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The technical section of the village pump is used to discuss technical issues about Wikipedia. Bugs and feature requests should be made at BugZilla.

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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Plan to reduce Template:Convert

11-Feb-2011: The essay about redesigning Template:Convert, to use condensed subtemplates, rather than 3,400 (of 24,000 needed) is titled "WP:A plan to reduce Convert subtemplates".
Currently, {Convert} is a vast contraption, so immensely huge that no single person really understands all of it, and parts of Convert are used (incorrectly) deep in the innards of some other templates, but never used directly by people writing articles. Hence, the improvements to Convert are chasing a moving target, of over 15 types or sub-families of conversion formats.
The redesigned, extended prototype has suffix "-x" as Template:Convertx which would allow comma=in, comma=out, comma=off, and other new features:

• {{convertx|9,250|km|mi|comma=in}} → Template:Convertx
• {{convertx|9,250|km|mi|comma=out}} → Template:Convertx

The only hope is this hybrid approach which "morphs" the current Convert subtemplates into updated forms, which allow passing new parameters to handle the new options. Essentially, each unit (such as: ft, m, km, sqft, oz-f) would choose between the new or old style of processing conversions. Unused units would not change (because who cares). The performance overhead is perhaps 5 levels lower for the expansion depth, but about 100 bytes more in post-expand size, for the new features, such as Convert using 300 bytes when Convertx would use 400 bytes of post-expand size. -Wikid77 05:46, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

"Comma in" and "comma out" contradict everything about proper number formatting and WP:MOSNUM. If you want to write 9250 km, then you need to write 5720 mi. Mixing styles is not appropriate. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 06:05, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I think mixing of styles was requested by people wanting to put direct quotes from some ignorant imbecile like Isaac Newton, or Max Planck, or Albert Einstein, who only spoke 5 languages, and did not understand the life-critical importance of using commas. Those guys never did anything more than develop reflector telescopes, or Planck's law, or relativity theories (E=mc^2). There's even talk of how they wrote unformatted equations, by hand, without using the Unicode &minus! Perhaps if WP:MOSNUM had existed centuries ago, then those guys could have been stopped, most certainly, before they became notable. -Wikid77 13:18, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, and if you want to quote them verbatim, you don't need convert templates, because I doubt Newton et al. wrote things like "A sphere of Template:Convertx, ...". If an editorial note, parentheses should not be used for this, but rather square brackets. "A sphere of 9250nbsp;km [5,750nbsp;mi / 5750 mi], ..." And take that crass attitude of yours elsewhere. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 15:06, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

• Sorry, I thought the joke was obvious, but I should have said how Template:Convert, for years, has been used inside direct quotations, with equivalent amounts in editorial brackets "[ ]" despite no commas in the quoted text. -Wikid77 14:12, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

This outburst is not helpful to your cause, and I think you know it. You should be encouraging people to focus on the issue at hand, not encouraging them to follow you down a tangent. Happy‑melon 13:57, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

I guess I forgot how some people dislike jokes about WP:MOS. Perhaps I should have said that Convert supports conversions going back over 3,000 years ago, with or without commas in their stone carvings. -Wikid77 14:12, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

Any plans on using the convert extension mentioned in Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-01-31/Technology report? -- WOSlinker (talk) 13:24, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

I was planning on starting a discussion about that soon on Template talk:Convert, but there are a few more features I wanted to implement and stabilise in it [the extension] first. Happy‑melon 13:57, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

• Template:Convert currently allows dynamic definition of thousands, and thousands, of new units (within a few minutes each), depending on which measurement units are used in each culture, as described in millions of articles of the other-language Wikipedias. We recently added the famous Egyptian cubit, and also added the French arpent (there are other arpents, both linear and square), due to widespread use in French colonial culture. Google estimates 143 million webpages about the word "measurement", but Convert also handles calendar dates, gun-barrel calibre, and musical notes, so we had to make Convert be a highly dynamic system, to allow users to add new units every hour of the day, and convert the words, not just numbers. Reality is so much more complex than just a list of 400 or 900 commonly used units. -Wikid77 14:12, 14 February 2011 (UTC)
• When reducing the internal structure of Convert, then some new features will also be added. For example, numbers will be displayed up to whole billions, with end-zeroes, to allow showing $billions of dollars, but then use scientific notation for larger amounts. For example, converting billions of dollars-per-pound:

• {{convert|32,000,000,000|$/lb}} → $32,000,000,000 per pound ($7.1×10¹⁰/kg)

Adding new features, while reducing the structure, will take full advantage of changing the fully-protected subtemplates in Convert, to test both the reduction of old subtemplate structures, as well as adding the new features, at the same time. -Wikid77 17:50, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Somebody should write an extension/parser-function for converting units. 68.69.54.2 (talk) 18:14, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

• That is like saying someone should write a parser-function to check spelling in 250 languages: some misspellings are valid words in other languages, and there are always new words to be added. Using parser-functions can only solve small parts of the conversion issues, such as calculating the raw numbers, determining the input precision, rounding to have end-zeros ("00"), formatting fractions (Template:Convert/numdisp), and inserting decimal point or decimal comma (as done now by using {{formatnum:4300.65}} in each other-language wikipedia). Meanwhile, Wikipedia must make preparations for more rare engineering measurements, or comprehensive historical articles, where rare units are used many times. Hence, the biggest problem has been to simplify adding hundreds of new unit names, such as cubit or arpent or scruple (20 grains), where typical users could easily set the conversion formula for a new unit. Currently, there are numerous problems in other wikipedias, such as French Wikipedia, with a wrong formula, wrong spelling, and incorrect wikilink for gram-to-pound (gramme à livre):
      • {{fr:Modèle:Conversion|454|g|lb}} → 454 grams (205 930,93598 livre |lb)
  The French spelling should be "454 grammes" and the incorrect formula causes it to miss 454 g is actually "1 lb" (not 205,930.9...). To avoid all those numerous problems, the English Wikipedia has used a "brilliantly ingenious" system of dynamic templates (since October 2007), allowing any user to add a new unit (as just 1 subtemplate), and set the formula, spelling and wikilinks in just one spot, rather than sleuthing the other formulas and logic needed to interface a new unit with older units. A new unit can be added, live, into English Wikipedia without affecting the prior 2 million conversions already in other articles. By comparison, some wikipedias must typically modify many parts of their template structure, such as 15 places to add a new unit into French Wikipedia's template "Modèle:Conversion" to handle "gramme" (hence explaining why the French WP template still has errors in some of those 15 parts). More later. -Wikid77 14:55, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Table show/hide disfunction

If I am on the right place: when asking for an uncollapse, it does not happen and my screen jumps to top-of-page. Example: (see also page Unicode character property):

General Category (Unicode Character Property)
Value	Category Major, minor	Basic type	Character assigned	Count (as of 15.1)	Remarks
L, Letter; LC, Cased Letter (Lu, Ll, and Lt only)
Lu	Letter, uppercase	Graphic	Character	1,831
Ll	Letter, lowercase	Graphic	Character	2,233
Lt	Letter, titlecase	Graphic	Character	31	Ligatures or digraphs containing an uppercase followed by a lowercase part (e.g., Dž, Lj, Nj, and Dz)
Lm	Letter, modifier	Graphic	Character	397	A modifier letter
Lo	Letter, other	Graphic	Character	132,234	An ideograph or a letter in a unicase alphabet
M, Mark
Mn	Mark, nonspacing	Graphic	Character	1,985
Mc	Mark, spacing combining	Graphic	Character	452
Me	Mark, enclosing	Graphic	Character	13
N, Number
Nd	Number, decimal digit	Graphic	Character	680	All these, and only these, have Numeric Type = De
Nl	Number, letter	Graphic	Character	236	Numerals composed of letters or letterlike symbols (e.g., Roman numerals)
No	Number, other	Graphic	Character	915	E.g., vulgar fractions, superscript and subscript digits, vigesimal digits
P, Punctuation
Pc	Punctuation, connector	Graphic	Character	10	Includes spacing underscore characters such as "_", and other spacing tie characters. Unlike other punctuation characters, these may be classified as "word" characters by regular expression libraries.
Pd	Punctuation, dash	Graphic	Character	26	Includes several hyphen characters
Ps	Punctuation, open	Graphic	Character	79	Opening bracket characters
Pe	Punctuation, close	Graphic	Character	77	Closing bracket characters
Pi	Punctuation, initial quote	Graphic	Character	12	Opening quotation mark. Does not include the ASCII "neutral" quotation mark. May behave like Ps or Pe depending on usage
Pf	Punctuation, final quote	Graphic	Character	10	Closing quotation mark. May behave like Ps or Pe depending on usage
Po	Punctuation, other	Graphic	Character	628
S, Symbol
Sm	Symbol, math	Graphic	Character	948	Mathematical symbols (e.g., +, −, =, ×, ÷, √, ∊, ≠). Does not include parentheses and brackets, which are in categories Ps and Pe. Also does not include !, *, -, or /, which despite frequent use as mathematical operators, are primarily considered to be "punctuation".
Sc	Symbol, currency	Graphic	Character	63	Currency symbols
Sk	Symbol, modifier	Graphic	Character	125
So	Symbol, other	Graphic	Character	6,639
Z, Separator
Zs	Separator, space	Graphic	Character	17	Includes the space, but not TAB, CR, or LF, which are Cc
Zl	Separator, line	Format	Character	1	Only U+2028 LINE SEPARATOR (LSEP)
Zp	Separator, paragraph	Format	Character	1	Only U+2029 PARAGRAPH SEPARATOR (PSEP)
C, Other
Cc	Other, control	Control	Character	65 (will never change)	No name, <control>
Cf	Other, format	Format	Character	170	Includes the soft hyphen, joining control characters (ZWNJ and ZWJ), control characters to support bidirectional text, and language tag characters
Cs	Other, surrogate	Surrogate	Not (only used in UTF-16)	2,048 (will never change)	No name, <surrogate>
Co	Other, private use	Private-use	Character (but no interpretation specified)	137,468 total (will never change) (6,400 in BMP, 131,068 in Planes 15–16)	No name, <private-use>
Cn	Other, not assigned	Noncharacter	Not	66 (will not change unless the range of Unicode code points is expanded)	No name, <noncharacter>
		Reserved	Not	824,652	No name, <reserved>

-DePiep (talk) 22:03, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Collapsable and Sortable don't mix very well. — Edokter (talk) — 22:28, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Metoo: seems to be related (so: combination => bug) -DePiep (talk) 23:39, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Since? -DePiep (talk) 22:29, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

This is probably caused by a conflict between MediaWiki:CollapsibleTemplates.js and the new MediaWiki 1.17 JS code. Kaldari (talk) 22:29, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, that's on Commons. The code here is in MediaWiki:Common.js. Kaldari (talk) 22:32, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Well, it looks like it is introduced (broken) by 1.17. What do we do? -DePiep (talk) 22:34, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Best ask Krinkle, he made some modifications to common.js today. — Edokter (talk) — 22:53, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Are we 100% sure this ever worked ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:57, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes, it worked. btw, I asked Krinkle at their Commons talkpage. -DePiep (talk) 23:01, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Eh, TheDJ, why the question? Anything strange in template's history or usage? -DePiep (talk) 23:16, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Because I wanted to make sure that we weren't misdiagnosing a problem. And we were, the root problem was always there, it was just less visible before. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:15, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

Strangely, this bug doesn't happen if you're looking at the table in an edit preview, only on live pages. Kaldari (talk) 23:34, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Come to think of it, this probably is because the sortable code breaks the collapse code. Krinkle will probably deal with that tomorrow. load order will probably matter in this case. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 23:47, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

The sortable code hasn't changed and is deprecated (soon to be replaced, for now the legacy ts_sortable will just continue to work). The collapsing code is not part of core and made on Wikipedia. Neither has changed recently, so I'm not sure how I can be of help. I doubt this ever worked. Since there's a lot of my agenda right now so I'm going to skip this for now since it's deprecated. The new collapser part of core (will be released in 1.18 or sooner) works fine with the tablesortable code as you can see on this demo page which has sortable and collapsible tatbles and what not all working fine. Krinkle (talk) 19:34, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

Again, yes it did work. Very unsympathic, this suggestion (and no more than that) (earlier written by TheDJ here), that it might not have worked before. If you doubt it, please reinstate the previous situation. E.g. the template here did sort&hide well since last August. Other formerly well functioning templates: {{Bidi Class (Unicode)}}, {{Unicode blocks}}, {{ISO 15924 script codes and Unicode}}. This is just my own catalog.

Whatever the code background, it was broken recently. "deprecated" is no reason to break it. "is not part of core" is not so either.

