Bots Newsletter, January 2022

Graphs are unavailable due to technical issues. There is more info on Phabricator and on MediaWiki.org. BRFA activity by month Welcome to the ninth issue of the English Wikipedia's Bots Newsletter, your source for all things bot. Vicious bot-on-bot edit warring... superseded tasks... policy proposals... these stories, and more, are brought to you by Wikipedia's most distinguished newsletter about bots. After a long hiatus between August 2019 and December 2021, there's quite a bit of ground to cover. Due to the vastness, I decided in December to split the coverage up into a few installments that covered six months each. Some people thought this was a good idea, since covering an entire year in a single issue would make it unmanageably large. Others thought this was stupid, since they were getting talk page messages about crap from almost three years ago. Ultimately, the question of whether each issue covers six months or a year is only relevant for a couple more of them, and then the problem will be behind us forever. Of course, you can also look on the bright side – we are making progress, and this issue will only be about crap from almost two years ago. Today we will pick up where we left off in December, and go through the first half of 2020. Overall In the first half of 2020, there were 71 BRFAs. Of these, Y 59 were approved, and 12 were unsuccessful (with N2 8 denied, ? 2 withdrawn, and 2 expired). January 2020 Yeah, you're not gonna be able to get away with this anymore. Y ST47Bot, Seppi333Bot, Qbugbot 4 · N2 PkbwcgsBot 25, PkbwcgsBot 26 A new Pywikibot release dropped support for Python 3.4, and it was expected that support for Python 2.7 would be removed in coming updates. Toolforge itself planned to drop Python 2 support in 2022. Two new bots dropped in January 2020: ST47Bot, the successor to STBot, and Seppi333Bot, whose task was to perform a weekly update of four "massive" wikitables for WikiProject Molecular Biology. Cydebot, an adminbot operated by Cyde since 2006, was blocked after going berserk on categories that hadn't yet been CfD'd. February 2020 Y AnomieBOT 78, Cewbot 2, DannyS712 bot 67, DannyS712 bot III 63, PearBOT 6, DemonDays64 Bot 2 · N2 PearBOT On February 1, some concerns were raised about ListeriaBot performing "nonsense" edits. Semi-active operator Magnus Manske (who originally coded the Phase II software|precursor of MediaWiki) was pinged. Meanwhile, the bot was temporarily blocked for several hours until the issue was diagnosed and resolved. On February 18, ST47Bot got into a tussle with Amalthea (bot), and had to be partially-blocked from Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Cases/Overview. March 2020 Y MajavahBot, SDZeroBot, TheSandBot 6, TheSandBot 7, Bitbotje, FACBot 6, TheSandBot 8, Qbugbot 5, Cewbot 3, SDZeroBot 2, PrimeBOT 31, WikiCleanerBot 12 · AntiCompositeBot In March, a long discussion was started at Wikipedia talk:Bot policy by Skdb about the troubling trend of bots "expiring" without explanation after their owners became inactive. This can happen for a variety of reasons -- API changes break code, hosting providers' software updates break code, hosting accounts lapse, software changes make bots' edits unnecessary, and policy changes make bots' edits unwanted. The most promising solution seemed to be Toolforge hosting (although it has some problems of its own, like the occasional necessity of refactoring code). Some of the twelve bot tasks approved this month were TheSandBot 6 (removing blocked users from Category:Wikipedia usernames with possible policy issues), and TheSandBot 7 (removing unblocked users from Category:Wikipedians who are indefinitely blocked for promotional user names). SDZeroBot 2 was approved to refine geographic stub tags. New bots approved this month were MajavahBot (to patrol WP:EFFPR), SDZeroBot (to merge stub tags), and Bitbotje (fixing DISPLAYTITLE modifications, DEFAULTSORT errors and broken behavior switches in draftspace). April 2020 Y TheSandBot 9, BHGbot 5, DannyS712 bot 69, SDZeroBot 3, ST47ProxyBot, WugBot 4, SDZeroBot 4, DatBot 10, WikiCleanerBot 11, WikiCleanerBot 13, WikiCleanerBot 14, AntiCompositeBot 2, Cewbot 4 · N2 DaedanBot 1 · Creffbot A discussion on the bot noticeboard, "Re-examination of ListeriaBot", was started by Barkeep49, who pointed out repeated operation outside the scope of its BRFA (i.e. editing pages in mainspace, and adding non-free images to others). Some said it was doing good work, and others said it was operating beyond its remit. It was blocked on April 10; the next day it was unblocked, reblocked from article space, reblocked "for specified non-editing actions", unblocked, and indeffed. The next week, several safeguards were implemented in its code by Magnus; the bot was allowed to roam free once more on April 18. ST47ProxyBot joined the stable in April, after a BRFA started in December was finally completed. As an adminbot, it was authorized to block IP addresses belonging to open proxies, public VPN services, and web hosts. New tasks approved for existing bots included BHGbot 5 (diffusing categories), TheSandBot 9 (taking over some tasks from the inactive RonBot), and WugBot 4 (updating data at ((Interactive COVID-19 maps))). Also, DatBot 10 was approved to scale down non-free SVGs — I didn't even know that was a thing. A discussion at Wikipedia talk:Bot policy was started by Thryduulf about whether WP:BOTCOMM should explicitly specify that bot operators must be responsive to concerns raised on English Wikipedia specifically (as opposed to Phabricator, SourceForge, Toolforge, et cetera). Eventually, the policy was amended to its current form: Issues and enquiries are typically expected to be handled on the English Wikipedia. Pages reachable via unified login, like a talk page at Commons or at Italian Wikipedia could also be acceptable [...] External sites like Phabricator or GitHub (which require separate registration or do not allow for IP comments) and email (which can compromise anonymity) can supplement on-wiki communication, but do not replace it. May 2020 Y MajavahBot 3, DannyS712 bot 70, CitationCleanerBot 5, Dreamy Jazz Bot 4, QEDKbot, William Avery Bot 2, DannyS712 bot 68, PrimeBOT 32, TheSandBot 10, Bot1058 7, BHGbot 6, EaglesBot 2, Cewbot 5, WikiCleanerBot 17 · N2 MDanielsBot, PhuzBot 3, Gedimon · ? PearBOT 7 MajavahBot 3, an impressively meta bot task, was approved this month for maintaining a list of bots running on the English Wikipedia. The page, located at User:MajavahBot/Bot status report, is updated every 24 hours; it contains a list of all accounts with the bot flag, as well as their operator, edit count, last activity date, last edit date, last logged action date, user groups and block status. Other approvals for this month were William Avery Bot 2 (processing redirects in ((R from scientific name))), DannyS712 bot 68 (allowing users to schedule bot reminders for themselves), TheSandBot 10 (removing blocked/locked users from Category:User talk pages with conflict of interest notices), Bot1058 7 (updating Wikipedia:Requested moves/Technical requests/Permalink), Dreamy Jazz Bot 4 (adding ((WikiProject Biography|living=no)) to talk pages where their associated article is in a year of death category), and QEDKbot (deleting and nominating empty categories). General syntax fixing tasks were approved for DannyS712 bot 70, CitationCleanerBot 5, PrimeBOT 32, BHGbot 6, Cewbot 5, and EaglesBot 2, as well as WikiCleanerBot 15, 16, and 17. Seven bots who fell below activity requirements (with neither the bots nor their operators having any edits or logged actions in two years) had their bot flags removed. They were NekoBot, Robert SkyBot, DASHBotAV, VoxelBot, JackieBot, ReferenceBot, and CensusBot. On May 12, EmausBot was blocked. June 2020 Y QEDKbot 2, AnomieBOT 79, WOSlinkerBot 6, Yapperbot 2, Yapperbot, AnomieBOT 80, Dreamy Jazz Bot 5, WikiCleanerBot 18, HasteurBot 15, MusikBot II 4, NoSandboxesHere · N2 RedWarn · ? Seppi333Bot 2 In July 2017, Headbomb made a proposal that a section of the Wikipedia:Dashboard be devoted to bots and technical issues. In November 2019, Lua code was written superseding Legobot's tasks on that page, and operator Legoktm was asked to stop them so that the new code could be deployed. After no response to pings, a partial-block of Legobot for the dashboard was proposed. Some months later, on June 16, Headbomb said: "A full block serves nothing. A partial block solves all current issues [...] Just fucking do it. It's been 3 years now." The next day, however, Legoktm disabled the task, and the dashboard was successfully refactored. On June 7, RexxS blocked Citation bot for disruptive editing, saying it was "still removing links after request to stop". A couple weeks later, a discussion on the bots noticeboard was opened, saying "it is a widely-used and useful bot, but it has one of the longest block logs for any recently-operating bot on Wikipedia". While its last BRFA approval was in 2011, its code and functionality had changed dramatically since then, and AntiCompositeNumber requested that BAG require a new BRFA. Maintainer AManWithNoPlan responded that most blocks were from years ago (when it lacked a proper test suite), and problems since then had mostly been one-off errors (like a June 2019 incident in which a LTA had "weaponized" the bot to harass editors). David Tornheim opened a discussion about whether bots based on closed-source code should be permitted, and proposed that they not. He cited a recent case in which a maintainer had said "I can only suppose that the code that is available on GitHub is not the actual code that was running on [the bot]". Some disagreed: Naypta said that "I like free software as much as the next person, and I strongly believe that bot operators should make their bot code public, but I don't think it should be that they must do so". Two new bots had their first BRFAs approved: Yapperbot, to replace Legobot for handling the Feedback Request Service, and NoSandboxesHere, to remove ((user sandbox)) from articles in draftspace using Category:Non-userspace pages using User sandbox. Conclusion What's next for our intrepid band of coders, maintainers and approvers? Will Citation bot ever be set free to roam the project? What's the deal with all those book links that InternetArchiveBot is adding to articles? Should we keep using Gerrit for MediaWiki? What if we had a day for bots to make cosmetic edits? These questions will be answered — and new questions raised — by the February 2022 Bots Newsletter. Tune in, or miss out! Signing off... jp×g 23:22, 31 January 2022 (UTC) (You can subscribe or unsubscribe from future newsletters by adding or removing your name from this list.)

Is it normal for the bot newsletter to be posted to WP:VPT? And why is the 2022 newsletter filled with items from 2020? I don't get why this is here. RudolfRed (talk) 03:14, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

I appreciate the newsletter being here. I would have missed it if it wasn't here.

I am guessing they are going through the backlog of uncovered events. If I was in charge I would just skip right to 2022, but it is intresting to see 2020's events though. So i don't mind either way. Rlink2 (talk) 03:17, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Reading is hard. Here's the TLDR from above: After a long hiatus between August 2019 and December 2021, there's quite a bit of ground to cover. ... I decided in December to split the coverage up into a few installments that covered six months each. ... this issue will only be about crap from almost two years ago. Today we will pick up where we left off in December, and go through the first half of 2020. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:13, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the summary. RudolfRed (talk) 23:48, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Hello, Village Pump frequenters,

I'm just putting this wish out there but is there any way that log pages could be sortable by namespace like an editor's contribution page can be? I assume this is difficult or impossible or it would already be possible. So, I guess I'm looking for an explanation on why this can't happen rather than asking that it happen. It would be so useful to me, and I assume other admins, if I could sort a deletion log to see just deleted categories or deleted draft pages. Is this an impossible dream? And if Contributions are sortable, why can't other log pages be sortable by namespace? Thanks for indulging me with further information (I'm hoping). Thank you. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 02:34, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

Also, if anyone could explain the "Tag filter" field, I'd appreciate it. I've found it to be basically useless but maybe it has a purpose that has eluded me. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 02:34, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

The tag filter allows you to filter by tags (like "AWB" and "mobile edit"). See WP:Tags (which does a terrible job explaining how to interact with them).

I don't think there's anything stopping it besides willpower. Izno (talk) 04:05, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

phab:T16711 is the task for filtering logs by namespace. There were performance concerns raised, which I think is why it's stalled.

phab:T23383 and phab:T27909 are about improving the tag filter to make it more useful with a dropdown list of tags. This is also the subject of a current community wishlist proposal, and assuming it gets accepted you'll be able to vote for it from 28 January. the wub "?!" 09:48, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

I sometimes wish that I could export special pages (e.g., .csv file for a spreadsheet). Then I could fold, spindle, and mutilate the contents to my heart's desire. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:20, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

My apologies for "unarchiving" this discussion but I thought it would be on this board for at least a week before being shoved into the archives. I can see it was done by a bot, so it must be the settings if there are no activity for 3 days or something like that, a discussion is archived. But I'm just getting around to coming back to see the replies.

It seems like I'm not alone in wishing for more utility in the log settings, I had not even thought about something like ones contributions or searches being exportable. To be honest, it's very interesting when some thoughtful editor searches and shares a phab report but whenever I check them out, they are from years ago which makes me think the answer is "Problem is noted but you won't see a solution in your lifetime". Thanks for the replies though. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 06:42, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

That is probably only possible server side. There is an roundabout way of doing this, copying the query behind the special page, paste it to quarry and sort to your hearts content. Same goes with exportable results.--Snævar (talk) 11:32, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

Yes, I have yet to learn the ways of quarry. I keep getting referred to it so must be very helpful. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 07:00, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Hi, please see WP:User access levels § Autoconfirmed and confirmed users. Here the template ((If autoconfirmed)) is nested within ((If IP)). On desktop version, it works; on mobile version logged in, it works too; but on mobile version NOT logged in ((If IP)) fails and whatever is within both the true & false parameters appears on the screen. As such, the message appears is "You are not logged in, so you are not autoconfirmedYour account is not autoconfirmed". I since tried to change the code of this page but it didn't work out. Can someone please check it out? Thanks! ---CX Zoom(^he/_him) (^{let's talk}|_contribs) 07:30, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

It seems to me that none of the user/group classes are available on mobile right now... Not sure if that was always the case, mobile is known to always have run their own order of modules etc, but this should be fixed indeed. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:57, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

I've tried to create templates with templatedata in the user namespace, and then use the insert template button, but when I type the name of the template it says that templatedata is missing. I can still access all of the all of the default parameters, so I know that the template exists, but templatedata is ignored. Any idea what could be the problem? ― Levi_OP^Talk 17:36, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

After reading over mw:Help:TemplateData, the first section says To add or edit TemplateData, first navigate to a template's page, located at "/Template:Templatename". Every other instance on the page also only refers to using the template namespace. Could anyone confirm that this feature only works in the Template namespace? ― Levi_OP^Talk 20:27, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Mediawiki help pages are generally reliable. They are created by the very same team that created the extension. Snævar (talk) 19:40, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Hi folks: We've noticed a huge increase in IP blocks on en.wp since June — going from around 60,000 blocks a month to 500,000 blocks a month, and staying there. It was only happening on English WP until October, when there was a similar sudden increase on Spanish WP.

I can see on Special:AutoblockList that there's a block with the reason "Autoblocked because your IP address was recently used by "<blocked user's name>"." It's happening every few minutes, always with a different blocked user. It's not possible that dozens of individual blocked users are each trying to make an edit, taking turns every few minutes, so there's clearly something else going on.

Do you know if there was a bot or some kind of change deployed in June that would autoblock a lot more IPs? I don't know if the current situation is a bug, or if it's working as intended. Can anybody help me? — DannyH (WMF) (talk) 21:32, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

I at first thought it was Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Archive337#Recent proxy blocks but the timing doesn't quite match up. I have no other ideas. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 21:44, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

The most recent ones seem to be primarily registering when a user gets hard blocked, but unless there's been a technical change in how this is handled, I'm not sure why hardblocking would cause such a big jump. Hog Farm _Talk 21:58, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

Your link didn't work. If we use the correct link, Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Archive335#Recent_proxy_blocks, the timing does sorta look about right. @GeneralNotability, Blablubbs, MarioGom, and ST47: for rough confirmation of the dates. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 22:54, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

Timing looks right to me, we started blocking in July and only announced it once we'd gotten the blocks in place and seen the effects. This appears to be working as intended, though there's no denying that we're blocking a lot of IPs. DannyH (WMF), there's some non-public background on this; if you'd like I can email you the details. GeneralNotability (talk) 00:38, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

"It's not possible..." - famously edible words. The blocklist has always been somewhat busy, anecdotally similar to how it looks now. I've had a quick look through some of them. The majority are accounts which have been blocked today or yesterday. Some others are accounts which were blocked some time ago, but have tried editing today. One example causing an autoblock, User:DaniloForrest6 has been logging in several times a day on different IPs, almost every day since they were blocked 3 months ago. I'd suggest grab a DB admin to pull out some quirky ones. I only saw one quirky autoblock in the current list, which doesn't match the reported 900% increase. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 22:12, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

I don't know if it's relevant to this issue but I have noticed a dramatic increase in bot-like or otherwise totally useless edits by IPs with no other edits. Examples: 1 + 2 + 3 + 4. There are also more like this which superficially looks like a good-faith edit but which consideration shows is totally misguided. I used to use polite edit summaries and even leave messages but it's impossible to keep up with now, and that's without me looking for it. I guess that wouldn't account for a huge increase in blocks, but who knows. Johnuniq (talk) 22:33, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

Isn't this just ST47ProxyBot? It's made 2,221,665 blocks in the last four months. Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 23:10, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

Well, this is the chart that I'm looking at. The green line that goes from the lower part of the chart all the way up is English WP, with the spike starting in June. The pink line that spikes in October is Spanish WP. Every other wiki appears to be acting normally. If that 10x spike was caused by actual user behavior, it would mean blocked users suddenly started to log in ten times more often than they did the month before. And the same thing would suddenly happen in Spanish a few months later. It can't be spontaneous individual behavior; there's something behind it. — DannyH (WMF) (talk) 23:20, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

@DannyH (WMF): Does that chart include both manual blocks and autoblocks? Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 23:23, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

It looks like LuchoCR (talk · contribs) started a similar proxy-blocking bot on eswiki in around mid-November.[1] I counted about 4,000 blocks in about half an hour before I gave up counting. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 23:57, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

Yes, the Spanish Wikipedia blocks are copied from English Wikipedia. MarioGom (talk) 00:32, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

DannyH (WMF): This is the new P2P proxy blocks by ST47ProxyBot. See Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Archive335#Recent_proxy_blocks. These are also regularly imported to global blocks and to Spanish Wikipedia. It would mean blocked users suddenly started to log in ten times more often than they did the month before. Not really, these are proxy blocks, which are performed regardless of the IPs being used or not. MarioGom (talk) 00:24, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

Excellent, thank you very much! That's exactly what I was looking for. Thanks, I appreciate it. — DannyH (WMF) (talk) 03:03, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

Hello; I confirm that I have personally been importing the blocks to P2P proxies, since on es.wikipedia they have been abused by WMF banned user #00026885. LuchoCR (talk) 05:30, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

@LuchoCR, DannyH (WMF), MarioGom, Zzuuzz, Suffusion of Yellow, Johnuniq, Hog Farm, and Pppery: if you folks are still interested in this subject, I invite you to see my SPI noticeboard discussion. The depth of the sockpuppetry is vast and growing, and it's refreshing to see editors like LuchoCR (talk · contribs) taking pre-emptive action after years of abuse. - Hunan201p (talk) 14:10, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

I have a further question — if the increase that I'm seeing is from proxy blocks, why are they showing up in Special:AutoblockList the way that they are?

