Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 142

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Blank spaces left when second-level headings follow floating boxes redux

Resolved

is it just me, or is this bug back again? Frietjes (talk) 19:50, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

Yep, def. back again. Lugnuts Dick Laurent is dead 19:51, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
that sucks, just added my hack back to my common.js to fix it until someone fixes it elsewhere. Frietjes (talk) 19:57, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
can TheDJ or someone else file a bug report? Frietjes (talk) 20:00, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

Blank spaces under level 2 headings

This was reported a week ago, and it's back. I just saw it come back for some reason, on the 2015 Saint-Denis raid. It also appeared on some of the cached articles that I had, where previously, there had been no whitespace. epic genius (talk) 19:52, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, it's definitely back again. I've spotchecked a batch of articles mentioned in the previous discussion and every one of them now displays large expanses of blank space. What problem is this change intended to fix, because it really looks like the "cure" is consistently worse than the disease? The Big Bad Wolfowitz (aka Hullaballoo) (talk) 20:08, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

phab:T118475 again. We're deploying the fix right now, sorry about this, it's ridiculous. Legoktm (talk) 20:12, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

I notice that at the very same moment that this bug returned (19:49 as near as I can make out), the little notification/talk message counters got smaller and paler. In monobook, anyway. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:14, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
Yes, this is under "Changes this week" at #Tech News: 2015-47. https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Server_Admin_Log says:
  • 19:24 logmsgbot: twentyafterfour@tin rebuilt wikiversions.php and synchronized wikiversions files: wikipedia wikis to 1.27.0-wmf.7
The bug return was also due to the new version. Thanks for the fast fix. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:37, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

+1 - I hope this bug isn't here to stay!. –Davey2010Talk 20:17, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

Stupid bug you go squish now! Lugnuts Dick Laurent is dead 20:21, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

Patch has been deployed, and the bug should be gone (may take ~5min to propagate). Legoktm (talk) 20:26, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

Yep, gone. Nice one! Lugnuts Dick Laurent is dead 20:36, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
Seconded. epic genius (talk) 20:47, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
Thanx. The Big Bad Wolfowitz (aka Hullaballoo) (talk) 21:39, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

Page curation

Articles, such as September, 1914, that were edited redirects or moved from another namespace stop showing the page curation toolbar and the "Curate this article" link on the left side shortly after they were reviewed. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 02:48, 14 November 2015 (UTC)

Yes, you're right, that's how the page curation software works. Marked as patrolled + more than 60 days old = not displayed in Special:NewPagesFeed. This fact is documented in Wikipedia:Page Curation/Help: "The New Pages Feed instead has an unlimited listing for unpatrolled pages, and a 60 day listing for patrolled pages". It is actually unrelated to redirects, page moves, or any other actions, although some of those actions may cause a page that was previously marked as patrolled to become 'unpatrolled', and thus re-appear in the list until very shortly after they get marked as patrolled again.
The situation has not changed since the last time you posted this information on this page on 4 November. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:07, 16 November 2015 (UTC)
The page should be shown 60 days from the day a redirect was turned into a non-redirect, a page not in the article namespace was moved to the article namespace, or a reviewed article was marked as unreviewed, rather than only for a short amount of time. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 03:35, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

Disable link and enable tooltip on location map

Hi there. Could someone help me with this, please? Thanks in advance! Rehman 14:01, 17 November 2015 (UTC)

Solved. Rehman 05:28, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

Looking for testers

Hello folks! I've just added two new features to the test version of reFill, a tool that can semi-automatically expand bare references (more information here):

  1. The tool can now generate localized templates for Wikipedias in other languages (like this on frwiki). While this shouldn't affect enwiki, I want to make sure that nothing goes wrong as some core parts of the code have been changed. If you edit other Wikipedias and want reFill work there, please let me know!
  2. The tool now has the ability to expand New York Times references, by leveraging its API.

If you use reFill and have time to try out the new features, please help test the experimental version. Thanks a lot for your help! Zhaofeng Li [talkcontribs] 12:41, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

By the way, I want to thank User:SyntaxTerror, User:Victor Lopes, User:Frank Geerlings, and all others who have translated the tool into other languages. You guys rock! Zhaofeng Li [talkcontribs] 12:53, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
Much prefer this version that using the script via my css.js (or whatever the correct page is). Just used it on this edit and looks good. Will find a few more bare url refs and give them a try. Lugnuts Dick Laurent is dead 19:51, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
Did this edit that filled in eight bare URLs. Takes a bit of time (approx. 2 minutes), but does the job. Lugnuts Dick Laurent is dead 20:38, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

Telugu Language

Can anyone help in answering Template_talk:Infobox_Hindu_temple#Telugu?--Vin09 (talk) 04:44, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

Watchlist changes

Instead of the links for differemt periods (1 hour, 2 hours, etc.) there is now a drop-down selecion list. That's OK I suppose, but if you use it, your URL gets extra crud in the query string besides ?days=0.5 - why, for example, is &action=submit required? --Redrose64 (talk) 23:02, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

Probably something to leave at phab:T50615 which implemented the change. Or possibly @Matma Rex: for comment. --Izno (talk) 00:30, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
I'm pretty sure the "string" expansion was always talking place IF you ticked on either button on the Watchlist page regardless of changing any of the parameters or not in the interim.

I believe the only way a "clean" string comes up for that page is if you open your Watchlist page using the corresponding link for it in your Personal tool-Bar (above the search box on the top right in Vector). I'm pretty sure your WatchList's hours/days setting in your User: preferences needs to be the same as your last (now) drop down menu selection too. -- George Orwell III (talk) 06:42, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

Disabled checkboxes

The three checkboxes in [1] are disabled. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 04:33, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

Well, go ask User:Σ about it, then. — This, that and the other (talk) 04:36, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

Image purge

Can someone please purge the image File:Perspective_isometrique_cube_gris.svg in the article Isometric graphics in video games and pixel art? For me at least the graphic is still showing a much earlier version. It is important because the image takes measurements and they are not correct when the image is squished like it is for me now. Thanks. SharkD  Talk  00:17, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

See section above. --Redrose64 (talk) 00:19, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
I am using Chrome, and have been trying to bypass the cache by pressing CTRL+F5. I've also tried purging the page using ?action=purge after the URL in the address bar. Is the image showing correctly for you? SharkD  Talk  00:47, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
Your three latest versions at File:Perspective isometrique cube gris.svg#filehistory look identical to me so it's hard to see which one of them is displayed. At Isometric graphics in video games and pixel art#Overview I see a square display of https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f7/Perspective_isometrique_cube_gris.svg/150px-Perspective_isometrique_cube_gris.svg.png. For me it is a 150×150 image with a green 30° to the lower left outside the cube. What do you see? PrimeHunter (talk) 12:01, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
The "latest" .svg on Commons has a 'more narrow' left and right margins (whitespace?, transparent?) than the previous versions have. And on the WP article itself, I doubt I'm seeing a 150×150 rendering (would be square); more like 150×167 here (a rectangle). Can this be more about the use of the dual image template and/or its settings than about chaching? -- George Orwell III (talk) 01:16, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
You describe the 540×600 version uploaded by AnonMoos after my post. There is indeed something wrong now. The article currently displays a 150×150 scaling at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f7/Perspective_isometrique_cube_gris.svg/150px-Perspective_isometrique_cube_gris.svg.png, presumably of the most recent of the 713 × 713 versions by SharkD, but it's stretched to 150×167 in the article. That's the dimensions it should be scaled to if the current 540×600 version had correctly been used to make the scaled version. I have tried all methods at commons:Help:Purge except renaming the file. The generated html of the article says: <img alt="" src="//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f7/Perspective_isometrique_cube_gris.svg/150px-Perspective_isometrique_cube_gris.svg.png" width="150" height="167" srcset="//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f7/Perspective_isometrique_cube_gris.svg/225px-Perspective_isometrique_cube_gris.svg.png 1.5x, //upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f7/Perspective_isometrique_cube_gris.svg/300px-Perspective_isometrique_cube_gris.svg.png 2x" data-file-width="540" data-file-height="600" />. So MediaWiki knows what dimensions the image should have, and asks the user's browser to display it with those dimensions. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:04, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
@Redrose64: What section? -- Veggies (talk) 12:07, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
#FLL Logo. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:43, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

I'm having problems myself. Thumbnails are not updating even after hard-refreshes, manual-purges, and cache-clears. -- Veggies (talk) 12:07, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

Maybe SVG images are immune to purges? SharkD  Talk  02:29, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
Beats me. I swapped out the {{Double image}} template for {{Multiple Image}} just in case since it's status is deprecated anyway but I don't see any difference in behavior between the two.

I also tried a "full purge" per the API options available - specifically:

... but I'm still seeing the "wrong" rendering regardless (though I beginning to wonder why a 'true' cube viewed dead center on the z axis is anything but equal in height and width; are we sure the base image is was a good one to begin with here?). -- George Orwell III (talk) 06:32, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

It is working properly for me now. I see the correct image in the article. SharkD  Talk  14:06, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

New template

Hey, in WikiProject Equine we kept coming up against the issue of not having an infobox specifically for horse shows and events. So I decided I'd create one. I have it in my sandbox right now (you can view it here) but I've never written a template before and would like somebody to check it out. It's likely not finished, as I'm waiting for some other WPEQ members to check it out and give feedback, but I'd like to know if it's a good start and if it would produce the correct template when moved to mainspace. Thanks. White Arabian Filly (Neigh) 17:44, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

If you mean the current wiki source of User:White Arabian Filly/sandbox#Infobox:Equestrian event then it has nothing to do with source code of a template. You only have code to call a template. Similar code is usually displayed on infobox pages but it is transcluded from a documentation page and not part of the actual template. Click the "Edit" or "View source" tab on an infobox to get an idea how the source code looks. And see Help:Designing infoboxes. Also, infoboxes are not placed in mainspace but in template space, but if you had working code in a user sandbox then it could also be called there by just giving the full name including namespace. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:49, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for your help, PrimeHunter. I have moved it to its own subpage, User:White Arabian Filly/Template:Infobox equestrian event and have added most of the source code. I know I have to add more and do some more work before it's ready to launch, but it's closer now. By my count, there are at least 15 articles the template can be used on once it's complete. This is my first time creating an infobox, so it's a learning process for me. Thanks again. White Arabian Filly (Neigh) 22:52, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

Creating a new infobox is ambitious when you haven't made any template before. I have helped you get the some of the basics right [2] so you can now call it with {{User:White Arabian Filly/Template:Infobox equestrian event|...}} to test it. A tip: You can test code changes without saving by placing test calls inside <noinclude>...</noinclude> of the page itself and previewing. The previewed version and not the saved version will be used for rendering your test call. Note how labeln and datan for each integer n are a pair in {{infobox}}, with label usually being a constant string displayed on the left half of the infobox, and data is a parameter set by the caller and displayed to the right of label. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:21, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

Thank you again, I am going to test it on Tennessee Walking Horse National Celebration, which I created and mostly wrote, so if I mess it up nobody will get mad--I can just revert. White Arabian Filly (Neigh) 23:52, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

You are not combining label and data in a meaningful way. I really suggest you read up on {{infobox}} and make tests by previewing directly on User:White Arabian Filly/Template:Infobox equestrian event as described in my tip. Otherwise you may get a really long cycle of saving template changes and then testing them. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:01, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

.ogg files fail with javascript error

All page that contain an .ogg file, even file description pages (and currently also the Main Page!) fail with the message Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'insertRule' of undefined in Chrome. The error appears after Chrome's native player disappears. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 18:26, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

It works for me. Chrome 46.0.2490.86 on Windows Vista. A search of your error message shows phab:T118792. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:27, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

Widescreen, default text size, picture madness

I think we can all agree that the wild west days of Wikipedia happened from 2001 to 2006. That's when they shot out the skeletal which became the core then we starting asking questions about quality and format and exactly what Wikipedia should be. Well, most of that was before 16:9 widescreen became the standard. I'm guessing Wikipedia renders at a specified pixel size per text that works well with an old 4:3 VGA monitor (50< pixels per inch (PPI) ), but this is way too small for your standard 16:9 1080p widescreen monitor, and I'm sure is even worse on smaller WQHD (~100ppi) and 4K monitors (28" = 150ppi). Before anyone says that the fault is on monitors have such high resolutions without being scalably larger screen sizes, understand that the pixel density is much too low on primitive tech, not too high on new tech (In fact even 300+ppi "Retina displays" do not even meet visual limits, a field that is plagued by non-science marketing misconceptions and doesn't seem to understand the distinction between being able to "count pixels" and be able to perceive a difference). I have had my browser set for Wikipedia to display at 175% for over a year and do not even think about it anymore. It just looks right. I picked it because at smaller sizes there seem to be scaling issues and any larger pictures look bad and it would be too much anyway. Sometimes, when there are lots of pictures in articles especially when they are pushing sections down, I reduce to 100% just to check it out, and it's often awful. Not only do the pictures push way beyond their sections, but the text is not comfortable to read.

Here is a screenshot at 100% and 175%, notice how the pictures are in the section they should be in, in fact that left picture that looked all by itself in the 100% view majically popped down to the section it was supposed to be in, and that leads to the collapsed garage photo actually being in the collapsed section

480px for closest scaling, but best to view full size

At the very least I am requesting an ability to be able to change your own default text size in your Preferences, though this only benefits users that know about it, much less the general public. Thank you. B137 (talk) 07:11, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

@B137: While waiting for an official fix, you can workaround it by adding some custom styling to your common.css:
#content {
    max-width: 800px;
    font-size: larger;
}
This will limit the width to 800px and make the text slightly larger. Zhaofeng Li [talkcontribs] 08:47, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
@Zhaofeng Li: Thank you. Wow that's even more obscure than going to Preferences. It helps but is a little clunky, I made it a little wider than that but is there any other keyword than "larger" for the text, perhaps something where you specify the px for vertical text resolution, or maybe just another word? larger1, larger2, largest..etc? B137 (talk) 09:02, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
@B137: For font-size you can specify px directly, or use small, medium, large, x-large, xx-large, etc. See MDN for details. Zhaofeng Li [talkcontribs] 09:08, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
Or, even better, use percentages, say, 125% or 140%. — This, that and the other (talk) 09:15, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
Thank you. That once again addresses the issue somewhat for me, but not for the general viewer. B137 (talk) 09:25, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
The 'general viewer' has no account and therefor has no preferences. And the idea of a cookie-based fontsize widget has been explored but not found feasable. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 11:58, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
You say that like they don't matter. And this issue is not something I'm making up. It's already a talking point for HD and ultra HD monitors, and many sites and operating systems are responding. Also, what I meant by "more obscure than preferences" was that even the average wiki user wouldn't be able to utilize that unless it was so pressing that they researched it. You can lead a horse to water and it might not drink, but it's more likely than if you left it altogether. B137 (talk) 12:06, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
Actual hardware viewing dimensions for the "general", anonymous or logged-in User: do not seem to be polled or tracked in an formal manner so setting the display/viewport [skin] "defaults" also do not seem to be based in any rational or statistical based formulations either (more like subjective 'beliefs' instead).

In other terms: If all you ever work on is a 17 inch laptop display panel; you're positive your optimal "display" settings are the norm. But if all you ever work on is a 26 inch desktop monitor; you're positive your optimal "display" setting are the norm. And if all you ever work on is done via a Miracast to your 55 inch smart TV; you're positive your "display" setting are the norm too. To round out the illustration, the "higher-ups" setting the current defaults in question seem to fall mainly into one of the three groups rather than be spread across all three groups; thus the "slanted" or "jaded" take frequently voiced regarding this issue.

Lacking the hard data needed to quell such bias, things are not likely to change I'm afraid but good luck if you make the effort. -- George Orwell III (talk) 21:39, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

Actually, the ideal solution would be to adopt responsive web design strategies, with the layout adapting to different screen sizes/resolutions automatically. Zhaofeng Li [talkcontribs] 08:14, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

Agreed (though that developmental front is also currently "stalled"). Can't do much about that while the 'content area' is constantly encroached upon by the typical site-logo and side-bar designs. And I don't know why the Winter prototype approach was dropped either - it seemed to be the logical next step after the Vector "refresh". I so hope they didn't drop it just because of a few .css "mistakes" :( ---- — Preceding unsigned comment added by George Orwell III (talkcontribs) 10:31, 22 November 2015
Making a site responsive, especially user authored and edited content with 15 years of history to it, is not simple. Many of these problems are on the radar of multiple teams inside the WMF and of individual volunteer developers. We talk about it all the time. But they are difficult problems to solve correctly. Especially the infrastructure challenge for responsive images is rather daunting, as is the fact that our content allows free usage of CSS to every single editor.
And Winter is not totally scrapped. Winter was a prototype, an experiment and many of its ideas and strategies are used in current development. More of it will trickle down eventually. More of the mobile Minerva skin will merge into Vector and core, more of OOjs UI will become visible in the general interface. And one day, all will be the same, yet totally different... Do keep asking for those improvements however. It's important to make your voice heard. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 16:11, 22 November 2015 (UTC)
Yes I use old wiki please don't ever make the new mobile style mandatory
I was slightly facetious when I said the css change solved it "good enough for me at least." When I had it set to just "large", the alignment wasn't bad enough to worry about, but that is still much smaller than when I zoom to 175%, and without scrunching the width (which means I am not getting full use of my screen) the images still push down too much. So I changed it to "x-large" and now the alignment is pretty significant: B137 (talk) 03:21, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Unexpected background color around thumb images due to LIGHT BLUE in Monobook

User:Liangent/lightblue and Special:Permalink/691743758 contain a demo: view it in Vector and it shows Wiki.png on pink background; view it in Monobook and some unexpected white/blue area is shown.

