Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)

 Policy Technical Proposals Idea lab WMF Miscellaneous 

• Table of contents
• First discussion
• End of page
• New post

The technical section of the village pump is used to discuss technical issues about Wikipedia. Bugs and feature requests should be made at Bugzilla (How to report a bug). Bugs with security implications should be reported to securitywikimedia.org.

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.

« Archives, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217

No purging on newer version of images

NOTE: Parallel discussion in progress at Commons:Village Pump#Problem with new version of image.

I uploaded newer version of the Introspective cover art. While the image page is already updated, the article shows the prior version of the cover art. How long can I wait? --George Ho (talk) 03:06, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Have you tried clearing your page cache? It could well be golding the 'old' version of the page. NtheP (talk) 15:42, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

I did delete "Temporary Internet Files" on Internet Explorer 9; old versions of images still appear. ...Well, I'm now seeing newer version of Showdown (Cheers)'s infobox image. However, Baby, Come to Me (Patti Austin and James Ingram song) should have the Japan single; I'm now seeing a French single. --George Ho (talk) 16:12, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

It appears the old thumbnail caching bug from mid-2011 has reappeared. I remember first seeing it around 23 May 2011 and the problem persisted to a greater or lesser degree through the summer of 2011. Around that time many users also reported very slow Wikipedia performance, even those on high-speed connections. I haven't seen much in the way of Wikipedia slowness (yet), but an image that I was trying to update yesterday failed to update the thumbnail cache, even after clearing my browser cache and purging the pages at Wikimedia Commons and on the English Wikipedia where the image is used. I tried a test edit by changing the thumbnail size by just one pixel, and the revised image appeared as it should have, but not if the image continues to use the same old thumbnail size. In 2011 the thumbnails would eventually get updated, but it could take 24-72 hours. I seem to recall this was assigned a bug tracking number, but after searching the Village Pump archives here and at Wikimedia Commons, I haven't been able to find the thread where that was mentioned. It's possible that the root cause was never properly identified and corrected, or someone may have re-introduced the bug with a software change that picked up a chunk of old source code from around mid-May 2011 or thereabouts. — Quicksilver^{T @} 05:46, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Even just changing the filename seems to fix the image; look at File:KDEN-TV Logo.png, which I changed from File:Logo-denver.png, while the unchanged File:KFWD T52.png is still waiting to get my change in. Nate • (chatter) 06:09, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Template:Bug, I think. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 19:41, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

That's it! Thanks for digging up the reference. — Quicksilver^{T @} 03:44, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

On File:Obama and Duke Duchess of Cambridge.jpg I get the following message on the 800px thumbnail no matter how much things are purged or refreshed, but can get other non-800px sizes: Error generating thumbnail
Error creating thumbnail: Image was not scaled, is the requested width bigger than the source? -- AnonMoos (talk) 13:45, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Right now, the files are not loading properly (or is loading slowly). Are tech guys debugging the problem? --George Ho (talk) 23:13, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Or maybe it's short-term loading problem. Now I'm confused. --George Ho (talk) 23:15, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Loading issues resolved? I see that loading is all right. Now then, anything uploaded this week has no issues. Look at "Smokin' in the Boys' Room"; loading is stable. --George Ho (talk) 04:38, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Related problems with images

Having the same problem myself; Telemundo has undergone a major brand imagining and many of their affiliates unveiled new logos in the last few days. I have been trying to update the local logos as I can, but have not been able to purge out the old revisions at all in articles. Tried in Opera, Chrome, IE10 both in regular and IE8 compatibility mode, and Firefox. Nate • (chatter) 03:16, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Probably also related is this: Having problems with a corrupted image discussion at Commons, which is still unresolved. Begoon ^talk 00:11, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Alpha version of the VisualEditor now available here

TL;DR: Today we are launching an alpha, opt-in version of the VisualEditor to the English Wikipedia. This will let editors create and modify real articles visually, using a new system where the articles they edit will look the same as when you read them, and their changes show up as they type enter them — like writing a document in a word processor. Please let us know what you think.

Why launch now?

We want our community of existing editors to get an idea of what the VisualEditor will look like in the “real world” and start to give us feedback about how well it integrates with how they edit right now, and their thoughts on what aspects are the priorities in the coming months.

The editor is at an early stage and is still missing significant functions, which we will address in the coming months. Because of this, we are mostly looking for feedback from experienced editors at this point, because the editor is insufficient to really give them a proper experience of editing. We don’t want to promise an easier editing experience to new editors before it is ready.

As we develop improvements, they will be pushed every fortnight to the wikis, allowing you to give us feedback as we go and tell us what next you want us to work on.

How can I try it out?

The VisualEditor is now available to all logged-in accounts on the English Wikipedia as a new preference, switched off by default. If you go to your “Preferences” screen and click into the “Editing” section, it will have as an option labelled “Enable VisualEditor”.

Once enabled, for each article you can edit, you will get a second editor tab labelled “VisualEditor” next to the “Edit” tab. If you click this, after a little pause you will enter the VisualEditor. From here, you can play around, edit and save real articles and get an idea of what it will be like when complete.

At this early stage in our development, we recommend that after saving any edits, you check whether they broke anything. All edits made with the VisualEditor will show up in articles’ history tabs with a “VisualEditor” tag next to them, so you can track what is happening.

Things to note

• Slow to load - It will take some time for long complex pages to load into the VisualEditor, and particularly-big ones may timeout after 60 seconds. This is because pages have to be loaded through Parsoid which is also in its early stages, and is not yet optimised for deployment and is currently uncached. In the future (a) Parsoid itself will be much faster, (b) Parsoid will not depend on as many slow API calls, and (c) it will be cached.
• Odd-looking - we currently struggle with making the HTML we produce look like you are used to seeing, so styling and so on may look a little (or even very) odd. This hasn't been our priority to date, as our focus has been on making sure we don't disrupt articles with the VisualEditor by altering the wikitext (correct "round-tripping").
• No editing references or templates - Blocks of content that we cannot yet handle are uneditable; this is mostly references and templates like infoboxes. Instead, when you mouse over them, they will be hatched out and a tooltip will inform you that they have to be edited via wikitext for now. You can select these items and delete them entirely, however there is not yet a way to add ones in or edit them currently (this will be a core piece of work post-December).
• Incomplete editing - Some elements of "complex" formatting will display and let you edit their contents, but not let users edit their structure or add new entries - such as tables or definition lists. This area of work will also be one of our priorities post-December.
• No categories - Articles' "meta" items will not appear at all - categories, langlinks, magic words etc.; these are preserved (so editing won't disrupt them), but they not yet editable. Another area for work post-December - our current plan is that they will be edited through a "metadata flyout", with auto-suggestions and so on.
• Poor browser support - Right now, we have only got VisualEditor to work in the most modern versions of Firefox, Chrome and Safari. We will find a way to support (at least) Internet Explorer post-December, but it's going to be a significant piece of work and we have failed to get it ready for now.
• Articles and User pages only - The VisualEditor will only be enabled for the article and user namespaces (so you can make changes in a personal sandbox), and will not work with talk pages, templates, categories, etc.. In time, we will build out the kinds of specialised editing tools needed for non-articles, but our focus has been on articles.

