Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)

 Policy Technical Proposals Idea lab WMF Miscellaneous 

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

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

If you want to report a JavaScript error, please follow this guideline. Questions about MediaWiki in general should be posted at the MediaWiki support desk. Discussions are automatically archived after remaining inactive for five days.

« Archives, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216

I dislike the visual changes to Mobile Wikipedia

I havent used the community pool before so Im sorry if this isnt in the right village. mobile wikipedia starting today as for some reason started auto directing me to en.m.wikipedia.org instead of the regular en.wikipedia.org. even if i directly remove the ".m" or "m.", it will just autodirect to it again. I really hate it, and find it unbearable to use and love the regular english language wikipedia much more. I dont know what is causing this problem. I havent seen anyone discussing this on either the wikipedia subreddit (where usually any updates are discussed) or on Wikipedia:News. I greatly appreciate any help with this, thank you! 92.236.211.53 (talk) 13:55, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

Use the "Desktop" link at the bottom of mobile pages to request the desktop version. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:00, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for your quick response! I already tried this and it unfortunately results in it providing the literal desktop version of the website, resulting in large amounts of negative space and awkward text placement next to images due to website trying to work for the horizontal mobile. the site worked perfectly for mobile prior. is this happening on your phone too? 92.236.211.53 (talk) 14:07, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

im typing from desktop as i also learned today that my phone's ip (this same ip) was caught up in a rangeblock to block a specific user(but is now resolved?). i thought just now that this might be whats causing this but i just made account on mobile and it still autodirects to en.m.wikipedia. i have no idea what to do 92.236.211.53 (talk) 14:28, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

Device name:Pixel 6a

Model:Pixel 6a

Android version:12

I wish this information perhaps helps in finding out how to reverse this. I sent this from my mobile. 92.236.211.53 (talk) 16:48, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

The behavior you're experiencing is how it has always worked. The "workaround" Primehunter provided is working how it has always worked. There isn't a way to "fix it". The closest thing you can do is have an account, change the account's skin preference, and then use the "use desktop" link when you are logged in and end up on the mobile website. Perhaps this is sufficient for you. Izno (talk) 18:31, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

I went back through screenshots I took and saw that you and Primehunter were right, it has always been "en.m.wikipedia". I think there's been an update to mobile Wikipedia's base, light colour scheme that caused the add-on I was using, darkreader to render it differently.

I do notice that the text on tables is larger, and colours are in my opinion not working well together either in the official dark mode or using my add-on on light mode.

Current, disliked Wikipedia (lightmode+darkreader) from today: https://imgur.com/a/wnNflgF

Correct Wikipedia, just darkmode with no add-ons, also today:https://imgur.com/a/4xdBsow

Previous mobile Wikipedia colour scheme (lightmode+darkreader), from 28th of April: https://imgur.com/a/up24a8G

Is there anyway to go back to how it was previously because I really do prefer how it was literally just yesterday? I'm sincerely sorry for the misunderstandings 92.236.211.53 (talk) 19:33, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

What specifically do you dislike about the "current" version? Izno (talk) 00:09, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

There is a higher contrast between the letters and the dark background, the purple that lists clicked-on links is a lighter purple so you have to strain your eyes more to discern it, the text on tables is larger than it needs to be while the text on the rest of the articles is currently still at their previous very good and readable size (shown in the imgur comparison linked above), and I dont get how that happened.

I dont know how else to describe it, but it looks like there is a white or blue filter over the articles that makes my eyes hurt. I can make another imgur comparison if that would help explain what im reffering to (just two image links this time tho). 92.236.211.53 (talk) 15:35, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

If you create an account or add ?useskin=timeless, then the desktop version is more mobile friendly a bit. Gryllida (talk, e-mail) 07:29, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

Ive made an account and it hasn't reverted the UI to how it previously was sorry.

?useskin=timeless is working very well thank you. It's a hassle to paste it to the URL for each new article I click on since it resets to the awful default on every new link or page loaded or when the editl is opened. Is there anyway to make it the default, since it will also be bad for when I'm reading with mobile data, having to load the site twice. Thank you very much regardless! 92.236.211.53 (talk) 20:11, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

Yes. You can make it the default by creating an account, logging in with it, then going to your Preferences, and under "Appearance" select the Timeless skin, then Save. But that's what Izno told you five days ago. — JohnFromPinckney (talk / edits) 21:03, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

Sorry for the late reply. I've logged into this account and and selected timeless in appearance but despite that it's still not automatically going through! Also. I apologize to inzo, I don't think I understood what they are saying then. AssanEcho (talk) 20:37, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

Sorry for the very late reply, about auto directing me to en.m.wikipedia.org instead of the regular en.wikipedia.org: It might've occurred due to a recent update to chrome and other chromium browsers. After this update, browser will always try to give you the mobile view, only way avoid it is to turn on the "desktop view by default" option in the browser settings. Vestrian24Bio (TALK) 12:03, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

its perfectly fine, The main issue now is me trying to find a way to get timeless skin to be the default on mobile as it still autodefaults to the standard, large text on tables and brightercontrast that i dislike. i used firefox on my mobile device as the default and primary browser. thank you very much for the help regardless! 92.236.211.53 (talk) 17:46, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

