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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noreferrer for Misplaced Pages

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Are there any plans to enable noreferrer on Misplaced Pages since there are browsers that support it? (There are also non-standard, browser specific methods to hide referrers).

For non-tech folks, when you are on the insecure wiki (http not https), and you click on an external link on the wiki, the external site you visit gets a copy of the wiki url you came from. For example, if you click on an external link in the reference section of any page, such as Banana, the site you go to will know you came from the url http://en.wikipedia.org/Banana .

Several privacy issues arise with allowing referers:

• If a low-traffic page is viewed, and an external link followed, if the person comments about a recent development on the page, it may be possible to link the ip to the editor.
• If a person visits the domain name or service repeatedly from the wiki, it may be possible to profile the individual.

Is it beneficial to let websites know the specific page from which a user is coming from or should privacy take precedence? Smallman12q (talk) 22:56, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

noreferrer - Discussion

This "referrer" feature, on any site, in any circumstance, is a disgraceful breach of privacy. I was appalled when I first learned of it. I think most people don't even know it exists. 86.176.208.123 (talk) 23:57, 11 January 2013 (UTC)

It's used in web analytics...something most people don't understand beyond buzzwords.Smallman12q (talk) 00:03, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

(edit conflict) To play devil's advocate for a second, HTTP referrers are useful to website operators to discover who links to them (search engine link searches might not find Misplaced Pages because our external links are marked "nofollow"). Website operators are often knowledgeable on the subject of the linking article (that's why we linked to the site), and seeing Misplaced Pages linking to their site would probably inspire them to check out the article. Some proportion of these, being knowledgeable on the subject, would go on to improve the article or suggest improvements on the talk page.

On the other hand, link spammers could use referrers from Misplaced Pages to gauge the success of a link-spamming campaign. (However, there are other techniques to do this without using referrers.)

IMO, one set of pages that absolutely needs "noreferrer" would be deleted pages viewed by administrators (ditto for oversighted pages viewed by oversighters). If an administrator clicked an external link, the referrer would leak information about the deleted page (e.g. the page title, the timestamp of the revision, and that it linked to that site). This would be particularly harmful for pages where even the page's title has been oversighted (e.g. as a BLP violation).

Also, if you are concerned about your own privacy, it is possible to turn off referrers globally (not just from Misplaced Pages), using a browser setting or add-on (how depends on your browser). Note that some websites won't work without referrers (e.g. this link requires a referrer to work). – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 00:46, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

Such an interesting dilemma! I'm a federal employee (and of average tech abilities), and as we boot up our computers we get a message about "no expectation of privacy" on our workstations. After seeing this for 15 years I've internalized the message, and assume that everything I do on the internet is public. And forgive me, I'm beginning to think that none of us should assume any level of privacy on the internet. That actually seems the safest, really. This leads me to understand that the internet is a giant advertising machine, and because I want to track where webusers come from to get to my educational site (so I can serve them better) I also know that someone is tracking me, as I buy dog beds for the local no-kill shelter on Groupon. And I'm ok with that, because I can't have it both ways.

Again, as someone creating an educational website I want to know when/if Misplaced Pages and the sister projects are sending me webusers - I can then strengthen my relationships with the referring websites (like we are doing here), and learn which uploaded files get used, and which don't, so I can be nimble and respond accordingly. Bdcousineau (talk) 01:08, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

No opinon on the current subject, but the fact that privacy on the web is very low, does not mean nothing should be done to improve it (that's a general rule, and one of the poorest common arguments I usually see: "given X is already bad, there is no problem in making it worse") - Nabla (talk) 01:18, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

• I've rephrased the request on WP:CENT to emphasise that this is a request to disable something used by Misplaced Pages web browsers as part of a common standard, rather than starting from a status quo of its absence. I can understand that in some circumstances there are limited privacy implications, but these circumstances seem fairly limited and unusual. Andrew Gray (talk) 17:14, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

Your formulation "disable something used by Misplaced Pages as part of a common standard" makes it sound like Misplaced Pages is actively doing something now to pass referrer information. I'm not sure how it works but isn't the standard that a website does nothing at all and the browser by itself passes referrer information? And then a website can choose to add code to request browsers to not pass the referrer? PrimeHunter (talk) 00:56, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

Yes, you're right - corrected. Andrew Gray (talk) 13:31, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

• Comment. Aren't these descriptions the wrong way round? How can support for "noreferrer" mean that "Misplaced Pages should have referers"? Ditto the one below. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.129.18.113 (talk) 18:35, 12 January 2013 (UTC)
  • Comment Agree with 86.129.18.113. The wording is confusing enough to render this useless. - Nabla (talk) 23:26, 12 January 2013 (UTC)
    • Per the above two comments (moved from the support section), I've swapped support and oppose and updated the description at the top of each section to be a little more verbose. Hopefully things are a bit clearer now. (I also updated James086's !vote to reflect support and oppose have swapped meanings.) – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 00:55, 13 January 2013 (UTC)
      • Thanks - Nabla (talk) 20:30, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

• Smallman, perhaps you can write up the code that allows an editor to opt in to a noreferrer feature and we can iVote whether to place that option in Special:Preferences. The noreferrer feature could work both in logging into Misplaced Pages (erase the URL from where you came into Misplaced Pages) and in clicking on external links in Misplaced Pages (prevent the target site from learning the Misplaced Pages URL source that referred to the target site.) -- Uzma Gamal (talk) 09:19, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

  I've just tried the following and it seems to work. -- WOSlinker (talk) 09:59, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

$("a.external").attr("rel", "noreferrer");

• Regarding Uzma's bit about erasing the URL from which a user enters Misplaced Pages, I don't think the WMF record this in a way that threatens privacy. Looking at the requests by origin report, it seems they only keep the domain name of the referer (not the full URL), and do not associate this with an IP address or username. Looking at the CheckUser documentation, CheckUsers cannot see referers either. It is possible that server logs accessible to developers might have them. If this were the case, it would be a topic for a separate discussion; this RFC is about referers sent to external sites, not those received by Misplaced Pages. – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 15:04, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

• Someone below mentioned that there are reasons why referers exist, so I decided to look them up. I've taken the below snippets from the HTTP 1.0 specification, to better inform this discussion.

This allows a server to generate lists of back-links to resources for interest, logging, optimized caching, etc. It also allows obsolete or mistyped links to be traced for maintenance.

...

Note: Because the source of a link may be private information or may reveal an otherwise private information source, it is strongly recommended that the user be able to select whether or not the Referer field is sent. For example, a browser client could have a toggle switch for browsing openly/anonymously, which would respectively enable/disable the sending of Referer and From information.
— Berners-Lee, T.; Fielding, R.; Frystyk, H. (1996). "Referer". Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.0. sec. 10.13. doi:10.17487/RFC1945. RFC 1945. {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

– PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 22:27, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

It's a little sobering that it's taken fifteen years for the private "toggle switch" idea to become common... Andrew Gray (talk) 12:10, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

The toggle switch was proposed in the HTTP/1.1 Protocol:

The Referer header allows reading patterns to be studied and reverse links drawn. Although it can be very useful, its power can be abused if user details are not separated from the information contained in the Referer. Even when the personal information has been removed, the Referer header might indicate a private document's URI whose publication would be inappropriate.

...

We suggest, though do not require, that a convenient toggle interface be provided for the user to enable or disable the sending of From and Referer information.
— Berners-Lee, T.; Fielding, R.; Frystyk, H. (1999). "Transfer of Sensitive Information". Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1. sec. 15.1.2. doi:10.17487/RFC2616. RFC 2616. {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

Also, for there have been proposals of a referrer alternative providing only the scheme, host, and port of initiating origin. Smallman12q (talk) 16:09, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

Though I didn't quote that part earlier, the exact same text appears word-for-word in section 12.4 of the earlier HTTP/1.0 spec. – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 22:36, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

For those folks who believe HTTPS is the panacea, referers are sent on https -> https connections but not on https->http connections.

Clients SHOULD NOT include a Referer header field in a (non-secure) HTTP request if the referring page was transferred with a secure protocol.terface be provided for the user to enable or disable the sending of From and Referer information.

