Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)

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Help needed with saving pages to a web archive

I would like to save several pages of handball leagues to a web archive, but only partly succeed to do so.

The "fixtures", "results", "standings" and "matrix" (mix of fixtures and results) of those leagues can be viewed on the website of the Netherlands Handball Association (NHV).

As exampla I'll take the "Heren BENE-League":

1. Goto https://www.handbal.nl/
2. Select "PROGRAMMA/UITSLAGEN/STANDEN" (Fixtures/Results/Standings) from the menu in the top black bar.
3. Select "POULES" from the orange oval.
4. Select the "Zaal" (indoor) entry from the "NHV Landelijk" line/section.
5. Select the "Heren BENE-League" entry.
6. from the "Poule BENE 23-24" line/section select either
   1. "Programma" (Fixtures) or
   2. "Uitslagen" (Results) or
   3. "Standen" (Standings) or
   4. "Matrix"

After the last selection you get the related info. You can switch between "Programma" (Fixtures), "Uitslagen" (Results), "Standen" (Standings) and "Matrix" info by selecting the corresponding tab. Don't use your browser functionality to go to the previous page in your browsing history (left arrow button before the address bar), it will result in having to go thru the menu all over again.

To my knowledge none of these pages can be saved on a web archive service like Wayback Machine or Archive.Today. This is caused because these pages are retrieved using HTTP POST requests contrary to HTTP GET requests.

These pages can also be retrieved using CURL on the command line:

Page	CLI command
"Programma" (Fixtures)"	curl -s -X POST -d "page=poules&tab=programma&params[]=XXX&params[]=35670" "https://www.handbal.nl/export-uitslagen"
"Uitslagen" (Results)"	curl -s -X POST -d "page=poules&tab=uitslagen&params[]=XXX&params[]=35670" "https://www.handbal.nl/export-uitslagen"
"Standen" (Standings)	curl -s -X POST -d "page=poules&tab=standen&params[]=XXX&params[]=35670" "https://www.handbal.nl/export-uitslagen"
"Matrix"	curl -s -X POST -d "page=poules&tab=matrix&params[]=XXX&params[]=35670" "https://www.handbal.nl/export-uitslagen"

Where:

XXX	A display string, which is not really relevant. For the league above it would be "NHV+Landelijk+^%^7C+Zaal+^%^7C+Heren+BENE-League+^%^7C+BENE+23-24" ("NHV Landelijk | Zaal | Heren BENE-League | BENE 23-24") without the double quotes.
35670	the ID of the league. Other leagues are e.g. 35674 for the "Heren Eredivisie" (Men Eredivisie) league or 35715 for the "Dames Eredivisie" (Women Eredivisie) league.

There's a undocumented way the request these pages in your browswer where an HTTP GET request is used:

Page	URL
"Programma" (Fixtures)"	https://www.handbal.nl/uitslagen-standen/#poules:programma:XXX:35670
"Uitslagen" (Results)"	https://www.handbal.nl/uitslagen-standen/#poules:uitslagen:XXX:35670
"Standen" (Standings)	https://www.handbal.nl/uitslagen-standen/#poules:standen:XXX:35670
"Matrix"	https://www.handbal.nl/uitslagen-standen/#poules:matrix:XXX:35670

Using these URL's clearly shows the effect of the display string XXX.

Changing 35670 into 35674 or 35715 will give the info for the other leagues mentioned above.

Using these URL's, the pages partly can be saved in a web archive.

Using:

Web Archive	Comment
WayBack Machine	None of the pages can be saved. WayBack cannot handle the "#" (anchor indicator) in the URL. Basically everything after the "#" is ignored.
Archive.Today	Creates a correct copy for the "Programma" (Fixtures) and "Uitslagen" (Results) pages. However not for the "Standen" (Standings) and "Matrix" pages.

It's exactly the 2 pages I'm mostly interested in, for which it's not possible to create a web archive copy. End of season the "Programma" (Fixtures) is empty anyway. The "Matrix" page only contains results at the end, and I prefer the matrix representation of the results above the list presentation on the "Uitslagen" (Results) page.

At the start of a new season the pages of the previous season are no longer available. Hence I would like to have a web archive copy to use as reference.

Does anyone have an idea how to create a web archive copy of the "Standen" (Standings) and "Matrix" page. I don't care which method and web archive is used, as long as I get a proper web archive copy.

Any help is appreciated. TIA.

--Sb008 (talk) 17:04, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

You will need to encode the URL. '#' is '%23'. I'v done one, leave you with the remainder (Wayback). Neils51 (talk) 13:38, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

@Neils51: Thanks for your effort tp come up with a solution. Unfortunately it doesn't give the desired result. I tried it for a different league, 35715=Women Eredivisie.

Page URL	Archive URL	Result
https://www.handbal.nl/uitslagen-standen/%23poules:programma:XXX:35715	http://web.archive.org/web/20230911182502/https://www.handbal.nl/uitslagen-standen/	OK
https://www.handbal.nl/uitslagen-standen/%23poules:uitslagen:XXX:35715	http://web.archive.org/web/20230910143129/https://www.handbal.nl/uitslagen-standen/
https://www.handbal.nl/uitslagen-standen/%23poules:standen:XXX:35715	https://web.archive.org/web/20230912110037/https://www.handbal.nl/uitslagen-standen/	Shows all (layout), except for the actual data.
https://www.handbal.nl/uitslagen-standen/%23poules:matrix:XXX:35715	http://web.archive.org/web/20230910084635/https://www.handbal.nl/uitslagen-standen/

So, with HTML URL Encoding I get the same results on WayBack Machine as on Archive.Today without encoding. Actually, I normally already use encoding because instead of "XXX" I mostly use "%20".

Furthermore, there're 2 additional "problems" with using WayBack Machine suitable UEL's:

• Browsers can't handle the encoded URL's, "%20" instead of "XXX" is no problem, but "%23" instead of "#" results in an HTTP 404 error.
• Wayback Machine has issues anyway, too often it seems to make a copy, but you get the message "There was a delay in registering this snapshot with the Wayback Machine. You may be redirected to a previous version right now. This snapshot will be available later." And it seems to me that the snapshot never gets registered and you're always redirected.

Once again, thanks for your effort.

