Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 187

Help needed to make a query more efficient
I'm trying to create a query to find non-existent templates which have at least one transclusion. I'd like to filter out userspace /  pages from the results as well. I tried with query/51274 and query/51273, but both run very slowly and/or end up getting killed. Does anyone know how I can improve the efficiency of these queries? Thanks in advance. - F ASTILY   09:10, 14 January 2021 (UTC)
 * You may be looking for Special:WantedTemplates. If that isn't what you want, it's probably at least a good starting point.  It's only updated occasionally though.  The last update was at 01:13, 20 December 2020. davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  18:24, 14 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Fastily is trying to replicate wanted templates precisely because the last report was almost a month ago. --Izno (talk) 18:58, 14 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Wait, that was Fastily? *trouts self* *gets caffeine* Sorry Fastily, if I'd paid attention to the who not just the what I would've known this wasn't a "low-hanging-fruit" question.  davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  22:56, 14 January 2021 (UTC)
 * No worries, I appreciate the effort to help :) - F ASTILY   01:15, 16 January 2021 (UTC)
 * or  may be quicker than  . Modules have their own content model, "scribunto".--Snaevar (talk) 18:51, 14 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Indeed, querying against the content model is a much better way to find not-JavaScript/CSS. --Izno (talk) 18:57, 14 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the suggestions everyone. I've revised the query and it succeeds without getting killed roughly 1/3 of the time.  I suspect this has to do with caching of previous runs.  Needless to say, this isn't ideal.  Is there anything else I could try or am I out of luck?  -  F ASTILY   01:15, 16 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Fastily, WP:RAQ folks may be able to help (I know there's one or two over there who I think don't check this forum too often). --Izno (talk) 02:28, 16 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Okay, I'll give that a try. Thanks again!  -  F ASTILY   04:51, 16 January 2021 (UTC)

Red link counter?
Hopefully an easily answered question, is there a tool or script that can count the number of red links in a particular article? I've searched the archives of this and other project pages, thanks. Nimbus (Cumulus nimbus floats by)  17:10, 12 January 2021 (UTC)
 * you may be able to do this in your browser for casual use, view the page source and use your browser's find/count utility to look for: .  You certainly could create a userscript to count these if you wanted to. —  xaosflux  Talk 17:31, 12 January 2021 (UTC)
 * That works thanks, 'page does not exist' is another search term that works. It is counting red links in navboxes so I guess the way to get a true picture is to place the article text minus the navboxes in a sandbox. For Firefox the steps are Tools>Web Developer>Page Source. Great stuff, thanks. Nimbus (Cumulus nimbus floats by)  17:47, 12 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Open the "console" tab of developer tools, and run  This will give you the count of all red links in the page content but excluding navboxes. –  SD0001  (talk) 08:29, 16 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks, works well. Nimbus (Cumulus nimbus floats by)  10:27, 16 January 2021 (UTC)

dablinks
Is there a substitute for Dispensers dablinks tool? The tool seems to be unavailable even via the links given at dablinks. Nthep (talk) 10:40, 16 January 2021 (UTC)

User compare report
While filing a SPI today, I observed that the "User compare report" link that is produced for case pages is a deadlink (presumably due to being a Betacommand tool...). The link should possibly be removed, I think, unless the tool has been moved (in which case it needs to be updated)? - The Bushranger One ping only 01:51, 15 January 2021 (UTC)
 * that is coming from Template:SPI report - you can request an edit or discuss the deadlink on that template's talk page. — xaosflux  Talk 11:56, 16 January 2021 (UTC)

Query, or feature request: UI in my own language
Is there currently a way, when guest-starring on other-language projects, to have the UI in my native language so that I can actually navigate? I appreciate that it's fun to learn new languages and attempt to navigate by touch and feel in, say, Arabic or Belorussian, but ain't nobody got time for dat, I would typically prefer to edit using an interface in a language that I understand, even if the content is cast in a completely unintelligible tongue. Is there currently a preference for this, or a phab that I can glom onto? Thanks! Elizium23 (talk) 06:05, 17 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Have you tried the Google Translate extension? - F ASTILY   06:41, 17 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Actually I won't bother! I just found out that there is a global preference to set language and once it's set, the UIs are all translated. It might not be entirely consistent or there may be a propogation lag effect, but I've successfully edited in Azerbaijani and much more now. Thanks for the pointer, anyway! Elizium23 (talk) 06:48, 17 January 2021 (UTC)

Mystery ping
I received a ping notification related to this edit - but I cannot see my name mentioned? GiantSnowman 22:49, 16 January 2021 (UTC)
 * The edit accidentally transcluded User:Cupper52 instead of linking to it. Your username is mentioned on that page, in the "Fact file" section, and that got picked up as a mention of you. * Pppery * it has begun... 22:57, 16 January 2021 (UTC)
 * OK, thanks! GiantSnowman 08:38, 17 January 2021 (UTC)

user device and OS stats
are there any stats available on wiki websites, indicating number (or percentage) of users on mobile vs desktop..also any info on operating systems in use..many thanks Gfigs   talk 07:38, 17 January 2021 (UTC)
 * See |bar|2-year|~total|monthly for mobile vs desktop on Wikimedia wikis. https://pageviews.toolforge.org has data on individual pages. PrimeHunter (talk) 08:25, 17 January 2021 (UTC)
 * thank you Gfigs   talk 09:10, 17 January 2021 (UTC)

Restoring musical score functionality
Due to T257066, musical scores through LilyPond have been partially disabled since last summer. However, for the moment it's possible to restore the display of the scores at least by commenting out the "vorbis=1" argument with percent signs. Since it does not look like the matter is close to being resolved, I'd like to propose creating a bot that will do such commenting out on all pages that use the extension, and then un-comment it once the functionality has been restored. I want to sound out the idea here before writing and requesting approval for such a bot, because it would involve making a large number of trivial edits, so I don't know what the community support would be for this. --Ipatrol (talk) 21:04, 16 January 2021 (UTC)
 * The thing is, that would only display it until someone changes the score, as has been confirmed on phabricator. It gives people an false sense that scores work, when they do not. Personally, I would say no to the proposal.--Snaevar (talk) 13:00, 17 January 2021 (UTC)

Editing toolbar - display only one button?
Hi. Can the editing toolbar ("This is sometimes called the '2010 wikitext editor'") be customised so it only shows the redirect button? I have no use for the other editing tools, but do use the redirect syntax a lot. Grateful for any help or code I can drop into my custom .css. Thanks.  Lugnuts  Fire Walk with Me 14:57, 16 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Yes, you would replicate the code at mw:Extension:WikiEditor/Toolbar_customization for each element you don't want and add to your javascript page. The reference toolbar, which is active by default, should be disabled in your gadget settings.--Snaevar (talk) 15:46, 16 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Thanks. I disabled the toolbar in my preferences years ago. IIRC the javascript was giving me issues with my web browser, and I'd forgotten about it until today. I had a play with turning it back on. How would I find out the names/properties of all the other buttons?  Lugnuts  Fire Walk with Me 17:49, 16 January 2021 (UTC)
 * The names/properties can be looked up in the page source, but I listed them below.
 * {| class="wikitable"

! section !! group !! tool
 * main || format || bold italic
 * main || insert || link file reference template-wizard
 * main || codemirror || CodeMirror
 * }
 * main || codemirror || CodeMirror
 * }
 * }


 * and then you can just remove the whole menus (sections), their names are advanced, characters and help, like so:


 * Personally I would readd the redirect button to the top (main section). No reason to open up an menu for one button. On the mediawiki page I linked, higher up on that page is some documention how to do that.--Snaevar (talk) 19:49, 16 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the reply, but this is beyond my expertise.  Lugnuts  Fire Walk with Me 13:26, 17 January 2021 (UTC)

Watch pages issue
Hello, I usually edit pages, and they are auto saved to my watchlist. This stopped happening for some reason? Also, I'm not getting certain on-wiki notifications such as reverts. I checked these settings, and they appear to be set correctly. Also, the email notifications are going through, just not the on-wiki ones. Huggums537 (talk) 14:46, 17 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Is "Add pages and files I edit to my watchlist" enabled at Special:Preferences? Is "Edit revert" enabled in the "Web" column at Special:Preferences? Please post an example of a revert you think should have notified you. Always include an example if possible when you report any issue. Were you notified of this post? PrimeHunter (talk) 15:20, 17 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Yes, all the settings are correct as I stated. I even checked my global settings. The last two reverts are in fact showing up in my notification list, but they are appearing as read, and I never saw them when they came in. The only way I knew about them was from my email. I used to get a "red light indicator button" at the top of the page near my username when this type of notification comes in, but now it works for everything else except reverts I guess. Weird. Huggums537 (talk) 15:50, 17 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Ok, so it turns out the watchlist issue did have something to do with my settings. I'm getting it ironed out. I'll have to wait it out on the revert issue to see if it was just something I might have overlooked when someone eventually reverts me. Thanks for your help. Huggums537 (talk) 16:10, 17 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I have reverted you as a test and then restored your post. Did you click the link in the email while you were still logged in and before viewing any other Wikimedia page since the revert was made? The link includes a  part. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:02, 17 January 2021 (UTC)
 * HA! Thanks. It worked! And, yes I think I might have done that. So that would explain it I guess... Huggums537 (talk) 17:04, 17 January 2021 (UTC)

tech problem (stalled) ?
what is to be expected (or done) with a tech problem, that seems to have stalled..?

Gfigs  talk 12:33, 16 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_186
 * T271288
 * Template_talk:Infobox
 * Template_talk:Marriage
 * The example in T271288 works for me with Google Chrome 87.0.4280.141, paper size A1. I tried other sizes, margens and scales but didn't find any problem. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:13, 16 January 2021 (UTC)
 * ok thanks, will check this on the browser.. Gfigs   talk 13:26, 16 January 2021 (UTC)
 * am having this problem on Mobicel X4 phone. Chrome 87.0.4280.141 browser. PDF Page Sizes ISO A0-A3..is anyone else experiencing this? Gfigs   talk 04:51, 17 January 2021 (UTC)

Template formatting issue
I apologize for posting with such a minute issue, but I didn't receive a response at the help desk and this has been bothering me for a while now! Wondering if anyone knows how to solve a formatting oddity at some of the medieval music templates I've been maintaining, such as Ars nova, Ars subtilior and Medieval music, where the bottom of the template is unable to center consistently, while also including the navigational arrows. The Medieval music one for example pushes the Category, Portal and WikiProject to the left when the "Renaissance music →" is put on the same line, though I'm unsure how to resolve this, even after much experimentation. Any help would be appreciated. Aza24 (talk) 08:50, 16 January 2021 (UTC)
 * A crude solution would be to put something blank with similar width at the other side, e.g. . If there is already something there but it's shorter then add something like   to it. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:02, 16 January 2021 (UTC)


 * I seem to have fixed it by setting the style to "position:absolute" here. It would cause overlap on extremely narrow screens, but that shouldn't be an issue as navboxes don't show up on mobile. &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 13:37, 16 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Thank you both, these ideas are very helpful! Aza24 (talk) 20:33, 16 January 2021 (UTC)
 * the adjustment to the Medieval music you just made off centered it for me still; I'm just using chrome on a mac desktop, and I checked what it looked like on a macbook air with chrome and it still wasn't centered., your method on Ars nova works perfect, but I'm not sure how to transmit it to Ars subtilior or Ars antiqua; when I tried it, it made the right aligned ones go far left. Aza24 (talk) 23:10, 16 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Your version [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Medieval_music&diff=1000809064&oldid=1000751226] pushed "Category Portal WikiProject" so far to the right of the center that it doesn't fit on the same line as "Renaissance music" in a narrow window. If it jumps to the next line for you then it may be centered there but not for others who see it on the line where it belongs. My version [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Medieval_music&diff=next&oldid=1000809064] seems better. The idea is something of about the same width as "Renaissance music →". That's definitely not 45 em (typography). PrimeHunter (talk) 23:35, 16 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Ah I see, well perhaps Skdb will be able to alter his solution to help with that one. Aza24 (talk) 23:38, 16 January 2021 (UTC)
 * , hmm, I just took a look but I'm afraid I can't figure out anything. is pretty good with this kind of thing, so he might know. &#123;{u&#124;  Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 02:41, 18 January 2021 (UTC)
 * , I went ahead and replaced the floated elements with ones using the "position: absolute" trick. The one that had to be aligned to the right, using "right: 0" moves them 0px away from the right side of their positioned parent. I also added a positioned parent so they would use the padding that contents of the below area have. – Brandon XLF  (talk) 03:38, 18 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Your solution seems to work perfectly, thank you Brandon! Aza24 (talk) 03:44, 18 January 2021 (UTC)

Header feature
I use to have a feature at the top of my page that showed when a page was created, by whom, and a few stats such as its length. Now, I don't see this info.-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 23:45, 16 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Preferences - Gadgets - XTools: dynamically show statistics about a page's history under the page heading. Is that what you are looking for? It's working for me. – Jonesey95 (talk) 01:50, 17 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Yes, that would be the one. Either a) Xtools was down at the time Tony looked, or b) he has another script that is broken and needs fixing. --Izno (talk) 04:16, 17 January 2021 (UTC)
 * That is a good script, but the one that seems to be down use to also show the latest diff summary and time, which is often quite handy.-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 05:28, 17 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Any advice on a potentially broken script?-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 23:54, 17 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I have an educated guess. In User:TonyTheTiger/vector.js, you have a link to User:Eizzen/LastEditor.js and another script by the same user. On 4 Jan 2021, those scripts were moved to match the user's new username, e.g. User:Eizen/LastEditor.js. If you remove the extra "z" from each of the user names in your vector.js file, and then reload or purge an article a few times, I suspect that your script will start working again. If that works, we may want to notify, who moved those pages, to say that editors who use those .js scripts may need to be notified about the page moves. – Jonesey95 (talk) 00:19, 18 January 2021 (UTC)
 * , This was result of a account rename and as of I know rename extension set a redirect from old script to new, so that people using old one don't have any issues. So I don't think the script is issue here. &#8208;&#8208;1997kB (talk) 02:42, 18 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I put the old (now a redirect) script name (with User:Eizzen) in my vector.js, and it did not work. I changed the script name to User:Eizen/LastEditor.js, and it works. It appears that moving the script, even with a redirect in place, broke the script's use, at least for me, and presumably for and about 18 other editors. Can you please notify them, or possibly fix the redirect so that it works, if possible? Thanks. – Jonesey95 (talk) 06:07, 18 January 2021 (UTC)
 * , I don't have permission to fix them, but I'll open a phab task as hundreds of users get renamed every day, so hundreds of such redirect. &#8208;&#8208;1997kB (talk) 12:48, 18 January 2021 (UTC)


 * -TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 12:27, 18 January 2021 (UTC)
 * missed one -TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 12:29, 18 January 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-03
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Changes later this week
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Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  16:09, 18 January 2021 (UTC)

Transcluding multiple pages based on multiple links pulled from wikidata.
Goal: Transclude all the links returned by wikidata call.

I got some help on the Module: wd help page that got me part way to a solution.

I'm using:

To give me this list of Richard Burton's spouses:

And I can kinda make it transclude them by doing this:

properties

But, upon saving, subst will do what it does and replace the wikitext with its substituted translusion links, which is what I'm trying to avoid.

Is there a way to achieve the same result, without using subst? Because if a new spouse were added to Richard Burton, I want my page to automatically capture that and take it into account and transclude the new spouse's page too.

Been trying workarounds like recursive subst through a template but nothing seems to manage this. Any help would be appreciated. El Dubs (talk) 00:25, 19 January 2021 (UTC)
 * You already asked this at Help talk:Transclusion and (in slightly different form) at Module talk:Wd; please observe WP:MULTI. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 08:37, 19 January 2021 (UTC)
 * My apologies, I was asking for more general information than I did at Module:wd, and I realised the Transclusion help page is not a very active one, so thought this the best place. Let's consider this the main one. El Dubs (talk) 19:10, 19 January 2021 (UTC)

How to template an article that uses public domain sources?...
I am working on a historical biography that's kind of a mess MOS-wise and reference-wise. It contains content copied wholesale from a book (published in 1850 and now public-domain). I have searched for an appropriate somewhat generic public-domain source template to use, similar to the Encyclopedia Brittanica &  Templates but have been unsuccessful. Help please! Thanks, Shearonink (talk) 19:23, 19 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I don't think this is really a technical problem, but you could use templates such as Template:PD-old-text or Template:PD-notice. Category:Attribution templates contains most of the attribution templates if your source is a popular one it may have a special template as well. —  xaosflux  Talk 19:50, 19 January 2021 (UTC)
 * - It might not technically be a "technical" problem but I thought I'd ask those more technically knowledgeable than myself about the answer and this place seemed like an appropriate venue to forestall my wandering in the Wiki-wilderness of ohsoMANYtemplates. I don't *think* it's a popular source but I'll continue poking around to see what I can find on that score. Thanks for your response - Shearonink (talk) 20:20, 19 January 2021 (UTC)
 * oh sure no worries, I meant I couldn't see a tech problem - so that if you had one we'd need more to go on. Hope those help! —  xaosflux  Talk 20:25, 19 January 2021 (UTC)

Number of edits not available via API?
Page information shows you "Total number of edits", but is this not available via a MediaWiki API? API:Info doesn't seem to cover it. Nardog (talk) 00:46, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

Tag reverted 2
Regarding fourth and fifth comment, here is the example that proves that tag should not be there: Special:Diff/1001276030/1001368163, Special:Diff/1001368163/next. Kalimoun's contribution line should not have (Tag: Reverted) at the end because that is not related to his/her contribution as other user reverted that edit indeed; other user's contribution can have (Tag: Undo) because it is describing the contribution in question. Solution can be to alter (Tag: Reverted) so that it is (Tag: Reverted by other user) and (Tag: Reverted by contrib user) or something like that, and when accompanied with tag Undo – e.g. (Tags: Undo, Reverted previous or one of previous contribs). Contributions in View history need to be clean. Also, by that line, '(cur | prev)' should be separated from the line some way, as well as (talk | contribs)‎ and total page size and (undo) function. I know this is kind of talkable matter but I see it consistent that way or something similar to that way. --5.43.83.177 (talk) 13:57, 19 January 2021 (UTC)
 * The "Reverted" tag is behaving exactly as intended. There is no technical problem, just dislike of a feature. Others like it. "(Tag: Reverted by other user)" seems long once you have seen a few hundred, and many editors will see thousands. The message is made by MediaWiki:Tag-mw-reverted. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:49, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

Hiding a specific list item label in Ordered list
Consider this ordered list: 1. Introduction

2. Luttes ("Struggles")

3. Voluptés ("Delights")

4. Jeu divin ("Divine Play") I'd like to hide the "0." (without breaking the indentation), but the rest of the labels should stay. How can I achieve that? Cheers, intforce (talk) 00:59, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

1. Introduction
 * try this:

2. Luttes ("Struggles")

3. Voluptés ("Delights")

4. Jeu divin ("Divine Play")
 * — xaosflux  Talk 01:29, 20 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks a bunch! :) intforce (talk) 01:31, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

Ordered list not correctly indented on mobile
I've raised this issue here; perhaps someone can shed a light on this issue. Thanks, intforce (talk) 12:49, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

lost my sandbox new article
Hi,

I just finished creating my first article and when I came back from a break, I discovered that the page was empty. As if someone close it and erased everything. What happened? Can I recover my text? Please help.

Many thanks, Jessica Wein — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jwein101 (talk • contribs) 04:00, 20 January 2021 (UTC)
 * You can always look in your contributions...but I think you're referring to Draft:MaestroVision? Shearonink (talk) 06:48, 20 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Courtesy ping User:Jwein101 (on behalf of Shearonink) Mathglot (talk) 19:31, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

Expensive parser function count max
When I look at the Parser profiling data on a particular page on en-wiki, I see (among other things), "Expensive parser function count:	15/500". But when I look at mw:Manual:$wgExpensiveParserFunctionLimit I see "99" listed as the maximum. Is "500" some kind of max limited by Mw software, and "99" is the configurable limit it has been set to on en-wiki? Or how exactly should I interpret each of those? Put another way: why doesn't the first one say, "15/99"? Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 19:25, 20 January 2021 (UTC)
 * It's the other way around. 99 is the MediaWiki default, but it's set to 500 on WMF wikis. Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 19:42, 20 January 2021 (UTC)
 * , Thanks! With a 500 limit, that makes the following question moot at this point, but for future reference: can I interrogate the expensive parser tally at run-time in a template, so that I could, for example, see if I'm getting "too close to the max", and then skip a bunch of low-priority expensive function calls in the middle part of the template, and save up my remaining allocation for the important ones which I won't get to till later on in the template expansion? I'm assuming the answer to that is a "no", but hoping I'm wrong.  What about in Lua? And if "no" to either or both, would it be an impossible task or unreasonable request to have it added to next years wish list, as an option I'd like to have as a template writer, e.g. something like,   ? Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 20:11, 20 January 2021 (UTC)
 * No to both. I don't see a reason you couldn't request it offhand, but I doubt it will make it through the community wish list, which tends away from the Technical wishes. (Might as well file a phab task anyway.) --Izno (talk) 20:43, 20 January 2021 (UTC)
 * The problem of course is then, how does a template decide which are the important exspenive things and which are not? How about when it can't control how sub-templates execute (and those don't have sufficient context to know they are in a limited environment)? --Izno (talk) 20:45, 20 January 2021 (UTC)
 * You are able to catch the "expensive expansion" error in Lua with mw.incrementExpensiveFunctionCount, (if pcall(mw.mw.incrementExpensiveFunctionCount) then over the limit else not) but there is no number of current expensive expansion errors, that is T177567. Your best bet is just to use as few functions that are expensive as you can.--Snaevar (talk) 20:55, 20 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Are templates defined to be evaluated in any specific order? — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 21:40, 20 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Izno, It couldn't on its own, of course; as the template writer, I would choose ahead of time, and code the stuff that was important in the second clause (the "else") and the less important stuff in the "then". Snaevar, your response gave me an idea how to reduce them, without losing functionality. Thanks to you both for good feedback on this. Mathglot (talk) 23:07, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

Citing a database query
Please see Teahouse where needs help on how to reference information extracted from a database. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 06:20, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

Lost "inspect diff" today in Chrome on Windows 10
Both have updated this week. On my iPad Chrome shows "inspect diff". Doug Weller talk 15:38, 20 January 2021 (UTC)
 * , context? Mathglot (talk) 19:40, 20 January 2021 (UTC)
 * good question - I've replaced the section heading I used but must have erased with my fumble fingers before I saved. Doug Weller  talk 19:50, 20 January 2021 (UTC)
 * "inspect diff" is made by this in meta:User:Doug Weller/global.js:


 * It loads User:Writ Keeper/Scripts/commonHistory.js. I added it to my own global.js and it works for me in Windows 10, both in Google Chrome 87.0.4280.141 before updating, and 88.0.4324.96 after updating. What is your skin at Special:Preferences? Do you see "inspect diff" at WikiNews? I see it. PrimeHunter (talk) 09:13, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
 * thanks, but now I'm even more confused. It came back on its own for enwiki, but I don't see it at wikinews. Doug Weller  talk 09:23, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

ReFill down again?
It's not worked for me this morning - is there a wider problem or is it just me? GiantSnowman 10:05, 20 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Reflinks is working fine.  The C of E God Save the Queen!  ( talk ) 14:32, 20 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Nice to know that reflinks is back but refill is still down. If someone who has access to phab would file a new request to get it going again that would be great. MarnetteD&#124;Talk 14:58, 20 January 2021 (UTC)
 * many thanks, I'll use Reflinks for now. GiantSnowman 15:41, 20 January 2021 (UTC)
 * FYI and  as far as I can tell the current version of reflinks (unlike the one that was deactivated last year) only adds a bot generated title to the bare url. It does not actually put the url into a cite template. IMO that is not useful as it doesn't help with linkrot. You may feel differently but I wanted you to be aware of what I found. Regards. MarnetteD&#124;Talk 18:45, 20 January 2021 (UTC)
 * That is what Reflinks has always done (or has for as long as I have done). Whenever this situation arises I always go back and re-convert properly using ReFill whenever it is fixed... GiantSnowman 18:47, 20 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Have you tried switching it to interactive? That does put the link in a cite template. I always use Reflinks and (barring a few it can't connect with), it does most of the work for you, you just have to trim the loose threads.  The C of E God Save the Queen!  ( talk ) 19:00, 20 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Thank you so much . Of course it would be something so simple that I was unaware of since I had never activated it before. Gosh it is nice to have this tool working again - now if we can just get reflinks back to working it'll be like the old days (all of two years ago) formatting bare urls. Thanks again. MarnetteD&#124;Talk 19:07, 20 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Wow, that's great, thanks! GiantSnowman 20:08, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

Any idea why it is adding a 1970 date to websites published earlier today, such as this? I've manually remedied. GiantSnowman 22:33, 20 January 2021 (UTC)
 * My guess is that it's obtaining a null value for the date, and instead of recognising that it's not valid, it's instead applying a standard function to extract the year; and if you have a zero value (i.e. treated as 00:00:00 UTC Thursday, 1 January 1970), the year is 1970. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 13:02, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

Local display of WikiData edits
On my en.wikipedia watchlist I noticed:
 * "MØ (Q10670047) (diff | hist) . . Btcprox (talk | contribs) (Created claim: Property:P6935: m, connected with Wikidata for Firefox 🦊; Added reference to claim: Property:P6935: m, added with Wikidata for Firefox 🦊)"

The 'Wikidata for Firefox 🦊' leads there to https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Tools/Wikidata_for_Firefox because of it, on WikiData, being a Wikilink 'WikiData:Wikidata for Firefox'. It should lead to https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Tools/Wikidata_for_Firefox but because it is displayed here, the 'Wikidata:' is being interpreted as an interwiki, not as a namespace on WikiData. Is there any way to change this so that the links lead to the right place? --Dirk Beetstra T C 11:37, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
 * The edit summary is made by a tool by Shisma. If they change the link to  then it will work both at Wikidata and other wikis. Here it gives Wikidata for Firefox.   would give Wikidata for Firefox which works here but not at Wikidata where the first   would be interpreted as the namespace. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:57, 21 January 2021 (UTC)


 * if I format the link like  (with single brackets), it should always lead to where it's supposed to lead, right? Is it a good idea to do so? How can I reproduce this bug?--Shisma (talk) 17:50, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
 * External link syntax doesn't render as a link in edit summaries. It has to be a wikilink. As I said, this will work: . To reproduce the problem: Enable "Show Wikidata edits in your watchlist" at Special:Preferences here at enwiki. Watch an enwiki page which had a recent edit with the tool at its Wikidata item, e.g. MØ. (I don't know whether all Wikidata edits appear in enwiki watchlists but the MØ edit does). View Special:Watchlist. The edit summary in  had a link to Tools/Wikidata for Firefox.. Viewed in an enwiki watchlist it gives the same wrong result as in my post. The Wikidata target does say: "There is a page at Wikidata:Tools/Wikidata for Firefox". That link works at Wikidata. Here at enwiki I had to pipe it with   in front to get it to work. But the link only shows at Wikidata if the user has the default language "en - English" at wikidata:Special:Preferences. That's because it's made by a customized message at wikidata:MediaWiki:Wikibase-noentity which includes:  . The customized message has not been translated to any other languages at Wikidata according to wikidata:Special:PrefixIndex/MediaWiki:Wikibase-noentity. Unregistered users also get the English message but that's nearly irrelevant since unregistered users don't have watchlists. The problem can also occur at other wikis, e.g. the German Wikipedia where some users will have set German at Wikidata, or have a global preference for German. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:54, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

Why is Wikipedia logging me out?
It could be because of WP's 20th anniversary. But why is Wikipedia logging me out when I load a page? Sometimes even if I log back in it won't stay logged in. And I do have cookies enabled! Nearly but not perfect (talk) 05:23, 15 January 2021 (UTC)
 * No issues here. Amaury • 06:48, 15 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I had the same issue, but it seems to have stopped now. Whatever the reason was, it wasn't too cool. I didn't catch it at first and made one edit while logged out. If it was something that affected lots of people, then lots of people got their IP addresses revealed. -- Marchjuly (talk) 07:02, 15 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Even if you have cookies enabled, the act of logging in does not guarantee that you will be served pages that indicate that you are still logged in. A number of factors are at work together: every time your browser requests a page, it sends the cookie at the same time, this is checked against the cookie table on the Wikimedia servers; only if this is present and valid are you treated as being logged in. So any of the following can cause you to be treated as logged out:
 * your browser sends the wrong cookie, a corrupt cookie, or no cookie at all
 * you have a dodgy internet connection causing the cookie to be damaged, received late, or lost altogether
 * the Wikimedia servers might be out of synchronisation (if the server that receives your cookie has a table that is different from the table on the server that first sent you the cookie)
 * For any given rendered page, several requests are sent to the server - one for the page content; one each for the various style sheets and Javascript files; one each for every single image. Even for a modest page like HTTP cookie that's a lot of requests (my browser sends 48), and each needs to be accompanied by your login cookie. There are lots of points of potential failure; the surprise is that it works well virtually all of the time. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 10:30, 15 January 2021 (UTC)
 * After logging in today, I started to get logged out just like described. I stayed logged in after disabling JS. It seems to be related to one of the Gadgets, as it stopped after I disabled them. However, I'm not sure which one causes the problem yet. -   t • c 12:48, 19 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Nevermind, I reenabled all gadgets one-by-one and the problem seems to be gone. -   t • c 12:58, 19 January 2021 (UTC)
 * So I'm not the only one? This happened just a bit ago, and the only way for me to stay logged in was checking "keep me logged in" which I normally don't like doing. Sro23 (talk) 16:38, 20 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Does WP:COOKIES help? Particularly the "I get logged out just after logging in" bit. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 23:30, 20 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Cookies are enabled and I have been using the exact same (containerized, regularly reinstalled using a script) setup for 1.5 years. The cookies could only have been blocked by one extension, uMatrix, but *.wikimedia.org and *.wikipedia.org are whitelisted. Local caching can't be the cause either; it's disabled. Date and time are set correctly, they're automatically synchronized at startup by Ntpd. As the issue hasn't persisted, I probably can't provide any more information. -   t • c 21:57, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I've used Google Chrome for years. I've had cookies enabled for years. I've had adblockers for years. I've never had a problem with Wikipedia keeping me logged in until January 2021. Nearly but not perfect (talk) 02:35, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

Wrong links in template documentation
Template:Redirect2/doc is an example of template documentation that contains links to PAGE1, which is an actual article. These should probably appear as redlinks like PAGE2, PAGE3, PAGE4 for the purpose in this usage. I think there are around 40 doc pages that link to PAGE1. Is there any way to fix this short of manually editing them all? MB 15:30, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Don't we have foobar-style pages (analogous to Template:Foo) dedicated for this purpose? – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:39, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Page1 is create-protected, so we could convert all the placeholder names to lower-case. — The Earwig   talk  21:10, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
 * There are only 15 doc pages at but I don't see a need to "fix" this. Page1 is red (deleted 10 times but not create-potected), but I think PAGE1 is easier to understand in documentation as something you have to edit in a real call. And Page3 is blue (or green if you color redirects). PrimeHunter (talk) 21:22, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
 * You are supposed to only make blue links with hatnotes and you can se the code works when they hit a target while the mix of red and blue may be a little distracting. I suggest we make them all blue by redirecting PAGE2 to ESPN.com (like Page 2), keep PAGE3 a redirect to Page 3, and redirect PAGE4 to Page Four (like Page 4). PAGE5 is not used in doc pages. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:33, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Oops, I saw it had been create-protected but did not notice the protection expired (threw me off as salting is frequently permanent). — The Earwig   talk  23:26, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

Notifications for WP Projects
I understand how to manage my own Watchlist, linking to pages I have personally edited.

But if I join one of the many Wikipedia Projects, some of which have their own Watchlists (associated with the Project, and not a specific User), how do I get alerted of changes to one of the watched pages?

