Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)

There seems to be an automated system for adding template data. (Once again we have used CamelCase – so user unfriendly! Please stop doing that everyone! Especially as an adjunct to a supposedly user-friendly change!)

But the problem is it adds the template data in templatedata tags (run together words, but at least not camel case!) without making sure they are in the appropriate noinclude tags.

Possibly it is is only supposed to work on template documentation pages, but it pops up on template pages too.

Is this a bug?

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 22:40, 31 July 2014 (UTC).

So, the page Ovin was speedy deleted. Disagreeing with the decision, I restored the page. However, I didn’t know there was a deletion review discussion happening at the time I re-created it. Would it be possible to create a note on the deletion log that the deletion of an article is currently under discussion? Oiyarbepsy (talk) 04:48, 3 August 2014 (UTC)

As someone who has been doing this manually for years, I hereby dutifully beg of anyone who is technically proficient and knows how to create and run a bot that will:

Please see the centralized discussion at Wikipedia:Bot requests#Create a BOT to alphabetize and organize categories automatically. Thank you, IZAK (talk) 09:10, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

Please see Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Create a BOT to alphabetize and organize categories automatically. Thank you, IZAK (talk) 22:48, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

I would like to move MediaWiki:Geonotice.js to MediaWiki:Gadget-geonotice.js, so that

If you enable the option “<gadget-geonotice>” which I added to testwiki:Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets, you should see a test notice on testwiki:Special:Watchlist. On English Wikipedia, the gadget would be enabled by default, to keep the current behavior. Helder.wiki 00:18, 27 July 2014 (UTC)

I just noticed a strange crunk on Derek Jeter and can’t find if this is a known issue. While viewing the mobile version of the page at en.m.wikipedia.org, I noticed that one (and only one) of the images is displayed vertically compressed to about half its height – it’s this one: File:Derek Jeter 2004.jpg. The image isn’t compressed on the desktop view, nor can I see any code that would cause it to be squished in mobile view. Given how high-traffic this article is I thought I’d bring it up here. I’m using Safari for iPad, if that helps. –NellieBly (talk) 16:16, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

During the past week I have running reflinks tools on the Sonia Sotomayor page to bring things up to date. It seemed to work well for the first 170 references, but cite #180 and #185 do not seem to match up with the actual article citations. In reflinks tools cite#180 gives a redlink for a “Gingrich” citation, but the article citation number has nothing to do with Gingrich. Could someone look at this, since it has not worked for two days. This is the reflink invoked to produce the list of link checks checklinks report. LawrencePrincipe (talk) 00:14, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

~~A company representative provided a logo File:HG logo-2012-spot Col-01.jpg~~

~~The image clearly has a white background.~~

~~Yet in the file history, as in the article Hydrogenics, the background is black.~~

~~What am I missing?~~

~~(My guess is that the background is not actually white, but transparent, but it should still not display as black, should it?)~~–S Philbrick(Talk) 13:05, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

This is just to let people know that all the protection templates have now been converted to use Module:Protection banner. See this thread for the background behind the switch and for the list of templates affected. Also, please leave a note there if you notice anything strange with the converted templates. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{? talk ?} 18:12, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

The URL

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Option_symbol

displays only the following text…

No Wikipedia page appears.

I tried to submit this via Bugzilla, but it hung while loading. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 165.121.80.236 (talk) 22:18, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

Hi, at List of longest cantilever bridge spans the table sorting does not work properly (e.g. click to sort on “Main span” column, then click again and nothing happens). This seems to be something to do with the row “many bridges with shorter span”. What is the best way to fix this? Is there a way to fix it other than just removing that row from the table? 86.128.1.157 (talk) 00:19, 6 August 2014 (UTC)

Hi, We came across the following service http://geoiplookup.wikimedia.org/, and would like to know few things associated with this service:

1) How much traffic we can cope with this service. 2) How reliable is this service in terms of availability and results. 3) Is there any pricing associated with this service or is it free of cost.

