Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)

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

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Sticky table headers not working on iPhone

CSS is used to make a big table's column and row headers top and left position sticky respectively. Works on Windows 10 (Chrome, Edge, Firefox) and Android (Chrome, Firefox). One user said doesn't work on iPhone SE 2020 (Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari), which we found "position: sticky;" on the table's "th" does work on non-Wikipedia websites and, if applied to a div box, works on Wikipedia. I don't have Apple products to test with. iPhone help appreciated.

• talk
• Template:COVID-19 pandemic data/styles2.css
• Template:2020 monthly cumulative COVID-19 death totals by country
• Template:2021 monthly cumulative COVID-19 death totals by country

Jroberson108 (talk) 16:02, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

For starters, can anyone with an iPhone or Mac computer verify that an issue exists where the table headers aren't sticking to the top and left while scrolling so they remain in view? We didn't have a Mac computer to test with. Please identify the device and the browsers tested. Jroberson108 (talk) 03:51, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

Headers appear to behave correctly on Firefox-96.0.2 on OS X (desktop). DMacks (talk) 04:04, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

@DMacks: Thanks, not sure if you could test other browsers too on your Mac? Just need someone to test iPhone browsers. Jroberson108 (talk) 08:19, 23 January 2022 (UTC)

Does no one have an iPhone that they can use to verify the issue exists? Jroberson108 (talk) 18:14, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

Works for me (tablet, Silk browser). ― Qwerfjkltalk 18:31, 24 January 2022 (UTC)

@Jroberson108, it's not working on an iPhone using iOS 15.2. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 02:44, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

@Qwerfjkl and Whatamidoing (WMF): Thanks for testing.

Can someone help figure out why sticky table headers don't work on Wikipedia with iPhone? We've already tested and found that using the "position: sticky;" style on a non Wikipedia site works on iPhone, so there is something going on with Wikipedia's styles that I haven't been able to identify. Jroberson108 (talk) 03:26, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

I still need help fixing this. If "technical" isn't the right section, then where should I ask? A front-end iPhone web developer is needed. Jroberson108 (talk) 20:47, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

Is @TheDJ around? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 02:42, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

Nested overflow contexts with sticky elements dont mix well. Fixed now. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:06, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

TheDJ, Jroberson108 and all. Thanks all! Fix is working. Both column and row headers are sticky on my iPhone SE 2020 in 4 browsers (Safari, Edge, Chrome, Firefox). For more info see:

Template talk:COVID-19 pandemic data#iPhone fixes

User:Timeshifter/Sandbox169

--Timeshifter (talk) 17:09, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

Community wishlist survey

The 2022 meta:Community_Wishlist_Survey_2022 is now open for voting on which wishes you would like to see worked on. A table of all wishes and their ranking is available. I proposed some, as did other English Wikipedia editors, and you may vote for as many wishes as you want. Thank you for lending your input to the process! — xaosflux ^Talk 20:42, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

To keep things together, if anyone wants to advertise any specific wish, please use subsections here. — xaosflux ^Talk 20:43, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

Does a wiki page exist? Aka - could we get WMF to finally fix a bug from 2007?

A long-running technical issue, which dates all the way back to 2007, is the simple question: does a wiki page exist? If you're developing a template or Lua module, then you can sort of do this already, but the answer will automatically include a link to the page in Special:WhatLinksHere - which causes problems for editors trying to resolve links to disambiguation pages and redirects. I'm trying to get the WMF to fix this via the m:Community Wishlist Survey 2022 - see m:Community Wishlist Survey 2022/Miscellaneous/Check if a page exists without populating WhatLinksHere for the proposal. Please have a look and consider supporting it, and also please have a look at the other issues that are being raised through this survey, so we can get WMF to work on them! Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 20:18, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

Sdkb's suggestions

Transclued from my talk, here's a non-comprehensive, non-ordered list of some items I'd be happy to see taken up:

• Allow wikilinks and formatting in TemplateData
• Show editnotices on mobile
• Tool that reviews new uploads for potential copyright violations
• Limit which namespaces are allowed in a category on the category page itself (fixing WP:DRAFTNOCAT)
• Make the edit request process easier
• Tool to add Wikidata to an article
• Better diff handling of paragraph splits
• VisualEditor should use human-like names for references
• Formatting columns in table
• Advanced table tools on Visual Editor
• Include section links in WhatLinksHere
• Table sorting on mobile
• Allow adding sitelink to redirect in Wikipedia section (Wikidata)
• Floating table headers

Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 22:39, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

I support New reference-filling tool and More capacity for Citation bot as well. ― Qwerfjkltalk 19:50, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

Huge increase in IP blocks

Hi folks: We've noticed a huge increase in IP blocks on en.wp since June — going from around 60,000 blocks a month to 500,000 blocks a month, and staying there. It was only happening on English WP until October, when there was a similar sudden increase on Spanish WP.

I can see on Special:AutoblockList that there's a block with the reason "Autoblocked because your IP address was recently used by "<blocked user's name>"." It's happening every few minutes, always with a different blocked user. It's not possible that dozens of individual blocked users are each trying to make an edit, taking turns every few minutes, so there's clearly something else going on.

Do you know if there was a bot or some kind of change deployed in June that would autoblock a lot more IPs? I don't know if the current situation is a bug, or if it's working as intended. Can anybody help me? — DannyH (WMF) (talk) 21:32, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

I at first thought it was Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Archive337#Recent proxy blocks but the timing doesn't quite match up. I have no other ideas. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 21:44, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

The most recent ones seem to be primarily registering when a user gets hard blocked, but unless there's been a technical change in how this is handled, I'm not sure why hardblocking would cause such a big jump. Hog Farm _Talk 21:58, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

Your link didn't work. If we use the correct link, Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Archive335#Recent_proxy_blocks, the timing does sorta look about right. @GeneralNotability, Blablubbs, MarioGom, and ST47: for rough confirmation of the dates. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 22:54, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

Timing looks right to me, we started blocking in July and only announced it once we'd gotten the blocks in place and seen the effects. This appears to be working as intended, though there's no denying that we're blocking a lot of IPs. DannyH (WMF), there's some non-public background on this; if you'd like I can email you the details. GeneralNotability (talk) 00:38, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