In general: a working thing is broken. So we should restore somehow. If Krinkle is short in time, just revert or ask someone else. -DePiep (talk) 20:02, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

This is probably caused by the JS using killEvt() which is deprecated now. See http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/ResourceLoader/JavaScript_Deprecations. Kaldari (talk) 05:17, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

So: deprecated yes, unavailable no. If I read the link well, the deprecated functions are still available now (in 1.17), but not for ever. This gives "us" the time to replace then with modern variants. All right then. Replace with something new if and when it works, I'd say. On top of this, is it required to push these changes while 1.17 is rolled out as it is? Is there something in this development-to-production stream I do not get? -16:55, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

I have an explanation. This edit replaced addOnloadHook(createCollapseButtons) (which means onload these days) with $(createCollapseButtons) (which means $(document).ready) making it run a bit sooner than before. As a result, sortables_init() from wikibits is now executed after createCollapseButtons() and the code cell.innerHTML += ... of course removes the handler. — AlexSm 18:29, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Is there any way to fix this problem? Lonelydarksky (暗無天日) _{contact me (聯絡)} 09:32, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Sure, just ask any sysop to revert that particular change: addOnloadHook() is going to stay with us for a while. Another option is to switch collapsible code back to href=javascript just like in other type of collapsible (NavigationBar). P.S. Looks like the sortable innerHTML issue was fixed in wikibits.js but did not make it to 1.17. — AlexSm 19:27, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

What is sysop? Probably theDJ, Kaldari, Krinkle, maybe even Edokter -- all present in this thread, should have reverted at first notice, instead of deflecting. But hey, they seem to have toes. -DePiep (talk) 20:28, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

The fix for the old sortables code is marked for deployment to the live website. But it's weekend, and system administrators have weekends as well. Roan already worked 6 hours in his spare upaid volunteer time yesterday, to take care of some important issues, but he did not yet get around to this one. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:13, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

Oh, it's weekend now. That explains it all. Very amateuristic to mention that as an explanation for untested changes. I posted here Wednesday. Very disappointing you introduce the personalised approach, TheDJ. -DePiep (talk) 21:22, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

In order to keep things related to this central, I will respond to this message over here. I apologize if I broke anything during my "migration"-edit. My intention was and still is to prepare the wikis for the upcoming change. Some may think that moving away from deprecated functions now is too soon, but I don't think so. Right now we can move away from them and move back and forth whenever we want, because both old and new are available now. Therefore this is, in my opinion, the perfect time to atleast attempt to switch, and test to see if everything still works like it should. Anything that broke ? Revert me, please do so, and then let me know what exactly broke with 1.17 and/or my edits. I love bug reports (that is, if something brakes, I rather hear about it so that it can be prevented in the future then it be silently fixed).
AlexSm is right in that the replacing of HTML is cause (atleast one of the causes) of any handlers being removed (such as collapsing and/or sortable clickable images and texts). I noticed during the development of another plugin in MediaWiki that it was being canceled somehow in table cells. It was caused by innerHTML and was fixed in trunk (rev:78893) which I've tagged to be merged to the live site, this will hopefully fix this!

I didn't mean to sound uncaring about this problem, but I can't fix everything everywhere and this particular script issue does not seem to be caused by something I did. I'm happy to check it out and perhaps be able to fix it, however from what I can see this issue may not have been noticed before but is not new and doesn't occur in most cases. Since a jQuery plugin has added to the repository (jquery.makeCollapsible) which does not seem to have any of the bugs, it would make sense to migrate to that instead of fixing or rewriting the current script. If you like I could install jquery.makeCollapsible locally on en.wikipedia (as it was not deployed) so you can check it out and start using it. That way, when it is deployed for real, it can simply be removed and everything will still work great. Let me know what you think, thanks, Krinkle (talk) 22:23, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Pardon me if I appear ignorant about what's going on. I'm under the impression that somebody recently introduced new changes to the original script or something, and that resulted in the problem with the collapsible and sortable functions. Am I correct? Anyway, I hope the experts can fix the problem as soon as possible. Thanks. Lonelydarksky (暗無天日) _{contact me (聯絡)} 07:33, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

No, that's not correct. The problem addressed here when a table is both wanted to be handled by the tablesortable-script and the collapsibletable-script is not new. Due to the recent changes people are testing scripts and this bug was finally found, but I'm fairly sure that this is not a new bug. Anyway, the new makeCollapsible module is a lot more flexible, can collapse both devisions, tables and lists and is also localized by using interface messages and works together with the sortable script. See it live here. Krinkle (talk) 13:27, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

Actually, the load order changes from ResourceLoader are probably what made this issue more visible and possibly affecting more browsers. But I'm guessing there. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:08, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

I still don't see why you both refuse to change that line back to addOnloadHook, be it for a day or for a week. You did not even try to estimate how many articles are affected right now, instead you just explain how nice everything will work in the future. — AlexSm 14:44, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

Krinkle, I don't mind or know about code, I don't, cannot and will not edit or revert in Commons. I am an editor here, who stubled upon the bug I reported here. Now, I'll repeat it: it did work. The example page in my OP, and the example templates I mentioned here later on, I build and tested and used: as expected. It is getting annoying (to state it friendly) the you keep suggesting that there was "an issue" ot that is was an existing bug; TheDJ suggesting the same. Then, krinkle, you repeat something about "deprecation". Whatever that may be, that is not an argument to introduce breaking code. End of argument. Also, what you call "testing", is now actually in production code here at en.wikipedia.

The procedure is quite simple: it failed in production, so revert. Then there is time to improve & test before reintroduce. -DePiep (talk) 21:34, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

I have tested this, extensively, for weeks. On test.wikipedia, test2.wikipedia, translatewiki.net and (even before all that) on my own wiki server. I have not changed English Wikipedia's Common.js (not Commons ) to "see if it works" or "testing". I changed it so that edgecases are discovered, which, afaik, it didn't reveal (except maybe this thread). Also, not untill now do I read that this problem was made worse by my edit (- addOnloadHook( createNavigationBarToggleButton );   + $( createNavigationBarToggleButton );), if somebody had mentioned so earlier I would have reverted that part of my edit, sorry if I missed that. Anyway, my fix to the sortable-code is now live, so this bug should be dead now. Greetings, Krinkle (talk) 10:47, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

I explained it in this edit and even put it on the left (with no indentation) to make it more visible. Well, doesn't matter now. — AlexSm 19:22, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

 Done The fix for this issue has been deployed. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:35, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

Thank you. -DePiep (talk) 21:37, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

For the record, deployment of the fix is done by Catrope, recorded as rev:82533 - which was originally committed as rev:78893. Krinkle (talk) 10:47, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Then have that record show my compliments to Catrope too. -DePiep (talk) 11:23, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Sorting at Template:US executions is now broken for me (clicking sort links leads the browser to jump to the top of the page) on Firefox 3.6.13 for the second and third columns (sorting on the first column works fine). Ucucha 14:40, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

This is related to the use of class='sortbottom' in that table. Ucucha 14:44, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Cause found bugzilla:27339. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:55, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, but the link you gave is to a tracking bug—what is the specific bug report? Ucucha 15:57, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Lol, sorry about that, bugzilla:27608 —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:00, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

I noticed that the problem has been fixed. Many thanks to those who fixed it. Lonelydarksky (暗無天日) _{contact me (聯絡)} 15:35, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Interface issues

The recent MediaWiki 1.17 release caused a number of problems on my editing interface. By the way, I'm using monobook. First, vertical strip along the left side of the page is unusually shifted down (see screenshot). Can anything in my monobook.js (possibly the script labeled "Personal toolbox - from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Brian0918/monobook.js", which appears below the standard links on the left hand side) be modified to fix this? Also, I got the old toolbar (for monobook) back by unclicking the options under "editing" in preferences, but the Wikipedia:RefToolbar 1.0 button shows up on the far left instead of the right. Any code to fix this? Thanks in advance, Goodvac (talk) 04:24, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

Right, I'm using MonoBook too, and the logo on the top left starts off a bit left and then moves right every time I open a new page, which slows down the opening. All Hallow's Wraith (talk) 06:14, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

Just try removing components that you think are problematic. That or using a JS console/debugger is likely the only thing you can do about it. The more work you do to prepare and pinpoint the problem, the less time other admins or myself have to invest to help you. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:25, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

How do I remove compnents I think are problematic? The logo? I can remove that? All Hallow's Wraith (talk) 08:40, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes you can remove the logo but the problem will still persist. My logo is switched off and i'm also having the same problem. Plus all my interwiki links are gone. ќמшמφטтгמ^torque 09:55, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

You edit your skin script page, and remove everything. No more userscripts, means no more user scripts messing things up. Then you just copy and past and test till you find what script specifically in our skin script page was causing the problem. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 17:38, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

I've never touched my skin script page before. What is the code that would make the logo stop moving (or rather show up correctly the first time), and the code that would remove this newfangled grey bar? All Hallow's Wraith (talk) 21:41, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

I found what was causing the problem: User:Omegatron/monobook.js/floatingSidebar.js. Now is there a way to modify that to be compatible with the recent update? Goodvac (talk) 09:34, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

The problem might be caused by the horizontal box at the bottom of any page on monobook, the one with the yellow border containing wikimedia foundation logo on the left, media wiki logo on the right and some info in between. This box is overlapping the floating sidebar. I dont think it was overlapping before this problem arose. ќמшמφטтгמ^torque 14:11, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

The floating sidebar script has been fixed. I do notice though that the footer in monobook changed since the update; it now spans all the way to the left, while it used to align with the content. It turns out that is only the case in IE6 and IE7. — Edokter (talk) — 13:45, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Jumping to the wrong section

I've had several incidents since the MediaWiki upgrade where clicking a section link from a different article or an edit summary takes me to the section immediately after what is in the link. When it happens, it will often keep happening on the same link several times and then it starts working once I have clicked any item in the TOC of the destination article. Once it starts working, I can't induce another failure even if I close the tab completely and reopen it. It just happened to me on Talk:Scientology#Call_Hubbard_a_.22Science_fiction_writer.22, which I clicked on from the edit summary by RUL3R in the page history. —UncleDouggie (talk) 20:48, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

So if I understand correctly, you clicked on that link and landed at "Image for Auditing subsection" ? Which browser are you using ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 00:02, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes, that's right. I'm using FF 3.6.13. It's got to be something with the browser jumping to the section before all the scripts run at the end with ResourceLoader and that somehow repositions the cursor. Others have reported strange jumpy behavior. In this case, I didn't scroll the window at all, it just immediately went to the wrong section. It happened more than once and on the subsequent incidents I was very careful to not scroll. Unfortunately, it corrected itself before I could get into serious troubleshooting. —UncleDouggie (talk) 08:27, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

When completing the edit of this very section, I first see the properly formatted #MediaWiki software and scripts section and about 1 second later it jumps down to this section. That's probably due to the auto collapsing of the header FAQ. Perhaps I had something similar but it didn't reposition to the proper location for whatever reason. My browser is running a little slow at the moment because I probably have 40 tabs open, but it was never a problem before the MediaWiki upgrade. I guess it's time to save off all the stuff I have in progress and restart. —UncleDouggie (talk) 08:38, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Ah right of course. It's a bit of a Firefox bug, but an annoying one for sure. Something we might be able to fix in the collapsing code though. (Remember that the collapsing code is an en.wp extension and not part of the MediaWiki software.) —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:13, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

I am experiencing the same issue on this pump since the 1.17 upgrade. Svick (talk) 21:10, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

I've got something similar and I'm using Google Chrome. When I navigate to a section (on pages with no collapsed text or anything like that), it first jumps to the right section and then, when the browser stops loading, jumps a section or two up the page. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 20:34, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

After lots of testing, I finally figured out what's happening. Any script that modifies the page can cause this behavior. It's a race between the page updates and the section jump. Before ResourceLoader, page updates usually won. Now it's a 50/50 proposition and it's worse if your network connection is congested because the scripts take longer to load. The biggest culprit for long talk pages is the gadget "comments in local time.js" because it changes so much text on the page. I run an enhanced version of the gadget, but the same thing happens with the stock version. Since I have my own copy, I made a quick change that has fixed the problem most of the time, although a big jump still happened once when my wireless link was overloaded running a backup. When I had this script disabled entirely, I still saw an occasional jump of a few lines. The culprit may have been the steward election banner that I hadn't dismissed in Safari where I was testing. Also strangely, in FF the jumps are always past the desired section and in Safari they are always before the desired section. I give up on that one. —UncleDouggie (talk) 07:32, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Is there some script writer we could coerce ask to fix that script for the general population who uses it? The page jumping is really annoying. :-( Killiondude (talk) 03:00, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

It is doing the same for me (in Firefox), and is driving me nuts. It can't exactly help the newcomers, who already have to deal with an interface that you need to understand in order to figure out how to complain that you don't understand it... AndyTheGrump (talk) 03:17, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

The problem with section links was also reported by Carnildo in this topic. I also notice the problem from time to time (in FF and/or Chrome). Helder 23:08, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Editing

The new editing template is a disaster. Clicking on Advanced, Special characters and Help does nothing (Windows XP). Please don't tell me that I need to change my IE8 settings. I want them as they are. As a chemist I need to have superscript and subscript readily available for chemical formua such as O₂⁺, not two clicks away. Also the Courier font is unpleasant to use. BTW the special characters did not work with the previous edit template, but one could get round that. Petergans (talk) 11:06, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Another issue: the link to citation template gives an old version. Petergans (talk) 11:23, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

The preferences were temporarily incorrect after the upgrade, the preferences are being restored as we speak to their pre-upgrade settings. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:47, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

12:47 < RoanKattouw> thedj: Known issue, running a script to (partially) fix it like right now. The ones still having the issue will, unfortunately, have to switch it off again —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:48, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Clarification: the script fixed most of the mess, but due to a minor FUBAR we were unable to fix the fact that certain users that had previously disabled the edit toolbar will now have it enabled again. These users will have to go to Preferences -> Editing -> Beta features and uncheck "Enable enhanced edit toolbar". There are about 4,200 affected users on English Wikipedia, if memory serves.

