Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)

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Cleanup from decades past

There's this recurring issue at Special:WantedCategories where a redlinked Category:Clean-up categories from YYYY gets generated because somebody has erroneously backdated a maintenance template to 15 or 20 years ago — following which a bot automatically recreates the resulting redlinked maintenance-queue category for that specific template, but then leaves the general "clean-up" container as a redlink that ends up becoming the category cleanup crew's job to fix.

For example, Category:Articles with unsourced statements from July 2004 has been recreated four times within the past two weeks, just from people accidentally typing 2004 instead of 2024 in a {{citation needed}} template somewhere in an article, which is obviously just a disruptive pain in the badonkadonk to have to keep dealing with over and over.

I've asked here before, and was told that it was possible, but obviously it didn't happen: is there any way that maintenance templates like {{citation needed}} can be made to do an ifexist check on categories, and file nonexisters in an error-catcher category (e.g. "citation needed with dating problems" or something along those lines) instead of causing the recreation of a redlinked category that's already been cleaned up and deleted in the past? Bearcat (talk) 13:21, 28 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Also, given that it's clearly possible for bots to detect and automatically create redlinked maintenance categories as needed, then can any of the following things that inevitably hit WantedCategories on a regular basis get farmed out to bots instead of becoming my job to fix?

"Wikipedia Today's featured article nominations from [Current Month and Year]", which consistently lands there at some point in the middle of every month without fail, and should really just be automatically created by a bot right off the top of the month if it's routinely expected to exist?
Any non-empty redlinks of the "Articles containing [Insert Language Here] text", "Pages with [Insert Language Here] IPA" and "CS1 [Insert Language Here]-language sources (lang code)" varieties?
Any non-empty redlinks for "Wikipedia sockpuppets of [User]" and "Suspected Wikipedia sockpuppets of [User]"? Bearcat (talk) 15:04, 28 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I'll comment on some of these.

Dated maintenance categories (such as Category:Articles with unsourced statements from July 2024) are created by AnomieBOT (talk · contribs) if either of two conditions apply: (i) it's now the last day of the preceding month; (ii) there's a page in the category and the date is valid - even if the year is a typo. I would expect that if you want different behaviour from AnomieBOT, your first contact should be Anomie (talk · contribs), who (unlike some botops I could name) is not only active but also replies to talk page messages.
Cats like Category:Wikipedia Today's featured article nominations from July 2024 have always been manual creations. One prolific creator (particularly of the early ones, in 2011-2016) was Bencherlite (talk · contribs), who is WP:MIA. Other people have also created them, see this list, but note that the person named is the one who made the last edit to the page, often this was the page creation but not always. I think that for this one, it's something to bring up at Wikipedia talk:Today's featured article/requests.
The sockpuppet ones should really be the responsibility of the WP:SPI admin or clerk who "tagged" the user pages.

HTH. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 17:18, 28 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Obviously sockpuppet ones should be the responsibility of the admin or clerk who tagged the page, but mistakes can and do happen — so there really needs to be a way to catch such mistakes before they become my problem to fix.

When it comes to the backdated maintenance templates, it's really a thing that the template needs to handle rather than the bot. The bot is just going to come along and create any non-empty redlink it finds, and can't easily modify a redlinked category to be different than what's there — it's the template that needs to be prevented from being able to generate a backdated redlink like that at all, so that there's nothing for the bot to have to recreate. So it's really that the template needs to have "if asked to regenerate outdated category that does not exist, then replace with problem-catcher category instead of redlinked date" code inside the template, because a bot can't make that happen if the template isn't already handling it. Bearcat (talk) 21:14, 28 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Some more details on how AnomieBOT works:

When the target category doesn't exist, the templates populate both Category:Articles with unsourced statements from July 2004 and Category:Articles with invalid date parameter in template. AnomieBOT looks through articles in the latter category to find the former, as there are simply too many possibilities for it to check for the former directly. Well, I suppose these days a DB query on Toolforge could be done, but suffix searches aren't very efficient.
AnomieBOT does look for missing "Clean-up categories from Month Year" categories to create them. I could have it also do "Clean-up categories from Year" if that's wanted. Would that be a special case, or should we have a Category:Wikipedia maintenance categories sorted by year to match Category:Wikipedia maintenance categories sorted by month?
AnomieBOT won't create dated categories for any date, only dates since 2004. I forget why I picked that year specifically, beyond deciding that anything earlier was definitely not some ancient article being undeleted or some ancient edit removing a maintenance tag being reverted. I could bump it to 2010 easily enough if people typing "200X" instead of "202X" is a common thing.
Having AnomieBOT create Category:Wikipedia Today's featured article nominations from July 2024-type cats wouldn't be quite as simple as most. Normally we'd just need to add the the base category to Category:Wikipedia categories sorted by month, but since in this case the base category is Category:Wikipedia Today's featured article nominations by month rather than Category:Wikipedia Today's featured article nominations I'd also need to configure an override for the bot. Also I'd need to do something if we don't want them to be created with {{Monthly maintenance category|cat=Category:Wikipedia Today's featured article nominations by month}}.
The non-date examples would need to be considered case by case. "Wikipedia sockpuppets of" and Wikipedia suspected sockpuppets of" seem like reasonable prefixes to search for. Not sure about "Articles containing", "Pages with", or "CS1".

