User talk:Bawolff/archives/6

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Ez Review with IE6

Hi Bawolff,

Do you know of any easy way to run the peer review gadget when using IE6? Alas, that's the default browser here at work to cope with some systems that can't readily be updated to suit better browsers.

It seems that with the Vector skin I can't get the drop-down menu to let me at it. I'd be happy just to pull up a page in any namespace (MediaWiki?) and plug in the article name. -- Brian McNeil (alt. account) /talk 16:44, 17 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I havn't done significant (read any) testing in IE6, but no reason why it should not work. Just go to whatever page you want to review, and type javascript:Bawolff.review.start() in the address bar, and hit enter (this also skips all the checks to make sure you're not reviewing an already published article, so make sure not to double publish something). Alternatively you can add the following code to your special:mypage/vector.js:
addOnloadHook(function () { if (document.getElementById(Bawolff.review_i18n.trigger_id) || Bawolff.review_i18n.trigger_func()) { addPortletLink("p-views", "javascript:Bawolff.review.start();void%200;", Bawolff.review_i18n.review_tab, "ca-peerReview-2", Bawolff.review_i18n.review_tab_tooltip); } });

cheers. Bawolff 23:53, 17 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

auto-lead generator request

Hia Bawolff, I was wondering if I could request a new feature for the lead generator? Basically, what I'd like is to have an option to use the infobox image for a lead if there's no embedded image in the corresponding article. Right now, if an article doesn't have an embedded image, then the default WN logo appears on the lead, which in my opinion looks abysmal. (does that make sense?) Earlier today, several leads had the logo after Shaka published some articles, and I had a little fight with him in IRC because I got upset that he doesn't like to add an image manually. :-( Anyways, I don't know how easy or if it's even possible do implement something like that, but thought i'd ask anyway. Cheers. Tempodivalse [talk] 18:14, 18 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If you give me a list of infobox (or category) -> image, its very easy. Its harder to make the script look inside the infobox to find the right image (i guess i could make a script to generate the infobox-> image list...). Currently it recognizes the following infoboxes:
Bawolff.leadGen.imgMap = { "UK" : "Flag of the United Kingdom.svg",
 "United Kingdom": "Flag of the United Kingdom.svg",
 "United States": "Flag of the United States.svg",
 "Canada": "Flag of Canada.svg",
 "Mexico": "Flag of Mexico.svg",
 "Computing": "Computer-aj aj ashton 01.svg",
 "Google": "Google logo png.png",
 "Obituary": "Wikinews tag obituary.png",
 "Science and technology infobox": "Science-symbol-2.svg",
 "Science and technology": "Science-symbol-2.svg" }

Bawolff 19:14, 18 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

OK, that doesn't seem to be overtly difficult, although I'd prefer that we used maps as opposed to flags ... Thanks though. Tempodivalse [talk] 19:41, 18 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Errors

A local JS function experienced an error on an API request. Please leave a note at User_talk:Bawolff. Details: permissiondenied: Permission denied <241:http://en.wikinews.org/w/index.php?title=User%3ABawolff%2Fmwapilib.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript&scrver=7> browser=Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.19) Gecko/2010040116 Ubuntu/9.04 (jaunty) Firefox/3.0.19

Netscr1be (talk) 10:50, 1 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Per your request:

A local JS function experienced an error on an API request. Please leave a note at User_talk:Bawolff. Details: unknownerror: Unknown error: ``$1 <238:http://en.wikinews.org/w/index.php?title=User%3ABawolff%2Fmwapilib.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript&scrver=5>

--ShakataGaNai ^_^ 07:39, 30 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Review gadget problem

Problem with passing Body of Sheikh Ahmed bin Zayed Al Nahyan found in Moroccan lake:

A local JS function experienced an error on an API request. Please leave a note at User_talk:Bawolff. Details: internal_api_error_DBQueryError: Database query error <undefined:undefined>