"It's not possible..." - famously edible words. The blocklist has always been somewhat busy, anecdotally similar to how it looks now. I've had a quick look through some of them. The majority are accounts which have been blocked today or yesterday. Some others are accounts which were blocked some time ago, but have tried editing today. One example causing an autoblock, User:DaniloForrest6 has been logging in several times a day on different IPs, almost every day since they were blocked 3 months ago. I'd suggest grab a DB admin to pull out some quirky ones. I only saw one quirky autoblock in the current list, which doesn't match the reported 900% increase. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 22:12, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

I don't know if it's relevant to this issue but I have noticed a dramatic increase in bot-like or otherwise totally useless edits by IPs with no other edits. Examples: 1 + 2 + 3 + 4. There are also more like this which superficially looks like a good-faith edit but which consideration shows is totally misguided. I used to use polite edit summaries and even leave messages but it's impossible to keep up with now, and that's without me looking for it. I guess that wouldn't account for a huge increase in blocks, but who knows. Johnuniq (talk) 22:33, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

Isn't this just ST47ProxyBot? It's made 2,221,665 blocks in the last four months. Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 23:10, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

Well, this is the chart that I'm looking at. The green line that goes from the lower part of the chart all the way up is English WP, with the spike starting in June. The pink line that spikes in October is Spanish WP. Every other wiki appears to be acting normally. If that 10x spike was caused by actual user behavior, it would mean blocked users suddenly started to log in ten times more often than they did the month before. And the same thing would suddenly happen in Spanish a few months later. It can't be spontaneous individual behavior; there's something behind it. — DannyH (WMF) (talk) 23:20, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

@DannyH (WMF): Does that chart include both manual blocks and autoblocks? Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 23:23, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

It looks like LuchoCR (talk · contribs) started a similar proxy-blocking bot on eswiki in around mid-November.[1] I counted about 4,000 blocks in about half an hour before I gave up counting. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 23:57, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

Yes, the Spanish Wikipedia blocks are copied from English Wikipedia. MarioGom (talk) 00:32, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

DannyH (WMF): This is the new P2P proxy blocks by ST47ProxyBot. See Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Archive335#Recent_proxy_blocks. These are also regularly imported to global blocks and to Spanish Wikipedia. It would mean blocked users suddenly started to log in ten times more often than they did the month before. Not really, these are proxy blocks, which are performed regardless of the IPs being used or not. MarioGom (talk) 00:24, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

Excellent, thank you very much! That's exactly what I was looking for. Thanks, I appreciate it. — DannyH (WMF) (talk) 03:03, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

Hello; I confirm that I have personally been importing the blocks to P2P proxies, since on es.wikipedia they have been abused by WMF banned user #00026885. LuchoCR (talk) 05:30, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

@LuchoCR, DannyH (WMF), MarioGom, Zzuuzz, Suffusion of Yellow, Johnuniq, Hog Farm, and Pppery: if you folks are still interested in this subject, I invite you to see my SPI noticeboard discussion. The depth of the sockpuppetry is vast and growing, and it's refreshing to see editors like LuchoCR (talk · contribs) taking pre-emptive action after years of abuse. - Hunan201p (talk) 14:10, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

I have a further question — if the increase that I'm seeing is from proxy blocks, why are they showing up in Special:AutoblockList the way that they are?

I'll show you what I'm seeing in that autoblock log -- I won't use links for the names because I don't want to ping all these people. :)

• 23:31 - 31 January - blocking admin Dr Kay - Autoblocked because your IP address was recently used by "Alexandru Mihai Zausila". The reason given for Alexandru Mihai Zausila's block is: "Abusing multiple accounts: suspected sock puppet".
• 23:29 - 31 January - blocking admin Widr - Autoblocked because your IP address was recently used by "Hamster KILL KILL". The reason given for Hamster KILL KILL's block is: "Vandalism".
• 23:28 - 31 January - blocking admin LuK3 - Autoblocked because your IP address was recently used by "BLMisApeacfulorganization". The reason given for BLMisApeacfulorganization's block is: "Clearly not here to build an encyclopedia".
• 23:26 - 31 January - blocking admin PhilKnight - Autoblocked because your IP address was recently used by "Borhan18". The reason given for Borhan18's block is: "Disruptive editing".
• 23:25 - 31 January - blocking admin Favonian - Autoblocked because your IP address was recently used by "Otávio Astor Vaz Costa". The reason given for Otávio Astor Vaz Costa's block is: "Abusing multiple accounts: User:MarquinhosWikipediano".

And so on, every one to three minutes. The way that I read this log, it says that blocked user Otávio Astor Vaz Costa tried to edit at 23:25 - then Borhan18 tried to edit at 23:26 - then BLMisApeacfulorganization at 23:28 - then Hamster KILL KILL at 23:29 - then Alexandru Mihai Zausila at 23:31.

That seems like a suspiciously regular pattern, a long list of banned users each trying to log in at a regular cadence. I don't mean "suspicious" as in I suspect that someone is doing something wrong, just "suspicious" meaning that I'm not sure I understand the explanation yet.

Is what I'm seeing in the log related to ST47ProxyBot blocking proxies based on the Spur info? If it's not, then where would I see the ST47ProxyBot activity? Sorry if I'm being annoying; I'm just trying to figure this out. — DannyH (WMF) (talk) 00:08, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Over a longer period, it looks like random times. We just have a lot of unwanted editors. The only duplicate I noticed was LaraBrockman visiting twice, several hours apart, possibly from work/school and home. Certes (talk) 00:33, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

It also look random to me. I see 12 minutes, 1 minute, 2 in a minute, and others. Yes, we really do get that many blocked users trying to edit. I can't see any relation between the autoblocks and ST47ProxyBot (btw, Special:Log/ST47ProxyBot). I suppose one thing to add is that when a blocked user tries to edit, the new autoblock will typically replace the older autoblock, so you don't tend to see too many repetitions in the autoblock list. It might look different if every hit was noted. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 00:46, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Certes, zzuuzz, Hunan201p: Thank you, that makes sense now. I appreciate the clarifications! —— DannyH (WMF) (talk) 22:04, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Adding a new edit filter trigger action: pop-up box

We currently have four edit filter trigger actions: disallow, warn, tag, and log. The first two are both very strong, and the last two are both quite weak, leaving a big hole in the middle. There are many actions someone might do where it makes sense to give them a warning (ideally in the moment) that they're probably doing something wrong, but not to stop them from saving the page with a bold warning.

Example of a pop-up box

One example of this is adding external links to body sections, a common newcomer mistake, as in my post here. Another is linking to disambiguation pages. This second one was the subject of a winning wishlist proposal, and the wishlist team recently rolled out a solution to it, the disambiguator extension, which produces the orange pop-up boxes seen in the screenshot at right.

