Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)

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Restored file version is incorrect

I ran into something weird, wondering if anyone's seen this before. The history, as best I can tell, is that File:Der Schatz (1923).jpg was uploaded in 2016 as a 640 × 480 image, DatBot replaced it in 2017 with a smaller 365 × 273 image, the original image was F5 deleted, and then today the original version was undeleted. What's odd is that the undeleted original file is showing up as an exact copy of the smaller version, and trying to revert back to it gives the error message "The upload is an exact duplicate of the current version of File:Der Schatz (1923).jpg." Anyone know why this might happen? hinnk (talk) 02:39, 15 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Hinnk, Try purging the page cache? Jay Cubby 16:03, 15 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I tried that, didn't do anything unfortunately. hinnk (talk) 16:25, 15 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Able to replicate. The older version is in fact a duplicate Jay Cubby 16:55, 15 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, I ended up submitting a bug report in case there's an underlying issue that might affect other files. Not too worried about this particular file, I should be able to recreate the original. hinnk (talk) 18:41, 17 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Inconsistencies with #assessment of dabs after null edits

[1] correctly says both of Lathyrism (disambiguation) and Bell TV are "Disambig" class. If you null-edit the talk page of one of those, it suddenly becomes "" (unknown) class in the database ([2]). If you null edit it again, it regains it. I've done this a few times on-and-off and it seems consistently reproducible. This does not behave the same for all pages: for now it looks like this happens solely to pages that are tagged only with {{WikiProject Disambiguation}}. For pages that have WP:DAB and another project, null editing makes a supplementary "" row appear and disappear. For pages that don't have the WP:DAB tag, they apparently always have a supplementary "" row on top of the correct one, and null-editing changes nothing. Anyone have an idea why? — Alien 3
3 3 09:31, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Courtesy ping to @MSGJ as they maintain the WP:PIQA ecosystem. —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 12:00, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I can reproduce this via [3]. It seems it may be because {{WikiProject Disambiguation}} is adding the assessment twice, once in the meta module and once manually (added by Galobtter in 2018). I have removed the additional call, so we can see if that fixes the problem, although why adding an assessment twice would cause it to disappear I have no idea — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 12:55, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

That made the assessment disappear permanently, so I have reverted my change. Time to study the code in the module ... — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 12:58, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@MSGJ: found it: the shell calls class_mask with the wrong FQS value: disambig is part of the Full Quality Scale. That false should be a true. Took me an awfully long while to find (followed a red herring and fully checked every step of the execution of class_mask). — Alien 3
3 3 19:18, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

That is not actually the part which is causing the issue, but I can see the logic you have followed. The page assessment on the banner shell does not run on non-articles. The line which needs to be changed is Module:WikiProject banner#L-487. Currently it runs even if class and importance are blank, which is the case for the Disambiguation template. And that blank assessment is overwriting the other one. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 08:16, 17 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This is the fix, and I have tested it successfully on Talk:Bell TV using {{WikiProject Disambiguation/sandbox}} — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 08:23, 17 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed, you're right. Many thanks. — Alien 3
3 3 11:13, 17 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, will probably deploy the fix later today — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 11:35, 17 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I applied this change yesterday but I think I need to revert it. On thinking further, PageAssessments are not just for class and importance ratings. They also serve to identify pages with WikiProjects. There are lots of projects which do not use quality or importance assessments, but my change yesterday will be removing them from the database. So instead, can we use a different project name for the manually applied page assessment. Something like this

"Disambiguation": {
 "class": "",
 "importance": ""
}
"Disambiguation2": {
 "class": "Disambig",
 "importance": ""
}

— Martin (MSGJ · talk) 10:35, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

incategory searching

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T399730

Similar to this discussion from two months ago, an incategory search of Category:Living people (a check I have to perform several times daily, due to the constant addition of draftspace and userspace pages to it) is once again failing to clear and drop pages that were already removed from it hours ago.

