Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)

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Template:Clickable button is broken

The clickable button templates, {{clickable button}} and {{clickable button 2}}, among others, have been broken for a few weeks. I assume this was due to a css or js change or the like. Compare the working buttons on Commons: commons:Template:Clickable_button. Anyone know how to fix these?--Sage Ross (WMF) (talk) 15:44, 22 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I assume you're referring to the lack of "button" styling? Interestingly enough, [1] makes the buttons there render correctly, but they are unstyled when not in edit mode. Chris857 (talk) 15:49, 22 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. And I just noticed the same thing, that they show up correctly in previews.--Sage Ross (WMF) (talk) 16:07, 22 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

They currently work for me in all tested situations. There is a previous discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 120#Dark blue over the word "wikicode" to the point where I can hardly see it. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:41, 22 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

jQuery.ui is no longer loaded by default. See Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 119#jQuery UI CSS may no longer load by default and linked mailing list post. Anomie ⚔ 16:50, 22 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, that's helpful. Is there a fix, or are we just stuck waiting until the switchover is complete? (Or do we just need to deprecate these buttons?)--Sage Ross (WMF) (talk) 20:01, 22 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Well we can fix them. But it adds again to the stack of javascript. So I guess the question is: Why do we need them with this styling ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:41, 22 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Personally, I'd think having transclusion counts of 869 and 76,859 respectively would be enough of a reason to make sure these templates are working and continue to be supported, no? Technical 13 (talk) 21:01, 22 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Why use JavaScript? It can be done with CSS alone. CSS is generally less of a burden for browsers then JS, and works for people who have JS disabled. CSS pseudo-classes can be used in MediaWiki:Common.css, which allow for different formatting when the user hovers over the button (:hover), clicks on the button (:active), or gives the button keyboard focus (:focus). – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 23:17, 22 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Well sort of my point. They no longer work, because jquery-ui is no longer needed by the core on every single page (and getting rid of unneeded dependencies is a good thing). So to bring them back, you either need to load all that CSS again (either all the time, or with JS only when there are buttons on the pages), or you decouple them from jquery-ui and implement some 'light' CSS on en.wp that doesn't have so much overhead and provides similar functionality. I'm not sure where these buttons are used, which contexts, which users, so it's a bit tough to call for me. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:50, 23 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I am unsure why the two templates aren't merged into one easy to use with advanced features template. I really don't care how they are supported and work, and even as a TE I don't have access to modify MediaWiki: namespace stuff, especially Common.* (which I would expect that even if MediaWiki: was added to something the could be edited by TE's in general would be fully protected anyways). So, what I'm thinking is, if you can get consensus to make {{Clickable button}} (with or without {{Clickable button 2}} merged into it) work with css in the MediaWiki:Common.css then go for it. Technical 13 (talk) 02:35, 23 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I noticed that the buttons look fine on User:TheJJJunk, but not on User:GoingBatty. I'm using FF25. GoingBatty (talk) 02:35, 25 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

@GoingBatty: They look fine to me on both our pages. Maybe this got fixed by the time I saw this. — TheJJJunk ^{(say hello)} 15:03, 25 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It works on both of those pages for me as well, but not on many others (for example, {{welcome student}}). It just depends on whether something else on the page causes the required code to be loaded, I guess.--Sage Ross (WMF) (talk) 15:15, 25 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm, the button on that page appears correctly for me as well. Even before it was switched to clicakablebutton 2. I tried adding a button on my sandbox, and that also displays correctly. I must be special. Or I have a user preference set or a script that activates it? — TheJJJunk ^{(say hello)} 15:37, 25 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'm guessing what people seem to be experiencing where some buttons seem to work for some but not others is due to caching issues (at least we are going to blame it on that because it makes such a good scapegoat). Try BYPASSing and see if they still don't seem right. Technical 13 (talk) 16:28, 25 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I've bypassed and cleared my caches on FF25 and IE10, and User:GoingBatty still doesn't show clickable buttons for me. :-( GoingBatty (talk) 01:42, 26 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I've tried another computer with IE8, and I don't see the clickable buttons whether I'm logged in to WP or not. GoingBatty (talk) 14:17, 26 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It seems much more likely to me that the reason people see different results, is because they have different gadgets/scripts enabled, which might be loading the code that the clickable button requires. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:12, 26 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The buttons work for me, so I logged out, and they didn't work. When logged in, I commented out all my imported scripts and blanked my .css page, and the buttons still worked. Gadgets then? — TheJJJunk ^{(say hello)} 15:22, 26 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

@TheJJJunk: Do you mind sharing what gadgets you have enabled? Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 16:02, 29 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

These are all of the options I have enabled in the Gadgets section of my Preferences:

After rolling back an edit, automatically open the contributions of the user whose edit has been rolled back
Open external links in a new tab/window
Twinkle
"Ask a question" feature for the Wikimedia Foundation's "Teahouse" project
Reference Tooltips
Citation expander
HotCat, not checked in the gadgets, but imported through a script
Form for filing disputes at the dispute resolution noticeboard
CharInsert
Add an [edit] link for the lead section of a page
Add a "Sandbox" link to the personal toolbar area.
Display diffs with the old yellow/green colors and design.

If you want to go through the scripts I have included as well, I have some on my common.js and vector.js I think. — TheJJJunk ^{(say hello)} 17:51, 29 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Aha - enabling Twinkle fixes the clickable button, and disabling breaks it again. Anyway to have the button work without using Twinkle? I also noticed that with Twinkle disabled, the buttons don't appear when I'm reading User:GoingBatty, but they do appear in edit preview mode. Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 00:03, 2 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

As Anomie said way up, jquery.ui is no longer loaded by default, and the button relies on some of its styles.
Unsurprisingly activating a gadget that requires jquery.ui (like Twinkle) will make the styles available, and I assume the editing toolbar also uses jquery.ui which explains why it happens to work there.
Amalthea 10:13, 2 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Since we weren't getting anywhere, i've proposed to add the most efficient loader that I could come up with to fix this problem. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:12, 2 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I have a potential solution here. Kaldari (talk) 19:20, 3 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks to both of you! Today I see the buttons just fine on User talk:ChrisGualtieri, but still don't see them on User:GoingBatty. GoingBatty (talk) 03:13, 7 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Reference problem

It used to be that you could click on a "^" next to a reference and it would direct you back up to where the citation is from in the text. Those carets have disappeared, at least for me. Was there a change recently? --Coemgenus (talk) 22:00, 24 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

You didn't give an example so I don't know whether you are looking at an article using another reference system, but I see "^" at for example Thomas F. Bayard#References. If a reference is used more than once then "^" is not a link. Instead there are letters linking to each use. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:20, 24 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

OK, it must be a problem on my end somehow, because that article isn't working for me. I held CTRL and hit reload and they appeared for a second, then vanished. Using Chrome browser. --Coemgenus (talk) 22:23, 24 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

All right, it came back when I disabled the "Near this page" beta feature. That's a bug, I guess. Is there someplace I should report it? --Coemgenus (talk) 22:29, 24 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Bugs should be reported at mw:Talk:Beta Features/Nearby Pages. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 22:42, 24 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

According to mw:Talk:Beta Features/Nearby Pages#Disrupts footnote linking from reflist to article footnotes there is already a fix in gerrit:97143 but I guess it hasn't been deployed yet. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:28, 25 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Links next to citations in reflist

I'm guessing that this problem is related to "Reference problem" up above, but that section is too vague for me to be sure. As long as I can remember, the reflist has had a ^ next to each number, which when clicked takes the reader to the spot where that citation is referenced; or when <ref name=whatever> and <ref name=whatever /> are used, we get a series of letters (a, b, etc.), each of which will take the reader to the reference spot when clicked. Within this month (seemingly in the last week or two) these have disappeared without warning or explanation; any idea what's going on? It's plainly a skin problem: these letters are missing when I view pages in Monobook with Firefox 25.0.1 and with IE 8, but when I use Vector, both browsers display the links properly. Nyttend (talk) 01:45, 30 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Have you enabled "Near this page" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures? If so, does it help to disable it? PrimeHunter (talk) 02:23, 30 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I've never checked the beta features, given the mess they made of removing the orange bar. I was completely unaware that the "Near this page" even existed, so no, I've not enabled it. Nyttend (talk) 17:28, 30 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I forgot to specify that for the same period of time I've been having what otherwise would seem to be an unrelated problem. Whenever I go to a category with subcategories, I've traditionally been able to find the sub-subcategories by clicking the little arrow next to the name of the subcategory. However, for the last week or two, clicking the little arrow always produces a message of "Problem loading data. Please wait a moment and try again." The second sentence is a link that effectively refreshes the category page. Has anyone else witnessed such a problem? Nyttend (talk) 17:55, 30 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

What happens if you log out and view https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_F._Bayard?useskin=monobook#References and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_F._Bayard?useskin=vector#References? In Firefox 25.0.1 I see ^ in both MonoBook and Vector, both logged in and out. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:35, 30 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I see everything properly when logged out, and when I view them in Vector while logged in, things are just as wrong as when I'm in Monobook. I didn't feel like switching skins just for this, so I'd been logging out before in order to use Vector; I never knew about the ?useskin thing. Time to check my preferences, I guess. Thanks for diagnosing it! Nyttend (talk) 14:11, 1 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Reference backlinks

Reference backlinks are missing:

Markup	Renders as
This is page content.<ref>LibreOffice For Starters, First Edition, Flexible Minds, Manchester, 2002, p. 18</ref> {{reflist}}	This is page content.^[1] ^ LibreOffice For Starters, First Edition, Flexible Minds, Manchester, 2002, p. 18

-- Gadget850^talk 01:17, 6 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I see the backlink in your example and in articles but I guess you have the issue in #Reference problem. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:50, 6 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I've been struck by this too. Not sure when because I haven't been editing much recently. I did have the new near-by links feature enabled but I turned it off and the problem remains. don't see it if I am logged out. A purge of my cache and restarts of the browser didn't fix the issue. Firefox. Jason Quinn (talk) 06:13, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Toolserver seriously funked up

Replication lag is now at over three weeks and counting. Any assistance with this problem would be much appreciated. DavidLeighEllis (talk) 01:29, 27 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

WMF+WMDE have chosen to axe the Toolserver, so most people have given up and don't care. You can use Labs: [2]. Legoktm (talk) 06:26, 27 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you. DavidLeighEllis (talk) 15:06, 27 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Would it be possible to add a notice to the old version, so people know?--S Philbrick (Talk) 17:41, 27 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, before tool server dies, we intend to turn it into a redirect page to let everyone know to change their links to point to labs.—cyberpower _Online^{Merry Christmas} 14:04, 1 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

And has anyone else noticed that X!'s editcount tool on labs hasn't been accessible for a couple of days? Jared Preston (talk) 16:42, 5 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I haven't been able to access it recently either... DavidLeighEllis (talk) 21:51, 5 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The counter seems to be up and running now. DavidLeighEllis (talk) 23:19, 6 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Toolserver is indeed seriously funked up. For example, for November it is reporting about 550,000 views for many articles such as Filter feeder, Bait fish, Striped bass and Menhaden. Is it true that WMF+WMDE are axing it and offering no transition strategy? --Epipelagic (talk) 02:51, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think stats.grok.se uses the toolserver, and the transition strategy is Tool Labs. Anomie ⚔ 14:02, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

We've known on this page for a long time that Toolserver was having problems, see for example this thread that I kicked off. The WMF are not under any obligation to offer a transition strategy, because Toolserver wasn't theirs. It belongs to WMDE who kept asking for money to keep it going - but they didn't get enough. But we have had plenty of notice - since about January 2012 IIRC (Jarry1250 may know precisely) - that Toolserver wasn't going to last forever, so, in a manner of speaking, it's our fault for (a) not donating to WMDE and (b) not migrating the tools to Labs - or at least, somewhere other than Toolserver. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:25, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Displaying a part of the table

I recently removed an outdated portion of a sporting standings table, by the updated but full table. Given that there are 20 teams in a league, the table is displayed in either of two ways -

Display a portion of the table (Say only top 5 teams) in the relevant article, which looks better, but requires being updated at 20 locations
Display the entire list in every article, making it unecessarily long, but requiring update at a single location.

