This is an archive of past discussions with User:Xaosflux. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Thank you for notifying me on my user talk page that my admin permissions have been suspended due to inactivity. Sadly, I have been too busy with other projects to do much Wikipedia editing in recent years. I still think Wikipedia is a great resource and a shining example of volunteer collaboration. Best wishes and Happy New Year.
Voting for the Sound Logo has closed and the winner is expected to be announced February to April 2023.
Tech tip: You can view information about IP addresses in a centralised location using bullseye which won the Newcomer award in the recent Coolest Tool Awards.
As far as Mediawiki-content controlled pages for enwiki, I found only 2: check_legal_html!https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page and check_legal_html!https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page, and then wikibooks, aside. Only contents in MediaWiki:Wikimedia-copyright are checked(and the main page redirect should not be moved without also updating that code)- but after rendering into the Main page. We should wait for legal to answer first, maybe the check is not needed anymore in the current form. Or maybe we could change the alert to just check the links exist and that would give you more flexibility, rather than forcing you to notify us every time. --JCrespo (WMF) (talk) 15:38, 9 January 2023 (UTC)
I don't necessarily always understand the lawyer's requests, but I am sure to follow their advice to avoid legal problems. :-) My guess is that at some point in the past, the footer disappeared due to a software bug/html rendering issue and that could have had legal consequences for us. I believe things like the license and the privacy policy are important enough to merit alerting over not having them! I don't know the details- what I know is that we (system administrators) get an alert when the footer is edited and want to make that better for us, in the most reasonable manner possible! Our lawyers understand the wiki, and they will know the best way to keep things editable while minimizing risk, I have no doubt- this is not about closing up things! --JCrespo (WMF) (talk) 15:52, 9 January 2023 (UTC)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
You can use tags to filter edits in the recent changes feed or on your watchlist. You can now use tags to filter out edits you don't want to see. Previously you could only use tags to focus on the edits with those tags. [2]
You can now use the thanks function on your watchlist and the user contribution page. [3]
A wiki page can be moved to give it a new name. You can now get a dropdown menu with common reasons when you move a page. This is so you don't have to write the explanation every time. [4]
Matrix is a chat tool. You can now use matrix: to create Matrix links on wiki pages. [5]
You can filter out translations when you look at the recent changes on multilingual wikis. This didn't hide translation pages. You can now also hide subpages which are translation pages. [6]
Changes later this week
Realtime preview for wikitext is a tool which lets editors preview the page when they edit wikitext. It will be enabled for all users of the 2010 wikitext editor. You will find it in the editor toolbar.
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 10 January at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis) and on 12 January at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 January. It will be on all wikis from 12 January (calendar).
Latest comment: 1 year ago2 comments2 people in discussion
My apology for reverting your edit as it had nothing to do with your change. I was trying to select the "diff" link on a page in my watchlist and I accidentally clicked the "revert" link on your edit instead. I undid the revert as soon as I realized what I had done. RedWolf (talk) 23:39, 15 January 2023 (UTC)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
The URLs in "prev" links on page history now contain diff=prev&oldid=[revision ID] in place of diff=[revision ID]&oldid=[revision ID]. This is to fix a problem with links pointing to incorrect diffs when history was filtered by a tag. Some user scripts may break as a result of this change. [7]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 January. It will be on all wikis from 19 January (calendar).
Some changes to the appearance of talk pages have only been available on Talk: and User talk: namespaces. These will be extended to other talk namespaces, such as Wikipedia talk:. They will continue to be unavailable in non-talk namespaces, including Wikipedia: pages (e.g., at the Village Pump). You can change your preferences (beta feature). [8]
On Wikisources, when an image is zoomed or panned in the Page: namespace, the same zoom and pan settings will be remembered for all Page: namespace pages that are linked to a particular Index: namespace page. [9]
The Vector 2022 skin will become the default for the English Wikipedia desktop users. The change will take place on January 18 at 15:00 UTC. Learn more.
Future changes
The 2023 edition of the Community Wishlist Survey, which invites contributors to make technical proposals and vote for tools and improvements, starts next week on 23 January 2023 at 18:00 UTC. You can start drafting your proposals in the CWS sandbox.
Sorry, I meant I believe that user is still blocked. You are of course welcome to lift the block, I just think you haven't done that yet. --Yamla (talk) 16:18, 17 January 2023 (UTC)
Latest comment: 1 year ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Hello, Xaosflux! I find myself in need of your technical advice. I was updating the SqWiki main page some days ago when I noticed that it doesn't render nice on mobile. Then I tried seeing what happened with EnWiki (I'm not an avid mobile wikiuser myself so I hadn't concentrated on such details before) and there I saw that the whole page layout changed, its "blocks" being rearranged in a very optimized column manner. Trying to replicate the same effect, I was searching around the source code to see what made this happen and eventually I learned about the existence of flexing in CSS. Given that I just learned about it I haven't been able to achieve much yet. Can you help me make SqWiki's main page behave in a similar manner as EnWiki's does in regard to that? - Klein Muçi (talk) 07:21, 19 January 2023 (UTC)
It's okay. Apparently the problem is far more complex than just using Display:Flex as I was hoping when I wrote that. Experimented a bit around. Maybe it should wait a bit. — Klein Muçi (talk) 13:33, 19 January 2023 (UTC)
all images on wikipedia do not work
Latest comment: 1 year ago12 comments2 people in discussion
No idea, sounds like something on your network in your browser; if you can verify that the "restricted site" message is coming from a WMF server (not just something your browser generated) you can open a bug report here. — xaosfluxTalk15:55, 20 January 2023 (UTC)
That happens, sometimes it isn't a direct block, but an extension that is blocking it too - if you don't control your network and computer you should start by contacting your org helpdesk. — xaosfluxTalk16:32, 20 January 2023 (UTC)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
Last week, for ~15 minutes, all wikis were unreachable for logged-in users and non-cached pages. This was caused by a timing issue. [10]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 January. It will be on all wikis from 26 January (calendar).
If you have the Beta Feature for DiscussionTools enabled, the appearance of talk pages will add more information about discussion activity. [11][12]
The 2023 edition of the Community Wishlist Survey (CWS), which invites contributors to make technical proposals and vote for tools and improvements, starts on Monday 23 January 2023 at 18:00 UTC.
Frankly, I don't know -- I just accepted all the defaults. I use WP just to look up information, and edit only to the extent of making small corrections to obvious spelling or grammatical problems. I've never bothered to figure out the jargon here, such as "skins". In the meantime, Edit seems to work more or less properly, except when it doesn't, jumping to top of page instead of to the correct Section.
(This is a copy/paste from our original discussion, to your talkpage. I very much appreciate your help and interest, but I'm another distressed user who wishes that far better than "good enough" had been left alone. If there were a way for users to choose the look and feel of WP as it used to be, I'd definitely be there instead.) Milkunderwood (talk) 10:04, 29 January 2023 (UTC)
The save button will always be greyed out until you make a change. I asked you to go there and look so I could try to guide you, but you never answered. If you want to reset all your options to the current default, you can go to these two pages and confirm: Special:Preferences/reset / Special:GlobalPreferences/reset. Note, there is no way to "undo" a preference reset. — xaosfluxTalk11:16, 29 January 2023 (UTC)
You may first want to actually check that Skin setting. It is right at the top of the page here: Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering, it says "Skin" and only one can be selected at a time. The new default is "Vector (2022)", the older default that you may want to try is "Vector legacy (2010)". — xaosfluxTalk11:18, 29 January 2023 (UTC)
Hey, it works! Thank you! I never understood what all that gobbledygook was, other than giving me a headache. (If I didn't reply, I don't live on WP, but just visit when I need to. Most questions I might ask are never responded to.) Milkunderwood (talk) 16:15, 29 January 2023 (UTC)
Latest comment: 1 year ago4 comments2 people in discussion
Hi, there's a community ban discussion going on at WP:AN#User:Doug Coldwell. Just before the votes, it says:
Per WP:CBAN, "discussions may be organized via a template to distinguish comments by involved and uninvolved editors". Please declare prior involvement and post in the "Involved" section only if you were previously involved.
I looked at the policy and saw no guidance on what makes an editor "involved". I was hoping you might know how this works, in practice if not policy. Also, how does an "involved" editor's vote compare to an "uninvolved" editor's vote when the discussion is closed? The whole thing seems pretty odd to me, but I don't generally vote - or even pay that much attention to - these discussions. Thanks.--Bbb23 (talk) 16:32, 29 January 2023 (UTC)
@Bbb23 creating such a section doesn't appear to be required by policy, in general declaring involvement is beneficial so this may just make it easier. — xaosfluxTalk20:53, 29 January 2023 (UTC)
Beneficial to whom? Other editors? The closer? I still don't get it, but it's not important, thanks for your reply.--Bbb23 (talk) 21:02, 29 January 2023 (UTC)
@Bbb23 the purpose of the CBAN is to determine if the community should ban someone - so if someone is in a personal dispute with the subject they may still have something to contribute but could be biased, and the closer could take that in to consideration. It is likely a short way to help someone just call that out instead of starting threaded comments about the other participants possible involvements. I don't think it is used often like that. — xaosfluxTalk21:09, 29 January 2023 (UTC)
Tech News: 2023-05
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
Last week, for ~15 minutes, some users were unable to log in or edit pages. This was caused by a problem with session storage. [13]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 February. It will be on all wikis from 2 February (calendar).
Future changes
Wikis that use localized numbering schemes for references need to add new CSS. This will help to show citation numbers the same way in all reading and editing modes. If your wiki would prefer to do it yourselves, please see the details and example CSS to copy from, and also add your wiki to the list. Otherwise, the developers will directly help out starting the week of February 5.
Latest comment: 1 year ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Do you have plans for {{Uw-ublock-nonsense/doc}}? It looks like the parent template uses shared documentation. If some random editor had created it, I would TFD it, but I figure that you either have plans for it or know how to use CSD G7. Thanks. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:24, 31 January 2023 (UTC)
Voting in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey will begin on 10 February 2023 and end on 24 February 2023. You can submit, discuss and revise proposals until 6 February 2023.
Tech tip: Syntax highlighting is available in both the 2011 and 2017 Wikitext editors. It can help make editing paragraphs with many references or complicated templates easier.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
In the Vector 2022 skin, logged-out users using the full-width toggle will be able to see the setting of their choice even after refreshing pages or opening new ones. This only applies to wikis where Vector 2022 is the default. [14]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 February. It will be on all wikis from 9 February (calendar).
Previously, we announced when some wikis would be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. These switches will not be announced any more, as the read-only time has become non-significant. Switches will continue to happen at 7AM UTC on Tuesdays and Thursdays. [15]
Across all the wikis, in the Vector 2022 skin, logged-in users will see the page-related links such as "What links here" in a new side menu. It will be displayed on the other side of the screen. This change had previously been made on Czech, English, and Vietnamese Wikipedias. [16]
Gadgets and user scripts will be changing to load on desktop and mobile sites. Previously they would only load on the desktop site. It is recommended that wiki administrators audit the gadget definitions prior to this change, and add skins=… for any gadgets which should not load on mobile. More details are available.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
On wikis where patrolled edits are enabled, changes made to the mentor list by autopatrolled mentors are not correctly marked as patrolled. It will be fixed later this week. [17]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 February. It will be on all wikis from 16 February (calendar).
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 1. This is planned for 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [19][20][21]
@JBW: you must be opted-in to being a mentee - probably from one of the early experiments, @Kaleeb18: was your prior mentor who has retired from WP; I removed them as a mentor so that people sending "ask my mentor" questions wouldn't go to him anymore, when this happened all of his prior mentees were pseduorandomly assigned to new mentors. You probably don't need mentoring at this point in your wiki career :) As an admin, I think you can claim yourself as a mentee at Special:ClaimMentee if you want to stay opted-in, but avoid that sort of thing in the future, or you can always poke The Night Watch and ask for some suggestions on articles to edit ;) — xaosfluxTalk17:43, 19 February 2023 (UTC)
I have no memory whatever of opting in to be a mentee, and if I did ever opt in then I certainly never followed that up and actually became a mentee. Perhaps, however, I should take it up now: there may be a benefit of advice from someone newer, with a fresh outlook, instead of the jaded and worn-out approach that I have probably fallen into. 🥱 JBW (talk) 18:40, 19 February 2023 (UTC)
@JBW: there is also a chance that you got hit with phab:T301981. Some people that never opted in get a notification anyway when their mentor changes (everyone has a mentor, but for most established users they are never used for anything). I'll keep following up on that ticket to avoid noise for people that don't need it. You are welcome to use the feature if you want! — xaosfluxTalk20:45, 19 February 2023 (UTC)
@JBW it is just the way the system got initiated, something about not having null entries in the database tables. Most existing users never got opted-in, so it doesn't do anything - except for now possibly give people annoying notifications until that gets fixed! — xaosfluxTalk22:07, 19 February 2023 (UTC)
For me, the notification was not at all annoying, in fact I found it more amusing than anything else. Anyway, thanks for the explanation. JBW (talk) 08:25, 20 February 2023 (UTC)
Mentoring still exists on Wikipedia? I thought all those old processes went inactive years ago. That's nice to know. I always thought that peer mentoring was a good concept. - jc3719:11, 19 February 2023 (UTC)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
Last week, during planned maintenance of Cloud Services, unforeseen complications forced the team to turn off all tools for 2–3 hours to prevent data corruption. Work is ongoing to prevent similar problems in the future. [22]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 February. It will be on all wikis from 23 February (calendar).