I'll show you what I'm seeing in that autoblock log -- I won't use links for the names because I don't want to ping all these people. :)

• 23:31 - 31 January - blocking admin Dr Kay - Autoblocked because your IP address was recently used by "Alexandru Mihai Zausila". The reason given for Alexandru Mihai Zausila's block is: "Abusing multiple accounts: suspected sock puppet".
• 23:29 - 31 January - blocking admin Widr - Autoblocked because your IP address was recently used by "Hamster KILL KILL". The reason given for Hamster KILL KILL's block is: "Vandalism".
• 23:28 - 31 January - blocking admin LuK3 - Autoblocked because your IP address was recently used by "BLMisApeacfulorganization". The reason given for BLMisApeacfulorganization's block is: "Clearly not here to build an encyclopedia".
• 23:26 - 31 January - blocking admin PhilKnight - Autoblocked because your IP address was recently used by "Borhan18". The reason given for Borhan18's block is: "Disruptive editing".
• 23:25 - 31 January - blocking admin Favonian - Autoblocked because your IP address was recently used by "Otávio Astor Vaz Costa". The reason given for Otávio Astor Vaz Costa's block is: "Abusing multiple accounts: User:MarquinhosWikipediano".

And so on, every one to three minutes. The way that I read this log, it says that blocked user Otávio Astor Vaz Costa tried to edit at 23:25 - then Borhan18 tried to edit at 23:26 - then BLMisApeacfulorganization at 23:28 - then Hamster KILL KILL at 23:29 - then Alexandru Mihai Zausila at 23:31.

That seems like a suspiciously regular pattern, a long list of banned users each trying to log in at a regular cadence. I don't mean "suspicious" as in I suspect that someone is doing something wrong, just "suspicious" meaning that I'm not sure I understand the explanation yet.

Is what I'm seeing in the log related to ST47ProxyBot blocking proxies based on the Spur info? If it's not, then where would I see the ST47ProxyBot activity? Sorry if I'm being annoying; I'm just trying to figure this out. — DannyH (WMF) (talk) 00:08, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Over a longer period, it looks like random times. We just have a lot of unwanted editors. The only duplicate I noticed was LaraBrockman visiting twice, several hours apart, possibly from work/school and home. Certes (talk) 00:33, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

It also look random to me. I see 12 minutes, 1 minute, 2 in a minute, and others. Yes, we really do get that many blocked users trying to edit. I can't see any relation between the autoblocks and ST47ProxyBot (btw, Special:Log/ST47ProxyBot). I suppose one thing to add is that when a blocked user tries to edit, the new autoblock will typically replace the older autoblock, so you don't tend to see too many repetitions in the autoblock list. It might look different if every hit was noted. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 00:46, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Certes, zzuuzz, Hunan201p: Thank you, that makes sense now. I appreciate the clarifications! —— DannyH (WMF) (talk) 22:04, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

I still haven't gotten my login credentials for Newspaper Archive via the Wikipedia Library, and it's been over a month. Who would I poke about fixing this? Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 18:05, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

@TenPoundHammer: wikipedialibrarywikimedia.org or post over at meta:Talk:The_Wikipedia_Library. — xaosflux ^Talk 22:32, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Hello! In the article List of most-played video games by player count, ref 13 has the error of |last1= has generic name. I attempted to fix it by just moving the last name to be part of the first name, however that just made the error worse. The ref does not give an actual author name and instead just lists the author as "Guest Author (sponsored)". What do I do here? ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 21:31, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Is it really important that your ref displays "Guest Author"? Why not just omit it? ((cite news))'s documentation says to give it an explicitly-blank author parameter, but it works fine even without that. —Cryptic 21:46, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

@Cryptic: Didn't know that would work since it threw another error when the |last1 parameter was empty. ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 21:50, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

@Blaze Wolf You can't have |first1= without |last1=. If you remove both it should work. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 22:39, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

The error is accidentally highlighting the poor quality of the source. The cited source is a sponsored post that looks like a press release. The real solution is to find a reliable source to support the claim in the article. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:45, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

The help link in the error message says:

False positives are possible. When the name is valid, wrap the parameter value in the accept-this-as-written markup:

|author=((Super User))

The actual credit in the source is "Guest Author (Sponsored)". When the website explicitly says this, I think it's misleading if the citation only specifies the website as source. You could write |author=((Guest Author (Sponsored))) to display what the website says without getting the error message. Or look for a better source. PrimeHunter (talk) 04:58, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

File:Vector-2022-preview-problem.webp (direct link)

I'm been using the Vector (2022) for around a year, but strangely, something happened today, when I go into edit source, and then with or without making any changes, clicking the Show Preview button, after which the content area will shrink and the various button at the top of the page will become messy as seen in the attached video. I have tried switching between Firefox, Edge, Chrome, and Brave but all yields the same result. Was there a code update when wrong somewhere? — Paper9oll (🔔 • 📝) 07:43, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

Currently, the emails you receive from Phabricator lack an "Unsubscribe" kind of button that would mute the task they were coming from without you having to go there and mute it manually. Or do they? Is there a way I can do what I want to do? Should I consider asking at Phab for that as a new feature? - Klein Muçi (talk) 13:34, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Suggest checking on this at mw:Talk:Phabricator/Help. — xaosflux ^Talk 13:59, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

@Xaosflux, thank you! I was checking in Phabricator to see if there was a place like this but I didn't find one. I guess that will do.

You know we already talked together a very similar thing but I keep getting 5-10 emails per day from Phabricator lately and things are quickly going out of hands. - Klein Muçi (talk) 14:04, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

@Klein Muçi: The frontpage at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/ has a link where to "ask questions about Phabricator itself". I'd like to know where else to link it, as you could not find the place. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 08:26, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

@AKlapper (WMF), maybe not the right place but I checked the sidebar and then here: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/applications/ (before giving up and coming to ask here). - Klein Muçi (talk) 11:17, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

When I go to a different language Wikipedia I am automatically logged in with my global account. But when I go to Wikidata or Commons, I usually have to log in again. Is this normal? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 10:50, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

@MSGJ: Do you have your browser set to disallow third party cookies or any kind of browser extension that would block them? Does the issue occur on other non-wikipedia sites like meta or wiktionary? All the wikipedias are hosted at variations of the xx.wikipedia.org domain whereas commons and wikidata have different addresses. 192.76.8.77 (talk) 10:56, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

@MSGJ: unfortunately, yes sometimes: see phab:T217519 for the general problem, phab:T226797 if it is only for a browser in strict mode, and also meta:Community Wishlist Survey 2022/Miscellaneous/Automatically log in to all projects if you are logged in to one for the current wish to fix it. — xaosflux ^Talk 10:58, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the quick replies and I'm glad it's not just me. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 21:09, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

I can confirm that the same login behavior occurs for me. On a related note, will it be possible to establish a common thread between the supposedly unified logins across Wikimedia, etc. The reason I'm asking is in the Metaverse, someone could pose as me in an alternate universe, and usurp my logins across all universes, eventually. Could WMF assert those same rights to identity for us, right now in the real universe, before a usurped identity metastasizes before our eyes. --Ancheta Wis   (talk | contribs) 23:20, 3 February 2022 (UTC)"

Ummmm. You already have a unified username/identity/login across all public Wikimedia wikis if that's what you're asking. Legoktm (talk) 08:17, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

It looks like the answer to my 'usurped identity metastasizes' question is "Wikimedia's implementation of Unified login is the way we are handling Identity.". — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ancheta Wis (talk • contribs) 09:16, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

So I had to login to Wikimedia to vote Support on a "Disable/enable the unified login" --Ancheta Wis   (talk | contribs) 23:46, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

Hi, this may be a naive question but is it possible to put utility functions I often use in a separate user script and call them in another? Thanks for your help.—182.251.108.127 (talk) 00:22, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

Yes, you can use something like jQuery's $.getScript to load another JavaScript file from on-wiki and then on its callback, use those functions. Legoktm (talk) 08:13, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

@Legoktm: I see, thank you! (My IP changed but I’m the OP.) —2001:268:900C:A331:49C7:ACF5:71DF:9DF9 (talk) 11:56, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

I'm wondering if it's possible to get the matched pattern text and use it in the replace string. For example:

((#invoke:String
|replace
|text text... [[other text]] more text
|[[.*]]
|<b>.*</b> additional text
|plain=false
))

As you can see, what I desire is that any time [[.*]] is matched, I would like to use the text that matched (the ".*" in this example) in the replacement string. Is this in any way possible? ― Levi_OP^Talk 16:29, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Put the text you want to capture in parentheses in your search pattern, and %1 in your replacement pattern: ((#invoke:String|replace|foo bar Baz boz|[A-Z]([a-z]+)|Q%1Q|plain=false)) produces foo bar QazQ boz. %2 will be replaced with the second capture group, and so on.

The search pattern in your invocation above doesn't work. Lua uses a horrifically neutered variant of regular expressions, and I haven't been able to come up with a pattern that non-greedily matches up to a pair of close brackets, or even a single close bracket. Escaping the open (and close!) brackets with %[ and %] prevents your pattern from erroring out, at least. —Cryptic 16:53, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Luckily, the brackets were only an example and I don't need to use them in my actual application. Thanks for the help though. I now see the section at Help:Manipulating strings that talks about this. ― Levi_OP^Talk 16:59, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

%[%[(.-)%]%] matches the contents of a link non-greedily, leaving the innards in %1, but won't handle nesting such as [[File:appletree.jpg|An [[apple]] tree]]. Certes (talk) 17:25, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

It should, but it doesn't. ((#invoke:String|replace|text text [[it didn't work]] more text|%[%[(.-)%]%]|it worked!)) should produce "text text it worked! more text", but instead gives "text text it didn't work more text". —Cryptic 18:11, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Umm, |plain=false:

((#invoke:String|replace|text text [[it didn't work]] more text|%[%[(.-)%]%]|it worked!|plain=false)) – capture not used here

text text it worked! more text

—Trappist the monk (talk) 18:35, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

That sound you hear is my head thunking against a wall. Thanks. —Cryptic 18:39, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

@Levi OP: A belated thought: %b[] should handle nested wikilinks such as my apple tree example, as long as there are no unpaired single [ or ] characters in the caption. Details: mw:Extension:Scribunto/Lua reference manual, search for "%b". Certes (talk) 11:17, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

Like I said above I wasn't actually handling brackets or wikilinks when I was using it; It was just an easy example. Cool to know and helpful to learn, though. ― Levi_OP^Talk 13:41, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

Would it be possible to make the "Article" tab a soft redirect (not sure if there is a more appropriate technical term)? For example, in the default "Vector" skin, if I am reading the revision history (or talk page, or "What links here") of a redirect and I want to edit the redirect (say, to retarget it or convert it to a disambiguation page), I will click the "Article" tab. This will take me to the target of the redirect rather than the redirect itself, when the latter is what I intended. (e.g. user is reading page history of UK → user clicks "Article" tab to make a change → user is redirected to United Kingdom → user must click "(redirected from UK)" to backtrack to their intended destination.)

Soft redirects, as I have described it, are already widely in use: if a change to a redirect comes across my watchlist or is in my contribution history, clicking the link bypasses the redirect and takes me straight to the page (which is what should happen). For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=UK&redirect=no. Schierbecker (talk) 00:36, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

I find User:BrandonXLF/NoRedirect useful. Certes (talk) 00:44, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

Interesting. Although it's overkill for me because, with the exception of my example, I do want to follow redirects in most other cases. Schierbecker (talk) 00:50, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

Just wrap the user script loader in "if on history page then load this script". It will then only work there. wgAction = "history" should do.--Snævar (talk) 08:07, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

E.g.

if (mw.config.get( "wgAction") == "history" ) {
  mw.loader.load('//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User%3ABrandonXLF%2FNoRedirect&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript')
}

(I think.) ― Qwerfjkltalk 17:58, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

Hi, I'm currently writing a user script (on a different wiki) and wondering if there's any way to generate page preview from a textbox on a dialog (using jQuery UI). It's a script that asks the user to fill out a bunch of fields and then edits a certain page when the form is submitted, and it'd be best if the user could see page preview on a new tab before posting, when clicking a dialog button. I'm guessing the "preview" parameter of mw:API:Parsing_wikitext could be used or User:SD0001/private-sandbox.js could be forked somehow, but it's just a guess and I'm really not sure exactly how. Do you guys have any idea about this, or know any user script that actually has page preview functionality? Any help would be appreciated. --Dragoniez (talk) 04:58, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

I don't know why you would want to open a whole new tab instead of a popup like Twinkle does, especially if you already have a dialog. The parse API only gives you the content of the parser output, so you'd have to reconstruct the CSS in the new tab to make it resemble the actual result. I suggest looking at the live preview code (search for "postData") and tinkering with Special:ApiSandbox#action=parse to get what you want. Nardog (talk) 14:36, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

@Nardog: Thanks for your comment. I'll check it out. (I guess this is a long way to go.) --Dragoniez (talk) 19:47, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

https://iw.toolforge.org/randomincategory/Pending_AfC_submissions%26server%3Den.wikipedia.org%26namespace%3D2!118%26type%3Dpage

The Random Submission button found on AfC project page is leading to a category searchbar instead of finding a random submission.Slywriter (talk) 18:05, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

@Slywriter: That means there are no pages in that category. ― Qwerfjkltalk 21:11, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

If only that were true, but the general category has over 3k submissions. Hint hint for any experienced editors reading along that AfC can ALWAYS use help.Slywriter (talk) 21:30, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

@Slywriter Something's wrong with my random in category tool. I'll look into it. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 21:19, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks.Slywriter (talk) 21:30, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

@Slywriter It should be working now. Long story short, WP:ITSTHURSDAY. Toolforge is still running an old version of PHP that defaults to using HTTP/1.0. A few hours ago a new version of mediawiki was deployed whose API requires HTTP/1.1 (see WP:ITSTHURSDAY), so I had to tweak the code to make it work. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 22:08, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

But but its still Wednesday. Seriously, thanks. Glad it was a "small" issue.Slywriter (talk) 22:15, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Seems to be related to phab:T300366 and phab:T271421. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 22:24, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

WP:THURSDAY comes a bit early for the non-Wikipedias. ;-) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:58, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

I know that several of you are already using the [reply] tool, but just a heads-up that it might finally be turned on for all "desktop" users early next week. Please see Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Offering the Reply Tool as an opt-out feature.

If you don't already know what I'm talking about, then click https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)?dtenable=1#Reply_tool_might_get_here_soon to see the new [reply] buttons after each signature on this page. If you click the [reply] button, you will get a little quick-reply widget, which has the important advantage of auto-signing the comment. The other tools (e.g., the [subscribe] button that we played with here last year) won't be deployed yet. (Maybe we should ask the team to give us all the subscribe button, though. I'm really liking it.)

For the regulars, on the assumption that somoene's going to ask about this new tool here:

• You can turn it off if you don't like it. Go to Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing-discussion (after it's deployed; if you don't have the Beta Feature enabled, then that section's probably invisible to you right now).
• There's a basic help page at mw:Help:DiscussionTools. The regulars here will want the more advanced help page: mw:Help:DiscussionTools/Why can't I reply to this comment? Technical details are at mw:Extension:DiscussionTools/How it works.
• Feedback is wanted. Since it's already been used to post 750,000 comments so far, I'm not expecting any big suprises, but if you run into a problem, feel free to ping me. You can also post at mw:Talk:Talk pages project/Replying (which uses Flow, not the new [reply] tool) or file tasks in Phabricator and tag them with #DiscussionTools.

I know this has been delayed several times already, but I do think it's finally on track to happen. Thanks for your support during this very slow process. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:34, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

little happy dance emoji (or something something) —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 23:15, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

"Version 94.0.4606.124 (Official Build) (64-bit)" is the version of Chrome I'm using. This problem has been ongoing for at least two weeks. About 2/5 of the time I click on edit source, the side-scrolling widget on the right side of the editing space will not come up, I have tried disabling my add-ons, without better results. Obviously this greatly hinders my ability to scroll down and up through articles. It doesn't happen when I switch to "visual editing", but I much prefer "source editing". I believe my device updated at around the same time that this problem began.--Phil of rel (talk) 06:40, 3 February 2022 (UTC) Edit: it seems to be happening even in visual editor right now. Even refreshing the page doesn't help.--Phil of rel (talk) 06:46, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

side-scrolling widget on the right side of the editing space is not standard, so, you're going to have to tell us what you think that is. Izno (talk) 16:56, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

I'm sorry, it used to come up for me, maybe I'm referring to something different when I use the term "widget", I mean the scrolling bar on the right side of the editing box. It used to come up all of the time, but if you're right and it's just not standard to have a side-scroller, then that answers my query. Thanks.--Phil of rel (talk) 19:44, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

Your standard scrollbar is missing, is how I read that. Is that correct? Izno (talk) 23:24, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

That's correct. Phil of rel (talk) 12:49, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

@Phil of rel, is it broken when you click this link to edit my sandbox? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:11, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

No, it works fine then. Phil of rel (talk) 21:51, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

@Phil of rel, it's probably a broken script or gadget in your account, then. mw:Help:Locating broken scripts has some advice on how to figure out where the problem is. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:34, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for your help. Phil of rel (talk) 00:54, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

It's odd, but the article title for Lando Calrissian is currently italicized despite no use of ((DISPLAYTITLE)) or ((italic title)). The page had been vandalized and required my semiprotection. Can anyone figure the title out? – Muboshgu (talk) 01:59, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

italic title = no. Izno (talk) 02:19, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

Izno, thank you! I didn't put two and two together with ((Infobox book)) being in the middle of it. – Muboshgu (talk) 02:19, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

But is the book fiction? -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 06:31, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

If a user attempts to create Example when Draft:Example already exists, a message pops up "There is a draft article for this article at Draft:Example" (see Harpreet Kaur for an demonstration). It would be good to have the opposite functionality: an editor attempting to create Draft:Albert Einstein should, assuming Albert Einstein is not a redirect, get a message along the lines of "Albert Einstein already exists; please consider improving that existing article." (more draconian, but with its advantages, would be to prevent creation of any draft with the same title as a non-redirected mainspace article). Anyone willing to tackle this? Thoughts? UnitedStatesian (talk) 04:24, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

When I go to Draft:Albert Einstein, I do indeed see "Note: There is a Wikipedia article named Albert Einstein (diff)" (with a link to the diff). I agree that this could be made bigger, similar to the message that pop ups vice-versa. 🐶 EpicPupper ^{(he/him | talk)} 05:30, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

((Draft at)) is the message you're referring to, and I agree a similar mbox would be a good idea here. Or could mirror the logic I added to ((draft at)) recently, where it doesn't show if the draft is a redirect outside draftspace, and have it so it shows the current small message if the article in question is a redirect, but an mbox if it's not. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 06:37, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

or, better still, all the other such messages could be made smaller. Thincat (talk) 11:08, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

Although I dislike the screenful of messages that pops up when I edit certain pages, this is a rare case where a big warning is appropriate. Anyone attempting to create the duplicate article would normally help us and themselves better by improving the existing page instead. Certes (talk) 11:48, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

Is there a way to enable the live updates for one's watchlist by default, rather than having to manually turn it on each time? I asked at the Teahouse and was told that another user's always stayed active when he turned it on, but that doesn't appear to be the case for me -- mine always turns off any time I refresh the page. — Czello 16:46, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

Don't think that's natively supported. There's User:SD0001/watchlist-update-title though that does this as well as updates the count of unread changes in the browser tab title. – SD0001 (talk) 03:23, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

I have a strange problem involving, of course, categories. The categories state that they aren't empty. If you look at Category:Empty categories awaiting deletion, you can see a few categories that indicate they have one or two pages in them, including Category:2000 establishments in Angola, Category:2022 Polish television seasons, Category:2022 Thai television series endings, Category:2022 Winter Olympics pictograms, Category:2004 Croatian television series endings and Category:2009 Peruvian television series endings are some examples you can see in the Empty Categories category.

And, if you look at these category pages, there is a bright red message "This category does not appear to be empty!". But the categories are, in fact, empty. I thought this might be a problem with a system lag or something (a layman's guess) and I was going to add this message last night when I noticed the problem but decided to wait to see if it went away. But they still appear to be non-empty empty categories. I did a "purge cache" and still, no change. I've been working with empty categories since 2015 and I've never seen this happen before.

