami (talk) 18:59, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

What's your browser and browser version? Alakzi (talk) 19:14, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

I do not see full caps in the examples on Template:Respell. Are you using a font that does not support small caps?--Anders Feder (talk) 19:15, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

Maybe that's the problem. The small caps in the description look fine, it's only in the examples that they're off. Perhaps we could remove the {{Unicode}} formatting? The only possible reason for it is the schwa, but schwa should be included in just about any generic font. — kwami (talk) 20:38, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

You could also replace .Unicode in your monobook.css with .Unicode:not([title="English pronunciation respelling"]). Alakzi (talk) 21:02, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

The Unicode class does nothing unless you have Windows XP. But it does allow other uses to specify their own font. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 21:42, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

The reason for the Unicode class is to force support of characters WinXP does not. But schwa is not a problem, and it is the only non-ASCII character in the respelling. Can we just remove the Unicode class, and let the respelling appear in the user's preferred font? — kwami (talk) 22:11, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

Yes, we should, because support for Windows XP ended on April 8, 2014. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 01:34, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

End of support by Microsoft doesn't mean end of support by MediaWiki, nor that nobody is using XP any more. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:19, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

As I said above, it only acts on XP. That does not preclude a user from specfying their own font. Incidentally, the template used .IPA before. Shouldn't it be changed back instead, considering it is an IPA template? -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 16:16, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

No, it's not an IPA template.

The point of the IPA or Unicode class is to support esoteric characters that do not appear in most fonts. That may mean a font that is inadequate for other things, such as small caps, bold or italics, all of which are used here. Since there are no esoteric characters in the output, there is no need for a special font class. I'll make the request. — kwami (talk) 18:53, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Talk:Denali section editing gone?

Is this a bug only for Talk:Denali that I can edit the entire talk page, but not the sections? It worked earlier today and I seem to have no problems with any other article talk page. Thanks. P.S. Another user has confirmed this problem, so it's not just me. Using Firefox ver 39. Fyunck(click) (talk) 05:15, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

That's really weird. I'm getting the same thing on Chrome, so I assume it's a problem with the page. Purging the page and removing the recently added toc limit didn't help. Someguy1221 (talk) 05:20, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

I dunno, but removing the {{Box-header}} fixes it (sandboxed, I haven't modified the talk page). ―Mandruss ☎ 05:22, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

I wasn't sure where to report it. It could have been a bug, or perhaps an administrator checked off some weird setting that I'd never heard of before. So I tried here first to find out what others thought. Fyunck(click) (talk) 05:26, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

I'm getting the same result as Mandruss. Dunno why that would mess with edit links. Someguy1221 (talk) 05:28, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

FYI, when I made this edit at 17:31 PST I believe it was working fine. So I think it happened sometime after that edit. Fyunck(click) (talk) 05:32, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

 Fixed Added |EDIT=yes per {{Box-header}} doc. ―Mandruss ☎ 05:33, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Thanks everyone for taking the time to figure it out. Fyunck(click) (talk) 06:02, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

If only I'd have been awake, I would have recognised it as the same problem described at User talk:Bgwhite/Archive 44#Table of contents box on 2015 National Pro Fastpitch season. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:24, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

I added some warning text to the template, but wouldn't it be better if the default was not to suppress the TOC and sections edits? You would have to add the parameters with a "no" to specifically include suppressing? Fyunck(click) (talk) 23:56, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

The {{box-header}} template (which was originally at Wikipedia:Wikiportal/box-header, later at Portal:Box-header) was designed to assist in the layout of portal pages, which normally don't have section editing, and normally don't have a TOC either. It wasn't intended for general use, nor was it intended to be used in the specific ways that it is now being used at Talk:Denali and 2015 National Pro Fastpitch season. Those pages would perhaps be better off using templates more suited to the purpose. {{box-header}} should be left alone, since if its behaviour in the absence of the |TOC= and |EDIT= parameters is changed, the appearance of several thousand portal pages will be compromised. Since the use of |EDIT=yes and |TOC=yes is very much non-standard, I have reverted this edit. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:40, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Based on this edit, then, it sounds like User:Wiklan would benefit from reading this thread. ―Mandruss ☎ 09:50, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Or User:WikIan, even! ―Mandruss ☎ 09:53, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Ok, but that still leaves a problem because editors are using it for general use, probably because it says right up top "A template standardizing the portal templates and for other purposes. What about some extra wording added to Usage that would tell of the consequences if those parameters are missing? Without some additional warning, it seems unacceptable and a portent of more troubles down the road. Fyunck(click) (talk) 09:52, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

