Wikipedia:Village pump (technical) (WP:VPT)

MediaWiki message delivery 01:24, 21 March 2023 (UTC)  Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong, but CentralAuth is already in MediaWiki:Sp-contributions-footer and I'm sure that it's been there for years. I don't use any scripts or gadgets that affect that box. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 08:22, 21 March 2023 (UTC) That's an enwiki customization, the default value for that message is empty. Anomie⚔ 11:45, 21 March 2023 (UTC) The new link will be in the line of links under the page heading. I don't expect software conflicts with any scripts. phab:T331743#8693808 says: (imho, this "conflict" will be "two links appear"). MediaWiki:Sp-contributions-footer added the link in 2011.[3] If we remove it then there will probably be protests from users who don't notice the new link or have simply gotten used to the old location. Interface changes tend to cause drama. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:00, 22 March 2023 (UTC) Now discussed at MediaWiki talk:Sp-contributions-footer#Protected edit request on 24 March 2023. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:02, 24 March 2023 (UTC) Hi all, I'm trying to fully expand {{Human history}} on the Human history article but am not sure how to do so. The sidebar code is a bit unclear and {{Human history|expand=yes}} isn't working. Any ideas? Aza24 (talk) 02:48, 24 March 2023 (UTC)  @Aza24, you can either set |expand= to the specific section you wish expanded by its name set in the wikitext (e.g. expanding the Holocene section which has |list1name=Holocene, you'd set |expand=Holocene). To expand all, set |expand=all. Izno (talk) 03:20, 24 March 2023 (UTC) Great, thank you! Aza24 (talk) 03:33, 24 March 2023 (UTC) Just tried to reset my password and I got internal errors saying my IP was blocked (it wasn't) half the time, and when it did load, it just loaded the normal login page. Had to go to Meta to reset my password. Has something changed? Anarchyte (talk) 10:38, 24 March 2023 (UTC)  @Anarchyte Special:PasswordReset loads for me. Were you trying it while logged in or logged out? Did you get the error on opening, or only on submitting? — xaosflux Talk 12:30, 24 March 2023 (UTC) Logged out. I couldn't submit a password reset request because it asked for my username and password (with a login button), not username and email. Anarchyte (talk) 12:48, 24 March 2023 (UTC) Note that now that I'm logged in, it loads fine while both logged in and logged out. Perhaps it was something to do with swapping IPs between WiFi and phone hotspot, and one being incidentally hit by a range blocked? Anarchyte (talk) 12:49, 24 March 2023 (UTC) Quite possibly, it could also be due to administrators getting an IP block exemption by default, so you wouldn't be affected by any IP blocks while logged in. 163.1.15.238 (talk) 14:41, 24 March 2023 (UTC) Double check that you used Special:PasswordReset and not Special:ResetPassword. Anomie⚔ 19:29, 24 March 2023 (UTC) That might be it, though I also recall there being no "Forgot password" button on the main login page when I had this problem. The "Help with logging in" link was there, but "Forgot your password?" wasn't. Anarchyte (talk) 02:33, 25 March 2023 (UTC) Recently someone added an infobox to the Rani Pokhari aricle. Since then, it appears no longer possible to place images in the text to the left of the infobox. All images are pushed to below the lower edge of the box, no matter where you put it in the text. This creates a messy look, plus the illustrations are no longer next to the texts they are supposed to illustrate. Is there a solution to this? Judithcomm (talk) 12:36, 24 March 2023 (UTC)  @Judithcomm The issue here seems to be that the first image in the article (the one with the caption "Wide view of Ranipokhari before 2015 earthquake.") is set to float to the right, so it appears after the infobox. The image that floats to the left is set to appear after this, so it appears further down the page. You generally should not place images floating to the left of an infobox per MOS:SANDWICH, as doing so causes display issues on narrower screens. 163.1.15.238 (talk) 13:14, 24 March 2023 (UTC) Problem solved! Thanks! --Judithcomm (talk) 13:23, 24 March 2023 (UTC) {{stack}} is the technical solution. