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).

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Persistent snackbar

I'm on Firefox 131.0.3 on Android 14. I have User:SD0001/find-archived-section enabled in my gadgets (and also mw:Extension:DiscussionTools in my Beta features, which has no effect on mobile).

As of recently (probably last Thursday), the snackbar popup I get from an archived / missing section link has stopped unpopping-up until I navigate away from the page.

Can anyone replicate / report to phab? Folly Mox (talk) 11:59, 30 October 2024 (UTC)

For clarity, my other snackbars (e.g. "Redirected from Wikipedia:vpt") pop away normally. It's just the archived section one that persists. Folly Mox (talk) 13:03, 30 October 2024 (UTC)

@Folly Mox: User:SD0001/find-archived-section makes a message starting with "Looks like the discussion". Your screenshot is from a newer MediaWiki feature which starts with "This topic". The box goes away when I tap it outside the link in iOS on an iPhone, e.g. at User talk:Citation bot#Bot does nothing. Are you saying the tap doesn't work for you, or did you expect the box to disappear by itself? I don't have an Android device for testing. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:53, 30 October 2024 (UTC)

That popup is generated by DiscussionTools, not the gadget. You can dismiss a popup on Minerva by tapping it (around a link if it includes one). Nardog (talk) 00:26, 31 October 2024 (UTC)

You can also accidentally dismiss it by clicking the space between the lines of a multi-line link, which I've managed to do multiple times :c. – 2804:F1...9E:DCD8 (talk) 00:35, 31 October 2024 (UTC)

That's the DiscussionTools notification. It's supposed to stick around until you interact with it. Could you confirm whether it's dismissed if you directly tap on it? (If it is, it's working as-intended. If not, that's a bug we should fix.) DLynch (WMF) (talk) 02:45, 31 October 2024 (UTC)

Apologies for the delay everyone; yesterday was exhausting. After constructing a test case, I can confirm that the snackbar disappears properly when tapped. I feel like the persistence is new behaviour(?) but understand why such a message would be intentionally left around until interacted with.

Perhaps removing the snackbar once e.g. the editing interface is opened might make more sense: it does look like a bug in the screenshots I posted (to me, anyway).

And apologies for throwing the find-archived-section gadget under the bus: I wasn't previously aware that Mediawiki had incorporated the same functionality until reviewing the documentation for my OP above.

I guess I was also wrong about DiscussionTools having no effect in Minerva: I don't see the "people in conversation" or "subscribe to thread", but upon reflection I suppose the linkable timestamps that point straight to a comment supplanting the prior requirement of diff hunting must be part of the extension as well. Folly Mox (talk) 12:58, 31 October 2024 (UTC)

Mobile editing and the reply tool don't reload the page when editing and then the popup remains. I don't know whether something could be done to make it disappear automatically on those actions. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:27, 31 October 2024 (UTC)

mw:Help:SourceEditor is pretty uninformative on this point, but maybe one of the devs who frequent this venue knows which hook triggers the opening of the edit interface and can add a snackbar disappear function there? Folly Mox (talk) 17:49, 31 October 2024 (UTC)

The reply tool check in the background for the arrival of new comments. In this part it may be possible to dismiss the snackbar. 176.4.242.5 (talk) 19:26, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Or at least hide it until it can be dismissed at cancelling or submission and the reload that is connected with either. 176.4.242.5 (talk) 19:30, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Is it possible to find out a list of articles and redirects for Climate change in .... ?

