Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 179

Deleting and reordering parameters using AWB
Is it possible to delete and reorder template parameters using AWB? I can't seem to find that option anywhere. If not, does anyone have any regexes for deleting the content of entire parameters within a template or for reordering existing ones? Thanks, – Srdjan m (talk) 19:47, 29 January 2020 (UTC)
 * You could do that with regular expressions, though making an expression that would always match every possible parameter value could be tricky. I would not like to give examples, unless I try it out first! Graeme Bartlett (talk) 13:03, 31 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Well, if you can figure out how to do it reliably, do let me know. You can use any example you want for deleting parameters and reordering them. Infobox examples might be best. – Srdjan m (talk) 11:11, 4 February 2020 (UTC)
 * , I am not sure if it helps. Years and years (and years) ago we ran AWB to convert tables of data into a sectioned infobox.  That required the bot to move lines around.  I think the trick I used was to put a dummy text in front of each line, with a number for in which section a piece of info needs to go.  Then you have a regex that swaps 'line2 (data)' and 'line1 (other data)' and all combinations, and you repeat that swap x-times.  At some point, there are no cases where there is a 'line2' before a 'line1' and you are all sorted.  The code can be found here: User:Beetstra/Chemicals.  It results in edits like diff (note that in the old table there is no 'order' in the information in the old diff, and that in the output the data is put into the correct section.  Note that the script is 'buggy' (in that it may miss misspelled stuff, and that it eats other things on the page). Dirk Beetstra T  C 13:35, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

More template troubles, different problem
I'd like some assistance with a template coding problem that's been brought to the attention of WikiProject Canada. Our List of villages in Canada is split up into separate sublists for each province, most (but not all) of which have been made collapsible due to the number of villages in each list. However, in all of the collapsed lists, the template doesn't actually display any column headers to explain what the data in each column represents. But if we attempt to edit the templates, column headers are present in them — which means they're just not displaying to the end user in page view mode.

So I wanted to ask if somebody with more experience in template coding can figure out if there's something in the template coding that can be changed to make the column headers display properly. Thanks. Bearcat (talk) 14:49, 4 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Before attempting to solve that issue, it should be better to observe MOS:DONTHIDE and rework the layout (or split if needed). --Gonnym (talk) 14:53, 4 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Just show everything by default. The article is not that long, and you'd be complying with MOS. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:56, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

Connection issues, Feb 4, 2020
Well, here we go again. A few minutes ago there were severe connection problems with all server clusters (At least for me!), and, as of writing this, ESAMS and EQIAD are at 0% ATS backend availability for upload per | grafana. Anyone know what's going on? --moonythedwarf (Braden N.) 17:01, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

Some cleanup templates are lacking substituted dates
More citations needed, COI, No footnotes, Disputed, – examples of cleanup templates that have working, functional substituted dates

Tone, POV, Cleanup reorganize, Like resume – examples of ones that don't

Same thing with inline templates:

Citation needed, Incomprehensible inline, Clarify, Who, – examples of ones that work

POV statement, Date missing, Dubious, Excessive citations inline, – examples of ones that don't

When you just insert the template, this is supposed to show up:

"Month and year"

I don't know why this does not occur with some of them. I've scoured the source code for all that I could find. I looked long and hard for similarities between the ones that worked and the ones that didn't. Couldn't find any. They all seem to have the code in place to substitute dates, and no other abnormalities.

It has been this way for some years now, I believe. Please can someone investigate this issue so that it can be fixed. Thank you. · • SUM1 • ·   (talk) 04:33, 5 February 2020 (UTC)
 * works fine for me. It produces . I did the same thing with POV, Cleanup reorganize, and Like resume, and they worked fine. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:27, 5 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Oh, that's not what I meant. The thing I said is supposed to show up when you insert the template does not show up for Tone and the others. · • SUM1 • ·    (talk) 05:40, 5 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Don't worry, I've figured it out. Some of them have


 * == Template data ==






 * in their documentation, and some of them don't. Perhaps someone could help me with adding this to all of them. · • SUM1 • ·    (talk) 05:54, 5 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Good detective work. That is the Template Data programming code used by the Visual Editor. If you insert one of those templates using the Visual Editor, and the template does not have the Template Data programming code in its documentation (please don't ask why template programming code lives in the unprotected documentation page), you won't get the date automatically. Most, or maybe all, of the above templates will have a date automatically added by a bot, so it should not be a problem. – Jonesey95 (talk) 06:00, 5 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Indeed. Though, I was considering mentioning, just like with the Unsigned and Unsigned IP templates, I've seen multiple times the bots fail to add the dates at all, years later. I also find out TemplateData is also used for the 2017 wikitext editor, which explains why it works the same way when I edit in source mode while not logged in, as of today. · • SUM1 • ·    (talk) 06:33, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

How to using unstripNowiki in subst: ?
Why notwork in  ? BUT WHY? And How to fix it?--Yu-Fan 宇帆 (talk) 07:42, 30 January 2020 (UTC)
 * See Special:Diff/938286178
 * In lua console, I try to print the return value returned from mw.text.unstripNowiki, then I got a string like, so I think mw.text.unstripNowiki notwork in.
 * Tested it and it does seem to work, the substitution simply places the template parameter in the Unstrip module invocation, so it will look the same but it is actually displayed from the function invocation. --qedk (t 桜 c) 15:29, 30 January 2020 (UTC)
 * → (work)
 * but  → 12 (not work)
 * → 12 (not work)
 * I think it doesn't work. (see sandbox test Special:diff/938411191)--Yu-Fan 宇帆 (talk) 01:00, 31 January 2020 (UTC)
 * I think it doesn't work. (see sandbox test Special:diff/938411191)--Yu-Fan 宇帆 (talk) 01:00, 31 January 2020 (UTC)


 * Does anyone know how to DELETE  tag and keep the inner text in  ? --Yu-Fan 宇帆 (talk) 06:57, 5 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I think you're misunderstanding the purpose of the template. It displays the text as it is supposed to be displayed without the tags (by invoking the module), it does not substitute and remove the nowiki tags itself. --qedk (t 桜 c) 07:27, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

The Main Page technical layout has gone live
Should there be any issues, please report them to Talk:Main_Page. Thank you, — xaosflux  Talk 00:08, 5 February 2020 (UTC)
 * , thank you —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 08:38, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

"Mark all notifications as read" is broken on mobile
If I click the "mark all notifications as read" button on mobile, the notifications clear on mobile, but on the desktop version I still see unread notifications. I've had this bug for a few weeks now, is anyone else having this problem? Narutolovehinata5 tccsdnew 00:14, 3 February 2020 (UTC)
 * It eventually remembers. I have had to click mark all over several sessions before it stuck. At this point, I just click desktop mode on the bottom of wikipedia and clear notifications from there. Slywriter (talk) 14:31, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

Better "n changes since last visit" in Watchlist
Before I ask for this in Phabricator I want to see if anyone besides me supports it.

Special:Watchlist shows the number of changes for each day as a clickable link. This is great for the current day but there is no single link that will show the diff from your last visit until now if there were unseen changes before today.

For example, this is a line in my watchlist from yesterday and today: "5 February 2020"

"history)"

"4 February 2020"

"history)"

I recommend changing it so it shows the "changes since last visit" so in addition to showing it if either there are a mix of unread and read messages on a given day, it also shows with the total number of unread messages if there are unread messages across more than one day.

This would now look like:

"5 February 2020"

"33 changes since last visit"

- history)

"4 February 2020"

"33 changes since last visit"

- history)

Note the "33 changes since last visit" is the same for both days. I could click on either link to "fully catch up" for this page. Right now, I click on History, scroll down to the newest link I have read, and click on the "cur" link to get the same "diff" page.

Would others find this useful enough to suggest at Phabricator? davidwr/ (talk)/(contribs)  17:29, 5 February 2020 (UTC)
 * This would be phab:T4877. --Izno (talk) 18:07, 5 February 2020 (UTC)
 * (See also phab:T10681. --Izno (talk) 18:12, 5 February 2020 (UTC))

Tech News: 2020-06
 Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Changes later this week
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 February. It will be on all wikis from 6 February (calendar).

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  20:04, 3 February 2020 (UTC)


 * Is that all? Looks like a boilerplate with no extras. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 20:19, 3 February 2020 (UTC)
 * , I was surprised too. Is that really it? moonythedwarf (Braden N.) 20:20, 3 February 2020 (UTC)
 * It appears so from [//meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tech/News/2020/06&action=history]. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:42, 3 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Pinging, who populated the changelog file for the previous version. Is there a changelog for this version? Sorry to bother you if you are the wrong staffer to ask. – Jonesey95 (talk) 00:11, 4 February 2020 (UTC)
 * It's complete. There's just not much to say this week. – Ammarpad (talk) 04:44, 4 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Apologies - we've still got a bug with automatic generation of deploy notes. See T243330: train-deploy-notes Jenkins job fails in conjunction with branch.py for that.  We'll get something posted here. - Brennen (talk) 18:46, 5 February 2020 (UTC)

Table sorting fustercluck
I've come across a significant problem with List of Canadian Inuit, which I'd like to solicit some help in cleaning up.

The default sort order in the list is by surname, using the Sortname template without issue. The problem comes up in the other columns which are using the generic sort template instead — in order to impose extra control on the specific order in which the entries would be sorted if a reader attempts to re-sort the list on that column, each entry is simply sortkeyed with sequential numbers: the entry that should become first is sortkeyed "001", the entry that should become second is sortkeyed "002", the entry that should become third is sortkeyed "003", and on and so forth. And this is, further, being used to control more than just each column in isolation: for example, in order to ensure that the four people in the list who were born in Manitoba remain in alphabetical order even after the list is re-sorted on the "region" column, those four people are sequentially sortkeyed as 003, 004, 005 and 006 in that column.

What this means, however, is that I can't simply add a new entry for an Inuit person who isn't already in the list, such as the Inuit musician whose article I was attempting to add when I discovered this — each time I want add even one new person, I would also have to undertake an extended project, anywhere between one to three hours long, of manually readjusting every single numbered sortkey in the entire rest of the article to reflect each individual column's new desired sort order. If there's a new Inuit person from Manitoba to add, for example, I would have to manually +1 every sortkey in that entire column for every single entry through the entire rest of the list in the process of adding that one person. Which in turn ends up meaning that the list can't be properly added to or completed at all, because no editor can or should ever reasonably be expected to commit to actually doing that much work. Only one new person has actually been added to this list since 2015, even though there are literally dozens of missing entries for Inuit people who do have articles to add — and I suspect that the opaqueness and dauntingness of this sequential sortkeying system is a big part of the reason for that.

Obviously, we shouldn't be using opaque coding systems like this, or creating this much excess work for editors who try to actually add new entries to the list — the template coding needs to be as transparent and simple as possible, and the only time a column should ever be sorted on numbers is when the visible data in the column is numbers. So is there any way to quick-fix this in an automated manner, or is somebody just going to have to buckle down and manually remove all the numbered sortkeys? Bearcat (talk) 16:48, 6 February 2020 (UTC)
 * A search-and-replace from  to   will remove the calls to the sort template, since Template:P2 is a template that outputs its second parameter. The space at the start of the replace string makes sure that the table cells are not completely empty; without that space, the table formatting is damaged. I've tried this at User:John of Reading/X1. -- John of Reading (talk) 18:20, 6 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Okay, thank you, that worked. I got confused by it for a second and thought it had broken other things, but it actually didn't. Bearcat (talk) 18:33, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

I advice giving Help:Sorting a proper read as well. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 18:42, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

There's something wrong with the Harvard cites at Golden plates
I fell down the rabbit hole of trying to fix the Harv error on ref #5 - spent way TOO much time but when I tried to fix it, my so-called "fix" then would cause other refs to fail etc.. I cannot figure out what is wrong. Please someone correct this and post here what caused the Harv error. Thanks, I give up. Good night. Shearonink (talk) 08:36, 5 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I've fixed one error, only for another error to pop up instead. Please see my comment at Talk:Golden plates. rchard2scout (talk) 15:14, 5 February 2020 (UTC)
 * P.s.: note for anyone else, in order to see Harv errors, you need this userscript. rchard2scout (talk) 15:14, 5 February 2020 (UTC)
 * The cascading Harv errors happened to me too - there is something technically wrong with the Harv-cite coding on the article. Shearonink (talk) 19:12, 5 February 2020 (UTC)
 * After a quick inspection, I don't see that there is anything technically wrong at Golden plates. Rather, it would appear that editors have been careless in writing either the citation templates or the, , and  templates. (Why does the article use three variants of the harv templates?)  This issue is best handled at the article's talk page.  If there is anything technically wrong, let me know.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 15:32, 5 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I see Harv errors quite a bit on articles that use Harv cites (thanks to 's wonderful script). Usually I can fix the issues myself but whatever is going on with this article is something beyond my poor expertise. I don't know what is technically wrong, I was unable to fix the problem and so was Rchard2scout. I don't know why the article has so many Harv cite variants and, frankly, it is huge and I don't have the time to bring them all into agreement with each other. I just want to know what's wrong so I can learn and fix it the next time I see it. I think the extra eyes and the more robust traffic here at Village pump:technical (3,305 watchers!) will help solve whatever is going on, the article only has about 160 watchers. Even if this post doesn't quite belong here please leave this thread up so we can all figure it out. Shearonink (talk) 19:12, 5 February 2020 (UTC)
 * What was wrong here was just many, many Harv errors. And Ucucha's script wasn't showing them all at the same time, so I went through them one by one. No actual bugs here, except maybe the fact that the script doesn't show all errors at once. rchard2scout (talk) 16:14, 6 February 2020 (UTC)
 * THANK YOU. Heh, I've never seen an article that had so many Harv errors that the script (sort of) gave up and only mentioned the first occurrence - that's a new on on me. Shearonink (talk) 20:11, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

Unexpectedly caught by pending changes
I'm autoconfirmed and all my edits should be automatically accepted on pages with pending changes. Bat as food has had pending changes since the end of last month, and I've edited the article many times since then, with all my edits automatically accepted. My most recent edit today was not automatically accepted, however, and had to be accepted with someone with pending change review rights. As far as I can tell, I have not had any rights changed. Any reason why that would have happened? Enwebb (talk) 21:56, 5 February 2020 (UTC)
 * It's probably because this IP edit had to be accepted first. Graham 87 03:05, 6 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I had an edit since then that was autoconfirmed. If you look at the history, I made an automatically confirmed edit, then another editor did the same. My next edit was then pending, despite being autoconfirmed and no other pending revisions. Enwebb (talk) 16:22, 6 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Since the PC has expired and there is no way to see the PC history (afaik), I say we can assume it was a one-time glitch. Either way, not a deal-breaker and what Graham87 said has the highest probability (maybe you missed a pending revision somewhere?). --qedk (t 桜 c) 16:47, 6 February 2020 (UTC)
 * This may be another instance of phab:T234743, which is discussed at further up this page. -- John of Reading (talk) 16:53, 6 February 2020 (UTC)
 * , seems probable, thanks. I just wanted to make sure I surfaced this if it was a new bug. Enwebb (talk) 18:05, 6 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Go to [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bat_as_food&action=history the page history]; click [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&page=Bat_as_food View logs for this page], and look for "configured pending changes settings". If there are lots of entries, you can restrict it by clicking the "All public logs" dropdown and selecting "Pending changes log". -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 20:02, 6 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I was referring to the tags added in the page history itself, "automatically accepted", "accepted by xx" and so on, which are permanently lost (again, afaik and as per WP:PC) when PC is removed or it expires. --qedk (t 桜 c) 20:09, 6 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Oh, that's the [//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Log?type=review&page=Bat_as_food Review log]. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 20:39, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

RegExp rule for changing every Hegira years to Gregorian years
Hello, Can someone write a rule for me? I want to change every Hegira years to Gregorian years. For example: Hegira years + 622 = Gregorian years. I have an incomplete rule. It's. Thanks, ⇒ Aram  Talk  19:19, 6 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Sadly, I don't think you can do that with a simple regex. Regexes alone cannot do math.  The language you're using may be able to accomplish this in a different way, however.  What language are you using?--Jorm (talk) 19:41, 6 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I speak in Central Kurdish (Sorani) and ckb:دەستپێک is my home Wikipedia. ⇒ Aram  Talk  20:03, 6 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I meant the programming language you are using, not your local language.--Jorm (talk) 20:26, 6 February 2020 (UTC)
 * You might want to look at some of the templates in Category:Date-computing templates. If you can isolate the Hegira year, you can use  Disclaimer: I haven't actually tried this .  See m:Help:Calculation for details on #expr.  davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  20:13, 6 February 2020 (UTC)
 * It would need to be substituted to work (but yes, it does work): . So, if you can isolate exactly the year with regex and somehow store it as a variable, it is possible, preferably using pywikibot/AWB. --qedk (t 桜 c) 20:23, 6 February 2020 (UTC)
 * It's not a constant 622 either, since the Islamic calendar is a lunar calendar of 354 or 355 days, and so the Islamic New Year occurs ten or eleven days earlier each Gregorian year. This means that whilst in the early days of the Islamic calendar there was a 622 year difference in the numbering, this has now shrunk to 579 (2020 CE spans 1441-1442 AH, and 1441 AH spans 2019-2020 CE). It can be shown that in several thousand years time, the two calendars will be in step (as far as numbering goes) for a few years, before diverging again. That aside, there are formulae at Hijri year. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 20:34, 6 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Unfortunately, I can't understand JS. Actually, I didn't understand you. Sorry!  Yes, I want to use the rule in AWB software. And by using "Find and Replace" do it.  Approximately, 622 is correct. Thank you for helping! ⇒  Aram  Talk  20:53, 6 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Either of the following will give you the date you want, just replace 1398 with the correct Hegira year
 * or, preferably,
 * 1398
 * The first one will stop working once I delete the page User:Davidwr/Add622. The page consist of only one line:
 * Here is what it renders as:
 * davidwr/ (talk)/(contribs)  21:04, 6 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Self-reply: I didn't realize that you were looking at the Arabic calendar.  The above code won't work except when the year difference is 622 years.  Sorry.  davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  21:06, 6 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Thank you for your good explanation! But this way is so hard and we should do it one by one. I want to change all by one click. In past, my teacher wrote a code for website and i saw it worked properly, but after putting it to Wikipedia JS file, it didn't work. the following is my teacher codes:
 * Hope It is a useful code for more explaining. ⇒ Aram  Talk  21:26, 6 February 2020 (UTC)
 * You say Approximately, 622 is correct. - but for present-day dates, it's way off. The current Hijri year is 1441 AH, but 1441+622=2063 (alternatively, 2020-622=1398), so calculating on the basis that the difference is 622 means that it's 43 years out. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 22:43, 6 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia does provide date conversion functions. This  renders as .  See Help:Time function for details.  Granted, it's not the search-and-replace that you wanted, but it may be useful. 21:32, 6 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Hope It is a useful code for more explaining. ⇒ Aram  Talk  21:26, 6 February 2020 (UTC)
 * You say Approximately, 622 is correct. - but for present-day dates, it's way off. The current Hijri year is 1441 AH, but 1441+622=2063 (alternatively, 2020-622=1398), so calculating on the basis that the difference is 622 means that it's 43 years out. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 22:43, 6 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia does provide date conversion functions. This  renders as .  See Help:Time function for details.  Granted, it's not the search-and-replace that you wanted, but it may be useful. 21:32, 6 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia does provide date conversion functions. This  renders as .  See Help:Time function for details.  Granted, it's not the search-and-replace that you wanted, but it may be useful. 21:32, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

Page preview needs Delay before the preview appears
Can you reuse the interface of Reference Tooltip with Delay before the tooltip appears (in milliseconds) for Page preview interface?
 * "Page previews (get quick previews of a topic while reading a page)"

T3g5JZ50GLq (talk) 02:27, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Some templates do not expand in a Citation bot's talkpage archive
In User talk:Citation bot/Archive 19 there are multiple instances of templates fixed, also wontfix, notabug and possibly others, which display their names in double curly braces instead of their content. At the same time they're correctly displayed at the main page User talk:Citation bot (at least until the tagged issue report is moved to archives). Any ideas what went wrong? --CiaPan (talk) 08:04, 7 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Nothing went wrong, as this is a documented feature of the archiving bot being used there. See User:ClueBot III, The bot will also convert in this list to escaped templates upon archival -- John of Reading (talk) 09:04, 7 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Wow, it hasn't even passed my mind that might be deliberate. Thank you for the prompt and clear explanation. --CiaPan (talk) 09:19, 7 February 2020 (UTC)
 * It was a bit of a surprise to me when I first ran into it. -- John of Reading (talk) 09:22, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Template:The Interviews name usage adds Category:Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation Interviewees
I have a list of interviewees from the website and I want to add to each page. There are about 900 persons with pages that use Template:The Interviews name. Is there a software solution?

T3g5JZ50GLq (talk) 02:00, 7 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I could do it using WP:AWB, but I wouldn't want to do it without consensus. — Arthur Rubin  (talk) 02:32, 7 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I see you created Category:Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation Interviewees yesterday. It does not seem suitable for a category and could easily be nominated for deletion as non-defining. See WP:COPDEF, WP:NONDEFINING, WP:CATDEFINING. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:20, 7 February 2020 (UTC)
 * "a defining characteristic is one that reliable, secondary sources commonly and consistently define"
 * The fact that "TV Academy" spent money to get 2 hours of video of TV industry personnel to record for posterity, with Google paying for online distribution, seems pretty significant. It ranks these 900 people with a very high notability out of the more than (160,000+17,500+9,081+7,000+350) personnel in the U.S. TV industry. T3g5JZ50GLq (talk) 12:53, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

IP range blocks
User:Vituzzu has blocked multiple ranges, and has not been responding to multiple requests at meta:User_talk:Vituzzu for unblocking, despite reminders at itwiki where he is most active.

These blocks are affecting many editors who use VPNs and cloud services. Some of the IP range blocks include English Wikipedia, while other ranges are only blocked on e.g. Commons, Wikidata & other language Wikipedias.

How can we get someone else to review these blocks, please? – Fayenatic  L ondon 14:29, 24 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Only stewards from metawiki can review them. Asking here is useless. Ruslik_ Zero 19:10, 24 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Note that one can override global blocks locally, at Special:GlobalBlockWhitelist. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 19:26, 24 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Thank you both. I found meta:Steward_requests/Global which is the place to appeal.
 * Can the blocking message be changed to link to that page, instead of saying "You can contact Vituzzu to discuss the block" since that has proved fruitless and frustrating for many would-be editors? – Fayenatic  L ondon 13:03, 27 January 2020 (UTC)
 * IP's can't place requests there, . —  xaosflux  Talk 14:49, 27 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks; I confirm that that email address is displayed in a different message to blocked IP users. The problem remains for logged-in users who are blocked; we see the message that I pasted at meta:User_talk:Vituzzu, which only refers us to one steward (who may, as in this case, choose not to respond to talk page requests). The message displayed needs to be changed. – Fayenatic  L ondon 21:01, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
 * can you point to the specific MediaWiki: messages that are being shown? — xaosflux  Talk 21:21, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
 * LIkely one of these. — xaosflux  Talk 21:23, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
 * It was not one of those, but it is now! I checked many on that page, then tried Search, which did not find it; so I tried a Google search, which found a mirror of it, via which I traced this copy: MediaWiki:Globalblocking-ipblocked-range/en. I edited that, but I assume that the original version is the locked one at meta:MediaWiki:Globalblocking-ipblocked-range/en. – Fayenatic  L ondon 22:23, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
 * ok - so your concern is that you don't like the message on meta-wiki, not here. Here is the challenge, meta-wiki is multi-lingual so we don't like to translate those messages directly.  I think a good idea may be to request that that message has an additional line, something like {IF X exists: "For additional information see X"} where X is a new message that can point to a page.  To request a change like this you can ask at phab by filing a feature request. —  xaosflux  Talk 23:19, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
 * This complaint has now brought to light a wider problem. Thank you MarcoAurelio for diagnosing this and for the fix in process, and Xaosflux for your help.
 * For the record, the link above for Steward requests is not the appropriate place to appeal against these blocks, but meta:SRIPBE. – Fayenatic  L ondon 12:26, 1 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Note, SRIPBE is not the place to "appeal" a global IP block, it is the place to request an exemption around all global IP blocks. — xaosflux  Talk 12:57, 1 February 2020 (UTC)
 * For the record, the blocking message is being changed, see meta:MediaWiki talk:Globalblocking-ipblocked-range/en. It will no longer refer people to individual stewards (who may be unresponsive). As for the frustrated editors unanswered at Vituzzu's page, I pinged those from the last 6 months myself (as WP:TPS), advising them to make a request on a generic page; some have already done so. – Fayenatic  L ondon 13:26, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Throttling of new users


For the first time today, I've had trainees throttled while making constructive edits (screenshot above). The only new aspect of is that they created accounts this norming, whereas usually I get them to do in advance (but often some do not). Is that the cause, or has something else changed? Andy Mabbett ( Pigsonthewing ); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:37, 4 February 2020 (UTC)
 * was the only edit they were doing "edit" at the time, or something else? (Perhaps adding external links?). If you have live attendees, you can use your eventcoordinator access to add the +confirmed flag to them (for up to 10 days) to help bypass certain newbie filters. — xaosflux  Talk 12:43, 4 February 2020 (UTC)
 * It sounds like the old problem of a maximum number of edits per minute allowed per IP address for IPs and Newbies. The guaranteed way of hitting it is to include the phrase "all hit save now" in your training presentation. Using a Wifi hotspot for some editors, or as Xaosflux mentions setting some editors as confirmed usually solves the problem. Of course the more editors on one IP address the more likely this is to happen.  Ϣere  Spiel  Chequers  20:35, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

Post 6 million article reflections: What does Wikipedia do "wrong" technically?
Having just passed the 6 million article mark, it's clear that Wikipedia is going to be around for a long time. Maybe it's time for some introspection. What do you think are major technical decisions in the design of Mediawiki, that were mistakes in hindsight? I will mention the two that I think were particular bad:


 * Wikitext itself is not defined by a grammar. As for the markup itself, the use of the same character to markup bold and italics, in particular, seems like a mistake.
 * Talk pages and the way we use them are a disaster.

With the wikitext, I don't know what the current status is but there have been efforts to define Wikitext. Those should be high-priority efforts by the WMF. As our article count grows, so too does the need for automated parsing. This is an issue where the technical debt will get worse with time and make the encyclopedia harder to maintain. (If my understanding about the current status is out-of-date, please point me to updates.)

As for threads, some sort of threaded implementation is needed. Structured Discussions is our attempt but so far the first implementation, Flow, has been unacceptable. Something more compact and minimal in style like reddit's comment system would have been leaps and bounds better. One of the major complaints I have is that the entire concept of "archiving" or closing discussions, where we tell users to not to add to an older discussion, is a big mistake. One should ALWAYS feel free to add to a discussion even if you are years late to the action. Why? Because people still read those discussions years late too. It doesn't make sense to leave questions unanswered just because nobody arrived in time to answer them or not to post a winning idea because you as a late arrival were the first to have it. Even when the user is still motivated enough to start a new discussion (and not all will be), it often doesn't make sense to fragment the discussion this way because it often leads to pragmatic issues because the new thread doesn't link to the original discussion. Plus too, the rate of discussion is dramatically different depending on the article so it's hard to even define what "late" to a discussion even means. It is normal to wait years for a question to be answered on a very obscure or highly technical article.

I've always felt like our subpage system could be modified to handle talk discussions. (I've been under the impression for a long time that this was one of our Perennial proposals but maybe not.) Picture this: a new threaded discussion could be started as a subpage of the talk page, replies as sub-subpages to that subpage, replies to replies as sub-sub-pages, and so on. The talk page itself would be generated by Mediawiki to show threads (subpages) with most recent activity. I think this idea could work brilliantly. 1) Threaded discussion (as a tree) is enforced by the storage of the data itself. 2) It would discourage the accidental editing of other's comments while still allowing for it when needed (with isolation of the history of modification to just that particular comment). Subpages NOT intended to be discussions could be marked so they are excluded from auto-generation of the talk page. I think this has HUGE potential for revolutionizing the way we handle discussions. It would also eliminate the need for our clumsy archiving process.

Anyway, those are the top two problems that I'd like to see be fixed so future generations of editors aren't saddled by poor decisions forever. Fixing each of these would require some work but I think the WMF and the community could tackle these. What do you think? What about your own pet peeves? Jason Quinn (talk) 04:36, 28 January 2020 (UTC)


 * Without comment on the general concept of modifying talk pages, you have pretty much described Flow, which worked on the tree discussion model and each thread as a subpage. Risker (talk) 06:08, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
 * We did just hold an immensely detailed cross-project talk page consultation on this issue, which seems to have given preference for an improved version of the current setup, designed to be more user-friendly, rather than any whole-hearted shift. Nosebagbear (talk) 09:50, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
 * The reason I heard why Flow was never adopted (besides being tightly integrated with VE, which was received with a marked lack of enthusiasm) was that no one could figure out how to port all of the old discussions into Flow. IMHO, & speaking from my experience with computers, is that the old discussions should have been left alone & everyone used Flow (or whatever) from a given point on. As long as it worked, after the first few weeks of bitching from one & all, it would have been accepted. (Or maybe the response to VE dissuaded those who made the decisions from implementing Flow, because without the first the second wouldn't work.) -- llywrch (talk) 00:34, 29 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Nope, it just had so many many issues and many people had "showstopper" type issues (and there were many of these) - one of mine is infinite scrolling - YUCK. — xaosflux  Talk 00:46, 29 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Second the disdain for infinite scrolling. Also second that Flow had more issues than just how to import old discussions. As I said above, the style was far too "fluffy" and not compact enough. As for old discussions, I think my idea of using subpages easily handles this: old discussions are simply moved to a special subpage called "old". Done and done. Jason Quinn (talk) 01:45, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

Also, the parsing of Wikitext has been made much more rigorous with the creation of Parsoid, which is now the definitive parser for Wikitext, and therefore also acts as the de-facto specification for that notation. It has a much cleaner internal architecture than the previous software, and in particular, the low-level tokenizer is now defined rigorously in terms of a Parsing Expression Grammar, making things like the apostrophe ambiguity at least well-defined, if not sensible. -- The Anome (talk) 12:07, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
 * @Jason Quinn, @The Anome 'pings' notify when the addressee, the text, and the signer are edited in one, unitary message. --Ancheta Wis   (talk  &#124; contribs) 12:25, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Alright, add that to the list: forgetting a ping is so user-unfriendly that people mess it up in a discussion about wikitext parsing. (Edit summary pings have helped in this area though.) --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 12:41, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Absolutely. If "belated ping" happens this often, it's no longer a user mistake, it's a use case. Just check if the editing user account name matches the account name in the signature (even if it's already there on the page), and if so, trigger the ping event. -- The Anome (talk) 18:12, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
 * , A  parser function might be a better idea, to explicitly say "Yes, I want to ping this person". If it gets evaluated in the expanded wikitext, send a notification. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 18:36, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
 * The main reason to require a signed edit is to avoid unwanted pings when you refactor or archive a talk page or copy existing posts, and the diff engine detects a userpage link in your edit. A parser function wouldn't change that problem unless it saved something else (or nothing) to indicate the ping is old and should not be repeated if the saved code is copied later. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:37, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

PAGE ]]) 22:07, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Our Main page is in need of some technical upgrades, especially so we can take back control of how it appears to mobile users. This has been challenging to deal with in the past, as efforts to improve technical components often creep in to "content" management - even when they don't have to. —  xaosflux  Talk 12:17, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
 * I tried to nudge the current TemplateStyles proposal implementer but it didn't pan out. Want to make a go at it with me and see how many millions of people we can scare with our horrid web design? :) --Izno (talk) 01:48, 29 January 2020 (UTC)
 * I don't care too much about the talkpages and wikitext - yes, it could be improved but both do properly serve their purpose and do not really pose a problem. I am much more worried by the total neglect of bugs and maintenance on some very old extensions.  My pet peeve is there the spam-blacklist extension, but also our AbuseFilter and CheckUser and similar are in a very bad shape (the latter now does get some attention).  There are bug reports of more than 10 year old that nonetheless are still utterly ignored.  --Dirk Beetstra T  C 12:27, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes, considering the scale of the WMF's budget, it would be good to see some more of it spent on software maintenance, rather than just developing new features. -- The Anome (talk) 12:34, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
 * +1 to that. It seems that once a WMF team declares a project "good enough for production", all development effort stops. I have noticed that WMF development teams have been starting to be more explicit about their development priorities (or lack thereof). This is a good start, but doesn't actually help anything get fixed. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 12:47, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
 * +2. I would much rather see a massive bug-fixing effort than yet another new approach that is then essentially abandoned at the late beta / 1.0 stage with hundreds of unpleasant bugs outstanding. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:16, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
 * +3. MER-C 15:32, 30 January 2020 (UTC)
 * If we're in the business of spit-balling crazy ideas, I personally don't care for visual editor, and I don't understand edit filters, but it would be super helpful to have a visual editor for edit filters.  G M G  talk  15:19, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes, and this applies to other tools too. For example, I have a five year old request for a simple feature addition to navigation popups, to make them show Wikidata IDs. Andy Mabbett ( Pigsonthewing ); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 20:53, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
 * The biggest thing in my mind is how we edit articles. Visual Editor is a great step forward, but it's not done yet.  Improving VE, and especially citation handling, should be one of the highest priorities.  We need to get it to the point where it's the default editor.  -- RoySmith (talk) 17:16, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
 * RoySmith, before we could do that, we'd have to have a long discussion about what it means for any piece of software to be "the default editor". There are many Wikipedias at which a majority of editors use the visual editor (i.e., the visual mode, showing rich text, not mw:Extension:VisualEditor's wikitext mode, which we usually call the 2017 wikitext editor) for at least some edits.  There are many editors who use it exclusively.  Some editors care about what's popular, rather than what's good for a particular purpose.  One of the problems we've had in deciding which is more popular is that we don't tag all the editing environments that are used on wiki.  Looking at the 500 most recent non-bot changes to articles here, I can tell you that 7 happened in Twinkle, 8 used STiki, 5 used HotCat, 1 used AutoEd, and that at least 40 used AWB ("at least", because only some AWB users tag their edits with that tool).  22 used the visual editor on desktop, 12 used the visual editor on mobile, and 10 the 2017WTE, which is part of VisualEditor.  57 used the wikitext mobile web editor.  But how many of the other ~350 edits used the 2010 wikitext editor?  Or WikEd?  Or the 2003 editor?  Or another editing environment?  Or didn't really use any editing environment?  Nobody really knows.  I've heard estimates that around half of edits on this wiki are bots or use scripts (like Twinkle), but we don't know whether, say, WikEd is used for more edits than the 2003 wikitext editor.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:58, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm talking about what a brand-new desktop user sees for the first time. Not bots. Not power-users with AWB, Twinkle, etc. Open an incognito window in your browser. Go to Special:Random. Click the edit tab. Right now, you get taken to a "Welcome to Wikipedia" screen, with two buttons: "Switch to the visual editor", and "Start editing". The very first thing a new user is confronted with is the requirement to make a choice that they can't possibly understand the implications of. That's a problem. They should just be immediately dropped into the Visual Editor, but along with that, VE also has to improve. And, yeah, it has to work on talk pages too.  -- RoySmith (talk) 20:33, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
 * We could probably get the devs to make that change (newbies at enwiki start in the visual mode, just like they do at many other wikis), but it'd probably take a local RFC, because of the history of individuals making contradictory pronouncements about what The Community™ wants. As for using it on talk pages, see .  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:53, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
 * What improvements to citation handling do you see needed in VE? Just curious :) Sam Walton (talk) 23:40, 29 January 2020 (UTC)
 * I don't know how much of what I'm going to say here is VE per-se, how much is Citoid, and how much is just the design of the templates.  But, it's all part of the overall UX, which is really all that matters.
 * It too often can't find the metadata it needs in automatic mode. That's not an easy one to solve, since it's usually a case of the website having sucky markup.  But, maybe we could log every URL it fails on, keep track of what domains it fails on the most often, and use that as feedback to build smarter (perhaps domain-specific) parsers.
 * Related to the above, it too often mis-categorizes things as web, when they really should be book, or magazine, or whatever. And when it does that, it's not easy to fix.
 * It can be hard to find the field you want. Some of the templates have way crazy number of fields (last2, last3, last4, etc) and you have to scroll through all of those to find what you want.
 * It should insert the reference in a human-friendly form, i.e. with one field per line. That way, if you need to go in and fix something in source editing mode, it's possible to find what you need to fix.
 * References get renumbered weirdly in preview mode under certain circumstances (T207182 and T52474)
 * It should be smarter about integrating edit filters. Try citing this book, for example.  You don't get the warning until you actually publish the page.  And then you get a dialog box with inscrutable "Dismiss" and "Continue" buttons (I have no idea which button does what).  I tried clicking "Dismiss", then I realized I had lost the error message, so I figured I'd just click "Publish" again to see it.  To my surprise, the second publish actually published it.  Anyway, the warning should come up immediately as soon as you try to insert the reference.  Yeah, I know, that's a messy fix because the filter architecture doesn't support that, but it's all part of a bad UX.
 * Don't get me wrong, what we've got now is pretty cool. It just can be a whole lot better/easier, and it needs to get there to make this really usable for newbies.  -- RoySmith (talk) 01:03, 30 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Speaking of the 2019 Talk Page Consultation, would you all please go to https://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Talk:Dog and log in (unless you want your IP address exposed) and try out the "Reply" tool. Talk pages project/replying/prototype testing suggests a testing script to follow.  Feedback can go on the talk page, or ping me, and I'll pass it along.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:06, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
 * @Whatamidoing (WMF) I can post my just-now experience on the beta.wmflabs with a blow-by-blow set of hints for just getting to respond on Talk:Dog. Would you like this? I can put these hints on your talk page for now. --Ancheta Wis   (talk  &#124; contribs) 21:07, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
 * , am I supposed to see something different on the beta Dog talk page? I don't see any options other than the normal "edit" links next to each section. --Ahecht ([[User talk:Ahecht|TALK
 * I guess we found a bug here, the "Reply" tool doesn't work if the discussion page has any comments before first section heading, and that page now does thanks to 's edit. I filed T243869 and submitted a patch to fix this. Matma Rex talk 00:19, 29 January 2020 (UTC)
 * In the meantime, I've added a section heading, so the 'Reply' buttons are visible again, and any interested person can try out https://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Talk:Dog . Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:26, 29 January 2020 (UTC)