Final point

This is not the final form of the VisualEditor in lots of different ways. We know of a number of bugs, and we expect you to find more. We do not recommend people trying to use the VisualEditor for their regular editing yet. We would love your feedback on what we have done so far – whether it’s a problem you discovered, an aspect that you find confusing, what area you think we should work on next, or anything else, please do let us know.

Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 03:26, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

How will the WMF track the VisualEditor's quality impact on the encyclopedia? What metrics will be used? What parameter space in those metrics will determine success or failure of the tool? Jason Quinn (talk) 05:35, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

At the moment I imagine the quality tracking is "not at all", since it's only available to a small number of users - a large chunk of whom are going to be power users. Tracking quality wouldn't necessarily be useful. I'm actually working on a review of the VE's impact on full deployment now. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 19:47, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Oliver is correct; we don't currently plan to collect quantitative data whilst the VisualEditor is only in an opt-in state for a handful of users. Later, when it will be deployed to a much larger number of accounts, is the time for that. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 19:59, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

I was asking about post large-scale deployment. I was wondering if quality impact studies were going to occur at all. Your relies seem to imply that there will be some which partly alleviates my concern. I imagine modeling "quality impact" to be complex and subtle so I was curious about details such as the variables that will be tracked. The model ought to be made fully public and transparent so it can be reviewed and critiqued. It would be easy to misinterpret data in such a study. As the VisualEditor will affect a dramatic change to editing habits, a lot of thought needs to be put into such studies to make sure the editor is actually helping rather than harming the project. Jason Quinn (talk) 04:14, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

I agree. In my mind, post-deployment tracking has to be twofold. The first is quality, sure, but the second is sociological impact. Even if 90 percent of the edits from newcomers are perfect, if edit volume has increased tenfold there's still going to be a dramatic uptake in junk, and while I think we'd all agree that the good outweighs the bad, there, we have to be very careful that the uptake in junk doesn't burn out the users who deal with it. If it does, there's a knock-on effect on everyone else. We need to be measuring burnout as well as good/bad ratios.

Out of interest, how would you measure quality? Are we simply talking a very basic comparison between quality of pre-VE and post-VE edits using hand coding, or...? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 21:41, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

To approach your question in a very literal sense, I would take this problem by starting with a very simple foundation and modifying that step-by-step to make it more useful. This could lead to several models, which is fine. The question of quality impact of the VisualEditor seems very specialized and the solution is not likely going to fit easily into some textbook solution. It also doesn't make sense to try to develop some grand analytical solution: too many subjective aspects to be perfectly quantifiable in a way that means something. Some model that "does well enough" is probably the best to be hoped for. Let's first just mention some of the variables likely worth tracking:

• absolute number and percentage of reverts within X (24?) hours of an edit (in general and by IP/account editors)
• number and percentage of blocks within X (24?) hours of an edit (in general and by IP/account editors)

The key is to focus on discontinuities in the graphs and a change in these variables that persist long-term. I say "long term" because I advise not to pay too much attention to any initial "jumps". People will edit abnormally for a while upon the introduction of new features because they are curious about them and test them out (er, play with them). After a few weeks or a month, things will become "old hat" and settle down. Any changes in the variables between this point and the point prior to the introduction probably have some significant meaning.

Your argument about burnout is a good one but I would frame it differently. Instead of thinking of it as a sociological effect (which is complicated and messy to handle), I would turn it into an analytical question: is the encyclopedia accumulating more undetected/reverted vandalism because of the VisualEditor? It would take a bit of thought to figure out how to estimate the rate of "undetected/reverted vandalism". I'm not sure off the top of my head how to do it but I've seen studies that graph the expected lifetime of vandalism, and perhaps that could be combined with the above data to estimate a reasonable yes or no.

Once tracking variables have been settled upon, I would pick some sensible values by which they are allowed to change due to the introduction of the VisualEditor. If they change by more than that, they should trigger (at the minimum) a second-guessing to the value of the Editor and prompt more study of the VisualEditor's impact. Regardless, a large amount of unbiased, common sense will be required to interpret any results. I would not have the same people who developed the editor helping to judge its success or failure. Jason Quinn (talk) 17:35, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

You may also wish to look at some quick thoughts I had on useful metrics for VE once we get closer to full deployment (linked to from the agenda of the latest monthly Metrics and activities meeting). Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 16:05, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Widget for downloading tables into .csv format?

Hi, I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask this. I was referred by the Teahouse to come here.

I often find myself looking at a table in Wikipedia (or elsewhere) and thinking to myself: "I'd like to download that data into Excel and rearrange it or merge it with data from elsewhere." But if I just copy the table and paste it, I usually get a long string of information. Instead of tabs between fields and a carriage return at the end of the line, there are just spaces between each of the entries. Using tools like BBedit, Tex-Edit Plus, Word, and lots of perseverance, I can usually recreate the table in a form that I can upload to Excel from this data stream, but it is often a difficult process (especially if the cells of the table have textual data with spaces).

So I would really like someone to create a widget that would make this task easy. What I envision: at the top of each table in Wikipedia there would be an icon. If you clicked on the icon, it would automatically download the table in .csv (comma-separated values) format which could then be easily imported into Excel or another spreadsheet program (Google Docs, etc.). I assume it would be relatively easy to create such a widget since tables have a regular and simple markup language (though text that extends over two or more cells might be a bit tricky). There are already widgets for converting spreadsheets into Wiki's markup language, but as far as I can tell, no easy way to go the other direction.

I see that there is a command line tool called wiki2csv at Wikipedia: Tools#Export: Conversion to other formats, but it seems much too complicated for the average user. I want it to be possible to go to a page like List of Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States and just click on an icon to download the table data in .csv format.

Is this something that already exists somewhere? Is it a good idea? Can/will someone do it? Randy Schutt (talk) 15:40, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Workin' on it. Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 15:43, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Not exactly the way you want to do it, but you can, instead, query the web page from Excel. In Excel 2007, it's at Data→Get External Data. You enter the URL, it loads the page in a special dialog, and you then choose which objects you want to import into the spreadsheet. I just tried it with the page you mentioned and it's not ideal – it doesn't manage to pick out the tables separately like it does with other sites I've used it on, but the data you need is there, embedded within a bunch of other stuff, starting at cell FA194. —[AlanM1(talk)]— 16:04, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Okay, try User:Writ Keeper/Scripts/tableConverter.js. It's a bit ugly, but it should work (possibly not in IE, though). When you get the download prompt, do pay attention to what the file is named; the file name starts out as weird garbage in my tests, and I don't know how to get around that. So just make sure to name it something sensible, and remember to end it with the ".csv" extension. Any advice on how to sex up the appearance or output would be welcome. Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 17:05, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Neither the 2004 or 2008 versions of Macintosh Excel seem to be able to import from a url. The 2008 version let's me import an html file from my desktop (File-Import...) but that, of course, involves an extra few steps (edit page on Wikipedia, copy table lines, paste into a new text document, save as an html file). I can do this, but it would be nice for it to be more automated. I don't know how to run the script that Writ_Keeper has created. Perhaps someone else can try it. I was hoping there would be something as simple as what the Census Bureau does, for example, at the bottom of this page: http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/39000.html . Randy Schutt (talk) 17:52, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Oh, sorry, just put importScript("User:Writ Keeper/Scripts/tableConverter.js"); into your common.js page. Once you do that (you might have to bypass the browser cache afterwards; instructions for how to do that are at this page), you should see a link that will appear below every wikitable, and when you click on it, it'll prompt you to download a file. As I said, just rename the file to something sensible with the ".csv" file extension, and it should be good. Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 18:19, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. I now have a nice "Export as CVS" line at the bottom of the table (though note that it is actually part of the table - a new cell in the first column and below the last row). But when I click on it I don't get the hoped for results. I'm running OS 10.5.8 on my iMac. On Safari 5.0.6, I get a new page with all the table's html code splayed across the screen. With Firefox 16.0.2, I can save the file (with a weird name zMpfGqwp-1.part), which I can rename and open in Excel, but the file has no content. With Chrome 21.0.1180.90 I get a file ("Download") that I can rename and open in Excel. It has the table information, but still includes all the anchors and span html code (could that be stripped out?). Randy Schutt (talk) 18:56, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Randy, your few extra steps to get HTML into Excel won't work. The text shown on Wikipedia's edit screen is in wikitext format, not HTML. It doesn't turn into HTML format just because you save it in an HTML file. A technique that should work (and is also fewer steps) is to use your browser's File ▸ Save As... command while reading the page. In the Save dialog, select HTML (without images) as the file type. (The default in some browsers is a "web archive" or with-images format such as MHTML. I'm not sure Excel can handle that.) Writ Keeper's script is the easiest option if it works for you (I've not tried it myself). – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 18:49, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