The explanation last time was that "the indexing pipeline got stuck today...and no updates were being processed" — so that may have happened again, and I wanted to let people know so that it can be looked into and fixed. Bearcat (talk) 13:50, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Bearcat: It shows the time of the searched revision. Add sort=last_edit_desc to see results in descending order of that time, and you only have to examine pages with a newer time than the last time you fixed all pages. At least in theory. In practice, the previous time you made the search it may have missed pages which were added to the category recently in an edit which had not been indexed by that search. The category could also have been added by a template edit without editing the page. But I think it's good enough when it's not important whether a page stays a little longer in the category. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:41, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

There's nothing to "sort" — since the search isn't updating at all, it isn't picking up any new additions since my last cleanup run on the current contents either. But draft or user pages getting added to that category happens at a rate of at least 40 to 50 pages per day, and with over a million articles it's just not possible to manually browse the category for draft or user pages at all — so it's a search that needs to be performed several times a day and can't just wait a week, and we can't just let it slide as "not a problem" if the search is failing to update at all. Bearcat (talk) 15:03, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Might a watchable subpage of Wikipedia:Database reports with output similar to quarry:query/95644 work better? (Admittedly, sometimes the database mirrors that both that and Quarry pull from sometimes get out of date too - try searching the VPT archives for "replication lag" - but it seems to happen less often.) —Cryptic 18:37, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Replag won't be a factor if using the API though. It's possible to setup API-based reports like at User:SDZeroBot/Category:Living people outside mainspace. (I combined Ahecht's queries for userspace and draftspace, as the cmnamespace parameter is multi-valued.) – SD0001 (talk) 13:14, 22 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, the api version is clearly superior. What I don't get is how it's so much faster - basically instant, when the query version consistently takes about ten seconds even when cached, and up to a minute otherwise. There's no possible index, so it still has to look through all 1.1 million members of the category. (Also, if we're going to link an api query, it should probably have all non-0/14 namespaces, not just 2 and 118 - the ones from talk: and so on are just as problematic.) —Cryptic 15:19, 22 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Theory: it's only looking at the first 500 results, and then filtering by namespace. Which is why clicking on the Talk link in the box on CAT:LP shows no results, despite there being four matching pages (Talk:David Dancrade, for example, which I deliberately haven't fixed). Also why my unsaved, aborted attempt to add a "non-article" link to {{APIQuery categorymembers/table}} shows nothing for Category:Living people but seems to work for Category:Automatic category TOC generates Large category TOC. Still some minimal value when using the recent links, I suppose, but anything not immediately caught would be lost forever. —Cryptic 16:27, 22 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Bearcat You can use Userspace pages from most recent and Draftspace pages from most recent to get the lists directly from the API without having to worry about search indexing. I added a collapsed box to Category:Living people that allows retrieving these lists for any namespace. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 18:48, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This specific instance of bad search data seems to have fixed itself before anyone could look into it. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 21:47, 21 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Expand language template won't recognize topic

I've been working through the uncategorized pages that have been tagged from translation from Italian to sort them out into the various topical categories. I have found an issue with certain uses for the expand template:

For example the page 2022–23 FC Crotone season used the template

{{Expand language|topic=|langcode=it|date=January 2025}}

This correctly displayed the banner for the page to be translated and the page correctly appeared in the general category Category:Articles needing translation from Italian Wikipedia, however when I filled in the topic field the page disappeared from the general category and never appeared in the Category:Sports articles needing translation from Italian Wikipedia

On the other hand for different pages, for example Mauro Bolognini, the template was

{{Expand Italian|date=November 2024}}

I added the topic field such that it now reads

{{Expand Italian|date=November 2024|topic=bio}}

And now the page correctly appears in Category:Biography articles needing translation from Italian Wikipedia

After some testing it appears that the problem occurs when

{{Expand language|...}}

is used as opposed to

{{Expand Italian|...}}

While I have no problem going back to change the template on the pages I have already sorted if that is the only way to fix this, I am concerned that this issue means there are plenty of pages using the Expand language template which don't appear on any sort of list and that would be very hard to track down. Giuliotf (talk) 21:13, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I should also add the the

{{Expand language|...}}

version of the tag appears to be the one used by Wikipedia:Twinkle and a lot of the problematic tags appear to have been added by Twinkle edits Giuliotf (talk) 21:39, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

In the past, the {{Expand language}} template was a meta-template only; that is, other templates like {{Expand Italian}}, {{Expand Catalan}} and others used {{Expand language}} to do the work. As it says on the doc page:

The primary use of this template is to create a new wrapper template for a particular language.

That used to be its only purpose, but at some point, this was altered, and it is now possible to call it directly. This causes more confusion than it is worth, imho, but I guess that was the consensus at the time. In any case, as you have noticed, the individual Expand language templates handle the |topic= param correctly, so your approach is the right one.