I agree. As a general rule, we should not only fix the immediate problem but take measures to avoid recurrences of the same problem. ―Mandruss ☎ 09:59, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Ok, so I added the info to the documentation. Please feel free to tweak it if it doesn't sound quite right. Fyunck(click) (talk) 05:14, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

To get around this I used {{toc limit}} WikIan -(talk) 08:17, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

@WikIan: I'm not sure what you mean by "get around", but there were no section edit links after the addition of {{TOC limit}}. Just wondering whether you got that (1) {{Box-header}} is not intended for article talk pages, and (2) if you use it there anyway, you must code |EDIT=yes. ―Mandruss ☎ 09:18, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

@Mandruss:You stated TOC was not available after the box (which I did not know required that parameter to keep section editing and TOC open) template was added, so adding {{TOC limit}} doesn't do much in this case except bring back the TOC because there are no deep-level subheadings WikIan -(talk) 10:03, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

@WikIan: No, I haven't said anything about the TOC, this was about the section edit links and I wasn't aware there was an issue with the TOC. Reviewing the page history, I now see that the TOC did disappear when you added {{Box-header}} and was restored when you added {{TOC limit}}. So that's two things one has to remember to do if using {{Box-header}} on an article talk page. Myself, I think I'll just not use {{Box-header}} on an article talk page. (Or any talk space, for that matter. I just forgot the tlx in two places and screwed up this page for about half a minute until I got it fixed.) ―Mandruss ☎ 10:30, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata: Access to data from arbitrary items is coming - new date set

Hi everyone,

A while ago I announced a rollout date for enabling a feature here - access to arbitrary data from Wikidata. We encountered some issues and decided to delay the rollout to make sure we're not screwing things up. I'm sorry for this delay. We've now fixed the issues and have set a new date for the feature rollout. It'll be September 16th.

In case you want more background information what arbitrary access is or have questions please see d:Wikidata:Arbitrary access.

Cheers Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 11:49, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Edit by user tool

Now that Flow development is (almost) dead, any chance WMF development will finally take a more professional attitude towards the Tool server and the tools (some of which are called by the standard Wikipedia interface) it hosts? [13] [14] --NeilN ^{talk to me} 16:33, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Yes!!! I depend on Edits by user a lot. It has been broken, on and off, for weeks. When the tool is broken there are no instructions on who to report the problem to. Ottawahitech (talk) 01:21, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

https://tools.wmflabs.org shows maintainers, here at https://tools.wmflabs.org/#toollist-usersearch which says Scottywong and Σ. See however User talk:Scottywong#Tools, and I see you already posted to User talk:Σ#Edits by user is broken with no instructions on who to contact. They are volunteer editors and not WMF employees. Calls of external tools, including those hosted at wmflabs, are added by editors at the English Wikipedia, for example at MediaWiki:Histlegend for the top of page histories, and at MediaWiki:Sp-contributions-footer (which uses {{Sp-contributions-footer}}) for the bottom of user contributions. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:45, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Whether Flow development is "(almost) dead" is disputable. Tool Labs is a pretty different department. If you have questions for the WMF you may want to bring them up on Meta where there is a dedicated place. --Malyacko (talk) 10:10, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Given the past responses I've gotten (and the disappearance of staff from a thread when I propose something concrete), WMF development is well aware of my criticisms of its practices. --NeilN ^{talk to me} 17:55, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Edit count is also broken

@Cyberpower678: The Edit count tool is also broken right now: the error message says:This URI is managed by the xtools-ec tool, maintained by Cyberpower678 and Tools.xtools. Perhaps its files are on vacation, or the link you've followed doesn't actually lead somewhere useful? I assume this is supposed to be funny, only I don’t have a sense of humour when trying to update Wikipedia:Missing Wikipedians when I am short of time, sigh… Ottawahitech (talk) 15:43, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Don't look at me. I don't make that error message, labs did. In any case I restarted the services.—^cyberpower_Chat:Online 15:57, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Today I got a slightly different message: This URI is managed by the xtools tool, maintained by MusikAnimal, Cyberpower678, Tools.xtools-articleinfo, Elee, Technical 13, Lixxx235, Tools.xtools-ec, and Nakon.bPerhaps its files are on vacation... (wikilink is mine) Ottawahitech (talk) 16:05, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Edit summaries

