Misplaced Pages

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view · edit Frequently asked questions (see also: Misplaced Pages:Technical FAQ) Click "" next to each point to see more details. If something looks wrong, purge the server's cache, then bypass your browser's cache. This tends to solve most issues, including improper display of images, user-preferences not loading, and old versions of pages being shown. No, we will not use JavaScript to set focus on the search box. This would interfere with usability, accessibility, keyboard navigation and standard forms. See task 3864. There is an accesskey property on it (default to accesskey="f" in English). Logged-in users can enable the "Focus the cursor in the search bar on loading the Main Page" gadget in their preferences. No, we will not add a spell-checker, or spell-checking bot. You can use a web browser such as Firefox, which has a spell checker. If you have problems making your fancy signature work, check Help:How to fix your signature. If you changed to another skin and cannot change back, use this link. Alternatively, you can press Tab until the "Save" button is highlighted, and press Enter. Using Mozilla Firefox also seems to solve the problem. If an image thumbnail is not showing, try purging its image description page. If the image is from Wikimedia Commons, you might have to purge there too. If it doesn't work, try again before doing anything else. Some ad blockers, proxies, or firewalls block URLs containing /ad/ or ending in common executable suffixes. This can cause some images or articles to not appear. For server or network status, please see Wikimedia Status. If you cannot reach Misplaced Pages services, see Reporting a connectivity issue.

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My android based phone internet browser now crashes consistently with Misplaced Pages

Does anyone else with an android smartphone have their browser crash every time they click on an inline citation to see the source? Mine has started doing that lately. I've shut down and restarted multiple times and it still happens. It happens on mobile or desktop versions. I don't know how to check the browser version on my smartphone. Biosthmors (talk) 21:01, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

This may be related to the gadget mw:Reference Tooltips which is enabled by default on this wiki. Helder 00:29, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

The group of Android phones is rather large. It might be helpful if you could report the Android version your phone is using, and even better which browser and browser version you are using. That makes solving this problem considerably easier. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:28, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

It should be Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) per this. Biosthmors (talk) 15:35, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

Browser version 2.3.4. Biosthmors (talk) 21:26, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

Performance

Mental note, MediaWiki:Gadget-ReferenceTooltips.js adds huge anonymous function to each .reference element. That might be a little resource inefficient. We should look into that. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:30, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

since you have the permissions, you can easily fix it yourself by pulling this function out of the "each", giving it a name (it won't leak to the global scope - it's inside a wrapper function anyway), and just use this name with the "each". i.e., let's say you give this anon function the name "doForEachReference()", replace the "each" with

 $(".reference").each(doForEachReference);

whether or not this will actually improve performce/resource use, and by how much, depends on how intelligent is the JS engine in the specific browser, but it's practically guaranteed not to make anything any worse, and some people think the code is nicer this way.

on a side note, this gadget is pretty wasteful anyway: the tip functionality already exists in the included jquery plugin jquery.tipsy, so 95% of the functionality can be achieved using much shorter (and more elegant, if i say so mywself) gadget we use in hewiki: he:Mediawiki:Gadget-CiteTooltip.js. the last 5% can probably be slapped on the hewiki gadget, and still be more economical/compact/simple than MediaWiki:Gadget-ReferenceTooltips.js. קיפודנחש (talk) 18:39, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

My own problems accessing Misplaced Pages from Android

I use an HTC Hero 200. The software isn't a newer version, either, but it tells me that I'm up to date with what it is running. I realize that I need to upgrade, but in the meantime, I'm having problems. I let my phone service lapse for a matter of weeks, and have been accessing the Internet via WiFi from various locations. Ever since, I'm facing quirks or outright problems when I log in to my account. I use the regular Misplaced Pages rather than the mobile site, even though at times it is slow as fuck on this phone, even before this recent stuff started happening. For about the past week, I noticed that I was browsing pages on the secure server, even though I didn't log in on the secure server. The past day or two, it tells me that I've logged in successfully, then as soon as I go to access my watchlist, it comes back to tell me that I'm not logged in, over and over. I'm guessing that the servers on here are recognizing that I'm accessing them from a variety of IPs, but I really don't know if that's the cause of this strange behavior or not. Any hints? I could just go to my service provider and pay them and perhaps this will all go away.RadioKAOS (talk) 22:33, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

I had a similar problem last night while logged in from my Android device. My broswer (see above) crashed while doing normal activities while logged in. Biosthmors (talk) 22:42, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

I've just tried with my Andriod Tablet (Nova 7 Aurora running 4.0.3) using the Browser - I can click the inline links, but nothing happens. It seems intermittent depending on device and Andriod version. Osarius - Want a chat? 09:55, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks all; I'll report this to the mobile team :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 15:51, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

I went and paid my phone bill this morning. I'm still having the exact same problem with mobile data, so I don't believe it has to do with accessing this site from numerous WiFi points, especially since I've done that before and never had any problems such as this. Here's the version information from my phone, hope this helps:

• Phone (as previously mentioned) - HTC Hero 200
• Firmware - 2.1-update1
• Baseband - 2.42.01.04.23
• Kernel - 2.6.29
• Build and software number - 2.36.556.1

(the kernel and build have additional information appended, but I don't know if this is relevant or if it is at all specific to this phone - I'm not that familiar with the inner workings of Android)

• Browser - WebKit 3.1 (I'm hoping this is in regards to the default Internet app; I've been using that, as I can disable the mobile site at the browser level rather than at the website level, as has been the case with other browsers I've used)
• PRI - 1.93_112

I realized that replacing my phone would be a good idea when I noticed that there's now a mobile version of Firefox, which this phone doesn't support. Of course, as with seemingly everything, money is the main sticking point. I had previously downloaded Opera, until I realized that it was taking up too much space. I then downloaded Opera Mini and have been using that to at least be able to log in and access my watchlist, but now I have to deal with a whole new series of quirks, hangups and problems. RadioKAOS  – Talk to me, Billy 21:26, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

As it turned out, I had to replace the phone anyway after two batteries blew up on me in less than four days. Since it is still ARMv6 rather than ARMv7-based hardware, I'm limited in what software I can run. At least I'm able to browse the web like normal again. RadioKAOS  – Talk to me, Billy 00:14, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Article feedback watchlist sort order

I originally posted this under Making it easier to clean up the Feedback Dashboard. However, article feedback is not related to the feedback dashboard, so I've separated this into a separate section. – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 16:17, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

I guess this would be related to why I saw the initial sort order of my feedback watchlist switch from ordered by date to ordered by "relevance" last night. Was this intentional? For a watchlist, sorting by date makes more sense. The relevance sort seems to be pretty random order. – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 23:05, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

This feature has nothing to do with the Article Feedback Tool or the related watchlist. These are comments asking for general help, from new registered editors only, viewable at Special:FeedbackDashboard. Perhaps we need a name change to make this less confusing... Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 07:57, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

My apologies; there are so many different uses of "feedback" at Misplaced Pages that I got a little mixed up. Perhaps the feedback dashboard could be called "New editor feedback" to make it distinct from article feedback?

My initial confusion aside, I'm still wondering why the default sort order changed, since order by date makes more sense for a watchlist. (I'm really not sure when order by "relevance" would ever make sense.) I've now figured out that I can get the original behaviour back by appending "?filter=comment" to the URL, and have updated my bookmarks accordingly. Ideally, this should be the default; if anyone wants the new behaviour, a user preference would be friendlier than having editors hack the URL. – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 16:17, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

Oh well... mw:Thread:Talk:Feedback Dashboard/ArticleFeedback and MoodBar dashboard names. Helder 19:46, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

I'm having the same problem with https://en.wikipedia.org/Special:ArticleFeedbackv5Watchlist?ref=watchlist - some times it sorts by Newest (which I want), but sometimes it sorts by Relevance (which is not helpful to me). I don't really care what the default (although I think Newest is more consistent with my watchlist) I just wish it would remember my settings (cookie or in my preferences). Mitch Ames (talk) 09:24, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

• Good point; date switching seems a lot more sensible :). It's stopped remembering your settings at all, though? That's very strange. I'll see if I can find out what's going on. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:56, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

  So, can you give me an example of what seems to trigger this behaviour, if anything? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:56, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

I haven't noticed any specific trigger.

• It forgets perhaps every few days or so - I usually check my watchlist and the feedback at least once a day (often more)
• I am normally logged in ("Remember me" is ticked), so I don't explicitly login each time. I typically close the browser (Firefox 12.0) between sessions, but typically don't log off my computer (Windows 7)
• I just rebooted my PC now, and when I check the feedback list it was sorted newest first (ie no problem)
• I also just logged out of Misplaced Pages and then back in, and the feedback list was still sorted newest first
• I couldn't swear to it, but I think the problem does not only occur if I clear browser cookies. Occasionally I clear browser cookies using CCleaner, but it has wikipedia and wikimedia listed as "cookies to keep". If the wikipedia/wikimedia cookies are cleared I'd notice because I'd have to log in.

I'll try to note if there's anything out of the ordinary next time it does forget.

Where is the setting stored anyway - is it a cookie? Mitch Ames (talk) 12:50, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

It is - it'd be much more sensible for us to just switch over to using a "hidden" preference of some sort. I'll see what I can do. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:11, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Back button sometimes blanks edit summary

Edit an article, press "Show preview" or "Show changes", use the browser's back button (or Alt+left arrow or equivalent) and on returning to the editing page, the edits are still there, but the edit summary is blanked. Note: if detected before pressing "Show preview" or "Show changes" again, edit summary can be retrieved by going forward to the other page with alt+right arrow, copying the edit summary, going back a alt+left arrow, and pasting the edit summary where it belongs. This is a new bug over approximately the past two weeks. —Anomalocaris (talk) 06:43, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

I rarely use the back button after Preview or Show changes but the edit summary is still there for me in Firefox. It's your browser which should remember it. Which browser is it? PrimeHunter (talk) 13:24, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

For me the back button kills all the changes. I'm on FF12 myself, and have it set to specifically keep things (which it does 98% of the time). ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 14:58, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

Firefox 16.0.1. —Anomalocaris (talk) 15:08, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

I also have Firefox 16.0.1 without problems. Does it happen when you are logged out? Which skin do you have at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering? And why do you go back after Preview or Show changes? PrimeHunter (talk) 15:37, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

I have not reproduced the error when logged out, but maybe I didn't try enough times. Note that if I use the back button when logged out, I get this dialog box:

Are you sure?

The page is asking you to confirm that you really want to leave - data you have entered may not be saved.

 

My preferences

• Skin: MonoBook
• Disable browser page caching: not checked
• Enable collapsing of items in the sidebar in Vector skin: checked
• Exclude me from feature experiments: not checked

I use the back button a lot because I edit and inspect, edit and inspect, and I like to get back to where I was before editing, keeping the edit history "tight". It's also convenient because the back button returns me to the same state of editing window. Also, when Show changes reveals several editing errors, it's useful to go repeatedly back and forward, correcting mistakes and finding the next one.—Anomalocaris (talk) 18:30, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

I'm unable to reproduce the problem with those settings. I haven't heard of your edit routine before. If Preview or Show changes reveals multiple problems with my edit then I usually try to fix all of them and then click Preview or Show changes again. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:02, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

It's still happening, sporadically. I am not the only Wikipedian who temporarily leaves the edit page comes back to it, as evidenced by a discussion a year ago here when a similar bug, in addition to blanking the edit summary, was sometimes removing all editing changes, on going back to the editing page from any other page. —Anomalocaris (talk) 06:48, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Even a Wikipedian who would routinely continue editing from the Preview page rather than clicking back to the Edit page might well click on an internal or external link on the Preview page. On going back to the Preview page, neither edits nor the edit summary should be lost. Yet, sporadically, the edit summary is lost. Therefore this is a matter of concern to all Wikipedians. —Anomalocaris (talk) 17:48, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Top 10,000 articles

Is there a list or something of articles by average page hits a week or something? I think it would be good to have to browse through and find some articles I'm interested in bringing up to GA.♦ Dr. Blofeld 22:39, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

I'm aware of Misplaced Pages:Lists of popular pages by WikiProject. Bgwhite (talk) 23:39, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

I log all Misplaced Pages hit statistics to a database. Give me a few minutes, I'll run a query that will approximate what you want. Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 23:49, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

HERE YOU GO. These are the highest traffic articles over the last ~3 months, quasi-sorted by popularity (I used a heuristic to make this search more efficient, but it should be fairly accurate). Hope it is helpful. Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 00:09, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

Yes, very. Thanks. Although the fact that One Direction are even more popular than the United States doesn't exactly say much. They represent everything wrong about today's spoon fed music! And Bieber more popular than sex! Gaaaaa. There will be some decent topics in there, I hope.♦ Dr. Blofeld 10:29, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

• Please see User:West.andrew.g/Popular pages, User:West.andrew.g has created a report of the 5,000 most popular articles in the past 10 days, set to refresh every 10 days, I believe. I think this is very valuable.--Milowent • 15:23, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

I personally am upset that Misplaced Pages discloses those statistics (IMHO they are a privacy invasion) and there's a lot of pages I avoid reading from the web site because of them. Given that they are there anyway, I don't have any problem with what Andrew West or Dr. Blofeld are doing, but I felt I had to say that not everybody thinks that it's right for Misplaced Pages to publish this info. 67.119.3.105 (talk) 00:48, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

How is disclosing these statistics a privacy invasion? Whose privacy is invaded? What is the problem? —Anomalocaris (talk) 15:53, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

The only way this could violate privacy is we could deduce who visited what pages based on these numbers, which is impossible, since there are no identifying details and you cannot correlate visits between pages or to any source. —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 16:13, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

Small new feature coming on Thursday

TL;DR: this is to announce a small new addition to the editing experience, based on previous testing.

What it is, and when it's going live:

This is a confirmation message that will tell all editors, anonymous or registered, that "Your edit was saved". It only appears for two seconds and then fades out, and is also dismissable via close button.

It looks like the screenshot to the right, and will work in most skins and browsers. Since it is supposed to consistently tell editors that their contribution was saved, it will appear on all edits, except page creations (since the message refers to an edit, which could be confusing use of the term when referring to page creation).

We're going to deploy this on Thursday, pending any last minute bug fixes, and it should go live shortly after.

Why we're launching it:

Confirming to someone that the contribution they just made was successful is a very common usability enhancement. It is used by most major Google products (Gmail, Maps, YouTube, etc.), Twitter, and innumerable other sites, like Dropbox. It is not used by sites like Facebook or Google Docs, where contributing is visually obvious 100% of the time, though clearly that's not the case when editing Misplaced Pages.

As part of editor engagement experiments, we tested this change with several thousand new registered editors, and comparing them to a control group, we found a significant increase in the volume of their edits — 23% in the short term — without an associated increase in how often they were reverted or deleted. (There's more about the results in our recent blog post.)

This data backs up the experience you see if you teach someone to edit. I've personally heard first time editors ask things like, "So what happens now?" and "When does it go live?" after saving. This message answers that question.

Please give it a try:

I realize that this may seem unnecessary for everyone is a very active editor already, and has thus learned that a successful save just means the page reloads in read mode. But since we've designed this feature to have as minimal an impact as possible, and because it has made a very measurable difference for people who are less experienced, I am asking everyone to give it a try for a week or two before making a final judgement about it. It's pretty easy to have a small, fast notification like this disappear from your attention after going about normal editing for a bit.

We've not immediately added a preference or gadget to remove this, for three reasons:

1. No other website allows you to permanently disable small notifications that confirm a contribution. This includes existing Misplaced Pages notifications like the watch/unwatch bubble message. They only exist on screen for a few seconds, and are dismissable in case they obscure any content. We're not making this dissappear after something like 100 edits, because once you start to expect it, not seeing it might look like the system is broken. For new people especially, who will be expecting to see this from their first edit on, consistency is extremely important.
2. The preferences tabs are totally bloated with checkboxes for single features, and there is already discussion about how to remove cruft. If in a while, the feature continues to be extremely distracting, then we can talk about adding a preference to opt out.
3. Personal CSS or JS can't hide this, because of the speed at which it appears and the order in which personal styles are loaded compared to the rest of the site. Update: It looks like we missed this, because the test environment we use didn't have personal styles enabled. Thanks to Yair rand below, the following CSS might work to hide the feature...