PartTimeGnome, oh yes, you're right. In the past, I've used a text editor to put the proper html headers on the file to make it into a proper html file. But for converting Wikipedia, your solution would be much better/easier. This process doesn't work if I use Excel 2003 for Mac (since it can't open html files), but it does with Excel 2008 for Mac. So this is a solution. Still, I would like a one-button solution and especially to have this be a normal part of Wikipedia (rather than having to install scripts, etc.) But, so far, Writ Keeper's script isn't working very well for me. Maybe I'm asking for too much. Randy Schutt (talk) 19:20, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Hmm, it's working for me in Firefox and Chrome, though I did have to fix a few bugs. Perhaps you should bypass your cache again and retry. What table are you trying this on? Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 19:27, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

one small problem is that tables in enwiki often contain junk in the form <span style="display:none">some-string-for-sorting</span> (it's not "junk" per se, but it cause pain for the converter. you probably want to do something like

//instead of:
var str = "" + $(el).text();
//you want something like:
var clone = $(el).clone();
clone.find('*').filter(function(){return $(this).css('display')=='none'}).remove();
var str = clone.text();

peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 20:42, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Writ_Keeper, it works pretty well now: On this page List of Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, Mac OS 10.5.8, Safari 5.0.6 opens up a new page with all the items enclosed in quotation marks and delimited by commas, and all the anchors and span code has been stripped out. I can copy and paste it into Excel and it converts without much effort. Firefox 16.0.2 worked for me once I turned off TACO (oops, my bad). And Chrome 21.0.1180.90 works pretty well too. The script works well on the two tables on this page too: United States Senate elections, 2014 and the second table has lots of empty cells. It mostly works on this page too List of United States Supreme Court Justices by time in office, but the term in office number is not quite right: for example, for Douglas it is 700413358000000000013,358 instead of 13,358. Perhaps the comma in the number is screwing up the conversion. But overall, this is a good solution for me. Thank you very much. Now my wishlist is: make the "Export to cvs" text smaller, make it into a button instead of a cell in the table, put it at the top right of the table instead of the bottom, and make it available to everyone without them having to put the script call in common.js. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Randy Schutt (talk • contribs) 21:35, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

what cause the problem you report is not the comma, it's exactly what i was talking about: an invisible field that's placed in sortable tables for sorting purposes. the remedy would be to remove the invisible data before generating the file. my snippet (admittedly untested) is supposed to do that. peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 21:52, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Yes, in this case (List of United States Supreme Court Justices by time in office) the Term in Days column is using the Template:Nts command to ensure sortability. Randy Schutt (talk) 22:46, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

on 2nd thought, my snippet is an overshoot. all you have to do is replace

var str = "" + $(el).text();

with

var str = $(':visible', el).text();

peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 00:01, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

Sorry, I was distracted by shenanigans elsewhere. That looks like a great solution, kipod, thanks! Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 01:17, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

I just checked and the new version works great. Thank you very much Writ Keeper and Kipon for your good work. Randy Schutt (talk) 16:44, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

I just added instructions for using this on Writ Keepers page (User:Writ Keeper/Scripts/tableConverter). I hope this is ok. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Randy Schutt (talk • contribs) 16:19, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

scripts not working

For about the last 20 hours, I've been having problems with my scripts functioning temperamentally. Problems specifically in the last 5 hours include script buttons that occasionally fail to appear on the sidebar so that attempts to repeat script calls after a diff are impossible. I refresh the vector page and the script buttons appear for a few more diff cycles, and then [sometimes not all of them] disappear again. Is anyone else experiencing these same problems? -- Ohconfucius ^{ping / poke} 06:11, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

Yes, the nominate for deletion script comes to a halt, because the OK button is greyed out. Tekstman (talk) 12:55, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

I am sorry, I thought I was editing the Wikimedia Commons village pump. But then again, it may be Wikpedia project wide. Tekstman (talk) 13:14, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

• I've since noticed that even popups isn't working for me now, and the insertion bars at the top of the edit window has disappeared, and the one at the bottom don't now insert anymore. It's becoming a minor catastrophe! -- Ohconfucius ^{ping / poke} 03:58, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Pending div/mod function change

Just a warning that the div and mod functions have changed, following the resolution of bug 6068. This is about how these functions work with non-integer parameters. It doesn't seem to have been implemented here yet, but has caused problems with co-ordinate displays on Commons (now resolved). See Commons:Village pump#Template Location damaged for further information.  An optimist on the run! 14:44, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

Replacing a file

I uploaded a new version of this file at 00:22 on 22 December 2012. It's used in one article. I've edited and reloaded the article, but I still see the old version there. Why? What can I do about it? Michael Hardy (talk) 00:31, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Hard refresh, for a first try. If you've viewed that image on that page previously, your browser cache will still show you the old version. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 00:41, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Most likely this is the same problem as described at #No purging on newer version of images above. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:24, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Nothing's working. I've purged the server cache, and emptied the cache on my machine from "the beginning of time", and the old image still appears in the article. But on this present page, I see the new one. Does anyone else see the new version in tangent half-angle formula? Michael Hardy (talk) 01:40, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

I see the old image on the article. When I remove the manually specified width limit (400px), the thumbnail shows the new version (given that my default thumbnail width is 220px). The 400px version of the image isn't updating for some reason. But yes, please read #No purging on newer version of images yellowtailshark (talk) 13:39, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

New Extension:GettingStarted

Screenshot of how Special:GettingStarted appears just after you've registered

Hi all,

Today we've launched the first preliminary version of a new way to try and get newly-registered people up to speed.

Right now, only between 20-25% of registered accounts ever edit,[1] even once. We'd like to improve that fairly dismal rate. Our first experiment is aimed at helping users who sign up, willing to edit, but who don't have an idea of where to get started editing.