We copied those styles to zhwiki and this issue was reported on zhwiki VPT by some other user today; upstreaming it here. Make sure to test both pages (article and non-article) because different styles are used. Liangent (talk) 22:30, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

Here is a simplified example:
Vector versus MonoBook shows the difference in rendering. Something apparently happens when Wikipedia:Extended image syntax#none is used in a div with padding. Can you just avoid doing that? PrimeHunter (talk) 23:46, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
MediaWiki:Monobook.css mistakenly thinks all instances concerning the div.thumb class are always part of a gallery-type of image display when of course that is not always the case. It seems the universally {common] defined background-color: transparent; is being overridden to 'sky-blue' by
div#content, div#p-cactions li a:hover, div#p-cactions li.selected a, div#content div.thumb {
    background-color: #f8fcff;
}
... by design but never gets around to "reverting" back to the "default" for some reason. Basically, the gallery-type instances need more specific selectors in order to differentiate it from the NoN gallery type of image display cases. User:Edokter? -- George Orwell III (talk) 23:58, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
Fwiw... I think the above needs to be split into...
div#content, div#p-cactions li a:hover, div#p-cactions li.selected a {
    background-color: #f8fcff;
}
div#content div.thumb {
    background-color: inherit;
}
... but that entire 'sky-blue' section in the .css has caveats defined for certain namespaces/selections/etc. so it would need some vetting first to be sure the changes aren't making things worse elsewhere. -- George Orwell III (talk) 00:18, 22 November 2015 (UTC)
Are there any real cases where this is a problem, or is this a glitch you stumbled upon? As PrimeHunter said: do you need to use padding? I'm not inclined to fix non-existing problems. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 12:29, 22 November 2015 (UTC)
It was found in {{Location map|caption=x|border=none}} used in some infoboxes with background. I noticed that it was due to class="thumb" in Location map and Location map was just trying to mimic thumb images, so I used thumb image to reproduce the issue here because it looks simpler. Liangent (talk) 22:03, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

X!'s tools for Neelix

On [3], many numbers are wrong. They display zero when they should actually be nonzero. For example, it says that Neelix

  • does not have any deleted edits
  • has not moved any pages
  • has not deleted any pages
  • has not protected any pages
  • has not blocked any users
  • has not uploaded any files
  • did not thank any users
  • did not review any pending changes
  • did not patrol any edits

when in fact, none of the listed statements are true. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 04:08, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

Just taken a look at the link and it currently says 12,904 deleted edits, 8,428 pages moved, 1,153 deleted pages, 73 protected pages, 9 users blocked, 914 files uploaded, 197 thanked users, 33,534 patrolled edits.Blethering Scot 20:54, 22 November 2015 (UTC)
I can confirm it said no deleted edits earlier but now I also see 12,904 so I guess the issue is fixed. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:31, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

CSS broken on en Watchlist ?

Is anybody else seeing this ?

Formatting for Special:Watchlist recently seems to have broken, at least using the monobook skin.

Has the CSS recently been changed or something? It seems, at least with monobook, that no CSS at all is being applied? Jheald (talk) 12:30, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

Nothing has changed. How is it broken? -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 13:35, 22 November 2015 (UTC)
I'm seeing my watchlist page simply as 1990s-style vanilla HTML, with no CSS applied. It seems only to be the watchlist page, no other pages affected. Jheald (talk) 15:31, 22 November 2015 (UTC)
... and now it's fixed. So I don't know what that was about. Jheald (talk) 16:01, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

Dusty articles

The dusty articles list has not been updated since June. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 23:31, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

It's transcluded from Wikipedia:Dusty articles/List which according to its history is built by SvickBOT (talk · contribs). Have you informed the bot operator, Svick (talk · contribs)? --Redrose64 (talk) 00:02, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

image tidy-up

I got into a pickle with File:Men of Men - bookcover.jpg, can someone remove the last two updates ? Thanks GrahamHardy (talk) 17:03, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

Which is the correct version, GrahamHardy?Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 17:06, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
the 2nd one up, 3rd one down, can the last two updates just be removed ? Thanks GrahamHardy (talk) 17:09, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
I've requested the removal. I assume that the current image is the correct one.Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 17:54, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
Done. Nyttend (talk) 21:00, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Misleading expiry time for protection

Follow-up to Category talk:Wikipedia pages with incorrect protection templates#Bot automation on it's way

This does not affect users who have set their local time zone to UTC.

If you protect a page, and instead of selecting a duration you select "other time" and enter a date and time, that is taken as UTC. But if you revisit the "change protection" for that page, and look at the "Expires" item, it says "Existing expiry time" with a date and time that are in your local time zone. If you wish to extend a current protection by, say, 24 hours, you need to be careful how you do it.

Assume a user in New York (UTC-5), they might see "Existing expiry time: 16:00, November 22, 2015". If in the "Other time" box, they enter "16:00, November 23, 2015" and Confirm it, then they revisit the "change protection" for that page, it says "Existing expiry time: 11:00, November 23, 2015" so they actually extended it by 19 hours, not 24. To get a 24-hour extension on the original expiry, they actually need to set "Other time" to "21:00, November 23, 2015". --Redrose64 (talk) 14:55, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

@Redrose64:This should be reported at Phabricator - see Wikipedia:Bug reports and feature requests. I see no reason to discuss this here. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 22:17, 22 November 2015 (UTC)
I know that it's ultimately a phab: thing, but searching phab for existing tickets is a pain. Many people post here initially even when it's a MedaiWiki software issue, since they know that at some point one of the phab regulars will come along and say "ah, that's ticket T987654 which has been open for three years". Saves filing a redundant ticket only to get it closed as "resolved, duplicate" which doesn't help much. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:16, 22 November 2015 (UTC)
More details, Redrose64. I've always had my time set to UTC, but just now I changed it to a random Australian time zone (how did Currie, Tasmania, population 746, end up as the reference point for a time zone area?) and protected a userspace page until 2015-12-15, 23:12. I then unprotected it, changed my time to America/Denver, and added the same protection, and the expiry time was the same. However, the protection log appears differently on the protection page — when I was in Tasmania, the latest log entry was

(change visibility) 07:44, 24 November 2015 Nyttend (talk | contribs | block) protected User:Nyttend/ZIP [Edit=Allow only administrators] (expires 10:12, 16 December 2015) [Move=Allow only administrators] (expires 10:12, 16 December 2015) (Protecting until 2015-12-15, 23:12 with time zone set as America/Denver) (hist | change)

Now that I'm in Colorado, the same line reads

(change visibility) 13:44, 23 November 2015 Nyttend (talk | contribs | block) protected User:Nyttend/ZIP [Edit=Allow only administrators] (expires 16:12, 15 December 2015) [Move=Allow only administrators] (expires 16:12, 15 December 2015) (Protecting until 2015-12-15, 23:12 with time zone set as America/Denver) (hist | change)

If you view the section of my contributions that includes those entries, you'll see the same dates and times regardless of whether your time zone is Dar es Salaam or Yap (I just checked), but the protection log changes with your time zone. This shouldn't be the case, especially given its effect on protection time changes: all the logs should be in UTC, so that everyone sees the same thing in all cases, and so that protection times aren't accidentally changed. Nyttend (talk) 20:54, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

TOC right

Resolved

{{TOC right}} doesn't seem to be working for me. @Funandtrvl: looks like they have tried to fix it recently? I'm on Chrome in case it's a browser issue. GiantSnowman 20:41, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

On which article(s)? In what way is it not working? --Redrose64 (talk) 20:51, 22 November 2015 (UTC)
Well it's not displaying. GiantSnowman 12:44, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
E1
E2
E3

E4

  • E5 E6
It works for me, for example on Alien, both logged in and out, Vector skin, Chrome 46.0.2490.86 on Windows Vista. Please provide the same details. I see a box to the right of this section with E1 above the box and E2 E3 E4 E5 E6 inside the box. Which of this do you see? PrimeHunter (talk) 13:16, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
It's working for me now, but I'm on a different computer/browser. I'll check again when I'm back at home. GiantSnowman 13:22, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
I'm back home and it's displaying fine. Whatever bug it was has been fixed. GiantSnowman 17:56, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

User sandbox appears in google search

Got a bit of a surprise just now. When I searched Michael Katovich "Studies in Symbolic Interaction" Volume 33 in google, the seventh of 185 results was the sandbox I'm working in, User:JG66/sandbox White Album reception (where Katovich's article appears as a source). I'm all for transparency on Wikipedia, but – boy, I just didn't expect a sandbox to come up! Is it quite normal, for these to appear in a google search? JG66 (talk) 04:57, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

This isn't new, back in the old days if a page could not stand deletionists I would keep working on the subpage version ha-ha. It takes more for non-main space stuff to show up though. B137 (talk) 05:01, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
There is an outstanding request to change this in the configuration. In the mean time. {{userspace draft}}, that's one of the reasons we have that template. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 06:12, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
JG66, it's quite normal, and you can meet the nicest people that way The {{NOINDEX}} and {{NOINDEX|visible=yes}} templates work nicely too. The visible parameter lets other editors know the page is probably not going to be indexed. These templates are not guaranteed to be effective. PS: Pinging TheDJ too. Cheers! {{u|Checkingfax}} {Talk} 06:41, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
Thanks to you all for the replies, especially those options, TheDJ and Checkingfax. Still can't get over the shock I got seeing "User:JG66/sandbox …" come up in google – scared the bloomin' life out of me! JG66 (talk) 07:15, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
I use {{user sandbox}}, which sets __NOINDEX__ as default; if you want the sandbox page to be indexed, you can override that with |noindex=no --Redrose64 (talk) 10:28, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
Thanks, Redrose64. {{userspace draft}} seems to work, actually. Fingers crossed. JG66 (talk) 11:28, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

The configuration change was finally deployed as well. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 17:59, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Excluding bot edits from watchlist

Help! I am desperately trying to exclude bot edits from my watchlist, which is being flooded with notifications of delivery of a mass message about the Arbcom election. I check the "hide bots" box and click "Go" on the next line, but next time I look the box is unchecked again, and the flood of mass-message notifications continues. It isn't a caching issue, I have tried purging the page. JohnCD (talk) 17:53, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

You can permanently remove bot edits from your watchlist by going into your Preferences, then the Watchlist tab. Look under "Advanced Options". Resolute 18:14, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
Thank you! It seems that checking the boxes in the "Watchlist options" box on the watch-list only affects the search you immediately do by clicking "Go". I found that confusing: perhaps there should be a note there to say "To permanently change these options, see Watchlist under Preferences". JohnCD (talk) 18:50, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
Perhaps off-subject here, but I don't think Search is effected in any way by Special:EditWatchlist. — CpiralCpiral 20:37, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

20:26, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Usage of template parameters (Tracking)

Is there a (simple) way to track articles by number of used parameters in a transcluded template? For example I have a template like this:

{{Template Alpha
|parameter1 = 
|parameter2 = 
|parameter3 =
|parameter4 = 
|parameter5 = 
...
|parameter20 = 
}}

How to track articles in categories, by number of used parameters of this template (how many parameters of this template have some values)? --XXN, 22:11, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

@XXN: Probably the easiest way would be to use a tracking category and change the sort key depending on the number of parameters. Some sample code:
[[Category:My tracking category|{{#expr: {{#if:{{{parameter1|}}}|1|0}} + {{#if:{{{parameter2|}}}|1|0}} + ... + {{#if:{{{parameter20|}}}|1|0}} }}]]
I haven't tested the above yet, but I've seen other code like it in various templates. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 23:28, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
Actually, ignore that - after testing, it doesn't seem to work. The following will, but you need to create as many different categories as there are template parameters.
[[Category:My template transclusions with {{#expr: {{#if:{{{parameter1|}}}|1|0}} + {{#if:{{{parameter2|}}}|1|0}} + ... + {{#if:{{{parameter20|}}}|1|0}} }} parameters]]
Best — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 23:49, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
Your test code does work when it's actually used.[5] PrimeHunter (talk) 01:44, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
Aha, that explains it - thanks for the fix. :) — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 02:29, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
Thanks for idea, Mr. Stradivarius. I also thought about this, but it's a bit tiresome to write such a function for a template with 20-30 different parameteres +with the same number of aliases for main parameteres names. --XXN, 01:03, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
@XXN: In that case, how about doing it in Lua? There are three ways that I can think of using Lua to do this. The first would be to count the number of all the parameters specified, including ones that the template doesn't recognise. The second would be to make a list of all the valid parameters and count how many of those are specified. And the third would be to use Lua patterns to specify groups of parameters - for example, if you specified the pattern ^parameter%d+$, you would count all the parameters that were specified that consist of the word "parameter" followed by one or more digits. Something similar is already done in Module:Check for unknown parameters. I'll try and write a module that does all three of these so you can choose which one is the most appropriate. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 02:29, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
@XXN: I've now written Module:ParameterCount which should make this process easier. Take a look at the documentation and see what you think. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 06:36, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
Thank you so much Mr. Stradivarius! Nice job!:) This module works very well. --XXN, 12:49, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

Browsing

I wonder if the developers of wikipedia would consider a turn book page option for articles instead of just the standard one page scrolling downwards. Like this at archive.org I actually find it easier to read and browse with a simple click between pages horizontally without having to keep scrolling downwards, especially for big articles. If we had a "Reader" function on wikipedia which converts articles to a book format, perhaps with two columns on each page I think I'd find it much more reader friendly and usable.♦ Dr. Blofeld 12:00, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

If you browse through the magazines on archive.org you'll notice that browsing content puts much less strain on your fingers with a simple click and is actually a more convenient way of reading for the reader. You don't have to keep moving it down, but you work across and it's all in one place, page by page. I also think that as it is an encyclopedia, customizing it to resemble an old encyclopedia with pages would be a more attractive way to read content and consolidate knowledge. I think even for mobiles and iPads it would be a far easier way to browse to simply tap between pages. To allow room for the double page book format there could be the option to have a hidden sidebar which only appears when you hover over it to maximize reading space and appearance. Another feature I think, the option to browse articles by subject. Like you could browse a category alphabetically in a book format, going from article to article, or click on a letter at the bottom to find surnames or articles with that letter in a given category or section of the project.♦ Dr. Blofeld 12:04, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
That archive.org page is a collection of scans of old magazines, rather than html, so doesn't have the formatting issues one would have trying to display Wikitext articles in that format across multiple devices of varying shapes and sizes. I agree with what you're saying about reading ease on mobile devices, but it won't be a simple matter. If you've ever tried to read a heavily-footnoted and illustrated book on the Kindle, iBooks or Google Play Books apps (which use the turn-the-page format) you'll know how hard it is to handle embedded images and internal footnoting and section links in this format, even with the full might of the world's three leading content-delivery companies working on it, and the markup of some Wikipedia articles is far more complicated than that of most books; I imagine it would lead to illustrations and tables regularly becoming separated from their accompanying text. That's not to say it's a bad idea, but if Apple can't handle it I'm not sure WMF Ops would be up to the task. ‑ iridescent 12:22, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

Stray </noinclude>

Just noticed that at Talk:Destruction_of_cultural_heritage_by_ISIL there's a stray standalone </noinclude> tag in a white row between WikiProject Africa and WikiProject Arab world. Editing wikisyntax doesn't reveal anything, looks like something went wrong elsewhere. Could someone check? Brandmeistertalk 22:36, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

{{WikiProject Libya}} had an incorrect edit yesterday. I think it has the intended content now. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:54, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

"maintenance" in the upper left corner of this page

Just curious. I'm starting to notice the unbolded and unlinked lowercase word "maintenance" in the upper left hand corner of new articles. And I just noticed it at the top of this VPump page. Is this new? And what does it mean? — Maile (talk) 22:47, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

I don't see it here or in any of the examined new articles. Please post an example article. Do you see it when you are logged out? What is your skin? PrimeHunter (talk) 22:58, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
OK, this was strange. I use Modern skin. "maintenance" appeared, besides on this VPump page, in the upper left hand corner of any new article I looked at on Newpages. I changed to Monobook, and that went away. So, I came back to Modern skin, and the phenomenon is completely gone from all articles I'd seen it on. Just one of those momentary flukes, I guess. — Maile (talk) 23:21, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

Uw-voablock

When editing Template:Uw-voablock, "No matching items in log." is shown in the top area. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 02:36, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

uselang=qqx shows it displays MediaWiki:Logempty. I don't know why. translatewiki:MediaWiki:Logempty/qqq says: "Used as warning when there are no items to show." The message is displayed in the actual log page [6] as expected. A random template with no logs Template:Uw-ublock-double also displays it in the actual log [7] but not in the edit page. The page history of Template:Uw-voablock shows a 2007 move [8] over a redirect at that title. Could MediaWiki be expecting a log entry for that and try to retrieve it but report that it didn't find anything? PrimeHunter (talk) 03:07, 25 November 2015 (UTC)
Since this page is protected the edit page will show the protection log entry. This page was protected under its old name {{vandalblock}}, which it was renamed from in 2007. I believe that at that time log entries, including the protection log, were not moved with pages. However, protection status was. The page is protected, but there is no log entry to be found, thus the message. Nothing to worry about – I do not recommend trying to 'fix' it. Prodego talk 04:16, 25 November 2015 (UTC)
The "missing" protection log is here. It's still the case that log entries are not moved when a page is moved. But if a page under a protection at the time of its move, an entry is added to the log for the new page name, see WP:MOVE#How to move a page item 4. This entry is of the form "moved protection settings from Foo to Bar (Foo moved to Bar)". Apparently that additional entry was not generated when the page was last moved, 21:24, 2 December 2007, and is probably a newer feature. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:06, 25 November 2015 (UTC)
Yes, I should have been more clear that this "moved protection settings" log was the "moved with pages" feature I was referring too. The log isn't simply moved – a new, different entry is added to the destination page, and the originals never move. "Logs don't move" generally holds for all logs. Prodego talk 13:02, 25 November 2015 (UTC)
I fixed this specific page; note, however, that this only fixed the one page - you would need to do it separately for each page which has this problem. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 15:48, 25 November 2015 (UTC)
I have mentioned the issue at MediaWiki talk:Logempty, with the message quoted to help find it in searches. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:33, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

2 articles with the same name ?