 * We breach the principles of DRY ("Don't repeat yourself"), on a massive scale. For example, by storing citation metadata dozens - sometimes thousands - of times in individual articles rather than one, centrally. And we're currently importing six million subject descriptions from Wikidata, rather than working with the Wikidata community - our colleagues and friends, and in some cases ourselves - to develop common standards, and then transclude them. For a volunteer project with a surfeit of outstanding tasks, such behaviour is self-harming. A professional organisation would prohibit such nonsense. Andy Mabbett ( Pigsonthewing ); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 20:48, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
 * , Sigh. WD has, on a massive scale, imported data without any control.  Their anti-vandalism (in the broadest sense of the word) is practically non-existing.  We need eons to check all the data and get it up to par, including having proper ways of protecting it.  At the moment it is a blessing that some of our featured articles are not using the WikiData data as it has been vandalised without anyone noticing.  Tell me, what is the use of a massive amount of data if you have no clue what is blatantly and scarily wrong? Dirk Beetstra T  C 11:46, 29 January 2020 (UTC)
 * More hyperbolic criticism of Wikidata not rooted in facts: "without any control" and "practically non-existing" are the scary words folks keep repeating to spread FUD. Wikidata's quality is ever-increasing, with more and more Wikipedia editions using Wikidata-driven infoboxes, bringing more eyeballs and quality checks. Wikidata does need more technical features to help out, like signed statements, but the future is inevitably going to include massive use of Wikidata. The sooner English Wikipedia wakes up to this, the better. Otherwise it's the same old saw: editors are quick to brush off Wikipedia's significant failures while deeming any problems with Wikidata as fatal. As to what said above: if we would only consolidate our citations into a structured database via Wikidata or some other system, that would bring orders of magnitude more efficiency to our references, and provide powerful new capabilities around quality, reliability and fact-checking. Rather than English Wikipedia trying to wing it with manual infoboxes, manual citations and manual short descriptions, it should attempt to join the 21st century and start unifying and collaborating. -- Fuzheado &#124; Talk 02:19, 30 January 2020 (UTC)
 * , OK, one of the WikiData items connected to one of our Featured Articles here is heavily vandalised, noted by ORES, no-one is doing anything about it (and the infobox on the only project (not a small one) that is using it is hence .. utterly incorrect .. an no-one eyeballs it). There are spamlinks all around (some more than a 1 year old), no-one does anything about it.  Some items get spam-links added over and over, and instead of protecting all wikis from that rubbish only after 5 or so attempts of spamming someone protects it (if it even gets detected).  And there are continuous attempts to vandalise up to hundreds of pages on all Wikimedia projects that use the data (of which above Featured article is a successful attempt), and that attempt is related to requests like this (if we would grant more sites like that for sites discussed in that thread the vandalism of the Featured article would have succeeded on an earlier attempt by the same user).
 * I totally, completely, utterly agree with user:Pigsonthewing that that would be a major improvement, but you really have to get your data correct, protected. There is absolutely no reason that the 'immutable' data is freely editable (read: vandalisable, because that is the only reason to change it), and that is likely even true for a good portion of the other data.  You may very well be right that the reliability of WikiData is improving continuously, but you have no clue if you are currently at 10% mistakes, 1% mistakes or at 1-in-a-million mistakes.  That you can confidently say that you are improving however suggests that we are more in the percentages than in the parts per million.  (and no, WIkiData is NOT a reliable source, it is just as volatile as any wiki). Dirk Beetstra T  C 05:39, 30 January 2020 (UTC)
 * I should have added here: now, if WMF had it's antivandalism tools up to date and controlled, then that vandalism would possibly have been detected and reverted (well, ORES did detect it ..). If WikiData had a way to protect correct and immutable data then you at least know that that is good data.  At the moment, here on en.wikipedia, and also on WikiData and anywhere else, it is an utter mess.  Protect your correct and immutable WikiData data, and you can fully automatically detect that data on en.wikipedia is wrong, and people will trust that data and just re-use the WikiData data.  Now, WikiData is just a tool to vandalise up to a couple of hundred of pages across the same number of wikis in one go.  --Dirk Beetstra T  C 11:55, 29 January 2020 (UTC)
 * It was written in PHP . This is one of the underlying reasons why WMF software is so crap. There are other, more competently designed programming languages that are better able to handle the level of complexity of MediaWiki currently, and even more. Ducks and runs. MER-C 15:45, 30 January 2020 (UTC)
 * I feel you. I've done a little PHP work (inherited a project).  In the few months I was working with it, I developed a deep loathing for the language.  But, I've always looked at Wikipedia and said, "On the other hand, if it was possible to write one of the world's largest websites in PHP, that's obviously evidence that it can be a productive tool".  Isn't FaceBook also a PHP shop?  Same observation there.  For that matter, English is a disaster of a language.  The grammar, vocabulary, and spelling are all bizarre.  I didn't even know that conjugating verbs was a concept until I learned Spanish in junior high school.  Yet, we've managed to make effective use of English in transportation, literature, and information retrieval.  There's certainly lots of problems with WikiMedia, but I'd be hard pressed to trace them back to the language it's implemented in.  -- RoySmith (talk) 16:20, 30 January 2020 (UTC)
 * True, but it takes more effort, stricter discipline and better software engineers in order to do so. Facebook can afford to pay billions to make that happen. The WMF? Not so much. MER-C 17:12, 30 January 2020 (UTC)
 * , mwaagh ... they do have a lot of money to spend and developers to make stuff. See, we have Flow, MediaViewer, Visual Editor ... SuperProtect.  We even have sarcasm.php (strangely, onlyrequired once ...). Dirk Beetstra T  C 06:51, 31 January 2020 (UTC)
 * FYI, mw:Extension:Sarcasm was not developed by and is not maintained by the WMF.&#x5B;whoosh&#x5D; Anomie⚔ 14:49, 31 January 2020 (UTC)
 * , I knew that. quite a bit of the material that however was developed by the WMF is not maintained by them either. Dirk Beetstra T  C 10:34, 2 February 2020 (UTC)
 * , the crappiness of php as a language is mostly based in it's history. As a language in itself (today, post 7.0) it is not that bad any longer. No, the crappiness now mostly comes from that fact that we have 16 year of accumulated crappiness, no specifications and a gazillion unwritten use cases that need to be supported. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 11:26, 31 January 2020 (UTC)
 * +1 on fixing old bugs, like the >6-year-old phab:T223002 in NavPops. —[ Alan M 1 (talk) ]— 08:32, 31 January 2020 (UTC)
 * , that's a community supported tool, it does not fall under the foundation. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 11:22, 31 January 2020 (UTC)
 * The talkpages work reasonably well, at least in editing terms. OK we need an “autosign on talkpages” option and it would be nice to be able to watchlist sections as well as whole pages. The bigger problem is the number of unanswered queries on article talk pages. Such things could be done if we didn’t have a philosophy among the developers that if you neglect software for long enough you can persuade people to ditch it for something shiny and new. It would be really helpful if there were a report listing talk page queries relevant to each wikiproject, with the option to mark such sections as resolved and/or not relevant to individual wikiprojects. On a bigger scale, we need to take a leaf out of the Chinese Wikipedia and give our readers the option of displaying Wikipedia in American English, Indian English or English. Most of that could be done programatically, and where it needs hidden templates or links to show whether you are using bonnet as in headgear, part of a car or type of chilli it would make for uncontentious reader involvement opportunities. Oh and probably our most urgent software need, we need to make this site easily editable on smartphones. Editing levels are still clearly above the 2014 lull, but there are lots of community skews that come from our being almost a broadcast medium to the smartphone generation.  Ϣere Spiel  Chequers  07:20, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

Is there still a minor edits tickbox? - in Preferences, that is
I couldn't find one but might have missed it. I ask because I sometimes see new editors marking content edits as minor, and before warning them I want to make sure I'm right. Thanks. Doug Weller talk 11:17, 7 February 2020 (UTC)
 * It's still below the edit summary box to the left of "Watch this page". Do you see it [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Example&action=edit&useskin=vector&safemode=1 here]? PrimeHunter (talk) 12:01, 7 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm an idiot, I meant in Preferences. I've edited the section heading. Doug Weller  talk 18:00, 7 February 2020 (UTC)
 * No, it was hidden for English Wikipedia in 2011. --Izno (talk) 18:10, 7 February 2020 (UTC)
 * (In fact, you participated in support of removing it at the related RFC. --Izno (talk) 18:11, 7 February 2020 (UTC))
 * I have a vague memory of that. User:Bishonen and I were discussing it recently and I'm sure Bish will be glad to know that also. So when I see new editors marking major content edits as minor from the getgo, I'll be sure to kindly tell them it's not a good idea. Strange how often those edits are problematic. Doug Weller  talk 19:01, 7 February 2020 (UTC)
 * We do have . -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 22:41, 7 February 2020 (UTC)


 * If anyone needs/wants to, this should work? Use at your discretion. --qedk (t 桜 c) 18:34, 7 February 2020 (UTC)


 * So new users who mark every edit as minor must be employing a custom Javascript? And as a corollary, IP editors aren't able to mark edits as minor since they can't customize any scripts? EdJohnston (talk) 18:49, 7 February 2020 (UTC)
 * No, users who want to have edits marked minor by default must use javascript; the second part doesn't apply because the "minor edit" checkbox is still there on the editor. They just have to mark them minor intentionally. No one should be marking edits as minor by default, and I actually would remove the "minor edit" thing entirely if it was up to me.--Jorm (talk) 19:03, 7 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the explanation. A new editor, or an IP, who is marking everything 'minor' is presumably checking the 'minor' box before every edit. Unless they are on Commons, on the French Wikipedia or some other Wikimedia site that still supports the setting of 'Minor' by default as an option in their editing Preferences screen. There is a slight chance that a new editor might be using a script to automatically mark all their edits as minor. If that causes a problem, their scripts are visible and can be scrutinized. EdJohnston (talk) 01:55, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I did wonder whether a global preference might cause this. So, I went to fr:Spécial:GlobalPreferences where I found the entry "Considérer mes modifications comme mineures par défaut"; in that, I enabled the two checkboxes at the start of the line and saved. I then went to a page on French Wikipedia and clicked an edit link, where I found that the "Modification mineure" checkbox was set. Then I went to a page on English Wikipedia and clicked an edit link, where I found that the "This is a minor edit" checkbox was not set. So, if there is no local preference available, a global preference can't force an override. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 10:54, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
 * or an IP . Logged in users on enwiki have two checkboxes "wpMinoredit" and "wpWatchthis" when editing, while IPs have none. They are completely absent from the html of anon edit-forms, not merely "hidden" by css. Also, "minoredit" is enumerated here as a separate user-right, which implies a wiki's LocalSettings.php file could be configured to grant "minoredit" to IPs, or limit it to some subset of logged in users, or disable it for everyone. So different rules may apply on other wiki sites. ―cobaltcigs 11:19, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

Special:RandomInCategory with action=edit
I have, in my web browser, a frequently used bookmark with the url: I don't know if this functionality is widely known, but it does successfully redirect an article title determined by Special:Random and opens it in edit mode (saving one click). Further testing reveals that other actions such as,  , etc. also succeed.
 * https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Random&action=edit

When I became aware of Special:RandomInCategory (see example), I tried to create an  bookmark for that as well:
 * https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:RandomInCategory/Articles_with_short_description_added_by_PearBOT_5&action=edit

Unfortunately the latter Special: page ignores the specified action. Any idea why? ―cobaltcigs 03:44, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
 * It does work for me with, perhaps this is some kind of bug? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 09:15, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
 * It chooses a random article from that category and opens it in (the default)  mode. For example, I just clicked it and got redirected to the url https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corbin_Allred with no editing box.
 * This differs from the behavior of the regular  urls, which do "remember" the specified action in all cases.
 * At least for me, using the exact same browser, etc. So when you say it "does work" for you… ―cobaltcigs 10:38, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
 * It drops any query string. Compare for example https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Random&useskin=modern&uselang=de to https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:RandomInCategory/Articles_with_short_description_added_by_PearBOT_5&useskin=modern&uselang=de. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/rSVN65054 from 2010 is "Special:Random now carries over query string parameters". You want the same for Special:RandomInCategory. You could file a Phabricator request. I didn't find one. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:53, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
 * As the creator of PearBOT 5 I'm a bit curious what you want to do. If you have any feedback feel free to tell me and I'll do my best to improve it. The bot still has many tens of thousand edits left so any little improvement will likely have a significant impact. ‑‑Trialpears (talk) 14:02, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Manually review a handful of your short descriptions each day without exhausting any particular section of the alphabet, or bumping into other users. As for feedback: if I were running that kind of bot I'd just form descriptions by dropping "s" or "es" from end of the "most important" category name (according to some proprietary ranking), rather than trying to parse any prose from the lead paragraph. Because those tend to be inconsistent and polluted with irrelevant details. ―cobaltcigs 14:31, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

Anyway, ticket opened: T244641. ―cobaltcigs 14:31, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

What's with images becoming unclickable?
Arising from an edit war over an article image that was reported at AN/I, I noticed that the image had an "i" in the bottom corner and tried to go to the image page to discover whose watermark this was, only to find the image is unclickable and the "i" is apparently the new way of actually going to its page. I assume this isn't some intrusive new feature of my browser but rather yet another intrusive new feature snuck in by the WMF? I don't like the defacement and I don't like the reduction in intuitiveness. Was there some place we were informed that this would be happening? ... and more importantly is there a way to turn it off in my preferences? Yngvadottir (talk) 17:57, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Could you provide a link to the image and/or page in question? -- RoySmith (talk) 18:03, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Was about to ask the same question. I was thinking it was Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents but that one works correctly for me. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 18:04, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
 * The article is Yeouido. Is the infobox generated from Wikidata and that's the problem?? I haven't happened to do any edits recently involving images, so I honestly don't know how new this is. Yngvadottir (talk) 18:07, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Ah. Thanks for the link.  Looking at the source, I see the image includes  .  Wow, imagemap?  I haven't seen a imagemap used since the paleozoic era.  No clue why the author did that, but I'm sure it's what's causing the issue.  You own the WMF a healthy dose of WP:AGF.  -- RoySmith (talk) 18:14, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
 * The imagemap was added in Special:Diff/816169558 -- RoySmith (talk) 18:18, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Looks like we've got over 900 imagemaps right now. Mind blown.  -- RoySmith (talk) 18:21, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes, I've just tried editing the article and discovered the HTML command. Thanks,, for tracking it down faster and for verifying my hunch that we don't tend to use that. I'm afraid my assumption that if it wasn't my browser, it was the WMF, is all too natural; to name just one supposedly well-intentioned change, I still get tension headaches when I have to look at the Media Viewer, though they're less violent than when it was originally served up. Can the rest of the imagemaps be removed, please, unless the image actually has defined links within different parts of it? Yngvadottir (talk) 18:27, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I think it unlikely they will be removed. I didn't know about this before today, but apparently it's an officially supported feature of MediaWiki.  See mw:Extension:ImageMap.  -- RoySmith (talk) 19:03, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
 * In addition most of the uses are appropriate with only 24 looking like they are without any links. ‑‑Trialpears (talk) 19:28, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
 * So, only 24 don't seem to go to different parts of a mosaic image, or such - can those be removed as obfuscatory clutter? Yngvadottir (talk) 19:34, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Sure, I don't have time right now but feel free to replace them with normal syntax if you want. Don't trust my search too much though and make sure it actually doesn't do anything first. ‑‑Trialpears (talk) 19:44, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Imagemaps are not a new feature, by a long way. They have been mentioned on this page several times in the past; and indeed, in one thread above. In fact, they are mentioned in this thread which dates from eight days after I registered. So in my personal experience, they've always been around. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 21:45, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
 * We also have a category system for imagemaps: Category:Wikipedia image maps. I made the poorly populated Category:Articles containing image maps in 2014. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:09, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

Need a list of all articles with multiple stub templates
Is there a way, any way, to get a list of all articles that have more than one stub template on them? Example: 1 Decembrie 1918 metro station. SD0001 (talk) 21:03, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
 * , if you're willing to torture the search function this kind of works. You can restrict the search further to avoid the timeout, for example by first letter in the pagename. ‑‑Trialpears (talk) 21:09, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks! That search query works with a prefix qualifier. But it's worth noting there seems to something funny going on in the search engine: A search for:
 * incategory:"All stub articles" prefix:"1" insource:/stub\}.*stub\}/
 * gives no results, but a search for:
 * incategory:"All stub articles" insource:/stub\}.*stub\}/ prefix:"1"
 * works (just the order of parameters changed). Any idea why? SD0001 (talk) 21:41, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Help:Searching says: "prefix: must only ever be given at the of a search box query". PrimeHunter (talk) 21:55, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Ahh, gotcha. MediaWiki is fun! SD0001 (talk) 22:06, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
 * It's not a crime for an article to have more than one stub template, see WP:TAGSTUB, paragraph beginning "If an article overlaps several stub categories". -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 21:50, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
 * For sure. What makes you think I want to remove the multiple stub templates? SD0001 (talk) 22:06, 8 February 2020 (UTC)

Indeed, they should be merged into a single template that accepts multiple parameters. ―cobaltcigs 00:31, 9 February 2020 (UTC)
 * This has been discussed before and rejected, see e.g. Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Layout/Archive 10. I think also at WP:VPR. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 10:52, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

Talk page edits not appearing
I've been attempting to edit Talk:Shirley Ann Jackson, but none of my changes are visible, though the edits are present in the edit history. I've checked in a few different browsers. Any ideas? Zagal e jo^^^ 04:25, 9 February 2020 (UTC)
 * In fact, there are multiple other sections of that talk page that aren't being displayed. I don't immediately see where the problem is. Zagal e jo^^^ 04:27, 9 February 2020 (UTC)
 * There was an improperly closed "hidden comment" tag at the end of the last section that was visible, meaning that every single thing in the entire rest of the page was being swallowed by it and treated as more hidden comment. I've removed it, and the page is now behaving properly. That's almost always the answer when something like this is happening; it's almost always because there's an improperly closed coding tag (hidden comment, gallery, reference, nowiki, etc.) somewhere in the article that's breaking the page. Bearcat (talk) 04:34, 9 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your help! Zagal e jo^^^ 14:42, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

Automatic archiving
There's something that's wrong with automatic archiving on the page Wikipedia talk:WikiProject U.S. Congress that causes it to work sometimes and leave discussions there for much longer than 180 days sometimes. I'm not really sure what's going wrong with User:Lowercase sigmabot III there. Any ideas as to a fix? Airbornemihir (talk) 20:02, 9 February 2020 (UTC)
 * "minthreadstoarchive" and "minthreadsleft" are not set, so they assume their default values of 2 and 5, as described at User:Lowercase sigmabot III/Archive HowTo. ST47 (talk) 21:21, 9 February 2020 (UTC)
 * ahhh I see. Thanks! Airbornemihir (talk) 21:57, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

template/lua to determine if X is in category Y
Just wondering if there is a way to get a boolean answer to the question "is article X in category Y?", using template markup or Lua. I did search for this before asking! Outriggr (talk) 08:58, 9 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I think the category toolbox extension would do what you want in Lua, but I don't know if it is installed on the English Wikipedia. Another way would be to use the title object and search the contents for the category (it wouldn't get parent categories though).  Jts1882 &#124; talk 09:37, 9 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I think it's not installed as  does not work. --Gonnym (talk) 09:47, 9 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Right. Special:Version shows installed extensions. mw:Extension:CategoryToolbox is not installed. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:08, 9 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks. From the above, I gather that what I ought to do is get the page contents using Module:Page (which I just found by guessing names) and use GetContent, e.g. and go from there. I've now got #invoke:String|count to work with the results of getContent, by previewing in my sandbox, so that's cool. I would think this task is general-purpose enough to be generalized into a template but am not aware of one.... Outriggr (talk) 10:42, 9 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Please don't. First, there are other ways for a category to be added to an article other than plain wikitext (from templates). Second, the overhead of reading and parsing wikitext to find a category string is not worth it. Some JavaScript could probably use the API to get accurate information, if there were a demonstrated need. Johnuniq (talk) 22:18, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

Edit history stats
Hi, is there a place to get page history stats plotted on a graph or in some tabular form? Edits per day, edits per day per user, etc. I could scrape the history and feed it into Splunk but surely this exists some place. Any pointers? --LaserLegs (talk) 00:14, 10 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I think the "Page statistics" link in any article's history page is probably what you're looking for. --Yair rand (talk) 06:55, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

Error deleting file: An unknown error occurred in storage backend "local-multiwrite".
Attempting to delete the expired PRODs File:CallipygianVenus.jpg and File:LocationAbkhaziaFinal.png throws this error; other files delete as normal. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 10:07, 7 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Current state, both files are again visible in Category:Expired proposed deletions, one attempt to move the newer file without leaving a redirect + move it back without leaving a redirect apparently didn't help. –84.46.52.123 (talk) 09:52, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

Programming help - US Census links going dark
Discussion moved to US Census Migration for easier editing and reference. -- RoySmith (talk) 15:35, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-07
 Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes
 * There is a new version of the Wikimedia Commons app for Android. It should fix the failed uploads problem.

Problems
 * There was a problem with the new MediaWiki version last week. It deleted some messages by accident. The new version was late because it was stopped to fix things.

Changes later this week
 * Octicons-tools.svg The MediaWiki action API is used by various tools like bots and gadgets. Some error codes will change. Some parameter values that do not follow the standard will no longer work.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 February. It will be on all wikis from 13 February (calendar).

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  19:09, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

Many auto edits and account risks
Sorry for asking here!

Hello, I'm from ckbwiki, I want to say... our project is so small and we have no bot to help us in some aspects. So, i want to use many auto software programs like AutoWikiBrowser, Huggle, WPCleaner (if you use another good one, please suggest to me) and many user scripts. For example: May i do hundreds or thousands of auto edits by using AutoWikiBrowser at the same time, then is there any risk to my account? Thanks! ⇒ Aram  Talk  13:49, 9 February 2020 (UTC)
 * tools like AutoWikiBrowser generally respect maxlag, so your "account" should be OK from a global perspective. Most projects have guidelines or rules about making lots of edits quickly, as it can make patrolling changes hard for others - but that is something the community at ckbwiki would need to decide.  When communities are concerned with this, it is normally recommended to make fast repetitive edits with a dedicated account that can be flagged as a "bot", w:ckb:ویکیپیدیا:بۆت has a little bit of information on this. —  xaosflux  Talk 15:46, 9 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your replying! But we haven't any skill about programming languages to creating a bot. So, I want to use AWB, and/or the others. So we have two options. First, i must use auto programs by logging in with my account (Aram). Second, i must create another account (not a bot) especially for these edits. Which one is your choice? Thanks! ⇒ Aram  Talk  18:42, 9 February 2020 (UTC)
 * ckbwiki already has many bots (about 20) - so I suggest you follow your community norms about when and how to use a bot. — xaosflux  Talk 18:45, 9 February 2020 (UTC)
 * You are right, but most of them are inactive. just i see IAB, AlaaBot and another one. However, THANKS! ⇒ Aram  Talk  18:59, 9 February 2020 (UTC)
 * to put it simply, the only people that are likely to complain about you editing quickly and repetitively at ckbwiki are the editors of ckbwiki. In general, if you want to do something over and over that really doesn't need anyone to check it (such as updating templates, fixing layouts, etc) I recommend you make a bot account and have it flagged.  If you edits will be "content" related (i.e. adding or updating facts to your articles) using a bot flag may be a bad idea, since it will the edits them from people that are not specifically looking for them. —  xaosflux  Talk 19:42, 9 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Don't worry! I'm a very good and active user at ckbwki and i don't think so that a user (on ckbwiki) want to complain to me. I want to use AWB and others to add/delete templates, categoies and files to/from articles, replace old parameter names with the new ones and some other actions quickly on articles. Is a bot's interface like AWB? Because of i have no skills that required to creating a bot. I meant programming languages. How can i see a bot's interface. Thank you for your all answers! ⇒ Aram  Talk  21:07, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

Cite web parameter accessdate
The cite web parameter |accessdate= seems to allow future dates. Why is that? Thanks. Martinevans123 (talk) 15:01, 10 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Because the world turns and today in one part of the world is already tomorrow in another part of the world. access-date should only allow for today plus one day into the future.  Are you seeing something different?
 * Also, questions about the cs1|2 templates are best addressed at Help talk:Citation Style 1.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 15:13, 10 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Really, it turns!? You must be one of these trendy modern editors. Maybe I'm just too UTC-centric? No, it was just a tomorrow date, thanks. Martinevans123 (talk) 16:05, 10 February 2020 (UTC)
 * The only mythology here is that somehow the Mediawiki software in incapable of presenting correct time zone information, which leads to bad module writing and impossible citation dates. This is not true. 72.43.99.138 (talk) 14:16, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * The only mythology here is that somehow the Mediawiki software in incapable of presenting correct time zone information, which leads to bad module writing and impossible citation dates. This is not true. 72.43.99.138 (talk) 14:16, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Related changes and talk pages
Is it possible to view related changes to the subject namespace page when only its talk page is a member of a category (for example Special:Recentchangeslinked/Category:High-importance Astronomy articles)? If so, how? Are there others who would like this to be possible? Utfor (talk) 17:25, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * There is an external website about linked from one or another of our tools pages that can do that for you at the WikiProject level. I'm not sure if there is a similar tool for categories... --Izno (talk) 17:31, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Could someone please tell me where I can find this? I tried to find it at Tools, but perhaps I overlooked it. Utfor (talk) 17:56, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Template:Expand Arabic and Category:Articles needing translation from Arabic Wikipedia
Forgive me if this is wrong the place to ask about this. Category:Articles needing translation from Arabic Wikipedia contained over 200 articles in January, now it is down to 32. It's not that the translations are complete, because articles such as Al-Faw and Abyan Governorate still need to be translated but have dropped out of the category. I suspect something may be wrong with Template:Expand Arabic, which is supposed to place articles in the translation category. Any ideas? --Cerebellum (talk) 13:29, 9 February 2020 (UTC)
 * , I'm probably responsible and did some major changes to expand language recently. I thought everything was alright based on my checks on expand Spanish, but seems like that's not the case. I'm currently away from my computer but will take a look at it tonight. ‑‑Trialpears (talk) 13:50, 9 February 2020 (UTC)
 * It's now dealt with. Sorry for the inconvenience. I'm on holiday and had a quite spotty internet connection these last few days so it took some more time than expected. ‑‑Trialpears (talk) 18:48, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Persistence of check marks when comparing selected revisions
When I mark two versions of an article, usually encompassing those that I haven't read since my last visit, in preparation for clicking on the "Compare revision history" button on an article's "Revision history" page, I'm finding that, after reading the rendered diff and clicking on the back-arrow to come back to the history page, the circles checked don't match what I selected, the two top ones being checked instead. This is intermittent and I can't reliably reproduce it. Does anyone else have this problem? Dhtwiki (talk) 20:08, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

How to search edit summaries
Hi, I posted first on WP:Help desk but got no responses and another editor suggested this board. Is there a way to search edit summaries across Wikipedia? I came across several edits I reverted that said Eklenti yapıldı (plugin done, in Turkish) in the edit summary, and I wanted to check out any similar edits but couldn't figure out how. Schazjmd  (talk)  19:46, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * you can use a tool such as ths one to search edit summaries. (It isn't very fast). — xaosflux  Talk 20:59, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Perfect, thank you ! Schazjmd   (talk)  21:03, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Edit request for module and complex template
in lang has replaced a few hundred individual templates that signified when an external link was in a particular language which is great. What's less great is that now the hundreds of subcategories at Category:Articles with non-English-language external links have all been emptied. Can someone help me fix this? The syntax here is too complicated for me: I can do templates and some Lua but I'm not a programmer. who started a relevant discussion. ―Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 19:50, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * in lang does not need to be changed; see the discussion at Template_talk:Link_language. The empty categories can all be (slowly, as at present, or quickly) deleted as deprecated, as there is a new category structure, populated by the template, that has replaced them. UnitedStatesian (talk) 19:56, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * , This is very confusing. Why on Earth did someone make a parallel category system? Why is it named "[x] sources" when they are links and not sources? This seems like a perfect example of needless bureaucracy and busywork when we had a perfectly functional system. ―Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 20:21, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Pinging as the creator. ‑‑Trialpears (talk) 20:23, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Why is it named "[x] sources" when they are links and not sources? It cannot be presumed that article content associated with the, , and  templates and now associated with  is or ever was a .  Editors have not always used these templates solely with links.  The 'sources' naming scheme recognizes that editors at en.wiki use these templates as it suits them regardless of whether the content is plain text, an external link, or even an interwiki link to another language Wikipedia.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 23:02, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 23:02, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

A week ago, I started a discussion trying to resolve the duplicate category trees between link language and in lang by redirecting the former to the latter. If successful the old categories could be tagged with Db-templatecat and deleted. ‑‑Trialpears (talk) 20:05, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Toolforge questions
This is the second time I'm attempting to get my bots set up at Toolforge and failed. Is there anyone who is willing to give me some guidance? Steps I've completed: Steps where I'm stuck:
 * Wikitech account (developer account)
 * Created a tool on Toolforge
 * Gotten shell access
 * Added public key to Wikitech account
 * Private key stored in /.ssh w.r.t root
 * tools-login.wmflabs.org added to known_hosts
 * What to do next? --qedk (t 桜 c) 13:35, 5 February 2020 (UTC)
 * , are you trying to log in as  and not  ? --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 13:44, 5 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I feel amazingly stupid, thanks. I added a custom host-user configuration to resolve this. --qedk (t 桜 c) 13:55, 5 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Live help is available at, so you know :) &mdash; MusikAnimal  talk  19:16, 5 February 2020 (UTC)
 * You'll also want to subscribe to the cloud services mailing list -- RoySmith (talk) 20:57, 5 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Since I'm unable to get help on the IRC channel, I thought it better to ask here. Why doesn't  persist between sessions on Toolforge, I've tried it with and without a venv, in my toolforge account, as the tool, saving it to ./profile, just doesn't work and it's very annoying working on macOS with Toolforge. Secondly, Pywikibot seems unable to make newlines from "\n", so how do I deal with that. It was generating newlines properly for a while and then it didn't, some secret I'm missing out? --qedk (t 桜 c) 08:25, 9 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Unfortunately, "on Toolforge" can mean any of a number of different things. Are you talking about directly on the bastion hosts, or grid engine, or a docker instance, or maybe something else?  Could you give the exact sequence of commands you're using?  -- RoySmith (talk) 14:58, 9 February 2020 (UTC)
 * This will then throw a Unknown locale: UTF-8 error, which I have to fix by adding the variables to bash_proifle every session. tools-login is aliased to tools-login.wmflabs.org. --<span style="font-family:'Trebuchet MS',Geneva,sans-serif">qedk (t 桜 c) 15:12, 9 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Hmmm. I took the liberty of poking around in /data/project/qedkbot.  All I see in your .bash_profile there is setting PYTHONPATH.  Does that not get set properly?  In the sequence of commands above, if you do   right after the , does your PYTHONPATH not include the value you set in .bash_profile?  -- RoySmith (talk) 15:24, 9 February 2020 (UTC)
 * That is exactly the issue yep, I set the variables two hours ago on my latest bot run (had to!), and now you don't see them. I know setting the variables at the start of each session works because then I don't get the Unknown locale error, but if you want I can try . --<span style="font-family:'Trebuchet MS',Geneva,sans-serif">qedk (t 桜 c) 15:43, 9 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes, please run the printenv and see what you've got after   That should at least narrow it down to whether the environment variable isn't getting set, or if it's getting set but maybe overridden by the venv or something.  Another thing to try is after you activate the venv, fire up an interactive python and do   to see if it made it that far.  You might also try sticking   in your .bash_profile and see if that gets printed; that should confirm the .bash_profile is getting run.  -- RoySmith (talk) 15:55, 9 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes, please run the printenv and see what you've got after   That should at least narrow it down to whether the environment variable isn't getting set, or if it's getting set but maybe overridden by the venv or something.  Another thing to try is after you activate the venv, fire up an interactive python and do   to see if it made it that far.  You might also try sticking   in your .bash_profile and see if that gets printed; that should confirm the .bash_profile is getting run.  -- RoySmith (talk) 15:55, 9 February 2020 (UTC)


 * I saw your BRFA. I assume that means you've solved this.  What turned out to be the problem?  -- RoySmith (talk) 01:28, 10 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I wish it was fixed, a bit loaded up on coursework so didn't get to debug it yet. Still setting the variables every session, I'm guessing submissions to the grid engine will not throw an Unknown locale error. --<span style="font-family:'Trebuchet MS',Geneva,sans-serif">qedk (t 桜 c) 06:48, 10 February 2020 (UTC)
 * This is very, very weird - the environment variables show up just fine in  (inside and outside venv). Here's the output for  :  . Tells you something? --<span style="font-family:'Trebuchet MS',Geneva,sans-serif">qedk (t 桜 c) 09:44, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I was indeed correct, for some reason  was not setting the variables in .bash_profile (which makes me wonder where they are being stored). Configured around Jupyter Notebook to let me edit hidden files (not a Vim fan) and then changed .bash_profile myself, seems to stick between sessions once added - which leads me to think it is the command itself that is not working (which is weird!). --<span style="font-family:'Trebuchet MS',Geneva,sans-serif">qedk (t 桜 c) 09:56, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm pretty confused at this point. The sys.path output you include above does indeed include the PYTHONPATH entries from your .bash_profile.  One odd thing I noticed is that your .bash_profile doesn't end with a newline.  I don't know if that bothers bash or not.  I've never used pywikibot.  I remember looking at it briefly a long time ago and coming to the conclusion that it was crazy complicated.  I took a look at the pwb.py source.  Yeah, it's nuts.  It's doing all kinds of crazy stuff with mutating sys.path and os.environ, and then executing other scripts.  I honestly can't tell WTF it's trying to do.  This looks like a pywikibot-specific problem, so I suggest asking the pywikibot developers.  Sorry I can't be more help.  -- RoySmith (talk) 16:56, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I don't think it's pywikibot, it is definitely something to do with the variables not getting saved in .bash_profile. I still appreciate all the help. Thanks a ton! -<span style="font-family:'Trebuchet MS',Geneva,sans-serif">qedk (t 桜 c) 11:30, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

Incorrect anchor in Watchlist legend
At Special:Watchlist on desktop there is a box on the right side with a list of abbreviations used on the page. It also links to Help:Watchlist in parenthesis, but it links to an old name of a section, #How to read a watchlist instead of #How to read a watchlist (or Recent Changes). Could somebody fix this? I guess that an interface admin is needed for this, thus. —⁠andrybak (talk) 12:11, 12 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Any sysop could make that change, but I happened to be drinking some tea and reading the news, so I took care of it! ~ Amory <small style="color:#555"> (u • t • c) 12:29, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

User search by last activity
Is it possible to search for, say, transclusions of Semi-retired on the user talk pages of editors who have not edited since, say 2018? Andy Mabbett ( Pigsonthewing ); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:31, 10 February 2020 (UTC)
 * If you don't mind that it doesn't see deleted or revdelled edits, or logged actions that don't create a revision, query/42052. —Cryptic 13:53, 10 February 2020 (UTC)
 * That's very useful, thank you. Now if it only showed the results as links... Andy Mabbett ( Pigsonthewing ); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:19, 12 February 2020 (UTC)
 * It's made to go into a wiki sandbox (or other) page. You don't even have to save it; you could just preview a page with its contents if you don't want it on-wiki. Killiondude (talk) 22:45, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

Watchlist format
Hello, I have managed to change my watchlist format by doing something but am unable to restore it to the previous format can some one tell me what I need to do to get back to previous format.

