Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)

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

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Tech News: 2014-24

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

Recent software changes

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf8) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on June 5. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on June 10, and to all Wikipedias on June 12 (calendar).
You can now use guided tours on the Arabic (ar), Bengali (bn) and Norwegian (no) Wikipedias. If you want this tool on your wiki, you need to translate it and ask in Bugzilla. [1] [2]

VisualEditor news

You should no longer be able to add empty references with VisualEditor. [3] [4]
The "use an existing reference" button in the reference tool is now shown as disabled, rather than hidden, when the reference has content. [5] [6] [7]
You will now see category contents again after saving an edit to a category page with VisualEditor. [8] [9]

Future software changes

MediaViewer will be enabled by default on all wikis on June 12. Feedback is welcome. [10]
You will be able to use information from Wikidata directly in Wikiquote pages starting on June 10. [11]
On wikis with the Translate extension enabled, translation administrators will soon be able to use the page migration tool to import existing translations to the new system. [12] [13]
You will soon see metadata on file description pages for Ogg files (example video, example audio). Some metadata with non-English characters may need to be purged or transcoded to UTF-8 before they show correctly. [14] [15]
Templates containing <ref> or <references> tags will no longer need dummy parameters to prevent caching. [16] [17] [18]
You will no longer be able to use Special:Thanks directly. The page will soon show an error message when you visit it. [19] [20]
Hovercards will no longer flicker. [21]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

07:39, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

Templates containing `<ref>` or `<references>` tags will no longer need dummy parameters to prevent caching.

This means that |close=1 will no longer be needed with {{reflist}} and variants. I performed a quick test on mediawiki.org and it looks good. Once deployed, template documentation will be updated. -- Gadget850^talk 10:41, 9 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

We are now running 1.24wmf8. This fix is not deployed and is not listed in the 1.24wmf8 change log. -- Gadget850^talk 20:32, 12 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

That change is coming with 1.24wmf9. Jackmcbarn (talk) 16:02, 13 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Not listed in the 1.24wmf9 change log. -- Gadget850^talk 13:38, 15 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

1.24wmf9 is now deployed, but this fix is not. -- Gadget850^talk 18:37, 20 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes it is. See Special:Permalink/613719402. Jackmcbarn (talk) 18:39, 20 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. Needed a purge. -- Gadget850^talk 18:53, 20 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Question re Special: Thanks

Are you telling us that we will no longer be able to "thank" another editor by clicking (thank) on revision diffs under article history ? — Maile (talk) 19:34, 9 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Maile66: No, this will continue to work exactly as it does now. If you've never typed "Special:Thanks" into the search box, this doesn't affect you. :) Matma Rex talk 19:38, 9 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Maile66: At the moment, you can go to Special:Thanks, type in the revision ID for an edit (for example, the revision number for this edit is 612255080), click Submit and you then see "(Example) was notified that you liked their edit". In future, this method will not be available, but the "thank" link on the edit will still work. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:58, 9 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks to both of you for this information. — Maile (talk) 21:01, 9 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hmmm, the thank button appears not to be working. Either that, or it is working but the thanker is not being told that the thankee has been thanked, if you get my meaning! Mjroots (talk) 10:01, 24 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I've just thanked you; I saw the usual "Are you sure?" popup, and the action was logged. You last thanked someone on 15 June. -- John of Reading (talk) 10:12, 24 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@John of Reading: - yes, I got your thanks. Confirms what I said though. Button not working for me. I tried to thank two separate editors today without success. Mjroots (talk) 11:46, 24 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

If memory serves, User:Steven (WMF) is the contact for Thanks. He'll probably need to know things like what web browser and computer system you're using, Mjroots. Also, do you have JavaScript disabled? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 05:08, 25 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'll keep this in one place as it may benefit others.

@Steven (WMF): - I'm using Firefox (not sure what version, but it's the latest one) and Windows XP. JavaScript is enabled as far as I know. Mjroots (talk) 06:04, 25 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Mjroots: To find out your Firefox version: in the menu bar at the top, select Help → About Mozilla Firefox. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:46, 25 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I've got Firefox 30.0 installed. Mjroots (talk) 04:30, 26 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Seems to be working again now. Mjroots (talk) 15:15, 27 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not at all impressed by the decision to do away with Special:Thanks. This decision forces those people that want to occasionally thank people for an edit here or there to have to put up with the horrible in-line thank process (poorly placed link, required confirmation for a simple process because of the poorly placed link, additional page history clutter). I vaguely remember that it may be possible to thank a user via the API, and I suppose I should finish my NoThanks script to be able to make use of this and better customize the thanking process. It won't be this week or next though as I'm cramming to complete the equivalent of four biology finals in the next week or so, but I'll get to it... — {{U|Technical 13}} ^{(e • t • c)} 15:24, 27 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I like the confirmation required bit, saved me from thanking the wrong person once. Dougweller (talk) 15:39, 27 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

When I'm done with NoThanks, it will have an option to undo the thank instead of having to confirm which will reduce the "normal operation" of thanking someone to one click... — {{U|Technical 13}} ^{(e • t • c)} 15:52, 27 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Missing piece of wiki table syntax/markup?

In tables, wiki syntax/markup offers...

| ... || ... || ... || (etc)

...as an alternative to...

| ...
| ...
| ...
| (etc)

...but, so far as I'm aware, it doesn't offer something like...

| ... || ... || ... -|
| ... || ... || ... -|
| ... || ... || ... -|
| (etc)

...as an alternative to...

| ... || ... || ...
|-
| ... || ... || ...
|-
| ... || ... || ...
|-
| (etc)

What can work (at least, at present) is...

| ... || ... || ... </tr>
| ... || ... || ... </tr>
| ... || ... || ... </tr>
| (etc)

...i.e. using the HTML "end table row" tag </tr>. I understand, however, that this is improper as it mixes wiki and HTML markup. So, may there be a wiki-style alternative, please? Sardanaphalus (talk) 17:13, 23 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The markup |- doesn't mean "end row", it means "begin row", that is, it's equivalent to <tr> not </tr> --Redrose64 (talk) 18:25, 23 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. How about a piece of wiki markup that can be added to the end of a row to mark the end of that row? Sardanaphalus (talk) 00:07, 24 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It's not necessary to mark the end of a row if the start of the next row is indicated, or the end of the table has been reached. This is because, for any given table row, the <tr> tag (for which the wiki markup is |- at the start of a new line) is mandatory, but the </tr> tag (for which there is no wiki markup) is optional (it's always been optional in HTML, but not in XHTML, which has no optional tags). --Redrose64 (talk) 08:40, 24 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm considering this from user-to-syntax, so to speak, rather than vice versa. Because it can be useful visually, I – user – ("I, User"!) would like to be able to mark the end of a row (and so, if one follows, the beginning of the next row on the next line) on the same line as the code for that row, just as the syntax already allows for each cell in a row. So how about a piece of markup – syntax – that facilitates this (whether "-|" or something else)...? Sardanaphalus (talk) 21:11, 24 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It's not a good idea to introduced hacks like detailed in that post and the above posting. It adds very specific behavior that can very easily break because it depends on a slew of side effects of the parser. Long term we are getting rid of many of these side effects, so you are just creating tables that are very likely to break at some point in the future. Use either HTML syntax or wikicode, but don't mess with combinations of the two or using templates to generate something that can also (although a bit more verbose perhaps) be done without a template. It's just a bad idea. We all know that wikicode is ugly, it's ugly in a thousand different ways, but it's what we've got and what we have to live with. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:10, 23 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

This use of </tr> has been around long before my becoming aware of it – in fact, it's near-certain I came across it here. Mixing markup may be a bad idea, but, in the long-term, isn't the idea that something is "what we've got and what we have to live with" a worse one...? Sardanaphalus (talk) 00:07, 24 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Using </tr> without the next tag being either <tr> or </table> relies on browser quirks: assuming that we're not dealing with XHTML (see my post of 08:40, 24 June 2014 (UTC) above), most browsers, on encountering the sequence <table><th>, for which the wiki markup is

{|
!

or <table><td>, for which the wiki markup is

{|
|

will assume that there should be a <tr> (i.e. a |-) in between. Similarly, if they encounter the sequence </tr><th> or </tr><td>, they will also assume that there should be a <tr> in between. Since the <tr> tag at the start of a table row is documented as being mandatory, not all browsers will assume that it should be present if it has been omitted, and so you mustn't rely on such behaviour. --Redrose64 (talk) 08:40, 24 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

That's what's motivating my request/proposal, especially as there's already provision for more than one cell per line of code. Sardanaphalus (talk) 21:11, 24 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I'll note that in the above instances, the parser will add the 'missing' <tr> automatically. So this is valid wiki markup resulting in valid HTML. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 11:11, 27 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

yes, relying on the HTML Tidy module as a hack is a very bad idea, especially since the core HTML Tidy it hasn't been updated since 1998. Frietjes (talk) 21:57, 23 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Since 2008 actually. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 23:00, 23 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

correct, thank you, the 1998 was a typo (still very old). Frietjes (talk) 23:56, 24 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Moved from User talk:Redrose64 § Wiki-style table markup

Any further thoughts / advice re Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Missing piece of wiki table syntax/markup?...? (Maybe I should enquire at mediawiki.org...?)
I imagine you might have quite a backlog – you seem to dispense advice and information everywhere! Very valuable. Hope you don't find it too exhausting.
Regards, Sardanaphalus (talk) 09:46, 27 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

(end of moved text) Please don't split discussions across multiple pages, it makes them harder to follow.

Posted on your talkpage as the discussion here seemed to've petered out. Sorry if that was a mistake. Sardanaphalus (talk) 08:07, 30 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It's not possible to configure the English Wikipedia to accept MediaWiki-style markup additional to what MediaWiki provides itself. That would need a feature request at bugzilla:. But aside from that, it is bad HTML to use end-of-row markers without corresponding start-of-row markers; it is also bad practice to expect a browser to make assumptions about where missing markup should have been placed, unless the documentation (which for tables may be found at: HTML 3.0; HTML 3.2; HTML 4.01; HTML 5.0; HTML 5.1) explicitly shows it to be optional markup. For a table row, the <tr> tag has always been mandatory; the </tr> tag has always been optional, except in XHTML 1.0 where it is mandatory (because there are no optional tags in XHTML). --Redrose64 (talk) 10:04, 27 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I can understand that it's bad HTML to use these markers without those markers and to rely on browsers and/or things like HTML Tidy to perfect syntax, but my request/proposal is for some wiki syntax to mark the end of a row (and possible beginning of a subsequent row) on the same line as the wiki syntax used to define that row. Sardanaphalus (talk) 08:07, 30 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

HTML Tidy is disabled by default in MediaWiki,[22] thus pages using this hack will break when ported to a wiki with the defaults. Tidy is required to mix wiki table and html table markup. -- Gadget850^talk 11:01, 27 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Automating the creation of Wikidata articles

When I create a new article (or see one created by someone else) I like to immediately create a corresponding Wikidata entry. I'm clearly not alone in this.

The process is tiresome, and we need a tool which, when initiated, creates the Wikidata article, with a "click confirm" check, allowing human review and intervention.

The tool could grab data from categories and infoboxes.

I understand this would be a complex process, so it might be best to develop it in manageable chunks: first for people (Infobox person; then Infobox musical artist, then Infobox officeholder...), then buildings (Infobox building, then Infobox church...), then...

Is anyone interested in working on this? I'm not a coder, but am happy to work on specifications and testing. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:06, 24 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

What about topics that already have a Wikidata item (for example, because an article exists on another WP)? πr² (t • c) 01:23, 28 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Upload a file through the API

I've looked around for an answer to this question, but I can't find any suitable discussion. The closest I got was talk:Upload this mw discussion page that shows some actual JavaScript code, but it isn't quite what I'm looking for. My question is, is it possible to not just upload a file using the API but to build a file out of text and then upload that text in the form of a file using JavaScript. The reason I ask is because I have a script that extracts data from WP:NRHPPROGRESS (big page.. may take a second to load) and outputs it to a subpage, from which I copy it into an SVG file and upload it. The thing is, though, the rest of the SVG file never changes (it's a map), so I feel like I should be able to simply copy it somewhere here as wikitext, query it, then add in the script generated code and have the entire text of the file on-wiki instead of on my hard drive. I would like to then take that total text and somehow make JS think it's the contents of a file and upload it directly to Commons. The only reason I think this should be possible is because of the SVG format, which is text-based instead of like JPG or PNG or something. Is there anyone out there that can think of a way to do this? I've never used the API to even upload a file, but I use it all the time to query categories, wikitext, edit, etc., so talk to me like I'm 5 if it's something upload-specific haha. Thanks!--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 14:17, 26 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Have a look at the code of the SVGEdit extension. (+ FormMulitpart), it just does what you want: Upload an SVG created by script. And of course it is possible to upload other formats as well, though a bit more complicated. (You would have to use the native FormData object, and get the binary data from somewhere, e.g. a canvas element.) --132.230.1.28 (talk) 09:54, 27 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for that response. I haven't tried anything yet, but from what I can gather from the code, it seems as if I can copy the code from both of these sources into a JS page on-wiki, call saveSVG("FILENAME", {...., data:SVGTEXT, ...}, "EDITSUMMARY", CALLBACKFUNCTION) where the ellipses would have all the other file data like encoding, etc., and it should work? Do I need to format SVGTEXT in any certain way, or can it just be regular text?--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 13:03, 27 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Classic Wikipedia article traffic stats not working. What!?

