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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That's not how pie charts are supposed to look...

Broken pie chart in question

Hello! I recently read this fascinating edition of the Signpost's Special Report on mobile, (shoutout to WereSpielChequers, the author of the atricle) and I noticed the pie chart was looking strange.

My user agent is Mozilla/5.0 (Android 13; Mobile; rv:109.0) Gecko/115.0 Firefox/115.0, using the Fennec browser on a OnePlus Nord 2 5G, if that is in any way relevant. --QuickQuokka ^{[⁠talk • contribs]} 22:27, 16 August 2023 (UTC)

 Works for me at Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-08-15/Special report. Firefox 116.0.2, Windows 10. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:33, 16 August 2023 (UTC)

@Redrose64: I didn't ask if it works for anybody else, I wanted to inform the devs of an error. QuickQuokka ^{[⁠talk • contribs]} 22:37, 16 August 2023 (UTC)

@QuickQuokka, Redrose is saying that this bug does not appear for everyone, which can help find its cause. — Qwerfjkltalk 13:14, 17 August 2023 (UTC)

This is a {{Pie chart}}, so that means the developers are your cohorts :). I am somewhat skeptical it can be fixed in a way which works for you and everyone else given what it's doing (Firefox for mobile is not a high-pageview browser). Izno (talk) 23:14, 16 August 2023 (UTC)

Call me a traditionalist, but nowadays I use a Chromebook, and I also have an antideluvian android mobile (now on Android version 10) that I bought second hand several years ago. Both show the pie chart with properly pie shaped slices. So it may just be the fennec browser? ϢereSpielChequers 07:08, 17 August 2023 (UTC)

Looking at the rendered html of that graph makes me want to cry. It's impressive as a hack, sure, but even if it is valid css, it's fragile and opaque; surely the Proper Way To Do This is an svg. —Cryptic 08:53, 17 August 2023 (UTC)

That would be good but then the chart would quickly become obsolete as it's much harder to update a diagram than some fairly clear wikitext. I know svg can be "easily" updated but a comparatively tiny number of editors would feel comfortable doing that and then going through the image upload procedure. Johnuniq (talk) 09:30, 17 August 2023 (UTC)

Today the colors would probably be done with conic-gradient. That's fairly new but should degrade more gracefully than this absolute mess of absolutes. About 0.5% of English Wikipedia page views would not support it (0.13% Chrome/Edge, 0.14% IE, 0.21% Safari). That's probably a reasonable percentage to try and improve things. Izno (talk) 17:34, 17 August 2023 (UTC)

---

Yet another example of a broken pie chart

 Comment: I am unarchiving this stale discussion, due to finding another person who experienced a similar bug, @2NumForIce

I found this screenshot on the Discord channel for Wikimedia, and I am not satisfied with the results of the discussion so far. --QuickQuokka ^{[⁠talk • contribs]} 23:14, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

I started working on a replacement Module:Sandbox/Izno/Pie chart which uses conic-gradient as I noted above. Just been a bit tired of Wikipedia things lately. Izno (talk) 01:22, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

I tested the page linked above on Firefox for Android 68 (last version supporting some old Android versions; at least I think I did, that was several days ago) and just now version 117, and neither displayed this issue. (I did notice some seams running through the middle horizontally and vertically, but presumably that's a consequence of aforementioned looking at the rendered html of that graph makes me want to cry.)

QuickQuokka, if you type about:support in your browser that has this issue, can you post what it lists under the "graphics" section for (1) "Compositing" and (2) "GPU #1" -> "Description"? LittlePuppers (talk) 04:05, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

@LittlePuppers: Certainly:

Graphics

Features
Compositing	WebRender
GPU #1
Description	Model: DN2103, Product: DN2103EEA, Manufacturer: OnePlus, Hardware: mt6893, OpenGL: ARM -- Mali-G77 MC9 -- OpenGL ES 3.2 v1.r32p1-01eac0.efd03ef21f136842c0935bd4f493fe81

Hope this clarifies my problem. QuickQuokka ^{[⁠talk • contribs]} 08:27, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

Dated maintenance categories

Wanted to ask about an issue that I've noticed with dated maintenance categories. This isn't the only time this has happened, and instead there have been a lot of examples of this of late, but I'll raise Category:CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of December 2022 as an example since that's the most recent case I've located.

What happened is that it was deleted as empty on August 1, but then sometime in the next week it somehow became repopulated, with the result that I had to undelete it on August 7 to get it off Special:WantedCategories, but then sometime in the week after that it was emptied again and thus had to be deleted a second time.

