Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)

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The technical section of the village pump is used to discuss technical issues about Wikipedia. Bugs and feature requests should be made at BugZilla.

Newcomers to the technical village pump are encouraged to read these guidelines prior to posting here. Questions about MediaWiki in general should be posted at the MediaWiki support desk.

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Why are diffs so inappropriately "inexact"?

Hi, I've been editing Wikipedia for many years. I'm shocked that the recognition capability for diffs is so lousy -- it's so rudimentary it seems like something from the 1970s or earlier. If you move one paragraph, everything under that paragraph shows up as completely new, even though it isn't. And so on. Why is the Wikipedia diff software unable to recognize exact text below a deletion, and so forth? Why can't this be improved? It's not rocket science, as they say. Word processors mastered this decades ago. And since diffs are such a vital part of any reliable editor's monitoring work, why isn't this a priority to reform? Text recognition capability seems to be a fairly easy thing to upgrade. Softlavender (talk) 10:13, 23 April 2011 (UTC)

Which word processors have mastered diff calculation? I can't even think of any that provide diffs in the first place. Microsoft Word can "track changes" because it can watch you as you type - this is not the same problem as providing the difference between two texts. Unfortunately, rocket science is a lot easier than diffs. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 11:10, 23 April 2011 (UTC)

I would repeat OrangeDog's rhetorical question - which word processors have mastered diff calculation? The "problem" with present-day diff calculation is that it is structural rather than semantic, meaning it looks at each text body as a linear batch of characters rather than as a group of hierarchically related expressions (doc, section, subsection, sentence, phrase, word). As far as I know, no commonly available application comes anywhere close to this treatment. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 13:15, 23 April 2011 (UTC)

User:Cacycle/wikEdDiff is in my opinion much better than the mediawiki default. Rjwilmsi 14:48, 23 April 2011 (UTC)

Yes wikEdDiff is definitely better. Gary King (talk · scripts) 17:50, 23 April 2011 (UTC)

Why doesn't Wikipedia use that, then? Sheesh, it's been around for over 4 years, and the current Wiki platform is dinosauric and awful. Softlavender (talk) 19:08, 23 April 2011 (UTC)

Yet no one seems to volunteer to rewrite wikedDiff in C (programming language). Oh right, most of the software is volunteer work, so easy to forget. Anyone can submit patches. Have you considered trying to make the improvement yourself ? Apparently it is SO easy to do. Sheesh —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:54, 24 April 2011 (UTC)

Good point, but MediaWiki is coded in PHP, no? —DoRD (talk) 12:21, 24 April 2011 (UTC)

wikEdDiff is a user script -- a piece of JavaScript code executed on Wikipedia pages. It executes on the user's machine (the HTTP "client" machine, vs. one of WP's "server" machines). There would be relative disadvantages to that with an implementation written in either C or php. Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 15:16, 24 April 2011 (UTC)

Oh (slaps forehead), I hadn't noticed that this is the tech-savvy vpt page. The talk of rewrite no doubt implicitlyv referred to updating the mediawiki diff code (no doubt written in php) to function similarly to wikEdDiff. Pls ignore the above statement of the obvious. Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 15:31, 24 April 2011 (UTC)

Actually, the diff code used on Wikipedia is written in C++ as a PHP extension. There is a pure PHP version, but it's too inefficient for use on such a high-traffic site. Mr.Z-man 19:53, 24 April 2011 (UTC)

Wikidiff does resync in many cases. (Yes it can be better - there is a tool that marks moved stuff in blue - is that WikiEd? - but just wanted to defend the poor ol' native tool. ) Rich Farmbrough, 12:53, 1 May 2011 (UTC).

I lol'd at "dinosauric." --MZMcBride (talk) 19:28, 24 April 2011 (UTC)

I agree that the edit diff's are an area that could use major improvement. Unfortunately, this requires a coder willing to do something about it. I think improving the edit diffs ought to be considered a high priority issue. It's something that the Wikimedia Foundation should pay somebody to improve. It's probably not that tough of a coding job but would have a major positive impact for editors. Jason Quinn (talk) 00:29, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

The issue is less one of technical solution as of dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's on the deployment as it is such a central feature of Wikipedia. Whoever does this needs to have some really good code hygiene and business analysis skills. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 01:51, 9 May 2011 (UTC)

• Ultimately, a "difference-bracket" option is needed to determine how many matching lines would indicate a re-sync of the 2 texts. Currently, comparisons get out-of-sync when a blank line is introduced (which ain't rocket science to fix). The hardest texts to re-synchronize would be multiple short lists with items repeated between lists, and that is why a "difference bracket" line count is needed, to overcome confusion when thinking lines in another list are a match to a changed list (which would be viewed as an inserted list rather than changed). In a sense, a blank line is a one-line list which matches every other such list, as appearing to be the same blank line, further down. -Wikid77 16:24, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
  • One of the intrinsic problems of standard matching algorithms is their focus on the line as opposed to the matching text block. This line-centric analysis is inherently stymied by the blank-line issue as you've pointed out. Line-centric approaches are certainly suitable for typesetting situations and to situations where data is presented in short or non-wrapping lines of relatively consistent length. What we need is an evolution forward from the "difference-bracket" kludge you've proposed as a way around the line-centric behavior of most difference engines. Hopefully someone with text analytics and deep regular expression skills has time to consider this. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 03:49, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

• Setting difference-bracket line-count is typical: The consideration of the "difference-bracket" setting, as specifying a line-count bracket to re-sync the matching lines, is not a "kludge" but rather, reality of how people edit, IMHO. People edit in line-mode, splitting text into separate lines, to make editing easier, and almost all articles have multiple lines inside. An editor could treat the markup as following a "string grammar" with no split lines, as just one massive text block containing many "<br />" connected, internally, as a continuous stream of markup text; however, "everyone" splits the markup into lines. This is especially common in lists, where very few people put a list as "AA<br />BB<br />CC" but instead, editors put 3 separate lines (for "AA" then "BB" then "CC"). A continuous mass of text would be unwieldy, to most people, and that is why differencing, or markup-comparison, has been treated as a line-mode comparison for decades in other computer systems. By contrast, the WYSIWYG interfaces are severely hampered by the difficulty of showing before/after changes, without shifting the generated display window. A difference-bracket must be used in highly repetitive lines, such as tables of similar data, and the resync problem can go hundreds of lines unless a difference-bracket line-count is specified to logically resync the text. For very long paragraphs, editors could purposely split the text, with an HTML-style comment ("<--Text split for short diff-list-->"). Similarly, the category-links could be scattered across the article's markup, but putting them as separate lines, at the bottom, makes editing and additions easier (with fewer duplicates). A similar "search-bracket" could be specified for search-engine matches, with repeated search phrases, but as a "word count" because people are expecting words in most searches, rather than lines with strings of markup symbols. However, it is helpful to consider alternative schemes to see why they would be more difficult for users to control. -Wikid77 15:37, 20 May 2011 (UTC)
• I've been complaining about this for years (well, I've complained twice, I think, in four years, probably!). WP's diff generation is totally rubbish (in certain common circumstances) and full of basic schoolboy errors. Last time I mentioned it, I think I was told that the source was available, and if the errors were so "basic" I should fix it myself! He-he, very amusing! 86.183.0.105 (talk) 12:02, 21 May 2011 (UTC)
• I've invoked the WikEd Gadget via my Preferences and it does provide a very different editing and version comparison world, one that is going to take a little getting used to, but which is much richer than the current editing and diff interfaces. I think that evangelizing about the WikEd Gadget to get more people to use it (is it possible to determine how many use it now?) could lead to the desired progression of the project through emerging interested talent, including the required rewrite needed for integration into WikiMedia software. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 02:30, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

  WikEd is great, I use it myself, and it seems to be extremely popular. The only real problem with it is that it's a resource hog. Anyone using an older computer probably shouldn't use it. Even with my band new laptop, I still turn it off occasionally.
  — V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 03:06, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

My gadgets are gone most of the time

My gadgets are gone — not all the time, but most of the time. They happen to appear on this page while I'm editing this message, but not on any other en-Wikipedia pages I have open. No popups, no clock in the upper right corner of my display, no collapsing items in the navigation menu with vector skin, no "purge" link, page and user options no longer appear in drop-down menus on the toolbar. Even worse, external links no longer open in a separate window. It's as if all my advanced user preferences are being completely ignored!

Searching the archives, I found Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 88#Did something happen to popups?, but the advice there hasn't fixed my problem with popups, in spite of me adding lines to my common.css and vector.js pages. According to that discussion, there's a problem with a resource loader that has yet to be fixed.

In the meantime, what can I do to get back my normal Wikipedia functionality? This has been going on for about 4 days now. ~Amatulić (talk) 00:10, 3 May 2011 (UTC)

I'm going to go ahead and assume those are all gadgets (i.e. JavaScript stuff), in which case, one of your gadgets has an error in it that only triggers on some pages, breaking all the other gadgets. Do you get any errors in your browser window? What browser are you using? Regards, - Jarry1250 ^{[Weasel? Discuss.]} 19:55, 3 May 2011 (UTC)

Yes, those are all gadgets available in the user preferences. I am using Google Chrome. The odd thing is, sometimes everything works, like this morning, and sometimes I get none of those gadgets I set, like right now.

Here are the errors I get in the Javascript console window when I look at a page.

• load.php: GET http://bits.wikimedia.org/en.wikipedia.org/load.php?… undefined (undefined)
• index.php:7611: Uncaught ReferenceError: hookEvent is not defined
• index.php:8: Uncaught TypeError: Cannot call method 'wikiUrlencode' of undefined
• index.php:198: Uncaught ReferenceError: addOnloadHook is not defined
• index.php:19: Uncaught ReferenceError: importStylesheet is not defined
• index.php:7: Uncaught ReferenceError: addOnloadHook is not defined
• index.php:5: Uncaught ReferenceError: addOnloadHook is not defined
• load.php:1: Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'addPortletLink' of undefined
• load.php:1: Uncaught ReferenceError: importScript is not defined
• index.php:369: Uncaught ReferenceError: addButton is not defined
• geoiplookup.wikimedia.org: GET http://geoiplookup.wikimedia.org/ undefined (undefined)

Many of those errors appear to be related to general utility functions and unrelated to scripts I have. Particularly addOnLoadHook looks like it may be related to the resource loader. If you look at User:Amatulic/vector.js you'll see that I don't have much there. I've commented out all but what I consider most necessary, and it made no difference. What I have has worked fine until a few days ago.

If it matters, here are the gadgetrs I have set in my user preferences. None of these things are working at the moment:

Browsing gadgets:

• Navigation popups (also I added this manually to my vector.js to no avail)

Editing gadgets: None

User interface gadgets:

• Add a "Purge" tab to the top of the page
• Add a clock in the personal toolbar
• Add page and user options to drop-down menus on the toolbar.
• Allow /16 and /24-/32 CIDR ranges on Special:Contributions forms as well as wildcard prefix searches
• Display an assessment of an articl's quality as part of the page header for each article.
• Focus the cursor in the search bar on loading the Main Page
• Open external links in a new tab/window

User interface gadgets: editing:

• Add an [edit] link to the lead section of a page (this doesn't work for me now)
• Allow up to 50 more characters in edit summaries.

Library compatibility gadgets: none

~Amatulić (talk) 01:04, 4 May 2011 (UTC)

What's really bizarre about this is the unpredictability. In the same browsing session, sometimes I get my gadgets including popups, and sometimes not. Actually, most of the time not. And this started just last week. ~Amatulić (talk) 17:57, 5 May 2011 (UTC)

...And the problem is not my scripts. I have no scripts running in my vector.js page. This happens on every browser I try (Chrome, IE8, Firefox).

I do notice that the browser spends a long time waiting for bits.wikimedia.org. It appears to generate an error 503 (service unavailable) rather frequently. It happens on Commons too: the file upload wizard fails to start, apparently because of a failure with bits.wikimedia.org. Might this be the source of my problem?

Try it yourself. Click on this link, which my browser attempted to access from Commons: http://bits.wikimedia.org/commons.wikimedia.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=en&modules=ext!uploadWizard&skin=vector&version=20110510T164824Z

I pretty consistently get "Error 503 Service Unavailable" with a "Guru meditation" message below suggestive of the old Amiga computer. ~Amatulić (talk) 16:53, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

Ha. Sometimes my gadgets work. And sometimes I can click on that link above. The content begins:

mediaWiki.loader.implement("ext.uploadWizard",function($,mw){(function($){function Tipsy(element,options){this.$element=$(element);this.options=options;this.enabled=true;this.displayed=false;this.fixTitle();}

which suggests my problem may indeed be the resource loader failing to load, on those far-too-frequent occasions (beginning just over a week ago) when the resource at bits.wikimedia.org generates a 503 error. ~Amatulić (talk) 23:12, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

It's been 2 or 3 weeks now since this problem started. Anyone have any idea what's going on? It does seem to be a problem with the availability of bits.wikimedia.org, as far as I can tell. ~Amatulić (talk) 18:12, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Both of your links are working for me. Have you tried using a different internet connection and seeing if that's the issue? If not, try disabling all of your gadgets and scripts, and see if you get an error from bits. —mc10 (t/c) 23:03, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

I've done that (disabled everything), except I've tried from multiple computers on the same network rather than from different networks. I don't see why bits should suddenly give problems on my network when it was working before and I have no problems with any other sites.