I could, I suppose, place a ghost edit on each article within the category, but that would be tedious. One project I follow has 1,500 pages on its watchlist. Or is this somehow automatic, if I add my name to the participants list? Sorry I couldn't find this on the help FAQ. Jax MN (talk) 22:31, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
 * See Help:Watchlist for many other features of the watchlist, including how to watch by a click, and Special:Watchlist/raw where you can insert a list of pages to watch them all. Be careful not to delete the existing entries and save. The watchlist has no page history. You cannot get notified of changes to a WikiProject watchlist without watching each page but there may be a link you can click to see recent edits like at WikiProject Fraternities and Sororities/Watchlist. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:29, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

What does unified login cover?
I went to upload something to wikisource just now and was surprised to discover I wasn't logged in automatically with my wikipedia account. Does unified login not include wikisource? -- RoySmith (talk) 22:48, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Unified login does include wikisource. I'm not sure why you weren't logged in, but you should be able to log in with the same username and password you use at Wikipedia. * Pppery * it has begun... 23:02, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
 * You may need to disable any browser option which says "Block third party cookies". -- zzuuzz (talk) 23:14, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
 * , Yup, I was able to manually log in with my enwiki credentials (including being asked for 2FA). The log shows my wikisource account was created a couple of years ago.  Well, anyway, I'm in, so thanks for the help.  zzuuzz, I've never had to do that on other WMF projects (commons, wikidata, etc).  -- RoySmith (talk) 23:17, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Try Wikiversity, which works the same as Wikisource. I guess it's something to do with the domain names, but never looked into it too closely. -- zzuuzz (talk) 23:24, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
 * , Interesting, that worked automatically. Well, I'm not going to worry about it too much.  Thanks. -- RoySmith (talk) 23:28, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I sometimes have to click any link or reload a page before being logged in at another wiki. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:32, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
 * This has happened to me a time or two. It's rare, but it does happen. In fact, it happened just right now.  I was fine clicking on Wikisource and Commons, but Wikidata had me logged out.  When I tried to log in, I got a message that my login was "invalid or expired".  I clicked on Commons (where I was logged in), then came back to Wikidata, and I was already logged in at Wikidata. — Maile  (talk) 23:53, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

Problems rendering mathematical symbols
There can be problems displaying the equal sign (=) and the minus sign (-).

$$\frac{dM}{dt} = Q - S = Q - \frac{M}{\tau}$$ sometimes renders correctly and sometimes does not:
 * Example:
 * $$\frac{dM}{dt} = Q - S = Q - \frac{M}{\tau}$$

and in some contexts, such as here, always fails to display the minus sign.

size bar: 30 µm displays as expected, while does not display at all. That is, the presence of the equal sign suppresses the display altogether — Epipelagic (talk) 21:48, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Another example:
 * It's two unrelated issues. I guess your browser is Google Chrome. See T269222: "Minus signs not displaying in Math formulas (on certain zoom levels in Chrome browsers)". The minus displays for me at all zoom levels in Google Chrome 88.0.4324.96. The other issue is that  is interpreted as assigning the value   to a template parameter called  . You can get around it by writing   or  . See Help:Template. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:16, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Many thanks — Epipelagic (talk) 02:38, 22 January 2021 (UTC)

Background color
Hi, could anyone tell me is there an option/setting to change the (white) background color of WP (if yes, and what options are available)? Thank You!(KIENGIR (talk) 17:06, 10 January 2021 (UTC))
 * there are a few ways to go about this, first can you tell us how you normally view wikipedia? (Desktop, Tablet, Mobile, or Mobile App) — xaosflux  Talk 17:24, 10 January 2021 (UTC)
 * There is no simple on/off option that will do that for you, but a simple user script can let you change the colour of any part of the page. What do you want changed? — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 18:20, 10 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Xaosflux,
 * Destop (which inludes as well laptop).
 * GhostInTheMachine, I consider watching too much bright white component would be not the best, I'd consider a less warm color which may work good with the black text color without having a visual interlace harming (= sorry I cannot phrase it better, it's like you'd put a bright purple text on a black background). So what I want to change is not the color of WP margins (headlines and sidelines), but the rest which serves the background of anything else, which is white.(KIENGIR (talk) 08:30, 11 January 2021 (UTC))
 * If it bothers you in Wikipedia, then I presume it bothers you equally on other websites that are not Wikipedia, and that also have bright white backgrounds? If this is the case, you can find the answer by googling  (change " " to the name of the browser you use). Or try this search. Mathglot (talk) 09:13, 11 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Desktop "dark mode" is hard (see T199634 for progress on the effort). You may customize your standard desktop background my updating this page: Special:MyPage/vector.css, and can request styling of many elements, for example putting:  on that page will change the main article body from whitish to grayish. —  xaosflux  Talk 11:59, 11 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Mathglot,
 * especially I considered just in WP, and I don't use Chrome but Firefox. However, I managed to scale the exact background and text parameters, and I've found a good composition, however, the problem is then I don't see properly the diff marker color adjustment (= opening a diff, in which the changes are covered with a slightly bluish box, in which the text color became as well marked more darker)...
 * Xaosflux,
 * before analyzing in more details your suggestion - which may have been solved meanwhile as mentioned above, could you suggest the solution the newly mentioned emerging issue? Thank You(KIENGIR (talk) 12:23, 11 January 2021 (UTC))
 * just as you may use a personal style for most any element, you can also style those - just look at the source to find what the identifier is, then add the styling to adjust it; my example above was very simple for just the ".mw-body" id - but you can use it for most anything. — xaosflux  Talk 15:30, 11 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks your recommendation works, this green is fine (but still only if I put brightness & contrast to nil and Gamma to the minium allowed - 0.5 by this constellation). In this case the adjustment markers are as well ok. However I should dig in more into the issue on the browser examiner/console to locate all needed parameters and test their adjustments alltogether. Maybe I'll go ahead when having more time. Thanks for now!(KIENGIR (talk) 16:25, 11 January 2021 (UTC))
 * You're welcome - for your use case you may be better off with a browser extension, they may be more robust.  The benefit of using the vector.css file is that it will follow you to other browsers and computers you may use (while logged in). —  xaosflux  Talk 16:28, 11 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I recommend you take a look at Dark Reader, a browser extension that automatically generates a dark theme from a site's normal colour scheme. It doesn't work perfectly 100% of the time – for example, it rarely produces unreadable yellow-on-yellow text –, but Wikipedia is normally usable very nicely with it. – Rummskartoffel (talk • contribs) 23:05, 16 January 2021 (UTC)
 * thank you I will test it!(KIENGIR (talk) 23:14, 16 January 2021 (UTC))
 * There is Preferences|Gadgets/Appearence - Use a black background with green text. DuncanHill (talk) 23:26, 16 January 2021 (UTC)
 * , addressing only your point about the difficulties with DIFF, I entirely agree; that you can easily fix however. It's especially difficult to see differences that consist only of white space, which prompted me to alter the DIFF program style I see. I thought this was in my common.css, but it's not; now I'm not sure where I made that change. Maybe someone else can tell you (and remind me, at the same time!). Cheers, Mathglot (talk) 05:34, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
 * No, it's the third of these lines in User:Mathglot/vector.css:  so see MediaWiki talk:Monobook.css/Archive 4 and Village pump (technical)/Archive 37. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 21:32, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Redrose already reminded you, I also applied, it gives a little dotted border, however, regardless how many clues gave Redrose, I could not change the diffcolors (or I thought I did not but had no effect, you may check my vector.css edit history, I have been to lame and missed something?). Btw. I tried Rummskartoffel's suggestion and installed darkreader, seems work quite fine in total dark, even with diff markering, however if it is conflated with my vector.css set backgound color set know (kinda green), diffs would be again a problem. Anyway, I wish to successfully parametrize addeddifchange and "deletediffchange" cover color...what did I wrong? Thank You(KIENGIR (talk) 02:40, 22 January 2021 (UTC))
 * Redrose already reminded you, I also applied, it gives a little dotted border, however, regardless how many clues gave Redrose, I could not change the diffcolors (or I thought I did not but had no effect, you may check my vector.css edit history, I have been to lame and missed something?). Btw. I tried Rummskartoffel's suggestion and installed darkreader, seems work quite fine in total dark, even with diff markering, however if it is conflated with my vector.css set backgound color set know (kinda green), diffs would be again a problem. Anyway, I wish to successfully parametrize addeddifchange and "deletediffchange" cover color...what did I wrong? Thank You(KIENGIR (talk) 02:40, 22 January 2021 (UTC))
 * Redrose already reminded you, I also applied, it gives a little dotted border, however, regardless how many clues gave Redrose, I could not change the diffcolors (or I thought I did not but had no effect, you may check my vector.css edit history, I have been to lame and missed something?). Btw. I tried Rummskartoffel's suggestion and installed darkreader, seems work quite fine in total dark, even with diff markering, however if it is conflated with my vector.css set backgound color set know (kinda green), diffs would be again a problem. Anyway, I wish to successfully parametrize addeddifchange and "deletediffchange" cover color...what did I wrong? Thank You(KIENGIR (talk) 02:40, 22 January 2021 (UTC))

How to deal with link rot on "Official Website"
[Fixed with Infobox OS parameter website special value of hide ] Lent (talk) 03:33, 22 January 2021 (UTC) The "Official Website" for SUPER-UX (this version) is no longer valid. The displayed information is retrieved from Wikidata via Template:Infobox OS, as the website parameter is blank. The Wikidata information allows other language Wikipedia projects to use, and in this case provide, the website URL and have the information consumed and displayed by each of the Wikipedia projects.

I asked and updated the information as no longer valid, per a project chat over on Wikidata.

See: (On Wikidata) Best way to deal with link rot on "Official Website"

The Wikidata solution of setting the end time (P582) qualifier to the Wikidata statement(data) has been done. The rationale, I gather, is that old Wikidata information can be tagged with the end time (P582) to say the statement(data) was valid, up to and including the end time value. This implies, I gather, that some time after the specified end time value, the statement(data) should be treated as no longer valid.

As the Official Website still is rendered by the Infobox OS, I'm assuming that the official website (P856) value from SUPER-UX (Q2665351) is being used anyway.

What is the best way to resolve this?
 * 1) Set some other qualifier on the wikidata information that Infobox OS recognizes
 * 2) Wait/Request some bot to set things or note things properly, like Citation bot does for broken doi's
 * 3) Request a change to Infobox OS (or the parent/superclass template) to not display an Official Website if a P582 end time qualifier exists and the value is not in the future
 * 4) Workaround the Infobox OS to eliminate/modify the displayed value
 * 5) Workaround the Infobox OS to display URL for the last valid snapshot of the site cached at archive.org
 * 6) Something else

Or a mixture of the preceding?

Enquiring minds want to know :) Lent (talk) 12:39, 17 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Template:Infobox OS mentions the option . PrimeHunter (talk) 13:23, 17 January 2021 (UTC)
 * ✅ THANKS! I missed that special value. I guess I'm spoiled by emphasis like bold and
 * — xaosflux  Talk 11:35, 22 January 2021 (UTC)
 * , Thank you. Worked like a charm. Walrus Ji (talk) 11:49, 22 January 2021 (UTC)

Fonts too small
Has the EN.Wikipedia reading font been recently changed? I find it to be too small and hard to read. Fonts on other websites are OK including those on FR.Wikipedia, DE.Wikipedia and NL.Wikipedia. Is there a way to increase the font size just for EN.Wikipedia? Changing the Chrome (Version 87.0.4280.141) font setting makes the EN.Wikipedia font better but makes the font too large for all other sites. I use Windows 10 Version 2004 (OS Build 19041.746). Thanks. TheTrolleyPole (talk) 15:53, 22 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Just use Ctrl + or Ctrl - on the page to enlarge or reduce and it will keep the setting for that website. That's how Firefox does it and I think Chrome is the same. Also try Ctrl 0 to reset the font size and that might restore your normal Wikipedia size. —  Jts1882 &#124; talk 16:48, 22 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks. The tip works on Chrome. I suspect I may have accidentally pressed Ctrl - causing my reading problem. TheTrolleyPole (talk) 17:06, 22 January 2021 (UTC)

Editing news 2021 #1
Read this in another language • Subscription list for this newsletter

Reply tool
The Reply tool  is available at most other Wikipedias.


 * The Reply tool has been deployed as an opt-out preference to all editors at the Arabic, Czech, and Hungarian Wikipedias.
 * It is also available as a Beta Feature at almost all Wikipedias except for the English, Russian, and German-language Wikipedias. If it is not available at your wiki, you can request it by following these simple instructions.

Research notes:


 * As of January 2021, more than 3,500 editors have used the Reply tool to post about 70,000 comments.
 * There is preliminary data from the Arabic, Czech, and Hungarian Wikipedia on the Reply tool. Junior Contributors who use the Reply tool are more likely to publish the comments that they start writing than those who use full-page wikitext editing.
 * The Editing and Parsing teams have significantly reduced the number of edits that affect other parts of the page. About 0.3% of edits did this during the last month. Some of the remaining changes are automatic corrections for Special:LintErrors.
 * Венов_дијаграм.svg A large A/B test will start soon. This is part of the process to offer the Reply tool to everyone.  During this test, half of all editors at 24 Wikipedias (not including the English Wikipedia) will have the Reply tool automatically enabled, and half will not. Editors at those Wikipedias can still turn it on or off for their own accounts in Special:Preferences.

New discussion tool
The new tool for starting new discussions (new sections) will join the Discussion tools in Special:Preferences at the end of January. You can try the tool for yourself. You can leave feedback in this thread or on the talk page.

Next: Notifications
During Talk pages consultation 2019, editors said that it should be easier to know about new activity in conversations they are interested in. The Notifications project is just beginning. What would help you become aware of new comments? What's working with the current system? Which pages at your wiki should the team look at? Please post your advice at mw:Talk:Talk pages project/Notifications.

–Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:02, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

Fixing the refs in this article...what am I doing wrong?...
So...I have stumbled upon this article - It's Only a Play. While refs are present with good/correct information, none of them use the Citation Style 1 templates - cite web/news/journal etc. What tool should I be using to fix the refs? I have tried to run my ref tools on the article but either I get a message back that all is well or (literally) nothing happens. I think I need to update my tools - like Reflinks/reFill2/etc on my common etc pages - but am not sure  what  needs to be fixed. If some of you wonderful tech-wizards could figure out what I am doing wrong and tell me what I need to do to get it right, that would be awesome and a big help. Cheers & thanks - Shearonink (talk) 17:58, 22 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Hi Shearonink—per WP:CITEVAR, I don't think anything needs to be done. "To be avoided: adding citation templates to an article that already uses a consistent system without templates". — The Earwig   talk  18:34, 22 January 2021 (UTC)
 * The first step is to get consensus on the article's talk page to change the established citation style. The second step would be to manually convert the citations to use cite web and similar templates, which would improve the display of the references, which have minor formatting errors (I see at least a half dozen errors in spacing) that are taken care of by the CS1 templates. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:23, 22 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Manual conversion...btdt. Not my favorite housekeeping chore but I guess I'll do it again. If, of course, there's consensus for such a change. Shearonink (talk) 07:11, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

Server problems?
Anyone else getting 503 varnish backend errors? I just lost an edit I was trying to save from classic source editor. And VE has slowed to a crawl. Pelagic ( messages ) – (20:04 Sat 23, AEDT) 09:04, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

Embedded video insist downloading rather than playback (on iOS mobile)
On iOS mobile device (Safari and Chrome), while playing Webm and ogv embedded in an Wikipedia article, it directs users to download the file rather than a simple playback (which is ridiculous for a >100Mb video). On Android (Chrome), while ogv works perfectly, Webm could only be played from the beginning, ignoring the time tag commands (Note: most users specify a starting time of the video so that it corresponds to relevant content to the article). The above issues does not happen on desktop computers. Is there a fix? -- love.wh  04:23, 19 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Try the same thing on testwiki:, especially the playback part. There is an different audio/video player there (video.js, instead of Kaltura here). There is an ogv file at testwiki:Equivalence_principle, for example.--Snaevar (talk) 17:31, 19 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Also, are you using the mobile app or the mobile website to access these? (If both, is it the same experience?) — xaosflux  Talk 17:38, 19 January 2021 (UTC)
 * For me, the sample Webm played from 41" and Ogv plays but from 0:00. Then I retried the Webm and it was at 0:00.  *scratches head*  Desktop site, Timeless skin, iPad Air, Safari, iOS12. Pelagic ( messages ) – (20:32 Sat 23, AEDT) 09:32, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

Adding an automatically updated featured content section to Wikipedia:WikiProject_Zimbabwe/Rhodesia_task_force
I was wondering how you can get an automatically updated featured content section by the JL-Bot to WikiProject_Zimbabwe/Rhodesia_task_force similar to what WP:WikiProject YouTube and WP:X/showcase have please?  The C of E God Save the Queen!  ( talk ) 14:41, 20 January 2021 (UTC)
 * , it looks like it's done through the template on JL-Bot's user page here. BlackcurrantTea (talk) 13:16, 23 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Thank you How would that work for a subproject like Rhodesia as that's a task force?  The C of E  God Save the Queen!  ( talk ) 13:22, 23 January 2021 (UTC)
 * That's a bit above my pay grade, . Try the bot's talk page. Cheers, BlackcurrantTea (talk) 14:01, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

The MediaWiki namespace
I found something strange, every page that starts with "MediaWiki:Bad image list/" exists, and its specific text is "The format is as follows:

Only list items (lines starting with *) are considered. The first link on a line must be a link to a bad file. Any subsequent links on the same line are considered to be exceptions, i.e. pages where the file may occur inline."

The more strange thing: none of these pages even actually exist:. For example: MediaWiki:Bad image list/Archive 6, MediaWiki:Bad image list/MediaWiki:Bad image list, MediaWiki:Bad image list/hexuhv8o7d4ghfxg3sjiuyvh4s7dihrt876wtghf7.

I have no idea how this happened, but could someone please explain it to me? JJP...MASTER![talk to] JJP... master? 23:45, 23 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Bonus question: why does editing MediaWiki:Hello/xyz show "Hello"? Johnuniq (talk) 23:51, 23 January 2021 (UTC)
 * , so does MediaWiki:Hello/h4rdughnmjvf4cthedui4ngyhuckverhn. JJP...MASTER![talk to] JJP... master? 23:52, 23 January 2021 (UTC)
 * , Wait literally EVERY page in the MediaWiki namespace, even on my own private wiki, does this same thing! JJP...MASTER![talk to] JJP... master? 23:57, 23 January 2021 (UTC)


 * The MediaWiki space is primarily for "messages" and the /subpage notation is for language variants, compare MediaWiki:Hello and MediaWiki:Hello/es. There is a "fallback" language if the requested variant isn't available or doesn't exist, normally the wiki default language. —  xaosflux  Talk 01:15, 24 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Interesting, thanks. However, at MediaWiki:Aboutsite I see "About Wikipedia" and a history link which shows the history of the page as expected. And you have explained that MediaWiki:Aboutsite/xyz shows the same because there is no xyz language and it falls back to MediaWiki:Aboutsite/en. How does MediaWiki:Aboutsite/es work? It shows "Acerca de Wikipedia" but there is no history so the translation comes from elsewhere. Johnuniq (talk) 01:30, 24 January 2021 (UTC)
 * translatewiki:Mediawiki:Aboutsite/es is the ultimate source, with several intermediate steps. See Localization * Pppery * it has begun... 01:37, 24 January 2021 (UTC)
 * The subpage only shows content if the parent page is a system message in the software. For example, MediaWiki:Introduction is not a system message so it's not listed at Special:AllMessages, and MediaWiki:Introduction/XYZ is red. PrimeHunter (talk) 08:02, 24 January 2021 (UTC)

Text alignment in infoboxes
On Alexei Navalny, is anyone else having an alignment issue with the "Leader of the Russia of the Future Party" in the infobox? For me (Safari 14.0.2, OS 11.1), "Russia of the Future" is rendering slightly below the rest of the text; the problem goes away if you get rid of the link or the footnote at the end. Esszet (talk) 02:39, 24 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I see it in Safari 13.1.1 on Mac OS 10.14.6 (desktop) as well. It looks fine in Chrome and Firefox. The "Russia of the Future" link is below the black text, and the efn footnote in inline with the black text instead of superscripted. Strange. – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:44, 24 January 2021 (UTC)
 * You're right, I didn't notice that, it isn't superscripted at all. Esszet (talk) 15:25, 24 January 2021 (UTC)

Categorizing cross- and same-namespace redirects
Please see Template talk:R to project namespace There have been some late comments. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:20, 24 January 2021 (UTC)

ContentSub margins
For some reason, the ContentSub text style, used for things like short descriptions, has a much taller bottom margin. I'm using the legacy Vector skin and, to me, it looks off, having gotten used to the original spacing. -B RAINULATOR 9 (TALK) 03:21, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

Category count?
Counting the categories via  does not work here – the PAGESINNAMESPACE magic word is expensive and so is disabled on this wiki. Is there a statistics page somewhere that will say (roughly) how many pages exist here in each namespace? — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 20:53, 24 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Is Database reports/Page count by namespace what you are looking for? – Jonesey95 (talk) 01:02, 25 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Perfect! thanks — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 09:23, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Blockedtext-composite
Blocked users currently see this text when they try to edit: MediaWiki:Blockedtext. However, if a blocked user is subject to multiple blocks (for example, they're directly blocked and their IP address is also hardblocked), they instead see this default text: MediaWiki:Blockedtext-composite. This is a wholly useless message, especially in comparison to the carefully designed MediaWiki:Blockedtext. It's worse than it looks on first glance; when I was testing, I found that "$2" is always replaced with something generically useless like "there are multiple blocks affecting your account". Could someone look into replacing it with a modified copy of MediaWiki:Blockedtext, especially by adding links to WP:AAB and WP:GAB? I would do it but unfortunately I don't have the time right now. Best, KevinL ( aka L235 · t · c) 21:06, 24 January 2021 (UTC)
 * , I replaced it with a modified version of Blockedtext. However it still probably needs further work, I'm not sure of a clever solution for the $2, besides perhaps just omitting it altogether and putting something generic. Unless MediaWiki itself changes, I can't forsee a way to list out all the block reasons, but I hope someone more techy than I can give it a go. CaptainEek  Edits Ho Cap'n!⚓ 07:07, 25 January 2021 (UTC)
 * There are explainations of the parameters at translatewiki:MediaWiki:Blockedtext-composite/qqq. I would look into using $5 instead of $2, it is after all not just an simple block ID number. Maybe count the number of ID's, in order to know the number of blocks?--Snaevar (talk) 14:03, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-04
 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
 * You will be able to read but not to edit Wikimedia Commons for a short time on at 07:00 (UTC). You will not be able to read or edit Wikitech for a short time on at 09:00 (UTC).

Changes later this week
 * Bracket matching will be added to the CodeMirror syntax highlighter on the first wikis. The first wikis are German and Catalan Wikipedia and maybe other Wikimedia wikis. This will happen on 27 January.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from . It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from . It will be on all wikis from (calendar).

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.  18:29, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

MediaWiki userspace and User Contribution special search for IPv6 broken?
The Special:Contributions seems broken when processing IP6 addresses. It cannot accept the format used by [&action=history] links. Special:Contributions requires upper case IP6 while [&action=history] generates lower case IP6. If you enter one into the other it comes up null. Special:Contributions should accept any miniscule/majiscule mix-and-match. (a regexp for recognizing an IPv6 entry and then either upcasing or downcasing the input to further process seems like a solution). This is a problem when manually adding unsigned. Also, this is a MediaWiki problem when accessing user pages. Could real user could masquerade as an IP address by using a different case or mixed case name? Where do we leave talk messages to such a user, since they appear to be different usernames with different userspace/usertalkspace pages?

Example:


 * Special:Contributions/2600:1702:1DE0:8FB0:48CE:823:DDC6:3A30
 * Special:Contributions/2600:1702:1de0:8fb0:48ce:823:ddc6:3a30
 * Special:Contributions/2600:1702:1de0:8fb0:48ce:823:ddc6:3a30

-- 70.31.205.108 (talk) 13:57, 25 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Yes, usernames are case sensitive. Impersonation should not be an issue, as we do not allow username selection that looks like an ip address. —  xaosflux  Talk 14:08, 25 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Regarding that template, post some examples at Template talk:Unsigned and someone may look in to the module that powers it to improve it (Module:Unsigned). — xaosflux  Talk 14:09, 25 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Special:Contributions failing on lowercase IPv6 is a recent bug T272225: "Special:Contributions no longer accepts display form of IPv6 addresses". PrimeHunter (talk) 17:38, 25 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Indeed, I was sure that lowercase worked, hence . -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 22:21, 25 January 2021 (UTC)

A workaround is probably needed. I started with a suggestion at Template talk:IPvandal. Johnuniq (talk) 00:10, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

Moving of categories
I understood that there are categories about Serres regional unit, of Central Macedonia Region at Greece that have problem to the name. Category "People from Skoutari" refers to municipal unit of Skoutari, however there is the village of Skoutari (the capital of municipal unit), too. Or the category People from Nea Zichni. This category refers to Municipal of Nea Zichni but there are also the municipal unit of Nea Zichni and the village of Nea Zichni (capital of the Municipal and the municipal unit.) Maybe someone user can help to the rename of the categories? BILL1 (talk) 01:01, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

I think that category about the people from Nea Zichni must rename to "People from Nea Zichni (municipal)" (because there is also village and municipal unit with this name. A possible future category about people from Nea Zichni municipal unit can named "People from Nea Zichni (municipal unit) and a possible future category about the people from Nea Zichni village can named "People from Nea Zichni". BILL1 (talk) 01:10, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

Izno can you help me? BILL1 (talk) 03:35, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
 * , you should use the requested moves process. --Izno (talk) 03:37, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Izno ok thank you BILL1 (talk) 03:52, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Actually, you should use WP:CFD, not RM. —&thinsp;JJMC89&thinsp; (T·C) 07:04, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

Diff heading background on Monobook
When looking at the diff for the only revision of a page (e.g. Special:Diff/1002959183/prev) on Monobook, the background heading is white which stand out from the off-white Monobook background. The culprit is a CSS constraint  but I couldn't find it in the site's common.css or monobook.css so is this a recent change on the parser side? — Wug·a·po·des​ 20:57, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
 * User:Evad37/rater/app.js, which is loaded via User:Evad37/rater.js, must be the culprit. Nardog (talk) 21:14, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I can confirm that. --Izno (talk) 21:23, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
 * . Rater loads its own diff styles – since MediaWiki doesn't provide them except on diff pages – but it was doing so earlier than needed, before it's dialog was even opened, and wasn't removing them when they were no longer needed. - Evad37 &#91;talk] 00:18, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Wouldn't using  be simpler and stabler? Nardog (talk) 00:25, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

Captchas and blind people again
I am aware that this has been discussed before since I had a quick search of the archives. But the problem still persists that the captcha shown when you create an account or add a link to an article is not accessible to blind people such as myself.

Yes, you can request that someone creates an account for you, which is what I did when I joined. But many people may be put off by this.

I feel that Wikipedia should provide an audio challenge or use something like reCAPTCHA v2's I'm not a robot tick box. Many website's use either of these methods, and Wikipedia is one of the few I can think of that doesn't.

What are your thoughts on this, and is anyone currently working on a solution?

Many thanks.KaraLG84 (talk) 14:21, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
 * The local English Wikipedia community can not make this change, it would be at the very least a WMF-wide global change as accounts are global. You can follow up on the discussion about this here: T6845. —  xaosflux  Talk 14:27, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Sadly it seems that nothing has been done about it. The last comment was over a year ago.KaraLG84 (talk) 14:42, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
 * , this is correct. Its a hard/expensive problem to solve. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 15:54, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
 * One that has been solved many times by many organisations. DuncanHill (talk) 16:07, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
 * But not as open source. --Izno (talk) 17:55, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Indeed, it needs to be open-source. Graham 87 07:39, 22 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Everything I can think of is a pending Amazon patent... *sigh* Enterprisey (talk!) 03:03, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

Template Category U.S. State elections by decade
Hello.

Could someone please do something about Category U.S. State elections by decade, which doesn't work properly after a category move.

See several subcategories of Category:Elections in Washington, D.C., for instance Category:1970s elections in Washington, D.C..

Thank you.

HandsomeFella (talk) 07:30, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Category U.S. State elections by year is also wrong now, e.g. in Category:2000 elections in Washington, D.C.. PrimeHunter (talk) 08:46, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I think this situation may benefit from a fix that I added to some similar templates and categories. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:14, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

File:Image page sandbox.png
I reupload this image page sandbox for tests, because my picture is a jpeg, not png. Can I go ahead, upload my file, and then use that as a file sandbox? 54nd60x (talk) 04:22, 27 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Also how to make a HTML page in my sandbox (not HTML) but hides banners e.g. https://thankyou.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thank_You/sandbox 54nd60x (talk) 05:07, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Which image page test do you want to make that requires jpeg instead of png? You can only use a subset of HTML. See Help:HTML in wikitext. I'm not sure where you want to hide banners from whom but don't try to hide them from others. Special:Preferences has the option "Suppress display of fundraiser banners" for yourself. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:06, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
 * The image page test is File:Image page sandbox.jpeg not yet uploaded yet. I was only trying to hide the banners because the above thankyouwiki URL looked cool to me, since it didn't show the nstab or the edit control and not the logo on the left. It looked as if it was its own website and I wanted to do so. I tried to copy from the above URL to User:54nd60x/sandbox2 and kept modifying it (by typing spaces before each unindented line) but still doesn't work and I don't understand why it would work on Thank You Wikipedia. 54nd60x (talk) 10:29, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Pings only work if the user page link is added in a signed edit so didn't notify me. You didn't address which image page test you want to make but one more file doesn't matter so I suppose you can just go ahead even if the png page might work just as well. https://noc.wikimedia.org/conf/highlight.php?file=InitialiseSettings.php sets mw:Manual:$wgRawHtml to true for thankyouwiki so it can use raw unchecked HTML. That is not done here or for any wiki where normal unified accounts work. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:17, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Ok, thanks for the clarification. I will go ahead and upload the image. 54nd60x (talk) 23:53, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

Section edit links missing at Free France; probable template bug
Please see Talk:Free France for a summary of a problem at the Free France article, which currently has no section edit links. I've seen this before elsewhere, and it's usually a template problem. I searched back as far as 2017 (e.g., rev 809824702) which also displays the same problem, and it's extremely unlikely it was not noticed at the article this long and furthermore, the history shows plenty of section links auto-generated by the edit section procedure. Most probably, the article is transcluding a template that was recently changed and not fully tested. It's possible the problem is my own, since I do edit templates, but nothing lately, and I don't see it at first glance. Can anyone have a quick look, to see if you can find the culprit? Thanks. Mathglot (talk) 23:43, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
 * checking. — xaosflux  Talk 23:48, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Special:ExpandTemplates spits out General Leclerc’s second armored division included two units of female volunteers: The Rochambeau Group in the infantry (dozens of women) and the Woman Service of the Naval Fleet in the marines (9 women). Their role consisted of administering first aid to the first line of injured soldiers (often to stop bleeding) before evacuating them by stretcher to ambulances and then driving these ambulances under enemy fire to care centers several kilometers behind the lines. . __NONEWSECTIONLINK__ I've fixed the issue now. --Izno (talk) 23:50, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Bad template was removed. — xaosflux  Talk 23:52, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
 * For the record, old versions never have section edit links. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:59, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Wow, that was fast! Thank you everybody! I do sometimes look at page source from expand templates for other kinds of things, but didn’t realize it might be a helpful tool in a case like this, so thanks very much for that insight as well. Mathglot (talk) 00:09, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

Comment/request regarding "Display categories" gadget in Safari iOS (mobile)
Greetings and felicitations. I've enabled the "Display categories" gadget in mobile. I use Safari under the latest version of iOS, and the Vector (default) skin (i.e., I'm using a browser, not the Wiki app). I appreciate the option, but IMHO there is one small problem with the appearance: the categories have nothing separating them from external links if an "External links" section is toggled open, and in that browser the link color is the same whether a link is internal or external, so the link(s) and the category/ies are crowded together and difficult to distinguish at first glance. Would it be possible to add a carriage return/line break or other separator to the end of the last section when it's toggled open? —DocWatson42 (talk) 01:13, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