--Sb008 (talk) 11:26, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Template:Advert not displaying in Firefox

There appears to be an issue with Template:Advert not displaying in Firefox (my version is 117.0). The page does not load and only displays a white blank page. This also means any pages with the template do not display the template while the rest of the page does display. Osarius 09:01, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

Not experiencing this on Firefox 117.0 on macOS. Could it be an extension, maybe an adblock cosmetic filter that filtered it as a likely advert? DFlhb (talk) 09:16, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

Not experiencing this either. I have bunch of extensions enabled among which includes adblockers with bunch of filters enabled (none are cosmetic) and trackers blockers, and Firefox built-in Enhanced Tracking Protection enabled in Custom mode. If you haven't done so, try launching Firefox in Safe mode and visit the Template:Advert and see if it's displaying. — Paper9oll (🔔 • 📝) 09:59, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

I see the template as normal on Firefox 117.0. However, I've whitelisted Wikipedia in my ad blockers. I expect one of your extensions thinks that a page called Advert might be an advert. Certes (talk) 11:14, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

Yep, you're all correct. Turns out to be an adblocker extension. My bad Osarius 10:34, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

Weird bullet indentation adjacent to left-floated image

If you view Black market in wartime France#Response by authorities, you'll see a left-floated image, with some content flowing around it, including three bullet items. But, the three bullet items

• appear to have very odd indentation;
• not only aren't they indented right a couple of characters, or even flush with text above it, they are
• actually shifted to the left, as if there were a bit of negative left padding. This seems very odd.

What could be going on here? Is there a ticket for this already, or should I write one?

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. Mathglot (talk) 08:29, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

That's just how the CSS works out. The margin is on the <ul>, but that extends under the image as the floated image only pushes the text right. There's a template {{flowlist}} that can wrap the list to avoid this display issue. That's also why MOS:IMAGELOC suggests avoiding left-floated images when bulleted lists are nearby. Anomie⚔ 11:53, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

This is a known issue, and has been so for as long as I've been around (14+ years). That said, it's improved a little during that time - when I first started, the bullets actually overlapped the image. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 18:54, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

Thanks, all. Just to be clear, when we say that this is "just how the CSS works out", I assume we mean that "this is just how the Mediawiki CSS works out". Given the CSS box model, I'm assuming that if I tried this in a pure Html file external to Wikipedia using an html unordered list and rendered it in a browser, the indentation would be correct. In other words, this is a Mediawiki bug, not a bug in CSS. I'm not pushing for it to be resolved if it's been outstanding this long, I just want to be clear where the locus of the problem is, in case this comes up again. Mathglot (talk) 19:49, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

You assume incorrectly. Try it and see. Anomie⚔ 21:27, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

(edit conflict) No, if you have HTML code like this:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Demo of list alongside left-floated image</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/a9/Example.jpg/100px-Example.jpg" width="100" height="108" style="float:left;" />
    <ul>
      <li>List item
      <li>List item
      <li>List item
      <li>List item
      <li>List item
      <li>List item
      <li>List item
      <li>List item
      <li>List item
      <li>List item
    </ul>
  </body>
</html>

you will find that the first few list items (six in my browser) have their bullets overlapping the image, with the left of the letter "L" immediately to the right of the right-hand edge of the image; and the last few list items (four in my browser) are below the image, arranged normally. So you need extra CSS to move those first few bullets to the right. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:30, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

Also six in my browser. Well, I'm stunned. So the problem is with CSS itself, then, as I can't see any way that this is compliant with the box model, unless there's some very fine print somewhere. Wow. So the solution here is to use {{flowlist}}; thanks for that great tip, and all the supporting work to demonstrate this. I'm still getting over my shock. I wonder what else is lurking out there in CSS-land that I don't know about. (Don't tell me; I don't think I really want to know!) Mathglot (talk) 22:39, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

Floated elements are removed from the layout flow and so the bounding boxes of other elements don't take them into account. However floated elements do push aside the inline content of the other elements. Floats have always been tricky to use as a result—you often have to allocate space for them within other elements—and thus other layout methods like grid or flexbox were invented and are usually preferred nowadays. isaacl (talk) 00:31, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

@Isaacl:, thanks for this. My skills are mostly a robust 4.1, with some of the bright and shiny 5.0 stuff, but I'm not up on things like grid or flexbox, so at least I know where to look to update my increasingly rusty skills. Much appreciated. Mathglot (talk) 01:04, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

I think the "fine print" you're missing is that the list item bullets ("markers" in CSS terms) are not a part of the box model. They are drawn outside of the boxes of the list items, regardless of what else appears there. And by the way, there's a workaround in CSS that changes that – list-style-position: inside [1] causes the markers to be placed inside the list item's box, and behave more intuitively. The drawback is that you can't adjust where exactly the marker appears using margin and padding any more. Matma Rex talk 14:50, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

On a fine technical point, note the bullet will get pushed over by the floated element in that case because it is inline content (though of course that necessarily means it's put within the box content). isaacl (talk) 17:01, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

On another fine technical point, the only actual CSS in my example is the declaration float:left inside the single style= attribute of the img element. The list is pure HTML, using no CSS at all. I know of no non-CSS method for flosting an object such as an image. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:35, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

<img src=... align="left"> is deprecated Html, but still works using your example, modified; but bullet placement is the same. Mathglot (talk) 21:06, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

The align= attribute isn't deprecated, it's obsolete, which is why I didn't mention it. It's still supported by all major browsers though, but this is not guaranteed. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 17:01, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

I don't think Matma Rex has suggested there is more CSS other than the single style attribute in your example. isaacl (talk) 21:12, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia launch dates

List of Wikipedias#Wikipedia editions lists active Wikipedias with their launch dates. A discussion here asks whether there is a way to get an authorative list of such dates. Is the date of launch for each project available somewhere? Johnuniq (talk) 04:10, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

Special character causing unresolved issue at WP:FA

Could someone have a look at Wikipedia:Featured_articles/mismatches#In_Category:Featured_articles_but_not_on_Wikipedia:Featured_articles relative to this old attempt at a fix, which did not work? Thanks! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:46, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

So the bug is that the article Β-Hydroxy β-methylbutyric acid should not appear on the report at Wikipedia:Featured_articles/mismatches? If so, sounds like a bug in GreenC bot. Would likely need GreenC to take a look, or have the source code published somewhere. –Novem Linguae (talk) 15:37, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

It's partially published on toolforge (see User:GreenC bot/Job 15), but parts aren't world-readable so I can't test. (Also, the last time I used awk for more than a few minutes at a time was before unicode existed.)