To help those editors get started, we're presenting newly-registered users with articles gathered by SuggestBot from the copyediting backlog, optimizing for shorter articles that are easier to edit. In the future we will continue to tweak and optimize the task list, either by adding other easy task types, or reducing the number of choices new users have to make. We also have future plans for adding helpful tools, such as tooltip-based guided tours of how to edit.

Feel free to take a look at the Special:GettingStarted page now, though it appears slightly differently for users who just registered, so check out the screenshot to the right as well. Please let us know if you have any questions or feedback, and I'll keep folks updated as we iterate on this idea. If you're interested in more detail, our product requirements and analysis plans are available to read. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 00:38, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Looks neat. Is the extension pulling off a wiki-page that SuggestBot updates? If so, which page is it? And per WP:BEANS, is that page at least semi-protected? How often is the list updated? (If this is answered somewhere else, sorry about that!) Legoktm (talk) 03:04, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Yes, SuggestBot is supposed to update Template:Opentask-short every hour (so named because it is similar to Template:Opentask from the Community Portal). I don't believe that template is semi-protected, but good idea. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 03:08, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. Looks pretty cool to me. Legoktm (talk) 03:26, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

SuggestBot reverted the padlock: [2] jcgoble3 (talk) 04:33, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Aaaand the bots keep going back and forth. It's actually important that we leave out the padlock, since the template is transcluded. It doesn't seem the padlock gets transcluded in to the MediaWiki message, so it's not a real UI problem. However, we probably want the bots to quit edit warring. ;) Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 07:26, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Time for WP:LAME#Bot wars. I've notified both operators, although I now see that you notified SuggestBot's operator. Nyttend (talk) 12:04, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

 Done See WP:LAME#Template:Opentask-short. jcgoble3 (talk) 21:55, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Sorry about causing this, the script updating the template page isn't sophisticated enough to prevent this issue. I've stopped the bot for now and will rewrite its logic so it doesn't touch the padlock template. I'll probably also move the notice about SuggestBot updating the template from the talk page in the process. Should be going again in a few hours. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 16:15, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

I've implemented a fix that keeps the <noinclude>...</noinclude> sections intact while the list might get replaced. I've also made the bot less insistent on editing regardless of the circumstances. Should hopefully keep everything running smoothly from now on, otherwise I'm sure someone will get in touch again. Cheers, Nettrom (talk) 19:01, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

I was going to suggest using {{nobots|deny=Lowercase sigmabot}} however your solution works as well. Legoktm (talk) 19:12, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

For me, the "How to help / Fix spelling and grammar ..." box spills about half-off the right side of my screen. Using a 1024x768 resolution with Chrome on XP. Chris857 (talk) 03:34, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Yes, at that browser size that happens for now. We're going to add styles that are more responsive in next iterations (we do weekly deployments). Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 07:26, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

OT (for here, anyway), is there a discussion somewhere about finding the reason for this surprising (to me) statistic? It's hard to imagine 75% of people bothering to register are just overwhelmed. I wonder if there is some other reason people would register and not edit. Other than giving you a personalized watchlist, what benefit would there be to registering if you are just reading? —[AlanM1(talk)]— 17:14, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

this seems to me like asking for trouble and frustration. imagine what will happen when, say, 455 new editors will be presented with the same list of 10 "article for improvement". if 10% will respond, the many edit collisions that will ensue is a fire-safe method to guarantee huge amount of frustration.

one way around it is to find some way to "personalize" the list, i.e. distribute the articles among the users in some clever way. complete randomization will not be good - you do not want to present to the user a whole new list every time she goes to Special:GettingStarted, but presenting the same list to everyone can cause trouble. קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 17:36, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

The frequency of updates is something we can tinker with. It's also in our roadmap of potential features to add a 'refresh' button on the page, allowing people to skip through multiple article sets. We'll also have a sense of the rate at which people are trying to edit, but running in to edit conflicts or other problems (we're anonymously tracking article edit attempts and save attempts or previews, in addition actually saved edits). Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 19:52, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

twisi, the idea of presenting to the whole english speaking crowd a set of 10 articles and asking them "edit these", does not make sense.

if you won't get enough response to create collisions then the whole effort probably isn't worth it, and if you *will*, you'll just frustrate the participants. peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 20:05, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

The image is too blurry for me to read. Kdammers (talk) 07:49, 15 December 2012 (UTC) — comment moved from section below by PartTimeGnome

You can click the image to see a larger version. Once at that page, click the "Original file" link to see the image at its maximum size. (If your mouse pointer then turns into a magnifying glass when you hover over the image, you might need to click once more to see it at maximum size.) – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 16:55, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

"An administrator on Wikipedia should customize this message"

When I go to that page, I get a message that makes it look like Wikipedia isn't configured properly: "An administrator on Wikipedia should customize this message by editing MediaWiki:gettingstarted-msg." (See it for yourself.)

The linked MediaWiki page exists and has content, so the message is rather misleading as to the problem. The message should link to MediaWiki:gettingstarted-msg/en-GB, since I use en-GB for my language. This can probably be fixed easily enough for English variants by creating redirects at the /en-GB and /en-CA pages (admin needed). Or, if redirects aren't allowed in MediaWiki space, transclude the main MediaWiki:gettingstarted-msg page instead. However, I think the fallback message should be friendlier for users whose native language is not English. For example:

This page is not yet available in your language. The default language is shown below:

{{MediaWiki:gettingstarted-msg}}

(Obviously, the "This page is not yet ..." bit should be in the relevant language. I note that the current "An administrator ..." message is always English, even if your language is set to e.g. French. I'm guessing this is because this is a new feature, and the guys at translatewiki.net haven't had a chance to translate it yet.) – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 23:11, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

as far as i understand, this message is shown to a new user immediately after signing up (i.e., creating a new account). as such, the user preferences can't have anything other than the default language for this specific wikipedia as "useLang". so the content of the message you see will show (in English) for new users on wikis that did not set MediaWiki:gettingstarted-msg, and do not have appropriate translation for the message in translatewiki. it is not a problem here. setting uselang to en-GB and then looking at the message is kinda silly test: once you reached the point of setting the user language, you are past the point of *actually* ever seeing this message... peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 23:21, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Kipod is correct. It's currently impossible for the intended audience (newly-registered users) to have set an alternate language when they view the page, because it is delivered before they have access to their preferences. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 00:04, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

In that case, perhaps the extension should always use MediaWiki:gettingstarted-msg, and not bother checking the user's language? – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 00:13, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

Quick update: I drafted a quick feature page at Wikipedia:GettingStarted. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 07:14, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Hat template not working?

