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This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (technical). Please do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to revive any of these discussions, either start a new thread or use the talk page associated with that topic.

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Inclusions when copy & pasting

If I copy and paste article content, including superscript numerals for citations, those superscript numerals are not present when I paste the text into another app.

However if the copied text contains a template, like {{citation needed}}, then the text [citation needed]is included in what is copied.

Why don't we style content so that that the latter kind of text is also not included? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:30, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

@Pigsonthewing I'm not sure what combination of browser/OS/text editor you're using, but when I copy and paste out of Chrome, Edge, or Firefox into Notepad on Windows the superscript numerals are present. We could make references unselectable by adding user-select: none; to the references class, but it doesn't appear that we're currently doing that. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 21:37, 5 December 2024 (UTC)
I used Firefox on Android in the case described, coying from mobile. Using Firefox on Windows 11, I too get the superscript numerals included. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:45, 5 December 2024 (UTC)
@Pigsonthewing If you want it to work on desktop, you can add the following to your Special:MyPage/common.css:
.mw-parser-output .noprint, .mw-parser-output .reference { user-select: none; }
The .reference covers references, the .noprint covers anything else, such as citation needed tags, that's flagged as non-printable. You could change the latter to .Inline-Template if you want to limit it only to inline templates such as {{citation needed}}. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 21:57, 5 December 2024 (UTC)
Thank you. It's not that it's what I want, I wonder why we're not doing that for everybody, by default. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:29, 7 December 2024 (UTC)
When you say If I copy and paste article content, including superscript numerals for citations, those superscript numerals are not present when I paste the text into another app. you are probably using the use-Parsoid beta feature. I can reproduce this behavior when a page is generated with Parsoid and can't when I turn it off (compare useparsoid=1 and useparsoid=0), using Firefox for Windows. I believe this stems from how the numbers are included in the text in Parsoid (by CSS content). This should change back to the "old" behavior at some point (WMDE is working on references broadly).
The reason references don't do that today, and our various inline templates probably shouldn't, is probably in the realm of "people understand the content is sourced when you include the footnotes" and has become something of a feature of trust. Especially so for the inline template case. See open task at phab:T284607 which also points to a previous discussion about this topic. Izno (talk) 19:46, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

Lowercase italics title

Hello. On UDraw Studio, is the correct method of handling the italicized lowercase title done in this edit? That looks like an intense kludge, but my attempt has an error at the bottom. Then that would be likewise for uDraw GameTablet, once it gets an infobox. Thanks. — Smuckola(talk) 07:55, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

@Smuckola: Look at Wikipedia:Page_name#DISPLAYTITLE_conflicts and Wikipedia:DISPLAYTITLE. Near the top of Template:Infobox video game it says:
Polygnotus (talk) 08:53, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

Text color change after hovering on the text of appeared window of a hyperlink

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T382142

Hi, for example for Tim Berners-Lee link, and if we have visited this article at least one time:

  1. After we hover our mouse on the link, a window appears containing his image and some text (first sentences of article)
  2. If we hover on the text, the color of text changes to blue.

This happens only if we have visited this article at least one time. This behavior is not reasonable, and no color change is needed in this scenario. Please inspect. Thanks, Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 09:42, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

are you sure you are not accidentally selecting the text in the window, instead of hovering ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:15, 6 December 2024 (UTC)
@TheDJ Yes. I'm sure. After hovering, color changes. But it happens if we have seen the target of link at least one time. Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 16:22, 6 December 2024 (UTC)
Well as far as I can remember it is not something that anyone else has reported. Have you tried with different browsers ? Maybe it's a browser extensions you have installed or something like that. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:24, 8 December 2024 (UTC)
@TheDJ I tried Google Chrome, Firefox and Microsoft Edge and Opera, and even I sign out of them, and even I installed Opera for the first time, to check the scenario, and even I checked the scenario in another Laptop, but the problem persists. I really surprise that you don't see the bug. Here is a screenshot of the problem:
I had hovered on the appearing window of "World Wide Web" on the article "Tim Berners-Lee", and the color changed to blue, but my cursor is not shown in the screenshot. Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 11:46, 8 December 2024 (UTC)
I get same issue in Edge and Chrome. Don't think all the text is supposed to show purple when hover ever? Indagate (talk) 12:21, 8 December 2024 (UTC)
I don't think so. In my opinion, no color change is needed. Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 12:25, 8 December 2024 (UTC)
I see this when I use a logged-out, non-private window in Firefox 133 and Chromium 131. Note that in the popup, the entire text is part of a link so that clicking it will take you to the popped-up article. What appears to be happening in this situation is that the CSS 
@media screen {
  a:where(:not([role="button"])):visited:hover {
    color: var(--color-visited--hover,#534fa3);
  }
}
has a higher specificity than 
.mwe-popups .mwe-popups-extract {
  margin: 16px;
  display: block;
  color: var(--color-base,#202122);
  text-decoration: none;
  position: relative;
  padding-bottom: 4px;
}
The former has (0,2,1) due to :visited:hover and a, while the latter has only (0,2,0). Anomie⚔ 14:31, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

Non-Latin module problems

Eyes at Module talk:Political party § For languages not using latin would be appreciated, I am not sure how best to proceed. Primefac (talk) 14:55, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

Restore Appearance pane

How do I restore the Appearance pane when I am not logged in? I clicked "Hide". Thank you. -SusanLesch (talk) 18:34, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

Click the little eyeglasses icon at the upper right, next to "Donate", then click Move to Sidebar. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:07, 8 December 2024 (UTC)
Wonderful. Thank you, Jonesey95! -SusanLesch (talk) 19:31, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

Image and maybe infobox help for an upcoming TFA

Newly passing a year-long featured article review, Minneapolis is scheduled for TFA on New Years Eve. Thus we have up to three weeks to fix this. Yesterday, Sbmeirow reported a configuration that leaves a big gap of white space under the three photos in §History > Industries develop. (That configuration is: not logged in, Appearance set to WIDE; Firefox, Chrome, and Edge.) On Minneapolis talk, I offered 6 different ways to fix this. He decided to move images around (which now are not in places corresponding to the prose, and two form an MOS:SANDWICH). Can an expert in image use here please tell me which alternative is best? I've begun to think all I have to do is hide the maps in the infobox but Sbmeirow doesn't think so. The last stable version is from December 4. Thanks for any help. -SusanLesch (talk) 19:55, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

I've reverted to that version with the fix applied. No comment on any of the intervening changes, some of which look to have been attempting to "fix" the issue and some of which look to have been adjusting other qualities. Izno (talk) 22:30, 8 December 2024 (UTC)
Well done. Thank you, Izno. -SusanLesch (talk) 22:52, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

Lua article date info

Hi, how can I get article creation and article last edit dates in Lua? Gryllida (talk, e-mail) 04:58, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

That cannot be done. JavaScript has access to the API but not Lua. Johnuniq (talk) 05:09, 9 December 2024 (UTC)
The last edit date is available through frame:callParserFunction('REVISIONTIMESTAMP', { 'Foo' }), though this counts as expensive. Nardog (talk) 06:39, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Is there any way to generate a list of articles where the pointer misses the red outline on the map, as can be seen in this example; Battlefield High School? Abductive (reasoning) 05:55, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Not easily as a ready made tool yet I think. You would have to query information from multiple sources; Local page, Wikidata item AND OSM relations with a link to a Wikidata item. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:24, 9 December 2024 (UTC)
I see. It might be easier if one worked on something similar that was entirely within Wikidata. Thank you. Abductive (reasoning) 10:36, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Mobile view sidebar

On a desktop, the mobile view sidebar does not give a realistic view for interactive content, such as Template:Body_roundness_index

  1. It shows spin buttons for numeric entry fields, which do not show on a real mobile
  2. It does not show a keyboard at the bottom half of the screen when an input field is selected.

Uwappa (talk) 09:37, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

What is "the mobile view sidebar"? Nardog (talk) 10:03, 9 December 2024 (UTC)
A desktop will never truly behave the same way as a mobile device, without a LOT of engineering. Also devices have all kinds of differing behaviour, you should NOT assume that content behaves the same everywhere. This is HTML, we are not printing a book, the content is flexible and adapts and you should not in any way expect pixel perfectness. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:06, 9 December 2024 (UTC)
It should not be too much of an effort to hide the spin buttons using CSS.
I'm not sure about showing a keyboard, a general CSS statement using pseudo code :focus for input fields might do the trick. Uwappa (talk) 11:38, 9 December 2024 (UTC)
@TheDJ you should write yourself an essay of the above content just to save you having to retype it any time someone talks about math or layout or.... ;) Izno (talk) 18:11, 9 December 2024 (UTC)
The same code is sent to your browser/device which just treats it differently. Compare to https://www.w3schools.com/howto/howto_css_hide_arrow_number.asp where your mobile device probably also omits arrows/spinner at "Default". Maybe designers of the device thought it would be too small to control and would just interfere with tapping the field to write a number. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:00, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Whatever happened to edit conflicts?

Before this recent sudden change from the last two months or so, if I made an edit and someone published an edit to the page while I was making that edit, I would be met with a page where it shows two boxes: the "current revision" of the page, and the "Your text" containing the version of the page that was supposed to be published but was prevented by an edit conflict.

Now, today, this is what happens when an edit conflict happens. I get a page saying that there was an edit conflict, but then all I see is the "current revision" editing window box! I no longer get the "Your text" box anymore, so now whatever I wrote before gets completely lost as a result.

What happened here? — AP 499D25 (talk) 03:47, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Well, I just did a test in the sandbox and what do you know, the 'Your text' bit is there allllllllll the way at the bottom of the page. Seriously though, I swear there wasn't anything like that during the edit conflicts I ran into while editing some talk pages and noticeboards earlier! The next time this actually happens I'll post an update and maybe upload a screenshot.
For accessibility reasons, the "Your text" section should seriously be moved to before the "Wikidata entries used in this page" and "Pages transcluded onto the current version of this page" bits, since the former is much, much more important when one runs into an edit conflict. — AP 499D25 (talk) 03:57, 9 December 2024 (UTC)
Is "Paragraph-based edit conflict" on or off in Preferences → Beta features? Nardog (talk) 04:09, 9 December 2024 (UTC)
It's disabled. I've never messed around with beta features before. — AP 499D25 (talk) 04:16, 9 December 2024 (UTC)
Not sure whether this is relevant to the current discussion or not, but I could never figure out how to use that thing. When you hit a merge conflict, in, say, git, the relevant options are generally "accept yours", "accept theirs", or "accept both". In an edit conflict on Wikipedia, the correct option is ALMOST ALWAYS "accept both", and that was the one I could never figure out how to do.
So I would highlight "mine", do Ctrl-C or right-click-copy, then refresh the page and paste it into the appropriate place. But WTF is a merge-resolution tool for, if it can't do that? Was I just too dim to figure out how to make it work? --Trovatore (talk) 04:44, 9 December 2024 (UTC)
The "Wikidata entries used in this page" and "Pages transcluded onto the current version of this page" bits may both be collapsed. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 18:48, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Tool to find some text I added in the past

Is there a tool to search for a specified text string added by my (or any specified editor's) edits in any article (including deleted revisions - perhaps searching from most recent to oldest)? (was looking for some article where I thought I had added something somewhere ... but I think this might generally be a useful tool to augment anyone's memory) Shyamal (talk) 03:52, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

May need to use Quarry. The closest I could find is this. -- Gryllida (talk, e-mail) 05:22, 9 December 2024 (UTC)
Revision text is not available on the replicas. There is no way to get the information being sought here. If the Shyamal has an idea of which article, they could try the Who Wrote That browser extension. Izno (talk) 05:25, 9 December 2024 (UTC)
@Izno: There is no way to get the information being sought here. There is. Polygnotus (talk) 05:26, 9 December 2024 (UTC)
I made a tool like that, but because I am not an admin I can't see deleted contributions. Polygnotus (talk) 05:25, 9 December 2024 (UTC)
Thanks! That seems to be immensely useful - maybe you should consider opening it up somewhere - I should have said content that had been deleted not deleted revisions. Shyamal (talk) 05:48, 9 December 2024 (UTC)
Do you mean WP:BLAME? -- GreenC 18:52, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-50

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

Weekly highlight

  • Technical documentation contributors can find updated resources, and new ways to connect with each other and the Wikimedia Technical Documentation Team, at the Documentation hub on MediaWiki.org. This page links to: resources for writing and improving documentation, a new #wikimedia-techdocs IRC channel on libera.chat, a listing of past and upcoming documentation events, and ways to request a documentation consultation or review. If you have any feedback or ideas for improvements to the documentation ecosystem, please contact the Technical Documentation Team.

Updates for editors

Layout change for the Edit Check feature
  • Later this week, Edit Check will be relocated to a sidebar on desktop. Edit check is the feature for new editors to help them follow policies and guidelines. This layout change creates space to present people with new Checks that appear while they are typing. The initial results show newcomers encountering Edit Check are 2.2 times more likely to publish a new content edit that includes a reference and is not reverted.
  • The Chart extension, which enables editors to create data visualizations, was successfully made available on MediaWiki.org and three pilot wikis (Italian, Swedish, and Hebrew Wikipedias). You can see a working examples on Testwiki and read the November project update for more details.
  • Translators in wikis where the mobile experience of Content Translation is available, can now discover articles in Wikiproject campaigns of their interest from the "All collection" category in the articles suggestion feature. Wikiproject Campaign organizers can use this feature, to help translators to discover articles of interest, by adding the <page-collection> </page-collection> tag to their campaign article list page on Meta-wiki. This will make those articles discoverable in the Content Translation tool. For more detailed information on how to use the tool and tag, please refer to the step-by-step guide. [1]
  • The Nuke feature, which enables administrators to mass delete pages, now has a multiselect filter for namespace selection. This enables users to select multiple specific namespaces, instead of only one or all, when fetching pages for deletion.
  • The Nuke feature also now provides links to the userpage of the user whose pages were deleted, and to the pages which were not selected for deletion, after page deletions are queued. This enables easier follow-up admin-actions. Thanks to Chlod and the Moderator Tools team for both of these improvements. [2]
  • The Editing Team is working on making it easier to populate citations from archive.org using the Citoid tool, the auto-filled citation generator. They are asking communities to add two parameters preemptively, archiveUrl and archiveDate, within the TemplateData for each citation template using Citoid. You can see an example of a change in a template, and a list of all relevant templates. [3]
  • One new wiki has been created: a Wikivoyage in Indonesian (voy:id:) [4]
  • Last week, all wikis had problems serving pages to logged-in users and some logged-out users for 30–45 minutes. This was caused by a database problem, and investigation is ongoing. [5]
  • Recurrent item View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug in the Add Link feature has been fixed. Previously, the list of sections which are excluded from Add Link was partially ignored in certain cases. [6][7]

Updates for technical contributors

  • Codex, the design system for Wikimedia, now has an early-stage implementation in PHP. It is available for general use in MediaWiki extensions and Toolforge apps through Composer, with use in MediaWiki core coming soon. More information is available in the documentation. Thanks to Doğu for the inspiration and many contributions to the library. [8]
  • Wikimedia REST API users, such as bot operators and tool maintainers, may be affected by ongoing upgrades. On December 4, the MediaWiki Interfaces team began rerouting page/revision metadata and rendered HTML content endpoints on testwiki from RESTbase to comparable MediaWiki REST API endpoints. The team encourages active users of these endpoints to verify their tool's behavior on testwiki and raise any concerns on the related Phabricator ticket before the end of the year, as they intend to roll out the same change across all Wikimedia projects in early January. These changes are part of the work to replace the outdated RESTBase system.
  • The 2024 Developer Satisfaction Survey is seeking the opinions of the Wikimedia developer community. Please take the survey if you have any role in developing software for the Wikimedia ecosystem. The survey is open until 3 January 2025, and has an associated privacy statement.
  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week. [9]

Meetings and events

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

MediaWiki message delivery 22:13, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

SVG → PNG not rendering transparently?

A minor issue in the grand scheme of things, but it did pique my curiosity: when rendered as a PNG in the article Buffy the Vampire Slayer, why does File:Buffy the vampire slayer.svg have a white background, when the SVG at the commons exhibits a transparent background? — Fourthords | =Λ= | 22:08, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Dark mode support in Template:Infobox television series. The color added should probably match the infobox color in light mode, which is #f8f9fa, but that's still a grey. Izno (talk) 22:45, 9 December 2024 (UTC)
I'm not sure what you mean, except to infer it's not an error with the SVG nor the transparent PNG rendering? — Fourthords | =Λ= | 00:44, 10 December 2024 (UTC)
It is not an error. Izno (talk) 01:51, 10 December 2024 (UTC)
The white background color comes from Template:Infobox television series, and it was decided to be added as an night mode fix in the discussion Template talk:Infobox television#Template needs to be updated to support night mode. Snævar (talk) 02:52, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

Quantum Chip

Hello all. Firstly, I apologize that this might be the wrong place to ask this. But, given that there are some good minds here -- I thought of asking nevertheless. Where can I read more about today's quantum chip announcement and how it advances computing? I tried searching for a couple of Wiki articles, but, could not find them. Am I searching wrong? Appreciate any pointers on where I could read how today's announcement advances the topic. Thanks. Ktin (talk) 05:17, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

The correct place is Wikipedia:Reference desk/Computing but see Slashdot. Johnuniq (talk) 05:24, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

Template for example article rendering

I'm looking for a template like {{markup}} except without the left wikicode column. Basically it should be able to display the right column of Template:Fake_heading/doc#Example plus the output of {{lorem}} and {{reflist}}.

I was editing to fix dark mode at WP:REPEATCITATION. I thought {{quote box}} was a good idea, because the original text used <blockquote>. However, people said this is misuse, made the distinction It is not making a quote, it is giving an example, and told me to come here to WP:VPT. It's not clear to me the difference between quotes and examples that use <blockquote>, so I'll just draw the line at the presence of {{fake heading}} or {{reflist}}.