.postedit {
   display: none;
}

Thanks for reading all that, and of course please speak if you have questions/comments. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 09:55, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

Good feature! I'm the sort of experienced user who will not benefit, but I'm glad that the inexperienced user is being considered. Binksternet (talk) 19:46, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

I second that. This will (probably) not bother me too much (I'll just have to remember that the box fades out in a few seconds), and I think it's going to be a very effective feature to tell first-time/new editors in a quick and clear way that they have actually edited a page. I know how lots of people wonder: so did it save my changes or not? Jsayre64 (talk) 22:48, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

Please give it a try: Interesting wording. Unless I'm misunderstanding something, since we can't turn it off, if we still want to edit we will be forced to try it. So why say please? I'm not saying the "feature" is bad, I'm just saying you probably could have chose better wording.--Rockfang (talk) 20:12, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

I used that language in the context of Jimbo's request at Wikimania in 2011 to give the WMF some more room to deploy things, give them a try, and then give us feedback. The assumption is that this will be permanent because we previously tested it, but that definitely doesn't mean we're not open to feedback and changes in the future, including an opt-out. I just didn't want to start the conversation with an assumption that we don't want to ever change things for existing community members, and instead want to request an open mind about it. I realize that's not as simple as it sounds, but I watch VPT and other forums pretty closely, so we're not just going to dump new software on the site and run. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 20:54, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

"...so we're not just going to dump new software on the site and run". From my observations, from big projects to small things, decisions made top-down by WMF fiat seem to be get implemented, "discussed" for a while until opposing users lose interest, and then forgotten about. Jason Quinn (talk) 00:17, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

• Question Will there be a way to turn it off? I don't want this kind of confirmation. I am not saying it is a bad idea, but I prefer to have it the way it is right now. Also I am sure if I wouldn't ask, someone else will do later. -- Toshio Yamaguchi (tlk−ctb) 20:18, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

  Question seconded. It really needs a "disable permanently" option. Deryck C. 20:30, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

  See the section above about a preference to disable. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 20:38, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

  I asked that question after reading the section above. I take it that WMF is not willing to implement a disable option then. Thanks Yair's CSS suggestion above; the confirmation message also isn't as intrusive as I thought so it doesn't bother me too much. Deryck C. 22:03, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

• Another question: is it deployed on Vector only? Deryck C. 20:30, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
  • No, not Vector only. I've tested in on Monobook and older skins except Classic. It works with those skins, and is smart enough to scale to the correct text size, etc. I'm not opposed to suppressing it for older, non-Vector skins if people want to propose it or submit a patch though. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 20:38, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
• "Personal CSS or JS can't hide this, because of the speed at which it appears and the order in which personal styles are loaded compared to the rest of the site." What? User CSS is loaded before the visible content even starts. I doubt that the box is going to be done with entirely inline styles, so there must be a class or id attached to it, so users will be able to do a simple display:none; to hide it easily. --Yair rand (talk) 21:00, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
  • My understanding is that because the feature is presented dynamically with JavaScript, you can't use personal CSS to hide it, regardless of the speed issue. Yair, you're a developer right? I can show you the Labs instance where we're testing this. We tried to think of a userscript or style that wasn't an extremely nasty hack, but were unable to find one. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 21:14, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

    Being presented dynamically with javascript doesn't at all stop elements from being hidden by user CSS. (Am I a "developer"? I thought that generally referred to WMF employees, which I am not. I just fiddle with JS and CSS here and on Wiktionary...) A link to a Labs instance where I could test it would be great, thanks. --Yair rand (talk) 22:47, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

    Just butting in here to absolutely 100% argue against the idea that only Wikimedia Foundation employees could be developers. When we talk about developers in the Wikimedia movement, we mean EVERYONE who suggests changes to MediaWiki code, gadgets, bots, user scripts, and so on. So you're included. Sumana Harihareswara, Wikimedia Foundation Engineering Community Manager (talk) 21:39, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

    CSS code is #postedit-container{display:none;}. Works fine. --Yair rand (talk) 22:55, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

    Hmm. Doesn't seem to work for me on Labs, when applied to my Vector or Common CSS. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 23:08, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

    MediaWiki has $wgAllowUserJs by default set to false. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:59, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

    Yair rand's CSS works for me. Double sharp (talk) 05:30, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

    • AdBlock Plus is your friend. They (talk) 22:12, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
    • en.wikipedia.org##DIV#postedit-container They (talk) 23:28, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
• Interesting. I suppose all questions will be answered in a few hours when it goes live. SilkTork 21:36, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

• Alternative suggestion - This required the reloading of the page twice, which is impractical. All the sites you mentioned also make use of AJAX and javascript functions to display temporary messages on loaded pages. A bar that appears then disappears is much more practical to a whole page. - Floydian  _¢ 21:46, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
  • Where did you test it? This does not require users to reload the page, and does in fact use JavaScript to display it as a temporary message for a couple seconds. As for adding the notification after complete page load... I'm not sure that's less annoying than having the message appear along with page reload post-edit. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 22:02, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
    • My bad, I completely misread the image :S - Floydian  _¢ 23:47, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
      • No worries. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 23:52, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

• Question – What time (exactly?) are you going to release this change? It's already Thursday in UTC and in my time zone. –– Anonymouse321 (talk • contribs) 05:06, 18 October 2012 (UTC)
  • Sorry, I mean Thursday afternoon PST. There is no exact predetermined time, because deployment is a process that's not immediate. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 06:45, 18 October 2012 (UTC)
    • Live! – It looks like the change just went live (for me at least). –– Anonymouse321 (talk • contribs) 00:18, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
      • OK, so "Thursday afternoon PST" meant Thursday, 23:59 UTC. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:22, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
        • Well, 23:59 UTC is 3:59 PM (15:59) PST, right? (BTW, isn't it PDT right now?) –– Anonymouse321 (talk • contribs) 15:36, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
• What is the effect, if any, on high-speed editing like bots or (in my case) AWB edits? Does it in any way slow down or obstruct such editing? Fram (talk) 07:57, 18 October 2012 (UTC)
  • None, if the edits are made via the API like I assume AWB and most bots do. If there is a bot or other tool that makes an edit in a semi-automated fashion but doesn't use the API, it's possible but unlikely. This a very small feature, and we've already put some performance hacks in place to make it snappy, so we don't anticipate problems. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 08:07, 18 October 2012 (UTC)
    • Thanks. Fram (talk) 08:13, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

• nagware I kind of like keeping browser scripting turned on, on sites like this, where presumably the scripting is non-harmful (actually, it's not, every year or so I have to create a new browser profile to fix various "bugs" that seem to come from "somewhere"). While I can't think of the wikipedia name offhand, the editor which color codes the editing window separating text from code is kind of nice to use, but I guess I can turn it off, it just is slightly more tiring to use, and takes a little longer to make edits. That's the side effect of stopping these popups. Maybe someday the foundation will decide that encyclopedia content shouldn't be visible unless scripting is turned on, like some sites do now. It's almost humorous, follow a link to read something and find a Blank Page unless scripting is allowed. Can't serve a page until ID is shown. Show us your papers! Gzuufy (talk) 15:28, 18 October 2012 (UTC)
  • "Maybe someday the foundation will decide that encyclopedia content shouldn't be visible unless scripting is turned on, like some sites do now." Doubtful. Unlike some participatory sites, many of which require login and other stupid requirements to just read content, job number one for us is to give away the encyclopedia to as many people as possible. For readers, we are actually are moving in the opposite route of what you describe, enabling features such as optionally disabling images on the mobile site to speed up page load times for those on slow connections. Reading != editing when it comes to browser requirements. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 17:48, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks Steven. Gzuufy (talk) 19:27, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

So, if I have Javascript disabled in my browser, can I still edit? And will I see this message? InedibleHulk (talk) 19:13, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

InedibleHulk, I just submitted this message with scripting off. I don't know if it is limited to disabling only javascript, I'm using Noscript. The editor appears slightly different. It opens quicker, probably due to the limited speed of my connection. I haven't seen those messages yet, once they appear, we'll know what, if anything, works to block them. Gzuufy (talk) 19:27, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

Yes, you can edit without JS. And no, you won't see this message if you have JS disabled. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 19:40, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

Cool, thanks. No objections here, then. InedibleHulk (talk) 20:09, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

• If the purpose of this is to let users know when their edits were saved, shouldn't userrights (with the exception of, say, "confirmed") disable this? I can't imagine this affecting users who already have rollback, etc. on their accounts. That said, this is only minimally intrusive. Several userrights have their own .css Special: pages, so perhaps the disabling script mentioned above could just be added to those pages? --Philosopher  05:08, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
  • That would make perfect sense if you consider everyone who already has these userrights, but think about it from the perspective a brand new person. Say you start editing today, make a few thousand edits. You've learned that a successful edit = seeing that two second flash. You get rollback, and suddenly you don't see the confirmation anymore, on your edits or on rollback. That would probably seem like an error, if you've grown accustomed to it. The feature is configured like it is not because we really want you to read the message every time, but because a consistent display like this, with the green checkmark you can easily scan, is an extra assurance. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 05:15, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
    • That's a fair point. What page does the code come from, btw? Given your point about the accustomed user being surprised, perhaps it'd be better to just put the "disable" code on the talk page of whatever MediaWiki: page the code comes in from (for easy reference) but leave it active for everyone? I'll admit I was surprised at how minimal the intrusiveness was, but I'm going to turn it off for myself anyway. --Philosopher  05:48, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

Has the change been deployed yet? On the older rig I use (IE7, Windows XP but with JS enabled) I'm not seeing the change enabled yet or on Safari on iPhone. Haven't checked on anything else. if it has been deployed can the wtachnotice be removed. NtheP (talk) 08:06, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

• I don't understand why we can't turn this off? It's annoying. GiantSnowman 10:31, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
  • You can turn it off - just take the .css code above and put it into your Special:MyPage/common.css. You could always propose a gadget or a preference if you want, though Steven Walling does have a point about those pages becoming crowded. --Philosopher  10:41, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
    • Thanks; I think many would prefer a preference option, but that's for a later date. I'm not au fait with the technicalities, is my .css page User:GiantSnowman/monobook.css? GiantSnowman 10:46, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
    • I've added to User:GiantSnowman/common.css, think it's all OK. Thanks for your help. GiantSnowman 10:51, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
      • Glad it's working. For future reference, Special:MyPage/common.css is for all skins, pages like Special:MyPage/monobook.css or Special:MyPage/vector.css are for if you want a change to only affect that particular skin. --Philosopher  11:23, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
        • I don't think that it's any more annoying then the bubble that appears after you watch/unwatch a page. Left to its own devices, it disappears pretty quickly anyway (quicker than the "watch" bubble); and before that happens, its presence doesn't prevent you from clicking a link or the "back" button. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:11, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
          • It's not a competition, annoying is annoying. ¦ Reisio (talk) 20:05, 20 October 2012 (UTC)

• I have a concern that will come into effect with the reintroduction of pending changes this December. Suppose a new editor makes a change to a page, gets this message telling them their edit was saved. Yet, it hasn't appeared until a reviewer has checked the edit and passed it. This will cause confusion with all the newbies wondering why their edit hasn't showed up. I am opposed to pending changes anyway. Rcsprinter (post) @ 16:37, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
  • The use of Pending Changes or Flagged Revisions is part of why we went with the very specific language of "Your edit was saved", as opposed to "Your edit is live" or similar. (This feature is also deployed on German Misplaced Pages currently as well, btw.) Even if PC or FR is used at 100% it is accurate to say that the edit was saved. Remember that new editors don't all have a mental model of editing like we do, where saved == visible. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 22:59, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

• I like this a lot. However two seconds seems a bit fast; you could easily miss it, especially if you were looking at somewhere else on the screen (where the save button was?) and then looked up. Not everybody is super quick off the mark. I'd suggest extending the duration to four seconds. I also think a slightly slower fadeout would look nicer, but that might just be me; the visible duration is more important. — Hex (❝?!❞) 19:01, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
  • Oh - and I've found a bug. If I hit back in my browser (Chrome, Windows) and land on a page that had displayed the notification, it displays it again. — Hex (❝?!❞) 19:05, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
    • Yep, myself and others have got this bug too. We've got a fix ready and waiting for deployment in the coming week. As for the speed: we tried five seconds, and that was way too long. The original comparative test on the site was at three seconds, which I would be happy to return it to later. For initial deployment, I just wanted to minimize the impact on regular editors. Thanks for reporting, Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 23:06, 21 October 2012 (UTC)
    • Should be  Fixed now. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 17:15, 23 October 2012 (UTC)
• Not to second-guess those working on technical improvements for the encyclopedia—but I generally feel that we should avoid most bells & whistles unless there's a really good reason to add them. Creeping complication, load times, clutter, etc. ... groupuscule (talk) 22:28, 19 October 2012 (UTC)
  • I agree 100%. It's one of the maxims of good design that more features all the time generally don't always help, and in fact often hurt usability. That's why the team explicitly takes an experimental approach to new things, where we test them out before committing to enabling them forever/for everyone. For this feature, the demonstrated positive impact it had for new editors, plus the fact that this design pattern is very common on the modern Web, is why we decided to add it. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 22:37, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

• Can't say I have read everything above but I'm guessing some of our long-term users are complaining about it in there somewhere, so for the record this long term user thinks it is just fine and can easily see that new users would find this helpful and reassuring. FYI it works fine on my iPad (not everything here does) and does not seem to be affecting page reload times at all. Beeblebrox (talk) 23:09, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

• Bug report - If I edit an article, then save that edit, I get the popup. So far, so good. Then I click edit a second time, and decide not to save but to click "Article" (or whatever is at top left to return to the same page) the unedited article is displayed with the popup on top. Very misleading. Elizium23 (talk) 15:32, 20 October 2012 (UTC)
  • Noted in Bugzilla, and we've got a fix waiting to be deployed as soon as we can this week. Thanks for reporting, Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 22:34, 21 October 2012 (UTC)
  •  Fixed now. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 17:15, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

This shows just long enough to be annoying (like something flickering in your peripheral vision annoying), and barely long enough to be useful. Bonus: can transient JavaScript dialogs be trusted? Why no, no they can't. :p ¦ Reisio (talk) 17:38, 20 October 2012 (UTC)

• I'm getting the same bug as some others here. Telling editors their edit was saved when no edit was saved is very misleading. If it can't be fixed it should be turned off. Ryan Vesey 20:07, 20 October 2012 (UTC)

Me too. Right now I am getting the message every time I use the browser Back function to return to a page I saved 15 minutes ago. (IE8 on XP). Nurg (talk) 20:38, 20 October 2012 (UTC)

That's a bug we're going to deploy a fix for in the coming week. Sorry for the annoyance. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 23:35, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

Should be  Fixed now. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 17:15, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

I am still seeing this in Chrome (Mac OS) every time I go to to a new page without editing, even if I am logged out. Firefox and Safari seem fine. Jokestress (talk) 13:08, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Did you try clearing your cookies and cache? The issue appears to be fixed for me. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 01:45, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

The issue still happens in Chrome. I have some additional details. I cleared cache and cookies, logged back in and visited several pages. Everything was fine - no notification. Then I did a small edit to a bio, and the notice came up. After that, every new page I visited had the notice come up. Even when I opened this page to add this comment, it said "your edit was saved" after it loaded, before I even made a change. Hope this helps. Jokestress (talk) 17:36, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Please allow a preference to disable this

• No matter how much one editor thinks this is a really good idea, there will ALWAYS be a whole bunch of people who do not. Imposing preferences on everyone is like the Henry Ford style operating philosophy: you can have any car you like so long as it's black. That's a really outdated way of thinking, and it's a real pity people think that's acceptable now. Wikidea 10:02, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

Sorry, I see there's some discussion above about how to switch it off, but can you explain the steps for people like me who aren't developers? I'd be grateful. Wikidea 10:09, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

You add ".postedit { display: none; }" (without the quotes) to Special:MyPage/skin.css :) - Jarry1250  11:34, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

Many thanks for your help. Wikidea 17:31, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

I do think it's a good idea for newcomers, as I've seen questions asked on the Help Desk many times relating to this issue, but I can't add the above text to anything because "Misplaced Pages does not have a user page with this exact name."— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 19:56, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

No, you don't; but that's not a problem. You merely need to create it: go to Special:MyPage/common.css (which should give you a heading "Creating User:Vchimpanzee/common.css" and an edit box; paste the single line

.postedit { display: none; }

into that edit box; and click Save page. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:18, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. — Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 20:34, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Turning the CharInsert gadget off by default

As many of you are probably aware by now, the character insertion toolbar at the bottom of the edit interface was recently moved into a gadget. There has been some consensus established that perhaps it should be turned off by default, but the discussion was not exactly conclusive, and nor does there appear to be any good way to do this without affecting current users' preferences, as changing an existing gadget's default from on to off turns the gadget off in everyone's preferences, including those who were using it already and even those who had previously explicitly turned it on.

Does anyone know of a good solution to this? Perhaps an appropriate warning before turning it off, or not turning it off at all for the time being, or maybe changing the Gadgets extension so that changing a default doesn't affect existing preferences and if an admin really does want to reset everyone's preferences, uninstalling the gadget entirely and then reinstalling it would be required? -— Isarra ༆ 19:40, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

I think a new (default off) gadget would have to be created, and the old (default on) gadget would have to be deprecated. The two would have to be designed to not interfere with each other; I would make the old gadget load the new one (using mw.loader.load()) in addition to displaying a notice of the change. PleaseStand (talk) 09:12, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Aye, I suppose that could work, though it would be messy. Would also need to add a createpage requirement so it would only show up for registered users the duration of the transition, but that would be doable... -— Isarra ༆ 15:15, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Problem with edit conflicts

On en.wiktionary, we have a problem with edit conflicts. If you edit a section of a page and an edit conflict occurs, the bottom textarea will only contain the section you edited. If you copy-paste that into the top textarea, you will actually delete the entire page except for the section you were editing. This worked fine before, so there seems to have been a regression. Is this known, and if yes, will it be fixed? -- Liliana-60 (talk) 22:43, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

It has always been like that. The top one contains the 'current' (with the edit made at the time between you opening your edit window and saving your edit) and the bottom dialog contains the state as you had desired to save it (but is not possible because an edit conflict occurred). —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:53, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

In such situations, English Wiktionary uses the default system message:

'Someone else has changed this page since you started editing it. The upper text area contains the page text as it currently exists. Your changes are shown in the lower text area. You will have to merge your changes into the existing text. Only the text in the upper text area will be saved when you press "Save page".'

