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How hard would it be to set up ORES for the Draft: space?

Hi all

So I've tried recently to find articles within the Draft: space from Wikipedia:Drafts to work on but I have found it very difficult because I have to go to each one individually to check what is in it.

I think that having a page with an ORES rating would make this much easier. E.g pages with an ORES rating of 0.9 are probably more likely to only need a small amount of work to get them to being publishable than an article with a rating of 0.4.

Would this be difficult to set up? I would be very happy to work on the documentation around it if someone technical could set up the actual rating system.

Thanks

John Cummings (talk) 19:55, 22 March 2018 (UTC)

Hi John Cummings! I don't think it would be that hard. I'd like to see the Page Curation Tool start integrating ORES predictions. I think the most difficult work to make that happen is to make ORES predictions available inside of MediaWiki so tools like that can query them in a straightforward way. We've just finished work to make those predictions available. See Phab:T175757 (pending deployment). We'll be working to get that "draftquality" and "drafttopic" predictions in there soon too -- probably with a month. These predictions will allow you to quickly identify new drafts that are likely to be spam (G11), attack (G10), or vandalism (G3) (draftquality) and to categorize the rest by topic so you can review the drafts that align with your interests/expertise -- maybe even prioritizing the highest quality drafts first (wp10/articlequality). Once these are available in MediaWiki's internal databases, we need to find places to surface the predictions and to filter by them. Where would you want see the predictions surfaced? I think once we decide on a location to surface a prediction, we can build a better estimate of how much dev work it'll take. --Halfak (WMF) (talk) 21:49, 22 March 2018 (UTC)

I've run ORES over AFC before: User:SQL/Interesting_AFC_Stuff. no one seemed interested. SQL^{Query me!} 01:36, 23 March 2018 (UTC)

Thanks very much @Halfak (WMF): and @SQL:. @SQL I never saw this before, very interesting :) @Halfak, this is very timely, I guess I'd really like to see Wikipedia:Drafts become a place for people to rescue drafts from drafts hell and get turned into articles, to become more of a place to collaborate on articles before (not only after) they are published. I think this will help less effort be wasted when people create a draft or when an Article for Deletion is moved to draft space. Do you have an example of what an ORES page might look like? I'm aware that there may be a very high volume of drafts so displaying them all may be quite a large page..... Thanks again both. John Cummings (talk) 15:33, 23 March 2018 (UTC)

I've been thinking about tagging draft talkpages with ORES wp10 predictions, and maybe draftquality as well. It wouldn't be terribly hard. SQL^{Query me!} 03:25, 24 March 2018 (UTC)

SQL cool! Nice to see you experimenting with that. I think we need to find a good way to get this in front of people. E.g. if we could implement a sort-of backlog browser that could take advantage of some of these machine predictions and other filter criteria, we could help people to "rescue drafts from drafts hell and get turned into articles". John Cummings, I can't tell you how excited I am that you've got an eye for this too. I wonder if we could work with SQL to develop a sort-able list using the draft quality/wp10 models now. If we have a few people try to use it, that will help us better understand what is missing -- and what would be important for the draft hell backlog browser tool.  :) I'm hoping to have the draft topic model deployed and well documented in time for the Wikimedia Hackathon in Barcelona. Either of you interested in attending or maybe just hacking with us remotely? --Halfak (WMF) (talk) 20:46, 26 March 2018 (UTC)

@Halfak (WMF): Sort-able list is on it's way now (was very easy to code). Will be at User:SQL/AFC-Ores when it's done. I'll have SQLBot update it daily / make source code available later tonight. SQL^{Query me!} 21:29, 26 March 2018 (UTC)

@Halfak (WMF): and @SQL: I'm not a programmer but very eager to help to get this off the ground where I can (I guess working on usability, beta testing etc), ley me know where I can help :) John Cummings (talk) 21:42, 26 March 2018 (UTC)

@SQL:, this looks amazing, one suggestion I have is to have table sorted by OK% as the default. Is is possible to have it updated more commonly than daily? Just thinking if it becomes popular then people may trip over each other? John Cummings (talk) 21:45, 26 March 2018 (UTC)

@John Cummings: - Easily implemented! First run just completed. How often would you think we should update? SQL^{Query me!} 21:56, 26 March 2018 (UTC)

@SQL: super, is it possible to add definitions of the table columns at the top? I'm not clear what they all mean exactly. No idea how often they should update, is there something similar we could look at and see how often they update? John Cummings (talk) 09:52, 27 March 2018 (UTC)

 Done SQL^{Query me!} 16:22, 27 March 2018 (UTC)

@SQL: amazing work. My only other thoughts are about the order of the columns, I think the OK% column is probably the most useful so should go before the other % measurements (it appears to be a summary of the other percentages?). Just an observation that having one very long file name in the the Article column makes that line very long. These are all a bit of nitpicking rather than big things, I feel like its ready to be used when a short introduction is added to explain the purpose of the list, something like:

This list (generated by ORES) rates draft articles to help users find suitable articles to improve and then publish.

Any suggestions on the best way to integrate this into the Wikipedia:Drafts page? I'm aware its a very long list...perhaps a translusion with a scrolling section or a collapsable section?

John Cummings (talk) 19:31, 27 March 2018 (UTC)

Two things - one, I was thinking of removing "Vandalism" and "Attack" all together - they aren't really useful in this context. Two - maybe 'top 25 possible copyvios' / 'top 25 spam' / bottom (and/or top) 25 OK tables transcluded onto WP:DRAFTS? SQL^{Query me!} 02:52, 29 March 2018 (UTC)

@SQL:, I think removing vandalism and attack are a good idea, I've been looking at the spam articles and many of them appear to be of notable subjects, just written in a tone that doesn't fit with Wikipedia so I'm not sure how useful that label is. Transcluding the top 25 would be a great idea, I guess if one gets popular you could upgrade to top 50... Let me know if there's anything I can do to help, once its live I'll be sure to let people know about it :) John Cummings (talk) 07:57, 29 March 2018 (UTC)

@SQL: oh p.s I think just replacing the 'finding drafts' section on Wikipedia:Drafts is probably the best place to put it. If you want any help rewriting the section let me know. John Cummings (talk) 12:36, 2 April 2018 (UTC)

@John Cummings: Sorry for the delay, but I've got it up at Wikipedia:WikiProject Articles for creation/tables - the bot should finish filling in the FA/GA prediction table (and flipping the 'top 25 ok' table) in ~5-6 hours. SQL^{Query me!} 12:30, 5 April 2018 (UTC)

Hi John Cummings. I would suggest to use wikiproject assessment for this. See User:Kephir/gadgets/rater.js, Special:PageAssessments (example). Gryllida (talk) 21:05, 25 March 2018 (UTC)

Thanks @Gryllida:, I'll take a look. John Cummings (talk) 21:42, 26 March 2018 (UTC)

The other WP:RATER has ORES built in for page assessment as well (I have found it to be reasonably accurate). Kephir's rater has some advantages, but isn't being actively developed any more. — Insertcleverphrasehere ^{(or here)} 23:47, 26 March 2018 (UTC)

Did not know of it before, thank you. Gryllida 01:38, 27 March 2018 (UTC)

Hi all -- I'm Marshall Miller; I'm a new product manager on the Community Tech team with DannyH at WMF. As part of the follow-up to ACTRIAL, the Community Tech team is going to have some bandwidth over the next couple months to take on an improvement to the AfC process. I've been following along with the conversation on this talk page and elsewhere to learn about the biggest challenges facing AfC and the ideas for improving it.

I’ve attempted to summarize AfC’s challenges, goals, and ideas for improvement here: AfC Process Improvement May 2018.

The idea of integrating ORES scores or Copyvio checks in a streamlined fashion into the AfC workflow is one of the ideas being discussed on the talk page of that summary linked above, so I wanted to let you know in case you want to participate in that conversation over the course of the next week as we consolidate around some of the top ideas for improvements that WMF could help with.

FYI: John Cummings, SQL, Insertcleverphrasehere, Gryllida, Halfak (WMF)

MMiller (WMF) (talk) 21:57, 4 April 2018 (UTC)

Responded on the talk page. I am not an experienced articles for creation reviewer, so please be wary of some of my comments that might be misleading or counter constructive as a result. --Gryllida (talk) 04:02, 5 April 2018 (UTC)

the tables seem very useful. I want to track what actually happens to the articles there. Is there any automatic way of providing a historical record of what gets added/removed, or snapshots at intervals? (If not, I may do it manually). DGG ( talk ) 20:23, 11 April 2018 (UTC)

@DGG: - This query should do it. It only goes back as far as the recentchanges table, IIRC 30 days-ish? SQL^{Query me!} 01:35, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

There's also the Daily Delta, updated daily. SQL^{Query me!} 01:36, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

@SQL:, Wikipedia:Drafts looks great :), I just did a bit of testing with a few volunteers and we have a few requests of changes:

1. Please can the list update more frequently or have a manual update button (its not clear on how regularly the page updates).
2. Is it possible to link to longer lists than top 25 for each section? E.g Top 250? One of the testers wanted to start using the draft space as their place to create articles and getting to the Top 25 is a bit of a dark art.
3. The term 'OK drafts' is a bit confusing, is saying 'highest quality' and 'lowest quality' a good alternative?