Now, obviously, there's no value in tagging dated maintenance categories for the "keep even if empty, because a possibility of future reuse exists" option that general undated maintenance categories sometimes get — but I don't see any great value in Wikipedians going through a looping delete-undelete-redelete cycle on them either. So is there any alternative way that could have avoided this, such as having the maintenance template only generate dated categories if they actually exist, and substituting a generic undated "crapcatcher" category if they don't, so that such situations are prevented from showing up as "wanted" redlinks? Bearcat (talk) 13:03, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

I guess a page reappeared in the category because it was reverted to a revision with that dated tag. A template would have to use #ifexist to omit red categories but it's an expensive parser function with 500 total allowed per page. That could cause problems on pages with many such templates. It would also delay creation of new maintenance categories. I would like a MediaWiki feature like regexes in a MediaWiki message to say that certain category names should be treated as hidden categories if they don't exist. Then normal readers and registered users with default settings wouldn't see an ugly red link in the category list. It wouldn't solve your problem but I think this is a more important problem with red maintenance categories. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:41, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

Many of the actual maintenance templates do use #ifexist (mostly via Template:Dated maintenance category or Template:Fix/category or Module:Message box) to populate Category:Articles with invalid date parameter in template. Then AnomieBOT's DatedCategoryCreator task looks through that category every 2 hours to find articles that have redlinked dated subcats of categories in Category:Wikipedia maintenance categories sorted by month and Category:Wikipedia categories sorted by month to automatically create them. Whether it would be appropriate to have the CS1 templates do something similar I don't know. Anomie⚔ 18:11, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

Given the number of uses on our largest pages, not likely. Izno (talk) 18:20, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

Umm, are you sure? The only dated maint cats that cs1|2 populates are subcats of Category:CS1 maint: DOI inactive. Presently, there are ~2k articles that have |doi-broken-date= (all of them in Category:CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of August 2023). Since the dated maint cat is dependent on |doi-broken-date=, the cs1|2 module would only have to call the expensive function mw.title.new ('Category:CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of <month> <year>').exists when |doi-broken-date= is found. I doubt that there will be more than 500 of those parameters in a single page. When |doi-broken-date= is found without a matching extant category, the module can emit the red-linked cat plus a blue-linked cat for AnomieBOT which can then somehow create a blue-linked cat from the red-linked cat. Does AnomieBOT add all of the wikitext presently in the category page itself or is that an exercise left to editors?

—Trappist the monk (talk) 18:48, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

AnomieBOT creates the dated categories with either {{Monthly clean-up category}} or {{Monthly maintenance category}}. See Category:Articles with unsourced statements from August 2023 or Category:Uncategorized from August 2023 for some examples. If we want to we could do a different template for CS1 maint cats, of course, but I'd still recommend the category page transclude a single template (whether that's like {{CS1 maintenance category}} or {{CS1 maintenance category/DOI inactive}} or maybe even {{CS1 maintenance category|DOI inactive}}) so it's easy for people to adjust the contents without needing changes to the bot. Anomie⚔ 19:44, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

I thought the bot would recreate a deleted category if it were repopulated? I assume this wouldn't require a lot of work, just a periodic check of "TOPIC as of MONTH YEAR"; there are a lot of possibilities of course (272 months have passed since Wikipedia was set up, and that's for each topic category: 272 "unsourced articles as of", 272 "NPOV issues as of", etc), but it shouldn't be hard for a bot. Nyttend (talk) 11:42, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

Not hard to program, but time and resource consuming. Which is why the bot currently relies on Category:Articles with invalid date parameter in template to flag the articles having problematic categories instead of querying 54000 category names every few hours. Anomie⚔ 12:14, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

I'm beginning to think that an automated solution utilizing AnomieBOT doesn't fit here. The example category, Category:CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of December 2022, is not named properly for AnomieBOT (it wants ... from <month> <YYYY>). It isn't clear to me how to apply either of {{Monthly clean-up category}} or {{Monthly maintenance category}} where the desired category title uses a date that isn't current-month and current-year.

I'll think some more about this and continue the discussion at Help talk:Citation Style 1.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 17:49, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

Neither of those are insurmountable if people at Help talk:Citation Style 1 decide they'd want AnomieBOT's help. If they decide they want it, let me know on User talk:AnomieBOT. Anomie⚔ 19:41, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

Update: As of the latest run of Special:WantedCategories, Category:CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of December 2022 was repopulated again by a new page that was not even the same page as the last time it repopulated, meaning I had to recreate it a third time. Bearcat (talk) 12:42, 25 August 2023 (UTC)

The relevant pages are Native American use of fire in ecosystems today, and Schizoid personality disorder before. In both cases a citation that was populating the category was caught up in an unrelated edit war. I ran Citation bot to remove today's page from the report, and I suspect neither of those pages are going to show up again in the report, but obviously there's nothing I can do about other pages. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 14:31, 25 August 2023 (UTC)

I have to ask, is there any value in the template actually generating dated monthly categories at all? Given that as of right now the dated monthly for August is the only one left, is there a reason why it can't just throw everything into one undated category and stuff anything that would cause problems like this to even occur in the first place? Bearcat (talk) 20:33, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

My understanding is that Headbomb keeps the dates up to date. He can give voice on the point. Izno (talk) 21:05, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

I'm not doing anything wrt to dated DOI categories. Someone else is though. The solution here really is that when some old broken DOI is found, just run citation bot on the page and it'll update to a modern date (or get fixed). Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 00:57, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

Question: Is there a tool for seeing "most-pageviews days" for an article?

