Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)

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The technical section of the village pump is used to discuss technical issues about Wikipedia. Bug reports and feature requests should be made in Phabricator (see how to report a bug). Bugs with security implications should be reported differently (see how to report security bugs).

Newcomers to the technical village pump are encouraged to read these guidelines prior to posting here. Questions about MediaWiki in general should be posted at the MediaWiki support desk.

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Canned edit summaries and vandalism

Hi, I just wanted to ask if the web designers can change the mobile website to when you are previewing your edit, change "Example: Fixed typo, added content" to "Explain your changes in your box" or something like that because the canned edit summaries have caused a lot of vandalism, especially un-reverted edits. This new look can reduce canned edit summaries and vandalism. 68.228.254.131 (talk) 20:50, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

If you can link to such examples, that always helps. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 23:15, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

Actually, the canned edit summaries are pretty helpful with spotting vandalism. If I see >5 byte change with a canned edit summary of "fixed typo" then I immediately pull up a diff as the edit is likely to be some form of disruption. --NeilN ^{talk to me} 23:22, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

This, this, or this, has wrong edit summaries, two of them are vandalism. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.228.254.131 (talk) 23:19, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

OK... so where you say "canned edit summaries have caused a lot of vandalism", you meant that people use the wrong edit summary if they have nefarious purposes ? I presume you mean that they hide their nefarious purposes behind valid edit summaries, while without canned summaries, they'll likely use the edit summary not at all, or use it for nefarious purposes as well ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:26, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

There's a long-term plan to autogenerate simple edit summaries. I'm hoping that they will decide that "Changed teh → the" is one of the easy cases. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 06:18, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

Whatamidoing (WMF), why can't you folks in SF ever keep us in the loop with your "long-term plans"? How long are we talking about here, next year or 15 years from now? I thought you couldn't auto-generate edit summaries, because per Jdforrester it would be very poor form, and goes against our user expectation models. – wbm1058 (talk) 11:49, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

That particular Phab task is specifically about edits that add section headings, rather than some simple edits in general (which is what my comment is about). The specific Phab comment that you quote identifies four options, and rejects only one of them (the one in which you would not be allowed to edit or override the automatically prepared edit summary) as poor form and unexpected. I'm hoping for the third of the four options in that comment – but for the general case of some simple edits, not specifically for the case of only edits that happen to add a new section heading.

I don't have a schedule. My best guess doesn't extend beyond 'not this year'. Also, I fully expect that it will appear in VisualEditor (both modes) before it appears in any of the old wikitext editors (it'll almost certainly require Javascript, some of the necessary processing is probably easier to do in VisualEditor, etc.). See phab:T54859 for one of the VisualEditor-specific requests.

On the general question of how to stay in the loop for long-term plans, it sounds like you want the annual plan. The first draft for the coming fiscal year was just posted on Meta. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:27, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Sharedupload-desc-here

Moved to Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)

 – – Train2104 (t • c) 05:53, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

In late 2011 it was suggested (by user jonkerz) unlinking the Commons logo (File:Commons-logo.svg) in MediaWiki:Sharedupload-desc-here or making the link point to the actual file on Commons like it is in pt:MediaWiki:Sharedupload-desc-here. In many other major/important Wikipedias that logo is either unlinked or link points to the corespondent Commons file page. Hereby I've opened this thread to decide together what to do. XXN, 20:59, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

Working with files in several Wikipedias, jumping from on wiki to another and trying to access file pages from articles, sometimes I've encountered a problem here clicking quickly on that logo to access the specific file page of the viewed file on Commons, but in result I just opened one more time the page File:Commons-logo.svg:( That's why personally I prefer to see that link pointing to the corespondent Commons file page of the viewed file, or at least to see it unlinked. XXN, 20:59, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

I didn't even notice this...but now that I do, it seems really silly. Support delinking it. – Train2104 (t • c) 19:41, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

Moved to VPR as this is a proposal – Train2104 (t • c) 05:53, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

Panoramic viewer?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T70719

Does Wikipedia currently yet support any panoramic viewers for 360 degree (or less) panoramic images/movies? Thanks. SharkD  Talk  02:23, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

No, and I doubt that it's going to turn up in the annual plan for next year. But I keep hoping, because there's a Commons contributor who has made some awesome images in that format. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 06:23, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

For anyone willing to work on this, it wouldn't be terribly hard. It's basically just moving the pannellum JS library into a MediaWiki extension, making sure that the thumbnail renderer outputs some sort of hook for the library to detect and adding the RL modules. It's a couple of days work but you need to have the days.. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:20, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

I have been using Pannellum on my website too. It works pretty well IMO. Performance seems better than Panosalado. SharkD  Talk  23:56, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

Update: I asked around, and there's a proof-of-concept gadget at Commons. See c:Template:Pano360. But it's there, not here, etc. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:31, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

There seem to be some issues with it. For instance, there is something very wrong with this panorama. SharkD  Talk  15:21, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

Also, the template is not designed for use inside articles. Just image description pages. Though that would be easy to fix IMO. SharkD  Talk  15:23, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

