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view · edit Frequently asked questions (see also: Misplaced Pages:Technical FAQ) Click "" next to each point to see more details. If something looks wrong, purge the server's cache, then bypass your browser's cache. This tends to solve most issues, including improper display of images, user-preferences not loading, and old versions of pages being shown. No, we will not use JavaScript to set focus on the search box. This would interfere with usability, accessibility, keyboard navigation and standard forms. See task 3864. There is an accesskey property on it (default to accesskey="f" in English). Logged-in users can enable the "Focus the cursor in the search bar on loading the Main Page" gadget in their preferences. No, we will not add a spell-checker, or spell-checking bot. You can use a web browser such as Firefox, which has a spell checker. If you have problems making your fancy signature work, check Help:How to fix your signature. If you changed to another skin and cannot change back, use this link. Alternatively, you can press Tab until the "Save" button is highlighted, and press Enter. Using Mozilla Firefox also seems to solve the problem. If an image thumbnail is not showing, try purging its image description page. If the image is from Wikimedia Commons, you might have to purge there too. If it doesn't work, try again before doing anything else. Some ad blockers, proxies, or firewalls block URLs containing /ad/ or ending in common executable suffixes. This can cause some images or articles to not appear. For server or network status, please see Wikimedia Status. If you cannot reach Misplaced Pages services, see Reporting a connectivity issue.

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Invitation to test Hovercards

Hi everyone,

We’d like to invite you to beta test Hovercards. Hovercards is inspired by Navigation Popups, and shows you a card and image which provides a summary of any article link you hover over. Unlike Navigation Popups, Hovercards is aimed at satisfying the needs of readers, so the cards are more minimal and don’t include actions. In a future release we may consider adding an “Advanced” option for editors which exposes actions, but for our first release we are tightly focussed on the reader experience.

To turn Hovercards on, click the “Beta” link at the top right of your screen, scroll down until you find Hovercards, and tick the box!

We’d appreciate any feedback you have. You can leave feedback at mw:Talk:Beta Features/Hovercards. Bug reports can be filed at Bugzilla.

Thanks!

--Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 21:39, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

This is just my occasional reminder that if you don't have a Bugzilla account (which not only is completely separate from your Misplaced Pages account, but which also publishes your e-mail address to the world), and you ever need to get a bug filed, then you can always leave a note on my talk page with the written report that you need filed. There are a lot of volunteer and staff devs who are also willing to help out with these things. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:52, 6 June 2014 (UTC)

I had it enabled for a few weeks before but had to stop using it because of this annoying bug. However, it's fixed now thankfully and I've reenabled Hovercard. Huzzah!, —  dainomite   20:11, 6 June 2014 (UTC)

Indeed. We waited to post this notice until after we got the fix for that bug merged. I'm glad you're enjoying it! --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 00:06, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

• Having read "provides the casual reader with a streamlined browsing experience" in the description (and then read the rest too...), my reply to the invitation is "thanks, but no thanks". I hope it will be an opt-in feature, or at least have an easily accessible opt-out. Peridon (talk) 13:26, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

@DGarry (WMF): I would have left a comment at mw, but I don't appear to have the privilege of editing there. The 'Add new topic' button is greyed out, and there is no 'edit' button that I can see. Yes, I was logged in. If that is how Flow works, you can keep it for me. It looks as bad as this new Media viewer thing in the thread below this one. Peridon (talk) 13:34, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

BTW I regard 'being focussed on someone's experience' as an indicator of spamming... PR or marketing talk. Peridon (talk) 13:38, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

High-level design briefs can often sound like that. You'll notice I've kept my messages on this board a lot more precise, as the audience here appreciates more specificity. --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 00:02, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

I've just re-created my user page at mw (someone having deleted my previous one for being 'spam'), but still cannot edit the page linked above, or the Flow talk page. Does this mean that I will be unable to use Flow if it gets rolled out here? Peridon (talk) 10:25, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

Peridon, what happens with you click in the text box that you described as "grayed out", where it has a + sign and says "Start a new topic"? WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:07, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

Absolutely nothing. No little hand to show I'm over a link, no action. There's no 'edit' button either. I can view history, or click other little buttons, and even (it seems - I haven't saved) edit the header (there's a little pencil for that). No new topic, though. Just grey. They're welcome to the thing - I don't want to see it brought in here without some sort of opt-out. Probably impossible, as with so much of the technical wizardry that only serves to confuse people. Peridon (talk) 20:06, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

@Peridon: Thanks for the feedback on the design - the grey text has been mentioned a few times, and is being addressed in the almost-finished redesign - in the current version, it looks even lighter in Firefox, which adds additional opacity to "placeholder" text, which is very annoying.

Regarding the problem with not being able to create a new topic, I'll look into it. Could you let me know what browser/OS you're using, and if there are any non-standard settings, so that I can try to reproduce the problem in order to file a bug? Much thanks. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 01:08, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

@Quiddity (WMF): Firefox 20 on XP Pro (classic view) with Monobook. I change settings only when needed, so I couldn't tell you what is standard and what not. So far as I know, the only changes I've made at mw would be to use Monobook as I loathe Vector. I'm not in mw very often, and probably won't be after someone deleting my user page as spam without warning or notice. The grey doesn't look like a deliberate grey - it looks like a something missing (like the link that's supposed to be there) grey. If it IS a deliberate grey, please bin it and use a decent black. Grey is hard to see for a lot of people, as are thin lined fonts (such as New Scientist uses. To hell with fashion - go for clarity. Peridon (talk) 19:38, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

I wonder if the designers could be convinced to make it exactly the same colors as the Search box. That's "grey", but nobody looks at that and says it's not working or "greyed out". WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:46, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

Template usage

I'd like to know how often {{cite doi}} is used. I am interested in both

1. article count and
2. total count (because it may be used multiple times on a page).

From this page I see that {{Cite doi/doc/format}} is used oin 47581 pages, while {{Cite doi/subpage}} is used on 47577 pages. I'm not quite sure why {{cite doi}} is not on the list. Is this the answer to the first part of my question? How do I get the answer to the second part?--S Philbrick(Talk) 14:18, 7 June 2014 (UTC)

• I don't know if a data dump will give you that information or not. I don't think it does. You'd either have to have a script that pings the api for every page that uses the template and counts the instances in the wikitext source of that, or do it manually. Running a script like that would take a great deal of time (even though it shouldn't be overly difficult to write the script I suppose) and would likely hang (or appear to) your system. Would you like me to try writing you such a script? Would it be something a specific wikiproject would be interested in and would use more than once or twice, like a weekly run to update some table or something? Let me know... — {{U|Technical 13}} 14:27, 7 June 2014 (UTC)

That sounds like more work than is necessary. For my present needs, I simply need a roguh number. I literaly could live with knowing how many zeros. I plan to write up a prososal, and want to say somethign like, "Misplaced Pages currently has roughly 100,000 usages of the template". If the real number is 200,000, it doesn't change what I have to say, but if it is 1 million or 1 thousand, it would make a difference. I was hoping that there was something that already tracked this, and I just didn't know where to look.--S Philbrick(Talk) 14:48, 7 June 2014 (UTC)

As background, my goal is to try to expand doi usage to more than just technical papers, but as part of my proposal, I'd like to cite the current usage.--S Philbrick(Talk) 14:51, 7 June 2014 (UTC)

• According to there are "16087 transclusion(s) found." (number of articles it is on directly). There is no existing tool I'm aware of that will tell you haw many times it is used on each page. You could pick 161 of them at random (1%), and average that number to get a rough estimate I guess. — {{U|Technical 13}} 15:11, 7 June 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. Yes, I was thinking of doing a small sample, which will be good enough for my purposes.--S Philbrick(Talk) 17:24, 7 June 2014 (UTC)

I did a small sample, got 5.9 per page so roughly 100,000 usages.--S Philbrick(Talk) 17:47, 7 June 2014 (UTC)

You will probably want to look over the March 2014 discussion at Misplaced Pages talk:WikiProject Medicine/Archive 47#Replace .22cite pmid.22 with .22cite journal.22, in which people mostly said that they dislike that type of citation template. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:20, 7 June 2014 (UTC)

Wow, I thank-you for pointing me to that discussion, but it is quite confusing. I'm not quite sure what was proposed, I am sure I don't know what, if anything was agreed to. However, I definitely did not come away with the impression that there is widespread opposition to the {{cite doi}} template. I see disagreements over horizontal versus vertical formats, and disagreement over LDR style references, but those issues are orthogonal to my interest in the doi template - I want a template which requires a single entry and fills out the full reference. We can debate where that reference appears (silly me, I think references belongs in the reference section), whether the formatting should be vertical or horizontal, whether white spaces should be included or excluded, and exactly how to format the names, but all of those issue are distinct form the concept of a citation template requiring only one parameter.--S Philbrick(Talk) 13:43, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

@Sphilbrick I have a script to search an all-pages database dump, and I have a dump from 2 May 2014. I put the (big!) results in my sandbox2 (permalink). There were 12,197 articles with 23,501 unique {{cite doi}}. 5,695 (24%) of those are repeated, giving a total of 29,196 occurrences. This is also discussed at WP:BON and WT:Template namespace. The WP:BON discussion points out that Category:Cite doi templates lists 49,409 pages—I have not looked at why that number is much bigger than mine. Actually, a lucky click might explain the answer: I noticed that one of the templates listed in the category is not in my list, and the template is used only at WP:Choosing Wisely/American College of Surgeons (my list only shows usage in articles). Johnuniq (talk) 11:32, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

• See also comments at WP:TFD#Template:Cite doi/10.5665.2Fsleep.1378 Keith D (talk) 11:51, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for sharing those numbers. I'm slightly surprised that your implied templates per page (roughly 2) is so much lower than the (admittedly) small sample value I calculated (5.9). I briefly wondered if I were getting a non-representative sample. I reject that possibility, but perhaps it is the case. In any event, while your numbers seem a fair bit lower than my estimate, for my purposes I only need an order of magnitude number. So your results actually corroborate the conclusion that the number is more than "thousands" but not as high as "hundreds of thousands". Thanks also to User:Keith D for that discussion, very relevant to my interests.--S Philbrick(Talk) 13:06, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

@S Philbrick:

• The Misplaced Pages Cite-o-Meter (provides a conservative estimate of the number of times journal articles from a particular publisher are cited in the 100 largest Wikipedias. Using the Misplaced Pages API, Cite-o-Meter searches for occurrences of a DOI prefix in the main namespace of these Wikipedias.)
• The Topmost Cited DOIs on Misplaced Pages (Max Klein on Apr 10, 2014): "Note this analysis is strictly looking for the Cite doi template, so it doesn’t take into account DOIs that are mentioned in the Cite journal template." ... "What are the most used DOI prefixes? Below are the top 10. (...) With Elsevier dominating the top spot"... "which pages use the most DOIs? (...) The list is as you might expect is power-law distributed. In fact 60.6% of pages that have any DOI citation, have only one." etc.