The problem has been difficult to repeat this week. Things seem to have improved somewhat; those links are also working for me at the moment. But I can never predict when it will happen. Sometimes I get popups on my watchlist, sometimes not. ~Amatulić (talk) 18:33, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

Pages failing to load

Since about 6:30 am UTC, I am having severe problems getting the site to load. Pages load very slowly, usually waiting for bits.wikimedia.org, and in most cases timeout. Occasionally they load minus the skin. I'm running Win 7 (Home Premium) and Firefox just updated itself to 3.6.17 when I rebooted to see whether that would fix the problem. Other sites are loading, so it appears to be a Wikipedia problem. It's happening for me with de. as well as en. Apologies if this has been reported but I don't see it in the contents for the page and this edit screen still tells me it's reading en.wikipedia.org so I hope this posts! Yngvadottir (talk) 15:25, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

I'm running XP Pro with Chrome and experiencing the same thing. OhNoitsJamie ^Talk 15:58, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

I'm using Windows 7 and not encountering any problems. IE9 Windows 7 X64 --Tyw7  (☎ Contact me! • Contributions)   → Shake 'n Bake 16:12, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

The Operations team is looking into this now. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Wikiwooster (talk • contribs) 17:12, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

• I also had timeouts for more than 3 hours, but with Firefox 3.6.13 (not 3.6.17), and used IE for slow access (with fewer timeouts). The wide impact of today's slow response can be seen by observing page-view stats for the next few days, such as for article "blanket" (but don't view that article, to avoid "epistemic feedback"): stats May-2011 (averaged 208 pageviews-per-day in April). Some other articles can be used as "litmus test" articles, which have had steady daily pageviews as immune to the typical weekday-rises of many articles, such as "Beach" (which rises ~50% from weekend 950 to weekday 1,450 pageviews). Response seems better now. -Wikid77 17:42, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

The pageview stats seem to indicate no hindrance to reader interest: whatever slow-down occurred for hours, on 10 May, did not cause many readers (world-wide) to stay away for the whole day. -Wikid77 16:24, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

• I have been having connection problems as described since at least 00:01 UTC on 10 May affecting only Wikipedia pages (i.e. not CNN/google etc). Some page configurations, such as simple diffs, load faster than others, timing out on quite a few, editing and saving are problematic; script-running is slow to a crawl too. I am Hong Kong based, have tried a public machine (IE on W7), my work (FF on NT) and home (Chrome on OSX) machines all give similar problems – not browser-related for what I can tell. --Ohconfucius ^¡digame! 04:05, 11 May 2011 (UTC)
• For what it's worth, I'm having consistent issues loading pages here. Something like a quarter of the time Wikipedia pages fail to load (general Internet connectivity is fine). RxS (talk) 18:30, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

• Me, too. I don't know about 25% of the time but VERY frequently. Sometimes on something as simple as clicking on My watchlist. Most annoying.--Bbb23 (talk) 18:34, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

25% might be a bit high but not by much. It lasts a couple minutes then is fine. It is annoying to say the least. Anyone have any idea what's going on? RxS (talk) 18:37, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

(smiling) I didn't say 25% was too high. Might actually be low. Annoying was a diplomatic word.--Bbb23 (talk) 18:42, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

The problem is no better today.--Bbb23 (talk) 17:47, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

• It was much improved the day after my complaint above; it has deteriorated again today – noticeably slower, but tolerable. --Ohconfucius ^¡digame! 17:54, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

• For me, it started on May 13 and has continued since with little change for the better or for the worse, although it comes in waves.--Bbb23 (talk) 18:38, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

Bump. It does come in waves, but never goes away and is bad tonight for example. RxS (talk) 03:12, 16 May 2011 (UTC)

I would describe it as intermittent but frequent and consistent. The phrase "never goes away" is particularly apt, although I might say "never completely goes away" instead as occasional clicks work fine. Is anyone investigating this? It seems lately it's just reports from me, RxS, and Ohconfucius.--Bbb23 (talk) 16:54, 16 May 2011 (UTC)

I've had the same problem intermittently (using XP & Chrome). It seems to happen more on some specific pages, especially article history, although maybe my brain is just trying to find patterns in randomness. Hasn't happened in the last few hours. bobrayner (talk) 14:10, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

• I'm so glad this isn't just me. I've been having this problem for a week or more. I use Windows XP and Firefox 4.0.1. Is anyone trying to look into this? --Auntof6 (talk) 03:39, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

• Look at the topics ("Slow load time" and its subsection) lower down on this page.--Bbb23 (talk) 14:07, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

"Rate this page"?

What is going on with the weird "rate this page" box at the bottom of Joseph Elsner, Planet, and maybe other pages as well? This is not a template - it seems like it's coming straight from MediaWiki. Is this part of some proposed rating scheme? If so, where was that discussion? » Swpb^{τ • ¢} 04:32, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

Found a relevant MediaWiki page via google, but I don't know what it means: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/86530. Wha?!... » Swpb^{τ • ¢} 04:49, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

May be related to [1] -- placing a bug on Bugzilla. » Swpb^{τ • ¢} 05:00, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

Look a few sections up, in Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Expanded Use of Article Feedback Tool. Prodego ^talk 05:02, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

I see. Where was the Signpost on this?? I guess it came in after "press time". Well, Signpost ought to have something on it next week, at least: Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Newsroom/Suggestions#Expanded Use of Article Feedback Tool. » Swpb^{τ • ¢} 05:13, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-05-09/Technology report#In brief. You're just failing everywhere on this thread! :-) Killiondude (talk) 05:50, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

WP:DBAD, Killion. As I'm pointing out at Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Newsroom/Suggestions#Expanded Use of Article Feedback Tool, that little Tech Report "In Brief" entry hardly does justice to the potential significance of this development. As one who reads News and Notes with interest but lacks the software knowledge to benefit (usually) from poring over the Tech Report, and then stumbles across this odd "Rate this page" feature, for which I was fairly certain there was no community discussion on WP, I think my response was perfectly reasonable. I think the failure here is with the people who were positioned to better inform the community of this major change. » Swpb^{τ • ¢} 15:36, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

While I support the Article Feedback Tool (at least, for research right now), I agree that it was not a very good idea to suddenly add it to 100,000 pages without telling the community in a big notice beforehand ... people will be very confused for a while. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 04:27, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

There is also "Expanded Use of Article Feedback Tool" as a discussion above. There just needs to be a "what is this?" button on the page when it starts, then people will know. Overall,k about time it started - a good idea, and just a beginning. There will be more in 2 years I am sure. History2007 (talk) 08:12, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

What I am wondering, however, is how these ratings supposed to keep up with the edits? If we have a lousy stub which is (rightfully) rated by a dozen people as lousy, and tomorrow an editor comes in and improves it to, say, B-class, are the old lousy ratings still going to carry over? And surely over time this kind of problems will only accumulate?—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); May 12, 2011; 19:41 (UTC)

Good point. And this really means that this tool deserves more comment from the community at large, so suggestions such as yours can be included. As you stated, many of these ratings can become "stale ratings" that rate a snapshot of the article in the past and will lose validity over time, as the content changes. I will suggest a discussion the general Village Pump. History2007 (talk) 07:21, 13 May 2011 (UTC)

Hi everybody, the extension of the AFT to 100K articles (about 3% of articles on the English Wikipedia) was announced on the Wikimedia blog and on wikien and you can find an extensive discussion of the rationale on this page. Feedback from the community is very much welcome as the feature is still experimental and we'd love to hear how to improve it. For other frequently asked questions, check out this page. --DarTar (talk) 19:13, 13 May 2011 (UTC)

I like "Rate This Page". Maybe people don't have the time or inclination to provide detailed criticism. It works for me.70.125.135.72 (talk) 20:18, 13 May 2011 (UTC)

I think it is a good idea, but the more I think about it, the more convinced I become that it is but a beginning and has a long way to go. But the journey has to stop with this step. I think we need an Rfc. History2007 (talk) 23:30, 13 May 2011 (UTC)

And when are these things going to disappear from the pages they've just appeared on? Surely they're not permanent? They're way too big and ungainly. They don't look like the small ones that occasionally appeared on pages before. All Hallow's Wraith (talk) 10:24, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

I agree with All Hallow's Wraith. They are obtrusive -- way too big and ungainly. They interfere with viewing the Categories. And they make Wikipedia in general, and the article in particular, look very unprofessional. The thing has multiple problems and was very ill thought out. Please remove the things or allow us a way to remove them ourselves. Thank you. Softlavender (talk) 10:58, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

Assuming you are using the vector skin, you can add #mw-articlefeedback{ display:none; } to your Special:Mypage/vector.css file, which will make them disappear (works for me anyway). Jenks24 (talk) 11:04, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

Why not make the "Rate this Page" panel collapsable (and collapsed by default) like some of the navigation boxes found at the bottom of some articles? [|Retro00064|☎talk|✍contribs|] 00:47, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

Right, that's a great idea. I wouldn't mind them that much if they were collapsible. There should have been wider community input about their implementation. And like I said, is there a set date for when this trial stops? All Hallow's Wraith (talk) 02:03, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

I don't like the idea. Nonetheless, this is something which can be customizable by adding the appropriate code in personal js code. Helder 13:45, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

It just appeared magically in two redirects (here and here) I made today (in addition to the main article they were being redirected to). ¬___¬ Is there any way to remove them from those pages, they'd just be wasted sitting on a page no one ever sees (if the primary goal is to gather feedback, that is).-- Obsidi♠n^Soul 16:17, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

That's definitely a bug. We'll look into it.--Eloquence* 17:50, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

Someone above also mentioned disambig pages. I assume those will also be avoided now. Right? History2007 (talk) 16:09, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

No it is still being added to random new pages. See here. CambridgeBayWeather (talk) 06:35, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure it is a bad thing to be able to get feedback also for disambiguation pages: some disambiguation pages can be complete and well-organized while others are not. This information may be useful. Helder 13:45, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

The appearing of it in new pages is just a consequence of the way used to define "random page" in the js code. See mw:Thread:Talk:Article feedback/New pages/reply (3) for more details.

But I would consider a bug the presence of the extension on redirect pages, since it is only useful in the target pages. A fix for this was requested on Bug 29164.

You can try to delete the redirect page and recreate it so that its page_id changes. If you are lucky, the three last digits of the new page_id will be greater than or equal to 027 and the tool will not be displayed... :-)

Seriously, a more general (but still temporary) solution would be to add some code to MediaWiki:Common.js to hide the form in redirect pages. One option would be to query the API for info about the page and add the CSS #mw-articlefeedback{ display:none; } if it has the parameter "redirect". Such a code could probably be ported to the extension itself (or maybe this information is available to the extension by other means). Helder 13:45, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

Where are the Ratings saved? How can one make changes? Bielle (talk) 18:00, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

That is a separate Pandora's box:

• Can the ratings be edited by the person who submitted them?
• Can they be edited/reverted by others if they are vandalism?
• What does it mean for a rating to be vandalism? X-standard deviations gap where X=...?
• Can ratings be edited by an admin if they are part of WP:Wikihounding of an editor by another?
• Can IPs/puppets repeatedly rate?
• Etc. etc. etc.

But these are policy rather than software issues, and they could not have possibly all been anticipated as part of a technical design. I do not have answers for them, but as any new feature/tool general suggestions by various people will eventually provide some answers. This is a new and interesting game with potential for a positive impact on Wikipedia, so we will just have to wait and see. But please do make suggestions ASAP because the sooner suggestions are fed into a software design as it undergoes testing the better. History2007 (talk) 21:34, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

Here is the way the ratings logic is currently implemented:

• After a user rates an article, their rating appears pre-filled upon subsequent views of the article.
• If a user wants to change their rating, they can adjust the stars and click submit. They may also clear their ratings entirely by clicking on the trash icon next to the stars. This re-rating overrides their previous rating.

So at any point in time, an article has only one ratings set for a given registered user or IP address since subsequent ratings take the place of previous ratings. This mechanism makes it a little more difficult to game the ratings. For example, if ratings were associated by cookie, a user could easily rate an article, delete the cookie, and then rate the article again. Since the ratings are associated with IP addresses/accounts, a user would either have to find another machine with a different IP address or create another account.