Collapsing part of an infobox based on the number of rows of data

Help from parser function expert needed. There is an infobox I'm trying to develop {{UK railway station usage/sandbox}} that every year should get a new line of data added with the data for that year. Is there a way to specify within the infobox coding to display only the most recent three rows and collapse any additional rows into a labelled section (and omit that section if the total number of rows is two or less)? I don't want to specify that the three rows displayed are, for example, 2016, 2015 and 2014 but to take the three most recent rows for which data exists even if it ends up displaying 2015, 2013 and 2012 because 2016 and 2014 aren't recorded. I'd hope that this also makes the infobox dynamic and doesn't require huge amounts of recoding when 2017 gets added. Nthep (talk) 21:55, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

I have thought about this (for another language and use-case, but from technical POV it is the same). IMO, parser functions isn't the best solution (it will be very hacky). I would suggest Lua, which may be relatevily simple. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 16:21, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for that, after investigation that was where I was thinking things will end up. Nthep (talk) 18:40, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

Sister projects search results

Hello,

In September of last year the Discovery Search team reached out to this community to discuss early work on showing other Wikimedia projects in the search results. The team will soon be ready to put final code updates on the most recent A/B test and make this change happen in production. This update will only add search result snippets from the Wikimedia sister projects in a sidebar to be displayed on the search results page. The release date is expected to be near the end of April 2017 on all Wikipedias.

Further testing is described at Cross-wiki Search Result Improvements/Testing.

If you want to test these results in advance, directions for self-guided testing are available. Additional information on this work can be found at Cross-wiki Search Result Improvements. We are excited to bring what is one of the more substantial changes to search to Wikipedia and appreciate your feedback.

Thank you, CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 22:02, 6 April 2017 (UTC)

Is there a way that a wiki can decide which sisterprojects they want or don't want to display? E.g. I can imagine people objecting to the too commercial aspect of Wikivoiyage, or the risk of copyright violations from wikisource, or unwanted images from Commons, or... For example, on one of the example images the WMF presents, when people look for rainbows, they get a Wikivoyage snippet about Camping Rainbows in Egestorf[1]. That seems to me to be highly unwanted behaviour. The risk for e.g. BLP violations from Wikinews also seems considerable. In general, looking at the provided examples, the added value from Wikibooks, Wikivoyage, Wikinews, Wikiversity and Wikiquote seems minimal. Commons and Wiktionary are much better candidates for this. Fram (talk) 12:10, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

@CKoerner (WMF):, in case you didn't see this. This seems to me to be one of those WMF changes which go hardly noticed beforehand, and then will get some backlash from the regulars for the reasons I gave above once it gets implemented.

@Fram: You can use CSS to hide each of the blocks if desired, they have distinct classes for each and every type of block. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:31, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

Thanks but no thanks. This is about what we will show to each and every reader, not about me. Do we really want to show e.g. the way-too-often purely promotional Wikivoyage results? Or the apparently similar Wikiversity results (this is the Wikiversity result when I look for "beer", this probable copyvio is the one I get when I search "madonna"). When someone looks for spaghetti, do we really want to show them this from Wikibooks? This is the kind of shit our "sister" projects have, but which doesn't belong on wikipedia at all. Fram (talk) 10:13, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

Who said anything about personal CSS ? We could easily hide them from en.wp centralised CSS styling. There would be no performance impact or other limiting factors as far as I can determine. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:21, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

I misunderstood, I thought the "you can use CSS" refered to me personally using CSS, not enwiki in general doing this. Thanks for the explanation and the suggestion! Fram (talk) 20:03, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

I have now tested with other search terms, and one blocker is easily found: just like originally happened with "related articles" and a number of other WMF attempts to be modern, you again succeed in showing fair use images in a place where they are not allowed: [2]. As long as this happens, this should not be deployed to enwiki (or anywhere else probably). If and when this is corrected, a good discussion about which sister projects are wanted and which aren't should be had before deploying this (for me, only wiktionary and perhaps non-fair use images actually are a positive addition). Oh, and the layout (for me at least) on a result like this is very bad, with the "not exists" on the left and the results on the right. Fram (talk) 09:06, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

I note that the media search results have always returned fair use images and shown them in the results. https://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&profile=images&search=smurf&fulltext=1 —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:31, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

Indeed, that doesn't seem like a blocker to me. I agree though that Fram's second link looks a bit odd, with 'doesnt exist' on the top left, suggested enwiki results on the right, and then results from other projects way at the bottom. Sam Walton (talk) 09:35, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

Maybe people referring to a 'doesnt exist' message are logged out when they search and see:

The page "Ggo" does not exist. You can create a draft and submit it for review or request that a redirect be created, but consider checking the search results below to see whether the topic is already covered.

Logged in I see:

The page "Ggo" does not exist. You can click on "Ggo" to create the page directly, or you may create a draft and submit it for review, but consider checking the search results below to see whether the topic is already covered.

