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Can someone create a {{Pounds}} and similar, to insert £ and Yen and other symbols not easily found on the interface on some devices? Could even be subst. Fundy Isles Historian - J (talk) 13:48, 11 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

You already created {{pound}} lol. I've just created {{yen}}. If there are others you need, you'll need to specify them. —Beleg Âlt ^BT (talk) 16:51, 11 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

{{euro}} (€) available. • M-le-mot-dit (talk) 17:55, 11 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

Why do we need these? In the Page interface, there's a drop down table of special characters, that should be about as easy; a little harder for speed-typing, less error-prone for remembering the right name. Adding a template just makes things differ more at the text level from the display level. If they need to exist, they should be used as subst templates only, as {{subst:pound}}, so they don't clutter up the page text.--Prosfilaes (talk) 18:43, 11 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

I don't think there's any harm in such templates existing; and they can be substed as you say —Beleg Âlt ^BT (talk) 18:44, 11 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

I vaguely recall once passing by a bot that subst'd templates marked as "always subst", but IDK if it's still running. — Alien  3
3 3 19:27, 11 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

Since the forced deployment in November 2024, and multiple discussions including [1], 2, 3, and 4, the idea of overriding the excessive paragraph spacing from V22 was floated multiple times. V22 raised the 0.9em spacing between paragraphs to 1.5em, which broke content that expected text to have similar size across skins (notably but not only {{overfloat image}}).

This proposal is therefore to add to MediaWiki:Gadget-Site.css:

.mw-body p {     margin:0.4em 0 0.5em 0; } 

Technical notes:

• this should have neither false positives nor false negatives given that .mw-body p is the exact same selector used by V22.
• if site.css is loaded before the skin css, then we can just add a html at the start of the selector: will not change the selection (given everything's in an html), and will give it more specificity (0,1,2 vs 0,1,1).
• 0.4em 0 0.5em 0 is exactly how it was in V10.
• this may stop working one day whenever WMF decides to IDHT another change through; but so can the entire website, and at least we'll have a fix. If it stops working, we can easily remove it and go back to our current state of having broken content.

— Alien  3
3 3 15:39, 6 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

 Support as proposer. — Alien  3
3 3 15:39, 6 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

 Support, strongly. Thanks for starting the vote! --Jan Kameníček (talk) 15:51, 6 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

 Support SnowyCinema (talk) 15:58, 6 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

 Support Tcr25 (talk) 16:09, 6 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

@BD2412: as the only beaureaucrat - could you please make the above change? —Matrix(!) _{ping one}^{when replying} {user - talk? - _uselesscontributions} 17:49, 15 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Is this not something any admin can do? I am not so technically adept that I wouldn't worry about breaking something trying to do this. BD2412 T 18:32, 15 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Actually, I don't appear to have access to edit this page either. BD2412 T 18:33, 15 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Only interface administrators have the right to edit MWspace .js/.css. The only vaguely active interface administrator of ENWS is as of now Xover; but he's had little time in the last few months. He still answers talk page posts, though, so I left one.

@Matrix: I don't know where you got the "only bureaucrat" part, though; Beeswaxcandle is also a crat.) — Alien  3
3 3 19:44, 15 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

For what it's worth, I'm competent at CSS and I would be willing to edit in the namespace. I am an interface administrator on other wikis as well. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 20:15, 15 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

I think I misread the rights log, sorry Beeswaxcandle :( —Matrix(!) _{ping one}^{when replying} {user - talk? - _uselesscontributions} 20:54, 15 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Can't crats give themselves IA at Special:UserRights? Or is this only on some wikis. —Matrix(!) _{ping one}^{when replying} {user - talk? - _uselesscontributions} 20:58, 15 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

IDK if it's possible; but (although we have no official policy on it) until now the practice has been to give the flag after a request and !vote for it at WS:ADMINS; I think it'd be better to keep it that way. — Alien  3
3 3 21:13, 15 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

If someone wants to put themselves up for the interface admin role, I am certain that we could process a nomination in fairly short order. BD2412 T 22:50, 15 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

The ad hoc process so far for Interface Admin has been that the editor requesting the additional right has been recognised by the 'crats as a person of good standing in the enWS community; and has the demonstrable skills to make appropriate changes to the interface. Thus far all people who have had the IA right have also been Admins. We have granted the IA right for the period of time through to their annual recall and then attached the two together. If someone who is not an Admin was to be granted the IA right, it would either be (a) for a limited period of time (enough to make the necessary changes for a particular purpose); or (b) through a formal nomination process. We haven't formalised this process up until now, as it hasn't been needed. (Note that it is a requirement from the MW lawyers that Interface Administrators use MFA to log in.) Beeswaxcandle (talk) 01:01, 16 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Done See diff.

Note for the record: I still think this is a very bad idea long term and that we should have tried really hard to solve this at the template layer instead, but since I don't have the available wiki-time to explore that approach this way at least resolves the annoying issue introduced by Vector-22. We are now in a situation where we're fighting the skin in an area that the skin (WMF) think they own, rather than adapting to the skin, and that's always a bad idea long term. Granted that the WMF caused this issue by meddling way down in the part of the content that they should have left to us, but since they did do that and won't change their minds on it, we're almost certainly making more trouble for ourselves long-term by trying to override it. --Xover (talk) 07:56, 1 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

• See Wikisource:Bots for information about applying for a bot status
• See Wikisource:Bot requests if you require an existing bot to undertake a task

Designated for requests related to the repair of works (and scans of works) presented on Wikisource

See also Wikisource:Scan lab

Apparently some new “feature” has been forced upon us again. These are annoying pop-up boxes which really mess up the formatting, especially if whatever text at the top of the page is centered (as it often is). Can this be disabled by default for everyone? TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 00:32, 6 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

Dropped a task (phab:T393436) to ask them to not barge into the content like this, but I don't have much hope.

And no, this extension and its parameters are a wmf thing, so we can't really do anything on our own. — Alien  3
3 3 08:50, 6 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

I have no clue what you're talking about. Can you tell me the steps to reproduce this issue? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 11:49, 6 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

I can see it on any page that I open (and it is very disturbing), so if you do not, you might have it disabled in your preferences. See also the screenshots uploaded to the above linked phabricator task. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 11:54, 6 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

I don't. I'm trying to figure out which settings the original person has to see why he sees it, but if you're seeing it also, that is odd to me. I'm not sure why anyone is seeing this. I'm not. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 12:19, 6 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

In the preferences under the "User profile" tab there is a section "QuickSurvey extension" where the surveys can be set as hidden. Currently logged out users also do not see it, but if this feature stays, we can imo expect it will be used to display messages (e.g. pleas for funding) to them as well. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 12:50, 6 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

These things are highly targetable and targeted, see mw:Extension:QuickSurveys. Probably you aren't counted as an active patroller here (and this precise survey is about patrolling tools). — Alien  3
3 3 12:57, 6 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

Just an example of what I am seeing: [2] --Jan Kameníček (talk) 13:06, 6 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

• Another awful example: Charter Granted by Queen Elizabeth to the East India Company. This time, the pop-up is within the delete template. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 16:59, 11 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

  Well, it just barges into the first thing it finds. They don't appear to be actively paying attention to tasks, and I don't expect them to pay attention to user feedback either, so this probably won't be fixed for a good while. My two cents are go disable it in your settings.

  At least we've got the comfort most users don't see it.... But of course they make whatever surveys they want targeting whoever they want, so it's not that unlikely that this will become a problem for everyone in the near future.