Note particularly the fourth sentence 'You will have to merge your changes into the existing text.'

Something very similar appears in MediaWiki:Explainconflict, which is the equivalent message customised for use on English Misplaced Pages. This (to my mind) has a better explanation of what to do about it (the four numbered items at the bottom). ---Redrose64 (talk) 13:16, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

No, it has never been like that. It used to show the entire page in your textbox, and not just the section you edited. With the way it is now, we've had it happen very often that users inadvertently deleted the entire page like this. The folks at Commons are having the same problems. It seems to work just fine in German Misplaced Pages, so some server configuration must be wrong. -- Liliana-60 (talk) 18:11, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks everybody. I've forwarded this into the issue tracker at https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=41280 --Malyacko (talk) 21:18, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

It looks like a bug to me. I am looking in to this now . Will try to get this fixed shortly and deployed soon as possible. Cheers. --Aude (talk) 07:40, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

This is fixed but awaits approval and deployment by one of the lead developers, probably when SF people wake up in several hours. --Aude (talk) 09:58, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Counting usage of templates parameters

Hello, is there any way, any tool or whatever to find out how many times is a specific parameter of a selected template in use or if at all, please? I've searched both Misplaced Pages and Toolserver but I've failed.

For example, a template "Template1" has a parameter "Parameter1" and it's transcluded in three articles. I'm not interested in substitutions. In first and second one the parameter is used, in third it's not.

• First article: {{Template1|Parameter1}}
• Second article: {{Template1|Parameter1}}
• Third article: {{Template1}}

So the number I'm looking for is 2 as the Parameter1 is used in 2 articles. Thank you in advance! --Loupeznik (talk) 23:37, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

About the only way is to have the template add the page to a tracking category when "Parameter1" is used. Anomie⚔ 03:25, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

You need more, maybe example code? -DePiep (talk) 19:14, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Watchdog templates with Lua searches 183,000x faster

Lua strings are not just lightning-fast, they are "greased lightning". So a template based on a Lua script module could scan an entire article section, for typos or trivial grammar errors, within a fraction of a second. I have created some string-search operations in a Lua module to compare search-speed performance, especially because the markup templates, such as {str_find}, are so slow. Even template {strfind_short} is 6x-7x faster than old {str_find}. However, while {strfind_short} can match about 30 strings per second (within length 20), the Lua-based template can match over 500 strings per second (within a length of 22,000 characters). So, if I calculated the math right: it is 500 x 22,000 v. 30 x 20, or 11,000,000 / 60 = 183,333x times faster using Lua rather than markup templates. For testing, the large text in template parameter 1 was over 22,000 characters as 35 paragraphs of text. Now, a parameter {{{1}}} can pass over 160,000 characters of text (~300 paragraphs), but I think there might be some run-time limits for Lua processing activity, so every so often, the result is "Script error" while at other times, the Lua module can scan the 22,000 characters for 50 different phrases.

Finally, with such rapid scanning of character strings, I think we have entered the era of "watchdog" templates, which could scan a section of text to warn of improper new contents, as well as report missing data considered vital to the article. If the watchdog template scanned 5 upper paragraphs, to check for 50 crucial phrases of basic data, or rumors to avoid, then it could perform the watchdog scan in about 1/50 of a second (3x faster than a single {cite_web} template). The tactic would be to leave it active inside an article, to scan those "5 paragraphs" during every edit-preview of that section, and warn about missing phrases, or added "rumors" and advise to discuss the proposed changes first. In many cases, the watchdog might just link a maintenance category, to warn other editors that crucial data items had been removed, or questionable text was now contained in a list of articles. It is far better to have a template run, every time for 1/50 second, to advise an editor not to re-add rumor text or peacock "greatest" phrases, than to have that unwanted text saved and require a revert, plus issue a user-warning about such types of editing. In extreme cases, the watchdog section might cover 35 paragraphs, depending on various essential data items, or related rumors, and run within 1/10 second. In a sense, some watchdog templates would act as per-article, per-section "content filters" but allow the text to appear during edit-preview, rather than totally disrupt the page in the manner of rejecting black-listed websites. If the watchdog activities became too tiresome, then they could be reduced to shorter sections, or have fewer warning phrases, as needed. -Wikid77 (talk) 07:19, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Does lua properly support character encodings, most importantly multibyte characters and possibly variable length characters? I was under the impression lua has byte-only seeking and comparing. —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 09:10, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Not as part of the standard library; see above. A custom C library for UTF-8 string processing was implemented, and Tim Starling chose not to deploy it because of certain objections to the specific design (see the Bugzilla page). That particular library provided no pattern matching functionality, as the plan was to use an existing regex library like PCRE for that. PleaseStand (talk) 09:33, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

• Letters vary as 1-2 bytes but diacritics work: When running Lua "string.sub(mydata,2)" to omit the first character of a string, I found that accented-letter characters (and other diacritics) use 2 bytes, and I had to omit the first 2 as "string.sub(mydata,3)" and start at the 3rd "letter" to remove the first accented-letter. However, that tactic is working (in October 2012), and I am able to compare the Greek or accented-letters to change to lowercase letters, one letter at a time. Note, as mentioned above, function "string.lower(mydata)" only translates plain letters to lowercase, leaving the accented letters in the string to remain uppercase, so that required extracting each character to compare values. Currently, the searches work to allow regular expressions (regex) to match accented-letters within a string, even though characters have the mix of 1-2 bytes. So, an action of a "watchdog template" could include watching for removal/addition of diacritic spellings, where the issue had reached consensus to use one format, and not re-edit a page to constantly change the accented letters. -Wikid77 14:02/17:03, 22 October 2012 (UTC)
  • It sounds like a workaround that is not consistent. To be honest, I'm not comfortable with such a solution being deployed. For example, what happens when a script fails to detect a character and offsets the remaining text by 1 byte? Suddenly you have a string of gibberish. I don't really know the specifics of this case, but I know what happens when regex/string/encoding aren't being supported/standardized. Our string templates are workarounds, because we don't have any kind of "pure" string function extension enabled afaik, which is really the way we should go. —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 17:15, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

A chopped diacritic letter affects no others: Lua modules would be used to allow rapid substring, search, compare, and string-length operations. Also, only each accented-letter, split by string.sub(mydata,2), would show a gibberish "" character, while the remainder of the text would still be readable; for example "ãfton Åhlens title 'Æther' " would lose only the first "ã" and pinpoint where the text glitch occurred, to direct efforts to fix that word. So, in actual use, all the text is handled properly because any problems are pinpointed so quickly. -Wikid77 08:20, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

• This sounds hackish. Ignoring whether it's ultimately a useful feature, why should we use templates for functionality that could presumably be migrated to MediaWiki itself? The core issue here is a "watchdog" feature. Some of that functionality may already exist through the edit filter. Improving the edit filter's capabilities would make far more sense than encapsulating huge chunks of article content in {{easily breakable watchdog templates|. {{Nihiltres|talk|edits|⚡}} 17:57, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

• Watchdog templates/modules easier to update than MediaWiki: In terms of the time-delay logistics, a template or Lua script module can be updated in minutes, or days, compared to the weeks, or months, waiting for the next release of the MediaWiki software. When watchdog scanning of article text is done by a template, then only some portions of an article would be checked, rather than all text, and also, a template could detect improper text coming through a trancluded section of text, while an edit-filter scan might just limit the restriction to text entered at the keyboard for the specific article. A watchdog template would scan all text within a designated section, even when coming from another template. For example, a watchdog template might restrict the measurement units, such as wanting "inch" rather than "centimetre" and catch that word coming from Template:Convert, whereas an edit filter might look only for the input text, with unit-code "in" for inches, and not catch the conversion which puts "centimetre" into the article text. In general, a watchdog template might warn of the spelling "-metre" in articles using American English (with spelling "-meter"), and warn the editor to change spellings before the first SAVE of the edit. Also, there could be several styles of watchdog templates, where editors could choose the style most-effective for their article sets, or switch to a different watchdog template. That allows quick updates to watchdog features, or choosing a separate watchdog style for each article section. As for breakable template markup, there are many ways to "break" an article, and saving a rumor phrase, with no watchdog warning (or category link), could be even worse. -Wikid77 08:20, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

• We shouldn't do this in wikitext. But the idea is not without merit. Tim suggested yesterday (and if memory serves me well actually suggested it before) that Lua modules might make sense for abuse/edit/tagfilters. Such a thing is not currently planned, but if anyone cares to work on it.... —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:28, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Alerts for grammar/content must be done in wikitext: There have been numerous other discussions, about methods to pre-screen "all" content outside of the wikitext format, but unfortunately, the use of direct quotations in articles requires that the rules must be selectively turned on, or off, multiple times per article, to allow exact quotations, even with misspelled words or grammar errors, to appear in text without pre-screening by edit-filters. We even have Template:sic (" ") to defend misspelled words. Each article, section-by-section, should decide what words or phrases must, or must not, be used in each part of the article. For direct quotations, almost anything is allowed, and so a watchdog template must not be used to reject quoted text from the original quotation. Another crucial point we learned from the slow cite templates: people will still edit articles even when checked for 200 non-used cite parameters in 250 citations, where the time to check for those 50,000 rare parameters was tolerated, even to wait over 20 seconds for an edit-preview of a page. Although 99% of citations can be coded using only 30 title, author, journal, volume, page, date and url parameters, the cite templates always check to allow another 200 alias parameter names. So, by comparison, the idea of waiting to search for just 50-100 specific phrases will seem "instantaneous" compared to the cite templates always checking for those 50,000 unused cite parameters in a major pop culture article. -Wikid77 12:46, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

• Watchdog for reminders not policing of text: There have been concerns that the "watchdog templates" would be used for so-called policing of text, to lock-out changes until approved by an admin or such. No, instead, the idea is that the watchdog parameters of "watch phrases" could be changed by any user, but act as reminders for what the text should, or should not, contain at that section of the article. For example, years ago, an editor reset the "landfall time" for Hurricane Katrina, as several hours different from the official reported landfall time, and naturally, even though the page was edited numerous times per day, the incorrect landfall time went "undetected" (unnoticed) for 11 days. Now, consider if a watchdog template had been set to check the landfall time, then the changed time would have generated a warning to the initial editor, in edit-preview, and an alert to all readers of the article when saved. Rather than being overlooked for 11 days, every minute the page was viewed, there would be a warning which showed that specific landfall time-of-day as "missing" from the related section. Even novice readers would see the prior time stated, as considered by the watchdog as the important text to show, rather than the adjusted time in the same section. To stop the warning, any user could either restore the landfall time, or change the watchdog text to match the new time. There would be no "policing" of text but rather, just reminding people that the important landfall text had been changed. -Wikid77 11:41, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Tell when someone is editing a page?

Per a question at Misplaced Pages talk:Page Curation#Could the tool detect if some one else is editing the article?, is there any way to program a tool to know if somebody has the edit window open for a page? Ryan Vesey 14:36, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

You could let browsers with JavaScript 'ping back' at regular intervals to some api (has some potential privacy issues) but not impossible. In theory we could do it with the toolserver and a default gadget, though doing it in core+extension would be preferred. Of course it would never provide more than an 'indication', you should never overly rely on information like this. (ppl might have JS disabled or leave the window open while they go on a vacation). —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:56, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Could the indicator disable itself if the person hadn't typed anything in five minutes, say? David1217 22:15, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

using API to get time-line of page protection status

Is it possible to use the API (or some other means) to get a time-line of page protection?

I've been told that the Protection Log is only partly reliable, since users had to record their actions "by hand" in some cases.

For example, is there a way to formulate an API query to say "give me a history of page protection actions on George W. Bush"? Do we know how far back that history goes? (e.g., I have been told that "more ancient" protections may not have been logged at all, or only manually.)

Thank you for any help you might be able to provide.

Sincerely,

Simon DeDeo Dedeo sfi (talk) 18:00, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

The old protection log wasn't created manually; the only major difference between the old logs and the new ones are that the former were placed on Misplaced Pages namespace pages by the software while the latter were not. The old protection log was created in November 2003. Older protections, back to March 2003, can be found in the history of Misplaced Pages:Lists of protected pages (then Misplaced Pages:Protected page); that page was indeed updated by hand. Graham87 07:04, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Thank you, Graham87. When (for example) the old protection log says "23:05, 15 May 2004 MykReeve protected Flag of Lithuanian SSR" is there a (automatic) way to determine whether this was move protection, or edit protection, or both? My understanding is that semi-protection was introduced on 12/2005 (which is also when the log becomes more explicit about what is happening and things become reasonably simple to work with.) Dedeo sfi (talk) 20:35, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

As far as I can tell, move-protection was introduced sometime before the end of 2004 (see the bottom of ), but there's no way of automatically identifying when it was used. --Carnildo (talk) 00:37, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Based on Wikipedia_talk:Lists_of_protected_pages/Archive_2#Protection_against_page_moves, it appears that move-protection was introduced in December 2004. jcgoble3 (talk) 01:00, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Indeed; it was introduced at the same time as the modern logs that use special pages. Both were new features of MediaWiki 1.4, which was deployed to the English Misplaced Pages on 23 December 2004 (UTC). Graham87 05:43, 24 October 2012 (UTC)         

script problems...

Hi, I am having problems with my script at User:Mdann52/common.js (Basically a dump of various scripts I've found!) The only way I've managed to do to make any of it work it to add no wiki tags to it. Any advice?? Mdann52 (talk) 19:13, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

<nowiki> tags just make the entire user JS page invalid, disabling everything. Perhaps you could instead remove all the duplicate entries, scripts that are of no use for anyone but admins, and scripts you can add as Gadgets (see diff). After doing that, install one script at a time, so that if any script causes problems, you know which one it is.

You also should not install any scripts you have no particular use for. This is especially true for the linkclassifier script, as it makes tons of non-cacheable API requests (and your installation of that script was incomplete anyway – see User:Anomie/linkclassifier).

Also, each user script you install puts you at risk for compromise of your Misplaced Pages account. As little knowledge as I have of computer hacking techniques, I know a definite way, possible partly because of the widespread use of user scripts, in which I could compromise the accounts of Misplaced Pages administrators, bureaucrats, checkusers, and oversighters in a manner that leaves little or no public evidence. However, of course I'm not going to. (Then again, can you really trust me?) PleaseStand (talk) 22:47, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

(I, for one, welcome our new javascript overlord. — Richardguk (talk) 22:55, 22 October 2012 (UTC))

My advice would be to stop making a somewhat random collection of all kinds of scripts and start trying to actually use the scripts, one by one. When you've figured out which ones you like to use you can try combining them, some are incompatible with others. I would recommend giving AWB a spin BTW. Have fun! They (talk) 22:59, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Seconded. If you don't know when you are doing, it's better to stay away from them and limit yourself to gadgets. When you do use scripts, use them one by one, slowly building your collection and try to learn a bit about the basics of JS while you are extending your usage of them. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:33, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

 Done Thanks for the advice :) Mdann52 (talk) 08:39, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Strikethrough and the digit 4: font selection issue?

In reviewing edits made today, for well publicised reasons, to List of career achievements by Lance Armstrong, I though that whoever had stricken his Grand Tour record had overlooked the 1998 Vuelta. But no: the positioning of the strikethrough and the shape of the digit 4 are such that they co-incide almost perfectly. Compare the output of <s>4</s>, 4, with 4, the unadorned digit. It is obviously an issue that will only arise very occasionally, but is there a simple solution available, like raising the strikethrough a few pixels? Could it at least be logged for raising as an issue if the default font is ever under review. Kevin McE (talk) 20:23, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Trivial and unimportant. Laughably so. There is bound to be other digits either side which will show the whole thing is struckthrough, and even if not, there should be additional text to provide explanation/context. doktorb _words 20:29, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

I've acknowledged that it is a rare issue, and your comment about context makes it evident that you haven't bothered to review the issue in situ. I merely asked whether there is a low impact solution and that it be noted as a minor issue that might be borne in mind if there is a wider review. So why the extraordinarily rude tone of your reply? Kevin McE (talk) 20:54, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

You could strike surrounding spaces like  4 , or thin spaces like  4 . PrimeHunter (talk) 20:50, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Thank you: ininitely more constructive than what preceded it. Kevin McE (talk) 20:54, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

The strikethrough position is browser-dependent; and in any case, the position of the horizontal line in the figure 4 is not consistent between fonts. Both of these can ultimately only be set at the client end, not here. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:03, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

On another point, <s> is now obsolete; you can use {{strikethrough}}, but that won't change the appearance. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  16:10, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

<s> isn't obsolete - <strike> is though. Don't know why they should be treated differently, since both were deprecated in HTML 4.01. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:36, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

"containing..." goes straight to matching page

Clicking "containing..." in the drop-down box below the search box is supposed to always give a search results page. I currently go straight to a matching page name in all five tested browsers and all tested searches, for example on "cat" in Firefox. It doesn't matter whether I'm logged in. I can only get a search results page by first making a blank or non-matching search and then use the second search box in the search page http://en.wikipedia.org/search/?search=&title=Special%3ASearch. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:23, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Yes, I can reproduce this issue. There've been some JavaScript changes to the search box recently and this may be further fallout. We'll investigate. Eloquence* 01:55, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

This issue should be fixed now. PleaseStand (talk) 06:52, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks very much for the fix, PleaseStand. :-) --Eloquence* 07:27, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Problem with "Africville" article

I do not understand why it is impossible (at least for me) to reach the history of the Africville article. When I click on that tab, I get this error message:

2012-10-23 01:32:33: Fatal exception of type MWException

This has been going on all day. I have not encountered a similar problem with any other article. Can anyone fix it?Kelisi (talk) 01:37, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

It works for me. I get the url http://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Africville&action=history. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:58, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Nope! That link still gives me the error message. What's going on? Why does it only happen with this article? Kelisi (talk) 02:01, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

After you get to that page with the error, what happens if you WP:BYPASS your cache? (essentially hard refresh the page) Chris857 (talk) 02:17, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Or what about another url like http://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Africville&offset=&limit=50&action=history? PrimeHunter (talk) 02:25, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Refreshing does no good. Using the "action-purge" parameter does no good. However, PrimeHunter's link does it. I have also just discovered that I can reach the history of the Africville article if I log out, but once I log in again, it's back to the old problem. Is it something to do with my account? Kelisi (talk) 04:31, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Have you cleared the entire cache as described in WP:BYPASS? PrimeHunter (talk) 04:51, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

I have just tried reloading, and also reloading and bypassing the cache, as laid out in the instructions for my browser (Google Chrome, by the way). Nope, the problem still persists. Kelisi (talk) 16:23, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

And now I have just tried clearing the cache, and still the problem persists. Kelisi (talk) 16:29, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

I'm not quite sure why you are getting the error. Can you view the history while logged out? what about in another browser? --Aude (talk) 08:59, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

I'm using Google Chrome and have discovered that I can reach History only if I log out. I have just tried Internet Explorer and have found that I get the same kind of error message there, until I log out, and then there's no problem. What am I to make of that? Kelisi (talk) 00:27, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Insert feature back at bottom of edit window; thanks!