We have a great tool for looking at pageviews over a given stretch of time, for example three-year pageviews of Sean Connery, but I am curious as to whether there is a way to see, for example, the top twenty individual days for pageviews for an article. BD2412 T 01:30, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

I'm not sure of such a tool but, as a workaround, it can be done by using Download > CSV on that page and then sort by the pageviews column in Excel, OpenOffice Calc or other software. Simeon (talk) 13:12, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

@Simeon: Thanks, I'll try that. BD2412 T 04:05, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

Update: Yes, that worked like a charm. BD2412 T 04:51, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

amazon kindle access

to keep this short, i am currently writing this from an amazon kindle (reading device) and attempting to access Wikipedia from it is slow, buggy,and prone to crashes, it would be awesome if this could be dealt with as soon as possible — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.10.35.182 (talk) 21:35, 25 August 2023 (UTC)

You'll have to get Amazon to fix that. Doug Weller talk 16:59, 28 August 2023 (UTC)

Is importScript asynchronous?

I use AutoEd with a custom set of functions in my common.js. Rather frequently AutoEd fails to run, with a warning left in my browser console along the lines of jQuery.Deferred exception: autoEdISBN is not defined ReferenceError: autoEdISBN is not defined. My suspicion is that importScript('Wikipedia:AutoEd/isbn.js') is importing the autoEdISBN function asynchronously, which creates a race condition where AutoEd might try to invoke it before it has finished importing. Is that right? And if so, is there some way to wait until importScript is finished? rblv (talk) 01:51, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

importScript is indeed async, since around a year ago I think. I think what you want is mw:ResourceLoader/Core modules#mw.loader.getScript. Izno (talk) 02:08, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

importScript has always been async. – SD0001 (talk) 08:47, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

No. It was not made async until Krinkle's adjustments last year to "undeprecate" it. This was one of the reasons it was not made a shim for mw.loader.load originally. Izno (talk) 15:42, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

That is not true, or rather – it is a myth. ImportScript was always async. It shared mostly the same code as the mw.loader family – the approach being to insert a <script> element into the page, which causes deferred loads in all browsers. But unfortunately a few users took to describing importScript as synchronous and "bad" without looking into its source code. – SD0001 (talk) 16:39, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

Thank you, mw.loader.getScript looks like what I need. Unfortunately I think there is an inherent race condition in how AutoEd handles user-defined plugins. I attempted to fix User:Rublov/common.js by using getScript to asynchronously load the AutoEd plugins, and then attaching a callback to the Promise object inside of autoEdFunctions to ensure that the code doesn't run until the scripts are loaded. AutoEd however treats autoEdFunctions as synchronous and reloads the page as soon as it returns, which is often (always?) before the async callback in autoEdFunctions has had a chance to run.

Maybe someone else has figured this out. rblv (talk) 21:23, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

Unfortunately I think there is an inherent race condition in how AutoEd handles user-defined plugins. AutoEd is ancient and I'm surprised it's maintained much less functional. I would not be surprised if there was one. Izno (talk) 21:31, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

Any suggested alternatives that are better maintained? rblv (talk) 21:41, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

Although Wikipedia:AutoEd/Customization implies the core script should be imported first, the preset files actually defer loading the core script until after the page DOM model is "ready" (however jQuery determines this). Thus I suggest structuring your common.js file to match the preset files, copying how it loads the core script (such as the code from complete.js, line 39 to line 41). I'm not sure if that's still too soon; if so, then instead of loading the core file as in line 40, you can invoke a promise like the one you have in your current common.js file, and in its callback, load the core file. This will result in a clear sequence: document ready → helper files are loaded in some order → core file is loaded. isaacl (talk) 22:06, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

Ah, I had assumed it was necessary for the core script to be loaded first. If not, then it's possible to do everything in the right sequence. Thank you! rblv (talk) 23:15, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

I looked at some of the helper files—they define standalone functions that don't use anything from the core script and don't execute any code, and I saw the preset files loaded them first which confirmed it would work in that order. You're welcome! isaacl (talk) 23:38, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

