Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)

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The technical section of the village pump is used to discuss technical issues about Wikipedia. Bugs and feature requests should be made at Bugzilla (How to report a bug). Bugs with security implications should be reported to securitywikimedia.org.

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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Database lag

Rising steadily for the past few hours. Up to 681 seconds now. Equazcion ^(talk) 10:19, 2 Jul 2012 (UTC)

Any info on when this might be resolved by? Jenks24 (talk) 10:48, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

It took a minute for the page to load. This is getting out of hand.—cyberpower ^Chat_Offline 11:13, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

I just saw it go over 800 seconds! Roger (talk) 11:32, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

Over 900 seconds now. Counter-vandalism editing gets rather hard when it takes more than 15 minutes for an edit to appear in your watchlist... Fram (talk) 11:52, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

942 seconds now. Editing in general gets hard when your watchlist doesn't want to load.—cyberpower ^Chat_Offline 11:56, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

If you want the lag message to display minutes/seconds also, I just made a script for that -- see User:Equazcion/LagToMinutes :) Equazcion ^(talk) 12:02, 2 Jul 2012 (UTC)

It doesn't work right. I'm getting 280000 minutes and 21 seconds.—cyberpower ^Chat_Offline 12:34, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

1030 1057 1133 seconds....is this a record?--Gilderien Chat|List of good deeds 12:21, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

Caught is at 1000 even. W0OT! Is the number a 32-bit variable or a 64-bit variable? We wouldn't want an overflow after 9.10194444 hours... :) --Guy Macon (talk) 12:23, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

It's no record :( Highest I've seen is just over 9,000 seconds (!) Equazcion ^(talk) 12:27, 2 Jul 2012 (UTC)

Is there a point at which editing will (have to) be shut down to protect the integrity of the database? What are the server geeks saying about the problem? Roger (talk) 12:28, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

Well toolserver replag (edit counter) is at "4 hours, 24 minutes, 14 seconds" --Gilderien Chat|List of good deeds 12:45, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

PS. If anyone had tried my script above, it had a bug when the seconds went over 1,000, but it's been fixed now. Equazcion ^(talk) 13:02, 2 Jul 2012 (UTC)

Operations is now aware of the replication lag problems. They are investigating. You might want to keep an eye on server admin log with regards to resolution of the issue. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:04, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

It's largely a false alarm, although it does seem to cause very slow loading of watchlists. IIRC there are five database slaves, and only one of the five is actually lagged; the other four are fine, so most of the time you will actually get an up-to-date response from the server. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 13:25, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

So far every single time I've reloaded my watchlist, the lag message appears accurate. The last change that appears in the list is from the time just before the lag amount showing. Equazcion ^(talk) 13:28, 2 Jul 2012 (UTC)

(/d) Yes, it's only db12 DB overview. BTW, check infra status to see how many problems operations is dealing with that you are actually NOT noticing as a user. :D Makes you wonder how often they fix stuff and we never even thank them for it. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:32, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

Hey I'm not complaining. I look at database lags kind of like forced relaxation :) Equazcion ^(talk) 13:37, 2 Jul 2012 (UTC)

Yes, if I look at my watchlist it only shows changes from about 40 minutes ago. But if I actually load a page it shows the current version, not a 40 minute old version. Looks like the code is written so that Special:Watchlist always reads from the slowest slave. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 13:52, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

That's the way it always is with database lags. I've never seen the lag actually cause old versions of pages to show up. It just affects the watchlist display (far as I know). Equazcion ^(talk) 13:54, 2 Jul 2012 (UTC)

"just affects"? Heh, for me, the watchlist is god. Having it work this badly (and it was having problems yesterday, too) is heresy.--Bbb23 (talk) 15:11, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

Lag reached 1,483 seconds. --Meno25 (talk) 13:36, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

Is it just me or has this been happening a lot more since WP switched from Godaddy to the new provider? Kumioko (talk) 13:42, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

I doubt there's any correlation, since that switch only affected who the domains were registered with. Which has absolutely nothing to do with the databases. the wub "?!" 15:46, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

Agreed was about to say the same thing.—cyberpower ^Chat_Online 15:53, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

• @Equazcion: the script doesn't seem to work in Monobook, but I think you knew it might not. Bishonen | talk 14:57, 2 July 2012 (UTC).

Loading my watchlist: <!-- Served by mw3 in 30.838 secs. -->

Now 2027 seconds. This could be related? If they are changing the times on all the edits made so far today?--Gilderien Chat|List of good deeds 15:28, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

I was about to ask if the leap second could have caused this as well.Edinburgh Wanderer 15:42, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

Update: We now at 36 min. lag and loading the watchlist reports <!-- Served by mw33 in 30.903 secs. -->—cyberpower ^Chat_Online 15:48, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

The cause is not really known yet. The server is running some scripts to get the last remaining Sha1's of revisions populated, but that should not take that much resources to cause this. Another operations guy should be waking up soon and hope is that he can properly debug the problem. The lag has been going down a bit the past half hour though (without apparent cause). Unfortunately this db server is also serving up all the watch list requests, so it's a bit annoying for the editors. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:04, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

It's not just lag. Getting many "general error" screens when trying to log in or edit. North8000 (talk) 16:25, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict) It's not just watchlists that are affected, but contribs lists too. For example, Special:Contributions/Redrose64 shows my most recent edit as being to Cardiff Central railway station at 15:48 UTC, but I'm certain that I've made at least six edits since (to Swansea railway station, Llanelli railway station, Carmarthen railway station, Whitland railway station, Template:POV, User talk:MSGJ). --Redrose64 (talk) 16:26, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

And page histories are similarly affected/afflicted, too. Bishonen | talk 21:23, 2 July 2012 (UTC).

• Appears lag might be sloooooowly coming down? - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 16:31, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

  Still taking longer to load though. <!-- Served by mw42 in 31.096 secs. -->—cyberpower ^Chat_Online 16:55, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

Update: Replag decreasing at a rate of about 15 seconds per minute. I estimate 4 hours, 27 minutes, and 44 seconds until replag is cleared at current speed.—cyberpower ^Chat_Online 17:08, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

Now lag is 1,255 seconds. --Meno25 (talk) 17:14, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

Replag down to 10 seconds now. Yay. Now to fix the errors.—cyberpower ^Chat_Online 19:07, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

Toolserver replag

OK, up-to-date watchlists and contribs, at l(e)ast(!), which is good; but still an ever-growing replag on the toolserver:

Caution: Replication lag is high, changes newer than 6 hours, 42 minutes, 25 seconds may not be shown.

What is causing this and why is it not decreasing at all for days? Jared Preston (talk) 17:48, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

Update: "Caution: Replication lag is high, changes newer than 9 hours, 18 minutes, 10 seconds may not be shown."

Why is the replag getting higher? Does anyone know when/if the server-problem will be fixed in the next few days? Jared Preston (talk) 20:15, 4 July 2012 (UTC)

No idea what its means but tool server says High replag because of inserting of many SHA1-hashes. Its getting worse rather than better.Edinburgh Wanderer 22:08, 4 July 2012 (UTC)

See, I don't understand it either. The only hashes I like are these ones. Maybe someone has dropped some on the server, now up to 10 hours, 33 minutes, 20 seconds. Jared Preston (talk) 06:22, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

You should try corned beef hash some time.  :-) But this is the "technical" discussion area, and it is a rather technical issue. The Wikipedia database that stores old page revisions had a new field added to it recently to make it easier to determine whether two past revisions are identical or not, so that we can identify reverts. Now the servers are in the process of filling in this field, which previously had been blank, and all these changes need to be copied to the Toolserver (which is a separate system from Wikipedia). The flood of changes is overloading the Toolserver and causing the high replag. Unfortunately, according to the Toolserver admins, it could take another week or two for this process to finish. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 11:55, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

Just so you guys know, this isn't happening with me. Hadger 18:58, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

Hadger, can you confirm that by checking this link? Thanks for the help, Russ – I can cope (just about) with a week to ten days! Jared Preston (talk) 19:48, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

Oh. That's what you were talking about. I thought that you were talking about watchlists and contribution pages having that appear. :) Hadger 19:30, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

It's now on the way down, having peaked at around 10:00 UTC today with just under 140000 secs (38+ hours), the current figure is about 130000 (36 hours). --Redrose64 (talk) 21:10, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

It appears to have been steadily going up all month, and now at over 160,000 (44+ hours). However, the edit counter tool lists only 16 hours. Why the discrepancy? GoingBatty (talk) 03:19, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

There are two database servers for enwiki on the Toolserver (rosemary and thyme), and they are lagged to different degrees:

[2:31pm] <Earwig> @replag
[2:31pm] <tsbot> Earwig: s1-rr-a: 17h 13m 22s [+0.26 s/s]; s1-user: 2d 34m 37s [+0.22 s/s]

— The Earwig ^(talk) 18:34, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanation. Looks like the lags are continuing to increase and are now over 18h 41m and 2d 19h. On July 5, Russ said "according to the Toolserver admins, it could take another week or two for this process to finish." Is there any update from the admins? Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 16:19, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