Thanks

John Cummings (talk) 14:14, 13 April 2018 (UTC)

@John Cummings: - Absolutely on all 3 points. It was updating daily, I've bumped that to ~every 6 hours. I can make some more subtables, possibly tomorrow. I don't think the OK% reflects the quality of the draft, but I'm not 100% sure. mw:ORES#Curation_support reads like it might be the inverse of the likelyhood of being CSD'ed for being spam/vandalism/attack. SQL^{Query me!} 01:41, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

@SQL:, great stuff :), I'll think some more about the naming, maybe just 'highest rated', 'lowest rated' and 'potential spam'? Top 25 OK is very underwhelming :) John Cummings (talk) 13:33, 15 April 2018 (UTC)

@John Cummings: - Looks like the change presented here was undone by @Moxy: - [1]. SQL^{Query me!} 04:17, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

Great chart but simply overwhelmed for transclusion on this explanatory supplement page arrived at by many many talks. Pls dont make our editors looking to derive serviceable information from the page to have to scroll though a huge list at the start of a parent type article. --Moxy (talk) 04:35, 21 April 2018 (UTC) {{quotation }}

Discussion is now also at Wikipedia_talk:Drafts#Draft_chart_talk. SQL^{Query me!} 05:01, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

User:Kudpung you may be interested in how this could dovetail into adding Drafts to the Page Curation function. Legacypac (talk) 05:02, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

The irony is that Aaron is talking about this earlier in the thread with John Cummings but they don't appear to be aware of the other discussions on the same topics in in other venues where Marshall Miller is also leading some discussions. I'm never sure how the work at the WMF overlaps, or if indeed it does, or even if we are discussing these issues at too many different venues.. That said, the simple answer is that it should dovetail. This is one of the very reasons why the New Pages Feed should incorporate the flow of Drafts - because AfC doesn't have such a flow overview. So it's all a bit chicken-egg. AFAICS, many new page reviewers AFAICS don't appear to be bothered to use most of the excellent article meta information that is displayed in the feed, which is a great shame, so I'm not sure if ORES would help much. It might even lead them to making even more superficial checks on the new pages. Too much reliance on AI technology sometimes turns out to be a net negative to accurate productivity. That said, overall, NPPers do indeed do a somewhat better job than the AfCers - for now. With the correct training in these apps however, perhaps we would meet our goals, but even the tutorial at WP:NPP seems to be a challenge for some. On a more positive note, I believe there is finally a fully automatic replacement for the sorely missed Coren Search Bot under development which would help enormously.Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 05:42, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

@SQL:, I reverted the removal. John Cummings (talk) 12:02, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

Could you address the concern raised.--Moxy (talk) 12:40, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

@Moxy:, can you describe your concern here so that we can have a discussion about if it is possible to address this? Simply removing a useful tool people are using because you don't like it is disruptive editing, please leave the tool on the page until we have discussed. Thanks, John Cummings (talk) 15:33, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

Suggestion: we change the tables to collapsed so that they are easy to find and access but do not take up room for people who are not using them. John Cummings (talk) 15:37, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

Er, no, John Cummings, it's fairly standard practice - suggest you self-revert until there is consensus to include. Moxy is right: whether the tool is useful or not, it overwhelms the informational page, and it really isn't necessary to transclude it there at all for people to use it. Nikkimaria (talk) 15:43, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

I suggest something like this, it maintains all of the functionality of the uncollapsed version and addresses the concerns of taking up space on the page John Cummings (talk) 16:11, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

@John Cummings: Take a look at how this page's TOC now looks and behaves with that in place. Nikkimaria (talk) 16:19, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

@Nikkimaria: Ah, sorry, forgot to change the section headings to <h4>, if the problem persists (I'm sure that's a way of avoiding it making section headings but it doesn't seem to have filtered through) I can just change it to big or something else. Other than the formatting issue I feel like this resolves the issue, what do you think? John Cummings (talk) 23:21, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

Still persisting on my end. @Moxy: thoughts? Nikkimaria (talk) 00:50, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

As mentioned above simply overwhelming for an information page. Guess I will have to make a new page WP:Finding drafts for this table and explain what the chart is about and more info about the topic. Will do this in the next few days. This does raise a concern.....do we have these walls of links on other info type pages. If so perhaps we should explain accessibility concerns about this on our MOS pages. It's disruptive to have a wall of links leading to editors not getting serviceable information..... we know statistically editors simply won't scroll through all that mess wall of text to get any information *Which_parts_of_an_article_do_readers_read....we structure our help pages in a certain format for a reason Moxy (talk) 01:40, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for bringing my attention back to the conversation here, Kudpung. Aaron and I have been talking a lot about this in the last couple weeks, so he and I are in sync on this front. SQL and John Cummings -- what you have been putting together so far is really great, and the Community Tech team is thinking on our end what we can learn from it as we mull over the potential improvements to AfC summarized here, which sound similar to what you're doing. We'll be able to build some more detail around our thoughts this coming week as people come back from Wikimedia Conference. -- MMiller (WMF) (talk) 15:26, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

Thank you, Marshall for pointing me to this. Aaron, SQL, John Cummings, and Gryllida, these lists are really excellent. However, and as mentioned above by DGG, doing this post facto they represent a lot of work for anyone wishing to work through them manually. AFAICS, AfC still has no recognised work flow in the sense that one exists for WP:NPP as shown in the chart by Insertcleverphrasehere, which while complex and somewhat intimidating, has received positive comments by serveral users, or the more simplified one at File:New Page Review Flow Chart.jpg. IMO, the meta information provided by ORES would be very useful if it were highlighted in the Special:NewPagesFeed if submitted drafts were to be incorporated there with a user defined option in the preferences to select drafts only. More reason to consider migrating the functions of AfC into the NewPagesFeed and Curation UIs. Despite the resistance of Community Tech to prioritise the upgrades required for these UIs, IMO this would be a more rational deployment of WMF resources.Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:41, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

@Kudpung:, Marshall, Aaron, SQL, DGG, Moxy, and Gryllida are you happy for me to re-add the list in the form below until a longer term solution is potentially found through the suggestions above? This solution reduces the size of the list when people aren't using it to 2 lines and does not effect the table of contents. I hope this proof of concept helps to show the value of having something more developed and so make it more likely to have resources allocated to making it happen. John Cummings (talk) 07:23, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

I understand Moxy's concerns. My concern is more: Who will go to Wikipedia:Drafts and see and use the list even if it is collapsed? Perhaps it could be on a dedicated sub-page such as, just for example, Wikipedia:Drafts/ORES. That said, it would need to be linked to from AfC (and/or) the page patrolling tools. However, that would be the same parallel problem with CopyPatrol.Halfak (WMF) has said he would like to see ORES integrated into the Curation system, but I think he means into new arriving articles. I can certainly imaging that meta information being included in the entries in the Special:NewPagesFeed. So I ask again, what is the problem with giving AfC the opportunity to share that feed for their reviewing? It would seem to me to be a ready-made solution (bar the engineering). Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 08:53, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

Interesting Drafts (ORES)

▼

Does ORES provide WikiProjects tags? If ORES was used to add WikiProject tags to any articles which do not already have them, that could be interesting. I am really interested in knowing what percentage of the main namespace is tagged with a WikiProject and what is not. --Gryllida (talk) 04:29, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

Unable to delete anything

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T191875

The "delete" functionality seems to have stopped working. I've tried it on a few speedies (example) and get:

"A database query error has occurred. This may indicate a bug in the software.

[Wsx7PgpAAEQAAEII7OoAAACE] 2018-04-10 08:53:14: Fatal exception of type "Wikimedia\Rdbms\DBQueryTimeoutError"

The deletion log appears to have had no activity for 15 minutes, which suggests other admins are having problems too. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 08:55, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

Same here. Will file at Phab. BethNaught (talk) 08:57, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

• I just came over here to report the same thing myself - several deletions I just attempted gave the same error "A database query error has occurred. This may indicate a bug in the software." and "[Wsx78gpAMF0AAEo1QGwAAABE] 2018-04-10 08:56:15: Fatal exception of type "Wikimedia\Rdbms\DBQueryTimeoutError"" (with the "Wsx78gpAMF0AAEo1QGwAAABE" part different in each case). Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 08:58, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Was in the process of writing out the exact same message. I've tried deleting different namespaces and with different reasons but to no avail. I'm getting the exact same error message (except the string at the start which is different every time). Anarchyte (work | talk) 09:00, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

• Huh:) The spammers ought to have a (predictably short) fun-time.....~ Winged Blades^Godric 09:16, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

It's been fixed. Anarchyte (work | talk) 09:26, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

Can confirm - this is fixed now :-) ~Oshwah~^{(talk) (contribs)} 09:29, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

Yup - on one G12 I just looked at, somebody had done a courtesy blanking in the interim to get rid of the copyvio. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 09:30, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

Yep, all good here too. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 09:31, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

It seems some regular database maintenance, that should normally have no impact on edits made deletes fail for 40 minutes. Database administrators will research why this happened and put measures in place to prevent from happening again. Apologies for the problems caused, this was a really bad thing to happen. We will share our findings here, for the time being, you may want to review edits from 9:40 to 10:19 UTCCorrection: 8:40 to 9:19 UTC in case some to-delete pages/editions were missed. --JCrespo (WMF) (talk) 09:36, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

Techie things go wrong, that's just life ;-) Thanks for the quick response. Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 09:37, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

I once discovered the hard way that if you start an OPTIMIZE TABLE on a mysql database, and then kill it with CTRL+C, it leaves the table in an unusable state. As Boing! said, things break, it's just life, and thanks for the prompt investigation. Ritchie333 ^{(talk) (cont)} 09:53, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

A preliminary incident report has been published at https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incident_documentation/20180410-Deleting_a_page_on_enwiki Sadly it is not as easy as "a wrong command was sent". The initial research points to a race condition on blocking on delete + blocking on maintenance, but only once we reduce the amount of locking done on delete (T191892) we will see if that prevents the issue in the future (other than monitor an correct earlier the issue). --JCrespo (WMF) (talk) 15:32, 10 April 2018 (UTC)

In a decades-long career as a user of large computer systems in industry, I always found it hard to distinguish between successful hacking and failed maintenance, when maintainers don’t manage to test the effects of their changes, or to note problems and notify users appropriately that the problem has been detected and is being fixed. Edison (talk) 14:30, 16 April 2018 (UTC)

Mapping content of different language articles to English

I find that Russian articles frequently deviate from English articles - to a point where false or misleading information is disseminated. For example, Echinacea (corn flower) has no reference in English that it may be used to isolate/purge radio-isotopes from the human body, yet this claim is made in the Russian version. So, there should be a simple translation program used (Google) to compare languages of the same article for words used that are not within the English (correct and trustworthy) version. A red flag would be raised and the article should be reviewed by a competent language volunteer to assure the reliability and accuracy of foreign language entries. Thanks! — Preceding unsigned comment added by NM Remote (talk • contribs) 05:13, 12 April 2018 (UTC)

I trust Google Translate even less than I trust a poorly-referenced Wikipedia article. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 07:25, 12 April 2018 (UTC)

Just chiming in to support Redrose64's comment; my feeling is the same as theirs. Mathglot (talk) 07:40, 12 April 2018 (UTC)

I'm not surprised by the claim; it's one of hundreds of miraculous-seeming claims for that plant. What you wouldn't find is any WP:MEDRS-qualifying sources that support such a claim. User:Jytdog or User:Alexbrn, do you know any editors who can read Russian and might be interested in looking into this report? The idea of being able to automatically identify significant differences might be a good one (e.g., it could help us find new content, so we could expand our articles), but in the short-term, it's possible that we could find someone to review that article and make sure that it meets that community's standards. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:24, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for the invitation but I don't read Russian and my hands are overfull dealing with woo-pushers here. Sorry. Jytdog (talk) 23:30, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

Two factor authentication for all users?