Looking forward to a reply from your end. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Nmalh7 (talk • contribs) 03:24, 6 August 2014 (UTC)

Where do I complain/offer feedback about the Wikipedia app/mobile version (not sure if those are the same thing, but I think they are). If that place is here, I’d like to suggest that the preloaded edit summaries be removed or de-emphasized. I’m talking about the screen that comes up on the app after you have made an edit, but before saving, that asks “How did you improve this article?”, with four options: Fixed typo, Fixed grammar, Added links, and Other. Since this feature was added, the “Fixed typo” edit summary has predictably become very popular – it is the first and most prominent option, and it’s not obvious that skipping the edit summary is possible – but almost never accurate. As a patroller, I would rather see no edit summary at all than a false one; false edit summaries, until recently, usually indicated to me that a user was purposefully trying to evade detection. –Bongwarrior (talk) 09:35, 6 August 2014 (UTC)

Without logging on I look at any WP article and the first two tabs across the top read “Article” and “Talk”.

Then I log on and the tabs change to “Page” and “Discussion”. Why? This might confuse a new user.

Suggest changing the tabs to read “Article” and “Talk”, to agree with the way articles and talk pages are referred to throughout the project.

Monobook skin, Firefox 31: Noyster (talk), 10:12, 6 August 2014 (UTC)

When editing many pages (in Chrome + Windows 7), for instance List_of_longest_cantilever_bridge_spans, I see two errors in the console:

Ruslik_Zero 10:37, 6 August 2014 (UTC)

The link in a tab button at the top of Wikipedia pages to a non-existing page (like say a non-existing talk page) displays bluish purple. It is hard to distinguish them from existing pages. Is there css code that will make them red like normal links to non-existing pages. —teb728 t c 00:57, 6 August 2014 (UTC)

There seems to be an issue with the {{DISPLAYTITLE}} template. When it’s used in a article about an album, to override the normal italic formatting for the article title that’s embedded in the {{Infobox album}} template, an unsightly red warning is displayed at the beginning of the article. An example is the current version of “Europe ’72 (Live)“, here. Without the Displaytitle override, the article title would be displayed as “Europe ’72 (Live)”, but the parenthetic text is part of the album title and so should also be italicized. This was working fine before — and the italicization is still working — but now there’s a nasty message displayed, saying “Warning: Display title “Europe ’72 (Live)” overrides earlier display title “Europe ’72 (Live)”.” Anyone know how to get this fixed? — Mudwater ^(Talk) 19:53, 6 August 2014 (UTC)

When I look at the revision history for an article, the year includes a comma, such as “2,014.” In the history of this very page it says “Wikipedia:Village pump (technical): Revision history View logs for this page Browse history From year (and earlier): 2,014” Is there any country on earth where years are stated thus? This just looks peculiar. How hard would it be to format the display so years are displayed as they are everywhere else? Edison (talk) 00:28, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

Is anyone else having issues getting to webcitation.org? I have been trying for most of August 6, to archive some sites, and I have not been able to. It says the website is down. I also tried to access already archived links to no avail either. I know there was talk a while back that it was going to be shut down, due to lack of funding, so I hope this is not the case. If so, that is very disconcerting. – Favre1fan93 (talk) 03:52, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

You can see log messages by searching for the log message type, e.g. Special:Log/massmessage or Special:Log/import. If you search for log entries by log action, these two log entries will show up. For example, if someone sends a mass message, the log entry will still show up at Special:Log/massmessage, even if it says “log action removed”. It seems that deleted content accidentally is exposed to users this way. Is it really supposed to be like this?

I discovered this because I saw the log action quoted below when I was looking at “Special:Log/someaction” at metawiki. I won’t tell which log action I was looking at to avoid revealing unnecessary private information.