Not from the admins, but I've done my own analysis. Unless something is done about the cause, the replags are likely to continue increasing at least until the end of July, and probably for a week or two after that on s1-user. This is all due to a massive database update; eventually, it will get to the end of the database, but in the meantime all Toolserver tools are suffering. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 23:43, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

The replag has been racing up, in spurts, for the last 48 hours or so. When will this upward spiral end? Please help! Jared Preston (talk) 15:50, 19 July 2012 (UTC)

Certianly be good if we could get an official update on this.E W 18:56, 20 July 2012 (UTC)

Although the replag graphs continue to climb, the notice at the top of X!'s Edit Counter has now disappeared. This time yesterday it was showing 14 hours and some minutes, a figure which hadn't changed by more than two hours in over a week. I suppose that this means that rosemary (or thyme?) has caught up, but thyme (or rosemary?) hasn't. I've looked at the diagram and lists on tswiki:Servers but it's not at all clear which is which. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:57, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

<Dispenser> @replag
<tsbot>     Dispenser: s1-user: 1w 1d 6h 10m 35s [+0.53 s/s]; s2-user: 11s [-0.00 s/s]; s3-rr-a: 24s [+0.00 s/s]; s3-user: 24s [+0.00 s/s]

thyme is default server and is on duty as the s1-user server which hosts user databases and is slowly drifting behind. rosemary is on duty as s1-rr server, which does not have access to user created databases or temporary tables (actually, use ENGINE=MyISAM when defining temporary tables to workaround InnoDB permissions bug). — Dispenser 17:01, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

Currently it is over a week, the table I included is somewhat dynamic, updated hourly, and may be easier to read then the info Dispenser posted. For the record, a week has 168 hours. So as of this post, 199 hours is 8 days and 7 hours. Vegaswikian (talk) 18:45, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

The replag managed to go down to zero yesterday evening, as Redrose noted, but now it is climbing back up again (please see X!'s Edit Counter for reference). Currently above 10 hours! Jared Preston (talk) 06:52, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

This was due to apparently some configuration changes, see jira:MNT-1258. — Dispenser 17:23, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

Do we even have a rough idea how long it is likely to take for the other to start catching up.Blethering Scot 23:24, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

My educated guess: replag on thyme will continue to increase at least through August 5, and possibly a couple of days beyond that. After that, it should start to decrease, but how long it will take to recover completely is beyond my ability to predict. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 23:29, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

The main thing is it starts catching up, from the last time it wasn't actually to bad once that process started. The last time did they not reach that point around the same time seems to be a big gap this time, might be my memory of it.Blethering Scot 23:38, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

Perhaps a bit after August 5.  ;-) --j⚛e decker^talk 06:38, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Edit conflicts

I don't know if this is related to the above at all, but over the last day or so I've had some crazy edit conflicts. The two most memorable:

• a.) the edit conflict page popped up showing no conflict, but having the orange "you have a talk page message" banner too. I clicked to see the talk page message (to a new tab) but no messages, though it sent me to an IP page and it showed an IP at the top, instead of me being logged in. But when I clicked on the "edit" button in the original window gain, it showed me as logged in.
• b.) apparently had a three-way edit conflict, and though I got the conflict screen, the amazing thing was that my edit was already saved to the page (showing my full signature).

There have been several others conflicts of various types.

Not to mention seeing the wikimedia page fairly regularly.

And yesterday the database "read only mode" notice was up for several minutes.

Hope this helps. - jc37 17:23, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

And not only did I edit conflict with meno above (lol@ irony), but it took several minutes (with the wikimedia screen and even the browser "can't connect to server" screen for several minutes) in order to post the above. I connected to other websites just fine in the interim. - jc37 17:30, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

It wasn't an edit conflict but something wierd just happened at an RfA. I wanted to comment on an oppose and the entire page got messed up and then the server gave up so I had to wait before it came back. When I hit Rollback, it blanked the page and said it reverted it edits by me to the last version by a user that didn't even contribute to an RfA. Things returned to normal after I used a previous version and restored the RfA from there but I'm curious to know what that was especially the Rollback message that was created in the edit summary.—cyberpower ^Chat_Online 17:42, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

Weird; Special:Contributions/Flynnster14 shows just eight edits, and none of them are to Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Zagalejo. At least ClueBot didn't come around and warn you for blanking pages :-) Nyttend (talk) 19:21, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

That's a plus, assuming ClueBot wasn't having issues as well. I can't figure out why Rollback acted the way it did. Maybe the foundation staff could figure it out.—cyberpower ^Chat_Online 20:27, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

I found this.—cyberpower ^Chat_Online 20:32, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

Any chance this is related to the leap second? --Guy Macon (talk) 20:32, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

No, leap second fun was yesterday. Max Semenik (talk) 22:19, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

"My preferences" tabs not working

Under "my preferences" none of the tabs across the top :- Appearance, Date and time, Editing etc. are doing anything. No matter which one I select it stays on "User profile". Is this just me, or a general glitch? - Arjayay (talk) 14:43, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

Mine are working fine. (Windows 7, Firefox 14) Dismas|^(talk) 15:11, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

I think I saw some mention this a couple of days back - you're using Internet Explorer? Which version? - Jarry1250 ^{[Deliberation needed]} 10:47, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

IE8 (can't upgrade with XP) Tabs still not working - Arjayay (talk) 15:13, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

Have you tried a hard refresh of the page ? See bypassing your browsercache. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:06, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

Yes - Refresh, reboot, remove temporary files, wait 4 days - still not working. - Arjayay (talk) 07:50, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

9 days now and it is still not working - any other ideas? anywhere else I should be reporting this? - Arjayay (talk) 15:30, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

I still haven't seen other people with IE8 confirm this, I'd like to see confirmations before reporting. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:56, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

I have the same problem with Chrome (latest version for now). Adress in adress field changes, but nothing happens. Updating page shows needed page for a second, but then page Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-personal appears again. --AJZ (talk) 09:03, 5 August 2012 (UTC)

I have discovered that my preferences are not working. I've recently acquired a new computer: Windows 7 with IE9. I did every instruction to the letter as indicated on the prior page to this one: I've cleared my cookies, refreshed, cleared cache, removed temporary internet files. logged in and out, fretted and fumed! The preferences tabs appear, but no matter which I click, I'm just moved further down my "User Profile" page. Fylbecatulous talk 03:42, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

It seems the problem is in wiki engine. --AJZ (talk) 04:48, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

And what, precisely, does "It seems the problem is in wiki engine" mean?
And, more to the point, is it likely to be fixed in the forseeable future? Arjayay (talk) 15:24, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Yes, with my upgrade, I'm hankering to use a gadget or two that just laughed at my old XP. thanks Fylbecatulous talk 15:29, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

It means that this problem can only be solved by fixing MediaWiki engine, not browser or anything else. --AJZ (talk) 03:25, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

I use Chrome on XP, and have not noticed the issue. Chris857 (talk) 03:46, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Those who experience the issue could mention the skin they use, if changing the skin and language helps (like this: ...Preferences?uselang=en-gb&useskin=modern) and if resetting all preferences helps. — AlexSm 04:05, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

I think I'm using Vector - but as I can't get the Appearance tab to work, I can't check this.
I followed the link above, but just get the front (User profile) page and none of the other tabs work.
I did consider trying "restore all default settings" - but if it doesn't work, I'm left in a far, far worse situation. - Arjayay (talk) 07:53, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

If it is any help, My preferences are just as stuck on Wikimedia Commons - Arjayay (talk) 08:02, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

This is the funniest thing ~ I feel now as I did when I worked in a control room and agents would call in with some nebulous problem for me to sort and solve (with no clues to parse). I too believe I'm using Vector, but I can't find out since I can't check my preferences. (Ditto negatory response following the link above) Neither can I change the one skin I have (unless there's a secret path to circumvent having to make alterations in "my preferences"). Is there? Who's on first? Fylbecatulous talk 16:09, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Not important anymore but you could just switch to another browser to fix your preferences or use other projects. — AlexSm 16:37, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Possible solution: in IE go to menu Tools and uncheck "Compatibility View". There is also a button in the to address bar that could be easily pressed by accident. — AlexSm 16:37, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Diff formatting uneven

Look at this. I have IE9, so I don't know if that means anything, and I chose the page appearance Wikipedia had when I started, as well as the method where I continue displaying diffs with yellow and green.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 18:55, 27 July 2012 (UTC)

A screenshot might be handier. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:50, 27 July 2012 (UTC)

http://users.cybercity.dk/~dsl522332/Bad_IE9_diff_for_blanking.gif was made logged out with IE9. If Compatibility View is enabled in IE9 then the diff looks normal. The same happened on another page blanking I tested. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:32, 27 July 2012 (UTC)

Hmm, seems IE9 finds reason to interpret 48% width as 100% width. Strange, there is no reason to fill out that space unless it's ignoring the colgroup styling. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:28, 28 July 2012 (UTC)

Just to make sure we're dealing with the same thing, how should I send the screen shot?— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 19:53, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

I already linked to a screenshot above. If the diff looks similar to you then there is no need for another screenshot. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:04, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

I'll look at it later. I'm sure it's a trustworthy site but I'm at home.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 21:20, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

Okay, it's similar enough. Thank you.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 13:40, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

On Firefox, which is what this computer has, the diff looks perfectly normal.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 13:41, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

Live article count

Hi. I was wondering if somebody could provide me with a live article count in my preferences which keeps track of how many articles I've created like it does with edit count?♦ Dr. Blofeld 08:50, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

This probably can't be done easily, as the edit count in your preferences is taken directly from a database field, but there is no such field in the database for the number of articles created by a user. That figure would have to be calculated manually, which would take a long time for users with many edits such as yourself. :-) Graham87 08:54, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

Feature experiment for new Wikipedians

One of the confirmation messages

The second confirmation message, but this time with a more encouraging message.

