Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Redrose64 (talk | contribs) at 18:20, 7 November 2013 (→Unable to do anything through IE8: South Wales should get the same geonotices as Berkshire except for the WikiTakesTube13 one). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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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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Drop-down option for saved edit summaries/subject headers

The drop-down option for saved edit summaries/subject headers etc. has vanished for the second time (previously fixed by unclicking 'Always use a secure connection when logged in' on 'Preferences'), and I can't seem to fix it. Any help welcome. GiantSnowman 11:44, 24 October 2013 (UTC)

Anyone? GiantSnowman 11:22, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

GiantSnowman Seems you're referring to the gadget (first one in the "Editing" section). I tried enabling it and it works for me. You may want to try disabling it, saving your preference, re-enabling it, and saving your preferences again. Also bypass your cache. equazcion → 07:01, 3 Nov 2013 (UTC)

No, it's not that - I'm referring to manually typed edit summaries which were saved, the option you have suggested refers to 'default' edut summaries as defined by Misplaced Pages. GiantSnowman 18:38, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

• The drop-down edit summaries - or anything else in a form field - are saved by your browser, not by Misplaced Pages. Have you cleared your local saved settings, switched web browser, upgraded it, etc? Andrew Gray (talk) 20:31, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

• Not that I'm aware of, and drop-down fields on other websites are as fine as usual. GiantSnowman 20:42, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

I guess you're talking about autocomplete. I don't generally advise relying on that, as it's somewhat tenuous and there are about a million different things that can make it disappear. You may be interested in User:Equazcion/CustomSummaryPresets though. equazcion → 04:57, 5 Nov 2013 (UTC)

Note the option on one of my browsers has come back. GiantSnowman 12:59, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

Font color of article text

Has the font color of text in the body of Misplaced Pages pages changed? I think it used to be black, but now all pages appear to have grey text. Is this the case for anyone else? -- Toshio Yamaguchi 19:53, 24 October 2013 (UTC)

To expand a bit, I know that the font color used to be the same as the color of my signature (which is black). Now there is a noticeable contrast (at least for me). -- Toshio Yamaguchi 20:06, 24 October 2013 (UTC)

It's definitely black for me - MonoBook and Vector. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:46, 24 October 2013 (UTC)

Still grey for me (vector skin + Safari). -- Toshio Yamaguchi 11:15, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

Seems to be defined as #252525 in the style sheet. The printable versions seems to have changed as well. Not a fan. — Whisternefet (t · c) 20:45, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

I see it too. What is weird is that I can't find it defined anywhere in the source! Where the hell does it come from? — Edokter (talk) — 10:19, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

It comes from Vector's skin styles, and was changed – I presume accidentally – in https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/79948/ . I'll submit a patch to restore the previous value. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Matma Rex (talk • contribs) 11:00, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

It comes from https://bits.wikimedia.org/en.wikipedia.org/load.php?debug=true&modules=skins.vector&only=styles&skin=vector, which is generated by LESS. It seems the new color was introduced by Jon (WMF) in gerrit:79948, but I believe it was supposed to be an opt-in beta feature. Helder 11:04, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/92065/ Matma Rex talk 11:07, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

The color #252525 is present in the image of this document: mw:Wikimedia Foundation Design/Color usage#Color Coding/ What Colors Represent. Helder 11:17, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

The patch has been accepted and will be deployed on November 7 per mw:MediaWiki 1.23/Roadmap. The hack in MediaWiki:Vector.css should be removed then. Matma Rex talk 14:27, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

That is not a hack! That is perfectly valid CSS!! Shame!!! — Edokter (talk) — 11:24, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Okay, okay, the workaround. ;) Matma Rex talk 11:29, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Requests to dezoomify an image

I was asked to upload PD (direct link to zoomified image: ). image to Commons, but it uses the evil zoomify javascript. I tried to use the tools listed on commons:Help:Zoomable images, but they either require skills I don't have (ex. Python, Ruby + ImageMagick, etc.) or are broken ( by User:kolossos gives 404, gee, toolserver tool that is not maintained, what a surprise; was loading an image, then gave me a black screen; upon a second run it froze at 92%). As it appears using those tools requires skills (or luck) I don't have, perhaps someone here will have a better luck. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 02:46, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

I've managed to get the image successfully. Can you post what I should put on its description page when I upload it? Jackmcbarn (talk) 03:21, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

@User:Jackmcbarn: Description: {{de|Nationalitätenkarte der östlichen Provinzen des Deutschen Reiches nach dem Ergebnissen der amtlichen Volkszählung vom Jahre 1910 entworfen von Ing. Jakob Spett}} (I can't do more with that than a Google Translate myself; but ping User:MyMoloboaccount; he requested it so hopefully he will also translate the description). Author: Spett, Jakob; publisher Gotha Justus Perthes. Year: 1910. Category:Maps in German, Category:Ethnographic maps of Poland (I think). Thanks! --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 05:00, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

"National map of eastern provinces of German Reich based on official census of 1910" would be ok. As to licence I believe it would be PD, but I am no expert, as to reason, to demonstrate the national census of 1910 in German Empire and its demographics.--MyMoloboaccount (talk) 22:08, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

I need a PD reason to upload it, and I still need a filename. Jackmcbarn (talk) 03:43, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Jakob Spett died in 1942 according to , p. 77. (He was born in 1863 or 1862 according to the same source, pp. 74-75: they state his wife was 93 years old in 1968, and her husband was 12 years older.) The map is a derivative work; it is based on "Vogels Karte des Deutschen Reiches und der Alpenländer", published also by Justus Perthes in Gotha in 1915. That earlier map was created 1891-93 by cartographer Carl Vogel (1828-1897) as "Karte des Deutschen Reiches". It was revised and extended to cover the "Alpenländer" (alpine countries) 1913-15 by cartographer Paul Langhans. Langhans lived 1867-1952 and thus the map is not yet in the public domain in Germany, and neither is Spett's derivative. Therefore not suited for uploading to the Commons. If you want to upload it locally at the English Misplaced Pages, that would work; it's {{PD-1923-abroad}}. (Spett's map was used in the negotiations at Versailles after WWI, so it must have been published by then.) Lupo 13:04, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

File:National map of eastern provinces of German Reich based on official census of 1910.jpg If you see any improvements that can be made to its description page, please make them. Jackmcbarn (talk) 15:39, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Thank you. Lupo 20:16, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Making links with quotes work

I've frequently run into the problem of wanting to cite a search (usually on talk pages; I realize of course it isn't typically a valid citation for articles) and failing:

"photo+credit%3A+Misplaced Pages"+-site%3Awikipedia.org search

The reason for this turns out to be that the standard resolution of a link doesn't handle the quotation mark. Whereas %22 works just fine:

search

One option is to put in a bug report over it - I imagine someone has - but I don't have the patience to chase that squirrel. So I'm thinking to seize the old Template:Link, which currently redirects to Template:Ill. This would involve changing a hundred or so redirects to direct links from the articles that still use it, then repurposing it into a small, simple template with the intended usages:

{{link|1=https://www.google.com/search?q="photo+credit%3A+Misplaced Pages"+-site%3Awikipedia.org|search}} and/or <nowiki>

i.e. so that you can use it to produce the plain text to link if a second parameter is omitted, or to produce a functioning link if it is given.

Does this seem like a good idea to you? Wnt (talk) 22:15, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

It does seem like a good idea, but can you make it so that the wikilinking is handled automatically and the text to be displayed is an optional second parameter:

{{link|http://www.google.com/search?q="foobar"}} could return

and

{{link|http://www.google.com/search?q="foobar"|foosearch}} could return

I think that would be easier to use... Livit⇑/_What? 20:12, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

I think you're saying what I meant in the first case I listed above: {{link|1=https://www.google.com/search?q="photo+credit%3A+Misplaced Pages"+-site%3Awikipedia.org|search}} ought to return Wnt (talk) 21:28, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

You are starting with a partially encoded string, why not use a fully encoded string ? It's better to use a fully unencoded string, and feed that to the encoder OR use a fully url encoded query string to begin with. {{urlencode:"photo credit: Misplaced Pages" -site:wikipedia.org|QUERY}} https://www.google.com/search?q=%22photo+credit%3A+Misplaced Pages%22+-site%3Awikipedia.org ... —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:09, 30 October 2013 (UTC)

You're right - better not to reinvent the wheel (I had some notion somehow you could improve readability in some strange situation by not uuencoding everything, but this is almost certainly asking for trouble!). However, it is still nice to have one template with two parameters rather than the more unusual magic word format inside a bracketed section, and "link" seems like a really desirable synonym for "urlencode:" even when only one parameter is used. Wnt (talk) 15:00, 30 October 2013 (UTC)

Well, this wasn't much of a mandate, but I've gone ahead with Phase I and altered all of the incoming links to use Template:ill directly. The only "what links here" entries for Template:Link are user .js modules, and by doing sequential deletions I've determined these are set off by a comment line, as shown at User:Wnt/ArticleTranslator.js. While I don't know for sure that the javascript doesn't rely on the template (I don't know if the what links here is meaningful at all) I don't think {{Template|Link}} ({{Link}}) is meant literally in that usage, and if it is, I'd expect it to simply display a link to the template rather than relying on its results.

I'll hold off a bit before continuing though, to see if there are people still out there actively adding {{Link}} in the course of their editing. Wnt (talk) 00:36, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Ummm, whoops! My link to the what links here wasn't to the first page. Ugh... lots more... Wnt (talk) 19:43, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

I am not signed in

But I am signed in. I never signed out, and I recently had to sign back in, and I assume I checked the box saying to keep me signed in for 30 days. I went to the login screen and was told I was already signed in as vchimpanzee, though I could sign in with a different name. I signed in again. After that, I clicked on "online" at the top of the screen and was told I was not signed in.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 19:23, 30 October 2013 (UTC)

I used the page history and undo to say I was online, and that worked fine.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 19:57, 30 October 2013 (UTC)

There are quite a lot of related threads in the archives, mostly from Misplaced Pages:Village pump (technical)/Archive 114 onwards. If the circumstances suggest that Misplaced Pages doesn't think that I'm logged in, I use Ctrl+F5 and that normally works for me. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:01, 30 October 2013 (UTC)

It didn't work. And I'm wondering if Misplaced Pages will think I'm not logged in next time. I did check the box. I'm about to leave anyway and change to offline. I may edit tomorrow form a library, but of course I won't already be signed in there.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 21:28, 30 October 2013 (UTC)

It happened for clicking on "Offline" and CTRL-F5 didn't help.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 21:38, 30 October 2013 (UTC)

If you do have Javascript enabled and are still seeing no notice of the login, please check for Javascript errors in the browser's error console. Please also try to update your browser cache by https://en.wikipedia.org/Wikipedia:BYPASS. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 13:25, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

I'm not at home but I'll try these steps when I get there. I got a message to update Java, which I am aware is not Javascript, but I'm not sure whether I actually did. I also got a message telling me to update my virus protection but it didn't say how, and I spent time in a live chat with someone connected with the virus protection company. This is when the problems started happening.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 14:13, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

Whoops. Are you sure that the "virus protection company" was legit? I get phone calls 2-3 times a week from somebody claiming to be from Windows support and asking me to visit their website for a free online check. I never do it. --Redrose64 (talk) 17:52, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

Does this only happen when clicking the online/offline links? I think there might be a bug in the online/offline script you are using. The code contains hard-coded HTTP URLs, but Misplaced Pages now uses HTTPS by default for logged-in users. For the links to work on HTTP and HTTPS alike, the URLs should be protocol-relative (i.e. "//en.wikipedia.org/w/...") or server-relative (i.e. "/search/?..."). I suggest contacting the script's author. I've already fixed the same issue in the template associated with the script. – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 22:16, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

Good catch, I'v made the links protocol relative. They probably should be server relative as well, but I leave that up to the author. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:52, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks guys. Didn't realise Misplaced Pages had changed to a secure transmission protocol. Cheers anyway. CJ 15:25, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

To PartTime Gnome: I had the problem only when I first went to the site each day, and when clicking on the online/offline links. I go to the site using HTTP links. I saved them in an email to myself which I update as I work my way through the Help Desk archives.