Many thanks to whoever restored the insert panel (with wiki markup and lots of other useful stuff—think it's called "Edittools" or similar) at the bottom of the edit window. While I was slowly learning to live without it, having it back makes my WP life much easier. All the best, Miniapolis (talk) 02:21, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

I too am glad that it is back. However, I notice that it is slightly narrower in Chrome than the edit box and grey box below. Minor quibble, but it is back. Chris857 (talk) 02:30, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Actually, it's the editor and gray box that is too wide I believe. This has been a known issue for a while, though I can't find the ticket right now. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:41, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

• I echo the above in welcoming its return! It's been quite inconvenient editing without it. -- Ohconfucius  04:23, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

+1. Jenks24 (talk) 16:16, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Continue editing link is gone

Next the message that says "Remember that this is only a preview; your changes have not yet been saved!", there used to be a link that said "Continue editing", but it no longer appears. This was a very useful feature that was especially important in large articles – it allowed us to get to the edit box without having to scroll through all the content. Why did it disappear?

Safari 6.0.1 on OS X 10.8.2

–– Anonymouse321 (talk • contribs) 04:01, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Huh, me too. Never noticed it was gone. I've got Safari 5.1.7 on OS X 10.6.8. David1217 04:16, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

• Why is it needed? You should just scroll down to the edit box, or hit the tab to jump to the edit window, to continue editing. -- Ohconfucius  04:25, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

It's apparently supposed to come from MediaWiki:Continue-editing. I don't know why it's missing. It was removed from MediaWiki:Previewnote in . We could get it back by reverting that edit but it might suddenly cause a duplicate if MediaWiki:Continue-editing is displayed. PrimeHunter (talk) 04:29, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Fixed and expect it to be deployed later today. --Aude (talk) 12:00, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

 Fixed Looks fixed to me! Thank you –– Anonymouse321 (talk • contribs) 16:04, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

While on discussion of this feature, there is a pending change in wording of the "continue editing" link to "'Go to editing area". Of course, English Misplaced Pages can override that if wanted, but is the new, proposed wording good? Cheers. --Aude (talk) 19:29, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

1. Support – It's good to clarify what that link does. –– Anonymouse321 (talk • contribs) 20:08, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

About Template

In the Template:Finance links you would see an Eg. of a company, their if u click the "Hoover's" link you would find nothing except it says "Page Not Found". Something is wrong either we modify the url or "hoover" has to be replaced by other. I think the new page doesn't really provide enough information to bother having such links at all, and we should probably simply remove support for Hoover's from finance links entirely. Instead we should put Bloomberg Businessweek or MSN Money link in the template. Could you please do that it would be really helpful.--♥ Kkm010 ♥ ߷ _{♀ Contribs ♀} 04:36, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

"Business data" at General Electric#Video clips has an example with a currently dead link to http://www.hoovers.com//--ID__10634--/free-co-factsheet.xhtml. Here is how it once looked: http://web.archive.org/web/20070929133424/http://www.hoovers.com//--ID__10634--/free-co-factsheet.xhtml. The corresponding free page today is apparently http://www.hoovers.com/company-information/cs/company-profile.General_Electric_Company.8e594783fd3e6c6e.html. Misplaced Pages talk:WikiProject Companies would be a better place to discuss which links should be in the template. If Hoover's is kept then both the template and all calls of the template with the hoovers parameter would probably have to be changed. PrimeHunter (talk) 05:17, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

I would say "hoovers" should be removed completely, since it doesn't provide enough information about a company. And replace with either Bloomberg Businessweek or MSN Money providing correct link. As far as companies which have "business data" its not going to be a big problem, overtime hoover link shall be replaced either by bot or some other editors.--♥ Kkm010 ♥ ߷ _{♀ Contribs ♀} 10:51, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

"Cite" does not automatically insert date retrieved

When using the "cite" button, the access date is automatically filled in for "web" and "news" items, but not for "book" and "journal" items. I got so used to it being automatically filled in, that I am unwittingly omitting it when I cite a book or journal. Is there some reason for this or is it a bug? --MelanieN (talk) 10:03, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

"Access date" is only for online sources because they can go dead or change content. Books and journals are often offline and shouldn't have an access date in those cases. I guess you have disabled "Enable enhanced editing toolbar" at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing. I have it enabled and don't get an automatically filled access date for any of the citation templates but there is an icon to insert current day, except for Cite book which has no field for access date in that toolbar. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:36, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

OIC. So it's not a mistake - they meant to do it that way and it's OK. ("It's not a bug, it's a feature.") Thanks for the explanation. --MelanieN (talk) 18:29, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Improving communication between editors and "tech people"

Hi. I'm posting this as part of my job for the WMF, where I currently work on technical communications.

As you'll probably agree, communication between Misplaced Pages contributors and "tech people" (primarily MediaWiki developers, but also designers and other engineers) hasn't always been ideal. In recent years, Wikimedia employees have made efforts to become more transparent, for example by writing monthly activity reports, by providing hubs listing current activities, and by maintaining "activity pages" for each significant activity. Furthermore, the yearly engineering goals for the WMF were developed publicly, and the more granular Roadmap is updated weekly.

Now, that's all well and such, but what I'd rather like to discuss is how we can better engage in true collaboration and 2-way discussion, not just reports and announcements. It's easy to post a link to a new feature that's already been implemented, and tell users "Please provide feedback!". It's much more difficult to truly collaborate every step of the way, from the early planning to deployment.

Some "big" tech projects are lucky enough to have Oliver Keyes who can spend a lot of time discussing with local wiki communities, basically incarnating this 2-way communication channel between users and developers. The $1 million question is: how do we scale up the Oliver? We want to be able to do this for dozens of engineering projects with hundreds of wikis, in many languages, and truly collaborate to build new features together.

There are probably things in the way we do tech stuff (e.g. new software features and deployments) that drive you insane. You probably have lots of ideas about what the ideal situation should be, and how to get there: What can the developer community (staff and volunteers) do to get there? (in the short term, medium term, long term?) What can users do to get there?

I certainly don't claim to have all the answers, and I can't do a proper job to improve things without your help. So please help me help make your lives easier, and speak up.

This is intended to be a very open discussion. Unapologetic complaining is fine; suggestions are also welcome. Stock of ponies is limited. guillom 14:17, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Enable and create a process at village pump technical where, after it is vetted (as needing the tech person involved or informed) it goes to the appropriate technical person. This requires having a few folks at VPT who have the info on who to send what to. This would create the much-needed link without burying the tech folks with stuff. North8000 (talk) 14:44, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages:MediaWiki/DeveloperMemo was my attempt to better organise communication between editors and developers, back in 2009. Didn't get very far... Rd232 15:00, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

That's very interesting; I wasn't aware of such an initiative. It seems that a similar process would benefit from being tried out, to see if we could make it work, perhaps with better tools and/or more involved editors and developers. Thank you for sharing that. guillom 12:48, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Above, I started a thread. I would appreciate a reply saying who is working on it, its priority level, and when it might be fixed. That kind of communication seems like it should be normal. Biosthmors (talk) 16:42, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

In a project that is not to a large degree volunteer based perhaps. Unfortunately that is not the case. So almost all bugs are in the state of limbo until someone randomly decides to pick it up (because that's how volunteers operate). In your case, it's not even reported as a bug yet, since no community member went to bugzilla to file a bugreport. Remember, this page is an English Misplaced Pages discussion forum, not a tracking system for bugreports. This is part of the reason why I suggested we improve integration with bugzilla. That opens us up to a second problem however, that sometimes people seem to think that bug trackers are discussion forums :D —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 17:19, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Some open bugs related to this allowing bugs to be created/changed via email and MW Bugzilla integration extension. Helder 23:59, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

With the current infrastructure there isn't a whole lot anyone can do that wouldn't be completely insane or just plain not very effective. Frankly the best I can think of would be to put the stuff on meta or mww depending on what it is and then just have some way that it can be announced globally and also watched globally by anyone who wishes to be involved. A better tie together for all the projects so they stop seeming so much like random myriad sites that visiting others takes conscious effort would go a long way, and isn't there work being done on exactly that?
That said, nothing will ever get great involvement from everyone; even community-made major changes to a single small project will inevitably take at least some users by surprise... -— Isarra ༆ 16:51, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Yes, there is some work being done on better crosswiki integration, and notifications. I agree that they should improve the situation, but not only are they not available yet, but I doubt they'll be enough. There's probably room for incremental improvements and/or complementary tools or processes that we could try out in the meantime. guillom 12:48, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

• Part of the problem actually is that we have too much information. Oliver is a human filter on that. What we need is something that is good at finding the information that is relevant. Like a tech search engine that has some understanding about latests changes and is able to find relevant blog posts, bugzilla tickets and projects based on that context.
• Account integration with bugzilla (loggin in with your wikimedia account) is another small thing that probably would help. (would send replies to wikimail, not publicize your email address on bugzilla)
• Make 'tracked' an extension, put the info in a DB table and use it from bugzilla to link back to the wiki's so developers can more easily find all the wiki comments. (and again make it searchable)
• Try to find a way to do more with 'assigned'. (unassign automatically)
• For WMF issues, perhaps add a state 'scheduled' + date
• Make a stricter separation between WMF and non-WMF items in bugzilla.
• Expose the 'state' information trough the 'tracked' extension.
• Make it possible to 'watch' an issue trough the 'tracked' extension (would email user if the issue is fixed, or if new comments are posted in bugzilla)
• Create a 'simple' report a bug page. These issues are filed in a special category, and then sorted by volunteers + bugmeister into the proper component, priority, closed as duplicate etc. Will have explanation that all feedback is welcome but that we don't have the resources to get back to everyone personally. Possibly also integrateable right into the mediawiki website by use of a gadget. Could easily gather UA info, mediawiki version info etc automatically.

Will list more when I think of it. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:54, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Thank you, that's very helpful. More integration with other sites and tools is indeed a recurring theme. Other points you make particularly resonate with me, for example the separation between WMF and non-WMF items (in 2012, I wrote "Wikimedia projects and MediaWiki are separate products and they should be acknowledged as such: as a consequence, the separation between bugs in the MediaWiki software, and Wikimedia-specific operations & configuration requests should be made more explicit."). I'm going to make a list of all suggestions, and also discuss this with Andre Klapper, our new Bug management person. Hopefully, we can make progress on this front. guillom 12:48, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Allow multiple means of accessing developer/editor discussions:

• wikitech-l (and the other mailing lists) are isolated from Misplaced Pages. Subscribing and registering is a barrier to editors posting. Mailing lists are hard for casual readers to follow discussion threads; or to catch up with all new posts without having to re-read every thread or read discussions unthreaded.
  • It should be easy to create a bot that automatically cross-posts from the mailing list to a specially-created wiki project page (with autoarchiving in the normal way; though the bot would need to remove quoted paragraphs which are extensively re-posted on the mailing lists).
  • With a little extra effort, a new bot could also post editor comments on the wikipage to the mailing list, removing the barrier to editors having to sign up to a separate list and making dialogue convenient by either method.
  • All mailing lists should have RSS feeds, preferably two feeds for flexibility: with and without full content alongside the message headers.
• better still, improve RSS generally across wikis, so that editors can subscribe to summary and/or full feeds or changes to VPT and indeed any wiki page (the present watchlist RSS is a start, but does not allow subscribing to pages independenly of adding them to the watchlist, and does not provide details of the text changes).
• improve watchlist email notifications so that editors can choose between:
  • summaries (as now, but with the option for subsequent emails if there are subsequent changes before the page is viewed) and
  • the full text of any changes (diffs, as though it were a mailing list).

As mentioned previously in recent months, MediawikiWiki is a remote forum for most editors, as the watchlist is not integrated into the enwiki list. But long-term lengthy discussions should not be crowded on to a single page like en:VPT or VPP. So restrict VPT to ephemeral discussions and brief pointers to pages (on enwiki or on mw?) where bigger issues are discussed at greater length. But do also ensure that the initiator posts regular brief feedback to VPT (or site notices), at least weekly, so people do not miss out on discussions which change focus over time. (For example, I often reluctantly abandon discussions announcing test prototypes, because they are initially too buggy to comment on constructively. But it would be useful to be reminded when projects move from alpha to beta or to RC so that editors can engage in meaningful pre-implementation testing. For technical or policy proposals, it is helpful to know first whether many other editors have begun taking them seriously before commenting, as no one can take a close interest in every vague or speculative proposal.)

(I've assumed above that enwiki is the best or least-worst forum, because in practice it is by far the most active wiki. Of course, it would be better still to integrate other languages and projects, but with MediawikiWiki so isolated from most editors, enwiki is probably more useful, so that the unattainable "best" does not become the proverbial enemy of "the good". A cross-wiki watchlist would go a long way to avoiding this conflict.)

— Richardguk (talk) 17:01, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

A lot of excellent points and ideas, thank you. Centralizing or integrating discussion venues is a recurring theme, and one I also believe will be integral to successfully establishing an ongoing dialogue between editors and developers. I'll keep all your suggestions in mind when exploring options to do that. guillom 12:58, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

The problem I have with the page mw:Wikimedia Features engineering is that changes to the mentioned projects do not appear on watchlist, so I would have to watch each of the individual pages. Helder 23:59, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Perhaps this could be solved with a gadget? There's already one in place to facilitate the addition and editing of status updates for engineering activities. It seems conceivable to expand that gadget to also include a button to "Watch all projects on this page", or something similar. guillom 12:58, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

More generally, why not introduce Reddit-style in-place replies on talk pages? (The wikitext could be restricted to a simple subset, and it would ensure contributions were signed. The existing section-based method would remain available.) That would make feedback much more appealing to new editors (avoiding the need for the separate "Article Feedback" mechanism), might prevent edit conflicts, and would avoid having to load a lengthy section of wikitext when editors simply want to append or insert a brief comment. — Richardguk (talk) 17:08, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

• In my experience, pointing out things that don't work well and suggesting improvements on Village Pump (or any other Misplaced Pages forum) is a complete waste of time. Maybe there's a response or two, then in a few days the thread scrolls off into archive oblivion, with nothing done or ever likely to be done, and one might as well not have bothered. I'm not of course suggesting that all proposals can or should be implemented, or that developers have time to address every issue raised. However, it is frustrating that proposals from ordinary editors seem not to be even considered by or looked at by anyone who might have any influence in scheduling developers' work. Pages such as those at VP would provide a much more satisfying user experience if someone at least said "thanks, yes, we'll put that on the list for consideration" or something. 86.160.208.15 (talk) 17:18, 23 October 2012 (UTC)
  • I think this is true to some degree. But remember that even the official list (bugzilla) is already well over 40000 issues (with multiple feedback items) over just the last 10 years and even there developers don't have the time to keep up with everything, the amount of feedback troughout the entire community is a number in the hundreds of thousands I suspect. We need to find ways to aggregate information better automatically. As the community has a problem consuming information, so do the developers have a problem consuming the huge amounts of feedback (often duplicate) of the community. And we need to do a better job in pointing out to people that much of the website by the nature of our organization, is simply NOT under active development or maintenance. There simply aren't enough people to do the work that the community would like the developers to do. We should point out that there submission is important and will be used eventually. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 17:40, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Incidentally, I do recall in one discussion, a long time ago, that I was advised to register with that "Bugzilla" thing, but there was some suggestion that it listed people's email addresses in full plain text on publicly accessible Internet pages, which obviously is a complete no-no, so I never did. Is that still the case? Or maybe it was never the case and I got hold of the wrong story. 86.160.208.15 (talk) 20:34, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