Benny the mascot (talk) 18:04, 30 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Ditto. In big letters with an intimidating red border this time. On Double bomb blasts kill at least twelve in northern Caucasus. C628 (talk) 16:22, 31 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Now with Make Lead. "A local JS function experienced an error on an API request. Please leave a note at User_talk:Bawolff. Details: badtoken: Invalid token <undefined:undefined>" Same article. I don't think Google Chrome likes Wikinews very much. :( C628 (talk) 16:24, 31 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
The invalid token one is possibly the fault of my gadget, the other two are definitely the devs fault. If it continues to happen, let me know. Bawolff 08:21, 1 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Same as above, on Four dead after US helicopter crashes in Afghanistan. Didn't show up on the "latest news" column on the main page, at least not initially, even after purging it. I'm sorry, I should really remember to review stuff using Opera and not bother you. Thanks, C628 (talk) 03:58, 10 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Hi. That article didn't show on the main page because EPR did't sight it; I sighted it, a bit later, after I noticed it under Newsroom#Articles improperly published. --Pi zero (talk) 04:25, 10 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Make lead

"A local JS function experienced an error on an API request. Please leave a note at User_talk:Bawolff. Details: TypeError: Object doesn't support this property or method <undefined:undefined>" Just after posting UK Prime Minister announces date for general election to main page, lead three, which worked fine. Message came after page reloaded. Using Internet Explorer. Cheers, C628 (talk) 14:01, 6 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Make lead posting to wrong page [resolved]

I don't think it did. at 13:39 you used make lead to update lead 3 to Clashes leave eighteen dead in Thai capital - [1], three minutes prior, at 13:37, Rayboy also updated lead 1 to Clashes leave eighteen dead in Thai capital [2]. Thus it looked like you updated lead 1, when really you updated the third lead, and the first lead was just coincidently changed to the same article by Rayboy8. I looked through your contribs, and it does not appear that you touched lead 1 prior to writing this message, so I'm chalking this one up to coincidence. (I geuss in order for this to happen, it means make lead is a popular success :D ). Cheers. Bawolff 02:10, 12 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Feedback Thought

In cases like this where it isn't going to LQT. Perhaps adding a --~~~~ sig would be in order? --ShakataGaNai ^_^ 18:56, 13 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Good idea. (It originally did that, then i turned it off for lqt). Bawolff 20:23, 13 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Wikimedia privacy policy

Hi Bawolff, I comment here on your blog post on rating system (your blog is somewhat restrictive in identifications allowed for commenters). Anyway: Nice work, rating system. I am however a bit worried by the extension publishing ip addresses of all visitors that do rating, does that comply with our privacy policy? Cheers, Erik Zachte (talk) 07:57, 15 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It doesn't publish who says what, only their comments to threads. The js isn't recording anything special, it is just the same if they hit edit & save. --ShakataGaNai ^_^ 08:02, 15 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Yep, agree with Shaka. A non-registered user's IP would have been revealed anyway if he had edited a page. The official WMF policy page has more info on this stuff. Tempodivalse [talk] 13:40, 15 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Erik (/me feels honoured, important people are talking to me) - I'm not intemently familiar with our privacy policy, so I don't know for certain, but given that the extension was enabled in the first place I would assume so (for the ips that appear on special:ratinghistory ). I just made some of the front end more visually appealing, the core extension itself was written by werdna and enabled ages ago. I did add the comment box, which I have no idea if it should be considered any different from editing a page. It did not occur to me that it would be, but again I don't have intimate knowledge of the policy. I really hope it is not in violation of the policy. Bawolff 14:20, 16 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Easy Peer Review Error Messagw

Bawolff,

Got the following error when reviewing this article:

"A local JS function experienced an error on an API request. Please leave a note at User_talk:Bawolff. Details: TypeError: Bawolff.review.isError is not a function <521:http://en.wikinews.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Gadget-easyPeerReview.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript&270z52> browser=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)"

Thanks, Calebrw (talk) 02:01, 19 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It should be noted that the reviewed template was added to the collaboration page of the article, but the {{publish}} template had to be added manually to the article. Calebrw (talk) 02:05, 19 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Done. Should be fixed now. Slightly too much of the point counter code got disabled after the contest ended. Cheers. Bawolff 02:27, 19 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The following came up as I reviewed Fourteen dead in two attacks in Somalia:

A local JS function experienced an error on an API request. Please leave a note at User_talk:Bawolff. Details: TypeError: Result of expression 'Bawolff.review.isError' [undefined] is not a function. <undefined:undefined> browser=Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7D11 Safari/528.16

Benny the mascot (talk) 02:43, 19 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

probably have just a cached version of script (same issue as above). try doing a hard refresh before reviewing your next article. Cheers. Bawolff 02:52, 19 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I'm still having a problem with creating the comments pages. (Check my recent reviews if you don't understand what I'm saying) How exactly does one do a hard refresh? Benny the mascot (talk) 14:26, 24 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry if i'm butting in here, but as Bawolff seems to be away, thought I'd pop in. Shift+refresh button should do it on most browsers. Tempodivalse [talk] 14:36, 24 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I'm using an iPhone. ;) Any other suggestions? Benny the mascot (talk) 14:52, 24 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm, not sure. You could try the following:
  • Navigate to some page that is currently up for review:
  • In the address bar type:
javascript:location.reload(true)
  • Hit enter

Not sure if that will work, but it might. If that doesn't work, let me know, and we'll try something else. Bawolff 03:18, 25 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Nope, doesn't work. I think I'll try using my PC next time, just to check whether this is just a problem with my phone. I'll keep you posted. Benny the mascot (talk) 14:47, 25 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Anything like a possible now?

(OK very short paragraphs but it is basically still breaking news) SatuSuro (talk) 02:44, 20 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Paragraphs should really be longer... Bawolff 02:47, 20 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Overcat is a crime on other wiki's - is it allowable here? (Australia and Western Australia) SatuSuro (talk) 02:49, 20 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Not sure what overcat means, but i assume you mean putting it in subcategories and the parent categories. Over here we use categories in a slightly different manner. Because we are a news site, if someone looks up category:Australia we assume they want the latest news for australia, not just the latest news for things about australia that don't fit in another category. Thus we have a more categories the merrier philosophy. Bawolff 02:59, 20 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
- we have an as reliable Geosciences australia :) http://www.ga.gov.au/earthquakes/SatuSuro (talk) 03:20, 20 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
lol. Geoscience australia is just as good. I used USGS as i knew the url off hand, and some of the sources were saying different things, so better to go to a more direct source. feel free to change it if you want. By the way, when writing the article, make sure to put the most important details near the top (injuries come before background about the tetonic stabiltity of the region) (inverted-pyramid style) Bawolff 03:26, 20 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah well I thought for all the geographically challenged who either edit or read here or elsewhere - regional context might be on... but hey i have to get off - could you factor in http://www.ga.gov.au/bin/earthquake.pl?title=W%20of%20Kalgoorlie,%20WA.&;magnitude=5.0&;depth=0&;station=KMBL&;xy=121.429,-30.830&;date=20,04,2010&;time=00,17,09&;bg1=eqrisk_lm&;zoom=500 please ? - thanks if you can - cheers - the real world beckons SatuSuro (talk) 03:28, 20 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm accoding the that source, the page is only available for 90 days, which seems kind of stupid (It also doesn't preform any validation. For example here is a magnitude 11 earthquake - [3]. if they're dynamic i'm not sure why it is not valid after 90 days). Bawolff 03:34, 20 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

BTW - thank you very much for your considered patience with a newcomer - it is appreciated - have been registered for a very long time - but first try of sorts - thank you SatuSuro (talk) 03:33, 20 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

No problem. We are all new at one point. Welcome to Wikinews. 03:34, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