To Redrose: I clicked on the symbol for the virus protection company (McAfee, actually) that appears on my screen automatically. From there I can go to support. I hardly think a scam artist could reproduce the entire web site or redirect me to him from the legitimate site.

I forgot to click "keep me signed in" so I signed out and signed in again. I also deleted history. I don't have the problem now. Thanks.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 19:13, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

Didn't work. I clicked on "back" as many times as necessary to get back to where I started, and the first page still looked like I wasn't signed in. I even changed one number in the URL and got taken to another page that looked like it. I signed in, forgot to say I wanted to stay signed in, signed out, and signed in again. Now all is well. I hope.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 19:34, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

After clicking "back" sufficient times, you may still need to force your browser to reload the page (in Firefox, F5 may be sufficient, otherwise try Ctrl+F5) - otherwise it may display a cached copy, one which still suggests that you're not signed in. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:10, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

Weird. I used the link with http rather than https and I appeared not to be signed in. Changing the URL to https solved the problem. I'm going to send myself that email with the URLs corrected.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 19:09, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

By the way, I'm on IE.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 19:13, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Fix needed for Template:Alphanumeric TOC

Hi, when using Template:Alphanumeric TOC, it is adding an unwanted section of ==Contents== to each article wherever it is transcluded. See: 2000s in film and note in the TOC that there are 2 sections labelled "Contents". The usual Template:Compact ToC does not do this. Would someone be able to fix the template for us? Thanks much Funandtrvl (talk) 00:05, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

I think the problem is in Template:TOC top, which inserts the offending H2: <h2>{{{title|{{MediaWiki:Toc}} }}}</h2>. I'd prefer if someone more familiar with TOC templates could look at this though. The templates involved are also all still full-protected. equazcion → 00:25, 1 Nov 2013 (UTC)

(edit conflict) It's caused by the use of <h2>...</h2> in by User:TheDJ. h2 was removed earlier after discussion at Template talk:TOC top#Edit request but it has gone in and out. I think it should be out. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:27, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

I doubt this will be all that controversial. Just get rid of it. equazcion → 00:30, 1 Nov 2013 (UTC)

In reading the Talk page referenced above, it looks like the "Content" section link/listing in the TOC of an article is usually undesirable. I vote for taking it out, since when the alphanumeric toc is used multiple times in an article, like 2000s in film, it looks very weird to have multiple Content sections in the TOC. The template is protected, and I don't know enough code to be able to fix it. Do I need to make an edit request on the template's talk page? Funandtrvl (talk) 01:14, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

It seems like User:TheDJ inadvertently re-inserted the H2 tags recently in an unrelated edit. The consensus is to leave them out. If an admin downgrades the protection level to template-protect I can probably do this but I would really rather User:PrimeHunter or User:TheDJ, or someone else who knows TOC templates, to be the one. equazcion → 01:38, 1 Nov 2013 (UTC)

You could make an edit request at that talk page, but if you don't have a specific code replacement to provide I don't think it would happen. equazcion → 01:44, 1 Nov 2013 (UTC)

There was little inadvertent about it. It was quite on purpose, to make it mirror the ACTUAL Table of Contents structure. As the Template:TOC top documentation mentions, use "primary=false" when a TOC is used in addition to a proper TOC. The reason to use h2 is for accessibility reasons. And remember that Template:Alphanumeric TOC is not the only user of Template:TOC top. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:32, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

The actual TOC does use <h2>...</h2> but it doesn't produce a TOC entry saying "Contents". PrimeHunter (talk) 11:12, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

The primary TOC mentioning Contents is a side effect of editors using more than one TOC on a page. Most uses of {{TOC top}} REPLACE a proper TOC and then there is no problem whatsoever in using H2, and you will have consistent and expected behavior for pages. It's when you add a secondary TOC, when you start to create trouble. So make that distinction by using the 'primary=false' option and you won't have a problem. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:59, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

I think this edit to 2000s in film] illustrates what DJ means. Without the option, the templates cause an extra heading to appear in the template. In my experience it is more common for the template to be use as replacement for the TOC. older ≠ wiser 12:12, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

• The protection of Template:Alphanumeric TOC has been lowered to TE if there is a consensus for a change, which there seems to be. Happy editing. Technical 13 (talk) 11:42, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

Template:TOC top is still full-protected, and that's where the change would need to be made. User:TheDJ, you just told us a bunch of things that were already mentioned -- but didn't mention why you felt your change back to H2 was a benefit. Is there any reason it wouldn't be better to make multiple TOCs not produce this unintended behavior by default, rather than requiring a parameter to fix it? Edit: I see you mentioned accessibility reasons, but I'm not sure what those could be -- and most other TOC templates don't seem to produce an H2, at least not by default. Any reason it particularly belongs in templates that use Template:TOC top? equazcion → 13:48, 1 Nov 2013 (UTC)

Now dropped to TE protection.--User:Salix alba (talk): 14:07, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks Salix :) PS. For the time being I added mention of this "primary" parameter to the documentation at Template:Alphanumeric TOC. I doubt people using this template would've reasonably known to go looking at TOC top to find that information. equazcion → 14:18, 1 Nov 2013 (UTC)

1. Regarding accessibility reasons, if you don't use h2, a screenreader will not identify the header of the Article ToC in it's own Document ToC (which includes much more than just the article headers) as it does for other pages. The official TOC and most fake ToCs do actually use h2 (I did a rewrite of almost all of them not so long ago).
2. "multiple TOCs not produce this unintended behavior". That would indeed be nice, but that is unfortunately not possible since we are faking our own ToC here. There is no 'knowledge' that we can use to determine if a table is an additional fake next to a proper TOC, or if it supposed to be replacing the proper TOC.
3. Again the problem here is not the h2 itself, it's that you use are using two elements that are designed to present a ToC for an article (combined with the fact that the core software only knows about the it's own primary ToC). Another example that shows that this is a somewhat faulty usage for 2000s_in_film: if I put a heading named G in between Events and Highest-grossing films, and then press the G of the Template:Alphanumeric TOC in that article, it will take me to this newly added G instead of the G in the list. It has been visually added to the section of the page, but that doesn't magically make it specific to the section. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:26, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

These are all valid things to consider. I nevertheless have to say it seems haphazard to change the default behavior and add a parameter required to get it back to the currently expected behavior, when that parameter would of course not be in any invocation yet, no one would know about it, the talk page consensus was against it, and without making any documentation changes to the affected parent templates (which are the only places any users would realistically be looking). And yes, regardless of your opinion on whether multiple TOCs should actually be used on a page. I've now changed the documentation for the particular template that brought the issue to VPT, but there are still another 30 or so to go, and adding this parameter to the affected uses is probably a bigger job. equazcion → 14:51, 1 Nov 2013 (UTC)

It's true, there is a lot of cleanup. And it is true that when I made the original changes, I did not think about the fact that about 2-5% of the uses would be 'incorrect' to begin with. But this one problem is not more important than the problems solved. In general we should move forward and become more correct, not keep crap in simply because we have crap that depends on crap.

If you ask me, we should replace every list or section section usage with a "Alphanumeric section TOC" that has primary set to false, and preferably uses prefixes for the header IDs. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:14, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for adding the primary option to {{Alphanumeric TOC}} in . But many editors will fail to set primary=false when it's required. Is there no way to make it accessible in screenreaders without causing the "Contents" entry in cases where the page also has a normal TOC? PrimeHunter (talk) 15:29, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

We could add an option into the core software to automatically remove headers from the vanilla ToC, if given a certain paramater. But that would be highly en.wp specific behavior/requirements, I doubt it would be easily accepted. The other option is to create an option for building alternative TOC formats into the core software. I'd give that a higher chance of success, but it would be more complicated. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:17, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks to those above that added the parameter description for "primary=false" to the /doc page. Are there any other templates that would need that description too? I would have never known to look for Template:TOC top, so I appreciate the description for the proper use. :) I agree it might be a good idea to make a Template:Alphanumeric section TOC...maybe that would be a simpler solution that would also be able to keep the main Alphanumeric template as is, for the reasons above. Funandtrvl (talk) 20:51, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Heading and image overlap

A reader reported, via OTRS, that in Hinduism in Tamil Nadu, the heading "Bhairavar" overlaps the image. I see the problem, in Mozilla Firefox, but not in Chrome. Can anyone see why?--S Philbrick(Talk) 13:45, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

Depends on screen resolution and default fonts and font sizes on the operating system that you use. More information welcome (I cannot reproduce with 1440px screenwidth on Firefox 24 on a Fedora 19 system). --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 15:26, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

This is a known CSS issue, caused by the margins that we have on top of images. It's actually the appropriate behavior (according to CSS) in very specific combinations of text and floating blocks (images). It's undesirable, but not really avoidable without reducing the margin on top of the image by at least half, which I think is also not really desirable. It's one of those things that no one really thought about when defining clear behavior in the CSS specification. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:14, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Interlanguage links in different font

The interlanguage links have changed their font-family. They used to be in the same font-family as the rest of the page (Arial), but now they are something called "Autonym" which is apparently pulled from

@font-face {
  font-family: "Autonym";
  font-style: normal;
  src: local("Autonym"), url("//bits.wikimedia.org/static-1.23wmf1/extensions/UniversalLanguageSelector/lib/jquery.uls/css/font/Autonym.woff?2013-10-24T17:33:20Z") format("woff"), url("font/Autonym.ttf") format("truetype");
}

It appears to be a result of <div id="p-lang" class="portlet" role="navigation">...</div>. The trouble with that font is that it's indistinct (Windows XP, Firefox 24, MonoBook) - it's blurred, with blue and red fringing, particularly on tall thin letters like lowercase i and l - see screenshot at right. Arial, by contrast, is sharp-edged without fringing. This isn't just English Misplaced Pages; it's others too e.g. French. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:13, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

More specifically:

#p-lang ul {
    font-family: 'Autonym',sans-serif;
}

So, I should be able to override it with

#p-lang ul {
    font-family: 'Arial',sans-serif;
}

in my Special:MyPage/skin.css (as indeed I can) - but when and why did the change come in, and where was it announced? --Redrose64 (talk) 21:28, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

Gag, this looks horrible, especially as letters have "gaps" in them. Hopefully this can be quickly fixed... - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 21:20, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

See https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/10/28/the-autonym-font-for-language-names/. The aim is to have all language names in all scripts visible, even where a user doesn't have the relevant fonts installed on their computer. It's a good idea, but I agree that the font itself could use some work. the wub "?!" 21:23, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

#p-lang ul { font-family: inherit; } should reset the font its original value. I agree the font does not render well at all on Windows. — Edokter (talk) — 22:48, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

...I find it hard to believe that there are very many computers out there that don't have Arial... thanks Redrose64 for the fix script (and btw, it works if you have it all on a single line in the skin.css as well). - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 23:56, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

It's not a script, it's a CSS rule. CSS is very tolerant of whitespace - generally speaking, if a newline is permitted, a space is permitted instead - and most spaces may be removed. In fact, in that particular CSS rule, only one of the spaces is mandatory - the one before ul - so you can put

#p-lang ul{font-family:'Arial',sans-serif;}

and it works equally well. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:03, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

"inherit" is better because you don't need to specify any font; it resolves to the parent elements font, which is whatever the rest of the page uses. — Edokter (talk) — 14:54, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

I know; but I was replying to The Bushranger, who was replying to me, so I repeated my example changing only the whitespace. I could have used

#p-lang ul{font-family:inherit;}

but this would not have illustrated the whitespace elimination quite so well, because there were other changes not related to whitespace. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:20, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

I was also replying to The Bushranger :) — Edokter (talk) — 19:26, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

I like and use User:Equazcion/SidebarTranslate which solves the original missing-fonts problem (and a few others) entirely.