Hi everyone. I wanted to give some notice that the experiments team at the Foundation is starting a new feature test later today.

What this is: For two weeks, a random sample of newly-registered Wikipedians will get a three-second confirmation message after they save their edits. We're testing two different message texts, but otherwise they look the same (see the screenshots to the right).

If you're interested in related experiments or more about the inteface design, that's here. If you're interested in the data analysis side of things, that's here.

Why we're testing this: The overarching purpose of these tests to get clear data about what improvements to the software we can make to encourage more Wikipedians to join the project. The elevator pitch for this feature in particular is that it's a good idea to confirm to a person when their contribution is successful, unless it is visually obvious 100% of the time. This confirmation message usually takes the form of a small, temporary message on screen, and that's exactly what we're doing for the first iteration of what we're calling "post-edit feedback." This is a small change to the site, but one that I hope will increase Wikipedia's ability to give new contributors real-time feedback about editing.

Who will see it: The only people who will see this user interface change is a random selection of those who register and edit after the start of the experiment. Anyone who has contributed in the past will have learned that the normal state of affairs is that there's no confirmation after saving other than page reload, so we're not changing the editing experience at all for existing community members or people who happen to be logged out.

If you're editing and you see changes to the URL for the next couple weeks, don't panic, as it's intentional. As discussed in other threads above, the purpose of this URL change is to confirm that the page you are on is in a post-edit state, even if you are not being delivered the test. It also helps us debug the feature. Regular URLs will continue to work just fine if you enter them/click on them, and after the experiment is over, the normal links will return.

If you want to experience this first hand, please don't register new test socks here on English Wikipedia. ;-) If anyone is interested in seeing it in action for all of its three seconds of glory, then let me know, and I can upload a screencast to Commons. For the more technical among us, there's also a simple way to see the message using your browser console – the prompt is mw.experiments.showFeedback('Your message here.') on any article.

What we need your help on: If you see any breakages or very unusual site activity please report it, either here or on Bugzilla under the E3 component. We've done much more rigorous testing than our last experiment, so I don't anticipate any performance problems. However, be on the lookout for any strangeness around editing/saving.

Thanks, Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 18:07, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

What's the "<speech bubble icon> Editing Wikipedia..." thingy in the top-left corner on the screen shots about? Bawolff (talk) 18:42, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

Oh, that's MoodBar. It's one half of a new editor feedback system that's been around for a while. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 18:57, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

Is there a reason the Wikipedia logo is rubbed out in the picture? If there is a copyright issue, there are a heck of a lot of derivatives that need to be deleted. Ryan Vesey 19:00, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

It is, indeed, a copyright issue. We try to blur the logos and trademarks out so that we don't run into any sharing problems and we don't have to use the "Copyright by Wikimedia" license when the files are placed on commons.--Jorm (WMF) (talk) 19:10, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

You should really just cut it out rather than blur it, otherwise you're still just creating a derivative work. - Jarry1250 ^{[Deliberation needed]} 20:31, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

The whole question of how to deal with WMF mockups/screenshots and the correct way to avoid unnecessary copyright restrictions is a question to be settled with the Commons community, I think. We should probably just start an RFC or something, so that the question is answered once and for all. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 20:38, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

Blurring it out should be sufficient, just as pixelating an image is. In any case, I feel it would have been easier to attribute the image rather than blur it. The only reason I asked was because it initially made me curious as to whether there was a more strict copyright on the logo than on other Wikipedia images. That would have made me concerned about things like File:Bouncywikilogo.gif. Ryan Vesey 20:45, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

Pixellating an image is sufficient? - Jarry1250 ^{[Deliberation needed]} 20:47, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

That has been my assumption at least since I've seen it done before. It may be that it is acceptable due to de-minimis. Note that per commons:com:De minimis "Where the extent of copying falls below the threshold of substantial similarity" is also an argument for de-minimis in the United States. For an example of that see File:Korean War Veterans Memorial Without Soldiers.jpg (in this case blurring is used). Ryan Vesey 20:53, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

In fact, is it possible that the image would have qualified for de-minimis without the blurring? Trademark protections would still apply. Ryan Vesey 20:55, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

Yes, I think so. The blurring is just to remove any doubt, particularly outside in the US. Which is why, if you're just doing it to remove doubt, you should just cut it altogether. - Jarry1250 ^{[Deliberation needed]} 20:59, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

You're talking Stalin style? As in File:2009 FIFA Confederations Cup ball by adidas.JPG? At that point, I suppose it'd come down to what was easier. If this was to be used in a public manner it might make more sense to do the latter, but I don't think it matters too much now. Ryan Vesey 21:05, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

Well, the usual response is "we're not entirely happy, perhaps the WMF should license its logos CC-BY-SA and rely on its trademark protection", which the WMF legal team isn't particularly happy about. And repeat. - Jarry1250 ^{[Deliberation needed]} 20:47, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

The WMF being hypocritical? Next you'll be telling me the sun will rise in the east in the morning. - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 19:50, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

I assume it will be too hard to give Cluebot a chance to reject an obscene edit before the contributor is given a friendly green tick and a "Thank you". -- John of Reading (talk) 21:27, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

Yes, but if AbuseFilter or the spam blacklist prevents an edit from being saved, no message will be given. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 21:42, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

Image thumbnail quality

The thumbnails that WP makes for images are severely JPEG compressed, such that they look "harsh" and have visible ringing artifacts. It seems such a shame to waste precious screen pixels by filling them with such low-quality stuff. Who can help work on refining this tradeoff? Dicklyon (talk) 18:49, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

Not everyone has that much bandwidth and pixels to waste. The tradeoff is called a tradeoff for a reason of course. Just because your are doing some of the trading, doesn't make the balance bad. It just means it apparently isn't to your liking. Anyways, they are just imagemagick settings. The current settings are mostly in here: in https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/gitweb?p=mediawiki/core.git;a=blob;f=includes/media/Bitmap.php 80% compression, with a sharpenfactor of 0x0.4. So find some new settings, create a set of original test files (graphs, photo's, diagrams, with various dimensions and quality) show results pre and post and convince folks :D —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:15, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, that's useful info. I realize there are tradeoffs and opinions involved, so the real question was about who needs to be convinced. I'll also need some help making the case, as I'm not a software engineer and don't hack php and ImageMagick and such (but I can learn). I do have some useful experience in image quality and compression that I can bring to bear, if people are open to it. By the way the jpeg quality parameter 80 is not a percent, even though it is often referred to as such because it's defined from 0 to 100; it's an arbitrary parameter in the IJG's jpeg6b library (unless ImageMagick used something different, which I doubt). I very much agree with the guy who concluded "Below 85, the artifacts are too onerous for my taste", especially nowadays when bandwidth is not as scarce as it used to be, and screen real estate is usually the more precious resource. From a quick googling around, it appears that the sharpening has gone to 0x0.8 (here), which may be part of the problem. With less sharpening, the thumbs would be less harsh, and a higher quality setting could be used without increasing the file size. Worth a try, anyway... Dicklyon (talk) 22:01, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

That's probably because you are not using dial up in africa :D Anyways, in terms of sharpen, bugzilla:24857 might be of interest. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:00, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Yes, it's fascinating how they tried to fix a problem and created another; some comments in the code might have prevented that. I've reverse-engineered their before and after kernels, in terms of both what I think they were trying to do, and what they actually did, in comparison to the unsharp-mask kernel (I did all this in Matlab, as, like I said, I'm not really a software engineer, but I can figure out C code to some extent). Anyway, the new sharpening scheme in ImageMagick is usable, and the new parameters are not as bad as the old ones. We could do better, however, by using their actual unsharp masking function instead, since its two additional parameters would let us get good visual sharpening without so much effect on JPEG encoding size, and then we could go to quality 85 and get a net win. The default 220-pixel thumbs are tiny (about 12 KB) and would stay about that size.

But in the process, I found that in spite the non-optimality of this sharpen function, things are not as bad as I thought. The main problem I was having was that I had my browser's magnification up a bit, so I wasn't seeing thumbnails 1:1, but through a cheesy upsizing. With that fixed, they're really not nearly as bad as they appeared to me, so it's probably not worth worrying about. But thanks for the pointers; now I know how ImageMagick works and how its code is written (without comments). If anyone cares about their residual bug, or how we can exploit their unsharp mask to advantage, let me know. Dicklyon (talk) 19:56, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

Citation template problem

When using the citation template (Firefox 15.0) three things happen.