  Aaaahh, deploying breaking changes with no discussion, no warning, no community opt-out, and without listening to feedback. Becoming a habit, isn't it? — Alien  3
  3 3 17:43, 11 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

  It's showing up for me too. Once I disable it on one project, then I get it on another. Those of us who regularly visit multiple projects are going to be the most annoyed. --EncycloPetey (talk) 18:50, 11 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

  Did you check the global settings? Perhaps there you can opt-out for all projects. — Alien  3
  3 3 18:56, 11 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

  I don't even have the option of using the same skin globally. --EncycloPetey (talk) 21:28, 11 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

  That's weird. So like, when you go here, you don't see a "Skin", a checkbox on whether to make it a default setting, and radio buttons with the options? — Alien  3
  3 3 05:20, 12 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

Might I suggest the following solution? : #bodyContent .ext-quick-survey-panel {display:none;} —Beleg Tâl (talk) 00:57, 18 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

There's a setting to always hide them; the concern is about not being able to opt out the community as a whole (except through site css, but Xover is the only active intadmin and has shown much reticence to adding that kind of stuff (see MediaWiki talk:Gadget-Site.css#Overriding_V22_paragraph_spacing)). — Alien  3
3 3 08:18, 18 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

• Alien: If that is an issue, we can simply come to a consensus, as a community, that the QS system needs to be blocked, and direct him to make the appropriate changes reflecting that consensus. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 12:35, 18 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

  Yes, the reticence of one admin should not override community consensus, and Xover knows that as well as the rest of us :) (that being said, I think a proper proposal would be necessary to determine consensus for something like this) —Beleg Tâl (talk) 23:13, 18 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

  Is amending the user profile, as stated by Jan above, not a good enough solution ? -- Beardo (talk) 02:11, 19 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

  From the technical standpoint, yes, changing site CSS is 99% sure to work. — Alien  3
  3 3 06:18, 19 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

  As Alien333 said, the concern is about not being able to opt out the community as a whole - and you can't do that with the user profile. —Beleg Tâl (talk) 18:00, 19 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

Update: quicksurveys was undeployed from ENWS two weeks ago. I have asked them to not redeploy until they fix this. — Alien  3
3 3 08:46, 17 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Help:Image extraction#HathiTrust no longer works me; when I try running it, I just get Error 403.--Prosfilaes (talk) 08:27, 17 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

I haven't tried any programs myself, but there are a few image downloader programs for HathiTrust available on GitHub, this one for example. Perhaps someone with more knowledge of HathiTrust can vouch for a particular method. Penguin1737 (talk) 23:22, 18 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

@Prosfilaes: You might look into: Internet Archive Downloader. It is fashioned as a browser extension and it does not sound appropriate since based just on the name it seems to target Internet Archive but it also has a HathiTrust downloader called "Ayesha". —Uzume (talk) 04:11, 17 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

I have just tried it and it works. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 23:02, 1 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

Heads up that I tagged Wikisource:Purchases with {{historical}} since it hasn't actually been in use in several years. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 17:48, 18 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

This project page is interesting and was unknown to me until just now. It is very similar to an idea that TE(æ)A,ea. and I have discussed recently, which would involve creating a centralized page in the Project namespace for requests for scans to be made where no scans appear to be accessible online (which would replace User:TE(æ)A,ea./Requests in their personal user space). My suggested name was either WS:Requests for scans, or making that a section of the WS:Scan Lab. FYI, because of the inter-library loan (ILL) system, very few books would actually need to be bought in order to be scanned anymore (as far as I understand it), but buying should definitely be an option for those who are willing to donate the material, in cases where ILL is not possible. All in all, the Purchases page has merit conceptually, but in its current implementation inserting {{historical}} was the right move. SnowyCinema (talk) 18:00, 18 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

@SnowyCinema: If someone does start buying hard to find PD works for scanning, I recommend they donate the purchases to some place like Internet Archive after the scanning is completed. That said, I do wonder what happened to the "Current funds: $20" at the now historical purchases page. Did someone abscond with those funds? It surely matters little now but it does leave a trailing question mark of a sort. —Uzume (talk) 04:21, 17 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Hello everyone! Community Tech are building a new feature, called Favourite Templates, that will provide a better way for new and experienced contributors to recall and discover templates via the template dialog, that works with both VisualEditor and wikitext editor. We hope this will increase dialog usage and the number of templates added.

Since 2013, experienced volunteers have asked for a more intuitive template selector, exposing popular or most-used templates on the template dialog. At this stage of work, we are focusing on allowing users to put templates in a “favourite” list, so that their reuse will be easier. At a later stage, we will focus on helping users discover or find templates.

We are looking for potential additional testers for Favourite Templates, and we thought you might be interested in trying it out. If so, please let us know if it is the case, we would be happy to set up a pilot. So far, the feature has been deployed successfully on Polish and Arabic Wikipedia, and we’re currently in talks with other projects for expanding the pilot phase.

In addition, we’d love to hear your feedback and ideas for helping people find and insert templates. Some ideas we’ve identified are searching or browsing templates by category, or showing the number of times a template has been transcluded.

Of course, we are ready to answer your questions and to give you all the information you need. Thanks in advance!

—SWilson (WMF) (talk) 05:23, 29 May 2025 (UTC)Reply

Though there's been no opposition, it looks like there aren't people interested in this, so I don't know if we'd be a very useful pilot wiki. — Alien  3
3 3 17:27, 17 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

@Alien333 Thanks for your message. Given that there was no opposition, we turned it on on your wiki. We hope it will be useful for your work anyway, so let us know what they think about it. Please ping me under this thread or use my talk page to get messages to me. Cheers, Sannita (WMF) (talk) 09:22, 18 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

So far I can see no instructions either here or on Meta as to how to initiate or use this "feature". Nothing shows up for me when editing in the Page: namespace or here. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 09:46, 18 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

@Beeswaxcandle: on template pages, next to the "watch" star, there's now a bookmark icon to mark a template as favorite. When editing (with the editing toolbar enabled), the TemplateWizard (the puzzle icon [3]) now offers you when opened your list of favorite templates. — Alien  3
3 3 10:25, 18 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Thank you @Alien333 for beating me to it. I will bring up the necessity for more documentation about the feature. Sannita (WMF) (talk) 12:57, 18 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Ah. So, as I only switch on the space-hungry sprawling monstrosity of an editing toolbar when training beginners, I'm not the target audience. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 18:21, 18 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

(@Beeswaxcandle: On the space-hungry side: the toolbar has a few actually useful for regular buttons; notably the OCR button or the page image manipulation buttons when editing in pagespace. To keep those, what I do is CSS away (display: none) all the other ones. That might interest you.)