Currently, there isn't a definition of ratings vandalism, and ratings cannot be edited or deleted by anyone but the rater. We should continue to monitor the ratings patterns to see if it would be useful to have this type of feature. It will be tricky since such a definition will have to be able to separate vandalism from true changes (e.g., if the article is vandalized and as a consequence receives lower reviews). Based on the limited averages we're seeing on the dashboard, it looks like the volume of well-intentioned ratings outweighs the volume of vandalism ratings, at least among the more heavily rated articles. Howief (talk) 22:44, 16 May 2011 (UTC)

By the way, I assume the ratings go into a SQL-based repository of some type. Do they? If so, what is the Wiki-protocol for editing that type of data? I have not seen an example of that in Wikipedia. Is there one? History2007 (talk) 00:38, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

Finally! Finally I traced the thing here. (Happy that someone used the phrase "Rate this page" because how could I be ever guessing the "Article Feedback Tool" when there is not name of the feature on that ratebox!)

Well nice thing to rate the page and let the public be more engaged with Wikipedia content as Eric Moeller mentioned above. But the weird thing about this particular box is that this element, unlike any other in Wikipedia so far, can't be easilly traced to its origin, source code, discussion about it, or explanation of what the feature is and how it popped there. Normally when there is something new out, I look at the wikisource code and trace it back to the project which discusses its merit. I am satisfied then. Not need to ask, no need to comment a thing. Well here it suddenly poped out of nowhere. No trace of it in the page's wikicode. No link to follow, ... just uppearing on the end of weird page (lets say, it was not one of the best pages here, not one of the featured articles).

So in conclussion after rereading all written here, I completelly agree with what TheDJ mentioned above:

Conclusion, the feature needs a "What is this?" link and a "turn this off" button as well as a good place to turn it on again.

(But would there be the "what is this?" link, they could at least hunt for the more answers - on how to switch it off etc. on the description page. The "what is this?" link is quite essential)

I believe this might be yet quite interesting feature and I believe it will be good source of statistics. Just provide some common courtessy for fellow wikipedians, so they can fetch some information about it on their own and easily. In the end they will be not wasting your time, the time of the more knowledgeble by repeating the same question here and elsewhere all over again.--Reo ⁺ 18:52, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

In addition to redirects mentioned above, feedback tool is now also in some disambiguation pages: ARA Veinticinco de Mayo. Also, where can I find when the feedback tool appeared on a particular page? Shouldn't that information be visible in page logs? MKFI (talk) 16:38, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

While I wholeheartedly support this initiative, for me too its sudden appearance was quite a shock... There should have been some sort of warning. Also, I question the usefulness of this tool in stub articles. What is there to evaluate in two or three-line articles? IMO the tool only makes sense for C-class and above, where there is an actual more or less complete article to evaluate. Of course, most articles are not even assessed, so this would be impossible to implement, but perhaps articles with stub notices should be excluded. Constantine ✍ 09:35, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

• This template is showing up on Pieria (Syria) (and other articles) without anything on the article to create it (or any way to remove it). The project page at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Article_feedback/Public_Policy_Pilot/Workgroup does not seem to have anyone who watching it. This project seems abandoned and out of control, it should be controlled or shut down. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 10:54, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

Slow load time

Are Wikipedia pages painfully slow to load today for anyone else, or is it just me? SlimVirgin ^{TALK|CONTRIBS} 17:25, 16 May 2011 (UTC)

Not just you, REALLY slow... [stwalkerster|talk] 17:29, 16 May 2011 (UTC)

Working fine for me and that's speaking as someone with a broadband speed that's a tiny 223kbps. AD 17:37, 16 May 2011 (UTC)

I get time-outs partway through loading large pages (like WP:RD/S), or loading of the page but not the toolbars and frame decorations. Sometimes a quick hit "reload" resolves it...probably one hella-lagged (to use the technical term) machine in the pool. DMacks (talk) 17:44, 16 May 2011 (UTC)

It's been bad for several days now. See topic above for more complaints.--Bbb23 (talk) 17:46, 16 May 2011 (UTC)

Echo the above. It's pretty awful. --NeilN ^{talk to me} 20:05, 16 May 2011 (UTC)

Things are loading at a decent speed for me. No complaints at the moment; I haven't encountered any error messages yet. Gary King (talk · scripts) 20:49, 16 May 2011 (UTC)

It's been midly irritating all day, but now it's painful. Difs and pop-ups are uber-slow, and many times pages only load half-way. Other times when they do load, the font is very tiny, or the page is disjointed. --Jezebel'sPonyo^{bons mots} 00:10, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Disjointed pages are always painful. You should seek medical advice. Seriously, for me it varies from irritating (actually rarely just mildly irritating) to painful. With the new buttons on Firefox 4, I often have to click on X to stop and then on the arrow to reload, and sometimes more than once. I just wish someone would let us know what is going on, even if it's just to say "we are still looking into it".--Bbb23 (talk) 00:18, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Agreed, it goes in streaks. I'm surprised it's not more of a topic of conversation. When it fails, it's gone for several minutes...RxS (talk) 03:27, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

We must carry on and we must keep calm.

I can't get into my watchlist at all; it just hangs. Diffs are bad, history is bad, articles very slow, talk pages are sometimes only half loading. Has been like this for a couple of days for me. SlimVirgin ^{TALK|CONTRIBS} 13:18, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

I thought this was just me. It's making editing a real pain. Some kind of news that someone knows what's wrong (and that it may get better at some point) would be lovely. --Dweller (talk) 15:18, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

It has been a real hindrance to my editing as well. It's frustrating when I have to wait literally minutes and then my browser finally just shows me a blank page, or even worse, a partially-loaded page. When a page doesn't load all the way, it can be difficult to tell, especially if it's a page I've never visited before. I might just assume that's all there is to the page. Then I reload, and all of a sudden the article is twice as big.

I have a suspicion that this slow performance may coincide with the decision to turn on email notification for EVERY editor on Wikipedia at the same time. Per the discussion below talking about the new email feature, that feature was available on smaller encyclopedias for some time but avoided on en.wiki because of performance concerns. Maybe those concerns were valid? -- Atama頭 16:40, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

I highly doubt that. Sounds more like a caching server that is kaput somewhere. Other possibility is perhaps that the central notice for the board elections that is running right now ? I'm asking in the IRC channel of the system administrators for any ideas about the cause. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:56, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for doing that. Hopefully, they will respond and you can let us know.--Bbb23 (talk) 18:58, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

I, too, wonder if it's a caching server problem. I've been having problems with loading time at work for about a week now (which is before the email notifications were turned on, by the way), but at home everything is loading in no time and with no problems...—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); May 17, 2011; 19:04 (UTC)

Can you please explain a bit more why there would be a difference between your work and home experiences? Is there something we can do at our end to mitigate the problem?--Bbb23 (talk) 19:29, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Because the connections are routed via different providers, so there's a good chance that my work connection is hitting a defective cache server whereas my home connection does not?—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); May 17, 2011; 19:45 (UTC)

Interesting. If that's true, then it would also explain why some people are complaining, why some are saying it's okay, and why more people aren't complaining at all.--Bbb23 (talk) 19:51, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

I edit from work, and from home. From home it's a simple cable connection to a local ISP. From work, it's through a Websense proxy server that goes through who knows where, but nowhere close to here. I don't think this is a regional thing. Also, this issue is serious enough that I'm probably going to stay away from Wikipedia for awhile. This site is nearly unusable in this condition. It's like driving a car that breaks down every 5 minutes or so on the highway. -- Atama頭 00:09, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

I'm now getting load times over at least a minute for pretty much every page. Timing a few, the shortest was 1m2s, Logic gate. It's getting ridiculous. [stwalkerster|talk] 01:16, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

I have opened a ticket bugzilla:29034. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:41, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

Users affected, and who know how to, might consider running traceroutes on en.wikipedia.org and/or bits.wikimedia.org. Might be helpful in figuring out if it is maybe a routing issue or something ? Link to them from here, or from the ticket. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:54, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

 Done, but it's not as bad now as it was last night. [stwalkerster|talk] 13:12, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

Not one of those who "knows how to", I did want to note that it had eased up for me this morning, but has gotten worse as the day has progressed. :/ --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 13:21, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

Local traceroutes and from an online service show no problems with either en or bits. —DoRD (talk) 14:17, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

Is everyone of you from the UK per chance ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:50, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

Not here, no. --NeilN ^{talk to me} 13:53, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

Nope. Texas. It's been very slow for me, but has been running more smoothly today. —DoRD (talk) 13:54, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

It's slightly better for me today, but still slow and some pages are still only half loading. SlimVirgin ^{TALK|CONTRIBS} 13:59, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

I'm from the Southern east coast. I was on the west coast last week and had no issues there, but picked up problems as soon as I got back home. I tend to agree with Slim that it seems slightly better today. --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 14:06, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

Southwestern U.S. here. The problem continues. It may be slightly better this morning, but yesterday it got worse as the day progressed, so I'm waiting to see if it's really any better. Plus, it's still happening, so unless someone did something, why would it really be better? As for traceroutes, I'm suspicious as to their validity (with online tools). For example, I ran a traceroute from this site, and for both wikipedia and wikimedia, it showed slightly slow but not horrible timings. I then tried doing the same thing with www.cnn.com, and it timed out over and over until it aborted. Yet, when I access www.cnn.com, the response is instantaneous and complete. So, if someone can suggest an online tool that shows credible results, I'm willing to try it.--Bbb23 (talk) 15:45, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

It's already getting worse for me. I clicked on BLPN and it shows the title, says "transferring data" in the status bar, and just sits there. It's still sitting there as I type this message (it's been at least 2-3 minutes). Usually, I click on X and then refresh to push it along, but I'm curious what it will do if I don't do that. Should time out, but FF doesn't seem to care. :-) --Bbb23 (talk) 16:05, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

It's pretty quick for me at the moment, but it's been up and down all day. Usually it just hangs halfway through loading a page for a few minutes, then sometimes carries on, if I don't get impatient and refresh it. I must have left a tab open in that state for about 10 mins though, surprised Chrome didn't time it out... it's annoying though. [stwalkerster|talk] 16:15, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

Western Canada on this end. Given the responses above, it definitely does not appear to be UK related. --Jezebel'sPonyo^{bons mots} 15:48, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

Ohconfucius (above in earlier topic) is in Hong Kong. Don't know if he's still experiencing the problem.--Bbb23 (talk) 15:51, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

West coast of the US here and it's still irritatingly slow. Killiondude (talk) 17:20, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

I cannot discern an obvious pattern here. Can someone use Firebug or WebkitInspector to at the very least pinpoint the transaction that is on hold for so long and the server that it is trying to reach ? Also, try using "View Source" of the webpage, and look for the '<!-- Served by line in the served out html of a request that takes this long. More detailed information is needed if we want to pinpoint the problem, cause the sysadmins don't see any reason for these problems. The status.wikimedia.org is also not having any issues from any of the locations that polls for access. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 17:36, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

I'm willing to help, but I need more specific instructions from you. I use FF 4. I just added Firebug as an add-on (never used it before). I've enabled the console. I have the console in a separate window. It appears to log entries for each time I click on something (clearing what it logged on the previous click). It seems to create maybe 25-35 entries per click with columns as to what it's doing. What do you want me to provide here to be looked at? Are there any special settings you want me to use on Firebug?--Bbb23 (talk) 17:57, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

It's back to being very slow for me. Pages barely loading. I'm having to keep several windows open, and once I press save, go to another window to open the page if I want to keep writing there. In the meantime, I can see in the first window that it hasn't finished loading yet. SlimVirgin ^{TALK|CONTRIBS} 17:58, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

Me too, taken about 5 minutes to load just this edit page, after various attempts through getting Wikimedia errors - duly reported to the tech IRC channel too. Looks like they're having other issues right now though. [stwalkerster|talk] 18:28, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

It just took me nearly 15 minutes to make one edit. Couldn't get the page to open, couldn't get preview to work, then why I tried to save I kept getting error messages. It's too slow to use now, so I'm giving up for a bit. Six error messages so far trying to save this edit. SlimVirgin ^{TALK|CONTRIBS} 18:28, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

Some more issues are currently playing up, possibly due to the deploy of the Google News SiteMap extension a few hours ago, or due to updated translated messages. It's not yet known if these new issues (which are much larger and seemingly affecting everyone) are in any way related to the issues that are being reported in this topic. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:34, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

This is a error I just got, generally it's been very slow today (same as every other day this week)...and getting this edit done was like pulling teeth. Request: GET http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical), from 208.80.152.88 via sq63.wikimedia.org (squid/2.7.STABLE7) to ()Error: ERR_CANNOT_FORWARD, errno [No Error] at Wed, 18 May 2011 18:08:47 GMT RxS (talk) 18:45, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

Looks like the bugzilla bug has been closed as "INVALID". 3 mins it took me to load this edit page - and I highly doubt it's any of the issues Krinkle has suggested on the bug report, due to the number and the geographical distribution of people affected by this. [stwalkerster|talk] 19:15, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