This architecture for a type of notification could be extremely useful if it could be applied in response to any edit filter, as it'd allow us to fill in that middle hole. Ideally, the circumstances for triggering and content of the message would be entirely definable by the community to suit our needs. I asked NRodriguez (WMF) about this possibility here, and now I'd like to hear from some of the technical editors here: how feasible would this be? {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 23:07, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

I'd really like this, but it would basically require writing a whole new extension form scratch (or at least repurposing some third-party software). In order to operate at any reasonable speed on large pages, the "filters" would need to run on the client (e.g. inside a Web worker), not on the server. Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 23:21, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

It'd definitely require some work, but I wonder if most of it would be just reusing the code from the disambiguator extension. Courtesy pinging Enterprisey in case you're interested, as this relates to WP:Making editing easier. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 23:27, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

The hard part would be writing a whole new parser for the AbuseFilter syntax, at least if you want compatibility with existing filters. Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 23:28, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

...or maybe not. What if the client just calculates a diff every time the user stops typing for more than a second or so, and sends that to the server. That's not so much bandwidth, but the client and server could still keep a synced copy of the edit form. Still that's maybe hundreds of extra web requests (and filter checks) for every edit. Could the servers handle that? Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 23:31, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

I think that it can take up to three seconds to send that information (that's the high side of normal, but not an extreme event), and one-second breaks are common, especially for people who don't type fluently. So you might set your wait time a little longer, but in theory, it should be feasible. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:28, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

This is basically what my WP:Text reactions was about. It is not connected to the abusefilter system, nor do I think it should be as this is something that's better done client-side. And when done client-side, we should smartly use JS events rather than evaluate the entire text every n seconds, which is not exactly performant. – SD0001 (talk) 15:01, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

I don't think it makes sense to try to incorporate this into AbuseFilter, or at least the effort required may not be worth the while. For your example of adding external links to the body, specifically, I would advise going the same route we did with the disambig notifications feature (source code), and building it into a local gadget. Keystroke listeners are actually fast, and unlike disambiguation this wouldn't even require an API request, just some good regular expressions to identify when an external link is added. Wikipedia:Text reactions sounds like the more correct approach.

I would also keep the mw:Editing team in the loop on any plans we have, since the broader "make editing easier" effort is also on their radar (phab:T265163). — MusikAnimal ^talk 22:34, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

• @Suffusion of Yellow, SD0001, and MusikAnimal: Thanks all. I'm not particularly attached to any particular method here, so long as it can generate the desired behavior and is as configurable by the community as possible without developer help. SD0001, is there anything I can do (as a non-coder) to help move text reactions closer to something deployable at scale? {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 22:41, 30 January 2022 (UTC)
• Something else that hasn't been suggested yet: If the user has CodeMirror (the syntax highlighter) enabled, highlight the problematic text instead of making them hunt for it. Yes, that's possible. Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 23:37, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

  @Suffusion of Yellow Nice! I would file a task for that, if one doesn't exist already. My team may be able to help with it. Thanks! — MusikAnimal ^talk 04:23, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

• @Suffusion of Yellow re server-side checking: I recently discovered that every time you stop typing in the source editor, an action=stashedit request is posted with the entire edit box contents. (This is happening in MW core, since at least 2014 according to git blame – so seemingly bandwidth isn't a problem.) So the server already has the text and already parses it to prepare the edit, the question is whether AbuseFilter can operate on stashed edits and send its warnings along with the action=stashedit response. (Too bad the CommTech proposal phase has ended!) – SD0001 (talk) 03:59, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

  @SD0001: Thanks. I was under the impression that stashing didn't start until the first time you focus on the summary field. But it seem you are right, and it starts before that.

  Actually, stashed edits already are run against all the filters.[2] The result is however not revealed in the response; it will come back as successful even if the edit will be disallowed. Revealing the result would be an obvious security flaw; people could work out what the private filters are checking for without us knowing about it. So if we go with the server-side approach, it would only take a tiny change: If the filter actions include "pop-up", do reveal the result in response to a stashedit response. Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 21:35, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Special:PendingChanges - Rollback option

Should Special:PendingChanges have a rollback option beside each listed edit like Special:RecentChanges has? With the popups gadget you can hover over the change and see it without having to actually go there. In case of a vandalism, the rollback option could be useful. Would that be wise to be a native feature or would it be better if it was a personal user script (considering that it could be useful only? when paired with the aforementioned gadget)? Any phab tickets already exist on this? Thoughts? - Klein Muçi (talk) 04:08, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

Weird kind of delay in categorisation

I'm faced some weird issues when tried to categorise templates today. I opened up the issue at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Categories § Weird kind of delay in categorisation. Hopefully someone from here will give it a look. Thanks! ---CX Zoom(^he/_him) (^{let's talk}|_contribs) 10:44, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

The issue has been resolved at the destination page. Cheers! ---CX Zoom(^he/_him) (^{let's talk}|_contribs) 13:25, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

intitle: redirect search

When I search for Lucifer intitle:/2019/, the first result is Lucifer (film). That's expected, because Lucifer (2019 film) redirects there. However, this redirect is no longer mentioned in the search results as it used to be. Is this an intentional MediaWiki change? It's not my scripts or gadgets; I see the same when logged out. Certes (talk) 17:56, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

The search has several "redirect from" entries. It appears to only be omitted when the other part of the search matches the title. For example, Prithviraj intitle:2019 shows "Lucifer (film) (redirect from Lucifer (2019 film))". PrimeHunter (talk) 20:43, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

Sortable log pages? Maybe one day?

Hello, Village Pump frequenters,

I'm just putting this wish out there but is there any way that log pages could be sortable by namespace like an editor's contribution page can be? I assume this is difficult or impossible or it would already be possible. So, I guess I'm looking for an explanation on why this can't happen rather than asking that it happen. It would be so useful to me, and I assume other admins, if I could sort a deletion log to see just deleted categories or deleted draft pages. Is this an impossible dream? And if Contributions are sortable, why can't other log pages be sortable by namespace? Thanks for indulging me with further information (I'm hoping). Thank you. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 02:34, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

Also, if anyone could explain the "Tag filter" field, I'd appreciate it. I've found it to be basically useless but maybe it has a purpose that has eluded me. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 02:34, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

The tag filter allows you to filter by tags (like "AWB" and "mobile edit"). See WP:Tags (which does a terrible job explaining how to interact with them).

