Wikipedia talk:Linter

The Firefly report column headers have shifted to the right, or something like that. For example, clicking on the figure for Bogus file options in the article namespace gives the Fostered content errors, etc. See this screen dump. This problem appears to have started earlier today. —Bruce1ee^talk 12:25, 22 January 2026 (UTC)

Weird. I'll look into it but this weirdly coincides with me changing a job for the CCI stats, haven't touched the lint error report since adding the new lint error 2 months ago. Tenshi! (Talk page) 12:29, 22 January 2026 (UTC)

Fixed. Turns out when I did add that new lint error, I forgot to add it in what reads the stored data, resulting in that when I presume someone updated the linter to check for the new extension tag with template parameter error. Tenshi! (Talk page) 13:11, 22 January 2026 (UTC)

Thanks, it's working fine now. —Bruce1ee^talk 13:25, 22 January 2026 (UTC)

Extension tag with template parameter lint errors can be frustrating to diagnose within gallery tags. I have reported a bug at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Comment doesn't work in gallery. It seems that within a gallery tag, a newline automatically closes an open comment. But worse than that, within gallery tags, the linter sees a comment as if it were regular markup. This markup:

<gallery class="center">
<!-- File:WDL Barnstar.svg|alt=I, '''SarahStierch''', hereby award you, {{ {{{|safesubst:}}}ROOTPAGENAME}}, the '''World Digital Library Barnstar''' for your fabulous contributions to the [[Wikipedia:GLAM/World Digital Library|World Digital Library-Wikimedia Partnership]]. I do hope you will continue to contribute, and thank you for all you do to expand on Wikimedia's mission of sharing free knowledge! [[User:SarahStierch|SarahStierch]] ([[User talk:SarahStierch|talk]]) 16:17, 30 June 2013 (UTC) -->
</gallery>

has no files visible to gallery, but, on removing the <pre>...</pre> tags here, it generates a Extension tag with template parameter lint error. It's very hard to fix things when the programmer's tools don't work properly. —Anomalocaris (talk) 07:33, 2 February 2026 (UTC)

Anomalocaris, phabricator is the correct place to report bugs in mediawiki. — Qwerfjkltalk 11:43, 2 February 2026 (UTC)

Posted to phab:T18057 at suggestion of Xaosflux. —Anomalocaris (talk) 19:28, 3 February 2026 (UTC)

Is there a reason why we should be fixing these errors if every wiki is on RemexHtml or Parsoid now? It seems like a redundant error unless there are reasons we should be keeping backwards compatibility with Tidy. — Tenshi! (Talk page) 13:04, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

Do you have an example page? I think the idea is that the workarounds for any of these Linter errors could or would eventually be removed from the parsers, so we are supposed to fix them in anticipation of that day. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:24, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

Sorry, I mistook one, mw:Help:Lint errors/pwrap-bug-workaround and mw:Help:Lint errors/tidy-whitespace-bug are the help pages with examples. Tenshi! (Talk page) 15:33, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

As far as I can tell, both of those pages are saying "Tidy had a workaround for this syntax, but Remex/Parsoid does not, so it needs to be fixed to avoid display problems". I think that is why we fix them. Anyway, they are all fixed and are easy to fix, so what is the question? – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:50, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

Ah, I had interpreted it as the other way around and that they were fixed in Remex/Parsoid but not Tidy. — Tenshi! (Talk page) 16:05, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Lar/Accountability&diff=next&oldid=1321942134

I am not sure that I see the benefit in replacing single strikeout pair that covers multiple lines with many many individual strikeouts, line by line. It makes the whole thing a lot harder to edit accurately should I ever wish to do so in future (not a lot of POINT in editing struck out text but...). Which error on the List_of_lint_errors is this? (change was done by Tenshi!'s bot) Thanks. (I have half a mind to revert the change but that would be edit warring with a bot! LOL) ++Lar: t/c 13:24, 13 February 2026 (UTC)