Regarding your concern about categorization, do you have an example? Here are a couple of search links that might help:

all articles calling Expand language
3 dozen which use topic param
1 which uses topic and lang=it (you would need a different search if it uses lang first, and then topic)

If you find some examples which are uncategorized, please post them here. Hope this helps! Mathglot (talk) 21:58, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Mathglot

The Italian article you linked (Cervi Brothers) does not appear in any of the Italian articles needing translation categories, and there are plenty of other examples such as 2022–23 FC Crotone season that I linked above.

@PrimeHunter below suggested that the keyword has not been entered correctly, which appears to be the case for the sports articles in which case there is a problem with the documentation and with the two versions of the command having inconsistent keywords.

Another point is that I've seen other articles (for example Ballando con le Stelle series 10) which used the "Expand Italian" template that had an incorrect keyword that were placed in the general category which seems to be a sensible way of doing it. For the "Expand language" version of the command if an incorrect keyword entered the article is still removed from the general category, but isn't put into another category afterwards; at the very least this command should be updated such that if an incorrect keyword is entered it defaults to the general category Giuliotf (talk) 23:06, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Add ping: User:Giuliotf. Mathglot (talk) 21:59, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Giuliotf: You didn't post the code which failed: {{Expand language|topic=sport|langcode=it|date=January 2025}}. Template:Expand language#Parameters says:

Do not use these parameters for direct transclusion:

|name= (defaults to 'Expand language'; only needed for transcluding templates; could change css class membership if altered, which could affect rendered appearance of the box)
|topic= (could interfere with categorization)

I looked at the code and if you do use |topic= anyway then it has to match a category name, in this case "sports" (plural) in Category:Sports articles needing translation from Italian Wikipedia. It works with |topic=sports but there is contradictory documentation about the extra "s". PrimeHunter (talk) 22:04, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I've just tested this

{{Expand language|topic=sport|langcode=it|date=January 2025}}

with sport singular it doesn't work

{{Expand language|topic=sports|langcode=it|date=January 2025}}

with sports plural does seem to work correctly

{{Expand Italian|date=November 2024|topic=sport}}

with sport singular works correctly

{{Expand Italian|date=November 2024|topic=sports}}

with sports plural doesn't work Giuliotf (talk) 22:22, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

And I've been following this documentation to know the keywords to used Template:Expand Italian, which is what is linked from Category:Articles needing translation from Italian Wikipedia which says to use "sport" singular Giuliotf (talk) 22:25, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

For {{Expand Italian}}) (or any of the individual language templates), it has to do with how coders at the individual templates code the switch statement with selector 'sport' or 'sports'; they all seem to use the singuar, per this search, but the same cannot be said for topic transp, which sometimes must be given that value (e.g., {{Expand German}} or {{Expand Italian}}, but sometimes may use transport for the topic as well (e.g., French, Portuguese). The same variability exists with topic cult. If you find anomalous examples, please list them and they can be brought in line. Mathglot (talk) 23:07, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

None of them appear to use a '#DEFAULT' switch selector, which could be used to detect an invalid topic and return an error instead of doing the categorization differently/wrong. That would have to be added individually, to each Expand FOO template one at a time. Although they wouldn't have to be done all at once, there is common doc for all the individual languages, so we would have to be careful what to say about invalid topics, until they were all done. I looked into the possiblity of unifying all of the individual Expand FOO templates, and while it is possible, it is probably not worth the pretty significant, and very tedious effort to do it. One upside, would be fixing problems like the one you have raised here. But it is doubtful whether it is worth expending that much effort to do it, for a relatively minor improvement from the user's point of view. Then main benefit would be to future maintainers of the template, not users, and that isn't a good enough reason to do it, imho, especially as there are easier methods available right now; i.e., fix the switch statement (add #DEFAULT), fix the doc page, or both. It would be easy to add something to the doc page saying what happens if you pick an invalid topic, and if it doesn't already have that, we should add it.

