Commons:Village pump/Technical/Archive/2024/09

Files still in category but categoryname no longer in wikitext

Hi there, I am hoping someone can help me out with the following: I attempted to move the files starting with inventory numbers starting with M in this category to a sub-category which was specifically designated for that upload from one of our partners (for metrics and outreach purpose). I used cat-a-lot, but it reported it was 'unable to move files to category because old category name does not exist'. After which I used open refine to change the categoryname in the wikitext. This worked and moved them to the designated category, but for some reason the files also still appear in the original category, eventhough the original category name is not present in wikitext of the files anymore. I have tried to find the solution for this myself but am at loss and really hope someone here can point me in the right direction towards solving this! Thank you so much, any help with this is greatly appreciated.. MichellevL (WMNL) (talk) 14:51, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

The category is added by template: Template:Universiteitsbibliotheek Maastricht
 ∞∞ Enhancing999 (talk) 15:13, 5 September 2024 (UTC)

Hi Enhancing999, thanks for getting back to me, I am sorry for only replying now. If I understand correctlythe category Verjaardag Wikimedia Commons 20 jaar is added by the template, however I do not see this in the template documentation. Could you please show me where you found it and how I can remove it? Thank you so much! MichellevL (WMNL) (talk) 09:14, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

Cat-a-lot performance, maintenance

Cat-a-lot seems very slow, since a few days. For example It takes 8 mins to edit a batch of 500 files (locking the tab). Can this be confirmed to be a server or a scripting issue and checked and fixed for speed. rollback ? It should not be my bandwith, but maybe advice on a local setting? Thank you Peli (talk) 12:21, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

I have the same experience. Very slow. Wouter (talk) 12:51, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

Please see this thread. Prototyperspective (talk) 21:59, 1 September 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-36

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

Weekly highlight

• Editors and volunteer developers interested in data visualisation can now test the new software for charts. Its early version is available on beta Commons and beta Wikipedia. This is an important milestone before making charts available on regular wikis. You can read more about this project update and help to test the charts.

Feature news

• Editors who use the Special:UnusedTemplates page can now filter out pages which are expected to be there permanently, such as sandboxes, test-cases, and templates that are always substituted. Editors can add the new magic word __EXPECTUNUSEDTEMPLATE__ to a template page to hide it from the listing. Thanks to Sophivorus and DannyS712 for these improvements. [1]
• Editors who use the New Topic tool on discussion pages, will now be reminded to add a section header, which should help reduce the quantity of newcomers who add sections without a header. You can read more about that, and 28 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
• Last week, some Toolforge tools had occasional connection problems. The cause is still being investigated, but the problems have been resolved for now. [2]
• Translation administrators at multilingual wikis, when editing multiple translation units, can now easily mark which changes require updates to the translation. This is possible with the new dropdown menu.

Project updates

• A new draft text of a policy discussing the use of Wikimedia's APIs has been published on Meta-Wiki. The draft text does not reflect a change in policy around the APIs; instead, it is an attempt to codify existing API rules. Comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome on the proposed update’s talk page until September 13 or until those discussions have concluded.

Learn more

• To learn more about the technology behind the Wikimedia projects, you can now watch sessions from the technology track at Wikimania 2024 on Commons. This week, check out:
  • Charts, the successor of Graphs - A secure and extensible tool for data visualization (25 mins) – about the above-mentioned Charts project.
  • State of Language Technology and Onboarding at Wikimedia (90 mins) – about some of the language tools that support Wikimedia sites, such as Content/Section Translation, MinT, and LanguageConverter; also the current state and future of languages onboarding. [3]

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

MediaWiki message delivery 01:02, 3 September 2024 (UTC)

upload wizard for books

Is there a campaign interface (Upload Wizard configuration) that fills in {{Book}} instead of {{Information}}?

It could make it easier for people to understand files like the ones in the Chinese categories.
 ∞∞ Enhancing999 (talk) 12:30, 3 September 2024 (UTC)

Best way to batch upload from Youtube?

I found on Youtube some interesting video collections under Creative Commons, mainly [4]https://www.youtube.com/@AnimadosICAIC Cartoons from Cuba]. Some of those are really good. But there are a ton of those cartoons under CC. Is there any way of batch uploading the collection?