I've just come across List of deceased hip hop artists and List оf dесеаsеd hiр hор аrtists - They have the same title yet the content's somewhat different (The talkpages for both are completely different) so are the names somehow different as I can't spot any differences between the 2... Thanks, –Davey2010Talk 04:31, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

The second version has many Cyrillic letters instead of Latin letters. You can for example copy-paste the name to the "Characters" field at http://r12a.github.io/apps/conversion. PrimeHunter (talk) 04:52, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
I marked the second one for speedy deletion using a rationale that seemed reasonable to me. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:03, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
PrimeHunter - Bloody hell how on earth did you know that!?, I spent about 5 minutes clicking between the tabs like an idiot trying to figure what on earth I was missing! ,
Jonesey95 - Ah thanks I was gonna tag it after but wanted to find out the issue first,
Well least it's not a bug! :), Thanks for both of your helps, –Davey2010Talk 05:10, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
If you look at the source of this discussion, you may see a difference in how the characters render. Some fonts will show them as the same, and some will show them as different. Mine uses a monospace font of some sort, which shows the Cyrillic letters as smaller and "thinner", as if they are underfed. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:17, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
Ah yes the other one has all letters & stuff - I had never even gave it a thought about the Latin stuff, I'm still using the prev 'pedia font so that could be why there wasn't a noticable difference, Ah well thanks for your help :), –Davey2010Talk 06:05, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

There were also pages in the main namespace that had the same title as a non-main namespace page due to T87645. All such pages were already deleted by Topbanana. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 23:02, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

Not the same issue at all. T87645 concerned pages in mainspace which should have been in another namespace, but where the namespace value had been set to zero and instead the namespace name formed part of the page name. This thread concerns pagenames that are in the correct namespace, whose page names are composed of characters which resemble each other but are different. In the redlink above, the page name is "List оf dесеаsеd hiр hор аrtists"; and the characters that I've underlined are the Cyrillic letters а (U+0430), е (U+0435), о (U+043E), р (U+0440), с (U+0441). --Redrose64 (talk) 12:49, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

Peer review bot down - please help!

Hi technically aware Wikipedia village pump (Technical) denizens, I'm one of the regular peer review mop (non administrator) handlers. We have a crisis brewing... the bot that closes old reviews (PeerReviewBot) has stopped working, last edit June 19. This is a very time-consuming and labourious task to be done manually that was previously easily automated. The bot is owned by CBM who is mostly retired.

Is it possible to either get the bot started again, or create a similar bot that does the same thing? Yours very gratefully, --Tom (LT) (talk) 23:09, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

It might be worth asking at WP:BOTREQ. I notice that the bot's userpage says the code is available on Toolserver SVN, which no longer exists - I wonder if it was backed up somewhere. — This, that and the other (talk) 23:11, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
I am retired from running bots. The bot's source code is available on wikimedia tool labs from anyone who has access to the VeblenBot project, i.e. Ruhrfisch and possibly me. Unfortunately, although I have made several public requests for someone to take over the bot, nobody stepped up to take over. If anyone is interested, I can see if I can still log in to email them the bot code. It is not a difficult project to code from scratch, in any case. — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:22, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
@Fhocutt (WMF): I know you got Citation bot up and running--is there scope for you to poke at this bot also? --Izno (talk) 05:47, 21 November 2015 (UTC)
If there's no one to take over CBM's code, I'll have a go at this. I don't use Perl, so I won't re-use that code, but it's a fairly simple set of tasks. Relentlessly (talk) 17:20, 22 November 2015 (UTC)
Thanks very much Relentlessly, this is much appreciated by me and the many other users who use peer review. --Tom (LT) (talk) 06:12, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

Is Labs down?

Doesn't matter which browser I use. The tabs are missing things. Under what would normally be Page/History (and other selections), we only get History. You can't find your Userspace at the moment via User/Userspace. — Maile (talk) 16:48, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

toollabs: has lots of tools and many of them are working. Please be more specific if you have problems with one of the tools. The XTools (those starting with tools.wmflabs.org/xtools) have been down a lot the last year and are currently down for me. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:09, 25 November 2015 (UTC)
Well, how about this error message that just came up when on Loyal Valley, Texas, from Page/History, I chose Revision history statistics:

Four hundred and four!

The URI you have requested, /xtools/wikihistory/wh.php?page_title=Loyal_Valley,_Texas, doesn't seem to actually exist. If you have reached this page from somewhere else...

This URI is managed by the xtools tool, maintained by MusikAnimal, APPER, Tparis, Cyberpower678, Tools.xtools-articleinfo, Elee, Technical 13, Lixxx235, Tools.xtools-ec, and Nakon.

Perhaps its files are on vacation, or the link you've followed doesn't actually lead somewhere useful?

You might want to looks at the list of tools to find what you were looking for, or one of the links on the sidebar to the left. If you're pretty sure this shouldn't be an error, you may wish to notify the tool's maintainers (above) about the error and how you ended up here.

Also, I had tried just the usual Page views options earlier, and sometimes it says "connecting" forever without ever doing anything. And once, it actually provided the stats. I think Labs might be working on something. — Maile (talk) 17:47, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

As shown by your quoted text, that is one of the XTools. This page has had lots of discussions about down XTools in the last year. It doesn't imply a general problem at Labs. As mentioned, lots of other tools at Labs are working. Labs is a host for a large number of independent tools, often made by volunteer editors. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:02, 25 November 2015 (UTC)
Maile66, MusikAnimal may have fixed the issue: User_talk:MusikAnimal#Please_kick_the_Xtools_server. --NeilN talk to me 03:38, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

This looks like a good excuse to let people know about Labs labs labs and Beta beta beta. There are a lot of things that are called "Labs" or "Beta". Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:59, 27 November 2015 (UTC)


Autoconfirmed checker?

Is there anything that makes it quick and easy to check whether a user is autoconfirmed, or how close they are to becoming autoconfirmed? Thanks. Samsara 22:22, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

@Samsara: User:PleaseStand/User info 106.0.176.61 (talk) 22:45, 25 November 2015 (UTC)
Thank you. :) Samsara 23:04, 25 November 2015 (UTC)
You can also get info about a user if you have WP:POPUPS enabled and hover over a link to their user or talk pages. Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 15:46, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

Page information

On some pages such as Barbershop 3, the page information shows the wrong number of edits. For that page, it says that there are 146 edits when there are actually only 7. The remaining 139 edits were merged into Barbershop: The Next Cut. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 03:28, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

The page had not been edited since the revisions were merged. A null edit updated the counts at https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Barbershop_3&action=info. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:45, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

File reuploading

When uploading a new version of a file, the edit is not marked as a minor edit, as it is when protecting or moving pages. For example, this edit to File:Saule - Dusty Men (feat. Charlie Winston) official cover.jpg is not marked as a minor edit. Note that this is the opposite of Tryptofish's problem at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 139#Page moves marked as minor edits. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 05:53, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

Sounds about right to me; uploading a new version of a file is a pretty major edit to that file. Why page moves, in particular, are marked as minor is not at all clear to me. — This, that and the other (talk) 09:15, 26 November 2015 (UTC)
GeoffreyT2000, thank you for reminding me of that. I agree that it would be good for the community to reevaluate how certain actions are or are not labeled as minor. I've been busy with other things lately, but I do agree that this ought to be pursued further. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:29, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

Unwatch from watchlist?

Hey folks, is there a way to "un-watch" pages from the watchlist? Seems to me like that would be an exceptionally handy feature, so much so that I'm sure it's been proposed before, but I can't find it. Cheers! Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 15:43, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

Special:EditWatchlist Reedy (talk) 15:44, 26 November 2015 (UTC)
I use WP:POPUPS to do this. -- John of Reading (talk) 16:08, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

@Ivanvector: mw:Snippets/Unwatch from watchlist 106.0.176.61 (talk) 16:32, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

Awesome, thanks! I just recommended popups in a thread above, I don't think I knew it could be used that way. Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 16:39, 26 November 2015 (UTC)
@Ivanvector: I use User:Anomie/unwatch.js for this. It gives you a handy "unw" link on the watchlist itself, next to the "diff" and "hist" links. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 21:55, 26 November 2015 (UTC)
Another Festivus miracle! Thanks, that's perfect. Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 22:27, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

Notification look change

I'm not sure if this is good or other, at this point. But mentioning it. I have Modern skin. That you-can't-miss-it red notifications now just very subtly changes from a white 0 to white numbers when there are notifications. It's so subtle you don't notice it unless you are looking for it. Maybe that's not all bad. It might have something to do with the latest Tech News mention, "Echo notification icons in MonoBook will look more like other icons in the theme." — Maile (talk) 23:52, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

It needs to be a lot brighter. I'm sure there's an WP:ACCESS issue having it so pale. Lugnuts Dick Laurent is dead 13:46, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
I also use Modern skin. I actually acquired five new notifications yesteday at different times without noticing any of them. To me this is bad. I consider my notifications a vital part of my day, since some require response or action, or retaliation. (sigh...this constant tinkering..). Fylbecatulous talk 16:56, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
See WT:Echo#Notification icon colours. The techniques there are only tested in MonoBook, but may work in Modern. --Redrose64 (talk) 00:11, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
Yep, that works. Thanks. Lugnuts Dick Laurent is dead 20:51, 25 November 2015 (UTC)
Thank you all. Yes this works for me with the Modern skin. Excellent. ツ Fylbecatulous talk 12:39, 27 November 2015 (UTC)
The Modern skin is only supported by volunteers. But since there are no volunteers that actually maintain it, in reality, especially when it comes to integrating with other extensions, it's simply not supported. I therefor wouldn't advise anyone to use it. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 13:19, 27 November 2015 (UTC)
I really am not complaining and have given my gratitude for this fix. Some years ago I had LASIK which was a delight, but it did leave me glare sensitive. I have my television brightness and contrast toned way down or I see a haze for hours after viewing. The Modern skin is easiest for my eyes. If it became too quirky or deprecated I would switch. Thanks again. ツ Fylbecatulous talk 22:01, 27 November 2015 (UTC)

When following a section link I am invariably taken well below the target

I've been experiencing this for a few months now. Anytime I follow a link to a section I am taken a ways below it. For example, the third link on this page (currently) is Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 142#Image purge. If I navigate to that link I end up so that the top of my screen is just above the next section header. As far as I know, other than keeping my browser up to date, I have made no changes. No deal breaker but a bit annoying. I use Firefox on a Mac and Monobook. Is it on my end and any ideas?--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 00:12, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

P.S. I thought maybe it was a cache issue, so I dumped everything just now, then logged in and tried the same link – same result. However, I then logged off, dumped everything and tried it without logging in. The issue went away. So I'm guessing it does have something to do with my settings, or my use of Monobook, or some combination of those, plus some change to the software here.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 00:20, 25 November 2015 (UTC)
Known issue with collapsed content and some browsers (Firefox at least). Too lazy to look up the phab ticket. --Izno (talk) 00:59, 25 November 2015 (UTC)
@Fuhghettaboutit: Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_141#Firefox_and_anchors --NeilN talk to me 15:54, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

Arbcom elections

On vote.wikimedia.org, I am attempting to submit different votes, discarding my earlier votes, and being told I need to log in to vote, when this wiki states on the main page that registration is not required and it is only meant for a limited number of accounts. When I go to vote, it says "Welcome, Rubbish computer", so I have no idea whether or not I am logged in. Please advise. Thanks, --Rubbish computer (HALP!: I dropped the bass?) 23:19, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

If it welcomes you by name, you're logged in. The rules say:
An editor is eligible to vote who:
  1. (i) has registered an account before Wednesday 00:00, 28 October 2015
    (ii) has made at least 150 mainspace edits before Sunday 00:00, 1 November 2015 and,
    (iii) is not blocked from the English Wikipedia at the time of their vote.
I'm not sure where you are when it's greeting you by name, but if you're on the voting site for "2015 English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee election", you're on the Wikimedia server. I've never tried changing my vote, so don't know how that works.— Maile (talk) 23:28, 26 November 2015 (UTC)
@Maile66: Okay, thanks. I knew I was eligible when I recieved the Wikimedia message, and my vote is registered from earlier, but I don't know hoe to change it: it says to just fill it out again, which it won't let me do. Thanks, --Rubbish computer (HALP!: I dropped the bass?) 23:33, 26 November 2015 (UTC)
You cannot log in at vote.wikimedia.org but if you are logged in at the English Wikipedia and click a vote button such as the one at Special:SecurePoll/vote/398 then you should be taken to vote.wikimedia.org without being logged in there but in a way where the software knows who you are and lets you vote. Is this not working for you? If so, please be more specific about which page you are on when something goes wrong, and exactly how it goes wrong. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:45, 26 November 2015 (UTC)
Rubbish computer, are you running NoScript or other browser extensions? WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:03, 27 November 2015 (UTC)
@WhatamIdoing: I'm not sure, but I use AWB, if that affects it. I voted on mobile earlier, and tried to revote on my computer. Thanks, Rubbish computer (HALP!: I dropped the bass?) 01:20, 27 November 2015 (UTC)
Please try to describe what actually goes wrong, especially at what point you are told you need to log in. For example: "I reach https://vote.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:SecurePoll/vote/560 which says 'Welcome, Rubbish computer'. I can select radio buttons to vote but when I click 'Submit vote', I'm told I have to be logged in." PrimeHunter (talk) 02:02, 27 November 2015 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter: After I've picked my votes and pressed the "Vote" button: sorry if I was unclear about any of this. Rubbish computer (HALP!: I dropped the bass?) 10:57, 27 November 2015 (UTC)
Someone else has answered this elsewhere, but thanks anyway. Rubbish computer (HALP!: I dropped the bass?) 11:02, 27 November 2015 (UTC)

How to stop automated messages appearing on my talk page?

Is there some code I can put on the page, or something to tick in preferences? --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 05:26, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

Cheers. — Earwig talk 07:24, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

Unable to log in to use AWB

I am currently unable to log in using AWB because it is stated that the acccount "Rubbish computer" already exists. I am using the correct password and I have tried closing and reloading the tab. Please advise. Thanks, --Rubbish computer (HALP!: I dropped the bass?) 13:05, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

It appears to be working when I don't click "Save account", so never mind. --Rubbish computer (HALP!: I dropped the bass?) 15:06, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

Date header

The "November 23" header in Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion is not shown, but the discussions from Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2015 November 23 are shown. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 15:26, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

Fixed with this edit -- John of Reading (talk) 15:51, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

Could we NOINDEX File: namespace pages that have non-free images?

In light of the above discussion about NOINDEX, I'd like to present an idea I've had. Currently, Google Images and other image searches search all images hosted on Wikipedia and create thumbnails for them. This is not always the desired behavior on our part, because we host non-free files as non-free precisely not to make them reusable. Our non-free license templates warn the user that: "Any other uses of this image, on Wikipedia or elsewhere, may be copyright infringement" (emphasis added). While the end user has the ultimate responsibility if they chose to reuse these images outside Wikipedia, we should not promote reuse by letting search engines index our non-free files. It serves neither the copyright holder nor Wikipedia's purposes.

