Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)

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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 in Phabricator (see how to report a bug). Bugs with security implications should be reported differently (see how to report security bugs).

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Table cell contents spilling over.

. When viewing the following table in the mobile version of the site, some text from the first column spills over into the adjacent cell of the second column.

Team	Constructor	Chassis	Power unit	Tyre	No.	Drivers
Scuderia Ferrari	Ferrari	SF15-T	Ferrari	P	5 7	Sebastian Vettel Kimi Räikkönen
Sahara Force India F1 Team	Force India-Mercedes	VJM08	Mercedes PU106B Hybrid	P	11 27	Sergio Pérez Nico Hülkenberg
Lotus F1 Team	Lotus-Mercedes	E23 Hybrid	Mercedes PU106B Hybrid	P	8 13	Romain Grosjean Pastor Maldonado
Manor Marussia F1 Team	Marussia-Ferrari	TBA	Ferrari 059/3	P	TBA TBA	Will Stevens TBA
McLaren Honda	McLaren-Honda	MP4-30	Honda RA615H Hybrid	P	14 22	Fernando Alonso Jenson Button
Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 Team	Mercedes	F1 W06 Hybrid	Mercedes PU106B Hybrid	P	6 44	Nico Rosberg Lewis Hamilton
Infiniti Red Bull Racing	Red Bull-Renault	RB11	Renault Energy F1-2015	P	3 26	Daniel Ricciardo Daniil Kvyat
Sauber F1 Team	Sauber-Ferrari	C34	Ferrari	P	9 12	Marcus Ericsson Felipe Nasr
Scuderia Toro Rosso	Toro Rosso-Renault	STR10	Renault Energy F1-2015	P	33 55	Max Verstappen Carlos Sainz Jr.
Williams Martini Racing	Williams-Mercedes	FW37	Mercedes PU106B Hybrid	P	19 77	Felipe Massa Valtteri Bottas
Source:

Anyone got an idea what's causing this and/or how to solve this. Tvx1 22:24, 28 February 2015 (UTC)

I don't have a mobile device and it looks right for me in both desktop and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)&mobileaction=toggle_view_mobile. The table has a coding error in {{nowrap|{{nowrap|Mercedes PU106B Hybrid}} which should only have one {{nowrap}}. Does it help to remove that:

Team	Constructor	Chassis	Power unit	Tyre	No.	Drivers
Scuderia Ferrari	Ferrari	SF15-T	Ferrari	P	5 7	Sebastian Vettel Kimi Räikkönen
Sahara Force India F1 Team	Force India-Mercedes	VJM08	Mercedes PU106B Hybrid	P	11 27	Sergio Pérez Nico Hülkenberg
Lotus F1 Team	Lotus-Mercedes	E23 Hybrid	Mercedes PU106B Hybrid	P	8 13	Romain Grosjean Pastor Maldonado
Manor Marussia F1 Team	Marussia-Ferrari	TBA	Ferrari 059/3	P	TBA TBA	Will Stevens TBA
McLaren Honda	McLaren-Honda	MP4-30	Honda RA615H Hybrid	P	14 22	Fernando Alonso Jenson Button
Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 Team	Mercedes	F1 W06 Hybrid	Mercedes PU106B Hybrid	P	6 44	Nico Rosberg Lewis Hamilton
Infiniti Red Bull Racing	Red Bull-Renault	RB11	Renault Energy F1-2015	P	3 26	Daniel Ricciardo Daniil Kvyat
Sauber F1 Team	Sauber-Ferrari	C34	Ferrari	P	9 12	Marcus Ericsson Felipe Nasr
Scuderia Toro Rosso	Toro Rosso-Renault	STR10	Renault Energy F1-2015	P	33 55	Max Verstappen Carlos Sainz Jr.
Williams Martini Racing	Williams-Mercedes	FW37	Mercedes PU106B Hybrid	P	19 77	Felipe Massa Valtteri Bottas
Source:

Does it help to remove all nowrap (may be controversial in an article), or for simplicity replace them by {{identity}} as here:

Team	Constructor	Chassis	Power unit	Tyre	No.	Drivers
Scuderia Ferrari	Ferrari	SF15-T	Ferrari	P	5 7	Sebastian Vettel Kimi Räikkönen
Sahara Force India F1 Team	Force India-Mercedes	VJM08	Mercedes PU106B Hybrid	P	11 27	Sergio Pérez Nico Hülkenberg
Lotus F1 Team	Lotus-Mercedes	E23 Hybrid	Mercedes PU106B Hybrid	P	8 13	Romain Grosjean Pastor Maldonado
Manor Marussia F1 Team	Marussia-Ferrari	TBA	Ferrari 059/3	P	TBA TBA	Will Stevens TBA
McLaren Honda	McLaren-Honda	MP4-30	Honda RA615H Hybrid	P	14 22	Fernando Alonso Jenson Button
Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 Team	Mercedes	F1 W06 Hybrid	Mercedes PU106B Hybrid	P	6 44	Nico Rosberg Lewis Hamilton
Infiniti Red Bull Racing	Red Bull-Renault	RB11	Renault Energy F1-2015	P	3 26	Daniel Ricciardo Daniil Kvyat
Sauber F1 Team	Sauber-Ferrari	C34	Ferrari	P	9 12	Marcus Ericsson Felipe Nasr
Scuderia Toro Rosso	Toro Rosso-Renault	STR10	Renault Energy F1-2015	P	33 55	Max Verstappen Carlos Sainz Jr.
Williams Martini Racing	Williams-Mercedes	FW37	Mercedes PU106B Hybrid	P	19 77	Felipe Massa Valtteri Bottas
Source:

PrimeHunter (talk) 04:56, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for mentioning that coding error. That didn't cause the problem however. Actually it did not do any harm at all. If you click on the link to the mobile view and then reduce the width of your browser screen to the minimum you will see the text from the first column spilling over. Using the identity template doesn't solve it. Tvx1 05:38, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

I already tried the minimum width on mobile and it works for me. I get a horizontal scroll bar and no overlap. I will stop guessing. It's too hard when I don't have the problem. PrimeHunter (talk) 05:51, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

Since I'm not able to explain the issue with text, I have made a screenshot:

As you can see, content from the first column is spilling over into the second. Tvx1 21:20, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

It doesn't spill over for me. Based on the amount of spillover in your screenshot, maybe your browser doesn't reserve space for the flag icon when the column width is calculated. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:05, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

Multiple user have reported this to me though, regardless of which browser they use. Tvx1 06:54, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

I think you're spot on there. Either the flag icon isn't taken into account, either it's just counted as a 1px character. Is there a way to solve this? Tvx1 19:07, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

Does it change anything if the size of the image is increased, or removed altogether? Googol30 (talk) 04:06, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

Well, cells without flagicons don't spill over into other, no matter how wide they are. But we want to have them in that table. Tvx1 10:13, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

And does making the icons larger make the problem worse? What I'm trying to determine is how the browser is interpreting what it's given and why it isn't making the cells large enough. If the browser isn't making sufficient space for all of the elements the cell contains, should we worry about that, since it's then the fault of the browser, or find a workaround and try to fix the problem on our end, even if the mobile browser isn't working as expected? I didn't seem to catch what your mobile browser even is. If I could replicate the problem on my end, I could attempt to fix it, but the desktop version of Chrome I'm running handles element widths as expected. Let me add a table with the changes I'm thinking of for illustration:

Team	Constructor	Chassis	Power unit	Tyre	No.	Drivers
Scuderia Ferrari	Ferrari	SF15-T	Ferrari	P	5 7	Sebastian Vettel Kimi Räikkönen
Sahara Force India F1 Team	Force India-Mercedes	VJM08	Mercedes PU106B Hybrid	P	11 27	Sergio Pérez Nico Hülkenberg
Lotus F1 Team	Lotus-Mercedes	E23 Hybrid	Mercedes PU106B Hybrid	P	8 13	Romain Grosjean Pastor Maldonado
Manor Marussia F1 Team	Marussia-Ferrari	TBA	Ferrari 059/3	P	TBA TBA	Will Stevens TBA
McLaren Honda	McLaren-Honda	MP4-30	Honda RA615H Hybrid	P	14 22	Fernando Alonso Jenson Button
Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 Team	Mercedes	F1 W06 Hybrid	Mercedes PU106B Hybrid	P	6 44	Nico Rosberg Lewis Hamilton
Infiniti Red Bull Racing	Red Bull-Renault	RB11	Renault Energy F1-2015	P	3 26	Daniel Ricciardo Daniil Kvyat
Sauber F1 Team	Sauber-Ferrari	C34	Ferrari	P	9 12	Marcus Ericsson Felipe Nasr
Scuderia Toro Rosso	Toro Rosso-Renault	STR10	Renault Energy F1-2015	P	33 55	Max Verstappen Carlos Sainz Jr.
Williams Martini Racing	Williams-Mercedes	FW37	Mercedes PU106B Hybrid	P	19 77	Felipe Massa Valtteri Bottas
Source:

Of course, this is an extreme size change, but it's to troubleshoot things here. Does this make the problem worse, fix it, or make no difference whatsoever? Googol30 (talk) 23:42, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

Googol30, that makes the problem much worse. Here is a screenshot:

In case I hadn't made it clear yet, this is an issue that only occurs on the mobile version of the site. The only mobile browser I have thus far identified not to be affected by this issue is Firefox. All other mobile browser have this problem. I mostly use mobile Safari, but as said other mobile browsers are affected as well. Tvx1 00:37, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

References
References

Slow response and load time?