I use video2commons to upload one per one, but it is a slow method. TaronjaSatsuma (talk) 12:55, 17 September 2024 (UTC)

I think asking at the talk page of video2commons would be more appropriate. There already is a thread about this: Commons talk:Video2commons#API for this tool albeit probably not easy to see due to its title. Some info on that there. Batch upload of all videos from a channel would be great. Your example isn't really good however, there are far better examples. I think it would be best be added directly into video2commons so you can simply enter a channel URL and it guides you through importing all CCBY videos where you can deselect some videos to not import, adjust the titles, and so on. Alternatively a separate tool could make use of V2C via some API or fork it for specifically this functionality. However it's implemented it should not lead to blocking others from using the tool so there would need to be some measures like some pause between every 5 videos or so. Another thing that is needed is that video2commons needs to check if a video with that youtube ID has already been imported so things don't get imported multiple times which can more easily happen once such functionality is there. Since nobody seems to yet developed such a tool according to the thread at V2C it may now indeed be good to ask here. Prototyperspective (talk) 15:21, 17 September 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. Very good reply. TaronjaSatsuma (talk) 15:30, 17 September 2024 (UTC)

This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. --廣九直通車 (talk) 10:33, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-37

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

Feature news

• Starting this week, the standard syntax highlighter will receive new colors that make them compatible in dark mode. This is the first of many changes to come as part of a major upgrade to syntax highlighting. You can learn more about what's to come on the help page. [5][6]
• Editors of wikis using Wikidata will now be notified of only relevant Wikidata changes in their watchlist. This is because the Lua functions entity:getSitelink() and mw.wikibase.getSitelink(qid) will have their logic unified for tracking different aspects of sitelinks to reduce junk notifications from inconsistent sitelinks tracking. [7]

Project updates

• Users of all Wikis will have access to Wikimedia sites as read-only for a few minutes on September 25, starting at 15:00 UTC. This is a planned datacenter switchover for maintenance purposes. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [8]
• Contributors of 11 Wikipedias, including English will have a new MOS namespace added to their Wikipedias. This improvement ensures that links beginning with MOS: (usually shortcuts to the Manual of Style) are not broken by Mooré Wikipedia (language code mos). [9]

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MediaWiki message delivery 18:48, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

Troubleshooting needed for File:AMD Zen.svg

Can someone investigate why the SVG graphic image File:AMD Zen.svg suddenly stopped working? On the Wikipedia pages where it's used, it's just a blank grey image, and if I click on it, it says "Sorry, the file cannot be displayed - There seems to be a technical issue. You can retry if it persists. Error: could not load image from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9f/AMD_Zen.svg/800px-AMD_Zen.svg.png". Then when I go to Commons where it's hosted, I just see a link to "File:AMD Zen.svg" in place of where the image should be. Opening the link brings me to a page with the error "XML Parsing Error: prefix not bound to a namespace", and trying to open a lower-resolution render just results in a random WMF error like "server technical issue" or "Too many requests, try again later".

Obviously I've had a look at the file upload and page history for this item and there doesn't seem to be any recent changes (or vandalism) that could have caused this to happen. AP 499D25 (talk) 07:53, 13 September 2024 (UTC)

no xlink namespace declaration. We will need to wait for Commons image scalars to quiet down. Glrx (talk) 20:03, 13 September 2024 (UTC)

Now it's working again. Kinda bizarre that the other similar-looking files File:AMD Threadripper.svg and File:AMD Epyc.svg were still working at the time, which led me to think that perhaps there was a programming error or some code change that broke File:AMD Zen.svg. AP 499D25 (talk) 03:12, 14 September 2024 (UTC)

A bot that moves categories to the bottom of the page

Many of my files have the categories in the description. There’s too many to manually move, but is there a way to move them to the bottom with a bot as is done on Wikipedia? Immanuelle ❤️💚💙 (please tag me) 07:37, 8 September 2024 (UTC)

Example? Prototyperspective (talk) 09:53, 8 September 2024 (UTC)

@Immanuelle: You can almost certainly use COM:VFC to do it, but I'd suggest not bothering. The categories will work properly wherever they are, so no-one will care unless they're actually reading the wikitext. And if they're reading the wikitext they can fix it themselves. --bjh21 (talk) 11:11, 15 September 2024 (UTC)

Problem in File:Typhoon-Yagi 5.jpg

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T374773
RESOLVED

For some reason when I attempted to open File:Typhoon-Yagi 5.jpg, I get nothing but File not found: /v1/AUTH_mw/wikipedia-commons-local-public.d5/d/d5/Typhoon-Yagi_5.jpg. Neither switching browser nor clearing cache help the problem. Initially I thought the file was broken, but Túrelio informed me that he can access the file without problem.