Considering these two alternatives, I wonder if there is any way to re-organise this current format sere is a way to transclude the full list to display only the relevant portions of a table, using some set parameters? (For example, if the parameters are 1 and 5, then only the top 5 clubs are shown)? I think a hack like that could be useful for usage in many more sporting articles.

In short, all I want is a possible way to display {{2013–14 Premier League table}} so that only a portion of the table is shown, based on how you call the template. Is it possible?

TheOriginalSoni (talk) 23:42, 1 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks to TheOriginalSoni for inviting me to this discussion. I agree that the best solution would be a centrally updated template with the ability to only show certain sections of the table when the focus of the article is a specific team; after all, there is no point showing the teams at the bottom when the focus is on the top. I would love to know if this is possible, although I'm sure it would take such intricate coding that it may not be worth making such a template when it would need updating every few days (and therefore more chance of breaking the template). – Pee Jay 02:39, 2 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I made a test at {{2013–14 Premier League table/sandbox}} with code choosing which rows to display based on the already passed team parameter, so the season articles don't have to be updated when the team positions change. I had problems controlling pipes and newlines so the source isn't pretty. Here is how it looks with the parameter team=ALL:

Template:2013–14 Premier League table/sandbox

With team=ARS:

Template:2013–14 Premier League table/sandbox

With team=MNU:

Template:2013–14 Premier League table/sandbox

With team=CPA:

Template:2013–14 Premier League table/sandbox

You control which rows to display for each team by adding its 3-letter code to a switch statement for each of those rows. When team positions change, those codes have to be manually swapped around in the template. You can choose to display more than 3 rows by adding the team code to more rows. PrimeHunter (talk) 04:41, 2 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

PrimeHunter, The formatting of this truncated table is exactly how I expected it to be.

I also created a subpage at {{2013–14 Premier League table/sandbox/1}} with the text "Template:2013–14 Premier League table/sandbox/1" which I intended to replace at the code's switch expressions. You can see I've replaced one instance of ARS in the code to see that it works.

This way the places do not have to be replace everywhere on the table, making it less likely to break the code, albeit more clumsy. Also, whenever teams change positions, the respective subpages would have to be altered to have the correct rankings.

While this code works, I was kindof hoping for a less hacky of a way. Is there any way to do that?

TheOriginalSoni (talk) 06:09, 2 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

As one (of very few) editing this template so far, I must say I really like this idea of having this table. A reason for having it is to have something that is continuosly updated, which do not happen on all club articles. To make it only show parts would be fantastic, then it would be better for each of the articles. If/when this is done some visual things maybe can be done (yellow color of team unneccesary?) to make it look even better.

My only concern is that it can not be to complicated to update, since that makes a bigger risk for errors. Today a lot of IP edit league table and if we should use it even on the main PL article with team=ALL then there could possibly be a lot of correcting to do. The more articles it is used in, the more editors will try and edit it. But in total I am very positive and I have tried editing in the sandbox above (just show preview, never saved it) and to me it is not that hard updating it, but I could imagine other editors "forgetting" to update the parameters of which rows to be shown. QED237 (talk) 12:03, 2 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

User:PrimeHunter, I love you. This is exactly what I was expecting. Now to sort out some minor user-friendliness issues and it'll be perfect! – Pee Jay 12:08, 2 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. 20 subtemplates like {{2013–14 Premier League table/sandbox/1}} for team positions would be impractical. I have changed {{2013–14 Premier League table/sandbox}} to get all 20 teams from {{2013–14 Premier League table/p}} by supplying a parameter for the position. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:04, 2 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Looks good to go. Great work, PrimeHunter.

Could we use another less obstrusive colour, like #F5D44E to highlight? TheOriginalSoni (talk) 13:27, 2 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Might I suggest writing this in Lua? By moving it to Lua you could just input the wins, draws, losses, goals for, and goals against for each team, and then the template could automatically calculate the matches played, the goal difference, and the points. It could also automatically update each team's position in the table, and you could also pass a parameter to limit the number of entries. All the complicated bits could be put in the module, and the template invocation would look something like this:

{{#invoke:league table|premier
|limit = 5
|team1 = [[Arsenal F.C.|Arsenal]]
|team1_wins = 10
|team1_draws = 1
|team1_losses = 2
|team1_for = 27
|team1_against = 10
|team2 = [[Chelsea F.C.|Chelsea]]
|team2_wins = 8
|team2_draws = 3
|team2_losses = 2
|team2_for = 24
|team2_against = 11
...
}}

If there's any interest in this, I can try and code something up tomorrow. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 14:08, 2 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Mr Stradivarius, that sounds great. I'd like to see how that would look. – Pee Jay 14:40, 2 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I don't edit league tables but it sounds great. You may need more parameters for a general module. Some leagues can give punishments where points are deducted from a team (they can even have a negative number of points). Automatic computation of positions would give complications with some tie rules like La Liga#Competition format. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:53, 2 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Okay so now there has been no edits for a while, what is the next step? Is there something more to be done? Should I we go to WT:FOOTY to find consensus for instering it on the team articles? QED237 (talk) 00:02, 6 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Mr. Stradivarius started on Module:League table but hasn't edited it for a week. Should we go ahead with the system in {{2013–14 Premier League table/sandbox}}? PrimeHunter (talk) 03:06, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Don't delay the deployment on my account - I am planning to make the module quite general, so that it could apply to all leagues and all sports, and getting it right may take some time. That, and I also have a few other Lua projects on the go at the moment. The Lua solution can always be deployed later, when it is ready. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 03:58, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I have pinged WikiProject Football about this discussion. If nobody objects in a couple days, I think we should be good to go. TheOriginalSoni (talk) 21:34, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This is a good idea, I've thought about how to do it myself a couple of times in the recent past. The only suggestion I'd make is that I think having five teams in the cropped league table allows a greater context for the position in the table. this is especially true for teams near the top and the bottom of the table. => Spudgfsh (Text Me!) 21:46, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

As I have said I really support this and I would also say that always showing 5 teams would be the best. If a team is first, second or third show teams 1-5, if a team is fourth show 2-6, fifth 3-7, and so on. QED237 (talk) 11:52, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Should we have the table both on the main PL article or only on the season articles? Would be nice to have same table everywhere. QED237 (talk) 11:54, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

That would be my preference. it was on 2013-14 in English football last time I looked. => Spudgfsh (Text Me!) 12:01, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I agree, that would be the best, but I doubt it will be pain free on 2013–14 Premier League and when I inserted this template "full table" on season articles I met some resistance. Some of the arguments was that this template is "ugly" and that the table currently on 2013–14 Premier League looks better. QED237 (talk) 12:06, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

To me we should also discuss the yellow color, good or change it? And also should we not show when the table was last updated even on the truncated small tables? QED237 (talk) 12:23, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I've been been berated for my choice of colours in the past (see here Talk:Doctor_Who_missing_episodes#"1.4 List of lost episodes"). The choice of colour should satisfy WP:Colour. => Spudgfsh (Text Me!) 21:27, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Personally I would display the whole table so you no not have to go off somewhere else to find the rest of the information, so hope that there is a display all even when a team name is specified. Keith D (talk) 14:02, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I understand your opinion, but the reason for starting this is that in general editors feel that it is unneccesary to display the whole table. The whole table already exists, but due to the fact that we should not show the whole table it was brought here to see if there was a simple way to show parts of the table. QED237 (talk) 14:32, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Literally just wanted to stop by and say this is brilliant. I have been waiting for something like this for years but never had the know-how or time to go about doing it myself! Support, support, support. Qed, thanks for bringing this to my attention, and please let me know again if it comes in! Andre666 (talk) 22:09, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

If you should thank someone it is User:TheOriginalSoni who started this discussion. I have never heard of Village pump before, I just pasted the info along to the talkpages of the articles. QED237 (talk) 22:22, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

/UserProfileIntro subpages

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T59748

As you can see at this "everything" search of WP ([3]) certain new users are creating their new user pages in a subpage of their user at /UserProfileIntro. I've randomly checked a few of the pages and they were all created with the following summary: (Updating user profile introduction) (Tag: Mobile edit). November 22, 2013 is the oldest user account where this has happened, and there have been scattered instances since. I did a little Google searching and found the phrase UserProfileIntro in a script that was being developed for the mobile users. I submitted a bug report (now closed/deleted) at Bugzilla and was left a stern message that said "Closing this bug - this feature works as intended. If you have problems with it, please open a more specific bug." I'm fairly certain that new users shouldn't be directed to create their user page in a subdirectory, and that whatever is causing this is not right.

Am I nuts, or is this really a problem. If it is, can someone notify the proper people about it. I failed in that area. Thanks. --| Uncle Milty | talk | 02:30, 3 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Apparently the mobile people are "reinventing" user pages just for mobile. How strange. Anomie ⚔ 03:20, 3 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yep, that looks odd. Most of the User pages are non-existent, but there is content at the User:XXXX/UserProfileIntro page that would typically appear on the User page. Is there someone reading this page who can explain how/why this behavior counts as "works as intended"? Alternatively, is there someone here who has enough pull on Bugzilla to open this as a bug and not have it closed summarily? It doesn't seem consistent with how things have typically been done around here, but maybe there is some grand plan of which we have not been made aware. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:46, 3 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Jdlrobson, do you know about this? — This, that and the other (talk) 10:54, 3 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This is a controlled experiment in beta to explore ways that we can in future encourage people to edit their user pages via smaller micro contributions. For the time being we want to see if people would fill these in and what kind of things they would say. We did not want to pollute user pages with this so we created it as a sub page. Let us know if you want to mark them in a way to make your lives easier or to make it clearer this is an experiment. Jdlrobson (talk) 21:48, 4 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see anything wrong with all that. I imagine the main problems are 1) It was not clearly advertised. This is fine if it's just a small experiment but it does mean people may be confused when they come across it. 2) No real explaination was offered before now (or if it was it doesn't seem to have been clearly linked previously). The bug report just says this feature works as intended but it can't be assumed people would understand the reason why it's creating the pages as subpages. While I understand bugzilla is intended to track bug and not engage with the community, a simple explaination like you offered above, either when closing the bug report or via a link when closing the bug report would probably have stopped this thread being started. Maybe it would have been better to approach you directly but I can understand with the bug closure combined with the fact the editor just didn't see any reason why this would make sense, that they may have felt asking the community was best. Nil Einne (talk) 20:52, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I was wondering how long it would take people to notice this :D I don't see a problem with this, we can do whatever we want with it at any time. Let them play, measure and find the best solutions. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:02, 3 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I added an example for those are wondering where this is used. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:28, 3 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Uncle Milty, it would be useful to have the closed tickets ID number. Then the ticket can simply be re-opened with some added detail instead of creating a "new" ticket that would simply get closed as a duplicate. :) Technical 13 (talk) 12:56, 3 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, I thought it was gone, but it was filtered out of my search. ID # 57748. --| Uncle Milty | talk | 13:47, 3 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I noticed bugzilla:57931 while reading this thread. Yay for bugs! Legoktm (talk) 16:38, 3 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Hidden comment constantly being removed

