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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 65.175.135.214 (talk) at 23:53, 30 October 2018 (→‎Copyright: new section). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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Errors in the summary of the featured article

Please do not remove this invisible timestamp. See WT:ERRORS and WP:SUBSCRIBE. - Dank (push to talk) 01:24, 29 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

"First described by Carl Linnaeus in 1758". This refers to the first formal description under the binomial system (which originates with this publication), so the source from whence the species gets its formal specific name arctica. This meaning is obvious to a biologist like myself, but I would have thought that many other readers of the main page will interpret the statement as implying that no one previously had written down any sort of description of it, which is presumably not true at all. The article uses "first formally described" with a link to Species description. I think that we should either do the same here or cut out completely this part of the sentence (which is not so interesting since the species names of most of the prominent European animals also derive from this publication). JMCHutchinson (talk) 19:09, 25 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Good point. Either proposed solution works for me, although I have a slight preference for the former. Gog the Mild (talk) 19:16, 25 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Indeed, a very good point. I prefer the first suggested solution ("first formally described" with a link to Species description). DuncanHill (talk) 23:08, 25 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Done, formally described with link. Stephen 00:24, 26 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Errors with "In the news"

  • ‘’The U.S. Democratic Party's National Convention opened in Chicago, sparking four days of clashes(pictured) between anti-Vietnam War protesters and police.’’

Errors in "Did you know ..."

  • have a question about the question mark in
    • ... that Wolfgang Rihm said of the music of his 1987 opera Oedipus: "Sound is a weapon here – or a scalpel"?
    Is there a way to indicate that there is a question mark at the end of the quote, - he said "Sound is a weapon here – or a scalpel?" --Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:57, 26 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
An internet search suggests that there should be one question mark, inside the quote. TSventon (talk) 09:24, 26 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
How quotes mix with punctuation is a matter of style, and our house style on this is MOS:LQ, so this should be written as:
... that Wolfgang Rihm said of the music of his 1987 opera Oedipus: "Sound is a weapon here – or a scalpel?"
although I would probably use "asked" instead of "said". My only concern (@Shubinator, @Theleekycauldron) is that we've got various bits of software that assume a hook ends in "?" and I'm not sure if this would break those. RoySmith (talk) 13:41, 26 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
mine would be okay, i believe :) theleekycauldron (talk • she/her) 15:24, 26 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
 Done He’s now asking and the question mark is inside the quotation mark. Schwede66 15:29, 26 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Errors in "On this day"

"an arson" looks wrong to me - shouldn't that be "an arson attack"? wikt:arson says the noun is usually uncountable. -- John of Reading (talk) 07:13, 25 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed, thanks Stephen 07:46, 25 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Please replace the image of Neptune's rings with File:Neptune Close Up (NIRCam).jpg, a better and more recent image from the JWST. Thanks, Cremastra (talk) 15:03, 25 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I prefer the existing image, to be honest. It looks more interesting. Schwede66 15:31, 26 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

"sparking four days of clashes(pictured) between" should be "sparking four days of clashes (pictured) between" - Sebbog13 (talk) 00:28, 26 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Beat me to it. Also I know this is not the proper avenue, but the use of a looping GIF feels tacky given the subject matter and should be replaced by a static image or a link to a video. DigitalIceAge (talk) 01:22, 26 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I have just swapped the hooks for this set. Since the page has already been protected, I invite editors to look at the new set to ensure there are no problems. OTD needs more OTD swappers, so if you are interested in selecting the hooks that appear each day, please WP:BEBOLD or ping me if you have any questions. Z1720 (talk) 20:26, 25 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I did that for a little bit – if there's a need, I'll try to get back to it occasionally. Cremastra (talk) 20:59, 25 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
(August 30)
(August 26, today)
  • at "including railway track for the", pls pipe the link to Rail profile. (Per refs, it was just the steel rails not "track" which includes other components eg sleepers etc.) JennyOz (talk) 11:39, 25 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    I'm not certain this is a change that needs to be made. Most people would understand track to mean the rails. We could even unlink it altogether to be honest, it's a fairly well-known concept. The only caveat might be that Americans call it "railroad" instead of "railway", not sure if that's a source of confusion!  — Amakuru (talk) 16:44, 25 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    I'm with Jenny here: our article defines "railway track" as the structure on a railway or railroad consisting of the rails, fasteners, railroad ties (sleepers, British English) and ballast (or slab track), plus the underlying subgrade. As such, by including the link, we're saying that the ship carried structures including rails, fasteners, sleepers, ballast and subgrade, which isn't true. Admittedly, I'm not sure that "Rail profile" is a great target either, though it seems to be used between those two articles as the main article for the metal things themselves -- it might be better to drop the link altogether. UndercoverClassicist T·C 20:06, 25 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    That's just late enough that it might have been a prefabricated track (like decauville). It would really be worth checking the sourcing. (Such track was often used in industrial or agricultural projects rather than as common carrier lines, so it often escaped mention by even the most crazed railfans.) Qwirkle (talk) 22:52, 25 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    PS: The sources cited in the article all say rails or railway iron, not "track". Qwirkle (talk) 22:59, 25 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    It might be worth either linking Victorian Government or re-wording to "Government of Victoria", as every part of the British Empire had a Victorian government in 1883.