Given Krinkle's response that it may be caused "problems at your provider" and "anything on your computer", I have to doubt that this VP thread was even reviewed despite being linked to in the bug report. How frustrating for the editors who are affected. --Jezebel'sPonyo^{bons mots} 19:30, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

I'm sorely tempted to reopen that bug report actually, with something snarky like "I'm pretty sure I've got a different ISP to other people whom this is affecting, given it's affecting people all over the world". So far I have restrained myself though, cos that sort of response isn't fair to them either. Seriously though, I think it should be reopened re-affirming this thread. I just don't trust myself to keep a cool head while doing it. [stwalkerster|talk] 19:37, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

Aah, the old "user error" canard. It's nice to know someone cares. Fortunately, we're well-paid for all of our work here.--Bbb23 (talk) 19:41, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

Don't worry, ops are working on it. Nemo 19:51, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure how you know, but I certainly hope you're right. My offer to DJ (above) to help still stands if someone explains what they need and what I should do.--Bbb23 (talk) 20:10, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

Yes if we wish to retain and attract editors editing needs to be faster than it is now. We need to through everything we have at this problem. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 20:37, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

• I'm on the US South East Coast in Florida and it's been terribly slow the past couple of days and remains slow today. Pages half-load, they load slowly section-by-section, only load the header of the page then hang, happens on articles, talk pages, and even my watchlist...sometimes I'll have to refresh the browser to get the whole watchlist to load. Very irritating. Dreadstar ☥ 20:37, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

TheDJ and myself have done some poking, and we don't think it's an issue at Wikimedia, nor an issue with the users. We think the problem may lie with some server/router/rr somewhere in the middle, which we don't really have control over. I'm going to try re-routing my local traffic over an SSH link to a remote machine of mine, but I dunno what will work and what won't at the moment. [stwalkerster|talk] 20:43, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

Good luck, but I must say that if it's a router, it seems odd it's not affecting other servers besides Wikipedia/Wikimedia. Network issues can be very complex to diagnose. I hope someone can pinpoint the problem.--Bbb23 (talk) 21:04, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

If it is something in the middle, it's odd that it's happening to users across a couple continents. RxS (talk) 21:16, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

Could be something pretty close to Wikimedia - it'd go a way to explain the temperamental nature of the problem too, and also why it's only affecting some users. One network peering partner of many going bad, network decides to route a request through them, and suddenly a page is really slow to load. [stwalkerster|talk] 21:21, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

It's been happening Down Under too. Very frustrating. -- Jack of Oz [your turn] 21:37, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

And here in southern Ontario, Canada, it reminds me of the first time I went on line about 15 years ago when the images scanned on the screen line by line. This is not a user or an ISP or a browser problem. 21:57, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

Yes, exactly, it'll do the old-school style line-by-line scanning down the screen, building the page slowly. Sometimes hanging on a section, wait for it, then draws the next section down... Dreadstar ☥ 23:11, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

I've had a lot of trouble too here in California. Even at school where I have tons of bandwidth in both direction, uploads to Commons are proceedubg at an unusually slow rate, taking hours to upload 100 MB. Ordinary pages like this one are loading slowly and timing out too. Dcoetzee 23:57, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

You're a graduate student in computer science. Fix it! :-) --Bbb23 (talk) 00:17, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

It's really bad tonight...hard to do anything. Is there an update somewhere? I'm having a hard time believing that this worldwide issue is being caused by something near Wikipedia but not Wikipedia itself. RxS (talk) 03:55, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

I'm in the Pacific NW. The site has been slower than usual on and off for the past few days.bllix (talk) 04:58, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

Just so it's clear, the problem is still continuing for me. Tomorrow will be the first-week anniversary of this problem (for me).--Bbb23 (talk) 14:21, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

I've asked on the Foundation mailing list whether anyone is looking into it; no reply so far. SlimVirgin ^{TALK|CONTRIBS} 14:26, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

Have you received any reply? The problem continues, and what is most troubling is the lack of any feedback from those responsible for fixing it except for a crappy response to the bug report. It's hard to believe anyone is investigating or working on the issue. I'd love to be proved wrong.--Bbb23 (talk) 15:48, 20 May 2011 (UTC)

Erik Moeller posted a reply in the Bugzilla thread, citing a number of issues, one of which is a router problem in Tampa that can't be fixed until Tuesday at the earliest. But it looks like there's some hope coming. -- Atama頭 23:25, 20 May 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the update. It's been dreadful this afternoon here.--Bbb23 (talk) 23:32, 20 May 2011 (UTC)

Yet more page loading issues

For the last several hours, I've been unable to load pages either on en:wp or on Commons without logging in through the secure server: regardless of what page I try to load, it gives me a "cannot display the webpage" message similar to what I get if I go to a nonexistent website. Does anyone have an idea how to get rid of the "Do you want to view only the webpage content that was delivered securely?" message that I get from IE version 8.0.6001.19048? Or do I simply have to try a different browser? On top of that, does anyone know what's going on with the servers to make this happen? Nyttend (talk) 04:16, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

I see discussions above with people's locations being asked: I'm in Bloomington, Indiana. Nyttend (talk) 04:16, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

Bugzilla:29034 for reference. :| TelCoNaSpVe :| 05:10, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

Yep things are real slow now; however, refreshing once usually loads the page immediately. Gary King (talk · scripts) 14:21, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

Yes, there is a problem. For about 3 days, intermittently. Pages don't load or load very slowly. Bus stop (talk) 14:32, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

Agh, it's still happening and it's just unbearable. Dreadstar ☥ 15:59, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

Last four or five days (in Australia) it as been slow but the last two it has gotten worse to the point that pages (articles, templates, talkpages ect) just don't load or half load and needs to be refreshed a few times to get them to load, whether I'm logged in or not. I've even used my Edu's computers and internet to see if my broadband ISP was the cause but still have the same issue there as well. Bidgee (talk) 03:25, 20 May 2011 (UTC)

• Ok, just now my watchlist only loaded about a quarter of the way and hung, this code was at the very end of the watchlist: "<li class="mw-line-odd watchlist-4-" Dreadstar ☥ 17:01, 20 May 2011 (UTC)

• I'm getting the same thing. My watchlist keeps loading only halfway, and often without the top part, and it's now happened a few times in preview too, where I can see only the top part of the article. SlimVirgin ^{TALK|CONTRIBS} 17:03, 20 May 2011 (UTC)

• In addition to the resource loader failure I've been experiencing for 3 weeks now (see "My gadgets no longer work" above), I am also experiencing flakey page loading for the last 3 days. My experience is the same as SlimVirgin's: The page loads part way and hangs forever. If I hit my 'reload' button the page reloads quickly and completely. ~Amatulić (talk) 17:08, 20 May 2011 (UTC)

• Seems to be worse today! Pages don't completely load but normally a few refreshes fixes allows it to full load, but today even refreshing isn't working. Getting a fully loaded page is just luck today! Bidgee (talk) 03:29, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

Bump, is this ever going to be fixed? RxS (talk) 05:54, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

Unfortunately, because of the combination of these two sections, updates are inserted in two places. According to Atama above, there is a router problem that will hopefully be fixed next week, although the phrase "Tuesday at the earliest" is not at all concrete as to when. Then, of course, there's the issue of whether the router problem is actually the cause. One thing I can say for sure is it's been really horrible yesterday and today for me.--Bbb23 (talk) 14:15, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

Just to clarify, for anyone who hasn't visited the link to Bugzilla, Erik Moeller said the following:

Erik Moeller 2011-05-20 21:27:06 UTC

According to the ops team, there are a number of separate and unrelated ops issues that have come up in the last few days:

1) Not all users are experiencing slowness, but a subset of users are. There's no definite smoking gun, but the most likely cause are ongoing issues with one of our routers in Tampa. The router will have to be taken down for maintenance to fix this issue, and order to perform this maintenance operation with minimal disruption, we need to have key ops engineers on standby to deal with any issues that may arise. My understanding is that the best available maintenance window is Tuesday next week.

2) There was a software deployment on May 18 which caused an application server overload; it was reverted the same day.

3) The mobile servers are currently intermittently overloaded, throwing internal server errors, and servers to provide additional capacity have been racked today.

4) In case you're looking at it, ganglia.wikimedia.org is not displaying correct server status information (as of yesterday); it's in the process of being fixed.

We're still in the process of setting up a new primary data center location in Ashburn, VA, which will give us higher site reliability in general, and also create the possibility of safe failover in maintenance or emergency situations.

What I gathered from that is that we wouldn't expect to see an improvement until Tuesday (tomorrow). What I quoted above was three days ago, on Friday the 20th. -- Atama頭 16:29, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

I don't know about the rest of y'all, but today it seems much better for me. --Auntof6 (talk) 14:54, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

The techs have performed some much needed maintenance on the network today. [2] Hopefully this has resolved the problems people were having. the wub "?!" 17:07, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

No, it hasn't resolved problems. Image thumbnail updating, both on Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, is as slow as before. I estimate it is running at approximately 1% of normal speed. Thumbnail updates after uploading a modified image now still take upwards of 24 hours, where they used to take less than 60 seconds. —Quicksilver^{T @} 20:10, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

It's improved for me as well.--Bbb23 (talk) 01:08, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

Slower

Because that it is slower, it is more difficult to edit pages. I have tried to edit many pages but I get an message that it could not be processed because of bandwidth. I saved all the codes they gave me. Its Chinese.

Here it goes (Please note that I replaced my IP by "--.--.--.---")

---

Request: POST http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=500_Keys&action=submit, from --.--.--.--- via sq75.wikimedia.org (squid/2.7.STABLE7) to 208.80.152.88 (208.80.152.88) Error: ERR_READ_TIMEOUT, errno [No Error] at Mon, 16 May 2011 19:01:38 GMT

---

Request: GET http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:AbuseLog/4761656, from --.--.--.--- via sq75.wikimedia.org (squid/2.7.STABLE7) to 208.80.152.48 (208.80.152.48) Error: ERR_READ_TIMEOUT, errno [No Error] at Mon, 16 May 2011 21:19:22 GMT

---

Request: GET http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:AbuseLog/4761656, from --.--.--.--- via sq66.wikimedia.org (squid/2.7.STABLE7) to 208.80.152.48 (208.80.152.48) Error: ERR_READ_TIMEOUT, errno [No Error] at Mon, 16 May 2011 21:27:57 GMT

---

Request: POST http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Ebe123&action=submit, from --.--.--.--- via sq74.wikimedia.org (squid/2.7.STABLE7) to 208.80.152.85 (208.80.152.85) Error: ERR_READ_TIMEOUT, errno [No Error] at Tue, 17 May 2011 18:09:05 GMT

---

Request: POST http://fr.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Mod%C3%A8le:IP_scolaire&action=submit, from 208.80.152.50 via sq62.wikimedia.org (squid/2.7.STABLE7) to () Error: ERR_CANNOT_FORWARD, errno [No Error] at Wed, 18 May 2011 18:06:29 GMT

---

Request: GET http://fr.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Mod%C3%A8le:IP_scolaire&action=edit, from 208.80.152.74 via sq63.wikimedia.org (squid/2.7.STABLE7) to () Error: ERR_CANNOT_FORWARD, errno (11) Resource temporarily unavailable at Wed, 18 May 2011 18:07:57 GMT

---

Request: POST http://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mod%C3%A8le:IP_scolaire&action=submit, from 208.80.152.49 via sq61.wikimedia.org (squid/2.7.STABLE7) to () Error: ERR_CANNOT_FORWARD, errno [No Error] at Wed, 18 May 2011 18:10:06 GMT

---

Request: POST http://fr.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Cat%C3%A9gorie:Adresse_IP_scolaire&action=submit, from 208.80.152.82 via sq64.wikimedia.org (squid/2.7.STABLE7) to () Error: ERR_CANNOT_FORWARD, errno [No Error] at Wed, 18 May 2011 18:16:46 GMT

---

Request: POST http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=500_Keys&action=submit, from --.--.--.--- via sq75.wikimedia.org (squid/2.7.STABLE7) to 208.80.152.88 (208.80.152.88) Error: ERR_READ_TIMEOUT, errno [No Error] at Wed, 18 May 2011 21:21:51 GMT

---

~~EBE123~~ ^talk_Contribs 21:10, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

Watchlist emails

See also bugzilla:5220#c40, #Email notification notification, Wikipedia:Village_pump_(miscellaneous)#E-mails_from_Wikimedia [3], Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents#Question_about_Suggest_a_Bot [4], MediaWiki_talk:Watchlist-details#Talk_emails [5]

When did watchlist notification emails get enabled for enwiki? I just received one regarding my user talkpage. And how do I disable them for myself? --Cybercobra (talk) 22:02, 16 May 2011 (UTC)

Turn it off in My preferences. As per a discussion above, it was recently added, but it presumed we wanted to be notified, not necessarily a great presumption.--Bbb23 (talk) 22:05, 16 May 2011 (UTC)

It only notifies you for edits to your talk page. There's more information about this in your watchlist, at the top where announcements usually go. Gary King (talk · scripts) 23:57, 16 May 2011 (UTC)

LOL, I didn't even notice the announcement until you mentioned it.--Bbb23 (talk) 00:00, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Likewise; I hadn't checked my watchlist yet and thus seen the notice. --Cybercobra (talk) 01:15, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

I received several of these annoying emails, and worked out for myself how to turn it off, well before seeing this announcement. May I state that I heartily disapprove of turning such a new feature on by default -- it creates a large amount of unwanted emails. The least-impact implementation would have been off-by-default. Hrafn^Talk_Stalk(P) 07:16, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

And I'm sure that there is a group of users who welcome finally being able to receive email notifications of their user talk pages, without having to even do anything for it. We should add a link to those emails on how you disable them btw. That is the very least we can do. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:22, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

bugzilla:29022. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:25, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

I agree that an assumption that the vast majority of users would want this was not necessarily a good one.

