Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 187

Usually, when you click on a red link like this while logged in, it will takes you to the editor for that article to create (i.e. it links to https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=a_red_link_like_this&action=edit&redlink=1 instead of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/a_red_link_like_this). I personally find this rather annoying, so I'd like to ask if there are any way of stopping the editor to launch automatically and have the red links go to Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. message instead.

NotCory (talk) 07:54, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

@NotCory: Wikipedia:User scripts/List#For reading shows the below. PrimeHunter (talk) 08:37, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

• noeditredlinks^[1] (source) – stops the opening of the editor when clicking on red links.

@NotCory: Try putting this in your common.js: $("a.new").each((i,el)=>$(el).attr("href", $(el).attr("href").match(/(\/w\/index.php\?title=.+)&action=edit&redlink=1/)[1]));. What it does is replaces every red link's href property with the href without the part that says &action=edit&redlink=1. Hope this helped! ―sportzpikachu _{my talkcontribs} 08:41, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

@Sportzpikachu: and @PrimeHunter: I'm honestly surprised that this function is not available in the settings page. Thanks! NotCory (talk) 09:26, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

Maybe it would be made a gadget if power users used VisualEditor. They mostly use the source editor and there it isn't annoying to click a red link you don't want to create. PrimeHunter (talk) 09:34, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

Hi all

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

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

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

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

Thanks very much

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

I recently discovered WP:CiteUnseen, which is a user script that takes approach #2, flagging sources with icons depending on how they are listed in RSP. — The Earwig ^talk 22:17, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

And also User:Headbomb/unreliable. --Izno (talk) 22:25, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

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

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

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

Thanks

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

That is not something appropriate for an article. It might be reasonable to put something on the article talk page, but I do not think a standard template exists for that. You could maybe convince the script writers above also to provide a note when a source's page is being viewed. --Izno (talk) 23:19, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

Ah, I see. Sorry for misunderstanding your original comment! Daily Mail is an interesting case because Wikipedia's assessment of its reliability is itself the subject of commentary in RS and is mentioned in Daily Mail#Reliability, but I agree with Izno that this typically doesn't belong in the article on the source itself. I could support a talk page template, but this is the wrong forum for that discussion (maybe WP:VPR). — The Earwig ^talk 23:23, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

@The Earwig: and @Izno: I'll look more at a talk page template, thanks for your help. John Cummings (talk) 10:04, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

I'd like to know why Category:The Walt Disney Company is a distant subcategory of Category:Finnish people, but what's the fastest way to find it out? I don't want to click the blue ►'s on a category page until I find the connection. 87.95.206.253 (talk) 18:33, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

Theoretical answer: express the category tree as a directed graph and do a breadth-first search from Finnish people cat until you get to that one. Not sure if a tool exists that does this. – SD0001 (talk) 18:49, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

Found it: Category:Finnish people → Category:Finnish diaspora‎ → Category:Finnish diaspora in North America → Category:Finnish American‎ → Category:Finnish-American history‎ → Category:New Sweden → Category:Forts of New Netherland‎ → Category:Wall Street → Category:New York Stock Exchange‎ → Category:Companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange‎ → Category:The Walt Disney Company‎. I wrote a quick script to do it; I don't know of a generic tool to solve this problem, unfortunately. — The Earwig ^talk 19:45, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

I love the category system. --Izno (talk) 20:10, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

If so, you'll find User:SDZeroBot/Category cycles interesting :P – SD0001 (talk) 05:13, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

Another endless backlog for a system that should have died when Wikidata was born. Yes, I love it! --Izno (talk) 05:34, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

The root problem is coming from people using categories as "has something to do with". Sure, Wall Street might have had a fort, but the category is not about the fort. Similarly, "Finnish-American" is not a category for people, so it shouldn't be a subcategory of a category for people. The German Wikipedia is much stricter enforcing consistent category patterns (e.g. only people in categories for people), there you get these surprises less often. --mfb (talk) 12:56, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

Thanks. Too bad there's no tool that does this. Would be helpful when using WP:PetScan. 87.95.206.253 (talk) 17:57, 24 January 2021 (UTC)

The page Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Missing articles by nationality/Israel hasn't been updated in a week. During that time I created a Wikidata item eligible for inclusion on the page via the automated (Listeria) update, but it understandably doesn't appear in the list. As manual additions are removed by the next update, I chose to engage "Update the list now." The result was a full-screen message: Listeria: Killed by OS for overloading memory. (Also: "Check out the current bot status" - which displayed a table beyond my understanding.). What to do now? (I wrote here because the WikiProject page is in the EN WP.) -- Deborahjay (talk) 12:25, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

@Deborahjay: I guess you mean Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Missing articles by nationality/Israel which hasn't been updated in five weeks. I get the same message on "Update the list now" near the top. "current bot status!" in the error message links to https://listeria.toolforge.org/botstatus.php which doesn't seem helpful here. Maybe the list is too large. User:ListeriaBot is operated by Magnus Manske. If there is an issue with a bot then you should usually contact the operator. I have pinged him now. By the way, your signature with italics in the timestamp is confusing and may also confuse some tools which expect a signed post to end with (UTC) and not (UTC)''. If you want the user parts to be in italics then you can enter ''-- [[User:Deborahjay|Deborahjay]] ([[User talk:Deborahjay|talk]])'' in the Signature field at Special:Preferences and enable "Treat the above as wiki markup". PrimeHunter (talk) 13:16, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

@PrimeHunter:, your comprehensive reply is much appreciated. That list is indeed long, though I haven't compared it with the corresponding "by country" Women in Red lists. (N.B. Israeli biographies in numerous fields are generally notable in the Anglophone WP). I hadn't thought of Listeria as a bot; somewhere along the way I got to thinking of it and its operator User:Magnus Manske as having legendary status (!). Meanwhile I'll go to settings and make a proper italicized signature for my User name, as you've described. -- Deborahjay (talk) 13:29, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

Update: have added this matter as a request to d:User talk:Magnus Manske. Also, I fixed my four-tildes signature to appear in italics without including the date/time stamp. (UTC)-- Deborahjay (talk) 16:35, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

Maybe this is a non-issue, but I always have to go through and unwatch pages that are archived (old PRs, GAs, FACs etc.) and I certainly have forgotten to do so plenty of times. Is there a reason that we're able to continue watching archived pages? Maybe this is a non-issue, as in it doesn't take anything extra to watch them, but at the same time it seems pointless. Any thoughts? Apologies if this has been discussed before. Aza24 (talk) 00:18, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

I prefer to keep watching my GA reviews so as to ensure vandalism on the pages doesn't go unnoticed and most of the time it is no additional trouble. Eddie891 ^Talk _Work 00:26, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

Consider using the new temporary watch feature. :) --Izno (talk) 00:35, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

Archives can be edited like any other page, they just rarely are. There is no need to unwatch them. You can search (Ctrl+f in many browsers) Special:EditWatchlist for "archive" and unwatch if you want. I have 136 and don't care. PrimeHunter (talk) 08:55, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

• Yeah, I agree with the above that watching e.g. old GA reviews is a good thing. 99% of the time nothing happens to them, and the remainder is typically vandalism or something else I want to know about so I can revert or respond to it. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 16:44, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
• @Aza24: because an "archive page" isn't a thing as far as the system is concerned, it is just another page that contains archive in the title. If an archive is made by moving a page, you will continue to watch it - if it is made by copy-pasting text you won't start watching it. You can bulk edit your watchlist here: Special:EditWatchlist/raw and quickly delete the lines you want to remove if they are bothering you. — xaosflux ^Talk 19:47, 26 January 2021 (UTC)

I suppose the talk pages project would in the future allow you to follw sections that get archived, see mw:Talk_pages_project/Notifications and phab:T262990.--Snaevar (talk) 20:31, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

Can anybody explain why this edit by GeneralNotability (talk · contribs) is shown as "Reverted"? Subsequent edits (of which there are two as I write this) do not reinstate the content removed by GeneralNotability. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:56, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

The part of the MediaWiki code that marks edits as "reverted" is presumably, though erroneously in the case of talk pages and similar pages that are sometimes returned to a blank-ish state, looking for a previous revision of the page that matches the new revision. In this case, this diff shows that the current version of the page is identical to a version from 7 April 2017, so MW applied a "reverted" tag to every intervening edit. That looks like a bug to me. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:10, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

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

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

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

@Ktin: This data does exist - see m:Research:Wikipedia clickstream - but it's not made available through the pageviews tool, it's only on a monthly basis (not daily or hourly), and it cuts out all pairs with less than ten occurrences. I believe these restrictions are all for reader-privacy purposes, which seems reasonable. You'd have to process it manually to get the data you're after, but it does look possible to at least get some kind of idea.

For example, Great conjunction was definitely on ITN in December 2020. In that month, it got 606287 tracked pageviews, of which 119614 were from a known Wikipedia mainspace page. 106300 of those came from the main page. (Of the rest, 339k came from external search engines, 120k had no known referrer, 18k came from other external sites, and 11k from other WM sites)

The normal pageviews tool reports 613802 user-agent views in that time, so while not exactly consistent you can see they're definitely in broad agreement. Conjunction was up from 21/12 through to the end of the month; there were 421280 pageviews in that time, so at a very approximate guess one-quarter of its total traffic during those days came from the main page link. Andrew Gray (talk) 13:41, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

Andrew Gray, this is brilliant! Thanks a ton!!! While daily data would have been gold, for the most part we can work with monthly data! I am copying two other of our project members @The Rambling Man and Amakuru:.

Andrew, just to try my understanding, would this be a fair read: The COVID-19_pandemic page received 159008 page views from the Main Page for the month of December (~5300 daily views, given that we know that the link was there for the entire month)? Similarly, Sugathakumari received 3908 page views (now normalizing this to daily will be difficult but not impossible, we will have to roughly reconstruct how many days this link was on the main page) and similarly Alex Trebec received page 2403 views from the homepage (similar daily normalization challenge)? Thanks a ton again. Ktin (talk) 14:47, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

Andrew Gray, Another quick follow up question. Looking at John le Carré seems like the article received 23,500 views from the main page for the entire month (we will have to normalize for daily, by reconstructing how long the article was on the main page). But, one thing caught my attention -- John_le_Carré_bibliography seems to have received 163 page views. But, to the best of my knowlege John_le_Carré_bibliography link was not featured on the main page, but, I see, the below snippet. Do you know what that might be indicative of? Ktin (talk) 14:59, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

John_le_Carré	Main_Page	other	1713
John_le_Carré_bibliography	Main_Page	other	31
Main_Page	John_le_Carré:_The_Biography	other	51
Main_Page	John_le_Carré_bibliography	other	163
Main_Page	John_le_Carré	other	23500

@Ktin, The Rambling Man, and Amakuru: The Covid/Sugathakumari/Trebek numbers look correct to me, yes! Looking across the whole dataset, this would make COVID-19_pandemic the third most popular onward link from Main Page that month, behind Hyphen-minus (2951391), Lists of deaths by year (1130422), and Wikipedia (214705). I think it is reasonable to assume that #1 is an anomaly and can be ignored, and possibly so is #2 - the onward links here don't seem to correlate to actual views of those pages. Next on the list were COVID-19_pandemic_by_country_and_territory (120652) and Great conjunction (106300 - more popular than I thought - it did have a great photo though!).

For your second question, the key here is other. The pageviews data seems to work on the basis of "this user went from A to B" rather than specifically "this user clicked the link to B". As a result, if you have a page open and search for a page, then click straight through to the search link (which I think is default if your search matches the pagename), it will show up in this data. Similarly, I think it will also record it if you get a link out of a navigation popup, which can let you go to "links from a linked page". The net result is that links don't actually need to exist on the page to show up in this data, and "Other" seems to be flagging these cases. Those 163 people will - probably - have been on the main page, entered "John le Carré bibliography" into the search box, and gone straight there.

