Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)

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The technical section of the village pump is used to discuss technical issues about Wikipedia. Bug reports and feature requests should be made in Phabricator (see how to report a bug). Bugs with security implications should be reported differently (see how to report security bugs). Newcomers to the technical village pump are encouraged to read these guidelines prior to posting here. If you want to report a JavaScript error, please follow this guideline. Questions about MediaWiki in general should be posted at the MediaWiki support desk. Discussions are automatically archived after remaining inactive for five days.

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Question about user account renames

Hi, I'm hoping someone might be able to provide me with an answer about user account renames. In my work as an admin, and even as an editor, I've looked at user logs and frequently I find log entries about user renames missing. I'd say, 50% of the time, there is no information about a rename even when I know the previous name of the account I'm looking at or the editor is open about the fact that they've been renamed. I look in the logs under Global rename log (where I have never found any relevant information) and User rename log (which sometimes has information) but frequently, there is no information present at all about this change. This can be useful information as an admin, especially if you have dealt with an account before under a previous name. When you are looking at an editor's behavior, it's useful to know if you have already interacted with them before under a different username.

Aren't all renames logged or somehow noted on the user's account? Is there some step global renamers need to take so that the change is in the editor's user logs? Why would it be missing and could it start always being noted in the user logs? Thanks. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 21:41, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

@Liz: if these are somewhat "recent" (last few years) there should be many type of logs and links between accounts. It may help if you provide some examples. Also keep in mind, that due to WP:SUL accounts almost exclusively get renamed on meta-wiki (c.f. meta:Special:Logs/gblrename). — xaosflux ^Talk 22:00, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

The users own logs doesn't show renames. It's in the logs of the renamer but that doesn't help if you don't know who or when. The rename log shows the rename under the old username, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Log?type=renameuser&page=Cassidausa for Cassidausa to Cassibri0615. If they had any userspace pages at the time then the page history will show the rename, e.g. [1]. Otherwise I don't know a method to find renames if you only know the current name, apart from systematically going through all renames at Special:Log/renameuser, or looking for clues in their edits. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:26, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

They show as page moves in the histories of the User: and User talk: pages. See this edit for example. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 00:05, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

There are several ways, we just don't make it "easy" phab:T152830 seeks to make it easier, but hasn't been taken up by any devs. — xaosflux ^Talk 00:18, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for your variety of responses. They help me understand the situation better. The username changes are all recent ones, just from the past year. I changed my own username years ago and I see people are still going to Wikipedia:Changing username/Simple to do renames so I didn't realize that most people bypass Wikipedia and go to Meta Wiki. It still seems like this information would be somehow associated with the editor logs whether it is done here on the English Wikipedia or Meta Wiki. I mean, why would the system be different depending on the project where the request was made? It seems like the system would treat the change the same but then I'm no up on wiki technology.

As for examples, I don't have them in my browser history any more but I'll post back here and tag you the next time I check for this info (probably later today). Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 03:11, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

As far as the "where does someone request" a rename - it doesn't really matter as far as the actual renaming goes, other than making sure it gets to people that can and will do it. As far as the "do renames" part, it is all on meta-wiki since the accounts are global. Local Special:RenameUser is only usable by stewards for very odd use cases. — xaosflux ^Talk 11:16, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

Okay, because of a broken redirect, I found a new rename but I'm not going to be specific because the editor wants to vanish. So, there was nothing in their user logs but when I did go to their user pages, there was an edit that indicated that the page had been moved from, say, User talk:X to User talk:Z. There's an indication of a rename in the page history. But this is really only a feasible approach for recent name changes, not ones that were done a few years ago, where you have to comb through the history of a user talk page if you have a suspicion that there was a name change. So, there is a way to find out but since there are logs for User renames and Global renames, it still seems like this information should be posted to one of these logs. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 22:32, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

Article format issue due to long scripts

I noticed Cebu was in Category:Pages with bad rounding precision, and when viewing it, much of the article was filled with red warning messages that said something like "time to run script exceeded". This article pulls a lot of information from WD. This was what I saw when viewing the last saved version of the article (this one). That version of the article, and subsequent ones, now appear normal to me, so there is nothing to show. But there were dozens of timeout messages displayed. I'm guessing this has something to do with server response time and this article is reaching some limit and times-out. MB 02:40, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

One or more editors of Philippines-related articles has really gotten into populating tables and infoboxes using Wikidata. It looks like their template or module code may need some streamlining or conversion into Lua modules. Here's the report that you can see by using your browser's View Source feature for that page:

Lua time usage: 8.909/10.000 seconds
Lua memory usage: 41585746/52428800 bytes
...
Transclusion expansion time report (%,ms,calls,template)
100.00% 12844.075      1 -total
 65.46% 8408.099     55 Template:PH_town_table
 62.71% 8054.449     53 Template:PH_town_table/mid
 45.12% 5795.319    337 Template:PH_wikidata
 25.83% 3317.306    270 Template:Rnd
 19.81% 2544.300    159 Template:Wd

It is very close to the limits. – Jonesey95 (talk) 06:15, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

The Wikidata module, which template:ph wikidata uses, is a bit old and uses inefficent functions (module:WikidataIB is better). In some places it throws the whole item around between functions in the module. That can be improved, and I did so in the sandbox. There is always going to be a limit at some point, though. Template:ph wikidata also uses several invokes to module:string, according to User:Dragons flight/Lua performance each invoke takes some time.--Snaevar (talk) 16:12, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

Stub creator tool

Sometimes I come across a notable topic that we don't have an article for, and I want to quickly create a stub and seed it with some references, but it's a topic that I don't have experience creating articles about, so I don't know how these articles are "supposed" to look or what they're "supposed" to have.

I'm dreaming of a tool that will let me quickly create a stub by having templates for various topics, where I can choose the topic, fill out some basic information (like infobox parameters and a paragraph of prose) and references, and it will create the page with the correct infobox, navboxes, categories, create the talk page with the right WikiProject tags, etc. Basically, select the article topic (e.g. athlete, scientist, album, book, car, town, school, etc.), fill out a form, click, and it makes a stub with all the right parts. Editors could create new templates for new topics, or custom/personalized/alternate templates, kind of like custom warnings in Twinkle.

Does anything like this exist? Levivich ^harass/_hound 08:05, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

Levivich, don't think such a tool exists, but would be cool. Copy this post to WP:SCRIPTREQ unless you get a response here. (There unanswered requests don't usually get archived, so someone could see it and write a script some time.) – SD0001 (talk) 13:28, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

Levivich Are you looking for something like Template:Biography? Slywriter (talk) 17:28, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

@Slywriter: Yes! Thank you! That's basically what I was looking for... except one of those for various different topic areas. Do you know if we have other templates like that for other topics? I poked around the category tree a bit and can't seem to find a category for that particular kind of template (I don't even know what you call it... an "article template"? An "article generator template"?). What I was looking for was a tool that had a bunch of those kinds of templates so I can select the topic I'm creating an article about and it'll load the appropriate template (or form or whatever) for me to fill out. Knowing a template already exists is a huge help (especially if/when I take up SD0001's advice about posting at SCRIPTREQ)... thanks for pointing me to it! Levivich ^harass/_hound 17:34, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

Levivich,(sorry if ping not needed), so a search for exact text "sample layout" lead me to WP:MOS/Layout, which is handy guide but no samples and another for US Fed legislation Wikipedia:WikiProject_United_States_Federal_Government_Legislative_Data/Proposed_layout. Beyond that, I only found a handful of images showing layouts. Also a review of the history of the user who created the biography (15 years ago) doesn't show them creating/editing any others beyond infoboxes. Slywriter (talk) 18:04, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

@Slywriter: (pings are great on busy pages!) Thanks for looking. (I'm pretty sure there's also a song, album, or musician template in one of the wikiprojects, to add to the list.) I guess the script writing might be the easy part; the hard part is writing all the templates, which requires knowing the best practices and MOSes for all the topics. I guess it wouldn't be so tough to find a recent FA for each topic and convert it into a template like {{biography}} (and then run the template by the appropriate WikiProject); maybe that's something I'll chip away at. Levivich ^harass/_hound 18:14, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

Levivich, this may or may not be helpful,

Category:WikiProject_style_advice

My quick review (only went through A-C) show as some examples aviation has detailed guides but no templates, baseball has a fork of biography, and chemistry has simpler guides, no templates.

{{Aerostart}} {{Aerobiostart}} {{Airlinestart}} ? — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 20:22, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

Perhaps straying too far from your goal but does seem like a missed opportunity not to have layouts readily available as part of the MOS/layout article and then branching from there into the various categories (Arts, Biographies, History, Science etc) and subcategories(painting/book, actor/football).