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:30, 24 March 2023 (UTC) You can include an image by doing this:  [[File:Filename.jpg]] You could also do this in the infobox (depends on the infobox):  | logo = Filename.jpg For GeoJSON routes you can often include them in the infobox thusly:  | map = {{maplink-road|from=Santa Cruz, Big Trees and Pacific Railroad.map}} But what if I wanted to include a map outside of the infobox? Like maybe the route of something or other has changed over the years and I wanted to show how it's changed over the years. I mean, I guess I overlay the GeoJSON onto, say, an OSM map and then screenshot it and upload the screenshot but you lose a lot of resolution if you do that. Like with a GeoJSON you can zoom in to whatever specific area you're interested in. Does this river / road / railroad cross this other river / road / railroad? You can zoom in to your hearts content and answer that question. Any ideas? TerraFrost (talk) 05:17, 25 March 2023 (UTC)  {{mapframe}} does not need to be in an infobox. Izno (talk) 05:33, 25 March 2023 (UTC) I think this is the right place to ask this sort of thing. I have a simple bullet list of 12 BLP articles at User:Zaathras/sandbox3, all have infobox images. When I hover the mouse over the link, the image from the infobox pops up in a thumbnail on all but 2 (the 2 are noted). I've looked at the articles and can see no difference, can someone say why these 2 do not produce a preview? Zaathras (talk) 13:34, 25 March 2023 (UTC)  @Zaathras: The articles are Katie Cannon and Osinachi Ohale. It's the same for all links to them. The infobox images are chosen by mw:Extension:PageImages for those articles but then rejected by the popup feature because the original uploads are too small. See mw:Extension:Popups#Known problems. The description of the size requirement is cryptic to me. I suspect the actual rule is that width × height must be either at least 320 × 200 px or 203 × 250 px. I suggested a change with no reply at mw:Topic:X24ym9nooumpgr1h. File:Katie G Cannon.jpg is 194 × 213 px. File:Osinachi Ohale (cropped further).jpg is 207 × 238 px so the width os too small for the first rule and the height is too small for the second rule. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:34, 25 March 2023 (UTC) Interesting, thanks. Zaathras (talk) 21:25, 25 March 2023 (UTC) Page images are used in several places, mainly small images at search results to help identify a wanted article. Popups (Page Previews) shows a single larger image at a time. It apparently wants to show a fixed size without scaling up which gives blurry images. The images could be reuploaded at a larger resolution but they are already blurry so I don't recommend scaling them up. We should probably never scale up uploads just to get Popups to accept them. The requirement may change anyway. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:32, 26 March 2023 (UTC) The convert template produces this incorrect display of the word "change": "reduced the temperature in the sickroom by 20 degrees Fahrenheit change (11 °C)." There's a workaround that only works when the abbreviations are used: Template_talk:Convert#incorrect_use_of_"change" --Espoo (talk) 11:47, 26 March 2023 (UTC)  Please discuss this on the template talk page, it has plenty of watchers. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 18:12, 26 March 2023 (UTC)   I'm not allowed to edit on the page Israel, but that's "impossible"; I have been registered for 4 months, have over 5 500 edits to my credit, have never (obviously) vandalised, and have always respected the rules. JackkBrown (talk) 23:49, 26 March 2023 (UTC)  @JackkBrown, the page is fully-protected, meaning only admins can edit it currently. Izno (talk) 00:07, 27 March 2023 (UTC) Please forgive me if this was the wrong place to post this.  A new "Talk:" page section is here: Wikipedia talk:About the sandbox#Obsolete info? (or what?)Enjoy ... Mike Schwartz (talk) 08:08, 27 March 2023 (UTC)  I have updated the text for Vector 2022.[4] PrimeHunter (talk) 15:16, 27 March 2023 (UTC) Thank you.  --Mike Schwartz (talk) 01:14, 28 March 2023 (UTC) @Mike Schwartz: Oh, I never knew it was posted here too. If I'd known I would never have started this help desk thread. Please see the guideline about multiple posting. Graham87 04:59, 28 March 2023 (UTC) This thread is basically a pointer to the talk page section he started. I don't see how it conflicts with WP:MULTI. Nardog (talk) 05:31, 28 March 2023 (UTC) @Nardog: Yeah I guess not ... he should have made a pointer from the sandbox talk page thread to here though. If he had I would've been happy to wait for somebody from here to post at that thread. Instead, because I knew I was one of the only active watchers on that talk page and I couldn't help fully because of my blindness (even though it was a relativvely urgent issue), I felt compelled to get more eyes on the situation, which I did at the help desk (because I thought people there would be used to helping out new users). . It was a bit of wasted effort on my part. Oh well, what's done is done. Graham87 12:39, 28 March 2023 (UTC) Back in August, Teemu Leisti (talk · contribs) moved all of references in the article Enlargement of NATO to the References section, replacing each one in the prose with a named ref tag, like <ref name=foo_2020_01_01/>, to match. The user's edit summary was "Moved definitions of all references to the References section. Made the names of references more systematic." I've never seen this sort of thing done before on Wikipedia, and I am now finding this makes working on sections or subsections of the article unnecessarily difficult, since to edit or remove an out-of-date reference requires constantly editing the full article using Ctrl+F to track down sources. Also previewing edits to sections is frustrating because all the references are listed as "Cite warning: <ref> tag with name foo_2020_01_01 cannot be previewed because it is defined outside the current section or not defined in this article at all." It's been far to long with far too many intervening edits to undo this action. To put these back manually would mean individually copying, Ctrl+Fing, and pasting back 278 references, so before I waste hours on this, is there a script that could be run to put the references back where they normally go? Is there somewhere else I might ask about this? Thanks,  Patrick Neil, oѺ∞/Talk 16:18, 27 March 2023 (UTC)  I am not sure what you mean by "references in prose"? There are still in prose albeit in a separate section at the end of the article. As to ref templates, they are highly recommended for the use because they standardize ref appearance. Ruslik_Zero 20:02, 27 March 2023 (UTC) See Help:List-defined references.  I've seen scripts that convert pages to this style, but I've never seen a script that undoes the conversion. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:45, 27 March 2023 (UTC) @Patrickneil: Converting an article to WP:LDR should only be done with consensus, per WP:CITEVAR. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:57, 27 March 2023 (UTC) You could delete all the references from the reference section and then wait for User:AnomieBOT to rescue them from previous versions, but you'd want to get talk page consensus before doing so. --Ahecht (TALKPAGE) 21:35, 27 March 2023 (UTC) @Redrose64 and Whatamidoing (WMF): Thanks, "list-defined references" was the term I should have used. Yes, the user changed the article from footnotes whose information is in templates within the prose next to the sentence or phrase they are sourcing, to list-defined references at the end of the article, probably by using one of those scripts you mentioned. No, there was no discussion or consensus for this change in August, but I can start a discussion about changing it back on the article's talk page now. @Ahecht: Using the bot might not be the worst idea, something to look into at least. Thanks! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Patrickneil (talk • contribs) 21:56, 27 March 2023 (UTC) @Patrickneil: User:Kaniivel/Reference Organizer may do what you want. Keith D (talk) 22:46, 27 March 2023 (UTC)  MediaWiki message delivery 01:11, 28 March 2023 (UTC)  How can I opt out of the multi-column region-separated list of interlangs that shows up when you click "n languages" in Vector 2022 (when that number is large, e.g. [10]) and go back to the single-column alphabetical list instead? I have "Use a compact language list" disabled in Preferences, but this doesn't appear to have any effect on Vector 2022. This has been a deal breaker for switching to the new skin for me. Nardog (talk) 08:53, 28 March 2023 (UTC)  You go to Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering and disable the "compact language list" in the Languages section. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:44, 28 March 2023 (UTC) Jinx. I already have. Does it make any difference on Vector 2022 for you? Nardog (talk) 09:50, 28 March 2023 (UTC) @Nardog: this is being looked in to with phab:T333321. — xaosflux Talk 10:26, 28 March 2023 (UTC) @Nardog oops, just saw YOU opened it :D — xaosflux Talk 10:26, 28 March 2023 (UTC) And T319690 shows the option was deliberately made to be ignored in Vector 2022 so my task will likely be declined (h/t Stjn). So I'm just looking for a hack to force the non-compact list at this point. Nardog (talk) 10:33, 28 March 2023 (UTC) @Nardog, I wonder if you might be able to get more traction in that Phab task if you could write a User story.  It's a model that presents the problem, rather than the solution.  I don't know what your own story would be, but I could imagine someone saying "As a person who reads two languages well, I always want to see the list of available languages.  I feel disappointed when I click on the language switcher, only to find that there are only articles available in languages I can't read." Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:03, 28 March 2023 (UTC) I might do that but again, I'm not hopeful the software will be changed to my liking so I'm just asking for a JS hack that works for now. For the record, I'm not looking for a way to bring back the interlangs list on the sidebar, I just want the single-column list when I click "n languages" as opposed to a multi-column region-separated one. Nardog (talk) 00:47, 29 March 2023 (UTC) Special:WantedCategories is suddenly flooded, for no reason I've been able to identify, with a glut of hundreds of redlinked class-rating categories for inactive or defunct WikiProjects.  I thought this might have been related to recent edits to {{WPBannerMeta}}, which "normalized" quality ratings by transferring them from direct code within the template over to Module:WikiProject quality assessment, but a temporary revert of the edit that was made to that template yesterday failed to make any of the redlinks stop being generated on the talk pages — so I've self-reverted my test revert, but am struggling to identify what else might have caused this. Of course, that might still be where the zombie categories are coming from, but it would require the expertise of someone with more experience in template coding than I've got to identify and fix that.  A subset (but not most) of the categories had already somehow been emptied back out before I saw the latest run of WantedCategories at all, but since there's no way for me to identify what the implicated articles were in the already-cleaned categories, I also can't determine what was done to clean them out so that I can apply it elsewhere. So could somebody take a look at this, and figure out how to fix it? Thanks. Bearcat (talk) 14:36, 28 March 2023 (UTC)  Never mind. Practically at the same time as I was posting this question, the editor who had made the original change to the template posted to my talk page clarifying that they had already identified and corrected the error, so the categories are clearing out on their own based on the processing of the job queue. So I'll revive this if it's obvious by the next WantedCategories update that they aren't clearing out and thus there's something else wrong, but so far it looks like this is resolved. Bearcat (talk) 14:52, 28 March 2023 (UTC) If I go to the first one in the special page, i.e. Category:NA-Class Stub sorting articles (2,585) (which I am 100% certain should be empty because WPSS has never carried out page assessments), there are plenty of bluelinked categories. If I go to one of those pages (let's call it Category XYZ), the cat box at the bottom does not mention NA-Class Stub sorting articles at all. So the problem is with the links tables. If I then WP:NULLEDIT Category XYZ, it still does not mention NA-Class Stub sorting articles. When I then return to NA-Class Stub sorting articles and refresh it, Category XYZ is no longer listed. So the job queue should clear it; if that is too slow, you need to send a null-bot to visit all those bluelink cats. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 16:29, 28 March 2023 (UTC)I saw this headline and was hoping for something about WP:WikiProject Zombies. :( Anomie⚔ 20:56, 28 March 2023 (UTC)  Commons will no longer allow me to use the same name for an svg file that is used for a png file. I had to add a tilde (~) at the end of the file name I changed:  File:World map of total confirmed COVID-19 deaths per million people by country~.svg File:World map of total confirmed COVID-19 deaths per million people by country.pngThis makes it difficult for people to change Our World in Data (OWID) maps in Wikipedia articles from PNG to SVG. Now that the SVG maps have been fixed by OWID.  