Has anyone else problems with very slow page loading of Wikipedia (and Commons) pages at the moment? I can easily get a cup of coffee, while a page loads. Other internet sites with lots of content work fine. My provider is O2 in Germany. Maybe some remaining problems from the server maintenance? GermanJoe (talk) 16:51, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

Never mind, apparently whining fixed the problem :). As of now the lag is gone. GermanJoe (talk) 17:26, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

I've also been experiencing unbearably slow load times over the past 1-3 days, and it's still ongoing. Hopefully my whining will fix it as well. --Bongwarrior (talk) 17:35, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

I've been having the same problem. I see a "Waiting for bits.wikimedia.org..." message for a ridiculously long time while the page is attempting to fully load. It's still there; I had time to draft, re-think, and re-draft this message in the meantime. 2602:306:8019:581F:C04A:172:4C19:B890 (talk) 14:51, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

It has been hit-or-miss for me. It was bad yesterday afternoon, fine last night, and bad again today. --Bongwarrior (talk) 20:40, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

I've pinged someone about this, but I hope it has resolved itself by now anyway. Thanks to those who posted their locations, ISPs and/or IP addresses. That is particularly helpful information for decoding these problems. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 05:04, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the report (and thanks for escalating it, Whatamidoing (WMF)). I don't see anything unusual in our front-end performance dashboards, which makes me think that these are most likely isolated cases. One thing you can do to help us troubleshoot this further is to try browsing the site in Privacy mode. This will have the effect of logging you out, which will tell us if MediaWiki might be having some specific problem rendering JavaScript for your account.

The reason this problem happens at all is something we have to fix. Our JavaScript is render-blocking by (bad) design. What this means is that we allow JavaScript code to modify the page before it is shown to the user. We do this by telling the browser not to render the page until some JavaScript code has executed.

We load JavaScript from an external domain, bits.wikimedia.org. Guess what happens when bits.wikimedia.org is unreachable for some reason? You guessed it: no one can see any content. This problem is called Frontend SPOF (hey, red link!) or "single point of failure" (because the failure of just bits.wikimedia.org is enough to effectively take all wikis down, as far as users are concerned). You can read more about this phenomenon in this blog post by Steve Souders.

I am hoping to have a fix for this sometime this coming quarter. (Making the JavaScript not block rendering is easy, but there are various extensions that depend on this behavior, and we need to go over each one and find a viable alternative on a case-by-case basis.) You can track progress at T95152. --Ori.livneh (talk) 06:11, 6 April 2015 (UTC) (wearing my Wikimedia Foundation hat).

Thanks to you and Whatamidoing and whoever else looked at this. I'm not sure if someone fixed it or if it fixed itself, but I haven't had any problems for a few days now. --Bongwarrior (talk) 01:46, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Date errors

There are two date errors (refs 122 and 127) in Endocrine disruptor due to missing days, i.e. only year and month is given. How can this be fixed without just inventing a day (e.g. by adding -01)? --Leyo 09:01, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

|date=2008-07 is not a supported date format, so you would have to use |date=July 2008, which would be consistent with a number of existing examples in the article. (By the way, Wikipedia:Help desk is better suited for usage questions like this.) ―Mandruss ☎ 09:17, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

OK, thanks. But is there a good reason why this format is not supported by the template? --Leyo 11:15, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

Because it's ambiguous. This was discussed at Help talk:CS1 errors and other places. --Redrose64 (talk) 11:26, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

What might it be confused with? The number of the week? I had a quick look at the archives but I couldn't find any mention. Alakzi (talk) 11:34, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

If a reader sees 2008-09, should they read it as September 2008 or 2008-2009? ―Mandruss ☎ 11:36, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

See Is YYYY-MM an acceptable date format? (Feb–Apr 2014). Warning: it's a deeply unsatisfying experience to read this RFC. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:12, 5 April 2015 (UTC)

@Mandruss: I see your point. But anyway, why doesn't Template:Cite web automatically convert e.g. 2008-09 to September 2008? That would be the easiest to read. --Leyo 19:18, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

@Leyo: Because the template wouldn't know if 2008-09 means September 2008 or 2008–2009. GoingBatty (talk) 23:31, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

But it doesn't do it with unambiguous dates such as 2009-03-14 either. That's what I don't understand.

BTW: commons:Template:Information converts e.g. | Date = 2008-09 to September 2008 (or in any other language). --Leyo 23:59, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

@Leyo: Are you saying you don't understand why Template:Cite web doesn't automatically convert to another format? YYYY-MM-DD is a perfectly acceptable format, so it doesn't need to be converted. GoingBatty (talk) 01:17, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Also, how would the citation template know whether to output "14 March 2009" or "March 14, 2009"? --Redrose64 (talk) 16:49, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

VisualEditor News #2—2015

Did you know?

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The user guide has more information about how to use VisualEditor.

Since the last newsletter, the Editing Team has fixed many bugs and worked on VisualEditor's performance, the Citoid reference service, and support for languages with complex input requirements. Status reports are posted on Mediawiki.org. The worklist for April through June is available in Phabricator.

The weekly task triage meetings continue to be open to volunteers, each Wednesday at 11:00 (noon) PDT (18:00 UTC). You do not need to attend the meeting to nominate a bug for consideration as a Q4 blocker. Instead, go to Phabricator and "associate" the Editing team's Q4 blocker project with the bug. Learn how to join the meetings and how to nominate bugs at mw:Talk:VisualEditor/Portal.

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Looking ahead

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-Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk), 17:50, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

The template data editor used to be intuitive about 3 or 4 months ago, since that time it deteriorates towards total unusability. –Be..anyone (talk) 22:30, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

I haven't tried to do anything signifiamt with it for weeks. What would you like to see changed/fixed/un-broken? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 05:09, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

Elevation at any given point on Earth

Hi. As you might know, Google has a somewhat accurate database of the elevation at any given point on Earth. There are also many sites online that uses this database, to derive the elevation, when presented with coordinates or other location input. Can this feature be made available to Wikipedia? Or is such a feature already existing here? For example, as an option, can the widely used coordinates template also be made to output the elevation of the given area? Ping: Magnus Manske, Kolossos. Thanks, Rehman 05:31, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

Or possibly an enhancement to GeoHack, so you don't get the added overhead unless the reader clicks on the coords? ―Mandruss ☎ 05:51, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

It would be good to have the elevation displayed in infoboxes, so having the feature just in GeoHack doesn't seem optimal. One fairly easy way to make these elevations available in articles would be to use a bot to add them to Wikidata, for all Wikidata entities that have coordinates. Perhaps better would be to do it on Wikidata through an extension that caches the data, so that it doesn't require actual bot edits for the system to work, but doesn't require looking up the data from Google every time the page is parsed. I'm not sure how difficult writing such an extension would be, however. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 12:32, 5 April 2015 (UTC)

It'll be possible to do this easily in Wikidata once we have support for units. This is being worked on by the development team right now but will still take a bit. If you want to track progress you can follow phabricator:T77977. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 11:00, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

Gif issue

• Hi everyone. Going through our backlog of FPs that haven't been on the main page yet, I came across File:Shallow water waves.gif. However, at Template:POTD/2015-05-03 it is not displaying. Is this fixable? — Crisco 1492 (talk) 07:03, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

Armbrust fixed it by allowing the image to keep its original size, adding an edit description of "fix, it looks like image isn't rescalable". Actually, the image itself *is* resizable (i just checked at w3schools), but wikimedia's mechanism of sizing images (using cached versions for specific w+h combinations) isn't working in this case. -- Jokes_Free4Me (talk) 11:23, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

• That's... odd. Is it fixable? — Crisco 1492 (talk) 05:53, 5 April 2015 (UTC)

If you open the actual failed thumbnail, it reports error 137, which usually means it took longer than 15 seconds to finish resizing the image (it has 300 frames...). So reduce frames, reduce w x h, or turn it into an actual movie instead of a GIF. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:53, 5 April 2015 (UTC)

• Not sure that's the right link; elves? Anyways, it appears the only solutions to that are all things that a) I could not do myself and b) would end up causing the current FP to be delisted / replaced, so I guess the "no downsampling" trick is it for this and other gifs in the future. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 23:45, 5 April 2015 (UTC)

No idea why DJ linked to T5258, but i found out that 137 = Out of memory. Beats me why they can't actually include this explanation in the error page. :-?? -- Jokes_Free4Me (talk) 00:32, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

He may have meant phabricator:T84842, phabricator:T72296, or phabricator:T25063 (still open and filed by him, so probably likeliest), from a quick search. --MZMcBride (talk) 16:41, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Stats.grok broken again

I think I should let the teccies here know thst the stats tool is broken again. It has failed to capture the stats for 1 April which of course was AFD, which means that the DYK stats for that day cannot be added to the statistics page. Can someone fix this please? The C of E God Save the Queen! (talk) 12:10, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

• Wikiviewstats is likewise down. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 05:54, 5 April 2015 (UTC)
• I believe that the best way to report this is to send e-mail to this mailing list about analytics. Stats.grok.se's owner is reportedlty subscribed to the mailing list. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 05:15, 6 April 2015 (UTC)
  • Now it appears to have stopped working altogether. It appears to have stopped capturing data after 3 April. This is a bit of a problem. The C of E God Save the Queen! (talk) 09:09, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

stats.grok.se not working

I can't get the last 3 days page views on any article? Is anybody else aware of a problem here? Nathan121212 (talk) 11:28, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Guide for editors to deal with mobile version functionality?