See bugzilla:148. Helder 23:59, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Not that Gerrit is very nice, but there is bit of a barrier for ordinary people to comment on changes there... Logged out folks cannot comment and review there, nor are accounts linked with Misplaced Pages accounts so login isn't simple. The register link on gerrit goes to the Developer access page on mediawiki.org --Aude (talk) 19:37, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Gerrit is the last place we want ordinary people going (I could go into why, but suffice to say IT'S POOP). Point is, if we don't want to scare people way, we should really push for the average folks to stick to bugzilla. -— Isarra ༆ 20:19, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

That's true, and yet there's also a lot of information in gerrit, which brings us back to better integration / centralization of technical discussions; this seems to be the cornerstone of this problem. guillom 12:58, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

In my experience, pointing out things that don't work well and suggesting improvements to Oliver is simple and it works well. Have we tried cloning Oliver yet? If that is impossible, we could try to find some more people like him who can function as a human filter between the community and the devs. A lot of valuable dev-time is wasted if we don't filter the communication. They (talk) 20:14, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks to all who have already commented; there's a lot of useful information in there. Please continue to add your thoughts and spread the word about this discussion; I'm watching it with a lot of interest! guillom 14:27, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Tech help needed at another thread

Hi, at an argument is being made that saving bytes in the database (by reducing article size) is a good reason for creating dozens of templates, and shunting bits of article content into those. Though there may be other reasons for creating the tenplates in question, I think the space-saving one is nonsense (the gains, within the context of Wikipedis as a whole, being utterly minuscule and irrelevant). Assuming I'm right, it would be beneficial for someone with technical expertise to knock that idea on the head once and for all in that thread, as it doesn't seem to be going away. Also, the question was raised at that thread as to whether Misplaced Pages saves a complete copy of a page every time a change is made, even if only one byte. I have said I think it does, but again perhaps a techie person could confirm or correct that at the aforementioned thread. 86.160.208.15 (talk) 17:28, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Old wiki logo

Anybody know the coding to restore the old wiki logo?♦ Dr. ☠ Blofeld 19:09, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

If you just need it to work for one person on one computer with one browser you could do a dirty CSS hack like:

<div style="position:absolute !important; left:-170px; top:-123px; z-index:1436;"> ]</div>

Javascript is a cleaner but slower solution. They (talk) 21:48, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Or maybe you want another old logo at Misplaced Pages:Misplaced Pages logos. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:50, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

page editing problems

Advice and help are needed here regarding a page that uses dozens of (cite book) templates. Any and all help would be greatly appreciated and is urgently needed. Thanx, -- Gwillhickers (talk) 20:05, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

need some carpentry done on a table

We've been discussing a mass article merger at Misplaced Pages talk:WikiProject Lego. Participation was not what I had hoped for but I believe it was sufficient to say there is a consensus to perform the merges. What would be involved would be taking about 65 articles and merging them into one big sortable table, or possibly two or three if it seems to large for one page. I have no idea how to make sortable tables and from the looks of it neither does anyone else involved Inthe discussion. Posting here in the hope that there is somebody who can at least help us get started with doing this. any help appreciated. Thanks. Beeblebrox (talk) 20:32, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Follow the pattern shown in the example at Help:Table#Sorting. --Tagishsimon (talk) 20:36, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

"Your edit was saved" problem - yes, I saw the above discussion

Originally, I thought this was a good idea; but it's got a flaw that cripples its value. Namely, it appears constantly, even when not saving an edit.

If I navigate to any Misplaced Pages page, talk page, project page, etc, the message "Your edit was saved" appears. If I had actually been editing and had just saved something, this would be a useful confirmation. Unfortunately, it appears when I simply navigate to the pages. It also appears when navigating to "special pages" such as Special:LinkSearch, Special:Preferences or even Special:SpecialPages.

This only happens when logged-in, not when logged out. I haven't tried other browsers yet; from this PC I use Google Chrome. I can test from IE and Firefox later tonight from my other system. I am also logged-in via the secure server. Could it be some odd interaction quirk with between the new message code and some other setting or script, or is it an issue with the secure server, or with the browser being used? Is anyone else seeing this issue?

If all else fails, I may just add the code from above that disables the message. --- Barek (talk • contribs) - 20:44, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

We just deployed a fix where the feature was shown multiple times if you refreshed or went back to a page you just completed an edit on. However, I haven't heard of anyone else using Chrome get this error (myself included) on literally every page load. My first recommendation would be to clear your cache, clear your cookies, and then try logging in again (clearing your cookies completely should log you out). If you don't have cookies enabled, this may be related, so let me know. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 21:20, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

I'd still try clearing your cache and cookies, but there's a secondary issue we're seeing when it comes to detecting post-edit state. It's not particular to Chrome though. Fix is on its way shortly, if we can squeeze it in to a deployment window today. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 21:43, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks: I cleared my cache and cookies, then restarted Chrome. That seems to have resolved the issue (or maybe you already snuck in your other patch). Either way, the issue appears to be resolved now - I should have recalled to do that on my own. Thanks for the assist. --- Barek (talk • contribs) - 21:49, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Any time. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 22:05, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

I'm still having a bug where the save message displays again for me on the page I visit immediately after saving. Safari 5.1.7 running OS X 10.6.8 on a MacBook Air. David1217 22:05, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Strangely, I can reproduce the same error in Chrome using my staff account, but not in other browsers. It may be a cookie issue. There are some related fixes that will be deployed tomorrow, so I will continue testing, and check in again. Seeing duplicates like this pretty annoying, so thanks for your patience David (and anyone else watching), Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 07:52, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Okay, we deployed a new version today, so I would clear your cache again and let me know if you're still getting anything broken. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 22:37, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

It appears to be working correctly now. Thanks Steven! David1217 17:53, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

French language error messages

On this version of Femen france, the author entered references with <ref>...</ref> tags, but neglected to include a reflist. The normal error message that would occur on such a page is:

Cite error: There are <ref> tags on this page, but the references will not show without a {{Reflist}} template or <references/> tag; see the help page.

but on this page, the error was rendered as:

Erreur de référence : Des balises <ref> existent, mais aucune balise <references/> n’a été trouvée.

Why would the reference error message show up in French? WikiDan61_ReadMe!! 20:11, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Huh! The problem seems to have cleared itself up. Some glitch! WikiDan61_ReadMe!! 20:11, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

This happens when an somebody whose Preferences → User profile → language is not set to en - English makes an edit following which an error situation exists. When this happens, the non-English message is stored in the cached copy of the page, and the fix (assuming that your own language setting is English) is to either edit the page or WP:PURGE it. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:02, 23 October 2012 (UTC) amended Redrose64 (talk) 13:52, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Yup a known issue. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:27, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Apparent bug causing massive text loss when saving

{{tracked|41280}}

There appears to be a new bug that sometimes causes massive loss of text when attempting to save a page, without any apparent error on the part of the editor. See this page history and this page history for examples. This is the same problem reported above in the section titled #page editing problems. Looie496 (talk) 22:41, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

According to this discussion, there has been a Bugzilla report filed about it. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:23, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

This is a serious bug – I have seen at least 7 instances today alone in various places, including this page. –– Anonymouse321 (talk • contribs) 00:31, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

From the discussion referred to: Bugzilla:41280. — Richardguk (talk) 00:52, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

It should be fixed now and the fix deployed some ~12 hours ago. If anyone still sees anywhere that this still happens, please report it here (ideally with some details of what you were doing / how it happened). I'll be checking here. --Aude (talk) 08:32, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

@Aude#: Didn't the software previously avoid most edit conflicts by automatically merging simultaneous edits to different sections? I think there may be a more subtle ongoing regression. — Richardguk (talk) 10:34, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Hmm.... I can poke at the code more and try to figure that out. --Aude (talk) 12:22, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Here's one which occurred this morning, after Aude's message. That wasn't mine; but yesterday, whilst attempting to save this edit, I got an e/c - so I followed my usual policy in such situations:

1. copy my text to clipboard;
2. use the "back" button to return to the normal page view;
3. go for the section's link again in order to get a fresh session ID
4. paste in my text and hit "Save page"

This triggered a second e/c, so I did steps 2-4 again, and it saved. I then checked the page history to see whether somebody had been editing the same section as me, or editing the whole page - but they weren't: every edit for the previous fifteen minutes (longer than I had been typing) was to a different section. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:46, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Okay, thanks for reporting this. Looking into this now. --Aude (talk) 13:54, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Here is one just now, looks like the same issue. Was editing just the last section. Didn't click preview, if that matters. —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 17:22, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Ironically, another editor reported finding this bug, and, in so doing, almost blanked the page. Reaper Eternal (talk) 18:01, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Yea, it was this edit that I wanted to report—cyberpower _Offline 18:10, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

here is another one that happened earlier today, well after the supposed fix which Aude indicates should have happened at approximately 20:30 23 October. This one is some time after that. I didn't even know I had done this, until someone pointed it out and fixed it. --Jayron32 18:06, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks everyone for reporting and the details. I was able to reproduce this on my test wiki so hope a fix is along shortly. --Aude (talk) 18:48, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

I've found that it's not confined to logged-in users - anons do it too, see here. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:01, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

And on the main page. Resolute 20:17, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

As Redrose has said, I have noticed, upon awareness of this issue, several instances of right after IPs making an edit, an article is blanked like here. SassyLilNugget (talk) 20:21, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Here's a report at ANI. • Jesse V. 20:27, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Okay, I think this fixes it and expect it to be deployed in a few minutes. Sorry about the problem and not being able to fix it quicker. :( Cheers. --Aude (talk) 20:39, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Print Edition

I'm just wondering if a "Print Edition" could me created for some pages, as sometimes it may be helpful to have the option of printing out the information (eg the rules to a game, like Four Square http://en.wikipedia.org/Four_square) so that you take the information somewhere else, in order to put it to use? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Axeliz (talk • contribs) 23:29, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

See Help:Printable. They (talk) 23:49, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

See also the Book Creator. Now you can compile a games compendium. --Tagishsimon (talk) 00:13, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

The user also asked this question at Misplaced Pages:Help desk#Print Edition. PleaseStand (talk) 00:47, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

New mobile site design

The WMF mobile and design teams have just released some design improvements to the Misplaced Pages mobile gateway. Included in the release are a new navigation and language selection system, as well as improved typography and spacing for better readability. Check it out and let us know what you think!

You can also now opt in to the Beta mobile site, a testing ground for experimental features, directly from the mobile site settings – if you're interested in keeping up with and testing out new editor-focused features as they're built and prototyped, please sign up for the mobile Beta testing team and help us make the mobile Misplaced Pages experience better for you. Maryana (WMF) (talk) 03:36, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Search box

There seems to be something odd going on with the search box within the last week or so. I type in a search term, and one or more relevant items might appear, but when I move the cursor into it, often I get a different list. As an example, I typed "the beatles", and at first it showed items beginning with "the beatles", then it jumped to all items starting with "the be". This kind of thing happens on both home and work PC's. Any idea what's going on with this? It never used to do this. What changed in the last week or two? It started happening when the word "Search" started to appear in the search box, instead of normally being blank. ←Baseball Bugs carrots→ 04:42, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

I could not reproduce this.  Hazard-SJ  ✈  05:14, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Everything seems fine with Safari 6.0.1. What browser(s) and version(s) are you using? –– Anonymouse321 (talk • contribs) 05:28, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

IE 8, for both home and office. ←Baseball Bugs carrots→ 05:30, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

I've asked the editor Marnette, who experienced a similar problem, to come here and comment. ←Baseball Bugs carrots→ 05:33, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T43349

My search box is currently not showing any suggestions, just standard auto-complete entries.--Atlan (talk) 06:38, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Created a ticket. There have been some changes to the search drop down over the last weeks, so I guess one of those changes is tripping up IE8. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:08, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

As for my problem, it occurs in Cologne Blue skin. It always appears to me bug-fixing Cologne Blue is no more than an afterthought to the programmers.--Atlan (talk) 09:40, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

This is correct. The only truly supported skin is Vector. The monobook skin is actively maintained. The others, usually only see changes if there is feedback about problems. There is also a discussion atm to remove some of the skins, because no one ported them to the new structure (in over 7 years of time). CologneBlue was on that list, but then someone ported it. This is also the reason why you are currently seeing some of the changes in cologneblue. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:14, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Okay, thanks for the info. Should I file this problem as a bug or can I expect this to be fixed in the near future? I happen to like Cologne Blue so I'd rather not switch. :) --Atlan (talk) 11:42, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

This is belated as I have only just logged back on. After months have having anything that I typed in the search box bring up a list that kept refining itself as I continued typing - which was very useful BTW - that function completely stopped two days ago. I hope that it get restored. MarnetteD | Talk 14:49, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

• FYI, I see this glitch occasionally, and I have no customisations of any sort. 86.160.216.252 (talk) 20:08, 24 October 2012 (UTC)
• The search suggestions script used by the vector skin recently replaced the generic script used in other skins, hence why the suggestions may be acting a little differently than folks are used to, but from what I can tell it's working as intended where it's working at all (such as in monobook). That it isn't working in cologneblue is a bug, however not necessarily one with much priority to fix as the entire skin is currently undergoing an overhaul as part of a drive to remove or update all legacy skins. -— Isarra ༆ 21:20, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Update Template:Taxobox/taxonomy

Still need /sandbox installed at Template_talk:Taxobox/taxonomy. Been waiting over 2 weeks for {editprotected} of 7 October 2012. Some admin please update, or discuss there. —— The update should reduce maintenance category:

• Category:Pages_where_expansion_depth_is_exceeded - had 4,416 pages

Within an hour after updating the template, that category should have less than 4,000 pages (current live count: 4 pages). Note that some taxobox articles will still be listed in that category, due to other problems in related templates not yet fixed. Thanks. -Wikid77 11:09, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Done, and reverted. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:39, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

• Revised /sandbox as noted, so try again: I need an admin to install the changes from the /sandbox again, as I have refined the proposed change to {taxobox/taxonomy}, to handle higher taxon levels as in article "Cetacea" but without showing the extra infra-taxons.

• See {editprotected} in Template_talk:Taxobox/taxonomy.

After the update, I will check the above Category, to see how many articles are fixed by that update. Thanks. -Wikid77 (talk) 18:57, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

New image parsing functions?

I recently noticed that the images no longer parse grainy on my retina display for my iPad. Software update? It looks really good. Now we just need a higher quality Misplaced Pages logo to make retina display friendly.—cyberpower _Offline 11:26, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

You can thank Brion Vibber who added support for that. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:47, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Give him my thanks. It looks amazing. Just add a high resolution Misplaced Pages logo and we're good to go.—cyberpower _{Limited Access} 12:34, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

You're welcome. :) It still needs some more work, and as you note things like the logo still need improvement, but it's a start! We've got it partially working on the mobile site too for phones, still a bit experimental there. --brion (talk) 20:06, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Citation template reveals date and quotation marks within visibly text

The date of the citation is visible, and the title has quotation marks. Seems strange to me. Observed at: http://en.wikipedia.org/Interaction_Design_Institute_Ivrea?oldid=518846527

Markup

Its exhibition design unit (E1) was spun off to form an independent company, {{cite web|url=http://www.interactiondesign-lab.com/ |title=Interaction Design Lab |accessdate=2009-10-04}}, currently operating in Milan. Among the academic advisors of Interaction Ivrea were leading practitioners and theorists like ], ], Joy Mountford, ], ], {{cite web|url=http://www.nathan.com/ |title=Nathan Shedroff |accessdate=2009-10-04}}, ] (co-founder of ]) and ] (co-founder of ]).

Screenshot

— Preceding unsigned comment added by PutzfetzenORG (talk • contribs) 15:25, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Hi there. The problem is that you're using a template for the wrong purpose. The {{cite web}} template is used for producing formatted citations for the bottom of an article - see Misplaced Pages:Citing sources. It looks like you want to make links to external websites. That's done with square bracket syntax, like this.