I realize this is an annoyance to these people, and I apologize for messing up. However, I'm sure you would've been more annoyed if you'd gotten the new toolbar and the preferences interface would refuse to turn it off, which is what would've happened if we hadn't done anything at all :) --Catrope (talk) 15:12, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Actually, that is exactly what is happening to me. Regardless of the state of the checkbox, I have the enhanced edit toolbar active. There is no way for me to get the old one back. -- Whpq (talk) 15:15, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Could you try again now? --Catrope (talk) 15:25, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

I followed the instructions given above and I am back in working order again. Thanks! ---RepublicanJacobite_{The'FortyFive'} 15:29, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Reply - Still doesn't work for me. I am using Firefox version 3.6.13 on Windows XP. I shut down the browser and started it again. The checkbox was clear, but I had the enhanced edit tool bar. I checked the box and saved my preferences; opened a page to edit and confirmed I had the enhanced edit tool bar. I then unchecked the box and saved my preference. I opened a page to edit, and the enhanced edit tool bar is still there. -- Whpq (talk) 16:16, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Try WP:BYPASS? –xeno^talk 16:18, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Reply - Still broken for me. I cleared my entire cache and it made no difference. For extra fun, I switched to Chrome. Same problem. I then switched to IE8, and again, the same problem. Note that with IE8, I've never even visited Wikipedia so there's no way anything is cached. No matter which browser I am using, I only see the enhanced edit toolbar regardless of my preference setting. -- Whpq (talk) 16:32, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

UPDATE - I found a way to get the toolbar back! In your preferences, under the editing tab, there are two checkboxes that are related to beta features. The first is supposed to toggle between the old edit toolbar and the advanced edit toolbar. The second relates to some features. Previously, the state of the second checkbox was irrelevant. Now, in order to get the old toolbar back, you need to uncheck both boxes. -- Whpq (talk) 21:15, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes, this is what the real issue was: the behavior of the second box change. The whole database thing turned out to be a red herring. I've deployed a prospective fix that should restore the old behavior, please tell me if it works. --Catrope (talk) 22:48, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

I am able to toggle between the classic toolbar and the advanced toolbar regardless of the state of the state of the "Enable Dialogs" checkbox. This is the behaviour that is expected and matches the behaviour prior to the upgrade. So inthat way, it works. This may perhaps be unrelated. The classic toolbar itself seems to have changed. The "cite button" which is the one most used by me, is on the far left of the toolbar instead of on the far right, next to the "ref" button. And when the "cite button" is clicked, the toolbar formatting gets whacky. The "cite" button moves to the top on its own. The series of template buttons are below that with their bottom edge overlapped with the rest of the classic toolbar (minus the "cite" button. -- Whpq (talk) 18:25, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Edit box font forced to Courier

Since the upgrade, the edit box is using Courier rather than my preferred monospace font. It actually comes up for a split second in my font and then changes. Presumably someone's hard-coded Courier somewhere in a CSS file, which isn't really acceptable.

I see a couple of other people mentioning this above, but nobody's claimed it's been fixed. – Smyth\^talk 22:15, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

There's no hardcoded font in the MediaWiki CSS or any skin CSS for the edit box. Double-check your browser settings. — Edokter (talk) — 23:27, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

The line spacing is definitely greater than normal for me. - ʄɭoʏɗiaɲ ^τ _¢ 23:45, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

That they did change, with the new edit toolbar. That can be corrected with textarea#wpTextbox1 {line-height: normal !important;}. — Edokter (talk) — 00:00, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Additionally, you can specify #wpTextbox1 {font-family:whatever !important;} where whatever is the name of your preferred font, and need not be fixed-width necessarily. 68.69.54.2 (talk) 17:53, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Well that's weird. My browser settings have indeed changed without my intervention. Maybe caused by a Chrome upgrade that happened at roughly the same time? – Smyth\^talk 10:35, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

The font in edit mode changed for me too yesterday. Does anyone know how we can fix it? SlimVirgin ^{TALK|CONTRIBS} 02:09, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

If you're using Chrome, double-check your browser settings. Really. I don't know how it changed, but it did. – Smyth\^talk 10:44, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

I'm using Firefox, and my settings haven't changed. I just checked it on Chrome and it's the same problem. I'm also getting a weird thing where sometimes (not always), when I open the edit box, it only fills half the screen. So something odd has happened to width in general.

The new font (or new width, whatever it is) is awkward to edit with, partly because some of the symbols aren't translating well. For example, an em dash looks like an en dash, and an endash looks like a hyphen. So I would love to get it back to what it was. This change occurred for me at almost exactly 18:00 hours (UTC) on February 20, in case anyone knows of something that happened then. SlimVirgin ^{TALK|CONTRIBS} 17:38, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Try Special:Preferences -> Editing -> Disable all "Beta features" –xeno^talk 17:45, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, Xeno, I tried that yesterday. The only thing it did was change my toolbar. I already had the new toolbar (before this recent change) that others are complaining about, so when I removed Beta features, it took me back to the old one. But it didn't change the font issue. SlimVirgin ^{TALK|CONTRIBS} 17:53, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

What is Special:Preferences → Editing → Edit area font style set to? ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 14:55, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

When undoing an edit, edit summary is not "recognized" when edit summaries are required

In my Preferences, I have enabled "Prompt me when entering a blank edit summary". If I click on "undo" on an edit, then don't modify anything and just hit "Save page", then I am told that "You have not provided an edit summary." even though the default undo edit summary is there. I can merely just hit "Save page" again on the warning page, and the edit summary appears. This appears to have begun happening since MediaWiki 1.17. Is anyone else experiencing this? Gary King (talk · scripts) 04:49, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

I normally have the switch turned off, but I turned it on to check, and undid one of the last edits, and it saved properly. (Firefox, Monoboox). Beyond My Ken (talk) 07:31, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Okay thanks; I'll go through my scripts then. Gary King (talk · scripts) 16:08, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Undo worked fine just now, so it was probably just a temporary glitch. Perhaps session data was lost for that moment, which sometimes, although pretty rarely, happens to me. Gary King (talk · scripts) 03:32, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure if it's directly related (since these tickets primarily focus on preloading summaries via the url parameter, rather than internally preloaded summaries such as those from the Undo-button), but check out bug 24295 and bug 17416. Krinkle (talk) 13:25, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Special:NewPages only displaying the latest 50 new pages

Has anyone else noticed this since 4 days ago? The backlog is only showing new pages of today's date. --Kudpung (talk) 13:42, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Filed as bugzilla:27339. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:55, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

That's the tracking bug. You mean bugzilla:27607. Reach Out to the Truth 18:05, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

I investigated the issue, I can't find anything wrong. The newer 50, older 50 links work as expected. Perhaps you are confused by the "hidepatrolled" setting, which all new pages older than a day apparently are atm. I guess patrolling is going better than you are used to ? :D —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 00:04, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Ha! I noticed hidepatrolled was enabled, so I clicked the link to show all changes. I didn't realize that clicking that also removed "dir=prev" from the query, so I saw the front of the backlog and thought it was the back! Maybe we should slow down our new page controlling; it's causing us all to get confused. Reach Out to the Truth 03:37, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Guys, are you sure there's nothing wrong? There was an approximately 28- or 29-day backlog of unpatrolled articles (i.e. thousands of articles) that disappeared over the course of a day or two, which just happened to coincide with the release of 1.17. In the past year, I've never seen the backlog shorter than about 20 days. Are we positive this was just an extremely unlikely coincidence? Special:Newpages appears to be working correctly now, however it also appears that the entire backlog was somehow lost during the release. —SW— ^confess 00:20, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

RevDel'd page history font color for admins

So it used to be that when everyone looked at a page history with deleted revisions, they would show up as grey. Now, admins see blue links that are struck. How can I get it back to just grey; it's easier to read IMO? Regular users still seem to see the grey. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 17:34, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Italicize part of the article title

For articles List of Case Closed manga volumes, List of Case Closed volumes (1–20), List of Case Closed volumes (21–40), List of Case Closed volumes (41–60), and List of Case Closed volumes (61–current), I want to italicize Case Closed which is at the middle of these titles. Since all the articles share the same introductory text, I made a template {{Case Closed manga introduction}}. The template successfully makes the title of List of Case Closed manga volumes become what I expected, but the titles of the other four articles doesn't change.

After some testing, I found that it is because {{str index/getchar}} doesn't contain "–" so all the string manipulation templates can't recognize the symbol. Of course given the number of involved articles is so small I can do the task manually, but I'm curious about the inclusion criteria of {{str index/getchar}} as I can't find any discussion and whether there is any alternative method to italicize only the middle part of the article title. --Quest for Truth (talk) 22:44, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Disappearing comment

I just commented at Talk:Walter Raleigh, and while the comment is shewing up in the edit history it is invisible on the page. When you open the section to edit, it's there, it just doesn't shew when you look at the page ordinarily. DuncanHill (talk) 23:06, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Looks like the same problem I reported above Problems displaying changes. Keith D (talk) 00:12, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Probably server lag. Does a WP:PURGE fix it? – ukexpat (talk) 14:23, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

If the same problem I reported then sometimes a purge will clear it. Keith D (talk) 22:39, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Portal: namespace

Hi. We'd like to start creating portals on cy, but we're not sure how to go about it. Do we keep the Portal: namespace, or would we use the native Porth: namespace? Bencherlite suggested I ask here before commencing (discussed here). Thanks. -- Xxglennxx (talk • cont.) 00:09, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

It doesn't look like cy: actually has a portal namespace at the moment. I think you'll have to ask for one to be added at bugzilla. Ucucha 00:18, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

My watchlist

Before I take this to Bugzilla, I thought to bring it up here, in case it might be controversial, or too difficult to implement. I would like to have the ability to note items on "My watchlist" as mark as unread in case I want to keep them on that particular list. This would imply the "automatic" marking them as read so they would drop off the list. An example might be the effect in an email reader. There we have the ability to keep a msg by indicating that it is "unread" (even if we've read it, but we want to keep it as unread). It would really be great to be able to clear the clutter of items on a particular watchlist that I've already checked and do not need to see again (without removing them from the main watchlist list, so that I would still be able to see a new edit). Perhaps include a little checkbox next to each item that can be checked if we want to keep it on that particular list (mark as unread)?  — Paine Ellsworth ( CLIMAX )  00:23, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

I like the idea. Helder 00:29, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

I like the idea too but this is Wikipedia so good luck with that idea. Everything here is controversial and difficult to implement. --Kumioko (talk) 00:39, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Thank both of you very much! This is probably an item for the overworked devs at bugzilla. I just didn't want them to turn me down if this has already been tried. Maybe some of the techs here can tell me if there's an open bug?  — Paine Ellsworth ( CLIMAX )  11:58, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

If I understand you correctly, my Desktop Watchlist could do what you want, if you use Windows. But it does it in reverse – you manually mark edits as read. Svick (talk) 15:04, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Impossible to save edits in Firefox.

Starting a few minutes ago, it is impossible to save edits in Firefox, so I am now using Internet Explorer. For example, if I try to click save on Ilha do Cardoso, it loads a blank page with a soft hyphen for the title and http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ilha_do_Cardoso&action=submit as the URL. The same thing happens on every page on the English Wikipedia, but I can still save pages on the German Wikipedia using Firefox.— Preceding unsigned comment added by Turnnewly (talk • contribs) 01:53, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Sockpuppet. →♠Gƒoley↔Four♣← 02:06, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

WP 1.0 bot co-maintainer wanted

I'm looking for a co-maintainer for User:WP 1.0 bot. This is the bot that tracks WikiProject article assessments. It is also closely involved with the Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team that produces packaged DVDs of selected Wikipedia articles. The bot itself runs on the toolserver, as does the web interface that allows users to query the assessment data. It's written in PERL at the moment, but the data is stored in a proper database on the toolserver where it can be accessed by tools in any language.

