Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)

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

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Extra letter "R" between C and D in category listing

See Category:All portals. The list first shows portals starting with 0-9, then starting with A, B, C (including things not starting with C, but with a sortkey starting with a C), then continues through the alphabet with R, D, E, ..., P, Q, R, S, ... What is this extra letter "R" between C and D?

The issue was reported by User:JoeNMLC at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Portals#Curious_about_"Portal_category_list" but this looks like it could use some wider attention. —Kusma (talk) 11:00, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

Fixed with forcing update of the category member by removing/readding to the category. — xaosflux ^Talk 11:33, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

Thanks! So it was some kind of database hiccup? —Kusma (talk) 11:58, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

It looks like a hiccup or MediaWiki bug I haven't seen before. The Internet Archive shows [1] the issue 19 September with an R heading between the C and D headings. Special:ExpandTemplates shows Portal:Reformed Christianity just adds a normal [[Category:All portals]] with no sortkey and no DEFAULTSORT. It's added by a template but even if the template had different code at the time, it should not be possible to create an R heading between C and D on a category page. The Internet Archive shows a normal Latin letter R and not some special Unicode character. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:11, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

Here is HTML source from the Internet Archive:

<li><a href="/web/20240919122212/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Czech_Republic" title="Portal:Czech Republic">Portal:Czech Republic</a></li></ul></div><div class="mw-category-group"><h3>R</h3>
<ul><li><a href="/web/20240919122212/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Reformed_Christianity" title="Portal:Reformed Christianity">Portal:Reformed Christianity</a></li></ul></div><div class="mw-category-group"><h3>D</h3>
<ul><li><a href="/web/20240919122212/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Delaware" title="Portal:Delaware">Portal:Delaware</a></li>

It looks as you would expect if R was actually a letter betwen C and D and there was only one portal starting with R. The category collation system determining how to sort characters is sometimes changed and can be set differently for different wikis. Maybe this page was cached in the middle of a change or accidental setting. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:23, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

 Done - Thank you! JoeNMLC (talk) 17:01, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

Standard parameter name for Wikidata IDs

Some time ago, we standardised large numbers of templates so that they all used the same parameter names for the same thing; for example |birth_date= instead of |birth-date=, |birthdate=, |birth=, |dob=, etc.

I now find that we have a number of parameter names for a Wikidata item about a subject, for example:

• {{Authority control}} - |qid=
• {{Interlanguage link}} - |WD=
• {{Taxonbar}} - |from=

This causes confusion for editors who use more than one of these templates, on a regular or occasional basis.

I propose that we standardise these to |qid=, while keeping existing names as aliases for backwards compatibility. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:44, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

We also standardized on |coordinates= in infoboxes a few years ago, which was a nice improvement. |qid= makes the most sense to me for this purpose. I get 227 hits in template space for {qid|, only 10 hits for {WD|, and 66 hits for {from| (most of which are not Wikidata-related). – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:08, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

• Support alias |qid=. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 03:40, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

Incorrect diff description when edits in between are suppressed or revision deleted

I know I should just make an account to report stuff, but instead I just want to ask, is this bug something anyone would even care about fixing?:

• On Special:Diff/1258722312/1258757481 it says the obviously wrong message One intermediate revision by 22 users not shown
• If I don't include the one revision that is not suppressed in between, then it just says nothing, even though there are 37 (I think?) revisions in between.

I chose a suppressed one as the example, but it happens with revdels too, though maybe not if you are an admin. – 2804:F1...6D:D079 (::/32) (talk) 00:53, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

I doubt any devs are going to get to work on that one right away, but sure go file a WP:BUG if you'd like. Problem statement seems to be that when there are deleted versions, inaccurate counts are passed to diff-multi-otherusers. — xaosflux ^Talk 02:32, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

It's an interesting bug. If you look at this range of edits in the page history: [2] you can see more clearly that only the content of the revisions has been hidden, but not their authors. We might be querying the data for this message slightly incorrectly. As a dev, I'd be curious enough to look into why this happens, even if it turns out to be too complicated for a quick fix. Also, I found a Phabricator report that sounds quite similar to this problem: T277920. Matma Rex talk 08:09, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