I now get - b  01:44 	Anne Hutchinson‎ (diff | hist) (+63‎) InternetArchiveBot (talk | contribs block) (Bluelink 2 books for verifiability. gra) #IABot (v2.0) (GreenC bot) [rollback] m   01:44 	RAF Hemswell‎ (diff | hist) (0‎) Neils51 (talk | contribs | block) (→‎After closure: spelling - it's->its) [rollback] (Tag: AutoWikiBrowser)

What I want is what I still get on Commons - (diff) (hist) File:Blacktoft Sands RSPB reserve with Ship.JPG‎ 14:10 (+410)‎ ‎Pigsonthewing (talk | contribs)‎ ‎Created claim: depicts (d:P180): (d:Q11446)

Keith D (talk) 02:05, 12 February 2020 (UTC)
 * @Keith D: Do you mean the b (bot) entry? That is a simple option in preferences. The simplest would be to compare Special:Preferences with commons:Special:Preferences. The latter apparently is what you want, and the former might be different. Johnuniq (talk) 02:44, 12 February 2020 (UTC)
 * No it is the actual layout of each entry that changed, possibly after I use Related changes. The time has moved to the front rather than the (diff) (hist) and you get a bunch of changes that you can toggle which is not what I want. I have compared preferences under watchlist and they appear to be the same on both sites. Keith D (talk) 11:42, 12 February 2020 (UTC)
 * It's "Group changes by page in recent changes and watchlist" at Special:Preferences. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:10, 12 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Many thanks for that. Unchecking resets it to what it was, do not know why preferences were changed by the Recent changes form which should not be modifying preferences. By the way that preference is not available on Commons. Keith D (talk) 17:02, 12 February 2020 (UTC)
 * T202916. Anomie⚔ 00:20, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

Outage
Error Our servers are currently under maintenance or experiencing a technical problem. Please try again in a few minutes. See the error message at the bottom of this page for more information. If you report this error to the Wikimedia System Administrators, please include the details below. Request from 98.21.227.217 via cp1089 frontend, Varnish XID 898433163 Error: 503, Backend fetch failed at Tue, 11 Feb 2020 21:13:05 GMT

This has been going on for quite some time and I finally got back in.— Vchimpanzee  •  talk  •  contributions  •  21:34, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Incident report at Incident documentation/20200211-caching-proxies. &mdash; MusikAnimal  talk  04:33, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

Redirect target tool
Hi, is there a template that can, given a redirect page name, return the page it redirects to (so inputting VP should yield "Wikipedia:Village pump")? Thanks. tLoM (The Lord of Math) (Message) (Report false positive) 06:14, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Module:Redirect does that. —&thinsp;JJMC89&thinsp; (T·C) 06:37, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

Rendering slow, scripts and notifications in lag
This morning many things are slow to the point of being very annoying and preventing me from doing my work. Examples are (1) After clicking on a page, I have to refresh the screen as it doesn't fully render, (2) scripts run slowly, sometimes so slowly as to be worthless, (3) notifications are in lag - I got a red 1 on my notifications at the top and when I clicked on it, it said I no notifications...a few minutes later I was finally able to click on the notification that had indeed been made earlier, and (4) my interface at the top is rarely complete without being refreshed, sometimes more than once.--Bbb23 (talk) 15:32, 12 February 2020 (UTC)
 * This may be related to the incident above – Ammarpad (talk) 07:42, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

XTools question
Why is "Top Edits" called that instead of "Edits"? Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 10:27, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Top Edits can show the pages you have edited the most: . Your link restricts it to a single page where it just shows your edits to that page. The name is not descriptive in that case. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:09, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Even in your example, "Edits per namespace" would be a reasonable heading. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 12:21, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Top Edits is the name of the tool itself. XTools is a collection of tools. I don't think "Edits Per Namespace" would be a good tool name, and it gives no indication that it finds the most edited pages. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:46, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

Some pages appear different than others...
Is anyone else seeing different page/font formatting all the sudden? I'm seeing my default font/layout style on certain pages, but other pages (such as the contribution list) are, for some reason, appear to have a different configuration, HTML setup, etc. Steel1943  (talk) 20:24, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
 * ...And now, it's no longer happening. Eh, glad it only lasted for a few minutes, I guess. Steel1943  (talk) 20:25, 13 February 2020 (UTC)


 * Yes, I spotted that too. There was a (brief) change to the shade of blue for pages that had not been visited.  Lugnuts  Fire Walk with Me 20:53, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

Can't preview
I can't get preview or "show changes" to work. The error message is "Our servers are currently under maintenance ...". Is anyone else experiencing this? SarahSV (talk) 05:21, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * , I've seen that a fair number of times in the past two weeks. To add to the frustration, it's most frequent when I've a slow or unreliable connection. On occasion preview has worked in Safari when Firefox (which I usually use) gave me nothing but errors; perhaps changing browsers will work for you as well. BlackcurrantTea (talk) 11:18, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I was getting this recently when looking at my watchlist, which was large. The message seems to be a generic one when a transaction times out because it has taken more than a set period of time.  I suppose that recent occurences are due to a new release or setting, like the update which caused outages across Europe. Andrew🐉(talk) 11:56, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * and, thanks for the replies and tip about other browsers. I did try with others, and it worked, so the problems seemed confined to Firefox. A few minutes ago, it didn't work with another browser either. I lost an edit because I thought it had saved, but I got an error message. The back button and "try again" didn't work. SarahSV (talk) 21:29, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * @SarahSV: I don't think it is browser related; that's probably just bad or good luck depending on factors outside your control which made it appear that one browser functioned better than another. There have been reports here of time-outs and related problems for a couple of weeks and someone linked to a WMF blog or somesuch saying a massive denial-of-service attack on Wikipedia was impacting users in various areas. See also just posted below with "Error Our servers are currently under maintenance or experiencing a technical problem". I looked at two articles you were recently editing and they are massive with, from memory, 5 or 6 seconds of CPU time required to render the page. It would only take a bit of extra pressure on the server or the networks between servers to cause the problems you mention. The "under maintenance" message appears to be a last-resort "we don't know what the problem is but we give up" generic message that is not related to the actual problem. One way to avoid losing stuff is to do the equivalent of Ctrl-A Ctrl-C (select all, copy) before clicking preview or publish. Then, if there is a problem, you should be able to paste into a text editor to save what you had in the edit window. Johnuniq (talk) 22:55, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * , thanks for the information. I do usually save off-wiki and I did this time too, went to press save, then changed my mind and made more edits. That was the edit I lost. Usually, the back button or "try again" retrieves lost text, but this had disappeared entirely. I just tried preview and "show changes" on Firefox on a long article, and it's working again. SarahSV (talk) 00:44, 12 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Just noting that it (preview timing out) has started again. SarahSV (talk) 00:48, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
 * The WMF error page typically includes a section of information at the bottom with technical ifnormation about the error, under the heading "If you report this error to the Wikimedia System Administrators, please include the details below". Please remember to include these details when you report errors, ommitting your IP address if reporting publicly. If the problem only occurs on a page or set of pages, include that as well. Otherwise, it's like saying "There's vandalism on Wikipedia!": true, but not actionable. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 18:37, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
 * , where should I send those details? I don't like to post technical data because I don't know how specific it is. But again today, I can't use preview. I've been able to do it sporadically over the last few days, but then it stops working again. SarahSV (talk) 21:49, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
 * , At this point, filing a bug report is the best idea. If you don't want to go through that process, I do it for you. The technical details typically will contain at least your IP address, a Varnish XID (a number), and/or a MediaWiki request code (a long string of letters). The Varnish XID and MW request code are uniquely-generated values and are only stored in the non-public server logs. Those codes are necessary to be able to and only useful to find the log entry relating to your specific problem. Your IP address, however, identifies your internet connection and should not be posted publicly. Other information in the technical data, like what servers your request passed through or what specifically went wrong, is not specific to you or your request and doesn't have privacy implications. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 22:18, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
 * , thank you for that information. It's extremely helpful. SarahSV (talk) 22:23, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
 * See and  below, and this January archive. Search the last link for "Katherine (WMF)" to see a link to an announcement on Twitter. An announcement here with the current status would be helpful—are there currently any known problems? Johnuniq (talk) 22:32, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

So, is this a larger problem? Malicious stuff
I was doing some work related to the international treaty on wetlands yesterday Ramsar Convention, when I clicked on the linked website, and was surprised to get 'malicious ware' blocked - I tried again today and was again malicious blocked. I finally figured out that if I changed the old link from http to https the problem went away. I guess my concern is, is this happening other places in Wikipedia articles such that readers will be alarmed and is there something organized that can prevent it? Alanscottwalker (talk) 17:23, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
 * that article has a lot of external links on it, can you be more specific about the one you had trouble with? — xaosflux  Talk 18:28, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
 * it's the non-https version of Ramsar.org which redirects you to something like http://game9091.getprizes51.life/8585178743 . Or maybe it's just the website in general, and it triggers it randomly, even in the https version. This article deals with the general problem. &#32; Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 18:32, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes, it was the official www.ramsar.org with http. Alanscottwalker (talk) 18:36, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Hmm, works for me (see output below), however something could be hijacking that DNS or injecting on your connection - in any event it looks like the article was updated to the https link and this was an external issue. — xaosflux  Talk 18:38, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

wget>wget http://www.ramsar.org --13:36:40-- http://www.ramsar.org/ => `index.html' Resolving www.ramsar.org... done. Connecting to www.ramsar.org[18.197.134.191]:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 301 Moved Permanently Location: https://www.ramsar.org:443/ [following] --13:36:40-- https://www.ramsar.org/ => `index.html' Connecting to www.ramsar.org[18.197.134.191]:443... connected.
 * Well, I said I updated the article to https, interestingly, just now put in http:// www.ramsar.org in my browser and it resolved to https://  www.ramsar.org, perhaps I trained the browser. :) Alanscottwalker (talk) 18:45, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
 * you did. It's a malicious ad somewhere on the website. See the howtogeek article above. &#32; Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 18:47, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Alanscottwalker (talk) 22:41, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

Detecting links to stateful web apps
To make a long story short, we've got a large number of external links to a US Census site which are broken because the site implements a web app where the URLs do not encode the full state of the app. I suspect the problem is even bigger than we've identified with this one site (i.e. lots of sites that do this). Do we have any tools that can keep this from happening in the future? It would be nice if WP:CITOID, for example, did some kind of pre-flight check on URLs. Any URL with /jsf/ in it is likely to have this problem. Or maybe something that watched the recent changes firehose and verified each external link was at least reachable? -- RoySmith (talk) 16:46, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
 * "reachable" is a very vague term, if a page returns an HTTP 2xx code it is at the very least "reachable" - and we wouldn't want to stop any link addition just because it is not reachable in a specific instant - remote resources can go up and down all the time. If you have some very specific patterns we could possibly put up an edit filter to warn or stop editors making such additions (providing there is consensus that the links are not helpful at all - we don't want to dissuade editors, especially anons and new editors from trying to give a reference). —  xaosflux  Talk 18:27, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
 * , For sure, we don't want to give editors the wrong incentive. But on the other hand, if they're inserting links that are broken, it would be useful to warn them about that.
 * This particular example is particularly troubling. First, assume the editor is exercising some due diligence and previewing their edit before saving.  What they'll see is the correct page, because the preview is happening in the same web context so all their cookies are available.  Even worse, if we had some automated tool that came along later and tries the link in a cookie-free context, it would still work, in the sense that the tool would get back a perfectly well formatted page, it would just happen to be the wrong data.
 * I don't know what the right answer is. I was hoping somebody else has thought about this previously and come up with some magic fix.  It's conceivable that flagging all URLs with /jsf/ in them would be useful, but I think it likely it would just generate a ton of spurious warnings.   -- RoySmith (talk) 23:13, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
 * can you give some exact examples of these urls being used that are actually broken? Searching for   is getting lots of results, for example this link that appears to be useful. —  xaosflux  Talk 00:15, 14 February 2020 (UTC)
 * My apologies, I should have mentioned earlier. See WP:USCENSUSLINKS for more details, and there's a table of links down near the bottom of that page.  Yes, the factfinder link you found is what I'm talking about.  -- RoySmith (talk) 00:42, 14 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Why is this not simply (hah!) a version of the fact that any URL can return different content from moment to moment, even if state is not involved. Just about the first thing that most of us noticed about HTTP was that the server isn't obliged to serve up the content of the same static file every time. Due diligence would suggest that the page author understand the dynamics of the target site, and use a permalink if possible, otherwise look elsewhere for a snapshot. David Brooks (talk) 00:57, 14 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I agree that would be the ideal case. But, in practice, it's unrealistic to expect that most editors know that, so having some automated assistance would be a good thing.  -- RoySmith (talk) 01:04, 14 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Why is this not simply (hah!) a version of the fact that any URL can return different content from moment to moment, even if state is not involved. Just about the first thing that most of us noticed about HTTP was that the server isn't obliged to serve up the content of the same static file every time. Due diligence would suggest that the page author understand the dynamics of the target site, and use a permalink if possible, otherwise look elsewhere for a snapshot. David Brooks (talk) 00:57, 14 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I agree that would be the ideal case. But, in practice, it's unrealistic to expect that most editors know that, so having some automated assistance would be a good thing.  -- RoySmith (talk) 01:04, 14 February 2020 (UTC)

How to block usurped URLs in non-main-space
This is a situation that comes up occasionally. As an example, www.gaylesbiantimes.USURPEDcom has been domain hijacked by a spammer. It's now blacklisted (thus adding "_USURPED_" so this post will go through), but we still have instances. In mainspace they have all been removed ie. made into direct archive URLs or changed to usurped. That leaves about 70 remaining on talk pages etc in non-main. What to do? Unable to convert them to new archive URLs as the edit filter will prevent new additions. Couple ideas: Thoughts? -- Green  C  03:16, 14 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Delete the URLs outright, leaving behind smoking craters.
 * Surround them with nowiki tags.
 * Add "USURPED" or some similar string into the domain portion.
 * Create a new template that does.. something.
 * I think a template that does something like  would work well, maybe linking to an explanatory page. Otherwise, nowiki around the URLs should be fine. The only issue I could think of would be sections not being automatically archived properly--I don't remember if the spamblacklist considers nowiki or not. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 04:05, 14 February 2020 (UTC)


 * Able to avoid the edit filter if the URL already exists on the page: example. A template would be good. --  Green  C  16:11, 14 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Posted template help request at Requested_templates -- Green  C  16:19, 14 February 2020 (UTC)

Interwiki "Your notices" seem to be persistent
In recent days, my "Your notices" icon (next to "Your alerts") has had a persistent "82" flag. On clicking, they come from Wikisource (and I'll try to find somewhere to ask the same question over there) and reflect a recent spate of hooks from WS articles I once "created" into Wikidata. Trying to expand the dropdown under "More notices from another wiki" and click the blue dot doesn't reduce the count. Logging in to Wikisource, I blue-dot each individual notification, but on reloading they come right back. I gave this a week after noticing it in case of a database delay. Am I missing something? David Brooks (talk) 18:02, 12 February 2020 (UTC)
 * For "somewhere" I suggest Meta, they manage all kinds of global stuff including messaging, notices, default profile, subscriptions, blacklist, OAUTH, etc. –84.46.52.187 (talk) 18:13, 12 February 2020 (UTC)
 * try to clear them using the controls at Special:Notifications. — xaosflux  Talk 18:32, 12 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I was trying to clear them there (both by a group click and each individual blue dot) but to no avail. However, I then thought about Notifications on my Preferences page on Wikisource and noticed "Connection with Wikidata" was checked. I unchecked and they disappeared. Which is nice, but still obscures the underlying bug of failure to clear. I'll try to find the right place on Meta, and maybe search phabricator. David Brooks (talk) 19:24, 12 February 2020 (UTC)
 * As reported on Meta:Babel, the problem gradually cleared itself. It feels to me like a much-delayed background task, but that's probably misinformed speculation. David Brooks (talk) 18:49, 14 February 2020 (UTC)

Template:Party name with color
Can someone proficient in template coding take a look at my unanswered edit request at Template talk:Party name with color, namely add a  somewhere so that this supports piped links when used with. For instance,  would become. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 12:27, 9 February 2020 (UTC) Without "full" I'd expect "Constitution", with "full=yes" I'd expect "Constitution Party". I've extended the examples to show that something is wrong. If it would work (it doesn't) you could get a /meta/shortname Foo Party for a full name German Foo Party. –84.46.52.187 (talk) 13:42, 12 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I figured out how DAB works and added it to Template:Party name with color/doc for Constitution Party (United States). For what you really want I'd need a party with sub-pages /meta/color (ideally) + /meta/shortname (required) for a decent full example on the /doc page, the functionality might already exist. –84.46.52.123 (talk) 09:35, 10 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Using your example:  doesn't show up as   but  . – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 17:19, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes, there is no 2nd parameter as you suggested it. But should have an effect for  = Constitution Party (United States)/meta/shortname.
 * But that's the thing. I don't want to alter the shortnames every time someone uses an ad hoc name in a table. I don't want to bypass the piped linked either, so as to preserve whatever semantic difference there is. That's why I'm suggesting the second unnamed parameter. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 16:00, 12 February 2020 (UTC)
 * If you copy the template as is to a sub-page /sandbox and the /doc as is to a sub-page /testcases  not logged-in users could help to figure it out, i.e., the /testcases should be limited to the 5 examples in /doc (nothing else) and use the /sandbox instead of the real thing. But doesn't enwiki have a "template workshop" or project, is VP/T supposed to be that place? –84.46.52.187 (talk) 17:03, 12 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Done. I know of no centralized or otherwise active forum. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 19:36, 14 February 2020 (UTC)

Issue with Edit summary list, colors
Greetings, Within "Edit summary" box, after I start typing, the popup box appears with "remembered" lines. This popup box is black text with white background. When hover over these lines, the "hover-cursor" is black text with black background, so it is impossible to read. Wondering if there is an override for this color for Vector skin? Before writing here I have tried different color changes, and none of my testing successful. Regards, JoeHebda (talk) 03:14, 14 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure what you mean by "hover-cursor" but I don't see a problem in Firefox with Vector. When I hover over a line, the whole line gets light grey background with black text (easily readable), while there is still a normal arrow cursor. Does it happen in [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Sandbox&action=edit&safemode=1 safemode] or if you log out? What is your browser? PrimeHunter (talk) 16:37, 14 February 2020 (UTC)
 * To clarify, at EditSummary box, when I start typing, a box pops up (white BG, black text) with lines that I previously typed. As I move the (white) mouse-arrow-pointer(hover) over these lines, that line changes to blackBG, blackText and is un-readable.
 * 1. Safemode - with Win10, not sure if that still works.
 * 2. Log out - has no effect.
 * 3. Browser is Brave (Chrome-based) with Shields turned off.
 * While the hover-line is black-on-black, the line hovered on appears down in the Edit summary box & so is readable there. So maybe this is a "non-issue"? JoeHebda (talk) 19:50, 14 February 2020 (UTC)
 * [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Sandbox&action=edit&safemode=1 safemode] simply means the link I made with  in the url. It's a MediaWiki feature which omits local JavaScript and CSS. Google Chrome gives me a light grey background like Firefox, both in safemode and without. I don't have Brave. The autocomplete box is made by the browser. I don't know whether the background color can be changed in Brave. Somebody asked 3 days ago at  with no reply. It's the only mention I found. The timing makes me wonder whether it's a recent bug. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:11, 14 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I tried the sandbox safemode test & same result of black-on-black. Chances are the error is in Brave browser that I recently updated. Only update 2 or 3 times a year, and I did notice a number of GUI fixes color-wise; especially on top-tabs visibility. So chances are this is a new error from the browser. Thanks for your help. Regards, JoeHebda (talk) 21:29, 14 February 2020 (UTC)

Programming Direct-links to Wikipedia articles
I am hitting "disambiguation pages" more than I think necessary. Is there a better way to actually search for the Wiki article I want? Like an "advanced search"?

This will be done in my program with many different searches using auto-generated (but what should be definitive) search terms.

e.g. I want the "Roman Forum (Plovdiv) page.

My search term is: Roman Forum, Plovdiv, Bulgaria.

But that goes to the "disambiguation page" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?sort=relevance&search=roman+forum%2C+plovdiv%2C+bulgaria&title=Special:Search&profile=advanced&fulltext=1&advancedSearch-current=%7B%7D&ns0=1.

But if I search for: Roman Forum then I get the wrong page entirely -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Forum.

Can I drill down my Wiki search to (say) first restrict it to Country=Bulgaria and City=Plovdiv before searching for: Roman Forum ? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sdc7683 (talk • contribs) 17:05, 14 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Your link gives a page of search results. A disambiguation page is something else, a manually made page like Forum. If there is an exact title match (except capitalization) to a search, e.g. Roman Forum for a search on "roman forum", then our search function can take you directly to the page which can both be an article and a disambiguation page. Otherwise you get a page of search results. There is no feature to take you directly to the best match to a search without an exact title match. There is a feature to not go to an exact title match but always display search results. In a url it's done by adding . Compare for example https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=roman+forum and https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=roman+forum&fulltext=1. Our search cannot do things like   or  . You can include   or   in a search but it will match any mention in the page. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:34, 14 February 2020 (UTC)

Suggested articles
Is it possible to set a personal list for suggested articles on the left of each article? The current list ist mostly useless and I hate clicking more each time. Or, if that is not possible, is it at least possible to just simpy show all the languages? Ludost Mlačani (talk) 07:32, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
 * If you want to show all the languages, look at the Appearance section of your preferences, and under Languages, make sure that 'Use a compact language list, with languages relevant to you' is not checked. Some pages exist in many more languages than others; you may not always see a difference when checking/unchecking this option. BlackcurrantTea (talk) 08:12, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes, that's great. Thanks.Ludost Mlačani (talk) 09:21, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

Moving content from page to page
Not complaining about anyone; I mention someone in detail because it's a user rights issue, not a user behaviour issue.

Eight years ago, I created Antoinette Tubman as a redirect to the article of her husband, William V.S. Tubman. Recently, User:Lajmmoore created an article about Mrs. Tubman at the title of Antoinette Tubman (Q15783650). Not having meant to include the Wikidata ID# in the title, she then replaced the redirect with the article contents, and now we have an article. All is good. Weirdness: Lajmmoore did not move the page over a redirect (her only user rights are autoconfirmed and extended confirmed), and the edit summary looks semi-auto-generated.

(moved content from Antoinette Tubman (Q15783650) - I picked her up from a wikidata redlist and made the page without realising there was a redirect in place. I moved page content here and will request a deletion for the new one.)

This looks like the first part was autogenerated (as if it's not a simple copy/paste move), and then she wrote a custom message after the hyphen. How is this possible? Is there some new tool I've missed out on? The page has no log entries other than someone reviewing it, so it's not as if someone else did a history merge, and the wrong-title page has no log entries except for the G7 deletion that Lajmmoore requested. Nyttend (talk) 02:15, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

PS, note that Lajmmoore was the only editor in the history of the deleted page, aside from someone adding a G7 deletion tag — doing a histmerge for WP:CWW purposes would be pointless. Nyttend (talk) 02:16, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
 * It was a simple copy-paste move. I assume the whole edit summary was written manually and see nothing odd in that. Lajmmoore was the only contributor to the original page so she was allowed to copy-paste it and have it deleted. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:37, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
 * You guys are right that it's not strictly necessary ... but I've history-merged the deleted edits in anyway, if only for the edit summaries. Graham 87 03:43, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
 * hi all - thanks so much for the help - its my fault for not spotting the redirect! thanks for history merging, i'm learning more wikipedia all the time & supportive conversations like these are great. just so i know for future, should i always request a merge, even if i'm the only editor? thanks again everyone (Lajmmoore (talk) 07:22, 15 February 2020 (UTC))
 * If you are the only contributor then it's not necessary to history merge or attribute the original page per Copying within Wikipedia. In this case you did attribute the original in the edit summary [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Antoinette_Tubman&diff=940813195&oldid=940812524] but didn't explicitly say you were the only editor. That meant others could be unsure whether attribution to other contributors was missing after the original page history was deleted, so the history merge by Graham87 is helpful. He could also have undeleted and redirected the original without a history merge, but it would be an odd redirect title. A search found a single example Betty May (Q18416435). It's from a page move with no history so it should probably be deleted. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:54, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Previous discussion at Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion/Archive 76, Redirects for discussion/Log/2019 November 5, MediaWiki talk:Titleblacklist. Typically, everybody agreed they shouldn't be created, and there were enough people objecting to each method in favor of one of the others that none of them got consensus. —Cryptic 13:16, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

Automated suggestion for |dead-url= |deadurl= to |url-status
Apparently this feature request should be made in Phabricator but I have no idea where to start there. Could someone who knows what to do please post this request?

Would it be possible to add an automated suggestion for the now removed, previously deprecated, parameters,  and   of Module:Citation/CS1 to be replaced with   ?

I think it would involve editing Module:Citation/CS1/Suggestions/sandbox with the

I think this is something an expert should do.

--Lent (talk) 09:57, 16 February 2020 (UTC)
 * If it involves editing an on-wiki template, it probably can be asked for at Help talk:Citation Style 1. I think that is the go-to person for these templates. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 10:19, 16 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Ha! I had just posted to his talk page, pointing here! See: User_talk:Trappist_the_monk. --Lent (talk) 10:30, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

deadurl and dead-url added to Module:Citation/CS1/Suggestions/sandbox.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 16:01, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

Need help with a simple script
I'm trying to make a script that simply highlights a string, but I utterly suck at javascript. Basically, if you have something like



And I have regex like

then the above would be rendered as
 * Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

See also this scriptreq. &#32; Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 16:43, 12 February 2020 (UTC)
 * This is not done "simply". To target a piece of text, but not surrounding text, they need to be in different DOM nodes. To accomplish this, you would have to molest the HTML of the page somehow, perhaps by wrapping each occurence in a span tag with a certain class. I can't say beforehand what the consequences of doing that is, with regard to performance, or other systems expecting a certain HTML structure. Also, the advice you are given at User scripts/Requests is incorrect. is an immediately invoked function expression. It does not wait until the page has loaded. It is  you want. It would be remarkable if the IIFE waited for the page to load, given that it is not just JavaScript, but pure EcmaScript and therefore has no knowledge of – or dependency on – the DOM. If things have worked for you despite that, it has probably worked by accident because the code is not directly in your personal JS page, but on a separate page that you import with  . That network request might take several hundred milliseconds, which may or may not be sufficient for the page to load before the script is executed. Nirmos (talk) 18:22, 12 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I'll try to update things. It was working probably 75% of the time, with a reload often being enough to get it to work when it didn't. &#32; Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 18:54, 12 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Actually User:Headbomb/unreliable.js was already up to snuff there. Reloads just cleared cached pages I had already visited. &#32; Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 18:56, 12 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I can't see that User:Headbomb/unreliable.js is "up to snuff". Nowhere in the code do I see or any equivalent signature. This might be a simplification, but the "thing" immediately after  or   and its   can either be a string or a function. When it's a string, it usually means "do something with the element(s) that match(es) this selector". When it's a function, it means "run this function after the page has loaded". I am assuming here that you are confusing the two and think that your waits for the page to load. It does not. Nirmos (talk) 19:26, 12 February 2020 (UTC)
 * so how would you fix the above? ? &#32; Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 05:24, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I think you want something like this but I don't have a page to test it against. --Jorm (talk) 05:50, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Okay I think it works. I feel like there's a lot of fine-grained stuff that can be done here.  I also would expand the styles beyond just background color and call them out pretty explicitly.  If you can provide me with a sandbox page with examples of all the link types, I can do that. It would be fun! --Jorm (talk) 05:59, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Regarding the "change text inside of text" bit, it can be done (but not saved; it would only be locally visible to you), but how to do it depends on what the use case is. That is:  what are you actually trying to do, because there may be a better way.  --Jorm (talk) 06:03, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

User:Headbomb/unreliable/testcases will have them. The wiki one won't work, because it's namespace dependant. The 10.1101 won't work either because those are bugged, but I'd want to highlight the first two in an ideal world. &#32; Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 06:13, 13 February 2020 (UTC) If you want to arbitrarily call out sections of a paragraph in such a way, it is also certainly possible to do, but will absolutely slow down page rendering and possibly to the point where the site becomes useless.--Jorm (talk) 16:40, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Headbomb, I made some changes now that I have that, to call out blacklisted ones even more so. Import my script and tell me if that's the kind of thing you want?--Jorm (talk) 06:20, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
 * seems to at least work as well as what I had. The exact CSS colors and style are still being refined, but I went with the same color scheme as WP:RSPSOURCES provisionally. &#32; Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 06:24, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Headbomb: Well, it's faster (for one) and it is guaranteed to execute (which is what Nirmos) was talking about above). That said, I can think of 30 ways to make this better or more useful (e.g., call out twitter links especially, etc.)  Regarding the 10.1101 issue:  what you're asking for is ... very sketchy to do, as it amounts to hand-wrapping innerHTML segments inside of an anchor tag.  It's possible, but doing so will almost certainly slow down page renderings significantly and it is unlikely to produce the results that you want.
 * It does feel faster here. However, I really don't understand why matching  is fine, but   (or  ) is sketchy. Seems pretty straightforward to me, but then again, I don't know JS whatsoever. To be clear, this is a distinct issue than matching stuff anywhere in the page. This one would still be an href lookup thing (WARN_DOIS_RGX).
 * Concerning Twitter links, I don't see why they'd need to be specially identified over other things, but it's certainly possible. Ideally, they would be some sort of mainscript at User:Headbomb/unreliable.js, which sets classes, with people being able to customize the css for each class when importing the script. &#32; Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 17:16, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Also https://markjs.io/ may or may not be useful here. It looks like a general highlighter script. &#32; Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 17:18, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

came up with some clever things, and the main issues have been solved and good compromises have been found. I invite you all to peruse, install, and use the newly-minted Unreliable/Predatory Source Detector script! &#32; Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 18:57, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

Copyvios tool
The copyvios tool (https://tools.wmflabs.org/copyvios/) seems to be dead at the moment, reporting "504 Gateway Time-out openresty/1.15.8.1". Anyone know what's up? <b style="color:#7F007F">Ritchie333</b> <sup style="color:#7F007F">(talk) <sup style="color:#7F007F">(cont)  13:32, 17 February 2020 (UTC)
 * There's some information about this at T245426. – Ammarpad (talk) 13:48, 17 February 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-08
<section begin="technews-2020-W08"/> Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes
 * Pages on Wikidata and Commons now load faster. You can read more about page load performance.

Changes later this week
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 February. It will be on all wikis from 20 February (calendar).

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. <section end="technews-2020-W08"/> 16:16, 17 February 2020 (UTC)

Template for pages in category
Hi, is there a template or any mechanism that can return "yes" if a page is in a specified category and "no" if otherwise? Thanks. tLoM (The Lord of Math) (Message) (Report false positive) 02:50, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Not that I know of. It could be done with mw:Extension:CategoryToolbox, but that's not installed here. (It also says it's in an experimental status, but no work on it has been done since 2017.) rchard2scout (talk) 07:59, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Technically yes, using lua and scribunto patterns, but that is expensive performance wise and not reliable for templated categories. What do you want to use it for? ‑‑Trialpears (talk) 08:05, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

Amanda Bynes; disruptive editing?
In this section, I simply tried to change "Hairspray went on to become Amanda's most successful film at the time" to "Hairspray went on to become Bynes' most successful film at the time", but the edit was rejected with the message:

An automated filter has identified this edit as potentially violating our policy on biographies of living people, so it has been disallowed. Disruptive editing may result in a block from editing.

How is that a violation? There must be an error with the filter.  Erpert  blah, blah, blah... 13:41, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

Attempt to change a talk page section heading to make it neutral stopped by a BLP filter
I tried to change Talk:One America News Network to Talk:One American News Network (to comply with WP:TALKNEW and got the warning "An automated filter has identified this edit as potentially violating our policy on biographies of living people, so it has been disallowed. Disruptive editing may result in a block from editing." I'm not sure why but it's stopping me from making the heading neutral. Doug Weller  talk 13:43, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
 * And I just read the post immediately above mine, clearly there is a problem. Doug Weller  talk 13:46, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Looks like there was a brief error introduced to filter 1008 by JzG which was quickly fixed. Sam Walton (talk) 13:56, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Indeed. I apologise. Unfortunately we have a rather determined IP-hopping vandal. Guy (help!) 13:58, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Noting here that the filter appears to have disallowed some 250 edits. Please test your edit filters outside of disallow mode next time JzG! Sam Walton (talk) 13:59, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

Switching editing modes
My default editing setting is Source. I used to be able to switch from Source to Visual editing and back without losing edits until a day or two ago. Now that menu item has been replaced with the Search and Replace function. Normally I switch a number of times while creating an article. Is anyone else unhappy about this change? Why has this change been made? Oronsay (talk) 19:21, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Apologies. Reviewed my preferences and recovered this facility. Oronsay (talk) 20:16, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

Template markup help
I customize template for my use, I have some user warning templates, I would like to have them create a section header automatically when placed by Twinkle, but I have no idea what the markup would be. Could someone help me with this? Thanks (Please ping me )   -  FlightTime  ( open channel ) 18:13, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
 * have a look at the templates used for notifying page creators of a possible deletion, such as Template:Db-test-notice. Many of these accept a parameter like 1 to add a heading (despite its name it isn't a header). -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 23:12, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Will do, thanx for your time. Cheers, -  FlightTime  ( open channel ) 23:19, 18 February 2020 (UTC)

Now I can't revert pending changes
"Permission error You do not have permission to review revisions, for the following reason:The action you have requested is limited to users in one of the groups: Editors, Pending changes reviewers.

And here I thought I'm an editor. But I guess I'm only an Oversighter so can't be trusted with pending changes. :-) More vandalism?  Doug Weller  talk 17:09, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
 * , I believe this is . ‑‑Trialpears (talk) 17:34, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Did a small change at Special:UserRights/Doug_Weller to see whether the problem is tied to specific permissions. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 18:01, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I've tested it before when someone else raised the issue and the PC userright solves it. It's an issue with the FlaggedRev extension itself afaik and the userright fixes it. --<span style="font-family:'Trebuchet MS',Geneva,sans-serif">qedk (t 桜 c) 08:28, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

Why Wikimedia Foundation Error, incl. details
If you report this error to the Wikimedia System Administrators, please include the details below.