Exactly when "link" or "other" shows up is another question. Main Page > Great conjunction is recorded as "link", and we know it was still present on 31/12. Main Page > Banksia serrata is recorded as "other", and it was TFA in mid-December but definitely gone from the frontpage by 31/12. I suspect this means that what it does is snapshot whether it shows up in the links table (the one on Special:Whatlinkshere on a particular day, maybe the nearest conveniently-dated dump (there was one on 1/1). This is a sensible way of doing it for most pages, where links are usually pretty stable, but a bit awkward for interpreting the mainpage or other frequently-rotating pages; for articles you know were on the mainpage, I wouldn't worry too much about it. Andrew Gray (talk) 15:37, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

In this edit, a page which was originally written with (((...))) instead of [[...]] was fixed to use the later. Is there some other platform (i.e. one from which this might have been copied) that uses triple parens for markup? -- RoySmith (talk) 19:38, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

Back in Usenet days it used to mean "I like this", but we're literally talking back in the 1980s-90s. For I hope obvious reasons, no legitimate platform nowadays is going to use triple parentheses as part of its markup. ‑ Iridescent 19:46, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

Triple parentheses aren't particularly obvious unless you know of the trope. --jpgordon^{𝄢𝄆 𝄐𝄇} 19:51, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

Jpgordon, I guarantee that if any software developer were to inadvertently and in good faith use "put triple parentheses around a name" as a markup code, they'd be made painfully aware the moment they checked the corporate email account or any of their social media platforms. ‑ Iridescent 19:23, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

There is some sort of browser plugin that adds triple parentheses around text and it can unknowingly be applied when editing, similar to the Drumpf plugin. That, along with a growing vandalism trend led to the creation of Special:AbuseFilter/766, but it is only triggered in the mainspace while the page in question is in the draftspace. — MusikAnimal ^talk 20:03, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

Has anybody noticed any changes to how radio buttons display in page histories next to (cur | prev)? Feels like it used to be more like:
(cur | prev) 🔘 🔘
But now it's more like:
(cur | prev)🔘🔘 with radio buttons touching each other, and also closer to the closing parenthesis.

First saw it on on Win 10 Chrome, but I also see it on Win 10 Edge while logged out, so I don't think it has anything to do with my browser or account settings. Thanks. Cyphoidbomb (talk) 20:06, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

I see the unhelpful change in spacing as well. I appear to have won the "crappy update" lottery this week.-- Jezebel's Ponyo^{bons mots} 20:12, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

WP:ITSTHURSDAY broke that one, see phab:T273148. — xaosflux ^Talk 20:22, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

Ex. here. The relevant user is not only auto-confirmed, but also extended-confirmed, but their changes are somehow not getting auto-accepted. Is this a known issue? RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 02:16, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

Another example here and here. This isn't an isolated occurrence, AFAICS. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 02:28, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

I just encountered another one that should have been accepted automatically today, but wasn't. Schazjmd (talk) 18:51, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

• Is this the same symptom as phab:T233561? — xaosflux ^Talk 18:56, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

Um...it sounds the same as the description (the rest of the page is over my head). Schazjmd (talk) 19:08, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

Looks like this is known issue phab:T233561. — xaosflux ^Talk 19:18, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

I'm having a similar issue. My edits to semi-protected pages are no longer being automatically accepted. Maestro2016 (talk) 21:49, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

Oh wait, I just realized my edit has already been brought up as an example. Any idea what the issue is? Maestro2016 (talk) 21:51, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

Software bug being currently worked on. Majavah (talk!) 22:08, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

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

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

And the ding-dang problem fly in the ointment can be found above in "Tech News" Changes later this week Bracket matching will be added to the CodeMirror syntax highlighter on the first wikis. The first wikis are German and Catalan Wikipedia and maybe other Wikimedia wikis. This will happen on 27 January. [10] Recurrent item The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 January. It will be on all wikis from 28 January (calendar). — Preceding unsigned comment added by Maile66 (talk • contribs) 17:12, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

@Maile66: CodeMirror is the syntax highlighter on the icon to the left of "Advanced" in some toolbars. Are you using that? I don't know whether it has the quoted message. Syntax highlighter at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets does have the message. MediaWiki:Gadget-DotsSyntaxHighlighter.js loads it from mw:MediaWiki:Gadget-DotsSyntaxHighlighter.js by User:Remember the dot. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:43, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

Indeed, this is not CodeMirror (which, btw, you should use instead). --Izno (talk) 22:00, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

Un hun, OK, whatever. The icon is always clicked. It's just this stupid message that keeps appearing. If I refresh my screen, the message goes away and the highlighting rerturns. Just more stuff that coincidentally started to appear with the above-mentioned CodeMirror syntax highlighter work that happened today. — Maile (talk) 00:28, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

@Maile66: Do you mean the icon has darker background to indicate it's activated? I suppose it might be a conflict between syntax highlighters. Is the gadget enabled? Does a template call like π have purple text or yellow background when you edit? What is your browser? Please give an example page where it happens. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:42, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

CodeMirror has an 200ms max runtime (https://codemirror.net/doc/manual.html#option_workTime ) and no, WMF did not change that setting. Using that would fix Maile's problem.--Snaevar (talk) 14:58, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

Well, whatever it was, has not happened since yesterday. I'm thinking maybe it had something to do with tech changes were in progress yesterday, and then just resolved itself. Have no idea, really. — Maile (talk) 22:36, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

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

please advise Gfigs (talk) 00:10, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

@Gfigs: The above table is 800px wide in Firefox, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer (don't do that in articles). What is the perceived problem and what is your browser? PrimeHunter (talk) 00:18, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

PrimeHunter, thanks. Chrome (mobile) 66.0.3359.116. table width is fixed (not changing)..Gfigs (talk) 00:34, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

@Gfigs: The table width is also fixed for me in Safari on iOS when viewing the mobile version. I see a wide 800px table in the desktop version in Safari on iOS, and both in the mobile and desktop version in Firefox. The other table below has a cell with width: 20%. That requests the cell width to be 20% of the whole table. Browsers don't cut off content to satisfy a width constraint. They make the cell as wide as needed to show the whole content. PrimeHunter (talk) 09:02, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

seems to be some differences with browsers and viewing modes..however, why should Chrome crop height (rows), and not width (columns)? also 20% of table width, should not be 3/4 of page, that is over 200% of table width..sorry, don't understand what is going on here..Gfigs (talk) 12:20, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

I am not sure what you are trying to do, nor why you are trying to do it, but I hope you will decide NOT to do it. There is generally no good reason to use px to try to set the width of a table. Maybe for images, not anything else.
We should be letting the user agent/device/browser choose an appropriate size for the tables, based on the content. If you absolutely must tweak the display, consider using em widths on certain columns, or a margin next to the table.
But you didn't answer PrimeHunter's question: what is the problem you're trying to solve? — JohnFromPinckney (talk) 01:50, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

JohnFromPinckney, thanks..am following Help:Table example Gfigs (talk) 03:13, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

as per Help:Table : "Warning: Setting specific pixel sizes is deprecated, as it interferes with the ability of the browser to adjust content to suit the browser window, device size, user-end font size limits, and other constraints. It is strongly preferred to use relative sizes, in percentage or em values." Gfigs (talk) 03:34, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

some further info on use of em and % values in tables Gfigs (talk) 09:17, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

anyhow, it's not doing much. above table, with width:100% and 300%, appears the same..Gfigs (talk) 04:04, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

That advice is not about you. It's about mobile readers and readers using different skins or resolutions than you. Don't do it. --Izno (talk) 04:23, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

can't resize the table width..it's not working over here, with either px, em or %..height in px and em seems to be working ok (sometimes). although height in % is not Gfigs (talk) 04:43, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

not sure if this makes much sense. although was expecting to see narrow cell with "T" inside. not 3/4 of page width..

Gfigs (talk) 07:45, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

seems to be the wikitable class that is causing some confusion. at least, this works as expected in desktop view..although not mobile view..Gfigs (talk) 14:37, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

indeed seems as if browser won't crop table width below text width (desktop view), although will crop table height..not sure what is happening in mobile view though Gfigs (talk) 14:56, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

if you are editing Wikipedia on mobile phone, please read this. thanks to your viewpoints, and inputs..Gfigs (talk) 21:37, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

Why are you forcing desktop users over to the mobile site to read that? It would have been better to link it as mw:Recommendations for mobile friendly articles on Wikimedia wikis. Please note that some of the recommendations there are contrary to our own manual of style. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:04, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

alright apologies, have been frustrated with appearance of tables on mobile Wikipedia..hoping on this page may also be of interest though wikipedia:Category:Templates that are not mobile friendly Gfigs (talk) 05:37, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Interwiki links break on nonexistent pages break if they are very long. An example is here. I am using chrome version 88.0.4324.104. -³²²UbnBr₂ (Talk | Contributions | Actions) 00:58, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

@Unbinilium-322 Dibromide: They break in certain circumstances if there is both an interwiki link and something else in front like a namespace or special page. See phab:T258521 and User:PrimeHunter/Page name size in interwiki links. Your example adds Special:Search/ in {{No article text/sister projects}} and that pushes it over a 255-byte limit. It works in a local link:

Special:Search/Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor

But it fails in an interwiki link:

[[wiktionary:Special:Search/Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor]]

We could avoid the error by testing the length of {{PAGENAME}} and not attempt to make interwiki links if it's too long. We could either omit links completely or use external link syntax which does work: Wiktionary. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:09, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

@PrimeHunter: I can not edit the {{No article text/sister projects}} template. I need an admin to change it to an external link. -³²²UbnBr₂ (Talk | Contributions | Actions) 03:58, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

It would require some coding. I have posted to Template talk:No article text#Interwiki links fail on long search strings. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:52, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

What about changing wiktionary: to wikt:, wikibooks: to b:, wikinews: to n:, wikiquote: to q:, wikisource: to s:, wikiversity: to v:, wikivoyage: to voy:, commons: to c:, wikidata: to d:, and wikispecies: to species: (Assuming my edit request to add Wikispecies to the template was successful?) It would resolve a lot more issues. Using URLs for pages that can be reached by interwiki to me seems like a bad idea. 54nd60x (talk) 12:47, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

The interwiki prefix is not counted in the 255-byte limit so it wouldn't help to use shortcuts. This has wiktionary: plus 255 A's and works:

wiktionary:AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

This has wikt: plus 256 A's and fails:

[[wikt:AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA]]

I only mentioned external links as an option when the interwiki link doesn't work. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:22, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

@PrimeHunter: Ok, thanks for the clarification. But I’ve noticed that there are always edge cases like these, for example:[[Special:MyPage/aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa]] and longer would give errors and broken links at the bottom as well. I bet I could come up with even more of these cases, but I don’t think it’s too realistic someone would try to edit a page close to 255 bytes. I don’t think this should be ignored, but I do think that we should come up with a solution to this. 54nd60x (talk) 13:40, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

FYI There is also the fact that you cannot create editnotices for pages greater than 238 bytes. 54nd60x (talk) 13:47, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Hello, just checking if anyone else is having similar issues or if it's just my computer playing silly devils. For the past couple of days, if I sign in, look at my watchlist page, then go to another page, when I move to the other page, I get signed out. It also happens sometimes if I switch pages between other, non-watchlist, pages. Not sure what the possible cause could be. Red Fiona (talk) 16:12, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

@Redfiona99: This sounds like Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 187#Why is Wikipedia logging me out?. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:57, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Thanks Redrose. It sounds very similar, especially the thing about it only having started happening recently. I've also had the same set up for at least a couple of years and have cookies enabled. I'll just assume it's the computer having the hiccups. Red Fiona (talk) 20:33, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

This is NOT a discussion about deleting the main page, rather a technical question I have after reading the page Wikipedia:Don't delete the main page. Is it really true that administrators can't delete the main page? And what does it mean that it might work? It was confusing and hard to understand, but I still want to know what technically happens when you try to delete the main page. 54nd60x (talk) 11:45, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