Hope you dont mind - I have left a comment at the admin general page, julians talk and figure somebody might need to create a remedy for such - if one gets in unchecked - wow - every phenomenon known to 'uman kind might have a seer telling us he is here (or she depending on the contents of theirtheir breakfast I suppose) - I would suggest a remedy might be something like WP:SPAM on wp en - as it does link to a blog SatuSuro (talk) 04:35, 20 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, thats fine. The main thing is that its unclear if we should moderate comment space or not except in extreme cases. This is more a case of potentially spam then anything else. I think i'll leave it for now, and let others decide. It is kind of an edge case. Bawolff 04:38, 20 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
heheheh I like thatmaybe san diego slipping slowly into the pacific - on the edge literally :) SatuSuro (talk) 04:41, 20 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Expanding Ticker

Hi Bawolff
I've tried to expand your ticker to my wiki but I failed. I copied MediaWiki:ticker2.js, the MediaWiki:common.js and MediaWiki:common.css rows but nothing appears. I've exported similar stuff before and I kinda know the basic, but I failed on this. Do you have any ideas why it wouldn't work out? I would be very thankful for answers and advices.
-- Nintendere (talk) 19:00, 21 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hi. To make it work, change line 36 (or somewhere around there) of you Common.js from
addLoadEvent(function () {if ((window.disable_ticker2 !== true) && (document.getElementById("singleTickerForPage") || document.getElementById('enableTickers'))) importScript("MediaWiki:ticker2.js");});

to

addOnloadHook(function () {if ((window.disable_ticker2 !== true) && (document.getElementById("singleTickerForPage") || document.getElementById('enableTickers'))) importScript("MediaWiki:ticker2.js");});

Cheers. Bawolff 20:18, 21 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you very, very much! It works. Thanks again for your fast help!
Nintendere (talk) 20:42, 21 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Audio News Briefs file issues

I seem to be having some issues with the news brief files and naming conventions. First of all, when I go to Category:April 19, 2010 the news brief takes up the entire top of the page and everything else that is linked to that date is at the bottom (this is an issue for all dates starting on April 15). Also, there is a problem with the April 19th news brief itself. You mentioned in your comment to me a couple of days ago that we use the News briefs:Monthname day, year not News briefs:Monthname, day year. I must have just put a comma in the wrong place, but now there are 2 pages - one is News briefs:April 19, 2010 and the other is News briefs:April, 19 2010. I see there is a redirect but, well, .... I think I'm just confused because now I don't even know how to ask the question :)

If you have a few moments, if you could look at what I'm doing wrong then I'll fix it all up, but I'm just so confused now I don;t even know where to begin.

Thanks for your help

Turtlestack (talk) 16:47, 22 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Javascript analysis for forensics

If I can get you some Zeus 'sploit code & logs, tonight or sometime tomorrow, how fast can you work out what its doing? -- Brian McNeil (alt. account) /alt-talkmain talk' 12:32, 24 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Depends on what its doing, how complicated it is, how obfuscated the code is, etc. I can certainly try. The javascript part is probably only a minor part of the virus though. Bawolff 22:54, 24 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Widget bug

Bawolff, I received the following in EZPR today:

A local JS function experienced an error on an API request. Please leave a note at User_talk:Bawolff. Details: badtoken: Invalid token <241:http://en.wikinews.org/w/index.php?title=User%3ABawolff%2Fmwapilib.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript&scrver=6> token=5a6f0e030c1c99ca553e592ae2d2e9d2+\; browser=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

The article also failed to autosight. Cheers, Tempodivalse [talk] 23:44, 25 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I've got the same problem too. --Diego Grez let's talk 00:48, 26 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Thats odd, as it says its submitting a token (but then erroring on lack of a token)... I'll look into that further. Possibly an issue with the api itself. Bawolff 02:52, 27 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
So far can't reproduce. Tell me if it continues to happen. Bawolff 05:43, 27 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Contest

Shouldn't the review script be fixed to add to the new article log and reflect the new point values and user cat naming? --Mikemoral♪♫ 23:19, 1 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I think I broked it

Yeah, this showed up on Make Lead: A local JS function experienced an error on an API request. Please leave a note at User_talk:Bawolff. Details: TypeError: pageText is undefined <81:http://en.wikinews.org/w/index.php?title=User%3ABawolff%2Fsanbox%2FleadGenerator.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript&scrver=7> browser=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729) --Patrick M (TUFKAAP) (talk) 04:28, 7 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Which page were you trying to use make lead with (that error can happen when it has trouble finding a lead paragraph). Bawolff 13:43, 7 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Use of the secure portal