Anyway, seems like much of the information is somewhere, just not well-organized to direct a new editor towards nor for an experienced editor to find without significant work. Slywriter (talk) 18:51, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

@Slywriter: Not really straying too far from the goal; having the model layouts just as MOS sub-pages (and listed somewhere in the MOS) would be helpful just by itself, and is probably more than half the battle... from there, creating subst-able templates, or a script, is really just incremental convenience. Levivich ^harass/_hound 19:01, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

WikiProject style advice is one place, we do also have specific subMOSs for some topics with varying detail. Example MOS:VG has a short version 'here's what this should look like' and longer form 'here's what goes in each section'. --Izno (talk) 19:52, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

ApiOutput

Hello, I have a question regarding one of the seven skins installed on Wikipedia. Obviously, the six of the seven are Vector, MinervaNeue, Modern, MonoBook, Timeless, and Cologne Blue. The last skin is a bit confusing to me. I can arguably say that the last is not a skin because it does not appear on Special:Version on any wiki, and mw:Special:Search/Skin:ApiOutput returns zero results. However, I can also say that it is a skin in that its appearance does not appear to duplicate any existing skin. ApiOutput appears to be a skin for not just Wikimedia, but for other wiki farms like Fandom. For example: https://community.fandom.com/wiki/Main_Page?useskin=apioutput Is this because this skin is a special case, or is this not even a skin at all? 54nd60x (talk) 12:43, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

It's the hidden "skin" used for the API help output and pretty-printed results output. It omits most of the site chrome, including the sidebar and header, that don't really make sense there (and that may not even work right since the help is served from api.php rather than index.php). Anomie⚔ 13:26, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

How to find sleepers?

I want to do a SQL query for users whose first edit was a long time (say, more than a year) after their account was registered. Any suggestions on query strategy which isn't absurdly inefficient? -- RoySmith (talk) 16:26, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

@RoySmith: the hard part there is likely that we have over 40,000,000 users that would need to be queried - could any other factors that would eliminate a LOT of accounts be used to filter that down first? For example here are your one year 'sleepers' limited to only users that are "bots": quarry:query/52557. — xaosflux ^Talk 19:49, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

Skipping users which have no edits gets rid of 29 million users. Counted with user_editcount in the user sql table, so it is not as accurate as counting revisions (took 147s to run that).--Snaevar (talk) 21:51, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

Snaevar, That's fascinating: 3/4 of the people who make account never perform a single edit! -- RoySmith (talk) 22:42, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

RoySmith, If your home wiki is another wiki, an account will be created for you here on your first visit, even if you are just here to read an article. That likely skews results significantly. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:14, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

@RoySmith: here are 1000 users that meet your "sleeper" criteria - before spending time working on much huger lists you could go through that to see what % of those accounts are "problems" (ignore the "bots" title) — xaosflux ^Talk 13:28, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

Xaosflux, Cool, thanks. That should get me started. Your SQL-fu is much stronger than mine :-) -- RoySmith (talk) 14:24, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

Visual editor copies ref to top of page

Hi all, does anyone know why visual editor seems to do this from time to time? I didn't click anywhere near the top of the article and just was expanding the ref. I don't have any other examples off hand, but I have noticed this happening every now and then. Rather odd. --TheSandDoctor ^Talk 16:36, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

TheSandDoctor, Wow, that's weird. I've never seen it do that myself. Do you have some other examples? -- RoySmith (talk) 17:04, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

@RoySmith: Definitely a weird one. Unfortunately not off hand or that I could find in around a 30 minute search. I know that I have seen it before (typically IPs notice and correct lol), but it seems to happen every few hundred to few thousand edits. Special:Diff/1002506672 is the closest I could find, where it inputted random text at the start of the article. --TheSandDoctor ^Talk 18:24, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

TheSandDoctor, You've got under 500 edits that have been reverted. Maybe look over that list and see if any ring a bell? -- RoySmith (talk) 18:37, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

@RoySmith: Good idea. Found one on Taylor Swift Special:Diff/988510759 --TheSandDoctor ^Talk 18:52, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

TheSandDoctor, Thanks. Were these both instances of you having copied the completed cite template from somewhere and pasted it into the article? The next time this happens, could you please set your time machine to t minus 5 minutes and video record your earlier editing session? -- RoySmith (talk) 19:02, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

Logout

I'm randomly logged out since few deys (monday?). What is the problem this time? Why this problem keeps coming back from time to time? Like atleast 1-2 periods a year. Eurohunter (talk) 18:26, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

@Eurohunter: Sometimes that is due to security and everyone is logged out when a bug is found (that was once or twice last year), other times it could be cookie related. Did you clear your cookies recently? — Preceding unsigned comment added by TheSandDoctor (talk • contribs) 18:55, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

@TheSandDoctor: No it's already like I'm log out few times in hour now. It looks like it log out me but when I refresh I'm loged in again. I never clear my cookies when it's happening. It's not the first time. Eurohunter (talk) 21:08, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

Eurohunter, We've heard this a couple of times over the last few days here.. the reports and the fact that they happen very incidentally, but still somewhat 'often' to some people, make it sound like maybe in some regions some people are accidentally hitting a server which is having problems with login sessions.. .. I advice filing a report in Phabricator. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:10, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

@TheDJ: Interesting. This problem has been seen at least several times in the last few years. Do you have idea what could cause this has returned? Eurohunter (talk) 16:51, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

Eurohunter, there are a 1000 different potential causes for login problems. It keeps coming back because it is a problem that people actually recognise, unlike many other problems that happen each and every day with similar causes. Its recognition bias. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:40, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

I am going through my watchlist, and just now I clicked a diff link on that and found I was shown the page with "Not logged in" and a "Log in" link at the top; inside one second the "Central login" popup appeared. Checking my system, I find that I presently have a flaky connection to my router, so it might have dropped a packet at some point resulting in an incomplete cookie. returning to my watchlist, it displayed as normal and other diff links also worked fine. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 16:48, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

For what it's worth, I've been having similar experiences repeatedly over the past several days. I log in, it shows that I've logged in, and then when I go to another page, I get logged out. After I log back in, I seem to stay logged in for the rest of the session. It looks as though when I first log in, the log in doesn't fully "stick". I'm definitely not clearing anything from cookies or browsing history to cause it. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:25, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

Global watchlist - Update 8

Updates associated with DannyS712's Global watchlist script and the Global watchlist extension:

As I noted in the last issue, I received a grant from the WMF to develop the global watchlist script into an extension. That extension has now been deployed on Meta. Visit m:Special:GlobalWatchlistSettings to get started.

I do not plan on any further developments being made to the user script. I have released version 9.1.0 to both the dev and stable versions, which includes a notification about the extension being available when you use the user script. You can dismiss the notification, and the script still works, but it will no longer be maintained.

Those interested in providing feedback for the extension should use the phabricator board, phabricator:tag/mediawiki-extensions-globalwatchlist. Any bug reports about the extension should be filed there.

This will likely be the last update sent to this list.

Thanks, --DannyS712 (talk) 19:42, 17 February 2021 (UTC)

---

Global watchlist user script: About • Updates • Code
Global watchlist extension: documentation

Correcting accidentally-broken "bad title" links

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T275261

It was pointed out to me earlier that on mobile Discord, surrounding links with less than/greater than symbols (which disables the link preview) causes the greater-than symbol to be appended to the end of the link (so for example, instead of a link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page, you'd get a link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page%3E). This can be detected relatively simply, and a "Did you mean" suggestion displayed, via MediaWiki:Title-invalid-characters (which displays the body of the "Bad title" message), since the second parameter ($2) is the title the reader attempted to access (in the same style as is already done on MediaWiki:Noarticletext, for example if the accessed title is missing a closing parenthesis). As an example, see https://yugipedia.com/wiki/MediaWiki:Title-invalid-characters?action=edit and https://yugipedia.com/wiki/Dark_Magician%3E. I thought about just adding this, but decided that would probably be too bold, and that it would be a better idea to ask here first (which would also allow others more clever than me to suggest potential better ways to go about this). 「ディノ奴千？！」^{☎ Dinoguy1000} 03:14, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

This sounds like a bug in Discord. – Jonesey95 (talk) 06:15, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

Sure, but the missing closing parenthesis which is caught by MediaWiki:Noarticletext is also caused by bugs in various software, so that by itself isn't a convincing argument to me (of course, it might be to the wider community, and that's fine). 「ディノ奴千？！」^{☎ Dinoguy1000} 09:58, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

If some software sees https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Example_(musician) in plain text and wants to make a link then it's a choice whether to guess the ending ) is part of the url or part of the surrounding text. Smart software could look for a matching ( to make the guess but wrong guesses are not bugs and no software will always guess correctly. If Discord (software) has a feature to write <...> around a url like <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page> and the same software then treats > as part of the url then it certainly sounds like a bug which may be fixed. Is this the actual situation, or does the problem arise if somebody copies <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page> to somewhere else without removing >? PrimeHunter (talk) 12:02, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

Regardless of whether this is a bug in Discord, putting the suggestion in the message if a page exists without the > seems like a no-brainer. It's always possible that someone could copy a link wrong (<url> is a typical way of writing URLs in plain-text emails and someone could copy the trailing bracket by mistake), and there are no downsides that I can think of at all? — The Earwig ⟨talk⟩ 18:28, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

I just wondered whether this is a Discord bug which may be fixed soon. I didn't know the email practice you mention so let's do this. We don't have #explode so it must be coded differently. But how far should we go in trying to guess errors? Some users mix up external and wikilink syntax and write stuff like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page|Main Page] which gives Page. Should the message check if you get an existing page by both dropping a pipe and everything after it? PrimeHunter (talk) 21:27, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

You're right. I think we can try splitting at a pipe and stripping any non-title characters from the end of the string, and see what that gives us. — The Earwig ⟨talk⟩ 22:21, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

MediaWiki is, of course, a cruel mistress. I don't see an easy way to escape the $1/$2 arguments to pass into templates or parser functions. — The Earwig ⟨talk⟩ 23:26, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

Thought a bit more and discussed with Legoktm. This should probably be done inside MediaWiki itself, because of insurmountable difficulties in parsing the bad title input to the interface message in wikicode. An option would be for MediaWiki to split the bad title at the first unsupported character and pass that to the message as $3, and then we can wrap that in {{#ifexists:$3|{{Did you mean box|1=$3}}}}. — The Earwig ⟨talk⟩ 23:51, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

The French Wikipedia's birthdate

First Wikipedia revisions history.