The classic Wikipedia article traffic statistics does not show older data for any article before December 2010. A Great Catholic Person (talk) 19:20, 27 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Try "View history" | "external tools: Revision history statistics" | scroll down to the traffic history |scroll down to other items like user edits

--Ancheta Wis (talk | contribs) 22:21, 27 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

This message was a replacement for an older one (see this diff) and that's why it's out of chronological order. Graham87 08:14, 28 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Requested new citation template feature: Hover the mouse over a footnote marker and the supported text is highlighted

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T20231

Sorry for the long title. That's what I'm looking for. Often I'll use three different sources to support three different facts in a sentence. The reader, just looking at the three footnote markers^[1]^[2]^[3] won't know which ref's support which assertions. Would someone please make a citation system - template, VE, I don't care - that highlights the supported text when you hover over the footnote marker?

So, in this example:

At any given time, about half of all patients with malignant cancer are experiencing pain, and more than a third of those (and two thirds of all patients with advanced cancer) experience pain of such intensity that it adversely affects their sleep, mood, social relations and activities of daily living.^[1]^[2]^[3]

hovering the mouse over ^[1] produces:

At any given time, about half of all patients with malignant cancer are experiencing pain, and more than a third of those (and two thirds of all patients with advanced cancer) experience pain of such intensity that it adversely affects their sleep, mood, social relations and activities of daily living.^[1]^[2]^[3]

hovering the mouse over: ^[2] produces

At any given time, about half of all patients with malignant cancer are experiencing pain and more than a third of those (and two thirds of all patients with advanced cancer) experience pain of such intensity that it adversely affects their sleep, mood, social relations and activities of daily living.^[1]^[2]^[3]

hovering the mouse over ^[3] produces:

At any given time, about half of all patients with malignant cancer are experiencing pain, and more than a third of those (and two thirds of all patients with advanced cancer) experience pain of such intensity that it adversely affects their sleep, mood, social relations and activities of daily living.^[1]^[2]^[3]

I'll pay US$1000 to the first person or team who, in the next 6 months, presents a useable citation template, visual editor fix, or anything else that incorporates this option in article citations. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 12:07, 27 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I built this (one of several systems) for such markup back around 2000. It's a nightmare. The extra markup you have to place into the body text to indicate just what and where is being sourced quickly becomes onerous. It's especially bad when there are multiple citations and they overlap, but not in a nested fashion. No-one bothers with it these days. Take a look at TEI for what's probably the lead in this sort of system.

Better approaches seem to take it the other way. Annotate the citations to indicate the scope to which they apply. This can use techniques like XPointer or even the old Purple Numbers. Most of these systems for practical use then need auto-coalescence of the cited regions, such that citation markers only appear once per joined block, not repeated for every region.

The systems that mostly work for such needs are legalistic and work by formalising the structure of the text. Everything breaks down to statements or clauses, none of which can be compounds. It's easy (and usually verbose) to number each of these. The addressing becomes a simple matter of listing numbered paragraphs. It works, it's specific and it's also horribly unreadable. Not what we want at all. Andy Dingley (talk) 12:21, 27 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Well, that doesn't sound very useful! :o) (I didn't understand most of what you said.) I'm not too bothered - at least in this prototype stage - how much effort it takes on the editor's part, but if it's really very onerous others will object to me putting it on articles. And it would need to appear to the reader like any other en.WP citation, except for the extra feature. If it can't effectively be done, no worries.

I was thinking the editor could just copy and paste the relevant article text against a template parameter

|supports="Blah blah blah" "Alpha beta gamma"

and any text on the page exactly matching the text within quotation marks would be automatically highlighted. From this user-point-of-view that would be the simplest, but if that's not doable, then the simple feature I'm looking for is probably unattainable. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 12:40, 27 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Anthonyhcole: What you described is doable, of course, but I'm not sure if it would be practical:

I can't think of a way to do this without forcing the user to adjust technicalities about such tags when new content is added (in your example, the texts would have to be updated in both places; some numbering approach like what Andy described would require updating the numbers). This could be avoided by implementing this in VisualEditor, but then VisualEditor is hated around here for some inexplicable reason and doing that would surely get someone hanged.
Allowing one <ref> tag to provide a citation for several text fragments instead of just one also feels problematic (if you think you need this, it means you actually want to use <ref name>!). This actually would be more problematic from the interface standpoint in a visual tool than in wikitext.

That said, a more limited version of such a tool (where a single ref would only provide citation for a single and adjacent and immediately preceding wikitext fragment) looks feasible to me, and hopefully it wouldn't be too awkward to use neither in wikitext nor in VisualEditor; but I think one should first think really hard about both the wikitext formats and possible visual interface for such a thing. Matma Rex talk 18:36, 27 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

To clarify, here's a variant of your original examples that I believe to be feasible. I don't think any meaning is lost.

At any given time, about half of all patients with malignant cancer are experiencing pain^[1], and more than a third of those (and two thirds of all patients with advanced cancer^[3]) experience pain of such intensity that it adversely affects their sleep, mood, social relations and activities of daily living.^[2]

At any given time, about half of all patients with malignant cancer are experiencing pain^[1] and more than a third of those (and two thirds of all patients with advanced cancer^[3]) experience pain of such intensity that it adversely affects their sleep, mood, social relations and activities of daily living.^[2]

At any given time, about half of all patients with malignant cancer are experiencing pain^[1], and more than a third of those (and two thirds of all patients with advanced cancer^[3]) experience pain of such intensity that it adversely affects their sleep, mood, social relations and activities of daily living.^[2]

Matma Rex talk 18:43, 27 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'll love the VE when it's finished. :o) The bug linked by WhatamIdoing below seems to aim at the solution you're targetting, Matma Rex. I might just add my support to that, with a proposal for the hover feature. Thanks for your input. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 02:34, 28 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

This isn't entirely a new idea; Template:Bug was filed in 2009. Some of the comments there might be relevant. If you don't have or want a (free, but e-mail-address-exposing) Bugzilla account, then just leave a note on my talk page, and I can post any comments there that you'd like to add to the enhancement request. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:39, 27 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Whatamidoing, I created a Bugzilla account last night, but I'm not sure what to say there. Can I just add a support for the feature and add a request that the "hover-over-the-footnote-marker" feature be included? That place looks like my "pending" basket, where I poke stuff I'm never going to get done. But if you think it's not utterly futile, I'll throw it in. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 02:34, 28 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I think it's not utterly futile, and I'd encourage you to post it. Bugzilla etiquette is generally that comments which say only "me too" are discouraged, but that any comment suggesting another way to do it (your hover-over idea, for example) or any related problem or implementation challenge is very welcome. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 03:58, 28 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. Will do. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 04:59, 28 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I have implemented the functionality which is described above. I wanted a solution that would work for any reference regardless of which citation template was used, or even if a citation template is used at all. I created a new template, {{Ref supports}} – an alias {{Cite supports}} is available – which is used to describe the text supported by the reference. The {{Ref supports}} template is placed inside the <ref>...</ref> tags along with whatever the reference is (e.g. {{cite web}}, a non-template based reference, etc.). Currently, you can specify up to 10 text segments, but that could easily be expanded. The text segments are encoded into a span, similar to how COinS works. That information is then read by the user script described in the next paragraph. The {{Ref supports}} template itself displays nothing visible on the screen unless |show= is set to something non-blank. If |show= is set then whatever it is set to is output prior to a list of the quoted text segments. In general, the text segments are expected to be from the rendered page (i.e. without wiki-markup). However, there is minimal handling for [[some]] [[types|of links]] and not fully tested handling of a bit more wiki-text being within the {{Ref supports}} template. Currently, the text segments must be in the same paragraph and prior to the reference. I'm open to expanding that, but did not want to start out with doing a full search on the page due to unknown performance/possible miss-matches. Text segments will match only the single closest sequential set of words/punctuation. However, the formatting of the text is ignored (e.g. italics, bold, links).

You will also need to import the user script User:Makyen/RefSupports.js by adding importScript('User:Makyen/RefSupports.js'); to either your common.js, or the .js file for your skin. So far, I have only tested this using the Vector skin in Firefox and Chrome.

I still plan to put work into the package for cleaning up, optimizing, documentation improvement and further testing and improvements. Notably it does not intelligently deal with overlapping spans. If you have multiple references supporting similar, but not exactly the same text you will probably need to break the text segments described in the {{Ref supports}} templates such that the segments end at similar locations.

I used two test pages at which you can try it out: test01 and test02. On test01 I have only added {{Ref supports}} to the first three paragraphs. In addition, the following paragraph is a copy of test02 and should be fully functional. It is a functional version of the example paragraph above written by Anthonyhcole:

At any given time, about half of all patients with malignant cancer are experiencing pain, and more than a third of those (and two thirds of all patients with advanced cancer) experience pain of such intensity that it adversely affects their sleep, mood, social relations and activities of daily living.^[1]^[2]^[3]

— Makyen (talk) 17:26, 28 June 2014 (UTC);update to be an exact match to the requested highlighting. Add |url= to {{cite web}}14:48, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Makyen, when you say "You will also need to import the user script User:Makyen/RefSupports.js by adding importScript('User:Makyen/RefSupports.js'); to either your common.js, or the .js file for your skin" do you mean the reader must add that code to their common or skin js in order for it to work? If so, can you tell me how to do that? (I use Monobook.) --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 00:54, 29 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Anthonyhcole, yes. The person reading the page will need to have added the import of the user script User:Makyen/RefSupports.js to either their common.js page, or the .js page for the skin that they use. I just briefly tested it in all of MonoBook, Modern and Cologne Blue and it was working fine. Thus, your common.js page is probably the most appropriate.

The easiest instructions are to:

Copy the following:
{{subst:iusc|User:Makyen/RefSupports.js}}
Then Click on this link to edit your your common.js page.
Paste the text you just copied onto the page that opens, which is your common.js.
Save the page and bypass your cache to make sure the changes take effect.

— Makyen (talk) 01:47, 29 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Ah. Sorry, I'm looking for this, but for all readers of the article, not just those with an account who've added js. Is there any way to tweak your solution so that the highlighting appears for all readers whose mouse hovers over a footnote marker? --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 09:50, 29 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Ahh..I see. I can understand that you actually desire functionality to be available to everyone. Another time, it would be very helpful for that to be stated up front. There is a very significant difference between all levels of use for something that is available for you, that is available optionally to small groups of people, available optionally to larger groups of people, and something that is basic functionality provided by default to everyone.

It is possible to have JavaScript that is run for all people viewing the page. It is a significant process to go from a user script to something that is run for everyone. Usually a user script is offered by a user to be available to the community. Then, if it becomes sufficiently used and desired by the community, it can be adopted as a gadget, which gives it more visibility and makes it easier to enable/disable. It is possible, but very unusual, for it to be included such that it is automatically loaded for everyone.

However, it is not clear to me that there is consensus that this is functionality the community desires to have for everyone. Although I could have easily missed it, I am not aware of any RfC that was done to see if the community desires this functionality. As I understand it, one method of beginning to see if it is something the community desires is to post an RfC at Village pump (proposals)‎‎. However, that is only for the English Wikipedia. If you are desiring it to be standard functionality across all Wikipedias, then an RfC is needed on Meta with global participation. I would suggest initiating an RfC to determine if this functionality is desired by the community prior to proceeding further. If there has been such an RfC, I would appreciate a pointer to it. — Makyen (talk) 02:35, 30 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, I've just noticed this comment. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 12:26, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding payment: Do you mind if I hold an RfC at the end of this process, to decide who deserves to be paid for this feature, and how the money should be distributed if there's more than one inventor? --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 10:51, 29 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Do I mind? The short answer is yes. On the other hand: Ultimately, it is your money and you get to make the choice as to how to, when to, or even if to, disburse it. Another time, I would have appreciated that being stated up front, or at least phrasing the offer in a manner that does not imply the urgency/competition of being "first". While I might have worked on something had I known this to be the case, I certainly would not have done so in the time-frame I did. — Makyen (talk) 02:35, 30 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Makyen, just to be clear, I offered the money to whichever person or team met the brief. Do you claim to have met the brief? --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 15:25, 30 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Anthonyhcole:

[Note: Shortly before this post, I updated the script with improvements and additional features.]