"An attempt to load a user script has failed"
When I'm using mobile I'm getting multiple "An attempt to load a user script has failed" error messages (apparently in my case it seems to involve DYKhelper). Other editors I've talked to on Discord have reported a similar issue. Narutolovehinata5 tccsdnew 23:29, 25 January 2021 (UTC)
 * It's being thrown by MediaWiki:Mobile.js: diff. —  The Earwig   talk 23:37, 25 January 2021 (UTC)
 * IMO, this was not handled well. The error says to see the JS console but most mobile users do not have access to a JS console. For most users, it's not clear what the problem is. (We could just say the error in the box instead of telling people to check another thing for the error. Is the concern the error is too technical? Then what are they supposed to do about it anyway?)
 * Unless we're going to go through thousands of personal JS files and replace peoples' importScript invocations (I assume this is a nonstarter)... rather than leaving things broken, can we copy this shim from Meta? I don't understand the point of forcing people to make their personal JS more verbose. I recognize there are alternate things in the works (T27845 is WONTFIX, but has related tickets). Nevertheless, those things aren't here yet (as far as I know), so an importScript shim seems like the cleanest workaround for the moment. —  The Earwig   talk 00:01, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I assume this is a nonstarter Why? That's exactly what we're doing with the globals. It just takes someone doing it. --Izno (talk) 00:33, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
 * You're right. But I think a shim still makes sense until it is done, so things are not broken. —  The Earwig   talk 00:36, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
 * The better shim seems reasonable to me? At any rate, this is all related to error reporting being turned on for enwiki, so I think some version of either of these is basically required ~ Amory  (u • t • c) 02:02, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Directing users to the script that failed to load, rather than where the error is occurring (their common/skin js), results in confusion like this . If a notification is to be shown on every page load, it should link to a tutorial page on how to actually fix the issue and where to ask for help. - Evad37 &#91;talk] 01:08, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
 * My main goal was to suppress a large amount of errors we're seeing from mobile users trying to load incompatible scripts. How you want to deal with that I leave up to you. Providing a shim would also address the problem, but is just sweeping the issue under the rug adding technical debt to interface admins. I should note the mw.notify technique has been successful on other wikis, (with translation of course) for getting these scripts and gadgets fixed. Perhaps linking to Special:MyPage/common.js and the associated skin.js may help. Jon (WMF) (talk) 02:03, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Maybe I'm crazy here, but I had no clue that importscript was being deprecated. Why was it first completely removed on mobile - the platform that most people have the least amount of access to identify the problem and resolve it, instead of first being removed/warned-on on desktop where people can actually click through links/etc to identify and fix the issue? And where was this notified to the community prior, because I watch this page and I may have just missed it but I saw no notice that what I presume is literally millions of uses of importScript and importScriptURI will have to be re-done, and presumably from the comments here and elsewhere others didn't either. I'm all for the change (one load instead of 4 separate ones) but jeez, roll it out in a way that lets people 'upgrade' to the new one, and helps people do so - not just throws a ton of errors and removes scripts from many people on mobile. Just my 2 cents, and regards -bɜ:ʳkənhɪmez (User/say hi!) 02:09, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
 * , like many of its cousins, was deprecated in MediaWiki 1.29. 1.29 was formally released nearly 4 years ago at this point. I am 100% certain we have seen at least one Tech News covering the deprecation.
 * I agree that we should be less verbose about the issue on mobile and instead be verbose for users on desktop first. On mobile, we should silently fail to load and continue to throw errors in the console (not that will help much since neither Firefox nor Chrome these days provide access to console trivially or at all [I need to go see if Firefox can be configured on]). --Izno (talk) 02:42, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Oh wow. That's news to me. I assumed once I saw like 2/3 scripts that recommended install using that, it was the proper way. Not to mention that User:Enterprisey's scriptinstaller still uses importScript. Point being, even if it was announced, it obviously wasn't done so well enough if people like Enterprisey who have multiple scripts never updated, and regardless, this rollout of "screw people on mobile with a bunch of useless errors they can't fix at that time" is.. botched. Is there a way to have a bot change all instances of importScript (and its cousins) to the new version? I'm surprised in 4 years of it being deprecated nobody's made one (or if they have, that it doesn't run every so often to catch new uses). -bɜ:ʳkənhɪmez (User/say hi!) 02:48, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Amory above is working on the deprecated global config variables right now (as is Legoktm, globally, heh). I can't speak for their interest in working on this one, but it's similar niche work (that, yay, requires interface admin hat). It probably will bubble up a lot of scripts that don't work as a result, since importScript assumes synchronous load or something (I think) and mw.loader.load does not, so some dependency declarations may be missing.
 * I did mention in an offwiki discussion that I too am concerned that our technical documentation and support tools like Enterprisey's installer need to be updated. Even just the fact that Iusc was not updated to (redirect to) Lusc is bothersome, because of a 2-person talk page discussion over half a decade ago. But we have to start somewhere, otherwise, as you did, Monkey See, Monkey Do.
 * The reason no-one has made one is because the problem is essentially invisible. At best we hear about broken scripts, usually on this page (for one reason or another, not necessarily importScript only). At worst, silence as editors go inactive or they miss that their favorite script doesn't work, or.... I'm sure you see the problem. Given how many user Javascript pages there are, a bot is more or less the only feasible way to deal with the problem. I haven't actively inquired before, but it might be a good idea to make a Phabricator task so that we can identify active users with Javascript subpages (using deprecated Javascript if possible) and start by updating those pages instead. Maybe can help with that problem. --Izno (talk) 03:11, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
 * If importScript is deprecated and support is actively being removed soon, it would help those of us who are somewhat technical but need a cookbook if someone here could point to or whip up a page describing the steps to migrate from importScript to whatever is supported. Also, when I look at my vector.js, I see the following warning in a red box: Code that you insert on this page could contain malicious content capable of compromising your account. If you import a script from another page with "importScript" or "iusc", take note that this causes you to dynamically load a remote script, which could be changed by others. If importScript has long been deprecated, should this text be modified? – Jonesey95 (talk) 03:25, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Yes, that is an example of documentation that should be updated (at least insofar as it should not mention importScript, not the other part of that sentence, which naturally remains true).
 * The cookbook is and has been mediawikiwiki:ResourceLoader/Migration guide (users). --Izno (talk) 03:33, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
 * The larger task here is T130879 created in 2016, but stalled for some time. For the record, the method was soft deprecated on desktop first and the mobile site never inherited the importScript function because the mobile site was built after deprecation began, and at the time the mobile site couldn't even run user scripts so we didn't know it was an error. An error in a JS script on mobile like this basically stops the rest of the script execution. There's a lot of moving parts, but we have better tooling and visibility now, so going forward we're in a much better place, and hopefully this can be sped up, but there's going to be a lot of work to be done, to make up for lost time and fix existing code. user:Izno, User:Ladsgroup has recently got global interface editing rights, and has a bot for fixing related legacy code (see T72470). I imagine he would be a good person to help with enwiki's efforts but right now his focus is on deprecating the wg variables. I'd hope the bot he's been using could also be used for importScript when we get round to it. Jon (WMF) (talk) 04:13, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I'd prefer either making importScript a wrapper around mw.loader.load, or making a new wrapper ("importScriptAsync"?) and migrating to that; I find the URLs less readable. Should those two options be RfC'd? I'd be happy to do the migration work. The one issue with the former is that people might've been depending on the load order (admittedly unlikely). Enterprisey (talk!) 03:51, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
 * As I said offline, I'm not a fan, and that the real issue is that users have to edit their Javascript pages is what sucks, not the fact that the API for importing foreign Javascript isn't framed in terms of wiki pages (and the related task on the Phab side was declined). --Izno (talk) 04:19, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

I definitely can help in migrating, just currently busy with thousands of usages of deprecated globals (just counting mediawiki namespace). Once I'm done with that, ping me and I help with this one too User:Jon (WMF) Ladsgroupoverleg 05:59, 26 January 2021 (UTC) Are we talking about a retrospective change to all user scripts that still use the equivalent of iusc / Install user script to use Lusc / Load user script instead? — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 13:52, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
 * In simple terms, how can us relatively non-techie folks fix this? Do we need to swap failing scripts to the "mw.loader" style? Do we need to swap alls scripts to that? Is there another better solution? Plz ping me :) CaptainEek  Edits Ho Cap'n!⚓ 08:34, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
 * While you’re all figuring this out, whatever this is, can someone disable the stupid warning on mobile devices? It’s sticky, it doesn’t go away, it’s highly annoying and it’s also quite useless... if there’s something to fix here, use a bot, edit the gadgets/templates, add a shim, whatever, but whilst the templates/gadgets are all using the old format it’s way too early to be bugging people to update their own common.js to fix this. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 11:45, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Borrowing words from can a tech wizard please disable the notice for those using mobile devices? The notice I’m seeing is permanent & just takes up almost all the space on the screen, to say this is upsetting is to put it mildly, it’s even more annoying than the “image greying” problem we mobile phone editors faced last year. And please, like  said can one of y’all tech wizards be so kind as to explain to us 'laymen' (which I gladly accept that I am regarding anything related to advanced coding) the simplest manner in which we can fix this error? Please this is a cry for help. @ aren’t you affected by this also? Celestina007 (talk) 15:43, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I've disabled this for now, at the very least some more discussion is warranted as this is disruptive to contributors. — xaosflux  Talk 15:54, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
 * @, Many thanks for helping out, all is back to normal. Celestina007 (talk) 18:01, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

From WP:IANB:

One of the affected users, Celestina007, has 3 Javascript pages locally: User:Celestina007/common.js, User:Celestina007/twinkleoptions.js, User:Celestina007/redwarnConfig.js, and a JSON page User:Celestina007/raterPrefs.json. I'd guess the 'config' pages aren't relevant. --Izno (talk) 18:56, 26 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Also not a fan of "Move to desktop JS" per my previous statement. This Javascript should just work in both places instead. --Izno (talk) 19:07, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
 * esp as there is no User:USER/Desktop.js and asking someone to abandon that and fork in to every single other skin isn't a good idea. — xaosflux  Talk 19:17, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
 * At any rate, I think we're kind of done here. We should have a targeted discussion/RfC about how to go forward with all the deprecations, mass editing, etc., but for now the empty function is the correct solution. ~ Amory  (u • t • c) 19:43, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Momentum counts for something, so let's figure out what kind of targeted discussion we should have ;).
 * If we ask the non-technical community about how to deal with  and friends, it's going to be "just make it work".
 * The technical community might have some of the following opinions, just based on here and the various Phab tasks:
 * The API sucks (I basically agree with that, but...)
 * The user JS system sucks and no-one but techies should need to understand it and/or care about it
 * A shim is bad for various reasons (extra Javascript load, not exactly the same function at the end of the day anyway re asynchronicity, etc.) (see also phab:T27845 discussion where a shim was basically rejected)
 * Globals suck (among the reasons for the deprecation in the first place)
 * Other opinions possibly? We should just make a decision.
 * My experience regarding TemplateStyles migrations is that no one has come to bang my door down, and I'm sure you're seeing similar with your globals removal that you've been hacking at in your free time. So I don't think "what should be done to get to the end state?" is an interesting question. We should just go to the end state.
 * Is there some other question we need to ask? Maybe "Do we want to emit a similar notice as the one tried of late on desktop so that we can harness the masses first"? --Izno (talk) 00:58, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
 * (extra Javascript load, not exactly the same function at the end of the day anyway re asynchronicity, etc.) please elaborate ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 01:14, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure what to elaborate with. I understand that loadScript does some things, and assumes a certain execution model, that mw.loader.load/using don't. To make a shim for loadScript (whether we want to replicate it exactly or not) would accordingly require additional Javascript in Common.js or elsewhere; if we replicate it exactly that's more rather than less Javascript, and in both cases versus removal entirely we would be comparing it to no extra Javascript. (I'm not being deliberately evasive on the exact functionality differences; I'm just not sure of the exact distinction and haven't looked at the code. I know one of the differences is that it takes a URL and one takes a wiki page (the API), and I am pretty sure a second is that mw.loader.load doesn't control for when scripts load, whereas importScript does. For 99% of the population, this second case probably isn't relevant. There may be other differences I don't know about....) --Izno (talk) 03:05, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
 * That's kind of what I think as well — we need to see what the likely end state is.There are tens of thousands of pages in question here alone. There's importScript, importStylesheet, addOnloadHook, and even addPortletLink that will need doing.  I don't see a viable path beyond blanking and botting given the numbers.  An RfC or something could determine the dividing line — userspace owner hasn't edited in X years, script not edited in Y years, etc. — but it's either shim forever or blank and bot, no? ~ Amory  (u • t • c) 02:18, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
 * We'd only shim until "user scripts 2.0", whenever that happens, I think. What's "blank and bot"? Enterprisey (talk!) 02:56, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
 * whenever that happens I mean, on an infinite timescale... One advantage of a shim is, as we've seen, that we can message users through it.  Console notices progressing to a weekly/daily message, that sort of thing.  Could be handy.By blank and bot, I mean that there are tens of thousands of unused user scripts and skin pages.  One could imagine authorizing a bot to clean up every page as long as the owner had been active within a couple years or the script had been edited lately or something, and blanking otherwise.  "Blanking" could even be a "if you see this message it was blanked by RfC, see link and do this fix" kind of thing.  Just spitballing, but trying to say that given the scale we're talking about the viable options are limited. ~ Amory <small style="color:#555"> (u • t • c) 03:02, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Blank user Javascript pages (meeting some criteria/on) and swap to loader.load for the rest. Anyway, you mentioned you want importScriptAsync, which doesn't fundamentally fix the problem of shimming either way (i.e. you still have to bot that case away). --Izno (talk) 03:04, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I agree; I just don't like the look of mw.loader.load and prefer user common.js pages to not look radically different. Enterprisey (talk!) 03:22, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
 * The third option is "whenever WMF pulls the plug, deal with it then with whoever says everything broke", which I see as essentially "blanking everyone's scripts all at the same time and then active users get to say something (loudly)". There is a fourth option, which is apparently that Gadgets 2.0 supports user-space gadgets in some form (whenever Gadgets 2.0 happens). That option requires some significant rewrites even for the popular scripts. Among those, I think I prefer blanking and botting (to either of the not-shim options): it's in our power, the change is obvious (but may break some things, but will unbreak mobile use), the present API we know will be stable (for some probably non-zero time), and we have you who are willing but have signed yourself up to at least one other deprecation first. ;) Heck, if we really want to have fun today we could just make the deprecated functions no-op on desktop and beat the WMF to it in option 3. (I wouldn't do that without an RFC.) --Izno (talk) 03:02, 27 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Just make it work, please. Shimming is the most sensible thing to do IMO. A few lines of extra JS in Mediawiki:Group-user.js (note that this is the file you want, not Mediawiki:Common.js since unregistered users don't have personal script pages {they could be using stuff like greasemonkey but that isn't our problem}) is not going to have any performance impact. I don't have time to look into this deeply but I don't think there's any functional difference between mw.loader.load or importScript beyond the input format. They're both asynchronous, and neither returns a promise like mw.loader.using does. Correct me if I'm wrong.
 * I'm pretty sure our largely non-technical userbase prefers
 * rather than the scary
 * – SD0001  (talk) 06:32, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I mean, I'm not going to advocate technical gatekeeping, but maybe it should be a little bit scary. I think people underestimate just how dangerous user scripts can be. Writ Keeper &#9863;&#9812; 04:43, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
 * – SD0001  (talk) 06:32, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I mean, I'm not going to advocate technical gatekeeping, but maybe it should be a little bit scary. I think people underestimate just how dangerous user scripts can be. Writ Keeper &#9863;&#9812; 04:43, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

Search problem
If I'm looking for an editor's contribs from date x onwards, I go to their contribs, then "search for contributions", then I add two dates: from date x, to date y.

I can never get the "from" date to work. When, after entering the dates, I go to "oldest", I'm taken to the editor's first edit, not the first edit on the "from" date. What am I doing wrong? SarahSV (talk) 21:08, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
 * this appears to be a bug, I opened T273112. There is an example of a manual workaround in the description. —  xaosflux  Talk 20:55, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
 * , thanks for doing that. I'm afraid I didn't understand your workaround. SarahSV (talk) 21:59, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
 * manually put in a URL such as this:  where the "offset=" is YYYYMMDDhhmm format. —  xaosflux  Talk 22:59, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

My cheatsheet: Johnuniq (talk) 01:21, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
 * First 5 edits: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions/Jimbo_Wales&dir=prev&limit=5
 * Last 5 edits: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions/Jimbo_Wales&dir=last&limit=5
 * 5 edits before 201004 (last 5 edits in March 2010): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions/Jimbo_Wales&limit=5&offset=201004
 * 5 edits since 201004 (first 5 edits in April 2010): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions/Jimbo_Wales&dir=prev&limit=5&offset=201004
 * thank you both, that's very helpful. SarahSV (talk) 04:51, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

Stop the editor from launching automatically when clicking on a red link
Usually, when you click on a red link like this while logged in, it will takes you to the editor for that article to create (i.e. it links to  instead of  ). I personally find this rather annoying, so I'd like to ask if there are any way of stopping the editor to launch automatically and have the red links go to Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. message instead.

NotCory (talk) 07:54, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
 * User scripts/List shows the below. PrimeHunter (talk) 08:37, 28 January 2021 (UTC)


 * – stops the opening of the editor when clicking on red links.
 * Try putting this in your common.js: . What it does is replaces every red link's href property with the href without the part that says  . Hope this helped! ―sportzpikachu <sub style="display:inline-block"> my talk  contribs  08:41, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

and I'm honestly surprised that this function is not available in the settings page. Thanks! NotCory (talk) 09:26, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Maybe it would be made a gadget if power users used VisualEditor. They mostly use the source editor and there it isn't annoying to click a red link you don't want to create. PrimeHunter (talk) 09:34, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

Request: Some way to show on a reliable sources Wikipedia page that it is a reliable source
Hi all

I've been looking at Reliable sources/Perennial sources and wondering if there would be some way of showing on the Wikipedia article for those sources that they are considered a reliable source by Wikipedia or not. This could be helpful for both new and experienced users who are researching a new topic to identify which reference sources are reliable, especially if they are not aware of this table which a lot of work has gone into, and also possibly readers who wanted to know more about a news or other reference source's reliability.

I'm unsure how technically reading information off the table at Reliable sources/Perennial sources but I have a few initial ideas on what this could look like.


 * 1) A template on the talk page for the article which included the summary of the reliability of the source in a colour coded box like in the table followed by the legend key explaining what the classification means e.g 'generally reliable'.
 * 2) Some kind of icon or template in the Wikipedia article References section which explains similar information as above, perhaps saying something like 'Wikipedia considers NAME OF ARTICLE a reliable source, to find out more please click here' or whatever the classification is.

Please let me know what you think of this idea or possibly how it could be implemented

Thanks very much

John Cummings (talk) 22:12, 27 January 2021 (UTC)


 * I recently discovered WP:CiteUnseen, which is a user script that takes approach #2, flagging sources with icons depending on how they are listed in RSP. —  The Earwig   talk 22:17, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
 * And also User:Headbomb/unreliable. --Izno (talk) 22:25, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

Thanks very much and, these look like very useful tool. What I've tried to describe is different to these (if I understand what they are doing). I would like to be able to go the Wikipedia article for a reference source on Reliable sources/Perennial sources eg Daily Mail and somewhere on the article or the talk page without installing any plug ins to be able to to see something like to:

''Wikipedia does not use NAME OF ARTICLE as a reliable source. There is community consensus from a request for comment to deprecate NAME OF ARTICLE as a source. The source is considered generally unreliable, and use of the source is generally prohibited. See Reliable sources/Perennial sources for more information on reliable sources.''

This would only be added to articles or talk pages that exist on the perennial sources page, so would only be around 500 pages or so. My guess is the easiest way this could be achieved in a template on the talk page which somehow can keep up with changes on the main perennial sources page.

Thanks

John Cummings (talk) 23:12, 27 January 2021 (UTC)


 * That is not something appropriate for an article. It might be reasonable to put something on the article talk page, but I do not think a standard template exists for that. You could maybe convince the script writers above also to provide a note when a source's page is being viewed. --Izno (talk) 23:19, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Ah, I see. Sorry for misunderstanding your original comment! Daily Mail is an interesting case because Wikipedia's assessment of its reliability is itself the subject of commentary in RS and is mentioned in Daily Mail, but I agree with Izno that this typically doesn't belong in the article on the source itself. I could support a talk page template, but this is the wrong forum for that discussion (maybe WP:VPR). —  The Earwig   talk 23:23, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
 * and I'll look more at a talk page template, thanks for your help. John Cummings (talk) 10:04, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

Finding the connection between two categories
I'd like to know why Category:The Walt Disney Company is a distant subcategory of Category:Finnish people, but what's the fastest way to find it out? I don't want to click the blue ►'s on a category page until I find the connection. 87.95.206.253 (talk) 18:33, 20 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Theoretical answer: express the category tree as a directed graph and do a breadth-first search from Finnish people cat until you get to that one. Not sure if a tool exists that does this. – SD0001  (talk) 18:49, 20 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Found it: Category:Finnish people → Category:Finnish diaspora‎ → Category:Finnish diaspora in North America → Category:Finnish American‎ → Category:Finnish-American history‎ → Category:New Sweden → Category:Forts of New Netherland‎ → Category:Wall Street → Category:New York Stock Exchange‎ → Category:Companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange‎ → Category:The Walt Disney Company‎. I wrote a quick script to do it; I don't know of a generic tool to solve this problem, unfortunately. —  The Earwig   talk 19:45, 20 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I love the category system. --Izno (talk) 20:10, 20 January 2021 (UTC)
 * If so, you'll find User:SDZeroBot/Category cycles interesting :P – SD0001  (talk) 05:13, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Another endless backlog for a system that should have died when Wikidata was born. Yes, I love it! --Izno (talk) 05:34, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
 * The root problem is coming from people using categories as "has something to do with". Sure, Wall Street might have had a fort, but the category is not about the fort. Similarly, "Finnish-American" is not a category for people, so it shouldn't be a subcategory of a category for people. The German Wikipedia is much stricter enforcing consistent category patterns (e.g. only people in categories for people), there you get these surprises less often. --mfb (talk) 12:56, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Too bad there's no tool that does this. Would be helpful when using WP:PetScan. 87.95.206.253 (talk) 17:57, 24 January 2021 (UTC)

Listeria fails to update a WikiProject Women in Red page from Wikidata
The page WikiProject Women in Red/Missing articles by nationality/Israel hasn't been updated in a week. During that time I created a Wikidata item eligible for inclusion on the page via the automated (Listeria) update, but it understandably doesn't appear in the list. As manual additions are removed by the next update, I chose to engage "Update the list now." The result was a full-screen message: Listeria: Killed by OS for overloading memory. (Also: "Check out the current bot status" - which displayed a table beyond my understanding.). What to do now? (I wrote here because the WikiProject page is in the EN WP.) -- Deborahjay (talk) 12:25, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I guess you mean WikiProject Women in Red/Missing articles by nationality/Israel which hasn't been updated in five weeks. I get the same message on "Update the list now" near the top. "current bot status!" in the error message links to https://listeria.toolforge.org/botstatus.php which doesn't seem helpful here. Maybe the list is too large. User:ListeriaBot is operated by Magnus Manske. If there is an issue with a bot then you should usually contact the operator. I have pinged him now. By the way, your signature with italics in the timestamp is confusing and may also confuse some tools which expect a signed post to end with  and not  . If you want the user parts to be in italics then you can enter   in the Signature field at Special:Preferences and enable "Treat the above as wiki markup". PrimeHunter (talk) 13:16, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
 * , your comprehensive reply is much appreciated. That list is indeed long, though I haven't compared it with the corresponding "by country" Women in Red lists. (N.B. Israeli biographies in numerous fields are generally notable in the Anglophone WP). I hadn't thought of Listeria as a bot; somewhere along the way I got to thinking of it and its operator User:Magnus Manske as having legendary status (!). Meanwhile I'll go to settings and make a proper italicized signature for my User name, as you've described. -- Deborahjay (talk) 13:29, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Update: have added this matter as a request to d:User talk:Magnus Manske. Also, I fixed my four-tildes signature to appear in italics without including the date/time stamp. (UTC)-- Deborahjay (talk) 16:35, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

Watching archived pages
Maybe this is a non-issue, but I always have to go through and unwatch pages that are archived (old PRs, GAs, FACs etc.) and I certainly have forgotten to do so plenty of times. Is there a reason that we're able to continue watching archived pages? Maybe this is a non-issue, as in it doesn't take anything extra to watch them, but at the same time it seems pointless. Any thoughts? Apologies if this has been discussed before. Aza24 (talk) 00:18, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I prefer to keep watching my GA reviews so as to ensure vandalism on the pages doesn't go unnoticed and most of the time it is no additional trouble. Eddie891 Talk Work 00:26, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Consider using the new temporary watch feature. :) --Izno (talk) 00:35, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Archives can be edited like any other page, they just rarely are. There is no need to unwatch them. You can search ( in many browsers) Special:EditWatchlist for "archive" and unwatch if you want. I have 136 and don't care. PrimeHunter (talk) 08:55, 26 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Yeah, I agree with the above that watching e.g. old GA reviews is a good thing. 99% of the time nothing happens to them, and the remainder is typically vandalism or something else I want to know about so I can revert or respond to it. &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 16:44, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
 * because an "archive page" isn't a thing as far as the system is concerned, it is just another page that contains archive in the title. If an archive is made by moving a page, you will continue to watch it - if it is made by copy-pasting text you won't start watching it.  You can bulk edit your watchlist here: Special:EditWatchlist/raw and quickly delete the lines you want to remove if they are bothering you. —  xaosflux  Talk 19:47, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I suppose the talk pages project would in the future allow you to follw sections that get archived, see Talk_pages_project/Notifications and T262990.--Snaevar (talk) 20:31, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

That "Reverted" tag is misleading
Can anybody explain why by  is shown as "Reverted"? Subsequent edits (of which there are two as I write this) do not reinstate the content removed by GeneralNotability. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 21:56, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
 * The part of the MediaWiki code that marks edits as "reverted" is presumably, though erroneously in the case of talk pages and similar pages that are sometimes returned to a blank-ish state, looking for a previous revision of the page that matches the new revision. In this case, this diff shows that the current version of the page is identical to a version from 7 April 2017, so MW applied a "reverted" tag to every intervening edit. That looks like a bug to me. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:10, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

Article / Page Referral Data
Hi All, I thought I had asked this question before, but, not able to find in the archives, so, I am beginning to wonder if I ever asked this question here at all.

While working at WP:ITN and WP:ITNRD we want to answer a simple question. What fraction of an article's page views come from clicks on the homepage when an article is listed on ITN. So, all I am looking for is referral data for a page saying of x page views, y came in from the homepage. This referral data seems like it would be collected for sure, but, have not seen this in the page views tool. Is there some other place where we can find this information? We want to use this data to get a better understanding of what links the users click on our homepage, and more specifically on the ITN panel. Thanks in advance. Ktin (talk) 23:36, 25 January 2021 (UTC)


 * I think this has been asked for somewhere or another. Not sure where though. --Izno (talk) 00:34, 26 January 2021 (UTC)


 * This data does exist - see m:Research:Wikipedia clickstream - but it's not made available through the pageviews tool, it's only on a monthly basis (not daily or hourly), and it cuts out all pairs with less than ten occurrences. I believe these restrictions are all for reader-privacy purposes, which seems reasonable. You'd have to process it manually to get the data you're after, but it does look possible to at least get some kind of idea.
 * For example, Great conjunction was definitely on ITN in December 2020. In that month, it got 606287 tracked pageviews, of which 119614 were from a known Wikipedia mainspace page. 106300 of those came from the main page. (Of the rest, 339k came from external search engines, 120k had no known referrer, 18k came from other external sites, and 11k from other WM sites)
 * The normal pageviews tool reports 613802 user-agent views in that time, so while not exactly consistent you can see they're definitely in broad agreement. Conjunction was up from 21/12 through to the end of the month; there were 421280 pageviews in that time, so at a very approximate guess one-quarter of its total traffic during those days came from the main page link. Andrew Gray (talk) 13:41, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * , this is brilliant! Thanks a ton!!! While daily data would have been gold, for the most part we can work with monthly data! I am copying two other of our project members.
 * Andrew, just to try my understanding, would this be a fair read: The COVID-19_pandemic page received 159008 page views from the Main Page for the month of December (~5300 daily views, given that we know that the link was there for the entire month)? Similarly, Sugathakumari received 3908 page views (now normalizing this to daily will be difficult but not impossible, we will have to roughly reconstruct how many days this link was on the main page) and similarly Alex Trebec received page 2403 views from the homepage (similar daily normalization challenge)? Thanks a ton again. Ktin (talk) 14:47, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * , Another quick follow up question. Looking at John le Carré seems like the article received 23,500 views from the main page for the entire month (we will have to normalize for daily, by reconstructing how long the article was on the main page). But, one thing caught my attention -- John_le_Carré_bibliography seems to have received 163 page views. But, to the best of my knowlege John_le_Carré_bibliography link was not featured on the main page, but, I see, the below snippet. Do you know what that might be indicative of? Ktin (talk) 14:59, 29 January 2021 (UTC)


 * The Covid/Sugathakumari/Trebek numbers look correct to me, yes! Looking across the whole dataset, this would make COVID-19_pandemic the third most popular onward link from Main Page that month, behind Hyphen-minus (2951391), Lists of deaths by year (1130422), and Wikipedia (214705). I think it is reasonable to assume that #1 is an anomaly and can be ignored, and possibly so is #2 - the onward links here don't seem to correlate to actual views of those pages. Next on the list were COVID-19_pandemic_by_country_and_territory (120652) and Great conjunction (106300 - more popular than I thought - it did have a great photo though!).
 * For your second question, the key here is other. The pageviews data seems to work on the basis of "this user went from A to B" rather than specifically "this user clicked the link to B". As a result, if you have a page open and search for a page, then click straight through to the search link (which I think is default if your search matches the pagename), it will show up in this data. Similarly, I think it will also record it if you get a link out of a navigation popup, which can let you go to "links from a linked page". The net result is that links don't actually need to exist on the page to show up in this data, and "Other" seems to be flagging these cases. Those 163 people will - probably - have been on the main page, entered "John le Carré bibliography" into the search box, and gone straight there.
 * Exactly when "link" or "other" shows up is another question. Main Page > Great conjunction is recorded as "link", and we know it was still present on 31/12. Main Page > Banksia serrata is recorded as "other", and it was TFA in mid-December but definitely gone from the frontpage by 31/12. I suspect this means that what it does is snapshot whether it shows up in the links table (the one on Special:Whatlinkshere on a particular day, maybe the nearest conveniently-dated dump (there was one on 1/1). This is a sensible way of doing it for most pages, where links are usually pretty stable, but a bit awkward for interpreting the mainpage or other frequently-rotating pages; for articles you know were on the mainpage, I wouldn't worry too much about it. Andrew Gray (talk) 15:37, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

triple parens?
In this edit, a page which was originally written with  instead of   was fixed to use the later. Is there some other platform (i.e. one from which this might have been copied) that uses triple parens for markup? -- RoySmith (talk) 19:38, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Back in Usenet days it used to mean "I like this", but we're literally talking back in the 1980s-90s. For I hope obvious reasons, no legitimate platform nowadays is going to use triple parentheses as part of its markup. &#8209; Iridescent 19:46, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Triple parentheses aren't particularly obvious unless you know of the trope. --jpgordon&#x1d122;&#x1d106; &#x1D110;&#x1d107; 19:51, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Jpgordon, I guarantee that if any software developer were to inadvertently and in good faith use "put triple parentheses around a name" as a markup code, they'd be made painfully aware the moment they checked the corporate email account or any of their social media platforms. &#8209; Iridescent 19:23, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * There is some sort of browser plugin that adds triple parentheses around text and it can unknowingly be applied when editing, similar to the Drumpf plugin. That, along with a growing vandalism trend led to the creation of Special:AbuseFilter/766, but it is only triggered in the mainspace while the page in question is in the draftspace. &mdash; MusikAnimal  talk  20:03, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * There is some sort of browser plugin that adds triple parentheses around text and it can unknowingly be applied when editing, similar to the Drumpf plugin. That, along with a growing vandalism trend led to the creation of Special:AbuseFilter/766, but it is only triggered in the mainspace while the page in question is in the draftspace. &mdash; MusikAnimal  talk  20:03, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

Radio button spacing issue in history view?
Has anybody noticed any changes to how radio buttons display in page histories next to (cur | prev)? Feels like it used to be more like:

But now it's more like:

with radio buttons touching each other, and also closer to the closing parenthesis.

First saw it on on Win 10 Chrome, but I also see it on Win 10 Edge while logged out, so I don't think it has anything to do with my browser or account settings. Thanks. Cyphoidbomb (talk) 20:06, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I see the unhelpful change in spacing as well. I appear to have won the "crappy update" lottery this week.-- Jezebel's Ponyo bons mots 20:12, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * WP:ITSTHURSDAY broke that one, see T273148. — xaosflux  Talk 20:22, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

Some pending changes edits which should be auto-accepted
Ex. here. The relevant user is not only auto-confirmed, but also extended-confirmed, but their changes are somehow not getting auto-accepted. Is this a known issue? RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 02:16, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Another example here and here. This isn't an isolated occurrence, AFAICS. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 02:28, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I just encountered another one that should have been accepted automatically today, but wasn't. Schazjmd   (talk)  18:51, 29 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Is this the same symptom as T233561? — xaosflux  Talk 18:56, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Um...it sounds the same as the description (the rest of the page is over my head). Schazjmd   (talk)  19:08, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Looks like this is known issue T233561. — xaosflux  Talk 19:18, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I'm having a similar issue. My edits to semi-protected pages are no longer being automatically accepted. Maestro2016 (talk) 21:49, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Oh wait, I just realized my edit has already been brought up as an example. Any idea what the issue is? Maestro2016 (talk) 21:51, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Software bug being currently worked on. Majavah (talk!) 22:08, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

Real annoying message about the disabling of syntax highlighting
Syntax highlighting on this page was disabled because it took too long. The maximum allowed highlighting time is 20ms, and your computer took 27ms. Try closing some tabs and programs and clicking "Show preview" or "Show changes". If that doesn't work, try a different web browser, and if that doesn't work, try a faster computer.