Hello,
the 15th of January 2001 is widely recognized as the Wikipedia birthdate. What about the French Wikipedia's birthdate ?

On the 11th of May 2001, posted on the Wikipedia mailing list, a message advertised the creation of french.wikipedia.com. But in the introduction of the article French Wikipedia, 23 March 2001 is mentioned as the starting date of the french edition of Wikipedia (until the 20th of July 2006, the introduction displayed August 2001 as the birthdate. On the 28th of January 2019, the 23 March 2001 date appeared with a citation (24th of September 2010) from ZDNet France). The article's french version does mention the same date, but with a "citation needed" warning.
The oldest version of the french home page is available on Internet Archive (IA) and dates back to the 19 of may 2001. Unfortunately, the archive only shows the 4th revision. On fr.wikipedia.org, the oldest revision of the home page dates back to the 11th of October 2002.
I've wondered whether frWiki could have been mistaken for the french version of Nupedia. According to IA, a Nupedia French Language Translation Project was open since at least the 9 April 2001. A thread of messages (IA archive) from Francais-L mailing list, hosted on www.nupedia.com, shows however that the french Nupedia was not online before the 1st of April 2001 (see messages' content on IA).
On Wikipedia-l mailing list, the 16th of March 2001, Jimmy Wales wrote:
"I want to set up some alternative language wikipedias. French and German would be good [...] I intend to setup the following domain names and wikis: french.wikipedia.com, francais.wikipedia.com (both pointing to the same thing)".
On the 16th of April 2001, on the Francais-L mailing list, Larry Sanger posted the following message (IA archive):
"Another thing to consider is to encourage Jimmy Wales [...] to create a French Wikipedia, under the title http://fr.wikipedia.com. I've already asked him to do this for all the foreign languages we're translating into on Nupedia, but I think Jimmy is busy these days--so if you encourage him, he'll create it soon, I am guessing. (If you were to tell him that you have an article, in French, that you want to add, that would probably persuade him.)"
This confirms that fr.wikipedia.com was not available before April 2001.

On fr.wikipedia.org, the first revision of the known oldest article, Paul Héroult, dates back to the 4th of August 2001. On IA, a 19th of May 2001 version is available. Some revisions are apparently missing on fr.wikipedia.org...

The fr.wikipedia.com to fr.wikipedia.org change took place on the 2nd of November 2002.

Questions: what is the accurate French Wikipedia's birthdate ? Does a reliable source exist about it ? Could relevant Wikipedia revisions be retrieved ?

Note: this message may not be considered a technical issue, so, please, feel free to move it into a Village pump section you think is more appropriate.

--ContributorQ (talk) 18:55, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

@ContributorQ: it might help to ask them, they have an page for non-french questions here: w:fr:Wikipédia:Bistro_des_non-francophones/en — xaosflux ^Talk 19:03, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

Hello @Xaosflux, I am a regular french Wikipedia editor. On Le Bistro (17 January 2021) (the french Village pump), the question has been discussed, but no one has provided a decisive convincing proof. --ContributorQ (talk) 19:41, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

This is a good question that has come up on occasion (not only French). A common table of established dates would be very useful indeed, it would then be possible to do things like {{NUMBEROF|fr|birthdate}}, which could be added to a new column in List of Wikipedias and many other places ({{NUMBEROF}} has been exported to 70+ wiki langs). The date table should be open to change and discussion, I suspect Commons Tabular is better than Wikidata for this purpose, possibly a page on meta.wikimedia.org. Wherever easily machine readable and commonly available. -- GreenC 19:15, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

@ContributorQ: I did a couple of database queries and the earliest edit in the current French Wikipedia database is this one to Utilisateur:BernardVatant and dates to 1 June 2001; the [[earliest deleted edit is ironically to Wikipédia:Nupedia Translation Project and dates from 8 June of that year. Graham87 11:16, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

@ContributorQ: Double-pinging you because I think I've struck gold here! This directory of database dumps contains a file called wiki-fr.tar.gz. Inside that gz archive under the "/wiki-fr/lib-http/db/wiki" directory, the first line says "990174692³3HomePage³3*³30³3217.14.192.xxx³30³3id³2111". 990174692 is a Unix timestamp and is equivalent to 18 May 2001, 08:31:32 (UTC/GMT). The line also indicates that the edit was made by the IP address 217.14.192.xxx (the last octet of IP addresses was always obscured by UseModWiki). The corresponding entry in the difflog file does indeed sound like it could be the French Wikipedia's very first homepage edit. I will place the original text at fr:Utilisateur:Graham87/HomePage, for want of a better location, because (a) it relates to the French Wikipedia and (b) I don't know how to format it within this message. Frwiki editors can do whatever they like with my subpage.

This directory contains a script by Tim Starling for porting the very early English Wikipedia dumps to a more modern format. Adapting the script to the French Wikipedia database dump would probably take a lot of work and is beyond my skill level. Graham87 11:57, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

Also see this message on Wikipedia-l, which I found from following footnotes 45–46 at History of Wikipedia. Graham87 12:17, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

There is a lot of relevant history in the August 2001 English Wikipedia database dump at the title "International Wikipedia". Despite the gaps in history, I have imported it all to its current location, Wikipedia:Multilingual coordination; the relevant edit about the French Wikipedia and several others is this one. Also note that the Wikipedia-l thread above begins on 11 may 2001, not 18 May. I can't explain the discrepancy; perhaps the subdomains existed but had no content before 18 May. Graham87 12:44, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

First Wikipedia logo (2001).

@Graham87: Excellent! Thank you very much for your time and the job done. It helps a lot. With the informations you provided, I could retrace a more precise sequence of events.

In the March 2001 Wikipedia-l archive there is no message announcing that a french version of Wikipedia has been created. On the 16th of March 2001, Jimmy Wales posted his wish to create one, a Catalan wikipedia and a German Wikipedia. A few minutes later, he also announced the online availability of deutsche.wikipedia.com. A message by JimboWales, on Wikipedia ("Multilingual coordination" meta page), confirms that:
"I have set up Catalan and Deutsch (or Deutsche, that's still up in the air!), and I anxiously expect there to be some problems or complaints as people start to use them[...]
I think that we should have French and Spanish next, but I don't know how to write 'French' and 'Spanish' correctly. If someone will tell me, I will set them up."

On the 19th of March 2001, JimboWales announced the creation of nihongo.wikipedia.com ("Multilingual coordination" meta page). The day after, a confirmation of the online availabality of catalan.wikipedia.com, deutsche.wikipedia.com and nihongo.wikipedia.com has been published.
On the 11th of May 2001, on Wikipedia-l, Jason Richey announced the creation of the french.wikipedia.com subdomain and eight other new wikis or subdomains (xx.wikipedia.com, xx = chinese, esperanto, hebrew, italian, japanese, portuguese, spanish or russian).
On the 13th of May 2001, someone asked for a french version ("Multilingual coordination" meta page).
On the 16th of April 2001, on the Francais-L mailing list, hosted on www.nupedia.com, Larry Sanger posted the following message (IA archive):
"Another thing to consider is to encourage Jimmy Wales [...] to create a French Wikipedia, under the title http://fr.wikipedia.com. I've already asked him to do this for all the foreign languages we're translating into on Nupedia, but I think Jimmy is busy these days--so if you encourage him, he'll create it soon, I am guessing. (If you were to tell him that you have an article, in French, that you want to add, that would probably persuade him.)"
On the 18th of May 2001, in a reply to a request made on the 15th of May 2001 by Jimmy Wales, Jason Richey implicitly announced, on Wikipedia-l, the creation of the alias fr.wikipedia.com which was confirmed by Larry Sanger, the same day ("Multilingual coordination" meta page). Three days later, on the "Multilingual coordination" meta page, JasonR announced the creation of sv.wikipedia.com.