My belief is: Yes, the original brief is fulfilled. However: This is a situation where I am attempting to write something that fulfills your requirements. In such situations, it is much easier to match your requirements and desires if you can tell me where you see issues or features that are lacking, or where you would like improvements. I can program for years attempting to guess at what it is that you desire to be changed. Without feedback as to what features you desire to have changed, improved, or added I have to go off of what I feel should be included and guess at what more/different it might be that you want.

As to specific enhancements/fixes, I would suggest that we move that portion of this discussion to User talk:Makyen/RefSupports.js so as to not clutter this page with the specifics of the development of the script. Of course, any unresolved issues that you believe cause there to be a failure to meet the brief can be mentioned here. I, of course, am also interested in fixing any bugs which you, or others, might find. If you find one please inform me. If so, please provide an example page where the bug shows up.

The goal is to get you what you want while not significantly exceeding what I understood the brief to be. [I'm not trying to hedge here, nor say that I am unwilling to go beyond what I understood the brief to be (which matches what you restated below).] This is a normal issue for contract work. The goal is to fulfill the customer's requirements while staying within both what is possible and reasonable (for both parties and the environment in which it is done). This can often be a source of concerns for both parties as things not specified in the original brief or foreseen by one party or the other come to light. [I'm not trying to hint at anything specific, just a general statement about performing work to specification.]

I would appreciate any feedback you can provide as to what you would like to see improved. I have put a brief list of ease-of-use improvements I see as desirable for something which would be deployed to a wide group of people, and which I plan to work on in the near future, at User talk:Makyen/RefSupports.js#Planned improvements. — Makyen (talk) 14:48, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I've deleted my last post (that you refer to) so as not to distract us, for now. If you'd prefer to restore it, go right ahead.

I want to add citations to an article, Cancer pain, that function like this: When a reader - any reader, not just logged-in readers, or readers who have installed a script or enabled a gadget - hovers their mouse-pointer over a footnote marker, the text supported by the source that footnote marker links to is highlighted. I'm not bothered how fiddly or arduous it is for the editor, at this prototype stage. But I would expect it to function, from the readers' point of view, just as our existing footnoting does, with the addition of this one feature. For now, I just want to put it on one article, Cancer pain, as a trial. It doesn't need to be something that can be easily replicated right across this or other projects.

If we need to dispense with the existing citation templates, I'm quite happy to rewrite all the citations by hand. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 15:24, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Technicals images shouldn't show in MediaViewer

Please see Template:Bug first. Purely informative images, like portal icons, should not appear in MediaViewer. So we have to add a metadata html class to templates like:

--Rezonansowy (talk | contribs) 08:24, 27 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Be aware that the metadata class, when applied to a box-type object, hides the whole box from Mobile view (see e.g. #Closed AFDs not displaying on mobile version above). --Redrose64 (talk) 08:52, 27 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

.metadata is for things that are not part of content. I think that traditionally, portal stuff etc generally is considered part of the content (they are classified as 'see also' content), though there is something to be said to classify it as metadata.... The metadata class is not to be randomly applied to hide images from MMV and I will revert such things on sight. This is MMVs problem, not ours. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:00, 27 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

See our discussion on Bugzilla. There's a noviewer class for this. The problem is that templates like {{Sister project links}} are still using the metadata class. Otherwise, we should link every portal icon to the corresponding portal. --Rezonansowy (talk | contribs) 06:12, 29 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Redrose64 and TheDJ:? --Rezonansowy (talk | contribs) 15:00, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Something changed font rendering in Chrome

I noticed last week on mediawiki.org, and now here, that Chrome is somehow forced to use its own method of font smooting, but I cannot determine what causes it. Ohter browser as well as other websites in Chrome are unaffected. Normally, I have ClearType enabled (on XP), and now I see that Chrome uses some, probably built-in "pseudo", ClearType-like method, which is not native to XP. It's not necessarily bad, just a slight degrade, but I really like to know what causes it. Has some webkit-specific CSS been introduced in the latest update? -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 08:35, 27 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Nothing that I know of. Could it be related to a Chrome update? Kaldari (talk) 00:40, 28 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Finding things in my user space.

Some while ago I made some useful notes in a subsection of my user space which I now cannot find. Is there any way to get a directory of your own user space? Martin Hogbin (talk) 09:08, 27 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Special:PrefixIndex/User:Martin Hogbin —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:22, 27 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Alternatively, e.g. If you can't remember this in the future, go to the foot of your "Contributions" page and click on "Subpages". (There is one less page if you search this way; as it searches for user space pages starting "Martin Hogbin/" rather than "Martin Hogbin") - Arjayay (talk) 09:37, 27 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. Martin Hogbin (talk) 12:56, 27 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Page title conflicts through newly assigned Unicode characters?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T69193

Just out of curiosity, I wonder how the Mediawiki software will deal with the following (rather obscure) situation, or if anything should be done about it. We currently have a redirect entry at ϳ (i.e. Unicode U+03F3, an obscure codepoint clone of "j"), which redirects to a section in the article on the normal Latin letter, J. In the latest update of the Unicode standard, a new uppercase equivalent of this character was introduced, at U+037F. That codepoint, although previously not yet a legal character, has also had a Wikipedia redirect entry for some while, Ϳ. I suppose that once the MediaWiki software gets updated to work with the latest version of the Unicode character database, the software will recognize that these two page titles are case equivalents, which means that they can't be technically distinguished from each ther. Will the software somehow automatically resolve this conflict by removing or forgetting about one of the two pages; will it remain accessible; or should it be deleted first? Fut.Perf. ☼ 10:49, 27 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Update to 7.0 and your question outstanding in bugzilla:67193. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:35, 27 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

We had a problem two or so years ago with a user who had registered an account using a single character, U+0271, for their user name: ɱ (talk · contribs); at the time, MediaWiki did not recognise that this was the lowercase form of U+2C6E and so it allowed the account to be created with that name. Later, it decided that the user name should be uppercased and linked to Ɱ (talk · contribs) which was not the same account. More at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 105#Link in history says user does not exist. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:49, 27 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

As yes, the problem of Eversonian capitals. The lack of capital forms for many Latin/Greek/Cyrillic characters has led to an unfortunate ad hoc approach where these get added to Unicode at a later time when the capital gets discovered at a later time. Unicode has been doing a lot better at just encoding both case pairs for new characters, but there are still a large number of old letters (encoded early in Unicode) that really can't be justified until we find actual capital forms being used. I'll put in a reminder at writing systems to remind people to file a bugzilla to update case matching whenever a new Unicode version gets release. Van Isaac_WS^cont 00:53, 28 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, this particular character is probably an especially absurd case. The existence of the lowercase codepoint never made much sense to begin with, and the proposal document for the uppercase one is nothing short of bizarre. It's the first character proposal I've seen that fails to cite even a single authentic instance of use of the character in print – the only thing shown is one where the proposer thought the author ought to have used it but didn't (and clearly intentionally so.) But anyway, that's not for us here to worry about. On another note, one wonders why Mediawiki even has to define all these case mapping pairs manually all the time. Doesn't PHP have built-in Unicode case-mapping functionality, like any other decent programming language today? Fut.Perf. ☼ 10:28, 28 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Sure it does. But "built-in case-mapping" still depends on having up-to-date data files that contain the casing conversions. So I'm not entirely certain that there is a substantial difference between "doing it manually" and "built-in functionality". Van Isaac_WS^cont 19:36, 28 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Improved Diff acting up

For the last week or so, whenever I try the improved diff button I don't get the diffs but instead get a passage from a wikimedia script file which, surprisingly, includes a change marked with the usual red/green coding of the improved diff display. I'd post it here, but I'm afraid what the code would do to the system. Hope someone can get this comment to the appropriate people. SteveMcCluskey (talk) 01:18, 28 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@SteveMcCluskey: I think the page you're looking for is User talk:Cacycle/wikEdDiff. It looks like there was a large update to the code 4 days ago.

Re: pasting text dumps, just enclose them in a <pre>...</pre> tag. (or if it's many screens long, either take a screenshot, or paste the text at http://pastie.org )

Before that though, try clearing your browser cache (WP:REFRESH), justincase.

HTH :) –Quiddity (talk) 08:55, 28 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the advice. I tried purging my cache and it didn't fix it so I've posted at User talk:Cacycle/wikEdDiff. --SteveMcCluskey (talk) 20:29, 28 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Resuming PDF downloads

> Kindly add new feature of resuming pdf download because wikipedia pdf > download files does not support resume ! This is very sad after an error we > can not resume because resume unsupported — Preceding unsigned comment added by 107.167.99.170 (talk) 05:50, 28 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Could you please elaborate? I assume you're referring to Special:Book's rendering (from the 'Collection' MediaWiki extension). If you can give steps to reproduce the problem, please report it on Wikimedia's bugtracker. Does the page not refresh for you? If it doesn't refresh you can just reload the page. πr² (t • c) 03:37, 29 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

jQuery update causes constant script error

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T65303

Ever since the begining of the jQuery update and its console tracking, I've been getting script errors. They don't typically cause a crash but they do seem to screw up loading/caching every so often.

The most common error message is: Expected identifier
and it points to: targetFn.super=originFn
in something (load.php?) starting with var targetConstructor=targetFn.prototype.constructor;

Any ideas on who or where I should refer this to? -- George Orwell III (talk) 05:03, 29 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

That's not caused by jQuery upgrade, and is already fixed: Template:Bug (but probably not deployed; the error will disappear in a few days). I suggest upgrading to a newer browser that supports this syntax. Matma Rex talk 10:27, 29 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your attention & the pointer re: OOJS issues. -- George Orwell III (talk) 13:29, 29 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

GeoGroupTemplate not working

{{GeoGroupTemplate}} collects links from a page and displays all of them on a Google map at once. For example, clicking the link at National Register of Historic Places listings in Alexander County, Illinois causes the browser to go to [23], which typically plots the page's seven {{coord}} locations on Google's map of the county. However, it's consistently been down over the last few days. What's going on? The error message says that the tool isn't currently being maintained by its operator, Para. I suspect vandalism, as Para's made exactly one edit to this project, and it's worked fine for years with no problems bigger than the occasional hiccup. But how to revert it when I can't see any relevant edits that Para's made? I don't even know what site to check! The template itself hasn't been edited in eight months. Note also that there's a similar problem at Commons; hitting the GeoGroupTemplate at Commons:Category:Allen Street (Bloomington, Indiana) takes me to https://maps.google.com/maps?q=http%3A%2F%2Ftoolserver.org%2F%7Epara%2Fcgi-bin%2Fkmlexport%3Fproject%3DCommons%26article%3DCategory%253AAllen_Street_%2528Bloomington%252C_Indiana%2529, which returns only a "file not found" message. I'm sorry for the tone, but I'm highly dependent on this service, and WP:VOLUNTEER is a good reason not to complain about inaction, not a good reason not to complain about bad action. Nyttend (talk) 05:12, 29 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It's Toolserver, which (as we have been warned several times on this page over the last two years) won't last forever. To be precise, it's got just over 40 hours left. If we're lucky. --Redrose64 (talk) 07:46, 29 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The toolserver link is just a redirect since that one edit, and the tool is actually hosted on Tools Labs. Its web service for the project had died with the error "sockets disabled, connection limit reached", which never happened on the Toolserver. Looks like I'm hitting some sort of a difference between Toolserver's Zeus Web Server and Labs' lighttpd. The tool doesn't get an exceptional number of hits, so it's going to take a while before it has the chance to hit the limit again, and to figure out a way to monitor the web server and whether the options at http://redmine.lighttpd.net/projects/1/wiki/Docs_Performance might affect it. --Para (talk) 22:37, 29 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Labs is a real pain. I used to be able to get a list of pages that I'd created, excluding redirects, at http://toolserver.org/~tparis/pages/index.php?name=Redrose64&namespace=0&redirects=noredirects - that now sends me to http://tools.wmflabs.org/xtools/pages/index.php?name=Redrose64&namespace=0&redirects=noredirects which has never worked for me - it takes absolutely ages before throwing a 504 Gateway Time-out. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:16, 29 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Servers not serving, and not timing out either

Resolved

For about four hours now, I've been unable to get any normal Wikipedia page to load completely. Most of the page loads fine, but after it's mostly (all?) displayed, the spinny thing in the browser tab continues to revolve, with the status bar showing either "Read en.wikipedia.org" or "Read bits.wikimedia.org" - this continues indefinitely, I left one going for half an hour before deciding that it would neither finish loading nor time out. Pressing Escape removes that message and replaces the spinny with a favicon. All namespaces except Special: appear to be affected; but the problem does not show up at either Commons or Meta. I'm using Windows XP, Firefox 30, MonoBook; and I'm in England. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:57, 29 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Redrose64: Look in the Network tab in the web developer to see which page it's stuck on. Jackmcbarn (talk) 19:14, 29 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Mostly it's either http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Equazcion/SkipFileWizard.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript or http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:RefToolbarLegacy.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript but I did spot http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php once, without a query string. Maybe Equazcion knows what's wrong with the first one. Since I tried that "Network" thing, I've not seen it stick on any bits.wikimedia.org files. However, the HTTP 304 code is always shown against these, so surely it shouldn't be trying to re-retrieve? --Redrose64 (talk) 19:41, 29 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I turned it off overnight, cleared all the Web Content Cache, now working. But slower, because it's got to bring back a whole bunch of images that are frequently used. I guess it'll get faster once those are all in my content cache again. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:23, 30 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Flags and text distorted when editing (Chrome, Firebox)

(Chrome 35.0.1916.153 m, Firebox 30)

Extraneous links have been viewed in Preview or in 'Check changes' on the parts being later damaged.