I'm having trouble finding a guide for editors to the current function differences in the mobile version. Basically an explanation of what the mobile version does with wikicode that is different from what the desktop version does with it, a catalog of what features don't presently work in the mobile version (navigation templates and certain table formatting are two that I've found on my own), and tips for editors to work around these to maximize page compatibility or at least flag a page as better viewed through the desktop version. However, I can find no relevant link from Help:Mobile access (not even an acknowledgment there that pages may render differently, let alone how to deal with it) and searching is proving impossible given the "mobile view" link that appears at the bottom of every page. postdlf (talk) 15:18, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

The "Mobile view" link may make it hard to search with external search engines like Google but our own search engine ignores the interface messages. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:06, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

That's good to know, but not proving helpful here. Maybe it's on meta somewhere? postdlf (talk) 22:31, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

Thats an interesting question Postdlf. The Mobile web page on Mediawiki, explains some concepts around MobileFrontend, and how the mobile web experience works. You can also test new features on beta mode, which you can enable from settings. Through testing, and with hints from mobile users like yourself, we are able to work on enhancing functionalities, something which is usually updated; where a catalogue might not be efficient for a long term. In addition, eventually the target is to have a mobile experience that is comfortable enough for mobile use. Maybe, instead of flagging for "best viewed on mobile" we can use phabricator, to report issues on mobile to help enhance it. What device and browser do you normally use? Thanks for the interesting question :-) --Melamrawy (WMF) (talk) 00:01, 5 April 2015 (UTC)

Given that the mobile version is, what, six years old now? And there are still common page elements that don't work... So I'm very unclear on what you're considering the "long term" to be here. I don't even have any way of knowing what's a feature and what's a bug because I don't know what choices have been made about what specific code to support or not or how to process it. We should have a summary from the developers of 1) features that have been deliberately omitted that will never be included, 2) features that developers intend to include but have not yet, and 3) features that are supposed to be already working but aren't because of known bugs that have not yet been corrected. Without that, WP editors have no way of maximizing a page's functionality and visibility of all its elements regardless of whether it's viewed through the mobile or desktop version other than through trial and error. We should have that support. postdlf (talk) 15:47, 5 April 2015 (UTC)

This is just of the top of my head. Feel free to put it somewhere for further refinement
What doesn't work on purpose right now and probably will never work

• User and site javascript

What doesn't work, because it requires another form of interacting with the page

• navboxes
• Section level maintenance templates
• Page title coordinates (phab:T91481)
• Page top emblems like FA, GA etc

What works badly due to requiring different way to interact with pages

• Very large tables
• File pages

What doesn't work due to technical challenges

• Some audio and video embedding
• Deprecated HTML style attributes like border, bgcolor on tables etc
• Hundreds of templates that simply never considered the fact that they would have to work on a small screen

—TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:39, 5 April 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, TheDJ. It's shocking to me that the developers apparently have never put this together and don't seem to even think it would even be useful, let alone necessary.

So we should be using CSS attributes in tables rather than html, to ensure greater compatibility with the mobile version? Though I've seen that not all CSS parameters seem to work either, nor does the sortable table class.

And why are navboxes special? The mobile version doesn't ignore all templates, so what's different about navbox code?

How do we determine what wikicode in a page loads depending on whether it's being processed through the desktop or mobile version? postdlf (talk) 16:12, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

Based on this, I believe that you'll want to ask User:Edokter your questions about navboxes. Even if there were no technical difficulties, the value might be limited. Take a look at these navboxes. On my laptop, the first navbox-with-children set fills a full screen. Imagine that it were constrained to a smartphone. How long would it take to scroll through it (assuming that Module:Navbox were re-written to make it wrap onto a small screen in the first place)? Do you realistically think that you would be able to find what you wanted? (I'm not convinced that navboxes are used much by non-editing readers anyway. Perhaps someday, someone will track the links and let us know.)

Also, it's probably "thousands" rather than "hundreds" of templates that need to be redesigned. Many of them are visible, but awkward. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:57, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

We don't want to gut or abandon features we rely upon in the desktop version just to make the mobile version easier to deal with. But assuming you have a point about navboxes being far less practical when viewed on a small screen, it seems that there are work-arounds we could be using right now to both make them visible in the mobile version and make them less unwieldy, by coding in alternate mobile versions of navbox templates that don't use {{Navbox}} (if compatibility issues with that master template's CSS is the problem), and that have fewer, higher priority links so as to take up less viewing space (though defaulting to collapsed would also help with that). But as I mentioned above, I don't know how to make different versions of a page load depending on desktop/mobile version viewing.

That there are thousands of templates that need to be redesigned is a rather compelling reason for the overview I was asking for on how to make wikicode mobile version-compatible, based on the current state of the mobile version's functionality. postdlf (talk) 17:30, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

I agree that a significant amount of work needs to be done. I have suggested before that the WMF coordinate a program similar to the structured data cleanup work at Commons, so that problems can be identified, tracked, and fixed by community members. I don't know if it will happen, but if you have any ideas about what kind of support it would take (maybe a class on when and how to use CSS?), then please feel free to ping me.

I'm not sure that I agree that many non-editing readers actually rely upon navboxes. I'd like to see some evidence that a lot of people scroll to the end of pages (kind of unlikely: a lot of people read just the lead) and click on a collapsed box (unlikely) and find what they want there (possible, but only if you make it that far). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:52, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

"It's shocking to me that the developers apparently have never put this together": It's not been really asked for before. And it is constantly changing as well. Also the average user cannot really fix it anyway.

"So we should be using CSS attributes in tables rather than html [...] not all CSS parameters seem to work either, nor does the sortable table class", no because, because you should be using CSS declarations instead of deprecated HTML attributes and a sortable table isn't a CSS class (classes are HTML, which can be referenced in CSS rules). But that has nothing to do with mobile, you should be doing that anyway, it's just even more broken on mobile. No for mobile you should be using CSS rules and CSS statements in style blocks, but you cannot, because it isn't possible with wikicode yet. And this paragraph shows why the average users shouldn't care. It's too difficult to get all this right, without turning everyone into a web and/or PHP developer and large parts of it are simply not fixable yet. Work on it if you are capable of it, or trust that other people will fix it eventually.

"And why are navboxes special?", Well, first; they aren't really content. They are a really verbose, structured form of navigation for related content. Written in an unstructured technology, in a style that won't fit (technically and editorially) a small screen. Anyone with a little bit of UI design insight will see that it is hopelessly broken (even barely usable for desktop in my opinion). It's not directly fixable, because it's basically the completely wrong system authored in the complete wrong technology. Any slightly better system you will make, is still using the wrong technology.

Anyway, the majority of remaining problems require fundamental changes to the foundations of the wiki, which are being worked on, but simply happen VERY slowly (lest we have a user revolt because some template suddenly starts adding 1 space char extra on desktop or because some form of interactivity is considered to be too 'Facebooky'). This is also why it's not that easy for editors to help with this. It's not hopeless, we are making new technology like WikiData, Lua, MMV and even VE that are making changes to the foundations that at some point will enable us to close the gap, but it's slow none the less (and often unpopular, because it is change). As a mobile developer myself (and one that even worked on the first mobile web version of English Wikipedia) I'm really freaking impressed what they have been able to do so far with the mess that is Wikipedia and wikicode. it just requires a few more years to really get there, because our sites are simply put very unique. And spray painting race stripes on the car simply won't make it a Nascar, no matter how many people think that all that is missing is the race stripes. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:00, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

Probably good advice. Other than when I've occasionally been involuntarily redirected to the mobile version when using my iPad (which is really annoying, particularly when you've manually typed in the URL), I've completely ignored it up until a couple days ago when I happened to see my wife looking at a particular article on her phone and I had to wonder "where the hell's the rest of the content?" I'm happy to go back to pretending the mobile version doesn't exist if the support just isn't there for me to do otherwise. postdlf (talk) 20:07, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

• @TheDJ: Actually, i would agree that it is getting "too 'Facebooky'"... And how exactly does a new threading mechanism (or even two different ones) help with improving the handling of CSS, or with prototyping better ways for the presentation of content? But when the editors are asking for a road-plan, so they know not to focus on stuff that will get deprecated, then i believe you should no longer insist that "it's not that easy for editors to help with this" -- they're not asking for ways to help with foundations, but for details on what will those foundations support. -- Jokes_Free4Me (talk) 20:34, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

What you are saying is: "How does landing a man on the moon help me ? I just want a non sticky pan and you are building a rocket." Which is fine. It just doesn't mean that the developers can promise recognizing the qualities of teflon and marketing it to a popular markt, before they have flown a rocket. Cleanup is gradual, don't focus on the specifics. If it is REALLY problematic, then at some point we will automate something to solve it or change the software, and maybe we will ask for assistance with volunteers. It's like consists of vs composed of" an endless task, because the majority of people simply won't know, no matter how much time you spend trying to correct or educate them. That doesn't make it a useless task or a pointless task, but it does mean you have to know what you are doing and not just randomly replace stuff with a designated alternative. That might be worse than leaving the old stuff in. The web standard has become a living standard for a reason. Conformity to set rules was breaking it more than non conforming is pushing it forward to not being broken. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:52, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Mobile editor is pretty much useless when it comes down to it. Where is the Undo button?!!! Why are talk pages so damn hidden? Where is the user talk page button? Why aren't you sent direct to the user page? Why are users contributions so hidden? And the watch list is super confusing, just make it more like the desktop version... EoRdE6^{(Come Talk to Me!)} 17:51, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

I believe the answer to your question about the Undo button is "in same place that it's in the desktop site: in your browser". VisualEditor (available as a Mobile Beta feature) has an undo button, but the wikitext editor does not. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:52, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

So one last comment: This is basically much like WP:PERF. Don't worry about it, but don't do stupid things; Get involved if you really want to help out and aren't interested in writing articles anymore, because it will consume you :) —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 17:30, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

TheDJ, this is an almost shockingly optimistic view of what it's like to work with the Wikimedia Foundation mobile team.

In my experience, any change to the mobile interface (MobileFrontend) is nearly impossible. The extension is a scope-creep abomination that's closely guarded by a small cabal that's insistent on ensuring that mobile users are treated as second-class citizens, with a hobbled interface and missing content. Instead of acting as a mobile front-end, the extension tries to implement myriad unrelated functionality as a means of bypassing community consultation and scrutiny. Instead of falling back to the working desktop site, the interface often just pretends as though the user's request is insane (why would a user ever want to visit a talk page or view category links?!).

Of course, the mobile team has "easy" answers to these issues such as completely re-implementing the idea of groups of pages (Gather), never mind that the we already have watchlists, categories, and even a very similar extension called Collection. Or when looking at the site-wide set of permissions we have that control who can edit pages (cf. Special:ListGroupRights), the mobile team has no issue (re-)inventing its own separate permissions system in order to bypass the standard system and enforce a view that every user must log in to be able to edit. These parts of the design philosophy of the mobile front-end are completely contrary to Wikimedia's values. And the mobile team is quickly accumulating technical debt that we'll someday be forced to mop up.