General discussion

Countries in blurbs

Since this has now been removed from ERRORS, raising it here, although it's relevant to the blurbs currently on the main page. We have four ITN blurbs, two of which mention the country they relate to, two of which do not. Should we standardize this moving forward? To be clear, (and pinging Stephen, since he replied to me via edit-summary at ERRORS) I'm not referring to links, but to whether the country is named at all. Thoughts? Vanamonde (talk) 00:33, 22 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

It seems obvious to me that the most internationally recognizable cities should be able to stand alone. New York City and London would be the quintessential examples. Istanbul, currently on the Main Page, should be able to as well. If there is a desire to make an informal or formal list, I think the AP's international list, which includes roughly 50 cities around the world, provides a good list of contenders to pick from. Modulus12 (talk) 16:46, 22 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Apply common sense but understand that the majority of our readers aren't aware of most of the world. The Rambling Man (talk) 16:49, 22 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
That list includes no US cities (which the article considers "domestic"). Do non-US sources use the state when referring to US cities? My recollection is the BBC doesn't use the comma formatting at all, preferring plain "San Fransisco" for the biggies and "the American city of Ames" or some such for smaller ones. That might work for us? ghost 12:51, 23 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The Beeb uses the comma formatting for places in the U.S. when needed to disambiguate common city names, or to localize relatively unknown places. Some U.S. names are major cities in multiple states (Portland, Springfield, Wilmington, etc.) You can see the BBC using "Portland, Oregon and not just "Portland". Similarly, Springfield, Massachusetts. For unique, but obscure place names, they still include the state: Nashua, New Hampshire for example. This reflects common practice in the U.S. State names are skipped when a) the context makes it unneeded (For example, news sources in Massachusetts would just say Springfield unless they meant one of the ones outside the state), or it's one of the biggies (San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Miami, etc.) For cities outside of the state in context, and except for probably the top 20-30 largest cities, most U.S. writing always includes the state name, often because a) city names are frequently duplicated or b) for obscure places, it isn't always readily well known. --Jayron32 23:55, 24 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@GreatCaesarsGhost, Modulus12, and Jayron32: If we're doing states within the US (a country of 300 million and 50 states) it does seem that we should also use sub-national divisions within other similarly large countries; and we typically haven't. Provinces in Brazil or China, states in India, or oblasts in Russia are all comparable in size and population to states within the US. So the analogue to "Springfield, Massachusetts" would be "Sagay, Negros Occidental", rather than "Sagay, Philippines", which we have on the main page at the moment: conversely, if we want to keep the current form, we should be using "[[Springfield, Massachusetts|Springfield]], United States" I don't have a clear preference, but I do think we should be consistent. Vanamonde (talk) 03:14, 25 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Only if common usage, as can be demonstrated in reliable sources, does similarly. In the context of U.S. placenames, excepting for the largest, well-known, unambiguous cities, the use of the state name alongside the city is ubiquitous. If English language sources do similarly for places in other countries, I would agree with you. I haven't seen that usage in my own exposure, but if you have style guides or major non-U.S. English-language outlets that do so, we can start a discussion based around those. --Jayron32 03:21, 25 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I can talk about what my ear likes, but that's hopelessly biased by consumption of American media sources. For what it's worth, I hear states/provinces for the US, Canada, and increasingly India, so that's what I'd lean towards. We should follow what the non-domestic sources use, as most of our readers are non-domestic to any story (US is a borderline case). ghost 11:15, 25 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Agree. --Jayron32 14:36, 25 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Why not use alpha ++ and + cities? Howard the Duck (talk) 01:19, 30 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Too few cities. Jerusalem is in the lowest level with a ton of cities like Santa Cruz and San Pedro Sula. I've looked at US and world atlases a lot and am from the same continent yet still don't know if those are North or South California/Hemisphere respectively. This is because that list is based on accounting, advertising, banking/finance and law firms as a barometer for advanced producer services and thus integration to the world economy which makes Tel Aviv an Alpha- city and Jerusalem like a Delta-. Cause Israel's advertisers, bankers and law and accounting firms prefer to not be in Jerusalem due to that country's situation. Also Makkah (Mecca) is an Epsilon city or lower while its port 70km away is Beta- and the its nation's capital Riyadh is Alpha-. And Vatican City is not on the list either. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 14:53, 30 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