Computer's check by Spybot & AVZ didn't help as well as Chrome restart.

It's possible to work only in Firebox restarted with adds-on disabled,

In IE-8 all is Ok.

The same browsers work well at other computer.

More details are at parallel ru.wikipedia tech forum where no solution has yet been found. :( --Igorp_lj (talk) 23:43, 29 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Igorp lj:, perhaps you can post a screenshot or something on imagebin.ca That might be easier for everyone to understand the problem. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:42, 30 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@TheDJ:, thank you. Here the are:

1-view-chrome=firefox - so mentioned topic is viewed in Chrome & Firefox before any action. Pls paid attention for extraneous links at the words Russia (дифф1 ) & ~~играла~~ (дифф5)

versus

normal view firefox-no-adds-on

and this is 'Show changes' window in Chrome & Firefox (again there is no edit yet):

check-ch-chrome=firefox with appropriate result : {{Flag|Russia}}--> {{Flag|}}

Sure there is now change for 'firefox-no-adds-on' case.

Such results one can view opening one of 'дифф1-дифф7' diffs at mentioned ru.wikipedia tech forum.

By the way : I have to pass to 'firefox-no-adds-on' to post this because of there there was same link for Russia again ({{Flag|Russia}}--> {{Flag|}}) in Chrome preview. :(

--Igorp_lj (talk) 11:03, 30 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2014-27

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

Recent software changes

The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf11) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on June 26. It will be added to non-Wikipedia wikis on July 1, and to all Wikipedias on July 3 (calendar).

VisualEditor news

Context menus in VisualEditor will no longer flicker and disappear when you insert a new reference, formula, image, etc. [24] [25]
A bug that prevented relocating items due to cache was fixed last week. [26] [27]
VisualEditor will no longer scroll to the bottom of the page when you try to edit section 0. When you try to add a formula, VisualEditor will no longer scroll to the top of the page. [28] [29] [30] [31]
Links to category pages or file pages added with VisualEditor will now work correctly. [32] [33]

Future software changes

You will no longer be able to upload files on wikis that do not have any copyright tags. [34] [35]
Toolserver tools will be stopped on June 30. Please make sure to change gadgets that link to the Toolserver to point to Tool Labs instead.
CirrusSearch will be enabled on June 30 as the primary search method on 34 new wikis, including the Czech (cs), Danish (da), Finnish (fi) and Hebrew (he) Wikipedias. [36]
All Wikimedia wikis will be using a security method called perfect forward secrecy starting on July 1. If you see a problem, please report it. [37] [38]
Starting on July 1, it will be possible to globally rename global (SUL) users. [39]
You will soon see block information when you visit the contributions page or try to edit the user page or user talk page of a user who is affected by an IP range block. [40] [41]
You will soon be able to use {{!}} as a magic word to produce the pipe character, for instance for use in tables. [42]

Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by MediaWiki message delivery • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

06:53, 30 June 2014 (UTC)

Template code help please!

Hello technical people.

There's a a discussion going on at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Cricket here about whether the Template:Infobox cricketer should include more than four fields in its "competition" coding.

I started Template:Infobox cricketer six columns and a mock-up test pseudo-article User:Shirt58/Xavier Tras to test it out, but no dice: my horribly malformed code still only outputs four "competions" fields. I am confident that this is because, ahem, I have very little clue at all about how the more complex template code works.

Could someone who groks template code possibly have a little look into this? Thank you!

Peter in Australia aka --Shirt58 (talk) 13:40, 30 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

That's a good start, but you will also need to add to Template:Infobox cricketer/career which formats the table. I love the pseudo-article! -- John of Reading (talk) 13:51, 30 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Collection: Missing tools from Toolserver?

On July 1st 1:00 am UTC, the Toolserver accounts will be expired and tools which haven’t been migrated yet to Tool Labs will stop working. More information can be found here. To get an overview, we started a collection: Do you miss any tools or have you observed any broken redirects? Would you like to maintain a orphaned tool? If so, please post them here. Thank you very much! Silke WMDE (talk) 15:30, 30 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Line spacing

Where can I find the Wiki Help on line spacing and how to change it? (For example, if I want to make the space between a heading and the text under it not a double-line space, but a 1.5 line space.) I have looked everywhere but cannot locate it. . --P123ct1 (talk) 19:21, 30 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Duplicate of Wikipedia:Help desk#Line spacing but this is the better place.

The space between a heading and the text is governed by two properties: the bottom margin of the heading (which for level 1 and level 2 headings is 0.25em, and for level 3/4/5/6 headings is 0px), and the top margin of the paragraph (which is 0.5em). It's probably easiest to reduce the top margin of the paragraphs; you can change it on a personal basis by adding some code to Special:MyPage/skin.css. The code to add varies depending on the skin that you are using. If you have the default (Vector) skin, try this:

div#content p { margin-top: 0.3125em; }

If you use a different skin, another value may be necessary. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:42, 30 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

That looks mind-shatteringly complicated. Having looked at the link I wouldn't know where to being with skin.css. I will find another way round it. --P123ct1 (talk) 22:15, 30 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

You copy that single line of code, click the link I gave, edit the page, paste in the line of code, and save. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:38, 30 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I have done that (and bypassed the cache as instructed) but it makes no difference. I am trying to widen the line spaces before headers I have made in a text I am editing, after turning some of the text into a long bulleted list with some headings. I am using the Vector skin. What am I doing wrong? --P123ct1 (talk) 10:35, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Is this one specific page? If so, which one? --Redrose64 (talk) 10:50, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It is section 7.7.5 "2014 events" in the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant#2014 events article. I can't widen the gap between the month headings and text above them. Clicking enter twice makes the gap too big. Someone had already started putting in some bullet points and I see in the wikitext they put in a semicolon before the months. I don't know if this has anything to do with widening the line space before the first entry for the month. I haven't been editing in Wikipedia for long and am still learning the basic technical stuff! --P123ct1 (talk) 12:17, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It is usually best not to change the default styling. The "2014 events" is actually a list item, not a header. Try using a level 4 header (====) instead. -- [[User:Edokter]] {{talk}} 12:29, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I was under the impression that P123ct1 wanted to set styling on a personal basis: some people do find that varying the spacing between paragraphs improves readability.

Anyway, the text "2014 events" is a level 3 heading; the text "January 2014", "February 2014" etc. is marked up with a semicolon, so is technically a term in a definition list. The bulleted lists that follow the months should not have blank lines between list items, so I removed those per WP:LISTGAP. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:37, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks to both - it makes more sense now. I will use the "definition list" method next time. --P123ct1 (talk) 13:28, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Multiple pinging

Can it be made possible to ping several editors simultaneously (in a multiple ping)? They might be listed as participants or members in a WikiProject (see Category:WikiProjects). They might be categorized in a category of Category:Wikipedians.
—Wavelength (talk) 00:02, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

If so, should be restricted to mass-message-senders! — xaosflux ^Talk 00:13, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

For several years, I have participated at Wikipedia:Reference desk, asking and answering questions. A few times, I have visited the talk pages of WikiProjects to invite comments from their members in answers to those questions. A typical question at one of the reference desks might be relevant to two or three WikiProjects, and it would be convenient to be able to ping them from a discussion in progress. Also, sometimes a question might involve experience or expertise in a foreign language, and it would be convenient to be able to ping certain editors (with the experience or expertise) from a discussion in progress. (Ideally, every editor would watchlist all the reference desks, and every discussion would have a brief, informative heading.)

—Wavelength (talk) 00:38, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Wavelength and Xaosflux: You can already do this. As with any single-person ping, you need to ensure that all the relevant links to user pages are added in the same post as your own signature. --Redrose64 (talk) 07:35, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It would be possible to make a module so that you could do this without knowing all the participants' usernames. There would be a submodule for each project, each with a list of usernames. To use it, you would type {{mass notification|WikiProject Foo}} My message. ~~~~, and the module would insert all of the usernames in the submodule. (The font could be small, or the usernames could even be hidden.) One drawback: I seem to remember that after a certain number of userpage links are included in a post, notifications are no longer sent out. I can't seem to find the number on the extension page or on a few other pages I looked at, though. Is the username limit just my imagination? — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 09:49, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Mr. Stradivarius, if you are going to undertake a project like this, it would likely be a good idea to incorporate it into a converted {{Ping group}}... — {{U|Technical 13}} ^{(e • t • c)} 12:03, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I've got no concerns there, just don't want to open the doors to anyone sending notifications to categories, e.g. pinging Category:Wikipedians in the United States, or even Category:Wikipedia administrators could be disruptive. — xaosflux ^Talk 12:09, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I've now got provisional code working at Module:Mass notification. Please see Template:Mass notification for documentation. Here's some example output:

Notifying all members of WikiProject Example (more info · opt out): A message. — Mr. Stradivarius on tour ^{♪ talk ♪} 16:26, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Wavelength: And as I just got a ping from my alternative account about the message above, I'm satisfied that everything is working properly. Suggestions for formatting the module output are welcome. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 16:28, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Error: the group "T13" was not found. should ping me on all my accounts (except the one I'm currently on of course)? — {{U|Technical 13}} ^{(e • t • c)} 16:57, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm, it looks like this will need to be inline if it's going to play nicely with bulleting and indenting. Here's a new inline version which also hides the individual member links: Notifying all members of WikiProject Example (more info · opt out): my message. — Mr. Stradivarius on tour ^{♪ talk ♪} 17:35, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Mr. Stradivarius, can you add functionality to the module to make the "group" name linked? Since the name may not be an actual page, this would need to be an include-able option from the list page. Also, will this template accept parameters if you want to use it to ping a half dozen or so users and you know all their names (like {{Ping group}} does)? with these two additions, {{Ping group}} can probably be replaced with a redirect to this template/module. — {{U|Technical 13}} ^{(e • t • c)} 18:09, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Technical 13: I've done the first part. I'm not sure adding other users in separately is really necessary. You can just use other notification templates at the same time, or include the usernames manually. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 00:00, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Please see Wikipedia_talk:Mass_message_senders#Bypassing_mass-message_controls.3F. Need to get some details of how this is going to be controlled to prevent making an end-run around the mass messaging controls. — xaosflux ^Talk 14:54, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Toolserver shut down

No more reflinks

It's gone as of today. Is there something else we can use? Anna Frodesiak (talk) 02:36, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

FYI: The toolserver.org reference converter seems to be shut down

I just saw the following error when visiting both http://toolserver.org/~dispenser/cgi-bin/webreflinks.py and http://toolserver.org/~dispenser/view/Reflinks:

"Good bye Toolserver

As of July 1, the community run Toolserver was shut down. My tools weren't aligned with the Wikimedia Foundation's priorities, so they didn't make the transition to Labs."