Please note that links to other websites than Misplaced Pages are usually put in an "External links" section just before the end of articles, not main article text; see Misplaced Pages:Manual of Style/Layout. Please also have a look at Misplaced Pages:External links for information about what links we consider suitable to include in an article. — Hex (❝?!❞) 15:46, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Email

Using Template:You've got mail you can notify email recipients for sending them email. Is there a way to done this automatic? I mean, can i put a template in my talk page, that notify me that a/some user/s send my an email from wikipedeia? Xaris333 (talk) 15:36, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

If you want an easy way to add the {{you've got mail}} template, you can enable Twinkle in Preferences → Gadgets (click the TB link once Twinkle is installed). If you want a way for people to easily email you, you can use the {{mail}} template. David1217 21:52, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

I don't think that's what the user was asking. I think he/she was asking whether there was an onwiki system for automatically notifying users when they get new mail through the "Email this user" feature. The answer to that question is no. Graham87 08:20, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Table

Is there a way, the first column of a table to give automatic numbering; Like using tha symbol #. Xaris333 (talk) 15:44, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

No. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  01:31, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Hey, be nice. — Hex (❝?!❞) 18:48, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

• There is {autocol} to number across all columns: I recently developed a browser-independent template to generate a multiple-column table, as Template:Autocol, with or without auto-generated numbers, using the wikimarkup language, and get this: I did it without losing my sanity over the bizarre newline restrictions in templates, which work differently than newlines with inline #ifeq-structures. So, for example:

• {{autocol|one|two|three|four|five|six|ncols=3|num=y|wrap=y|n=6}}
  Result: Template:Autocol

Now, for the general case of auto-numbering just 1 column in a wikitable, we need a tiny wp:parser function as {{#set:xx|34}}, so that a parameter value can be updated inside the same page, for a row counter, by {{#set:xx: {{#expr:{{{xx}}}+1}} }} So, using a {#set:xx|...} function then the wiki-parser could generate the auto-numbered row numbers in any wikitable. Otherwise, a table must generated, with hand-coded row numbers, but skip the remaining rows when reaching a max-row-count parameter. That is how {autocol} works: the item numbers are already hand-coded inside the template, but it stops at limit n=60 (or such) and does not display the other hand-coded item numbers. That is why {autocol} is so fast; it does not even need to add-up the count numbers, it just displays the canned numbers as the hand-coded values. -Wikid77 (talk) 19:45, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Intersection of categories for medical articles needing cleanup

Hi, I'm trying to produce a list of medical articles needing cleanup, or even better a list of medical articles needing cleanup ordered by their Importance. I've looked at the Category intersection template but it's not working for me:

{{Category intersection|Medical articles in need of cleanup|Cleanup templates|WikiProject Medicine|}}

Medical articles in need of cleanup

I don't know which tool is best for this, or which specific categories to cross-reference. I remember a tool that could generate a list for the intersection of two categories but I'm not sure where to find it, or which categories will work best. Any ideas? Thanks! Ocaasi 16:12, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Ok, I found a tool that looks like it works, Magnus' of course: https://toolserver.org/~magnus/category_intersection.php. But I'm still not sure which categories to use. Ocaasi 16:15, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Also http://toolserver.org/~magnus/catscan_rewrite.php, but still not sure which categories to use. Ocaasi 16:44, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Edit conflicts with other sections, new issue

So, it appears that the issue with the edit conflict system that caused pages to be mostly deleted has been fixed; however, can someone file a new bugzilla report since it is still possible to edit conflict with another section? Ryan Vesey 19:08, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Actually, the primary issue hasn't been fixed at all. Ryan Vesey 19:17, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Reported at Bugzilla:41352, which is being tracked above (#Apparent bug causing massive text loss when saving). — Richardguk (talk) 19:38, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

• Beware ghost edit-conflicts when section not changed: During these past few days, on 4 occasions up to 23 October, I have been notified of "edit-conflict" when running a section-edit of a middle section, but the original section had not been changed by anyone. So, a re-edit with copy/paste was then able to save the section, as only one ghost edit-conflict for each page. -Wikid77 (talk) 19:52, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Global locking notice in Special:Contributions

When you view the contributions of a blocked user, you're presented with a notice that the user is blocked; see Special:Contributions/WoW for an example. However, the same is not true for users that are globally locked but not presently blocked, as you'll see if you look at Special:Contributions/Omar-Toons. Is there a way that we admins can add such a notice (presumably by having the system check the global log at Meta), or would this be something that only the developers can do? Nyttend (talk) 00:42, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

It is probably possible using Javascript, but ideally developers should do something. The pop-ups gadget sorta serves this purpose (when I mouse over the talk page or user page link for a locked user).--Jasper Deng (talk) 00:51, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

It would also be nice if a "this account is locked" notice popped up in Special:Block when attempting to block a locked account, similar to the way it does with a blocked account. Reaper Eternal (talk) 01:02, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Locked accounts should still, usually, be blocked, as locking will not trigger an autoblock of the underlying IP. MBisanz 01:11, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

It would still be helpful to see such a notice, as if an account were locked, chances are greater that it should be blocked rather than warned.--Jasper Deng (talk) 01:18, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

That makes sense. MBisanz 15:58, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Recent changes from new accounts

How long do you have to have an account before it stops showing up in the recent changes counter from new accounts? My account was created about a month ago and has plenty of edits (therefore is auto-confirmed), but it still shows my edits at the "User contributions for new accounts" special page. –– Anonymouse321 (talk • contribs) 07:16, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Taking a quick look at the code, it appears that the "newbie" contribs looks for contributions by the most recent 1% of accounts created. There's also a special check to exclude bots after taking the 1%. Since we have 48,453,756 registered users, the most recent 484,538 (that's anyone with a "User ID" over 47969218) are considered "newbies" for the purposes of Special:Contributions. Anomie⚔ 13:39, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

BTW, for you personally, you'll stop showing up there once we hit 17,766,793 accounts. Anomie⚔ 13:46, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Wow, that's an interesting way of determining what a new contributor is, but I guess that's the way it is! Thank you So I guess it has nothing to to with your edits/rights. –– Anonymouse321 (talk • contribs) 15:08, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

PDF writer

As an IP has discovered in Oceania, a map on the page causes a huge error when rendering as a pdf. Is there a way to make it pdf friendly, or exclude it from the pdf rendering? I've added it back in for now, as I think web utility trumps pdf utility, but it's not an ideal solution. CMD (talk) 10:32, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

I have added the template that includes this map to Category:Exclude in print, which specifically marks a template such that it is not included in PDF printing. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:49, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Works great, cheers! Much appreciated. CMD (talk) 15:07, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Allowing "view source" tabs for individual sections

Well, if we can have separate edit tabs for sections in articles, then why can't we do the same for "view source?" Let's say if an IP wants to view the source of a section of Barack Obama, rather than clicking "view source" at the top and scrolling down to the section, he can just simply click a "view source" tab at the section heading. Would this be a good idea? Narutolovehinata5 13:14, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

This is technically feasible: for instance, at the section "2010 midterm election", the edit link for registered users is edit. If an unregistered user were to use exactly the same URL, they will get the same section but in "View source" mode - it's headed "View source for Barack Obama", and they see the normal messages (MediaWiki:protectedpagetext, MediaWiki:viewsourcetext etc.) that unconfirmed users see when viewing the whole page source; also, the "Save page" buttons, etc. are absent. So all that's missing are the links at the top of the sections. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:53, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Watchlist show/hide concept change...

The "hide/show" on the Watchlist headbox(?) doesn't seem to do what I would expect it to. For example, if I have the help desk in my watch list and the last non-ip edit occurred and 11:00 and the last ip edit occurred at 11:05, I would expect that clicking "Hide Anonymous Users" would keep the help desk in my watchlist, marked as 11:00 with the non-ip editor's information as if the ip edit did not exist. Instead, it completely removes the Help Desk from what is displayed.

I'm curious as to whether other editors would prefer that the hide/show would work the other way, whether it is technically feasible to do so as a general change and whether it would be possible to have that as a tool/javascript/preference?Naraht (talk) 15:08, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

This is Template:Bug; the big problem there seems to be that the people who are "in charge" of database stuff don't seem to have ever commented on whether the proposals there are efficient enough to be implemented.

Note that you can somewhat emulate this now with the "Expand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent" preference under Watchlist. And if someone really wants, they could write a user script to remove all but the first instance of a page; or you could just use the "Group changes by page in recent changes and watchlist (requires JavaScript)" preference under Recent changes. Anomie⚔ 16:28, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Good to know that there are other people who think the same way that I do, bad that it hasn't been sorted out yet... I did take your advice and try to emulate it in that way, but I think I'll stay with the other way for now.Naraht (talk) 18:04, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

There is a great gadget/script available that does this and more. I forget where it lives but someone with the knowledge will be along shortly. Rich Farmbrough, 21:36, 25 October 2012 (UTC).

New banner

Is Misplaced Pages really going to beg me for five bucks on every page? --Bongwarrior (talk) 21:05, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

I'm also finding the banner annoying. I have to click to close it on every page. Can't it please remain closed once I click the X on it once? Calathan (talk) 21:08, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Yes, there needs to be some way of disabling it once it is viewed. As it is, the need to constantly close it is seriously discouraging me from working on Misplaced Pages until it is fixed. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:12, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Agreed. I just donated and it's still bugging me... That's seriously flawed. Biosthmors (talk) 21:13, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

If I could navigate the upload pages I would show a screen dump of the mess it makes in Opera. How do I make it go away? Mr Stephen (talk) 21:21, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict) There is also a display problem with it in Monobook in that it completely covers or hides the toolbar and it makes the tabs above the page disappear. (I know I can click the x to fix this, but whatever is causing it to do this should be fixed as well.) This problem is happening in multiple browsers (IE9 and Opera 12.02). (screenshot of the display problem) - Purplewowies (talk) 21:26, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

• Has the "Suppress display of the fundraiser banner" gadget stopped working? --illythr (talk) 21:24, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict) There are at least two different banners. One of them (blue background, no mugshot, text in three columns "Misplaced Pages is non-profit, but it's the #5 website in the world. With 450 million monthly users, we have the same costs as any top site: servers, power, rent, programs, staff and legal help. To protect our independence, we'll never run ads. We take no government funds. We run on donations: £5 is the most common, the average is about £20. If everyone reading this gave £5, our fundraiser would be done within an hour. Please help us forget fundraising and get back to Misplaced Pages.") is buggy in Firefox/Monobook skin: it extends all the way to the left; and although it displaces the page content (that part enclosed by <div id="content" class="mw-body-primary">) and the left-margin menu (from "navigation" on) downwards, the puzzleball and the tabs are not moved downward at all - so they also obscure some text. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:24, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Preferences → Gadgets→"Suppress display of the fundraiser banner" for anyone who doesn't know. Ryan Vesey 21:28, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

I take it someone is looking into the problem of them appearing on every new page seen? Getting questions in many places about the frequency of these pop-up's. Moxy (talk) 21:30, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

It should stay away once it is cleared. This thing of reappearing in their face with every new page is going to piss off people to the point of reducing donations. North8000 (talk) 21:28, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

One of the most annoying things I've seen on the web in a long, long time. :( - TexasAndroid (talk) 21:29, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Okay, I'm gonna go do something else other than WP. As a Wikignome who makes lots and lots of little edits, this is an annoyance bordering on unusability. :( - TexasAndroid (talk) 21:32, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

• Agreed, this is an atrocity, showing no signs of having been tested on real user experience. Nobody wants this kind of pestering. Ever. The sort of thing that can kill a project stone dead. AllyD (talk) 21:33, 25 October 2012 (UTC)
  • Gee, that might be a slight overreaction. Ed  07:43, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

This was an accident, someone deployed changes to the website, while at the same time someone was in the progress of reverting some changes to CentralNotice. This caused a broken version of CentralNotice to be deployed. It's being taken care of as we speak. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:37, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

• Hi all, I'm very sorry for the banner mixup on Thursday. That was a mistake, logged in users were not supposed to see the banners at all. Fundraising banners are supposed to stay closed once you click the close button and we've worked on correcting those errors. Thanks for your understanding and sorry again for the confusion and annoyance. Meganhernandez (talk) 20:42, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Fund-raising

Not all is as it should be in the land of Misplaced Pages. Rich Farmbrough, 21:31, 25 October 2012 (UTC).

Hi Rich, sorry about that. We had some code that wasn't ready to be deployed sitting in the deploy queue -- we were preparing to remove it from the queue when operations did a sync operation which pushed the code. We've disabled all banners until the old/working code can be redeployed. Thing should be back to normal soon. Thanks for letting us know! Jvandavier (talk) 21:39, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

• Thanks for the screengrab Rich - this is exactly what I was describing at #New banner above. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:55, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

No CSS

Most of the time what I see is the text without any formatting as in the screenshot. It then disappears after a few moments. Helder 13:37, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

I just saw it again on ptwiki. The banner is in a div whose id="B12_JimmyBlank", which seems to be defined on Meta (where it is not shown either). BTW: do we really need to create three <style type="text/css"></style> tags inside of the centralNotice div? IE users may have problems because of this. Helder 21:35, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

What happened in the last hour? (October 25/26, 2012)

I've been off-line for about an hour. When I left, everything was as it should be. Now all Gadgets are gone - Toolbars, everything. My Sandbox and who knows what else is not showing at the top of the page. The only thing available under Preferences is my login information. Tabs on articles are missing. Can I assume this is something being worked on, or was it some change that went into effect? — Maile (talk) 21:27, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Discovering more. On navboxes, the collapsed state is no longer working. In the Search bar, it no longer returns any results at all. — Maile (talk) 21:36, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

See if a hard refresh fixes it; the cause appears to have been reverted. -— Isarra ༆ 21:39, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Doesn't do a thing for me. Neither does logging off and then back on. Neither does closing down my browser completely and re-opening. — Maile (talk) 21:43, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Could try enabling the gadget mentioned in the section above, I dunno. Wish I had real answers. -— Isarra ༆ 22:23, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

This seems like an issue that is completely separate from what everybody else was experiencing. Can you upload a screenshot? Have you attempted using Misplaced Pages from another browser? Ryan Vesey 22:28, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

I don't know anything about how to upload a screenshot. And while I understand why you're asking, the multiple issues would take multiple screen shots. But I do believe you might have hit on something. I opened Misplaced Pages in Opera, and it seemed normal. Bear in mind that I have no issues of any kind on any other website. It is strictly Misplaced Pages. Even Commons looks like its normal self to me. Wikisource looks normal. Only Misplaced Pages. I'm using Firefox 16.0.1, but have been for a while. I don't know if the server makes any difference: Served by mw55. I'm accessing Commons by srv247. Opera is accessing Misplaced Pages on a different server mw52. So, this looks like it might be more server-related. — Maile (talk) 22:57, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

@Maile66: at Misplaced Pages:Village pump (technical)/Archive 103#Edit summary and Subject/headline funkiness I described how to create and upload a screenshot (search for "here's how I did some of my screenshots"). --Redrose64 (talk) 10:09, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Well, I use IE, and my editing window has changed two hours or so ago: the tool bar with special characters such as en dash, em dash and tilde has disappeared, and the script I had installed is gone, too. What the heck happened? And is this even the right place to report such things? – ὁ οἶστρος (talk) 23:19, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

This is the right place. And thank you for posting here, so we can at least know it's not just my browser, not just my account. — Maile (talk) 00:09, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

I use the navigation popups gadget, the gadget for the UTC clock and purge link at the top right of the page, and the gadget for an link for the lead sections of articles. Neither the navigation popups nor the UTC clock are showing up. The lead section link is showing up, however. I've tried disabling these gadgets, bypassing the Internet Explorer browser cache (Ctrl key + Refresh button in browser), and reenabling, as well as just purging an article I have been reading, to no avail. —{|Retro00064|☎talk|✍contribs|} 01:21, 26 October 2012 (UTC).

I have resolved it on my browser. For some reason, NoScript began seeing the English Misplaced Pages (and only that one) as potentially harmful and started blocking it. Once I changed the settings, everything corrected. — Maile (talk) 01:24, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Clarification. NoScript add-on belongs in Firefox. Not aplicable in Internet Explorer. Poeticbent talk 16:11, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

I use Internet Explorer 8. I often browse with InPrivate Filtering on to block ads, but even with that turned off (as it is at the moment) the gadgets are still not working for me.

Internet Explorer does report errors on pages here on Misplaced Pages. See the below copied report. The "Object doesn't support this property or method" error references the navigation popups JS file and appears to occur every time I move the cursor over a link (which would normally cause a navigation popup to appear), causing the exact same error to occur multiple times in the error report. The below report is one where that error appears only once (because I had not moved my cursor over multiple links when I copied the report).

Webpage error details
User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/4.0; GTB7.4; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media Center PC 5.0; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; .NET4.0C)
Timestamp: Fri, 26 Oct 2012 02:13:02 UTC
Message: Expected identifier
Line: 2
Char: 804
Code: 0
URI: http://bits.wikimedia.org/en.wikipedia.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=en&modules=ext.EventLogging%2CUserBuckets%2CmarkAsHelpful%2CpostEdit%7Cext.Experiments.experiments%2Clib%7Cext.articleFeedback.startup%7Cext.articleFeedbackv5.startup%7Cext.gadget.DRN-wizard%2CNavigation_popups%2CReferenceTooltips%2CUTCLiveClock%2Ccharinsert%2Cteahouse%7Cjquery.articleFeedbackv5.verify%7Cjquery.autoEllipsis%2CcheckboxShiftClick%2CclickTracking%2Chidpi%2ChighlightText%2Cjson%2CmakeCollapsible%2Cmw-jump%2Cplaceholder%2Csuggestions%7Cmediawiki.api%2Chidpi%2CsearchSuggest%2Cuser%7Cmediawiki.api.watch%7Cmediawiki.page.ready%7Cmediawiki.page.watch.ajax%7Cmobile.desktop&skin=monobook&version=20121025T221751Z&*
Message: Object doesn't support this property or method
Line: 1163
Char: 2
Code: 0
URI: http://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=MediaWiki:Gadget-popups.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript&518697159

—{|Retro00064|☎talk|✍contribs|} 02:28, 26 October 2012 (UTC).

In spite of my having re-set the NoScript yesterday, this morning it was once again seeing the English Misplaced Pages as harmful and was blocking it. I have once again adjusted the settings. Within NoScript options, there is a "white list" of what sites can be permanently alllowed. It's on that list that Misplaced Pages - and only Misplaced Pages - keeps being removed when I go offline. Nothing on that list should be coming off without my manually taking it off. This seems to have popped up at the same time as the above-mentioned "New Banner". Too much of a coincidence. I've always had banner ads blocked, so I don't see the ad. But I would bet that something Wikimedia did to send out that "New Banner" is the same thing that keeps meddling in our scripts to mess us up. — Maile (talk) 11:10, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Things seem to have gone back to close to normal on my side: script link has re-appeared and a similar editing tool bar has also shown up. Dunno, might be possible to change the latter to what it was via the editing options ("My preferences" is still crippled by missing tabs, by the way), but badly labeled, confusing and convoluted as they always have been, I don't feel like noodling around there at the moment – especially not, if I can't be sure things won't be suddenly and arbitrarily reset without warning again by the Wikipeda powers-that-be.