The OWID SVG maps no longer have the problem of the OWID logo covering part of the date. It was fixed by OWID recently adding a Wikimedia compatible font, Liberation Sans. See:  Wikipedia:Graphics Lab/Illustration workshop/Archive/Feb 2023#File:World map of total confirmed COVID-19 deaths per million people by country.svg Wikipedia:SVG help#font-family issues--Timeshifter (talk) 18:59, 28 March 2023 (UTC)  @Timeshifter, we can't help you with the issue. You should discuss at Commons. Izno (talk) 21:47, 28 March 2023 (UTC) File:World map of total confirmed COVID-19 deaths per million people by country.svg without a tilde already exists. You uploaded it. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:50, 28 March 2023 (UTC) PrimeHunter. Oops. Thanks! S**t happens when I am sleepy. I struck out the incorrect info. I will try to get the tilde version speedy deleted. Concerning Our World in Data (OWID). Let me try to salvage this by saying that people should feel free now to substitute the SVG version for the PNG version of almost any OWID map or chart. --Timeshifter (talk) 05:52, 29 March 2023 (UTC) I'm not sure when it changed, but when I make a block on an IP now, the IP I'm blocking shows up in an uneditable grey box in the "Username, IP address, or IP range" field. It used to be easy to make a rangeblock by simply appending the range (e.g. /24, /64) to the IP number. Now that's not possible without clicking 'x' to remove the IP, writing or pasting the IP number back into the field, adding the range, and then blocking. This is also the case if you want to modify a block on a single IP to a rangeblock via Change block. It's extremely irritating.-- Ponyobons mots 23:21, 28 March 2023 (UTC)  @Ponyo, I think you're running into phab:T332994, which should be deployed next week? Izno (talk) 23:36, 28 March 2023 (UTC) I asked about this a few years ago, but it seems like there hasn’t been any major developments since. Can you give a timeline with regards to when I can expect this functionality to come? Regards, Interstellarity (talk) 00:22, 29 March 2023 (UTC)  Asked where, who, what are we even talking about ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:54, 29 March 2023 (UTC) @Interstellarity sounds like you want some sort of "private browsing mode" on the ios app? Have you opened a feature request for that? If not you can use this form to do so, it is certainly not something we can fix locally on the English Wikipedia. — xaosflux Talk 10:21, 29 March 2023 (UTC) When I put a template on a talk page (e.g. in this case {{BLP noticeboard}}, I get the message "Convert formatting to wikitext?". "You pasted content with rich formatting. Would you like to convert this formatting to wikitext?". What's the purpose of this? Seems like something that is rarely if ever needed. After a few times it no longer appears though. Fram (talk) 14:38, 29 March 2023 (UTC)  @Fram: I would assume it's because there's some other formatting other than just the template that isn't visible when just copying it. I believe it's also for if you just paste the template code in the Visual Editor. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 14:43, 29 March 2023 (UTC) If I copy your signature ("Fram (talk)") and paste it into source mode, it will paste the literal text Fram (talk). If I click convert formatting to wikitext, it will fix it up to [[User:Fram|Fram]] ([[User talk:Fram|talk]]). My guess is that you copied from a template marked up as {{example}}, which is a link, so it tries to be smart and asks if you want to paste the literal interpretation of what you copied, a link to the template, rather than just the text. Legoktm (talk) 14:44, 29 March 2023 (UTC) Doesn't seem to be the same though, I posted the exact text I gave at the top, which upon saving just gives the expected result (the template, not some unwanted simple text like with my username example). I tried it again at another page (without saving!), Talk:Salini (surname), and I get the same result. The example you gave (with my sig) is an example of a good use of this though, so at least it answers the question when this would ever be useful. But in this case, the end result is <nowiki>{{BLP noticeboard}}</nowiki>, turning a working template into a nowiki version instead of the other way around. Fram (talk) 14:58, 29 March 2023 (UTC)