Hi all

I'd like to spend a significant amount of time writing and working with experts on creating Climate change in NAME OF COUNTRY / STATE etc articles. First I would like to understand which do and don't exist. I tried making a simple list of all the countries to see redlinks however it seems that one or more users created a significant number of redirects so this doesn't work. I've been using List of sovereign states to create a list, but I'm sure there are other options like islands, states within countries etc. Is it possible to do a query or is there another way to find:

1. A list of existing articles for Climate Change in ...
2. A list of redirects for Climate change in ...
3. A way to have a live list of missing Climate change in NAME OF COUNTRY articles since simple redlinks don't work because of the redirects that have been created (I guess I could make a table of redlinks with comments on which are redirects as a basic version)

Many thanks

John Cummings (talk) 11:48, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

You may be interested in User:BrandonXLF/GreenRedirects. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:37, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

PrimeHunter thanks so much :) you always know the right answer! I can create a manual to update page from this now I think, if you or anyone else has any ideas about creating an automated page please let em know. Thanks again. John Cummings (talk) 12:57, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

@PrimeHunter, @John Cummings You can also use the CSS code at the bottom of User:Ahecht/Scripts/RedirectID to add a icon next to redirects (similar to the icon next to external links). --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 22:10, 2 November 2024 (UTC)

Hi Ahecht can I check something, does this redirect icon only appear for users who have installed this or does it appear for all users? John Cummings (talk) 23:33, 2 November 2024 (UTC)

@John Cummings For both my CSS and BrandonXLF's CSS users would have to have it installed. You could use WP:TemplateStyles to apply User:Ahecht/Scripts/Redirect_icon.css or User:BrandonXLF/GreenRedirects.css to a page for everyone, even logged out editors, but using it to style an entire mainspace page seems contrary to the usage guidelines. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 15:17, 3 November 2024 (UTC)

Redirects are in italics at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:AllPages?from=Climate+change+in&to=&namespace=0. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:53, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

{{Is redirect}} can test for redirects in wikitext. 500 calls are allowed in a page with no other expensive parser functions. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:22, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

PrimeHunter thanks again, super helpful. One final question, do you know if there is a template I could use to tell if a page includes a specific word or phrase? I would love a way to tell if articles for countries mention climate change. I know this is probably a very niche use case but I'm wondering if there is template that might do this for another reason. John Cummings (talk) 19:31, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

It's a search modifier, not a template, but WP:INSOURCE is close to what you're asking for. jlwoodwa (talk) 02:09, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

Graphs of categories

Is there a way to create a graph that shows how many pages are in a category (y-axis) over time (x-axis)? It would be particularly useful for error tracking categories. Failing that, a text-based way to monitor category population changes. -- GreenC 02:40, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

Well, there's User:MusikBot/CategoryCounter — Qwerfjkltalk 13:30, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

"Graphs are unavailable due to technical issues" .. oh forgot about that. Maybe no graph option. Unless it was like an ascii bar graph:

Jan: ------|-------
Feb: ---|--
Mar: -------|----
Apr: -----|----
May: --|-
Jun: ----|---
Jul: --|-------------
Aug: ------------|---
Sep: ---|---
Oct: ---------|-
Nov: ------|--

▅▆▂▃▂▂▂▅▂▂▅▇▂▂▂▃▆▆▆▅▃▂▂▂▁▂▂▆▁▃

Source-- GreenC 14:15, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

User:MusikBot/CategoryCounter might work in 1-3 months. The team behind Mw:Extension:Chart is pushing for an deployment soon, see phab:T372081. Template:Articles lacking sources chart/data has to move to the Data namespace on Wikimedia commons, and you also need a new page, again in the data namespace on commons, that decides how the graph looks. Snævar (talk) 14:54, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. -- GreenC 15:37, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

There's also User:SDZeroBot/Category counter which I just finished setting up. Raw counts only, no graphs for now. (I noticed that the MusikBot task, apart from being disabled, stores the counts on-wiki which seems like an unsuitable place for large-scale storage, and it also requires an admin to enable new categories for counting.) – SD0001 (talk) 18:10, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

User:SD0001 this works for my purposes. Thank you! You could also store the data on Commons, in JSON, and it would be available to Lua templates on all 300+ wikis, which might make graphic presentation possible. The only limit is JSON file size so it probably would require a new file every year, with monthly and yearly totals included in the JSON for scaled views. Example JSON. Example module that reads it (here). -- GreenC 06:45, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-45