I have placed a hidden comment onto an article using the  tags to deter deleterious edits to the page but it seems that whenever an IP editor edits the page the comment disappears. Is this a consequence of visual editor and is there an alternative I can use so the text remains in the section of the article where it has been placed?—Ryulong (琉竜) 03:03, 3 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Considering that VE isn't available to IPs at this time and the edits aren't tagged with the VE tag, it seems unlikely that VE has anything to do with it. More likely you've run into an IP editor who is deleting your comment. Anomie ⚔ 03:24, 3 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Well shit. How do I keep it in there then?—Ryulong (琉竜) 17:52, 3 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Semi-prot the page? --Redrose64 (talk) 17:56, 3 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

PC1 protection maybe? Technical 13 (talk) 18:57, 3 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

An WP:Edit notice for the page is another possibility, but have you considered whether adding this is truly necessary and appropriate? "How do I keep it in there" sounds like an WP:OWNership issue. Have you considered whether the IP might actually be improving the page by removing a message that might seem unfriendly? WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:24, 3 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I had put it in there because editors had been expanding the antagonists' entries to be summaries of the entire TV series from the point of view of the antagonists, which is still somewhat a problem on the article as evident here.—Ryulong (琉竜) 09:39, 7 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Editnotice created. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:43, 7 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Script Error in Templates

Moved from Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive821 § Script Error in Templates

I was not sure where to post this, so I think the ANI is the best place. I noticed that Template:M1 year in topic suddenly has a script error. Judging by the templates it includes, the error seems, based on timing, to be the result of edits on Template:Navbar and Module:Navbar by Edokter (linked so she/he is aware, not because the report is about them). The Navbar pages are fully protected so I cannot edit them myself to see if they are indeed the source of the error. EvergreenFir (talk) 03:58, 4 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

One of the greatest weaknesses of Lua modules, and something that Wikidata has to deal with all the time in its project namespace, is that if you have too many lua modules on one page, they stop loading after a while and you get that message. That might be what it is, but as I don't understand templates very well, it might be something else entirely. Sven Manguard Wha? 04:43, 4 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Lua's worst problem has been the miserly 10-second timeout, which then stores "Script error" for each Lua function in the rendered page. Some have imagined the Lua clock ran like traditional CPU time, but numerous tests confirmed it can double (or triple) in slow servers (a 4-second Lua slows 2.5x as 10-second and craters). -Wikid77 00:34, 7 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

@EvergreenFir: This should be at WP:VPT. If you have scripting enabled in your browser (JavaScript, nothing to do with modules), when a "script error" occurs, you can click the red error message to see a popup box with details. You can select that text and copy it, to be pasted into a report at WP:VPT.

@Sven Manguard: Ouch, I try to follow WP:VPT and have not seen any mention of a problem with modules (apart from the total runtime of 10 seconds per page, which is plenty). Is there a discussion about that somewhere? Has Anomie commented? Johnuniq (talk) 05:46, 4 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Oh no, Lua 10-second timeout is way low, should be 20-25 seconds. Timing has confirmed slow servers can double/triple Lua clock and "safe" 4-second run slows to wannabe 12-seconds (aborted at 10-sec. limit). -Wikid77 00:34, 7 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

OK, I should have clicked the first link above (Template:M1 year in topic). I had assumed that it was the usage of that template somewhere that had a problem, but it is actually on the template page. The error text is:

Lua error: Cannot pass circular reference to PHP.

Backtrace: (none)

A little digging shows the problem occurs when "{{#invoke:Year in other calendars|main}}" is previewed in a sandbox. Mr. Stradivarius may be able to throw some light on the matter, which is possibly in Module:Year in other calendars or one of the modules it calls. This section should be closed, with further discussion elsewhere. Johnuniq (talk) 06:14, 4 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

My first thought is that it looks complicated, and that it might be a server-side change. It's not a change in Module:Year in other calendars, as that hasn't been edited recently, and it was working as late as 27 November when I made this comment. It might be a change in one of the modules it calls, which I'll investigate now. It is quite a hefty module, though (as was Template:Year in other calendars/old before it), so Sven Manguard may be on to something with the "too many modules on the page" comment. More in a second. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 07:03, 4 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It looks like the problems are coming from Module:Japanese calendar, but neither that or the modules it calls have been edited recently, so I think it must have been a change server-side that has broken things. I'm not sure yet about any possible fix. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 07:29, 4 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Also, the module calls that are causing the script errors from #invoke work fine when used from the debug console. It appears to be only module invocations using #invoke that are affected. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 07:37, 4 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This appears to be due to the fix for Template:Bug, which was deployed yesterday. Module:Year in other calendars is returning various objects in its 'p' table. Removing those should fix the problem. If access to those objects is necessary for some other module, the p table could contain an accessor function which would return them. BJorsch (WMF) (talk) 14:15, 4 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yep, that's the one, and I've fixed it now. Thanks! It was confusing because I had done the same thing in both Module:Year in other calendars and Module:Japanese calendar. I got rid of the extra objects in 'p' for the former, and used an accessor function for the latter. By the way, where can I subscribe so that I know that things like this are coming? :) — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 14:47, 4 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

That's a very good question. Unfortunately, there isn't any non-developer-oriented place for change notifications. I suppose the closest thing is [4] and [5] (if only there were a way to filter out the "Localisation updates" entries) if you want to watch changes that have been merged, and [6] will show you changes that are currently proposed, and [7] shows open bug reports and feature requests. BJorsch (WMF) (talk) 18:33, 4 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Raise Lua 10-second timeout: Meanwhile, keep pressing to raise the pitiful Lua timeout limit to 25 seconds. Many Lua timing tests have confirmed how slow servers can double/triple the Lua clock and a "safe" 4-second run slows to wannabe 12-seconds (aborted at 10-sec. limit). Should be 25-second limit, because unlike "wp:Wikimedia Foundation error" (WFE), Lua timeout stores "Script error" in the rendered page (forever) with no 70-second grace period to extend the formatting and save good results 7 minutes later. Again the Lua timeout is not a mere smaller version of the 60+10-second parser limit, and instead a Lua timeout scars the rendered page with "Script error" for every aborted Lua #invoke run after the 10-second cutoff. The Lua 10-second timeout is like narrowing a 7-foot (2-metre) road shoulder as 7x smaller along a mountain-side road at the cliff's edge (all because the Lua tires are better, except on gravel!). -Wikid77 00:34, 7 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, this particular script error didn't have anything to do with the 10-second time limit. It was because I was returning non-function values to PHP from the Lua modules in question, and Scribunto had changed from allowing this behaviour to prohibiting it. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 04:04, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Wikicode or Extension for collecting comments/answers and users voting and ranking the most helpful?

I am developing a course in Wikiversity and I would like two tools to take advantage of peer learning, as in MOOCs. I wonder if there are already ways to implement these in wikis or whether we would need to develop new extensions.

I want to present a question prompt with a textarea input box for the user to input an answer. Then after submitting, the user would see the prompt, the course-recommended answer, and a page of all submitted answers (which have been stored with automatically added user's signature --~~~~).
I want for users to be able to click vote up or down comments/answers, so that a page will display postings in order by rank of up/down votes.

Is there a way to approach either of these functionalities with currently existing wiki tools or extension? I know we have some sort of polling tool for administration. Is it adaptable to these needs? If there isn't an existing way, is there a group I should contact that would be the logical place to propose developing these tools?

Note: In part this is a rethinking of an earlier question I posted in the Help desk here --Kenmayer (talk) 14:33, 4 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

There might be existing extensions for upvotes/downvotes/likes/+1, but I don't know whether the devs/ops would be willing to install it on Wikiversity. Try searching on MediaWiki.org. It would be possible to write a quick JS hack to do something like this (assuming the user has JavaScript enabled), but it would log the username of every voter. Not sure if you want that or not. You might also be able to write a complex template or Lua module to do something like this, but I don't think it would be very good for the students. πr² (t • c) 04:48, 6 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Careful editors could vote in a preformatted, sortable wikitable: I have noted how wp:edit-conflicts during a 20-user edit session can be prevented by separating each user response by a separator line, such as table-row token "|-" between each response stored in the page. Ideally, each of 20-30 students would have voter-id codes (V1-V30) pre-stored as "line id codes" in the empty voting table, and then each student would respond by updating the row which has their voter-id code, putting remarks in the empty row, but as a sortable table. Example:

  {| class="wikitable sortable" <--also set columns for sorting
  ! Id || Issue || Vote || Time || Remarks
  |-
  | V1 || issue #1 || vote || ~~ ~ ~~ || (remarks)
  |-
  | V1 || issue #2 || vote || ~~ ~ ~~ || (remarks)
  |-
  | V2 || issue #1 || vote || ~~ ~ ~~ || (remarks)
  |-
  | V2 || issue #2 || vote || ~~ ~ ~~ || (remarks)
  |-
  | V3 || issue #1 || vote || ~~ ~ ~~ || (remarks)
  |-
  | V3 || issue #2 || vote || ~~ ~ ~~ || (remarks)
  |}

Explain to each student to update the rows for their voter-id under the "vote" column to "yes" or "no" (or whatever choices), and connect the 5 tildes ("Template:J") together, as the timestamp next to their vote. If the voting all occurred during the same month, then the time-of-day could be sorted by timestamp column, hours/days "0:01, 1-31 December" etc.

Also each voter could change their prior votes, if they felt misled or mistaken during an earlier response. Of course there is always the chance for glitches during editing of the wikitable format, but if various students were asked to "moderate" and check the table format, from time-to-time, then the wikitable of votes would be keep functional, and best of all: almost no edit-conflicts with 20-30 users all updating the same page within a period of minutes or hours. Also, any hostile comments could be redacted in such a system, although the "peer pressure" of all students meanwhile editing the same table would tend to "tone down" excessive remarks during voting. To reduce name-related problems, students could be asked to avoid discussing voter-ids, as semi-anonymous editing (although ids could be deduced), and privately discuss when someone else is editing under their voter-id. Due to the "magic" of the "|-" separator lines between rows, then all 20-30 students could edit the table at the same time, or announce "I'm saving edit now" to allow other students to wait 30 seconds before the next attempted Save-page operation. Even with the current primitive level of edit-conflict merging, such a voter-wikitable could be used to collect votes, allow re-votes, and sort the issues/votes into date-time order. Once sorted, then the total votes, for each related issue, would be easy to count. -Wikid77 (talk) 23:26, 6 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

How soon do you need this? I believe that something like this will eventually be possible via WP:Flow , but I doubt that these sorts of advanced workflows would be before the end of next year (or the year after that, even). WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:15, 7 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

So will Flow have upvotes? Will it keep track of each user's karma? I don't see why that would be needed. This is an encyclopedia, not a social network. Oh, wait, are you talking about creating a custom workflow that would be equivalent to likes/dislikes? Are there any examples of how this would work? πr² (t • c) 04:34, 7 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I'm thinking about some sort of custom workflow. Flow is basically a bunch of building blocks. They're supposed to add a "building block" that makes a plain vote possible (straight-up voting is far more popular at other projects, but even the English Wikipedia uses votes for a small number of things, like RFAs). So it seems to me that a custom workflow along these lines might be possible (but not any time soon, and someone would have to figure out how to set it up). WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:18, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Template links as parser function

