Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)

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Coming soon: A new sub-referencing feature – try it!

Hello. For many years, community members have requested an easy way to re-use references with different details. Now, a MediaWiki solution is coming: The new sub-referencing feature will work for wikitext and Visual Editor and will enhance the existing reference system. You can continue to use different ways of referencing, but you will probably encounter sub-references in articles written by other users. More information on the project page.

We want your feedback to make sure this feature works well for you:

• Please try the current state of development on beta wiki and let us know what you think.
• Sign up here to get updates and/or invites to participate in user research activities.

We are aware that enwiki and other projects already use workarounds like {{sfn}} for referencing a source multiple times with different details. The new sub-referencing feature doesn’t change anything about existing approaches to referencing, so you can still use sfn. We have created sub-referencing, because existing workarounds don’t work well with Visual Editor and ReferencePreviews. We are looking forward to your feedback on how our solution compares to your existing methods of re-using references with different details.

Wikimedia Deutschland’s Technical Wishes team is planning to bring this feature to Wikimedia wikis later this year. We will reach out to creators/maintainers of tools and templates related to references beforehand.

Please help us spread the message. --Johannes Richter (WMDE) (talk) 11:11, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

This is a very important task to work on, but I am not sure how this proposal is an improvement for those of us who do not use the VisualEditor.

Compare:

<ref name="Samer M. Ali">Samer M. Ali, 'Medieval Court Poetry', in ''The Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Women'', ed. by Natana J. Delong-Bas, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), I 651-54.</ref>

{{r|Samer M. Ali|p=653}}

or:

<ref name="Samer M. Ali"/>{{rp|653}}

with:

<ref name="Samer M. Ali">Samer M. Ali, 'Medieval Court Poetry', in ''The Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Women'', ed. by Natana J. Delong-Bas, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), I 651-54.</ref>

<ref extends="Samer M. Ali" name="Samer M. Ali, p. 653">p. 653</ref>

existing workarounds don’t work well with Visual Editor and ReferencePreviews OK, then VE and ReferencePreviews need to be fixed so that they work well with the existing ways of referencing.

Adding another competing standard (obligatory XKCD) is not very useful unless you want to disallow the others which will probably make people very mad (see WP:CITEVAR) and is not necessarily an improvement.

There is no reason why VE or RP would require a new standard, they could just as easily support one of the existing ones (and ideally all of em).

Am I missing something?

Polygnotus (talk) 15:14, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

Sfn is routinely out of sync with its parent and requires the use of third party scripts to detect that it is so. Extended references do not i.e. the Cite extension will issue a warning when you have an extension without a parent.

And Rp is objectively subjectively ugly. Presenting it as a potential option is offensive. :)

In <ref extends="Samer M. Ali" name="Samer M. Ali, p. 653">p. 653</ref>, a name for the subreference is not required (<ref extends="Samer M. Ali">p. 653</ref> will be typical I suppose), and even when it is you can abbreviate since you know what the parent is (e.g. <ref extends="Samer M. Ali" name="SMA653">p. 653</ref>).

Some other benefits:

• Reference extensions work with reference previews to display the extension directly with the primary citation.
• The extensions are grouped with the primary citation in the reference lists.

And the third, which you brushed aside: VE works well with reference extensions.

None of which can be said of the other two items. Izno (talk) 16:01, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

And as for OK, then VE and ReferencePreviews need to be fixed so that they work well with the existing ways of referencing., MediaWiki systems try to be agnostic about the specific things that wikis do around X or Y or Z. As a general design principle this helps to avoid maintaining systems that only some wikis use, and leaves the burden of localization and each wiki's design preferences to those wikis. Rp additionally has nothing to work with in regard to VE and ref previews. Izno (talk) 16:06, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

@Izno: Thank you. Gotta sell these things a bit, you know?

Is this style of referencing intended to replace all others? If its better, then lets just abandon all other variants.

The extends keyword is familiar to codemonkeys but perhaps not the most userfriendly for others. I am not sure why it would be harder to show an error when someone writes <ref name="nonexistant" />{{rp|653}} than when someone writes <ref extends="nonexistant">p. 653</ref> but in theory this new system could auto-repair references (has that been considered?) Category:Pages_with_broken_reference_names contains 1300+ pages.

Also I am curious what your opinion Wikipedia:Templates_for_discussion/Log/2024_August_15#Template:R here would be. Polygnotus (talk) 16:17, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

I agree with Izno—I'd rather have a syntax that integrates with the <ref>...</ref> syntax, rather than relying on templates, which mixes in a different syntax, and are wiki-specific. isaacl (talk) 16:28, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

If you control the parser you can make any string do anything you want so the currently chosen syntax is, in itself, no advantage or disadvantage. Polygnotus (talk) 16:31, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

You provided the wikitext for two examples and asked if one seemed to be an improvement, so I responded that in my opinion, the syntax of the sub-referencing feature under development is conceptually more cohesive to an editor than one where wikitext surrounded in braces follows the <ref ... /> code, or uses solely wikitext surrounded by braces. Sure, any strings can be turned into any other strings, but there are still advantages of some input strings over others. I also prefer the resulting output of the reference list. isaacl (talk) 16:45, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

Agreed, but I assume that things are not set in stone yet. I don't mind the difference between [1]:635 and [1.1] or what exact wikicode is used. So I am trying to think about functionality (e.g. automatically repairing broken refs/automatically merging refs instead of how things get displayed/which wikicode is used). Polygnotus (talk) 16:47, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

I apologize as your first post seemed to be concerned about the wikitext markup being used by users of the wikitext editor. From a functionality perspective, I think as Izno alludes to, it will be easier to implement features such as detecting hanging references and merging them together with a syntax that is within the <ref> element, rather than relying on detecting templates and associating them with <ref> elements. That would require the MediaWiki software to treat some wikitext in double braces specially. (It would be easier if the extended information were flagged using triple braces, since it would avoid clashing with the extensible template system, but I don't see any advantages to that over extending the <ref> syntax.) isaacl (talk) 17:09, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

Please don't apologize to me (even if there would be a reason to do so, which there isn't), I am a very confused and confusing person and I understand myself roughly 4% of the time (and the world around me far less often than that). Polygnotus (talk) 17:14, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

Good to see this moving forward. My main interest was how it would look on the hover, rather than in the References section. I thought the ref extends might 'fill in' variable fields into the general ref, but it seems instead that it just created a new line below. How flexible is this below line, will it display any wikitext? Could we for example add chapters and quotes? (Which will need manual formatting I assume.) CMD (talk) 16:53, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