Seeing that account security is a big issue nowadays I was wondering about 2FA for Wikipedia - using either hardware keys or authenticator apps. I was surprised to learn that it is to a subset of users (mostly admin type people). Is there any reason it cannot be offered to regular users? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Master Of Ninja (talk • contribs) 16:19, 12 April 2018 (UTC)

This is proposed quite frequently, but there are scalability issues that prevent it from being rolled out more fully. You may wish to see the discussion from last month about enabling two-factor authentication for more information. --Deskana (talk) 16:35, 12 April 2018 (UTC)

Thank you for the explanation and link. - Master Of Ninja (talk) 17:36, 12 April 2018 (UTC)

The main issue that I see is that the current implementation has no backup. With most 2FA systems, there are other ways to get in to your account if you lose your authenticator software or the seed code (Google has a system that can call you with a login code, banks have customer service people who can ask you security questions or, if worst comes to worst, snail mail you to verify your identity, etc.). Unfortunately, most of those methods wouldn't work for Wikipedia since it would require the WMF storing your personal information, which they don't want to do (Wikipedia could use email as a second factor, but there are security issues with email). Instead, you have to open a bug report on Phabricator, wait for a developer to see it, hope that your IP hasn't changed so a checkuser can verify your ID, and then the developer has to manually edit the database to remove 2FA from your account--Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 22:57, 12 April 2018 (UTC)

It's not actually manually editing the database, it's running a maintenance script, but otherwise mostly correct. FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY ^[u+1F602] 04:00, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

Left-aligned Module:Photo montage

About Module:Photo montage, in using mobile view, all of the montage photos are left-align. For example, Desktop view, Mobile view. Could you change it to align-center? I think it looks nicer than now. How do you think?--126.236.202.216 (talk) 13:41, 13 April 2018 (UTC)

That page doesn't use that module. Also, please always report your exact browser version and your OS version. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:40, 13 April 2018 (UTC)

The page had already been edited from Module:Photo montage to Module:Multiple image. See the former version, this problem is caused by Module:Photo montage. OS/iOS 11.3, brouser/Safari (sorry, version unknown)--126.236.202.216 (talk) 04:39, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

When this was reported, the then version of the article, which used Module:Photo montage, had the montage left-aligned for me when viewed in mobile view in Google Chrome on Mac OS X. Appears Frietjes' change of the module from table to div since then fixed that. --Pipetricker (talk) 21:46, 16 April 2018 (UTC)

 Done Thanks.—126.236.196.246 (talk) 04:28, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

Why did I get a notification about this?

I got a notification that looked like this.

I'm rather baffled, since the linked diff appears to make no mention of me whatsoever. Can anyone explain why I received this notification? Eman235/talk 05:21, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

You probably got pinged because Atsme's user page got transcluded by accident. Probably because of the image with this caption: ""In Memorandum: An Editor's Hand after Scrolling down EEng's Talk Page." User:Eman235/talk 5:40 am, 29 May 2017 (UTC−5)". Anarchyte (work | talk) 06:30, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

@Eman235: Yes, Mr. Daniel Plainview (talk · contribs) wrote {{user:Atsme|Atsme}} presumably as a typo for either {{user|Atsme|Atsme}} or [[user:Atsme|Atsme]]. The first is only one character different, the second four; but whichever it was intended, it makes all the world of difference. So, everybody whose user page is linked from user:Atsme will have been notified for the same edit. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 09:11, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

Oh my!! Apologies to all... ^{Atsme📞📧} 09:36, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

Haha! That's an amazing mistake... Eman235/talk 02:11, 15 April 2018 (UTC)

LOL well that's a smidgen embarrassing. Sorry about the confusion. Still kind of trying to work out the best way to ping other users without the colon added by default. Mr. Daniel Plainview (talk) 15:08, 16 April 2018 (UTC)

Mr. Daniel Plainview You can use a simple link, as here; or a variety of templates, the simplest of which is {{u}}. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:53, 16 April 2018 (UTC)

I use {{yo|Example}} for pinging, it's easy enough. Home Lander (talk) 21:26, 16 April 2018 (UTC)

@Home Lander: {{yo}} is merely a redirect to {{reply to}} and as such it includes a colon, which is what Mr. Daniel Plainview doesn't want. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 13:54, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

It's pretty janky, but I did write a user script to help with this; it puts a drop-down below the edit box that gives you an option to insert a ping for you for anyone whose name is already linked in the section. Installation is to add mw.loader.load("/enwiki/w/index.php?title=User:Writ Keeper/Scripts/autoping.js‎&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript"); to your common.js page. Like I said, it's a little janky, though; the user detection isn't perfect, and it doesn't always insert the ping in the right place. Still might be of use though. Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 14:07, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

@Writ Keeper: I'm having trouble understanding how it works... presumably it scans for usernames and encloses these in [[User:username|username]]. It's something to do with a variable called this but I can't find where that is set, nor even declared (I guess it's a string?); the first use is as this.selectedIndex but even that isn't set up anywhere. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 18:09, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

@Redrose64: Not quite. What it does is it scans for usernames that are already linked in the section (as identified by the regex /\[\[User:([^|#\/\]]+)/g), which will usually be either people's pings or signatures. It then puts those names in a dropdown menu right above the edit summary box; when one of the usernames in the dropdown is chosen, the script will insert a ping, in the form @[[User:<username>|<username>]]: into the edit box at the cursor's last location. (If the cursor hasn't been in the editbox yet, or if the edit box has lost focus, the placement can still get pretty wonky.) The this that you see is the dropdown menu itself, such that this.selectedIndex is a reference to the dropdown entry chosen (i.e. the index that was selected). It's a Java-style this keyword; it refers to the object currently being operated on. In this context, it refers to the DOM object from the jQuery selector $("#pingMenu"), since the code is in that object's "change" event callback. (I spend a loooot of time in the jQuery API.) Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 18:49, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

Writ Keeper: In which case, I don't see the point. Notifications are generated by links to a user page, as here. Changing such links to templates will make no difference at all as to whether a notification is sent or not. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:29, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

@Redrose64: I...think you still might not get how it works? The point is that you don't have to type out a user wiki link or remember a template format or (especially) copy and paste a user who has wacky characters in their name, you just click on a dropdown and the script writes it out for you. It doesn't change anything to anything else, it inserts something. Like, if I was too lazy to type out Redrose64, but wanted to ping you, I just choose the dropdown and the script writes out: @[[User:Redrose64|Redrose64]]: Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 20:01, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

This did not notify me. It is fairly well known that the user link and signature must be added in the same post, but it is less well understood that it must all be done be a new post, not as an amendment to an existing post. That is also one of the reasons that I am sceptical about your script. If you link a few examples of where your script has been used, I should be able to determine if a notification would have been sent. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:43, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

@Redrose64: I mean, that has nothing to do with my script. This is an edit where I used the script, and the ping went through. This very post is another. Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 20:48, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

@Redrose64: Ha, when he wrote about not wanting a colon, I interpreted that as not having to type one, like he did above for the accidental userpage transclusion. LOL. Home Lander (talk) 13:57, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

Responsive MonoBook

General question: does anyone know of any particular reasons why making the MonoBook skin responsive for mobile (sidebar moved to bottom, navigation in general a bit collapsed, has proper scaling, looks like this, screenshots: phab:F16577440, phab:F16577439) would be a bad idea? As much as I'd argue that all skins should just work across devices and scale appropriately, it's come up that some people may not want this. Do folks here expect such to be the case, or something that should be considered a blocker? -— Isarra ༆ 19:02, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

You want to begin another project? Ruslik_Zero 20:50, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

XD --Izno (talk) 20:52, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

More accurate would be to say I already... did it, really, though it's a fairly small one. The patch exists and just needs some fixes before we merge it, but it also makes sense to verify that it's not likely to be a problem in practice beforehand as well. -— Isarra ༆ 21:45, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

I use Timeless presently and if I didn't have at least one sidebar for any medium-size or longer article I would be sad. --Izno (talk) 20:52, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

It'd still have the sidebar at normal resolutions, as the desktop layout is unchanged. The linked example has it live on my personal wiki, so if you make it narrow you can see it collapses into the mobile layout at 850px. -— Isarra ༆ 21:45, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

Right, but some people either a) edit on mobile or b) edit with a half-width screen. Actually, this is something about Timeless that bothers me come to think of it. :) --Izno (talk) 22:11, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

(And it bothers me more because I only have access to the tools in one place--the top... maybe I don't need them? --Izno (talk) 22:14, 14 April 2018 (UTC))

We should speak more about this, because it sounds like you might be hitting on something that could well be quite important in general for this stuff. What's the issue, exactly, that's been coming up? That it's just too wide that the layout changes? Is it causing problems specifically for the editing action, or just usage in general as an editor? -— Isarra ༆ 12:44, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

Really the idea here is to make ALL the skins work across devices. Timeless, MonoBook, Vector... -— Isarra ༆ 21:46, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

Sure. --Izno (talk) 22:11, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

I still see the sidebar at the left side, not at the bottom. Ruslik_Zero 20:28, 15 April 2018 (UTC)

It's only at small resolutions it does that. Under 850px at standard dpi. Otherwise it's exactly the same. -— Isarra ༆ 12:44, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

How do you transclude a lead only?

I've run into a bit of a mystery...

This works: {{#section:Donald Trump|Lead text}}

This doesn't work: {{#section:Physical geography|Lead text}}

Can anyone explain to me why?

Thank you.    — The Transhumanist   23:29, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

The wikitext at Donald Trump contains:

<section begin=Lead text />
...
<section end=Lead text />

At Help:Magic words, search for "#section" to find a link to documentation. I hope transclusions like this are rare because it is very unlikely that the same text is really useful in two places, and it is likely that future edits will either break the transclusion or make it inappropriate. Johnuniq (talk) 23:43, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

Thank you.

See Portal:Donald Trump, and Portal:Donald Trump/Intro.    — The Transhumanist   23:48, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

Follow-up question

Is there a standard default name for a lead section?    — The Transhumanist   23:50, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

I found this: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Labeled_Section_Transclusion#Transclude_the_introduction

But it picks up hatnotes too. Getting closer though. I'd like a method that doesn't require marking up the source page being transcluded, and if it is needed, makes it as minimally intrusive as possible.    — The Transhumanist   00:08, 15 April 2018 (UTC)

The Transhumanist, {{#invoke:String|match|pattern='''.+|s = {{#lsth:Water}}}} All text after bold Galobtter (pingó mió) 06:21, 15 April 2018 (UTC)

Galobtter, thank you. By the way, sometimes the bold isn't at the very beginning of the lead paragraph. How would you catch those?    — The Transhumanist   06:27, 15 April 2018 (UTC)

Taking Tropical Cyclone, this pattern only seems to work ok when in a module, thus: {{#invoke:Get lead|main|{{#lsth:Tropical cyclone}}}} Galobtter (pingó mió) 06:49, 15 April 2018 (UTC)

Galobtter, Can this technique be extended to transcluding the content of a short description template?, Something in the line of {{#invoke:String|match|pattern={{short description|= {{#lsth:Water}}}} · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 08:04, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

Hmm, @Pbsouthwood: {{#invoke:String|match|pattern=<div class="shortdescription.-</div>|s = {{#lsth:Water}}}}. Not running the code here, since it adds the short description to the village pump (that can be fixed, depending on your use case- what are you trying to do this for?) Galobtter (pingó mió) 08:47, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

Galobtter, there are uses as an annotation in some lists, such as indexes, where transcluding the short description after the link would be very informative. All that would be needed is the text from the unique short description in an article. Not needed for disambiguations etc where the same short description applies to several articles/pages. I have an idea that this would be helpful for creating automated indexes, possibly for outline lists too, maybe also as an option in category lists. Really anywhere that a short description after a link might be useful. Could also have applications in hovercards. This sort of application would make the short descriptions really useful inside Wikipedia instead of just being a pain in the butt forced on us to avoid being described by Wikidata.· · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 09:35, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

Pywikibot login doesn't read password file. Help/more doc? (on Toolforge)

So, the background is that I set up an account for Muninnbot on Toolforge. The bot should use Pywikibot's predefined login.main() to login, but I cannot make it to work. I believe I have read, understood and followed the instructions from the Toolforge manual for using PWB's shared install, as well as Russell Blau's starter on PWB.