You can make Wikipedia always give you the Desktop view via User:Writ Keeper/Scripts/unmobilePlus.js. Some skins (for example Monobook with "responsive mode" enabled) are actually more suitable for use on my phone than the official "mobile" version. —Kusma (talk) 19:40, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

This script doesn't work on chromium mobile browsers with mobile view (at leasts not anymore), just tried it. Vestrian24Bio (TALK) 09:57, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

Getting different fonts into wikipedia

inside the english wikipedia we are able to use several other types of fonts for userpage editings. in the si:wikipedia.org(sinhala wikipedia project) we only have one default font. is there someone who can make it so we can use other few famous free licensed sinhala fonts inside sinhala wikipedia?

i did ask the one and only most active admin in that project here, he says he dont have the technical knowledge for this, hence im seeking help here.

below are some free licensed sinhala fonts:

• font.akasa
• sinhala-font

VihirLak007^hmu!/_duh. 13:19, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

The proper way is to ask on phabricator for those fonts to be added to "Universial Language Selector". Also, try to use the gear icon next to the "languages" heading in the left sidebar on old vector. If you are on new vector, then it is under languages next to the page title and then the gear icon. Sometimes people ask for fonts that are present, they might just not be the default font. Snævar (talk) 17:39, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Is there evidence suggesting Template:no spam works?

This has been something that has been bugging me for a while. I know that it is possible to match emails with just a bit of regex, namely (.*)?@(.*)?(\ |$), but is escaping with nospam actually reducing spam? My concern is really with OCR because although the literal character @ is escaped, it only takes a bit of OCR, which is at this point much, much better than a human, in order to get all the emails and continue sending that same spam.

I wonder if maybe the best solution for this would be to have another CAPTCHA before a person is able to view an email or all the emails on the page. This is done on YouTube and more. This could be done for all mailto: links, etc. Awesome Aasim 18:45, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

My concern is really with OCR because although the literal character @ is escaped, it only takes a bit of OCR

would be to have another CAPTCHA

Did you think this one through? Izno (talk) 18:54, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

I am not thinking there should be one of those text CAPTCHAs. There are much smarter ones like GeeTest and ReCaptcha and etc. The reason we do not use one of these is that we are really, really concerned about privacy.

The text CAPTCHA was defeated over a decade ago, thanks to OCR. The current trend in CAPTCHAs I am seeing are those where one clicks on sliders. We unfortunately will have to collect more data to tell if someone isn't a human.

For example, YouTube's CAPTCHA to view a business email address on a channel is the standard "I'm not a robot" CAPTCHA.

If we do not want to go the CAPTCHA rabbit hole, we can rate limit. Rate limiting effectively stops spam, and we can go a step further by preventing people from viewing email addresses when using an open proxy or Tor. Awesome Aasim 21:25, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

It probably works at least some of the time. I doubt that it's cost-effective to even parse HTML correctly to harvest email addresses, much less render the whole page and run OCR on it. Here's an article by someone who tried a few simple techniques and found that some of them indeed work: https://spencermortensen.com/articles/email-obfuscation/ (although he didn't try the specific thing this template does). It'd be easy enough to test it yourself, if you don't mind waiting a few months for results: just create two unique email addresses and post them somewhere, one with this template's obfuscation, one without; then wait for the spam to arrive (or not). Matma Rex talk 19:10, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Another thing that could be tried is replacing each of the characters with their Unicode/ASCII values. It probably would make it even more confusing, while still allowing linked email addresses and the like. Awesome Aasim 20:54, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

An email link needs the literal email to be present in the link, so it can be passed to the email client. It can be obscured in the HTML source by rendering it with Javascript, but it's still going to be in the resulting page, and with the widespread prevelance of dynamic web pages nowadays, it's common for web crawlers to process retrieved pages after running any Javascript code on them. isaacl (talk) 22:24, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

As for OCR, there is a way to run browsers in headless mode; in other words, render the page without showing anything to the user. There are utilities that also can take scrolling screenshots of pages. With OCR so ubiquitous I doubt it wouldn't be hard to set up something that reads webpages like that. Awesome Aasim 20:56, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

I'm not sure why you're referring to headless browsers? Anyone harvesting email links isn't likely to be using a browser per se. (What might help deter some harvesters is including some obscured text on every page that is designed to produce a huge amount of back-tracking in typical email regexes, and perhaps causing memory overflow... except that it would confound uses by good-faith users, too.) Implementing an effective CAPTCHA system that is accessible and preserves user privacy is a challenge that the WMF has not resolved for many years now (see Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)/Archive 56 § Captchas for some discussion). isaacl (talk) 21:56, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

I particularly liked T354234 on that front. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 23:01, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Is it something that the WMF alone could solve? We can just have a CAPTCHA system that is FOSS and that can be hosted on Wikimedia be done with it. Or choose one of the proprietary options that may or may not be the best (like GeeTest or reCAPTCHA or uCAPTCHA or etc.), although they technically collect more data, and be done. Maxmind (which is being used for IP information) is proprietary, as are all the other WHOIS sites. Don't those sites and "whatsmybrowser" and etc. collect browsing data? Even Wikipedia has some tracking used by the WMF.