@User:Sannita (WMF): Also, tell the devs that in V10 the bookmark icon is much larger than the star next to it or the rest of #p-views. Probably a fixed size or something. — Alien  3
3 3 20:28, 18 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

@Alien333 Will report, thanks! Sannita (WMF) (talk) 10:08, 19 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

On 11 Sept. 2024 I updated Portal:Proofreading milestones with our 6500th completed index. I just went to check on progress to the next milestone of 7000 only to discover that there are only 5284 in Category:Index Validated. How and when did we lose over 1500 validated Indexes? Beeswaxcandle (talk) 09:19, 2 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

I place my bet on the index lua error from two months and a half ago. We have ~12k indexes that just don't have any categories (out of 35583 total indexes). I think some of those affected by the bug had all their Page:s already transcluded, and so the Page:s didn't count as orphan and we didn't find them yet. The categorylink table must just have not been updated. Confirmation of this: The first thus uncategorised index reported when I queried was Index:! Explosive objects in War in Ukraine, 2022 (01).jpg. It had page_links_updated set to 20250311190213, which is 11 march, the date of the lua index error. On a null edit, it disappeared from the list. We probably ought to get 'round to null-editing all these indexes. I'm really busy these days but I could patch up some code next week. 12k is not that much. If we say one null edit/min that makes 12k minutes, or 200 hours, or just over a week. — Alien  3
3 3 12:07, 2 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

(FYI: the complete list is here. To refresh (you need to have forked) just re-submit. Replag aside, should update instantaneously.) — Alien  3
3 3 12:24, 2 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Hadn't thought of that, despite the fact that I've been null-editing Indexes via LonelyPages every three days. I'm part way through G with another update due this evening (my time). Any Index that is not pdf or djvu has been skipped over. Where there are Pages without an Index, I've left them for investigation later. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 17:58, 2 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Any specific reason for skipping non-pdf/djvu indexes? Normally they should work like others. — Alien  3
3 3 19:01, 2 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Because the listing in LonelyPages is the Page namespace and the link to the Index doesn't appear as a tab in the same way. Thus easier to ignore at present and then deal with as a group later. I much prefer dealing with a single workflow at a time. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 19:09, 2 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

By the way - the orphaned pages listing was actually updated yesterday - it starts again on the first of the month,

I have been trying to reduce the main pages on the orphaned pages list. A number of those have been works transcluded but affected by the index lua error. (And so not linked from anywhere else). I have tried adding other links as well. Of course, this means that main pages affected by the lua error do not show there if they already were linked from elsewhere. --

Beardo (talk) 19:09, 2 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

@Beardo and Beeswaxcandle : the query I linked to above does give an exhaustive list, transclusion or no transclusion, exploiting the fact that broken indexes lost their categories. It also gives the indexes not the pages, so there's no trouble of reaching the index from the pages. If you want, I can reasonably easily get the list into a wikipage with links (as opposed to the quarry result of just page names). — Alien  3
3 3 19:37, 2 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

I've made a list at User:Beeswaxcandle/Sandbox2. Having already dealt with some, it's reduced in size by ca. 500 from the initial. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 08:21, 3 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Would you mind other editors editing that page? So we can remove those that are done and keep track of where we're at. — Alien  3
3 3 10:41, 3 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

I've forked the query to select .djvu indexes (page_title like '%.djvu'). 3600 are remaining. • M-le-mot-dit (talk) 10:52, 3 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Welp, we do also have to do the PDFs. It's not a good thing, but many indexes are done PDF. — Alien  3
3 3 10:54, 3 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

I have no problems with other editors editing the page. Keeping track and not duplicating effort is always good. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 22:33, 3 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

All DjVu indexes done. The page is updated. • M-le-mot-dit (talk) 08:37, 4 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

All jpg, jpeg, webm indexes done. • M-le-mot-dit (talk) 09:18, 4 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

All not .pdf indexes done (6,818). User:Beeswaxcandle/Sandbox2 updated. Now 5,641 pages in Category:Index Validated • M-le-mot-dit (talk) 09:18, 4 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

The proposed query has to be modified, ~2000 indexes having categories other than "Index:...".

I have used as a jointure:

and page_id not in ( select cl_from from categorylinks where cl_to like 'Index%' )

to get a new list. • M-le-mot-dit (talk) 08:29, 7 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

AND NOT EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM categorylinks WHERE cl_from = page_id AND cl_to LIKE 'Index%') is probably faster. — Alien  3
3 3 08:41, 7 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

As a side note, I found why these indexes have some of their cats but not all: the categories that are added manually are actually out of the template; so when the template broke, they only lost the categories that relied on it; which means the status cats &co, but not the manual ones. — Alien  3
3 3 17:56, 7 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

All Indexes in the second list are now null-edited and Category:Index Validated is at 6953, which approximately what I was expecting to see. There are only 141 in the Validated category that need to have their transclusion status checked. Thanks to @M-le-mot-dit: for the assistance on getting all the Indexes null-edited so quickly. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 09:42, 9 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

The milestone of 7000 Validated indexes was reached yesterday. • M-le-mot-dit (talk) 07:57, 13 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

(I think it's Index:Skyes Picot, The Manchester Guardian, Monday, November 26, 1917, p5.jpg.) — Alien  3
3 3 08:04, 13 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

The Category contains a template ({{Proofreadpage_index_template/testcases}}), so it may be Index:The President's Proclamation (Proctor, 1963).jpg. Quarry gives 7004 indexes. • M-le-mot-dit (talk) 08:18, 13 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Indeed, good catch! :) — Alien  3
3 3 10:13, 13 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

It was indeed The President's Proclamation. Portal:Proofreading milestones has been updated. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 18:11, 13 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

MediaWiki message delivery 23:54, 2 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

For anyone not paying attention to the technical plumbing, the item relating to ES2017 support is huge! That's the last piece missing for us to be able to code Gadgets (and user scripts for that matter) in somewhat modern JavaScript. That's a big plus in general, but we have one bit of old code in particular that's a horrible unmaintainable mess that slows down every single page load on enWS and which was in practice impossible to replace without support for async/await. We're still missing some API surface to make it truly efficient, but now at least it can be modernized and cleaned up and made somewhat maintainable. Big kudos to the WMF devs that sheperded this change through to approval and deployment (raising the JavaScript level in MediaWiki is a fairly big deal both technically and getting approval). Xover (talk) 08:11, 1 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

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

• The Trust and Safety Product team is finalizing work needed to roll out temporary accounts on large Wikipedias later this month. The team has worked with stewards and other users with extended rights to predict and address many use cases that may arise on larger wikis, so that community members can continue to effectively moderate and patrol temporary accounts. This will be the second of three phases of deployment – the last one will take place in September at the earliest. For more information about the recent developments on the project, see this update. If you have any comments or questions, write on the talk page, and join a CEE Catch Up this Tuesday.

Updates for editors

• The watchlist expiry feature allows editors to watch pages for a limited period of time. After that period, the page is automatically removed from your watchlist. Starting this week, you can set a preference for the default period of time to watch pages. The preferences also allow you to set different default watch periods for editing existing pages, pages you create, and when using rollback. [7]

• The appearance of talk pages will change at almost all Wikipedias (some have already received this design change, a few will get these changes later). You can read details about the changes on Diff. It is possible to opt out of these changes in user preferences ("Show discussion activity"). [8][9]
• Users with specific extended rights (including administrators, bureaucrats, checkusers, oversighters, and stewards) can now have IP addresses of all temporary accounts revealed automatically during time-limited periods where they need to combat high-speed account-hopping vandalism. This feature was requested by stewards. [10]
• This week, the Moderator Tools and Machine Learning teams will continue the rollout of a new filter to Recent Changes, releasing it to several more Wikipedias. This filter utilizes the Revert Risk model, which was created by the Research team, to highlight edits that are likely to be reverted and help Recent Changes patrollers identify potentially problematic contributions. The feature will be rolled out to the following Wikipedias: Afrikaans Wikipedia, Belarusian Wikipedia, Bengali Wikipedia, Welsh Wikipedia, Hawaiian Wikipedia, Icelandic Wikipedia, Kazakh Wikipedia, Simple English Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia. The rollout will continue in the coming weeks to include the rest of the Wikipedias in this project. [11]
• View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• AbuseFilter editors active on Meta-Wiki and large Wikipedias are kindly asked to update AbuseFilter to make it compatible with temporary accounts. A link to the instructions and the private lists of filters needing verification are available on Phabricator.
• Lua modules now have access to the name of a page's associated thumbnail image, and on some wikis to the WikiProject assessment information. This is possible using two new properties on mw.title objects, named pageImage and pageAssessments. [12][13]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