The technical aspect of it is to add the NOINDEX switch to all non-free license templates (similarly to how it's used in sandbox templates; see above discussion). I'm not technical minded enough to understand what the (dis)advantages would be from that point of view, so I'd like the Village pump to consider those first, before we start thinking about if this is a good candidate for a new policy. Some questions that come to my mind are:

  1. There are legitimate reasons for accessing the file page through an external search engine (finding information about why a file is used on Wikipedia; as a principle Wikipedia is mostly open; etc.) and this would be blocked. Then again, some pages are deliberately NOINDEX because of concerns about illegitimate outside use (eg. BLP talk pages)
  2. I don't know how image thumbnails on search engines are indexed. Are they derived from the article pages where the images are displayed or from the image description pages, or both? (From both, according to the previous discussion. Opinions as to whether the user should be pointed to image description page that displays the license, or to the article it's used in (which is the result of NOINDEXING) differed. Finnusertop (talk | guestbook | contribs) 12:21, 23 November 2015 (UTC))
  3. None of us know how search engines' algorithms work, so it's not easy to come up with 'negative' search engine optimization (SEO) to hide our images to the best of our ability. If I google "site:en.wikipedia.org/ +bigcompanyname +logo", I'll find the image I want for my hypothetical illegitimate reuse, but I don't know why it was returned in search results.

My understanding is that this is not implemented already simply because no one ever thought of it, not because it would be a bad idea (policy-wise, usability-wise, technically). Finnusertop (talk | guestbook | contribs) 11:32, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Seems to be totally unnecessary. Google will index any image, presumably under fair use. What they do is up to them. Wikipedia does not have to attempt to control reuse of material, apart from stating that it is not free. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 11:37, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
Thanks for the reply, Graeme Bartlett. To emphasize: I'm not worried about reuse by Google per se (there are court cases that say Google's reuse of images as thumbnails is okay), but of reuse by people who find our hosted non-free images with Google search. "Wikipedia does not have to attempt to control reuse of material", yet for text materials we do. BLP talk pages, drafts and sandboxes are hidden from search engines, even though our license allows the reuse of those materials. As for non-free files, our license does not allow reuse, so I am confused as to why should we make it technically easy. This could also be a legal protection (out of our fair-use claims many are admittedly invalid); compare this with the obvious protection against legal threats concerning libel material that our noindexing of BLP talk pages offers. Finnusertop (talk | guestbook | contribs) 11:50, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
You're overthinking this. People constantly improperly fork and reuse the actual article content here repeatedly and without a thought as to the copyright violation. Images are just another example and not something that requires extra work to protect. Google books has entire "ebooks" that are literally nothing more than improper Wikipedia quoting which makes it a mess to figure out whether a fact is true or not when people go into circular sourcing. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 11:57, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
The difference is that non-free content we host is not "our content" whereas Wikipedia articles are. If someone illegitimately reuses non-free content they got off Wikipedia they are violating the copyright holder's right and we are 'complicit' in that. If someone reuses Wikipedia article text without proper attributing they are breaching the terms of our CC BY-SA 3.0 license, which is not quite the same thing. It's misguided to think that images are not different; they are and that's why we have the non-free content criteria for files that are different from the non-free content criteria in general (text quotations are fair-use, but we deliberately treat them with less scrutiny, see WP:NFC#Text). Finnusertop (talk | guestbook | contribs) 12:21, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

If we take the whole site out of Google, we probably don't have a vandalism problem anymore either ! Google indexing is NOT the way to solve problems. If we are so concerned about Fair use images, we should just totally remove them. It's the only way to actually solve the problem of secondary reuse of non-free content. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 18:09, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

We NOINDEX pages not to prevent their reuse, but to make them less visible. We don't need people being attracted from the outside to "legal threats concerning libel material" (the reason for NOINDEXing the BLP talk pages). If some fair use claim is incorrect, we want the issue noticed and brought to our attention. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 22:29, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
I don't see the problem here. Wikipedia/WMF doesn't pick up liability for copyright infringement by a 3rd party, and has no obligation to take any steps to prevent or limit 3rd parties from infringing copyright, beyond making sure that the copyright status is correctly reflected when the image is viewed on WP itself (i.e. on the image's own page). NOINDEX makes perfect sense for sandbox pages and BLP talk pages, but I strongly oppose any use of it for primary content as being wildly inappropriate and overall harmful. The idea of a non-searchable or less than fully searchable encyclopaedia is frankly laughable, and that includes all images now that the world has image searching technology. --Murph9000 (talk) 10:47, 26 November 2015 (UTC)
Not seeing a problem here either. I also wonder whether the NOINDEXing would also work; policy demands that non-free images be used in articles, so the file would be indexed anyway by way of the article it's posted on. I also fail to see why the lack of reusability is a problem that needs removal from Google's indexes. Google indexes a lot of images that are non-free. And non-free status does not prevent always reuse, too.Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 10:59, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

I support this proposal. NFCC dictates that Wikipedia may only use non-free materials in articles (not disambiguation pages), and only in article namespace, subject to exemptions. There is no exemption for our display of non-free content outside of Wikipedia, hence it is technically in violation based on a broad interpretation of the policy. ViperSnake151  Talk  00:49, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

Re your phrase "our display of non-free content outside of Wikipedia" - there is no such concept. Either we display it - in which case it's not outside of Wikipedia - or somebody else displays it - in which case it's not our display. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:47, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

Section-specific notifications

Does a tool exist that will ping me only when content is added to a particular section of a page? - Dank (push to talk) 13:50, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

I'm not aware of one, but I'd love to be able to do that with some talk pages and noticeboards. The last time I followed it, however, my understanding is that Flow will have this capability built in. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:31, 26 November 2015 (UTC)
Not yet, see phab:T2738. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 13:22, 27 November 2015 (UTC)
Right. I smell two red herrings. First, it's irrelevant how hard it is for a bot to search for "==" on a talk page (although I suspect it's not that hard) ... it would work perfectly fine for my purposes to insert two hidden comments and have a bot check the diff regularly between one comment and the next to see if the diff has changed. Second, I'm not asking for permission. This is a simple task, anyone can code it if they feel like it, and I'm asking if anyone who reads this page feels like doing it. - Dank (push to talk) 16:55, 27 November 2015 (UTC)
P.S. I meant red herrings in the Phab thread, not here :) - Dank (push to talk) 17:16, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

Bot request is at WP:BOTREQ#Pinging when a "task" section is edited. - Dank (push to talk) 17:15, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

Search for "Mm³"

Is there a way to find uses of "Mm³" in the encyclopedia. Note that the "³" is the Unicode character rather than a superscripted "3". I've found some by searching for "mm" and increasing the number of search results to 5000 then using find to look for "Mm³" and paging through the results, but I don't think that gets them all. Thanks,  SchreiberBike | ⌨  03:05, 28 November 2015 (UTC)

Google is quite helpful here. — Earwig talk 07:27, 28 November 2015 (UTC)
Google's 120 results also include finding m<sup>3 (and that's m not mm) at Spremberg Dam, (from an infobox template's MCM).
I think this is just because Google's index hadn't updated since you had changed the page. It no longer appears in the results. Anyway, WP:DUMPS are the way to go (as Johnuniq says) if you want to be completely sure you've caught everything. — Earwig talk 06:50, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
"mm3" gives 140 results. CirrusSearch seems to be ignoring the unicode ³ but it is supposed to be "normalized" to 3, just as the various forms of quotation marks are all normalized to ASCII quotes on our keyboards (T41501). Also, regex are supposed to find exact strings, even with with unicode . So I've opened T119806.
Normally, non-alphanumeric characters are ignored like that, but in this case, they should definitely not be ignored. THis means you'd have to evaluate all "mm" terms. WP:AWB might work for you @SchreiberBike:. — CpiralCpiral 21:14, 28 November 2015 (UTC)
See phab:T95849 106.0.176.61 (talk) 22:14, 28 November 2015 (UTC)
@SchreiberBike: This sort of search can be done using WP:DUMPS. Unfortunately my most recent download is from April 2015 and so is out of date, but I put a list of article titles in my sandbox (permalink). I searched for "mm²" or "mm³" but in retrospect I should have searched for "m²" or "m³" or possibly just any superscripted number. Some caution about correcting would be needed because there might be special cases where substituting html superscript would break the wikitext; example:
  • {{convert|100|m²|abbr=on}} → 100 m2 (1,100 sq ft)
  • {{convert|100|m<sup>2</sup>|abbr=on}} → 100 m2[convert: unknown unit]
Johnuniq (talk) 03:27, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
  • Thanks for all the ideas. I'll start chasing things down today or tomorrow.  SchreiberBike | ⌨  03:02, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

Logging output of Special:PrefIndex

Hi,

is there a tool that I could use to fetch output of Special:PrefIndex query and log it in a text file? I am familiar with pywikibot and I am guessing there will be a way to do this through mediawiki API, but right now I dont know any better way than manual copypasting. Thank you kindly for your advice. --Wesalius (talk) 05:30, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

If you have pywikibot installed and have used it and so are logged in, the following example works:
python ../scripts/listpages.py -family:wikipedia -prefixindex
What page names are you looking for? Shakespeare
There are options to format the results and to write the output to a file, but the above is my first run of a script so I haven't tried them. Johnuniq (talk) 07:06, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
Thank you very very much. This is just great! If you want a nice output, you dont have to bother with the script functions, it is easily obtained with
...listpages.py -prefixindex > file.txt
One more question, do you know if I can somehow filter out redirect pages? I did not find that possibility in the script documentation, but maybe there is a workaround (using a different tool?). Thanks so far! --Wesalius (talk) 07:33, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
Inspecting pagegenerators.py makes it appear that redirects are never included. I also noticed that listpages.py has comments at the top which specify how -format can be used to control how the output appears. Johnuniq (talk) 09:22, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
Well, I used listpages.py to generate this list and it does contain redirects. The special page gives redirects as well, so it makes sense that its output contains them. --Wesalius (talk) 11:19, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
@Wesalius: there is option to hide redirects in Special:Prefixindex, if you missed that ;) Anyway, if you're familiar with SQL, you can use quarry:, there you can filter out redirects. If you're not familiar with SQL, you tell me, what exactly you want to get and I most probably could help you. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 11:38, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
I did not miss that, thank you though :-) What I need is quite simple: All pages at cs.wikisource that start with "Ottův" and are not redirects. Thank you. --Wesalius (talk) 11:46, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
 Done, see here. At the bottom of page, there are pages in other namespaces. In case you need numbers: 56 in non-article namespace, 14064 in article namespace. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 12:42, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
Thank you Edgars2007! Could you please post at some subpage at wikisource the quarry query you used to generate the list, so I can re-run when needed without bothering you? --Wesalius (talk) 12:50, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
 Done. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 13:30, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

How to fix the sitenotice?

I just noticed the big banner for the first time. How does one edit it, or even request edits to it? The banner reads "The Wikipedia Asian Month is ending soon, please report your contributions before it ends." Note the comma splice, which of course is an easy fix for anyone able to edit the notice. I thought perhaps it was MediaWiki:Sitenotice, but that hasn't been used since June. Nyttend (talk) 21:39, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

@Nyttend: mw:Help:CentralNotice 106.0.176.61 (talk) 21:45, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

Where do you post bot source code?

If someone has written a bot to make very useful edits that would come in handy for technologically sophisticated wikipedians, where should he or she post the source code for it? How should he or she licence it so that it cannot be deleted in the future? 81.101.142.111 (talk) 01:45, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

He/She can either choose to host the source code on MediaWiki's Gerrit code review platform, or go with other commercial platforms like GitHub and Bitbucket. There isn't any license that will prevent the software from being deleted, but any OSI-approved license should give the author enough protection against liability, while encouraging collaboration and distribution. It will also allow the software to run on WMF's Tool Labs platform. Zhaofeng Li [talkcontribs] 02:00, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

Side-by-side view image is disappeared for some index file in Wikisource

Sorry if it is invalid place for this.

I posted followed issue in English Wikisource Scriptorium.

There is index file in Ukrainian Wikisources (but it looks like it is common problem). When I trying create / edit any page I do not see page thumbnail. Div that should containing it just empty (I looked code). It's very strange because thumbnail is existing in another tab. I've tried purge according file, purge index, purge page, uploaded updated version of file (with OCR) but div still did not have image. Also I see thumbnails in other indexes. What it could be?

From other user answers we have:

  • it's interlanguage issue (UK/EN Wikisources at least)
  • it's not PDF issue (DjVu also affected)
  • it's not browser/OS issue (there is no image in page HTML code, it's not rendering or client scripts issue)

Next steps? Artem.komisarenko (talk) 08:10, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

I suspect this is partly because the scripting in s:uk:MediaWiki:Common.js. The english wikisource had to do a lot of cleaning up on their scripts lately as well, so it might be that similar problems are hitting uk wikisource. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 09:54, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

Solution found in Scriptorium. Field Scan resolution in edit mode on Index page (edit mode) should be blank, not zero (it's integer field, so users often set in zero). Artem.komisarenko (talk) 11:54, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

{{in title}}: OR not working

The template {{in title}} seems not to be behaving as described in its documentation: "OR" logic is not working. See Template_talk:In_title#OR_malfunctioning.3F. Can anyone shed any light, please? PamD 13:42, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

16:17, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

Citation bot: gauging interest in/prerequisites for the automated citation fixing function

I'm asking for input on whether there's interest in automated citation fixing from Citation bot, and what it would take to get the bot to the place that was possible. Please join in on the Citation bot talk page with opinions or answers, particularly if you might be interested in taking up maintainership. Thank you. --Fhocutt (WMF) (talk) 22:41, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

Hiding multiple revisions at once

How is an administrator able to hide or unhide multiple file revisions at once?[15] I can only figure out how to do them one at a time, or how to undo another administrator's actions. Magog the Ogre (tc) 23:28, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

Have you asked Ronhjones (talk · contribs)? --Redrose64 (talk) 00:47, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
The log summary suggests that he used User:Legoktm/rescaled.js for hiding the revisions. --Stefan2 (talk) 13:44, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
There isn't an interface for it (there probably should be), but you can construct a url to do it if for some reason you really don't want two log entries, or you're writing a script and don't want to go through the API. Handy example: File:BBGM_Logo_2014_rgb.jpg currently has two old revisions. The links to hide them individually are [16] and [17]. To do both at once, combine their ids fields, separated by commas, to get [18]. —Cryptic 17:46, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

Community Wishlist Survey

Hi everyone!

We're beginning the second part of the Community Tech team's Community Wishlist Survey, and we're inviting all active contributors to vote on the proposals that have been submitted.

Thanks to you and other Wikimedia contributors, 111 proposals were submitted to the team. We've split the proposals into categories, and now it's time to vote! You can vote for any proposal listed on the pages, using the {{Support}} tag. Feel free to add comments pro or con, but only support votes will be counted. The voting period will be 2 weeks, ending on December 14.

The proposals with the most support votes will be the team's top priority backlog to investigate and address. Thank you for participating, and we're looking forward to hearing what you think!