I suspect the problem is the -b flag in fambot.awk; it looks to be what's preventing the "β-Hydroxy β-methylbutyric acid" in WP:Featured articles from being properly upcased to "Β-Hydroxy β-methylbutyric acid" as fetched from the category:

cryptic@tools-sgebastion-10:0~$ cat ~cryptic/betas
Β-Hydroxy β-methylbutyric acid
β-Hydroxy β-methylbutyric acid

cryptic@tools-sgebastion-10:0~$ file ~cryptic/betas
/home/cryptic/betas: UTF-8 Unicode text, with CRLF line terminators

cryptic@tools-sgebastion-10:0~$ gawk -b '{print toupper(substr($0,1,1)) substr($0,2)}' ~cryptic/betas
Β-Hydroxy β-methylbutyric acid
β-Hydroxy β-methylbutyric acid

cryptic@tools-sgebastion-10:0~$ gawk '{print toupper(substr($0,1,1)) substr($0,2)}' ~cryptic/betas
Β-Hydroxy β-methylbutyric acid
Β-Hydroxy β-methylbutyric acid

—Cryptic 15:51, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

Hmmm that's weird as I had it working with a static override in the bot code for this particular name. Something in the past few days changed somewhere, it wasn't my code. The -b is interesting, I could try removing it, it might break other things. This has used up a lot of time. I keep trying. -- GreenC 16:09, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

User:SandyGeorgia: This is the problem. Recall we added this workaround so the bot sees it as B and not β since the Category page returns it as B we want WP:Featured article to also return it as B. I'm hesitant to try Cryptic's suggestion of removing the -b switch because it might break other things, but, I can try that if you prefer, the worse that will happen is the report has false positives and we add the -b back. -- GreenC 18:34, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

Over my head; trust all of you to do whatever you think best :) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:19, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

Piping the wikilink looks like a good workaround here. I've done so in this diff. –Novem Linguae (talk) 19:26, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

Noincludes on article hatnote

Can anyone explain why there are noincludes on the "For ... " hatnotes at the top of Operation Gideon (2020) (permadiff)? I've not seen that before on article dab pages, and don't understand why they are needed here. (Also unclear why the dab page Operation Gideon (disambiguation) isn't just used, but that's another matter.) Thx, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:46, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

I think it was unintentional… <noinclude> tags were first added with a bot notice: [2]. Then another user, probably accidentally, moved a hatnote inside these tags: [3]. The bot notice was later removed: [4] but the tags were not. (They could also be used legitimately for article excerpts, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.) Matma Rex talk 15:05, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

That article has been contentious, so I'm a bit reluctant to fix this myself without ample feedback. Does anyone else see any reason for the noincludes? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:52, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

Article pretty much has no transclusions (in other words, nothing "includes" it), so it should be safe to remove the noinclude tags. I've done so. If anyone more tech saavy than me wants to explain why Talk:Operation Gideon (2020) shows up in the list of transclusions despite not transcluding the article, feel free :) –Novem Linguae (talk) 17:57, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

Many talk pages appear to transclude their corresponding article. Some templates in the talk banners, such as {{Talk header}}, will be referencing the page in a way that causes a transclusion to be recorded. For example it might run getContent() on it in a Lua module to determine what sort of page it is (article, redirect, dab...). Certes (talk) 18:09, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

Thanks all; I'll wait to correct the duplicate hatnotes, then, until we get through a Requested move that is now being discussed. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:18, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

When an article transcludes itself, 99+% of the time it uses {{cite xxx}} templates (Trappist the monk has explained why in the past). The other tiny fraction are genuine errors, this probably isn't such a case. As for talk pages transcluding their articles - {{talk header}} and {{WikiProject banner shell}} both do this, as do all WikiProject banners. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 13:30, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

{{Short description}} appears to cause a self-transclusion too, probably due to Module:Pagetype#L-116. (Example: A4042 road: preview with the SD removed, and it disappears from the used template list.) I expect there are others. Certes (talk) 16:04, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Tech News: 2023-37

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

• ORES, the revision evaluation service, is now using a new open-source infrastructure on all wikis except for English Wikipedia and Wikidata. These two will follow this week. If you notice any unusual results from the Recent Changes filters that are related to ORES (for example, "Contribution quality predictions" and "User intent predictions"), please report them. [5]
• When you are logged in on one Wikimedia wiki and visit a different Wikimedia wiki, the system tries to log you in there automatically. This has been unreliable for a long time. You can now visit the login page to make the system try extra hard. If you feel that made logging in better or worse than it used to be, your feedback is appreciated. [6]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 September. It will be on all wikis from 14 September (calendar).
• The Technical Decision-Making Forum Retrospective team invites anyone involved in the technical field of Wikimedia projects to signup to and join one of their listening sessions on 13 September. Another date will be scheduled later. The goal is to improve the technical decision-making processes.
• As part of the changes for the Better diff handling of paragraph splits wishlist proposal, the inline switch widget in diff pages is being rolled out this week to all wikis. The inline switch will allow viewers to toggle between a unified inline or two-column diff wikitext format. [7]

Future changes

• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on 20 September. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [8]
• The Enterprise API is launching a new feature called "breaking news". Currently in BETA, this attempts to identify likely "newsworthy" topics as they are currently being written about in any Wikipedia. Your help is requested to improve the accuracy of its detection model, especially on smaller language editions, by recommending templates or identifiable editing patterns. See more information at the documentation page on MediaWiki or the FAQ on Meta.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 21:05, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

the inline switch widget in diff pages is being rolled out this week — Is there a Special:Preferences option to remove this? It's extra screen space taken up by a feature that I don't use. Mitch Ames (talk) 01:15, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

.mw-diffPage-inlineToggle-container { display: none } in your CSS should do away with it. —Cryptic 01:24, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Additionally, .ve-init-mw-diffPage-diffMode is the CSS class for the visual/wikitext switch if you also don't want to see that. (And .mw-diff-table-prefix is the class for the div that houses them both.) - Purplewowies (talk) 03:36, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

I'm sure Preferences option would be easier. How does one request such an option? Mitch Ames (talk) 04:59, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Hi Mitch Ames, I'll pass this feedback on to the rest of the team — I think we did consider a preferences option to show/hide (and/or set a global default, and thus hide the need for it), but feedback in the past suggested that folx dislike "more things" appearing in their preferences so that likely swayed us against the option. Either way, I'll pass it on — TheresNoTime-WMF (talk • they/them) 09:03, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

folx dislike "more things" appearing in their preferences — More or less than they dislike more things appearing on every diff page? Surely I'm not the only one who views diffs far more often than I view my preferences page. Mitch Ames (talk) 11:43, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Maybe you should try using the feature —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:47, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

I have tried the feature, and I don't like it. It might be useful if it showed the "as displayed" diff (ie with formatted text instead of wiki markup), but as it stands I find it harder to read than the existing "standard" diff or (for some scenarios) wikEdDiff. I realise that many people might like it, but I think wasting screen space for a switch that is visible all the time - even when I'll never use it - is a bad idea. Mitch Ames (talk) 11:56, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Diff interface with various toggles

@Mitch Ames There's also an option to show the "as displayed" diff, using the "Visual" button that you should find next to the "Inline" toggle (see image on the right for how it should look).