HTH. Anomie ⚔ 00:10, 29 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding bumping from 2004 to 2010 – can the bot look up the earliest existing month/year category and not create categories which are earlier than that? —⁠andrybak (talk) 15:00, 30 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Bad news: Category:Articles needing additional references from October 2006 is an active backlog. Good news: there are fewer than 1,000 articles in all of Category:Clean-up categories from 2006, not including those in Category:Articles containing potentially dated statements from 2006, which is apparently not a backlog category. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:32, 30 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

OK, so the cutoff year could be the earliest existing category's year or {{CURRENTYEAR}} − 10, whichever is the latest (the maximum out of the two). —⁠andrybak (talk) 18:00, 30 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I wonder how often people validly undelete, or unredirect, or otherwise revert to a revision that has a maintenance tag older than that. Or how often people change a tag from one category to another, suddenly populating the "another" category with a bunch of old dates. Also I'd rather have a consistent cutoff rather than having to try to look up an earliest date for every different category. Anomie ⚔ 23:47, 30 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Can I butt in here for a moment to ask if we're seriously considering making the lives of people who actually work the backlogged cleanup categories (I'm sure they exist) significantly harder, so that the people who keep Special:WantedCategories tidy are less inconvenienced? I've also had empty maint categories I've G6'd years ago pop back up, and that's a good thing, because it means someone's reverted an unsourced article that was made into a redirect years ago, or copy-pasted in an old version of a deleted article, or reverted a page to a really old version, and those all need to be dealt with. If we make the maintenance tags not categorize such edits, then they're going to be noticed by a lot fewer people. If it's just a matter of the bot not recreating redlinked grandfather cats, then have it make those. Or, y'know, deal with the underlying problem - most of the time the correct thing to do was a simple rollback or G4 speedy, in my experience - and then G6 the maintenance cat again. Even if you omit the last, it's not going to last an hour anyway; we've got admins who race each other for easy speedies like that. —Cryptic 03:56, 31 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It is in no way whatsoever a "good thing" for the same backdated maintenance category to come back as a red link four times in the space of just two weeks, and not even one of those times resulted from anything that could have been simply "reverted back to the way it was" or "deleted" — every time required a full "edit article to find mistyped template date". Every single minute that anybody has to spend on redlinked category cleanup is one more minute than anybody should have to be spending on redlinked category cleanup — the ideal state of that report is "always empty because no redlinked categories are ever on any pages at all", and anything even slightly short of that is a problem.

Part of the rule against redlinked categories, in fact, is that templates are strictly forbidden from generating redlinked categories at all, and have to be modified if and when they are generating redlinked categories.

So it's not my job to just patiently redelete the same maintenance categories over and over again without asking for something to be done to prevent them from even recurring in the first place — my job is to take any and all steps necessary to get that report to a state of "always empty and never listing even one redlinked category because no redlinked categories ever exist to be listed". Bearcat (talk) 16:56, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see any other way to read this other than as confirmation that you'd rather articles (which real people read) - remain broken, so that A) the bot-recreated maintenance categories, which only editors (and a tiny minority of those) use, don't need to be redeleted - and there's plenty of admins willing to do that, and B) maintenance reports of those maintenance categories, which are looked at by an even tinier number minority of editors, and which I'm not convinced are used by anybody at all, remain tidy. Oppose action, and may I suggest your priorities are seriously in need of adjustment. —Cryptic 17:47, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I'll thank you to kindly not put words in my mouth. Not only did I not say that "articles should remain broken", I didn't say a single thing that could even possibly be interpreted that way. But literally by definition, any redlinked category that ends up on an article is also a broken thing — an article with a redlinked category on it is breaking the article, a template that generates and transcludes redlinked categories is breaking the article, and on and so forth. What I asked for is ways to fix broken stuff, not ways to "break" anything, because an error-checker category is not breaking anything, while the redlinked categories I'm trying to fix are the only thing that's "breaking" anything whatsoever in this equation. Nothing I asked for here "breaks" anything, while not doing anything about what I asked for here is breaking things, because templates adding redlinked categories to articles is breaking things while templates checking and applying error-checker categories if there's a potential problem to be checked for is not breaking anything. Bearcat (talk) 20:36, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Dark mode issues

In dark mode, at {{Stabbing Westward}}, the actual link for Stabbing Westward is an extremely dark grey that is difficult to see on a black background. Also, when editing, anything that is NOT a link is grey text on a white background. It was not this way before. Does anyone know how to fix this?