MediaWiki message delivery 01:16, 10 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

NOTE: The default watchlist expiry time feature isn't available on here and it isn't available on enwiki or commons either. It is available on mediawikiwiki though, and I'm not sure why. Duckmather (talk) 19:18, 10 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

See wikitech:Deployment train#Groups. In a nutshell: mediawiki updates are progressively rolled out in groups; we're in group 2, so we get them on wednesdays; as opposed to mediawikiwiki being in group 1 (tuesday) and enwiki being in group 3 (thursday). — Alien  3
3 3 19:57, 10 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Thank you for explaining! Duckmather (talk) 16:55, 13 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

This states that the source was ftp://ia340915.us.archive.org/1/items/LovecraftInPdfFormat/a_jermyn.pdf - trying that link did not work for me, and trying to find this item on Internet Archive gave me nothing. Anyone have any ideas where this source might be ? -- Beardo (talk) 02:35, 10 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

That link uses the FTP protocol. Switching to http or https gives a 500 error.

It also is a link to the direct file as opposed to the IA item.

However, I can't find any item with such a name either.

Possibly it was pulled out of IA's collections, but that would seem strange (pre-1930 publication). — Alien  3
3 3 08:04, 10 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Thanks. Wikipedia indicates that the story was only published under that title in 1986, so I assume that it was taken from a later collection. -- Beardo (talk) 13:20, 10 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Ah, that would explain IA pulling it out of their collections. In the last few months they've pulled out a lot of stuff which was plausibly PD (probably afraid of getting sued to death). — Alien  3
3 3 13:25, 10 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

And, of course, shows a danger in not uploading the scan to Commons or here.

We now have a scan-backed copy of the story from the original Weird Tales printing, and a Weird Tales reprint available for transcription. -- Beardo (talk) 18:18, 10 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

@Beardo, Alien333: You can see the IA item does still exist but has been made unavailable by looking at the metadata for the item ID: https://archive.org/metadata/LovecraftInPdfFormat. The "is_dark":true is the key to their redactions which in this case is likely copyright and time related (meaning that item will likely return to visible once it hits public domain status). Incidentally, this is also one of the reasons why I would like to see IA-Upload changed to use /metadata/id instead of relying on /details/id?output=json (they are similar but not the same); see src/ApiClient/IaClient.php, line 44. —Uzume (talk) 23:19, 27 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Thanks. I suspect that it might be some time before that becomes available again. Also, as has been pointed out in the deletion proposal, that link to the source was added a couple of years after the page was created - so may well not have been the source for this page anyway. -- Beardo (talk) 23:43, 27 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

I have no idea why this template is the number one spot on Special:WantedTemplates (all such links are in the Page namespace). My guess is that it is somehow being transcluded by means of a different, broken template. Duckmather (talk) 19:12, 10 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

It appears to be something to do with {{float left}} after ShakespeareFan00's last fiddle. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 19:40, 10 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Due to a typo in Special:PermaLink/15019930, {{float left}} briefly called {{id}} instead of using {{{id}}}. By the time it was corrected, it got the time to spread out it these 3k-ish pages. Discussed this with them back in April; we were hoping that MW would realise and purge pagelinks. Manifestly not. I'd say ignore it? Except if someone fells like going on a null-editing spree again. — Alien  3
3 3 19:54, 10 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Update: either it was the waiting, or the purging the template, or someone purging all the pages *shrug*, but now the links to {{id}} have disappeared from whatlinkshere. I think Special:Wantedtemplates will reflect that in a few days' time. — Alien  3
3 3 20:00, 13 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

You can just restore the deletion at Q7743126. RAN (talk) 20:33, 10 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Done SnowyCinema (talk) 13:28, 13 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

There are two indexes Index:Cabin at the Trail's End (IA cabinattrailsend0000sheb).pdf where some pages have been created and Index:The Cabin at the Trail's End.djvu where, apparantly, the OCR is a page off. Which to keep ? -- Beardo (talk) 20:00, 13 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Given that a) OCR off by a page is a fixable problem; b) pdfs have more bugs; c) the djvu's OCR is slightly better than the pdf's; my 2¢ are take the djvu.

I have taken the liberty of realigning the OCR of the djvu. (One of the good sides of djvus is that the hidden text can be easily extracted, tweaked and readded.) — Alien  3
3 3 20:52, 13 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Thanks. -- Beardo (talk) 15:24, 14 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Announcing that I've just created a webservice that automatically realigns DJVU OCR at https://realignocr.toolforge.org/ . Probably someone will find it useful^[1]. Feel free if you've got suggestions. There's some more doc at User:Alien333/realignocr (perhaps it should live in WS:space? IDK). If someone finds a misaligned file which this doesn't fix even after retrying, please tell me; I can probably adapt the code for that new case.

— Alien  3
3 3 15:10, 16 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

MediaWiki message delivery 23:38, 16 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

More languages • Please help translate to your language

Hello all,

The call for candidates for the 2025 Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees selection is now open from June 17, 2025 – July 2, 2025 at 11:59 UTC [1]. The Board of Trustees oversees the Wikimedia Foundation's work, and each Trustee serves a three-year term [2]. This is a volunteer position.

This year, the Wikimedia community will vote in late August through September 2025 to fill two (2) seats on the Foundation Board. Could you – or someone you know – be a good fit to join the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees? [3]

Learn more about what it takes to stand for these leadership positions and how to submit your candidacy on this Meta-wiki page or encourage someone else to run in this year's election.

Best regards,

Abhishek Suryawanshi
Chair of the Elections Committee

On behalf of the Elections Committee and Governance Committee

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2025/Call_for_candidates

[2] https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Legal:Bylaws#(B)_Term.

[3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections/2025/Resources_for_candidates

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:44, 17 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Two points:

• I have just added recent months to the index as they were not there. Is it not possible to have that done automatically ?
• I note that up to 2021, there is included a list of topics for each month. Was that added manually ? I guess nobody is too worried by that now.

-- Beardo (talk) 14:24, 18 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

I think all that's manual up to now, yes.

On the month listing: I've just added an automatic prefixindex list archive box (also in a multi-column layout, reduces the scrolling). Looking good to you?