I liked the idea of using the native-language name, but in practice it made things so much harder for me to find (as a monolingual reader who occasionally wants to check out various other language examples) - I'd often have to mouse-over each of the links, looking for the 2letter prefix that looked familiar or correct. –Quiddity (talk) 20:08, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

• It's spread to Main Page#Misplaced Pages languages. Not that I look down there very often: I wouldn't have noticed for weeks, except I got this edit on my watchlist. --Redrose64 (talk) 00:58, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

Uncommanded unchecking of preferences options...

I just discovered that somehow "Add pages I create and files I upload to my watchlist" had been unchecked in my preferences without my having done so. Whats up? — Preceding unsigned comment added by The Bushranger (talk • contribs) 23:53, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

I can confirm that. In fact, if I go to Preferences → Watchlist, enable "Add pages I create and files I upload to my watchlist" and save, it immediately disables itself again. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:08, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

I tested it here and it still works for me. Interestingly, although Add pages I create and files I upload to my watchlist is unchecked, this page I just created was still added to my watchlist. -- Toshio Yamaguchi 13:18, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

I have been able to check that option just now and it stayed checked. Matma Rex talk 13:28, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Crappppp, this is probably my fault, I've suggested some cleanup-only changes in the config which I needed for something else (they basically make this option off by default), they were accepted, and we all missed the fact that this was set to true elsewhere… sorry, you'll have to live with this for a few hours/days until somebody with appropriate permissions is around to fix it D: (But you should be able to reenable this for yourself right now perfectly well. It's just the default that was accidentally changed.) Matma Rex talk 13:36, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

The preferences should be restored for everyone now. Matma Rex talk 16:41, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Failed action=purge

I see a strange error message at :

Any idea what's going on? --Stefan2 (talk) 00:47, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

I was getting a similar message while trying to perform the following actions:

• Deleting File:04 - Pero Me Acuerdo De Tí.jpg
• Uploading a new version of a file at File:44adelaidelogo.png
• Modifying file description of File:44adelaidelogo.png.

The problem occurred both in Chrome and Firefox and seems to be resolved now -- Diannaa (talk) 01:08, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Weird. I got a watchlist notification that File:Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D intertitle.png had been deleted by User:Mark Arsten, but the file was still there, so I tried to purge the page, which failed. I see that you later deleted it. --Stefan2 (talk) 01:24, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

I just had a bunch of database query errors myself while trying to delete some images. Very frustrating. Mark Arsten (talk) 01:26, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

I deleted it shortly after this bug resolved itself. Things have been kinda sketchy on the deletions for the last day of two, where I get the "Wikimedia Error" page. Then I would go back and see if the file had actually gotten deleted, and sometimes it was and sometimes not :/ -- Diannaa (talk) 01:29, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Right now it seems like I can't delete the last four files in Category:Orphaned non-free use Misplaced Pages files as of 25 October 2013. Any luck there? Mark Arsten (talk) 01:44, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

It took a lot longer than it should have, but File:Cfnews13.jpg deleted successfully on the first try. - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 09:36, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

jQuery UI CSS may no longer load by default

See http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2013-October/072779.html. As of next week, jQuery UI may not be loaded by default on some wikis. I'm not sure if this is true here - we might have something enabled for all visitors that includes jQuery UI - but if we do lose this CSS, templates like {{clickable button 2}} and {{help pages header}} will suffer. (What's worse, many logged-in users won't notice, since gadgets like Twinkle include jQuery UI.) — This, that and the other (talk) 01:59, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Hmm... {{clickable button 2}} just makes a plain link for me (see my test). {{help pages header}} is just a horizontal list of links with bold formatting. Have the styles already been disabled? Does this depend on skin? (I'm using Monobook.) Does it require some gadget to be enabled? (I've disabled most gadgets, including many of the defaults.)

The e-mail you link to mentions editing common.js to re-enable the styling, not common.css as one would expect for CSS. Is this in fact a JavaScript effect and not CSS? (I have JS disabled.) – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 16:11, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Since jQuery UI is a javascript library, its accompanying CSS is indeed only loaded through javascript. Instead of relying on jQuery UI, we migh consider using MediaWiki.UI for pretty buttons instead, or have all buttons styled pretty by default. — Edokter (talk) — 16:27, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Is 'mediawiki.ui' module loaded by default? Ruslik_Zero 19:19, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

No, but there have been suggestions on making it so (and a patch pending). Hard to say if it will be, in the end, there was some opposition. You can always just make common.js load it here. Matma Rex talk 21:12, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Might as well just load jquery UI from common.js here then, since we already have templates relying on that. Plus there's the standards thing. equazcion → 21:16, 2 Nov 2013 (UTC)

Looking at the mediawiki.ui JavaScript (or lack thereof), mediawiki.ui is pure CSS. jQuery, on the other hand, does a lot of fancy dancing with its scripts, dynamically changing the styles on a button when various events occur (some of which could be done better with CSS pseudo-classes). I don't think there's any hope of getting the jQuery buttons to work without JavaScript. Mediawiki.ui would definitely be preferable because it can work without JavaScript.

Obviously, loading mediawiki.ui from common.js would be a bit silly (why make pure CSS depend on JavaScript?). An option that would work for everyone would be to make it a dependency of a default-on gadget (the gadget itself wouldn't need to do anything; it's just there to pull in mediawiki.ui). – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 17:16, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

What about loading https://bits.wikimedia.org/en.wikipedia.org/load.php?debug=false&modules=mediawiki.ui&only=styles&skin=vector&* from common.css?Helder 10:19, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

FYI: the reason that we stopped loading jquery.ui by default is both for performance reasons (latency improved visibly after doing this), and because the longterm plan is standardizing on mediawiki.ui as the CSS for controls like buttons. There's a lot of work to be done, but there's a biweekly hack day where WMF engineers are working on this now, so good things are on the way. :) Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 22:46, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

For me, it is still a button. PartTimeGnome, it's probably something specific to your setup. BTW, the Teahouse gadget (which is really just a loader) used to depend on jquery.ui.button. However, this was not necessary since there's a using in MediaWiki:Gadget-teahouse/content.js before it's really needed anyway. Legoktm and I talked about this, and he removed the gadget dependencies just now.

As far as jquery.ui.button, I think loading it from Common.js is simplest (although wikitext only uses the CSS, other modules use the JS too, so we shouldn't load just the CSS somehow). However, I verified a gadget that depends on jquery.ui.button and has a no-op CSS file (just a comment) will also work (there does need to be a file). The downside is this adds to preference bloat with something most users won't understand or care about. Superm401 - Talk 00:01, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Edokter already identified what causes the problem for me: the jQuery CSS is only loaded from JavaScript (which I have disabled). I took a further look myself, and I'm not sure the jQuery CSS would work on its own anyway (someone please correct me if I'm wrong there). My preference would be to switch to mediawiki.ui for button styling since it is pure CSS. (And Steven indicated MediaWiki is moving that way anyway.) – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 22:09, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Search algorithm

A reader tried to search, using "cobalt II chlorate" in the search box.

The reader wondered why it didn't immediately find Cobalt(II) chlorate

I note that it does suggest this in a drop-down box, but it doesn't think it is a good enough match, so it doesn't bring you directly to the article.

I note that the search term differs from the title in three respects:

1. Case
2. The parentheses around II
3. The space after cobalt

The case is not an issue, as the search will find the right term even is the case doesn't match.

One question I am posing is whether we think that the lack of parentheses should be a problem. Is it reasonable to configure the search algorithm to create a match when the search terms and target differ by parentheses?

I'm sure it could be done. One question is whether it is supposed to work, and doesn't because of a bug, versus something that might be nice, but has never been requested. Assuming it isn't handled, the question is whether we think articles with parentheses are common enough to make a request for a change in the algorithm. I'm personally on the fence, and would be supportive if the developer say it was easy, and would not push for it if the developer says it is tricky.

The second is whether the existence of a space should prevent the search from getting a hit. I see that if I search for "hollydolly" it asks if I mean "holly dolly". If I search for "slip stream" I get to Slipstream, but only because someone created a redirect (I think).

I think it would be nice if searching could give you the right article even if the search ans target differed by a space—even if you knew to add the parentheses, I don't think it is obvious that a searcher should know to enter "cobalt(II) chlorate" rather than "cobalt (II) chlorate".--S Philbrick(Talk) 15:27, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Cobalt(II) chlorate is the first hit for me on cobalt II chlorate. Do you mean when the search includes quotation marks as in "cobalt II chlorate"? That doesn't work for me but people should know to try without quotation marks when they are not sure of the exact title. The whole point of using quotation marks is to ask for exact hits only. I wouldn't expect it to match when there are differences in spacing. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:35, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

I think what Sphilbrick is saying is that typing "cobalt II chlorate" into the search box and hitting enter should immediately take you to Cobalt(II) chlorate, much like how typing "ApPLe" into the search box and hitting enter immediately takes you to Apple (since it's case insensitive, I presume). Theopolisme (talk) 21:35, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

It's not due to case (in)sensitivity, but punctuation and spacing. Cobalt(II) chlorate has a pair of parentheses and one space; "cobalt II chlorate" has no punctuation but two spaces. If I type that into the search box, it suggests "Cobalt(II) chlorate" in the list, but unless I pick that entry before hitting ↵ Enter, it will go to Special:Search. Now, if Cobalt II chlorate were created as a redirect (which is permissible because it's a plausible search term, and so could fall within either or both of "Alternative names" and "Alternative ... punctuation") you would simply need to type that in and ↵ Enter without needing to select from the list. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:55, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

I asked the question, and what Redrose64 said is exactly what I meant. If the user is searching for cobalt II chlorate, I think it's obvious the users means Cobalt(II) chlorate, and therefore it seems logical to me he/she should be redirected. Besides that, you don't often use parentheses when typing search-terms, so I assume there are more users than only me searching for cobalt II chlorate instead. Of course, if this 'change in the search algorithm' would be accepted, it would have to affect all chemical formula-searching. IsaiahvH (talk) 13:45, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

It's obvious to a chemist that "cobalt II chlorate" and Cobalt(II) chlorate are one and the same. But computers aren't so intelligent; they need to be given special provision about such matters as IUPAC nomenclature of inorganic chemistry. In this case, section IR-2.8.2 of Nomenclature of Inorganic Chemistry states "In names they indicate the formal oxidation state of an atom, and are enclosed in parentheses immediately following the name of the atom being qualified." At school (early 1980s), we were taught about the parentheses, but not that there should be no space before the opening parenthesis. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:59, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

I googled it, and it seems indeed that parentheses are commonly used (something my teacher does not, but that's because he is _lazy). So the actual question seems, is it worth modify the search algorithm to redirect the user when searching for a term without parentheses, (I think) obviously meaning the term with parentheses? What's worth considering is redirects are for redirecting because the user obviously means the official term. Asides that, 1) Some people who have never learned or have forgotten or have never studied Chemistry, do not know about the parentheses, and 2) It is rather uncommon to type parentheses when typing a search-term.