All of this has been pointed out repeatedly, and in some ways, it's difficult to blame the mobile team for taking advantage of its lack of oversight. In my opinion, both the Wikimedia community and people like Erik at the Wikimedia Foundation really need to step up and join others in saying that the current behavior of the mobile team is harmful and unacceptable to Wikimedia. (cc: postdlf) --MZMcBride (talk) 14:10, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Synonyms Available in Wikipedia

[copied post removed] — Preceding unsigned comment added by Shanus444 (talk • contribs) 08:55, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

This was also posted to Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)#Synonyms Available in Wikipedia. Please only start a discussion in one place. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:21, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

Revdel reason length limitations

The "other/additional reason" textfield accepts only 100 characters on the admin revdel interface, however the field in the database where the reason ends up can accommodate 255 bytes. Is this a deliberate design decision or a bug? MER-C 13:16, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

Tech News: 2015-15

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

Recent changes

• You can join a new email list for important news about Wikimedia Labs. [1]
• You can read the last monthly report. In the future you can read team reports every three months. You can see current work on the roadmap. [2] [3]
• The number of articles in Special:Statistics is now updated once a month. [4]
• You can use a new version of the Wikipedia app for Android. Using the app, you can now share a fact with your friends. [5]

Problems

• The import tool was broken for a few days. Imports didn't add log entries. You can delete and import pages again if necessary. [6]
• Labs was broken several times this week. [7] [8] [9] [10]

Changes this week

• The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since April 1. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from April 7. It will be on all Wikipedias from April 8 (calendar).
• You can now add the same special characters with VisualEditor as with the wikitext editor. [11]
• Many bugs around copy-paste in VisualEditor are now fixed. [12] [13]
• You can now use basic tools of VisualEditor in the new talk tool. You can add links, bold and italics. You can also mention people. [14]

Meetings

• You can join the next weekly meeting with the Editing team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on April 8 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• You can again comment on how you want to see Wikidata edits in your watchlist on other wikis. [15]

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

15:42, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

Ogg file stuttering

Someone left a message on my talk page suggesting that several of the audio files I had uploaded were stuttering, and are sometimes truncated, proposing that I add 0.5-1s to both the beginning and the end of the file. Beyond the fact that many of these files are pronunciations are are only about 1s long total, this seems like a kludge. It seems to me that the right solution would be to either improve the load behavior of the file so that the stuttering and truncation don't happen at all or, if we're sticking with the kludge - have the silence added server-side with the canonical version preserved, so that it can all be removed at once if the problem is fixed in the future. If this is the wrong forum, I apologize, let me know where to take this. 0x0077BE ^{(talk · contrib)} 21:25, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

To some degree, yes this is a thing. It takes a bit of time for the decoder to start up, especially with such a fuzzy codec as Vorbis is. If your computer is slow, and the player is badly written, it will probably be a lot worse even. The cutting off is also something that happens with badly authored players. The wikimedia player is TMH, and it is actually a JS wrapper around an assortment of potential playback engines, so figuring out what Quicksilver was using will be important to seeing where the actual player issue is located. Then you also have to consider that the audio chip (with energy saving these days) needs to start up and shutdown, and perhaps even an external amplifier. All having been primarily designed to playback continuous audio, not 1 second fragments. So yes, as a general rule: The landscape of playback technology is bad, and you probably shouldn't rely too much on the first 300ms and the last 300ms (300ms being more or less the time it takes to start or stop and the action actually materializing in audio signal) being present. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 17:39, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

I'm using primarily Mozilla SeaMonkey on Linux. I'm not sure how my installation of SeaMonkey produces sounds from all Web sources, although I know that it uses the VLC plugin for some, which is fairly lame compared to the sound support one finds in Microsoft Windows or on Mac OSX. It's an HTML5-capable browser, and it seems to reproduce HTML5 AV content flawlessly, but it has difficulty with the startup of short OGG audio files on Wikimedia. Others have commented on the ends of short audio clips being truncated with Mozilla Firefox, without specifying their operating system or hardware, though I don't recall seeing that problem with SeaMonkey. Since the combinations of hardware, operating systems, browsers and AV plugins is vast, my thought is that we can't optimise for all of them, but by padding audio files with 500 ms to 1000 ms of silence at both ends, we can at least give most site visitors a good chance at a better experience. — Quicksilver^{T @} 18:13, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

@ Quicksilver, when you click on the player's "Menu" option, then go to the gears and click that, it will show you what kind of playback technology it is using. For native Mozilla on linux, I would suspect is should be able to use Native HTML5, which is probably the best option if it is available. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:49, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

My concern here is that the padding of silences breaks the abstraction of the file itself - taking as an example the pronunciation of the word bream, the "actual" data is the part where the word is being spoken, and nothing external will change that. The purpose of the prepended and appended silences is an implementation detail that overcomes the limitations of various players. Since these two things are orthogonal, it would be better not to tie them to one another by modifying the canonical representation of the files themselves. If, until players improve, it is necessary to prepend and append silence, I think maybe it's preferable to do so server-side if possible. Of course, if this is not practical for some reason, a bot can probably be created that pads silences in audio files, but again it doesn't seem like the right design, conceptually. 0x0077BE ^{(talk · contrib)} 12:08, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

Vital articles link in the Recent changes

I have proposed it here: MediaWiki talk:Recentchangestext#Vital articles link. Any comments welcome. -Ugog Nizdast (talk) 00:22, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Unknown, pervasive, unstable bug with editing

Some of the time when I start to edit source I am not able to use the up or down keys (and only the up or down keys)—pressing them does nothing. No reaction. Other times this is not the case and they work as expected. I have no idea what is causing this issue and it is disturbing me greatly. Any ideas? (and, no, it's not the keyboard). ResMar 00:55, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

(if it's worth anything the keys appear to always work 100% when I create a new section). ResMar 00:58, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Which browser and operating system is this about? Also wondering if browser plugins or add-ons come into play here - trying without them and with a fresh profile might be worth a shot. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 13:21, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

@AKlapper (WMF): I cleaned my user-scripts, saved, exited Firefox, restarted, tested. Everything worked fine. Ok, I thought, so it must be one of the user-scripts. I started adding them back again and, lo and behold, after adding all of them back one-by-one the issue...failed to re-appear. I'm still at a loss for what the problem was, but I've not experienced it since. Very, very strange. Probably not actionable, unfortunately. I'll let you know if it comes back up. ResMar 18:35, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

the source of the issue is the "autocomplete" gadget from hewiki (which you never brought back - hence the disappearance of the issue... the comment in your vector.js says "doesn't seem to work" - i can attest that it *does* work on enwiki). personally, i think this annoyance is fair price to pay for this super-useful gadget (basically, it detects when you enter [[ or {‎{ and then it autocompletes the ‏‎‎article name of template name as you type, in a little drop-down box that appears on the far end of the editing window). there is a workaround: once the cursor get "stuck", hit escape once to "unstick" it. admittedly it's an annoyance, but IMO the benefit of the gadget far outweigh it. peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 20:40, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

What happened to the UNDO feature?!?

I mean, what's the deal with all those unneeded nbsp's? -- Jokes_Free4Me (talk) 00:56, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Let's start with pinging @Whatamidoing (WMF) and TheDJ: and work from there. I bet one of them can either puzzle it out or bug some more techy people. --Izno (talk) 02:37, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

More likely some browser extension that the user is using that is mangling the textarea. Remember, undo is nothing more than, 'load a previous old version in the current edit screen'. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:30, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Probably. Also, it's likely that the user is on a Windows box. Macs seem to provide better support for these things. How the non-breaking spaces get added (I assume that they are present) is probably due to sloppy typing on my part: option-space (the Mac command) is easy and the difference isn't visible. Why they get converted, rather than left alone, by subsequent editors, is beyond me.

I occasionally see the same thing when User:Doc James edits a talk page. If he and Ugog Nizdast have the same browser/OS/extensions/whatever, then we might be able to narrow down the list of possible causes. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:59, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

I had no idea I did this. Let me try to recall what happened that day. I use Firefox and of late, it has been giving trouble only on Wikipedia by taking almost forever to load. I think that's what happened regarding my double post. I don't know if that has anything with my preceding undo action though. I checked all my recent undos and no sign of this problem.

The only extension I have is this recently-installed "Wikipedia references creator" which I never tried out; I've just disabled to see if it helps my loading problem. My OS is Gentoo by the way. -Ugog Nizdast (talk) 08:42, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

• While not identical, I'll note there was a similar report of something funky going on over at User talk:Jackmcbarn/editProtectedHelper#Changing from hex to rgb in signatures? where syntax was being changed. It was assumed based on the information we could gather that there was something funky going on with Parsoid, and I'm not sure if the same thing happened here or not but it would probably be a good idea for someone (TheDJ—Whatamidoing (WMF)—Jackmcbarn—Legoktm) to look into it. At least that is my take on it, opinions of others may vary and one of those people I pinged might know the answer without digging too much. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 12:46, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Article disappeared without being deleted

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T92046

I went to update Na dialect, and when I hit 'save', I got a message that revision #0 does not exist. I checked the deletion log, and there's no listing. Could someone restore it, please? — kwami (talk) 01:06, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

•  Done; reverting yourself twice resets the page and fixes the error. — Crisco 1492 (talk) 01:08, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

@Kwamikagami and Crisco 1492: (edit conflict) This appears to have just occurred on all pages. Script error of some sort, lasting for about 15 seconds. Very brief, however. Someone might have pushed a bad commit at WMF HQ or something. ResMar 01:09, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Weird. Thanks! — kwami (talk) 01:09, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

I've had this happen a few times; a WP:NULLEDIT cleared it. Alakzi (talk) 01:10, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

It was discusssed at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 135#Weird deletion display error. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:15, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Interesting. They better fix it. This has the potential to cause great damage. ResMar 01:39, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

The error message is MediaWiki:Missing-revision which has made false claims for weeks in most cases. It seems time we change it to say something like "This page could not be generated, probably due to a server problem. Clicking may fix it." If we only do it when $1 is 0 then I guess there will be very few cases where the original message was right. We can change it back when the bug is fixed. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:03, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Some debug code has been added to the live website to figure out what is causing this. Please do keep reporting such issues with as accurate a time as possible —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:26, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

The search "This is usually caused by following" currently reports these 17 mainspace cases listed with UTC times:

17 cases of error

Astronomical catalog of the page named "Astronomical catalog" does not exist. This is usually caused by following an outdated history link to a page that has been deleted 5 KB (37 words) - 22:40, 29 March 2015 Leo Gregory revision #0 of the page named "Leo Gregory" does not exist. This is usually caused by following an outdated history link to a page that has been deleted 4 KB (37 words) - 01:01, 30 March 2015 Cork Airport revision #0 of the page named "Cork Airport" does not exist. This is usually caused by following an outdated history link to a page that has been deleted 31 KB (37 words) - 19:53, 6 April 2015 DuBois, Pennsylvania of the page named "DuBois, Pennsylvania" does not exist. This is usually caused by following an outdated history link to a page that has been deleted 21 KB (37 words) - 00:55, 7 April 2015 Denville Township, New Jersey page named "Denville Township, New Jersey" does not exist. This is usually caused by following an outdated history link to a page that has been deleted 44 KB (39 words) - 00:19, 3 April 2015 Grid The revision #0 of the page named "Grid" does not exist. This is usually caused by following an outdated history link to a page that has been deleted 4 KB (36 words) - 01:01, 6 April 2015 History of Nickelodeon the page named "History of Nickelodeon" does not exist. This is usually caused by following an outdated history link to a page that has been deleted 33 KB (38 words) - 19:34, 29 March 2015 Peking Union Medical College page named "Peking Union Medical College" does not exist. This is usually caused by following an outdated history link to a page that has been deleted 6 KB (39 words) - 01:01, 6 April 2015 Thighmaster revision #0 of the page named "Thighmaster" does not exist. This is usually caused by following an outdated history link to a page that has been deleted 3 KB (36 words) - 19:00, 6 April 2015 The Breakfast Club (radio show) named "The Breakfast Club (radio show)" does not exist. This is usually caused by following an outdated history link to a page that has been deleted 4 KB (40 words) - 01:01, 6 April 2015 Michael J. Tyler #0 of the page named "Michael J. Tyler" does not exist. This is usually caused by following an outdated history link to a page that has been deleted 11 KB (38 words) - 01:41, 3 April 2015 Scott Arnold revision #0 of the page named "Scott Arnold" does not exist. This is usually caused by following an outdated history link to a page that has been deleted 422 B (37 words) - 19:46, 29 March 2015 Terrorism in Yemen #0 of the page named "Terrorism in Yemen" does not exist. This is usually caused by following an outdated history link to a page that has been deleted 29 KB (38 words) - 01:01, 4 April 2015 Timarcha lugens revision #0 of the page named "Timarcha lugens" does not exist. This is usually caused by following an outdated history link to a page that has been deleted 7 KB (37 words) - 19:47, 31 March 2015 Pseudomugil paskai #0 of the page named "Paska's blue-eye" does not exist. This is usually caused by following an outdated history link to a page that has been deleted 901 B (38 words) - 22:01, 27 March 2015 Ministry of Transport of the page named "Ministry of Transport" does not exist. This is usually caused by following an outdated history link to a page that has been deleted 19 KB (38 words) - 01:01, 6 April 2015 List of schools in Honduras page named "List of schools in Honduras" does not exist. This is usually caused by following an outdated history link to a page that has been deleted 540 B (40 words) - 01:01, 4 April 2015

Some of them don't currently display the error message. Others may be missing from the search results. Google found List of entertainers who died during a performance where I see the error now, but it's not in the above search. If you want to track current cases then you could add a tracking category to MediaWiki:Missing-revision. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:13, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

15 seconds? A few hours later and it is still displaying the error message on the article you've suggested. When I originally reported Forever, no edits were made and it sorted itself out on its own. Is it just a bug or something else? Simply south ...... time, deparment skies for just 9 years 13:36, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia Server Clock

DST for Europe occurred on Sunday, March 29, but it looks like the Wikipedia server clock has yet to be adjusted. It is currently 9:34 PM here, and they're eight hours ahead of me when both them and the US are in or out of DST, which means it's 5:34 AM for them, but the server clock is saying 4:34 AM. - Amaury (talk) 04:34, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Test edit Nakon 04:39, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Isn't the server time in UTC? If so, it is correct. Regards, Orange Suede Sofa (talk) 04:42, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

The server clock is always in UTC, which doesn't observe daylight savings —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:31, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Consider also, that if the Wikipedia clock did observe daylight saving, somebody would need to decide which hemisphere it should follow, and on which weekend it would change. In Europe, when clocks go forward by one hour, they stay the same in Australia; but a week or two later, they go back. Six or so months later, the Australian clocks go forward, and three or four weeks after that the European clocks go back. This means that at the start or end of the year, when it is 12:00 noon in London, it is 23:00 in Melbourne, Vic - that is, they are 11 hours different; and in mid-year, when it is 13:00 in London, it is 22:00 in Melbourne - 9 hours different. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:11, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Not to mention the havoc it would wreak on edit histories. –xeno^talk 18:56, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Though if he likes that he could set personal preferences to display local time. But that is so confusing I think it ought to be not allowed. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:52, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Idea

I am not sure but somebody would have already asked it.
Can there something be done to Teahouse so that unanswered questions have some notice (either in bold or a tag on it like {{unanswered}}) for those questions which has not been answered yet?
Sometimes, I see some user's question goes down (under other questions:) and other were actually answered quickly but not his/her
aGastya  ✉ let's have a constructive talk about it (: 05:01, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Try WP:BOTREQ —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:32, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Have you discussed it at WT:Teahouse to see if there is any support for the idea or whether it has been discussed previously? Nthep (talk) 12:19, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

@Nthep: Yes I had asked it over there, but no answer!
aGastya  ✉ let's have a constructive talk about it (: 15:03, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Previously posted at Wikipedia talk:Teahouse#Idea, subsequently posted at Wikipedia:Bot requests#Unanswered questions, please see WP:MULTI. --Redrose64 (talk) 08:23, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

Associated namespace

For about three years now, Special:Watchlist has had an "Associated namespace" checkbox which means that if you have selected e.g. Template namespace, it will also display changes in Template talk: namespace. The URL query string parameter for Template namespace is namespace=10 but what is the additional parameter for "Associated namespace" being selected? When I select it manually and click Go, the entire URL is reduced to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Watchlist (I guess it's now using POST instead of GET) which is not just useless for bookmarking, but Firefox periodically complains "Document expired" and I need to go through all the selections again. --Redrose64 (talk) 08:46, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Watchlist?namespace=10&associated=0 vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Watchlist?namespace=10&associated=1 —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:23, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

best professional mediawiki skin?

Hello, I want to create a wiki for my lawfirm. Looking for a skin that:

1. looks very professional, (think http://www.bsp.lu/) but is
2. widely used enough that I can get support with the skin if needed.
3. also I would like drop down menus, also like http://www.bsp.lu/

Thank you. Twolegalsystems (talk) 13:37, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

I would recommend to take a look at mediawikibootstrapskin.co.uk, they have Bootstrap based skins there and you should be able to get support and customization for these. --Sitic (talk) 19:50, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Issues with maths font

Hey all, just passing this on. I can pass on a screenshot if you need it (for agents – Ticket:2015040310016461) For OTRS, Mdann52 (talk) 16:36, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

I am a visually impaired person who uses 'High Contrast Black' for my Windows colour scheme. I have no choice but to use this scheme if I am to be able to read text on my computer.

My problem is certain types of text being used by some articles. An example of this problem is contained on the following page:

Single transferable vote#Voting

The example of text I want to take issue with is reached by first clicking on item 3: Voting, then read down to the heading 'Counting The Votes; Setting the quota'. The actual text immediately follows the words '...given by the formula' and immediately before the words '...where the quota is an integer'.

I'd tell you what the text says, except I can't actually read it because it shows under Windows 'High Contrast Black' as just a mess.

I saw exactly the same problem on a page entitled 'Net migration' where all the formula's were written in the same type of text.

I can't, to my knowledge, change anything on your page to correct this. I certainly can't change my colour scheme. This is something that only Wikipaedia can correct, but how you do that is down to you guys. One thing is for sure, as it stands, I am being excluded from the information contained in this type of text, and I have no idea how widespread across your site this is occurring. I've never seen it before, so it must a fairly recent introduction.

Yes this is a problem with math. Unfortunately math is still not a first class citizen on the web. We have made some progress in this regard, but for many platforms it is still sub-par. I have no problems with the "invert colors" option of my Mac however. (not sure how high contrast black works on Windows). I've send you a mail to forward the results to me, perhaps I can help out finding a workaround for the user by setting a different mathjax option or something in his preferences. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 17:46, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

@TheDJ: I've already mentioned this to them, they said that maybe we should consider changing the default. I'll check with them they are happy for me to pass it on to you - just something I need to do with regards to all OTRS communications, as they are covered by the non-public data policy, I cannot pass them on unless they consent to me doing so. Mdann52 (talk) 18:33, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

We are not ready to switch the default yet. We can't break 10% of math for the sake of the 0.5 % of people who have trouble reading that math. If we did that for every accessibility problem, the website would become unreadable unfortunately :( We are looking into 'accessibility' preferences that can also be used by anonymous users. But it's a side project by a few people who are interested in such problems. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:40, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

New editing option?

On the editing screen, I suddenly saw a "Citations" option next to "Show changes"! What's going on? Is it a new feature? Or is it just me? Or what? --Mr. Guye (talk) 23:41, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

I still see "Cancel" next to "Show changes". Is this reproducible, i.e. consistent? ―Mandruss ☎ 04:19, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

It's made by enabling "Citation expander" under the Editing heading at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:11, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

Scrolling disabled for iOS

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T95465

I have encountered this problem for for maybe two weeks now, possibly more. I am unable to scroll while editing on the Wikipedia mobile site on iPhone, iOS 8.2. Does it have something with technical problems or it is my mobile? Callmemirela (talk) 04:05, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

I just tried it and encountered the same problem. This is apparently something to do with the most recent version of iOS Safari. Scrolling works when editing with iOS Chrome or the Wikipedia app, but not with Safari. Scrolling while editing in the desktop view works just fine in iOS Safari, on the other hand. For another twist, this affects both Safari and Chrome on an iPad. ​—DoRD (talk)​ 17:53, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

@Callmemirela: Bug report filed. ​—DoRD (talk)​ 19:20, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

Edit counters that works ?