For the {{Expand language}} template, as PrimeHunter already explained, you just shouldn't use it. Probably an enhancement to that template to catch that case would be an improvement (a general template exists to catch invalid params, and could be used for that.) Mathglot (talk) 23:34, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

For the {{Expand language}} template, |topic= is not an invalid parameter, but it might be supplied with an invalid value. Looking at the wikisource for Template:Expand Italian, it has the following code:

|topic={{#switch: {{{topic}}}
 | bio = Biography
 | geo = Geography
 | gov = Government and politics
 | cult = Culture
 | hist = History
 | mil = Military
 | sci | tech | scitech = Science and technology
 | sport = Sports
 | struct = Building and structure
 | transp = Transport
}}

so {{expand Italian|Football Club Internazionale Milano|topic=sport}} is treated as if it were {{Expand language|otherarticle=Football Club Internazionale Milano|topic=Sports|langcode=it}} and the page is placed in Category:Sports articles needing translation from Italian Wikipedia. This is a subcategory of Category:Articles needing translation from Italian Wikipedia which has 11 subcategories, corresponding to 10 of the 11 possible values for topic; the eleventh is Category:Featured articles needing translation from Italian Wikipedia, which is emitted when |fa=yes is set. There is corresponding, but different, code in Template:Expand French:

|topic={{#switch: {{{topic}}}
 | bio = Biography
 | geo = Geography
 | gov = Government and politics
 | cult
 | culture = Culture
 | hist = History
 | sci | tech | scitech = Science and technology
 | mil = Military
 | sport = Sports
 | transp
 | transport = Transport
 | struct = Building and structure
 | commune = French commune
}}

which means that {{expand French}} allows |topic=culture as an alias for |topic=cult; and also allows |topic=commune, which has no corresponding value in {{expand Italian}}. Compare Template:Expand Neapolitan, where |topic= is silently ignored - it passes a blank value into the |topic= parameter of {{Expand language}}. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 10:46, 17 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps {{Expand ...}} too could use a consolidation like the former {{lang-xx}} templates. Nardog (talk) 12:19, 17 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

As mentioned above, and in greater detail at the template. It is doable, but would be very tedious. Mathglot (talk) 02:39, 20 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:The 50,000 Destubbing Challenge

Can somebody fix the column/flag icon error. If it's the size causing it, help archive entries added from the contest? ♦ Dr. Blofeld 15:54, 17 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This looks done now. Izno (talk) 03:05, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Password Plus and Super Password

Is there a reason the "Display title" feature isn't working properly on Password Plus and Super Password? It should have everything but the "and" italicized, but even with a use of {{displaytitle}} the "and" is still italicized. I tried mucking around with displaytitle and it just kept giving me error messages. Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 16:17, 17 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

According to the documentation for {{Infobox television}}, it automatically italicizes the entire page title. You can try adding |italic_title=no to the parameters and then using DISPLAYTITLE: magic word directly. isaacl (talk) 16:37, 17 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see a recent edit by you (or anyone else) attempting to set displaytitle on that article, so I assume you only previewed? There's a big red warning on preview only that says something else sets it to italicize the whole title. Typically that's an infobox, and - as Isaacl says - here it's two separate transclusions of {{infobox television}}. Either putting it after the infoboxes or (better) adding italic_title=no to their parameters (for both transclusions) works properly. —Cryptic 16:40, 17 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I previewed like five times and kept getting error messages so I just gave up. Looks like it's been fixed though. Ten Pound Hammer • ^{(What did I screw up now?)} 17:36, 17 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed in Special:Diff/1301011499 Ponor (talk) 16:41, 17 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

italic_title=no seems to force the infobox's header to the article name, ignoring name=. Compare output before, after, and reproducible with just {{Infobox television|name=Password Plus|italic_title=no}} on that page (but, strangely, not when previewing here). Might be better to leave the infoboxes as-is and override the title afterwards after all. —Cryptic 16:56, 17 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

That was odd but I found a way to respect name=.[4] PrimeHunter (talk) 22:53, 17 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Amazing fix CMD (talk) 04:12, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Well-spotted. I did look at Module:Infobox and didn't see anything relevant; I didn't think to check which module {{infobox television}} actually called.