However, on the other side, the user will see the official term in the dropdown or after hitting ↵ Enter in the search-overview-page. So it is not an issue, but, as Chemistry is widely used, I think it would improve Misplaced Pages if this search algorithm modification would be adopted. But that's just my opinion ;). IsaiahvH (talk) 16:55, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages talk:Persondata-o-matic editing rights

Hi there. I've got a problem using the above, it says that I've not got the right to edit the article in question every time I try to use it on an article and then click 'save'. I've browsed the docs for the gadget and messaged the creator with no response. Anyone know a fix or what I'm doing wrong? --S.G. _ping! 20:14, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

The author of the tool, User:Dcoetzee, last edited six hours before you posted your problem at Misplaced Pages talk:Persondata-o-matic. Since you also sent him an email, it looks like you'll have to wait until he returns to Misplaced Pages matters. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 04:43, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Infobox criminal is turning programmers into murderers

Robert Tappan Morris created the first computer virus, though Template:Infobox criminal seems to be forcibly adding "Killings" to his page. There doesn't appear to be anything on his page's syntax that is causing this. Is this a mistake, or is the template revealing a darker truth? ▫ JohnnyMrNinja 23:46, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

In this edit today the template was merged by @Underlying lk: with Template:Infobox murderer.Blethering Scot 23:58, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Fixed; n.b. I've not checked for other parameters that might trigger that header even though they are displayed higher up. --Redrose64 (talk) 00:02, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the quick fix! ▫ JohnnyMrNinja 03:57, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Tylenol

Tylenol (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

There's something up on the page. The "Advertisement" header shows up in the TOC, but it's blank in the text itself, and the link it broken. I've examined the Wikimarkup and can't figure out what's wrong. All the ref tags are closed, so what is causing this problem? hbdragon88 (talk) 07:52, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Slight correction: the header was ==Advertisements== (plural). I've confirmed your observation. After I disabled AdBlock Plus for Misplaced Pages pages, however, the header, and the correct TOC link operation, reappeared. As a workaround, I've changed the header to ==Marketing==. Hbdragon88, did this resolve your issue? You can test your browser/plugin behavior against a prior revision of Tylenol. --Lexein (talk) 08:09, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Revert oversights edit?

There was an edit to Post that was reverted, and it seems that the edit was oversighted out of existance. Help:User contributions doesn't explain what a struck-out edit means, and Help:Reverting doesn't mention that this could happen. User:Eeekster is not a sysop or 'crat; I can't tell if they're an oversighter. If I remember correctly, oversighting actions are logged as such anyways - and there's nothing in the logs for the appropriate time. So what happened? Josh Parris 09:49, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

The suppression log is also private. --Rschen7754 09:55, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

So, suppression is undocumented (in the help pages) and privately logged. Orwellian. Josh Parris 10:14, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Help:User contributions#Deletion says: "In some limited circumstances individual contributions (that is, specific edits) may be removed from public view by administrators using Revision Deletion; such edits remain visible to administrators. In even more limited circumstances edits may be oversighted, remaining visible only to the handful of users with the Oversight permission." The link on "Revision Deletion" shows how it looks. There is no secrecy about the existence of the feature. It's just a question of how much overlap to have between help pages. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:58, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Also, if you think Oversight is being misused, you can raised the matter here. Mark Arsten (talk) 19:00, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

The only real fix to the problem is to have live updated mirrors that aren't under the same administration. I'd like to tell them not to do it, but you know full well that they may feel they have no choice under governments with a quite imperfect notion of what 'free expression' is about, and once they start doing it at all it is just so enticing to keep going further, gradually growing and expanding their godlike powers. Wnt (talk) 15:53, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

I don't know where oversights might be logged. Example: here are two edits which I WP:REVDELled; so it's my name in the deletion log. I then sent an email to Special:EmailUser/Oversight - the oversight action took place within an hour, and I got an email back from one of the oversighters stating (amongst other info) "We appreciate you bringing this to our attention, and a member of the Oversight team has suppressed the information in question. Thanks for the vigilance, and please let us know of any other edits needing suppression that you see in the future." I presume that it was sent by the person who actually carried out the oversight action. But I have looked at the visible logs of actions carried out by that person, and I do not see an applicable entry. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:48, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Oversight logs are only visible to oversighters. See Misplaced Pages:Oversight#Logging. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:16, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

FWIW, the log is at Special:Log/suppress, though you need the OS bit to see it. --Rschen7754 10:35, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

• Let me start by saying that although I have suppression rights I am not familiar with this specific case and have not investigated who did the suppression. So, for starters, no there is no public log of who did which suppression action. And no, the team will not explain itself to the community. I know, that sounds terrible, but our primary function is to protect privacy and remove libel. In order to accomplish this by necessity we cannot discuss it openly. However, if you wish to challenge a suppression action you may contact the audit subcommittee, whose job it is to review the work of the oversight and checkuser teams and insure they are acting in accordance with the applicable policies and not overstepping their bounds or using their permissions abusively. It is my understanding that that process is also anonymous, only the members of the subcommittee know both the identity of the oversighter or checkuser who took the action and that of the user who made the report. Beeblebrox (talk) 20:09, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

  I could wish for more transparency. While I understand that you cant remove content to avoid privacy violations and then say wht that content was, it surely would be possible to log who did any particular oversight action, and even to indicate a general category of content removed (attack, defamation, personal info, outsourced contentious content that violates BLP, OTRS action, or whatever). None of that would violae anyone's privacy or perpetuate any libel. DES 01:58, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

  Equally, you could say "removed libellous statement about Ronald Regan" or "suppressed Privacy violating information on Donald Duck" or whatever. Those without suppression rights would have some idea of what happened, but there's also WP:BEANS. Regardless, the software doesn't allow, so: meh. Josh Parris 02:33, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

  However, there are some cases when revealing why an edit was suppressed would be just as bad as revealing the contents of the edit. (For the record, I am not an oversighter here, though I am on Wikidata). --Rschen7754 10:37, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Superfluous line-break in template

Hello.

Could someone help identify where there's an unnecessary line-break in {{Year in Norway}}. The line-break is transcluded, which makes the articles that use the template look a bit awkward.

Thanks.

HandsomeFella (talk) 11:35, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

I removed some line breaks between categories that seemed extraneous, which fixes the issue in tests, but the whitespace is still showing up when this template is used just after {{Use dmy dates}} (as seems to be the case with most of its uses). equazcion → 11:59, 3 Nov 2013 (UTC)

This seems to be caused by the line break in the code before the wikitable begins. Since that wikitable code needs to be at the beginning of its own line, I can't find a way to get rid of the whitespace, aside from chopping off everything that comes before it (which does effectively remove the whitespace in these articles, FYI). This seems like it might be a common issue for templates so maybe someone knows of a solution I'm unaware of. equazcion → 12:07, 3 Nov 2013 (UTC)

I think there is at least some improvement. Thanks for trying. HandsomeFella (talk) 14:29, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

I've managed to fix it. That was a tricky one. A single line break before the table is fine, the problem was caused by having two consecutive line breaks before the table. The first line break is not in the template itself, but in the articles that use it (between the {{Use dmy dates}} and {{Year in Norway}} templates). The fix was to put something between those line breaks to stop them being consecutive, but that doesn't cause a visible gap itself. An empty <nowiki/> tag did the trick. – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 16:33, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

The real problem was the text before the beginning of the table, which introduces a whiteline before the {| class=. See the warning about whitelines on WP:NOINCLUDE. I moved the text to the beginning of the template, and removed the <includeonly> tag. The obvious minus being that the page Template:Year in Norway itself now looks ugly. Debresser (talk) 09:08, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

I think you've misunderstood the warning at WP:NOINCLUDE. It refers to white space before <noinclude>, after </noinclude>, after <includeonly> or before </includeonly>, warning that said white space will be included in the template's output. There wasn't any white space on either side of the <includeonly> tags you removed. I tested re-adding them without making any other change, and the template still displayed correctly in the article 1972 in Norway (I didn't save this test).

Also, your changes moved text inside the table, but before the first table row, which is neither valid nor logical. The error text is intended to be shown outside the infobox, so should not be inside the table. Your changed worked in articles thanks to HTML Tidy fixing the invalid markup by moving it outside the table. If you'd tried this at Special:ExpandTemplates (where HTML Tidy does not run), invalid HTML is generated due to a <span> tag between <table> and the first <tr>. W3C's validator reports "Start tag span seen in table. Cannot recover after last error. Any further errors will be ignored.". (There are two other errors reported by the validator, but those are down to HTML generated by MediaWiki itself, unrelated to the template.)

Since your changes generated invalid HTML and messed up the appearance of the template page itself, I have undone them. (I completed your move of the category to the doc page. The doc page is the right place for categories.)

PS: I see you made several attempts before you found something you liked. Please don't make test edits on a live template. You can see what effect your changes will have on another page without saving by using the "Preview page with this template" options beneath the edit box. – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 23:57, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

<includeonly>...</includeonly> is bad template engineering to begin with. You should just have a dummy default variable value in <noinclude>...</noinclude> tags in the #if conditional, like {{{1|<noinclude>dummy year</noinclude>}}}. Then you can include a default value for {{{1|}}} so that the template displays on its own page. VanIsaac_{WS Vex} 00:37, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

@PartTimeGnome See below for my response. Just wanted to mention here that I did not err in my reference to WP:NOINCLUDE, and it is precisely that whiteline issue I was referring to. Just that often people don't recognize the whiteline. Debresser (talk) 01:24, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

Fixing the problem in other templates

That's interesting. This trick could fix the common problem that occurs whenever two "invisible" templates are placed at the top of an article. See the white space at the top of User:John of Reading/Sandbox. -- John of Reading (talk) 16:56, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

The first three templates in your sandbox all use {{Dated maintenance category}}. Adding a <nowiki/> to that template fixes the gap in your sandbox too. Before I make a protected edit request, can anyone think of any undesirable side effects this could cause? – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 17:53, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

I would strongly oppose the addition of stray code to template. First of all because another user will surely remove it sooner or later, not knowing why it is there. Secondly, because it is ugly. It is against all rules of coding to do such things. But the main reason is that there is a simpler solution to the problem: put all the invisible templates right after each other without any spaces between them. See User:John of Reading/Sandbox where I did so and the whitespaces are gone. We could add a warning about this to the documentation of certain templates like {{Use dmy dates}} and others, but even if there would be an extra space, this is not a big problem. Debresser (talk) 11:42, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Alternatively, since templates like {{use dmy dates}} or {{use British English}} do nothing except categorise, put them with the other cats - at the bottom. Any spurious blank lines which may be generated will be much less obtrusive in such a position. There is precedent for this, since templates like {{coord|display=title}} which place their output somewhere other than the actual position of the template, are typically placed at the bottom as well. --Redrose64 (talk) 11:52, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Another thing that might artificially reduce the problem is adding the problematic templates to {{Multiple issues}}. Debresser (talk) 07:27, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

There are problems with that. {{multiple issues}} is for enclosing cleanup message boxes: requests to fix the article, to be removed when the fix has been done; when all have been done, and when there are none left to fix, {{multiple issues}} gets removed as well. By contrast, {{use dmy dates}} and similar are not requests to fix the article - they are permanent indicators of the article's writing style. If the article has no cleanup issues, and you add

{{multiple issues|
{{use dmy dates|date=November 2013}}
{{use British English|date=November 2013}}
}}

it looks kind of odd, see User:Redrose64/Sandbox5, it's got a blank area within the {{multiple issues}} box with the implication that there should be some message or other. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:41, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

You are right. Thanks. Debresser (talk) 21:07, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Regarding someone possibly removing the code because it is not clear what it does, an <!-- editor comment --> will fix that. (I'd hope administrators would show more care editing a fully protected template, but maybe I hope for too much... )

On the point about ugliness, I agree, but I couldn't think of a better way to do it. There is much that is ugly about MediaWiki's markup language, so we often have to do ugly things to get the job done.