In my opinion, this is a valuable tool that should be retained, not disbanded. --Jax 0677 (talk) 02:55, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Completely agree that this is a great tool and should be preserved! MaxPayne888 (talk) 07:06, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see why people are acting all surprised about this. Here at VPT, we've known for about two years that all was not right with Toolserver. For the last year or so, we've been told - quite often - that it would be shut down; and some months ago we were told that it would be no later than 30 June. So, today is 1 July, and I don't expect any Toolserver links to work, ever again. --Redrose64 (talk) 07:32, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

To answer the question about Dispenser's tools on the Toolserver, this user has stated on several occasions that they will not migrate their tools from the Toolserver to the new Wikimedia Labs infrastructure. I believe it has something to do with not being allocated the very large amount (24 TB) of disk space that was requested (see an old discussion), but Dispenser didn't really explain himself very clearly. — This, that and the other (talk) 07:49, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I have to say I honestly can't imagine why you'd need anything remotely near 24TB to store 20 million links - that's more than a megabyte per link. And as was pointed out somewhere else, with the WMF servers using multiple redundancy and industrial-grade disks, that's not a trivial amount of resource - it's not like buying a bunch of cheap disks for your home PC. If the WMF raises it as a significant issue (which it is), the way forward is surely to engage in discussion on how to reduce the space requirements and how to fit it in with WMF's available resources? — Alan / Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 08:40, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I don't much care about the rationale. It's in the left hand menu and it needs to work. It's referred to in countless places. The alleged wisdom f crowds strikes again. So how about someone who understands the politics gets it put back? And no, I wasn't aware it was going because, hey, I don;t come here often. Fiddle Faddle 08:27, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Timtrent: It's not in the left hand menu for all users; it's only there for you because it's been installed in User:Timtrent/vector.js - specifically, it's all the lines from

// Add [[WP:Reflinks]] launcher in the toolbox on left

to the end of the file. --Redrose64 (talk) 08:44, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Alarmed to hear this brilliant tool is no more. It was far the best way to create footnotes and rescue old ones. It did not work with Internet Explorer, but it worked perfectly with Firefox. How crazy to get rid of it. --P123ct1 (talk) 10:00, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

That does not console me. It is referred to in countless places, in templates, in help pages, in talk pages. The link to it is everywhere. And it needs to work again. Fiddle Faddle 08:47, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm pretty sure the only way it will ever start working again is if Dispenser chooses to migrate it to Labs, or releases the source code to allow someone else to migrate it (as far as I can tell, the source code is not publicly available). Either way, it would be an immense undertaking that would take a substantial amount of time. — This, that and the other (talk) 08:52, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

And so we descend into the morass of linkrot. Oh joy. We migrate Wikipedia more and more towards Idiocracy. Shall we just turn the lights off now? Reflinks goes. Citation bot stops combining duplicate references, and the whole edifice takes a backward step.

Or shall we do something about it? Gosh it might involve money. Well, WMF has money. Let's spend some. Fiddle Faddle 08:58, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Like. Fylbecatulous talk 12:52, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, why don't we do something about it ? The community needs editors and the editors need good project governance and skilled technical volunteers. There is more than one way to contribute and you are welcome to step into any of those roles at any time. If you write a well defined grant request the Foundation even might throw some money your way. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:10, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I;d like to thank you for your encouragement. When I get some from you I will. Fiddle Faddle 10:19, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Timtrent: To return to your point "I wasn't aware it was going because, hey, I don;t come here often" - VPT was not the only place. I've checked the Signpost archives, and have found:

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-10-01/Technology report#WMF and the German chapter face up to Toolserver uncertainty (whole section)
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-04-22/Technology report#In brief ("Toolserver users to get year to migrate: ...")
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-05-14/Technology report#Highlights from this week's Tech report ("Toolserver tools will be stopped on 30 June. ...")
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-06-04/News and notes#In brief ("Toolserver death imminent: ...")

There are plenty more. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:38, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, justify it all you like. I never saw it. I gave up reading the signpost ages ago. Still, now it has gone I hope the furore over its departure will do something. This reminds me of the Vogon constructor crew who demolished the earth and the earth never had time to object because it never saw the notice. Fiddle Faddle 10:22, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

What Reflinks used to do, even with its limitations, saved a lot of time. To echo Anna Frodesiak: do we have any similar tool? Sam Sailor ^Sing 09:17, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Reflinks was an invaluable tool, and I would like to add my support to the calls to revive or replicate it. --LukeSurl^{t c} 09:23, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

As above - whatever the reasons or rationale, this tool is invaluable and all efforts to revive it should be explored. Manually trying to deal with all the bare URLs around would take eons, and I seriously doubt anyone would be prepared to reduce their numbers. For anyone uncertain of the size of the problem see [Category:Articles needing link rot cleanup from June 2014], for just one month's worth of the backlog to be addressed.

Derek R Bullamore (talk) 09:49, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'll add my two cents worth of pleaing - please bring back Reflinks in some shape or form, a crucial tool. Mick gold (talk) 11:13, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Checklinks has also gone. - X201 (talk) 10:38, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Well, this is unfortunate. I knew there was some question and trouble surrounding this from past usage of the tool, but didn't know it was going to go away today... Is there no alternative or similar tool at all? -- ferret (talk) 11:44, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, so this finally happened (it's been announced many times it would, but it kept getting postponed). The first thing people who come here are going to want to do is to remove the chunk of code from their common or skin specific .js page that looks something like (if you are unsure exactly what to remove, I'd be happy to look and help you):

// Add [[WP:Reflinks]] launcher in the toolbox on left
addOnloadHook(function () {
 addPortletLink(
  "p-tb",     // toolbox portlet
  "http://toolserver.org/~dispenser/cgi-bin/webreflinks.py/" + wgPageName
   + "?client=script&citeweb=on&overwrite=&limit=20&lang=" + wgContentLanguage,
  "Reflinks"  // link label
)});

The next step is figuring out which of the multiple options for what we can do to come up with a solution to this loss in no particular order as I see it:

Create a consensus to give in to Dispenser's demands for 24TB of hard drive space and request the WMF to consider it.
Create another tool similar to reflinks and let it take over.
Create a userscript or gadget to pull a list of link URLs in <ref>...</ref> tags on the page and scrape each URL trying to obtain as much information as possible about the page. It will loose a lot of the "other" features of reflinks, but will essentially offer replacement "preformed" citations in the simplest form.
Create a partnership with another site (there's a vast array of "reference generator" sites like http://www.citationmachine.net/, http://www.easybib.com/, http://www.bibme.org/) to create a tool that will return better cited pages.
Revise and update Citation bot (operated by Smith609) to be able to take over this task.

I'm sure there are other options I've not thought of, but I wanted to get the ball rolling discussing a solution to the problem instead of re-establishing there is a problem. I personally support the upgrade to Citation bot to allow it to automatically fix citations and also be able to do so via a UI. There is also a discussion on mw:Tool Labs/Collection of issues after Toolserver shutdown where you can report other tools that are now gone that you will miss and work on building the list of tools to recreate or get migrated over. — {{U|Technical 13}} ^{(e • t • c)} 12:53, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I think an obvious possibility that you have perhaps overlooked it to get Dispenser to release the source code into the public domain and explain the need for that 24TB (times redundancy requirements). That way, perhaps some work can be done on improving data-storage efficiency (and at more than 1 megabyte per link, there surely has to be something better). And if Dispenser doesn't want to do the work, perhaps someone else could take over? (As an aside, I think a general good move forward would be for the WMF to only allow tools to be run on their servers if the source is released into the public domain) — Alan / Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 13:22, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

This might be one for legal, but can the WMF after notification of the tool owners and a grace period open all the source code on their servers to the others interested in maintaining the tools? Basically a notification that they have X amount of time to get their tools/bots code off the server or it will be considered abandoned and based on the fact that all stuff one WMF servers is suppose to be CC-BY-SA anyways... I'm expecting a no, but it would be interesting to see exactly what legal has to say. If someone knows someone from legal that can ping them to this discussion for an answer, that would be awesome. Thanks. — {{U|Technical 13}} ^{(e • t • c)} 13:33, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
- Actually, one of the differences between Tool Labs and the toolserver (and, a cause of friction originally), is that tools being Open Source is in fact a requirement of hosting in Labs – specifically to deal with that situation. We obviously can't do that retroactively, however. — MPelletier (WMF)^(talk) 14:12, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  - Ah, thanks for the info. I strongly support the requirement for all future tool code to be Open Source - it's entirely within the ethos of Wikimedia as a whole, and we really can't rely on tools that are privately owned and subject to the whims of their owners. — Alan / Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 14:44, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
If there is no hope to retrieve this, getting a replacement built will be important. Maybe it could be an Individual Engagement Grants project? —Anne Delong (talk) 13:57, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

(Copied from the AN thread): I don't know which employee who reputedly said [that 24TB was unreasonable], but that seems to be a gross simplification. I do remember discussing the topic with Dispenser about this, and I remember telling him that 24 TB is a significant chunk of the space available to Labs (our disk space is somewhat constrained and expensive to increase because it lives on a highly redundant array of commercial-grade disks and not on consumer devices), but also that he should discuss this with the Foundation to see if they could allocate the resources to support his tool.

I've also offered to help him analyze other methods of storage for his data (24TB does seem very inefficient for storing some 20 million external links – since it represents over a megabyte of data per link) but he has not offered further details of his architecture or engaged in discussion on how it could be adapted to Tool Labs.

Tool Labs remains open for anyone who has the desire to port/adapt/rewrite the tool. — MPelletier (WMF)^(talk) 03:54, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Re: "Is there no alternative or similar tool at all?" (by ferret) see a little list of ref tools:

https://toolserver.org/~citegen/ is down too (403), User:Holek/cite-gen (licence see CC-BY-SA 2.5 Polska. [43], [44]) N
Universal reference formatter https://toolserver.org/~verisimilus/Scholar/Cite.php is down too (403) [45] N
http://tools.wmflabs.org/makeref/ (Magnus Manske) is working Y
http://tools.wmflabs.org/templator/?language=en , meta:Templator for web References (Magnus Manske) is working Y
Wikipedia Citation template filling https://tools.wmflabs.org/citation-template-filling/ seems OK! Y
http://proveit.wmflabs.org/ seems OK (User:ProveIt_GT) Y
refToolPlus, Wikipedia citation tool (for Google Books only or DOI or NYT) Y

And in future: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor/Design/Reference_Dialog --Atlasowa (talk) 14:14, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Updated, Makeref seems to work now --Atlasowa (talk) 08:17, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I think this discussion belongs at MW: MW:Tool_Labs/Collection_of_issues_after_Toolserver_shutdown. -- Ohc ^¡digame! 14:39, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Timtrent: I'm also very disappointed that Dispenser's tools are now gone. I hope that they will be recreated in some other form. In response to your comment that "It's referred to in countless places", I started removing those references yesterday, including {{Cleanup-bare URLs}}, {{Incoming links}}, {{Dabnav}} and various documentation pages. Links still need to be removed from many other places, including many WikiProject pages (e.g. Wikipedia:WikiProject Mars#Tools). GoingBatty (talk) 17:27, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Redrose64: Although the Toolserver's demise has been a long time coming and mentioned in many places, I bet there are a lot of users who have been happily using Dispenser's tools without understanding that they were hosted on the Toolserver. GoingBatty (talk) 17:32, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I was one of those users. I've always found Reflinks useful because I edit with a screen magnifier and it saves me having to search out names and dates from articles, which can present problems. I think we need to get something else up and running to replace it as soon as we can. I'll fix the sources I've added today manually, but can't imagine wanting to do that on a long term basis. It may also mean I'm less likely to take on big projects such as FAC and GA. This is Paul (talk) 20:18, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Reply - While http://tools.wmflabs.org/templator/?language=en may be the best replacement, it is still much more time consuming than WP:REFLINKS. While I do not have the skill set to create such a tool, I think that it would be extremely helpful to have something equivalent put in its place. If we do not replace this tool, we will have numerous problems with link rot. --Jax 0677 (talk) 19:29, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Nah, doesn't even come close in terms of efficiency. Pulls in quite a lot of junk metadata, but still can you ever imagine trying to populate more than maybe two citations with Templator? I can, and the thought doesn't appeal in the slightest. -- Ohc ^¡digame! 08:04, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@This, that and the other: The code is available and could easily be ported, but cannot be used on Labs as it is not under a free license. πr² (t • c) 20:26, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I assumed every single tool was migrated over .... obviously not, I (and probably everyone else) used Reflinks everyday so I'm disappointed to see it's now dead... –Davey2010 • (talk) 21:36, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Note: I am taking care of the links at the Wikiprojects as seen here :-) -- Moxy (talk) 00:48, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