The fundamental problem with data and privacy is a CAPTCHA has two opposing forces: On one side you need to collect as much data as possible to assess whether one is a human or not. On the other side you do not want to store that data indefinitely. There is not a good easy way to balance this. Awesome Aasim 23:06, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

If you have a good free, open source implementation in mind, please do go to the appropriate Phabricator ticket mentioned in the other thread and let the WMF know about it. Yes, the tension between keeping personal data private and using it as an identity check is why expanding the use of CAPTCHA may not be the best approach. isaacl (talk) 23:49, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Remember of course the principle that spam only works on the gullible, and those using techniques to hide their email address from spammers are likely to be the least gullible, so there's is surprisingly little incentive to circumvent such techniques. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 23:01, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Does the "gullible" include "those who naively think replacing characters with images to try to deter spam"?

BTW I actually think that a lot of the spammers have moved onto something else like impersonating Amazon or Google or Microsoft or whatever to do a phishing attack. I think they get these emails from actual data breaches, not just from random parts of the web. For phone numbers those are consecutive, so it isn't too hard to send spam via text. Nonetheless, we can all fall for phishing attacks. Where they somehow get email addresses is anyone's guess. Awesome Aasim 23:11, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Spammers don't generally use OCR because it adds processing time and cost. They get plenty of addresses to spam with simple web crawling. Captcha systems are either not accessible (for the blind for example), or they contribute to commercial AI-training (reCAPTCHA, others) that a free encyclopedia should not be involved with. And spammers have no problem getting captcha solutions. Many 'free' sites that show a captcha are really forwarding queries for a spammer who will use the solution on their real target. MrOllie (talk) 23:17, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Images looping

When I'm viewing images with the mediaviewer in any article, I often navigate to the next image using the arrows. And when I get to the end, there are no more arrows. This makes sense. But for the past few days, the images have been looping, which is especially confusing when there's only one image. How can this be fixed? Thanks, Cremastra — talk — c 19:55, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, looping with only one image would be confusing. Fixing it probably requires filing a task on Phabricator. Izno (talk) 20:09, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Please provide a link to the page you are seeing this problem on. — xaosflux ^Talk 20:28, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

As I said, it's every page. So try Thomas Cooke (actor) or Scolopendra alcyona. Cremastra — talk — c 20:39, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

A loop was requested at phab:T77877 with code by Simon04. It was deployed here yesterday. I don't know whether he considered it would give a "self-loop" when there is only one image like Scolopendra alcyona. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:36, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Is there a way to disable it for myself? I find it somewhat annoying to be flicking through a picture gallery and thinking there's more and then ending up back at the start. It's confusing and disorienting, as was pointed out on the phab ticket. Cremastra — talk — c 21:44, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

No, it cannot be disabled for yourself (at least non trivially). I have left a comment on the ticket. Izno (talk) 22:02, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

On some websites with photo loops, it shows "1 of 6", etc. somewhere on the screen (top right on IMDb), so you know how far through you are, and if you have cycled to the start. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:23, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Jdlrobson has replied on the ticket that they intend to add such numbering at the top right and will add CSS classes so users can disable the behaviour.  —  Jts1882 | talk  07:15, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Middot

OK, this is something that may be an issue that needs looking into (probably not by me) or it may not be important.

When I look at the source code of, for example Talk:Interpunct, using Chrome, and try to validate it at Free Formatter it finds invalid characters such as b7 (interpunct) - despite the fact that HTML clearly says <meta charset="UTF-8">. It could of course be Chrome's fault or Windows not letting me cut and paste UTF8, but both seem unlikely. Are we putting out illegal UTF8? All the best: Rich Farmbrough 23:16, 18 October 2024 (UTC).

We're not, that validator's output is incorrect. Matma Rex talk 00:30, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

A smaller example:

<!DOCTYPE html><html><head><meta charset="UTF-8"><title>a</title>
<body>
<div>This character '·' is valid</div>
</body></HTML>

Seems correct... still errors in the formatter, even when uploaded as a file with utf-8 encoding. Definitely a tool problem. – 2804:F1...ED:5881 (talk) 20:50, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

Workaround for Safari bug with small caps?

• H<span style="font-variant: small-caps; text-transform: lowercase;">ELLO</span>. renders as HELLO.
• H<span class="smallcaps" style="font-variant-caps: all-small-caps;">ELLO</span>. renders as HELLO.