Aside from dark mode, the goal was to stop copies of the wikisyntax <blockquote style="padding:1em; border:1px solid #999;"><!--code for display--> from proliferating across at least 3 different pages. Deduplicating repeated wikicode is the purpose of templates. I have also found that dark mode is fixed faster with templates than inline styles.

What template should we use for example article render outputs? 172.97.141.219 (talk) 15:13, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

The raw blockquote should not have been a blockquote either. :) We don't appear to have a good block example template of any sort (obligatory mention of {{xt}} for inline use). Izno (talk) 18:44, 9 December 2024 (UTC)
{{Divbox}} or {{Box}} may be useful. There are others in Category:Box templates. Some of them may need adjustments to support dark mode. – Jonesey95 (talk) 18:58, 9 December 2024 (UTC)
should not have been: no wonder I was confused.
A page used the dark-mode-unfriendly {{box}} with {{blockquote}}, which we want to avoid but without it {{box}} swallows newlines absent <nowiki/> workarounds.
I found {{divbox|plain}} to be useful. It is used as a block example template at {{Backmasked-f/doc}} and {{UK-waterway-routemap/doc}}. I struggled with the bottom margin until {{CCIsubst}} taught me to omit the last newline. 172.97.141.219 (talk) 06:32, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

Template-smuggled redlinked categories, yet again

The newest run of Special:WantedCategories is an even bigger trainwreck of redlinked class-rating categories again, with the total number of redlinked categories hitting 652 this time, but it's now a completely different problem. Instead of "FM-Class [Project] articles" categories having been left as unemptied redlinks following the categories being moved to "pages", now it's predominantly "FM-Class [Project] pages" categories that never previously existed at the "articles" form at all, and thus can't be resolved by moving or categoryredirecting anything.

There's also a smaller but significant cluster of "NA-Class [Project] articles" categories that never previously existed, and seven instances (across a variety of classes) of the nonsense "[Something something] pages articles" form that obviously shouldn't exist at all. As well, several (but not all) of the redlinks I brought here a few days ago haven't actually been resolved, and are still populated.

Can somebody look into what's causing all of this? Thanks. Bearcat (talk) 14:44, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

@Bearcat: We know what's causing this, it's the ongoing activities at Module talk:WikiProject banner and Template talk:WikiProject banner shell, to which you have been directed before. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 16:36, 10 December 2024 (UTC)
Nobody's "directed" me anywhere "before", and it is not my responsibility to quietly put up with having to wade through a flood of 653 redlinked categories. If there are "ongoing activities at Module talk:WikiProject banner and Template talk:WikiProject banner shell", then it's the responsibility of the people involved in those ongoing activities to resolve any and all redlinks that result from their activities before they get thrown onto my plate.
Special:WantedCategories has a size limit beyond which it is full and cannot detect additional categories beyond that limit. So template-generated maintenance categories cannot be allowed to accumulate on that list without being resolved, because every time I just let a batch of hundreds of them sit there unblued that's just pushing the report hundreds of articles closer to its size limit. And even cleaning out the categories I can deal with is significantly harder as long as maintenance categories remain there undealt with, because having to scroll through hundreds of these redlinks I can't fix makes it significantly more difficult to find the redlinks I can fix, especially (again) if they're allowed to accumulate rather than being resolved. So it isn't my responsibility to just politely shut my yap and put up with hundreds of maintenance categories I can't fix cluttering up that report — if they're being caused by ongoing banner template changes, then the projects that are implementing the banner changes need to keep redlinks off that report by dealing with them before they land on that report, because they're significantly interfering with an important maintenance task.
And finally, the handful of "pages articles" categories are obviously just an error, rather than anything intended, so that's a thing that needs to be fixed by whoever made that mistake. Bearcat (talk) 17:04, 10 December 2024 (UTC)
I refer you to this post. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 18:03, 10 December 2024 (UTC)
This is an issue of wikiproject not specifying that they have class assessments that deviate from the global one. An mass message was posted in April 2023, example, that the projects with the redlinks did not act on. Some of those have file classes, like Wikipedia:WikiProject_Aviation/Assessment, where as others do not like Wikipedia:WikiProject_Technology/Assessment.
I thought about this and came to the conclusion that it is best just to have an exclusion list. The exclusion list would list any deviations from the global classes, so projects get the global classes except where they have exclusions. That requires someone to go through the "/Assessments" subpages of the wikiprojects with those redlinks.
The other option would be to use |QUALITY_CRITERIA=custom for projects that deviate from the global classes, either on the basis of redlinked categories or by going through their "/Assessments" wikiproject subpages. Both two methods, the redlink or assessment subpage method, should result in a partial revert of User:Cewbot edits, where the wikiproject classes of the wikiprojects in question where moved to the global one or just removed. Snævar (talk) 18:18, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

Question about email from new user

Can a user who is not yet auto-confirmed send an email to an editor who has enabled "Email this user"?

This is probably a relatively simple question, but it may be the answer to a question about administrator accountability. Some administrators have (in my opinion, reasonably) semi-protected their talk pages, or asked another admin to semi-protect their talk pages, due to abuse from unregistered editors. The question is how a non-autoconfirmed user can contact such an administrator about an administrative action. I think that if the admin has email enabled, that satisfies admin accountability.

This issue came up at Deletion Review, and will probably go away there because the requesting user has been blocked, but I think that the question is worth asking. Robert McClenon (talk) 20:23, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

Special:Preferences has a toggle "Allow emails from brand-new users" that determines whether unconfirmed editors can send the user emails. SilverLocust 💬 20:29, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

Watchlist weirdness

Hello! I've been trying to watch a category (Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting) for additions/removals (see mw:Help:New filters for edit review/Filtering#Type of change), but the watchlist won't display those edits. The stranger thing is, though, that I can't see an entire 250 entries (without a latest version only filter) unless I turn off the "Category changes" filter. Further, I am able to see the problems on the mobile app.

I'm experiencing the problem on Google Chrome version 131.0.6778.109. Thanks!

     — Daℤyzzos (✉️ • 📤) 21:36, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

@DaZyzzogetonsGotDaLastWord: Watchlisting a category in the conventional sense watches for changes to that page. Because a category is just another page in MediaWiki. Add this to your Special:MyPage/common.js file: 
{{subst:iusc|User:Nardog/CatChangesViewer}}
The documentation is over at User:Nardog/CatChangesViewer. Polygnotus (talk) 01:21, 10 December 2024 (UTC)
@AZyzzogetonsGotDaLastWord: No need for a JavaScript solution these days. There's a setting in the watchlist tab of your preferences called "Hide categorization of pages". If it's unchecked, the watchlist will show category removals/additions. Graham87 (talk) 03:59, 10 December 2024 (UTC)
@Graham87: Thank you, I did not know that. Downside is that it results in ~146 entries in the watchlist! Polygnotus (talk) 12:03, 10 December 2024 (UTC)
@Graham87, I have that setting unchecked (meaning do show categorizations in the watchlist) and it still doesn't show categorized pages. It does know there are some, though (it doesn't show a "no results found" message if I filter to only show categorization of pages). – Daℤyzzos (✉️ • 📤) Please do not ping on reply. 22:50, 10 December 2024 (UTC)
Thanks for the recommendation, but I'm trying to get the pages to appear in my watchlist, not just on the category page (I don't really care about what order the pages were added to the category in, I'm just trying to consolidate everything on my watchlist). – Daℤyzzos (✉️ • 📤) Please do not ping on reply. 22:14, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

Disambiguation pages relating to ships

Hello, I have discovered that disambiguation pages relation to ships (such as HMS Hannibal) are not classified as disambiguation pages and are not being displayed in orange (when you have the "Display links to disambiguation pages in orange" gadget enabled). Not sure how to fix this so I thought I'd alert you all here. GMH Melbourne (talk) 02:14, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

They are not disambiguation pages but Wikipedia:Set index articles so there is nothing to fix. It's working correctly. PrimeHunter (talk) 03:58, 11 December 2024 (UTC)
Gotcha, thank you! GMH Melbourne (talk) 04:46, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

[wikibase-conflict-patched] Your edit was patched into the latest version

I encountered this warning message while running wbeditentity. I wonder if anyone can tell me how to avoid it, or who I should ask to get a solution to the problem? Kanashimi (talk) 23:22, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

Transliteration error at Ninurta

Hi. I just chanced upon a Good Article, Ninurta, which now has a red-linked Error on the first line. It's some kind of problem with transliteration, it seems because it's using non-Latin alphabet or characters. It is using the "transl" template and I don't know how to correct it. Would somebody please fix this? ProfGray (talk) 14:02, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

I fixed it by replacing the non-Latin "𒅁" with "Ib (cuneiform)" in the wikilink. Please improve the help text if was not clear to you. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:50, 11 December 2024 (UTC)
@Jonesey95 thank you! ProfGray (talk) 00:20, 12 December 2024 (UTC)

Template-generated redlinked categories, again

Once again, Special:WantedCategories has thrown up a handful of redlinked categories that are being smuggled in via templates that have farmed their category generation out to modules that I can't edit, and thus I can't fix the redlinks.

  • Category:FM-Class articles — This got renamed to Category:FM-Class pages a few days ago via a CFR discussion, but the {{Category class}} template is still module-farming the old category rather than the new one. Some, but not all, of the pages also have the new category directly declared on them alongside the redlink being carried in by the template, but the redlink is still present on over 500 talk pages.
  • Category:Wikipedia dual licensed files with invalid licenses — This is being piggybacked by the licensing template on an image, but the template itself doesn't directly contain any text enabling that category. Obviously if this is actually wanted, then it should be created by somebody who knows how to create project categories like that (i.e. not me), but if it's unwanted then it needs to go away.
  • Category:Wikt-lang template errors — Autogenerated on test page Template:Wikt-lang/testcases. Again, should be created if it's actually wanted, but needs to be kiboshed if it's not. If it's actually unwanted, then just fixing the errors on that page won't be enough, and it will need to be made impossible so that it doesn't come back in the future. And, of course, since I don't work with wikt-lang template gnomery, I'm not in a position to determine whether it's wanted or not.

So could somebody with module-editing privileges fix these, and/or create the latter two categories if they're actually wanted? Thanks. Bearcat (talk) 15:59, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

I'll take care of the first item — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 16:08, 4 December 2024 (UTC)
Can someone take a look at the FM-Class articles categories in Category:Wikipedia non-empty soft redirected categories and see if they can be moved to pages without disrupting the wider category structure for each project? Timrollpickering (talk) 17:19, 5 December 2024 (UTC)
The FM-Class one is a textbook example of why people absolutely must consider the broadest implications when there is a proposal to rename categories that are (i) part of a system and (ii) generated by code in templates and modules. That is to say: don't action the cat rename until every template, module and associated page is ready to be suitably amended. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:38, 5 December 2024 (UTC)
Yes, absolutely. This one took me by surprise. But I will try and get the module reworked later today. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 08:56, 6 December 2024 (UTC)
Special:WantedCategories is now filling up with this mess. Can someone please either apply the module changes ASAP or else reverse the category name changes? Timrollpickering (talk) 12:59, 7 December 2024 (UTC)
Module was updated 08:28 today, so hopefully you are seeing some improvements now — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 18:48, 7 December 2024 (UTC)
I see you updated Template:Category class, but overlooked Template:Category class/column and Template:Category class/second row column. I've now updated those and Template:Articles by Quality/up and Template:Articles by Quality/down, but the first of these is still linking to the old category via {{class}} which invokes Module:Class. (E.g. FM links at Category:20th Century Studios articles by quality and Category:FM-Class 20th Century Studios pages.) Perhaps we should instead write a custom line for FM, like you did here[10] for Unassessed. – Fayenatic London 19:59, 7 December 2024 (UTC)
Most articles have now moved but there are a handful where the templates are stubbornly generating the old categories - see Category:Wikipedia non-empty soft redirected categories for the remaining ones. Timrollpickering (talk) 12:59, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

And another mess. Category:Low-impact WikiProject Wikipedia essays pages articles is a redirect being populated somehow but I'm not sure what and can't find the relevant text in the templates. Special:WantedCategories shows similar cases, as well as numerous redlinked FM pages categories. We need to stop this mess where categories are populated by code templates that are near impossible to amend but the category names can be easily changed. Timrollpickering (talk) 21:41, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

@MSGJ: is this a result of your 7 December edit to Module:WikiProject banner? – Fayenatic London 22:52, 11 December 2024 (UTC)
There are some comments at Module talk:WikiProject banner#Changes for FM-class — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 08:37, 12 December 2024 (UTC)

Weird problem with STN Template

Sunrise Izumo makes frequent use of the STN template, which is supposed to simplify the creation of links to train station articles. The template does what its supposed to, but it also inserts a link to a discussion about merging the template! Not sure how I should deal with this. Isaac Rabinovitch (talk) 17:13, 6 December 2024 (UTC)

I think this update by @Primefac: put a comment in the source code that should be in the talk page? -- Verbarson  talkedits 20:20, 6 December 2024 (UTC)
He says he put it in the source deliberately. See his talk page.
--Isaac Rabinovitch (talk) 20:25, 6 December 2024 (UTC)
It's normal to display a notice in articles using a template which is nominated for discussion. See Template:Tfm#Display on articles. {{STN}} is used in 19,600 articles and often many times in the same article, e.g. 54 in Sunrise Izumo and Karasuma Line. That causes excessive notices. I don't think it's possible for a template to detect it has already been called on the same page so we cannot say "Only display the notice at the first call". Maybe |type=disabled should be used in {{STN}} to never display a notice on articles. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:53, 6 December 2024 (UTC)
Now it makes sense. How will we know if we are not told? And the disruption is pretty minimal. -- Verbarson  talkedits 23:20, 6 December 2024 (UTC)
"The service operates in conjunction with the Sunrise Seto service to ‹See TfM›Takamatsu between Tokyo and ‹See TfM›Okayama. The combined 14-car train departs from Tokyo, and stops at ‹See TfM›Yokohama, ‹See TfM›Atami, ‹See TfM›Numazu, ‹See TfM›Fuji, ‹See TfM›Shizuoka, ‹See TfM›Hamamatsu (final evening stop), ‹See TfM›Himeji (first morning stop), and arrives at ‹See TfM›Okayama, where the train splits."
How is that "minimal"? Isaac Rabinovitch (talk) 03:12, 7 December 2024 (UTC)
I've disabled the TfM link. Nardog (talk) 05:38, 7 December 2024 (UTC)
If we want to only display something at the first occurrence of it on a page then what are the options? Would we have to add site-wide JavaScript which hides the other occurrences after loading the page? PrimeHunter (talk) 11:14, 7 December 2024 (UTC)
Or just don't put a notice of a technical discussion in a place where it's mostly going to be seen by ordinary Wikipedia users. I don't see how this is "normal." I've been reading and editing Wikipedia for almost 20 years, and this is the first time I've encountered such a thing. I guarantee you that 99% of Wikipedia users will find such a notice annoying and distracting. Isaac Rabinovitch (talk) 17:31, 7 December 2024 (UTC)
Notices concerning discussions about articles can be published at the head of the article; they are visible to all readers, but can be ignored by those not interested in WP processes. They don't disturb the flow of the article. It is hard to see how notices of discussion about templates can be published without inserting something into the flow of the article. Should there be an 'I want to see the nuts and bolts' flag that is normally off, but can be set on manually (or configured permanently as a account preference) to enable/disable such notices? -- Verbarson  talkedits 18:15, 7 December 2024 (UTC)
This in your CSS will hide tfd notices in mainspace, assuming they all use tfd:
.ns-0 .tfd {display:none;}
We could hide it for IP's and show by default for registered users. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:56, 7 December 2024 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter You could use WP:TemplateStyles and the :nth-child(1n+2 of .tfd){display:none} to make it only show the first tag in a given paragraph. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 17:29, 10 December 2024 (UTC)
Looks like MediaWiki can't parse the period before .tfd for some reason, but .tfd ~ .tfd {display: none;} does the same thing (hides all sibling .tfds that come after another .tfd). --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 19:32, 10 December 2024 (UTC)
The :nth-child(1n+2 of .tfd) form is not in Selectors Level 3 (a W3C Recommendation) but it is in Selectors Level 4, which is a W3C Working Draft. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:43, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

It could also be off for IP's but on by default for registered users?

Primefac's edit was in accordance with WP:TFDHOW step 1, sixth bullet, except that they appear to have specified |type=tiny instead of |type=inline. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 12:35, 7 December 2024 (UTC)
|type=tiny is an acceptable alternative to |type=inline per Template:Template for discussion#Display on articles. But, as Template:Template for discussion#Which type should be used? goes onto say completely disabling, as Nardog has done, is ok if "the insertion of any template is deemed too detrimental to a large number of articles, or if it breaks markup". Nthep (talk) 13:41, 7 December 2024 (UTC)
off for IP's @PrimeHunter: Have any IPs requested hiding this?
99% of Wikipedia users will find such a notice annoying and distracting The same could be said for compulsory voting in Australia. Similar to what Primefac said, I think people complaining about not being notified pose a greater threat because they could riot and demand the results be overturned.
I requested an edit to make the notification less intrusive. It will be easy to skip over like the other inline cleanup tags and references:

The service operates in conjunction with the Sunrise Seto service to [TfM]Takamatsu between Tokyo and [TfM]Okayama. The combined 14-car train departs from Tokyo, and stops at [TfM]Yokohama, [TfM]Atami, [TfM]Numazu, [TfM]Fuji, [TfM]Shizuoka, [TfM]Hamamatsu (final evening stop), [TfM]Himeji (first morning stop), and arrives at [TfM]Okayama, where the train splits.