I may have missed some doc because from what I can read I followed all the steps. Details with ssh sessions on Toolforge etc:

Simple session - login on Toolforge as the tool account, run login.main(), abort (ctrl-C) when credentials are requested

Linux tools-bastion-03 3.13.0-139-generic #188-Ubuntu SMP Tue Jan 9 14:43:09 UTC 2018 x86_64 Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS tools-bastion-03 is a Tool Labs bastion (toollabs::bastion) ====================================================================== _______ _____ _____ _______ _____ ______ ______ _______ | | | | | | |______ | | |_____/ | ____ |______ | |_____| |_____| |_____ | |_____| | \_ |_____| |______ ====================================================================== This is a server of the tools Cloud VPS project, the home of community managed bots, webservices, and tools supporting the Wikimedia movement. Use of this system is subject to the Toolforge Terms of Use, Code of Conduct, and Privacy Policies: - https://tools.wmflabs.org/?Rules General guidance and help can be found at: - https://tools.wmflabs.org/?Help The last Puppet run was at Sun Apr 15 19:12:08 UTC 2018 (1 minutes ago). Last login: Sun Apr 15 18:47:04 2018 from 213-245-111-42.rev.numericable.fr tigraan@tools-bastion-03:~$ become muninnbot tools.muninnbot@tools-bastion-03:~$ python Python 2.7.6 (default, Nov 23 2017, 15:49:48) [GCC 4.8.4] on linux2 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> from scripts import login >>> login.main() Password for user Muninnbot on wikipedia:en (no characters will be shown): Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> File "/data/project/shared/pywikipedia/core/scripts/login.py", line 179, in main site.login(sysop, autocreate=autocreate) File "/data/project/shared/pywikipedia/core/pywikibot/site.py", line 2090, in login if loginMan.login(retry=True, autocreate=autocreate): File "/data/project/shared/pywikipedia/core/pywikibot/login.py", line 308, in login password=True) File "/data/project/shared/pywikipedia/core/pywikibot/bot.py", line 407, in input data = ui.input(question, password=password, default=default, force=force) File "/data/project/shared/pywikipedia/core/pywikibot/userinterfaces/terminal_interface_base.py", line 292, in input text = self._input_reraise_cntl_c(password) File "/data/project/shared/pywikipedia/core/pywikibot/userinterfaces/terminal_interface_base.py", line 310, in _input_reraise_cntl_c raise QuitKeyboardInterrupt() pywikibot.bot_choice.QuitKeyboardInterrupt

Same problem, but with a non-interactive session (so it aborts because stdin is EOF)

As the tool account, I crontab'd to make the following Python test run on the grid, i.e. in the same conditions as the bot should run: #!/usr/bin/env python3 # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- import datetime from scripts import login import sys print(datetime.datetime.utcnow(), ' - test executed') print('Python PATH is:', sys.path) print('I will attempt to login via PWB') login.main() print('login.main() did not freeze') results in the following cron-0.out file: 2018-04-15 18:50:22.191869 - test executed Python PATH is: ['/mnt/nfs/labstore-secondary-tools-project/muninnbot/Teahouse-bot/scripts', '/data/project/shared/pywikipedia/core', '/data/project/shared/pywikipedia/core/externals/httplib2', '/shared/pywikipedia/core/scripts', '/usr/lib/python3.4', '/usr/lib/python3.4/plat-x86_64-linux-gnu', '/usr/lib/python3.4/lib-dynload', '/usr/local/lib/python3.4/dist-packages', '/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages'] I will attempt to login via PWB <class 'EOFError'> (The script's last line is never reached) ...and the following cron-0.err file: Password for user Muninnbot on wikipedia:en (no characters will be shown): WARNING: /usr/lib/python3.4/getpass.py:92: GetPassWarning: Can not control echo on the terminal. passwd = fallback_getpass(prompt, stream) Warning: Password input may be echoed. Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/lib/python3.4/getpass.py", line 70, in unix_getpass old = termios.tcgetattr(fd) # a copy to save termios.error: (25, 'Inappropriate ioctl for device') During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred: Traceback (most recent call last): File "/data/project/muninnbot/Teahouse-bot/scripts/test.py", line 12, in <module> login.main() File "/data/project/shared/pywikipedia/core/scripts/login.py", line 179, in main site.login(sysop, autocreate=autocreate) File "/data/project/shared/pywikipedia/core/pywikibot/site.py", line 2090, in login if loginMan.login(retry=True, autocreate=autocreate): File "/data/project/shared/pywikipedia/core/pywikibot/login.py", line 308, in login password=True) File "/data/project/shared/pywikipedia/core/pywikibot/bot.py", line 407, in input data = ui.input(question, password=password, default=default, force=force) File "/data/project/shared/pywikipedia/core/pywikibot/userinterfaces/terminal_interface_base.py", line 292, in input text = self._input_reraise_cntl_c(password) File "/data/project/shared/pywikipedia/core/pywikibot/userinterfaces/terminal_interface_base.py", line 306, in _input_reraise_cntl_c text = getpass.getpass('') File "/usr/lib/python3.4/getpass.py", line 92, in unix_getpass passwd = fallback_getpass(prompt, stream) File "/usr/lib/python3.4/getpass.py", line 127, in fallback_getpass return _raw_input(prompt, stream) File "/usr/lib/python3.4/getpass.py", line 149, in _raw_input raise EOFError EOFError CRITICAL: Closing network session.

I believe I have a correct setup for my password file

...i.e., I have a password file in the correct format, and user-config.py points to it: tools.muninnbot@tools-bastion-03:~$ cat user-config.py | grep password_file password_file = "/data/project/muninnbot/.pywikibot/passwords" tools.muninnbot@tools-bastion-03:~$ cat /data/project/muninnbot/.pywikibot/passwords ("Munninbot", "<something>") (Password redacted of course - but yes, I am sure I put the correct password in the file, I manage to log on en-wp manually by copy-pasting from the file)

I tried following the stack trace around PWB's source code to understand what is going on, but frankly I got lost fairly quickly. Tigraan^{Click here to contact me} 19:51, 15 April 2018 (UTC)

@Tigraan: What are using the login script for? If you just need to login, then try using something like this.

import pywikibot
site = pywikibot.Site() # or site = pywikibot.Site('en', 'wikipedia')
site.login() # Logs in
site.logged_in() # Test if logged in

— JJMC89 (T·C) 04:00, 16 April 2018 (UTC)

@JJMC89: the exact same problem occurs with your code snippet (I had already tried using the pywikibot.Site().login() but did not keep the logs so I wanted to make sure to execute your exact snippet). It asks for the password (so it is a no-go in non-interactive session), and the stack trace points to similar places.

details for the stack trace but it is similar to above

Linux tools-bastion-03 3.13.0-139-generic #188-Ubuntu SMP Tue Jan 9 14:43:09 UTC 2018 x86_64 Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS tools-bastion-03 is a Tool Labs bastion (toollabs::bastion) ====================================================================== _______ _____ _____ _______ _____ ______ ______ _______ | | | | | | |______ | | |_____/ | ____ |______ | |_____| |_____| |_____ | |_____| | \_ |_____| |______ ====================================================================== This is a server of the tools Cloud VPS project, the home of community managed bots, webservices, and tools supporting the Wikimedia movement. Use of this system is subject to the Toolforge Terms of Use, Code of Conduct, and Privacy Policies: - https://tools.wmflabs.org/?Rules General guidance and help can be found at: - https://tools.wmflabs.org/?Help The last Puppet run was at Mon Apr 16 17:42:40 UTC 2018 (21 minutes ago). Last login: Sun Apr 15 19:42:21 2018 from 213-245-111-42.rev.numericable.fr tigraan@tools-bastion-03:~$ become muninnbot tools.muninnbot@tools-bastion-03:~$ python3 Python 3.4.3 (default, Nov 28 2017, 16:41:13) [GCC 4.8.4] on linux Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> import pywikibot >>> site = pywikibot.Site() >>> site APISite("en", "wikipedia") >>> site.login() Password for user Muninnbot on wikipedia:en (no characters will be shown): Traceback (most recent call last): File "/data/project/shared/pywikipedia/core/pywikibot/userinterfaces/terminal_interface_base.py", line 306, in _input_reraise_cntl_c text = getpass.getpass('') File "/usr/lib/python3.4/getpass.py", line 78, in unix_getpass passwd = _raw_input(prompt, stream, input=input) File "/usr/lib/python3.4/getpass.py", line 147, in _raw_input line = input.readline() KeyboardInterrupt During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred: Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> File "/data/project/shared/pywikipedia/core/pywikibot/site.py", line 2090, in login if loginMan.login(retry=True, autocreate=autocreate): File "/data/project/shared/pywikipedia/core/pywikibot/login.py", line 308, in login password=True) File "/data/project/shared/pywikipedia/core/pywikibot/bot.py", line 407, in input data = ui.input(question, password=password, default=default, force=force) File "/data/project/shared/pywikipedia/core/pywikibot/userinterfaces/terminal_interface_base.py", line 292, in input text = self._input_reraise_cntl_c(password) File "/data/project/shared/pywikipedia/core/pywikibot/userinterfaces/terminal_interface_base.py", line 310, in _input_reraise_cntl_c raise QuitKeyboardInterrupt() pywikibot.bot_choice.QuitKeyboardInterrupt >>> site.logged_in() False

The intent is to login the bot and use scripts.add_text to post notifications. But I just don't manage to get the password file right. Tigraan^{Click here to contact me} 18:11, 16 April 2018 (UTC)

@Tigraan: My guess is that you're using the password for that account that you use for the web interface or the file permissions of the password file aren't correct. You should use OAuth (or BotBasswords). If you add me as a maintainer, I can poke around. — JJMC89 (T·C) 02:52, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

@JJMC89: File permissions allow reading (see "I believe I have the correct setup for the password file" in the OP), unless Pywikibot does something funky (e.g. run from another account) but I do use the same password as for the web interface. Is that wrong? I will try OAuth instead in any case. Will keep you updated. Tigraan^{Click here to contact me} 08:22, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