Stefan2 (talk) 12:53, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

Is there a way to get a merged feed for unregistered users over an IP range? Let’s say you’re @congressedits (which I’m not), and that Congress upgrades to a IPv6 system. Would the only way to search a standard subnet array be to search 2^64 (in other terms, 18446744073709551616) different usernames to cover the system? On a smaller scale, I’ve tried crawling a IPv6 ‘0/16’ network, which takes more than five hours and a whole lot of resources on both of our ends.

It seems like there should be an easier way to do this, either to query for active usernames over an IP range or to combine RSS feeds over a range without accessing them individually. Is there? What am I missing? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Joecover (talk • contribs) 19:55, 7 August 2014 (UTC)

In an article the templates are too many, so the last of them are not appear. Ok, the easy solution is to remove some of them. Is there any other solution? Xaris333 (talk) 02:50, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

It is at Greek wiki. el:?????? ??? ????????? ?????? ??? ????????? ??????? ??????????? Xaris333 (talk) 04:08, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

I’ve got a script, let’s call it Script A. When Script A finishes running its relatively lengthy function (takes about 500 ms on large pages like WP:ANI), I want it to notify Script B (in another file) that it is done running.

What’s the best way to do this?

If this were a normal JS environment that I had full control over, then I might use something like jQuery promises, but I don’t know if that’s an option here? Gary (talk · scripts) 06:39, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

Is there an easy way to generate a list of editors whose only edits are in their own userspace, so that it’s easier to locate (manually) editors who are using Wikipedia (innocently mostly) as a webhost? Skittle (talk) 09:39, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

I just did this manual undo because this undo “could not be undone due to conflicting intermediate edits; if you wish to undo the change, it must be done manually.” However, I looked at the history, and while Help:Undo#Undo says it “will fail if undoing the edit would conflict with later edits.” it seems to me (ISTM) that this edit would not have done so. (I’m not surprised by undo failing in such cases.) and If I’m not mistaken, this diff shows that there were no differences between the line as it existed right after the edit I wanted to undo and the line as it existed right before undo failed and I had to do it manually. Has undo always been this weak? ISTM that where there are no differences between a line as it existed right after the edit one wants to undo and the line as it existed right before an undo attempt, the undo should not fail. Yet that was the case, and it did fail. Therefore, undo seems to be broken. –{{U|Elvey}} ^(t•c) 16:11, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

The VisualEditor team is currently working mostly to fix bugs, improve performance, reduce technical debt, and other infrastructure needs. You can find on Mediawiki.org weekly updates detailing recent work.

The biggest visible change since the last newsletter was to the dialog boxes. The design for each dialog box and window was simplified. The most commonly needed buttons are now at the top. Based on user feedback, the buttons are now labeled with simple words (like “Cancel” or “Done”) instead of potentially confusing icons (like “<” or “X”). Many of the buttons to edit links, images, and other items now also show the linked page, image name, or other useful information when you click on them.

The team posts details about planned work on the VisualEditor roadmap. The VisualEditor team plans to add auto-fill features for citations soon. Your ideas about making referencing quick and easy are still wanted. Support for upright image sizes is being developed. The designers are also working on support for adding rows and columns to tables. Work to support Internet Explorer is ongoing.

The Editing team will be making two presentations this weekend at Wikimania in London. The first is with product manager James Forrester and developer Trevor Parscal on Saturday at 16:30. The second is with developers Roan Kattouw and Trevor Parscal on Sunday at 12:30.

Please share your questions, suggestions, or problems by posting a note at the VisualEditor feedback page or by joining the office hours discussion on Thursday, 14 August 2014 at 09:00 UTC (daytime for Europe, Middle East and Asia) or on Thursday, 18 September 2014 at 16:00 UTC (daytime for the Americas; evening for Europe).

