Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)

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The technical section of the village pump is used to discuss technical issues about Wikipedia. Bug reports and feature requests should be made in Phabricator (see how to report a bug). Bugs with security implications should be reported differently (see how to report security bugs).

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

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Talk page message notification in mobile view?

I don't have a smartphone, so I've only occasionally seen Wikipedia on one. I've been thinking about the case of a new editor who was first blocked, then indeffed for repeating an action they'd been warned about on their talk page, and who has never edited anything except article space. They don't have e-mail enabled and the mini-orange bar is kind of small and the red numbers even smaller, and it occurs to me that all their edits are marked as mobile and using the mobile interface. What do such users see when they have a talk page message? Is it possible for them not to notice? And how easy is it for them to find their talk page if they do see the message and access the notification? (Since they don't have e-mail enabled, they won't be getting e-mail alerts, presumably, although I believe that's now a default setting for those who do enable e-mail.) Does anyone have a screenshot or any other clarification? Yngvadottir (talk) 06:59, 4 January 2017 (UTC)

An editor gets a nice red indicator at the top red, which is pretty hard to miss. See to the right side —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:59, 4 January 2017 (UTC)

I didn't notice it until i vread the comment in which you mentioned it, so it's quite possible that a newcomer (having less of an idea than me about how Wikipedia works) would miss it, too. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 09:39, 4 January 2017 (UTC)

I do have two iPhones and they also display a red tick like that one. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 09:40, 4 January 2017 (UTC)

OK, thanks to all. So they get the red numbers but not the little orange "new message" bar. If they then click on the red number, how easy is it for them to reach their talk page? Is it similar to what I experience on desktop view—the notifications screen loads slowly and then displays a list of who's left messages on the talk page, each of which is clickable? Since they are blocked, their talk page is the only place they can now edit, and they are actually required to copy the unblock template, but several of us have been hoping they will make any kind of response there, so the next issue is whether they can easily figure out how to. Yngvadottir (talk) 15:40, 4 January 2017 (UTC)

The difficulty of figuring out how to deal with complex, template-based workflows is one of the reasons that WP:Flow was invented. Anyone who's watched unblock requests knows how many newbies get it right, even on desktop systems. It's a complicated workflow no matter what your device is. So imagine that the editor doesn't just get a message with technical instructions. Imagine that the message has a "Respond" button built into it, maybe with a few tickboxes (e.g., "I want to appeal this block" vs "I don't want to appeal this block right now"), and that this button adds the template, cats the page, and pings the admin – and all the newbie has to do, or even all the newbie can do, is provide the content for the message. Or imagine that it has a timer to remind the blocking admin to check back after a week (a day, a month, a year) to see whether an indef is still necessary (or whether a re-block has been earned).

But that's the idea for the future, and before we can do the fancy stuff with Flow, it has to be able to handle conversations. They're still working on some of that (e.g., making it possible to find comments made in Flow via Special:Search). WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:41, 4 January 2017 (UTC)

I'm afraid that doesn't answer my question. Flow destroys our ability to use talk pages for article collaboration and as a result the community has decisively rejected it. Even if it hadn't, completely reconfiguring all talk pages is clearly not a viable solution right now. So I'm still asking—right now, what is this editor's path to their talk page? If they do whatever passes for clicking on the smartphone version of the red number they see, can they get there to read the messages, and can they then see an edit button of some sort? Because if not, we need to treat editors flagged as using mobile differently, perhaps by feeding them a big and obvious link in warning templates. I'm going to ping in Cullen328 at this point, because he's been exploring both editing interfaces on his smartphone and has experience explaining the results to technical incompetents like me. Yngvadottir (talk) 19:31, 4 January 2017 (UTC)

I know that you have always held firmly to the belief that Flow cannot be used for collaboration. However, as a point of data, I have personally used Flow to collaborate on creating and improving multiple pages on multiple wikis. So it clearly can be done: I have done it, and so have many other people. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:44, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

Yngvadottir, I use the desktop view by default on my smartphone the vast majority of the time, but occasionally check out the mobile view, and did so just now. In desktop view, I have a highly visible orange bar telling me I have messages, plus a less prominent little bell icon with the number 2 telling me that I have been pinged or thanked. In mobile view, as mentioned above, the orange bar is absent, but the bell icon is more prominent and has a visible red box with the number 2 overlaid. So, if a user understands that they should click that box, they will see a list of pings, notifications of talk page messages and so on. The problem is that some new users may ignore the red box on mobile, but then again, some ignore the orange bar on desktop Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 22:44, 4 January 2017 (UTC)

When one clicks on the red tick, one should have a list of notifications. These link to the pages they are on, i.e the talk pages. Also, plenty of projects work with Flow, not that transition here would be easy. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 20:15, 4 January 2017 (UTC)

@Jo-Jo Eumerus and Cullen328: Thanks for confirming. It does sound as though the editor has simply not clicked on the message icon, but it's possible they don't know how to respond. Is the path to the talk page as clear on mobile as it is on desktop (I have no idea how the click mechanism works on a phone, and as I say, for me at least, notifications load agonizingly slowly), and is there then an "edit" button? I dimly recall from the early days of the mobile interface hearing that mobile users don't see a tab for article talk pages. I'd like to be sure this editor has just failed to click through and respond, rather than needing instructions on how to do so. There are going to be increasing numbers of new editors using mobile only, so despite my own preferences and limitations, I'm concerned. Yngvadottir (talk) 22:58, 4 January 2017 (UTC)

I found that talk page button at the bottom of each page a while ago. I think it's there under the theory that phones are better for reading than for editing, so a person who accesses Wikipedia on phone is less likely to need the talk page than one who accesses Wikipedia on desktop. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 23:07, 4 January 2017 (UTC)