— Berners-Lee, T.; Fielding, R.; Frystyk, H. (1999). "Transfer of Sensitive Information". Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1. sec. 15.1.3. doi:10.17487/RFC2616. RFC 2616. {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

That means that when you click on a secure site from the secure wiki, you will send a referer. HTTPS will only prevent sending a referer to http sites.Smallman12q (talk) 16:54, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

noreferrer - Support

Misplaced Pages should enable noreferrer, so that referers are not sent to external sites:

• Support - Changes should be made in the best interests of readers and editors, not external sites. I think our users are more important than the owners of sites we link to. James086 15:21, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

  Misplaced Pages sends referers to external sites now. The proposal is to stop doing this, not to add it. (James' comment previously referred to adding referers to Misplaced Pages, but he has since corrected this.) – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 00:55, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

• Support - Misplaced Pages should take every reasonable step to ensure that it doesn't violate the privacy of any person. Telling other sites that the use rhad previously visited Misplaced Pages, let alone a specific Misplaced Pages page, is clearly such a violation. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 14:18, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

There has been some confusion here about how referrer works but Misplaced Pages doesn't tell anything to other sites now. It's browsers which usually by themselves tell a site where the browser came from. The proposal is to make Misplaced Pages ask browsers to not tell they came from Misplaced Pages. I think few sites do that currently so when you surf, a website usually knows where you came from. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:56, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

Whether it's Misplaced Pages, or the user's own browser doing stuff behind the user's back, is irrelevent. If Misplaced Pages can prevent such action from being taken behind the user's back, it should. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 13:00, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

• Support seems like since we do nofollow this would be logical too. That said, I don't think we should get all paranoid about the reasoning: the sky isn't going to fall because website A knows it's been linked to from website B, and any site likely to do something sinister with that info probably shouldn't be linked to on WP anyway. Andrew Lenahan - Starblind 22:24, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

  Nofollow serves an actual purpose: it takes away the SEO incentive for people to spam their links here. Noreferrer does not have any such purpose. Anomie⚔ 22:31, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

• From what I understand, for the people that care, this is a positive. For the people that don't care, there's no effect at all. Therefore, I support. Sven Manguard Wha? 01:27, 15 January 2013 (UTC)
• Support. If Misplaced Pages can ask browsers to not reveal that our users have visited a page on Misplaced Pages, we should do so, for the same reasons we use nofollow on links. Some external sites will use this information for "wikipedia optimization" to the detriment of our attempts to reduce COI problems. --Guy Macon (talk) 20:10, 16 January 2013 (UTC)
• Support and completely disagree with opposes I have read. We cannot control other sites or individual browsers, but we can do this. --Nouniquenames 04:25, 17 January 2013 (UTC)
• Support. Misplaced Pages should not be an ad click enabler. 5.12.84.224 (talk) 19:54, 17 January 2013 (UTC)
• Support per Od Mishehu and Guy Macon. The web was a much smaller and saner place when this sort of tracing capability was introduced. The time to opt out is past due. ~ Ningauble (talk) 16:21, 18 January 2013 (UTC)
• Support Referers might have been an ok idea in the CERN era of an academic-operated, research-oriented web. In today's advertiser and user-profiling web, they are evil and should be suppressed whenever possible. 67.117.146.66 (talk) 08:43, 25 January 2013 (UTC)
• Support since as Sven said "for the people that care, this is a positive. For the people that don't care, there's no effect at all". Helder 11:15, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

noreferrer - Oppose

Misplaced Pages should continue to allow referers to be sent to external sites:

• This is pointless paranoia. The few people who are concerned should either avoid clicking external links, install a browser extension to block/falsify the referrer, or use the Javascript snippet WOSlinker posted above. Anomie⚔ 15:45, 13 January 2013 (UTC)
• Agree with Anomie above. Anyone who is worried about a site knowing they got there by following a link in Misplaced Pages should be even more worried about links on other sites and install or activate referrer blocking in their browser. Kiore (talk) 08:50, 14 January 2013 (UTC)
• Referrer isn't as big of a privacy breach as people think. It's also useful for certain sites, such as when I was working on my edit counter. I'll bring up an anecdotal example of why referrer was helpful: The tool was getting hit hard in basically a DOS attack. It was causing my email to get spammed, the tool was getting throttled, and by looking at the referrer, I found which page the attack was coming from, and was able to solve it. It's near impossible to get anything bad out of the referrer, and when a site really needs it, like I did, it's useful to have. (X! · talk)  · @957  ·  21:57, 14 January 2013 (UTC)
• This is just a lot of FUD to me. Referrers are mostly harmless (especially coming from Misplaced Pages). Legoktm (talk) 01:33, 15 January 2013 (UTC)
• Let's not mess up the way the Internet was designed to work. There are reasons the referrer exists, and there is no reason to remove that en masse. Prodego 07:52, 15 January 2013 (UTC)
• This is stupid. It gives people a false sense of privacy while breaking an important part of the HTTP protocol. --Chris 11:58, 15 January 2013 (UTC)
  • The Referer header is optional; omitting it does not break the protocol. The proposed technique for disabling it is part of HTML5, not some hack. However, I do think it would be an abuse of rel="noreferrer" to turn it on globally. The use intended by the HTML5 authors was to block referers from private pages, to avoid leaking private information. – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 22:47, 15 January 2013 (UTC)
    • For more detailed info, see The rel attribute of HTML5. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:05, 15 January 2013 (UTC)
• I agree with what all the "opposers" before me have said. The only "sure" way to do this, would be for the user to do it in his UA settings, not trying to enforce a one-size-fits-all "solution" by mucking about with Misplaced Pages (which probably wouldn't work anyway). ⇔ ChristTrekker 14:22, 15 January 2013 (UTC)
• So, if you visit a website, your IP is transmitted to them anyway. All that putting noreferrer on it does is deny the site owner useful information about who is linking to their site. So, oppose. —Tom Morris (talk) 20:48, 15 January 2013 (UTC)
• Oppose, It is in the HTTP protocol for a reason, it is useful, people can block this on a case by case basis using scripts so removing noreferrer for the whole site seems pointless and wrong. ·Add§hore· 21:20, 15 January 2013 (UTC)
• Oppose, it's standard, useful for web analytics, and if the user doesn't want to people to know where they've been, they can disable it themselves/use the secure server. --SarekOfVulcan (talk) 11:50, 16 January 2013 (UTC)
• X! shows that these can be useful --Guerillero | My Talk 08:54, 18 January 2013 (UTC)
• Oppose per Tom, Sarek et al. Johnbod (talk) 12:00, 18 January 2013 (UTC)
• Oppose 1) Referrers are part of the structure of the Web. Misplaced Pages should work with the web protocols, not against them. 2) One way to measure the success of partnerships with GLAMs and other organisations is for them to see how many referrals they get via Misplaced Pages. This is important: one of the drivers of the growing academic respectability of Misplaced Pages is that people who run scholarly journals or online archives are seeing how much Misplaced Pages is driving their traffic. MartinPoulter (talk) 19:23, 19 January 2013 (UTC)
• I'd rather see HTTPS by default for logged-in users. --MZMcBride (talk) 01:54, 21 January 2013 (UTC)
• Oppose per MartinPoulter. the wub "?!" 14:05, 22 January 2013 (UTC)
• Oppose - Sarek sums it up beautifully. As we are the Worlds fifth largest (and by far the most visible) website out there, it's up to us to lead the way in standards. There is a simple solution to this: Edit the Special:LoginUser page to briefly mention noreferrer in the explanation field. -T.I.M 01:19, 24 January 2013 (UTC)
• Oppose; there are no genuine privacy benefits, and there are a number of entirely legitimate technical reasons why that header is useful. Users genuinely concerned about following links should use the privacy extension of their browsers or retype URLs, not rely on specific sites using noreferrers. — Coren  03:33, 25 January 2013 (UTC)
• Oppose per Anomie, Sarek, Martin, Tom. If we are really concerned about users privacy under the belief they cannot take care of it themselves, we should enable HTTPS by default as MZMcBride and Edoktor have suggested. Nil Einne (talk) 07:03, 25 January 2013 (UTC)
  • Comment Referers are still sent when the url is https. Also, https doesn't help much with privacy of page views if someone can snoop the TCP traffic (since the lengths of the pages are still observable through the encryption, and that goes a long way towards identifying the pages). Https is useful for protecting passwords but that's about it. It has nothing to do with this referer issue and is a red herring. And the idea of asking users to log in and set a profile option to turn off referers is unhelpful: logging in correlates all of the person's pageviews together (a privacy problem in its own right), and anyway the vast majority of visitors never log in or edit (that's that #5 website in the world thing: non-logged-in read-only users). It would be ok to have a login option to turn the referers on for users who want to send them. 67.117.146.66 (talk) 08:54, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

noreferrer - Neutral

• Ah, crap. Are we hosting an RFC here, not at WP:VPR? If we get a flood of !votes, I may need to unwatch this page. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:25, 12 January 2013 (UTC)
  • Perhaps, for that reason, any RfC, poll or whatever, likely to attract a large turnout, should be on its own sub-page? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:57, 14 January 2013 (UTC)
• This issue seems slightly paranoia. Anyway, it will also be moot once Misplaced Pages switches to https-only, as clicks from secure sites never send referrers. — Edokter (talk) — 09:34, 13 January 2013 (UTC)
• Normally I'd favor any efforts by a site to protect its users' privacy. In this case, since concerned users already have ways to strip or forge referrers on their own (several methods are mentioned here), I don't see a compelling need for any action on Misplaced Pages's end. Kilopi (talk) 05:30, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

• I'm leaning towards oppose. Referers provide useful information for webmasters, which most sites do not use in a way that threatens privacy. Users should decide for themselves whether or not they want to provide referers to websites and use their browser settings (or add-ons) to control this. (I acknowledge that browser makers could do more to make privacy options clear to users.) I also regard the proposal as abusing the "noreferrer" feature, as the HTML5 authors did not intend it to be used across a whole site.