Anyone else having problems entering in edit summaries ? I can type anything else (this message for example), however, when I attempt to enter an edit summary I get no text in the Edit Summary window (I do see a flashing cursor). I'm running Chrome Version 45.0.2454.85 m on Win 7, using monobook skin, everything else seems to be working fine, except edit summaries KoshVorlon We are all Kosh 17:35, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Have exactly the same issue since today and also use C45.0.2454.85 m with W7. It has made me switch to VisualEditor for the day which is actually pretty good although it takes some getting used to.--Wolbo (talk) 22:33, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Since Chrome 45 was released only 2 days ago, might it be a browser bug specific to Windows 7 ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:53, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

It might also be Chrome itself. I booted into Win 10 (at work) using Chrome 44 and edit summaries were no problem. I'll try the same with IE , FireFox and Opera as well and see what happens. KoshVorlon We are all Kosh 16:32, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Just did some test, and it looks like it's a Chrome issue. Using Windows 7 , I was able to use edit summaries with Firefox and IE, just not Chrome. KoshVorlon We are all Kosh 18:01, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

I have this too. Supremely irritating. Chrome version and set-up same as Kosh's. --Dweller (talk) 09:51, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

@KoshVorlon, Dweller, and Wolbo: By any chance does this happen only when you use the WikiEd interface? - 185.108.128.3 (talk) 10:40, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Speaking only for myself, I didn't know what that means. And having followed your wikilink, I still don't know what that means. --Dweller (talk) 10:48, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Do you mean does my edit screen look like this, the answer is yes. --Dweller (talk) 10:49, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

I tried testing on Chrome 45/Windows 7 and could not reproduce the issue except when using the WikiEd interface. @Dweller: Disable "wikEd, a full-featured integrated text editor" in Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets and see if you are able to add edit summaries. - 185.108.128.10 (talk) 10:58, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

That worked a treat. Thank you. --Dweller (talk) 11:09, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

BRIEF Followup - Seems Disabling "WikEd" in "Preferences/Gadget" works for me at the moment - entering text in the "Edit Summary" window now seems OK - Thank you for the suggestion - and - Enjoy! :) Drbogdan (talk) 17:18, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

(edit conflict) 185.108.128.10 I actually don't use WikiEd at all. (Just checked again to make sure it wasn't turned on), it's off. Seems to be a Chrome issue. KoshVorlon We are all Kosh 11:10, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

@KoshVorlon: Could you try removing importScript('User:Δ/monobook.js'); from your monobook.js and check again? If that does not work, could you clear your entire monobook.js and see if the issue persists? - 185.108.128.10 (talk) 11:21, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

:::::::: Actually, I can tell you it's not Delta's monobook.js, I logged in with Firefox and was able to enter edit summaries. | per this edit summary just done in Firefox, with me logged in  :) KoshVorlon We are all Kosh 13:45, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Struck out. I just tried Chrome logged out and it works just fine. Our I.P user seems to have it right, however, the delta monobook.js grants me a sidebar that I've really grown accustomed to using. I'll live with it I guess. It seems to not work well with my current version of Chrome. KoshVorlon We are all Kosh 13:49, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

• ping Cacycle. Seems to be a WikiEd styling issue with Chrome 45. No input on forms like edit summaries and new section titles. Happens to me on OSX as well. - 185.108.128.10 (talk) 12:57, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, working on it. Cacycle (talk) 14:56, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

FWIW - YES - Same/similar problem - Sent Feedback to Google (see copy below) - hope this helps in some way - in any case - Enjoy! :) Drbogdan (talk) 14:41, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Extended content

NEW: Also, If Interested, See "Google Help Forum" Here => https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/eXYKzUTK9yw;context-place=forum/chrome PROBLEM - GOOGLE CHROME - SEPTEMBER 4, 2015 SENT GOOGLE CHROME FEEDBACK (see copy below): Subject: Google Chrome: unable to enter "edit summary" in Wikipedia? --- https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/186850?rd=1 --- FEEDBACK TO GOOGLE: PLEASE HELP - PROBLEM: Google Chrome Version 45.0.2454.85 m (on two different WinXP computers) => Unable to enter text in the "edit summary" box in Wikipedia? - Earlier Google Chrome browser versions seemed all OK - Other browsers, including Firefox, are also OK - Thank you for your help with this - Enjoy! :) Dennis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Drbogdan Computer systems: Windows XP; Google Chrome (Dell desktop; HP Pavilion laptop) Files attached: GoogleChrome-Wikipedia-UnableToEnterTextInEditSummaryBox-1.jpg Related webpage: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Google_Chrome&action=edit Dr Dennis Bogdan * Computer DataPro Consulting drbogdan at comcast.net * drbogdan at yahoo.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Drbogdan http://www.facebook.com/drbogdan http://home.comcast.net/~drbogdan/publications.html