For me in Firefox the layout depends on the zoom level and window width. At 90% to 170% and full screen the layout is OK with Wikipedia results below the italicised message and Sister projects to the right. At 80% I get what others describe with Wikipedia results to the right of the message, and Sister projects below all the Wikipedia results and to the left. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:31, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

I meant the second (logged-in) message. Firefox, full screen, 100%. Whatever the resolution, the results should look the same as in the current search results (and the same as results where a page does exist). Fram (talk) 11:22, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

ListeriaBot adding non-free images to Wikipedia namespace page

Does anyone know why User:ListeriaBot keeps adding non-free images to Wikipedia:Tambayan Philippines/Task force LGU/Provinces in Wikidata with this edit? I've asked about this at User talk:ListeriaBot#Adding non-free images, but not sure how active that page is. The three files being continuously added are licensed as non-free, although one of them is shadowing a Commons file of the same name. From the bot's talk page, it appears to have been the subject of other discussions on VP/T before. Maybe it's something with the files themselves, but they should be used outside the article namespace per WP:NFCC#9. -- Marchjuly (talk) 02:11, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

It is operated by user:Magnus Manske. Given that the images are those named on Wikidata, it may expect it is adding a commons image. So the bot should be reprogrammed to check that the added image is actually the one from commons. It the talk is ignored,then we can block the bot without further warning, as bot operators must be responsive. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 02:23, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

These files are local ones which shadow ones on Commons. There appears to be a licensing conflict - Commons has a {{PD-PhilippinesGov}} which says that works produced by officers/employees of the Philippine government are in the public domain, while we have a {{Non-free Philippines government}} which says that the work is a product of the Government of the Philippines which does not permit commercial use, making it non-free. I have no idea which one is correct. – Train2104 (t • c) 02:44, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

@Train2104: Per c:COM:CRT#The Philippines the clause for prior approval is determined to be a non-copyright restriction and can be safely ignored for the purposes of Wikimedia Commons by policy. Therefore works of the Philippine Government is considered to be under the Public Domain. Generally, Commons should always be given deference when it comes to copyright templates over local enwiki templates. Their policies are kept up to date far better than our ever will be. --Majora (talk) 03:28, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

This TfD was closed as no consensus. A discussion should be started elsewhere to standardize the two. – Train2104 (t • c) 03:34, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

It was closed that way because TfD is not the place to have a drawn out discussion on the merits of non-copyright restrictions. Rightly so in my opinion as TfD was never designed for that purpose. In my opinion, the 929 transclusions of {{Non-free Philippines government}} probably have to be gone through. The copyright template needs to be replaced with the proper one (again, giving deference to Commons on matters of copyright), and the files need to be moved to Commons and deleted off of enwiki.

As for the actual original purpose of this thread. @Marchjuly and Graeme Bartlett: it doesn't looks like these photos are actually fair use but are considered free. There doesn't seem to be a need to block the bot at this time. --Majora (talk) 03:44, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

The TfD listed above is over a year old; we can try again. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 04:04, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

The files being added are licensed as non-free. If that's incorrect, then maybe they should be re-licensed. Moreover, if the other two are also shadowing Commons files, then maybe all three should be speedied per WP:F8 if applicable. Just for reference, the diffrences between Commons and Wikipedia on the licensing of Philippine governments files was discussed at Wikipedia talk:Non-free content/Archive 64#Philippine government works back iat the end of 2015, but that was archived without anything being resolved. There is the much older discussion at Wikipedia talk:Non-free content/Archive 14#Template:Philippines-politician from 2006. -- Marchjuly (talk) 04:37, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

@Graeme Bartlett: The bot has re-added File:Ph seal bataan.png, File:Ph seal biliran.png and File:Ph seal camiguin.png and will probably keep re-adding them each time they are removed. While it's true c:File:Ph seal camiguin.png, c:File:Ph seal bataan.png and c:File:Ph seal biliran.png exist on Commons, no information at all is provided about them and they appeared to have been transferred to Commons from ceb.Wikipedia. If the Commons files are fine, then the local versions on not needed here; moreover, leaving them as is will only confuse things and mistakenly lead others to use them incorrectly. If the file names weren't the same, I could just replace the local files per NFCC#1 with the PD ones and let the locals be deleted as orphans. Because the names are the same, however, there is a chance someone will simply re-add the files in good faith so that they are not orphans. Do you think it would be OK to tag the locals with {{db-f8}}? Please note that although the file formats are the same for all files in looks to me that the quality of at least two of the local files is better than their Commons versions. -- Marchjuly (talk) 01:20, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

I deleted File:Ph seal biliran.png as it was identical to one on Commons. Other two files are not identical to those on Commons and the difference is not only in size. I do not know which of them are better. They can be uploaded to Commons under different names and deleted from enwiki. Ruslik_Zero 20:04, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

Ok, I moved the remaining files to Commons: c:File:Ph seal camiguin2.png and c:File:Ph seal bataan2.png, updated file links and deleted them from enwiki. Ruslik_Zero 20:30, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

Thank Ruslik0 for taking a look and figuring out how to resolve this. -- Marchjuly (talk) 21:47, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

API query to determine page protections

I need to determine the edit/move protections on a page via the API (e.g., office, full, semi, pending-changes, etc).

It is not easy to do via category memberships. For example, although there is a top-level "Category:Wikipedia semi-protected pages", beneath that there is also a "Category:Wikipedia_indefinitely_semi-protected_pages" and many other variations. When recursing through to find sub-categories, you quickly encounter sub-categories that contain pages that aren't under protection, and a greater depth, almost listing every category on the encyclopedia.