  However, I'm putting myself down as neutral because I think the noreferrer feature should be used in limited circumstances. When someone with permission to view an oversighted (or deleted) page clicks an external link, a referer should not be sent. Some websites make referer logs public, and hence could expose article titles that have been suppressed on Misplaced Pages. Given that a common reason for suppression of a title is a BLP problem, we should do everything we can to prevent such titles being sent to other sites. Protecting non-public information such as this is the intended use of noreferrer. – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 23:30, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

• Question: http://wiki.whatwg.org/Meta_referrer gives four possible values for using referrer in a meta tag (never, always, origin, default). Are we talking about adding a meta tag to our HTML or adding something to the HTTP headers? If the latter, are those four values available in the HTTP header? --Guy Macon (talk) 20:34, 16 January 2013 (UTC)
  • Thus far, this proposal has discussed adding the HTML5 rel="noreferrer" to every link. Using the meta tag would be another way to achieve the same end. I am unaware of an HTTP header that would have the same effect. If we were to go ahead with this, it might be worth investigating which method has the best support amongst browsers (or just use both to be extra certain). – PartTimeGnome (talk | contribs) 22:47, 16 January 2013 (UTC)
    • If we can make it work, the "origin" option has a lot going for it. It tells the linked-to page that the link came from en.wikipedia.org without saying what page on Misplaced Pages. --Guy Macon (talk) 06:58, 17 January 2013 (UTC)
      • Special:Linksearch would still identify the originating page with high accuracy. Most extlinks aren't on large numbers of pages. 67.117.146.66 (talk) 09:00, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Uploaded file summary

At some point (circa July 2012 ?) a number of files began showing up with the Permission field for their {{Information}} templates filled with "Evidence: Will be provided on request.". See e.g. File:Acumen International.png. Does anyone know why that started showing up with those files? VernoWhitney (talk) 20:45, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

The phrase appears in MediaWiki:FileUploadWizard.js, so it's probably shown as one of the selectable options. -- John of Reading (talk) 20:51, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

Why is that even an option? If the copyright owner has given appropriate permission, it should be provided to OTRS without being requested and if it isn't the image should be deleted; and they certainly should not be tagged for moving to Commons. Otherwise we will have even more images with unconfirmed copyright status and that is not a good thing.--ukexpat (talk) 20:58, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

Looking through the history, apparently it used to be "The license agreement will be forwarded to OTRS shortly" which is on a few hundred images which have already been moved to commons and a few hundred more locally. VernoWhitney (talk) 21:18, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

I asked Future Perfect at Sunrise to weigh in here since they're the primary editor. I also have discovered that this same topic has come up before at Misplaced Pages talk:File Upload Wizard/Archive 3#Letting through too many images without permission, Misplaced Pages talk:File Upload Wizard/Archive 2#Evidence: Will be provided on request., and commons:Commons:Administrators' noticeboard/Archive 36#A general licensing point. Should this discussion perhaps be moved elsewhere (no 'right' place springs to mind) to figure out if this is the most desired behaviour? VernoWhitney (talk) 21:44, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

Yep, I'm the culprit here; I put these options into the upload form when I wrote it last year. My thoughts were these:

• In my understanding, this was the previous policy status quo: we don't force people to provide evidence the moment they do their uploads; they just need to make a plausible assertion of licensing and we tell them their images might get deleted if they can't provide evidence if and when challenged. When I wrote the form, I didn't want to create the impression it was sneakily introducing new, stricter policies.
• While most such images certainly should be challenged (and I as well as others actually tag most of them with "no-permission" routinely), I believe there are situations where a reviewer might legitimately take an uploader's word for it and accept an assertion of licensing without evidence, on assumption of good faith. I, for instance, occasionally do that with COI editors, when it is obvious from an uploader's editing profile that they are acting as the article subject's representative.
• Most importantly, I believe this option is useful because it gives problematic uploaders a relatively simple way of admitting a file isn't their own. If we didn't have this option, many of these uploaders would choose to lie instead and tag the files as "own work", which would make copyvios much more difficult to detect.

By the way, I would guess most of the ones that have turned up on Commons with the "will be provided" option were not moved there, but uploaded directly to Commons from our WP:FUW form. That option was disabled some time in July, I think.

For previous discussion of this option, see Misplaced Pages talk:File Upload Wizard/Archive 2#Evidence: Will be provided on request.. Fut.Perf. ☼ 22:02, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

A quick look at the files in Category:Files licensed by third parties that have the "on request" annotation shows that there are probably hundreds that should be challenged. I tagged a few yesterday but ran out of steam. If we are so tough on potential copyvios elsewhere, why are we not showing the same rigour here? Personally, I think that option should be rewritten to immediately tag the image with {{di-no permission}} so that the uploader is put on immediate notice that permission must be provided. As for COI editors, why should they be exempt? If they have have appropriate permission they should have to provide it or face deletion just like everyone else.--ukexpat (talk) 17:32, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

I often see people uploading images as "own work" although the images obviously aren't own works. If this feature in the upload wizard makes copyright violations easier to discover, then I think that it is a good thing. However, maybe this option could tag the files with {{subst:npd}} automatically? There are other "bad" templates such as {{permission from license selector}}, but files with that template automatically get {{db-f3}} and don't require someone else to go through the files and tag it manually.

I don't like the idea of assuming good faith for file copyrights. While it is unlikely that a contributor with a good standing would try to violate copyright, it is possible that other people might not know this and then tag the file with "no permission" in 5 or 10 years. If the contributor no longer is around, the file would then be lost. It is better to sort out the OTRS part now while the contributor still is around. --Stefan2 (talk) 11:26, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

I like the idea of making it auto-tag it for speedy deletion just like the permission-for-Misplaced Pages-only option (although I didn't see that option at all just now while glancing through the FileUploadWizard.js). F11 deletion requires notification of the uploader, though. Would that be satisfied just by an explanatory template on the file page itself like the template you pointed out, or would we need to get a bot involved if we change to that option? VernoWhitney (talk) 16:24, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

Well, if the file is going to be tagged as {{subst:npd}}, the uploader needs to be notified about this, but not necessarily on his talk page. He will most likely look at the file information page after uploading the file, and there it will say that permission needs to be sent to OTRS. Wouldn't that be enough? The upload wizard could also be designed to automatically put a notice on the uploader's talk page using the uploader's own account. --Stefan2 (talk) 22:16, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

I've asked at Misplaced Pages talk:Criteria for speedy deletion#Question about notification requirement for F11 for some more input regarding this. VernoWhitney (talk) 17:10, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

I came here following Stafan2's note at WT:CSD, having not previously been aware of this discussion. Personally, I think that if a user has state that they will provide evidence "on request", we must assume good faith that they will provide it when requested. As an absolute minimum, we must therefore explicitly request that permission before or at the same time as tagging for speedy deletion - in other words the speedy deletion clock must not start until the permission has been requested. This brings up the second question about what constitutes adequate notice, and for me the minimum must be notices on the file page and the user talk page. I say this because any user familiar with Wikimedia wikis, and likely other people too, will have an expectation that any requests specifically for them to be made on their user talk page. Thryduulf (talk) 03:07, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

parser function admin

Is there a parser function which could be used in a template to alter behavior if was posted on admin or non-admin's talk page? NE Ent 19:28, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

No. --MZMcBride (talk) 20:49, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

Actually, it might be possible, considering that Template:Adminstats only shows for admins. (X! · talk)  · @289  ·  05:55, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

{{#if:{{adminstats|{{{1}}}}}|{{{1}}} is an admin|{{{1}}} is not an admin}} would probably work, if placed on a userpage. (X! · talk)  · @292  ·  06:01, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

The claim that Template:Adminstats only shows for admins is untrue: try logging out and viewing either Template:Adminstats or Template:Adminstats/X! - it's visible.

The second idea doesn't work for all users (whether admin or not), see User:Redrose64/Sandbox11. The problem is that it relies on the existence of a bot-generated template, and that template is only generated for admins who have asked for it. Further, it is not deleted if an admin is later de-sysopped. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:02, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

What you can do, is ADD information that is only visible to admins. You can use the css class sysop-show, which should make that CSS block only visible for sysops (but the content will always be in the HTML). Example: the answer of the question is 42, but hidden for most users. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:05, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

Struck part of my last comment because somebody's requested creation of Template:Adminstats/Redrose64 which didn't exist when I set up my test. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:35, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

Cyberbot will automatically create adminstats for administrators if it finds a link {{adminstats|adminname}}, as it did in your sandbox. Therefore in effect, you requested it yourself :-)   An optimist on the run! 22:42, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

Actual image locations

I have a quick question about the locations of the actual images for files. Lets take File:SummitArenaAndConventionCenter.jpg as an example. The URL it says the image is at is http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/6b/SummitArenaAndConventionCenter.jpg . Everything here makes sense and I was just wondering if the '6/6b' part of the URL ever changes from image to image? ·Add§hore· 17:18, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

Yes, they're (i) the first character and (ii) the first two characters of the image's hash code. Each character can be in the ranges 0-9a-f, so there are 16 possibilities for each, therefore the chance that these characters are the same for any two images is 1 in 256. I don't know which hashing algorithm is used: it might be MD5, SHA-2, or something else. --Redrose64 (talk) 17:36, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

Thanks! ·Add§hore· 17:37, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

It's MD5. See mw:Manual:Image Administration#Data storage. http://md5-hash-online.waraxe.us/ says SummitArenaAndConventionCenter.jpg has MD5 hash 6b31f364001ca46f7b6efd0f53acc0f7. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:00, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

Yes, I knew it had come up before, so after posting the above, I've been back through the archives and found your post at Misplaced Pages:Village pump (technical)/Archive 98#Some images appearing red. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:10, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I think the MD5 hash is called internally from FileRepo::getHashPathForLevel().