I think we should be having much better stats about all refs on Misplaced Pages (see also my little collection at de:Benutzer:Atlasowa/ref stats with studies). refs are one of the most important quality indicators, and Misplaced Pages should build a reference database (across WP language versions and including wikidata)! --Atlasowa (talk) 07:27, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for all that information. I've bookmarked the cite site. The blog post was interesting, and I am still absorbing it. I agree we ought to have a refernces database. I haven't been very involved in wikidata, my guess it is on their list.--S Philbrick(Talk) 12:37, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

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-Misplaced Pages 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.

VisualEditor news

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

Future software changes

• MediaViewer will be enabled by default on all wikis on June 12. Feedback is welcome.
• You will be able to use information from Wikidata directly in Wikiquote pages starting on June 10.
• 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.
• 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.
• Templates containing <ref> or <references> tags will no longer need dummy parameters to prevent caching.
• You will no longer be able to use Special:Thanks directly. The page will soon show an error message when you visit it.
• Hovercards will no longer flicker.

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._or_<references>_tags_will_no_longer_need_dummy_parame-Tech_News:_2014-24-2014-06-09T10:41:00.000Z">

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 10:41, 9 June 2014 (UTC)_or_<references>_tags_will_no_longer_need_dummy_parame"> _or_<references>_tags_will_no_longer_need_dummy_parame">

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

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

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

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)

@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)

@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)

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

Tool for Page →History → Contributors

This used to be a tool to give us a list of article contributors by name and by edit count. Then there has been this long time when all that came up was a message that all tools are being migrated to Labs. Has that migration completed? Because What comes up has absolutely nothing to do with individual contributors. — Maile (talk) 19:20, 10 June 2014 (UTC)

You could use XTools - and if you like it, it's new gadget-helper. Migration from toolserver is done and I'm about to put the finishing touches on it. Hope you like it. --Hedonil (talk) 00:09, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

XTools is pretty neat . I see what I'm looking for. It's the Page History tool at XTools, which gives a pretty awesome account. And scrolling down to the bottom, I see the information Contributors tool used to give. XTools Page History is way more cool and informative than the old tool was.— Maile (talk) 11:58, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

Also, I following your instructions on adding this as a Gadget, and now I see the stats showing at the top of my article pages. Thank you so much. — Maile (talk) 12:09, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

Very nice.--S Philbrick(Talk) 17:40, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

• Yeah, when is the old "Contributors" thing coming back? pbp 04:03, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

Ditto, this is a useful feature.--♦IanMacM♦ 06:38, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

See also Misplaced Pages:Village pump (technical)/Archive 126#Contributors to a Misplaced Pages page, and probably a couple of others. As I understand the situation, the actual "problem" is that volunteers can't be forced to port their tools to WMFLabs if they don't want to (and I'm not sure that the independence of volunteers is truly a "problem" in the end, although this particular volunteer's choice is inconvenient for me, too). WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:14, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

And to add on to what WhatamIdoing said, these topics also don't encourage these volunteers to do it either. Why not go to their page and say "I really love your tool, it's super useful, we appreciate your technical expertise, and value your time on this project. Could you please migrate? We promise Wiki-cookies". That'll do 1 x 10 ^ 6 more towards getting them to actually do it than complaining here and calling them out. From a tool owner perspective, it essentially feels like being called lazy and you come off as unappreciative.--v/r - TP 18:44, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

I'm not sure which one of us on this thread you are referring to. However, my initial question was because I have no idea who maintains or created a lot of those tools on page history. — Maile (talk) 19:03, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

It's really directed at anyone who has ever come here for a tool written by a volunteer - ever :). That particular tool is run by meta:User_talk:Duesentrieb.--v/r - TP 19:16, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

I left a note on Duesentrieb's talk pages - both the English page and the German page. And I found a few notes by other people. Perhaps if enough of us ask, it will eventually be fixed. Dirac66 (talk) 20:01, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

Article Info is also a good tool.--v/r - TP 22:08, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

Solution found

Thanks very much to TP for suggesting Article Info! This leads to a form which says "Page history - Get various statistics about the history of a page", so I tried the Revision history statistics link on an article History page, and found an even more direct route to the List of contributors, now called Top Editors.

So my directions would be - choose any article, go to the History page and click on Revision history statistics, then scroll down to Top editors. True, the list doesn't include the least frequent editors with 1 or 2 edits, but one can still check for any single editor's contributions by using Edits by user. Dirac66 (talk) 19:41, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

That's the XTool that Hedonil mentioned above, which you can add this as a Gadget. There's a draw-back to the XTool, I'm just noticing. It only gives the select "top" editors, not all of them. That's very limiting on many articles. While I like the XTool, I'd really like to have the old one working. Sometimes there is a need to see ALL the contributors of an article, in particular the IPs. — Maile (talk) 22:13, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

I've added a line to topeditors section which now shows the number & count of all other editors (besides the top 30) - and a link that provides an extra url-parameter editorlimit for more results. This value decuples on each more call (30, 300, 3000 ...), or you can set it by hand. This way, you have free choice on how many rows you want to retrieve. --Hedonil (talk) 15:49, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

Excellent. I think that with these more calls, Revision history statistics now provides all the information formerly given by List of contributors plus a lot more. The only remaining problem I see is that many people don't know where to look, since List of contributors still leads to the wrong form. Would it be possible to put some sort of redirect on List of contributors, so that it leads to Revision history statistics? Dirac66 (talk) 19:43, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

Thank you, Hedonil. I just discovered this tool has been substituted for the old one under the Article history "Contributors". And I do see where you added the extra "more" so we can see all the editors. This tool is awesome. Thank you for all the time you spent developing it and deliverng it to us. — Maile (talk) 21:38, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

Well...Labs now says there's "no service". Let's hope that's temporary, because the little gadget for the XTool is not functioning right now, either. — Maile (talk) 21:43, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

Labs and the gadget back to normal now. So thanks again for this tool. — Maile (talk) 22:11, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

Helpful links move with Help Desk

I thought it was a glitch, but it appears to be an intentional new feature. Several helpful links stay in the lower left corner of the screen as you scroll down in the Help Desk.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 19:00, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

Yes, Technical 13 (talk · contribs) added this to the Misplaced Pages:Help desk/Header. -- John of Reading (talk) 19:09, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

• I've added the ability to collapse the section per request of some editors and there is also an id for the section so those that don't like it can completely make it go away. Still trying to figure out how to make it remember its last state. Maybe Krinkle can help with that as he seems to have done a lot of testing for this on testwiki. — {{U|Technical 13}} 19:35, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

I see that this is used with other help pages. Yes, I would like this to go away if I can do so. I tried "collapse" when I first saw it and the result was actually annoying. — Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 19:55, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

It worked! Thanks.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 19:56, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

Disabled it again, this is very disruptive on monobook as it overlays the footer and several navigation divs in column-one. It's also broken on monobook, there is no #mw-head. I recommend to put this in a user script/gadget to make it opt-in, and to test it on all skins before deployment. Amalthea 21:34, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata issue

Moved from user talk:Pigsonthewing

So here am I writing content on Baumwollspinnerei Hammerstein taking a lot of material from a book and de:Baumwollspinnerei Hammerstein which is actually a redirect from de:Hammerstein (Wuppertal)#Industrie. I want to put an interwiki link between the two pages. The good old : code has gone- but no problem- time to try wikidata.

How? there are not a lot of clues

• Click on the language wheel. No not that. x
• Goto unrelated page and look for help. That sort of works- it says that
• I need to go to the original page- that is de:Hammerstein (Wuppertal)#Industrie and look for an edit icon, and get in that way! *x Neither pages have an edit icon.

So I must manually create a Wikidata item

• x Mumble to myself about just typing ] - and through an unrelated page, get in and find the create new item. !.Easy

Now I enter Baumwollspinnerei Hammerstein as the name and c&p a sentence from the en:Baumwollspinnerei Hammerstein lede. the page is created and it is given a Q number. (Q17164698). Refresh en:Baumwollspinnerei Hammerstein and no sign of it. No link.

I go back to Wikidata (do we type that up as q:Baumwollspinnerei Hammerstein ?) and decide I should try to add another language to Q17164698.

I am given one box to enter a language code and the sitename followed by a □ |. Save is grayed out.

• x Stalemate.Cup of coffee/ check email and clean up the page.

Change preferences from Vector to monobook. Try again- but this time I see two dataentry boxes !Success? I have added en:Baumwollspinnerei Hammerstein to Q17164698. Vector doesn't work- monobook does on Firefox 26.0 for Linux Mint

Now back to en:Baumwollspinnerei Hammerstein to see the wikidata below the languages.

• X (refresh) and nothing. Hour later nothing and nothing in history. This is not the way to manually add a interwiki link

Lets try the German article. Back to Wikidata and add another language. Failed with error message : An error occurred while trying to perform save and because of this, your changes could not be completed.Site link dewiki:Hammerstein (Wuppertal) is already used by item Q1573863. At least that is clear- You cannot link to an anchor. You cannot link to a redirect page that is linked to an anchor.

Which in this case rather defeats the object of interwiki links.