Go to Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2012 November 25 and you'll see a massive list of redirects that are up for deletion. Because the list is so long, I added the {{hat}} template some days ago at the start of the list, and I placed {{hab}} at the bottom. All was well: the page became substantially shorter unless you clicked the "show" tab. However, "hide" and "show" are no longer appearing — the page is set at "show" and can't be changed to "hide". Any clue why not? The code appears to be the same. Nyttend (talk) 02:38, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Works fine for me. Was your javascript enabled? Clear your cache? Legoktm (talk) 04:10, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

How again do I enable and disable Java? I learned how in order to get around the SOPA blackout, but I've since forgotten. Running IE8. Nyttend (talk) 05:43, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

This should be how. Unfortunately I'm on a Mac so I don't have anyway of testing whether something is broken with the template show/hide code on IE8. It would be nice if we had something like WP:IE8 which listed all the problems with using it. :P Legoktm (talk) 05:50, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Tsk, tsk; you need to start using a computer instead of a Mac. The link was helpful, but it looked like I already have everything turned on. Turns out that it was a script, though — many pages lately have been giving me a "Stop running this script? A script on this page is causing your web browser to run slowly..." message; if I stop running it, the hat template doesn't work; if I permit it to continue, the template works fine. Thanks! Nyttend (talk) 05:56, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Article feedback monitoring is broken

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T45099

I'm trying to monitor article feedback at Special:ArticleFeedbackv5, but all of the text fields and buttons for featuring, marking as resolved, hiding, and requesting for oversight are gone (all it has is the "Feature this post" text and the "x" close button). Anybody else seeing this?

(tech specs: OS X 10.8.2 running Safari 6.0.2) The Anonymouse (talk • contribs) 08:25, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

I see all the buttons and the fields, but can only hide and unhide posts. The other buttons are all nonfunctional. (Windows 7, Firefox 14). Evanh2008 ^{(talk|contribs)} 10:59, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Confirmed. This was reported to bugzilla earlier today, I'll add a link in a minute. Legoktm (talk) 11:00, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Is it possible, and if so, might it be a good idea, to turn off AFT until it's fixed? I know it's still in development and all, but I'm a bit worried about the fact that we've lost our capability to moderate what can at times be a rather turbulent part of the project. People post feedback submissions without even thinking where they go, and it's a lot simpler to type in a bunch of curse words in the helpful text box at the bottom of the page than to open up the edit window and vandalize. If that's all this were about, though, I obviously wouldn't be suggesting this, but... there is stuff that has to get oversighted on AFT. Clearly it doesn't happen that often, but I'm kinda bothered that right now someone could write (as I indeed once saw someone write) "FIX THIS FUCKING ARTICLE OR I'LL COME TO YOUR HOUSE AND KILL YOU," and we wouldn't even be able to hide it from the public view, much less oversight it. Same goes for saying nasty things about friends and winding up disclosing personal details about a minor, or a host of other things: At the moment, when a random reader looks at an article's feedback, they see absolutely everything that's been posted since this glitch started. I don't know, but I find that a bit troubling. — Francophonie&Androphilie^{(Je vous invite à me parler)} 11:10, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

MathML weirdness

Can someone look at Farad#Equalities and suggest what's going on in the <math> section? With MathML enabled the output is just a single line of garbage. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 11:27, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Brackets were missing from the \mathrm element. Maybe this is what was intended? Jafeluv (talk) 13:35, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Excellent. Cheers! Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 10:14, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Archives search bar

Hi, I see the topic has been raised at least once in 2011, but I did not understand how the concern has been addressed. Here’s the issue : if I type, for instance, « Blanchett » or « iconic » in the search bar of this Talk page, I get no results although those words are present in the archives. What’s the problem ? Cheers, --182.163.42.82 (talk) 12:49, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

This is not about the size issue in your 2011 link. The search index just hasn't been updated since you created the archive earlier today. See Help:Searching#Delay in updating the search index. If you remove the subpage indicator '/' from the search prefix then Blanchett prefix:Talk:I'm Not There currently reports it at the main talk page because it was located there when the search index was last updated. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:29, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks a lot. Understood ! --182.163.42.82 (talk) 00:00, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

Table sorting by script

When looking at someone's SUL accounts at Special:CentralAuth, it would be useful to have the table automatically sorted by edit count when the page opens. Does anyone know if there's a way to sort a table by a specified column in Javascript? Jafeluv (talk) 13:04, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Yes. You're looking for Quentinv57's tool. Legoktm (talk) 13:34, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Hmm... That's not sorted by edit count by default either, is it? Jafeluv (talk) 13:47, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Not by default, but if you hit the arrow it will sort. Legoktm (talk) 16:27, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

You can do that in CentralAuth as well, of course. But the question was whether it can be done by script. Jafeluv (talk) 11:23, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

try adding the following line to Special:Mypage/common.js

if (wgCanonicalSpecialPageName == "CentralAuth") $(function() {$('th:Contains(Edit count)').click().click()})

peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 19:50, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks! Can't seem to get it to work, though... [4] Any idea what I'm doing wrong? Jafeluv (talk) 07:54, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Mysterious behaviour of Template:Talk other

The template {{talk other}} takes two positional parameters, and returns the first if used on a talk page, and returns the second if used on a non-talk page. Thus,

{{talk other|This is a talk page|This is a subject page}} returns This is a subject page

when used here. However, it breaks if all or part of the second parameter is wrapped in <span class="error">...</span>:

{{talk other|This is a talk page|This is a <span class="error">subject page</span>}} returns

(i.e. nothing). I spotted this because I found a case of {{edit semi-protected}} being used on an article here, when searching for bad edits by this anon. It should have shown and put the page into Category:Non-talk pages requesting an edit to a semi-protected page, but did neither of these. If I amend {{edit semi-protected}} to remove the class="error", it works. I've determined that if the <span> has no attributes, it works - but as soon as it's given an attribute, whether class= id= or style=, regardless of whether the attribute has a value or not, the whole of the second positional parameter is ignored. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:41, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Try this:

{{talk other|This is a talk page|This is a <span class{{=}}"error">subject page</span>}} returns This is a

Otherwise the equals sign is interpreted as part of the template syntax. Jafeluv (talk) 16:15, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Or this:

{{talk other|1=This is a talk page|2=This is a <span class="error">subject page</span>}} -- WOSlinker (talk) 16:23, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Ah yes, that would do it; or even

{{talk other|This is a talk page|2=This is a <span class="error">subject page</span>}} returns This is a

which is a bot more "obvious". Thank you --Redrose64 (talk) 16:25, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

All non-user pages now fixed up. Some had carried the {{edit semi-protected}} for over a year. --Redrose64 (talk) 17:59, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

File uploading issue (file not uploading)

I can not Upload file. Tried twice. After clicking on "upload' it gives message Once uploading is completed, you will find your new file at this link:, but when after some time when clicked on the link, I found the files have not been uploaded. Tried thrice. File name: File:Gomolo logo.jpg --Tito Dutta (talk) 00:13, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

Special:Log/upload shows many uploads by others before and after your post. It sounds like you used Wikipedia:File Upload Wizard. Please post to Wikipedia talk:File Upload Wizard instead. Include your browser and if possible, a weblink to a copy of the file. PrimeHunter (talk) 03:04, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

strange edit after page move

this looks weird. The middle edit is '-1' but nothing changes. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 02:36, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

There are three '-1' edits so I'm unsure which edit you refer to. Is it [5] where a space was removed after "residence they shared"? PrimeHunter (talk) 02:48, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

Sorry, I was referring to the, now deleted, edit by SilverFox183 (talk · contribs). There were only three edits: 1) the page move to include '2012' prefix, SilverFox183's edit, followed by a bot and I didnt inspect that edit. It's probably hard to debug now that the page has been moved back over the redirect, but the 'diff' omitted the diff section, similar to how it appears for moves and protection actions. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 04:38, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