1. It works.

2. Nothing happens when I click Insert, but Preview works.

3. When I click Insert the citation is placed at the top of the section I'm editing.

I was ignoring this until someone at said I didn't add sources, showing this diff. Dougweller (talk) 20:50, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

• I have Firefox 14.0.01 and Windows XP. I used to have that phenomenon of the citation template not inserting anything, and then sort of solved that by switching out of my Modern skin to something else, and then back again. However, I was editing earlier in the day, and it flipped back to that non-insertion and then starting inserting again.
• The inserting it at the top of the section, instead of where it's supposed to, has been driving me nuts since at least July 18 when I reported it Here. Nobody replied to my post.. And it hasn't been just the citation template where it happened. It would also happen if I clicked my pointer in a spot to type, and what I typed would jump to the top of the section or somewhere else. Haven't had that today. Both things have happened to me, also. Maile66 (talk) 21:44, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

I suspect you are referring to the cite button on the editing toolbar; see WP:REFTOOLBAR. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 22:42, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

In my case, the jumping around and inserting in the wrong place is not limited to that Cite Button on the toolbar. It has happened with Provelt. And it has happened, as I indicated above, when I'm just typing. Like if I decide to insert a few characters of typed text in another paragraph up there, I would click in the place where I want something inserted and type, and it would insert at the top of the section instead of where it's supposed to. Hasn't happened today. But it's certainly happened over this past weekend, and before. I can at least date it back to my July 18 post. Maile66 (talk) 20:20, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

And it just now did it, so it's still happening. I was doing an insert from the Cite template on the toolbar, at the end of a paragraph. When I clicked on "Insert", it jumped to the top of the section and inserted it in front of the "==" before the secton header.Maile66 (talk) 12:18, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

Render server error

Book tool output for this book still failing rendering book output. Sctechlaw (talk) 07:41, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

render error text

An error occurred on the render server: RuntimeError: command failed with returncode 9: ['mw-render', '-w', 'rl', '-c', 'cache/a1/a1c55a0e1e5b1067/collection.zip', '-o', 'cache/a1/a1c55a0e1e5b1067/output.rl', '--status', 'qserve://localhost:14311/a1c55a0e1e5b1067:render-rl', '--template-blacklist', 'MediaWiki:PDF Template Blacklist', '--template-exclusion-category', 'Exclude in print', '--print-template-prefix', 'Print', '--print-template-pattern', '$1/Print', '--language', 'en'] Last Output: /index.php?oldid=430028393' 77.0026441036% laying out The Cardinal77.0026441036% laying out The Cardinal2012-07-31T07:34:55 rlwriter.info >> rendering: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=430028393' 77.0026441036% laying out The Cardinal77.0026441036% laying out The Cardinal2012-07-31T07:34:55 rlwriter.info >> rendering: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=502746659' 77.0026441036% laying out The Agony and the Ecstasy2012-07-31T07:34:55 rlwriter.warning >> invalid image url (obj.target: u'file:Agony and the Ecstasy 1965.jpg') 2012-07-31T07:34:55 rlwriter.warning >> invalid image url (obj.target: u'file:Agony and the Ecstasy 1965.jpg') 77.0026441036% laying out The Agony and the Ecstasy2012-07-31T07:34:55 rlwriter.info >> rendering: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=502746659' 77.0026441036% laying out The Agony and the Ecstasy2012-07-31T07:34:55 rlwriter.warning >> invalid image url (obj.target: u'file:Agony and the Ecstasy 1965.jpg') 2012-07-31T07:34:56 rlwriter.warning >> invalid image url (obj.target: u'file:Agony and the Ecstasy 1965.jpg') 77.0026441036% laying out The Agony and the Ecstasy2012-07-31T07:34:57 rlwriter.info >> rendering: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=504069669' 77.0026441036% laying out Assassin's Creed: Lineage2012-07-31T07:34:57 rlwriter.warning >> invalid image url (obj.target: u'file:Assassins Creed Lineage Cover.jpg') 2012-07-31T07:34:57 rlwriter.warning >> invalid image url (obj.target: u'file:Assassins Creed Lineage Cover.jpg') 2012-07-31T07:34:57 rlwriter.warning >> invalid image url (obj.target: u'File:aclbts1.jpg') 77.0026441036% laying out Assassin's Creed: Lineage2012-07-31T07:34:58 rlwriter.info >> rendering: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=504069669' 77.0026441036% laying out Assassin's Creed: Lineage2012-07-31T07:34:58 rlwriter.warning >> invalid image url (obj.target: u'file:Assassins Creed Lineage Cover.jpg') 2012-07-31T07:34:58 rlwriter.warning >> invalid image url (obj.target: u'file:Assassins Creed Lineage Cover.jpg') 2012-07-31T07:34:58 rlwriter.warning >> invalid image url (obj.target: u'File:aclbts1.jpg') 77.0026441036% laying out Assassin's Creed: Lineage2012-07-31T07:34:58 rlwriter.info >> rendering: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=386818719' 77.0026441036% laying out Medici (board game)2012-07-31T07:34:59 rlwriter.warning >> invalid image url (obj.target: u'File:Medici game.jpg') 2012-07-31T07:34:59 rlwriter.warning >> invalid image url (obj.target: u'File:Medici game.jpg') 77.0026441036% laying out Medici (board game)2012-07-31T07:34:59 rlwriter.info >> rendering: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=386818719' 77.0026441036% laying out Medici (board game)2012-07-31T07:34:59 rlwriter.warning >> invalid image url (obj.target: u'File:Medici game.jpg') 2012-07-31T07:34:59 rlwriter.warning >> invalid image url (obj.target: u'File:Medici game.jpg') 77.0026441036% laying out Medici (board game)2012-07-31T07:35:03 rlwriter.info >> rendering: u'License' 77.0026441036% laying out License77.0026441036% laying out License77.0026441036% rendering 2012-07-31T07:35:03 rlwriter.info >> start rendering: u'/home/pp/sandbox/cache/a1/a1c55a0e1e5b1067/tmpFuLpyp.rl' 2012-07-31T07:35:04 rlwriter.info >> memory usage after laying out: 732.09375 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering 77.0026441036% rendering in function system, file /home/pp/local/bin/nslave.py, line 64

Anybody? Could this be a problem related to article templates? — Sctechlaw (talk) 02:45, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Database search query

Pew Research Center This is small (120 empolyees in infobox) American opinion(?) polling company. 'What links here' goes to many articles. When I first saw one of the links I thought it looked 'spammish'. I am Canadian so I don't know how valued this company's polls are because we have different ones up here. This has me wondering if it is possible to search the database to see if a few users have added the wikilinks to all of these articles, if it is coincidence that so many exist, or if it is a polling company that has high hits on google for 'opinion poll'. If this is possible it may be handy to see if any users are 'spamming' articles by simply doing things like adding poll result wikilinks to them.--Canoe1967 (talk) 09:41, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

I did more research. They are notable and cited for statistics all over. I was also curious that couldn't find their Survey methodology figures. Two others I found easily at 1000 calls a day. This company may just be lower, sell their stats for less that way, and thus they are small and notable. Feel free to resolve this as a goose chase unless someone else wants to kick it.--Canoe1967 (talk) 12:50, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

Character recognition in #ParserFunctions

I use parser functions (like #switch:) to handle Braille cell characters (they are defined in Unicode). So far I use numbered cell-id's, like "1356" not ⠵ (for U+2835 ⠵ BRAILLE PATTERN DOTS-1356). My straight 0-8 number id is to be sure that the id is correctly identified in parsing. (I was afraid that the straight Braille unicode character ⠵ might not be identifying in some situations). But maybe I am mixing font-issues up with code-issues.
So now my hypothesis is: in WP parsing code, such a character ⠵ can be used for identification and so can be used without doubt in the parser functions. Am I correct? -DePiep (talk) 12:41, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

To a switch statement, a (non-control, non-weird-space, non-reserved-for-wikicode) unicode character is a unicode character, and should be identified perfectly well. Fancy braille things should be fine. (One point of consideration though, the character may be changed if used in an id attribute of an html tag (It will still work, it just may be replaced with something else, probably an underscore followed by numbers) Bawolff (talk) 18:04, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

ok, thanks. All this Unicode braille is in the range U+28xx. (256 ids) -DePiep (talk) 01:56, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Jodie Kidd image

The image File:Jodie_Kidd_2008.jpg on Jodie Kidd renders correctly in IE (8.0), but not in Firefox (10.0 - all I have to test with right now) - it's rotated 90 degrees left in the latter. Note that the EXIF information on the image was changed recently to reflect the proper orientation. FF shows it in its original orientation, but distorted to fit its current aspect ratio. This doesn't seem to be a caching issue, but I'm not sure. --Fru1tbat (talk) 14:56, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

Sounds like a caching issue to me. Looks fine now to me, is the issue still present for you? (Sometimes images take a couple minutes before the thumbs can be purged. If the thumbnail fail to purge for only a specific size thumb, sometimes differences are noticed between users if they have different default thumb sizes in preferences ) Bawolff (talk) 18:10, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