On topic: if someone feels like it they're free to but I don't think it's very useful; the search form can already very easily find specific topics. — Alien  3
3 3 17:35, 18 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Thanks. When I look, it has "Manual - Historical" vertically beside the new box. I don't know how to correct that. -- Beardo (talk) 18:35, 18 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Should be fixed. (Was an issue with the floating.) Also took the occasion to move the automated toc further down. — Alien  3
3 3 19:16, 18 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

I still see the headings vertical at the side. -- Beardo (talk) 00:48, 19 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Huh. I can't reproduce by switching to any of the available skins. Could you perhaps "save page" (as in the html &c) as you see it and put that somewhere in a temporary file storage on the web? Would allow me to debug. A screenshot of what you're seeing would also help. — Alien  3
3 3 07:35, 19 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Is the problem the box is for you only ~200px wide? It's supposed to be full-width. If that was the issue, I just tried another fix that should hopefully make it full-width. — Alien  3
3 3 07:42, 19 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

I don't know how to provide you the "save page" but the screenshot is at File:User-Beardo-Scriptorium-Archives Screenshot 2025-06-20 145959.png - you will see that it is full page,

If no one else is getting this problem, perhaps there is something up with my settings. -- Beardo (talk) 19:11, 20 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Thanks a lot for the screenshot! Much clearer. After investigation, it's not related to your settings; I could reproduce in a clean chrome. I think it's due to how chrome treats full-width floating content. Regardless, I have added a {{-}} after the box and I no longer see this behaviour in chrome. Is it fixed for you too? — Alien  3
3 3 19:19, 20 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Fixed for me too. Thanks -- Beardo (talk) 20:35, 20 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

While we're at it, I've also added automatic lists to WS:Proposed deletions/Archives and WS:Copyright discussions/Archives. — Alien  3
3 3 13:07, 21 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Many new users start creating works before getting in touch with the community and knowing the "right" way to do it; they often end up doing stuff like people did here around 2010 (mediawiki headers for titles, arbitrary formatting, no source/only a link as source, &c). Warning (gently) users that are creating non-scan-backed works would probably help.

I was thinking of an edit filter along the lines of:

• if a new user
• creates a page
• with \{\{[Hh]eader[\}\|], but without \{\{[Vv]ersions[\}\|] or \{\{[Dd](ab|isambiguation)[\|\}]
• not a redirect
• longer than 500 bytes (to not warn someone that just is creating a placeholder page where they will transclude later; the aim is to catch someone adding content in mainspace)
• does not contain \<\s*?pages\s
• does not contain \{\{[Aa]uxTOC[\|\}]; tocs can get damn long sometimes
• then warn the user gently that this isn't the way we do things

These editors adding low-quality works can, just with a bit of nudge, good will and explaining, be taught to create much better stuff. They can be hard to locate, as they're not in contact with the community; the goal of this would be to get them to manifest themselves and ask for help, so we can give it.

Then there is also the question of the exact language of the warning. I think the goals of it would be:

1. Encourage them to get help and learn
2. Not be too techy or jargon-y
3. Not look like scolding or saying "boo! you did bad stuff!"

A proposed draft:

Hello! it looks like you're adding a work directly on a main page. The preferred way to add content is to instead use transclusion from an index page. If you're not sure what this means or you have other questions, feel free to ask them at Wikisource:Scriptorium/Help.
If you are not adding content directly to the main namespace, please report this false positive to WS:AN.

What do you think?— Alien  3
3 3 20:35, 18 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Sounds a good idea to me. -- Beardo (talk) 00:54, 19 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

@Alien333 I don't think the occasional false positive is a big issue, but just in case, could pages like Works of Jules Verne and The Complete Works of Count Tolstoy be excluded (if they aren't already)? Maybe overthinking things, as probably not the place a new user would start (so feel free to ignore if troublesome). Otherwise, I like your draft message. Regards, TeysaKarlov (talk) 20:34, 22 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

It is true that these should be excluded. I would say that mainspace added TOCs should be in AuxTOC, but it hadn't struck me that for multi-volume works it's been standard practice to not; though that's a discussion for another time. As for what we can do here, I think it's safe to bet that new users, which would probably be defined as less than a week old, won't be creating new multi-volume works. Not a guarantee, but looks good enough to me. And worst case, a new user creating a multi-volume work has a 90% chance of getting something wrong in the process; putting them in touch with the rest of us can't hurt. — Alien  3
3 3 20:58, 22 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

 Support —Beleg Tâl (talk) 00:43, 23 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Jan.Kamenicek: as the main abuse filter editor I'd like your take on this. — Alien  3
3 3 18:40, 28 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

 Support. Let's give it a try. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 21:00, 29 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Are categories like this one and Category:Authors with approximate workperiodstart dates supposed to show up as regular categories? Or are these maintenance categories that should be hidden? Both appear at the bottom of Author:Marian Fell, for example, though I am not sure why they should. There are birth and death dates for this individual on Wikidata. --EncycloPetey (talk) 02:53, 21 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

I recently added handling of work period start and work period end from wikidata to Module:Author. I must have forgotten to take care of the categorisation. I think the cats appear because we fetch on one side work period and on the other regular dates, and then decide which to use. Let me take a look. — Alien  3
3 3 06:04, 21 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Done Yep, it was what I thought; I just removed those cats when we don't use workperiod. I have created the cats as hidden cats because sometimes we want them: not for Marian Fell (and they don't appear there anymore), but for e.g. Author:Pearl Poet. — Alien  3
3 3 06:20, 21 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

At Brooklyn Evening Star/1853/09/05/Died What is causing the second "died" in the green banner? RAN (talk) 15:22, 21 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

I assume the section name is being pulled from Wikidata. The problem is that the "title" should be the containing work, not the name of the section. --EncycloPetey (talk) 15:26, 21 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

+1 to EP; here title should be Brooklyn Evening Star. — Alien  3
3 3 15:52, 21 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

• Yes, I converted "| section =" to "| wikidata =" instead of just adding it.

@Richard Arthur Norton: the section parameter should be kept; it should say "Died"; the title parameter is the title of the parent work where this appeared; here "Brooklyn Evening Star" or the specific issue. — Alien  3
3 3 17:19, 21 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

We have Portal:National Weather Service and Portal:National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that has a subsection for the National Weather Service. Shouldn't they be linked ? And in the same area in portals ? -- Beardo (talk) 03:28, 22 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

The NOAA portal should link to the NWS portal for sure. No reason to duplicate effort. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 17:26, 22 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

But do you think that the NWS portal should be a sub-portal of the NOAA one ? Or leave it in a different part of the structure ? One is class QC and the other JK. -- Beardo (talk) 17:55, 22 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

There is a clear hierarchy and departmental organization, so it makes sense for NWS to be a sub portal of NOAA which is itself a part of the Department of Commerce, the executive branch of the feds, the United States, etc. Portal:Federal Government of the United States is a child of Portal:United States, but the former is JKA and the latter is IN. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 17:59, 22 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

MediaWiki message delivery 23:21, 23 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Index:Campobello Tourist Booklet 2.pdf has a single photo spread across two pages, obviously it's better to stitch the image together but how to handle? Fundy Isles Historian - J (talk) 12:22, 24 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

I would put the full image at Page:Campobello Tourist Booklet 2.pdf/5, and then leave Page:Campobello Tourist Booklet 2.pdf/6 blank. I'd also put a note in the header on Page:Campobello Tourist Booklet 2.pdf/6 just to indicate that it's transcribed on the previous page. —Beleg Âlt ^BT (talk) 13:19, 24 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Look at Page:The Tunnel (1905) Alfred E Burke.djvu/3 and Page:The Tunnel (1905) Alfred E Burke.djvu/4 vs. The Tunnel Between Prince Edward Island and the Mainland for an example. You'll want to save to Commons each half of the image separately, as well as a merged/joined version. Then use the ifeq statement on both pages to show the separate images in the Page namespace but to only transclude the stitched-together version in the main space. —Tcr25 (talk) 13:33, 24 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

{{Page other}} may replace ifeq; or you may use {{Elsewhere}} on the second page if you prefer the first solution. • M-le-mot-dit (talk) 14:10, 24 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Dear Wikimedia Community,

The Community Affairs Committee (CAC) of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees assigned the Sister Projects Task Force (SPTF) to update and implement a procedure for assessing the lifecycle of Sister Projects – wiki projects supported by Wikimedia Foundation (WMF).