Orange bar of doom seems to be broken

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T345031
Resolved

Hello, The big orange "You have new messages" bar for logged out users seems to be broken - I can't get it to disappear. I tried editing my talk page by adding a space, but all that did is change the message to "You have new messages from 2 users", even though one of the "messages" was placed by myself. 86.23.109.101 (talk) 19:25, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

@Matma Rex You asked on phabricator if the notifications clear on editing - I've edited my talk page twice and the notification is still there - in fact the notification has updated to say I have messages from 2 users, even though one of them was myself. 86.23.109.101 (talk) 13:07, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply, I will look into it. Matma Rex talk 15:12, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

i got a message on my talk page, and saw it thanks to the new notification method. however the notification can not be dismissed, liek the old orange one. this may or not be a big deal but it is something you should know about here at this noticeboard. :^) 173.87.169.10 (talk) 00:16, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

• i am not able to reply to matmarex at Phabricator who said Are you sure that this worked previously? There are bug reports like this going back to 2013 (T59840), and as far as I know, due to the way caching for logged-out users work on Wikimedia wikis, the only reliable way of getting rid of the bar is making an edit. i can only say here that yes, the orange one used to clear when checking new messages, and making an edit doesn't clear it. it is still there. 173.87.169.10 (talk) 23:51, 28 August 2023 (UTC)

  I have made edits and the bar remains 2601:5CC:8300:A7F0:BCA0:9CD1:8F91:5F53 (talk) 16:01, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

  Thanks you all for comments, I found the cause of the problem (see Phabricator for details) and I hope we'll get it fixed later this week. Matma Rex talk 00:01, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

Trouble with the orange bar

(moved from my original ANI report)

A couple days ago, I was notified on my phone that someone had posted a message on my talk page with the standard "new message" template. I looked at it and pressed the links given, but the bar wouldn't go away. Two days passed, and it's still there. Today, I checked another phone (one that hasn't been used to edit Wikipedia in over a month), and it has the same template which also will not go away. I then looked at my computer (which technically doesn't even use the same IP address as me), and it has the exact same problem. I am posting here to figure out if this is just me, or a bigger issue, since the notification bar is really annoying and distracting when I am editing or reading the edit history of something. 47.227.95.73 (talk) 02:05, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

See the section above Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#Orange_bar_of_doom_seems_to_be_broken RudolfRed (talk) 02:21, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

Fixed

We deployed a fix for the problem. The orange bar should clear the next time you visit your talk page. Matma Rex talk 20:47, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

@Matma Rex Thank you very much, it just cleared properly! 86.23.109.101 (talk) 20:58, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

Module:Math rounding function

Is the discrepancy between round function in Module:Math and expr round intentional?
More details:
Module_talk:Math#Rounding_in_the_module_and_rounding_in_the_expr MarMi wiki (talk) 20:34, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

Visual editor confusion when combining lang template with a wikilink

I used the Visual editor to add a wikilink to a lang template and vice versa, and it looked fine in the visual editor, but bad in the rendered article. See references to "Du Dingyou (杜定友; 1898–1967)" in Ligature (writing)#Chinese ligatures and Guangzhou Library#History

How can that be fixed? Thanks! ★NealMcB★ (talk) 21:23, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

This is why templates have documentation... See Template:Lang § Links.

You wrote this:

[[Du Dingyou|{{lang|zh-Latn|Du Dingyou|italic=no}} ({{lang|zh|杜定友}}; 1898–1967)]]

In mainspace, that translates to:

[[Du Dingyou|<span title="Chinese-language text"><span lang="zh-Latn" style="font-style: normal;">Du Dingyou</span></span>[[Category:Articles containing Chinese-language text]] (<span title="Chinese-language text"><span lang="zh">杜定友</span></span>[[Category:Articles containing Chinese-language text]]; 1898–1967)]]

notice the category wikilinks within the Du Dingyou wikilink which MediaWiki rejects. Here in Wikipedia namespace, what you wrote works because categories are suppressed by the template:

Du Dingyou (杜定友; 1898–1967)

To do it right:

{{lang|zh-Latn|[[Du Dingyou]]|italic=no}} ({{lang|zh|杜定友}}; 1898–1967)

which in mainspace translates to:

<span title="Chinese-language text"><span lang="zh-Latn" style="font-style: normal;">[[Du Dingyou]]</span></span>[[Category:Articles containing Chinese-language text]] (<span title="Chinese-language text"><span lang="zh">杜定友</span></span>[[Category:Articles containing Chinese-language text]]; 1898–1967)

No wikilink conflict.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 21:53, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

Moving images off commons to be fair use.