Of course, as far as technical problems go, this is more of a curiosity than anything else but I wondered if anyone had an idea why this would suddenly happen now, and to more than one category page. Thank you. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 23:05, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

@Liz: that red error is from the db template making use of the PAGESINCAT magic word; it is not reliable as it is subject to database and replication lag, which can't be fixed with a purge (phab:T85696). So either ignore it, or wait. — xaosflux ^Talk 23:33, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

The code is in Template:Db-c1: ((#ifeq:((PAGESINCAT:((PAGENAME))))|0||((error|This category does not appear to be empty!)))). "does not appear" is a hint that it may not be certain. If it's currently very uncertain then we could state it more clearly or link a page which mentions the issue. PrimeHunter (talk) 04:28, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

Well, I don't quite understand but I appreciate the explanations. That doesn't have to do with your explanations but my lack of understanding of templates and all things database. It's nice that others can figure out what is going on when weird, unexpected things happen. Many thanks. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 05:40, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

Today we ran a script to recount categories so that counts are well, correct. It's possible said script has a bug or there's some other race condition going on. I re-opened T299823 for now. Legoktm (talk) 08:11, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

Okay, Legoktm, another VERY LITTLE BUG which can drive CSD patrolling admins a little nuts. Category:Candidates for speedy deletion as spam always has 1 page too many in the content listing (see right-side listing of categories on the page). If there are 2 pages in this category, it will say there are 3 pages. But mostly, it says there is 1 page when the category is actually empty.

A few weeks ago, the CSD categories were completely out-of-whack but this is a very specific mistake that is only happening in the Spam CSD category but it's been a couple of days now. Admins who patrol CSD categories like to clear them out so to still have a 1 page indicated when the category is empty can be a little irritating. Not, stop the world irritating, but if you have a solution, that would be awesome! Thank you. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 05:08, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

@Liz: There is a long-standing known bug causing counts to be wrong. Basically whenever a page is added or removed to MediaWiki, it just adds +1 or -1 to the count, so if that fails for any reason, there will permanently be one more or less page in the category and it just tends to get worse over time. The first step to making that less worse is T299823, which I mentioned earlier. We now recount all categories from scratch on the first of the month.

The second part is T85696, which once deployed (still in progress) will let you purge the category page to recount it from scratch. Hopefully that'll be available in a few weeks and then in the future if you find a category with counts that are off, purging it will do the trick. Legoktm (talk) 06:29, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

If $1 links to $2 and if I then go to $1 and click on "related changes", I get a list of changes to $2. But if I have $1 on my watchlist, I also can view changes to Talk:$2. Will it be difficult to implement a corresponding feature in related changes? It would be useful to monitor talk pages easily without having to link to them specifically or manually add the links to my watchlist. Utfor (talk) 08:43, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

Hello all, I don't really want to go messing with a highly used template that uses a module, so I was wondering if it was a simple job to create a version of this template that is in a default collapsed state. It's taking up a lot of real estate on year pages and I am guessing that 99.9% of the readers of those pages don't even look at it. TIA, Black Kite (talk) 14:39, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

Something like:
((cot | Year in various calendars | right=true | b-color=transparent | border2=transparent | bg2=transparent | bg=transparent)) ((Year in various calendars)) ((cob)) ― Qwerfjkltalk 16:18, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

The template's documentation says (in bold italic, no less): "Please do not rename or remove these classes nor collapse nested elements which use them."

I do not know why that should be so but before you go off and collapse all of those infoboxen (which I don't find to be all that obtrusive) you should discover why the template documentation is so averse to collapse.

The text in the template's documentation is added by ((Microformat message)). Alas, that template's author, Sardanaphalus, is, apparently, no longer with us. Perhaps someone else knows the reason.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 16:22, 6 February 2022 (UTC) 16:32, 6 February 2022 (UTC) (spelling + more)

Thanks both. I'll have a mess about with it in userspace and see if it breaks anything. Black Kite (talk) 19:18, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

Over on the page Mary Robinson#Resignation as president, I have tried to put wikilinks on the words "Cathaoirleach" and "Ceann Comhairle". These words are in Irish, so I have also put them in a ((lang)) template. It's formatted like this: [[Ceann Comhairle|((Lang|ga|Ceann Comhairle))]]. Weirdly enough, in the visual editor it appears an a blue-link in italics. But in the reader view, it just shows the square brackets etc.. Any advice about where I've gone wrong? Thanks. Xx78900 (talk) 22:26, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

@Xx78900: See Template:Lang#Syntax and usage, last paragraph, and use [[Ceann Comhairle|((Lang|ga|Ceann Comhairle|nocat=true))]]. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:53, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

Thank you! Xx78900 (talk) 22:55, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

Would it be possible to give Special:allpages the ability to filter out redirects? We have a redirect discussion where someone wants to delete redirects because of the inability to filter them out, and we shouldn't be deleting redirects merely because of a shortcoming with our tools. Thanks. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 21:04, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

The thing about special pages is that they are for every wiki, including the sister projects and all of the wikis listed on wikiapiary (it lists wikis that use Mediawiki). Creating an Wikipedia:Database reports for this purpose on the other hand is entirely possible.--Snævar (talk) 21:15, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

Plus all redirects on Special:Allpages are in italics.--Snævar (talk) 21:18, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

Special:PrefixIndex supports hiding redirects for what it's worth, so it is indeed a bit of a weird asymmetry. Nardog (talk) 21:33, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

As does mw:API:Allpages! Nardog (talk) 21:35, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

It used to. However it seems it was disabled in March 2017 to resolve an issue where someone mass screen-scraping special:allpages caused outages (phab:T160916). A request to re-enable it in August 2017 was declined (phab:T173479). The task to actually fix the issue (phab:T160983) has been open since March 2017, but no actual action appears to have taken place since then (it wasn't even prioritised until September 2021, when it was rated low priority). So it seems like a database report or similar is going to be the only useful way forward for the next several years (deleting redirects is not a useful way forward). Thryduulf (talk) 01:35, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

21:14, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

I am considering writing a script to analyze data from WP:AIV. The script will need to query about 10,000 diffs using the compare action of Wikipedia's API. The script is purely read-only: I am not making any edits, just downloading the JSON outputs for offline use. I have read MediaWikiWiki:API:Etiquette and don't want to run anything that exceeds a reasonable rate of API requests. My questions are:

• Is running my script allowed by policy?
• Do I need to get BRFA approval to proceed?

I am willing to spread the API requests out over time and limit myself to batches of 500 requests at a time. I appreciate any technical advice from more seasoned editors as this is my first foray into using the API. Best, Altamel (talk) 03:55, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

• Yes
• No (you are not doing any actions that modify en.wp)

—TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:23, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

Yup, that. Not something that the English Wikipedia will care about - however if you do flood the server developers may shut you down. Your request is really not "that big" in the grand scheme (20x 500 result requests) - just don't do something silly like make 10000 individual requests - each with a new session - and all in parallel :D — xaosflux ^Talk 10:48, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

@Altamel: just to be clear, don't make 500 requests at the same time, requests should be made in series, not in parallel. Legoktm (talk) 08:09, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

Hope we didn't confuse you with terms - yes you can make 1 "request" that has 500 results; then repeat that process in series, 20 times. If you really have to you could make 10,000 requests, but also do them in series - and if it is public-read only data: skip authentication steps too. Don't make hundreds of parallel requests. — xaosflux ^Talk 15:24, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

The compare API only supports one result at a time. Though I'm not sure @Altamel why you want to query diffs. Sounds like you'd be better off querying the revisions, which can be done in bulk (50 revisions per request, although if you have a bot account you could upto do 500 {but there's a 12 MB size limit on the API response which 500 revisions could break}) and then compute the diffs locally. – SD0001 (talk) 15:51, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

@TheDJ, Xaosflux, and Legoktm: thanks everyone for the replies. Good to know this is a permissible use of the API, though I must admit I am still a little confused about the difference between parallel and series. I have not run any requests en masse yet (still testing small bits of code in the API sandbox). So to clarify – even though I can't pipe requests for the compare API, if I write the code so that it waits until a JSON is returned, and then loops back to making the next request, and repeat that 10,000 times – that's what you mean by making requests in parallel?
SD00001, I did not know that the compare API can only handle one revision at a time – thanks for the clarification. That explains why my tests in the API sandbox, where I tried to use the pipe character to request multiple revisions at once, kept returning errors. I had planned to use diffs because it was easier to match up the content that was added with the account that added it – as you pointed out, otherwise I would have to back out the diffs manually. Altamel (talk) 19:55, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

Some programming languages/libraries allow for making multiple HTTP requests at the same time (see Asynchronous I/O), which would be requests in parallel. To make requests in series, just wait for the first request to finish and then make the next one. I would recommend using one of the pre-existing API client libraries, they all should take care of that for you. Legoktm (talk) 06:32, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

@Altamel, why do you want to do that? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:08, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

Whatamidoing (WMF), I am hoping to analyze statistics regarding the frequency of reports and average response times. If I ever find the time to finish the analysis, I might write my results up as a report and offer suggestions for improving AIV. Best, Altamel (talk) 19:55, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

In that case, would you rather be counting "edits", or would you rather count "comments"? mw:Extension:DiscussionTools has a hidden tag that would let you identify new (signed) comments (e.g., in RecentChanges), and there's a way to identify and count the individual comments on the page, too. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 05:22, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

@Altamel, take a look at what https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)?dtdebug=1#API_policy_question does to this discussion. Would that kind of comment parsing be more useful to you than the diffs? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:30, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

@Altamel, you may be interested in User:Enterprisey/AIV analysis. I have a document describing the raw data format and can prepare more data over any timespan you want. Enterprisey (talk!) 00:34, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Hi

I'm working on some documentation on Meta and have built a map using Template:Graph:Map not realising it wasn't available on meta. Please could someone who knows how to copy templates copy it over for me? I would ask there but I doubt my message would get seen.

Thanks very much

John Cummings (talk) 19:18, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

m:Template:Graph:Map already existed, but was missing some required dependencies. I've now created them, so it should work now. I always hate how much other wikis are a graveyard of broken templates ... * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 22:43, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

Pppery thanks so much, works like a charm https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:John_Cummings/map. John Cummings (talk) 01:09, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Pppery maybe they should have a soundtrack to accompany them... Mathglot (talk) 02:52, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Hello! Can someone experienced in the translation feature in Commons help me with adding translation and language tags to some project pages? The pages and the details can be found here. I asked in the Translators' noticeboard there but I didn't get an answer and thought that maybe I can have some more luck here. Any kind of help would be appreciated as I've never had a chance to work with that feature before. - Klein Muçi (talk) 03:35, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

In a standard JS there is skin specific infornation header (e.g. User:Nux/vector.js) -- "The accompanying .css page for this skin is at...". In the latest skin there seem to be a generic info (e.g. User:Nux/vector-2022.js). Nux (talk) 23:13, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

I have updated Template:Script doc auto/core2.[3] PrimeHunter (talk) 04:14, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

• [[imdbtitle:4699982|Rebellion]] = Rebellion
• ((IMDb title | id= 4699982 | title= Rebellion)) = Rebellion at IMDb

0mtwb9gd5wx (talk) 04:46, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Do you have a question? See meta:Help:Interwiki_linking and meta:Special:Interwiki for information. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:52, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

If your non-question is about the preferred form in articles then it's generally templates. It's easier to answer a question if you actually ask one. PrimeHunter (talk) 06:54, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

This is getting really really annoying. I have all banner ads turned off in my prefs, but still have ads on nearly every page, often multiple ads on a page so I have to scroll down to get to the article. It's nearly all garbage, and 'dismissing' them doesn't seem to do any good -- they just pop back up over and over. Hundreds of ads a day; some of the ads I've seen thousands of times. (Like the 'Vote in the Community Wishlist Survey' popup, which is even in extra-large type so that it takes up lots of room.) Once is enough. How do we turn them off or opt out? And is there a universal opt out? Thanks. — kwami (talk) 10:06, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

@Kwamikagami: you can opt out of the central-notice banners here: Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-centralnotice-banners; and you can disable geo-notices by turning them off here: Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets. — xaosflux ^Talk 11:36, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Also you shouldn't be getting them thousands of times, but if you have disabled cookies or local storage - you will likely see them much more than you should. — xaosflux ^Talk 11:37, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Thank you! I'd already unticked everything at the first link, but didn't know about Central Notices at the 2nd. That should help. — kwami (talk) 11:41, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

The search button in the top right on mobile view is broken when using the browser without javascript. I think it used to go to Special:Search, now it's just dead. 46.188.165.16 (talk) 07:22, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

See mw:How to report a bug. --Malyacko (talk) 10:43, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

This commit must be the culprit. The #searchIcon button used to be inside the form element, but now it's outside. Ping BWang (WMF). Nardog (talk) 11:00, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the report Jdlrobson (talk) 16:08, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

On my notifications screen, if I press the person icon, a popup appears. I am unable to press the buttons on it. If I do, the popup hides without changing the site. A temporary fix would be, on mobile devices at least, to add the sandbox buttons ect to the sidebar. I assume this popup works with other users, but I use an Amazon Kindle, and isn't possible currently to use my computer for web stuff. Any help or fix would be greatly appreciated. L10nM4st3r _(talk) 11:34, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Could this be the same bug described here?: phab:T298746 Jdlrobson (talk) 16:10, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

All the buttons are visible, they just don't work. -- L10nM4st3r _(talk) 23:03, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Hi, I use a Gen 10 Amazon Kindle's default web browser, last system update on October 2021.

On the notification screeen, if I press the person icon a popup with buttons show. I cannot press them. If I try, the popup instead hides.

I cannot easily find anything else that can help. If you need more info, please ping me.

Thanks, -- L10nM4st3r _(talk) 15:25, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

(1) Does the address bar say en.m.wikipedia.org or just en.wikipedia.org? (2) If you follow this link, which skin is selected? Nardog (talk) 15:34, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

On further inspection, the button shows only in advanced mode, right? When I turned it off, the button disipears and I can access my userpage on any page... I used the Vector Legacy 2010 and im on "en.wikipedia .org". No ".m." included. — Preceding unsigned comment added by L10nM4st3r (talk • contribs) 15:55, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Sorry, I forget to sign...-- L10nM4st3r _(talk) 15:57, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

By "advanced mode" you mean on the toggle on this page? That suggests you're indeed using the mobile site and Minerva, even though your report of the domain and preferences suggests otherwise. So, to recap: when you tap or , a menu shows up but tapping inside the menu does nothing, while you can use the menu that shows up when tapping just fine. Is that correct? Nardog (talk) 16:20, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Sorry I took a while to respond, Im in my gaming time now. Yes, you are correct. — Preceding unsigned comment added by L10nM4st3r (talk • contribs) 17:56, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Sry, forgot again :( -- L10nM4st3r _(talk) 17:58, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

I made a mistake, yes it is en.m.wikipedia! Sry-- L10nM4st3r _(talk) 19:31, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Not as inportant at the moment, but too similar to class as a different bug type: "new discussion" and article "edit whole" buttons don't work either, but I have managed to work around it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by L10nM4st3r (talk • contribs) 23:20, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Dear experts,

In this draft of a table in my Sandbox, borders appear around each cell. How can I eliminate them, please? I've checked out Help:Table with nosuccess. If there are other faults in my coding, I'd greatly appreciate being corrected. Cheers, SCHolar44 (talk) 07:59, 9 February 2022 (UTC)

Consider Help:Gallery tag instead. PrimeHunter (talk) 08:50, 9 February 2022 (UTC)

Thank you, PrimeHunter. I'm fairly familiar with that page, but I want to make the gallery collapsed. Hence resorting to table format. SCHolar44 (talk) 11:49, 9 February 2022 (UTC)

I made a change to your sandbox which removed the borders but unfortunately there are other problems with your table which I don't have time to evaluate or fix at the moment. I'll check back on things when I get home from work. Best regards.--John Cline (talk) 09:18, 9 February 2022 (UTC)

Many thanks, John. Only 4 letters! I'm looking forward to benefiting from your other corrections. Cheers, Simon. SCHolar44 (talk) 11:49, 9 February 2022 (UTC)

See MOS:COLLAPSE. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:31, 9 February 2022 (UTC)

Hello, everyone! You may know me as the creator of CopiedTemplateEditor and InfringementAssistant. Contributor copyright investigations has been backlogged for over 10 years now with over 192 currently active cases and I thought it would be a good idea to develop a userscript/gadget that better handles the processing of CCI cases. I've requested a rapid grant from the Wikimedia Foundation to help in this endevaour. You can find more information about the scope of the userscript/gadget and the grant on m:Grants:Project/Rapid/Chlod/Contributor copyright investigation tool. Feel free to leave comments, questions, suggestions, ideas, and endorsements on the grant talk page. Thanks! Chlod (say hi!) 02:21, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Hello! On Talk:George Orwell, the answered edit requests appear to be leaking into other sections not related to the edit request that is answered. I'm thinking it's the images that are causing this but I don't know how to fix it. ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 18:50, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

This is normal behavior for things floating right that clear right. You can fix it by removing images or removing bad edit requests or both. Do not remove good edit requests much less their corresponding boxes. Izno (talk) 19:01, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Fixed like this. DuncanHill (talk) 19:02, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks! ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 19:04, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Just had the following message when trying to go to my watchlist "upstream connect error or disconnect/reset before headers. reset reason: overflow". DuncanHill (talk) 19:31, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

WP:ITSTHURSDAY.-- Jezebel's Ponyo^{bons mots} 19:34, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

So did MediaWiki just update or what exactly happened? ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 19:36, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Welp, that proves I'm not the only one with this issue. ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 19:34, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Wikipedia having issues?