172.97.141.219 (talk) 14:45, 11 December 2024 (UTC)
If we're going to use {{fix}}, could we put it at the end of the template so as to match other inline cleanup templates' usage? E.g.:

The service operates in conjunction with the Sunrise Seto service to Takamatsu[TfM] between Tokyo and Okayama[TfM]. The combined 14-car train departs from Tokyo, and stops at Yokohama[TfM], Atami[TfM], Numazu[TfM], Fuji[TfM], Shizuoka[TfM], Hamamatsu[TfM] (final evening stop), Himeji[TfM] (first morning stop), and arrives at Okayama[TfM], where the train splits.

     — Daℤyzzos (✉️ • 📤) Please do ping on reply. 22:23, 11 December 2024 (UTC)
@DaZyzzogetonsGotDaLastWord: {{subst:Tfd}}/{{Tfd/dated}} is transcluded first in the template to discuss, and I wouldn't know how to delay output. Ahecht replaced {{fix}} with templatestyles, saying TfD is not cleanup, but kept [square brackets] while <angle brackets> confuse non-template-editors. I also proposed {{topicon}}. 172.97.141.219 (talk) 12:27, 12 December 2024 (UTC)

Does the Japanese Wikipedia allow English edit summaries?

IP tried to ask the Japanese Wikipedia if English edit summaries is allowed but ended up with receiving no consensus. So, i'm gonna mirror his discussion here on the English Wikipedia's village pump. 67.209.130.128 (talk) 03:14, 12 December 2024 (UTC)

The English Wikipedia has no authority over the Japanese Wikipedia. We would probably not want Japanese edit summaries here, but we don't have a "help for non-English speakers" page either so make of that what you will. * Pppery * it has begun... 04:32, 12 December 2024 (UTC)
It appears to have no filter to stop non-Japanese edit summaries. I suggest that you supply an edit summary in English that is helpful when editing. Without knowing the language, perhaps you can usefully edit images, or numbers on a page. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 06:37, 12 December 2024 (UTC)
I really wouldn't recommend editing a Wikipedia in a language you don't speak for anything beyond the most perfunctory of edits, e.g. maybe replacing images with technically superior versions. For that, machine translation (perhaps with a courtesy note explaining you don't speak the language) should suffice. Remsense ‥ 论 06:39, 12 December 2024 (UTC)
Unironically unironically the highest quality tip. Thank you. 67.209.130.66 (talk) 08:49, 12 December 2024 (UTC)
If you log in, Japanese Wikipedia might send you a welcome message - they sent me one some years ago, see ja:利用者‐会話:Redrose64, which includes one line of English:
Hello, Redrose64! Welcome to Japanese Wikipedia. If you are not a Japanese speaker, you can ask a question in Help. Enjoy!
which may help here. I see that an IP has posted a similar question at 04:10, 3 December 2024 (UTC). --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 18:50, 12 December 2024 (UTC)
Or SWMT. JJPMaster (she/they) 20:50, 12 December 2024 (UTC)
I sometimes perform file moves on Commons, which generates a copy of my edit summary (in English) copied to all languages where the file is renamed pursuant to the file move. I have never had a problem result from this in any language Wiki, including Japanese, where I have some 250 of these. BD2412 T 20:54, 12 December 2024 (UTC)

Fun problem with Improved Syntax Highlighting (beta feature)

Was editing a page (2014 Gaza War) with the Improved Syntax Highlighting beta feature when I noticed that the text I was editing was all purple. Scrolled up to find where the problem started, and it was first completely unnhighlighted, then all purple except for [[where it should be different]], then it was just completely off kilter. E.g. As part of its crackdown and concurrent to rocket fire from Gaza, Israel conducted air strikes against Hamas facilities in the Gaza Strip. I guess that's beta features for you. – Daℤyzzos (✉️ • 📤) Please do not ping on reply. 23:32, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

The talk page for that beta feature is mw:Help talk:Extension:CodeMirror if you want to report a problem there. It helps to describe exactly what you clicked on and what you saw. For example, were you using the Visual Editor, and were you editing a section or the whole article? – Jonesey95 (talk) 00:56, 12 December 2024 (UTC)
Thank you... not sure how I would get syntax highlighting in Visual Editor though... :-) – Daℤyzzos (✉️ • 📤) Please do ping on reply. 01:46, 12 December 2024 (UTC)
Phab:T366035 析石父 (talk) 14:26, 12 December 2024 (UTC)
Thank you. – Daℤyzzos (✉️ • 📤) Please do ping on reply. 21:28, 12 December 2024 (UTC)

Redirects to anchors

Redirects to anchors don't seem to work.

If I go to Special pages it redirects to MediaWiki at the top of the page. But if I click the link in "Redirected from Special pages" it shows a link to MediaWiki#Installation and configuration. And if I click that link, I get the anchor jump.

Is the failure to do the jump on redirect peculiar to Firefox or do I need to file a bug report with Wikimedia? Or is this a known issue they won't be able to fix?

Thisisnotatest (talk) 03:06, 13 December 2024 (UTC)

What version of Firefox are you using?
You can find it under help > About firefox. Snævar (talk) 03:35, 13 December 2024 (UTC)
Redirects to a section require scripting to be enabled. Johnuniq (talk) 08:13, 13 December 2024 (UTC)
Works correctly for me. Firefox 133.0.3 (64 bits) @ Windows 11 Home. --CiaPan (talk) 09:00, 13 December 2024 (UTC)
Works for me in Firefox with JavaScript enabled, bot not disabled as Johnuniq said. Does https://www.whatismybrowser.com/detect/is-javascript-enabled/ say JavaScript is enabled? What is the url in the address bar after clicking Special pages? With JavaScript enabled and working correctly it should be rewritten to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki#Installation_and_configuration and jump to the section. Without JavaScript the url remains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_pages. It does display the MediaWiki article but doesn't jump to the section. This is an effect of MediaWiki using "pseudoredirects" and not real HTTP redirects. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:56, 13 December 2024 (UTC)

Typing "Template:gl" (lower-case G, lower-case L) in the search box takes me to an unexpected page

When I type "Template:gl" (lower-case G, lower-case L) in the search box at the top of my page (in Vector 2022), and then click Search, I am automatically taken to Template:GL (upper-case G, upper-case L). There is not a redirect at Template:gl, so I do not understand why this happens. I believe that I should end up at this search result page, telling me that "The page "Template:Gl" does not exist., etc."

This also happens if I type "Template:gin", so it is not limited to two-letter names.

I thought that after the first character, case was significant in page names. What is happening here? – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:20, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

The search box allows very near matches. This query matches "Now try all upper case" or another type of near match. 172.97.141.219 (talk) 19:51, 10 December 2024 (UTC)
Thanks for that. I suppose this (to me) inconsistent behavior is helpful for nearly everyone, but not for template editors and gnomes trying to investigate and fix specific problems. I find it a bit frustrating that the Search box at the top of the page behaves differently from the Search page. I guess that's why one has a white-background button that is the same height as the text box, and the other has a blue-background button that is taller than the text box. Maybe that will help me remember. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:56, 10 December 2024 (UTC)
The big search box at Special:Search always makes a search and never goes directly to a matching page name. The normal search box on every page always goes directly to a page which only differs by captizalition, unless you select "Search for pages contaning" in the dropdown. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:15, 10 December 2024 (UTC)
Jonesey95, if you append a tilde to any search in the top-right box, it will force a search result page, regardless if a page exists matching your search string or not. This is actually documented somewhere, and not some kind of klugey thing that might go away next version. Try Template:Ambox~ or similar. Mathglot (talk) 09:02, 13 December 2024 (UTC)
Interesting. Strangely, it doesn't tell me that "The page Template:gin~ does not exist", as I might expect, but I'll file that tip away for future use. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:03, 13 December 2024 (UTC)

Data sorting in tables

Hi there, I've created a page List of Neo-Latin authors which has sortable lists.

In the first column, I've added data sorting via either |data-sort="Lastname, firstname"| or with {{sortname|Firstname|Lastname}}, or variations on these. The seem to be outputting to the table, but it doesn't seem always to sort on these values. In particular, cells which have sort values, but do not contain data, are treated as blanks.

It is necessary to have some data-less name cells, because the table contains columns for the author's original names, and their Latin names; but either of these can be absent for different authors.

I've tried adding nsbsp; to make browsers think there is content, in case that is the issue, but that doesn't seem to help. Any ideas? Jim Killock (talk) 17:12, 13 December 2024 (UTC)

@JimKillock: It's called data-sort-value.[11] PrimeHunter (talk) 18:23, 13 December 2024 (UTC)
Ah great - thanks! Jim Killock (talk) 20:29, 13 December 2024 (UTC)

Cursor jumping

For a month or longer now, my cursor has been jumping to the beginning of my sentence when I'm writing a message in places like the Help Desk or an article's Talk page — but interestingly, not here at Technical Help — and try to type capital letters or certain common symbols such as colons, semicolons, parentheses, quotation marks, exclamation points, and question marks. This happens ONLY when I'm working in Wikipedia, nowhere else.

It's really maddening, because it means I waste a lot of time going back to the start of a line and copying the letter or symbol to pasted back down where I was typing. Can you help me stop this? Augnablik (talk) 12:08, 14 December 2024 (UTC)

Module editor needed, again

Another two redlinks generated by the move of template-generated maintenance categories again, this time relating to {{Infobox road}}:

But yet again, the template isn't directly declaring these categories itself in any place I could fix them myself, but is smuggling them in via a module I can't edit, so I need somebody with module-editing privileges to clean them up. Thanks. Bearcat (talk) 17:20, 13 December 2024 (UTC)

This is beyond me, too. And I tested and it doesn't follow redirects. Posted at Template talk:Infobox road in the hope that one of the editors watching that knows how this works. * Pppery * it has begun... 17:30, 13 December 2024 (UTC)
I think exceptions to ISO names need to be added at Template:Infobox road/meta/mask/category.  —  Jts1882 | talk  18:10, 13 December 2024 (UTC)
I agree, it is safer than adding it to the ISO, less templates using the subtemplate than the module. Snævar (talk) 20:19, 13 December 2024 (UTC)
I've made this edit and it seems to make the change. One road that I null edited is there at the moment.  —  Jts1882 | talk  08:04, 14 December 2024 (UTC)
The trace here is Template:Infobox_road > Template:Infobox road/meta/mask/category > Template:Country name > Module:ISO 3166 > Module:ISO 3166/data/National. The last module "Module:ISO 3166/data/National" mentions "Cabo Verde" as the main name and "Cape Verde" as the alterntive, hence the category gets thee "Cabo Verde" name. Snævar (talk) 19:40, 13 December 2024 (UTC)
  • Thanks, gang. I followed up Jts's Cape Verde edit above with another one that used the same format to deal with the Georgia category, and that also worked, so that one's now clean as well. Thanks again for figuring this out. Bearcat (talk) 15:35, 14 December 2024 (UTC)

Yet another mystery

When I add topics in places like the article Talk pages and the Help Desk, perhaps elsewhere too, I'm finding a lot of times that square-shaped "sticky notes" have begun to pop up with brief dictionary definitions of words. No idea why. I don't ask for them, they just seem to come on their own. They get in the way of my typing. Is there a way to stop this? Augnablik (talk) 12:46, 14 December 2024 (UTC)

Do the "sticky notes" look something like this?
note
A brief record of facts, topics, or thoughts, written down as an aid to memory.
More »
     — Daℤyzzos (✉️ • 📤) 15:59, 14 December 2024 (UTC)
Yes, except mine are square.
By the way, @DaZyzzogetonsGotDaLastWord, please tell me how you inserted that image. That's exactly what I wanted to do in this message but didn't know how. Augnablik (talk) 16:22, 14 December 2024 (UTC)
Okay. If the "sticky notes" look like that, you probably have some sort of dictionary extension installed. If you're using Google Chrome, check here to see if you have that installed. If you're not using Google Chrome, I doubt I can help any further.
I made the diagram using the {{box}} template—it's not an image. Documentation for using the {{box}} template can be found here. Information on uploading a screenshot (image) of Wikipedia to show your problem can be found here.
     — Daℤyzzos (✉️ • 📤) Please do not ping on reply 18:53, 14 December 2024 (UTC)
1- I am using Chrome. :) I followed your link and ended up on a page entitled Google Dictionary, so I suppose that means the dictionary is installed. Now what?
2- A box template, interesting. I look forward to learning about this. Augnablik (talk) 08:14, 15 December 2024 (UTC)
@Augnablik: Everybody sees a page called Google Dictionary at [12]. The question is whether you see a button to add or remove the extension. It may be another extension. See https://support.google.com/chrome_webstore/answer/2664769#uninstall-extension. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:15, 15 December 2024 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter, I see an Add button. Augnablik (talk) 12:17, 15 December 2024 (UTC)
@Augnablik: Then look for another installed extension as described at my link. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:27, 15 December 2024 (UTC)
I did what you asked, looking for another installed extension. Two came up. One was clearly an extension, and it didn't look important, so I deleted it. But the second is Acrobat! I can't imagine why that would appear as an extension. As you can guess, I didn't uninstall it.
Perhaps for the uninstallation to work, or the sticky notes to stop (if that's supposed to happen now), I'll restart my computer and come back to see what happens. Augnablik (talk) 15:09, 15 December 2024 (UTC)

Another mystery

When I go to the talk page for a Wiki article entitled "Ramendra Kumar" and click on History, sometimes I see the entire history as I'd expect, with all messages in descending order ... other times I see selected revisions (there's a box saying "Compare selected revisions," so I'm calling what I see that same way). I never know what to expect when I click on History. I assume this would happen at other article Talk pages.

Of course I want to see the entire history. Please help me stop the selected revisions from coming up when I click on History. Augnablik (talk) 12:43, 14 December 2024 (UTC)

Augnablik, what is the URL, in both cases? — Qwerfjkltalk 13:38, 15 December 2024 (UTC)
It's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramendra_Kumar, @Qwerfjkl. But now I see the history as it should look. I've noticed this has happened before with that history ... but now I've discovered this is happening with other histories as well. One day, I see selected revisions — another day, everything.
I checked several more edits that I made to other articles and the History tab is bringing up all the revisions correctly. Let me check on this again tomorrow and see if it goes back to seeing just selected revisions. Stay tuned, please.
I'm intrigued by your User name, as it's certainly an interesting version of the Qwerty keyboard! Augnablik (talk) 15:36, 15 December 2024 (UTC)
Augnablik, I mean the URL when you only see certain versions, not the URL of the page.
As far as I know there is no Qwerfjkl keyboard; I just started on Qwerty and got bored halfway through. — Qwerfjkltalk 15:56, 15 December 2024 (UTC)
Oh, sorry, that’s what I thought I’d copied for you. It’s https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ramendra_Kumar&action=history .
But again, I’ve now found that the selected version/entire version changes happen elsewhere as well as at that page. And by the way when I just checked at the RK page, I found the edits were now showing in their entirety. So, then, they changed twice in one day.
As for your Wiki name, lyes, I know there’s no keyboard that uses it. I was just having a little fun with you, Augnablik (talk) 18:26, 15 December 2024 (UTC)

File:01 Burqa (cropped).tif

When I hover over the "reply" link on WP:VP/P policy I see File:01 Burqa (cropped).tif. Any particular reason for that? CambridgeBayWeather (solidly non-human), Uqaqtuq (talk), Huliva 23:00, 13 December 2024 (UTC)

Not sure which "reply" link you're hovering over (there are far too many to try all of them), but neither hovering nor clicking yielded the file in question for the two I tried. – Daℤyzzos (✉️ • 📤) Please do not ping on reply. 23:29, 13 December 2024 (UTC)
It's all the reply links. Only hovering shows the image and click on the reply link just opens the page to reply. CambridgeBayWeather (solidly non-human), Uqaqtuq (talk), Huliva 04:54, 14 December 2024 (UTC)
@CambridgeBayWeather: I guess you have enabled "Navigation popups" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets. The reply links are made by "Enable quick replying" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing. The links points to the page itself and File:01 Burqa (cropped).tif is displayed in Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Can we hide sensitive graphic photos? Popups can display an image outside the lead, unlike the default feature Page previews at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:36, 13 December 2024 (UTC)
I do have the navigation popup enabled. It just seemed an odd choice of image for the VP/P page as I didn't realise that was the only image on the page. I see that File:718smiley.svg is showing at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals). CambridgeBayWeather (solidly non-human), Uqaqtuq (talk), Huliva 05:00, 14 December 2024 (UTC)
Maybe the icons at Wikipedia:Village pump should also be added to the top of the pages. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:12, 14 December 2024 (UTC)
There's not really a good place to add only the relevant icon, and hovering over a link to WP:VP (no particular section) yields no image, despite the WP:VP/P one being in the header, so I'm not quite sure where at all one would put a relevant image. – Daℤyzzos (✉️ • 📤) 15:42, 14 December 2024 (UTC)
Popups looks at the source text in Wikipedia:Village pump and doesn't discover the icons which are transcluded from {{Village pump}}. Hovering on the template link shows the first icon File:Edit-find-replace.svg. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:15, 14 December 2024 (UTC)
Ah. Still doesn't solve the question of where one would put the WP:VP icons. – Daℤyzzos (✉️ • 📤) Please do not ping on reply. 22:52, 14 December 2024 (UTC)
Huh. I thought that at the top might work because when I hover over my talk page link above I see File:ANEWSicon.png and on my user page, File:CambridgeBayWeather logo.svg. On PrimeHunter's I see a barnstar and his talk page link shows File:Information.svg. But for some reason hovering over the links to Daℤyzzos and his talk page show no images at all. CambridgeBayWeather (solidly non-human), Uqaqtuq (talk), Huliva 00:18, 15 December 2024 (UTC)
Actually, hovering over a link to your talk page displays File:Wikipedia Administrator.svg, but that's still provided (albeit smaller than File:ANEWSicon.png) by the Adminidstrators' newsletter. – Daℤyzzos (✉️ • 📤) 18:35, 15 December 2024 (UTC)
And that's what I'm seeing now. CambridgeBayWeather (solidly non-human), Uqaqtuq (talk), Huliva 18:39, 15 December 2024 (UTC)
I did some testing and I found... (drumroll please)
...that I have absolutely no idea why my talk page (or normal userpage for that matter) gets no image! But at least we know now that it can't be something to do with the image or its syntax .
     — Daℤyzzos (✉️ • 📤) Please do not ping on reply. 19:19, 15 December 2024 (UTC)