/Johan (WMF) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:41, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

Confusing title in patrol log

The page Multiple Treatments was moved to Multiple treatments. When clicking on the review button in the page curation toolbar on the latter page, the patrol log confusingly shows the former page. In general, when a page is created as "A" and was later moved to "B" and then you patrol "B", the patrol log will show page "A". The log should instead show the current title at the time of patrolling, "B". GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 15:37, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

Slow saving edits

Anyone else noted that across the last few hours? Really slow in saving any edits (doesn't matter what size article). Everything else seems to be at normal speed though. Lugnuts Dick Laurent is dead 19:30, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

Have created an updated version of WP:NOTIFS in user-space

Hello all, I have created and edited an updated version of the WP:NOTIFS page to reflect the change to a two-alerts system (I don't know what the technical name is). I am curious to see if I have missed anything that needs updating, and if the page is ready to replace the current WP:NOTIFS article. Here's the link: User:Drcrazy102/sandbox/Update to WP:Notifications. Cheers, Drcrazy102 (talk) 07:52, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

I would pay less attention to "the history of notifications" and "it replaced...". Things like that can be very confusing and should probably be split into a /history page. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 10:00, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
Hey TheDJ, Quiddity (WMF) did a tune-up of the article. Just want to check if that has fixed your concerns or if more tweaks are needed. Still seeking some more eyes on the page to have a fine-tooth review. Cheers, Drcrazy102 (talk) 10:47, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

Interlanguage links

Is there an easy way to find/generate a list of articles that don't have any interlanguage links in the left hand column? ~ ONUnicorn(Talk|Contribs)problem solving 15:47, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

As in, don't have a Wikidata item/not assigned to a Wikidata item, or as in, don't have any other links at the item to which they are assigned? The former is Special:UnconnectedPages and the latter is Special:WithoutInterwiki. --Izno (talk) 15:57, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
Unconnected pages is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you very much! ~ ONUnicorn(Talk|Contribs)problem solving 16:06, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
Not exact, but roughly
insource:/\[\[[^:wW1-9].:|\[\[wa:|\[\[wo:/ prefix:MATH are the MATH's that have two-letter links.
-insource:/\[\[[^:wW1-9].:|\[\[wa:|\[\[wo:/ prefix:MATH are the MATH's that do not.
The regexp takes heed of unwanted [[wp: and [[:s and links to numbers.
It misses the three-or-more wp:interlanguage link names, but using the pattern there for wa and wo any such list could become exact, and a maintained search link if needed.
I only used prefix to limit the search domain here. — CpiralCpiral 23:08, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

Investigating main/sub-article relationship

Dear Wikipedians,

I am a computer science PhD student at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. We are working on a project focusing on understanding and identifying the main article and sub article relationship in a purpose of better serving the Wikipedia article structure. You can find the detail of the project description here. We invite you to go to that page and review our questions. If you are interested in this question and want to know the results, please don't hesitate to take the survey (link in the previous page) and sign up the watch list as we will post our results to that Meta page. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cheetah90 (talkcontribs) 17:07, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

After a 2-year hiatus, edits have resumed from this IP, and it was reported to WP:AIV. I see User:127.0.0.1, which says "It generally cannot be used by normal users." Anyone know what's happening? Best, SpencerT♦C 00:47, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

User:Reaper Eternal seems to have already (has recently) blocked the User:127.0.0.1 on WP:AIV. 67.189.126.119 (talk) 00:52, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
It's a server misconfiguration. Edits are being attributed to the loopback address. I've softblocked the IP to stop the ridiculous amount of vandalism (i.e. registered users it's affecting will still be able to edit, but the vandals won't). Anybody can unblock it once the misconfiguration is corrected. Cheers! Reaper Eternal (talk) 00:55, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
The server misconfiguration is corrected, this shouldn't be happening anymore. Sorry! BBlack (WMF) (talk) 00:59, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
No testing in prod! </joke> So what was the issue? Free Bullets (talk) 01:02, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
This gerrit commit changed one of the addresses in our internal X-Forwarded-For headers from a WMF-internal 10.0.0.0/8 IP to 127.0.0.1, and somehow this broke MediaWiki's parsing of the header and it decided that 127.0.0.1 was the client IP rather than digging further through the list like it usually would. BBlack (WMF) (talk) 01:07, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

API query blank when it shouldn't be

Can anyone explain to me why when I query the API for the categories of Talk:Barney L. Elias House, it comes up empty? Like it finds the page ID and everything, but it does not include any categories despite the fact that the page is clearly categorized. Is this some kind of bug, or am I doing something wrong? Compare to the query for Talk:Threefoot Building here, which does show categories as expected.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 02:39, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

I made a null edit of Talk:Barney L. Elias House and the query showed the categories a minute later, but not a few seconds later. PrimeHunter (talk) 03:21, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
For the record, this is how the query page looked before::
-<api batchcomplete="">
  -<query>
    -<pages>
       <page _idx="48534455" pageid="48534455" ns="1" title="Talk:Barney L. Elias House"/>
     </pages>
   </query>
   <limits categories="5000"/>
 </api>
PrimeHunter (talk) 03:25, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
Sounds like Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 141#Category membership issues. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:19, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

Donation message disappears when logged in

Why does the donation message disappear when logged in, on Firefox 42.0, but this probably happens on other browsers. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mocker7guy (talkcontribs) 15:50, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

Go to Preferences -> Gadgets and untick "Suppress display of fundraiser banners" and it should show up again. Sarah-Jane (talk) 15:53, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

Hi @Mocker7guy: This is a deliberate decision: we know that many of the people with accounts are generously giving their time by editing, which is at least as valuable as monetary donations! And a secondary reason is that it saves us a lot of hassle testing the banners with all the different skins and gadgets available to logged in users. If you do still wish to donate money, you can always click the "Donate to Wikipedia" link in the sidebar, or visit https://donate.wikimedia.org. Thanks! Peter Coombe (Wikimedia Foundation) (talk) 16:17, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

Problem with the page subpage counter

Noticed this one a while ago; sometimes the ?action=info page doesn't count the number of subpages correctly. For example, counts 14 subpages but the list has only 13.Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 17:42, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

User:Jo-Jo Eumerus/Cerro Guacha and User:Jo-Jo Eumerus/Cerro Chascon-Runtu Jarita complex were deleted three days ago. Maybe one of them is still counted. See the similar Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 141#Category membership issues. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:33, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

Editing comment text accompanying uploaded image files

I've been a Wikipedia editor for nearly 12 years and can get around pretty comfortably. Yet aspects of image uploads still have me stymied. I accidentally pasted some raw Wiki markup into the Comment field when uploading a new image. When I saw the result, I realized I had made a mistake. The markup was still markup, and had not, in that place, been rendered properly. Thinking that, as with most other Wikipedia edits, I could just go in and fix my mistake, I attempted that, and found out I was wrong! What I had intended to place in that Comment field was what an uploader of a similar image had put there, "fair use reduce". So how does this get fixed? The image page is: File:City-of-bothell-new-logo.photograph2.jpg I want to do the right thing, yet here I find my hands are tied. Any help appreciated. --Alan W (talk) 04:24, 27 November 2015 (UTC)

The "fair use reduce" is a template that tags an image for a bot or admin to reduce the image size to make it meet non-free image use requirements. As it is a template, it has to be enclosed in double curly braces like: {{ }} . I have got ahead and done this for you on that image. --MASEM (t) 05:16, 27 November 2015 (UTC)
OK, thanks. I guess the user who uploaded the previous version of this logo image didn't know about the curly braces, and I assumed, when I should not have, that it was done correctly and I could just follow that example. I was not aware that the image size needed to be reduced further, either. (I knew it would automatically be reduced when fitted into the infobox where it is being used, but I guess that is considered not enough.) As others have no doubt said, uploading images to Wikipedia is still much too convoluted and confusing a process for most Wikipedians. I have something of a technical background, and my head is still spinning from all this. Anyhow, this situation is not your fault, and I appreciate the help. --Alan W (talk) 06:39, 27 November 2015 (UTC)
@Alan W: When you don't use the File Upload Wizard, and you are the first person to upload an image under a particular name, as you were with File:City-of-bothell-new-logo.photograph2.jpg, the comment in the upload log and the edit summary in the page history are both set to the first 255 bytes of the wikitext for the file description page. In those entries, only Wikilinks are expanded, the rest appears as raw markup - this has been the case for many years, and it can't be altered. If you try to "fix" it by altering the wikitext, as you did here, all you do is alter the appearance of the file description page - log entries cannot be amended. But if your intention was to upload an image and immediately add {{non-free reduce}} to it, why not simply reduce the resolution yourself before uploading? There are several programs/applications/packages which will do this. Reduce it on your computer to whatever size is necessary, then upload that in the normal way. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:10, 27 November 2015 (UTC)
With the usual 20/20 hindsight, I see that I should have used the File Upload Wizard. I was thrown off by thinking that I would not need that as I am an "experienced user". What I didn't consider is that when it comes to uploading image files, I am really not such an experienced user. :-) As for reducing the image size myself, I could have done that with tools I already possess and can use; but, as I said to Masem above I didn't think it necessary, as I knew the size would be reduced on the page I intended to use the image on, automatically, to be squeezed into the Infobox. Anyway, all's well that ends well, and I appreciate all the feedback and assistance by you and Masem, RedRose64. I still say, though, that—not criticizing anyone in particular—uploading images on Wikipedia is much too hard for an "encyclopedia that anyone can edit". You have to be a combination graphic artist, lawyer, and computer programmer, and even then you could miss some requirement or unexpected behavior. --Alan W (talk) 19:11, 27 November 2015 (UTC)
You have to be a combination graphic artist, lawyer, and computer programmer is probably the best description of the file upload situation that I've yet seen. Thanks, I may quote you on that in the future.  — Scott talk 11:22, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

User:Renamed user ea641...

Who or what is "User:Renamed user ea6416fc"? And why can someone hide after f*king me around? -DePiep (talk) 01:49, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

It's poor form to ask a question you know the answer to. --Floquenbeam (talk) 02:29, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
BF. -DePiep (talk) 18:20, 3 December 2015 (UTC) Care to explain your "BF" shorthand? My urban dictionary suggests some interpretations may not be very kind. If you intended an unkind meaning, perhaps you should strike or replace it in the interests of promoting a more collegial editing environment; if you do, please feel free to remove this comment afterward. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 21:17, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
DePiep It's not too hard to see who it is, but I don't see any interaction between you and they in December at all, so you'll want to explain what you mean . KoshVorlon 16:59, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
I know who it was too, and that user didn't interact with anybody in December - but we shouldn't speculate upon who they were, what they did, or why. See WP:RTV. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:35, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
Then their name would be "Vanished user ###### " :) KoshVorlon 21:39, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
This should not be a right to vanish case, since it was under a bit of a cloud. Perhaps that is why the user name is not "vanished user...". I think everyone has the right to stop editing though. So @DePiep:, is there any template mess that still needs cleaning up? Graeme Bartlett (talk) 11:50, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
By what policy then did this happen? Especially, how can the former name be found but are people here secretive about that? (and er, writing 'I don't see any interaction ...in December at all' on December 2nd is funny, sort of). -DePiep (talk) 18:20, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
The person concerned has made no edits since 19 November 2015, and certainly none on 2 December 2015. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:50, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

DePiep, is there a semi-valid reason why you are pursuing this? If you click on the original user name, it takes you to a page that shows the time and date of the user's renaming. There are no "secrets" here, the renaming was properly requested and executed, and there are no issues of which I am aware. The user decided to request an account renaming and then called it a day. I suggest that you respect that. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 21:17, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

Image links to open directly on Commons

Hey. Is there a way to do this? For instance, if I click on an image, instead of taking me to the enwiki dummy image page (which is technically non-existant), is there a setting which would take me directly to the Commons file page instead? Thanks, Rehman 23:45, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

Number of displayed revisions resets to 50

[19] shows 500 revisions. When setting the month and year to November 2015 and clicking the go botton, the resulting page [20] resets the number of displayed revisions to the default 50. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 03:13, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

You get 500 because it was specifically selected – either by pressing the 500 button or by the URL. When you change a selection it should reset to your default. What setting do you have in the "Number of edits to show..." field of the Recent Changes tab of your preferences? Prodego talk 03:18, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
It is 50. Clicking the go button should preserve the number of displayed revisions rather than resetting it to 50 or whatever number you have in your preferences. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 03:32, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
The current behavior is the intended behavior. The number of revisions to be displayed is set on the output of the search, and isn't a property of the search itself. You may wish to add a feature request to MediaWiki (the software behind Wikipedia) to change this behavior. You can do that at [21]. Prodego talk 03:45, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
This problem also occurs with logs, but not with user contributions. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 15:34, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

Last section on Users Talk Page will not allow properly rendered new sections below it

Unable to add a properly rendered new section to this User talk page. Any new sections added below this section render as plain text, and this section becomes plain text too. Even the signatures revert back to tildes, replies do not work, nor do pings go out with replies. See the bottom of the section for some recent action. This has been going on for 2 days now. Ping me back. Cheers! {{u|Checkingfax}} {Talk} 09:29, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

@Checkingfax: There was a stray <nowiki>, which disabled the formatting of everything that followed. I've fixed that and tried to tidy up. -- John of Reading (talk) 09:51, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
John of Reading, thanks. Those nowiki's are slippery, hard to spot, and dangerous! Good job. Cheers! {{u|Checkingfax}} {Talk} 10:24, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
Preferences → Gadgets → Editing → Syntax highlighterCpiralCpiral 08:49, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

There is something wrong with Draft:Daniel Clitnovici and the way that it interacts with the Articles for Creation Help Script. The subject does not meet association football notability guidelines because he has not played in a fully professional league, and is an assistant coach, not a head coach, in a fully professional league. However, if I try to decline it, the decline process hangs. It says DECLINING and then locks up. I have tried doing the decline at least three times using Google Chrome and once using Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer says that Wikipedia is not responding due to a long-running script, and asks if it should stop the script. Stopping the script leaves the page unchanged. I also tried Commenting using the AFCH script, which also hangs. There may be something peculiar about the history of the page, with references to previous OTRS tickets. Can someone please look at why this page hangs when being declined? Robert McClenon (talk) 17:54, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

To answer the above, what I was expecting was for the draft to go into a declined status. What happens is that it stays in a pending status. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:54, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

Being dealt with at PAFC Helper Script help page. Problem with specific page, which was bad punctuation, dealt with. Have requested to have script corrected so that missing end brace doesn't hang script. Robert McClenon (talk) 18:12, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

Files not shown

Information icon4.svg
File:Information icon4.svg

On some pages such as Template:ANI-notice, some files are not shown. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 03:58, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

Which files? I don't see any problems there. Try to clear your cache. PrimeHunter (talk) 04:06, 4 December 2015 (UTC)
Specifically, the two instances of File:Information icon4.svg, one that is included in substitution, and the other in {{Subst only}} in {{Documentation}}. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 04:09, 4 December 2015 (UTC)
commons:File:Information icon4.svg is a redirect to commons:File:Information icon4.svg. I see the image both times at Template:ANI-notice. I wonder whether something prevents Commons redirects from working for you. I see the image for both names to the right. What do you see? PrimeHunter (talk) 04:30, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

Aleigha Paige Dry

The page Aleigha Paige Dry was patrolled and marked for speedy deletion by Σ, but has an empty deletion log because perhaps it might have been oversighted. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 04:03, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

Yes, there is some oversight going on. I don't know whether it's normal to have no deletion log. I'm an admin but not an oversighter. PrimeHunter (talk) 04:15, 4 December 2015 (UTC)
It doesn't happen often that a deleted page has no deletion log, but I've encountered it before. I don't think the suppression would've had anything to do with it. Graham87 07:02, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Article request workshop, a page which created or substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; you may participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Article request workshop and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of Wikipedia:Article request workshop during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. Alsee (talk) 11:36, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

What the hell?? How did this get posted HERE? I used Twinkle to nominate an abandoned and improperly created Flow page for deletion. Did Village_Pump_(technical) somehow get listed as the page creator? Alsee (talk) 23:31, 2 December 2015 (UTC)
It must be because User talk:Flow talk page manager redirects here. The three Twinkle edits are here. Wikipedia talk:Twinkle/Archive 34#Future of Twinkle indicates Twinkle isn't expected to work with Flow. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:33, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
You're probably right about the redirect. But I'm not sure how you concluded from that discussion that Twinkle isn't expected to work with Flow. What we were saying is that Twinkle will be able to handle Flow boards at such time as they become more widespread. Flow boards require slightly different methods of interaction via the MediaWiki API, as it does not make sense to, say, fetch or edit the content of an entire Flow board. At this time I'm not inclined to make any changes to Twinkle, given that we only have 6 Flow boards on this site at the moment, but it can be done down the line if needed. — This, that and the other (talk) 10:08, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
I meant it isn't expected to be working now, so it shouldn't surprise if issues arise when trying to use Twinkle on a Flow page now. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:24, 3 December 2015 (UTC)
This, that said: we only have 6 Flow boards. I could only come up with five, one of which is gone and three are being discussed for removal. Did I miss any?
  1. Wikipedia_Talk:WikiProject_Hampshire - No posts in over a month, and no Hampshire activity in over 3 months.
  2. Wikipedia_Talk:WikiProject_Breakfast - No Breakfast activity in fourteen months. RFC in progress to end trial.
  3. Wikipedia:Article request workshop - Abandoned after three days. Miscellany For Deletion in progress.
  4. Wikipedia_Talk:Article request workshop - Paired with above.
  5. Wikipedia_Talk:Flow/Developer_test_page - Gone. I think it was lost and never restored when admin tools were tested on it. Alsee (talk) 13:21, 5 December 2015 (UTC)
The full list based on database:

Bigger font-size in search box

Could somebody give me CSS rules to get bigger font-size in search box for Monobook skin? Font-size in general is fine, but in search box I would like to have it bigger. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 13:29, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

#searchInput {font-size:110%;} seems to work. Since the width of the search box is in em by default, and thus dependent on the font size, you may want to set the width: property too. SiBr4 (talk) 13:41, 4 December 2015 (UTC)
Thanks! --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 13:55, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

Why the thumb and preview of this image is very broken?