@54nd60x: here on the English Wikipedia, attempting to delete the main page should fail, and give the person attempting to do it the following message: You cannot delete or move the main page., this is because of a custom hack for the configuration that only applies to enwiki that intercepts that action. — xaosflux ^Talk 12:50, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

(edit conflict) You see MediaWiki:Cant-delete-main-page. The message that it might work is not a reflection of what the software does, but instead a method of trying to discourage admins from doing stupid things in the event some unforseen server problem allows the main page to be deleted. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 12:51, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

@Pppery: I suppose more likely one would already have to be pretty drunk to even consider this, and particularly in that state they may fail to notice that they are actually deleting the main page on another project. This would require having sysop privileges on multiple wikis, like a global sysop, but still seems like one of the more plausible scenarios. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 13:26, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

@54nd60x: I can confirm that the custom hack doesn't apply to Commons on the beta cluster. The deletion was rather uneventful, no different from any other page. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 13:19, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

• FYI, there's an extensive deletion log for the main page. Andrew🐉(talk) 19:23, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

  Yeah, but mostly they're WP:REVDELs; the last true deletion was 4 February 2008. As regards 54nd60x's original post, pages with more than 5,000 revisions either can't be deleted, or they can be deleted but then can't be undeleted, I can't remember which. But if you want to know who ended up looking very silly trying to do daft things to the main page, have a read of WP:STOCKS. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:26, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

  It's they can't be deleted by anyone except for stewards. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 21:30, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

As some of you may be aware, using the bare global variables (e.g. wgPageTitle or wgNamespaceNumber) has been deprecated for some time, where instead mw.config.get('wgPageTitle') should be used (more info at mediawiki). A lot of customized user javascript pages still use these deprecated global "wg" variables, but as these will at some point stop working, the most imported scripts have now either been dealt with or will be in the near future.

Remaining, though, are users' individual skin customization pages (e.g. common.js or vector.js). Alongside some discussion on WP:IANB, I've made a list of every such skin page using legacy variables, and would like to start fixing the pages of active users so these deprecated things can be turned off without causing mass-disruption; every edit would be manual with regex and AWB, a process already effective. That discussion has some links to prior discussion and more info, and although this should be a largely unnoticed process, I thought folks should be aware of it. Global interface editors and staffers have already been making edits, and will continue do so otherwise.​​​​​​ ~ Amory (u • t • c) 22:09, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

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

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

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

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

@Wreck Smurfy: There are several ways to do it, e.g.: [Narodnoe Opolcheniye] [Narodnoe Opolcheniye] [Narodnoe Opolcheniye]. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:30, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Thanks. Much obliged. Wreck Smurfy (talk) 00:00, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

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

@Innocentbunny, on your Wiki's common.css add body.page-Main_Page.action-view h1.firstHeading, body.page-Main_Page.action-submit h1.firstHeading { display: none; } - this should hide the main page title. See mw:Manual:FAQ#How do I hide the main page title? ✨ Ed talk! ✨ 22:57, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

@Innocentbunny: You may be interested in MediaWiki:Vector.css where we hide other things on the Main Page, e.g. footer-info-lastmod because the page itself is rarely edited and we don't want readers to think we aren't updated. The English Wikipedia does not allow images in signatures per Wikipedia:Signatures#Images. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:18, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

@Ed6767: Hey thanks a lot Ed, I think it will work, will follow up. @PrimeHunter: looks very helpful thankyou, and thanks for pointing out, i changed my signature :)  Innocentbunny    TALK  04:27, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

So I had come across what I thought could be a helpful tool to have in Wikipedia:Tools/Navigation shortcuts. I put it in my common.js and saved before I realised that the template it links to in Template:Navshortcuts has been deleted. It appears users thought it wasn't a template and then it was a test page. So it maybe a case that this is all so old now and not usable but I'm wondering if there is anything can be done to recreate it? I'd even have the script on one of my own pages if we can have the original template back. I just don't know what the script will be. NZFC^(talk)(cont) 02:34, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

NZFC, it looks like you can just install it like a normal script using the code mw.loader.load('/w/index.php?title=User:Jsimlo/shortcuts.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript'); – BrandonXLF (talk) 04:12, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Thanks BrandonXLF, I'll have a play with that. (I really don't know what I'm doing with code and normally just follow steps but I'm learning. NZFC^(talk)(cont) 08:26, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

The 2017 deletion of {{navshortcuts}} looks wrong; the tagger and admin likely didn't examine the page carefully enough and used an invalid rationale. (The 2018 deletion was for spam.) I restored it and added documentation. If this should be deleted, it needs to go through TFD. The reason the documentation doesn't just ask you to add importScript(...)/mw.loader.load(...) seems to be because the script adds some extra configuration to your common.js. — The Earwig ^talk 20:25, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

@The Earwig: So people are being encouraged to subst that into their common.js? It should be fully protected, for obvious reasons. Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 20:31, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

You are absolutely right (I protected {{load user script}} under the same rationale a few days ago). Done. — The Earwig ^talk 20:35, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Thanks! Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 20:47, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Thabks all, appreciate you looking into it for me and the outcome. NZFC^(talk)(cont) 04:28, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

Cython#Example. The bottom half of the image on the right isn't clickable, likely due to the syntax-highlighted paragraph on the left. How to fix it? --fireattack (talk) 12:09, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

Comes from the class mw-highlight which is part of the syntaxhighlighting, but I don't know which part exactly. --mfb (talk) 13:13, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

This is phab:T272853. There's a fix merged already, it should arrive at en.wikipedia on Thursday. the wub "?!" 13:19, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

User:Lilac Soul/popups.js is another of these locked user JS pages by users who rarely or never edit any more that's causing problems for the redirect bot to move from Category:Foo to Category:X1. Can someone with the technical access/knowhow please either move it or better still zap the problem completely? Thanks in advance. Timrollpickering (talk) 12:29, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

@Timrollpickering:  Done. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 14:22, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

@Ira Leviton kindly corrected the punctuation in three {{cite book}} entries on a page I created, where a stray comma had been left after the publisher's address. As far as I remember, all three were created by using the cite book template, entering the ISBN, and accepting whatever it returned. Obviously, in future I shall keep an eye on the punctuation that it leaves lying around. I am wondering, though, if this is a problem with the cite book template, or with the Wikidata content on which (I assume) it relies?

Verbarson (talk) 20:34, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

this discussion belongs over on the tool you used https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:RefToolbar AManWithNoPlan (talk) 20:40, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

No, the cite book template is fine. Sometimes the auto-generators (refill, Citoid i.e. VisualEditor, and others) will have punctuation because the source data they draw from has bad data. The particular issue in this case can be highlighted for you by adding .mw-parser-output span.cs1-maint {display: inline;} /* display Citation Style 1 maintenance messages */ to your personal CSS page, which will display many other "possibly wrong" things (which is why maintenance messages are hidden by default). --Izno (talk) 20:40, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

Thanks @Izno. That code detected the error, so now I will be warned in future. --Verbarson (talk) 21:49, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

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

Verbarson (talk) 20:31, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

@Verbarson: I have removed in initial newline from {{User lives in}}. Table syntax with || to separate cells must be on a line starting with |. Before my edit, the template broke that. You could have started the next cell on a new line with |. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:26, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

@PrimeHunter: Thanks. It's working like all the others now. --Verbarson (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 21:55, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

I attempted to move 東京 to 東京 (disambiguation). The move should overwrite the redirect at 東京 (disambiguation), which points to 東京 and only has one edit. However an error message popped up preventing me from moving the page. HELP 053pvr (talk) 22:29, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

@053pvr: Which error message and why do you want it moved? I'm not moving it without knowing the reason or language. If you want to redirect 東京 to Tokyo then it looks like the target would need a hatnote like:

That's ugly to English readers who don't know Japanese. Tokyo gets 2600 times as many views as 東京 , so very few readers would potentially save a click. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:00, 1 February 2021 (UTC)

ok, not moving it. (Sorry if this attempted page move caused any disruption.) 053pvr (talk) 00:11, 1 February 2021 (UTC)

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

• Support There's a charitable project to turn Tolkien's home into a literary centre. There's an associated Kickstarter and so I put a link when I mentioned it in a related discussion. I was disgusted to find this being censored by an automated blacklist. It's vexatious bureaucracy like this which is steadily stifling Wikipedia. Andrew🐉(talk) 10:31, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

@Andrew Davidson: The problem is when spam (or other bad intentioned types) or uninformed persons would wish to add such links to talk pages. Although I see few reasons to link directly to a WP:PRIMARY source like this (such as a kickstarter page would be - if the kickstarter is worthy of mention, you'd ideally have a secondary source reporting on it), I'd support if this was maybe restricted to either users on a whitelist or ECP editors or something like that (more restrictive than just AC). RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 00:34, 1 February 2021 (UTC)

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

I noted here that I am no longer able to set Pending Changes protection for articles. I have full access to the semi-protection fields, and the Move Protection option opens up when I click "unlock further protect options", but the Pending Changes box remains greyed-out and unclickable. I've tried logging out and back in again and the same issue occurs whether I use Firefox (my default browser) or Chrome. I'm using the Monobook Skin. @Xaosflux:.-- Jezebel's Ponyo^{bons mots} 16:47, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

@Ponyo: what is the page you are trying to do this for? Can you copy the full URL of the page while you are trying to unsuccessfully make this adjustment? — xaosflux ^Talk 16:55, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

If it is any page, try this page and see if you can access the PC section? — xaosflux ^Talk 16:56, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

@Xaosflux: I cannot set pending changes on any article page, including the one you linked.-- Jezebel's Ponyo^{bons mots} 17:01, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

@Ponyo: are you by chance blocking javascript either specifically or with a browser extension? In Chrome, try to open an incognito mode window, log on and try again with the link I put above. Next thing to try, if you use keyboard controls and TAB between the fields, does it enter the PC section or skip over it? — xaosflux ^Talk 17:06, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

I'm not blocking javascript, and pending changes still remains greyed out in Chrome incognito mode. Tabbing skips over the pending changes box. It goes from the question mark beside the words Pending Changes and skips down to the "Other/additional reasons" field.-- Jezebel's Ponyo^{bons mots} 17:13, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

I can't imagine it should help, but I'm going to reset your +sysop status. — xaosflux ^Talk 17:17, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

@Ponyo: I really don't think it will matter - but please try to log out, log back in now and try again at this new random page here. — xaosflux ^Talk 17:20, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

Logged out (upon which my Firefox coincidentally updated) and back in, but PC options are still unclickable. I also tried switching to Vector, but it didn't make a difference.-- Jezebel's Ponyo^{bons mots} 17:24, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

Just chipping in to say it's the same for me. I also use Firefox, so I wondered if it was browser-related, but I've tried in Chrome and Edge and it's the same. I'm also not blocking Javascript. Black Kite (talk) 17:34, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

@Black Kite: At least I'm in good company.-- Jezebel's Ponyo^{bons mots} 17:46, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

@Ponyo: OK lets try something to see if it is client-side or permissions-side:

1. Go to this page
2. Click on "Make request" at the top. This will fail.
3. Click on Correct token and resubmit at the bottom
4. See if it added 1 hour of PC1 to Foo or if it failed (get the failure message).