Review works on the secure portal; Makelead doesn't. --Brian McNeil / talk 23:23, 12 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

[4] was done from the secure portal, so works for me. What error are you getting? Bawolff 03:16, 13 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Done Link was wrong, should be fixed now. Bawolff 03:34, 13 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Out of curiosity, is there any way to stay totally within the secure site? I notice that if I click a commons or enwp link I invariably end up off the secure site, and logged out. Not particularly good. --Brian McNeil / talk 15:42, 13 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I came across some js on Wikipedia that would automatically correct URLs. w:WP:JS I think. Mikemoral♪♫ 22:53, 13 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I've imported 'pedia's js as a gadget. Bawolff 02:23, 14 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Weird EPR behaviour

On this article EPR posted 2 reviews of the article. I didn't click the back button or anything, so I'm not sure why that happened. I'm using FF3.6.3 if that helps. This has happened to me before, but I've never been certain before that I hadn't accidentally clicked "back", and screwed with the script. Gopher65talk 02:06, 16 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

You can read all this if you want. It's all relevant, but it's a giant rambling mess, and it will probably just confuse you, so I struck it out. Gopher65talk 02:47, 16 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Whoa. Also the revisions on the "Revision XXXXXXXX of this article has been reviewed by Gopher65" part are totally screwed up now. That's odd. When I failed the article it didn't have an image. In fact, the second review listed there (the first "pass") is actually the revision that I failed. The final version that I passed is the last one reviewed, and the first one, the one that says "failed", is actually in intermediate revision that I never reviewed... Gopher65talk 02:25, 16 May 2010 (UTC) [reply]
I'll note that at one point I attempted to review the article, but there was an edit conflict and it didn't go through (I checked the talk page after the review failed". But, strangely, the version I tried to review actually *isn't one of the ones listed there*, and is actually the version directly before the intermediate revision that I didn't pass.Gopher65talk 02:29, 16 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

<unindent> So that was a random ramble. Here's my detailed description of the chain of events:

  • 1) I fail this article. (rev 1020964)
  • 2) He fixes article. (rev 1020972)
  • 3) He clicks the "move article to review" button on the "tasks" template and has a very strange Javascript, browser, ISP, or other error. The article is somehow reverted to the pre-review rev 1020957. (rev 1020977)
  • 4) He notices something is different, but thinks that it was just the image gone missing. He readds image. (rev 1020979)
  • 6) At the same time I try and review the article, thinking I'm reviewing his fixed version. I edit conflict with his "readd image" edit.
  • 7) We have a "WTF just happened" discussion on IRC and then I revert the article to his fixed version for him. (rev 1020983)
  • 8) I push the "move this article to review" Javascript button on the "tasks" template. (rev 1020984)
  • 9) I review the article. (rev 1020987)
  • 10) I notice the extra review template, and the mixed up revision numbers on all three review templates. None of the templates have the correct revision number.
  • 11) I post here.

Gopher65talk 02:43, 16 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, here's what i think happened (not sure, this is all really odd):
  1. At 01:24 G628 moved the article to review using button. This worked fine.
  2. Gopher65 did some copyedits
  3. Gopher65 failed article at 01:34, (this worked fine)
  4. C628 does some edit
  5. C628 moves back to review using the button at 01:53 (this is where bad stuff starts to happen)
    • For some reason, that acts on the revision from 01:23 not 01:48.
    • This is the revision from last time C628 moved it to review
    • Thus perhaps the revision was cached
  6. Gopher65 tries to review that revision, but there is an edit conflict with C628. For some reason, the peer reviewed message gets posted to talk page (shouldn't have happened probably), but article is not published, not sighted, and opinion page is not created.
  7. Gopher fixes up the issue from the broken move to review, essentially reverting things
  8. Gopher reviews, everything works.