@Tigraan: The passwords file in my directory is 700 (executable). It doesn't use another account, but there have been a number of breaking changes to the API action=login. Basically Pywikibot must use OAuth or BotPasswords instead of the username/password used for the web interface (interactive login). — JJMC89 (T·C) 14:29, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

@JJMC89: I got an owner-only OAuth consumer at meta:Special:OAuthConsumerRegistration, added its content in a {{{1}}} line in user-config.py as described in mw:Manual:Pywikibot/OAuth (after having chmod 700 that file of course), and now it works. Many thanks! Tigraan^{Click here to contact me} 19:35, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

Resolved

Username should be c/p-able

Hi. About WP:USERNAME. Whatever their fancy colors styling duh, I run into this problem: I cannot copy/paste their username. So I propose: Username must be c/p friendly (css wise). - DePiep (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 20:15, 15 April 2018 (UTC)

What are you referring to? "fancy colors styling" sounds like your issue is with customized signatures and not with the username policy. If you think a signature should display the real username so you can copy-paste from the rendered signature instead of the mandatory wikilink in the source then you can post a suggestion to Wikipedia talk:Signatures. If you see a signature without the username in the source then point the user to WP:SIGLINK. If you enable "Navigation popups" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets then you can copy-paste the username from a popup when you hover over a signature. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:51, 15 April 2018 (UTC)

I say: Similar to {{DISPLAYTITLE:}}: the username in a sign must be copy/paste-able whatever the formatting (styling). Sure that could require a guideline change. - DePiep (talk) 20:44, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

Or WP:DISPLAYTITLE. Any phab id? - DePiep (talk) 21:04, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

I doubt there would be a phab id; it's not a technical problem, and I don't think there could be a technical solution, short of removing the ability to customize signatures. In what context do you need to copy and paste a user's name?Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 21:12, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

hmm, in communication (think talkpage). It helps when the reply-to name is the same as the post-sign-name (duh). For *all* readers of a discussion. Today, one cannot trust searching a sign-name (because the user-name may be different & hidden). - DePiep (talk) 21:19, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

@DePiep: Please clarify. Is your complaint (1) that some rendered signatures do not show the username, or (2) that the usernames in some rendered signatures are not c/p-able? ―Mandruss ☎ 21:55, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

All of these, and more: they should be legible too. - DePiep (talk) 22:26, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

• Examples of bad:

1. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 10:41, 14 April 2018 (UTC) (see [2])

[[User:Pigsonthewing|Andy Mabbett]]

• Primary needs: 1. username should be legible (reader's eye); 2. copy/paste name; 3. page searchable per visible name. 4. "Talk"-link clear. - DePiep (talk) 22:26, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

That's a bad example of bad, since it satisfies all four of your points. ―Mandruss ☎ 22:33, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

Userlink copy/pastes to: "Andy Mabbett", so User:Andy Mabbett. What is your question? - DePiep (talk) 22:37, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

Why can't you copy/paste from the source? There are a variety of easy solutions already available for this. Killiondude (talk) 22:40, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

1. Why must I? 2. Does it help reading, searching the talkpage? 3. Username can be hidden in irrelevant but disturbing code. (see source code from example #1; this is a simple example because it has no color & talkpage mixups). My question: did you yourself never met this situation? - DePiep (talk) 22:50, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

Andy gives the username following the userpage link.
Hey I agree with you in principle, I think the signature p&g should be improved and enforced. As a practical matter in the current environment, established editors are not going to change their sigs unless given a choice between that and a block, which is never going to happen. You might have some luck with a few new editors, the ones who haven't been here long enough to know that the community doesn't really care about compliance with signature p&g. Once they learn better, I suspect many of them will simply change back to what they had before. I think any improvement to the p&g is largely a waste of time. ―Mandruss ☎ 22:54, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

So now you say like: 'established users won't give up their privilege'. Sure, if that is how Wikipedia works. I repeat: usernames in talkpages should be open&clear this way, because it is a website. - DePiep (talk) 18:14, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

Non-free images in portal

A number of non-free images have been somehow embedded or transcluded into Portal:Amiga which is a problem per WP:NFCC#9. Does anyone know how to tweak the portal's syntax so that it does not include any non-free content? The files are File:HAM6example.png, File:Amiga-90sLogo.gif, File:Amiga Logo 1985.svg and File:Recent Amiga.svg. -- Marchjuly (talk) 07:59, 16 April 2018 (UTC)

• Reminds me of another problem with portals, that often people copy from articles without attribution. Anyhow, I've fixed it by reverting Legacypac's edit here. Also legacypac, atleast use {{#lsth:Article}} to transclude only the lead - the entire article shouldn't be dumped in the front of a portal lead Galobtter (pingó mió) 08:18, 16 April 2018 (UTC)
  • Thank you for your help Galobtter. -- Marchjuly (talk) 12:22, 16 April 2018 (UTC)

Was not aware of that bit of code. I did not like the content as it was presented. I'd rather redirect the entire portal to the associated topic Legacypac (talk) 15:11, 16 April 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-16

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

Changes later this week

• Profiling statistics for an abuse filter tell how often edits match the filter. The statistics for the abuse filters were reset after 10000 actions. Wikis can now decide to reset it more or less often. They can file a phabricator task to do so. [3]
• Abuse filters will now treat integers and floats more precisely. For example, 5/2 was rounded down to 2 but will now be 2.5 and 2*4 will be the integer 8 and not the floating-point number 8.0. Division values are the only ones changed. For the rest only strict comparisons (=== and !==) will be affected leaving the values unchanged. [4][5]
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 April. It will be on all wikis from 19 April (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 17 April at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 18 April at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• The new PDF renderer could not create PDFs from books. Books are in this case collections of pages on a Wikimedia wiki. PediaPress will take over development of the books-to-PDF function. [6]
• Pywikibot will no longer support Python 2.7.2 and 2.7.3. [7]
• Volunteer developers can fill out the Wikimedia Communities and Contributors survey. The last day is April 22 (UTC). This is a third-party service survey. See the privacy statement.

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

15:20, 16 April 2018 (UTC)

Autoblock detector tool broken?

The autoblock detector tool at https://tools.wmflabs.org/xtools/autoblock/ just seems to list all autoblocks, regardless of the username entered. Surely this is not the intended behavior? Can someone please investigate? -- The Anome (talk) 19:50, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

When you hit submit it's just redirecting to that wiki's Special:AutoblockList. The old tool didn't actually work anyway, at least at the time we retired it. What is the expected behaviour? Would the username pertain to the originally blocked user, or the blocking admin? For privacy reasons we can't reveal the account/IP that was autoblocked. — MusikAnimal ^talk 19:50, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

Petscan down

https://petscan.wmflabs.org has been giving a "502 Bad Gateway error" for about the last 40 minutes. William Avery (talk) 20:29, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

It's still giving the same error. What's the best talk place to find out info about this? - X201 (talk) 07:59, 18 April 2018 (UTC)

Still down. Petscan is an invaluable maintenance tool: what is the best way to contact the WMF engineering team about this? -- The Anome (talk) 09:52, 18 April 2018 (UTC)

It's back now. It would still be useful to know where to report problems in future; and interesting to know why it went down for so long. William Avery (talk) 11:49, 18 April 2018 (UTC)

Well some searching often gives you the answer. In this case Wikipedia:PetScan comes up quite quickly, which gives you all the information you need. —TheDJ (talk • contribs)

@TheDJ: - I've got to disagree with you there. While there is reference that this is run by "Wikimedia Foundation's cloud computing environment", the "issues" link goes to the third party bitbucket.org reporting service. That page also says it is an "external tool", and yes it is not part of core, but if it is operated by WMF it is in the enterprise scope. So from just reading the page you referenced, this appears that there is some paid support from the foundation that perhaps should be engaged via phabricator - but like with what I think are too many services, there is no clear direction on how users should intake trouble reports and what to expect once it is submitted; or if after-action reports are going to be produced. This type of confusion is unfortunately common with tooling, especially knowing what aspects of outages are expected to be handled under an SLO by paid staff and which aspects are dependent on volunteers. — xaosflux ^Talk 14:58, 18 April 2018 (UTC)

Note, I'm really just trying to think of a way forward on issue reporting - perhaps we need some big templates (report an issue) that can be applied to the most popular tools - and they can link to or include specific directions for the bigger apps. — xaosflux ^Talk 15:04, 18 April 2018 (UTC)

Yeah, i guess a lot of people have trouble distinguish between "run on" and "run by" —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:26, 18 April 2018 (UTC)

And most people would have no way to know if something isn't working because an underlying system is malfunctioning. — xaosflux ^Talk 15:56, 18 April 2018 (UTC)

I found and followed the issues link, but it seemed to be for dev issues, rather than operational problems. William Avery (talk) 18:39, 18 April 2018 (UTC)

Any auto-hyphenation yet

I wonder if yet any way to auto-hyphenate long words on browsers, as done 40 years ago by soft hyphens (versus "required hyphens"), to now wrap long words on narrow windows or smaller hand-held devices. See Danish sports page: "1927–28 Danmarksmesterskabsturneringen". I have used "<wbr>" to auto-wrap non-hyphen text, but want to auto-hyphenate to append "-" in each mid-word wrap. No hurry on this. -Wikid77 (talk) 00:49, 18 April 2018 More: As I recall, the soft-hyphen "&shy;" worked fine on either computer browsers or mobile phones, but there were concerns for some screenreader devices to handle Wikipedia pages. However, I was thinking the newer screenreaders could handle (skip) the "&shy" characters when processing the hyphenated text. Alternatively, I wonder if soft hyphens were to be limited to one per long word, as a compromise to reduce problems in screenreaders, that limit might allow more use of soft hyphens in WP text. -Wikid77 (talk) 04:06, 18 April 2018 (UTC)

I don't know the technical background, but see Phineas Gage for some extreme methods of markup, including {{shy}} (used 50 times). Johnuniq (talk) 05:02, 18 April 2018 (UTC)

i think the primary concern is readability of the wikitext honestly. Anyway, hyphenation is primary a layouting problem, and with HTML that makes it a responsibility of the browser, not of wikipedia. It seems that browsers still dont recognize syllables in arbitrary languages and thus still dont support this as a layouting option. Then again, i feel that people are increasingly confusing the web with a typesetting platform sometimes. Its not, the web is designed to be dynamic, not to be an optimal typesetting language. Thats what latex is for. You cant even dictate what font or what size of rendersurface a person is using, so dictating hyphenation is even harder and shy’ing every syllable of every word seems an excessive solution to a minor problem to me. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 06:24, 18 April 2018 (UTC)

There is a working draft CSS property for this btw. I haven't tested it since it was introduced in 2016, but maybe we should look at that again. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:26, 18 April 2018 (UTC)

The relevant W3C Working Draft was last updated on 22 August 2017 - just 8 months ago. It should not be considered stable, and is not a finished work - that won't occur until it is promoted to W3C Recommendation. Nutshell: don't rely on it. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 13:28, 18 April 2018 (UTC)

Seems like something we can easily experiment with in the mobile skin. Wonder if anyone will notice. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:44, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

Delete

Plz delete Module:Compare User:Capankajsmilyo^{(Talk | Infobox assistance)} 12:08, 18 April 2018 (UTC)

 Done

For future tests like that consider using the module sandbox Module:Sandbox

—Trappist the monk (talk) 12:13, 18 April 2018 (UTC)

Special:Notifications

I'm getting an error of: PHP fatal error: Argument 1 passed to EchoEventPresentationModel::getTruncatedTitleText() must be an instance of Title, null given when I visit this page. It's the same on desktop and mobile. The buttons in the toolbar work fine SmartSE (talk) 22:51, 18 April 2018 (UTC)

 Works for me --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:54, 18 April 2018 (UTC)

@Smartse: Works for me too. This may be an issue specific to a certain notification you have received; you may like to file a Phabricator task. — This, that and the other (talk) 01:32, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

@Redrose64 and This, that and the other: Thanks for looking. It's still not working for me so will file a report. SmartSE (talk) 11:24, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

Replication lag

The on going replication lag on ToolForge is apparently due to normalization of users and IP addresses in the database. The "analytics" database server replag varies (due to the round-robin DNS?). The "web" server has no secondary, so lag is consistent.