I haven't been able to find an efficient way to do this on a per-page basis. Could I download the entire list of protected pages from the "Special:" function? Probably, but that seems like overkill for a quick task. West.andrew.g (talk) 02:21, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

mw:API:Info#inprop=protection. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:44, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

Yes, the API is probably the best route. Membership of categories like Category:Wikipedia semi-protected pages does not necessarily mean that all the pages in that category are semi-protected, nor that all semi-protected pages are in that category. The category is merely a reflection of the templates on the page such as {{pp-semi}}. For example, User:Redrose64/Sandbox12 is semi-protected until 09:28, 7 May 2017 (UTC), but is not in any "protected pages" cats. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 09:30, 7 April 2017 (UTC)

Abandoned rater gadget

User:Kephir/gadgets/rater is a useful (and popular?) tool for quickly adding WikiProject ratings from an article's page, but it has been abandoned for some time now (with a number of suggestions on its talk page). Would anyone be interested in adopting it? czar 00:55, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

If memory serves, User:Kaldari was working on a similar script at one point. Either User:Harej or User:Walkerma may know who is active in assessment work these days. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:39, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

I have a script at User:Kaldari/assessmentHelper.js. It's a lot simpler than Kephir's tool. It's basically just for adding new assessments (rather than changing existing ones). Kaldari (talk) 20:33, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Thanks Kaldari for letting us know. Sorry, I don't have the tech skills to help, and I'm not sure who would be able to help with this. We're having trouble even getting someone to look after the assessment bot which has recently been limited to manual mode only. Walkerma (talk) 03:55, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

External links

Hi! Please see my messages on talk pages this and this.

Actually the matter is that I have seen some English film wiki-pages, which have some links repeated two times; one under #Reference section and other under #External_links section. Why a link has been provided two times in one page? I think a template ({{Extref}}) should be made to resolve this, which can be put in between the article as reference and those can be listed only under #External_links section. This will remove the repetation of a single link in a single article. I have discussed this matter with Admin:Cyphoidbomb, and he suggested me to ask it here.

Also I had a conversation with TropicAces, and the user accepted this matter here. But the problem there is the links have gone under notelist and might disturb other notes on that page. Please help, Thanks! M. Billoo 04:07, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

Ugh. Having some references in the references section and some more under a "notes" section that's misplaced underneath the external links? No thanks. Anomie⚔ 13:27, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

It's against MOS. See WP:LAYOUTEL "nor should links used as references normally be duplicated in this section". --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:00, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

code editor?

Is it just me of has the code editor been removed? It used to be that when editing Lua or JavaScript files, the editor changed to support the use of tabs, syntax coloring, regex search and replace. I have changed none of the settings at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing. I will miss that stuff if the code editor has been permanently removed.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 10:21, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

@Trappist the monk: It still loads for me. Maybe your internet connection speed is preventing it from loading, or something in your CSS/JS pages is messing with it. Jc86035 (talk) Use {{re|Jc86035}}
to reply to me 11:03, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

Those reasons would be surprising. No recent changes to User:Trappist_the_monk/common.js nor User:Trappist_the_monk/common.css; internet connection speed is plenty fast. We just had Thursday which may be a clue. I noticed this first yesterday(Friday) while editing sco:Module:Citation/CS1/Date validation – at the time, I suspected that sco.wiki didn't have the code editor installed. But, now that for me it isn't working at en.wiki, and we just had Thursday, I wonder if mwf hasn't done something to break the code editor.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 11:24, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

On code pages I have a <> icon at the top left of the edit box to switch between code and source editor. And in the source editor I can also click "Advanced" above the edit box to get a search and replace icon with regex to the far right. The interface is different from the code editor. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:10, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

That's the fix. Thanks.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 14:04, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

Find/replace parameters in the edit URL

How do the amfind and amreplace parameters in the edit summary work? In the infobox at Downtown (Petula Clark song)#Downtown .2788 there is a link for deprodding, which I wrote to contain the parameters amfind={%7Bproposed%20deletion%2Fdated%20files.*%7D%7D%0A*.*>&amreplace=%20 based on what I saw in old versions {{prod blp/dated}} before I converted it. However, when I click on the link, the prod template is still in the edit box. – Train2104 (t • c) 18:58, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

It would require user JavaScript to do anything with the url parameters. I found some old scripts at User:Jnothman/automod.js and User:Henrik/js/automod.js. A userspace search on automod finds more. I don't know whether they work and have significant use. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:00, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

In that case, we should probably remove it from widely visible maintenance templates... – Train2104 (t • c) 21:01, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

I see you did that. Let's see if users with such scripts object. xkcd: Workflow is sometimes quoted here. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:24, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

Well, I'd rather that they object than someone without the script click "deprod" and save the page, not knowing they didn't actually deprod. And userscripts shouldn't be advertised on article space maintenance tags. – Train2104 (t • c) 00:55, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

Question

This is an extremely odd question, and has far less to do with technical aspects of Wikipedia than it does with my own browser, but I just wanted to know if anybody else has encountered this and/or knows how to fix it. The situation is that frequently, when I'm typing a block of text that's longer than just a few lines, at some point in the text Google Chrome seems to have a weird predilection for self-inserting a hard line break when my text has wrapped to a new line in edit mode, causing my text to suddenly

do this. (In this instance I did it intentionally to show what I'm talking about. Normally, however, this happens without me doing anything to make it happen.)