Furthermore, if you're going to switch something like this on, it'd be a good idea to mention in the text of the email that it's just been switched on - my first reaction to getting one of these was that my account had been hacked and someone was playing with my watchlist and preferences.

I presume that I missed all the debate and publicity before you switched it on. Debate: it's alluded above that there has been considerable support "elsewhere" for this, but no link is provided. Where was that debate? Was it properly and sensibly publicised so that many users could participate, eg at WP:CENT? And publicity: when the extensive debate concluded, I presume it was properly announced, in the Signpost etc - could you point me to the announcements?

I'll assume I missed all of these steps before someone pressed the green button. --Dweller (talk) 11:35, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

I don't think there was any discussion for this. Per the mailing list post, it looks like it was just enabled immediately after a quick discussion among a few developers. Gary King (talk · scripts) 12:04, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

And to be honest, I don't really know why this crack team of developer-ninjas bothered -- I can't remember the last time that somebody posted something on my user talk that couldn't just as easily wait a day before being brought to my attention -- most of the time even the online alerts are simply a distraction from actual editing. Hrafn^Talk_Stalk(P) 12:30, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Sometimes i wonder why the crack team of developer-ninjas bother as well. Users seem so capable of implementing stuff themselves. They sure talk like they are capable. I propose we just hand over the project to the volunteers who see the need to complain about every little change, then they can endlessly discuss changes internally, while no one every writes any code or updates a server configuration. Seems like a much better plan. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:40, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia works through discussion and consensus. Implementing something like this without discussion and consensus was a bad idea, even if the idea itself was a good idea. This isn't "every little change", this was a big change - I repeat, I seriously thought my account had been hacked. --Dweller (talk) 14:11, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

MediaWiki is not Wikipedia, it is a very different community with a very different organisation, don't make the mistake of thinking they are more than loosely similar. Equally, Wikimedia is not Wikipedia, don't make the mistake of thinking that enwiki is anything more than the older brother of the 850 other Wikimedia projects. Had this change been specifically and solely on enwiki, it would be reasonable for there to be discussion here, although I am also fully in favour of reducing the inertia in this area. If it were a Wikimedia-wide change for social reasons, a WM-wide discussion on meta might have been appropriate, considering the magnitude (or otherwise) of the change. Since it was a change for purely technical reasons, it is no surprise that it followed only technical discussions. The only reason this feature was not activated when it was first added to MediaWiki many years ago were technical limitations; once those were removed, the software was set back to its default state. The default behaviour of the MediaWiki software is not defined by consensus on the English Wikipedia. Happy‑melon 15:02, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

I'm with Dweller -- I do not consider Wikipedia suddenly and unaccountably spewing emails at me to be a "little change". My first reaction was 'how do I turn it off?' -- no answer. My second was 'why did they do this without asking me?' That something like this should be opt-in rather than opt-out should be blindingly obvious. The result was that something I neither needed nor wanted caused me a great deal of hassle. So I'm sorry, but I'm not feeling in the least bit grateful. Hrafn^Talk_Stalk(P) 14:20, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Just wanted to state that this is great news! I keep forgetting to check my talk page, and I often reply to messages 3 days late. Thanks for making this happen, guys. For those who aren't happy about this, it's just one click away. -- Luk ^talk 13:03, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

• Erm, this debate from nearly a year ago (thank you, my invisible friend) is when the idea seems to have been raised. It shows clear consensus that people liked the idea, but on an opt-in basis only. So, it's not that the developers didn't bother to gain consensus (though that would have been bad enough) - they ignored it, which is worse. Consensus has been ignored. Why? --Dweller (talk) 14:34, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Probably because the operations staff have beter things to do than go searching for such threads on all 850 wikis, most of which are in languages they don't even read. Happy‑melon 15:05, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Hmm. Were the developers not directed to that conversation when they were asked to make the change? Did someone misrepresent that conversation when asking the developers to make the change? --Dweller (talk) 15:14, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Oh for pete's sake, for those editors incapable of clicking on their preferences it might cause some inconvenience, but frankly there are far more important things to get worked up about. Oh noes! I got told that someone had left a message for me! Woe and gnashing of teeth! DuncanHill (talk) 14:42, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

I dunno, compared to some of the things Wikipedians get worked up about, it's not surprising that this procedural fiasco or glitch (depending on your POV) generates controversy. I think we should have a straw poll. :-) And returning to my favorite sore point of the last few days, clicking on My preferences isn't as easy as it was before the major response time problem.--Bbb23 (talk) 14:59, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

I know that I wasted a lot of time dealing with the slow-down, which caused all sorts of strange behaviors that I could not easily determine were on the WP end. Based on the threads here, it ppears that many of Wikipedia' most productive editors were likewise distracted trying to deal with the unannounced system problems. Who knows what the first-time users thought. Taken together, the total time wasted was probably considerable. Long ago admins were warned about deleting pages with long histories because of the impact on the databases. Let's hope the developers themselves don't loose track of that same requirement.   Will Beback  talk  09:24, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

These emails have been active on smaller wikis for a long time (e.g. commons). If I remember correctly they were disabled on enwiki for performance reasons. Apparently those have been fixed and the notifications have been re-enabled. You can turn them off in your preferences. It's not as if this is a new feature: it's an old feature that was disabled because of an old bug. — Carl (CBM · talk) 15:18, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

I think the checkmarks for boxes in Wikipedia Preferences are upside-down. Anybody else noticing that? Bus stop (talk) 15:57, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

I just noticed: the checkmarks are upside-down elsewhere as well, such as in the edit windows, such as the check-boxes for "This is a minor edit" and "Watch this page". Bus stop (talk) 16:37, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

My checkmarks are right side up - on My preferences and everywhere else. Try rotating your monitor. :-) --Bbb23 (talk) 16:44, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

This is pretty interesting: the checkmarks are upside-down when using Opera, but not when using Firefox or Safari. Thanks, Bbb23, that got me thinking! Bus stop (talk) 16:58, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

I just don't buy it. The change has been made because the developers have been asked to by enwiki (on two occasions), not because of their own agenda, Wikimedia's agenda or reinstating an old status quo. Both Bugzillas ([6]) and ([7]) clearly state the request is for default off/opt in. In the second of the bugzillas, Xeno even points out that it has been requested as default off, but is shrugged off.

So, that's the developers ignoring the consensus behind our request. Then, above, when the new feature is announced, it's wrongly stated that consensus was for it to be default on.

Even if I agreed that this is a small issue, it's been badly implemented, treading on consensus.

Moving forward, can someone who knows how to please now put some text into the emails that clarifies that this is a new feature so people receiving it for the first time are less likely to be alarmed. I'll notify the Signpost to get something in their next edition. --Dweller (talk) 16:05, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Dweller - you "just don't buy it"? Excuse me? Did you not read Tim's message and the resulting comments, are you saying he's lying, or are you just plain ignoring it? Alternatively, if he gave another reason somewhere else, I'd love for you to direct me there.

This was a Wikimedia-wide change to Mediawiki. enwiki doesn't have control over either of those things. Ale_Jrb^talk 18:15, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

I've not seen a message from Tim. Where is it? --Dweller (talk) 21:50, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

My god the pointlessness of discussions like this. Can't people go write articles or fix bugs and be productive? Input: The mails were broken, they got fixed. Output: people don't like change, no matter what it is. Get some perspective already, there are so many things to do (like make suggestions on how to improve the information inside the email notifications) yet people seem to want everything perfect in one go. More and more the English Wikipedia community is stifling development instead of fostering it. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:46, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Part of the problem is the often poor quality of communication between community and developers. I did try and address this with the WP:DEVMEMO approach, but it was never going to work if both developers and community didn't get behind it. Rd232 ^talk 22:19, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

@Dweller, [8]. It is also linked on everyone's Watchlist. Killiondude (talk) 21:54, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

I'd not seen it, thanks (it's not linked on my Watchlist, that I can see). I don't disagree with what Tim says - but the Bugzilla discussion does show that Xeno raised our objection to default on, and it was ignored. I have to say I'm surprised by the reaction I've had here. When a functionary even appears to ignore consensus, they're pilloried. Anyway, let's get on with it. The Signpost coverage has been and gone and I missed it four times, even when looking for it three times, so I'll concentrate on working on improving the email itself. I've already suggested making an improvement to the email notification, something that's been largely overlooked in the <shock, horror, he's criticising the developers> reaction. Where and how can I input into it? --Dweller (talk) 09:05, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

The relevant system messages are here: [9]. {{editprotected}} on the talk page is (I think) the standard way to go about getting system messages changed, though changes to something reasonably obvious like this would probably be better discussed somewhere. [stwalkerster|talk] 11:33, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

It's great that this feature is now available, I'm undecided whether I'll personally leave it on. I do wonder if it would have been possible to notify editors a bit more in advance of it being enabled, so that those who definitely didn't want it could have turned it off early? Rjwilmsi 22:59, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Not as easily as just turning it on. The software has a switch - the feature is either on (notifications possibly sent, user preference option visible), or off (notifications not sent, user preference option invisible). Some software changes would have had to have been made to allow users to enable/disable this setting before allowing mails to be sent - a software change that would add a (at the time) preference option which did absolutely nothing - leading to users getting confused that it wasn't working. Whatever happened, there would have been some suggestions for "improvements" - there's no way to win this one. [stwalkerster|talk] 11:33, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

Strong +1 on TheDJ and again, thanks Tim. Dweller, discussions are linked also from bugzilla:5220#c40, and contain answers to the objection you quoted, which by the way was not ignored, see bugzilla:5220#c38. Nemo 18:41, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

Comment: this (default on) is the right approach for the long tail of occasional editors. The transition was not handled well - the first email sent by the system should have been preceded by a one-off "welcome to WP email notifications" type email, and obviously each email should include details on how to turn it off (which apparently they didn't, but this is now being addressed). In sum, a good idea, with an unnecessarily rocky transition. Let it go, it's done. Rd232 ^talk 22:17, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

Although I think I would have myself set the default to no and then let users set it themselves if they wanted the EMAIL its not a big deal. Worse case I can just delete it like junk mail. A couple of suggestions though:

1. A setting to not send the EMAIL unless I haven't logged on in 24 hours
2. An option to only send one EMAIL per day (or X amount of time the user prefers).
3. We should not send out EMAILS to users who are blocked or banned. (such as sockpuppets)
4. It would be great to be able to modify the EMAIL message or even make it include the message left on the talk page.

There are also a couple side effects of this that might benefit WP.

1. It may draw the attention of users who don't edit anymore and some may come back and do a few edits.
2. We may be able to use this EMAIL function for other things such as Newsletter notifications, notices of new changes to WP, etc. Some users may prefer getting newsletters via EMAIL rather than on the talk page.

So although there might be a few that find it irritating I think that there are more that may find it useful. --Kumioko (talk) 23:10, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

I disagree with a few points here (numbering same as above):

1. I've not logged on in about 20 days IIRC. A minor change to this - not made any logged action in the past 24 hours (tracking page views like this would likely be too heavy on the servers, and likely require schema changes for little benefit).
2. Only one email is actually sent until the user visits their talk page. When they've visited, it's fair game for the system to send them another email
3. Blocked users may find email notifications useful to determine that their unblock request has been dealt with for example. I don't see what the point of not sending them to sockpuppets etc is - if I was a sockpuppeteer I wouldn't bother setting an email address - too much unneeded hastle to create socks. Therefore, email notifications wouldn't be sent anyway for the simple reason of there being nowhere to send them to. Those that do set an email address are likely the master, or a user who got blocked for 3RR or something. These are however just guesses based on common sense - I have no way of knowing the actual data.
4. Modifying the message can be done through the system messages in the MediaWiki namespace.

Second set of points:

1. Users who don't edit any more probably won't get messages left on their talk page, so this will likely be only a small effect. Anyway, bringing good people back to Wikipedia can't be a bad thing, can it?
2. This is an email notification system that tells people if their talk page has been modified. It's not a system to send messages to users via email instead of on their talk page. If you want to receive newsletters via email alone (would be nice!), it needs to be done via Special:EmailUser or a mailing list.