By the way, the inline diff is basically the same thing as wikEdDiff, so if it is harder to read, perhaps there's some improvement to be made. Can you explain why it feels worse to you? Matma Rex talk 22:47, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

For my part, I'd be more likely to use the feature if it didn't come with a gigantic, infantilizing button. Desktop is not mobile. With the visual/wikitext toggle, at least we can hide the redundant icon and debuttonize, but with this, if the immense graphic is hidden, the remaining label is nonfunctional. —Cryptic 14:28, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

@Cryptic I can't say I understand why you feel this way about the button, but you make a good point that the text of the label should also be clickable, and we follow that principle everywhere else throughout MediaWiki. It turns out that it was also designed to work this way here, and it's a tiny mistake that broke it – I proposed a patch at T346132 that will correct it, so this will probably be fixed here on Wikipedia next week. Matma Rex talk 23:20, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Updates on Vector 2022, Zebra, dark mode, and more

Hi everyone,

First of all, many thanks for your involvement in discussions about the desktop interface and the Vector 2022 skin.  Below, we give you an update on Vector 2022 and Zebra, as well as our next project, which includes introducing dark mode, and customizations on mobile and desktop for both logged-in and logged-out. Let's do this!

Last few months: Zebra, preference persistence, annual plan, and more

During our conversations about Vector 2022, we mentioned that we see the skin as an improvement in itself, but also, as a foundation on top of which we can continue to make improvements.  We also discussed ideas for changing our default interfaces on desktop and mobile browsers.

Over the last couple of months, we have continued working on skins through bug-fixing, performing an A/B test on Zebra (read the new update with results from the test!), and studying our previous user testing on font size. We have also taken a close look at the latest Community Wishlist Survey's top #1 proposal, dark mode, as well as other accessibility-related requests from communities. Those of you who have read the annual plan or took part in the consultations of its draft, might have also noticed this related objective (WE2.1).  If you watch our team even more closely, you may have read our May update where we captured some of the initiatives mentioned above.

In addition to that, we have worked on building out the capability for logged-out users to customize certain portions of the interface. First of these were introduced as a result of the conversations we had together around customizing the width of content in Vector 2022.  We are glad your community encouraged us to build a way for readers to set these options and look forward to using it for changes that improve accessibility!

Next project: Improved typography and dark mode

Now, we are ready to work on a next project. Our focus will be on making the site more accessible while reading and easier to customize. We will work on:

1. Providing more options for font size and typography (currently, these are only available on mobile) and improving our default typography
2. Building out a dark mode

Both of these will be available on desktop and mobile, and customizable for all logged-out and logged-in users.

We have published our initial thoughts on this project page, as well as some of our initial research and review of existing literature for the project.  We welcome you to read over our thinking and share your opinions below.  We are currently defining what success means for this project. Sketching out summaries of the research we’ve done so far that made us realize that accessibility should be a priority for this work.

We are also building a tool that will allow editors to experiment with different options around font size and typography.  The goal here would be to identify what needs different communities have for various customizations and make it easier to discuss ideas for the changes together.  We hope to have this tool ready to share with you all within the next couple of weeks.

Thank you and we look forward to hearing your thoughts! OVasileva (WMF), SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 02:23, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the update. It looks like Wikipedia:Vector 2022 could use some updates. It doesn't show that anything has happened since January 2023.

Also, is the team still processing bug reports? Things like T325219, an easy fix that would eliminate some "oops" whitespace at the top of every single page, sitting idle since February do not inspire a lot of confidence. Other feature requests sit idle, like T333590, asking for notification icons to be in the sticky header, and T329673, asking for the sticky header to appear in all pages and page views (e.g. diffs and history). I've had to work around these basic problems since December using personal CSS. Editors should not be expected to have to do this with the default skin. – Jonesey95 (talk) 03:12, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

I don't process Wikimedia bug reports, yet for T333590, all I see is a personal assertion of editor behavior that is not backed up with data. As a neutral observer, this bug is no more important than any other random feature request. If there is evidence that most editors expect certain behavior, I suggest including the data for that so it can be properly evaluated. Without that, it sounds like a personal wish list item. Orange Suede Sofa (talk) 07:38, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Is there any information on how the tested groups were selected? Aaron Liu (talk) 13:53, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Based on the user's local "user ID", where odd numbers are one group, and even numbers are the other. You may preview your ID here. More information is in comments to the Phabricator task T335379; there's also a detailed report. It's very technical, though – a layperson like me doesn't understand most of that code and information ;) SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 14:04, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Dark mode? For me? Thank you so much! 199.208.172.35 (talk) 15:35, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Content of Category:Soviet and Russian attack aircraft

The category was moved to Category:Soviet attack aircraft, but it was populated by a template, and the content was not moved when the move was performed by a bot. I tried to figure out what exactly needs to be modified, but failed. Could someone help please. An example member of that category is Category:1930s Soviet attack aircraft. Thanks. Ymblanter (talk) 05:55, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

It's caused by |Soviet under "Output cat 2 regardless" in {{Airntd}}. The template is used in lots of Soviet-related categories and other cases will break if it's removed. For example, Category:1930s Soviet experimental aircraft is currently in Category:Soviet and Russian experimental aircraft but would change to Category:Soviet experimental aircraft. It appears to require a more complicated change. I'm not delving further into it. PrimeHunter (talk) 09:19, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Ugh, I "fixed" {{Airntd}} before seeing PrimeHunter's response. Ymblanter, should these other categories be moved to match the outcome of the discussion that led to moving the "attack aircraft" category, or should I undo my template changes? Note: I will be away from Wikipedia for about 12 hours soon. Any template editor is welcome to revert my changes to that template if that is the right thing to do. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:04, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Thanks both of you. All the categories which were inside Category:Soviet and Russian attack aircraft should be moved, but if there are any others they should not. If there is no solution via template may be we should just make a separate template or add categories by hand? Ymblanter (talk) 14:10, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Or at least I do not think we currently have consensus for moving all these categories. I am just trying to implement a particular CfD conclusion though, this is not really an area I understand well. Ymblanter (talk) 14:12, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

At the end it seems to work, thanks a lot. Ymblanter (talk) 16:37, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

My change has created a bunch of red-linked categories. I have reverted the change pending a more sophisticated fix, a more comprehensive CFD, or an undo of the initial CFD that seems to be tied to other categories. – Jonesey95 (talk) 23:55, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

Fixed this specific problem using {{Resolve category redirect}}. More problems of this sort will likely crop up in the future. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 04:12, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

PageNotice extension - now available for testing

It has been proposed numerous times on this wiki to install the PageNotice MediaWiki extension to allow a uniform header to be automatically displayed at the top of every page in the Draft namespace. See Wikipedia:Village_pump_(idea_lab)/Archive_39#Universal_notice_for_draftspace for what I understand to be the most recent discussion, but it was suggested as far back as 2014.

I'm pleased to report that the extension is now available for testing. The wiki used for testing PageNotice is Beta English Wiktionary (not Wikipedia).

I'm happy to grant established English Wikipedia users temporary admin rights on your Beta English Wiktionary account if you would like to test this new feature. There is no Draft namespace on Wiktionary, but you can test with any other namespace if you wish. Instructions for using the extension are at mw:Extension:PageNotice.