Just a random idea, but would it be worthwhile to replace the {{tl}} template with a more "built-in" method of linking to templates? (i.e. a parser function or something? {{tl:ambox}} instead of {{ambox}}?) Would it even be worth it? ViperSnake151 Talk 17:17, 4 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I cannot phantom any reason why that would make a significant impact. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:58, 4 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The built-in method is a normal wikilink with namespace: Template:Tl. I see no reason for anything else. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:02, 4 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, the {{tl}} templates are just wikilinks with some nifty css styling (templates are still linked like normal wikipages). Theopolisme (talk) 03:14, 5 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

No, there's no way it's worth it. Right now, we have over a dozen tl* templates that do all sorts of linking, formatting, with or without parameters, and there are probably more that will be built in the future. It would be insane if we had to have a mediawiki update in order to add new tl* functions. This isn't even anything that would be worth it to try to do with lua - they're basically about as simple as templates get. Van Isaac_{WS Vex}^contribs 03:31, 5 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Template:tl runs 800x/sec, #ifeq at 750x, Lua 500x: Comparing the runtime of {{tl}}, as 800x per second, to the #ifeq parser-function at 750x/second, then the operations seem about equal, where {tl} must format the template-name wikilink and that involves a check for existing page to set link color blue/red, etc. Also, {tl} has remained static, as a rapid template, not burdened with 15 layers of /core subtemplates dragging /core2 subtemplates. A tiny template, inserting one word, runs at 2,400x/second. Formerly, the Lua Scribunto interface ran tiny Lua scripts at only 300x per second, but we complained and the developers quickened Scribunto in April 2013 to 500x-600x Lua per second. Some people have imagined that complex Lua script never gets slow, but runtime tests have confirmed how checking 100 parameter names and error-check formatting those Lua parameters does, as could be expected, slow the operation of Lua, where simple checks of just a dozen parameters might run 3x faster. Hence, the current template {tl}, as 800x per second, is running perhaps 2x faster than Lua could offer. -Wikid77 19:30, 6 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Enhanced recent changes

I'm getting really annoyed. Enhanced recent changes isn't allowing me to expand grouped up edits (it was allowing it intermittently before, especially if I WP:BYPASSed my cache) except in really, really, rare occasions. I'm wondering if it has anything to do with removing jQuery from loading on all pages by default? Any one else experiencing this (I've tested on multiple machines with various OSes and browsers and two out of three of my accounts with the same results). Any suggestions on what may be causing it? Technical 13 (talk) 22:48, 5 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I personally don't have enough time to investigate this, but I'm sure you could give more details. :) Please add ?debug=true or &debug=true to the query string and check the JS error console. P.S. AFAIK, jQuery is still loaded by default, but jQuery UI is not anymore. πr² (t • c) 04:42, 6 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Adding ?debug=true makes enhanced recent changes work, so there is nothing appearing in the error console when I do that. The error console without ?debug=true looks like:

Error console report

Same error console log with ?debug=true

I hope all of this helps you figure it out PiRSquared17. Technical 13 (talk) 02:25, 7 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

O_O. That's a lot more than I expected. Order of magnitudes more. I can't duplicated this (works for me), so could you provide your browser and skin? I'm wondering if you get a JS error when you actually click the expand links. πr² (t • c) 03:39, 7 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

PiRSquared17, I've done some more testing to see if I can narrow it down and isolate it, and when I click the expand arrows/links and they don't expand I get nothing int the error console (I load the page and clear the log and nothing new appears). With ?debug=true set and the sections expand, I get the following JavaScript warning, but that is it: [11:54:13.836] ReferenceError: reference to undefined property queue[0] @ [8] It's a real nuisance having to add ?debug=true each time to make it work. I'll do some more digging because if no-one else is having an issue, it must be in one of the userscripts I am using or made. Technical 13 (talk) 17:03, 7 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Table sorting problems

Using IE11/Win7. I see various glitches with table sorting at List of elements. For example:

1. Load page. Click repeatedly on the sort button for the "Abundance" column (far right). Some clicks appear to do nothing, others appear to sort the table by atomic number (ascending or descending) instead.

2. Load page. Click each of the sort buttons in turn, from left to right, ("Z", "Sym", "Element". etc.). When I get to "Atomic weight" the sort ceases to function (on that or any other column).

Is this a browser bug or something in Wikipedia? 86.171.42.57 (talk) 18:20, 6 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Hey, thanks for finding this. I think I fixed it with this edit. There are 13 columns, but there were only 12 sort keys (don't know if that's what they're called). There was also a random test edit that I reverted, which didn't seem related. So, your browser and Wikipedia are fine, just a mistake in the table. Chris857 (talk) 20:17, 6 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Chris, all seems to be working properly now, thanks very much for sorting it out. 86.171.42.57 (talk) 01:30, 7 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

adding of categories facilitated on article creation

Is it possible for persons creating articles to be presented with a dropdown box of the categories at the time of submission. On choosing the desired category, the person can save the article. Thus work involved in looking for articles that are not categorized is eliminated?

Thank you

Anupama Srinivas (talk) 18:21, 6 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I oppose. Special:UncategorizedPages is made automatically so it isn't much work to find them. There are tens or hundreds of thousands of categories for articles so a dropdown box of "the categories" is not practical. And most articles should be in several categories. If we force new users to select one category then they would often make a poor choice and it's harder to find the problem articles to add better categories. It would also require a software change. The developers have better things to work on, and many new users would be frustrated when they are unable to save. And should it apply to moving drafts into mainspace? Drafts should not have categories intended for articles. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:41, 6 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Template trouble

The answer to this is probably really obvious but apparently my brain isn't working properly. Why is the template on Dead to Fall (and related) pointing to User:Jax 0677/Template:Dead to Fall rather than Template:Dead to Fall as it should, and how can I fix it? Thanks--Jac16888 ^Talk 19:16, 6 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Look inside {{Dead to Fall}}, the name parameter is set to User:Jax 0677/Template:Dead to Fall. Van Isaac_{WS Vex}^contribs 19:35, 6 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Bingo, thanks--Jac16888 ^Talk 19:45, 6 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

What links here doesn't link

According to this list, a lot of articles link to BB&T Ballpark. I had to link to similar article earlier this week and discovered the need to make that a disambiguation page, but after moving the article that was there, I found a bunch of articles where even if I clicked on edit and tried CTRL-F, I couldn't find the words "BB&T Ballpark". I know I fixed a template, but a bot has tagged the article now. I reverted the tag and reported the situation to the bot's talk page, because I'm just not finding the links.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 19:53, 6 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

If you update a link in a template, as here, the links at Special:WhatLinksHere/BB&T Ballpark aren't updated immediately; you normally need to wait for the job queue to process them. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:00, 6 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I figured I had given it time.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 20:34, 6 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The job queue has been ropey since they reconfigured it about six months ago. It's two days since your edit - but it can take more than two weeks in some cases. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:16, 6 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Ive noticed the same thing a few times. Surely that isn't normally what it should be like.Blethering Scot 21:29, 6 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Pages seem to change in groups of 500 but some get stuck: (new essay: wp:Reformat) Even weeks after a change to a template has "completed" the relinking process, there might be several pages still stuck with old links, and could be cleared with null-edits. For years, it's as though a database read/write lock among several pages had caused a "relink conflict" and the pages could not be relinked when whichever wp:job_queue processed the reformatting job (wp:JQ says Wikipedia runs 3 queues at once). Also, according to wp:JQ, when more than 1,000 pages have the "invalidated cache" to trigger reformat, they are grouped as 500-pages-per-job, and checking WhatLinksHere tends to show progress as sporadic groups by hundreds of pages, either linked or delinked, in "fits and starts" where even the whole process can get delayed during the multi-day ordeal. Yet, always be prepared to null-edit the leftover stragglers when all jobs have finished relinking within the 3(?) job_queues. It would be great if a database write-lock timeout would re-queue each stuck page, to be reformatted as another job, re-added to a queue, but perhaps that requeue decision could not be handled down at the level of relinking each template used inside a page. With the Lua megatemplates, there are even more cases where changing a Lua megamodule would trigger formatting a "million" pages which formerly were reformatted as smaller groups of separate (near-redundant) fork templates, such as the 24 wp:CS1 cite-template forks now forced to all reformat 2.2 million pages for any Lua edit to the giant Module:Citation/CS1, or the new Module:Convert which would combine all the various 20,000-page, separate Convert subtemplates to always trigger reformatting all 554,000 pages for any Lua edit made to Module:Convert. I worry Lua has become used in a "pennywise and pound-foolish" architecture, running 6x-13x times faster than markup, but triggering 100x-1000x times as many page reformats as the prior smaller template forks, with /core subtemplates. Many Lua modules should use forced multi-fork, split designs (as multiple Lua modules) to trigger less system-wide reformatting of all pages. -Wikid77 15:06, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

However it happened, it's fixed now.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 19:55, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

VisualEditor template data filled by Google Code-in students?

(Edited my posts after a friendly chat with Equazcion--no info lost)

Wikimedia is participating in Google Code-in, where 13-17 years old students have completed already more than hundred technical tasks, including coding, documentation, QA, UX, and promotion. Students are completing tasks almost faster than we can create them. We need more!

If you, like me, have added VisualEditor template data to templates, you will probably agree that it becomes a boring task after the first time. Then again it is a very useful work. For GCI students, a task like this will be instructive. For en.wiki, this is a chance to get work done and new contributors with a potential to stick around. Note that this work would benefit not only en.wiki, but also all Wikimedia projects watching and using copies/adaptations of these templates. What do you think? It would be great if someone would step in, become a Google Code-in mentor, and coordinate this little project until January 6, when GCI ends. If you want to try before committing, just point me to 5 templates welcoming VisualEditor template data. I will create a task, and share here the news when the updated templates are ready for review. Then you can decide what comes next. Deal? PS: the last GCI task completed is a rewrite of Template:Interval in Lua.--Qgil (talk) 06:20, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

A tangential exchange was moved to User talk:Equazcion#VP Visual Editor exchange. equazcion → 07:24, 8 Dec 2013 (UTC)

There are quite a few templates listed at Wikipedia:VisualEditor/TemplateData#Commonly_used_templates. Perhaps some of the infoboxes? Theopolisme (talk) 17:51, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

That list might benefit from being re-run. {{nts}} wasn't on it, and I get a transclusion count of over 16,000 for that template. Also, many of the non-English Wikipedias are much, much further behind with TemplateData work. Some templates are exactly identical, without even translating the parameter names, so it might be efficient to create TemplateData for everything all at once. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:24, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for the feedback and the advice. I have created five tasks and one of them has been already claimed. Let's see how it goes. Let's continue this discussion at Wikipedia_talk:VisualEditor/TemplateData. PS: Theopolisme happens to be one of these very smart and productive GCI students. Hi! --Qgil (talk) 00:34, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Global Wiki search?

Is there a way to run a global search across all (or multiple wikis) looking for different language versions of the same article or results from the same search term? Thanks.-Godot13 (talk) 19:44, 7 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

@Godot13: - Have you tried a Google search - for example, search for "godot site:wikipedia.org" GoingBatty (talk) 20:00, 7 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I haven't tried but I will. Thanks-Godot13 (talk) 02:20, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Also include language codes in search: Mozart site:wikipedia.org es OR de OR fr OR el, because Google Search gives English-language webpages top rank, and adding the codes "fr" (French) or "de" (German deutsch) or "es" (Spanish español ) will cause those other-language webpages to list sooner among English pages. For "el" (Greek Elleniki ), the rank might be so low as to require a separate search with Greek site:el.wikipedia.org, but a topic like "Mozart" will appear in several pages for each language. -Wikid77 21:00, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

So, this might actually be possible in the not-too-distant-future. Right now, our current search setup is such that wikis don't really know other wikis exist (other than Commons). With the new search engine we're working on, all of the wikis search data will be in the same cluster and cross-wiki queries might well be possible. I'm already looking at using them for Commons search as well as some rudimentary interwiki search.