Just tried in Firefox 14.0.1, and it's still rotated incorrectly. I just tried again in IE, and in Safari as well, and it's fine in both, but not Firefox. --Fru1tbat (talk) 23:21, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

Ok, looks like the problem might be the way Firefox handles the embedded thumbnail. When the image in the article is set to 300px, the orientation is correct. When it's set to 200px or below, it's rotated and distorted in Firefox. Maybe the embedded thumbnail should just be removed? This might fix it. Or is there a better solution? For now, I've just made the image slightly larger in the article. --Fru1tbat (talk) 14:13, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Image caption "0" disappears

Please consider these images & their caption/mousehover text: thumb|20px|2

Thumb, caption "1": 1	Thumb, caption "0": 0
(nothing specified) caption "1": Mouse hover text = 1	(nothing specified) caption "0": Has no caption (no hover text)

Anyone with an idea or workaround/solution? -DePiep (talk) 19:12, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

Good catch. Sounds like a MW bug (Specificly sounds like somebody either using PHP's negation (!) operator, or using weak comparision (==) when they should have used strict comparision (===). Bawolff (talk) 19:49, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

Perhaps this one $alt = empty( $options['alt'] ) ? '' : $options['alt']; from includes/media//MediaTransformOutput.php —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:32, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

Also: entering "00" works well (numerical value would still be 0 right). Tested a bit with/without size param 20px -- same effect. And hey, this is from a True Aim! (ask me for details). I am not a bug seeker, I already spent dozens of edits myself on this ;-) -DePiep (talk) 00:44, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

That matches with the behavior of empty as described here. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:09, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Filed bugzilla:38910 for this small problem. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:13, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Lowercase interwikis

Sometime ago part of interwiki languages displayed in lowercase letter (yes some language names begin with lowercase letter). But now it has been changed. I think it should be changed back to use language's own format, to start with lowercase or not. Current format is wrong for some languages. --Olli (talk) 05:50, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

see also discussion on the bugtracker —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 06:53, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

thx--Olli (talk) 09:00, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Also Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 100#MediaWiki 1.20wmf5 deployment complete --Redrose64 (talk) 10:43, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Article titles containing "prefix:foo"

So, I've been seeing a few articles accidentally created recently with titles ending with "prefix:foo" in them, like Chelsea Newman prefix:Wikipedia:Manual of Style, Yiddish prefix:Talk:Isaac Asimov/, and How do you cut and paste something that I have from pdf including pictures prefix:Wikipedia:FAQ (there's one from today, too, but I don't really want to link it, due to its content). Looking at the VPT archives, I've seen some discussion of it being a result of searching with the prefix and then following the creation suggestion, and that a Bugzilla entry was opened (and closed) and an edit filter was suggested. Did anything happen with this? I can't imagine an edit filter for this would be hard to make; wouldn't it just be article_namespace == 0 & article_text like "* prefix:*" or something? I don't think that would have many false positives or anything. Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 14:56, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

I think Titleblacklist would be a better option. And if you want to find more useless pages then grep can help; for example, currently there are 2 redirects in mainspace and 126 pages and redirects in userspace. — AlexSm 16:00, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Ooh, that's a good idea. I'll put an edit request over there; thanks! Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 17:20, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Or we could "fix" it even better with some JavaScript by simply hiding MediaWiki:Searchmenu-new in this case. I just did in another project (of course, we already had Search.js called from Common.js on the search page). — AlexSm 18:17, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Well, it's already added to the title blacklist, so that's probably good enough for the moment, at least. The only thing about the JS solution is that, for all the examples of this that I've seen, people aren't intending to create a new page at all; they seem to be trying to make a new section on a talk page, so, while JS is definitely a more elegant solution to the narrow problem, I'm not sure it's a good idea for the wider problem. Allowing people to accidentally create pages with more-plausible titles will probably allow more of these accidental articles to slip through the cracks, I think. Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 18:35, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

See also bugzilla:29989. Helder 20:12, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Question about protection

I posted this at WP:AN (here) but got no reply. I have just fully protected Syria for a week as a result of an content dispute. However, the article was previously semi-protected until October because of persistent vandalism. I have no intention to remove the semi-protection that is already in place, as the full protection is for a different, shorter-term issue. However, when the protection expires, the semi-protection will also be lost (as happened at Barack Obama citizenship conspiracy theories). Is there a way to prevent the current semi-protection from expiring when full protection expires? If not, is it worth talking to the developers about? Thanks. ItsZippy ^{(talk • contributions)} 17:50, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Nope, there isn't. It's probably worth filing a bug about it on Bugzilla. Graham87 01:53, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

Meetup template broken

Wikipedia Meetups

August 2024 +/-
Christchurch 30	August 4, 2024 (2024-08-04)
NC Triangle Wiknic	August 6, 2024 (2024-08-06)
Seattle Wiknic	August 11, 2024 (2024-08-11)
London 207	August 11, 2024 (2024-08-11)
San Diego 112 Wiknic	August 17, 2024 (2024-08-17)
San Francsico Wiknic	August 17, 2024 (2024-08-17)
Oxford 103	August 18, 2024 (2024-08-18)
BLT Office Hours	August 25, 2024 (2024-08-25)
San Diego 113	August 26, 2024 (2024-08-26)
September 2024 +/-
BLT Office Hours	September 22, 2024 (2024-09-22)
San Diego 114	September 23, 2024 (2024-09-23)
Full Meetup Calendar • Events calendar on Meta For meetups in other languages, see the list on Meta

{{Meetup}} seems protected, so I can't figure out why it's not working, as, for example, here. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 20:03, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

It just means that the subtemplate for next month - Template:Meetup/September 2012 - hasn't been created yet. Compare for example Template:Meetup/August 2012 or Template:Meetup/July 2012. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:55, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Template help required

Resolved

Need some help with {{Sent off}}. The current implementation overlays two images, which results in alignment problems on the subsequent line. We have a single image equivalent to the two overlaid images but it's a bit beyond me to work out how to incorporate it into the template. See Template talk:Sent off for more information. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks. DH85868993 (talk) 13:21, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

Fixed —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:19, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

need help with talk page automatic archiving

Hi,

For some reason my automatic archiving stopped working in May. Further, although there are three archives I can't find them in the edit window and I don't know how to make a fourth archive (to archive my too long page myself) that would relate to the first three archives. I've fiddled but can't fix it. Help? MathewTownsend (talk) 16:16, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

I couldn't see anything wrong with your Mizabot definitions, but there were a couple of stray characters in the existing archives which I have removed just in case that helps. I also tidied up the first archive to match the others. Hope that is OK. You can make the fourth archive yourself if you wish: open the third archive, replace the "3" with a "4"" in the browser's url field and open that. You then get a page with a create button for the new archive. Just start it off with {{aan}} as for the others. You can then cut sections from your current talk and paste them into the new archive. --Mirokado (talk) 17:09, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

Thanks! I'll try that. MathewTownsend (talk) 17:40, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

A question concerning scripting and protection

I'm asking this question on behalf of User:Betacommand/User:Δ

I am looking for a script, not sure if it exists or not, but I want to add a tab to my site that automatically protects a page, it loads the action=protect fills in the length (indef) permissions (sysop) and reason and then automatically submits its. Any help would be appreciated.

He will be watching this page for your reply and find a way to contact you if interested (or you can contact him directly via email too). Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 17:14, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

Try (with customisations):

var portletLink = mw.util.addPortletLink( 'p-cactions', '#',
        'Autoprotect', 'ca-autoprotect'
);
$( portletLink ).click( function(){
	var currentPage = mw.config.get( 'wgPageName' );
	var pageId = mw.config.get( 'wgArticleId' );
	jQuery.getJSON(
	  mw.util.wikiScript( 'api' ), {
		'format': 'json',
		'action': 'query',
		'titles': currentPage,
		'prop': 'info',
		'intoken': 'protect'
	  }, function ( data ) {
		var token = data.query.pages[pageId].protecttoken;
		jQuery.post(
			mw.util.wikiScript( 'api' ), {
			 'format': 'json',
			 'action': 'protect',
			 'title': currentPage,
			 'protections': 'edit=autoconfirmed|move=sysop',
			 'expiry': '20171024160754',
			 'token': token,
			 'reason': 'Blah'
	  } );
	} );
} );

Regards, - Jarry1250 ^{[Deliberation needed]} 20:00, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

Remove all browser 'Rollback' links everywhere

Hi, I'd like to remove all "Rollback" links everywhere from my browser. I have the following in my common.css:

 .mw-special-Watchlist .mw-rollback-link {
    display: none;
 }

which removes the Rollback links from my Watchlist, but I don't want them anywhere. I want to keep Rollback permission for Huggle but not for any other use. Can this be done? Thanks... Zad68 20:03, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

I think all the rollback links have the same CSS class, so if you just delete the ".mw-special-Watchlist" pit, it should work everywhere. Seems to for me at least. Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 20:07, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

Works!! Just as advertised. Cheers!! Zad68 20:12, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

• As more and more people are using hand held/touch screen devices to use Wikipedia (especially when they are away from home), I think having this as an option in preferences might be a good idea. - jc37 20:10, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

• Yes please! I'd actually like to disable Rollback only on my mobile device. Is there some sort of JavaScript thingie I can put in that says, If I'm on a mobile device, then remove the Rollback link? Zad68 20:12, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

try the following

@media only screen and (max-device-width: 480px) {
  .mw-rollback-link {
     display: none;
  }
}

It means, "only apply to screens with a maximum width of 480px" —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:17, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

I'm actually not using an iPhone or iPad. WP:NPOV fail! :) Can this be done in a more general way, such as checking for mobile connectivity? I know that Wikipedia detects when I'm connected via my mobile device browser and offers the mobile version, so I know Wikipedia can tell when I'm connected mobile. What's the if-statement clause for that? I think that would 100% do what I want. Thanks in advance.... Zad68 13:18, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

I didn't say you were. your mobile device screen is larger then this ? Raise the number.. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:53, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

Just making an iPhone vs. Android joke. Actually my mobile device has 1280 x 720 native resolution and reaches into desktop resolution range. It'd be better to make this determination on an explicit "is it mobile?" check instead of making an assumption based on screen resolution. Zad68 15:21, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia down?