I don't think there's anything stopping it besides willpower. Izno (talk) 04:05, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

phab:T16711 is the task for filtering logs by namespace. There were performance concerns raised, which I think is why it's stalled.

phab:T23383 and phab:T27909 are about improving the tag filter to make it more useful with a dropdown list of tags. This is also the subject of a current community wishlist proposal, and assuming it gets accepted you'll be able to vote for it from 28 January. the wub "?!" 09:48, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

I sometimes wish that I could export special pages (e.g., .csv file for a spreadsheet). Then I could fold, spindle, and mutilate the contents to my heart's desire. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:20, 25 January 2022 (UTC)

My apologies for "unarchiving" this discussion but I thought it would be on this board for at least a week before being shoved into the archives. I can see it was done by a bot, so it must be the settings if there are no activity for 3 days or something like that, a discussion is archived. But I'm just getting around to coming back to see the replies.

It seems like I'm not alone in wishing for more utility in the log settings, I had not even thought about something like ones contributions or searches being exportable. To be honest, it's very interesting when some thoughtful editor searches and shares a phab report but whenever I check them out, they are from years ago which makes me think the answer is "Problem is noted but you won't see a solution in your lifetime". Thanks for the replies though. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 06:42, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

That is probably only possible server side. There is an roundabout way of doing this, copying the query behind the special page, paste it to quarry and sort to your hearts content. Same goes with exportable results.--Snævar (talk) 11:32, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

Yes, I have yet to learn the ways of quarry. I keep getting referred to it so must be very helpful. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 07:00, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Issue with citation anchoring

A page I put a lot of work into, Timoleague Friary, has recently passed GA review. As part of the review, however, two issues with citation anchoring arose, and while I was able to correct one of them, neither myself nor the reviewer no how to approach correcting the issue. The reviewer suggested that a 10-15 character htlm string would resolve this issue, but to be honest I do not understand what that means. The problem is that when using the {{sfn}} template, some of the sources have editors but no listed authors. As a result, they not anchoring the reference to the cited source. Could anyone please advise? Thank you.

The sources with anchoring issues in the article are as follows:

• Crowley, Helen; et al. (2016). Timoleague Friary (Mainistir Thigh Molaga): Self Guided Tour Booklet. With the assistance of Flor Hurley, Dr Anne Julie Lafaye, and Monastic Ireland. Timoleague, Co. Cork: Molaga Tidy Towns Association, history sub-committee. pp. 1–14.
• Hallinan, Mona; Nelligan, Conor; Sleeman, Mary, eds. (2021). Heritage Artefacts of County Cork. Cork: Cork County Council; Heritage Unit. pp. 231–233. ISBN 978-1-911677-03-1.

Xx78900 (talk) 10:39, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

When given multiple names, the {{cite book}} template uses the first four from |last1=–|last4= + the year portion of the date from |date= or |year= to make its CITEREF anchor ID. To work properly, the {{sfn}} template needs the same names and year so:

{{Sfn|Crowley|Harrington|Hickey|Kingston|2016|p=1}}

Crowley et al. 2016, p. 1

to link to this citation template (I changed Hickey because titles and postnominals have no place in the citation; I deleted |others= because not necessary as a finding aid):

{{Cite book |last=Crowley |first=Helen |title=Timoleague Friary (Mainistir Thigh Molaga): Self Guided Tour Booklet |last2=Harrington |first2=Emmett |last3=Hickey |first3=Patrick |last4=Kingston |first4=Diarmuid |last5=McSweeney |first5=Edward |last6=Murphy |first6=Joe |last7=Whooley |first7=Donal |publisher=Molaga Tidy Towns Association, history sub-committee |year=2016 |location=Timoleague, Co. Cork |pages=1-14 |display-authors=1}}

Crowley, Helen; et al. (2016). Timoleague Friary (Mainistir Thigh Molaga): Self Guided Tour Booklet. Timoleague, Co. Cork: Molaga Tidy Towns Association, history sub-committee. pp. 1–14.

Hallinan is the same sort of issue. When there are no authors named, {{cite book}} falls back to |editor-last1=–|editor-last4=.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 12:32, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

Template from mass messaging system refuses to follow talk page format

Hello! So on User talk:ARoseWolf, I attempted to move the message from the Mass Messaging System to be within the talk page format, however for whatever reason, when I moved the ending brackets to have the message contained within it, the message is still outside of the format. What is going on here? ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 15:15, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

@Blaze Wolf: seems like a pile of GIGO: (a) The message contains a "table", but it is not very well formatted, and probably shouldn't be a table at all; but in general it works on normal pages. (b) Your talk page is also using a table element that you are trying to surround everything in, breaking any new-sections. Looks like you try to suggest people don't do this by breaking the "new section" buttons, but that doesn't work for MMS - which would have no way to ever try to insert a "new section" in to the last section, before some table tag that is supposed to match a higher section. Suggestion: get rid of the table on your talk page. — xaosflux ^Talk 15:37, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

@Xaosflux: That is not my talk page. It is the talk page of ARoseWolf. ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 15:39, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

@Blaze Wolf: oops - I mean theirs not yours in all of that :) For the first part, you could ask @Megalibrarygirl: to see if maybe they could improve their newsletter, maybe with a div wrappper instead of a table. Also note, every single time you try to "fix" that other user's talk page, you are retriggering the "you have new messages" banner. — xaosflux ^Talk 15:41, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

@Xaosflux: Yep I know. Not trying to spam their notifs. Hopefully RoseWolf or Megalibrarygirl will be able to make it work on the talk page temporarily. ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 15:43, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

Tech News: 2022-05

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

Recent changes

• If a gadget should support the new ?withgadget URL parameter that was announced 3 weeks ago, then it must now also specify supportsUrlLoad in the gadget definition (documentation). [3]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 February. It will be on all wikis from 3 February (calendar).

Future changes

• A change that was announced last year was delayed. It is now ready to move ahead:
  • The user group oversight will be renamed suppress. This is for technical reasons. This is the technical name. It doesn't affect what you call the editors with this user right on your wiki. This is planned to happen in three weeks. You can comment in Phabricator if you have objections. As usual, these labels can be translated on translatewiki (direct links are available) or by administrators on your wiki.

Events

• You can vote on proposals in the Community Wishlist Survey between 28 January and 11 February. The survey decides what the Community Tech team will work on.