Christmas message error

Urgh I just sent out a load of Christmas messages and forgot to add a </div> at the end. So responses will spew onto the background. Can somebody use AWB or a bot to quickly fix it and add it like this, it would take an hour to do manually! ♦ Dr. Blofeld 10:29, 15 December 2024 (UTC)

Some have been fixed already. Each one will require checking manually. @Dr. Blofeld: What is the original that you used? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 12:35, 15 December 2024 (UTC)
Blowers, you are guilty of having too many wiki-friends! Looks like RedRose64 is very kindly helping you out. Martinevans123 (talk) 12:47, 15 December 2024 (UTC)
A number of them are contributors to the challenges who deserve to be shown that they are appreciated Martin! ♦ Dr. Blofeld 12:58, 15 December 2024 (UTC)
The only challenge I generally ever attempt is this one, and the results aren't usually very impressive. Martinevans123 (talk) 13:25, 15 December 2024 (UTC)
Redrose64, or use AWB to alert them to add </div> at the end if they've not already fixed it! ♦ Dr. Blofeld 12:52, 15 December 2024 (UTC)
That would be spamming. But what is the original that you used? Presumably it was a template; if I can fix the problem at source, it shouldn't occur again. It seems that every year, somebody sends out Christmas greetings with unclosed markup of some kind - in this case there were both a missing ''''' and a missing </div> but in the past I've seen cases of unclosed tables, or where closing tags are transposed. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 12:59, 15 December 2024 (UTC)
Please let me know if I can help with this. I have a bot task approved for fixing typos and issues in mass messages. – DreamRimmer (talk) 13:21, 15 December 2024 (UTC)
Is it possible something could be coded to fix the ones Redrose hasn't done yet? It's just it'll take over an hour to fix manually. Perhaps if this is a common problem at Christmas something could be coded to fix them? Only if it wouldn't take long to do Dream. ♦ Dr. Blofeld 16:56, 15 December 2024 (UTC)
Yes, I can fix it. It is bedtime here where I live, so I will take care of it tomorrow. – DreamRimmer (talk) 17:14, 15 December 2024 (UTC)
All  Done now, including fixing up some half-fixes by others - do people really think that </div style> is valid?. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 19:59, 15 December 2024 (UTC)

URGENT - more category template mess

A mass nomination has been listed at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Working for processing with hundreds and categories and hundreds of thousands of articles. However these are generated by convoluted code in templates and it's not clear how to change WikiProject & taskforce "articles" to "pages" without causing chaos.

Can some please URGENTLY look at the templates and sort this out. Once again we've had a mass renaming pushed through without stopping to check it can be easily done. Timrollpickering (talk) 00:04, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

Module talk:WikiProject banner has some discussion about the topic. Izno (talk) 00:12, 16 December 2024 (UTC)
I see at the top of Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Working#Bot work it states If the category needs to be split among multiple destination categories, requires template editing, or requires editing the documentation subpage of templates, or any other special circumstances that require manual review, list it at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Working/Manual rather than here. Perhaps that should be done, and the person who didn't do that in the first place informed of their mistake? Anomie⚔ 00:14, 16 December 2024 (UTC)
I've moved the list to Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Working/Large and will try blocking the bot for a couple of hours to see if that resets it. I have asked the editor who put the list on the main processing page to remember to fix templates at the same time. But more generally this whole renaming mess has caused chaos, not least because of the absurdly complicated way these categories are generated without being easy to amend. Timrollpickering (talk) 00:22, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

Infobox radio station issues

In many articles at Category:CS1 errors: URL regarding radio stations have a common problem and its about a citation error that too in same place. It's something with {{Infobox radio station}}.––kemel49(connect)(contri) 17:38, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

Not a WP:VPT issue.
I only looked at one article (WALC) but in that article there is this:
| facility_id = WALC: 72377 <br />WZLC: 173901
The value assigned to that parameter completes an incomplete url.
If one is to believe the template documentation, the only value that should be assigned to that parameter is the 'numeric Facility ID' – whatever that is. As currently written, the value assigned to |facility_id= looks like a mishmash of callsigns and facility IDs for two different radio stations. Perhaps the other radio station articles in Category:CS1 errors: URL suffer from similarly malformed input.
—Trappist the monk (talk) 18:16, 16 December 2024 (UTC)
Is it appropriate to remove WALC: & <br /> and only put one line of numerical rather than two.––kemel49(connect)(contri) 18:22, 16 December 2024 (UTC)
You should probably discuss this issue with editors at Wikipedia:WikiProject Radio Stations. Editors there should be able to tell you how to properly handle two (related) radio stations in a single article/infobox. Perhaps that discussion will result in changes to {{Infobox radio station}}.
—Trappist the monk (talk) 18:56, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

Highlight function of Interactive Pathways Map not displaying content correctly

when you try to use the function Highlight as in


GlycolysisGluconeogenesis_WP534|highlight=Glucose-6-phosphate_isomerase

the thumbimage is not displayed correctly: it is centered on the highlighted objcet as intended but not displayed, leaving a void where the highlighted object should be.

div style="position: relative; top: -204.445378151261px; left: -239.5px; width: {{{bSize}}}px" the problem is in width:{{{bSize}}}. it should be fit-content

the problem affects every interactive pathways map i have seen. A.garofalo32 (talk) 20:37, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

The highlight box when clicking on a notification linking to this post is also way oversized: it extends just past the bottom of the text in the previous post an well below the bottom of the footer. (Wait—is this reply also going to be way off to the side? Only one way to find out!) – Daℤyzzos (✉️ • 📤) Please do not ping on reply. 20:49, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-51

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

Weekly highlight

  • Interested in improving event management on your home wiki? The CampaignEvents extension offers organizers features like event registration management, event/wikiproject promotion, finding potential participants, and more - all directly on-wiki. If you are an organizer or think your community would benefit from this extension, start a discussion to enable it on your wiki today. To learn more about how to enable this extension on your wiki, visit the deployment status page.

Updates for editors

  • Users of the iOS Wikipedia App in Italy and Mexico on the Italian, Spanish, and English Wikipedias, can see a personalized Year in Review with insights based on their reading and editing history.
  • Users of the Android Wikipedia App in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia can see the new Rabbit Holes feature. This feature shows a suggested search term in the Search bar based on the current article being viewed, and a suggested reading list generated from the user’s last two visited articles.
  • The global reminder bot is now active and running on nearly 800 wikis. This service reminds most users holding temporary rights when they are about to expire, so that they can renew should they want to. See the technical details page for more information.
  • The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 13 January 2025 because of the end of year holidays. Thank you to all of the translators, and people who submitted content or feedback, this year.
  • Recurrent item View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed in the Android Wikipedia App which had caused translatable SVG images to show the wrong language when they were tapped.

Updates for technical contributors

  • There is no new MediaWiki version next week. The next deployments will start on 14 January. [13]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 22:21, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

Add new category: articles in mainspace that contain template "Draft article"

{{AfC submission}} uses Module:AfC submission catcheck so it can list AfC submissions with categories automatically in Category:AfC submissions with categories.

It looks like {{Draft article}} also uses Module:AfC submission catcheck but it does not appear to be listing articles in mainspace that contain {{Draft article}} in a category. Can we do that? I have asked @Tol: to add removing {{Draft article}} from articles in mainspace to TolBots list of tasks. It would be nice if the bot could work from a category, just like the existing task to remove {{Draft categories}} from mainspace articles.

Note that there are currently no articles in mainspace that contain {{Draft article}} but that is because I used AWB to remove it. Thank you, Polygnotus (talk) 06:33, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

@Polygnotus You're basically asking for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere?target=Template%3ADraft+article&namespace=0&hidelinks=1&hideredirs=1&limit=50. It's been a while since I've used the desktop AWB, but in WP:JWB it's pretty easy to generate a list of mainspace pages that transclude a template. You can import the JSON file below to do it for {{Draft article}}:
{
	"Draft article template in mainspace": {"string":{"namespacelist":["0"],"linksto-title":"Template:Draft article"},"bool":{"linksto":true,"backlinks":false,"embeddedin":true,"imageusage":false},"replaces":[]}
}
TolBot should be able to do something similar. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 17:21, 10 December 2024 (UTC)
That would also be a way to achieve the same goal, but that would be inconsistent, less elegant, and a waste of dev time. AWB and JWB are intended for tasks that require human supervision, which this does not. Polygnotus (talk) 15:56, 13 December 2024 (UTC)
@Polygnotus PyWikiBot, or whatever TolBot is using on the backend, should be able to perform a similar search. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 19:28, 16 December 2024 (UTC)
@Ahecht: I know how Pywikibot and the Action API work. You have not given a reason why you prefer that approach. Polygnotus (talk) 10:22, 17 December 2024 (UTC)

Sub-referencing: Request for feedback

Hello, I’m Johannes from the WMDE Technical Wishes team. Four months ago, we reached out to the community to discuss the new sub-referencing feature we are currently working on. Thank you to everyone who shared their thoughts and feedback on meta:Talk:WMDE Technical Wishes/Sub-referencing or in local village pump discussions!

We would like to ask for your perspective again, because we’ve made changes to the wikitext syntax of sub-referencing, based on the feedback we’ve received and because it’s the only viable way of dealing with some technical limitations. Please visit meta:Talk:WMDE Technical Wishes/Sub-referencing#Request for feedback to read more about our approach for inline sub-referencing and share your thoughts! Thanks Johannes Richter (WMDE) (talk) 14:06, 17 December 2024 (UTC)

Account creation limit for administrators

I'm trying to process WP:ACC requests and I'm getting the message that I've exceeded the "6 accounts in the last 24 hours" limit (when I tried it via the API, I got "acct_creation_throttle_hit") despite the fact that I am an administrator have the noratelimit userright. Reading WP:Account creator and WP:Event coordinator it seems like admins shouldn't be subject to that limit. I've verified via the API that I am properly logged in and have noratelimit. Any idea why I'm not able to create further accounts? --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 19:14, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

Special:ListGroupRights#sysop confirms you should have noratelimit. You have created 9 accounts today.[14] wgAccountCreationThrottle is set to 6 in https://noc.wikimedia.org/conf/highlight.php?file=InitialiseSettings.php. If the problem started after the 9th then I really don't know why. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:55, 16 December 2024 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter Some were created directly with the ACC tool, so they may appear to come from a toolforge IP address as opposed to my own, and others were created manually. At least that's all I can think of. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 21:11, 16 December 2024 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter I just tried creating some other accounts both manually and via the tool and they both worked, but the specific username I tried before still gives me the "6 accounts" error. Does that rate limit follow the username somehow? --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 21:18, 16 December 2024 (UTC)
I don't know. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:35, 16 December 2024 (UTC)
You could be hitting a special upstream mitigation, is there anything unusual about the username you are trying to create? — xaosflux Talk 22:16, 16 December 2024 (UTC)
Might've been the email domain, which appears to be on various lists as "likely used for abuse and fraud". --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 14:20, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
Could be - I don't normally create accounts for people with suspicious email addresses. — xaosflux Talk 18:04, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
How are you authenticating to the API? If you're using a bot password or an OAuth client it's possible that the client does not have a grant that includes noratelimit. Taavi (talk!) 15:14, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
I was using Special:ApiSandbox, so no bot password or OAuth (and the same issue occurred with the regular account creation page as well). --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 15:22, 17 December 2024 (UTC)

Page may not contain recent updates.

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T382388

I assume this has something to do with how new MediaWiki versions are tested on Thursdays (to the best of my recollection), but the footer all pages on desktop now displays "This page was last edited on [date], at [time]. Warning: Page may not contain recent updates."

This isn't terribly helpful (my first thought was a 'this page may not reflect recent developments in the subject matter,' but I'm fairly sure it actually means 'someone could have edited this page in the time since you opened it.' I think it's possible to display a message if the page has been updated since it's opened (the reply tool does this).

Though prompting the reader to reload the page could present the issue of the most recent edit being vandalism, I think it'd overall be beneficial (such as the case of rapidly developing events).

I was able to find a few related things, if of any help. Searching "page may not contain recent updates" (w/ quotes) on Google yields results that seemingly are cached versions of this message on other MediaWiki wikis. Phab:T226634 from 2019 contains the message at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T226634#5285990 JayCubby 00:35, 18 December 2024 (UTC)

I noticed a Changes newer than x seconds may not appear in this list. on Special:Contributions, hadn't noticed it anywhere else. I checked it and the message is MediaWiki:lag-warn-normal, which makes me thing that we are maybe experiencing server lag? – 2804:F1...33:D1A2 (::/32) (talk) 00:41, 18 December 2024 (UTC)
Now I don't see it anymore (as of a couple seconds ago). Weird.
here's a screenshot
And now I see it again! JayCubby 00:45, 18 December 2024 (UTC)
I just saw it, it's MediaWiki:Laggedreplicamode - pretty sure it's just lag.
Of course, it's quite possibly still a WP:THURSDAY problem, but this isn't new behaviour. – 2804:F1...33:D1A2 (::/32) (talk) 00:49, 18 December 2024 (UTC)
Looks like today isn't Thursday, despite my wishes. JayCubby 01:23, 18 December 2024 (UTC)
I'm getting the same nessage on my watch list, user contributions and noticeboards Knitsey (talk) 00:46, 18 December 2024 (UTC)
Huh. I'm not able to view it at VPT, but I can see it on my watchlist. Not AN though. JayCubby 00:49, 18 December 2024 (UTC)
This is indicative of replication lag. Elli (talk | contribs) 00:48, 18 December 2024 (UTC)
Nothing substantial at wikimediastatus.net, but maybe that's not the place to look. JayCubby 00:51, 18 December 2024 (UTC)
https://replag.toolforge.org/ - just be aware that this is a live feed, meaning it's often 0, but if you refresh during a multiple seconds lag you can gradually see the count go up until the lag has passed (where it then goes back to 0) – 2804:F1...33:D1A2 (::/32) (talk) 01:09, 18 December 2024 (UTC)
Due to high database server lag, changes newer than 121 seconds may not appear in this list., well then.
Most I saw were ~20 seconds maximum, that was a big one. – 2804:F1...33:D1A2 (::/32) (talk) 01:16, 18 December 2024 (UTC)
Looking at the graph that @AntiCompositeNumber posted in the phab (adjusting the time), it looks like the lag completely stopped after the 2 minutes lag on eqiad...
Did someone do something? – 2804:F1...33:D1A2 (::/32) (talk) 01:28, 18 December 2024 (UTC)
There was some maintenance on invalid skin preference values that didn't get mentioned in the server admin log and was more impactful than expected. The replag went away when the script finished. AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 14:31, 18 December 2024 (UTC)

Seeking bot that checks for duplicate sources

Is there any bot on Wikipedia that will check an article for sources that are used multiple times (and could be combined)?   ▶ I am Grorp ◀ 22:26, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

There is a tool available at https://yabbr.toolforge.org/ that helps combine duplicate references. – DreamRimmer (talk) 02:12, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
Looks like that's a different function. It finds articles where someone has twice named a citation using the same refname. I'm looking for something which finds duplicate URLs, so that I can combine them into one [named] citation that can be referred to multiple times.   ▶ I am Grorp ◀ 02:20, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
Wikipedia:ReFill is also helpful in combining duplicate references, but it is mainly used for fixing bare references. – DreamRimmer (talk) 02:38, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
That sounds like the ticket! I'll give it a try.   ▶ I am Grorp ◀ 02:48, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
@Grorp: There's User:Polygnotus/DuplicateReferences, but I've not used it myself. I did come across it here, inspiring me to do this. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:04, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
@Redrose64: Thanks! I've tried it out and it works great.   ▶ I am Grorp ◀ 03:34, 19 December 2024 (UTC)

Undesirable (and new?) line wrapping

I don't know if it's just me noticing something that has been there for a long time, or if something new is happening, or if my CSS or browser is to blame, but I am noticing undesirable line wrapping that I have not seen before. I am seeing references after full stops (periods) that wrap to the next line. I'm seeing the ")" in "f/16)" (in the lead of Exposure value) wrapping to the next line. And I think one other kind of wrapping that should not be happening but that I can't remember at the moment. I don't think this sort of wrapping was happening before; references stayed with the preceding punctuation, and a closing parenthesis would stay with the text that preceded it. I could be wrong or misremembering, of course. My gut feeling is that I just started noticing it in the last month or so.

If it's just me, I'll live with it, but I thought I would post here to see if this prompts anyone else to chime in. I am using Vector 2022 on the latest Firefox for Mac OS. I can link to example pages and even provide screen shots as needed. – Jonesey95 (talk) 01:01, 19 December 2024 (UTC)

I am seeing references after full stops (periods) that wrap to the next line.

This has unfortunately always been the case. I found Phab tasks and comments documenting this going back to 2016: T100112#2027495, T125480. There have been cases where line wrapping around references behaved even worse than that (interesting ones I found: T96487, T110057, T132255), and those have been fixed.

I'm seeing the ")" in "f/16)" (in the lead of Exposure value) wrapping to the next line

I can reproduce this, screenshot for reference: F58028918. This is caused by using display: inline-block; in the template {{f/}} (basically the same issue as T110057 mentioned above, actually). It was added not quite a year ago: [15]. I'm not sure what these rules are for, but someone could probably find a way to do this differently and avoid the problem.