If I compare [6] and [7] (admin only links) then the second apparently removed an extra newline at the end. That explains '-1' but raises another question: How could the first have en extra newline at the end? I thought it would be stripped on saving. I can no longer see a diff but maybe the diff ignored the extra newline or whatever it was. PrimeHunter (talk) 05:20, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

Videos

I don't think I should have to download something to watch a video. I don't feel safe downloading something from Wikipedia. Like anyone at all can watch new changes for whatever reason, the same is true for videos and programs. Every day my virus softwhere finds something new that some creep wrote. --69.3.114.139 (talk) 06:50, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

You're not downloading it from us. Depending on whether you want the program embedded in your browser or instead into an existing video player, and which one, you'll have your choice of downloading it from Mozilla, Microsoft, VLC, Real, Java, etc. See Wikipedia:Media_help_(Ogg). Someguy1221 (talk) 06:58, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

I don't need to download anything, because the internet browser that I use to read websites supports embedded video so I don't need any additional software. You didn't mention which browser and version you use, but if it's an older one maybe you could consider upgrading? --Malyacko (talk) 09:35, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Data mining for deletion vs user stats

How easy would it be to produce a data set consisting of the age of accounts that have created pages that have been deleted via CfDs and Afds? The data would be number of pages per new account age time bands (it would mean getting access to the history of deleted pages). I want to see if there is a case for lengthening the stand down period of new page creation for new user accounts. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 18:47, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

The best way to do that would be to run a query on the database, so any Toolserver user should be able to do that for you. Legoktm (talk) 19:44, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

Watchlist JS bolding

Demonstration of the problem. See below for explanation.

This is not a new problem, but rather something that I've put up with since the day I registered nearly two years ago and I'm finally fed up with it. When I load my watchlist for the second or subsequent time in the same browser session, JavaScript bolds the entire line of all edits that are new since the last time I loaded my watchlist. This would seem helpful except for three major problems: first, it's based solely on whether it was listed the last time I loaded my watchlist with no regard to whether I've viewed the edit through other means, and second and more important, I have CSS set up to bold the titles of pages that have changed since I last visited them, and this JS thingy hinders that by bolding edits that I've already visited via other means, including my own edits. I've had enough of this and am looking for a way to disable the script that's doing this. Any ideas? jcgoble3 (talk) 21:49, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

Have a look at Wikipedia:Customizing watchlists. NtheP (talk) 22:15, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

I did. Most of that page deals with how to work with the changes from bugzilla:33123. There's nothing there about whatever script this is, which is far older than the $wgShowUpdatedMarker change. jcgoble3 (talk) 23:00, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

At Preferences → Gadgets, there is an option "Display pages on your watchlist that have changed since your last visit in bold (see customizing watchlists for more options)" Is it switched on? If so, switch it off. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:42, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

That's off, and again, that deals with $wgShowUpdatedMarker, which I actually use and want. This JavaScript is something totally different that has been around since at least January 2011. I know I did not do anything to turn it on; it was on from the moment I created my account. I'll get a screenshot for you guys in a few minutes. jcgoble3 (talk) 00:09, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

It probably wasn't since the day you registered, but the day after that. It looks like the script you added in this edit is what's doing it. Anomie⚔ 00:26, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Here's a screenshot. The top half of the image shows the watchlist as it is loading, with this page correctly not bolded because I have visited this page since the last change (indeed, the last edit was my own). The bottom half shows my watchlist after it completed loading, with the entire WP:VPT line and the entire line for my last edit now annoyingly fully bolded because that edit was made after the last time I loaded my watchlist. The fact that the bolding does not occur until after the page completes loading tells me that this is being done my JavaScript. If I use the "Inspect Element" feature of Firefox 17.0.1 to examine the HTML, I see that inline CSS has been added to the <td> of the VPT line and the <tr> of my last edit. jcgoble3 (talk) 00:33, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

reply to Anomie OK, then if that script is the problem, then which parts of that script do I copy over to get just the top-of-page notifier line? I want to keep that but get rid of the watchlist bolding. jcgoble3 (talk) 00:38, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

Looks like User:Ais523/watchlistnotifier.js would benefit from updating to accommodate the updated marker; probably excluding rows which have the class mw-changeslist-line-not-watched. I don't know enough JavaScript to comment more specifically.

As an aside, I think this illustrates a core failing of watchlists. The standard user interface ought to exclude edits made before a page was last visited, and also exclude edits that are listed on the watchlist when the "Mark all pages visited" button is clicked. (At present, the button also resets pages that were edited between the time the watchlist was generated and the time the button is clicked, so very recent edits are wrongly marked as visited even though they have not yet shown up on the user's watchlist.) See Bugzilla:4903#c7 for a related feature request that has been open for nearly seven years.

— Richardguk (talk) 07:18, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

Job queue

The job queue for enwiki has been over 1,000,000 for most of the past week, having risen rapidly around 3 weeks ago:

• API jobs="1085212"
• Ganglia queue graphs
• Gdash I/O graphs
• Ganglia I/O graphs
• Ganglia jobrunners graphs

Until November, typical values (allowing for brief spikes) were usually well under 100,000. Unfortunately, the more useful measure of job queue durations does not seem to be recorded (Bugzilla:9518).

This was recently discussed under Bugzilla:42614 in relation to recent code changes, but that bug has since been marked resolved.

Does Wikipedia:Don't worry about performance mean that this should not concern us, or does something need fixing?

— Richardguk (talk) 12:07, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

This edit and two days later this one didn't exactly do wonders for the job queue. We know that it's still being processed because Category:Pages with malformed coordinate tags is still being populated. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:33, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

The queue seems to have risen further over the past 10 hours, to a recent peak of around 1,200,000. — Richardguk (talk) 17:42, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

Something should be done, I've been waiting for an update to whatlinkshere from a navbox update for 23 hours now, this is a measurable problem now... --Joy [shallot] (talk) 19:25, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

The job queue is now over two million. I'd say there's a major bug somewhere. jcgoble3 (talk) 20:56, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

And now it's skyrocketed to over 5.5 million. Can somebody please file a bug on Bugzilla? I don't have an account there and am not interested in creating yet another account that I'll rarely use. jcgoble3 (talk) 05:49, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

It's been discussed on the #wikimedia-tech IRC channel - those two big spikes are supposed to be the end of it, and things should be getting back to normal. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 09:26, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Partly corrupted image?

What's going on with File:Bethlehem Inn NO Vacancy.jpg? It appears to be partly corrupted; thumbnails sometimes download and sometimes don't. When I try to go to the 250px thumbnail, I get a message of "503 Service Unavailable [line break] The server is currently unavailable. Please try again at a later time. [line break] There was a problem while contacting the image scaler: [Errno 110] ETIMEDOUT". When I uploaded it, neither the thumbnail (same resolution as the smaller image here) nor the large-resolution image displayed on the file description page, but they've since started working properly. While the 250px resolution version is displaying fine here, it's not showing at WP:RDH. Nyttend (talk) 17:15, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

As I can reach the 250px thumbnail I guess that it's a server cache related issue which might even depend on where you live. See for example the software bug report here: bugzilla:41130. --Malyacko (talk) 09:38, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Some new scripts

So I added some new scripts to my userspace, that some of you might find interesting. Some of them are older than others, Some of them are ported from hewiki, some of them I added to WP:JS.