— xaosflux ^Talk 18:46, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

@Xaosflux: I believe it failed. There is a red message that states:

 "error": {
       "code": "stabilize_denied",
       "info": "Permission denied.",
       "*": "See https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php for API usage. Subscribe to the mediawiki-api-announce mailing list at <https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-api-announce> for notice of API deprecations and breaking changes."
   },
   "servedby": "mw1363"

-- Jezebel's Ponyo^{bons mots} 19:08, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

@Ponyo and Black Kite: thank you for the updates, I've opened bug: phab:T273317 on this issue. — xaosflux ^Talk 19:15, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

@Ponyo and Xaosflux: Working again now. Looks like 660007 fixed it. Black Kite (talk) 00:45, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Could this have anything to do with the fact some edits by AC users are somehow not accepted (see my thread above)? RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 17:41, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

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

Hello everyone, I'm on ckbwiki. A while ago, Mediawiki had added a new level of protection called editautoautorollprotected. Now, that level is not in Module:Protected edit request/active. For example, see ckb:وتووێژی داڕێژە:زانیاریدانی ئەنیمانگا/سەر, which is written that the protection level (editautoautorollprotected) is unknown as an error message. I edited the module according to exist codes (See the diff), but it didn't work. Can anyone help us? Thank you! ⇒ AramTalk 20:17, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

Aram, in the diff you posted, the user group was 'editautopatrolprotected'; I corrected it in the thread title. It looks like it was T230103, added in January 2020. I can't tell you any more than that, but perhaps someone else here can read the Phabricator/MediaWiki tea leaves. Best of luck, BlackcurrantTea (talk) 11:08, 1 February 2021 (UTC)

Hello Aram, this was a change made by me. Long story short, protection levels should generally have their own user right, rather than bind to some other already existing rights. Such rights are usually named editXXprotected, where XX is a string that explains the purpose of the protection well. For instance, fully protected pages use editprotected as the controlling right. Some wikis, like Czech Wikipedia, assign this right to non-sysop group(s) as well, allowing users in that group edit pages that are normally sysop-only. That's why I made MediaWiki to use editautopatrolprotected rather than the right autopatrol, which, by itself, means something different (it makes your edits as patrolled automatically). That makes the effect of individual rights more expectable.

I did not realize wikis might use a module with hardcoded protection levels. I fixed your Lua module. It no longer throws an error, through since I'm not a ckb speaker, I can't verify it displays what it is supposed to.

Best, --Martin Urbanec (talk) 13:15, 1 February 2021 (UTC)

Thank you both PrimeHunter and Snaevar that I saw your efforts to fix the problem!

And thank you BlackcurrantTea, you replied to me and opened a door to solve the problem! And finally, thank you Martin Urbanec to solve the problem! Your edits were very good for solving the problem and now the template is shown properly and the error message is gone. Thank you all! ⇒ AramTalk 14:35, 1 February 2021 (UTC)

It's 2021, and our sortable tables still somehow aren't sortable on mobile. Is this sitting as a request somewhere, and if so, how do we give it a boost? {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 23:49, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

That would be phab:T233340. the wub "?!" 00:24, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

Sdkb, This issue is important and on quotehow do we give it a boost?/quote:

I think the way for that would be to make WMF implement easy-to-implement and overdue measures Wikipedia, as one of the world's largest websites (additionally equipped with millions of dollars), has at its disposal to a) attract more developers b) increase the efficiency and time of their work.

This is would be one of the most important things WMF could do in 2021, is something they should have done years ago and would basically only require one WMF individual to spend 2 days or so. Hence it is only a matter of will / decision-making.

Increasing the number of volunteer - and maybe some paid - developers is very likely to speed up such obviously overdue issues with the mobile website, the mobile apps and MediaWiki. Prototyperspective (talk) 12:39, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

I'd like to second the need to prioritize this. It is frustrating and honestly rude to the reader that this functionality is removed on mobile – both the app and mobile browser. And on mobile Chrome browser "Request Desktop Site" just redirects back to the mobile page, even though I can manually remove the "m." from the url and sortability works. Wikipedia used to have many duplicative articles (actually still does) with related data but sorted differently, but sortable tables made these unnecessary and encouraged merges. The long-term failure to implement this capability removes the ability of mobile readers to get the best understanding in an article that its writers deliberately made possible. Thanks, Reywas92^Talk 04:25, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

Not that I want to create the page yet, but I am wondering, why is it impossible to create the page? Unlike trying to edit the page WP:123, which instantly redirects to Wikipedia:123, the skin page doesn’t work when you are logged in. In fact, you can’t even protect the page (I’m not admin) but when I tried to do it https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:54nd60x&action=protect it went to User:54nd60x/timeless.css a few seconds later because I use the timeless skin. So who can directly create the page? It wouldn’t be a problem for non-logged in users (I tried going to the skin.css page while logged out it doesn’t redirect.) Again, I’m not trying to create the page, but I just noticed this unusual pattern while trying to create the page and it surprised me. 54nd60x (talk) 03:11, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

This is not a real page. It exists solely as a Javascript redirect. If you want one for timeless, you have the above; if you want one for all skins, that exists at User:54nd60x/common.css. --Izno (talk) 03:59, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

The code is in MediaWiki:Group-user.js. It enables links Special:MyPage/skin.css and Special:MyPage/skin.js to take any user with JavaScript to the css and js page for their current skin. PrimeHunter (talk) 09:43, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

@54nd60x: if you really want to create that page you can - it won't do anything useful and will just be a pain for anyone in the future though so I suggest against this. — xaosflux ^Talk 14:17, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

@Xaosflux: Thanks for the advice. Actually, I never planned to create the page in the first place, it just surprised me that the redirect was not instant, but there was a small delay in the redirect. Now I know that it is because it is a JavaScript redirect and can be disabled, so that was the reason for the delay. 54nd60x (talk) 14:24, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

Resolved

 – This issue has been marked partially solved as it is tracked with a code issue on phabricator:

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T273389

I uploaded this animation and tried adding it to 2020 SO:

but the animation does not play despite only being the small thumbnail.

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

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

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

--Prototyperspective (talk) 23:53, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

@Prototyperspective: The limit is width × height × frames < mw:Manual:$wgMaxAnimatedGifArea. Wikimedia wikis set it to 100 million in . commons:File:The Looping Orbits of 2020 SO.gif is 836 × 480 × 375 frames = 150,480,000. This would work: 681 × 391 × 375 frames = 99,998,250. Or 836 × 480 × 249 frames = 99,918,720. I haven't found a Phabricator request to increase the current limit. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:22, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

PrimeHunter, increasing the limit and/or solving issues due to which it exists/is that low would be the proper, longer-term solution but there should already be a way to get these gifs to play without doing so: there is a rendered 320 × 184 px version of the animation: how can one use this smaller version or is that not possible? Prototyperspective (talk) 00:29, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

@Prototyperspective: The 320 × 184 px version is not animated. You have to either upload an animated gif with width × height × frames < 100 million, or display it at the uploaded size. That works. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:37, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

PrimeHunter, I have to revise my previous comment: increasing the limit and/or solving issues due to which it exists/is that low isn't necessarily a better / more proper longer-term solution in this case.

→ The better solution would be to make pages use the downsized thumbnail version / a version automatically downsized to below that limit. Just like with images, pages don't need to use the full-size .gif when the animation is displayed in a smaller size on it.

(Whether or not larger animations could play isn't necessarily relevant for this. And only after this has been implemented would raising the limit be a longer-term solution to remaining issues and may currently not be appropriate - and possibly never so due to e.g. new file-formats.)

I made a separate upload (with which the animation does play) because I could not use the "Upload another version of this file"-functionality for this without reducing the main file's size (which could get automatically downsized renderings linked).

I will create a phabricator issue for it and link it here. Prototyperspective (talk) 14:03, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

Prototyperspective, well.. you really shouldn't be using gifs as movies. Movies are movies. upload a movie instead of a gif. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:44, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

22:37, 1 February 2021 (UTC)

As the way Tech News is written is the most common feature to be pointed out both in positive and a negative feedback, I have been making an en-gb version of Tech News for some months now. It's not necessarily British, but it merges extremely short sentences together and allows for terms that anyone well-versed in the English language would understand. Well-versed for example is a term you probably wouldn't find in the regular Tech News. Here's the above issue in en-gb. I also occasionally add some additional explanation or the situation for a particular issue on English-language projects. I haven't really advertised it, pageviews are generally disappointing. I'd like to hear some feedback. Do you like it? Do you have suggestions? — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 06:15, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

@Alexis Jazz: my suggestion has nothing to do with content, just execution - we generally discourage anyone to use en-variants as their interface language since there isn't an en-gbwiki (or en-auwiki, etc) - and especially here on enwiki they will miss out on a LOT of localize interface messages since we don't translate them to the variants and variant-fallback support is subpar. — xaosflux ^Talk 14:25, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

@Xaosflux: This way I've been able to produce this version without spending a lot of time. Actually forking the newsletter is both much more work and would reduce exposure even further. The en-gb version isn't distributed to any wiki, the only way to read it is by going to meta, so I'm not sure what localized interface messages have to do with this. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 14:39, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

@Alexis Jazz: was just noting that we generally discourage the use of /en-xx pages because almost noone has it as their language pref, and we suggest noone does use it as their pref for the reasons above - no concern with this specific example! — xaosflux ^Talk 14:57, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

Made a central feedback thread at m:Talk:Tech/News/2021/05/en-gb. Maybe should have done that from the start. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 15:02, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

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

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

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

What Rchard said. --Izno (talk) 15:35, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

Resolved

 – thanks all — Czello 19:19, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

For example, on WWE Raw the episode number is manually increased by +1 each week. This can be easily missed by editors, and if there's a factual error it means we're worsening the problem by adding a number each week. It would be grand if there was a way for this number to increase by one automatically every Monday. WWE rarely ever misses shows of Raw: they even filmed a live one on Christmas Day in 2019. Automating this seems like a no-brainer. Additionally, it would need to start on 1445 as that's the current number of episodes. — Czello 16:05, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

The magic word {{CURRENTWEEK}} is the current week number. You could add that to the episode number for Christmas Day — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 16:25, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

It would roll over at the start of each year setting the number backwards. -- GreenC 19:02, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

Suppose you knew the 1000th episode was on January 1, 2016 (numbers made up). Then you could calculate {{#expr:1000 + {{age in weeks|January 1, 2016}}}} → 1542. If they ever went off schedule, you could adjust the starting point. That said, I'm not convinced this is a great idea. — The Earwig ^talk 16:32, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

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

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

I guess it would be pretty simple: {{#expr:{{Time ago|2021-02-01|magnitude=weeks|numeric=y}} + 1445}} though I added a new |numeric= feature to {{time ago}} to make it work. It says add the number of weeks since 2021-02-01 to 1445. -- GreenC 18:53, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

To add or subtract edge cases could do something like {{#expr:{{Time ago|2021-02-01|magnitude=weeks|numeric=y}} + {{#expr:1445<!--Shows as of 2021-02-01--> - (1<!--Christmas 2020 no show--> + 1<!--Easter no show-->) + (1<!--Special show 06-01-2021--> + 1<!-- Special show 08-01-2021-->)}}}} so it is self-documenting. -- GreenC 18:59, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

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

• {{#pos:Žmržlina|žlina}}
• {{#len:Icecream }}
• {{#rpos:Žmržlina|lina}}
• {{#sub:Icecream|3}}
• {{#explode:Split%By%Percentage%Signs|%|2}}

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

• phab:T8455 suggests these were never enabled, and the supported alternative is to use Lua modules, like Module:String. — The Earwig ^talk 21:38, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

  @The Earwig:, that looks very familiar, must be what I remember about working before. Maybe this isn't the right venue, but couldn't those functions be repurposed as wrappers to the Module? Or maybe, just create templates with the same name, minus the hash... er, wait, maybe that exists already? Time out... Mathglot (talk) 21:45, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

  They ought to be:

  {{pos|Žmržlina|žlina}} = {{pos|Žmržlina|žlina}}

  {{len|Icecream } = {{len|Icecream}}

  {{rpos|Žmržlina|lina}} = {{rpos|Žmržlina|lina}}

  {{sub|Icecream|3}} = _Icecream

  {{explode|Split%By%Percentage%Signs|%|2}} = {{explode|Split%By%Percentage%Signs|%|2}}

  but apparently aren't.