OK leave it there. — Preceding unsigned comment added by ClemRutter (talk • contribs) 14:28, 11 June 2014 (UTC)

I don't know where to begin with this; can someone assist ClemRutter, please? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:36, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

About 10mins ago- we got a working link. My watchlist suggested that a new Q code had been given- then the old Q code delinked- by me. I then followed instructions (Edit links add) a new better dataentry page appeared, I filled it in for de: and it worked. Thanks- I hope the other items in the feeback are as easily solved-- Clem Rutter (talk) 22:32, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

Hi Clem! There are two places on an Misplaced Pages article where you can go directly to the Wikidata entry if it exists. Both are in the left column in Monobook skin: "data item" in the tools section and "edit links" in the languages section. Of course somebody or somebot has to make the Wikidata entry first. To refer to a Wikidata entry, we can use "d:" as the project identifier, so d:Q1573863 will link to the data entry - or you can search for "Baumwollspinnerei Hammerstein" on d:Wikidata:Main_Page. Drop me a note if you get stuck in future. --RexxS (talk) 13:06, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

Hi RexxS- thanks for the post. I have got the link working- I just think it was important to register a user experience.The second time around it worked like clockwork. I think we have proved that the process can work, but a lot of attention needs to be paid to making intuitive. Both to oldtimers and the group of newbies I will be training next week. I missed the "Data item" in tools- which suggests to me that I need to up my caffeine intake, or this needs to be renamed to "Wikidata links". I can't recall seeing a reference in any of the Help documentation... but that is for another day. Do keep me in the loop,, and contact if you want an opinion from someone with a little distance from the group.-- Clem Rutter (talk) 15:29, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

Unable to view diffs logged in

I'm getting a page that says "Fatal exception of type MWException" whenever I try to view diffs from my watchlist (in Chrome, on OS X, with either Vector or Monobook appearance, if any of that makes a difference). If I copy-and-paste the same URL to a not-logged-in copy of Safari it works normally. Is anyone else seeing this? —David Eppstein (talk) 21:02, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

@David Eppstein: That sounds unusual. Can you provide a link here to one of the diffs that causes this error? --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 22:08, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

Some diffs that are causing this error: . Some diffs that are *not* causing this error: your reply above, . I have not made any changes to my rendering preferences (other than trying a switch to monobook to see if it would make a difference). Looking at the titles of the problematic and unproblematic diffs makes me wonder: could this be a problem with <math>/mathjax? —David Eppstein (talk) 22:38, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

They all loaded for me.—cyberpower _Online 23:09, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

There's an ongoing issue with MathJax right now, to avoid issues set your preferences to render in PNG temporarily. Legoktm (talk) 01:20, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

Yes, it appears to be a combination of (in prefs => appearance) "Leave it as TeX" and MathJax. Instead setting it to "Always render PNG" (but still keeping MathJax checked) avoids the problem and still leaves me seeing the formulas as MathJax. —David Eppstein (talk) 04:03, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

Volume of an n-ball

Everytime I try to browse the page Volume of an n-ball, I get the following error: " 2014-06-13 00:10:09: Fatal exception of type MWException". I use Debian 7 and this happens with both Firefox and Chrome. It works properly in Windows but worked the results with different browsers in iOS are mixed. Taha (talk) 00:26, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

It happens if in the "Math" secion of user preferences the choice "Leave it as TeX" is selected (regardeless of wether MathJax is enabled or not). Anybody knows if this bug is already known / worked on and if / where it is tracked? --Patrick87 (talk) 01:02, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

OK, my bad, see section above... --Patrick87 (talk) 01:28, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for the response. Taha (talk) 03:46, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

Internal error on Misplaced Pages:Reference_desk/Science

I'm getting " 2014-06-13 08:51:10: Fatal exception of type MWException" on Misplaced Pages:Reference_desk/Science. I've tried it a few times in the last couple of minute and it does not seem to affect other pages.--Salix alba (talk): 08:55, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

@Salix alba: See previous two threads concerning Preferences → Appearance → Math and the "Leave it as TeX" preference. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:01, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

Weird pageview statistics

I'd previously asked User:Henrik, but he doesn't seem to be currently available.

I noticed some weird entries in the popular pages tool's May listing for Thailand, and checked the pageviews statistics tool and it also showed abnormal spikes for the Thailand women's national football team article on 21–22 May and for the Bhumibol Adulyadej article on 12 May. (The same issue affecting a user page was mentioned at User talk:Cunard#Weird pageview stats.) Any idea what's going on? --Paul_012 (talk) 08:58, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

Earlier today, someone inquired about the User_talk:Cunard case in the Wikimedia Analytics IRC channel (see #wikimedia-analytics log from 16:22). I never got an email about it, but it seems to have started on that page sometime between December 2012 and January 2013. These hits are almost surely from an automated script or bot of some sort. I recommend you contact the Analytics team. I see you have already asked stats.grok.se's owner Henrik (though he likely does not know exactly where these are coming from). πr (t • c) 04:24, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

See post by Ironholds below. πr (t • c) 11:22, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

Broken diffs

Ive been using several reports and a tool for checking NFCC issues, today I ran across something Ive never seen before. It appears that our diff system is completely broken I just removed a file for WP:NFCC#9. http://pastebin.com/XSy8741u is the diff table that I was shown, and this was the saved diff completely different than what I was shown the first time. Werieth (talk) 13:01, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

• Bump Werieth (talk) 02:03, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

  There have been a lot of problems with "show changes" recently. Does it look like the same issue as below? πr (t • c) 04:34, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

Interface problems

I've recently (within the past week) noticed several annoying changes in the overall interface. For instance, when I go to a page that doesn't exist, I'm presented with only the text "There is currently no text in this page. You can search for this page title in other pages, search the related logs, or edit this page", with no links to any other WMF projects, no mentions of other reasons that the 'no page here' message might be displayed, no link to the article wizard, etc etc. This particular change is quite minor, of course, and it's not something that really bothers me, but it's indicative of the greater issue. Although there used to be a function that would, if you went to a nonexistent page for an address with a mismatched parenthesis, suggest the version with the matched parentheses (i.e., 'there is no article called "blorg (blorg", did you mean "blorg (blorg)" ?'), and that doesn't seem to be available any more regardless of whether I'm logged in.

I'm also vaguely disappointed that, when the page for file:Example.jpg tells me that the file is actually on Commons, the Commons icon isn't displayed any more. Still not a major issue, though.

What is a major issue is that Page History no longer has any links to the external tools.

"For any version listed below, click on its date to view it. For more help, see Help:Page history and Help:Edit summary. External tools: Revision history statistics · Revision history search · Contributors · Edits by user · Number of watchers · Page view statistics (cur) = difference from current version, (prev) = difference from preceding version, m = minor edit, → = section edit, ← = automatic edit summary -- what I see when I'm logged out.

"Diff selection: Mark the radio boxes of the revisions to compare and hit enter or the button at the bottom. Legend: (cur) = difference with latest revision, (prev) = difference with preceding revision, m = minor edit." -- what I see when I'm logged in.

Another major problem is the little box that's found at the bottom of the contributions page... but isn't there any more.

Here's what I see when I'm logged out:

"(username): Subpages · User rights · Edit count · Edit summary search · Articles created · Global contributions / log · SUL / accounts"

and here's what I see when I'm logged in:

<nothing>

This is presumably the result of someone making changes to MediaWiki code without considering the results it might have. I would like to know what can be done to remedy the issue. Thank you. DS (talk) 15:39, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

You didn't change your language settings, by any chance? Check that your language is set to "en" (not "en-GB" or "en-CA") and see if that fixes the problem. Most of enwiki's customised messages are only available when you set your language to "en". — Mr. Stradivarius 15:42, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

Ah! Thank you. Always good when a seemingly complex problem has a simple solution. DS (talk) 15:58, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

You know, any admin who wanted to, could make the "translations" for these MediaWiki: messages, and then people could set their preferred languages to an English variant without losing access to useful information and links. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:46, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

I could, but I don't want to. There are hundreds of customised messages to try and keep track of. This morning I amended two of them - for vanilla English only - but I'm not going to "translate" them for some trivial tomato/tomato difference. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:30, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

Exactly. It's just not maintainable. If you change your interface language, you are going to miss some information. Simple as that. Perhaps we should add a warning to one specific message that is always visible... —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:56, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

We could have a bot do it for en-CA, en-GB of course, ignoring any CA, GB specifics, and auto synchronizing after every change in the main message. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:03, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

By far the best solution would be wholesale deprecation of all en-* localisation; it's really not needed in any meaningful way and it just soaks up time, leads to problems like above, etc. Andrew Gray (talk) 15:10, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

Media viewer fails to give credit to all people in specific circumstances

The Media viewer fails to give credit to all people listed under author in situations where:

1. There is a {{Creator:Foo}} tag used for one of the authors, but
2. Other authors are listed below said tag.

For example, , if viewed in media viewer, will only credit Mathew Brady, leaving out my restoration work.

Given the amount of times that I have my restoration work grabbed without credit already, I'd rather not encourage people. Adam Cuerden 01:16, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for reporting and filing a bug about this. You will see this more often for quite a while. We are at the start of a VERY long path where we need to translate all our 'human readable' data with regard to image pages into machine readable information, and that attempt is going to be incomplete for many years. (Remember when we didn't even have {{Information}} and how many files still don't ?) —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:48, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

Watch vs. Contrib.

My most recent edits (to Geography of South Korea and Flight of the Phoenix (2004 film) do not show up on my Watching list, even though they are marked as "to watch" by me. I'm practically certain that in the past my own edits were always included in the Watching list as long as they were current. Am I wrong, have things chagned, or is there a bug?Kdammers (talk) 05:26, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

Did you change your preferences to "Hide my edits"? VanIsaac_WS 07:12, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

No, I didn't, but I'll check to see if it got changed "for me" some-how. Kdammers (talk) 10:26, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

Uuu, that was a bad choice of words. Any-way, I looked at my settings. "Hide my edits" is not ticked.Kdammers (talk) 10:31, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

• Kdammers, there are two hide/show my edits toggles. I know I've absent mindedly checked the wrong one before. There's one on the watchlist tab and one on the recentchanges tab of your preferences. Also to check is if edits by registered users is checked or hide minor edits is checked, I've seen some combinations return initially unexpected results that were logically sound. — {{U|Technical 13}} % — Preceding undated comment added 14:07, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

Teahouse question indicated user signed when he/she didn't sign

This question on The Teahouse appears to indicate a situation that should be corrected. If a person does not actually notify someone, but the notification comes from him/her by some automatic process, that person's notification shouldn't appear in any history as coming from that person, or in that person's contributions. And yet Twinkle has an automatic notification feature which, in this case, sent a user a notification from himself on his own talk page. He was afraid his account had been compromised.