URI fragment support might also be useful. One sub-reference could link to, for example, https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/mexico/#government and another to https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/mexico/#economy Polygnotus (talk) 16:56, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

As noted here meta:Talk:WMDE_Technical_Wishes/Sub-referencing#Unintended_consequences .. unleashing this complexity into the mainstream without guidance is a huge mistake that is going to cause years of cleanup work, if ever. There are two main issues I can think of:

• What parameters should be sub-referenced? It should be limited to page numbers, and quotes. Not, for example, multiple works, authors, volumes, issues, IDs, dates of publication, ISBN numbers, etc..
• How is data in a sub-ref added? If it's free-form text, it's a step backwards from CS1|2's uniform |page=42 to a free-form text like "Page 42" or "(p) 42" or whatever free-form text people choose. Bots and tools need to be able to parse the page number(s). Free form text is not semantic. Templated text is semantic. Anything that moves from semantic to non-semnatic is bad design.

Before this is set loose, there must be consensus about how it should be used. It opens an entirely new dimension to citations that is going to impact every user, citation template, bot, bot library (PyWikiBot etc), tool, etc.. -- GreenC 17:00, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

Yeah its also a bit weird to ask for feedback and then already have a proof of concept and say is planning to bring this feature to Wikimedia wikis later this year. You must ask for feedback before code is written and before any timeline exists. Polygnotus (talk) 17:05, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

At a minimum, it should not be added until there are clear guidelines for usage. More specifically, it should have a feature that issues a red error message if the sub-ref does not contain a special template for displaying page numbers and/or quotes ie. anything else in the sub-ref is disallowed. Then new parameters can be added once consensus is determined. We should have the ability to opt-in parameters, instead of retroactively playing cleanup removing disallowed parameters. -- GreenC 17:18, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

@GreenC: So then you would get something like this, right?

<ref extends="Samer M. Ali" page="" chapter="" quote="" anchor="">
<ref extends="Samer M. Ali">{{subref|page=""|chapter=""|quote=""|anchor=""}}</ref>

And then a form in VE where people can fill it in.

Polygnotus (talk) 17:32, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

The former was deliberately not chosen during design work as being too inflexible for all the things one might want to make an extending reference. Izno (talk) 19:33, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

"All the things", which below you said was only page numbers, chapters and quotes. What else do you have in mind? -- GreenC 20:04, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

There have been previous requests for support in CS1 for subsections of chapters of works. But that's beside the point: we don't need to lock this down out of some misbegotten idea of chaos. YAGNI. Izno (talk) 20:45, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

It will be chaos as currently proposed, though I never said "lock this down". Johannes asked for feedback. The two main issues I raised, Johannes already said, these are known issues. He said, make a guideline. So I suggested at a minimum, let's make a guideline. You and Johannes don't seem to be on the same page about that. You hinted that were part of the development team, is that correct? -- GreenC 23:09, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

No, I am a volunteer interested in this work since when it was first discussed at WMDE Tech Wishes and/or the community wishlist and have been following it accordingly, working on a decade ago now.

Guidelines are descriptive also. "We usually use it for this, but there may be exceptions." is reasonable guideline text. "You are required to use it only for this." is another reason it's not going to fly. Izno (talk) 16:06, 20 August 2024 (UTC)

That's a shame, the former was precisely what I imagined and was excited for when I first read about the idea. CMD (talk) 02:36, 20 August 2024 (UTC)

@GreenC We don't do that with regular references. There's nothing in the software that produces a red error message if I do <ref>My cousin's roommate's friend told me</ref>, so why should subrefs be enforcing that? --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 19:37, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

@Polygnotus: This has been being discussed for many years now. m:WMDE Technical Wishes/Sub-referencing was created in 2018, and even then the idea had already been being discussed for a while. phab:T15127 was created in 2008. It's not odd that they're finally at the stage of having an implementation (or if it is, it's that it took so long to get here). Anomie⚔ 21:45, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

@Anomie: Ah, thank you, I didn't know this was a "plant trees under whose shade you do not expect to sit"-type situation. Polygnotus (talk) 22:19, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

You should probably assume that's the situation for any MediaWiki change. A few years back, some user script authors were mad because a code change had been throwing error messages at them for "only" seven years(!), which was obviously too short a time frame for them to notice that anything needed to be adjusted. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:06, 23 August 2024 (UTC)

I actually totally disagree and think you're making a mountain out of a molehill. My anticipation is that most people will use it for the obvious (page numbers). In some cases they may use chapters (a single long text with a single author or even for anthologies). Rarely do I anticipate them using anything else, but I think they should have the luxury of putting whatever they want in the reference.

As regards mandating some use like templates, that's not how it works, though I can imagine some sort of {{Cs1 subref}}... which is probably basically {{harvnb}} and some others.

One thing however that is sure not to occur is to have subreferences of subreferences. This should prevent the vast majority of pathological cases. Izno (talk) 19:32, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

You think it's a mountain to have a guideline for usage before it's turned on? -- GreenC 20:37, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

Uh, yeah. People have successfully used our current mechanisms for extending a parent reference in many many ways which notably don't fit what you want. Izno (talk) 20:44, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

/me looks back 20+ years… sure is a good thing we wrote all those guidelines before making a wiki that was to become the most popular encyclopedia……. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:20, 20 August 2024 (UTC)

No one's stopping you from writing some guidelines. There might not even be any opposition if you put sensible things in it. But as Izno says, the guidelines would be advisory rather than prescriptive. – SD0001 (talk) 14:03, 20 August 2024 (UTC)

See WP:PROPOSAL if you really want to bother with this. I personally wouldn't recommend it, though. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:07, 23 August 2024 (UTC)

When a document has a nested structure, e.g., chapters within sections, it is natural for an editor to want citations that match that structure. I would expect nested citations to include arbitrary combinations of author, editor, page, quote, title and URL, depending on the type of document. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 22:15, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

Does "will work for wikitext and Visual Editor" cover the list-defined references examples on the demo page? I'm testing right now and the Visual Editor still seems to have the same problems with list-defined references that have existed for some time.[1] Will this update fix any of those issues? Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 02:28, 20 August 2024 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for your feedback, questions and interest in sub-referencing! Given the large number of comments, I’ll try to provide answers to all of them at once:

1. replacing other referencing styles: We don’t intend to replace other citation styles. We are fulfilling an old community wish, creating a MediaWiki solution for citing a source multiple times with different details. Citation styles are a community matter and per WP:CITEVAR you can continue to use your preferred way of referencing. If the community wants certain referencing templates to be replaced by sub-referencing, they are of course free to do so, but that’s up to you.
2. reference pop-up:

   • Reference Previews are going to display both main- and sub-reference in one reference pop-up, showing the sub-reference’s details below the main information (example). There are still a couple of details going to be fixed in the next couple of months.
   • ReferenceTooltips (the gadget enabled by default at enwiki) will need an update. It currently only displays the sub-reference’s information (example), similar to the behavior with sfn (example). But different to sfn (example) it currently doesn’t show a pop-up on top of the first pop-up for the main information. Given that gadgets are community-owned, we won’t interfere with that, but we’ll try to assist communities in updating the gadget.
   • Yes it will be possible to display any wikitext in sub-references, just like it is possible to do so using normal references (without any templates). We’ve intentionally allowed this, because local communities prefer different citation styles (and even within communities users have different preferences), therefore our solution shouldn’t limit any of those. Citing sources with different book pages will probably be the main reason to use sub-referencing, but it’s also possible to use it for chapters, quotes or other details.
   • You’ll need to do the formatting (e.g. writing details in italic) yourself, except if the community creates a template for sub-references

3. URI fragments: Those can be used for sub-references as well (example)
4. List-defined references in VE: We are aware of the issues mentioned in phab:T356471, many of those also affect sub-references. As we are still defining some VE workflows (currently we’ve mostly worked on the citation dialog) we haven’t found a solution yet, but we might be able to resolve at least some of those issues while continuing our work on sub-referencing in Visual Editor.
5. What parameters should be sub–referenced?

   • As already mentioned on meta this should be up to local communities, given the many different referencing styles. It should also be up to them to decide if they want to use templates for sub-referencing or not. We’ve reached out to communities much in advance, so you should have enough time working out some guidelines if your community wants that.
   • But as Ahecht said: Users can already use references for all kinds of unintended stuff, sub-referencing is not different to that. It’s necessary to technically allow all kinds of details in sub-references, due to the many different citation styles within one community and across different communities.
   • From our user research we expect most people using sub-referencing for book pages. There will be a tracking category (example) which could be used to check if there is unintended usage of sub-referencing

6. Nested citations: Should be possible with sub-referencing (example), if you’re talking about WP:NFN?. Feel free to test other referencing styles on betawiki and give feedback if anything doesn't work which should be working.
7. VE and RefPreviews should be fixed to work with all existing referencing styles: Just like Izno said it’s unlikely to achieve that, because local communities are using many different types of referencing and could come up with new local referencing templates every day. That’s why we’ve chosen to add a new attribute to the existing and globally available MediaWiki cite extension.
8. Adding another referencing style isn’t really useful: We are fulfilling a wish which is more than 15 years old and has been requested many times in the past years. Existing template-based solutions for citing references with different details only work on those wikis who maintain such local templates – and most of those have issues with Visual Editor. That’s why a global MediaWiki solution was necessary. You can always continue to use your preferred citation style per WP:CITEVAR.
9. Doesn’t look like an improvement for Wikitext: If you compare it with template-based solutions like {{rp}} you are correct that those allow for simpler wikitext. But if you’re editing in multiple Wikimedia projects, your preferred template from one project might not exist on the other one. That’s why a MediaWiki solution will be beneficial to all users. And most current template-based solutions have the already mentioned disadvantages for Visual Editor users. Also readers will benefit from a more organized reference list by having all sub-references grouped below the main reference.
10. The attribute “extends” doesn’t seem user friendly for non-technical users: We’ve done several consultations with the global community and a lot of user testing in past years where we asked for feedback and ideas on the attribute name. One takeaway is that the name is less important for many users than we initially thought, as long as they can remember it. And our user tests showed a surprisingly large number of Wikitext users switching to VE in order to use the citation dialog (for referencing in general, not just for sub-referencing) – if you do that, you don’t need to deal with the attribute name at all. We didn’t see any major issues with “extends” for people exclusively using Wikitext in our user tests. But so far there is no final decision on the attribute name, so if you have any ideas let us know (we’ll make a final decision soon).
11. You should have asked for feedback earlier: We’ve been working on this feature (on and off) for almost 8 years and had a lot of community consultations (e.g. at Wikimania, WikiCite, discussions on metawiki where we invited communities via Mass Message) and many rounds of user testings – always with the involvement of enwiki users. And we are doing this big announcement now in order to make sure that really everyone knows in advance and can provide further feedback while we are finalizing our feature.

Thanks for all of your feedback, it's well appreciated! --Johannes Richter (WMDE) (talk) 16:20, 20 August 2024 (UTC)

Perhaps it would be wise, in future, to make a list of predictable reactions/questions and incorporate the responses to those in the announcement. Highlighting the advantages of a change/addition, USPs if any, why decisions were made and perhaps even a short timeline can make the reception much warmer. Some people here (e.g. Polygnotus) don't know the 15 years worth of background information. The good news is that I think that it is an improvement (although it could be a bigger improvement). I assume others have also mentioned things like ensuring refs don't break and automatically merging refs (but I do not want to dig through 15 years of history to figure out why it wasn't implemented) and this is/was an opportunity to make something superior to the existing methods that could replace them. The OrphanReferenceFixer of AnomieBOT will need to be updated. Polygnotus (talk) 17:04, 20 August 2024 (UTC)

It's always difficult to write such announcements in a way that they answer the most important questions while also being short an concise so that people actually read the them ;) Some of the questions raised in this section have already been answered in meta:WMDE Technical Wishes/Sub-referencing#FAQ and we'll continue to add more frequently asked questions there, if we notice (e.g. in this village pump discussion) that certain questions come up again and again. Johannes Richter (WMDE) (talk) 17:16, 20 August 2024 (UTC)

Agreed, it is super difficult to strike the right balance. And even if you do, some will still be grumpy. But its also very important. Polygnotus (talk) 17:20, 20 August 2024 (UTC)

If the announcement is too long, then nobody reads it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:11, 23 August 2024 (UTC)

Yes, the {{collapse}} is super useful. Polygnotus (talk) 01:35, 29 August 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the detailed response and the included screenshots. I was a bit glum following my comment above but I think I have a better grasp of the underlying concept now. If we are able to use citation templates in the sub-reference field, that may provide a way to fix at least some of the potential issues raised above. Is there a place to track changes to the reference pop-up (File:Sub-referencing refpreview.png)? My first impression is that's perhaps not a necessary large white space but I'm curious to read more discussion on the matter. CMD (talk) 17:25, 20 August 2024 (UTC)

@CMD depends on what you mean by "place to track changes"? There are several phabricator tags which might serve this purpose (although we've collected a lot of user feedback which is still under discussion and therefore not filed as a task yet). We want to use meta:WMDE Technical Wishes/Sub-referencing#Recent changes and next steps to document important changes on the current prototype and can certainly document further changes to Reference Previews for sub-referencing in this section as well, if that's what you imagined? Johannes Richter (WMDE) (talk) 15:43, 21 August 2024 (UTC)

Yes, reference previews are one of the great benefits of the Wikipedia reference system. I'll follow on meta. CMD (talk) 16:27, 21 August 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the lengthy reply! Can a template tell if it's being used in an extended reference?