The massive problem with that theory, Jo-Jo Eumerus, is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. It is 100% possible for people to edit productively using a smartphone, and I know that's true because I do so myself. I have written many articles including Good articles, participated in thousands of AfD debates, answered hundreds of questions at the Teahouse, all on my Android smartphone. There are literally billions of Android smartphones in use today, and failure to encourage worldwide smartphone editing is a gigantic mistake. Please read my essay called Smartphone editing for further information on this critical issue. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 01:12, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

Template:Convert/old deleted so need copies

Yes, the vast wikitext-based measurement converter Template:Convert/old (and ~2,800 subtemplates) was deleted c.04:30, 5 January 2017 (per December 22 TfD), and typical editors can no longer see wikitext unit-conversion calculations. Meanwhile, still trying to fix Lua Module:Convert for precision errors converting some ranges, which {convert/old} had fixed in Dec 2013. Also Mach speed precision seems wrong, so can someone copy deleted Template:Convert/Mach to User:Wikid77/(same), and I'll try debug precision errors. Thanks. -Wikid77 (talk) 07:23, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

@Wikid77: This can only be actioned by an administrator--you should make your request at WP:REFUND if the deleting administrator is unwilling to un-delete and move the templates. --Izno (talk) 13:44, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

@Wikid77: Was just passing - done - User:Wikid77/Template:Convert/Mach - Drop me a note if you want any more. Ronhjones  ^(Talk) 15:22, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

Wikipedia citation format (WCF) bibliographic database project

Note: was originally posted at the Wikipedia help desk

Correction: use of the term Wikipedia citation format (WCF) should be replaced by Wikipedia Citation Style 1 (CS1).

Hello all. This post explores the idea of a python project to develop a modest Wikipedia citation format (WCF) native bibliographic database application. The software would be user local and represents a stop-gap measure until the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) develops a proper wiki-wide solution to the problem of handling references on Wikipedia.

Background

Creating and tidying WCF templates, like {{cite journal}}, is hard work. Zotero offers WCF export but does a really lousy job of formatting, being limited to horizontal output and an illogical ordering of fields. Its output invariably requires considerable hand processing.

On some occasions, almost all fields are missing, but it should be noted that the Zotero team would like help to improve its web translator routines. There are number of other projects which develop tools for harvesting bibliographic information and producing WCF cite templates. Harvesting citations is an upstream issue and such tools are different from and complementary to the proposal being presented here.

Once a particular citation template is complete and clean, there is no reference management software (that I know of) that can handle WCF natively or even remotely well. The Wikicite application is limited to Windows (I use Linux) and development seems to have stalled a few years back. The pybliographer project shares some structural similarities with what I am considering. It is no longer based on BibTeX, but pybliographer does not support WCF. Moreover, the last update was two years ago and traffic on their mailing list tanked around 2008 (if my memory serves me correctly their lead developer stepped aside about then). Notwithstanding, the pybliographer documentation is also a good place to start. JabRef is clearly active, but does not offer WCF import or export. Even so, it might be an option to contribute code to the JabRef project. The downside is that JabRef is built around BibTeX and their underlying data model may not be very compatible with WCF.

In terms of data design, some of the WCF templates are rather poor, for instance: chapter handling in {{cite book}} and location and date handling in {{cite conference}}. Nevertheless, we have to live with what we have.

The Wikimedia WikiCite project is, of course, the best answer, but it will be a while (several years?) before it is running comfortably.

Proposal

UML class diagram of proposed database

So perhaps a new native WCF reference management system is in order:

• written in current python (v3.5 at present on Ubuntu) and developed, in the first instance, on Linux
• run locally (that has downsides as well)
• command-line (at least while the core functionality is sorted)
• good search features
• checking and tidying (linting) of markup (the ultimate integrity check is running the template thru Wikipedia)
• offers a range of export options including HTML, Markdown, wiki markup, and formatted text, as well as BibTeX and RIS

In terms of scope:

• not international (because citation templates are highly language specific)

The command-line interfaces would be:

• wcflint — reprocess and tidy a selected citation — interacting thru the system clipboard
• wcffind — search the database using nominated fields and regular expressions — via the command-line
• wcfedit — add (or remove) a citation from the database — interacting thru one of several supported text editors (nano, emacs, vim, gedit)

I have already drafted up some of the software design. Please see the UML diagram (above) showing the core structure.

I am very interested in feedback, supportive or otherwise.

with best wishes, RobbieIanMorrison (talk) 10:55, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

References

Is it not true that there is no 'Wikipedia citation format' (no in-house format)? The example templates that you listed are all part of Citation Style 1 which is a commonly used suite of templates but they are, by no means, 'official' in any sense.

I agree that {{cite conference}} has problems and could/should be improved. I cannot find anything that suggests that you have raised that topic at Help talk:Citation Style 1. Neither can I find anything that suggests that you have raised the topic of |chapter= in the same venue. Surely, if there is something wrong with these templates, those issues should be addressed at cs1, should they not?