In wikitext, the {{filepath:...}} parser function returns the URL for any specified file – but only if it has already been uploaded. For example: produces‎ this link.

But bypassing the file description page by linking to the file directly might breach the attribution requirements of the file authors, so a conventional File: link is usually appropriate.

Presumably the subdirectories are used so that multiple servers can store files instead of having them all in one location. For 1 in 256 files, the path will contain ".../a/ad/...", which has sometimes confused adblockers into not displaying those files. — Richardguk (talk) 18:36, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

Media:SummitArenaAndConventionCenter.jpg gives a direct link to the uploaded file instead of the file page. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:09, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

Thanks everyone! ·Add§hore· 21:19, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

Just to clarify: "the first two characters of the image's hash code" - the digits are the md5 sum of the image's file name (not the hash code of the image). 129.173.209.17 (talk) 15:57, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

Wikimedia sites to move to primary data center in Ashburn, Virginia. Read-only mode expected.

Suppressing Article Feedback tool on dabs

Hi. I've been seeing the feedback tool (v4 mostly) on a lot of dab and set index pages, where they aren't really helping at all. Is there a magicword or something that can be used to suppress their appearance? Intelligentsium 04:46, 20 January 2013 (UTC)

I believe applying Category:Article Feedback Blacklist should remove the feedback tool. You may want to check if there's a common template used by many or all of the pages in question, but no others (such as a specialized disambig or set index template), and add the category to that template instead. jcgoble3 (talk) 05:29, 20 January 2013 (UTC)

{{Disambiguation}} should be transcluded on most of them, so adding the template to the category should hide them all. (edit: actually, disambig already has the category. Do you have examples of disambig pages with AFT on them?) (X! · talk)  · @294  ·  06:03, 20 January 2013 (UTC)

Hm... the examples I've seen have all been set indices and disambiguations that are mistakenly marked as such. I'm going to add the {{surname}} template to that category also then. Intelligentsium 06:10, 20 January 2013 (UTC)

Er... oops heh heh, that template is protected. Would an admin kindly do it (I don't think a formal request is necessary)? Intelligentsium 06:12, 20 January 2013 (UTC)

The problem with adding the category to the surname template is that surname pages often have content alongside the disambiguation, which causes issues. (X! · talk)  · @301  ·  06:13, 20 January 2013 (UTC)

I see your point. However, I don't believe pages like Spiridonov which are essentially dabs and probably will never become anything more need the feedback tool (pages like Smith (surname) on the other hand, do). The vast majority of pages on which {{surname}} is transcluded seem to fit this latter description. Is there an alternative solution that doesn't involve large-scale changing of pages? Something based on the page's size perhaps? Intelligentsium 06:23, 20 January 2013 (UTC)

I feel as if it's one of those things that should get its own parameter, and then added to the articles that need it. (X! · talk)  · @310  ·  06:26, 20 January 2013 (UTC)

Yes, that was my first thought too, but even if the default were set to no feedback, there may be hundreds of pages with content that it would have to be added to (a drop in the bucket compared to the 21000 or so that use the template, but still). The alternative of course, it to use feedback as the default and suppress feedback as needed when spotted (obviously I'm not going to bring ~20000 pages into compliance all at once) but sheer scale would be a constraint to how effective this could be. (The set indices also do not generally get a lot of hits, so some of them will inevitably be missed). Still, this isn't exactly a mission-critical feature and the wiki will not die if a page that should not have feedback has it enabled, or vice versa. Intelligentsium 06:41, 20 January 2013 (UTC)

Bots, archive links to web pages

Hello, may I ask - are there in the English Misplaced Pages bots that automatically archive links, as many web pages often are inaccessible? Russian Misplaced Pages has w:ru:Участник:WebCite Archiver. Examples of his work: . Are there any similar job in the English Misplaced Pages? Thank you.--Ворота рая Импресариата (talk) 06:46, 20 January 2013 (UTC)

User:WebCiteBOT went inactive a while back, and User:Lowercase sigmabot III never heard a response back from the webcite team, so unfortunately not. Legoktm (talk) 06:49, 20 January 2013 (UTC)

• Thank you. And how, then, on the English Misplaced Pages solve the problem of the dead links and move permanent links to external web sites? This is a common problem, and the archive manually all of the links for a very long time.
  
  Oh, and is there a manual to bots, You indicated? If they can work in other wiki-projects? Thank you.--↑‡‡К воротам рая Импресариата‡‡↑ 06:43, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

That is not an acceptable WP:SIGNATURE doktorb _words 06:47, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

We use {{dead link}} to mark dead links where necessary and often add links to pages archived in The Wayback Machine. Beyond that, I'm not sure if we do anything. – Philosopher  11:52, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

Crawler bots effect on page views

Following on from a query made to the cultural-partners mailing list, I'm curious about this, which no doubt has been discussed before. How best to estimate the number of page views that are actually bots? Is it a fixed number for all articles, or will it vary with the popularity of the article? User:Mike Peel pointed to this page, showing about 15% of ?all Wikimedia page requests are from bots, but what does this mean for the average en:WP article? Johnbod (talk) 16:25, 20 January 2013 (UTC)

Preventing Group Account Names

Not sure if this is the right place - but once upon a time, a person creating an account saw the contents of the page MediaWiki:Fancycaptcha-createaccount. However I've seen an large increase of messages at OTRS from people who do not understand why they have been blocked because they have used a name of their business, etc. - they certainly have never heard of the user name policy. I did try the create account with another PC and found that the message is no longer displayed - all they get is a tiny link on the Username box that says "(help me choose)" - I can assume you that they do not click the link, they don't want help in choosing, they have already made up their decision. Is there some way we can get the little explanation box back? It would stop lots of new editors getting rather upset at being blocked for a reason that has never been explained to them.  Ronhjones  02:17, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

If you log out then click this link, you'll see that MediaWiki:Signupstart, which is currently blank, is displayed at the top of the page. Perhaps you could use that? jcgoble3 (talk) 04:26, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

I suggest you talk to Steven (WMF) (talk · contribs) before redesigning the "create account" page. See this VPT archive. -- John of Reading (talk) 07:15, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

I've requested that he comment here. – Philosopher  11:45, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

Thanks John and Philosopher for the heads up. I really appreciate being invited to chime in on interface issues like these. I have a longer explanation about the message, why we removed it, and the testing data etc., but in the short term I just wanted to note that the current interface of the signup page won't display any contents of MediaWiki:Fancycaptcha-createaccount, except to users that have JavaScript disabled or who won't accept cookies, who get the old version for now. For now I wouldn't recommend trying to use new messages such as MediaWiki:Signupstart, as we haven't tested to see if overwriting defaults in that or other messages will break the styling of the new signup page. I do have some suggestions for how we might address the issue Ron brings up, and also wanted to say that Ron approaching the issue with the goal of lessening headaches for new people unfamiliar with our rules is admirable. Talk soon, Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 06:09, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

Okay, following up, let me give you some bullet points on why we made the change we did, and why I don't recommend placing another list of "do not" items about usernames. Forgive me for being verbose...

• First up: MediaWiki messages like Fancycaptcha-createaccount are meant to describe elements of the interface, and as you can tell by the title, the purpose of that message was to describe the CAPTCHA. Having it be used to provide warnings about username policy was technically a misuse of the message.
• We get more than a hundred users signing up every hour, and thousands per day. When looking at from that high level view, you can tell that it is unlikely that all of these users need to see several paragraphs and five bullet points about username policy. The sheer number of registrations vs. username blocks every week makes this clear.
• The current version of the page, which we ran as a side-by-side test to half of visitors to the signup page, produced a 4% increase in people successfully registering, and no statistically significant increase in the rate at which new accounts were blocked (for any reason). That sounds small, but at the seasonal rate of account creation for that week-long test, we netted more than 2,700 additional people. When comparing that gain to the potential for any confusion among people who are going to be blocked either way, the end decisionw was a clear one to us. Removing excess instruction and warnings is one important part of making the signup process easier on the majority of people.
• The system for dealing with bad usernames ultimately needs to be redone. As tracked in bug 32330, our current thinking is that in the long run, we are going to let admins force a username reset which the user completes before they are allowed back in to their account. This is much more elegant than blocking and forcing users to create a new account.
• The "help me choose" language in the link was suggested by an editor, over the version we originally had which as "username policy". I'm totally open to suggestions about changing the description of that link.