If there is any probability of this all working in the Visual Editor, we should also aim to make templates that work in the Visual Editor. That would mean a template that slots inside of an extended reference, rather than a template that invokes one (the way that {{r}} or {{sfn}} work). There is already some discussion at Help talk:Citation Style 1 about building a template for consistency between the main named reference and the extended sub-references. I considered making a proof of concept template that would only handle pages, quotations, and so on, but folks have already mentioned citing named sections in a larger work and other broader ideas.

For a template to plug into this, I've checked the parameters currently available in major templates that cite locations within a longer work. If I've missed anything feel free to update this table:

In-source location parameters in existing templates

Element	{{Cite book}}	{{rp}}	{{Sfn}}	other CS1
Page	page, p pages, pp at	page, p, 1 pages, pp at	p, page pp, pages loc, at	minutes time event inset
Quote	quote trans-quote script-quote quote-pages quote-pages	quote, q, quotation translation, trans, t, tq, translation-quote, translation-quotation, trans-quotation, xlat quote-page, qp, quotation-page quote-pages, qpp, quotation-pages quote-location, quote-loc, quote-at, quotation-location	(within loc)
No pp	no-pp	no-pp, nopp	(not available)
Postscript	postscript		ps

Also, regarding formatting, CS1 and sfn are based (to an extent) on APA and Harvard citation styles.

Also(B), regarding LDR, one of the issues with list-defined references in the Visual Editor is that removing all usage of a reference from an article's body text makes the reference become invisible in the VE and emits this error message on the rendered page, "Cite error: A list-defined reference named "Bloggs-1974" is not used in the content (see the help page)." To have an un-called reference isn't exactly an error, though. Editors move citations from the bibliography and standard references down to other sections (Further reading, External links, and so on); some articles still have general references at the bottom. Is there a way to push un-called references down to the bottom of the list and treat them as a maintenance issue rather than an outright error, like the below example with citations borrowed from Template:Cite book/doc^(11-02-2024)

References

1. ^ Mysterious Book. 1901.
2. ^ Bloggs, Joe (1974). Book of Bloggs.
3. * Bloggs, Joe; Bloggs, Fred (1974). Book of Bloggs.

* Notes with an asterisk (*) are not cited inline.

Also(C), regarding guidelines and guidance, we could create Help:Sub-referencing before the feature goes live, Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 02:53, 21 August 2024 (UTC)

Can a template tell if it's being used in an extended reference? No, not currently. Lua experts feel free to correct me if I am wrong. Polygnotus (talk) 02:57, 21 August 2024 (UTC)

push un-called references down to the bottom of the list and treat them as a maintenance issue it isn't even a maintenance issue; it is useful if people name refs so that those names can be used later to refer to those refs. But if no one refers to em that is fine. Polygnotus (talk) 03:01, 21 August 2024 (UTC)

I have adjusted the table; |postscript= is for terminal punctuation only, not for in-text locations. As for LDRs that are named but not cited, those are most definitely errors. They are generated by the MediaWiki software, hence the name of the help page (Help:Cite errors/Cite error references missing key) and the use of the word "error" on the Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting page, and the name of the MediaWiki page that holds the error message, MediaWiki:Cite error references missing key. – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:08, 21 August 2024 (UTC)

@Jonesey95: But why would it be considered an error if a ref has a name but nothing that refers to it? Polygnotus (talk) 08:56, 21 August 2024 (UTC)

Indeed to best of our knowledge templates currently cannot tell if they are being used in a sub-reference. But it should be possible to make such changes. As templates are community-owned, we cannot do that ourselves, but we'll try to assist communities (e.g. by providing documentation or some examples) with the necessary changes to citation tools and templates. Johannes Richter (WMDE) (talk) 15:47, 21 August 2024 (UTC)

Yes, additional parameters might be needed on <ref>...</ref> and on citation templates to designate main and sub-references.

LDRs that are named but not cited are most definitley treated as errors; that doesn't mean that they should be treated as errors. There are other markup languages where uncited references are treated as legitimate. Admiitedly {{Refideas}} is a workaround, but it would be nice if {{Reflist}} could include incited references and if the LDRs were listed first. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 16:20, 21 August 2024 (UTC)

Zombies in the search index

Screenshot of an error with a Wikipedia search

This search – -hastemplate:"short description" prefix:"List of" – returns just two results and they are the same page – List of Coastal Carolina Chanticleers head baseball coaches. One copy (2024-06-09T16:09:55) is a version of the article just before it was moved to draftspace (2024-06-09T16:49:44). The other version is the article that was re-created under the original article name. Any clues as to how we expunge the undead version from the search index? — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 14:08, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

copied from WP talk:Short description — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 14:13, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

phab:T331127 maybe, which should have been fixed a while ago. Izno (talk) 14:59, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. Looks like it, but the ticket was closed a few weeks back. Should it be re-opened? — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 15:29, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

I nudged it, we'll see what the response is. Izno (talk) 15:52, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

Strange short description - how to fix it?