—Trappist the monk (talk) 13:14, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

Hello Trappist. First, I should have been more specific: I am referring solely to the Citation Style 1 template family and not to other citation frameworks supported by Wikipedia (the CS1 templates are the only ones I encounter in relation to the hard sciences). I note too that Zotero calls its Wikipedia export format "Wikipedia Citation Templates" and does not offer other Wikipedia export formats. That said, Wikipedia itself does not officially endorse one citation framework or house style over another. And second, you are quite correct that I have not flagged issues relating to two CS1 templates I obliquely criticized. Their widespread deployment means that any change to the syntax and/or semantics of their public interface will need careful consideration. But my mission is not to refine the CS1. My interest is to create linting and database tools to make the use of CS1 templates, as they stand, easier and more consistent. Thanks for your comments. Much appreciated. RobbieIanMorrison (talk) 15:23, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

Surely, Zotero can call its own citation exporting scheme whatever it likes, but that does not make it correct or binding. The CS1 templates have had the most systematic development and are pretty visible. That and the fact that they are more consistently presented than others could account for their popularity with science-article editors. It is also conceivable that such editors are the least in need of a biblio system, since they are far more likely than other editors to already know the objectives, mechanics, and semantics of citing article claims. Having citations in hard science articles that are usable is a more important matter imo. If the output is illegible to anyone without specialized knowledge, then it is not useful. The average non-expert reader of this non-expert encyclopedia will be unable to verify the cited claims. However, I am not dead set against the idea. Whether it may lead into another little Wikipedia island with its own peculiarities and small circle of adherents, is something to be seen I guess. 72.43.99.146 (talk) 15:55, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

I agree with everything you say. It is clearly up to editors to select appropriate references. Whether this project gains traction is an unknown – which depends, to some degree, on how useful and how visible it becomes. It may well end up being islanded. But I would like to get some early feedback in the hope that it could be made more widely useful. Thanks for your response. RobbieIanMorrison (talk) 16:11, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

Cites are enormous bureaucracy: The wp:CS1 {cite_web} template now processes over 200 cite parameters, and any new system would likely need 7+ years to fit into the cite mold. When I developed the first Lua script module to match CS1 cite format, I never imagined the minor parameters would continue debate over 5 years, while major issues would be overlooked. Over 10 years ago, cites needed parameter "subtitle=" for people to add subtitles, but only French Wikipedia did it; likewise a parameter "note=" was needed after titles to explain typical details, but just not a priority. The hideous parameter "accessdate=" should have been renamed "acdate=" many years ago, when someone even barked how the ten-letter parameter was horrific, and still to this day, "accessdate=" is the most-misused & misspelled parameter of all time ("access" in Spanish and French has one "s" as acceso or accès, while Portuguese has one "c" as acesso), plus the long name "accessdate" causes many people to omit lead pipe bar "|" (in "|accessdate="). So now almost half of all cite errors are accessdate, but instead, users have debated every month at wt:CS1 about proper use of cite data in obsessive, trivial minutia for the other 200 cite parameters. I just cannot do that. I avoid wastes of time, but one day will people wake-up to see they have wasted the best years of their adult lives bickering about minutia, rather than making cites easier. So beware the cites as an energy vampire. I prefer to go out and enjoy life. -Wikid77 (talk) 07:25, 6 January 2017 (UTC)

I seem to have stumbled across a hornets nest here. My focus is on developing some modest command-line software to help users clean, store, and find their CS1 citations. There seems to be little support for this otherwise, with the exception of Zotero. The design of the CS1 citation family is of very little interest to me beyond being able to navigate around that subset of more common usage that I will need to support. Comments directed toward my software proposal will be very welcome. Best wishes. RobbieIanMorrison (talk) 12:40, 6 January 2017 (UTC)

No, not a hornet's nest, just Wikid77. Regarding clean CS1 citations, you should be interested in mw:Citoid and especially the fact it uses the Zotero translation service (review section "Installation"). --Izno (talk) 14:34, 6 January 2017 (UTC)

Hello Izno. Thanks very much for the pointer. I remain a big fan of WikiCite and look forward to its launch and development. Regarding citoid/Citoid, this looks like a real-time citation harvester and CS1 translator. Great for visual editing, but not fundamentally a database. Instead, each DOI or other resource is interrogated on demand. Did I get this right? I need a database that I can load and search, based on my special interests and my recall, with the associated PDFs logged and available. That service need not be local, for instance, Zotero provides cloud storage and syncing. But I don't like their web interface and find it faster to edit citations in a text editor than to click around enumerable GUI edit boxes. In the same way that I like editing raw LaTeX, Markdown, and wiki-markup. Best wishes. RobbieIanMorrison (talk) 15:59, 6 January 2017 (UTC)

Not a hornet's nest. Come on over to Help talk:Citation Style 1, where we focus on the topic at hand in a constructive manner instead of wasting our own time by writing 250 words about something that we denigrate as a waste of time. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:32, 6 January 2017 (UTC)

Hello Jonesey95. Thanks for the suggestion to help. What I really need is way of managing the stack of references I currently keep on a single sandbox page. Not having a suitable reference management system is quite limiting, so I will continue to work on the idea I posted. It should not take very long to code, perhaps two weeks. For the record, my proposal is somewhat modeled after BibTool by Gerd Neugebauer and hosted at GitHub and represents a similar utility for BibTeX files. RobbieIanMorrison (talk) 18:13, 6 January 2017 (UTC)

I can't find a definitive statement, but WikiCite may be WMDE rather than WMF. I recommend that you talk to people at d:Wikidata:WikiProject Source MetaData before committing to a particular approach. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:53, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

Hello Whatamidoing (WMF). Just to note that https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/profile/1608/ lists some activity. I can't see anything specific to Wikipedia Deutschland though. Thanks for the comment. Best wishes. RobbieIanMorrison (talk) 00:05, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

Do you know anyone who has loaded Wikipedia into MediaWiki?

@TheDJ: I've never met anyone who has loaded any of WP into a local installation of MediaWiki...

Have you done it? Do you know anyone who has?

How did you go about it?

What problems did you run into?