Hello again! Just recently (within the hour), when I've tried accessing pages i get the message upstream connect error or disconnect/reset before headers. reset reason: overflow. Is Wikipedia having issues right now or is it just me? ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 19:34, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

This is being tracked at phab:T301505, and the error message is a side effect of phab:287993. —GMX^{(on the go!)} 19:47, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Do you mean phab:T287993? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:53, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Nope. It was phab:T287983. Also not a "side effect", the "origin" I guess. —GMX^{(on the go!)} 19:58, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Special:History/Just_6.5 is showing a recent edit that based on the history and current article looks like it should have occurred in between the previous two edits.Slywriter (talk) 21:00, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

It looks OK. The three latest edits (earliest first) are: unlink Ramin Mashare in #Cast; unlink Ramin Mashare in infobox; redlink Ramin Mashare in infobox (revert previous edit). Certes (talk) 21:48, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Certes Maybe I'm having a cache issue but the article does not have the live redlink on my screen and the double revert seems off as there shouldn't have been anything to unlink the second time.Slywriter (talk) 21:54, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

@Slywriter: I see a redlink in the infobox but black text in section Cast. The "double revert" was removal of two separate links to the same title. Certes (talk) 21:57, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Thank you. Totally missed they were different areas. Got worried because its Thursday Slywriter (talk) 21:59, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

I had opened a section as can be seen. But now, the reuse tab of citation has appeared again. What had happened last time, and what has happened now. Itcouldbepossible^Talk 08:41, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Are you sure you are seeing File:2017 wikitext editor.png and not File:Accessing the cross-wiki upload tool from wikitext editor, step 1.png ? It is not a big deal if it is the latter.--Snævar (talk) 10:17, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

It looks like you need to select text that contains a reference in order to use the "Re-use" tab. I'm still not sure how it's supposed to work though, as it adds <references><ref name="..." /></references> in the middle of the prose, which results in "Cite error: A list-defined reference with the name '...' has been invoked, but is not defined in the <references> tag (see the help page)." Nardog (talk) 10:30, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

@Nardog@Snævar I am really sorry for creating such a confusion. Last time and this time too, I made the same mistake. I can see the reuse tab only when I am visual editor mode, and not in source mode. I have got things right. Thanks for your overall help. Itcouldbepossible^Talk 10:43, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

To be fair, we did only have one editor until VisualEditor was deployed. (External editors and CodeEditor do not count.) Snævar (talk) 16:47, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

We actually have a list of editor screenshots to help identify the many various editors. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 00:00, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

At the time the visual editor was deployed in 2013, there were these options here:

• 2003 wikitext editor
• 2006 wikitext editor (since removed; exists only as a user script/gadget now)
• 2010 wikitext editor (that's the one you're using, @Snævar)
• mobile wikitext editor (the old version, not the current one)
• Wikipedia:WikEd (gadget)

The current list is at mw:Editor. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:33, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

@TheDJ@Whatamidoing (WMF)@Snævar Thanks for all your help. Itcouldbepossible^Talk 02:29, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

After saving, there is the "Your edit was saved" box near the top of the page that persists for what seems like 2-3 seconds. I often want to edit the short description next, and this box is blocking access to the short description helper. I know I can move the cursor over there and click on dismiss, but is there a way for me to change the timer to something like a half second so it will disappear faster. MB 04:58, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

I don't know about shortening the time but you can get rid of it altogether by adding .postedit { display: none;} to your common.css Nthep (talk) 10:09, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Nthep, Thanks for that, I tried it and the box is indeed gone. Much better. MB 05:50, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

It's not up for enough time for me to use my browser's "inspect" feature (in order to examine the javascript and stylesheets), yet is up for enough time to annoy MB. Ironic? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 14:02, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

@Redrose64: something you can try, in Chrome at least: Open the dev tools, and go to the "sources" tab. Then load your page, press F8 at any point to pause script execution. — xaosflux ^Talk 14:31, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Hi, I tried asking at the Teahouse and they recommended asking here. The article for pimecrolimus displays fine normally, but if you open it in mobile view or edit it with the visual editor, you see all of the markup for the infobox at the beginning of the article (like this). This is the case in different browsers and in the Android Wikipedia app. I'm thinking there's something in the infobox content that's breaking it, but I compared with some other drug articles and couldn't figure out quite what the problem is. Any ideas? Thanks. flod logic (talk) 13:42, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

This fixed it as far as I can tell (I couldn't reproduce the problem on mobile, only in VE). It must be the single braces in the split lines that tripped them up. Nardog (talk) 13:55, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

That did it. Thanks! flod logic (talk) 15:56, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

The ((coord)) template is supposed to put the geographical coordinates at the top right of the article when the parameter "display=title" (or its variants "display=inline,title" and "display=it") is used. Instead, when I'm logged in it displays the coordinates at the point the template is used, right-aligned. With the variants, it displays the coordinates in place twice, once directly and again right-aligned. I believe this changed yesterday, although it may be it happened earlier and I didn't notice until then. The template and the module it invokes haven't changed, so I'm not sure where to look. For an example of use, see Oban, New Zealand, just below the map in the infobox.

I'm using Firefox on a desktop with vector non-legacy; I'm aware that display=title doesn't work on mobile. If this is something unique to my preferences, it's not important but I'd be grateful if anyone could suggest a conflict with some gadget I may have enabled (I don't recall changing anything in my preferences or .css and .js files recently, apart from removing a few gadgets today to see if they affect this problem). If this does apply to all logged in users, it's a significant regression as coord is used in over a million articles and I suspect display=title is a common parameter.-gadfium 04:38, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

This week WMF has made Vector 2022 its own skin and this is probably one of the results. Coord has been a troublesome template generally. It won't impact anyone who isn't logged in at this time and of course only those who use Vector 2022.

I don't know how to fix this one. Izno (talk) 04:47, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks. I can confirm that changing my skin to Vector legacy (2010) fixes the problem, but I'll stick with Vector (2022) and know this glitch doesn't affect most viewers.-gadfium 05:07, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for reporting this. I'll now revert an edit I just made as a workround to the problem in an infobox coordinate display. Thincat (talk) 12:00, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

This is intended behaviour and preferable to the other situation where the coordinates were overlapping the text. See phab:T281974 for all the gorey details and Template_talk:Coord/Archive_11#Use_page_status_indicator_for_coord?

@Izno earlier in that Phab ticket you wrote "Because there is no way to differentiate between new and old Vector that I know of, there's no way to fix this that makes both new and old variants of the skin happy. Either a) it's time to split new Vector out, b) time to give up on legacy vector for all involved, or c) give me a vector2 somewhere in one of elements toward the top of the DOM."

You now have a way to differentiate between the two.. so can this be solved now, or do we understand the problem differently now?

Feel free to edit MediaWiki:Vector-2022.css if you have a better idea for how to handle this.

In eu:MediaWiki:Vector-2022.js, an imperfect solution exists, where JavaScript is being used to inject it into the table of contents so perhaps that could be used here as an interim solution. Jdlrobson (talk) 21:35, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

@Jdlrobson (WMF), "intended behavior"? Yikes. This is causing infoboxes to exceed their intended width, and the duplication is absolutely not something that can remain. I've never seen any explanation of why language switching is such an essential feature that it needs to commandeer that top right corner, but if you're also going to then just shove everything that used to be there into the article and tell the community to clean it up, that's a problem. ((u|Sdkb)) ^talk 23:23, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

I can't judge whether it's worse to have:

• overlapping text which make both text unreadable/unclickable
• the coordinates inline - a larger infobox
• the coordinates hidden.

However the first option was clearly bad, judging by the many bug reports I've had to handle over the last 6 months since the problem was originally identified (in May 2021). In my better judgement I thought the second was a better. As I said before, feel free to revert the change in MediaWiki:Vector-2022.css or provide a different solution. It was a good faith suggested improvement on something that has been a problem for over a half a year that I'm constantly seeing bug reports on from users complaining.

I'm trying to be helpful here. I've spent the entire week addressing problems with gadgets in my own free time so I am hurt by the accusation here that I'm unnecessarily dumping work on the community, particularly for a skin which is opt-in exactly because of these kinds of bugs, that together we need to fix. Jdlrobson (talk) 23:53, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

@Jon (WMF), it's telling that putting the language switcher somewhere else isn't even listed in your options. It appears that decision was made long ago, with as far as I know zero community input. ((u|Sdkb)) ^talk 00:35, 5 February 2022 (UTC)^{Edited 05:11, 8 February 2022 (UTC) per below.}

((Coord)) appears below, not beside, the top heading so I don't see how moving the language dropdown could help. That said, canceling position: absolute; is a weird choice. top: -3em; works perfectly for me. Also, Vector 2022 can show topicons like ((Administrator topicon)) just fine, so wrapping ((Coord)) with <indicator>...</indicator> is another option. Nardog (talk) 00:53, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

Nardog, I will take an edit request for the Vector 2022 sheet if you post one. Izno (talk) 03:21, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

@Sdkb, I understand that more than half people who speak English do so as a second language, and almost half the traffic to the English Wikipedia is from countries where English isn't the primary language. It's possible that while the language switcher is not especially relevant to monoglots like us that it's still useful to many millions of people. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:40, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

As a tri-glot from a country where English isn't the primary language, I don't find the language switcher useful because articles on English Wikipedia are almost always better than in most other languages. – SD0001 (talk) 05:27, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

@SD0001, we have a pretty good idea of when someone might want to switch to read an article in a different language: if it is featured/good status there but not here, is substantially longer there, has substantially more citations there, or is for a topic whose coordinate location (P625) is in a country where that is the primary language. The WMF folks might want to consider making the switcher more prominent only in those circumstances. Someone reading about Chicago's Harris Theater in Arabic should absolutely be given a prominent link to the English article, but readers of the English article definitely don't need to know about the Arabic page. ((u|Sdkb)) ^talk 05:44, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

A smarter approach to language switching would also allow readers some degree of personalization. If I indicate in my settings that I know English and Hindi, then it's worthwhile to suggest the Hindi page prominently if the algorithm thinks it might be even slightly better than the English page, and Hindi should always be listed first when the menu is opened. Features like this would encourage more readers to create an account, which then helps us if they decide to start editing. ((u|Sdkb)) ^talk 05:50, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

mw:Universal Language Selector/Compact Language Links is supposed to do this, but I've turned it off as it's really useless. I can't manually select which language I want to be at the top and it thinks I'm fluent in languages I'm not just because I clicked on them just once. Nardog (talk) 05:56, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Specifically, see the FAQ on how to select which languages are shown. @Nardog and @SD0001, I believe that if you add your favorite languages to your web browser, then CLL will keep those at the top. That's how it seems to work for me.

I have Compact Language Links on at most wikis and off at a few. I think it's a good default for people who read fewer than ~five languages and who aren't systematically going from wiki to wiki (e.g., not for an editor who wants to update the picture on every article about their favorite boy band, or, in my case, someone who occasionally needs to find all the village pumps in every language for a project). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:55, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

[I]f you add your favorite languages to your web browser, then CLL will keep those at the top. Therein lies the problem. I might want to keep larger wikis at the top but I'm not going to tell every website I visit I'm a super polyglot. Nardog (talk) 22:19, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Couldn't disagree more. Simply which (and how many) language editions have corresponding articles can tell you a lot about the subject itself even if you have no interest in reading any of them. I'd be really bummed if they forced the new Vector on us for this reason. Nardog (talk) 05:56, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

That sort of meta information might be intriguing as a curiosity, but for the purposes of informing readers, I don't think we should be holding it up, as it's a poor proxy for a subject's importance and it fails WP:DUE as it's not anything external sources ever talk about. ((u|Sdkb)) ^talk 18:46, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

@Sdkb, are you saying that the language switcher isn't talked about in external sources, or that nobody ever writes about Wikipedia having many language editions? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:03, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

I'm saying that if you go to a random topic, say Moon, no external source telling you about the Moon ever mentions that the Moon has an article in 254 language editions of Wikipedia. We'd never consider writing that in the lead, any more than we'd consider noting in the article that it got 262,285 pageviews over the past month. Because it's not covered in external sources, it's not due, so it's not something we should emphasize for encyclopedic reasons to teach people about a subject as Nardog seems to suggest above. ((u|Sdkb)) ^talk 21:16, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

I wouldn't know if sources talking about the Moon mention it, but this journal article about Zika fever specifies that the related Wikipedia articles were available in 96 languages.

DUE applies to "All encyclopedic content on Wikipedia". The user interface is not "encyclopedic content". Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:22, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

Hey @Sdkb, just wanted to chime in with some details on the research and feedback we did on language switching during the development of the new button.  We were able to get feedback from multilingual readers in India (results available here), as well as about 200 logged-in editors and community members across 10 languages (feedback summary available here).  This feedback round showed that most people preferred the new location of the language switching functionality.  Upon deployment, we did see some data and received feedback showing it was more difficult for some people previously familiar with the feature to find the new version.  We are currently working on iteration to make sure languages are sufficiently visible for the folks who need them.  More information can be found in this blog post and the feature page within the documentation. Hope this is helpful! OVasileva (WMF) (talk) 19:18, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

@OVasileva (WMF), thanks for sharing those links; they were good reads. It looks like there was some feedback sought, so I'm crossing out my comment on that above. It doesn't entirely alleviate my concerns, though, since in both cases the question was framed as "does this make it easier to switch languages?", and as Izno noted below, yeah, if you make something super prominent, of course it'll make it easier to find, but it also has costs, as some editors like MusikAnimal pointed out. Was there ever any sort of intermediate prototype tested, like keeping it in the left sidebar but just moving it higher up? (Moving the "tools" section links somewhere else, like under the "more" menu similar to Twinkle, would also help with the issues the India focus group had from needing to scroll, even though some editors might have concerns.)

One other thing I noticed in the India focus group is some concerning trends related to how readers decide whether to trust Wikipedia. Per pp. 147–148, only 6 out of the 24 mentioned references. Further, it appears that zero out of 24 mentioned the single biggest indicator of an article's trustworthiness, which is whether it has a recent GA or FA review. This is something I've long suspected, given that our icons aren't placed prominently and aren't designed well, but it's absolutely relevant that moving the language switcher into the top right corner pushes the GA/FA icons down a row, further degrading their prominence. This is a major problem if we want to facilitate good information literacy among readers. I mentioned this to you at Wikimania, but I've seen no indication anyone on the Desktop Improvements team is working on it. Granted, some of the work needs to be done on the community side, but there are very concrete ways the WMF could help. The topicon move discussion deadlocked largely because many editors held the (imo implausible) view that readers do know about GA/FA; asking the next focus group about it would give us research to answer that question. And assuming they don't, the WMF design/graphics folks could provide icon ideas or prototype designs for the community to consider that'd help readers notice GAs/FAs better. What can be done to get those things on the agenda? ((u|Sdkb)) ^talk 05:10, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Previous research has shown that readers click on a ref tag (i.e., click on any single blue clicky number) approximately three times per 1,000 page views (and then primarily on stub articles, which suggests that they are seeking more information than the article contains). In that context, having 25% of the readers mention the references is much higher than I would have expected. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:08, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for spending the time to write everything out here! Here’s some thoughts from our side:

Language Switching: I think something that is worth pointing out was that the goal of moving the language button itself was to make it easier to switch languages, thus, that is what we were testing for :) To give a bit more detail on why this is important - what we learned from the research in India was that a lot of folks that were using the wikis in multiple languages did not know they could actually switch languages directly from the page.  They would instead go to a search engine and type the name of the article followed by their suggested language and then the wiki (for example:  “moon hindi wikipedia”) and then hope to get the correct result.  From our perspective this was due to two different factors - the first was the location of languages on the page - at the very bottom, often times requiring scrolling, the second was their positioning within the sidebar itself.  

As you mentioned, the sidebar contains a lot of links that both refer to properties of the article, most of which currently under the “tools” heading: (ex: languages, related changes, interwiki links) as well as links that refer to properties or navigation to the site as a whole (ex: recent changes, community portal, etc).  Even though these are in separate sections, it’s difficult to tell which will act on the article vs which will act on the whole site.  As a part of the project, we are beginning to work on ways to separate these so that it is easier to understand which link does what.  Moving languages to the top of the page served this function too - it is now visually clearer that selecting a language will show you that article in a different language rather than send you to the main page of the wiki in that language.  In terms of further explorations around this separation, this is our most recent prototype of what it might look like to separate these menus completely.  As a note - this is a very early prototype that we haven’t yet tested with readers or communities so nothing certain, yet we would love feedback on it if you have any initial thoughts.  We're still doing more tweaks on this (for example, making the menus pinned by default) and will start sharing it more widely in the next few weeks.

On trust: In terms of your second question - thank you for raising this again.  As I mentioned then, this is still something that we want to do, although it is outside of the initial scope of the project.  The way we see it is, Desktop Improvements will focus on cleaning up the navigation and creating the space for exposing different tools and indicators for article quality.  Here, I’d also like to question whether the GA/FA tags are the best way to do this (they might be, it’s just something we should test first).  When we take this on, we would probably want to start with a study of different types of quality indicators to identify which ones are perceived as increasing the levels of trust in the article.  Another thing we would like to explore is how we can use the language/copy of the links and items themselves to better indicate its meaning, with the hypothesis that reducing confusion here will also influence people’s overall sense of trust and welcomeness.  Pinging @AHollender (WMF) here as well, as he might have some further thoughts on this.

Hope this is helpful! OVasileva (WMF) (talk) 10:57, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

@OVasileva (WMF), thanks for sharing the prototype! There are a bunch of changes I'd make to the menu items, many of which come from WP:SIDEBAR20 (e.g. put the print/share/link section first above tools); that RfC is an important one to review to get a sense of how the community thinks about the sidebar items. The pinned ToC is fine with me, but removing the copy from the end of the lead is likely to get pushback because it'll cause infoboxes to extend into the body and create sandwiches. The menu pinning is a neat feature—something I'd also like to see explored (for both this and the user menu) is to have the dropdown appear on cursor hover rather than requiring a click—I think that'd make the collapsing pill go down a lot easier.

On trust, we should be careful to distinguish between indicators that make readers trust a page more and those that reflect an actual difference in quality, and ideally push those things into alignment. An FA icon is huge for the latter but I'd guess not for the former. That's something we could try to remedy through better design. The India survey seemed to focus mostly on "How do we get users to trust us more?", and while that might be the typical goal in the corporate world, our situation is more complex: we certainly do want readers, but we don't want them to trust us so much they take legal/medical advice from unsourced content. ((u|Sdkb)) ^talk 19:09, 10 February 2022 (UTC)^{Edited 19:58, 11 February 2022 (UTC)}

Jdlrobson I'm really sympathetic to Sdkb here right now given that I know that the test that was performed that "supported" this change was fundamentally shit. Yes, of course more people are going to see it if it takes up more space at the top of the page. That was the wrong null hypothesis to begin with.

That said, here's some further recommendations on the technical side of what can be done now since it will apparently take heaven and earth to get WMF to back that change out, and I am not strong enough to move that much. Either:

1. ensure that MediaWiki:Vector-2022.css is always concatenated after MediaWiki:Vector.css, or
2. remove the Vector 2022 dependency on MediaWiki:Vector.css.

I have a strong preference for the latter just from a cleanliness and 'trainability' perspective.

Right now my console is telling me that -2022.css is getting concatenated into the file before Vector.css, likely defeating the purpose of having the dependency on Vector.css in the first place. Review Brooklyn, where the .vector-2022 #coordinates CSS has insufficient specificity to override the CSS in Vector.css (notably, the .mw-indicator #coordinates block), because it's appearing before and not after the other.