While a "search all the wikis" would be very cool it also has the ability to be resource-intensive, so we'll have to tread carefully. It's definitely something I've thought about very recently though :) ^demon^{[omg plz]} 01:43, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I imagine the potential drain on the system for such searching could be huge. It would be interesting to see how efforts toward such a search function progress. Thanks.-Godot13 (talk) 02:20, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

There is a tool called Global Wikipedia Article Search at http://vs.aka-online.de/globalwpsearch/ --Snaevar (talk) 03:08, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Characters overlapping on my watchlist

This just started happening tonight. Anyone know why this overlap is happening? Dismas|^(talk) 04:04, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know, but I've seen this off-and-on for months? now. (I have Chrome, XP, if it matters). Chris857 (talk) 04:41, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It's a Chrome bug that is sometimes triggered by left-to-right markers. — Edokter (talk) — 09:43, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It doesn't seem to have anything to do with the left-to-right markers, it's that Chrome has issues with <span dir="auto"> and multiple whitespace characters. I've just checked this in Chromium 31.0.1650.57 and reduced it to a test case of just

(<span dir="auto">foo    bar</span>)

(foo bar)

and still saw the issue. See also Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 100#Anomalous Edit Summary and Template:Bug. Anomie ⚔ 13:12, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I filed a ticket in webkit for this not so long ago. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:25, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I wasn't aware of the other bug report. That one seems fixed in webkit/blink now, so quite possibly were are dealing with a related but subtly different problem with this case. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:43, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

"The other bug report" being webkit bug 94832? After looking that over and the comments on the linked fix commit, it seems to me it's only related in that they both involve dir="auto". Anomie ⚔ 14:18, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'm seeing this in Safari, not Chrome. Dismas|^(talk) 02:48, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

That doesn't surprise me: both are WebKit browsers. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:06, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Disappearing revert type edits and possible mis-identification as "can be undone"

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T31762

I've encountered cases when reverting an edit which the screen says "can be undone" and where it apparently accepts the revert but the edit never shows up. From the particulars, I'm guessing that it mistakenly identified an edit as "can be undone" when in fact it can't, (which I guess is a second problem) and then it acts as if it took the edit but doesn't. I've this happen 3-4 times in the last few weeks. An example is to try to revert the 3:07 4 December edit at Punk rock. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 14:16, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

(BTW I don't still wish to make that revert)North8000 (talk) 14:22, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The mentioned edit [9] has already been reverted in [10]. If you undo the edit again and save then you make a null edit which isn't logged. Do you have en example where undo should make a change but doesn't? PrimeHunter (talk) 14:40, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict) When I bring up the "undo" diff for that edit, it shows no actual changes in the diff, making it in effect a null edit which doesn't show up in the history. The undo logic should probably detect this situation and display a more appropriate message. Anomie ⚔ 14:44, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

@Primehunter, I don't remember where the other ones are. They might have been the same situation (reverting an already reverted item). Maybe the best thing would be to allow null edits and have them show up. This might help another situation which comes up. When I make a significant error in an edit summary, at first I tried null edits to enter a second correction to the edit summary. Then I noticed that they don't "take". Now someone has to make a small change in the article in order to enter an edit summary correction. North8000 (talk) 20:48, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Block quote formatting

Take a look at the bottom half of this. Note that the attribution line spacing is very wide, I think maybe even more than the actual quote. Where do I report this for fixing? Maury Markowitz (talk) 17:11, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

You should be more specific - I do not see anything special on that page. Ruslik_Zero 18:38, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

"We don't have fighter aircraft, we have fear-enducing aircraft"

French President Charles de Gaulle, speaking of the Mirage IV in 1963.^[1]

"We don't have fighter aircraft, we have fear-enducing aircraft"

French President Charles de Gaulle, speaking of the Mirage IV in 1963.^[2](<small>...</small> removed here)

^ Sokolski 2004, p. 95.
^ Sokolski 2004, p. 95.

I guess it refers to the {{Quote box}} to the right. The line spacing is also large for me. It looks a little better when <small>...</small> is removed from the source parameter, but the line spacing is still larger than in the quote. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:10, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Common problem. When you reduce the font-size in a multi-line container, line-height is not automatically adjusted with it, but in some cases remains inherited from its parent. If you reduce the font size, you have to reset the line height to 1.5em as well. BUT... I note the font-size is too small anyway. — Edokter (talk) — 19:29, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict) The line heights are all set to "1.5em", but that depends on the font size in effect on the element where the 1.5em is calculated. The quote box has an inline style to reduce the font size to 88%, but the line-height is inherited from the page text (in my browser, it inherits 19.05px where 1.5em would now be 16.7833px). Due to the layout of the wikitext produced by the template, the quote itself gets wrapped in a <p> which has a stylesheet rule resetting the line-height (so that does get the 16.7833px), while the source text doesn't get the <p> and therefore is still inheriting the larger line-height. The <small> just makes it worse, because the line-height is still being inherited. I wonder why the line-heights are done as ems instead of plain numbers which have more sensible inheritance behavior. Anomie ⚔ 19:47, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

@Anomie: That's Template:Bug. tl;dr Because someone made a bad decision in 2005 and it's too much boring work and annoyance to change this now (as plain search&replace introduces minor interface changes). (There were three patches for this submitted over the years, none made it.) Matma Rex talk 20:01, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It sounds like the problem with the most likely of those patches was basically "What if this changes how things look? Please prove to me that it won't." "I don't care enough to do that much work." Too bad. Anomie ⚔ 21:01, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

@Anomie: I never looked at that one, but I did look at gerrit:55126 which was almost exactly the same and it did change layout in unpleasant ways. Compare the "before" and "after" screenshots I added there: before after. Matma Rex talk 21:09, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

What, more space around the headings? That seems easy enough for someone to fix. Anomie ⚔ 21:33, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

@Anomie: Well, you're free to try :) Personally I have better things to do than to figure out the multipliers, and then manage the community here disgruntled because we moved a link by five pixels. Matma Rex talk 22:40, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I was looking at that and just can't remember why we used ems when we updated quote box. This should be discussed at the template talk. -- Gadget850^talk 20:00, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

A site-wide fix would be easy: [p,] div, span { line-height: 1.5em; } — Edokter (talk) — 20:47, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

A better fix would be along the lines of gerrit:27043. Anomie ⚔ 21:01, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

That's quite extensive. Simply adding <div> and <span> to the <p> already in commonElements.css is more effective. All the other lineheights apply to specific elements anyway, with minimal risk of embedding. — Edokter (talk) — 21:28, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

In retrospect, my solution also has unwanted side effects. — Edokter (talk) — 21:34, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Edokter, what does the selector [p,] div, span pick up? I know what div, span matches: any <div>...</div> element and any <span>...</span> element. I also know that e.g. div[att] matches the <div att=value>...</div> element. But what does the initial [p,] do in your example? --Redrose64 (talk) 21:43, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Nothing really; it is already defined in commonElements.css with line-height: 1.5em;. That's why I put it in [brackets]. — Edokter (talk) — 22:29, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Still puzzled, so I want to see where this [p,] is being used, but I've drawn a blank: for a start, what is commonElements.css? MediaWiki:commonElements.css is a redlink. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:23, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It's in MediaWiki core, specifically this folder. — This, that and the other (talk) 06:32, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Another RFPP Twinkle issue

I requested "raise protection" on one move-protected page, but it went to "lower protection section instead. Same for other such requests. --George Ho (talk) 01:32, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The best place to post problems with Twinkle is at WT:TW. I'll take a look at this issue; it occurs because Twinkle is getting confused by the move protection already applied to the page. — This, that and the other (talk) 06:28, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Also please note that some (all?) of the section headings at WP:RFPP were recently altered, which broke the incoming links except when somebody came along and did this. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:32, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

advanced search needed

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T23988

I am not the first one who ask for a really advanced search. e.g. here, here, and here. There should be an advanced search similar to Google or Ebay advanced search. i.e A friendlier usage of the existing search parameters. is it possible? Ykantor (talk) 07:56, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

At present, we're using Lucene, via MWSearch. I believe that CirrusSearch is being tested as a possible replacement. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:45, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Confirming what Redrose64 wrote. If "advanced" search is wanted, it would be good to start by defining the problem that should get solved. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 11:19, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Exactly, "advanced search" says nothing, unless you define what options you consider to be advanced. There are some details about the current query capabilities of Cirrus search. If we can start by making a list of things that are not possible but desired and which of those options you would want to be exposed trough an advanced search page, then that would be very helpful. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:00, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I guess it is better to have some improvement, rather than asking for the ultimate search, that requires a lot of work and thus risking getting nothing.

As said, let us start with the existing features (e.g intitle, prefix) but arrange it in a friendlier advanced search, similar to Ebay or Google one. e.g. the user may fill the intitle in a dedicated input box, even if he does not know what is the parameter inline name. Ykantor (talk) 14:17, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

As noted below, now there is Help:Advanced_search, but we have found that advanced features with non-advanced users is a rare mix, so it is better to focus on "power users" as more likely to use advanced features. In fact, in Template:Convert, which tracked each option used for 6 years, the many advanced options were used in less than 2% of pages, while 98% used basic options, despite extensive documentation plus top notes about advanced options. -Wikid77 18:21, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Help:Searching and Help:Advanced_search: Currently, the page Help:Searching is written as a full introduction, and so a new page, Help:Advanced_search could be written for experienced users who want a direct, condensed list of the advanced-search features and syntax format, beyond the general wp:wikisearch. For example, a lead tilde, "~phrase" will ensure a full search, rather than showing one page named "phrase" (which has been very frustrating, because for years, WP has alternated between always show a full search or show one page as titled). I will try to write that advanced description (in my spare microseconds this month!). -Wikid77 (talk) 17:24, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for this important tip (the ~) and for writing advanced description. Still, a friendly advanced (e.g. Ebay advanced search) should help a lot to utilize the already existing features). Ykantor (talk) 19:17, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Definitely not something we're looking at for the first iteration of CirrusSearch (right now we're focusing on feature parity with lsearchd, but more stable & modern), but something we've talked about in the medium term. Being able to facet search results like this would be fantastic :) ^demon^{[omg plz]} 04:07, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Say that 1% of Wikipedia editors are using the search advanced features, but with a friendlier interface, 3% will use advanced search. Friendliness is more important than power. Ykantor (talk) 20:36, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

View count stats

RESOLVED: Stats.grok.se fixed. -Wikid77 12:18, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I've just noticed that the viewcounting tool appears to have stopped working. For example, Cyclone Bodil hasn't counted the views on the page for the past three days. Is there a problem? The C of E God Save the Queen! (talk) 08:29, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It's an external tool. Problems can be reported to the operator at User talk:Henrik, but he rarely answers. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:09, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Data was logged but not shown in reports: During past delays in pageview stats, the problem has been fixed within 3-5 days. There are alternative reports (also missing recent days):

http://stats-classic.grok.se/en/201312/Nelson_Mandela (monthly barchart)

http://stats.grok.se/json/en/201312/Nelson_Mandela (list as date/number)

However, people have noted the pageview-data has been logged for the missing days, so once the reports are unstuck, then all days should appear as expected. -Wikid77 (talk) 16:33, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