I probably haven't explained this well, so I will include this description of the problem:

Hey Jodosma. Here's what happened. When you list a discussion at RfD using Twinkle it gives you an option to "Notify page creator if possible?"; if you don't take the checkmark out of the box Twinkle then provides a warning for editors of the category through your account automatically when you save. Here, since you are the only editor of Category:Mountain passes of the Appenines, when you listed it for discussion in this edit using Twinkle, you automatically warned yourself the same second (and then yelled at yourself for doing so:-)--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 00:52, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

When I thought this was something that really happened, I took it to the proposals page, because I didn't think any automatic action ought to be credited to a user, and this was the response:

Twinkle isn't automatic. It is your responsibility to read the user manual. Legoktm (talk) 23:54, 13 June 2014 (UTC)

So can anyone say why this person found his/her own name in the history when he/she didn't do anything?— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 15:51, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

They DID do something. They used Twinkle to perform an action. That's what Twinkle (and I suppose other automated things) are for. It's not Twinkle doing an action - it's not a full bot. The person who starts things off by using Twinkle is responsible for the edit just as surely as if they had typed it all up themselves. Before I became an admin, I'd done 12,000 edits. All purely manual. One or two people found this hard to believe. After I got my mop, I also started using Twinkle to save time and typing. That's all Twinkle is. A set of templates and a script or two to post them. Full bots run by themselves, and sign for themselves - but ultimately the bot owner is responsible for what the bot does. Users of scripts are responsible for what they do and their actions through the scripts need to be attributed. If you or they don't like it, do it the hard way. Like I used to. Can be done - just needs memory and fingers. Peridon (talk) 17:59, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

• Hopefully my fairly drawn out explanation on THQ with timestamps and links to their contribution history will clarify. — {{U|Technical 13}} 18:36, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

Other Twinkle issues

Hello! I don't get it. On en.wikipedia, I have all the TW rollback options. But when I access the ro.wikipedia or uk.wikipedia, those options are simply not there. Can someone tell me how is this possible? I don't know if it's very relevant, but I'm using Chrome. I also tried with Safari, but it's the same thing. Thank you. --Winter (talk) 17:56, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

I was going to say "Go into 'Preferințe', then 'Gadgeturi' and click the box by Twinkle. I'll leave you to work out the Ukrainian one - same idea though." but I can't get it either. It may not be available there in Twinkle. I can't even find Twinkle on the French WP. Peridon (talk) 18:13, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

Not all Wikipedias have Twinkle. There are no universal gadgets, not even HotCat, since Welsh Misplaced Pages has no gadgets at all. You can use Wikidata to get an approximate idea: these Wikipedias all have Twinkle; others may have as well, but any others don't have an equivalent to our WP:TW page.

The Gadgets list in prefs is rarely translated into anything other than the local language, so if you don't read the local language it can be tricky looking through a gadgets list. However, you can use the ?uselang=qqx trick - here are the gadgets lists for French, Romanian, and Ukrainian Wikipedias. In those, look for "(gadget-Twinkle)", count the number of lines from the top (or bottom) of the section (e.g. third from top of the second section for Romanian), switch back to the normal language, set the option and save. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:41, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for all the answers. On ro.wikipedia worked just fine until 5 days ago. Since I'm one of the recent changes patroller there, my work just became a bit harder without these options. I checked the site, Redrose64, thanks. It's there and already checked. Two days ago was probably the weirdest TW issue. Several recent changes patrollers complained that Twinkle appeared doubled on their browsers and without any possibility to use it whatsoever. Since no one had a clue of what could have possibly gone wrong, I thought to give a shot here. Thanks again, and to you too, Peridon. --Winter (talk) 22:11, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

@Wintereu: By "Twinkle appeared doubled on their browsers", is this the issue described at #Misinterface layout above? --Redrose64 (talk) 22:19, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

If it is the same problem as above, try Monobook instead of Vector until they get it fixed. It worked just fine here right through... Peridon (talk) 22:37, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

Exactly the same, Redrose64. Thankfully, the problem was fixed. As for the missing RB options, I'm still hopping. --Winter (talk) 13:23, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

@Wintereu: Twinkle is not internationalized. There are forks for other wikis, but you need to talk the the respective Twinkle maintainers there if you see any issues. For ro-wp that seems to be ro:User:Andrei Stroe, I can't find a Twinkle Gadget on uk-wp. Amalthea 17:05, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

I'll do that. Thanks for the time with the explanations. --Winter (talk) 17:53, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

Strange message

I see the message:

"<IP address removed for privacy reasons> is a student in Intellectual Freedom - LIS 493 (course talk)."

on the contributions pages of many IPs (all that I've tried) that are not <IP address removed for privacy reasons>, and who do not appear to have any connection to that course (example: Special:Contributions/71.198.212.248, Special:Contributions/37.230.4.122). This only happens with IPs, not registered users. I'm not sure if this is the best place to report this, but I couldn't find any mention of this elsewhere. ʍw 19:57, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

I'm seeing a slightly different message starting with my IP address. I've therefore redacted the IP address from your post, since it is likely to be yours. Someone will be receiving a trout once this is resolved... -- John of Reading (talk) 20:07, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

Seems to be resolved now; I hope an explanation is forthcoming. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 20:16, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

• Weird. I don't know! I have 5 students & they all set up user accounts, and were all novices. As to "a student in the class" -- when I was setting up the course page today, I clicked on "add a student", and tried to add myself (with my userid); when I saved, it listed that IP address, and did not list my userid. I'm not sure if that was a cause of the IP address or merely a correlation in time. I tried then to delete the IP address from the students in the course ("remove from course") -- have tried twice! -- and it won't delete. I imagine that my efforts to remove the IP from the class are why it has the "privacy reasons" message. But how did the IP address get added to begin with? Why are they trolling the Jimbo Wales page? --Lquilter (talk) 20:10, 14 June 2014 (UTC)
  • responded on my talk page & on the Help desk page too. --Lquilter (talk) 20:17, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

• • • Those IPs were picked more-or-less at random, I'm sure the "trolling the Jimbo Wales page" is completely unrelated to the course. ʍw 20:41, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

• (edit conflict) I don't see that message, can one of you post a screenshot and can you both check your preferences and tell me if Preferences → Appearance → Show a link to your courses at the top of every page. is checked or not? If either of you has wikEd enabled, can you hold down your control key, and click on the wikEd icon in the very top right corner of the screen and paste the results into a page someone and point me to it, if you put it here, please put it in an {{Hst}}{{Hsb}} collapsed section. Thanks. — {{U|Technical 13}} 20:23, 14 June 2014 (UTC)
  • You don't see it because this is in the middle of being fixed. The bad database entry has been removed and I believe we are waiting for a fix so this doesn't happen again. --Krenair 20:30, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

• • (ec) No, I don't have Show a link to your courses... or wikEd enabled. (I am kicking it old-school with Monobook, incidentally.) Looks like the Bugzilla report has a screenshot now. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 20:31, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

• • I don't even know how I would enable wikiEd! I do have a "show a link to your courses", since I just went through & checked that. This is my first time doing an official course assignment in wikipedia & clearly there's a bit of a learning curve ahead. I'm relieved that the bug was fixed, although still mystified about what it was and if I triggered it. --Lquilter (talk) 20:34, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

• • The problem does seem to be resolved now, but, FWIW, I did take a screenshot when I first noticed (I haven't uploaded it yet, is there still any need?) and I don't have said box checked in my preferences (I've never done anything related to these courses). ʍw 20:41, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

@Mysterious Whisper: No, there's no need to upload a screenshot. The behind-the-scenes experts are dealing with it. -- John of Reading (talk) 20:47, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

• No per John. Happy editing! — {{U|Technical 13}} 21:03, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

Hi. There were a few bugs in the EducationProgram extension that stacked up on top of each other and caused this to happen. The immediate cause has been fixed, and there are some patches in progress to prevent this from happening again. There are technical details on bugzilla:66624 if you're interested. Sorry about the trouble. Legoktm (talk) 00:19, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

Any chance of reviving Misplaced Pages:Dump reports/Missing articles?

I just discovered this and it's a pretty neat idea. The last report is from 13 December 2011.-- Brainy J ~✿~ (talk) 21:18, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

Unstyled and non-loading pages

Anyone else having the unstyled pages or the pages that never load? This is really starting to irritate me. Dustin (talk) 21:23, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

The issue may have suddenly resolved itself within the past ten seconds, so no response may actually be necessary. Dustin (talk) 21:25, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

Yeah, I think most of the problem was on my end. However, at one point, I did receive this message:

WIKIMEDIA FOUNDATION

ERROR

Our servers are currently experiencing a technical problem. This is probably temporary and should be fixed soon. Please try again in a few minutes.

If you report this error to the Wikimedia System Administrators, please include the details below.