I figured out why it happens: T277920#10368811 but it is indeed a bit tricky to fix, and it will probably stay unfixed for now, unless someone volunteers to implement it. Matma Rex talk 22:55, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

Discussion at Wikipedia talk:Reliable sources/Perennial sources § Amendments needed to the transclusion splitting plan

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Reliable sources/Perennial sources § Amendments needed to the transclusion splitting plan. Not sure who to notify, but I'm not confident in putting another merge banner onto the page, and this does involve technical. Aaron Liu (talk) 02:15, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

Max lag on Enwiki API requests

This is happening again ("13926.578336 seconds lagged"). Previously reported Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_216#Server_lag responded by User:Taavi. Same problem with a broken replica? -- GreenC 05:11, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

Works for me. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 05:34, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

Still an issue? Taavi (talk!) 06:27, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

It appears to happen intermittently almost every week nowadays. – SD0001 (talk) 13:43, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

Menu for new topic missing

For me it's normally a + sign. Doug Weller talk 14:00, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

It is working fine for me atleast The AP (talk) 15:53, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

After Login, goes to WP home page

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T381216

Greetings, Recently I noticed that after 1. Log out; 2. Log In; 3. Browser now goes to Wikipedia home page instead of previously "remembered" page. Usually it was my Watchlist. Not a major concern, just curious of this change. Regards, JoeNMLC (talk) 17:06, 29 November 2024 (UTC)

This is likely unintentional change. Reported at phab:T381216. – Ammarpad (talk) 09:34, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Contents/Outlines

Can anyone work out why Wikipedia:Contents/Outlines has so much white text on a light green background, to the extent that the text is virtually invisible. Nthep (talk) 15:05, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Pinging @TheDJ:, is this in any way related to your changes to Wikipedia:Contents/styles.css and dark mode? Nthep (talk) 15:10, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

That change would have caused it, yes. Headers particularly have some opinionated CSS that you have to take some effort to override. It's not hard to fix, I will look at it in the morning in TheDJ doesn't beat me to it. Izno (talk) 06:40, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

This should be fixed ish now. Izno (talk) 19:11, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. Nthep (talk) 19:24, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

Wikispecies Template/ Module assistance needed

On Wikispecies, we are told (at species:Wikispecies:Village Pump#Switching to the Vector 2022 skin: the final date):

Module:Authority control uses the deprecated toccolours class. A navbox class with some styling should be used instead. This is how they did it on English Wikipedia. For more context: phab:T314254.

Wikispecies is a small project; can someone assist there, please? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:00, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 202#class="toccolours" does not render formatting in Vector 2022 suggests that the magic incantation is "Pinging @Izno and TheDJ". WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:32, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

I can look at it in the morning. The good news is that there aren't many uses if you exclude user and user talk pages. (And still not that many even including those.) In most cases the easiest solution is to swap to wikitable, but that may not be appropriate for all pages. Izno (talk) 06:45, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

I've cleaned out the remaining uses of necessary toccolours on Wikispecies. You may review my edits there at your leisure. Izno (talk) 05:26, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Seems to be working well. Thank you. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:30, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

 This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:55, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Faulty interwiki formula

ProofWiki has altered its URL structure (dropping the 'www') without preserving a redirect such that the current interwiki format (e.g., proofwiki:Definition:Set) doesn't work. Can this be changed from Wikipedia, or should I go to phab:? Tule-hog (talk) 21:59, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

@Tule-hog These are defined at Meta:Interwiki map, updates can be requested on the talk page. 86.23.109.101 (talk) 22:40, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Simple math in template

This change throws an ugly red error message in the template's page, but it works when the template is actually used. I assume that there is something obvious and simple that I've missed, and I would appreciate diffs to the fixes or other advice.

Secondly, what I'd like to accomplish is a bit more ambitious. I'm open to being told to give it up. But where we have this now:

Village pump

Revenue	12345 (in 2023)
Expenses	13399 (108.5% of revenue in 2023)

I'd like it to be able to handle currency formatting ("$12,345"). This might require a bot/AWB run to convert all of the manually written |revenue $12.3 million to |revenue=12300000 |currency=$ |revenue-note=<ref>source goes here</ref>, which will then be displayed as $12.3 million to the reader.