(Please also consider renaming the skin too. I hate writing the numbers after. Some pun off Vector would be cool, I've seen Matrix tossed around. Or possibly Space, from vector space, because of all the whitespace [everyone will have a wry laugh at that one].) Izno (talk) 05:05, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

And following this up, it looks like having the interlanguage links there/not there affects what the offset should be when we make the system an indicator and keep using position absolute. 3.5em when it displays and 0 when it doesn't. So, nothing I can do to fix that at all without just making it an indicator and tossing our absolute positioning. I can maybe undeploy the change I made to Module:Coordinates and then try to position stuff from there, but I doubt that will work the way I want seeing as no one has moved on that. Izno (talk) 06:26, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

Maybe this is fixed now, IDK, I've reverted the Module:Coordinates change and adjusted MediaWiki:Vector-2022.css. It works for collapsed interwiki list which is standard? in Vector 2022. Still seeing that Vector-2022.css is concatenating into the file before Vector.css. Izno (talk) 21:30, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

I set up tabs for my user pages, and everything seems to be working except User talk:SandyGeorgia, which is displaying at only partial screen width from my iPhone and from an Android. Can anyone help? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:46, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

Switch to desktop view. The mobile site apparently doesn't show the nice formatting you set up. RudolfRed (talk) 19:03, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

Since it worked on seven pages out of eight, it had to be an error at User talk:SandyGeorgia. I found the problem. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:59, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

Unable to get this working. Following the directions I added the script and reloaded the browser cache. The watchlist now has a box at the top with "Smart watchlist settings" options. Click the box for "Enable hide user buttons", but then nothing changes in the watchlist, there is no box next to the username to hide that name. The Smart watchlist settings box has a purple error at the bottom "To use Smart Watchlist, enable 'enhanced recent changes' in your user preferences", but I am unable to find 'enhanced recent changes' in the preferences menus. -- GreenC 19:57, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

@GreenC I assume that means either checking "Group changes by page in recent changes and watchlist" and/or unchecking "Use non-JavaScript interface" --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 22:20, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

Ahecht , I tried four combos of those two buttons: (both off, 1 on 1 off, 1 off 1 on, both on) and it worked: with both on. Thanks for the tip! -- GreenC 22:45, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

If the instructions in WP:HIDEBOTS need updating, please update them! Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 00:13, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

Well, that user script hasn't been updated in more than a decade. I wouldn't expect it to work – a lot has changed with watchlists and recent changes over time. – SD0001 (talk) 05:35, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

Is getting protection levels (e.g. autoconfirmed, sysop etc.) via API possible? If yes, how? NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh 06:07, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

@NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh: Which API? The JS API (window.mw) or the MW API (/w/api.php)? ―sportzpikachu _{my talkcontribs} 06:08, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

MW API. I have read quite a lot of documentation at mw: but haven't found anything so far. NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh 06:13, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

@NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh: See the API docs. Example ―sportzpikachu _{my talkcontribs} 06:15, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

I mean protection levels in general. For instance, here in enwiki we have autoconfirmed, extendedconfirmed, templateeditor and sysop, but there is no extendedconfirmed level at Test Wikipedia. IIRC, Twinkle's protect module have to set this up manually. NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh 06:23, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

@NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh: Ah, I see. I do not believe there is any API way to retrieve that data, you might have to hardcode it. ―sportzpikachu _{my talkcontribs} 06:24, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

The problem is that hardcoding may cause some abnormal response, especially when it comes to a crosswiki tool. Any workaround will be much appreciated. NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh 06:30, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

@NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh The siteinfo API provides this: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&meta=siteinfo&formatversion=2&siprop=restrictions – SD0001 (talk) 06:38, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks a lot! That is exactly what I was looking for. NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh 06:43, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

Resolved

 – NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh 06:43, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

I can see them[4], but I'd like to be able to see them as part of my global contributions. I gather that the volunteer maintainers would probably fix this is asked. Thanks. Doug Weller talk 14:00, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

It's not a straightforward problem to fix. It's tracked at phab:T114777. – SD0001 (talk) 15:19, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for letting me know. Doug Weller talk 15:34, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

The module Module:User-exists, which I am working on for use at SPI, attempts to verify if a local user exists. I could not see a built in method (such as parser function or lua function) that verifies if a user exists, and I'm pretty sure Lua or templates do not support calling the API.

I thought that by transcluding the contributions page, and then expanding the template I could read the wikitext and detect when no such user existed by looking for text such as "is not registered on this wiki" at the top of the page. This nearly worked, but for some reason when expanding Special:Contributions it said the template did not exist. I got around this by creating a wrapper template to transclude the contributions called Template:Contributions transclusion. This didn't error out, but instead the returned wikitext is UNIQ--item-0--QINU which I was told on IRC is a parser strip marker tag. When displaying this by returning the parsed text renders the contributions page, but I cannot get the text in the lua code.

My question is, does anyone know how to evaluate UNIQ--item-0--QINU into the text returned in lua? Alternatively would this need a Phabricator ticket to fix? Dreamy Jazz ^{talk to me | my contributions} 16:09, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

This is not possible, and in fact the ability to do it was deliberately removed in gerrit:171290 back in 2014. The specific feature of reading Special:Contributions caused a security issue (phab:T73167), in addition to the data-storage bug the patch claims to report. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 16:15, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

Ah. That's annoying. Do you know of any way to check if a user exists then? Dreamy Jazz ^{talk to me | my contributions} 16:18, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

I'm not aware of one, but that doesn't mean it necessarily doesn't exist. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 16:20, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

My searches for it didn't find anything. I think I will do this via a bot and the API unless someone else has any ideas. Wanted to get automatic categorisation, but I think this is not going to work. Thanks anyway. Dreamy Jazz ^{talk to me | my contributions} 16:22, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

I've deleted both the module and template as it seems the idea won't work without additions to the software, so these are both unused / not working. Perhaps these would be useful in a parser function / lua function, but that would need a phab ticket. Dreamy Jazz ^{talk to me | my contributions} 16:29, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

You might try fetching the content of user and user talk pages. Not everyone (me, for instance) has a user page with content, but most of us, most of the time, have something on our talk pages. In the debug console, this:

=mw.title.new ('User:Trappist the monk'):getContent()

returns nil

but this:

=mw.title.new ('User talk:Trappist the monk'):getContent()

returns the unparsed content of my talk page. When a blanked page exists, these return an empty string.

Yeah, not 100%, but might be sufficient for most cases.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 16:40, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

Good idea. The reason for wanting this is to tag SPI cases where the username for the case does not refer to a user that exists either globally or locally. This would likely be due to when an account is later renamed, and unless the redirect is deleted / suppressed when renaming the user this would say that the user exists (as a redirect would still show page content). This could be combined such that if the user talk page does not exist or if the user talk page is a redirect to another user talk page it tags it as possibly broken. However I can see this as maybe having some false positives (such as accounts locked globally, but which never were blocked locally and have no user talk page) being tagged as being possibly broken. Plus any globally renamed account without a local talk page won't show up. This, however, is probably going to be a small number as if there is a SPI someone will have likely created their user talk page. I might try this out, but will compare with pywikibot and the API to see if this method works well enough. Dreamy Jazz ^{talk to me | my contributions} 17:01, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

You may be able to exploit some mw.* function that leaks information on whether the user exists. For example, I hoped that

mw.getContentLanguage():gender("Example", "masculine", "feminine", "neutral")

might give useful results, but it returns "neutral" for both non-existent users and those who exist but haven't recorded a gender preference. Certes (talk) 18:05, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

I have this user script:

var header = $("h1").text();
$("h1").text(header + " <span style=\"color:red\">[Wikipedia]</span>");

It is supposed to add a red [Wikipedia] to the right of the page title, but instead it displays

User:Anpang01/common.js <span style="color:red">[Wikipedia]</span>

(not User:Anpang01/common.js [Wikipedia])

It looks like the span tag and css got nowiki'd. How do I fix it? Anpang01 (talk) 01:29, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

@Anpang01: no idea what you are trying to do, but you can just edit the page with this link. — xaosflux ^Talk 01:48, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

What? No, I'm editing it, it's just the script isn't working. Anpang01 (talk) 01:51, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

Try e.g. $("<span style=\"color:red\"> [Wikipedia]</span>").appendTo('#firstHeading');. $().text() is a method for setting element text, so it escapes special characters. It can also be basically achieved in CSS btw:

#firstHeading::after {
	content: " [Wikipedia]";
	color: red;
}

Nardog (talk) 02:00, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

Since you're modifying the underlying document object model directly, you're updating the text contents of the h1 element, so whatever you put in there is the text within the element. You can use the html() method to alter the corresponding HTML within the h1 element; just beware of what you insert (for example, if the original header, in this case, was some malicious Javascript, it would execute). isaacl (talk) 02:10, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

 The html() method worked Anpang01 (talk) 02:21, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

Be mindful of the security issue; it's not safe to put arbitrary text into an HTML document this way. isaacl (talk) 02:24, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

Yes, I know that. Anpang01 (talk) 03:10, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

While reading the pages linked on Template:Brexit topics, I noticed that some of them didn't have the template. After digging around, I found ((Check completeness of transclusions)), which adds a link to a tool that shows which articles are linked by the template but not transcluded, and vice versa (example). This template appears to currently be predominantly used on sports team templates to help ensure that all the players have their respective teams' templates transcluded, but it is actually useful for every single navbox and sidebar, particularly as so many have dozens or hundreds of links. I therefore think it should either be added to the Wikipedia sidebar in the tools section under "What links here" when you're on a template page, or added to the "External tools" section on the "What links here" pages for templates. Does anyone else agree? 60.242.222.90 (talk) 08:23, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

Straightforward:

1. I ssh into Toolforge from my Linux laptop;
2. I'm in;

1. I ssh into Toolforge from my Windows laptop;
2. I'm asked for my passphrase;
3. I'm in;

Any way I can make both laptops behave the same? - Klein Muçi (talk) 04:07, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

These sound like features of your specific ssh clients; various clients have options to reuse the current OS credential, or to save your credentials for future sessions. — xaosflux ^Talk 05:58, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

Just use an SSH key without a passphrase (assuming no else has access to your laptop). – SD0001 (talk) 06:45, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

@SD0001, eh, I've thought of that but I felt uncomfortable nonetheless given that my bot is activated on more than just one wiki.

@Xaosflux, any place where can I read more about ssh clients, what I'm currently using or if I can change them somehow? - Klein Muçi (talk) 09:57, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

Well, your linux laptop does have an ssh key without passphrase – which is why it doesn't ask for it. – SD0001 (talk) 13:44, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

@Klein Muçi: sure, Wikipedia ;) Comparison of SSH clients. In a pinch for Windows I've used PuTTY (it philosophically does NOT allow "saved passwords"). In general, you should never reuse the same password for multiple systems (which I have a feeling is how your linux one may be working). If you are going to store a password - you might has wells store a private ssh key, in effect it is just a long password. — xaosflux ^Talk 14:01, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

@Xaosflux, nice! I'll take a look at it.

@SD0001, oh, really? How can I be sure and add one if I really don't have a passphrase? - Klein Muçi (talk) 14:08, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

You use the default built-in ssh client, right? If you don't enter a password, it simply means there's no password. ssh-keygen -p can be used to add one. – SD0001 (talk) 14:27, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

@SD0001, if I'm not wrong, yes. What happens if I already have one and add that command? Does it notify me? Or does it simply prompt me to add a new one anyway? Does it notify me if the new one is the same as the old one? - Klein Muçi (talk) 14:39, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

@Klein Muçi I think I answered this question for you before, but if you're using PuTTY on Windows, you need to add your SSH key to Pageant (it should've been installed along with PuTTY). See this tutorial. Once you do that, PuTTY will not ask for your key's password when you log in to toolforge. You'll still have to enter your password into Pageant every time you reboot your computer, but you won't have to do it every time you connect. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 15:11, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

@Ahecht, oh, yeah, it did seem familiar as a question. Sorry for my memory. I'm not using PuTTY though. :/ - Klein Muçi (talk) 15:20, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

@Ahecht, so you're suggesting that I do have a passphrase even for my Linux PC but it's only Windows that asks me to authenticate continuously just because I don't use PuTTy while Linux has no need for that? Put in even more simple terms: "My Linux" is fine and secure while "my Windows" is "lacking" PuTTy? - Klein Muçi (talk) 15:41, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

Update:

Turns out my Linux also asked for the passphrase every time I shut it down and restarted. It was just that I had spent quite a long time without shutting it down that I had forgotten about that part. So the situation is basically what Ahecht mentions above. Both computers ask for the passphrase but the Windows one asks for it every time I connect while the Linux one asks only after it gets restarted. This would rephrase the question to "How can I make Windows also behave the same way; That is, only ask for the passphrase after it gets restarted. I'm using the default built-in SSH client (OpenSSH). Is there any way to achieve this with that or is there a must I must get another client? - Klein Muçi (talk) 03:12, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

@Klein Muçi In Windows, press ⊞ Win+r, type services.msc and hit enter, scroll to "OpenSSH Authentication Agent", right click, click "Properties" set the "Startup type" to "Automatic", hit the "Start" button (if it's not greyed out), and hit "OK". Open your command prompt, type ssh-agent, hit enter (nothing should happen), then type ssh-add <path-to-private-key-file> and hit enter (it should prompt for your passphrase). You should now be able to SSH in without it asking for your passphrase each time. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 05:17, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

@Ahecht, did everything you said. It worked. cmd now only asks for passphrase on restart. The only problem remaining is that I rarely use the command prompt. I use the Git bash as I find it more flexible. (I read out our past discussion and I see that I've mentioned it in the past as well.) How can I replicate the same result in it? - Klein Muçi (talk) 11:43, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

If I type ssh-agent at the Git bash, I get:

SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/ssh-q9s4HLjho1rD/agent.756; export SSH_AUTH_SOCK;
SSH_AGENT_PID=757; export SSH_AGENT_PID;
echo Agent pid 757;

And if I type ssh-add <path-to-private-key-file>, I get:

Could not open a connection to your authentication agent. - Klein Muçi (talk) 13:20, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

Git CMD, perhaps unsurprisingly, behaves exactly as cmd: You type ssh-add <path-to-private-key-file>, it asks for the passphrase and it allows you to SSH without asking for your passphrase each time.

It's only Git Bash that isn't allowing me to do that. Sadly, that's what I use. :/ - Klein Muçi (talk) 13:57, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

@Klein Muçi So you're not using the default Windows OpenSSH, you're using the ssh that comes with Git Bash. If so, follow the instructions at https://docs.github.com/en/authentication/connecting-to-github-with-ssh/working-with-ssh-key-passphrases#auto-launching-ssh-agent-on-git-for-windows --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 14:12, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

@Ahecht, literal examples of what I did: vi ~/.bashrc, copy-paste the mentioned lines, save. Nothing happens. :/ If I type ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa, it again says that it couldn't open a connection to my auth agent.

I closed and reopened Git Bash, I get no passphrase or any new prompt. - Klein Muçi (talk) 14:28, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

I suddenly find that my Gadgets and user scripts are not working correctly, or at all, on various projects, including this one, Wikidata and Commons.

For example, Navigation popups are visible, but clicking the links in them results in no action taking place. The upload Wizard on Commons has no scroll bars (I have to tab between fields), and if I enter a copyright template under "Another reason not mentioned above", I cannot preview it.

I'm using Firefox under Windows 10 (both fully up-to-date). I have disabled Ghostery, to no effect. [Update: If I use Edge, they seem OK.]

Anyone else seeing this? any clues? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 10:47, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

Do you have enabled javascript in the firefox settings? It's like the css loads but the js...not exactly. Anpang01 (talk) 12:44, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

Yes, it's enabled. Thanks, Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:30, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

Do you have an ad blocker or privacy tool? I disabled mine for wikipedia.org so I can run scripts from related sites such as mediawiki.org. Certes (talk) 13:37, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

Like you, I have mine disabled here. Thanks. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:46, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

Most troublingly, the citation tool (Citoid) on RefToolbar is not working. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:46, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

Resolved

 – Problem resolved: I forced Firefox to update all plugins and things seem to be working now. I've no idea which one (or more!) was causing the problem, but I hope this helps anyone else experiencing the same issue. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:08, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

19:17, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

When piping a parameter (like (({1|))}), if the parameter is not provided, it will default to what is after the pipe (for (({1|(({2|)))))) if 1 was not provided, it would default to the value of 2). The thing is, if there is whitespace, it will use the whitespace and not continue (for (({1|(({2|)))))), ((template|1= |2=value)), 1 would be matched because it was provided, even though it's whitespace). The part that makes this annoying is that if statements don't match the whitespace, and will result in false. For example:

(Template)

((#if:(({1|(({2|))))))|1 or 2 had a value|neither had a value))

(Example)

((template
|1= 
|2=I have a value!
))

This template will result in neither had a value, because while |1= had a whitespace, and provided it to the if statement, the if statement didn't accept it.

I know that I can manually check through every parameter to make sure that they aren't whitespace, but this adds a lot of redundancy and takes up a lot of space. For example:

((#if:(({1|))}|1 or 2 has a value|((#if:(({2|))}|1 or 2 has a value|neither had a value))))

will give the correct result.

Is there any way I can loop through multiple parameters that will continue down the line on a whitespace, without manually checking every parameter for whitespace before performing the if statement? Thanks, ― Levi_OP^Talk 19:45, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

((if empty)) * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 19:51, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

@Pppery: How can I use ((if empty)) to solve my problem? ― Levi_OP^Talk 20:31, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

((if empty|(({1|))}|(({2|))))} behaves identically to (({1|(({2|))))}, except that empty parameters will still pass through. The template can take any number of parameters (((if empty|(({1|))}|(({2|))}|(({3|))}|(({4|))))}, works to produce the first of four parameters with actual content). I thought that was what you are looking for, but I may have misread (and Jonesey95's idea is clearer when doing a basic "are any parameters set" anyway). * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 21:53, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

Oh! I see what you mean now, and this could be a useful template, but jonesey's answer is probably more what I'm looking for. Thanks, ― Levi_OP^Talk 22:01, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

Have you considered this?

((#if:(({1|))}(({2|))}|1 or 2 has a value|neither had a value))

That might be what you are looking for. For a real-world example, look at the data9 line at ((Infobox mountain)). – Jonesey95 (talk) 20:51, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

@Jonesey: Thanks! I didn't really think about this or realize that it was possible. This looks to be exactly what I'm looking for. Thanks again, ― Levi_OP^Talk 22:02, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

I have posted twice on [this talk page] and e-mailed <wikipedialibrary@wikimedia.org> twice, but gotten no response about this.

I signed up for Wikipedia library abount a month ago and have yet to get my login credentials for Newspaper Archive. What's the holdup? Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 03:54, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

• @TenPoundHammer: seems to be a duplicate of Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_195#Wikipedia_library_question. TWL is not managed or maintained by the English Wikipedia. You can try the form on this page: <https://wikipedialibrary.wmflabs.org/contact/> and also the mailing list linked from that page. If still no answer, you could try meta:User talk:Samwalton9 (WMF) who is listed as "Product Manager, The Wikipedia Library". — xaosflux ^Talk 15:07, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

  Pinging @Nikkimaria Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:41, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

I’m a mobile user and prior today when checking my contributions it shows it in the manner I’m familiar with, but today I checked my contribs but it displayed it as though it were in “advanced mode” I checked to see if I accidentally toggled “on” “advanced mode” but I didn’t. Please is there any help as to remedy this? Celestina007 (talk) 21:09, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

I just cried for a bit, then figured tough luck. Hope you get a work-around. I loved the minimalistic mobile and just switch to desktop as needed.Slywriter (talk) 21:13, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

@Slywriter, yes, but I’m pretty sure there’s a way to remedy this, @PrimeHunter, could you please chime in here? Could anyone please be so kind as to tell mobile users how to remedy this? Celestina007 (talk) 21:16, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

There should be a switch to turn it off here. I'm an idiot. Found the Phabricator task but couldn't connect the dots in my head. —GMX^(ping!) 22:41, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

Celestina007, toggling on then off restored for me. Mistook my watchlist for user contribution. :( Slywriter (talk) 22:45, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

It would be extremely helpful if you reported how you feel on phab:T293268 as the simplistic view was removed as the most vocal users are the people who disliked it. I was also disappointed to lose the original styles. I'm working towards making it possible to restore the old view with user styles or possibly make some of the good parts appear in the more powerful advanced view. I'll report back when I have something viable. Jdlrobson (talk) 02:56, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

I'm also having a problem with this. I like the simple one, I dont like the current, it loads too long. Please fix this. We have already a AMC with its own style of user contribution, it's enough, but please don't make the standard mobile style complicated. —Ctrlwiki (talk) 04:10, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

To get the classic Minerva look back. Add

mw.loader.load('/w/index.php?title=User:Jdlrobson/mobilecontribs.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript');

to Special:MyPage/minerva.js. For a more permenant fix, please record your feedback on phab:T293268. Jdlrobson (talk) 05:27, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

We need interface administrator to fix this. I don't usually add scripts like that, i don't like it, just return the oldest one it's easy, so scripts not needed. Why they changed it without other users opinion, I am heavily mobile user, they should notify other mobile user like me if they gonna change something on the style, the heck. —Ctrlwiki (talk) 06:03, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

Please feel free to chip in on MediaWiki_talk:Gadgets-definition#Consider_making_User:Jdlrobson/mobilecontribs.js_a_default_mobile_gadget. Jdlrobson (talk) 00:03, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