The table below shows data extracted from the frWiki dump (wiki-fr.tar.gz). The timestamps and other data are infos retrieved from revisions logged in the "recent changes" file (rclog) and "diff log" file (diff_log).

From 2002 frWiki dump (dumps.wikimedia.org)

Revision #	Timestamp	Date	Page	Content
1	990174692	2001-05-18 8:31:32	Home page	This is the home of the new French Wikipedia. Please replace this text with something appropriate en francais, and start writing!
4	990259515	2001-05-19 8:05:15	Home page (see record on IA)	This is the home of the new French Wikipedia. Please replace this text with something appropriate en francais, and start writing! Please see our instructions (sorry, in English) on how to edit a page. (Perhaps these could be translated... Paul (Louis-Toussaint) Héroult
1	990259529	2001-05-19 8:05:29	Paul Heroult (see history page on IA)	[...]
5	991380665	2001-06-01 7:31:05	Home page	Cette page est la racine de Wikipedia en Français, que vous êtes invités à faire grandir ... Please see our instructions (sorry, in English) on how to edit a page. (Perhaps these could be translated... Voirour instructions (sorry, in English) pour le mode d'emploi : comment éditer une page. A suivre ... BernardVatant
1	991380815	2001-06-01 7:33:35	BernardVatant (see on frWiki)	Page contact pour Bernard Vatant Très intéressé par ce projet collaboratif. J'espère pouvoir y consacrer un peu de temps. Mes passions : l'Astronomie et le partage des connaissances. Pour en savoir plus : http://www.universimmedia.com Me contacter : bernard@[...]

All collected infos are consistent with the May 2001 birthdate (11th, or 18th); none does tally with the 23 March 2001.

The tables below show data extracted from some pther wikis dumps. The timestamps and other data are infos retrieved from the first revision logged in the "recent changes" file (rclog) and "diff log" file (diff_log).

From 2001 wiki dump (dumps.wikimedia.org)

Timestamp	Date	Home page's content (www.wikipedia.com)
979586833	2001-01-15 19:27:13	This is the new WikiPedia!

From 2002 xxWiki dumps (dumps.wikimedia.org)

Wiki	Timestamp	Date	Home page's content
de	984703365	2001-03-16 00:42:45	This is the new German language wikipedia. I obviously need to translate all of the error messages, page text, etc Advice solicited! Just write here on the homepage for a couple of days, and then we'll get started next week. I do not speak German. Larry Sanger speaks some. So only English speaking people (who also speak German) are likely to be able to effectively communicate with me.
ca	984776841	2001-03-16 21:07:21 (see history page on IA)	This is for the Catalan language wiki project.
ja	985041045	2001-03-19 22:30:45	irrashaimase! kore wa nihongo no wikipedia desu. kakite kudasai.
eo	990174584	2001-05-18 8:29:44	This is the home of the new Esperanto Wikipedia. Please replace this text with something appropriate in Esperanto, and get to work!
fr	990174692	2001-05-18 8:31:32	This is the home of the new French Wikipedia. Please replace this text with something appropriate en francais, and start writing!
it	990174783	2001-05-18 8:33:03	This is the home of the new Italian Wikipedia. Please replace this text with something appropriate in Italian, and start writing!
pt	990175390	2001-05-18 8:43:10	This is the home of the new Portuguese Wikipedia. Please replace this text with something appropriate in Portugues, and start writing! Please see our instructions (sorry, in English) on how to edit a page. (Perhaps these could be translated...)
sv	990611216	2001-05-23 9:46:56	Välkomna till Svenska Wikipedia! Denna sidan är startsidan (HomePage) för den svenska wikipedian. Målet med Wikipedia är att skapa ett uppslagsverk med uppslagsord av alla möjliga typer där allt innehåll är fritt att använda enligt GNU Free Documentation License.[...]
nl	992991055	2001-06-19 22:50:55	Welkom bij de nieuwe (19/06/2001) Nederlandstalige Wikipedia. Wikipedia is een gemeenschapsproject met het doel vanaf nul een complete encyclopdie te creëren. De Engelstalige versie is in januari 2001 opgestart en bevat al meer dan 9000 pagina's. We zouden graag voor de Nederlandstalige pagina's een vergelijkbaar succes zien[...]
pl	1001517728	2001-09-26 15:22:08	= Polskia Edycjia Wikipedii = 26 Wrzesnia 2001 postanowilismy wystartowac polska edycje Wikipedii Zapraszamy wszystkich do tworzenia nowych artykulów i tlumaczen tekstow z wikipedii.

@GreenC: FYI.

PS: It would be nice to import in each current xxWiki database the very first revision of the homepage and the first article.

--ContributorQ (talk) 17:12, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

@ContributorQ: No worries ... glad to help. Nice analysis! The only major things that I would add/modify are that the page histories in the 2002 dumps are probably not complete (see below) and that the edits to the multilingual coordination page were all made not to Meta (which didn't exist in early 2001) but to the actual English Wikipedia. Re the deletion of the history: see Wikipedia:Usemod article histories and an explanation at MeatballWiki; for instance in the French dump, the earliest surviving edit to the Paris article is a very well-developed page dated 26 January 2002 (UTC) (so it is obviously not the actual first edit to that page). The reason the HomePages probably survived so well is that they were relatively lightly edited. There may also be cases where history of a page from, say, May and November 2001 might have survived but the intervening edits in August may not have. The August 2001 English Wikipedia dump is complete but the 2002 dumps for the other languages are almost definitely not. Graham87 18:35, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

@Graham87: You're right, Multilingual coordination was indeed not a meta page. I corrected that.
I think what makes sense here is the coherence between the data extracted from the dumps and the Wikipedia and mailing lists' announcements.
Paul Heroult, the first frWiki's article, has been imported from the french Nupedia version as emphasized by its content (see, for comparison, the 16 Apr 2001 messages from Francais-L, on IA), the timestamp and the uploader's pseudo (an IP: 217.14.192.xxx). Therefore the first revision of the french HP and the first article seem pretty reliable.
It's a pity however that article histories contain some missing or dubious entries. --ContributorQ (talk) 07:09, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Most-wanted articles

This might not be a technical question but I was wondering how to update this list. The last time it was updated was nearly two years ago by an IP editor, not a bot.

Any idea where to find a list of nonexistent articles with the most links to their blank pages? Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 20:08, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

@Liz: I can run a query and update it. If there’s a need, I can get my bot to update it regularly. ƒirefly ( t · c ) 20:42, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

• Special:WantedPages Lots of high counts due to TODO list templates and the like — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 21:09, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

Yeah, the problem with WantedPages is that there’s no way to exclude links from outside mainspace, which can often skew results. ƒirefly ( t · c ) 21:22, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

I once made a suggestion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Council/Archive 21#Proposal: Disallow transcluded to-do lists but didn't follow up with wider notification. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:04, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

A personal aside re "To-Do Lists": In my experience I have found that most To-Do Lists are put up and then left-alone, languishing in a kind of talk page-visual clutter/editorial purgatory with very few meaningful updates. They just disappear into the WP-woodwork... Shearonink (talk) 22:23, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

That's what I thought as well, but when I looked into the edit history of the page, there are lots of edits removing formerly red links that are now actual articles. So, whether editors are consulting this list or doing it on their own, wanted articles on this list are being created on a regular basis.

As for regular updates, I think that the list probably doesn't change a lot in the short term but weekly or monthly updates might be useful. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 22:53, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

Source has no page number on crucial page

I want to use a reference in a source that has page numbers for virtually all the text - but not for the "Authors note" at the beginning, which has some useful information. If I were referring to any other page in the book, the ref would look like (for page 99). I am sure that there must be a way of stating "author's note" instead of a page number, but cannot find it. Any ideas? ThoughtIdRetired (talk) 21:12, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

You can use Template:Cite book#In-source locations and say |at=Authors note. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:56, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

Thanks, that would seem to work, but has a problem if the same source is needed elsewhere in the article (which is highly likely). That means I would have to use the full reference a second time (giving it a slightly different refname) and use the {{rp|99}} code for the page numbers. The problem is that it would be a mess for the reader, as they cannot track all the parts of the article that rely on the one book.