Request from 72.251.70.228 via cp1075 frontend, Varnish XID 892793136 Error: 503, Backend fetch failed at Wed, 19 Feb 2020 06:59:37 GMT

The file is about 70K, and I've seen this problem with files half the size and less. Pi314m (talk) 07:05, 19 February 2020 (UTC)
 * , unfortunately, this is an ongoing problem. See the sections above, 'Can't preview' and 'Outage'. BlackcurrantTea (talk) 08:19, 19 February 2020 (UTC)


 * There is a semi-reliable workaround, and I've been using it for weeks. (I reported this problem in moons ago ... I've seen it in November, December, ..). No, it's not a matter of which browser, but how much text is in a section being edited. On what should have been a single edit (in response to a suggestion), I've done at least 30 edits on the same article. You might wish to pass this along, perhaps by running some kind of search and/or trace on the "Backend fetch failed" string within system logs. Pi314m (talk) 09:04, 19 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm quite sure the and  sections above are unrelated, but indeed there have been periodical issues with stability. I don't think it has anything to do with the amount of text you're adding either, since I sometimes get the same error when fetching small amounts of data through the API. The 503 backend fetch failed error is sort of a catch-all message. This graph provides real-time data on the 500/503 responses for Varnish, in particular. Any unusual spikes and downtime are usually automatically reported to the site reliability engineers. &mdash;  MusikAnimal  talk  17:44, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

Can you force one script to load after another?
I have two competing scripts (by design), but I want one to load/apply after the other kicks in (basically, load in the same order they appear in User:Headbomb/monobook.js). Right now which of User:Headbomb/identifiers.js and User:Headbomb/unreliable.js loads first seems completely random. I want USer:Headbomb/unreliable.js to override User:Headbomb/identifiers.js when there is a clash.

Is there a way to do this? &#32; Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 18:31, 19 February 2020 (UTC)
 * doesn't have a way to do that, but you could use . To load identifiers.js and then unreliable.js: mw.loader.getScript( "/w/index.php?title=User:Headbomb/identifiers.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript" ).then( function {

mw.loader.getScript( "/w/index.php?title=User:Headbomb/unreliable.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript" ); } );
 * I'm not sure what you mean by overriding the other script. --Yair rand (talk) 19:14, 19 February 2020 (UTC)
 * seems to work. And what I mean by that, is both script touch the same things. Let's say Script A looks for words containing SOURCE and colors them green, and while Script B looks for words containing SPAMSOURCE and colors them red. If you find SPAMSOURCE, you're get SPAMSOURCE → SPAMSOURCE (Script A) →SPAMSOURCE (Script B) [B overrides A]. Or you'll get SPAMSOURCE → SPAMSOURCE (Script B) →SPAMSOURCE (Script A) [A overrides B], depending on the load order. By fixing the load order, I'm ensuring that SPAMSOURCE has a higher priority over SOURCE. &#32; Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 19:23, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

Scripts are not working
This User:FR30799386/undo.js script that allows me to undo from the mobile version is not working anymore. Is there an alternative?--SharʿabSalam▼ (talk) 09:26, 19 February 2020 (UTC) Follow the backlinks listed in your common.js page and check to make sure that the script is still being maintained by that same user. If not, remove the script from your common.js and add the new script import location. I had a script fail on me this week, turns out that it had been operating on a redirect for ages. I put the new import location in and the script worked again. - X201 (talk) 10:39, 19 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Actually a lot of scripts are not working with me. I don't know why? I have tried to revert all the things I have done recently but still not working. Is there a bug or something?--SharʿabSalam▼ (talk) 09:38, 19 February 2020 (UTC)
 * You have a lot of scripts in User:SharabSalam/common.js. I see you tried to revert to an earlier version. But perhaps it is an old script playing up. So you could try commenting them out with // one by one until something works. Then add them back in with a different order to narrow down the culprit. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 10:26, 19 February 2020 (UTC)
 * and, but why is the 'undo mobile' script not working although I copy-pasted the code here User:SharabSalam/minerva.js? Is this also because of common.js .--SharʿabSalam▼ (talk) 11:26, 19 February 2020 (UTC)
 * You have to run your script in User:SharabSalam/minerva.js; the install instructions are in User:FR30799386/undo, you would have to put that mw.loader.load call in your common.js with a change to call your minerva.js. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 11:47, 19 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Also the person who created that script has been blocked indefinitely, so obviously won't be maintaining it. If a bug has crept in you'll need to hope that someone else picks up the script and takes over maintenance. - X201 (talk) 11:52, 19 February 2020 (UTC)
 * had planned to maintain the scripts; however, that post was eleven months ago, and things might have changed since then. BlackcurrantTea (talk) 04:16, 20 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm definitely not working on that script, sorry DannyS712 (talk) 04:16, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

Caption not wrapping in periodic table micro template
At Extended periodic table:

The box is sized to the width necessary to display the caption, wider than it needs to be to display the table, instead of wrapping the caption. It's even more exaggerated if you remove the br tag, displaying the entire caption on one line. Can someone suggest how to get the template to size to the width of the table and wrap the caption instead? —[ Alan M 1 (talk) ]— 09:33, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

OK, trying in my sandbox, I found you can add a width in a hidden style parameter, and you don't even have to edit the template:

Graeme Bartlett (talk) 10:02, 19 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Right, or just insert br tags in the caption to make it substantially narrower than the table (to allow for differences between fonts, etc.). However, it seems to me that "fixing" the template would be a better solution. —[ Alan M 1 (talk) ]— 11:34, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

I've found an answer, based on. The structure here is a parent div (with ) containing three child divs: the title; the nav image of the periodic table; and the caption. I add  to the second child and   to the third. This is the equivalent result (other styling trimmed here for simplicity): <div style="float:right;border:1px solid;text-align:center;font-size:85%;background:#f8f8f8;line-height:100%;"> Extended periodic table Ununennium (element 119) (boxed) in period 8 (row 8) marks the start of theorisations Note that a long title also/still causes the same problem. I can't find a  value to style the title's div that prevents this (  and   both end up setting the width for the following divs). (time passes) I've made the changes in and created. The usage in Extended periodic table would look like:

Pinging, who made the table→div change in 2018. Comments, problems anyone? —[ Alan M 1 (talk) ]— 19:42, 19 February 2020 (UTC)


 * I wonder whether folks with knowledge about accessibility, such as User:RexxS and User:Pigsonthewing, would be able to help you resolve the problem with caption widths. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:48, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

Special:ContentTranslation
Hi. I, on portuguese Wikipedia domain, realized there's an error within the current JS code content in the mentioned page. I found it through the Chrome console mode (where I believe it is manifesting itself as the only findable error), but I understand just a little about the language, and, soon, really cannot restore it. Could someone fix it? What is happening involves the page fonts and the identification of the existent and unexistent links, which, respectively, aren't the same previous one (that is the only thing I can confirm; they, now, are presenting itself as the standard for them) and don't differ between the usual colors, blue and red, illustrating what I said. Some detailed images: 1, 2 and 3. Creditor Editor (talk) 19:43, 12 February 2020 (UTC).
 * to report a software bug with the ContentTranslation extension you will need to open a task at phabricator, directions to do that are available here: How_to_report_a_bug. — xaosflux  Talk 18:23, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Creditor Editor, what are the JS errors themselves? --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 07:06, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

Too many links marked by "Strike out blocked usernames"
I'm using this feature, which I have turned on in the preferences, but there is an error (with the version history of MatthewOF's talk page as an example):

https://i.imgur.com/DyFRDA6.png

(Click the link to view the image. I don't host it on Wikipedia because it would be quickly deleted).

The links to the differences are also marked like that.

Also, there is another issue: one of the edits is marked as Replaced, but it actually blanks the page. Someone must fix that. Also, why is editing revision tags not available to normal users? <span style="font-family:Fira Sans,sans-serif"> Key a com  (💬 | 🖊) 07:51, 16 February 2020 (UTC)
 * all things being equal, probably better you avoid edit-warring with an administrator. Promising Wikipedia careers have come to a halt over less. ——  SN  54129  08:01, 16 February 2020 (UTC)


 * For the question of tags, see Tags with a list at Special:Tags. One example is MediaWiki:Tag-mobile web edit. These are added mostly by software, filters, bots and other automated methods, so it would be pretty disruptive and a huge mess if anyone could add or change them. Already I would say there is a mess, for example with many hardly used tags for wikiEdu. Replaced means "Edits that remove more than 90% of the content of a page", so blanking falls into that category. Blanking should also apply, and these tags are generated by software, so it's difficult to change it! When I use the edit tags interface there are only about 16 different tag names I could add, and replaced or blanking were not options. The only ones are the tags labelled "Applied manually by users and bots". Graeme Bartlett (talk) 10:45, 19 February 2020 (UTC)
 * But, when MatthewOF did this edit, the user actually blanked the page. <span style="font-family:Fira Sans,sans-serif"> Key a com  (💬 | 🖊) 15:38, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

Internet speed - Processing request
Greetings, From time-to-time I see "Processing request" delay while waiting for another article to load. I've been working on backlog at "Category Unassessed biography articles". Currently my ISP linespeed is at 5MB/sec. Wondering if upgrade to 10MB/sec will actually reduce or eliminate delay? JoeHebda (talk) 15:41, 20 February 2020 (UTC)
 * No. It is the server computer needing to do some work (such as processing a database querry) before it can send results to you over the network, not an issue with the network connection speed.  RudolfRed (talk) 02:08, 21 February 2020 (UTC)
 * , I don't know how technical you are, but if you want to dig a bit under the covers, and you're running Chrome, there's a ton of information available in the console. Under View / Developer, select "Developer Tools" go to the Performance tab, click record, and reload the page.  That'll tell you more than you could possibly want to know about how much data is being transferred, and how fast.


 * Just to give you an idea, I timed reloading this page. It moved a total of 923 Kbytes of data in 1.8s, which works out to about 0.5 MB/sec.  The bottom line is that for anything text based, almost any internet connection is going to be way faster than you need.  Anything more than a couple MB/sec will really only make a difference for streaming video.


 * As a practical suggestion, what you might want to do is install a browser extension like Open Selected Links. That will let you go to Category:Unassessed biography articles, select a bunch of articles, and in a single click, open them all in individual tabs.  Then you can work through the preloaded tabs one at a time, doing whatever you need to do to each one. — Preceding unsigned comment added by RoySmith (talk • contribs) 02:38, 21 February 2020 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the "Open Selected Links" suggestion. I used it once so far & it's helpful. Yesterday, I changed DNS servers for my internet connection & that gave a bit more speed. Regards, JoeHebda (talk) 17:05, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Notability (sports)/Archive 18
This is appearing as its own article in the Fix Wikilinks list. I don't want it deleted really - I just want someone take notice and move it to its right place. Rogermx (talk) 21:07, 21 February 2020 (UTC) --Originally posted here Doug Mehus T · C  21:43, 21 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Question Does anyone know means by the page "appearing as its own article in the Fix Wikilinks list," and can they offer insight into any fix that may be required? Doug Mehus  T · C  21:45, 21 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I've added a colon to remove this archived talk page from Category:All articles with too few wikilinks. I wonder if that was the issue? -- John of Reading (talk) 21:54, 21 February 2020 (UTC)
 * ,, and I should've known that, too. I'm almost positive that's what meant, particularly looking at the the prior edit diff that showed that category, and I see it's removed from . I'm going to go ahead and mark this as done and close it in a few days if we don't hear back from Rogermx. Doug Mehus  T · C  22:01, 21 February 2020 (UTC)
 * ✅ by . Doug Mehus T · C  22:03, 21 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks to everyone for their quick attention on this. Rogermx (talk) 22:13, 21 February 2020 (UTC)
 * 👍 Doug Mehus T · C  22:15, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

Template to convert from HTML
I am doing some year calculations with for example   shows the year 3 years from now. However for this task the number "3" will be in HTML format. But this does not work:  (I added a space between "& #" so the browser doesn't interpret the HTML). When passed HTML throws an error as it probably should. Is there a wikitemplate that takes as input HTML and outputs ASCII? Something like  --  Green  C  17:26, 21 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Does  work?
 * In lua, there is  which will take more than one html entity and returns whatever text is in the string so if you give it the digit 4  it will return '4'.
 * I think that I recall that someone has written a module that will call a single lua function but can I find it? Nope.  If it's out there, surely someone here knows where it is.  Of course, if that doesn't exist, a simple module:
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 21:13, 21 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Are you talking about Module:LuaCall? ( -> ) * Pppery * <sub style="color:#800000">it has begun... 21:20, 21 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Yeah, that.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 23:46, 21 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Are you talking about Module:LuaCall? ( -> ) * Pppery * <sub style="color:#800000">it has begun... 21:20, 21 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Yeah, that.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 23:46, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

It does work, thank you! Behold:  =  --  Green  C  01:31, 22 February 2020 (UTC)

More interface changes
In MonoBook skin, the page history has recently been subject to a styling change: the buttons like "Compare selected revisions" no longer look like buttons, but flat white text boxes. I am finding it harder to pick out these objects, and that makes it an accessibility issue. How do I get the buttons to look as they did before, i.e. like the "Mark all pages as visited" button at Special:Watchlist. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 20:53, 21 February 2020 (UTC)
 * The buttons now look the same as the "Mark all changes as seen" button on the watchlist. A welcome change too, the default buttons were small and barely legible. --<span style="font-family:'Trebuchet MS',Geneva,sans-serif">qedk (t 桜 c) 21:06, 21 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I, too, use MonoBook and prefer them the way they were before. I thought about asking here for css help to change them back, but hadn't taken the time to write the request. I'd certainly appreciate it if someone could tell me how. BlackcurrantTea (talk) 22:53, 21 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I note the color of Wikieditor toolbar has also changed to a very poor color. It'd be good to get back the old color there too. – Ammarpad (talk) 05:22, 22 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Put $(".mw-ui-button").removeClass("mw-ui-button") in, like so. You'll get a flash of unstyled content by doing it in javascript instead of css, but previous oo-ui fugliness went so deliberately far out of its way to make a pure css solution impractical that I didn't even look for one this time. —Cryptic 07:07, 22 February 2020 (UTC)
 * , that works. It also fixes the "Contest this speedy deletion" button in Template:Db-g2. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 08:43, 22 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I edit with JavaScript turned off because the interface annoys me in various ways, and would still very much appreciate a css solution if that's possible. BlackcurrantTea (talk) 15:29, 22 February 2020 (UTC)

MetadataPanel date fix
I am posting here to serve notice that I've requested a patch to the common.js file. Request is here: MediaWiki talk:Common.js. Magog the Ogre (t • c) 17:29, 22 February 2020 (UTC)

Outdated notice in MediaWiki:Edittools?
There is a comment in MediaWiki:Edittools that any changes there need to be coordinated with MediaWiki:Gadget-charinsert.js but the latter page gives no indication of what would need to be updated. Does it mean that it's now on a different page, or that it is outdated? Pinging as the last editor of that js page. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 10:56, 23 February 2020 (UTC)
 * now at MediaWiki:Gadget-charinsert-core.js DannyS712 (talk) 11:12, 23 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Hmm. I see. I've updated the edittools message although one wonders if it's possible to use a template for both. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 11:15, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

Citation Expander button
I am asking this question here based on a suggestion from Headbomb after inquiring about their use of citation expander. I am able to use this tool via the Tools on the left nav bar, though never am able to see or access the Citations button anyplace. Can somebody help me determine what the problem is, as that may make things a bit easier. Thank you. --- FULBERT (talk) 17:41, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
 * What is your browser, and your skin at Special:Preferences? Does the Citations button appear if you preview a blank version of User:FULBERT/common.js? You don't have to save changes there, just look for the button on the preview. Does the button appear if you log out and click [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Sandbox&action=edit&withJS=MediaWiki:Gadget-citations.js here]? PrimeHunter (talk) 19:26, 15 February 2020 (UTC)
 * That looks like MonoBook to me. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:26, 20 February 2020 (UTC)
 * The image posted here is the illustration at Citation expander. FULBERT is missing the "Citations" button. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:24, 21 February 2020 (UTC)
 * , Thanks for helping me troubleshoot this, and sorry for the delay in my reply. I am using the default Vector Skin and am using Firefox (the most current version). I now seem to see the button when I click "Edit Source" (the only place I now seem to see it, as I have reset some of my previous Preferences) and if I press it I cannot see if anything is found or not. Is that the right place where I should see it, and if so, how do I know if it finds anything that should be accepted / reviewed? Many thanks. FULBERT (talk) 22:24, 22 February 2020 (UTC)
 * See User:Citation bot/use. See User:Citation bot/use for some examples you can try copying to an edit window and press the button. The gadget should then automatically change the text, for example from  to  . PrimeHunter (talk) 22:47, 22 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Pinging FULBERT. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:48, 22 February 2020 (UTC)
 * , Thanks for this; it now (oddly?) seems to be working. I am scratching my head as I think part of the problem has been how I have understood the directions. I have been reading the instructions for "Edit" which really should be speaking about "Edit source," and thus the instructions are assuming the default editor is the source editor, though I did not actually see that mentioned explicitly. Many thanks for your help in the pointing out the clearer directions and examples than I had located on my own! FULBERT (talk) 16:35, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

Template:Random slideshow is broken
Random slideshow seems to be broken. First noticed it not working on my userpage, and decided to check some others, like Portal:Italy. Indeed, it's broken there, too. I've confirmed via IRC that others are seeing it, so posting here. Pinging the creator, (but nobody has edited it in about a year). &mdash; Rhododendrites  <sup style="font-size:80%;">talk \\ 14:42, 21 February 2020 (UTC)
 * The problem is not from the template or the module it relies on but probably the  tag. See T245553. – Ammarpad (talk) 19:07, 21 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Following now. &mdash; Rhododendrites  <sup style="font-size:80%;">talk \\ 17:32, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

Pending changes didn't expire
See set pending changes to expire January 19th. and I reverted pending edits this week, as have a number of other editors since pc should have expired. Which seems to have just happened with the same problems that led to the article being protected multiple times. Doug Weller talk 19:45, 22 February 2020 (UTC)
 * No, Black Kite set semiprotection to expire January 19th. Pending changes were last set (before today) at 14:35, 21 February 2019, and didn't expire until 14:35, 21 February 2020.  The logs are clearer than the history here. —Cryptic 20:24, 22 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm confused. Yes, I was wrong about what Black Kite set, sorry. That mistake of mine didn't help. But look at the history/ where it's obvious pc was working on the 18th.
 * EG 16:34, 18 February 2020‎ Valenciano talk contribs block‎ [+] 64,386 bytes +11‎  Undid revision 941443355 by 107.77.195.231 (talk) rv POV/dishonest edit summary undothank Tag: Undo [automatically accepted]

But Where do you get pending changes set on the 21st for a year? I see "19:47, 22 February 2020 JzG talk contribs block configured pending changes settings for Gavin McInnes [Auto-accept: require "autoconfirmed" permission] (Persistent vandalism) (hist)" - ie set them right after my post, but no mention of your 21st date. In fact, this view shows nothing since the expiry of semi-protection on the 19th. Something's wrong. Doug Weller talk 17:14, 23 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Pending changes changes, unhelpfully, only show up in their own log, not in the protection log, as you'd expect. Also in all logs, where the relevant entry is currently fifth from the top. —Cryptic 17:41, 23 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Damn, I guess I should have known that. But,, spelling it correctly this time, how about the acceptance on the 18th? And why no end date for those set by ? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Doug Weller (talk • contribs) 17:50, 23 February 2020 (UTC)
 * On February 18, the pc set by JzG on February 21 2019 were still in effect. The pc change on February 22 2020 is indefinite, as you can see when reprotecting it.  I agree it's inconsistent that the pc log doesn't say '(indefinite)' in such cases (sample protection log entry, for comparison). —Cryptic 18:04, 23 February 2020 (UTC)
 * thanks. I see my confusion now. I was looking at the fact that semi-protection was being set covering much of the same period that article also had pc but not noticing that they overlapped. I didn't occur to me an article would have both. Doug Weller  talk 18:48, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

2FA problem
I urgently need 2FA disabled because my mobile device has failed and been replaced and the scratch codes I have written down, don't work. I'm assuming they are from a previous iteration.

Can anyone tell me how to get this done please? Guy (help!) 20:58, 23 February 2020 (UTC)
 * T245956 please send an email to ca@wikimedia.org from your registered email address to confirm ownership. DannyS712 (talk) 21:11, 23 February 2020 (UTC)
 * , quoting WP:2FA: If you are totally locked out, regaining access to your account will be very difficult and usually involve proving your identity beyond the shadow of a doubt to one of the developers via the Phabricator system who may or may not decide to manually disable 2FA in the database directly. If you cannot satisfy these requirements or the developers deny your request, it is impossible to turn 2FA off and you'll have to create a new account. Since you're still in control of your account and presumably the email associated with your account it probably won't be too much trouble proving you are you. ‑‑Trialpears (talk) 21:11, 23 February 2020 (UTC)
 * , Hence the message while I wasn't. All fixed now. Guy (help!) 22:03, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

Xtools is down
My traceroute is intermittent and the site does not open at all on the browser. Anyone else facing the same issue? I'm not sure what information this is giving me. --<span style="font-family:'Trebuchet MS',Geneva,sans-serif">qedk (t 桜 c) 20:48, 22 February 2020 (UTC)
 * You scared me! All looks good on my end https://stats.uptimerobot.com/BN16RUOP5/779220479. Are any other VPS/Toolforge tools not loading for you? &mdash; MusikAnimal  talk  17:33, 23 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Seems sorted now! Other Toolforge tools were ok so I'm guessing something went wrong on Xtools' instance. Quite unsure what happened. --<span style="font-family:'Trebuchet MS',Geneva,sans-serif">qedk (t 桜 c) 05:03, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

Bizarre text on external tools article stats pages
Have a look, e.g., at Weegee's stats page. Right at the bottom—literally the last thing before your taskbar—is some text in tiny font. It is completely irrelevant to the page itself and reads as if people are having a conversation on it. Oh, and it's randomized too. —— SN  54129  15:10, 24 February 2020 (UTC)
 * , it looks like it's pulling from some kind of a "funny quotes" list. Also, it looks like it appears everywhere that xtools theme is used - even on the main xtools page. creffpublic <sub style="margin-left:-8ex"> a creffett franchise (talk to the boss) 15:25, 24 February 2020 (UTC)
 * That's quite funny I guess. Bizarre is the word; I wonder how long it's been doing it ;)  cheers for the info   ——  SN  54129  15:28, 24 February 2020 (UTC)
 * , https://github.com/x-tools/xtools/blob/master/config/quote.yml has the full list. It looks like some history got lost, but the relevant files have been in the repo since at least 2019. creffpublic <sub style="margin-left:-8ex"> a creffett franchise (talk to the boss) 15:30, 24 February 2020 (UTC)
 * You can PM me if you want, and I can ignore you if I want...might make that my wikimotto :)   ——  SN  54129  15:35, 24 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes, all fun and games. The quotes originate from IRC/Quotes and the old Bugzilla bug tracker (hence the technical jargon). There was once a dedicated tool, which technically still works, it just isn't discoverable. We decided it wasn't worthy of having it's own tab in XTools, so instead of throwing it away we went with this subtle way of showing the quotes. It has been at the bottom of every page since the "new" version was deployed in 2017. &mdash; MusikAnimal  talk  17:49, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

Tools broken
The tools bar in the left hand pane of my browser usually displays 12-15 options - this afternoon most of those have disappeared, and now it only diaplsys 6. Any idea what has happened? Is it a wider issue or a problem with the script? GiantSnowman 18:10, 24 February 2020 (UTC)
 * It's that script. Ohconfucius edited it today [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Ohconfucius/script/MOSNUM_dates.js&diff=942416039&oldid=935327586] and accidentally removed the ending apostrophe at the last change. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:52, 24 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Many thanks. Found and fixed the glitch. --  Ohc  ¡digame! 20:02, 24 February 2020 (UTC)
 * now working again, many thanks. GiantSnowman 20:05, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-09
<section begin="technews-2020-W09"/> Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Changes later this week
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 February. It will be on all wikis from 27 February (calendar).

Future changes
 * There will be a reply button after each post on a talk page if you want one. This will soon be a beta feature on the Arabic, French, Dutch and Hungarian Wikipedias. You will have to turn it on if you want to use it. It will come to more wikis later. You can test the reply button. It was briefly shown earlier than planned by mistake on the four first wikis last week.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. <section end="technews-2020-W09"/> 20:59, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

Rate limit
I'm trying to develop a tool similar to Twinkle's unlink but for replacing links and I seem to be encountering a rate limit and I'm getting the message As an anti-abuse measure, you are limited from performing this action too many times in a short space of time, and you have exceeded this limit. Please try again in a few minutes. What exactly is the rate limit (practically for extended confirmed users and rollbackers)? – Brandon XLF  (talk) 23:46, 24 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Your quote is MediaWiki:Actionthrottledtext. mw:Manual:$wgRateLimits says the MediaWiki default rate limit for edits is 90 edits in 60 seconds for autoconfirmed users. https://noc.wikimedia.org/conf/highlight.php?file=InitialiseSettings.php sets the same default for Wikimedia wikis and doesn't change it for enwiki. Special:ListGroupRights does not give  to extended confirmed users or rollbackers, so I think 90 edits in 60 seconds should apply to you unless you are hitting an edit filter throttle. Are you getting the message here at enwiki? I didn't find many rapid edits in your recent contributions. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:52, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Also you can see the limits that apply to you using the API's meta=userinfo module, like this. Anomie⚔ 01:55, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Yeah I'm doing it here on the enwiki. I'm doing blank edits as a test for now because I don't want it to stop editing halfway through. I tried editing at 90 edits/minute and I'm still getting the error. It seems to allow me to do 30 edits than it shows the error 30 times than it resets, when editing at a rate of 1 edit/second. Which would make it seem like the rate limit is 30 edits/minute, but I don't see how that would apply to edits looking through InitialiseSettings.php and now –  Brandon XLF  (talk) 02:00, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Just realized my empty edits were linkpurges, which have the 30/60 limit :/. 90/60 seems to be working. – Brandon XLF  (talk) 02:44, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Cirrussearch-boost-templates
Came across this page when strolling through the system messages. I am a little unclear what its purpose is; ? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 11:03, 23 February 2020 (UTC)
 * it boosts the search results of pages with the templates listed DannyS712 (talk) 11:08, 23 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Ooh, that's a cool feature which I didn't know about either. Found the syntax documentation at MediaWiki:Cirrussearch-boost-templates/qqx. the wub "?!"  11:57, 23 February 2020 (UTC)
 * In general, you can usually find documentation for MediaWiki messages by clicking the edit or view source tab, and then "translatewiki.net" in a message at the top. It's unusual that the /qqx page displays documentation. It merely shows the default uncustomized MediaWiki message which happens to contain documentation here. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:32, 23 February 2020 (UTC)
 * So, for example, putting  would cause any page transcluding BLP unsourced to disappear from Cirrus Search? I am just asking to understand how that works (I don't think hiding it from the internal search would be a good move). Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 16:55, 23 February 2020 (UTC)
 * 0% does not remove a page but just places it after everything else. For example, Sukhi Turner has BLP unsourced so the article is last on page 2 of currently 33 results on . It's also last with 33% but moves to second-last with 34%. It's first on a normal search . See more at mw:Help:CirrusSearch. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:29, 23 February 2020 (UTC)
 * This only applies to actual searches. I assume the "Go" feature of the search box would still go directly to the article if the exact title is entered. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:36, 23 February 2020 (UTC)
 * You can see an example of it working at commons:MediaWiki:Cirrussearch-boost-templates. I think the original idea was also to make porn be de-ranked in the search results list, but as you could imagine, that's unlikely to happen. Bawolff (talk) 03:03, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

We need to update maintenance reports at least weekly
The maintenance reports in Special:SpecialPages are very useful. I for one use Special:WantedTemplates to find things that need cleaning up.

It would be useful to have a bot update this list once a week.

The bot doesn't have to run against the live database, it can run against a copy as long as the reports reflect the database as it was less than a week ago. davidwr/ (talk)/(contribs)  15:58, 21 February 2020 (UTC)


 * Special pages aren't updated by a bot. It's listed at Help:Special page, which makes me wonder if it's meant to be happening at all.  User:😂 might have a guess.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:57, 21 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Help:Special page was last updated in August, Special:WantedTemplates was updated in November, which means it became "active" at some point. Either that, or someone updated the Wanted Templates page it on a one-off basis. It's valuable and it should be updated much more regularly, at least weekly if possible. davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  22:21, 21 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Different special pages work on different schedules. Special:Wantedtemplates is supposed to be updated on the 20th of every month . In theory anyways. However looking at the page, it looks like that hasn't happened for several months. Bawolff (talk) 03:15, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
 * So what can be done about it? Is there someone or some group on the English Wikipedia or on Meta or elsewhere that needs to be alerted?  davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  03:28, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
 * It will be handled by devs. I've filed a ticket. This isn't the first time the system has broke. Bawolff (talk) 03:30, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Urbanecm fixed this. He re-ran Special:Wantedfiles today so it should be up to date on enwiki, and going forward it should be updated on the 20th of every month. I also updated Help:Special page to include the update schedule. Bawolff (talk) 13:06, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

Can not find duplication error
On the German Shepherd page there is a duplication short description error. I searched the article for a possible second posting of the template, found none. Hopefully someone here can figure this out. - FlightTime  ( open channel ) 17:06, 24 February 2020 (UTC)
 * The infobox template (Infobox dog breed) sets the short description. — <span style="font-family:Arial;background:#d6ffe6;border:solid 1px;border-radius:5px;box-shadow:darkcyan 0px 1px 1px;"> Jts1882 &#124; talk 17:20, 24 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes, and it's done it for . -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 20:27, 24 February 2020 (UTC)
 * As a general question, is it a good idea for infoboxes and taxoboxes to determine the short description? — <span style="font-family:Arial;background:#d6ffe6;border:solid 1px;border-radius:5px;box-shadow:darkcyan 0px 1px 1px;"> Jts1882 &#124; talk 21:04, 24 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I'd say no, on grounds of the principle of least surprise - I think the average editor would only expect the short desc to be modified by an explicit short description template, not by an infobox. creffpublic <sub style="margin-left:-8ex"> a creffett franchise (talk to the boss) 21:20, 24 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm a big fan or short descriptions through templates since it's the best way to automatically generate large quantities of short descriptions easily. There is also possible generate descriptions using a bot like is done with PearBOT 5 but that has several disadvantages, mainly that only one editor can modify the code and that doesn't apply retroactively. I can also say that the bot route is also a lot more time consuming since the accuracy has to be so extremely high while templated uses can be fixed later. There are problems and this situation can be potentially confusing, but the solution is not to remove the hundreds of thousands of descriptions from templates, it is to improve how tools like shortdesc helper handle multiple short descriptions and template generated short descriptions to avoid confusion. ‑‑Trialpears (talk) 22:56, 24 February 2020 (UTC)
 * One that came up on my watchlist recently was, which has been to provide an automatic shortdesc, discussion is at Template talk:Infobox UK place.  it did occur to me to enquire what would happen about those articles using  that already had a shortdesc. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 23:57, 24 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Answering the questions in reverse order: As I attempted to explain at Template talk:Infobox UK place, when the "noreplace" option is present in a template's short description transclusion, it means let a short description template in the article override the infobox's description. That means that if you put a short description in an article that already has one set by the infobox, the one in the article will be shown to readers. The short description in the infobox is applied by default if a better one is not present locally in the article.
 * As for German Shepherd, I don't see a duplicate short description, and I don't see a recent change to the article or to Infobox dog breed that would explain the error that reports. Maybe another editor can puzzle out that one. FlightTime, perhaps try a purge or a null edit? – Jonesey95 (talk) 03:10, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Cleared my cache, made a null edit, then took this sreenshot -  FlightTime  ( open channel ) 03:40, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Just guessing here: That looks like the desktop view, so I suspect that you have some script or gadget turned on that shows short descriptions, and that maybe you have two such scripts or the one you have doesn't work quite right. Did you follow these instructions to get the short description to show? If not, try that, and disable any other script you are using. All of that said, I remember seeing duplicate (and identical) short descriptions, without an error message, for a short period a while ago. It was not a problem in articles or in my configuration, and it went away by itself. – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:53, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
 * That is from this line  in your common.css file. Since simple css can't determine which short description is actually being used it just displays both. Mobile readers only see one. ‑‑Trialpears (talk) 06:01, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
 * You're correct, I deactivated that line and it fixed the issue (it also removed the description altogether, which is Ok I really don't need those anyway. I only added that line cuz I thought I'd help with adding them to articles). I want to thank everyone for their time and help, I kinda feel like someone who "cried wolf", but I guess that's what "community" is all about. Cheer to all and thanx again, -  FlightTime  ( open channel ) 15:30, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
 * That is right. I have the same code in my css. Sometimes it is useful to see what all the other short descriptions are that may be lurking unseen. One from an infobox and one from a local template is fine as long as it is overridden. Cheers, &middot; &middot; &middot; Peter Southwood (talk): 16:00, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
 * That is right. I have the same code in my css. Sometimes it is useful to see what all the other short descriptions are that may be lurking unseen. One from an infobox and one from a local template is fine as long as it is overridden. Cheers, &middot; &middot; &middot; Peter Southwood (talk): 16:00, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

Tailoring edit notices to different types of editors
Regarding this discussion at the ideas tab, is it possible to tailor an edit notice so that, for instance, it would show a different message to someone creating a new page if they have never created a new page before? Sdkb (talk) 20:39, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I know that the first time someone tries to edit, a notice pops up prompting them to consider switching to the visual editor; does anyone know how that came about? Sdkb (talk) 20:39, 13 February 2020 (UTC)
 * If you don't have an editor declared when you try to call the editor it can ask which editor you want to use, but that wouldn't work for this use case. — xaosflux  Talk 00:18, 14 February 2020 (UTC)
 * The edit notice (a module and template) isn't able to tell if the current user has ever authored a page before, that would be a very "expensive" query as it would require going through all of their past contributions. — xaosflux  Talk 00:18, 14 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Ah, that makes sense. Do you have any ideas about how to better achieve what we're looking to do? Is this something we'd need to get the WMF to help us code? Sdkb (talk) 07:33, 14 February 2020 (UTC)
 * What if we add something like:
 * to Mediawiki:Group-extendedconfirmed.css. Then a different version of the message could be shown to extendedconfirmed and non-extendedconfirmed users., that's not exactly what you're looking for, but is it close enough? Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 20:32, 14 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Something like that sounds like it would be very useful! Sdkb (talk) 06:18, 17 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Sorry, meant to get back to this sooner. I realized that most admins aren't in the group  . What do you see here between the parentheses: ( FNORD )? If there's nothing there, then to avoid showing sysops the "newbie" version of the message, we'd also to make some adjustments to MediaWiki:group-sysop.css. Does this seem like a bad idea? Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 21:33, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
 * an element can have multiple classes, such as in here: ( FNANDD ). That being said, I don't think there are a lot of edit notices that would only pertain to extended-confirmed people, are there some examples? — xaosflux  Talk 21:41, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
 * But if we want to hide something from admins too, we'd still need a  class in Mediawiki:group-sysop.css, yes? Sdkb was wondering if we could a show different version of an edit notice to users who have never created a page before. We could approximate that with

[newbie editnotice here] [regular editnotice here]
 * but no, I don't know of any other use cases besides the one suggested here. Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 22:00, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
 * We could do a bunch of things like that, but I don't think it is really a "good" idea, and "extendedconfirmed" doesn't really have anything to do with creating an "article". —  xaosflux  Talk 22:44, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

As of
Can anyone tell me why we need As of? It's highly used, and adds articles to Category:Articles containing potentially dated statements, but does anyone ever refer to that? It currently has 59,682 members, some being, contrary to its usage instructions, in the future, and others,, also against those instructions, historic. Andy Mabbett ( Pigsonthewing ); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:25, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I certainly have used it for statements that refer to a specific time period and need periodic updating. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 16:45, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I don't monitor the category pages but I have "Show hidden categories" at Special:Preferences and sometimes make an update after noticing an old as of category on an article of interest. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:49, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

Has there been an uptick in hacking attempts on accounts?
I just got a notice that someone try and failed to login my account multiple times. Just wondering if I'm alone in this, or if it's more widespread. &#32; Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 19:30, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I haven't noticed anything on my end for the time being. Amaury • 19:38, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
 * https://grafana.wikimedia.org/d/000000385/loginnotify?orgId=1&refresh=10s&from=now-30d&to=now suggests no (The green line is the number of notices for failed logins). Bawolff (talk) 19:52, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Guess someone had it for me. Good thing it didn't work! &#32; Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 20:59, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Yup, still getting targeted. &#32; Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 21:19, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
 * 5 in 3 days here. Leaky caldron (talk) 21:23, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
 * What bridge did you burn? Amaury • 21:24, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
 * No idea, if I had to guess either someone in the Kudpung arbcom case, or someone who's edits I reverted for citing predatory journals. &#32; Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 21:33, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Yeah, doesn't look like anything above the normal background noise of the usual suspects trying to cause havoc. Not much that can be done about it other than making sure you have a strong password, WP:2FA, and have an email set. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 21:28, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I do have a strong password, but I suppose it's time to have 2FA. Hopefully it's not too annoying if you use 2-3 devices. &#32; Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 21:33, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
 * One suspect is the blocked sock who made an appearance at AC Kudpung. Leaky caldron (talk) 10:58, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

Weird markup brokenness in AfD close
Something is amiss markup-wise in Articles for deletion/Aridhu Aridhu. The blue background div that's supposed to cover the entire AfD text only extends down as far as the reference list, and the next few paragraphs are outside the box. I'm guessing some interaction with the template, but I can't see what. -- RoySmith (talk) 13:13, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Never put a reflist inside a list. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 13:16, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

Additional interface for edit conflicts on talk pages
''Sorry, for writing this text in English. If you could help to translate it, it would be appreciated.''