  Also, I can't quite make uot if phab:T8455 means they weren't enabled for en-wiki, or weren't enabled at all. If the latter, then there should be no objection if I delete/hide the information at mediawiki, and refer people to the Module instead, right? Mathglot (talk) 21:55, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

  The ticket says they weren't enabled for WMF wikis, but they are still a part of the MediaWiki extension and may be enabled on other third-party wikis, so I wouldn't change anything there. No opposition to creating convenience templates like {{pos}} and {{len}}, though perhaps some other people watching this page have stronger opinions about that. — The Earwig ^talk 22:00, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

  That makes sense, thanks. I've added a discussion at mw, which I need to go modify given this new data. Thanks again, Mathglot (talk) 22:15, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

  {{String split}} already exists for #explode, {{Str len}} for #len, {{Str mid}} for #sub and {{Str find}} for #pos. #rpos is probably somewhere out there too. — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 22:25, 2 February 2021 (UTC)

  @GhostInTheMachine:, excellent; that saves me the time of creating them. I'll maybe make some template redirects so they match the Parser function names more closely, for folks who search for them that way. Too bad {{sub}} is taken for subscript, but {{substr}}^[a] ought to do the trick for most folks as a mnemonic name to find the wrapper with.^[b] Thanks much for this. Cheers, Mathglot (talk) 00:30, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

In the future, can I post edit requests to the MediaWiki namespace here instead of on the talk page? I submitted some edit requests and the talk page says "Talk pages in this namespace are generally not watched by many users." I know that the edit requests are tracked, but I still think that announcing it here would bring more people to the discussion. 54nd60x (talk) 02:59, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

@54nd60x: the edit request backlog is actually watched pretty well ( c.f. User:AnomieBOT/PERTable). Keep in mind, for non-customized messages we generally won't customize them without good reason; for ones that are about some special process - a venue common to that process is usually a good place to at least cross-advertise. VPT should only be for something primarily technical in the messages. — xaosflux ^Talk 03:52, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

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

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

It could happen if "realm" was marked in the edit area and you accidentally clicked [[Category:]] in the "Wiki markup" selection of the drop-down menu below the edit area. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:23, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

Thanks, that must have been it.  --Lambiam 14:35, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

Hi all

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

• User:John_Cummings/sandbox

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

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

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

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

Thanks

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

@John Cummings: If I understand what you're asking, maybe an {{Edit}} link with a preloaded page (copy of your sandbox somewhere) and a Template to substitute their name, which would be pulled from magic word REVISIONUSER? Mathglot (talk) 19:36, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

Take a look at how we manage signups for the GOCE copy edit drives. There might be code in there that is helpful. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:41, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

Thanks very much @Jonesey95: and @Mathglot: the bit I'm really stuck on is how to take a username with a space in and replace the space with a + in some places and a _ in other places on the same preload? John Cummings (talk) 20:00, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

@John Cummings: try {{#replace}}. Mathglot (talk) 20:24, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

Hmm, I see what you mean, I think... maybe the preload page should just be a one-line, template invocation of a second page which has your actual sandbox data, with the template of your design in the preload, which executes the task of replacing tokens in the second page with the userid the way you want it. Never tried that with a preload, and not sure if it will work; try it and let us know. Mathglot (talk) 20:31, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

I have used {{ROOTPAGENAME}} to automatically get the username in an unchanged copy. I also made some other changes. PAGENAMEE with EE makes url encoding in magic words. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:15, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

Direct link for users to create their own sandbox manager. Only needs saving. Seems to work well, with this account and with my space-containing old account as well. --mfb (talk) 14:30, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

(edit conflict) If your /sandbox doesn't exist then this will open an edit window to create it with User:John Cummings/sandbox preloaded. There is no preload if the sandbox exists.

Adding &section=new will add a new section with the preload whether the page exists or not:

&preloadtitle= can specify a section name which will also be in the automatic edit summary. It's blank in my example. I don't think you can make a preload command to overwrite existing content. You cannot preload from another wiki. mfb's link makes /Sandbox with uppercase S. This is not the link on "sandbox" in the default interface. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:35, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

Fixed the sandbox capitalization. In the German Wikipedia we made a template that does nothing but providing "$1", that way you can preload arbitrary text by using that template as preload and passing your text as parameter. If there would be a software solution for arbitrary preload texts (instead of pages) this could be made more international. --mfb (talk) 05:54, 22 January 2021 (UTC)

@Jonesey95:, @Mathglot:, @PrimeHunter:, @Mfb: thanks so much for your work on this, I've got a bit lost with the technical language, could someone recap to now what works and doesn't work? I'm not sure how to test it myself as I already have it on my sandbox and if I blank it and try to load the link above it just loads a blank page. Just FYI it seems that @Headbomb: has created a template at 'Template:Sandbox organizer' but not sure how this works or if it could be helpful building a button for people to use to make their own sandbox organiser. John Cummings (talk) 10:10, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

It's perfectly fine to register a second account for tests like that. Just don't abuse it. Above you can find links that will work for users who don't have a sandbox yet, and the new section link will work even if people have a sandbox already (but it will be below whatever is in there). The links all load the content of your sandbox organizer, so if you blank that there is nothing left to load. --mfb (talk) 12:48, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

thanks very much @Mfb:, how difficult would it be to make it load from the template rather than my personal sandbox? I feel like this is a much better long term solution. John Cummings (talk) 13:10, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

trivial, just change preload=User:John_Cummings/sandbox to preload=Template:Sandbox_organizer in the URL and make sure that template has the same code. --mfb (talk) 13:48, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

Thanks @Mfb: I created User:John_Cummings/sandbox2 using https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:MyPage/sandbox&preload=User:Template:Sandbox_organiser&action=edit however it doesn't work correctly and just makes broken links in the page, I just tried to import all the changes that @PrimeHunter: made to my userpage over to the template and it broke the template. Any ideas how to fix it? I feel like we are very close to making it work and then I can write all the documentation. Thanks very much for your help John Cummings (talk) 15:03, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

@John Cummings: The link to load Template:Sandbox organizer in /sandbox2 (if that page doesn't exist) would be https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:MyPage/sandbox2&preload=Template:Sandbox_organizer&action=edit. My code in User:John Cummings/sandbox works fine when it's copied to somebody's userspace and can read their username. I could set a username (e.g. yours) to use as an example when the code is not in userspace. Do you want that? It's simple to make but it adds extra code with a username to each of the 15 {{ROOTPAGENAME}}. Users who copy it may find it odd and wonder whether something is wrong if they see somebody else's username 15 times in the wikitext. At Template:Sandbox organizer the current code in User:John Cummings/sandbox would make links for User:Sandbox organizer. I have created that account and can mail you the password if you want to use it as an example user. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:52, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

Hi @PrimeHunter:, thanks very much for your reply, I think I've understood at least 50% of it so far... So I think the best option would be to copy the way it works in my sandbox over to the template, that way its not reliant on my user account and people can make improvements over time. Is that possible? I just want to make it a easy as possible for people to be able to add the sandbox organiser to their sandbox by pressing a button on a page of instructions (I guess on the template page), if they could also just copy someone else's sandbox organiser from someone elses page that would be great also but not sure if that is what you meant. Thanks again John Cummings (talk) 21:26, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

@John Cummings: My version at User:John Cummings/sandbox can already be copied to the userspace of any user, work correctly for that user, and be copied by others users to work correctly for them. You said it makes "broken links" at Template:Sandbox organizer. The question is which links you want the code to make when it's viewed on the template page and not copied to a user. My version makes links for User:Sandbox organizer because that's in the page name. The current version at Template:Sandbox organizer is coded to make links for User:Example. It's not possible to make links for whichever user is currently viewing the page Template:Sandbox organizer. When viewed there, it has to either make links for a specific user or disable the links. I can code my version to make links for User:Example on the template page, and still make links for a user who copies the code to their userspace. Do you want that? The code will look a little more complicated, e.g. replacing each of 15 {{ROOTPAGENAME}} with {{#ifeq:{{NAMESPACENUMBER}}|10|Example|{{ROOTPAGENAME}}}}. That is designed to also work at other wikis. If it only has to work at the English Wikipedia then it could use {{template other}} and say {{template other|Example|{{ROOTPAGENAME}}}}. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:38, 28 January 2021 (UTC)

Hi @PrimeHunter:

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

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

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

Thanks again

John Cummings (talk) 00:10, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

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

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

@PrimeHunter: @Mfb: did I do this part right? User:Sandbox organizer/sandbox and then I just need to use a link but this one doesn't work and I don't understand why.... https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:MyPage/sandbox&preload=User:Sandbox_organizer/sandbox&action=edit ? John Cummings (talk) 19:12, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

It works for users who don't have a sandbox yet. To make it work for everyone use the link that creates a new section. --mfb (talk) 11:41, 1 February 2021 (UTC)

@Mfb: sorry, I don't understand, which is the link that I should use that uses User:Sandbox organizer/sandbox to make a sandbox for anyone including people who already have a page called sandbox (which is probably most users of this)? Please just paste it in your answer and then I can go do everything else so people can use it. John Cummings (talk) 18:24, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

There is exactly one link posted here that has "section" in it. I can't believe it's too complicated to find that. --mfb (talk) 04:23, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

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

Are you saying you want to write {{Excerpt|Foobar|paragraphs=1–2}}, using an en-dash (1–2) instead of a hyphen (1-2)? If so, that's technically possible but... highly inadvisable, in my opinion. The template argument isn't prose so MOS:DASH needn't apply. This diff suggests the dashes user script should leave it alone. — The Earwig ⟨talk⟩ 05:46, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

Ah, missed that you linked User:GregU/dashes.js and I linked to User:Ohconfucius/dashes.js. The latter seems to be forked from the former, and has fixed this problem. — The Earwig ⟨talk⟩ 05:56, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

I don't know if anyone watches the talk page, so reporting here as well. See: Module talk:Excerpt#Bug report: Failure to display templated content in fragment and parameter problem. Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 09:55, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

Take a look at the summary of this diff. Even though I used [[:/æ/ raising]] with a colon in the summary as I did on the page (proof), it's linked to Talk:Near-open front unrounded vowel/æ/ raising, not /æ/ raising. (1) Has it always been like this? IIRC I feel like the summary parser would correctly point a link like this to the page in the main namespace. (2) Is there a way to link to /æ/ raising in a summary in a namespace that allows subpages? Nardog (talk) 14:14, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

@Nardog: I tried adding multiple colons and three is apparently the Goldilocks number. One or two gives a subpage link. Four or more gives no link at all. On a wiki page it already stops linking at two: [[::/æ/ raising]] fails. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:34, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

How on earth have we got such articles, anyway? I thought they were prevented by the software, similarly to article names beginning with colons, square brackets, etc. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:00, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

No, see Wikipedia:Page name#Technical restrictions and limitations. / is usually fine, although there are certain combinations of / with . that are disallowed. the wub "?!" 00:31, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

Using the more verbose inter-language wikipedia syntax seems to work: [[w:en:/æ/ raising]] isaacl (talk) 19:08, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestion. But the heading was rather rhetorical and the issue isn't that it's impossible but that [[:/æ/ raising]] didn't work as expected in the summary. Task created. Nardog (talk) 10:17, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

Just addressing your question #2... My out-of-the-blue guess is that the colon-prefix behaviour you use is a fallout from MediaWiki's handling of interwiki link syntax. Perhaps someone familiar with the code could comment? isaacl (talk) 17:00, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

Hi all

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

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:MyPage/sandbox?action=edit&preload=User:John_Cummings/sandbox&section=new&preloadtitle=

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

[Click here to create a Sandbox organiser in your sanbox]

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks

John Cummings (talk) 11:11, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

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

Click here to create a Sandbox organiser in your sandbox

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

My watchlist has become sentient. It thinks it knows what I want and has decided to act upon what it thinks. How can I control this before it is too late? -John Connor wooF 19:38, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

@Roxy the dog: I'm assuming you have unexpected entries on your WL? If so please check Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-watchlist and see if any of the "add pages" check boxes are on that you don't expect. — xaosflux ^Talk 19:40, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