Google will try this with a basic setup. If the problem is a conflict between Chrome and User:Δ/monobook.js, they won't have that script in their user setup, so won't see anything wrong. If you mention User:Δ/monobook.js to them, they'll say that it's a problem in that script, nothing to do with them. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:17, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

@KoshVorlon: User:Δ/monobook.js is a collection of various deprecated scripts and the reason I asked you to remove it is because it contained an instance of an older version of WikiEd that is causing this issue on Chrome. - 185.108.128.8 (talk) 16:46, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

New problem

I now can't see edit summaries in page history, watchlist and my contribs. What a bleeding pain. --Dweller (talk) 11:11, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

@Dweller: As a first step, could you try clearing your browser cache? - 185.108.128.10 (talk) 11:39, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Just restarted. That seemed to fix the bugger, thanks. --Dweller (talk) 11:44, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

wikEd disabled under Chrome 45.0

wikEd had to be disabled for the most recent Chrome version 45.0.2454.85 because of a browser bug. It was not not possible to type into empty wikEd input fields such as the edit summary or the find and replace fields. Cacycle (talk) 17:24, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

See the Google bug report: Chrome 528382 (Typing into empty <input> fields is not possible). Cacycle (talk) 18:25, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Why can't I send an email?

I have a legitimate reason for a sockpuppet account that I want to reveal secretly to someone in order to follow the guidelines.

But I don't even get a copy of the email. Other emails from Wikipedia arrive just fine.HarleyRandomBoy 22:20, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Who is sending whom an email? Martinevans123 (talk) 22:24, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Sorry, it didn't appear anyone had responded. Who should I send the email to? I (HarleyRandomBoy) chose User:Yunshui out of a list that appeared to be the correct one for reporting a legitimate sockpuppet account.HarleyRandomBoy 22:52, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

@HarleyRandomBoy: That email never reached me, I'm afraid - I was away on holiday at the time, but have now caught up on all my emails; there's nothing from you there. Not sure why it wouldn't have arrived. You might want to send it again, or try emailing the general arbcom list at arbcom-llists.wikimedia.org instead. Yunshui ^雲_水 06:53, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Default number of search results

Is there a way to change the default number of search results. I've looked. I've searched. I've not concluded. I hope it's twenty for everyone. — CpiralCpiral 22:46, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Default I don't know about. What I normally do, once the first screenful has arrived, is append &limit=5000 to the URL. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:07, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

That's it. Thank you. — CpiralCpiral 23:30, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

You can also click one of "20 | 50 | 100 | 250 | 500" at the bottom of search results, and manually change the url to a number up to 5000. The choice is not remembered for future searches. Earlier there was a "Search" tab in preferences for this and other settings but it was removed in 2014. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:56, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

I believe the reason MediaWiki starts at twenty and offers the other low numbers is because, on average, the up-front cost of page-ranking is recouped in the first twenty results, and that the only other significant processing costs are the post-processing work done as it is sent—gathering the context in each page, highlighting the terms on each page, performing word-proximity search requests on each page. I think all indexed searches (even with millions of results) are nearly instant and represent only an insignificant amount of processing required at search time. (Although the indexes take quite a bit of work to build and maintain in the background.) — CpiralCpiral 05:47, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

I wish there was a way to remove context and highlighting and all other post-processing, and just get the number of results and the pagenames from the index search. — CpiralCpiral 05:47, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

That's what we have API's for: mw:API:Search. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:47, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

You can modify the search results display - for example, the wrapping at 38em (less than half the page width at 1280px wide) was annoying me, so I did this (it might work in Vector too). On a search results page, each entry has three parts: the page name; the context; and the page size/edit date. If you only want to display the first of these, it should be possible to hide the other two with a CSS rule like

div.searchresult, div.mw-search-result-data { display: none; }

placed in Special:MyPage/common.css. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:39, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Notification of search-related request discussion

Anyone knowledgeable in CirrusSearch or regular expressions, or wiki-search in general, please consider lending your expertise to WP:VPR#Efficient search for policies and guidelines. Thanks. —67.14.236.50 (talk) 23:20, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Looking for the 's Bot and the 's Bot owner

Bob Marley's to Bob Marley's.