I want to highlight overspending in red ("108.5% of revenue" or "8.5% excess") and underspending in green. The usual rule of thumb in non-profit land is that spending 90% of revenue is ideal, and that both overspending and significant underspending are bad. So perhaps <80% is amber or (uncolored), 80–100% is green, and >101% is red.

I also want to introduce a third field, "Reserves" with an Operating reserve ratio calculated from the existing Expenses field. This would highlight <6 months in red, 6–12 months in amber, 12–24 months in green, and >24 in purple. (These are the generally recommended ranges for most non-profit organizations. To put this in context, private colleges with an operating reserve ratio of less than 12 months are at risk of joining the growing list in Category:Defunct universities and colleges in the United States, and if it's <6 months, that could happen soon and with no warning.)

What do you think? WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:21, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

I fixed the first issue (including issues you didn't know).[3] PrimeHunter (talk) 00:00, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

Thank you! WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:45, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

Either a module or an AWB run will be required for what you want, yes. The AWB run will be easier probably. I thought we had a template that handles currency already though? (Or perhaps we don't and that's what has caused so much grief with {{formatnum:}}). Izno (talk) 06:49, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

I don't know if we have something that already handles it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:38, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing {{Currency}} or {{Format price}}? The currency template converts values written in words to comma or space separated numbers, format price converts numerical inputs to words. 86.23.109.101 (talk) 11:48, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Rangeblock tool

Hello. Following this Teahouse thread in which it was revealed Fastily's departure from the project also resulted in the shutdown of their Toolforge services (thus causing a bit of confusion), DreamRimmer has created this tool that supersedes Fastily's tool over (seems close enough). However, Mediawiki:Blocklogtext still has the link to Fastily's now-defunct tool instead, which could cause some aforementioned confusion when some people wish to calculate rangeblocks. Therefore, I recommend changing [[:toolforge:ip-range-calc]] to [[:toolforge:galaxybots/iprangecalculator]] on the aforementioned interface page. Thanks. — 3PPYB6 ^{(T / C / L)} — 06:26, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

You can use {{edit protected}} on the talk page in the future. Izno (talk) 06:30, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

@Izno – I do realize that, and I've done that before, but the Editnotice explicitly stated that requests could be brought here because the MediaWiki talk namespace is generally not monitored very actively. Thank you so much for answering this quickly though! — 3PPYB6 ^{(T / C / L)} — 06:33, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, I think that edit notice is more about talk page posting in general rather than specific edit requests; simple/straightforward requests are taken care of pretty quickly from tracking on User:AnomieBOT/PERTable et al. Izno (talk) 06:35, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

Conclave (film)

I cannot work out what it is about this edit [4] that causes all references to display the error "Lua error in Module:Citation/CS1/Configuration at line 2083: attempt to index a boolean value.". Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 16:56, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

I can't reproduce the error now. It seems to be a known bug that occasionally something goes wrong in CS1 rendering and that happens. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 17:30, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

@Pppery There was a previous discussion about this here: [5]. As best I can tell the issue is that mw.ext.data.get() has an undocumented "feature" in that it can sometimes return false instead of returning the data table? 86.23.109.101 (talk) 18:22, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

This is in the process of being fixed, see Help talk:Citation Style 1#spurious errors when fetching identifier limit data from commons. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 20:01, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Weird template disambiguation link problem.

This is crazy one. The category tree for Category:Introductions by year causes a hatnote to appear on the category page with text along the lines of:

This category is for introductions in the year XXXX.

The problem is that introductions links to a disambiguation page. Through arduous layers of substitution, I have isolated the problematic string to:

This [[Help:Categories|category]] is for {{#invoke:ustring|gsub|\{{#if:1|'''[[{{#invoke:String|replace|{{PAGENAME}}|^%d%d%d%d (%a.-)$|%1|1|false}}]]''' in the '''year XXXX'''}}|%.$|}}.