From the archives there appears that there are 2 similar problems. One in February 2022 was resolved by clearing cache, while another in August 2022 ended up in Phabricator. I'd like to ask are there anyone having similar problems, and should I report the matter to Phabricator? Many thanks.廣九直通車 (talk) 13:02, 14 September 2024 (UTC)

Works perfectly well to me. Are you still getting the error message? — Alien  3
3 3 14:01, 14 September 2024 (UTC)

Well I just clicked on it and I'm getting the same error myself too! It must be related to my posting about File:AMD Zen.svg above. AP 499D25 (talk) 14:22, 14 September 2024 (UTC)

Maybe a browser issue? I'm on Firefox, and you? — Alien  3
3 3 14:30, 14 September 2024 (UTC)

i can also access it, both file page and original file https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/Typhoon-Yagi_5.jpg . using firefox on windows 11. RZuo (talk) 15:46, 14 September 2024 (UTC)

• I'm on Win 11. File page does not display image with Chrome or Edge. Loading directly in Chrome, I get "File not found: /v1/AUTH_mw/wikipedia-commons-local-public.d5/d/d5/Typhoon-Yagi_5.jpg" out of the cache.

access-control-allow-origin: *
access-control-expose-headers: Age, Date, Content-Length, Content-Range, X-Content-Duration, X-Cache
age: 480
content-length: 85
content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
date: Sat, 14 Sep 2024 17:58:37 GMT
nel: { "report_to": "wm_nel", "max_age": 604800, "failure_fraction": 0.05, "success_fraction": 0.0}
report-to: { "group": "wm_nel", "max_age": 604800, "endpoints": [{ "url": "https://intake-logging.wikimedia.org/v1/events?stream=w3c.reportingapi.network_error&schema_uri=/w3c/reportingapi/network_error/1.0.0" }] }
server: envoy
server-timing: cache;desc="hit-front", host;desc="cp4052"
strict-transport-security: max-age=106384710; includeSubDomains; preload
timing-allow-origin: *
x-cache: cp4052 miss, cp4052 hit/4
x-cache-status: hit-front
x-content-type-options: nosniff

File page and JPEG display with Firefox 130.0 (64-bit).

Glrx (talk) 18:12, 14 September 2024 (UTC)

Different users get (or don't get) the same file from different servers?
 ∞∞ Enhancing999 (talk) 23:58, 14 September 2024 (UTC)

Update: tried Safari on iOS, also failed. Probably best to be dealt on Phabricator?廣九直通車 (talk) 06:58, 15 September 2024 (UTC)

Phabricator bug report filed at phab:T374773, FYI.廣九直通車 (talk) 07:19, 15 September 2024 (UTC)

Johannnes89 on Phabricator reported that he has no problem in accessing the file with Chrome and Safari, presumably in his home in Germany. Like to ask where did you access the file?廣九直通車 (talk) 09:24, 15 September 2024 (UTC)

Yes I accessed it from Germany indeed, so the issue might be about accessing it from different servers. Johannnes89 (talk) 09:37, 15 September 2024 (UTC)

Just tried it from Edge, and it worked.