About a two-three minutes ago I was unable to access wikipedia. I checked downornot.com and it claimed wikipedia was down everywhere. What happened?--92.251.179.11 (talk) 21:24, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

well, it was down... or were you expecting some sort of conspiracy, where it was only down for you and someone changed the website downornot.com just to get at you ? :P —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:26, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Well it's up now! Secretlondon (talk) 21:30, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict) It appeared to be that all Wikimedia sites were down. At the time I had been deleting my cache and cookies, I thought it was my fault – that I had accidentally deleted Wikipedia too, haha! Jared Preston (talk) 21:28, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

I'd love to have that kind of power! Secretlondon (talk) 21:30, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

With great power comes great irresponsibility. — Richardguk (talk) 21:39, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Teahouse/Questions#What just happened?. It's time to throw somebody into the village stocks. Ryan Vesey 21:47, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

It's back, for me - but the css doesn't appear to be loading. Looks like the Internet from the eighties. pablo 15:19, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Back to normal now. pablo 15:25, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Categories in Google Chrome

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T41047

Categories are showing weird for me in Chrome. Some categories are on two lines for some reason. It changed suddenly a few days ago. Firefox and IE are showing them correcly. Any fix for this? --Mika1h (talk) 22:45, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

Interesting. I too use Chrome (on XP), but have not seen the issue. Chris857 (talk) 01:18, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

Scratch that, as I just found it occurring on Alice Dalgliesh. (At 100% zoom) all appear correctly except for "1893 births", where it is on two lines, but the space seems wide enough for it to fit on one line (just like the above picture). 1024x768 screen resolution, occurs at 200% zoom, 100% zoom. 175% zoom and 50% zoom affect other cats.Chris857 (talk) 02:32, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

I'm seeing it too--just started today for me. Mackensen (talk) 03:03, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

I see it too in Chrome 21. Looks like a measuring error in the layout fase. We probably need to file an upstream bugreport about this. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:56, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

I've submitted a report on bugzilla. Chris857 (talk) 02:13, 5 August 2012 (UTC)

I just realized that I've been seeing something very similar in tables of contents (TOCs). For example, in Leucophoenicite, "4.1 bibliography" displays on two lines, whereas it occupies only one line in IE. Chris857 (talk) 02:30, 5 August 2012 (UTC)

I've been noticing this as well, especially in motorsports results tables. Some cells with a longer-then-normal driver's name used to display on one line in Chrome 20, now they display on two lines in Chrome 21. I get the feeling tables in Chrome 21 now might need to have a width explicitly set to avoid this problem - unless it's an unintended Chrome bug. TheChrisD ^{Rants•Edits} 11:19, 5 August 2012 (UTC)

Cannot be reproduced in Chromium nightly build, so likely folks will just have to wait for Chrome 22. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:10, 5 August 2012 (UTC)

I have that too. In Chrome on Win Vista. Weird, but not really a problem for me. --Nnemo (talk) 07:12, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

The position of the vertical bar schocks me much more. --Nnemo (talk) 07:33, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Detect parental controls software before all visits to wiki pages

The article on bronies is being blocked by my parental controls software. I request that all visits to wiki pages should start with a scan for parental controls software. If it detects parental controls software, the software will be removed. See WP:NOTCENSORED. -- 96.50.22.205 (talk) 01:29, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

That's ridiculous. Wikipedia doesn't censor it's own content, we don't stop people from censoring content on their own. Ryan Vesey 01:48, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

Also, I don't want my browser changing or removing other software on my computer. Chris857 (talk) 02:01, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

Would it even be possible? If it is, it is probably illegal. Ryan Vesey 02:03, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

This comes pretty close. "It was discovered that any website could force users with the plug-in to open any program on their PC." Chris857 (talk) 02:11, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

It's not possible. In regards to Chris857: Its unlikely that everyone with parental control software also has software with remote execution vulnrabilities in it, and even then we're not going to start hacking people's computer simply because sexually explicit images want to be free. Bawolff (talk) 13:30, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

Pages in category

Is it possible for a template to reveal the number of pages in a category and all of the subcategories? Specifically, I would like to use it on Category:Articles without infoboxes. Ryan Vesey 04:04, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

This {{PAGESINCATEGORY:Articles without infoboxes|R}} will generate this: 0. Is that what your looking for? Kumioko (talk) 04:10, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

Nope, that just displays the one that are specifically in that category. The real number should be somewhere between 30,000 and 100,000. Ryan Vesey 04:12, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

As another note, there are so many pages in that category, it breaks catscan. I might need to have a couple of templates modified to add the articles to an all category. Soon, the category may become a subcat of Category:All articles that need to be wikified. Ryan Vesey 04:16, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

After looking at those cats, the count is right for this one. You might be right that there are as many or more articles that need an infobox however they need to be tagged as such to be in this category and there not tagged yet. I would actually say that there are likely to be more than 100, 000. The other problem is that there are some articles even at the FA level that don't have infoboxes because some folks don't think they are necessary nor bring value to the article. I personally don't agree with that however that view does exist. Kumioko (talk) 09:23, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

Template trouble

Resolved

I have been working with the {{request edit}} template set and have run into an issue I cannot figure out. The page Template:Request edit is showing up in Category:Requested edits. There is no call to that category (or any other) in that template page. That page calls (as default) the subpage at Template:Request edit/request when it is used. The subpage calls the category, but from within a noinclude block. How do I remove the template from the category? --Nouniquenames (talk) 04:28, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

It's now fixed with this. -- WOSlinker (talk) 06:28, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

Thank you very much! --Nouniquenames (talk) 15:29, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

Odd sound file

File:02 Calma Pueblo.ogg- Does this actually contain malicious code? Is it an mp4 file, or an ogg? Why is it so big? Thanks to anyone who can help. J Milburn (talk) 13:10, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

It is unlikely that it actually contains malicious code. We put that warning for any file that is not on the list of "safe" file formats. What most likely happened is someone took an mp4 file, changed the extension thinking that is all one needs to do to convert to ogg, uploaded it (somehow it got past the upload screen even though its extension doesn't match its type, or perhaps are file type detection subsequently got better), and here we are. Bawolff (talk) 13:22, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

The file was uploaded just two days ago. The first version was a regular ogg file but the second version was the MP4 file of the entire piece of music. I made a complete mess while trying to delete the second version, as it's a copyright violation; no matter what I did, even if I reuploaded a new version or bypassed my cache, Wikipedia still showed the long copyright-violating version, so I've deleted the file completely for now. Graham87 04:48, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

Nyttend just undeleted the original version of the file, as I was trying to do, but my computer still showed the longer copyright-violation version when I used the play sound button or tried to download the ogg file. I finally had a brainwave to try a different browser (Firefox instead of IE) and the problem was solved! Graham87 15:38, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

Hey thanks for all your help. I tried uploading a smaller version of the file and it went a little crazy. The only problem now is it is still a copyright violation because it is 124 kbps, when it should not be above 64. Any ideas? Basilisk4u (talk) 16:46, 5 August 2012 (UTC)

Try re-uploading it again, but make sure that you select the right file in the "source filename" box. After you've uploaded a version with lower resolution, ping me on my talk page. But I don't think the difference between 128 and 64kb/s is such a big deal that the original file needs to be deleted immediately. Graham87 08:16, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Proper licensing of gadgets and user scripts

I started a topic on Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Proper licensing of gadgets and user scripts which may be of interest for those watching this page.

Best regards, Helder 18:21, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

Overlinking vandalism.