I don't think it likely that your fix will survive for long in the face of AWB and bots falling over themselves to remove spaces after open-braces. If they do, using Template:DISPLAYTITLE or its redirect {{displaytitle}} instead of the magic word won't be matched by this misfeature either. Though, they might helpfully unfix that, too. —Cryptic 00:16, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Infobox TV should probably not be that smart. Izno (talk) 03:11, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Unusual edits by single purpose contributor

Hi. I’m just puzzled by some new accounts like Special:Contributions/Khlee560. At least on the iPad the diff is empty. Any idea what this about? Johnjbarton (talk) 22:47, 17 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

If you look at contributions, even deleted contributions, the account has done nothing. But if you look at global contributions you find someone who is mostly active on Ko Wikipedia. I'm assuming that's the Korean language wikipedia. I think this is what happens when you view some pages on a different language Wikipedia while logged in, the software automatically creates your account on that wiki. Ϣere SpielChequers 23:03, 17 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Makes sense thanks! Johnjbarton (talk) 01:48, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Johnjbarton: Ever since WP:SUL went live way back in May 2008, your account has been automatically created on WMF wikis, often when visiting for the first time when logged in; but sometimes it may occur without a visit. I occasionally receive a notification about an edit to my user talk page for a wiki that I am certain that I have never visited, usually for an Asian language. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 08:34, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! I think what happened here was I borrowed my Mom's iPad to look at my Watchlist but the filter setup for the iPad Wikipedia App UI is quite different from the web app. So I saw more diffs than I would usually see. I hope to switch back to my computer soon ;-) Johnjbarton (talk) 16:14, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I just happen to have my mum's iPad (Air 2, if you're interested) right here. Ihe interface is so very different from Windows, I've really only learned how to launch an app... I don't know how to close one, there's no handy "X" icon top right. My nephew says it probably means that I have a whole bunch of apps running silently in the background, soaking up memory, bandwidth and battery. So it may take some days to test your assertion. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:46, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Johnjbarton: I don't know which edits and diff you are referring to. Everybody can make an account and Khlee560 is one of millions with no edits here. Maybe "Show Wikidata edits by default in recent changes" is enabled at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rc, or you enabled Wikidata edits on the Watchlist itself, and you saw something at wikidata:Special:Contributions/Khlee560. @Redrose64: A local account can be created without a visit if a wiki imports the page history of a page you have edited. See meta:Requests for comment/Welcoming policy. Other wikis often import our templates and you have edited many of them. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:04, 19 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Bot job hanging with no errors on toolforge

Christiebot (GAN maintenance) runs every twenty minutes on toolforge. Over the last three weeks or so it has hung several times; this has never happened before. There are no errors in the error log and the audit trail I keep shows nothing unusual. Running toolforge jobs list shows "Running for 14h15m18s" (for example), and the job will do nothing till it's killed. The fix is to delete the job and reschedule it, but of course that means a delay till someone tells me the bot is not running, and until I'm near a computer. Is there any way to automatically kill a job if it's been running for more than, say, thirty minutes? And is there any way to see what state the job is in so I can tell what's going wrong? I can activate more of the audit code in the bot to try to trace where it is hanging, but that'll be slow and probably time consuming; if there's any way to shortcut that process I'd be glad to know about it. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:37, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Looks like wikitech:Help:Toolforge/Troubleshooting is a good place to start, and it has information on how to follow up with help on that system. — xaosflux ^Talk 14:52, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I know the other day they had some network filesystem issues, which could make process hang trying to access a file. Anomie ⚔ 02:23, 19 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, both. I hope it's the network issue, as that would be unlikely to recur. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:51, 19 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Is there any way to automatically kill a job if it's been running for more than, say, thirty minutes? Yes, since phab:T306391 there's a --timeout option in the toolforge jobs command (documented at wikitech:Help:Toolforge/Running_jobs).
Infra issues will always keep happening; it's on you to put the necessary fail-safes in place. – SD0001 (talk) 09:09, 20 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Unable to add shape for delhi

Hey, I am trying to add the boundary shape of Delhi in the infobox, but so far I only see the point. I am unable to understand the problem.

I am using Firefox Nightly (142.0a1) on Android 13. I am using mobile website.

Screenshot: https://files.sahil.rocks/htxke6f4.jpg KhubsuratInsaan (talk) 03:34, 19 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@KhubsuratInsaan:

{{maplink|frame=yes|plain=yes|frame-width=300|frame-height=170|frame-align=center|zoom=4|type=shape|title=Delhi|marker=city|stroke-width2=2|stroke-color2=#808080|id=Q9357528}}

uses National Capital Territory of Delhi (Q9357528) and produces this from data in https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/1942586:

Is that what you wan? PrimeHunter (talk) 09:35, 19 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Oh yes, That is what I wanted. I tried reproducing the map after updating that osm relation to the delhi wikidata, but I am unable to do that and I get a json parsing error. The change that I tried: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Delhi&diff=prev&oldid=1301365134 KhubsuratInsaan (talk) 12:00, 19 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@KhubsuratInsaan: The former version [5] works for me now. The above shows Null Island after your OpenStreetMap changes. It displayed right earlier but I forgot |type2=shape in the rendered code. PrimeHunter (talk) 09:48, 20 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Oh thanks. the article looks better now. KhubsuratInsaan (talk) 10:01, 20 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Category:Harv and Sfn no-target errors

I am working through this Category and have come upon an article with no obvious issues, Don Aker. I tried to fix what I thought might be the problems but created more, eventually gave up, and am throwing myself on the tender mercies of the Village Pump. Can someones here please take a look and tell me what I am missing? And maybe even fix the issue while you're at it? Thanks, Shearonink (talk) 01:13, 20 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, Shearonink, can you double-check which article you were working on, that you need help with? There are no recent edits by you to Don Aker. Mathglot (talk) 02:09, 20 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I did say I gave up... I simply returned that article to the state I found it in, not wanting to compound any pre-existing errors. I couldn't figure out what the errors were, my Harv error-catcher gadget didn't catch them. But the article is sitting in the Category so I know *something* is wrong. - Shearonink (talk) 02:15, 20 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

|author={{Text|Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia}}

Module:Footnotes reads the wikitext so it sees that author as a {{text}} template as plain text; not what that template produces. Rewrite the long-form template like this:

{{cite web |date=14 April 2020 |title=Author spotlight: Don Aker |url=https://writers.ns.ca/author-spotlights/author-spotlight-don-aker/ |website=[[Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia]] |access-date=16 June 2025 |ref={{sfnref |''Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia'' |2020}}}}

"Author spotlight: Don Aker". Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia. 14 April 2020. Retrieved 16 June 2025.

and the short-form templates like this:

{{Sfnmp|''Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia''|2020}}^[1]

References

^ Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia (2020).

—Trappist the monk (talk) 03:11, 20 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Trappist the monk - Thanks for the explanation. I did what you posted but have also adjusted the single author "sfnmp" cites to "sfnp". My edits from your suggestions have dropped this article from the Category in question. Yay! Chipping away... - Shearonink (talk) 04:46, 20 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Missing Reply links

Why are Reply links not appearing in the last two sections of the talk page Talk:Washington metropolitan area? The signatures aren't malformed, as far as I can tell. Largoplazo (talk) 15:38, 20 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

One of your posts from had an unclosed blockquote, should be fixed now. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 15:48, 20 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, sure, blame it on me. 😄😉 Oops. Thanks for catching that! Largoplazo (talk) 16:42, 20 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

alleged "massive leak on Wikimedia sites"

This item] on Hacker News claims a "massive leak on Wikimedia sites". A poster at one of the criticism sites asked why this wasn't asked here so i figured it would be easy enough to ask:

was there a leak?
when?
was any of our data put at risk?
anything else we should know?

2600:1010:A121:E21D:F194:32D8:71A1:7788 (talk) 22:54, 20 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'm having a hard time taking anything a forum post linking to a site called "wikipediasucks.co" says seriously. Sophisticatedevening^(talk) 00:43, 21 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Those are supposedly oversighted edits. The policy tells you what kind of information this is. The thread is dismissive about the validity of the leak and supposedly the host took the data offline. At the very least it is not accessable. Like one of the chatter wrote, this is more likely to be considered serious by the companies and idividuals that where libeled or attacked in said oversighted edits than Wikipedia itself. The affected companies and individuals are usually the same as the articles the oversighted edits was made on. Snævar (talk) 06:37, 21 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The claimed leak is of data which was once public before being removed for good reasons. Anyone who loaded the right article at the right time could have read and saved it. Every monthly database dump will contain revisions which have since been redacted. There are websites (hopefully with good lawyers) which exist to retain articles Wikipedia is deleting. And of course, any fool could fill their own website with the same libel, copyvios, personal information and offensive material without Wikipedia's help. If the leak exists, it's simply a catalogue of bad edits that were reverted and suppressed efficiently to Wikipedia's credit. The file will be "massive" in the sense that Wikipedia has a lot of words, but I don't think it's going to change our world. Certes (talk) 07:29, 21 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I am pretty sure I've seen researchers saving a number of edits, then paring down the list to all these edits that were oversighted, in order to get an idea of what we use oversighting for. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 09:24, 21 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Just curious: what is "oversighting"? Johnjbarton (talk) 23:23, 21 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