@JCrespo (WMF):, would you like to add anything? — Dispenser 01:58, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

Replication lag should now be fixed on 2 out of 3 servers. We try to keep the web server as updated as possible, but the analytics ones, due to long running queries, sometimes it is simply not possible. If queries are short, you can use the web server. Due to the current topology and the nature of the changes (ROW based replication is more reliable, but also less flexible with schema changes), sometimes replication lag has to happen. The smaller tables that will be introduced will minimize in the future the schema change time. Also, there is ongoing plans to make redundant, not only the servers, as there is now, but the replication channel T190704, that should also minimize (but not make fully disappear) lagging due to maintenance- we are only waiting on new hardware to arrive for it. --JCrespo (WMF) (talk) 07:52, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

Image displaying at 90-degree angle

Resolved

Somehow File:Smokey the Bear sign.jpg is displaying sideways on Smokey_Bear. Can anyone explain and fix this? Please use {{ping}} to let me know. ―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 07:42, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

@Koavf:, it shows as properly vertical for me. Sometimes clearing your browser cache fixes stuff like this. If not, try looking at it in another browser and/or quitting and restarting your browser. BlackcurrantTea (talk) 08:28, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

@Koavf: is this resolved or are you still seeing the problem? BlackcurrantTea (talk) 09:51, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

@BlackcurrantTea: Resolved yes, thank you. ―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 20:27, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

Invisible stub category?

For several days the redirect Romani people in Slovenia has been appearing in the list at Category:Stubs. There is no visible stub template or category in the redirect "article", nor anything in the history of the redirect which seems to show either of these. Articles from which the {{stub}} template (or the incorrect Category:Stubs) is removed (usually replaced by a specific stub template) normally disappear from the category listing instantly. Any ideas? I'd just like to stop it appearing when I'm stub-sorting. PamD 07:48, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

It's not there now. That may be because the article was, coincidentally, just edited and that would have purged cached information. Some background is at WP:PURGE but an easy way to purge would be to edit the article then click Publish without making any change and with no edit summary. Nothing will be recorded in the edit history but categories will be updated. Johnuniq (talk) 08:18, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

Thanks: will try to remember that for another time. PamD 11:37, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

A purge updates the page itself but not category pages and WhatLinksHere. A null edit updates all of it. Johnuniq described a null edit but called it a purge. PrimeHunter (talk)

Discord

Sometimes References are split up in two or more subsections, each with its own sub-heading, say: ===Notes=== and ==-Citations===. Some editors happen not to like to have these sub-heading visible in the TOC. Which is the correct way to proceed:

• {{TOC limit|2}}, which of course affects all subsections of the same level,
• or
• {{fakeheader|level=3|Notes}}, which has a punctual scope, but maybe also other technical drawbacks?

Thanks. Carlotm (talk) 08:23, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

Just because some editors don't want that doesn't make them right. WP:PSEUDOHEAD —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:49, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

Apparently 227 articles use fake heading template Galobtter (pingó mió) 10:27, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

So, the response is, do whatever you like? Carlotm (talk) 20:50, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

No, the response is DONT use Pseudo headings (like the guidelines tell you). Secondly don't fret so much about what goes into the ToC, it's an automated system, you can't control everything, just because you want to (which is why it's easier to use than LaTeX). And then be prepared for most people just doing whatever they want anyways. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:40, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

Okay, that is the most sensible thing I've read on Wikipedia in a very long time. Thank you for the smile, TheDJ - not to mention the reality check. Risker (talk) 00:38, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

Thanks TheDJ. I'll try to enforce the DONT. Carlotm (talk) 21:04, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

Bluelink RGB color

Can someone link to the (formal) definition of the wikilink RGB colors (for example, the blue of the in blue wikilink)? I want to do contrast checks. - DePiep (talk) 09:58, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

See Help:Link_color. BlackcurrantTea (talk) 10:18, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

Resolved

- DePiep (talk) 12:31, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

Feedback from rollbackers and admins wanted: planned changes to rollback action

This is what the confirmation could look like – what do you think?

If you have rollback rights, you might be familiar with this problem: You want to thank someone, but you accidentally click the rollback link – since no confirmation is needed for rollbacks, this can lead to very unpleasant misunderstandings. A top wish from the German Technical Wishlist asked to solve this problem.

Here’s the solution suggested by the Technical Wishes team. If you have rollback rights, please let us know if this solution works for you. The feedback round ends on May 4th, 2018. -- Best, Johanna Strodt (WMDE) (talk) 13:37, 19 April 2018 (UTC)  Please post your assessments on the feedback page on Meta.

NB that this solution isn't just the illustrated confirmation box--it also entails removing the rollback link by default from all list views (page histories, watchlists, user contributions, basically anything that isn't the shown diff page). It's significantly more disruptive than I thought at first glance. Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 13:58, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

Removing the rollback link from all list views is potentially very disruptive - such as when tracking a persistent vandalism-only user. This would not be acceptable, in my opinion. Home Lander (talk) 15:27, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

Agree. Although, maybe having an inline 2nd confirmation (such as the 'thank' feature), would be better than a pop-up? Rehman 15:31, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

Well there would be a preference. However indeed - part of why I requested rollback is precisely because it shows up in lists and allows quick reversion there, unlike Twinkle. Galobtter (pingó mió) 15:40, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

@Home Lander and Galobtter: Hello and thanks for your thoughts on this topic. I'd like to ask you to post your assessments on the feedback page on Meta. This way, all ideas and opinions can be discussed in one place. Have a good Monday!. -- Best, Johanna Strodt (WMDE) (talk) 08:11, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

We should really tell Rehman the same thing. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 08:22, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

Removing the "thank" function would also solve the problem of confusing the "thank" and "rollback" links. How many times do people accidentally click "rollback" without noticing? (If you notice, you just rollback your own edit, which takes 1 second and completely solves the problem). —Kusma (t·c) 09:01, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

@Kusma: Please comment there, not here. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 10:13, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

Table isn't working

The Fb cl header navbar template that I use on many of the pages I've created has stopped working, in spite of the fact that it has not yet been deleted. Why is this happening? Also, if it is deleted, what would be the easiest way to replace my tables? Birdsgeek (talk)

Examples:

• 2017 Campeonato Acriano
• 2017 Campeonato Alagoano
• 2017 Campeonato Cearense — Preceding unsigned comment added by Birdsgeek (talk • contribs) 14:35, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

@Birdsgeek: I moved the <noinclude> code to in front of the TfD tag and purged the cache on one of the articles on which it is used, and it seems to have made a difference. Is it behaving normally now? Home Lander (talk) 15:18, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

Yes, it is. Thank you! Birdsgeek (talk • contribs) 17:35, 19 April 2018

Updating Good article lists

Hi. I have a few requests relating to maintaining good articles and was hoping I could get some help from the technically minded folk here.

• Update articles that have been passed as a good article, but do not have the {{good article}} template. Legobot does this after a review, but I have come across a few that do not have it.[8][9][10]
• Removing the {{good article}} template from articles that do not have it. This occurs usually when editors start a new article and copy paste from an existing good one.
• Updating pages listed at Wikipedia:Good articles/all. This means removing ones that are no longer good articles and adding those that reviewers forgot to add.

We have Category:Good articles which lists article pages with the GA icon and Category:Wikipedia good articles which lists the talk pages with a passed review {{GA}}. There is a discrepancy of 25 between the two. There are about 2000 entries missing from Wikipedia:Good articles/all so that is where most of the work will lie. If it was possible to do it in petscan or some other tool that would be great as I could then run it myself in the future. Cheers AIRcorn (talk) 22:27, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

@Aircorn: I've created Wikipedia:Good articles/mismatches using AWB's list comparer. — JJMC89 (T·C) 04:16, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

@JJMC89: Thanks a lot. That's perfect. I have AWB, but didn't even know about list comparer. I should be able to update the mismatches page myself in the future. AIRcorn (talk) 05:24, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

Checking "watch" box in edit action box doesn't put article on watch list

For some time now, my checking the "Watch this page" box in the edit action box doesn't accomplish what it used to, and I have to click on the star in the top-of-page tab bar to put an unwatched page on my watchlist. I'm using Firefox 59.0.2 (32-bit) under Windows 7. Dhtwiki (talk) 23:19, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

I have Firefox 59.0.2 (32-bit), but Windows 10. Clicking the "watch" box in the edit action box just worked for me. Are you using NoScript? If so, try disabling NoScript, and then checking the watch box. The latest version of NoScript interferes with much that it used not to. In my case, when I need to, I disable NoScript, change what I need and save, then re-check NoScript. — Maile (talk) 23:27, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

I used to, but no longer, use NoScript. However, I have been using Private Browsing, which may be the cause. I'll look into that. Evidently, the feature is working for others. Thanks for the reply. Dhtwiki (talk) 03:39, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

@Dhtwiki: I use Opera 36, no private browsing, no noscript. If I edit a page (or section) and check "Watch this page" and save, the top of the page doesn't update the watch star (tab if you use MonoBook skin); but if I reload the page (or go to page history) and check the tabs at the top, it shows as being watched; it also gets listed if I go straight to my watchlist after saving. To my mind there is some sort of caching delay such that an older version of the page is being displayed. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 07:02, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

I had a couple of user-warning templates to give out tonight, the usual cause of my putting new pages on my watchlist. I checked the box, then when the watch star showed white after I published my edit, I refreshed the page and the star showed blue. So, mystery sort-of solved. Thank you for pointing out the possibility of, what?, more aggressive caching on Firefox's part? Dhtwiki (talk) 03:56, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

commons.wikimedia.org Log in problem

"There seems to be a problem with your login session; this action has been canceled as a precaution against session hijacking. Please resubmit the form."