I started typing "Space-Men" in the search bar and it suggested the Space-Men article with the strange short description of 1960 Italy?'"`UNIQ--ref-00000004-QINU`"'? film. It shows up in the page information page that way too, but not in the article's source/wikitext, so I'm not sure how to fix it. Any ideas? 28bytes (talk) 17:34, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

I think I've fixed it? DonIago (talk) 17:43, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

it does, but it doesn't explain how it got there. Nthep (talk) 17:47, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

Looks like a bug, something to do with strip markers. Nthep (talk) 17:56, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

{{Infobox_film}} builds a shortdescription from the country. The country ends with a reference. A reference gets replaced by a strip marker, for technical reasons. But a short description doesn't have wikitext support, so the stripmarker is not automatically replaced/removed. The template that adds the automatic short description should be updated to strip the strip markers. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:27, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

@TheDJ: is that something you could adjust? Template in question would be Template:Infobox film/short description. - Favre1fan93 (talk) 20:15, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

@Doniago it's almost never a good idea to "fix" something like you as you didn't actually fix the issue and it's probably on other articles. Instead you just have posted it at Template talk:Infobox film/short description so it can be fixed at the source. Gonnym (talk) 20:00, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

While my effort to fix it evidently didn't address the underlying issue, if you're going to slap my hand you could at least acknowledge that I made a good-faith effort to fix the most immediate problem that was presented in the OP, and that I made it clear in my own message that I wasn't sure that I'd really fixed it at all. I'm not sure what you're talking about with the second part of what you've said, unless you meant to say that I could have posted it there. Except that I couldn't have posted it there because I didn't know that the underlying issue was with the template, nor did the OP indicate that the issue lay with the template. DonIago (talk) 20:17, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

Not sure what this was supposed to accomplish. lets be glad some people try to make things better before complaining about their work. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:00, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

After thinking more on it, I agree. Fixing the broken case as a temporary measure seems fine, not different from CSS fixes people make. I do think VPT should try to find the root cause of problems, but I don't think DonIago's change should have been reverted while the problem is not fixed.

Fixing it like that would be bad if it was done in mass as that would create future work, but it wasn't. – 2804:F1...00:86B7 (::/32) (talk) 00:03, 27 August 2024 (UTC)

I'm unclear if the strip markers not being detected is a larger issue, or something that needs to be coded into Template:Infobox film/short description. Nthep and DJ's comments made it seem like an easy fix, so I restored Space-Men to using the auto-generated SD so it will be as it was prior to the issue and utilize that auto SD. But if it is not an easy fix, then yes, we can implement the workaround that Doniago did. - Favre1fan93 (talk) 16:10, 28 August 2024 (UTC)

The problem is fairly common where the infobox generates a short description from values found in the infobox. Often a country is expected, but the country name turns out to be a list of countries. Often (like here) a field is expected to be a simple piece of text, but has a reference appended or includes an extra formatting template. In this case, the reference should be moved into the article text – the infobox should be only a summary of details that are present in full in the article. Otherwise, just add a manual SD like DonIago did. The sandbox is well out of date, so I assume that nobody has signed up to fix the template? If not, can we please just fix the Space-Men article? It hurts — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 18:16, 30 August 2024 (UTC)

It seems easy enough to fix, just wrap the parameter in {{KillMarkers}}. — Qwerfjkltalk 20:28, 30 August 2024 (UTC)

Ah. I would have first tried {{Strip tags}}. Is that too aggressive? However, us mortals make such changes. We need somebody with superpowers to fix the infobox template for us. So, for now, I just fix individual articles as I find them — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 21:41, 30 August 2024 (UTC)

{{KillMarkers}} added. Should solve the Space-Men issue. Please note here or on the talk of the template in question if more issues arise because of this change. - Favre1fan93 (talk) 22:05, 30 August 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-35

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

Feature news

• Administrators can now test the temporary accounts feature on test2wiki. This was done to allow cross-wiki testing of temporary accounts, for when temporary accounts switch between projects. The feature was enabled on testwiki a few weeks ago. No further temporary account deployments are scheduled yet. Temporary Accounts is a project to create a new type of user account that replaces IP addresses of unregistered editors which are no longer made public. Please share your opinions and questions on the project talk page.
• Later this week, editors at wikis that use FlaggedRevs (also known as "Pending Changes") may notice that the indicators at the top of articles have changed. This change makes the system more consistent with the rest of the MediaWiki interface. [2]

Bugs status

• Editors who use the 2010 wikitext editor, and use the Character Insert buttons, will no longer experience problems with the buttons adding content into the edit-summary instead of the edit-window. You can read more about that, and 26 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

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• Please review and vote on Focus Areas, which are groups of wishes that share a problem. Focus Areas were created for the newly reopened Community Wishlist, which is now open year-round for submissions. The first batch of focus areas are specific to moderator workflows, around welcoming newcomers, minimizing repetitive tasks, and prioritizing tasks. Once volunteers have reviewed and voted on focus areas, the Foundation will then review and select focus areas for prioritization.
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MediaWiki message delivery 20:29, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

List of contributions as plain text

If I filter my recent contributions, for example to show only page creations and exclude the User: namespace, I am returned a list of edits.

If I only want the names of the pages concerned, as plain text, can I extract that, using some too or other? If so, how? Or can I get the results as, say, a CSV file? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:09, 27 August 2024 (UTC)

Not via the WEBUI, you may get close with the API - but a quarry report is likely going to give you what you want assuming your filters are supported cheaply. — xaosflux ^Talk 18:26, 27 August 2024 (UTC)

WP:RAQ. Izno (talk) 21:02, 27 August 2024 (UTC)

Another possibility is old-school screen scraping. Just go to your contributions page in a browser and save the page as HTML (in Chrome, it's File/Save Page As..., and I'm sure similar in most other browsers). Then hack at the HTML with standard command-line tools. This did a pretty good job for me:

 % grep "mw-contributions-title" User\ contributions\ for\ RoySmith\ -\ Wikipedia.html | sed -e 's/<\/a>//' -e 's/.*>//' | sort | uniq

It's ugly and hackish, but for a one-off job where you can accept occasional errors, it's often the best way. If you're not into the command-line, google for "HTML to CSV conversion" and you'll find lots of other tools that do this. RoySmith (talk) 15:22, 29 August 2024 (UTC)

I use Notepad++ + regex. I copy the list into Np++, use Alt to column-select all the text to the left of the page names & remove it, then Ctrl+H to remove diffhist [^\r\n]+, leaving only the page names.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  16:23, 29 August 2024 (UTC)

Thank you, Tom.Reding (and all) that's an interesting approach. But the recent results for my contribution include:

    12:02, 26 August 2024 diff hist +32‎ N De Cotiis ‎ #REDIRECT Vincenzo de Cotiis current Tags: New redirect Uncategorized redirect

18 August 2024

    18:59, 18 August 2024 diff hist +32‎ N Taxa inquirenda ‎ Species inquirenda current Tags: New redirect Uncategorized redirect

7 August 2024

    22:04, 7 August 2024 diff hist +31‎ N Jablochkoff electric candle ‎ #REDIRECT Yablochkov candle current Tags: New redirect Uncategorized 

and not only does your regex not work for that (it removes the page titles as well as other stuff), but the "diff hist" columns do not align, as the dates are of differing lengths. Are we at cross purposes? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:14, 30 August 2024 (UTC)

Replacing: (\r?\n)[^\r\n]+? diff hist [\+\-][\d\.,]+[‎ ]+(?:N[‎ ]+)?([^\r\n]+?)(?: ‎ )[^\r\n]+

with: $1$2

worked for me for the sample text.