I have just tried again with and it seems to give exactly what I want. I have no idea why it didn't work the first time I tried it.ThoughtIdRetired (talk) 22:45, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

@ThoughtIdRetired: This is one of the typical reasons for the use of shortened footnotes. Rp is sometimes the other mechanism used, but I find it ugly. --Izno (talk) 06:23, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

@Izno:I feel that shortened footnotes make it more tedious to work out where the text of an article comes from. You might find the reference more easily, but it is difficult to get a view of how much of the article relies on that work, and it is slower to get back to the point you had read to in the article. I have done quite a bit of trying to work out where some articles are sourced and therefore this is the voice of experience. It's a particular issue if several authors have written more than one work on the subject - I have to make written notes in complex cases. So, the citation method I have chosen may not be pretty, but it scores better on functionality. Obviously, just a point of view.... ThoughtIdRetired (talk) 08:10, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

@ThoughtIdRetired: Typing <ref name="Greenhill 1988">{{cite book |last1=Greenhill |first1=Basil |title=The Merchant Schooners |date=1951 |publisher=Conway Maritime Press |location=London |isbn=0 85177 475 X |edition=1988}}</ref>{{rp|author's note}} gives. I find shortened refs abominable, I find articles strewn with errors because people get them wrong. DuncanHill (talk) 02:25, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

References

@Izno, ThoughtIdRetired, and DuncanHill: Just to point out the opposite point of view and what I consider to be the advantages of {{sfn}}s. Using {{sfn|Greenhill|1988|p=47}} adds reusable refs to the reflist without having to resort to the <ref name="Greenhill 1988 p47"> malarkey :) which one often comes across. All refs to the same page are automatically grouped together, and you only have to change the page number(s) in the {sfn} to achieve this. Plus, you only have to hover your mouse over the {sfn} to see the basic ref, and hovering again or clicking on it takes you to the {cite book} in the Bibliography, and the back button returns you to where you were. With the even easier <ref>Greenhill 1988 p. 47</ref>, just as commonly found, you have to physically scroll down to the Bibliography and scroll all the way back up again to find where you were.

I agree that screwed-up {sfn}s are annoying: often that's because the editor didn't include |ref=harv in {{cite book}} etc. The few examples I have come across have mostly been of this type. However, you now don't need it any more: CS1/2 copes with it automatically, and a bot has been removing |ref=harv from {cites} for a while. Since I use {sfn}s all the time I find fixing them only takes a few moments, and I haven't come across a bad one for some time. I also agree that {sfn}s and {cite book} can take longer to learn than <ref name="" />, and more slightly more time-consuming to use in an article. Last time I looked the relevant information was scattered over several Help pages with not much attempt to construct a single comprehensive instructive page about using just {sfn}s and {cite book} etc. Things may have improved. Would anyone know how many articles actually use {sfn}s? I know it's a minority.

In order to use sfns properly, I believe the {cite book} params have to be correct as well: the actual edition cited should be in (parentheses), and the original edition in [square brackets]. I would tend to use |year= and |orig-year= which displays slightly differently: {{cite book |last1=Greenhill |first1=Basil |title=The Merchant Schooners |year=1988 |orig-year=1951 |publisher=Conway Maritime Press |location=London |isbn=0 85177 475 X}}. You can use |ref={{harvid|Greenhill|1988a}} in {cite book} and {{sfn|Greenhill|1988a|p=}} to distinguish different books published in the same year. You can use |loc= as in {{sfn|Greenhill|1988a|loc=Author's note}} Obviously reffing is very personal and can be contentious. I started a section on my talk page with a view to gathering people's ideas and possibly writing an Essay. If anyone would like to contribute, let loose with their gripes etc. with reasons, please feel free. MinorProphet (talk) 05:39, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

References

Bibliography

• Greenhill, Basil (1988) [1951]. The Merchant Schooners. London: Conway Maritime Press. ISBN 0 85177 475 X.
• Greenhill, Basil (1988). Pleasure Schooners. London: Conway Maritime Press. ISBN 0 85188 478 X

As a note, you do not need to use |ref={{harvid|Greenhill|1988a}} in {cite book}, just set year=1988a: {{cite book |last1=Greenhill |first1=Basil |title=Pleasure Schooners |year=1988a |publisher=Conway Maritime Press |location=London}}, which outputs the necessarily disambiguated citeref: CITEREFGreenhill1988a. --Izno (talk) 07:40, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

Thanks, learn something every day. >MinorProphet (talk) 10:01, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

@MinorProphet: When building a {{cite book}} (or similar) with a view to using {{sfn}}, the only parameters that matter for the {{cite book}} are: |last1= (or |last= if there is only one author), |last2=, |last3=, |last4= (as many as are applicable) and |date=; other parameters such as |edition= and |orig-date= do not contribute to the sfn anchor. As regards suffix letters for years, see refs 25, 50, 51, 55 at Reading Southern railway station. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 11:50, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

@Redrose64: Hi, I think I was aware that {{sfn}} only needs |last=etc. and |date=, but my wording was clumsily expressed. What I was trying to say was that since you can use {{cite}} params in various ways not necessarily envisaged by their authors, are |edition=1988 and |year=1988 equally valid methods for displaying what amounts to the same concept? In other words, is there (or should there be) one and only one way to use eg {{cite book}}? There will probably be both purists and hackers. Also, it's very much a personal choice since everyone seems to have developed their own favourite style of cite, regardless of the many very specific Chicago/Harvard/Oxford/CS1|2 styles. Thanks also for the helpful pointers to Reading SR station - coincidentally I was at school there in the 1970s, and remember well the old GWR station with the original entrance building. >MinorProphet (talk) 13:06, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

At present, if you are not specifying the day and month you can use |year= as an alternative to |date=; but |year= is not guaranteed to work forever - there are those who would seek to eradicate all parameter alternatives for the cite templates. If you don't stick to what's in the documentation, it may not work and you will probably get a bot trampling all over your edit. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 13:31, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

I seem to remember a very long time ago that I encountered some difficulty with using |date= with only a year. It would have been when I first started trying to understand {{cite book}} coupled with {{sfn}} etc.; perhaps merely an initial misunderstanding. Anyway I've used |year= ever since with books, and |date= with {{cite journal}} and {{cite news}} but I really don't care what the param is, even |go-forth-and-multiply=...(lol?) If |date= takes any combination of DDMMYYYY etc., I'm quite happy to use it.
@ThoughtIdRetired and DuncanHill: I have been slow to understand your preference for a {{cite book}} in the reflist, with perhaps no bibliography. As was pointed out it, is indeed much easier to locate every reference to a book etc. by using <ref name="" /> in the reflist along with {{rp|36}} etc.: all refs are linked to the source on one line. My personal feeling (along with Izno, I think) is that it somehow slows down the whole flow of the article, as if the reference itself were more important than the information being imparted. It obviously depends on a number of factors: many social science journals use Chicago-style (Greenhill 1988, 38) as a matter of course which also (imo) breaks up the flow. Mind you, many scientific articles are simply not concerned with forging a literary style, but merely presenting information in the plainest and simplest way possible. Again, it's a matter of preference. I am not being aggressive or dismissive, merely trying to understand why people prefer certain reffing styles.
So, why might someone want to locate every cite of a particular source in the whole of an article? As a general reader, when coming across an article that interests me, I might well attempt to hunt down the source, but I wouldn't necessarily want to pinpoint every ref in a specific book, even as an editor or creator of an article. Thoughts? MinorProphet (talk) 15:31, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

Most of the sfn errors I come across (and I have fixed hundreds) are undefined works, or multiple undifferentiated works, or not matching the name in the sfn brackets with the names in the defined citation. Sometimes they are because of editors copying lumps of text from other articles and not bothering to check the refs afterwards, or editors "cleaning up" bibliographies and further reading sections without realising that some of the works are being called by refs. I've also seen them broken because someone has, cleverly and helpfully, defined refs in a template which happen to have the same name as other refs used on the page calling the template. As a reader I want to be able to check a citation quickly and easily, and for me short citations make that harder. They don't break up the flow of the text because if I just want to read the text I can choose not to look at the refs. When it comes to "literary style" in article space I'm with Beckett, who tried to write without it, and Q, who told us to kill our darlings. "Just the facts, ma'am", as Joe Friday didn't quite say. DuncanHill (talk) 15:58, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

I am caught by surprise by the volume of comments here - I will have to study them in more detail later as a bit rushed right now.
An immediate answer to So, why might someone want to locate every cite of a particular source in the whole of an article? As a general reader,.... - in 2 parts. (1) General reader: when I first started using wikipedia - before doing any editing - if I wanted to find out more on a subject it seemed sensible to pick the major sources for an article and read them. Rightly or wrongly, I feel my preferred method of referencing allows you to quickly identify where the bulk of the article is sourced. (I note that "further reading" sections are an unreliable source of helpful reading material - if the books are not used as references in the article, why are they important?) (2) As an editor, more by accident than design, I seem to spend a lot of my rather limited editing time on articles that I feel are something of a disaster (in terms of content). The first job is to work out where the article is sourced. (That often answers the question: why is this so bad?) So often there is an impressive list of references, but when you get into it, you realise that most of the meat of an article is sourced to something one would struggle to define as an RS. The weirdest that I have found is a ref that appeared to be based on Fast Sailing Ships by David MacGregor - it's a pivotal work and cited in Clipper - where you would expect it to be used often. It then turned out to be an on-line link to just the index of this book, was used once, and supporting text that suggested the editor had never actually read the source. (Fixing this is a work in progress.) So - working out the overall reference base for an article seems key to sorting out any content problems.ThoughtIdRetired (talk) 17:20, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