You might know the new interface for edit conflicts (currently a beta feature). Now, Wikimedia Germany is designing an additional interface to solve edit conflicts on talk pages. This interface is shown to you when you write on a discussion page and another person writes a discussion post in the same line and saves it before you do. With this additional editing conflict interface you can adjust the order of the comments and edit your comment. We are inviting everyone to have a look at the planned feature. Let us know what you think on our central feedback page! -- For the Technical Wishes Team: Max Klemm (WMDE) 14:14, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

Appearance files
Hello!

Can you adjust your settings so that files at file pages and at Special:ListFiles/USER has a transparent background instead of white? With transparent I mean the dark gray/light gray checkerboard which are seen when looking at files in WP:Media Viewer.Jonteemil (talk) 10:05, 25 February 2020 (UTC)


 * "Transparent background" means the image itself is defined as transparent so the background is determined by something else and not by the image. The checkerboard is a way to indicate that an image is transparent. If transparent images are displayed with a white background then it's hard to tell whether it's the image itself which has a white background. The checkerboard is only seen for transparent images, e.g. File:Adidas Logo.svg. If I hover over the image on the file page File:Adidas Logo.svg then I also get the checkerboard there. I get it permanently on commons:File:Adidas Logo.svg. commons:MediaWiki:Common.css has this:
 * It includes places you didn't request. You can add Special:Listfiles by including  in the list:
 * Place the code in . PrimeHunter (talk) 12:35, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks!Jonteemil (talk) 12:40, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Can you do it globally on all language versions of Wikipedias btw? Like adding something to m:User:Jonteemil/global.css? Jonteemil (talk) 20:09, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
 * That should work fine. Your global css applies to all Wikimedia wikis, not just Wikipedia languages. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:19, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I know. I think Wikipedia is the only Wiki I use that have file pages so it shouldn't be a problem elsewhere. Thanks.Jonteemil (talk) 21:21, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Commons has a few... They already have the CSS for file pages but not for commons:Special:ListFiles/Jonteemil. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:48, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I know. I think Wikipedia is the only Wiki I use that have file pages so it shouldn't be a problem elsewhere. Thanks.Jonteemil (talk) 21:21, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Commons has a few... They already have the CSS for file pages but not for commons:Special:ListFiles/Jonteemil. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:48, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

Any collapsible box isn't functional when logged in.
What is going on? If I sign out I can use collapsible elements but when I'm signed in to my account, they do nothing when clicked. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Daemonspudguy (talk • contribs) 18:22, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Is it still happening? The green collapsible areas at the top of this page are working fine for me.  There may be a bug in you Skin or other settings in your preferences or one of the gadgets or .js or other configuration files may have a bug or be triggering a bug.  If your web browser or operating system recently updated, that could also play a role, but I would look at other things first.  Do you have the same issue on other projects, such as the Commons?  Standard IT advice which is almost certainty overkill if the problem is with your computer but probably useless if it's not:  Reboot the computer and try again.  If that doesn't work, try again using a different web browser or different computer, or at least clear all caches, "cookies," and other data from your web browser. davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  18:31, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
 * If it works with [//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Pages_where_template_include_size_is_exceeded?safemode=1 safemode=1] then try removing  in User:Daemonspudguy/common.js. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:12, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

What is the difference between MediaWiki:Wikimedia-copyrightwarning and MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning
MediaWiki:Wikimedia-copyrightwarning and MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning. They both use purposefully the same text, but why does MediaWiki display two separate system messages for them? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 10:56, 23 February 2020 (UTC)
 * = override provided by mw:Extension:WikimediaMessages,  = mediawiki core message. They say the same thing because the latter transcludes the former:   DannyS712 (talk) 11:03, 23 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I know this part, the thing I am wondering is why MediaWiki has 2 system messages for this. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 11:04, 23 February 2020 (UTC)
 * The WikimediaMessages extension is for all of the WMF changes that aren't in wikimedia core. The core message will always exist, but it can be deleted here, because it should never be shown. See WikimediaMessagesHooks::onSkinCopyrightFooter and mw:Manual:Hooks/SkinCopyrightFooter DannyS712 (talk) 11:10, 23 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Yes, this question was basically a question of whether one of them can be deleted. Given that they are a) interface messages and b) copyright sensitive, I wanted to know exactly what they do before a MFD (nevermind plain deletion). Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 11:13, 23 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I would keep MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning. It's linked from 62 pages, and people who know MediaWiki may look it up directly to find our license. If something in MediaWiki fails or is changed, it might be displayed again instead of MediaWiki:Wikimedia-copyrightwarning (I wouldn't be shocked if it's already displayed unintentionally somewhere). Reusers who copy our pages to a MediaWiki installation but don't have the extension may also display it. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:52, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

As with any other system message, if you delete it, then the default text (which is not stored on wiki) will appear whenever it's invoked. You won't just see an empty message or a redlink. I believe the default text is:

Please note that all contributions to are considered to be released under the $2 (see $1 for details). If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly and redistributed at will, then do not submit it here.

You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource. Do not submit copyrighted work without permission!

at the moment. (The $1 and $2 variables get filled in based on other strings.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:50, 24 February 2020 (UTC)
 * You don't need to say "I believe", since the default text is displayed [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:AllMessages&offset=Copyrightwarnin&limit=1 here]. You just added a couple of extra newlines. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 00:10, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
 * The default English message is also displayed at subpages which don't correspond to a language code, e.g. MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning/qqx. Whatamidoing copied it exactly with a  which was rendered as a newline while AllMessages displays the code. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:00, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I copied it from MediaWiki.org, and the line break came with it. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 02:27, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I wasn't referring to the tag, but to the two newlines: one after "for details)." and the other after "free resource." -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 12:04, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Whatamidoing also copied those exactly. They are in the source of MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning/qqx and mw:MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning. They don't render in html because newlines don't do that but they are also in the html source of your [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:AllMessages&offset=Copyrightwarnin&limit=1 here] link. Maybe Special:Allmessages should be coded to render newlines but it doesn't now. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:22, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

Problems using the wikipedia dump bz2 file
Hi, I just downloaded enwiki-20200201-pages-articles-multistream.xml.bz2.

I tried to open it with wikidumpparser. It crashed on the first line, saying "System.Xml.XmlException: 'Unexpected end of file has occurred. The following elements are not closed: mediawiki. Line 45, position 1.'" I extracted the xml file. Too big for notepad++. I tried using firstobject xml editor, which I have used to open xml files larger than a few Gigabites before. Firstobject xml editor just closed without any error message when I tried to open the xml.

I would prefer to open it in .net, but any language will do. I just want a program to be able to look up many articles, and I thought a local file would be better than many calls to the online wikipedia. Perhaps I was wrong. Do you have any suggestions? Is there something wrong with the dump? Is it a newer format? Do you have any suggestions on how to access it at all or alternatively for accessing the online wikipedia often in the best way?

I have used a few .net libraries some years ago, but as I read the documentation, nowadays I need permission, and probably special permission if I want to make many calls. So I thought the dump might be an alternative, not to disturb anyone too much.

I recently realized that wictonary may be more appropriate for my needs. I had similar problems with the dumps. Star Lord -   星爵 (talk) 22:15, 25 February 2020 (UTC)


 * Star Lord -   星爵, how many is "many articles"?  A thousand a day?  A thousand an hour?  A thousand a minute?  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 02:26, 26 February 2020 (UTC)


 * At this point in time, I cannot tell how many it will be eventually, Whatamidoing (WMF). It may be years before it needs any amounts at all. I am investigating possibilities for the future. I shall ask again when I can give you reliable numbers. However, I have now had a look at "https://en.wiktionary.org/w/api.php?" and it looks like this will serve me well initially. Initially, there will only be a few lookups for basic definitions. I read somewhere that there seems to be a limit for these calls. 500 calls a day standard and 5000 for bots. Are these reliable numbers? Would I need to register a bot somewhere when ( and if ) the numbers approach 500 a day, do you know? Star Lord -   星爵 (talk) 07:10, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
 * There is not (yet) a limit on number of API calls per day. However, mw:API:Etiquette encourages making requests serially rather than in parallel and using a user agent that identifies your code and indicates a way to contact you in case you wind up doing something that negatively impacts the sites. Anomie⚔ 13:09, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Thank you! Star Lord -   星爵 (talk) 17:05, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

Did you decompress the dump properly? That type of error message suggests to me the dump file was maybe truncated or not decompressed properly (just a guess though. I dont really know much about this). Bawolff (talk) 09:37, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Wikidumpparser, where that error occured, decompresses via GZipStream internally. Star Lord  -   星爵 (talk) 17:05, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
 * well given you are using a bzip2 dump not a gzip dump, maybe that's part of the problem. Bawolff (talk) 23:16, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

Effects of nofollow
Does anyone know whether the complaint in this edit summary has any basis in fact? I thought that  attributes had no effect on search engine optimization, but he thinks that it has a negative effect. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:47, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Nofollow is an instruction to search engines to ignore, or not follow, the links that are tagged with it. How search engines interpret tat information can differ, is not usually made public, and wholly out of our control. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 16:00, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
 * In theory search engines are supposed to make the link not count in ranking pages or only count weakly. I have never heard of nofollow being interpreted negatively. Bawolff (talk) 23:19, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

Closing tag issue at an AFD
At Articles for deletion/Shahra Razavi the green box does appear to stop at a reflist template rather than the actual footer. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 17:30, 27 February 2020 (UTC)
 * An editor put a colon in front of reflist which can cause issues. Also, the editor should have used reflist talk. Fix.  davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  17:36, 27 February 2020 (UTC)
 * This is exactly the same issue as above. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 20:24, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

Huggle and bad words (score words)
Hello, How score words in wp:Huggle/Config.yaml work? For example: If i write "fu**" on an article, can Huggle's users find my edit soon and revert it? Can we add Arabic words in Huggle/Config.yaml (on our project)? Thanks! ⇒ Aram  Talk  21:00, 16 February 2020 (UTC)
 * No one! ⇒ Aram  Talk  19:52, 21 February 2020 (UTC)


 * Hi, Aram, sorry that nobody has answered yet. I'm not familiar with Huggle, so I can't help you on the usage aspect.  I expect it would most likely be Unicode-compatible and able to deal with Arabic script.  Is Huggle config already deployed on your project (I assume ckb-wikipedia from your global contribs), or are you evaluating whether it's worth setting up?  If you haven't already, it might be worthwhile asking at Meta or ar-wp in addition to here (and if you do find an answer elsewhere, please let us know).  Cheers!  (Please ping me in replies, I don't often visit VPT.)  Pelagic (talk) 11:16, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Addendum: you might be able to experiment with a user-level config before attacking your wiki's site-wide Huggle config. Pelagic (talk) 12:06, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Thank you for your replying! yes, we already added our project to Huggle. ⇒ Aram  Talk  11:53, 28 February 2020 (UTC)

Earwig's copyvio detector
I know there have been problems with Earwig's copyvio detector (https://tools.wmflabs.org/copyvios) for some time, but I am now experiencing one which, for me at least, is totally new. Every time I make a search, I get a list of totally irrelevant sites, with nothing whatever in common with the Wikipedia page I used in the search. This applies even to exact duplication of searches I did within the last half hour or so and which then found web pages with significant overlap with the Wikipedia page I am searching for. Certain web sites keep coming up, no matter what I am searching for, such as https://www.thebalancecareers.com/ https://www.careeronestop.org and https://apastyle.apa.org Anyone know anything about this? JBW (talk) 10:57, 28 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Possibly related to, but it's hard to see how the problem described there would account for these symptoms. -- RoySmith (talk) 14:12, 28 February 2020 (UTC)

Green titles?
I noticed the title of Media coverage of Bernie Sanders is in green. Digging through the generated HTML, it looks like this is due to, which leads me to believe it's tied to the article being B-rated. But, how does this little bit of magic work? I don't see anything in Content assessment which talks about it. -- RoySmith (talk) 14:09, 28 February 2020 (UTC)
 * At, it's "". -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 14:41, 28 February 2020 (UTC)
 * , it is a community gadget called Metadata_gadget —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 14:41, 28 February 2020 (UTC)

Any tool that can create a log of mergers I proposed?
I recently started using Twinkle and I am quite fond of its CSD and prod log features. But I came to a realization that Twinkle's lack of proposed merge log may be unduly reinforcing my favor of prodding/AfDing stuff. A merge discussion is a good alternative in some cases, but as there is no log of proposed mergers, I think myself and many others may even subconciously prefer prod/AfD to mergers since the latter are hard to keep track of. Any suggestion of how to remedy this with a tool (or a Twinkle option I missed?) would be appreciated. --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 11:53, 28 February 2020 (UTC)
 * If there isn't a Twinkle-specific way, you can probably search your contibs by edit summary. WP:Village pump (technical)/Archive 177 shows how to, two different ways. —Cryptic 14:29, 28 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Right, I know how to use edit summary search but it can often fail due to server lag, and if you forgot to use standardize edit summaries, it is another point of failure. --<sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 15:22, 28 February 2020 (UTC)

Table formatting anomaly
Issue appears at List of Warped Tour lineups by year, and displays in multiple browsers.

On a line by itself, at the left margin and directly beneath the horizontal Compact ToC, is a stray parameter:

align="center"|

I cannot determine where this is coming from in the code. It is quite distracting. Any help will be much appreciated. Thanks! NedFausa (talk) 06:45, 28 February 2020 (UTC)


 * There was some misplace CSS styling in the "36 Crazyfists" row. I've commented it out temporarily, but you should check that the appropriate columns are ticked and if so delete the commented code. — <span style="font-family:Arial;background:#d6ffe6;border:solid 1px;border-radius:5px;box-shadow:darkcyan 0px 1px 1px;"> Jts1882 &#124; talk 08:24, 28 February 2020 (UTC)


 * thank you! The page looks much better now, and the checkmarks appear to be properly placed. What a relief. Not knowing CSS, I was utterly baffled and ready to swear off drugs completely. NedFausa (talk) 15:57, 28 February 2020 (UTC)

Wikisophia links?
I somehow just got sent to wikisophia.org. It was through an Interwiki link (in Ecclesiology) that started "s:" so, yes, it should have gone to Wikisource, and it does now, but before I made the edit I am positive it linked me to wikisophia (which appears to be both abandoned and unaffiliated with Wikimedia). It was to a database error page. I don't know how to reproduce it now, because the links are pointing to Wikisource now, even in the old revisions. Any clues? Elizium23 (talk) 18:03, 28 February 2020 (UTC)
 * wikisophia:Main page generates a 403-forbidden message. Either the expansion listed at meta:Special:Interwiki is incorrect or the wikisophia site has a bug. But http://wikisophia.org/wiki/Main_Page works fine. In any case, the site seems stale and parts seem broken.  In any case, the page still a link to wikisource (spelled out, not :s:...) I fixed it to point to wikisource, which is where it should logically point to anyway in this instance.  davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  18:59, 28 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Okay, thanks. Is it a Visual Editor bug? Apparently I introduced the links unwittingly in this revision. Is Wikisophia affiliated with Wikimedia? Elizium23 (talk) 19:07, 28 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Is it a Visual Editor bug? No clue.  Is Wikisophia affiliated with Wikimedia?  Doubtful, Wikimedia/Wikipedia inter-links work with many projects that are not affiliated with Wikimedia.  As a general rule of thumb, if the "forward" column in meta:Special:Interwiki says "yes" its very likely it is affiliated, if it it says "no" it's likely unaffiliated.  I'm sure there are exceptions, such as the luxo interwiki (which translates to https://tools.wmflabs.org/guc/?user=$1 ).  davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  19:16, 28 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I have a high level of confidence that this is indeed a Visual Editor bug. I have triggered it twice in my sandbox, once with a copy of the Ecclesiology article, and the second time with a de minimis snippet of an image and a caption.
 * It can be reproduced by taking a passage of text including a ":s:" Interwiki link to Wikisource, copy and paste that text into the caption of an image, then save. Upon saving (and not earlier) it becomes a hardcoded "wikisophia:" link.
 * So, who from WMF do I ping that a phab can be created? I don't have an account there... yet... Elizium23 (talk) 19:20, 28 February 2020 (UTC)
 * VisualEditor has a prominent link near the top to report problems. As far as who to ping at the foundation or on phab, I don't know.  You can log into phab with your Wikipedia account.  davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  19:34, 28 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm unable to reproduce the issue. Your edit summary in [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Elizium23/sandbox&diff=943087587&oldid=943087453] says "Tags: 2017 wikitext editor". That indicates you were not using VisualEditor in that edit but have enabled "New wikitext mode" at Special:Preferences. I'm still unable to reproduce. Does it happen when you start the edit with [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Elizium23/sandbox&action=edit&oldid=943087453&safemode=1 safemode=1]? PrimeHunter (talk) 22:16, 28 February 2020 (UTC)
 * , I was using Visual Editor in the bug edits, for sure, because I used it to copy-paste rich text. It doesn't trigger if I put it in the immediate caption box, only if I "edit" the photo and put it in the richtext caption parameter box in the edit window. I triggered it again with safemode=1 (I had to switch to Visual Editor because your link started me in 2017 Wikitext editor). Maybe the tagging is part of the bug, but the last edit is correctly tagged as VE. Elizium23 (talk) 00:53, 29 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I was copying directly to the caption without editing the image. I can reproduce the bug now and made a larger test at User:PrimeHunter/Shortcut bug. It tests all shortcuts in the first table at Help:Interwiki linking. When I edited [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:PrimeHunter/Shortcut_bug&oldid=943136598 this version] as described it made [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:PrimeHunter/Shortcut_bug&diff=943136783&oldid=943136598 this diff] showing that five shortcuts get wrong expansions: wikt:, q:, s:, v:, voy:. VisualEditor converts
 * to
 * PrimeHunter (talk) 02:26, 29 February 2020 (UTC)
 * PrimeHunter (talk) 02:26, 29 February 2020 (UTC)
 * PrimeHunter (talk) 02:26, 29 February 2020 (UTC)

Watchlist help
Hi all, I am experiencing a technical issue. I regularly participate at WikiProject Peer Review. For some reason, I can't get recent changes relating to the discussion page to display on my watchlist. They used to display, but at some period in the last few months even though it's still on my watchlist, I just can't see the messages. Details are: Can anyone help shed some light on this? --Tom (LT) (talk) 04:33, 23 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Page I am trying to watch: Wikipedia_talk:Peer_review. The watchlist star is filled when I view this page.
 * I can confirm Wikipedia:Peer review is on my watchlist (although the talk page is not)
 * This process works for other pages - for example Molecular Biology, I can see a recent talk page edit and just the WP is watchlisted. However, an edit on the 18th February on the peer review talk page doesn't show up on my watchlist.


 * Tom (LT), do you have your watchlist preferences to set to hide your own edits, bot edits, and/or minor edits? Are your prefs set to see every single edit separately, or only the most recent?  (That item is "Expand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent".)  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:45, 24 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks WMF. I can't really explain it. I checked a number of times when it wasn't working and someone else had edited the page last; checked those settings; checked those prefs. At any rate it started working against two days after this post... weird. Anyhow please consider this request for help resolved. --Tom (LT) (talk) 06:31, 29 February 2020 (UTC)

Line break issue
Hi, I've had to resort to adding a  tag here to get the editor to respect a line break: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Universal_Kinship#Arguments Throughthemind (talk) 14:58, 29 February 2020 (UTC)
 * , fixed by starting <blockquote ></blockquote> and paragraphs on a new line. —⁠andrybak (talk) 15:19, 29 February 2020 (UTC)


 * Thanks! Throughthemind (talk) 15:24, 29 February 2020 (UTC)

Mobile version of main page on nds-nl.wikipedia
Hi there. Can anyone tell me if it's possible to make the section "Wikipedia" (in the right-hand column) appear before the section "Wat is neadersassisk?" (in the left-hand column) on the mobile version of the nds-nl.wiki, without changing the order of the content on the desktop version? Servien (talk) 19:36, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
 * , no, because you have two columns in two separate divs. If you want this, the content of both columns needs to be in a single parent div, so that you can use the CSS order property to change the order of the siblings. The meta main page uses something like this (though it keeps strict row divs, but theoretically those can be removed with a little bit more flex box magic). —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 10:56, 27 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your response, . I'm managed to localise the current design for the Dutch Low Saxon main page, but I'm not that familiar with CSS programming. If it doesn't take much time of your time, are you by chance willing/able to look into this? (If not that's fine too, we've got the basics covered, it would just be a nice detail). Servien (talk) 15:30, 29 February 2020 (UTC)

I created a personal template but need help on parameters.
Sorry if I'm asking in the wrong section of the Village Pump, but this is a question asking for help about how to have my template do what I want it to do.

I've created a template, Tenryuu/GOCE talk, which pings the user that I've placed as an argument for. Reading the documentation for notifications I've learned that I also need to have my comment signed for it to work. I originally wanted to just add  to the end before I realised it would just be substituted for an actual signature at that time. Currently I'm using this piece of code to add my own signature at the cost of having to create another parameter,.

What should I do to tweak my template so that I can sign my template when I post it without the need for a  parameter? -- Tenryuu (🐲 • 💬 • 🌟) 03:09, 29 February 2020 (UTC)
 * You can cheat by mixing and matching &lt;includeonly>. Try out the change I've made (it might need to be using &lt;onlyinclude> instead). --Izno (talk) 04:09, 29 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Tried both the new change and the suggestion. Both don't seem to work. Reverted back to 2-parameter template. Thanks for the edit . -- Tenryuu (🐲 • 💬 • 🌟) 04:44, 29 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes, of course it didn't work. You saved over that page instead of using a sandbox... --Izno (talk) 05:09, 29 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I copied the code over to my sandbox and previewed it several times to no avail. -- Tenryuu (🐲 • 💬 • 🌟) 05:36, 29 February 2020 (UTC)
 * One way to put a signature in a template that will be substed is like this: . – Jonesey95 (talk) 07:01, 29 February 2020 (UTC)

I must be doing something wrong. Right now my code looks like this:

What am I doing wrong? -- Tenryuu (🐲 • 💬 • 🌟) 21:34, 29 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I have fixed it for you. – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:42, 29 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure what code you used. Could you put it in  tags? -- Tenryuu (🐲 • 💬 • 🌟) 23:15, 29 February 2020 (UTC)

Is it your intention to allow the template to be used by other users? If so, it should be moved to a more descriptive name. If not, it should be moved to "User:Tenryuu/...". Nardog (talk) 23:27, 29 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm moving it over as per another user's suggestion. Just wanted to get all of it fixed first. -- Tenryuu (🐲 • 💬 • 🌟) 23:31, 29 February 2020 (UTC)
 * You should probably file the remaining redirects for G7 speedy deletion then. Nardog (talk) 23:42, 29 February 2020 (UTC)

✅. Learned it was a tricky thing to do with substitution. Thanks for the help. -- Tenryuu (🐲 • 💬 • 🌟) 23:38, 29 February 2020 (UTC)

Assistance needed to make Help:Introduction more mobile-friendly
As part of an effort to make it ready for use as the main introduction page for new users (see proposal here), we are looking to improve the way Help:Introduction displays on mobile devices. Is anyone here skilled enough in mobile design to take on that task? Or is there anywhere else on WP we should go to ask? Your work would have a huge potential impact, assisting nearly every new editor to the project from here forward. Sdkb (talk) 04:30, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
 * As far as I can see, Help:Introduction looks pretty good on mobile devices until I shrink my device screen and the two fixed columns of buttons start to overlap each other. Fixed columns in general are less compatible with mobile viewing than responsive columns. Ideally, the two columns should be responsive so that they show as one stacked column on screens of smaller width. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:07, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
 * , i've moved it into templatestyles, which will make it easier to apply styling and to adapt the styling at different viewport sizes. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 11:07, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
 * thank you both! Are similar edits needed at Intro to (the template used in the tutorial modules), or is it in better shape than Intro to single (used for the main intro page) was? Sdkb (talk) 21:05, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
 * should at least display reasonably well on mobile devices now with the two columns re-flowing to fit the screen size. {{{tlx|intro to}} mainly needs to reflow the left-hand panel to appear above the text on narrow screens, and possibly on mobiles compress the vertical height of that panel (maybe the nomobile class within MediaWiki:Mobile.css would work?). T.Shafee(Evo &#38; Evo)talk 00:44, 27 February 2020 (UTC)
 * The Template:Intro_to/sandbox now works pretty well on mobiles (as well as making the window on a desktop narrow). Just watining for the sandbox version to be copied over to the main template. Thanks particularly to for tips. T.Shafee(Evo &#38; Evo)talk 07:18, 1 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes, I'm so glad to see it; thank you both for taking this on! I may make some tweaks in the next few days to try to improve the navigation, but the main thing left to do at this point seems to be convincing the community to implement the tutorial more widely. Sdkb (talk) 08:26, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

Creating an Abuse filter
Hello everyone! Can someone create an abuse filter for me? The process of creating is complex to me and i can't understand it. Goal: Matches strings (bad words in pages) Here are some of rules; It: I'll explain more after someone replied. Thanks! ⇒ Aram  Talk  14:36, 29 February 2020 (UTC)
 * matches only whole words.
 * matches words that contains this string.
 * matches only whole words on non-talk pages.
 * Why? --Izno (talk) 16:16, 29 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I want to catch bad words used by bad users easily and revert them quickly, but for our project (ckbwiki). It is useful for us. ⇒ Aram  Talk  17:12, 29 February 2020 (UTC)
 * you can ask a filter designer for help at Edit filter/Requested. — xaosflux  Talk 17:22, 29 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Be sure to note that you are just asking for help building a filter for ckbwiki. — xaosflux  Talk 17:23, 29 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Thank you very much! ⇒ Aram  Talk  11:24, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

Roman Numerals in the Volume Parameter of the Citation of Cite Book Templates
Dear Village pumpers. I hope this is the right forum. I often use the Citation or the Cite Book template to describe sources cited in Wkipedia articles. Some of these sources are works comprising more than one volume. For example: I believe this is correct and the only doubt here is whether I should have said: |volume=Volume 56, since "Volume 56" is printed at the beginning of the book.

However, older works typically number their volumes in Roman. At first, I modernised these using Arabic numbers, for example: A bit of browsing in Wikipedia shows that this approach is not rare. Then I discovered that the documentation for the Citation template, just like that for the Cite Book template, explicitly mentions Roman version numbers. I deduced that the original form should be respected, as given in the book. Now, in the given example, the book is inscribed "VOL. LXII. Williamson–Worden" at its beginning. I simplified this as "|volume=LXII Williamson–Worden" in the template, which might be acceptable. So I started to make appropriate changes in the concerned edits to correct my error.

However, recently I had the occasion to discuss the topic with an experienced Wikipedian at an introductory workshop for new editors and that person recommended to transliterate to Arabic numbers as many readers have trouble deciphering Roman numbers. I read MOS:NUM. It instructs us to avoid Roman numbers for dates and centuries but does not mention volumes. What is correct usage? With many thanks Johannes Schade (talk) 17:22, 28 February 2020 (UTC)
 * My philosophy is to use whatever format the original source used. I make the analogy to page numbers.  It's common for books to have front matter pages numbered in roman, then to pick up again in arabic page numbers for the main body of the book.  Citing page iv as 4 would be just plain wrong.  I figure the same logic applies to volume numbers.  -- RoySmith (talk) 14:00, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

As a bot writer, preference is Arabic numbers. This is how Google Books does it for example and so does Internet Archive when possible. It makes computerized interactions with metadata more error prone when using Roman, given the choice. Also recommend in the above example to have https://archive.org/details/isbn_0198614063 and 95-98 ie. --  Green  C  14:49, 1 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I would change to Arabic numerals, unless there is a publication that numbered older volumes with Roman numberals but then started over again with Arabic numerals, starting at "1". This is different than book page numbers; it is not unusual to have both a page i and a page 1. Jc3s5h (talk) 15:23, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

Troubleshooting the calendar template
Can someone help me troubleshoot the template? It shows up correctly under desktop view, but in mobile view the month and day-of-the-week labels do not appear, making pages like this one look very confusing. 28bytes (talk) 14:44, 29 February 2020 (UTC)
 * The subtemplates have  in the header cells. This class is not displayed in mobile where navboxes are omitted. The styling for navbox-title is in MediaWiki:Common.css. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:40, 29 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Subtemplates with names like . -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 16:56, 29 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks, for the replies. I'm still a little confused about how best to fix this, though. Thoughts? 28bytes (talk) 02:04, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

WP:REFILL is down
Both versions. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 17:34, 26 February 2020 (UTC)


 * Citation bot is down too! AManWithNoPlan (talk) 18:31, 26 February 2020 (UTC)


 * Actually the entire tool server is down. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 18:33, 26 February 2020 (UTC)


 * It's been like that for days. I read somewhere earlier this month that there is a hardware issue that is supposed to be solved on the 26th (today).  I don't remember where I read it though. I wouldn't be surprised if the estimated fix date was optimistic. davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  18:34, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
 * , thanks for the info. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 18:38, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
 * it's still not working. Sheila1988 (talk) 20:10, 27 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Worked just now, thanks to all involved, appreciate it. Caro7200 (talk) 16:26, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

Is there a...
...a gadget or template that can automatically convert an amount of past dollars into present dollars, like say $75,000 in 1927 to [what would that be worth today]? Thanks, Shearonink (talk) 05:23, 1 March 2020 (UTC)
 * inflation * Pppery * <sub style="color:#800000">it has begun... 05:25, 1 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks, Shearonink (talk) 18:14, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-10
<section begin="technews-2020-W10"/> Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Problems
 * Readers who were not logged in briefly saw the interface in a language decided by their browser. It should normally be in the language of the wiki. This happened for a short period of time last week. This was because of a bug.

Changes later this week
 * If you forget your password you can ask for a new one to be sent to your email address. You need to know your email address or your username. You will now be able to choose that you need to enter both your email address and your username. This will be a preference. This is to get fewer password reset emails someone else asked for.
 * When you asked for a new password you could see if the username didn't exist on Special:PasswordReset. Now the page will show the username you entered and tell you an email has been sent if the username exists. This is for better security.
 * On Special:WhatLinksHere you can see what other pages link to a page. You can see if the link is from a redirect. You can now see which section the redirect links to.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 March. It will be on all wikis from 5 March (calendar).