In the second version, which is used in {{LORD}} (which renders as LORD), Safari 17.6 on MacOS creates extraneous whitespace after the end of the word. The first version is fine. Is there a good reason not to switch to the first one in templates like {{LORD}} and {{Kangxi radical}}? —Kusma (talk) 14:12, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

In particular, is there any browser where the first version breaks? —Kusma (talk) 05:52, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

I'm viewing this on the Firefox app and I get the same results – first is good, second has extra whitespace. jlwoodwa (talk) 19:05, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

Linkclassifier seems to be forcing page refresh

I'm not sure what is going on. I've only noticed this since yesterday (Oct 18). I have installed User:Anomie/linkclassifier from long time back. The code I use is updated to place the link in the sidebar/toolbox. When I click that link on any page, it appears to force the page to reload and does not highlight any of the links as it used to. I've tried using the current instructions for loading, but with no difference. I use Vector 2022 skin and I also checked in monobook; the reload still happens there, although it looks like at least some of the links get highlighted. Any help would be appreciated. older ≠ wiser 15:29, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

@Bkonrad: Well, have you asked Anomie (talk · contribs) directly? Their script may be old, but Anomie is still around (as of yesterday), so should be able to offer advice. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 15:54, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

I made some changes yesterday, but nothing that should have forced a page refresh... Ah, I had a typo. Sorry. Should be fixed now (you may need to WP:Bypass your cache). Anomie⚔ 16:27, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. All looks good now. I asked here first since my js has blend of things I picked up from others here. older ≠ wiser 23:47, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Is user_touched a thing?

According to mw:Manual:User_table#user_touched, there's a user.user_touched, but as far as I can tell, it's always NULL. What's the actual status of this field? RoySmith (talk) 22:37, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

The manual says it's the last time the user logged in. That's private data. Fields like this are redacted from the Toolforge replicas, so they appear null. – SD0001 (talk) 22:57, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

OK, that makes sense. Is there a list somewhere of redacted fields? It would be really nice if was visible in the "Database tables" menu of Quarry :-) RoySmith (talk) 23:01, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

@RoySmith Here's the code that controls what gets copied to the toolforge replicas:

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/plugins/gitiles/operations/puppet/+/9e7303f945a7f665a50d6d745f40092a370c096c/modules/role/templates/labsdb/maintain-views.yaml

So for the user table:

user:
source: user
view: >
select user_id, user_name, user_real_name, NULL as user_password, NULL as user_newpassword,
NULL as user_email, NULL as user_options, NULL as user_touched, NULL as user_token,
NULL as user_email_authenticated, NULL as user_email_token, NULL as user_email_token_expires,
user_registration, NULL as user_newpass_time, user_editcount, NULL as user_password_expires

86.23.109.101 (talk) 23:38, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

We redact user_touched but not user_real_name??? RoySmith (talk) 23:45, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

If I'm understanding mw:Manual:$wgDefaultUserOptions correctly, it's an optional field for users to configure (and one that seems to be disabled on English Wikipedia), to be displayed in place of their user name, so by design it's intended to be known openly (and could be just another alias). isaacl (talk) 01:26, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

It is not possible to set user_real_name on Wikimedia wikis, so there is no need to redact it. It is disabled as to not encourage people to disclose more information than needed. AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 02:12, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

It used to be the last time the user logged in. I'm pretty sure that is no longer true. I think now it is last time you changed your preferences. Bawolff (talk) 15:29, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

map embedded with maplink-road doesn't show fill colors even tho expanded map does

I recently embedded https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data:Navajo_Nation.map into Navajo Nation by doing this:

image_map = {{maplink-road|from=Navajo Nation.map}}

The map was successfully embedded, however, the "fill" color (eg. data.features.0.properties.fill) is being ignored. At least in the embedded version. When I click on the map in the article the expanded map shows the filled color. So why doesn't the embedded map show the "fill" color and what can I do to fix that? TerraFrost (talk) 22:43, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Is there a global way to display a logo based on Wikidata information? Should there be? Can it be made dark mode aware?

Sorry if this sounds like a strange or even stupid question, but please read to the end if it doesn't make sense, I promise you it does.

• Wikipedia added dark mode WP:DARK recently.
• I can access Wikidata via e.g. {{Infobox company| homepage = {{Official URL}}}}. This is nice and it saves time.
• There doesn't appear to be a way to access Wikidata's logo image (P154) property in an Infobox template in a similar named fashion.
  • I know {{Infobox company}} will "fall back" to P154 if it's defined
  • Other infoboxes like {{infobox hospital}} don't seem to be able to do the same thing.
  • I might be a dummy that just hasn't found that yet, but I don't think I've seen any examples in the wild like I have for {{Official URL}}
• If there is and I just haven't been able to find it, is Wikipedia's dark mode smart enough to check for the for color scheme (P8798) property?
  • The only two values are dark-on-light color scheme and light-on-dark color scheme
  • i.e. P8798 is basically designed for this already

Being able to pull something like {{logo image}} without needing each infobox to implement it directly might be useful, and having it adapt to users' dark mode preferences would be pretty cool. I'm not entirely sure if there's even a way for MediaWiki to "check" if a user is using Dark Mode and "reply" with some kind of variable that could be used here.