On my mobile (but using the desktop view with responsive design disabled) the portal links at the top of the page are all on top of each other instead of being arranged in a grid like they should be. Double sharp (talk) 00:33, 23 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Can you supply a screenshot? Do you see the same or different when you make your PC browser very narrow? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 07:11, 23 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I see the same on my iPad: I was about to come here to say I see the portal links appearing beside a single bullet point, with all of text overlapping and unreadable.
Also, the sister projects are listed one after the other down the screen in one column, not in multiple columns.
All this in desktop mode, not mobile. No idea how I would enable or disable responsive design, so I assume I am getting whatever is the default.
Peculiarly my iPhone shows both properly - separate bullets for the portals, and two columns for the sister projects. But on my iPhone (but not my iPad) the text size in the ITN/OTD box is noticeably smaller than in the TFA/DYK box. The different font size has been an issue for a while, but I've not bothered to complain about it before.
Neither of these change if I change screen orientation (i.e. wide or narrow).
How many pages impressions does the Main Page get every day? How much testing was done before the redesign was deployed? 213.205.240.133 (talk) 07:52, 23 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I can reproduce the font sizes pretty easily on chrome's device emulator on iPhone X, portrait. My guess is that the lack of a viewport meta activates font scaling on certain browsers, which causes issues because the columns are set to 55% and 45%. I'm also getting very inconsistent font sizes below the table, starting from FP.
I can't reproduce the issue with portal links on any configuration of chrome's device emulator from Windows 10 on desktop, including playing with various responsive resolutions.
I don't think the responsive design was tested much on mobile devices using desktop mode. At this time, I would suggest a rollback until these issues are fixed. Isa (talk) 08:27, 23 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Noting that the responsive design is not responsive in Moto G running Chrome for Android (~360px*~480px). — fr+ 12:49, 23 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Error on Wikipedia main page on Ipad2