Apparently, this causes the invoked string to link to the category name minus the year (so Category:1649 introductions gets reduced in the string to introductions). I have no idea how to solve this so that rather than linking to the disambiguation page, it links to a relevant meaning of "introduction". Which meaning that would be is a separate question; for now my concern is how does the linked term become editable at all. Cheers! BD2412 T 20:50, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

Which meaning that would be is a separate question probably the main question. If you know which link it should go to, Category:Introductions can be moved per WP:C2D as will its sub-categories, which will cause the template to work correctly. Gonnym (talk) 20:56, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

On further review, the category itself may indeed be somewhat problematic, as it appears to mix different kinds of introductions (of products, of ideas, of logos). Alternatively, perhaps it makes sense to create a WP:Broad concept article generally covering the concept of introduction itself. BD2412 T 21:31, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

Okay, forget the technical solution, I have started Draft:Introduction, and will work on that this week. BD2412 T 21:43, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

If it seems hard to adapt a template to give a wanted output in a special case then a possible but not ideal alternative is to just change the output at the call with {{replace}}. In this case, {{YYYY introductions category header}} could for example change {{YYYY foos category header|beginnings}} to {{replace|{{YYYY foos category header|beginnings}}|'''[[introductions]]'''|introductions}}, if there is no suitable link target and we don't want a link at all. The replacement may fail later if a change means that the exact output no longer says '''[[introductions]]'''. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:03, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

Some issues in dark 2022 theme

Hi. I have been read this page Frank Grillo and see there yellow-white is including in template's background. Please fix it in dark theme. VollyM (talk) 23:00, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

Template:Pending is the culprit, it does not support dark theme. Also see Template:Partial/styles.css. Snævar (talk) 01:01, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

{{Pending}} is working fine for me in dark mode; I see black text on a yellow background in the cell containing "Hard Matter". Please be more specific about the problem description, and maybe post a screen shot. – Jonesey95 (talk) 01:46, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

I see blue text on a black background for "Hard Matter", in both Vector2010 and Vector2022. Odd. CMD (talk) 02:38, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

@Jonesey95 black text on yellow background in dark theme.

https://imgur.com/a/oVpwbmR VollyM (talk) 10:10, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

I see the same black on yellow that shows in VollyM's screen shot. It looks fine. As for Chipmunkdavis's blue on black, please make sure that you are logged out when you check on the colors. If you are still seeing blue on black, let us know what browser you are using. – Jonesey95 (talk) 13:53, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

How do I use dark theme when logged out? CMD (talk) 14:22, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

For me, there is a sidebar on the right side with radio buttons under the header "Color (beta)". If you don't see it, look under the confusing "glasses" icon at the upper right, next to the "Donate" link. For me, an easy way to check how things look when I am not logged in is to open a different web browser (Safari, Brave, Chrome, etc.) than I usually use for editing. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:18, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

@Chipmunkdavis: Some browsers provide a "private browsing" feature, or similar. In Firefox, right-click a link and select "Open Link in New Private Window". It opens a new instance of the browser and loads the page reached through the right-clicked link, but does not send any cookies. The effect of this is that if the right-clicked link is a Wikimedia page, it's loaded exactly as for a logged-out user - Vector 2022 and all that bother. Important: if you intend to use the "Restore Previous Session" feature when opening Firefox at the start of the next day's netsurfing, make sure that you close the new private window before closing the main window, otherwise, the next time you open Firefox, and use the "Restore Previous Session" feature, it'll restore that private window and not the main one. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:53, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Back on track, this is about the tables in Frank Grillo#Filmography. So you have a table that uses template:pending film and template:pending series, which in turn both use template:pending. Making the background color change with dark mode pretty much requires templatestyles. Adding a templatestyles tag to any of the templates will not work, because it is a part of a table. Adding a templatestyles tag to the page itself would require an edit to all of the pages these template use, is probably a Manual of Style error and is ugly. Other options or bite the bullet and ask for a bot run? Snævar (talk) 14:48, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Also, I am letting someone else fix this. Snævar (talk) 11:23, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

User:Awesome Aasim/xfdvote

This script I created seems to be drifting more and more and not working on newer formats of XfD pages, and I don't seem to be using it as much, so I want to know if someone might be up for forking the (six) scripts and making it better. It might need a complete rewrite. Thanks. Awesome Aasim 19:05, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

trimming watchlist not working

So, I realized I have way, way too many things on my watchlist. I spent an hour last night going through it and removing a lot of it, but it when I hit the "remove pages button" it just sits there for a minute and then reloads the list, complete with the same checked items. I'm assuming I was trying to do too much at once, just wondering if anyone knows exactly where the line is as I don't want to waste too much time on this. (I'm aware I could also edit the raw watchlist but that seems even more tedious.) Just Step Sideways ^{from this world ..... today} 21:52, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