And when that happens, it's a complete pain in the ass to correct it, typically requiring several repetitions of backspace backspace retype didn't work backspace backspace retype again before it actually corrects the formatting. So is this just happening to me, or have other people been having the same problem? Bearcat (talk) 20:56, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

Personalized CSS to hide certain types of divs

Once again I come to en-wiki for technical advice since my home-wiki is fairly small.

Would it be possible to have a piece of personalized CSS that hides certain types of divs? Let's say I have defined a div in MediaWiki:Common.css called "Foo" and I want to enter some code in User:InsaneHacker/common.css that makes any content within a "Foo"-div not show up when I load a page? Respectfully, InsaneHacker (💬) 16:41, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

You seem to have at least one misconception about CSS: Let's say I have defined a div in MediaWiki:Common.css called "Foo" is not how CSS works (at least with respect to the question you're asking--the "cascading" part of CSS is important to remember for later). CSS works by targeting some part of the HTML of a page, not the CSS of another stylesheet (which is what Common.css is). So you can hide certain kinds of divs just by knowing the structure of the HTML in the pages which you are trying to affect. It would help us help you if you gave us the exact kinds of divs you would like to hide. --Izno (talk) 17:32, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

I have limited css knowledge but I guess you refer to code similar to this in da:MediaWiki:Common.css:

 div.NavContent {
 	font-size: 100%;
        background-color: #fafafa;
        padding: 2px;
 }

It doesn't "define" NavContent but gives css rules for divs with the class NavContent. The class is assigned in wikitext or by the MediaWiki software. You should be able to override or supplement the css rules in personal css by replacing the part in { ... } with your own css, for example like this to hide it:

 div.NavContent {
        display: none;
 }

PrimeHunter (talk) 17:52, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

Yep, should work. I'm using such CSS to prevent some text from being shown that's not useful to me, like the copyright warning before the save button. Regards SoWhy 17:56, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

@PrimeHunter and SoWhy:Thanks, exactly what I needed. Respectfully, InsaneHacker (💬) 18:36, 9 April 2017 (UTC)

Can't start WP:GLOO

Hi. I have been trying to install Igloo, by pasting the code into my common.js file and vector.js file. I then cleared my cache, but it did not help. Can you please help me? Cheers, FriyMan ^talk 07:27, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

It says to install with importScript('Wikipedia:Igloo/gloo.js'); which you did correctly. Wikipedia:Igloo/gloo.js says mw.loader.load("//tools.wmflabs.org/igloo/code/Igloo/gloo.js");. But I get a 503 Service Unavailable error message at http://tools.wmflabs.org/igloo/code/Igloo/gloo.js. See List of HTTP status codes#5xx Server error. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:05, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

@FriyMan: at User:FriyMan/common.js, you have exactly the same problem that you had at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 153#My Twinkle stopped working. - you have omitted the terminating semicolon from the previous line. In Javascript (as with many other programming languages like Pascal and C), programs comprise a list of statements, and it's not necessarily one statement per line - newlines are largely irrelevant (except when the // form of comment is used). It is semicolons that are used to separate the statements, and omitting a semicolon between two statements will usually cause both statements to fail. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 18:50, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Remove "day by day" sections from Watchlist?

Is there a way to tweak the Watchlist to list changes without regard to which day they were edited on? If I've been gone for a few days, my watchlist shows me pages changed today, followed by pages changed yesterday (sometimes listing the same pages with yesterday's changes), and so on for the day before that, etc.

I would prefer to simply see a list of all pages changed, with a single link I could click on to show me the diff of the page since the last time I visited it.

Is there a Preference or a .js/.css tweak for this? Thanks. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:56, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

There is a(n ancient) phabricator task for this at phab:T10681. --Izno (talk) 15:53, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

@Jonesey95: Add $('.mw-changeslist > h4').hide(); to your custom skin script (e.g. User:Jonesey95/vector.js). But this also affects the Recent Changes page.

To enable the tweak only for the Watchlist page, use instead:

if ( mw.config.get( 'wgCanonicalSpecialPageName' ) == 'Watchlist' ) {
$('.mw-changeslist > h4').hide();
}

--XXN, 17:49, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Neither of these tweaks worked for me. I still see the day headers (e.g. "10 April 2017" in bold before today's list of changed pages). Also, based on what the code looks like it should do, wouldn't it just hide the headers but leave the changed pages grouped by day? I want to see all changes by page, regardless of which day the changes happened on. – Jonesey95 (talk) 18:06, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Do you have "Expand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent" enabled in Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-watchlist? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:47, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Yes. I want to see all changes since the last time I viewed a page, not just the arbitrary change that happens to be the most recent one. I find it difficult to imagine a use case for disable that checkbox. – Jonesey95 (talk) 20:00, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

@Jonesey95: You have introduced this code inside another conditional statement,[3] this is why it didn't work. Move the new code below the last ending curly bracket and it will work. It removes the date headers in page, leaving an uninterrupted list of entries. --XXN, 20:00, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

@XXN: Your Javascript is unbroken, but that is not what Jonesey wants. He wants the functionality described at the phab task, which would take probably a hundred lines of Javascript to execute on the client side. --Izno (talk) 20:19, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Hmm, I misunderstood. Sorry. Now I remember the proposal at the Community Wishlist Survey. XXN, 20:36, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

(A) Oops, that's embarrassing. (B) Thanks to all for your attention to this trivial request. I have bumped the phab task to see if anyone is paying attention to it. – Jonesey95 (talk) 01:02, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