A couple caveats:

1. The 2 apparently empty brackets [ ] actually contain 2 whitespace characters each, present in sample text, 1 of which is 0-width, so be careful when copy-pasting, since misplacing and/or losing the 0-width character is never good.
2. There are 3 whitespace characters in (?: ), which are also required.
3. The position & formatting of diff hist/diffhist probably differs based on skin, but the idea is to use some string that appears at the same relative position on each line.
4. Make sure there is a blank line before the first line, to match (\r?\n), which are the CRLF characters, or else the regex won't evaluate the first line.

~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  14:57, 30 August 2024 (UTC)

What Izno said. Or, to save you the trip, here's a list going back to late June 2018 (when the create log began). I've removed creations in user talk, too, since I assumed that's what you meant; there were 585 in that namespace, compared to just 21 in User:. CSV available in the cyan "Download data" box. —Cryptic 14:46, 30 August 2024 (UTC)

Onlyinclude allows for transclusion of hidden comments?

I was wondering, has it always been the case that <onlyinclude>...</onlyinclude> tags, if placed inside of a hidden HTML comment, will still transclude its contents when called from another page? (For example, see here and here in my sandbox.) This seems strange to me, if the code is hidden it seems like it should not be transcluded elsewhere. This doesn't seem to apply to includeonly though.

I'm aware of the issue with onlyinclude+nowiki tags mentioned here, but found nothing about hidden comments. Thanks, S.A. Julio (talk) 06:54, 28 August 2024 (UTC)

I assume it has always been like that and it seems logical to me. Comments <!-- ... --> are saved as part of the page and not stored somewhere else. If the page has onlyinclude tags inside then all other parts of the page are ignored on transclusion so the comment start and end tags are not seen. includeonly works different. A page with includeonly but no onlyinclude is processed from the beginning on transclusion so the comment tags are seen there. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:10, 28 August 2024 (UTC)

Okay, thanks for the clarification. S.A. Julio (talk) 19:11, 28 August 2024 (UTC)

Partially blocked user still able to edit page?

Any idea how DN27ND is still able to edit the page Nori Bunasawa? They appear to have been partially blocked from editing it on July 31, but were able to make dozens of edits to it on August 27. –Novem Linguae (talk) 07:34, 28 August 2024 (UTC)

The most likely explanation is that, because of an AfD debate, the article was deleted and the pageblock then ended. And then the article was recreated, and the editor was then able to contribute to it. The current incarnation of the article was deleted by another administrator a few minutes ago, just as I was about to click the delete button. My explanation is an informed hunch and those with deeper understanding of the software may have a better explanation. Cullen328 (talk) 07:44, 28 August 2024 (UTC)

On 28 August 2024, Special:Contributions/DN27ND moved User:DN27ND/sandbox3 to Nori Bunasawa. I guess a partial block from editing does not prevent moving a page to the deleted and unsalted target. The edits occurred in the sandbox, before moving. Johnuniq (talk) 07:46, 28 August 2024 (UTC)

There's some edits after the page was moved. I think Cullen328 above might be on the right track. Maybe partial blocks are by page_id rather than page_title. Thank you both for the ideas. –Novem Linguae (talk) 07:48, 28 August 2024 (UTC)

Just a brief update here...

The previously blocked user is already arguing for undeletion at Requests for Undeletion, here [3].

Given that the article coudl as easily have been deleted under G5 as G4, would it not be possible for an admin to just site block the user, rather than for others to have their time wasted by his continual bad faith actions? Axad12 (talk) 08:29, 28 August 2024 (UTC)

That's off-topic for the technical discussion. Nardog (talk) 08:48, 28 August 2024 (UTC)

You can post future updates about user behavior in Wikipedia:Teahouse#Speedy deletion criteria, which I'm subscribed to. –Novem Linguae (talk) 08:54, 28 August 2024 (UTC)

No problem, I will open a thread at ANI and copy you in. (I will say for now however that I feel that the user's behaviour at Requests for Undeletion was quite unacceptable). Axad12 (talk) 08:57, 28 August 2024 (UTC)

@Novem Linguae Partial blocks apply to a specific incarnation of a page, not the page title (as you say, it works by page id). If you move a page to a new title the partial block should move with it.

You also cannot use a partial block to stop an editor creating a page.

See the manual on mediawiki: MW:Manual:Block and unblock#Partial blocks

See Phab:T271253 for a request to make this clearer. 86.23.109.101 (talk) 10:48, 28 August 2024 (UTC)

Namespace naming inconsistently

Perhaps changed recently or I did not pay attention but Special:Watchlist has filter for namespace and refers to Article/Mainspace as "Content", the first I've seen it named as such anywhere. I like content but find it confusing when elsewhere e.g in Special:MovePage it's called (Article). I don't have a strong opinion on the correct name, but think we should minimize confusion. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 10:55, 28 August 2024 (UTC)

Are you perhaps confusing the "All contents" entry with the "Article" entry in the drop down ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:18, 28 August 2024 (UTC)

If you really see "Content" and not "All contents" then what is your language at Special:Preferences? "All contents" in the watchlist means all non-talk pages. There is also a MediaWiki concept of "content namespaces" which can be set by a wiki with mw:Manual:$wgContentNamespaces. I think it's only mainspace for all Wikimedia wikis (no mention in InitialiseSettings or CommonSettings). I haven't seen it used in any watchlist settings. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:52, 28 August 2024 (UTC)

{{trout}} me 🎏 You are right! I did not read closely enough, despite bothering to report it here, because I would have expected it to select all content/talk pages then. Thank you for the informative links down MediaWiki rabbit hole! ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 12:36, 28 August 2024 (UTC)

Invisible text on pending changes page histories with green on black gadget.