accept-ranges: bytes
access-control-allow-origin: *
access-control-expose-headers: Age, Date, Content-Length, Content-Range, X-Content-Duration, X-Cache
age: 0
content-length: 7434740
content-type: image/jpeg
date: Sun, 15 Sep 2024 14:55:18 GMT
etag: fe68fa2d2c9fb9101db078cb263815cb
last-modified: Fri, 13 Sep 2024 09:57:44 GMT
nel: { "report_to": "wm_nel", "max_age": 604800, "failure_fraction": 0.05, "success_fraction": 0.0}
report-to: { "group": "wm_nel", "max_age": 604800, "endpoints": [{ "url": "https://intake-logging.wikimedia.org/v1/events?stream=w3c.reportingapi.network_error&schema_uri=/w3c/reportingapi/network_error/1.0.0" }] }
server: envoy
server-timing: cache;desc="miss", host;desc="cp1115"
strict-transport-security: max-age=106384710; includeSubDomains; preload
timing-allow-origin: *
x-cache: cp1115 miss, cp1115 miss
x-cache-status: miss
x-content-type-options: nosniff
x-object-meta-sha1base36: l1h10jxvtd5o73z4q51fcqsot4fy2wu

Glrx (talk) 14:59, 15 September 2024 (UTC)

server cp1115 seems to have the file, but not cp4052
 ∞∞ Enhancing999 (talk) 15:07, 15 September 2024 (UTC)

As of 16:00 UTC+8, I can now access the file without problem in Hong Kong. Will like to hear if anyone elsewhere still has trouble in accessing the file?廣九直通車 (talk) 08:14, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

Now that the task has been resolved on Phabricator, I think it's time to resolve and archive this thread. Thanks for all of your comments.廣九直通車 (talk) 10:33, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

Curious how often this happens. Apparently there is a weekly process to fix it, see phab:T374773#10147831.
 ∞∞ Enhancing999 (talk) 10:43, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-38

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

Improvements and Maintenance

• Editors interested in templates can help by reading the latest Wishlist focus area, Template recall and discovery, and share your feedback on the talkpage. This input helps the Community Tech team to decide the right technical approach to build. Everyone is also encouraged to continue adding new wishes.
• The new automated Special:NamespaceInfo page helps editors understand which namespaces exist on each wiki, and some details about how they are configured. Thanks to DannyS712 for these improvements. [10]
• References Check is a feature that encourages editors to add a citation when they add a new paragraph to a Wikipedia article. For a short time, the corresponding tag "Edit Check (references) activated" was erroneously being applied to some edits outside of the main namespace. This has been fixed. [11]
• It is now possible for a wiki community to change the order in which a page’s categories are displayed on their wiki. By default, categories are displayed in the order they appear in the wikitext. Now, wikis with a consensus to do so can request a configuration change to display them in alphabetical order. [12]
• Tool authors can now access ToolsDB's public databases from both Quarry and Superset. Those databases have always been accessible to every Toolforge user, but they are now more broadly accessible, as Quarry can be accessed by anyone with a Wikimedia account. In addition, Quarry's internal database can now be queried from Quarry itself. This database contains information about all queries that are being run and starred by users in Quarry. This information was already public through the web interface, but you can now query it using SQL. You can read more about that, and 20 other community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.
• Any pages or tools that still use the very old CSS classes mw-message-box need to be updated. These old classes will be removed next week or soon afterwards. Editors can use a global-search to determine what needs to be changed. It is possible to use the newer cdx-message group of classes as a replacement (see the relevant Codex documentation, and an example update), but using locally defined onwiki classes would be best. [13]

Technical project updates

• Next week, all Wikimedia wikis will be read-only for a few minutes. This will start on September 25 at 15:00 UTC. This is a planned datacenter switchover for maintenance purposes. This maintenance process also targets other services. The previous switchover took 3 minutes, and the Site Reliability Engineering teams use many tools to make sure that this essential maintenance work happens as quickly as possible. [14]

Tech in depth

• The latest monthly MediaWiki Product Insights newsletter is available. This edition includes details about: research about hook handlers to help simplify development, research about performance improvements, work to improve the REST API for end-users, and more.
• To learn more about the technology behind the Wikimedia projects, you can now watch sessions from the technology track at Wikimania 2024 on Commons. This week, check out:
  • Hackathon Showcase (45 mins) - 19 short presentations by some of the Hackathon participants, describing some of the projects they worked on, such as automated testing of maintenance scripts, a video-cutting command line tool, and interface improvements for various tools. There are more details and links available in the Phabricator task.
  • Co-Creating a Sustainable Future for the Toolforge Ecosystem (40 mins) - a roundtable discussion for tool-maintainers, users, and supporters of Toolforge about how to make the platform sustainable and how to evaluate the tools available there.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:58, 16 September 2024 (UTC)