Occasionally a vandal will come along and disrupt an article by needlessly linking every single word in a sentence or two. I am guessing that most such efforts are merely tests, but they do tend to bump up the disambiguation link count, and can confuse readers and reduce readability. I'd like to see the bots that routinely revert additions of curse words and the like to add this to their repertoire. Such vandalism should be fairly easy to parse by a bot, since it typically includes putting links around common words like this and and and the. If not solved by a bot, perhaps at least a report could be compiled somewhere so that suspicious edits following this pattern can be swiftly identified and reverted. Cheers! bd2412 T 16:13, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

How to hide bots from watchlist

==Watchlist==

Is there a way to auto-hide bots in my watchlist, i.e. so it displays the URL http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Watchlist&namespace=&hideBots=1 automatically?--Gilderien Chat|List of good deeds 16:36, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

Try looking in your preferences and please do not add new sections like this: there is a special "New section" ("or "+") tab on top of the page. — AlexSm 16:45, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, I should have realised, on both counts.--Gilderien Chat|List of good deeds 16:49, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

Resolved

Bypass upload wizard when clicking redlinks

Hi there. I'm looking for a way (preference, script, etc.) to get it so that when I click a redlinked file page it takes me to the blank page in the file namspace (like it used to), rather than to the upload wizard. This would be tremendously useful to me, as getting to that page is a much easier/convienant way to view the file's deletion rational than any of the alternative methods are. Sven Manguard Wha? 17:18, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

Example: If I click on File:47th_Dai_Abdul_Qadir_Najmuddin_.JPG, I want to be taken to this page. Sven Manguard Wha? 17:19, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

I'll second that - it would be quite useful. --Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 21:51, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

Here's some script to put in your Special:MyPage/skin.js or Special:MyPage/common.js:

$("a.new").filter("[href*='Wikipedia:Upload?wpDestFile=']").each(function(index, el) { el=$(el); el.attr('href', el.attr('href').replace('wiki/Wikipedia:Upload?wpDestFile=', 'w/index.php?action=edit&redlink=1&title=File:')); })

— This, that, and the other (talk) 09:52, 5 August 2012 (UTC)

I think it's better to be redirected just to wiki/File:.... It looks better, it shows file usage and if implemented globally (on some project) there is no confusing for newbies edit window. — AlexSm 15:06, 5 August 2012 (UTC)

Multiple editors have complained about this situation for several years now. Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 99#File redlink should not lead to godawful upload form is a recent one with some technical discussion. Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 77#Redlinked files linking to upload page has a link to an underlying bugzilla item and a .js solution. DMacks (talk) 20:01, 5 August 2012 (UTC)

Editing my watchlist

When I click on the "View and edit watchlist" link, I get a Wikipedia error page. It says, "Our servers are currently experiencing a technical problem. This is probably temporary and should be fixed soon. Please try again in a few minutes." On the other hand, if I try the "Edit raw watchlist" link, the page doesn't load; I just get a white screen.

I have almost 24,000 pages on my watchlist. I want to whittle down my watchlist, but I don't know how, if neither link will work.

Allen (Morriswa) (talk) 17:49, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

Well....you could go to some of the pages on it (by looking at the basic watchlist screen) and manually remove the star in the article by clicking on it...bit slow but with over 10,000 pages it might not let you load it anyway.--Gilderien Chat|List of good deeds 17:51, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

Can you explain what you mean by "manually remove the star in the article by clicking on it"?

The only way I can currently remove any pages from my watchlist is to open them and click the "unwatch" link.

Is there any other way that I can view ALL of the pages on my watchlist, such as an option on the Toolserver site? Allen (Morriswa) (talk) 17:58, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, that's what I meant..though with 24,000 it might be a while.--Gilderien Chat|List of good deeds 18:17, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

The star refers to the the way a page is unwatched in the default Vector skin. You must have another skin. Compare http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Morriswa?useskin=monobook and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Morriswa?useskin=vector. If unwatch works in your skin then there should be no advantage in Vector. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:19, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

Also, Help:Watching_pages#Size_limitationsuggests that you should reduce it manually, though does not exclude the possibility of other methods.--Gilderien Chat|List of good deeds 18:23, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

I have the Monobook skin. What other methods are there? Allen (Morriswa) (talk) 18:25, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

WP:POPUPS has an unwatch feature when hovering over a link. Wikipedia:WikiProject User scripts/Scripts#Watchlist includes a link to user:js/watchlist. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:06, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

Yes, I know that it does. However, with nearly 24,000 pages, I can't remember them all. If I could, I would be able to type them in and unwatch them that way. Allen (Morriswa) (talk) 09:55, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Does Special:Watchlist display correctly? If so, you can at least use part of the feature. Get into the habit of unwatching pages as you check the listed edits, unless you're strongly interested in the page. This will (slowly) reduce your watchlist size); to prevent it increasing quickly, switch off all the "Add pages ... to my watchlist" options at Preferences → Watchlist, and when editing a page, only check "Watch this page" if you're strongly interested in it. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:43, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Template coding technical assistance needed

See Wikipedia talk:Template messages/User talk namespace#Template:Db-attack-notice needs modification. Thanks. Beeblebrox (talk) 21:13, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

Is the search algorithm in Wikipedia different than on Commons?

I was looking for a file named JohnLloydMiller.jpg on Commons, and the search failed.

I leaped to the conclusion that there was no such file, but this is wrong.

The same search on Wikipedia works

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=JohnLloydMiller.jpg&button=&title=Special%3ASearch

It looks like a search in Wikipedia assume that if you search in the File namespace, it should look for files whose name starts File:xxxx, but the exact same search in Commons fails?

This seems hard to believe. Am I missing something?--SPhilbrick(Talk) 00:15, 5 August 2012 (UTC)

The Wikipedia search finds File:JohnLloydMiller.jpg which was uploaded to the English Wikipedia 26 July 2012‎. The Commons version at commons:File:JohnLloydMiller.jpg was uploaded 4 August 2012‎ and hasn't been indexed by the search function yet. A Commons search does not search files uploaded to Wikipedia. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:44, 5 August 2012 (UTC)

I didn't expect the Commons search to find the enwiki version, but you answered my question, the Commons search didn't work becasue the index hasn't been updated. Arghh, I should have figured that out myself, but it happened so long ago, it didn't occur to me that it is still the same day. Thanks.--SPhilbrick(Talk) 01:43, 5 August 2012 (UTC)

Reference bubble

Hello,

Now, when I fly over a reference link, I get a bubble with the ref above my mouse, and that is great !

But what happens when I fly over a ref link which is near the top of the view ? The reference goes above the view, where I can't see it. This is not very clever. In such case, it would be nicer to hatch the ref bubble below my mouse. Look at this screen photo.

Thanks for improving that, and keep up the good work !

--Nnemo (talk) 04:16, 5 August 2012 (UTC)

This is ReferenceTooltips, shown in Preferences → Gadgets as "^(D) Reference Tooltips: hover over inline citations to see reference information without moving away from the article text (does not work if "Navigation popups" is enabled above)". It was added to the gadgets list with this edit (see Wikipedia:Gadget/proposals#Reference Tooltips and Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 87#Gadget proposal), and switched on by default with this edit (see MediaWiki talk:Gadgets-definition#ReferenceTooltips on by default). I believe that the discussion page for the gadget is at User talk:Yair rand/ReferenceTooltips. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:00, 5 August 2012 (UTC)

Edits lost when logged in as user, but retained when I log out and become anonymous

Sometimes, over the last week, my edits have been lost upon "Save" (i.e. the page goes back to the old version, there is no record of my edits in the history, and I can't recover my edits). However, if I log out to become an anonymous IP user and make the exact same edit on the exact same page, using the exact same browser, then it works and my edits are saved.

Has anyone else noticed this? It doesn't happen on every page, but when it does happen on a particular page it will continue consistently on that same page. Logging out and then logging back in doesn't help. Grover cleveland (talk) 07:04, 5 August 2012 (UTC)

Site errors when moving

A week or so Bwilkins got a site error when moving the Syrian Civil War article, see Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Archive238#Site errors in middle of move. Today I moved the article and, although in both cases the move appears to have gone through, I also got a site error. Yesterday the same thing happened (site error, but move worked) when I moved 2011–2012 Egyptian revolution. Now, I'm not suggesting this has to do with moving pages related to the Arab Spring, but is it perhaps because both articles are very big and have a decent amount of subpages? Here is the site error I got:

Request: POST http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:MovePage&action=submit, from 10.64.0.130 via cp1014.eqiad.wmnet (squid/2.7.STABLE9) to 10.2.1.1 (10.2.1.1)
Error: ERR_READ_TIMEOUT, errno [No Error] at Sun, 05 Aug 2012 11:57:49 GMT

Can anyone explain this or pass it on to someone who may be able to resolve it? Cheers, Jenks24 (talk) 12:08, 5 August 2012 (UTC)

When you move a page, you only get a response from the server, after the move is done. Basically in order to present you the "it succeeded" page. However if the move takes longer then 10-20 seconds to execute, the network setup behaves as if the request failed. The operation is continuing (so the move did not fail), but you just didn't get to see the result. You often see the same problem on complex pages when editing, the response of the server takes so long to generate, the timeout error is presented before you get to see the new version of the page. The problem is that it is very difficult for the squid server to distinguish between something that takes very long, and something that cannot reach another server. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:27, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Substitution error occurring after posting deletion sorting templates

Resolved

Recently an error has been occurring when posting delsort templates, in which rather than the delsort notice posting, a message is posted that states "This template must be substituted!" despite the "subst:" prefix being in place.