What I'm looking for is someone who is interested in contributing to the WP 1.0 project or being a co-maintainer of the bot. The bot code was rewritten about a year ago, and is stable, but there are many features and improvements that could be made. I'm happy to give commit access to anyone who wants to contribute to it, and in particular I'm looking for a co-maintainer to share admin access to the bot's account. I think it's not ideal to have such a key bot dependent on a single bot operator.

This is a big project - there are over a thousand WikiProjects that rely on the bot, and the bot is one of the few that has made over 1,000,000 edits. I have always found it interesting and satisfying to work on, but it's grown enough that I think additional maintainers would be helpful. I would be happy to mentor and help new maintainers learn how the system is designed.

To avoid spamming this board too much, please feel free to respond or ask questions on my talk page if you're interested. — Carl (CBM · talk) 02:46, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Layout problem with class "infobox bordered"

I just noticed a weird effect in the infobox generated by {{chembox}}: there is no hairline border on the right edge of it (vector, firefox-3.6.13 on WinXP). I can't say when it started, but it looked unusual enough and caught my eye quickly that it's likely a very recent change. I narrowed it down to a simple reproducible situation of a table that is class="infobox bordered" that has style="border-collapse: collapse;" (the default for this class). Using other infobox classes or setting border-collapse to a different value cures it (diff). Depending on what other things are on my interface, sometimes other edges are missing. When I had a "you have new talkpage comments" box, I think the bottom and right were missing in preview-mode while editing, whereas the top and left were missing when the page was displayed in read-mode (not 100% sure of which pairs were which, I forgot to screenshot while hacking on it). DMacks (talk) 03:58, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Lead section [Edit] gadget

The gadget allowing editing of the lead section of articles is no longer functional. I know that this was working earlier today (I used it earlier!), so I'm here asking "what the hell?" did someone roll out a patch earlier today, or something? How can I get the gadget working again?
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 04:38, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

This edit broke it, any sysop can fix it by changing pt-br to 'pt-br' in quotes.— AlexSm 04:55, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Facepalm

...you know, this may actually make me apply for WP:RfA (*Raises eyebrow*)
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 05:04, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Fixed. Thanks AlexSM! DMacks (talk) 05:23, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes, thank you!
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 05:38, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

I tested that edit in both Chrome9 and IE8 without problem. Was it apparent only in Firefox? — Edokter (talk) — 11:57, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

I observed that it was broken and that this edit fixed it. I was using WP vector theme running on Firefox3 on Windows. DMacks (talk) 13:29, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Edokter I just tried Chrome9 and IE8 and they both do not accept this syntax either: in Chrome open Tools->Developer tools, in Console try obj = {a-b:5} (result: SyntaxError), compare to obj = {a:5} which works. — AlexSm 15:21, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Insert section when editing de-linked

Is that just my computer or has WP been "improved" by restricting the usability of the editing section? There is no more drop down menu to choose from, an everything that could be inserted has been de-linked. Instead of clicking on the four tildes to insert a signature, I have to copy+paste it now, and the same goes for anything else. I haven't changed anything in my preferences or in my browser settings, so a change in the source seems to be the only reasonable guess. Can this be changed back in any way? Best, Trigaranus (talk) 07:50, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

In Preferences, go to the Editing tab and uncheck "Enable enhanced editing toolbar". That will give you the old editing toolbar back. Isn't it easier to just type out ~~~~ than to copy and paste it, though? Gary King (talk · scripts) 18:09, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

"configrevisionjumper is not defined"

This problem has been for a while, even before the switch to MediaWiki 1.17. When selecting the Revision Jumper from the Preferences I get the following javascript error in the Firefox Error Console: "configrevisionjumper is not defined", and the extension is not working. Anyone know what to do about it? Nageh (talk) 09:22, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Gadget code MediaWiki:Gadget-revisionjumper.js calls dewiki gadget de:MediaWiki:Gadget-revisionjumper.js. Dewiki gadget needs extra file de:MediaWiki:Gadget-revisionjumper-config.js which used to be called with absolute path (de.wikipedia.org/...) but since Jan 8, 2011 the path is relative (wgServer) and since there is no local file MediaWiki:Gadget-revisionjumper-config.js the enwiki gadget fails. — AlexSm 15:45, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

So can someone set up this file? It's kind of a bad joke when an extension is officially supported by the Preferences menu but then doesn't work. Thanks for the explanation, btw. Nageh (talk) 16:14, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

I've fixed it. Sorry, —DerHexer (Talk) 16:36, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Page removed from watchlist

Resolved

 – Discussed on IRC at #Wikimedia-tech. There was a bug. Fix should be deployed out shortly. Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 16:23, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

I think this problem pertains to the transition to 1.17 -- as this behavior started up around that time, and was absolutely fine in the weeks/months before. Previously, page Wikipedia:STiki/revert_count was on my watchlist. After the transition, it is off my watchlist. I add it again, it disappears again. It's disappearance seems to correspond to whenever the page is edited. The page is edited nightly by a script (which uses my credentials). What is going on here? I didn't notice any API changes that would have caused this. Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 16:13, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

That script probably sets the watchlist action to unwatch it. ΔT _{^{The only constant}} 16:39, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Negative. It's just a simple edit -- no such parameter is passed -- and there has never been a "this article needs to keep being watched" flag? Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 16:54, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

UncleDouggie -- saw you posted on this but then retracted. Can you provide any insight? Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 19:22, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

I forgot that I had done a mass purge of user talk pages from my watchlist a few days ago and I had removed the page at that time. —UncleDouggie (talk) 05:23, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Also, added to the watchlist of my alternate account. We'll see what happens when the update occurs at 5:00UTC. Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 01:06, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

It was NOT removed from the watchlist of my alternate account, only the one making the edit. Reading the API Documentation, nothing has changed. Typically I have "&watchlist=preferences" (by default). I explicitly changed it to "&watchlist=nochanges" -- and the page was still removed from my watchlist. Something very funny going on here.... Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 06:30, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Given what I observed above, this might be the cause for more concern. I don't know how often pages get edited via "api.php" -- but what if it were the case that every time someone edited a page in this fashion, it de-watch-listed it (if it were watchlisted)? You'd think this would have been noticed by now -- but the tools that use "api.php" are often anti-vandal ones (and not JavaScript tools like Twinkle, which per the controversy below, seem not to be using "api.php"). Because the tools are patrol tools, users are often patrolling arbitrary topics, so the number of times a patrolled page is a watchlisted one may be rare (and then actually noticing the de-watch-listing would require a keen eye). Thoughts? Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 15:24, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Confirmed; bigger issue. I just added the sandbox to my watchlist, and made an "api.php" edit to the sandbox. The sandbox was no longer on my watchlist after this edit. This is a change in functionality obviously related to the 1.17 transition. The "watchlist" flag is seemingly ignored. Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 15:24, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Twinkle problem

Is anyone else having problems with Twinkle? Whenever I try to use it this morning, it gets as far as "User talk page modification: data loaded..." before just sitting there doing nothing. I even tried removing it from Preferences>Gadgets then re-adding it, no dice. - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 16:19, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes, it's dead for me as well. Someone must be trying to fixing something. —UncleDouggie (talk) 16:38, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Yep; I'm getting "data loaded..." and then nothing. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 17:08, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Making it hard for me to revert vandalism, I shall give up for a while. Dougweller (talk) 19:11, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Evidently, Twinkle isn't the only javascript-based tool that's out of order right now. The ARV tool that I often use to report vandals is also broken. I wonder how many other javascript-based tools are also experiencing technical difficulties at this moment. --SoCalSuperEagle (talk) 20:46, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Reported at, surprise surprise, Wikipedia talk:Twinkle/Bugs. The ARV tool is part of Twinkle, IIRC. – ukexpat (talk) 21:06, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes, Twinkle does have its own ARV feature, but I was referring to a separate ARV tool that was developed by Lightdarkness. I just took a little peek at the actual javascript coding for that tool and noticed that it also depends on the so-called "editform" element that Twinkle relies on. (The error messages that Twinkle has been displaying today specifically mention the "editform" element.) So basically, it seems that just about any javascript-based tool that relies on the "editform" thing would be affected by the issue that's caused Twinkle to stop functioning normally. --SoCalSuperEagle (talk) 22:02, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Just to say, I'm having the same problem with Twinkle. DuncanHill (talk) 04:36, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

I have successfully upgraded the standalone ARV tool to use the API. My working version can be found at User:UncleDouggie/aiv.js. Now we just need to fix Twinkle! My changes to the ARV tool were rather extensive. However, if Twinkle is modular enough, perhaps I can easily deploy the same fix? I'll go start looking at it. —UncleDouggie (talk) 11:51, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Problem with template:cite doi

Something has gone wrong with this template even though nothing has been done to it today AFAICT. The templates have been made by a bot, for example Template:Cite doi/10.1111.2Fj.1744-7429.2007.00354.x but for some reason a lot of them are not transcluding, as can be seen here. Any idea what this could be caused by? SmartSE (talk) 17:31, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

They are not transcluded because they have not been created yet. Ruslik_Zero 18:52, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

They have been that's what I don't get - the example I gave above exists but is not appearing as reference 9 in the list. {{cite jstor}} which redirects to {{cite doi}} is working fine though which makes it even more strange (see for example ref 2 in the list linked to). SmartSE (talk) 19:03, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

There appears to be a problem with the citation bot expanding cite jstor – see discussion. Rjwilmsi 19:31, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

It was broken by the MediaWiki 1.17 rollout change to urlencode. LeadSongDog come howl! 05:53, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Should now be fixed.LeadSongDog come howl! 16:44, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Turning on refTools for everyone

Per the overwhelming consensus at this discussion at Village pump (proposals), I will be turning on refTools for all editors today. If this causes any problems, please revert the additions at MediaWiki:Common.js/edit.js. Thanks. Kaldari (talk) 19:08, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Will this have any effect on users not using the enhanced toolbar? –xeno^talk 19:11, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes, they should see the older version of refToolbar. Kaldari (talk) 19:22, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Will there be any way to suppress it? –xeno^talk 19:26, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes, see Wikipedia:RefToolbar 2.0#Disabling. Kaldari (talk) 19:32, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. –xeno^talk 19:38, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Actually it looks like the disabling mechanism might not work due to the loading order. Looks like I'll need to figure out something else... Kaldari (talk) 21:35, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Fixed. Kaldari (talk) 22:18, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

This seems to have made the citation templates no longer work for me. I've explained to Kaldari on his page; see here. Would it not make sense to let people switch these things on and off in their preferences as they choose to? SlimVirgin ^{TALK|CONTRIBS} 21:48, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

I'm not convinced this is related to the new universal refTools code. Your screenshot was of the gadget version (which prevents the universal version from loading). In addition, you said that the problem persisted even after you disabled the new script explicitly. Kaldari (talk) 22:18, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Looks like the problem was a conflict with the experimental "Enable preview dialog" feature. Kaldari (talk) 01:08, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Edit box load time

With ll the new "goodies" the edit box loads really slowly (pages are served slowly enough as it is) I can focus on it and type a few words (sometimes all I need is "Subst:welcome ~~ ~~", only to have it redraw itself to put all the fancy gew-gaws in. Can they be supressed? Rich Farmbrough, 22:20, 23 February 2011 (UTC).

Sure, just pop over to Special:Preferences > Editing > Usability features > Enable enhanced editing toolbar :) - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 22:26, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, done. Strangely, I had already visited that box. Maybe it was auto-ticked for me? Rich Farmbrough, 16:43, 24 February 2011 (UTC).

I would like to suggest that somebody install here a workaround for bugzilla:11130 which is used on pt.wikibooks to stop sending the HTML of MediaWiki:Edittools for people who can not use it at all: those who can't use JavaScript.

This kind of modification was previously suggested in some places:

• Bug 11130, specifically in comment 10 and comment 14;
• MediaWiki_talk:Edittools/Archive_6#Idea
• MediaWiki_talk:Edittools/Archive_3#Revert
• commons:MediaWiki talk:Edittools#Duplication of special characters;
• A talk on Commons.
• ...

This probably would save some bytes when editing pages. Helder 00:26, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Um... English Wikipedia switched to JavaScript-based Edittols a long time ago, what you see in MediaWiki:Edittools is just plain text that was put there intentonally for people who have JavaScript disabled. Also, I'm almost sure the original poster complains about new "beta" toolbar. — AlexSm 02:10, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

I see the problem here as well. First, the enhanced toolbar "suddenly" applies line-height:1.5em after the page is loaded; if this change is really necessary the CSS should be sent to browser before the edit box. Second, enhanced toolbar makes edit box to lose its focus on load which is annoying if you're already typing something; this doesn't happen with the old toolbar. — AlexSm 02:10, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Looks like this was reported about a day ago as mediazilla:27620. — AlexSm 02:52, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Recent Javascript changes

Howdy.

So, I was just alerted by a user that my igloo script had suddenly stopped working - and indeed, it has. I have tracked the problem down to the fact that innerHTML no longer seems to be defined for the DOM returned by my DOMParser - when it most definitely was before. Have there been any recent changes that would particularly affect this, or alternatively, does anyone know how to fix it?