• https://commons.wikimedia.org/enwiki/w/index.php?title=Special:UserLogin&returnto=Special:Contributions/Z75SG61Ilunqpdb
• using same Username and Password

Z75SG61Ilunqpdb (talk) 23:23, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

Fixed: logout, delete all wikipedia and wikimedia cookies, login to wikimedia, login to wikipedia, now OK.

Z75SG61Ilunqpdb (talk) 23:31, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

making input box responsive

Is there any way by which one can make the <inputbox></inputbox> responsive to screen size using divs — FR⁺ 11:13, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

Do you have an example where you would want to apply this ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:55, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

TheDJ-User:FR30799386/Main Page — FR⁺ 16:10, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

@FR30799386: the problem is not the inputbox, it's the divs around it. You want a responsive gridlayout, for which you can best use flexbox layouting or display:table-cell —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:04, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

Special:RandomInCategory

In its present form, Special:RandomInCategory is not very useful because it does not support subcategories. If, for example, you want a random scientist, you could try typing in Scientists for the category; but Category:Scientists has 25 subcategories and 17 articles, all of which are there because someone did not bother to classify them properly. Not a very representative sample! Are there any plans to expand its functionality? If not, is there an alternative way of finding random articles? RockMagnetist(talk) 19:10, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Random lists randomlink.js. The documentation mentions randomlink_hops but the script hasn't been edited since 2010 and the author is inactive. I don't know whether it works. PrimeHunter (talk) 09:34, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

I had looked at randomlink.js and didn't think that it would be useful for finding articles in a category; but now it occurs to me that one could run CatScan V2.0β and then use randomlink.js on the output. RockMagnetist(talk) 16:01, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

Aesthetic change

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T191031

Quick note: The icons in the mw:2010 wikitext editor changed this week. I believe that it's just the latest phase of the years-long UI standardization work. It'll be in the upcoming issue of Tech News. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:21, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

links

Recently, when a cursor is over a link, there is a photo and a summary of the article. This is particularly bothersome when looking at an editor's contributions. It is also not helpful with articles as it can block a large portion of the text of the article.

Where can there be a discussion on ending this new practice? AN? Or somewhere else? Vanguard10 (talk) 02:52, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

@Vanguard10: it sounds like you have enabled NavigationPopups in Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets - check if you can disable it there. — xaosflux ^Talk 02:57, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

Or possibly page previews at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering. --Izno (talk) 03:29, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

If there is a gear wheel at the bottom right to disable it then it's mw:Page Previews. You can post feedback on the talk page. PrimeHunter (talk) 09:27, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

Moving a page to an /Archive

Is it technically possible to prevent the sitewide ability to move a page to a subpage of a nonexistent page? If not, can a filter be used to flag such a move when it has occurred?--John Cline (talk) 04:53, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

Probably not, and that wouldn't be a good idea anyway. Talk:/r doesn't currently exist (although it would be perfectly valid to create it), but that should not prevent someone from moving subreddits whose articles are named incorrectly and have talk pages to the correct place. {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 13:31, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

Can you give an specific example of a move that was performed that you would want to prevent? — xaosflux ^Talk 00:00, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

I am primarily concerned with people moving their talk page, along with its history, into an /Archive and then recreating the page anew. It disjoints the page's history and makes searching for earlier edits difficult. Archiving should be accomplished by cut and paste and unfortunately, administrators are the leading culprits in the counter intuitive method of moving pages to /Archive instead. I can find examples later, I am leaving right now, but I've seen this done quite often and don't think it's much of a little known practice.--John Cline (talk) 00:26, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

The docs show that using move to archive a talk page is not recommended. However, moving was a documented method in September 2012 and many admins are old timers from long before then. It is irritating to watch a talk page where moving is used because you end up with many archive pages on your watchlist however it would be awkward getting people to change their ways. Johnuniq (talk) 01:49, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

I agree.--John Cline (talk) 13:05, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

I don't think that this method would stop people from moving their talk pages anyway. If you move User_talk:Example to User_talk:Example/Archive, then User_talk:Example exists. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:22, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

Yes, thank you, I agree. It oft happens that one's "brilliant idea" isn't nearly as brilliant as one earlier believed. I know that sinking feeling, well; imagining 3 or 4 more reasons why it wouldn't actually work. Perhaps considering methods that won't work is the path to ideas that will? If so, I am keen in knowing I've done my part, perhaps even well. Thank you again.--John Cline (talk) 18:20, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

selective transclusion

This works:

{{#invoke:String|match|pattern='''.+|s = {{#lsth:Aviation}}}}

That transcludes the lead prose from the aviation article.

But, when I try and put it in a template, like this (to accept a parameter):

{{#invoke:String|match|pattern='''{{{1}}}.+|s = {{#lsth:{{{1}}}}}}}

It doesn't work.

All comments and suggestions are welcome.    — The Transhumanist   11:03, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

It's not possible. See Help:Labeled section transclusion#No template and phab:T39256. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:15, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

No, PrimeHunter, I think you are confusing defining LST blocks via template (not possible as you have proven) and calling LST via template, which there is no reason shouldn't be allowed by template. {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 14:19, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

Hello The Transhumanist. I think this will work:

{{#invoke:String|match|pattern='''.+|s = {{#lsth:{{#if:{{{1|}}}|{{{1}}}|}}}}}}

If I understand your intent correctly.--John Cline (talk) 19:25, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

@John Cline: This works:

{{#invoke:String|match|pattern='''.+|s = {{#lsth:{{{1}}}}}}}

And this works:

{{#invoke:String|match|pattern='''.+|s = {{#lsth:{{#if:{{{1|}}}|{{{1}}}|}}}}}}

But this does not work (I'd like to insert a parameter in the pattern):

{{#invoke:String|match|pattern='''{{{1}}}.+|s = {{#lsth:{{{1}}}}}}}

That returns the error "String Module Error: Match not found".    — The Transhumanist   22:27, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

The Transhumanist, when I test the code at Special:ExpandTemplates

{{User:The Transhumanist/Sandbox163|Aviation}}

returns the lead of the Aviation article, whereas

{{User:The Transhumanist/Sandbox164|Aviation}}

returns "String Module Error: Match not found". If your goal is to pass the article's title using unnamed parameter 1, Sandbox163 does this, if you want a regular expression that always matches the lead text excluding Twinkle tags, infoboxs, and the likes, that is proving to be a difficult undertaking. I am going to continue testing for a solution. I wish you the best in the mean time.--John Cline (talk) 23:50, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

Thank you very much. By the way, is there a way to include a variable in the match pattern?    — The Transhumanist   00:17, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

Lua Patterns doesn't appear to provide a way to do this directly. Though, there might be a work around somewhere. Still looking.    — The Transhumanist   01:31, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

@John Cline: There appears to be a way to include a Lua variable in a pattern match. How do you pull the current page name into a Lua variable?    — The Transhumanist   02:05, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

See my sandbox for a LUA module that might lead you to a solution. The module fetches everything from the beginning of an article to the first == section header. This works ok for Aviation because all of the hats are wrapped in <noinclude>...</noinclude> tags; try another article and the results might not be what you want.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 10:39, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

I have Module:Sandbox/Galobtter/Get_lead; which has a nicer pattern that skips over to the lead. Galobtter (pingó mió) 10:46, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

I tried something sort of similar to your ".+\n(.-'''.+)". It sort of worked but left out the lead's image which {{#lsth:Aviation}} includes. When I try your pattern in my module, I get nil when used in mw.ustring.match (content, ".+\n(.-'''.+)"); or the whole article minus the lead image and hat templates when used in string.match (content, ".+\n(.-'''.+)");. It is not clear to me why the mw.ustring.match() matches nothing. I have seen this before. The latter is because there is nothing in your pattern to stop string.match() from matching and consuming characters except that it runs out of characters to match and consume.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 11:28, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

When hovering over a blue linked title using popups the snippet rendered is similar to the snippet I believe we're trying to call. Does anyone know how popups retrieves its data (in case it can be used)?--John Cline (talk) 13:02, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

Looks to me like an API call that returns article content in json format. From that, popups creates the html for rendering. See MediaWiki:Gadget-popups.js and look for function loadAPIPreview.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 14:58, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

API calls "by hand" within Pywikibot: no public-facing method... why?

Background: I wanted something equivalent to the API's action=parse&prop=sections to use via Pywikibot. After some searching, I found the following in pywikibot/site.py's source code:

    # TODO: expand support to other parameters of action=parse?
    def get_parsed_page(self, page):
        """Retrieve parsed text of the page using action=parse."""
        req = self._simple_request(action='parse', page=page)
        data = req.submit()
        assert 'parse' in data, "API parse response lacks 'parse' key"
        assert 'text' in data['parse'], "API parse response lacks 'text' key"
        parsed_text = data['parse']['text']['*']
        return parsed_text

The TODO note lets me think that (for now) PWB implements only a small subset of the action=parse API, and in particular not what I wanted, but please let me know if that is wrong. However, that snippet hints at low-level methods that allow a dirty hack to make arbitrary API calls; the output of the API's https://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/api.php?action=parse&prop=sections&oldid=837538913 can be obtained via

import pywikibot
# Define subfunction for arbitrary API calls
def manual_API_call(site, **kwargs):
    """Make API request by giving parameters 'by hand'."""
    request = site._simple_request(**kwargs)
    return request.submit()

# Pass parameters by hand
def find_sections(site, pagerevision):
    params = {'action': 'parse',
              'prop': 'sections',
              'format': 'json',
              'formatversion': 2,
              'oldid': pagerevision,
              }

    return manual_API_call(site, **params)

print(find_sections(pywikibot.Site(), 837538913))  # same output as web request https://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/api.php?action=parse&prop=sections&oldid=837538913

Is there a PWB equivalent to the low-level API call manual_API_call defined above? If no, why not (since all the machinery is in place)? Defining it myself does not look great to me, since we are calling a "private" method of the pywikibot.APISite class, and this looks like bad practice to me. For instance, if _simple_request gets renamed or changed in the future, the above snippet will stop working, but the rename/change itself will not be marked "breaking" by PWB devs (since that is not a public method). Tigraan^{Click here to contact me} 15:28, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

@Tigraan: I don't know if there is an equivalent to your manual_API_call, but you can avoid using the private method. Add from pywikibot.data.api import Request after line 1, and change line 5 to request = Request.create_simple(site, **kwargs). — JJMC89 (T·C) 18:29, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

Sweet! So it does exist, actually. Thanks! Tigraan^{Click here to contact me} 19:29, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

Reference misalignment

On List of songs in Guitar Hero, the reference list at the bottom of the page is numbered differently than the in-line reference tags (it skips #7). I think the cutoff has something to do with the group Note, and I'm not sure if this error has come because of the new-looking tooltips. For some odd reason I can't seem to recreate this on any page other than other Guitar Hero songs lists. Hameltion (talk, contribs) 18:38, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

Below is a simplified version of the issue with different numbers at C and Ref for C. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:37, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

A.