If there is a desire to enable the extension on this wiki (the non-beta English Wikipedia), community consensus would need to be demonstrated.

Ping @Sdkb and SD0001:. This, that and the other (talk) 10:03, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

I'd be happy to test it out, sure! Thanks to all who have worked on this! {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 13:55, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

@Sdkb have you created an account on Beta English Wiktionary (or any other beta.wmflabs.org site)? What is your username there? Let me know and I'll assign the admin bit. This, that and the other (talk) 08:30, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

@This, that and the other, created an account at Beta Wiktionary with my same username of Sdkb. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 17:08, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

@Sdkb done. This, that and the other (talk) 23:22, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

Got it to work, @This, that and the other; see https://en.wiktionary.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/User:Sdkb.

Two comments that come to mind:

1. I'd prefer it to go above the page title, just like a banner would, rather than below.
2. When viewing or editing a page, it's hard to tell where the banner is coming from. Just like editors with the requisite permissions for editnotices on Wikipedia have the "page notice" and "group notice" links in the editor, there should be a link to the namespace banner MediaWiki page so that editors can edit it if desired.

Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 03:04, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

@Sdkb re your second point, I feel this is something that should be handled locally, similar to the {{editnotice load}} system for editnotices.

The first point is a more interesting one. The placement of the notice at the top of the page content, beneath the title, makes it valuable for boilerplate text or disclaimers of the kind that this project might want to include at the top of Draft pages. What is the use case that you are imagining, where the notice goes above the page title? I note that in Vector 2022 skin, this would span the whole width of the page, deepening the disconnect between the page content (which is in a fixed-width panel) and the page notice. This, that and the other (talk) 03:16, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

The use case would be the draft namespace. Idk, it just seems more intuitive to have it above the title, and less like it could be confused with the actual page content. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 03:19, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

Is User:HBC AIV helperbot5 working?

Wikipedia:Usernames for administrator attention has a long list of accounts that were blocked in the past few hours but have not been removed. Is HBC AIV helperbot5 working? It's usually faster than this, surely. Bishonen | tålk 10:42, 12 September 2023 (UTC).

Thanks for the ping, I have restarted the bot now. — JamesR (talk) 10:49, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Cool, thanks. Bishonen | tålk 11:04, 12 September 2023 (UTC).

Looks like it's been glitchy the last few days. See also Wikipedia:Bots/Noticeboard#AIV bot is down again(?) –Novem Linguae (talk) 11:10, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Anomie's comment at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#In general may be related. Looks like restarting certain servers can make Toolforge cron jobs hang and require a manual restart. –Novem Linguae (talk) 15:08, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

XTools not working

Resolved

 – The reported issue with toolforge has been resolved — closing this so that any new/unrelated issues are not incorrectly assumed to be related. fwiw, it looks like this was T346177 — TheresNoTime (talk • they/them) 15:54, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

I was browsing random pages for cleanup purposes, and I noticed that the XTools info was not showing up whatsoever. I tried turning it off and back on, no luck. I reset the browser, and still no luck. I am on Chrome v116.0.5845.179, and it has been working for the past several days, before stopping working about 30 minutes ago. Is anyone else having this issue? EDIT: it seems to be back to normal, but it sounds like some server issues are going on DrowssapSMM (talk) 13:34, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm also seeing this on my side. I'm also using Chrome, and trying to access the page gives a DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN error. Maybe WMF is having some server issues? Liu1126 (talk) 15:53, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

They must be. I saw several '503 Service Unavailable' errors when trying to get from the watchlist to this page, and had a similar problem several hours ago. There's no replag, and it's been long enough since the last time this happened I don't remember what else to look up. BlackcurrantTea (talk) 16:16, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

geohack.toolforge.org not working

Hi all, I don't know if it's something that you already know, but it looks like that geohack.toolforge.org doesn't work (impossible to contact server). -- bs (talk) 14:06, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Earwig and https://toolforge.org are both throwing 504 errors for me. – dudhhr ^talk_contribs^she_her 16:25, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Firefly's CCI Tools are still working. – dudhhr ^talk_contribs^she_her 16:32, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Not sure if related, the entire English Wikipedia was down earlier (est. 16:05 UTC) like for 3 mins throwing 504 errors for me. Currently, English Wikipedia and the toolforge's tools are up and working for me. — Paper9oll (🔔 • 📝) 16:37, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Never mind, reloaded w/ cache bypassed and it 504s. – dudhhr ^talk_contribs^she_her 16:39, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Six hours on, geohack.toolforge.org is still throwing a HTTP 504, so it's not a short-term glitch. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:26, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Recent changes filters down?

Trying to check out vandalism using recent change filters and nothing has appeared since 11:34 AM EST (now 1:14 PM EST as of posting). Just wondering if it needs a restart. Kline | yes? 17:15, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

In general

It seems there was some sort of NFS issue this morning (I don't see an email about it, but there was mention on IRC and in wikitech:Nova Resource:Tools/SAL), and while it was resolved with a restart several hours ago it seems it made a lot of tools hang. Their maintainers will likely need to restart them. Anomie⚔ 17:52, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Alright. Thanks! :) NotAGenious (talk) 17:54, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

good to know, thanks! DrowssapSMM (talk) 18:01, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

It looks like some of this is due to a DNS misconfiguration, see Phab:T346177. 192.76.8.91 (talk) 01:47, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

At first, I thought it was me. I brought it up to the teahouse. Then I was pointed to this. I'm glad to see the problem fixed. Cwater1 (talk) 14:25, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

osm4wiki.toolforge.org

Still getting "504 Gateway timeout" errors when I try to invoke an OpenStreetMap link.
e.g. https://osm4wiki.toolforge.org/cgi-bin/wiki/wiki-osm.pl?project=en&article=Bow_Range&section=Peaks+and+mountains
RedWolf (talk) 18:10, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Still not working

504 Gateway Time-out

HandsomeFella (talk) 19:27, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

Tiny text on mobile web

Recently I have been seeing very small text size on some articles but not others, and on this very page, when using an iPad. I haven't figured out what it is about the page that changes the size. (Might affect tablet and not phone, would have to confirm on the latter.) When I say tiny, I mean so small that that Minerva is as hard to read as Vector and Vector 2022. Anyone know what changed? ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 18:16, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Are you sure you didn't switch to the desktop site ? When you click the Aa in the addressbar on the device and click 100%, does that fix it ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:07, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Mobile web, 100% zoom

Yes, 100% sure, TheDJ. And zoom is 100%. I'll work on uploading some screenshots. Happens when logged-out also.