This could possibly be more of a reference desk question, but as the only thing that would have stopped it working would be a change made here somewhere (or to several different browsers simulateously, I guess), I think this is a reasonable place to put it. Thanks! Ale_Jrb^talk 22:52, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Change to 1.17. See mw:ResourceLoader/Migration_guide_(users) and mw:ResourceLoader/Migration_guide_(developers) Reedy (talk) 00:56, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

... do you happen to know why objects returned by DOMParser would stop providing innerHTML due to these changes? Ale_Jrb^talk 01:28, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Devs switched to the site to HTML5 doctype, read Simetrical's explanation from 2009. — AlexSm 04:52, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Oh. Dear. Guess we can scratch that project then. =/ :| Ale_Jrb^talk 16:48, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

We're back at HTML4 at the moment but will likely get switched to HTML5 again: follow mediazilla:27478. Just switch your script to mw:API which was supposed to be used by any userscripts in the first place. — AlexSm 16:55, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

I do use the API, but diffs are returned as - yes, you guessed it, strings - and in order to perform DOM edits on the strings you need to - yes, you guessed it - use DOMParser! Which stopped working properly. I will investigate another way of doing it, I suppose, for the future. Thanks anyways. Ale_Jrb^talk 17:08, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

You have to use AJAX with the API. The end result is simpler, but it's a big change to your code. Take at a look at my conversion of the ARV tool at User:Lightdarkness/aiv.js for a working example. Replace the addLoadHook while you're at it as I did because that's scheduled to break next. —UncleDouggie (talk) 20:11, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

I meant of course the jQuery AJAX library. —UncleDouggie (talk) 02:35, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

MW suddenly ignoring "line-height" CSS property

On my Canadian postal code list pages, such as List of A postal codes of Canada, I set the CSS "line-height" property to a certain amount to maximize the amount of text that would fit on the screen. But now, suddenly the page has been rendering with too much leading space per line, as if the line-height was set to "200%" when I specified "125%". Can this be fixed? I'm using the Monobook skin. --  Denelson83  23:22, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Line-height looks fine on that page. The 125% is applied to the text in each cell as you have set it, according to my browser. It doesn't look like 200% for me. Gary King (talk · scripts) 18:05, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Hey, it's suddenly fixed on my screen. No idea why it went like that in the first place... ¬_¬ --  Denelson83  23:40, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Search index not being updated?

It seems that the index for the search function is about three days behind what's in the articles, and not gaining any ground at all. Does the operator who monitors the index updating ever read this page? My pathetic little WikiGnome activities really start to bog down when this happens. Chris the speller (talk) 00:28, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Raised the same thing at WP:Help_desk#Search_Index it's feast or famine, we'll get swamped when it does update.
Arjayay (talk) 17:54, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

I also asked on the Help Desk if there a way to arrange search results in order?
I use the search index to find mis-spellings, but some are "correct" being redirects, quotes, deliberate, or part of File or URL names e.g. "rythm" which currently has 56 "correct" mis-spellings. When a search returns 57, finding the extra one is labourious. If they could be ordered according to date of last revision, the new entry would be at or near the end.
Arjayay (talk) 18:04, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

The stinkin' updater appears to be rolling again, though it will probably take a day or two to catch up. Chris the speller (talk) 13:54, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

More than Twinkle is broken

There are several threads above and numerous comments on the Twinkle talk page that indicate that something changed today that broke a number of tools, including:

• Twinkle
• Igloo
• ARV
• Friendly

This would seem to indicate that the something changed in the core system (pardon me if I have used the wrong term here). Looking at Twinkle activity in particular, it appears that something changed on 23 February between 15:40 and 16:12 (UTC). I noticed some changes in the MediaWiki namespace [[1]} relating to refTools, but the timing appears after-the-fact. I'm not sure what else might have changed.

I think it would be helpful to those looking into these problems if someone in the know (i.e., more knowledge than I) could identify what changed in this timeframe that could event remotely be the cause of such problems. I also think it would be wise to temporarily undo any such changes until a workaround can be developed. Having these anti-vandalism tools off-line is not good for the project. -- Tom N (tcncv) talk/contrib 04:05, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

IDK what caused it (1.17 update?) but I think not using scripts is good for people. We didn't all have cell phones ten years ago and we dealt with it. Manually adding boilerplates takes longer but it prompts me to write a personal message instead—why not, given that I'm already opening up the edit window? /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 04:17, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

For most of us, it's bad, because it gives the vandals a leg up. - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 04:32, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

And if you were a bad a typist as I, I believe you also would have a greater appreciation for these tools. And yes, I often go out of my way to write personalized notes when I find new potentially constructive editors struggling against policy, but when I come across the "Zak's a fag" style edits, I prefer to minimize my effort. BTW, I don't use a cell phone (although I do keep a pay-by-the-minute deal that I keep charged for emergency use). That's about $500/year more toward my retirement. (Grin) -- Tom N (tcncv) talk/contrib 04:44, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Writing a personalised message to a vandal takes a lot of time, better spent at reverting actual vandalism. The amount of vandalism is so high that we simply don't have the luxury of writing individual messages to vandals. Look at the ANI thread asking for more vandal fighters. Dr.K. ^{λogosπraxis} 05:20, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

If you don't want to write a personalized message you could use a warning template from WP:Template messages/User talk namespace#Warnings. Powergate92Talk 05:54, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Yep. Been there, done that. And multiple times too. Still, I hope you realise the one-button convenience and speed of Twinkle is unmatched compared to manually adding/substituting templates and adding headers. Dr.K. ^{λogosπraxis} 06:06, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Explanation: looks like all of this is caused by developers switching DOCTYPE on all pages to HTML5 doctype (look at the HTML source: it's <!DOCTYPE html> right now), just like it happened in 2009. Btw, all theese tools should have switched to API a long time ago... — AlexSm 04:47, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the info. So what are the chances of them granting a reprieve? And to whom should we make the request? -- Tom N (tcncv) talk/contrib 04:54, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

This has set vandal education back to the stone age. Dr.K. ^{λogosπraxis} 05:20, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Could someone post some guidelines by which we might distinguish the workaday effort of "developers," which screw things up, stop various tools from working, and hamper us volunteers in our efforts to maintain and improve the encyclopedia, from possible malicious actions of hackers which have the same regrettable effects in making everyone's life difficult? Developers untested and capricious "improvements"/malware, tomato/tomahto. I wasted a lot of time just trying to get Twinkle to work to post a vandal warning. Edison (talk) 05:34, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

The workday of a developer? I imagine it's something along the lines of work > work > more work > get complained at > do a bit more work > get complained at some more. Here we have the developers keeping Wikipedia up-to-date and making major improvements to the way in which it "works". And yet people seem to not be capable of even giving them even the smallest amount of gratitude. If a few out-dated scripts break while doing so, it's really something for the script writers to fix (as I'm sure they will). And in the long run it will actually result in better scripts, hopefully using the API as Alex mentioned. There is a reason we have an API... If all programs had been using that all along as they are intended to, then they wouldn't run into problems as that is almost always backwards compatible and rarely changes anyway. - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 06:37, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes, if the tools had been using the API..., but reality is that some well-established tools don't and these are tools are an important part of anti-vandalism efforts. And while these tools are broken, the RCPs that normally use them are not doing their job, or are doing so in a reduced manner. I do agree that these scripts should be updated to use the API, but this may take a few days or weeks to update and properly test. Now that we know the changes have had an adverse impact (even if not the fault of the developers), I see no harm in asking if the changes can be temporarily rolled back to give the script writers time to adapt and allow the RCPs to continue their work. I don't think a "tango-sierra - they should have known better" approach is the way this should be handled. As for the developers, I have the utmost respect for the work they do and I applaud their efforts at implementing new features and keeping the system updated with improved technologies. My understanding is that, except for a core group, most of them are volunteers too. -- Tom N (tcncv) talk/contrib 07:49, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Well to be fair they've been aware for years that they should be using the API (e.g. see here), but on the other hand it's not simply a matter of snapping one's fingers and suddenly using the API. I doubt it would be feasible to temporarily revert the update in the meantime, however, there are alternatives to twinkle and other js anti-vandalism tools. For those who are interested, the actual place the tool is breaking is here, on the "var form = doc.getElementById( 'editform' );" line. Also here's a discussion from a while ago which seems to be along the same lines. - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 08:33, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Update: User|BarkingFish has posted on the Twinkle talk page that "the HTML5 switch on, has been switched off." UncleDouggie has made extensive changes to the stand-alone ARV tool to switch to the API, and is looking at Twinkle. (Thanks UncleDouggie!) May I suggest that someone with the necessary back-end (toolserver?) access scan userspace for other .js scripts that contain similar not-long-to-live constructs, such as the getElementById('editform') snippet that Kingpin pointed out above. I expect that there may be many scripts out there that have copied the techniques of others, and it would be wise to notify the owners/maintainers that conversion to the API is essential for continued operation. A deadline for compliance can be negotiated with the development team. -- Tom N (tcncv) talk/contrib 14:43, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Would someone please come up with a temporary fix for this problem? We Wikignomes are pretty useless without these tools. – ukexpat (talk) 14:34, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

• Update - Twinkle is fixed and fully functioning again. Amsaim (talk) 14:41, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Looks like Twinkle is back in business, at least the warning part. Haven't tried all aspects. Favonian (talk) 14:39, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

I have only fixed the warning module so far. I'll try to get CSDs up next, but I'm going to run out of time for today very shortly. More details here. —UncleDouggie (talk) 16:17, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

The RFPP reporting module is not functioning. Message: "Requesting protection of page: The marker that identifies where the protection request is supposed to be added on WP:RFPP could not be found. Aborting" Dr.K. ^{λogosπraxis} 03:45, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Fixed. Someone broke the heading order on WP:RPP. —UncleDouggie (talk) 06:57, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Thank you. Great job. I'll keep an eye for these headings from now on. Dr.K. ^{λogosπraxis} 07:12, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

bug with "contributors"

There is a bug with "contributors", the toolserver WikiSense under "file history". I followed the links and set up an account to report the error, but I couldn't find any way to actually report it.

The problem is that if you go to "history" and "contributors" on Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Checkmate, it lists some contributors (including me) that did not contribute to this article, but to checkmate instead. (I don't know what else to do about reporting this.) Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 04:11, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

It's not correctly processing everything before the colon, I think. If you said you made a JIRA account, go to this page, log in, click "bug" at the top right, and go on from there. Otherwise, try contacting the tool maintainer directly; JIRA is just preferable because it keeps track of everything. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 04:23, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

I created an account about an hour ago, but it won't let me log in, and when I tell it that I'm having problems logging in, it doesn't find me. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 04:40, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Well, I got logged in and found "bug" under "create issue". Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 04:45, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

"Compare selected revisions" = RevDelete

When I attempt to compare any two revisions of a page by using the "Compare selected revisions" button, it takes me to an error page:(URL)

You have either not specified a target revision(s) to perform this function, the specified revision does not exist, or you are attempting to hide the current revision. Return to Main Page

Is anyone else seeing this? I am using monobook on IE7. decltype (talk) 08:16, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Use the radio buttons te selct revision to compare (left button), use the checkboxes to select the revision you want to (un)delete (right button). Not selecting any checkbox and clicking the (un)delete button will result in this error. — Edokter (talk) — 13:43, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

I had a similar problem when RevDelete first came out. When I selected two radio buttons and pressed enter, the "Del/Undel selected revisions" button was capturing the enter action. I am not able to reproduce such behavior now. (I am presently running monobook in Firefox.) -- Tom N (tcncv) talk/contrib 21:27, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Merged Reflinks

I'm not sure if this is the right place for this, but I'm detecting a pretty serious problem tonight. It seems many reflinks have been merged within the last day or so (I don't know exactly when this happened, but I just noticed it a few minutes ago). I've checked the history pages and I can see it's not something that anyone has done manually on the pages I'm watching, but it's obviously something within the automated system that's changed. As I'm sure most people know many pages have more than one reflink to the same site - for example when a celebrity has been nominated for an Emmy Award several times. The reference SITE is the same as other reflinks on the page, but the actual LINK is different. The same is true for interviews - for example - A star will do an interview with Variety, and then 2 or 3 years later will do another DIFFERENT interview with them. In these instances I have usually used a single quote (') to distinguish one reflink from another when I create or add reflinks to pages. If there are three different reflinks to the same site then I use three single quotes, etc, like this - (these are modified so the reflinks will show up as text, and I've removed the rest of the reftags and actual link portions of the reflinks, just to give you the idea of what I'm talking about) -