Anyway, the other reason I ask about actual stats on the increase in OTRS email is because we are coming out of the holiday season. As you can see from data like this, every year around Christmas and New Years, we see a very large dip in all account creations. The increase you may be feeling is almost certainly in part due to the fact that the overall number of registrations is increasing again, slowly but surely. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 20:01, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

I've added a comment to bugzilla:32330 with two features that are essential to any such change. – Philosopher  18:08, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

Useful links disappeared from botton of Nostalgia skin

Ever since early December 2012, the English Misplaced Pages does not have the row of handy links at the bottom of pages any more. It looks like this only applies to the Nostalgia skin, which I use. It also only seems to have happened to a few wikis, (e.g. these links that use Nostalgia on English and German, but not on French or meta). I was wondering if anyone knows why it happened, and if there is any chance of some of the links being restored. The links I am talking about are the ones that look like

Edit this page | Watch this page | Discuss this page | Page history | What links here | Related changes
| Move this page

I use the Nostalgia skin because it seemed the simplest way to get rid of the left-hand margin and avoid overriding browser fonts. I most often used this row of links to see if a page was on my watch list, to change the watchlist status, and for the “What links here” function. Recently I have been resorting to typing in the URLs manually. Vadmium (talk, contribs) 04:21, 21 January 2013 (UTC).

Pending Changes disagreeing with itself

Special:PendingChanges recently referred me to a pending change at Deaths in 2013 (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) (which I'd reviewed the previous edit to, but I don't think that has anything to do with what happened). However, when the diff loaded, it told me that it had already been accepted. Yet the history told me that the two edits (an addition by an IP and its subsequent reversion by Eyesnore (talk · contribs)) were still pending. I raised the issue on IRC, where several other editors saw the same issue; Legoktm (talk · contribs) deprecated the revisions and re-accepted them, and as far as I can tell, that fixed everything. Here's the problem, though: the review log shows that Eyesnore's revert was auto-accepted. But everything I can find on the subject says that the only edit auto-accepted following a still-pending edit is rollback executed by a reviewer. Eyesnore's a rollbacker, but not a reviewer. So am I mistaken, and are rollbackers' reverts in fact auto-accepted, or is there a bug in the system? — PinkAmpers& 06:25, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

According to Special:ListGroupRights, Eyesnore's status as a rollbacker should not have permitted him to be auto-reviewed (although there could be a bug that permits it). MBisanz 06:33, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

It also might check the SHA1 and if they are the same from a already approved edit it might auto-except that. Werieth (talk) 14:32, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

Selectively hiding watchlist notices

Is it possible to hide watchlist notices by type? I'm not interested in seeing notifications of upcoming meetups, which occur frequently. — Hex (❝?!❞) 13:47, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

It is possible to hide individual geonotices (see MediaWiki:Geonotice.js), for example the current UK meetup one may be hidden by setting

#geonoticeUKFeb2013Meetups { display: none; }

in your Special:MyPage/common.css, but since that ID will probably change when the March meetups begin to be shown, it's easier to go for the link. Alternatively you can hide all geonotices on a permanent basis using

.geonotice { display: none; }

instead. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:13, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

Great - thanks. I wasn't aware of the workings of geonotices before. — Hex (❝?!❞) 15:17, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

weblinkchecker.py

Sorry, I do not work with weblinkchecker.py . :-( Examples: 1, 2. The code of weblinkchecker.py I copied from JeffGBot, adding information for the Russian Misplaced Pages. What I did wrong? Thanks.--Ворота рая Импресариата (talk) 14:33, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

Run it again over the same page in a week, it will then report dead links. Werieth (talk) 15:15, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

The title of the George Galloway article is italicised

Here is the discussion with further information . Govgovgov (talk) 15:46, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

I jerry-rigged a solution by using {{DISPLAYTITLE}} after the radio show infobox. If someone can think of a better way, feel free to do so. Ryan Vesey 15:52, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

The proper fix was to use the right right parameter name italic_title for {{Infobox radio show}}. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:40, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

Curiosity concerning stats.grok.se

As some of you may or may not know, I previously went by the Misplaced Pages alias of Backtable. My former userpage was deleted on January 4, 2013, as per my own request. Ever since then, stats.grok.se has reported a sharp increase in views of my deleted userpace, starting when the page got deleted. Stats.grok.se reports hundreds of post-deletion views per day, even though not getting 10 pre-deletion views per day was nothing unusual. Is this an error on behalf of the viewcounter, or is there an otherwise reasonable explanation for the uncanny increase in views? I know I haven't been viewing it that much.

Also, I did send an e-mail to Henrik about this, as was recommended here, but that user has not been very active on Misplaced Pages as of recent. I also e-mailed another administrator about the viewcount anomaly, and the administrator referred me here. Mungo Kitsch (talk) 22:14, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

Purely a guess, but could it be bots external to Wiki, e.g. Googlebots, trying to spider your page repeatedly when they can't find it?  An optimist on the run! 14:57, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

I'm unfamiliar with bot practices, but I would venture to consider your guess possible. I found this page, and I may instill some of its suggestions to hopefully reduce viewcount. Mungo Kitsch (talk) 03:12, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

Template talk:Wikimedia for portals

See: Template talk:Wikimedia for portals#Wikivoyage. Is there a way to add a yes/no function to this template, to what will display, kind of along the lines of Template:Sisterlinks, except that it is horizontal, instead of vertical. Thanks, --Funandtrvl (talk) 22:39, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

If you mean how to make it not to display Wikivoyage, that is {{Wikimedia for portals|voy=-}}. Ruslik_Zero 13:23, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, I just see that now. I'm going to change the dash to "no", to match the way the Sisterlinks template works, it seems more clear-cut that way. The dash is very vague to what it does. --Funandtrvl (talk) 17:38, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

Feedback appreciated on edit request

I've filed an edit request to incorporate {{Pp-pc1}} (though not {{Pp-pc2}}) into {{Pp-meta}}, in keeping with other protection templates. I believe it to be fairly non-controversial, as does Salvidrim, who's reviewing the request, but he's suggested that I seek comment from other editors before he carries out (or doesn't carry out) the changes. I agree that this is a good idea, and would be very grateful if some editors experienced in template markup could look over my work, both to make sure that I haven't screwed anything up and to comment on whether or not it's a good idea regardless. If necessary I can open an RfC, but it seems simpler to just fish for some feedback here. — PinkAmpers& 06:37, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

Data center migration

Hi; just a quick reminder that the planned data center migration (see above) is happening today, in about 2.5 hours now. guillom 14:41, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

You mean it's not started yet? Misplaced Pages has been slow all day here in the UK. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:11, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

No, it won't start before 1.5 hour. Is it better now? guillom 15:25, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

Does that mean no edit (in either talk namespace or article space) will be possible? -- Toshio Yamaguchi 18:18, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

Yes, for some time saving any edits will not be possible. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 19:02, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

The watchlist notice says "Wikimedia sites will be periodically in read-only mode early this week." So inbetween there will be periods where editing is possible? -- Toshio Yamaguchi 18:22, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

Well, starting at 1740 today, there was a span of about half an hour where no edits at all were possible (ending ten minutes ago or so), but we're making edits now, so I guess the answer to both your questions is "yes." :) Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 18:25, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

All sites were in read-only mode for ~30 minutes, but the migration was completed successfully. We don't expect any further related editing interruptions. Asher Feldman 00:36, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Don't save my change yet!

When I am editing an edit summary, if I accidentally press return the edit is saved, like this.

Is there a way to disable this functionality? Either through configuring Misplaced Pages or my browser.

Yaris678 (talk) 18:18, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

Hey, Yaris! You could try this script that I just wrote (not wholly by myself); I haven't tested it completely for cross-browser shenanigans, but I think it should work. Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 19:34, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

Jarry1250 (talk · contribs) provided me with a one-line fix which you can find in my vector.js. It seems to work. -- John of Reading (talk) 19:55, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

Cool. Thanks guys. I'll have a go with one of these tomorrow. Yaris678 (talk) 22:48, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

I have applied Jarry1250's code to my monobook.js and it seems to work. (I use the monobook skin, not vector.) Thanks guys! Yaris678 (talk) 11:37, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Removing markup

Hi - is there a template or parser function that will strip wiki mark-up from text, just leaving raw text?  An optimist on the run! 18:29, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

No. Though if you give further details about what you're trying to accomplish, there may be another solution available. --MZMcBride (talk) 19:03, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

Ok, it's rather complicated, but here goes: I use a personalised {{information}} template on Commons, and want to put an anchor link in it to the licence section. This uses the header {{int:license}}. This gives a different title depending on a user's language preference. The obvious solution, which I've tried, is to link to ], which works for en-gb (my preference), but causes problems for the default en language. This is because {{int:license}} expands to ] for en, containing a link. When this is transcluded into the anchor link, it produces nested square brackets, breaking the template. I want to strip the mark-up from {{int:license}}, so that it leaves ] for English users. I can't just link to ] directly, as it wouldn't work for users with other languages set. I could get around the problem by having a special case if {{int:lang}}=en, but there may be other languages that also have links in the header.