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

Updates for editors

• Stewards can now make global account blocks cause global autoblocks. This will assist stewards in preventing abuse from users who have been globally blocked. This includes preventing globally blocked temporary accounts from exiting their session or switching browsers to make subsequent edits for 24 hours. Previously, temporary accounts could exit their current session or switch browsers to continue editing. This is an anti-abuse tool improvement for the Temporary Accounts project. You can read more about the progress on key features for temporary accounts. [1]
• Wikis that have the CampaignEvents extension enabled can now use the Collaboration List feature. This list provides a new, easy way for contributors to learn about WikiProjects on their wikis. Thanks to the Campaign team for this work that is part of the 2024/25 annual plan. If you are interested in bringing the CampaignEvents extension to your wiki, you can follow these steps or you can reach out to User:Udehb-WMF for help.
• The text color for red links will be slightly changed later this week to improve their contrast in light mode. [2]
• View all 32 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, on multilingual wikis, users can now hide translations from the WhatLinksHere special page.

Updates for technical contributors

• XML data dumps have been temporarily paused whilst a bug is investigated. [3]

In depth

• Temporary Accounts have been deployed to six wikis; thanks to the Trust and Safety Product team for this work, you can read about the deployment plans. Beginning next week, Temporary Accounts will also be enabled on seven other projects. If you are active on these wikis and need help migrating your tools, please reach out to User:Udehb-WMF for assistance.
• The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization newsletter is available. It includes: New languages supported in translatewiki or in MediaWiki; New keyboard input methods for some languages; details about recent and upcoming meetings, and more.

Meetings and events

• MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference Fall 2024 is happening in Vienna, Austria and online from 4 to 6 November 2024. The conference will feature discussions around the usage of MediaWiki software by and within companies in different industries and will inspire and onboard new users.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:47, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

"Thank" link missing

Recently the "Thank" link is missing from page histories and diffs. Safari 18.1.--AntientNestor (talk) 14:10, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

It works for me in Firefox. You have to be logged in. Are you sure your login is working when they are missing? Please post an example link. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:27, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

@PrimeHunter:You're right—working in Firefox, which would be a workaround. Still missing from Safari, though.--AntientNestor (talk) 15:53, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

It is present for me in Version 18.0.1 (19619.1.26.111.11, 19619) and in iOS's Safari 18.1 —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:01, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

Suggestion to improve search bar results

Would it be possible to have redirects show up at the same level of importance as they would if the article was at that title? This is a little weird to explain but basically from my level of understanding search bar results are currently sorted roughly by how likely a user is to need that article. For example when you type Apollo in looking for the Apollo missions the first relevant result is Apollo 11, then 13, then others. This makes a lot of sense to me but I want to know if it's possible to include redirects into this.

Right now redirects only show up in the search bar below all the possible exact match results until fully typed exactly. For example if you start typing "New York Times" into the search bar it puts a bunch of court cases involving the NYT before the newspaper right up until you type the final S, at which point the newspaper goes to the top like it should have been. This is not intuitive for readers and if "New York Times" showed up at the level of importance that "The New York Times" did, it would be better for navigation. Another example is the Edvard Munch painting The Scream. It's really iconic and notable but a reader could very easily forget the "the" and just type "scream", at which point they would have to remember exactly "Scream (painting)" before they get the one they want because there are a bunch of other less important articles that do start with exactly "scream". This is terrible for navigation, obviously. But if "Scream (painting)" showed up in the search results where it would if the article was called that, that would fix the issue.