Since other people don't appear to be experiencing the same, I’ll test on some other devices. Maybe it’s “a me thing”. It looks fine on iPhone.) ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 21:25, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

On two old iPads that I keep around for testing it looks “normal”. 15–18 words per line, my top post line-breaks at: on/this, that/changes, latter.)/When, Vector/2022. (5 lines total) iOS 9.3.6 and 12.5

On the iPad where I'm writing this: 25 words per line, line breaks at haven't/figured, latter.)/When (3 lines total) iOS 15. ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 22:31, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

For comparison: desktop web using Vector 2022 with all sidebars (menu, ToC, tools) hidden, I get same line breaks on all three tablets: out/what, so/small. Portrait not landscape orientation in all cases. ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 22:39, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Inserted screenshot above, next to the original “I'll work on uploading comment.” ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 23:06, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Replicated on another iPad also running iOS 15. Confirmed so far on Safari 15.6.1, and Safari 15.6.6 on iOS 15.7.7. Viewport doesn't appear to be a factor: 810 x 977 and 768 x 921 affected; 768 x 922 and 928 unaffected.

Another relevant observation: I get a flash of normal larger text (FONLT?) and then the size changes to small.

Clearing “website data” for wikipedia.org or browsing in-private doesn't make a difference. ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 04:28, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

Dark Mode and hardcoded colors

Is there any way, for example, in lists of colors (like in iPhone 15) to exempt certain colors/markup from being converted to "dark mode"? It's undesirable to see a dark hue swapped for a light hue (or vice versa) on something that should be showing color accuracy. Like a CSS class or something that exempts an element from being modified? —Locke Cole • t • c 03:41, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

The class .mw-no-invert prevents color inversion. – SD0001 (talk) 04:53, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

@SD0001 Thank you! That got it. Implemented at iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 on just the table color cells and it survives swapping back and forth. =) —Locke Cole • t • c 04:05, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

Noticeboard archive problem - Multiple threads don't display, but material is in the archive

I am having a problem with material in a noticeboard archive that cannot be displayed by viewing the archive, and can only be seen by editing the archive. The material is, in effect, hidden, and I don't know why. Either I am making some complicated mistake, or the viewing of an archive is making some complicated mistake. Is someone knowledgeable willing to take a look at a noticeboard archive? Is there some character sequence that says to hide everything until an unhide sequence is encountered?

I briefly thought that under some circumstances, User:Lowercase sigmabot III was dropping portions of archived threads when adding new threads to a noticeboard archive. After some investigation, I have concluded that, in at least one case, portions of threads are invisible in the archive, although the material that cannot be seen on viewing can nonetheless be seen when editing the archive. The problematical archive file is Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution_noticeboard/Archive_230. I become aware of a problem because I was unable to find a dispute over Purdue University Global. If I view the archive file, I don't see a Purdue dispute. On closer examination I see that thread begins as a dispute about Peter Eckstein-Kovacs and then picks up as a dispute over Theanine. The end of the EK case and the beginning of the Theanine case are not seen. However, if I edit the archive file, I see the Arvind Kejriwal case, then the Purdue University Global case, then Yamam, then Vehicle registration plates of New York, then Vurg, then Theanine.

The problem happens the same if I am using Firefox or Google Chrome or Opera as the web browser. Am I explaining clearly enough what the issue is? Robert McClenon (talk) 04:38, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

I've fixed it (and then Nardog fixed my fix). You were on the right track comparing the wikitext to the rendered version; you just stopped narrowing it down too soon: it wasn't ==Arvind Kejriwal==, but ===Third statement by moderator (Eckstein-Kovacs)===, that was the first header not displayed, so the problem was just before it. —Cryptic 04:52, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

Thank you, User:Cryptic. So there was a loose tag that ate five cases. That sounds like a blurb for a bad horror movie. So I wasn't making a complicated mistake, and there wasn't a complicated mistake in viewing, but there was a complicated mistake in what was being archived. It shuffled along like a zombie until it stopped for some tea, and then the caffeine and theanine got it to wake up. I saw the reference error, but I didn't realize that the reference error would do something like that. Strange. Thank you. Robert McClenon (talk) 05:51, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

Follow-Up Question

So am I correct that this can happen to any noticeboard archive under the wrong circumstances if there is a malformed reference or certain other errors? Robert McClenon (talk) 06:56, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

Not just that; it can happen on any page, not just noticeboards or archives. An unclosed template or tag has the potential to swallow a large blob of content or even the rest of the page. – Jonesey95 (talk) 13:29, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

Autofill

It seems that Autofill (in citation templates) is not working. Ali Pirhayati (talk) 07:32, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

Same issue with Refill. GiantSnowman 15:51, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

Got a WP:Steps to reproduce? Hard to tell what the bug just from this description. –Novem Linguae (talk) 15:01, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

One-click archiver

Resolved

Can anyone determine what is off with the one-click archiver at Talk:Operation Gideon (2020) ? It looks like I have a faulty pipe or some such. I copied the template from Talk:Dementia with Lewy bodies, where it is working fine, so it's not the script, rather something I did wrong. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:48, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

@SandyGeorgia Try it now. I've removed the {{Archive basics}} because it shouldn't be necessary on that page, the oneclickarchiver script should be able to get its information from the {{user:MiszaBot/config}} template. 163.1.15.238 (talk) 15:19, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

Thanks, 163, but now I get the error message: "No archive counter was detected on this page, so archiving was aborted. See User:Equazcion/OneClickArchiver for details." SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:28, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

Line 47 of the script searches for '\\|counter ?= ?(\\d+)', with no space before the word "counter" and at most one space before and after the equals sign. So at Talk:Operation Gideon (2020) the setting in the "User:MiszaBot/config" is not understood, whereas the one in the deleted "Archive basics" was accepted.

I think the original problem was a mismatch between lines 56 and 74 of the script. Line 56 accepts an optional space between the pipe and the word "archive", but when line 74 does some further processing, it doesn't allow for that space. Thus the text | archive = remains in the name of the archive that the script tries to create.

A workaround for now might be to restore the "Archive basics", placing it above the "User:MiszaBot/config" so that line 56 of the script finds the "archive=" line from the "Archive basics" and not the one from the "User:MiszaBot/config". -- John of Reading (talk) 16:58, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

John of Reading thanks, it worked! Unfortunately, I corrupted the test by moving from my iPad to real computer (different browser) in the interim, so I will next go back and undo and re-test also from my iPad, to make sure it wasn't a browser issue. Thanks again ! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:09, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

@SandyGeorgia: I don't think the problem was caused by your choice of browser. -- John of Reading (talk) 17:11, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

Yep, it worked from iPad, so we're good here-- thx again. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:12, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

@SandyGeorgia: Rather than diving straight into the code I should have looked at the documentation! The script user:Equazcion/OneClickArchiver is known to be buggy; you should be using one of the versions listed at Wikipedia:One click archiving. -- John of Reading (talk) 17:32, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

Yep- looks like I'm outdated; now to see how many VPT help requests it will take me to get that updated :) Thanks again, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:21, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

Thanks again; User:SandyGeorgia/common.js all set, and tested and working. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:28, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

Using the API to query for article ratings

Hi there. I'm doing a project for my Deep Learning class this semester where I'm attempting to evaluate the quality of articles using a recurrent neural network. In order to do this, I'm hoping to create a dataset where the article's rating is used as the target feature. I know that I can download a dump of the English Wikipedia very trivially, but I have never used the API before, and I'm unsure if I could use it to connect article ratings (and possibly other metadata) to downloaded articles. I'm aware each article title acts as a unique identifier within its namespace, so would I have to download all of the article talk pages, parse them for the class, and manually associate them with every article? Could there be an easier way using the API? All the best, TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 20:17, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

@TheTechnician27 Could you use the rating categories for this, e.g. Category:B-Class biography articles? You could use mw:API:Categories to get the categories present on the talk page, and extract the ones that give the rating?