So basically there were two issues:

  • The move to review button got the wrong revision. (probably cache related) This is surprising, i need to look into that futher.
  • Easy Peer review's edit conflict handling somewhat sucks. Its always sucks and should be fixed.

Bawolff 02:01, 17 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

A bug to be squished

I found [bug 6092]!!!

If fixed, and my guess at the code is right (haven't looked, see timestamp), You could use {{CURRENTTIMESTAMP:{{FULLPAGENAME}}/Lead n}} in your date arithmetic, and either drop the number of leads parameter for a 'degrading' portal, or just have it as a maximum value.

Ideally, and it may already be possible, you can do a check if the page exists as well.

Oh, and looking at your code - that is what's wrong with it; the leads are embedded within the portal page itself. If someone just changes one, when three were previously auto-suppressed, then they'll all reappear.

Late here, you try and make sense of which magic words need hacked, I look at your code again, my over-cluttered brain thinks back to assembly, using macros, and avoiding the crud that came with imposing C, Java, and C++ syntaxes everywhere. Same as HTML was supposedly not readable enough, wikimarkup was born, and we're futzing with templates like mine. :S

P.S. Not hacked below the leads, yet... -- Brian McNeil (alt. account) /alt-talkmain talk' 02:06, 27 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

{{CURRENTTIMESTAMP}} is the current time right now (subject to caching). I think you're thinking of {{REVISIONTIMESTAMP}}. The fix for that bug was reverted by tim with the comment "Reverted r49575, {{revisionid:...}} due to unresolved CR comments and the general cache-breaking insanity of the concept.". The bug if fixed would probably help with this, however even if fixed today, it would take a while to become live on Wikinews (and in all probability, it will not be fixed for a little bit), thus we probably should not hold out for it. I put all the lead templates directly in the template call because it can detect when edited. I figure that if anyone edits the portal, they can remove the old leads. There's also the issue of where we put the lead template subpages - in the category namespace seems wrong, but putting it in a different namespace from the category also seems wrong. Bawolff 05:03, 27 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
p.s. You can check for page existence using {{#ifexist:some page|exists|does not}}. Bawolff 05:03, 27 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Right. So, ...
  1. All Portal templates constrained to a maximum of one lead (I don't trust people not to bollox a multi-lead template.
  2. I see if I can log into bugzilla from work, read that stupid bug-reversion, and clarify what I posted at OMGam.
  3. We need a MakeLead for the Portal template, but let me work on mine. I'll save my now-functional 1..5 lead code.
I will properly document the templates I've been creating, and then we can talk about what we need to do to put this everywhere. I, personally, and if the bot can be hacked together quickly enough, would favour the whole lot being changed to redirects to categories - but only if a few people are committed to taking the next step to getting professional portals set up. --Brian McNeil / talk 10:06, 27 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
If we can make WN:ML work for portals (a definite future goal, but not something happening this very instant), the concern of people messing around with multi-lead portals where one of these leads is super-old could be mitigated by WN:ML checking how old the leads are, and removing old ones. I don't think the bot would take too much effort to hack up. I definitly agree that are portals have looked way too unprofessional for far too long. I like the idea of them fitting in stylistically with the main page. Bawolff 10:18, 27 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
<edit conflict due to me having to evacuate in fire alarm drill> I was just trying to add an afterthought that a portal-specific makelead could fix the problem. I'm going to keep working on my look-n-feel solution, but a single-lead version should be "mostly hackable" from that right now. For the full-blown thing, I've got the conditional inclusion of 1..5 leads working fine. Now I'm on to tweaking out some of the other bits 'n' pieces.
A passing query would be, is there any way to put the date of an article in the DPL in really small text, and a condensed format? Eg [YYYY-MM-DD].? --Brian McNeil / talk 11:30, 27 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
yeah, its slightly hackish though, and must be done in the external css. Basically put the dpl in some div with a specific class name, and then do div.yourclass li {font-size:smaller;whaterever else} div.yourclass li a{ font-size: normal} . Bawolff 11:39, 27 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, basic idea is select all the list items that make up a dpl, shrink them, then unshrink anything in a link, leaving just the date shrunk. Bawolff 15:24, 27 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Moar Wikicode questionzzzz