Link: File:2015 San Bernardino shooting map location of mass shooting.png and check the right thumb. Notice the weird space on the right (and the aspect ratio of the image is also messed up because of that). The original image doesn't have this problem --fireattack (talk) 11:07, 5 December 2015 (UTC)

An old version of the image is stuck in the cache. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 11:15, 5 December 2015 (UTC)

Edit filter problem

I have been seeing edits tagged with "speedy deletion template removed" where the speedy deletion template has not, in fact, been removed. I note this edit in particular (which may well be lost by the time anyone reads this as the article will not last long). This appears to be a bug in the edit filter functionality. WikiDan61ChatMe!ReadMe!! 15:08, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

This is strange. The filter (firstly) checks that in removed_lines - that is the yellow highlighted area - there is a speedy deletion template, and it shouldn't tag if there isn't, but in this and a couple of other examples I found it's tagged. This implies a bug in the extension to me, but I don't know what would have caused it. I could be reading things wrong though. Pinging @MusikAnimal and Dragons flight: who might have a better answer. Sam Walton (talk) 15:24, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
Well, what's really weird is Axmedclahi tripped the filter here, yet using batch testing nothing shows up when I run the filter against that user MusikAnimal talk 15:35, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
Special:AbuseLog/13857578 and Special:AbuseLog/13857437 shows the edit filter worked on a wrong diff. It was VE edits so looks like cases of phab:T73947. Another thing: Doruk bor was deleted but the edit filter log can still display the deleted wikitext to non-admins. Has this been discussed? PrimeHunter (talk) 17:54, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
The visible edit filter log for deleted pages is phab:T44734. I'm surprised this has been known for three years with no work to change it. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:14, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
Ah, great find. It's a shame this has been known about for so long, I'm wishing I managed to get the AbuseFilter into the community wishlist survey now... Sam Walton (talk) 19:59, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
An other example, verifyable by any admin: this diff doesn't have the speedy tag removed; it was tagged as such anyway. The edit filter log for the edit shows the removal of the speedy tag. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 17:59, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

Media player not loading properly

I'm not really sure why, but the media player to play song clip is not loading properly in some pages, for example Alejandro (song), but works in other pages. I've tried it in different browsers, and they appear to behave differently - in Chrome, the player does not appear at first go, but appears when the page is refreshed (or when you return to the page later), in IE it does not appear even when refreshed, but it works right away in Firefox. In Chrome (but not IE or Firefox) it also appears to affect the collapsible function in a table, for example at You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' (that fault only appears after the sound clip was added), but appears fine when refreshed. Hzh (talk) 15:22, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

@Hzh: I tried with Alejandro (song) and it works with Firefox 42 on Linux. Are there any error messages in the "Console" of your browser's developer tools? --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 12:07, 4 December 2015 (UTC)
@AKlapper (WMF): Yes, Chrome in Windows gives an error message - "Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'insertRule' of undefined", it goes away when the page is refreshed and the player loads properly. On IE, it does not give an error message, but has three warnings - 2 "Unmatched end tag", and "visited and :link styles can only differ by colour. Some styles were not applied to :visited." I don't have problem on Firefox either, only on Chrome and IE (IE appears to be worse because the problem does not go away when refreshed - it gives an extra message "The code on this page disabled back and forward caching"). Hzh (talk) 13:26, 4 December 2015 (UTC)
@Hzh: Once the software fix for the bug report in phab:T118792 has been merged into the code base and deployed on Wikimedia servers, this problem should be gone. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 19:40, 4 December 2015 (UTC)
Excellent! thank you. Hzh (talk) 20:07, 4 December 2015 (UTC)
Seems to be working only intermittently. Hzh (talk) 12:10, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

I made a proposal in the WMF's 2015 Community Wishlist Survey for more information on the sign-up page - see "Tell prospective users what Wikipedia is not for" near the bottom of this page. One commenter said that this requires no development because the facility to add a message is already available at the page MediaWiki:Signupstart which can be edited by any admin.

The page does not seem ever to have had any content, I have not dared to experiment, and clearly an RFC would be necessary to decide what message if any to add, but can anyone confirm that this page would do the proposed job? Would content placed there appear only on the en:wp sign-up page? If so, I will withdraw the proposal from the WMF's list. JohnCD (talk) 22:49, 5 December 2015 (UTC)

?uselang=qqx or &uselang=qqx (when there already is a ?) in a url shows the used MediaWiki messages and their placement. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:UserLogin&returnto=Main+Page&type=signup&uselang=qqx says "(signupstart)" below the main heading. This confirms that MediaWiki:signupstart is displayed there. It's hard to determine whether it's displayed elsewhere but considering the name, I assume it's only used there. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:08, 6 December 2015 (UTC)
I guess you meant whether the page is used outside the English Wikipedia. No it's not. Each MediaWiki wiki has its own pages in the MediaWiki namespace and only uses those in the interface. If they don't have a given page then a default in the MediaWiki software is displayed. This MediaWiki default cannot be set at the English Wikipedia. We can only replace it locally. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:31, 6 December 2015 (UTC)
So (to make sure I have got this right) anything added to MediaWiki:Signupstart would appear on the sign-on page that a not-logged-in user of en:wp sees after clicking "Create account"? JohnCD (talk) 11:28, 6 December 2015 (UTC)
It's true. However, I would advise you to take heed of the comments left by the oppose voters at the Meta poll. Any negatively-toned message is likely to discourage many bona fide individuals from creating an account, even if the message is not specifically directed at them. After all, it's hardly very welcoming to say "Hello! If you are X, Y, Z, or ABC, we don't want you here". I would advise you to read through outreach:Account Creation Improvement Project and its associated pages before proposing any changes to the account creation screen. — This, that and the other (talk) 11:38, 6 December 2015 (UTC)
Thanks. I have asked for the proposal to be withdrawn from the wishlist survey, as it is not something that is competing for development resources. Any use of the page would certainly need considerable discussion and an RfC, but I think it should be possible to devise wording which is welcoming to people interested in contributing to an encyclopedia, while saving wasted time and embarrassment for those who thought Wikipedia was another social-networking site or a place to advertise. JohnCD (talk) 14:53, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

Case sensitivity of "linksto:"

The "linksto" keyword in searches does not work when there is a lowercase letter after the colon. For example, Special:Search/linksto:mathematics does not return any result. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 00:20, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

@GeoffreyT2000: Could you (in general) please explicitly describe why you brought this up? Do you implicitly consider this wrong behavior? Do you implicitly ask for a hint how you can fix the code? Currently unclear... --Malyacko (talk) 12:02, 6 December 2015 (UTC)
It really should, to be standard; hastemplate is standard in the usual way of ignoring the first letter, but not linksto. Ya gotta get capitalization exactly as the title line except when the first letter is lowercase. linksto:IPad. It also should report redirects like WhatLinksHere, but no, only wikilinks, and so only to that page title given, not to the content itself.— CpiralCpiral 12:50, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

Emojis not showing up in edit bar

Used to have an emoji console in the edit bar, but that's gone now. Any idea what happened to foul the following script?

// sMirC Emoticons-bar for the WikiEditor
mw.loader.load('//meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Perhelion/WikiEditorEmoticons.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript&maxage=86400&smaxage=86400&bcache=1');

Atsme📞📧 17:42, 29 November 2015 (UTC)

Why on earth would you want to use such silly things on Wikipedia? See WP:NOTSOCIAL. -- Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 18:51, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
Emojis are a universal language. Atsme📞📧 20:18, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
As it's meta:User:Perhelion/WikiEditorEmoticons.js, have you asked Perhelion (talk · contribs)? --Redrose64 (talk) 23:14, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
Redrose64, after a quick review of their UP and TP, they don't appear to be active. I vaguely remember something about a small group of techs getting angry about something, and they may have reacted by disabling scripts they've written. Not sure but was hoping someone else might know. Atsme📞📧 00:57, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
Their last edit was eight days ago, but I wouldn't say they were inactive as such. The "small group of techs getting angry" presumably refers to some writers of user scripts refusing to port their scripts to Labs (following the loss of Toolserver), either because it was too difficult, or they objected to the requirement for open source. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:53, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
Hello and thanks for ping. I can't see any malfunction, I see only you have removed this script local on 28 Nov, so I guess you have some script-blocker or you have high security-settings.[22]
@Dodger67 this is a very bad argument, alone that the substantial examples on MetaWiki are smilie buttons (from the techs himself).
Have a good start into the weekUser: Perhelion 13:29, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
Redrose64, thank you for the update and for pinging. I'm relieved to know you're still active, Perhelion. I am one of many editors who sincerely appreciate what techs contribute to this project, and extend a sincere thank you for all you do! I removed the script a few days ago but put it back today. I initially removed it because it has not worked in Safari for quite some time. I'm a Mac user (El Capitan) and my primary browser is Safari 9.0.1 but I also use FireFox, Chrome and Maxthon on occasion. The script runs ok in Firefox and Chrome but it doesn't work in Safari or Maxthon. Any idea on what settings in Safari might be blocking the script and are they changeable? Atsme📞📧 15:46, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
"SyntaxError: Unexpected keyword 'const'. Const declarations are not supported in strict mode." I get an error as well. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 16:22, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
 Done Oh* removed, thanks! ●^_^●User: Perhelion  01:48, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
@Perhelion: see your TP. Atsme📞📧 15:36, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

sfn and AV media?

I hope this is a "just works" answer, but I'm editing offline so I don't know... I'm quoting an interview published as a podcast. I use it throughout the text, so I would like to use sfn to refer to it. How do I do this and point to minutes/seconds? And do I need a first/last in order to get a HARV with a name? The template page suggests using people= so I did that. Maury Markowitz (talk) 20:30, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

For citing a podcast, there is {{cite podcast}}. To refer to a particular time perhaps use {{sfn|Last|loc=0:15}}[1]

References

  1. ^ Last, 0:15.
  • {{cite podcast |last=Last |first=First |title=Title |url=//example.com |ref=harv}}
    • Last, First. "Title" (Podcast). {{cite podcast}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
Trappist the monk (talk) 20:54, 4 December 2015 (UTC)
If you don't have a suitable Last, you can use {{sfn|Title|Year|loc=min:sec}} and in the {{cite podcast}} make sure that you have a matching |ref={{sfnref|Title|Year}}. --Redrose64 (talk) 00:51, 5 December 2015 (UTC)
Most useful everyone. BTW RR, is that "4=" a typo? Maury Markowitz (talk) 22:13, 6 December 2015 (UTC)
No, it's there because {{tlx}} takes only positional parameters and I needed the loc=min:sec to be visible. If the 4= is omitted, it looks like this: {{sfn|Title|Year}} --Redrose64 (talk) 00:31, 7 December 2015 (UTC)
See also the first bullet at Help:Template#Usage hints and workarounds. {{tlx|sfn|Title|Year|loc{{=}}min:sec}} would also have worked: {{sfn|Title|Year|loc=min:sec}}. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:40, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

Image thumbnail not purging

Default size thumbnail (220px unless you changed the preference)
219px thumbnail

I updated commons:File:Top Oil Producing Countries.png and List of countries by oil production and my browser cache, but the article is still displaying the old version of the image thumbnail. Many thanks if someone can force it to update promptly? —Patrug (talk) 01:12, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

Lately there have been several reports of thumbnails not updating when a new version is uploaded, and none of the methods at commons:Help:Purge work. The only working method I know for an article is to force another size which isn't already cached, but this breaks user ability to choose thumbnail size at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering. It seems to usually update within a few days so don't force a size unless it's important. If you do force a size then please check for an update of the default size and change it back then. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:33, 6 December 2015 (UTC)
Thanks for the quick advice. From a Help search, I see that variations of this problem have been plaguing WP for years, not just lately. Seems nobody has come up with a good way to improve the system? —Patrug (talk) 01:47, 6 December 2015 (UTC)
The reports have been more frequent lately. The thumbnail discussed here was updated within the last 10 hours. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:45, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

"No wiki" formatting in {{citation}} paramaters causing CS1 error

Does anyone have a workaround for this? I'm using the quote parameter in a citation template for a quote that contains a URL. I don't want to link to the URL, so I'm using the no wiki formatting (i.e. <nowiki></nowiki>). However, doing so causes a CS1 error. Below are examples.

Without the no wiki formatting:

"Uniform Resource Locator", Wikipedia, 17 November 2015, retrieved 7 December 2015, A typical URL could have the form http://www.example.com/index.html, which indicates a protocol (http), a hostname (www.example.com), and a file name (index.html). {{citation}}: External link in |quote= (help)

With the no wiki formatting:

"Uniform Resource Locator", Wikipedia, 17 November 2015, retrieved 7 December 2015, A typical URL could have the form http://www.example.com/index.html, which indicates a protocol (http), a hostname (www.example.com), and a file name (index.html).

– Zntrip 01:50, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

The general issue is discussed at Help talk:Citation Style 1/Archive 10#Null character error message appearing in citations. Your case could for example replace the colon by {{colon}} to avoid producing a link. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:00, 7 December 2015 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter: {{Colon}} is a good workaround while the error messages are worked out. Many thanks! – Zntrip 02:12, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

Image purge is really slow

I see at least one other report here in regards to the slow purge ("Image thumbnail not purging"). And on New Zealand flag debate I've counted at least 4+ hours since the New Zealand flag was vandalised (one of the two image versions are correct). Currently these are different: 164px-Flag_of_New_Zealand.svg.png vs 164px-Flag_of_New_Zealand.svg.png?action=purge. Why doesn't ?action=purge immediately purge the vandalised version? +mt 06:21, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

Because there is a very complicated system behind ever single image view, and something in that system is currently broken and no one truly understands how and why. It's proving to be very frustrating for the engineers. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 09:03, 7 December 2015 (UTC)
@TheDJ: Is there a Phabricator task tracking this? — This, that and the other (talk) 23:35, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

17:53, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

Need regex help for a search

Can someone write me a regex (or something) to find all instances of [[Imaj: at the Haitian Wikipedia? They all need to be changed to the actual name for the File: namespace (or to "File:", since English wikicode works in all languages), and searching insource:imaj gives me too many false positives (almost 2,000 too many ;-). WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:02, 5 December 2015 (UTC)

I searched a dump of the htwiki articles. See my sandbox (permalink). It would be interesting to compare that with the results of doing a wiki search. The dump will not include any changes in the last week. Johnuniq (talk) 07:39, 5 December 2015 (UTC)
Regex: insource:/\[\[imaj\:/i, which currently gives 1428 results. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 09:01, 5 December 2015 (UTC)
I shouldn't be surprised, but that search gives an excellent agreement with the search of the dump. I put a note about the differences at the top of my sandbox. Johnuniq (talk) 09:42, 5 December 2015 (UTC)
Answer to your question in sandbox is yes - WhatamIdoing fixed. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 10:26, 5 December 2015 (UTC)
Right, and you can also escape single characters using backslashes, and you can escape strings with double-quotes delimiters. For a basic, exact-string search, quoting can't hurt. See mw:Help:CirrusSearch#MetacharactersCpiralCpiral 20:13, 5 December 2015 (UTC)
Those false-positives are your friends. insource:"[[imag:" insource:/"[[Imag:"/. A bare regexp, unaccompanied by any other search term, would otherwise crawl every page, and would not be an indexed-search at all.— CpiralCpiral 20:13, 5 December 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, all. I appreciate it. It appears that disabling "Imaj:" might have been an accident. It's being discussed at phab:T120702. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:44, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

HELP - Code for 4-images (1tall/3short) in 2-Columns?

IF Possible - would like help in presenting 4-images: 1 very tall vertical image in vertical column-1 and 3 related short images in an associated vertical column-2.

Seems the following "Template:Multiple image" code (see below) doesn't seem to work with vertical columns? - seems there's no "|percol= " option? - but maybe some other workaround? (nonetheless, horizontal rows seem to work ok - see example at => "Aromatum Chaos#Gallery") - my best efforts with this so far is at the following => "Sputnik Planum#Gallery" - in any case - Thanking you in advance for help with this - and - Enjoy! :) Drbogdan (talk) 21:48, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

{{multiple image |perrow= |caption_align=center |align=left |width=200 |direction=vertical
|image1=PIA20201-Pluto-ManyDifferentTerrains-20150714.jpg
|caption1=test1
|width1=
|image2=PIA20200-Pluto-BurneyBasin-CratersPlains-20150714.jpg
|caption2=test2
|width2=
|image3=PIA20199-Pluto-Mountains-NearSputnikPlanum-20150714.jpg
|caption3=test3
|width3=
|image4=PIA20198-Pluto-SputnikPlanum-Mountains-20150714.jpg
|caption4=test4
|width4=
}}
Per WP:MULTI, please discuss at Template talk:Multiple image/Archive 2#HELP - Code for 4-images (1tall/3short) in 2-Columns? --Redrose64 (talk) 00:27, 7 December 2015 (UTC)
@Redrose64: Thank you for your comment - and suggestion - yes - *entirely* agree - Thanks again - and - Enjoy! :) Drbogdan (talk) 01:45, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

Blank edit summary prompt

I have always had "Prompt me when entering a blank edit summary" checked in Preferences - but this does not work when reverting more than one edit - e.g. comparing and undoing the last three edits from the page history. I am sure it used to work - can this be reinstated? (Win 7, IE11, Vector, without AWB or other tools)- Arjayay (talk) 09:10, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

What function buttons do you use to trigger it ? —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 12:15, 7 December 2015 (UTC)
I select the version immediately before the suspect edits, and the revision of the last suspect edit, typically 3 or 4 revisions, from the article history. I click "Compare selected revisions", check that the revisions were vandalism, and click undo. If I accidentally do not enter an edit summary at that point, it will save the edit without a prompt. I checked this out at User:Arjayay/sandbox before starting this post, to make sure I was not mistaken. - Arjayay (talk) 14:02, 7 December 2015 (UTC)
If you undo revisions, a copy of what revisions are being undone is placed in the edit summary box -- thus, the box is thus not empty/blank, and thus the "blank edit summary" check will not trigger. -- 143.85.169.19 (talk) 16:12, 8 December 2015 (UTC)
Only if you undo a single revision. This gives an edit summary of "Undid revision 123456789 by [[Special:Contributions/Username|Username]] ([[User talk:Username|talk]])", but not if you undo several at once - as I have explained above - this gives a blank edit summary box. - Arjayay (talk) 16:25, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

Cite template says valid URL is invalid

At Bill Dooley (basketball), the citation template is yelling at the URL [33]. (It says "Check |url= value (help)".) It looks valid to me and works if I click on it. Any ideas? --B (talk) 12:56, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

This is Help talk:CS1#Spurious check URL value. --Izno (talk) 13:09, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

Ref help

I'm getting a "check url= value" error in a ref on James Sears, although the URL looks to me to be 100% valid and the link works. Can someone take a look, and if you find a problem maybe let me know what it is? The ref is (currently) #5, "Toronto city council candidate James Sears promotes online ‘spanking’ game against female rival". The link is to a story about it, not to the game itself (gross). Thanks for having a look. Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 22:08, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

A url with a single letter before the first period currently produces this error message. Just ignore it. It's discussed at Help talk:Citation Style 1#Spurious 'Check .7Curl= value' error? PrimeHunter (talk) 22:14, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

Search error

[34] gives a search error. It gives the pages having a mobile url for the url parameter (see the section above). GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 16:53, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

@GeoffreyT2000: Escaping the forward slashes with backslashes fixes the problem: [35]. But it seems as though it ought to work with forward slashes, so something's wrong. As you have been told before, bug reports are better placed in Phabricator. — This, that and the other (talk) 23:42, 7 December 2015 (UTC)
To me, as long as the documentation is lacking at Help:Search or at MW:Help:CirrusSearch, here or mw:help talk:CirrusSearch or some IRC channel seems more appropriate than phabricator, and talk:CirrusSearch seems best. Some topics are just so complicated or in such flux that documentation is missing. I like answering these questions because it helps me document search.— CpiralCpiral 05:49, 8 December 2015 (UTC)
[36] also gives the error. It works with 20 results, but not with 500 results in both cases. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 00:13, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

I see nothing wrong with the insource:"url = http://m" query itself. And it runs without modification from the search results page, (7477 results), even though the error msg says An error has occurred while searching: We could not complete your search due to a temporary problem. Please try again later. But the problem seems to be with the URL. I can urlencode it or search link it. For comparison:

  1. //en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&limit=500&offset=0&profile=default&search=insource%3A%22url+%3D+http%3A%2F%2Fm%22 (the original)
  2. //en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&search=insource:"url+=+http://m"&ns0=1&fulltext=Search (search link URL)
  3. //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search/insource:%22url_%3D_http://m%22   (fullurl urlencoded)

CpiralCpiral 05:49, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

Images overlapping with bullet lists; image placement on page doesn't always correspond with placement in code

The following is copied from my original post in the Teahouse, with some additional information; hopefully I've brought this to the correct place this time.