How did you solve them? The Transhumanist 07:17, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

Vexing parameter-passing problem

I have:

• Two templates, lets call them Chart and Bar
• A multi-line string of "variable" parameters, with each line containing one set of parameters to be passed to Bar
• A string of "constant" parameters, to be passed to Bar on each call

I call Chart, passing it both strings. For each line in the "variable" string, Chart makes a call to Bar, passing to it the parameters from that line, as well as the parameters from the "constant" string. Caveats:

• The number of values in the lines vary from line to line.
• The number of lines in the string is not known ahead of time.
• The "constant" parameters must be passed to Chart; they cannot be hard-coded.

I've been trying with module:string and {{item}}/{{component}} for a few days, without success. How do I make this work?

A million thanks, —swpb^T 21:05, 6 January 2017 (UTC)

@Swpb: From your description, it sounds that the best way of implementing this would be to write a Lua module that calls Bar. With Lua it would be easy to determine the number of lines in the string and the number of values in each line, but this is very hard to do in template code. It sounds like it may be necessary to convert Chart to Lua as well, but it is hard to say for certain without knowing more of the specifics. Best — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 01:40, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

Tool for AfD closing stats?

Is there some kind of tool which can give me stats about a user's AfD closes? How many they closed, how many as keep, delete, etc, how many ended up being reviewed at WP:DRV, and of those how many were upheld or overturned? -- RoySmith (talk) 00:21, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

There is; it's used in (almost?) all WP:RFAs. Go to an RfA and search for the blue collapsible box "RfA/RfB toolbox"; expand that, and in there you will find a link "AfD votes". It's set for the admin candidate, but can be used for anyone just by altering the appropriate part of the query string - here's one for RoySmith (talk · contribs): https://tools.wmflabs.org/afdstats/afdstats.py?name=RoySmith --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 13:42, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, but that's not quite what I was asking. Those are stats for votes during an AfD discussion. I'm looking for closes. How many AfD's did I close as keep? How many did I close as delete? How many of my closes were reviewed at DRV? I also notice the tool seems to be confused about my participation. It says that of the last 200 AfDs, 165 pages had no discernible vote. I'm assuming that's mostly AfD's I closed (since my close counts as an edit). -- RoySmith (talk) 14:33, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

@RoySmith: There was an AfD-close-stats tool written by Scottywong available a few years ago, but Scottywong retired and it looks like it didn't make the transition over to Tool Labs from the Toolserver. The AfD stats tool that Redrose64 linked to above was also written by Scottywong, and is currently available thanks to APerson and Σ, but I'm not aware of any plans to convert his other tools at the moment. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 02:06, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

Actually, I see there was an attempt to port the AfD-close-stats tool to Tool Labs by JackPotte at https://tools.wmflabs.org/jackbot/snottywong/cgi-bin/afdadminstats.cgi. At the moment that URL brings up a MySQL error though. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 02:13, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

I can take a look at the code for that and take a stab at resurrecting the tool, if nobody else is working on it at the moment. Enterprisey (talk!) 02:21, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

That was the link to the CGI, here's a link to the menu page: [1] Sir Joseph ^(talk) 02:27, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

Yeah. I wanted to add that the tool is actually mostly functional right now; toollabs:jackbot/snottywong/afdadminstats.html is the form where you enter the username, and I didn't get errors on anyone I tried it with. Enterprisey (talk!) 02:56, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

Country infoboxes often changing

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T150763

Hello, I was wondering if anyone was able to offer insight into why many edits seem to reorder fields in the country infobox. See [2] as an example. I've noticed this for awhile but never thought to ask about it until now. It is however annoying as the new order is a bit nonsensical, and can make future editing a bit more difficult. Thanks, CMD (talk) 09:51, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

@Chipmunkdavis: VisualEditor reorders the parameters based on TemplateData in the template's documentation. It may be a good idea to change the order of the parameters in the TemplateData to match the documentation's blank example. Jc86035 (talk) Use {{re|Jc86035}}
to reply to me 09:58, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

Perfect, thank you very much. CMD (talk) 10:11, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

@Chipmunkdavis: No problem :) Jc86035 (talk) Use {{re|Jc86035}}
to reply to me 13:23, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

Footnotes

Footnotes such as those produced by {{ref label}} (as well as those done that way without the template) don't seem to work in mobile view (produces endless loading), and the popup doesn't display on mouseover. Should this be fixed or left as it is, or should they be converted to use {{efn}} etc.? Jc86035 (talk) Use {{re|Jc86035}}
to reply to me 15:25, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

Please report it in phabricator —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:20, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

@TheDJ: Okay, although I'm guessing it'll be a wontfix given it's been deprecated for almost eleven years for most cases. Jc86035 (talk) Use {{re|Jc86035}}
to reply to me 04:41, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

I guess that's now phab:T154861. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 21:37, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

Cannot get page to appear in category

I cannot get Draft:Bishal Ruidas to appear in Category:AfC G13 eligible soon submissions. Purging, null editing, and the "forcelinkupdate" API parameter all did not work. GeoffreyT2000 (talk, contribs) 17:09, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

@GeoffreyT2000: Isn't it only five months since you moved it in August? Pppery 17:15, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

Yes, which means that the category will appear on the page if one purges it. When doing a null edit, the category disappears because it thinks that {{REVISIONTIMESTAMP}} refers to the time of the null edit rather than the last saved revision in the page history. The API parameter only updates link tables, not category tables. GeoffreyT2000 (talk, contribs) 17:30, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

Sorry, I though you were talking about the category for actual G13-elligible submissions, not Category:AfC G13 eligible soon submissions, which I didn't know existed. Pppery 17:33, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

Odd, old page display duplicates new page display but w. different hist

• So I have User:Lingzhi/sandbox and User:Lingzhi/sandbox2. For me at least, they display 100% identically, including changes I just made minutes ago. But I haven't edited sandbox2 since 25 July 2015‎, as the page history clearly shows. I can blank that sandbox2, I suppose, but I might wanna use it again for other topics. Besides, I thought I should report it 'cause it's strange.  Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 18:36, 7 January 2017 (UTC)
  • {You're transcluding the first sandbox in the second. Pppery 19:02, 7 January 2017 (UTC)
    • Hah! I had totally forgotten. Thanks!  Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 03:54, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