Any suggestions?  An optimist on the run! 19:25, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

Set an WP:ANCHOR. For example, <span id=Licensing /> --Redrose64 (talk) 19:32, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

^ This, basically. Though Commons really ought to have canonical anchors for these standard sections. --MZMcBride (talk) 19:36, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

Or instead of a raw <span> tag, use commons:Template:Anchor. jcgoble3 (talk) 19:38, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

I'd thought of that, but hoped to avoid having to edit all my images (over 200), having only just gone through them all to add the header in the first place. Oh well, AWB makes it easier. Thanks for your help.  An optimist on the run! 21:00, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

Here's a proof-of-concept that it can be done, though the technique is probably too clunky for widespread adoption:

• An undocumented quirk of the {{anchorencode:...}} magic word causes it to extract the dot-encoded displayed text from a wikilink, making it possible to link to the relevant section, so {{anchorencode:]}} will produce Bar_baz.3F
• There doesn't seem to be a way to extract Foo or the unencoded Bar baz?.
• Because the extracted display text is always dot-encoded, it needs piping to prevent non-ASCII text and punctuation from displaying oddly. Fortunately, in this case it's possible to cheat by piping int:version-license which happens to have the same intended meaning as int:license but uses only unlinked plain text – at present! (The display texts of the two messages are not identical in every language, so it is not possible to link with the simpler unpiped ].)
• So the following should work:

  ]
  

There's a working example at commons:User:Richardguk/int anchor test which you can test by appending the uselang parameter to the URL. But the fact that it can be done by this obscure workaround doesn't mean that it ought to be done! In particular, links could break if there were changes to the internal workings of {{anchorencode:}} or to the format of int:version-license messages. But it is an interesting demonstration of wikitext's quirks.

— Richardguk (talk) 01:46, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

secedit script listed as obsolete but...

This script from 2007 has been listed as obsolete by the user scripts project. However, I bumped into it and tried it out and it seems to work just fine in Firefox 18.0.1. Might this be erroneous? Can some other people with other configurations try out the script to see if it works? ResMar 18:55, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

I don't know, but "obsolete" might mean "made unnecessary" rather than "no longer working". Grandiose (me, talk, contribs) 19:29, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

The script is no longer necessary. It was written at a time when there were no "edit" links for article sections in Misplaced Pages and the only way to edit a section was to open the entire article. — Quicksilver 19:34, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

The listing specifically states that it has been "Broken by MediaWiki changes". While there is a live preview option under editing preferences, as well as an Ajax preview script, neither of them works inline in the same manner as this one - ae. they both take you to a new webpage. Maybe it's been rendered obsolete by something better, but I haven't found it yet... ResMar 19:42, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

Hold up, that's not how it works. It changes the interface so that clicking on the edit button opens an inline editing interface, without switching to a &section= editing page, and allows you to do all the usual stuff without changing web urls. ResMar 19:46, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

Hmm in the latest Chrome it doesn't work most of the time and when it does it edits the section below.--Gilderien Chat|List of good deeds 20:41, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

It's been possible to edit article sections since at least July 2003. Graham87 14:57, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Images not rendering

I've uploaded ~800 images as part of Commons:Batch_uploading/AELG. While image metadata is visible for all the images, some of them do not have a preview/don't thumnail: File:Eulalia Agrelo Costas (AELG)-1.jpg, File:Valentín Arias (AELG)-1.jpg, etc.. When I click on File:Eulalia Agrelo Costas (AELG)-1.jpg for the full image, it shows up fine, however, the preview thumbnail says "Error generating thumbnail The source file for the specified thumbnail does not exist." Anyone know how to fix this?Smallman12q (talk) 01:25, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

This has been happening for a while now, Misplaced Pages:Purge has some instructions that may solve the problem, these may fix but but don't expect the results to be quick as I noticed a similar problem with File:Moorhouse in Cumbria - geograph.org.uk .jpg in the Moorhouse, Cumbria article a few days ago and the thumbnail wouldn't display at the correct size in the article until several hours later (adding the "?1" to the url would work for the image, but the syntax used in articles doesn't allow that. The full size images of your uploads are appearing correctly. Peter James (talk) 01:37, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

In general we face some on-and-off thumbnail issues, see the list under "Depends on:" bugzilla:41371. Bug 41130 (server caches) comes to my mind but mostly people from North America are affected, while I can reproduce the problem here and am based in Europe. As recommended by Peter I'd wait a few hours, and if the issue still happens I'd file a bug report in the bugtracker (I'll happily do that). --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 11:40, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

It looks like something broke on the wiki side from 19:14, 22 January 2013 to 19:17, 22 January 2013. All of the files in between don't render. It's only a few minutes, but the bot does 10-15 files/minute. See listfiles on commons for the bot for the empty rendering spaces.Smallman12q (talk) 23:47, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Maybe it has something to do with the data migration that was happening yesterday. The Anonymouse (talk | contribs) 23:56, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

19:14, 22 January 2013 to 19:17, 22 January 2013 was definitely data migration time and we were read-only for 33 minutes at that time. See the announcement. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 11:40, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

On the other hand, I also see very similar issues with thumbnails that were not created around that time. I'll try to find a developer to discuss with. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 12:58, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

Resolved-It's been fixed thanks!Smallman12q (talk) 03:14, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

-Speaking of thumbnails: I updated two images on the Commons, which were updated on WP the next day, but not in the article (Puget Sound faults); purging my cache did not help. I now see that it is the thumbnail version that is not updating. Changing the "upright" parameter to a different size appears to force a new rendering. But invoking the image at the old size gets the old version of the image. I suspect that each size of an image in use is stored as a separate file, and these are not being updated when the source image is changed. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:19, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

Your bug is a bit different in that you have stale thumbnails, whereas my bug had no thumbnail. Thumbnails are cached. The server cache for your images could be stale. Did you try Misplaced Pages:Purge? (Go the image file on commons, add ?action=purge to the url and hit enter).Smallman12q (talk) 03:14, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

There is a similar problem with File:The_cave_video_game_cover.png, a new version has been uploaded but the old image is displayed with the new image's dimensions. Purge has no effect. Reverting, and then restoring the image has no effect. Adding the purge command to the image url will display the correct version of the image, but it has no long lasting effect. It may be worth investigating if there is a chance that this could be affecting all images uploaded during the fault period. - X201 (talk) 11:34, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Same problem as described by X201 here: File:Grail browser on Linux.png --Morn (talk) 12:04, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Users reporting site time issues and delay in visible update of edits

Hi. At Talk:Main Page, a couple of users are reporting that the site is rendering for them as 22 Jan, despite them living in Europe, where it's currently 23 Jan. Hence, they're seeing yesterday's TFA. NB I live in the UK and all seems fine to me. --Dweller (talk) 11:58, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

• Yes, I was the first poster on main page, the Main Page definitely doesn't update for me. Firefox 9.0.1 and 10.0.2 here. Windows XP 2002 SP3. France. F5, CTRL+F5, restarting the computer doesn't work, and I have this problem on different computers. I'm stuck on Jan 22, which was a rather miserable day for me :D BTW is this problem related to the one I have on Commons ? The Commons Main Page doesn't update regularly for me either, I have to force it by switching to mobile view and back. Thank you, have a nice day. 130.79.37.169 (talk) 12:11, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Thank you, reported.  :) Philippe Beaudette, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 14:28, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, Philippe. --Dweller (talk) 14:31, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

I'm having the same problem and I'm in the UK. The main page should be 23rd January. Why is yesterday's page loading instead? I've never had this problem on Misplaced Pages before. TurboForce (talk) 14:41, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

This is a confirmed problem related to the eqiad migration, and operations is working on it now. Hopefully should be resolved shortly. ^demon 14:43, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. While this glitch may be annoying for those it's affecting, it's remarkable that the migration has had such little impact. Virtual coffee and chocolate to all the developers from me. (I presume that American IT people depend on similar foodgroups to their British cousins). --Dweller (talk) 14:46, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

This was a routing problem relating to page purges, and it's now been fixed (and primarily affected European users). Any affected pages can be purged and should show up properly for all users. ^demon 15:02, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Concur with Dweller. I can honestly say that if I hadn't read about the migration, I wouldn't have noticed a thing. Well done!  An optimist on the run! 15:16, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

This problem is still ongoing, at least for me here in the UK. Many pages will show their 22 Jan version in read mode even if later edits have been made. The edits can be seen in edit mode, but will not appear in normal read mode. Neither do they show up in the history view. It's the same for the talk pages. 78.146.235.71 (talk) 04:04, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

The problem is still ongoing, I posted to Talk:Main Page about one of the sections not updating. and was pointed to here. (The DYK section is not updated for unlogged visitors.) It's probably not just the front page. Yesterday I made 2 edits to an article. I could see them in my contributions, but they weren't present in the article's revision history and in the article itself. (Even when I was logged in.) When I returned to Misplaced Pages today, they were there. --Moscow Connection (talk) 05:08, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

By the way, when I log out, no recent modifications on any pages seems to be shown. In the revision history too, I see an older version without newer edits. I try to purge pages, but nothing helps. When I log in, I can see everything. --Moscow Connection (talk) 05:50, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

2 examples of what I see when I log out:

• On the front page the "Did you know..." section is from 08:00, 23 January 2013
• At Template:Did you know, I am shown the revision from 16:00, 22 January 2013. Purging doesn't help. --Moscow Connection (talk) 06:19, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

This glitch is still active in Germany. Although our location is 0730 UTC on 24 Jan the main page shows 1630 UTC 23 Jan. And the Talk page shows a completely different UTC. Purging the pages does not work at all. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 155.56.68.216 (talk) 06:47, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

Still an issue UK 11:46gmt 24JAN2013, main page shows 23JAN data, tried all the purges etc, viewing vis USA proxy shows correct date data. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.104.131.116 (talk) 11:47, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

Issue is still active as of 1530 GMT 24 January in Netherlands on IE and Firefox, purging etc. no effect. Site still is showing 23 January information. This seems to only be the case with en.wikipedia.org, nl, fr and de versions working fine. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.210.0.175 (talk) 15:35, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

The glitch is still ongoing (for those not logged in). Many pages still shown in their January 22 or 23 state. This must be causing pretty serious problems. What is being done about it? 78.146.235.71 (talk) 21:40, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

• This seems to still be ongoing for many users: OTRS Ticket #s 2013012410012095, 2013012510003923, 2013012510003558, 2013012510004002, 2013012510003094. All of them came in within the last 16 hours. Ks0stm 09:40, 25 January 2013 (UTC)
• Verified from a PC other than my own in Oxford, England (IP address 195.171.xxx.yyy) using IE8 under Windows XP; at 10:15 UTC today the main page showed: TFA - Skye; DYK - 16:00, 23 January 2013 (European birch aphid etc.); OTD - January 23; TFP - Executive Mansion.