I have no idea how this would be implemented or even if it's possible. Please let me know if this is even a feasible idea. Ladtrack (talk) 19:04, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Redirects vary greatly in relevance. Science Times also redirects to The New York Times but isn't mentioned there. The redirect currently has seven views in the last 30 days.[4] I don't think it should inherit the importance of the newspaper and rank high when you start typing "science". PrimeHunter (talk) 21:58, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

there are in principle two kinds of redirecting, the orthographic and the semantic one. The semantic redirect has one extraneous property. It can point to a part of the article, that is some semantically dependent section. An orthographic redirect is about different writing of the lemma,so it will never point to only a part of the article. So both kinds of redirects can be differentiated by the presence or absence of the "#" separator in the target. And if you need to set a semantic redirect to a whole article, then add the separator without a section name. 2A02:3035:B07:530:180:786A:E014:DDFD (talk) 13:12, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

I fear that weighting all redirects equally to the main article title would do more harm than good. Many popular articles have lots of redirects, and in particular redirects that start with different letters than the main title. If there are ten really popular articles with redirects starting xyz... then they could dominate the completion suggestions. If you typed bro into the search box, you might be disappointed to see the top suggestions being Youtube, Barack Obama, Los Angeles Dodgers, New York Yankees, France, Brooklyn, Autism, HTTP cookie, Malcolm X, and Brooklyn Dodgers. (The relevant redirects are: Broadcast yourself, Brock Obama, Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers, Bronx Bombers, Bro-C'hall, —, Broad Autism Phenotype, Browser cookie, Brother Malcolm, and —).

The common factor in your two examples are that they start with The. I think "ignoring common completion prefixes" might be a better approach. (It was #4 on our list of most promising tasks for working with an outside consultant in 2018.) Obvious ways to attempt this would be to ignore stop words (the, a, an, of, etc.), though we don't have stop word lists for all the languages we'd want to support, and it wouldn't catch wiki-specific common title prefixes like List of. Automatically finding candidates is possible, but I'd be afraid of blindly trusting them since, for example, Maria might be a very common prefix, since it is a very common name cross-culturally. You could also compare titles to existing redirects (The New York Times vs New York Times) for common ignorable prefixes, though there may not be enough data on smaller wikis. Implementation details require more thought, like preventing the "prefix" from being the whole title (The The) or everything up to a paren (To Be or Not to Be (book))—how do you know when to stop in those cases? What happens when a prefix-stripped title matches another title (The Dog vs Dog)? Do you require prefixes to be whole words (then you miss naj- in Polish, but you don't want to strip The off the front of Theater or Theodore)? If you automatically find el, la and los in Spanish, how do you make sure you get las? If you have à, le, la, and les, in French, should you add au and aux, and if so, how do you know? What do we do in Chinese or Japanese? Etc., etc., etc. Language is always complicated.

So, this is something that is on the Search Team's radar, but not currently near the top of our priority list. (Unfortunately we have a lot of infrastructure and query service work that needs our attention.) TJones (WMF) (talk) 19:50, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

Hi, thanks so much for the detailed reply. That's a great issue that I hadn't considered. Ignoring common prefixes isn't perfect (there are examples like Facebook, Inc. → Meta Platforms or Marquis de Lafayette → Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette that I think also need to be fixed) but given I have no idea how to solve the problem you've pointed out I would settle for ignoring prefixes.

I do think there are some feasible ways around the other issues, though. The obvious question would be, does the change have to roll out for every language at once? Starting with one and then adding more seems a lot easier. That way a lot of the rules can be placed manually; I'll go through possible solutions to each of these issues, and while I'm sure some of them won't work and there will be many more issues, this seems like a surmountable challenge to me.

Okay, one at a time:

• Manually include wiki-specific prefixes like List of
• Manually exclude anything that will obviously cause problems like Maria
• Like you said, specifically rely on existing redirects and don't remove prefixes unless it matches an existing redirect (The (band) for this example, the book has no redirects and could be excluded). Remember, while this isn't perfect and a lot of redirects will be missing, any improvement is good for navigation.
• Even though the title is stripped internally for navigation purposes, display the actual article title in the dropdown menu so people can differentiate; this is already done for redirects, so someone typing dog could easily see The Dog and realize it's not what they're looking for.
• Do not strip off whole words in the English Wikipedia, in Polish Wikipedia naj- can be marked to be stripped off from the word itself without it affecting anything in other languages
• For cases like las, au, and aux, again ensure that it must be matched with an existing redirect. I don't know nearly enough about Chinese or Japanese to even venture at a solution, but I'm sure one could be found, and while that is being worked on it could be implemented in other language Wikipedias.