Request: /5.0 http://(null)(Windows, from 72.198.94.xxx via cp1055 frontend (:80), Varnish XID 2897667758 Error: 403, HTTP method not allowed. at Sat, 14 Jun 2014 21:20:11 GMT

Thanks if you respond. Dustin (talk) 21:49, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

@Dustin V. S.: This sort of thing happens every few months. See WP:WFEM, Misplaced Pages:Village pump (technical)/Archive 120#Style load problems continue, Misplaced Pages:Village pump (technical)/Archive 120#Wikimedia error, site very slow, looks like when Internet first developed, Misplaced Pages:Village pump (technical)/Archive 120#"Misplaced Pages Error" ?, Misplaced Pages:Village pump (technical)/Archive 122#Wikimedia Foundation Error, Misplaced Pages:Village pump (technical)/Archive 123#Wikimedia Foundation Error. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:42, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

Yes, my error page looked like that one. But I don't understand part of this; did anyone else see that same error page today? Dustin (talk) 23:37, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

It's random and unpredictable, although there are phases when it happens more often. Go to another tab in your browser, check your contributions. If the edit is shown, you're OK; if it's not, return to the first tab, use the browser's "back" button to return to the editing screen, and click Save page again. --Redrose64 (talk) 00:30, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

Well random and unpredictable they are not of course. It's just like it says, the servers ran into a problem. There are however 100s of servers and hundreds of reasons why there might be problems (giving the appearance of randomness perhaps). The error code 403 is unusual here btw. usually it's 503 (which would basically be 'server is too busy to deal with you now'). As long as it doesn't happen too often, it's not something to worry about though. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:32, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

Automation of Misplaced Pages:Requests for comment/All and related pages

From what I understand this list is manually maintained. This leads to quite a messy appearance and surely is fairly effort intensive. Could this process be automated? A short statement could be included in the RfC template, and pages holding the template of an active RfC could be listed by a bot. Thoughts? --LT910001 (talk) 22:49, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

@LT910001: Why do you think it's manually maintained? Legobot (talk · contribs) does pretty much all of the necessary editing. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:31, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

I see. The subpages all have the text "This is a human-edited list of requests for comment", which I thought referred to the page itself rather than the request board.--LT910001 (talk) 23:38, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

The text "This is a human-edited list of requests for comment" relates specifically to Misplaced Pages:Requests for comment/Request board, which is linked from the bottom of each subpage because {{RFC list footer}} is included at the bottom of each of those subpages. Not many edits get made to that page. If I try to edit one of the other subpages - for example Misplaced Pages:Requests for comment/Biographies - I see this notice which warns me against editing it. These subpages have histories like this which doesn't show much human editing. There is some, but the bot often reverts the human with its next edit. --Redrose64 (talk) 00:05, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

Username magic word

Is there a magic word, like {{PAGENAME}}, which will substitute my username? I'd like to create a button that creates a new level 4 section for a talk page titled "Comments from (user name)", but I can't find whether there's a magic word that can insert the user's username. --LT910001 (talk) 23:43, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

There is actually: {{subst:REVISIONUSER}}. — Edokter (talk) — 23:47, 14 June 2014 (UTC)

• See mw:Help:Magic Words#revision specifically for all of the details. — {{U|Technical 13}} 00:58, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

CSS files and text using <font>-2014-06-15T15:55:00.000Z">

Okay, at my css file at User:Dustin V. S./common.css, I have been attempting to get past the unsatisfying default font of Misplaced Pages such that the standard is to use Times New Roman instead, but when I made a change to my css file as to try to do so, I realize that the change made it to where regardless of whether or not a certain text piece already has a set font, Times New Roman will be used if <font> was used instead of <span>. A lot of places use the old <font> method of changing text, though, so is there a way to keep my skin from changing those pieces of text? "Blackletter using font" compares to "Blackletter using span". Only the second one will work. Is there a way of fixing this? Especially with user signatures using <font>, this forces them to display in my set font from my css file, Times New Roman. Dustin (talk) 15:55, 15 June 2014 (UTC)"> ">

• Please read Misplaced Pages:Village Pump (proposals)#RfC: Should deprecated/invalid/unsupported HTML tags be discouraged?, where there is an attempt to start a process to remove all of these deprecated and obsolete HTML elements from the wiki in as little of a jarring way as possible. — {{U|Technical 13}} 17:17, 15 June 2014 (UTC)
• AFAIK HTML attributes such as face="..." cannot be changed using CSS. The obsolete <font> element doesn't appear to support any CSS at all. The first example in your post inherits the font from your skin because of a missing "; "Blackletter using font" does work. SiBr₄ (talk) 17:36, 15 June 2014 (UTC)
  • <font face="FOOBAR">...</font> can be replaced with <span style="font-family: FOOBAR">...</span>. — {{U|Technical 13}} 17:43, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

Sorry to seem ignorant about this; I'm no professional when it comes to css; the most I ever learned much about was Java, a completely unrelated programming language. And Technical 13, I actually was aware of that last part, and I have modified my signature to reflect it. Thanks for the responses. I still want there to be a way for situations where another font is already used, for Times New Roman to not be used, though. I didn't know if it was possible to change my css file in some way to fix this problem, so I thought I should ask. Also, SiBr4, could you show me the "working" version of the first example then? I really don't understand exactly what you mean, sorry. Also, I didn't notice the missing quotes, but I re-added them and it still displays as Time New Roman instead of Lucida Blackletter. Have you looked at the css file of mine I linked? Thanks anyway. Dustin (talk) 19:35, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

A correctly coded element with specified font should overwrite the font used in the surrounding text: "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet" (using <font face="Arial"> within <span style="font-family:Times New Roman">). Having looked up what Lucida Blackletter looks like, the example from my previous comment doesn't appear to display in that font, but that's probably because my browser doesn't recognize or support the font (it does work for me in the Arial example). SiBr₄ (talk) 20:20, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

@SiBr4: I don't know how to resolve this issue; the outer font with "span" appears to sometimes override the inner font with "font". See these examples:

<span style="font-family:Lucida Blackletter;">One <font face="Times New Roman">Two</font></span>: "One Two" - this works as I would expect

<span style="font-family:Times New Roman;">One <font face="Lucida Blackletter">Two</font></span>: "One Two" - this does not. Dustin (talk) 20:36, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

I see everything in TNR because my browser apparently does not support Lucida Blackletter. Substituting the latter with a Lucida font Firefox can display, like

<span style="font-family:Lucida Handwriting;">One <font face="Times New Roman">Two</font></span>: "One Two"

<span style="font-family:Times New Roman;">One <font face="Lucida Handwriting">Two</font></span>: "One Two"

it works like it should for me (showing "One" in Lucida and "Two" in TNR in the first case, and the other way around in the second). SiBr₄ (talk) 20:48, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

You want to show everything in TNR, unless someone uses a <font> tag or a different font in anyother way. Your * selector is to broad as it includes <font>, and therefor overrides the <font face="..."> attribute. What you want is to match the selector that sets our default font:

html, body {
    font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;
}

That should retain all custom font set in signatures etc., wether they use <font> or <span>. -- ] {{talk}} 21:37, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

Thanks; in making that change to my css file, both lines from my example work now! Thanks for the help. Dustin (talk) 01:29, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

So apparently <font> does accept CSS and CSS overrides attributes (test: <font face="Arial" style="font-family:Times New Roman;">Foo</font> → Foo displays in TNR). Thanks for clarifying that. SiBr₄ (talk) 09:28, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

Correct. All (even obsolete) elements accept CSS, and CSS always supercedes old HTML styling attributes. -- ] {{talk}} 10:42, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

IP disruption proposal

I have posted an idea at the ideas lab (User:Spinningspark/IP disruption proposal) but perhaps I can also ask for people here to assess it for technical feasibility just for reassurance that I am not being completely stupid. Well alright, I am completely stupid, but there may still be some merit in the idea. SpinningSpark 16:10, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

I think it is a marvelous suggestion for lessening disruption by IP-hopping vandals. Binksternet (talk) 16:36, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

Well first of all, people can choose not to have cookies enabled of course. Plenty folks do that. Second a browser cannot easily return the MAC address in a cookie. If that was possible, advertising agencies would have a field day. Lastly, cookies expire at some point and can be deleted by users, killing your tracker. Also it might conflict with our current privacy policy (not sure). —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 17:11, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

Cookies may not be the best method of retrieving the MAC address, I don't know, that's why I am asking for technical review. Perhaps I ought just to say what we want to achieve and leave it to the devs to find a method. However, I don't think a user clearing out cookies would be a problem. The history associated with that MAC will still be there on the server and the server will place a new cookie the next time that machine tries to edit. The new edits will still be added to the right history. SpinningSpark 17:26, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

It is not possible to retrieve the MAC address via the web browser without the use of custom plugins, even if it were possible MAC addresses are modifiable, and even if they weren't this is most likely not going to fly with Wikimedia Foundation's privacy policy. Matma Rex talk 17:33, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

I can't see what the privacy issue is. Hiding the IP address is improving privacy, not breaching it. I also don't understand why access to the MAC address is a security issue, but I expect there is a good answer to that. If it is technically impossible then it is a dead idea anyway, but before I let go of it altogether, this forum suggests that it might be possible with Java or signed Javascript. I appreciate that MAC addresses can be spoofed, but I am not looking for something that is completely unbreakable; we are not guarding nuclear secrets here. Yes, a MAC address can be spoofed, but it is not as easy as getting a new IP from an ISP that dynamically allocates them on each connection. This would be putting one more obstacle in the way of the trolls, most of whom are amateurs and would be stopped by this. SpinningSpark 19:56, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

This just isn't technically feasible. There's no way that the developers would ever go for running signed JavaScript or a Java applet just to retrieve a user's MAC address. Jackmcbarn (talk) 20:09, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

Humour me for a moment. What are the difficulties? SpinningSpark 20:29, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

Using JAVA to achieve this, is like attaching an unreliable Tank to a bike, when you are competing in the Tour de France. You just don't do it. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 00:42, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure the JavaScript part is untrue, or at least I don't know of any API that would allow this (and the post doesn't mention any either). It might be possible with Java applets (I'm not experienced enough in this to know for sure), but wouldn't be feasible because a) signing applets is apparently non-trivial and unsigned ones pop up huge red warnings in browsers, b) Java security vulnerabilities appear often enough that browsers often automatically disable the plugin even if it's installed, but outdated, and updating it is not straightforward, and c) these days people very often don't even have Java installed (assuming their device can even run it), as it's been largely displaced by Flash and HTML5 for web usage. (The Java applet page is an interesting reading, although it seems outdated by a year or two.) Matma Rex talk 01:18, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

I mostly meant the part about cookies when I mentioned the privacy policy, I vaguely recall that there used to be some rather draconian limits on cookie usage and expiration defined there (IIRC this was the reason why the login cookies used to expire in 30 days), but they seem a bit more lax these days (wmf:Privacy_policy#Information_We_Collect, wmf:Privacy_policy/FAQ#cookieFAQ). If we were to identify users by their MAC addresses (which is probably not possible and definitely not feasible), this would surely have to be incorporated there as well. Disclaimer: I am, obviously, not a lawyer :) Matma Rex talk 01:18, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

Without some other unique, system-based, non-spoofable identifier it would be inappropriate to hide the IP address for the record of any such edits.

