Wikipedia:Village pump (technical): Difference between revisions

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security implications should be reported differently (see how to report security bugs

).

Newcomers to the technical village pump are encouraged to read these guidelines prior to posting here. If you want to report a JavaScript error, please follow this guideline. Questions about MediaWiki in general should be posted at the MediaWiki support desk. Discussions are automatically archived after remaining inactive for five days.

view · edit Frequently asked questions (see also: Wikipedia:FAQ/Technical) Click "[show]" 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 Wikipedia services, see Reporting a connectivity issue.

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Resolved

Can someone please have a look at this? I was having a talkpage technical error at Talk:Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory? Relevant version. I have fixed the issue in the current version, but I think it will mess-up the archives when we get to that time. (please  mention me on reply; thanks!) --Emir of Wikipedia (talk) 21:08, 2 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

If someone could help that would be appreciated. Emir of Wikipedia (talk) 18:33, 3 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Bumping thread. Emir of Wikipedia (talk) 17:20, 4 November 2020 (UTC) (please  mention me on reply; thanks!)[reply]

@Emir of Wikipedia: I'm not sure I'm seeing what you're looking at or what you might have done to fix it, but it looks like there's a quote box with an unclosed ref tag in it. Look for <ref name="braune2">. I think this code would produce a "ref invoked but not defined" error on the talk page, but I'm not sure if that error would render inside the quote box, or if it would just mess things up unpredictably. You need to close the tag, otherwise Wikipedia thinks everything after it is part of the reference. You can add a / to the end of the tag (<ref name="braune2" />), but then you also need to define the reference and add a {{reflist-talk}} somewhere in the section. It might be better to pull the URL of the reference from the article and replace the ref tag with an external link on the talk page instead. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 17:36, 4 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Ivanvector. Thanks. I just used an external link, and it looks like that has fixed it. --Emir of Wikipedia (talk) 19:50, 4 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

This is the edit.

talk · contribs) next visited this page, it moved threads to a different archive. If a thread is resolved, just use {{resolved}}. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 08:18, 6 November 2020 (UTC)[reply

]

I posted this elsewhere and was asked to report it here. I am not sure if this is the right place to post this, but I need to post it somewhere. The system is not letting me go through categories in the normal way. When I open a category it has the first 200 articles. However when I click on next it goes straight to a page starting with the 200 articles beginning with the first one categorized under B. If I go back it gives me a page with the previous 200 articles, but will only allow me to go back 1 page. This means in some categories some articles in the category cannot be navigated from. This is a very frustrating situation.John Pack Lambert (talk) 20:28, 16 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The above is not the full extent of the problem. When I click on the A tab to navitage in categories it takes me to B, and when I click on B it takes me to C. The more specific tabs like Ae or Aj take me to B, and always at the start of B. So that method of navigation is a problem as well. I have seen this in the 1927, 1929 and 1990 birth year categories. The same problem occured when I went to the category 20th-century American journalists. It seems to be a general navigation problem. I actually turned off my computer and turned it back on things it might be a function of something on my computer. I do not think it is. I have only noticed this problem in today.John Pack Lambert (talk) 20:35, 16 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I started noticing this problem today as well, within Living people and specific birth year categories, after about 20:00 UTC. --Ken Gallager (talk) 20:49, 16 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I would guess this is related to the Unicode upgrade. (More specific thread.) Try again toward the end of the week. --Izno (talk) 20:50, 16 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

(reposting from above): It took about nine days in 2016 and was estimated to take about eight days in 2018. I don't know if the process is similar this time, but I would not be surprised to see it take a week to get sorted (I couldn't resist). – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:04, 16 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Johnpacklambert: Examples are always good, per the box at the top. Without a link to a category, we can't see what is happening, so can't judge if there is a problem or not. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:24, 17 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The problem seems to have been resolved.John Pack Lambert (talk) 21:26, 17 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe on that one page, but see my example below. --Guy Macon (talk) 20:40, 19 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Re: "Examples are good":

On the page Category:Taylor & Francis academic journals when I click on "A" I get B through J and when I click on "B" I get C through J. "C" gives me D through J, and "D" gives me E through L.