--Jax 0677 (talk) 22:10, 28 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This is a known issue for visited links in navbox titles. There is a proposed fix. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:31, 28 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Reply - Good to know. Can't wait to hear more about it. --Jax 0677 (talk) 22:54, 28 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I don't edit templates, generally, but even when I edit regular pages after hours (when the site changes colours), I now have that white edit window with light-coloured text, rendering everything essentially unreadable. I've been eschewing editing when the site is dark (or, like right now, typing in a plain-text program and copying/pasting), thinking surely this is a widespread problem and will be fixed quickly, but maybe it's only tied to what you're discussing, here? You linked to a discussion about templates and navboxes; will that proposed fix also affect all white-background editing issues, too? — Fourthords | =Λ= | 02:27, 1 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

FWIW Jonesey95, I no longer have light text on a white edit-window, but it's now changed to dark-grey text on a black edit-window. Different, but equally unreadible. This was as of yesterday evening; I'll check again ronight and update if anything else's changed. — Fourthords | =Λ= | 16:45, 4 August 2024 (UTC) P.S. Confirming this state of affairs remains upon this evenings palette switch. — Fourthords | =Λ= | 01:38, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Reply - The issue is fixed when I am logged in to my home computer. However, when I am in dark mode on a public computer, the title of a music navbox is very dark grey. --Jax 0677 (talk) 12:51, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Inflation template broken

I noticed on Hey Jude#Auctioned lyrics and memorabilia that the inflation conversion from pounds to US$ is showing "US$FXConvert/Wordify error: cannot parse value 'Unknown country code for year 2023: GBR '". Many of the GBR test cases on Template:FXConvert/testcases are similarly broken, so it's probably affecting a lot of articles. I can't tell where exactly this data is coming from or if there were recent changes causing this. hinnk (talk) 19:00, 31 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

At a quick glance, it looks like data for {{Inflation}} in Template:Inflation/UK-GDP/dataset, Template:Inflation/year, and Template:Inflation/fn was updated for 2023, but Template:To USD/data/2023 was not updated. {{FXConvert}} seems to assume that will have been updated too. BTW, I see similar errors for CAN, IND, and BGD. Anomie ⚔ 21:20, 31 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Snowman304: @Izno: Would the changes mentioned in Template talk:Inflation#Template-protected edit request on 15 July 2024 have caused this? hinnk (talk) 22:41, 31 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

What Anomie is saying there is that FXConvert was already broken. The changes there just made it clear that it is. Izno (talk) 23:09, 31 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Oh my mistake, I had read it as the template working (or at least, not showing any errors) until the new data exposed a case it couldn't handle. Is there a more appropriate place to raise this issue then? I notice Template:FXConvert doesn't have a talk page. hinnk (talk) 23:58, 31 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

There are many errors at {{FXConvert/doc}} and that template's testcases page. It looks like the error is generated by {{To USD/data/2023}}, which is much smaller than {{To USD/data/2021}}. It appears that if a country code is missing from the "/2023" template, it generates an error message. It is unclear to me how numbers are chosen for the /2023 template. – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:49, 1 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Most of the pages currently transcluding errors have this problem. I noticed it started about a month ago with Canada (CAN) on a few pages. I tried to trace it but it became too much of a time sink to debug. Now it's really gotten bigger since GBR joined in. Where, oh, where is the editor who designed and implemented all this obscure complexity? – wbm1058 (talk) 04:05, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, Anomie. Now it's coming back to me. I recall looking at this and making a fix earlier this year. Snowman304 made this edit at 05:52, 29 July 2024. Damn, that Template:Inflation/UK-GDP/dataset is buried so deep in the system that it's a wonder anyone ever finds it. No wonder it only ever gets updated about once every three or four years. I just updated the instructions comment:

<!-- *** When changing this also update the reference in Template:Inflation/fn and the latest year in Template:Inflation/year! *** -->

Category:Pages using an unknown country code in Template:To USD lists mainspace pages which are showing {{error}} messages.

I see that Template:To USD/data/2023 is the template that's populating that category. That defaults to showing the error for any country that's not listed, and not very many countries are listed. I guess we look to the parent template Template:To USD for documentation. – wbm1058 (talk) 11:08, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The most recent edit at Template talk:To USD was made in February. Documentation for how to add new data? Hah. wbm1058 (talk) 11:28, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I spent an hour in my user sandbox on 22 May 2024‎ attempting to fix Canada. So I think the issue with data failing to be updated in a timely manner dates back to this 21:13, 9 May 2024 update to Template:Inflation/CA/dataset. – wbm1058 (talk) 14:49, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I got as far as tracing the problem down to Template:To USD/General, where I updated the documentation to show two examples – one working and one broken. Now they both work. – wbm1058 (talk) 15:05, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, every year data has to be added. Trigenibinion (talk) 11:37, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I have updated 2022 and 2023. Trigenibinion (talk) 13:37, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, Trigenibinion. Carbon price and List of owners of Italian football clubs are still showing errors for code "EUR". – wbm1058 (talk) 14:33, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The WB data does not provide EUR. Somebody had added it without mentioning the source. I have restored that, but I will have to update the ECB data so that the conversion goes through ToEUR. Trigenibinion (talk) 15:02, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I had used an old script. The EUR data is provided by the WB in each country. Trigenibinion (talk) 16:31, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I think I don't have a script for the current European data, but only for the historical ECU data. Also, it seems the European data does not include the country name and code but only the currency name and/or code. The sites are not as easy to use as the WB. Trigenibinion (talk) 18:11, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