Loss of cite button etc

I've lost the cite button and there are a number of scripts (all in one place) that aren't working. The one script that works reliably is DYKcheck. Twinkle, enabled through preferences and not JavaScript, loads intermittently only. Bypassing my cache doesn't fix any of this. Dropping the URL for a page in edit mode into a private browsing session does two things: (a) it shows the cite button (yeah!) but (b) it logs me out. Logging back in within that private environment, the cite button is gone. The problems are the same whether I'm using my laptop or my iPhone. Bandwidth shouldn't be the issue (31 Mbps down and 9.4 up). Given I have the problem across two devices, I'm somewhat reluctant to clear my cache. Any suggestions? Schwede66 22:03, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

You have 'User:AlexTheWhovian/script-redlinks.js' enabled and this throws an error for me. Might be related, or not. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:18, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

		A beer on me!
		TheDJ deserves a beer; problem fixed! Schwede66 22:37, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

Deleting 580 articles (and their talk pages)

• Relevant AfD: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Algeria at the 2015 UCI Road World Championships.

This was an AfD for every article - 643 in total - in Category:Nations at the UCI Road World Championships except the ones not in a subcategory (i.e. the six listed at the bottom). The AfD was submitted via a Bot Request (Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/PrimeBOT 6). The result of the AfD was that articles which had a parent article to redirect to would be closed as such, whilst all the others would be deleted. I have manually closed all the former (there were 63) leaving all the others (580) to be deleted. So - is it possible to create an adminbot run to delete all the articles in those ten subcategories? Or could it be done via an automated tool? The deletion rationale would simply be the name of the AfD above. Black Kite (talk) 01:11, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

•  Doing... –xeno^talk 01:22, 8 January 2017 (UTC)
  •  Done. Twinkle has a batch-deletion module (d-batch), for future use. –xeno^talk 01:27, 8 January 2017 (UTC)
    • Thanks. I know the d-batch tool existed, but I don't trust myself with stuff that can delete lots of things at once. Black Kite (talk) 01:38, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

Cleanup

I'm not sure if this I should be requesting this here, but now they've all gone, {{flagUCIRoad}} and {{flagUCIRoadathlete}} is used to link to them in articles 2006–2015. Can someone with some template knowledge please adjust it so it links to the nations overall article (i.e. Germany at the UCI Road World Championships). I think there'll need to be regular expression used in AWB to sort out the pages to remove the empty parameters used for {{flagUCIRoad}}. BaldBoris 02:43, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

@Frietjes: Can you help with the template? Thanks BaldBoris 15:57, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

User:BaldBoris, yes. I will contact you on your talk page. Frietjes (talk) 16:03, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

Slow editing

I'm experiencing this for many days already, on different Windows PCs, all with recent Firefox (monobook.js) - when I start editing a large article (>70 kB, roughly, not particularly large), that particular Firefox window slows down so that it takes up to about a second to type in a single character. Meanwhile all other functions (reading, erverting, etc., remain fast). The overload is on the CPU. Unchecking the FF option "Use hardware acceleration when available" doesn't help. Any hints? Materialscientist (talk) 07:48, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

I've always had this problem. That's why I edit by sections. Of my recent edits to Liverpool Street station, all were to single sections except this one, which took so long that I went back to section by section editing, even though it means twice as many actual edits. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 11:09, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

@Materialscientist: Mozilla recently implemented per-tab processing for a lot of users, so this might explain some of it. Jc86035 (talk) Use {{re|Jc86035}}
to reply to me 11:12, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

It occasionally happens to me (Firefox on Windows Vista with Vector), but it stops when I close and reopen the browser. Try editing Heart logged in and out in MonoBook and Vector. In which cases does it happen? If it doesn't happen on Heart then try the far larger ‎List of named minor planets (numerical) (MonoBook, Vector). All the examples currently work fine for me. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:31, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

New version of wikilabels

Hello, Wikilabels is the system to label edits for ORES. Until now, users would have to visit a page in Wikipedia, for example WP:Labels and install a gadget and then label edits for ORES. With the new version (0.4.0) deployed today, you can directly go to Wikilabels home page, for example https://labels.wmflabs.org/ui/enwiki and label edits from there. If you installed the gadget, you can remove it now. We also provided some sort of minification and bundling to improve its performance.

Labeling edits would help ORES work more accurately and in case ORES review tool is not enabled in your wiki, you can provide these data for us using wikilabels so can enable it for your wiki as well.

Best MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:15, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

@Ladsgroup: What is ORES? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:15, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

@Redrose64: m:ORES and also you can enable mw:ORES review tool as a beta feature Ladsgroup^overleg 19:20, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

I see. The thing is, the term wasn't linked either here or at m:Wiki labels, so as this was mass messaged, you might like to look at clarifying the term on all the other recipients. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:12, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

Current banner not displaying properly on at least some devices

screenshot

As you can see, the banner is cut off on my screen. I tried scrolling it to reveal the remainder of the text and it didn't work. I am using the desktop version of the site, but on a mobile device (iPad Air2, current version of Safari for same) I don't think I'm the target audience here, but presumably they want whoever is to actually be able to read it. Beeblebrox (talk) 04:59, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

The text also needs some copy-editing. I never remember where these banners live, and IIRC, when I found one once, I was unable to edit it (for obvious reasons). – Jonesey95 (talk) 06:28, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