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 1. This is planned for 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [23][24][25]
Latest comment: 1 year ago8 comments4 people in discussion
Your userpage says User Boxen instead of Userboxes, it must have 1 capital and no typos, also you must join the two words UrSUS529 (talk) 17:20, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
UrSUS529, this is an inside joke for computer nerds from the old days of computing. The joke is that "oxen" is the plural of "ox", so "boxen" should be the plural of "box". – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:56, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
Really? I always thought it was a German thing. What do oxen have to do with computers? Or is it that computers were sometimes called boxes? Still, I like Xaosflux's answer - it's so polite.--Bbb23 (talk) 18:27, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
I don't suppose they had cows in mind when they created the VAX acronym. My knowledge of Latin is not scholarly, but rather through my knowledge of French (vache), if I happen to think about it.--Bbb23 (talk) 21:02, 24 February 2023 (UTC)
Latest comment: 1 year ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Hi Xaosflux! When I recently tried to move Draft:Pete Sutherland to Pete Sutherland (currently a redirect to a soap opera character), it gave me the normal error, as non-admins cannot overwrite a page. I'm about to submit a request to WP:RM#TR to usurp the title, but I noticed that the interface message does not point to it, or indeed even suggest that usurping is possible; it just says The page could not be moved, for the following reason: A redirect already exists at Pete Sutherland, and it cannot be deleted automatically. Please choose another name. Telling editors unilaterally to choose another name when sometimes usurping is the right course of action is bad advice (and reinforces systemic bias to the extent it gives precedence to older articles), so I think it should be changed. I couldn't find where that message is stored, as searching doesn't turn it up and I'm not able to add uselang=qqx to the URL in the middle of submitting. You tend to be knowledgeable about this area — would you be able to help me find and modify the message? Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}}talk05:31, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hello, Xaosflux and friendly talk-page stalkers.
The mw:Editing team is starting a new project, mw:Edit check. They are particularly seeking the views of RecentChanges patrollers and other reviewers. One of the open questions is: When should the visual editor encourage people to add a citation?
The meeting will be this Friday, 3 March 2023. More information is available at mw:Editing team/Community Conversations#3 March 2023. I hope that you will be able to attend, but if you aren't, please consider leaving your advice to the team on the talk page. They would particularly value hearing about the citation standards at different Wikipedias, and also what you think the biggest problem is with the first edits made by new editors. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:21, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
Latest comment: 1 year ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Hello, Xaosflux,
Your user page is showing up on the broken redirects page as a page to be deleted or fixed because, well, it is a broken redirect. But I see in the page history that it is a test edit. So, I'm unsure what to do here. We delete broken redirects or at least remove or correct them from the page they are on but we also don't generally mess around with user pages of editors who have as much experience and advanced privileges as you have. But these error pages get updated every 6 hours and until the page is either deleted or the content altered, it will keep showing up as an error that needs to be dealt with.
So, maybe you could finish up with your test or alter the content so that it links to an existing page before my mild OCD kicks in. Thank you! LizRead!Talk!21:05, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
Last week, in some areas of the world, there were problems with loading pages for 20 minutes and saving edits for 55 minutes. These issues were caused by a problem with our caching servers due to unforseen events during a routine maintenance task. [26][27]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 March. It will be on all wikis from 2 March (calendar).
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 1. This is planned for 14:00 UTC. [28]
Following a request for comment, the Portal CSD criteria (P1 (portal subject to CSD as an article) and P2 (underpopulated portal)) have been deprecated.
The Terms of Use update cycle has started, which includes a [p]roposal for better addressing undisclosed paid editing. Feedback is being accepted until 24 April 2023.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Community Wishlist Survey 2023 edition has been concluded. Community Tech has published the results of the survey and will provide an update on what is next in April 2023.
On wikis which use LanguageConverter to handle multiple writing systems, articles which used custom conversion rules in the wikitext (primarily on Chinese Wikipedia) would have these rules applied inconsistently in the table of contents, especially in the Vector 2022 skin. This has now been fixed. [29]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 March. It will be on all wikis from 9 March (calendar).
A search system has been added to the Preferences screen. This will let you find different options more easily. Making it work on mobile devices will happen soon. [30]
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 March. It will be on all wikis from 16 March (calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Chavacano de Zamboanga Wikipedia, Min Dong Chinese Wikipedia, Chechen Wikipedia, Cebuano Wikipedia, Chamorro Wikipedia, Cherokee Wikipedia, Cheyenne Wikipedia, Central Kurdish Wikipedia, Corsican Wikipedia, Kashubian Wikipedia, Church Slavic Wikipedia, Chuvash Wikipedia, Welsh Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [31][32]
Latest comment: 1 year ago9 comments2 people in discussion
Hello, Xaosflux! Is there a way one can block an account from creating other multiple accounts? If you check w:sq:Speciale:Log/newusers and search the page for Të paret e Llapit you'll see that they have wrongly created 4 new accounts now, maybe attempting to write an article (they've also tried using their user page as an article page). Any function that can block this functionality from an account? - Klein Muçi (talk) 10:25, 14 March 2023 (UTC)
Can you give me temporary admin access on TestWiki for 1 week so I can unblock and reblock your 2nd account and thus learn what option to use for that? We have the interface badly translated in Albanian in such a way that most options don't make any sense for us. I need to retranslate them. — Klein Muçi (talk) 13:35, 14 March 2023 (UTC)
Thanks a lot! Small curiosity: I'm not familiar with the expression "prod sysop". What exactly does prod stand for? — Klein Muçi (talk) 02:44, 15 March 2023 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi sorry for the jargon, "prod" = "production". We generally will give any permeant sysop of a production public wiki admin access on testwiki to test things. — xaosfluxTalk09:26, 15 March 2023 (UTC)
Oh, okay. That's what I was thinking but I couldn't find the definition anywhere explained. Do these rules apply to the interface admin role as well? I was thinking that maybe testing and localizing new gadgets there before getting them to run on SqWiki would be a good thing but currently I'm not working with any gadgets. — Klein Muçi (talk) 15:00, 15 March 2023 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi basically yup, if you need it there feel free to ping me. We generally do remove it from people not actively using it after a while. The one sort of gadget test we don't normally like much of on testwiki is default gadgets, so if your gadget is for logged-out-users, you can test it QUICKLY, then turn it right off (otherwise it can interfere with lots of other people's tests). If it is a gadget for users (even if you will make it default elsewhere) - don't make it default, and just turn it on to test it (and once done, delete it). — xaosfluxTalk15:09, 15 March 2023 (UTC)
EFN is fine for any filters you think have an error, especially if you have an example and a proposed fix - worse case nothing happens :) — xaosfluxTalk10:17, 17 March 2023 (UTC)
@Xaosflux I got it already sorted out at WP:EFN. The / was used as text for detecting the automatic summary not as a delimiter that has to be escaped, but escaping it would still work, so it makes no difference if changed or not. 1AmNobody24 (talk) 12:44, 17 March 2023 (UTC)
The Signpost: 20 March 2023
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
Last week, some users experienced issues loading image thumbnails. This was due to incorrectly cached images. [33]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 March. It will be on all wikis from 23 March (calendar).
There will be a new option for Administrators when they are unblocking a user, to add the unblocked user’s user page to their watchlist. This will work both via Special:Unblock and via the API. [34]
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Wikipedia mobile apps teams. During the meeting, we will discuss the current features and future roadmap. The meeting will be on 24 March at 17:00 (UTC). See details and how to join.
Latest comment: 1 year ago5 comments2 people in discussion
Hello, Xaos! Can you help me solve something in SqWiki? This is our template for creating RFAs: Link. It works fine in itself (recent example) but look what happens when you transclude it on the main page where people are expected to see RFAs: Link. The problem is with {{User|{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}. I think I should be using {{safesubst}} somewhere over there to solve it but I'm not sure where exactly. - Klein Muçi (talk) 19:51, 22 March 2023 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi I think I understand what you want, is it this: When someone makes a new application (such as it would appear in this link) all those SUBPAGE values should be subst'd in on to the new page they are creating? — xaosfluxTalk20:20, 22 March 2023 (UTC)
I suppose so. I was talking only about the first SUBPAGE value because that is what is bringing problems but maybe all of them should be subst'd. — Klein Muçi (talk) 20:23, 22 March 2023 (UTC)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The AbuseFilter condition limit was increased from 1000 to 2000. [35]
Desktop users are now able to subscribe to talk pages by clicking on the Subscribe link in the Tools menu. If you subscribe to a talk page, you receive notifications when new topics are started on that talk page. This is separate from putting the page on your watchlist or subscribing to a single discussion. [37]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 March. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 March. It will be on all wikis from 30 March (calendar).
The legacy Mobile Content Service is going away in July 2023. Developers are encouraged to switch to Parsoid or another API before then to ensure service continuity. [39]
Latest comment: 1 year ago5 comments2 people in discussion
Hello, Xaosflux!
I was wondering if you could provide some practical advice on matters related to categories. My homewiki has always been a mess in regard to categories. Now we're trying to put our attention to that area a bit. Any advice on how to start attending to the category-tree so we can provide a well-structure hierarchy? From what I've seen, we've started dealing from the branches: Users translate articles and with them, they create the missing categories (and sometimes their parent categories) they find on EnWiki on those articles. This makes maintenance/technical categories almost non-existent when compared with their content homologues.
Bonus question: Why can't we have redirects work on category pages? I was thinking of asking about such a thing in the technical wishlist but I thought that it looked as a too obvious request so I thought that maybe there must be a reason why that doesn't exist. — Klein Muçi (talk) 14:05, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi for the second part, phab:T5311 is ~20 years old, it may never happen for a pile of reasons. For the first part, there are lots of philosophies, and it depends what your community wants. Categories do not need to be a "tree" (and they seldom only are) - they are more of a "web". For example take the article, w:sq:Banka_e_Shqipërisë, it is in w:sq:Kategoria:Ekonomi - is that useful? Who is it useful to? Categories may be used in different ways by different people (editors vs readers for example). In general, I think that very large categories are not useful for readers. For example our Category:Scientists would be unwieldy if it was fully populated, but with only 54 entries w:sq:Kategoria:Shkencëtarë could still be useful for your readers. Wikipedia:Categorization contains the guidelines that we use here on enwiki. — xaosfluxTalk14:21, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
Yes, I've read those guidelines. I just don't know how I would start applying them practically. I mean, I was searching for a way I can "supervise from the top" the web-creating process, if that makes any sense. Utilizing tools and mass-changes. Creating a standard. Because now everyone just creates the categories needed for their article and as you said everyone is using different philosophies.
On the concept, a community discussion about what you want and what you don't want is where to start. Good background would be any deletion or merge discussions you may have had about categories in the page. Do you want your category pages to contain their own content as well, or not (such as an overview of the topic) - do you want them to just be for navigation, or also for content?
On the redirects, one of the primary reasons is that categories are primarily managed by wikitext on the screen, and what to do if a category is moved (and how to do it), especially during category splits or merges. — xaosfluxTalk15:26, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The system for automatically creating categories for the Babel extension has had several important changes and fixes. One of them allows you to insert templates for automatic category descriptions on creation, allowing you to categorize the new categories. [40][41][42][43][44]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 April. It will be on all wikis from 6 April (calendar).
Some older Web browsers will stop being able to use JavaScript on Wikimedia wikis from this week. This mainly affects users of Internet Explorer 11. If you have an old web browser on your computer you can try to upgrade to a newer version. [45]
The deprecated jquery.hoverIntent module has been removed. This module could be used by gadgets and user scripts, to create an artificial delay in how JavaScript responds to a hover event. Gadgets and user scripts should now use jQuery hover() or on() instead. Examples can be found in the migration guide. [46]
Some of the links in Special:SpecialPages will be re-arranged. There will be a clearer separation between links that relate to all users, and links related to your own user account. [47]
You will be able to hide the Reply button in archived discussion pages with a new __ARCHIVEDTALK__ magic word. There will also be a new .mw-archivedtalk CSS class for hiding the Reply button in individual sections on a page. [48][49][50]
Future changes
The Vega software that creates data visualizations in pages, such as graphs, will be upgraded to the newest version in the future. Graphs that still use the very old version 1.5 syntax may stop working properly. Most existing uses have been found and updated, but you can help to check, and to update any local documentation. Examples of how to find and fix these graphs are available.
The rollback of Vector 2022 RfC has found no consensus to rollback to Vector legacy, but has found rough consensus to disable "limited width" mode by default.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
There was a problem with all types of CentralNotice banners still being shown to logged-in users even if they had turned off specific banner types. This has now been fixed. [53]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 April. It will be on all wikis from 13 April (calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Moroccan Arabic Wikipedia, Danish Wikipedia, Dinka Wikipedia, Lower Sorbian Wikipedia, Ewe Wikipedia, Greek Wikipedia, Emiliano-Romagnolo Wikipedia, Esperanto Wikipedia, Estonian Wikipedia, Basque Wikipedia, Extremaduran Wikipedia, Tumbuka Wikipedia, Fulah Wikipedia, Finnish Wikipedia, Võro Wikipedia, Fijian Wikipedia, Faroese Wikipedia, Arpitan Wikipedia, Northern Frisian Wikipedia, Friulian Wikipedia, Irish Wikipedia, Guianan Creole Wikipedia, Scottish Gaelic Wikipedia, Galician Wikipedia, Gilaki Wikipedia, Guarani Wikipedia, Goan Konkani Wikipedia, Gothic Wikipedia, Gujarati Wikipedia, Manx Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [54][55]
Latest comment: 1 year ago14 comments2 people in discussion
Hello, Xaosflux! I find myself a bit confused as how to handle a certain situation.