Future changes
 * The developers are working on a new interface to solve edit conflicts on talk pages. You can give feedback.
 * There is a vote on the creation of a new user group called abuse filter manager. The vote runs from March 1 to March 31 on Meta.
 * Octicons-tools.svg  was used for the mobile site. It was deprecated in 2017. It will stop working in April. Wikis should see if they use it. If they do they should fix it. You can read more and ask for help. This affects 183 wikis. There is a list.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. <section end="technews-2020-W10"/> 00:35, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

A bit of Python and regex experience
--<span style="font-family:'Trebuchet MS',Geneva,sans-serif">qedk (t 桜 c) 16:59, 27 February 2020 (UTC) Here's the regex:  (used in conjunction with re.IGNORECASE)

Here's the culprit:Special:Diff/942899385

Here's a demo: Demo

Any clue what went amiss? --<span style="font-family:'Trebuchet MS',Geneva,sans-serif">qedk (t 桜 c) 16:14, 27 February 2020 (UTC)
 * , Remind us what you're trying to do? --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 16:27, 27 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Match templates my bot should skip, such as, deletion templates, and so on (the false positive here being the template). See the tagging sub-point at the BRFA: WP:Bots/Requests for approval/QEDKbot. --<span style="font-family:'Trebuchet MS',Geneva,sans-serif">qedk (t 桜 c) 16:29, 27 February 2020 (UTC)
 * , are you using,  , or something else? --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 16:36, 27 February 2020 (UTC)
 * First, re.compile with the IGNORECASE flag, then calling the compiled regex with re.match. --<span style="font-family:'Trebuchet MS',Geneva,sans-serif">qedk (t 桜 c) 16:39, 27 February 2020 (UTC)
 * , There's your problem.  only matches when the regex matches the start of the string. The category page starts with , which doesn't match the regex. Use   instead. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 16:47, 27 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Thank you, yet again you've made me feel absolutely stupid for not reading the documentation properly but honestly, thanks a ton! { --<span style="font-family:'Trebuchet MS',Geneva,sans-serif">qedk (t 桜 c) 16:59, 27 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Hey, I only know why it didn't work because I've made the same mistake before. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 17:01, 27 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Why the terminal ?  Isn't your regex supposed to be looking for a whole template so should begin with   and  end with  ?  Because you are using a real language (python) simplify the regex into multiple regexes and and use python to test each one separately.  I have found that to be much more understandable and reliable than complex regex alone.
 * What is ?  It isn't a template so what is is?
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 16:32, 27 February 2020 (UTC)
 * That's the second capture group for the category this bot adds: Category:Empty categories with no backlinks. --<span style="font-family:'Trebuchet MS',Geneva,sans-serif">qedk (t 桜 c) 16:35, 27 February 2020 (UTC)
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 16:32, 27 February 2020 (UTC)
 * That's the second capture group for the category this bot adds: Category:Empty categories with no backlinks. --<span style="font-family:'Trebuchet MS',Geneva,sans-serif">qedk (t 桜 c) 16:35, 27 February 2020 (UTC)


 * I'm going to answer your question by not answering it. Regexes are cool.  I love them.  I'm a regex jedi.  But, they're the wrong tool for this.  If you're using Python, you should be using MWParserFromHell to parse wikitext.  There's just no excuse not to.  -- RoySmith (talk) 14:20, 28 February 2020 (UTC)
 * A shoutout to seems to be in order, if only by analogy. —Cryptic 15:57, 28 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I'd never seen that before. Cute, but I don't think the author quite makes the point emphatically enough.  BTW, for anybody who thinks they can parse wikitext with regexes, consider adding   and   tags randomly to a page and see how any regex-based tool survives.  -- RoySmith (talk) 16:10, 28 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Wikitext just isn't designed to be parsed. There's no way around it. For checking for page-level skip templates and categories, I'd suggest using API calls/DB queries to get the list of categories and templates on the page. This method is more reliable since it's wikitext-independent: if I use an uncommon redirect you didn't think about before or put the category in a different template, the bot still works as expected. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 04:27, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

importScript no longer a part of the mobile version
I know importScript has been "deprecated" for a few years now and mw.loader.load is recommended instead, but I notice importScript has suddenly been removed from the mobile version of Wikipedia but not the desktop version. (Had not seen this mentioned, so if anyone else is wondering why their scripts don't seem to work on mobile that would be the reason). Everybody is of course still using importScript in their common.js, is that reason enough for the English Wikipedia to add importScript support again on our end? – Thjarkur (talk) 22:27, 1 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Seems like it. --Yair rand (talk) 21:48, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

There's also importScriptURI, importStylesheet, and importStylesheetURI. The following code seems to work (this is almost the code that is currently used on Desktop): if (!window.importScript) { window.loadedScripts = {}; window.importScript=function(page){var uri=mw.config.get('wgScript')+'?title='+mw.util.wikiUrlencode(page)+'&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript';return importScriptURI(uri);}; window.importScriptURI=function(url){var s;if(loadedScripts[url]){return null;}loadedScripts[url]=!0;s=document.createElement('script');s.setAttribute('src',url);document.head.appendChild(s);return s;}; window.importStylesheet=function(page){var uri=mw.config.get('wgScript')+'?title='+mw.util.wikiUrlencode(page)+'&action=raw&ctype=text/css';return importStylesheetURI(uri);}; window.importStylesheetURI=function(url,media){var l=document.createElement('link');l.rel='stylesheet';l.href=url;if(media){l.media=media;}document.head.appendChild(l);return l;}; } – Brandon XLF  (talk) 06:59, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

Can't use DISPLAYTITLE
I want to change the display title for my user (talk) page, but it isnt working. I put everthing in correctly and it still doesn't display. I'm trying to get it to a similar stylisation to my signiture.  N0nsensical.system (err0r?)(.log) 12:25, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
 * you can not use display title to change the characters of a title. — xaosflux  Talk 12:39, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
 * c.f. Page_name. — xaosflux  Talk 12:39, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
 * You can't change the characters that are displayed so 'o' cannot become '0' or 's' become 'S' and you can't add or remove characters. You can change the style:
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 12:41, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
 * It works! Thank you!  N0nsensical.system (err0r?)(.log) 12:45, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
 * If you want the lowercase 'o' to look more like zero then you can increase the font size.  produces N o nsensicalSystem. I removed bolding from 'o' to compensate for the larger font. It's too wide for a zero and 1.5em is too big for me here but better on your user page heading. Make preview tests there if you want to play with different factors like size, font and bold. It may look different in other browsers and for other users. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:27, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
 * It works! Thank you!  N0nsensical.system (err0r?)(.log) 12:45, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
 * If you want the lowercase 'o' to look more like zero then you can increase the font size.  produces N o nsensicalSystem. I removed bolding from 'o' to compensate for the larger font. It's too wide for a zero and 1.5em is too big for me here but better on your user page heading. Make preview tests there if you want to play with different factors like size, font and bold. It may look different in other browsers and for other users. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:27, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

I can't log on to Albanian wikipedia
Every time I try to do so, it gives me that big red box telling me that "this session has been canceled due to a risk of session hijacking, please go back and refresh and try again", or something like that. " I went back and refreshed like it told me to, but it kept doing that. I also tried creating a new account, but it still would not like me to log in. I also tried clearing my cookies, but to no avail. I am on a laptop right now, running Windows OS, and using Google Chrome. What shall I do! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Victionarier (talk • contribs) 22:34, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I ran into a similar issue. Did you try cleaning localStorage and sessionStorage as well? That seemed to fix the issue for me. You may also want to try to restart the entire browser or your computer. To clear localStorage and sessionStorage, go to the Albanian Wikipedia, open devtools (press F12 or Fn+F12), got to "Application", locate "Local Storage" under "Storage" on the side, press the triangle, right-click on "https://sq.wikipedia.org", and press "Clear". Do the same for "Session Storage". – Brandon XLF  (talk) 02:16, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Odd, I can get into the Albanian Wikipedia just fine with my unified login, but I get a similar error to the one you got when trying to log into Wiktionary and Wikidata. I'll try logging all the way out and logging into them specifically.  davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  21:26, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
 * OK, I quit my web browser which had the effect of flushing everything. Now the problem seems to have gone away. If I log into the English Wikipedia first, I can get to WikiData and Wiktionary.  If I log into Wiktionary first, no problems either.  Things that make you got "hmmmmm...".  davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  21:35, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

Is there a tool, that can search a path through categories, to find a way how an article falls into some category?
I mean, if there is this category hierarchy: is there a tool that accepts input "Category A" and "Article" and can find this path? MBH (talk) 05:58, 27 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Category A
 * Category B
 * Category C
 * Category D
 * Category E
 * Category F
 * Article
 * Seems like "get list of categories for a given target page" is the fundamental feature:
 * en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=categories&titles=Article
 * Run recursively, one can build a full geneological tree from the original target all the way up to Category:Contents (or stopping when a certain category of interest is detected). One detail of concern is that there could be several paths (articles in a non-diffused cat, when asked for any cat at that or a higher level; articles described by several different pools of "topic X by Y" diffused cats), and also intentional or unintentional cycles. Depending on how many steps there are in the chain, what you're hoping is a directed tree may be some other sort of directed graph. DMacks (talk) 06:15, 27 February 2020 (UTC)


 * The fact is that several years ago I created a tool for this task, https://tools.wmflabs.org/mbh/cpf.cgi (yes, it works recursively through API, as you described). I am thinking about i18-ise it and announce in enwiki, but first decided to find out, whether such a tool already exists (maybe I reinvent the wheel?). It already can work on enwiki, I mean interface i18n. MBH (talk) 06:43, 27 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Neat! Now all you have to do is compare the full trees (back to Category:Contents) of two articles to find their category-geneological relationship. It's like a generalized alternative to Wikington Crescent. DMacks (talk) 09:38, 27 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Is Category tree any use? see example below.

- X201 (talk) 10:09, 27 February 2020 (UTC)
 * looks like a nice expandable upward tree, but this (as with the other category tree variants only operate on cats not articles as the starting point. DMacks (talk) 10:28, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

I came here to ask this same question after running a PetScan search of Category:People + subcats and coming up with false positives like the article A. I searched Category:Deaths by millennium and related + subcats, and came up with false positives like Iraqi National Congress. So is there any tool that will tell me the pathway between, say, Category:People and the article A? Levivich [dubious – discuss] 03:49, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Sadly, this is an uglier problem than it seems. It's not the mechanics of traversing the category graph, it's that the graph itself is a mess.  As mentioned above, there's cycles.  There's also just plain old bogus data, i.e. people who have added incorrect categories to articles or incorrect sub-category links.  I once tried to attack this from the other direction: I wanted to find all articles that were recursively a member of Category:Music.  I beat my head against the wall for days.  Or was it weeks?  Seems simple, right?  Perform either a depth or breadth first traversal of a tree, and keep going until you've reached all the terminal nodes.  Except that there's cycles.  So, you add in cycle detection.  And ignore hidden categories.  As I remember, it was reasonably well behaved for about the first 12 or 13 plies, with fewer and fewer new nodes being discovered in each iteration.  Then it started to diverge again, discovering gazillions of pages that weren't remotely related to music.  I'm not saying don't do this, just be aware that you may run into similar problems.  -- RoySmith (talk) 14:37, 28 February 2020 (UTC)
 * RoySmith My tool is searching up from article, not down from category, because splitting at each step is many times less. Moreover, looks like ruwiki's category tree is much, much, much better structurised and cleaned from cycles, than enwiki's. In ruwiki, when an extraneous article falls into "New articles in Category:XYZ" botlist, my tool usually finds category path, composed of 10-15 categories. In enwiki, I tried to find a pretty strange path, for example between "Harry Potter" and "Category:Classical antiquity". and... found it composed of 236 categories, including such categories as "Computational neuroscience", "International Commission on Stratigraphy geologic time scale of Earth" and "Mammals"! See https://tools.wmflabs.org/mbh/cpf.cgi?lang=en.wikipedia&uppercat=Classical+antiquity&page=Harry+Potter . I have never seen anything like this in ruwiki. If enwiki's category tree is such a mess, I think, any category navigation tools will be not useful here. MBH (talk) 17:44, 28 February 2020 (UTC)
 * That. Is. Awesome. But I don’t see Kevin Bacon in there anywhere. 04:00, 29 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Does the tool mentioned above give what you want: https://tools.wmflabs.org/mbh/cpf.cgi?lang=en.wikipedia&uppercat=People&page=A? — <span style="font-family:Arial;background:#d6ffe6;border:solid 1px;border-radius:5px;box-shadow:darkcyan 0px 1px 1px;"> Jts1882 &#124; talk 08:16, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Well, that finds a path, but not the shortest path. PetScan says it can do it in 7 steps. The shortest I have found so far is 14:
 * > >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  > A
 * Within that chain, the step from people to non-people is > . This happens because  is both a WP:topic category and a set category.
 * Another thing that happens is that non-person topics are included when you get down to eponymous categories, e.g. :
 * > >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  >  > Iraqi National Congress
 * That's also longer than 10 steps, but you get the idea. – Fayenatic  L ondon 21:39, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Thank you both! Yes, that tool answers my question/shows a path (if not the shortest path). Levivich  [dubious – discuss] 22:22, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

Text is enlarged






Hello. I have no idea where to put this so I’ll put it here. I am using the desktop website of Wikipedia on Safari and iPadOS 13. Not the mobile website. Ok. Here is my problem. Whenever I try to view certain pages (such as WP:ANI) the text is enlarged and it breaks the page. I could not reproduce this while logged out or by logging in to another account with clean JS/CSS (User:PorkchopGMX test). I will be posting screenshots once I upload them. Thanks, PorkchopGMX  ( talk with me  -  what i've done ) 23:39, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Here are the screenshots. PorkchopGMX  ( talk with me  -  what i've done ) 00:08, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Also, upon further testing, I could reproduce on User: PorkchopGMX test and while logged out. PorkchopGMX  ( talk with me  -  what i've done ) 00:09, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Reset your browser zoom to default and then report back. --Izno (talk) 01:54, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
 * That would be the aA symbol in the left of your addressbar. Click it, then click between the - and + on the percentage to reset it back to 100%. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 08:52, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
 * The aA is always at 100 percent but the text is enlarged. I have also experienced an issue where sometimes I cannot use the page because the text keeps getting bigger and smaller like it’s flashing. PorkchopGMX  ( talk with me  -  what i've done ) 11:54, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I am now at school and I won't be able to try any of your suggestions until i get back home in the afternoon. PorkchopGMX  ( talk with me  -  what i've done ) 12:53, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

A bot to archiving discussion(s)
Hello, Is there any good bot to archiving discussion(s) for our project (ckbwiki). Thanks! ⇒ Aram  Talk  12:16, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Contact the owners of the bots listed in Category:Wikipedia archive bots to see if they are interested in supporting the Sorani (Central Kurdish) Wikipedia. davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  17:28, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

Table Problem
I can't fathom, why the new prime minister in the Ukraine wants to be next to the table instead of in the table. Maybe someone can tell me what I did wrong at List of prime ministers of Ukraine — Preceding unsigned comment added by Agathoclea (talk • contribs) 07:13, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
 * There were multiple rowspan errors, some of them in earlier rows. I have fixed it. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:03, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

All of a user's articles for a WikiProject?
Hi there! I am curious to know if there is a way to find every article that a user has created for a particular WikiProject, maybe by cross-referencing edits that are page creations with pages that have a particular WikiProject banner on the talk page (including redirects)? For example, I am curious to find all the pages I started for WikiProject Novels. If this is the wrong place to ask, could someone please point me in the right direction? Thanks! BOZ (talk) 14:18, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
 * You could write a script that iterates through every article a user has created then check if its talk page is a member of any categories that are put on by the WikiProject template and ONLY the WikiProject template. You can download a list of all pages created by a user by going to https://xtools.wmflabs.org/pages/en.wikipedia.org/BOZ but replace BOZ with the username you are looking for. You can then create a url like https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&format=json&titles=Talk:All%20Darkness%20Met&prop=categories but change "titles=Talk:All%20Darkness%20Met" to titles=Talk:article name from list generated by WMFLABS tool goes here".  You can then scan that output for the presence of categories that are placed by WikiProject Novels.  This will take a little coding or massaging of data in a spreadsheet, but it can be done.  This is not the only way to do it, just the first way that popped into my head.  If you are asking if someone has already created a tool to do what you want, I don't know the answer to that. davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  16:28, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Can AWB load all pages created by a user, then filter by all pages whose talk pages is in a certain category? (Haven't used AWB in ages, so not sure). —Kusma (t·c) 17:42, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
 * , I don't know of any tool that does that (off the top of my head). The API-based methods Kusma and davidwr suggest would definitely work, but it's easier to just query the database directly. 42737 says you've created 77 pages in WikiProject Novels. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 18:24, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
 * OK, thanks! That link did not work for me for some reason. BOZ (talk) 18:25, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Try query/42737. davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  18:43, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
 * *grumbles about interwiki prefixes* AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 21:45, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
 * OK, thanks! :) BOZ (talk) 21:48, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

Unbreaking custom signatures in software
Hello, tech-minded folks and people who have to clean up after other folks' mistakes:

The Editing team is proposing that MediaWiki just not allow users to set some of the WP:CUSTOMSIGs that are banned at most wikis, including at least one category of sigs banned by WP:SIGFORGE. It should also make things a bit easier for bot ops/archive bots (more reliable signature detection).

New requirements for user signatures has the specific proposals. This will go out in Tech/News, but I'd be happy to hear from you before then. The proposal is not as restrictive as our practice here (e.g., it accepts a link to Special:Contributions in lieu of a link to your user page), because it needs to work for all the wikis. However, if you think that it's too restrictive in any area, or if you can think of a case that might not have been sufficiently considered, please (please please please please) post that information over there. Thanks, Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:10, 4 March 2020 (UTC)


 * Oh, and they're not planning to invalidate any existing custom signatures. If you think they should (or, e.g., that they should, but wait a year first), please feel free to tell them that, too.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:12, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Great idea, but allow projects and third-party users of MediaWiki software to opt out. For example, if the English Wikipedia or WikiData or some third party web site that uses the software wants to keep the current behavior, they should be able to do so.  For community-run Wikimedia projects, it would presumably be a community decision to accept any software that imposed requirements stricter than existing ones.  For the English Wikipedia and others where the software would merely be enforcing the existing requirements, this change should be accepted as routine.  I say it should be routine for the English Wikipedia, if any existing users have grandfathered-in exceptions that would break under the new code, then an en-wiki discussion would have to be held before accepting the changed code. davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  18:28, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks for copying this to mw:Topic:Vhyuojgwggvwuwg9. Let's continue the discussion over there.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:05, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I think all custom signatures should be disallowed.--Jorm (talk) 21:22, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Regarding The proposal is not as restrictive as our practice here (e.g., it accepts a link to Special:Contributions in lieu of a link to your user page), - we already allow that, see WP:SIGLINK. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 23:24, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I had thought that we required a link to User: or User_talk:.  Maybe I'm thinking of the original Echo/Notifications settings for pings.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 04:09, 6 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Seems a reasonable idea. &middot; &middot; &middot; Peter Southwood (talk): 06:27, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Lets start tomorrow. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 09:13, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

Proposal for a tiny default gadget displaying a "Submit this draft" button on untagged drafts for new users
I've mentioned this at WikiProject Articles for Creation ([] []), we have too many confused and frustrated new users unable to submit their drafts for review because they accidentally removed the AFC draft template from their draft.

With WP:VPT's blessing, I would like to add this script as a default hidden gadget. On untagged drafts, it shows this banner:

The script would only be loaded in draftspace and only displayed to non-extendedconfirmed users.

We have [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?sort=relevance&search=-insource%3A%22%7B%7Bdraft%22+-insource%3A%22%7B%7BAfC+submission%22+-insource%3A%22%7B%7BPlease%22&title=Special%3ASearch&profile=advanced&fulltext=1&advancedSearch-current=%7B%7D&ns118=1 10,000 draft articles] that don't include the instructions "Click here to submit your draft for review".

– Thjarkur (talk) 22:58, 1 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Looks good to me. Long overdue.
 * Regarding the code, note that array  and   are not supported on IE 11, and so should not be used. Use   instead. You could maybe define   as    SD0001 (talk) 15:29, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm always a bit wary of adding scripts that run always for everyone. What is the mechanism you are going to use to prevent this from executing on every page load? And I do specifically mean 'executing', not just completing every action on the script. Could you results be accomplished by adding something to the draftspace edit notice (Template:Editnotices/Namespace/Draft) instead? —  xaosflux  Talk 15:40, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Tech note, I would think that namespace parameters for gadgets is currently pending T63007. — xaosflux  Talk 15:42, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I thought this was possible to do with a cheap single-line namespace-check before loading the rest of the script but then again I'm not quite sure how gadgets are packaged together. Does there exist something like "Wiewnotice"? Since Editnotices are only displayed when editing, having this button in the editnotice would erase any changes the user has made, not give them any indication of whether their draft has been submitted when viewing, and nobody notices editnotices when using the VisualEditor. – Thjarkur (talk) 16:02, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I don't think it's inefficient at all, but regardless the check for extended confirmed can be done in the gadget definition itself, so that the gadget will only be packaged for non-EC users. I do think we should implement the IE 11 fixes that SD0001 points out. &mdash; MusikAnimal  talk  16:58, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
 * except getting EC users to submit their drafts can't be the big problem, it is all of the others. — xaosflux  Talk 17:03, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Oh wait, you're right, in gadget definitions we can only target what permissions the user has, not what they don't have. Duh! I still don't think this gadget will have a noticeable impact on performance, if that's the concern. &mdash; MusikAnimal  talk  17:13, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
 * alone not likely, but it is "creep"y. Having a gadget the runs on every single page read just to say "is this page in this name space, if so do this...".  And since IP users can create drafts it would be needed for logged out users too!  That's why I think either of the below solutions are much better, I'd prefer having a PageNotice - but a bot task would be easy enough too. —  xaosflux  Talk 18:14, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Regardless, I'd say it's not worth it for IP visitors, given the ratio of page views to interest in submitting drafts. ~ Amory <small style="color:#555"> (u • t • c) 22:14, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
 * this list shows that IP users makes lots of drafts - especially since they can't make articles. Agree that running such a script for them is a horrible idea, but having a bot add the missing submit buttons would be an fairly easy job. —  xaosflux  Talk 00:06, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Sure, lots of drafts compared to total drafts, but not lots of drafts compared to IPs that load pages on the wiki aka pageviews. ~ Amory <small style="color:#555"> (u • t • c) 02:00, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Sure, lots of drafts compared to total drafts, but not lots of drafts compared to IPs that load pages on the wiki aka pageviews. ~ Amory <small style="color:#555"> (u • t • c) 02:00, 3 March 2020 (UTC)


 * T6469 seems like the "best" answer for this, solving it via mw:Extension:PageNotice which can put a notice on just certain namespaces - and has been stalled in development limbo for over 10 years. — xaosflux  Talk 16:31, 2 March 2020 (UTC)


 * Another quick-option, have a bot place that banner on Draft pages without it, it could run periodically as well. — xaosflux  Talk 17:05, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
 * That also sounds fine, had proposed that before but the response was somewhat mild. If that's preferable over this then I'll go with the bot. – Thjarkur (talk) 13:57, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

Again, this: is not the same as The first one is an immediately invoked function expression. It does not wait until the page has loaded. Nirmos (talk) 22:29, 2 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Thank you, have until now always relied on common.js being executed late. – Thjarkur (talk) 14:00, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

If someone is going to work on the infrastructure to load gadgets on demand, I suggest starting with the support needed for the chess viewer gadget, as discussed at, might be of more immediate benefit to readers. isaacl (talk) 22:46, 2 March 2020 (UTC)


 * Wait what, the chess viewer wasn't enabled after all?

As MusikAnimal says, I don't think this will have any impact on performance. If is concerned about the proliferation of default scripts that are useful only on a small number of pages, we can set up a common loader that loads scripts on demand, as has been already discussed somewhat. We can go like:

I have added the relevant line for MediaWiki:Gadget-DRN-wizard, which it should be noted,, is an existing default gadget that works on exactly one page on the wiki. All gadgets (including the non-default ones) that use a separate loader script page could consider joining this common loader for better end-user performance. Also pinging User:Writ Keeper from the previous discussion. SD0001 (talk) 13:34, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I did recommend using a helper loader script that could manage other scripts when we last discussed this. For this specific example, using a bot to add these banners seems much better though, for the chess thing - using an extension similar to how we use other special markups like   would generally be better to - when we are running in to code that only needs to run a a very minor number of pages - having to execute it on every single page read is overkill.  And  having to check every single page read to see if someone is on a very small internal project page is certainly what I'd consider bloat.... —  xaosflux  Talk 14:22, 3 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Consensus was reached to enable the chess viewer (see ), and the discussion I linked to seemed to reach a consensus on an implementation approach. However, in the end, an interface admin needs to volunteer to work on the implementation (קיפודנחש (aka kipod) agreed to provide whatever work that a non-interface admin can do), and none has stepped forward. isaacl (talk) 06:52, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
 * part of that problem is that yes, it has support to enable it "for chess articles" - however the implementation suggestion was to enable software on every page. Using that viewer as an extension would fix that challenge. —  xaosflux  Talk 14:11, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
 * In the discussion on the interface admin's noticeboard, you said I'm not opposed to the gadget route and provided a suggestion for a generic loader gadget, and others agreed with this implementation, so that's about as good as consensus gets. With an extension, the equivalent infrastructure to call the right extension is written already, so it's a sunk cost. I appreciate the concern on browser performance, and feel the proposed generic loader keeps the cost minimal. isaacl (talk) 16:10, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
 * An extension would certainly be better as every single wiki site could take advantage of it, but building a loader gadget that loads other gadgets is a possible option - still think for that chess thing that the extension is an order of magnitude a better solution, and for this banner thing that a bot to add the banners is the best answer. — xaosflux  Talk 16:15, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Personally I don't think a gadget is a good solution for the problem raised in the original post, either. I understand that everyone is a volunteer, and so that's life if no interface admin is interested in implementing a generic loader gadget to support on-demand loading of gadgets or scripts. (Similarly, if no editor is interested in making a new chess viewer extension, that's life too.) However if someone is interested in spending some effort in implementing the original proposal, I suggest taking into consideration the previous discussion on the generic loader. isaacl (talk) 16:47, 4 March 2020 (UTC)


 * Aside note, T8883 was just updated - if implemented it could help a lot of these "need a script" on very minor amount of pages conditions. Input and support there would be most welcome! —  xaosflux  Talk 15:02, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

Is there a way to load JavaScript in an article?
I wonder if it's possible to load JavaScript from a .js page in the body of an article like the tag. What I ultimately want to do is to make a customtoggle collapse many other customtoggles (not just toggle/invert their state), i.e. only one collapsible active at a time. By the way, are the Tabber and Tabs extensions really not available in Wikipedia? Alexiscoutinho (talk) 19:15, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
 * no, see Adding JavaScript to Wiki Pages. Javascript and html may not be loaded directly via wikitext, you can craft a special link that will load a page with a script to use (c.f. Snippets/Load JS and CSS by URL).  You can see all of the installed extensions at Special:Version, mw:Extension:Tabber is not installed here. —  xaosflux  Talk 20:15, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks a lot. Alexiscoutinho (talk) 07:28, 6 March 2020 (UTC)
 * T8883 can be followed to track development on this ask. — xaosflux  Talk 15:20, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

Partial protection?
Hello, I was wondering if it's possible for partial protection to be enabled. What this would entail is that administrators can prevent editing certain parts of pages by certain users. Before I formally propose to enable it, I just want to ask if is a technically possible to do. Interstellarity (talk) 16:36, 6 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I don't think it is possible to do directly, but since a user can be blocked from editing entire pages, they can also be blocked from editing pages which are transcluded in whole or in part. Whole-page transclusion is how templates work.  Partial-page transclusion is rarely used, but you do see it in places like 2020 United States presidential election. Look for the word excerpt and look for the Excerpt template in the source code in those sections.  Then go to the destination page and look at the source code for <section begin=...> and <section end=...>.
 * I do NOT recommend using this technique merely to effect a partial-page block, but if it is already being used for good editorial reasons, and the editor who needs to be blocked is disrupting the transcluded content, page-blocking him from the transcluded page may be an appropriate remedy. Please see Blocking policy and tread carefully, asking for editors to be blocked should never be taken lightly.  davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  17:37, 6 March 2020 (UTC)
 * No, it is currently not possible. All the methods for implementing such a feature that I can think of have a similar problem to the oft-proposed category-based blocks: they can give non-admins the ability to adjust page protection. If you proposed this, it's not likely that anyone would implement it and less likely that this community would support it's use. --AntiComposite (talk) 17:51, 6 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Hello and . I do recognize that administrators do not block anyone from editing without a good reason and I try not to unless it is clear that the person should be blocked such as LTAs. Since it is not technically possible to do, I will not take any further action at this point. Interstellarity (talk) 18:40, 6 March 2020 (UTC)
 * For this edit, part of one of my user-sub-pages is effectively read-only for a bot that is paged-blocked on a totally unrelated page (block log). The bot could remove the entire transclusion from the page but it cannot edit the "block" as it is transcluded from a page it is page-blocked from editing.  Does that count as "giving non-admins (me) the ability to adjust page protection (on the page in "my" user-space)"?  Technically, maybe.  However, other than some special cases and as contrived examples, there is no utility and no risk to the project as a whole since non-admins can't set or remove protection on the underlying pages. davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  19:39, 6 March 2020 (UTC)
 * The problem is that this only really works when interacting with bots. The transcluded subpage method works well for "You can only edit this section, nothing else". For the cases of "You can edit everything but this section", there isn't a great solution. A bad-faith editor could get around the protection by substing the template and then editing the page. The other, slightly more robust solution is through in-text tags, similar to the section transclusion tags. An admin would put the tags around the section they wanted to protect. Another editor, however, would likely be able to move those tags, unless an edit filter stopped them. A bad-faith editor would likely be able to circumvent such protection by copying the content outside of the tagged area and then commenting out the protected section. --AntiComposite (talk) 20:06, 6 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm not going to complain that editors can work around something that isn't intentional. That said, any such "working around" would itself be considered "disruptive editing" and land the editor at WP:AN/I if he wasn't fully blocked first.  davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  20:11, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

Editor Interaction Analyser slow
Hey, does anybody other than Sigma ever help maintain the Editor Interaction Analyser? I see that they've not edited here in a few months and the tool is slow, which I've detailed on their talk page. Thanks, Cyphoidbomb (talk) 23:10, 7 March 2020 (UTC)

Autoconfirmed user but edits put on pending review
As an autoconfirmed user my edits are usually automatically accepted on semi-protected pages, but the page for Parasite (2019 film) appears to be back logging my edits for approval. Is there some special protection? JohnWickTwo (talk) 03:41, 7 March 2020 (UTC)
 * If you edit a page that has pending unreviewed revisions, those changes will remain unreviewed. Because of how MediaWiki stores revisions, your edits contain those unreviewed edits. Because you are not a pending changes reviewer, you can not review those pending changes. See WP:Pending changes. --AntiComposite (talk) 03:58, 7 March 2020 (UTC)
 * That wasn't the issue, made his edit immediately after an accepted edit.  In any case, I accepted his edit and rejected a subsequent one.  The page is now showing the latest edit.
 * Autoconfirmed is done dynamically. I don't pretend to know all of the "magic" that goes into the decision, but I do know that if Wikipedia thinks you are editing from certain IP addresses, such as an open proxy, the threshold goes WAY up.  Other rare conditions may temporarily cause you to not be considered autoconfirmed.  The way around this is to request to be put in the "confirmed" group.  davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  04:03, 7 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Please cite a source for that statement. I can find nothing in the MediaWiki documentation, the code, or our configuration itself that suggests autoconfirmed behaves as you describe. Everything points to autoconfirmed being determined solely by 4 days and 10 edits. --AntiComposite (talk) 05:05, 7 March 2020 (UTC)
 * There's an open bug, phab:T234743, describing how the software sometimes gets permissions wrong when trying to apply pending changes protection. I can't tell whether that happened here. -- John of Reading (talk) 05:50, 7 March 2020 (UTC)
 * WP:AUTOCONFIRM says: "However, users with the IP block exemption flag and who are editing through the Tor network are subjected to much stricter autoconfirmed thresholds: 90 days and 100 edits. ". JohnWickTwo has 3 years and 2230 edits so it's not relevant here. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:58, 7 March 2020 (UTC)
 * beat me to it. I also had vague memories of software bugs in the back of my mind but didn't know if any were still "live" or not. davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  17:53, 7 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks to editors for getting back. Davidwr report is accurate that the software bug has not been fully fixed, and John of Reading has identified the ticket from last October at phab which was still being discussed last month. I retested the autoconfirm this morning and now it seems to be temporarily working, possibly after buffers were cleared overnight. JohnWickTwo (talk) 00:33, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

Wikipedia.org authoritative DNS servers need IPv6 addresses
When doing some tests of different websites using the Internet.nl website test, I was surprised that www.wikipedia.org failed the test for IPv6. In looking at the results, while the web servers for www.wikipedia.org have IPv6 addresses, it seems that the authoritative DNS servers do NOT have IPv6 addresses. This means someone on an IPv6-only network would not be able to look up the addresses to connect to Wikipedia. They could connect to the web servers over IPv6, of course, but they would need to get the AAAA records over IPv4. Realistically, most people on IPv6 networks today will still have access to DNS servers over IPv4, but as some new networks are being deployed IPv6-only, users will have to go through edge gateways to get to IPv4. It would be a tiny bit faster for them to be able to get the DNS records natively over IPv6. It would be great if the Wikipedia name servers were also reachable over IPv6. (If there is a better place to report this, please let me know. Thanks!) - Dyork (talk) 02:30, 8 March 2020 (UTC)


 * Update for those not wanting to read through the phabricator thread - over on Talk:IPv6, where I first noted this issue, summarized the task as basically: the WikiMedia Foundation is in the process of moving authoritative DNS to anycast first, and then will add IPv6. - Dyork (talk) 09:33, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

Extra space produced by Template:M
At Hebrides Terrace Seamount, M produces two superfluous spaces between "ML" and the magnitude. Is there a way to correct it? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 16:50, 8 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Better now? There was excess white space in the template code. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:21, 8 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Yeah, that's better now. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 17:23, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

Calling Out External Links inside the Body
I ran across an article today (Graham McTavish; I'm watching The Hobbit; don't ask why) and noticed that there were a handful of in-body external links to IMDB and I realized how easy it would be to not see those so I spent a couple minutes writing a script that will call them out (light red background, upper-and-lower dashed red borders) so that they can be manually inspected.

It should only fire on article pages, and only on links that are not inside of the References area. I'd like to avoid those in the "External links" section but couldn't figure out a way to do so in the time I wanted to spend on this. If anyone knows of a better selector than  please let me know.

Anyways, it's at User:Jorm/inthroughtheoutdoor.js (I've also been listening to a lot of Led Zeppelin lately) if you want to use it --Jorm (talk) 22:49, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I think this would be better setup as a CSS file that can be directly imported to users CSS files and with the JS script loading the CSS page for users who want to use JS. – Brandon XLF  (talk) 04:38, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I can see that, given its simplicity. I had thoughts eventually do to things that require programming outside of css, but sure.--Jorm (talk) 04:44, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Pinging User:Beetstra, who will know who else might be interested in this. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 04:10, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

(thanks for the ping). This is certainly helpful. I will have a look at it, I may have some suggestion (if you did not already do it). Maybe a ping to WP:WPSPAM and WP:EL would be good. —Dirk Beetstra T C 05:59, 6 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I found a couple bugs so I'm going to have to grind things on the codeside and would def. be willing to hear suggestions. --Jorm (talk) 16:10, 6 March 2020 (UTC)
 * , I would like to see some additions, like possibility to whitelist (there are some external links that we standard use within infoboxes and in-text (links to bible verses when on some specific sites, links to identifying/official bodies like for NASDAQ, tools.wmflabs.org etc.). On the other hand, what we see with spam is people linking cross-wiki to wikis where their organisation is notable (a German company may have an article on de.wikipedia but not eligible here), or where notability is not a problem (WikiData accepts way more than we do).  Could those be colored (marked) at the same time (everything is blue nowadays).  --Dirk Beetstra T  C 05:19, 8 March 2020 (UTC)
 * User:Beetstra: Hey, that sounds totally doable and probably fun for me to do! If you want to put together a wish list of features?  I've got this idea about separating the the whitelist/blacklist/configuration into one script and then the execution code in another (so that they can be worked on independently).  And regarding what can be done:  I can write most anything if I know what the use case is for and the limitations of the platform.--Jorm (talk) 18:18, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

Pywikibot tutorial
Hi, where can I find a comprehensive manual of Pywikibot that is layman-friendly? Thanks! tLoM (The Lord of Math) (Message) 07:03, 8 March 2020 (UTC)
 * The guides are only useful for installation, literally everything else you have to find for yourself (which I found out the hard way):
 * There is mw:Manual:Pywikibot/Installation
 * mw:Manual:Pywikibot/Create your own script
 * The rest you have to hunt down on the API docs, most important is the page module. There are very important things such as using site.login, etc. which are barely covered. If you want a Toolforge+PWB documentation, wikitech:Help:Toolforge/Pywikibot is a good start, but it's so horridly incomplete, I doubt you won't need to do your own research. --<span style="font-family:'Trebuchet MS',Geneva,sans-serif">qedk (t 心 c) 09:56, 8 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Okay, and one side note: How long does it take to load a page, from your experience? Take the page 2019–20 UEFA Europa League. I managed to load it without Pywikibot in about 1.1 seconds. Can Pywikibot do much faster? Thx. tLoM (The Lord of Math) (Message) 05:59, 9 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I have not benchmarked the code, but on an average every edit takes 9-10 seconds, with anywhere between 6-8 seconds of sleep, so that leaves 2-3 seconds for loading the page, processing (regex + couple of if-elses) and saving the page. --<span style="font-family:'Trebuchet MS',Geneva,sans-serif">qedk (t 心 c) 07:38, 9 March 2020 (UTC)

Page views not working?
I refer to Daily pageviews of this article on Talk:2019–20 Australian bushfire season. It seems to have had a coniption. Any ideas on how to fix it? There is even a loop in the displayed graph! Aoziwe (talk) 11:48, 8 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Looks okay to me? --<span style="font-family:'Trebuchet MS',Geneva,sans-serif">qedk (t 心 c) 13:32, 8 March 2020 (UTC)
 * You broke it in [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Annual_readership&diff=next&oldid=941172644] which should only have used  the first time. Fixed by [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Annual_readership&diff=944541095&oldid=944286745]. The risk of loops could be avoided by implementing [//www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Graph:PageViews&diff=2959395&oldid=2861439] in Template:Graph:PageViews per mw:Template talk:Graph:PageViews. This would make a bar chart instead of an interpolated curve. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:37, 8 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Hmm, that's weird, when I made the edit, the template used the unencoded version of the magic word and was not working but when I switched it to the encoded version, it worked, now this happened. --<span style="font-family:'Trebuchet MS',Geneva,sans-serif">qedk (t 心 c) 14:16, 8 March 2020 (UTC)
 * The page name should never be encoded in the call of Graph:PageViews. I have noticed your first change in [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Annual_readership&diff=next&oldid=941172644] was also wrong. Before your edit the template used urlencode to encode the page name in the link to https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews whether a target was given or not. This was correct. You changed to encode with  but only when a target was not given. I have restored [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Annual_readership&diff=944552887&oldid=944541095] the previous link which works in all my tests both with and without a target given. If you see a broken call then please give an example. There are subtle differences between our url encoding features and it's possible https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews only works with one encoding system in some situations. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:16, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks all. Now working again. Aoziwe (talk) 08:26, 9 March 2020 (UTC)

Turning off 2017 wikitext editor
How to disable the 2017 wikitext editor? I hate all my edits being tagged like that! <span style="font-family:Fira Sans,sans-serif"> Key a com  (💬 | 🖊) 12:25, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I find it very useful regardless of how it's tagged, but if you really want to disable it, it's a "Beta feature" in preferences called "New wikitext mode" so just untick that box and save. Elizium23 (talk) 12:29, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Th... thank you! --<span style="font-family:Fira Sans,sans-serif"> Key a com  (💬 | 🖊) 12:34, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
 * We really ought to be tagging all the edits. (It'd make my life easier, anyway.    )  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:01, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
 * The wikitext editor is not enabled and it's suddenly all that is available. So how do I make it go away? <b style="color: #0066cc;">—Мандичка</b><b style="color: #6600cc;">YO</b> 😜 08:07, 9 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Wikimandia, this is at least the third page that you've posted your problem to. This community tries to centralize discussions in one place.  Shall we take it all back to the WP:Teahouse?
 * (You can't disable all the wikitext editors. The software won't let you.)  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:13, 9 March 2020 (UTC)

More pywikibot questions
Hi, I've scanned through some of the source code. However, I still don't understand: Can you please answer them, providing necessary code to help me with them? Also, can you please help me go through the steps of installation of pywikibot? I am using a Mac version 10.15. Thanks in advance. tLoM (The Lord of Math) (Message) 05:59, 9 March 2020 (UTC)
 * 1) How to login to the account;
 * 2) How to have a bot run constantly - do we need to keep the computer on forever?
 * You log in to the account by calling . Having a bot run constantly is more of a general programming question, you could use a cron job or a while loop, either way obviously the computer would need to be on in order for the bot to run... the wikitech:Help:Toolforge is a shared server environment that you can request access to in order to run bots or other tools. Pywikibot does not require installation, you would unzip it (or clone the git repo) somewhere and either run the bots from that directory, or add that directory to your PYTHONPATH environment variable. ST47 (talk) 07:08, 9 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I can't afford to have a program on 24/7 on my computer. So if I run it on Toolforge, does it automatically run the code periodically/continuously without user intervention? That is, can it run at 9am on the cloud even if my computer is off at 9? Thanks. tLoM (The Lord of Math) (Message) 07:44, 9 March 2020 (UTC)

- pinging. tLoM (The Lord of Math) (Message) 07:44, 9 March 2020 (UTC)
 * You can do anything that a cronjob can do. However, if you need to ask these questions, have you considered making a request at WP:BOTR? ST47 (talk) 07:47, 9 March 2020 (UTC)
 * , It all started in WP:VPI and became a huge mess, so I decided to run it in userspace. The only problem is, where do I find the git repo or the zip file? Thanks. tLoM (The Lord of Math) (Message) 08:34, 9 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Have you tried googling "pywikibot"? ST47 (talk) 08:36, 9 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I have downloaded the xip file and unzipped it. One more question: in which file do I write my program, inside the "Pywikibot-master" folder or within the "Pywikibot" subfolder?