I've noticed (first) that bullet lists and images don't always play nice together (I've seen this on a number of pages; for a current example, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_spotted_eagle; I had to click "Random Page" a few times to find that one), and (second) that when I looked at the page code (in this case for Vladimir the Great, Grand Prince of Kiev: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_the_Great), the placement of the code for the image within the page did not seem to correspond at all with the placement of the image on the page as viewed (see the version of the page that predates my changes).

My attempts to fix this were somewhat trial-and-error, and I was helped out by another user (Laszlo Panaflex) who pointed me toward the style guidelines, which have been helpful but not particularly for the specific point in question--unless my search-fu is weak. This is getting long, so I'll get to the point. My big question is: Why is the code for images not always present in the section the images appear in? This seems to be at odds with the goal of having images placed in the sections of the article that are relevant to the image in question.

My browser is Internet Explorer 11.0.25, just in case it's a browser issue (with IE, one never knows :-).

Many thanks for your assistance. I have some experience as a Web page designer (about ten years ago, all working directly with HTML and JavaScript), so I have some experience with how tricky images can be to put where one wants them.

Jakk42 (talk) 00:12, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

Yes, both are intricacies of how HTML and CSS work. For lists next to floating content we have a 'workaround' in the form of the {{flowlist}} template. For the positioning of images. For images. Well we only have two "bars" on the side. Left and right. So if you put two huge infoboxes that will push images down. There is not really a workaround for that unfortunately. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 08:40, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

Interwiki links not appearing

Ombudsman is not displaying Interlanguage links. Why? Its Wikidata entry is ombudsperson (Q169180). Blue Rasberry (talk) 19:09, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

Most often this happens when an data item is merged with another on Wikidata. I didn't look into this specific instance. Purging the page fixed the problem. --Izno (talk) 19:48, 8 December 2015 (UTC)
Thanks, will purge next time. Blue Rasberry (talk) 21:57, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

Deprecated parameters search tool?

Does a tool exist for checking articles by creator name, in which deprecated parameters exist in citations? I've created several hundred articles, so I don't check them all regularly. When I find one with deprecated parameters error messages in the citations, I like to make corrections. Is there a tool that will allow me to search through all articles I created for the deprecated parameters? — Maile (talk) 16:39, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

I've made this database query for you which should answer your question when it finishes running (assuming that I haven't made any coding errors). — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 02:11, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
@Maile66: It appears that I did indeed make a coding error, and the query has come up with zero results. However, after some tinkering with pywikibot, I've found that you are currently the author of three articles with deprecated cite parameters: Connecticut Women's Hall of Fame, Film career of Audie Murphy, and Maryland Women's Hall of Fame. I'll have a look later into what went wrong with my database query (if no-one points it out to me first) so that you will be able to run it again in the future. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 09:21, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
You have to replace spaces with underscores in all page titles, in this case Pages containing cite templates with deprecated parameters. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 09:48, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
Anyway, it would be wrong. Improved query (tested for different wiki and different category):
USE enwiki_p;
SELECT p.page_namespace, p.page_title
FROM page AS p
INNER JOIN categorylinks AS cl
	ON p.page_id = cl.cl_from
INNER JOIN revision AS r1
    ON p.page_id = r1.rev_page
WHERE cl.cl_to = 'Pages_containing_cite_templates_with_deprecated_parameters' and r1.rev_user=3102801 and r1.rev_parent_id=0
ORDER BY p.page_namespace, p.page_title;
rev_user is the same rev_user_text, but this is user ID (I suppose, this should be better) and rev_parent_id=0 means, that it is page creation. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 10:02, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
rev_parent_id is a good trick, thanks! I'll remember that for the future. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 14:14, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
@Maile66: The query is now fixed thanks to Edgars2007, and you should be able to run it again in the future to find more pages if you need to. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 14:22, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
@Mr. Stradivarius: Thanks. — Maile (talk) 14:24, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Template:Bar chart

Re: {{Bar chart}}

Briefly (details at eleven), I was working with this template to try to get the bars of the chart to render well in mobile view. The bars would go off the chart and outside the border on the right. I tested the template on my own Android phone, and the problem could also be seen in the first test case on the /testcases page after clicking the "Mobile view" link at the bottom of the page. We were getting close to a solution when, all of a sudden, the bars completely disappeared in mobile view, which left only the other items and data. I'd like to find out what happened. Was this a software "fix"? If so, then where is the discussion that resulted in this fix? I think it's a mistake to eliminate the bars of this chart, because they have purpose and should not be taken out. Rather, they should be rendered well, even on mobile devices, and that is probably doable. Thoughts? Happy holidays! Paine  18:53, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

@Paine Ellsworth: The bar display in mobile was disabled in this edit by Jdlrobson. I assume that removing the "nomobile" class would restore the bars, but instead, I think the best move would be to convert the template to use mw:Extension:Graph via Lua. That extension uses dedicated visualisation software and is (presumably) designed to work well on mobile, whereas the template attempts to render the output using custom divs, which were likely not designed with mobile in mind. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 00:05, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
Thank you, Mr. S! That is a good idea to use mw:Extension:Graph via Lua. The bars of the chart do, in my humble opinion, have purpose and meaning and should be rendered as intended on mobile devices, not just flatly eliminated from view. That is why I worked so hard on a solution (that also rendered the bars well, by the way). Any idea how long before mEG can be implemented?  Paine  20:19, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Default size for screenshot not working

Wikipedia
A white sphere made of large jigsaw pieces, with letters from several alphabets shown on the pieces
The logo of Wikipedia, a globe featuring glyphs from several writing systems, for the letter W or sounds "wi", "wo" or "wa"
Screenshot
Main page of the English Wikipedia
Main Page of the English Wikipedia
URLwikipedia.org

How to fix show/hide feature i.e. default size not working? It is probably caused by wrapping inside {{Begin hidden}} template because it is working for logo above. --Obsuser (talk) 02:52, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Add "frameless" or any pixel value (did it in this example). --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 12:30, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
@Obsuser: You already posted exactly the same q at Template talk:Infobox website#Default size for screenshot not working. Please observe WP:MULTI, and replace one of them with a direction to the other. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:18, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

IRC office hour with the WMF's new Vice President of Product

This was announced on some mailing lists, but people who don't subscribe might also be interested:

Wes Moran is the new(ish) Vice President of Product for the WMF. Previously, he was the head of mw:Wikimedia Discovery. On Thursday at 20:00 UTC/12 noon PST (in a little less than 27 hours) he'll be on IRC for an open office hours session. Everyone is welcome to drop by, say hello, pitch your favorite idea for a feature or bug fix (also: five days left to vote at m:2015 Community Wishlist Survey!), or ask questions.

See m:IRC office hours for information on how to join. If you are unable to attend, then you can leave a note on my user talk page with questions. I'll check my talk page here at the English Wikipedia an hour or two before the event (not necessarily during it) to see if anyone has any questions they'd like to have asked. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:24, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Are we still having category bugs?

Is there still an open glitch with files showing up in categories? On 30 November I added quite a few files to Category:Wikipedia files missing permission as of 30 November 2015. I've now been finding out that quite a few of them didn't actually show up in that category and as a result weren't deleted. An example would be File:Rudolph douglas raiford, 1943 (2).jpg. Kelly hi! 18:00, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

  • The bug is still there. Tagged files will show up in the categories eventually. If the category already has been deleted at that point, then the files will show up in quarry:query/6007, and I will then discover the files. --Stefan2 (talk) 11:59, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Is subst broken, or is it just me?

Why did I have to make this edit by hand? Shouldn't WP:SUBST happen automatically when I save the page? --NYKevin 04:18, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Some things don't work inside ref tags. The lead of WP:SUBST says: Note that ref-tags refuse to run "subst:" unless temporarily renamed as "<xref name=xx>" or similar. PrimeHunter (talk) 04:35, 10 December 2015 (UTC)
Use {{safesubst:#tag:ref|{{cite web|url=https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/hh802690%28v=vs.85%29.aspx|title=Alternatives to using Transactional NTFS|author=<!--Staff writer(s); no by-line.-->|access-date={{subst:TODAY}}|website=[[Microsoft Developer Network]]}}}} instead of <ref>{{cite web|url=https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/hh802690%28v=vs.85%29.aspx|title=Alternatives to using Transactional NTFS|author=<!--Staff writer(s); no by-line.-->|access-date={{:subst:{{TODAY}}}}|website=[[Microsoft Developer Network]]}}</ref>. It is due to Help:Substitution#Limitation. --Obsuser (talk) 04:43, 10 December 2015 (UTC)
The link is Help:Substitution#Limitation. PrimeHunter (talk) 04:48, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Pages with parser function time errors

Pages with parser function time errors: I don't see a way to edit the banner on this page to the fix the error: File:O.J. Simpson 1990 · DN-ST-91-03444 crop.JPEG Ping me back. Cheers! {{u|Checkingfax}} {Talk} 14:12, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

"Edit local description" or just "History" and revert. done. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 14:58, 10 December 2015 (UTC)
@Checkingfax: missed that pingback request, so here it is. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 16:57, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Tip-of-the-Day template bug

Hi, over in the Wikipedia Tip of the day (TOTD) department we are having trouble with two of our tip display templates after we rolled out a new {{clickable button 2}} format for the previous/next tips. The error issue was big red letters saying there was a TIME issue. The issue only presented itself on two tip display templates: {{totd-random}} and {{totd-tomorrow}}. You can see three of the TOTD display templates on my userpage here: User:Checkingfax#Tip-of-the-day. However here and here are the workarounds we have attempted in the meantime. Now the totd-tomorrow template displays the tip link only (instead of displaying the whole tip). We have not implemented any workarounds on the totd-random display template. If you click on the "another" link on totd-random repeatedly you will land on a tip that has the new "clickable button 2" format (we have only implemented it on about 45 of 366 tips).

Here is what the error looks like:

[[Wikipedia:Tip of the day/Error: Invalid time.|Prior tip]] - [[Wikipedia:Tip of the day/Error: Invalid time.|Next tip]]

Ping me back. Cheers! {{u|Checkingfax}} {Talk} 06:22, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

It's because at Template:Totd-tomorrow {{SUBPAGENAME}} (which is used at Wikipedia:Tip of the day/December 10, that is used for {{totd-tomorrow}}) is Totd-tomorrow, which doesn't look like a valid time for me ;) --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 10:42, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
Hi Edgars2007, can you please edit those two templates so they function? I put a new template on my User page called {{totd-static}} for testing specific tip dates. Thank you. Cheers! {{u|Checkingfax}} {Talk} 14:03, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
Currently I don't have some good solution. That's why I didn't ping you, as you asked. My comment was more like a comment to someone, who has, that the person don't have to investigate, what's wrong. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 14:54, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
The problem is that the 366 daily pages like Wikipedia:Tip of the day/December 10 use {{SUBPAGENAME}} to derive the date from the page name. It works fine on the page itself but if the page is transcluded on page A then the name A is used as the basis for {{SUBPAGENAME}}. Until recently [37] this was handled by the daily pages using includeonly and noinclude to process different code on transclusions and direct views. On transclusions the date was not available so "Prior" and "Next" were based on the current date. Recent changes tries to always use {{SUBPAGENAME}} but this fails on transclusions. I have created a new template {{Totd nav}} to make the navigation links to the prior and next day. It accepts the date as an optional unnamed parameter. If no parameter is given then it uses the current date. I suggest {{Totd nav}} is called on the 366 daliy pages with the date as a hard coded parameter, for example {{Totd nav|December 9}} on Wikipedia:Tip of the day/December 9.[38] Advantages: Prior and next always use the actual date of the displayed tip, and the navigation code is maintained in a single place instead of being spread on 366 pages which must each be updated if the design or something else is changed. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:56, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter: You mean, the daily pages include Wikipedia:Tip of the day/February 29 ("leap day"), right? GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 03:06, 11 December 2015 (UTC)
Yes. PrimeHunter (talk) 03:09, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

Azb, lrc and gom languages links are red

See List_of_Wikipedias article. Azb, lrc and gom languages links are red. Why? Is it possible to fix it? --ԱշոտՏՆՂ (talk) 12:52, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

I see you also reported it at meta:Talk:List of Wikipedias#Red links. The interlanguage prefixes azb:, lrc:, gom: are currently not recognized so they are just interpreted as local page names (please don't create pages with them while it's possible). The Wikipedias seem to be working https://azb.wikipedia.org, https://lrc.wikipedia.org, https://gom.wikipedia.org. The error is outside Wikipedia. The only fix we can make here is to use url's instead of prefixes until the error is fixed. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:18, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
I have reported it at phab:T120937. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:29, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
These three Wikipedia editions were all recently created, so I expect that either (a) the interwiki map either hasn't been updated recently, or (b) the script that updates the map is using an outdated list of wikis. I have asked Alex Monk to look into it. — This, that and the other (talk) 13:53, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
https://web.archive.org/web/20150729112343/http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias shows all three worked 29 July 2015. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:38, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
If you specify w:azb: (that's "Wikipedia:Azerbaijani", rather than "Aerbaijani, and the default is Wikipedia"), then it should work now. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:13, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
The previously broken azb:, lrc:, gom: also work now, after the interwiki cache update which was posted at phab:T120937. Pages still displaying red links must be purged. I have fixed List of Wikipedias and meta:List of Wikipedias with purges. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:20, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
Broken again. Pinging Krenair (I'll reopen the task as well). — This, that and the other (talk) 23:15, 10 December 2015 (UTC)
It should stay fixed this time. --Krenair (talkcontribs) 23:27, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Watchlist email notifications

Are there problems today with emails triggered when an article on your watchlist is edited? JMHamo (talk) 17:17, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Could you elaborate what you mean by "problem" exactly? --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 05:37, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

Special:Gadgets

Why all the redlinks (double MediaWiki prefix) at Special:Gadgets? --Lam-ang (talk) 20:13, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Because it says "MediaWiki:MediaWiki:" instead of "MediaWiki:" and the former is not a namespace.Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 20:14, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Move log

When you visit the redlink Well, at least I know I'll be getting the last page move in on this, ever, now that the editing and moving protection expiries can be set seperately now. Prove me wrong!, the only log entry that it says is that it was moved to Barney & Friends by Mr.Z-man. That move apparently did not leave a redirect but it does not say "without leaving a redirect". The same problem also occurs with other moves by that user such as I fapped to her just there. She's really enthusiastic when she fux and gives secks. to Roxy Reynolds, as well as some moves by Lar such as Zweibrüder Optoelectronics to User:Steschke\Zweibrüder Optoelectronics. The earliest entry in the move log that says "without leaving a redirect" is the move of Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Chernobyl disaster to Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Chernobyl disaster/archive1 by GimmeBot. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 00:29, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

I suspect that it's because these pages weren't moved without leaving a redirect. In the first case, the user still has a deleted edit for the talk page, representing the redirect left from the move; in the second case, both for the article and the talk page. I suspect that Oversight may have removed some of these logs. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 05:55, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

Centering an unordered list

I must be losing it, because I can't figure out for the life of me how to properly horizontally center an unordered (with bullets) wiki-list. The way it's currently being done at the page I just linked to is (on Google Chrome 47.0, anyway) giving centered text but non-centered (left-aligned) bullets, leaving a huge gap between the bullets and text. No combination of divs, spans, tables, style=, and align= is working for me. What am I missing? - dcljr (talk) 19:51, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Did I fix it with style="text-align: center;"? --Izno (talk) 20:35, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
Nope, present in Chrome 46 also, with above style. And in IE 11. In Firefox 42.0 this renders fine. --Izno (talk) 20:38, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
Try using list-style-position: inside; as well. That seems to work in Chrome. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 22:46, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
I'm glad it wasn't just me! [grin] Thanks, everyone. - dcljr (talk) 18:43, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

Edit start date conflict

When I hold the mouse over my user name, the pop-up says I started editing on 26 Jan 2002. But according to my contribution log my first update was 24 Sept 2001. I'm a bit puzzled by this disagreement. Cheers Manning (talk) 01:57, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

Which local script or gadget do you have activated? I don't have such a pop-up here. --Malyacko (talk) 06:01, 11 December 2015 (UTC)
Whichever script it is, it's probably based on the user_registration field of the user table, which is also displayed when you use Special:Listusers]. The problem is that for accounts that were created before the new user log was implemented, the date of the account creation had to be estimated based on the date of the first edit. In your case, Manning, back when the user_registration field was being populated, your "Manning Bartlett" account would have only had edits that went back to 26 February 2002. However, the edits by the account "ManningBartlett" were subsequently merged with your current account by Tim Starling (I can't find a link for that, but I know it happened), so the "Manning Bartlett" account has contributions from 2001. Graham87 13:27, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

Good proxy for article importance?