P.S. you can use Special:APISandbox to experiment with using the API - in this case use action = query and select the categories property. 192.76.8.91 (talk) 20:38, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

@TheTechnician27, you could also use the page assessments API (action=query & prop=pageassessments).
You may be interested in mw:ORES. — Qwerfjkltalk 20:56, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

Yes, I was going to point to that. mw:Extension:PageAssessments has some more info. Izno (talk) 20:59, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

@Qwerfjkl: I was actually aware of ORES as a new page patroller, and I was hoping to compare my results against its (obviously its will be better, so it's a good watermark). I'll certainly have a look at and try to figure out the PageAssessments extension. Incidentally, I'm going at this with the assumption I can't just query 6.7 million article ratings for free. What sorts of hurdles do you think I might face here? Either way, thank you so much for sharing this! I would've never found it on my own. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 00:45, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

@TheTechnician27, I think there are some rate limits. You'll want to make sure to query multiple pages in each request, and querying categories might be quicker. — Qwerfjkltalk 06:09, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

The API is not intended for such bulk usage. PageAssessments also has a database table which you can preview via Superset. Ideally, you should sign up for a Toolforge account to access the database directly. Use paginated queries to retrieve N (say 10000) records at a time (don't use OFFSET for pagination, instead order by pa_page_id and filter its values to be greater than the last value from previous iteration). – SD0001 (talk) 10:48, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

@SD0001: That makes a good deal of sense. I've since created a Toolforge account and installed MariaDB. So what I understand so far is that I should make paginated queries to a Wiki Replica. I don't understand a ton about databases, but I think I should be able to figure it out. Regarding the paginations, do you know roughly how often I should query? I know I won't overwhelm the WMF's infrastructure or anything, but I also don't want to be greedy. Additionally, does a school project (possibly attached to an academic paper) qualify as "benefit[ting] the Wikimedia movement"? If I learn more about Toolforge, I might be able to create useful tools in the future, but I'm not under the impression my project RNN could possibly be better than what the WMF already uses. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 19:16, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

You can send a new query as soon as the previous query is over. Any research on Wikipedia content quality (or ways to assess it) qualifies as benefitting the movement. – SD0001 (talk) 03:31, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

"Patrolling is disabled on this wiki"

I was testing out a change to one of my user scripts and noticed that Wikipedia does not have recent changes patrolling enabled on the wiki. I wonder what would it take to turn this feature on? I picture it would be great for stuff like ORES review where certain edits that are below the threshold of ClueBot NG but in the range where they might need fixing could show up in Recent Changes with the "!" indicating unpatrolled. What are your thoughts? Aasim - Herrscher of Wikis ❄️ 22:05, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

@Awesome Aasim: We do have WP:RCP. Can you please clarify what feature you are asking about? RudolfRed (talk) 01:23, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

@RudolfRed This is a technical question. I am not saying it is impossible to patrol recent changes. What I am saying is that it is impossible to mark recent changes as "patrolled". I wonder if there might be a reason for this. Aasim - Herrscher of Wikis ❄️ 01:41, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

This link might help: WP:Patrolled revisions. Someone must know more about it than me, but I think you might have to delve into the history of Pending Changes. I seem to vaguely recall some incompatibility, compounded by a lack of investment into development, but I might be imagining that. As you've already found out, and will see from the backlinks, being really clear and precise with terminology is key if you want to move it forward. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 07:07, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, this. I also see as a big project it would be impractical to "mark every revision as patrolled" on behalf of the patrollers. Pending Changes does give something similar to RC patrol in which the best revision can be rated. I do think, though, that there would be some benefit in being able to mark individual or sets of revisions as patrolled.

I know New Page Review uses the same patrolling system, but we can give "rollbackers" the ability to mark individual revisions as patrolled but not new pages. Because those are the two tools a rollbacker needs to embark on RC patrol. Aasim - Herrscher of Wikis ❄️ 16:04, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

Patrols seem to be somewhat equivalent to new page reviews on this wiki. Perhaps that is why this ability is still turned on (I see [Mark this page as reviewed] for new pages if the Page Curation toolbar is closed), but is restricted to editors that have the new page patroller permission. –Novem Linguae (talk) 14:56, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

Short answer: we don't have this enabled - and likely won't because of the highly customized PageTriage extension here - combined with our extremely high volume of revision creations. Also, you don't have "patrol" rights (which do work on "new pages" via pagetriage). — xaosflux ^Talk 15:04, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

I think this question is about individual edits, rather than creating new pages.

If it seems impractical to "mark every revision as patrolled", then presumably it is even more impractical to have multiple editors look at the same edit several times. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:02, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Thursday

Looks like toolforge just crashed. Abductive (reasoning) 15:10, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

Broken since Tuesday; see #XTools not working above. Certes (talk) 15:35, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

Other things broke. They've come back. It was a separate issue. Abductive (reasoning) 15:46, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

@Abductive: Everything working okay now? — TheresNoTime (talk • they/them) 15:54, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

Yes. Abductive (reasoning) 18:04, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

Multiple toolforge tools still not working

Someone closed the toolforge discussion above, but I still can't get to https://signatures.toolforge.org/reports/en.wikipedia.org or https://templatecount.toolforge.org/index.php?lang=en&namespace=10&name=Cite_web or https://wlh.toolforge.org/pages/Cite_web?ns=10. I get "504 Gateway Time-out" on each page. – Jonesey95 (talk) 03:32, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

https://linksearch.toolforge.org/ doesn't work either ("502 Bad Gateway"), is that a temporary issue, or has it been moved? Markussep ^Talk 08:15, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