• First off Jdlrobson, thank you for the script, that might suffice for now. I totally understand and appreciate the frustration of Ctrlwiki, I do not believe this implementations are well thought out(or the potential consequences) I believe it is behoove of anyone making such drastic interface implementations must, as a prerequisite, initiate a conversation with mobile editors. To be honest this change has done nothing but incapacitate me, every now and again, mobile editors are faced with new changes to the editing interface and we have to learn to “adapt” I’m sorry but there is only so much mobile editors can take until we feel “this” isn’t worth it anymore. As stated elsewhere, whilst the script may suffice for now, in the long run I believe this implementation be reverted back to status quo for editors using mobile devices. To anyone reading this, I’m sorry if this comes off as rather passive aggressive, of a truth, I’ve never been more upset than I was yesterday after the new (unexpected) implementation for mobile device editors was made, which i am totally irate about. Once again I’m sorry but I’m sincerely saddened by this. Celestina007 (talk) 22:37, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

  One of the problems we're (all of us) facing is that there is no obvious way to reach mobile device editors as a group. I'm looking at some fairly big changes to mobile at some other wikis (enabling the mw:Reply tool, but when you change this, then you have to change that, and when you touch that, then there's this other thing...), and I'm just not sure how to reach them. There are central pages for technical problems, for new editors, for policy wonks, etc., but not for mobile editors. I'm seriously considering a CentralNotice banner, as one of the few things that might work. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:38, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

With too many tabs open in my browser, I tripped over my myself and inadvertently left a welcome message for a Talk page range (here), instead of the intended IP recipient. This was later cleared up, but not before a different IP saw the message and spammed my UTP, which RegentsPark kindly cleaned up for me. But that left us each scratching our heads: who knew you could create a Talk page for a range and leave a message on it, and how does that even make any sense? Maybe the mw software should prevent that? Or if there's some use case for it, can we get a edit notice added to trap this case in Preview mode with a great, big, red warning, "Are you sure you really want to leave this message for an IP range? Usually this is reserved for WP:SOMETHINGELSE." Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 23:40, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

I wonder if preventing IP range talk pages from being created would mean preventing subpages of IP talk pages, because I bet that's what the software recognized it as (even if an IP can't end in a zero) and therefore you could create it. Nardog (talk) 00:04, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

The only way we could know for sure if IP range talk pages are considered subpages would be to create one and see if it has a link at the top taking you to the main IP talk page. ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 00:07, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

The example was User talk:94.252.0.0/17. It's considered a subpage of User talk:94.252.0.0: ((SUBPAGENAME:User talk:94.252.0.0/17)) produces 17. For comparison, subpages are disabled in mainspace so ((SUBPAGENAME:94.252.0.0/17)) produces 94.252.0.0/17. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:35, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

Ah ok. SO the solution might be to prevent subpages of IP addressed from being created since there's usually no need for an IP to have a subpage since there's the chance it can change. ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 00:43, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

These are fundamentally just wiki pages with no other special meaning (and certainly not the meaning associated with a normal user talk page, IP or otherwise). Changes to these pages do not reach or notify anyone. Izno (talk) 01:12, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

That's interesting. Does that mean that all the IPs in 94.252.0.0/17 got an orange bar of doom, or was the anon just stalking your contributions? Is it possible that we have finally stumbled upon a way to communicate with a whole IPv6/64? (added) Sadly, it looks as if Izno answered these questions while I was typing them. Certes (talk) 01:17, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

@Izno: If they don't reach anyone else, was it just by chance that my UTP got spammed (here, @22:11) by a different IP (94.252.85.48) than the one I intended to welcome (94.252.4.105) and subsequently did end up welcoming (here), and which just happens to be within IP range of the spammer? Seems too coincidental. Mathglot (talk) 01:46, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

Coincidental in the sense that you tried to reach the editor, probably dropped a warning somewhere, and then the same user came to have a chat with you from a different IP because we have some fairly intelligent abusive editors out there. Izno (talk) 04:14, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

In any case, I'd still like an edit notice (or do I mean, 'edit filter'?), because I'll trip myself up again someday when I'm not being careful enough, and that would help. Mathglot (talk) 01:48, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

You're far from the first person to do this. Here are 650 other examples. (I ignore IPv6 pages beginning with A-F, as I've never seen one.) Certes (talk) 14:55, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

I think WP:EFN is your go to for that request. Izno (talk) 02:14, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

• I suppose in some cases they could be useful; but software changes may be needed to support them. Likely planned changes in ip masking will mostly moot this idea though. — xaosflux ^Talk 15:00, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/<ISBN#>
• Wikipedia:Book sources

ADD :

• https://www.publishersweekly.com/<ISBN#>

OR:

• https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/search/index.html?q=<ISBN#>

0mtwb9gd5wx (talk) 19:22, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Book sources is the right place for this suggestion. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:26, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

At Talk:The story of the Rich man and Lazarus the pageviews template displays 1 week of views. However, the code is ((Annual readership|days=90|expanded=true)), same as at Talk:Adam's Bridge, which looks right. Am I missing something? Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 10:56, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

It looks like it was moved a week ago, that probably has something to do with it. --rchard2scout (talk) 12:59, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

Pageviews don't move with the page if it is moved, which means the move performed by now blocked user left the page views at the old title. Dreamy Jazz ^{talk to me | my contributions} 15:51, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

Hmm, that wasn't an obviously good move. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 20:03, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

If you look at that revision, you can see that there are lots of non-rendered wikimarkup in a chunk of text at the end of the "Inexperienced editors answering questions" section. That looks like unclosed nowiki tags, but if you look at the source carefully, the tags are actually properly closed.

I thought about asking AssumeGoodWraith to fix their signature in the line of that edit, which fixed the thing. But I am not sure that the signature is actually to blame.

Looking at the symptoms, the only explanation I have is that nowiki tags are greedy matches (i.e. in a code sequence (nowiki)stuff1(/nowiki)stuff2(nowiki)stuff3(/nowiki), the first nowiki matches the last /nowiki, and the middle stuff is nowikied). I am not using the actual tags for obvious reasons. If that is so, surely that is new behaviour, and surely that is not intended.

Is there a (computer witch-)doctor in the room? Tigraan^{Click here for my talk page ("private" contact)} 10:05, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

Let's just try it instead of guessing: [[stuff1]] not supposed to be nowiki [[stuff2]]. NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh 10:14, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

After seeing this, I was thinking about replacing that with ((pipe)), but it probably auto substs it and breaks templates again. – AssumeGoodWraith (talk | contribs) 10:16, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

@Tigraan: If you have your syntaxhighlighter feature enabled (when editing the whole page), you will probably see what happened. It was this non-nowikied nowiki tag that made up our mess. NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh 10:22, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

@AssumeGoodWraith: And about your signature, consider using HTML entity | which will also gives a | that can never be parsed. NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh 10:32, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

The effect of a <nowiki> tag varies depending upon the existence of a </nowiki> tag at a later point in the page. If there is one, everything between those two tags is treated according to the description at H:NOWIKI. But if there isn't, the <nowiki> tag is not processed and is displayed as plain text. So if a discussion page has a single unbalanced <nowiki> tag in any section, that tag has no effect until somebody adds a <nowiki>...</nowiki> pair later on - and then that closing </nowiki> tag gets paired with the pre-existing <nowiki> tag, and everything in between, including the newer <nowiki> tag, is treated per H:NOWIKI. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:24, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

In regex you can neglect a pattern by putting it in brackets and putting a caret before the characters ([^pattern]). I don't see anything in the documentation that shows how to do this using Scribunto patterns. Is this possible? ― Levi_OP^Talk 17:22, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

I think you can just use exactly the same syntax in Lua patterns as you do in Regex. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 17:57, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

It appears as though you can. I think I was just doing something wrong in my testing and it wasn't working but it appears to be now. Thanks. ― Levi_OP^Talk 18:44, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

It's the final row in the table: [^set]: Represents the complement of set, where set is interpreted as above. Izno (talk) 18:59, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

I read that, but "the complement of set" is not very descriptive of the fact that it is negating everything in the set. I feel like this should be clarified. ― Levi_OP^Talk 19:29, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

Complement (set theory) is probably worth reading then. It is not negation. Izno (talk) 19:33, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

@Izno: Ahh. I didn't realize that "complement" had such a literal meaning in the context of set theory. That's now how it's used in the normal english context. Also, how is that not negation? Do you mean that [^set] in scibunto patterns isn't the same as negation in regular regex? Because [^set] is commonly called a negated set in regex. ― Levi_OP^Talk 20:14, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

Yes, I realized that complement was equivalent to negation, though that article does make it obvious that it can also be called the logical complement. Kind of wondering why those are two separate articles now, or at least why they aren't linked in some see also fashion. Izno (talk) 20:28, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

The negation of a proposition is different than the complement of a set, though, so while it might be something that could be under "see also", they're distinct. From a set theory point of view, the complement of a proposition would be all other propositions. isaacl (talk) 21:26, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

There is no negation. The pattern [abc] finds all characters in the set {'a', 'b', 'c'}. The pattern [^abc] finds all characters not in that set. That is, it finds all characters in the complement of the set {'a', 'b', 'c'}. Johnuniq (talk) 22:11, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

Although the POSIX documentation for regular expressions doesn't seem to use the term, others such as Perl's documentation on character classes does (calling it a "negated" or "inverted" class, as well as referring to it as a "negation"). isaacl (talk) 23:16, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

Well I'm not going to fight Perl:) Johnuniq (talk) 02:14, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

Hi everyone, I came across a certain table, which renders results something like this:

Here, the wanted and actual rendering is same in wide and low width screens, but in middle width screens they're not the same. I can use &nbsp; to prevent line break after every word, except between "York" & "is" but that will prevent additional line break between "Ipsum" & "of" even in low width screens.

Now, are there any "Breaking priority" (using brpr henceforth) templates on Wikipedia? Say for example, we use ((brpr|1)) between "York" & "is", and ((brpr|2)) between "Ipsum" & "of"? The one with higher breaking priority breaks first if needed, and the lower one breaks later. The required markup will become Lorem Ipsum ((brpr|2))of New York ((brpr|1))is a good man. If it doesn't exist already, can they be made using modules? or a new project on mediawiki to create <bpx/> tags where x is the priority level has to be started? Thanks! ---CX Zoom(^he/_him) (^{let's talk}|_contribs) 16:15, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

&nbsp is part of the HTML standard, and is interpreted by the web browser, not the mediawiki parser. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 16:27, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

Actually, I wanted to know if mediawiki allows this kind of additional feature, whereby we can explicitly mention the level of Breaking priority. So that I can use it. ---CX Zoom(^he/_him) (^{let's talk}|_contribs) 16:36, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

Stop trying to control wrapping, especially of long phrases. Rendering doesn't work like that. Izno (talk) 19:25, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

Tbh, the place where I wish to use it is just 14 characters long without any special html characters. I just want to change the 'point of line break' in mid-width areas, and not when area is genuinely too small. As you can see above, the wanted & actual rendering are the same for low width, but different for mid-width. And hence, the need for multi-level brpr templates, so that it breaks at the correct places according to available width. ---CX Zoom(^he/_him) (^{let's talk}|_contribs) 23:32, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

The point I'm making is that there is no one correct place. Even if we accept your sense of aesthetics as correct (which, I definitely do not), making a change will cause bad behavior for something else. Just accept that this is not LaTeX or even MS Word and that what you want to do is a negative in the general case. Izno (talk) 03:59, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

What Izno said. Plus, given any phrase having two or more potential wrapping points, neither the HTML specs nor the CSS specs provide any means for prioritising one wrap point over any other. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 11:18, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks Izno. Thanks Redrose. ---CX Zoom(^he/_him) (^{let's talk}|_contribs) 18:18, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

I tried searching around for an answer, but didn't find one; apologies in advanced if it's obvious.In short: for some reason, my addition of a comment on a talk page resulted in the disappearance of a large portion of text from that section for reasons that are entirely beyond me.

See the bottom section ("Inaccurate use of far-right label") in Special:Permalink/1071912592 and compare that with the underlying wikimarkup (displayed correctly in User:WhinyTheYounger/sandbox, "bug reproduction" — I copied the exact markup from the talkpage diff). The talk page doesn't display paragraphs of text that occur between my "first" ref (the third in the markup) and the additional portions of my comment even though it's in the underlying markup. It's like it got commented out. I tried toying around with the reflist-talk template and a few other things to fix the issue, to no avail. Any idea what's going on here? WhinyTheYounger (WtY)(talk, contribs) 18:57, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

The big red Cite error: A <ref> tag is missing the closing </ref> (see the help page) is your clue. Can you see that giant error message in that permalink? Did you click on the link to the help page? The problem is that you tried to close <ref> with <ref> instead of with </ref>. One little slash can cause so much trouble. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:25, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

@Jonesey95, about that big red error message. I looked at that version of the page and the error message flashed briefly (once but not again) before disappearing because I have the Discussion tools activated. I can only see those error messages when the tools are turned off! Not good since I spend time trying to fix reference errors. StarryGrandma (talk) 20:19, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

The problem is only on talk pages. StarryGrandma (talk) 20:42, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

Thank you @Jonesey95! But the ref error warning doesn't appear for me in the permalink either (or if it does, so briefly that I can't tell). I likewise have Discussion tools activated. WhinyTheYounger (WtY)(talk, contribs) 21:08, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

By default, it's not displayed on talk pages because of the CSS rule

.mw-parser-output .brokenref {
  display: none;
}

You need to do this in order to see them. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:31, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks, Redrose64. I must have enabled that years ago and forgotten about it. Why those messages would not show on talk pages is beyond me. Silent failures are generally not user-friendly. – Jonesey95 (talk) 06:34, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

It sounds like there's a Flash of unstyled content, before the warning message is hidden by sitewide CSS. It doesn't appear to be related to Discussion Tools.

I thought, though, that the eat-the-rest-of-the-page thing for unclosed ref tags had been fixed some years ago. Is this new behavior? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:27, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

@Whatamidoing (WMF) If you just have an unclosed <ref>, then it won't eat the rest of the page. However, if you have an unclosed <ref> followed by a valid <ref>…</ref> tag (even in a different section), then it will eat everything between the unclosed <ref> and the closing </ref> of the second tag. :/ Matma Rex talk 18:56, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

It's a really weird coincidence, but I also noticed this issue with discussion tools yesterday while working on an unrelated problem, and reported it here: T301845 (I'm one of the developers working on this). It's actually a bug in our software, and should be fixed soon. But the errors might still be hidden by sitewide CSS here, and I'd suggest that it should be changed to reveal them. Matma Rex talk 18:54, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

Hi, does a Lua module for Software version parsing and comparison exist somewhere, here, on Meta, MW, or somewhere else? Is there a library one could simply use built into MediaWiki? Would Apache-Licensed material be allowed? -- Rillke (talk) 21:34, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

N.b. I'm seeking for a solution for es:Módulo discusión:Ficha de software#Version sorting. -- Rillke (talk) 21:38, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

@Rillke The following should work:

function paddedcompare(a, b)
  local y, z = "",""
  for i, v in ipairs(mw.text.split(a,'.',true)) do y = y .. string.format('%08d', tonumber(v)) .. '.' end
  for i, v in ipairs(mw.text.split(b,'.',true)) do z = z .. string.format('%08d', tonumber(v)) .. '.' end
  return y < z
end

table.sort(t, paddedcompare)

--Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 22:48, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

If the version numbers could contain anything other than digits and periods, you will need to use the following:

function paddedcompare(a, b)
  local function zeropad(s)
    local o = ""
    for v in string.gmatch(s, "(%d*%D*)") do
      if tonumber(string.match(v, "(%d*)")) then
        o=o..string.format('%08d', tonumber(string.match(v, "(%d*)")))..(string.match(v, "(%D+)") or '')
      else
        o=o..v
      end
    end
    return o
  end
  return zeropad(a) < zeropad(b)
end

table.sort(t, paddedcompare)

--Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 23:48, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

The numbering is all over the place and some larger headers take up 2 or more numbers. Has anyone else seen this behavior before? NW1223(^{Howl at me}/_{My hunts}) 01:48, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

Was white-space: nowrap removed accidentally from .tocnumber? It does seem like a CSS issue to me. I'm using Vector-2022 btw. — Paper9oll (🔔 • 📝) 01:52, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

This was caused by this edit to the custom CSS styles for the page. I've reverted it as no explanation was given in the edit summary for why the CSS rule was used. Dreamy Jazz ^{talk to me | my contributions} 02:39, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

I thought it was just my screen. ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 03:05, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

Thx, I have made the condition more specific and that should take care of it. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:03, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

Can someone with more HTML know-how than me take a look at this? —GMX^{(on the go!)} 17:49, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

It seems to be related to htmltidy. Ruslik_Zero 20:43, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

@Ruslik0: We no longer have htmltidy, it was removed in July 2018 (and we couldn't have got TemplateStyles with Tidy still in place). See for example Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 166#Tidy to RemexHtml, Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 166#Tech News: 2018-25 and mw:Parsing/Replacing Tidy. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 13:16, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

It does not matter. Something still modifies the html after the wikicode is parsed. Ruslik_Zero 20:08, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

User:२ तकर पेप्सी/Sandbox check this a user thinks it's a bug and has suggested to say it here. — Preceding unsigned comment added by २ तकर पेप्सी (talk • contribs) 01:07, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

I was the one who suggested they ask here. I don't necessarily think it's a bug since the unknown parameter errors only show up when previewing the edit. However something is causing the infobox to not work properly. ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 01:16, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

It's been fixed by PrimeHunter. Apparently the issue was there were invisible non-breaking spaces (as in ones that don't come from &nbsp or its template equivalent). ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 01:21, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

I just came across this edit, which was clearly vandalism, and which stayed in the article for two years. The next edit by the same editor (to a different article) was reverted by User:ClueBot NG as vandalism, but there does not appear to be any mechanism for editors to be alerted that an editor reverted for vandalism on article X had also previously edited article Y. Something should be done to this effect. BD2412 T 01:25, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

I can see some issues with this. An editor may have made a constructive edit on article Y and then on article X they make an edit that gets reverted by ClueBot NG (whether it be a false positive or not). Sending a notification to editors who have edited article Y or X may make them think that edit is also vandalism and, if they don't actually check it, will lead to a revert of a constructive edit. And there's also the issue with ClueBot NG having occasional false positives (doesn't happen often, but it does happen). ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 01:31, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

I'd rather deal with false positives leading to investigation than long-term undiscovered vandalism. If there's a way to balance the risk while achieving this, I'm open to it. BD2412 T 05:55, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

• What are you picturing here? After ClueBot reverts someone, where would it send messages, specifically? Who would it alert and how? I could see some sort of centralized log of ClueBot vandalism reverts if that doesn't already exist (although of course we can already examine ClueBot's edit history), but the question would be whether editors would actually track it. I don't think ClueBot could reasonably ping individual editors or even drop notices on individual pages - that would get far too spammy, especially if ClueBot reverted someone with a non-trivial number of edits. Possibly ClueBot could determine possibly-related edits or possibly-related articles the user has edited and log them on that central page, but what algorithm would it use for this determination? If it just lists every single other page the user has ever edited, that's only really going to be viable if eg. the user has only edited a handful of pages. --Aquillion (talk) 06:18, 18 February 2022 (UTC)
  • There are some limiting factors that could be applied. I think we can assume that editors with any substantial number of edits are not likely to be vandals. We can look at edits that introduced non-lexicalized character strings which ClueBot might not catch (for example, the first edit I noted above includes a change of "Attorney" to "Assorney", not a word), or edits that change blue links to red links, change dates, proper names, and the like. A centralized repository might include a snippet of the text changed, so it can easily be dismissed if obviously not vandalism. If there were a way to opt in to getting a ping about a vandal being reverted who had previously edited an article I have watchlisted, or an article in a particular category tree, I would certainly opt into that. BD2412 T 06:38, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