If you look at sq:Marrëdhëniet e jashtme të Maqedonisë së Veriut, you'll see that there are some empty sections and some other strange behaviors in it. After a bit of investigation I found out that this was coming from {{Pb}}. In EnWiki PB=Paragraph break but in SqWiki PB=Përdorues i bllokuar (Blocked user).
If you search for Template:Pb in SqWiki you'll see that apparently that is a really old template we would use to notify users about their blocks. If you check its transclusions you'll see that it has been used less than 50 times in all these years. Now normally I want our Pb template to serve the same purpose as the one here. Most of our new articles are CX translations and for CX to work correctly it needs to have the same technical infrastructure in templates. The problem is that I don't know how to handle those ~40 old transclusions. I can use AWB for massediting but what change would I need to do exactly? - Klein Muçi (talk) 12:56, 17 April 2023 (UTC)
No, that's the problem: I don't know how to handle the situation. Should I just remove all those ~40 cases? Should I create another template and use that in those? Maybe I should just substitute the code there in those cases? A completely different solution? I don't know what would be the best choice in such situations dealing with these kinds of conflicts. — Klein Muçi (talk) 18:19, 22 April 2023 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi ah ok, so there are a few options. Yes you should remove those from those pages, as they certainly don't belong there. As far as exactly what to do, this will depend a bit on how your project standardizes style (or doesn't). It looks like you have w:sq:Stampa:Quote that you may convert things to, or you can just use plain wiki text, something like this. It really comes down to how much and what type of templates/wikitext/etc you want to be on your page sources. — xaosfluxTalk23:03, 22 April 2023 (UTC)
Hello, Xaosflux! Sorry it took me so long to get back to this but I took a wiki-break and now I'm just starting to slowly ease myself in into work again. I tried converting them to quotes but the whole thing is a mess. Check the last post in here: w:sq:Përdoruesja diskutim:Rrjedha Hitting Edit on it sends you to edit the template itself. I've come to the conclusion that I should remove them completely from the talk pages. Any idea how to quickly remove such sections with AWB? — Klein Muçi (talk) 09:59, 5 May 2023 (UTC)
Well, yes. I can always remove them manually if it seems too much for regex. We're talking about only 40 cases in total. I was expecting for something greedy like .* if you understand what I mean. Basically if that template is in a section all that section must go. — Klein Muçi (talk) 10:56, 5 May 2023 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi why are you trying to match unordered lists that happen to be following that template? Just matching the PB template and their content is one thing, but the second part gets complicated - how many levels of unordered lists are you also trying to capture? (What is the identifier to know when to stop including text?) To be clear, I'm asking about how you are also removing the text in that diff that starts with this: :Gjithashtu të hoqa edhe nga grupi i përd. — xaosfluxTalk11:01, 5 May 2023 (UTC)
Note: even only the PB's would need to be manually reviewed, as the ending delimiter would be the }}, but you have to watch for cases where another template is inside of that template. — xaosfluxTalk11:02, 5 May 2023 (UTC)
Yes, I'm aware of that. I'm matching the whole discussion. The template notifies one that they are blocked. Sometimes a discussion issues after that "Why was I blocked? Because you did this. No, I did not!" The whole section must be removed so maybe the delimiter would be ==, the starting point for the next section? — Klein Muçi (talk) 11:16, 5 May 2023 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi that's beyond what I normally do in AWB, you can ask over at Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/Tasks. For what it's worth this would likely be completely disapproved here: removing/replacing a broken template would always be fine - but just deleting user discussions as a side affect of a "template cleanup" would not be. Of course, how your project operates is up to your community, but I suggest you use a good edit summary so it doesn't appear you are trying bury discussion removals under the guise of template repair. — xaosfluxTalk13:10, 5 May 2023 (UTC)
Yes, I'm aware of that. That's why I tried finding a workaround but I was literally unable to find a solution for quite some days now so I'm going for the "good edit summary" way. :/ And no problem about AWB. I only said that after your initial suggestion. I can remove them manually if that is the only solution. - Klein Muçi (talk) 13:26, 5 May 2023 (UTC)
Tech News: 2023-16
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
At Wikimedia Commons, some thumbnails have not been getting replaced correctly after a new version of the image is uploaded. This should be fixed later this week. [59][60]
For the last few weeks, some external tools had inconsistent problems with logging-in with OAuth. This has now been fixed. [61]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 April. It will be on all wikis from 20 April (calendar).
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Due to security issues with the Graph extension, graphs have been disabled in all Wikimedia projects. Wikimedia Foundation teams are working to respond to these vulnerabilities. [63]
For a few days, it was not possible to save some kinds of edits on the mobile version of a wiki. This has been fixed. [64][65][66]
Changes later this week
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on April 26. This is planned for 14:00 UTC. [67]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 April. It will be on all wikis from 27 April (calendar).
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The Video2commons tool has been updated. This fixed several bugs related to YouTube uploads. [71]
The Special:Preferences page has been redesigned on mobile web. The new design makes it easier to browse the different categories and settings at low screen widths. You can also now access the page via a link in the Settings menu in the mobile web sidebar. [72]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 May. It will be on all wikis from 4 May (calendar).
A request for comment about removing administrative privileges in specified situations is open for feedback.
Technical news
Progress has started on the Page Triage improvement project. This is to address the concerns raised by the community in their 2022 WMF letter that requested improvements be made to the tool.
Latest comment: 1 year ago15 comments2 people in discussion
According to policy, when a user is blocked, the only page they can edit is their Talk page, but something came up on a blocked user's Talk page that I've never seen before, and I wanted to confirm the language in WP:OPTIONS: "Sitewide block will prevent the user from editing any page on Wikipedia with the exception of their own user talk page." (emphases in original). Can a blocked user change their Preferences? Thanks.--Bbb23 (talk) 11:28, 3 May 2023 (UTC)
@Bbb23 yes, sitewide blocked users can do things like change their own preferences and update their watchlist, however your quote above isn't wrong "... the user from editing any page..." - those type of actions are not considered "edits" and the targets of those actions are not "pages". Such a block would prevent pseudo prefernces such as a Special:MyPage/twinkleoptions.js from being updated. Does something else seem amiss? — xaosfluxTalk13:58, 3 May 2023 (UTC)
There are two ways I know of to change your watchlist. One is to "view and edit" it and the other "edit raw watchlist". Although both use the word "edit", it seems like the latter is more like editing a "page". Assuming a block user can do either, what is the point of all this? Why should they be permitted to do it? And although it may seem obvious to a technical user like you, I would favor clarifying the policy section, although I'm not sure how it should be worded.--Bbb23 (talk) 14:04, 3 May 2023 (UTC)
@Bbb23 I suppose the key part there is that neither of those are "pages". They are made up of system messages (which are on pages, that they can't edit) - and private data.
Blocking is a control that we use to stop disruption, preferences and watch lists can be used for adjusting ones "reading" experience, thus they are not prevented from being maintained during a block (There isn't an option to turn that on either in the current software).
We don't have a specific local "policy" about this, I think that section of the policy page is just meant to be informational, perhaps you could clarity what "edit"s are there by linking to Help:Editing.
You could also add a statement that clarifies that blocked users may still manage their user settings. There are lots of reasons that should still be allowed - for one blocks are not necessarily indefinite, and being able to do things like: change your notifications, mute abusive users, fix things like a bad signature that got you blocked in the first place, etc - should certainly be allowed.
If a user does manage to create special disruption via their private preferences (which the local admins wouldn't be able to detect and would generally have a sysadmin and a security task involved), their account can be locked to prevent them from logging in at all. — xaosfluxTalk14:37, 3 May 2023 (UTC)
What you're saying with respect to the why makes a lot of sense to me, thanks. As for clarifying the policy, I don't see where Help:Editing says anything that elaborates on what is a "page" and what is not (I skimmed it - it's awfully long). Would a steward lock a user just because of the private preference subterfuge? I always thought locks were generally available only for cross-wiki abuse. As an aside, I'm not sure what kind of private preference you're referring to.--Bbb23 (talk) 14:48, 3 May 2023 (UTC)
@Bbb23 such a lock would likely come from WMF T&S or a sysadmin, hypothetical example - a vulnerability exists that if someone loaded some exact combination of things in to their watchlist it caused system disruption, they may be locked for TOS violation (and people would be scrambling to patch the vulnerability), other times locks have been temporarily used were when someone was causing disruption by abusing the read API (things that are transparent to project admins).
mw:Help:Page is a redlink, the technical aspects of "what is a page" are here: mw:Manual:page table. In high-level "edit" is an action that create a revision to a "page". Things like: what your signature is, the contents of your watchlist, what your password is, etc - are certainly not 'pages' and don't have revision entries. — xaosfluxTalk15:04, 3 May 2023 (UTC)
I'd only add mw:Manual:page table to the blocking policy if I was really pissed and wanted to torture anyone who read it. :p --Bbb23 (talk) 15:09, 3 May 2023 (UTC)
@Bbb23 wrapping back to the start - I'm assuming there is some confusion of "why can a blocked account edit their preferences", it's just because they can. Perhaps adding "Blocked users are not prevented from managing their preferences." to the end of that information line would be your fix? — xaosfluxTalk15:15, 3 May 2023 (UTC)
That would certainly be the simplest and smallest change. I don't like making any significant changes to policies without first obtaining a consensus. I'll think about it. Given this issue has never come up until now after all these years of blocking editors, maybe it's unnecessary to do anything. FYI, the issue came up because of one of your examples above (changing one's signature). In closing, I just wanted to say that I always learn a lot when having these kinds of discussions with you, and I appreciate it.--Bbb23 (talk) 15:24, 3 May 2023 (UTC)
@Bbb23 you are welcome, hope I helped without getting too technical; for the specific situation, think I've dealt with such a user once or twice. They had a non-compliant signature (something with templates or images I think), asked them to change it, they wouldn't, blocked them until they said they changed it, unblocked. FYI: phab:T306574 is a feature request that would allow admins to forcibly reset someone's signature. — xaosfluxTalk15:34, 3 May 2023 (UTC)
You helped and got very technical (smiling), but if the answer is technical, what can you do? Besides, you do a good job of teaching. This user wasn't blocked for their signature, although editors complained about it. In case you're interested, see the block of ChiserYT and the post-block discussion about their sig.--Bbb23 (talk) 15:43, 3 May 2023 (UTC)
A bit off-topic. You changed the blocking policy on partial blocks to include a third option: "or from performing a specific set of actions". I looked at the block form, and I don't see any way to do that or even what you mean. Could you clarify?--Bbb23 (talk) 15:04, 3 May 2023 (UTC)
@Bbb23 goal of that is just to give admins choices, I agree that often a pblock isn't very effective against a user that wants to be disruptive. — xaosfluxTalk15:17, 3 May 2023 (UTC)
The Signpost: 8 May 2023
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Last week, Community Tech released the first update for providing better diffs, the #1 request in the 2022 Community Wishlist Survey. This update adds legends and tooltips to inline diffs so that users unfamiliar with the blue and yellow highlights can better understand the type of edits made.
When you close an image that is displayed via MediaViewer, it will now return to the wiki page instead of going back in your browser history. This feature request was voted #65 in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey. [73]
The SyntaxHighlight extension now supports wikitext as a selected language. Old alternatives that were used to highlight wikitext, such as html5, moin, and html+handlebars, can now be replaced. [74]
Graph Extension update: Foundation developers have completed upgrading the visualization software to Vega5. Existing community graphs based on Vega2 are no longer compatible. Communities need to update local graphs and templates, and shared lua modules like de:Modul:Graph. The Vega Porting guide provides the most comprehensive detail on migration from Vega2 and here is an example migration. Vega5 has currently just been enabled on mediawiki.org to provide a test environment for communities. [76]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 May. It will be on all wikis from 11 May (calendar).