"Try a faster computer."??? We aren't working at some computer fair where we can hop about and sign on to one computer after another. This whole message above has randomly been popping up the last day or so. As I'm typing this, everything went back to normal - and I did not shut one tab or doing anything else it suggests. But this is a pain. Reminds me of the old, old days of Wikipedia when we had to save our stuff every few minutes. My computer did not suddenly become old, or slow. And it only seems to be on this wikipedia. I just did a test on Wikisource, and it looks like it has always looked on my computer. Not happening on Commons, either. — Maile (talk) 16:59, 28 January 2021 (UTC)


 * And the ding-dang problem fly in the ointment can be found above in "Tech News" Changes later this week Bracket matching will be added to the CodeMirror syntax highlighter on the first wikis. The first wikis are German and Catalan Wikipedia and maybe other Wikimedia wikis. This will happen on 27 January. [10] Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 January. It will be on all wikis from 28 January (calendar). — Preceding unsigned comment added by Maile66 (talk • contribs) 17:12, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
 * CodeMirror is the syntax highlighter on the icon Codemirror-icon.png to the left of "Advanced" in some toolbars. Are you using that? I don't know whether it has the quoted message. Syntax highlighter at Special:Preferences does have the message. MediaWiki:Gadget-DotsSyntaxHighlighter.js loads it from mw:MediaWiki:Gadget-DotsSyntaxHighlighter.js by User:Remember the dot. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:43, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Indeed, this is not CodeMirror (which, btw, you should use instead). --Izno (talk) 22:00, 28 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Un hun, OK, whatever. The icon is always clicked. It's just this stupid message that keeps appearing.  If I refresh my screen, the message goes away and the highlighting rerturns.  Just more stuff that coincidentally started to appear with the above-mentioned CodeMirror syntax highlighter work that happened today.  — Maile  (talk) 00:28, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Do you mean the icon has darker background to indicate it's activated? I suppose it might be a conflict between syntax highlighters. Is the gadget enabled? Does a template call like $\pi$ have purple text or yellow background when you edit? What is your browser? Please give an example page where it happens. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:42, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * CodeMirror has an 200ms max runtime (https://codemirror.net/doc/manual.html#option_workTime ) and no, WMF did not change that setting. Using that would fix Maile's problem.--Snaevar (talk) 14:58, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Well, whatever it was, has not happened since yesterday. I'm thinking maybe it had something to do with tech changes were in progress yesterday, and then just resolved itself.  Have no idea, really. — Maile  (talk) 22:36, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

wikitable width
wish to insert Help:Table example, to make width of wikitable from 200px to 800px. although, seems to have no effect..

please advise Gfigs (talk) 00:10, 28 January 2021 (UTC) We should be letting the user agent/device/browser choose an appropriate size for the tables, based on the content. If you absolutely must tweak the display, consider using em widths on certain columns, or a margin next to the table. But you didn't answer PrimeHunter's question: what is the problem you're trying to solve? &mdash; JohnFromPinckney (talk) 01:50, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
 * The above table is 800px wide in Firefox, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer (don't do that in articles). What is the perceived problem and what is your browser? PrimeHunter (talk) 00:18, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
 * , thanks. Chrome (mobile) 66.0.3359.116. table width is fixed (not changing)..Gfigs (talk) 00:34, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
 * The table width is also fixed for me in Safari on iOS when viewing the mobile version. I see a wide 800px table in the desktop version in Safari on iOS, and both in the mobile and desktop version in Firefox. The other table below has a cell with . That requests the cell width to be 20% of the whole table. Browsers don't cut off content to satisfy a width constraint. They make the cell as wide as needed to show the whole content. PrimeHunter (talk) 09:02, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
 * seems to be some differences with browsers and viewing modes..however, why should Chrome crop height (rows), and not width (columns)? also 20% of table width, should not be 3/4 of page, that is over 200% of table width..sorry, don't understand what is going on here..Gfigs (talk) 12:20, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I am not sure what you are trying to do, nor why you are trying to do it, but I hope you will decide NOT to do it. There is generally no good reason to use px to try to set the width of a table. Maybe for images, not anything else.
 * , thanks..am following Help:Table example Gfigs (talk) 03:13, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
 * as per Help:Table : "Warning: Setting specific pixel sizes is deprecated, as it interferes with the ability of the browser to adjust content to suit the browser window, device size, user-end font size limits, and other constraints. It is strongly preferred to use relative sizes, in percentage or em values." Gfigs (talk) 03:34, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
 * some further info on use of em and % values in tables Gfigs (talk) 09:17, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * anyhow, it's not doing much. above table, with width:100% and 300%, appears the same..Gfigs (talk) 04:04, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
 * That advice is not about you. It's about mobile readers and readers using different skins or resolutions than you. Don't do it. --Izno (talk) 04:23, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
 * can't resize the table width..it's not working over here, with either px, em or %..height in px and em seems to be working ok (sometimes). although height in % is not Gfigs (talk) 04:43, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
 * not sure if this makes much sense. although was expecting to see narrow cell with "T" inside. not 3/4 of page width..

Gfigs (talk) 07:45, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
 * seems to be the wikitable class that is causing some confusion. at least, this works as expected in desktop view..although not mobile view..Gfigs (talk) 14:37, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
 * indeed seems as if browser won't crop table width below text width (desktop view), although will crop table height..not sure what is happening in mobile view though Gfigs (talk) 14:56, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
 * if you are editing Wikipedia on mobile phone, please read this. thanks to your viewpoints, and inputs..Gfigs (talk) 21:37, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Why are you forcing desktop users over to the mobile site to read that? It would have been better to link it as Recommendations for mobile friendly articles on Wikimedia wikis. Please note that some of the recommendations there are contrary to our own manual of style. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 21:04, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * alright apologies, have been frustrated with appearance of tables on mobile Wikipedia..hoping on this page may also be of interest though wikipedia:Category:Templates that are not mobile friendly Gfigs (talk) 05:37, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Long interwiki links from nonexistent pages break
Interwiki links break on nonexistent pages break if they are very long. An example is here. I am using chrome version 88.0.4324.104. -322UbnBr2 (Talk &#124; Contributions &#124; Actions) 00:58, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
 * They break in certain circumstances if there is both an interwiki link and something else in front like a namespace or special page. See T258521 and User:PrimeHunter/Page name size in interwiki links. Your example adds  in No article text/sister projects and that pushes it over a 255-byte limit. It works in a local link:
 * Special:Search/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
 * But it fails in an interwiki link:
 * wiktionary:Special:Search/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
 * We could avoid the error by testing the length of  and not attempt to make interwiki links if it's too long. We could either omit links completely or use external link syntax which does work: [ Wiktionary]. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:09, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I can not edit the No article text/sister projects template. I need an admin to change it to an external link. -322UbnBr2 (Talk &#124; Contributions &#124; Actions) 03:58, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
 * It would require some coding. I have posted to Template talk:No article text. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:52, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
 * What about changing to,  to ,  to ,  to ,  to ,  to ,  to ,  to ,  to , and  to  (Assuming my edit request to add Wikispecies to the template was successful?) It would resolve a lot more issues. Using URLs for pages that can be reached by interwiki to me seems like a bad idea. 54nd60x (talk) 12:47, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
 * The interwiki prefix is not counted in the 255-byte limit so it wouldn't help to use shortcuts. This has  plus 255 A's and works:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
 * This has  plus 256 A's and fails:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
 * I only mentioned external links as an option when the interwiki link doesn't work. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:22, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Ok, thanks for the clarification. But I’ve noticed that there are always edge cases like these, for example: Special:MyPage/aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa and longer would give errors and broken links at the bottom as well. I bet I could come up with even more of these cases, but I don’t think it’s too realistic someone would try to edit a page close to 255 bytes. I don’t think this should be ignored, but I do think that we should come up with a solution to this. 54nd60x (talk) 13:40, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
 * FYI There is also the fact that you cannot create editnotices for pages greater than 238 bytes. 54nd60x (talk) 13:47, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Wikipedia logs me out when I switch pages
Hello, just checking if anyone else is having similar issues or if it's just my computer playing silly devils. For the past couple of days, if I sign in, look at my watchlist page, then go to another page, when I move to the other page, I get signed out. It also happens sometimes if I switch pages between other, non-watchlist, pages. Not sure what the possible cause could be. Red Fiona (talk) 16:12, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
 * This sounds like Village pump (technical)/Archive 187. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 19:57, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks Redrose. It sounds very similar, especially the thing about it only having started happening recently.  I've also had the same set up for at least a couple of years and have cookies enabled.  I'll just assume it's the computer having the hiccups.  Red Fiona (talk) 20:33, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Deleting the main page
This is NOT a discussion about deleting the main page, rather a technical question I have after reading the page Don't delete the main page. Is it really true that administrators can't delete the main page? And what does it mean that it might work? It was confusing and hard to understand, but I still want to know what technically happens when you try to delete the main page. 54nd60x (talk) 11:45, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * here on the English Wikipedia, attempting to delete the main page should fail, and give the person attempting to do it the following message:, this is because of a custom hack for the configuration that only applies to enwiki that intercepts that action. —  xaosflux  Talk 12:50, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * You see MediaWiki:Cant-delete-main-page. The message that it might work is not a reflection of what the software does, but instead a method of trying to discourage admins from doing stupid things in the event some unforseen server problem allows the main page to be deleted. * Pppery * <sub style="color:#800000">it has begun... 12:51, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I suppose more likely one would already have to be pretty drunk to even consider this, and particularly in that state they may fail to notice that they are actually deleting the main page on another project. This would require having sysop privileges on multiple wikis, like a global sysop, but still seems like one of the more plausible scenarios. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 13:26, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I can confirm that the custom hack doesn't apply to Commons on the beta cluster. The deletion was rather uneventful, no different from any other page. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 13:19, 29 January 2021 (UTC)


 * FYI, there's an extensive deletion log for the main page. Andrew🐉(talk) 19:23, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Yeah, but mostly they're WP:REVDELs; the last true deletion was 4 February 2008. As regards 's original post, pages with more than 5,000 revisions either can't be deleted, or they can be deleted but then can't be undeleted, I can't remember which. But if you want to know who ended up looking very silly trying to do daft things to the main page, have a read of WP:STOCKS. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 21:26, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
 * It's they can't be deleted by anyone except for stewards. * Pppery * <sub style="color:#800000">it has begun... 21:30, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Cleaning out deprecated global variables
As some of you may be aware, using the bare global variables (e.g. wgPageTitle or wgNamespaceNumber) has been deprecated for some time, where instead mw.config.get('wgPageTitle') should be used (more info at mediawiki). A lot of customized user javascript pages still use these deprecated global "wg" variables, but as these will at some point stop working, the most imported scripts have now either been dealt with or will be in the near future.Remaining, though, are users' individual skin customization pages (e.g. common.js or vector.js). Alongside some discussion on WP:IANB, I've made a list of every such skin page using legacy variables, and would like to start fixing the pages of active users so these deprecated things can be turned off without causing mass-disruption; every edit would be manual with regex and AWB, a process already effective. That discussion has some links to prior discussion and more info, and although this should be a largely unnoticed process, I thought folks should be aware of it. Global interface editors and staffers have already been making edits, and will continue do so otherwise. ~ Amory <small style="color:#555"> (u • t • c) 22:09, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Square brackets in quotes with links
I've been looking for a fix or work-around for a minor issue regarding quoted text in articles.

Under the usual rules in journalism (Strunk & White, et. al.), when an author inserts additional info in a quotation for clarification it is placed in brackets rather than parentheses to indicate this is not part of the original quote.

In Wikipedia such additional info is often in the form of a link, especially where non-English sources are being quoted. However, since links are formatted using brackets, there seems to be no way to also use brackets to indicate that this is additional info. Any attempt to do so messes up the formatting. The fallback is to use parentheses, but this is misleading to the reader as it appears to be part of the actual quote.

As an example from my most recent work: "The 84th Guards Division (commanded by Major General Georgii Borisovich Peters) was formed in the Kuybyshevsky district of Moscow as the 4th Moscow Division of the People's Militia (Narodnoe Opolcheniye)." In this instance the first parentheses are from the the original document. The second is from my insertion of a relevant link, and it should be in brackets, but I can't figure out any way to make it so. Wreck Smurfy (talk) 02:12, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
 * There are several ways to do it, e.g.: [ Narodnoe Opolcheniye] [Narodnoe Opolcheniye] &#91;Narodnoe Opolcheniye]. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:30, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Much obliged. Wreck Smurfy (talk) 00:00, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

Need help in desigining Mainpage
Hi there, im writing om behalf of Hindi Wikipedia, we have been redesigning our main page, ive been doing most of the work on it. However, the 'Main Page' title still appears on our [hi.wikipedia.org main page], we want to remove it. I however have no Idea on how to do it. can someone pleae help me with it, or help direct me to a place where I can get help. Thankyou. 🙏  Innocentbunny     TALK  22:37, 29 January 2021 (UTC)


 * @Innocentbunny, on your Wiki's common.css add   - this should hide the main page title. See mw:Manual:FAQ ✨ <span style="font-family:'Roboto',sans-serif;font-weight:300;text-shadow: 2px 2px 10px black;color:black;">Ed   talk!  ✨ 22:57, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * You may be interested in MediaWiki:Vector.css where we hide other things on the Main Page, e.g.  because the page itself is rarely edited and we don't want readers to think we aren't updated. The English Wikipedia does not allow images in signatures per Signatures. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:18, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Hey thanks a lot Ed, I think it will work, will follow up. looks very helpful thankyou, and thanks for pointing out, i changed my signature :)   Innocentbunny     TALK  04:27, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Tools/Navigation shortcuts isn't working because Template:Navshortcuts has been deleted
So I had come across what I thought could be a helpful tool to have in Wikipedia:Tools/Navigation shortcuts. I put it in my common.js and saved before I realised that the template it links to in Template:Navshortcuts has been deleted. It appears users thought it wasn't a template and then it was a test page. So it maybe a case that this is all so old now and not usable but I'm wondering if there is anything can be done to recreate it? I'd even have the script on one of my own pages if we can have the original template back. I just don't know what the script will be. NZFC <sup style="color:black">(talk) <sup style="color:black">(cont)  02:34, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
 * , it looks like you can just install it like a normal script using the code  –  Brandon XLF  (talk) 04:12, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks BrandonXLF, I'll have a play with that. (I really don't know what I'm doing with code and normally just follow steps but I'm learning. NZFC  <sup style="color:black">(talk) <sup style="color:black">(cont)  08:26, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
 * The 2017 deletion of navshortcuts looks wrong; the tagger and admin likely didn't examine the page carefully enough and used an invalid rationale. (The 2018 deletion was for spam.) I restored it and added documentation. If this should be deleted, it needs to go through TFD. The reason the documentation doesn't just ask you to add /  seems to be because the script adds some extra configuration to your common.js. —  The Earwig   talk  20:25, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
 * So people are being encouraged to subst that into their common.js? It should be fully protected, for obvious reasons. Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 20:31, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
 * You are absolutely right (I protected load user script under the same rationale a few days ago). Done. —  The Earwig   talk 20:35, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks! Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 20:47, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Thabks all, appreciate you looking into it for me and the outcome. NZFC  <sup style="color:black">(talk) <sup style="color:black">(cont)  04:28, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

== to your personal CSS page, which will display many other "possibly wrong" things (which is why maintenance messages are hidden by default). --Izno (talk) 20:40, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks @Izno. That code detected the error, so now I will be warned in future. --Verbarson (talk) 21:49, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

Userbox bug affecting an enclosing table
I have placed the Userbox in my user page where it forms part of a table. In order to get the table to display correctly, I had to add &lt;/td>&lt;td> after the template to start a new cell, instead of putting ||. This still happens when I remove the England parameter (and live on Planet Earth). It does not occur for any of the other userboxes I currently use. I assume this is a bug in the template, as it appears no different to other Userboxes in usage or presentation.

Verbarson (talk) 20:31, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I have removed in initial newline from User lives in. Table syntax with  to separate cells must be on a line starting with  . Before my edit, the template broke that. You could have started the next cell on a new line with  . PrimeHunter (talk) 21:26, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks. It's working like all the others now. --Verbarson (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 21:55, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

東京
I attempted to move 東京 to 東京 (disambiguation). The move should overwrite the redirect at 東京 (disambiguation), which points to 東京 and only has one edit. However an error message popped up preventing me from moving the page. HELP 053pvr (talk) 22:29, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Which error message and why do you want it moved? I'm not moving it without knowing the reason or language. If you want to redirect 東京 to Tokyo then it looks like the target would need a hatnote like:


 * That's ugly to English readers who don't know Japanese. Tokyo gets 2600 times as many views as 東京, so very few readers would potentially save a click. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:00, 1 February 2021 (UTC)
 * ok, not moving it. (Sorry if this attempted page move caused any disruption.) 053pvr (talk) 00:11, 1 February 2021 (UTC)

Allow banned sources in talk pages
Sometimes in Talk or Wikipedia namespace it's useful to be able to link to sources that would never be acceptable in Main space. My current occurrence was naturalnews, but some others were while trying to edit old archives from WP:ITN which included now blacklisted links. Anyway, maybe take a feature to selectively enable that feature by namespace. --LaserLegs (talk) 02:06, 30 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Support There's a charitable project to turn Tolkien's home into a literary centre. There's an associated Kickstarter and so I put a link when I mentioned it in a related discussion.  I was disgusted to find this being censored by an automated blacklist.  It's vexatious bureaucracy like this which is steadily stifling Wikipedia. Andrew🐉(talk) 10:31, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
 * The problem is when spam (or other bad intentioned types) or uninformed persons would wish to add such links to talk pages. Although I see few reasons to link directly to a WP:PRIMARY source like this (such as a kickstarter page would be - if the kickstarter is worthy of mention, you'd ideally have a secondary source reporting on it), I'd support if this was maybe restricted to either users on a whitelist or ECP editors or something like that (more restrictive than just AC). RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 00:34, 1 February 2021 (UTC)

Help – Signpost template too large error
Hey, could somebody take a look at WT:Wikipedia Signpost ... it looks like it might be due to a template-too-large error. We have implemented a workaround, so it's not a showstopper, but it should get fixed before the next edition. ☆ Bri (talk) 02:36, 1 February 2021 (UTC)

Unable to set Pending Changes
I noted here that I am no longer able to set Pending Changes protection for articles. I have full access to the semi-protection fields, and the Move Protection option opens up when I click "unlock further protect options", but the Pending Changes box remains greyed-out and unclickable. I've tried logging out and back in again and the same issue occurs whether I use Firefox (my default browser) or Chrome. I'm using the Monobook Skin. .-- Jezebel's Ponyo bons mots 16:47, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * what is the page you are trying to do this for? Can you copy the full URL of the page while you are trying to unsuccessfully make this adjustment? — xaosflux  Talk 16:55, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * If it is any page, try this page and see if you can access the PC section? — xaosflux  Talk 16:56, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I cannot set pending changes on any article page, including the one you linked.-- Jezebel's Ponyo bons mots 17:01, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * are you by chance blocking javascript either specifically or with a browser extension? In Chrome, try to open an incognito mode window, log on and try again with the link I put above.  Next thing to try, if you use keyboard controls and TAB between the fields, does it enter the PC section or skip over it? —  xaosflux  Talk 17:06, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I'm not blocking javascript, and pending changes still remains greyed out in Chrome incognito mode. Tabbing skips over the pending changes box. It goes from the question mark beside the words Pending Changes and skips down to the "Other/additional reasons" field.-- Jezebel's Ponyo bons mots 17:13, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I can't imagine it should help, but I'm going to reset your +sysop status. — xaosflux  Talk 17:17, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I really don't think it will matter - but please try to log out, log back in now and try again at this new random page here. — xaosflux  Talk 17:20, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Logged out (upon which my Firefox coincidentally updated) and back in, but PC options are still unclickable. I also tried switching to Vector, but it didn't make a difference.-- Jezebel's Ponyo bons mots 17:24, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Just chipping in to say it's the same for me. I also use Firefox, so I wondered if it was browser-related, but I've tried in Chrome and Edge and it's the same.  I'm also not blocking Javascript. Black Kite (talk) 17:34, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * At least I'm in good company.-- Jezebel's Ponyo bons mots 17:46, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * OK lets try something to see if it is client-side or permissions-side:


 * 1) Go to this page
 * 2) Click on "Make request" at the top.  This will fail.
 * 3) Click on Correct token and resubmit at the bottom
 * 4) See if it added 1 hour of PC1 to Foo or if it failed (get the failure message).
 * — xaosflux  Talk 18:46, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I believe it failed. There is a red message that states:

"error": { "code": "stabilize_denied", "info": "Permission denied.", "*": "See https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php for API usage. Subscribe to the mediawiki-api-announce mailing list at &lt;https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-api-announce&gt; for notice of API deprecations and breaking changes." },   "servedby": "mw1363"
 * -- Jezebel's Ponyo bons mots 19:08, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * thank you for the updates, I've opened bug: T273317 on this issue. — xaosflux  Talk 19:15, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Working again now. Looks like 660007 fixed it. Black Kite (talk) 00:45, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Could this have anything to do with the fact some edits by AC users are somehow not accepted (see my thread above)? RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 17:41, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

Hello everyone, a brief update on this issue. When we noticed this issue, we decided to rollback all wikis to previous MediaWiki version (wmf.27), which fixed this. Right now, we believe the issue is successfully fixed by reverting two problematic patches, and we tested the fix at test2.wikipedia.org, which has FlaggedRevs enabled. Right now, all wikis but Wikipedias (including the English Wikipedia) are at wmf.28, while Wikipedias are still at wmf.27. Wikipedias should be upgraded later today, so we can proceed with the next version (wmf.29) on Tuesday, per the regular process. We're pretty certain the issue is fixed, and won't reappear, but if this becomes a problem again, please ping me, so I can investigate more. Best, --Martin Urbanec (talk) 14:17, 1 February 2021 (UTC)

editautopatrolprotected level of protection
Hello everyone, I'm on ckbwiki. A while ago, Mediawiki had added a new level of protection called editautoautorollprotected. Now, that level is not in Module:Protected edit request/active. For example, see ckb:وتووێژی داڕێژە:زانیاریدانی ئەنیمانگا/سەر, which is written that the protection level (editautoautorollprotected) is unknown as an error message. I edited the module according to exist codes (See the diff), but it didn't work. Can anyone help us? Thank you! ⇒ Aram  Talk  20:17, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * , in the diff you posted, the user group was 'editautopatrolprotected'; I corrected it in the thread title. It looks like it was, added in January 2020. I can't tell you any more than that, but perhaps someone else here can read the Phabricator/MediaWiki tea leaves. Best of luck, BlackcurrantTea (talk) 11:08, 1 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Hello, this was a change made by me. Long story short, protection levels should generally have their own user right, rather than bind to some other already existing rights. Such rights are usually named editXXprotected, where XX is a string that explains the purpose of the protection well. For instance, fully protected pages use editprotected as the controlling right. Some wikis, like Czech Wikipedia, assign this right to non-sysop group(s) as well, allowing users in that group edit pages that are normally sysop-only. That's why I made MediaWiki to use editautopatrolprotected rather than the right autopatrol, which, by itself, means something different (it makes your edits as patrolled automatically). That makes the effect of individual rights more expectable.
 * I did not realize wikis might use a module with hardcoded protection levels. I fixed your Lua module. It no longer throws an error, through since I'm not a ckb speaker, I can't verify it displays what it is supposed to.
 * Best, --Martin Urbanec (talk) 13:15, 1 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Thank you both PrimeHunter and Snaevar that I saw your efforts to fix the problem!
 * And thank you BlackcurrantTea, you replied to me and opened a door to solve the problem! And finally, thank you Martin Urbanec to solve the problem! Your edits were very good for solving the problem and now the template is shown properly and the error message is gone. Thank you all! ⇒ Aram  Talk  14:35, 1 February 2021 (UTC)

Sortable tables on mobile
It's 2021, and our sortable tables still somehow aren't sortable on mobile. Is this sitting as a request somewhere, and if so, how do we give it a boost? &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 23:49, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
 * That would be T233340. the wub "?!"  00:24, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
 * , This issue is important and on quotehow do we give it a boost?/quote:
 * I think the way for that would be to make WMF implement easy-to-implement and overdue measures Wikipedia, as one of the world's largest websites (additionally equipped with millions of dollars), has at its disposal to a) attract more developers b) increase the efficiency and time of their work.
 * This is would be one of the most important things WMF could do in 2021, is something they should have done years ago and would basically only require one WMF individual to spend 2 days or so. Hence it is only a matter of will / decision-making.
 * Increasing the number of volunteer - and maybe some paid - developers is very likely to speed up such obviously overdue issues with the mobile website, the mobile apps and MediaWiki. Prototyperspective (talk) 12:39, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
 * This is would be one of the most important things WMF could do in 2021, is something they should have done years ago and would basically only require one WMF individual to spend 2 days or so. Hence it is only a matter of will / decision-making.
 * Increasing the number of volunteer - and maybe some paid - developers is very likely to speed up such obviously overdue issues with the mobile website, the mobile apps and MediaWiki. Prototyperspective (talk) 12:39, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Increasing the number of volunteer - and maybe some paid - developers is very likely to speed up such obviously overdue issues with the mobile website, the mobile apps and MediaWiki. Prototyperspective (talk) 12:39, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

I'd like to second the need to prioritize this. It is frustrating and honestly rude to the reader that this functionality is removed on mobile – both the app and mobile browser. And on mobile Chrome browser "Request Desktop Site" just redirects back to the mobile page, even though I can manually remove the "m." from the url and sortability works. Wikipedia used to have many duplicative articles (actually still does) with related data but sorted differently, but sortable tables made these unnecessary and encouraged merges. The long-term failure to implement this capability removes the ability of mobile readers to get the best understanding in an article that its writers deliberately made possible. Thanks, Reywas92Talk 04:25, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

Trouble creating User:54nd60x/skin.css
Not that I want to create the page yet, but I am wondering, why is it impossible to create the page? Unlike trying to edit the page WP:123, which instantly redirects to 123, the skin page doesn’t work when you are logged in. In fact, you can’t even protect the page (I’m not admin) but when I tried to do it https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:54nd60x&action=protect it went to User:54nd60x/timeless.css a few seconds later because I use the timeless skin. So who can directly create the page? It wouldn’t be a problem for non-logged in users (I tried going to the skin.css page while logged out it doesn’t redirect.) Again, I’m not trying to create the page, but I just noticed this unusual pattern while trying to create the page and it surprised me. 54nd60x (talk) 03:11, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
 * This is not a real page. It exists solely as a Javascript redirect. If you want one for timeless, you have the above; if you want one for all skins, that exists at User:54nd60x/common.css. --Izno (talk) 03:59, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
 * The code is in MediaWiki:Group-user.js. It enables links Special:MyPage/skin.css and Special:MyPage/skin.js to take any user with JavaScript to the css and js page for their current skin. PrimeHunter (talk) 09:43, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
 * if you really want to create that page you can - it won't do anything useful and will just be a pain for anyone in the future though so I suggest against this. — xaosflux  Talk 14:17, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the advice. Actually, I never planned to create the page in the first place, it just surprised me that the redirect was not instant, but there was a small delay in the redirect. Now I know that it is because it is a JavaScript redirect and can be disabled, so that was the reason for the delay. 54nd60x (talk) 14:24, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

Animations/gifs don't play
I uploaded this animation and tried adding it to 2020 SO: but the animation does not play despite only being the small thumbnail.

On the file's pages (Commons and WP) it displays: Note: Due to technical limitations, thumbnails of high resolution GIF images such as this one will not be animated.

How to add it in a way to make it play without having to upload a smaller version (there already are smaller rendered other resolutions)?

If that's currently not possible are there phabricator issues for this problem?

--Prototyperspective (talk) 23:53, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
 * The limit is width × height × frames < mw:Manual:$wgMaxAnimatedGifArea. Wikimedia wikis set it to 100 million in . commons:File:The Looping Orbits of 2020 SO.gif is 836 × 480 × 375 frames = 150,480,000. This would work: 681 × 391 × 375 frames = 99,998,250. Or 836 × 480 × 249 frames = 99,918,720. I haven't found a Phabricator request to increase the current limit. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:22, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
 * , increasing the limit and/or solving issues due to which it exists/is that low would be the proper, longer-term solution but there should already be a way to get these gifs to play without doing so: there is a rendered 320 × 184 px version of the animation: how can one use this smaller version or is that not possible? Prototyperspective (talk) 00:29, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
 * The 320 × 184 px version is not animated. You have to either upload an animated gif with width × height × frames < 100 million, or display it at the uploaded size. That works. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:37, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
 * , I have to revise my previous comment: increasing the limit and/or solving issues due to which it exists/is that low isn't necessarily a better / more proper longer-term solution in this case.
 * → The better solution would be to make pages use the downsized thumbnail version / a version automatically downsized to below that limit. Just like with images, pages don't need to use the full-size .gif when the animation is displayed in a smaller size on it.
 * (Whether or not larger animations could play isn't necessarily relevant for this. And only after this has been implemented would raising the limit be a longer-term solution to remaining issues and may currently not be appropriate - and possibly never so due to e.g. new file-formats.)
 * I made a separate upload (with which the animation does play) because I could not use the "Upload another version of this file"-functionality for this without reducing the main file's size (which could get automatically downsized renderings linked).
 * I will create a phabricator issue for it and link it here. Prototyperspective (talk) 14:03, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
 * , well.. you really shouldn't be using gifs as movies. Movies are movies. upload a movie instead of a gif. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 14:44, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I made a separate upload (with which the animation does play) because I could not use the "Upload another version of this file"-functionality for this without reducing the main file's size (which could get automatically downsized renderings linked).
 * I will create a phabricator issue for it and link it here. Prototyperspective (talk) 14:03, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
 * , well.. you really shouldn't be using gifs as movies. Movies are movies. upload a movie instead of a gif. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 14:44, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
 * , well.. you really shouldn't be using gifs as movies. Movies are movies. upload a movie instead of a gif. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 14:44, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-05
<section begin="technews-2021-W05"/> 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
 * IPv6 addresses were written in lowercase letters in diffs. This caused dead links since Special:Contributions only accepted uppercase letters for the IPs. This has been fixed.

Changes later this week
 * You can soon use Wikidata to link to pages on the multilingual Wikisource.
 * Often editors use a "non-breaking space" to make a gap between two items when reading but still show them together. This can be used to avoid a line break. You will now be able to add new ones via the special character tool in the 2010, 2017, and visual editors. The character will be shown in the visual editor as a space with a grey background.
 * Octicons-tools.svg Wikis use abuse filters to stop bad edits being made. Filter maintainers can now use syntax like  as well as the   syntax for IP ranges.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from . It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from . It will be on all wikis from (calendar).