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

17:40, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

Bots Newsletter, January 2022

Bots Newsletter, January 2022

BRFA activity by month

Welcome to the ninth issue of the English Wikipedia's Bots Newsletter, your source for all things bot. Vicious bot-on-bot edit warring... superseded tasks... policy proposals... these stories, and more, are brought to you by Wikipedia's most distinguished newsletter about bots.

After a long hiatus between August 2019 and December 2021, there's quite a bit of ground to cover. Due to the vastness, I decided in December to split the coverage up into a few installments that covered six months each. Some people thought this was a good idea, since covering an entire year in a single issue would make it unmanageably large. Others thought this was stupid, since they were getting talk page messages about crap from almost three years ago. Ultimately, the question of whether each issue covers six months or a year is only relevant for a couple more of them, and then the problem will be behind us forever.

Of course, you can also look on the bright side – we are making progress, and this issue will only be about crap from almost two years ago. Today we will pick up where we left off in December, and go through the first half of 2020.

Overall
In the first half of 2020, there were 71 BRFAs. Of these, Y 59 were approved, and 12 were unsuccessful (with N2 8 denied, ? 2 withdrawn, and 2 expired).

January 2020

Yeah, you're not gonna be able to get away with this anymore.

• Y ST47Bot, Seppi333Bot, Qbugbot 4 · N2 PkbwcgsBot 25, PkbwcgsBot 26
• A new Pywikibot release dropped support for Python 3.4, and it was expected that support for Python 2.7 would be removed in coming updates. Toolforge itself planned to drop Python 2 support in 2022.
• Two new bots dropped in January 2020: ST47Bot, the successor to STBot, and Seppi333Bot, whose task was to perform a weekly update of four "massive" wikitables for WikiProject Molecular Biology.
• Cydebot, an adminbot operated by Cyde since 2006, was blocked after going berserk on categories that hadn't yet been CfD'd.

February 2020

Speaking of WikiProject Molecular Biology, Listeria went wild in February

• Y AnomieBOT 78, Cewbot 2, DannyS712 bot 67, DannyS712 bot III 63, PearBOT 6, DemonDays64 Bot 2 · N2 PearBOT
• On February 1, some concerns were raised about ListeriaBot performing "nonsense" edits. Semi-active operator Magnus Manske (who originally coded the Phase II software|precursor of MediaWiki) was pinged. Meanwhile, the bot was temporarily blocked for several hours until the issue was diagnosed and resolved.
• On February 18, ST47Bot got into a tussle with Amalthea (bot), and had to be partially-blocked from Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Cases/Overview.

March 2020

• Y MajavahBot, SDZeroBot, TheSandBot 6, TheSandBot 7, Bitbotje, FACBot 6, TheSandBot 8, Qbugbot 5, Cewbot 3, SDZeroBot 2, PrimeBOT 31, WikiCleanerBot 12 · AntiCompositeBot
• In March, a long discussion was started at Wikipedia talk:Bot policy by Skdb about the troubling trend of bots "expiring" without explanation after their owners became inactive. This can happen for a variety of reasons -- API changes break code, hosting providers' software updates break code, hosting accounts lapse, software changes make bots' edits unnecessary, and policy changes make bots' edits unwanted. The most promising solution seemed to be Toolforge hosting (although it has some problems of its own, like the occasional necessity of refactoring code).
• Some of the twelve bot tasks approved this month were TheSandBot 6 (removing blocked users from Category:Wikipedia usernames with possible policy issues), and TheSandBot 7 (removing unblocked users from Category:Wikipedians who are indefinitely blocked for promotional user names). SDZeroBot 2 was approved to refine geographic stub tags. New bots approved this month were MajavahBot (to patrol WP:EFFPR), SDZeroBot (to merge stub tags), and Bitbotje (fixing DISPLAYTITLE modifications, DEFAULTSORT errors and broken behavior switches in draftspace).

April 2020

Listeria being examined

• Y TheSandBot 9, BHGbot 5, DannyS712 bot 69, SDZeroBot 3, ST47ProxyBot, WugBot 4, SDZeroBot 4, DatBot 10, WikiCleanerBot 11, WikiCleanerBot 13, WikiCleanerBot 14, AntiCompositeBot 2, Cewbot 4 · N2 DaedanBot 1 · Creffbot
• A discussion on the bot noticeboard, "Re-examination of ListeriaBot", was started by Barkeep49, who pointed out repeated operation outside the scope of its BRFA (i.e. editing pages in mainspace, and adding non-free images to others). Some said it was doing good work, and others said it was operating beyond its remit. It was blocked on April 10; the next day it was unblocked, reblocked from article space, reblocked "for specified non-editing actions", unblocked, and indeffed. The next week, several safeguards were implemented in its code by Magnus; the bot was allowed to roam free once more on April 18.
• ST47ProxyBot joined the stable in April, after a BRFA started in December was finally completed. As an adminbot, it was authorized to block IP addresses belonging to open proxies, public VPN services, and web hosts. New tasks approved for existing bots included BHGbot 5 (diffusing categories), TheSandBot 9 (taking over some tasks from the inactive RonBot), and WugBot 4 (updating data at {{Interactive COVID-19 maps}}). Also, DatBot 10 was approved to scale down non-free SVGs — I didn't even know that was a thing.
• A discussion at Wikipedia talk:Bot policy was started by Thryduulf about whether WP:BOTCOMM should explicitly specify that bot operators must be responsive to concerns raised on English Wikipedia specifically (as opposed to Phabricator, SourceForge, Toolforge, et cetera). Eventually, the policy was amended to its current form:

Issues and enquiries are typically expected to be handled on the English Wikipedia. Pages reachable via unified login, like a talk page at Commons or at Italian Wikipedia could also be acceptable [...] External sites like Phabricator or GitHub (which require separate registration or do not allow for IP comments) and email (which can compromise anonymity) can supplement on-wiki communication, but do not replace it.