However, the issue of obtaining the MAC address is something of a red herring. While it would be nice to have a non-user-changable method of uniquely identifying the machine from which edits were being made, having a way to uniquely identify the hardware does not appear reasonable. On the other hand, just having the servers assign a unique code to the machine in a cookie, even if the code is only valid for a set period of time (e.g. 30 days), could go a long way toward tracking vandals across IP changes. Alternately, the cookie could just record the IP addresses from which the non-logged-in editor has been editing. These could be checked against being blocked and if the majority are blocked then edits are disallowed. Obviously, the vandal could just disable cookies, or delete the cookie. While it would be possible to require cookies be enabled in order to edit as an IP, that is probably not a good idea. Limiting it to a just a cookie without unique physical machine ID allows for the possibility of multiple user accounts on the same machine (e.g. a family's shared computer).

Basically, there are multiple ways in which it would be possible, although imperfectly, to determine that IP edits are being performed by the same machine/user from different IP addresses. Using just cookies is imperfect, but would probably hinder, or at least make life a bit less convenient for, a significant percentage of vandals. — Makyen (talk) 02:07, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

I like the idea that a Wikimedia-centric cookie would assign a unique identifier, the cookie lasting 30 days. Such a feature would catch many of our vandals and socks, despite some of them being savvy enough to employ a workaround. Binksternet (talk) 05:03, 20 June 2014 (UTC)

Random file tool returns files from Commons

Hi. I was using the Special:Random/File tool for a long time on rowiki, in order to fish for unfree images and candidates for Commons. Last days when I accessed the tool, it returned me only Commons files. Tried @ enwiki - same drill. Anyone knows if it's a bug or something has been changed in the Random tool? John of Reading suggested on the Help desk this might be linked to bugzilla:65366. Thanks in advance for assistance. --Gikü (talk) 18:25, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

Filed as bugzilla:66643. NEverett (WMF) (talk) 19:41, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure you rock :D Thanks! --Gikü (talk) 19:55, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

Should be fixed in gerrit:139833 by Manybubbles aka NEverett (it now has code to restrict results to the local wiki). It should have also fixed an issue where Special:Random/Talk, /User, etc. did not always forward to the correct namespace, and added Selenium tests for good measure. Thanks NEverett (WMF)! πr (t • c) 04:08, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

Just pushed the fix live a few minutes ago. Please let me know if you notice anything funky.NEverett (WMF) (talk) 15:20, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

Posting data a diff from an external site

I have a bot which takes the content of a page on Commons, cleans it up, and then posts it as if the user had clicked diff in the edit box so that s/he can view the changes and submit them if desired.

Click here for an example: .

Unfortunately, it looks like it's stopped working; the software doesn't accept my post anymore; it blanks the text.

This is what my bot is submitting:

• wpTextbox1 = the text
• wpSummary = a custom edit summary
• wpDiff =" wpDiff"
• wpStarttime = the current Mediawiki timestamp
• wpEdittime = the Mediawiki timestamp for the previous edit time to the page
• wpAntispam =

What am I doing wrong? Magog the Ogre (t • c) 20:24, 15 June 2014 (UTC)

Strange. It seems that show changes may be broken. πr (t • c) 00:59, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

Try adding wpUltimateParam. πr (t • c) 01:44, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

Tried, no dice. Magog the Ogre (t • c) 21:32, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

Perhaps you need an edittoken in order to send the diff nowadays. In general I would say, it's either an encoding mistake, or you are just missing too many of the fields. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:24, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

• "Cleanup v2" works for me, but there are character set problems with some files. Note that "cleanup v2" sets wpDiff to "Click me if you have JavaScript disabled", not "wpDiff" as you wrote above. --Stefan2 (talk) 21:18, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

broken redirects are transcluded

If a page transclude a template which is a broken redirect, then the page will transclude the content of the broken redirect. I dont think that was an issue before the content of redirect was shown on the redirect page itself. See List of members of the European Parliament for Portugal, 2009–14 (its has category:Redirects from moves and category:Redirects for discussion too). The reason is that Democratic_and_Social_Centre_–_People's_Party is RfD. Is it a bug or a feauture? (should RfD be noincluded?) Christian75 (talk) 06:41, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

I can't make sense of what you're saying. None of the pages you linked to are broken redirects. Jackmcbarn (talk) 17:02, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

What Christian75 means is that on the rows for Diogo Feio and Nuno Melo, in the second column, the Wikicode has {{colorbox|{{Democratic and Social Centre – People's Party/meta/color}}}} but the intended redirect at Template:Democratic and Social Centre – People's Party/meta/color is not being followed, instead, the page is being transcluded including the RfD notice, the broken redirect directive, and the {{R from move}}. It is that last template that is producing the unwanted categorisation. This is not a bug, but is expected behaviour if the #REDIRECT ] is not the first item on the very first line. --Redrose64 (talk) 17:38, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

Redrose64 - It didnt work that way before redirect pages displayed its content. Check this real broken redirect, {{User:Christian75/test-pump}}: Christian75 (talk) 20:14, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

• Is it still broken? I fixed the page based on what Redrose64 said (put the redirect itself back on the top line and the RfD notice after it) and it seems to be working fine to me... — {{U|Technical 13}} 20:45, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

• yes and no. Normally we do not redirect RfD, but it isnt broken anymore. (But if you go to Template:Democratic and Social Centre – People's Party/meta/color you will not notice that the redirect is a RfD). Christian75 (talk) 20:55, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

• If you follow the link in the "Redirected from" to https://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Template:Democratic_and_Social_Centre_%E2%80%93_People%27s_Party/meta/color&redirect=no - you will... — {{U|Technical 13}} 21:05, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

• but thats not the point... The documentation of RfD says "This template must be placed above the redirect; otherwise, the page will redirect as normal and users of the redirect will not be informed of the nomination." - it worked a few month ago... Christian75 (talk) 21:13, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

For clarification, User:Christian75/test-pump is a broken redirect, and Democratic and Social Centre – People's Party isn't a redirect at all. Transclusions of either of these appear to function normally. Jackmcbarn (talk) 04:16, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

@Jackmcbarn: The problem wasn't with Democratic and Social Centre – People's Party but with Template:Democratic and Social Centre – People's Party/meta/color. It was a functioning redirect, until that RfD notice got added before the #REDIRECT ] with this edit. Adding anything at all - whether plain text or a template - before the #REDIRECT means that the page is no longer a redirect, but a normal page, the whole of which gets transcluded by markup such as {{Democratic and Social Centre – People's Party/meta/color}} Since it's treated as a normal template, not a redirect, any templates on that page get expanded, and the transclusion therefore includes any categorisations made by those templates, which is why the article List of members of the European Parliament for Portugal, 2009–14 was appearing in Category:Redirects for discussion (because of the {{Rfd/core}}) and in Category:Redirects from moves (because of the {{R from move}}). --Redrose64 (talk) 11:00, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

I got that much. I just had (and still have) no idea why broken redirects were ever brought into the discussion. Jackmcbarn (talk) 16:06, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

Tech News: 2014-25

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

Reminder

• You can subscribe to the wikitech-ambassadors mailing list to get news more quickly and to send feedback or report problems.

Recent software changes

• The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf9) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on June 12. It will be added to non-Misplaced Pages wikis on June 17, and to all Wikipedias on June 19 (calendar).
• You can now read a summary of the Wikimedia technical report for May 2014.

VisualEditor news

• You can now easily see the target of a link or other information using the context menu.
• When you edit a reference, you can now empty it and click the "use an existing reference" button to switch it to re-use another reference.
• You can now add and edit {{DISPLAYTITLE}} and __DISAMBIG__ in the page settings menu.
• The tool to insert special characters is now wider and simpler; the order of mathematical symbols is now correct.

Future software changes

• Media Viewer will be enabled by default on all wikis on June 19. Feedback is welcome.
• You will no longer be able to use navigation popups and Hovercards at the same time.
• You will no longer see image thumbnails on search results pages on Wikibooks and Wikisource wikis.
• It will soon be possible to globally rename global (SUL) users.
• Tablet users will be redirected to the mobile view of Wikimedia wikis starting on June 17.
• The special page that lists most linked-to templates will soon include pages from all namespaces; it will also be renamed to Special:MostTranscludedPages.
• An IRC discussion about Phabricator will take place on June 17 at 17:30 UTC on the channel #wikimedia-office on freenode (time conversion). You can also read a blog post about the upcoming switch to Phabricator.
• You can now comment on the draft 2014-15 goals of the Wikimedia Foundation engineering department.

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

07:13, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

The global rename news is also being discussed by stewards on m:SN. It has recently been postponed until July 1. You can read the details on MediaWiki.org. πr (t • c) 04:04, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

Copyrighted image upload

Is there a guide anywhere to helping to decide how to upload a coprighted image? I have found using the upload wizard disconcerting with finding the right option when I am unsure. I have also asked for help on this on the image copyright noticeboard but nobody responded. Difficultly north (talk) Simply south alt. 12:23, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

Can you explain the problem? You can only upload a copyrighted file if it will qualify as a fair use image. The current step 3 in the upload wizard has a checkbox stating

This is a copyrighted, non-free work, but I believe it is Fair Use.

What is unclear?--S Philbrick(Talk) 13:57, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

It is once I tick that box and move into the area with all the information. The image I would like to upload is an artist's impression of a future sculpture planned for the Scottish Border called the Star of Caledonia. If for example I select "This image is the official cover art of a work", do I put the Author\Owner as the Gretna Landmark Trust as I am unsure of the actual artist. The source of this particular image is from BBC News, for example but there is a similar darker image from the Gretna Landmark Trust website. Which would be the best option to select for artist's impression? The images in question, for example, can be found here or originally here.

And when it asks how the image use will be minimal, should I put that it is an artist's impression and will only be used in the article in question to show what the sculpture is designed to look like until it is actually built or along the lines of this? Difficultly north (talk) Simply south alt. 14:18, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

The place to ask these questions is Misplaced Pages:Media copyright questions, not here. The details of copyrights aren't technical Misplaced Pages issues. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 16:38, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

Difficultly north, I don't see why you chose "This image is the official cover art of a work". That is usually for album/cd/dvd covers. Doesn't seem to be applicable. In fact, I perused the six alternatives, and do not see one that fits, leaving only option seven some other kind of non-free work.