Reading about Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia got me thinking about far simpler things that might already be common elsewhere online but not implemented here yet. Checking if a user's browser reports "preferring dark mode" is becoming more ubiquitous.

⚠ Disclaimer ⚠

I still use Vector legacy (2010) with Dark Reader because I didn't like the sidebars on the redesign

Just to make sure I wasn't being extra stupid, I tested with Vector (2022), and it looks like some pages try and account for it. For example, Apple Inc.'s logo is black, so an editor used [[File:Apple logo black.svg|frameless|upright=0.4|class=skin-invert]] in their infobox - emphasis on class=skin-invert - but that really only works with Vector (2022)'s dark mode. Dark Reader doesn't pick up on it, and I imagine that one Chromium about:flags option to force dark mode everywhere doesn't either.

Footnotes

-αβοοδ (talk) 19:35, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

Using a tilde inside <math></math>

I have a problem rendering a tilde inside a <math></math> tag:

Unsatisfactory !

Source code	Result
<math>x</math> ~ <math>y</math>	$x$ ~ $y$
<math>x ~ y</math>	$x~y$
<math>x \tilde y</math>	$x{\tilde {y}}$
<math>x \tilde \ y</math>	$x{\tilde {\ }}y$

The result should be as in the first line, but without breaking the code into two parts. Can that be done? AstroOgier (talk) 15:32, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

LaTeX uses \sim for "squiggly lines" that aren't diacritics. Like so: $x\sim y$. jlwoodwa (talk) 15:41, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Missing tags for use in <math></math>

I am writing articles on astronomical subjects on Danish Wikipedia and am missing the possibility of inserting proper symbols representing degrees (°), arc minutes (′) and arc seconds (″) inside <nowiki><math></math></nowiki> (outside is no problem as you can see).

Unsatisfactory !

Source code	Result
<math>\delta</math> = <math>-</math>67° 12′ 34.07″	$\delta$ = $-$67° 12′ 34.07″
<math>\delta = -67^\circ 12' 34.07''</math>	$\delta =-67^{\circ }12'34.07''$
<math>\delta = -67</math>° <math>12</math>′ <math>34.07</math>″	$\delta =-67$° $12$′ $34.07$″

The middle one comes closest by using a single <math></math> tag, but uses ^\circ as a workaround.

It would be proper to have tags \degree, \minute and \second for this purpose. Can that be fixed somehow, where should one apply? AstroOgier (talk) 15:37, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

@AstroOgier This would be raised at mw:Extension talk:Math or in a feature request at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/task/edit/form/102/?projects=Math --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 17:34, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

No deletion log entry for office actions?

Asian News International vs. Wikimedia Foundation has been blanked and office-protected. Its history is no longer visible, but I can't find any logs relating to the history's removal. How is this possible? Even oversighting generates a log entry. jlwoodwa (talk) 15:38, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Never mind, I misremembered. As explained in Wikipedia:Oversight § Logging, oversighting does generate a log entry – but in Special:Log/suppress, which normal editors cannot view. jlwoodwa (talk) 16:00, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Oversighting generates a log entry that is visible only to oversighters, everyone else sees nothing. See note 9 for item 5 of Wikipedia:Oversight#Operation on how deleting a page with a 'Suppress all edits' option makes the deletion log show at Special:Log/suppress (oversight log) instead. That's probably what they did. 2804:F1...EE:EFBD (talk) 16:00, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-43

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

• The Mobile Apps team has released an update to the iOS app's navigation, and it is now available in the latest App store version. The team added a new Profile menu that allows for easy access to editor features like Notifications and Watchlist from the Article view, and brings the "Donate" button into a more accessible place for users who are reading an article. This is the first phase of a larger planned navigation refresh to help the iOS app transition from a primarily reader-focused app, to an app that fully supports reading and editing. The Wikimedia Foundation has added more editing features and support for on-wiki communication based on volunteer requests in recent years.

iOS Wikipedia App's profile menu and contents

Updates for editors

• Wikipedia readers can now download a browser extension to experiment with some early ideas on potential features that recommend articles for further reading, automatically summarize articles, and improve search functionality. For more details and to stay updated, check out the Web team's Content Discovery Experiments page and subscribe to their newsletter.
• Later this month, logged-out editors of these 12 wikis will start to have temporary accounts created. The list may slightly change - some wikis may be removed but none will be added. Temporary account is a new type of user account. It enhances the logged-out editors' privacy and makes it easier for community members to communicate with them. If you maintain any tools, bots, or gadgets on these 12 wikis, and your software is using data about IP addresses or is available for logged-out users, please check if it needs to be updated to work with temporary accounts. Guidance on how to update the code is available. Read more about the deployment plan across all wikis.
• View all 33 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the South Ndebele, Pannonian Rusyn, Obolo, Iban and Tai Nüa Wikipedia languages were created last week. [1][2][3][4][5]
• It is now possible to create functions on Wikifunctions using Wikidata lexemes, through the new Wikidata lexeme type launched last week. When you go to one of these functions, the user interface provides a lexeme selector that helps you pick a lexeme from Wikidata that matches the word you type. After hitting run, your selected lexeme is retrieved from Wikidata, transformed into a Wikidata lexeme type, and passed into the selected function. Read more about this in the latest Wikifunctions newsletter.