A lesson

"this user has stated on several occasions that they will not migrate their tools from the Toolserver to the new Wikimedia Labs infrastructure" Why on Earth were we hosting tools which were (apparently) not open source, with the code available for anyone to fork? I hope that lesson has been learned. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:54, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Because it worked for years and WMF has other priorities. However, yes, tools on WMFLabs must be open source. --NeilN ^{talk to me} 17:11, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

That's good to know. I'm not clear, though, what "WMF priorities" have to do with what was on the toolserver. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:30, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Toolserver wasn't WMF, it was Wikimedia Deutschland. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:42, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Andy Mabbett, it's an irritation I have with the WMF. I feel they should be proactive, look for tools that are heavily used in projects but have maintenance risks, and spend some of the ample funds they have to formally take them over or provide support to mitigate the risks. For example, Reftoolbar, one of the best tools for editors, was broken for significant periods of time over the past few years. Now I can't complain because it's maintained by volunteers. But instead of strengthening the stability and maintenance of these types of tools, WMF gives us other stuff... --NeilN ^{talk to me} 19:13, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

WMF stopped being proactive (except in a public-relations role) a long time ago. — Alan / Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 19:20, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I've never seen it more proactive. I seriously wonder if people understand how much of what the WMF is currently responsible for was initially thought up and prototyped by highly committed volunteers. It's mostly just the scale that has changed. It always has been the volunteers that were the proactive ones. That's how and why the whole of toolserver got built in the first place and it's why WMF thought it was time to facilitate it in a more permanent manner. It might not be finished yet, but long term this is probably a much healthier setup. Also when asking why, remember that the toolserver much predates the technical staff of WMF actually. Toolserver started in 2005. In oktober 2006, WMF only employed 2 technical staff employees. I would however qualify them more as 2 paid fulltime volunteers assisted with a ragged bunch of unpaid volunteers. It probably took until late 2009 before WMF tech staff was able to look into the future beyond just 'keeping the thing online'. By that time toolserver was already hosting hundreds of services. It's why an API was added, why ResourceLoader arrived, why work was done on replication and database dumps. In some way that made the problem bigger, because more tools were being built by more volunteers :) —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:18, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

So WMF reacted reactively to what individuals were doing, and saw that it was good and helped - but that's not proactive — Alan / Boing! said Zebedee (talk) 21:33, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

You mean it's not proactive on the front end parts that you care about. It was quite proactive at backend parts. But that doesn't translate into instant results, it's with the foresight of the next ten years, not for today. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:21, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Sadly, there is very little that we (the WMF) can do about tools whose maintainers refuse to open source. We obviously can't simply steal their code, or forbid project volunteers from using them until they break. The only thing we can do (and have done) is to provide an infrastructure for running tools of that kind with a set of rules designed to make sure things like that cannot happen in the future.

I suppose you could say that the lesson was already anticipated and learned; but there's nothing we could do that would fix things retroactively. — MPelletier (WMF)^(talk) 23:53, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the comment. Obviously, it sucks to abruptly lose a tool that many people used productively... but it's pretty much inevitable that something was going to break with the shutdown of the Toolserver, especially given the lack of agreement with the author of Reflinks in terms of licensing and computing resources. —Moxfyre (ǝɹʎℲxoɯ | contrib) 01:57, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

MPelletier (WMF), I'm not sure the lesson was fully learned. Suppose some other volunteer tech guru resurrects Reflinks. Is WMF prepared to allocate money and resources to ensure the code will be properly taken care of if the volunteer stops volunteering instead of hoping another volunteer steps up? --NeilN ^{talk to me} 02:10, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I don't believe that's an entirely reasonable expectation any more than it would make sense to expect that the WMF could hire editors to take the place of leaving ones. We are, in the end, a volunteer-driven project; what we can do is make sure that everything is in place to make sure that any volunteer that is willing to take over a community tool is able to.

That said, any tool that has become a critical component of the volunteers workflow may be a reasonable candidate for integration into production (as an extension, perhaps, or part of core) and it might be a good idea to propose its rewrite/integration as an Engineering project. — MPelletier (WMF)^(talk) 02:39, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

WMF is a volunteer-driven organization? News to me. So all these people are volunteers? We both know WMF is largely staffed with paid positions, designed to support a volunteer organization which focuses mainly on content. It is entirely reasonable to expect any good proactive IT department to identify important IT functionality which is weakly supported by them and take steps to improve the situation. Again, being proactive is not waiting for users to come to you with proposals hoping to pick up spare change left over from VE and Flow. Being proactive is actually assigning WMF resources to go out into the projects, seeing what's being used, and making sure the important stuff is properly covered as part of their every day jobs. --NeilN ^{talk to me} 03:45, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Of course it is. None of it would be here if it weren't for the volunteers who originally built the Wikimedia movement. And if they all left, the WMF would be absolutely nothing. Legoktm (talk) 04:48, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think you're understanding or addressing the distinction I'm making. --NeilN ^{talk to me} 04:54, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

In the years in which editing and development were both voluntary, an editor would see an issue, and a developer would address it in a 1:1 tester/developer ratio. When the code was stable, the tester would announce it, and the developer would wait for more requests. Very efficient. Why couldn't this kind of model be used today? That would lessen the amount of overhead. --Ancheta Wis (talk | contribs) 05:11, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Development IS still voluntary plus a few people get paid by WMF so they can do long-term development and are definitely around. Maybe you missed the word "completely" in your sentence? Anyway, when were those days you dscribe? How did that one tester among those tens of thousands of users find that one developer among those thousands of developers? How many issues are you aware of that never got reported plus which criteria allow to judge which model worked better (if there actually are different models)? Are there examples that your described model works and scales in any other really huge free collaboration project on the internet? I'm curious and somehow doubtful. --Malyacko (talk) 09:01, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It was over 10-11 years ago. Wikipedia was small enough that Recent changes was usable, meaning that the community of editors could lurk and pounce on the changes. For example, when the homunculus page was started with one sentence, 7 editors jumped in over the hour & a half after it was started. At that time, Wikipedia had a large number of developers who also edited, so a peer would request and another peer would implement, or administer. The peers separated out by interest/inclination afterward. As another example, User:Eloquence proposed that the main page have a small number of categories to link to, so we just jumped in and re-implemented the main page. We seemed to all know html, for example, and the wiki text just seemed intuitive, not needing explanation. The help pages got implemented in the same way. One peer, then another, in a huge cascade, as in for example {{catmore}}, now obsolete. Hacking got us what we wanted, for example when user:mav discovered the proper magic word to increment the date counter, which was the basis behind Selected Anniversaries. There were no portals, at the time, so we abused the category pages to serve as portals. You get the idea. Very few constraints. --Ancheta Wis (talk | contribs) 14:21, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I am torn between thanking Dispenser for creating this tool, which was immensely useful, and berating him for not making it open source/free software and "taking his toys with him". Did anyone ask him (or did he say himself) why his tools are not open source? User:Dispenser/Toolserver migration hardly explains much, and I do get the general feeling of "either my way or the highway" attitude :( PS. That said, perhaps there's just some sort of misunderstnading/burn-out. I'd hope that current troubles don't overshadow Dispenser's immense contributions, and we can work this out - i.e. if he is too burned out to continue himself, at least convince him to license his tools under GFDL or such. Looking at his page at [46] I am not seeing any copyright notice; does anyone know if he ever addressed that in some shape or form? (Also, how stupid it was of us not have a generic note that any and all content hosted on the Toolserver would be open source...?).

I said it before, however, just like User:Pigsonthewing, that hosting non-open source content on toolserver was an error. It created a set of bad practices that we are now paying for. If it's not open code, we should reject it from the start. PS. If anyone replies to me directly, please echo me. Thanks, --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 13:37, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus, you bring up a good point. Dispenser's tools are open source but not freely licensed. The new Tools Labs policies only state that tools have to be open source and open data, nothing about licenses. So what's to prevent a similar situation from happening again? MPelletier (WMF), can you comment? --NeilN ^{talk to me} 14:08, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@NeilN: What does "open source but not freely licensed" mean? Are you saying that he shares the source code (does not imply open source) but doesn't license it under a free/open source license? —Moxfyre (ǝɹʎℲxoɯ | contrib) 18:19, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Moxfyre: Correct. The source is publicly available but is not freely distributable or modifiable. Kind of like Microsoft_Reciprocal_License#Restricted_licenses. --NeilN ^{talk to me} 19:13, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Other tools

I see above that checklinks was mentioned, but while this discussion is occurring, I'd also like to point out Dispenser's other tools like Dabsolver and Dabfix, which I've found useful for disambiguating links or expanding dab pages. They may not be as broadly useful, but they were handy and I'd hate to see them not replaced. —Ost (talk) 17:36, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Dabsolver was by far the best disambiguation tool by a country mile. Will be less likely to dab without it.Blethering Scot 20:37, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, we always knew that if we made a mistake Dabsolver would be along soon to let us know about it. How many people will remember to check every link they add? This is Paul (talk) 20:42, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

That's what DPL bot does, and it has nothing to do with Dabsolver. Graham87 04:14, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Is there a replacement for Dispenser's transcludedchanges tool?

I just tried to check the transcludedchanges WikiProject watchlist tool, only to find that since the toolserver had been shut down and the tool hadn't been migrated to labs, it doesn't exist anymore! Is there any replacement for this currently on labs or planned for labs, or will we have to make do without this incredibly useful tool for the forseeable future? StringTheory11 (t • c) 19:37, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I had the same experience. The WikiProject watchlist was one of my startup tabs. Van Isaac_WS^cont 21:44, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Also Scottywong's tools

Scotty tools. I don't know how many tools Scotty aka Snottywong had out there, but he has been semi-retired for a while. One of his tools we depended on at Did You Know was what DYK referred to as the QPQ check. It checked for how many previous DYK nominations a user had on the Main Page by detecting how many notices the DYK bot had placed on their user page. 5 or more means they are required to to a QPQ review when they nominate a DYK hook. Now we have no way of ascertaining that data. — Maile (talk) 22:13, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Maile66: "23:23 <Betacommand> Im in the process of writing DyK checker" "23:24 <Betacommand> Im about half way done already" Meatsocked by 930913 {{ping}} 22:36, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. — Maile (talk) 22:38, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Maile66: "00:01 <Betacommand> http://tools.wmflabs.org/betacommand-dev/cgi-bin/dyk.py?user=Maile66 or http://tools.wmflabs.org/betacommand-dev/cgi-bin/dyk.py" "00:09 <Betacommand> Im open to feedback/more tool requests" Meatsocked by 930913 {{ping}} 23:12, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I have posted a notice at DYK Talk and asked for comments to be posted here at this thread. This, looks good to me as far as duplicating what Scotty had. — Maile (talk) 23:31, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

"And here is the code for your /Common.js
if(wgNamespaceNumber==3 || wgNamespaceNumber==2) mw.util.addPortletLink('p-cactions', '//tools.wmflabs.org/betacommand-dev/cgi-bin/dyk.py?user=' + encodeURIComponent(mw.config.get('wgTitle')), 'DYK Notices');

Or if you prefer for your greasemonkey users"

930913 {{ping}} 23:35, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

OK, I copied and pasted the above to my Common.js. What does it to for me? Will it be in my Toolbox sidebar? What DYK really needs is for this to be added to Template:DYK tools, which then appears on each nomination template. — Maile (talk) 23:43, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I pasted this onto the DYK tools template. We'll see how this works. — Maile (talk) 00:03, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Can we raise the loss of these tools with someone at WMF?

I ask because I think the loss of all these tools will affect my ability to edit, and perhaps that of others. I'm classed as visually impaired and use a screen magnifier to work on articles, and things like Reflinks, Dabsolver, etc, save a lot of time and effort. As I've mentioned above I can't imagine wanting to take on anything big because it'll be a nightmare trying to get it into shape. We do need something to replace the tasks these things did. This is Paul (talk) 21:19, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm certain that the WMF are aware: but it is not their fault that replacement tools are not on Labs. They did not create any of the tools on Toolserver, the onus is primarily on the tool creators to make sure that there is an equivalent on Labs. Missing tools fall into two main groups: those that were set up on Toolserver by users who (for one reason or another) are no longer with us; and those that were set up on Toolserver by users who are still around, but have either forgotten or refused to port the tools over. Either way, the WMF are not responsible for creating replacements; and if the source code is not available (as is the case with Dispenser's tools), there's not much that anybody else can do other than start from scratch. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:24, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I have to point out here that this very scenario is the reason why the Labs terms of service were constructed from the start with the requirement that any software used or installed there (with very limited exceptions) be open source and readily salvageable in case of departure or inactivity by the maintainers.