By the way, they let us know of all kinds of Misplaced Pages-related activities and initiatives via text boxes forced atop of pages, why do they not also announce in advance impending highly disruptive changes to the user interface and their exact nature (i.e., what's gonna change and how to get back to how it was if one prefers that)? – ὁ οἶστρος (talk) 13:38, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Sometimes they do --Redrose64 (talk) 13:56, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

See also thread below at Misplaced Pages:Village pump (technical)#What's going on? Pop-ups dead (October 26, 2012) for more reports. Poeticbent talk 15:25, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

So...what can be done to get me my clock back? I'm not interested in being told to abandon IE8. Nyttend (talk) 18:06, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

What's up with the horrible diff display?

Is this another software bug? It seems unable to indicate properly a simple line insertion or deletion, e.g. It causes people to revert, almost blindly. Tijfo098 (talk) 21:40, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

You inserted a line-break as part of your additions, so it's showing the removal of some content from one line and its insertion on the next. - Jarry1250  22:06, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

...But the diffs are displaying oddly, at least for me (I'm using the old diff view gadget). I remember there being spaces between some of the lines where there are none now. - Purplewowies (talk) 22:43, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

• Split paragraphs or newline breaks in reftag footnotes: Misplaced Pages's pattern for comparing diffs relies on matching the newlines, so try to have more newlines, as shorter paragraphs or splitting reftag footnotes to have newlines inside. Otherwise, those large, massive globs of text are difficult to compare, sort of like that literary trend to have paragraphs with one sentence spanning an entire page. Instead, keep sentences limited to 4 prepositions, and seek shorter paragraphs. For easier comparison, use a separate edit to split the long paragraphs or reftag footnotes, then the next edit can be used to add/change text, with easier side-by-side diff views. -Wikid77 (talk) 12:01, 26 October 2012 (UTC)
• The problem of the diff display flagging huge chunks of an article as having changed when they are identical has been around for as long as I can remember. Every time I can be bothered, which is probably about three times in eight years, I complain about this on some random Misplaced Pages page. Nothing is ever fixed. 86.177.108.63 (talk) 17:47, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Show changes when editing old revisions

Apologies if this has been mentioned somewhere else. It seems like "show changes" no longer works properly when editing an old version of an article, for about the past week or so. It now calculates the changes based on the old revision that I've selected, not based on the current version of the article as it should. For example, I made this edit by saving an older revision without making any other changes, but "show changes" showed me nothing at the time. Thanks. --Bongwarrior (talk) 22:39, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Although I requested a way to get a diff against an old revision of a page (on bugzilla:41307, two days ago), that request didn't receive any comment so far, so I don't think this is someone trying to implement it (which probably should be made by some extra button, or preference, or as in the User:Js/ajaxPreview, which requires you to use SHIFT to get this behavior). Helder 01:00, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

It appears to have been broken in the big ContentHandler merge. Anomie⚔ 01:29, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

watchlist bug

I've had a feature on my watchlist which allows a collapsable tree-view, with changes grouped by article and a little toggle to show hide the edit for a page. Upto an hour ago this worked fine, but its stopped now. I think it was a preference or gadget but I can't see anything which corresponds (I do have Expand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent checked).

Looking at my error console I'm getting

Exception thrown by ext.articleFeedbackv5.watchlist: Object has no method 'stall'

which might be the cause. I've tried this on chrome/safari on OSX.--Salix (talk): 23:28, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

I have the same WP settings on Firefox 16.0.1/Vista, and when I loaded my watchlist a few minutes ago, everything worked fine except the groups didn't collapse. A simple reload fixed it. jcgoble3 (talk) 00:28, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Back to normal now and the Exception is no longer thrown.--Salix (talk): 00:31, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

What's going on? Pop-ups dead (October 26, 2012)

Last time I came to mention what seemed like a glitch I found that the change had been intentional. I wonder whether I'll be similarly dismayed this time. I found three glitches tody.

• Pop-up seem to be dead.
• The edit tool box down the bottom has gone to "copy and paste" mode.
• The link to my sandbox has disappeared.

What's going on? JIMp _talk·cont 03:03, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Is this the same thing as #What happened in the last hour? (October 25/26, 2012) above? jcgoble3 (talk) 03:18, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

It seems to be, thanks. JIMp _talk·cont 04:59, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Pop-ups are absolutely not working. I've done various troubleshooting routines to no avail. Rivertorch (talk) 08:26, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Same here. No pop-ups, since yesterday. And NO Edit toolbar. I thought, it was my computer. Now I know it wasn't. Poeticbent talk 15:18, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Ditto I was using IE8 at the time. Swap to Firefox 16, no problems. NtheP (talk) 16:20, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

My wild guess is that this is related to https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=41428 which was already fixed in the codebase and only affects Internet Explorer. --Malyacko (talk) 11:53, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

How do ratings work?

Why don't the ratings follow standard arithmetic? I rated an article that I thought was poorly written as a 2. Apparently all the other raters think the article is a stellar example of clarity, since 50 ratings had averaged to 5. Okeh, no problem there. How-ever, when I re-checked the average, it was 3.5. I don't understand how this can be. Sure, I think my rating is better than the fives, but it should have had only minimal influence: (250+2)/51 = 4.9+ . What gives?Kdammers (talk) 07:51, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Try asking at Misplaced Pages:Article feedback. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  13:08, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

I don't understand. I went to that link, but it's just a general discussion. When I went to some articles to see if "Article feedback" could be found there, I didn't see any-thing like that at all.Kdammers (talk) 05:09, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Tool requests

Where is the best place to request additional tools to be written? In need of a few functions similar to what CatScan and Image checker can do to help with clean-up tasks.--Traveler100 (talk) 11:55, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Need to slow down on interface changes

The current chaos caused by rampant changes to the display and edit-interface of Misplaced Pages pages seems to be out-of-control. I think it is time to slow down all these massive changes. There have been complaints about missing "gadgets" and "popups", and meanwhile, I do not even have the title on some pages with monobook skin in Internet Explorer. Let me say that again, for clarity:

• Sometimes Misplaced Pages drops the title off the top of some pages.

So, after a redirect, I resort to hovering on the "edit-page" link to see what the page name shows as the probable page title in the URL. Anyway, please slow down on all the massive changes, stop creating all those Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) sub-classes and sub-sub-sub-sub-classes. Instead, please pre-test the proposed changes to the interface for 2 weeks (or such), and start merging and deleting those CSS sub-sub-sub-classes and return to simple formatted text with simple visible attributes in the span-tags or div-tags, rather than one of 87,000 million CSS classes. The system is far too complex to have hourly updates of everything, so tests should be carefully run, for weeks, with each of the major skins, to ensure compatibility. The tactic of using operational increments to continuously improve the system is a good idea, but must have fuller integration testing with prior system features. Of course, I am just saying all this to reaffirm common sense. Some day, I even want the title to display on every page. -Wikid77 (talk) 12:35, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Gotta second that. Today I have all the problems listed in section #What's going on? Pop-ups dead (October 26, 2012) not far up form here, and the search box fails to drop down with suggestions. The missing popups and search suggestions are especially trouble. The new layout below the edit box looks nice, but it doesn't justify all the trouble we've been having ever since it was rolled out. More stability, please. --Stfg (talk) 15:35, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

To my knowledge they're not linked at all. Are you guys on IE8, by any chance? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 16:16, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

I'm on IE8, yes. Popups and the dropdown are working again now. These two arose very recently -- they were working 24 hours ago, but the one about "The edit tool box down the bottom has gone to 'copy and paste' mode" has been going on randomly for about a month. IIRC you mentioned at the time that it was known and being examined. --Stfg (talk) 17:23, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

P.S. the "my sandbox" link has reappeared too. Thanks muchly to whoever solved these. --Stfg (talk) 17:25, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

I had disappearing page titles in IE6 (spit) earlier today, fwiw. But very happy with a very frequent release cycle, living in hope that regression testing and maybe A/B testing improves, but on balance willing to live with glitches for the sake of change. --Tagishsimon (talk) 17:28, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Broken rendering of 'x' in math tags

Noticed on Sinc function, <math>x</math> seems not to be working: it gives an 'Invalid URL' error if you load the image in a new browser window, though the URL looks fine. Compare the three following trivial and near identical math expressions; the first and only the first is broken for me:

• <math>x</math>: ${\displaystyle x}$
• <math>y</math>: ${\displaystyle y}$
• <math>z</math>: ${\displaystyle z}$

--JohnBlackburne_deeds 12:33, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Everything looks normal for me. The URL for X here: https://upload.wikimedia.org/math/9/d/d/9dd4e461268c8034f5c8564e155c67a6.png HumphreyW (talk) 12:48, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Seems fixed now for me too now. Very odd (I'm not using the secure server but it's fixed anyway).--JohnBlackburne_deeds 12:54, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

There area apparently some misconfigured nodes. Depending on luck, when I edited math today sometime I got a big red message about texvc not installed. Retrying the edit randomly picked another server box and it worked. It happened twice in twenty edits or so. Tijfo098 (talk) 21:39, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Hotcats stopped working ?

Misplaced Pages:Hotcats has stopped working for me; it's still set in my preferences and I'm using IE8, is it just me? Thanks GrahamHardy (talk) 14:24, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Possibly due to bugzilla:41428. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:54, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Indeed. Quick update that Engineering is on it - hopefully I'll hear something soon. When I do, this is the first place I'm coming to. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 16:15, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Is this the same bug that's preventing pop-ups from working? If so, it's definitely not limited to IE (I'm using Safari). Whatever the cause, going through my watchlist without pop-ups is sort of like doing 20-digit long division without a calculator—extraordinarily laborious and prone to errors. If there's any chance this is due to the new "page saved" message (or whatever it says), I suggest just turning that off; it's such a light gray and disappears so quickly that it vanishes by the time I even notice it's there. Rivertorch (talk) 16:24, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Added: Pop-ups appear to be working again. Yay. Just as I'm about to log out. A huge wet sloppy bucketful of WikiLove to whoever made the fix. Rivertorch (talk) 17:05, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Indeed; tis now fixed :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:39, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

All pop-ups are back to normal, thanks guys. Poeticbent talk 17:58, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Great to hear! I'll pass everyone's thanks on to the responsible dev :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 20:39, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Change the name of a tab

Is there any way I can use CSS or something to change the name of the page history tab from "View history" to just "History"? On my iPad, sometimes the tabs run out of space and collapse in so you can't click on them. I want to make the tab names shorter to avoid this problem. Thanks, David1217 17:09, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Not possible in CSS, but check the small CompactTabs script on my user page that shortens all tab names. — Edokter (talk) — 19:35, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Ugh, not more JavaScript. Oh well, the script works, so thanks Edokter. David1217 20:24, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

"Possible" in css via dirty dirty trickery:

 #ca-history.collapsible span {overflow:hidden;position:relative;} #ca-history.collapsible span a {position:relative;left:-3em;width:3em;}

--Splarka (rant) 15:12, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Depending if the browser supports it (it should, these days), you can also do

 #ca-history a { content:'History'; }

but that's just wrong on many levels. -— Isarra ༆ 03:44, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Tooltips on references

If I point at a reference number (one of the superscript blue numbers in square brackets), a tooltip appears with the content of the note. Just as it has for the last few weeks. But now the tooltip does not disappear I point elsewhere. So if I move the mouse around the page, much of it gets covered with tooltips, and I cannot read the article. How do I make them disappear? I am using IE8. JonH (talk) 18:12, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Probably just another problem that a recent update caused for us IE8 users. I've had a bunch of features disappear, as well. See the threads up above, such as "What happened in the last hour? (October 25/26, 2012)". Nyttend (talk) 20:47, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

New pages

Is there a way to find the new pages of a specific day? For example the new pages created on 4th March 2011? Xaris333 (talk) 18:23, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Pages created in the last month are listed at Special:NewPages; but page creations are not permanently logged, otherwise it would be a simple matter to filter Special:Log. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:57, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Thx!! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Xaris333 (talk • contribs) 20:20, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Is there a particular day you want? 67.119.3.105 (talk) 22:14, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

4th March 2011 Xaris333 (talk) 23:41, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Special:ArticleFeedbackv5

I thought that there was a recent announcement telling us that admins could permanently delete abusive comments. Did I remember wrongly? I've just found one (2.125.111.139 on Help:Page History), but all I could figure out was how to hide it, and it's un-hideable. Nyttend (talk) 20:50, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

The recent announcement was about Special:FeedbackDashboard. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 21:08, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

fatal exception

I'm trying to save an edit on Functional programming and am getting the error message

2012-10-26 21:10:42: Fatal exception of type UsageException

Someone else was getting a similar error further up. The hex number changes across different attempts to save. Something is broken...

67.119.3.105 (talk) 21:11, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Filing a bug report (see https://www.mediawiki.org/How_to_report_a_bug ) in bugzilla.wikimedia.org with good steps and info is welcome. --Malyacko (talk) 11:55, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

"My sandbox" in my user toolbar

I updated my preferences just now. There is an option to enable "My sandbox" in my personal toolbar at the top of the page. I believe this was new since I last updated the preferences, because it just suddenly appeared in the toolbar one day, and I left it enabled. My problem is this: the sandbox defaults to /sandbox, whereas I already had an entire sandbox tree set up at /Sandbox. I don't see anything where I can change the default location, so that I could click on "My sandbox" and it would take me to my actual sandbox, as opposed to the "other" sandbox. Or am I to gather from this that the capitalization is discouraged and I should go about renaming all of those pages? RadioKAOS  – Talk to me, Billy 00:14, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

It's optional what to call your sandboxes. Help:My sandbox shows a way to make a link to /Sandbox. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:31, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

If I were you, I'd just redirect the /sandbox to your /Sandbox. Ryan Vesey 00:33, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

"My sandbox" is an edit link so it would still edit the redirect at /sandbox. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:59, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

You could move the page from "/Sandbox" to "/sandbox". –– Anonymouse321 (talk • contribs) 01:03, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

A page move should do it. This feature was added to the gadgets list on 15 February 2012 and was switched on for all users right from the start.

Regarding capitalisation: most templates have a documentation subpage; and many also have a sandbox subpage. The /doc page will automatically link to the /sandbox (see, for example, the second line of the second green box at Template:Cl) provided that it is lowercase - any /Sandbox is ignored. I expect that the choice of lowercase Special:MyPage/sandbox was for consistency with the templates. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:58, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Force update of articles in a category

A little challenge with the administration of clean-up pages. I am looking at editing an article clean-up template so that it checks if the article has a talk page or not. If there is no talk page it will add the article to a maintenance category. It is working how I would expect it to work but not exactly how I want it to. If you add the template to the article page and there is no talk page it is added to the category. If you then create the missing talk page the template output on the article page will update by simply refreshing the page. However the article will not be removed from the category until you force an update to the article by editing it. Is there another way to force an update of the article so that the category correctly reflects the status of the talk page without editing the article page? --Traveler100 (talk) 11:46, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

You can wait some time, usually a few hours. Ruslik_Zero 11:57, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Not sure this will happen as purge does not update categories.--Traveler100 (talk) 16:42, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

I know this technically involves editing the article, but a Null edit will do the trick. Graham87 13:51, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Would work on a single page but really want to do it on all the pages in a category (about 400). Could null edit the template but as over 170,000 articles use it. This would not make me popular. --Traveler100 (talk) 16:42, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

The job queue should handle it. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:33, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

I'd say do this on toolserver rather than adding another template. 67.119.3.105 (talk) 19:26, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

That was my first preference, this solution is second choice. I have asked for a tool to list all articles in a category that have no talk page in a number of locations (does not appear to be an official location), but no one has come forward to help. Anyone willing to assist or explain how I can create such a tool? --Traveler100 (talk) 19:30, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

There is a template (and image cache, etc) update routine through the API, see also Misplaced Pages:Bots/Requests for approval/Joe's Null Bot. mabdul 20:03, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, but I was think more along the line of a tool something like Image checker or CatScan that could be places as a link in the category page and dynamically check which do not have a talk page.--Traveler100 (talk) 20:20, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Is there a particular category for which you want this? If the number of categories and articles is not too large, then yeah, an API client would be straightforward. Otherwise you'd be better off running SQL queries on toolserver. (I don't know if this is the right place to ask for someone else to write a toolserver script, if you're not up to doing it yourself).