My userscript Watchlist-openUnread can show you diffs of pages since you last viewed them, rather than just since the previous day. It might not quite be what you are looking for, in that it will open the n newest or oldest unread pages rather than a specific page, but that might be good enough. - Evad37 [talk] 01:50, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-15

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• Tidy is going to be replaced with an HTML5 parsing algorithm. Bad HTML in wikitext would cause problems on a number of wikis. There is now a ParserMigration extension on all wikis that you can use to help clean this up. You can read more about how you can use it. [4]

Changes this week

• Some older web browsers will not be able to use JavaScript on Wikimedia wikis from this week. If you have an old web browser on your computer you can upgrade to a newer version. [5]
• New filters for Recent changes will come to Wikidata and Persian, Russian, Turkish and French Wikipedia on 11 April. The schedule has been changed to fix the user intent prediction filters for some wikis. User intent prediction means the filter tries to make it easier for editors to determine if the edit was made in good faith or not. Other wikis will get it later. [6]
• The list of special characters in the wikitext editor and the visual editor will now have a group of Canadian Aboriginal characters. [7]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 April. It will be on all wikis from 13 April (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 11 April at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• Because of a data centre test you will be able to read but not edit the wikis for 20 to 30 minutes on 19 April and 3 May. This will start at 14:00 (UTC). You might lose edits if you try to save during this time. You can read more about this.
• RevisionSlider will change how you move between revisions. This will be available on the test wiki from 11 April. It will come to other wikis later if users like the change. You can test it and give feedback.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

18:34, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

How would I go about creating a Bot-policy related group of task in phabricator?

I did a lot of work behind the scenes on bot-related policy stuff recently. A lot of that involved creating tasks in phabricator.

However, it would be quite nice to be able to flag all bot-policy related tasks with a tag, or group them under some kind of umbrella project so they can all easily be found and can be tracked, and possibly sub-categorized within the umbrella project. How would I go about doing that?

E.g. having some hierarchy like

1. #BotPolicy
   1. #BotPolicy-Account
   2. #BotPolicy-Cosmetic
   3. #BotPolicy-Communication
   4. #BotPolicy-<other subtask>

Then I could flag T161467 with #BotPolicy-Communication. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 20:43, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

@Headbomb: See mw:Phabricator/Creating and renaming projects. — JJMC89 (T·C) 21:06, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

I tried that, and while I can find lots advice on when it's OK to do something, an hour later, I can't make any sense of how to actually do it, or what it is exactly I want to do (do I want to create a new tag, or does this need a new project, etc...). There's no sandbox, so I'd rather not screw it up. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 21:13, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

"How to actually do it" is covered under "Permission" (second item). A tag is a project. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 10:36, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

Somehow, I missed that, ugh. I hate those type of brainfarts. @AKlapper (WMF): are tags re-nameable once they have been created, or are they immutable? Can priority be set on a per-tag basis (e.g. High priority for #FirstTag, Normal priority for #SecondTag)? Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 11:23, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

@Headbomb: For renaming projects/tags, see Renaming projects. Priority is independent from projects/tags (one task has one priority; one task can have several associated projects/tags). In theory, Herald rules could be used to set a task's priority when a project/tag is associated to a task, in practice I doubt that this is a good idea when it comes to realistic project management. Have you looked into using columns on workboards instead? --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 11:57, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

The columns/workboard is pretty much exactly what I had in mind, yes. One single tag should be enough then. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 12:01, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

Why is this "needed" on phab? For the most part it is a global system, but you seem to be referring to policies related to only the English Wikipedia. Are you referring to tasks realted to the global bot policy? — xaosflux ^Talk 23:47, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

It might not be *needed* on phab, per se, but it would likely be the easiest way to track things. I'm thinking en-wiki mostly, and nothing that would be mandatory. I just want a way to categorize/track things related to bots/bot policy. For instance bot authentication, security, edit summary improvements, improvements related to cosmetic bot policy, bot interactions with watchlists, etc. A lot of that would be of use to non-English wikis, however, but en-specific things could be tagged #BotPolicy-en or similar if that's prefered. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 00:17, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

I think some sort of #bots in general certainly could be helpful. — xaosflux ^Talk 05:04, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

T162685 for those interested. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 13:38, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

Move toward a simplistic design

It's 2017 and the UI design is dominated by simplistic or flat design or whatever it is. But Wikipedia didn't catch up the trend. Basically what it means is to remove all the gradients things like gradient buttons and gradient borders. Here is my attempt:

Proposed modification to site skin

.mw-body { border-left: 1px solid #cacaca; border-right: 0px; border-top: 1px solid #CACACD; border-bottom: 0px; } body{ background: none; } #mw-page-base{ background: none; } #mw-head-base { border-left: 1px solid #cacaca; margin-left: 176px; background: #f7f7f7; height: 5.2em; } div#mw-panel div.portal{ background: none; } div.vectorTabs ul li{ background: none; } div.vectorTabs span{ background: none; } div.vectorTabs ul{ background: none; } div.vectorTabs li.selected{ background: none; } div.vectorTabs{ background: none; } #left-navigation { margin-left: 12em; } #right-navigation { margin-right: 9px; } #firstHeading{ border-bottom: 0px; } #siteSub{ display:none; } div#footer { border-left: 1px solid #cacaca } div.vectorTabs li.selected a, div.vectorTabs li.selected a:visited { color: #0645ad; text-decoration: none; } #mw-head a:visited{ color: #0645ad; }

Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/xuz0wik.png

You can evaluate it by pasting it to your user common.css (here).