It's obviously extremely disruptive when a community tool being relied upon by the project's volunteers for day-to-day works breaks down and can't be fixed; and Labs was designed to make that situation easier to recover from. — MPelletier (WMF)^(talk) 23:46, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It seems pretty clear now that the issue lies solely with Dispenser. He needs to come forth with the real reason for not porting it to the new server. Without his code, the place will have some hiccups but nothing will come crashing down. Nobody has been bothered rewriting it before because there was no need, but I am sure someone will come along and write a free-licensed version if Dispenser refuses to give over the code. But writing new code will take time. -- Ohc ^¡digame! 02:15, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

A new reflinks will take a lot of time. Once again, why not put some money on the table? A cash offer for a new reflinks or the old code ought to get this sorted out right away. Why not? Anna Frodesiak (talk) 05:18, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Only Dispenser knows the real reason why he's holding out. You may have an answer, but I wouldn't care to speculate. -- Ohc ^¡digame! 08:07, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Reply - Should we start an WP:RFC to have The Wikimedia Foundation reimplement WP:Reflinks or an equivalent application through their code or otherwise? --Jax 0677 (talk) 19:38, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Getting reflinks again

I asked Dispenser at his IRC channel if he could donate the code for reflinks to WMF. I'm not sure how that all works and if the code could be used again. Anyway, couldn't WMF even pony up some cash for the cause? Reflinks saves editors thousands of hours. It's an essential service, no? Anna Frodesiak (talk) 23:54, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

WMF seems to have $22,171,889 in a great big pile. I suggest we offer 5,000 bucks for the product, and that's peanuts. That would leave WMF with $22,166,889 which is still plenty. Anna Frodesiak (talk) 00:11, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

How would a "Throw some code over the wall" action help? I don't think it's really about money - code needs to be understood in order to maintain it, but nobody except for the author has an understanding of the codebase (and its complexity or quality). --Malyacko (talk) 09:07, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Oh. Okay. Sorry. I just don't know anything about code. I thought it would just be like buying a software product. Anna Frodesiak (talk) 09:14, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

But, as Anna Frodesiak says, it saves (saved) editors thousands of hours?? Martinevans123 (talk) 09:23, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Anna Frodesiak: Usually, software bought off the shelf will have been written such that it will work on a variety of different systems, but not all - something written for Windows is unlikely to work on a Mac (and vice versa). Normally there is information on the packaging which shows which systems it works with - but for each of those, the software writers will have needed access to each of the different platforms that they claim compatibility with. If they only have access to one machine, which is running Microsoft Windows XP (Service Pack 3), they cant put "For Microsoft Windows" on the packaging, because it's unlikely to work with Windows 3.1, perhaps not even with Windows XP (Service Pack 2). By analogy, software written specifically for Toolserver won't necessarily work on Labs without careful testing and adjustment. We may be able to get a copy off Toolserver, and it may be possible to install that copy on Labs; if we can install, we can then test; but without the source code, we can't adjust. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:50, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

However, a savvy developer will be able to take the code and read it, and untangle the original requirements and design decisions from it. They can make an educated judgment call on whether to port the code or rewrite it, but without an original reference implementation of how it is supposed to work exactly, any new tool will be swamped by "it doesn't work with 'x'" reports the minute it's launched. So the code is useful even if it's not ultimately used. Ritchie333 ^(talk) ^(cont) 13:19, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Underlining the need discussed here for Reflinks. I just came across an article with 579 references, almost all of them bare URLs. Based on the title of the list article, I think it must be one in a series of 26 articles. — Maile (talk) 17:52, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

A sad day for WP. And I can't believe the laconic WMF statement "everybody knew the toolserver was going to shut down". Yeah, i had heard about that, but never in my worst nightmares imagined that this would mean closing down tools like reflinks (and anybody here having trouble recently with Citationbot, too, especially articles with more than just a few references?) Isn't that what WMF is for, providing support for the editing community? Wasn't it obvious to anybody involved in the technical side of these things that massively used tools like this need to be replaced? As Anna Frodesiak says, they're sitting on a pile of $$$, why aren't they using it to prevent this kind of situations? Instead they are spending time, money, and effort on unwanted "improvements" (like the much-missed orange message bar) and sit idly by and watch the blue sky while hugely useful tools disappear. Make our life easier, not harder, people! --Randykitty (talk) 18:57, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Checklinks Alternative?

Is there an alternative to Checklinks somewhere out there? I ask because I used Checklinks often to make sure my GA and FA articles are up-to-date link-wise. - Neutralhomer • Talk • 00:35, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Seriously, no alternative to Checklinks exists? - Neutralhomer • Talk • 16:32, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Break

24 TB isn't needed. Legoktm (talk) 00:58, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I took it down due to Dispenser's request. It was a very simple proof of concept, that running webreflinks.py DOES NOT require 24 TB of space. It took about 2 hours to set up on a fresh webserver, or about 30 minutes on Tool Labs. Legoktm (talk) 01:28, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

User:Legoktm: can you tell us more about this request? What did Dispenser say? Why did he want you to take down what you describe was an already-working replacement? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 13:59, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Please let's collect missing tools in a single place

Hello! Thanks for the feedback about what's missing! May I ask you to keep the collection of what is missing / malfunctioning in one place only? It's so much easier for everbody to go through one page only. As mentioned above, we created one single page where you add the tool you miss most, missing redirects from Toolserver to Tool Labs and problems you can't name exactly (we'll sort out what you mean). You add also add yourself as someone interested in migrating or maintaining someone else's tools, so the upper part can work a bit like a voting for those who want to help to see which tools are missed by how many people. Would you mind to bring the missing tools you mentioned over? Thanks! Silke WMDE (talk) 07:15, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

See list here: User_talk:Dispenser#A_table_showing_the_old_Toolserver_tool_and_its_replacement by User:Anna Frodesiak - is this what you wanted? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 13:52, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Isn't that the same list as is shown at #Duplication detector below? --Redrose64 (talk) 16:40, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Suggestion: positive reinforcement, or stuff the pride and ask (beg) nicely

Here's a thought. We can rant about some developers not using open source, taking their toys, etc., and it will make them even more alienated. Or we can consider that nothing is white or black, those guys (that guy...) did a lot for the community in their own way, and if we ask really nice, they may port the tools/relicence them under GFDL and let others work on them. So how about dropping at Dispenser's talk page, and leaving him a wikilove "thank you for your past great contribs, can you port/relicence your tools"? type of a message? I'd be surprised if getting a few dozen NICE requests telling him we appreciate his works wouldn't make him reconsider. I, for one, have been burned out of Wikipedia before, and few kind words, even in the occasional ocean of malice, did a lot to make me stay. Let's show Dispensers that we are not "leechers" who just demand and rant, and keep a lid on our valid but not so constructive complains of "he could've done it better" (yes, he could - and so could have all of us). --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 13:57, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

RfC to have The Wikimedia Foundation implement an application equivalent to Reflinks

I am starting this thread to determine whether an RfC should be started to see if The Wikimedia Foundation can/should implement an application equivalent to WP:Reflinks, through payment, outsourcing or otherwise. I am not as familiar with the history of Reflinks as some people are, so I wanted to enlist feedback. Thoughts? --Jax 0677 (talk) 19:41, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

User:Dispenser/Checklinks was also very valuable. BollyJeff | talk 20:00, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Lets wait for the fallout to settle and see who steps up to replace the tools that where lost in the toolserver shutdown. Odds are most of these will be replaced if we give them time to do so. Werieth (talk) 20:02, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Authority control template not showing in mobile

The {{Authority control}} template is not showing in the mobile versions of our pages (nor the new android app). Is this because the HTML table is classed navbox-inner? It should display, since its content is data, not navigation-chrome. I'm also concerned that other data-containing templates may be hidden by the same cause, whatever it is. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:37, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

No it's because the the HTML table has the class navbox which like the metadata class (and four others) is set display: none !important; in mobile. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:38, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Redrose64: Thank you. So, what's the bast way to fix this? Assuming we really don't want navboxes to display in mobile, what's the best alternative class to give the template (which, semantically, is not a navbox), to preserve the appearance on desktop, yet display in mobile? Do we need a new class? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 19:01, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I now see that I missed that class, because the template's using nested tables, that's surely unnecessary? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 19:03, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The template was Lua-ised over a year ago, the workings are impenetrable. I left a note at Template talk:Authority control#Not on mobile which may be spotted by those responsible. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:05, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I also find my ability to contribute to template development is reduced, since I can't code Lua. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:40, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

If you make it look like a navbox, by pretending it to be a navbox, then it will behave as a navbox. Currenly navboxes are not shown in Mobile, because they pose significant interaction design problems when it comes to usability on smaller devices (a problem that the Mobile team will work on long term). Navboxes are also traditionally internal links. External links should go into the external links section. This is a side effect of it being aligned with "person data", but person data is metadata (primarily for search engines) that is hidden (and long term can be sourced from WikiData). Navboxes also don't count as the 'content proper'. They are 'assistive', you could call them User interface elements defined in content, the content should be complete without their presence just as much as with their presence. If you want to find longterm solution to you immediate problem, then those are the issues that need to be dealt with. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:44, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Another new bug today - don't know the terminology

Probably related to all the July 1 changes going on. Pick any article, because it doesn't matter which one or which edit. Go to the article Page → History → Compare Selected Revisions. You get the usual Diffs view. What has changed today is below the diffs. There is a toggle arrow that, prior to today when clicked, opens a window below it and always shows you clearly "red" highlight for what was taken out and "green" highlight for what was added. But clearly. If it's a word or a symbol, that's what you see in red or green, in its regular place within the prose. The diff today that I've linked above will still open a window below with the toggle arrow. And there's still red and green highlights. But to a non programmer, it's just a bunch of unusable code:

NewPP limit report Parsed by mw118066 CPU time usage: 01.828116 seconds Real time usage: 01.966262 seconds Preprocessor visited node count: 1223/1000000 Preprocessor generated node count: 5661/1500000 Post‐expand include size: 12394/2048000 bytes Template argument size: 732/2048000 bytes Highest expansion depth: 14/40 Expensive parser function count: 1/500 Lua time usage: 0.080114/10.000 seconds Lua memory usage: 1.81 MB/50 MB

Etc. etc. etc. and on it goes. — Maile (talk) 21:05, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Entirely unrelated. @Cacycle:, this has bren happening sporadicallysince Special:ComparePages support was added to wikEdDiff and I can't remember if I reported it or not... — {{U|Technical 13}} ^{(e • t • c)} 21:37, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Significant backlog at Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Holding cell

I'm hoping to find some interested template editors to assist with the significant backlog found at Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Holding cell, particularly with the merge results. Thanks in advance. -- Netoholic @ 21:17, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Duplication detector

Hello again! Since the Toolserver is gone, so has Duplication Detector. Has it migrated somewhere? Or, if not, is there an alternative? I am already in withdrawal over Reflinks... —Anne Delong (talk) 22:19, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. Dup Detector at Labs — Maile (talk) 22:22, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Anne, Duplication Detector has been on Labs for months now, Copyvios was moved yesterday and User:Technical 13/Scripts/CVD.js was updated accordingly this morning. — {{U|Technical 13}} ^{(e • t • c)} 23:17, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I was likely still using an old bookmark in my browser. I tried looking for for the WP:Duplication detector page to find the replacement, but didn't find it. It's obviously there, so I guess my bad typing is to blame. I later found a link to the new version in the template on a page which was tagged for deletion because of copyvio, but not in time to remove this query. —Anne Delong (talk) 04:19, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Is there a list somewhere of the toolserver tools and their wmflabs replacement? Anna Frodesiak (talk) 23:25, 1 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Now there's a good question! —Anne Delong (talk) 04:19, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I started this (Feel free to change the transclusion to a link if you like.):

Link: User:Anna Frodesiak/Grey sandbox

User:Anna Frodesiak/Grey sandbox

If it exists already somewhere, please say and I'll delete it. Otherwise, please help expand it and we can stick it somewhere useful or link to it. Many thanks, Anna Frodesiak (talk) 08:39, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The main list is mw:Wikimedia_Labs/Tool_Labs/List_of_Toolserver_Tools. --Nemo 10:03, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Wow, that's a monster. I think the table might still be useful. Thoughts? Anna Frodesiak (talk) 10:21, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

toollabs:tools-info/migration-status.php --Glaisher (talk) 11:31, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the link. :) Anna Frodesiak (talk) 11:45, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