Why do you want it anyway? I've never understood why some editors consider it important that every article have a nonempty talk page, if there hasn't been any active discussion. Talk page page tabs used to be redlinked all the time, and a bluelink in the tab meant there was some possibly-relevant discussion there. If the link was red you knew there was no discussion so there was no need to cick it. Now the bluelink doesn't mean anything (because talk pages often have wikiproject templates with no discussion) and you have to actually click the link and wait for the page to load, to find out if any discussion has taken place. 67.119.3.105 (talk) 20:31, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

I am look for a way to easily list articles in a category that do not have talk pages as part of a collection of techniques to reduce the very large backlog of articles needing clean-up. In particular I am looking at orphaned pages. With over 170,000 it is a task not possible for a small group of people to address, the task needs to be distributed though-out the Misplaced Pages community. If you look at a recent month of tagged Orphaned articles 30% of the articles do not belong to a WikiProject or even have a Talk page. Here is a snapshot from a couple of days ago that took some time to manually build. The idea is to easily identify these pages then add a WikiProject to them, this will bring the articles to attention of subject experts who hopefully can better address the clean-up requests. --Traveler100 (talk) 04:41, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

You can request Toolserver queries through its query service. Graham87 08:10, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

• The way to fix a list of articles is to submit them as an active list of articles to fix by people who actively fix articles, not create a WikiProject-tagged talk-page for each one: If the goal is to truly fix a set of articles, then those articles should be edited, rather than creating and tagging their talk-pages. If a WikiProject should be involved, then write a note to the WikiProject members who actively edit those types of articles, and either link to a category of pages, or just list all the pages to be edited for improvement. Just putting notes in a talk-page can have little impact, for years and years. -Wikid77 (talk) 15:35, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

Fatal exception of type UsageException

I just temporarily created Talk:Internet Archive/FatalException after getting repeated error messages when trying to save Internet Archive. The messages were all of the form:

2012-10-28 03:08:51: Fatal exception of type UsageException

2012-10-28 03:10:59: Fatal exception of type UsageException

2012-10-28 03:16:12: Fatal exception of type UsageException

I may have to try to submit my changes in piecemeal fashion, but I thought I'd ask about the error first. Obviously, there are a lot more checks going on when an edit is submitted to article space than to talk space, more so when they are submitted by an IP editor, so I assume there's a problem with one of those checks. 72.244.206.55 (talk) 03:25, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

I thought that with 2400+ page watchers I might be able to get some advice or help with this. Since I didn't, I worked around the problem. 72.244.206.55 (talk) 05:43, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

This sort of error seems to only originate from within the API, so I can't understand why it would be appearing from normal editing. It looks very strongly to be the fault of an extension, although that still doesn't really solve any problems.

Is the error only occurring when editing long pages? When editing a section? When making substantial changes? Does it appear in your web browser as plain text, or within a normal Misplaced Pages interface with logo/sidebar/tabs etc?

Perhaps jump on IRC #wikimedia-tech next time this happens. — This, that, and the other (talk) 06:51, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

Same as I wrote above under "fatal exception": Filing a bug report (see https://www.mediawiki.org/How_to_report_a_bug ) in bugzilla.wikimedia.org with good steps and info is welcome. --Malyacko (talk) 11:56, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Unicode displays as blanks

Don't know what am doing wrong. Unicode displays as blanks, e.g., at Knight (chess), the first sentence: "The knight (    )". The corresponding wikicode looks like this for me: "The '''knight''' ({{unicode|   }} {{unicode|   }}". My WP Preferences are set to browser default font. I set my Mozilla Firefox browser default font to MS PGothic (since that font successfully displays all the chess symbols at this site). I must be missing something basic, can someone help identify what? Thanks! Ihardlythinkso (talk) 07:09, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

I see "The knight (♘ ♞)". The unicode template only works on IE on XP and should yield the default font on other browsers ("The knight (♘ ♞)"), but they all display fine for me. What is your OS? — Edokter (talk) — 09:13, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for replying. I have XP Home. Yes I think things changed when I went with Mozilla Firefox recently when IE was going goofy and MSFT had no upgrade for IE after IE ver 8 for XP system. I don't know whether you can see the unicode icons or not, I assume you can, because when you try and display for me what you see, I will see different here (I still see blanks in everything you specified). So is there a way I can see the icons under Firefox? (Or if what you said, "the template only works on IE on XP", means there's no way under Firefox, that's probably my answer, but please confirm, since that is bad news then for me!) Thank u. Ihardlythinkso (talk) 09:24, 28 October 2012 (UTC) p.s. And just thinking about this ... If displaying the icons is a matter of font access, it seems weird that that would change between browsers? (Is there something big in the designs which block application of font interpretation of unicode between browsers? Do you know how that work? (In other words, do you know why the template goes browser-dependent?) Thx. Ihardlythinkso (talk) 09:32, 28 October 2012 (UTC) p.p.s. Okay I just brought up IE ver 8 and see that you can see the icons. If the template doesn't work under Firefox & XP (is it just Firefox & XP, or Firefox & other OSs too?), then doesn't that affect lots of users just not me? Thx. Ihardlythinkso (talk) 09:46, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

The template only targets IE on XP by design, as it has limited support for unicode, whereas other browsers have sufficient unicode support built in. I see the the chess characters in all my browsers on XP, including Firefox. Firefox should map unicode to XP's defaul unicode font, which is Lucida Sans Unicode, in case the character is not present in the default browser font (usually Arial). Check if Lucida Sans Unicode is present on your system. — Edokter (talk) — 10:28, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

Thx for your reply. Yes, I have Lucida Sans Unicode. My Firefox is rel. 16.0.2, and I change the default font by Tools -> Options -> Content -> Default font. When I change to either Lucida Sans Unicode or Arial, the icons are still blank. I cleared my cache a couple ways just in case. (I'm a little confused, because at this site, chess symbols are blank with either Lucida Sans Unicode or Arial too. MS PGothic is one of the few or only that give me symbols at that test site.) The WP "My preferences" look like they can't select font or even default to browser font at second look ... under preferences it is just "Editing" -> "Editing area font style" that I chose "Browser default" (but, I think it means the editing window only; am I overlooking a WP font specification?). So the Q is, why is my result under Firefox diff from yours? Thx for any help! Ihardlythinkso (talk) 11:27, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

To be honest, I have no idea. Language settings in your browser may also affect unicode, as well as the 'Character encoding' setting (under View), which should normally be set to UTF-8. — Edokter (talk) — 11:40, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

I also have Windows XP (Service pack 3) and Firefox 16.0.2, where the default font is Times New Roman. I don't think that I've ever altered this, because the vast majority of web pages these days (Misplaced Pages not excepted) explicitly set the base font for the page. Within "The knight (♘ ♞) is" I see two chess knights: the first white, the second black. The appearance of these is similar to the images although not identical. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:03, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages does not set a base font; it only sets it to 'sans-serif'. If you click the 'Advanced' button next to the default font, you will see which font Firefox uses for sans-serif (which is most probably Arial). — Edokter (talk) — 14:32, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

Ok, I played around and finally got it! My (Firefox) View → Character Encoding has always been Unicode (UTF-8), so that wasn't it. But when I unclicked the box at Tools → Options → Content → Advanced → "Allow pages to choose their own fonts", I finally get to see the chess symbols. (But my Content → Default font → must be MS PGothic, MS Gothic, or MS Mincho )

So I'm back in business, thank you Edokter. And thank you too Redrose64. Ok, Ihardlythinkso (talk) 06:21, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Are we really using Unicode chess glyphs in prose now? I suppose the chess project should be commended for finding yet another way to reduce the accessibility of their articles. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 15:08, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

"Now"?! Those glyphs were added to the Knight (chess) article on June 26, 2007. (I don't know dates regarding other chess piece articles, I haven't checked.) My first edit to Misplaced Pages was September 2, 2010. The pros or cons of using glyphs is not a topic for this thread or board. Why don't you take your opinion or comments or advice to a proper forum for that, rather than leaving snide comments here? (You are an Admin? And like to leave snide comments here because it makes you feel good? Good grief. Grow up.) Ihardlythinkso (talk) 19:18, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Bug in jsMsg()?

This fairly new notification system has apparently a bug, or I'm doing something wrong. When calling it twice in succession (which can be triggered by going to http://en.wikipedia.org/Sandbox?withJS=blah.js&withCSS=blah.css, but works with any page), the second instance immediately cancels the first one. They should appear stacked. Can someone provide some insight? — Edokter (talk) — 16:27, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

I was going to suggest using mw.notify but when I tested the following in the console I got the same problem:

mw.notify('foo', {tag: 'test' });
mw.notify('bar', {tag: 'test' });

Helder 17:41, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

Er... just remove the ", {tag: 'test' }" part and it works: mw.notify('foo'); mw.notify('bar');. Helder 17:48, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

Right. jsMsg probably maps to the deprecated mw.jsMessage anyway. Using mw.notify instead. Thanks. — Edokter (talk) — 18:09, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

The point of the tags is indeed to show only one notification of a certain type at a time. A bit more on the supported options here.--Eloquence* 00:29, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

WP 1.0 bot - new maintainer needed

I am going to step down as the maintainer of the WP 1.0 bot at the end of November. A new maintainer for the bot is needed. More information can be found here. — Carl (CBM · talk) 17:10, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

Huggle activation

What should I do to activate Huggle? Oh, I also need the code for User:TruPepitoM/huggle.css. TruPepitoMTalk To Me 05:56, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Could you clarify what you mean by "activating"? https://en.wikipedia.org/Wikipedia:Huggle doesn't cover this? --Malyacko (talk) 11:57, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

"Activating" meaning enabling it on my account through the user configuration page, plus adding the code to enable Huggle in huggle.css. TruPepitoMTalk To Me 12:14, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

I think it needs to say "enable:true". See, for example User:ParisianBlade/huggle.css or this list of other examples. -- John of Reading (talk) 12:18, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Template problems

Could someone with developer rights please look at the NCAA Division I FBS football ranking movements templates. When I try to view any of these I wait ages and get a timeout message: "Sorry, the servers are overloaded at the moment. Too many users are trying to view this page. Please wait a while before you try to access this page again. Timeout waiting for the lock." Specifically, I was trying to delete template:NCAA Division I FBS football ranking movements/testcases coloring. I managed to move it to template:NCAA Division I FBS football ranking movements/tt but I cannot delete it. — RHaworth (talk · contribs) 10:26, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

I deleted it without any problems. Ruslik_Zero 19:11, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages skins

Please, please some wiki tech guru design a new skin or two, the skins we have are getting boring. We should have the choice to design our own skins or at least have more choice. Presentation of information and graphics is really important. Foundation people, please get a designer to create some new ones.... ♦ Dr. ☠ Blofeld 14:33, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Sorry but this has been found to be technically impossible. They tried, but they couldn't get the skins thin and hypersensitive enough to match the personality of a typical Wikipedian.... ;) Zad68 14:42, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Couldn't find a "dramatic" enough design eh?♦ Dr. ☠ Blofeld 15:08, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Instead, there are plans to remove several old skins:) Max Semenik (talk) 15:27, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Well Vector, Monobook, Cologne and Modern are of course the better ones but if they're going to throw out those old skins at least create some new ones which are up to date graphically.♦ Dr. ☠ Blofeld 18:11, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

I don't think it should be the Foundation's responsibility to create a slew of themes for the site. The fact that they allow multiple themes is weird, in my opinion; what other major website allows that level of customization? The existing themes are "boring" because we see them day in, day out; there's a certain benefit to keeping things consistent, especially considering how much time it would take to introduce multiple themes and make sure every bug is ironed out. EVula // talk // ☯ // 18:42, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

If folks are interested in pushing for more modern skins, I think there are designers at the Foundation who would agree. I would check out some of the ideas here, for instance. However, the question of designing new skins has less to do with whether it's our responsibility, and more to do with how we prioritize projects for the year. For a broad roadmap to compare skin work to, I'd look at Wikimedia Engineering/2012-13 Goals. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 19:12, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

New skins doesn't sound like something the foundation should be working on. Perhaps they should instead create a simple gallery where people can submit CSS pages so others can easily try them out and install them? I agree that no other major website offers so much custom CSS, which they shouldn't because design should focus on the best consistent experience, not on dozens of different skins which each could present their own problems. Too much of a headache to support. But if the skins were done by community members, then it would be better. Gary King (talk · scripts) 19:30, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

This looks awesome Steven! Something which puts a panorama image across the top looks great. I'm sure many of the ideas would prove popular Steven. ♦ Dr. ☠ Blofeld 19:35, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Mine Talk Page Doth Be Glitching!

I've had people try to post on my talk page, but nothing seems to be showing up. Any ideas of what to try? I've purged and it still won't show. Hamtechperson 15:52, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Somebody had added unclosed <ref> tags, which I have now removed. Reaper Eternal (talk) 15:57, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

JavaScript not loading on my Watchlist?

For some reason, JavaScript isn't loading on my Watchlist. This morning it worked fine, but in the past few hours JavaScript has not been loading on my Watchlist. For instance, I use "Enhanced recent changes", so diffs should be collapsed, but at the moment they are all expanded. I'm also using the Monobook skin. I see no errors appearing in my JavaScript Console in Firefox. JavaScript works fine on all other pages. At the moment my guess is that something was changed in the JavaScript for Watchlists, such as a new variable, that could be conflicting with one of my scripts, so no error is given but something is still broken. I emptied my JS and CSS pages, and still the same problem on my Watchlist, so something seems to be broken on Misplaced Pages's end. Gary King (talk · scripts) 18:48, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Link Classifier wasn't working for me on my Watchlist after I read your post, but I just manually reloaded it and it then worked. I would suggest that, and then emptying your browser cache if it doesn't work.--JohnBlackburne_deeds 18:56, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

I already did a hard refresh and cleared my cache. Here's what I narrowed it down to. It appears that one of the pages in my watchlist is breaking the JavaScript in my watchlist, which sounds crazy but it appears to be the case. I have a second test account, which has an empty watchlist. I watched a few pages, and Enhanced Recent Changes works fine there (with about five articles in the watchlist). I then copied my own watchlist to the test account. Then the JavaScript breaks on the watchlist. It also does not appear to be skin-related because I tried Vector and it breaks there too. Gary King (talk · scripts) 19:03, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

It seems that any page that I have resolved feedback using the Article Feedback Tool (it's the thing where new editor can comment on the quality of an article, with a green smiley face, a red sad face, etc.), if I remove those pages from my watchlist, then my watchlist JavaScript is fixed. Gary King (talk · scripts) 19:15, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Okay I'm pretty sure I figured this out. This one page that I'm watching has unmoderated comments (comments that are awaiting an action, such as hiding it). Since this is the case, Misplaced Pages usually gives a message saying something like "one of the pages you are watching have unmoderated comments". It seems that this message, as of very recently (six hours ago or so), breaks the Watchlist's JavaScript. I know this because moderating all comments or removing the page from my watchlist fixes the Watchlist. I've already sent an email to hopefully the right person with regards to the AFT. Gary King (talk · scripts) 19:24, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

You are absolutely correct. This is a reoccurrence of the same bug that we saw with this tool last week. I have already pinged the foundation developers (and informed them that this simply should not happen 6x a week). —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:02, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks and thanks; we're on this :). Ironholds (talk) 20:39, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Fix hopefully in; can someone clear their cache and test? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 20:58, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

I've never posted in the teahouse but it's in my contributions

And I can't find where I posted when I get there.

I've never been there because it seemed confusing when I was used to a certain setup. I see now it's like the Help Desk but in reverse order.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 19:15, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

No, but you have posted to Misplaced Pages:New contributors' help page/questions, which yesterday was moved to Misplaced Pages:Teahouse/questions. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:53, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Then where is my edit?— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 20:15, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Okay, this might be a clue. My contributions say "Teahouse/questions" but that sends me to a redirect page with the correct capitalization. There are about two weeks that are not archived.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 20:23, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Your several posts were removed with this edit, which appears to be the first half of a WP:CUTPASTE violation - I can't find the second half (i.e. the place where this text was pasted to). I suggest you take it up with AnnaHendren (talk · contribs); when the destination is located, it may be necessary to file a request at WP:REPAIR so that Anthony Appleyard (talk · contribs) can see if it can be rescued in a proper manner. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:29, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. I may not be the only person this happened to. Fortunately, I was attempting an answer, not asking a question.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 20:42, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

I archived the last two weeks questions and answers to Misplaced Pages:New contributors' help page/Archive/2012/October. See Misplaced Pages talk:Teahouse#Change from NCHQ to here for more discussion about what happened and what should be done next. -- John of Reading (talk) 21:02, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Aha, so this edit is the second half of the WP:CUTPASTE. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:17, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Can we get any c/p problems undone, please? AnnaHendren has been responsible for a number of questionable actions this week and in light of her apparent lack of desire to explain them the obvious course of action would be to revert them. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 00:31, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

WebCite error

When I try to archive a url with WebCite or try to retrieve a previously archived one, I get

Warning: mysql_pconnect() : Too many connections in /home/webcita/public_html/lib/adodb/drivers/adodb-mysql.inc.php on line 367 DB Connection failed

Now of course WebCite is not a Wikimedia site, but it nevertheless affects my editing of Misplaced Pages, since I just wanted to cache a url used as a citation in an article. So lets hope this will be fixed soon. -- Toshio Yamaguchi (tlk−ctb) 20:30, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Perhaps you could try contacting them? ^demon 21:42, 29 October 2012 (UTC) 21:42, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

WP page editor changes

Where does one go to discuss recent changes to the WP page editor? Contact Misplaced Pages is not much help. Does anyone know who the individual(s) is that adds or removes features to the WP page editor? i.e. pop up message telling editors 'Your edit was saved' is annoying and sort of insults the intelligence of those who have edited on Misplaced Pages for more than ten minutes. Is this the beginning of more pop up messages? -- Gwillhickers (talk) 19:10, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

• Misplaced Pages noticeboards
• Misplaced Pages features
• Pages automatically checked for accidental language links