Thanks. tLoM (The Lord of Math) (Message) 09:01, 9 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Within the Pywikibot-master folder, or you could write your program anywhere else and simply add the Pywikibot-master folder to your PYTHONPATH environment variable. ST47 (talk) 09:05, 9 March 2020 (UTC)
 * , where do I insert the password for the bot? And also does site.login run with arguments and what does it return? I don't seem to be able to find it at the docs. Thanks. tLoM (The Lord of Math) (Message) 09:32, 9 March 2020 (UTC)
 * By the way, if you had written any simple bots with python can you please show me the full source code (but replace the passwords with "XXXXXXXX")? Thanks. tLoM (The Lord of Math) (Message) 09:37, 9 March 2020 (UTC)
 * You should have found this page of the manual (it's the second google result for "pywikibot" for me), which tells you how to run "generate_user_files". Once you do, there will be a user_password.py file, which is where the passwords are stored. site.login does not take any useful arguments. There are a number of existing bots that can be found in the "scripts" directory. ST47 (talk) 09:44, 9 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I ran through the program and used pwb.py login to login as my bot name. So when I run my next script, will it stay logged in as that bot? Thanks. tLoM (The Lord of Math) (Message) 10:01, 9 March 2020 (UTC)

notifying. tLoM (The Lord of Math) (Message) 12:57, 9 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I got your first ping. Why don't you try it and find out? ST47 (talk) 16:04, 9 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I tried it. However, every time I ran something, the terminal threw a  error. I have been running these programs in the following syntax:

Am I running it correctly? Thanks. tLoM (The Lord of Math) (Message) 02:08, 10 March 2020 (UTC)
 * No. Please see mw:Manual:Pywikibot/add_text.py. There is no "-test" listed on that page, and values must be in quotation marks. Also, "..." might show the actual error. --Malyacko (talk) 02:26, 10 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Oops. I meant "text" when I typed "test". It seemed to be working, thanks! (But I got blocked by an edit filter when I was using a bot to edit my own userpage ;) ) Thanks! tLoM (The Lord of Math) (Message) 03:08, 10 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I have several more questions. I was completely baffled by the documentation. So how do I call a page given a title? For example, given the page name "User:ST47", how do I generate an editable page object? Many thanks. tLoM (The Lord of Math) (Message) 04:18, 10 March 2020 (UTC)

Pinging Malyacko. tLoM (The Lord of Math) (Message) 04:20, 10 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Please do not ping individual people for no good reason, as this is not a private support line. Thanks for your understanding. It also seems that this becomes a neverending thread. If you don't understand a specific sentence of the documentation, then you may mention that specific sentence of the documentation and describe what exactly you've tried so far and what was the output so far, in a Pywikibot support forum. I'm afraid that teaching programming might be out of scope here. --Malyacko (talk) 10:58, 10 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Actually I have just completed all I had to now; my bot was editing well. Thanks for teaching me and your support! tLoM (The Lord of Math) (Message) 11:04, 10 March 2020 (UTC)

Two-factor authentication
Hi I need help of the abovementioned. I have 2FA at the moment, but would like to change the mobile number. what should I do and how to do it? Thanks in advance. here ping <b style="font-family:Georgia;font-size:80%;color:#FA0"> CASSIOPEIA</b>(<b style="#0000FF">talk</b>) 05:04, 10 March 2020 (UTC)
 * H:DISABLE2FA? :) --Malyacko (talk) 11:01, 10 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Thank you very much.<b style="font-family:Georgia;font-size:80%;color:#FA0"> CASSIOPEIA</b>(<b style="#0000FF">talk</b>) 22:47, 10 March 2020 (UTC)

{{subst:Orfurrev}} automatically added
It can't be too hard to have {{subst:Orfurrev}} being added when uploading a new version of non-free content. I'm no programmer but can't you just write "If deepcat:Category:"All non-free media" = yes, then add {{subst:Orfurrev}} when uploading new version"."? Would this be possible, or am I naïve?Jonteemil (talk) 22:15, 9 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Doesn't (operated by ) already do this? * Pppery * <sub style="color:#800000">it has begun...  23:20, 9 March 2020 (UTC)
 * What I mean is that the second you upload a new file, the template is added. I don't mean a bot adding it a few hours later.Jonteemil (talk) 01:02, 10 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Uploading a new file version doesn't even edit the file page. I don't think MediaWiki has any feature to make automatic edits unless you count page creation at original uploads and moves (moves leave behind MediaWiki:Move-redirect-text). Making a new MediaWiki feature for automatic edits to existing pages sounds non-trivial to me and not worth it unless it's part of a larger complicated system of automatic edits. Which is exactly what bots already are. You could try to make somebody get a bot to respond faster like User:ClueBot NG reverting possible vandalism within seconds but I don't see any urgency here. The tag stays for seven days anyway. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:38, 10 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Does the software really needs to be updated for this to work? I mean you can edit pages with both WP:Twinkle and WP:HotCat and this is done with the present software.Jonteemil (talk) 23:02, 10 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Uploading a new version is done with MediaWiki. A MediaWiki feature would only run during uploads. Twinkle and HotCat are user scripts which require JavaScript in the browser. It would be possible to make a user script for this at the English Wikipedia. I don't think you would get support to make it a default gadget (or any gadget), or part of sitewide JavaScript. I think a user script would have to constantly check whether your last action was an upload. Every default script slows down the site for all users with JavaScript, or at least all autoconfirmed users if the script is limited to those. I also think a default script which makes automated edits would be controversial when we can just wait for a bot to add the tag if the uploader didn't. And if you find and install an optional user script to add the tag then you already know about the tag. It's not that hard to write {{subst:Orfurrev}}, and it's rare to upload new versions. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:29, 10 March 2020 (UTC)

Unexpected notifications
Hi, I was working with my new bot account User:ZhengdunBot. For a few days everything worked fine. But then at around 1:30 UTC today, I was bombarded with 17 notifications. Apparently people (some bots) from all over the world are welcoming me in a dozen languages, including the Arabic Wikipedia and the Hindu Wikipedia. Some of these messages were posted by bots. I don't know what is happening. Can anybody explain this for me? Thanks. tLoM (The Lord of Math) (Message) 13:48, 10 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Special:CentralAuth/ZhengdunBot shows the bot account was created at 154 Wikipedia languages within 5 minutes today. This happens when a logged in account views any page at a Wikimedia wiki. Some wikis post welcome messages to accounts without edits. I have long considered making a proposal at meta to only allow welcomes if the account has edits at the wiki or was originally created there. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:39, 10 March 2020 (UTC)
 * To be clear, the account is only created at the wiki you visit. The bot apparently visited 154 wikis in alphabetical order. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:48, 10 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Not true, I have accounts at a number of wikis that I've never visited - see Special:CentralAuth/Redrose64 and sort on the "Edit count" column. All these zeroes don't just mean that I've never edited there, it also means that I've never visited either, since on first visiting a site, I set my language and skin at the preferences and create a user page to make it clear that I don't speak their language. Before visiting them, several have sent me welcome messages on User talk: or by email (both of which trigger a notification); and that is almost always the reason why I then visit the site for the first time. See User:Redrose64, the part beginning "For some reason, ...". Sometimes (most recently at Tulu Wikipedia), when I go to the prefs to set a language, I notice that I'm already autoconfirmed - after making precisely zero edits. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 08:38, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I was discussing ZhengdunBot and didn't say it was the only way your account can be created. It can also happen if the wiki imports the page history of a page you have edited. Imported edits don't show at Special:CentralAuth but sometimes (not always) show at user contributions at the wiki itself so this is tricky. For example, Special:CentralAuth/Redrose64 says 0 edits at tn.wikipedia.org but clicking the "0" leads to 4 imported edits (to 4 different templates) from 2013. Our templates are often imported by other wikis and you have a lot of template edits. Automatic account creation due to imported edits started in December 2017 and included edits imported before that date. See Village pump (technical)/Archive 162. tcy:Special:Log/Redrose64 shows when your tcy account was created. tcy:Special:Log/import shows many imported pages that minute, e.g. [//tcy.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%E0%B2%9F%E0%B3%86%E0%B2%82%E0%B2%AA%E0%B3%8D%E0%B2%B2%E0%B3%87%E0%B2%9F%E0%B3%8D:As_of&action=history] which you edited in 2013 and 2014. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:41, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
 * The default autoconfirmation requirements for Wikimedia wikis are set in https://noc.wikimedia.org/conf/highlight.php?file=InitialiseSettings.php. It's 4 days for mw:Manual:$wgAutoConfirmAge (changing the MediaWiki default of 0), and 0 edits for mw:Manual:$wgAutoConfirmCount. You satisfied both when you created a tcy user page 16 days after the account creation and welcome. enwiki sets $wgAutoConfirmCount to 10 edits. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:02, 11 March 2020 (UTC)

Maps
Tech talks will offer a talk about Maps on 25 March 2020 at 18:00 UTC (11:00 a.m. PDT, 2:00 p.m. EDT). You can watch the talk live at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LH-pYdi9Ks Questions will be taken on IRC at #wikimedia-office

Please share this information with editors who are interested in the future of maps. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:04, 11 March 2020 (UTC)

Why is Bapunagar Darpan a blue link?
In Articles for deletion/Bapunagar Darpan, the link to Bapunagar Darpan renders in blue, even though the target has been deleted. What's going on there? -- RoySmith (talk) 01:49, 12 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Cache issue? It shows as red for me. 28bytes (talk) 02:04, 12 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Hmmm, yeah, must have been. It's red for me now too.  Nevermind :-)  -- RoySmith (talk) 02:19, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

Articles for deletion/Log/2020 March 12
What is going on here?  NonsensicalSystem (err0r?)(.log) 11:35, 12 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Was missing some HTML tags. &#8208;&#8208;1997kB (talk) 11:40, 12 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks!  NonsensicalSystem (err0r?)(.log) 11:46, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

geohack broken?
Is it just me, or is tools.wmflabs.org/geohack broken? With two different browsers, I'm currently unable to view  links on articles. —Steve Summit (talk) 10:31, 12 March 2020 (UTC)


 * Yes, it seems like it is down. Reh  man  10:35, 12 March 2020 (UTC)


 * The autofill in reftoolbar seems down too, is it connected? Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 10:59, 12 March 2020 (UTC)


 * It is a cloud-wide issue. None of the wmflabs tools are working. &#8208;&#8208;1997kB (talk) 11:30, 12 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Being tracked at T247501. – Ammarpad (talk) 11:46, 12 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Everthing is up now. &#8208;&#8208;1997kB (talk) 11:53, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

That's not arabic
Hello! Here I'm using refToolbar, autofilling a Google books url. I know refToolbar isn't perfect and bears watching, but it surprised me when I noticed that the language was deemed "arabic". My question is, was this info grabbed from an external source, or is it something internal that could perhaps be improved? If so, who should I tell about it? Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 08:59, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

I note that in this case refToolbar got the language right. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 09:04, 12 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Reftoolbar uses Citoid and citoid in turn uses Zotero, which has a Google Books scraper, which retrieves this XML description of the book from Google books, which states that the language of the book is 'ar'. Therefor, please contact Google books to correct their data. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 13:33, 12 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks! Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 13:59, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

Two images, one caption?
In American Bank Note Company Printing Plant I've got two maps showing the same area in different years. Is there a good way to have the two images connected with a single caption? -- RoySmith (talk) 03:03, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Multiple image. PrimeHunter (talk) 03:08, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
 * You can use its footer caption to do a single caption, or alternative, still use that template and have separate captions but there will be a single frame around both. Either approach gets you an effect I think you want that makes a clear connection between your two maps there. --M asem (t) 03:23, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Yup, that's what I was looking for. Thanks.  -- RoySmith (talk) 03:48, 13 March 2020 (UTC)

Display issues
My watchlist has just said "common watchlist" (fixed); the main page search bar had moved (fixed); and some articles are displaying references differently (showing as 1.1, 1.2 rather than 1abc (still a problem). Is somebody messing around with something behind the scenes? GiantSnowman 20:18, 12 March 2020 (UTC)
 * WP:ITSTHURSDAY -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 21:48, 12 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Interesting, thanks! GiantSnowman 19:36, 13 March 2020 (UTC)

Why is the review log not included in the list of all public logs?
Ever since I was granted pending changes reviewer rights, I've been curious about why my list of all public logs does not include the changes from my review log (which lists edits to pages under pending changes protection that I've reviewed). I spent some time looking for a discussion about this, but was unable to find anything. Are any other editors aware of why this is the case? – Lord Bolingbroke (talk) 20:56, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
 * See Village pump (technical)/Archive 177 and T237729. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:59, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Also my last comment at Village pump (technical)/Archive 179. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 22:18, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Thank you for providing these links and . After looking through them, I'm still unsure why the developers decided to exclude the thanks log, review log, patrol log, and tag log from something that says "all public logs". Did they think these logs would add too much clutter to the main log? Is there any technical reason why they could not be included? As  previously noted, it's not an intuitive user interface. – Lord Bolingbroke (talk) 02:13, 14 March 2020 (UTC)

version history suggestion, questions
iiuc, 'version history' indicates a section name except when 1) the lead is the only section edited or 2) multiple sections have been edited. Is there a way to change the 'version history' tool so it indicates "(lead)" when the only edits are to the lead and "&lt;section 1>, …, &lt;section n>" when edits are made to multiple sections? Or is there another tool available to identify all edits made to an article section? Humanengr (talk) 06:19, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
 * To the first question, it already does this, but you need to visit and enable "". This doesn't just do what it claims, it also pre-fills the edit summary with   so that when saved, there is not just an indication that the lead section was edited, but also a link to that section,  . To the second, you need to manually set them in the edit summary. For instance, in  I used an edit summary of   and you should see that there are two clickable section names in the diff, each preceded by a &rarr; arrow. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 08:53, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
 * IOW, the history page isn't looking at the edits and figuring out what was edited – it's showing the edit summary that was saved by the editor. If the editor used a section-edit link to edit, the edit summary field is pre-filled with  . The editor can remove/change/add to it as they like. For example, if you look at this page's history, you'll see that I changed the edit summary (to start with a capital letter, which the section does not). —[  Alan M 1 (talk) ]— 12:26, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I changed the edit summary (to start with a capital letter, which the section does not) and which breaks the link from history and watchlist; don't do that.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 12:46, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Thx for the explanation and instruction. However, my question comes at this from the other side — given that not all editors set for auto 'top' or manually indicate all the §§ they enter, I was hoping there was a tool which did figure out all the times a given § was edited. Humanengr (talk) 17:31, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
 * If there is such a tool, I do not know of it.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 22:46, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
 * 'twas a slim hope. Thx, Humanengr (talk) 22:54, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
 * not exactly as ambitious as you'd want it, but helpful nevertheless: User:Jcgoble3/SectionInput.js – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 10:03, 14 March 2020 (UTC)

Gadget/User Script to disable MediaWiki:Bad image list
High-contrast-emblem-default.svg Wikipedia is not censored OOjs_UI_icon_eyeClosed.svg and never will be. All articles fall under this disclaimer. By clicking this checkbox you'll only hideing these images from yourself (in all wikiprojects) while still open for other's.

Recently I find out this help page & became really confused. If we are giving advice because they are the half of the userbase, why can't we also provide it as a choiceable option (as a 'Gadget' or an 1 click 'User Script'). We still providing some gadget & most of the user script only because of the user demands. Well, If all of these are against 'POLICY' then a simple info template must be possible, Right ?

--- --Masum The Great (talk) 14:14, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Hello Wikipedians, I'm eagerly waiting for a replay . Isn't it rude to not getting a replay from any active Wikipedian after 127 hours when all the other query got replied. Thanks in advance . --Masum The Great (talk) 14:54, 16 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Well, after another 55 hours i'm still keeping (AGF) & just mentioning some of the users only to provide suggestions about this issue. ,,,,,,,,,. I have no idea who to mention so please excuse me if it bothers you. if my point is not clear enough, please ask. Thanks.--Masum The Great (talk) 16:34, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
 * @Ahm masum: Hi. I'm sorry that it has taken so long for your question to get answered, but you must understand that we're all volunteers here. People like Xaosflux and TonyBallioni are here entirely by their choice, and no editor is required to do or answer anything they don't want to. Even people who are employed by the WMF have no obligation to answer your question; the village pump is a community-run place, and gadgets are community-created and developed, so no WMF employee is obliged to answer questions about them any more than any other volunteer. So, no, it's not rude for nobody to answer your question. It happens, you just have to be patient, and if necessary, ask it again.
 * Your question is not particularly precise; it's not clear what you're asking for. Are you asking for one of the scripts mentioned in that help page to become a gadget? If so, which script? Most of them are not amenable to becoming a gadget, since they require too much personalization in the code. Are you asking for page notices reflecting NOTCENSORED? If so, what pages? How do you decide what needs it and what doesn't? in all of the above cases (particularly the pagenotice, which could be extremely disruptive to the appearance of pages to the reader), you would need community consensus for that; have you started an RfC about it to gather that consensus? Writ Keeper &#9863;&#9812; 16:44, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
 * This would be a very expensive "gadget", as the image code is not presented to the readers today, only an anchor tag to the image. Such a script (that you are welcome to build for yourself and then try to propose that it gets adopted) would need to look for every anchor, try to see if it is on the BIL, then re-render it.  A click-to-load option is being discussed at T198550, so you may want to follow up on that. —  xaosflux  Talk 16:49, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm assuming the goal is you want to auto-hide any and all offensive imagery. If so, going solely off of the bad image list isn't that effective, since it is usually retroactively updated following an act of vandalism. There will always be more "offensive" imagery that isn't blacklisted. There is a NSFW image classifier running on Cloud Services, so it is possible to make a script. However it would be very slow and resource-intensive, since you'd need to fetch the scores in real-time. T198550 as Xaosflux mentions is probably the best way forward if we want the "click to load" functionality, since it might allow us to pre-store the image scores. I will comment there with what I know. In short -- the algorithm exists, and it works very well, it just isn't in production. Don't get your hopes up :( If you simply want one of these user scripts to be a gadget, you'll need to achieve consensus for this. I don't really see the point since it would only be but so effective. As for the "info template", I do not think showing this atop relevant articles will be met with praise. &mdash; MusikAnimal  talk  18:51, 18 February 2020 (UTC)


 * I don’t follow this page, and don’t know why I was pinged. I have no thoughts to contribute. TonyBallioni (talk) 17:27, 18 February 2020 (UTC)
 * And then sometimes you'll get a late reply, like this one from me. I'll leave it as an exercise for somebody else to calculate the time difference in hours.   Did you find the responses helpful?  Thanks after the fact are better than "thanks in advance".  And clarifications are sometimes warranted.  Whom do you refer to when you say "they are half of the user base"?  Pelagic (talk) 10:21, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm feeling super sorry for this late reply, cause almost 285 hours has been passed. 😢

Yes. These responses were helpful. অনেক অনেক ধন্যবাদ @MusikAnimal, @xaosflux & @Pelagic. It was informative & kind hearted. I would offer a Cappuccino.

Circumstances of revelation: I even give an advice in my native wiki village pump based on these responses. The thing is: There was an active debate on my village pump about NSFW related images. The topic was: Artwork or photography ? Then all the active Wikipedians divided in 2 groups & the discussion became a little bit nasty.Then I find out that help page & now I'm here.

User demand: If i'm not mistaken, 'User demand' has a crucial spot In wikimedia 2030 movement strategy. And I'm totally agree that not all the user demands are acceptable cause some of these are fully against foundation/Wikipedia principals. But not the NSFW. these demands are structured & most of the (90% ~) demands are acceptable by foundation/Wikipedia principals. of course there is a scope for long turms debate & discussion before implementation. But I believe no one can or should say that NSFW related demands are not a VALID user demand. And this long awaiting user demand can be solvable by implementing @MusikAnimal's proposal.

And now I like to correct my statement a little bit .MORE THEN HALF OF THE WIKI READERS DONT LIKE TO SEE 'NSFW' IMAGES ON THEIR 1st VISIT WITHOUT INFORMED. proof? see here:(1, 2, 3) --Masum The Great (talk) 11:20, 8 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Speaking as someone with deep, first-hand knowledge and experience regarding this issue (by request of the Board, I designed - and was excoriated for - the Personal Image Filter): This will never happen.  --Jorm (talk) 18:11, 8 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Also for purely practical reasons, even if all those involved decide that this would be a fantastic idea this will never happen. At the time of writing Commons contains 59,736,572 images plus there are all the locally hosted images on every wiki (at the time of writing English Wikipedia has 883,051). Since no volunteer is going to go through all those flagging "potentially unsafe images", it would rely on paid staff; assuming someone can review at most 10,000 pages a day before burning out completely, even if we hired ten dedicated full-time employees to do nothing but review images and click "safe" or "unsafe", it would take them two years just to review the images we already have, let alone review images uploaded in future, handle appeals regarding potentially miscategorised images, etc. &#8209; Iridescent 21:36, 8 March 2020 (UTC)
 * To expand on this: Marking/tagging images as "not safe" requires that there be a formal definition of what that is (which ends up being Western Imperialist) unless you do a system whereby images are tagged ("nudity", "violence", "spiders") and allow users to white or blacklist tags. However, this method has two major flaws: gamification by trolls (e.g., all photos of Barack Obama get tagged as "violent", a situation that can be handled if we really want to but adds a lot of workload.  This is the easy problem, though.  The difficult one is the fact that once the images are tagged, state actors (e.g., governments) can then apply censorship filters of their own, at the metal/ISP level, and this would absolutely violate the five pillars.--Jorm (talk) 21:52, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

You may be interested in T247614. * Pppery * <sub style="color:#800000">it has begun... 19:15, 14 March 2020 (UTC)

AFC
The afc (afch 0.9.1) script is not notifying users when I accept drafts. -- Thegooduser  Life Begins With a Smile :)  🍁 03:06, 14 March 2020 (UTC)
 * In the acceptance window, there's a "Notify submitter" checkbox, you should make sure you'e not unchecking it. It's checked by default. – Ammarpad (talk) 08:00, 14 March 2020 (UTC)
 * it is always checked -- Thegooduser  Life Begins With a Smile :)  🍁 21:24, 14 March 2020 (UTC)

Extended confirmed users and pending changes
I'm an extended confirmed user and yet my edit was held under review. As per WP:PC, pending changes restrictions are limited to only unregistered or new users. Also note that the edit was published when there was no any pending review.

File:Edit History.jpg Stormbird   (talk)  07:12, 9 March 2020 (UTC)
 * This is the fairly-difficult-to-follow Phabricator task T233561, mentioned just a few sections up. As far as I know, the root cause is unknown. ST47 (talk) 07:26, 9 March 2020 (UTC)


 * See section above for "Autoconfirmed user but edits put on pending review". Have any of the editors on the Phabricator task been notified? JohnWickTwo (talk) 00:46, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

Suggestion for the main page
There are some wikis where the main page/homepage don't have an edit button, history button, etc. such as wikiHow. Can I suggest removing the read, view source and view history buttons? This means having only the main page buttons and talk buttons visible to non-administrators, and only administrators having access to all buttons. I find them unnecessary for non-administrators, especially given only they can edit the main page. I&#39;m not perfect but I&#39;m almost (talk) 23:42, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I feel like this is a question better for mediawiki.--Jorm (talk) 23:46, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
 * We could do it here by adding  to the list at the start of MediaWiki:Vector.css and other skins, and then add override code to MediaWiki:Group-sysop.css. But I don't support it. There are already other tabs so we wouldn't save space, and it could cause confusion. I once suggested a way to make the main page history more useful by adding a link to Main Page history. The view source tab is already made more useful by adding special text for the main page in Protected page text, e.g. a link to Main Page/Errors. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:48, 12 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm completely against this suggestion. Non-admins can't edit the main page, but it's perfectly legitimate for them to investigate how it's structured, and they should be able to track the history and see what changed and who changed it.  No, no, no, utterly utterly no. --Trovatore (talk) 01:19, 12 March 2020 (UTC)
 * +1 as per.
 * A user's ability to examine the wikicode underlying every page in the site database — even and especially the ones they lack permission to edit — is consistent with the third pillar, "Wikipedia is free content that anyone can use, edit, and distribute". Wikipedia may only aspire to be "the sum of all human knowledge", but it unequivocally is the largest known repository of MediaWiki source code in existence. The content source's value as an implicit resource is IMHO on par with the explicit value of the published output. Every single one of us has at least one WikiCoding technique or skill that we learned not through instruction or formal learning materials, but simply by observing someone else employing it "in the wild".
 * Restricting the ability to View Source on the Main page would offer little-to-no protection against abuse and vandalism. (Say it with me: "Security through obscurity is not security.") But it would both:
 * Present a "challenge" to potential bad actors, by turning the source of the Main page into a challenge to be met, and a prize to be won — potentially increasing malicious activity targeting the Main page.
 * Represent an abdication of Wikipedia's commitment to free and open sharing of knowledge.
 * Hard oppose. -- FeRDNYC (talk) 08:15, 15 March 2020 (UTC)
 * (Apologies, didn't actually mention security as being any sort of motivation for the proposal. That's usually the misguided impetus for this sort of idea, or at least one of them, so I perhaps got a little carried away. Still, if it's not to "protect" the page then there's even less reason to do this.) -- FeRDNYC (talk) 08:23, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

Making dates in sortable Wikitables chronologically sortable
Hi all,

I'd like to make dates in sortable Wikitables chronologically sortable, for example in the article List of battles of the War of the First Coalition. The table does not recognise the fact that the dates that I put in the first column have a value that should be sortable according to history instead of the alphabet and the day numbers in those dates. For example, it now thinks that 1 June 1794 came before 1 March 1793 just because the M shows up before the J in the alphabet, despite the fact that 1793 came before 1794 in history. There is probably some template that I can use for this, but I couldn't find it. Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 07:55, 14 March 2020 (UTC)
 * , try Help:Sorting. There is a "data-sort-type=date" parameter to use. Elizium23 (talk) 08:03, 14 March 2020 (UTC)
 * , thank you, but it still doesn't quite solve the problem. For some reason part the dates get lined up properly from first to last (April 1792 – October 1797), then the rest sorted in seemingly random ways. It can't just be explained by the fact that some events took several days and that therefore dates like '18 November – 22 December 1793' aren't properly recognised and sorted. Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 08:18, 14 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Ah, my bad, part of the problem was caused by my earlier attempt at fixing this problem using the Template:Date table sorting. I guess I'll have to solve the multiday event sorting problem manually, let's give it a go. Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 08:27, 14 March 2020 (UTC)
 * It seems like it capable of handling some kind of range format, but I can't seem to find one that works now, so replacing   with   should work for you. —[  Alan M 1  (talk) ]— 08:58, 14 March 2020 (UTC)
 * With some regex help I have used  to sort all ranges by the start date and all imprecise dates by the earliest possible date.[//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_battles_of_the_War_of_the_First_Coalition&diff=945509999&oldid=945485792] Entries with the same start date get the same sort key and are not sorted by end date. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:10, 14 March 2020 (UTC)

If people want date sorting then the sort keys should exclusively be defined using ISO 8601 dates, plain and simple. Nothing else makes sense. YYYY-MM-DD dates are trivially sortable, numerically as well as "alphabetically" (via numerical fallback), because they naturally order the date components in a most-to-least-significant digit progression with zero ambiguity. And as you say, for date ranges you just set the start date as the sort key, at least in the majority of cases. -- FeRDNYC (talk) 04:05, 15 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Not so, if the column header is given the  attribute. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 12:01, 15 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Sure, if all the data in the column is sortable that way, then great. But if it isn't — as in the example gave, where some cells contained date ranges and etc. — and a   has to be populated, then it just feels kind of counterproductive to use anything other than ISO 8601 when populating that (invisible, anyway) field. -- FeRDNYC (talk) 12:38, 15 March 2020 (UTC)
 * The table has many pure dates like "28 April 1792" which don't need a sort key. It seemed natural to use the same sort key format as in dates without sort keys. It was also easier to copy the month name with regex, and it's easier to check that the sort keys match the displayed dates. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:56, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

LinkSearch leaving out some links
I've been trying to cleanup some broken links with the sequence https://repositorio.ingemmet.gob.pe/handle/ingemmet such as there are at Purupuruni but LinkSearch believes they only exist at Huaynaputina for some reason. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 17:02, 15 March 2020 (UTC)
 * The links in Purupuruni and several other articles say http and not https. The top of Special:LinkSearch shows it distinguishes between the two. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:23, 15 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Ah, OK. Anyhow, got the links fixed now. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 17:50, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

U+AB5E displays incorrectly in WP default font
Hi. My understanding is that WP now has webfonts that display characters that aren't in any fonts on my computer. At least, I don't think this one is.

In the article tilde, we have the following text -

ɫ	U+026B	LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH MIDDLE TILDE ꭞ	U+AB5E	MODIFIER LETTER SMALL L WITH MIDDLE TILDE ꬸ	U+AB38	LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH DOUBLE MIDDLE TILDE ◌ᷬ	U+1DEC	COMBINING LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH DOUBLE MIDDLE TILDE

The character $⟨ꭞ⟩$ U+AB5E shows a double tilde, as if it were the next (but modifying rather than combining). I can't find a font on my computer than displays it at all, so I assume it's the WP display font that's the proplem.