Future changes
 * Minerva is the skin Wikimedia wikis use for mobile traffic. When a page is protected and you can't edit it you can normally read the source wikicode. This doesn't work on Minerva on mobile devices. This is being fixed. Some text might overlap. This is because your community needs to update MediaWiki:Protectedpagetext to work on mobile. You can read more.
 * Octicons-tools.svg Cloud VPS and Toolforge will change the IP address they use to contact the wikis. The new IP address will be . This will happen on February 8. You can read more.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. <section end="technews-2021-W05"/> 22:37, 1 February 2021 (UTC)


 * As the way Tech News is written is the most common feature to be pointed out both in positive and a negative feedback, I have been making an en-gb version of Tech News for some months now. It's not necessarily British, but it merges extremely short sentences together and allows for terms that anyone well-versed in the English language would understand. Well-versed for example is a term you probably wouldn't find in the regular Tech News. Here's the above issue in en-gb. I also occasionally add some additional explanation or the situation for a particular issue on English-language projects. I haven't really advertised it, pageviews are generally disappointing. I'd like to hear some feedback. Do you like it? Do you have suggestions? — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 06:15, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
 * my suggestion has nothing to do with content, just execution - we generally discourage anyone to use en-variants as their interface language since there isn't an en-gbwiki (or en-auwiki, etc) - and especially here on enwiki they will miss out on a LOT of localize interface messages since we don't translate them to the variants and variant-fallback support is subpar. — xaosflux  Talk 14:25, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
 * This way I've been able to produce this version without spending a lot of time. Actually forking the newsletter is both much more work and would reduce exposure even further. The en-gb version isn't distributed to any wiki, the only way to read it is by going to meta, so I'm not sure what localized interface messages have to do with this. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 14:39, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
 * was just noting that we generally discourage the use of /en-xx pages because almost noone has it as their language pref, and we suggest noone does use it as their pref for the reasons above - no concern with this specific example! — xaosflux  Talk 14:57, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Made a central feedback thread at m:Talk:Tech/News/2021/05/en-gb. Maybe should have done that from the start. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 15:02, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

“New” skin
Hello, I was just browsing Wikipedia on my mobile device and I came across this “skin:”



However, it is not one of the five skins in preferences, and it is also not cologneblue or apioutput.. Doesn’t look like the Nostalgia skin either. So is this even a skin? If yes, what skin is this? If not, why and when does this appear? This “skin” doesn’t appear to me too often but it does occur occasionally. 54nd60x (talk) 09:18, 2 February 2021 (UTC)


 * That looks like it's just missing CSS. It probably means there's some connection problem, which caused the CSS to not load. --rchard2scout (talk) 09:24, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
 * What Rchard said. --Izno (talk) 15:35, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

Is there a way to make a number count up every week?
For example, on WWE Raw the episode number is manually increased by +1 each week. This can be easily missed by editors, and if there's a factual error it means we're worsening the problem by adding a number each week. It would be grand if there was a way for this number to increase by one automatically every Monday. WWE rarely ever misses shows of Raw: they even filmed a live one on Christmas Day in 2019. Automating this seems like a no-brainer. Additionally, it would need to start on 1445 as that's the current number of episodes. — <i style="color:#8000FF">Czello</i> 16:05, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
 * The magic word   is the current week number. You could add that to the episode number for Christmas Day — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 16:25, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
 * It would roll over at the start of each year setting the number backwards. -- Green  C  19:02, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Suppose you knew the 1000th episode was on January 1, 2016 (numbers made up). Then you could calculate  &rarr; . If they ever went off schedule, you could adjust the starting point. That said, I'm not convinced this is a great idea. —  The Earwig   talk  16:32, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

According to IMDB the 28th season had 56 episodes. This suggest not all are 7 days apart, need to verify. -- Green  C  17:33, 2 February 2021 (UTC)


 * This is partially because of inconsistent "season" length (what they call a season is fairly arbitrary); it's not a perfect 52-week thing. However, Raw is always on a Monday night so it shouldn't really have to change from a 7-day thing. — <i style="color:#8000FF">Czello</i> 17:48, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

I guess it would be pretty simple:  though I added a new numeric feature to  to make it work. It says add the number of weeks since 2021-02-01 to 1445. -- Green  C  18:53, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
 * To add or subtract edge cases could do something like  so it is self-documenting. --  Green  C  18:59, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

Parser string functions not expanding
Why are Parser string functions not being expanded in Special:ExpandTemplates? Or in my sandbox, or here either, for that matter:

I'm pretty sure this worked before. I must be doing something incredibly dumb; when you stop snickering, please clue me in; what am I missing? Mathglot (talk) 21:26, 2 February 2021 (UTC)


 * T8455 suggests these were never enabled, and the supported alternative is to use Lua modules, like Module:String. —  The Earwig   talk 21:38, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
 * , that looks very familiar, must be what I remember about working before. Maybe this isn't the right venue, but couldn't those functions be repurposed as wrappers to the Module?  Or maybe, just create templates with the same name, minus the hash... er, wait, maybe that exists already?  Time out... Mathglot (talk) 21:45, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
 * They ought to be:
 * {{len|Icecream } =
 * but apparently aren't.
 * Also, I can't quite make uot if T8455 means they weren't enabled for en-wiki, or weren't enabled at all. If the latter, then there should be no objection if I delete/hide the information at mediawiki, and refer people to the Module instead, right? Mathglot (talk) 21:55, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
 * The ticket says they weren't enabled for WMF wikis, but they are still a part of the MediaWiki extension and may be enabled on other third-party wikis, so I wouldn't change anything there. No opposition to creating convenience templates like pos and len, though perhaps some other people watching this page have stronger opinions about that. —  The Earwig   talk 22:00, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
 * That makes sense, thanks. I've added a discussion at mw, which I need to go modify given this new data. Thanks again, Mathglot (talk) 22:15, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
 * String split already exists for #explode, Str len for #len, Str mid for #sub and Str find for #pos. #rpos is probably somewhere out there too. — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 22:25, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
 * , excellent; that saves me the time of creating them. I'll maybe make some template redirects so they match the Parser function names more closely, for folks who search for them that way. Too bad sub is taken for subscript, but substr ought to do the trick for most folks as a mnemonic name to find the wrapper with. Thanks much for this. Cheers, Mathglot (talk) 00:30, 3 February 2021 (UTC)
 * The ticket says they weren't enabled for WMF wikis, but they are still a part of the MediaWiki extension and may be enabled on other third-party wikis, so I wouldn't change anything there. No opposition to creating convenience templates like pos and len, though perhaps some other people watching this page have stronger opinions about that. —  The Earwig   talk 22:00, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
 * That makes sense, thanks. I've added a discussion at mw, which I need to go modify given this new data. Thanks again, Mathglot (talk) 22:15, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
 * String split already exists for #explode, Str len for #len, Str mid for #sub and Str find for #pos. #rpos is probably somewhere out there too. — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 22:25, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
 * , excellent; that saves me the time of creating them. I'll maybe make some template redirects so they match the Parser function names more closely, for folks who search for them that way. Too bad sub is taken for subscript, but substr ought to do the trick for most folks as a mnemonic name to find the wrapper with. Thanks much for this. Cheers, Mathglot (talk) 00:30, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

MediaWiki namespace edit requests
In the future, can I post edit requests to the MediaWiki namespace here instead of on the talk page? I submitted some edit requests and the talk page says "Talk pages in this namespace are generally not watched by many users." I know that the edit requests are tracked, but I still think that announcing it here would bring more people to the discussion. 54nd60x (talk) 02:59, 3 February 2021 (UTC)
 * the edit request backlog is actually watched pretty well ( c.f. User:AnomieBOT/PERTable). Keep in mind, for non-customized messages we generally won't customize them without good reason; for ones that are about some special process - a venue common to that process is usually a good place to at least cross-advertise. VPT should only be for something primarily technical in the messages. —  xaosflux  Talk 03:52, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

Annual readership not working on all browsers/OSs
I went to post a note on the template talk page, and noted others were having the same problem. For me, it works in Chrome and FF on MS, but not in FF on Mint. (Though it does work in Falkon on Mint.) Others have had problems in Chrome, dating back to Sept., but didn't specify their OS. — kwami (talk) 07:50, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

Mystery modification
I prepared the wikitext of a response to a question at the Reference Desk offline in a text editor and then copied it over to the Wikipedia edit window using copy–paste. In doing so I must have made the mistake of giving the paste command twice, because the text was duplicated. At least, I assume that was my fault. In previewing I did not notice the duplication, but I saw a mark-up error, which I corrected in the second pasted copy before "publishing". Afterwards, it turned out there had been another modification, in the first of the two pasted copies: the text "the realm of" has been replaced there by " ". I swear I did not make this senseless change. Its provenance is a complete mystery to me. Does this ring any bells with anyone? --Lambiam 12:13, 3 February 2021 (UTC)
 * It could happen if "realm" was marked in the edit area and you accidentally clicked  in the "Wiki markup" selection of the drop-down menu below the edit area. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:23, 3 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks, that must have been it. --Lambiam 14:35, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

Need some help building a proforma with sections autofilled based on username
Hi all

I've spent quite a lot of time building a resource to help keep people's multiple sandboxes organised to make writing draft articles and publishing them a bit easier


 * User:John_Cummings/sandbox

Whilst people can simply copy the page and change the name in the wiki text manually I would really like to make a page on Wikipedia where people can make their own version of this simply by clicking a button, this will make it easier to discover and also use the tool.

To make a version of this page for other users all that needs to happen is for my name to be replaced in the wikicode with the user who wants to use it (I have instructions at the bottom of the page for doing this manually). Because the page uses multiple tools there are two versions of the username that have to be replaced, one which replaces a space with a '+' and another which replaces a space with _, eg John+Cummings and John_Cummings.

Does anyone have an idea of how to create a button that would


 * 1) Read someone's username
 * 2) Add their username to a proforma adding in their username with either a '+' or a '_' in different places in the proforma (people can have 0 or 1 or 2 or a lot of spaces in their username)
 * 3) Saves the page or makes it very obvious how to save the page, either overwriting their existing sandbox or letting users chose where to save the page

Thanks

John Cummings (talk) 15:23, 20 January 2021 (UTC)


 * If I understand what you're asking, maybe an Edit link with a preloaded page (copy of your sandbox somewhere) and a Template to substitute their name, which would be pulled from magic word REVISIONUSER? Mathglot (talk) 19:36, 20 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Take a look at how we manage signups for the GOCE copy edit drives. There might be code in there that is helpful. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:41, 20 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Thanks very much and  the bit I'm really stuck on is how to take a username with a space in and replace the space with a + in some places and a _ in other places on the same preload? John Cummings (talk) 20:00, 20 January 2021 (UTC)


 * try mw:Help:Extension:ParserFunctions. Mathglot (talk) 20:24, 20 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Hmm, I see what you mean, I think... maybe the preload page should just be a one-line, template invocation of a second page which has your actual sandbox data, with the template of your design in the preload, which executes the task of replacing tokens in the second page with the userid the way you want it. Never tried that with a preload, and not sure if it will work; try it and let us know. Mathglot (talk) 20:31, 20 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I have used  to automatically get the username in an unchanged copy. I also made some other changes.   with   makes url encoding in magic words. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:15, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Direct link for users to create their own sandbox manager. Only needs saving. Seems to work well, with this account and with my space-containing old account as well. --mfb (talk) 14:30, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
 * (edit conflict) If your /sandbox doesn't exist then [https:/wiki/Special:MyPage/sandbox?action=edit&preload=User:John_Cummings/sandbox&summary= this] will open an edit window to create it with User:John Cummings/sandbox preloaded. There is no preload if the sandbox exists.
 * Adding  will add a new section with the preload whether the page exists or not: [https:/wiki/Special:MyPage/sandbox?action=edit&preload=User:John_Cummings/sandbox&section=new&preloadtitle=]
 * can specify a section name which will also be in the automatic edit summary. It's blank in my example. I don't think you can make a preload command to overwrite existing content. You cannot preload from another wiki. mfb's link makes /Sandbox with uppercase S. This is not the link on "sandbox" in the default interface. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:35, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Fixed the sandbox capitalization. In the German Wikipedia we made a template that does nothing but providing "$1", that way you can preload arbitrary text by using that template as preload and passing your text as parameter. If there would be a software solution for arbitrary preload texts (instead of pages) this could be made more international. --mfb (talk) 05:54, 22 January 2021 (UTC)

,, , thanks so much for your work on this, I've got a bit lost with the technical language, could someone recap to now what works and doesn't work? I'm not sure how to test it myself as I already have it on my sandbox and if I blank it and try to load the link above it just loads a blank page. Just FYI it seems that has created a template at 'Template:Sandbox organizer' but not sure how this works or if it could be helpful building a button for people to use to make their own sandbox organiser. John Cummings (talk) 10:10, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
 * It's perfectly fine to register a second account for tests like that. Just don't abuse it. Above you can find links that will work for users who don't have a sandbox yet, and the new section link will work even if people have a sandbox already (but it will be below whatever is in there). The links all load the content of your sandbox organizer, so if you blank that there is nothing left to load. --mfb (talk) 12:48, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
 * thanks very much, how difficult would it be to make it load from the template rather than my personal sandbox? I feel like this is a much better long term solution. John Cummings (talk) 13:10, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
 * trivial, just change  to   in the URL and make sure that template has the same code. --mfb (talk) 13:48, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

Thanks I created User:John_Cummings/sandbox2 using https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:MyPage/sandbox&preload=User:Template:Sandbox_organiser&action=edit however it doesn't work correctly and just makes broken links in the page, I just tried to import all the changes that  made to my userpage over to the template and it broke the template. Any ideas how to fix it? I feel like we are very close to making it work and then I can write all the documentation. Thanks very much for your help John Cummings (talk) 15:03, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
 * The link to load Template:Sandbox organizer in /sandbox2 (if that page doesn't exist) would be https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:MyPage/sandbox2&preload=Template:Sandbox_organizer&action=edit. My code in User:John Cummings/sandbox works fine when it's copied to somebody's userspace and can read their username. I could set a username (e.g. yours) to use as an example when the code is not in userspace. Do you want that? It's simple to make but it adds extra code with a username to each of the 15 . Users who copy it may find it odd and wonder whether something is wrong if they see somebody else's username 15 times in the wikitext. At Template:Sandbox organizer the current code in User:John Cummings/sandbox would make links for User:Sandbox organizer. I have created that account and can mail you the password if you want to use it as an example user. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:52, 28 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Hi, thanks very much for your reply, I think I've understood at least 50% of it so far... So I think the best option would be to copy the way it works in my sandbox over to the template, that way its not reliant on my user account and people can make improvements over time. Is that possible? I just want to make it a easy as possible for people to be able to add the sandbox organiser to their sandbox by pressing a button on a page of instructions (I guess on the template page), if they could also just copy someone else's sandbox organiser from someone elses page that would be great also but not sure if that is what you meant. Thanks again John Cummings (talk) 21:26, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
 * My version at User:John Cummings/sandbox can already be copied to the userspace of any user, work correctly for that user, and be copied by others users to work correctly for them. You said it makes "broken links" at Template:Sandbox organizer. The question is which links you want the code to make when it's viewed on the template page and not copied to a user. My version makes links for User:Sandbox organizer because that's in the page name. The current version at Template:Sandbox organizer is coded to make links for User:Example. It's not possible to make links for whichever user is currently viewing the page Template:Sandbox organizer. When viewed there, it has to either make links for a specific user or disable the links. I can code my version to make links for User:Example on the template page, and still make links for a user who copies the code to their userspace. Do you want that? The code will look a little more complicated, e.g. replacing each of 15  with  . That is designed to also work at other wikis. If it only has to work at the English Wikipedia then it could use template other and say  . PrimeHunter (talk) 22:38, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

Hi

Thanks so much for trying to explain things, honestly I'm pretty lost now with the new account and the template stuff, whatever way you think works best. Maybe if I just outline again the functionality and you make the magic happen whichever way you think will be the best option?


 * 1) A central page somewhere that people can go to find and understand what Sandbox organiser is.
 * 2) A button on that central page that creates a sandbox organiser for users.
 * 3) The sandbox organiser 'master copy' to not be my sandbox so I don't have to keep it the same for ever :)

I was thinking about asking for the button to be added to the bottom of the sandbox organiser as well but encouraging people to go get the most up to date version on the centralised page is probably a good idea. I assume people will adapt it to specific use cases and perhaps there could be several different ones people could chose from.

Thanks again

John Cummings (talk) 00:10, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Make two different pages. It's messy to put everything on the same page. A page describing and showing the sandbox organizer with a button to create one. And separate from that the template that gets preloaded, this one is never meant to be viewed directly by users so broken links there don't matter - the links are fine once it's used on sandbox pages. The second page can be what used to be your own sandbox. The first page can be whatever layout you want. --mfb (talk) 00:29, 29 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Yes thanks what I meant by a 'central page' and then a 'master copy', glad to know I've understood some of what is needed to make this happen :) John Cummings (talk) 01:04, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

did I do this part right? User:Sandbox organizer/sandbox and then I just need to use a link but this one doesn't work and I don't understand why.... https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:MyPage/sandbox&preload=User:Sandbox_organizer/sandbox&action=edit ? John Cummings (talk) 19:12, 29 January 2021 (UTC)
 * It works for users who don't have a sandbox yet. To make it work for everyone use the link that creates a new section. --mfb (talk) 11:41, 1 February 2021 (UTC)
 * sorry, I don't understand, which is the link that I should use that uses User:Sandbox organizer/sandbox to make a sandbox for anyone including people who already have a page called sandbox (which is probably most users of this)? Please just paste it in your answer and then I can go do everything else so people can use it. John Cummings (talk) 18:24, 3 February 2021 (UTC)
 * There is exactly one link posted here that has "section" in it. I can't believe it's too complicated to find that. --mfb (talk) 04:23, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

En Dashes on Template:Excerpt
Template:Excerpt doesn't recognize en-dashes when taking out some paragraphs, only hyphens, and if I put an en dash there it just thinks nothing is there at all. Since MOS:DASH and some some scripts that I use to clean up are a thing, it makes it a bit tricky. Could someone go in there and make it accept en dashes or something? Thanks. <em style="font-family:Lucida;color:Indigo">Flalf <em style="font-family:Lucida;color:Indigo">Talk 05:11, 4 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Are you saying you want to write, using an en-dash (1–2) instead of a hyphen (1-2)? If so, that's technically possible but... highly inadvisable, in my opinion. The template argument isn't prose so MOS:DASH needn't apply. This diff suggests the dashes user script should leave it alone. —  The  Earwig ⟨talk⟩ 05:46, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Ah, missed that you linked User:GregU/dashes.js and I linked to User:Ohconfucius/dashes.js. The latter seems to be forked from the former, and has fixed this problem. —  The  Earwig ⟨talk⟩ 05:56, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

Bug report for Excerpt
I don't know if anyone watches the talk page, so reporting here as well. See: Module talk:Excerpt. Cheers, &middot; &middot; &middot; Peter Southwood (talk): 09:55, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

Is linking to articles beginning with a slash impossible in summaries?
Take a look at the summary of this diff. Even though I used  with a colon in the summary as I did on the page (proof), it's linked to Talk:Near-open front unrounded vowel/æ/ raising, not /æ/ raising. (1) Has it always been like this? IIRC I feel like the summary parser would correctly point a link like this to the page in the main namespace. (2) Is there a way to link to /æ/ raising in a summary in a namespace that allows subpages? Nardog (talk) 14:14, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I tried adding multiple colons and three is apparently the Goldilocks number. One or two gives a subpage link. Four or more gives no link at all. On a wiki page it already stops linking at two:  fails. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:34, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
 * How on earth have we got such articles, anyway? I thought they were prevented by the software, similarly to article names beginning with colons, square brackets, etc. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 20:00, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
 * No, see Page name.  is usually fine, although there are certain combinations of   with   that are disallowed. the wub  "?!"  00:31, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Using the more verbose inter-language wikipedia syntax seems to work:  isaacl (talk) 19:08, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the suggestion. But the heading was rather rhetorical and the issue isn't that it's impossible but that  didn't work as expected in the summary. Task created. Nardog (talk) 10:17, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Just addressing your question #2... My out-of-the-blue guess is that the colon-prefix behaviour you use is a fallout from MediaWiki's handling of interwiki link syntax. Perhaps someone familiar with the code could comment? isaacl (talk) 17:00, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

Making a button which links to an fairly complex Wikipedia url
Hi all

I'm working on a tool to help people organise their sandbox and with a lot of help from I'm 99.9% of the way there. However I'm stuck with one last thing, I want to create a button which people click on to create the tool in their sandbox, however the link is a little complicated and is confusing the template I'm trying to use. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to embed this link into a button?


 * https:/wiki/Special:MyPage/sandbox?action=edit&preload=User:John_Cummings/sandbox&section=new&preloadtitle=

Currently I'm trying to use 'blue button' but its getting a bit confused and puts brackets around the link and adds a pipe to the title of the section it creates

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks

John Cummings (talk) 11:11, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Looking at the source of Blue button, it has an undocumented  parameter for external link syntax. The below uses that and the more portable fullurl, plus   to omit the external link icon. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:16, 4 February 2021 (UTC)


 * thanks so much, I've added a note on the template doc page to make it clear this is an option. John Cummings (talk) 19:26, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

Judgement Day (Watchlist)
My watchlist has become sentient. It thinks it knows what I want and has decided to act upon what it thinks. How can I control this before it is too late? -John Connor wooF 19:38, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I'm assuming you have unexpected entries on your WL? If so please check Special:Preferences and see if any of the "add pages" check boxes are on that you don't expect. —  xaosflux  Talk 19:40, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Actually, and forgive me for not explaining properly, it is putting things onto the list that will magically vanish from the list after a time, and will no longer be watched. This kinda makes it all a bit silly, wouldn't you say? -Roxy the happy dog . wooF 19:43, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
 * There's a dropdown menu next to the checkbox to put something on your watchlist (or a popup that appears if you click on the star icon) that lets you specify if you want to watch a page permanently or a fixed period of time. isaacl (talk) 19:52, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Note, currently you can only do this by going to a page and using the watch control - a central/bulk control for this is being discussed at T269318. — xaosflux  Talk 20:00, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I noted the appearance of the drop down list a few days ago, realised that if I never touched it things would remain the same, except they haven't. New user talk pages that go onto my list now do so only for 28 days. I discovered this by seeing a lonely little clockface embedded into an entry on my list. -Roxy the happy dog . wooF 20:06, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
 * , were these pages watched because of Twinkle? The default watching behavior recently changed for things like xfd and csd and warnings recently changed to take advantage of the watchlist expiry.  You can customize them all at WP:TW/PREF. ~ Amory <small style="color:#555"> (u • t • c) 20:17, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Indeed yes. So it is Twinkle's fault. Whoever changed that behaviour without telling me should go and sit on the naughty step. I'll imvestigate and sort it out. Thanks, everybody, for your help. -Roxy the happy dog . wooF 20:22, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Hi! It me.  I'm already sitting, though. noted with minimal input here for two months, linked from this board ~ Amory <small style="color:#555"> (u • t • c) 20:31, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I'd be lost without Twinkle btw. You can come in from there now, it must be cold. -Roxy the grumpy dog . wooF 20:46, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

Redirect will be redirected by bot; how to prevent this
I created the redirect And just like that but there is not currently an article called And Just Like That.... When one is created, my redirect will have to be changed to redirect to the new article. I can't just redirect to the proposed article name because the bot will get to it first.— Vchimpanzee  •  talk  •  contributions  •  21:25, 3 February 2021 (UTC)
 * , place on the lowercase redirect (on mobile so can't expand further on it). — &thinsp;J947 ‡ message ⁓ edits 21:43, 3 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I don't know if I did something wrong but did it anyway. At this time the redirect does not happen but there will still have to be a manual fix when the article is created, something I was hoping to avoid.—  Vchimpanzee  •  talk  •  contributions  •  21:07, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
 * You did it right in, except that you shouldn't have changed the actual redirect. The bot was right to restore it. The point is that And just like that will automatically appear in Category:Avoided double redirects to be updated if And Just Like That... becomes an article (or starts redirecting to another article than now). There are probably editors who monitor the category and will quickly change the redirect, so you don't have to worry about it and periodically examine whether it should be changed. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:09, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
 * If  was possible (this is T3575 from 2005) then we could use existing features to code things like: "redirect to PAGE1 if PAGE1 is an article, redirect to the same target as PAGE1 if PAGE1 is a redirect, and redirect to PAGE2 if PAGE1 doesn't exist". None of this is possible now. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:24, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

Accounts lacking Login Wiki or Meta (or not appearing on CentralAuth at all)
Whenever I visit CentralAuth for an account, it almost always has local accounts on login.wikimedia.org or meta.wikimedia.org, even if it was just created. But occasionally it lacks them, like here and here.

And sometimes an account has no CentralAuth profile at all (i.e. it returns "There is no global account for '...) even though it has some local edits here and was created long after the SUL finalization (I'm afraid I couldn't dig up an example of this, but I've seen it).

How do they happen? I'd like to know if it reveals anything about the accounts (e.g. created in some unusual way), which might help us combat cross-wiki abuse. Nardog (talk) 02:17, 3 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I think this may occur in certain cases for users that aren't running/are blocking javascript; normally you get an account there because  says to - but I think that process also fails gracefully if for whatever reason it doesn't pass.  These types of users will normally end up getting these SUL users once they log in again. —  xaosflux  Talk 04:05, 3 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Also, those accounts appear to have been created normally here on enwiki. — xaosflux  Talk 04:06, 3 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the explanation. Any idea why a newly created local account may lack a CentralAuth page at all? Nardog (talk) 09:52, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
 * can you be a bit more specific, are you saying there is a local account but nothing in Special:CentralAut for a user? Can you show me any sort of recent example (perhaps in the past year)? This may occur in some cases where a global account had a problem with a rename, where the SUL account was hidden, or when odd one-off bugs have happened related to replication/autocreation/etc. —  xaosflux  Talk 11:17, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Yes. Example sent via email. Nardog (talk) 11:36, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
 * got your email, that (private) example is over 2 years old so it is unlikely we'll be able to get logs tracked down for whatever was going on and has likely been resolved back then - also I don't see any global contributions since then either - sorry not the answer you are looking for yet. — xaosflux  Talk 12:13, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks anyways, and apologies for not realizing 2019 wasn't the past year! lol Nardog (talk) 12:18, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

Usernames with invalid characters
Also, I noticed some unusual cases that have accounts on centralauth with 0 attached wikis, but are totally impossible to create and I don't know why it ended up on there. For example, this username contains the invalid characters "{" and "}". Also this, and this. None of those accounts are possible to create as those usernames contain unsupported characters, so what is that about? 54nd60x (talk) 14:35, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
 * these occur from time to time for various reasons and will be cleaned up eventually - you can follow T160296 for more information. — xaosflux  Talk 14:40, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
 * So is it because those accounts were actually created at one point, I'm guessing before the character restrictions were put in place? 54nd60x (talk) 01:23, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

IAbot can't work properly
For more details， please visit. Therefore， please use "repair single page" or its similar function before the task is solved.--Alcremie (talk) 01:40, 5 February 2021 (UTC)
 * True, (diff), I tried to fix a page but it simply removes the dead link tags without adding any archives. <b style="background:linear-gradient(#cdf4ae,#cbedf8);color:#6d6f30">enjoyer</b>|<b style="background:linear-gradient(#cbedf8,#cdf4ae);color:#6d6f30">talk</b> 02:22, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

[[Fish-eye disease|Hard redirect]] Googleable
My understanding, backed by multiple Google tests, is that redirects shouldn't appear in search engine hits and that their target is retrieved instead. However, Fish-eye disease shows as first result in [//www.google.com/search?q= Fish eye disease Wikipedia], tho doesn't in DDG. I tried to explain this by features like being connected to a WD item or being an R from merge, but results show this is irrelevant. Any explanation I'm missing? Assem Khidhr (talk) 01:27, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
 * , Interesting. When you look at the Google cache (click the little down-pointing triangle at the end of the header line in the google search results), it shows that it has indexed https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Fish-eye_disease&redirect=no.  Looking at the rendered HTML, it does include:
 * so it shouldn't get indexed. Beats me what happened. -- RoySmith (talk) 01:52, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
 * I don't see  in the HTML. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:38, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Me neither (at least for this), but I'm getting that it has to do with Google's indexes and probably nothing can be done on Wikipedia's end. Assem Khidhr (talk) 06:21, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
 * "redirects shouldn't appear in search engine hits" - why? Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 13:39, 5 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I don't see  in the HTML. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:38, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Me neither (at least for this), but I'm getting that it has to do with Google's indexes and probably nothing can be done on Wikipedia's end. Assem Khidhr (talk) 06:21, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
 * "redirects shouldn't appear in search engine hits" - why? Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 13:39, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

Sandbox organiser
Hi all

Sandbox organiser is a set of tools to help you better organise your draft articles and other pages in your userspace. It also includes areas to keep your to do lists, bookmarks, list of tools. You can customise your sandbox organiser to add new features and sections. Once created you can access it simply by clicking the sandbox link at the top of the page. You can create and then customise your own sandbox organiser just by clicking the button. All ideas for improvements and other versions would be really appreciated.

Huge thanks to and  for their work on the technical parts, without them it wouldn't have happened.

John Cummings (talk) 10:44, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

Related changes glitch
Does anyone know why the Classical music related changes is showing conversations and edits from the tea house & help desk? Best - Aza24 (talk) 10:02, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
 * They are linked in Wikipedia help pages which is displayed below WikiProject Classical music. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:50, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

Number of rows in edit box
Fussed by the lack of a preference (any longer) I've edited Help:Preferences here basing myself on WP:Village pump (technical)/Archive 153 Could someone savvy review this please? Since this is no longer a preference option maybe it should be somewhere else. Or maybe it is. Thincat (talk) 12:56, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I tested it exactly as described and it works. You could add a link to Special:MyPage/common.css. --mfb (talk) 14:16, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

Feature request: Preferences > Gadgets > Strike out usernames that have been blocked
Not sure if this is the smart place for this or not, but with regard to is there any way to strike out IPs that are part of rangeblocks? Or maybe dotted strikes for rangeblocks with partial site blocks? Thanks! Cyphoidbomb (talk) 01:01, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
 * As far as I can tell, there's no way to query the API for more than one rangeblocked IP in a single request. By comparison, it's possible to check for up to 50 directly blocked IPs (or users) at once. So visiting a page with 200 unique IPs linked would flood the API with 200 requests (instead of 4), which seems rude, particularly from a popular gadget. Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 21:40, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Understood. Thanks for the info! Cyphoidbomb (talk) 21:58, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

Archive subpages over 20 level deep
I was looking at pages in all namespaces on this wiki with over 200 byte long titles when I found multiple pages which are archive subpages which are over 20 levels deep. One example is Talk:Clan Campbell/Archives/2018 1/Archives/2018 1/Archives/2018 1/Archives/2018 1/Archives/2018 1/Archives/2018 1/Archives/2018 1/Archives/2018 1/Archives/2018 1/Archives/2018 1/Archives/2018 1/Archives/2018 1/Archives/2018 1/Archives/2018 1/Archives/2018 1, which ClueBot created. See query/4320. User:Cobi is the botmaster. What happened here?--Snaevar (talk) 21:06, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
 * That's funny. Johnsoniensis added  in the lead  before  which should be in the lead. Is it or isn't it in the lead afterwards? ClueBot III couldn't make up its mind. It's only a valid archive request if it's in the lead and ClueBot III apparently thought it was because it archived the page. It should only archive non-lead sections but it archived the "section" including the archive request. In the next run it saw the archived archive request and thought it was a request to archive the archive so it dutyfully continued doing so recursively until it hit the 255-byte limit on page names. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:24, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Funny bug. I fixed the intended archives, so all the extra archives can be deleted once Cobi doesn't need them for debugging any more. --mfb (talk) 09:55, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Commuter town nesting. Scottish clan of archives. Here is a more creative variation: I'm cleaning these up and nominate them for deletion. That's all in the article namespace. There are many more in the user namespace, but that's up to these users. At least one of them has been cleaned up in the past, see HighKing cleanup (the deletion request appears in the same query because of its long name). --mfb (talk) 10:40, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Update: The bug is not triggered by the empty section title, the other pages had filled section titles. Seems to be a general problem that the bot accepts archiving instructions in archivable sections. I realized Cobi has sysop rights so they can check the pages even after they are deleted, so I nominated all of them for speedy deletion. There are still user pages if others want to see examples. Found another archiving issue with Scottish articles in the process and fixed that as well. --mfb (talk) 13:05, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

I've found some additional messed-up pages; should these be MfD'd? jp×g 22:57, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
 * 1) User talk:Astroketh/Archives/2019/November/Archives/2020/February
 * 2) User talk:Astroketh/Archives/2019/November/Archives/2020/February/Archives/2020/May
 * 3) User talk:Astroketh/Archives/2019/November/Archives/2020/February/Archives/2020/May/Archives/2020/August
 * 4) User talk:Astroketh/Archives/2019/November/Archives/2020/February/Archives/2020/May/Archives/2020/August/Archives/2020/October
 * 5) User talk:Loksmythe/Archives/2020/August/Archives/2020/November
 * 6) User:ClueBot III/Master Detailed Indices/User talk:Loksmythe/Archives/2020/August/Archives/2020/November
 * If the "real" content of these pages gets moved to the most appropriate true archive page, such that all that is left in the fake archive is a or similar, then the fake archive can be tagged with  (there are not many valid uses for WP:CSD, but this is one of them). -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 23:57, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Oh, chains that are still being formed. Move the archiving templates back to the parent talk page, make sure all the talk sections are in an archive, then nominate the nested archives for speedy deletion. G6, Db-error and G1, Db-nonsense both work. I wouldn't (and didn't) do this for user talk archives, however. It's best to ask these users first. If they want help with cleaning up, then U1, user request, is another possible deletion reason. For article talk pages there is no such concern. --mfb (talk) 00:28, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I cleaned up all article talk page archives with the patterns "[month]/Archive", "1/Archive" and "2/Archive". The last one had just one instance and there were no accidental "3/Archive" or "4/Archive", so I didn't search beyond that (there are plenty of false positives in these searches, like Talk:Fallout 4/Archive 1). That's another 40 soon-to-be deleted edits. It makes Category:Candidates for uncontroversial speedy deletion look weird. --mfb (talk) 02:15, 6 February 2021 (UTC) --mfb (talk) 02:15, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I don't see why user talk pages should be exempt - I can't think of a reason why the archive should itself be archived. Usually it's simply because the user concerned placed the archiving template in a section,, repeated . I think I fixed up the chain rooted at User talk:Sgubaldo - this involved [//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Redrose64?offset=20210206130000&limit=11 eleven edits] and [//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Log/Redrose64?offset=20210206130000&limit=30 thirty G6 deletions]. And that's for just one user talk page which only ever had three threads posted to it that didn't originate with that same user.
 * Looking at the last 5,000 edits by ClueBot III in User talk: space (i.e. back to 15 December 2020), I have also found other chains rooted at User talk:Astroketh, User talk:Denisarona, User talk:Loksmythe, User talk:Mdriscoll03, User talk:Tessaracter, User talk:Tomcat7 and User talk:Trillfendi. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 14:58, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
 * What if I create User talk:Mfb/Archive 1/Archive 1/Archive 1 and archive things in it? Will you clean that up as well? I generally avoid changes in the space of other users unless it's clearly meant to be edited. I asked all active users with "endless" chains (one replied already), I skipped banned and completely inactive users. There are many additional users with a shorter archive nesting: Search 1, Search 2, Search 3 (similarly for the other months). By the way: The Cluebot subpages are irrelevant once their associated archive pages are deleted. There might be an automated clean-up script, I don't know. --mfb (talk) 15:13, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I'm not talking about altering/deleting subpages that were deliberately created by the user, but fixing up archiving errors caused because the was put in the wrong place - in a section of the talk page, instead of before the first heading of that page. If re-archiving like this is not stopped when detected, it will continue until the software limitations (which I believe are a limit of 255 characters after the "User talk:" part) cause the process to bomb out. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 20:51, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I know the cause and I have fixed many of them in the past week in the article talk namespace. I still think it's up to these users to decide if they want this reverted or not. It's not breaking Wikipedia, it's just an odd place for the archived discussion. --mfb (talk) 06:02, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

2FA
Can I disable 2FA with scratch codes? CAPTAIN MEDUSA  talk  12:19, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Yes, according to Help:Two-factor_authentication, which says you can use a normal code or a scratch code for disabling it. RudolfRed (talk) 17:59, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
 * BTW, as a PSA to everybody, if you have 2FA enabled, now is a good time to check to make sure you remember where you stashed your scratch codes and that you can still get to them. Actually, it's not a bad idea to burn one now to make sure you understand how to use them.  There's nothing special about now that makes it a good time.  But, "never" is most certainly not a good time. -- RoySmith (talk) 18:39, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Warning - never get down to less than TWO scratch codes, if you are down to 2 or 1, regenerate codes by disabling 2FA and reactivating it. — xaosflux  Talk 23:42, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
 * In fact rather than rely on scratch codes, it might be a better idea to use an app like Authy that encrypts 2FAs and stores them on the cloud; you can then install the client on your phone, home laptop and work laptop. Then the only way to get locked out of your account (or be at the mercy of scratch codes) is if you lose all your devices. – SD0001  (talk) 17:21, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

checking screen sizes
is there any way on Wiki, Chrome (mobile), or Android phone, to view what a mobile article page looks like in various custom screen sizes ? Gfigs (talk) 08:16, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
 * as @Aklapper posted in phab:T271288Gfigs (talk) 15:06, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
 * If you use a PC, you can view an article on Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge or some other Chromium-based web browser. In such browsers, you can use the DevTools, which can be opened using F12 button on keyboard. You can emulate various screen sizes by following the instructions here: The steps mentioned in the link can be used in Google Chrome or any other Chromium-based web browsers also. Hope it helps! CX Zoom (talk) 20:33, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
 * , thanks Gfigs (talk) 22:50, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

Disabling the reply button
Is there a way to disable that obnoxious [] button, preferably one that doesn't require logging in? I've been using the preview mode workaround but it's really getting old. 78.28.44.204 (talk) 12:39, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
 * in the css should do the job. Without login you would need to do that in your browser, logged in you can use the custom css page. mfb (talk) 13:02, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Are any IP's getting it here at the English Wikipedia or is the post about another wiki? mw:Talk pages project/Replying says it's only deployed as opt-out at the Arabic, Hungarian and Czech Wikipedia, e.g. at hu:Wikipédia-vita:Segítség. If you have an account then you can disable it at the bottom box at hu:Special:Preferences. The CSS to remove it is . The class   is used by User:Enterprisey/reply-link which is loaded in User:Mfb/monobook.js. It's not targeted with   but with  . PrimeHunter (talk) 14:24, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
 * That solved the issue, thank you! And to answer you, the question was indeed about the English Wikipedia. 78.28.44.204 (talk) 18:27, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I don't see it whether logged in or out. I guess they are running an A/B test and you are in the group which gets the tool. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:22, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

Vandalized Article
I'd like to report that an article is heavily vandalized. Please help to restore its initial form. It is: The Three Fools. Thanks in advance for the help!--MrPanyGoff (talk) 20:21, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
 * are you having a technical problem? You should be able to go to the article, select history, select any old version, click edit, then publish that old version again. —  xaosflux  Talk 21:19, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Anyway, thanks everybody who help to fix that issue!--MrPanyGoff (talk) 08:29, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-06
<section begin="technews-2021-W06"/> 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
 * The Wikipedia app for Android now has watchlists and talk pages in the app.