PDF printouts have lost some harv citation detail

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T48115

In PDF printouts, harvnb citations are not rendered in the footnotes. The ordinary web pages are working; it's just the PDFs that are not working. For example, in Sequent, footnote 2 has a harvnb "Lemmon 1965 p.12" as expected in the web page; however, when 'download as PDF', that pdf's footnote 2 will have a bunch of commas. Same issue with footnote 1 in the PDF. Footnotes work in both IE 11 (Win 7) [which has Acrobat 8.1], and in Firefox 29.0 (Ubuntu 14.04) [which has PDF Producer: ReportLab PDF Library - www.reportlab.com PDF Version:1.4 Page Count:7] --Ancheta Wis (talk | contribs) 00:42, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Ancheta Wis: It's not a problem with {{harvnb}} but with templates that are enclosed in parser tags such as <ref>...</ref> - the PDF renderer doesn't handle them at all well. There is plenty on this at Help:Books/Feedback (and its archives), in the archives of this page (e.g. Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 116#PDF output of Wikipedia Page is Missing its References Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 124#Re "Download as PDF" function), and in bugzilla:46115. Pages that use {{sfn}} instead of <ref>{{harvnb}}</ref>, such as NBR 224 and 420 Classes, render just fine as PDF, which suggests to me that one way of fixing it without using {{sfn}} is to use {{#tag|ref|...}} instead of <ref>...</ref> - but that's cumbersome. --Redrose64 (talk) 08:24, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Empty group of users

Would someone mind explaining what this is? The listing at Special:Statistics just links to Wikipedia:Users, which is rather unhelpful. --N Y Kevin 00:42, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It's a form in which you enter the first few chars of the user name [e.g., Example], and select the role [e.g., Rollbacker], then click Go, and you will see a report of those users with that privilege. --Ancheta Wis (talk | contribs) 00:56, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I think NYKevin is specifically asking about the access group 'users' - which has no members. — xaosflux ^Talk 01:05, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

IIRC it's for IPs. Ansh666 03:11, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It was caused by an erroneous change to the EducationProgram extension (gerrit:139646). I've commented there. — This, that and the other (talk) 05:50, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Where are my search prefs?

I would like to change my search preferences, but cannot find them. All the help links indicate that there is supposed to be a "Search" tab on my preferences page, but it is not there. Help? — Gorthian (talk) 03:27, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Gorthian: You can set default namespaces to search for at Special:Search under the "Advanced" tab, tick the box next to Remember selection for future searches. Other customisations can be done by using gadgets. There are several gadgets to customize search. --Glaisher (talk) 06:07, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, Glaisher, but I've already set an "Advanced" search, and now my search-result page always shows the whole kit and kaboodle of the "advanced" checkboxes, and I have to scroll a ways to see the actual results. (I work chiefly on my iPad, and screen space is precious.) I was hoping to have a better solution. I will check out the gadgets. — Gorthian (talk) 06:22, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

New "insource" search not working (for me)

I am unable to use the new "insource" search feature described at this mediawiki page to search using regular expressions. This feature was supposed to be enabled in CirrusSearch, the new beta search feature, on June 26.

I have enabled the new search in my Beta Preferences. I try to search for the example on the page linked above — insource:/foo/ — but I get only a red error message: "An error has occurred while searching: We could not complete your search due to a temporary problem. Please try again later."

It has not been a temporary problem, at least for me. I have gotten this same error message when trying to search for any regular expression using the syntax above. I have tried this search a few times a day for the past four days. I have gotten this error message every time.

Is it working for anyone? What is the trick to making it work? – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:32, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@NEverett (WMF): ? — This, that and the other (talk) 05:52, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

See mailarchive:wikitech-ambassadors/2014-June/000768.html & bugzilla:43652#c13. --Glaisher (talk) 05:53, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the links. I had seen the first one via the helpful Tech News update that has been posted to this page. The mailing list note says that "the article source will take some time to roll into the index after the deployment." I wonder if "some time" means a few days or a few months. Recategorizing articles when templates are changed is taking about 90 days currently.

The bugzilla report said that Wikipedias were about 10% indexed at some point on June 27, but there is no subsequent update to let us know the pace of the reindexing. And of course, being the hegemonic sort that I am, I care only about the English-language WP, so I really want to know the reindexing timeline for en.WP, not the average of all WPs.

The bugzilla report also says that Special:Search/insource:/a/ is working, but I get the same red error message when I try it. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:48, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry about that! Yeah, enwiki isn't fully indexed with source yet - it'll be a few more days before its done. I just tried it and it worked for me but I get that this doesn't mean it works for everyone all the time. I've opened bugzilla:67418 issues like this. So far it has three points: error message when a query times out, raise the timeout for regexes, and making sure that the regex is executed last. When we first implemented this we spent so long making sure syntax errors were somewhat readable that we neglected those other points. Syntax errors are pretty ok though: Special:Search/insource:/a/.NEverett (WMF) (talk) 15:33, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Let me revise that "few days" because I can be more accurate. enwiki is 39% done reindexing right now. Rough math puts that completing around July 11th. Unlike the old search index a full reindex is slow and competes with other stuff running on the job queue. Its one of my least favorite parts of the whole thing. It creates a much higher fidelity search index but at a pretty steep cost. On the other hand if MediaWiki gets faster then so does this so at least we're in an "a rising tide lifts all boats" kind of situation.NEverett (WMF) (talk) 15:48, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Recategorizing articles when templates are changed is taking about 90 days currently

Another point: "Recategorizing articles when templates are changed is taking about 90 days currently." Wow! You mean, like, if a template that contains a category changes then pages that have the category take months to get reindexed by Cirrus? That's horrible. I knew it was slow and I've always wanted to add monitoring to it but its never floated to the top of the list. I've bumped it up bugzilla:67419. NEverett (WMF) (talk) 15:42, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

NEverett (WMF), I have moved this to its own subsection. I will give a concrete example so that we are both talking about the same thing. The Citation/CS1 Lua module, which is the foundation for heavily-used citation templates like {{cite web}} and {{cite journal}}, was updated on 30 March. The changes included the creation of a new citation error category, Category:CS1 errors: authorlink. Between 30 March and 28 June, a few hundred articles trickled into that category as articles were processed (by a back-end null edit or something; the job queue?). I fixed them every day or two as they popped up in the category. The most recent one to appear was corrected on 28 June, shortly after it appeared in the category. As you can see in the date of the previous edit before my edit, some sort of reindexing or job queue put the article in the category, not an erroneous edit by an editor.

There were other new categories and error types created in this revision. They behaved in the same way, with a large chunk of articles popping into the category in the first week or so, then a continual trickle for months.

As recently as six months ago, these changes propagated in less than 60 days, which is still ridiculously long, but now it's 50% longer. Anything you can do to make that propagation faster will be appreciated. Thanks! – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:56, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Something happened to the job queue about a year ago. Until then, a template change would pretty much always be fully processed within twelve hours, and was often finished in less than two. Since then, it takes days - even weeks - and sometimes appears that some job queue tasks never get fully completed. There are several link tables which should be updated together; sometimes one of these is updated but not the others. Consider the category mentioned above: it might be that viewing an article shows the category at the bottom, but upon going to the cat page, the article is not listed (let's call this case "A"). It might be the other way around: you view a cat page, click on an article, and find that the cat is not shown at the bottom of the article (case "B"). A WP:NULLEDIT to the category does nothing useful; a NULLEDIT to the article fixes things up - for that one specific article. For case "B" you can go through the whole cat, article by article, and NULLEDIT; but for case "A", although a NULLEDIT will also fix that one article, I know of no way of locating the other articles that need the same treatment. Another situation concerns "what links here". The template might have links to other pages - this is common practice with navboxes - and if an article link is added to or removed from the navbox, a "what links here" for that article may give a false picture for a very long time. Something similar happens when templates transclude other templates - the deeper a template is in the transclusion tree, the less likely it is that a "what links here" for the template will show the transclusions accurately. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:54, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Mobile view being intrusive

I have disabled mobile view on my tablet because I find editing easier on desktop view. However, when following certain links to Wikipedia (specifically those of the form http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bond - note, not https:// and not index.php) I am nevertheless sent to the mobile page, even though the mobile site recognises I am logged in. Unfortunately, several useful sites use this sort of link, not least Google.

Is there a way to permanently disable mobile in Preferences, and if not, why not? BethNaught (talk) 09:11, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

PS following the link I typed will not demonstrate the behaviour as MediaWiki appears to automatically use https:// when rendering links if you have that enabled in your Preferences. BethNaught (talk) 09:12, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It seems that the cookie that is set to keep track of this is set as a 'secure' cookie. that means it is not visible when entering form an http link. I'm not sure why this is. I'll look a bit further or report it as a bug. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:19, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you. Sounds like it's easy to fix for the relevant people. BethNaught (talk) 14:45, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Looking for a class

Is there a class that produces <code>...</code> formatting? If so, I'd be grateful to know more – I haven't noticed anything in MediaWiki:Common.css or Wikipedia:Catalogue of CSS classes. Sardanaphalus (talk) 11:26, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

<code> is an HTML tag. --Glaisher (talk) 13:22, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I think that what Sardanaphalus is after is a class that mimics the normal styling of the <code> tag, so that the class can be applied to a table cell, with the effect that everything in that cell will be styled as if it were enclosed in <code>...</code> --Redrose64 (talk) 13:29, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Not really, there is mw-code, but that is part of the interface, it's not really intended for content and might have sight effects (either now, or in the future), so not to be advised. Also, using the html tag does more than apply styling, it also indicates semantics, you should therefor use it whenever you write a code block. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:00, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

New search history tool

The new search history tool at https://tools.wmflabs.org/xtools/blame/?style=new is very useful, but what does starting date and ending date mean? For example, is the starting date the date you want to move forward from or back from? The tool can be used without filling in those boxes, but it would be good to know what they mean. --P123ct1 (talk) 18:16, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I am not getting pinged

Edits like this and this have not resulted in me getting notifications - any reason why? Is it because I am already watching those pages? Giant Snowman 18:25, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Pinging only works if a signature is added with the same edit as the userpage link; see the documentation at mw:Echo/Feature requirements#User Mention. In the first diff the link was added when the comment was already there, which doesn't trigger a notification. The ping in the second diff should have worked though. SiBr₄ (talk) 18:32, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict) It's not related to watching the pages. You are only pinged when the post which linked you was signed in the same edit (see Wikipedia:Notifications), so your first example did not cause a ping. The second should, assuming you have a checkmark in the Web column at "Mention" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-echo. It was two weeks ago. Are you sure you weren't pinged? If you were then it should still be listed when you click the number next to your user name at top of pages. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:35, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I definitely wasn't pinged for any of those direct posts, see this - though I did receive a 'ping' for this recently... Giant Snowman 18:52, 2 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

[1] "test 1".Template:Ref supports

[2] test 2Template:Ref supports

[3] test 3Template:Ref supports

[1]

[2]

[3]

Tech News: 2014-24

Templates containing <ref> or <references> tags will no longer need dummy parameters to prevent caching.

Question re Special: Thanks

Missing piece of wiki table syntax/markup?

Automating the creation of Wikidata articles

Upload a file through the API

Classic Wikipedia article traffic stats not working. What!?

Requested new citation template feature: Hover the mouse over a footnote marker and the supported text is highlighted

Technicals images shouldn't show in MediaViewer

Something changed font rendering in Chrome

Finding things in my user space.

Page title conflicts through newly assigned Unicode characters?

Improved Diff acting up

Resuming PDF downloads

jQuery update causes constant script error

GeoGroupTemplate not working

Servers not serving, and not timing out either

Flags and text distorted when editing (Chrome, Firebox)

Tech News: 2014-27

Template code help please!

Collection: Missing tools from Toolserver?

Line spacing

Multiple pinging

Toolserver shut down

No more reflinks

A lesson

Other tools

Is there a replacement for Dispenser's transcludedchanges tool?

Also Scottywong's tools

Can we raise the loss of these tools with someone at WMF?

Getting reflinks again

Checklinks Alternative?

Break

Please let's collect missing tools in a single place

Suggestion: positive reinforcement, or stuff the pride and ask (beg) nicely

RfC to have The Wikimedia Foundation implement an application equivalent to Reflinks

Authority control template not showing in mobile

Another new bug today - don't know the terminology

Significant backlog at Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Holding cell

Duplication detector

PDF printouts have lost some harv citation detail

Empty group of users

Where are my search prefs?

New "insource" search not working (for me)

Recategorizing articles when templates are changed is taking about 90 days currently

Mobile view being intrusive

Looking for a class

New search history tool

I am not getting pinged

Templates containing `<ref>` or `<references>` tags will no longer need dummy parameters to prevent caching.