There's no exact line, no. I would expect most database operations to succeed if you're modifying fewer than 500 things, but if it was less than that you can try stepping it down by some reasonable number. Izno (talk) 22:39, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

When I tried to do it all at once it was for sure well over five hundred items. I clearly haven't done a serious trim since timed watchlisting became a thing however long ago that was, there's old ArbCom cases on there, old afds, at least fifty usernames I blocked for having "poop" in them, and so on. I'll try going a little slower I guess. Just Step Sideways ^{from this world ..... today} 22:52, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

I use Special:EditWatchlist/raw. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 23:49, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Yeah for my recent watchlist purge that many people in this thread would know about, I edited my raw watchlist to remove 1,173 pages and had no problem. I thought using the check-box interface would be more tedious and error-prone (also pages that big don't work too well on my setup). I didn't remove inactive/barely active pages/old user pages though. And it took way more than an hour for me; more like seven (I know this because I have a chat log about it).Graham87 (talk) 04:30, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Also the raw watchlist is ordered a bit weirdly. From personal experience it seems to be ordered alphabetically for pages added to the watchlist before 2017, and then by the date the page was added after then. Graham87 (talk) 04:39, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

I noticed that happening at a time when I had about 24,000 pages in my watchlist. Since I trimmed it to about 16,000 it behaves normally - primary sort is by namespace (main, talk, user, user talk, etc.) secondary sort is alphabetical. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 13:21, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Even my previous watchlist had 3,247 pages on it (but as I said before, a lot of the pages on it now are for all intents and purposes inactive). Graham87 (talk) 14:49, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

@Just Step Sideways I'll add a plug for User:Ahecht/Scripts/watchlistcleaner which can help with removing a lot of the cruft. If you use any of the "slow" options, you might need to let it run overnight if you have a 5-figure watchlist page count. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 15:39, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

It's at about five thousand currently, I've managed to clear it out some already but I'd like to remove pretty much all the user/talk pages and start over on that front as half of it is people who were blocked for username violations years ago and most of the other half is "why did I have this person's page watched?" Just Step Sideways ^{from this world ..... today} 20:37, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

If you're like me, you'll spot somebody doing something dubious, go to their user talk page only to find that somebody else has messaged them three minutes ago, and watch the page anyway in case the situation escalates to the point where stronger action is called for. First user stops misbehaving, then six months later another post appears telling them that a draft they started hasn't been touched and is liable for speedy deletion under WP:G13. You check their contribs, and find that not only did they stop misbehaving, they left entirely. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 23:42, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

If a change actually pops up when looking at my list, I'll go see if I made any of the last hundred edits, or posted there in the past year, if neither of those is true I unwatch, but that's a very slow way to narrow it down. Just Step Sideways ^{from this world ..... today} 03:08, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-49

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

Updates for editors

• Two new parser functions were added this week. The {{#interwikilink}} function adds an interwiki link and the {{#interlanguagelink}} function adds an interlanguage link. These parser functions are useful on wikis where namespaces conflict with interwiki prefixes. For example, links beginning with MOS: on English Wikipedia conflict with the mos language code prefix of Mooré Wikipedia.
• Starting this week, Wikimedia wikis no longer support connections using old RSA-based HTTPS certificates, specifically rsa-2048. This change is to improve security for all users. Some older, unsupported browser or smartphone devices will be unable to connect; Instead, they will display a connectivity error. See the HTTPS Browser Recommendations page for more-detailed information. All modern operating systems and browsers are always able to reach Wikimedia projects. [6]
• Starting December 16, Flow/Structured Discussions pages will be automatically archived and set to read-only at the following wikis: arwiki, cawiki, frwiki, mediawikiwiki, orwiki, wawiki, wawiktionary, wikidatawiki, zhwiki. This is done as part of StructuredDiscussions deprecation work. If you need any assistance to archive your page in advance, please contact Trizek (WMF). [7]
• This month the Chart extension was deployed to production and is now available on Commons and Testwiki. With the security review complete, pilot wiki deployment is expected to start in the first week of December. You can see a working version on Testwiki and read the November project update for more details.
• View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug with the "Download as PDF" system was fixed. [8]