To convert from USD to EUR, To EUR will fall back to using To USD beyond its last year of data. Trigenibinion (talk) 18:30, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

To convert from INR to EUR, To EUR will fall back to using INRConvert beyond its last year of data Trigenibinion (talk) 18:32, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

SVG dark-mode support

It should be possible to specify the colour-scheme to be used when rasterising SVG files. This would influence the default styling applied to SVG elements and activate any CSS media queries that target prefers-color-scheme. For example, a background normally rendered as pale blue for white backgrounds might select a darker shade in night-mode to avoid the garish contrast:

:root {
	color-scheme: light dark;
	fill: #00c;
}
@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark){
	:root { fill: #003; }
}

The MediaWiki thumbnail generator already provides a means of specifying language when rendering multilingual SVGs by prefixing the thumbnail's filename with langid- (where id is the BCP 47 tag of the desired language). The same approach could be used to request a rendering of an SVG using a particular colour-scheme; for example, by supporting an optional dark- prefix in thumbnail URLs. Expressed in BNF, the format of thumbnail URLs would be:

<thumbnail-url> ::= <base> "/" <name> "/" [<theme>] [<lang>] <size> "-" <name> ".png"
<base>          ::= "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/14/"
<theme>         ::= "dark-" | "light-"
<lang>          ::= "lang" <locale> "-"
<size>          ::= <width> "px-"

; Variables (values shown here by way of example)
<name>          ::= "Lang_Status_01-EX.svg"
<locale>        ::= "de"
<width>         ::= "480"

I'm aware of a CSS class named .skin-invert-image that inverts image colours for dark-mode users, but it's an inelegant and hacky solution that really only works for images with simple colour palettes (like this). A more robust and seamless approach would be to extend the image syntax to include a new parameter named theme that recognises one of three values: dark, light, and auto (the default). Auto would select either the dark or light rendering of an SVG based on the reader's display preferences, while dark or light specify motifs unconditionally (potentially facilitating the use of <picture> tags, should MediaWiki support them in the future).
— Alhadis (talk) 23:07, 1 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

That is pretty well written, but SVG´s are outputted as PNG´s to the client. So, either the "wgSVGNativeRenderingSizeLimit" or "wgSVGNativeRendering" server settings would be have to be on for this to work, as per phab:T208578. Snævar (talk) 01:53, 3 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

That's a lot of extra complexity in the software, and equally important, requires editing and reuploading a lot of images. For that reason it is not very likely to happen soon. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 17:21, 3 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

JavaScript IllWill.js help needed

There is a problem with the behaviour of User:Cobaltcigs's IllWill.js: If I fill in the edit summary as I go along editing an article, and then invoke that script, it overwrites my edit summary with its own. I'm no expert in JavaScript, but it occurs to me that changing in line 162 the operator = to += would fix that. Then again, it might need more elaborate coding.

I left a message on the user's talk page, but he hasn't edited for some months. I also left a message at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject JavaScript#Help: IllWill.js a few days ago, without response so far, so I would appreciate it if someone here could fix this or confirm that my suggestion will work. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 14:09, 3 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Michael Bednarek, probably the easiest thing to do is simply fork the script. — Qwerfjkl talk 14:46, 3 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Black icons and the dark mode gadget on Vector2010

Certain templates use SVG images that are not visible with the dark mode gadget.

How to fix this? Polygnotus (talk) 20:59, 2 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

No spam is already using the appropriate classes. The gadget should be modified.

After a recent edit, the same is true of Paid. Izno (talk) 17:41, 3 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

newline

If you use {{subst:Welcome-newuser|heading=no}} it insert an extra newline at the top. Can that be fixed? Thanks, Polygnotus (talk) 02:20, 3 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

There's nothing in the template itself that would do that, so you need to look deeper. The next level in is Module:Template wrapper which is passed Template:Welcome. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 15:13, 3 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

No, this can not be fixed. Izno (talk) 17:45, 3 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure what Izno means. The newline is inserted by {{Welcome}} which could be changed to not insert a newline in the future. It wouldn't affect past substitutions, and I don't know whether the template is used in circumstances where it would be bad to omit the newline. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:01, 3 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

AFAICS removing the newline would make it so that welcome normally substs like == Welcome ==Ipsum rather than the intended == Welcome ==\nIpsum. Perhaps you can make it work. Izno (talk) 22:11, 3 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The rules for whitespace stripping and rendering are complicated and the template actually leaves two newlines which is why it renders as extra whitespace. I have removed the first newline in the sandbox version with a method [1] which leaves behind a nowiki on substitution. Not elegant but are there real problems? PrimeHunter (talk) 23:47, 3 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

That's pretty gross to be plopping on new editor talk pages. They don't need an introduction to nowiki in that way.... Izno (talk) 23:51, 3 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Unicode direction weirdness