There is a Bot that scrubs Wikipedia for wikilinks that have 's outside the wikilink and then moves the 's to inside the wikilink (e.g. the Bot changes [[Bob Marley]]'s to [[Bob Marley|Bob Marley's]].

1. Where is the policy that encourages this house style?
2. How do I get a hold of the Bot owner?
3. How do I request Bot attention to an article needing changes?

Thank you. Checkingfax (talk) 01:47, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

User:Basilicofresco?

—Trappist the monk (talk) 01:53, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

I think FrescoBot did the opposite but later reverted its own edits when it turned out to be controversial. See User talk:Basilicofresco#Blocked Bot for 12 hours for changing a style issue in articles. and Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Linking#Saxon genitive and piping. I don't think there is currently consensus to go either way by bot. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:05, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

FrescoBot managed by Basilicofresco goes from 's]] to ]]'s and I'm looking for the Bot that is doing it in reverse to make the "apostrophe s" part of the blue link. The Bot is out there. I've seen it. Thank you. Checkingfax (talk) 04:41, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Where have you seen it?--Anders Feder (talk) 04:48, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

I wish I had jotted it down. That's why I'm here. The Bot was scraping a few pages on my watchlist. There is an alphabetical list of Bots but it is extremely long and there is no Bot description on that long list. Thanks again for checking in. Checkingfax (talk) 05:25, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Checkingfax, please contact me later after you get some conclusion about this idea. -- BullRangifer (talk) 05:32, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

It was FrescoBot (talk · contribs) which both moved the 's outside the link, e.g. this edit and then put it back inside, as a self-reversion, see this revert. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:02, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

{{DISPLAYTITLE}} + __NOTOC__ = extra whitespace

At Life is Good Company, there is some extra whitespace before the article content. I have found that if I remove just one of either {{DISPLAYTITLE}} or __NOTOC__, the whitespace disappears, so it seems the combination of the two is causing the extra whitespace. This repros on Firefox, Chrome, and IE. Regards, Orange Suede Sofa (talk) 06:06, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

already solved I think ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:42, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Yes, two consecutive "blank" lines (with no rendered content) cause extra whitespace. Both {{DISPLAYTITLE}} and __NOTOC__ can be anywhere on the page. They have both been removed from that page by now but that's another matter. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:48, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Does API expose CategoryCollation value?

Does the API expose the value of $wgCategoryCollation in a query, I can't find it in the siteinfo data. Detail: in AWB I want to be able to determine using the API which language wikipedia wikis are using one of the uca- options i.e. use diacritics & accents in sortkeys. (From what I can see it seems like this value could be category-level, I am interested in the site value only.) Thanks Rjwilmsi 08:16, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

I don't know an API call but the actual setting for Wikimedia wikis is done in https://noc.wikimedia.org/conf/highlight.php?file=InitialiseSettings.php. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:15, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Use the raw text link at top for parsing. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:40, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia's HTTP compression

I am doing some research on Wikipedia's HTTP compression (I believe that Wikipedia uses mod_gzip.) I want to use 7zip (I am open to using something else) to compress some HTML files the same way that Wikipedia compresses them when sending them to the browser. The goal is to see how much the size of compressed file changes if we change the HTML in various ways

With 7zip the following options only give you one choice if you want to use gzip:

• Archive format: gzip
• Compression method: Deflate
• Dictionary size: 32 kB

But you have choices for the following:

• Compression Level: Fastest, Normal, Maximum, Ultra
• Word size: 8, 12 16, 24, 32, 48, 64, 96, 128, 192, 256, 268

Related: mod_gzip, gzip, DEFLATE, [ http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1952.txt ], [ https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1951.txt ], [ http://www.schroepl.net/projekte/mod_gzip/ ], [ http://www.innerjoin.org/apache-compression/howto.html ], [ http://perl.apache.org/docs/tutorials/client/compression/compression.html ].