[stwalkerster|talk] 23:23, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

Proposed enhancement to email text

I'd welcome some eyes at MediaWiki_talk:Enotif_body#Proposed_amended_version, particularly as a) left out a bit of text b) I am not tech-savvy enough to be confident I've not messed anything around and c) I like working with consensus. Thank you. --Dweller (talk) 09:08, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

There's no point pfaffing around endlessly; this needs to be done, as users are already getting talk messages and hence emails. So I've gone ahead made some changes, linking to Help:Email notification which I've created. I've also removed some text which relates to email notifications for watched pages more generally; the feature is only enabled on English Wikipedia for user talk pages, so that's quite unnecessary confusion. PS Could someone ping my talk page so I can get a message and see what it looks like? Rd232 ^talk 22:34, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

Question: is there any way for someone who's forgotten their password to remove email notifications? I suspect not, and whilst this won't be too common, it will be an issue sometimes. Any solutions, anyone? Rd232 ^talk 22:40, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

doh, if they've forgotten their password and still have emails coming through, they can reset their password via email. :) Rd232 ^talk 01:10, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

trying to correctly inline format a map file with geodata

Hello I am trying to move a map, with geodata creating a dot layer, from an infobox into the article main body. However the standard thumb template is not allowing this. When I put the map syntax from the infobox into text sections, it displays correctly except the text wont wrap so it creates a ton of white space. This is a good map and this article needs it, but right now its only on the talk page because the formatting is so bad. I simply don't know the correct syntax to make it display as a normal thumbnail. Great East Japan Earthquake... 66.220.113.98 (talk) 18:54, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Resolved

 – The map has been moved -- John of Reading (talk) 07:52, 20 May 2011 (UTC)

Firefox crashes with two column layout

I guess this should really be a Bugzilla issue or a firefox bug but here goes. The page Portal:Mathematics/Suggestions reliably causes Firefox on a Mac to crash (latest versions of both). The problem seems to have something to do with pictures in a two column layout. Safari also seems to have problems with the page placing the pictures incorrectly. Any thoughts?--Salix (talk): 21:25, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Works fine for me in Firefox 4 on a Mac. I don't understand why having pictures in a two-column layout would crash a browser. Gary King (talk · scripts) 01:46, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

Just crashed for me, using Firefox 4 on a PC. 216.93.212.245 (talk) 22:33, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

So [10] doesn't crash but the latest revision does? Does this always happen or only sometimes? And does it crash in a different browser? Gary King (talk · scripts) 14:25, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

I just checked with IE8 and had no problem loading the page, though the last image took a long time to load. 216.93.212.245 (talk) 17:10, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

I think we determined on IRC last night that it's a FF4 thing. FF4 on Win7 and Ubuntu both shut down when trying to open that page. Killiondude (talk) 19:31, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

Works for me on FF4 on XP. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 15:23, 20 May 2011 (UTC)

The Portal:Mathematics/Suggestions page loads OK for me with Firefox 3.6.17 on Ubuntu 10.04. Also works OK with SeaMonkey 2.0, which is now based on Firefox 3 code. It loads with Opera 11 without crashing, but doesn't show 2-column layout at bottom. —Quicksilver^{T @} 16:50, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

Template Help

• Template:Basketball kit
• Template:Baseball uniform

Both of those templates need tweaked so that they will not spew red-linked files when the parameters given dont have a valid file. [11] was a similar edit in order to prevent spewing errors. ΔT _{^{The only constant}} 03:13, 20 May 2011 (UTC)

• click the edit tab, copy, paste, save, done!
  — V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 04:08, 20 May 2011 (UTC)
  • Its not that simple and templates give me headaches. ΔT _{^{The only constant}} 13:58, 20 May 2011 (UTC)

Gray bar

The gray bar that shows up at the top of the screen previously only showed up every once in a while. Now it has expanded its reach and shows up on every single page (and why not?). What is the magic code to get rid of it? For Monobook. All Hallow's Wraith (talk) 12:46, 20 May 2011 (UTC)

You mean the centralnotice (the thing about board elections)? /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 15:26, 20 May 2011 (UTC)

No, just a random gray bar that pops up and takes time to load, every time. I know other monobook users have had it appear since those technical "improvements" were made in February. All Hallow's Wraith (talk) 22:53, 20 May 2011 (UTC)

No, it's the central notice, you have just hidden it, but the 'hidden' code doesn't seem to fully hide it on Monobook. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:57, 21 May 2011 (UTC)

It's not the notice. I already removed that. The gray bar is obviously part of these great technological improvements that arrive whenever Wikipedia starts working too quickly. All Hallow's Wraith (talk) 13:45, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

Preferences to suppress rulespam

Are there any more options in "Special:Preferences" to suppress all this extra "rulespam" which appears when someone tries to edit pages? Some of it comes from the "Page notice" blurbs, but the most verbose seems to be "View source" showing a long diatribe. I understand that new users, trying to edit a protected page, need to see the view-source rulespam, perhaps 6 or 7 times during their first week of editing, but I have seen the view-source rulespam "1,001 times" now. And, there's no "hide-this" button. Hence, I thought a preference-option could be set for "advanced user" to suppress most of the rulespam blurbs, and perhaps have "Page notice" read the "advanced-user" preference and reduce the page-notice rulespam, as well. -Wikid77 16:12, 20 May 2011 (UTC)

All those things have css classes and ID's just add the proper one to your common.css/vector.css with display:none; and it's fixed. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:56, 21 May 2011 (UTC)

Actually the "view-source rulespam" doesn't. I requested one be added at the interface talk. — Bility (talk) 00:34, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

Google Chrome inserts an extra line break when adding a comment to a talk page

I asked about this on our Computing Reference Desk and was told this is might be a bug in our JavaScript and that I should post something here. Google Chrome inserts an extra line break when adding a comment to a talk page. For example, when I typed this,[12] I had only one blank line between my post and the previous one. By the time I submitted it, it changed into 2 blank lines which I fixed in my next edit.[13] A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 16:17, 20 May 2011 (UTC)

• Most browsers would show an extra line there, when 2 blank lines are placed above a posted reply. The way the wiki-typesetting works (MediaWiki software), by default, is to ignore 1 blank line above a colon-indented line, but treat extra blank lines as if being "<br />". The Wikipedia markup text does NOT act as a "string grammar" and so split lines an more than 1 blank-line might affect the formatted text. However even some browsers have had bugs where they re-formatted text, differently, when the HTML markup was split onto multiple lines, even though, by string-grammar rules, line-breaks should not affect the parsing (and display) of markup text. Remember: wiki-text does not follow string-grammar rules, and it is sensitive to extra blank lines, which change the meaning of the markup text. -Wikid77 17:38, 20 May 2011 (UTC)

Automatic edit summary for redirecting pages

Per Martin's suggestion I am posting here to ask whether or not it's possible to have the MediaWiki software detect redirect categorisation templates. The original edit request was here: MediaWiki talk:Autoredircomment#Edit request 2. —James ^{(Talk • Contribs)} • 10:11am • 00:11, 21 May 2011 (UTC)

Everything is possible, most isn't implemented, some things are not a good idea. This seems like a lot of complexity for a small problem so I doubt anyone will implement, but bugzilla: is for feature requests. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:54, 21 May 2011 (UTC)

regex problem redux

 Reopened (Previous attempt)

Weeks ago, I and others invested time confirming that a November 2008 addition to the English language spam blacklist, in response to "markets.com" spam by 98.219.81.190, had unintended side-effects. After consulting with the admin who had introduced the regex for the original problem, it was confirmed that the regex needed to change.

An editor who is part of Wikipedia:WikiProject Spam tried repeatedly to fix the problem, with no success. With the help of http://regexpal.com/ I came up with an idea, but my suggested didn't work. There have been other suggestions as well, but no one has come up with the fix yet. I brought the problem up at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Spam_blacklist#Discussion hoping for advice I could pass along to those watching MediaWiki_talk:Spam-blacklist#Troubleshooting_and_problems, but no one at meta bothered to comment. So I am hoping the village pump can help. Feel free to comment here or at MediaWiki_talk:Spam-blacklist; I'll be watching both. Thank you in advance. 67.101.5.242 (talk) 05:52, 21 May 2011 (UTC)

There was a similar problem with "way.com" which seems to have been fixed - see meta:Talk:Spam blacklist/Archives/2010-10#way.com and meta:Spam blacklist. Peter E. James (talk) 12:59, 21 May 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, your suggestion was essential in getting someone to fix the problem. For more details, see Talk:Ingles. 67.101.6.37 (talk) 21:05, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

Different versions of same article appearing

Hi. I am hoping you can assist me with a question from my talk page that I have been unable to answer, in particular the bolded part.

On 17 May 2011, I made five edits to the Les Misérables page under the library IP 205.189.194.208. I cannot recall whether they got through the first time (I believe they got rejected the first time or it took a while to save) but according to the page's history, they got through. On May 18th, I did three edits (as you described above) under 170.170.59.138. From what I recall, they also had problems or took a while to save, but once again according to the history, they got through. Now, if I type the URL with the accent and no underscore(Les Misérables), it shows the updated page, but when I type the title without the accent (Les_Miserables), it shows a previous version. I also type it with the accent and underscore (Les_Misérables) and it shows another earlier version. It's only when I click on "Edit" and then click on "Save Page" that the recent edits show up on all versions of the title ( a null edit). Even just clicking on "Edit" and reading the text on the edit page itself, the updated text is present. But when I delete my cache/browsing history, the "Les_Miserables" and "Les_Misérables" versions goes back to a previous page. Also on your talk page (this page), when my browsing history is clear (or cleared), the IP 170.170.59.138 on May 20 shows up in your page history, but not the question I posted. It even says at the bottom of the page "This page was last modified on 16 May 2011 at 02:17." Once again, when I click "Edit/View Source" and then click "Save Page" that the page and page history is fully updated, and the correct date and time of modification is stated. As you can see in this page's history, I did delete the question a few times. I even tried another IP (70.25.99.236) and it also gives the same problem. 170.170.59.138 (talk)

Thank you. Jevansen (talk) 05:58, 21 May 2011 (UTC)

For 'readers'/google, redirects in wikipedia are not real redirects. They are more like copies of the same content with another title. As such when one article is refreshed in the cache, not necessarily all alternative copies are updated at the same time, often leaving you with entry points where outdated content is presented to IP users. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:50, 21 May 2011 (UTC)

Reference desk pages still broken

Hi, there are still ongoing problems with frequent stale pages (often days old) at the Reference Desk. Everything is badly broken and urgently needs looking at, IMO. These problems have been outstanding for months, with no sign of anything being done. See, for example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Reference_desk#Still_broken

If anyone can do anything to escalate this, it would be greatly appreciated.

86.183.0.105 (talk) 11:43, 21 May 2011 (UTC)

User talk notification

Is there is a way, that I can change the colour of my user talk notification? Armbrust ^{Talk to me} _Contribs 19:59, 21 May 2011 (UTC)

Try adding div.usermessage { background-color: #FFCE7B !important; } to your Special:MyPage/skin.css. User<Svick>.Talk(); 21:56, 21 May 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, added. Now just need a message to my talk page to test it. :) Armbrust ^{Talk to me} _Contribs 23:33, 21 May 2011 (UTC)

Added a test for you above. — Bility (talk) 00:37, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

dammit, stop that! There's a page specifically for that around here somewhere...
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 05:51, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

Haha! I guess you could look at WP:ORANGE. — Bility (talk) 06:54, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

For consistency, I suggest setting border-color as well. Feezo (send a signal | watch the sky) 04:10, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

Database error query

Just a quick query. When saving I am getting a page saying

"Database error"

as well as the following text

A database query syntax error has occurred. This may indicate a bug in the software. The last attempted database query was:

   (SQL query hidden)

from within function "GlobalUsage::insertLinks". Database returned error "1290: The MySQL server is running with the --read-only option so it cannot execute this statement (10.0.6.41)".

What is this about? My edits do appear to be saving however. Simply south...... unintentionally misspelling fr 5 years 00:03, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

I've been getting this for about 20 minutes, during which my edits weren't saving. They are now though. doomgaze (talk) 00:06, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

One of the master database servers crashes last night around this time, which of course generates a lot of trouble for all write actions. There was some fallout and ripple effects, and stuff settled down after a reboot and about 20 minutes of wait time. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:36, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

Image caching?