Thanks all for your carefully and generously-expressed views. I feel that the original thread has shifted far enough to be restarted in the following sub-section. MinorProphet (talk) 21:40, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

DuncanHill, if you're looking to fix sfn templates without matching full references in articles, have a crack at Category:Harv and Sfn no-target errors, current population 26,000 articles. A limited fraction of them are false positives, but most need fixing. Category:Harv and Sfn multiple-target errors also has about 3,600 articles at the moment. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:52, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

@Jonesey95: - I'm not looking to fix sfn errors, I just keep finding them! I've got a script that highlights them on the page. DuncanHill (talk) 00:20, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

Further thoughts on refs

It has been increasingly obvious to me for some time that there are a number of deep-seated problems with "WP" and its overall attitude to sourcing and referencing. The comments here exemplify what I have began to call WP's psychosis in regard to reffing. Maybe my impending essay could be titled "Why is this so bad?"™

1) @DuncanHill: I sympathise completely with your distress about failed {{sfn}} refs. I haven't experienced a tenth of your discomfort. I regularly click on 'Random article' to get a feel of what's around, but it's mostly Ukrainian 3rd-division footballers, Iranian villages pop. 270 in 2004, Japanese railway stations and species of minute sea snails in Patagonia with approx. 1 ref per article, or 2 if you're lucky. I get the feeling that you are a fan of {{sfn}}, Duncan, but the attempts of ill-informed editors have left you in a state of disrepair. Why do they get it so wrong? I refer to my previous post, which points towards a complete lack of comprehensive and authoritative help in this specific area. The choices of reffing presented to a noob editor are mind-bendingly multifarious. The possibilities presented in the various reffing "Help" pages are utterly contradictory and are displayed as a smorgasbord of equal-valued options, none of which can possibly be "better" than any other, since "consent" is apparently the prime factor.

Why is it so bad? Because although sfns and cite books are one of the best ways to approach referencing (imo), they are also the hardest possible way on WP, and quite frankly the "Help" is derisory. It's no accident that there are so many sfn fails: you might as well ask "Why do so many people die on Mt. Everest?" PS Why do you refer to William Faulkner, 'darling killer' as Q?

2) @ThoughtIdRetired: Thanks for your early reactions: I look forward to some further thoughts. I feel that you perhaps approach almost the same problem from almost 180°: the ability to pinpoint the significant sources (RS) of any article (if any) seems indeed crucial to working out whether it's even worth fixing (WP:Blow it up and start over), or could could just do with a little smartening up around the edges. If you would like some assistance with 'Clipper' I'd be happy to have a look at least. Slocum, Alain Gerbault, Dana, my seafaring literary heroes. I seem to remember having bought a copy of The Log of the Cutty Sark or something similar, a few years ago. I'll be getting the opportunity to dig out some boxes soon.

We all know when we come across a well-written, welcoming, intelligent and cogently-argued article, with enlightening, well-chosen sources and an over-arching sense of style and purpose, understandable by experts and newcomers alike: but these are, alas, most rare. Even the best-contrived, illuminating text in an encyclopedia article must fail unless it is backed up by solid references. Surely the quality of the refs underpin and define the entire edifice of our amazing enterprise: yet the reffing here is an utterly contradictory, gloomy and psychotically destructive enterprise as long as any editor can do what they damn well choose. There are far too many reffing options, and none can be be allowed a priority under the current system. The best reffing takes time and effort to learn, and the Help is pitiful: you can do this, or that, or the other, you can achieve it in 47 other ways which we will mix up and intersperse with other pointless and dead-end options, or you can devise your own insane system: but if you create an article with reffing system X, that's how it will be for the rest of time unless some sort of "consensus" is reached, which usually consists of two equally intellectually unattractive argumentative saddos engaging in an edit war before subjecting themselves to Arbitration presided over by sleeper fifth columnists and QAnon New Page Patrollers who by their billion edits have wormed their way into Adminship. Hmm, perhaps David Foster Wallace might have begun his career with a similar sentence. Sleep beckons. MinorProphet (talk) 21:40, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

@MinorProphet: No, I'm not a fan of sfn, even when done perfectly. DuncanHill (talk) 00:20, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

@MinorProphet: Like Faulkner, I was misremembering Q - "Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings". DuncanHill (talk) 15:36, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

Seem to be 3 headings for issues here.
Getting citation information into an article accurately and efficiently. My preference for this is the {cite book} template. I have used {sfn} but find the technical requirements tedious and/or difficult to learn (i.e. I have missed the easy way to use it). The multiple problems with short references in Wikipedia suggest I am not alone in this. One problem with {cite book} is that you then have to use an extra template to put a page number in the first time. The second problem with {cite book} is that on the second use of a reference, you have to remember the name you gave the ref. Solutions of this include having a second copy of the whole article open and using "edit find" to get the right one. This is relevant if there is a prolific author on the article subject who has written several useful refs. References I use a lot are stored on my user page (so that gives consistency between articles on similar subjects.)

Then there are problems getting citation information out of an article. Short citations require some adept handling of the mouse to show the full reference details (you already have the page number at this point) - but it works. However, you cannot go to the reference section and make a quick assessment of the number of times a source is cited. (Unless I am missing something.) {cite book} has the problem of "ugly" inclusion of the page number in the text of the article. It is pretty pointless to show that then, because the reader does not know which ref it applies to without hovering the cursor over the reference's number. Playing (amateur) systems analyst for a moment, it is surely possible to improve the display of {cite book} references by only displaying the page number on user request (either by cursor hover, as part of seeing the whole reference, or an on/off preference switch for the page).

The last problem with references is source selection. This is the first and major fundamental role of an editor - decide which sources are important and authoritative, providing the basis for the article. (The second fundamental role is putting all that material into an intelligible and readable form.) To put this trivially, I am sure I could find a source that said the moon was made of cheese (in the children's book section), but not appropriate for Moon.
More seriously, I don't know if all subject areas have this problem, but I have been editing in areas where there are a huge number of books that are totally inadequate. For Highland Clearances there are many books written for the "tourist bookshop" that simply pander to the misconceptions of the people who buy them. This is even addressed by academic historians (Tom Devine covers it quite extensively: The Scottish Clearances: A History of the Dispossessed, 1600–1900. London: Allen Lane. ISBN 978-0241304105 pgs 9-11).
In maritime history, particularly on subjects like Clippers, there are many "coffee table" books (similar criticism to the Scottish tourist bookshop fare), but also authors who appear authoritative, but have big failings. Eric Kentley (16 years as a curator at the National Maritime Museum) wrote Cutty Sark, the Last of the Tea Clippers, published by Conway Maritime (a very good quality publisher for this subject) (2014). His lack of grasp of the subject is shown by some of the reviews of this book on Google (not the reviews that say "present for...." etc.) (Not sure I want to risk anything legal for Wikipedia by listing all the stuff Kentley got wrong.) Interestingly the worst of these were edited out in the second edition. (I note Cutty Sark does not use this work.) Basil Lubbock is a fantastically prolific writer - and often the only source on some sectors of the subject - but even his Wikipedia page warns that he get things muddled up a lot.
In short, you need an understanding of the subject to choose the sources.
Another danger is the book that is readily available online. If google books let you see all the text of a book that is not totally ancient, that surely tells you that there is no value left in that work for the publisher. The book of a similar age that you cannot see on google books, but would have to buy or find in the library, is almost certainly more authoritative. The partial views that you can get on google books means that an editor is seeing things out of context - and can misunderstand. Some authors are a real risk for this - Eric Richards (Scottish historian) often lays out the argument he wants to demolish in some detail, then says what he thinks. The snapshot views offered by google books would completely misrepresent his output.
Then we have the source that is authoritative on some aspects, but not others. For instance [2], where a philosopher (appropriate in discussing the morality/legality of the bombing of Dresden) was cited for the death toll of the bombing of Hamburg. He simply had the wrong number - and any editor on top of the subject should have spotted this, or if they didn't know, checked it. My thinking here possibly goes further than WP:CONTEXTMATTERS warning about "Information provided in passing by an otherwise reliable source".
Overall, Wikipedia editors need higher standards on source selection. A bit more time reading and a bit less time editing.
I should add - I have, at times, made some real howlers on Wikipedia - but am fortunate that other editors have politely corrected them. ThoughtIdRetired (talk) 14:55, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

I've found a few howlers caused by poor source selection. A couple of favourites - a misattribution of a famous quote to the wrong speech, because one historian blindly copied another's error, another a totally spurious quotation ultimately sourced to a satirical work. Both of these would (or should) be obvious to anyone familiar with the subject. I'm sure I must have made a few too. Hopefully someone picks them up! DuncanHill (talk) 15:50, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