Changes later this week
 * You can see edits to chosen pages on Special:Watchlist. You can add pages to your watchlist on every wiki you like. The GlobalWatchlist extension will come to Meta on 11 February. There you can see entries on watched pages on different wikis on the same page. The new watchlist will be found on Special:GlobalWatchlist on Meta. You can choose which wikis to watch and other preferences on Special:GlobalWatchlistSettings on Meta. You can watch up to five wikis.
 * Octicons-sync.svg The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from . It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from . It will be on all wikis from (calendar).

Future changes
 * When admins protect pages the form will use the OOUI look. Special:Import will also get the new look. This will make them easier to use on mobile phones.
 * Some services will not work for a short period of time from 07:00 UTC on 17 February. There might be problems with new short links, new translations, new notifications, adding new items to your reading lists or recording email bounces. This is because of database maintenance.
 * Octicons-tools.svg Last week Tech News reported that the IP address Cloud VPS and Toolforge use to contact the wikis will change on 8 February. This is delayed. It will happen later instead.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. <section end="technews-2021-W06"/> 17:40, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

Template determinism

 * 1) Are templates defined to be evaluated in a specific order or are they defined to be evaluated an undefined order?
 * 2) During the template expansion of the page, can one template change the state of something so that another template can detect that change? — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 12:25, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
 * If they are nested then inner templates are evaluated first. If they are in parallel they should not depend on each other (but Lua can analyze the source code of the article, so in principle you can create trouble). --mfb (talk) 14:17, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
 * A Lua module can find where its template is in the source (see for one), but I assume that the source it sees is read-only? — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 16:56, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Yes. There are numerous safeguards so that templates can not change other template transclusions (that is, other than subtemplates). In lua editing the source would be done with the internal os libary, which is intentionally blocked on all WMF projects.
 * There are two situations where templates are evaluated, one if the page is purged or edited, and the other if there is any change in the template itself. For the former the templates are evaluated from top to bottom (e.g./f.x. the lead first), for the latter see Purge.--Snaevar (talk) 17:43, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
 * , I assume they're also re-evaluated if a new version of Lua is installed? -- RoySmith (talk) 18:55, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Interesting point but I don't think Lua has ever been updated in Scribunto. Special:Version is saying Lua 5.1.5 which is the same as six years ago and probably longer. Johnuniq (talk) 22:15, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Indeed, we have had 5.1(.x) since initial installation, with some 5.2 backports. (I am sad, because multi-line strings are directly supported in 5.2 but were not one of the backports.) I anticipate any upgrade to a newer version would have some amount of pre-upgrade linting work (apparently there is a fork in the community between LuaJIT and Lua >5.1, much the same as there was one between Python 2 and 3). --Izno (talk) 01:00, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

OK, in full — Templates (and their module children) are not strictly deterministic as they can output non-deterministic data (such as the time), but the evaluation is isolated and module code cannot write to anything outside of the evaluation of the current template. i.e. A template/module can only output HTML/wikitext and cannot alter any existing wikitext, cannot write to Wikidata, cannot write to any database anywhere and cannot alter any "global" or system variables. This means that a template/module cannot "pass" any information to another template/module other than the children being expanded within their own expansion. That right? — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 19:19, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * That's correct. One way to look at it is that devs want people to be able to edit any section on a page and preview the result, without needing to parse the whole page. Indeed, a dozen people could be simultaneously editing and previewing different sections and each works in complete isolation. An enterprising editor found they could muck around with refs to break the isolation model, but that was regarded as a bug and the system patched to prevent it. It is possible to have a loadData module which does calculations and returns a fixed table of data. I would recommend against it, but such a module could read the page and decide what to do based on what it finds. Once loaded, subsequent accesses to the module would get a cached table. Johnuniq (talk) 22:20, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

Talk:Hezbollah - Military History Project not showing in mobile view
So, while investigating how to trim the banner spam, I noticed on mobile a blank section between two project notices (Lebanon and Organizations)

Switched over to desktop mode and found the page renders correctly with "Military History" being listed between the two.

A look at the wiki markup doesn't show any obvious reason this project wouldn't render on mobile. Though as I cut and paste I notice the importance field is missing.

Slywriter (talk) 22:29, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

Textarea not always monospaced
In User:Redrose64/monobook.css I have the rule  and this works for most multi-line text input boxes, such as the one that I used to type this in. But it's ignored in the large text input box at Special:EmailUser/Oversight (or any other recipient name), where I'm getting a PS font. How might I get a monospace font there also? -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 21:43, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * You can try adding the following class selector:  isaacl (talk) 21:56, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * That worked for the textarea concerned - but it also matched all text input boxes, such as the subject line on that page, the edit summary below this box, and others. So I used an id instead:  which works. But I'm still puzzled as to why the first selector wasn't matched. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 22:50, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I see a default CSS rule setting  for , which will have precedence over your rule. —  The  Earwig ⟨talk⟩ 23:12, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I saw the same rule as The Earwig (using my browser's developer tools to examine which rules applied to the HTML element in question), thus my suggestion. Rules that match with greater specificity take precedence over those that match with less specificity. So something that matches by matching two classes, or one ID and one class (for a total of two selectors) takes precedence over a match on just one class. isaacl (talk) 23:43, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

Extra newlines when copypasting
If I go to a page with the CSS content model, highlight two or more lines, copy to clipboard and paste those elsewhere, there are two linefeeds (U+000A) after each line instead of one, the result being a blank line between consecutive "real" lines. This appears to be a recent change: how may I restore the old behaviour? -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 21:51, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * This is a Gecko-specific issue and has been fixed for 1.36.0-wmf.28 (T271614). I wonder why it hasn't been deployed here though; Tech News doesn't say. I guess you could override the CSS until then if you want it fixed now. Nardog (talk) 00:43, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I am pretty sure I saw WAID say elsewhere that our train got stopped for wmf.28. I assume it will come this week. --Izno (talk) 01:05, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

Logins bounced
Typically I log in direct to my watchlist, then click through to any interesting-looking pages. Recently, when I begin to say edit an article, I sometimes find that I am no longer logged in and my edit is recorded under my IP address. This has begun to happen quite often. Is it a known issue, and if so is it more likely to be a server or browser bug? &mdash; Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 16:01, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Me too, actually. Trying to hit watchlist first has been a losing proposition of late. It usually happens to me on a mobile device though. --Izno (talk) 18:33, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Now I am noticing I a tooltip-style popup, top right: " Central login You are centrally logged in as Steelpillow. Reload the page to apply your user settings." It's appeared twice already this session. If this is signed by my IP address, we are homing in on the culprit. 85.255.232.32 (talk) 19:02, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Ha! See that! It bounced me off and I have had to log in a second time to sign this. &mdash; Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 19:05, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * This sounds like Village pump (technical)/Archive 187. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 22:09, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Yes it does, thank you. However no mention was made there of the little popup. That popup suggests to me that the service knows there is an issue; presumably it remembers that you are logged in but has lost some of your session credentials. The fact that the problem is affecting/annoying multiple users and has only begun recently suggests to me that Something Needs To Be Undone. &mdash; Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 11:08, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

plugin error message
I keep getting this type of message popping up, "You are importing User:Lupin/popups.js into common.js" and to remove it as it's unmaintained. I am not sure why I started getting it today, and how to get rid of it. Any help? Govvy (talk) 12:27, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
 * The code is in User:Govvy/monobook.js. You can remove the first 9 lines. Enable "Navigation popups" at Special:Preferences if you want a replacement. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:56, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I removed the first 9 lines and left importScript('User:Lightmouse/monobook.js/script.js'); there, you know, I forgot that page existed! Cheers. Govvy (talk) 14:24, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I tweaked the prompt at User:Lupin/popups.js to try to make this a little clearer. — xaosflux  Talk 14:35, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

Temporary watchlist
I just made a post on a user talk page, and somehow this was added to my watchlist for only 28 days. I did not select 28 days, I always leave it at the default permanently. What is occurring? DuncanHill (talk) 17:55, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
 * It is the default for Twinkle. You can adjust your preferences at WP:TW/PREFS &mdash; MusikAnimal  talk  18:05, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks, I had no idea there was such a page. DuncanHill (talk) 18:17, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

Did Thursday come early this week?
I'm seeing drop-down menus (More, TW, etc) getting stuck open. Any idea what's going on? -- RoySmith (talk) 18:25, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Thursday came late, actually. has a fix for the bullet points issue in Twinkle that should be deployed soon. As for the hover states being broken, that's due to a bug in MediaWiki that has since been fixed but not scheduled to go out until the next deployment train (Thursday). See T273143. &mdash;  MusikAnimal  talk  18:28, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Ah, I can tell nevermind.. davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  18:32, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
 * The issue with the MoreMenu submenus is separate, by the way, and that should be fixed now too. I only pushed that update a few minutes ago so it may take a few more minutes for it to show up on your end. &mdash; MusikAnimal  talk  18:34, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
 * MoreMenu is fixed for me. Multi-bug day, I blame it on being squeezed between Patch Tuesday and WP:THURSDAY.   davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  18:44, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
 * , Hmmm, 90-ish minutes later, it's still happening for me. I tried restarting Chrome and emptying my browser cache, to no avail.  Maybe I just need a larger value of "a few more minutes" :-) -- RoySmith (talk) 19:52, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Are you talking about the issue with MoreMenu submenus, or the broken hover states (where you have to click on "Page" or "User" to make the menu appear)? If the latter, that won't be fixed until the wmf.30 train arrives, which is scheduled for this Thursday.
 * If the former, I'm confused why it's still broken for you. I'm guessing you installed MoreMenu via the gadget. Maybe try turning the gadget off and then on again? Or try installing globally, which is the preferred route anyway because it works on all wikis. &mdash; MusikAnimal  talk  20:29, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
 * , Ah, I guess I'm talking about the later (i.e. the screenshot I posted above). Thursday, then. -- RoySmith (talk) 20:36, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Twinkle fix now pushed; sorry all, had planned to put it up later today but didn't realize it was gonna come early this week. ~ Amory <small style="color:#555"> (u • t • c) 18:46, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Also heads up about . Release Engineering (with good reason) will now halt the train if any new errors show up. This should mean fewer errors will make their way to English Wikipedia, but as a consequence we may see more erratic train schedules like this, where the new version arrives on Monday/Tuesday/etc. instead of the usual Thursday. &mdash; MusikAnimal  talk  19:01, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Is there a way for us to get a notice here when the software is updated, perhaps with a link to release notes, or is there a page we can add to our watchlists to know about changes? The tech news that is posted here is forward-looking, so things listed there do not always happen on time, and the link to the new version always leads to a blank page when the news posting is added here. – Jonesey95 (talk) 20:37, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I think the ecosystem is too big to have a fully comprehensive release notes for weekly trains. But anything notable should go through Tech News. Bugs like the broken hover states of dropdown menus are of course not announced in advance because they were not intentionally introduced.
 * As for when the train arrives, you can check versions to see the current status, and Deployments to see the current schedule. Whenever the train is delayed, an email is sent to the wikitech-l mailing list. You can also see if anything is currently blocking the train by checking train-blockers. That redirects you to the corresponding Phab task for the upcoming train, and blockers there are listed as subtasks. At the time of writing there are no subtasks, so wmf.30 should hopefully come as planned on Thursday.
 * The recent policy change around deployments may actually improve the situation, as developers might get in the habit of reverting problematic changes, rather than holding up the train to fix them. Time will tell. &mdash; MusikAnimal  talk  21:21, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
 * As for when the train arrives, you can check versions to see the current status, and Deployments to see the current schedule. Whenever the train is delayed, an email is sent to the wikitech-l mailing list. You can also see if anything is currently blocking the train by checking train-blockers. That redirects you to the corresponding Phab task for the upcoming train, and blockers there are listed as subtasks. At the time of writing there are no subtasks, so wmf.30 should hopefully come as planned on Thursday.
 * The recent policy change around deployments may actually improve the situation, as developers might get in the habit of reverting problematic changes, rather than holding up the train to fix them. Time will tell. &mdash; MusikAnimal  talk  21:21, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
 * The recent policy change around deployments may actually improve the situation, as developers might get in the habit of reverting problematic changes, rather than holding up the train to fix them. Time will tell. &mdash; MusikAnimal  talk  21:21, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

Mildly irritating orange box
Hi, this might have been answered before, but I cant find it.

Whenever I visit an XfD page, I get a popup orange box in the top right hand corner of my screen saying "XFDcloser is now a gadget! Please upgrade to the gadget version." The thing is, I *have* upgraded to the gadget version. The box goes away if I click on it, but it's still slightly annoying. Can I stop it from appearing? (Firefox 85.0, Win10) Black Kite (talk) 21:51, 9 February 2021 (UTC)


 * In User:Black Kite/vector.js, remove . By the way, if you follow the link "upgrade to the gadget version", it should tell you to do this. —  The Earwig ⟨talk⟩ 22:15, 9 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Doh! Of course, thank you - I only glanced at it and it mentions common.js first - forgetting I was using vector. Black Kite (talk) 22:18, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

How to add/subtract numbers by column in the table?
It was seen here that I will edit something with addition with multiple columns in one row. There were 50 states plus DC, and its 5 territories of the U.S., but how does it work to equal the number in the totals? (Note that it also takes >8 seconds to load this template page and also errors/problems while loading the table's visual editor, since it was repeated and doesn't work).

Also, how to subtract three columns, to equal something in one row (for example,in the same page table, it was total confirmed cases - deaths - recoveries = active cases)?Evan0512 (talk) 03:20, 1 December 2020 (UTC)

Political party color using nowiki
I was inspecting the output produced by a module (not relevant here, but see "UNIQ--nowiki" at permalink if wanted). That output included strip markers from nowiki tags resulting from the module expanding color templates for political parties. For example: Why is the nowiki used? If someone puts on a page in normal wikitext, the nowiki stops   from being interpreted as a numbered list item. However it looks like these templates are being used in wikitext or HTML to generate a table. The resulting HTML gives a table cell like the following:
 * Independent politician/meta/color generates
 * Independent Communist/meta/color uses Political party color and generates

which is transformed to

Are those nowiki really desirable? Johnuniq (talk) 04:34, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
 * On the template, and maybe in the transclusion (I don't remember exactly), those pound signs would otherwise be interpreted as an ordered list item. --Izno (talk) 04:53, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I think I've mishandled some of the set-ups before in my time and the consequences have been a bit messy. I think something about the election results boxes - of which there are a smattering of different designs for FPTP, STV, AMS etc - goes wonky if the color section isn't bracketed by the nowiki tags. doktorb wordsdeeds 05:10, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

Need some technical help
Hey all, looking at this request from, they appear to have moved an article into Talk space, and yet the talk page has gone missing. Anyone have any ideas for where it could have gone and how to restore the pages to their original locations where they can be safely moved? Much appreciated. Cyphoidbomb (talk) 04:11, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
 * The issue has been resolved by . Thanks to both of you. Yashthepunisher (talk) 05:12, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

Last call for projects
Wikimedia is applying as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2021 and Outreachy Round 22. We're currently gathering project ideas for the application. If you have ideas for projects, share them here: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T270429 -- The Wikimedia GSoC & Outreachy Organization Administrators --<span style="font-family:'Trebuchet MS',Geneva,sans-serif"> qedk ( t  愛  c ) 15:01, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

RefToolbar and Cite button
Hi. Why is this function so intermittent? I added it via the gadgets page in my preferences, and it works from time to time. But quite a lot of the time, clicking the button just sends it off spinning and doesn't do anything. Clicking cancel gives the "Error: Citations request failed". I'm using the latest version of Firefox. Anyone else having the same issues? Thanks.  Lugnuts  Fire Walk with Me 16:14, 6 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Been hit-and-miss for the last two days now.  Lugnuts  Fire Walk with Me 10:12, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * maybe check RefToolbar/2.0 Gfigs (talk) 12:07, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * That error message is from MediaWiki:Gadget-citations.js.--Snaevar (talk) 18:46, 8 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Thanks both. Looked at both of them, but still the same. The cite tool worked fine yesterday, but isn't working (for me) right now. I reckon it's good for maybe 50% of the time during any given day.  Lugnuts  Fire Walk with Me 12:54, 10 February 2021 (UTC)


 * And now back to working fine...!  Lugnuts  Fire Walk with Me 15:43, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

Upon creating an article
When creating an article, is there any way to suppress or collapse or otherwise hide the box that says, "Before creating an article, please read Wikipedia:Your first article. We recommend that new editors ..." etc.? If there isn't, could a way to suppress that box be added to Preferences? Abductive (reasoning) 16:46, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
 * you can add this line:


 * To your Special:Mypage/common.css or Special:Mypage/skin.css file. — xaosflux  Talk 16:59, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Great, it works! Hidden. Thanks. Abductive  (reasoning) 17:25, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

Is there a way to collapse selected rows of a table?
In IBM System/370 I have a table with several long sections. There is a heading row showing bit positions, and I want cells in subsequent rows to align with those headings, so I don't want to put those sections in nested tables. I would like to make each of Control Registers and General Registers separately collapsible. Is there a way to do that? Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 22:55, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * It is possible to collapse each row seperatly, with an class="mw-collapsible" in the tr, and class="mw-collapsible-content" in all of the subsequent td's. Mw-collapsible is the Mediawiki collapsible code, it differs from NavFrame collapsible by not having an autocollapsible function.--Snaevar (talk) 18:23, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
 * It is not NavFrame that provides autocollapsible. Anyway, 'autocollapse' is shimmed to function based on mw-collapsible on en. --Izno (talk) 23:34, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

Reverted tag missing
I cannot see the useful "reverted" tag in some contributions that were reverted. Examples of mw-reverted are in recent changes but what about these: Am I missing something or is this hopefully a temporary glitch? Johnuniq (talk) 03:06, 11 February 2021 (UTC))
 * user with 3 edits, all reverted
 * IP with 1 edit, reverted
 * user with several edits, all reverted
 * , TIL tags are applied asynchronously. For example, when I first looked at Special:Contributions/Cheekyrascal, only the first two edits had the Reverted tag.  Now all three do.  See meta:Help:Reverting: The mw-reverted change tag is applied shortly after the revert is made... -- RoySmith (talk) 03:47, 11 February 2021 (UTC)
 * That makes sense, thanks. I've never seen a lag before and would guess that something unusual is holding up the process. I hope it gets back to a fast response because the point of the tag is to see which edits need to be checked/reverted on encountering a problematic editor. Johnuniq (talk) 04:06, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

Uploads disabled vs. Permission error
I have come across both versions of messages attempting to upload files on other wikis. The first one says “Permission error” and then says “The action you have requested is limited to users in the group: Administrators.” See wikt:Special:Upload. The first one isn’t quite hard to understand. However, the second title says “Uploads disabled.” Then it says “Local file uploads are disabled. Please upload to Wikimedia Commons.” See d:Special:Upload. I have a question about the second message: Does the second message mean that not even administrators can upload images on that wiki? If so, then who can upload? I always thought that administrators could do “everything” on the wiki; by everything I don’t mean literally everything, but something like uploading images should be available to sysops or at least someone on every wiki. 54nd60x (talk) 04:58, 11 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Regular admins can do many things, but not everything. The system administrators can disable features directly in the software so that no one can perform them. That is what you're seeing in the "Uploads disabled" case: that's what happens when  is set to   in MediaWiki. Wikidata doesn't need any locally hosted files, so it's disabled there. —  The Earwig ⟨talk⟩ 05:25, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

Wikidata notices
Is there any way to turn off the endless stream of Wikidata notices? It's rendered my "inbox" useless. Maury Markowitz (talk) 12:03, 11 February 2021 (UTC)
 * By "inbox" do you mean e-mail, onwiki notifications or watchlist? There are settings at Special:Preferences, Special:Preferences, wikidata:Special:Preferences. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:01, 11 February 2021 (UTC)
 * It is an icon of an inbox. Actual messages to me show up in the bell icon. Thanks for the pointer, I did find the (hopefully correct) option. It is very odd that it is on another web site. Maury Markowitz (talk) 14:49, 11 February 2021 (UTC)
 * This is a consequence of how the various WMF sites interact. At one level, every wiki (the various language wikipedias, wikidata, commons, etc) is a seperate site, with its own set of preferences.  For example, I might want to be notified when somebody links to a page I've created on enwiki, but not on wikidata.  On the other hand, all (well, most) of these projects share a common authentication system, so you don't have to create a new account on each site.  One of the things that gives you is that notifications generated on any of the sites are visible on all the others via your inbox.  It's actually a very handy feature, but I can see how it could be surprising and/or confusing.  -- RoySmith (talk) 15:52, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

New articles from specific category
How I can see new articles from Category:Bilateral relations by country and its subcategorieres? Eurohunter (talk) 16:21, 11 February 2021 (UTC)
 * you can use the PetScan tool. Here is an example set of parameters: PetScan query. —  xaosflux  Talk 16:49, 11 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks Eurohunter (talk) 17:35, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

User default sandbox
Why default user sandbox isn't capitalised as any other namespace? So we should have User:Example/Sandbox instead User:Example/sandbox. Eurohunter (talk) 18:01, 11 February 2021 (UTC)
 * If you mean the 'Sandbox' link in the user menu bar at the top, it actually leads to 'user:example/sandbox'. Ruslik_ Zero 20:11, 11 February 2021 (UTC)
 * The namespace is the part before the colon, in this case "User". The first character after the namespace is automatically capitalized, in this case "E". The default /sandbox is a user subpage. Subpages are fully case sensitive like any other part of a page name after the first character. I don't know how the case was chosen but all skin subpages are also lowercase: /common.js, /common.css, vector.js, vector.css (and the skin name is Vector), /monobook.js, monobook.css (skin name MonoBook), and so on. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:18, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

Maintenance categories
Just noticed that Category:Astronomy templates is not hidden at Solar radio emission and is displayed alongside encyclopedic categories (more fresh eyes than mine are needed). Btw, could we run a bot that will detect all unhidden maintenance categories and hide them? Brandmeistertalk  20:56, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
 * , this was caused by incorrect categorization wikitext at Template:The Sun and has been fixed. —⁠andrybak (talk) 21:42, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks, I thought it had to do with the category itself. Brandmeistertalk  21:51, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
 * - the category was placed outside the <noinclude ></noinclude> when it should have been inside, ideally placed in the documentation page (see WP:CAT). is not a maintenance category, and there should be no reason to hide it - otherwise it wouldn't be shown at Template:The Sun, where its display is highly appropriate. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 14:19, 11 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Unhidden maintenance categories is a very rare problem in my experience and not something we really need a bot for. A more common problem is that the category doesn't exist and shows up red which looks worse. I have thought about making a Phabricator request for a MediaWiki message with regex for category names which should be treated as hidden categories if they don't exist. A feature similar to MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist. The numerous template-added maintenance categories with names like Category:Articles with dead external links from April 2020 would be easy to target with regex. Some wikis might choose to hide all red categories. The feature could also have a setting to automatically hide the category if it does exist. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:07, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

There seems to be a problem with your login session...
I had an interesting thing happen to me this evening. My main machine was down, so I dug out an old laptop and tried to use that. Trying to log in to wikipedia, I got, "There seems to be a problem with your login session; this action has been canceled as a precaution against session hijacking. Please resubmit the form.  You may receive this message if you are blocking cookies".

To make a long story short, if you ever get that, take a look at what version browser you're running. If it's something ancient, try updating your browser :-) — Preceding unsigned comment added by RoySmith (talk • contribs) 23:59, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I've seen this at least once in the last week or so. I'm using up-to-date software.  davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  00:12, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I've seen this message when I've had the login page up but didn't login for a while; I've always assumed this corresponded to the login page timing out (one approach to mitigate the risk of a person-in-the-middle attack). If your old laptop had an old, cached version of the login page, then it would be a stale login session. isaacl (talk) 01:13, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
 * , I was able to login via an incognito window, but clearing the browser cache in the main browser window didn't help. I don't remember if I cleared my cookies or not, but it's unclear why updating to a newer version of chrome would make a difference if it was a stale cookie problem. -- RoySmith (talk) 17:45, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I got that same message a couple of days ago, maybe at the same time. I am using the latest version of Firefox supplied with my Linux distribution. I retried a couple of times and got the same message but then left it for an hour or so and could log in perfectly well. It looks to me that this may be a timeout of some kind, caused by something running slowly on the client or server or network. Phil Bridger (talk) 09:48, 11 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I have been getting this message occasionally, for quite some time. More recently, see the discussion above on Logins bounced. &mdash; Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 09:54, 11 February 2021 (UTC)
 * This issue is a bit different, where an attempt to login fails, as opposed to already being logged in and then being logged out unexpectedly. isaacl (talk) 18:27, 11 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Superficially, yes. But I began experiencing them both within a fairly similar timescale and they are both login bounces. How strong does a coincidence need to get before it isn't one? I'd hate to be dogmatic either way. &mdash; Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 19:28, 11 February 2021 (UTC)
 * While anything is possible, logging in is a distinct function from maintaining a logged-in session. So I wouldn't a priori tie these two symptoms together. isaacl (talk) 20:07, 11 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time it's enemy action. Ian Fleming, Goldfinger. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 20:38, 11 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I had both issues. I was logged out unexpectedly and then got the message described above when I tried to log back in. Phil Bridger (talk) 21:11, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

Minor rendition problem
I know this is incredibly minor but it's bugging me. Take a look at Arithmetic mean, in the example as part of the definition. The first, fourth and 7th plus (+) signs not properly formed. my initial thought was that it was an artifact of my monitor or some temporary rendition problem, I believe it persists, and I can reproduce it in other browsers.

I created:
 * User:Sphilbrick/MathML example 1
 * User:Sphilbrick/MathML example 2
 * User:Sphilbrick/MathML example 3

Note that the problem does not exist an example 2 but does an example 1 and example 3.

I think that suggests that it has something to do with the header, But I can't think why that would be.-- S Philbrick (Talk)  16:17, 11 February 2021 (UTC)
 * ...you didn't actually describe what problem you are having, but given how you managed to talk around it, I believe you're suffering from this issue. --Izno (talk) 16:33, 11 February 2021 (UTC)
 * , I don't think so, though I can't really exclude that as a possibility. It isn't that the + is missing, it's that simple pixel's are missing and it's not a crisp pair of lines. would be interested to know whether any others see exactly what I see. when I look at example 2, the plus signs are crisp and well-formed, but in examples one and three, the + doesn't look quite right. I just tried an experiment changing the font size. If I increase or decrease the font everything looks fine; the only issue is that the default size. S Philbrick  (Talk)  17:42, 11 February 2021 (UTC)
 * , if you aren't seeing it I can create a screen shot. S Philbrick  (Talk)  17:42, 11 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Indeed, I am not seeing it. Some other things for you to add: What skin, what browser(s), what operating system, and what is your math display setting at the bottom of Special:Preferences? --Izno (talk) 18:30, 11 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I'm seeing it as well. Curiously, on the article page, it's the 1st, 4th, and 7th plus signs, but if I open the image in a new tab, it's the 2nd, 4th, and 6th signs. I'm using Vector on Chrome 88.0.4324.150, and math display is set to "MathML with SVG or PNG fallback". Here are some screenshots. Malformed plus signs on Arithmetic mean article.png Malformed plus signs on their own.png --rchard2scout (talk) 07:07, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
 * , thanks for the screenshots, procrastination bails me out yet again:) S Philbrick  (Talk)  12:58, 12 February 2021 (UTC)

Wikipedia mobile app keeps logging me out
I've been using the Wikipedia mobile app to edit on my Android phone. Ever since enabling 2FA, the app logs me out every few days, which is incredibly frustrating as I have to go into authenticatior every time to log back in. Is this a known issue / something I am doing wrong? Elliot321 (talk &#124; contribs) 03:29, 13 February 2021 (UTC)

Wikitable help; space between columns and rows?
I'm trying to get this wikitable format to look more like this div style one. In making a new project page for WikiProject Classical music I was advised to not use divs since they leave a huge white space when the window is decreased and are not optimal on many devices. I figured the best way would to put this in a table format but I'm having trouble finding a way to have it not looked so crammed; is there a way to put space between columns and rows? Best - Aza24 (talk) 23:04, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I have taken the liberty of editing your sandbox directly, as it makes it really easy to try things out directly. Please feel free, of course, to revert my edit. My quick test was successful, if I measure it against your "look more like this" criterion; I'd say it does. It is not particulary responsive to changes in display size, which I don't much like, but then, your "div style" version isn't either.
 * I used two different methods to simulate the divider lines, the upper one (between rows 1 & 2) uses CSS border properties, which is cleaner (I believe) than using . The lower dividers, between rows 2 & 3, use  . The border version has a small break between cells, but maybe that doesn't disturb you much.
 * Perhaps you can see where I set widths, so you can then adjust and try out your changes as suits you. &mdash; JohnFromPinckney (talk) 00:39, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Whoever told you that about divs is wrong. That would be the preferred mechanism to do what you are trying to do. --Izno (talk) 01:48, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Agreed, the content Aza24 has is not tabular. That's why I added  to my sample code, as it's purely for layout. The div sample might be improved by relaxing some of the constraints on it. As it is now, it can't resize either larger or smaller to adapt to various display sizes. &mdash; JohnFromPinckney (talk) 01:56, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks a lot, that's exactly what I was looking for, I've opted for the version without the vertical spacing. , I don't really know what to do—a user on the talk page was insisting I remove them. As I understand it, it's because of the white space it leaves by the section simply moving downwards rather than minimizing when a window is minimized. I don't know how much better this is, but at least it kind of addresses that issue? Aza24 (talk) 02:09, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
 * This is what they said, if that helps:
 * Every browser has the ability to increase and decrease scale. That is a first step to emulate large and small screens, before even going to different software and hardware (e.g. various screen height/width ratios) set-ups. When performing such first step checks you should see that your proposed layout (especially the second) is extremely problematic. For clarity, such checks, when working with tags, are html student 1.0 steps. Note that the MediaWiki software allows to use tags directly, but usually that shouldn't be done: tags are, in wiki environment, commonly operated via templates and other features, without most editors actually ever seeing them. That is because they are tricky, and the template implementations of them at least avoid to make the most common mistakes. So, if you can't find a template to implement a layout feature, it should normally better not be implemented with html code directly, while those that are a bit more experienced in html specifically tried to avoid them (by not including them in a template or some such). So I've interpreted this as I should be using a Wiki Template, not pure HTML and a Wikitable seemed the only possibility...? Aza24 (talk) 02:15, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Every browser ... set-ups. This is more or less reasonable. The word that we are looking for there is responsive, that is, a page design is responsive when it can change to fit the screen on which it is viewed. (Tangent: In reality the best way to test different resolutions is actually to test different resolutions by increasing or decreasing the width of the browser viewport. Zooming, which I assume is what is meant by increase/decrease scale, is usually secondary to that assessment.)
 * Your understanding that you should use wikitables is incorrect and in fact result in a much design on the responsive axis, as tables do not act like you might prefer at small widths. Moreover, they are wrong from a semantic point of view.
 * but usually that shouldn't be done Is more or less reasonable when dealing with article space because article space can be changed often, and where simplicity/wikitext is preferred anyway so that it is easy to use there (see WP:MOS; especially, these reasons are not really the reasons proffered). It becomes unreasonable in a non-reader facing area, which usually do not change and where you might prefer to be fairly creative. Go hogwild!
 * What you definitely should do is use WP:TemplateStyles e.g. in WikiProject Classical music/styles.css (you will need someone to start that page and change the content model; feel free to ping me), and put all of what are now inline styles in one place. It will make it easier to test and adjust for different resolutions and text sizes, and most importantly, it makes CSS media queries available to you, which will help make your wikipage design responsive. What I would also recommend is to avoid position relative, etc., in favor of display: flex, which will also help make your design responsive. --Izno (talk) 02:50, 9 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Fresh ping since I failed on the previous. --Izno (talk) 23:35, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Sorry for taking so long to respond, and thank you for all of this. IDK—I'm not very familiar with CSS (I barely know any HTML) so making such adjustments may be a huge learning curve. I will attempt to look into this more this weekend, but am getting rather discouraged by having a Project page that needs an entirely new language for just a small section! Aza24 (talk) 08:15, 13 February 2021 (UTC)

resizing parts of an Infobox in mobile view
am doing this comparison from Chrome (mobile). please toggle the width entries, in above code, to see if you can change sizes of parts of the Infobox, in both desktop and mobile views. the only width entry seems to be functioning for me (in desktop view) is "bodystyle" and "titlestyle". I cannot change headerstyle, labelstyle, or datastyle widths in desktop. and none of width entries seem to have any effect in mobile view. please check for errors in above code. is this expected behaviour ? or should it be reported, if so, where (or to whom) ? Gfigs (talk) 08:51, 12 February 2021 (UTC)


 * A cell cannot be displayed with two different widths so there are dependencies: body width = header width = label width + data width. If you specify conflicting widths then they cannot all be satisfied. body width is 22em by default if you don't override it. The second infobox has body 4em, label 2em, data 2em. The data field is widened to fit the widest word "consectetur". Use soft hyphen if you want to permit word breaks to get a more narrow column. Don't make an article infobox this narrow. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:01, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
 * , hope, everything adds up on mobile.. Gfigs (talk) 12:28, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
 * , I'll also point out that these are not just tables, they are inboxes. Infoboxes have a whole set of custom CSS especially on mobile (on mobile we render them as a flex box grid). Also you probably should know about max-width and min-width for instance, which generally are better to be used if you want to set a certain limit, as opposed to a 'starting' position to calculate the width to be actually used. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 14:55, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
 * , seems to be ok..just a few glitches in understanding here..Gfigs (talk) 16:53, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
 * appears as if size of Infobox bodystyle, cant be changed here on mobile with width or max-width. size of headerstyle, titlestyle, labelstyle, datastyle and belowstyle can be changed on mobile with max-width. bodystyle width can only be changed within boundries of the template, in desktop..Gfigs (talk) 02:11, 13 February 2021 (UTC)


 * as you can see, most Infobox columns/row widths can be changed with max-width. however, bodystyle size can't be changed, with max-width on mobile..dont know why though, should be possible..Gfigs (talk) 07:10, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I think it could be the navbar, on bottom of Infobox ? Gfigs (talk) 07:36, 13 February 2021 (UTC)


 * probably not..anyhow, thank you to everyone working on this and Wikipedia Gfigs (talk) 09:17, 13 February 2021 (UTC)

Template link template is broken
Hi. I have noticed that template links in the form of (eg) R from colloquial name are now displaying a massive redirect banner across the site. Eg:

R from colloquial name

Looking closer, I think this was probably caused by a recent move of the main template page from Template:TL to Template:Template link.