May 2020

We heard you like bots, so we made a bot that reports the status of your bots, so now you can use bots while you use bots

• Y MajavahBot 3, DannyS712 bot 70, CitationCleanerBot 5, Dreamy Jazz Bot 4, QEDKbot, William Avery Bot 2, DannyS712 bot 68, PrimeBOT 32, TheSandBot 10, Bot1058 7, BHGbot 6, EaglesBot 2, Cewbot 5, WikiCleanerBot 17 · N2 MDanielsBot, PhuzBot 3, Gedimon · ? PearBOT 7
• MajavahBot 3, an impressively meta bot task, was approved this month for maintaining a list of bots running on the English Wikipedia. The page, located at User:MajavahBot/Bot status report, is updated every 24 hours; it contains a list of all accounts with the bot flag, as well as their operator, edit count, last activity date, last edit date, last logged action date, user groups and block status.
• Other approvals for this month were William Avery Bot 2 (processing redirects in {{R from scientific name}}), DannyS712 bot 68 (allowing users to schedule bot reminders for themselves), TheSandBot 10 (removing blocked/locked users from Category:User talk pages with conflict of interest notices), Bot1058 7 (updating Wikipedia:Requested moves/Technical requests/Permalink), Dreamy Jazz Bot 4 (adding {{WikiProject Biography|living=no}} to talk pages where their associated article is in a year of death category), and QEDKbot (deleting and nominating empty categories).
• General syntax fixing tasks were approved for DannyS712 bot 70, CitationCleanerBot 5, PrimeBOT 32, BHGbot 6, Cewbot 5, and EaglesBot 2, as well as WikiCleanerBot 15, 16, and 17.
• Seven bots who fell below activity requirements (with neither the bots nor their operators having any edits or logged actions in two years) had their bot flags removed. They were NekoBot, Robert SkyBot, DASHBotAV, VoxelBot, JackieBot, ReferenceBot, and CensusBot.
• On May 12, EmausBot was blocked.

June 2020

A partial block averted at the eleventh hour for the robot that makes Legos

• Y QEDKbot 2, AnomieBOT 79, WOSlinkerBot 6, Yapperbot 2, Yapperbot, AnomieBOT 80, Dreamy Jazz Bot 5, WikiCleanerBot 18, HasteurBot 15, MusikBot II 4, NoSandboxesHere · N2 RedWarn · ? Seppi333Bot 2
• In July 2017, Headbomb made a proposal that a section of the Wikipedia:Dashboard be devoted to bots and technical issues. In November 2019, Lua code was written superseding Legobot's tasks on that page, and operator Legoktm was asked to stop them so that the new code could be deployed. After no response to pings, a partial-block of Legobot for the dashboard was proposed. Some months later, on June 16, Headbomb said: "A full block serves nothing. A partial block solves all current issues [...] Just fucking do it. It's been 3 years now." The next day, however, Legoktm disabled the task, and the dashboard was successfully refactored.
• On June 7, RexxS blocked Citation bot for disruptive editing, saying it was "still removing links after request to stop". A couple weeks later, a discussion on the bots noticeboard was opened, saying "it is a widely-used and useful bot, but it has one of the longest block logs for any recently-operating bot on Wikipedia". While its last BRFA approval was in 2011, its code and functionality had changed dramatically since then, and AntiCompositeNumber requested that BAG require a new BRFA. Maintainer AManWithNoPlan responded that most blocks were from years ago (when it lacked a proper test suite), and problems since then had mostly been one-off errors (like a June 2019 incident in which a LTA had "weaponized" the bot to harass editors).
• David Tornheim opened a discussion about whether bots based on closed-source code should be permitted, and proposed that they not. He cited a recent case in which a maintainer had said "I can only suppose that the code that is available on GitHub is not the actual code that was running on [the bot]". Some disagreed: Naypta said that "I like free software as much as the next person, and I strongly believe that bot operators should make their bot code public, but I don't think it should be that they must do so".
• Two new bots had their first BRFAs approved: Yapperbot, to replace Legobot for handling the Feedback Request Service, and NoSandboxesHere, to remove {{user sandbox}} from articles in draftspace using Category:Non-userspace pages using User sandbox.

Conclusion

• What's next for our intrepid band of coders, maintainers and approvers?

• Will Citation bot ever be set free to roam the project?
• What's the deal with all those book links that InternetArchiveBot is adding to articles?
• Should we keep using Gerrit for MediaWiki?
• What if we had a day for bots to make cosmetic edits?

These questions will be answered — and new questions raised — by the February 2022 Bots Newsletter. Tune in, or miss out!

Signing off... jp×g 23:22, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

---

(You can subscribe or unsubscribe from future newsletters by adding or removing your name from this list.)

Is it normal for the bot newsletter to be posted to WP:VPT? And why is the 2022 newsletter filled with items from 2020? I don't get why this is here. RudolfRed (talk) 03:14, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

I appreciate the newsletter being here. I would have missed it if it wasn't here.

I am guessing they are going through the backlog of uncovered events. If I was in charge I would just skip right to 2022, but it is intresting to see 2020's events though. So i don't mind either way. Rlink2 (talk) 03:17, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Reading is hard. Here's the TLDR from above: After a long hiatus between August 2019 and December 2021, there's quite a bit of ground to cover. ... I decided in December to split the coverage up into a few installments that covered six months each. ... this issue will only be about crap from almost two years ago. Today we will pick up where we left off in December, and go through the first half of 2020. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:13, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the summary. RudolfRed (talk) 23:48, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Bug: broken heading/edit summary on redlink(?) talk pages

What's causing these? The edit summary's "new section" text gets included in the section's heading. It seems to happen when you start a new discussion section (with the "New section" button) on a redlink page, and it seems to have started in September 2021. See e.g. Template talk:Taxonomy/Streptophyta, Template talk:Taxonomy/Faboideae and Template talk:Taxonomy/Amygdaloideae. I already reported this here, but since this seems to happen elsewhere too, I decided to bring this up here. 85.23.79.231 (talk) 01:40, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Artificially-generated redlinked maintenance category

There's a page, Draft:Performance (finance), which is filed in the redlinked maintenance category Category:AfC pending submissions by age/2 weeks ago — the issue being that said maintenance category was deleted a few weeks ago per Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2020 December 26#Category:AfC pending submissions by age/2 weeks ago due to an AFC project decision to refine it to more detailed subcategories like 14 days, 15 days and 16 days. And for added bonus, the category was empty at the time it was deleted, meaning that this is a new issue.

The problem, however, is that the redlinked category isn't being declared on the draft, but is being artificially transcluded by one of the AFC templates — but it doesn't seem to be coming from {{AfC status/age}}, the apparently obvious candidate, because that doesn't appear to have a "2 weeks ago" option in it at all, and I have no idea how to figure out what other template is generating it. But (a) pages aren't supposed to have redlinked categories on them at all, and (b) this obviously strands the page from the AFC maintenance queue that it should be in, so for both of those reasons it needs to be fixed.