Shortly after uploading, I made a change to the file Media:Schur_lattice_paths.svg. It seems this change has not been applied to the image as it appears in articles, or even on the image page and thumbnails, before actually clicking through to see the svg. It's not a browser issue, I checked on multiple computers (some only after the second image was uploaded, so no chance of browser cache interfering). Will this be fixed automatically?--Sam^Talk 05:06, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

In future, try purging the image description page on Commons. I've just done that to the above image. Graham87 07:24, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

Page ratings

I'm creating a number of redirects, and a lot of them are getting the "rate this page" feature appear. Is there really any need for this on redirects and dab pages? Can it be turned off for these? Mjroots (talk) 08:15, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

It always helps if you list a couple of examples. And this probably requires software changes to fix, so bugzilla:. bugzilla:27252 might be related btw. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:30, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

Examples: Erato Sartes, MV Erato Sartes, Spaarnestroom, MV Spaarnestroom, Starkenborgh, MV Starkenborgh. Mjroots (talk) 07:14, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

Template broken with unexpected >

Hi, there's something wrong with the {{Deleted template}} wrapper - "Expression error: Unexpected > operator". I don't know what the problem is. Anyone? Rd232 ^talk 11:39, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

It displays an error in preview because REVISIONID only exists in saved versions. Peter E. James (talk) 11:54, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

Right. User:Tothwolf has come up with a fix - thanks! Rd232 ^talk 14:06, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

 Fixed I changed the logic to check if REVISIONID exists before comparing it with an #ifexpr. [14] It will now also display the notice during a page preview. It should be safe enough to assume that if someone is previewing a page, the new saved page will have a higher REVISIONID anyway. --Tothwolf (talk) 14:09, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

Section editing links not appearing for some reason

Can anyone see why the section editing links are not appearing on Wikipedia:WikiProject Animal rights? SlimVirgin ^{TALK|CONTRIBS} 17:57, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

There is a __NOEDITSECTION__ a few lines above the Recognized content section header. —DoRD (talk) 18:05, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

Brilliant, many thanks! SlimVirgin ^{TALK|CONTRIBS} 18:17, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

Articles by quality statistics - broken for National Railway Museum

Resolved

Can anyone give me guidance as to why I have no importance statistics in the article assessment quality table for the National Railway Museum, shown below. Also, according to summaries at individual category pages, I have 15 articles assessment for quality and 28 assessed for importance ... but 17 articles turning up in the table. I've looked at the job queue and poked the table at the update page. That exhausts my knowledge. All help welcomed; thanks. --Tagishsimon (talk) 14:37, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

National Railway Museum-related pages by quality
Quality
	Total
Assessed	0
Total	0

Okay. So it was a lag in the toolserver database.

Section link problem from main page

The main page's "In the News" section has a link about the WTO ruling regarding Boeing and Airbus. The link is Competition between Airbus and Boeing#World Trade Organization litigation but when clicking this link, my browser (Firefox 4) sends me to the bottom of that article instead of to the relevant section. I can't see any problem with the link name itself. Comet Tuttle (talk) 17:03, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

I had the same thing happen to me. I think it started happening off and on (to me) when the ResourceLoader or something was changed on the site. Killiondude (talk) 08:58, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

Editing toolbar disappeared

From one of my browsers (Firefox). It is still in Chrome. Any idea what I might've messed up? Restarting the browser is not helping, I've recently installed a new firewall but disabling it does not restore the toolbar. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 17:42, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

Adding some other issues, it seems that for Wikipedia in Firefox, my Javascript is not working. Why could that be? PS. It doesn't work on en wiki and Commons, but it works on pl wiki and many other websites... --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 17:12, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

Performance problems and functionality quirks

I've been editing WP articles for years but in the past few months I've perceived a rise in the number of performance problems or functionality quirks I've been experiencing. I'll briefly mention the types of symptoms I've seen.

Description of performance problems and rendering quirks

The obvious performance issues are pretty self-evident: I'll make an edit, and the version I see after clicking on "save page" doesn't have my changes, or perhaps there is a delay before my changes are reflected in the article's history; in some cases, I'll do a WP:PURGE, which often seems to update the current version, but not always (as in today). Almost always I follow WP:SLOW and don't think anything more about it; if there's doubt about my changes being saved, my Special:Contributions page seems like it is always up-to-date even if article history or the current article version is out-of-date.

But in recent months I've started seeing some weird quirks in WP's page rendering and other functionality problems. They sometimes seem to be accompanied by slower-than-average performance. One common example is the illusion of page protection/semi-protection. I edit without logging in and as vandalism and page patrollers have clashed more often, I've had to get more and more used to pages being protected or semi-protected. A few months ago I clicked on "view source" anyway, and I'm finding there are a good number of cases where I am allowed to edit the article. I don't know if its just with semi-protected articles or if other kinds of protection behave that way. I can say that in all cases when "view source" is displayed, section editing is never available.

Another page rendering quirk I've seen is the occasional dynamic change in what wp:User style a page is rendered in. Obviously when you don't log in, you get the default style, but I've had multiple cases in the past few months where after I click on "save page" I get results back that are rendered in a different style than the default, or, more often, in a raw version seemingly rendered without the benefit of any style sheet at all. I should point out that this particular symptom hasn't happened in a couple of months, so it might have be a transient effect of some style tweaking that I think was going on not too long ago.

It seems plausible to me that this style rendering quirks could be attributed to performance problems; I usually use firefox, and I believe that when my local internet connection is slow, it can manifest as a delay or even a failure to apply style sheets to the current page of any website, WP included.

I am curious if others are seeing the same things in these past months. I also have a question: if I want to to get a performance status and a state of health check about WP, where's the best place to go? I known about http://status.wikimedia.org/ and http://ganglia.wikimedia.org/; I also know that WP:CHAT and certain email aliases/archives are available. But I've got to think that there must be some page in the WP: namespace that summarizes WP health and performance from the user's perspective instead of the subsystem perspective presented by those sources. I've tried WP:HEALTH, WP:STATUS, WP:PERFORMANCE, all to no avail, as well as WP:FAQ WP:FAQ/Technical, and FAQs mentioned at the village pumps. I've tried some archive searches too, and briefly resorted to googling various topics.

Thanks in advance. 67.101.7.230 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 18:29, 23 May 2011 (UTC).

This is probably related to this thread above on this page. A lot of people are frustrated. I'm on a semi-Wikibreak until it's fixed, it's too frustrating. (Obviously not a full break or I wouldn't be typing this.) -- Atama頭 19:43, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

Google Chrome inserts line on talk pages

This issue was posted at the Reference Desk five days ago, and the poster was told to bring the issue here; I don't think they have, so I will add it. Often, when I write a post on a talk page, Chrome adds an extra line break before my indent. (Examples in the link above.)

Can you help?  ajmint  (talk•edits) 19:29, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

Is this the same issue as #Google Chrome inserts an extra line break when adding a comment to a talk page, above? -- John of Reading (talk) 19:36, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, didn't see that (just searched archives).  ajmint  (talk•edits) 19:39, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

Image update! GAH!

It's really getting on my nerves, images don't update, even if I purge really hard! Are there any admins in here who can fix this? --Beao 23:21, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

I'm seeing the same problem. Modified images uploaded 6-12 hours earlier aren't showing up, even after clearing my browser cache and clicking on the Wikipedia clock display to force purging. This has been going on for several days now, and it doesn't matter what time of day it is. I first encountered it on 23 May 2011, while trying to upload a new version of a rather small JPEG image, and every image since then has been a pain in the ass. Somebody obviously monkeyed with the server settings; thumbnail regeneration has become nonexistent. Could it be that the purging command is no longer being executed? —Quicksilver^{T @} 16:18, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

Small problem with the timeline tag

Please assist I was looking at the timeline inserted into Sikhism (permanent link) using the <timeline> tag and I noticed that if you use the following scheme:

PlotData=

  width:10 textcolor:black align:left anchor:from shift:(12,-6)

  bar:Nanak from:1469 till:1539 color:1

...

It creates a timeline that includes the text "1469-1539" in the legend at the bottom, rather than the typographically correct "1469–1539" (that is, it generates a hyphen rather than an ndash, cf. WP:DASH.) Can someone amend this? Should I open a bug at Bugzilla for this? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 23:38, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

Although this should be a noncontroversial request at bugzilla:, I'd personally wait until the current dispute over dashes/hyphens is resolved before filing a bug. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 16:43, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

IP's contributions not showing up when using popups

Clicking on [15] which I sourced through an edit, I find the IP's contributions. Going through popups [16] I don't find any, why is this? Dougweller (talk) 04:31, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

The contribs show for me with Popups. Try hard refreshing the current page, and then the contribs page. Gary King (talk · scripts) 05:24, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, but the first url still doesn't show anything. I did shift/F5 in Chrome and also copied it to IE which I hadn't used for the url before. Dougweller (talk) 08:02, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

• The answer lies within the 'User:' in the popups' url (note it's not present in the former link). Somehow, it inserts the 'User:' whilst it ought not to. --Ohconfucius ^¡digame! 08:47, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

I see a contribs list on a mouseover of both links. I have had similar issues in the past, however. Killiondude (talk) 08:55, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

Mouseover works for both also, but the 2nd url (not the first, sorry) still doesn't. Dougweller (talk) 09:04, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

Usually when this happens, refreshing the page fixes it for me. When Popups content doesn't load, I think it's usually because it times out when trying to contact the server, since the site can be slow sometimes. Gary King (talk · scripts) 18:01, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

Article Feedback tool showing up on redirects

Why Presently, users can rate Kierkegaard, even though it's simply a redirect to Søren Kierkegaard. What is the purpose of this? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 06:38, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

This is accidental and Eloquence has already stated here somewhere, that they will look into that this week. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:30, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

A fix has been implemented and should go live with the next deployment.--Eloquence* 17:46, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

Project: Kill

Hi. I created Project: Kill as a redirect to a Leslie Nielsen film which actually has that name. However, it has placed it as a Wikipedia:Kill wrongly. The redirect is currently up for deletion at here. I need a tech guru to move Project Kill to Project: Kill as the title of the film article and evade it going to Wikipedia:kill.♦ Dr. Blofeld 11:53, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

This is not possible. "Project:" is the native name of the Wikipedia namespace. It cannot be used as an article name. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:51, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

See also: Wikipedia:Namespace#Aliases. On Wikisource for instance, Project: redirects to the Wikisource namespace. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:03, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

It explicitly says there: "Project: Mersh is located at Project Mersh (Project: is an alias for the Wikipedia namespace)". עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 11:56, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

Arecaceae

Anyone else notice anything wrong with this page, or is it just me? Angryapathy (talk) 16:52, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

Seems normal to me; could you describe what is wrong with the page as you see it (or take a screenshot)? /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 17:47, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

Looks fine to me too. If you didn't specify what the problem was, I assume that something went horribly wrong at the beginning of the page, probably the infobox, since the timeline at the top can perhaps look odd in certain circumstances. Just try bypassing your cache to get the latest version of the page. Someone vandalized the infobox so it was broken for a brief moment but it's fixed now. Gary King (talk · scripts) 17:59, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

Why is Wikipedia so horribly slow?

Wikipedia was never quick, but now it's slower on broadband than it was on a telephone line. I've just have seen a moderately long page (60,658 bytes) take over 3 minutes. The main culprit may be bits.wikimedia. --Philcha (talk) 18:26, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

I misread your section title as, "Why is Wikipedia so horrible now?" and was tempted to agree with you ;) ╟─TreasuryTag►person of reasonable firmness─╢ 18:28, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

Changed "horrible" to "horribly" in section title. —Quicksilver^{T @} 16:33, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

Please see #Slow load time above - although, it was supposed to have been fixed by now. —DoRD (talk) 19:09, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

Stale article histories

For days I have been seeing seeing stale article histories. Example: Revision history of Louis XIV of France stops on May 19, even though following the "next edit" link via "Compare selected revisions" shows at least 6 more edits. Those extra edits show up in user histories, just not in the article history. This is not the only article with a stale history, just an example. I have cleared my cache many times, turned off Firefox 4.0.1 and turned off rebooted my computer. Is it me or is it Wikipedia? 71.234.215.133 (talk) 19:38, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

This seems to be only for logged out users, but yes, I've seen this too. - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 21:09, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

This should be fixed now, the same thing happened with newer versions of images. Apparently the slowness of the servers, also had another issue, sometimes purge commands would get lost, and the squids never received the latest versions of articles because of that. Both issues should be fixed now I think, but i'm not totally 100% sure. I'm not sure if the WMF is sure yet. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:35, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

It is still occurring. More information: if I edit an article the stale histories update; if I clear the cache after that the stale histories return. I find this frustrating, as one of the stale histories is to this project page. 71.234.215.133 (talk) 11:24, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

"Slowness of the servers" isn't a valid explanation. Somebody monkeyed with settings or software and broke something. I've seen image thumbnails not being updated for upwards of 10-12 hours, and the purge command doesn't force an update anymore, either. —Quicksilver^{T @} 16:31, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

Problems with SVG images

I've noticed a number of SVG maps today that aren't displaying properly. For example, if I visit https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/File:US_states_by_total_state_tax_revenue.svg I see a generic icon that looks like a blue amoeba with two tangent lines. If I click on that and visig http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/US_states_by_total_state_tax_revenue.svg I see the map properly. The map does not show up in the article State tax levels in the United States properly. I tried purging but this did not seem to help. -- Beland (talk) 04:48, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