A vision of relevant, accessible, and impactful free knowledge has always guided the Wikimedia Movement. As the ecosystem of Wikimedia projects continues to evolve, it is crucial that we periodically review existing projects to ensure they still align with our goals and community capacity.

Despite their noble intent, some projects may no longer effectively serve their original purpose. Reviewing such projects is not about giving up – it's about responsible stewardship of shared resources. Volunteer time, staff support, infrastructure, and community attention are finite, and the non-technical costs tend to grow significantly as our ecosystem has entered a different age of the internet than the one we were founded in. Supporting inactive projects or projects that didn't meet our ambitions can unintentionally divert these resources from areas with more potential impact.

Moreover, maintaining projects that no longer reflect the quality and reliability of the Wikimedia name stands for, involves a reputational risk. An abandoned or less reliable project affects trust in the Wikimedia movement.

Lastly, failing to sunset or reimagine projects that are no longer working can make it much harder to start new ones. When the community feels bound to every past decision – no matter how outdated – we risk stagnation. A healthy ecosystem must allow for evolution, adaptation, and, when necessary, letting go. If we create the expectation that every project must exist indefinitely, we limit our ability to experiment and innovate.

Because of this, SPTF reviewed two requests concerning the lifecycle of the Sister Projects to work through and demonstrate the review process. We chose Wikispore as a case study for a possible new Sister Project opening and Wikinews as a case study for a review of an existing project. Preliminary findings were discussed with the CAC, and a community consultation on both proposals was recommended.

The application to consider Wikispore was submitted in 2019. SPTF decided to review this request in more depth because rather than being concentrated on a specific topic, as most of the proposals for the new Sister Projects are, Wikispore has the potential to nurture multiple start-up Sister Projects.

After careful consideration, the SPTF has decided not to recommend Wikispore as a Wikimedia Sister Project. Considering the current activity level, the current arrangement allows better flexibility and experimentation while WMF provides core infrastructural support.

We acknowledge the initiative's potential and seek community input on what would constitute a sufficient level of activity and engagement to reconsider its status in the future.

As part of the process, we shared the decision with the Wikispore community and invited one of its leaders, Pharos, to an SPTF meeting.

Currently, we especially invite feedback on measurable criteria indicating the project's readiness, such as contributor numbers, content volume, and sustained community support. This would clarify the criteria sufficient for opening a new Sister Project, including possible future Wikispore re-application. However, the numbers will always be a guide because any number can be gamed.

We chose to review Wikinews among existing Sister Projects because it is the one for which we have observed the highest level of concern in multiple ways.

Since the SPTF was convened in 2023, its members have asked for the community's opinions during conferences and community calls about Sister Projects that did not fulfil their promise in the Wikimedia movement.[1][2][3] Wikinews was the leading candidate for an evaluation because people from multiple language communities proposed it. Additionally, by most measures, it is the least active Sister Project, with the greatest drop in activity over the years.

While the Language Committee routinely opens and closes language versions of the Sister Projects in small languages, there has never been a valid proposal to close Wikipedia in major languages or any project in English. This is not true for Wikinews, where there was a proposal to close English Wikinews, which gained some traction but did not result in any action[4][5], see section 5 as well as a draft proposal to close all languages of Wikinews[6].

Initial metrics compiled by WMF staff also support the community's concerns about Wikinews.

Based on this report, SPTF recommends a community reevaluation of Wikinews. We conclude that its current structure and activity levels are the lowest among the existing sister projects. SPTF also recommends pausing the opening of new language editions while the consultation runs.

SPTF brings this analysis to a discussion and welcomes discussions of alternative outcomes, including potential restructuring efforts or integration with other Wikimedia initiatives.

Options mentioned so far (which might be applied to just low-activity languages or all languages) include but are not limited to:

• Restructure how Wikinews works and is linked to other current events efforts on the projects,
• Merge the content of Wikinews into the relevant language Wikipedias, possibly in a new namespace,
• Merge content into compatibly licensed external projects,
• Archive Wikinews projects.

Your insights and perspectives are invaluable in shaping the future of these projects. We encourage all interested community members to share their thoughts on the relevant discussion pages or through other designated feedback channels.

We'd be grateful if you want to take part in a conversation on the future of these projects and the review process. We are setting up two different project pages: Public consultation about Wikispore and Public consultation about Wikinews. Please participate between 27 June 2025 and 27 July 2025, after which we will summarize the discussion to move forward. You can write in your own language.

I will also host a community conversation 16th July Wednesday 11.00 UTC and 17th July Thursday 17.00 UTC (call links to follow shortly) and will be around at Wikimania for more discussions.

-- Victoria on behalf of the Sister Project Task Force, 20:57, 27 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

MediaWiki message delivery 23:40, 30 June 2025 (UTC)Reply

Hi there, currently I have been transcribing a couple of "Post" Incunabula and early modern Latin books that contain a series of post medieval characters, eg la:Foenix (first proofing done), la:De Principe (second proofing in progress) and la:Congestorium Artificiosae Memoriae (first proof in progress). These scribal characters are part of the orginal text and IMO important to preserve, albeit also not something to show to users, by default. The characters are generally available in Unicode and include:

• well know ones, such as &/et; ⁊ / et;
• characters with tildas to indicate abbreviations, such as ñ, ę, ã, ẽ, õ, ī, ũ
• less well known ones, such as ꝑ, ꝓ, p̄, ꝗ̈, qꝫ, ꝙ, ꝗ, ꝶ, ť, ⹌, and ꝰ
• I have developed a series of templates for these characters and what they represent.

Many of these are picked up extremely well by Transkribus OCR using the Latin Incunabula model which Wikisourcee make available, see this page for example.

It would save a great deal of time to be able to automate the replacement process for these scribal characters, before doing to full page proof. This would need to be at an early stage, rather than post manual changes, as some of the changes need checking, or choosing (eg, ñ can be many things).

For now I am going to automate the process on desktop, but this means doing it page by page, copy paste back in, etc. Processing the pages in bulk per book at the initial stage by a bot would be hugely labour saving. As I understand it, I would need to seek administrator status before having a chance to ask for approval. This is a bit different, I think to most bots, which are aimed at various tidy-ups of existing content, but I hope it can be considered. JimKillock (talk) 14:29, 1 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

I don't speak for or know the practices of LAWS, but I'll say that dumping tends to be a bad idea and/or frowned on.

If you've got the list of replacements, I can make you a script that will automatically make them when a user starts creating one of the concerned pages. — Alien  3
3 3 16:05, 1 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

That sounds like a great help - how would it be applied by the user? (it obviously is only needed on some books, etc). JimKillock (talk) 16:30, 1 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

A user can install a script by adding a mw.loader.load to their common.js page (User:<username>/common.js). As for when to apply it, scripts can know enough stuff about on which page we're invocated to figure out whether to do something. In this instance, it would I suppose check that 1 we're in page namespace, 2 we're creating a page (not editing one that already exists), and 3 we're only in these three indexes. Do these conditions look good to you? — Alien  3
3 3 16:37, 1 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

yes I think so. Does that mean, then, that the script itself could be modifiable, ie, I won't have to ask in order to add any new transformations, or add books to check for as they are needed? I will start working on what is needed meantime. JimKillock (talk) 17:25, 1 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

Yes, you could edit it. To add a replacement you'd add in a specific place a line that looks like "w", "whatever",. To add a book, you'dd add a line that looks like "Indexname",. — Alien  3
3 3 17:28, 1 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

Great! Here is my current list of adjustments: la:Usor:JimKillock/Transformations. And thank you! JimKillock (talk) 17:46, 1 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