Golopotw (talk) 05:01, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

You may be interested in Isarra's work on mw:Skin:Timeless. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:40, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

And its deployment progress. We're very organised. Very. -— Isarra ༆ 15:00, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

Non-free image in Teahouse archive

For some reason File:Action-centre-warning.PNG is showing up as being used in Wikipedia:Teahouse/Questions/Archive 290#Disapearing image file (but not image page)?, which is not something allowed per WP:NFCC#9. I've tried a couple of times to link/hide the file, but can't seem to get it done. Anyone know what's going on here and how to resolve this? Thanks in advance. -- Marchjuly (talk) 07:42, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

[[:File:Action-centre-warning.PNG]] with a colon in front doesn't produce a File usage entry but my tests at User:PrimeHunter/sandbox3 show that [[:Media:Action-centre-warning.PNG]] and [[Media:Action-centre-warning.PNG]] do produce an entry even though the file is not displayed in the page. I don't know whether it's a bug or feature. A Media link Media:Action-centre-warning.PNG bypasses the file page and goes straight to the actual file so readers don't see license information. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:52, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

Its a "new" feature, but how new I do not know. But it seems like if you change :media with :file it does not show up. (there is other pages which links to that file, see: what links here (I see PrimeHunter said the same ...) Christian75 (talk) 13:34, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

It's not that new, I've come across this before, I don't recall exactly where. Werieth (talk · contribs) at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 122#File usage bug alludes to a similar problem ("perhaps it was a [[Media: link causing the false hit") so it seems that they were aware of it three years ago. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 13:52, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

Sorry, I was only refereeing to the :file - I didn't knew of the existence of the media tag at all), and thought it was the behaviour of :file which had changed. But Mediawiki has some kind of explanation here (in the history of MW:Help:Images (e.g. here: https://www.mediawiki.org/enwiki/w/index.php?title=Help:Images&oldid=332287 (search "Media:" on the page)) - I read it (:media) as a feature, and if it shouldn't be linked you should use :file - Christian75 (talk) 14:05, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Patrolled revisions

Is there a reason that the above proposal wasn't implemented, even though an RfC on it was successful? The basic premise is that an edit that isn't vandalism can be marked as patrolled, so RC patrollers or people checking their watchlist don't have to look at it. This would help prevent effort duplication, where lots of editors check an edit that might appear to be vandalism but isn't. The feature already exists in MediaWiki (see mw:Help:Patrolled edits), and has for many years. It's fully enabled on Wikidata, where it is helpful for checking recent changes. It doesn't affect the article at all, it's just a behind-the-scenes system for patrollers, very similar to STiki's system of classifying edits. Cheers, Laurdecl ^talk 05:29, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

Can you link to that successful RfC? Wikipedia talk:Patrolled revisions has at the top a long list of unsuccesful RfCs, but apparently not the one you refer to. Fram (talk) 07:15, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

@Fram: I believe this is the RfC the proposal page refers to (a whopping 259 supports). I can't see how this would be a controversial addition anyway. Laurdecl ^talk 07:51, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

Thanks. So, contrary to your initial post, after this 2009 RfC, the proposal (for a trial) was implemented, extensively tested and discussed, and finally the trial was ended after a lengthy 2011 RfC where the third fase concluded with the disabling of the feature: Wikipedia:Pending changes/Request for Comment February 2011/Archive 3. So the reason "the above proposal wasn't implemented" is that it was implemented, tested for a long time, and disabled again after community discussion. Please familiarize yourself with this history (which you could easily have found from the top of that old, old RfC) and you will rapidly "see how this would be a controversial addition". Fram (talk) 08:09, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

The controversy was over pending changes (which is now implemented anyway), not this. Patrolled revs simply tags edit as not patrolled until they, well, are. Laurdecl ^talk 08:30, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

Pending changes is implemented on a very, very limited basis, not all-out as it originally was planned. Fram (talk) 09:01, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

More importantly, that RfC wasn't even for patrolled revisions, but for pending changes, which isn't the same. Pending changes are not shown before being approved, unpatrolled revisions are shown live. Fram (talk) 08:13, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

From the page title: "Flagged protection and patrolled revisions". Laurdecl ^talk 08:27, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

Yes, so? The RfC was for pending changes, from that page "A trial of patrolled revisions is not planned yet.", and at the top "Patrolled revisions was not implemented." Do you have an actual RfC about patrolled revisions which supported the implementation of patrolled revisions specifically? Please don't point to your 2009 RfC (well, a poll, not an RfC) again, as you can read at the actual 2010 RfC "Only flagged protection will be part of the trial, patrolled revisions has not been developed yet." (emphasis mine): Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Pending changes trial. As for the use of patrolled revisions on Wikidata, it doesn't seem to be really have any positive effects, thousands of unpatrolled edits are falling of the end of the recent changes page, including vandalism and dubious changes. You are free to start a discussion or RfC about having patrolled revisions activated on enwiki, but pointing to an 8 year old RfC which started a failed trial of another tool only isn't going to help. Fram (talk) 09:01, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