Can anyone tell me if there are any global edit counters who works. Most of them seams to be out of order.--85.166.159.202 (talk) 04:10, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

This tool should be what you're looking for (and it seems to be working all right for me). ~SuperHamster Talk Contribs 04:13, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

Is there really some other global edit counters? --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 19:19, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

There used to be loads, but they were all on Toolserver, which died last June. AFAIK the XTools one (linked at the bottom of your contribs as "Edit counter") is the only other one which got ported to ToolLabs. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:45, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

I was talking about the global ones. I know there was (is?) plenty of edit counters for edits made in local Wikipedia (like this one and this one). --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 20:14, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

The XTools one is global. Here are your counts for Croatian Wikipedia; Estonian Wikipedia; Latvian Wikipedia; Russian Wikipedia; Meta; Wikidata. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:06, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

Well don't look at stats.grok.se, it's been broken since 3 April and no-one has fixed it. The C of E God Save the Queen! (talk) 22:21, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

We had different opinion what is global. I though that global means one page, where is every Wikipedia, but you - one tool, which can be used for every project. Ok, nevermind :) --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 06:27, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

• Edgars2007, as a maintainer for xTools, I need to ask what you mean by all stats on one page. Do you mean have one really long page which lists all wikis (there are 720 last I checked) or do you want a combined total on one page as if it was a separate wiki? The later could probably be done, if there was enough of a demand for it. I'll note that it would be an extensive amount of processing to do it, so there would have to be a discussion between myself and the other maintainers to see what level of community request we would need to attempt to undertake that task. Give me a couple weeks (let's say by May 1st) and I'll create WP:XTOOLS to describe the existing tools and then you can start a discussion on the talk page for that page and we can take it from there. Thanks for your suggestion. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 12:39, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Technical 13, you misunderstood me. I am satisfied with xTools. Everything is fine. But I had some ideas about it last summer, if you're interested in them I could tell them to you (if i've not forgotten them). Actually, I would be more interested in this one :) --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 10:49, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

I use any of these three: Meta Wiki, Tool Labs (Quentinv), Tool Labs (GUC) that work pretty well, and the first one never goes down (it can't). EoRdE6^{(Come Talk to Me!)} 22:26, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

New article template

I don't know if this is the place to ask this question or not, but a few issues with the new article template seem like they would be a minor fix and would be helpful for editors.

• Why does the {reflist} not automatically appear as {reflist|30em}? (With just reflist, the references can be as long as the article with in-line citations.)
• Why does {DEFAULTSORT:} not appear? (I was totally unaware that this effected the sort of categories. Thankfully another editor added it to some 30 articles for me, but it should not be something that a new editor has to find out after the fact.)
• Why is there not a drop down or key that one can choose an info box from? (I understand that an infobox is optional, but it seems odd to have to save your file and add it after the fact when the information is more easily input from the beginning.)

Thanks for your help. SusunW (talk) 16:41, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

1. Because some people have voted against it on the talk page of Reflist
2. There is always some information missing. This is not a problem, we are a work in progress. The VE editor has it somewhere in the "page options"
3. You should try using VE, it has a nice template inserter. You still have to know what to look for though, there is autocomplete, but we have thousands of templates.

Hope this helps —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 17:06, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

There is no way for {{reflist}} to detect the number of citations in the list. If there is only one reference, then {{reflist|30em}} will split it into columns. And {{reflist|20em}} is more appropriate for Shortened footnotes. -- Gadget850 ^talk 17:22, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

I think it would be better to use the plain <references /> tag for brand-new articles created through the Article Wizard. Since they changed the fonts (years ago) {{reflist}} without any additional parameters is just a more expensive method of getting <references /> into the article.

Also, phab:T53260 is about supporting column formatting directly in the <references /> list, and it might be possible for that to use autoformatting options that can't be done in a template. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:45, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

Maybe I can save this before I get stuck in another 20 minute loop telling me there is an edit conflict which will not allow me to even leave the page. If you mean by VE , Virtual Editor program, no thanks. Tried it, it is even more user-unfriendly than this version of Wikipedia. I couldn't even sign my posts. It seems to me it is no wonder people give up editing. Writers, researchers and readers are not all programmers, nor do they wish to be. I don't understand most of your answers. A simple it isn't possible would communicate more than a list of programming options or telling me to look through thousands of options. I've been on Wiki hide-n-seek for months and many of the pages that tell you in the contents that the answer you seek is there, do not contain the answer at all. Thanks anyway. SusunW (talk) 17:59, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

Just so you do not think I am randomly complaining look at this page Wikipedia:Categorization of people#Creating a new category Though it says creating a new category, it tells you everything thing you need to do before you create a category, but not how to do it. Apparently programmers and writers just do not speak the same language. Not your fault, nor mine. We just are not communicating. I do appreciate the effort. SusunW (talk) 18:05, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

Oh, I think we have a misunderstanding here. Most documentation is historically a community and volunteer driven effort. Anyway, much of the complexity is because people have asked for complexity. If you want to configure hundreds of things, then at some point something becomes unusable for common folk. PS. The page you link to with regard to categories are all community rules. Technically, categories 'exist' (forever) as soon as you've used them (once) on a page (but they might be empty and/or not have a wiki description page). Also, where did you encounter VE on pages where you are supposed to sign ? I suspect that this shouldn't be happening, it's not made for having discussions. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:17, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

I truly don't know one writer who wants the system to be any more complex than it is. It's way more complicated than most editors I know want it to be. :) FYI Categories don't exist unless you create them. They remain red on the bottom of an article unless you can figure out to create them, with trial and error because the instructions don't actually give an answer. I did manage to figure it out, no help from the help page. The VE page was a discussion page for a project, clearly it didn't function like that and the great programmer gods in the sky suggested that it wasn't designed for that. (I actually posted on the page that "maybe the programmer gods in the sky can explain it" and someone did.) In my utopia, editing would be simple and straightforward. Instructions would be concise and clear. Again I thank you for your time. SusunW (talk) 23:41, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

"They remain red on the bottom of an article unless you can figure out to create them" This is a common misunderstanding. The category technically exists independent of the page that is attached to it, there can be pages inside a red category, there just isn't a page present for that category. Any requirement for a category not being red, is a community rule. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 06:49, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Issues with random page

Hey all, Someone mentioned to me the other day that when they used random page feature on Safari, the history of the pages they visited didn't save - it just saved lots of instances of "special:Randompage". Is this intentional, or a bug? Thanks, Mdann52 (talk) 18:34, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

@Mdann52: Bug in Safari, see Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 129#Random article and browser history. It seems to be recording the URL that you sent, rather than the URL that you received. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:41, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

Special:Maintenance

What is (or was) Special:Maintenance, and what does/did it do? It doesn't appear to exist, but https://en.wikipedia.org/robots.txt prevents compliant bots from archiving it. Nyttend (talk) 22:48, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

It was before my time but based on searching it had different features to help editors with maintenance work. Search results include "check for double or broken redirects", and url's with Special:Maintenance&subfunction=brokenredirects, Special:Maintenance&subfunction=mispeelings, Special:Maintenance&subfunction=disambiguations. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:05, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

See also rev:13270. Helder 20:08, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Category:Articles using football box collapsible parameter assistantreferees

Looking at the 2012–13 in German football article I noticed it was listed in the non-existend Category:Articles using football box collapsible parameter assistantreferees, as are 146 others. I had a look at Template:Football box collapsible to see whether it comes from there but was not able to trace it down. Does anybody know what is happening there? Thanks, Calistemon (talk) 12:15, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

I don't know why Secret Agent Julio added the category but the code is near the end of Template:Football box collapsible: {{#if:{{{assistantreferees|}}}|[[Category:Articles using football box collapsible parameter assistantreferees|{{PAGENAME}}]]}}. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:30, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

I dropped User:Secret Agent Julio a line asking him whether he intended to do this. Thanks for the quick clarification, Calistemon (talk) 12:46, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

It's due to either this edit or this one. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:48, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

I did not intend for the category to display, as I thought I had hidden it (using "main other"). I guess I was wrong. Apologies, as it was unintended. I now have removed the code from the template. Sorry about the confusion. SAJ (T) 17:14, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

My own vector.js ang vector.css

Hello, what the participants can see the unusual styles JS / CSS? For example, I want to Wikipedia pages are displayed in white lettering on a black background instead of black text on a white background. Thanks.--Парис "Анима" надаль (talk) 13:20, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

@Парис "Анима" надаль: White on black is not as easy as green on black. At Preferences, go to the "Appearance" tab, select "MonoBook"; then go to the "Gadgets" tab, select "Use a black background with green text" and save. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:35, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Wikilink in a footnote not expanding

In At Freddie's#Notes and 7½ Cents#Notes there can be found footnotes that contain a wikilink that refuses to become a blue-link. I have no idea if this is an actual bug or some minor incompetence on my part. Choor monster (talk) 15:44, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

@Choor monster: The pipe trick doesn't work inside of <ref>...</ref>. --Izno (talk) 16:03, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Thanks very much! I did not know it was called the Pipe trick, just monkey-see-monkey-do on my part all this time. Choor monster (talk) 16:16, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Draft-class is not included in WikiProject statistics table

Please see User:WP 1.0 bot/Tables/Project/Disability, the table is not counting the Draft-class pages. Similar tables belonging to other WikiProjects do include Draft-class stats, but I can't figure out what's different about the way the bot task has been set up for WikiProject Disability. The Project banner is correctly set to use the "Full Quality Scale" for the Class parameter so the page tagging is working correctly, just the stats table is missing/ignoring the category. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 16:14, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

@Dodger67: - just tested this for WP:GER (see table), drafts as separate statistic row were added after I changed the assessment main category with this edit:[16] in Category:Germany articles by quality (and did a manual bot-run). A similar change with your project values in your project's main assessment category may work as well, see the documentation for "extra" parameters at Template:ReleaseVersionParameters. Disclaimer: projects can have different assessment settings and methods. You'll have to test, if a similar change works with your project's categories and template settings. GermanJoe (talk) 18:17, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Thanks GermanJoe, that fixed it! BTW As you have added Drafts to the list I have tagged a few pages in Draft-space for WikiProject Germany. If you search for pages containing the word "Germany" or "German" in Draft-space you'd find many more relevant drafts you could tag - just look them over first to see if it's worth doing. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 19:58, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

is there a function to determine if page X is in category Y?