Can you look at Template:NewPortal/Header. How do I make the "graphic" parameter work and put a flag over the top of the existing graphic? --Brian McNeil / talk 18:23, 30 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Define over-top. Like where the wikinews logo background is currently? In the middle like in the new years version [5]? Bawolff 22:54, 30 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Er, perhaps I should've used the word "overlaid". That is, in-line like the text and on top of the background graphic that's in the template.
Oh, and I borked the table code around the damn thing.
The next thing I want to do, and have two days off to hack about with (dependent on getting a doc's appointment for some strong painkillers), is to develop DPL-based content templates to replace where we've most popular, original, &c. That, for a geographic portal, would be the main Politics & conflicts, Health, Crime and law, &c. topical areas as seen on the current Africa portal.
Like all programming languages, the issue with wiki markup using heavy parserfunction stuff is practice. As you'll see in the current version, I am managing to get a lot of the complexity moved down a level or two. I've yet to be brave enough to suss out {{tasks}} and re-use that wackiness to have Portal:United Kingdom drill-down into regions; however, you can probably see where I'd like to go with that.
Lastly, 1. where's/what's the ticket code? 2. We can do most-popular in categories, right? The latter is much further down the priority list, but a full portal-system implementation should be able to include "most popular in Europe/North America/...". -- Brian McNeil (alt. account) /alt-talkmain talk 00:00, 31 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
yeah, wiki-table syntax is less than ideal. Personally i prefer html tables to it. parser functions in general have the problem of no variables. In ordinary programming if you have some complicated thing you do var complicatedThing = blah(); in wikisyntax you can't do that which reduced readability. The whitespace being significant (sometimes) also doesn't help readability. {{tasks}} is actually fairly simple. just one giant switch statement. for the dpl content templates, you might want to look at {{portals suck}}, it will be similar to what you want to do. I'll have a look at the graphic. Bawolff 01:11, 31 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Also, ticker code is at {{ticker}}. It can take any wiki list as a ticker. {{Popular articles}} could concievably be made per-category, would require coding though (not that much though), also has larger issue that some categories simply will not have any popular articles at a given time. Bawolff 01:18, 31 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Don't teach your grandmother to suck eggs! :P
If wikisyntax was Turing-Complete, you could wreak havoc with poor coding.
P.S. Thanks for the pointers! I'll likely pick up more, and bug you once I've had some sleep. Must also devote some time to watching "Going Postal". -- Brian McNeil (alt. account) /alt-talkmain talk 03:45, 31 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
P.P.S. I can't figure out why the DPL is partway down displayed lead 1 on Portal:Scotland. What it should now be compared to is the actual main page; I have started moving the more complex, and extablished, coding into subpages. So, it should just be getting the formatting tweaked. Is that solved by saying ShakataGaNai three times? :P -- Brian McNeil (alt. account) /alt-talkmain talk 03:58, 31 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
lol, all things are solved by invoking shakataGaNai's name. I hate to disappoint you, but supposedly wiki-syntax is turring complete (even before tim added parser functions. something to with the fact you can use a parameter to specify the name of another template to be transcluded can be exploited to make an if statement or something). The dpl is in the middle as tables default to a vertical-alignment of middle. to make it go to the top you have to apply the css vertical-align: top to the table cell containing the dpl. Bawolff 06:25, 31 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
ok, I looked at the graphic problem. I removed the float (the left value in the image syntax). I also made the link a local one, so as to work on the secure server. You may want to fiddle with the size and vertical-alignment of the image (however baseline (Default) seemed to be the best vertical alignment in my testing). Bawolff 06:36, 31 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
At that point we put it in the main css. (you can do by namespace in the main css, but really its not the best idea. people don't like it when things behave differently on different page. Its better to use the subpage thing for specific testing, and then when ready for prime time, but it into mediawiki:Common.css. Bawolff 13:56, 31 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • It is looking quite promising for me having this 95% finished in my couple of days off. I could really do with getting a 'private' chat with you and Shaka in IRC to nail down specifications for tools to maintain portals and have stale leads "degrade" elegantly.
At the moment, I'm abusing Portal:Scotland - so far, so good. That's geographic, and on that front I'd want to be able to have Portal:Europe have drill-down into individual country portals. On a topical side, I'll likely abuse Portal:Health, or Education, and have that drill-down into 'continent' portals.
This is going to be quite, quite, complex, but,... gotta keep ahead of the bot on my edit count. ;-) --Brian McNeil / talk 14:32, 31 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
lol. Bawolff 14:35, 31 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Additional comments tab