• watchlistMark: As you know, when scanning Recentchanges, the pages in your watchlist appear in boldface. This script adds similar functionality to the pages "User contribution" and to Category pages. In addition, it adds under the page title a little button, that when pressed, adds "watch" link after each page, so you can easily add half (or all) pages in a particular category to your watchlist. For watched pages, the link becomes "Remove". same for pages in "User contribution".
• Watchlist scout: Will poll your watchlist every time you go to a new page, and every 60 seconds hence. If there are unread pages in your watchlist (i.e., pages that would display in boldface on your watchlist), it jumps a message box similar to the "someone left you a message", with links to your watchlist, to the modified pages, and to their history.
• Template Parameters Wizard: i mentioned it here before, but i take the opportunity to plug it here again. this script helps fill template parameters when editing
• "In place" rollback (only for users with "rollback" permissions): this script changes the behavior of "rollback" button, such that instead of switching to the version diff page, you stay in place while the target page is rolled back. can be useful in conjunction with "popup". Also, right-clicking the "rollback" link allows you to add a summary to the rollback
• Hide HotCat markers: If you are like me, you love HotCat functionality, but you hate the way it uglify the Categories section at the bottom of each article. this script hides all the ugliness, and adds "HC" at the right edge of the categories div. pressing the HC will expose all of hotcat controls, and pressing it again will re-hide them (personally, i think this is the way HotCat should have worked from the start).
• Personal edit tools: allows you to add personalized edit tools in a subpage of your user space that are available when editing. you can have general toos *and* namespace specifci tools.

I hope some of you will find some of these helpful. if you try them and have problems/coplaints/suggestions, please let me know.

Peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 00:07, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

"4,122,002 articles in English"

...so says the front page. But it's not, though, is it? That includes redirects and disambiguation pages, which you can't claim to be articles. There are 222,842 disambiguation pages alone; there's no equivalently easy way of counting redirects, but there must be a hell of a lot. (Perhaps someone with Toolserver access could produce a figure.) I try to assume good faith, but if I'm right (I may well be misunderstanding something though) it strikes me as borderline dishonest to report the combined figure as "articles" on the front page in this way. — Hex (❝?!❞) 17:03, 17 December 2012 (UTC) Edit: qualify statement so as not to sound rude. Insertion marked. — Hex (❝?!❞) 17:37, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

The figure 6,934,819 is pulled from the variable {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}}. However, the MediaWiki documentation states that {{PAGESINNS:0}} differs from {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} in that the former includes redirects and disambiguation pages - this implies that {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} does not. --Redrose64 (talk) 17:18, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Interesting, thanks. The figure on the front page links to Special:Statistics, which presents the figure as being "content pages", linking to Special:AllPages. However, the list on that page begins with !, which is a redirect. It would be beneficial to have some precise clarification on the matter from a developer. Either way, I would suggest that some wordage on this matter is added to relevant places to avoid any further ambiguity. — Hex (❝?!❞) 17:32, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

The Special:Allpages link is a bit misleading, I agree (though no doubt well-intended) - a link to the definition of the phrase "content pages" would be better. I vaguely recall we had something like this on Special:Statistics many years ago. Andrew Gray (talk) 18:09, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

I just found Template:Bugzilla which addresses this point. — Hex (❝?!❞) 19:53, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Redirects aren't counted in that total, though disambiguation pages are, and a small number of things which are technically articles aren't. The value is generated using the NUMBEROFARTICLES "magic word" (6,934,819), which is apparently defined as "Number of pages in content namespaces", using the definition at mw:Manual:Using_custom_namespaces#Content_namespaces - so no redirects and at least one internal link. There are well over a million redirects (the largest category is 955k) but I'm not sure of an exact total. Andrew Gray (talk) 17:25, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks - had an edit conflict with you here. See my comment above as well. — Hex (❝?!❞) 17:32, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

We have 5,724,232 redirects in namespace 0 at the time of posting. - TB (talk) 18:15, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

I've just come across Wikipedia:Database reports/Page count by namespace which is where I'm guessing that figure came from. Useful report. — Hex (❝?!❞) 19:34, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

I see that the report shows four redirects from category space. This figure should be zero: how do we find which are the redirects? Special:ListRedirects is useless - it doesn't permit a namespace filter, even if you try to put one in the URL, like this. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:08, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Using the API i only see one: Category:X2. peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 21:01, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

I get the same result with AWB (special page → make list → all redirects → Category: namespace). Category:X2 is explicitly a testing category per the page history and should be left as a redirect. jcgoble3 (talk) 21:07, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Ah - I generated the above figure on the Toolserver. I see three redirects from category space; Category:Ming_Empire, Category:X2 and Category:Suspected_Wikipedia_sockpuppets_of_RevAntonio. The fourth one counted on Wikipedia:Database reports/Page count by namespace seems to have been deleted within the last 20 hours. - TB (talk) 21:47, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Now that I've been set straight (always happy to be corrected) about redirects, does it sound fair to suggest that maybe the figure for articles shouldn't include disambiguations? — Hex (❝?!❞) 19:46, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

There would be NO way to count that, because a large number (I'd guess well over half) of disambiguation pages don't have '(disambiguation)' as part of their title. Though I guess one could use articles with Category:Disambiguation pages -- but my gut tells me that 144,646 pages is very low, so there's probably many without the category. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 20:56, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

While not every disambiguation page has {{disambig}} or a similar template, I suspect the vast majority do - so deducting the 244k figure below, which is generated from these templates, would seem to be a good first approximation. You'd also want to account for set indexes such as USS Enterprise (37k pages), which aren't technically disambiguation pages but behave much the same way for readers. Andrew Gray (talk) 21:17, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Good catch - I rarely encounter those. Melodia, even if the figure for disambiguations isn't accurate - and I think that Andrew is right in saying that most of them are categorized - it will get more accurate over time. And even incorrect, it still helps to make the total count of articles more representative of reality. — Hex (❝?!❞) 22:14, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

I missed this discussion in starting a thread at Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Correct_the_Main_Page_.22article_count.22, which includes an autocalculation method for excluding disambiguation pages based on Category:All article disambiguation pages. Not sure how or whether to merge these threads; anyone feel free to do whatever seems best. Rd232 ^talk 21:03, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

This has been tried before. Graham87 12:21, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

That discussion (2008) seems mainly to center on what the definition of an article worth counting is, which is probably why it fizzled out - shades of counting the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin. I don't propose to rule out pages on the basis of being a stub, merely on being disambiguations or set indices, which definitely aren't articles. However, it did lead to the creation of {{Number of actual articles}} (producing "6,456,215") which uses the technique that Rd232 suggested on the other pump. I've just updated it to subtract set indices as well. — Hex (❝?!❞) 13:00, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Better table editing?

One of the perils of editing a table with lots of columns and/or rows is that if you try to add or delete an entry or column, you can mess up the whole table.

Is there/should there be any way to make it possible to edit a table like you would in Word or Excel or something? That is, have an interface that looks like a table, where you can add or remove columns from the top of the table (instead of having to individually add the new column to each row), and edit a cell or add or delete a row without the possibility of messing up the "framing" for the rest of the table. It would let less computer-savvy people add things to tables without worrying about screwing up the entire table, and make it a *lot* less time-consuming to add a new column to a table with a lot of rows.