Example – When posting: {{subst:delsort|Business|~~~~}}

This is what is being displayed:

—Northamerica1000^(talk) 01:22, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

I've fixed it. User:Czarkoff made an edit to the template but didn't use {{issubst}} correctly. I've fixed that with this edit. -- WOSlinker (talk) 06:40, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Thank you – The templates are posting correctly at this time. Northamerica1000^(talk) 06:48, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia goes awry again

I am just wondering what the error with Wikipedia now. Why is it also only displaying Times New Roman with the Main Page a mess? Purging the pages does not help. It is only on secure that everything displays normally. Difficultly north (talk) 14:28, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia down

Summary: A fiber cable connecting the main Wikipedia datacentre with the rest of the world was accidentally cut by construction. Workarounds have been put in place, but this required considerable time before they were finished and effective (about an hour). Operations should slowly return to normal now. DNS entries were changed, so if you experience trouble, likely this is due to slow DNS updates between you and Wikipedia. If you are still affected, at some unpredictable point in time, it will also be fixed for you.

Let's get in first. Down, down, down, down, down. You can check the status with http://status.wikimedia.org/ Regards, SunCreator ^(talk) 14:32, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Based on IRC chat, it seems like a line got cut by a construction worker in Tampa. Ryan Vesey 14:33, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

As a note, the current error notice gives a link to irc chat that uses irc:// that is fine for those with clients, but not for a majority of the people who see it. I would suggest changing that to a webchat.freenode.net link. This issue was raised on IRC as well. Ryan Vesey 14:34, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Official Twitter updates found at https://twitter.com/Wikipedia. A wikipedia status site telling you everything is working just fine. http://wikistatus.ezyang.com/ :) Now would be the time to donate, except the donation server is down. Regards, SunCreator ^(talk) 14:37, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Red status lights have changed to yellow http://status.wikimedia.org/ Regards, SunCreator ^(talk) 14:41, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Secure Server works like a dream :) --Gilderien Chat|List of good deeds 15:19, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Aren't big data centers usually fed by cables going by two different routes? Anway diffs have been working fine for me since I started this afternoon's session (New York) almost two hours ago. Jim.henderson (talk) 18:55, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Consider this an opportunity to give backhoe fade and backhoe fading some attention. ☺ Uncle G (talk) 19:15, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

• Ah, this might be why it's responding slowly right now? - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 03:12, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
  • There was another issue today (likely caused indirectly by the issue yesterday), where one of the internal links in the Tampa datacentre got overloaded, causing significant responsiveness issues. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:36, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Diffs not working

(Extracted from section above as appears to be a different problem) Diffs are not working on either the normal or secure server - is this a general problem related to the "down"? or is it (like "my preferences" above) only affecting me and a few others? - Arjayay (talk) 18:35, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Diffs have been working fine for me. Ryan Vesey 18:44, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

They flash up momentarily and then the text disappears leaving a selection of grey bars and white boxes with blue lines around them - but no text. Arjayay (talk) 18:53, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Diffs still just flashing up momentarily and disappearing leaving a selection of grey bars and white boxes with blue lines around them - but no text Arjayay (talk) 08:23, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

I'm getting this problem too. Not even the flashing, just the blank diffs. Enhanced diff display also non-functional. Popups is working, though. IE8, Vector skin. --Stfg (talk) 13:51, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

I'm also using IE8 and Vector - Out of interest Stfg, are your tabs under "My preferences" working? The "My preferences" problem above predated the "outage" that seems to correlate with the diffs not showing - Arjayay (talk) 15:58, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Yes, my tabs under "My preferences" are working fine. --Stfg (talk) 17:01, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Forcing creation of a section without a heading

Is there a way to force/trick MediaWiki into creating a numbered section (e.g. a div or other block element) that does not have a corresponding H# heading? This would be very useful for making individually editable glossary entries using template-structured glossaries per MOS:GLOSS. The technical problem is that a H# heading, e.g. something in ===Heading here=== markup, cannot be inside a <dl>...</dl>-based definition list structure, as used by template-structured glossaries. Nor vice-versa (you can't put <dt>...</dt> markup inside a heading). One could get around this issue by breaking entries out into templates and transcluding them, and having an edit link template edit the template page, but this would violate the principle that we don't use sub-articles or effectively "hide" article content in templates. My guess is that there is not an extant way to do this, but also that it would not be hard for developers to implement. My experience with MW's bugzilla tells me that a request to add such a feature, however, would be ignored for several years as too low-priority. So, I'm hoping there's an existing means of pulling this off already. — SMcCandlish   Talk⇒ ɖ∘¿¤þ   Contrib. 06:04, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Edit protected template request

Is there any chance someone can please take a look at the edit request for Template talk:WikiProject United States? Its been open for 10 days now and only admins can edit it because the rest of us with hundreds of thousands of edits and years of experience on Wiki can't be trusted to do it. :-)Kumioko (talk) 10:54, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

I'm an admin but don't know anything about the WikiProject and eight changes sounds like a lot to review. You could try asking at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject United States. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:22, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

I understand and I would but unfortunately the vast majority of the active members of the project are not admins so we cannot make the change. All we can do is put it out there and wait which usually takes a couple weeks for someone to get around to it. Which is also the reason there are so many at a time. Its starts as one or 2 and then after a couple weeks the list grows. Kumioko (talk) 13:10, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Facebook link previews

If you share a Wikipedia page on Facebook, the preview image is invariably the MediaWiki logo. Regardless of how one feels about Facebook, this is stupid and annoying.

While this is clearly the result of some poor heuristics by Facebook programmers (in the absence of other cues, they seem to grab the last image on the page?), I was wondering what could be done to address the issue on Wikipedia. One way might be to add some attributes to the main image within an infobox. However, this seems to be very difficult without getting parser functions to hack through HTML and add an attribute, maybe with regular expressions. This immediately seemed like a bad idea to me, but I was wondering if there was any precedent for doing this. I don't see anything in the docs that I would trust to work properly on arbitrary HTML, but I'm not a wizard with wikitext, so maybe there is some way.

Of course, even if it worked, this would also cause lots of chaos on Wikipedia's side because we'd have to regenerate every infobox, and the cost is almost certainly not worth it.

The easiest alternative seems to be to pester Facebook to special-case what their sharer does for Wikipedia pages. I've already pinged Kul Wadhwa, the Wikimedia employee who manages the relationship with Facebook, as well as people I know who work at Facebook. But I just wanted to be sure that there wasn't an easy fix on our end, if anyone asks.

NeilK (talk) 12:07, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Related recent Wikitech-l thread (there were other discussions too): "Facebook grabs the Mediawiki logo instead of the site logo". Regards, HaeB (talk) 12:32, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Thank you, HaeB. The OpenGraphMeta extension would at least make the preview be a Wikipedia globe or something. I guess there is no reasonable way to get the Infobox image, though. NeilK (talk) 12:43, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

You could mark the infobox image with a particular CSS ID or a magic word, surely. --MZMcBride (talk) 13:08, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Doesn't Facebook allow you to choose a thumbnail now? In addition, could we face any legal trouble if a non-free image was used as the thumbnail in the link to Wikipedia? Presumably it is all FB at that point, but I wanted to throw it out there. Ryan Vesey 21:59, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Feedback tool

Why do some articles link to the feedback tool (eg, Clifton Gardens, New South Wales, List of rice diseases) and some ask for page rating (eg, Mazeppa (opera), Quinoline-4-carboxylate 2-oxidoreductase)? SpinningSpark 18:11, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Articles that link to the feedback tool are either in Category:Article Feedback 5 or Category:Article Feedback 5 Additional Articles. You can add the 2nd category to any article you wish. Ryan Vesey 18:16, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Spinningspark: didi you follow "What's this?" links to WP:Article Feedback Tool (which says "deployed on almost all pages") and WP:Article feedback (which says "only about 5 percent") and found that the explanations are not clear enough? — AlexSm 18:22, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Since I would probably not have posted here if I had that information, then no it is not clear enough and your rhetorical question seems only to have been asked in order post the sarcasm which followed. And yes, I did follow the "What's this?" link first - it goes here and does not contain any of the information you claim. SpinningSpark 19:34, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia Mobile View bug?

Accessing Wikipedia pages by Google search on my up-to-date iPhone 4S using Safari shows up in desktop view instead of automatically switching to mobile view. Can anyone confirm this for me? Scott523 (talk) 20:13, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Go to Wikipedia:Enable mobile version and click the link. Ryan Vesey 22:00, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Linking to italizied titles

How do you link to an article which is italizied when there is a different article titles conventionally. I found a broken link (Fuzzy Wuzzy) that in the past targeted to the second link on the disambiguation page (which at some time was moved to Fuzzy Wuzzy in italics). I am at a loss as to how to repair the link. How do I link to this sort of title?--BirgitteSB 01:54, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

There are no "italized page names". The other page is Fuzzy-Wuzzy with a hyphen in the middle. It's displayed title is italized with {{Italic title}}. — AlexSm 02:04, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

I just knew it would be something ridiculous that I was failing to see! Thanks.--BirgitteSB 02:34, 8 August 2012 (UTC)