A bunch of logos for entities of the Indian government are about to be deleted. See https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/Files_found_with_intitle:emblem_intitle:INS_incategory:GODL-India and https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/Files_found_with_intitle:insignia_incategory:GODL-India If I change the license to fair use, does it automatically get migrated to the Wikipedia.en server, or does each one have to be re-uploaded? Richard-of-Earth (talk) 22:11, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

No it won't be an automatic transfer. You should re-upload. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 00:35, 28 August 2023 (UTC)

Okay, follow up question. I see no notification on the talk pages of the articles that use these logos. Is there a way to notify them all? Richard-of-Earth (talk) 14:45, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

Notifying about commons deletions is Commons deletion notification bot, although it is implemented differently than you are mentioning: Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Community Tech bot 5. Snævar (talk) 16:35, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

Mobile redirect when on desktop

Currently there are two modes the english wikipedia can be in.

Desktop site:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Mobile site:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

The mobile site has a different layout, narrower content and does not use the full width like the desktop site does.

Here's my problem:

If someone copies a link on mobile and posts it online somewhere, and someone on desktop clicks it, they'll get sent to the mobile site. Even though they are on desktop.

There should be a redirect from the mobile site to the desktop site if the site detects you are using a desktop browser.

BTW: You already do it the other way around (redirect to mobile if desktop site is linked) avalean (talk) 12:13, 28 August 2023 (UTC)

There's a batch of tasks linked around phab:T214998, one of which should fit this bill. Izno (talk) 17:55, 28 August 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-35

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

• As part of the changes for the better diff handling of paragraph splits, improved detection of splits is being rolled out. Over the last two weeks, we deployed this support to group0 and group1 wikis. This week it will be deployed to group2 wikis. [1]
• All Special:Contributions pages now show the user's local edit count and the account's creation date. [2]
• Wikisource users can now use the prpbengalicurrency label to denote Bengali currency characters as page numbers inside the <pagelist> tag. [3]
• Two preferences have been relocated. The preference "Enable the visual editor" is now shown on the "Editing" tab at all wikis. Previously it was shown on the "Beta features" tab at some wikis. The preference "Use the wikitext mode inside the visual editor, instead of a different wikitext editor" is now also shown on the "Editing" tab at all wikis, instead of the "Beta features" tab. [4][5]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 August. It will be on all wikis from 31 August (calendar).
• New signups for a Wikimedia developer account will start being pushed towards idm.wikimedia.org, rather than going via Wikitech. Further information about the new system is available.
• All right-to-left language wikis, plus Korean, Armenian, Ukrainian, Russian, and Bulgarian Wikipedias, will have a link in the sidebar that provides a short URL of that page, using the Wikimedia URL Shortener. This feature will come to more wikis in future weeks. [6]

Future changes

• The removal of the DoubleWiki extension is being discussed. This extension currently allows Wikisource users to view articles from multiple language versions side by side when the <=> symbol next to a specific language edition is selected. Comments on this are welcomed at the phabricator task.
• A proposal has been made to merge the second hidden-categories list (which appears below the wikitext editing form) with the main list of categories (which is further down the page). More information is available on Phabricator; feedback is welcome!

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

MediaWiki message delivery 13:58, 28 August 2023 (UTC)

I'm curious if anyone knows of a discussion or a checklist that led to the decision to declare that the visual editor is no longer in the beta stage of software development. Until one of these recent updates, the Editing tab said something like "Disable the visual editor while it is still in beta". Was there a big set of bug fixes? Is VE still inserting nowiki tags where it should not (that diff is from four weeks ago), a long-standing bug? – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:53, 28 August 2023 (UTC)

The software is stable and has been for the better part of a decade at this point. It should have been "out of beta" long ago. Izno (talk) 17:37, 28 August 2023 (UTC)

Thanks. I agree with the latter part of your statement. I will keep my eyes out for new instances of still-open bugs that I filed half a decade ago. Maybe they have quietly been resolved but not closed in Phabricator. That would be nice. – Jonesey95 (talk) 18:21, 28 August 2023 (UTC)

Just a reminder that ALL parts of the software have decade long bugs that are open. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 05:46, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

Edit count and account age

I just noticed that Special:Contributions now displays one's edit count and account age. While this change is long overdue and I'm sure welcomed by many, this unfortunately clashes with the various User info scripts that many editors (myself included) have due to this functionality not being natively supported until now. These scripts are: User:Amorymeltzer/scripts#User Info, User:PleaseStand/User info, User:Enterprisey/userinfo, m:User:SMcCandlish/userinfo, m:User:Perhelion/userstatus, and possibly others. How do I disable the native version (i.e. I want to keep using the script version, as it has more features)? InfiniteNexus (talk) 15:56, 28 August 2023 (UTC)