As for the "simpler" solution: good luck getting editors to use the templates all on one line. Many editors find placing each template on a separate line to be more intuitive, as evidenced by the many pages where this is the case. Generally, templates should be designed to be easy for editors to use, rather than expecting editors to adapt to their quirks. Templates should try to hide the complexities of wiki markup from the people that use them. One template per line is certainly easier to read. Keep the ugly stuff in a template so other editors don't need to worry about it.

One template per line is consistent with how categories are normally used (given the main purpose of the templates is categorisation): categories are typically one-per-line too. Also note that the current behaviour is inconsistent: where the template outputs a category, it is safe to use one per line. Where it outputs nothing, it will cause a gap. Code that looks fine in article space will show with gaps when copied to a user sandbox (because the categories are suppressed in userspace). – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 23:00, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

I agree with you completely that one template per line is the standard, and looks good. I was surprised you didn't see the whiteline: it is the break between the end of the remark about the red warning text and the beginning of the table with {|. That is why I moved the warning inside the template. Even conceptually, I think the warning is not out of place inside the template proper, as you claim above. The biggest minus I see is that the template page became real ugly. Debresser (talk) 01:17, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

importScript execution delayed

I created a Javascript function, addTopLink, to insert an arbitrary convenience link into the horizontal menu at the top right of the page. I had the function inside my common.js, followed by a call to insert one link, and it worked.

I thought I'd make the function generally available, so I moved it to User:Largoplazo/toplinks.js. In my common.js I replaced the function definition with importScript('User:Largoplazo/toplinks.js');, and refreshed the cache. It didn't work: my custom link stopped appearing in the top menu. So I did some troubleshooting, the state of which you can see in the two files. At this moment the bottom three lines of my common.js are commented out, but when they weren't, what happened each time a page loaded is that:

1. A dialog box reading "undefined" appeared, which I dismissed.
2. A dialog box reading "Just reached the end of toplinks.js" appeared, which I dismissed.

The first dialog should display the contents of window.teststring, which is set inside toplinks.js. Since it was appearing as "undefined", that means it hadn't been set yet. The second dialog comes from an alert call directly inside toplinks.js. So the calls were coming in the wrong order.

Finally, I opened Firebug and went to the console. I could see that window.teststring had its assigned value and the function addTopLink existed. So toplinks.js was being fully executed, just not in the expected sequence.

What am I missing? —Largo Plazo (talk) 13:07, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Scripts loaded via importScript() are executed asynchronously – that is, the browser sees the importScript, starts loading that script in the background, and continues down to alert(window.teststring) and addTopLink, which don't work like you expect because the script might not be loaded yet.

You could use something like this, but I'm not sure if it's the best practice. It definitely works, though.

importScript('User:Largoplazo/toplinks.js').onload = function() {
  alert(window.teststring);
  addTopLink("pt-newpagesfeed", "NewPagesFeed", "/Special:NewPagesFeed");
}

Matma Rex talk 13:51, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Oh, also – there's a default function called mw.util.addPortletLink which does pretty much the same thing as your addTopLink and some more: mw:ResourceLoader/Default_modules#addPortletLink. Matma Rex talk 13:56, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Since WP pages are HTML 5, and I see the script element is defined to have an onload event in HTML 5, this is great! Though I'll check out addPortletLink as well. Thanks. —Largo Plazo (talk) 15:34, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Help needed tracking recent changes to medical content

User:Femto Bot used to populate Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Medicine/Recent changes (Warning: page is 700k now -DePiep) which in turn updated Special:RecentChangesLinked/Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Recent changes. I think that's how it worked. It reported all changes to pages with {{WPMED}} on their talk page. Anyway, it was an awesome tool for patrolling some of Misplaced Pages's most sensitive content. But since Rich Farmborough was banned from bot work it's stopped working - it only reports recent changes to pages beginning with "A". Does anyone feel like volunteering to fix it, or is there someone at WMF who I could ask to arrange it?

This tool aims to do the same thing but it's slow and often times out, and when it works it's running a couple of days behind.

Anybody? If no one wants to volunteer, can someone please tell me who at WMF to approach? We need this feature. Without it, anything could be happening to our medical content. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 16:53, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

There was also Tim1357's tool, but his account has expired from the Toolserver. This does look like a fairly urgently needed feature - perhaps ask over at Misplaced Pages:Bot requests to see if a willing bot operator wants to take it on? Not all of our bot operators are regular readers of this page. — Mr. Stradivarius 14:23, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, Mr S. I've left them a note. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 18:05, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

I also think this should be a core service WMF provides to the community. I perceive a large disconnect between community needs and what the WMF does. Why is that? We shouldn't have to do think we have to become project managers with m:IEG proposals just to get some WikiProject support... Biosthmors (talk) pls notify me (i.e. {{U}}) while signing a reply, thx 17:52, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Let's see what happens at Bot requests. But if there's no response there we should take it to the WMF. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 18:05, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

No response yet. I've asked Rich if he can help. --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 06:52, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

I see from the talk page of the bot that seems to drive this (User_talk:Femto_Bot) that the bot has been blocked. If that block were lifted, would Special:RecentChangesLinked/Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Recent changes start working again? --Anthonyhcole (talk · contribs · email) 07:16, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Over at WP:ELEMENTS we have a different the same solution. We have a project page with all article pages (maintained manually). Then we have a link on the project page that opens special page Related changes (not RC). The page is Special:RecentChangesLinked/Wikipedia:WikiProject Elements/Articles/List of articles, the link is RELC.

Technical notes: WP:RELC has useful features like showing editors, edits per day, and more. Maybe the base list page could be updated by some bot, adding the project pages (list of WP:ELEMENT pages is not that volatile, medicine more I guess). We have added the talkpages too, as a choice. We have the same for templates, see here. -DePiep (talk) 08:09, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

oops lol. I now see that the page has the same intention. That leaves the question: needs a bot that puts all pages in Category:WikiProject Medicine articles and cats below on a page (undouble, with/wout talkpage). Is there no other bot? -DePiep (talk) 08:19, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

I asked if it could be done by a module (Lua) in-site: Misplaced Pages:Lua_requests#Filling_the_RELC_page_using_Lua. -DePiep (talk) 08:59, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

The block on Femto Bot (talk · contribs) cannot be lifted under the terms of Rich Farmbrough (talk · contribs)'s ban. One possibility (which I may be entirely wrong about) would be for ownership of Femto Bot to be transferred away from Rich Farmbrough, with somebody else (perhaps an established bot operator) taking it on. This would mean (under the terms of the ban) that provisions would be needed to ensure that Rich Farmbrough never use Femto Bot again. More feasible is that Rich Farmbrough could disclose the whole of the source codes for Femto Bot, which would then be used to create an entirely new bot - and that would of course require a WP:BRFA, similar to the situation here. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:14, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

You have got to be kidding me (and that is only in reply to your first sentence). We're going to shoot a WikiProject in the face because somebody/some people got pissed off at an individual? WTF is going on in this place? Biosthmors (talk) pls notify me (i.e. {{U}}) while signing a reply, thx 10:52, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

No. We will not shoot the WP:MED. Already multiple initiatives are under way to help the project out. And no, the block is not there because "some people got pissed off". -DePiep (talk) 12:26, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

• Note: At the moment I am working on a manual solution for WP:MED. Am I the only one, or do we have an edit clash ahead? -DePiep (talk) 12:48, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

I send my thanks to the God(s) above, as they may be, DePiep. Would you like to pick out a WP:MED barnstar for yourself? Thank you so much. Biosthmors (talk) pls notify me (i.e. {{U}}) while signing a reply, thx 12:55, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

When I nail a barnstar on my own barn, I always hammer myself on my thumb, and then it falls on my toe. I could look up one for you though, for returning to kindness. -DePiep (talk) 13:04, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

• Everyone calm down, Ill get a replacement up shortly. Werieth (talk) 14:41, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

I use a slightly modified version of Ganeshbot for generating the project lists. Keith D (talk) 14:44, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

• Even more calm everyone. I made the list manually (28000 MED articles) and prepared the RELC link. WARNING: this new RELC list page is 700k. I also moved the page to Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Medicine/List of pages/Articles because this name is more automatable (other namespaces, other projects) and also because the old name was incorrect (it did not show what it said).

Now it is up, recent, and running for WP:MED: WP:MED Articles - Related changes. I'll go to their talkpage for details.

Bot actions (I cannot do) are welcome, and my question to the masters is to work into the generic setup I made (task name: "RELC list"). -DePiep (talk) 15:18, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

• There is an up to date solution available for WP:MED (presented to them at WT:MED). So no time pressure. Then at the bot request page there is follow up on this (for future updates). We may pilot this one into a generic solution for projects. Looks like this thread can be closed. -DePiep (talk) 17:24, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

A bit late, but there is a replacement available for Tim1357's tool mentioned above. Dispenser's transcluded changes tool shows all recent changes for pages that have a particular template on their talk page. (Though right now it's suffering from a few days of toolserver DB lag). Toohool (talk) 17:56, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. At WP:BOTREQ a future bot solution was initiated, expanding into a more generic solution proposal (could it work for all wikiprojects?). That requires the bot to more interact with a request from a project (think, like the archiving bot).

I should note that the original bot, mentioned on top here, listed only 5% of the pages (1500/30000) ! The letter A was not even complete. -DePiep (talk) 06:17, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

Wikimedia Foundation Error notice

Since yesterday there has been a problem with saving edits to User:RoslynSKP/Southern Palestine Offensive. When the edit is saved, instead of going back to the article, the Wikimedia foundation error notice appears. Then by backtracking and hitting reload the edit finally appears. Is there any way of fixing this problem? --Rskp (talk) 04:46, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

The page is too complicated to finish rendering before the connection times out. After a next visit, parts of the page have been cached, and rendering will be faster, so that's why it works on other pageviews. This is a common problem with overly complex pages. The advise is to simplify the page using fewer and less complex templates (which include references). —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:51, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

TheDJ. You mean a number of references is still an issue in this with Lua, and that it is more so when refs are used in a template? -DePiep (talk) 07:54, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Assuming that RoslynSKP means this sort of message, yes it does happen with overcomplex pages, but yesterday I got it for edits to three relatively small pages: of the three, the largest was Oxford, Witney and Fairford Railway. --Redrose64 (talk) 10:46, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for that. Yes, it is very long, but it only has one template plus the refrences. I'm in the process of cutting it down. --Rskp (talk) 01:04, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Tech News: 2013-44

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

New features

• The style and colors for warning boxes, error messages, and success messages in all skins of MediaWiki has been changed.

VisualEditor news

• You will soon be able to switch from editing in VisualEditor to editing wikitext directly without having to save the page. You can't yet switch from wikitext to VisualEditor but developers hope to make it possible in the future.

Problems

• There was a problem on October 31 during the activation of MediaWiki 1.22wmf2 on test wikis. mediawiki.org was also broken, and if you had problems logging in, it was probably because of this as well.

Future

• Because of the problem with MediaWiki 1.22wmf2, the calendar has changed. It will be added to mediawiki.org and non-Misplaced Pages sites on November 4, and all Misplaced Pages sites on November 7.

JavaScript / Gadget developers

• Due to a recent change, gadgets and user scripts that use jQuery UI should explicitly load the appropriate modules, as they may not be loaded by default.
• Developers have started to remove long-deprecated methods. You should check the JavaScript console (in debug=true mode) and look for deprecation warnings and their stack trace.