I took a picture of the error on ipad2 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Automaticacc (talkcontribs) 16:00, 23 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@Yair rand: I don't think this thing is ready to be live yet. Fixing bugs piecemeal while it's running in production by copying stuff from your sandbox is not exactly professional, and you seem to be the only one around who knows what's going on. I would again advise that the main page be reverted and that this new implementation go through a lot more testing before it's allowed back live. Isa (talk) 17:13, 23 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Isanae: The OS in question has so few views on the desktop site that it's literally not even listed on the stats (which usually cuts of at about 0.03%-ish, I think), but looking at the relative stats of other versions we're probably looking at 0.0003% of views. In retrospect, there definitely should have been more testing, but I think we're fine now. --Yair rand (talk) 17:20, 23 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I have sandboxed the fixes. Can everyone please confirm that Wikipedia:Main Page/sandbox looks okay in all of their devices and browsers? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 18:45, 23 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Nope, the fixes don't work for me on my BlackBerry Passport (BlackBerry 10). I still see all the portals on top of each other in a very similar manner to the screenshot. If I go back into the page history and see the last version before today's changes, the portals appear correctly. Maybe the issue appears on small screens and isn't related to browser/OS limitations? I think that the main page changes should be rolled back until the issue is fixed.
I also noticed that on my Passport, only the first row from "Wikipedia's sister projects" appears. I hadn't noticed that before, so I think that this is also new, but going back into the page history doesn't force all the sister projects to list properly. --JECE (talk) 20:11, 23 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
arrow Reverted — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 21:11, 23 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@JECE: Thank you. Does the "In the news" section appear to the right or below the "From today's featured article" section on your BlackBerry? --Yair rand (talk) 21:12, 23 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The portals now appear correctly after the rollback. However, I still only see Commons, MediaWiki and Meta-Wiki under "Wikipedia's sister projects". I took a closer look and it seems that the problem is related to line breaking. It's hard to describe, but you can actually scroll the page 'off-screen' to see the other projects after you first scroll down the page to the relevant section.
@Yair rand: To the right. The screen is wide enough to use the 'Desktop view' version of Wikipedia. --JECE (talk) 21:53, 23 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@JECE: Could you provide a screenshot of Wikipedia:Main Page/sandbox from your Blackberry? Also, do the colors on this test page appear as described? Thanks. --Yair rand (talk) 05:20, 24 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Yair rand: I can see the red, but not the blue or green. Any quick guide on how and where to upload new images? I don't think that I've done that before.--JECE (talk) 12:24, 24 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@JECE: WP:WPSHOT — fr+ 13:46, 24 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@JECE: Okay, so Blackberry doesn't support complex nth-child/nth-of-type selectors. Reworked a bit. Does WP:Main Page/sandbox display correctly now? --Yair rand (talk) 21:07, 28 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Yair rand: The issue with the portal links has been fixed on my BlackBerry 10 device, yes. However, see below. The columns still appear off for Wikipedia's sister projects. --JECE (talk) 21:52, 28 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Isanae: could you also comment on the version in the sandbox and describe any issues you see? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 11:37, 24 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
All I can really test is Chrome's mobile device emulator, which anybody can do. I still see font scaling issues with a variety of devices, but it's really a losing battle because we're trying to get responsive content within a non-responsive page, which is never going to work correctly. As long as the whole page isn't converted to use the viewport meta, we'll have to accept that unpredictable font scaling and layout will happen.
Apart from font scaling, I can't see any problems on my side, but Chrome's device emulator is not a replacement for real devices. Other users seem to be reporting problems above that I can't reproduce. I still don't think it's a good idea to put this in production. To me, this is going the wrong way about it: as long as mediawiki doesn't get a proper responsive design overhaul, this whole thing is pointless. Just my 2¢. Isa (talk) 12:14, 24 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
(edit conflict)information Note:I have made some minor changes to Template:Main Page/sandbox/styles.css with this edit. The layout is now responsive both in Chrome DevTools and on my Motorola handset. Regards. — fr+ 12:26, 24 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@JECE: Does this version of Sister projects display as expected for you ?122.163.93.133 (talk) 12:55, 24 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@122.163.93.133: Yes. Huh, I can't believe it took me a year to notice that issue. Maybe I had noticed it at some point and did not put two and two together. --JECE (talk) 13:53, 24 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I see that this edit happened just a couple days ago. @MSGJ:, could you roll back this change too? --JECE (talk) 14:21, 24 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@JECE: Could you take a look at Template:Wikipedia's sister projects/sandbox and confirm if it is working properly or not. I have changed the code to use Template:Wikipedia's sister projects/sandbox/styles.css which gets rid of some of the newer, probably incompatible code. — fr+ 18:28, 24 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@FR30799386: Yes and no. Your code changes do fit all the sister projects into columns, but only two columns instead of the three that used to fit fine. In the old revision that the anonymous user shared above, I see three columns. --JECE (talk) 21:41, 28 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Any further comments on Wikipedia:Main Page/sandbox? @FR30799386:: I made your changes to styles.css live. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 21:44, 26 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

@MSGJ: See above regarding the columns issue.--JECE (talk) 21:44, 28 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move 24 October 2018

– Not a subtemplate of {{Main Page}} (a redirect to {{Main Page toolbox}}), but instead of the actual main page. Main-page-related cruft tends to get put in Wikipedia namespace, so the CSS page should go there too. {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 01:18, 24 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

TemplateStyles CSS pages must have the sanitized-css content model to function, and only .css pages in the template namespace have that by default. I think it will keep the content model if moved outside of the template namespace, but if not, an admin can change it with Special:ChangeContentModel. (No opinion on which namespace is most appropriate, but when creating it, Template was the only option.) --Yair rand (talk) 02:55, 24 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

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