What is a reasonable and easily usable API-based proxy for subjective article "importance"? The best candidate for this would be page views, but while some sort of work is being done now in this area, the only way to use this data comfortably AFAIK is via the stats.grok.se API, which is highly rate-limited and only allows something on the order of ten requests per minute.

I thought perhaps the length of a page's editing history, but this brings up controversial topics moreso than important ones. ResMar 15:20, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

I linked this earlier today elsewhere, but there is a (the official) PageView API just released; see phab:T44259#1747860. --Izno (talk) 15:59, 11 December 2015 (UTC)
Number of incoming links, maybe? —Cryptic 22:56, 11 December 2015 (UTC)
Do you mean importance as in the |importance= parameter of many WikiProject banner templates? If so, both page views and incoming links are poor ways of assessing it. Each WikiProject has its own scheme, and if you don't understand the scheme of a given WikiProject, don't attempt to automate it. A page that is "Low" importance to one WikiProject may well be "High" or even "Top" importance to another; but the page views and incoming links will be exactly the same. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:32, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

Google Chrome unable to link directly to section?

Basically title, it seems like linking to an article subsection like this doesn't seem to consistency work anymore on google chrome. A few months ago I recall that it did.--Prisencolin (talk) 23:20, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

@Prisencolin: That link correctly links to the History subsection when I try it in the latest version of Chrome. Was it that link in particular that wasn't working for you, or another one? — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 23:42, 8 December 2015 (UTC)
@Prisencolin and Mr. Stradivarius: I have that same issue sometimes with the Google Chrome web browser. Cheers! {{u|Checkingfax}} {Talk} 06:30, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
Might be collapsible content above the section being rendered before the target section is located by the browser and then collapsed immediately afterwards. When the content is collapsed, the text below it (including that in target section) all moves upwards, but the browser window doesn't compensate for that, leaving the wrong text showing in the window. (I hope people understand that description!) This happens in Firefox, as well. - dcljr (talk) 19:00, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
[Oops, I guess that can't be what's happening in your example! - dcljr (talk) 19:01, 9 December 2015 (UTC)]
It also seems to happen to me occasionally when using other browsers, but it seems like its worst with chrome.--Prisencolin (talk) 06:56, 11 December 2015 (UTC)
These are browser problems which we can do nothing about. The solution is for the browser to defer processing of the URL fragment until after all scripts which affect the page layout have finished. --Redrose64 (talk) 08:28, 11 December 2015 (UTC)
In that case, does anyone know if there are bugs with each of the browsers tracking this? Because this is my number one irritation with WP right now. It makes my watchlist unusable when tracking conversations in heavily-trafficked talk pages. Regards, Orange Suede Sofa (talk) 08:35, 11 December 2015 (UTC)
But what has changed? This had not been a problem until relatively recently. Was there some change that precipitated this? olderwiser 18:02, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

FWIW - noticed this concern (Google Chrome browser - current ver 47.0.2526.80 m & earlier vers?) with several Wikipedia subsections - including the following => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Global_warming#oil_companies_knew_that_burning_oil_and_gas_could_cause_global_warming_since_the_1970s... - link seems to "slip" down to another subsection lower on the page? - maybe the subsection title is too long (or equiv) in this instance - not sure - but a Chrome browser problem seems to exist atm - iac - Enjoy! :) Drbogdan (talk) 13:28, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

Truncating my edit summary.

I moved Concentration inequalities to Concentration inequality, and wrote this summary:

This page gives several _examples_ of concentration inequalities, but it is not about a system of such inequalities in the way in which, for example, "Maxwell's equations" is about a system of equations.

In the edit history, my summary was truncated after "for example".

I wrote the summary for the PURPOSE of being understood. Does it exceed all current technology to notify the person writing the summary that end of the length limit has arrived, or that it is near? This deception is at best very rude. Michael Hardy (talk) 01:09, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

@Michael Hardy: Edit summaries cannot exceed 255 bytes in length; and this includes those relating to a page move, which have a kind of standard header inserted at the start - in this case it's "Michael Hardy moved page Concentration inequalities to Concentration inequality over redirect: ", which is 103 bytes, so there was only 152 bytes left; of those, a further three bytes are taken up by the mandatory ellipsis which always appears when an edit summary is truncated, leaving 149 bytes in which to squeeze the first part of your 202-byte reason.
Page log entries are also restricted, but to 200 bytes; this apparent reduction of 55 bytes is more than balanced by the omission of the "header" information from the start, so there is somewhat more room for explanation. If you look at the logs for Concentration inequalities, you will see that your reasoning was truncated at a later point - "equations." became "equation", so only two characters were lost. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:01, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
@Redrose64: But that doesn't appear when you look at the edit history. And I was given no warning that either of those truncations would happen. Michael Hardy (talk) 21:31, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
What is your browser? There is code to prevent typing more than 200 bytes in the move summary field, but some browsers may not recognize it. It's annoying that log summaries up to 200 bytes can be shortened when they are displayed as edits with edit summaries and the 255-byte total limit is broken. That issue affects everybody. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:51, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
@Michael Hardy: If you go to the history of the page, e.g. that for Concentration inequalities, there's a link at the top, View logs for this page. Click that. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:55, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
@Redrose64: I have been well aware of that link for years. So what? If I want my summary to be seen by people who are not interested in finding out whether they've seen the whole of my summary, how does my awareness of the existence of that link help? Michael Hardy (talk) 00:05, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

An internal link that leads to an external site

In the reference section of this version of Promise ring there is an internal link, [[sector001:Promise Rings|Promise Rings]]. This link actually takes you to an external link, http://www.herpromiserings.com/promise-rings This does not look like a desired function. -- GB fan 10:54, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

There are many such interwiki prefixes pointing to non-WMF websites. meta:Interwiki map lists all of them. SiBr4 (talk) 11:11, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
Thanks that helped, but according to that table sector001 is supposed to go to http://gagadesigns.net/wiki/startrek/index.php?title=$1 but sector001:Promise Rings goes to http://www.herpromiserings.com/promise-rings -- GB fan 12:28, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
$1 is replaced by url encoding of the part after the colon so sector001:Promise Rings goes to http://gagadesigns.net/wiki/startrek/index.php?title=Promise_Rings. This is currently a redirect to http://www.herpromiserings.com/promise-rings. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:51, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
Thanks, that makes sense. -- GB fan 13:33, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
This really doesn't look like a useful interwiki. I'll propose its removal. — Earwig talk 00:47, 13 December 2015 (UTC)
meta:Talk:Interwiki map#Sector001 — Earwig talk 00:54, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

TNA-image template

Could someone look how to fix the dead link in the TNA-image template inside file description of File:INF3-271 Anti-rumour and careless talk You forget - but she remembers.jpg? The working URL source is http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/theartofwar/prop/home_front/INF3_0271.htm. I tried, but to no avail. Brandmeistertalk 16:36, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

The link should be changed here. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 17:44, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

Twinkle not working?

It's checked in my Preferences, and was just working a few minutes ago, now the options are gone. Chrome and Version47.0.2526.80 m I just noticed it loads for the initial load on my phone or another computer, but then the Twinkle Menu disappears once I navigate to another page. --Giooo95 (talk) 23:53, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

@Giooo95: Thanks for providing your browser version. If you don't mind, could you follow the steps outlined at WP:JSERROR and reply here with your findings? You appear to only have Igloo installed as a user script, which shouldn't have any conflicts with Twinkle. MusikAnimal talk 00:13, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

load.php?debug=false&lang=en&modules=jquery%2Cmediawiki&only=scripts&skin=vector&version=%2Ba17lhsh:156 Use of "wgUserGroups" is deprecated. Use mw.config instead.

Pretty much the Twinkle menus will not show up all the time. When they do, the links will not work within the drop down menus. Chrome, Windows 7, Version47.0.2526.80 m Browser has been cleared. --Giooo95 (talk) 00:17, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

Using redr with moved pages

There is currently a discussion at MediaWiki talk:Move-redirect-text#Redr about whether to use the {{redr}} template automatically on pages that are moved. If any editors here are interested, please consider commenting over there. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 13:31, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

JS and CSS redirects

JS and CSS redirects are not listed in Special:WhatLinksHere. For example, User:Wildthing61476/monobook.js is not listed in Special:WhatLinksHere/User:RickKJr/monobook.js, nor is User:Wildthing61476/huggle.css in Special:WhatLinksHere/User:RickKJr/huggle.css. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 04:33, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

WLH and the search parameter linksto don't track (index) URL-style internal wikilinks. The most efficient way to list URL-style internal wikilinks to a given fullpagename takes up to eighteen searches. Seriously, tracking URL-style links should be a feature request. T121379 I mean, the rest of the info on those pages is indexed for searches. We can index every pdf file in media, but we cannot track URL-style internal wikilinks or track cross-namespace redirects. I don't know, but it seems to me the single solution to both of these issues is to give redirects there own index and search parameter. — CpiralCpiral 08:52, 14 December 2015 (UTC)
Can someone link to an external tool, or provide an SQL query, to find all URL-styled internal wikilinks to a given fullpagename? I don't think there is a table to query for it. — CpiralCpiral 08:52, 14 December 2015 (UTC)
At least in articles there is Checkwiki for internal link written as an external link, which scans Wikipedia each day. If that's what Cpiral talked about. If somebody is interested, here is the list of all JS and CSS redirects in user, Wikipedia, Mediawiki namespace (OK, they are only in user namespace) - 3385 pages. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 09:24, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

GIF resized animations are awful

Looks pretty bad.

I especially used quality settings when generating my GIF at 512x512px and I am happy with the image at that resolution. But the thumbnails and smaller sizes all look pretty awful. Is there anything I can do on my end to improve the quality? SharkD  Talk  08:05, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

The thumbnail to the right looks great to me. Usually these issues are related to OS/browser combinations. --Izno (talk) 14:31, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
There are "streaks" left over around the bottom roof line when the house expands. Compare to the original which is smooth. SharkD  Talk  05:48, 13 December 2015 (UTC)
Looks the same as the original to me (Win7/FF 42). Regards, Orange Suede Sofa (talk) 06:29, 13 December 2015 (UTC)
Looks pretty fine to me as well. Though it should be said that GIF is notoriously bad at scaling. Use either a movie, or render it at the resolution you will use it at, if the quality is your concern. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 17:45, 13 December 2015 (UTC)
I see what he's talking about, and it is most certainly not my browser. There are shadow images left behind when the viewing angle of the house changes. It looks horrible.—cyberpowerMerry Christmas:Unknown 18:12, 13 December 2015 (UTC)
Well clearly it's not happening to everyone. If you're confident that it's not your browser, then what do you suppose it is causing it for some and not for others? OS image libs maybe? Orange Suede Sofa (talk) 23:15, 13 December 2015 (UTC)
I've verified it in GIF Movie Gear. Compare the thumbnail vs the original. You'll see a residual of the far wall from the first frame and the horizon sticking. My guess, an issue with dithering (each frame has a separate 255 palette in the resize) and optimizing (transparency). As for solutions? Browser have been switching to bi-linear scaling, so maybe we should skip server side scaling? — Dispenser 01:24, 14 December 2015 (UTC)
Now I see it too. But not scaling is not a solution, as that could result in very large file downloads. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 11:55, 14 December 2015 (UTC)
Or smaller (Examples are actually worse after 5 years). IIRC, The devs said scaling is to increase fidelity (back when browsers used nearest-neighbor scaling), not to decrease file size. I played with the source example in GMV its actually smaller if I remove the inter-frame transparency (less grid pattern to overdraw) and our scalers actually did a good job of knocking down file size. I also have a database report of various GIF breakage. — Dispenser 13:56, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

Redirect to section bugged

On some browsers, redirect to sections don't seem to work any more. E.g. WP:BIO1E redirects to Wikipedia:Notability_(people)#People_notable_for_only_one_event, but clicking on the redirect brings me to the top of Wikipedia:Notability (people). Interestingly, clicking on the hashtagged section link works fine. I'm using Google Chrome version 47.0.2526.73 m on Windows. Where can I log this as a MediaWiki bug?  Sandstein  09:30, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

You don't, because it isn't a MediaWiki bug. It works fine in Firefox, therefore it's a problem with Chrome; and it may be related to #Google Chrome unable to link directly to section? above. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:10, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
I currently have the same issue in Firefox. For instance, when I put https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:In_the_news/Candidates#Angkor_Wat into URL bar, I'm initially redirected to the Douglas Tompkins section. When I edit and save a particular section, I'm also redirected elsewhere after saving. However, sections work fine upon clicking. Brandmeistertalk 16:43, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
Using Safari, this issue happens intermittently to me too.—cyberpowerMerry Christmas:Unknown 18:16, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

Does this script contain malicious content capable of compromising your account?

Does the following script contain malicious content capable of compromising your account? importScript('User:קיפודנחש/cat-a-lot.js');Monopoly31121993 (talk) 10:28, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

@Monopoly31121993: No, it doesn't. Zhaofeng Li [talkcontribs] 10:33, 13 December 2015 (UTC)
@Zhaofeng Li:, would you please explain your response? Thank you.Monopoly31121993 (talk) 10:36, 13 December 2015 (UTC)
MediaWiki:Jswarning is a standard warning always displayed on your js pages, also when they are empty. The only thing User:קיפודנחש/cat-a-lot.js does is load code from the MediaWiki namespace at Commons. This namespace can only be edited by Commons administrators so commons:MediaWiki:Gadget-Cat-a-lot.js has no edit link for others. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:36, 13 December 2015 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter:, Thank you for this. I've tried to add this but I can't figure out how to add this. Would you mind adding it for me and/or explaining to me what I'm doing wrong? Thank you.Monopoly31121993 (talk) 20:29, 13 December 2015 (UTC)
@Monopoly31121993: User:Monopoly31121993/common.js is correct. Do you not see "Cat-a-lot" in the lower right corner of category pages and search pages? It requires JavaScript in your browser. Do you have a [show]/[hide] link in the table of contents on this page? That indicates you have JavaScript enabled. Try to bypass your cache. ⋅PrimeHunter (talk) 21:36, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

Lua error message on ISBN book search page

When I click on an ISBN in a citation, I get taken to the book search page but there is big red text on said page reading

"Lua error: invalid expiry date ("--"). Lua error: invalid expiry date ("--")."

This is not only happening with several ISBNs I just copied into cites from places like Amazon or ABEbooks (as i normally do) but also with old ISBNs that I put in cites months ago and at that time worked without triggering an error. I presume this has to do with the parsing of the ISBN but not sure if this relates to (a) the Lua problem already discussed above and/or (b) a number of bug reports that seem to already exist re ISBNs. TheBlinkster (talk) 18:33, 13 December 2015 (UTC) P.S. This is happening in both Firefox 42.0 and Chrome 47.0.2526.80 m , I'm using Win 7 . TheBlinkster (talk) 18:46, 13 December 2015 (UTC)

I have posted it to Module talk:Protection banner#Magic word for protection expiry. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:13, 13 December 2015 (UTC)