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

10:36, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

version MediaWiki 1.22wmf2 is mentioned above in couple places, with future reference. this version was deployes last April, so most probably this is a typo, and meant to be MediaWiki 1.23wmf2. peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 18:19, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Module:Pagetype

I've created Module:Pagetype, a replacement for {{pagetype}}, and I am thinking of updating the template to the Lua version later on this week. The Lua version has some differences from the current template, and {{pagetype}} has around 5 million transclusions, so I would like to get others' comments before making the switch. Please let me know your thoughts over at Template talk:Pagetype#Module:Pagetype. — Mr. Stradivarius 14:18, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

The Misplaced Pages Adventure: Quick bug-help

Hey folks,

If you're logged in could you go here, then click CONTRIBUTIONS. And tell me if the game advances to the next step ("All your work"). I've had 2 bug reports, both with Firefox 24.0+ that it's causing a loop. Cannot replicate on my end. Multiple tries or different browsers would be much appreciated. Best, Jake Ocaasi 14:54, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Can't seem to reproduce it here. Firefox 25, Chrome 30, Opera 17. equazcion → 15:09, 4 Nov 2013 (UTC)

Although it does seem that every page you go to afterwards shows the adventure message box, until you explicitly 'X' it out. Maybe that's the "loop" they're referring to? equazcion → 15:11, 4 Nov 2013 (UTC)

Yes, I can reproduce this on FF24. It is a endless loop as long as you hit "Contributions". If you hit the ← it advances to the next stage. If you open any other page after that it also shows the next stage (for me, but I did it after hitting back which took me forward). I have screenshots if you need, let me know. Technical 13 (talk) 15:39, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Ocaasi, it's only happening for users with spaces in their usernames. In step 14, you're comparing wgUserName with the page address -- one has underscores in place of spaces and the other doesn't, so the script is not detecting that the contributions page has been reached. equazcion → 15:48, 4 Nov 2013 (UTC)

Nice catch, Equazcion! Any idea for a fix? Ocaasi 15:50, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

• return gt.isPage( 'Special:Contributions/' + mw.config.get( 'wgUserName' ).replace(/ /g, '_') );

I think that might do it. equazcion → 15:53, 4 Nov 2013 (UTC)

Trying that now. Thanks! Ocaasi 16:01, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Equazcion, it works!! Ocaasi TWA (talk) 16:04, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Awesome! Glad I could help :) equazcion → 16:07, 4 Nov 2013 (UTC)

Idea on meta about LaTeX export. Is it a feature request in bugzilla?

I like the ideas stated in m:Grants talk:IEG/LaTeX Export. Might someone who is experienced with bugzilla track it or say whether or not it is being tracked? Thanks. Biosthmors (talk) pls notify me (i.e. {{U}}) while signing a reply, thx 16:08, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

I cannot find a ticket so feel free to file one. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 11:10, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

See bugzilla:37933 and bugzilla:27574. Helder 15:11, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

Mysterious watchlist entries

Every few days, something appears in my watchlist that I don't remember needing to watch. Sometimes, I can explain it after a bit of checking, since I occasionally watch a page that I've never edited because it's the subject of a discussion that I'm involved in - for example, I've watched Template:LUL Platform Layout Metropolitan/island because I've contributed to its TfD. But occasionally, I simply can't explain why a particular page is on my watchlist - one such case that's appeared today is Template:PBB/2492, which I've never edited, and nor do I have any knowledge of (or interest in) this ... er, "Follicle stimulating hormone receptor", something biological I guess. I'm wondering if somebody else has attempted to watch this page but some database error has caused it to be put on my watchlist. Does that seem plausible? --Redrose64 (talk) 16:43, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

You deleted its talk page in June. -- John of Reading (talk) 17:00, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

OK, thanks; can you explain Robert Tappan Morris? --Redrose64 (talk) 22:37, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Above at #Infobox criminal is turning programmers into murderers you replied to a post about that article and clearly viewed it. I guess you clicked watch on that occasion, maybe by accident. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:58, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

I did view it (twice), once to verify that there was an unwanted heading, and once after I'd fixed the infobox template that JohnnyMrNinja had mentioned, in order to verify that the heading had gone. But I didn't need to go for "edit this page" on Robert Tappan Morris because I was certain that the problem was in the infobox template. --Redrose64 (talk) 00:25, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Corrupted non-ASCII characters

For about an hour today (between 19:45 and 20:40 UTC) a bug in the MediaWiki parsoid caused all non-ASCII characters to be corrupted on page save. So if you see any strange diffs in your watchlist, for example, accented characters changing to garbage characters, please correct or revert them. A full postmortem on the problem will be released shortly. Kaldari (talk) 22:06, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

i believe that this issue pertains to VE edits only. it should not be all that difficult to look for all changes with "visualeditor" tag within the time-window where the problem existed, and make sure all is good. for unrelated reason, VE is off by default on enwiki, so no anon edits should be affected, and it seems that relatively small number of registered uses use it (at least, the number of edits with the tag is not huge). peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 00:47, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

followed my own advice. found 3 pages with some corruptions that were not fixed yet, and rolled them back. ignored pages where the history contains summaries with "ooopsie" and/or swearwords towards VE in edits following the corruption window, and pages in userspace. hopefully these were the last 3. peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 01:44, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

User Talk page message

When developers got rid of the orange bar across the top of the page showing new messages on user talk pages, new messages were highlighted in orange around the talk link in the user menu. However in the last couple of days even this has disappeared, only appearing a day late in the notifications. Why? Simply south...... cooking letters for just 7 years 22:49, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

There was a bug in which the orange bar didn't show up for monobook/modern skins. This has been fixed, but I'm not sure if it has been deployed yet. Legoktm (talk) 23:24, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

It's been more than a couple of days, see Misplaced Pages:Village pump (technical)/Archive 119#Talkpage notification. --Redrose64 (talk) 00:10, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

If it has been fixed, why did I experience this on Saturday? Difficultly north (talk) - Simply south alt. 12:08, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Because, as mentioned by Lego above, it has not been deployed yet. It was "fixed", which means code has been written and committed ("saved"); it was not deployed, which means that Misplaced Pages is not running that code yet. Matma Rex talk 13:04, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

When will it be deployed? Lugnuts 13:25, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

No later than November 14 (per mw:MediaWiki 1.23/Roadmap). Maybe sooner if it is backported, but that's usually reserved for critical patches, and this is at worst annoying :) Matma Rex talk 13:35, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Notification tool not working

For the past couple of days, the notification tool hasn't been working properly for me. I'm seeing the white number in the red box (see diagram right), but I can't click on it to display the actual notifications (when I hover over the number, my pointer stays as an arrow, it doesn't change to a hand). I don't think I've changed any preferences. I'm using IE9 on Windows 7 with the Monobook skin. Thanks. DH85868993 (talk) 03:52, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Did you go to Special:Notifications to see if you actually have notifications? ~HueSatLum 03:56, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Yes, and I did. It seems to be exactly the same problem as was reported here (where, unfortunately, there was no resolution). DH85868993 (talk) 03:57, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Pinging User:Quiddity who's usually knowledgeable about this stuff :) --Elitre (talk) 10:55, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Andre, I'm wondering if this has anything to do with the enhanced recent changes bug I've been experiencing the last few weeks where the arrows aren't expanding. Refreshing the page (sometimes multiple times is required) fixes the issue. I am using FF24 and have seen many quirks like this with it on this site and other sites (which indicates to me that it's likely not a MediaWiki bug). If I can track down the cause (or come up with a plausible explanation) and a solid set of steps to reproduce, I'll file an appropriate report on Bugzilla, of course. (I accidentally posted this on the archive as well, but thought better of it and am putting a copy here. I'm leaving the post on the archive for now because I pinged Andre there as well and don't want confusion. Not a biggie to leave it there as well.) Technical 13 (talk) 12:53, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

The notifications figure is supposed to be clickable even if it's a greyed-out zero. As such, it's working for me in Firefox 24 under Windows XP - I don't know if I have "enhanced recent changes" or not because I can't find it in Preferences. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:38, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

I think Technical 13 is referring to the "Group changes by page in recent changes and watchlist" preference. – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 21:48, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

OK, I tried that both enabled and disabled - the greyed out zero is clickable in both cases. --Redrose64 (talk) 00:50, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

Some further info. I tried logging out and back in. Immediately after I log in, my toolbar shows "DH85868993 talk preferences watchlist contributions log out" and the notification tool ("") is clickable. A few seconds later, "sandbox" appears between "talk" and "preferences" and a "person" icon is displayed to the left of my username, and then the notification tool is no longer clickable. (I tried this with the "Group changes by page in recent changes and watchlist" preference both enabled and disabled and it was the same in both cases). DH85868993 (talk) 01:11, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

In fact, I can reproduce similar behaviour by refreshing any page using my browser's refresh; when I initiate the refresh, "sandbox" and the "person icon" disappear from my toolbar and the notification tool is briefly clickable; when the refresh completes, "sandbox" and the "person icon" reappear and the notification tool is no longer clickable. DH85868993 (talk) 01:26, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

Problem with Brazilian wandering spider

The Brazilian wandering spider page has something weird which I can't fix.

The references and citations are not showing on the page but if you look at the source code they are all there. Can someone else have a look as I couldn't fix it. filceolaire (talk) 14:01, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Fixed. The trick in cases like this is to find the last visible text, and look hard at the markup that follows it, as that's probably where the error is. -- John of Reading (talk) 14:11, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Secure links

Is there something I can add to my js or css that makes it so raw URLs to other Misplaced Pages pages (like to diff pages or whatever) do not direct me to the HTTPS version?—Ryulong (琉竜) 14:05, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

I don't think so. If the Javascript implementation within MediaWiki permitted URLs to be modified, we'd be open to all sorts of problems. If I'm replying to a thread which contains hardcoded https://en.wikipedia.org/ links, I often remove the https: part and if it was a bare URL, I also enclose in single square brackets, because the protocol-relative form doesn't work outside square brackets - compare //en.wikipedia.org/ with . --Redrose64 (talk) 14:48, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

@Ryulong: User:PiRSquared17/nosecure.js. πr (t • c) 17:01, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Thank you.—Ryulong (琉竜) 17:14, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages mobile page have a bug for sister project links

I found Misplaced Pages mobile page cannot show sister project links (which is formed of {{Sister}}) when I read some articles, I hope you can solve the problem, thanks.--Great Brightstar (talk) 14:25, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

This is a known issue with anything constructed using {{side box}} and it's because of the metadata class (see Misplaced Pages:Village pump (technical)/Archive 116#'Listen' template not rendering in mobile view and Misplaced Pages:Village pump (technical)/Archive 116#CfDs in mobile view). We can fix {{sister}} by adding |metadata=no within {{side box}} - but this should not be done without discussion. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:58, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Unable to do anything through IE8

I have seen this problem posted by someone else on one or another help page but now I can't find it. For the past few days (since around the end of October) I've been unable to do any meaningful editing of wikipedia pages on a computer I regularly use that runs IE8 (it's not mine and I don't have the option to change browser). If I scroll down, the text runs all over the place. If I enter anything in the search box, it doesn't show up. I can't use any drop-down menu. I daresay the answer to this is that IE8 is old and has stopped working (I've already changed to Chrome on my home PC), but I just wanted to check.Deb (talk) 19:02, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Firefox doesn't work either. Funandtrvl (talk) 18:04, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Re: Funandtrvl, what version of Firefox? Re both, what operating system? - Jarry1250  18:07, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Firefox 25.0 doesn't work, it doesn't show the links at the top right of page. I can get IE10 and Chrome to work right now with WP. Funandtrvl (talk) 18:11, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

I've got FF25 and it's been working fine for me since the upgrade a couple days ago. Have you both tried rebooting your PCs yet? equazcion → 18:13, 5 Nov 2013 (UTC)

Ok, the rebooting worked... thanks for the reminder when all else fails...reboot (or hit) the computer. Funandtrvl (talk) 18:24, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Unfortunately it doesn't help me. I reboot every evening. Deb (talk) 18:28, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

In your case, it is probably the IE8 browser. Is there a compatibility mode that you can turn on? Or anyway to get someone to upgrade the browser on that PC/laptop? Funandtrvl (talk) 18:32, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Would you be able to provide a screen capture of the problem in action? We should probably still be support IE8. - Jarry1250  18:33, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Please delete the word "probably" in the above post - you should be supporting IE8. The above posts exemplify WP's arrogance towards IE - the original post is about IE, but immediately switches to concern about Firefox.
Arjayay (talk) 19:27, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

I'm guessing Jarry1250 was referring more to IE8 being a few years old, rather than it merely being IE. equazcion → 19:37, 5 Nov 2013 (UTC)

As the original poster states "a computer I regularly use that runs IE8 (it's not mine and I don't have the option to change browser)". Many editors are still using XP, so cannot use IE9 or IE10.
The current versions of IE are not supported either - I use IE10 and haven't been able to use the cite templates on the Ref Toolbar for months, whilst the search and replace hasn't worked on IE for years.
Misplaced Pages wonders why so many experienced editors are leaving - I'm not claiming any great contributions, 44K edits over 6 years, but if anything is likely to cause me to quit it is the combination of implementing half tested software (I'm being very generous with the half) and the arrogance towards users of IE Arjayay (talk) 20:03, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

If you just assume that people are aware problems exist, they will never get fixed, especially when it comes to IE problems, as few tech-y people use it. I just tested Reftoolbar in IE10 and it worked fine, so the problem may be specific to your browser configuration, or a conflict with a user script or gadget (try it logged-out).