It's meta:Special:CentralNoticeBanners/edit/WomanYouNeverMeetInitiative_2017. meta:CentralNotice says you can suggest uncontroversial corrections and tweaks at meta:Meta:Requests for help from a sysop or bureaucrat. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:41, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

Birth date template query

I've been tidying up birth dates where there's a hard-coded age which will become out of date, by applying various templates. In some cases such as this example I've used {{birth-date and age}}. I've paused, as I've just noticed that this changes the date format to dd Month yyyy even when I provide it in the American style as Month dd, yyyy. Even including the display parameter {{birth-date and age|September 20, 1980|September 20, 1980}} doesn't work. I've found a workaround: the display parameter is only reformatted if it's a valid date, so {{birth-date and age|September 20, 1980|<nowiki/>September 20, 1980}} displays the text I type in without altering it to dd Month yyyy. Is there a better way? I think the relevant processing is actually in {{birth-date}}, and I'm loathe to suggest a change to that as it's so widely used. Certes (talk) 12:49, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

To clarify: There are a few hundred cases to change, so I could set up JWB regexes to convert "September 20, 1980" to {{birth date and age|1980|9|20|mf=1}} (a different template: no hyphen in name) but I suspect this is a perennial problem with a standard solution that my searching has failed to find. Certes (talk) 13:26, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

It displays as entered for me. I guess you changed your date format preference at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering. I have the default "No preference". Don't force a date format on users by circumventing the preference with special code. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:32, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

Thank you PrimeHunter, I knew I'd missed something! So what I thought was a problem is actually a minor improvement, and I'll let the dates display according to user preference unless anyone comes along with a different opinion. Certes (talk) 13:38, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

@Certes: On the contrary, for articles with a definite date format (that is, most of them), the date format should be forced, in accordance with MOS:DATETIES. I don't use {{birth-date and age}} but {{birth date and age}} (this is the one with a hyphen); this respects the parameter |df=y meaning "day first" (n.b. |mf=y is ignored, the default for this template is month first). --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:41, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

Redrose64, I'm not sure you are discussing the same as us. It's fine to force a date format to IP's and users with no date preference but Certes was (without knowing it) trying to also force it on users who have specifically set a date preference for their account at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering. I see no reason to override that. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:50, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

I think the point Redrose64 is making (correctly, imo) is that this is an article-preference issue, not a user-preference issue. As far as article preferences go, there are several sections in MOS:NUM that provide guidance regarding dates. As article preferences (if any are established) face the readership in general, they should be the determining factor. 72.43.99.146 (talk) 16:31, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

I was trying to preserve the existing date formats, a mix of dmy and mdy, for everyone. Because I set a preference for dmy dates many years ago and forgot about it, I was seeing the dates change to dmy unexpectedly. This suited me, but I mistakenly assumed that everyone would see dmy dates and I was concerned for readers in other locales. PrimeHunter explained that I was worrying unnecessarily: my changes weren't forcing dmy on anyone, and I verified this by resetting my own preference. In this particular case, I think {{birth-date and age}} has all the advantages of {{birth date and age}} plus the bonus of allowing readers to force a format if they choose to change their display preferences. It was clear to me that forcing formats with the nowiki kludge wasn't a good solution, which is why I refrained from applying it and came here instead. Thanks again for your help. Certes (talk) 23:01, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

Ability to close account temporarily

Maybe I'm wrong, but I read it is possible to close your Wikipedia account. It made me think for a while that it wouldn't be such a made idea. I would like to open my email and not have to read about something new that happened on Wikipedia. I know I can close my notifications, but still I think the ability to close my account would me a chance to give other things besides Wikipedia. And why not?

Facebook has this feature where you can close your account and activate it whenever you want, even though it's users can turn off notifications. Why can't we also have this option for Wikipedia users?--Taeyebar 15:48, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

What would be the benefit of closing an account? Since we can't delete accounts or make them hidden for legal reasons (the edit attribution needs to be publicly available), "closing" an account would make no difference to either the user in question, or any outside observer, to that user just logging off Wikipedia. If you're really finding it so hard to let go of Wikipedia that you need your account somehow locked to give you the chance to move on, I'm more than happy to block you, but be sure that's what you really want before you request it. ‑ Iridescent 15:55, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

@Taeyebar: @Iridescent not really. You can disable email, then ask for a Wikipedia:Courtesy vanishing that will rename you to something like User:VanishedUser56465456456456465, then just walk away. — xaosflux ^Talk 15:58, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

As far as the and then you would want to come back again part, self requested block is likely the best option; you can also blank or requesting deletion of your userpage; and blank you talk page, you can not delete your edits or other peoples edits to your talk page. — xaosflux ^Talk 16:02, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

Xaosflux, OK I'll consider taking your advice. But why is it possible to do from facebook, but not here?--Taeyebar 16:14, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

There are a lot of things you can do other places but not here. One significant reason is that when you edit articles, etc, your edit is part of the revision history that you irrevocably agree to release your contribution under the CC BY-SA 3.0 License and the GFDL - which requires maintaining attribution. In sites like facebook you can deactivate your account and it disappears everything you have done - that would violate the copyright you agree to on each edit here. — xaosflux ^Talk 16:17, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

What if my editing history stays, just I go? My account is redlinked until I reactivate it.--Taeyebar 16:32, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

We can delete your userpage and you can request it to be undeleted later if you change your mind (or just recreate it later) if you want. Would you like this? — xaosflux ^Talk 16:36, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

@Taeyebar: Maybe take a look at WP:WIKIBREAK. There are methods, scripts, blocks etc to help you if you need. (I understand :) EoRdE6^{(Come Talk to Me!)} 02:03, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

Ability to filter logs

In the log interface (for example, the Block log) there are very few options to filter, especially negatively. For example, there are zillions of bot entries in the block log and there is no way to get rid of them, like there is in my Watchlist. As far as I can see, there is also no ability to search in the accompanying note. Could these features be added? Jytdog (talk) 16:52, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

no responses to this. would folks who watch this page please let me know if there a better place to request this? thx Jytdog (talk) 21:07, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

Those fields certainly do not like standard wildcards/exclusions. Tried doing "-ProcseeBot" (without quotes) and it eliminated everything, contrary to Help:Searching#Syntax.--☾Loriendrew☽ ☏(ring-ring) 00:36, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

The URL query strings provided for the various Special pages are not search strings, unless explicitly documented as such, for instance, the search= parameter of Special:Search. Virtually all other query parameters expect single non-list values, which might be numeric or string. In general, if there isn't a selection for what you want at the top of the relevant special page, there isn't a URL query parameter for what you want either.