— kwami (talk) 18:17, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
 * “My understanding is that WP now has webfonts that display characters that aren't in any fonts on my computer.” This is an incorrect understanding. Only specific language versions use this (as it impacts performance), English Wikipedia does not. All fonts are from your computer. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 20:59, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

Ah, my bad. Thanks. — kwami (talk) 21:29, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

How do I find what urls are blacklisted & thus stopping archiving?
See which has the edit summary " (Archive failure: ceterach.exceptions.EditError: 'spamblacklist': CeterachError('Your edit was not saved because it contains a new external link to a site registered on Wikipedia\'s blacklist. * \'\'\'To save your changes now\'\'\', you must go back and \'\'remove the blocked link\'\' (shown below), and then save. **Note that if you used a redirection link or URL shortener (like e.g. \'\'\'goo.gl\'\'\', \'\'\'t.co\'\'\', \'\'\'youtu.be\'\'\', \'\...)". Thanks. Doug Weller talk 08:45, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
 * We're talking about the recent history at Talk:PragerU. It's weird because the archive bot made a successful edit to increment the counter (but why did it do that when Talk:PragerU/Archive 1 is tiny?) but gave that edit summary. Note the "shown below": when you try to save a page with a bad URL, the URL (or is it the regex matching the URL?) is shown. I did a dummy edit to the talk page (adding a space), thinking that when I saved it would quit with a blacklist message, however it didn't. Then I restored the counter to 1 and again the edit worked. I looked at the bot's other edits at the time of its last error and there were none related to this page. In short, no idea. Johnuniq (talk) 09:07, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
 * @Doug Weller: I found the URL (breitbart.com) and fixed it by surrounding it with nowiki on the talk page. Perhaps the bot tried to remove a section that did not contain the offending link, then found it couldn't save it. To report the problem, it incremented the counter in section 0 and put some of the error message it had received in the edit summary? Johnuniq (talk) 09:18, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Hmm, but my two edits (adding a space and setting the counter to 1) were "edit whole page". Why didn't they trigger the blacklist? Johnuniq (talk) 09:20, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
 * thanks for fixing the immediate problem, but there's something wrong still. It simply should not be so hard to fix. Doug Weller  talk 09:30, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Unfortunately the bot's attempt to log the exception it received cut off the part where it would inform about the problematic link; possibly User:Σ needs to update it for mediawiki-api-announce/2019-September/000148.html to have it generate a more useful message (or even the problematic link). Johnuniq's attempt to test it by making a dummy edit to the page would not work as Extension:SpamBlacklist intentionally does not trigger on links that already exist in the page, only newly-added ones (as would happen when the bot attempted to add the archived section to the archive page). An effective test would have involved copy-pasting the entire contents of the talk page to a sandbox. Anomie⚔ 12:16, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

I go through the logs (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log/spamblacklist&limit=500&type=spamblacklist&user=) and resolve the ones where it was an archiving bot hitting the blacklist. I just remove the 'http(s)://' from those links and then it archives (I do try to keep the url as much complete as possible so you can copy-paste them into your address bar, but that does not always work). My reasoning is that on talkpages links do not NEED to be clickable anyway, and these are archives. --Dirk Beetstra T C 14:12, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the info Anomie and Beetstra, it's all very logical in retrospect. What did you see that showed a problem? If wanted, I could manually archive the talk page to cut its size down to something more manageable, if the old sections aren't wanted. For example, I could leave the Grammar section and following but archive the earlier sections. Johnuniq (talk) 22:21, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
 * it's basically what I didn't see, the blacklisted url. Doug Weller  talk 15:24, 17 March 2020 (UTC)

c:MediaWiki:Gadget-RenameLink.js
Can this gadget be implemented to en.w.? It would make renaming files so much easier.Jonteemil (talk) 01:29, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Not directly; it adds c:Template:Rename to a file description page - but our own Template:Rename is for use on talk pages. So the script would need some adjustment. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 13:04, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Well I know that you can't just copy it 100% and expect it to work. But I don't think it's that much that needs to be changed. Change to, what more?Jonteemil (talk) 15:48, 17 March 2020 (UTC)

Page-size data
While trying to resolve an exceeded template-size error, I tried to follow Help:Template, but the page-source does not have that HTML comment block. Instead, I see a single line that begins. Anyone recognize that, or know how to get a user-readable output? I have tried enabling/disabling &#91;&#91;User:Dr pda/prosesize&#93;&#93; in my .js to no effect. DMacks (talk) 13:53, 16 March 2020 (UTC) PAGE ]]) 17:08, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
 * You quote the last line of the html. "NewPP" is a few pages from the bottom. Which browser and feature are you using to view the html and on which page? You can also click "Parser profiling data" at the bottom of a preview to see similar data for the preview. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:04, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Page 2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_the_United_States gives a "Post-expand include size" error. This means the cumulative size of all templates transluded on the page exceeds the limits. I think the main cause is the number of references and citation template (935). At the moment the references are all transcluded correctly and only the navbox 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic fails. — <span style="font-family:Arial;background:#d6ffe6;border:solid 1px;border-radius:5px;box-shadow:darkcyan 0px 1px 1px;"> Jts1882 &#124; talk 14:20, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
 * You can preview different parts to see their cost at "Parser profiling data". For example, 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic data/United States medical cases chart uses 306,141 out of 2,097,152 available bytes. 2020 coronavirus pandemic in the United States has 399 references in a collapsed box and uses 786,132 bytes in total. It may be time to split the article. It's not like new events will stop. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:33, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I definitely support that (I was lured into it via User talk:Shearonink but this was a more general question of what I was (not) seeing on multiple pages. At the time, I was grepping the HTML for key strings that would be in the comment-block and the only match was in that RLQ string. Now the HTML comment block is back there. No idea what was broken where or what unbroke it...I blame aliens. DMacks (talk) 16:29, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I search the HTML source for "NewPP". That sometimes does not work with a large article and when the network or something is congested, or perhaps it's my impatience. The problem is that requesting the HTML source seems to fetch the page from Wikipedia again, and then show the HTML. That can take a long time and the NewPP at the end simply has not arrived when I'm searching so I see "not found". I think it sometimes times out as well. Johnuniq (talk) 22:26, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
 * If you edit the page and then hit the "Show preview" button, you can scroll down under the edit box and click on "Parser profiling data (help)" to see the values embedded in the HTML block you are looking for (things like "Post-expand include size", "Template argument size", and "Expensive parser function count"). --Ahecht ([[User talk:Ahecht|<span style="color:#FFF;background:#04A;display:inline-block;padding:1px;vertical-align:-.3em;font:bold 50%/1 sans-serif;text-align:center">TALK
 * Thanks! I didn't think about checking it in preview-mode. DMacks (talk) 17:34, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Make sure that you edit the whole page, since if you edit a single section and preview that, you only get the figures for that particular section. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 18:56, 17 March 2020 (UTC)

Missing "missing periodical" error?
Mount Takahe is currently categorized as Category:CS1 errors: missing periodical but I don't see which reference is inducing the error. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 07:55, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Errors will show up in preview mode during editing. Ref #77 "Kohno, Mika; Fujii, Yoshiyuki" says "Cite journal requires |journal=" Elizium23 (talk) 08:05, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Mended it, but it didn't show up in the preview. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 08:15, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
 * , you removed  from your common.css in January, which is probably why the error doesn't show up. Either add that back, or (as is now the recommendation at Help:CS1 errors), add  . rchard2scout (talk) 10:29, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Added it back, let's see if it works. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 10:34, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
 * The missing periodical errors are hidden by default. That was the result of that cite-web-missing-website kerfuffle.  All other error messages are displayed.  To show the missing periodical errors use this css in your common.css:
 * The css suggested by Editor Rchard2scout does not control display of error message but does display maintenance cs1|2 maintenance messages.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 13:32, 18 March 2020 (UTC) 13:47, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 13:32, 18 March 2020 (UTC) 13:47, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

Requests for help regarding refill
I know refill has been undergoing changes both large and small for a year or so. I also know that its creator Zhaofeng no longer maintains it. At some point had worked on it but AFAIK others are also involved. I need to request that any and all people working on refill please add User talk:Zhaofeng Li/reFill to their watchlist. That is still where editors go when they have questions and concerns regarding the tool but those go unanswered. It would benefit the 'pedia if those posts were at least acknowledged. It would also be of help if updates regarding changes to refill were posted there - and maybe here as well. Anything that can be done would be appreciated. PS if there is another notice board that would be better for this request please feel free to move it there. MarnetteD&#124;Talk 19:34, 16 March 2020 (UTC)


 * MarnetteD, it's looking like abandon ware at this point, but I may be wrong. Eternal hope. Programs like this are a significant undertaking, someone might seek financial backing from WMF or other non-profit given community demand/push would be an easy grant proposal. -- Green  C  14:14, 18 March 2020 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the reply . While this news isn't the best at least it helps to know the situation. Would you mind posting this at User talk:Zhaofeng Li/reFill? I could copy/paste your note there if you prefer. Agasin thanks for the update. MarnetteD&#124;Talk 16:48, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

Analysis of edit summary usage
Because of health issues, I am not quite up to pursuing this myself, but looking at my analysis of edit summary usage, I am struck by the fact that my stats are so heavily influenced by posts from five or ten years ago. Is anyone here willing to propose that this tool be modified to show stats from the last five years in the pie charts at the top, possibly with another set of all time stats near the bottom? --Guy Macon (talk) 16:54, 12 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Surely this is a question of desirability, i.e. does the community want that view of data for an RfA, rather than the technical feasibility of achieving it? Leaky caldron (talk) 18:18, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Is there someone ready and able to modify the tool should the community say yes, or are we talking about Yet Another Situation where pretty much everyone agrees that a change would be beneficial but nobody actually makes the change? Thus my "Is anyone here willing to propose that this tool be modified" question, which would appear to require someone who knows where to ask. I am not up to it,,having had a heart attack in the last two weeks,. --Guy Macon (talk) 02:45, 14 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes, we can make this change if people want it. There is a quick solution here, though. If recent edit summary usage is what matters, simply give it a date range, for example . RfA toolbox can be modified accordingly, changing the link something like:
 * https://xtools.wmflabs.org/editsummary/en.wikipedia/BrownHairedGirl/0/
 * That said, I'm happy to see you back to editing, hopefully in good health! :) &mdash; MusikAnimal  talk  01:31, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks! Health is improving. In the last 12 days I went from "could not sit up in bed" to "can walk 200 feet unaided".
 * OK, modifying the RfA toolbox looks like the technical solution. So I ask, when someone evaluates an RfA how far back should the edit summary count go? Ten years+ is clearly silly; how well I was using edit summaries in 2010 is irrelevant for an RfA today. But is two years the best number? Maybe five years? What does everybody think? --Guy Macon (talk) 05:14, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I also asked at Template talk:RfA toolbox. --Guy Macon (talk) 14:04, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Let's just be WP:BOLD, change it to two years, and see if anyone objects. I don't imagine anyone will. --Guy Macon (talk) 13:41, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
 * For the time being, I object. This requires broader agreement. Leaky caldron (talk) 14:29, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Maybe the general WT:RFA page is the right place to discuss it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:49, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-12
<section begin="technews-2020-W12"/> Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes
 * Octicons-tools.svg There is a new API module for changing the content model of existing pages. Use  to specify the new model. You can read the documentation on mediawiki.org.

Changes later this week
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 March. It will be on all wikis from 19 March (calendar).

Future changes
 * If you edit a page at the same time as someone else you can get an edit conflict. There is a new two-column interface to make it easier to solve this. It will soon be active by default on the German, Arabic, and Farsi Wikipedias. It will be on by default on more wikis within the next months. You will be able to opt out of the new interface.
 * You can see a proposed design for replying to comments in an easier way.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. <section end="technews-2020-W12"/> 21:18, 16 March 2020 (UTC)


 * Update: The deployment train was blocked on a bad bug for a couple of days.  Also, they've canceled almost every deployment (except essential bug fixes) for this week.  We'll hopefully find out on Thursday whether next week will be more normal.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:25, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

Wikipedia keeps logging me out
I have been logged out without any action on my part three times in the last couple of hours. Every time I log in I click to stay logged in for 365 days. Has anyone else had this problem? Sundayclose (talk) 01:31, 14 March 2020 (UTC)


 * Sundayclose, I believe the usual advice is to log out (on purpose, this time) and log back in, and see if that helps.
 * Also, have you changed any browser settings, such as those around privacy (especially whether cookies are kept and whether third-party cookies can be set)? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 02:07, 14 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the reply. I haven't changed any settings. But it hasn't happened since I made the post above. Maybe it was just a blip. Sundayclose (talk) 02:47, 14 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I narrowed down the problem. If I use the refill app, I end up logged out. Even if I have another window open that is logged in, that window shows me logged out after I go to any Wikipedia page. Strange. Should I post something elsewhere see if others who use refill have this problem? Thanks. Sundayclose (talk) 20:02, 14 March 2020 (UTC)
 * At, it looks like User:MarnetteD knows how to report problems with ReFill and therefore might be aware if anyone else has difficulty with it. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:55, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the ping . Please see GreenC's recent post at that thread. I haven't had this happen and I've been using Refill daily. Now I only edit from my computer so if you are using a pad or your phone that might be part of the problem. That is a total guess so apologies if it is way off the mark. MarnetteD&#124;Talk 17:04, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
 * It's happening to me, too, and I'm not using ReFill.--Jorm (talk) 17:09, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
 * For me it usually happens when I switch machines. I have 3 disctinct devices at home. Very annoying, but what can you do. I do wish there was a way to keep multiple machines logged in the same account on the same IP though. &#32; Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 20:41, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

New 1000 top viewed articles report now available
I noticed the other day that the popular pages report had gone down. I've been working on something similar for work (an inbound social media traffic report), and I had a lot of related code already written, so I put together this top 1000 viewed articles report. I plan to update the report daily, with the previous day's results. If it's helpful, I'd be happy to maintain it indefinitely.

Where else should I announce this? It seems to me that in the middle of a global pandemic, it's more important than ever for us to know what articles people are reading.

BTW, I think I could also create a complete replacement for the Popular Pages report (which is weekly, not daily) pretty easily—as long as 1000 pages is enough, since that's the limit of what you can grab from the Rest API in a single query. Feedback appreciated! Cheers, J-Mo 20:29, 15 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks, J-Mo. I would think Top 1000 would be plenty, in fact, I'm not sure if many people will look beyond the Top 500. I just checked out the Top 100. Liz <sup style="font-family: Times New Roman; color: #006400;">Read! Talk! 21:31, 15 March 2020 (UTC)


 * Hm, someone's been hitting the US Senate article on the mobile site several million times a day. (Desktop is still getting only a couple thousand hits a day.) Looking at the next 100 or so articles, it looks like nobody's interested in reading about anything but the pandemic right now. --Yair rand (talk) 22:28, 15 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I noticed that too. I'm not 100% sure that the data gathered from the top 1000 API screens out spiders/bots (some of the other pageview resources allow you to specify no bots and spiders). I'll follow up on this. Even if our pageview processing pipeline does try to screen out bots, it doesn't always catch all of them. So, take those numbers with a grain of salt because it could just be search engines indexing that page a lot, or other weird non-authentic user traffic... Cheers, J-Mo 00:06, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
 * .-- Moxy 🍁 22:37, 15 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Just to be clear, daily/monthly/yearly pageviews is available in real-time with topviews. There is a "Show mobile percentages" option that helps surface bot-inflated traffic, and some false positives are automatically excluded. As far as I know Analytics is working to improve bot detection, which is being tracked at T123442. The popular pages report was useful because it offered per-week granularity which is not available through the API (T133575). &mdash; MusikAnimal  talk  01:14, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
 * yep, see: "BTW, I think I could also create a complete replacement for the Popular Pages report (which is weekly, not daily) pretty easily—as long as 1000 pages is enough, since that's the limit of what you can grab from the Rest API in a single query." Looks like I may have time to work on that this week now... J-Mo 22:56, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Sorry I missed the "(which is weekly, not daily)" part! You probably already thought about this, or perhaps it helps you: The issue I ran into is that we don't have data to sum for those below the top 1,000. So say Foo made the top 1,000 only on Saturday, summing only the /top endpoints won't give the full picture. I think you'd at least need to collect all the unique /top pages for the week, get the sum of the daily /per-article pageviews, then do your sorting. I seem to recall the possibility that a page isn't in the top for any day in the week, but could still be in the top overall, but I might be wrong about that (and it'd probably wouldn't throw off the top 100 pages or so anyway). At any rate, this was much too slow for an on-demand tool, hence quite fitting for a bot :) Best, &mdash; MusikAnimal  talk  00:40, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Yep, that's how I plan to do it. Thanks ! J-Mo 16:28, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Would it be possible to include a sortable column to show the size of the jump up or jump down in the listing from the previous reported data? It strikes me that this might help editors focus on just the sudden surges/spikes in interest (especially from social media campaigns) and ignore the long term articles of genuinely broad interest. I'm not sure I've phrased that very clearly, though. Nick Moyes (talk) 17:23, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Totally clear. Isaac Johnson and I are working on more or less exactly what you describe here. More information on this Meta page. We hope to have the first version of that report up and running within a week, and I'll be actively soliciting feedback on how to improve it. So stay tuned... J-Mo 19:33, 17 March 2020 (UTC)

IIRC, it's documented that previous tools blacklisted pages that were being artificially boosted. Did anyone ping ? --50.201.195.170 (talk) 21:00, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I posted on the Popular pages talkpage (linked above). J-Mo 21:16, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

Tech News: 2020-11
<section begin="technews-2020-W11"/> Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes
 * There is a new search word called . You can use it to search for articles on a specific topic. It is available on the Arabic, Czech, English and Vietnamese Wikipedias. It will come to more Wikipedias soon.

Changes later this week
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 March. It will be on all wikis from 12 March (calendar).

Future changes
 * There is a plan for new requirements for user signatures. You can give feedback.
 * The Wikipedia Android app will do push notifications if users want them. This could help you see for example when someone wrote on your talk page or your edit was reverted. This will come later this year.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. <section end="technews-2020-W11"/> 17:14, 9 March 2020 (UTC)


 * Two things:
 * mw:Special:MyLanguage/New requirements for user signatures is the same thing as.
 * Anybody want to play with my new (pre-beta) toy? Go to https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilisatrice:Whatamidoing_(WMF)/Brouillon?dtenable=1&uselang=en and find the (blue) Reply link at the end of each timestamp.  Leave me a quick reply and ping me (here, there, anywhere) to tell me what you think.  (Still not working in Safari.)
 * Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:21, 9 March 2020 (UTC)
 * If it ain't working in Safari, what do us lowly MacBook owners do, download Chrome? } --<span style="font-family:'Trebuchet MS',Geneva,sans-serif">qedk (t 心 c) 23:37, 9 March 2020 (UTC)
 * We wait until the patch gets merged tomorrow. This is their second try at fixing this bug.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:54, 10 March 2020 (UTC)
 * It's working in Safari now (for me, anyway). Please try it out.
 * I've started posting information at Talk pages project. The magic link is on its talk page.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:10, 10 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Received your ping (and from fr.wiki at that)! --<span style="font-family:'Trebuchet MS',Geneva,sans-serif">qedk (t 心 c) 23:11, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
 * The  search parameter is an awesome improvement. I've created a template, filter category by topic that makes use of it to help filter backlogged maintenance cats, like Category:All articles lacking sources, by topic. SD0001 (talk) 17:40, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
 * User:SD0001, I think volunteer-me wants to hear more about that at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Medicine.
 * On the question of signatures, User:AntiCompositeNumber has created https://tools.wmflabs.org/signatures/ It should be handy for any editors who are concerned that their signatures aren't okay.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:31, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

Bug in Minerva skin?
While using the skin "Minerva", edit section buttons from transcluded pages don't work correctly, i.e. the user is not directed to the section on the page that is being transcluded. Please verify and fix! Below is a transclusion from User:Guywan/sandbox. Try to edit the section below using the Minerva skin. Shortcut to Minerva. Regards, —guywan (talk • contribs) 14:16, 19 March 2020 (UTC)
 * this is a known issue, T198011. — xaosflux  Talk 14:20, 19 March 2020 (UTC)


 * Thanks. How do you find these things on Phabricator? That place confuses me to no end. —guywan (talk • contribs) 14:47, 19 March 2020 (UTC)
 * search works OK there, normally when you want to search for something try to limit your search to "tasks" that are "open" and know what type of keywords are usually used (in this case "minerva section transcluded" worked for me as in this query). — xaosflux  Talk 15:15, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

Can pages and edit histories be moved to Wikipedias in other languages?
I'm currently participating in a deletion discussion where this thought came up during my participation in the discussion: Can pages and edit histories be moved to Wikipedias in other languages? I figured this would be the place to ask, considering that I know pages and edit histories can be moved from the English Wikipedia to Wikimedia Commons, and I was curious if the same can be done in regards to transferring pages and edit histories to other Wikimedia projects. (Specifically, I'm trying to see if it is possible for a page and its edit history to be transferred to the Albanian Wikipedia [sqwiki].) Steel1943  (talk) 15:58, 19 March 2020 (UTC)
 * For reference, the discussion is at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Draft:Anitaduraku and the related inquiry (made by me) is in this diff. Steel1943  (talk) 16:03, 19 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes Maybe, by using Special:Import. I'm apparently a prolific editor at some other wikis. –<b style="font-family:verdana;color:#000">xeno</b><sup style="color:#000">talk 16:22, 19 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Keep in mind, that although this is possible, it is not necessarily set up, e.g. sqwiki doesn't have any local XML importers, and enwiki isn't a transwiki source for them currently (only sqwikiquote is). If the sqwiki community wants its admins to be able to transwiki from enwiki, they can have an RfC then ask for it to be added to the import list there (such as they way they added sqwq in T221234.) — xaosflux  Talk 16:31, 19 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Oops. –<b style="font-family:verdana;color:#000">xeno</b><sup style="color:#000">talk 16:50, 19 March 2020 (UTC)
 * For a fun example of importing working correctly, check out the history of the dewiki article on Asad Qaiser. You'll see lots of English-language versions (containing the names of enwiki editors), then an official import to dewiki on 1 December 2018, then everything in German from then on. The importer was de:User:Chewbacca2205. EdJohnston (talk) 16:56, 19 March 2020 (UTC)
 * You can see examples of pages we import inbound here at WP:RFPI. — xaosflux  Talk 16:58, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

=url and =archiveurl do not match
Based on test logging it is estimating about %6 of all citations with an archive URL are radically different from the source URL. Since we have millions of citations with archive URLs there are 100s of thousands. Examples:

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

I don't see how it could be fixed with automation. Unless we had a policy that if a url is dead, then the source URL in the archive url replaces it. For example replace this:

With this:

The idea being, archiveurl is an authoritative source once the url is dead. The other option is to do nothing and leave them alone, but look at #6 for example, ugh, problems like this are not uncommon. Some have been caused by bot bugs, misunderstanding how to use the citation templates, entry errors, AWB-type search & replace scripts that change the URL but not the archive URL, etc.. Wanted to hear thoughts and opinions on how we might approach this given the scale, and that it is growing ie. community/manual intervention has not been sufficient alone. -- Green  C  14:06, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Certainly, cs1|2 can look at the value assigned to url or chapter-url (or appropriate alias) and compare with the value assigned to archive-url. For archive.org urls we should find the the selected url/chapter url in the archive url; when we don't emit error message and categorize.  Other archives?  I don't know.  There are archive urls that don't have the archived url, are there not?
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 15:14, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Editors do a lot of crazy stuff. My experience has been that problems will grow if there are no consequences to saving an edit with a problem in it. Showing red error messages allows conscientious editors to see that there is a problem, and possibly fix it themselves. If the error is missed by the editor who creates the problem, gnomes will notice the problem and fix it (eventually). This situation looks like an error, so we should probably display a red error message when the url and archive-url do not match. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:25, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

, sounds like a good idea. Given the 80/20 rule, which generally holds up well on Wikipedia, there is a good possibility there are a small number of domains representing a large number of cases. These might be fixable by bot. For example the logs are showing a frequent number of  vs. - it can be approached from both - a red warn message, plus a bot to reduce the short tail of common cases. -- Green  C  14:59, 19 March 2020 (UTC)


 * (edit conflict) While it would be great to reduce the number of such mismatches, by far not all of these mismatches are actual errors. We should be very careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater by trying to fix this automatically and trash citations.
 * As Trappist already pointed out some archiving sites (for example archive.today) produce archive links which do not even remotely resemble the original url at all. While (in the case of archive.today) long url forms incorporating the original link seem to be available as well somewhere, so far I have been unable to find them being displayed on the archive site itself, so users have no choice but to copy&paste the tiny-url for archive-url and hoping for some bot to detect and expand these links later on (which appears to be working fine).
 * In the case of archive.org, in many cases the resulting link of the archived url is not simply the original url prefixed by some encoded date but differs in subtle details like additional path segments or parameters added (which were not part of the original url) or site names replaced by other ones (f.e. google.com replaced by google.de, but sometimes also completely different looking urls). It is my understanding that this depends on how the target web server reacts on queries from different locales and user agents.
 * The opposite case exists as well, someone might have added a page number parameter to the url of a PDF, without touching the corresponding archive url out of fear it could render the archive url to become non-functional.
 * This is also why blindly replacing a dead url by the url extracted from the archive url may not always be a good idea.
 * For some known sites, it may be possible to set up rules to "normalize" links and resynchronize urls and archive-urls, but I don't think this could be done in general - in particular not when the original url is no longer live.
 * I think, it could be useful if a bot detecting such mismatches in citations would leave a hidden comment in the article's source code, so that editors working on that article can check those links in order to see if they can be improved or not. Similar, our citation templates could detect such mismatches as well and show a hint in edit preview. However, there must be some way for editors to disable this after investigation, leaving a status like archive-status "links differ, but contents match", "url no longer available, but link differences appear to be harmless", "implausible link differences, citation could benefit from new links", "citation implausible, search for better citation", "not applicable, unknown archive url scheme", etc.
 * However, documentation must be very clear that such mismatches are not necessarily errors, and that this should be fixed only in cases where a fix is obvious and does not weaken or invalidate a citation. I really fear mind-less editing removing otherwise valid citations just to get rid of such hints.
 * --Matthiaspaul (talk) 17:39, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

Full colour 3D models on Wikipedia and other projects
Hi all

If you'd like full colour 3D models to be available on Wikimedia projects please subscribe to this phabricator task to show that it is a feature people want.

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T246901

Thanks

John Cummings (talk) 09:17, 14 March 2020 (UTC)


 * Phabricator doesn't accept voting behaviors. Bug management/Development prioritization is primarily about strategic goals and practical problems, not popularity.  The number of 'tokens' and subscribers has no effect on whether the task gets done.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:16, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I think there can be a mild effect when prioritizing bugs, where people see a bug has a lot of tokens and see its popular, they're more likely to prioritize it highly. But in my experience that only really happens when the bug is already on the list of things to do, and its just a matter of where on the list the task falls, where this bug is not even on a list. Bawolff (talk) 19:25, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

Request for input
To those of you who are adept at dealing with all thing technical please see this thread Template talk:AllMusic and offer any info that you can. I know that a WP:RFC might be needed but I wanted to get more input before proceeding. Thanks for your time. MarnetteD&#124;Talk 20:56, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

Unable to move category page
Although Category:Pages using infobox given name with unknown parameters is not protected, I have no option to move it (it should be "Category:Pages using infobox name with unknown parameters", as the template has been moved). Why is that? Andy Mabbett ( Pigsonthewing ); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:30, 19 March 2020 (UTC)
 * only admins, bots, and pagemovers can move a "category page". Keep in mind that moving the page does not move the pages that are in it to the new category.  There are many bots that will take care of that, and if it is a speedy move you can list it at WP:CFDS. —  xaosflux  Talk 16:34, 19 March 2020 (UTC)
 * News to me. Since when? The category is only applied by a template, which I have already updated. I'll ask at the page you suggest. Thanks. Andy Mabbett ( Pigsonthewing ); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:40, 19 March 2020 (UTC)
 * it was removed last year following a (not highly attended) RfC. — xaosflux  Talk 16:48, 19 March 2020 (UTC)


 * FWIW, I'm actually a bit shocked that you don't have the page mover user permission, given that I am somewhat familiar with your work. I'd assume that if you went to WP:PERM/PM to request the page mover permission, it would be granted to you. Steel1943  (talk) 17:03, 19 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Thank you, but Xaosflux has already, and kindly, given me that bit, and I have now moved the category. Andy Mabbett ( Pigsonthewing ); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:19, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

Interactivity in visualizations?
After watching the coverage of coronavirus on Wikipedia, I'm pretty surprised at the lack of interactivity on the charts and plots representing the page. (For example, take a look at image: In order to show accurate information, it needs to be updated by hand every day.)

I'm wondering if other editors have ideas on building in more interactive and user-editable charts. Is it at all possible to integrate tools like ArcGis or Plotly Dash to help better and more accurately illustrate data like this on Wikipedia? If not, is there a way we could build in this functionality, in particular for articles like this, where data and plots need to be regularly updated by the same editor and critically need up-to-date information? It would be amazing to have even some of the functionality of visualizations like this or this. I'm curious in particular for advice or recommendations from editors who have ideas on how to solve this issue. SiliconRed (talk) 00:47, 17 March 2020 (UTC) PAGE ]]) 17:04, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
 * There are a whole series of templates for automatically graphing data at Template:Graph, chart and plot templates. You can also use the Graph extension directly if you want to pull the tabular data from Commons instead of embedding it in the graph template. If you want something more advanced than static plots, you can do some pretty neat things with the extension, such as the demo at mw:Extension:Graph/Interactive Graph Tutorial. --Ahecht ([[User talk:Ahecht|<span style="color:#FFF;background:#04A;display:inline-block;padding:1px;vertical-align:-.3em;font:bold 50%/1 sans-serif;text-align:center">TALK
 * Exactly what I was looking for, thanks. I'll look into how this could be used w.r.t. the Coronavirus data. SiliconRed (talk) 17:08, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
 * still interested in working on this? I'd be willing to help out. — Wug·a·po·des​ 21:53, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

Detecting and fixing improper talk page deletion
Are there people/specialized tools for quickly checking/responding if''' there is a pattern of WP:ARCHIVENOTDELETE violations (the "not blanked" part) like this one edit by a user or on a talk page? Where is discussing and addressing such things more on topic - that's not as general as here? Also, IMO tools like OneClickArchiver shouldn't work on a talk page unless the page has archives and the archives are searchable and linked from it.''' User:Technical_13 User:Technical_13/1CA? User:Another_Believer? (belatedly signed) --50.201.195.170 (talk) 21:16, 14 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Original title was: Re. detecting and fixing improper talk page deletion - violations of "Article talk page discussions should be archived – not blanked"
 * It's not a crime to violate WP:ARCHIVENOTDELETE, but such removals may be against WP:TPO and violations of that are strongly discouraged. BTW your post won't have notified or, because you didn't sign it. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 21:32, 14 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Fixed (unneeded since you notified 'em.) So are you saying one violation is more or less wrong than the other?
 * Hope someone addresses my questions.
 * I noticed that the violation(s) by what seems to be a SPA, so I wonder about NPOV violations (as the edit seemed to be quashing discussion) and why there were 4061 exams, not 3700 (surely a rounded number). [Edit: Seems editor is inactive and was making good edits, to my eye.]
 * Oh yeah:
 * --50.201.195.170 (talk) 22:10, 14 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I reworded the title of this section because I was unable to link to the header from another page. Not sure why not. EdJohnston (talk) 23:04, 14 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I notified Nickayane99, the person who did the attempted archiving on Talk:2020 coronavirus pandemic on cruise ships, in case they want to respond. The issue is the apparent failure to archive properly, but the cited discussion may be too recent to make it sensible to archive this kind of post. It's true that no archives have yet been created for that page. Does the One-Click Archiver work even when no archives exist yet, and when no MiszaBot header has been created? EdJohnston (talk) 23:22, 14 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I never use one-click archiver (OCA) and I wish that others didn't either. It's a bit like hatting a thread - somebody has taken it upon themselves to decide that nobody else is allowed to comment. If a page is set up for automatic archiving, there's normally no reason not to let the relevant bot handle it in the normal course of things. OCA has also been known to send threads to the wrong archive - perhaps an old one, or it might start a fresh archive page when the current one is still very small. On that, I once came across a case where someone used OCA to archive five or six threads which all ended up in separate archives. OCA can also screw the archive pages, particularly when a page is normally archived by ClueBot III. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 00:43, 15 March 2020 (UTC)
 * OCA is a great tool when used reasonably. It's super useful to manage WP:BOTREQ, for example. &#32; Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 20:43, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Ed: Good. Just to clarify, OCA was used by a different user.  And  can't reply -  Red:Agreed. Looks like OCA should be disabled.  pinged. We don't have better/less dangerous tools, Headbomb? (and your reply is out of order.) ?  --50.201.195.170 (talk) 03:39, 15 March 2020 (UTC)
 * BOTREQ is, for some reason, set up to be archived by both and by . They are currently configured to write to different archives - lowercase sigmabot III will write to Bot requests/Archive 80 and ClueBot III will write to Bot requests/Archive 74. This inconsistency is one of the causes of the problems that I mentioned above. But so long as OCA is used on every thread before it hits the age threshold (60 days since the last post), and so no threads become old enough to trigger an archiving bot, there shouldn't be a problem. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 21:56, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

Still hope someone addresses these questions (more directly). And how can undo not be smart enough to work on edits like these? --50.201.195.170 (talk) 20:38, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
 * If a script - such as OCA - causes edits to two (or more) pages, there is no link between them; and since Undo works on one page at a time, you would need to undo edits to each page separately. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 21:42, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

Updating the captcha for account creation
As part of a review of new user pages, I noticed that the account creation page (Special:CreateAccount) currently uses what seems like an outdated captcha. Can we update to the one where you just check the "I'm not a robot" box? Or are we deliberately avoiding that one so that we're not beholden to Google? Sdkb (talk) 22:39, 19 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Outdated? "I'm not a robot" box is what is old and what most automated systems can get around. What is needed is an upgrade not a down grade. Educate yourself here-.--104.249.229.63 (talk) 22:55, 19 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I think it's safe to say we do not want to be dependent on a third party for managing our editors, there are lots of improvement ideas on this topic though, you can follow and comment on them here: tag/confirmedit_captcha_extension. — xaosflux  Talk 23:12, 19 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Ah, if it's actively under discussion, I probably don't have much to contribute that's not already been brought up. Glad it's being worked on, though, and I hope prioritized to some extent. Having new contributors' very first experience on WP being an example of outdated tech isn't the foot we want to put forward. Sdkb (talk) 23:16, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

Cursor jumps to left of line when typing a capital letter and writes it there - probably a chrome extension error; but which one :) ?
Hi everybody :)

What: when in the "Editing Talk", when I want to type a capital letter , the cursor jumps to the beginning of the line and generates it there. I've had something similar in facebook messenger when I had to make a key-combination to generate a letter with an accent, and after googling a bit, I understood this was probably due to an extension in google chrome I had added. In chrome extensions, there is a switch on/off button next to every extension, so using that and reloading the page to activate the effect of switching on/off the extension, I managed to pin down it was the " grammarly extension ". I have that switched off. Anybody any idea what (chrome extension) makes my cursor jump to the beginning of the link/paragraph? When typing this section, I can type capital letters without the cursor jumping to the left of the line/paragraph. So, it only happens in the "Editing Talk" as I see. Thy :) SvenAERTS (talk) 12:54, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Please avoid excessive use of underlining, it feels like shouting. Also, your section heading is on the long side. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 13:09, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
 * SvenAERTS, are you using a Mac? I am, and I have this happening on other websites.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:31, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Whatamidoing (WMF), yes using a mac. Try switching off some chrome extensions. even here  i cannot touch the shift button and type a letter or it would jump to the left of the line.  maybe it has to do with a pop-up box that pops-up when i put my cursor in an already written word and hit the shift button and it wants to translate things to english apparently and it has a mention "source: google".  is that translate pop-up a chrome extension or a wikipedia feature? Thy SvenAERTS (talk) 00:09, 20 March 2020 (UTC)

Registration date differences
There a big difference in registered date displayed between Xtools (correct) and CentralAuth (incorrect) - (presumably this is only for pre-SUL users) for instance for me - this has 2002-11-26 while Special:CentralAuth/Shyamal has "registered" as 2008-03-26 (which matches the "attached on" dates for en.wiki) Shyamal (talk) 17:00, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
 * SUL began in May 2008. Before then, you needed to register separately at each wiki, and your registration on en.wp is recorded at Special:ListUsers, as [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:ListUsers&limit=1&username=Shyamal here]. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 17:37, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
 * "Registered" at Special:CentralAuth/Shyamal is under "Global account information" and says when the unified global account was created after it became possible in 2008. "attached on" means when a local account was attached to the global account and not when the local account was originally created if it was earlier. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:52, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
 * The registration date at "Special:Listusers" is only an estimate based on the date of your first edit, because your account was created long before the creation of the new user log in September 2005. Graham 87 08:51, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
 * 2015 ticket with no action about clarifying that "registration" on CentralAuth isn't registration: T138145 ~ Amory <small style="color:#555"> (u • t • c) 09:39, 20 March 2020 (UTC)

Double infoboxes
Hi, can somebody shrink the two infoboxes to default collapsed on Lochs of Spiggie and Brow so they fit in the sections?♦ Dr. Blofeld  12:08, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
 * This article uses which has no provision for collapsing. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 13:07, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I wrapped the infoboxes in another infobox and set them as child so the hidden doesn't take up the entire width of the screen. – Brandon XLF  (talk) 00:13, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
 * yo dawg I heard you like infoboxes so I put an infobox in your infobox... --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 00:32, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
 * This is bad practice. I know MOS:DONTHIDE doesn't apply to parts of of infoboxes, but it should definitely apply to entire infoboxes. Whenever a section is too short for the infobox to appear within the section, one should use clear. Nardog (talk) 08:20, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
 * MOS:DONTHIDE definitely applies to parts of the infobox. The fact that some infobox have this feature does not mean they are somehow accessible all of a sudden. --Gonnym (talk) 08:28, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
 * And now it's reverted. Nardog (talk) 08:14, 20 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Restored. Additionally, seems an editor there doesn't understand BRD that he invoked. --Gonnym (talk) 08:20, 20 March 2020 (UTC)
 * And I see you don't understand it either: you've just edit warred too and still didn't bother to open a talk page discussion. I've returned it to the status quo of five days ago and removed both IBs until a discussion and a consensus takes place. (And please don't just throw straw men about WP:LOCALCONSENSUS into edit summaries: it's clear there is absolutely no consensus established at all). I look forward to people actually discussing the matter rather than continuing to edit war on the basis of no consensus. - SchroCat (talk) 10:49, 20 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Seeing as I've edited once, while you reverted two different editors, I wouldn't call what I did edit warring, but would actually say that you are actively doing so. --Gonnym (talk) 10:56, 20 March 2020 (UTC)
 * You jumped in to revert information that had been previously challenged and reverted. You were edit warring. Whether you think you were or not, you were. You did it without opening a discussion on the article talk page. It doesn't matter what you thought you were doing, but you were edit warring. (And as for your edit summary here: I am afraid you have got the wrong end of the stick entirely. A page does not have to have an "administrator ruling in effect"; that is just one of the examples. the ArbCom restrictions refer to all pages. Go ahead and breach the restrictions and see what ArbCom say if you wish.) - SchroCat (talk) 11:17, 20 March 2020 (UTC)

Can't update preferences
18:15, 20 March 2020 (UTC) So I tried to update my Global Preferences yesterday, and it didn't work. Changing local preferences will work, but not global. So I tried resetting global preferences, and now I can't update my preferences local or global at all! I've tried clearing my cache, using a different device, it still won't work. Anyone know a fix? Copy and paste the code to reply(Talk) 01:41, 20 March 2020 (UTC)
 * you had many scripts enabled, I've disabled your user scripts here and on meta-wiki. Please log off, clear cache, and try again. You may want to updated your GP's at meta:Special:GlobalPreferences. — xaosflux  Talk 03:59, 20 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Of course, feel free to re-enable your user scripts when you want. — xaosflux  Talk 04:00, 20 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Issue persist. User scripts does not seem to be the problem. Tried doing it on here and meta, still does not want to update.     Copy and paste the code to reply(Talk) 05:04, 20 March 2020 (UTC)
 * What goes wrong when you try to update preferences? Can you for example not toggle checkboxes, or not save afterwards, or the changes are not remembered, or they have no effect? Name an example preference you are trying to change. What is your browser? PrimeHunter (talk) 12:43, 20 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Essentially any preference, such as toggling Enable section editing by right clicking on section titles, it will toggle, but the save button doesn't work. I mainly use chrome (version 79/80), I've tried it on Opera (version 67), nope. In this case, it seems to be an account issue, but not related to user scripts.     Copy and paste the code to reply(Talk) 16:50, 20 March 2020 (UTC)
 * It works for me in Chrome 80. Does the Save button remain greyed out and never changes to blue when you modify a preference? Does it work with [//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences?safemode=1 safemode] or in [//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences?useskin=modern Modern]? PrimeHunter (talk) 17:11, 20 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Try these links directly: Special:Preferences/reset & Special:GlobalPreferences/reset from a standard desktop browser, be sure you have javascript enabled. — xaosflux  Talk 17:21, 20 March 2020 (UTC)
 * It worked! Either it was because I (w/ cache clear) allowed javascript for wikipedia.org or because of your reply. Issue resolved, thanks. Can I Log In (talk) 18:15, 20 March 2020 (UTC)