Ladtrack (talk) 05:48, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

Being logout again

This happened awhile ago, cleared up, and has now started happening again. Anyone know what's going on? -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 14:26, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

This sounds like phab:T372702 (though I don't think anyone else reported it clearing up for a bit); the latest update there (from about two weeks ago) is that the devs are having a hard time telling what the cause is, but added some additional logging to help track down the issue. 129.170.197.163 (talk) 02:24, 8 November 2024 (UTC)

Thanks I'll keep an eye on the phab ticket. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 02:30, 8 November 2024 (UTC)

All redlinks showing up as blue in Vector 2022 and Minerva when using older browsers

Hi! Recently, all redlinks (such as this one) have started showing up as blue. This only seems to happen when using the Vector 2022 or Minerva skins on Firefox 77/Chrome 87 and below (haven't checked other browsers), and doesn't affect the original Vector.

Redlink color

	Vector	Vector 2022	Minerva
Firefox 78	Red	Red	Red
Firefox 77	Red	Blue	Blue
Chrome 88	Red	Red	Red
Chrome 87	Red	Blue	Blue

I saw the thread linked from a previous section on this page, but this issue appears to be different from T315347 which seems to have been a 2020 issue affecting mobile users, while the current problem just started happening recently and affects the desktop site. 2A00:807:E7:D39B:AD41:2CD8:279A:980F (talk) 11:11, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

Red links have the CSS class new and get their color from loading a CSS rule from outside the page itself. CSS in Vector 2022:

@media screen {
  a:where(.new:not([role="button"])):visited {
    color: var(--color-destructive--visited,#9f5555);
  }
}

It's simpler in Vector legacy (sometimes just called Vector):

@media screen {
  a.new:visited {
    color: #a55858;
  }
}

If you know how to add a CSS rule to the viewed page in your browser, can you say whether one or both works? PrimeHunter (talk) 11:45, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

You may have to add !important to the color line to override existing rules:

@media screen {
  a:where(.new:not([role="button"])):visited {
    color: var(--color-destructive--visited,#9f5555) !important;
  }
}

@media screen {
  a.new:visited {
    color: #a55858 !important;
  }
}

PrimeHunter (talk) 11:54, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

The Firefox 77/78 and Chrome 87/88 dividing points line up with the introduction of the :where() CSS selector, which Vector 2022 and Minerva both use. Anomie⚔ 13:17, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

The question is, why is the user running those browser versions? Windows 7 (which is EOL) and up should be able to run Chrome 109 and Firefox 115. What OS are you using? Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 13:41, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

I'm actually using Firefox 66 on Estobuntu 14.04 (which I know is really outdated, but I'm currently working on figuring out how to install a newer OS). I used this site to check what browser versions the issue happened on. I'll just use the original Vector skin as a workaround until I can install a newer browser. 2A00:807:E5:D017:AD41:2CD8:279A:980F (talk) 00:50, 8 November 2024 (UTC)

If you have to run the old browsers for some reason then you can create an account and save the last CSS version in your CSS to automatically load it on all English Wikipedia pages when you are logged in. Or save it in meta:Special:MyPage/global.css to load in all Wikipedia languages and Wikimedia wikis when you are logged in. Your account automatically works at all of them and keeps you logged in. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:40, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

Which means the rule will not work for browsers from before that time.