Updates for technical contributors

• In late February, temporary accounts will be rolled out on at least 10 large wikis. This deployment will have a significant effect on the community-maintained code. This is about Toolforge tools, bots, gadgets, and user scripts that use IP address data or that are available for logged-out users. The Trust and Safety Product team wants to identify this code, monitor it, and assist in updating it ahead of the deployment to minimize disruption to workflows. The team asks technical editors and volunteer developers to help identify such tools by adding them to this list. In addition, review the updated documentation to learn how to adjust the tools. Join the discussions on the project talk page or in the dedicated thread on the Wikimedia Community Discord server (in English) for support and to share feedback.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 22:19, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

patents.com lapsed

patents.com lapsed and is for sale. Searching for insource:"patents.com" shows 26 pages affected. {Cite patent|...} was not an instant fix for the one I rescued, so I linked to the Google Patent page. -A876 (talk) 01:49, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

You are looking for WP:URLREQ. Izno (talk) 01:56, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

eparticle action in log?

Any idea what this log entry is about? It corresponds to https://quarry.wmcloud.org/query/88408. RoySmith (talk) 17:33, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

The former education program extension, which was uninstalled years ago. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 18:00, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

They were adding the target article to their course list, in the uninstalled Education Program extension. – Ammarpad (talk) 18:06, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Incorrect robots meta tag on live article

The article "It's Coming (film)" has a "noindex,nofollow" robots meta tag despite being a live article, not a draft. This is preventing Google indexing. Could someone please help remove this incorrect tag? The article is at It's Coming (film). Thank you. Stan1900 (talk) 21:13, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

These are being appropriately applied. The page will not be indexed until new page patroller approves it. Izno (talk) 21:29, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for the information. Could you tell me the typical timeframe for new page patrol review? Also, would resolving the paid editing template discussion help speed up this process? Stan1900 (talk) 21:39, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Why are you concerned with when Google indexes it? RoySmith (talk) 23:28, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for the response. The article documents a recent release, and I want to ensure that accurate information is properly indexed and visible for readers and contributors seeking details about the film. Any guidance on how to proceed would be greatly appreciated. Stan1900 (talk) 23:49, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

My guidance would be to concentrate on writing good articles, let the new page patrollers do their jobs, and don't worry about what Google does. RoySmith-Mobile (talk) 13:37, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Transliteration template not accepting some Latin characters

As seen in Bashkortostan's infobox, {{Transliteration}} is throwing an error at text containing some rarer Latin characters—"transliteration text not Latin script". This example: {{transliteration|ba|Başqortostan Respublikahınıñ Dәwlәt gimnı}}. Does anyone know why this is and if it's intentional? If not, can it be fixed? Ookap (talk) 05:56, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

You did the literal textbook example of that error (on the help page): For example, <text> has Cyrillic shwa (ә; U+04D9) instead of the Latin shwa (ə; U+0259).. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 07:00, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

You can copy-paste the string to the text area at https://r12a.github.io/uniview/ and click the down arrow to see this. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:36, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Determining browser page size

WP:ARTICLESIZE speaks of "browser page size". How to determine this value in Firefox? ―Mandruss ☎ 10:12, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Mandruss, I assume it means this? — Qwerfjkltalk 10:19, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

I wouldn't know exactly what it means; I didn't write it. Based on my limited understanding, I'm guessing it corresponds to the number of bytes downloaded, which should correspond to the file size in one's browser cache, which is aka HTML page size. Regardless of what it means, it's one of the measures of article size deemed significant by the community, and I need to know how to determine it in Firefox. ―Mandruss ☎ 10:38, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Mandruss, in much the same way as on chrome. — Qwerfjkltalk 10:41, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. If I were a web developer, that might help. ―Mandruss ☎ 10:44, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

WP:ARTICLESIZE mentions "browser page size" once in the lead and never refers to it again. I guess the author just wanted to clarify that the used sizes are something different. I have never seen browser page size used in Wikipedia discussions about size. I suggest you just ignore it. Anyway, in Firefox the "Tools" tab (you may need to press Alt to see the tabs) has "Page info" which includes size, but I'm not sure how it's defined. It's far smaller then the HTML file if you save it. Is it a download size for a compressed version? If I open a HTML file stored on my own computer then Firefox doesn't even show the size field. That makes sense if it's a download size and Firefox didn't download anything. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:25, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Neither readable prose size nor wiki markup size is a direct measure of performance impact. So I gather technology advances have rendered performance issues insignificant, at least within technical size limits imposed by the PEIS limit etc. ―Mandruss ☎ 12:37, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