"0-9" gives me A but the "previous page " link works and brings me to Écoscience for some strange reason.

"W" gets me X and "X" gets me "There are no pages or files in this category".

--Guy Macon (talk) 20:09, 19 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

A quick update about categories sorting: at the moment, the sorting is still being rebuilt on English Wikipedia. This takes more time due to an unscheduled database restart. Thank you for your patience and your understanding! Trizek (WMF) (talk) 10:26, 24 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Resorting is now done. Please let me know if you find some anomalies that aren't explainable from your side. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 16:53, 24 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Guy Macon, Écoscience was still at the top of Category:Taylor & Francis academic journals. I had to remove the pipe and blank space after the category name in order to get it to sort properly. I do not know enough about categorization to know if this is new behavior. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:06, 24 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@

WP:SORTKEY, second bullet. That said, using a space as the sortkey was incorrect in this instance, because Écoscience is not the main article of Category:Taylor & Francis academic journals, so your removal was valid. BTW I go past the HQ of Taylor & Francis twice a day, on my journey to/from work. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:15, 24 November 2020 (UTC)[reply

]

Hi people, the list jumps from Amal Azzudin to Shahida Abbasi, I suspect that the recent people have been added. I haven't noticed before...GrahamHardy (talk) 18:41, 18 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@GrahamHardy: All categories will be out-of-sorts for the next few days due to a recent change in the Wikipedia software. If it's still a problem in a week and a half, raise the issue again. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 18:44, 18 November 2020 (UTC) (true, but irrelevant) davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 18:46, 18 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, the problem you saw may be unrelated, it has to do with the {{DEFAULTSORT}} on the respective pages. Most, but not all, people are "sorted" last-name-first. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 18:46, 18 November 2020 (UTC) Update Yup, Shahida Abbasi has {{DEFAULTSORT:Abbasi, Shahida}} in it. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 18:48, 18 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

No, those sort keys don't explain the incorrect sorting. The actual issue is the one you struck, also described above in #Tech News: 2020-47. MANdARAX • XAЯAbИAM 19:21, 18 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Doh, yeah, Abbassi comes before either Amal or Azzudin. Both should come after "Caffeine, ingesting." davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 19:24, 18 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Categories not alphabetizing new articles properly

This may be a problem that has already been noticed by other people, but as I can't find evidence that it's been raised here recently I wanted to mention it just in case.

Some recently created articles — specifically articles that were either newly created today, or already existed but got added today to a category that they weren't previously in — don't seem to be getting alphabetized correctly in their relevant categories. For example, in

I know this problem has occurred in the past; however, I don't recall whether it resolved itself naturally, or whether somebody had to tweak something at the server level to fix it. Bearcat (talk) 19:53, 18 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Expect this to take a week or so to be resolved. See above. – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:41, 18 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Would an interface warning help?

I'm not up on the details of how our interface customization works, but would it be possible to use that to put a warning banner on the top of every category page for the next week, alerting people that it's a known problem? -- RoySmith (talk) 18:00, 24 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Per comment above by Trizek (WMF), this is done. --Izno (talk) 18:22, 24 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Hi. I don't know why, but on some pages with {{

Something weird's going on with Category:Indian computer scientists at the moment - none of the categories are showing. You can add one via Hotcat and that works, but anything that goes via the main edit screen doesn't show - none of the usual tricks like null edits, purging etc seem to work. My only thought is that it's had some revert battles with an IP of late, so that it's maybe been locked somehow? Could someone take a look? TIA. Le Deluge (talk) 14:58, 23 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

 Fixed The comment at the top of the page was incorrectly closed. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 15:02, 23 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Gah - that was my first thought, I looked at it and didn't see that extra !, so annoying when you know something must be right in front of you and you don't see it. Thanks. Le Deluge (talk) 16:27, 23 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Template:Linked is showing some failures of the < nowiki > HTML tag and this is having knock-on consequences by displaying items and populating categories inadvertently. Can anyone work out what's causing this? Timrollpickering (talk) 16:50, 23 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Not sure what the bug was, but replacing the brackets with HTML entities has fixed it. ‑ 