MediaWiki does support some pretty old browsers, but skins are neither core nor does the level of support provided by core for old browsers require more than "you can read the page" for some value of "reasonable". See also mw:Compatibility. Izno (talk) 15:45, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

Script to add unrefernced tag

Is there any script to run through WP:AWB or WP:JWB to add the unreferenced tag to articles that has no references? VihirLak007^hmu!/_duh. 20:17, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

Anyone? VihirLak007^hmu!/_duh. 06:19, 8 November 2024 (UTC)

Doing this is prone to false positives (since not all references are inline and/or correctly formatted, and there’s a number of special cases), and therefore should be done cautiously instead of blindly running through them. There have been bots that have flagged these in the past but they have had community-wide approval.  novov talk edits 12:54, 8 November 2024 (UTC)

Oh right. Yeah its better to go through each article in this matter. VihirLak007^hmu!/_duh. 12:59, 8 November 2024 (UTC)

AfD Statistics for User down today

Voting matrix Stats for users not updating today. Thanks in advance for any info on this. — Maile (talk) 21:09, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

Never mind. It seems to be working OK now. — Maile (talk) 00:53, 8 November 2024 (UTC)

Does anyone else have this possible bug?

When editing on mobile, I've noticed what I think is a bug, but I haven't posted to Phabricator, because I'm not entirely sure, so I wanted to hear others input. When I edit on my phone (which is a OnePlus phone runnning on Android, if that matters) in the browser Google (don't have the app, did not test with it and only tested Google), whether in visual or source editing I can't highlight a word or phrase that has the red wavy line underneath. If I try, the screen freezes and I get booted from Google. When I reenter, it's as though I never tried to edit in the first place. Doesn't occur on my computer editing with Google however.

Does anyone else have this bug? Its not like I can't just edit on computer, but I wanted to bring this to someone's attention, so it can be fixed in the future.Thank you in advance for replies. 90.133.232.139 (talk) 21:36, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

Duplicate, identical, and inconsistent system messages

• MediaWiki:Edit (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)
• MediaWiki:Delete (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)
• MediaWiki:Protect (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

For context: I have been scrolling through Special:AllMessages and noticed that "delete" and "protect" exist as substantial duplicate of messages. Likewise, I have never figured out why, but MediaWiki:Edit duplicates the contents of MediaWiki:Editthispage and is inconsistent with the message actually shown to most users MediaWiki:Skin-view-edit/MediaWiki:Vector-view-edit/MediaWiki:Editsection.

I am trying to figure out if these messages are actually used for some reason or if they are no longer and can safely be deleted. I recently withdrew my own MFD of all three of these pages because I need to get more help on this. And I also withdrew a speedy criteria idea discussion also. Doing some digging in the archives I found Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 195#Inconsistent tab names in monobook for the latter two. However, looking at the default, that appears to have been fixed.

As for MediaWiki:Edit there is phab:T310529. This behavior is getting quite confusing and I need to figure out what is going on.

I wonder if we can fish out more of these messages and maybe, on a rainy day, we can figure out what to do with them; send them to MFD, or what.

Pinging the users that previously were involved in this (at least in the past couple of days or whenever). @Pppery @Xaosflux @Thryduulf @Robert McClenon

I do have other questions about MediaWiki:Rollbacklinkcount (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) and MediaWiki:Rollbacklinkcount-morethan (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs), and I remember dropping the discussion because it is a stylistic thing, but I do have concerns about if any of these overrides (especially the minor ones, minor in teh sense that they just add a comma or change the case or whatever) are being made with consensus or not, and if they are to solve a temporary problem, why they aren't being undone once that temporary problem is fixed.

To be clear, I have no trouble whatsoever with the overrides made for Wikipedia's sake, like those that link to Wikipedia policies or Wikipedia help pages or adding appropriate styling. This is primarily about "minor edits" where different punctuation, capitalization, or phrasing is used as opposed to the original message. If there indeed is a problem with a system message for all wikis (not just Wikipedia), then the wording should be fixed in the software.