And I think one other kind of wrapping that should not be happening but that I can't remember at the moment.

Well, it's a bit tricky to guess from that ;), but my crystal ball shows me you're thinking of T353005, where some error and warning messages now break words with hyphens when wrapping lines, starting also about a year ago. I heard a few people complain about that and I find it a bit unpleasant myself. Did I guess right?
Matma Rex talk 01:54, 19 December 2024 (UTC)
Adding a &zwj; after the span in {{f/}}, as shown in Special:Diff/1263967231, would at least fix the issue in that template. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 17:15, 19 December 2024 (UTC)
The problem with NOT wrapping (especially when dictated by templates), is that it works for 90% of the cases. But there is also the 10% of cases where the value is too small to fit in the infobox or on a mobile screen in 1 line. But the templates can't make that distinction, so it's generally a bad idea to put 'no wrap' as a default in a template. Overall it is better to depend on the browser to mostly do things right and not fret too much about the occasional times that it gets it wrong. Because flipping that assumption around tends to create harder to maintain wikitext that gets it wrong about the same or even more often. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:36, 19 December 2024 (UTC)
Thanks for the responses. As I said, I really can't tell if I'm seeing something new, or if I noticed one and now the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is in effect. If I see something really egregious, I'll take a screen shot. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:50, 19 December 2024 (UTC)

Why are frwiki talk pages so much nicer than ours?

Take a look at (for example) https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Oracle#Li_M'H%C3%A2_Ong_(2). This seems to be typical of talk pages on frwiki. The threading of replies is so much easier to follow. Is this just some snazzier CSS they're using, or something fundamentally better to edit the pages? RoySmith (talk) 01:07, 18 December 2024 (UTC)

It looks like just some snazzy CSS. * Pppery * it has begun... 01:09, 18 December 2024 (UTC)
I see no reason not to adopt the CSS over here, or some other form of threaded discussion by default.JayCubby 01:22, 18 December 2024 (UTC)
There are some gadgets that support it. I think ConvenientDiscussions is one of them. I'm not a general fan of the styling. Izno (talk) 02:08, 18 December 2024 (UTC)
A screenshot of Convenient Discussions for reference:
Threads are collapsible, and a change is coming that would allow to collapse/expand all replies to a comment in one click, similar to how you can do that on Reddit with a +/− button.
And, of course, pure CSS is only a half-solution here since markup and HTML produced by it are trickier and don't correspond to the actual comment structure as one-to-one. Jack who built the house (talk) 05:31, 20 December 2024 (UTC)
I'd love to see that too! – Closed Limelike Curves (talk) 23:06, 18 December 2024 (UTC)
I created my own experimental CSS stylesheet to add style formatting to discussion threads; see User:Isaacl/style/discussion-threads for an example of how it looks and instructions on using it. There is an accompanying user script to temporarily turn the style formatting off for the current page, should you want to see how the page looks by default. isaacl (talk) 02:25, 18 December 2024 (UTC)
I don't personally like that layout, but the customer is always correct in matters of taste I suppose? It's just styling hacks (see without). frwiki has thousands of lines of custom css being loaded by default (e.g. from w:fr:MediaWiki:common.css , w:fr:MediaWiki:Vector-2022.css, w:fr:MediaWiki:Gadget-Mobile.css). Someone could write a "pretty talk pages" script here, and if it was popular we could make it available as a gadget. — xaosflux Talk 14:53, 18 December 2024 (UTC)
What's been done in the past is A/B testing of different gimmicks by the WMF. I'd be curious to see the rate of abandoned comments now versus with a shiny new layout is. JayCubby 15:16, 18 December 2024 (UTC)
My stylesheet continues to be used by (double-checks)... only me. I like it, but it's not evident yet that there's a significant demand for different styling of discussion threads. isaacl (talk) 18:17, 18 December 2024 (UTC)
That looks HIDEOUS. All the boxes and colors distract me from the text. I would find it harder to follow those conversations. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 15:51, 18 December 2024 (UTC)
The threading is entirely frwiki's custom CSS. It's pretty easy to do, with how talk pages use nested definition-list syntax for discussions already; body.ext-discussiontools-replytool-enabled dd { border-left: 2px solid lavender; padding-left: 1ex; } gets you about 95% of the way there. There's plenty of room to get fancier, of course. (And sometime people use unordered lists instead, which would need to be handled separately.)
There's also a visible difference since enwiki is the only place that the DiscussionTools "visual enhancements" haven't been turned on yet (T379102). That's why they have the fancier thread summaries in the topic list and under the headings, and the more button-like reply links. If you're curious what that'd be like here, you can turn it on with the dtenable URL parameter.
We did experiment with going much further in page-reformatting with DiscussionTools as well. You can see our structure-debug page for an example of that. It's actually what the talk pages in the mobile apps use now -- they get the talk page data from the DiscussionTools API and build the view from that, rather than from the normal wikitext render. DLynch (WMF) (talk) 16:39, 18 December 2024 (UTC)
This looks so cool! I'm really looking forward to it on enwiki :) any way I can opt-in to DiscussionTools improvements like this sooner? – Closed Limelike Curves (talk) 03:45, 19 December 2024 (UTC)
You can enable DiscussionTools in the beta menu. I don't know where that's located in Vector 2022's menu (I use MonoBook), but it's in there. ♠JCW555 (talk)♠ 04:46, 19 December 2024 (UTC)
Right, I have it on, but it looks like FrWiki and other wikis are using a newer version with more features (which is what I'm interested in). – Closed Limelike Curves (talk) 19:46, 19 December 2024 (UTC)
For the record, those boxes don't show up on mobile. That issue, combined with the fact that replies aren't as far apart in the new version, makes it harder for mobile users to tell who is replying to who compared to the current version. QuicoleJR (talk) 19:05, 19 December 2024 (UTC)
Woah, it looks like MediaWiki has an even nicer talk page GUI? Any way I can enable that on all wikis? – Closed Limelike Curves (talk) 19:56, 19 December 2024 (UTC)
I have since learned that this would be a terrible idea. (I still like the look, though, and it would be great to have some way to sort threads by age.) – Closed Limelike Curves (talk) 20:14, 19 December 2024 (UTC)
It would be indeed great to have more control over sorting threads, especially since there are a number of wikis (including the main wiki I contribute to, Russian Wikipedia) which have to resort to bad hacks to display certain forum pages in recent-oldest sorting order and not oldest-recent as it is default. It would’ve been great to see these hacks made obsolete with DiscussionTools, see phab:T313165, but AFAIK no one actively develops it any more, so I guess we’ll have to wait till WMF decides to fund it again. stjn 21:40, 19 December 2024 (UTC)
That's Flow. It failed for complicated reasons, has limped along unmaintained since 2016-ish, and is currently in the process of being completely removed now that DiscussionTools was deployed as the outcome of the 2019 talk pages consultation. DLynch (WMF) (talk) 20:20, 19 December 2024 (UTC)
This is also as ugly as homemade sin. Way too much whitespace.--User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 20:47, 19 December 2024 (UTC)

Updating broken JavaScript user script for adding a template to RefToolbar 2.0

Hi! Hopefully this is the right place to put this. Template:Cite RCDB's documentation contains a suggested user script to add the template to RefToolbar 2.0. However, it imports User:Mr.Z-man/refToolbar 2.0.js, which hasn't been a think since 2013. On the page is now a note saying "This script is now enabled by default." The existing script, however, does not work out of the box, throwing the error below. If someone who knows JS could help modify the script to work without the linked user script, that would be great! 

VM385:2 Uncaught ReferenceError: $j is not defined
    at <anonymous>:2:913
    at globalEval (startup.js:1141:17)
    at runScript (startup.js:1292:6)
    at enqueue (startup.js:1179:5)
    at execute (startup.js:1399:5)
    at doPropagation (startup.js:748:6)

Plighting Engineerd (talk) 01:38, 20 December 2024 (UTC)

The instructions were VERY VERY outdated. I have updated them and tested the 'new' fragment and it works. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:43, 20 December 2024 (UTC)
Thanks so much! Works perfectly now! Plighting Engineerd (talk) 13:23, 20 December 2024 (UTC)

contentious topics/aware plus "topic code"

i want to add the contentious topics/aware template to the top of my talkpage, but the list of topic codes says to substitute the template so i did but the israel/palestine topic code did not display. how do i include the topic code? Daddyelectrolux (talk) 19:04, 19 December 2024 (UTC)

@Daddyelectrolux You don't need to subst that template, you would just do {{Contentious topics/aware|a-i}}. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 19:51, 19 December 2024 (UTC)
the topic codes page states that the template should be substituted. perhaps that should be removed, to avoid new people from make my same mistake? thank you User:Ahecht. :) Daddyelectrolux (talk) 00:23, 20 December 2024 (UTC)
@Daddyelectrolux: You wanted to use Template:Contentious topics/aware which doesn't say to use subst. Template:Contentious topics/table is used to document other templates and it varies whether they require subst. I have added this to the documentation.[16] PrimeHunter (talk) 12:14, 20 December 2024 (UTC)
To be fair, up until yesterday Template:Contentious topics/aware/doc just linked to Template:Contentious topics/table. I updated it so that it properly transcludes the table, which hides the subst: syntax. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 15:27, 20 December 2024 (UTC)

Site is under maintenance

I was unable to complete an edit a few minutes ago. I got an error message saying the site was under maintenance. Clicking on "back" did get me the edit I was trying to make and a few seconds later I was successful.

I posted just for documentation but I am having difficulty with a site that is very slow and I came here to do an edit to have something to do while waiting for pages on that slow site to come up. The slow site slows everything else down.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 21:21, 20 December 2024 (UTC)

Blacklisted website not on any blacklist

I wanted to save an edit containing a link to tradingview.com but it keeps showing a message:

"Your edit was not saved because it contains a new external link to a site registered on Wikipedia's blacklist or Wikimedia's global blacklist. [...] The following link has triggered a protection filter: tradingview.com [...]"

So I tried to figure out whether I shouldn't use that website as a source and on what blacklist that website is supposed to be but I couldn't find anything. Is that a bug? Killarnee (talk) 14:18, 21 December 2024 (UTC)

It's on the global blacklist at meta:Spam blacklist. Anomie⚔ 14:29, 21 December 2024 (UTC)
Yeah. It was added in October 2017. See the request and link report. – Daℤyzzos (✉️ • 📤) Please do not ping on reply. 14:44, 21 December 2024 (UTC)
Hm now I found it too, somehow the find tool in Safari wasn't able to find it. Thanks you both. Looks like I have to search for another source. Killarnee (talk) 14:58, 21 December 2024 (UTC)

Special:Shortpages

When I try to view this special page I just get the following error:

[8f6642e6-42f2-4bba-8e7d-01bac9220c2f] 2024-12-21 18:40:02: Fatal exception of type "Wikimedia\RequestTimeout\RequestTimeoutException"

Is anyone else getting this error when viewing that page? Thanks. 2A0E:1D47:9085:D200:E9BC:B9ED:405A:596B (talk) 18:42, 21 December 2024 (UTC)

It works now. Problems come and go. I had to restart my phone half an hour ago to get something to work. Extra: That was a problem with an app on my phone (nothing to do with Wikipedia). Johnuniq (talk) 03:10, 22 December 2024 (UTC)
I see a similar error when I try to check logs for Special:Log/ProcseeBot. [1d666f00-ed84-4e73-928d-04edc6edc844] 2024-12-22 10:33:05: Fatal exception of type 'Wikimedia\Rdbms\DBQueryTimeoutError'. – DreamRimmer (talk) 10:39, 22 December 2024 (UTC)
Likely also worth noting that, above the error, it says To avoid creating high database load, this query was aborted because the duration exceeded the limit. Though I suppose that's the definition of a timeout... – Daℤyzzos (✉️ • 📤) Please do not ping on reply. 15:43, 22 December 2024 (UTC)
Tracked at phab:T325062. – DreamRimmer (talk) 18:00, 22 December 2024 (UTC)

I wonder if anybody remembers some technical details of the use of File:Wiki.png for the logo in the top-left corner during the 2000s (not limited to enwiki). This discussion led me to asking this. I found some clues on Commons – quoting myself from the aforementioned discussion:

The log for File:Wiki.png shows two interesting entries:

commons:Commons:Deletion_requests/Archive/2005/09#Image:Wiki.png is also interesting. [...]:

Image:Wiki.png should be moved to a different name (already re-created at Image:Wiki-commons.png) as it currently is aliasing that name on every wiki project and therefore not allowing local logos on those projects. Tim has already changed the logo location, so it shouldn't break the commons logo, but we should wait about a week before moving it to give time for the caches to update. The logo is now hardcoded so there is no need to protect this specific image.

Does anybody remember any further details?

Thanks, Janhrach (talk) 20:59, 22 December 2024 (UTC)

I don't really remember, but we have historical records of the configuration going back to 2012. The current system, where logos of each wiki are stored in the configuration, was introduced in 2015 in change 209616 and other commits around that time. Wikis had the option to use the locally uploaded Wiki.png as a logo until 2017, when it was removed in change 359037. Alas I don't really know the historical context around these changes, I just found them in the history. Matma Rex talk 14:13, 23 December 2024 (UTC)
Thanks. Janhrach (talk) 14:17, 23 December 2024 (UTC)

Colors of images in {{Infobox government agency}} are inverted in the dark mode

When the {{Infobox government agency}} template is included into some page, SVG images inside it have their colors inverted if the dark mode is on. See, for example, the article United States Department of State, specifically the seal: it should have dark blue outter ring, white inner circle with a brown eagle, but instead you can see the seal with a bluish-white outter ring, black inner circle with an orange eagle. Looked at several other infobox templates, none of them have a simmilar issue. Also, only vector images are affected by this, raster images are not. I wanted to try to debug it, but the template is fully protected. Tohaomg (talk) 17:30, 22 December 2024 (UTC)

@Tohaomg it's most likely this edit by @Jonesey95: that has introduced the behaviour. Probably best discussed at Template talk:Infobox government agency. Nthep (talk) 18:04, 22 December 2024 (UTC)
See the previous discussion. A more comprehensive fix is welcome. The sandbox is open for anyone to edit. – Jonesey95 (talk) 18:57, 22 December 2024 (UTC)
This is not an acceptable solution, please revert. Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 20:52, 22 December 2024 (UTC)
The reason skin-invert worked for signatures was that white writing paper is common and even though colors in pens is varied, the most commonly used ones are dark.
Logos are not created on the basis of a palette of colors, unlike signatures. Logos are created to be visible and understandable from far away and close up. As such, they should not be inverted at large.
I consider the edit request in the template to be unactionable, as it did not ask for any particular solution, not even a hint at one. Snævar (talk) 23:24, 22 December 2024 (UTC)
I'm not sure why people are continuing to reply here. This discussion will be lost in the archives of VPT; please post at the template talk page with comments, suggestions, proposed fixes, or requests. – Jonesey95 (talk) 06:00, 23 December 2024 (UTC)
@Jonesey95: I am not buying that argument for one second, also you are refusing to talk about the issue itself. Stop this bureaucratic nonsense. Most issues are solved during discussion not after, it being "lost in the archive" is a non starter as an argument. Clearly neither myself or Sjoerddebruin are going to move this discussion to the template talk page. If you continue attempting to refrain from discussing about the issue itself, consider this your first warning. I would also like to voice my disappointment of how you are handling this, I do expect better than this. Snævar (talk) 09:24, 23 December 2024 (UTC)
Responding like this and bypassing the instructions that are clearly indicated at the top of the template page is really something, especially with an unsure edit summary. Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 09:32, 23 December 2024 (UTC)
I wasn't discussing the issue here because of WP:MULTI. See the template's talk page for further discussion. I have reverted the change and continue to welcome a better way to fix the problem that was identified and that is still present. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:55, 23 December 2024 (UTC)

Log out

I keep logging out every time I close the browser on my phone. Achmad Rachmani (talk) 22:11, 23 December 2024 (UTC)

Do you have some sort of ad blocker or privacy thing enabled that isn't allowing you to save cookies perhaps ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:15, 23 December 2024 (UTC)
@TheDJ: I have some sort of ad blocker enabled. Achmad Rachmani (talk) 22:22, 23 December 2024 (UTC)

Cat-a-lot gadget

Hi. To follow up a query a user had on my talk page, I wanted to see if there was any way that edits using Cat-a-lot could be marked as minor by default? At present there is now way I am aware of to mark these edits as minor. Alternatively, would there be another way these edits could be filtered out of watchlists? We have a tick box to hide "page categorization", so could they maybe be included in that for example? Thanks. Jevansen (talk) 23:42, 23 December 2024 (UTC)

commons:Help:Gadget-Cat-a-lot#Preferences says there's a preference for that, it also shows this image: commons:File:2013-03-31-Gadget-Cat-A-Lot-prefscreen.png... is that just outdated info? does the interface still look anything like that?
Edit: erm, right, commons:Help:Gadget-Cat-a-lot#As your user gadget also shows how to set preferences with javascript, which I think is what you might have to do if there is no option (due to it not being a gadget on Wikipedia? You installed it as an user script, at least.) – 2804:F1...57:88CF (::/32) (talk) 02:23, 24 December 2024 (UTC)
Aha! The userscript you imported the gadget from (User:קיפודנחש/cat-a-lot.js, you import them here), manually sets the preference, including a minor: false!
I'm pretty sure you can overwrite that by just adding a line setting the preference after you import the script, but you could aso just copy their script into your common.js (replacing the import) and change that part to minor: true, that would also do what you want. – 2804:F1...57:88CF (::/32) (talk) 02:36, 24 December 2024 (UTC)
Hi. Thanks for this. I've updated User:Jevansen/common.js, but this doesn't seem to have changes things. Perhaps I've not done it right? Jevansen (talk) 21:02, 24 December 2024 (UTC)
Then I'm really not sure hm, I had tried looking at how other people did it, like User:Roland_zh/common.js (which seemed to work: diff), but I'm not really seeing much different? I mean it's set after the import, I guess. Well that and they are importing the gadget two different times, in two different ways...
I did find User:Liz/cat-a-lot.js, but I cannot confirm that it works, since Liz seemingly never used it.
If those don't work then I don't know, I'm sorry. Can't test it without an account anyways - maybe someone else will know. – 2804:F1...26:F77C (::/32) (talk) 21:27, 24 December 2024 (UTC)
Huh... the script you used was intentionally set to false this year: User talk:קיפודנחש/cat-a-lot.js#Minor: false
Because Help:Minor edit says adding and removing categories is not a minor edit... – 2804:F1...26:F77C (::/32) (talk) 21:40, 24 December 2024 (UTC)
Good find. I have to admit this isn't a guideline I could recall. Think it's generally an accepted practise to mark as minor any automated cat additions done on mass, as long as they're not in contentious topic areas or especially BLP sensitive etc. It was an admin that made this request to me after all. At any rate, you've definitely solved the cause of the issue here. Appreciate your help. Jevansen (talk) 01:32, 25 December 2024 (UTC)

Is it unproblematic to use `lang=` spans in section headers?