Iridescent 17:08, 23 November 2020 (UTC)[reply

]

17:17, 23 November 2020 (UTC)

I'm doing a redesign of the languages list that appears at the bottom of the main page. I'd like to get it looking a little more like the "Read Wikipedia in your language" list on the global landing page, where the "More than 250,000 articles" etc. headers are in the middle of a horizontal rule (which produces a cleaner visual hierarchy). Could anyone help me code that at the sandbox? {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 22:00, 23 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

This Stackoverflow thread looks promising. I think the one on the main page uses JS, but the thread linked here uses CSS, so you might be able to use template styles. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:43, 23 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Proof of concept follows, using similar technique to the global landing page; it could use some refinement but it works. {{Nihiltres |talk |edits}} 22:51, 23 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

For something like this, you should note that hard-coding the background color leaves a chunky box around the text on any page where this doesn't match the background color of other text - so that should be avoided. — xaosflux ^Talk 17:32, 24 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:RefToolbar § Autofill access-date button not there. Any technical help will be greatly appreciated! Funandtrvl (talk) 01:23, 24 November 2020 (UTC)Template:Z48[reply]

I think I've identified the issue, but we need an interface admin to make the edit. Ideally sooner rather than later. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 02:04, 24 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you!! Funandtrvl (talk) 04:02, 24 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

problem fixed, thanks! Funandtrvl (talk) 20:37, 24 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Where is the best place to find someone to update {{Cite_OED}}? I've asked several times on the talk page at Template_talk:Cite_OED#Template_needs_updating, but that page probably doesn't get much exposure. Happy to ask elsewhere if someone could point me in the right direction. MichaelMaggs (talk) 22:33, 24 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

MichaelMaggs, maybe Help talk:Citation Style 1? {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 03:49, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, will try that. MichaelMaggs (talk) 10:13, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I wanted to draw the attention of VPT to a serious issue with music articles right now. Musical scores are not displaying, replaced with the error message "Musical scores are temporarily disabled." This results in significant gaps in many music articles, as the scores are used for essential explanations and examples (see inversion (music), for example). The score element is used on hundreds of articles and has been broken since July. There is some discussion of the issue at Help:Score and Help talk:Score, but there's no indication that anything is being done to fix it. I think some Wikipedians with more technical expertise than I need to step in and find a solution to this, as it's causing major damage to Wikipedia's music coverage. If this is being worked on and there's a timeline for fixing it, please let me know. Many thanks. --Albany NY (talk) 03:34, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Albany NY: It's a known problem. I forget where I saw the official notice, but it's been like that for weeks. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs) 03:35, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

See T257066. Scores have been disabled for security reasons, and it is challenging for volunteers to fix because the security problems have not been disclosed widely. – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:01, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you all for your consideration, Ed talk! 04:19, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