Note also that the revision leaves the heading itself unstruck. That is not the desired intent. The heading should also be struck. ++Lar: t/c 13:26, 13 February 2026 (UTC)

Looking at the revision before, the error that is shown is "Misnested tags". An <s>...</s> tag cannot be applied to multiple rows. If you want something else, you can use {{Strikethroughdiv}} which can help. Though I'm not sure how that works with headings. Gonnym (talk) 13:32, 13 February 2026 (UTC)

The s (and strike) tag is an inline tag, and doesn't cleanly span across blocks. When it is used to wrap blocks, it reports a misnested tag error. Adding the s tag to each bullet, while more verbose, is the simplest and near foolproof solution for a bot to use. There are other solutions possible, but some of the other options have some quirks that need a little finessing (div based solutions can't start on an indented/bulleted line for one example). One discussion about this: Wikipedia_talk:Linter/Archive_6#Favorite_stripped_strike_replacement?. You may certainly add an s tag to strikeout the header if you wish, just put it within the header notation like so: (== <s> Title</s> ==). Zinnober9 (talk) 14:04, 13 February 2026 (UTC)

Lar, this error is explained a bit more at mw:Help:Lint errors/misnested-tag. Example 4 is the most relevant example. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:10, 13 February 2026 (UTC)

@Tenshi Hinanawi: in case you haven't seen this thread yet, it looks like there's a bug in not applying misnested <s> tags to headers. (p.s. hi Lar, from another obsessive LEGO fan :)) Legoktm (talk) 00:36, 14 February 2026 (UTC)

Maybe striking headers is unnatural. So maybe it's not a bug? (p.s. There are many obsessions, and LEGO is one of mine, first among many) ++Lar: t/c 01:22, 14 February 2026 (UTC)

I don't think I can fix this at the moment since the regex that is being used for section headings uses spaces as a demarcator, and I haven't found a better solution that doesn't miss text intended to be struck out. Tenshi! (Talk page) 11:56, 14 February 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanation, everyone. Appreciate it. Didn't realise the s tag can't span. ++Lar: t/c 23:44, 13 February 2026 (UTC)

If you are curious why tidy font link errors are suddenly appearing on pages that do not appear to have been touched since 2008, this VPT thread should enlighten you. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:01, 13 February 2026 (UTC)

Also related: Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Tasks § Temporary Wikipedian userpages. Primefac (talk) 12:01, 14 February 2026 (UTC)

All cases using a correctly applied {{hst}} and {{hsb}} (NOT the redirected {{hidden begin}} and {{Hidden end}}!) are reporting 2 stripped div errors (225 transclusions for 550 errors). If anyone wants to figure this error out. (Example). Zinnober9 (talk) 16:21, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

Is Template:Hidden begin missing a closing div in line 3 for the contentstyle part? Gonnym (talk) 17:10, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

I think this might be a LintHint bug. See Page information for that /doc page, which shows no Linter errors. LintHint sometimes shows false positive errors; I've been getting some incorrect "link in link" errors in Preview mode when {{xt}} is used like this; the link in link error shows in Preview and Read view but not in Page information, the latter of which I believe is canonical. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:44, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

More: The expanded content for

{{hst|reason=Custom heading text}}
Text you would like to hide
{{hsb}}

which LintHint says has two stripped /div tags, is

<div class="mw-content-ltr mw-parser-output" lang="en" dir="ltr"><style data-mw-deduplicate="TemplateStyles:r1214851843">.mw-parser-output .hidden-begin{box-sizing:border-box;width:100%;padding:5px;border:none;font-size:95%}.mw-parser-output .hidden-title{font-weight:bold;line-height:1.6;text-align:left}.mw-parser-output .hidden-content{text-align:left}@media all and (max-width:500px){.mw-parser-output .hidden-begin{width:auto!important;clear:none!important;float:none!important}}</style><div class="hidden-begin mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style=""><div class="hidden-title skin-nightmode-reset-color" style="background:#f2dfce; color:inherit; padding:2px;">Custom heading text</div><div class="hidden-content mw-collapsible-content" style="background:#fcf4ef; color:inherit; border:#aaa 1px solid;padding:0.4em;">
<p>Text you would like to hide
</p>
</div></div></div>

which is valid and has no Linter errors that I can see. That is another bit of evidence that makes me think this is a LintHint false positive. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:52, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