Actually, and forgive me for not explaining properly, it is putting things onto the list that will magically vanish from the list after a time, and will no longer be watched. This kinda makes it all a bit silly, wouldn't you say? -Roxy the happy dog . wooF 19:43, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

There's a dropdown menu next to the checkbox to put something on your watchlist (or a popup that appears if you click on the star icon) that lets you specify if you want to watch a page permanently or a fixed period of time. isaacl (talk) 19:52, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

Note, currently you can only do this by going to a page and using the watch control - a central/bulk control for this is being discussed at phab:T269318. — xaosflux ^Talk 20:00, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

I noted the appearance of the drop down list a few days ago, realised that if I never touched it things would remain the same, except they haven't. New user talk pages that go onto my list now do so only for 28 days. I discovered this by seeing a lonely little clockface embedded into an entry on my list. -Roxy the happy dog . wooF 20:06, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

Roxy the dog, were these pages watched because of Twinkle? The default watching behavior recently changed for things like xfd and csd and warnings recently changed to take advantage of the watchlist expiry. You can customize them all at WP:TW/PREF. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 20:17, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

Indeed yes. So it is Twinkle's fault. Whoever changed that behaviour without telling me should go and sit on the naughty step. I'll imvestigate and sort it out. Thanks, everybody, for your help. -Roxy the happy dog . wooF 20:22, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

Hi! It me. I'm already sitting, though. noted with minimal input here for two months, linked from this board ~ Amory (u • t • c) 20:31, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

I'd be lost without Twinkle btw. You can come in from there now, it must be cold. -Roxy the grumpy dog . wooF 20:46, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

I created the redirect And just like that but there is not currently an article called And Just Like That.... When one is created, my redirect will have to be changed to redirect to the new article. I can't just redirect to the proposed article name because the bot will get to it first.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 21:25, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

• @Vchimpanzee:, place {{R avoided double redirect|And Just Like That...}} on the lowercase redirect (on mobile so can't expand further on it). — J947 ‡ ^{message ⁓ edits} 21:43, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

I don't know if I did something wrong but EmausBot did it anyway. At this time the redirect does not happen but there will still have to be a manual fix when the article is created, something I was hoping to avoid.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 21:07, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

@Vchimpanzee: You did it right in , except that you shouldn't have changed the actual redirect. The bot was right to restore it. The point is that And just like that will automatically appear in Category:Avoided double redirects to be updated if And Just Like That... becomes an article (or starts redirecting to another article than now). There are probably editors who monitor the category and will quickly change the redirect, so you don't have to worry about it and periodically examine whether it should be changed. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:09, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

If #REDIRECT [[some wikitext which produces the page name]] was possible (this is phab:T3575 from 2005) then we could use existing features to code things like: "redirect to PAGE1 if PAGE1 is an article, redirect to the same target as PAGE1 if PAGE1 is a redirect, and redirect to PAGE2 if PAGE1 doesn't exist". None of this is possible now. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:24, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

Whenever I visit CentralAuth for an account, it almost always has local accounts on login.wikimedia.org or meta.wikimedia.org, even if it was just created. But occasionally it lacks them, like here and here.

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

How do they happen? I'd like to know if it reveals anything about the accounts (e.g. created in some unusual way), which might help us combat cross-wiki abuse. Nardog (talk) 02:17, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

@Nardog: I think this may occur in certain cases for users that aren't running/are blocking javascript; normally you get an account there because $wgCentralAuthAutoCreateWikis = [ 'loginwiki', 'metawiki' ]; says to - but I think that process also fails gracefully if for whatever reason it doesn't pass. These types of users will normally end up getting these SUL users once they log in again. — xaosflux ^Talk 04:05, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

Also, those accounts appear to have been created normally here on enwiki. — xaosflux ^Talk 04:06, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

@Xaosflux: Thanks for the explanation. Any idea why a newly created local account may lack a CentralAuth page at all? Nardog (talk) 09:52, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

@Nardog: can you be a bit more specific, are you saying there is a local account but nothing in Special:CentralAut for a user? Can you show me any sort of recent example (perhaps in the past year)? This may occur in some cases where a global account had a problem with a rename, where the SUL account was hidden, or when odd one-off bugs have happened related to replication/autocreation/etc. — xaosflux ^Talk 11:17, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

@Xaosflux: Yes. Example sent via email. Nardog (talk) 11:36, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

@Nardog: got your email, that (private) example is over 2 years old so it is unlikely we'll be able to get logs tracked down for whatever was going on and has likely been resolved back then - also I don't see any global contributions since then either - sorry not the answer you are looking for yet. — xaosflux ^Talk 12:13, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

Thanks anyways, and apologies for not realizing 2019 wasn't the past year! lol Nardog (talk) 12:18, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

For more details， please visit T269831. Therefore， please use "repair single page" or its similar function before the task is solved.--Alcremie (talk) 01:40, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

True, (diff), I tried to fix a page but it simply removes the dead link tags without adding any archives. enjoyer|talk 02:22, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

My understanding, backed by multiple Google tests, is that redirects shouldn't appear in search engine hits and that their target is retrieved instead. However, Fish-eye diseaseFish-eye disease shows as first result in Fish eye disease Wikipedia, tho doesn't in DDG. I tried to explain this by features like being connected to a WD item or being an R from merge, but results show this is irrelevant. Any explanation I'm missing? Assem Khidhr (talk) 01:27, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Assem Khidhr, Interesting. When you look at the Google cache (click the little down-pointing triangle at the end of the header line in the google search results), it shows that it has indexed https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Fish-eye_disease&redirect=no. Looking at the rendered HTML, it does include:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">

so it shouldn't get indexed. Beats me what happened. -- RoySmith (talk) 01:52, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

I don't see noindex in the HTML. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:38, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Me neither (at least for this), but I'm getting that it has to do with Google's indexes and probably nothing can be done on Wikipedia's end. Assem Khidhr (talk) 06:21, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

"redirects shouldn't appear in search engine hits" - why? Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 13:39, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

	Sandbox Organiser A place to help you organise your work

Hi all

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

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

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

Does anyone know why the Classical music related changes is showing conversations and edits from the tea house & help desk? Best - Aza24 (talk) 10:02, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

They are linked in {{Wikipedia help pages}} which is displayed below Wikipedia:WikiProject Classical music#See also. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:50, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

Fussed by the lack of a preference (any longer) I've edited Help:Preferences here basing myself on WP:Village pump (technical)/Archive 153#Edit box size Could someone savvy review this please? Since this is no longer a preference option maybe it should be somewhere else. Or maybe it is. Thincat (talk) 12:56, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

I tested it exactly as described and it works. You could add a link to Special:MyPage/common.css. --mfb (talk) 14:16, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

Not sure if this is the smart place for this or not, but with regard to Preferences > Gadgets > Strike out usernames that have been blocked is there any way to strike out IPs that are part of rangeblocks? Or maybe dotted strikes for rangeblocks with partial site blocks? Thanks! Cyphoidbomb (talk) 01:01, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

@Cyphoidbomb: As far as I can tell, there's no way to query the API for more than one rangeblocked IP in a single request. By comparison, it's possible to check for up to 50 directly blocked IPs (or users) at once. So visiting a page with 200 unique IPs linked would flood the API with 200 requests (instead of 4), which seems rude, particularly from a popular gadget. Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 21:40, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

@Suffusion of Yellow: Understood. Thanks for the info! Cyphoidbomb (talk) 21:58, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

I was looking at pages in all namespaces on this wiki with over 200 byte long titles when I found multiple pages which are archive subpages which are over 20 levels deep. One example is Talk:Clan Campbell/Archives/2018 1/Archives/2018 1/Archives/2018 1/Archives/2018 1/Archives/2018 1/Archives/2018 1/Archives/2018 1/Archives/2018 1/Archives/2018 1/Archives/2018 1/Archives/2018 1/Archives/2018 1/Archives/2018 1/Archives/2018 1/Archives/2018 1, which ClueBot created. See quarry:query/4320. User:Cobi is the botmaster. What happened here?--Snaevar (talk) 21:06, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

That's funny. Johnsoniensis added == == in the lead before {{User:ClueBot III/ArchiveThis}} which should be in the lead. Is it or isn't it in the lead afterwards? ClueBot III couldn't make up its mind. It's only a valid archive request if it's in the lead and ClueBot III apparently thought it was because it archived the page. It should only archive non-lead sections but it archived the "section" including the archive request. In the next run it saw the archived archive request and thought it was a request to archive the archive so it dutyfully continued doing so recursively until it hit the 255-byte limit on page names. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:24, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Funny bug. I fixed the intended archives, so all the extra archives can be deleted once Cobi doesn't need them for debugging any more. --mfb (talk) 09:55, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

Commuter town nesting. Scottish clan of archives. Here is a more creative variation: Talk:History_of_Ybor_City/Archives/2013/August/Archives/2014/January/Archives/2014/July/Archives/2015/January/Archives/2015/September/Archives/2016/February/Archives/2016/August/Archives/2017/February/Archives/2017/August. I'm cleaning these up and nominate them for deletion. That's all in the article namespace. There are many more in the user namespace, but that's up to these users. At least one of them has been cleaned up in the past, see HighKing cleanup (the deletion request appears in the same query because of its long name). --mfb (talk) 10:40, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

Update: The bug is not triggered by the empty section title, the other pages had filled section titles. Seems to be a general problem that the bot accepts archiving instructions in archivable sections. I realized Cobi has sysop rights so they can check the pages even after they are deleted, so I nominated all of them for speedy deletion. There are still user pages if others want to see examples. Found another archiving issue with Scottish articles in the process and fixed that as well. --mfb (talk) 13:05, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

I've found some additional messed-up pages; should these be MfD'd?

1. User talk:Astroketh/Archives/2019/November/Archives/2020/February
2. User talk:Astroketh/Archives/2019/November/Archives/2020/February/Archives/2020/May
3. User talk:Astroketh/Archives/2019/November/Archives/2020/February/Archives/2020/May/Archives/2020/August
4. User talk:Astroketh/Archives/2019/November/Archives/2020/February/Archives/2020/May/Archives/2020/August/Archives/2020/October
5. User talk:Loksmythe/Archives/2020/August/Archives/2020/November
6. User:ClueBot III/Master Detailed Indices/User talk:Loksmythe/Archives/2020/August/Archives/2020/November

jp×g 22:57, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

If the "real" content of these pages gets moved to the most appropriate true archive page, such that all that is left in the fake archive is a {{Talkarchive}} or similar, then the fake archive can be tagged with {{db-error}} (there are not many valid uses for WP:CSD#G6, but this is one of them). --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 23:57, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

Oh, chains that are still being formed. Move the archiving templates back to the parent talk page, make sure all the talk sections are in an archive, then nominate the nested archives for speedy deletion. G6, Db-error and G1, Db-nonsense both work. I wouldn't (and didn't) do this for user talk archives, however. It's best to ask these users first. If they want help with cleaning up, then U1, user request, is another possible deletion reason. For article talk pages there is no such concern. --mfb (talk) 00:28, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

I cleaned up all article talk page archives with the patterns "[month]/Archive", "1/Archive" and "2/Archive". The last one had just one instance and there were no accidental "3/Archive" or "4/Archive", so I didn't search beyond that (there are plenty of false positives in these searches, like Talk:Fallout 4/Archive 1). That's another 40 soon-to-be deleted edits. It makes Category:Candidates for uncontroversial speedy deletion look weird. --mfb (talk) 02:15, 6 February 2021 (UTC) --mfb (talk) 02:15, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

I don't see why user talk pages should be exempt - I can't think of a reason why the archive should itself be archived. Usually it's simply because the user concerned placed the archiving template in a section, as here, repeated here. I think I fixed up the chain rooted at User talk:Sgubaldo - this involved eleven edits and thirty G6 deletions. And that's for just one user talk page which only ever had three threads posted to it that didn't originate with that same user.