I'm not sure where the RfC is, I'm only going by the project page, which says there was one. Wikidata isn't really a good example, they have a far smaller community than enwiki, and are apparently quite lax about incorrect data (see the response to this discussion I started). The feature is developed now, according to the MediaWiki page. In fact, the system is used to patrol new pages, it just hasn't been fully enabled. I would think that you of all people would want this, as it ensures every edit is in time patrolled (no more lurking BLP violations). We could sort recent changes by oldest first and make sure nothing slips through the cracks. If we really need an RfC then I could start it, but I don't feel this is controversial. Laurdecl ^talk 09:13, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

"I would think that you of all people would want this, as it ensures every edit is in time patrolled (no more lurking BLP violations)." It ensures nothing at all. At the moment, not even all pages get patrolled, never mind if we would mark all (or many) edits as unpatrolled. "Recent changes" only lists the most recent, there is no way to get "older" recent edits at the moment. Try it at Wikidata, please provide us a link to the "oldest" unpatrolled edit. If you can't, your claims about what this change can achieve are not based on the actual situation. Fram (talk) 09:46, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

The point is that good edits are marked as such, and RC patrollers can spend more time on edits that possibly aren't. A part of this would be an "auto patrol" right, probably granted after a certain level (extended confirmed, perhaps?). Take an example: If an IP makes an edit with a suspicious looking edit summary then it will be checked by more people than another with a summary like "fixed typo". Assuming the edit is good, this leads to lots of editors needlessly rechecking the edit and wasting their time. There is a feature on Wikidata that allows hiding of patrolled revisions. Scroll to the bottom of the unpatrolled list and you will find the oldest unpatrolled edits, voila. Laurdecl ^talk 09:59, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

"Scroll to the bottom of the unpatrolled list and you will find the oldest unpatrolled edits, voila." No, that is not how it works. The unpatrolled list only shows the 50 (default) or 500 (maximum option) most recent unpatrolled edits. Any unpatrolled edits older than that (thousands and thousands of them) are simply not shown. Fram (talk) 10:10, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

The limit is 5000, just as it is with watchlist, user contribs, page history etc. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:34, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

Cite button when editing

My cite shortcut button has recently disappeared from the top toolbar when I edit. I have refToolbar ticked in my Preferences. When I previewed this post it's reappeared. Any ideas why this might have happened?. Thanks. Eldumpo (talk) 15:37, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

It may be cause by a conflict with another script that you are using. Ruslik_Zero 20:03, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

wikibits.js is being removed on 25 April 2017

Some old Javascript, some of which has been deprecated for more than five years, is being removed later this month. Some old user scripts may need to be updated. For more information, see https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-ambassadors/2017-April/001574.html Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:22, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

Bots Newsletter, April 2017

Bots Newsletter, April 2017

Greetings! The BAG Newsletter is now the Bots Newsletter, per discussion. As such, we've subscribed all bot operators to the newsletter. You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future newsletters by adding/removing your name from this list. Highlights for this newsletter include: Arbcom Magioladitis ARBCOM case has closed. The remedies of the case include: Community encouraged to review common fixes Community encouraged to review policy on cosmetic edits Developers encouraged to improve AWB interface Bot approvals group encouraged to carefully review BRFA scope Reminders/Restrictions specific to Magioladitis BRFAs We currently have 27 open bot requests at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval, and could use your help processing! Discussions There are multiple ongoing discussions surrounding bot-related matters. In particular: RFC on COSMETICBOT Efforts at WP:CHECKWIKI to identify cosmetic fixes Requested move for the Bot Owners' Noticeboard A phabricator ticket T162685 has been made to have a "bots" tag, so issues related to bot frameworks can be tracked New things Several new things are around: A BAG Guide has been created (WP:BAGG, discussion). Users now have the option to hide AWB from their watchlists via a script (WP:HIDEAWB, discussion) The guidance on how to deal with bot issues has been overhauled (WP:BOTISSUE, discussion) The bot policy has been updated to clarify that bot operators are required to register accounts. (WP:BOTACCOUNT, discussion) Wikimania Wikimania 2017 is happening in Montreal, during 9–13 August. If you plan to attend, or give a talk, let us know! Thank you! edited by: Headbomb 00:29, 13 April 2017 (UTC) (You can unsubscribe from future newsletters by removing your name from this list.)

Tempate line gap

Does anyone have an explanation—or solution—for the gap between the two templates at List_of_films_considered_the_best#External_links? It looks monstrous but I can't find the cause of it. Betty Logan (talk) 00:56, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

I have a solution, but not an explanation :) I removed a couple blank lines, not sure which edit did the trick.--S Philbrick(Talk) 01:20, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

Problem with Commonist

Hello. Commonist doesn't work anymore. It worked 3 months ago, but it automatically updated today. I tried to make it work, updating my Java as well. It gives nothing. And I refuse to upload my photos 1 by 1. If anybody can help, I would greatly appreciate. Thanks, Jack ma (talk) 07:07, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

 Done I succeeded : execute the .jnlp with jawaws.exe, and manually added a security URL in java configurator (compulsory since 8.0) : http://neonstau.de/commonist/ws/commonist.jnlp. Not simple... Jack ma (talk) 07:26, 13 April 2017 (UTC)