Until now, all new OAuth apps went through manual review. Starting this week, apps using identification-only or basic authorizations will not require review. [77]
There will be an A/B test on 10 Wikipedias where the Vector 2022 skin is the default skin. Half of logged-in desktop users will see an interface where the different parts of the page are more clearly separated. You can read more. [79][80]
jquery.tipsy will be removed from the MediaWiki core. This will affect some user scripts. Many lines with .tipsy( can be commented out. OO.ui.PopupWidget can be used to keep things working like they are now. You can read more and read about how to find broken scripts. [81]
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
Citations that are automatically generated based on ISBN are currently broken. This affects citations made with the VisualEditor Automatic tab, and the use of the citoid API in gadgets and user scripts. Work is ongoing to restore this feature. [82]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 May. It will be on all wikis from 18 May (calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Gorontalo Wikipedia, Hausa Wikipedia, Hakka Chinese Wikipedia, Hawaiian Wikipedia, Fiji Hindi Wikipedia, Croatian Wikipedia, Upper Sorbian Wikipedia, Haitian Creole Wikipedia, Interlingua Wikipedia, Interlingue Wikipedia, Igbo Wikipedia, Iloko Wikipedia, Ingush Wikipedia, Ido Wikipedia, Icelandic Wikipedia, Inuktitut Wikipedia, Jamaican Patois Wikipedia, Javanese Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [83]
Gadget and userscript developers should replace jquery.cookie with mediawiki.cookie. The jquery.cookie library will be removed in ~1 month, and staff developers will run a script to replace any remaining uses at that time. [84]
Hello, I was blocked, possibly auto-blocked with no appeals process in place, while providing a source of information for citation as requested. I tried to reset the password on my account but the one sent to my email did not work. I am still logged in here. I am mentally disabled, and have been accused of multiple wrongdoings, all of which are not true and there being no appeals process, I am beginning to grow concerned over the validity of Wikipedia's editing processes. Please unblock. TENROU9999 (talk) 21:44, 15 May 2023 (UTC)
Thanks for your feedback. I am looking at a page that says I am blocked, and it says Im blocked for reasons which do not make sense to me. I cannot properly navigate this web of decentralized editing procedures due to my disabilities, and I am seeking help from a person rather than a help page. i have already looked at the help page and it did not answer my question, as I h
followed the instructions and I was blocked for a longer period of time instead. Can you please direct me to a person that can help? TENROU9999 (talk) 22:43, 15 May 2023 (UTC)
@TENROU9999 what makes you think that you are blocked? What exactly is the message you are seeing? Blocks generally include the name of the administrator that made the block, and as you are not blocked (as you are able to post this message) you can also post a message to the administrator that made the block. For a general support type question, you may visit Wikipedia:Teahouse where volunteers can help you. If you prefer to get help by (much slower) email, you may email info-enwikimedia.org. — xaosfluxTalk23:10, 15 May 2023 (UTC)
I don't know how to share screenshots here. The page that says I am blocked will not let me copy and paste the text to here. It is accessible in my Edits tab TENROU9999 (talk) 23:37, 15 May 2023 (UTC)
Here is a rough copy of the text for reference. The user who blocked me appears to be engaging in biases which are too complicated to unpack here. "The account has been blocked from Editing Wikipedia. This does not affect your ability to read Wikipedia pages" The account TENROU9999 has been blocked (disabled) by Achim55 for the following reason(s): Vandalism on 10 other projects blocked up to 5 years" TENROU9999 (talk) 23:40, 15 May 2023 (UTC)
I disagree with the misnomer of Vandalism on these pages as I was providing necessary removal of other's vandalizing those pages using biased editing processes. My block is being done to me by someone with a clear bigotted bias. TENROU9999 (talk) 23:42, 15 May 2023 (UTC)
The user you mentioned, Achim55, is not an administrator here on the English Wikipedia. They are an admin on Wikimedia Commons, a different project. Your userid is not blocked on any project. If you email full screen shots of your entire screen, with the error message, to info-enwikimedia.org someone will be able to look in to it further. — xaosfluxTalk00:01, 16 May 2023 (UTC)
Notes for self, phab:T336721 opened about this being the wrong message - root cause: commonswiki failed to autocreate account due to underlying network block. — xaosfluxTalk01:08, 16 May 2023 (UTC)
Latest comment: 1 year ago4 comments2 people in discussion
Hi Xaosflux, could you help me unblock my location? And also, why did I get blocked? I'm just using my account in another location so I could add this.UserAV666 (talk) 08:36, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
@UserAV666 your account has never been blocked here on the English Wikipedia. Some network ranges are blocked, but they are not specific to you. To look in to that, we would need the exact details of the block message you are seeing. — xaosfluxTalk09:27, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
Oh...Well yes I checked and I'm not blocked anymore!:D I was blocked a few days or weeks ago, but now I'm not. The only thing that I remember is that it said that most people who see this did nothing wrong. Then I only understood that my location or account was blocked and I tried to edit in another area of where I live and it worked. So I thought my location was blocked. Now I can edit in where I live. And also, where did you see that "I've never been blocked before"? UserAV666 (talk) 11:30, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
@UserAV666 see Wikipedia:Blocking policy for a lot of information about blocks. In general there are 2 main types of blocks: (a) Blocks of a user account; (b) Blocks of a network address. Blocks of a user account are about a specific user - you can see your own block log (it is empty) here at Special:Logs. Blocks of a network address impact anyone that happens to be using that address, and can happen for many reasons - depending on how you access the internet your network address could be shared with thousands of other people or more - especially if using a VPN or other "private browsing" software. — xaosfluxTalk13:12, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
Translations
Latest comment: 1 year ago25 comments2 people in discussion
Once again, I want to thank you for your reply on TSventon's talkpage. Even though I could not figure it out, I think it was good advice. I do want to ask about machine translation, as I'm not sure what my problem is. Basically, I'm in the process of translating articles from the Russian Wikipedia onto here, but even though I try my best to work the phrases/sentences into logical English, it still shows up as being "machine translated". For example, I have one translation in progress that is 60% complete, but it shows 100% machine translated. As a disclaimer, I use Google Translate for assistance but only when I absolutely have to. Is there a way to find out why it's being flagged like this? Please let me know. Thanks again for any help you can provide. Losipov (talk) 05:33, 20 May 2023 (UTC)
When I hover my mouse above a translation, it will have two numbers: "x% translated, y% from machine translation". It's weird because for some translations that I check multiple times, I will have 0% machine translation one time and then all of a sudden it shows I have part of it machine translations. Seeing that machine translation isn't available here, I'm also confused. Losipov (talk) 17:43, 20 May 2023 (UTC)
@Losipov that is odd, as machine translation isn't enabled here. When you started the translation, were you on another project (such as the source project)? — xaosfluxTalk20:50, 20 May 2023 (UTC)
If by "project source" you mean editing other articles in different tabs, most likely not (at least not that I can recall). I don't know what I'm doing wrong for it to happen. Do translations have to be extremely precise? Because on the Russian Wikipedia the articles are written in a different way than here. So, it's not exactly in that style but still I try to translate as accurately as I can. Losipov (talk) 00:19, 21 May 2023 (UTC)
@Losipov I'm trying to duplicate the issue, but need to know the exact steps you are doing that lead to where you are. When you decide to translate something, can you tell me what you do, step by step? For example: (a) Go to the article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple (b) Click Translate (c) .... ;; especially if (a) is starting on another site such as https://ru.wikipedia.org
Here's an example. I go to "Contributions" and click on "Translations", and pick articles to go through. If you want, the article "Artik & Asti" from the Russian Wikipedia might be the easiest to show my problems (in fact, that's the article I was referring to when I said 60/100% in the original comment. I click "add translation" for some sections like the tables, and just fix them up with English translations wherever necessary. When I exit and hover over the progress bar, it shows that it's somehow machine translated (for that specific article, it shows 100% machine translated). Is it a problem with the templates? I'm not sure. But those are some of the steps.
@Losipov that may be a display bug, we don't have machine translation turned on here (it's not automatically trying to translate the text is it?). Will it let you continue? — xaosfluxTalk03:38, 21 May 2023 (UTC)
You could get the error about "unmodified text" that has a comment about Automatic translation is provided only as a starting point. Make sure that the content is accurate and reads naturally in your language. Your translation cannot be published without further editing., if there are many templates/etc. — xaosfluxTalk03:41, 21 May 2023 (UTC)
Before I respond to your latest replies, I do want to point out something that happened very recently. I published the page Sayonara detka within the past hour, and up until the moment I published it, it showed "80% translated, 0% from machine" or something like that. I made one final translation of something minor there, and when I go back to check out the final result in Content Translation, it shows "88% translated, 20% from machine" (or something like that). Keep in mind it's a short article, so I don't know what the problem is.
Now to your latest replies:
1) Yes, I can keep working on that translation. 99% of time it doesn't automatically translate; only for some templates it does (Example: On the Russian Wikipedia for the article Lesha Svik, it shows critics reviews. And those almost always automatically translate if I click on "add translation". Here's the article: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A1%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%BA,_%D0%9B%D1%91%D1%88%D0%B0)
2) I do get that message constantly. I always make it go away with edits though (ie: I translate enough to the point of it going away automatically). Again, it's confusing why the machine translation message is there even when its disabled. Losipov (talk) 03:59, 21 May 2023 (UTC)
I apologize if the screenshot comes out wonky, but that's what I'm seeing. Is this normal? Let me know if you can't see the screenshot by the way, or if you need more of them. Losipov (talk) 15:37, 21 May 2023 (UTC)
@Losipov: thank you for the screenshot, this appears to be a software bug. I've opened bug ticket: phab:T337201, you may subscribe to that for updates. You may be able to publish your draft translations even if that value is still there. I suspect what is happening is that the label on that is wrong, and it is actually reporting the "unmodified text" value, not the "machine translated text" value. — xaosfluxTalk15:50, 21 May 2023 (UTC)
So there is nothing "wrong" with my translations correct? That isn't supposed to happen? From the looks of it it shouldn't. I had another question in the meantime. Oftentimes when I do translations and leave the articles, the place of the text will move to the wrong spot. For example, if there's a section titled "Music videos" and I made another section name somewhere else in the article (like "History" or something). This happens pretty frequently and I'm not sure why that is. It's not that big of a deal, but do you know of a solution to this? Losipov (talk) 19:19, 21 May 2023 (UTC)
@Losipov the draft translations are private, so I can't see if there is something "wrong" or not, but I'm guessing that counter is counting something else. If you reuse a section that is the same template with the same template content, it may say it is 'untranslated'. I'm not sure how the section titles work in that tool, I haven't done much in that area. I would expect that almost anything coming out of the translate tool would require some manual cleanup once it is published -- why it is always best to publish to a sandbox first, finish the cleanup, then move the article to mainspace in my opinion. — xaosfluxTalk20:57, 21 May 2023 (UTC)
@Xaosflux Ok, I get what you're saying. If I publish it in the sandbox, will it still have the article attribution (ie: It shows that the article was translated from another Wiki)? That might be a better route, now that I think about it. It's just that the charts/tables I put in get messed up somewhere along the line, and other editors are able to fix them. Not all hope is lost there lol. Losipov (talk) 05:34, 23 May 2023 (UTC)
@Xaosflux so one of my translated articles was deleted, but I asked the editor who deleted it to bring it back into a draftspace. If I edit the translation and publish it into my draftspace, will that create a duplicate or will it replace what currently exists there? If you know, of course. Thanks again. Losipov (talk) 21:06, 23 May 2023 (UTC)
And I apologize if this thread is unnecessarily long lol. I did not envision it being this way. I do appreciate your advice though; it's very helpful. Losipov (talk) 21:07, 23 May 2023 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
An improved impact module will be available at Wikipedias. The impact module is a feature available to newcomers at their personal homepage. It will show their number of edits, how many readers their edited pages have, how many thanks they have received and similar things. It is also accessible by accessing Special:Impact. [86]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 23 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 24 May. It will be on all wikis from 25 May (calendar).
Latest comment: 1 year ago10 comments2 people in discussion
Hello Xaos! :)
Can you help me with a small change related to an interlink?
Check sq:Stampa:Faqja kryesore/Mbyllja and click Wiki-Burimet. It sends you to the general mainpage of the Wikisource mainpage. It should instead send you to this? I'm not well informed on Wikisource and that link above does look strange but maybe that is the right place where it should lead? (Shqip=Albanian) If so, any idea how to change change the template? - Klein Muçi (talk) 02:01, 28 May 2023 (UTC)
Can you try doing the said change? I lowered the protection from that template. I've tried doing that in the past but failed to accomplish it. :/ — Klein Muçi (talk) 05:55, 28 May 2023 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi looks like that is only used on Faqja_kryesore, you just want the wikisource link to go to that page on wikisource? Or is this template going to be used on many pages and need dynamic output? — xaosfluxTalk11:58, 28 May 2023 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi I tried a little bit, but didn't solve this yet - no more time right now. Looks like some problems in w:sq:Stampa:Sisterprojects layout. I'm not quite sure what you are trying to do there, it looks like you are trying to send your readers to all sorts of different links on the sister projects based on their interface language (as opposed to just linking to the sq-xxxx projects). Is that your intention? If not those templates look severely over complicated. — xaosfluxTalk15:51, 28 May 2023 (UTC)
I'm not really sure... I remember I've copied that template from somewhere with the exact same name (maybe EnQuote). The idea is to send readers to the Albanian versions of localized projects (and to the general ones if no localized versions exist, like in the case of Commons, Wikidata, etc.) I don't know what exactly is going on with Albanian Wikisource... — Klein Muçi (talk) 16:38, 28 May 2023 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi may want to simplify that, all that copy-paste dragged a lot that you don't need in there. You mentioned "Albanian Wikisource", however there is no such thing. For example, there is an English Wikisource and a French Wikisource. You are wanting to just link to some subpages on the interlanguage-wikisource. (wikisource.org). — xaosfluxTalk16:58, 28 May 2023 (UTC)
I would simplify it if I knew how to do that while preserving the current state. As for the Albanian Wikisource... So that's only a weird experiment someone has done in the past ? :P If that's the case, maybe linking to the wikisource.org is good enough. — Klein Muçi (talk) 17:45, 28 May 2023 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi I'm not familiar with how language groups organize on wikisource, may want to ask someone over there. As far as your template, I don't think you need any of those conditionals, layered project names, etc - since all you want is a set of static links, someone from your project may be better off forking to a new page instead of trying to drag all that overhead from some other project over. — xaosfluxTalk19:03, 28 May 2023 (UTC)
Editor Interaction Analyzer
Latest comment: 1 year ago9 comments2 people in discussion
This stuff really wears me out. Σ hasn't edited in almost a year. With great difficulty, I set up the so-called health tool, and it shows "no results". See here. Did I do the set-up wrong?--Bbb23 (talk) 16:15, 28 May 2023 (UTC)
I assumed I'd find more intersection than that, but after glancing at some other pages, the intersections occurred on May 26, at the earliest. I can't interpret the link to the lag you provided, but I'll take your word for it. Wouldn't that also affect the EIA? Is the lag unusually behind recently because that might explain why EIA has been working intermittently lately.--Bbb23 (talk) 16:34, 28 May 2023 (UTC)
So, should I take from this that EIA's results may be incomplete depending on the lag? When you say it will probably settle down, do you mean that the lag will go back to "normal", or is there a new longer normal? Just trying to figure out what to expect.--Bbb23 (talk) 17:41, 28 May 2023 (UTC)
@Bbb23 if I recall correctly, the tool data base replica is usually <12 hours. Check back with that link above later in the week - if it persists being many days long for a while we can open a ticket. — xaosfluxTalk19:01, 28 May 2023 (UTC)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Citations can once again be added automatically from ISBNs, thanks to Zotero's ISBN searches. The current data sources are the Library of Congress (United States), the Bibliothèque nationale de France (French National Library), and K10plus ISBN (German repository). Additional data source searches can be proposed to Zotero. The ISBN labels in the VisualEditor Automatic tab will reappear later this week. [87]
For a few days earlier this month, the "Add interlanguage link" item in the Tools menu did not work properly. This has now been fixed. [89]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 May. It will be on all wikis from 1 June (calendar).