So what 7zip compression level and word size would match Wikipedia's HTTP compression? --Guy Macon (talk) 13:52, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Does this answer your question ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:27, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

I think it does. Specifically:

LoadModule deflate_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_deflate.so

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>

<IfModule mod_filter.c>

DeflateCompressionLevel 9

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css text/javascript application/x-javascript

</IfModule>

</IfModule>

...gives me the compression level, and I see no place where the word size is defined, so it must be the default. I will have to figure out what the default is, but it should be findable. Of course I am assuming that Wikipedia uses the same settings for compressing text/html -- the code above only sets it for CSS and Javascript. --Guy Macon (talk) 15:55, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Yeah I haven't been able to find that yet. Maybe if you checkout the entire git repo of the config you can fulltext search through it. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:08, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

A curious email...

Just recently, I received this curious email in my inbox (the one that I use for Wikipedia). This has happened once before. It was written in Arabic, said something about "MediaWiki message delivery", and was from wiki@wikimedia.org. The email address seems to have been responsible for an email confirmation scam in the past. I didn't open the email (I just deleted it), but I'm wondering if anyone else has received an email like this. --Biblioworm 15:32, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Just a wild guess... Someone may have clicked on 'reset password' on the Arabic Wikipedia, while trying to (unsuccessfully of course) log in with your user name. Happens all the time. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 15:45, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

But you must know the recipient's email address to reset the password; only I and a few other users know my email address, and none of them edit on the Arabic Wikipedia (that I know of, anyway). The email also didn't appear to be about password resets, but rather said something about "MediaWiki message delivery", as I mentioned above. --Biblioworm 15:51, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Check your talk page on Arabic Wikipedia and other Arabic wikis. You may have received a talk page message and had an email notification as is default on many wikis. BethNaught (talk) 15:55, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

I have received many mails from wikis where I'm not active, usually welcome mails or notifications that somebody edited my talk page. And anynone can enter your username at Special:PasswordReset without knowing your email address, and request a new password sent to whatever address is stored for the account. The old password continues to work and the new expires if it isn't used. If you have deleted the mail and don't know what it actually said then I don't think there is much point in trying to guess what it was about. Don't worry about it. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:52, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

A lot of people got these messages. The e-mail message says that you have a message on your talk page at https://fa.wikivoyage.org/wiki/بحث_کاربر:Biblioworm (Farsi, not Arabic). The message on your talk page (and 2,500+ other people who have ever visited the Farsi Wikivoyage while logged in) congratulates the community upon their successes and encourages you to improve articles. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:29, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Special:CentralAuth/Biblioworm shows that during 13 minutes on 20 October 2014 the account was created at 665 Wikimedia wikis. I guess some tool was used to visit all the wikis and cause automatic account creation. The numerous accounts are likely to produce some mails. Just ignore them. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:07, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Pages in categories

Could somebody point me to Phabricator ticket (I just don't believe, that this hasn't been reported) about those situations in categories, when the first entry of some letter is in new column, but the letter itself is in the previous (tha last one). Like currently it is with E and Eslamabad-e Kahur Khoshk in this one. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 16:50, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Yes, this! Current version of Chrome, XP. Eslamabad-e Kahur Khoshk is the last link in the column. When I click on it, the link bounces to the top of the next next column. Because the click release must normally occur on the link, the target page does not load and I must scroll up to click again. Seen this a lot in a variety of category pages.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 17:25, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Category listing has changed twice this year, once in March, and again in (I think) April. In between those two changes was this thread. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk · contribs) should know if there are related Phab tickets. --Redrose64 (talk) 17:47, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

phab:T46304 is pretty close. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 08:22, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for the link. Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 08:58, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Weird things going on with the User:David Tombe account

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Log/David_Tombe today, which reads:

06:27, 3 September 2015 User account David Tombe (talk | contribs | block) was created

which is odd, because the David Tombe account was created a long time ago, and that user departed from Wikipedia in 2011: see the deletion log of User talk:David Tombe. At the same time, according to the logs, that account does not appear to have made any edits, deleted or undeleted, at any time, past or present, which just doesn't make sense, as Tombe was a prolific contributor. This is really peculiar: is this a database glitch, or the result of some sort of special administrative procedure? -- The Anome (talk) 17:43, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

I see also from the logs that:

15:38, 11 August 2015 Maire (talk | contribs) renamed user David Tombe (0 edits) to Cinnamon90 (per request)

David Biddulph (talk) 17:50, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

If you look at the deleted edits on the user page or talk page you can see what the renamed account is. -- GB fan 18:05, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Looking at it more, what probably happened is that in March 2011 when he left the project he was renamed to the new name. Then in April of 2011 some recreated the account. That is the one that was recently renamed to Cinnamon90. Today someone again recreated the account. -- GB fan 19:28, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