So could somebody with more technical prowess figure out what template is generating this outdated category, and fix it to refile that draft where it actually belongs? Thanks. Bearcat (talk) 15:18, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Looks like Template:AfC age category is doing it. —Cryptic 15:29, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

I am digging into this one. At the moment, it appears to be a quirk with {{time ago}}, which, when fed two different date stamps – from 21 days and 1 hour ago and 21 hours and 16 hours ago – gives "21 days" when asked for days but "2 weeks" and "3 weeks", respectively, when asked for weeks. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:38, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Well, that was an hour well spent. It appears that there is a bug in {{Time ago}}, which I have reported at its talk page. Any logic-minded programming nerds are welcome to take a look. It appears that if you feed the module a time stamp in the form YYYYMMDDHHIISS (I is minutes) and the hours and minutes are both "00" (i.e. the first minute after midnight), the module calculates the weeks incorrectly when the time ago is a multiple of 7 days. This appears to be an edge case, but edge cases happen (the odds of a time stamp being in the one minute after midnight are 1 in 1,440, if I am mathing right, so this will happen to that percentage of drafts for exactly one day when they get to 21 days old). For now, I have adjusted the time stamp on that draft by one minute.

If the bug does not get fixed, we could probably fiddle with {{AfC age category}} to have it rewrite the category name when {{time ago}} suggests "2 weeks" erroneously. – Jonesey95 (talk) 18:05, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

I haven't looked at this issue but if desperate I could use Module:Date for this as it calculates date differences accurately. Johnuniq (talk) 22:45, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Does templatedata work on user namespace templates?

I've tried to create templates with templatedata in the user namespace, and then use the insert template button, but when I type the name of the template it says that templatedata is missing. I can still access all of the all of the default parameters, so I know that the template exists, but templatedata is ignored. Any idea what could be the problem? ― Levi_OP^Talk 17:36, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

After reading over mw:Help:TemplateData, the first section says To add or edit TemplateData, first navigate to a template's page, located at "/Template:Templatename". Every other instance on the page also only refers to using the template namespace. Could anyone confirm that this feature only works in the Template namespace? ― Levi_OP^Talk 20:27, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Mediawiki help pages are generally reliable. They are created by the very same team that created the extension. Snævar (talk) 19:40, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Namespace filter for logs

Hi. I come from phab:T16711. Is there any people interested in contributing a patch to allow namespace filtering for Special:Log? It would be really useful to be able to see, for example, all categories deleted by some user. Thanks in advance, Paucabot (talk) 18:37, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Bug in Template:If IP?

Hi, please see WP:User access levels § Autoconfirmed and confirmed users. Here the template {{If autoconfirmed}} is nested within {{If IP}}. On desktop version, it works; on mobile version logged in, it works too; but on mobile version NOT logged in {{If IP}} fails and whatever is within both the true & false parameters appears on the screen. As such, the message appears is "You are not logged in, so you are not autoconfirmedYour account is not autoconfirmed". I since tried to change the code of this page but it didn't work out. Can someone please check it out? Thanks! ---CX Zoom(^he/_him) (^{let's talk}|_contribs) 07:30, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

It seems to me that none of the user/group classes are available on mobile right now... Not sure if that was always the case, mobile is known to always have run their own order of modules etc, but this should be fixed indeed. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:57, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Email notifications - Phabricator

Currently, the emails you receive from Phabricator lack an "Unsubscribe" kind of button that would mute the task they were coming from without you having to go there and mute it manually. Or do they? Is there a way I can do what I want to do? Should I consider asking at Phab for that as a new feature? - Klein Muçi (talk) 13:34, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Suggest checking on this at mw:Talk:Phabricator/Help. — xaosflux ^Talk 13:59, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

@Xaosflux, thank you! I was checking in Phabricator to see if there was a place like this but I didn't find one. I guess that will do.

You know we already talked together a very similar thing but I keep getting 5-10 emails per day from Phabricator lately and things are quickly going out of hands. - Klein Muçi (talk) 14:04, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

AfC Random submission broken

https://iw.toolforge.org/randomincategory/Pending_AfC_submissions%26server%3Den.wikipedia.org%26namespace%3D2!118%26type%3Dpage

The Random Submission button found on AfC project page is leading to a category searchbar instead of finding a random submission.Slywriter (talk) 18:05, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

@Slywriter: That means there are no pages in that category. ― Qwerfjkltalk 21:11, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

If only that were true, but the general category has over 3k submissions. Hint hint for any experienced editors reading along that AfC can ALWAYS use help.Slywriter (talk) 21:30, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

@Slywriter Something's wrong with my random in category tool. I'll look into it. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 21:19, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks.Slywriter (talk) 21:30, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

@Slywriter It should be working now. Long story short, WP:ITSTHURSDAY. Toolforge is still running an old version of PHP that defaults to using HTTP/1.0. A few hours ago a new version of mediawiki was deployed whose API requires HTTP/1.1 (see WP:ITSTHURSDAY), so I had to tweak the code to make it work. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 22:08, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

But but its still Wednesday. Seriously, thanks. Glad it was a "small" issue.Slywriter (talk) 22:15, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Seems to be related to phab:T300366 and phab:T271421. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 22:24, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Get matched string in replace function

I'm wondering if it's possible to get the matched pattern text and use it in the replace string. For example:

Wiki Source	Rendered Result
{{#invoke:String |replace |text text... [[other text]] more text |[[.*]] |<b>.*</b> additional text |plain=false }}	Original text to be replaced: text text... other text more text What I'd like the result to be: other text additional text

As you can see, what I desire is that any time [[.*]] is matched, I would like to use the text that matched (the ".*" in this example) in the replacement string. Is this in any way possible? ― Levi_OP^Talk 16:29, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Put the text you want to capture in parentheses in your search pattern, and %1 in your replacement pattern: {{#invoke:String|replace|foo bar Baz boz|[A-Z]([a-z]+)|Q%1Q|plain=false}} produces foo bar QazQ boz. %2 will be replaced with the second capture group, and so on.