You might also want to look at the paleogrpahic forms defined on English Wikisource, as I think there should be some standardisation of template names between laWS and enWS? ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 18:04, 1 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

On standardisation of templates: not necessarily, no. At least for these kinds of templates, knowing that there probably won't be any early modern latin here. — Alien  3
3 3 18:37, 1 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

They can be bot-replaced at a later date if really needed, I guess. JimKillock (talk) 20:32, 1 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

┌───────────────────────┘
@JimKillock There you go: User:Alien333/scribal.js. Normally you can install it by adding importScript("en:User:Alien333/scribal.js") to la:User:JimKillock/common.js. If/When you want to modify it, I recommend copying it to your userspace, and then using that. — Alien  3
3 3 19:23, 1 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

Thanks very much indeed! JimKillock (talk) 20:33, 1 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

There is code in place to make {{index talk remarks}} read from the index talk, and display that (see eg here). However, it currently does so if and only if the section's name is exactly "Quick notes". That's very restrictive and a bit counter-intuitive. I suppose that is intentional; to prevent transclusion of the whole talk page, but perhaps we could make something more sophisticated, such as:

• if one of the sections contains "formatting", "convention", or "note" (case-insensitive)
• then transclude the first comment of that section (up to the first timestamp).
• And maybe even crop it at 1kb.

Thoughts? — Alien  3
3 3 07:30, 2 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

@Alien333 Seeing as no one else has commented, I guess I'll say it seems reasonable. It can be easy to miss the "formatting guidelines..." statement, and I know I have in the past. Regards, TeysaKarlov (talk) 01:16, 6 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

Please be notified that there is a request for comment on Meta that you may be involved with, at m:Requests for comment/Should paid editing as a CU be allowed. You can voice your concerns regarding the topic.

Please do not reply to this message. 〈興華街〉📅❓ 12:25, 2 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

For those who have made comments to the RFC, you can ignore this message.

This is to notify those who haven't made comments there. 〈興華街〉📅❓ 14:09, 2 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

On page Page:Odes on Several Subjects - Scott (1761).djvu/56, two errata are identified, the second of which relates to a footnote. Incorporating this erratum on Page:Odes on Several Subjects - Scott (1761).djvu/35 using the above-referenced template generates an error (Cite error: <ref> tag in <references> has conflicting group attribute "errata".) Is there a way to fix this? Chrisguise (talk) 08:30, 3 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

ref tags inside ref tags don't work. The fix to that is replacing the outer <ref>...</ref> by {{#tag:ref|...}}. I have done that for this page. There are more precisions on stuff like this at w:WP:NFN. — Alien  3
3 3 10:26, 3 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

Thanks, I never think to look for guidance outside WS help. Chrisguise (talk) 16:35, 5 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

{{refn}} is preferred over {{#tag:ref|...}}, I believe. See also Help:Footnotes and endnotes#Nested_footnotes. Arcorann (talk) 02:41, 8 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

I don't see why it should be. Looking at the code, when giving no other parameters than 1, it's exactly the same. — Alien  3
3 3 10:51, 8 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

@Alien333@Arcorann I just came across another instance of a footnote within a footnote, but in this case the main footnote was spread over several pages. See Page:The poetical works of James Beattie (IA poeticalworksofj00beat).pdf/68, Page:The poetical works of James Beattie (IA poeticalworksofj00beat).pdf/69, Page:The poetical works of James Beattie (IA poeticalworksofj00beat).pdf/70 & Page:The poetical works of James Beattie (IA poeticalworksofj00beat).pdf/71 I tried using the {{refn|''Text''<ref group=B>''Sub-footnote''</ref> |group=A}} method but it didn't work. I tried various combinations of things with no luck, but when I added | name=X on the first page and | follow=X on subsequent ones, it did. This feature doesn't seem to be documented (at least not on the {{refn}} template page). Chrisguise (talk) 22:08, 9 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

There are these orphaned pages:

• Page:Phreno-mnemotechnic Dictionary (Fauvel-Gouraud).djvu/28
• Page:Phreno-mnemotechnic Dictionary (Fauvel-Gouraud).djvu/29
• Page:Phreno-mnemotechnic Dictionary (Fauvel-Gouraud).djvu/3
• Page:Phreno-mnemotechnic Dictionary (Fauvel-Gouraud).djvu/30
• Page:Phreno-mnemotechnic Dictionary (Fauvel-Gouraud).djvu/4
  

The parent index does not exist and these are the only pages linked to the file at commons. (Page 4 has content).

Can they just be speedy deleted ? Or does something need to be done with them ? -- Beardo (talk) 04:33, 4 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

@Beardo I have created the index. Not sure if the IP editor will get back to it, but you never know. Regards, TeysaKarlov (talk) 05:18, 4 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

Thanks. I don't understand how they managed to create pages without an index. -- Beardo (talk) 12:54, 4 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

Well, it's a page like any other: if you go to that title, you can just create it. Just like you can create a subpage without a parent page. — Alien  3
3 3 13:45, 4 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

Yes, but they are linking to the Commons file. It just seems strange that they could have done that. But no matter. -- Beardo (talk) 14:38, 4 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

@Beardo @Alien333 If either of you are curious, my guess would be that the pages were created in essentially the conventional way, and not by going to the individual titles. E.g. You initially create the index page (via the file on Wikisource), but rather than clicking "publish changes" on the index page, you instead click "show preview". The preview then shows up the page list, and from there you can right click on the individual Page:pages, open them in new tabs, and then publish those pages, still while the index is in show preview mode (say, to help with creating the pagelist). Then, for whatever reason, the index page itself wasn't published, and so the pages ended up orphaned, until now. Regards, TeysaKarlov (talk) 01:22, 6 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

Thanks - that seems likley. -- Beardo (talk) 02:19, 6 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

A while back, I asked what the rules are regarding ſ and {{ls}}, and how authoritative is the the style guide statement:

For phonetically equivalent archaic English letter forms (e.g. ſ, ꝛ), a template (e.g. {{Long s}}) is generally desirable to track and maintain flexibility for the display of such characters.

This discussion is here. It involved debating things back and forth quite a bit, but ended on the final word:

Our practice is to take the style guide seriously. [...] Some readers (myself included) prefer displaying the original orthography of long s, and there is no reason not to enable it for them, if some contributor is willing to enable it for them. Although I do not know about anybody who would be actively searching throughout the Wikisource for occasions to apply the ls template, generally such contributions cannot be prevented. @User:Jan.Kamenicek

Today I tried to switch ſ to {{ls}} in Slavery, a poem, and @User:EncycloPetey undid it, scolded me, and told me I "misunderstood the policy". Eievie (talk) 19:05, 4 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

From the discussion you linked to: "...its usage is recommended, but not required. So if somebody does not use it, nobody forces them to do so, and they can work without the template." --EncycloPetey (talk) 19:07, 4 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

From the cited Style Guide section: "...the character should simply be entered," which indicates there are situations where the long-s can be entered without using the template. --EncycloPetey (talk) 19:09, 4 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

Both of those quotes are taken out of context.

So if somebody does not use it, nobody forces them to do so, and they can work without the template. (At the same time when somebody applies it, it must be accepted.)

That's talking about not messaging a user and saying "Using ſ is wrong and you should be using the template instead."

For phonetically equivalent archaic English letter forms (e.g. ſ, ꝛ), a template (e.g. {{Long s}}) is generally desirable to track and maintain flexibility for the display of such characters. However, in those cases where the archaic form is necessary (e.g. a work that is comparing letter forms or satirizing archaic styles), the character should simply be entered.