Not entirely sure how to or whether I have the permissions to fix this personally, so I'm posting here. BlackholeWA (talk) 22:32, 12 February 2021 (UTC)


 * I think someone just fixed this. Thanks. BlackholeWA (talk) 22:44, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Yes, I fixed it after seeing your earlier post at Template talk:Template link. Please see WP:MULTI. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 22:57, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
 * My bad, I was unsure that anyone would see my comment on a fairly unfrequented talk page. Thank you for the fix. BlackholeWA (talk) 13:26, 13 February 2021 (UTC)

Extensions
I have recently tried to install MediaWiki skins for use on Wikipedia, however the instructions are super unclear and I end up getting random characters when I try to open the file. Is it because the extensions don't work for Wikimedia? Are those extensions for use on Wikimedia, or can they be used on other sites using MediaWiki? I would like help with installing a skin, thanks. 54nd60x (talk) 15:34, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * You can't install skins "for Wikipedia"; if you are running your own mediawiki instance you can install skins for your users. For more on this follow up at mw:Manual:Skin configuration. —  xaosflux  Talk 16:08, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * If you need future help with this, mediawikiwiki:Support is the place to go. This page is for technical discussion on English Wikipedia. --Izno (talk) 18:22, 14 February 2021 (UTC)

need help making a change to a language code, if that is even possible.
See my recent comments at Template talk:Native name. Nobody has responded there yet. I haven't been able to get even a vague impression of where these language codes are actually listed. The change itself is relatively minor, but I don't actually know who to even ask about it. Beeblebrox (talk) 21:15, 14 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Have just replied there. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 21:37, 14 February 2021 (UTC)

what is the 'postMath' stripmarker?
This search returns about 265 results, most of which appear to be section headers. Yet, when you click on the individual results, the headers look normal. Why are stripmarkers showing up in the search results? And what is a postMath stripmarker?

I discovered this at Special:Permalink/1006770866. When I remove the  that gives the Lua script error, I get this: Special:Permalink/1006769917 which is the expected result.

Why is that? Does a Lua script error prevent MediaWiki from 'completing' its job on an errored page?

—Trappist the monk (talk) 18:41, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * No idea but looking at a couple of the search hits shows F-score has heading  and the search result includes "F-score (section '"`UNIQ--postMath-00000003-QINU`"')". Another example is Encoder (digital) with heading   and search result "Encoder (digital) (section '"`UNIQ--postMath-00000001-QINU`"'-to-n encoders)". Perhaps the search index is constructed at some middle step during saving a page and the math rendering is incomplete?? How you got that message is another mystery—I don't see any math. Johnuniq (talk) 22:38, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Not sure what's going on with search, but Lua errors breaking math rendering is T236629 * Pppery * <sub style="color:#800000">it has begun... 22:40, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks for that. In retrospect it seems to me to make some sense that the search results are 'broken' because it would not surprise me to learn that a search results page does not go through the same processing as a regular wikipage. That suggests that the normal math stripmarker isn't replaced with the rendered image but is instead replaced with another stripmarker that acts as a (rather poor) placeholder.
 * —Trappist the monk (talk) 22:57, 14 February 2021 (UTC)

Unusual width expansion of infobox templates using Ordnance Survey National Grid
Hi, for some reason, several templates are now showing the http code for os_grid_reference, and it's causing the infoboxes to take up almost the entire page width. I don't know which sub-template is causing this to happen. See: Template:Infobox UK place/doc/London, or Template:Gbmapping. Appreciate any help! Thanks, Funandtrvl (talk) 00:24, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Well, now it appears that the issue is fixed. Funandtrvl (talk) 00:26, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

Date formatting outside citations
Would it be possible to create a template that takes in a date and returns it formatted either mdy, dmy, or YYYY-MM-DD based on whether use mdy dates, use dmy dates, or neither is present? This relates to this thread, and has some other potential applications as well. &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 23:13, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * A template with a call to the string2 module could do it. It would "just" search in the article text for each use template and call date with the correct format as P2 — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 23:22, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I suppose this would mean ripping out (or directly invoking) Module:Citation/CS1/Configuration and Module:Citation/CS1/Date validation. —  The  Earwig ⟨talk⟩ 00:54, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Hmm, I'm not sure how to do those things, but I'd love to see it! &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 03:02, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
 * We had such templates until about twelve years ago, when automatic date formatting was abolished following community consensus. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 13:23, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

Problem with tables
I cannot get the table syntax to work per the documentation.

produces:

But instead of the row header being emboldened, the whole row is.

Hawkeye7  (discuss)  08:40, 15 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Apparently, "Each header cell should be on a separate line in the wiki-markup" (Help:Table). So this works:


 * --rchard2scout (talk) 13:00, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
 * It is only the first character of the source line that is used to determine whether cells should be marked up as header (exclamation mark, ) or data (pipe,  ). All of the cells in that source line are then marked up the same way as the first. If the source line begins with a header cell, double exclamation marks and double pipes may then be used indiscriminately in that line without affecting the cell type - all will be header cells; but if the source line begins with a data cell, only double pipes may be used for subsequent cells - exclamation marks (single or double) are treated as plain text. Hence, to have different cell types in the same table row, you need to use at least one line for each type. This has been the case for several years. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 13:44, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

Time difference
When I am on my user contributions page and hover over the "hist" link for an article, the times that appear in the window that pops up are one hour earlier than the (correct) times that appear when I click on the the link and display the article's history page. Anyone else see/report this issue? Firefox is my browser FWIW. UnitedStatesian (talk) 15:55, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Go to Preferences > Appearance > Time Offset, and make sure your time zone is set correctly. :) ƒirefly  ( t · c ) 16:02, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Correction: It is only when the contribution in question is before the switch off of summer time last fall: the hist preview pop-up and actual history page show times differing by one hour. UnitedStatesian (talk) 16:06, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * It's best to select "Use wiki default (UTC)". -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 13:21, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
 * The time stamps in the database are UTC which has no summer time. MediaWiki converts the page history to your time zone selection at Special:Preferences. It remembers which past edits were during summer time and winter time so it varies how many hours it changes the UTC time. The popup when you hover over a "hist" link is not made by MediaWiki. It is made by Navigation popups which you have enabled at Special:Preferences. The code is in MediaWiki:Gadget-popups.js. It adjusts all times by the same amount. It is reported at MediaWiki talk:Gadget-popups.js and T223002. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:24, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks so much : it's always a good bet that you would be the one with answer and the Phabricator issue link. UnitedStatesian (talk) 16:28, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-07
<section begin="technews-2021-W07"/> 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
 * There were problems with recent versions of MediaWiki. Because the updates caused problems the developers rolled back to an earlier version. Some updates and new functions will come later than planned.
 * Some services will not work for a short period of time from 07:00 UTC on 17 February. There might be problems with new short links, new translations, new notifications, adding new items to your reading lists or recording email bounces. This is because of database maintenance.

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

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe. <section end="technews-2021-W07"/> 17:54, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

Where is this cite web "fetch" markup coming from?
There is a recent pattern of strange markup involving the word "fetch" or bollixed parameters. I'd like it to stop. Here are some examples.

These are just 3 examples I've found and corrected recently. I'd like to get to the bottom of this. —Anomalocaris (talk) 22:42, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I would guess mw:Citoid. --Izno (talk) 22:51, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I just checked and Zotero does the same thing, so the problem probably originates there. Vahurzpu (talk) 00:16, 13 February 2021 (UTC)

I added a 4th example that may be part of a different pattern. —Anomalocaris (talk) 23:07, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
 * The 4th isn't seriously broken but just making wrong guesses at some of the Cite web parameters. To reproduce all 4: Edit a page, e.g. Special:MyPage/sandbox, with VisualEditor. Click "Cite" and "Automatic", and enter one of the four url's in the above diffs:


 * 1) https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/newslocal/wentworth-courier/council-votes-to-reject-any-proposals-for-light-rail-long-bondi-rd/news-story/8570d0a66fe1a31e41ec532d1c612768
 * 2) https://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/national/corangamite-mp-sarah-henderson-quiet-on-gay-marriage-debate-in-canberra/news-story/e278a94f7ed86cdf12ebca6abc4f3438
 * 3) https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/churchs-almighty-religious-lobby-lords-it-over-state-lnp/news-story/583a8c8ca25aeac44d35d54be090c26b
 * 4) https://www.newsday.com/long-island/tropical-storm-isaias-li-1.47737460
 * Ignore that it looks wrong and click "Insert" or press "Enter". PrimeHunter (talk) 23:36, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
 * PrimeHunter: That's it, the visual editor "Add a citation" tool messed these up, at least in examples 2–4; the page at example 1 isn't responding properly. That means:
 * It would be good to improve the Add a citation tool to avoid these errors. It should be possible to add a snip of code along the lines of "if find 'then innerHTML' then return failure".
 * Meanwhile, users should be advised both in help or how-to pages about the visual editor and in the dialog box presenting the citation results that the user should carefully examine the automatically-generated reference and see if it makes sense; in particular, if the results don't begin with a valid last name, they may be bollixed. This isn't the whole story because, of course, if there is no last name in the item, the reference won't begin with one. We should be able to come up with a short and reliable, "Look for X" to help the user detect the most common problems.
 * —Anomalocaris (talk) 00:31, 13 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Also, I assume the visual editor citation tool has a database along the lines of "If the website is nytimes.com then use The New York Times". Is there such a database, and if so, is there a page for recommending additions to it? Some useful additions would be along the lines of "Facebook entries should use Facebook" and "YouTube entries should use . I say "along the lines of" because there are exceptions to both. —Anomalocaris (talk) 00:52, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
 * , no, this is all retrieved from The NY Times webpage. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 19:10, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

Page Moves Labeled as Minor Edits
In checking the history of an article which is currently being discussed both at WP:ANI and at AFD, I saw that the page was created in draft space, and was then moved by another editor to article space, and the move is listed in the page history as a minor edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sarah_A._Matthews&diff=prev&oldid=1006628272&diffmode=source

This seems to be sufficiently inconsistent with the concept of a minor edit that it ought not to be allowed. I was about to write that I did not know whether it was labeled as minor by intentional action, by unintentional action, or by lack of action. Then I checked my own contribution history, and I see that when I move a page, either to disambiguate it or to accept a draft, it is labeled as a minor edit. So it appears to be a lack of action. In any case, labeling a page move as a minor edit is wrong and is the Wrong Thing to do. Page moves are often contentious. Can this be changed? Robert McClenon (talk) 00:30, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * the null edit in the page history for a title move seems to have been around since 2005, a discussion was started on improvements to that but has been stalled for a long time, see T46388 for more on the subject. In any case, it isn't something that we can do anything about directly here on the English Wikipedia. —  xaosflux  Talk 01:08, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * User:Xaosflux - Thank you. I thought that this was the most likely forum to get an answer, and that is an answer, even if it isn't the answer that I wanted.  Robert McClenon (talk) 01:59, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * you're in the right place for sure, I was only saying there isn't any way for us to tweak it directly - anyone interested would need to bug the mediawiki developers. — xaosflux  Talk 02:06, 14 February 2021 (UTC)

If an user has an option checked to mark all changes as minor in their settings then page moves get marked as minor.--Snaevar (talk) 02:11, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * User:Snaevar - A user shouldn't be able to mark all edits as minor either. Robert McClenon (talk) 05:02, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * The preference to mark all edits as minor was removed from the English Wikipedia in 2011 at T26313. PrimeHunter (talk) 09:19, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * all pages moves are marked as minor, that setting doesn't matter see example here. — xaosflux  Talk 03:40, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Ok, I was unaware of the enwiki specific configuration. I suppose the devs want to have an discussion on wikitech-l, since phab is not an discussion platform. Other communities are unlikely to support an global MediaWiki change on this.--Snaevar (talk) 14:19, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Implemented as stupid. Broken as implemented.  Robert McClenon (talk) 05:02, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * And the article that started this discussion was written by sock trolls, but that is a different issue. Robert McClenon (talk) 05:04, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * The issue is that the mark as minor feature is useless and archaic. The real fix is to delete it from MediaWiki. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 09:04, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * do you mean mark as minor default user option (that we removed from enwiki a long time ago) - or that the null edit made by moves is marked as minor? For the former, there could be use cases outside enwiki and it is easy enough to configure per project.  For the later, well you know where phab is :) —  xaosflux  Talk 16:19, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I mean minor edits in general. The concept is so useless. Users decide *themselves* whether they consider their edit to be minor, mark it as such, and the only purpose for this is for people to hide minor edits on their watchlist? Well, what if a vandal just marks as minor to avoid scrutiny? Or a newbie editor. Or an experienced editor thinks something is minor, like a capitalisation, but still someone else disputes it. Thus, can't trust to filter out minor edits. The feature is useless imo. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 17:02, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Marking edits as minor might not have great value in a public wiki that allows anonymous editing. However within a more private setting, such as a company, club, or other organization where all editors have to be registered and authenticated, deliberate vandalism is not an issue and so having the ability to mark edits as minor can be useful. isaacl (talk) 17:05, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Fair. Guess there should be a config setting to disable it on a per-wiki basis. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 17:19, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * as far as manually marking things minor, there is a permission  that we give to all registered users (not IP's) and by community discussion we could remove the ability for it to be used from "all users" and restrict it to only admins/bots or other collections of users (e.g. rollbackers maybe).  Feel free to work up a proposal if you want to pursue that. —  xaosflux  Talk 20:16, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * interesting! I might just do that. Though, just a question, if it's removed from rollbackers does this pose a problem with rollback? e.g. will rollbacks still be marked as minor if one doesn't have the "minoredit" permission? Further, does it pose a problem with Huggle? (I believe Huggle doesn't use the software rollback, but still marks as minor?) If so, we could add it to rollbackers and limit marking as minor to only be used for reverting vandalism (via PAGs). ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 20:34, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * that would have to be tested out, I'm thinking it won't (but would still tag as minor - just like page moves would continue to; I don't see any WMF projects that are actually restricting minoredit from users - but we should be able to. As far as pseudo-rollback that uses minor, it would break since it is happening "client side" - how gracefully it breaks would be up to the tool design. —  xaosflux  Talk 00:24, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
 * , fully agree with you. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 19:13, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
 * this (referring to that pages moves are marked as minor on the null edits) is not an enwiki specific configuration, which is why I've pointed interested editors to the discussion at the ticket. If it was an enwiki specific configuration we could come up with a community consensus to update our specific option - but there is no such option to alter this by project today. —  xaosflux  Talk 16:14, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I might have missed someone saying this earlier but minor claims that the article content has not changed substantively. That is exactly correct for a page move. If your watchlist includes minor edits, you are supposed to decide whether "moved page" is something you want to investigate, but the minor tells you that you don't need to check the content. I don't know whether page moves are missed if your watchlist does not include minor edits. If they are, that might be worth pursuing. Johnuniq (talk) 22:22, 14 February 2021 (UTC)


 * just to sort of loop all this back to the start, while yes the page history includes the "minor" marker on the null-edit automatically added when page is retitlted, this is not a traditional "edit". For example, on Special:Watchlist and Special:RecentChanges this appears as a "log" action not as an "edit" with the minor marker, so it is not obscured from those patrolling processes (i.e. that hideminor=1 parameter has no impact on the visibility of that output).  Along with the discussion above, is there any part of the workflow you use in maintaining articles that is being impacted by that null edit minor flag? —  xaosflux  Talk 12:09, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
 * No problems from me on this particular issue. I just have an axe to grind with minor edits functionality. As such, I've started Village_pump_(proposals) ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 19:58, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

Edit description buttons
Is there any way to have edit description buttons? Eurohunter (talk) 13:51, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Maybe. Can you provide more of a hint about what you want? Where do you want these? What are they supposed to do? Are you looking for edit summaries? &mdash; JohnFromPinckney (talk) 14:09, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I'm looking for edit summaries buttons so I don't need to type "links" etc. everytime when I edit page. Eurohunter (talk) 14:45, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * if you go to Special:Preferences you can enable the gadget "Add two new dropdown boxes below the edit summary box with some useful default summaries", this will enable the gadget scripts from MediaWiki:Gadget-defaultsummaries.js for you. — xaosflux  Talk 16:11, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Too much clicking to to add "Clean up/copyedit" for example. Is there anything simpler or can I use this (green buttons under edit summary)? Eurohunter (talk) 16:21, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * You can do whatever you want with your personal Javascript. --Izno (talk) 18:21, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * How I can use PLWP js? Eurohunter (talk) 18:33, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * someone could port it in to a gadget, but if you want to just run personal javascript you can copy and paste whatever you want in to Special:MyPage/common.js - keep in mind you should be sure you know what you are doing and can read the script - as you will be responsible for anything you do with it. — xaosflux  Talk 20:11, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Can I use mw.loader.load or I have to copy it directly here? Eurohunter (talk) 20:23, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * you can use a loader between projects, keep in mind that that polish script seems to being already calling load on that project (ext.gadget.edit-summaries) so may fail elsewhere. — xaosflux  Talk 01:20, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
 * So I just have to add mw.loader.load with link to pl:Wikipedysta:Skalee/dodatkowe przyciski opisu edycji.js? Eurohunter (talk) 05:18, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Like I said above, I don't think it will be that easy on a quick read - as that script looks to call other scripts as well - you can feel free to experiment and copy the scripts to your User:Eurohunter/xxx.js subpages, then just call your own script from your /common.js. If you translate it and get it working here it could even become a gadget here one day. —  xaosflux  Talk 11:57, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Can I do it in some Wikipedia space instead of mine? Eurohunter (talk) 18:12, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
 * no, however once you build it out an interface administrator could move it to the MediaWiki namespace for general use (and other testers can call your userspace from theirs). — xaosflux  Talk 20:16, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

Temporary watching preference
Hi! I hope this isn't too dumb a question: where do we set our temporary watching preferences? I've looked in the Watchlist tab of my user preferences, and looked at Help:Watchlist, but I'm no wiser. The system seems to be choosing for me that certain pages should be watched for a while only, and I'd like it to stop. I do not want to have to visit each of those pages to reset the watchlist expiry. Advice, anyone? Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 20:53, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
 * There is a dropdown when you edit a page, and also one when you add it via the "watch" button. By default it's permanent, at least for me, I have to change the option if I want a temporary entry. External user scripts might have their own preferences. --mfb (talk) 21:13, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Particularly, Twinkle is opinionated; the solution to which is to change one's WP:TW/PREFS. --Izno (talk) 21:19, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
 * If you want to watch all current pages on your watchlist permanently then you can go to Special:EditWatchlist/raw, copy everything to somewhere else, save a blank watchlist, and then copy everything back. The watchlist has no page history so be careful not to lose the copy or store it with a wrong format, e.g something which mangles some special characters. If this is too scary then Special:EditWatchlist can help you identify pages you are watching temporarily. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:32, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

PDF single full-width column
how should you interpret this ? Help:Download_as_PDF

1.PDFs are rendered in a single full-width column; this cannot be changed.

since PDF Page Sizes A0-A3, for articles with Infoboxes, seem to have at least two columns ? Gfigs (talk) 09:05, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * some Infoboxes in these are not rendering properly (cropping text). especially those with lengthy entries of Marriage..would it not be better for the PDFs to match the desktop view layout (wider Infoboxes ?). or alternatively, make the PDFs single column, as in Letter, or A4 page sizes, until this display problem in larger page sizes can be fixed ?..Gfigs (talk) 09:49, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * viewing from Chrome (mobile) 87.0.4280.141 Gfigs (talk) 09:52, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * have software ask browser not to squeeze Infobox into second column ? -"The atomic number of Chromium is 24. If it had thirty protons, it would be Zinc. - Edison" Gfigs (talk) 10:04, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * PDF export Gfigs (talk) 22:36, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * as you can see in the last code posted in Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_187 when resizing bodystyle and datastyle simultaneously, by putting max-width in datastyle, Infobox is losing wordwrap in data column (desktop view), for bodystyle widths less than 10em (and datastyle half this). it is most noticeable as posted, with bodystyle 4em..Gfigs (talk) 02:49, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

this is for printing a PDF article on A0 size paper, that is 84cm x 119cm..Gfigs (talk) 03:33, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
 * as you can see on mediawiki2latex.wmflabs.org there are no A0-A3 page sizes..Gfigs (talk) 13:54, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
 * A0 is defined as having an area of 1 square metre, and sides in the ratio 1:sqrt(2). This works out as the longer side being 2^0.25 m (1189.207 mm, to 3 d.p.) and the shorter side being 2^-0.25 m (840.896 mm, to 3 d.p.). -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 17:44, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

I don’t understand what this is about. “Some things do some thing” is a terrible problem description. Please give exact links to pages, steps u are taking, result expected and result given (where possible with a screenshot) if u want ppl to help u along. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 19:18, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
 * it's interesting to read about what's happening on Wikipedia, and the Wiki sites..have started learning Wikitext, and slowly reading the Help pages. whilst trying to follow technical progress..theres so much to learn just from your posts. and I will also be trying to contribute..thanks to everyone working on Wikipedia, and for your inputs.. Gfigs (talk) 22:38, 15 February 2021 (UTC)

Template:enroute not working
I've been editing Tizard Bank which has a citation to the Sailing Directions for the South China Sea. This used the enroute template with parameters 161|2017|13. The citation displayed correctly, but when following the link to the pdf I got a 404 not found error. This also happens with other parameter combinations and with the example given in the template article. I've used another form of citation as a temporary fix, but it would be convenient to have this working. Kognos (talk) 22:12, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * , so to lay out the issue, you tried to use, and it returned , rather than https://msi.nga.mil/Publications/SDEnroute, which is the link you want?

&#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 23:17, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * The citation the template returns looks fine, and is what I want. The problem is that when you click on the link that should take you to the pdf it gives a 404 not found error. The link to https://msi.nga.mil/Publications/SDEnroute is what I have put in as a temporary fix so that users can get to the pdf, albeit indirectly. Kognos (talk) 23:42, 14 February 2021 (UTC)
 * , is the URL you get to via the temporary fix the same as the one provided by the template? If not, what's the difference? That'll probably tell you what you need to change with the template. &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 03:01, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
 * No it's not. The url from the template is https://msi.nga.mil/MSISiteContent/StaticFiles/NAV_PUBS/SD/Pub161/Pub161bk.pdf. This, as can be seen, is a link to a pdf, which is what we want. But it's broken, it gives a 404 error. The link I put in, https://msi.nga.mil/Publications/SDEnroute, goes to the general enroute page where you have to put in the document number again. Less convenient, but you can at least get to the pdf. Kognos (talk) 09:04, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
 * https://msi.nga.mil changed their url's without making redirects. This is unfortunately very common for our sources. I have examined the site and updated the template. Many of the current Pub. numbers in the selection box at https://msi.nga.mil/Publications/SDEnroute are not coded in the template. Maybe they were added after the template was made in 2018. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:26, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I have added the 21 remaining publications. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:55, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Poking around, I'd figured out that ths was probably the problem, but coudn't see how to fix it. I've changed the citation back to use the template, and updated it to the latest edition. Thanks again. Kognos (talk) 10:55, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

Technical maintenance planed‬
A maintenance operation will be performed tomorrow morning UTC time (Wednesday 17th at 07:00 AM UTC).

It will impact all wikis and is supposed to last up to one minute.

During this time, new translations may fail, and Notifications may not be delivered. For more details about the operation and on all impacted services, please check on Phabricator.

A banner will be displayed 30 minutes before the operation.

Thank you, SGrabarczuk (WMF) 17:45, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

Incorrect "months ago" info
I just updated the pre-release date on Sumatra PDF. Before I edited the page, the stable release date was listed as "3.2 / 15 March 2020; 10 months ago". After I edited the pre-release date, it turned into "3.2 / 15 March 2020; 11 months ago". Since the 15th was yesterday, why wasn't it "11 months ago" already? 93.136.144.94 (talk) 14:47, 16 February 2021 (UTC)
 * You were likely seeing a cached version of the page, the templates are not constantly recalculated on every view - once you edited the page it forced a recalculation. — xaosflux  Talk 15:09, 16 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Well, that's a little unexpected. I guess I'll have to recalculate time passed in my head from now own o.O 93.136.144.94 (talk) 16:38, 16 February 2021 (UTC)
 * You can force an update with a purge without editing. In my experience, biographies of living people nearly always show the correct updated age on their birthday. See e.g. articles at July 29. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:35, 16 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I wonder if it would make any sense to have a bit of site JS to update these relative times on page load. It would disadvantage non-JS users, but purging would still work for them. —  The  Earwig ⟨talk⟩ 17:52, 16 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Clientside JS doesn't have wikitext parsing so it couldn't always be done for output in any format but it could be done on the produced html in some selected cases. BLP's usually use (614,000 mainspace transclusions), e.g.  in Michael Jordan where it currently produces  . That is standardized and specific enough to allow JavaScript manipulation without random unwanted changes. Somebody (not me) could make a userscript for this and some other templates like Start date and age (86,000 mainspace transclusions). I don't think it should be default. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:58, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

ApiOutput
Hello, I have a question regarding one of the seven skins installed on Wikipedia. Obviously, the six of the seven are Vector, MinervaNeue, Modern, MonoBook, Timeless, and Cologne Blue. The last skin is a bit confusing to me. I can arguably say that the last is not a skin because it does not appear on Special:Version on any wiki, and mw:Special:Search/Skin:ApiOutput returns zero results. However, I can also say that it is a skin in that its appearance does not appear to duplicate any existing skin. ApiOutput appears to be a skin for not just Wikimedia, but for other wiki farms like Fandom. For example: https://community.fandom.com/wiki/Main_Page?useskin=apioutput Is this because this skin is a special case, or is this not even a skin at all? 54nd60x (talk) 12:43, 17 February 2021 (UTC)
 * It's the hidden "skin" used for the API help output and pretty-printed results output . It omits most of the site chrome, including the sidebar and header, that don't really make sense there (and that may not even work right since the help is served from api.php rather than index.php). Anomie⚔ 13:26, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

Article format issue due to long scripts
I noticed Cebu was in Category:Pages with bad rounding precision, and when viewing it, much of the article was filled with red warning messages that said something like "time to run script exceeded". This article pulls a lot of information from WD. This was what I saw when viewing the last saved version of the article (this one). That version of the article, and subsequent ones, now appear normal to me, so there is nothing to show. But there were dozens of timeout messages displayed. I'm guessing this has something to do with server response time and this article is reaching some limit and times-out. <b style="color:#00FF00">MB</b> 02:40, 17 February 2021 (UTC)
 * One or more editors of Philippines-related articles has really gotten into populating tables and infoboxes using Wikidata. It looks like their template or module code may need some streamlining or conversion into Lua modules. Here's the report that you can see by using your browser's View Source feature for that page:

Lua time usage: 8.909/10.000 seconds Lua memory usage: 41585746/52428800 bytes ... Transclusion expansion time report (%,ms,calls,template) 100.00% 12844.075     1 -total 65.46% 8408.099    55 Template:PH_town_table 62.71% 8054.449    53 Template:PH_town_table/mid 45.12% 5795.319   337 Template:PH_wikidata 25.83% 3317.306   270 Template:Rnd 19.81% 2544.300   159 Template:Wd
 * It is very close to the limits. – Jonesey95 (talk) 06:15, 17 February 2021 (UTC)
 * The Wikidata module, which template:ph wikidata uses, is a bit old and uses inefficent functions (module:WikidataIB is better). In some places it throws the whole item around between functions in the module. That can be improved, and I did so in the sandbox. There is always going to be a limit at some point, though. Template:ph wikidata also uses several invokes to module:string, according to User:Dragons flight/Lua performance each invoke takes some time.--Snaevar (talk) 16:12, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

Global watchlist - Update 8
<div style="border-style:solid; border-color:#606060; background-color:#f8f8f8; border-width:2px; text-align:left; padding:7px;" class="plainlinks"> Updates associated with DannyS712's Global watchlist script and the Global watchlist extension:

As I noted in the last issue, I received a grant from the WMF to develop the global watchlist script into an extension. That extension has now been deployed on Meta. Visit m:Special:GlobalWatchlistSettings to get started.

I do not plan on any further developments being made to the user script. I have released version 9.1.0 to both the dev and stable versions, which includes a notification about the extension being available when you use the user script. You can dismiss the notification, and the script still works, but it will no longer be maintained.

Those interested in providing feedback for the extension should use the phabricator board, tag/mediawiki-extensions-globalwatchlist. Any bug reports about the extension should be filed there.

This will likely be the last update sent to this list.

Thanks, --DannyS712 (talk) 19:42, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

Global watchlist user script: About &bull;&#32; Updates &bull;&#32; Code Global watchlist extension: documentation

Question about user account renames
Hi, I'm hoping someone might be able to provide me with an answer about user account renames. In my work as an admin, and even as an editor, I've looked at user logs and frequently I find log entries about user renames missing. I'd say, 50% of the time, there is no information about a rename even when I know the previous name of the account I'm looking at or the editor is open about the fact that they've been renamed. I look in the logs under Global rename log (where I have never found any relevant information) and User rename log (which sometimes has information) but frequently, there is no information present at all about this change. This can be useful information as an admin, especially if you have dealt with an account before under a previous name. When you are looking at an editor's behavior, it's useful to know if you have already interacted with them before under a different username.