VisualEditor will be switched to a new backend on small and medium wikis this week. Large wikis will follow in the coming weeks. This is part of the effort to move Parsoid into MediaWiki core. The change should have no noticeable effect on users, but if you experience any slow loading or other strangeness when using VisualEditor, please report it on the phabricator ticket linked here. [90]
Latest comment: 1 year ago3 comments2 people in discussion
I did NOT clogged up the edit request queue. I made three requests in the span of three days with very reasonable, clearly described, X to Y requests, and have had multiple successful requests to other protected, active admin pages. User:AnomieBOT/PERTable has not had more than 11 active protected page requests at one time. Hardly a busy list.
On the request instructions, it states "If you have noticed an error or have a suggestion for a simple, non-controversial change, you can submit an edit request by clicking the button below and following the instructions. An administrator may then make the change on your behalf. Please check the talk page first in case the issue is already being discussed". It does NOT state that admin pages are off limits. Nor should it. Admin pages should be held to the same standard as other userpages, and if an issue is known, there should be an avenue to rectify the issue. These protected page requests ARE this avenue.
If there is a rule for only one request at a time, I am unaware of this. Apologies for having three requests open on a slow week. I will do better with timing.
I know there is procedural denial for requesting pp reduction for admin pages, but requesting valid fixes are 100% permitted, as demonstrated by the multiple, unquestioned, similar clean syntax requests in the past month I've made to active admin pages. ALL of which were accepted, by multiple administrators:
Other than the three pages you've marked 'not done', I've had NO rejected admin page correction requests.
I've cleared over three thousand of these Tidy Font errors on Wikipedia the past few months. My edits are clean, nonproblematic, and noncontroversial. Mediawiki's July 2018 change to RemexHtml rendered the <font>[[link]]</font> format of coloring links broken on many browsers (browsers affected default back to normal blue instead of displaying the user specified colors), and this issue is a highpriority WP:LINT error to fix.
If you disagree with the side note inquiry on User:Versageek/Talk/Archive/2, that's fine, it may be ignored. That's why I noted it as a side comment and not directly part of the request. I was surprised MSGJ lowered Versageek/Talk/Archive/1 since Versageek is Admin, but thought since there were the same errors on 2, 3, and 4 of the same user, I'd at least inquire if the same reasons for lowering 1 held for 3 and 4 so that I wouldn't need to make additional protection requests for this issue on those pages later on.
Nihonjoe has already permitted this type of request on his pages. If he wishes to directly review this change too, I welcome it. My request to one of his other pages earlier in May was the only one I've ever made that needed a discussion to pass, and it was due to our views and knowledge on ''' vs <b>. This discussion was smoothly resolved, and my requests was permitted with his approval. I don't see his Award list being any different.
Sure, User_talk:MastCell/Barnstars is a bit longer of a request, but one request for 7 X to Ys to clear a longer page of all issues seemed reasonable opposed to the idea of multiple single X to Y requests over a longer period of time. I consider and weigh my requests so they are reasonable. This is why I did not request changes to all the other, lesser issues on [User talk:Versageek/Talk/Archive/2]].
I ask that you reconsider these three requests, as I've followed the rules at WP:EDITXY as I have for all other requests, and these three requests are in line with others I've made for all admin pages; clearly defined, noncontrovertial syntax corrections that fix visually broken issues.
The edit request queue serves as an important check against the protection policy, so patrolling it is an important workflow for other admins. I'm not saying there is anything intrinsically wrong with asking for these changes, but it would be more appropriate to just ask on the base usertalk page of the user - especially when you are creating an entire new talk page that will unlikely ever be used for anything else ever - just to hold that request. If the user is inactive, you could add an administrator edit request there (or if they are lengthy inactive, perhaps the page doesn't need protecting anymore and it would be better to request its unprotection). — xaosfluxTalk09:21, 1 June 2023 (UTC)
Since you didn't object to change reason, just the method of how I went about requesting it, I wish you had just completed the requests and messaged me this info instead of declining them (because now I need to reference this conversation to confirm I'm not adminshopping on MastCell's and on Versageek's). But I will proceed with AERs on the talk pages for the remaining 5 protected pages with this error in User: space per your request of method used. Thank you for the reply. Zinnober9 (talk) 23:29, 3 June 2023 (UTC)
bot and page mover right
Latest comment: 1 year ago4 comments2 people in discussion
Hello. I was just wondering, do bots on enwiki have page mover access similar to auto-patrol? (on mrwiki bots have page mover access, but there is no special page-mover or "extended-mover" user-group there). Also, can bots move categories as well? or do they need to get page-mover flag? —usernamekiran (talk)17:01, 1 June 2023 (UTC)
thanks. I looked at WP:User access levels, but I couldn't find the info there. ListGrouRights had that info. Apparently, bots are not added to "page movers" by default, but they can move category pages. Thanks again, —usernamekiran (talk)18:11, 1 June 2023 (UTC)
@Usernamekiran Comparing Page Movers to Bots, bots do not have: move, delete-redirect, move-subpages, or tboverride. However in practice bots will generally also be in the autoconfirmed group, so they would pick up "move" from there. If a bot needed some of the other permissions, for example Special:UserRights/ProcBot, it will also be added to other groups. — xaosfluxTalk18:34, 1 June 2023 (UTC)
Upload rights
Latest comment: 1 year ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Hi Xaosflux. I was hoping to upload an updated version of File:South Moravian Region CoA CZ.svg to Commons (per the request in the description), but it appears I don't have the requisite set of rights to do so. Could I kindly request the right to upload a newer version of that file on Commons? Much appreciated! Algum (talk) 09:02, 3 June 2023 (UTC)
Hmm, I still cannot overwrite the file, unfortunately. I will ask for help on Commons, thank you! Algum (talk) 18:32, 3 June 2023 (UTC)
Hello
Latest comment: 1 year ago6 comments3 people in discussion
Hi,I am anonymous user. बॉट has also added a description of Bangladesh Congress President Shirin Sharmin Chaudhury as acting president, even though he has not served as president.Others have added English to the official language of Equatorial Guinea. Other notes were added that Muhammad Ahmad Mahgoub, the Prime Minister of the Republic of Sudan, had served as President after I confirmed that he had never served as President. please pay attention to बॉट. By the way, it has progressed to an editing war. Please really help me. 240F:31:3402:1:44C6:DFA8:21CE:17C0 (talk) 06:32, 4 June 2023 (UTC)
Another good way to bypass IP ban is to simply get a new IP address. One way to do this is to use a trusted proxy or VPN service, which will mask your IP address and your apparent internet connection.
The most common scenario of getting blocked by your server is trying to log in too quickly or with the wrong credentials too many times. Setting a time limit for the number of login attempts in most servers बॉट (talk) 07:09, 4 June 2023 (UTC)
In this article, we'll examine IP bans in-depth and provide you with some helpful tips on how to prevent them बॉट (talk) 07:14, 4 June 2023 (UTC)
IPv6 पते को IPv4 पते में बदलने का कोई तरीका (*) नहीं है क्योंकि उन दो प्रणालियों का स्वतंत्र रूप से उपयोग किया जाता है। (* बहुत ही विशेष मामलों को छोड़कर जो बहुत कम ही लागू होते हैं, नीचे देखें।)
आप वास्तव में IPv6 पते को IPv4 पते में क्यों बदलना चाहते हैं? बेहतर समझ के लिए एक मोटा सादृश्य लैंडलाइन बनाम मोबाइल फोन हो सकता है। कुछ लोगों के पास दोनों हो सकते हैं और आप उन तक पहुंचने के लिए उनके निर्दिष्ट नंबर (आईपी पते) दोनों का उपयोग कर सकते हैं, कुछ लोगों के पास केवल एक मोबाइल फोन है और कोई लैंडलाइन नहीं है (या इसके विपरीत)। आप IPv4 और IPv6 पतों की तरह एक लैंडलाइन नंबर को एक मोबाइल नंबर में "रूपांतरित" नहीं कर सकते हैं और इसके विपरीत।
वे "6to4 नोटेशन" और "IPv4-मैप्ड नोटेशन" IPv6 के शुरुआती समय से विशेष उपयोग के मामलों के बारे में हैं। IPv4 लिंक पर IPv6 को टनल करने के लिए 6to4 संकेतन का उपयोग किया गया था, और IPv4- मैप किए गए संकेतन का उपयोग IPv6 नोड्स को IPv4-केवल नोड्स का प्रतिनिधित्व करने के लिए आंतरिक प्रतिनिधित्व उद्देश्यों के लिए किया जाता है। ऐसा कुछ भी नहीं है जो आपके लिए मददगार हो।
आपके उद्देश्यों के लिए, लंबे IPv6 पते पुराने, छोटे IPv4 पतों की तरह ही हैं। वे एक ही उद्देश्य की पूर्ति करते हैं, वे बहुत बड़ी पता सीमा के कारण अधिक लंबे होते हैं। बॉट (talk) 07:48, 4 June 2023 (UTC)
Remembering password when IP is blocked
Latest comment: 1 year ago9 comments2 people in discussion
Hello Xaos!
In one of my wikiworkshops some weeks ago I remember encountering a rather unexpected behavior in 2 of my attendees: They had forgotten the password and were trying to go through the "I forgot the password" method to log in with the email method. However they weren't being allowed to go through with that because apparently the IP they were using was part of an IP range block. I've tried researching a bit about this phenomenon around meanwhile but couldn't find much information. Is this a well-known thing? Is it "accepted"? It looked rather disturbing to me that one basically may lose control of their account if they have forgotten their password and had the bad luck of being part of an IP range block. Of course, one may ask an exemption and then go through with that but people who have forgotten passwords usually aren't that calm and no new user really knows how and where to ask for an exemption because they don't understand what's going on in the first place, or as they put it, "why was I blocked???". In my case both users ended up opening a new account straight away, without even letting me time to intervene and help. - Klein Muçi (talk) 09:29, 4 June 2023 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi it is the expected behavior. There has a been a little bit of discussion about changing it in phab:T109909, mostly stalled that there would need to be a global discussion in support. Password reset requests may be used to harass other users. It most cases, IP range blocks aren't "anonymous only" - meaning they won't be able to contribute even if they did log in. There are a few workarounds: (a) if the user has access to a non-blocked range, they can use that. (b) if the block is only on one project, they could use another project to do the reset (not useful for global ip blocks). (c) they could request someone else reset their password for them via off-wiki channels such as VRT or UTRS. — xaosfluxTalk13:59, 4 June 2023 (UTC)
I see... Unfortunately none of those options work for new users. They literally have no idea what's going on on the first place; I'd need to write novellas as system messages to explain to them what IP editing is, what IP range blocks are and how, because of technical reasons, they somehow can't request a password change, which maybe I would but that would kind of defeat the purpose of the block as it would come paired with instructions on how to evade it. (Security through obscurity is not the best way but it has been working for us in this matter.) In the last 5 years, we have had only 1 IP range block active (we have discussed about it together in the past, if you remember). It is annonymous only. That has been enough for me to get contacted every 2-3 months on my social medias privately by random users who get the message "You are blocked by Klein Muçi" and get confused a lot when they see it. It takes me around 45 minutes to explain what IP editing and IP range blocks are and how they can solve what they're experiencing by just logging in (or creating an account), considering that the block is anonymous only. With the added variable of the blocked password reset the task becomes almost impossible, especially when considering people of a rather old age that have difficulties to use the computer to begin with. And we're talking only about people that actually put in the effort to track me down online. There are many, many users that just give up as soon as they see the block message. This is a problem of IP range blocks themselves but the password thing makes it worse. But anyway, I'll have to continue this conversation on the phab task, you already helped me in the right direction. Thank you! — Klein Muçi (talk) 08:14, 5 June 2023 (UTC)
What would be the general workflow for the Meta request though? Forum post referencing phab task? I've tried posting in Meta before but I've failed acquiring much attention in general. — Klein Muçi (talk) 10:59, 5 June 2023 (UTC)
Following an RfC, editors indefinitely site-banned by community consensus will now have all rights, including sysop, removed.