No PNG views

I noticed for a while now that when you click on an SVG file, there is no longer a PNG viewer. I don't know if that is considered a bug, an error, or a issue there having with that. Blurred Lines 15:30, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Please give an example and clarify what you mean by a PNG viewer. File:Example.svg is hosted at Commons but displays https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/84/Example.svg/600px-Example.svg.png. If you click the Commons link to commons:File:Example.svg then I see "This image rendered as PNG in other widths: 200px, 500px, 1000px, 2000px." Is that what you mean? It's made by commons:MediaWiki:Common.js and isn't in Wikipedia. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:19, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, that's what I meant. Somehow it's not showing up when I click on an SVG file. Blurred Lines 16:41, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Do you mean it's not showing up at commons:File:Example.svg? Do you have JavaScript enabled in your browser? If you have then you should see a [show]/[hide] link at #toc on this page. If you mean another page then please give a link to a specific example. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:07, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, my JavaScript is on, and I am not talking about on Commons, I'm talking about it not showing up on Wikipedia. Like on this file, and others that have SVG format. Blurred Lines 17:11, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I mentioned it's a Commons feature. Has it ever been at Wikipedia? PrimeHunter (talk) 17:41, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The English Wikipedia's MediaWiki:Common.js says:

if ( mw.config.get( 'wgNamespaceNumber' ) === 6 ) {
    /* file description page scripts */
    importScript( 'MediaWiki:Common.js/file.js' );
}

MediaWiki:Common.js/file.js by User:TheDJ has PNG code for SVG images so maybe a problem has developed with that code. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:09, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, I have started a discussion about this on its talk page, perhaps someone with more experience on the interface can have a solution to this error. Blurred Lines 18:51, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed. I had forgotten the script even existed.. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:20, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Is this the same issue as Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 120#Option to render a SVG images as PNG disappeared? --Redrose64 (talk) 19:53, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, that must be it. User:Astronaut should now have PNG links again. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:43, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2013-49

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

~~This newsletter is now posted using MediaWiki message delivery.~~

New features

The CommonsMetadata feature was added to all wikis. It creates metadata information about multimedia files (like their license) that can be read automatically by computer programs. It not only works for Commons, but for all wikis, and you can use it for files on your wiki by editing templates used to describe metadata. [11]
JavaScript code used on Wikimedia sites is now saved locally on your computer to load faster. [12]

VisualEditor

You can now paste formatted content copied from external sources (not just as plain text) into VisualEditor; this includes copy/pasting from other VisualEditor windows. [13]
You can now open VisualEditor by adding ?veaction=edit to the page URL, regardless of your user preferences. [14]
Many bugs have been fixed, and VisualEditor should also look faster, for example when you save a page. [15]

Problems

Due to issues, the new search tool ("CirrusSearch") was recently removed from wikis where it was enabled, then added again. [16]

Future

MediaWiki 1.23wmf6 was added to test wikis on December 5. It will arrive to non-Wikipedia wikis on December 10 and all Wikipedia wikis on December 12 (calendar).
The old Etherpad tool (replaced by a new version) will be removed on December 30, 2013. You can still save old pads before that date using the old address: https://etherpad-old.wikimedia.org. [17]

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

16:10, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

Though there may be plans to deliver this newsletter by MediaWiki message delivery in the future, this one was delivered using EdwardsBot like the previous ones. [18] – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 22:30, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

@PartTimeGnome: FYI, it was delivered to some pages using MassMessage. See m:User talk:Guillom#Tech-news_wasn.27t_delivered_to_Community_pages (permalink, relevant bug) for more info on this. Tech news should be delivered by MassMessage in the future (at least if the bug is fixed and a patch is merged before next week). πr² (t • c) 20:27, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Serious problem with page

I emailed a screenshot to User:Nil Einne. This library has Windows 8 and I'm not sure what version of Internet Explorer.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 18:54, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

me stares at screen with his confused face. I'm quite sure there is a context to this story, but I think you failed to add it to this post Vchimpanzee. :D —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:25, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Vchimpanzee seems to have random problems with various pages every so often on the library computers they use. Some of these may be caused by misconfiguration on behalf of the library, but many seem to be just random problems not worth worrying about. They generally ask for help identifying the cause of each of these problems which is what they're doing here. I presume the problem they're having is with a wikipedia page hence why they're asking here rather than a on the RD. I'm not totally sure of the wisdom of necessity of identifying each of these errors, many of which as I've said seem to be random stuff which probably isn't going to reoccur but I guess that's up to them and those offering help. Nil Einne (talk) 19:37, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I haven't received anything yet. While I don't particularly mind receiving this stuff, I should say I can't necessarily always offer help and by sending it to me you're ensuring no one else can use it to help. If it doesn't have identifying or other info you don't want to reveal, may I suggest one of the many external image hosting resources instead like [[19]]? Nil Einne (talk) 19:37, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I sent it again but the one I sent is in my sent folder, although the email address was being extremely uncooperative. I've never seen anything like this on Wikipedia.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 19:50, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

You can also share an image using a service like imagebin for instance. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:54, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. Here it is.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 19:58, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, we'll just have to hope Nil Einne gets it. I really don't know what else to do.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 20:01, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I asked for help again and was told FTP is not allowed. I was told to send the image in an email, which I have done. Twice.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 20:28, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I don't really know what this discussion is about, but if we're talking about a screenshot of Wikipedia, you can upload it to Wikimedia Commons. This would be preferable to using external sites. – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 22:25, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

At this library we can't even see the screenshot.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 23:08, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'm sorry but unless Nil Einne responds I don't know what else to do. I'm not going back to the library where I was when it first happened until next Monday. I apparently can't do anything at this one. If I'm at home (I will be tomorrow) I've got no one to help me with this.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 23:11, 9 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

You've been provided ideas already here: "if we're talking about a screenshot of Wikipedia, you can upload it to Wikimedia Commons". So this really does not depend on Nil Einne's response. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 15:16, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Providing me with an idea does not get it done. You can tell me how to do it until the cows come home but if I can't do it I can't do it.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 16:14, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I found someone who could help me today, and the problem was that this computer did not have Word. We got on another computer that did, but we still couldn't do anything with the image. She said that computer didn't have the software. She suggested emailing Nil Einne again. I showed her the above directions and she didn't seem to know what to do. All I know is there is a Word document with the screenshot. That is what the woman at the other library created.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 17:21, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

What does Microsoft Word have to do with uploading a screenshot? If you have the png/tiff/jpg/gif/bitmap, you can just upload it to Commons, but maybe you need to crop out the logo, unless it is necessary to understand the problem. (Edit: never mind, just noticed that the link you provided to download the image is actually a docx. Unfortunately, I cannot open docx files.) πr² (t • c) 17:52, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I really don't know why the woman at the library where this happened chose Word. Anyway, I'm at home and have gone through the process and on my computer screen is a file called "Wd0000001.wps", using Microsoft Works Word Processor. If anyone can get me past this point, I'd appreciate it.

A hint as to the nature of the problem: It actually says "This page has some issues".— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 19:29, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Just ignore MS Word, MS Works or any other word processing software: images are not text documents. You should use a program which handles images directly; fortunately, all versions of Microsoft Windows released over the last twenty years (or more) include a simple drawing program called "Paint" (other names have been used, such as "Paintbrush"). That can be used to create a .PNG file; if you're using Windows XP, it should be in Start → Programs → Accessories. Here's a condensed version of Wikipedia:Screenshots of Wikipedia:

Make sure that the problem is visible on screen
Press Print Screen
Start Microsoft Paint
Press Ctrl+V
Save this file, making sure that you select "PNG (*.PNG)" at the "Save as type" dropdown
Upload the file. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:02, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

My power went out, so I've been trying to get everything back as it was. Also, I am trying to do other things. Okay, I'm ready to go.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 20:36, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'm stuck. I have a file called "Bennett.png". I'm on this page with the following in the summary box:{{information |Description={{en|1= }} |Source=Screenshot |Date= |Author=Wikipedia Authors, see the history of [[w: ]] |Permission={{Wikipedia-screenshot|1=en|logo=no}} }}

— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 20:44, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Down at the bottom there should be a button Upload file. Click that. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:21, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know the file name. It's "Bennett.png" but surely that's not enough.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 22:39, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The file Bennett.png does not actually exist, so you could use that name (it's not very meaningful, but we can fix that later by a file move). --Redrose64 (talk) 22:45, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'm talking about what the file is called now. I used paint and clicked on save. Now what do I do when typing the name of the file in the "source filename" field. I click on "Browse" and see my first name, "Public", "Computer", "Network", and a whole bunch of categories that came with the computer. Nothing about "Bennett".— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 22:48, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

When you saved the file in Paint, you must have put it in some folder or other. My guess is that it's under "Desktop" → "My Documents" → "My Pictures", but since I don't have access to that computer, I really can't tell for sure.

If you are in a library, surely there's some geeky teenager about that you could ask? They tend to be very technology-savvy. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:04, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'm at home. I merely saved as "Bennett.png". I didn't PUT it anywhere.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 23:07, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I give up. I'm going to start this at a FOURTH library tomorrow and maybe someone can help me. I'm looking at "Bennett.png" right now but I have no way to send it to anyone.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 23:13, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

After clicking Browse, try clicking your first name, then click "Pictures". (If you don't see a "Pictures" option, perhaps you need to click "Documents" first, then "Pictures". I don't have access to a Windows PC to check ATM.) Hopefully your Bennett.png will be listed there – click it. – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 00:37, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, I'll try that next time. I'm here at the fourth library now and the man says he can help me.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 14:48, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

We did it! The file is File:BennettProblem.png.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 14:59, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Looking at it, nothing seems obviously wrong, though it is odd that you are at the mobile site. Chris857 (talk) 15:07, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I did a Bing search for more information about a newspaper article topic, and this came up. Whatever it was, it wouldn't let me look at the article's text, and it had no place to sign in, and I didn't know what I was going to do.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 15:22, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I believe that the three-bar icon at the top left corner is where you'll find the menu with the login option, as shown in this image. I've never used it, but this seems to be how it works. mw:Mobile design/Wikipedia navigation has some more information. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:25, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

If you want to view the page in the "normal" Wikipedia instead of the mobile version, scroll to the very bottom of the page then click "Desktop". – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 00:01, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you, everyone. The advice from User:PartTimeGnome worked (except I had to double click) and I could have uploaded the photo had I stayed on the computer long enough, but I had been on a very long time and had a lot of real world stuff to do. I'll save a link when the other discussion gets archived. Someone commented it wasn't a serious problem, but if you've never seen mobile Wikipedia before and don't know what to do when you get something like that, it IS serious. Now we have advice about what to do. Why Bing sent me there is a mystery.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 20:35, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Help with Google news search

Google's news archive search recently changed to only show news results that are less than 30 days old. If any of the technical wizards here at VPT know about Google or their news search (or any other news search engine), could you please hop over to Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous)#Google news archive search? and provide your input? We are hoping to find a technical solution to this problem. Thanks very much for your help. 64.40.54.29 (talk) 03:08, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Vanishing Edits on Watchlist

Clicking on my watchlist, my most recent edit does not appear. The same happens when I click contributions. My edit (made around 22:49 EST) does not appear. Anyone know why? -- Veggies (talk) 04:33, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, now I see the "changes longer than 3,100+ seconds ago won't appear" tag. -- Veggies (talk) 04:35, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I noticed this too and came to see if anyone had posted about it. EvergreenFir (talk) 04:36, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Edit metadata

Of possible interest to you, people involved with this large wiki and technical things: Grants:IdeaLab/Edit_metadata. Please comment at the talk page or at the bottom (the talk page is transcluded). Thanks!
Gryllida (talk) 09:10, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Formatting problem with 2-column content

Viewing Template:POTD/2013-12-15 using Firefox 22.0 on Linux, I see essentially no space between the columns in the 2-column section, so one of the lines looks like "5. Madreporite11. Ambulacral". Actually there seems to be a slight amount of negative space, with the "e" and "1" slightly overlapping. Varying the font size in Firefox using control-plus/control-minus, this is still true at all sizes I tried; only the amount of the overlap changes a bit.