Updates for technical contributors

• Users of the Wikimedia sites can now format dates more easily in different languages with the new {{#timef:…}} parser function. For example, {{#timef:now|date|en}} will show as "23 October 2024". Previously, {{#time:…}} could be used to format dates, but this required knowledge of the order of the time and date components and their intervening punctuation. #timef (or #timefl for local time) provides access to the standard date formats that MediaWiki uses in its user interface. This may help to simplify some templates on multi-lingual wikis like Commons and Meta. [6][7]
• Commons and Meta users can now efficiently retrieve the user's language using {{USERLANGUAGE}} instead of using {{int:lang}}. [8]
• The Product and Tech Advisory Council (PTAC) now has its pilot members with representation across Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and South America. They will work to address the Movement Strategy's Technology Council initiative of having a co-defined and more resilient technological platform. [9]

In depth

• The latest quarterly Growth newsletter is available. It includes: an upcoming Newcomer Homepage Community Updates module, new Community Configuration options, and details on new projects.
• The Wikimedia Foundation is now an official partner of the CVE program, which is an international effort to catalog publicly disclosed cybersecurity vulnerabilities. This partnership will allow the Security Team to instantly publish common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) records that are affecting MediaWiki core, extensions, and skins, along with any other code the Foundation is a steward of.
• The Community Wishlist is now testing machine translations for Wishlist content. Volunteers can now read machine-translated versions of wishes and dive into discussions even before translators arrive to translate content.

Meetings and events

• 24 October - Wiki Education Speaker Series Webinar - Open Source Tech: Building the Wiki Education Dashboard, featuring Wikimedia interns and a Web developer in the panel.
• 20–22 December 2024 - Indic Wikimedia Hackathon Bhubaneswar 2024 in Odisha, India. A hackathon for community members, including developers, designers and content editors, to build technical solutions that improve contributors' experiences.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:49, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

So... why is this page suddenly squeezed into the header?

Checked previous revisions and it happens there too. Also can't click reply, the script gets confused. This is not happening with any of the other village pumps, is it something from the updates above(tech news)?
In case you don't see it, for me the div with id "villagepumpfaq", which is added manually in this page, is consuming the entire page. – 2804:F1...96:C2CF (talk) 23:21, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Fixed. Izno (talk) 23:31, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Ah, it was vandalism... of course it was (not even the first time). I went looking up the complete wrong tree thinking it was a template change, should have read Template:FAQ more carefully (or I guess just noticed there is a 'view' and an 'edit' button). Thank you for fixing it. – 2804:F1...96:C2CF (talk) 00:02, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

How to temporarily turn off a style?

At IUCN Red List endangered species (Animalia), most of the list text is in italics using {{columns-list|style=font-style:italic; as they are scientific names, but some text should not be, "(Kootenai River subpopulation)" for example. How do I change that back to roman text without messing up the existing pattern? Thank you.  SchreiberBike | ⌨  23:24, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Use {{noitalic}}, like this. – Jonesey95 (talk) 23:31, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Maybe on another day I'd have figured that out, but for today I appreciate you pointing out the obvious. Thanks. SchreiberBike | ⌨  23:53, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

No problem. We're all here to help each other. – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:10, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

'Wikidata item' link is moving, finally.

Hello everyone, I previously wrote on the 27th September to advise that the Wikidata item sitelink will change places in the sidebar menu, moving from the General section into the In Other Projects section. The scheduled rollout date of 04.10.2024 was delayed due to a necessary request for Mobile/MinervaNeue skin. I am happy to inform that the global rollout can now proceed and will occur later today, 22.10.2024 at 15:00 UTC-2. Please let us know if you notice any problems or bugs after this change. There should be no need for null-edits or purging cache for the changes to occur. Kind regards, -Danny Benjafield (WMDE) 11:29, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

Internet Archive / Wayback Machine

The site is coming back online in parts. Services may work, stop, restart, this is expected. Each day more lights come on. See "The world’s largest internet archive is under siege — and fighting back", The Washington Post, 18 October 2024 -- GreenC 15:42, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

Retiring IPCheck

I'm not sure if this is the right forum for this, but is it time to retire IPCheck? I certainly applaud SQL's efforts over the years, but they're essentially inactive, the code base as been frozen for years, and newer things like the built-in IP Information tool and bullseye have come along. But we've still got IPCheck built into the interface at the bottom of IP contributions pages. RoySmith (talk) 17:39, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