With Baghdad Conservatory in my Firefox edit the start of the line is left of the edit box. Previously this resulted in someone adding an extra "T" to yield "TThe". But now the "The" looks like "he" in the edit box. Somewhere in the Arabic text there is a left to right unicode direction indicator as I can tell by trying to add spaces to it. How can we find and remove such characters? And is that character messing up the edit box? Graeme Bartlett (talk) 22:33, 3 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It looks fine in my Firefox (128.0.3), with Monobook, Vector, or Vector2022, in the "2010 editor", with and without &safemode=true added to the URL. I don't see any LRM or similar characters in that article. Anomie ⚔ 13:02, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

After seeing the discussion linked below, which mentions that it happens when the line starting with LTR text wraps within some RTL text, I was able to reproduce. I can reproduce in a plain textarea locally, so it doesn't seem to have anything to do with Wikipedia specifically. Anomie ⚔ 17:11, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This is one of the reasons that the cs1|2 templates support |script-title=. Try this:

{{cite news |script-title=ar:الراحل حنّا بطرس جزء من تاريخ الموسيقى في العهد الملكي |url=http://www.daraddustour.com/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AA%D9%81%D8%A7%D8%B5%D9%8A%D9%84/tabid/94/smid/604/ArticleID/31615/reftab/123/Default.aspx |accessdate=31 July 2011 |newspaper=Addustour |date=28 September 2010 |url-status=dead |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20120328094702/http://www.daraddustour.com/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AA%D9%81%D8%A7%D8%B5%D9%8A%D9%84/tabid/94/smid/604/ArticleID/31615/reftab/123/Default.aspx |archivedate=28 March 2012}}

الراحل حنّا بطرس جزء من تاريخ الموسيقى في العهد الملكي. Addustour. 28 September 2010. Archived from the original on 28 March 2012. Retrieved 31 July 2011.

|script-title= causes cs1|2 to wrap the title in <bdi>...</bdi> (bidirectional isolate) tags:

'"`UNIQ--templatestyles-0000001F-QINU`"'<cite class="citation news cs1 cs1-prop-script">[https://web.archive.org/web/20120328094702/http://www.daraddustour.com/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AA%D9%81%D8%A7%D8%B5%D9%8A%D9%84/tabid/94/smid/604/ArticleID/31615/reftab/123/Default.aspx  <bdi lang="ar" >الراحل حنّا بطرس جزء من تاريخ الموسيقى في العهد الملكي</bdi>]. ''Addustour''. 28 September 2010. Archived from [http://www.daraddustour.com/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AA%D9%81%D8%A7%D8%B5%D9%8A%D9%84/tabid/94/smid/604/ArticleID/31615/reftab/123/Default.aspx the original] on 28 March 2012<span class="reference-accessdate">. Retrieved <span class="nowrap">31 July</span> 2011</span>.</cite><span title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.genre=article&rft.jtitle=Addustour&rft.atitle=%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%AD%D9%84+%D8%AD%D9%86%D9%91%D8%A7+%D8%A8%D8%B7%D8%B1%D8%B3+%D8%AC%D8%B2%D8%A1+%D9%85%D9%86+%D8%AA%D8%A7%D8%B1%D9%8A%D8%AE+%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D9%88%D8%B3%D9%8A%D9%82%D9%89+%D9%81%D9%8A+%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B9%D9%87%D8%AF+%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D9%84%D9%83%D9%8A&rft.date=2010-09-28&rft_id=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.daraddustour.com%2F%25D8%25A7%25D9%2584%25D8%25AA%25D9%2581%25D8%25A7%25D8%25B5%25D9%258A%25D9%2584%2Ftabid%2F94%2Fsmid%2F604%2FArticleID%2F31615%2Freftab%2F123%2FDefault.aspx&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fen.wikipedia.org%3AWikipedia%3AVillage+pump+%28technical%29" class="Z3988"></span>[[Category:CS1 uses Arabic-language script (ar)]]

—Trappist the monk (talk) 13:16, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Previous discussion (July 2023) at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 206 § RTL scripts sometimes left-shifting lines displayed in editing environment (browser dependent). Folly Mox (talk) 16:31, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Browsers automatically display text in some scripts as right to left. This can cause different issues and confusion when editing. If you cannot read those scripts anyway then you may prefer to display them left-to-right with code like this in your CSS:

textarea {
  direction: ltr;
  unicode-bidi: bidi-override;
}

It doesn't affect what you save so you're not going to damage the pages but may be less likely to do something wrong. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:39, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Template:Welcome-Foreign/persian

Just thrown {{welcome-foreign/Persian}} on a user, and it hasn’t prompted a == Welcome == title to spawn. I’m pretty sure most use of welcome-foreign prompts a title? Unless I’m thinking of another template that Welcoming Committee often use? MM (Give me info.) ^(Victories) 08:44, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Well that template does not include any header. So if you are able to write Persian, you could add in the header to the template. The header should have == translation of welcome == , though one I checked out had === instead of ==. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 10:41, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Germany categories

Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2024 July 21#German Confederation has had the effect of leaving behind 56 non-empty redlinked categories for Special:WantedCategories cleanup, because "YYYY in Germany" categories were moved to "YYYY in the German Confederation", but then various subcategories were left behind in the redlinks because the category was template-transcluded onto them instead of being directly declared — and while it is technically possible for me to fix them by manually going around switching {{EstCatCountry|Germany}} to {{EstcatCountry|the German Confederation}}, doing that would have the side-effect of simultaneously breaking other categories on the same contents (e.g. "[Decade] establishments in Germany", "Establishments in Germany by year"), by turning them from bluelinks into redlinks because they still need the Estcatcountry template to be saying "Germany" rather than "the German Confederation".