@Jonesey95 and Markussep: Ah, apologies, that was me — I was under the impression that the lasting effects of that issue had been resolved. I'll take a look at these mentioned tools and see if a simple webservice restart resolves it — TheresNoTime (talk • they/them) 08:45, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Linksearch has changed to "503 Service Temporarily Unavailable". The other three are OK now. Markussep ^Talk 13:24, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

https://templatetransclusioncheck.toolforge.org/?lang=en&name=Template:Deeg_district appears to have the 504 error still. Is there some systematic way to check all of the tools, or do we just post them here as we stumble upon them? – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:52, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Another one: https://fireflytools.toolforge.org/linter/enwiki says "Internal Server Error", which may be a different problem. – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:00, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

"Inline" thing

What on earth is this "Inline" thing that now (as of today) appears on diffs, just below the revision slider and against the right margin? It's got a smartphone-style slidy button. If I hover my mouse over it, there's no hint at all as to what it does. I shall not click the button if I don't know what it does. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:19, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

It displays the diff in like a simplified Visual style. Hyphenation Expert (talk) 21:21, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

It switches between the default two-column and the new inline diff style. As mentioned in the latest tech news above, this is part of addressing a Community Wishlist request. the wub "?!" 21:44, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

@Redrose64: A tooltip on hover with a short description as to what the toggle does sounds like a useful idea I'll pass this on! — TheresNoTime-WMF (talk • they/them) 09:48, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

FYI, now logged at phab:T346429 — TheresNoTime-WMF (talk • they/them) 09:55, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Mobile web talk pages

The mobile website (idk about the mobile app, I don't use it) talk pages get unreadable if there's too many replies, because it squeezes it literally into one character width column. It is a little bit of a hard problem, because you need to make it clear who's replying to who. Maybe just make it stop getting thinner once it gets to a certain width

Browser: chrome mobile, Firefox mobile MarkiPoli (talk) 08:03, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Yes, this is a known problem of the current discussion/talk page model. Not really an easy way around it. It’s also relatively uncommon however. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:49, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

I can't access some pages

Resolved

Voiced bilabial nasal, Voiced labiodental fricative and Close central unrounded vowel

I can only see Israel flag if I try to access that pages. Is it my problem? 49.142.62.94 (talk) 10:02, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Template:IPA was recently updated, it seems to be causing issues on all pages that use it. John Womble (talk) 10:08, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Looks like it was some vandalism on Module:IPA — the image is likely cached for you (try refreshing/clearing your cache) — TheresNoTime-WMF (talk • they/them) 10:13, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Thank you! 49.142.62.94 (talk) 10:16, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Module protected and user blocked (see WP:AN/I report) — TheresNoTime (talk • they/them) 10:20, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

TYVM, should asked for a preemptive template protection. Nardog (talk) 17:23, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

User:MusikBot II should have protected it automatically. I'm not sure why it didn't here. It may be due to the Toolforge problems mentioned above. — MusikAnimal ^talk 18:52, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

A page fail to load on multiples of my browser

I have tried entering the URL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gdynia , without logging in, on Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Old IE. However, on Firefox, Edge, and Chrome, it showed an all-black page without selectable text below header, like https://pasteboard.co/YEpZrWcORKf9.png , while on Old IE, it show a giant Israel flag with no text. The issue would disappear after logging in. THe issue do not happen on other pages like Gdansk. Why is that? C933103 (talk) 10:12, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Edit: It seems to be same problem as the one above. C933103 (talk) 10:13, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

"Differences" now difficult to read on Monobook

Resolved

This changed yesterday and I thought it may be fixed overnight. Watchlisted items, when clicked on "Differences" to see what has been changed, comes up as a jumble of words and colors mixed with coding. This occurs on the Monobook skin, I haven't checked Vector to read what it looks like. Thanks if coders can bring the "changes" back to the good ole days (Wednesday). Randy Kryn (talk) 13:00, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Dumb question - you didn't swap from Wikitext to Visual view, did you? --130.111.39.47 (talk) 13:12, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

In the diff view, do you see a button at the top right that says "Inline"? Have you tried clicking that to see if things go back to normal? –Novem Linguae (talk) 13:20, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Thanks Novem Linguae and 130.111.39.47, that worked. Yes, I am extremely dumb when it comes to coding and the variations of computer tech, which is why I came here and was quickly set on the right path. My go-to blame is Windows10, which clicks and brings pop ups so often when the cursor is moved around that it seems natural now. Windows7, we hardly knew ye. Thanks again. Randy Kryn (talk) 13:30, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Hey Randy Kryn, I'm glad to see your query has been answered by Novem above — I do have a quick question though, if you have a moment; is it possible you accidentally toggled that "inline" slider to the "on" (the right hand) position? Only reason I ask is because, as far as I'm aware, it should be "off" by default and we'd ideally like to know if some folx are seeing it enabled by default..! — TheresNoTime-WMF (talk • they/them) 14:08, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Yes TheresNoTime-WMF, exactly. Either with my thumb in gliding down or the cursor bouncing around. I didn't even know there was such a switch to toggle. So it's not a default problem but a myfault personal glitch. Randy Kryn (talk) 14:22, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for confirming! — TheresNoTime-WMF (talk • they/them) 14:32, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Talk page archive button/userscript why isn't it working on...

I was cleaning up and responding on Talk:Drew Barrymore. I manually created Talk:Drew Barrymore/Archive 2 in advance of moving some stale posts/threads because Archive 1 was getting too big. I then used the "Archive" button (I have the 'OneClickArchiver' userscript installed), intending to archive/move a post to Archive 2. However, when I used that button the stale post was instead moved to Archive 1, so I then had to clean up the misplacement. I have subsequently noticed that the "Archive" button is only seeing Archive 1 as its target. Why? Please someone tell me whyyyyy and how to fix it so I can then maybe remember the next time I run into the same situation. Thanks, Shearonink (talk) 16:34, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Temporary accounts

Anyone who maintains tools that differentiate between logged-in editors and logged-out editors will want to see m:Talk:IP Editing: Privacy Enhancement and Abuse Mitigation#Username format settled. This is related to mw:Help:Temporary accounts and the introduction of a new user account type (so we can stop displaying IP addresses in the public page histories).

It'll be a few months before the English Wikipedia sees any of this directly, but for some tools, it is a significant change, and it's better to know about the change now than to be surprised at the last minute. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:43, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

When editing, pressing shift causes cursor to jumps to start of edit text box

I've been having a problem for a few years now where sometimes when I'm editing, holding shift and then typing anything (trying to access a capital or a special character) will cause the cursor to jump back to the beginning of the editing box, and type the special character or capital letter at the beginning of the box.

• it most often happens when I press shift and the character is surrounded by spaces or is the leading character (first letter of a word, opening any kind of bracket),
• somewhat less frequently if the character is at the end of a word or closing brackets, *least frequently if the character is inserted between two other characters

It happened once while typing this comment when i typed the "(" in "(first letter", but sometimes it happens constantly, and is very frustrating. What sort of documentation should I gather so I can submit a helpful ticket about this? -Furicorn (talk) 11:26, 16 September 2023 (UTC)