Originally posted this at Wikipedia:Help desk, where it was recommended I ask here.

I could've sworn I'd seen some template which did this, but now I can't find it and can't find an answer in the magic words or parser functions help pages (unless I'm missing something). The idea: I'd like to be able to run a basic function to say if page X is in page Y, and to specify true and false actions.

For example (and I'm totally making up the terms):

{{#IFEQ:{{PAGEINCATEGORY|April|Months}}|yes|positive|negative}} → "positive"
{{#IFEQ:{{PAGEINCATEGORY|April|Dubstep}}|yes|positive|negative}} → "negative"

Possible? — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 16:14, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Wikibase API changelog

Where might one find the Lua Wikibase API (mw.wikibase) changelog? Wikidata-generated location maps broke unexpectedly today, and I thought I'd track down the change that did it. Alakzi (talk) 16:15, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Hi, we announced the breaking changes in several places, including Wikimedia Tech news and the Wikidata mailing list (Using mw.wikibase.getEntity? Read on!). Also we tracked migrating modules on T88950 and migrated many ourselves. I'm sorry that we still caused disruption here, for some reasons these modules appeared as unused on our to do list P272. I've just fixed a module per hand and hope there aren't any further problems. Cheers, Hoo man (talk) 17:05, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Thanks Hoo man! It looks like I'd fixed it properly. I assume getEntity is simply an alias of getEntityObject now? Alakzi (talk) 17:10, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

@Alakzi: Indeed, as documented on mw:Extension:Wikibase_Client/Lua#mw.wikibase.getEntity (updated that earlier today as it has been deployed yesterday evening). - Hoo man (talk) 17:15, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Sandbox link

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T95669

At the top of the page, inbetween my talk page and preferences. It's appeared in the last 20 minutes or so. Anyway to get rid of it? Lugnuts ^{Dick Laurent is dead} 18:39, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Just today a link to my userspace sandbox has appeared in my personal bar. I remember this used to be an optional gadget, which I long ago disabled. Why has this reappeared, and how can I get rid of it? BethNaught (talk) 18:43, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

What's wrong with it? It encourages new users to use their sandbox's instead of testing in the mainspace. EoRdE6^{(Come Talk to Me!)} 18:47, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

I don't need a link to it. That's what's wrong with it, smart arse. Lugnuts ^{Dick Laurent is dead} 18:53, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

One, that doesn't answer the question and two: I rarely use my sandbox, I draft articles at ~/Article title and it's a red link for me because my user sandbox is ~/Sandbox with a capital. Now the personal bar takes up half my screen and it's just annoying. To repeat, where did it come from and how can I send it back there? BethNaught (talk) 18:51, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

(ec) I just noticed this as well. here is the edit that has caused this, but a glance at the Phabricator link doesn't make it clear how to re-disable the sandbox link - Matma Rex, can you shed some light on this? ​—DoRD (talk)​ 18:53, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

And, most of those of us who have been here a while don't want or need the link. ​—DoRD (talk)​ 18:54, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

It's good for newbies, but there should definitely be an easy way to disable that link. --Leyo 18:57, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Not an "easy way" exactly, but adding:

#pt-sandbox {
	display: none;
}

to your CSS file will hide it. If using the vector skin the appropriate file is Special:MyPage/vector.css. Dragons flight (talk) 19:03, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

(ec) It's not "easy" in the gadget sense, but I've been told that you can add #pt-sandbox { display: none; } to your common.css page to disable it. ​—DoRD (talk)​ 19:05, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Thanks to both, this has worked for me. BethNaught (talk) 19:07, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

By easy way, I was referring to Preferences or so. --Leyo 19:16, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

This really should be a preference/gadget or otherwise be turn-off-able. 98% of users having to do CSS-workarounds isn't quite the solution. Jared Preston (talk) 19:19, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

This did not work for me, either in the skin CSS (MonoBook) or in the common.css file. And other ideas? BMK (talk) 19:45, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Just replace the old gadget by a new CSS-only gadget which will hide the link provided by the extension. This should be enough to make it easy to enable/disable it again... Helder 20:00, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Could you do that? --Leyo 20:42, 9 April 2015 (UTC

The only thing needed (once there is consensus for this) is to create e.g. MediaWiki:Gadget-HideSandbox.css with the CSS above, and add this page to a new line on MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition, similar to the "HideFundraisingNotice" gadget. Then a description should be added to MediaWiki:Gadget-HideSandbox. This would make the option to appear at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets. Helder 02:12, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

• The code does not work for my MonoBook skin. Does anyone have a workaround? SilkTork ^{✔Tea time} 21:01, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

  monobook.css, not monobook.js! --Leyo 21:05, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

• Try putting li#pt-sandbox {display: none;} in your monobook.css or common.css file. MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 22:24, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

@Mandarax: Thanks, that worked in the monobook.css. BMK (talk) 03:26, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. That worked for me. SilkTork ^{✔Tea time} 07:27, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Filed a ticket phab:T95669 and submitted a patch. Glaisher (talk) 11:14, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Maybe the link could be done at least blue, as all other links at the top? Regardless does the sandbox exists or not. Will remind, that link was blue in the gadget version. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 13:54, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

• Thank you for this information. I had to change my skin to MonoBook (not necessarily happy with it, but whatever. I do already use it on Simple Wikipedia). Had to create my CSS page and add above code. Although it gave me dire warnings of several varieties, I managed to rid myself of the sandbox link. Nothing has exploded...I so do not need a mandatory link to my cat litter box. I am adult and brave and create all my text right in the edit window. Wow. Thank you again for this conversation. ツ Fylbecatulous talk 14:01, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

@Fylbecatulous: I can't say I'm an expert, but I don't think you were forced to change to Monobook. Doesn't this code

#pt-sandbox {
	display: none;
}

added to Special:MyPage/common.css work in Vector? --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 14:07, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Edgars2007, thank you. I was using the Modern skin. Appearance-wise it was best for visibility on my PC monitor (something to do with less glare with the background colours and font. I had LASIK in the past and I am really glare sensitve, even with the LCD). I sometimes stare at Wikipedia for hours, as my time card usage shows 12-16h faithfully. <smile>. thanks. I will hope for a permanent disengagement by the powers-that-be but we all know how that usually goes... Fylbecatulous talk 14:58, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Forgot there are more styles without Vector and Monobook :) Well, if you want continue using Modern, then copy this to your Special:MyPage/common.css. That should work (I tested). --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 15:14, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Excellent. thanks for the links, as well. That works and you can go ahead and patrol my new css page. I shall keep my Modern skin. Fylbecatulous talk 15:28, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

S

I'm fine with having a link to a personal sandbox, but it should be an uppercase S. User:Jc37/sandbox is where the link points to. It should be pointing to User:Jc37/Sandbox. - jc37 21:40, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

The gadget (which, if I recall, was enabled by default) linked to /sandbox, so linking to /Sandbox would probably result in unexpected redlinks. wctaiwan (talk) 22:08, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Then fix the gadget? - jc37 22:13, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

That wouldn't help. The (potentially large number of) people who have already created a sandbox using the gadget would have their sandboxes at /sandbox. As a drop-in replacement, this change shouldn't be breaking the sandbox link for those people. wctaiwan (talk) 22:22, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

And the sandbox gadget has already been removed anyway [17] since its function was redundant to the new mw:Extension:SandboxLink. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:37, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

So because some coder didn't give a thought to capitalising the initial "S" in sandbox, it can't be changed because the few who were using the gadget might have a redlink, as opposed to the millions of accounts on Wikipedia which now have this link at the top of the page? I presume there are lots of bots that know how to move a page. This shouldn't be a difficult fix.

Of course, the better solution would be for the wikisoftware to not have the letter after a slash to be case sensitive, like the initial letters. For example, User:jc37 and User:Jc37 manage to go to the same place. So why can't /S and /s go to the same place? - jc37 23:23, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

I don't know how lowercase sandbox was chosen in the gadget but all the skin subpages like /vector.js are also lowercase. mw:Extension:SandboxLink allows each wiki to choose a subpagename at MediaWiki:Sandboxlink-subpage-name. "sandbox" is the default for English. The subpage feature is disabled in some namespaces (notably main) and I think it would cause too much confusion if /s was converted to /S in namespaces where subpages are enabled but not in other namespaces. Should it for example be possible for an article to have /s in the name but not for its talk page? PrimeHunter (talk) 00:09, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

"the few who were using the gadget" Just like this new extension, the gadget was enabled for everyone by default. You probably just turned it off and forgot about it. There are approximately 192,400 lowercase sandbox pages, compared to 23,600 uppercase ones.[18] Not saying the original decision was the right call, but it's how it is. wctaiwan (talk) 00:55, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

I would like the following template on my user page

This user is offline, or has forgotten to update this message since starting a wikisession. (If there have been multiple edits from this user in the last 60 minutes and the most recent one wasn't to activate this template, it is safe to assume that this user forgot.)