You can hide it in your CSS:

.mw-contributions-editor-info {
	display: none;
}

Nardog (talk) 16:05, 28 August 2023 (UTC)

Thank you. InfiniteNexus (talk) 16:06, 28 August 2023 (UTC)

Tangentially related: the edit count shown is the number of edits actually made by yourself, and excludes transwikid edits. As an example, see de:Spezial:Beiträge/Redrose64 - this says "A user with 15 edits", but plenty more than 15 are listed - in fact there are 803 edits credited to Redrose64 on German Wikipedia, due to their love of importing our templates, modules and indeed articles. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 11:29, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

That's also the count currently used by the scripts I linked above, and the number shown at Special:CentralAuth for en-wiki. Curiously, XTools shows a different number. InfiniteNexus (talk) 16:01, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

Yes, see Wikipedia:Edit count § What is an edit count? Graham87 05:39, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

Formatting question

What would be the CSS code for blacking out one's User page? I want to do that to mine for a week or two for a private, personal reason. (Well, once I'm told how to do it, I will leave an explanation why. I'm just not interested in broadcasting the reason to the general, disinterested public.) -- llywrch (talk) 22:07, 28 August 2023 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you mean but if you want your own user page to only display the interface for you but display normally for others then you can add this to your CSS:

.page-User_Llywrch .mw-body {display:none;}

Omit .mw-body to blank the entire page. PrimeHunter (talk) 08:42, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

(Sorry to take so long to respond, been busy with non-Wiki stuff) No, what I'm looking for is a black background -- to the edge of the browser window -- for all to see, & perhaps white type. From your answer, I suspect .mw-body is somehow involved. -- llywrch (talk) 17:38, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

You can only affect the appearance of content within the main content area, by adding style attributes to HTML elements. Thus you could enclose your user page content within a <div style="...">...</div>. To change how someone sees the other parts of the page, you'd have to get them to load a custom CSS file. isaacl (talk) 17:52, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

You could use absolute positioning to cover the whole page, including the interface. But you really, really shouldn't. —Cryptic 18:18, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

It sounds disruptive to hide the interface even if it's your own userspace. You can make white text on black background in the main content area with code like: <div style="background:black; color:white; height:100em;">White text</div>. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:44, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

Deprecating minor edits?

There's a growing feeling (not sure I could actually call it a consensus yet) at WP:VPP#Proposal to remove "rearrangement of text" from definition of minor edit. that we should deprecate the whole minor edit feature. Let's assume for the sake of argument that we were going to do that. What would it look like from the technical point of view?

There's a rev_minor_edit field in the database. We certainly wouldn't remove that field; enwiki would just stop using it. There's a "This is a minor edit" checkbox on the edit form. Would would it take to make those go away? I'm assuming that could be done by an interface admin, at least for the web-based edit surfaces. And I assume the mobile apps would need to be modified at the source code level to delete those?

The various APIs all support setting that bit on edits. So I assume we'd need some kind of per-wiki configuration flag to say if rev_minor_edit is supported, and then figure out what to do if you try to set it on a project that doesn't support it. The two obvious choices are "silently ignore it" and "return an API error". I'm not sure which of those would be worse.

Special:Contributions and page histories (and maybe other places?) display an "m" on minor edits. I'm again assuming that's something that can be deleted by just editing the interface? I assume there's various search and filter forms which allow you to only look for minor edits? And of course, gazillions of tools and libraries would need to be modified to be aware of this. What else? I'm sure I've only scratched the surface. RoySmith (talk) 14:10, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

In theory, there's a simple config option: $wgGroupPermissions['user']['minoredit'] = false; would deny the right to mark edits as minor to logged-in users, just like it is currently denied to logged-out users. You'd still have to test various editing interfaces to make sure that they support this option – they probably do if they support logged-out editing, but someone might have assumed that logged-in editors always get this option instead of checking the user rights. Matma Rex talk 15:03, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

Would probably want to add it back (if it's not in the default set) for bots.

I wonder if rollback would still be marked as minor if that was set like that. Izno (talk) 15:46, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

I'm sorry, you guys want to do what?! InfiniteNexus (talk) 16:01, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

@RoySmith: The m is displayed on contribs, diffs, histories and watchlist. It may be hidden for everybody with the CSS rule

abbr.minoredit { display: none; }

placed in MediaWiki:Common.css. It's not a deletion, but a suppression; and a user may still override that with personal CSS. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 17:26, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

Why is there any need for this? Marking edits as minor is a great system. Edward-Woodrow :) _[talk] 20:35, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

Alright, you have my curiosity - Why is it a great system? - jc37 20:57, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

Might I suggest going over to the VPP thread to discuss if this is a good idea. This thread is for discussing how it might be implemented. RoySmith (talk) 21:07, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