• Support as proposer. Ed talk! 04:19, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Support per nom Disclosure: I am one of RedWarn's devs ―sportzpikachu _{my talkcontribs} 04:21, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• @Ed6767: isn't this not really going to be gadget-optimized because it is running code and directing users to external servers, additionally by loading external scripts isn't this bypassing security controls that are normally present with gadgets (that they would not be expected to behave differently without community managed interface administrators updating them - and also being able to watchlist the actual code)? — xaosflux ^Talk 04:24, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  Hi Xaosflux, we're using Toolforge, which is WMF hosted, and we plan to add signatures to all our external resources if we become a gadget meaning that we cannot change the code of those files without consequentially changing the signatures, so browsers will refuse to load them as there will be a signature mismatch. When there has been a change to these files, they will be made in a newer separate file on the server and updating them will be to the discretion of int admins. We will keep minification as low as we can, all of RedWarn's actual code and functionality is and will remain on-wiki, to allow for people to watchlist, along with tracking changes on the GitLab. Hope this clarifies, Ed talk! 04:33, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  Why does this need to be off-wiki? — xaosflux ^Talk 12:18, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  @Xaosflux, we can copy over the several JS and CSS dependencies on-wiki, but our speed tests on a test MediaWiki instance have shown that this would slow down the website drastically for RedWarn users. Either way, for technical reasons we'd still need to host other files, like fonts and sounds, off-wiki. Ed talk! 15:25, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  @Ed6767: thanks for the note, have you considered just moving the whole thing off-wiki then? Could be linked to a browser add-on, or if you really want to tie it to a wiki user, just a one-line script? — xaosflux ^Talk 15:39, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  @Xaosflux, we could, and we have thought about it, but that brings up again people being unable to watchlist the script itself for changes Ed talk! 15:59, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• Support because RedWarn is an amazing tool (even better than Twinkle in my opinion), and therefore should have the same status of Gadget. It would also help new users find the tool, streamline updating/deployment, and secure the code against vandalism or client-side tampering. — MrConorAE ^{(👤U | 💬T | 📝C)} 05:22, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Strongest possible support per nom. And also per the fact that RedWarn is one of the most powerful anti-vandalism tools that I've ever seen. JJP...MASTER!_{[talk to] JJP... master?} 16:08, 28 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Oppose - I have to admit that I have found RedWarn to be a useful tool. It has more rollback reasons than Twinkle, has more customization than Twinkle, and, while I cannot say it is easier to use as Twinkle, it does get really close. I just tested the tool on my old iPhone and it does not work. It also does not really work on Android either. Twinkle, on the other hand, works well on mobile. I don't even find the Pending Changes Review feature that useful, either. I think RedWarn is a solution looking for a problem. The new functionality could probably be rewritten with modern UI and cross-platform compatibility in mind. Now, all the technical details, which most readers would not be interested: RedWarn would do better if written using OOUI, not Google Material Design. OOUI is built into MediaWiki and is designed to work across all devices. Also, as much as I see good intentions with this, loading material from other servers is a security vulnerability. Material Design is not built into MediaWiki and is unlikely to be for a while. While that does mean that you may have to sacrifice certain icons, I can picture it being a lot more compatible with more browsers than Material Design. Good news, though: you probably are safe to upload these icons to Wikimedia Commons as they are CC BY-4.0 licensed. Aasim (talk) 08:09, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • What I think would be better is if we had RW's functionality merged into Twinkle. Keep the inspector, keep the multiple action tool, add a dropdown to the rollback reasons, add rollback previews, and add forms for the suppression forms, and voila, Twinkle has all the good RedWarn functionality! Oh, and make Twinkle not mess with the page content and confine everything to dialogues. Aasim (talk) 17:56, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• Strong support per nom. User3749 (talk) 16:19, 28 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Support as a frequent user, though I'm admittedly unqualified to fully gauge the validity of the technical concerns raised above. AngryHarpy‍^talk 16:57, 28 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Support. As a frequent user, I can say that RedWarn should be a gadget, it's a tool I find useful in anti-vandalism. However, I'm not a programmer, and therefore am not qualified to judge the technical concerns above. Justarandomamerican (talk) 17:01, 28 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• Strongest support Redwarn is a very good anti-vandal tool. It has highly customized warning, and gives a use to rollbackers and pending changes reviewers. I have almost entirely replaced Twinkle with it, except the sockpuppet, edit war, and welcome feature. - Best regards,
  ^talk _contribs 18:06, 28 November 2020 (UTC)[reply
  ]

A heap of articles are showing Lua error: bad argument #1 to 'formatDate' (NaN)., see articles with script errors. Several examples of the error can be found by searching Module:Sports table/WDL/doc for "Lua error". Related changes is not helping as much as it normally does. Since I can't figure it out, I am blaming Scribunto. The error message is exactly what a customized Lua might show if a function named formatDate was called with a Nan (not-a-number) as argument 1. Really reaching, I would guess that it is related to the expansion of references. I have no evidence for that speculation. Any better ideas? Johnuniq (talk) 04:40, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Johnuniq: Probably Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 184#Category:Pages with non-numeric formatnum arguments. --Izno (talk) 05:27, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