It can be discussed at Template talk:Anontools. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:07, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

Edit filter graph links broken

Hey all. This was raised at Wikipedia:Edit_filter_noticeboard#graph_links_broken, but it appears the edit filter graphs, seen at [10], are not currently working and display an internal error. Would anyone happen to have an idea what happened to it? One idea that was raised over at EFN was that the log table may have been messed up by protected variables being introduced, but I'm not sure if that's the case or it's something else. — Preceding unsigned comment added by EggRoll97 (talk • contribs) 03:26, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

@EggRoll97: I'm about to get on a flight, but a quick look at the tool's error logs shows:

Filters: 'raise errorclass(errno, errval): ProgrammingError: (1146, u"Table \'enwiki_p.abuse_filter_log\' doesn\'t exist")'

And a check of the replicas does indeed confirm enwiki_p.abuse_filter_log does not exist. Courtesy ping to the tool's maintainer Danilo.mac — TheresNoTime (talk • they/them) 04:15, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

The abuse_filter_log table was deliberately removed from the wiki replicas in gerrit:1077360, pointing to two Phabricator tasks I don't have access to. It's likely to remain broken unless Danilo.mac puts in an amount of effort that's basically rewriting the tool from scratch. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 04:30, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

Why so many edits in January and February 2024?

Wikistats says enwiki averages about 5 million edits/month, but we had 8.5 million in January and 9.4 million in February 2024 before going back down to the usual monthly average. Anybody know where those extra 10 million edits came from? A bot, I assume? Levivich (talk) 04:47, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

My guess is Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Cewbot 12/Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Qwerfjkl (bot) 26. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 05:07, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

Ah ha, revising the wikiproject banners on six million article talk pages. Thanks! Levivich (talk) 05:51, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

Fixing Lua errors

List of members of the International Ice Hockey Federation has multiple Lua (programming language) errors: "too many expensive function calls." Could anyone fix it, or know where else to seek a resolution? These errors are beyond my knowledge. Thanks. Flibirigit (talk) 11:13, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

The culprit is probably {{IIHFteams}}, which is called many times and has a ton of #if and #ifexist calls in it. – Jonesey95 (talk) 13:48, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

If you "Show preview", at the top you will see a message saying "It should have less than 500 calls, there are now 604 calls." These seem to come mostly from the {{IIHF}} templates. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 14:01, 23 October 2024 (UTC).

It does look as if some of these are redundant, so this might not be a hard fix. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 14:04, 23 October 2024 (UTC).

I have no clue how to fix it. I did not create the problem, I just saw that it exists. Are you able to he a hero and repair it? Flibirigit (talk) 14:06, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

I'm working on a fix and will come back. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:27, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

The code of {{IIHFteams}} had two ifexist tests for each linked article but only one of the tests were executed in each call so this could not be used to reduce the expensive parser function count. Instead I fixed it by skipping the tests for a list of countries which currently have all the tested articles.[11] If an article is later deleted then we just get a red link where there was unlinked text before, no biggie. List of members of the International Ice Hockey Federation now uses 435 of the 500 allowed expensive parser functions. Each country which isn't on the list uses six calls so there is currently room for ten more countries. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:02, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

Thank you, @PrimeHunter:. I would never had figured that out. Flibirigit (talk) 15:29, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

unexpected blank line output in modul/template code.

BTW this is from sinhala wiki project and noone capable of technical help in there hence im here.

In this template "si:සැකිල්ල:Country with of" when you give {{Country with of|LK}}, it finds LK from si:Module:Country/data and get country name translation "ශ්‍රී ලංකාව" and inside si:Module:Country it goes through si:Template:ConvertToAe to get "ශ්‍රී ලංකාවේ" (which means "of sri lanka").

But;
When used in template si:සැකිල්ල:Asia topic Test;

• Note: i added a custom suffix for now to make the error clear
  

As {{#if:{{{LK|♦}}}|[[{{{LK|{{{1|{{{prefix|}}}}}}{{Country with of|LK|of=yes|article={{{article|yes}}}}}{{{2|{{{suffix|Gems}}}}}}}}}|{{ඉංග්‍රීසි පදය සිංහලට|Sri Lanka}}]]}}

The output is;
[[ශ්‍රී ලංකාවේ
Gems|ශ්‍රී ලංකාව]]

With the second half going to next line. Just before the suffix. So its something wrong with either සැකිල්ල:Country with of, Module:Country/data, Module:Country or maybe Template:ConvertToAe.

Can anyone help in this matter? VihirLak007^hmu!/_duh. 11:55, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

@VihirLak007 Template:ConvertToAe has a new line between the end of the template code and the <noinclude> before the doccumentation. The <noinclude> needs to be on the same line as the end of the template, or a new line gets added to the template output. 86.23.109.101 (talk) 12:47, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

Wow!!! Thank you so much for your time. Really grateful. VihirLak007^hmu!/_duh. 12:50, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

Talk page dates, readability

Tlak page dates under monobook are not great contrat. Unfortunately under dark mode they are for me unreadable. Is this a widely seen (or unseen) issue? Is there a fix for one, other orp both of these issues, either at a system or user level? ext-discussiontools-init-timestamplink seems to be the applicable class.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough 13:36, 23 October 2024 (UTC).