There are somewhere around less than 1000 overrides going from the data on AllMessages. Reviewing them all is probably going to be a pain, especially because most of these messages don't have adequate documentation on MediaWiki. Awesome Aasim 02:19, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for withdrawing the MFD nominations pending further research. I don't understand the details of how those files are used, and I would prefer. before voting on whether to delete something, to know what it is and what it is used for:

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

Mending Wall by Robert Frost

Robert McClenon (talk) 03:47, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

These three are very old messages, and I don't have time to code search anywhere they could be in play. As phab:T310529 noted, at least one of them is still being imported in the current skins. Most of the use of these has been migrated to newer messages, but something could still be using them. Unless there is an actual problem, I'd leave them along. Code problems certainly should be raised on phab. — xaosflux ^Talk 10:48, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

Let's actually see... Vector 2022 Vector 2010 Monobook Timeless Minerva

I am not seeing (edit) anywhere. (skin-view-edit) yes, but not (edit). Maybe there is something that is missing? Awesome Aasim 14:58, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

Previewing the use of a message in the place you think it will appear does not correctly assess whether it will appear there. mw:Codesearch is the appropriate tool. Izno (talk) 16:58, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

And even with codesearch, some messages are used in pretty unconventional ways and can be difficult to locate (Dynamic definitions and compound definitions exist). —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:31, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

Issues with template:Chloroplast DNA

I hope I am at the right place with this issue - if not, I would very much appreciate redirection! I have been trying to fix the appearance of template:Chloroplast DNA, which is supposed to provide a clickable version of File:Nicotiana tabacum Choroplast genome.svg, but I am failing to make it display properly on both desktop and mobile (see template talk:Chloroplast DNA). It is used on Chloroplast and Chloroplast DNA, two fairly important articles, the former of which is currently being tidied up. I have a nagging feeling that there should be a completely different way of doing this than how [[[:template:Chloroplast DNA]] goes about it.

I've mocked up the template on User:Felix QW/sandbox 2 with a test page at User:Felix QW/sandbox if anyone would like to mess about with it without affecting mainspace. Thanks in advance to anyone who would be happy to have a look into this! Felix QW (talk) 12:06, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

A template using a mass of display absolutes overtop an image is going to have a hard time on mobile, yes. Mobile has different assumptions about how wide an image is, even if you would prefer it to have a certain size. Izno (talk) 16:56, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

Perhaps using mw:Extension:ImageMap instead would work. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 22:34, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

Thank you very much for the pointer—That was exactly the sort of solution I was thinking off! Felix QW (talk) 22:37, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

Mysterious category in The Joke's on Us

Is there a reason The Joke's on Us is showing a redlinked category Pages using the JsonConfig extension? I can't figure out how to remove it. Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 18:41, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

A WP:NULLEDIT did the trick. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 18:44, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

css style page turned into an article

On sinhala wikipedia i tried manually importing Help:Your first article/styles.css from here to there si:උදවු:Your first article/styles.css. But it turned into to an article type page. Never happened to me before. Can someone fix this? VihirLak007^hmu!/_duh. 19:45, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

can an admin please change the content model of this page si:උදවු:Your first article/styles.css VihirLak007^hmu!/_duh. 19:54, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

You need to ask someone who has admin rights on siwiki. Nobody here does. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 20:04, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

Ah right. Thanks. BTW, aren't there admins in existence who have admin right all over every wikipedia project?who might be able to do this types of edits on cross wiki projects if asked for help. Just curious VihirLak007^hmu!/_duh. 20:12, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

m:Global sysops and m:Stewards do exist. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 20:16, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. Got it done from a global sysop. VihirLak007^hmu!/_duh. 20:30, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

Creating new css style pages

How to create a "sanitized css" page from scratch? Everytime i try, the page creating window is for a article type new page(don't know the technical term) and not a css content model page. VihirLak007^hmu!/_duh. 22:28, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

You can only create them in Template space, with the .css postfix. But after that, you can move them to another namespace. See also TemplateStyles usage. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:34, 9 November 2024 (UTC)