Reupload crashed midway

On Poems Betham p9.jpg. I redid the colors, tried to reupload it, it lagged for a few minutes then crashed. A new version of the file has been added to the upload history, but the file itself is still exactly the same (including after purge), and when I try to reupload the corrected version, it gets refused as a duplicate of the "current version" of the file, which it is not. What should I do? — Alien  3
3 3 13:59, 14 September 2024 (UTC)

Undid the upload, redid the upload, all good now. Whatever... — Alien  3
3 3 14:54, 14 September 2024 (UTC)

Caching issue? I did see two different files when there were just two versions.
 ∞∞ Enhancing999 (talk) 15:43, 14 September 2024 (UTC)

No, purged everything twice, still didn't work. Once I undid and redid it, though, it started pretending that the first try worked. — Alien  3
3 3 15:52, 14 September 2024 (UTC)

Could be the typhoon problem mentioned above.
 ∞∞ Enhancing999 (talk) 13:40, 17 September 2024 (UTC)

Don't think so, it wasn't the same problem, as the file was not updating, but I didn't get a 404 error. — Alien  3
3 3 16:31, 17 September 2024 (UTC)

Audio of music contain copyvio thumbnails

The thumbnails are not showing up at the audio file but the thumbnail is embedded in them. However, they are embedded in the file and when downloading the file one can see or extract them. Example.

1. Many of these thumbnails are copyrighted. This means usually the thumbnail would need to be removed. video2commons already imports audio files without the thumbnails. Could there be some script or bot that categorized all audio files with a thumbnail set into e.g. Category:Audio files with embedded thumbnail?
2. Then as a next step one could remove all of them at scale and efficiently using some metadata removal tool, for example similar to command eyeD3 --remove-all-images **/*.opus (applied to all audio files in some category). I guess it would be best to not remove the thumbnail for identified cases where the thumbnail is CCBY as well, these could e.g. be moved to another category or audio files whose thumbnails should be removed to a subcategory of the category above. (A more sophisticated method would be to reverse image search each thumbnail for finds via tineye so only non-original works are deleted and thumbnails created by the person licensing the work under CCBY kept (if the CCBY license also applies to the thumbnail) but I don't think this would be necessary as it would cause a lot of manual work of checking whether it's indeed a copyvio and whether thumbnails without reverse search result are indeed not copyvios.)

Just as a note: the audio files of the example display 0:00 as duration instead of the duration which only shows after one has clicked play. Prototyperspective (talk) 00:07, 4 September 2024 (UTC)

When removing the thumbnail one could replace it with a link that enables people to easily download the thumbnail again from some metadata provider. So they should just contain a link or an ID with which to fetch the thumbnail but not a thumbnail image. Prototyperspective (talk) 15:12, 6 September 2024 (UTC)

Maybe this should be put into bot requests. I think thumbnails should be fetchable via e.g. MusicBrainz. Prototyperspective (talk) 10:45, 18 September 2024 (UTC)

Can we create a tracking category for Galleries not connected to Wikidata items?

Can we create a tracking category for Galleries not connected on Wikidata items?

I would like to be able to see which Gallery pages are not being used in Wikidata's Gallery' Property Commons gallery (P935), but I have no idea what the best strategy is for a crosswiki tracking category like that would be. A bot? @Multichill: Anyone you think who would be good at this? Sadads (talk) 20:41, 19 September 2024 (UTC)

We already can't reliably track categories that are actually connected to Wikidata, so it's unlikely. Given the average quality of galleries, it's probably not really a priority for these.
 ∞∞ Enhancing999 (talk) 08:58, 21 September 2024 (UTC)

You can use SQL queries to fetch a list about gallery pages without Wikidata items (Example: Quarry: 86422) -- Zache (talk) 10:41, 21 September 2024 (UTC)

Defaultsort template

Can someone explain how the template Template:DEFAULTSORT works as the page has no information of any kind like most other template have? Ww2censor (talk) 08:23, 21 September 2024 (UTC)