My suggestion is to go to Misplaced Pages:Non-free content review, where editors experienced in the criteria can help you.--S Philbrick(Talk) 17:03, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

"Stranded" on IP User Talk Page

What I am about to describe has happened several times today. I see a red link for an IP address talk page, which means that the user has not received any traffic. I click on the red link and am taken to the empty talk page. I use Twinkle to welcome the IP with a template suggesting creating an account. Then I click on the Back button to go back to the talk page that the IP had been editing or the history that I had been viewing. Nothing happens. The Back button doesn't take me back. I am "stranded" on the IP talk page. I have to type in the previous page, or go to my Watchlist. I know that in the recent past I did not have this problem. Does anyone have any suggestions? By the way, I am using Firefox 30.0. Robert McClenon (talk) 22:56, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

What happens if you right-click the "back" button? In FF this should give a trail of the most recently visited pages (up to 50 are stored, although often only the last 10 are shown). Can you select from that list? --Redrose64 (talk) 23:07, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

• It is because you visit the page, you edit the page (via twinkle) and it is reloaded. This first click of back is taking you back to the IP's talk page at a time before you welcomed them with Twinkle (although it may not be updating what you see, because it realizes the url is the same). What you need to do is hit back twice (or maybe three times) and you will get back there. — {{U|Technical 13}} 00:01, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

I tried hitting back two or three times and it didn't work. Maybe I should have tried four or five times, but that would be tedious. Right-clicking the back button does work. Robert McClenon (talk) 20:07, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

Finding a particular use of a parameter in a template

I noticed that Template:Geographic reference has a source listed that's obsolete. If this were a separate template, it would be simple to find but is there a way to search and find all the uses of that specific usage. This template is used in practically every single US city article, and many articles it seems, including Houston which is a featured article, have the old version and need to be updated so it is pretty important to figure it out. From Template talk:Geographic reference, there was a discussion of a bot request to do. If so, can we run it again? The latter discussion ended with a note in the documentation and no fix. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 23:19, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

Have you tried Special:LinkSearch for factfinder2.census.gov ? WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:35, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

That link goes to the actual text ones, and to both of the templated ones. I have no idea why this was done this way. I guess we could search for the text string in the wrong one. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 23:54, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

• I think what you want is what is called an administrative category, added to the template. It will take a few hours to a couple months to filter through the WP:Job queue, but you'll find all the pages using the that parameter via the template. — {{U|Technical 13}} 00:06, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

@Ricky81682: If you can spell out exactly what is wanted, I can search the database dump from 2 May 2014 and make a list in a sandbox. Johnuniq (talk) 00:14, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

All pages that have the text {{GR|R2}}, {{GR|2}}, {{Geographic reference|R2}} or {{Geographic reference|2}}. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 00:27, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

• John, where are you going to put that? I actually just DLed the DB today and as such have a more up to data copy if you prefer I run it. — {{U|Technical 13}} 01:07, 17 June 2014 (UTC)
• I put the (big!) results in my sandbox2 (permalink). That list could be used with WP:AWB to do automated changes, if something systematic is needed.

  @T13: Thanks but I've got a few home-grown scripts for the search that are too messy to upload. My bluesky plan is to develop a WP:Labs tool that could be asked to index a particular template—it would build a database of all occurrences in articles with parameters indexed, and queries could be submitted to list various things. That's not going to happen anytime soon, unfortunately. Johnuniq (talk) 02:57, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

  A tool like that could be very useful. πr (t • c) 04:12, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

@Ricky81682: Did you try the TemplateTiger? I think the fantastic user:Kolossos recently moved it from the templatetiger@toolserver to TemplateTiger@tools.wmflabs.org. Try both. See for example this for dewiki. --Atlasowa (talk) 07:50, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

Technical 13 took care of it. Thanks! -- Ricky81682 (talk) 07:54, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

Incorrect ref formatting

Hi Guys, I have been trying to clear some of the backlog on Pages with incorrect ref formatting and am stuck with regard to Portal:Northern Ireland it appears on the listing and has no such notice either on the page or in the hidden cats, can one of you boffins help? cheers The Original Filfi (talk) 09:37, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

I don't see it in that category at all, so the problem appears to be resolved. {{Nihiltres|talk|edits}} 14:55, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

Searching "View history"

Is there a gadget that can search for a particular set of words within a parameter of revisions listed on the "View history" pages as a whole, i.e. a global search within that parameter? Or can a search only be done by calling up each revision separately and then doing the search? Trying to pinpoint when a particular set of words has been changed/deleted can be like looking for a needle in a haystack. --P123ct1 (talk) 09:48, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

A tool called "Revision history search" is linked from all history pages. Matma Rex talk 09:57, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

I have never understood this tool properly. Take the wording at the bottom of the page after the search has been done. What does - as an example - "Comparing differences in between 5 and 6 while coming from 9.00 " mean? --P123ct1 (talk) 12:37, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

That's just the tool describing how the iterative search was done. –xeno 12:43, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

Then why does it give options, in the example I gave, to click on the date and "Search from here"? And what does "5 and 6 while coming from 9.00" mean? --P123ct1 (talk) 14:32, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

The system uses a binary search by default, which is where the numbers are coming from. The idea is to halve the number of revisions to search, making the search much faster than a linear one. You take the list of revisions and divide it in half, then try to determine if your change is in that half-list. If it isn't, you try the other half. If it is, then you halve the half-list into a yet smaller list and search again, and eventually you'll find the single revision with the change, or decide that it isn't present. {{Nihiltres|talk|edits}} 15:18, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

• I've tried to use that tool in the past. That tool's UI needs a thorough workover to make it intelligible to ordinary people. 86.179.5.128 (talk) 00:25, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

If you want an easier-to-understand GUI, you might also give this a try: https://tools.wmflabs.org/xtools/blame/?style=new .(new style will be default in a few days). --Hedonil (talk) 13:55, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

• @Hedonil: Thanks! I was just getting the hang of the other method, but this tool looks much simpler to use. --P123ct1 (talk) 20:12, 18 June 2014 (UTC)
• @Hedonil: It works like a dream! --P123ct1 (talk) 00:18, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

New mobile site for tablets

Update from the WMF Mobile Web team: Starting today, people accessing Wikimedia projects on a tablet will be sent to a special tablet-optimizied mobile site. Some features and functionality include:

• larger fonts and better content formatting for improved readability
• a mobile table of contents for page navigation
• all sections open by default for long-form reading
• improved thumbnail formatting
• article actions (edit, add image, watchlist) and notifications
• other reading and contribution features (login/create account, random article, upload, watchlist) in the left navigation menu

If you opt into the beta site (visit Settings in the left navigation menu and tap to opt into Beta), you'll also see a talk page feature, and starting June 19 20:00 UTC we will offer Visual Editor editing as an option for beta users, in addition to wikitext editing.

These changes are geared toward improving reading and contribution on a larger touch-screen device. If you prefer to use the old desktop version of the site, you can switch back by scrolling to the bottom of any page and tapping the "Desktop" link; this will return you to the desktop view until you opt back into the mobile view.

Let us know if you have any questions! We're available on IRC #wikimedia-mobile and via email (mobile-lwikimedia.org). Cheers, Maryana (WMF) (talk) 20:36, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

If I now visit an en.m. URL in my desktop browser, will I see the tablet or phone version? How may I switch to the other? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 11:20, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

Hi Andy – it's based on your browser window screen size. If it's larger than 768px by 768px, you get the tablet view, but if you shrink the window below those dimensions, you get the phone view. You can play around with resizing the window to see the changes between the two :) Maryana (WMF) (talk) 17:23, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

Page view stats

Page view statistics not working. Any chance someone could put another coin in the meter? 86.179.5.128 (talk) 00:23, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

Auto archive hasn't kicked in...

...on Talk:Pro-ana. Did I mess up something with the template?-- Brainy J ~✿~ (talk) 02:41, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

• Should be fixed and archive on it's next pass. Which may or may not be tomorrow. — {{U|Technical 13}} 02:54, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. I think I see what I did wrong now. I goofed and specified a completely different talk page.-- Brainy J ~✿~ (talk) 13:26, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages Article Traffic Stats: Problems, weird counting, and questions

When clicking the link to Misplaced Pages traffic statistics, since around 15:00 UTC, I attempted checking statistics for Tour de France, France national football team, Cristiano Ronaldo, United States men's national soccer team, and many more 2014 FIFA World Cup/sports-related articles. Using Firefox, I get "Problem Loading Page". Contacting Henrik, the operator of the traffic stats, does not work as he does not respond.

Plus, I'm seeing unusual pages such as University of East Anglia (not a popular university) and many other weird articles that I don't expect to see up in the top 1,000 list and many more that rank in the next 9,000. What is this issue? Are they Dos attacks? Is some bot doing something?

And, since our technology is advancing, I heard this doesn't count mobile pageviews. Could the pageview statistics count mobile, tablet, and other device pageviews? I think this would be a smart idea. A Great Catholic Person (talk) 05:15, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

In my professional capacity I'm the person actually rewriting the pageviews definitions, so:

1. This is a problem. I'm going to kick people internally to send him a note since, given that we bought him a new machine for the service, he should presumably want to reply to us. It could just be a TZ thing, though.
2. I have been investigating a similar problem reported by User:Gigs and User:PiRSquared17; having gone through the request logs of a page they highlighted, I'm pretty sure it's a bot attack wide disparity in IPs, circular referer chains and a single point of commonality in user agents - that most of them are on Windows XP. We're talking through ways of detecting this in the future.
3. Yes, it'll absolutely include mobile pageviews, if by that you mean 'pageviews through the mobile site'. Splitting out tablets versus phones on a per-article basis is potentially a pain, but it'll certainly be investigated. We're also looking at distinguishing different types of views: so, you'd have X pageviews, Y history pageviews and Z talkpage page views, or something. We'll see. Ironholds (talk) 05:25, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

• Are hits from search engines crawling Misplaced Pages still included? Is there any kind of estimate of how many page hits these are likely to contribute? I seem to remember from a previous discussion that search engine hits could be a significant fraction of total hits for low-visited pages. I would like to see a disclaimer, or some information about this, on the page view statistics page. Sometimes people say "look, people do read this article, there are around 50 hits every day", but if 49 of those are non-human then it's misleading. 86.179.4.47 (talk) 13:25, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