WP:OS. Izno (talk) 23:26, 21 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Reply working erratically

Sometimes clicking on it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Doug Weller talk 19:25, 21 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Is it consistent how it fails? That is, does it always fail on certain comments or certain pages, or does it randomly go either way? DLynch (WMF) (talk) 21:00, 21 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Inconsistently. Sohom (talk) 21:12, 21 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Always works for me. Johnjbarton (talk) 23:24, 21 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I've never seen it happen either. Makes me suspect it's a userscript or non-default gadget that's (unpredictably) adjusting the markup in the page that DiscussionTools uses to hook things up. DLynch (WMF) (talk) 01:22, 22 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I have zero scripts loaded at the moment and I still see it happening on a regular basis. Sohom (talk) 01:27, 22 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, so I did some debugging and there are scenarios where mw.dt.init function just doesn't get called with #mw-content-text Sohom (talk) 02:07, 22 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

That's interesting -- mw.dt.init is on a wikipage.content hook. Could you check whether that hook has fired at all when this happens to you? (And, I suppose, whether mw.dt.init actually exists? I'd think the DT modules failing to load is more likely than wikipage.content not firing, given how many things expect it to work.) DLynch (WMF) (talk) 02:32, 22 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-30

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

Updates for editors

The Translation Suggestions feature in the Content Translation tool now has another level of article filters added to the "... More" category. Translators who use the Suggestions feature can now select and receive article suggestions that are customized to geographical locations of their interest using the new "Regions" filter. [6]
Administrators can now limit "Add a Link" to newcomers. The "Add a Link" Structured Task helps new account holders start editing, but some communities have requested the ability to restrict it to its intended audience: newcomers. Administrators can configure this setting within the Community Configuration feature.
View all 29 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

For AbuseFilter editors on some wikis, it is now possible to filter edits based on the RevertRisk score of the edit being attempted. It is only populated if the action being evaluated is an edit. For more information, please see the ORES/AbuseFilter variables documentation.
The Beta Cluster wikis have been moved from beta.wmflabs.org to beta.wmcloud.org. Users may need to update URLs in any tools, or in their password managers. Any related issues can be reported in the task.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

WikiCite 2025 will take place from 29–31 August, both online and in-person in Bern, Switzerland. The event's goals are to reconnect communities, institutions, and individuals working with open citations, bibliographic data, and the Wikidata/Wikibase ecosystem. Registration is open and the call for proposals will be announced soon. [7]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:38, 21 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Template:Nihongo romanizations looking off

Something's changed in how romanizations are shown with {{Nihongo}}. I'm not entirely sure what it is, but I think the Latin-alphabet romanized text might have been changed to use the font meant for Japanese text. It looks odd, and it doesn't work well with long vowels when bolded, e.g. komusō, an example from {{Nihongo}}'s own documentation.

I'm not able to find where the change was made, but I'm likely not able to edit it back anyway. Where was the change, and is there any way it could be put back to how it was before? Thanks. Ookap (talk) 03:05, 22 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Not knowing what it looked like in the past, I can't tell what difference there may be. Have you asked at Template talk:Nihongo? But if several other people do not see a change, the problem may be at your end - a browser upgrade, for instance. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 07:42, 22 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

komusō looks fine to me, as does all of the other text at that template page. I suspect a change on the OP's end. The OP should try the usual tricks: look at it with a different browser, look at it while logged out, look from a different computer (e.g. go to a library). – Jonesey95 (talk) 12:27, 22 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It was a browser thing. Apologies. Ookap (talk) 17:25, 22 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion at MediaWiki talk:Titleblacklist § "Bad user subpages (ending in /)"

You are invited to join the discussion at MediaWiki talk:Titleblacklist § "Bad user subpages (ending in /)". Est. 2021 (talk · contribs) 15:32, 22 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Edit disappearing from watchlist

An occasional problem on this page is that of an edit not showing on the watchlist when all settings suggest that it should.

This edit popped up on my watchlist today, as a result of which I made this edit; and having saved it, the first edit vanished from Special:Watchlist. I've checked, and I am still watching the page. Yes, I do have "Expand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent" enabled. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 16:05, 22 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Do you have changes by you selected in the filters? ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 16:14, 22 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

[FOOTNOTE''Writers'_Federation_of_Nova_Scotia''2020-1] Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia (2020).

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