It seems to be for people who get the syntax wrong ("|" instead of ":"), see w:Template:DEFAULTSORT
 ∞∞ Enhancing999 (talk) 08:54, 21 September 2024 (UTC)

Filter request: parliamentdiagram images with incorrect licenses

When an editor uses the parliament diagram tool (https://parliamentdiagram.toolforge.org/), the license should be {{PD-shape}}. However, if someone manually downloads the image and uploads it to Commons, instead of clicking the buttons at the bottom to upload the image though OAuth, they can choose any license, and frequently choose incorrect ones (I regularly see the combo of cc-zero + pd-algorithm because that's what the upload wizard seems to steer people towards). Is there anything we can do with filters to catch when this happens so they can be fixed? The Squirrel Conspiracy (talk) 13:57, 22 September 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-39

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

Weekly highlight

• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on Wednesday September 25 at 15:00 UTC. Reading the wikis will not be interrupted, but editing will be paused. These twice-yearly processes allow WMF's site reliability engineering teams to remain prepared to keep the wikis functioning even in the event of a major interruption to one of our data centers.

Updates for editors

A screenshot of the interface for the Alt Text suggested-edit feature

• Editors who use the iOS Wikipedia app in Spanish, Portuguese, French, or Chinese, may see the Alt Text suggested-edit experiment after editing an article, or completing a suggested edit using "Add an image". Alt-text helps people with visual impairments to read Wikipedia articles. The team aims to learn if adding alt-text to images is a task that editors can be successful with. Please share any feedback on the discussion page.
• The Codex color palette has been updated with new and revised colors for the MediaWiki user interfaces. The most noticeable changes for editors include updates for: dark mode colors for Links and for quiet Buttons (progressive and destructive), visited Link colors for both light and dark modes, and background colors for system-messages in both light and dark modes.
• It is now possible to include clickable wikilinks and external links inside code blocks. This includes links that are used within <syntaxhighlight> tags and on code pages (JavaScript, CSS, Scribunto and Sanitized CSS). Uses of template syntax {{…}} are also linked to the template page. Thanks to SD0001 for these improvements. [15]
• Two bugs were fixed in the GlobalVanishRequest system by improving the logging and by removing an incorrect placeholder message. [16][17]
• View all 25 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• From Wikimedia Enterprise:
  • The API now enables 5,000 on-demand API requests per month and twice-monthly HTML snapshots freely (gratis and libre). More information on the updates and also improvements to the software development kits (SDK) are explained on the project's blog post. While Wikimedia Enterprise APIs are designed for high-volume commercial reusers, this change enables many more community use-cases to be built on the service too.
  • The Snapshot API (html dumps) have added beta Structured Contents endpoints (blog post on that) as well as released two beta datasets (English and French Wikipedia) from that endpoint to Hugging Face for public use and feedback (blog post on that). These pre-parsed data sets enable new options for researchers, developers, and data scientists to use and study the content.

In depth

• The Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) is used to get answers to questions using the Wikidata data set. As Wikidata grows, we had to make a major architectural change so that WDQS could remain performant. As part of the WDQS Graph Split project, we have new SPARQL endpoints available for serving the "scholarly" and "main" subgraphs of Wikidata. The query.wikidata.org endpoint will continue to serve the full Wikidata graph until March 2025. After this date, it will only serve the main graph. For more information, please see the announcement on Wikidata.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:31, 23 September 2024 (UTC)

Bad link preview in LINE

Sharing in LINE.

Image being shared in sample

Odd, the link preview in LINE looks so unfriendly: File:Sharing Commons files in LINE.png Jidanni (talk) 13:31, 28 September 2024 (UTC)

The text is from MediaWiki:Upload-disallowed-here. The question is if Commons places that text too prominently or if LINE (software) just picks the wrong string (likely if it doesn't happen with most others). This should probably be reported at LINE instead.
 ∞∞ Enhancing999 (talk) 19:49, 28 September 2024 (UTC)

Search box for category pages

Template:Search inside category is a neat template that can be manually added to category pages to add a search box where even unexperienced users can search the category contents.