As a part of the Wikimedia Foundation's IP Masking project, a new policy has been created that governs the access to temporary account IP addresses. An associated FAQ has been created and individual communities can increase the requirements to view temporary account IP addresses.
Technical news
Bot operators and tool maintainers should schedule time in the coming months to test and update their tools for the effects of IP masking. IP masking will not be deployed to any content wiki until at least October 2023 and is unlikely to be deployed to the English Wikipedia until some time in 2024.
Arbitration
The arbitration case World War II and the history of Jews in Poland has been closed. The topic area of Polish history during World War II (1933-1945) and the history of Jews in Poland is subject to a "reliable source consensus-required" contentious topic restriction.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The RealMe extension allows you to mark URLs on your user page as verified for Mastodon and similar software.
Previously, clicking on someone else's link to Recent Changes with filters applied within the URL could unintentionally change your preference for "Group results by page". This has now been fixed. [92]
Problems
For a few days last week, some tools and bots returned outdated information due to database replication problems, and may have been down entirely while it was being fixed. These issues have now been fixed. [93]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 June. It will be on all wikis from 8 June (calendar).
Bots will no longer be prevented from making edits because of URLs that match the spam blacklist. [94]
Latest comment: 1 year ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Hi, I saw you were one of the main contributors to the {{Photo requested}} template. I'm new to templates so was hoping you could help me with something. Specifically, adding a parameter for satellite images and adding a category for Satellite images requested. I've been uploading a lot of Sentinel-2 satellite images recently and I'd be nice to have a category for requests. I'm also sending this message to Swpb. PalauanLibertarian🗣️12:45, 12 June 2023 (UTC)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The Search Preview panel has been deployed on four Wikipedias (Catalan, Dutch, Hungarian and Norwegian). The panel will show an image related to the article (if existing), the top sections of the article, related images (coming from MediaSearch on Commons), and eventually the sister projects associated with the article. [96]
The RealMe extension now allows administrators to verify URLs for any page, for Mastodon and similar software. [97]
The default project license has been officially upgraded to CC BY-SA 4.0. The software interface messages have been updated. Communities should feel free to start updating any mentions of the old CC BY-SA 3.0 licensing within policies and related documentation pages. [98]
Problems
For three days last month, some Wikipedia pages edited with VisualEditor or DiscussionTools had an unintended __TOC__ (or its localized form) added during an edit. There is a listing of affected pages sorted by wiki, that may still need to be fixed. [99]
Currently, the "Sort this page by default as" feature in VisualEditor is broken. Existing {{DEFAULTSORT:...}} keywords incorrectly appear as missing templates in VisualEditor. Developers are exploring how to fix this. In the meantime, those wishing to edit the default sortkey of a page are advised to switch to source editing. [100]
Last week, an update to the delete form may have broken some gadgets or user scripts. If you need to manipulate (empty) the reason field, replace #wpReason with #wpReason > input. See an example fix. [101]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 June. It will be on all wikis from 15 June (calendar).
VisualEditor will be switched to a new backend on English Wikipedia on Monday, and all other large wikis on Thursday. The change should have no noticeable effect on users, but if you experience any slow loading or other strangeness when using VisualEditor, please report it on the phabricator ticket linked here. [102]
Future changes
From 5 June to 17 July, the Foundation's Security team is holding a consultation with contributors regarding a draft policy to govern the use of third-party resources in volunteer-developed gadgets and scripts. Feedback and suggestions are warmly welcome at Third-party resources policy on meta-wiki.
Latest comment: 1 year ago7 comments2 people in discussion
There is a new bullet on account contributions pages:
• JavaScript-enhanced contributions lookup 0.2 enabled. You may enter a CIDR range or append an asterisk to do a prefix search. For IPv6, you must use capital letters for gadget matching; native contribution matching is not case-sensitive.
@Bbb23 I'm pretty sure that is coming from an opt-in gadget you have enabled, Allow /16, /24 and /27 – /32 CIDR ranges on Special:Contributions forms, as well as wildcard prefix searches (e.g., "Splark*") You can turn that of in preferences if you don't want it. — xaosfluxTalk13:56, 19 June 2023 (UTC)
Probably so, but I'm 99% certain the bullet wasn't there before on named accounts, and fairly certain it wasn't even there on IP contribution pages. I do use it on IPs to change the single IP contributions to a range, e.g., from 103.73.183.199 to 103.73.183.0/24 by clicking on the "Search for contributions" drop-down and typing in the range. But what would be the purpose of a CIDR range on a named account? And how exactly are you supposed to do a prefix search with an *? Are we talking about something like changing Xaosflux to Xaosflu*, meaning it would find all named account starting with Xaosflu? I kind of do that now but using "User rights" and not using the asterisk, meaning I would just put in Xaosflu, and it should retrieve all accounts starting with that. The gadget isn't new, and I knew I had it enabled as well, but the display is.--Bbb23 (talk) 14:05, 19 June 2023 (UTC)
@Bbb23 hmm, ok - I can confirm it is coming from that gadget, I don't recall it showing on "named account" contribution pages previously, so this is likely a WP:ITSTHURSDAY thing. Please report issue at MediaWiki talk:Gadget-contribsrange.js; it doesn't look like there is an active maintainer for that gadget - but someone may be monitoring that page. — xaosfluxTalk14:11, 19 June 2023 (UTC)
Okay, I put a pointer to this discussion on that page. Feel free to elaborate there if you wish. Thanks.--Bbb23 (talk) 14:24, 19 June 2023 (UTC)
I'm taking it back here for a moment because I don't think others are necessarily interested in my quasi-personal comments. I don't know what has to be done, if anything, to the gadget. My suggestion is that at least the instructions be clarified. Personally, I don't see the point of using the * feature, but I'll continue to specify CIDR ranges as always. To do that, I must keep the gadget on, which means putting up with the irritating bullet, but I'm sure I'll get over it. :-) --Bbb23 (talk) 16:26, 19 June 2023 (UTC)
@Arjunsoumithran the history of that page had half of one sentence on it, not worth recovering. However you are welcome to start an article on that subject. If you follow this link it will help you get started. — xaosfluxTalk18:05, 19 June 2023 (UTC)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Flame graphs are now available in WikimediaDebug. [103][104]
Changes later this week
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
There is now a toolbar search popup in the visual editor. You can trigger it by typing \ or pressing ctrl + shift + p. It can help you quickly access most tools in the editor. [105][106]
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Action API modules and Special:LinkSearch will now add a trailing / to all prop=extlinks responses for bare domains. This is part of the work to remove duplication in the externallinks database table. [107]
Problems
Last week, search was broken on Commons and Wikidata for 23 hours. [108][109]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 June. It will be on all wikis from 29 June (calendar).
The Minerva skin now applies more predefined styles to the .mbox-text CSS class. This enables support for mbox templates that use divs instead of tables. Please make sure that the new styles won't affect other templates in your wiki. [110][111]
Gadgets will now load on both desktop and mobile by default. Previously, gadgets loaded only on desktop by default. Changing this default using the |targets= parameter is also deprecated and should not be used. You should make gadgets work on mobile or disable them based on the skin (with the |skins= parameter in MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition) rather than whether the user uses the mobile or the desktop website. Popular gadgets that create errors on mobile will be disabled by developers on the Minerva skin as a temporary solution. [112]
All namespace tabs now have the same browser access key by default. Previously, custom and extension-defined namespaces would have to have their access keys set manually on-wiki, but that is no longer necessary. [113]
Latest comment: 1 year ago6 comments3 people in discussion
Hi!
Can you take a quick look at SqWiki's main page? The body is made up of 4 blocks which can have dynamic content (especially the 2 on the left side of it). Is there a way I can make them be always aligned with CSS? (Maybe by making them auto-increase the padding around content on the smallest blocks to match the content on the bigger blocks?) - Klein Muçi (talk) 10:08, 28 June 2023 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi do you mean the vertical alignment of the left 2 with the right 2, such that they are a grid while they are in a 2x2 format? (Do you want the boxes to grown larger with a bunch of whitespace at the bottom of some of them if their side neighbor is much larger?) — xaosfluxTalk10:20, 28 June 2023 (UTC)
Yes. Maybe the whitespace can be evenly distributed on both sides, top and bottom. Whatever is better for the eyes, really. I've tried reading around about finding a way on how to achieve this but I haven't been able to find much so I haven't tested anything to know what would work better visually. — Klein Muçi (talk) 10:25, 28 June 2023 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi I don't know of any "quick" answers to this. Suggest you build a VERY simple page with just 4 squares of various heights, a basic css, load the page with a ?withcss type argument --- so that you get a working sandbox not also tied in to everything else on the main page, then you could ask over at WP:VPT. — xaosfluxTalk10:37, 28 June 2023 (UTC)
I suggest searching online for references on CSS grid. As per the name, it's the best way to layout elements in a grid ;-). isaacl (talk) 21:46, 2 July 2023 (UTC)
Administrators' newsletter – July 2023
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest comment: 1 year ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Disappointed
I want to submit an official investigation into what happened today regarding the two articles Draft:Khaled Al Saif, Draft:Sultan Bin Abdulaziz Humanitarian City and either the result of the investigation is that I am guilty and I am banned from editing on Wikipedia, or that the editors who treated me disrespectfully apologize to me and take back the article and a clear and frank apology on my talk page.
What happened was the clear disregard of the editors for people's minds and the use of their absolute power and acting as if Wikipedia belonged to them after fulfilling the conditions for the articles and talking to the help section in Wikipedia, and in the end they agreed with me on the note of the two articles. The editors come here and their words and their dealings differ. After advising the user @DoubleGrazing to apply for a revision of the draft to become an article, he deletes the draft and recklessly thinks about it. Is this a trap or what? After adding all the sources they want, he says that this is a paid article. As for the second article, he did not find anything that says except that this article was written by me in a publicity way. Deleting it from the beginning of the post I will not be sad, but I am saddened by the lack of respect he found here. I don't care about the two articles as much as I care about a clear and frank apology.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
From this week all gadgets automatically load on mobile and desktop sites. If you see any problems with gadgets on your wikis, please adjust the gadget options in your gadget definitions file. [117]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 4 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 5 July. It will be on all wikis from 6 July (calendar).
Latest comment: 1 year ago6 comments2 people in discussion
Is there a way to see a list of all former administrators, or, better still, all desysopped administrators, or, even more precisely, all desysopped, blocked/banned administrators? I'm trying to remember the username of an admin who was blocked for socking (a good while ago) and, IIRC, said the reason he socked was because he was "bored". I think the username was a common Anglo-Saxon first name followed by some numbers.--Bbb23 (talk) 01:30, 4 July 2023 (UTC)
Yes, Edgar181, I was close, I even thought the username started with an E, but the name that kept sticking in my head was Eric. Thanks! That aside, the first link in your reply just shows current administrators - I don't see how it shows current administrators with blocks. Something I'm missing?--Bbb23 (talk) 13:02, 4 July 2023 (UTC)
@Bbb23 on Special:Listusers, anyone that happens to be blocked will have (blocked) listed on their line. There is nothing automatic on-wiki for "list only users that are blocked and are also in group x" - that could be done on quarry. — xaosfluxTalk17:50, 4 July 2023 (UTC)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Section-level Image Suggestions feature has been deployed on seven Wikipedias (Portuguese, Russian, Indonesian, Catalan, Hungarian, Finnish and Norwegian Bokmål). The feature recommends images for articles on contributors' watchlists that are a good match for individual sections of those articles.
Special:BlockedExternalDomains is a new tool for administrators to help fight spam. It provides a clearer interface for blocking plain domains (and their subdomains), is more easily searchable, and is faster for the software to process for each edit on the wiki. It does not support regex (for complex cases), nor URL path-matching, nor the MediaWiki:Spam-whitelist, but otherwise it replaces most of the functionalities of the existing MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist. There is a Python script to help migrate all simple domains into this tool, and more feature details, within the tool's documentation. It is available at all wikis except for Meta-wiki, Commons, and Wikidata. [119]
The WikiEditor extension was updated. It includes some of the most frequently used features of wikitext editing. In the past, many of its messages could only be translated by administrators, but now all regular translators on translatewiki can translate them. Please check the state of WikiEditor localization into your language, and if the "Completion" for your language shows anything less than 100%, please complete the translation. See a more detailed explanation.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 July. It will be on all wikis from 13 July (calendar).