Now that you say it's a false positive, I think I've asked about this template pair before. Apologies. I don't encounter false positives with linthint often enough that I forget the tool has the occasional fault. Thank you both. Zinnober9 (talk) 22:19, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

I tried duplicating the code of {{Xt}} in tests to figure out what is triggering it. I've narrowed it down to {{#ifeq:{{NAMESPACE}}|{{ns:0}}|[[:Cateory:Test]]|{{{1|}}}}} with {{ns:0}} being the trigger. If I change it to {{#ifeq:{{NAMESPACE}}|8|[[:Cateory:Test]]|{{{1|}}}}} it's fine. I have no idea why this fails as it makes no sense to me, but this seems more than a standard false-positive. Gonnym (talk) 08:31, 18 February 2026 (UTC)

I've written a new report that shows the errors Misnested, Missing, Obsolete and Stripped errors in the Talk, User, User Talk, Wikipedia and Wikipedia talk namespaces per tag. User:WOSlinker/Lint errors per tag. -- WOSlinker (talk) 08:39, 1 March 2026 (UTC)

Very nice. Numbers like this definitely motivate me to do Linter fixes, trying to get a specific cell number to zero. It would be amazing if each cell could link directly to the list of errors. For example, the number for Talk / b tags could link to this list. I think it would be possible by tweaking the output of your report and your row template to convert the namespace number to the namespace name in the row template, and using the template parameters to create the URLs. I can give it a try if you want. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:16, 1 March 2026 (UTC)

I've added links. -- WOSlinker (talk) 15:28, 1 March 2026 (UTC)

Thank you, that helps. I think I'm also going to find this a very useful report. —Bruce1ee^talk 15:48, 1 March 2026 (UTC)

So nice! Now I know what I'll be doing for the next hour or so. – Jonesey95 (talk) 18:29, 1 March 2026 (UTC)

This excites me very much! Bookmarking this posthaste. Will be very helpful in finding and eliminating the small pockets of various combinations. Thanks for creating and sharing! Zinnober9 (talk) 02:25, 2 March 2026 (UTC)

em tags neutralized. Now that I've done that, I see something on this new page that makes me have a minor request. Would it be easy to add a "hide empty columns" check, or would that be a bother (to you or to the query runtime)?

Not concerned about an empty rows check since that search could just be manually removed from this query at those points in time since that would mean a firefly cell was emptied, and we could take care of that search by firefly (Stripped tags in Wikipedia Talk would likely be the first case of this). Zinnober9 (talk) 20:50, 8 March 2026 (UTC)

As of a few minutes ago, the last error type over 1 million finally fell; Missing end tags (999,925) is now below 1 million on Firefly! Only errors in User talk space (1,068,838) and the grand total (1,881,637) are still above 1 million.

Next few major achievements I see happening on the milestone horizon (in no particular order, and probably this year?) are:

• User talk errors dropping below 1 million (1,068,817)
• Stripped tags dropping under 100k (138,925)
• Project talk dropping to zero (42,955)
• Misnested tags dropping to zero (52,573)
• Complete elimination of the strike tag backlog (3126)

Well done everyone! Zinnober9 (talk) 02:23, 3 March 2026 (UTC)

Amazing work. I fixed a few thousand missing end tag errors today and yesterday when I saw that we were getting close to the million mark. There are tons of pages with many missing /p tags that are pretty easy to fix.

I've also been chipping away at strike tags. The report at User:Jonesey95/Pages with many strike tags currently shows the smallest pages (by character count) containing strike tags, because I got tired of working on pages that took forever to load.