So, essentially, there's no way for me to fix the existing redlinked categories without causing new redlinked categories in the process, and thus I need technical help getting them cleaned up. Thanks. Bearcat (talk) 13:27, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Note that not even all the "YYYY in Germany" categories were renamed, only the ones for years prior to 1871. Category:1871 in Germany and later still exist. As for Template:EstcatCountry, its documentation suggests that passing Germany and having redirects from "[Decade] establishments in Germany" to "[Decade] establishments in the German Confederation" where appropriate should work. Or maybe vice versa, passing "the German Confederation" and having appropriate category redirects in the other direction. Anomie ⚔ 14:24, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

That's fine, but with 56 of them, is there any way that a bot can be made to wham through recreating those redirects instead of it having to be my job? Bearcat (talk) 16:21, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I once put in a request at WP:AWBREQ for something similar, see Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Tasks/Archive 15#Victoria (Australia) → Victoria (state). --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 18:05, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The template should really be reworked to get the country name from the category title. Having a template for automation, but then requiring users to manually enter the information seems incomplete. Gonnym (talk) 18:11, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

XTools Edit Count down?

Since yesterday, when I bring up my Edit Count from XTools, nothing has updated in two days. Specifically, the Actrion, Patrol figure. On the Basic information, it says "Latest edit 2024-08-03 03:11" which is in error. It also lists "Latest logged action" as 2024-08-03 03:06. Something on the stats end not working? — Maile (talk) 18:48, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

High replag means that all sorts of stuff that should update will not update until the replication lag goes back to zero. – Jonesey95 (talk) 20:42, 4 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, there has been a high replag on both English Wikipedia and the Commons for two days now. It seems to have something to do with this. It's lasting longer than it was expected to take. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 00:21, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yup. I noticed this one too, today. Ktin (talk) 00:38, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the input. It's been so many years since I've seen this happen, that I forgot the possibility of it. — Maile (talk) 01:39, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, it seems to happen fairly frequently, I'd guess monthly or every other month. It usually happens on Thursdays or Fridays. It becomes very evident if your editing relies on bot reports. They seem the most directly affected by these system lags. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 01:50, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

So the replication lag has reached three and a half days. Is this situation normal or has something gone wrong and needs to be attended to? Can an end date be predicted or is it indeterminate? Nurg (talk) 22:25, 6 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

~~I poked around and was unable to find a phabricator bug report, but my searching on phabricator does not work well.~~ It looks T367856 accounts for this outage, but there has been no communication from WMF explaining why it is taking longer than the expected 26 hours and when it might be over. Maybe there is chatter on an e-mail list. Does anyone know if the WMF has uptime targets for their servers, including replag? With this one outage, currently at 92 hours, they will be below 99% uptime for the year. We had a 3+ hour outage in May 2024, a 4+ hour outage in June 2024, a 4+ hour outage in September 2023, and probably more. That's a good four and a half days of known downtime in the last twelve months for this valuable service. Not ideal. – Jonesey95 (talk) 06:34, 7 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

There is no guarantees for replag. It is a best effort. We are seeing a lot of this over the last 2 years because Wikimedia are doing major rearchitecting of various database tables to enable them to keep scaling, and unlike the production environment the tools environment does not have the same level of support that would allow to execute these changes without impact. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:32, 7 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

AfD Statistics not updating either

AfD Statistics https://afdstats.toolforge.org/afdstats has not updated since at least yesterday. I am assuming this is th same issue as replag — Maile (talk) 13:02, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Wikiproject Assessment tables not updating either

Reported at Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Index. Same root cause? Nurg (talk) 23:48, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

User Scripts and Template Substitution

I have a minor issue that I need some assistance with. I used to have two scripts that would help with some non-admin closures and archives. I believe the scripts were Discussion closer and manual-archiver. I have been inactive for some time, but, when I checked today -- neither of them seem to be working. In the past I would find two links on the right hand side of a discussion "Archive" and "Close". I would use them to do some amount of non-admin closures to clear the backlog at WT:ITN. Did something change with these scripts? Am I doing something wrong?