My apologies. I did not intend on stepping on any toes. I just noticed an assertion, and was curious about their perspective. Thank you for the link, I'll go check it out : ) - jc37 08:39, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

Template:Pp-move seemingly broken

Hi. Joe the Plumber is move-protected and tagged with {{pp-move}}, but I don't see a notice or a lock icon on it. Peja Bistrica is also move-protected and tagged with {{pp-move}}, but I don't see a notice or a lock icon on it. jlwoodwa tagged the documentation as inaccurate in this edit. Maybe this is why? Can someone please investigate? --MZMcBride (talk) 23:00, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

This is by design. See Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2020 October 25#Template:Pp-move and the page history of the template/underlying module. Izno (talk) 23:03, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

How confusing. Thanks. --MZMcBride (talk) 23:13, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

Also Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 207#Move protection templates not showing. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 23:23, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

Wikidata problem ?

I don't speak Wikidata, but suspect it may be involved in this mixup.

• Brian D. Berger is this guy.
• Dan Berger, writer, is this guy.

In trying to link the writer Dan Berger at Ruchell Magee, I found that a google search on Dan Berger shows google has an image of Dan Berger the writer, linking to the Wikipedia article of Brian D. Berger. Is that a Wikidata mixup and does someone know how to fix it ? (I just moved Dan Berger to Brian D. Berger to make way for Dan Berger.) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 12:05, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

Also, I may have moved the lobbyist to the wrong title; one of the sources refers to him as Brian Daniel Berger (Dan), while the other four refer to him as B. Dan Berger. The problem seems to date to 2018, but I may not have fixed it correctly. Just trying to avoid the problem of google mixing up Dan Berger the writer on black activism with B. Dan Berger the lobbyist. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 12:30, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

Google's knowledge panel has a confusing layout. The image is added by Google and selected by their own algorithm. It doesn't link to the Wikipedia article. They got it from https://jsis.washington.edu/humanrights/people/dan-berger/. The Wikipedia link is at the end of a text paragraph from Wikipedia. All other parts may be completely unrelated to Wikipedia. See Template:HD/GKG for a stock answer to complaints about Google errors. You can give feedback to Google that the image is wrong. You can try to upload an image to Brian D. Berger and maybe Google will use it. Most complaints about wrong images in Google panels have been for cases where the Wikipedia article had no image. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:10, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

Thx, PrimeHunter-- didn't know where to go with this, and I don't do images. Regards, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:47, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

FWIW I've checked on the Wikidata side - I think you're right that it was involved, as the item for B. Dan Berger was tagged with the Freebase internal ID https://www.google.com/search?kgmid=/m/02vlxwx but Google seems to associate that ID with the historian - everything except the WP article (which it will have picked up from Wikidata) is for Dan Berger the historian.

I've moved that ID across to a new item for the historian, linked to your new page, and I think Google will then pick that up in the near future. Fingers crossed, anyway... Andrew Gray (talk) 18:35, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

Andrew Gray thanks so much-- all greek to me, but I suspected a foulup there! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:12, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia:AutoEd

The documentation for Wikipedia:AutoEd mentions (in a few places) wikimagic for ISBNs. Should these be removed as wikimagic has been deprecated? 76.14.122.5 (talk) 18:57, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

I have removed the relevant text. Thanks for the note. – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:32, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

I assume they were suggesting the functionality be removed, not just the documentation. The entire code appears to be just this so it'll probably be enough to remove mw.loader.load(AutoEd_baseurl + 'isbn.js'); and txt = autoEdISBN(txt); from /basic.js, /complete.js, and /wikichecker.js. Nardog (talk) 21:45, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

That ISBN-fixing code is still useful. On Wikipedia, we write ISBNs as "ISBN ##########", not "ISBN-13 etc." or "ISBN: etc.", so removing that extraneous text is useful. Writing ISBNs in the latter fashions will cause ISBNs to appear on error reports. – Jonesey95 (talk) 06:51, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

Question - two Page view counts

On Timeless skin sidebar, when I choose Analysis, then Basic statistics. In section "Basic information", "Page views in the past 30 days" - that number is larger than if I page down to bottom and click on "Page view statistics" (External tools section). For example here for Wikiproject Football. Page views in the past 30 days is 1,636; vs Page view statistics is 1,104. Question: which of these is correct/more accurate? Regards, JoeNMLC (talk) 21:48, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

You need to set Page view statistics to 30 days. By default it is 20 days. (I don't know why 20 was picked and it's kind of weird.) Izno (talk) 22:13, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

Thanks - Is there any way to save that 30 day perference? I've tried several things and not able to. (Settings wrench, then tick "Remember chart preference", Save) It always comes up with the 20 days instead. JoeNMLC (talk) 23:22, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