B.

C

You need to repeat the group name inside the <ref> tag. This is a long-standing problem. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:37, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

Bug in "Articles created" tool in XTools

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T192739

So I was checking my created articles list, and one thing I noticed is that the article Yurika Endō is in it. The thing is: I didn't create the page, the article had recently undergone a history merge with a userspace draft that I wrote last month. What a weird bug: is there a way to make this more accurate? Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 14:12, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

I don't think there is. Can't see anything on Wikipedia:Administrators'_guide/Fixing_cut-and-paste_moves#Bugs that would explain this though. --Emir of Wikipedia (talk) 14:20, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

What's happening here is there are two revisions (1, 2) that have a parent revision ID of 0, when this is normally only the case with the first revision. In my opinion it's a bug with how histories are merged, but I can't say for sure. For XTools, I think we can just find the oldest revision with a parent ID of 0, which in this case would correctly attribute the article creation to Juandmarco. I'll look into fixing this soon. — MusikAnimal ^talk 15:22, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

Can't open an edit window with the normal links

When I click on the edit link the page starts to open and then quickly goes back to read mode.--John Cline (talk) 13:12, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

The section edit link is working but the ones at the top of the page are not.--John Cline (talk) 13:21, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

Works for me. Please link an example page, post the url you get by clicking the Edit tab, name your browser and your skin at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering, and say whether it happens when you are logged out. Does it happen on a short page like Example? does it happen with safemode? It may help to clear your cache. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:39, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

And tell us what editor you're using. --Izno (talk) 13:42, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

Ok, It has corrected, I cleared my temp files, cookies and cache, closed my open tabs, logged out, shut down, rebooted in safe mode (but accidentally didn't safeboot with networking), shut down again, started windows normally, and the top edit tab worked normally for me logged out, I logged in and it continues working. So I don't know what, if anything, I may have done to corrected things. Let me say, I did recently change a thing, and I may soon revert back to my former configuration, but let me ask if anyone knows of 1.1.1.1, known bugs with that service, and whether it could have contributed? I appreciate the help you guys so freely give, I'd have been technically lost long ago without you all! BTW Izno, what did you mean regarding what editor I am using?--John Cline (talk) 17:11, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia has settings to choose between multiple editors to edit pages. There is "Temporarily disable the visual editor while it is in beta" (WP:VisualEditor) at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing, "New wikitext mode" (mw:2017 wikitext editor) at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures, and wikEd at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets. VisualEditor and "New wikitext mode" add tags to edits and you don't use those. You probably use the normal source editor. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:06, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

@John Cline: Some of these editors are mentioned in the Tech News: 2018-17 section directly below. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:41, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

Ok, I understand. Over the years, I have experimented with this and that, I probably have things enabled that I never use, and depreciated stuff that don't even work. As far as gadgets, I settled primarily on popups. I have something turned on that opens the edit window if I double tap any part of the page except if a blue link is there, which launches instead; that's about it. I used Huggle until it stopped allowing me to login, and AWB stopped working when I deleted Explorer (foolheatedly). It's probably my machine about to blink out; its been a good one, for a good while. Still wondering if somebody can speak about 1.1.1.1, That is the only thing substantially different that I have recently done. I stumbled on Draft:1.1.1.1, and ended up using the service. Best.--John Cline (talk) 21:10, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

@John Cline: MediaWiki has an overview of editor options, but even that is a tad outdated again already, since it doesn't include the syntaxhighlight options yet. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:41, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

FWIW, using 1.1.1.1 as your dns resolver couldn't possibly cause this problem (Possibly it might cause you to not visit the most geographically close server to you, which could add a couple miliseconds to rendering time, particularly for not logged in users. If cloudflare was malicious (which they obviously aren't), they could in theory use the 1.1.1.1 dns server to prevent you from accessing wikipedia entirely). Bawolff (talk) 09:42, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

Tech News: 2018-17

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

• All Wikipedias now have Page Previews.
• The iOS and Android apps now have synced reading lists. This means you can save articles to a private list that can be seen on your other devices if you use the apps.
• The icons in the 2010 wikitext editor have changed. [11]
• The visual editor and the 2017 wikitext ask you to write an edit summary after you press Publish. This button now also shows an ellipsis. This is to show that pressing Publish is not the last step. [12]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 April. It will be on all wikis from 26 April (calendar).

Meetings

• You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 24 April at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join.
• You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 25 April at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

• <mapframe> will come to most Wikipedias in May. This means that you can put interactive maps in the articles. Nine Wikipedias that use a strict version of flagged revisions will not get this feature in May. [13]
• The rollback function could change. This was a German community request. All editors with rollback rights can leave feedback on the proposed solution. The last day to leave feedback is 4 May (UTC).

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

18:16, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

Mysterious extra checkmarks

When editing, I'm now seeing two mysterious extra checkmarks just below the proper check boxes. They first appeared a few days ago, but vanished within minutes. Now they're back: what are they for? MonoBook, Opera 36, Windows XP. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:58, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

Have you tried other browsers ? Opera + monobook + XP isn't exactly... common. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:36, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

If I create a redirect a check mark appears below the box, not in it.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 22:03, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

I see this is already here. I like Monobook and I use Edge only at home.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 22:05, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

I have difficulty trying other browsers. I can't upgrade from XP since the hardware won't be able to handle anything more sophisticated, so I'm confined to using XP-compatible browsers. Safari hasn't been updated since about 2012; IE8 is rejected by MediaWiki; Chrome hasn't been updated since April 2016. Firefox still gets the occasional update but is horribly slow - three minutes to follow a link and six minutes to go back again, which is prohibitive for watchlist checking. That leaves Opera. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 23:31, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

If you have hardware that old, have you tried Ubuntu or another Linux OS? Their requirements should be significantly less than Windows (which is in the realm of 4 GB RAM just for the OS right now...). --Izno (talk) 00:19, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

In that vein, I've had a lot of luck using Neverware Cloudready (Chromium OS - turns your laptop / desktop into a chromebook / chromebox), booted from a thumbdrive in older machines. SQL^{Query me!} 00:29, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

These extra checkmarks also show up for me on my phone in the desktop version (Android 5.1.1, Samsung Browser 3, Monobook). Double sharp (talk) 02:35, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

@Redrose64, Vchimpanzee, and Double sharp:, This seems an issue with .oo-ui-checkboxInputWidget .oo-ui-checkboxInputWidget-checkIcon.oo-ui-iconElement-icon rule is hiding the checkmark for most users, but for some reason it doesn't seem to apply for these browsers.. strange. Did people try bypassing their browser cache ? What about on this page with debug mode enabled ?—TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:34, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

@TheDJ: The problem persists for me even after purging, but doesn't appear with debug mode enabled. Double sharp (talk) 09:37, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

I also see these extra checkmarks on my desktop (Monobook, IE11, Windows 7). Double sharp (talk) 12:07, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

It seems to be intermittent. and is currently behaving normally. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 15:59, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

Cursor insertion point

In the last month or so, editing has become much more difficult. if I backspace to the front of the line, instead of the cursor moving to the end of the previous line, it moves to a random place in the previous line. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 22:10, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

It works for me. What is your browser and your skin at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering? Does it happen when you are logged out? Does it happen in safemode? Does it matter whether the previous line ends with a newline or is line wrapped? PrimeHunter (talk) 22:24, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

Browser if Firefox and the skin is Vector, which I think is the default. I don't have any new beta features switched on. Suppose I move the insert point to after "previous" in the line above, which is wrapped. I then add two blank lines and "xxxx" I then backspace over the xxxx and the blank lines. The cursor winds up in the word "ends". Works okay in safemode though. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 00:40, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

If it works in safemode then it's probably an issue with JavaScript, maybe in User:Hawkeye7/common.js, User:Hawkeye7/vector.js, or something enabled at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets. Does it happen when you are logged out? There is no reason to examine your JavaScript if it also happens logged out. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:11, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

@Hawkeye7: See Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 164#Severe display problems when editing and older archives. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 23:36, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

Wiki sending to a dangerous site?

−I noticed that many citations on a wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajneesh) use a site called webcitation.org. My security software (Norton) is red-alerting this as a "known dangerous site"; I tried linking via a couple of the original URLs (i.e. without the webcitation.org prefix) and they worked fine that way. I started to correct them on the page -- which is a page I didn't even want to spend any of my time on -- but then thought 1) what if this is a problem on other pages as well; 2) what if it's one of those actions the bots do automatically and deliberately, like those I see with "external links modified" and 3) (the bottom line) I don't know nearly enough to mess with this stuff. So I cancelled my changes and came here. I know so little, I'm not even at all sure where I should be bringing this up. Hope someone who knows what they're doing will make the necessary changes, or send this request to the appropriate department, or -- flush this whole note down the toilet. Whatever... alacarte (talk) 22:49, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

I can't speak on the matter beyond mentioning a project page that talks about it here: Wikipedia:Using WebCite. I'll be reading it myself at watching this thread. Thanks.--John Cline (talk) 23:32, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

Your security software seems to have a false flag set for the URL. WebCite is a known safe archiving service on the Internet, and we make extensive use of it on Wikipedia. Maybe GreenC has some more information. --Izno (talk) 00:42, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

WebCite is the second most common web archiving site on English Wikipedia, behind web.archive.org .. there is nothing inherently wrong with it, but there might be pages archived there that are dangerous which is why Norton is flagging the entire webcite domain since it sees the source URL in the path portion of the webcitation URL. -- GreenC 01:10, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

@GreenC, Professor alacarte, and Izno: I've noticed that WebCite tends to directly load some third-party content, like Google Analytics tracking, instead of loading that content from an archived copy (which is what the Wayback Machine and archive.is do). This loading of content could be related to the security software, but I'm not sure. Jc86035 (talk) 11:58, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

Tidy no longer running

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T192855

We have been warned many times over the last year or so, but HTML Tidy seems to have been turned off. This means that pages with unclosed (or badly-closed) markup may now show large amounts of corruption. Examples:

• malformed </code> tag
• missing </small> tag
• malformed </tt> tag

--Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 14:03, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

the third one listed is a direct result of a {{subst:Reviewer-notice}} (which has since been fixed), so it could be found on many user talk pages. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 14:26, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

It seems to have been inadvertently enabled in all wikimedia wikis and certainly caused https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T192855, and probably other reports there. It will probably be reverted as soon as the developers notice it. It makes the case for simply leaving it as is considering that there hasn't been that much of "drama" related to the early deploy. 16:19, 24 April 2018 (UTC)