Also, unrelated, at User:Ktin I see that the template substitution seems to be failing on most of the templates. Is that because there is a limit on the number of templates on an user page? This is obviously a minor issue. But was generally curious. Thanks. Ktin (talk) 00:36, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

User:Ktin is in Category:Pages where post-expand include size is exceeded. This causes attempted transclusions to just become template links when the limit is broken. It varies greatly how costly templates are. The main cause in your case is the 31 {{Get short description}}. For example, {{Get short description |2023 Indian Premier League final}} uses 9% of the 2 MB limit. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:05, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Without those 31 {{Get short description}}, the whole page would only use 3% of the limit instead of breaking it. You import User talk:DannyS712/DiscussionCloser in User:Ktin/common.js. See User talk:DannyS712/DiscussionCloser#Patched version (I haven't tried it). You also load User:Evad37/OneClickArchiver. Wikipedia:One click archiving says it's no longer recommended and suggests other scripts. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:17, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks a lot, PrimeHunter. The template evaluation workload makes sense. Appreciate you helping me get to the bottom of that. Will try updating that and the scripts over the weekend. Have a nice one! Ktin (talk) 15:23, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, it transcludes and recursively transcludes the target page. You might want to use something like {{Annotated link}} for better performance, though I'm not sure if that will help with the PEI limit. — Qwerfjkl talk 12:10, 7 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Template:Efn

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T371839

Template:Efn used with basic parameters would usually be displayed as ^[a][b] etc. But, in the recent days it's being displayed as ^{[lower-alpha 1][lower-alpha 2]} etc. Why is it? Vestrian24Bio (TALK) 01:20, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Where? -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 05:06, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Any page I see using it. Vestrian24Bio (TALK) 05:40, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Works for me Specific examples please. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 06:47, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Windows 10 version history, Windows 11 version history

Screenshots: [2], [3] Vestrian24Bio (TALK) 06:56, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

"Rendered with Parsoid", as above (#Start a discussion notice on Talk pages) to your earlier question. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 07:39, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Why is the Parsoid causing these problems and it isn't discussed anywhere on en-WP?? Vestrian24Bio (TALK) 07:42, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Vestrian24Bio, because most people don't use Parsoid, so some templates break with it. — Qwerfjkl talk 08:33, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Neither Windows 10 version history nor Windows 11 version history uses {{efn}}, please supply examples where {{efn}} is actually used and is a definite factor in the perceived problem. Also, your screenshots are unusable, as I can't find whatever it is I'm supposed to be looking for. Please follow the directions at WP:WPSHOT. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 14:41, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The section Windows 10 version history#Channels transcludes {{Windows 10 versions}} which uses efn. I can see the ^{[lower-alpha 1][lower-alpha 2]} as described in the screenshot and the list then is a,b, etc. Could the transclusion interfere with the correct behaviour of efn? — Jts1882 | talk 14:50, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I can see the problem on any page listed here. So, I took screenshots of 3 random pages:

Aristotle – Lead paragraph with ^{[upper-alpha 1]}; Screenshot
ASCII – Screenshot
Apple Inc. – Screenshot

Vestrian24Bio (TALK) 15:44, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I see no problem with any of these articles, logged-in or logged-out. If no problem is apparent when logged-out, but you have a problem when logged-in, that tells me that there's something unusual about your custom settings. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 17:39, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

"Rendered with Parsoid" as said above. Vestrian24Bio (TALK) 17:41, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see how that happens. According to mw:Parsoid, it's something to do with converting Wikitext to HTML. So, as all of our pages are written using Wikitext, and all of our readers are served HTML, the conversion process should be the same for everybody, and Parsoid must be that process. So why do I get something different from Vestrian24Bio? Has one of us turned off Parsoid, and if so, how and why? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:21, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It's not the default wikitext parser. If you opt into it at the bottom of Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing, you should see the [lower-alpha 1] misparse, too; I do, at least. —Cryptic 20:37, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

There is ongoing work in this area. I will file a bug. Izno (talk) 17:09, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Looks like the CSS for phab:T156351 (that Parsoid requires rather than using MediaWiki:Cite link label group-lower-alpha) needs updating after Ieff73769, probably from .mw-ref > a[data-mw-group=lower-alpha]::after to .mw-ref > a[style~="mw-Ref"][data-mw-group=lower-alpha]::after (and the same for the other groups). Anomie ⚔ 00:50, 6 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, that would fix it, just a specificity issue it looks like. And the change looks deliberate, but 1) I'm not sure the impact was considered, and 2) I'm not sure that [style~="mw-Ref"] particularly is a nice selector for sundry reasons. Izno (talk) 01:11, 6 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Dark mode for pure-HTML table templates

Template:Hsl-swatches and Template:Hsv-swatches use the pure HTML table format and needs to be adapted so that they display correctly in dark mode. –LaundryPizza03 (d c̄) 04:03, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed by Jonesey. Izno (talk) 17:22, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2024-32

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

Feature news

Two new parser functions will be available this week: {{#dir}} and {{#bcp47}}. These will reduce the need for Template:Dir and Template:BCP47 on Commons and allow us to drop 100 million rows from the "what links here" database. Editors at any wiki that use these templates, can help by replacing the templates with these new functions. The templates at Commons will be updated during the Hackathon at Wikimania. [4][5]
Communities can request the activation of the visual editor on entire namespaces where discussions sometimes happen (for instance Wikipedia: or Wikisource: namespaces) if they understand the known limitations. For discussions, users can already use DiscussionTools in these namespaces.
The tracking category "Pages using Timeline" has been renamed to "Pages using the EasyTimeline extension" in TranslateWiki. Wikis that have created the category locally should rename their local creation to match.