The search pattern in your invocation above doesn't work. Lua uses a horrifically neutered variant of regular expressions, and I haven't been able to come up with a pattern that non-greedily matches up to a pair of close brackets, or even a single close bracket. Escaping the open (and close!) brackets with %[ and %] prevents your pattern from erroring out, at least. —Cryptic 16:53, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Luckily, the brackets were only an example and I don't need to use them in my actual application. Thanks for the help though. I now see the section at Help:Manipulating strings that talks about this. ― Levi_OP^Talk 16:59, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

%[%[(.-)%]%] matches the contents of a link non-greedily, leaving the innards in %1, but won't handle nesting such as [[File:appletree.jpg|An [[apple]] tree]]. Certes (talk) 17:25, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

It should, but it doesn't. {{#invoke:String|replace|text text [[it didn't work]] more text|%[%[(.-)%]%]|it worked!}} should produce "text text it worked! more text", but instead gives "text text it didn't work more text". —Cryptic 18:11, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Umm, |plain=false:

{{#invoke:String|replace|text text [[it didn't work]] more text|%[%[(.-)%]%]|it worked!|plain=false}} – capture not used here

text text it worked! more text

—Trappist the monk (talk) 18:35, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

That sound you hear is my head thunking against a wall. Thanks. —Cryptic 18:39, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Wikipedia library question

I still haven't gotten my login credentials for Newspaper Archive via the Wikipedia Library, and it's been over a month. Who would I poke about fixing this? Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 18:05, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

@TenPoundHammer: wikipedialibrarywikimedia.org or post over at meta:Talk:The_Wikipedia_Library. — xaosflux ^Talk 22:32, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Generic last name

Hello! In the article List of most-played video games by player count, ref 13 has the error of |last1= has generic name. I attempted to fix it by just moving the last name to be part of the first name, however that just made the error worse. The ref does not give an actual author name and instead just lists the author as "Guest Author (sponsored)". What do I do here? ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 21:31, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

Is it really important that your ref displays "Guest Author"? Why not just omit it? {{cite news}}'s documentation says to give it an explicitly-blank author parameter, but it works fine even without that. —Cryptic 21:46, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

@Cryptic: Didn't know that would work since it threw another error when the |last1 parameter was empty. ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 21:50, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

@Blaze Wolf You can't have |first1= without |last1=. If you remove both it should work. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 22:39, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

The error is accidentally highlighting the poor quality of the source. The cited source is a sponsored post that looks like a press release. The real solution is to find a reliable source to support the claim in the article. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:45, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

The help link in the error message says:

False positives are possible. When the name is valid, wrap the parameter value in the accept-this-as-written markup:

|author=((Super User))

The actual credit in the source is "Guest Author (Sponsored)". When the website explicitly says this, I think it's misleading if the citation only specifies the website as source. You could write |author=((Guest Author (Sponsored))) to display what the website says without getting the error message. Or look for a better source. PrimeHunter (talk) 04:58, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

Empty, but not empty? categories

I have a strange problem involving, of course, categories. The categories state that they aren't empty. If you look at Category:Empty categories awaiting deletion, you can see a few categories that indicate they have one or two pages in them, including Category:2000 establishments in Angola, Category:2022 Polish television seasons, Category:2022 Thai television series endings, Category:2022 Winter Olympics pictograms, Category:2004 Croatian television series endings and Category:2009 Peruvian television series endings are some examples you can see in the Empty Categories category.

And, if you look at these category pages, there is a bright red message "This category does not appear to be empty!". But the categories are, in fact, empty. I thought this might be a problem with a system lag or something (a layman's guess) and I was going to add this message last night when I noticed the problem but decided to wait to see if it went away. But they still appear to be non-empty empty categories. I did a "purge cache" and still, no change. I've been working with empty categories since 2015 and I've never seen this happen before.

Of course, as far as technical problems go, this is more of a curiosity than anything else but I wondered if anyone had an idea why this would suddenly happen now, and to more than one category page. Thank you. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 23:05, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

@Liz: that red error is from the db template making use of the PAGESINCAT magic word; it is not reliable as it is subject to database and replication lag, which can't be fixed with a purge (phab:T85696). So either ignore it, or wait. — xaosflux ^Talk 23:33, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

The code is in Template:Db-c1: {{#ifeq:{{PAGESINCAT:{{PAGENAME}}}}|0||{{error|This category does not appear to be empty!}}}}. "does not appear" is a hint that it may not be certain. If it's currently very uncertain then we could state it more clearly or link a page which mentions the issue. PrimeHunter (talk) 04:28, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

API policy question

I am considering writing a script to analyze data from WP:AIV. The script will need to query about 10,000 diffs using the compare action of Wikipedia's API. The script is purely read-only: I am not making any edits, just downloading the JSON outputs for offline use. I have read MediaWikiWiki:API:Etiquette and don't want to run anything that exceeds a reasonable rate of API requests. My questions are:

• Is running my script allowed by policy?
• Do I need to get BRFA approval to proceed?

I am willing to spread the API requests out over time and limit myself to batches of 500 requests at a time. I appreciate any technical advice from more seasoned editors as this is my first foray into using the API. Best, Altamel (talk) 03:55, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

Any way to show page preview on a new tab in user scripts?

Hi, I'm currently writing a user script (on a different wiki) and wondering if there's any way to generate page preview from a textbox on a dialog (using jQuery UI). It's a script that asks the user to fill out a bunch of fields and then edits a certain page when the form is submitted, and it'd be best if the user could see page preview on a new tab before posting, when clicking a dialog button. I'm guessing the "preview" parameter of mw:API:Parsing_wikitext could be used or User:SD0001/private-sandbox.js could be forked somehow, but it's just a guess and I'm really not sure exactly how. Do you guys have any idea about this, or any user script that actually has page preview functionality? Any help would be appreciated. --Dragoniez (talk) 04:58, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

Problems with navigating wikipedia on Chrome on chromebook OS

"Version 94.0.4606.124 (Official Build) (64-bit)" is the version of Chrome I'm using. This problem has been ongoing for at least two weeks. About 2/5 of the time I click on edit source, the side-scrolling widget on the right side of the editing space will not come up, I have tried disabling my add-ons, without better results. Obviously this greatly hinders my ability to scroll down and up through articles. It doesn't happen when I switch to "visual editing", but I much prefer "source editing". I believe my device updated at around the same time that this problem began.--Phil of rel (talk) 06:40, 3 February 2022 (UTC) Edit: it seems to be happening even in visual editor right now. Even refreshing the page doesn't help.--Phil of rel (talk) 06:46, 3 February 2022 (UTC)

Any experiencing this?

File:Vector-2022-preview-problem.webp (direct link)

I'm been using the Vector (2022) for around a year, but strangely, something happened today, when I go into edit source, and then with or without making any changes, clicking the Show Preview button, after which the content area will shrink and the various button at the top of the page will become messy as seen in the attached video. I have tried switching between Firefox, Edge, Chrome, and Brave but all yields the same result. Was there a code update when wrong somewhere? — Paper9oll (🔔 • 📝) 07:43, 3 February 2022 (UTC)