I use the green on black gadget available through preferences. When I go to the history of a page which has pending changes, the bytes and the user-entered edit summary for the top two entries are in black text on black. I struggle to read this. If I click-and-highlight then I can read it. I'm not sure how long ago it started. For example here. Can it be fixed? Thanks, DuncanHill (talk) 16:07, 29 August 2024 (UTC)

Which skin are you using? Are you also in dark mode? (If so, which dark mode?) — xaosflux ^Talk 17:36, 29 August 2024 (UTC)

@Xaosflux: Monobook. No, I'm not using dark mode. DuncanHill (talk) 17:45, 29 August 2024 (UTC)

Old notifications reappearing

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T373443

The other day, I had a notification I had already seen reappear a month later. Apparently this is something which is seen on occasion, but nobody knows how to reproduce it. If this happens to you, please leave comments on T373443 with whatever details you can figure out, or just email me if you don't have phab access and I can do it for you. RoySmith (talk) 17:57, 29 August 2024 (UTC)

Missing history

The redirect Actinobacillus actinomycetemcomitans seems to have once been an article. Its history shows DRosenbach making an edit that converted it to a redirect and reduced the pagesize by 2037 bytes – but it doesn't show any revisions before that! What might have caused this? (I checked nost:Actinobacillus actinomycetemcomitans, but it didn't exist.) jlwoodwa (talk) 19:52, 29 August 2024 (UTC)

@Jlwoodwa: It's probably something to do with the histmerge that Dreamy Jazz (talk · contribs) carried out at 21:25, 22 May 2024 - the other page involved was Aggregatibacter actinomycetemcomitans. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:48, 29 August 2024 (UTC)

Special:Redirect/logid/162249345 is the log entry with slightly more details. — xaosflux ^Talk 21:22, 29 August 2024 (UTC)

Yes this because I history merged the page. The tool doesn't update the "diff count" on the revision that is left behind. The same thing occurs on the history page for Aggregatibacter actinomycetemcomitans, but that incorrect count has a revision before it. Dreamy Jazz ^{talk to me | my contributions} 15:44, 30 August 2024 (UTC)

Template code validation

Hi, can someone with a good knowledge of template code have a look at my request over at Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous) § Template:Permanent dead link? Thanks! — AP 499D25 (talk) 02:00, 30 August 2024 (UTC)

Dark mode new talk message

I have been experimenting with dark mode (&withgadget=dark-mode). While doing that, I received a "You have a new Talk page message" notification. In dark mode, I had no idea that the notification was there. The text is black on a dark brown background that visually disappears in the black window. I did not even see the light red badge on the bell. Looking at it now, the pink badge is kind of obvious but I only noticed it while looking for it after seeing the normal notification in another window with the original white background. It is essential that new editors receive an in-your-face talk notification because we block people who do not respond but continue with problematic editing. I know this should be requested elsewhere but there is not much point adding the opinion of one person so I'm looking for thoughts. Johnuniq (talk) 05:07, 30 August 2024 (UTC)

Which skin ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:02, 30 August 2024 (UTC)

Good point, monobook. Johnuniq (talk) 08:47, 30 August 2024 (UTC)

Problem of using "|show_designation=no" and "|show_type=no" on Template:Public art row

Hi

I am trying to use "|show_designation=no" and "|show_type=no" commands on Template:Public art row when I use the template on list of public art pages, but it keeps showing these colons.

What should I do to stop them being shown?

Cheers Shkuru Afshar (talk) 00:29, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

Please link to an example page. – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:18, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

I created an example on Template:Public art row/testcases. Shkuru Afshar (talk) 06:15, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

The simple answer is that these parameters are not recognised or supported by Template:Public art header. Perhaps it was thought that every table should have these columns. Are you sure it is appropriate to omit them in the article you are working on? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 06:36, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

No. I am not.

But what if all items don't have a grade? Like List of public art in Melbourne.

And "Type" parameter could be confusing. Some items could be both a sculpture and/or a statue. (Check "Driver & Wipers Memorial" and "King George V" on List of public art in Melbourne) Shkuru Afshar (talk) 06:43, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

If you like, we can take this discussion to Template talk:Public art row (which I have now watchlisted) and we can explore further options — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 06:47, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

I agree.

There, I am going to submit an edit request for both Designation and Type columns. Shkuru Afshar (talk) 06:54, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

Am I imagining that until today I could hide/unhide diffs in my watch list?

Or is that somewhere else? Doug Weller talk 12:30, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

Hm, maybe that is only for user contributions, sorry. Mind you it would be nice if it worked in watchlists. Doug Weller talk 12:33, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

Preferences - Watchlist - Changes shown & Watched pages? Donald Albury 12:57, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

@Donald Albury Nothing there, I think I'm just forgetting it was only contributions. Thanks. Doug Weller talk 13:00, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

Dark mode when logged out of Wikipedia

When logged out, in dark mode, at {{Soulfly}}, the actual link for Soulfly is an extremely dark grey that is difficult to see on a black background. It was not this way before. Does anyone know how to fix this? --Jax 0677 (talk) 12:41, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

Xtools appears to be down

Here - it says 'Error' and then "This web service cannot be reached. Please contact a maintainer of this project. Maintainers can find troubleshooting instructions from our documentation on Wikitech." Any idea what's going on? GiantSnowman 13:43, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

Now appears to be back up. GiantSnowman 16:37, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

Adding an EventListener to avoid unwanted submit during type of "edit summary" textboxes

Hi, for example during type of "edit summary" after an edition or during writing "Other/additional reason" for moving a page, users may press enter button, but they may or may not tend to submit their form. In the case of not tending to submit their form, this behavior of Wikipedia may be considered ill-posed. For example consider this scenario:

1. Enter my sandbox page
2. Do all the edits you want
3. Type some edit summary at the final text box
4. Press Enter

During the third stage, casual pressing enter key may lead to ill-posed submit of this form. So, I propose adding this EventListener to avoid wrong submit:

var input = document.getElementById("myInput");
input.addEventListener("keypress", function(event) {
  if (event.key === "Enter") {
  }
});

Or somehow showing a confirmation message box, like this:

var input = document.getElementById("myInput");
input.addEventListener("keypress", function(event) {
  if (event.key === "Enter") {
      let text = "Are you sure?";
      if (confirm(text) == true) {
        document.getElementById("myForm").submit(); 
      }
  }
});

Thanks, Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 15:46, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

How does one go about initiating a request for batch deletion of text?

Over a year ago, User:Mliu92 expressly conceded an error at Talk:California superior courts but never attempted to fix it.