If you use pop-ups, you can see the contributions from the old account. Why was the usertalk page deleted? That is not normally allowed. DuncanHill (talk) 19:45, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

You would have to talk to the deleting administrator about that, Jimbo Wales. -- GB fan 19:52, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Hmm, and the contruibutions by David Tombe seem to be credited to User:FDT = FDT contributions. DuncanHill (talk) 19:56, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

The account was renamed at some point and when that happens the contributions are credited to the new username. -- GB fan 20:05, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

But the rename left his old signature pointing to the old name - see here for instance, and the original name has also been renamed to Cinammon90, and also recreated today. So - there appear to be at least 3 accounts with the same name at some stage or other. God help anyone trying to work out who contributed what! DuncanHill (talk) 20:12, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Renames do not change the contents of pages, except of course for moving userspace pages to the new names. Whenever a user is renamed, signatures left under the old username will always be unchanged unless someone manually (and disruptively) modifies them. Nyttend (talk) 04:35, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Actually it is really easy to figure out who contributed what. What the original David Tombe account contributed, What the April 2011 David Tombe account contributed and What the September 2015 David Tombe contributed. The only one that might be a little confusing is the first one where the signature points to the original account but it has 0 edits. Then it takes just a little digging to see what the account is named now. -- GB fan 15:22, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

It's really easy 'once you have spent half an hour working out what happened. On renames, isn't a redirect normally left from the old userpage to the new one? DuncanHill (talk) 17:44, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Yes, but the renamers sometimes suppress the creation of the redirects. I don't know why. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:45, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

We allow people to create new accounts with the same name as deleted old ones? Surely that's a mistake: it can lead to confusion, as it has done here, and could also possibly be used for mischief. -- The Anome (talk) 20:35, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Rowspans in tables not quite working?

Please look at this table:

#		Governor	Term start	Term end	Term	Party
14	style="background:Template:Democratic Party (United States)/meta/color;"|	Raul Hector Castro	January 6, 1975	October 20, 1977	31	Democratic
15	style="background:Template:Democratic Party (United States)/meta/color;"|	Wesley Bolin	October 20, 1977	March 4, 1978		Democratic
16	rowspan="2" style="background:Template:Democratic Party (United States)/meta/color;"|	Bruce Babbitt	March 4, 1978	January 5, 1987		Democratic
	32

In the code, the "31" cell in Term is supposed to be three rows tall, and Babbitt is two rows tall. So it should look like Castro, Bolin, and Babbitt all shared term 31, and then Babbitt has 32 to himself. But it doesn't work that way ,at least in my Chrome; if people are seeing it correct, let me know and I'll post a screenshot. But when I examine it in Chrome, it has the third row for 31 as being 0px high. Is there any reason or fix for this? I've gotten complex rowspans to work recently but this one is still fighting me. --Golbez (talk) 21:04, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

The requested declarations are sent to your browser but Row 3 has no content that cannot be displayed alongside row 4, and then browsers may display a row with height zero. Below I have used style="height: 3em;" in row 3 to force it to display above normal height. Row 4 displays at normal height and you get the wanted result, at least in my Firefox. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:31, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

#		Governor	Term start	Term end	Term	Party
14	style="background:Template:Democratic Party (United States)/meta/color;"|	Raul Hector Castro	January 6, 1975	October 20, 1977	31	Democratic
15	style="background:Template:Democratic Party (United States)/meta/color;"|	Wesley Bolin	October 20, 1977	March 4, 1978		Democratic
16	rowspan="2" style="background:Template:Democratic Party (United States)/meta/color;"|	Bruce Babbitt	March 4, 1978	January 5, 1987		Democratic
	32

Yep, works here for me too, thanks. Incidentally, I solved the problem by adding portraits to the table, which made the rows much taller and thus Chrome got on board with it. I'll keep this in mind definitely for when it's needed, thanks!! --Golbez (talk) 21:36, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

@Golbez: See Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 138#Table formatting List of mayors of Bremen and threads linked back from that. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:06, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Database dump question

Is there a way to get a list of editors who have edited any of the articles tagged with a certain WikiProject banner? If so, how would I go about getting said list? –Fredddie™ 00:01, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