Of course, I know it's wrong to use templates like {{lang}} in section headers, but I know anchors work correctly in the transcluded HTML, so is there any reason a header like === <span lang="la">Tu quoque</span> === would break something? Remsense ‥ 论 16:59, 24 December 2024 (UTC)

Considering how {{subst:anchor}} works in section headings, this should be fine. I tested it in the sandbox and nothing went immediately wrong. jlwoodwa (talk) 05:22, 25 December 2024 (UTC)
When considering whether markup is OK in headings, there are several things to check - these include:
  • Whether the heading is actually broken, such as the appearance of the terminal equals signs in the rendered page
  • Whether inward links work from normal Wikitext
  • Whether inward links work from special pages (e.g. the little arrows in a watchlist)
There may be others. But generally, a <span>...</span> tag pair is fine. --Redrose64 🦌 (talk) 11:01, 25 December 2024 (UTC)

Question from Raph Williams65

Hello everyone, i created my own template — {{Golden Badge Award}}, but it does have documentation, could someone explain to me how i could add documentation in the template. &‐Raph Williams65 (talk) 12:31, 25 December 2024 (UTC)

@Raph Williams65: I guess you meant it does not have documentation. After posting here you created Template:Golden Badge Award/doc which is shown at Template:Golden Badge Award. Is there still something you want help with? PrimeHunter (talk) 21:12, 25 December 2024 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter: after i asked the question, i went to Template:Documentation subpage and found my answer. —Raph Williams65 (talk) 04:01, 26 December 2024 (UTC)

Delivering pings on the watchlist page

Apologies if this is old hat. Like many people, I sit on my watchlist page, clicking the "View new changes" link every so often. This would keep me up to date with stuff that I wish to be informed of, except that pings are not delivered. (By "delivered" I mean that the ping icon appears at the top of the page.) I only see that I have been pinged if I go to some other page. Would it be easy to deliver pings on the watchlist page too? For example, clicking the "View new changes" link could be added to the actions that cause ping delivery. Zerotalk 02:17, 26 December 2024 (UTC)

You can use User:BrandonXLF/UpdateNotifications.js, which automatically updates the alert and notification counts every few seconds. – DreamRimmer (talk) 05:32, 26 December 2024 (UTC)
I have forked this at User:DreamRimmer/UpdateNotificationsWatchlist.js, now it only updates notifications when we click "View new changes" link on the watchlist page. – DreamRimmer (talk) 06:57, 26 December 2024 (UTC)
There's also User:Evad37/livenotifications which polls minutely. – SD0001 (talk) 10:10, 26 December 2024 (UTC)

Discussion at VPI about NOINDEX

Editors might be interested in WP:VPI#NOINDEX AfDs on living people as it relates to a technical issue. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 15:52, 26 December 2024 (UTC)

Why does one of these PDF files give a thumbnail and the other a link?

alt text
Caption
alt text
Caption

The link above and the thumbnail image are generated from: [[File:Southern Telegraph, April 8, 1836, Rodney, Mississippi.pdf|page=1|thumb|alt=alt text|Caption]] [[File:US4256931A.pdf|page=1|thumb|alt=alt text|Caption]]

Why does one give a link and the other a thumbnail? Rjjiii (talk) 15:23, 26 December 2024 (UTC)

@Rjjiii File:Southern Telegraph, April 8, 1836, Rodney, Mississippi.pdf has been corrupted somehow, its size is shown as 0x0 pixels. This seems to have been going on intermittently for years, see phab:T297942. 86.23.109.101 (talk) 15:35, 26 December 2024 (UTC)
Thanks! That was really helpful. I ran the file through https://www.ilovepdf.com/repair-pdf and re-uploaded and it seems to work fine now. Rjjiii (talk) 16:02, 26 December 2024 (UTC)

Mass rollback not working for me.

I've installed User:Writ Keeper/Scripts/massRollback but it doesn't show up when I look at a contributions page. Doug Weller talk 09:30, 27 December 2024 (UTC)

You can use mw.loader.load('//meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Dragoniez/Selective_Rollback.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript'); . – DreamRimmer (talk) 09:42, 27 December 2024 (UTC)
@DreamRimmer Thanks. Copy and paste? And where to? Doug Weller talk 10:21, 27 December 2024 (UTC)
@Doug Weller: Please copy this and paste it into your common.js. – DreamRimmer (talk) 10:25, 27 December 2024 (UTC)

Quarry

In Python, or preferably Java, how do I run a Quarry query and do something with the results (e.g. log em to console)? Polygnotus (talk) 16:10, 27 December 2024 (UTC)

To run database queries in terminal, you will need db credentials. First, create a Wikimedia developer account and a Toolsadmin account. After you have those set up, you can create a tool and get db credentials. Once you have everything in place, I can share a simple Python script to help you run queries and manage the results. For a more detailed guide, check out Help:Toolforge/Quickstart. – DreamRimmer (talk) 17:07, 27 December 2024 (UTC)

Audio

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T382801

When there is audio given for a word as in "Polish: Polska [ˈpɔlska] ⓘ" there is a black speaker symbol that tells readers where to click to play the audio.

Unfortunately it seems that (at least on mobile versions) it doesn't account for the background colour so in pop up notes such as in "[a]" it just blends into the black background.

Is this fixable? I’d imagine that this possibly also interferes with dark modes but I don’t know how to check that.

  1. ^ Polish: Polska [ˈpɔlska] ⓘ

2001:BB6:B817:800:901:622:DF19:9BD2 (talk) 20:25, 27 December 2024 (UTC)

Good point, I've filed phab:T382801. Nardog (talk) 01:57, 28 December 2024 (UTC)

VPNgate blocking bot

I am seeking consensus on a proposal to develop and deploy a bot to help block VPNgate IP addresses used by a particular WP:LTA. For WP:DENY/WP:BEANS reasons, I cannot provide full details, but users familiar with the LTA in question will understand the context.

Background

I have tested several VPNgate IPs, and very few of them are currently blocked. According to Wikipedia's policy on open proxies and VPNs (per WP:NOP), these should be blocked. Given the volume of VPNgate IPs, I propose using a bot to automate this process.

This is building off this discussion on WP:BOTREQUESTS.

I am posting here to gauge consensus needed for a WP:BRFA.

Proposal

I propose a bot to automate blocking these VPNgate IPs using the following steps:

  1. The bot will use this list provided by VPNgate, which contains OpenVPN configuration files in Base64 format. The provided "IP" value is only the one that your computer uses to talk to the VPN (and sometimes wrong), not the one used for the VPN to talk to Wikipedia/external internet - this requires testing to uncover.
  2. The bot will iterate through each config file and use OpenVPN to test if it can connect. If successful, it will then use the VPN to send a request to this WhatIsMyIPAddress API to determine the real-world IP address used by each VPN to connect to Wikipedia. This is sometimes the same as the IP used to talk to the VPN - but sometimes completely different, see the demo edit I did using VPNgate on the Bot Requests discussion linked above and I also did one as a reply to this post. Also, testing is needed before blanket blocking because VPNgate claim to fill the list with fake IPs to prevent it from being used for blocking, again see the BR discussion.

Blocking or Reporting:

  • If the bot is approved as an admin bot, it will immediately block the identified IPs or modify block settings to disable TPA (see Yamla's recent ANI discussion per the necessity for this) and enable auto block.
  • If the bot is not approved to run as an admin bot, it will add the IPs to an interface-protected JSON file in its userspace for a bot operated by an admin to actually do the blocking.

Additional Information

  • I have already developed and tested this bot locally using Pywikibot. I have tested it on a local MediaWiki install and it successfully prevents all VPNgate users from editing (should they not be IP block exempt).
  • I’m posting here to gauge broader community consensus beyond the original WP:BOTREQUESTS discussion.

Poll Options

  • Oppose: Object to the bot proposal. Feel free to explain why.
  • Support options:
  1. Admin Bot (admin given code): An admin will run the bot, and I will provide the code for them to run, as well as desired environment setup etc. and will need to send any code changes or packages updates to them to perform. Admin needs to be quite technically competent.
  2. Admin Bot (admin gives me token): An admin provides me with the bot token (scoped per Anomie below) of a newly created account only for this purpose, allowing me to run the code under myself on Toolforge and fully manage environment setup (needs install and config of multiple python and brew packages not needed for standard pywikibot) as well as instantly deploy any needed code changes or dependency updates without bottlenecks. Admin only needs to know how to use Wikipedia UI and navigate to Special:BotToken, check some boxes, and then submit.
  3. Admin Bot (I run it): For this specific case I am permitted to run my own admin bot. Withdrawn per Rchard2scout and WMF viewdeleted policy.
  4. Bot without Admin Privileges: The bot will report IPs for potential blocking without admin privileges. Not recommended per large volume. Withdrawn per 98 IPs/hour volume, too much for a human admin.
  5. Non-admin bot v2 (preferred by me): My bot, User:MolecularBot is not an admin bot. It can, however, add IP addresses that it finds are the egress of open VPNgate proxies to User:MolecularBot/IP HitList.json (editable only by the bot and WP:PLIERS/interface admins). This means I can run the code for it and manage the complex environment. An admin's bot will be running the uncomplicated code (doesn't require the complex environment and OpenVPN setup for this bot) to just monitor that page for changes and block any IPs added.

Poll

  • Oppose for now. From reading that discussion, it looks like the IPs available through the API are only the "ingress" IPs, which is what you connect to on their side when using the VPN (and even then, it seems like the VPN client might sometimes use another IP instead?). If there's actually a publicly available list of outgoing IPs available, I'd be very surprised. From an operational standpoint, those IPs don't need to be public, and if they are, that's a serious error on their side. If we do somehow get our hands on a list, I'd be in favour of option 1. There's plenty of admins available who are able to run bots. --rchard2scout (talk) 08:37, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
    Hi rchard2scout, I think you misunderstand the bot. The bot connects to each "ingress" IP and then finds out the "egress" IP that it uses by sending a request to a "what is my IP address API" (not associated with VPNGate in any way), then blocking the egress. This fully disables VPNgate on my local instance of MediaWiki. Thus, a list of egress IPs are not required, because it makes it own by connecting to each of the ingress ones and sending a request. I apologize if my documentation wasn't clear. MolecularPilot 🧪️✈️ 08:44, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
    Noting that I currently do have a complete list of "egress" IPs from my local run of the bot, so should I take your vote as a support of option 1 like you stated? Thank you. MolecularPilot 🧪️✈️ 08:45, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
    Oops, you're right, I somehow missed this. Hadn't had my first coffee yet ;). Striking, adding new vote.
    That's so fine, my brain is a little laggy in the early morning as well! My technical/documentation writing probably needs some work as well, it's not my best skill (anyone please feel free to edit this post and make it clearer, if it's wrong I'll just fix it). Thank you for your time in reviewing this even though it's still the early morning where you are! :) MolecularPilot 🧪️✈️ 09:38, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
  • Support option 1. Options 2 and 3 are probably incompatible with our local and WMF policies, because an admin bot can do anything an admin can do, and you haven't gone through RfA, so you're not allowed access to rights like viewdeleted. Or (@ anyone who know this) are OAuth permissions granular enough that an admin can generate a token that allows a bot access to block but not to other permissions? In any case, I think option 1 is the easiest and safest way, there's plenty of admins available who are able to run bots. --rchard2scout (talk) 08:59, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
    Hi Rchard2scout, thank you for your new comment and feedback. I hope your morning is going well! Ah yes viewdeleted, silly me to forget about that (I have the opposite problem as you before, it is far too late at night where I live!), I do recall it from someone else's declined proposal of admin sortion, I've struck Option 3 now per WMF legal policy. Re OAuth permissions, I know from using Huggle that when you create a bot token there's a very fine grained list of checkboxed for you to tick, and "block" is in fact one of them, so it is that granular as to avoid all other admin perms, I've expanded Option #2 above to clarify this and more circumstances. I do believe this would be my preferred option, per the reasons I've placed in my expansion, but are really happy with anything as long as we can deal with this LTA. Anyway, enjoy your morning! MolecularPilot 🧪️✈️ 11:29, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
    There's no grant allowing block but no other permissions. The minimum additional admin permissions would be block, blockemail, unreviewedpages, and unwatchedpages. Anomie⚔ 12:33, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
    Support option 5 as well, and that doesn't even need a BRFA or an RFC. We do then need consensus for the adminbot part of that proposal, so perhaps this discussion can focus on that. --rchard2scout (talk) 10:19, 18 December 2024 (UTC)
  • Option 1. I believe this is the only option allowed under policy. Admins need to run admin bots. This RFC is a bit complicated. Usually an RFC of this type would just get consensus for the task ("Is there consensus to run a bot that blocks VPNGate IP addresses?"), with implementation details to be worked out later. –Novem Linguae (talk) 12:09, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
    Option 5 is fine if the bot doesn't need to do any blocking and is just keeping a list up-to-date. Don't even need this RFC or a BRFA if you stick the page in your userspace (WP:EXEMPTBOT). –Novem Linguae (talk) 09:50, 18 December 2024 (UTC)
  • I'd like to suggest an alternative approach: Write a bot or Toolforge tool that generates a data feed of IP addresses, starting with VPN Gate egress IP addresses, perhaps including the first seen timestamp and last seen timestamp for each egress. The blocking and unblocking portion of the process is relatively simple and a number of administrators could write, maintain, and run a bot that does that. (I suspect most administrators that run bots would prefer to write their own code to do that.) Daniel Quinlan (talk) 23:04, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
    Well, I started writing this suggestion before option 5 was added. Since it looks like this is basically the same as that option, put me down as being in favor of Option 5. Daniel Quinlan (talk) 23:15, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
  • Courtesy ping for Rchard2scout and Novem Linguae notifying them of the new preferred option 5 above, which I believe makes everything easier for both myself and the admin who wishes to help me (I'll leave a note on AN asking nicely once BRFA passes for MolecularBot). Also, Skynxnex, you expressed support for option 5 below, did you mean to format that as a support !vote in this section (my apologies for the confusing layout of everything here). Thank you very much to everyone for your time in reviewing this proposal and leaving very helpful feedback. MolecularPilot 🧪️✈️ 09:33, 18 December 2024 (UTC)
    I don't feel like I've thought about the different aspects to do a bolded !vote yet. Skynxnex (talk) 15:07, 18 December 2024 (UTC)
    That's so fine, thank you anyway for your feedback! :) MolecularPilot 🧪️✈️ 23:07, 18 December 2024 (UTC)
  • Support option 1 or 5 whichever gets the job done in support of the other options being worked on by the WMF. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 13:03, 26 December 2024 (UTC)

