Wikipedia talk:Shortdesc helper

Gadget is breaking message box display on deleted pages
I filed a ticket. Please review at your convenience. Thank you. – Novem Linguae (talk) 03:00, 14 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Bump. This bug is still happening for me. – Novem Linguae (talk) 23:31, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Noting that I just came here to report this issue as well. &zwj;—&zwj; a smart kitten [  meow ] 11:12, 5 May 2024 (UTC)

Shortdesc helper allowing insertion of invalid invisible space characters
In this 2020 edit, the Shortdesc helper allowed the insertion of an invalid invisible non-breaking space character. I fixed it with this edit, replacing the character with a normal space.

If this bug is still present, it would be helpful for the gadget to replace invalid white-space characters with spaces when a short description is saved. Database reports/Short descriptions containing invalid space characters is tracking these invalid characters in short descriptions. The report's population does not appear to be increasing, so maybe this problem has been fixed already. I'll look for a recent instance. – Jonesey95 (talk) 18:54, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Here's an edit from 6 January 2024 showing that this problem is still present. A couple of thinsp characters were apparently copy/pasted from the article into the SD helper text field. Let's scrub those and replace them with spaces. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:01, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
 * I submitted this to github as an issue, along with a suggested fix. I am not a programmer, so submitting a pull request with modified code is probably beyond my skills. Maybe would be able to make this addition? – Jonesey95 (talk) 20:22, 28 February 2024 (UTC)
 * should be easy to fix i'll try to do this soon Galobtter (talk) 07:10, 2 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Thanks. The report was completely cleared out a few days ago, and the problem appears to still be present. No rush, since it is pretty rare and easy to fix, but a code fix would be great. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:43, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
 * According to this diff, the problematic characters are ascii 160 (non-breaking space). These should be converted to ascii 32 (normal space). – Novem Linguae (talk) 23:04, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Patch submitted for approval. – Novem Linguae (talk) 23:25, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

Mystery short description not originally in article
In 2020 Singaporean general election, I added in my own short description (YY) through Shortdesc helper, but my edit summary says I changed the short description from XX to YY, even though XX was never present in the article in the first place (originally it was set to "none"). Where does the XX short description come from? Wikidata? JaventheAldericky (talk) 19:31, 21 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Yes. If we don't have a shortdesc but there is one at Wikidata, the Wikidata short desc is used, so if you set up a local one that overrides the Wikidata one. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 21:33, 21 January 2024 (UTC)

Jump after page load
With this gadget enabled, whenever I load a page, its content jumps downward a few seconds later. This is because the shortdesc is inserted into the page when the shortdesc itself has loaded, which requires making space for it. This is extremely annoying. Is anyone else having this issue? Does it seem like it would be easy to fix? jlwoodwa (talk) 02:31, 21 March 2024 (UTC)
 * This happens with all javascript elements, in my experience. I have a bunch of gadgets and scripts installed, and page elements jump around like baby kangaroos while the page is loading. – Jonesey95 (talk) 03:47, 21 March 2024 (UTC)
 * This is fixable with thr "hidden css peer gadget" technique if someone wants to code it up. See MediaWiki:Gadget-Twinkle-pagestyles.css for an example. – Novem Linguae (talk) 08:43, 21 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Hmm, this gadget already uses the "hidden css peer gadget" technique mentioned above. It's possible the hidden css peer gadget is broken and needs fixing, or that you just have other gadgets and user scripts pushing things around in the same area. Is anyone else (who has very little installed except Shortdesc-helper) having this issue? – Novem Linguae (talk) 23:29, 11 April 2024 (UTC)
 * That doesn't seem to be available on Monobook. jlwoodwa (talk) 03:08, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

Comma in comment
I couldn't find anything on the topic, so I figured I'd ask: Is there a reason for the comma in the comment? Currently shortdesc helper creates a comment like this (sorry for the german language example, but you should get the idea):

With a comma right after the new description. Which to me seems more confusing (Did I accidently place a comma?) then helpfull. And - at least in German, I assume English is the same - in front of brackets it's even wrong. Is there a case I miss when they are needed? Windharp (talk) 08:45, 26 March 2024 (UTC)


 * A diff would be helpful for debugging. – Novem Linguae (talk) 14:39, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Sorry, here you are. Windharp (talk) 15:23, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Good info there. So this is just the edit summary, not the wikicode. And it is probably Wikidata only. – Novem Linguae (talk) 16:51, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

Extremely specific issue on auto-generated "none"s
I opened an issue on github, but I am assuming that the github is not very active since there haven't been any new changes in six months, so here's a very minor technical issue that stumped me for a while. In policy w/ WP:SDNONE, many articles do not qualify to have proper short descriptions. However, adding { {short description|none} } to a template does not register on the editor, making it seem as if it has no short description instead of a "none" short description. Article that looks like it has no short description,  except it has an infobox that does,  and search results show it has a short description. -1ctinus📝 🗨  00:41, 8 April 2024 (UTC)
 * To be clear, it appears that everything is working properly from a Wikipedia standpoint, but the SD gadget is showing the Wikidata description instead of showing the correct "This page intentionally has no description." Is that the bug? – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:58, 8 April 2024 (UTC)
 * exactly. -1ctinus📝  🗨  16:46, 8 April 2024 (UTC)
 * this was discussed before at Wikipedia_talk:Shortdesc_helper/Archive_1. Changing what the short description template outputs might be needed. Galobtter (talk) 16:55, 8 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I'll keep the GitHub issue open, though.
 * However, it appears that the gadget has also changed since 2022. From the talk page giving a reason why it doesn't do that,
 * "It would help if the SD helper could detect that the page would have the SD set (to none or otherwise) by a template, but that would involve an additional API call to check the evaluated output of the page as well as a check of the page source"
 * ...doesn't the gadget already do that already? -1ctinus📝  🗨  17:16, 8 April 2024 (UTC)