< ref name="Kids' Choice Awards">

< ref name="Kids' Choice Awards'">

< ref name="Kids' Choice Awards''">

< ref name="Kids' Choice Awards'''">

- This method has always worked fine for me to separate different reflinks to the same site on a single Wikipedia page, until today where I notice all 4 of the above reflinks are now recognized as the SAME and have been automatically "merged", which makes them completely useless. As you can imagine, whatever this new change was has totally messed up dozens of reflinks on literally dozens of pages I've written and/or added reflinks to (some pages that had 40 reflinks yesterday, now show 25 reflinks due to the "merging"). I'm sure the pages I've worked on aren't the only pages affected by this change and I believe reflinks are the probably the most important element on Wikipedia to insure the integrity of the information provided here, so I'm curious - is this just a temporary "bug" or is this a permanent change that will mean I now need to go back in and fix every single page I've ever written, edited, or sourced? I'm hoping this isn't permanent or can be easily changed back because this would literally take me HOURS to go back and fix on every page I've ever edited (especially the extremely long ones with 40 or 50 or more reflinks). Time that would obviously be better spent improving NEW pages, instead of "fixing" dozens of old ones that were just fine a couple of days ago. --- Crakkerjakk (talk) 08:28, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Can you give an example of a page where it's a problem? It may be that something has changed so that the ' character is not recognised in the reference names. If they do have to fixed manually, you should consider asking someone with WP:AWB to do it for you, as they'll be able to semi-automate it. SmartSE (talk) 10:39, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Sure, one page that's a good (easy to review) example is the =Awards= section of the iCarly page. It's a Nickelodeon sitcom that has been nominated for multiple awards. I've just updated the Awards wikitable there within the last week with a bunch of reflinks (many of which all linked to different pages on the same sites - the Emmy Awards site, the Kids Choice Awards site, the Young Artist Awards site, etc.) All the links were separate as recently as yestrerday (I know this for a fact because I check reflinks for errors before I save any changes I make), but are now all merged, so that every Emmy Award reflink is "merged" with the first, every Kids Choice Award reflink is merged with the first, etc. That's a good place to just take a glance at what I'm talking about since all the reflinks in that case are listed in a relatively small wikitable. Of course the REAL problem is where links have been merged within the body of long articles I've written (where there are 40 or 50 reflinks on the page and many single reflinks were deliberately cited as many as 10 or 15 times within the article appearing in the "abcdefg" sequence in the =Reference= section, even BEFORE this recent "merging"), so I'm hoping this is part of the same bigger change that's been causing other problems here within the last day, and will be reverted, but if not then I'd definitely like to have someone do it who can semi-automate it. I'd just like to find out if this is a permanent change or if it's just temporary and will be fixed - before I go through my entire editing history to make a list of EVERY page I've ever edited that now has this problem. --- Crakkerjakk (talk) 11:00, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

I was looking at this, confirming your description, and now the problem has just this moment gone away. The {{sfn}} problem mentioned below seems to have cleared at the same time. Thincat (talk) 13:33, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes, you're right. I've just checked several pages, and the problem seems to have vanished just as quickly as it appeared. If anyone has info as to what caused this problem and why (so I know for future reference in case it ever happens again), please make a note here to let me know. Thanks --- Crakkerjakk (talk) 13:43, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

I think it had to do with the change to HTML5, which seems to have been reverted. When HTML5 mode is enabled, the it changes runs of whitespace, single-quote, double-quote, underscore, ampersand, octothorpe, and/or percent sign to a single underscore, and then trims leading and trailing underscores. In HTML4 mode, it replaces all these characters (and many more) with a variation on percent-encoding that uses periods instead of percent characters. Anomie⚔ 14:07, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

This encoding change is also evidently behind #Problem with template:cite doi above. LeadSongDog come howl! 14:30, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Ok, I get the gist of it, but I'm still kinda new to all of this - so I guess my final question(s) is this - Does the switch from HTML4 to HTML5 happen often? Or is it just a switch that happens occasionally for relatively short periods of time in the middle of the night for "maintenance" purposes? Or is there a plan in the works to switch to HTML5 permanently sometime in the future? Basically, do I need to think about fixing these reflinks now while I have them separated out and easy to identify before they're "merged" again permanently? --- Crakkerjakk (talk) 14:35, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

I would imagine the plan is that it eventually get switched permanently - and that this switch would have been permanent if it hadn't thrown up so many problems. Rich Farmbrough, 16:53, 24 February 2011 (UTC).

I see you've gone in and fixed all similar reflinks. Thank you Rich. --- Crakkerjakk (talk) 22:10, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Personally, I'd suggest using something more descriptive to distinguish the links -- dates, for example. --SarekOfVulcan (talk) 18:55, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Dates would work except many sites don't "date" their pages - Like the Emmy Awards site just shows the year, but even then - I'm often citing best TV show, best actor, best actress, etc, all different pages, but from the same year, so dating doesn't work. I know I originally did try and use numbers to distinguish reflinks to the same site (Emmy Awards 1, Emmy Awards 2, Emmy Awards 3, etc), but for some reason not all the numbers were showing up (although it was relatively early on in my time editing here when I first noticed reflinks to the same site would automatically be merged without something in the site name to make them different, so I could have been doing something wrong at the time). I try to be relatively descriptive in the reflink titles, so I just didn't see a need to go into elaborate detail with the site name since that would make every reflink a mile long (which I find incredibly annoying), and using the single quote (') seemed to be an easy fix (at the time). I see Rich has fixed the problem by going with my original idea of numbering the site names with 1, 2, 3, and that seems to work, so I'll just go back to doing that from now on, now that I know certain symbols could cause a problem down the line. --- Crakkerjakk (talk) 22:10, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Problem with valign=bottom

From User:Headbomb/Thingy

click to show

The first table has valign:bottom; and doesn't align properly. The second as valign:top; and aligns properly. What gives? Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 09:17, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

They don't align properly because each of those colored bars has an equally-sized table row beneath them, but I can't seem to trace its origin. — Edokter (talk) — 13:20, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Found it; you forgot the datacell ("|") delimiters. — Edokter (talk) — 13:32, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Good catch, many thanks. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 16:27, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

{{Sfn}} error

I have noticed on pages like Serial killer that are using {{Sfn}} the coding is all messed up...This are not new additions but long standing coding that is now just messed up. See also War of 1812#United States expansionism for an example. Moxy (talk) 09:30, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

It looks to me that the problem has cleared. I wonder if this is (was) associated with that above at #Merged_Reflinks. Thincat (talk) 13:38, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

It looks like it was related to the change from HTML4 to HTML5 modes. In HTML4 mode, wikitext characters get escaped in the anchor name, e.g. <ref name="foo [[bar]]" /> generates wikitext like <sup id="cite_ref-foo_.5B.5Bbar.5D.5D_0-0" class="reference">[[#cite_note-foo_.5B.5Bbar.5D.5D-0|[1]]]</sup>; note the brackets have changed to ".5B" and ".5D". In HTML5 mode, these characters aren't escaped, generating <sup id="cite_ref-foo_[[bar]]_0-0" class="reference">[[#cite_note-foo_[[bar]]-0|[1]]]</sup> instead, with brackets inside the attempted wikilink. Since brackets cannot actually appear inside a wikilink, boom. Anomie⚔ 14:18, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Yep. Broke {{singlechart}}, too.—Kww(talk) 16:26, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Filed as bugzilla:27694 —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:46, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Proposal re Prod process

I made a proposal for a minor change to Cydebot so that the admin dashboard list of Prods would be correct. The obvious candidate for making the change is Cyde, but my understanding is that Cyde is no longer action. I proposed the change on the talk page of Admin dashboard, but that page isn't getting a lot of traffic, and is languishing. Any suggestions? The requested change is trivial and I think noncontroversial, but I don't have the technical ability to do it. (To summarize the proposal - I think the list of prods should be those eligible now for deletion, not those whose eligibility will come up sometime in the next 24 hours.)--SPhilbrickT 15:53, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Commented there. Rich Farmbrough, 17:37, 24 February 2011 (UTC).

Broken table

Is the table in this article broken? --Highspeedrailguy (talk) 17:57, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes it was broken. I fixed it. Gary King (talk · scripts) 18:02, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

And I removed the rowspans and center aligns that weren't working or needed. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 18:06, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Jumping page

I have just added a post about half way down this page. Having pressed "save page" the screen shows the post I have added, then, after a few seconds, jumps to a point on the page about 2 or 3 screens lower down. I know there are extremely annoying jumps when the banners appear, but this huge jump leaves me lost. Is this likely to be resolved? or can it be avoided? (IE8 XP Vector if it matters)
Arjayay (talk) 18:13, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Are you using the gadget to convert timestamps to local time? I did an update to it a few days ago that seems to have helped for me, but it's not 100%. If you don't use that, something else is happening. It's all due to the implementation of ResourceLoader. —UncleDouggie (talk) 20:05, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

No, my local time is UTC (+/- a nanosecond or two) - Arjayay (talk) 08:59, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

This same "jumping" problem is happening to me too, but only on this page. I'm not having the same problem when clicking links to #sub-sections on any article pages. --- Crakkerjakk (talk) 00:23, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

I think it may be because the box at the top of this page is big, and includes a collapsed box for "Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)". When loading the page, the text appears, then the main box appears, then the full FAQ list appears, before the FAQ list automatically collapses to a "show" box. This seems to give a huge displacement - far more than the line or two of the normal "banner" that appears on most pages.

As previously noted, the banner arrives annoyingly late, so you often end up clicking on the wrong thing, as the page jumps just as you click. The banner and boxes did not cause a jump until the new software, is it an intrinsic fault of the Resource Loader? (It is a major annoyance), or can it be fixed? Arjayay (talk) 08:59, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

I have to amend my previous post that article pages aren't "jumping". Now that I look closely, I see that there is a slight jump when clicking #links to sub-sections on article pages like this #link to the =Operation= section of the Wikipedia page for example, but it's just an inch or so, as opposed to the huge jump here. You can see in that link that the =Operation= section lines up properly at the top of the screen at first, but then jumps down slightly. Part of the huge jump here on the Village pump page may be partly due to the sheer length of the page, as well as the other reasons you've stated, but I just thought I'd mention that there is a slight jump on all pages - it's just a relatively small jump on most article pages, so I didn't notice at first, but it is happening everywhere. --- Crakkerjakk (talk) 10:29, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

There's more information in a prior topic. Is anyone having problems with large jumps on article pages? We know of several culprits for Wikipedia and Talk pages, but there's not much we can do, at least not that we know about yet, given the new ResourceLoader. If someone can figure out the inverted behavior between FF and Safari, it might give us more clues. —UncleDouggie (talk) 06:31, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Suppressing day of the week with comments in local time gadget

Resolved

OK, this may sound like a dumb question, but I'm almost completely Java-illiterate, so here goes. I recently started using the Comments in Local Time gadget. Very nice little feature. The conversion to my timezone is great; however, it also adds the day of the week (Monday, Tuesday, etc) to the timestamp, which I don't care for. Is there any way to suppress that, but leave in the yesterday/today bit?--Fyre2387 ^{(talk • contribs)} 00:17, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Doesn't look possible at present, but you could probably ask for a configuration toggle at Wikipedia talk:Comments in Local Time. –xeno^talk 00:20, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

I already did it long ago, along with a bunch of other features. See User_talk:Gary_King/comments_in_local_time.js. —UncleDouggie (talk) 01:52, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Ah. Nice work - perhaps the codebases should be synched and the doc updated. =) –xeno^talk 02:05, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Gary King wasn't interested in a merge after I made the changes. I just rolled in one bug fix from his version into mine. His other recent changes have been cosmetic I believe. —UncleDouggie (talk) 02:45, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

I wouldn't really say that is an absolutely denial of interest, maybe he just forgot to merge the changes in? Given that this is a gadget, it should be subject to good faith improvements. If you make your version of the script completely backwards compatible (so that existing uses do not notice any change in behaviour), I'll merge the changes in. –xeno^talk 14:03, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

I have made my version 100% backwards compatible and merged in all updates made by Gary King since I did the fork. Here's the diff from the current gadget baseline. I removed one of the TODO items because I already made that fix as part of my updates. Once the gadget is updated, I will update the documentation to add usage of the new options. —UncleDouggie (talk) 18:09, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Changed merged in this edit. Revert if any issues pop up. –xeno^talk 18:28, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Documentation update is complete. —UncleDouggie (talk) 20:41, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Works perfectly, thanks much!--Fyre2387 ^{(talk • contribs)} 22:50, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Transcluded text from Template:R from incorrect name missing from Wikipedia:Template messages/Redirect pages##I to M

The {{{1|''the redirect target''}}} displayed message does not seem to appear on the page it's meant to be transcluded onto. :| TelCoNaSpVe :| 03:58, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Template messages/Redirect pages#I to M uses {{Tlrow}} which calls the redirect template {{{1}}} with {{{{{1|tlrow}}}|{{{2|}}}|{{{3|}}}...}}}. Here {{{2|}}} passes an empty unnamed parameter instead of no unnamed parameter. The empty unnamed parameter is picked up by {{{1}}} in {{{1|''the redirect target''}}} and correctly "displayed" (as an empty string). I don't know whether {{Tlrow}} can be modified to not add empty unnamed parameters when it's called without unnamed parameters. In this particular case, the table at Wikipedia:Template messages/Redirect pages#I to M could be forced to show the same as {{R from incorrect name}} currently does by replacing {{Tlrow|R from incorrect name|category=Redirects from incorrect names}} with {{Tlrow|R from incorrect name|''the redirect target''|category=Redirects from incorrect names}}. But it wouldn't be stable if {{tl|R from incorrect name}} is edited to display something else. PrimeHunter (talk) 04:50, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

urldecode

Anyone knows what happened to the urldecode function (it was part of the StringFunctions extension)? urlencode was dropped from the extension since it's a core/built-in function now:

• {{#urlencode:Hellooo nurse!}} → {{#urlencode:Hellooo nurse!}}
• {{urlencode:Hellooo nurse!}} → Hellooo+nurse%21

But urldecode has simply vanished:

• {{#urldecode:Hellooo+nurse%21}} → {{#urldecode:Hellooo+nurse%21}}
• {{urldecode:Hellooo+nurse%21}} → {{urldecode:Hellooo+nurse%21}}

--Amazeroth (talk) 10:28, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Stringfunctions was never enabled in Wikipedia, so this could not have worked before. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:25, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

I see, thanks. Yet my question remains: Is there really no urldecode function available at all? --Amazeroth (talk) 13:48, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

"Updating search index" out of order?