Discussion

  • Hey, it's me, User:MolecularPilot on VPNgate. This VPN is listed as 112.187.104.70 on VPNgate cause that's what my PC talks to. But, this VPN when talking to Wikipedia, uses 121.179.23.53 as shown which is completely different and not listed anywhere on VPNgate, showing the need for actually testing the VPNs and figuring out the output IPs are my bot does. Can this IP please be WP:OPP blocked? 121.179.23.53 (talk) 06:22, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
  • There is a relevant Phabricator ticket: T380917. – DreamRimmer (talk) 12:02, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
  • I don't think non-admins can run admin bots. Perhaps you would like to publicly post your source code, then ask an admin to run it? cc Daniel Quinlan. –Novem Linguae (talk) 12:05, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
  • I don't think blocking a single VPN provider will have the effect people want it to have. It's easy for a disruptive editor to switch VPNs. This is really a problem that needs to be solved by WMF. Daniel Quinlan (talk) 15:45, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
    Hi Daniel Quinlan, I guess I didn't make this clear enough in the post but this is designed to work with existing WMF proposals that are being worked on. Both T380917 and T354599 block/give higher edit filter scrutiny based on existing lists of "bad" IPs, this is the same as the old ST47ProxyBot (which actually does scanning but doesn't monitor "egress" IPs, it only attempts to connect to the "ingress" and then blocks it if successfully). This is great for a wide variety of proxy services because ingress/egress is the same, but for modern, more advanced services like VPNgate (and perhaps some services that because a problem for us in future) the ingress IP address is often not the same as the one used to edit Wikipedia, and so requires this solution (this bot). I'll admit that blocking VPNgate won't fully stop this LTA or all proxy vandals but VPNgate is quite a large and widely used network (claiming a total of 18,810,237,498 lifetime connections) that is currently almost fully permitted to edit Wikipedia, and by blocking it this significantly reduces the surface area for proxy attacks. This also creates the infrastructure for easily blocking any future VPN services that use different ingress/egress IPs - the bot can be easily expanded to use new lists. MolecularPilot 🧪️✈️ 21:14, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
  • What is the actual expected volume per day of new IPs to block? It looks like the current list has 98 ingress IPs (if I'm understanding the configuration blocks correctly). I'll also say I have pretty strong concerns about sharing "personal" tokens of any kind between users, particularly admin permission ones with non-admins. Skynxnex (talk) 19:48, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
    The list available through this API frequently rotates. It only provides 98 ingress IPs at a time, as you stated and refetching the list without [some duration of time, from my estimates it's around 1 hour] passing returns the same 98 IPs. After 1 hour (estimated) passes, a new 98 IPs are randomly selected to be provided to all users - but these may include some of the same IPs as before because they are picked by random selection from the whole list of 6057 (not available to the public), this has happened a couple times during my data gathering. Therefore re volume per hour, the maximum number of IPs to be blocked is 98, but it could be less due to already blocked IPs being included in that given hour's sample of 98, I hope this makes sense if there's anything that needs clarifying please don't hesitate to ask. MolecularPilot 🧪️✈️ 21:34, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
    Re "personal" tokens it's actually not a "personal" token to the admin's account, it would be (in theory) a token to an adminbot account with the only things it can be used for being those helpfully specified by Anomie above. However, regardless I see the concerns so I've added a proposal 5 which hopefully is a decent compromise above and ensures that I don't have access to any admin perms/tokens, but that there aren't any bottlenecks and that admins don't need to setup a complex running environment. Thank you for your time in commenting, Skynxnex. MolecularPilot 🧪️✈️ 22:23, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
    I see bot tokens as fairly similar to personal tokens since bots are associated with an operator. I think proposal 5 has promise. Skynxnex (talk) 23:08, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
    VPN Gate claims they have about 6,000 servers which is fairly close to my own estimate of how many IPs they are using. If we block each IP for six months, we'd end up averaging about 33 blocks per day. There would be a pretty large influx at the start, but I would want to spread that out over at least several weeks to avoid flooding the block log as badly as ST47ProxyBot did. Daniel Quinlan (talk) 23:10, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
    It's worth noting that an unknown amount of 'servers' are user computers that people have volunteered cpu time for (this information is somewhere on the website), so, like we see often with IP users, the IP that each server uses can and likely will change with time. This doesn't mean that an effort like this bot won't help, of course, but it's unknown how effective (as a percentage) it would be with just 33 blocks a day. – 2804:F1...33:D1A2 (::/32) (talk) 23:47, 17 December 2024 (UTC)
    33 blocks per day is a rough estimate, not a limit. Certainly there will be some delay when adding entries to any list generated as proposed above so the block rate will never reach 100%, but the egress IPs don't seem to change that much over time based on what I've seen. Daniel Quinlan (talk) 00:09, 18 December 2024 (UTC)
    So, I'm posting this anonymously through VPNGate because I don't want people to start suspecting me of things just because I admit to having used a VPN service some others are abusing to make disruptive edits here. Due to its strong base in Japan, I've used VPNGate many times in order to shop at Japanese web stores that block purchases from outside Japan (they typically don't want to offer international support and see this as the easiest solution for avoiding that), and I know a number of other people who've used it for similar reasons (also for Korea, which often has even more hosts available than Japan).
    In any case, while I've personally never enabled this on my PC, I can confirm what IP 2804: said: there's definitely a swarm of short-term volunteer IPs associated with this service who aren't part of VPNGate proper. The overlap between such people and good faith Wikipedia editors may not be large, but it's unlikely to be zero. Unless you have a good mechanism to avoid excessively punishing such users for popping up on your list for the short period of time they themselves use the VPN, maybe it's better to wait for and official WMF solution, which (based on the phabs) seems to intend to take "IP reputation" into account and would thus likely exclude such ephemerals, or at least give them very short term blocks compared to the main servers. Because getting blocked here for several months for having been part of VPNGate for a few hours hardly seems fair.
    Actually, now that I think about it: if you're going to connect to VPNGate servers for the express purpose of determining and blocking their exit IPs, you'd probably be in violation of their TOS. While you might consider this an "ends justifying the means" situation, are you sure you want to associate the WMF with such unauthorized usage? There's a difference between port scanning or getting an IP list via an API and actually traversing the VPN in order to investigate it. This absolutely is not a legal threat by me, but if VPNGate were to learn of this, I wouldn't be surprised if they took action. Aren't there enough services out there that provide VPN IP lists without having to roll your own scanner? It would seem a safer bet for the WMF to use something like that. 125.161.156.63 (talk) 16:05, 19 December 2024 (UTC)
    Oh, you didn't have to anonymise yourself, we don't cast WP:ASPERSIONS here and now you won't get a reply notification but that's okay! :) I checked the terms of service of their website before making their bot and it just says not to do anything IRL illegal otherwise they'll give your logged data to authorities if subpoenaed, but I will reach out to the VPNgate operators in Japanese (good practice opportunity, huh) when I have time just to double-confirm they're okay with everything. But btw, they encourage checking that your IP has changed to demonstrate it has worked in their how-to-guides, and this isn't 'tranaversing" as we're not collecting data on every single node but only the public IP of the exit node. Re short-term volunteers, that's a great point, and I'll update the JSON schema of its published data to include a "number of sightings" number, so that the blocking adminbot would escalate blocks as this increases so maybe it starts really short term like 2.5 days/60 hours (6000 active volunteers on average, divided by 100 checked every hour, minimum time to ensure the IP has truly stopped) if it's just 1 sighting but ramps up exponentially if it's seen again as an egress IP untill we're talking like 6months - 2 years blocks. Re WMF tickets, the distributed fact of VPNgate that anyone can start hosting means that most VPNgate IP addresses won't have a bad "reputation" (I checked a whole bunch on a variety of reputation lists and the egresses always had "good"" reputations) so reputation checking won't help (but they need short term blocks), also as you can't publically see the egress with VPNgate cause it's different to ingress (unlike most networks). So WMF solutions are actually quite innovative and smart for most VPN/proxy networks, it's just that VPNgate is a bit different needing a unique solution, this bot. MolecularPilot 🧪️✈️ 04:43, 20 December 2024 (UTC)
    I guess I'm just too careful or chicken even if most people would refrain from casting aspersions.
    I don't quite understand why you say you're not traversing. You're not just touching the network from one side, you're passing through it and coming out on the other side, that's traversing. However if they don't mind it, then I guess you're in luck. Ecxept maybe if those Japanese laws they mention a mllion times in their documents have a problem with something like this.
    I don't know what the WMF is basing its reputation measurements on. My meaning was that sites like browserleaks.com almost always seem to know about the VPN status of the exit nodes I've used over time. I don't know where they're getting this information from exactly, but that's what I meant by reputation, not whether they're good or bad but what they're known to engage in, like being a VPN node. And that database is probabably built either through collaboration or by specialized services, which the WNF can use as well. Like email providers use common antispam databases instead of each rolling their own.
    In any case, good luck with your bot, because I'm afraid these persistent abusers you want to keep out by this probably won't be averse to paying for commercial VPNs if they have to, and many of those only cost a handful of bucks a month. Commercial companies will almost certainly have a TOS that would prohibit your bot, so to counter them the WMF would in the end still have to resort to a specialist or collaborative VPN IP list of some kind. You can probably cut down on casual troublemakers by tracking VPNGate but I don't think it'll help all that much much against anyone highly motivated. They can even continue using VPNGate, it'll just be less convenient because they have to find brand new nodes before you catch those.
    92.253.31.37 (talk) 17:39, 20 December 2024 (UTC)
    I'm not sure what you mean by "Japanese Laws" they keep mentioning they don't seem to mention any, when I told you that the ToS said don't do anything irl illegal I was referring to this ToS page which doesn't mention any "Japanese Laws" but just says don't do anything like CSAM like your government can subpoena us for, because we'll comply (and directions for LEOs to request this). Re reputation yes, the major VPNgate nodes that have done it for a while do have bad reputations, particularly 219.100.37.0/24 which is the example servers run by the university themselves - but as you said, because anyone can start a VPNgate server and then there's always brand new nodes that won't have bad reputations and can be abused. But - as I've stated in a different discussion above, the list of VPN servers to connect to only updates with new servers hourly, so while reputation services won't catch the new exit nodes (because they won't be used poorly enough to trigger flagging for a white), the bot constantly waits for updates to the list and then immediately tests it to determine the new egress IPs. Re commercial services generally, unlike VPNgate, they use datacenters and static IPs that are assigned to "Hotspot Shield, Inc." (as an example) so it's easy to CIDR range block them and also the reputation of those deteriorates over time as they do bad things - the companies don't randomly get new IPs in random locations around the world, like VPNgate. In fact commercial reputation services excel at identifying commercial services (from my testing), but VPNgate is community distributed, like Wikipedia, and needs a unique approach. And yes, as I said to Daniel, I'll admit that blocking VPNgate won't fully stop this LTA or all proxy vandals but VPNgate is quite a large and widely used network (claiming a total of 18,810,237,498 lifetime connections) that is currently almost fully permitted to edit Wikipedia (the bot currently has 146 IPs in its list and as shown by the stats section of the toolforge frontend, ~60% are currently unblocked (and this is an underestimate because the list is mainly the "obvious" ones that are always provided first in the 98 hourly sample, like 219.100.37.0/24. This is because the bot has only had 1 full run of all IPs in a given hour's list, and many failed partial runs of just the first couple. I think blocking VPNgate significantly reduces the surface area for proxy attacks - only looking at only 10 of the blocked IPs I see link spam, edit warring, block evasion, vandalism and our favourite WP:LTA. MolecularPilot 🧪️✈️ 08:38, 21 December 2024 (UTC)
    They mention Japanese laws repeatedly in the texts shown when you click the licence and notice buttons under Help > About of the SoftEther VPN Client Manager. It's a canned statement saying they only comply with Japanese laws because they can't possibly follow every law worldwide.
    the bot constantly waits for updates to the list and then immediately tests it to determine the new egress IPs Are you going to run multiple instances of the bot in parallel, because the 98 IP list you get per hour seems far from sufficient for make claims about a strong level of protection if there are ~6000 egresses, many of which churn. With your current setup, an abuser can get their own list refresh, which would be different from what the bot gets, run it past your very helpful :) IP check tool and then make edits from any IP not covered. Which may not be many, but they only need one out of their 98, so it's likely they'll get something as long as the volunteer swarm keeps changing.
    Getting a bit more facetious, VPNGate could conversely determine the IP of your bot and block it as a censorship agent. :) I really think it contradicts the spirit of their operation even if they haven't prohibited it explicitly, since you don't happen to be a state agent. This is just my conjecture, but I'm guessing that if you looked at your IP list edits without focusing solely on the abuse, you'd also see constructive edits coming from them, quite possibly from people using VPNGate to bypass state firewalls. I am well aware of Wikipedia open proxy policy, but it can make editing somewhat difficult for such people.
    These remain my two sticking points: while useful, the bot won't be quite as effective as you represent; and you're arguably abusing their service to operate yours.
    Once this bot starts issuing blocks, you should probably amend Help:I have been blocked to include verbiage about having used a VPN in the recent past, because this situation isn't really covered by the "you are using a VPN" or collateral damage statements. 211.220.201.217 (talk) 15:21, 21 December 2024 (UTC)
    VPNgate does not have as firm of a ground as you claim. Yes, companies have terms of use and those terms of use often have clauses of disputes being filed in their local country. However, as multiple attourneys have pointed out, this local dispute solving when dealing with an customer from abroad does not really work. In reality, VPNgate is forced to deal with international laws, because otherwise they will just lose their case. (one of the legal opinions supporting this: https://svamc.org/cross-border-business-disputes-company-use-international-arbitration/ )
    As far as blocks go, yes, they could block one user, but let me remind you that there are 120,000 active wikipedia users. The script could just be passed on between users until all of their IP ranges are blocked. They would lose that war, every time. Snævar (talk) 20:11, 21 December 2024 (UTC)
    I don't recall claiming anything about firm ground. I have a problem with the WMF or parties associated with it engaging in somewhat questionable practices, even if it is for a good cause. I'm OK with port scanning or getting data from an API, because that's external probing, but actually passing through someone's premises with the intent of later restricting their users is something I find objectionable, and it is my conjecture that VPNGate would think likewise. If VPNGate blocked one user's bot, that would simply be an indication that they object to such activities, and having a million other users on the ready to take over would change nothing about that, and I'm fairly certain the WMF does not subscribe to this sort of hackerish way of thinking anyway. VPNGate aren't outlaws against whom anything goes, they operate a prefectly legitimate service, albeit one that some people abuse. It's also possible that it's just me, and VPNGate themselves have no objection to any of this. The OP was going to ask them, so I presume they'll inform everyone about the response sometime soon. 220.81.178.129 (talk) 11:44, 22 December 2024 (UTC)
    Yes, this is definitely not something that should be adversarial or "us against them" and if they express concerns about this behaviour, we should totally not try and evade it - after all VPNgate does share our mission of spreading free knowledge to the world (and are very useful to spreading Wikipedia and other websites around the globe, it's just some bad actors taking advantage of the kind service of both the university and the volunteers creating a problem). We just need to find a way to work together to ensure that we both can continue to do our things. Being the holiday season, it's pretty busy for me and I'm sure the same is true for the operators so I will reach out in the new year re their thoughts on this. MolecularPilot 🧪️✈️ 04:45, 23 December 2024 (UTC)
    Hi! The abuser can't get their own list refresh seperate from what the bot sees, I guess I wasn't clear before but what I meant was that everyone gets the same 98 IPs every hour, and then the next hour another 98 are randomly selected to be shown to everyone.
    Re censroship/state agencies this doesn't help state agents or censorship at all, because they want to block the input/ingress IP addresses that citizens would use to connect to the VPN network, and knowing the egress that the VPN network uses to connect to servers doesn't help them at all. I have clarified this in the README.md now so anyone who sees the project will know that it can't be used for censorship.
    Re users bypassing state firewalls, they can still read and if they want to edit we have WP:ACC for that (abusers could go through acc I guess, but then they can't block evade once their account gets indef'ed - and VPNgate has been used a lot by link spammers, people who want to edit war (especially someone who got really upset about castes, I've seen a lot of edit warring from detected IPs about that) to evade the blocks on their main account).
    Btw, thank you for calling my tool helpful, I'm not the best at UI design but I tried to put some effort in and make it looks nice and have useful functions. Thank you to you as well for your time in providing soooo much helpful feedback to make the bot better. :) MolecularPilot 🧪️✈️ 03:52, 22 December 2024 (UTC)
    Also thanks for reminding me to provide guidance to users on this, I think the current WP:OPP block message doesn't really fit with the VPNgate mode of temporary volunteers (who the user effected might not even know about but could get a dynamic assignment with an IP blocked for a few days). I'll make a custom block template! :) MolecularPilot 🧪️✈️ 03:54, 22 December 2024 (UTC)
    Tada I guess... {{Blocked VPNgate}} Anyone reading this please feel comfortable to be WP:BOLD and make it better if you'd like, it's still a very early draft. :) MolecularPilot 🧪️✈️ 10:06, 22 December 2024 (UTC)
    While tone of you thanks seems to include some aspersions :), you're welcome if what I've said has helped you. If the list is the same for everyone, you can indeed be a lot more effective. My point about censorship was less about you helping state censors and more about you using the loophole that VPNGate haven't said anything about private actors, and giving the impression that abuse is the only thing it is being used for. 220.81.178.129 (talk) 11:39, 22 December 2024 (UTC)
    Oh no I'm really sad now, please don't take my tone when I thanked you in the wrong way (it can be both hard to express and pick up on the internet)! Maybe saying "sooooo" was a bit over the top, but you've genuinely gone back and forth with me a lot of times and always written detailed, logical suggestions or concerns to help, so genuinely, no sarcasm, thank you!!! :) MolecularPilot 🧪️✈️ 04:41, 23 December 2024 (UTC)
    All right then, and sorry about my tendency to lean a bit on the paranoid side. 159.146.72.149 (talk) 09:25, 23 December 2024 (UTC)
    That's so fine! :) MolecularPilot 🧪️✈️ 05:00, 24 December 2024 (UTC)
    How feasible would it be to make the list of IPs private/admin-only? I mean, they're still going to get blocked, and that's public, but I feel like making a public list, even if one may or may not already exist, might be an unnecessary step?
    If I ran a VPN service I'd be a lot less upset about Wikipedia defending itself than Wikipedia creating a public up-to-date list of VPN IPs that everyone can use, without effort, to mass block most of my VPN. – 2804:F1...57:88CF (::/32) (talk) 02:09, 24 December 2024 (UTC)
    I'm not really sure, I don't think there's a way to restrict viewing a page on EnWiki (I could whip up a MediaWiki extension enabling "read protection" of a page, but I doubt the WMF would install it), but we do have things like checkuserwiki, arbcomwiki etc. which have limited viewership so prep haps the bot could operate on a new antiabusewiki (but this would require even more work from WMF than installing the extension) and then a stewardbot could issue global blocks from there? I would also have to take down molecularbot2.toolforge.org and the GitHub repo (that anyone could just download code and run it to get their own list). But even if we don't have a list, it's trivial to query the MediaWiki API for block status (that's what the toolforge tool does in addition to seeing if the IP is listed at User:MolecularBot/IPData.json when you lookup an IP or generate stats), there's very high ratelimits for this, and you just need to check if the block reason is {{Blocked VPNgate}} or whatever message the adminbot/stewardbot leaves. MolecularPilot 🧪️✈️ 04:54, 24 December 2024 (UTC)
  • I have a sudden realization that if we have a bot or a series of bots dedicated to blocking VPNgate IP addresses, it may be free work for adversarial/oppressive entities in their quest to prevent their people from accessing the internet freely in general. – robertsky (talk) 02:52, 29 December 2024 (UTC)
    Hi, as I've explained to others in this thread, the bot is totally useless to censorship agency's because the ingress and egress IPs used by VPNgate are almost always different. This is useful to the operators of web servers, like Wikipedia, who want to know when a user is using VPNgate to connect to their server. It is not helpful in any way to schools, companies or countries wanting to block access to VPNgate because it detects the IP addresses used for VPNgate to talk to servers, not the IP addresses used for users to talk to VPNgate - they are a different set. MolecularPilot 🧪️✈️ 01:40, 30 December 2024 (UTC)

Why does the account go out?