Perhaps we need a how-to-write-an-article guide that starts with references, as in "First, gather your sources and make sure they are acceptable, reliable and properly referenced." Then it becomes easier to build an article with a well-stocked reference section, on which every subsequently written section and paragraph will depend. I am only a newby in Wikipedia, but this is based on my experience writing other essays in an academic context, where the first thing I did with a new book was to write its reference down (in the locally relevant style) before starting to make notes from it. It saved me from thrashing around later trying to build a ref for a book that I had handed back long before. This might even <pious wish>discourage some of the more fantastical Draft pages from getting as far as being declined for lack of references</pious wish>. Writing in this way leads me a to use a hand-built reference list (all nicely in alphabetical order), with lots of sfn's picking out the relevant page numbers.--Verbarson (talk) 14:05, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

Force template to break onto new line

How do I force two consecutive {{rquote}} templates to break onto new lines? Such as the two quotes here. ➧datumizer  ☎  10:38, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

I made a hacky solution with an enclosing div.[3] Maybe somebody can do better. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:49, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

40%, no div? --mfb (talk) 18:10, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

That places them side by side again for me unless the window is narrow. Using Firefox, desktop, Vector. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:20, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

Ah... I tested it to the full width (and everything smaller than that) but my screen here isn't that big. If I zoom out then I can reproduce the problem. It's strange that a relative width leads to this behavior. Keep the div solution? Make the width 51% to ensure the boxes can't fit next to each other? --mfb (talk) 18:33, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

I ended up switching to a different template. Thanks though. ➧datumizer  ☎  07:36, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

Pending Changes again

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T275017

After this archived thread was resolved, I am once again unable to set pending changes on articles. @Xaosflux:. -- Jezebel's Ponyo^{bons mots} 17:00, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

phab:T273317 may be still a problem, could you see if you can add/remove users from the new page patroller and autopatrolled groups? You can test with Special:UserRights/Xaosflux_ep (just set it to expire in a day). — xaosflux ^Talk 17:16, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

Done. No problem there.-- Jezebel's Ponyo^{bons mots} 17:44, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

Added to phab:T275017. — xaosflux ^Talk 19:20, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

hi @Ponyo, thanks for the report and @Xaosflux thanks for putting it on Phabricator

As a possible workaround, can you try to add yourself to "pending changes reviewers" group to see if that helps you to workaround the issue? Martin Urbanec (talk) 02:09, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

(I know it can sound unrelated, but when debugging the previous occurance of the same issue, it sometimes worked with reviewer, but not without for some weird reason, so that's why I'm suggesting it) Martin Urbanec (talk) 02:10, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

For information, the same happened with my last edits. --Delfield (talk) 15:18, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

Pending changes auto-accept error again

In this this thread last month, several users (including myself) mentioned an error where our edits are not being auto-accepted on semi-protected articles. This techincal issue was eventually resolved. Now I'm having the same issue again, as seen here (same article as last time). Can this technical issue be fixed again? Thanks. Maestro2016 (talk) 02:13, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

Suspect this is same problem as Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#Pending_Changes_again above. — xaosflux ^Talk 02:19, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

I'm still having the same issue, as you can see from recent edits to the same article. I'm still getting the "pending changes" thing again. Maestro2016 (talk) 19:15, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

Non-displaying characters

Resolved

Hi all, I wonder if someone could kindly explain why I can't see a Check mark? Instead, I get a box with four tiny letters inside. I imagine it's something to do with installed character sets. I am using FF 47 on XP SP3 (yes, I know it's ancient and insecure). While I'm here, what might I need to do in order to see Japanese, Chinese, Arabic characters etc.? I have an XP SP3 install CD. Cheers, >MinorProphet (talk) 21:33, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

WP:UNICODE should help. – Jonesey95 (talk) 23:45, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

@Jonesey95: Ta-da! Everything I was after was completely sorted (including check mark) by following the instructions for Help:Multilingual support (East Asian)#Windows XP and Server 2003 and a reboot. Unsurprisingly, XP's Control Panel app couldn't find the specific install files on the CD by itself, but the Browse... button highlighted them and all was fine. Thanks so much for your swift and helpful response. Cheers, :>MinorProphet (talk) 01:32, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

Watched articles

Is there any way to mark articles I'm watching from templates or categories? Eurohunter (talk) 18:00, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

What do you mean? I think the answer is 'no'. Certainly we shouldn't 'mark articles'. --Izno (talk) 18:33, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you mean but Wikipedia:User scripts/List#Watchlist shows:

• Watchlist mark (source) – bolds watched pages in Category and "User Contributions" listings. Also adds a "Show watchlist controls" link to enable watching and unwatching directly from these listings.

I haven't tried it and the script hasn't been edited since 2015. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:43, 20 February 2021 (UTC)

References

@PrimeHunter: @Izno: I mean how do you know then which articles from certain category are you watching? It doesn't works. There is other script on PLWP pl:Wikipedysta:Kaligula/js/watchCat.js. Eurohunter (talk) 17:45, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

Range block

My ignorance of technical matters is complete. My IP address is currently subject to a range block. (1) The instructions given to IPs are confusing and misleading, and I think they ought to be changed. Is this the right place to raise this issue? (2) Up until today, this has not been a problem for me, since I can simply log in to my account. Today, the system kept telling me that I was not allowed to edit Wikipedia because my account had been blocked – it was logging me out in the middle of a simple edit. Sweet6970 (talk) 12:40, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

If this is not the correct place to raise my query, I would be grateful if someone would tell me where I should do so. Sweet6970 (talk) 10:42, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

Global user page

As I understand it, it is possible to configure one's preferences at meta to create a global user page that will be transcluded from meta to all wikis, MediaWiki:Help:Extension:GlobalUserPage. When a user does that, a user page is no longer editable on en-wiki and its history log is not viewable here either. Most of the time this is fine, but I can see some potential problems, e.g. if somebody starts putting some inapprorpriate material (spam, using the userpage as a webhost, personal attacks etc) on their global user page, and we are not able to address the issue here. Another situation concerns users who are banned or blocked (e.g. for sockpuppetry) on en-wiki. Often in such cases we tag their userpages accordingly but it would seem that for a user with a globally transcluded user page we don't have this capability. Or do we? I saw a user who got indef blocked at ANI yesterday and they seemed to have implemented a global user page option via meta today. Is there anything that can be done in such situations? Nsk92 (talk) 13:36, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

The easiest way is to create a user page locally. All local user pages override global ones. Note that meta has also policies against inappropriate material like spam, webhosting, attacking others, so for some pages requesting deletion there is an option too. Majavah (talk!) 13:43, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

If there is blatant inappropriate material on a meta-wiki user page, you may tag it for speedy deletion on Meta, if you aren't sure you can ask at meta:Meta:Requests for help from a sysop or bureaucrat. You should not put project-local scarlet letters on someone else's meta-wiki page though. — xaosflux ^Talk 15:41, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

Nsk92: the local user page can still be created if there is a transcluded meta page. Try it on your example. If someone is using their meta global page for abuse, a global lock is probably in order also. –xeno^talk 13:46, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

The blocked user in question, User:Tisquesusa, did have a local user page before. Then it suddenly disappeared and got replaced by a global user page transcluded from meta. The globally transcluded page does not contain any abusive or improper material at the moment (there was a G11 user subpage that I CSD tagged today and it got deleted). But the situation still somewhat concerns me. In fact I don't understand how I can try to create/edit a local user page for this user now (assuming I wanted to do that). I can't create a red link. I can't access the history log for the user page. The global user page just sits there. Nsk92 (talk) 13:59, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

The user page was deleted as WP:CSD#U5 by Deb today. I don't see how it qualifies as U5, mind you. An admin can recreate it if necessary. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 14:18, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

I can restore it if you think it's worth the effort - it looks pretty awful, mind you. Let me know. Deb (talk) 14:26, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

The page that was deleted (as both G11 and U5) was a subpage User:Tisquesusa/Más Muisca, not the parent user page. I don't remember what the user page itself contained, but the subpage was an advertisement page for a guided tour/adventure operation run by the user. That's U5 in my book. Nsk92 (talk) 14:30, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

@Deb and Nsk92: U5 only applies when the owner has made few or no edits outside of user pages. Tisquesusa has made lots of non-userspace edits, so the criterion cannot possible apply. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 15:03, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

Ah, yes, I see you are right. I should have only tagged it as G11. Nsk92 (talk) 15:11, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

Nsk92: what do you mean "I can’t create a red link"? Unless there was a change I didn’t hear a about, any user can create another user’s user page. –xeno^talk 14:34, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

Only if it doesn't exist already. When I type 'User:Tisquesusa' in the search window and press 'Go', I am taken to the global user page, User:Tisquesusa. If I press 'Search' instead, I get a line 'There is a page named "User:Tisquesusa" on Wikipedia.' Nsk92 (talk) 14:43, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

When visited locally, it can be edited locally, despite the global presence. Generally if there is abusive content it would simply be turned into a redirect to the user talk page. –xeno^talk 14:46, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

But how, exactly? How can it be turned into a redirect or edited locally, if necessary? I can't access the local history log for this user page now. And the edit button for it is not available either. Nsk92 (talk) 14:49, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