Every search result is dated to the 20 February 2011 or older. Is it possible, that somebody check the bot??? THX --Pitlane02 talk 11:21, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

This was also reported yesterday further up the page - anyone got any clues about how to investigate/fix the index updates? Gonzonoir (talk) 15:22, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

This bug is responsible. I've skipped page indexing for those pages last changed between 4:26 and 5:26am UTC on 20 Feb, and it should catch up during today and tomorrow. --rainman (talk) 22:49, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Redux of What Links Here

I would like to revisit this issue. #What Links Here, as absolutely nothing has been resolved since the problem arose on February 19. The job queue page says it will expand templates. The failure of expansion of the County municipality navbox templates is exactly the issue. Previously, if I created a new municipality page and included the template, the template would automatically expand in "What Links Here" by the time I had finished editing. That failed to happen with Quihi, Texas and Estacado, Texas. 6 days later, the only expansion on those specific ones, are where I did null edits on a few of the template municipalities. The remainder of those two templates remain unexpanded. This kink now seems the rule, not the exception. I had the same issue when I set up Click, Llano County, Texas - the municipality navbox template did not expand. To get around it, I did the null edits on every single municipality within the template. But an editor should not have to do that every time. Something changed inbetween February 19 and February 13, when I set up a new page where a template automatically expanded. I believe the new software happened in that time frame. Maile66 (talk) 13:15, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

I think the job queue's broken. This would be consistent with one of the topics in a thread which I recently raised at Help talk:Job queue#Where's it gone?. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:20, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Hmmmmm....interesting how on the Help talk:Job queue, there's very seldom a reply to any issue posted. All the way back to 2009. Maile66 (talk) 16:11, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

It seems that the job handlers had been down for a couple of days. http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/Server_admin_log "2:36 apergos: job queue reported slower than molasses, checked the job runners and there was one host running something. I did not restart the job runners though because the package has not been updated for 1.17 and was using the pre-1.17 deployment codebase. woops." Follow bugzilla:27727 for the progress. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:30, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Reference formatting change?

Why did we need to change cite.php to use letters instead of numbers? Such a change messes up formatting for many notes, such as seen in St. Anthony's Catholic Church (Padua, Ohio) — unlike when numbers were used for <ref> citations, you can't easily distinguish the content comment (following the first occurrence of "Padua" in the text) from one of the citations to the first reference. Nyttend (talk) 15:00, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

A mistake surely The inline cites are lettered and the references numnbered. Thincat (talk) 15:06, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

((edit conflict))

This is what I mean...

Okay, I've only just realised this, but apparently inline citations using <ref> now result in letters being displayed, sort of like this^[a] when it used to be like this.^[2] I don't really like the change, but what the hell, I can live with it. However, when using {{reflist}} to display the references, they still display with numbers to refer to the citations, even though the inline bits are now letters. So either the change to the inline citations needs to be reverted, or reflist and associated templates need updating. And can anyone please enlighten me on when this change was made? Thanks. Strange Passerby (talk • contribs • Editor review) 15:07, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

I just noticed the change as well. Anyone know where this was discussed / if it was discussed? Jujutacular ^talk 15:12, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

It's back to normal now. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:12, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Indeed. I'd really like to know where the actual change was implemented (for my own curiosity). Jujutacular ^talk 15:14, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Weirdly, it seems to be so on some pages but not all – Sam Oldham, seen in my screenshot above, still shows the letter format of cites, while another of "my" articles, List of 1952 Winter Olympics medal winners, appears to show numbers for cites... Strange Passerby (talk • contribs • Editor review) 15:15, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

I see numbers on Sam Oldham. Try WP:BYPASS, failing that, WP:PURGE. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:17, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Good idea; purging worked. Although like Jujutacular I'd like to know where and why it was changed... Strange Passerby (talk • contribs • Editor review) 15:20, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

This is my fault. I was working on the feature described below and the documentation in bugzilla was sketchy. It looks like MediaWiki:Cite link label group- changes the default labels for all in-text cite links, nut just the "footnote" group as I was lead to believe. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 15:56, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Weird. That page (since moved to MediaWiki:Cite link label group-footnote) doesn't seem to be part of the list of system messages. — Edokter (talk) — 16:33, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

How is AllMessages populated? MediaWiki:Cite link label group pages are not defined by default. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 16:40, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Cite.php: Custom cite links

The Footnote3 system using {{Ref}}/{{Note}} has been deprecated for standard footnotes, but is still heavily in use in tables, navboxes and the like. This is because the Footnotes system has a in-text cite link that uses a a minimum of three characters, including the space, and can be intrusive.

With the new deployment of MediaWiki, the Cite extension was updated to include custom cite links. This means we can now have in-text cite links of one character. For example, using a group name of "footnote" now uses lower case link labels instead of numeric:

The Sun is pretty big,<ref group=@alpha>Miller, E: ''The Sun'', page 23. Academic Press, 2005.</ref>
but the Moon is not so big.<ref group=@alpha>Brown, R: "Size of the Moon", ''Scientific American'', 51(78):46</ref>
The Sun is also quite hot.<ref group=@alpha>Miller, E: ''The Sun'', page 34. Academic Press, 2005.</ref>
== Notes ==

<references group=@alpha/>

The Sun is pretty big, but the Moon is not so big. The Sun is also quite hot.

Notes

Full documentation is currently at Wikipedia:Manual of Style (footnotes)/Cite link labels.

To do:

• Decide how to use this within the context of footnotes
• Need someone to check MediaWiki:Cite link label group-@greek (only admins can edit these)
• Decide if "footnote" is an appropriate name for the alpha default
• Decide if the footnote group currently at MediaWiki:cite_link_label_group-@alpha should be lower, upper or mixed; we can create all if needed
• Tweak documentation as needed and merge into the main

Technical stuff that I will deal with

• Create a help page for the error message— started at Help:Cite errors/Cite error no link label group
• Update the error message to link to the error page— Can't use a wikilink as the error message is classed as a reference
• Link the error message talk page to the central page— done

---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 15:39, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

First of all, is this related to the above thread? (i.e. every citation on every page was appearing as letters for about 15 minutes). Second: the reference at the bottom of the page needs to be the same format as the citation above. It is quite confusing to follow a letter citation to a numeric reference. Jujutacular ^talk 15:50, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes— my fault. It should clear up quickly. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 15:58, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

The reference list is an ordered list and uses numbers that don't match the in-text cite labels. Added to Template:Bug. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 18:34, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

<3 --Golbez (talk) 22:49, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

A couple of things:

1. I don't think that footnote is an appropriate name for a special-case usage such as this — ditto for all similarly normal-seeming names. There's too much chance of that name being used by an editor expecting it to work as a normal (i.e. not special-case) group name. Also, special-case group names defined at some distant-future point (e.g. greek, crylic) risk breaking articles which used those names as normal group names before they (suddenly and, to many editors, mysteriously) begin behaving in a special-case fashion. One solution might be to adopt a naming convention for this class of special-case group names and deprecate those names by convention for normal plain-vanilla group name usage. One convention which seems workable would be to require group names for this special-case usage to begin with commercial-at character (e.g., @footnote and @greek).
2. One useful application which I see for this is footnoting tables using the familiar cite-php <Ref ... method rather than the more complicated WP:Footnote3 method. However, I would expect that there would be some articles having multiple tables needing footnotes. As I understand it, this could be dealt with by creating some number of available groups using the same footnoting characters (e.g., group=@footnote1, group=@footnote2, etc., all identical to the exampled footnote group), but I wonder if this could somehow be done without requiring an admin to step in to create, say, the next five groups when the ones then existing aren't enough for some article. Perhaps a special-case suffix could cause reuse of a base group (that is, have a group named @footnote which picks the footnote numbering characters, and which could be reused by specifying group names like group=@footnote#1, group=@footnote#2, etc.).

I hope I've explained that in an understandable manner. It'll read like gibberish to some, but I'm guessing that it'll be clear to Gadget50 (Ed). Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 07:08, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

I had been pondering the naming scheme and using @ makes sense if it is allowed in the MediaWiki namespace (I will find out). As to point 2: this should not be an issue. When you use any parameter within {{reflist}} or <references>...</references> then it closes the reference list, and the use of |group= will certainly do this. Thus the references from one table will not get stuffed into the reference list for another. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 15:05, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Changed the existing groups to @alpha and @greek. I am going to add table examples to the doc page.

Special:NewPages

There's no yellow highlight. --Highspeedrailguy (talk) 16:19, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

There are for me. Perhaps all pages had been patrolled when you last looked at the page? Gary King (talk · scripts) 19:32, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

$.post().complete is not a function

I tried to use .complete() in post but throws error. also i get error if i use $('

').dialog() (not a bug in edit mode) -- Mahir78 (talk) 16:28, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

If I understand jQuery.post correctly, you'll be able to use $.post(...).success with jQuery 1.5, while right now $().jquery shows "1.4.2" here. I think dialog mode is only included in edit mode (with " Enable dialogs for ..." in preferences) intentionally because it has no use otherwise. You could try something like mw.loader.using('ext.wikiEditor.dialogs', your_function) as described at mw:ResourceLoader/Default modules#mediaWiki.loader. P.S. I'm not sure but maybe these questions are better asked at WT:WikiProject User scripts. — AlexSm 19:00, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

animated gif not playing

I uploaded an animated gif which plays fine here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GWM_HahnEcho.gif

...but only a static image is shown on the actual Wikipedia page here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_echo

I find the same behaviour in Firefox 3.6.3 and IE8. GavinMorley (talk) 17:04, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

I'm guessing it's too large. When GIFs reach 12.5 million pixels (I think) total, only a single frame is presented in the thumbnail. 640x480 x 256 frames is over 78 million pixels. It's a known issue. --Golbez (talk) 17:17, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

That's right, however, it's only when scaling. So if the size of the image is set to 640px, then it will still animate fine (hence why it animates fine on the file page). You could also re-upload with the gif scaled to the desired size (400px). - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 17:23, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks! all sorted now. GavinMorley (talk) 23:19, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Is the Vector skin faster than Monobook due to caching?