Before saving this edit and before posting this question here at VPT, I had to complete a captcha. Why was this requirement added? And did anyone tell all the bot operators? I don't see anything mentioning CAPTCHA here, or at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals), or at Wikipedia:Bots/Noticeboard. 122.150.71.249 (talk) 07:36, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#Emergency captcha enable which mentions "ongoing severe botnet disruption". It's temporary, while needed (although I haven't seen the background). Johnuniq (talk) 08:06, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

WP:ANI#"Delete P____" Doug Weller talk 08:44, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

Related OAuth breakage

If you run a tool that uses the python-social-auth module to do OAuth, the emergency fix described above probably breaks your authentication flow. Python-social-auth uses requests and doesn't override the default user agent. -- RoySmith (talk) 15:03, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

I haven't heard any problems from logged in users, (including bots) - has any bot actually had a problem? — xaosflux ^Talk 15:06, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

The issue is that the OAuth flow can't complete. As long as a user is already logged in, the token they got should continue to work. At least that's my understanding. I also see that T302047 was just opened to back this out, so it should become moot at some point in the not-too-distant future. -- RoySmith (talk) 15:12, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

Heh. Apparently, "not-too-distant future" means a couple of minutes ago :-) -- RoySmith (talk) 15:15, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

All afternoon I've needed to supply a Captcha just to preview my edits if they included a reference—a real pain—so I came here to find out what was going on. Glad to see it's in hand. Latest one, though, I didn't have to use one at all to save a new entry – result!--217.155.32.221 (talk) 17:02, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

In the Monobook skin, the "review pending revisions" thing overlaps the page title when the window is small enough (for example on my phone). Also, it looks like it is a dropdown menu, but it only seems to do mouseover. Can this be fixed and/or is there a way to turn this off? League of Nations is an example. —Kusma (talk) 12:27, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

That's no longer a good example, so just pick any page in Special:PendingChanges and reduce the window size in Monobook skin to see the problem. —Kusma (talk) 22:53, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

I assume you're using the responsive version of the skin. I do not see the issue you describe when I use the mobile emulator in Firefox. I do see that the pending changes box is not sized appropriately for responsiveness skins, but that's not that issue. Izno (talk) 05:07, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

Yes, I use the responsive version and Chrome (and I never use the mobile version). The most annoying thing is that on my phone, I can't see article titles for pages that have pending revisions. On my laptop, it is only an issue if the page title is very long. —Kusma (talk) 22:29, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

Hello. I am not familiar with python at all, but I want to perform only one task.
I am very good with C family. On mrwiki, I want to create an automated bot to do the task of "find and replace" in mainspace. On my computer, on command prompt, using replace.py I could do what I wanted to. I could change certain words from particular namespaces. The less than 10 contributions (all with english summary) of the bot can be seen at mr:special:contributions/KiranBOT_II.
Currently there is a list of words to be replaced in my user subpage at mrwiki. The current number is 42, but it expected to grow soon upto 200, and then slowly. The list/replace candidates are vetted on mr village pump before being added to that actual list.
From the idea of making a list of fixes in separate file (user-fixes.py), I created a separate file. Using that file, I was able to edit my userpage. But I still dont know the correct/working syntax of "find and replace" for pywikibot. I went through source code of replace.py, fixes.py and many other files, but still I could't find what I am looking for.
To be precise, how can I port following code to python/pywikibot, with addition to tell the pywikibot to edit in particular namespace(s).

{
            Summary = "summary for bot";
            Regex header = new Regex(@"\{\((nobots", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
            Skip = (header.Match(ArticleText).Success);

            Match n = Regex.Match(ArticleText, @"\{\{PAGENAME", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
            if (n.Success) ArticleText = Regex.Replace(ArticleText, @"(\{\{PAGENAME\}\})", "((subst:PAGENAME))", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);

            ArticleText = ArticleText.Replace("abc", "xyz");
            ArticleText = ArticleText.Replace("foo", "bar");

            return ArticleText;
}

I use the above code for my AWB bot. I am trying to do the same thing with pywikibot. There is a similar discussion that has almost gone stale at Wikipedia:Bots/Noticeboard#help creating a bot. Any help/guidance will be appreciated very much. Thanks a lot, —usernamekiran • sign the guestbook • (talk) 08:43, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

You can google find and replace in python. – SD0001 (talk) 15:33, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

@SD0001: I already did that, long before asking help on wikipedia. I tried a lot of variations, they are not working. The first search result is geeksforgeeks, I added string.replace(abcusernamekiran, xyz) to my script, and then got the error "NameError: name 'string' is not defined". I tried few different variations from few different sources, all of them are giving similar/some or other error. —usernamekiran • sign the guestbook • (talk) 17:39, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

There was no direct/definitive answer on any of the websites. I finally managed to do it by comparing few other source codes, and lots of experiments. Now, I have only one question, how to tell the script to edit in particular namespace(s)? Regards, —usernamekiran • sign the guestbook • (talk) 18:31, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

Do you mean you want to work on all pages in a particular namespace? That is done with a generator which iterates pages according to supplied parameters. I've never tried using the supplied scripts but pywikibot/pagegenerators.py seems to list options that might work with them. If writing your own program, I believe you would use pywikibot.pagegenerators.AllpagesPageGenerator with a namespace parameter. Johnuniq (talk) 23:05, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

If I go to my xtools page here [7], it has numbered links at the bottom so I can see article talkpages I've edited less. However, the page for articles [8] has no such links. Can this be fixed? Ping to @Mann Mann who asked first at the helpdesk. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 08:21, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for notifying me. Would someone please contact XTools developers for a solution/fix? OR any alternative way to view more entries in article namespace? Mann Mann (talk) 08:29, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

@Gråbergs Gråa Sång and Mann Mann: "xtools" is not part of the English Wikipeida, you can report bugs with that tool by using this link. — xaosflux ^Talk 10:57, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks! Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 11:00, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

When did this change to a + sign? It's very confusing, and I almost end up clicking on history by mistake.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 23:38, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

Still says "New Section" for me. ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 01:54, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

Do you have the Replace the "new section" tab text with "+" gadget enabled? That phab# above seems sus, wonder if we have to make a reverse gadget to change it back..... bleh. — xaosflux ^Talk 00:03, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

Historically, this has varied according to (a) skin and (b) the language selection made at Preferences. It still does:

Effect on the "New section" tab of varying skin/language setting

useskin=	uselang=en	uselang=en-CA	uselang=en-GB
cologneblue	New section	+	+
minerva	Add discussion	Add discussion	Add discussion
modern	new section	+	+
monobook	+	+	+
timeless	New topic	New topic	New topic
vector	New section	Add topic	Add topic
vector-2022	New section	+	+

The behaviour of MonoBook/en has certainly changed. It used to read "new section". It's something to do with the software using MediaWiki:Monobook-action-addsection (which does not exist locally) when I think it formerly used MediaWiki:Addsection (which does). --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 10:04, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

Xaosflux I would certainly not do that.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 16:08, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

There is )) )) at the bottom of Bibb County, Alabama#Government and infrastructure, but I can't see what could be causing it. ― Qwerfjkltalk 13:34, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

@Qwerfjkl: They're gone. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 13:43, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

Personally I think it is easier to see uneven brackets with one of the highlighters.--Snævar (talk) 19:30, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

In some random categories there are negative page and subcategory counts. for example, in Category:2022 disestablishments by continent i see:

2022 disestablishments in Africa‎ (2 C, -1 P)

And the "-1 P" is shown for every subcategory.

It is possible for the problem to be automatically solved after some time, then you won't see the problem when you arrive at this report, but possibly negative counts can be seen on newly created categories (Just guessing, not sure). As there are some changes to the category recount process (noted in the upcoming Tech News), i guess this issue should be reported on Phabricator. Thank you. Jeeputer (talk) 05:38, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

Is this related to Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 195#Empty, but not empty? categories? ― Qwerfjkltalk 07:59, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

@Qwerfjkl: Thank you for your response. Part of it (incorrect category count) is related. but the problem in that thread was one extra page in categories. The problem here is that categories have -1 page which is still incorrect, but in some different way. Jeeputer (talk) 19:44, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

It's the same problem - just force a recount by purging the category, per phab:T85696. ― Qwerfjkltalk 19:57, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

It is supposed to fix itself. MediaWiki has been coded to recount categories that have a minus number of category members. That logic was changed recently so it should kick in sooner than that, but I do not understand the specifics. See gerrit:c/mediawiki/core/+/506032.--Snævar (talk) 19:45, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

The automatic recount happens once a month, I don't know if the count going negative will force an extra run. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:54, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

Moved to Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers

I think WP:Ordinal used to have guidelines on when to use "first" and when to use "1st". I can't find it now. An editor is consistently using "1st" in a sentence when it should be "first". Where is the MOS guideline? Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 07:56, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

• This is the technical village pump, for discussion about technical items impacting Wikipedia; this thread is about content and style, and has been moved to: Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style/Dates_and_numbers#Using_"1st"_instead_of_"first"_in_a_sentence,_etc; please feel free to follow up on this there. — xaosflux ^Talk 21:19, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

• সেক্সি রসিক সেক্সি (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · page moves · block user · block log)

Hi, User talk:সেক্সি রসিক সেক্সি was recently nominated for speedy deletion by Afeef per WP:CSD#U2 as talk page of a nonexistent user. Despite no user being registered under this name, this unregistered user has six contributions and is currently blocked. Is this a bug that is occurring due to the characters in the username, or something else? ✗plicit 14:04, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

I would bet money that it's due to Unicode, or some weird character that might be in the username (e.g. a RTL override). However since the user quite evidently exists, it may be worth filing a bug report on phabricator. ―sportzpikachu _{my talkcontribs} 14:10, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

@Explicit and Sportzpikachu: that user does exist, but has a combination of blocks, locks, hides, and suppression settings so is likely not showing up on many queries. — xaosflux ^Talk 14:32, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

One of these is unregistered yet has contribs. I forget which one. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 23:49, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

_{Someone sure isn't afraid to express their political opinions}― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 23:52, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

I found it - Bonkrad (talk · contribs) has 25 contribs, but is not registered. The username doesn't have any characters outside the usual 26 letters, so we can probably rule out that theory. Their user log includes creation, block and a change to the block settings. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:37, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

@Redrose64 Special:Contributions (and every other interface) will report that the account is not registered if it has been locked and hidden globally, to avoid revealing abusive usernames. I don't know why this account has been hidden (it's indeed a little pointless if you don't also suppress their edits and log entries), perhaps it was a mistake; you might want to ask stewards if you want to know. Matma Rex talk 23:32, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

Any administrator can see whether an account is globally locked (and hence deduce if it's also hidden) by looking at the block interface: Special:Block/সেক্সি রসিক সেক্সি. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 23:46, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

I misread that as the block log and was a bit confused when it told me I didn't have permission to block the user because I thought you were linking to the block log of that user ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 23:48, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

Normally, for a globally locked account, the contribs page displays the text of MediaWiki:Centralauth-contribs-locked in a pink box - what confused me is the absence of that for Bonkrad. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 23:57, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

That account some steward suppression applied to it; this could be for many reasons but are generally good and get some peer review. You may not get much explanation if you ask 'why' - but if you think it is a bad lock for some specific reason you can open a VTRS ticket for steward review. — xaosflux ^Talk 23:54, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

As the title asks. Template:Copied requires you to manually enter the date of the diff that copied the material, which could be eliminated if the answer to this question is yes.  — Scott • talk 22:11, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

No, that would require an API query, which can't be done via Lua. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 22:19, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

Presumably one could, in theory, store certain known revid-timestamp pairs and compute the timestamp for an unknown revid using best-fit curves, since the date doesn't need to be accurate to more than about a day. In practice that probably isn't what you are looking for. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 22:58, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

That would work about 99.9% of the time, but ocasionally it would fail spectacularly. In that case it's because the page was deleted and restored before MediaWiki was upgraded to MediaWiki 1.5 in 2005, but imports among other things also produce out-of-order revision ID numbers. Graham87 05:22, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks all!  — Scott • talk 10:32, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

Everything on Wikipedia has just gone into tiny text. Seems to affect all pages, except preferences. Other websites unaffected. Using Monobook on Edge on Win10. DuncanHill (talk) 16:07, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

@DuncanHill: check if your browser "zoom" level is set to <100%? — xaosflux ^Talk 16:41, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

If that doesn't do it, see if it your scripts by loading this page in safe mode. — xaosflux ^Talk 16:43, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

@Xaosflux: I usually have everything at 125%, now if I have Wikipedia at 150% it looks like I expect it to. Safe mode looks the same as dangerous (?) mode. Other sites look normal at 125%. DuncanHill (talk) 20:03, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

@DuncanHill: just to rule out "monobook" can you try this page in Vector with Safemode? — xaosflux ^Talk 21:51, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

@Xaosflux: That looks huge at 150% and normal at 125%. DuncanHill (talk) 22:06, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

Monobook seems to be setting body { font-size: x-small; }. There's a big note in that context:

/* Font size:
** We take advantage of keyword scaling- browsers won't go below 9px
** See "Note 1" at https://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/fonts.html#value-def-absolute-size
** More at http://www.w3.org/2003/07/30-font-size
** http://style.cleverchimp.com/font_size_intervals/altintervals.html
** https://web.archive.org/web/20180201141931/http://style.cleverchimp.com/font_size_intervals/altintervals.html
** This affects users whose browser font size setting is < 14.4px,
** making #globalWrapper's font-size 11.43px at minimum.
** Gadgets have their own monobook-specific css rule to set the font-size similar to #globalWrapper.
*/

There is a rule right after at #globalWrapper { font-size: 127%; } also with the note /* scale back up to a sane default */.

It may be your browser vendor's renderer (Edge is powered by "Google" Chromium) no longer does what that note says on the tin. It may be that you modified your personal settings (not your zoom) at some point to produce smaller text. (Less likely but not impossible.) Or it may be that x-small is being interpreted a certain way now by Edge that it didn't before (for example, the <small> tag had inconsistent effects depending on the browser, which is why we set it to 85% in Common.css these days). Or it's possible that you changed the resolution on your desktop to a higher resolution (I have done so inadvertently before), which would appear to make the stuff displayed on your monitor smaller.

Either way, it is clear to me that "small" text is how Monobook is designed, more or less. Monobook text does look small to me as well (Firefox), but I can't say that it looks particularly smaller than how I remember it.

I don't know if this is worth filing a bug. I would guess that most stuff that would have been designed for Monobook exclusively went away when Vector became the norm, so a task "don't set these font sizes weird" might be accepted. I have no idea what the user fallout would be from that. --Izno (talk) 05:25, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

@Izno: Thanks. It's only en-wiki that's affected - not other languages, not Commons, not Wikiquote, not Wikisource, and I have Monobook set as a global preference. DuncanHill (talk) 10:27, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

Do you have the same problem in a different browser? How about if you open a private browsing window and don't log in? — xaosflux ^Talk 11:46, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

(Use monobook parameter to see in mb when not logged in. — xaosflux ^Talk 11:46, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

@Xaosflux: InPrivate+monobook looks normal, i.e. as it was before yesterday. I haven't got any other browsers installed. DuncanHill (talk) 13:55, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

@DuncanHill: hmm, try Private, then login, is it OK then, or does it break when you log in? — xaosflux ^Talk 14:01, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

@Xaosflux: When I log in it goes tiny. DuncanHill (talk) 14:05, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

@DuncanHill: I tried loading all of your scripts, on Edge, with Monobook and couldn't replicate this - and you say it is still a problem when you are using safemode as well? Only other thing I can suggest you try now is to turn off Gadgets and/or Beta features in your preferences and see if that helps. — xaosflux ^Talk 14:26, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

Also check the value of "Enable responsive mode - adapt layout to screen size on mobile." In your preferences. Jdlrobson (talk) 23:51, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

@Jdlrobson: That doesn't seem to have any effect (the problem is on desktop). DuncanHill (talk) 12:01, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

See this edit - the use of substituted "core" template used in WP:RM/T seems to cause issues with signatures that has pipe symbol in it that's not used for wikitext. FMecha (to talk|to see log) 08:44, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

They should use | instead of | in their signature. ― Qwerfjkltalk 08:53, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

Yes, as Special:Preferences#mw-htmlform-signature says. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:13, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

Should be references always supported with archive url? If yes will bot upddate url status dead no to yes when site with archive url will become dead? Eurohunter (talk) 11:43, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

No, archive urls should remain the discretion of the editor, although pre-emptive archiving should be encouraged in general, but especially for sources that only exist online. Keep in mind that all archive services are not equal, and their practices should be trusted and/or transparent to determine reliability. The idea of a bot marking urls as unavailable involves pretty complex coding. There are many different reasons for non-availability, including several transient ones that a badly coded routine may miss or flag wrongly. There is an effort to apply time-sensitive extensions to http. When/if these get approval and widespread application, the dead url issue will not be as important. 104.247.55.106 (talk) 14:05, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

Hello! So when using rollback on an edit, for whatever reason the edit summary duplicated part of the user's username. The edit is here. Anyone know what caused this to happen? It didn't appear to happen any other time I rolled back an edit by the same user. ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 00:25, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

@Blaze Wolf: it looks like you used a userscript to insert a custom rollback summary, you may want to check with the script maintainers here: Wikipedia talk:RedWarn, perhaps a problem with "$'s" or ".'s" in the username. — xaosflux ^Talk 00:51, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

@Xaosflux: Not in this case. I just used the rollback button that appears if you have the rollback perms. ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 00:52, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

I'm 99.9% sure, especially since the mediawiki rollback should not put non-constructive (RW 16.1)) in to the rollback summary - why do you think this wasn't script based? — xaosflux ^Talk 00:55, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

@Xaosflux: *Facepalm* Woops my bad. For whatever reason I didn't see the (RW 16.1) and the "non-constructive" part when reading my own edit summary. I just read the "rollback edits by" part and assumed I Didn't use RW for that edit. ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 00:59, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

The username was Theleak$22.25 and the edit summary was:

Rollback edit(s) by [[Special:Contributions/TheleakTheleak$22.252.25|TheleakTheleak$22.252.25]] ([[User_talk:TheleakTheleak$22.252.25|talk]]): non-constructive [[w:en:WP:RW|(RW 16.1)]]. $2 in the username was replaced with the whole username each time. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:22, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

Why would $2 cause that to happen? ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 13:36, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

$1, $2 and so on is sometimes used to designate the nth parameter or string match. I haven't read the RedWarn code but it must assign the username to $2 and later confuse it with an occurrence of the string "$2" in the original input. As xaosflux said, it can be reported at Wikipedia talk:RedWarn. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:45, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

Ah ok sounds good. I don't think it's common enough to be that big of an issue, but if I do encounter it again I'll report it there. ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 23:42, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

Yup, but this doesn't seem to be anything to do with "rollback", is likely just an input handling bug in that personal userscript. — xaosflux ^Talk 13:37, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

I've got over 23,000 pages but I wouldn't think that's a problem. In theory I could also try editing my raw watchlist, but that loads, shows pages for a second, and goes blank. Doug Weller talk 17:49, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

Yes, that's too many these days. Raw watchlist failing is probably a separate issue totally though. Izno (talk) 17:59, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

Try rawmode with safemode link, trim that way down. — xaosflux ^Talk 18:10, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

You could try trimming some of the cruft from your watchlist with my watchlist cleaner tool. You might want to skip the slow options the first time round, but I've been able to test it successfully on a 10,000 item watchlist. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 22:16, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks all. @Xaosflux: safe mode worked very well. I was then able to get it down to just under 12,000. But the normal way just displays it, it won't actually delete anything, just leaves a message "There are too many pages to display here." despite having shown them all. @Ahect: I installed it but I use User talk:The Transhumanist/WatchlistSorter.js which I think stops your script from working. At least I think I am, User:Doug Weller/watchlistSorter.js really puzzles me as it doesn't seem installed and I can't find it elsewhere. I've got three watchlists, one for articles/article talk page, main space and talk pages, userpage and talk pages, with colours. Doug Weller talk 14:21, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