Some special pages do have exclusions, but the syntax is not a search string, and is not general: for example, your watchlist restricted to non-bot edits in mainspace is

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AWatchlist&hidebots=1&namespace=0

but if you use the "Invert selection" checkbox as well, which adds the query parameter invert=1 to give

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AWatchlist&hidebots=1&namespace=0&invert=1

you will find that this extra parameter affects only the namespace= query parameter - it does not list bot edits only - instead, it lists non-bot edits outside mainspace.

What you are asking for is a new feature for the Special:Log page, and there's nothing we can do about that here, so you would need to file a feature request at phab:. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 09:41, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for answering. I will have to go figure that system out. Actually, I will not bother. Jytdog (talk) 10:31, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

Copy vio

What is the template that I can use to tag a page with copy violation material that needs to be deleted from the revision history? (See: Old Time Hockey). I already removed the material from the page, but I know there is a template I can use to tag the page as requiring attention from an admin to delete the revisions. (Please {{ping}} me). --Zackmann08 (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 17:50, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

@Zackmann08: {{Copyvio-revdel}} -- John of Reading (talk) 17:55, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

@John of Reading: many thanks! --Zackmann08 (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 18:15, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

User categories

In discussion at Wikipedia talk:User categories over whether redlinked user categories should be depopulated or left on userpages as a legitimate use of one's own userpage regardless of their interference with mainspace maintenance, one idea that's been floated is the possibility of segregating user categories from mainspace article categories via the creation of a new "User category" namespace, so that user category rules could potentially be revisited or adjusted because redlinks and jokes wouldn't be interfering with mainspace category maintenance anymore. (Or, alternatively, a wider "Wikipedia category" namespace to segregate all internal project categories — user, maintenance, Wikiproject, etc. — from mainspace content categories?)

I know that such a solution would be possible, as several new namespaces have been introduced over the eons that I've been participating in Wikipedia (hell, even Category: didn't exist yet when I started) — but I'm not familiar enough with the programming side to know whether it's an easy fix that could be implemented quickly within a few days, or a complex project that would take months to code and test and implement. Could anybody advise on how feasible this idea might be? Bearcat (talk) 17:59, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

Speaking as a MediaWiki developer, this idea would be extremely time-consuming to implement, to the extent that I would consider it unreasonable. The software assumes that all pages in namespace number 14 are category pages, so adding another namespace where this is true would cause all kinds of problems. — This, that and the other (talk) 02:34, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

However, if there are tracking categories (especially built in ones) we can put a switch to separate pages - example: Category:Pages using invalid self-closed HTML tags and Category:User pages using invalid self-closed HTML tags are both driven from MediaWiki:Deprecated-self-close-category. — xaosflux ^Talk 04:15, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

Is there anything else, then, that can be done to help get redlinked user categories off of Special:WantedCategories? As things currently stand, that project tool can't distinguish between redlinked user categories and redlinked article categories — which means that the people who are working on the important issue of cleaning up redlinked article categories are forced to work around permanent kludge that can never actually be cleared off the list. That's not sustainable or acceptable, however — the categorization project needs a way to get user categories off of that list entirely so that everything on that list is resolvable. For example, is there any way that Special:WantedCategories could be reprogrammed to exclude redlinked categories whose contents are in userspace instead of mainspace? Bearcat (talk) 23:28, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

Special pages are generated by the MediaWiki software where it's hard to get features added. Your best chance may be to instead ask for a database report at Wikipedia talk:Database reports. Another problem is that Special:WantedCategories is limited to 5000 categories. The English Wikipedia hits the limit.[3] I don't know whether a database report can go beyond the limit without doing it's own database scan instead of filtering Special:WantedCategories. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:12, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-02

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 now use datasets on Commons. You can see an example that is using this source. [4]
• There is a new opt-in beta feature of a wikitext mode for the visual editor. You can try it out.
• When you update a page with translations on wikis with the Translate extension the existing translations will be marked as outdated instead of removed. [5]
• The new version of MediaWiki was released to all wikis last week (calendar).
• MoodBar has been removed from the Wikimedia wikis. [6]
• The live option for the Tipsy notice tool has been removed. Gadgets and user scripts which use it need to be updated. [7]

Problems

• Editors who use Firefox 50 might get logged out or fail to save their edits. This is because of a browser bug. Until this is fixed you can enter about:config in the address bar and set network.cookie.maxPerHost to 5000. Firefox 50 is the current version of the Firefox. [8]

Changes this week

• There is no new version of MediaWiki this week because of the Wikimedia Developer Summit.

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

19:12, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

Robots.txt and Google's treatment of trailing slashes

Hi. There's a discussion going on here regarding our robots.txt file: MediaWiki talk:Robots.txt#Google thinks it's cute, we need to blacklist Wikipedia.253AArticles_for_deletion.252F. I'm advocating for simplifying the ruleset by removing trailing slashes from current disallow directives, but with the consequence that we'd be discouraging search engines from indexing root pages. --MZMcBride (talk) 06:03, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

Outdated server caches for redirected pages when logged out: is this a known issue?