@Mandruss The WP:PEIS limit has nothing to do with browser page size. You could easily have the longest article on Wikipedia with a PEIS of 0 if it had no templates, and I have also seen very short articles that exceed the limit due to multi-level transclusions. As to your second point, I have seen several pages recently that ended up being split because users with high-end computers complained about trouble loading the page (Talk:2024 United States presidential election#Merge of international reactions list is the most recent one I can remember). --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 13:55, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Order of operations to get browser size:

1. Tools > Browser Tools > Web Developer tools

2. A thing pops up at the bottom of the screen

3. Select Networking in the tabs of the newly popped up thing

4. Visit the page you wanted to know the size of, or refresh it

5. The size is in the bottom left corner after the number of requests as x kB / x kB transferred. Snævar (talk) 14:08, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Thank you. For the current article in question, that yields 4.33 MB / 365.03 kB transferred. As a direct measure of performance impact, I'm guessing the second number is more meaningful. Agree? ―Mandruss ☎ 14:20, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

I think the first number is more meaningful. The difference in the two numbers is just how much your browser has kept since the last visits (technical jargon: browser cache). The latter number is the first number minus this cache size. Snævar (talk) 14:46, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Ok. What would you call that first number in four words or less? ―Mandruss ☎ 15:52, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

The first number is the decompressed page size, the second is the amount of data transferred, taking into account compression and cached data. I added instructions at Wikipedia:Article size#Browser page size on getting more objective versions of both numbers that bypass caching and Wikipedia preferences. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 16:38, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

PEIS on List of public art in the City of London

See also: Template talk:Public art

I am trying to work out why the post-expand include size is so high on List of public art in the City of London (1,814,737 out of 2,097,152). We are trying to do some work on the table columns, which is not possible, because everything we do exceeeds the PEIS limit. Is there a easy way to work out which templates are causing the most problem? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 14:51, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

@MSGJ Looks like it's the 400 uses of {{Public art/row}}. Substing them reduces the PEIS by 650kB. Also, {{coord}} has a huge PEIS footprint, which gets double-counted because it's inside {{Public art/row}} and an additional bump because that template wraps it in an {{#if:. Switching them out for {{#invoke:Coordinates|coord}} saves about 200kb, but it breaks {{Maplink}}. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 16:52, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

@MSGJ I've fixed {{Maplink}} so that it no longer breaks when you use {{#invoke:Coordinates|coord}} --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 17:39, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Template-generated redlinked categories, again

Once again, Special:WantedCategories has thrown up a handful of redlinked categories that are being smuggled in via templates that have farmed their category generation out to modules that I can't edit, and thus I can't fix the redlinks.

• Category:FM-Class articles — This got renamed to Category:FM-Class pages a few days ago via a CFR discussion, but the {{Category class}} template is still module-farming the old category rather than the new one. Some, but not all, of the pages also have the new category directly declared on them alongside the redlink being carried in by the template, but the redlink is still present on over 500 talk pages.
• Category:Wikipedia dual licensed files with invalid licenses — This is being piggybacked by the licensing template on an image, but the template itself doesn't directly contain any text enabling that category. Obviously if this is actually wanted, then it should be created by somebody who knows how to create project categories like that (i.e. not me), but if it's unwanted then it needs to go away.
• Category:Wikt-lang template errors — Autogenerated on test page Template:Wikt-lang/testcases. Again, should be created if it's actually wanted, but needs to be kiboshed if it's not. If it's actually unwanted, then just fixing the errors on that page won't be enough, and it will need to be made impossible so that it doesn't come back in the future. And, of course, since I don't work with wikt-lang template gnomery, I'm not in a position to determine whether it's wanted or not.

So could somebody with module-editing privileges fix these, and/or create the latter two categories if they're actually wanted? Thanks. Bearcat (talk) 15:59, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

I'll take care of the first item — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 16:08, 4 December 2024 (UTC)