The default protocol of Special:LinkSearch and API counterparts has changed from http to both http and https. [120]
Special:LinkSearch and its API counterparts will now search for all of the URL provided in the query. It used to be only the first 60 characters. This feature was requested fifteen years ago. [121]
Future changes
There is an experiment with a ChatGPT plugin. This is to show users where the information is coming from when they read information from Wikipedia. It has been tested by Wikimedia Foundation staff and other Wikimedians. Soon all ChatGPT plugin users can use the Wikipedia plugin. This is the same plugin which was mentioned in Tech News 2023/20. [122]
There is an ongoing discussion on a proposed Third-party resources policy. The proposal will impact the use of third-party resources in gadgets and userscripts. Based on the ideas received so far, policy includes some of the risks related to user scripts and gadgets loading third-party resources, some best practices and exemption requirements such as code transparency and inspectability. Your feedback and suggestions are warmly welcome until July 17, 2023 on on the policy talk page.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 18 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 19 July. It will be on all wikis from 20 July (calendar).
MediaWiki system messages will now look for available local fallbacks, instead of always using the default fallback defined by software. This means wikis no longer need to override each language on the fallback chain separately. For example, English Wikipedia doesn't have to create en-ca and en-gb subpages with a transclusion of the base pages anymore. This makes it easier to maintain local overrides. [123]
The action=growthsetmentorstatus API will be deprecated with the new MediaWiki version. Bots or scripts calling that API should use the action=growthmanagementorlist API now. [124]
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hello xaosflux
I’m contacting you as you edited Growth features configuration in the past, using Special:EditGrowthConfig. This page is visible to anyone, but only a selected group of users can edit it and configure Growth features
This new feature will allow local administrators to change settings for Wikimedia Foundation-designed features. This way, they can configure the different features to best suit their wiki’s specific needs. This strategy eliminates the technical barrier for admins, to customize local settings. This also encourages a more inclusive and collaborative product development process.
But, there are currently two primary limitations to Community Configuration:
Discoverability: Many Administrators are unaware of the existence of Community Configuration.
Usage Scope: At present, only the Growth features can use Community Configuration.
We plan to integrate Community configuration into MediaWiki, as a default feature. Other Wikimedia Foundation teams and volunteer developers will be able to create Community configurable features. We expect this central place to be more discoverable.
Before the Growth team starts this project, we are seeking feedback, to guide our efforts in the right direction. We are particularly interested in your thoughts on the following:
How do you feel about more Wikimedia Foundation features that can be configured (enabled, disabled, edited) by Administrators?
Do you have any reservations or concerns about this idea?
What can we do to ensure that all Administrators are well-informed about Community Configuration?
How confident are Administrators in making changes using Community Configuration?
Based on your experience editing Special:EditGrowthConfig, are any parts of the procedure unclear or ambiguous?
Community Configuration should be visible to all. Should it only be modifiable by a select group of experienced Wikimedians?
Should all configuration options be only editable by Administrators and interface administrators?
Should we consider different user access levels for certain configuration options?
Out of curiosity, do you have any thoughts on how many edits would be made to this community configuration page each year?
Your insights will be invaluable in shaping the trajectory of this project. We look forward to your constructive feedback!
If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 25 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 26 July. It will be on all wikis from 27 July (calendar).
Latest comment: 1 year ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Hello, this template have been found problems affect its visual appearance on mobile phone screens, however due to different configurations for CSS styles between desktop and mobile view, this would be noticed by our readers. First, the top item of the content occupied this template having a wide grey stripe at the top. Second, the left column occupied half of template width, which looks very inconsistent among different devices. I've made fix in its sandbox page, and you'll see the problems on main template via these screenshots:
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Synchronizer tool is now available to keep Lua modules synced across Wikimedia wikis, along with updated documentation to develop global Lua modules and templates.
The tag filter on Special:NewPages and revision history pages can now be inverted. For example, you can hide edits that were made using an automated tool. [125][126]
The Wikipedia ChatGPT plugin experiment can now be used by ChatGPT users who can use plugins. You can participate in a video call if you want to talk about this experiment or similar work. [127]
Problems
It was not possible to generate a PDF for pages with non-Latin characters in the title, for the last two weeks. This has now been fixed. [128]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 August. It will be on all wikis from 3 August (calendar).
Starting on Tuesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Georgian Wikipedia, Kara-Kalpak Wikipedia, Kabyle Wikipedia, Kabardian Wikipedia, Kabiyè Wikipedia, Kikuyu Wikipedia, Kazakh Wikipedia, Khmer Wikipedia, Kannada Wikipedia, Kashmiri Wikipedia, Colognian Wikipedia, Kurdish Wikipedia, Cornish Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [129]
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Mobile Web editors can now edit a whole page at once. To use this feature, turn on "⧼Mobile-frontend-mobile-option-amc⧽" in your settings and use the "Edit full page" button in the "More" menu. [130]
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Content translation system is no longer using Youdao's machine translation service. The service was in place for several years, but due to no usage, and availability of alternatives, it was deprecated to reduce maintenance overheads. Other services which cover the same languages are still available. [131]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 August. It will be on all wikis from 17 August (calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Latin Wikipedia, Ladino Wikipedia, Luxembourgish Wikipedia, Lak Wikipedia, Lezghian Wikipedia, Lingua Franca Nova Wikipedia, Ganda Wikipedia, Limburgish Wikipedia, Ligurian Wikipedia, Lombard Wikipedia, Lingala Wikipedia, Latgalian Wikipedia, Latvian Wikipedia, Maithili Wikipedia, Basa Banyumasan Wikipedia, Moksha Wikipedia, Malagasy Wikipedia, Armenian Wikipedia, Kyrgyz Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [132]
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 August. It will be on all wikis from 24 August (calendar).
Can you change these from normal text to CSS for me? It is necessary to do some repair work on Signpost styling. Thanks. jp×g20:26, 23 August 2023 (UTC)
Latest comment: 1 year ago5 comments2 people in discussion
I noticed you removed the {{in use}} tag from Islamic Bill of Rights for Women in the Mosque even though it was actively being edited. Also, it seems the edit history has been suppressed. May I ask why? There's nothing in the in-use template instructions that says not to use it logged-out.
Not saying it's wrong, I genuinely want to understand if there's a policy at play. By way of context, there's a proposal to substantially change the article at the AfD discussion, and these changes seem to be a constructive part of that. Oblivy (talk) 10:28, 25 August 2023 (UTC)
@Oblivy there's a combination of things that went on with a few different admins. The edits made from 20230825T092551 to 20230825T094351 were made by an editor that claimed to be inadvertently logged out - an oversighter removed the username (an IP address) on request under WP:OSPOL criteria 1. Only the username portion of those edits has been suppressed, the content is available. In this specific case, multiple oversighters, including me, were all working on the suppression request at the same time. As the current version now had no one specific to attribute it to, I reverted to the last published version that had attribution (yours). We let the suppression requester know that if those were their edits, they are welcome to redo them once they are logged in (as is anyone else). Please let me know if you have any other questions on the administrative actions involved here. — xaosfluxTalk12:17, 25 August 2023 (UTC)
Thanks, I think it makes sense. As I understand it, a otherwise-registered editor didn't want to show up by IP, so their edits were reversed and the IP hidden and they can recreate the edits later. I had seen the original edits, which seemed good-faith, so I was wondering if there was some rule against IP editors putting an in-use template on the article (or something). No need to reply unless I'm totally off base. Oblivy (talk) 12:25, 25 August 2023 (UTC)
@Oblivy I'm not aware of any specific policy about the use of Template:in use. My own personal practice is that if I have to remove attribution from the "current version" of an article, then I revert it -- if someone won't claim the responsibility for what we are presenting to readers, then we probably shouldn't present that revision to readers. Sometimes I make an edit and claim it myself, but in this case I didn't want to. Anyone is welcome to revert my last revert and publish a prior version (taking responsibility for it). In case it wasn't clear, the content of the prior edits is right there in the history for anyone to see still. — xaosfluxTalk12:34, 25 August 2023 (UTC)
Latest comment: 1 year ago3 comments2 people in discussion
So this is twice now that I've pinged you about that topic. I hope that that's been ok. I don't know where else or who else would be good to point people to. Well, that and I know that when I ask you, I can trust the answer : )
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
As part of the changes for the better diff handling of paragraph splits, improved detection of splits is being rolled out. Over the last two weeks, we deployed this support to group0 and group1 wikis. This week it will be deployed to group2 wikis. [143]
All Special:Contributions pages now show the user's local edit count and the account's creation date. [144]
Wikisource users can now use the prpbengalicurrency label to denote Bengali currency characters as page numbers inside the <pagelist> tag. [145]
Two preferences have been relocated. The preference "Enable the visual editor" is now shown on the "Editing" tab at all wikis. Previously it was shown on the "Beta features" tab at some wikis. The preference "Use the wikitext mode inside the visual editor, instead of a different wikitext editor" is now also shown on the "Editing" tab at all wikis, instead of the "Beta features" tab. [146][147]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 August. It will be on all wikis from 31 August (calendar).
All right-to-left language wikis, plus Korean, Armenian, Ukrainian, Russian, and Bulgarian Wikipedias, will have a link in the sidebar that provides a short URL of that page, using the Wikimedia URL Shortener. This feature will come to more wikis in future weeks. [148]
Future changes
The removal of the DoubleWiki extension is being discussed. This extension currently allows Wikisource users to view articles from multiple language versions side by side when the <=> symbol next to a specific language edition is selected. Comments on this are welcomed at the phabricator task.
A proposal has been made to merge the second hidden-categories list (which appears below the wikitext editing form) with the main list of categories (which is further down the page). More information is available on Phabricator; feedback is welcome!
Following an RfC, TFAs will be automatically semi-protected the day before it is on the main page and through the day after.
A discussion at WP:VPP about revision deletion and oversight for dead names found that [s]ysops can choose to use revdel if, in their view, it's the right tool for this situation, and they need not default to oversight. But oversight could well be right where there's a particularly high risk to the person. Use your judgment.
The SmallCat dispute case has closed. As part of the final decision, editors participating in XfD have been reminded to be careful about forming local consensus which may or may not reflect the broader community consensus. Regular closers of XfD forums were also encouraged to note when broader community discussion, or changes to policies and guidelines, would be helpful.
Miscellaneous
Tech tip: The "Browse history interactively" banner shown at the top of Special:Diff can be used to easily look through a history, assemble composite diffs, or find out what archive something wound up in.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
EditInSequence, a feature that allows users to edit pages faster on Wikisource has been moved to a Beta Feature based on community feedback. To enable it, you can navigate to the beta features tab in Preferences. [149]
There is a new option for Administrators when they are changing the usergroups for a user, to add the user’s user page to their watchlist. This works both via Special:UserRights and via the API. [151]
The LoginNotify extension was not sending notifications since January. It has now been fixed, so going forward, you may see notifications for failed login attempts, and successful login attempts from a new device. [153]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 September. It will be on all wikis from 7 September (calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Eastern Mari Wikipedia, Maori Wikipedia, Minangkabau Wikipedia, Macedonian Wikipedia, Malayalam Wikipedia, Mongolian Wikipedia, Marathi Wikipedia, Western Mari Wikipedia, Malay Wikipedia, Maltese Wikipedia, Mirandese Wikipedia, Erzya Wikipedia, Mazanderani Wikipedia, Nāhuatl Wikipedia, Neapolitan Wikipedia, Low German Wikipedia, Low Saxon Wikipedia, Nepali Wikipedia, Newari Wikipedia, Norwegian Nynorsk Wikipedia, Novial Wikipedia, N'Ko Wikipedia, Nouormand Wikipedia, Northern Sotho Wikipedia, Navajo Wikipedia, Nyanja Wikipedia, Occitan Wikipedia, Livvi-Karelian Wikipedia, Oromo Wikipedia, Oriya Wikipedia, Ossetic Wikipedia, Punjabi Wikipedia, Pangasinan Wikipedia, Pampanga Wikipedia, Papiamento Wikipedia, Picard Wikipedia, Pennsylvania German Wikipedia, Palatine German Wikipedia, Norfuk / Pitkern Wikipedia, Piedmontese Wikipedia, Western Punjabi Wikipedia, Pontic Wikipedia, Pashto Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [154][155]
I went to look at the WP:BAG list and saw that you were on it : )
I thought I'd ask you here, rather than ping you there, this time, but you are of course welcome to answer here or there (or not) as you prefer.
Anyway, my main question is: I remember (somewhat vaguely) the various messes and Betacommand. And one of the things that I remember being talked about are edit rates, and so on. I'm not sure how they would specifically apply here, but speed of editing and perhaps not being as diligent as some might want, seeems to be the crux of things here. But I'm not sure how serious we should see this to be. For example, how fast is "bot fast"? Do we have any sort of rough benchmarks for semi-automated editing? Basically I want to AGF of the editor here. But if this is a genuine problem, then I'd like to see it faitly addressed. What comes to my mind is the second half of "Be bold, but not reckless".