And subsequently Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 185#Tech News: 2020-45 and Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 185#Tech News: 2020-46. --Izno (talk) 05:30, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Possibly my brain is off but I can't see how those links lead to this error. Module:Sports table/WDL/doc is in Category:Pages with script errors + Category:Pages using sports table with possibly ignored parameters + Category:Pages with reference errors and no other categories. Johnuniq (talk) 05:47, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I'm guessing the same changes (and particularly the task attached in one or the other of the tech news notes) are driving this sudden issue related to formatDate is my belief. I'm more or less puzzled that there wasn't a separate category emitted for that function as well. (We have some 70 uses of the function in our modules.) --Izno (talk) 06:00, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, that is plausible because languageObject:formatDate(...) is executed within Scribunto and it would probably show an error like this if it received a NaN. I tried constructing the error but failed. For example, mw.getContentLanguage():formatDate(0/0) gives "Lua error: bad argument #1 to 'formatDate' (string expected, got number)" and replacing the colon with a dot gives a different error specifically to catch that blunder. Johnuniq (talk) 06:23, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I've chased it a little further. When executing one of the examples with errors in Module:Sports table/WDL/doc, this code is executed:

• From Module:Sports table/WDL function pp.row

local win_perc = mm._precision_format((2*wins + draws) / (2*matches), 3)

• From Module:Math function p._precision_format

local formatted_num = lang:formatNum(math.abs(value))

The error then occurs. That is because wins and draws and matches are zero so mm._precision_format is passed 0/0 (NaN). Then value in Module:Math is also NaN and the lang:formatNum code gives that error. Except, the error message says formatDate. Because I can't see any recent changes in relevant modules at enwiki, I'm guessing that what I just said always occurred (that is, NaN was passed to formatNum). Perhaps something in Scribunto or the PHP library it uses now throws an error for NaN but treated differently before? Johnuniq (talk) 09:00, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The error claims incorrectly it is an formatDate error because of change https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/Scribunto/+/640246/ . There is an clear copy-paste error there. FormatDate has nothing to do with it.--

talk) 12:50, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply

]

Thanks, I tried looking around Gerrit but missed seeing that. Johnuniq (talk) 06:21, 26 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I think the above might be a red herring. I have just been trying to edit 2020–21 Championnat National#League table, where (2*wins + draws) does not equal zero for any club. I get the Lua error: bad argument #1 to 'formatDate' (NaN) when I save any change. Gricehead (talk) 10:52, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

To add - setting a ranking_style to ppg or perc stops the error, so it's something caused by entering the first outcome in the if ranking_style== switch. Gricehead (talk) 11:07, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

But I had made a typo in a team identifier for a position. That normally flags as a warning, but now throws this error. Gricehead (talk) 13:54, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Please try your wikitext again and see what happens now. If there is an inexplicable error, you might reply here with a link to show the problem. For example, you could put some minimal wikitext in your sandbox. Johnuniq (talk) 06:21, 26 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Possibly fixed

These errors are possibly all  Fixed by this edit. Please report further problems below, after purging or null-editing the article in question. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:10, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, and I see you reported the incorrect error message at phab:T268758. Johnuniq (talk) 06:21, 26 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Scenario

Because of a faulty keyboard in Firefox on one of my Linux laptops, I needed to install Chromium to test out a solution. I installed Wikipedia on Chromium, I failed to log in using my the name 'clemrutter' My user name is 'ClemRutter'. I applied for a forgotten password using the using 'clemrutter' and my default email address. A temporary password was sent to me. I logged in with that.

Problem

I logged in with 'clemrutter'. Looking at the top line-red link to user page, talk page and sandbox-- but I had two notifications to this new account- both links from other editors refering to edits I had made under the old account. Obviously one of the searches is case dependent, and the notification search is not.