@MusikAnimal might know. Izno (talk) 02:27, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

User:PrimeHunter/Pageviews.js adds a "Page views" link under Tools. You could make a modified version with &range=latest-30 inserted in the url. https://pageviews.wmcloud.org actually shows one more day than requested so use &range=latest-29 if you really want 30. I don't know whether it's intentional but latest n in the tool has n days between start and end with both included. The average is computed correctly by dividing with n+1. Your "Analysis" options are added by MoreMenu at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets. The default is to have a "Page information" link to what MoreMenu calls "Basic statistics" in the "Analysis" options. PrimeHunter (talk) 08:22, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

I can change the default range to 30 days. It has been 20 since the demo Mforns (WMF) created many years ago that inspired Pageviews Analysis. There's otherwise no basis to defaulting to 20 days, and I agree going with roughly a month is more sensible. I'll get that deployed soon-ish.

In addition, as PrimeHunter points out, Pageviews Analysis has some logic around date ranges that is admittedly less than ideal. The idea is the past N days should not include today, because it takes up to 24 hours for the pageviews pipeline to populate. The tool incorrectly goes off of your timezone, even though I made efforts to force UTC. So in addition to perhaps confusingly being an inclusive range (the last N days including start and end, where the numerical difference equals N), what you see may not even be the same as another user due to timezones. I'll make another effort to fix that. No one was complaining about that bug here, but this conversation reminded me that it still exists.

I don't know if date ranges inclusive is really a problem or not, but since it was brought up I'll change that as well so that you get exactly N days. Depending on how users react, if at all, this might be changed back to the old behaviour.

Thanks for the feedback, — MusikAnimal ^talk 19:44, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

HBC AIV helperbot5 down again

The bot that "clerks" WP:UAA and WP:AIV hasn't been clerking for a couple of hours and appears to be broken. Lavalizard101 (talk) 14:11, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

Adding images to articles on 'Mobile Edit'

Hello,

This might be a small thing, but is there no way to add images to articles in VISUAL EDIT in mobile editting. As I have checked, the only option is through SOURCE EDITTING. The same is available on PC though, i.e. adding Images or Templates through visual edit.

It is just a question as it becomes easier to edit in visual edit... Ray Frost (talk) 16:29, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

Untraceable (by me, at least) ParserFunction errors

Today, two Australian railroad articles, Alamein line and Glen Waverley line, have popped up in Category:ParserFunction errors. I can't find any error messages in the articles (even after expanding the collapsed templates) and so have been unable to attempt to fix the problems. Can anyone identify what the errors are? Deor (talk) 17:20, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

In both articles, it looks like the row for Botanic Gardens in the (collapsed) "Station histories" table. I'm not familiar with the template used to populate that row, though. —Cryptic 17:26, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

A similar error is being displayed at {{Table Age Calculator}}, in the documentation. I wonder if something has changed in the MediaWiki code, it being Thursday. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:41, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

Dang, I didn't notice that collapsed table hiding in the articles. I believe I've fixed the problem by tweaking the syntax of Template:Table Age Calculator in those Botanic Gardens entries. Deor (talk) 17:51, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

A few more will appear in the category over the next couple of minutes as the template transclusions are processed by the job queue. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:52, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

Labeled section transclusion doesn't work on templates

I've tried to transclude portions of templates within other templates using labeled section transclusion, but this never seems to work. Is this a bug that can be fixed? Jarble (talk) 17:22, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

... don't do that? Templates are literally made to be reused. LST is a mechanism that you should employ almost exclusively in the mainspace, and I can think of no reason to use it in template space. Izno (talk) 19:16, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

@Jarble: It shouldn't affect the behaviour whether pages are in template space but it's unclear what you tried to do. If you give a saved example and say what you wanted then we can probably say how to do it or give another way to get a similar result. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:26, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

@PrimeHunter: I found several templates that include labeled sections. I tried to transclude one of these sections here, but nothing is transcluded:

{{#section:Template:Campaignbox Congo Crisis|CongoCrisis}}

But I found another template where this transclusion appears to work as intended. I don't know why it works there but not here. Jarble (talk) 20:03, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

It's the last point at mw:Extension:Labeled Section Transclusion#Limitations: "section tags don't have any effect when used inside a template parameter". The section tags are inside a parameter in {{Campaignbox Congo Crisis}} but not in {{GAList/check/doc}}. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:15, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

{{Congo Crisis footer}} avoids labeled section transclusion but instead uses Module:Transcluder with {{#invoke:Transcluder|main|Template:Campaignbox Congo Crisis#CongoCrisis}}. This does work. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:49, 31 August 2023 (UTC)