This is most if not only useful when also searching subcategories so I forked it to Template:Search box inside category to use the deepcategory search operator that also searches subcategories. The problem with that is that it doesn't work in many categories where it would be most useful since deepcategory only works for relatively flat categories, not those with deeply nested subcategory branches. I created phab:T369808 and this was recently improved. However, it still fails on large categories and I think instead of failing it should show the results up to some level of subcategory depth and show a warning that not all subcategories could be included (maybe even list them).

Two examples where I think the search box searching all subcategories is useful: Category:Our World in Data and Category:Videos by Terra X.

Aside for the deepcategory issues there are now two further problems which is why I'm posting here:

• How can it be made to use MediaSearch instead of the older SpecialSearch? (I've also asked here at mw:Extension:InputBox earlier)
• This |namespaces= parameter doesn't seem to work – how can the box be made to search only Files?

Maybe at some point it (or a variant of it that is for example much smaller) could be added to category pages by default or to the Wikidata infobox. Better than these approaches would be if the Wikimedia search engine could show a dropdown whether to search all Wikimedia Commons or only the current category. The default would be to search all of WMC so the search experience for somebody looking to search all of Commons would stay the same but when looking to search only the category one would only need to select the second dropdown after entering some search terms into the box. This is like on GitHub where when entering something into the search bar when on some repository page (like this page) it shows the dropdown options "Search in this repository" or "Search all of GitHub".

If nobody knows, another page where to ask this would also be very useful.

--Prototyperspective (talk) 22:21, 28 September 2024 (UTC)

The search mode (MediaSearch vs. SpecialSearch) should default to the user's preferred choice. Commons:Village pump/Technical may be a better venue for, er, technical questions. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:57, 29 September 2024 (UTC)

I have configured MediaSearch to be the default but it searches SpecialSearch. Okay, I'll move this discussion there. Prototyperspective (talk) 20:44, 29 September 2024 (UTC)

This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. --廣九直通車 (talk) 08:09, 29 October 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-40

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

• Readers of 42 more wikis can now use Dark Mode. If the option is not yet available for logged-out users of your wiki, this is likely because many templates do not yet display well in Dark Mode. Please use the night-mode-checker tool if you are interested in helping to reduce the number of issues. The recommendations page provides guidance on this. Dark Mode is enabled on additional wikis once per month.
• Editors using the 2010 wikitext editor as their default can access features from the 2017 wikitext editor by adding ?veaction=editsource to the URL. If you would like to enable the 2017 wikitext editor as your default, it can be set in your preferences. [18]
• For logged-out readers using the Vector 2022 skin, the "donate" link has been moved from a collapsible menu next to the content area into a more prominent top menu, next to "Create an account". This restores the link to the level of prominence it had in the Vector 2010 skin. Learn more about the changes related to donor experiences. [19]
• The CampaignEvents extension provides tools for organizers to more easily manage events, communicate with participants, and promote their events on the wikis. The extension has been enabled on Arabic Wikipedia, Igbo Wikipedia, Swahili Wikipedia, and Meta-Wiki. Chinese Wikipedia has decided to enable the extension, and discussions on the extension are in progress on Spanish Wikipedia and on Wikidata. To learn how to enable the extension on your wiki, you can visit the CampaignEvents page on Meta-Wiki.
• View all 22 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• Developers with an account on Wikitech-wiki should check if any action is required for their accounts. The wiki is being changed to use the single-user-login (SUL) system, and other configuration changes. This change will help reduce the overall complexity for the weekly software updates across all our wikis.

In depth

• The server switch was completed successfully last week with a read-only time of only 2 minutes 46 seconds. This periodic process makes sure that engineers can switch data centers and keep all of the wikis available for readers, even if there are major technical issues. It also gives engineers a chance to do maintenance and upgrades on systems that normally run 24 hours a day, and often helps to reveal weaknesses in the infrastructure. The process involves dozens of software services and hundreds of hardware servers, and requires multiple teams working together. Work over the past few years has reduced the time from 17 minutes down to 2–3 minutes. [20]

Meetings and events

• October 4–6: WikiIndaba Conference's Hackathon in Johannesburg, South Africa
• November 4–6: MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference Fall 2024 in Vienna, Austria

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

MediaWiki message delivery 22:15, 30 September 2024 (UTC)