Urgency

Very low. Action needed: reviewing the source code for the searches. Review whether the username on log in needs to be verified before the password box is ungreyed. (see fair use unload wizard for file verification that we already use) --ClemRutter (talk) 11:36, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@ClemRutter: I'm not exactly following your problem? You made this report logged in at User:ClemRutter, not as User:Clemrutter. Usernames are case-sensitive, but not in the first letter (which are always uppercase). — xaosflux ^Talk 12:20, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

If you have 2 accounts with the same email address, but different mid-string casing I can see it could be confusing - but I'm missing what it is you would like done about that? — xaosflux ^Talk 12:23, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I am just being a good little boy and reporting a strange incident. I am not requesting any particular outcome. I have suggested that the existence of a username is checked before the password request is made, though in this case it wouldn't be helpful! Thanks to Certes for the explanation. ClemRutter (talk) 19:47, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Clemrutter was created automatically on 5 August 2017. It's a separate account with no edits, user page or talk page on enwp. However, similarly named accounts have about 20 edits in 2007–08 across several other wikis. I expect that a corresponding enwp account was created when global login was rolled out, and that is the one for which the temporary password was issued. Certes (talk) 12:29, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

After about my third time of making a mistake because I thought somebody was indef blocked when they were only temp blocked, I decided to hack on MediaWiki:Gadget-markblocked.js to make it show those two in different styles. What I discovered was that it already does, but the difference (opacity 0.4 vs 0.7) is so subtle, I never noticed it.

So, two questions. First, is there some pre-canned way to customize the styles? I'm guessing not, since they look hard-wired into the js code. Second, before I reinvent the wheel, has anybody already looked at this and come up with a good set of alternate styles? My first thought was one of the strikeout variations (double, wavy, dashed), but they all leave the underlying text nearly illegible.

Related: TIL that Special:Gadgets lists all the gadgets and gives you a way to map from the descriptive text strings in Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets to the actual gadget source code. -- RoySmith (talk) 14:48, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

 You are invited to join the discussion at Template talk:Collapsed infobox section begin § LintHint errors. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 18:10, 25 November 2020 (UTC)Template:Z48[reply]

When I attempt to fix dead links, I get an error message stating I am blocked. However, my account details indicates I am not [3]. I am able to edit normally otherwise. Cullen328 did accidentally block me the the 21st [4]. Is there a lag or something? S0091 (talk) 19:12, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

What was the exact message? Ruslik_Zero 19:33, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Pinging operator: cyberpower678 ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 19:34, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Ruslik0: below is the message that displays in a red box in the upper left of the page:

Analysis error:

blocked: You have been blocked from editing.

S0091 (talk) 19:45, 25 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

This is resolved. See also other reports on cyberpower's talk page. S0091 (talk) 17:41, 26 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Can anybody

Hi guys! Do any of you know any tools that could detect stub articles or short articles that have not been categorized in stub articles? Please spam below regarding the tools! Thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by CyberTroopers (talk • contribs) 20:00, 26 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@

WP:AWB. So that's one possible at least. RudolfRed (talk) 21:12, 26 November 2020 (UTC) RudolfRed (talk) 21:12, 26 November 2020 (UTC)[reply

]

If you do find some other tools, please add them to that page. RudolfRed (talk) 22:43, 26 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@RudolfRed: Thank you, buddy! I do use AWB, but is there certain source code I've to write to indentify the articles or they have like existed-button or tick box? Do you have any idea about it? CyberTroopers (talk) 02:39, 27 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Is it acceptable to use Template:In use in talk page mentions of the template? Please see the discussion at Template talk:In use#Use/mention distinction on user talk and other talk pages and discuss it there. —Anomalocaris (talk) 08:30, 27 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I asked this question in the help forum and they told me this would be the right forum to ask these kinds of questions. Sorry, for the typos and changes of character sets in editors. You will certainly see what I mean. I downloaded some of the 20200920 bz2 wikidumps and took care of checking their md5 and sha1 sums. To my understanding there is simply no way that the content of the compressed files containing the pages (which I have also eyeballed) could have been corrupted without anyone noticing. Yet, when you decompress them you will see <sha1>...</sha1> segments containing CDATA inside of every <page>...</page> segment right after the <text bytes="[byte length of the UTF-8 text]" xml:space="...">...</text> (which "bytes" (length) value I have checked for every text segment). The sha1 string value which doesn't make any sense to me, because:

• sha1 values are 40 bytes long
• sha1sum Linux utility is telling me it doesn't seem to be right

let's use as an example: frwiki-20200920-pages-articles-multistream6.xml-p13574284p13592810.bz2

<page>
  <title>The New Woody Woodpecker Show</title>
  <ns>0</ns>
  <id>13580602</id>
  <redirect title="Le Nouveau Woody Woodpecker Show" />
  <revision>
    <id>174712998</id>
    <timestamp>2020-09-14T13:14:29Z</timestamp>
    <contributor>
      <username>Bob08</username>
      <id>14737</id>
    </contributor>
    <comment>lien</comment>
    <model>wikitext</model>
    <format>text/x-wiki</format>
    <text bytes="49" xml:space="preserve">#REDIRECTION Le Nouveau Woody Woodpecker Show</text>
    <sha1>276az6ruof7t45y5svax3omeamdxps3</sha1>
  </revision>
</page>

~ 276az6ruof7t45y5svax3omeamdxps3 is only 31 bytes long and this is what Linux message digest utilities tell me: $ echo "#REDIRECTION Le Nouveau Woody Woodpecker Show" | sha1sum f1160df2ed230af750122eb08376dfb9251b8951 - $ sha1sum "/home/lbrtchx/cmllpz/temp/checkSHA1.txt" f1160df2ed230af750122eb08376dfb9251b8951 /home/lbrtchx/cmllpz/temp/checkSHA1.txt $ cat "/home/lbrtchx/cmllpz/temp/checkSHA1.txt" REDIRECTION Le Nouveau Woody Woodpecker Show ~ So, I have three related questions:

• What do those "sha1" segments inside of each "page" right bellow the "text" segment mean?
• Do you know of any "anatomical" analysis posted officially by wikipedia or anyone else with the explanation of the meaning of the tags they use?

I could understand as topical such tags as:

• • en|User talk
  • ja|Category
  • ru|Категория
  • en|Category talk
  • en|Category
  • ar|تصنيف
  • ko|분류
  • ja|Wikipedia
  • ru|Шаблон
  • ja|Template
  • en|Wikipedia
  • en|Template
  • ru|Википедия
  • en|Template talk
  • ko|í‹€
  • en|Draft

but I am not so sure about:

• • ja|The Ultimate Fighter
  • en|Star Wars
  • ru|Pirates of the Caribbean
  • ja|Pokémon the Series

are those colons in the titles officially used to define general topical matters such as Categories or anyone can just type a colon in a title to a message? or both? and in the last case which topics are owned by wikipedia and which aren't?

• There is also some funky mark up they use inside of their text segment which is xml-ish but not exactly xml. All I've heard was that such mark up is used as part of the processing through a mysql database. Could you safely use that kind of mark up to parse the document's segments?

lbrtchx — Preceding unsigned comment added by Albretch Mueller (talk • contribs) 12:25, 27 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Albretch Mueller: The SHA-1 values are in base36 format rather than in hex, as explained at mw:Manual:Revision table#rev_sha1, which explains why they are shorter than you expected. The export format is written about at mw:Help:Export#Export format. I don't understand all your questions (and some of them have probably lost info due to formatting problems), but I hope that helps. Graham87 14:52, 27 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Hello. I have access to two different ISPs, and three devices. Around a couple of months ago, I realised AWB was giving me an error during start-up whenever I was using

My first thought is either BSNL has screwed up some configuration and some traffic isn't routing properly or you are being speed throttled by them. When you can access it just fine by VPN, that indicates an ISP issue. -- Amanda (aka DQ) 18:53, 27 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Please see wikitech:Reporting a connectivity issue or if you can't access that page, try this copy. Legoktm (talk) 22:34, 27 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Installed it, but I can't find the link to use it, and it doesn't have any documentation. Any idea of how to use it? Thanks! NonsensicalSystem^(err0r?)_(.log) 10:00, 28 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@NonsensicalSystem, my understanding is that from any user's contributions page, you can click "rollback all", which will essentially do the same as clicking every [rollback] link on the page. The script doesn't do any more than that. Ed talk! 14:50, 28 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]