Monobook seems to be getting slower every day, while when testing in Vector, things seem faster. Are pages cached based on what skin you're using—meaning each article would have a different cache for each skin—or are they only based on a user's settings (math generation preferences, etc.)? Meaning, would pages load faster if I switched from Monobook to Vector (since Vector is the default skin)? Looking at the page sources, it looks like the main difference between Vector and Monobook is the sidebar, but I don't think that's part of the cache—is it? I did manage to eventually find a few pages in Vector that the server choked on, though, requiring 30 seconds or more to process, so maybe I'm best to just stick with Monobook for now. Gary King (talk · scripts) 19:52, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Did you test both skins while being logged out? You seem to have lots of code in your monobook.js. Plus, this edit makes your common.js (now a default personal JS file: check preferences) load the second time. — AlexSm 20:02, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Yeah I tested both skins logged out. The JS is not affecting load times since they come after the HTML has loaded. By "load time" I'm talking about the server processing time, where it says at the bottom of every page "Served by srv156 in 0.531 secs.", it'll sometimes be 30 seconds or more. Also, yeah I'll rename common.js to something else; I explicitly added it again since I had a JS error and couldn't find where it was, until I finally realized that common.js was being loaded automatically. Gary King (talk · scripts) 20:16, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

The more something is used, the better it will be cached (the cache is actually many caches, SQL, parserfunctions, wikicode rendering, interface rendering, squid (page) caching ). Since usage of monobook is declining, it is logical that less pages will be served from caches (esp from the squid caches for non-logged in requests). HOWEVER. when you are logged in, you never hit the squid caches anyways, so all steps AFTER building the article content, will never be fully cached. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:34, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

New User Edits

That's it - I call shenanigans. I've brought up the issue of new users all creating the same userpage, but no one there seems to know about this. Is this a new software implementation that makes a new editor's first edit to their user page? I cannot believe this is a school project, as it has been going on for the better part of a day. Any insight would be valuable. TNXMan 20:51, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

As I posted there, they may be sleeper accounts, created early and using boilerplate user pages and then used later on when needed. It is very unlikely to have anything to do with the software, considering only about 5% of new accounts have this user page rather than 100% of them. Gary King (talk · scripts) 21:03, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

All of this could be the same person: this sockpuppet blocked today, see his first edit. A userpage makes the user appear as a blue link in recent changes and might get him less attention from some patrollers. — AlexSm 21:20, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

While that person is indeed User:Crouch, Swale, they are  Unrelated to other accounts with the same userpage. TNXMan 21:26, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

It is a software feature, please AGF

Just created an alternate account, User:DuncanHillTestAccount. On creation, the first thing you are presented with is a big button saying "now create your userpage". Click it, and it opens the edit box ready filled in with the intro stuff we are seeing on these new userpages. DuncanHill (talk) 21:38, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks good to know thats interesting. Now if they could just do that for the talk page of articles when they are created! --Kumioko (talk) 21:45, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

So where is it coming from in case we want to update the template? I have a problem with the first item being "Recommendations for your user page". User pages shouldn't be the most important thing we ask new users to deal with. Also, does this mean we need to strip down the welcome templates to remove redundancy? —UncleDouggie (talk) 21:57, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

The announcement was here: Wikipedia:MediaWiki messages#Account creation tests, the system message is MediaWiki:Welcomecreation. — AlexSm 21:54, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

While I'm glad there was an announcement, perhaps next time it would be better to announce it on a more highly watched page. That talk page is watched by 53 people. Perhaps this page or the admin's noticeboard would be a better choice? TNXMan 21:58, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

(ec) A message that nobody sees is not, properly speaking, an "announcement". — Gavia immer (talk) 22:00, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

• As Tnxman noted at the very beginning, there is already a thread about this at AN. Might I gently suggest further discussion takes place there? DuncanHill (talk) 22:04, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

• Just one more technical note: one could find the source of the "problem" by checking RC in MediaWiki namespace; could be useful next time. — AlexSm 22:13, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

IPv6

Now, what will Wikipedia do when IPv6 gets deployed?Jasper Deng (talk) 21:45, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Here are some notes on the transition. Gary King (talk · scripts) 21:49, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

I was told there was no talk page

I created User talk:64.223.114.116 after seeing that the IP's vandalism had been reverted. For some reason, when I saved the edit, instead of the talk page, I got the message that appears when the talk page hasn't been created yet. I think the format was the one used for IPs who can't create articles. Is this a bug? I went back and saved my edit again, and all was fine. Except, after previewing, I had decided to give the IP the benefit of the doubt and somehow my original edit got saved. It turns out the person made the same edit three times with three different IPs, so the second-level warning was not inappropriate.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 22:27, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

When you clicked "Save" and saw "not created" page you just had to reload that page from the server to see your successfull edit. This seems to happen a lot lately. — AlexSm 22:38, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia as a workflow tool

(I don't know if this is the right place for this). I always wondered. Wikipedia is a "Workflow tool" par excellence. A lot of the activities in Wikipedia can be described as process (albeit loose processes). AFD, FAC, RFA... In addition, content pass by different states: Articles can have as state "FAC", "FA", "Nominated for deletion"... However, there's a total abscence of support of workflow by mediawiki software (Actually, I started this post, after noticing how nominating an article for deletion is a daunting task, which can be done in one click given the right tool support). Has there been any discussion, or proposal about evolving the software to support workflow? And if yes, could someone explain, while there hasn't been any progress toward this road (The strategy wiki fails to mention this issue). Thank you --Eklipse (talk) 22:37, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

there are tools for that see WP:TWINKLE ΔT _{^{The only constant}} 22:39, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Gadgets stopped working again

My gadgets have stopped working again (clock/purge, popups, blackscreen) also the predictive search thing has stopped. They do work when I'm in the edit screen. DuncanHill (talk) 23:52, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

What browser/version are you using? Have you tried purging your cache? {{Nihiltres|talk|edits|⚡}} 01:16, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Monobook, Chrome, WinXP. Will give that a try. DuncanHill (talk) 01:18, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Purging seems to have fixed it for now, but it is happening very often since the "up"grade. DuncanHill (talk) 01:22, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Ditto. If even happens after not just purging, but restarting the computer. In fact, it tends to happen there more frequently, at least for me with Safari on a Mac. As far as a non-technical person like me can tell, it's the slow loading of Javascript. DGG ( talk ) 02:54, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

I'm on Safari on a Mac, and I haven't seen a problem like this at all yet… {{Nihiltres|talk|edits|⚡}} 03:09, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Clearing your cache will most likely resolve this, from how you guys have explained it. Restarting your computer or browser shouldn't change anything, though. It does seem to sound like perhaps that the JavaScript is taking too long to load. Since 1.17, JS is loaded after the page rather than before, which allows the page to load and then the browser loads the JS, which is why you might be viewing a page with no JS functionality enabled—because it's still loading. I suppose that's better than staring at a blank page waiting for the JS to load first, though. Gary King (talk · scripts) 04:44, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Purging your cache should in theory make this worse because all the scripts have to be completely reloaded from the server. When I purge, it takes an extra 5 to 10 seconds for my scripts to run. So why is purging helping in this case? There must be something we don't understand here. By the way, my purges were all for debugging purposes, I haven't actually seen this problem since we escaped the HTML 5 black hole. —UncleDouggie (talk) 05:54, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

JavaScript does seem to be making Wikipedia browsing very slow recently. I just turned it off altogether and it makes such a difference, that I'm half tempted to leave it off for Wikipedia, even though it ruins the display of a number of things. - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 06:23, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

I don't see RefTools when I'm editing, maybe all the gadgets are failing for me? I'm on Safari/Mac. Tried emptying cache, no change. First Light (talk) 07:02, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Email not functioning on commons?

I've gone to email someone on commons, and I got the following red letter notice: Unknown error in PHP's mail() function. Is this standard? Magog the Ogre (talk) 03:20, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Question about the IPA-English interface

Sorry to post this here. I want to note a problem with the IPA (English) character-insertion menu (toolbar?) at the bottom of the WP edit field, but I don't understand the inner workings of the interface well enough to know where the code for this is, or how to suggest a change. Basically, the low-back phonemes were clearly designed by a British speaker and are insufficient for General American (GA), as the GA phoneme ɑ is missing. The closest in the menu are the two British-only phonemes ɒ and ɑː, neither of which exists in GA. (A similar thing applies to the missing GA phoneme ɔ, although in this case the British substitute ɔː is slightly less bad, since ɔ was historically a long vowel.) Benwing (talk) 04:58, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Value #expr: 1.2.3.4.5.00 is 1.2

Are there any plans to change parser function #expr to treat multiple dots as being an invalid number? Currently, the value of 1.2.3.4.5.00 in wiki-math is:

{{#expr: 1.2.3.4.5.00}} → 1.2

{{#expr: 1.2.3.4 + 100}} → 101.2

{{#expr: 1.2.3,4.5.00}} →

I was thinking 1.2.3.4 might generate an "expression error" because I was planning to detect a European million "1.000.000" (#expr value 1.0) as invalid, to be reformatted as "1,000,000". However, I realize "one man's bug is another man's neat feature" and we often use bizarre MediaWiki bugs to create kludge features all the time, to provide faster results for our readers. Perhaps someone already treats a numeric date "2.26.2011" as 2.26, so they might think dropping ".2011" is a neat feature of #expr. Meanwhile, we have Template:Valid to check if numbers are valid:

{{Valid| number= --12345.00}} → false {{Valid| number= 12345.00 }} → true

{{Valid| number=1.2.3.4.5.00}} → false {{Valid| number=1.000.000}} → false

So, {Valid} realizes the number is invalid, and I could use similar logic to detect "1.000.000" for reformatting. There's no hurry on this, just curious. -Wikid77 08:30, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Cite template not working?

The cite template does not appear to be working. The RH option is now headed <cite-section-label> which when selected produces a drop down <cite-template-list> (I don't remember either of these having < > before) When clicking the down arrow and selecting cite web (or any of the others), I get a totally blank form with nothing to say what goes in which box. (I'm using IE8, XP, Vector) Arjayay (talk) 12:08, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Page layout problems

Hi, in http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=South_Georgia_and_the_South_Sandwich_Islands&oldid=415969089 I see a large blank space breaking the lead section (specifcally, between "The total land area of the territory is 3,903 square kilometres (1,507 sq mi)" and "There is no native population on any of the islands" is a whole screen's worth of blank space). I know that the alignment of text with picture is what's causing it, and I know various things to try that will fix it. The puzzle is that I see problems very similar to this over and over and over again in many different Wikipedia articles -- I mean, like hundreds of times -- often (though not in this case) that have gone uncorrected for a long time. I think I asked about this one before, and it was suggested that different browsers lay out the page differently, so that many people did not see the problem. However, my recollection is a bit hazy. What I would like to do is establish again whether this problem is browser specific. I am using IE 8. Could others take a look in different browsers and report what they see? 86.176.210.29 (talk) 12:59, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

There is no gap in Firefox 3.6.13, Google Chrome 9 or Opera 11.01, but in IE7 the gap is there. Specifically, since the image File:South Georgia Photo by Sascha Grabow.jpg is right aligned, it is pushed down the page by the infobox. The paragraph beginning "There is no native population on any of the islands" is in the wikicode just after this image, and IE insists on vertically-aligning that text with the upper edge of the image, so the gap occirs immediately before this. The easiest fix is to align that image left instead of right. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:25, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. I would like to propose that this problem is investigated further by the technical guys to see whether Wikipedia's code generation can be tweaked so that all common browsers display the same thing in such cases. My guess is that in many cases that I've encountered, the person who made the edit was using a non-IE browser and had no idea that it broke the layout in IE. This is probably why such layout errors are so common. 86.176.210.29 (talk) 14:05, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

• Major typesetting problem: I will write a short essay "WP:Avoiding text gaps" to help people be aware of the text-gap problems and ways to avoid them. This is very frustrating because "all" IE browsers (at least from IE6 to IE8) show a large text-gap beside nearby non-stacked images, on wider windows. Plus, some people deliberately use CSS options which cause those large, awkward text-gaps, deliberately ignoring (yes) the trashy affect on IE browsers. If an image-box were set to float around the text, then the images would tend to amass into a page-wide gallery, so that is only a partial solution. However, using {{floatbox|image}} might be a very quick fix when adjusting only 1 image. For that article ("South Sandwich Islands"), I used "|thumb|left" followed by word-joining {{j|There is no}} to no-wrap that phrase for avoiding 1-word-per-line wrapping after a left-side image on narrow windows. I agree that the problem appears in hundreds of articles, and is probably the most trashy typesetting glitch for readers using IE: those large text-gaps make Wikipedia seem extremely unstable on IE browsers. -Wikid77 15:33, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Too small font in secure server while using Mozilla Firefox

I'm experiencing shrinked font-size in secure server in Mozilla Firefox 3.6.13. This issue does not happen in my Internet Explorer 8. Is there any problem in my browser or server, or MediaWiki CSS? It happens Korean Wikipedia, Wikimedia Meta-Wiki, Wikimedia Commons as well as English language Wikipedia. Best regards. Kwj2772 (talk) 14:11, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

You probably (accidentally) set your font-size in Mozilla with (ctrl-scrollwheel). Mozilla remembers fontsize settings per site. Simply reset to 100% while you are on the secure server. — Edokter (talk) — 15:36, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

That works. Thanks! Kwj2772 (talk) 15:51, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Account

Hello, I am participant of the Russian Wikipedia. I tried to register in the English-language Wikipedia under the name "Palaiologos", but it turned out that this account has already been there. But at the same time, if you type User: Palaiologos in the search engine of Wikipedia, it appears that no such page. Moreover, information on the disposal of this page is not in the deletion log. However, despite all this, I can not register under that name. What should I do? May I usurp this account? --90.188.224.108 (talk) 15:10, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

The creation of the user account does not create the userpage, and it is possible to create a "userpage" where the corresponding account is not registered. At a glance, it looks like you should certainly be able to usurp the account; see WP:CHUU for instructions. Anomie⚔ 15:27, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

The existence of a user page is not the same as the existence of a username. This page shows the username is not registered here. Best thing to do is to 'globalise' you account on ru.wikipedia.org, then you will automatically be registered here. — Edokter (talk) — 15:31, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

This problem has appeared at me just when I created a global account.--90.188.224.108 (talk) 15:54, 26 February 2011 (UTC)