I guess I'm in the spot of: I don't know what I don't know. And I'd like to make a better-informed decision on this. - jc3717:04, 6 September 2023 (UTC)
@Jc37 like most stuff here, it depends. I don't have time to dive in to that whole case, but in general if someone is making repeated "bad edits" - they need to stop and correct their behavior, regardless of if it is tool assisted. AWB bots are free - if the nature of the edits is something that really doesn't require human review, then there is benefit to others by using a flagged account -- that doesn't seem to be the case here, as the original complaint was that these are bad edits. As far as edit rate, back to the first claim - it doesn't matter if the edits are "bad", no rate is OK. Only if all the edits are "good" should rate start to be examined; 1 one time batch of say 100 edits in a minute isn't necessarily a brightline - but doing that every day could be. The reason is that high speed editing can overwhelm the ability for edits to be reviewed by others - and even be disruptive to the process by flooding recent changes and watchlists. Sorry this isn't a super clear response, but it is a nuanced subject. — xaosfluxTalk17:39, 6 September 2023 (UTC)
Latest comment: 1 year ago3 comments2 people in discussion
I see that they are semi-inactive, if they aren't around to respond, I can just make a new userbox in template-space of you like. - jc3718:01, 11 September 2023 (UTC)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
ORES, the revision evaluation service, is now using a new open-source infrastructure on all wikis except for English Wikipedia and Wikidata. These two will follow this week. If you notice any unusual results from the Recent Changes filters that are related to ORES (for example, "Contribution quality predictions" and "User intent predictions"), please report them. [156]
When you are logged in on one Wikimedia wiki and visit a different Wikimedia wiki, the system tries to log you in there automatically. This has been unreliable for a long time. You can now visit the login page to make the system try extra hard. If you feel that made logging in better or worse than it used to be, your feedback is appreciated. [157]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 12 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 13 September. It will be on all wikis from 14 September (calendar).
As part of the changes for the Better diff handling of paragraph splits wishlist proposal, the inline switch widget in diff pages is being rolled out this week to all wikis. The inline switch will allow viewers to toggle between a unified inline or two-column diff wikitext format. [158]
Future changes
All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on 20 September. This is planned at 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [159]
The Enterprise API is launching a new feature called "breaking news". Currently in BETA, this attempts to identify likely "newsworthy" topics as they are currently being written about in any Wikipedia. Your help is requested to improve the accuracy of its detection model, especially on smaller language editions, by recommending templates or identifiable editing patterns. See more information at the documentation page on MediaWiki or the FAQ on Meta.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
MediaWiki now has a stable interface policy for frontend code that more clearly defines how we deprecate MediaWiki code and wiki-based code (e.g. gadgets and user scripts). Thank you to everyone who contributed to the content and discussions. [160][161]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 September. It will be on all wikis from 21 September (calendar).
Latest comment: 1 year ago6 comments2 people in discussion
Hello! Can you help me understand something better? I was checking this list of needed templates in my homewiki and a lot of them are "shortdescriptions". Apparently they come from {{Infobox settlement}} but I'm not sure how that is supposed to work exactly. You set the type and you get an automatic template? I haven't seen such auto-generated templates in EnWiki. :/ - Klein Muçi (talk) 09:53, 24 September 2023 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi that template (here at least) is pulling in at least one lua module, which is trying to build short descriptions along the way. By default, the short descriptions from wikidata would otherwise be used. If you don't want that functionality in your template on sqwiki you should remove it; I expect this is one of those "the English Wikipedia volunteers built a very complicated template that probably shouldn't just be imported to another project as-is" sort of things. — xaosfluxTalk18:54, 27 September 2023 (UTC)
It's not a matter whether I want that functionality or not in our template. I literally don't understand what is going on exactly. Can you give me an example here on the English Wikipedia where a similar short description template is auto-created? I want to see the process at work to know how to fine-tune it for us. I have the same number of modules involved in that template with the same identic content. — Klein Muçi (talk) 11:45, 28 September 2023 (UTC)
That module builds the description input based off of other parameters that were input with the text calling the template from the article. This is using various string lookups and replacements
Results:
The wikidata description for this page is Katanga was one of the four large provinces created in the Belgian Congo in 1914. It was one of the eleven provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo between 1966 and 2015
The local description for this page is Former province in DR Congo
But again, I don't see the said module create templates like it is doing in here for us. :/ This is all I'm asking. I'll ask at the respective talk page. — Klein Muçi (talk) 15:11, 28 September 2023 (UTC)
@Klein Muçi ah OK, not sure - if I had to guess one of the string handling lines in the lua module are failing on the character set (e.g. not knowing how to change case of "ë" in "Qytezë"). — xaosfluxTalk16:16, 28 September 2023 (UTC)
Tech News: 2023-39
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Vector 2022 skin will now remember the pinned/unpinned status for the Table of Contents for all logged-out users. [164]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 September. It will be on all wikis from 28 September (calendar).
Gadget definitions will have a new "namespaces" option. The option takes a list of namespace IDs. Gadgets that use this option will only load on pages in the given namespaces.
Future changes
New variables will be added to AbuseFilter: global_account_groups and global_account_editcount. They are available only when an account is being created. You can use them to prevent blocking automatic creation of accounts when users with many edits elsewhere visit your wiki for the first time. [165][166]
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Wikipedia mobile apps teams. During the meeting, we will discuss the current features and future roadmap. The meeting will be on 27 October at 17:00 (UTC). See details and how to join.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
There is a new user preference for "Always enable safe mode". This setting will make pages load without including any on-wiki JavaScript or on-wiki stylesheet pages. It can be useful for debugging broken JavaScript gadgets. [167]
Gadget definitions now have a new "contentModels" option. The option takes a list of page content models, like wikitext or css. Gadgets that use this option will only load on pages with the given content models.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 October. It will be on all wikis from 5 October (calendar).
Future changes
The Vector 2022 skin will no longer use the custom styles and scripts of Vector legacy (2010). The change will be made later this year or in early 2024. See how to adjust the CSS and JS pages on your wiki. [168]
Latest comment: 1 year ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Hello. I hope you are doing well. I'm currently working on a bot to archive the ITN entries. So far, I've worked out everything, but there is only one issue now. Basically, the bot covers additions of entries, updates to existing entries (eg death tolls), and removal of entries. The bot can process multiple additions in the same edit, but I haven't been able to process removal if there is an addition at the same time. This always happens when someone updates recent deaths. While removal of death is not very much important, the removal of other news blurb/event should be mentioned in the archive page (e.g. natural disasters, bombings, and similar stuff). So my actual question is: would it be appropriate to request regular ITN updaters to remove only one news blurb in a single edit, and add an invisible comment regarding this in the ITN template? I have created archive of Sept 2023. By taking a look at it, you will realise what I am talking about. Kindly let me know what you think. There is also a longer discussion at Wikipedia talk:In the news#Archive of ITN postings. —usernamekiran (talk)02:30, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
@Usernamekiran as the pool of people that could update it is so large, and the reason you want this is not for the benefit of readers I don't expect it would get done reliably. The better fix seems to be to improve the bot logic. — xaosfluxTalk03:10, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
yes, I had the same reservations you mentioned. I thought adding an invisible comment along the lines "remove only one news blurb in one edit without adding, or removing anything else", like we already have "Post ongoing items in alphabetical order" would be feasible. I have tried a lot, but because of the way pywikibot processes the diffs, it is proving difficult. I will try again, or maybe I'll come up with some work-around/heuristics. —usernamekiran (talk)03:47, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
More details about EFH granting requirements and required trust
Latest comment: 1 year ago4 comments2 people in discussion
Hello xaosflux! While I regularly help in WP:EFFPR dealing with false positives by public filters, how could I make sure I could be trusted to have the edit filter helper right? Note that despite reading the granting guidelines [I am currently an extended confirmed user, have a secure password with 2FA enabled, have never been blocked or sanctioned (a clean block log), and can understand the English language (near native ability)], how can the community trust me to have the right?
I have thoroughly read WP:EFH about the revocation guidelines (sharing sensitive details to users without the right, abuse of edit filters, etc.), and I don't have any intent to assist with edit filters as I have a very basic ability to understand regex expressions, other than dealing with false positives. And note that I do not plan to request the edit filter helper right at this moment.
@64andtimin general: be active for a while (5 months is likely going to be consider a bit short); participate in areas where this is needed (such a /FP). You should also seek to remedy your blocks on other WMF projects (I see you are blocked on maiwiki). — xaosfluxTalk10:57, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
It looks like I was unblocked over there due to said block being accidental. And which areas I should participate in FP? (it looks like I should be active for at least a year or more if they should trust me to get the user right). Signed,64andtim (any problems?) 12:02, 3 October 2023 (UTC)
An RfC is open regarding amending the paid-contribution disclosure policy to add the following text: Any administrator soliciting clients for paid Wikipedia-related consulting or advising services not covered by other paid-contribution rules must disclose all clients on their userpage.
Technical news
Administrators can now choose to add the user's user page to their watchlist when changing the usergroups for a user. This works both via Special:UserRights and via the API. (T272294)
@PrimeHunter I expect that we should be able to purge the default messages that have been forked to the variants without issue. That cite stuff is all off local modules, etc - so will need to be investigated more. I doubt it's 100% and we should probably still discourage anyone from setting a variant. — xaosfluxTalk00:49, 9 October 2023 (UTC)
The color-colour on the default ones should still be removed; the ones on the local gadget, not sure. I don't think the local gadgets/scripts are helped by the change to the core handling. — xaosfluxTalk00:50, 9 October 2023 (UTC)
Our MediaWiki messages are not imported live from Translatewiki. Sometimes somebody updates a file and all our MediaWiki defaults are updated with changes since last time. We have customized MediaWiki:Blockiptext. MediaWiki:Blockiptext/qqx shows the default en message with "vandalized". Our MediaWiki:Blockiptext/en-gb has not yet "imported" the deletion of translatewiki:MediaWiki:Blockiptext/en-gb so it still shows an en-gb message with "vandalised". I assume the deleted Translatewiki message said that but don't have access to check. Oddly, translatewiki:MediaWiki:Blockiptext/en-gbalso currently says "vandalised". Translatewiki itself is powered by MediaWiki. I guess if they don't currently have a customized en-gb message then their en-gb page shows the current MediaWiki default for en-gb, so they have to wait for an import of their own deletion before the page will show the en version with "vandalized". That's a bit confusing. English is my second language and I have no stake in spelling issues like -ize/-ise but they apparently matter greatly to some. If somebody made an en-gb version at Translatewiki with a minor spelling change then our local en-gb users get that unless we customize our local en-gb version. I guess it varies whether this is considered good or bad. I think we should keep the current warning in Help:Preferences#Internationalisation but not reintroduce more prominent warnings in MediaWiki messages like MediaWiki:Preferences-summary/en-gb. https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/g/mediawiki/core/+/63b013c5bfdfe07be20557ce9cc26a79a98cf023/languages/i18n/en-gb.json shows a brief list of en-gb messages but I suspect it's all there are, out of 25000+ MediaWiki messages. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:50, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
Problem is that it isn't really just a translation of our local /en version; our local en version is completely customized away from mediawiki default - and there are still about 100 (of 10000+?) messages that mediawiki is pulling in to /en-gb as default -- but the "use local fallback" fight in that phab ticket is still going on. Short story, still work to do - and it's still useful to actively warn enwiki's users to not pick an /en-xx language setting or they will miss out on localizations. — xaosfluxTalk23:36, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
ACE ElectCom
Latest comment: 1 year ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Hi Xaosflux. This year if you're one of the top 3 vote getters do you intended to serve or might you step back into the reserve commissioner role as you did last year? Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 08:13, 9 October 2023 (UTC)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Fon (w:fon:) [172]
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 10 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 11 October. It will be on all wikis from 12 October (calendar).
Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Swahili Wikipedia, Walloon Wikipedia, Waray Wikipedia, Wolof Wikipedia, Kalmyk Wikipedia, Xhosa Wikipedia, Mingrelian Wikipedia, Yiddish Wikipedia, Yoruba Wikipedia, Zhuang Wikipedia, Zeelandic Wikipedia, Min Nan Wikipedia, Zulu Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [173]
At some wikis, newcomers are suggested images from Commons to add to articles without any images. Starting on Tuesday, newcomers at these wikis will be able to add images to unillustrated article sections. The specific wikis are listed under "Images recommendations" at the Growth team deployment table. You can learn more about this feature.[174]
In the mobile web skin (Minerva) the CSS ID #page-actions will be replaced with #p-views. This change is to make it consistent with other skins and to improve support for gadgets and extensions in the mobile skin. A few gadgets may need to be updated; there are details and search-links in the task.
Administrator changes
Interface administrator changes
CheckUser changes
Oversighter changes
Guideline and policy news
Arbitration
Miscellaneous
Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 10 January at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis) and on 12 January at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
The URLs in "prev" links on page history now contain 
- FlightTime (open channel) 00:21, 25 January 2023 (UTC)
Technical news
Done — xaosflux Talk 10:33, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
Thanks for the fast replies. 1AmNobody24 (talk) 10:24, 17 March 2023 (UTC)
A link to the user's Special:CentralAuth page will appear on Special:Contributions — some user scripts which previously added this link may cause conflicts. This feature request was voted #17 in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey.
The deprecated 
Resolved
wikimedia.org. — xaosflux Talk 23:10, 15 May 2023 (UTC)
![[105]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Visual_editor_toolbar_search_feature.png){kind=link}
- — Klein Muçi (talk) 10:57, 28 June 2023 (UTC)
Bureaucrat changes
The redirect Wikipedia:VPP has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Anyone, including you, is welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2023 September 9 § Wikipedia:VPP until a consensus is reached. —Matr1x-101 (Ping me when replying) {user page (@ commons) - talk} 14:54, 9 September 2023 (UTC)