Not the "Are you my friend" part. This shows whether Cyberpower678 is online, but not me. I often forget to update my status since it has to be done manually. I would like something to show I might be online but forgot.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 20:23, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

I cannot help you concerning this matter, but should you like to see the last activity of other users at one glance, you might be interested in this script. The documentation is in German, but the script works here (in English), too. Transclusion using

importScriptURI("//de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Schnark/js/letzteredit.js" + "&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript");

--Leyo 20:41, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

That's not exactly what he's looking for. He's looking for a way to show his inactivity to everyone else without having to update his page.—^cyberpower_Chat:Online 21:40, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

I am fully aware of this. --Leyo 22:04, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

C678 explained on his/her talk page the templates involved are too complicated to explain. For me, that's probably true. Thanks for trying.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 16:24, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Scrolling in mobile edit

I've been in the habit of catching small grammar, spelling, syntax, and usage errors on my mobile device (iPhone 4, updated iOS--I think--editing in Safari). However, whenever I go into mobile editing, it doesn't let me scroll down so I can fix the error. What is this? Lockesdonkey (talk) 21:17, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

@Lockesdonkey: See #Scrolling disabled for iOS above for more about this. Seems to only effect iOS, I am using it on Android Lollipop on my Galaxy S5 with no problems. Obviously that means I use Google Chrome for Android (v41). While this bug is fixed, maybd try using Chrome instead? EoRdE6^{(Come Talk to Me!)} 03:36, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Special:WhatLinksHere/VA_Tech

Can anyone tell me why Special:WhatLinksHere/VA_Tech claims that this redirect is transcluded in Virginia Tech? Thanks, --B (talk) 22:05, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

"transclude" does not have to mean "display the contents". Virginia Tech contains {{redirect|VA Tech}}. {{redirect}} will in some cases (I'm not sure of the specifics) use a module to transclude a page by the name of its argument, in order to examine the page source and detect whether there really is a redirect pointing to the page where {{redirect}} is placed. If there is no such redirect then the page containing {{redirect}} can be added to Category:Articles with redirect hatnotes needing review. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:29, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanation. --B (talk) 23:07, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Noindexing

Hi everyone. Where can I find information on what types of pages are noindexed by default? Also, is it possible to automatically noindex all subpages of a page (e.g. my own userspace), including pages that haven't yet been created? Thanks, Sunrise (talk) 23:04, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

@Sunrise: I don't know if it helps, but take a look at Category:Noindexed pages and MediaWiki:Robots.txt. Helder 02:17, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Thanks Helder! The Robots.txt file seems close to what I'm looking for in my first question. That said, other than Category:Noindexed_pages, all the entries seem to be individual pages. (For example, how is noindexing of the article talk namespace enforced?)

For my second question, it occurs to me that some application of a category might work; is it possible to add a category in a way that also applies to subpages? Sunrise (talk) 07:12, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Article talk is indexed by default but in many cases noindexed via {{BLP}}. Some languages noindex their whole article talk in wgNamespaceRobotPolicies but we don't. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:38, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Robots.txt is what gets appended to the system defaults and results in the actual robots.txt file (the robot/crawl policy, not necessarily the same as not being indexed). Pages that use the __NOINDEX__ magic word are the pages that get added to Category:Noindexed pages and then for namespaces, it is wgNamespaceRobotPolicies inside the config. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:07, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Stewards confirmation rules

Hello, I made a proposal on Meta to change the rules for the steward confirmations. Currently consensus to remove is required for a steward to lose his status, however I think it's fairer to the community if every steward needed the consensus to keep. As this is an issue that affects all WMF wikis, I'm sending this notification to let people know & be able to participate. Best regards, --MF-W 16:12, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Redirects to user pages where the global user page is transcluded are mistakenly classified as broken

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T90978

See for example User:Abigor001 which is supposed to redirect to User:Abigor. Abigor has a global user page transcluded on it (meta:User:Abigor and the feature is mw:Help:Extension:GlobalUserPage) . However Abigor001 does not redirect to Abigor, and it appears as a broken redirect in Special:BrokenRedirects. Anomie's link classifer also classifies it as a broken redirect. KonveyorBelt 17:14, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

This has been reported as phab:T90978. Cenarium (talk) 17:22, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Auto sig ability

It may have been discussed before my time, but is there any way to automatically detect when an editor forgets to sign his post, and possibly activate an automatic sig when we hit save page, or better yet prevent it from saving like what happens when we forget to add an edit summary? LOL I just forgot my sig. Atsme☯^Consult 17:29, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

It has been discussed before, yes; and there are strong arguments against it, because not all edits on discussion pages should be signed. Examples: [19]; [20]; [21]; [22]; [23]. --Redrose64 (talk) 17:49, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

At least we can detect if a user clicked the "signature and timestamp" button and put a little warning somehwere. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dixtosa (talk • contribs) 18:09, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

and maybe one day, when the community thinks it is ready, Flow will replace talk pages and make signatures unnecessary.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 18:17, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

If I'm not mistaken, there is a bot that floats around and autosigns some pages. And I know on commons there is a gadget for edit summaries, there may be one here. (found it SineBot (talk · contribs) obviosuly) EoRdE6^{(Come Talk to Me!)} 18:24, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Yes on Commons, saving without an edit summary results in this error message Reminder: You have not provided an edit summary. If you click "Save page" again, your edit will be saved without one. Now I can't remember if this was a gadget or what, but can we get this on en.wiki? EoRdE6^{(Come Talk to Me!)} 18:32, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

You can turn it on in Preferences. It is in the editing tab right under "Rows" -- GB fan 18:40, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

@EoRdE6: GB fan refers to Preferences → Editing → Prompt me when entering a blank edit summary (or the default undo summary) and there is also Preferences → Gadgets → Add two new dropdown boxes below the edit summary box with some useful default summaries. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:54, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Can we get it to also apply to a sig? That way it won't force a sig unless we make it that way. Reminder: You have not signed your post. If you click "Save page" again, your edit will be saved without your signature. And then we can turn on the feature in Gadgets or under Editing? Just a thought. Atsme☯^Consult 19:05, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Russian Wikipedia has enabled reminder (if I'm correct - like a dialog window) to sign your comment on talk pages. And personally I like much better Polish edit summaries (see for example in this page those two green lines). --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 19:13, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

What two green lines? --Redrose64 (talk) 19:18, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

These green lines --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 19:26, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

No, I don't have that. Maybe it's a gadget that you have enabled. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:34, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Yes, it is a gadget (See Zielone przyciski do szybkiego wstawiania opisów zmian.). But it is interesting – it's a default gadget, maybe you have disabled it? :) --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 19:48, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

That gadget is enabled (as are all of those from 'refTools – skrypt dodaje przycisk "cytuj" do paska edycji, umożliwiając szybkie wypełnienie i dodanie najczęściej wykorzystywanych szablonów cytowania.' down to 'Rozszerzona strona specjalna Prześlij.' inclusive). I've found that if I leave the gadget settings alone but change my language from en to pl, the green lines then appear. So it's dependent upon the user interface language. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:04, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Does English Wiki have it? Atsme☯^Consult 21:06, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

$(document).ready(function() {
    $("#wpSave").one("click", function() { /* change to wpPreview for testing */
        $("#editform").on("submit", function() {
            return !(this.wpTextbox1.value.indexOf("~~"+"~~")===-1 && (
                mw.config.get('wgNamespaceNumber')%2===1 ||
                $.inArray("Non-talk pages that are automatically signed", mw.config.get('wgCategory'))!==-1
              ) && !confirm("No sig, send anyway?"));
        });
    });
});

Here's my first shot at a JavaScript SineBot. Its missing a lot, but if there's serious interest I can develop it more. — Dispenser 23:38, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Can I use it now?? Oh yes, it will definitely be used, and should probably be included in the WELCOME message that goes out to all new users!! Thank you Dispenser - your efforts are greatly appreciated. Let me know if I can use it, and I will spread the word!! Atsme☯^Consult 00:00, 11 April 2015 (UTC)

Werelate.org, which uses WikiMedia as their platform, has implemented an auto-signature function, but I'm not sure how. The main developer over there is Dallan. An inquiry to him could provide details. The overall platform implementation (such as use of MediaWiki 1.7.1) is described at http://www.werelate.org/wiki/Special:Version . --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 00:09, 11 April 2015 (UTC)

insource searching for unicode symbol does not work as expected

I was doing some searching the unicode symbol "★" and getting odd results:

• "insource:★" search has no results. [24]
• "insource:/★/" search (i.e. the regex version of the search) has 81 results. [25]
• A simple "★" has only one result [26], Star (glyph), which was not returned on either previous search?
• "intitle:★" has no results [27], though ★, ★Macy*s and ★NSYNC all are suggested by autocomplete.
• And none of the searches finds the articles Emoji or Miscellaneous Symbols which also contain the black star symbol in their text.

Anyone have any insights into what is going on? Does the search just suck at unicode, or is something else happening here? Dragons flight (talk) 18:50, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Infoboxes

There have been several contentious discussions regarding infoboxes, including the one at Talk:Laurence Olivier#Infobox and it has even been discussed at ARBCOM. Some editors really like infoboxes and would be happy if there were an infobox in nearly every article. Other editors really dislike them. Right now, it seems that it's up to the author or authors of an article to choose whether to include an infobox, that the status quo needs to be respected, and that in order to change the status quo there has to be a consensus to change it, and that has been the difficult part: reaching a consensus. I wonder whether it might be possible to make the appearance of an infobox a display option, so that people can select the option to display, or show, the infobox in the articles that have them, or hide the infobox. Perhaps someone generally does not want to see the infobox but occasionally would like to see it in a particular article. Or perhaps someone generally wants to see the infobox but one day wants to change his or her preference and hide the infoboxes. An infobox could be created for most articles, and then readers can select the display option they prefer. This would solve a lot of problems and might make everyone happy. (Images such as portraits and coats of arms, etc., maybe could be left in the article even if the rest of the infobox is hidden.) CorinneSD (talk) 23:59, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

I do think this would be useful ... optional display of infobox based on preference. Personally, I'm pro-Infobox. We do not want to cripple the feed to WikiData that Infoboxes enable in order to satisfy a display preference. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 00:15, 11 April 2015 (UTC)

If an infobox is created, and then hidden, wouldn't the feed to WikiData still continue? CorinneSD (talk) 00:49, 11 April 2015 (UTC)

An old problem in a table

Somebody, please take a look at the table in "Calendric predictions" in Timeline of the far future and correct the error in it. This is a Featured List and shouldn't have remained like this for such a long time. -- Tisfoon (talk) 00:43, 11 April 2015 (UTC)

The error message must be new due to edits of {{Age in years and days}}. I fixed this article [28] but the template shouldn't behave like that. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:28, 11 April 2015 (UTC)

Preferences and css?

I've noticed that some, if not all, of my custom css (at User:Purplewowies/monobook.css, if this behavior is something specific to me and the css I have) doesn't work when I visit the preferences page. I don't remember this happening before, so is it a recent development? Is that an intended behavior? If that's the way it's been working/supposed to work, I guess I'll just stick my foot in my mouth now... - Purplewowies (talk) 03:26, 11 April 2015 (UTC)