  They are, in some form. We have a relatively crude regular expression currently identifying spiders, although what happens to the spider after it's been identified is unknown to me. This is also something we're factoring into the newer version (we have a user agent parser now, which means we can exclude/specially identify and segment hits from spiders). Google, at least, is sensible about their crawling, and pairs crawls of a page with edits to that page. Ironholds (talk) 16:36, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

I'm puzzled by your last sentence. I wonder if you could explain that a little further? Surely you are not suggesting that Google's search engine edits Misplaced Pages pages?? 86.179.119.9 (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 17:31, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

I'm assuming that Ironholds mean Google is accessing the edit page during its crawling of the Web; by "clicking" all the links on the page it will eventually "click" the edit button. It does not edit pages. -- 140.202.10.134 (talk) 19:32, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

Neither, actually (although we do have edits that claim to be from google bot, because there are a couple of users who (a) spoof their user agent and (b) think they're a lot funnier than they actually are). So, google has a bot built just for crawling Wikimedia sites. We have millions (or billions?) of pages, some of which change very rarely, some of which change very statically; crawling them all, constantly, would be untenable, and crawling them all in one big load once a month would lead to outdated information about things people care the most about. Instead, google's bot crawls the recentchanges feed; when it sees a new entry, it goes to that article, and crawls it, and caches the results. That way things are always pretty much up to date, but google doesn't have to crawl every article - just the ones being updated. Ironholds (talk) 23:12, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, that's interesting to know ... 86.179.119.9 (talk) 01:02, 20 June 2014 (UTC)

Edit conflict reports when I've saved

For some time now I've noticed that I occasionally get edit conflicts when I save - ie I try to save, I can't because of an edit conflict, I go out of the page and see my edit has been saved. Using Chrome. Dougweller (talk) 09:04, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

Maybe "occasionally" is the wrong word as it happened with this edit and my last talk page edit. Dougweller (talk) 09:07, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

I occasionally get it, when I think I clicked on the "Save" button, nothing happens, and I click again. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 09:15, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

Might be related to bugzilla:56849. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 10:00, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

Possibly. It's certainly a pain! Dougweller (talk) 18:11, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

Size of the DB, but latest revisions only

Is there a report anywhere showing the size of the en.wp database, but only including the latest revision of each page? That would be an interesting measure of the "real" size of the project. — Scott • talk 09:17, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

Dumps.wikimedia.org shows the compressed size of various dumps from en.wp. The main one "enwiki-20140614-pages-articles.xml.bz2" has the current version of every page, excluding the user namespace and all talk namespaces, and excluding all images. That's 10.2 GB, and it expands to 45.3 GB. -- John of Reading (talk) 09:39, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

Great, thanks. I see the dump formats are explained here. — Scott • talk 14:02, 18 June 2014 (UTC)T

Magic word for Wikidata ID?

Is there a 'magic word' that will return the Wikidata property number of an article? I'd like to include one in a cleanup template. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 11:15, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

The nearest thing I could find was {{PAGEID}}, but I'm not sure that's the same thing. It Is Me Here 12:01, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

No, the page ID isn't the same thing as the Wikidata item ID. And Andy, I assume that you want the item ID (e.g. "Q142" for France) rather than a property belonging to an item (e.g. Q142's property P36, the capital, is "Paris"). You can get the item ID by using Module:Wikibase:

• {{#invoke:Wikibase|id}} → Script error: No such module "Wikibase".

That only works for the current page. Also, it doesn't appear to be documented either on the module page or at mw:Extension:WikibaseClient/Lua. The Lua part of the Wikibase extension is being rewritten, so there is a chance this functionality might be removed at some point (I'd have to ask the developers to find out for certain what's happening to it), but it works for now. — Mr. Stradivarius 12:55, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

I'll also note that if you have the XTools gadget installed, the link to See full page statistics shows the Wikidata ID (Might not help for a template, but other readers might be interested)--S Philbrick(Talk) 18:48, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

It is also listed in the "page information" link on the left-hand panel. --Mdann52talk to me! 21:43, 18 June 2014 (UTC) ← Thanks. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 23:30, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

@Mr. Stradivarius:} Thank you, I'll give that a try. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:15, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

Now working, on {{Gender unclear}}. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:25, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

Module redirects?

Is is possible to have Redirect pages in the Module namespace? E.g. if I make Module:F → Module:G, then:

1. Will {{#invoke:F|ψ}} work the same as {{#invoke:G|ψ}}?
2. Will typing the internal link ] correctly take people to Module:G?

It Is Me Here 11:57, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

Sort of. You can create Module:F with the code:

return require('Module:G')

Then {{#invoke:F|ψ}} will work the same as {{#invoke:G|ψ}}, but ] won't take people to Module:G, as it is using a Lua "redirect", rather than a MediaWiki redirect. — Mr. Stradivarius 12:21, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

The problem with MediaWiki redirects right now, is that they can only be defined in wikitext, not in JS, CSS or Lua. Maybe at some point in the future, we can move that into the UI of mediawiki, and kill the dependency on wikitext. But right now, the above solution is the best approach, and actually fairly lightweight. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:23, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

OK, thanks! It Is Me Here 14:37, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

Redirecting a category on MediaWiki software

Just a heads-up, an editor is asking for assistance regarding a personal project using MediaWiki software. The original posting can be found here. Kurtis 20:29, 18 June 2014 (UTC)

Watchlists

I have not used the "Watchlist" function until now, and I see that not all edits to an article I have put on my watchlist are being added to it. For example, for 18th June there are no edits listed at all, and yet in the "View history" page there are over 50. I have set the list to go back seven days, but there is nothing listed for 16th and 17th June either, while there have been many edits on those dates as well. Also, how does a watchlist for an article really differ in usefulness from its "View history" pages (apart from its not having the "curr-prev" and "Compare versions" facilities)? --P123ct1 (talk) 08:50, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

You can have many pages on your watchlist and choose to only see the most recent edit on each. See Help:Watching pages and Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-watchlist. PrimeHunter (talk) 09:35, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

AFAIK the default setting is to only show the latest edit to each page on watchlists (but obviously not on page histories). The preference to change this is called "Expand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent" in the "Watchlist" tab (direct link in previous comment). The advantage of a watchlist is that you can keep track of many pages in one list; if you are watching only one page it's essentially the same as that page's history. SiBr₄ (talk) 11:08, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. I would have never have guessed from my Watchlist page that I should go to Preferences! --P123ct1 (talk) 11:48, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

Interesting, a few developers were recently just discussing making the watch list preferences accessible from the watch list. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:00, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

Size of tables

Is there a function that can return the number of rows in a table? I know that people have asked about automumbering before and the answer is no, but I don't necessarily want to autonumber. I just want to know the total the total number of entries. SpinningSpark 09:44, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

This might be possible in Lua, but it depends what exactly you want to be done. Can you give us any more details about how you want to use this row-counting function? — Mr. Stradivarius 09:53, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

I'll give one example: I am working on implementing a COI edit for Manitoba Sports Hall of Fame and Museum, replacing a scattered list of players with a sortable table. I ended up with 12 use cases, and worried that I might have missed someone. I knew there were 216 entries, so it would have been a nice and easy check if I could easily verify that my table had 216 entries. I know the work around, copy and past into Excel and count, but it would have been nice if I could access the number without doing that.--S Philbrick(Talk) 14:54, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

For things like that, a user script written in JavaScript would be a more natural choice than a Lua module. However, writing such a script might not be easy. You would have to ask someone more knowledgeable about JS than I. Lua would be more suitable for something like taking a list of names and outputting a formatted wikitable of the names, with e.g. a subheading at the top saying "this list contains nn items". — Mr. Stradivarius 15:26, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

Typing $('.wikitable tbody tr').length; at the console confirms that table has 216 rows. This should work elsewhere, although unfortunately it's going to get confused on pages with more than one table. Unless you're going to be requiring counts like this a lot, I'd suggest just saving that snippet somewhere to copy and paste when needed rather than going to the effort of turning it into a userscript which is loaded on every pageview. the wub "?!" 21:07, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

Nicely done. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 21:17, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

Poor search suggestions in search box

It's me again, not to report traffic stats (it's back up now), when I type in search suggestions I don't see any relevant topics. Type in "B" without pressing enter, some unpopular topic comes up. When you type in "I" it comes up with Iran Standard Time, and India second. A time zone would not be popular at all. Type in Super Bowl, the Super Bowl article comes first, but then do other old articles XLIII/2009, XLII/2008, and years before, rather than the current ones XLVIII/2014 and the upcoming XLIX/2015. PlayStations 2 and 3 come before PlayStation 4. Can someone fix this issue: Unpopular and outdated suggestions, because I see a glitch. Google and other search engines can put suggestions much, much better than Misplaced Pages, and Misplaced Pages needs to be as good as Google in updating search suggestions. A Great Catholic Person (talk) 20:32, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

I believe the algorithm looks at the "what links here" figures to work out which articles are most popular. Bakhsh and Iran Standard Time are linked from the infobox of just about every Iranian place name article (example). The algoithm isn't clever enough to see that these links are not important. -- John of Reading (talk) 21:23, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

Hmm...if suggestions are based solely on the popularity of links, I wonder if it'd be worth considering ignoring links that are a result of template transclusions? ~SuperHamster Talk Contribs 21:26, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

Accurately discounting links arising on transcluded templates from a count of 'what links here' is a rather difficult and expensive operation. However, having generated the most wanted lists for years, I do have a fairly efficient approximation that works well if this is useful - posted at Misplaced Pages:Most-wanted articles/wantedness.sql in case it it useful. - TB (talk) 21:41, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

Any changes to the Watchlist?

Since yesterday loading my watchlist makes my Safari 5.1.10 on Mac OS X 10.6.8 run with 100% load on both CPU kernels for about ten seconds, sometimes even longer, freezing the tab... it's the same on all language versions I tried (de, en, fr, es). Expand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent is enabled, as are WikEd and Popups. Firefox and Google Chrome behave as normal. I gave it a while, but it seems it doesn't change back for good. Dear developers, did you change anything about the configuration of the watchlist? – Thanks in advance, and good night till tomorrow! :) --Aschmidt (talk) 00:52, 20 June 2014 (UTC)

You're a little out of date. We're at 10.9, 10.10 if you use the beta OS, at this point.—cyberpower _Online 00:56, 20 June 2014 (UTC)

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