Is this because (1) the wikitext markup calling for two columns was done wrongly, (2) the HTML being generated from that wikitext is wrong, or (3) Firefox is rendering the HTML wrongly? And if it's 1 or 2, could someone please fix it?

I wonder if the cause is the fact that the sub-column (so to speak) with the item numbering gets wider as you go down the second column.

--174.88.132.197 (talk) 20:17, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Playing around with it (though not actually saving anything), raising the "style=width:70%" to at least 80% makes the columns better. However, getting rid of columns altogether increases overall height very minimally and eliminates all the unfortunate line breaks. Chris857 (talk) 20:34, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed size for columns is always problematic. When the POTD goes full width, the columns will be too wide. I gave the column width 12em, which is comfortable for each entry to have no linebreaks. This results in one column on the template page, but three columns on the main page (at 1280px wide screen). — Edokter (talk) — 23:09, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, Dok, that's much better. --174.88.132.197 (talk) 04:34, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Faulty redirect

When ever I click a link in Wikipedia that's intended to bring me to a specific section of another Wikipedia page, it instead brings me a few lines below that section and when I first go to that page the title of that section is just barely cut off from the top of the part of the page currently on the screen. Blackbombchu (talk) 21:11, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It's the responsibility of your browser to take you to the right place. If a page has collapsing/expanding elements then it can confuse the browser if an element changes size after the browser has chosen where to place you. Do you have such an element at top of all pages? Clicking in the browser address bar and pressing enter may cause your browser to place you again, this time accurately if there are no longer elements changing size. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:26, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

That problem happened many times the most recent of which was when I clicked prose in the notification at the top of the article Protest. I made no change to the browser then I tried clicking the exact same link in the exact same article later today and this time, the link actually brought me to the title of the section instead of a few lines below it, in the same browser even. The window never changed size nor did any ad ons get added to the browser shrinking the browser screen when the link brought me a few lines below the title of the section. Blackbombchu (talk) 23:17, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It also varies for me how accurate the browser placement is when I clicked a link on another page. As mentioned, it's your browser doing it. When you click a link like HTML anchor#Anchor, Wikipedia serves you the page HTML anchor with "#Anchor" at the end of the url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_anchor#Anchor. Your browser then looks at the page source for the id "Anchor", in this case <span class="mw-headline" id="Anchor">Anchor</span>, and automatically scrolls the page to that position. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:58, 10 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Bulk change of domain in external URLs

Greetings. Some quick searching revealed little in terms of an explicit tool to do this, but maybe this is something AWB or other semi-automated tool specializes in...

I probably have added 50-100+ external URLs to policy and discussion spaces that link back to a personal domain, where I host my academic writings and datasets relevant to Wikipedia and collaborative security. This domain has now changed, and while there is an HTTP redirect in place, administrative policies dictate that will not survive forever. The file paths are still the same on the new domain, but the domains do need to be changed. This is a touch painstaking manually. Is there a way to automate this? If so, is that solution limited to en.wp or is this something that can be done for all WMF properties (I know I have links on Wikimania wikis and Metawiki, at minimum)? Having plenty of experience coding with the Wikimedia API I know this would not be a terribly difficult thing to code up, but probably not worth the effort for my one off use. Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 01:30, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

@West.andrew.g: Sounds like WP:Bot requests is what you're looking for. I suggest you post all the details there, and hopefully some kind bot owner can help you out. Good luck! GoingBatty (talk) 02:35, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Hiding the stuff above my watchlist

I'd love a way to hide it. It takes up half my watchlist page. Suggestions? Anna Frodesiak (talk) 07:07, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Anna Frodesiak, I have the following in my .js file to remove the "Mark all pages visited" button in your screen shot:

importScript('User:Equazcion/RemoveMarkAll.js');

Bgwhite (talk) 07:48, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

After doing some experimenting, add the following code to your .css file to remove the big "watchlist options" box:

form#mw-watchlist-form

{ display: none; }

See User:Bgwhite/vector.css for other space saving options. Bgwhite (talk) 08:04, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yes!! I was looking for something just like that for a while.. Thank you! :) -- œ ^™ 08:20, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, thank you soooo much. This is wonderful. Could someone please add it for me. I have no idea how to do that or where. Also, I see at User:Bgwhite/vector.css a thing to remove the logo and move the left side options up to fill that space. That would be wonderful too. Thank you very, very much! :) Anna Frodesiak (talk) 10:06, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

By the way, I use monobook. I hope that's okay. Anna Frodesiak (talk) 10:07, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

There is no easy method for hiding the line "You have 0 pages on your watchlist (excluding talk pages)." without compromising other portions of the page. The line "Pages that have been changed since you last visited them are shown with a green bullet." may be hidden using

span#mw-wlheader-showupdated { display: none; }

The button Mark all pages visited may be hidden using

form#mw-watchlist-resetbutton { display: none; }

The box "Watchlist options" may be hidden using

form#mw-watchlist-form { display: none; }

All of these would be placed in Special:MyPage/common.css: it's not necessary to use javascript for any of this. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:41, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yay! It worked. I made User:Anna Frodesiak/common.css and pasted those three lines and it worked. I have no idea how, but it's great. Now, I only see "You have xxxxx pages on your watchlist (excluding talk pages)." I'm fine with that. I prefer to have that line, actually.

Thank you all. I'm very grateful. :) Anna Frodesiak (talk) 13:16, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

There is also mw:Snippets/Collapsible ChangesList options. Helder 15:41, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you. :) Anna Frodesiak (talk) 21:15, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Getting error message when trying random page in Education Program namespace

Clicking on Special:Random/Education_Program, after about a minute and a half I get this message:

A database query error has occurred. This may indicate a bug in the software.

   Function: RandomPage::selectRandomPageFromDB
   Error: 0

Does this happen for anyone else? -- œ ^™ 11:18, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. -- John of Reading (talk) 11:29, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This is probably related to bugzilla:58157. --Redrose64 (talk) 11:39, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not so sure. I've filed it separately as bugzilla:58324, so we'll see... — This, that and the other (talk) 11:41, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Collapse ate the page's table of contents

I collapsed the first item (a transclusion of a GA review) on the talk page atTalk:Saengerfest and then the table of contents for the overall page went inside the "collapse". As a workaround I moved it elsewhere on the page which fixed it. Is this a "bug" or did I do something wrong? North8000 (talk) 13:25, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Not a bug. By default the TOC is placed before the first section heading. That was a section heading in Talk:Saengerfest/GA1 so in [20] the TOC was collapsed together with the whole transcluded page. Workarounds include to remove headings from the transcluded page or place __TOC__ where you want the TOC. This overrides the default placement. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:54, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! North8000 (talk) 14:32, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Once a GAN is over, it shouldn't be transcluded to the talk page, but linked. the {{article history}} template is used for that, as here. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:47, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Right now that isn't in the instructions for reviewers. What happens is that it stays transcluded for a while and then I think a bot moves it. I think that that is normally a good thing.....a GA review being visible talk page content for a while just like any other talk page content. This was a special rare case where the reviewer left mid process without passing or failing the article and a second review was started. North8000 (talk) 18:33, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

An error about web font

I found an error about web font for Wikipedia today. For example, en:Tibetan alphabet can display Tibetan alphabets with Jomolhari, but zh:藏文字 cannot. How to deal with the issue? --Great Brightstar (talk) 14:08, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Link to deleted contributions

Is there a way to get to that link faster than by clicking "Special:Contributions" then "deleted user contributions"? Maybe added onto the sidebar list or something? Thanks for any suggestions you can offer. Anna Frodesiak (talk) 21:37, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This is probably not the most modern method to do it, but I use WP:POP, which allows you to hover over a username, then click "deleted contributions". —Kusma (t·c) 21:45, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

That does the trick! Many thanks. :) Anna Frodesiak (talk) 21:52, 11 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The below admin-only code in Special:MyPage/common.js should give you a toolbox link below "User contributions". (To curious non-admins: Removing the admin test will not give you access to deleted contributions) PrimeHunter (talk) 02:11, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

$( document ).ready( function() {
  var rights_isAdmin = (wgUserGroups.toString().indexOf('sysop') != -1);
  if (!rights_isAdmin) return; //Restrict to admins.
  if (wgNamespaceNumber != "2" && wgNamespaceNumber != "3") return;
  var username = mw.config.get('wgTitle').split( '/' )[0].replace( /\"/, "\\\"");
  addPortletLink('p-tb', mw.util.wikiGetlink('Special:DeletedContributions/')+username,
    'Deleted contributions', 't-deleted', 'Deleted contributions of this user', null, '#t-log');
});

Fantastic. Even better, and exactly what I wanted. Thank you so much!!! :) Anna Frodesiak (talk) 14:19, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Template:in title|searchterm asks about creating page "Intitle:searchterm"

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T23102

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T31989

Template:In title, which I see used in some "See also" sections,

Creates a link to search for page titles which contain given words. The default value of the first parameter is the current page name, and that of the second parameter is 'All pages with titles containing "searchterm".' —Template:In title/doc

For example, the first example on that documentation page is

{{In title|Wales}}

produces All pages with titles containing Wales.

That it does; but the resulting search page begins with

You may create the page "Intitle:Wales", but consider checking the search results below to see whether the topic is already covered.

Isn't this a bug? I would have mentioned this on the Template talk page, but that hasn't been written to in over two years. (Please ping me in your reply.) --Thnidu (talk) 01:11, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Well it's perhaps unexpected and not so user friendly. But it's not really a bug technically. That part just knows about what you entered, it has no capability to interpret the 'query' that you are making. That is all implemented at the search backend. The website interface sends it whatever you input, and the backend returns a list with results. So you can create an enhancement request in bugzilla to improve that experience. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 01:22, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I've found two existing bugs for this. I've added links to them at the top of this discussion. – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 22:39, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

@Thnidu: That is a general feature of the search function and not specific to the template. The same thing happens if you manually enter "Intitle:Wales" in the search box to find titles containing "Wales". If whatever you entered in the search box, including search syntax like "intitle:", isn't a page name then the software says you may create it. The message comes from MediaWiki:Searchmenu-new where $1 is the contents of the search box. If MediaWiki messages can invoke modules then I suppose we could make a search message module which analyzes $1 and tries to remove search syntax, or doesn't display a message at all if the search used search syntax. I don't know whether it would be too expensive to do such tests for every search. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:27, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, PrimeHunter. I guess it would be feasible to have {{In title}} and other such templates include some code that MediaWiki:Searchmenu-new would check for to suppress the message, but yeah, it would be a lot of work: maybe not to set up (I'm ignorant thereabouts), but to add into all the templates like that and make sure it gets added into future ones. --Thnidu (talk) 02:02, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Templates wouldn't have to do anything. MediaWiki:Searchmenu-new would just have to check for search syntax like intitle:, incategory:, prefix:. The "You may create the page" message never makes sense for those, regardless whether the user entered them manually or got there via a template like {{in title}}. If we started manipulating $1 then we could also consider other things, for example removing quotation marks. The search "Two words" suggests to make "Two words", but Two words is far more likely to be an appropriate title. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:39, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Although MOS:SEEALSO does not explicitly forbid search results pages (unlike WP:ELNO#EL9), I don't think that {{in title|something}} is a suitable candidate for inclusion in a "See also", because it's not a link to a related article, but might be considered equivalent to a disambiguation page. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:45, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Edit buttons at talk:Engineering have disappeared

Any ideas? Please see also this discussion. Thank you. Δρ.Κ. ^{λόγοςπράξις} 06:34, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed -- John of Reading (talk) 07:42, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:CSS and Javascript hacks

I don't think this is relevant to anything we have currently so should this be archived {{historical}}? TeleComNasSprVen (talk • contribs) 07:34, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting. I'm sure it could be theoretically added to at this point in time, but that content should be on Meta or MediaWikiwiki. Feel free to mark as historical. Be bold about marking things as historical if there's been no activity in years but looks like it should be kept for posterity's sake. Killiondude (talk) 07:39, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Well it looks there's no useful information that is salvageable save the edit history because everything seems to have been already documented on Help:CSS and WP:JS etc. I was thinking of the {{historical}} tag mainly because of the history alone, but I guess it could also be transwiki'ed and then deleted (or soft-redirected). TeleComNasSprVen (talk • contribs) 08:12, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I would be inclined to MFD it outright. There is absolutely nothing worth keeping on that page. — This, that and the other (talk) 08:52, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

A tool to tag taskforce pages?