Looking at the last 5,000 edits by ClueBot III in User talk: space (i.e. back to 15 December 2020), I have also found other chains rooted at User talk:Astroketh, User talk:Denisarona, User talk:Loksmythe, User talk:Mdriscoll03, User talk:Tessaracter, User talk:Tomcat7 and User talk:Trillfendi. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 14:58, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

What if I create User talk:Mfb/Archive 1/Archive 1/Archive 1 and archive things in it? Will you clean that up as well? I generally avoid changes in the space of other users unless it's clearly meant to be edited. I asked all active users with "endless" chains (one replied already), I skipped banned and completely inactive users. There are many additional users with a shorter archive nesting: Search 1, Search 2, Search 3 (similarly for the other months). By the way: The Cluebot subpages are irrelevant once their associated archive pages are deleted. There might be an automated clean-up script, I don't know. --mfb (talk) 15:13, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

I'm not talking about altering/deleting subpages that were deliberately created by the user, but fixing up archiving errors caused because the {{User:ClueBot III/ArchiveThis}} was put in the wrong place - in a section of the talk page, instead of before the first heading of that page. If re-archiving like this is not stopped when detected, it will continue until the software limitations (which I believe are a limit of 255 characters after the "User talk:" part) cause the process to bomb out. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:51, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

I know the cause and I have fixed many of them in the past week in the article talk namespace. I still think it's up to these users to decide if they want this reverted or not. It's not breaking Wikipedia, it's just an odd place for the archived discussion. --mfb (talk) 06:02, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

Can I disable 2FA with scratch codes? ~~ CAPTAIN MEDUSA^talk 12:19, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

@CAPTAIN MEDUSA: Yes, according to Help:Two-factor_authentication#Disabling_2FA, which says you can use a normal code or a scratch code for disabling it. RudolfRed (talk) 17:59, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

BTW, as a PSA to everybody, if you have 2FA enabled, now is a good time to check to make sure you remember where you stashed your scratch codes and that you can still get to them. Actually, it's not a bad idea to burn one now to make sure you understand how to use them. There's nothing special about now that makes it a good time. But, "never" is most certainly not a good time. -- RoySmith (talk) 18:39, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

Warning - never get down to less than TWO scratch codes, if you are down to 2 or 1 , regenerate codes by disabling 2FA and reactivating it. — xaosflux ^Talk 23:42, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

In fact rather than rely on scratch codes, it might be a better idea to use an app like Authy that encrypts 2FAs and stores them on the cloud; you can then install the client on your phone, home laptop and work laptop. Then the only way to get locked out of your account (or be at the mercy of scratch codes) is if you lose all your devices. – SD0001 (talk) 17:21, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

is there any way on Wiki, Chrome (mobile), or Android phone, to view what a mobile article page looks like in various custom screen sizes ? Gfigs (talk) 08:16, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

as @Aklapper posted in phab:T271288Gfigs (talk) 15:06, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

@Gfigs: If you use a PC, you can view an article on Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge or some other Chromium-based web browser. In such browsers, you can use the DevTools, which can be opened using F12 button on keyboard. You can emulate various screen sizes by following the instructions here: The steps mentioned in the link can be used in Google Chrome or any other Chromium-based web browsers also. Hope it helps! CX Zoom (talk) 20:33, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

CX_Zoom, thanks Gfigs (talk) 22:50, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

Is there a way to disable that obnoxious [reply] button, preferably one that doesn't require logging in? I've been using the preview mode workaround but it's really getting old. 78.28.44.204 (talk) 12:39, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

#reply-link-wrapper {display: none;} in the css should do the job. Without login you would need to do that in your browser, logged in you can use the custom css page. mfb (talk) 13:02, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

Are any IP's getting it here at the English Wikipedia or is the post about another wiki? mw:Talk pages project/Replying#Deployment says it's only deployed as opt-out at the Arabic, Hungarian and Czech Wikipedia, e.g. at hu:Wikipédia-vita:Segítség. If you have an account then you can disable it at the bottom box at hu:Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing. The CSS to remove it is .dt-init-replylink-buttons {display: none !important;}. The class reply-link-wrapper is used by User:Enterprisey/reply-link which is loaded in User:Mfb/monobook.js. It's not targeted with #reply-link-wrapper but with .reply-link-wrapper {display: none;}. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:24, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

That solved the issue, thank you! And to answer you, the question was indeed about the English Wikipedia. 78.28.44.204 (talk) 18:27, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

I don't see it whether logged in or out. I guess they are running an A/B test and you are in the group which gets the tool. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:22, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

I'd like to report that an article is heavily vandalized. Please help to restore its initial form. It is: The Three Fools. Thanks in advance for the help!--MrPanyGoff (talk) 20:21, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

@MrPanyGoff: are you having a technical problem? You should be able to go to the article, select history, select any old version, click edit, then publish that old version again. — xaosflux ^Talk 21:19, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

Anyway, thanks everybody who help to fix that issue!--MrPanyGoff (talk) 08:29, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

17:40, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

1. Are templates defined to be evaluated in a specific order or are they defined to be evaluated an undefined order?
2. During the template expansion of the page, can one template change the state of something so that another template can detect that change? — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 12:25, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

If they are nested then inner templates are evaluated first. If they are in parallel they should not depend on each other (but Lua can analyze the source code of the article, so in principle you can create trouble). --mfb (talk) 14:17, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

A Lua module can find where its template is in the source (see {{#invoke:string2|findpagetext}} for one), but I assume that the source it sees is read-only? — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 16:56, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

Yes. There are numerous safeguards so that templates can not change other template transclusions (that is, other than subtemplates). In lua editing the source would be done with the internal os libary, which is intentionally blocked on all WMF projects.

There are two situations where templates are evaluated, one if the page is purged or edited, and the other if there is any change in the template itself. For the former the templates are evaluated from top to bottom (e.g./f.x. the lead first), for the latter see Wikipedia:Purge#Server_cache.--Snaevar (talk) 17:43, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

Snaevar, I assume they're also re-evaluated if a new version of Lua is installed? -- RoySmith (talk) 18:55, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

Interesting point but I don't think Lua has ever been updated in Scribunto. Special:Version is saying Lua 5.1.5 which is the same as six years ago and probably longer. Johnuniq (talk) 22:15, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

Indeed, we have had 5.1(.x) since initial installation, with some 5.2 backports. (I am sad, because multi-line strings are directly supported in 5.2 but were not one of the backports.) I anticipate any upgrade to a newer version would have some amount of pre-upgrade linting work (apparently there is a fork in the community between LuaJIT and Lua >5.1, much the same as there was one between Python 2 and 3). --Izno (talk) 01:00, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

OK, in full — Templates (and their module children) are not strictly deterministic as they can output non-deterministic data (such as the time), but the evaluation is isolated and module code cannot write to anything outside of the evaluation of the current template. i.e. A template/module can only output HTML/wikitext and cannot alter any existing wikitext, cannot write to Wikidata, cannot write to any database anywhere and cannot alter any "global" or system variables. This means that a template/module cannot "pass" any information to another template/module other than the children being expanded within their own expansion. That right? — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 19:19, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

That's correct. One way to look at it is that devs want people to be able to edit any section on a page and preview the result, without needing to parse the whole page. Indeed, a dozen people could be simultaneously editing and previewing different sections and each works in complete isolation. An enterprising editor found they could muck around with refs to break the isolation model, but that was regarded as a bug and the system patched to prevent it. It is possible to have a loadData module which does calculations and returns a fixed table of data. I would recommend against it, but such a module could read the page and decide what to do based on what it finds. Once loaded, subsequent accesses to the module would get a cached table. Johnuniq (talk) 22:20, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

So, while investigating how to trim the banner spam, I noticed on mobile a blank section between two project notices (Lebanon and Organizations)

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

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

{{WikiProject Lebanon|class=GA|importance=High}} {{WikiProject Military history|class=GA|Middle-Eastern=y|Post-Cold-War=y}} {{WikiProject Organizations|class=GA|importance=High}}

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

In User:Redrose64/monobook.css I have the rule

/* monospace font for input boxes */
textarea.oo-ui-inputWidget-input {
  font-family: monospace;
  font-size: 13.3333px;
}

and this works for most multi-line text input boxes, such as the one that I used to type this in. But it's ignored in the large text input box at Special:EmailUser/Oversight (or any other recipient name), where I'm getting a PS font. How might I get a monospace font there also? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:43, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

You can try adding the following class selector:

/* monospace font for input boxes */
textarea.oo-ui-inputWidget-input,
.oo-ui-textInputWidget .oo-ui-inputWidget-input
{
  font-family: monospace;
  font-size: 13.3333px;
}

isaacl (talk) 21:56, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

That worked for the textarea concerned - but it also matched all text input boxes, such as the subject line on that page, the edit summary below this box, and others. So I used an id instead:

/* monospace font for input boxes */
textarea.oo-ui-inputWidget-input,
#mw-input-wpText .oo-ui-inputWidget-input {
  font-family: monospace;
  font-size: 13.3333px;
}

which works. But I'm still puzzled as to why the first selector wasn't matched. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:50, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

@Redrose64: I see a default CSS rule setting font-family: inherit; for .oo-ui-textInputWidget .oo-ui-inputWidget-input, which will have precedence over your rule. — The Earwig ⟨talk⟩ 23:12, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

I saw the same rule as The Earwig (using my browser's developer tools to examine which rules applied to the HTML element in question), thus my suggestion. Rules that match with greater specificity take precedence over those that match with less specificity. So something that matches by matching two classes, or one ID and one class (for a total of two selectors) takes precedence over a match on just one class. isaacl (talk) 23:43, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

If I go to a page with the CSS content model, highlight two or more lines, copy to clipboard and paste those elsewhere, there are two linefeeds (U+000A) after each line instead of one, the result being a blank line between consecutive "real" lines. This appears to be a recent change: how may I restore the old behaviour? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:51, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

@Redrose64: This is a Gecko-specific issue and has been fixed for 1.36.0-wmf.28 (phab:T271614). I wonder why it hasn't been deployed here though; Tech News doesn't say. I guess you could override the CSS until then if you want it fixed now. Nardog (talk) 00:43, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

I am pretty sure I saw WAID say elsewhere that our train got stopped for wmf.28. I assume it will come this week. --Izno (talk) 01:05, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

Typically I log in direct to my watchlist, then click through to any interesting-looking pages. Recently, when I begin to say edit an article, I sometimes find that I am no longer logged in and my edit is recorded under my IP address. This has begun to happen quite often. Is it a known issue, and if so is it more likely to be a server or browser bug? — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 16:01, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

Me too, actually. Trying to hit watchlist first has been a losing proposition of late. It usually happens to me on a mobile device though. --Izno (talk) 18:33, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

Now I am noticing I a tooltip-style popup, top right: " Central login You are centrally logged in as Steelpillow. Reload the page to apply your user settings." It's appeared twice already this session. If this is signed by my IP address, we are homing in on the culprit. 85.255.232.32 (talk) 19:02, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

Ha! See that! It bounced me off and I have had to log in a second time to sign this. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 19:05, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

This sounds like Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 187#Why is Wikipedia logging me out?. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:09, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

Yes it does, thank you. However no mention was made there of the little popup. That popup suggests to me that the service knows there is an issue; presumably it remembers that you are logged in but has lost some of your session credentials. The fact that the problem is affecting/annoying multiple users and has only begun recently suggests to me that Something Needs To Be Undone. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 11:08, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

I keep getting this type of message popping up, "You are importing User:Lupin/popups.js into common.js" and to remove it as it's unmaintained. I am not sure why I started getting it today, and how to get rid of it. Any help? Govvy (talk) 12:27, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

@Govvy: The code is in User:Govvy/monobook.js. You can remove the first 9 lines. Enable "Navigation popups" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets if you want a replacement. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:56, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

@PrimeHunter: I removed the first 9 lines and left importScript('User:Lightmouse/monobook.js/script.js'); there, you know, I forgot that page existed! Cheers. Govvy (talk) 14:24, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