Legobot's operator is busy with academic work, but if the bot comes back, it could work on about 18,000 User talk pages with "TWA/Earth" or just "TWA" in the name, each of which has at least three Linter errors. That batch alone would get us close to a million errors in User talk space. Links are on the bot's talk page.

WOSlinkerBot has been doing a great job with misnested tags. – Jonesey95 (talk) 02:54, 3 March 2026 (UTC)

I've been trying to get TenshiBot 6 to be automatic, hopefully that'll be able to make a dent in misnested tag strikeouts. Tenshi! (Talk page) 14:34, 3 March 2026 (UTC)

That would be great. Those misnested s tags are a pain to do manually. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:46, 3 March 2026 (UTC)

As a further note, it's now running automatically while I'm supervising it, though it's pretty slow currently since it isn't filtering any of the pages it can't fix out of the list of pages it uses. Tenshi! (Talk page) 16:57, 7 March 2026 (UTC)

The bot seems to have a problem currently where it will swap tags. Usually I'm able to fix this on my own but it keeps running into cases of 3 tags which are the same. Trying to workout a remedy somehow. Tenshi! (Talk page) 21:37, 8 March 2026 (UTC)

Today all of a sudden lintHint isn't showing up on edit pages. Is this affecting anyone else? —Anomalocaris (talk) 17:40, 5 March 2026 (UTC)

@Anomalocaris: There was an incident earlier and user scripts are disabled. It doesn't apply to gadgets it seems. Tenshi! (Talk page) 17:49, 5 March 2026 (UTC)

@Anomalocaris: You can still use linthint at Special:BlankPage/lintHint,I'm wrong. I had the page open before issues occurred and scripts were disabled, and reloading the page has deactivated for me. My mistake. Not currently usable. but all user scripts are turned off due to the massive error at mediawiki this morning. Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#Meta-Wiki_compromised. Zinnober9 (talk) 18:30, 5 March 2026 (UTC)

Linthint is live again. Zinnober9 (talk) 02:28, 6 March 2026 (UTC)

I don't have any great solution for this page's errors and seeking other's opinion for what would be best here. The page User:GrahamHardy/BookCoverImages is very large, and has missing/misnested em tag issues throughout (the small errors are an easy smalldiv fix). I tried (and failed) to fix it all the other day, but the fix was size prohibitive and crashed my browser, so I had to undo with a mea culpa. I'm seeing a couple options and neither is great, so hoping there's better option like an em div template that I can't find, ( {{em}} is an inline template), or if there's a community consensus for a final solution. I don't think an em command in the table's tablewide parameters will be in keeping with the intended usage since it's being used to escape em for the (notes) for the various titles, unless there's a {{escape|tag-to-escape|contents}} type of escape template. so I'm without a noninvasive solution right now.

The main two choices I see at this moment are splitting the page into 3-5 smaller pages and emming each bullet, or, since the user is gone (near daily user up until 2023 and nothing since), blanking with a "nofault, but please correct this error if you reinstate the contents" summary request, but both are a tad invasive.

Is there a better solution than either of these two, or is one of those solutions preferable to the other?

Thanks for your thoughts, Zinnober9 (talk) 19:49, 7 March 2026 (UTC)

I often find that replacing an inline wrapper with a block wrapper, without using templates, works well. But, of course, not always .... – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:03, 7 March 2026 (UTC)

Great solution. Thank you! Zinnober9 (talk) 21:43, 7 March 2026 (UTC)

I wonder if there is a way to find broken syntax that is a template that is closed with a link syntax: {{Ping|user]], but in general and not for a specific template. I was fixing lint error at and noticed the headings weren't being colored which tipped me off that something other than reported lint error was broken here. Gonnym (talk) 09:22, 10 March 2026 (UTC)

Gonnym, maybe something for Wikipedia:CheckWiki? — Qwerfjkltalk 11:11, 10 March 2026 (UTC)