In this poem, ſ is phonetically equivalent to s.

Eievie (talk) 21:07, 4 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

This is an issue that has long divided the community, which is why the policy page says "generally" and not "always". And the first quote in your reply was most certainly not out of context. --EncycloPetey (talk) 21:36, 4 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

There is a great difference between "it is permitted to use the character without the template" (which is true), and "it is not permitted to improve a transcription by replacing the character with the template" (which is false). I note also that the discussion on the Index talk page supports implementing {{ls}} in this work. In this circumstance, reverting Eievie's edits would seem to be highly inappropriate. —Beleg Tâl (talk) 21:19, 4 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

The Index Talk page first asks "long-s or regular-s", then a reply (paraphrasing) "I am not against it, using the template, but not going to do it", then a third editor favors long-s without mentioning use of a template, then you replied favoring use of a template. Only two of four editors favored use of the template, and only two of the four even said anything about the template. With a 50/50 split, it is not clear that the discussion supports implementation with a template. --EncycloPetey (talk) 21:31, 4 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

50/50 split between support and non-oppose is more than plenty and you know it. You are clearly out of line on this one and your pedantry isn't fooling anyone. —Beleg Tâl (talk) 21:48, 4 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

The long-s character was inserted by one of the four editors involved in the discussion. The template was added months later (today) by someone not involved in any way with the discussion or the proofreading and validation of the work. I have restored the pages to the state they were in. If you believe that the original discussion favored using the template, we can ask the four editors who were involved to weigh in explicitly, for/against. But clearly the editor from the discussion, who changed the regular-s into long-s, did not opt for the template. --EncycloPetey (talk) 22:09, 4 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

That is completely irrelevant. This is a communal project. Eievie's edits were consistent with the discussion. Your actions were inappropriate and uncalled-for. It is behaviour like yours that drives good editors away from Wikisource. —Beleg Tâl (talk) 22:27, 4 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

The actions of editors who participated in the discussion are irrelevant? The opinions of people who participated in the discussion are irrelevant? Really? --EncycloPetey (talk) 23:07, 4 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

The fact that the person who added the template was not actively involved in the discussion is irrelevant. I notice you also did not participate in the discussion, and yet you took it upon yourself to enforce a decision you weren't even part of (and which, for the record, is contrary to the discussion in question). —Beleg Tâl (talk) 00:43, 5 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

Admins support communal decisions whether they participated in making the decision or not. It's part of what admins do. --EncycloPetey (talk) 15:14, 5 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

What decision ? There wasn't a communal decision to that effect. -- Beardo (talk) 15:49, 5 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

@Eievie A general note on the authority of Wikisource:Style guide/Orthography (not on the use of the template in this specific index): the entirety of it is mostly one user's opinion 14 years ago. As Jan already told you in the discussion you linked to yourself: It has been added to Wikisource:Style guide/Orthography ages ago (in 2011) and I did not find any relevant community discussion that would actually approve it. I do not remember on coming across any such discussion myself. So in general avoid taking that for the gospel. (To EP & BT: maybe cool down a bit? Aggressiveness doesn't help with anything.) — Alien  3
3 3 23:23, 4 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

Rather than being one person's opinion, it was put together as a statement of what our practice was at the time. We were particularly having issues with the ff, fl and ct ligatures, which some editors were insistent on adding, despite breaking searches. At the time, we had no formal approval processes. However, if the community had had problems with this page of the Style Guide, then we would have amended it or canned it when it was published. The fact that it has required minimal editing since its initial inception indicates that it should now be regarded as definitive guidance and major changes will require an RFC. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 03:23, 5 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

It is almost never preferable to have the character directly inserted instead of the template. The only reasons I can think of are if you are transcluding too many templates on one page, causing some technical issue or if you absolutely should display the direct character, e.g. for comparison with the standard version. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 01:29, 5 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

'@Koavf@EncycloPetey@Eievie@Beleg Tâl@Beeswaxcandle@Alien333 For what it's worth . . . I can see little point in transcribing the long 's' as a long 's', and frankly I don't do so, and I rarely contribute to transcriptions where it is being used. I have been known to remove transcribed long 's's on validation, especially when whoever's done the proofread isn't consistent with how they've applied it (mixed use of various templates and direct insertion) or the validation is more challenging in other ways (NLS chapbooks!). However, if I do this, I do it to the whole work. If anyone changes 's' to long 's' on random pages of a work that I've done, I will and do revert such changes.

1. In the original work, the long 's' obviously makes transcription and proofreading more difficult (although the OCR is getting better) especially in poorer quality scans where it can be difficult to differentiate the long 's' from an 'f' (or the OCR thinks it's a 't', or misses it altogether ('she', 'the', 'he' is a particular favourite)). However, the long 's' is in the printed original and I can't do anything about that.
2. The language, sentence structure and paragraph length in most pre-20th century works is usually richer and more complex (I'm being generous here) than the 'Janet and John' (or whatever the American equivalent is) level of writing more often encountered today, especially on websites. On the assumption that WS does what it does in order to make texts available to read, reproducing the long 's' really gets in the way of reading what may already be challenging enough.
3. If you are going to transcribe them, at least set the system default so that it doesn't display them. If you're so invested in the long 's' then you can find the 'on' switch, rather than inflicting them on everyone.
4. I haven't ever come across an example where I've thought 'oh look, there's a long 's' that isn't phonetically equivalent to an 's'.'
5. On screen the rendering of the long 's' is awful, particularly without serifs, and especially when italicised.

Chrisguise (talk) 08:42, 5 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

That's the reason we have the template {{ls}}—so that the long s is there if you want it, and gone if you don't. And in mainspace, it defaults to gone. (It does make proofreading harder, I grant you that.) —Beleg Tâl (talk) 19:25, 5 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

I'm in a similar boat to @Chrisguise. For example, although currently in hiatus, I am working on transcribing the first volume of The Gentleman's Magazine from 1731. The page scans and OCR of this are pretty awful, and so quite a lot of manual typing is involved. I am transcribing all types of s as s in all the pages I'm doing (which, across the 3 1/2 issues done so far is... all of them).

I can understand keeping the long s when there is some strong stylistic reason for doing so (for example, in [Byrne's Euclid from 1847], where the use of long s is conscious and deliberate) , but for the vast majority of pre-1800 works, the only reason the long s was used is that's what typesetting looked like at the time, and it is as pointless to replicate in a modern edition as the other typographical tropes of the time. The only purpose that the ls template serves in these cases is to make proofreading/validity reading basically impossible, and to reduce the potential pool of people who might want to work on what will probably already be quite a niche project.

I have my suspicions that the call to preserve the long s came from people who weren't used to reading pre-1800 texts and thought that it was somehow a 'special character' that needed to be kept like Þ in middle English.

I imagine this discussion will now subside until the next time someone complains about long s in 6 months time, when the arguments will repeat, as is traditional. Qq1122qq (talk) 22:56, 5 July 2025 (UTC)Reply

@Qq1122qq, among others. I (also) dislike these ever-repeating discussions that Wikisource seems to end up in. Although I am not exactly sure what the result of this discussion is, could a short summary be added to the Template:Long s documentation, like the note that was added to Template:Old style, to at least attempt to stop the cycle repeating (as viciously)? Or is no such summary likely to be agreed upon? Regards, TeysaKarlov (talk) 01:28, 6 July 2025 (UTC)Reply