That image that you are seeing appears to be an icon that is part of the software. When I click to go to the SVG image directly to see how it renders there, my status bar in Internet Explorer 8 (which I believe has the Adobe SVG plugin installed) says "syntax error: line 10, column 2" and the image does not appear to load (or maybe it s just loading very slowly; who knows), so maybe there is a problem with the SVG image, but who knows. [|Retro00064|☎talk|✍contribs|] 06:11, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

The file is perfectly legitimate although using an unusual namespacing style; there's a bug in our code. Looks like bugzilla:27465 -- I've reopened the issue as the previous fix didn't actually solve the problem correctly. (Basic problem: SVG / XML allows many different ways of specifying that the file is SVG [XML namespacing]. The current code assumes that SVG always had a particular namespace prefix or no prefix, which is an assumption this file violates.) --brion (talk) 23:11, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

I've added this and some other files as regression test cases in our phpunit suite, and a fix is queued up for review & merging (see bug link above for full info). --brion (talk) 00:10, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

Overwriting .mid-files

Is it just me or is there something special about .mid sound files that makes it impossible to overwrite one with a new version? Yesterday I tried to upload a new version over an existing .mid file at File:Later Folia.mid. The upload log correctly registered my new version, but it's still the old version that gets played. Purging the page didn't help, and it's now almost a day. What am I doing wrong? Fut.Perf. ☼ 06:16, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

I can't answer the "What am I doing wrong" bit, but would a G6 deletion to allow upload of the new file work? Ok, it's possibly bending the rules about an admin using the tools to do something a non-admin can't, but as it's with the intention of improvement, possibly WP:IAR is involable. Mjroots (talk) 08:29, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

Hmm, I don't think I would want to do that. In that case it would be better to just upload it under a new name. Fut.Perf. ☼ 11:39, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

There's been a problem for the last few days in uploading modified images, too. New thumbnails aren't showing up for hours, although when one clicks on the full-size link, it is clear that the update has been accepted. I uploaded an edited image 10 hours ago, and it still isn't showing the new version thumbnail in the article. There may be a similar problem going on with all other media files. I first saw the problem with images on May 23, 2011. —Quicksilver^{T @} 16:27, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

page view is very large scale

The Wikipedia web page is such a large scale that the text is broken down to 5 or less words per line and all other features such as images are outside my view. I need to scroll over to access them.

This is the only web page that has this effect, so I don't believe it has anything to do with my settings.

My internet explorer is version 6.0.

Where can I view any responses?

Sue Haley <e-mail redacted> — Preceding unsigned comment added by 165.83.133.249 (talk) 12:59, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

You probably accidentally enlarged your font size for Wikipedia. To undo it, try Ctrl + Num -, or the View menu (I think it's called something like that in IE). User<Svick>.Talk(); 18:56, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

To restore default font/zoom size in most browsers, user [Ctrl]-0 (press the "zero" key while holding the Ctrl key down). —Quicksilver^{T @} 19:07, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

Making a compare from a history list - "on a new browser tab or browser page" option would be useful

• When I have called for a long edit history list display, it takes up my time and Wikipedia's server's time to make the table, if it is long. When I then call for a compare of edits, the compare display overwrites the history display, and when afterwards I click the browser's left-arrow to go back to the history display, I must wait while Wikipedia's server remakes the history display. It would be useful if I could call the compare display to come on a new browser tab or on a new browser page. (I use Firefox.) Anthony Appleyard (talk) 13:57, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

Try the TabSubmit add-on. I just now installed it because your post reminded me how much I have missed the SubmitToTab add-on that was lost in an update somewhere, and it seems to work the same way (Firefox 4.0.1). - 2/0 (cont.) 14:41, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

That's a great extension for something I knew "had to be doable somehow"! Wish it worked with the javascript bullsh^Wweb-systems I have to use at work, but everywhere else seems to work fine. Thanks for finding it. DMacks (talk) 15:15, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

hello

Hello can you please take a look at my User:Penpaperpencil/modern.css page? It is saying this to me: "Code that you insert on this page could contain malicious content capable of compromising your account. If you are unsure whether code you are adding to this page is safe, you can ask at the appropriate village pump. The code will be executed when previewing this page under some skins, including Monobook." and I didn't understand it. It would be really helpful if you could help :) PenpaperpencilTalk09:06,5/26/2011

That is a standard notice whenever you are editing a css page. There's nothing harmful on your page. (Aside: your signature contravenes WP:SIG#NT) -- John of Reading (talk) 09:16, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

Thanks and I didn't know about the SIG sorry :( PenpaperpencilTalk12:38,5/26/2011

Using template parameters containing spaces in URLs

This is actually a problem from gv.wiki, but we don't have anyone there to advise. I'm hoping someone here can help; it's probably something simple I just don't know about. We are having problems with our version of {{Wikispecies}}, which is very simplified, breaking when article names or the alternative parameters contain spaces. Without encoding, the URL just links to the first word in the name and uses the rest as link text. I can't find a way to encode them properly; PAGENAMEE doesn't help when the Wikispecies name doesn't match ours (which is most of the time), and urlencode substitutes a plus for a space, which doesn't match the WS article names. Any suggestions? -- Shimmin Beg (talk) 15:01, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

m:Tech is a new forum for issues from any Wikimedia wiki.

It sounds like you either need to specify a parameter name ({{foo|bar=http://google.com/?search=bing}} instead of {{foo|http://google.com?search=bing}}) or you can try {{urlencode:}}. --MZMcBride (talk) 15:09, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for your advice; I'll use m:Tech in future. Urlencode broke with spaces, but I've managed to fettle it by cribbing liberally from {{Commons}}. -- Shimmin Beg (talk) 15:37, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

Purpose of the article feedback tool?

I already brought that up at the MediaWiki page about the tool, but since I didn't get a reply, I will repeat this question here.

What is the intended purpose of the article feedback tool? I think we already have well defined criteria for determining an articles quality (like neutrality of the article, number of sources etc). Also, who is supposed to analyze the collected data? And when the collected data has been analyzed, in which way will this information be used to improve the article and by whom? I know these questions may sound silly, but I just can't see the answers.

Toshio Yamaguchi (talk) 15:06, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

Did you read mw:Article feedback, mw:Article feedback/FAQ, and mw:Extension:ArticleFeedback? --MZMcBride (talk) 15:10, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

I didn't read the pages you linked to yet, because I didn't know they exist until now :) Thanks very much for the links. Toshio Yamaguchi (talk) 15:19, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

Categories and redirects and links-to-redirect-to-self

After seeing the phrase "Individual Olympic Athletes" so capitalized in an article, but not a link, I looked to see if an article on Individual Olympic Athletes existed. It turns out that this title exists, but as a cross-namespace redirect leading to Category:Olympic competitors.

Fine. But what doesn't seem fine is that where it lists "Pages in category 'Olympic competitors'", one of them is Individual Olympic Athletes -- the same title whose redirect brought me to this page. If I saw that sort of thing on a normal page, I'd just edit and delink it -- but that concept doesn't apply here, since the content of a category page is generated automatically.

Presumably what's going on here is that because the page with the #REDIRECT line (necessarily) contains a link to the category page, the category processor is assuming that that page is itself in the category, and generating and entry on the category page for it. But in this case, not so!

I can't see why this would be intended behavior, so I'm assuming it's a bug and reporting it here in VP/T. If the point would be better raised elsewhere, please feel free to copy and paste this message accordingly.

(Side comment: if Individual Olympic Athletes is worth redirecting, then so is Individual Olympic Athlete. As an unregistered user -- who is going to remain that way, so don't bother replying -- I can't add that redirect, but perhaps someone else will.)

--208.76.104.133 (talk) 19:12, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

When did it become acceptable to link from article space to Category space? I thought that was a no-no. 216.93.212.245 (talk) 21:57, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

Not (necessarily). A colon here is sufficient to prevent the link from also categorising the page. That's fixed that one at least :) - Jarry1250 ^{[Weasel? Discuss.]} 19:15, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

Edit Count at Time[x]

I found Wikipedia:WikiProject_edit_counters, but it didn't seem to have what I was looking for. I need to write queries of the form "How many edits did user [x] have at time [y]?" This can be done using the API -- but extremely inefficiently, as you can only fetch metadata for 500 user contributions at a time (and I am not even interested in that metadata, I just want a raw count). Thus, prolific users and bots require many recursive calls -- leading to a ton of network traffic and lots of time. Anyone know of a more elegant solution? Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 20:24, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

You could request a toolserver account and then query the database directly. User<Svick>.Talk(); 21:17, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

File showing as old, deleted version

File:Talesofthenewteentitans4starfire.jpg is having a problem clearing the large size display image.

An editor decided to upload a "new" version of the file - actually a different image entirely - to avoid editing an article to get their way.

This was reverted, but while the thumbs and the archive of the original upload rendered the restored image, the large display on the file page and where the image is in use didn't change. Multiple reverts haven't cleared it. Aplying "purge" hasn't cleared it. Deleting the page and restoring only the original upload hasn't cleared it. Uploading from off page hasn't cleared it. Are there any other options?

- J Greb (talk) 21:58, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

Maybe delete the entire image off, and reupload them on a slightly different name? If original history need to be kept, delete all and restore only the required files (make sure each filehistory has a relevant pagehistory), and then try moving to a different name? This may be related to the server lag issues experienced at Commons (where some changes takes days to show up). Hope this helps. Regards. Rehman 06:00, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

Help needed with Miszabot archiving

Resolved

 – at Talk:2011 end times prediction

At Talk:2011 end times prediction we are set up for Miszabot to archive after 10 days (at least I think we are)... but for some reason it is not shifting old talk threads to the archives. A lot of the threads have comments that are more recent... but not all. Could someone take a look at it, please? Blueboar (talk) 23:50, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

Seeing old versions of pages

A lot of pages that I'm visiting are not displaying the latest revision. Definitely not a template issue than can be cleared up by purging, not a cache issue either because this happens to pages I haven't previously vistited. For instance, Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/University_of_California_Anti-Chinese_racism is showing up as still being an open AFD, even though it's been closed. Possibly related: many pages (including this one) are showing "view source" instead of "edit this page" despite not actually having any level of protection . 169.231.53.195 (talk) 05:03, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

Bundling nominornewtalk with Autoconfirmed package

The 'nominornewtalk' right is no big deal, but there's no reason it shouldn't already be bundled with the autoconfirmed user rights package. I mean, I don't want to get a new messages bar because a user spell-checked their own message 10 minutes after my last response, it's stupid and I hate that bar enough already. I'm sure other users feel the same about the message bar as I do. Thoughts? —James ^{(Talk • Contribs)} • 9:00pm • 11:00, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

• Bad Idea™ ΔT _{^{The only constant}} 11:02, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

Skype problem - processesing "invisible" text

A screenshot of the Wikipedia page on Colin Fleming illustrating the problem.

In the screenshot shown here, the template {{dts|2009|September|22}} produces the hidden output 02009-09-22 followed by the visible 22 September 2009. The 02009-09-22 22 September 2009 is interpretted by the Skype extension/add-on in web browsers as a phone number and rendered as such, meaning the hidden output becomes, undesirably, shown as a phone number. It is hard to determine how many pages this affects as it depends on whether the {{dts}} sort output and displayed output combine to make a phone number, but the Skype add-on is quite common in all web-browsers. Is there some way we can alter code in dts to stop this happening or block the add-on on wikipedia pages, I cannot image we have many actual phone numbers as WP:NOTDIRECTORY. Also this problem may transcend beyond this one template. Ideas welcome. Thanks, Rambo's Revenge (talk) 12:08, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

Problem with updating a video link change that existed on an older Wikipedia page

I have the xlinkbot reverting a link on the yo-yo page. I went ahead and released a video that corresponds to the yoyo wiki page into the public domain awhile back. The link worked fine without any problems. I accidently removed the clip that the video was linked to online(YouTube). I've uploaded the clip and tried re-linking it on Wikipedia and a bot keeps reverting the link to the removed status.

Yo-yo techniques[edit] SleepingFor more details on this topic, see Sleeper (yo-yo trick). Keeping a yo-yo spinning while remaining at the end of its uncoiled string is known as sleeping. Sleeping is the basis for nearly all yo-yo tricks other than looping, the player first putting the yo-yo in a "sleep" before throwing the yo-yo around using its string. Most modern yo-yos have a transaxle or ball bearing to assist this, but if it is a fixed axle yo-yo, the tension must be loose enough to allow this. The two main ways to do this are (1), allow the yo-yo to sit at the bottom of the string to unwind, or (2) perform lariat or UFO to loosen the tension (see yo-yo basics for video demonstration of throw down, sleeper, and UFO using a responsive yo-yo).

The updated link is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PjCBMrTc48.

- Luke Renner lukerennerstringslinger@live.com  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.56.212.17 (talk) 13:41, 27 May 2011 (UTC)