If you’d like to get this newsletter on your own page (about once a month), please subscribe at w:en:Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Newsletter for English Wikipedia only or at Meta for any project. Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:13, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

I’ve recently become involved in editing Template:Iraqi insurgency detailed map. The opening syntax for the template is{{#invoke:location map|top |Iraq |AlternativeMap=Iraq location map2.svg |float=left |width=1800|caption=y}}My question is how to make it so the image, File:Iraq location map2.svg is rendered unclickable, so as to leave the icons representing various areas of Iraq as the only clickable pieces on the map? As it is now, the map is clickable, which, for those with Twinkle, ends up loading infoboxes over important information when the mouse hovers over it. Basically, it’s a minor nuisance with (hopefully) an easy solution. Normally, I would have added a blank |alt= command to make an image non-clickable, but this doesn’t seem to be working and I don’t understand this advanced coding to know what {{#invoke:… means. Any help? — Veggies (talk) 19:20, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

Labs projects are far less open with data than their Toolserver counterparts. Is there anything (I’ve already contacted some authors) we can do? Maybe a less fucked up naming system? (http://tools.wmflabs.org/50592 is returning a blank page)? Should we forking non-open data projects before User:Silke WMDE deletes the Toolserver backups? — Dispenser 21:13, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

I’ve been away on Wikibreak. I have noticed as I start to return that while I was gone there has been a change to the css that controls the display of <code>...</code>, which, as you can see is wrapped in pretty little boxes. I suppose that it looks ok for short little things; not so good when the wrapped text spans multiple lines or when the new css disrupts previous formatting. For example, Citation Style 1 error messages used to look something like this (font size is controlled by {{reflist}}):

But, the same error message now looks like this:

In Module:Citation/CS1/Configuration I can replace <code>...</code> with <tt>...</tt>:

But, while not supported by HTML5, <tt>...</tt> is still supported by some Wikipedia css somewhere. I can see where it is part of a <link rel="stylesheet" href="... very long link..." /> but I haven’t been able to find the matching (human readable) css source file – anyone know where it is? Can I trust that <tt>...</tt> will continue to be supported? If this change to <code>...</code> was necessary (I don’t think it is) then there needs to be a way to display code-like text without all the radiused borders.

In Module:Citation/CS1/Configuration, error messages are wrapped in .... Anyone know where that class is defined? Perhaps it can be modified to override the <code>...</code> styling.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 22:42, 9 August 2014 (UTC)

The sizing on the template Bo-textonly appears to have been adjusted to work with the Microsoft Himalaya font (default Tibetan font on MS Windows) which renders Tibetan text at a very small size. This template fixes that – but results in Tibetan text when displayed on other operating systems, or with other Tibetan fonts, being rendered too large and this can mess up line spacing. There is no “standard” size for Tibetan fonts – so one scaling size does not fit all – in fact some Tibetan fonts don’t need any enlargement at all. Is there a way of fixing this so the re-sizing is based on the default Tibetan font being used on the client system?

Meanwhile I’ve put the scaling size on this template back to 130% where it was before Great Brightstar increased it. This is not ideal for all systems – Tibetan text will still be too big on many systems and maybe a little small on Windows – but it seems to be about the best compromise based on the different systems I’ve tried it on.

I haven’t yet checked to see if this problem is found in other templates for Tibetan script.

Chris Fynn (talk) 06:08, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

Following is the output from http://dispenser.homenet.org/~dispenser/cgi-bin/dablinks.py?page=Female_genital_mutilation

I can’t see anything in the article which links to FGM. I copied the article and intended to omit parts of the copy to locate the problem, but the copy does not show any problems. Following is the output from http://dispenser.homenet.org/~dispenser/cgi-bin/dablinks.py?page=User:Johnuniq/sandbox4

Comparison of the two pages: [1]. I don’t think dablinks caches results. Any ideas on the discrepancy? Johnuniq (talk) 10:11, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

Is there a way to make the “You are editing an out-of-date revision of this page” warning more prominent, e.g. by making the text red instead of black? The black text never gets my attention. I use Monobook skin and IE11. Thanks. DH85868993 (talk) 10:37, 10 August 2014 (UTC)