Redirected pages often load outdated server caches. This is mostly evident on redirects to project pages which transclude evolving discussions, e.g. WP:FPC. The thing is, this seems to occur only when logged out. I've noticed this for as long as I can remember. It's a minor issue, but I wonder if it's ever been raised. --Paul_012 (talk) 08:08, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

It's been raised in another context. The cache for a page is not refreshed as often for logged out users. It's only an issue for page content that's generated (e.g., Category: pages) or transcluded, since editing a page updates the cached version. --Unready (talk) 09:03, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

Waiting for a password change.

I was unexpectedly logged out of Wikipedia yesterday (9th Jan 2017) and have been unable to get a replacement password having forgotten the current one. I requested a new password yesterday but nothing has arrived. Is it usual to have such a delay? Please leave a reply on my talk page, I'm reluctant to leave my email address in a public place. Many thanks, Richard Avery. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.25.178.168 (talk) 14:45, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

That's from Richard Avery, and I guess a reply here would do. He is receiving notifications when his user talk page is updated, so there is a linked e-mail that works. :-) William Avery (talk) 15:52, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

You should not have to leave your address anywhere, since we can not reset your password for you. You can try to request a password again, be sure to check for spam/junk filtering by your email system. — xaosflux ^Talk 15:57, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

Password changed, issue sorted. Thanks. Richard Avery (talk) 07:21, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

Herodotus title

Head of the article Herodotus is "herodotus" for some reason. It is seems to have Template:Lowercase title inside, though I don't see it in code. PuchaczTrado (talk) 12:29, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

@PuchaczTrado: I've fixed it by purging the article. The article had not been fully updated to reflect the recent edits to Template:C. -- John of Reading (talk) 12:48, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

Search prefix revisited – search with multiple prefixes?

This is a follow-up to Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 152#Search prefix:

See Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 61 § is there a way to search several sections with one search? – June 10–17, 2009

And User talk:Rainman § modification to search several Wikipedian sections at one time – June 15–17, 2009

And User talk:Stmrlbs/Archive/001 § multiple prefixes – June 15–17, 2009

June 17, 2009 Help:Searching documentation update, alas documentation of this multiple-prefixes-separated-by-pipes feature was removed on October 11, 2009 when this was rewritten, to try to improve usability

"To search multiple sections of Wikipedia with different prefixes, enter the different prefixes with a pipe delimiter."

"This should be especially useful for archive searching in concert with inputbox or searchbox."

• MediaWiki search engine improved, 10 November 2008
  • en.wiki migrated to new search backend, June 2, 2009. Wikitech-l
• Initial import of rewritten Lucene-Search extension
  • History No commits between August 2007 and March 2010. So where is the June 2009 change to support this?

Clearly prefix did at least briefly take pipes. Unfortunately, the volunteer developer of that, Rainman, isn't active any more either, and I haven't been able to locate his code changes that implemented that feature.

Can anyone more familiar with how the source code archives work locate the changes that Rainman made to implement multiple search prefixes?

Would it be possible to make similar changes in our current search engine to do this? wbm1058 (talk) 02:44, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

Gmail is putting all of my Wikipedia email into a folder called "Social" -- how to fix?

Gmail is now putting all of my Wikipedia email into a folder called "Social", where it puts notifications from Facebook and YouTube. It has apparently been doing this since about late November 2016. I want to know how to get it to accept Wikipedia emails as normal emails into my "Primary" inbox. Does anyone know how to make it do that? Softlavender (talk) 03:00, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

Drag one to "inbox" then you should get a pop-up asking if you want to do this for all future email like that. — xaosflux ^Talk 04:08, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

Excellent -- thanks, Xaosflux. I tried that and hopefully the whole matter is solved. Softlavender (talk) 05:01, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

If you are using the Inbox mode I recommend switching back to old Gmail. That thing is garbage. Better yet, use third-party IMAP software which will load your Gmail in the normal, sane way. I use K9 Mail on Android (free, open source, available on Play store and F-Droid) and Mozilla Thunderbird on Windows (also free and open source, integrates with Firefox). Just some ideas. Pariah24 ┃ ☏ 16:43, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

Local config for end users

Hello y'all, I am wondering if there is a way on Windows to have a local copy of LocalSettings.php and skins folders for use on Wikipedia and other wikis as opposed to using custom CSS or JS. Some skins I'd like to use don't seem to support CSS. Any insight would be appreciated. Pariah24 ┃ ☏ 16:35, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

Bot to help with FA/GA nomination process

The process is as follows: (Pasted from FA nomination page):

Before nominating an artic)le, ensure that it meets all of the FA criteria and that peer reviews are closed and archived. The featured article toolbox (at right) can help you check some of the criteria. Place at the top of the talk page of the nominated article and save the page. From the FAC template, click on the red "initiate the nomination" link or the blue "leave comments" link. You will see pre-loaded information; leave that text. If you are unsure how to complete a nomination, please post to the FAC talk page for assistance. Below the preloaded title, complete the nomination page, sign with 47.17.27.96 (talk) 16:48, 12 January 2017 (UTC), and save the page.

Copy this text: Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/name of nominated article/archiveNumber (substituting Number), and edit this page (i.e., the page you are reading at the moment), pasting the template at the top of the list of candidates. Replace "name of ..." with the name of your nomination. This will transclude the nomination into this page. In the event that the title of the nomination page differs from this format, use the page's title instead.

May be a bot could automate that process? Thanks. 47.17.27.96 (talk) 16:48, 12 January 2017 (UTC)