I tweaked the prompt at User:Lupin/popups.js to try to make this a little clearer. — xaosflux ^Talk 14:35, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

I just made a post on a user talk page, and somehow this was added to my watchlist for only 28 days. I did not select 28 days, I always leave it at the default permanently. What is occurring? DuncanHill (talk) 17:55, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

@DuncanHill: It is the default for Twinkle. You can adjust your preferences at WP:TW/PREFS — MusikAnimal ^talk 18:05, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

@MusikAnimal: Thanks, I had no idea there was such a page. DuncanHill (talk) 18:17, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

I'm seeing drop-down menus (More, TW, etc) getting stuck open. Any idea what's going on? -- RoySmith (talk) 18:25, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

Thursday came late, actually. Amorymeltzer has a fix for the bullet points issue in Twinkle that should be deployed soon. As for the hover states being broken, that's due to a bug in MediaWiki that has since been fixed but not scheduled to go out until the next deployment train (Thursday). See phab:T273143#6812849. — MusikAnimal ^talk 18:28, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

Ah, I can tell Shubinator nevermind.. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 18:32, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

@Davidwr: The issue with the MoreMenu submenus is separate, by the way, and that should be fixed now too. I only pushed that update a few minutes ago so it may take a few more minutes for it to show up on your end. — MusikAnimal ^talk 18:34, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

MoreMenu is fixed for me. Multi-bug day, I blame it on being squeezed between Patch Tuesday and WP:THURSDAY. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 18:44, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

MusikAnimal, Hmmm, 90-ish minutes later, it's still happening for me. I tried restarting Chrome and emptying my browser cache, to no avail. Maybe I just need a larger value of "a few more minutes" :-) -- RoySmith (talk) 19:52, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

@RoySmith: Are you talking about the issue with MoreMenu submenus, or the broken hover states (where you have to click on "Page" or "User" to make the menu appear)? If the latter, that won't be fixed until the wmf.30 train arrives, which is scheduled for this Thursday.

If the former, I'm confused why it's still broken for you. I'm guessing you installed MoreMenu via the gadget. Maybe try turning the gadget off and then on again? Or try installing globally, which is the preferred route anyway because it works on all wikis. — MusikAnimal ^talk 20:29, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

MusikAnimal, Ah, I guess I'm talking about the later (i.e. the screenshot I posted above). Thursday, then. -- RoySmith (talk) 20:36, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

Twinkle fix now pushed; sorry all, had planned to put it up later today but didn't realize it was gonna come early this week. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 18:46, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

Also heads up about . Release Engineering (with good reason) will now halt the train if any new errors show up. This should mean fewer errors will make their way to English Wikipedia, but as a consequence we may see more erratic train schedules like this, where the new version arrives on Monday/Tuesday/etc. instead of the usual Thursday. — MusikAnimal ^talk 19:01, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

Is there a way for us to get a notice here when the software is updated, perhaps with a link to release notes, or is there a page we can add to our watchlists to know about changes? The tech news that is posted here is forward-looking, so things listed there do not always happen on time, and the link to the new version always leads to a blank page when the news posting is added here. – Jonesey95 (talk) 20:37, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

I think the ecosystem is too big to have a fully comprehensive release notes for weekly trains. But anything notable should go through Tech News. Bugs like the broken hover states of dropdown menus are of course not announced in advance because they were not intentionally introduced.

As for when the train arrives, you can check toolforge:versions to see the current status, and wikitech:Deployments to see the current schedule. Whenever the train is delayed, an email is sent to the wikitech-l mailing list. You can also see if anything is currently blocking the train by checking toolforge:train-blockers. That redirects you to the corresponding Phab task for the upcoming train, and blockers there are listed as subtasks. At the time of writing there are no subtasks, so wmf.30 should hopefully come as planned on Thursday.

The recent policy change around deployments may actually improve the situation, as developers might get in the habit of reverting problematic changes, rather than holding up the train to fix them. Time will tell. — MusikAnimal ^talk 21:21, 9 February 2021 (UTC)

Hi, this might have been answered before, but I cant find it.

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

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

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

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

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

I was inspecting the output produced by a module (not relevant here, but see "UNIQ--nowiki" at permalink if wanted). That output included strip markers from nowiki tags resulting from the module expanding color templates for political parties. For example:

• {{Independent politician/meta/color}} generates <nowiki>#DDDDDD</nowiki>
• {{Independent Communist/meta/color}} uses {{Political party color}} and generates <nowiki />#D50000

Why is the nowiki used? If someone puts {{Independent politician/meta/color}} on a page in normal wikitext, the nowiki stops # from being interpreted as a numbered list item. However it looks like these templates are being used in wikitext or HTML to generate a table. The resulting HTML gives a table cell like the following:

<td style="background-color:{{align|left|{{spaces|10|em}}}}"></td>

which is transformed to

<td style="background-color:#DDDDDD"></td>

Are those nowiki really desirable? Johnuniq (talk) 04:34, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

On the template, and maybe in the transclusion (I don't remember exactly), those pound signs would otherwise be interpreted as an ordered list item. --Izno (talk) 04:53, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

I think I've mishandled some of the {{Election box metadata}} set-ups before in my time and the consequences have been a bit messy. I think something about the election results boxes - of which there are a smattering of different designs for FPTP, STV, AMS etc - goes wonky if the color section isn't bracketed by the nowiki tags. doktorb _words^deeds 05:10, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

Resolved

 – Solved by Fastily -- Cyphoidbomb (talk) 05:18, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

Hey all, looking at this request from Yashthepunisher, they appear to have moved an article into Talk space, and yet the talk page has gone missing. Anyone have any ideas for where it could have gone and how to restore the pages to their original locations where they can be safely moved? Much appreciated. Cyphoidbomb (talk) 04:11, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

Cyphoidbomb The issue has been resolved by Fastily. Thanks to both of you. Yashthepunisher (talk) 05:12, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

Wikimedia is applying as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2021 and Outreachy Round 22. We're currently gathering project ideas for the application.

If you have ideas for projects, share them here: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T270429

-- The Wikimedia GSoC & Outreachy Organization Administrators

--qedk (t 愛 c) 15:01, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

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

Been hit-and-miss for the last two days now. Lugnuts ^{Fire Walk with Me} 10:12, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

maybe check Wikipedia:RefToolbar/2.0#Troubleshooting Gfigs (talk) 12:07, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

That error message is from MediaWiki:Gadget-citations.js.--Snaevar (talk) 18:46, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

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

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

Resolved

 – User CSS to the rescue! — xaosflux ^Talk 18:57, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

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

@Abductive: you can add this line:

.mw-newarticletext {display: none}

To your Special:Mypage/common.css or Special:Mypage/skin.css file. — xaosflux ^Talk 16:59, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

Great, it works! Hidden. Thanks. Abductive (reasoning) 17:25, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

In IBM System/370#Architecture details I have a table with several long sections. There is a heading row showing bit positions, and I want cells in subsequent rows to align with those headings, so I don't want to put those sections in nested tables. I would like to make each of Control Registers and General Registers separately collapsible. Is there a way to do that? Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 22:55, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

It is possible to collapse each row seperatly, with an class="mw-collapsible" in the tr, and class="mw-collapsible-content" in all of the subsequent td's. Mw-collapsible is the Mediawiki collapsible code, it differs from NavFrame collapsible by not having an autocollapsible function.--Snaevar (talk) 18:23, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

It is not NavFrame that provides autocollapsible. Anyway, 'autocollapse' is shimmed to function based on mw-collapsible on en. --Izno (talk) 23:34, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

I cannot see the useful "reverted" tag in some contributions that were reverted. Examples of mw-reverted are in recent changes but what about these:

• user with 3 edits, all reverted
• IP with 1 edit, reverted
• user with several edits, all reverted

Am I missing something or is this hopefully a temporary glitch? Johnuniq (talk) 03:06, 11 February 2021 (UTC))

Johnuniq, TIL tags are applied asynchronously. For example, when I first looked at Special:Contributions/Cheekyrascal, only the first two edits had the Reverted tag. Now all three do. See meta:Help:Reverting#Reverted edits: The mw-reverted change tag is applied shortly after the revert is made... -- RoySmith (talk) 03:47, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

That makes sense, thanks. I've never seen a lag before and would guess that something unusual is holding up the process. I hope it gets back to a fast response because the point of the tag is to see which edits need to be checked/reverted on encountering a problematic editor. Johnuniq (talk) 04:06, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

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

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

Is there any way to turn off the endless stream of Wikidata notices? It's rendered my "inbox" useless. Maury Markowitz (talk) 12:03, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

By "inbox" do you mean e-mail, onwiki notifications or watchlist? There are settings at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-echo, Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-watchlist, wikidata:Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-echo. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:01, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

It is an icon of an inbox. Actual messages to me show up in the bell icon. Thanks for the pointer, I did find the (hopefully correct) option. It is very odd that it is on another web site. Maury Markowitz (talk) 14:49, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

This is a consequence of how the various WMF sites interact. At one level, every wiki (the various language wikipedias, wikidata, commons, etc) is a seperate site, with its own set of preferences. For example, I might want to be notified when somebody links to a page I've created on enwiki, but not on wikidata. On the other hand, all (well, most) of these projects share a common authentication system, so you don't have to create a new account on each site. One of the things that gives you is that notifications generated on any of the sites are visible on all the others via your inbox. It's actually a very handy feature, but I can see how it could be surprising and/or confusing. -- RoySmith (talk) 15:52, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

How I can see new articles from Category:Bilateral relations by country and its subcategorieres? Eurohunter (talk) 16:21, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

@Eurohunter: you can use the PetScan tool. Here is an example set of parameters: PetScan query. — xaosflux ^Talk 16:49, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

@Xaosflux: Thanks Eurohunter (talk) 17:35, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

Why default user sandbox isn't capitalised as any other namespace? So we should have User:Example/Sandbox instead User:Example/sandbox. Eurohunter (talk) 18:01, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

If you mean the 'Sandbox' link in the user menu bar at the top, it actually leads to 'user:example/sandbox'. Ruslik_Zero 20:11, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

The namespace is the part before the colon, in this case "User". The first character after the namespace is automatically capitalized, in this case "E". The default /sandbox is a user subpage. Subpages are fully case sensitive like any other part of a page name after the first character. I don't know how the case was chosen but all skin subpages are also lowercase: /common.js, /common.css, vector.js, vector.css (and the skin name is Vector), /monobook.js, monobook.css (skin name MonoBook), and so on. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:18, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

Just noticed that Category:Astronomy templates is not hidden at Solar radio emission and is displayed alongside encyclopedic categories (more fresh eyes than mine are needed). Btw, could we run a bot that will detect all unhidden maintenance categories and hide them? Brandmeister^talk 20:56, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

Brandmeister, this was caused by incorrect categorization wikitext at Template:The Sun and has been fixed. —⁠andrybak (talk) 21:42, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

Thanks, I thought it had to do with the category itself. Brandmeister^talk 21:51, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

@Brandmeister: This was the problem edit - the category was placed outside the <noinclude>...</noinclude> when it should have been inside, ideally placed in the documentation page (see WP:CAT#T). Category:Astronomy templates is not a maintenance category, and there should be no reason to hide it - otherwise it wouldn't be shown at Template:The Sun, where its display is highly appropriate. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 14:19, 11 February 2021 (UTC)

Unhidden maintenance categories is a very rare problem in my experience and not something we really need a bot for. A more common problem is that the category doesn't exist and shows up red which looks worse. I have thought about making a Phabricator request for a MediaWiki message with regex for category names which should be treated as hidden categories if they don't exist. A feature similar to MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist. The numerous template-added maintenance categories with names like Category:Articles with dead external links from April 2020 would be easy to target with regex. Some wikis might choose to hide all red categories. The feature could also have a setting to automatically hide the category if it does exist. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:07, 11 February 2021 (UTC)