@Doug Weller: The message "There are too many pages to display here", displayed after you've hit the "Remove titles" button, is misleading. I think it is trying to say "I have removed the titles as you requested; if there were only a few, I would have listed them here as part of the confirmation message, but you've removed so many that I'm not going to list them." -- John of Reading (talk) 14:55, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

@John of Reading: It certainly is misleading, as I've just discovered. I've been able to trim my watchlist to under 10,000 and it now shows the pages I've deleted. I think with everyone's help I've accomplished what I was trying to accomplish, and I've reset ordinary and Twinkle preferences to add fewer pages. That plus the ability to set a time limit should keep it under control. Thanks all. Doug Weller talk 15:00, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

I was wondering if there was a script that allowed me to clean out my watchlist. ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 15:03, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

Geez anti-vandal work sure fills up your watchlist. The majority of the pages in my watchlist were userpages of either indef blocked users or IPs. Some of these I wish I could keep the talk page watchlisted but not the userpage but unfortunately that's not how it works. ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 15:12, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

19:10, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

I'm seeing this error message on Module:Authority control. From the additional info provided it seems the error is actually coming from Module:Documentation. Can anyone advise how to fix this? Thanks — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 19:10, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

Module:Authority control/doc currently uses exactly 500 expensive function calls. Prior to Special:Diff/1073247698 it was at 480. Module:Documentation probably adds a few more for testing if various subpages exist. The fix would be to reduce the number of expensive calls used in Module:Authority control/doc. Anomie⚔ 22:14, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

And a good to start that would be to remove all the calls to mw.site.stats.pagesInCategory. Johnuniq (talk) 22:29, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

I use Opera and recently had to reinstall it. Since reinstalling, I can't see the Tools tabs at the top of the page and when I click the Notifications icon the page is blank. I know that this is some setting about privacy or scripting but I can't remember or figure out which. Anyone have any ideas? Thanks in advance. Eggishorn (talk) (contrib) 20:43, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

@Eggishorn, which skin are you using? You should be able to tell by looking at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:59, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

@Whatamidoing (WMF) and WhatamIdoing:, Apparently, whatever problem I'm having is also preventing me from seeing the "Appearance" tab of the Preferences page, so I can't tell for sure. to the best of my memory, I think it's Monobook. Eggishorn (talk) (contrib) 15:20, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

Have a look at the images near the top of Wikipedia:Skin, see which is closest to what you have. The main details to consider are the items around the edges, rather than the main content. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:43, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

@Redrose64:, I think it looks most like vector Legacy, if that's any help. Thanks again. Eggishorn (talk) (contrib) 20:09, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

@Eggishorn, please click https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)&safemode=1 and see if mw:safemode fixes anything. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:21, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

@Whatamidoing (WMF) and WhatamIdoing: Sorry for the delay in answering. The safe mode didn't change anything but everything started working correctly shortly before your last question. I didn't change any settings either on WP or my browser or restart the browser either, so I was at a loss as to why what didn't work before suddenly did. I was holding off on answering until it seemed like the changes "held" but the tools seem to be working now. I'm kind of stumped but the immediate problem seems solved. Thanks for your help. Eggishorn (talk) (contrib) 20:10, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the update. I'm glad that the problem is solved, even if the solution is unknown. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:22, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

@Eggishorn: this is a bit o/t, but I'm an Opera user of long standing, until I discovered the Vivaldi browser, which I now use almost exclusively. If you're an Opera fan, try out Vivaldi; you might become a new fan and love it as much as I do. Mathglot (talk) 07:04, 22 February 2022 (UTC)

Hi, can someone please give a look at Talk:2022 United States House of Representatives elections § Wonky footnotes? As of now, reference #1003 and all after it won't show up as it ideally should. Someone explored the possibility that expansion of templates in the article caused it to exceed limits imposed by software. However, when I simply copy-pasted the page contents in User:CX Zoom/TestPage8, with some portions being pasted in User:CX Zoom/TestPage5 instead and being transcluded from there. Despite the total content being slightly lesser than original article, references #938 and all after it won't show up. Is the issue of references not showing up not dependent on article size or transclusions somehow significantly increase the post-expand size? Also, if someone can fix the main issue in question, it will be very helpful. Thanks! ---CX Zoom(^he/_him) (^{let's talk}|_contribs) 15:12, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

If the article is way too damn big now, with the election still nine months away, you know that the article will continue to grow for the next year and a half – longer if the election is in any way controversial. Time to split or consider severely paring it back to the essentials.

As a stop-gap, you might replace all ((cite web with ((#invoke:cite web|| and all ((cite news with ((#invoke:cite news|| (note the double pipe). That might be problematic because I suspect that that construct is not recognized by the bots and user scripts that cleanup after careless editors. It will not stop the growth of the article. Best that editors exercise editorial discipline and edit the article back to a reasonable size.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 15:33, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

Actually the problem is that it's still primary season. This same issue happened four years ago, indeed then all the references were broken! Only after the losers in the primaries are culled out the the article does it reduce down to a reasonable size. – wbm1058 (talk) 19:58, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks Trappist the monk. Thanks wbm1058. ---CX Zoom(^he/_him) (^{let's talk}|_contribs) 07:16, 22 February 2022 (UTC)

...but one thing I don't understand is why the page with the same content but one of its parts being transcluded from other page will load less number of references than a page that has all contents within itself. ---CX Zoom(^he/_him) (^{let's talk}|_contribs) 07:24, 22 February 2022 (UTC)

Moonraker (talk · contribs) has made edits like this on a number of articles. I see no point to this, since it is merely doubling up the styles that are applied by the inbuilt CSS rule

div.tright,
div.floatright,
table.floatright {
  clear: right;
  float: right;
}

that is triggered by the use of |thumb on the image. I brought it up on their talk page, and removed some such additions (example), but several of my edits have been reverted (example), reinstating the markup that is, to me, absolutely unnecessary.

So, has there been some change to the way that |thumb behaves, either in the site's CSS or in the MediaWiki software? It seems strange that such a radical change in behaviour (floated images failing to float) would not be noticed by several other people and at least one thread started here. But if there has been a change, fixing this in one or two places would surely be easier than adding <div style="float:right;clear:right">...</div> tag pairs around millions of images one by one. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 10:22, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

I see on their talk page that the user claims that it only affects small-screen mobile devices, which is probably true as floats don't make much sense at low widths. But as far as I know the relevant CSS rules have existed for years. And I doubt wholesale forcing of floats on mobile devices is really going to be a good experience for such readers. Anomie⚔ 13:11, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

This indeed has an effect on mobile devices, but it's a negative effect! Here's how the article you linked (Stewart Orr) looks like on my phone: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/F34958172. Images are made to display at full width on mobile for a reason, please don't override that. Matma Rex talk 13:59, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

I'm not overriding it, Moonraker is. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 14:19, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

Yes, sorry, I meant to say "let's not override that". Matma Rex talk 14:22, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

Moonraker Please stop making this change. Izno (talk) 17:33, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

Redrose64 and Izno, it seems to me you need to link some policy, rather than putting forward personal preferences. Most people (including me) are now using mobile devices. If I create an article and want a marginal image in it, one which does not split the text across the whole page width, the “thumb” option no longer works for me on the English Wikipedia, as it did until a few months ago. It still works fine on the French, German, and Italian Wikipedias, and perhaps on all others. By all means point me towards some other standard option. ((Main page image)) does the trick for me, but I believe it was GKFX who said that should only be used on the main page. If there is a policy which claims that marginal images are a problem, I am not aware of it. There must surely be a correct way to achieve them. Also, can someone please find out exactly what change has been made to the “thumb” mobile display on this Wikipedia, I believe it was last October, and why it was made? Moonraker (talk) 00:35, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

@Moonraker Marginal images still display on the mobile site, but they depend on your device's width and text zoom level. On my device, they appear like that when I turn it to landscape and zoom out to 75%: [15] (85% for comparison: [16]) (the example I tested is The Fighting Temeraire#Symbolism). If you see different results on different language Wikipedias, maybe you zoomed in on one of them accidentally or something? Matma Rex talk 01:05, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

This is actually irrespective of my personal preference. The irony is that you are installing your own personal preference without actually understanding the implications of what you are doing.

As for 'marginal' images, Matma Rex seems to have explained how and why they aren't working for you, and why in fact you should not try to enforce your preference. While it is possible something did actually change or break for you in October (there has been work on skinning for the past couple years), I have some doubts (Matma would know if it had -- he is a reasonably diligent software engineer for the movement). Izno (talk) 01:15, 20 February 2022 (UTC)

With respect, Izno, I have today checked on two other mobile devices, and on all of them the English Wikipedia is behaving differently from the other three Wikipedias I mentioned above, Fr, De, and It. I noticed it doing that about the middle of last October. I have just checked the Spanish WP (where the “thumb” option can be used as “thumb” or “miniatura”), plus Latin, Hungarian, and Polish, and on all of them “thumb” is still producing small marginal images which do not spread across the whole page width. On my “personal preference”, sure, it is simply for marginal images to go on displaying as they do everywhere else, at least on the pages I have designed. I understand the preference of Redrose64, which is to cut out unnecessary surplus text which he believes achieves nothing. That would make good sense if it did achieve nothing. He has said on my talk page he is using Windows 10 on a PC. Moonraker (talk) 05:37, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

What makes it your preference is that you are adding non-responsive HTML which inhibits the display for everyone else. Yes, everyone else.

Stop. Izno (talk) 05:45, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

Matma Rex, no, no accidental zooming in. It would be really helpful to get to the bottom of what the difference is between the way “thumb” is programmed to perform on this Wikipedia and the others. Do you have time to check that out? Moonraker (talk) 05:37, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

Moonraker, if you log out of the English Wikipedia, do images display differently? If so, your thumb size preferences on en.WP may be causing the different rendering between en and fr/de/it. – Jonesey95 (talk) 06:02, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

@Moonraker Can you link to the articles you're testing, and provide screenshots of what you're seeing? There is no difference between English and Polish Wikipedia for me, and I don't see any differences in configuration options that could affect how thumbnails are shown. Matma Rex talk 08:04, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

Matma Rex, I can do screenshots, but how do I post them here or somewhere else? Do you suggest I upload them to this Wikipedia or Commons, or is there another way to do it? As an example of the difference between En and Pl, the England page gives me about fifty “thumb” images in windows that take up the whole page width, but the Pl Anglia page shows “thumb” images to the right, each taking up about a third of the page width, with the text running down continuously. Moonraker (talk) 09:08, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

It doesn't really matter to me where you upload them. I used https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/file/upload/ (which is a part of our bug tracking software), you can use your favorite image hosting service. Matma Rex talk 11:53, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

Here's a link to a pl.WP copy of the English version of "England" (hosted on pl.WP). The templates and links generally don't work, but it should allow for straightforward comparison of the same image code on two different instances of Wikipedia. When I switch to mobile view, both pages stop flowing text around images and place them alone in the center of the page when my viewport window width gets below about 710 pixels, even though my thumb size preferences are different at en.WP and pl.WP. I see no difference. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:27, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

When posting here, you should have seen this notice, which includes the line

• Would a screenshot help you to describe the problem? If so, please follow the directions at Wikipedia:Screenshots of Wikipedia.

Some external image hosting services have objectionable advertising, or run untrustworthy JavaScript. Even imgur gives me problems - when visiting it my PC slows to a crawl and I need to reboot. So please can we stick with WP:WPSHOT which is as trustworthy as the rest of Wikipedia. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 11:35, 22 February 2022 (UTC)

Hi, to me (as a visually impaired person) it's very hard to find the (often small) pieces of text that are added or deleted in a diff. Texts that are added or deleted are placed within a <ins> or <del>-tag. The contrast ratio of the background color for these tags to the normal background color is 1:1.2 . WCAG 2.0 actually advises a ratio of at least 1:3 for user interface components. Since the added or deleted parts in a diff are a vital part of a wiki, I think this should be better accessible for all people by changing the background color of these elements (globally, through MediaWiki:Common.css?). I would like to propose this background color, which is #ADD6FF for the ins- and del-tags. This is a darker variant based on the same color that is used now. This considerably increases contrast to the normal background-color (#FFFFFF). Still not a 1:3 contrast-ratio, but this would make it far more easy for visually impaired people and actually anyone to find the changes within a diff. Novopas (talk) 09:46, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

That change would also make diff usable in dark mode, where ins and del are currently almost invisible even with average vision. Certes (talk) 12:17, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

@Novopas: Registered users can choose "wikEdDiff" and "Display diffs with the old yellow-and-green colors and design" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:57, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

Thank you, PrimeHunter, I wasn't aware of this option. On the Dutch Wikipedia I also changed my personal CSS to improve visibility of the ins/del-tags. But I still think that a lot of people, both registered and unregistered, could benefit from this change. Novopas (talk) 14:26, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

I have the settings suggested by PrimeHunter and still have problems finding small changes. MB 17:22, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

@MB: So do I, so I created two CSS rules:

td.diff-deletedline del.diffchange { background-color: #cfc; }
td.diff-addedline ins.diffchange { background-color: #ffa; }

I put them in m:Special:MyPage/global.css so that they would be effective on all Wikimedia Wikis, but you can put them in Special:MyPage/common.css so that they only affect English Wikipedia. Basically, the unchanged portions of lines retain the yellow (old)/green (new) backgrounds yielded by that gadget, as do lines wholly added or wholly removed, but changed content within an existing line gets the background colours exchanged - green for old removed text, yellow for new added text. This method even works for single spaces added or removed, which the basic gadget doesn't. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 13:26, 22 February 2022 (UTC)

• phab:T90948 is opened to determine better styling for diffs, feedback is welcome there! — xaosflux ^Talk 17:25, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

  No one is touching this with a ten foot pole, I think. It’s one of those typical, whatever u do, no one is satisfied and everyone is angry issues unfortunately. And then status quo tends to prevail for a long time. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:47, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

  Make it a per-user preference then, with the current wishy-washy pastels as the default. Certes (talk) 20:17, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

  Something I never understood is why desktop and mobile have as differing schemes as #a3d3ff/#ffe49c and #75c877/#e07076. To me the former is far superior and the latter barely legible, but I guess Novopas would disagree? Nardog (talk) 23:03, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

  Novopas is saying he can't distinguish (or not easily, anyway) the pastel backgrounds of the former from white, so it's as if the changes don't exist.

  Mobile is on the other color scheme because mobile use its own diff machinery and it wasn't updated when core was, in case you didn't read the task. Izno (talk) 23:20, 21 February 2022 (UTC)

  @Certes: a per-user preference would be great, but I'd suggest that the accessible option always be the default (also, because unregistered users won't be able to choose any preference). Thanks for the phabricator link, Xaosflux, although I'm really not proposing any different color scheme per se, rather proposing to make the current scheme more accessible to visually impaired people, by changing the background to a (slightly) darker shade. Izno is right in saying that the current background is practically invisible for me and other visually impaired users. (and as Certes pointed out, people with normal sight who are using dark mode) Novopas (talk) 09:55, 22 February 2022 (UTC)

FYI

 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Somebody please pitch in at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Footnotes and line wrapping issue. I am getting tired of explaining why it is unfeasible to make millions of changes just because of one user's borderline sub-optimal reading experience. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:22, 22 February 2022 (UTC)

Hello! So at WT:TEA, the hatnote Vchimpanzee added to his post is now engulfing the lower post. It appears it's been closed correctly so I'm not sure how to fix it. ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 14:25, 22 February 2022 (UTC)

@Blaze Wolf: looks like GIGO, reverted in this edit. — xaosflux ^Talk 15:10, 22 February 2022 (UTC)

The problem was that ((hab)) was in the middle of a line. It only works when it is at the very start of a new line. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 17:13, 22 February 2022 (UTC)

Sorry about that. I was thinking maybe people would object to reading all that but I felt I needed to say it somewhere.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 19:31, 22 February 2022 (UTC)

Hello! I'm working on improving the Euro Truck Simulator 2 article and was told that I could use the awards parameter for the video games review template to get rid of the awards section, however for whatever reason when I attempt to add the publisher of the award, it results in the publisher section for that being blank. Anyone know what I"m doing wrong? ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 23:41, 22 February 2022 (UTC)

Blaze Wolf, questions specific to a specific template should be asked first on the relevant template talk page or to the person who thinks they know what they're talking about. Izno (talk) 00:04, 23 February 2022 (UTC)

@Izno: Ah alright. I just asked here because I knew I would find people here that would know the answer to my question. Shall I ask this question there then or should I wait for someone to answer it here? ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 00:10, 23 February 2022 (UTC)

Go ask it there. Izno (talk) 00:10, 23 February 2022 (UTC)

Why is it that thumbnail images cannot provide vertical alignment as non-thumbnail images can? Can we add vertical alignment to thumbnail images? This would greatly enhance the placement of images to accommodate a wide range browser window widths. Yours aye,  Buaidh  talk e-mail 20:21, 22 February 2022 (UTC)

Buaidh Can you point to an example of what non-thumbnails are doing that you think thumbs should be able to do? Izno (talk) 20:25, 22 February 2022 (UTC)

I would like to vertically align the thumbnail image with the relevant point or paragraph. The vertical alignment default for thumbnails is always top. The following is a trivial example with equal line spacing and similar image sizes. If the paragraphs and images are of substantially unequal sizes, the discrepancy becomes far greater.

What I get is this:

1. George Washington
2. John Adams
3. Thomas Jefferson
4. James Madison
5. James Monroe
6. John Quincy Adams

   

7. Andrew Jackson
8. Martin Van Buren
9. William Henry Harrison
10. John Tyler
11. James K. Polk
12. Zachary Taylor
13. Millard Fillmore
14. Franklin Pierce
15. James Buchanan
16. Abraham Lincoln
17. Andrew Johnson
18. Ulysses S. Grant
19. Rutherford B. Hayes

    

20. James A. Garfield
21. Chester A. Arthur
22. Grover Cleveland
23. Benjamin Harrison
24. Grover Cleveland
25. William McKinley
26. Theodore Roosevelt
27. William Howard Taft
28. Woodrow Wilson

What I want is this:

1. George Washington
2. John Adams

   

3. Thomas Jefferson
4. James Madison
5. James Monroe
6. John Quincy Adams
7. Andrew Jackson
8. Martin Van Buren
9. William Henry Harrison
10. John Tyler
11. James K. Polk
12. Zachary Taylor
13. Millard Fillmore
14. Franklin Pierce
15. James Buchanan

    

16. Abraham Lincoln
17. Andrew Johnson
18. Ulysses S. Grant
19. Rutherford B. Hayes
20. James A. Garfield
21. Chester A. Arthur
22. Grover Cleveland
23. Benjamin Harrison
24. Grover Cleveland

Aren't John Q. and Rutherford cute? Yours aye,  Buaidh  talk e-mail 23:11, 22 February 2022 (UTC)

The basic explanation is that this is not how the web tech of interest here works. Izno (talk) 00:09, 23 February 2022 (UTC)

If you are just playing around in User space, you could do something hacky like ((float |top=-7em |[[File:John Q. Adams.jpg|upright=0.5|thumb|[[John Quincy Adams]]]])). I wouldn't use that construction in article space, though, unless I were prepared to test and maintain the affected pages with a variety of browsers, skins, and mobile/desktop viewers in perpetuity. – Jonesey95 (talk) 01:39, 23 February 2022 (UTC)

Which still doesn't work because user preferences. Izno (talk) 01:50, 23 February 2022 (UTC)

Works for me, but as I said, I would only do it in user space. – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:55, 23 February 2022 (UTC)