Aren't all renames logged or somehow noted on the user's account? Is there some step global renamers need to take so that the change is in the editor's user logs? Why would it be missing and could it start always being noted in the user logs? Thanks. Liz <sup style="font-family: Times New Roman; color: #006400;">Read! Talk! 21:41, 16 February 2021 (UTC)
 * if these are somewhat "recent" (last few years) there should be many type of logs and links between accounts. It may help if you provide some examples.  Also keep in mind, that due to WP:SUL accounts almost exclusively get renamed on meta-wiki (c.f. meta:Special:Logs/gblrename). —  xaosflux  Talk 22:00, 16 February 2021 (UTC)
 * The users own logs doesn't show renames. It's in the logs of the renamer but that doesn't help if you don't know who or when. The rename log shows the rename under the old username, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Log?type=renameuser&page=Cassidausa for Cassidausa to Cassibri0615. If they had any userspace pages at the time then the page history will show the rename, e.g. . Otherwise I don't know a method to find renames if you only know the current name, apart from systematically going through all renames at Special:Log/renameuser, or looking for clues in their edits. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:26, 16 February 2021 (UTC)
 * They show as page moves in the histories of the User: and User talk: pages. See for example. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 00:05, 17 February 2021 (UTC)
 * There are several ways, we just don't make it "easy" T152830 seeks to make it easier, but hasn't been taken up by any devs. — xaosflux  Talk 00:18, 17 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your variety of responses. They help me understand the situation better. The username changes are all recent ones, just from the past year. I changed my own username years ago and I see people are still going to Changing username/Simple to do renames so I didn't realize that most people bypass Wikipedia and go to Meta Wiki. It still seems like this information would be somehow associated with the editor logs whether it is done here on the English Wikipedia or Meta Wiki. I mean, why would the system be different depending on the project where the request was made? It seems like the system would treat the change the same but then I'm no up on wiki technology.
 * As for examples, I don't have them in my browser history any more but I'll post back here and tag you the next time I check for this info (probably later today). Liz <sup style="font-family: Times New Roman; color: #006400;">Read! Talk! 03:11, 17 February 2021 (UTC)
 * As far as the "where does someone request" a rename - it doesn't really matter as far as the actual renaming goes, other than making sure it gets to people that can and will do it. As far as the "do renames" part, it is all on meta-wiki since the accounts are global.  Local Special:RenameUser is only usable by stewards for very odd use cases. —  xaosflux  Talk 11:16, 17 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Okay, because of a broken redirect, I found a new rename but I'm not going to be specific because the editor wants to vanish. So, there was nothing in their user logs but when I did go to their user pages, there was an edit that indicated that the page had been moved from, say, User talk:X to User talk:Z. There's an indication of a rename in the page history. But this is really only a feasible approach for recent name changes, not ones that were done a few years ago, where you have to comb through the history of a user talk page if you have a suspicion that there was a name change. So, there is a way to find out but since there are logs for User renames and Global renames, it still seems like this information should be posted to one of these logs. Liz <sup style="font-family: Times New Roman; color: #006400;">Read! Talk! 22:32, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

How to find sleepers?
I want to do a SQL query for users whose first edit was a long time (say, more than a year) after their account was registered. Any suggestions on query strategy which isn't absurdly inefficient? -- RoySmith (talk) 16:26, 17 February 2021 (UTC)
 * the hard part there is likely that we have over 40,000,000 users that would need to be queried - could any other factors that would eliminate a LOT of accounts be used to filter that down first? For example here are your one year 'sleepers' limited to only users that are "bots": query/52557. — xaosflux  Talk 19:49, 17 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Skipping users which have no edits gets rid of 29 million users. Counted with user_editcount in the user sql table, so it is not as accurate as counting revisions (took 147s to run that).--Snaevar (talk) 21:51, 17 February 2021 (UTC)
 * , That's fascinating: 3/4 of the people who make account never perform a single edit! -- RoySmith (talk) 22:42, 17 February 2021 (UTC)
 * , If your home wiki is another wiki, an account will be created for you here on your first visit, even if you are just here to read an article. That likely skews results significantly. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 09:14, 18 February 2021 (UTC)
 * here are 1000 users that meet your "sleeper" criteria - before spending time working on much huger lists you could go through that to see what % of those accounts are "problems" (ignore the "bots" title) — xaosflux  Talk 13:28, 18 February 2021 (UTC)
 * , Cool, thanks. That should get me started.  Your SQL-fu is much stronger than mine :-) -- RoySmith (talk) 14:24, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

Most-wanted articles
This might not be a technical question but I was wondering how to update this list. The last time it was updated was nearly two years ago by an IP editor, not a bot.

Any idea where to find a list of nonexistent articles with the most links to their blank pages? Liz <sup style="font-family: Times New Roman; color: #006400;">Read! Talk! 20:08, 18 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I can run a query and update it. If there’s a need, I can get my bot to update it regularly. ƒirefly  ( t · c ) 20:42, 18 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Special:WantedPages Lots of high counts due to TODO list templates and the like — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 21:09, 18 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Yeah, the problem with WantedPages is that there’s no way to exclude links from outside mainspace, which can often skew results. ƒirefly  ( t · c ) 21:22, 18 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I once made a suggestion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Council/Archive 21 but didn't follow up with wider notification. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:04, 18 February 2021 (UTC)
 * A personal aside re "To-Do Lists": In my experience I have found that most To-Do Lists are put up and then left-alone, languishing in a kind of talk page-visual clutter/editorial purgatory with very few meaningful updates. They just disappear into the WP-woodwork... Shearonink (talk) 22:23, 18 February 2021 (UTC)
 * That's what I thought as well, but when I looked into the edit history of the page, there are lots of edits removing formerly red links that are now actual articles. So, whether editors are consulting this list or doing it on their own, wanted articles on this list are being created on a regular basis.
 * As for regular updates, I think that the list probably doesn't change a lot in the short term but weekly or monthly updates might be useful. Liz <sup style="font-family: Times New Roman; color: #006400;">Read! Talk! 22:53, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

Correcting accidentally-broken "bad title" links
It was pointed out to me earlier that on mobile Discord, surrounding links with less than/greater than symbols (which disables the link preview) causes the greater-than symbol to be appended to the end of the link (so for example, instead of a link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page, you'd get a link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page%3E). This can be detected relatively simply, and a "Did you mean" suggestion displayed, via MediaWiki:Title-invalid-characters (which displays the body of the "Bad title" message), since the second parameter is the title the reader attempted to access (in the same style as is already done on MediaWiki:Noarticletext, for example if the accessed title is missing a closing parenthesis). As an example, see https://yugipedia.com/wiki/MediaWiki:Title-invalid-characters?action=edit and https://yugipedia.com/wiki/Dark_Magician%3E. I thought about just adding this, but decided that would probably be too bold, and that it would be a better idea to ask here first (which would also allow others more clever than me to suggest potential better ways to go about this). 「 ディノ 奴 千？！ 」☎ Dinoguy1000 03:14, 18 February 2021 (UTC)
 * This sounds like a bug in Discord. – Jonesey95 (talk) 06:15, 18 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Sure, but the missing closing parenthesis which is caught by MediaWiki:Noarticletext is also caused by bugs in various software, so that by itself isn't a convincing argument to me (of course, it might be to the wider community, and that's fine). 「 ディノ 奴 千？！ 」☎ Dinoguy1000 09:58, 18 February 2021 (UTC)
 * If some software sees  in plain text and wants to make a link then it's a choice whether to guess the ending   is part of the url or part of the surrounding text. Smart software could look for a matching   to make the guess but wrong guesses are not bugs and no software will always guess correctly. If Discord (software) has a feature to write   around a url like   and the same software then treats   as part of the url then it certainly sounds like a bug which may be fixed. Is this the actual situation, or does the problem arise if somebody copies   to somewhere else without removing  ? PrimeHunter (talk) 12:02, 18 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Regardless of whether this is a bug in Discord, putting the suggestion in the message if a page exists without the > seems like a no-brainer. It's always possible that someone could copy a link wrong ( is a typical way of writing URLs in plain-text emails and someone could copy the trailing bracket by mistake), and there are no downsides that I can think of at all? —  The  Earwig ⟨talk⟩ 18:28, 18 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I just wondered whether this is a Discord bug which may be fixed soon. I didn't know the email practice you mention so let's do this. We don't have  so it must be coded differently. But how far should we go in trying to guess errors? Some users mix up external and wikilink syntax and write stuff like   which gives |Main Page. Should the message check if you get an existing page by both dropping a pipe and everything after it? PrimeHunter (talk) 21:27, 18 February 2021 (UTC)
 * You're right. I think we can try splitting at a pipe and stripping any non-title characters from the end of the string, and see what that gives us. —  The  Earwig ⟨talk⟩ 22:21, 18 February 2021 (UTC)
 * MediaWiki is, of course, a cruel mistress. I don't see an easy way to escape the $1/$2 arguments to pass into templates or parser functions. —  The  Earwig ⟨talk⟩ 23:26, 18 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Thought a bit more and discussed with Legoktm. This should probably be done inside MediaWiki itself, because of insurmountable difficulties in parsing the bad title input to the interface message in wikicode. An option would be for MediaWiki to split the bad title at the first unsupported character and pass that to the message as $3, and then we can wrap that in . —  The  Earwig ⟨talk⟩ 23:51, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

Non-displaying characters
Hi all, I wonder if someone could kindly explain why I can't see a Check mark? Instead, I get a box with four tiny letters inside. I imagine it's something to do with installed character sets. I am using FF 47 on XP SP3 (yes, I know it's ancient and insecure). While I'm here, what might I need to do in order to see Japanese, Chinese, Arabic characters etc.? I have an XP SP3 install CD. Cheers, >MinorProphet (talk) 21:33, 19 February 2021 (UTC)
 * WP:UNICODE should help. – Jonesey95 (talk) 23:45, 19 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Ta-da! Everything I was after was completely sorted (including check mark) by following the instructions for Help:Multilingual support (East Asian) and a reboot. Unsurprisingly, XP's Control Panel app couldn't find the specific install files on the CD by itself, but the Browse... button highlighted them and all was fine. Thanks so much for your swift and helpful response. Cheers, :>MinorProphet (talk) 01:32, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

The French Wikipedia's birthdate
Hello, the 15th of January 2001 is widely recognized as the Wikipedia birthdate. What about the French Wikipedia's birthdate ? On the 11th of May 2001, posted on the Wikipedia mailing list, a message advertised the creation of french.wikipedia.com. But in the introduction of the article French Wikipedia, 23 March 2001 is mentioned as the starting date of the french edition of Wikipedia (until the 20th of July 2006, the introduction displayed August 2001 as the birthdate. On the 28th of January 2019, the 23 March 2001 date appeared with a citation (24th of September 2010) from ZDNet France). The article's french version does mention the same date, but with a "citation needed" warning. The oldest version of the french home page is available on Internet Archive (IA) and dates back to the 19 of may 2001. Unfortunately, the archive only shows the 4th revision. On fr.wikipedia.org, the oldest revision of the home page dates back to the 11th of October 2002. I've wondered whether frWiki could have been mistaken for the french version of Nupedia. According to IA, a Nupedia French Language Translation Project was open since at least the 9 April 2001. A thread of messages (IA archive) from Francais-L mailing list, hosted on www.nupedia.com, shows however that the french Nupedia was not online before the 1st of April 2001 (see messages' content on IA). On Wikipedia-l mailing list, the 16th of March 2001, Jimmy Wales wrote: "I want to set up some alternative language wikipedias. French and German would be good [...] I intend to setup the following domain names and wikis: french.wikipedia.com, francais.wikipedia.com (both pointing to the same thing)". On the 16th of April 2001, on the Francais-L mailing list, Larry Sanger posted the following message (IA archive): "Another thing to consider is to encourage Jimmy Wales [...] to create a French Wikipedia, under the title http://fr.wikipedia.com . I've already asked him to do this for all the foreign languages we're translating into on Nupedia, but I think Jimmy is busy these days--so if you encourage him, he'll create it soon, I am guessing. (If you were to tell him that you have an article, in French, that you want to add, that would probably persuade him.)" This confirms that fr.wikipedia.com was not available before April 2001.

On fr.wikipedia.org, the first revision of the known oldest article, Paul Héroult, dates back to the 4th of August 2001. On IA, a 19th of May 2001 version is available. Some revisions are apparently missing on fr.wikipedia.org...

The fr.wikipedia.com to fr.wikipedia.org change took place on the 2nd of November 2002.

Questions: what is the accurate French Wikipedia's birthdate ? Does a reliable source exist about it ? Could relevant Wikipedia revisions be retrieved ?

Note: this message may not be considered a technical issue, so, please, feel free to move it into a Village pump section you think is more appropriate.

--ContributorQ (talk) 18:55, 18 February 2021 (UTC)
 * it might help to ask them, they have an page for non-french questions here: w:fr:Wikipédia:Bistro_des_non-francophones/en — xaosflux  Talk 19:03, 18 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Hello, I am a regular french Wikipedia editor. On Le Bistro (17 January 2021) (the french Village pump), the question has been discussed, but no one has provided a decisive convincing proof. --ContributorQ (talk) 19:41, 18 February 2021 (UTC)
 * This is a good question that has come up on occasion (not only French). A common table of established dates would be very useful indeed, it would then be possible to do things like, which could be added to a new column in List of Wikipedias and many other places ( has been exported to 70+ wiki langs). The date table should be open to change and discussion, I suspect Commons Tabular is better than Wikidata for this purpose, possibly a page on meta.wikimedia.org. Wherever easily machine readable and commonly available.  --  Green  C  19:15, 18 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I did a couple of database queries and the earliest edit in the current French Wikipedia database is this one to Utilisateur:BernardVatant and dates to 1 June 2001; the earliest deleted edit is ironically to Wikipédia:Nupedia Translation Project and dates from 8 June of that year. Graham 87 11:16, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

Double-pinging you because I think I've struck gold here! This directory of database dumps contains a file called wiki-fr.tar.gz. Inside that gz archive under the "/wiki-fr/lib-http/db/wiki" directory, the first line says "990174692³3HomePage³3*³30³3217.14.192.xxx³30³3id³2111". 990174692 is a Unix timestamp and is equivalent to 18 May 2001, 08:31:32 (UTC/GMT). The line also indicates that the edit was made by the IP address 217.14.192.xxx (the last octet of IP addresses was always obscured by UseModWiki). The corresponding entry in the difflog file does indeed sound like it could be the French Wikipedia's very first homepage edit. I will place the original text at fr:Utilisateur:Graham87/HomePage, for want of a better location, because (a) it relates to the French Wikipedia and (b) I don't know how to format it within this message. Frwiki editors can do whatever they like with my subpage.
 * This directory contains a script by Tim Starling for porting the very early English Wikipedia dumps to a more modern format. Adapting the script to the French Wikipedia database dump would probably take a lot of work and is beyond my skill level. Graham 87  11:57, 19 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Also see this message on Wikipedia-l, which I found from following footnotes 45–46 at History of Wikipedia. Graham 87 12:17, 19 February 2021 (UTC)
 * There is a lot of relevant history in the August 2001 English Wikipedia database dump at the title "International Wikipedia". Despite the gaps in history, I have imported it all to its current location, Multilingual coordination; the relevant edit about the French Wikipedia and several others is this one. Also note that the Wikipedia-l thread above begins on 11 may 2001, not 18 May. I can't explain the discrepancy; perhaps the subdomains existed but had no content before 18 May. Graham 87 12:44, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

Excellent! Thank you very much for your time and the job done. It helps a lot. With the informations you provided, I could retrace a more precise sequence of events.

In the March 2001 Wikipedia-l archive there is no message announcing that a french version of Wikipedia has been created. On the 16th of March 2001, Jimmy Wales posted his wish to create one, a Catalan wikipedia and a German Wikipedia. A few minutes later, he also announced the online availability of deutsche.wikipedia.com. A message by JimboWales, on Wikipedia ("Multilingual coordination" meta page), confirms that: "I have set up Catalan and Deutsch (or Deutsche, that's still up in the air!), and I anxiously expect there to be some problems or complaints as people start to use them[...] I think that we should have French and Spanish next, but I don't know how to write 'French' and 'Spanish' correctly. If someone will tell me, I will set them up."

On the 19th of March 2001, JimboWales announced the creation of nihongo.wikipedia.com ("Multilingual coordination" meta page). The day after, a confirmation of the online availabality of catalan.wikipedia.com, deutsche.wikipedia.com and nihongo.wikipedia.com has been published. On the 11th of May 2001, on Wikipedia-l, Jason Richey announced the creation of the french.wikipedia.com subdomain and eight other new wikis or subdomains (xx.wikipedia.com, xx = chinese, esperanto, hebrew, italian, japanese, portuguese, spanish or russian). On the 13th of May 2001, someone asked for a french version ("Multilingual coordination" meta page). On the 16th of April 2001, on the Francais-L mailing list, hosted on www.nupedia.com, Larry Sanger posted the following message (IA archive): "Another thing to consider is to encourage Jimmy Wales [...] to create a French Wikipedia, under the title http://fr.wikipedia.com . I've already asked him to do this for all the foreign languages we're translating into on Nupedia, but I think Jimmy is busy these days--so if you encourage him, he'll create it soon, I am guessing. (If you were to tell him that you have an article, in French, that you want to add, that would probably persuade him.)" On the 18th of May 2001, in a reply to a request made on the 15th of May 2001 by Jimmy Wales, Jason Richey implicitly announced, on Wikipedia-l, the creation of the alias fr.wikipedia.com which was confirmed by Larry Sanger, the same day ("Multilingual coordination" meta page). Three days later, on the "Multilingual coordination" meta page, JasonR announced the creation of sv.wikipedia.com.

The table below shows data extracted from the frWiki dump (wiki-fr.tar.gz). The timestamps and other data are infos retrieved from revisions logged in the "recent changes" file (rclog) and "diff log" file (diff_log).

All collected infos are consistent with the May 2001 birthdate (11th, or 18th); none does tally with the 23 March 2001.

The tables below show data extracted from some pther wikis dumps. The timestamps and other data are infos retrieved from the first revision logged in the "recent changes" file (rclog) and "diff log" file (diff_log).

FYI.

PS: It would be nice to import in each current xxWiki database the very first revision of the homepage and the first article.

--ContributorQ (talk) 17:12, 20 February 2021 (UTC)
 * No worries ... glad to help. Nice analysis! The only major things that I would add/modify are that the page histories in the 2002 dumps are probably not complete (see below) and that the edits to the multilingual coordination page were all made not to Meta (which didn't exist in early 2001) but to the actual English Wikipedia. Re the deletion of the history: see Usemod article histories and an explanation at MeatballWiki; for instance in the French dump, the earliest surviving edit to the Paris article is a very well-developed page dated 26 January 2002 (UTC) (so it is obviously not the actual first edit to that page). The reason the HomePages probably survived so well is that they were relatively lightly edited. There may also be cases where history of a page from, say, May and November 2001 might have survived but the intervening edits in August may not have. The August 2001 English Wikipedia dump is complete but the 2002 dumps for the other languages are almost definitely not. Graham 87  18:35, 20 February 2021 (UTC)
 * You're right, Multilingual coordination was indeed not a meta page. I corrected that. I think what makes sense here is the coherence between the data extracted from the dumps and the Wikipedia and mailing lists' announcements. Paul Heroult, the first frWiki's article, has been imported from the french Nupedia version as emphasized by its content (see, for comparison, the 16 Apr 2001 messages from Francais-L, on IA), the timestamp and the uploader's pseudo (an IP: 217.14.192.xxx). Therefore the first revision of the french HP and the first article seem pretty reliable. It's a pity however that article histories contain some missing or dubious entries. --ContributorQ (talk) 07:09, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

MLA??
On https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:CiteThisPage&page=Julius_Lekakeny_Sunkuli&id=856705571, we have

MLA Style Manual
 * Wikipedia contributors. "Julius Lekakeny Sunkuli." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 27 Aug. 2018. Web. 27 Aug. 2018.

Shouldn't the second one be Wikimedia Foundation

Also on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_Wikipedia, we have


 * "Plagiarism." Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 22 July 2004. Web. 10 Aug. 2004, en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Plagiarism&oldid=5139350

There's a contradiction here. &#32; Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 17:12, 21 February 2021 (UTC)
 * "Wikimedia Foundation, Inc." was removed in 2008. "Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia" was repetead in 2010. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:35, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

Watched articles
Is there any way to mark articles I'm watching from templates or categories? Eurohunter (talk) 18:00, 20 February 2021 (UTC)
 * What do you mean? I think the answer is 'no'. Certainly we shouldn't 'mark articles'. --Izno (talk) 18:33, 20 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure what you mean but User scripts/List shows:


 * – bolds watched pages in Category and "User Contributions" listings. Also adds a "Show watchlist controls" link to enable watching and unwatching directly from these listings.
 * I haven't tried it and the script hasn't been edited since 2015. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:43, 20 February 2021 (UTC)


 * I mean how do you know then which articles from certain category are you watching? It doesn't works. There is other script on PLWP pl:Wikipedysta:Kaligula/js/watchCat.js. Eurohunter (talk) 17:45, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

Stub creator tool
Sometimes I come across a notable topic that we don't have an article for, and I want to quickly create a stub and seed it with some references, but it's a topic that I don't have experience creating articles about, so I don't know how these articles are "supposed" to look or what they're "supposed" to have.

I'm dreaming of a tool that will let me quickly create a stub by having templates for various topics, where I can choose the topic, fill out some basic information (like infobox parameters and a paragraph of prose) and references, and it will create the page with the correct infobox, navboxes, categories, create the talk page with the right WikiProject tags, etc. Basically, select the article topic (e.g. athlete, scientist, album, book, car, town, school, etc.), fill out a form, click, and it makes a stub with all the right parts. Editors could create new templates for new topics, or custom/personalized/alternate templates, kind of like custom warnings in Twinkle.

Does anything like this exist? Levivich harass/hound 08:05, 17 February 2021 (UTC)
 * , don't think such a tool exists, but would be cool. Copy this post to WP:SCRIPTREQ unless you get a response here. (There unanswered requests don't usually get archived, so someone could see it and write a script some time.) – SD0001  (talk) 13:28, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

Are you looking for something like Template:Biography? Slywriter (talk) 17:28, 21 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Yes! Thank you! That's basically what I was looking for... except one of those for various different topic areas. Do you know if we have other templates like that for other topics? I poked around the category tree a bit and can't seem to find a category for that particular kind of template (I don't even know what you call it... an "article template"? An "article generator template"?). What I was looking for was a tool that had a bunch of those kinds of templates so I can select the topic I'm creating an article about and it'll load the appropriate template (or form or whatever) for me to fill out. Knowing a template already exists is a huge help (especially if/when I take up 's advice about posting at SCRIPTREQ)... thanks for pointing me to it! Levivich harass/hound 17:34, 21 February 2021 (UTC)
 * ,(sorry if ping not needed), so a search for exact text "sample layout" lead me to WP:MOS/Layout, which is handy guide but no samples and another for US Fed legislation WikiProject_United_States_Federal_Government_Legislative_Data/Proposed_layout. Beyond that, I only found a handful of images showing layouts. Also a review of the history of the user who created the biography (15 years ago) doesn't show them creating/editing any others beyond infoboxes. Slywriter (talk) 18:04, 21 February 2021 (UTC)
 * @Slywriter: (pings are great on busy pages!) Thanks for looking. (I'm pretty sure there's also a song, album, or musician template in one of the wikiprojects, to add to the list.) I guess the script writing might be the easy part; the hard part is writing all the templates, which requires knowing the best practices and MOSes for all the topics. I guess it wouldn't be so tough to find a recent FA for each topic and convert it into a template like (and then run the template by the appropriate WikiProject); maybe that's something I'll chip away at.  Levivich harass/hound 18:14, 21 February 2021 (UTC)
 * , this may or may not be helpful,
 * Category:WikiProject_style_advice
 * My quick review (only went through A-C) show as some examples aviation has detailed guides but no templates, baseball has a fork of biography, and chemistry has simpler guides, no templates.
 * Aerostart Aerobiostart Airlinestart ? — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 20:22, 21 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Perhaps straying too far from your goal but does seem like a missed opportunity not to have layouts readily available as part of the MOS/layout article and then branching from there into the various categories (Arts, Biographies, History, Science etc) and subcategories(painting/book, actor/football).
 * Anyway, seems like much of the information is somewhere, just not well-organized to direct a new editor towards nor for an experienced editor to find without significant work. Slywriter (talk) 18:51, 21 February 2021 (UTC)
 * @Slywriter: Not really straying too far from the goal; having the model layouts just as MOS sub-pages (and listed somewhere in the MOS) would be helpful just by itself, and is probably more than half the battle... from there, creating subst-able templates, or a script, is really just incremental convenience. Levivich harass/hound 19:01, 21 February 2021 (UTC)
 * WikiProject style advice is one place, we do also have specific subMOSs for some topics with varying detail. Example MOS:VG has a short version 'here's what this should look like' and longer form 'here's what goes in each section'. --Izno (talk) 19:52, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

Old dumps?
Would somebody be able to pull me a dump from sometime in the week of February 7 or 14, and throw me a list of the contents of as of that date in my sandbox at User:Bearcat/Temp? The category currently has 4,627 articles in it, but I know for a fact (I check it on a regular basis, what with that being my primary editing domain these days) that there were 4,655 just a couple of days ago — and since this is after I added three new films today, that means 31 films have disappeared from the category within the past day or two. One or two, I could handwave away as either an article getting deleted or a technical counting error, but not 31, so I need to figure out what's been disappearing and why. Thanks. Bearcat (talk) 01:45, 22 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I've saved the last 130 changes to the category on that page. User:Nardog/CatChangesViewer is good for this sort of thing. —&thinsp;JJMC89&thinsp; (T·C) 02:26, 22 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Okay, thanks. That definitely helps, as I see a significant cluster of IP edits that entail changing to . Bingo. I'll definitely bookmark that page for future reference. (Also, by the way, even the 4,655 of a couple of days ago also felt like the category had been shrinking, but I wasn't able to recall an exact prior number to prove it — but it turns out I was definitely right, because I've already got the category back up to 4,659 and still have about 60 more pages to correct.) Bearcat (talk) 02:37, 22 February 2021 (UTC)
 * , is that not overcategorising? &middot; &middot; &middot; Peter Southwood (talk): 04:44, 22 February 2021 (UTC)
 * The film project has a longstanding consensus that "[Year] films" and "[Country] films" catgories are supposed to be all-inclusive (hence they're tagged with the allincluded template). Yes, there are some other contexts where that would be considered duplicate categorization — but there are also situations where a WikiProject is allowed to establish a consensus that "all-inclusive" categorization is warranted in certain categories if there are compelling reasons for it. So if you'd like to try to convince WikiProject Film to overturn its prior consensus on that, feel free to take a shot — but the existing consensus is that is supposed to directly contain all films released in 2003 regardless of whether they're also in subcategories like  or not, and  is supposed to directly contain all Canadian films regardless of whether they're also in subcatgories like  or not, so people shouldn't be removing those categories without a consensus to change the current practice. (I should also note that when said consensus was established, I was opposed to it on the grounds that film wasn't a special case that needed to be handled differently than novels or TV shows or music where all-inclusive categorization isn't done — but I lost that battle.) Bearcat (talk) 04:54, 22 February 2021 (UTC)
 * thanks for the explanation, I had not encountered this exception before, but I usually only categorise articles that I edit significantly. I guess the IPs hadn't either. This is one of those cases where an exception is causing a lot of extra work for no obvious good reason. Cheers, &middot; &middot; &middot; Peter Southwood (talk): 05:14, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

Force template to break onto new line
How do I force two consecutive rquote templates to break onto new lines? Such as the two quotes here. &#x27A7; datumizer   &#9742;  10:38, 19 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I made a hacky solution with an enclosing div. Maybe somebody can do better. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:49, 19 February 2021 (UTC)
 * 40%, no div? --mfb (talk) 18:10, 19 February 2021 (UTC)
 * That places them side by side again for me unless the window is narrow. Using Firefox, desktop, Vector. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:20, 19 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Ah... I tested it to the full width (and everything smaller than that) but my screen here isn't that big. If I zoom out then I can reproduce the problem. It's strange that a relative width leads to this behavior. Keep the div solution? Make the width 51% to ensure the boxes can't fit next to each other? --mfb (talk) 18:33, 19 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I ended up switching to a different template. Thanks though. &#x27A7; datumizer   &#9742;  07:36, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

Unsuccessful Login Attempts
A few editors including myself have been notified of multiple unsuccessful attempts to login using the user's account and a wrong password. It appears that there is someone whom I will call a whacker, a poor imitation of a hacker, trying to log in using various user accounts. I have checked my Contribution History, and all of the edits are edits that I made. I have no reason to think that any of the login attempts succeeded. I have no intention of changing my password, because it isn't compromised, and is working as it should. So I have a two-part question. First, does anyone have a guess as to what the whacker is doing or trying to do? It probably doesn't matter.

Second, I have a technical question. When does the system lock out an IP address? Is there a rule so that after 3 or 5 unsuccessful attempts to log in from an IP address, the device is locked for a reasonable length of time, such as an hour? It isn't so much a matter of protecting the system, since strong passwords appear to be a sufficient protection. It is more a matter of maybe discouraging the whacker.

Third, and this is just a wild guess. I wonder whether the whacker is hoping that one of the humans behind the accounts will panic and will change their password to something easily guessed. Don't do that, then. Robert McClenon (talk) 19:58, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

Simplify marking WikiProject status on talk page
See discussion Template talk:WikiProject banner shell and please advise where else is right forum to discuss. I know it's potentially a major change. Shushugah (talk) 20:15, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

Logout
I'm randomly logged out since few deys (monday?). What is the problem this time? Why this problem keeps coming back from time to time? Like atleast 1-2 periods a year. Eurohunter (talk) 18:26, 17 February 2021 (UTC) Central login You are centrally logged in as Tryptofish. Reload the page to apply your user settings. which should be in a little box at upper right, just below the search box, which itself is just below the "Not logged in / Talk / Contributions / Create account /Log in" links. Usually, I find that reloading the page stubbornly shows me as not logged in; but following a link from the page to a different page works. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 21:19, 22 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Sometimes that is due to security and everyone is logged out when a bug is found (that was once or twice last year), other times it could be cookie related. Did you clear your cookies recently? — Preceding unsigned comment added by TheSandDoctor (talk • contribs) 18:55, 17 February 2021 (UTC)
 * No it's already like I'm log out few times in hour now. It looks like it log out me but when I refresh I'm loged in again. I never clear my cookies when it's happening. It's not the first time. Eurohunter (talk) 21:08, 17 February 2021 (UTC)
 * , We've heard this a couple of times over the last few days here.. the reports and the fact that they happen very incidentally, but still somewhat 'often' to some people, make it sound like maybe in some regions some people are accidentally hitting a server which is having problems with login sessions.. .. I advice filing a report in Phabricator. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 09:10, 18 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Interesting. This problem has been seen at least several times in the last few years. Do you have idea what could cause this has returned? Eurohunter (talk) 16:51, 18 February 2021 (UTC)
 * , there are a 1000 different potential causes for login problems. It keeps coming back because it is a problem that people actually recognise, unlike many other problems that happen each and every day with similar causes. Its recognition bias. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 08:40, 19 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I am going through my watchlist, and just now I clicked a diff link on that and found I was shown the page with "Not logged in" and a "Log in" link at the top; inside one second the "Central login" popup appeared. Checking my system, I find that I presently have a flaky connection to my router, so it might have dropped a packet at some point resulting in an incomplete cookie. returning to my watchlist, it displayed as normal and other diff links also worked fine. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 16:48, 18 February 2021 (UTC)
 * For what it's worth, I've been having similar experiences repeatedly over the past several days. I log in, it shows that I've logged in, and then when I go to another page, I get logged out. After I log back in, I seem to stay logged in for the rest of the session. It looks as though when I first log in, the log in doesn't fully "stick". I'm definitely not clearing anything from cookies or browsing history to cause it. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:25, 20 February 2021 (UTC)
 * It just happened to me again, so I paid close attention to what happened. I logged in successfully. I then went to my watchlist and clicked to see the combined new changes on one of the pages that I watch, and when I got there, it said that I was logged in centrally, but that I needed to re-log in for en-wiki. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:19, 22 February 2021 (UTC)
 * It shouldn't say that you "needed to re-log in for en-wiki". This is what it should say:
 * Thanks for the reply. Yes, you are exactly correct about how it said it. Obviously, this isn't the worst thing in the world, but it's been happening to me a lot lately, and seems more like a bug than a feature. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:48, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

Tech News: 2021-08
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
 * The visual editor will now use MediaSearch to find images. You can search for images on Commons in the visual editor when you are looking for illustrations. This is to help editors find better images.
 * Octicons-tools.svg The syntax highlighter now works with more languages: Futhark, Graphviz/DOT, CDDL and AMDGPU.

Problems
 * Editing a timeline might have removed all text from it. This was because of a bug and has been fixed. You might need to edit the timeline again for it to show properly.

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

Future changes
 * Octicons-tools.svg There is a user group for developers and users interested in working on Wikimedia wikis with the Rust programming language. You can join or tell others who want to make your wiki better in the future.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

00:16, 23 February 2021 (UTC)