I then went to one of these articles, followed links to about five pages deep, then backed out to the main page - and saw that it was now showing the correct information for January 25 (TFA - Pinguicula moranensis; DYK - 2012 Race of Champions, Abel Schr›der/Vester Egesborg/Undløse/St Martin's, Make the World Move, Thomas Aquinas Dictionary, Dima Yakovlev Law, Ian McKeever, Detroit's population increased over 1,000 times). --Redrose64 (talk) 13:50, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

This is geting ridiculous. This morning (25th) the main page was showing the correct date and I thought that at last all the problems had been fixed. This afternoon I visit it again, and its back to showing the 23rd! Come on, guys. You're losing technical credibility, here. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.59.43.240 (talk) 14:33, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Email notification

Hi, I've probably done something completely wrong but my email notifications of changes to watched pages seemed to suddenly stop yesterday evening; it had been working correctly until then. I have checked everything is still all ticked in 'preferences' in case I'd inadvertently changed something. To check that the email address was working I even sent myself an email from my alternative email which came through. I also tried sending myself an email from Misplaced Pages using the email this user facility, which hasn't arrived either. I use a Mac (if that makes any difference). I hope I'm managing to explain this query correctly! SagaciousPhil - Chat 15:03, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Based on the comments in the #wikimedia-operations channel, it should be fixed now. Legoktm (talk) 15:22, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Wow, thanks for such a speedy response! I'm still not getting anything through, I picked up your reply by constantly checking my watch list (I know - obsessive/compulsive springs to mind!). At least it's a relief to know it's unlikely to be something I've done and I'll just wait patiently as I'm not technical enough to know how to work the operations channels. SagaciousPhil - Chat 15:31, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

By the way, notifications were delivered a few hours later, within the end of the day (at least for me). --Nemo 13:40, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

Broken link at http://www.wikipedia.org/

When English is selected from The Misplaced Pages landing page it generates an error stating "No site configured at this address". Its been doing this for a few days.

When English is selected it tries to link to: http://en.wikipedia.org/ and I think it should be http://en.wikipedia.org/Main_Page. Kumioko (talk) 20:54, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

That's odd, http://en.wikipedia.org/ takes me to the main page whether I click the link on the landing page or enter it to the address bar (it automatically adds wiki/Main_Page as soon as the browser follows the link). The landing page works as I'd expect for me in Chrome and IE9. James086 20:59, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Ditto, working for me. Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 21:00, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Are you using Firefox? If so try this? James086 21:03, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Working properly in Firefox 18.0.1/Windows 8. jcgoble3 (talk) 21:26, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

That's interesting. I've tried it on 2 different computers with IE and Firefox and it doesn't work here. I also tried clicking the other links around the globe and they work, just not the english one. Kumioko (talk) 21:27, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

What URL does it lead you to? What HTTP headers and what HTML are you receiving? Ucucha (talk) 21:31, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

As I mentioned above it leads me to http://en.wikipedia.org/ and then generates a blank white page with "No site configured at this address". Its no big deal if no one else is having the problem. I've also already cleared my cache and my recent history. I even tried to restart my computer. I just thought it was something to do with the Server move from Fl to Va. Kumioko (talk) 21:34, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Link http://en.wikipedia.org/ works fine for me redirects to http://en.wikipedia.org/Main_Page.Moxy (talk) 21:39, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Hold the champaign

Special:Preferences gives my "Registration time" as 14:22, 16 October 2003; yet http://toolserver.org/~tparis/pcount/index.php?name=Pigsonthewing&lang=en&wiki=wikipedia says I made my first edit on Jan 26, 2003 08:34:04 - which is correct? Could the issue arise because the January edit was deleted? Should I, like the Queen of England, celebrate two "birthdays"? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:28, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

Actually, your first deleted edit (according to Special:DeletedContributions) was to Be in Birmingham 2008 on October 17, 2003. I'm not sure what the January 26 edit would be—possibly a database inconsistency. Ucucha (talk) 16:32, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

Thank you. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:46, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

For people who registered before September 2005, the Registration time was populated from the first edit at the time it was populated. There are other ways to determine the registration date for such affected people. MBisanz 17:57, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

You probably moved a page over a redirect when the bug described in the second-last paragraph of the section about moving over a redirect was in force. The edit may have since been nuked because somebody moved the page back over it (i.e. changing the title back to what it was before your page move). The errant edit is probably somewhere in the old dumps. Graham87 13:03, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Text and redirect in redirect page

In this article Fxall (or in this version of the article) and IP editor added some text without removing the redirect tag (go to edit mode to see)! Ignoring their formatting error, shouldn't the text in that page break the redirect? Or any changes recently? --Tito Dutta (talk) 16:29, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

No, MediaWiki simply ignores all text after a #redirect line. Ucucha (talk) 16:33, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

To clarify, it does parse templates, and uses category and interwiki links appropriately. It just doesn't display any of the text after the redirect line, although it once did. — Carl (CBM · talk) 16:35, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

I think a more important issue is the added text is promotional and a blatant copyvio of www.fxall.com/about. I have removed it. Chris857 (talk) 20:31, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

Special:StudentActivity

Special:StudentActivity is giving me a most unhelpfully vague error message:

2013-01-24 17:57:26: Fatal exception of type MWException

What is needed to a) fix the problem and b) de-mystify the error message for when it appears in the future? – Philosopher  18:12, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

I would try through WP:BUGZILLA or a note on Misplaced Pages:Education noticeboard. MBisanz 18:17, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

The unhelpful error message is presumably for security and privacy protection; the server admins will probably have access to the full error message, which may include sensitive data. Ucucha (talk) 21:49, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

Admin can't see revdel'd revisions

I seem to be unable to check out the revdel'd revisions at Derby sex gang. I don't even get to check the box for selecting a revision. I'm an admin; I was logged in; it usually works. What happen? Bishonen | talk 21:00, 24 January 2013 (UTC).

Oversight. Writ Keeper ⚇♔ 21:01, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

content not refreshing from Hungary, using ipv6.

Hi,

I have tried firefox, opera, chrome, reload, private browsing, f5, ctrl-f5, but i still see the state of the main page as it was on the 23rd of january. It seems that a squid needs a kick.

GET /Main_Page HTTP/1.1
Host: en.wikipedia.org
Connection: keep-alive
Cache-Control: max-age=0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/537.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/24.0.1312.52 Safari/537.17
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch
Accept-Language: hu-HU,hu;q=0.8,en-US;q=0.6,en;q=0.4
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-2,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3
Cookie: centralnotice_bucket=1-4.2; clicktracking-session=HBszflapTPzHCS9W0J1TpTXaa5HZfSrvq; mediaWiki.user.bucket%3Aext.articleFeedback-tracking=10%3Atrack; mediaWiki.user.id=57FUr6tSm2LJWGc2cBerv7Qv2Qrl8UCD
If-Modified-Since: Wed, 23 Jan 2013 14:58:51 GMT
HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified
Server: nginx/1.1.19
Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2013 04:24:38 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Connection: keep-alive
Last-Modified: Wed, 23 Jan 2013 14:58:51 GMT
Age: 134746
X-Cache: HIT from amssq43.esams.wikimedia.org
X-Cache-Lookup: HIT from amssq43.esams.wikimedia.org:3128
X-Cache: MISS from amssq44.esams.wikimedia.org
X-Cache-Lookup: HIT from amssq44.esams.wikimedia.org:80
Via: 1.0 amssq43.esams.wikimedia.org:3128 (squid/2.7.STABLE9), 1.0 amssq44.esams.wikimedia.org:80 (squid/2.7.STABLE9)
GET /search/?title=MediaWiki:Gadget-ReferenceTooltips.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript&508635914 HTTP/1.1
Host: en.wikipedia.org
Connection: keep-alive
Cache-Control: max-age=0
Accept: */*
If-Modified-Since: Wed, 22 Aug 2012 16:12:35 GMT
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/537.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/24.0.1312.52 Safari/537.17
Referer: http://en.wikipedia.org/Main_Page
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch
Accept-Language: hu-HU,hu;q=0.8,en-US;q=0.6,en;q=0.4
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-2,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3
Cookie: centralnotice_bucket=1-4.2; clicktracking-session=HBszflapTPzHCS9W0J1TpTXaa5HZfSrvq; mediaWiki.user.bucket%3Aext.articleFeedback-tracking=10%3Atrack; mediaWiki.user.id=57FUr6tSm2LJWGc2cBerv7Qv2Qrl8UCD
HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified
Server: nginx/1.1.19
Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2013 04:24:38 GMT
Content-Type: text/javascript; charset=UTF-8
Connection: keep-alive
Last-Modified: Wed, 22 Aug 2012 16:12:35 GMT
Age: 23
X-Cache: HIT from amssq37.esams.wikimedia.org
X-Cache-Lookup: HIT from amssq37.esams.wikimedia.org:3128
X-Cache: MISS from amssq40.esams.wikimedia.org
X-Cache-Lookup: HIT from amssq40.esams.wikimedia.org:80
Via: 1.0 amssq37.esams.wikimedia.org:3128 (squid/2.7.STABLE9), 1.0 amssq40.esams.wikimedia.org:80 (squid/2.7.STABLE9)

— Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:470:1F09:64B:213:E8FF:FEC5:70A5 (talk) 04:43, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

See discussion above: #Users reporting site time issues and delay in visible update of edits jcgoble3 (talk) 05:17, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

When it will start to work archivebot.py and weblinkchecker.py?

1) archivebot.py

I put in the parameters

|algo = old(1d)

Several days have passed, but still appears

Processing 10 threads There are only 0 Threads. Skipped

When it will be back up?

2) weblinkchecker.py

I set the parameter-day:1 several days have Passed, but the bot is doing nothing.

And the errors are gone. I think that the problem is not only in my family file, because the same error occurs when I run the bot in Russian Misplaced Pages.

http://pastebin.com/x1zQipmU

Thanks.--Ворота рая Импресариата (talk) 12:18, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

What's changed about images placed on the left?

In the past couple of days I've noticed that images placed on the left are no longer rendered where they should be. I haven't completely parsed the problem yet, but it appears that if a left-hand image is listed before any right-hand image it will be properly placed, but if it's coded after a right hand image, it gets pushed down to below that image, even if the right-hand image is pushed down by, for instance, an infobox. This is totally new. The left hand image used to render where it came in the coding, even if the right-hand image had to shift down because some other item was in its way.

What's changed? Beyond My Ken (talk) 13:04, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

I've put an example of the problem in my userspace, at User:Beyond My Ken/temp, taken from the Yonkers article. Note that there are three right-hand images which begin just before the "Northwest Yonkers" section. Then there are two left-hand images which should appear at the beginning of the "Southeast Yonkers" section, because that is where they are place in the coding. Instead, those images don't start until the top of the third right-hand image, so they are pushed down the page out of the section they're intended to be connected to. If the left-hand images were coded before the right-hand images, they would appear where they were placed, and the right-hand images would appear in the correct place also. (Feel free to play around with the page to verify this for yourself.) This is different from how image placement used to work, and it's not an improvement. Beyond My Ken (talk) 13:32, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

This has been normal behaviour for a very long time. Images are always rendered in the same order that they appear in the wikicode. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:33, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but that is not the case. A large proportion of the work I do is in page layout, and the images have never rendered in this fashion until recently, nor should they. Images used to (and should) render where they are put in the code, with the right and left images not interlinked in any way, which appears to be the case now. There's no reason that an image on one side of the page should be dependent on the position on an image on the other side of the page, and once they were not, but now they are in some fashion.

BTW, I've checked this under Firefox, Chrome, IE, Safari and Opera, both logged in and logged out, so this is not a browser-dependent problem, not is it anything to do with my settings. Beyond My Ken (talk) 13:44, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

See Misplaced Pages:Village pump (technical)/Archive 107#Layout funny in particular the rules for floating elements. I've been posting replies to similar questions here and on other talk pages for well over two years; my posts normally included the two words "pushed down" but I don't know of an easy way to go through nigh on 72,000 edits looking for the ten or so posts of that nature to see when I first described it. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:11, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Could this be caused by your browser switching to CSS or HTML5 standard layout rules? "The outer top of a floating box may not be higher than the outer top of any block or floated box generated by an element earlier in the source document." (CSS2, emphasis added.) Misplaced Pages switched to HTML5 last year, but I think Internet Explorer initially included Misplaced Pages on a transitional list of websites to render in quirks mode, and the layout mode can also be affected by user preferences. So different browsers will have applied different layout rules at different times. — Richardguk (talk) 15:18, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Detecting interwiki links

Is there a way to detect which articles (in a category) have interwiki links on them? I'd like to generate a "priority list" for translation of the articles in a certain category to other Wikipedias, and "have they already been translated somewhere" would be a very useful thing to know. – Philosopher  17:06, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Would this tool help? It's intended for finding articles not translated into a particular language, but it might be practical for your purpose. Andrew Gray (talk) 17:11, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Got it! If you search for an invalid language code like "xx" as the target, you'll get all articles with any interwikis, sorted by most translated. This search returns 63 articles from the 69 in Category:Presidents of the Oxford Union, ranging from one with 91 interwikis to 20 with only one. Andrew Gray (talk) 17:25, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

You can also get this information (probably with more options) from querying the toolserver database. I can run queries for you if you want. Legoktm (talk) 17:55, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Egads!!

Suddenly, everything's centered, in small text, and the navigation bar on the left is below all the page content. - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 17:47, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Ditto with Monobook and Firefox. I'm so glad it's not just me. :) SlimVirgin 17:48, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

I am experiencing the same issue with Chrome, though not consistently. §everal⇒|Times 17:49, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Switched from Monobook to Classic and back (on Chrome) and the problem disappeared. Ritchie333 17:49, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Same here with chrome and the default layout!--TKK 17:49, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Now back to normal for me. SlimVirgin 17:50, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Ditto with IE. Alden Loveshade (talk) 17:50, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

hide the banner at the top, then refresh the page. Frietjes (talk) 17:51, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Fixed now here too. - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 17:52, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Looks like all text is centered, small, and the menu on the left is pushed below all content. Imagine it's something being looked into already but makes me scared of Misplaced Pages! Cheers. Andre666 (talk) 17:48, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

if you close the "notice" at the top of the page, then reload, the problem goes away. someone forgot to close a tag up there. see the threads above and below. Frietjes (talk) 17:50, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Who ever put up that new banner on the Main page not updating has caused all text to appear small and centered! Please guys, a bit of professionalism. On a technical note, I'm using Chrome on Windows 7. 88.170.241.162 (talk) 17:49, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

I was just about to report this. A workaround is to hide the banner and refresh the page. The Anonymouse (talk | contribs) 17:49, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Looks like it has been  Fixed. The Anonymouse (talk | contribs) 17:52, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Several Misplaced Pages articles are being presented in a centered text format (as if they were being edited to have a central alignment). When the history of the page is viewed, the articles return to normal formatting. Due to the widespread appearance of this effect, I doubt that it is intentional mal-editing. I have viewed Misplaced Pages on several browsers and two different laptops to rule out any system issues. It appears that this is a Misplaced Pages-related glitch and not a problem with my personal computers.

Are there any other individuals experiencing this odd formatting? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.189.156.116 (talk) 17:50, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

hide the banner at the top, then refresh the page. see the threads above. Frietjes (talk) 17:52, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

(edit conflict)Mentioned above; it was a broken close tag in the technical notice banner at the top of the page. Fixed now; doesn't need to be closed first. - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 17:53, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

I don't know why or if anyone else is having this problem or not (I don't have time to read through everything people have said right now), but all of the content in every page on Misplaced Pages is showing up in smaller font than normal, and is centered in the middle of the page for some reason. Even the "Save page", "Show preview", and "Show changes" buttons are centered on my screen as I'm posting this. I've already checked some of the settings of my browser (including zoom, which is at 100%), and I don't think it's my fault. I'm pretty sure the sidebar and top bar are still their normal sizes, though. Alphius (talk) 17:51, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

hide the banner at the top, then refresh the page. see the threads above. Frietjes (talk) 17:52, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

(edit conflict)Mentioned above; it was a broken close tag in the technical notice banner at the top of the page. Fixed now; doesn't need to be closed first. - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 17:53, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the quick response! Alphius (talk) 17:56, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

My contributions are centered. It looks weird. IE9 and whatever the default was back in 2007. I think that's Monobook.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 18:04, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

And now my contributions look normal. I didn't do anything.— Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 18:06, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

Why should this be advertised in every article and create panic if it is about Main Page only?···Vanischenu/_Talk」 18:09, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

How to fix Portal: Current Events

Portal>Current Events are not being updated on Main Page after user edit.

Simply go and undo previous edit by different ip

Refresh main page and the undone edit will be shown.

17:50, 25 January 2013 (UTC) 187.12.26.206 (talk) 17:50, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

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