Project updates

Editors who help to organize WikiProjects and similar on-wiki collaborations, are invited to share ideas and examples of successful collaborations with the Campaigns and Programs teams. You can fill out a brief survey or share your thoughts on the talkpage. The teams are particularly looking for details about successful collaborations on non-English wikis.
The new parser is being rolled out on Wikivoyage wikis over the next few months. The English Wikivoyage and Hebrew Wikivoyage were switched to Parsoid last week. For more information, see Parsoid/Parser Unification.

Learn more

There will be more than 200 sessions at Wikimania this week. Here is a summary of some of the key sessions related to the product and technology area.
The latest Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin is available.
The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization newsletter is available. It includes: New design previews for Translatable pages; Updates about MinT for Wiki Readers; the release of Translation dumps; and more.
The latest quarterly Growth newsletter is available.
The latest monthly MediaWiki Product Insights newsletter is available.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:40, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

c:Template:Dir and c:Template:BCP47. I don't think I've ever used them. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:16, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

They're templates used by templates. Almost every file description page uses them indirectly when marking up the languages of file descriptions, for example. Probably many other translateable templates do as well. Matma Rex talk 09:01, 6 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Only templates that deal with multiple languages are likely to use these. Often as part of other templates. These are typical cases of templates that are used the most without people ever realizing they exist ;) —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:28, 7 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Cite button in Visual Editor is broken

I'm getting 404 errors from the API in the console, don't have time to investigate further. RAN1 (talk) 03:22, 6 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It works for me (trying to cite "https://www.example.com"). What inputs cause the problem for you? Matma Rex talk 08:59, 6 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Works for me now too. The API endpoint was responding with 404s when I was trying to cite apnews.com, it looked like it went down. RAN1 (talk) 14:43, 6 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

WikiProject templates category redirect mess

Something is suddenly causing various templates associated with WikiProjects to populate category redirects. Part of the problem is rooted in the template and category names not matching.

Populated redirects include: Category:WikiProject Belgrade, Category:WikiProject Doctor Who templates, Category:WikiProject Magazines templates and Category:WikiProject Portals templates.

Is anyone able to identify what change has caused these to suddenly populate and fix it? Thanks in advance. Timrollpickering (talk) 10:40, 6 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Based on timestamps things were added to the category, the first three look like they're due to Special:Diff/1238812083. The last seems to have been done manually: Special:Diff/1238918898, Special:Diff/1163203429/1238919315, Special:Diff/1238919052, and Special:Diff/1238918849. Anomie ⚔ 12:30, 6 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Gadget to view section sizes

Is there a way to view a page's section sizes without having to add {{Section sizes}}? A diehard editor (talk | edits) 13:10, 6 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Not aware of a way to see it all at once, but you can use Wikipedia:Prosesize on the edit preview screen when looking at a particular section. CMD (talk) 14:34, 6 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Delay in global lock on account

𝕲𝕵𝕺𝕭𝕬𝕵 𝕺𝕽𝕯𝕰𝕶 𝕺𝕱 𝕾𝕬𝕿𝕬𝕹's account is global locked, even though their name is in title blacklist for only on English Wikipedia.^[1] Also, why was their account even given the permission to be created, so that they can make three edits and then get globally locked? Thanks, ExclusiveEditor _{Notify Me!} 16:11, 6 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

^ .*[^\0-\x{FFFF}].* <casesensitive> in # Very few characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane are useful in titles on local

This global account was created on another project, TBL doesn't stop autocreation. — xaosflux ^Talk 18:58, 6 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Adding transparency to make templates more dark-mode friendly

As someone who has witnessed the transition to Fandom Desktop which had a dark mode included, I want to suggest something that might actually be good for templates, and that is adding transparency to backgrounds (not to the font, just to backgrounds using rgba or hex codes) This could be done automatically but it might be better to do so in wikitext and may be a good addition to the manual of style. This would allow the text to be colored white (or whatever) and we would not have to auto-color stuff with backgrounds black. I wonder what level of transparency would be good for this. I was thinking 0.1 but there isn't a good way to check. Maybe this could be done as a bot task for inline styles and by interface admins for CSS sheets. Awesome Aasim 19:34, 6 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Excessive "link added" notices

When a link to an article someone has created is added to a navbox, and someone subsequently edits any page in such navbox, regardless of the content of that edit, the user who created said article which was added to the navbox gets a notice that a "link was added" to that article, when that is not the case. I'm guessing the reason as to why mediawiki doesn't "register" that a link was added to a navbox in each transclusion of it has to do with the page not being purged until the next edit is made to it, but is there a way this can be fixed for link added notices? I'm aware one could just turn these off, but it does nevertheless seem like a bug. Flemmish Nietzsche (talk) 08:44, 7 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Not currently. From the perspective of Mediawiki, there is no difference between a link included in a page vs included via a templat, or rather what u describe a specific subset of templates. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:15, 7 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

[1] .*[^\0-\x{FFFF}].* <casesensitive> in # Very few characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane are useful in titles on local

[1]