An editor created a new WikiProject taskforce. Is there a tool that can help us to tag all relevant pages? We want to edit the project banner on talkpages: add taskforce name and assessments quality, importance. (Best would be a good manual. After this worst WP manual I'm low on patience). -DePiep (talk) 07:54, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

AWB can be used to modify text on all pages in a category. That category can be all talk pages tagged as belonging to some WikiProject, and the text can be the banner source code. This would be a semi-automated process, as AWB would show you each page in sequence, and you would tell it how to modify the template (either selecting from a list of predesignated choices, or manually entering the changes). Someguy1221 (talk) 08:13, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I could do that. Unfort, not available for all editors. -DePiep (talk) 10:05, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

If you're looking for full automation, there are a number of bots written that do this kind of thing, but the only one that I know of that is active now is AnomieBOT (the WikiProjectWorker task). I suspect this particular task might not have been run in a while, though - Anomie, could you comment on the feasibility of this? — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 08:47, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I just completed a run for WP:WikiProject Women artists a few days ago, although before that I hadn't run it in a while and the run shook out a bug (now fixed). Anomie ⚔ 14:18, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Also, this kind of request usually goes on WP:Bot requests. Most of the people who like helping with bots watch that page, so it might get you a better response than here. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 08:53, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Adding articles to a project/taskforce is botable? Interesting, but hard to imagine that a bot could do the logic. I'd guess a tool could make suggestions (e.g. by crossing categories) but thee tag are manual (Hotcat, AWB). -DePiep (talk) 10:05, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It all depends on whether the logic can be made to not require human judgment. Category membership or category intersection works if there are categories that are entirely within the scope of the project. AnomieBOT can even handle things like "Contains Infobox Foo with |bar= set to 'baz'". Anomie ⚔ 14:18, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Aah, sounds very great. I'll tell the others who asked me about this. They're not all bot/AWB requesters I guess. -DePiep (talk) 15:09, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

One approach that we've taken in the past is a two-step system: First, make a list for review/editing by a human. Second, have a bot tag articles based on the human-verified list. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:37, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

A bit of customization (monobook)

What's the CSS required to customize the "edit" tab at the top so it changes to a + sign? (I know there's some MediaWiki hack currently in place to do that for "new section".) I tried:

li#ca-edit {display: "+";}

but I'm going to guess the display property doesn't take strings. I would also like to, if possible, move the User Rights link at the bottom row of Special:Contributions into my toolbar (say, between Logs and Upload File) when I'm viewing any userpage so that it's easier for me to check at a quick glance their userrights. TeleComNasSprVen (talk • contribs) 10:42, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Correct, the display: property does not take strings. You need to use javascript; the 'Replace the "new section" tab text with "+"' gadget is MediaWiki:Gadget-addsection-plus.js. Based on that, I offer:

$(document).ready( function () {
    var tab, tablink;
 
    tab = document.getElementById('ca-edit');
    if ( !tab ) {
        return;
    }
 
    tablink = tab.getElementsByTagName('a')[0];
    if ( !tablink ) {
        return;
    }
 
    tablink.firstChild.nodeValue = '+';
    if ( mw.config.get( 'skin' ) === 'monobook' ) {
      tablink.style.paddingLeft = ".4em";
      tablink.style.paddingRight = ".4em";
    }
});

Put that in Special:MyPage/common.js. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:33, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Also, would setting the CSS background as "+" image and font color as transparent also work? Link wp:Custom shows moving items on page. -Wikid77 (talk) 13:30, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

A transparent font may be invisible but the text is still there, so it still has the same width as the words "edit this page". --Redrose64 (talk) 14:38, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

A slightly simpler jQuery solution (~~might require something additional for monobook, it seems~~ Looks fine for me using monobook, actually. @Redrose64: what was the padding for, if you don't mind my asking? I'm probably missing something)...

$('#ca-edit a').text('+');

Theopolisme (talk) 02:07, 13 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Watchlist key

How do I get rid of it? I've been here nearly 8 years, I know what a minor edit is... Giant Snowman 19:55, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Add ".mw-changeslist-legend {display: none;}" to your common.css.--v/r - T P 20:00, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Is there no intention of adding an option to Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-watchlist? Giant Snowman 20:03, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I have no idea, I didn't even notice it until you said something.--v/r - T P 20:05, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Doubtful. I'd say a gadget would be easy enough to make, but chances are that by the time someone wants to hide it they've probably been around long enough to be able to find WP:VPT and to edit their common.css once they get the answer. ;) Anomie ⚔ 20:24, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Auto Image template- Could the parameters widthn, heightn deleted?

Auto Image template needs the parameters "|widthn=, |heightn= "

widthN – this is the width in pixels of the full resolution version of the image in Commons or Wikipedia. Examine the individual image page to obtain the full resolution.

heightN – this is the height in pixels of the full resolution version of the image in Commons or Wikipedia.

Could the template read directly those 2 parameters ? It is cumbersome to look for those numbers.

BTW the instructions are:"Parameters with numerical values, if unused, must be removed and not left blank; if left blank, they may cause undesirable side-effects. These include |widthn=, |heightn= and |total_width=. If |total_width= is omitted, the default value is 600.".

Omitting the "heightn", it would presnt the images, but the relevant image is smaller, and it does not matter what is the parameter value. Omitting the "widthn" or both parameters, it does not work. Ykantor (talk) 20:01, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The template can not read directly those 2 parameters, but that option is being worked on - see Template:Bugzilla.--Snaevar (talk) 21:40, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you. Ykantor (talk) 09:17, 13 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Draft namespace being enabled soon

This is advance notice that, pending final code review, we're planning to enable the new Draft namespace on Tuesday, December 17th (in the afternoon PST).

The basic functionality of the new namespace is outlined in our technical requirements. There are also future ideas that our team plans to build and/or test. If you want to try it out now, you can test the new namespace on the Wikimedia Labs test wiki for English Wikipedia (RecentChanges in the Draft/Draft talk namespace there).

I view this as not the end of the work on Drafts namespace, but rather just the beginning. I'm hoping that in the new year, many of the open questions about drafts –how categories should work, whether to allow creation of drafts if a page already exists, and more– can be answered through simple discussion and some A/B testing. Please see the List of open questions I've posted for discussion.

I think our next step is to figure out how to help new editors get their drafts reviewed and published in a timely manner. There is still a huge backlog at Articles for Creation –tens of thousands of old stale drafts, thousands more at the front of the queue– and the new namespace as it will be launched won't solve this problem. We'll need to build better tools, experiment, and try some new approaches if we're going to simply shifting the backlog.

Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 23:04, 12 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Learn more

Perhaps a bot to move the pages from AFC to the Draft namespace might be in order.--v/r - T P 00:14, 13 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I think that's partially up the AFC project members to decide. Personally, I'd recommend against moving them en masse right now. If we move articles immediately, it might make it harder to get through the backlog, since we haven't figured out how AFC Helper Script or a fork of it would work on Drafts namespace. Instead, I think we should begin by testing recommending the draft namespace to new authors, and then doing reviews in a much more lightweight way, without the complex system of scripts, bots, and templates AFC employs right now. AFC was designed for a specific use case, and I think that we probably don't want the replicate some of the worst practices right away, like putting review comments and templates in to the drafts directly. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 00:39, 13 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The helper script should be rewritten, or at least given a substantial cleansing. It's become a convoluted mess as numerous developers have passed it along, and I think it would benefit quite a bit from some direction -- style guides, using built-in MediaWiki and jQuery functionality rather than weird hacks, etc. With that said, I won't have time to seriously look into this until (after) the holidays. Theopolisme (talk) 02:14, 13 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

If we want to add a simple interface to more quickly publish articles that are ready, then that's something we could take care of on my team. Adding additional buttons to the edit interface on only drafts (e.g. adding a "publish" button) is something that is much easier now that there will be separate namespace. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 02:25, 13 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed it will, and that's something I'm definitely excited about for the future. It's more about the extensive feature requirements outlined at Wikipedia:AFCH#Reviewing_an_article_submission that I'm "concerned" about -- and it will require more discussion by AFC folks before decisions can be made. Regardless, thank you so much for helping the Draft namespace come to fruition! Theopolisme (talk) 03:21, 13 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Sort problem, looking for character to sort after numbers

I'm trying to create a sortable table, currently in User:Sphilbrick/2012–13 NCAA Division I women's basketball rankings. Most entries are numbers, and I want to use numeric sorting. However, some schools in some weeks are not in the top 25. Currently, that is indicated by a "-" character. Unfortunately, that character sorts before any number, so when sorting any column, the teams outside the top 25 are listed first. I'd like to replace the character with something that sorts after numbers. I've tried en-dash and m-dash, blanks and non-breaking spaces.

I also tried specifying data-sort-type="number" for the column, but that didn't seem to help. Any suggestions?--S Philbrick (Talk) 00:28, 13 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Replace "-" with data-sort-value=99|-

I think that should achieve the desired effect. Documentation is at Help:Sorting#Specifying_a_sort_key_for_a_cell – Jonesey95 (talk) 01:02, 13 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, that worked.--S Philbrick (Talk) 01:31, 13 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Resolved

Hm, that's weird. unknown elements should sort to the bottom... Can you file a bug report please ? BTW. the way this 'ought' to be done is by using data-sort-type="number" on the column header to note that the column contents should be treated as numbers. Then using an ndash or mdash (not an hyphen or minus) for the cell content. As to why that doesn't work, it will require some investigation. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:44, 13 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Move-to-commons assistant

I've been unable to make this tool work since it was ported over to WMFlabs. It takes a long time, then tells me that TUSC is verified and the file has been created, but when I look there's no file. Any idea what wrong, on what end of things, and what I can do to fix it? Moving one or two files by hand is OK, but when I've got a dozen to do, not having a tool to do it with is annoying. Beyond My Ken (talk) 03:18, 13 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I had the same problem but I swapped to using User:This, that and the other/For the Common Good instead - works fine for me. NtheP (talk) 09:45, 13 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

[1] LibreOffice For Starters, First Edition, Flexible Minds, Manchester, 2002, p. 18

[2] Sokolski 2004, p. 95.

[3] Sokolski 2004, p. 95.

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