I just tried to fix a few examples and it's taking way too long. As a busy practicing attorney, I don't have two hours to spare to clean up someone else's mistakes. I have better things to do with the Labor Day holiday weekend, like going through more of my photography library to identify more photos for upload to Commons.

One of the longest running debates among lawyers for many centuries is whether a trial court should be organized as a nationwide or statewide entity that merely happens to sit in multiple counties, districts, or circuits—or whether each county, district or circuit should be regarded as having an entirely separate trial court. There are strong public policy arguments for and against each position, resulting in worldwide gridlock on this issue.

California is among the majority of American jurisdictions that adhere to the latter position. In other words, it has 58 superior courts, not one superior court that happens to sit in 58 counties. Section 1 of Article 6 of the California Constitution refers to "superior courts" (notice the plural) and Section 4 starts with the following words: "In each county there is a superior court of one or more judges."

Unfortunately, User:Mliu92 created many articles for superior courts that imply that California adheres to the former position. For example, the article for Santa Cruz County Superior Court incorrectly states that the "Superior Court of California, County of Santa Cruz, is the branch of the California superior court with jurisdiction over Santa Cruz County."

We need a bot to go through the English Wikipedia and replace every instance of the phrase "is the branch of the California superior court" with the phrase "is the California superior court". How do I go about initiating that request? Coolcaesar (talk) 19:11, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

You can request bot work at WP:BOTREQ. — xaosflux ^Talk 21:32, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

How are references rendered?

A while ago, I asked about references. I put that aside for a while and now I'm picking it up again. It's obvious that my original strategy was not going to work, so I'm starting again. Before I dive into this too deeply, is there any actual documentation on how references are rendered in HTML? Some of it I can suss out. For example, the first citation in Special:Permalink/1233803324 gives:

<sup id="cite_ref-:2_1-0" class="reference"><a href="#cite_note-:2-1">[1]</a></sup>

for the in-line citation and links to:

<ol class="references"> ... <li id="cite_note-:2-1"><span class="mw-cite-backlink">^ <a href="#cite_ref-:2_1-0">^{<i><b>a</b></i>}</a> ... </ol>

in the reflist, with the backlink for citation 1a, and I should treat the "cite_ref..." and "cite_note" ids as opaque strings (as opposed to trying to parse them, as I was originally doing). Is that it, or are the more bits of magic that will only become apparent when this iteration of my code breaks on something I haven't seen yet? RoySmith (talk) 19:26, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

Disappearing edit

Resolved

 – There was a subsequent edit. — xaosflux ^Talk 21:31, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

I'm not familiar with Phabricator and I'm not sure it's the best place to point this out. I made this edit. It appeared on the page after I clicked on the button to publish. As I clicked back to where I was before, the edit disappeared. It was gone from the live page and also gone when I clicked the edit button to browse the page's text, this without any intervention via succeeding edits. This continued to be the case after I cleared the cache for the page. However, the edit was still there when I checked the page's edit history and my own contribution history. I thought this to be bizarre, as I don't recall anything like this ever happening before. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 20:14, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

Your edit was undone by Sunshineisles2 in Special:Diff/1243313302 about 40 seconds after yours. I'm assuming this was an inadvertent reversion due to an edit conflict. RoySmith (talk) 20:23, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. I saw that edit but I guess I neglected to scroll all the way down. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 20:30, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

Yes, I was unaware this happened and it was completely unintentional. Apologies for any confusion. Sunshineisles2 (talk) 21:24, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

Tool request: What changed recently?

 Courtesy link: User talk:Mathglot § Ships of ancient Rome‎‎
History link: these 6 edits at Ships of ancient Rome

(Note: not sure this is the right venue for a tool request; I searched around and the hatnote at Wikipedia:Bug reports and feature requests pointed me here.)

I would like to request a tool that, given a revision number (or title) of a page and timestamps T1 and T2, would run down all the transcluded templates, {{excerpt}}s, and modules in that rev, and return a most-recent-first sorted list of transcluded/invoked items which have changes recorded in their history between T1 and T2, or since T1 (if T2 is empty). The tool should recursively expand templates (maybe only if |recurse=y?). Possible format: four columns, with 1) Item name, 2) last change timestamp, 3) rev. number, 4) userid; where item name could be template, module, or excerpted source pagename. Bonus: column five, containing the template traceback sequence, if the row item was not found at top level, i.e., the item was not directly transcluded by the given page rev., but further down.)

Here is my use case: I recently panicked when I noticed that Ships of ancient Rome, which has over one hundred {{sfn}} short citations and makes liberal use of {{excerpt}} had fifty harv errors of the type 'Harv error: link from CITEREFLastname-YYYY doesn't point to any citation'. (I am very familiar with sfn/Harv errors of this sort and how to fix them, and wrote part of the doc for it; ditto {{excerpt}} doc.) The offending edit was a very minor change to add a {{convert}} template to the body (diff) which resulted, very oddly, in the 50 errors. No one had changed {{convert}} or Module:Convert, so I first suspected PEIS issues or nonprinting characters, but that proved wrong, and the problem went away during the time I worked on it (see these 6 edits), so I presume an upstream problem had been fixed in the interim. It could have been an entirely different template, but my investigation was hampered, and then I abandoned it, because of the impracticality of tracking down every transclusion made by the article, possibly recursively if nothing changed in directly transcluded items.

Having a tool that would return a sorted list of most recently changed transcluded items would be a powerful aid in this situation. (O/T: we need a word that encompasses the meanings of transcluded, invoked, or excerpted; I vote for eval'ed unless somebody has a better idea.)

The way things turned out, the problem I observed (whatever the cause) was fixed while I looked into it, and that's great, but what if it hadn't been? Such a tool would be very useful to help someone track down a real problem and make it possible to find and advise the author of a recent change that broke something, whereas now, it is so impractical as to be near hopeless. Can anyone build this? (edit conflict) Mathglot (talk) 21:04, 31 August 2024 (UTC)

Sounds a lot like Special:RecentChangesLinked, except substituting the templatelinks table for pagelinks, only going in one direction, and without the unfeasible complication of looking at old revisions instead of the current one. I'm surprised it's not in MediaWiki already (and wouldn't be surprised if it was and I just didn't know where to find it). Twenty years ago I'd have suggested making a feature request. For now, something like quarry:query/85974 is probably the best you can hope for. —Cryptic 21:43, 31 August 2024 (UTC)