There are at least 5 major non-mobile browsers, each of which has a slightly different implementation of HTML, JS, and CSS, and they also vary between versions of the same browser. According to there are currently 13 different browser/version combinations with more than 1% usage share. Compare this to traditional application development where it's generally only necessary to get things to work on a handful of platforms and where the implementation of programming languages are generally held to common standards and you can see some of the challenges of web design.

Keep in mind that things like Reftoolbar, Popups, and wikEd are not WMF projects, they were and are fully developed by community volunteers, often only 1 or 2 people. Mr.Z-man 20:26, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

I just logged in to the Misplaced Pages on a WinXP PC running IE 8 and could not replicate any of the above issues. Let's try to move away from that "what browser you should/should not use" and get to what exactly is happening on the original user's PC. Tarc (talk) 20:10, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

I don't think anyone's actually focusing on which browser to use, other than Arjayay, who is just assuming others are. I'm thinking Deb has some local PC issue. You could try following the cache clearing instructions. When I get wonky browser behavior and none of the usual methods seem to work, I use CCleaner to perform a nice scrubbing, which works a large percentage of the time. It's a free program, though you do need to install it generally -- not sure if you have the ability to do that. equazcion → 20:36, 5 Nov 2013 (UTC)

I'll try and get a screen print tomorrow. I did do the cache clearing thing but it didn't make any difference. Unfortunately, of all the websites I access regularly, this problem is only occurring with wikipedia. Deb (talk) 20:40, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

I've got a screen print now - should I e-mail it to someone? Deb (talk) 17:39, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

There's more people with this problem. Seems to me like every fifth (or even every third) IE8 user is unable to use the site. I'm currently editing with Chrome tho. I can't use IE8 on XP or Windows 7. There's nothing all that odd about the way it looks, so I don't see how a screenshot is going to help you.

• When loading any page, it loads a blank page. Sometimes the previous page stays on screen until I minimize and maximize again, which makes the page blank.
• In compatibility mode, the page does seem to get loaded, but none of the links work; it's impossible to highlight text (it's sort of like a picture, instead of text) and scrolling completely messes up the page, creating vertical lines all over the window.

This has been hapening sinse about the 2'nt november. GMRE (talk) 18:23, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

• Can't provide a screenshot, but on looking at my watchlist, everything is fine for the first 2-3 entries, and then from that point everything else on the screen is long vertical streaks leading from characters. IE8 on WinXP. Only resolution is to close the window; more than once it's frozen the browser entirely. Risker (talk) 19:00, 6 November 2013 (UTC)
  • When I look at a page, it appears normal until I try to scroll down - then it goes berserk, much as you describe. Deb (talk) 19:37, 6 November 2013 (UTC)
    • Posting via IE8 here now. I've been trying to reproduce these errors but so far no dice. Deb, if you could, can you list the gadgets you have enabled -- or just try disabling all of them, bypass your chache, and see if stuff clears up? equazcion → 20:04, 6 Nov 2013 (UTC)
      • Not trying to be difficult, but I don't know what you mean by "gadgets". Deb (talk) 20:37, 6 November 2013 (UTC)
        • I guess that answers that, then :) Gadgets are in your Preferences, they're extra tools and tweaks you can enable. If you don't know what they are then it's safe to assume you have the defaults only. equazcion → 20:49, 6 Nov 2013 (UTC)
          • Gadgets are the settings listed at Preferences → Gadgets. A big problem with that list - not just the fact that there are so many (over 50) - is that several of them are opt-out, so will have been enabled without you being aware of the fact. So if you make a list of enabled gadgets, you may actually be listing several that the majority of people also have (probably without realising it). The Gadgets enabled by default (i.e. opt-out gadgets) are:
            • Enable the Teahouse "Ask a question" feature
            • Reference Tooltips: hover over inline citations to see reference information without moving away from the article text (does not work if "Navigation popups" is enabled above)
            • Form for filing disputes at the dispute resolution noticeboard
            • CharInsert: add a toolbar under the edit window for quickly inserting wiki markup and special characters (troubles?)
            • Add a "Sandbox" link to the personal toolbar area.
          • The ones that Equazcion is interested in are most likely anything other than those five. --Redrose64 (talk) 00:48, 7 November 2013 (UTC)
• Not to be rude, but why would anyone use IE anymore? KonveyorBelt 20:40, 6 November 2013 (UTC)
  • Deb explains that in her original post, Konveyor Belt. equazcion → 20:49, 6 Nov 2013 (UTC)
  • IE 8 is the default browser on the corporate machine I use at work. (I work as a contractor at a very well-known technology company. I can't say which, but their products are doubtlessly in the computers everyone here is using. Unless you are using exotic hardware.) I could use another browser with the work computer & take my chances with with IT, but I don't use most of the gadgets or fancy add-ons available for Misplaced Pages, & another browser would fix certain problems while introducing another set. No browser software is completely free of gotchas of some shape or flavor. -- llywrch (talk) 17:59, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

i do not think the problem described have anything to do with IE. to the original poster: please try to see if same problems exist when you are logged out. once you see they do not happen in this case, you probably want to go over Special:MyPage/common.js and Special:MyPage/vector.js (or monobook, if this is the skin you use), and eliminate stuff, until the behavior disappear. you can then bring stuff back in until the behavior returns - at this point you found the culprit. clearly wikipedia is compatible with IE8, with some limitations (i.e., some things do not work with ie8, such as displaying references in columns, some features related to "universal language", visual editor and such), but the basic functionality works with IE8 and even with IE7 (probably once you go to 6 and below, things stop working, and the same is probably true for ancient versions of netscape.... peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 21:10, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

I already checked Deb's .js files, they're empty. equazcion → 21:18, 6 Nov 2013 (UTC)

Same behaviour when logged out. Risker (talk) 22:55, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

Perhaps it's a geo located central or geonotice or something that is causing the breakage... That would explain why only some people are seeing this. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:33, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

Hmm maybe the new big ugly donation thing is doing it? equazcion → 12:57, 7 Nov 2013 (UTC)

I'm trying to get the donation thing to come up again for me but I'm not sure how. I think I hid it when it initially came up. I logged out and cleared cache and cookies, but it still won't show up. Ironic, that. equazcion → 13:05, 7 Nov 2013 (UTC)

deb, risker, stfg, could you post your general locations so we can check for geo notices that might be causing this? equazcion → 13:28, 7 Nov 2013 (UTC)

Berkshire, England. --Stfg (talk) 15:00, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

There are three geonotices covering Berkshire at the moment; these are at MediaWiki:Geonotice.js as follows:

• WikiTakesTube13: "Wiki takes the Tube, 9th November - photographers wanted to fill in some gaps of our coverage of London's finest buildings."
• UK131102: "Interested in having a chat with fellow Wikipedians? There are forthcoming meetups in: Cambridge, 9 November; London, 10 November; and Oxford, 17 November!"
• Belfast201311: "Interested in having a chat with fellow Wikipedians? There is a forthcoming meetup in: Belfast, 23 November!"

All three display fine for me in Firefox 24; I live in Didcot. --Redrose64 (talk) 17:09, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

South Wales. Deb (talk) 17:36, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

South Wales should get the same geonotices as Berkshire except for the WikiTakesTube13 one. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:20, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Even though all the current geonotices appear to be simple lines of text with nothing more complex than wikilinks, it is interesting that you're both in the UK. My next step would generally be to see what happens when these users disable javascript altogether. It may be a teensy bit involved for those not accustomed to technical settings but this shows how to do it, if any of the sufferers feel like giving it a try. equazcion → 17:42, 7 Nov 2013 (UTC)

Southern Ontario, Canada. I did try to take screenshots when the "striping" occurred, but the screenshots show a blank page, and not what I see on the screen. However, after taking the screenshot and trying to download it, when I returned to the Misplaced Pages screen, it was completely blank, and I had to close the browser to get back on. Risker (talk) 17:41, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

I did succeed in taking a screenshot although it doesn't look quite like it did on screen. But no one seems interested in looking at it. Actually, I'm not so concerned about my own position because I can still edit at home - what worries me is that there could be a lot of potential users out there who wouldn't dream of trying to edit but can't now access wikipedia to look at articles.Deb (talk) 18:07, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

You could upload it via Special:Upload. Click the "Browse" button to locate the screenshot file, enter something like "Screenshot of IE8 glitch" for the "Destination filename", and enter anything for the description -- I can take care of that afterwards. I'd be interested in seeing it just in case it could tell us something. equazcion → 18:13, 7 Nov 2013 (UTC)

Potential bug

I made a good-faith revert using STiki to Drake (rapper) (pp-pc1), and it did not automatically accept my change, but I have the reviewer right. So... I accepted it myself? See the review log. Should I report this as a bug? — MusikAnimal 21:12, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Yes, that's an issue with STiki. Jackmcbarn (talk) 02:12, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

Skipping Misplaced Pages:File Upload Wizard when I click a redlinked file

Some time ago the decision was made that if you clicked on a redlinked file, (for example, if you clicked File:Example Nonexistant Image.png), it would take you to the upload wizard, rather than to the file namespace page (so you would get this instead of this). While I'm sure that this was done to be a convenience for new editors unfamiliar with uploading, it is a tremendous inconvenience for people who work with files, like myself. People that work with files want to be able to click on a redlink and get to the file namespace page, because that allows them to see whether the file is redlinked because it has been deleted, or because it has been mistyped (which obviously require two different fixes). I could have sworn that at one time someone wrote a fix for me to stick in my custom .js or custom .css that would allow me to click on a redlinked file and get the file namespace page instead of the upload wizard, but that fix either stopped working or is a figment of my imagination that never existed in the first place, as I am getting redirected to the upload wizard (again?).