As you said monobook, I'm assuming you are using our gadget for dark mode, correct? If so, that can be locally customized, drop a request over at Wikipedia talk:Dark mode (gadget). Besides volunteers, User:Volker E. (WMF) may still work on requests there. — xaosflux ^Talk 13:41, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

For that class having bad contrast outside of that gadget running in monobook, I'm not seeing a bug open on that, please open one using this form. Including some screenshots may be helpful! — xaosflux ^Talk 13:47, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

Blank image

Anyone else see this as a blank image[12]? If I expand it I see the image, but the preview is blank. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 14:38, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

• Yes, all the previews/thumbnails are blank for me, in both Firefox and Edge. Black Kite (talk) 14:41, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

Any idea how long this has been happening? It could be related to phab:T265549, but that was back in June. Interestingly, the only version where the thumbnail works is a version that was reverted due to "rendering bugs". --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 17:35, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

Is there like a 1 MB limit? The only version that's visible is smaller than that. 1.28 MB is huge for an SVG, though a lot of it seems to be whitespace, embedded fonts, and repeated styles. Nardog (talk) 17:43, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

@Nardog I fixed it. I believe the problem was there was an empty ViewBox attribute, which apparently browsers know to ignore by librsvg was getting hung up on. I also removed the embedded fonts since they appeared to be generating errors in the browser, but I believe that's an unrelated issue. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 17:58, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

Oddly your first revision works for me, but not the second. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 19:06, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

Help in modifying a module and a template.

BTW this is for Sinhala wiki project.
In English both situations "Sri Lanka" and "economy of Sri Lanka" has the country name without difference. But in Sinhala language we don't have a "of" separately. So its like "ශ්‍රී ලංකාව" and "ශ්‍රී ලංකාවේ Economy".

In this navbox template සැකිල්ල:Asia topic Test,
when its used on another page as "{{Asia topic Test|Economy}}, it will lead every link to "country name + economy" as intended. But when its just "{{Asia topic Test}}", the countries links to its "of version", like "ශ්‍රී ලංකාවේ(of Sri Lanka) and not "ශ්‍රී ලංකාව(Sri Lanka)".

Is there a way to modify the module or template so when a prefix or a suffix isn't assigned through the navbox template, the country links stay same (eg:ශ්‍රී ලංකාව) and not in its "of version" (eg:ශ්‍රී ලංකාවේ)

Below are modules and template connected:

• සැකිල්ල:Asia topic Test - navbox temlpate
• si:සැකිල්ල:Country with of - template invoking module:country
• si:Module:Country/data - has the local word for every country code (LK = ශ්‍රී ලංකාව)
• si:Module:Country - get local word from "Country/data" and send through "ConvertToAe" if of=yes
• si:Template:ConvertToAe - convert ශ්‍රී ලංකාව to ශ්‍රී ලංකාවේ

Need this help since it links to half of potential pages for sinhala wikipedia. VihirLak007^hmu!/_duh. 17:06, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

for now im using "{{#if|}}" for a output which do work as i want. if theres an easy way to do it through the module or the template itself, please suggest VihirLak007^hmu!/_duh. 18:12, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

Seeking proper forum to start RfC to resolve dispute re most appropriate graph/chart format

I'm seeking the most proper forum for starting an RfC to resolve an ongoing dispute between charts of a more broadly accepted format (example: ) and charts of a relatively less experienced editor (example: ). The newer user is in good faith peppering various articles with what I think are unencyclopedically simplistic charts, sometimes bordering on cherry-picking, even replacing comprehensive charts with their simplistic charts. I can't seem to find the appropriate "Wikipedia:Wikiproject ___". Can an experienced editor please point me toward the most appropriate page to start an RfC? Thanks in advance. —RCraig09 (talk) 18:02, 23 October 2024 (UTC)
(Note that I'm referring to SVG etc. charts generated outside Wikipedia; I am not talking about the ~inflexible charts/graphs that Wikipedia generates internally.) —RCraig09 (talk) 18:02, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

Please help checking potential new article matches with Wikidata items by playing a game

Hi all. Would you have a bit of time to play a Wikidata game to match new Wikipedia articles against Wikidata items?

Pi bot automatically matches new biography articles with Wikidata where it can, and creates new items where there are no potential matches. The middle ground is more tricky, though, so it loads them into a game for checking by humans and waits for those to be checked before creating new items (to minimize duplicate items). A bit of a backlog has built up, though, and there are ~12,000 potential matches in the game. So if you have a bit of time, please do have a go! Matches will be directly saved as Wikidata edits by your account (using oath). Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 18:07, 23 October 2024 (UTC)