To keep people from throwing in gratuitous tables or whatever, you could restrict "table edit" to existing manually-created tables, but letting people add information to an existing table without having to worry quite so much about the format of the table would be nice.

(for example, recently, on the "vampire traits" page, I added a new column to one of the tables, and that page has something like 75 entries per table...) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tamtrible (talk • contribs) 21:17, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

The VisualEditor - which in the long run will make Word/Excel style editing possible - went into alpha testing on the English Wikipedia last week; details here, and you can enable it in preferences. (It's opt-in for the moment) Tables are not currently supported, but hopefully that functionality will be along soon :-) Andrew Gray (talk) 21:58, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Yay! Any ETA on it reaching the general public, and/or the addition of table functionality?... Tamtrible (talk) 22:12, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Not sure about specific elements, but the development plan calls for it to be "enabled by default for (almost) every wikipedia/mediawiki instance" - presumably with all functionality up and running - by July 2013. It may well slip - it's a hard project - but they did manage to make the December 2012 target for initial deployment, so you never know :-) Andrew Gray (talk) 22:39, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Information about existing inter-language bots

I'm looking for information about:

• which bots are active in Wikipedia for correcting inter-language links
• what those bots actually do

I've searched around but could only find the list of registered bots, the help section about bots and interlanguage links and various other not really useful results. I could NOT find any information about what each of the listed bots actually does. Does that information exist anywhere, and if so where?

--Robert (talk) 04:25, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

I think they often use the same Pywikipedia code. See mw:Manual:Pywikipediabot/interwiki.py. PrimeHunter (talk) 05:11, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

By the way, Wikidata will soon make interwiki links obsolete. --Rschen7754 05:13, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

I don't think that all the ILL bots use the same Pywikipedia code; some of them screw up ILLs on template doc pages, but most don't. This suggests to me that more than one algorithm exists. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:37, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

I think the question on top is asking which bot can repair the problem inter-language links but not how to make a bot. The problem inter-language links are include: if A links to B, B will be linked to A, and if A links to B and B to C, A will be linked to C.(help section about bots and interlanguage links) --Roiny88 (talk) 17:03, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Internet Explorer 8

My user scripts work on Firefox and Chrome, but almost all of them don't work on Internet Explorer 8, which is the browser installed on school computers. I tried enabling the JavaScript Standard Library in gadgets, but it did nothing. Here's a list of my enabled gadgets:

• Disable access keys
• Open external links in a new tab/window
• Twinkle
• Suppress display of the fundraiser banner
• "Ask a question" feature for the Wikimedia Foundation's "Teahouse" project
• Reference tooltips
• HotCat
• wikEd
• Yet Another AFC Helper Script
• Form for filing disputes at the dispute resolution noticeboard
• Add an [edit] link for the lead section of a page
• Change the "new section" tab text to instead display the much narrower "+".
• Disable animations in the interface.

I especially need Twinkle, seeing how I use it for basically everything. Is it possible to fix this, or do I just have to use Chrome portable? ❤ Yutsi ^Talk/ Contributions ( 偉特 ) 13:09, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

For the last couple or three weeks (probably since the last MW upgrade), I've been having lots of delays in IE8; I'm always getting the "Stop running this script? A script on this page is causing your web browser to run slowly..." message, even at pages such as Guam or Commons:Special:Upload. Nyttend (talk) 13:37, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Probably unrelated to the above problem. You may want to start your own thread of discussion. --Izno (talk) 13:55, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

You're SOL on at least Twinkle. See WP:TWINKLE. IE in general is notorious for being a special case in both Javascript and CSS, and it's only with the newest of versions that developers are able to do something useful with it without devoting hours of work for small functionality. --Izno (talk) 13:55, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Probably unrelated, but you might have to upgrade your browser to Internet Explorer 9 if you have Windows 7 or Windows Vista Service Pack 2. Otherwise, good luck. --George Ho (talk) 15:18, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Yutsi is using a school computer, so probably not in a position to change browsers.--SPhilbrick(Talk) 17:09, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

this may or may not solve this specific problem, but it might help: MediaWiki:Geonotice.js which is loaded by everyone, contains an extra comma on line #31. this does not bother the sane browsers, but it bugs the hell out of IE. if one of the sysops can delete this comma, Yutsi will be able to sail on until he/she will encounter the next problem... peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 19:28, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

I'm guessing it's this one. It's been like that for weeks; people removing the last notice don't seem to remove the comma from the one that becomes the last notice. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:37, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

it would help if one or more of the sysops would occasionally browse the site using IE8 and IE9, esp. in "compatibility mode". what you want to do is go to Tools => Internet Options => Advance tab, and there, under the "Browsing" section, you want to mark "Display notification about every script error". after that, you want to browse enwiki with "Compatibility mode" on. it really doesn't matter if this is a despicable browser - one can't ignore the fact that it is used by huge potion of the readers and editors, so the site should better work correctly with this browser. it is also a good idea to repeat this exercise from time to time when logged out, to make sure anons do not run into problems. peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 19:52, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Agh - a thousand apologies for letting that one slip in. Thanks for noticing & fixing it! Andrew Gray (talk) 20:49, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Huggle configure

Hi Editors, I have recently gotten rollback perms, and I want to use Huggle. I'm not sure how to configure it, so I was wondering if you could help me out. Cheers! Kevin12xd... | speak up | take a peek | email me 21:05, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

I would suggest you explore the menus. It's not really hard to use technically, the difficulty is avoiding false positives. Suggest you also look at the other tools available. Rich Farmbrough, 23:35, 18 December 2012 (UTC).

Ganglia

I was watching some job queue logs on Ganglia, suddenly it is asking for authorisation. http://ganglia.wikimedia.org/latest/graph_all_periods.php?c=Miscellaneous%20pmtpa&h=spence.wikimedia.org&v=93084&m=enwiki_JobQueue_length&r=hour&z=default&jr=&js=&st=1325547418&z=large is the url. Any ideas what's going on? Rich Farmbrough, 23:35, 18 December 2012 (UTC).

There is a security issue that has been discovered with the software (a cross-site scripting attack) so until this is resolved we've had to lock it down.--Jorm (WMF) (talk) 23:55, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Signing in from "New section" on a village pump and returning afterwards goes to "Edit" on the village pump

I can't really put it any better than the title. This bug occurs for me on WP:Village pump (technical) and WP:Village pump (miscellaneous) under both Firefox and Chromium on Arch Linux. --Gizmoguy (talk) 00:01, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

Background color changing

Under Monobook (in IE9), whenever I roll over any link (including those in the sidebar) on a page that isn't white (or perhaps just pages in non-article space) the color of the text body area changes to white. This also happens with some pieces of the Main Page. Am I the only one experiencing this? - Purplewowies (talk) 23:58, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Why Google search over internal search on village pumps?

At WP:Village pump I can see a search link for each village pump. These search links go to Google, which I feel is a bad idea for a number of reasons:

1. If the internal search was used it provides a wider test base for the internal search for use over meta.
2. Forcing an external search provider on users raises aesthetic and privacy concerns.

I discovered a discussion at WP:Village pump (policy)/Archive 59#NOINDEX of all non-content namespaces relating to this but it is old and I believe many of the counter-arguments to be outdated. Thus I propose a switch to the internal search.--Gizmoguy (talk) 00:00, 19 December 2012 (UTC)