I responded at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject X#Database dump question. Harej (talk) 02:56, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Can be done with a SQL query. It wasn't very useful since articles tend to have lots of minor edits and vandalism, so you'll scoop up RC patrollers. Never got the system to work. You can try hitting me up again to take another stab if I ever get database access again. — Dispenser 05:04, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

@Dispenser: if it came with a number of edits, I would have trimmed down the list to remove people with, say, fewer than 10 edits. –Fredddie™ 11:43, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Opera Repertory of the Salzburg Festival 2015

Help! The list should look like de:Opernbesetzungen der Salzburger Festspiele 2015 but it doesn't. I'm desperate. Please help. Thanks. --Meister und Margarita (talk) 14:16, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

@Meister und Margarita: I guess you want the background color in the wide cells at de:Opernbesetzungen der Salzburger Festspiele 2015. It's made with class="hintergrundfarbe8" where hintergrundfarbe8 is defined with background-color: #ffebad; in de:MediaWiki:Common.css. We don't have that class here but I have added the background color directly in [15]. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:24, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Thank you so much. Great job. Just another small request: In the German versions the participants start right on top, in the English/American version the lists of participants are centered. I would very much prefer the German version. Are you able to fix this too? Thanks and regards --Meister und Margarita (talk) 15:27, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Done with valign="top" in the table rows.[16] See Help:Table for general table help. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:35, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

valign is an obsolete attribute; vertical-align is the corresponding CSS property. I'm rewriting Help:Table to use the proper CSS methods instead of the old HTML ones. SiBr₄ (talk) 15:50, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

page width bar chart?

I've just added a use of Template:Bar chart at Refugees of the Syrian Civil War#Aid given and have made use of the field | bar_width = 36 (the default is 30) so as to make the length of the third bar harmonise with the length of the number presented. One problem is that when page width is reduced (as may be the situation if people are reading from a small device) two word titles such as "United States" get split onto two lines. I was also wondering about a way of changing the width to page width and then to apply a minimum width.

Thanks.

GregKaye 14:29, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

For United States, United Kingdom and all other you can use {{nobr}}. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 18:17, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Turn off

Hello. How can I turn off MediaWiki:somejs.js for themselves ? — Green Zero обг 14:31, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Please try to clarify the question. Give an example of what you are trying to achieve. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:37, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

@Green Zero: Also, what do you mean by MediaWiki:somejs.js? It doesn't exist. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:17, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

I think that somejs is placeholder text, not a real js script. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 18:19, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Translation tool

Does not make it clear when a page you are creating has already been deleted. This should happen in big red letters as soon as you fire up the tool.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 17:20, 4 September 2015 (UTC).

Script error: The module returned a value. It is supposed to return an export table.

Resolved

 – I only saw the big red message - no use-mention distinction!

It's back? All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 17:26, 4 September 2015 (UTC).

@Rich Farmbrough: Did you WP:PURGE the page? --Redrose64 (talk) 18:15, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

It was (and still is) this page. Let's try a purge though. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 19:00, 4 September 2015 (UTC).

Still can't make tags stay on page

Referring back to this, I still have to rush if I want to click on anything before it goes away. It is a Windows Vista and IE9 problem.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 20:56, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Your link goes to Wikipedia:Help desk#Book Creation. Did you mean Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 139#Hatnotes and "Main" disappearing? PrimeHunter (talk) 21:01, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

D'oh! Thanks for fixing it. I was informing someone on the Help desk I had suggested coming here. Looking back at my contributions, it appears I went to the archived page and somehow didn't get it copied and pasted.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 21:26, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Interface delay

For at least the last week, I'm having trouble with the user interface. It is almost always delayed in rendering the page, adding some pieces right away but other pieces later. I believe that during this delay the Firefox status at the bottom left says "read en.wikipedia" - can't remember if it says wikipedia.org. I have the latest version of Firefox for Windows. It's very annoying because the page jumps around and if I do something before it's stopped jumping, I can click on the wrong thing - not a particularly good idea if I'm blocking someone and the drop-down box moves.--Bbb23 (talk) 21:30, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Same here, several days now. It's due to some javascript that only kicks in once page loading is complete. The most annoying aspect is that I might be undoing a bad edit, and about to click on the edit summary box - and it suddenly moves down by half an inch so I click on {{{}}} or similar, squirting that into the edit window. So I then need to "undo". --Redrose64 (talk) 21:40, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Show the crossed W in Wikipedia logo

How do you specify the crossed W in the Linux Libertine font? The Transhumanist 21:39, 4 September 2015 (UTC)