Hmm, try clicking here. Maybe it is limited to administrators? –xeno^talk 14:57, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

Works for me, even though I'm not an admin. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 15:03, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

Your link works, and it allows me to create a local user page (it does look like it has been deleted or displaced somehow, presumably by the global user page being activated). But I have no idea how you created this link. Did you just manually type an entire http address? Interesting and strange ... Nsk92 (talk) 15:08, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

I’m using the desktop monobook ^responsive view; I have some custom scripts but I don’t think they are what’s adding the edit button for me. –xeno^talk 15:09, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

Weird. I am also using the desktop monobook view, but I don't have an edit button for that page. Nsk92 (talk) 15:17, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

Nsk92, the link you are probably looking for is "Add local description" which takes you to the edit page. It is confusingly named, but I think it is because it uses the same system as images on commons use (i.e. random file File:Rueda de prensa sobre la sentencia del tribunal europeo acerca de los desahucios en España (8558751810).jpg when viewed on enwiki has the "Add local description" link instead of "Edit"). The "Add local description" link makes more sense for images, as you are adding a local description of the image. However, it doesn't make as much sense for global userpages. Perhaps this should be renamed for global userpages to something like "Create local userpage"? Dreamy Jazz ^{talk to me | my contributions} 15:29, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Depending on preferences there may be one or more of the tabs "Add local description", "Create", "Create source", "Edit", "Edit source", or MonoBook variants. Don't you have any of them? PrimeHunter (talk) 15:31, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

You are right, there is an "Add local description" button. I didn't realize that it acts as a local edit button (which would presumably override a global user page?) Nsk92 (talk) 15:55, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

← Yes it would Nsk92. Dreamy Jazz, good suggestion for the interface change. The responsive view was giving me an intuitive pencil but in landscape, it is indeed Add local description. –xeno^talk 16:07, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

Xeno, if I'm not wrong, would that be achieved by placing the text needed in MediaWiki:Create-local? I also presume that mediawiki pages can contain parser functions and magic words which will work per page (so that the page knows where it is being used and then can modify the wording based on the namespace). It could, if I assume correctly for those both, use a parser function to check if the namespace number is 2 (i.e. userspace) and then output "Create local userpage" instead. Dreamy Jazz ^{talk to me | my contributions} 18:38, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

I've created a sandbox for this and when adding "?uselang=sandbox" to the URL it seems to work as intended. So my assumptions were correct. Dreamy Jazz ^{talk to me | my contributions} 18:50, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

I think this change is pretty minor, so I'm inclined to sync the sandbox (what is currently in MediaWiki:Create-local/sandbox) to MediaWiki:Create-local. However, I'll wait for a bit in case there are objections. Interestingly this page had no history until I edited it. That seems to be the same with MediaWiki:Create-local. Dreamy Jazz ^{talk to me | my contributions} 19:00, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

MLA??

From Wikipedia_talk:Citing_Wikipedia#MLA??

On https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:CiteThisPage&page=Julius_Lekakeny_Sunkuli&id=856705571, we have

MLA Style Manual

• Wikipedia contributors. "Julius Lekakeny Sunkuli." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 27 Aug. 2018. Web. 27 Aug. 2018.

Shouldn't the second one be Wikimedia Foundation

Also on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_Wikipedia, we have

• "Plagiarism." Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 22 July 2004. Web. 10 Aug. 2004, en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Plagiarism&oldid=5139350

There's a contradiction here. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 17:12, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

"Wikimedia Foundation, Inc." was removed in 2008.[4] "Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia" was repetead in 2010.[5] PrimeHunter (talk) 17:35, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

Stop Chrome from scrolling the editing box when I press enter

I asked this already at the reference desk but was unable to arrive at a diagnosis or solution. When I am editing Wikipedia, Chrome has some weird annoying feature that is horrendously annoying. Usually, but not always, when I press the enter key, the editing textbox will scroll so that the new line is at the very top of the text box, rather than the text box staying where it is and the new line pushing the text down under it (as is the expected behaviour). This only happens on Wikipedia (although I have not found any sites that use plain multiline text boxes to test... everything is script-based these days), and it happens on every computer I try it on. It happens logged out as well as in incognito mode, so this is the behaviour that IPs would be experiencing unless they use the visual editor.

I've used Chrome for years, but this behaviour has only been happening to my knowledge for the past several months. How do I stop text boxes from scrolling when I press enter? I'm up to date with v88.0.4324.150. - Floydian ^τ _¢ 17:46, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

This happens to me when I paste in one or more lines of text, but it is not consistent. Subsequent pastes do not always make it happen. Using Chrome on Lubuntu.--Verbarson (talk) 15:20, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

Image resolution on mobile

What is the highest resolution image that will display on mobile? I have noticed that if I go to Commons and click on a high resolution version in some cases it will not load. Is this the operating system or Mediawiki or something else limiting download size? Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 18:38, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

Pbsouthwood, Could you be looking at what I described in T270209? -- RoySmith (talk) 18:49, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

RoySmith, My experience has only been with .png files, Android OS, Samsung tablet and a few phones. I haven't done much experimentation because why bother if it is a known limitation. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 04:33, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

I have had a few friends test. iPhone 11 and 12 seem to manage, but Android phones tested so far fail on the original of File:Dive_sites_of_the_Whittle_Rock_Reef_high_resolution.png ‎(14,040 × 9,930 pixels, file size: 8.71 MB, MIME type: image/png) The next highest resolution available by default is not legible for the small print. Is it likely to be OS, browser, or timeout for some reason? · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 08:50, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

Maybe memory? · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 10:48, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

Old dumps?

Would somebody be able to pull me a dump from sometime in the week of February 7 or 14, and throw me a list of the contents of Category:Canadian films as of that date in my sandbox at User:Bearcat/Temp? The category currently has 4,627 articles in it, but I know for a fact (I check it on a regular basis, what with that being my primary editing domain these days) that there were 4,655 just a couple of days ago — and since this is after I added three new films today, that means 31 films have disappeared from the category within the past day or two. One or two, I could handwave away as either an article getting deleted or a technical counting error, but not 31, so I need to figure out what's been disappearing and why. Thanks. Bearcat (talk) 01:45, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

@Bearcat: I've saved the last 130 changes to the category on that page. User:Nardog/CatChangesViewer is good for this sort of thing. — JJMC89 (T·C) 02:26, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

Okay, thanks. That definitely helps, as I see a significant cluster of IP edits that entail changing Category:Canadian films to Category:Canadian direct-to-video films. Bingo. I'll definitely bookmark that page for future reference. (Also, by the way, even the 4,655 of a couple of days ago also felt like the category had been shrinking, but I wasn't able to recall an exact prior number to prove it — but it turns out I was definitely right, because I've already got the category back up to 4,659 and still have about 60 more pages to correct.) Bearcat (talk) 02:37, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

Bearcat, is that not overcategorising? · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 04:44, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

The film project has a longstanding consensus that "[Year] films" and "[Country] films" catgories are supposed to be all-inclusive (hence they're tagged with the {{allincluded}} template). Yes, there are some other contexts where that would be considered duplicate categorization — but there are also situations where a WikiProject is allowed to establish a consensus that "all-inclusive" categorization is warranted in certain categories if there are compelling reasons for it. So if you'd like to try to convince WikiProject Film to overturn its prior consensus on that, feel free to take a shot — but the existing consensus is that Category:2003 films is supposed to directly contain all films released in 2003 regardless of whether they're also in subcategories like Category:2003 animated films or not, and Category:Canadian films is supposed to directly contain all Canadian films regardless of whether they're also in subcatgories like Category:Canadian direct-to-video films or not, so people shouldn't be removing those categories without a consensus to change the current practice. (I should also note that when said consensus was established, I was opposed to it on the grounds that film wasn't a special case that needed to be handled differently than novels or TV shows or music where all-inclusive categorization isn't done — but I lost that battle.) Bearcat (talk) 04:54, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

Bearcat thanks for the explanation, I had not encountered this exception before, but I usually only categorise articles that I edit significantly. I guess the IPs hadn't either. This is one of those cases where an exception is causing a lot of extra work for no obvious good reason. Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 05:14, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

WikiProjects

Is there a way to see WikiProjects by article count similar to Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by article count. ~~ CAPTAIN MEDUSA^talk 13:08, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

BamBots has a list of 1998 WikiProjects with an indication of activity. Projects generally state a count of different classes of "their" articles — for example WikiProject Books/Assessment statistics. These are created by User:WP 1.0 bot. The bot page tracks 2560 WikiProjects, but I could not find a full list — just this — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 13:39, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

Here's a query that will show all the Template:WikiProject* usage on the article talk pages. -- WOSlinker (talk) 13:42, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

Awesome! Is that query persistent? — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 14:00, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

If you want to run it yourself, just use the Fork button to create your own copy. And then you can run whenever you want. -- WOSlinker (talk) 15:08, 22 February 2021 (UTC)