TLDR: Can someone please tell me how to skip the upload wizard and go straight to the file namespace page when clicking redlinked files? Sven Manguard Wha? 20:17, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Sounds like a pretty easy script to write, I'd be happy to do so, for my own benefit as well. I'll look into it later tonight :) — MusikAnimal 22:23, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

@Sven, this User:Gary King/show upload deletion logs.js might have been the script you were thinking of. NtheP (talk) 22:46, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

I just created User:Equazcion/SkipFileWizard, in case that's what you wanted. It should change all file redlinks to take you to the filespace page as you wanted. Not sure if Gary King's script does something similar... (and pinging MusikAnimal in case he was going to create it). equazcion → 23:00, 5 Nov 2013 (UTC)

Thanks! — MusikAnimal 00:27, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the assistance everyone. Turns out I did have another script doing that, but for some reason it stopped working. Hopefully Equazcion's will work for a while. Sven Manguard Wha? 00:47, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

Search failure on "news"

Any search involving "news" outside mainspace gives me the red error message: "An error has occurred while searching: The search backend returned an error:". Some examples: talk:news, category:news today, user:no news, wikipedia:good news. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:12, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Funky. Happens for me too. Chris857 (talk) 01:31, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

The old search engine makes me cry :( ^demon 02:23, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

What's even weirder is that it's not any search with the word "news" (User:news paperclip works); only apparently common expressions (like User:news paper) with the word return the error. ~HueSatLum 02:38, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

That's pretty frikkin' weird brah. equazcion → 02:45, 6 Nov 2013 (UTC)

Diff and other problems (probably IE8)

Hi. I've been having various problems which I suspect may be to do with IE8 (on Win XP Home SP3 fully patched). They don't occur on Chrome. I use Vector skin.

1. When opening a diff linked via https (like this one]), the first screenful looks fine, but: no text cursor appears when over text; double clicking a word of text fails to select it; clicking links on the top row, like Preferences and Watchlist, doesn't open the linked page; scrolling doesn't move the scroll bar but scolls garbage into the main area; and page-down key just puts nonsense on the page. The same diff linked via ordinary http (like this one) doesn't exhibit these problems. This issue has existed since late last week.
2. Clicking the triangle to obtain enhanced diff view (wikEdDiff preference) has not worked for months. It just gives a shaded box with three dots inside.
3. For about a month, the line of tabs to functions "Article, Talk, Read, Edit, ..." in some cases gets broken up and some of the tabs overwrite the page title. For example, as I type this, I see the "Project page" and "Talk" links are in the right place, but "Read, Edit, ..." are over the page title. (Clicking the displaced ones has the correct effect, though.) I have text size set to largest in my browser.

Thanks in advance for your help. --Stfg (talk) 13:15, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

Seems related to #Unable to do anything through IE8.equazcion → 13:38, 6 Nov 2013 (UTC)

1. I don't have IE8 unfortunately, but I can't replicate it on IE7. It does indeed sound related to what Equizcion is pointing at. The description appears to indicate that there might be some sort of 'overlay', which makes me fear you might have some spyware of advertisement toolbar or other type of browser extension installed that could be causing this. Could you check if you have any unexpected toolbars installed ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:12, 6 November 2013 (UTC)
2. This is broken for me as well it seems. The script is maintained by User:Cacycle, and his feedback page for the script is User_talk:Cacycle/wikEdDiff
3. When the tabs don't fit the screen anymore, they will indeed jump to the next line and partially overlap the title. This is expected behavior. It is also expected that dimensions at times change. If you use the largest text setting, then effects like these are to be expected, though less than ideal, the site is generally not optimized for 'extreme' situations. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:12, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

(←) @TheDJ: thanks for looking at them.

1. I've checked browser add-ons and installed programs, and nothing seems amiss. I've run a registry cleaner. No change. Will run a full scan overnight, but this only happens on Misplaced Pages and only with htpps.

Scan done, nothing found. --Stfg (talk) 09:03, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

1. OK, I've posted there.
2. Well, until a few weeks ago, they didn't do that. When the window was too narrow for all of them, the ones that wouldn't fit fell into the drop-down. I wonder if someone has fixed something, because if I expand the widow to screen width and then restore it to normal size, they do fall into the drop-down. Clicking show preview munges it again, but the same procedure puts it right once more. None of that was the case a few hours ago. The expand/contract procedure works slowly -- I see the munged screen and then watch it fall slowly into place -- so I wonder if there's a timing quirk.

--Stfg (talk) 17:28, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

Page move

How to move all the sub-pages of any page? Admins can only move up to 100. — Bill william compton 13:41, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

I think (haven't tried it) that admins can move 100 at a time, and could do n×100 in n batches if needed. Is there really a problem with that? PrimeHunter (talk) 15:06, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

What's the procedure of n×100 move? — Bill william compton 15:13, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

The best way to do that is probably to enlist a bot to execute the action. It can also be done manually trough the API, but it is rather cumbersome. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:29, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

Problem solved. Thanks PH and TheDJ. — Bill william compton 19:02, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

Autoblock checker down

I'm getting a "403: User account expired" but no indication of whose account it is. Peridon (talk) 17:03, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

I dont know if its related, but I get random "You are currently unable to edit pages on Misplaced Pages due to an autoblock affecting your IP address" Christian75 (talk) 17:07, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

Numerous users are caught up in that. See User_talk:Jimfbleak#Block? where a correct block of one editor seems to have had unintended knock on effects for many others. Valenciano (talk) 17:14, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

Err, no - I'm not suffering from autoblock. I was trying to check if a blocked editor was autoblocked. This is a Toolserver account problem - if you don't go into an account there for six months they cut you off. Damn nuisance on some of the main things hosted there. Peridon (talk) 17:18, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

Just found it - it's User:Nakon. Peridon (talk) 17:28, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

There's a temp replacement here courtesy of TParis.--Jezebel'sPonyo 17:30, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

ec - I've mailed Nakon anyway. Peridon (talk) 17:33, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

TParis emailed Nakon a couple weeks ago, and I left a notification on their talk page. A bit more context.--Jezebel'sPonyo 17:41, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

I did email Nakon at the time and he was fine with my copy of the tool and said he'd get his account sorted soon.--v/r - TP 18:45, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

Wikimedia Foundation IP addresses causing autoblocks

On User talk:Jimfbleak#Block.3F several users have reported autoblocks on IPs including 2620:0:862:1:A6BA:DBFF:FE38:FC71, which belongs to the Wikimedia Foundation, this is not the users' IP address. Another is 2620:0:862:1:A6BA:DBFF:FE38:D75F - there have also been several edits from the range today. Peter James (talk) 17:36, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

I remember last week (ish) we were having similar issues with vandalism from IPv4 addresses on the Wikimedia server range.--Jezebel'sPonyo 17:44, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

Yes. This was again a problem caused by missing MediaWiki configuration for new Varnish cache servers that we deployed in Europe today. In some cases our cache servers use IPv6 to communicate with eachother, and MediaWiki wasn't yet configured to recognize their IPv6 IPs, causing these misattributed edits. This should have been fixed now. Our apologies! -- Mark Bergsma (talk) 17:49, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

Search box problem with back button

In the last day, I've noticed a problem with the search box (Monobook, Firefox 25, Windows XP). I click in the search box in the left margin, type in the first few letters of the page name, and when it appears in the suggestions, I arrow down to it and press Enter; this takes me to the appropriate page as it always has done. The problem arises when I then use either backspace (or alt+left-arrow) - it goes back, but then re-processes the search and moves forward again. I need to use backspace (or alt+left-arrow) twice quickly in order to go back and stay back. Is this a result of a MediaWiki change, or a bug introduced with Firefox 25 (to which I was upgraded recently)? --Redrose64 (talk) 00:29, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

Horrible slowdown

I can barely edit at the moment. It appears to be the usual recurring problem with bits.wikimedia.org (at least that seems to be what my browser says is the hang-up). It took several minutes just to get this page to display. I use the latest version of Firefox, if that matters.--Bbb23 (talk) 00:46, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

By "latest", have you upgraded from FF 24 to FF 25 in the last couple of days? --Redrose64 (talk) 00:50, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

I'm on v.25, but I can't remember how many days ago I upgraded. In any event, the slowdown just occurred late this afternoon, and it acts like all previous slowdowns I've seen.--Bbb23 (talk) 01:02, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

I'm having similar problems attempting to access or edit articles and article histories in article space. I also use FF 25, but I also tried in Chrome (logged out) and it doesn't work any better. Not much trouble on this page, however. --Arxiloxos (talk) 01:22, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

Just to chime in, all is well on my end. This could be an "availability zone" issue, maybe. I'm in the NYC area. The current WikiMedia performance status appears to be okay as well. I'm on Chrome 30 OSX. — MusikAnimal 01:39, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

Fine here too, also NYC. For the record though I seem to have consistently experienced the slowdowns on queue with the reports here previously -- just none showing right now. equazcion → 01:48, 7 Nov 2013 (UTC)

I'm getting the same slowness. Pinging and tracerting bits.wikimedia.org doesn't seem to show any problems. --Closedmouth (talk) 02:01, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

All seems fine on FF25 for me. Thinking it's a caching issue for Bbb... Try WP:BYPASSing. Technical 13 (talk) 03:55, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

Whole site has been very slow for me (IE9 on Win7 in Australia) for the last 12 hours at least. DH85868993 (talk) 04:21, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

Also very slow for me in Japan. I'm on Firefox 25/WinXP at the moment. — Mr. Stradivarius 05:51, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

Working fine for me on Firefox 25/Windows 8 in Ohio. Based on locations provided here and listed on user pages, it seems that Americans are not having problems, but Australia and Japan are. Not sure how large the problem area is. Bbb23 and Arxiloxos, where are you at? I can't get a location off of either of your user pages. Knowing a location could help the devs track down the issue. jcgoble3 (talk) 07:52, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

Sounds like there could be some trouble in the new ulsfo Oceania caching center. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:27, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

Performance is much improved for me (in Australia) now. DH85868993 (talk) 09:41, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

We had network issues (congestion in one of our links) in our new ulsfo (San Francisco) datacenter that resulted in significant slowdowns during peak hours. We route traffic to datacenter based on users' geolocation and hence this issue affected only traffic coming from US & Canada West, Oceania and a minority of Asian countries. We've redirected North American traffic back to Ashburn, Virginia to free up the link and this seems to have alleviated the issues for now. We're still monitoring the situation and working on it so that we can have the issue permanently fixed and traffic rerouted back to San Francisco within the next days. Thanks to everyone here and on IRC for the report, this helped a lot. Faidon Liambotis (WMF) (talk) 11:51, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

Edit window collapsing when editing common.js

If this is just me, never mind, there are easy workrounds. With Windows 7, Firefox and WikEd, when I try editing common.js (or vector.css) the edit window displays and shrinks to nothing before I can get there. Preview showing OK. Disabling WikEd solves the problem. I wonder if this is FF 25 but I don't often edit custom.js. Editing other pages OK. Both Monobook and Vector. With WikEd running, same problem with IE8 but Chrome 30 is OK. Thincat (talk) 11:30, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

I believe it's a known conflict between WikEd and the new default editor that attempts to show up for all .js pages. equazcion → 12:51, 7 Nov 2013 (UTC)

That's OK then. Thincat (talk) 13:39, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

Notification bug?

So I saw somewhere where someone tried to notify me with a lowercase u. In other words, they used {{u|Biosthmors}} instead of {{U|Biosthmors}} but I didn't get a notification, I don't think. Is this a bug? Is it tracked? Can someone test it and see if it notifies me or not? Thanks. Biosthmors (talk) pls notify me (i.e. {{U}}) while signing a reply, thx 12:25, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

Hi, Biosthmors. Thincat (talk) 12:27, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

Echoing Thincat's sentiments, I, too, would like to express my hi to you, Biosthmors. equazcion → 12:49, 7 Nov 2013 (UTC)

Biosthmors, I too would like to echo what Thincat and Equazcion had to say, and follow up with a strong hi. Technical 13 (talk) 12:55, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

It works it works! Thanks all. Biosthmors (talk) pls notify me (i.e. {{U}}) while signing a reply, thx 13:16, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

This is not my IP address

Special:Mytalk is taking me to User talk:2620:0:862:1:91:198:174:67. That's a Wikimedia IP6 address. 149.241.39.156 (talk) 17:33, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

User talk:2620:0:862:1:91:198:174:70

It looks like a big lot of random IPs (including mine) get a "You have new messages" for everything that happens in this page. Do something, please--176.58.248.185 (talk) 17:57, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

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