Moved from Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) § Why does the account go out?
 – Aaron Liu (talk) 00:29, 29 December 2024 (UTC)

Why is my Wikipedia account getting kicked out every hour or every day or every minute? (Strait WikiN (talk) 11:30, 28 December 2024 (UTC))

Do you allow cookies on your device? 331dot (talk) 11:50, 28 December 2024 (UTC)
Yes. I gave permission. To delete cookies or not to delete t Strait WikiN (talk) 14:48, 28 December 2024 (UTC)
Possibly related to phab:T372702? @Strait WikiN please confirm. NightWolf1223 <Howl at me•My hunts> 00:35, 29 December 2024 (UTC)
What do I confirm? Thank you. (Strait WikiN (talk) 02:31, 29 December 2024 (UTC))
They were asking you to confirm whether or not the recent bug fix linked above had resolved your issue. --SarekOfVulcan (talk) 18:46, 30 December 2024 (UTC)

Source editing

Hey can we stop having the source html diffs intermix removed text with added thereby making it impossible to read or copy/paste?

It makes it really difficult when a ref gets broken, and we need to get it from the previous edit, but we can’t copy from the visual and the source text is yellow mixed inseparably with blue. Snokalok (talk) 17:44, 30 December 2024 (UTC)

Go into desktop mode rather than using the mobile view while on a mobile device. You can find the choice for this at the very bottom of the screen. StarryGrandma (talk) 19:43, 30 December 2024 (UTC)

Update Help pages as "Search" button changed in Vector Skin 2022

FYI
 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere. Neutral advertising as there has been little response.

In the desktop version, the magnifying glass "Go" button to click to search link has been replaced by the "Search" button at the top of every page in the default Vector skin (2022). But most help pages have not reflected this change. Please see Help talk:Contents#"Search" button changed in Vector Skin 2022. waddie96 ★ (talk) 09:00, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

Free High Quality PDFs of Wikipedia Articles

Hi,

on

https://mediawiki2latex.wmcloud.org/

you can get high quality PDF versions of Wikipedia articles for free in seconds. EPUB, ODT and LaTeX versions are also possible.

For more details on the underlying open source project see b:de:Benutzer:Dirk Hünniger/wb2pdf or the presentation File:Wb2pdfTalk.ogv

Merry Christmas and a happy new year!

Yours Dirk Hünniger (talk) 11:58, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

List-defined refs

Hi, can anyone explain to me why this edit does not fix the ref name error at ref 507? Thanks, DuncanHill (talk) 19:02, 28 December 2024 (UTC)

@DuncanHill The ref name is "Gaza genocide CNN_22_October_2024" you'd just named it "CNN_22_October_2024" Nthep (talk) 19:29, 28 December 2024 (UTC)
@Nthep: Thanks, I hadn't realised that excerpt changed the refnames. Anyway, as I've been told by an admin not to proceed I won't fix any of the other errors in the article. I don't want an ARBPIA block for fixing refs. Obviously better to leave them broken. Nobody else seems to care anyway. DuncanHill (talk) 20:10, 28 December 2024 (UTC)
Please do not make claims about me unless you can prove them. Nobody mentioned ARBPIA, and I certainly didn't play the admin card: my edit at Gaza genocide was made as an ordinary WP:XC user, a threshold that I passed way back in July 2009, more than two years before I became an admin. --Redrose64 🦌 (talk) 20:20, 28 December 2024 (UTC)
You, an admin, quoted CITEVAR at me telling me not to add LDR to an article I was editing. One I've edited several times to mend reference errors. Anyway, I won't try to fix the article again. DuncanHill (talk) 20:25, 28 December 2024 (UTC)
Yes, I'm an admin; but where did I mention that? Did I do anything that might be construed as "I'm an admin so my edit trumps yours"? Also, I didn't quote CITEVAR, I linked it. It's an editing guideline that we are all expected to follow. --Redrose64 🦌 (talk) 20:32, 28 December 2024 (UTC)
Your sig is highlighted in blue like all the other admins. DuncanHill (talk) 20:36, 28 December 2024 (UTC)
It's not a MediaWiki default feature, you probably have some gadget installed that does that (possibly User:Amalthea/userhighlighter.js); these gadgets cannot distinguish between edits made using admin permissions (such as editing a fully-protected page) and those which anybody, even the total newbies, can make (such as this post). I certainly don't have any special tool that marks some edits as admin edits and not others. In any case, my sig here is exactly the same as all the other sigs that I have left on any other discussion page since 00:01, 25 December 2024 (UTC), whether I have my admin hat on or not. --Redrose64 🦌 (talk) 21:17, 28 December 2024 (UTC)
And your name is highlighted in blue on my watchlist, like all other admins. I wasn't talking about "edits made using admin permissions". You, an admin, told me "do not add WP:LDRs to articles that previously had none, this goes against WP:CITEVAR". DuncanHill (talk) 21:25, 28 December 2024 (UTC)
(edit conflict) But I didn't do so with my admin hat on, I did so as a watcher of WP:VPT. That's what I'm saying here. I can't turn the admin bit off and on at whim (that's a WP:CRAT action), not even according to whether I need to use admin rights or not. The rights are just there, all of the time, and have been since 2011. For example, on a fully-protected page, I get an "Edit" tab and not a "View source" tab, but I also get a pink box stating "Note: This page is protected so that only users with administrative rights can make edits." It's like a WP:30/500 page: you and I both get the pink box stating "Note: This page is extended-confirmed protected so that only users with extended confirmed rights can make edits." When I edit such pages, I do so with my WP:XC hat on; and when I edit VPT, I do so hatless. One thing the admin right does not do is give my edits any greater weight. Any XC user could have made the fix that I did, and given the explanation that I did. If you feel that I am guilty of a misuse of the rights that come with the admin bit, you know what to do. --Redrose64 🦌 (talk) 21:53, 28 December 2024 (UTC)
When an admin says "do not do x" to a non-admin, then THEY ARE WEARING THEIR ADMIN HAT. It's not about "using your admin rights", it's about the fact that you are an admin. DuncanHill (talk) 22:16, 28 December 2024 (UTC)
This page is unprotected, anybody (who has read that guideline) could have written a post similar (if not identical) to mine. If I had preceded my post with a phrase such as "As an administrator, I must warn you that ...", you might have a point. But I didn't. This page has more than 3,600 watchers; I can't find out who they are (except for myself), but I suspect that some are admins and some not. The rights of a person making a post shouldn't make any difference to how that post is interpreted. Unless, of course, somebody posts in a manner that implies that they have a right that in reality, they don't. --Redrose64 🦌 (talk) 22:48, 28 December 2024 (UTC)
But not anybody wrote it, an admin wrote it. You can't tell people "do not" and then pretend you weren't an admin when you said it. If it really upsets you that people know you are an admin then resign. DuncanHill (talk) 23:00, 28 December 2024 (UTC)
I'm not pretending not to be an admin; I'm saying that the edit was done without recourse to the admin toolkit. It doesn't upset me that people know I'm an admin (it's right there on my user page), but apparently it upsets you. You can't expect an admin to do nothing but block, delete and protect: at some point admins will want to make a perfectly ordinary edit. If you are upset that you have found out that some editors also happen to be admins, uninstall that gadget that you seem to be using. Then we'll all look the same again. --Redrose64 🦌 (talk) 23:20, 28 December 2024 (UTC)
This isn't about you using the toolkit or not. It's the fact that you are an admin so when you give an instruction it is an instruction given by an admin. An admin - you - told me "do not add WP:LDRs to articles that previously had none, this goes against WP:CITEVAR". I folowed the instruction the admin had given me. DuncanHill (talk) 00:07, 29 December 2024 (UTC)
AN report filed. --Redrose64 🦌 (talk) 00:26, 29 December 2024 (UTC)
@DuncanHill and Nthep:That's not it at all. The problem is that almost the whole of the "Genocide" section is transcluded from the lead section of Gaza genocide, except for that article's infobox (and certain other preliminary matter); and the ref concerned was defined inside the infobox. Moving it outside the infobox fixes it.
BTW: please do not add WP:LDRs to articles that previously had none, this goes against WP:CITEVAR. --Redrose64 🦌 (talk) 19:43, 28 December 2024 (UTC)
@Redrose64: How else do I fix the broken refnames? That wasn't the only one. DuncanHill (talk) 19:49, 28 December 2024 (UTC)
(edit conflict) You brought one specific issue to this problem board, which I fixed, and this is the thanks that I get for that. So, despite your claim that they are responsible for all that remain, I don't see why I should fix any more for you. Please note that you have not been forbiddedn from fixing refname errors in this article by Redrose64. If there is any responsibility, it should lie with those who introduced the error in the first place, which certainly was not me. In short: problems should be fixed at source, not somewhere down the chain. --Redrose64 🦌 (talk) 20:13, 28 December 2024 (UTC)
@Redrose64: You told me not to use list-defined refs, even though this seems to be the only way of fixing the refname errors in the article. I am not going around looking for fucking horrible referencing systems to add to random articles for the hell of it, all I am trying to do is fix problems when I see them. Can you do me a favour? Next time I ask for help just ignore me. We'll both be happier, and probably things will get fixed faster. DuncanHill (talk) 20:20, 28 December 2024 (UTC)
Please read what I wrote. I didn't tell you not to use list-defined refs, I directed you to a guideline that says not to change the article's established referencing style. In my edit to Gaza genocide (linked above), I demonstrated that LDRs are not the only way of fixing the refname errors in the article. If you have other problems of a similar nature, please list them and the watchers of this page will endeavour to help, but don't expect them to do so if you are going to treat them the way that you treat me.
In short: if you don't want help from the people who hang around a help desk, don't ask at that help desk. --Redrose64 🦌 (talk) 20:29, 28 December 2024 (UTC)
I want help from helpful people. I didn't ask you to fix anything, I asked why my edit hadn't worked. I intended, having sorted the first one out, to go ahead an fix the other errors myself. You came down on me with "do not add WP:LDRs to articles that previously had none, this goes against WP:CITEVAR". So are you now saying I can ignore that? DuncanHill (talk) 20:35, 28 December 2024 (UTC)
To quote from my very first reply here: The problem is that almost the whole of the "Genocide" section is transcluded from the lead section of Gaza genocide, except for that article's infobox ... and the ref concerned was defined inside the infobox. Moving it outside the infobox fixes it. There you go: an explanation of what the problem was, plus directions on how to fix. Now, what else have I omitted to provide you with? --Redrose64 🦌 (talk) 21:21, 28 December 2024 (UTC)
Will that work for all the others in the article? DuncanHill (talk) 21:28, 28 December 2024 (UTC)
No, scrub that, Redrose64 - PLEASE STOP TRYING TO HELP ME. It's really unpleasant now. DuncanHill (talk) 21:30, 28 December 2024 (UTC)
OK, shall I take myself to WP:AN? --Redrose64 🦌 (talk) 22:06, 28 December 2024 (UTC)
  • This is a bit ridiculous, especially as that article still has citation errors caused by faulty transclusion. Adding list defined refs to solve the citation error it better than having a citation error. Yes CITEVAR, but this is a perfect case to remember IAR. Having large red error messages is obviously worse than not having large red error messages. If another editor wants to fix the issue by editing the article being transcluded fine, but that is not always possible as some articles are transcludsd multiple times. Fixing it in the original article may then break it in others. Ultimately the responsibility to make sure these errors don't exist is on those setting up the transclusion, rather an editor trying to make the encyclopedia better by removing obvious large error messages. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 13:12, 29 December 2024 (UTC)
    Also per WP:CITEVAR fixing errors in citation coding isn't a CITEVAR violation. If the fix isn't to your liking then per CITEVAR Do not revert someone else's contribution merely because the citation style doesn't match. If you know how to fix it, then fix it. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 13:20, 29 December 2024 (UTC)
    I did fix it, and also fixed it in a manner that does not change the citation style in either the thranscluding article or the transcluded article; nor will it break any other articles that transclude it. In so doing I am not aware that I reverted anybody. Please show which edit I reverted. --Redrose64 🦌 (talk) 14:43, 29 December 2024 (UTC)
    I don't say you revertex. The bit I highlighted was that if you don't like the fix that has been done then do it another way, fixing the issue is more important than how the source code looks. Criticising someone for making a fix is counterproductive, even if you dislike how they fixed the issue. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 15:04, 29 December 2024 (UTC)
    @ActivelyDisinterested: I'm confused, Did I make the right fix, or not? --Redrose64 🦌 (talk) 01:21, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

Group changes by page in contributions

Is there a way of grouping changes by page in contributions (in the same way this works in my watchlist)? If there is, this would greatly help me in checking for any unfinished editing tasks that I have meant to come back to, but have not. (With the impending New Year, this is a standard housekeeping task for me.) ThoughtIdRetired TIR 19:35, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

@ThoughtIdRetired: It's not part of the MediaWiki software, so is not available as a preference. But it should be possible for a JavaScript expert to write a gadget that will do what you want. --Redrose64 🦌 (talk) 01:17, 1 January 2025 (UTC)
Wikipedia:User scripts/List#Contributions gives you User:BrandonXLF/ContribsByPage. Aaron Liu (talk) 03:41, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

How to get technical help if requested but not replied to

Around the 14th of this month, I asked for help in a request entitled "Cursor jumping" but never got a reply. Around that same time, I had some medical issues and was eventually hospitalized. The request was archived. I'd like to follow up on it now because it's extremely time-consuming when writing and responding to messages in Wikipedia when I'm on my computer. The problem doesn't happen on my cell phone or anywhere else on my computer except in Wikipedia.

There were two other help requests that are similarly in need of continued help ("Mystery sticky notes" and "Another mystery"), but let's start with this one. Augnablik (talk) 11:22, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

Well, it's been said that the best way to get an answer to a question on the Internet is, not to ask the question, but to post the wrong answer to the question. Uporządnicki (talk) 11:48, 31 December 2024 (UTC)
@Augnablik: Please visit this link, try writing something, and let me know if you are still facing this issue. – DreamRimmer (talk) 12:01, 31 December 2024 (UTC)
@DreamRimmer, the link goes to my sandbox (???). If that's what you intended, then no, what I described doesn't happen there. It's only when I'm writing or replying to messages. Augnablik (talk) 12:47, 31 December 2024 (UTC)
Yes, this was intended to check if the issue occurs in safe mode. Please try resetting your preferences. – DreamRimmer (talk) 13:05, 31 December 2024 (UTC)
Resetting my preferences to what? I surely didn’t set any preferences to do these annoying things! Augnablik (talk) 13:33, 31 December 2024 (UTC)
Could be the same issue as Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 208#When editing, pressing shift causes cursor to jumps to start of edit text box. If you have enabled the Google translate gadget, try disabling it. Nardog (talk) 13:40, 31 December 2024 (UTC)
Oh, yikes — I’d hate to do that because I use Translate often. 😓
But it’s not just the Shift key that makes the cursor jump; it’s also still other keys like “ ‘ — plus a few more I wrote about in my original message several weeks ago. Augnablik (talk) 15:39, 31 December 2024 (UTC)
Well, @Nardog, it turns out that I don't have Google Translate on my computer, only my phone. So that's not the culprit affecting my jumpy cursor when working on messages in Wikipedia. Any other ideas? Augnablik (talk) 16:26, 31 December 2024 (UTC)
I'm talking about the "GoogleTrans" gadget. You can't have it only on your phone and not on your computer, unless you log into different accounts on those devices. Nardog (talk) 04:21, 1 January 2025 (UTC)
@Nardog, I'm beginning to get a glimmer of an idea of what you're talking about. I still don't quite understand what a gadget is, but here's what I do know: that on my computer, when I'm on Google Drive or in a Google-driven e-mail account, I see Google Translate in what I think is called the "dot menu" as one of a number of available programs I can use (I forgot it was there because I guess I haven't used it much on my computer) ... but when I'm on my cell phone, I see a separate icon for Google Translate. And you want me to do something to un-enable Google Translate on my computer. How do I do that?
I translate a lot on my cell phone, but if I want to use the program on my computer is it really necessary not to have access to Google Translate in order to use Wikipedia in peace? There are some other weird things going on when I write or edit messages in Wikipedia besides the jumpy cursor that I described in one of the earlier messages I also submitted some weeks back here at the Village Pump technical question place. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Augnablik (talk • contribs) 05:00, 1 January 2025 (UTC)
Follow this link and locate the fifth item "(E) (U) GoogleTrans: open a translation popup for the selected text or the word under the cursor when pushing the shift button". If it's checked, uncheck it and click "Save". I'm not talking about translation feature or extension on your devices and those have likely nothing to do with your symptom, even if the GoogleTrans gadget (which isn't on your devices) wasn't the culprit either. Nardog (talk) 06:58, 1 January 2025 (UTC)
@Nardog, Did that, although the "(E) (U) GoogleTrans: open a translation popup for the selected text or the word under the cursor when pushing the shift button" item was third on my screen. It had been checked, so I unchecked it and saved the change.) At first, I thought what you asked me to do had worked because there was no more cursor jumping for maybe 7 or 8 sentences. But now it's still going on.  : 0
I forgot to mention that sometimes, like in the short last sentence I wrote, the initial capital letter also jumps back to the beginning of another sentence, not always the previous one. Other times, like in this sentence, that doesn't happen. Augnablik (talk) 08:11, 1 January 2025 (UTC)
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_217&oldid=1267762430"
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