Hi Bawolff,

I have a question in regards to setting up the additional 'comments' tab.

You suggested to try the extensions 'CommentPages' or perform a js-hack. It seems that we couldn't get the commentary-extension to work, so I am wondering if you are happy to send me the code and instructions for the js-hack?

A bit more details about what we need:

First of all, we only want to have this additional 'Comment'tab in one of our customised namespaces. The namespace is called 'guidelines'. Everyone has 'read' access to articles and discussion, but only certain groups have editing permissions for articles in that namespace and the respective 'talk'-column... We are using 'Lockdown to restrict those permissions.

So is it possible to set up this additional 'comment'-tab in the 'guideline' namespace only and give everyone access to post comments there? However, they only have reading access for the articles and discussion of the 'guidelines'-namespace?

Not sure if you get what I mean, but let me know if anything comes to mind.

Hi. So you want to give people the ability to post comments to a certain namespace, but not the ability to read the comments that they post? I'm not sure if you can grant edit privs without read privs, but if you can make lockdown do that, then you should be able to make it work. It would probably work much better if people were allowed to both read and edit the comments namespace, as mediawiki really wasn't designed for allowing editing without reading. For the javascript code, do something like (you may have to make sure i got the plural right on the namespace names):

The following js in mediawiki:common.js

addOnloadHook(function () {
 if (wgCanonicalNamespace === "Guidelines" || wgCanonicalNamespace === "Guidelines_talk") {
  addPortletLink('p-cactions', wgServer + wgScript + '?action=edit&section=new&title=' + 'Comments:' + encodeURIComponent(wgTitle), 'New comment', 'ca-comments-tab', 'Post a new comment on this guideline', null, document.getElementById('ca-talk'));
 }
 if (wgCanonicalNamespace === 'Comments') {
 addPortletLink('p-cactions', wgServer + wgScript + '?title=' + 'Guidelines:' + encodeURIComponent(wgTitle), 'Guideline', 'ca-guideline-tab', 'View guideline', null, document.getElementById('ca-talk'));
 addPortletLink('p-cactions', wgServer + wgScript + '?title=' + 'Guidelines_talk:' + encodeURIComponent(wgTitle), 'Talk', 'ca-guideline-talk-tab', 'View guideline', null, document.getElementById('ca-talk'));
 }
});

The following css in Mediawiki:Common.css

/* replace the 100 after the body.ns- with whatever namespace number you use for the public_comments: namespace */
body.ns-100 #ca-talk {display: none}

Note the above code won't make redlinks for non-exisitant pages, for your use i don't think thats important. Also this assumes the skin is Monobook. some other skins won't work as good with this code. Bawolff 09:06, 28 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you. Sorry, I probably wasn't too clear with my description about the user rights. Everyone should definitely be able to post and read the comments that they post in this additional comment-tab. However, they only have reading permission for the 'guidelines'-articles and default 'guidelines'-talk pages. This additional tab should basically collect 'public' comments.Juttavd (talk)
In that case it should work fine. Bawolff 00:24, 31 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Just by looking at the code as a layperson, I am wondering if the suggested change in Mediawiki:Common.css would hide all talk-pages. This is definitely not what should happen. The regular 'talk column' should still appear when you are in the 'guidelines'-namespace.

Also, if we call the new namespace 'Public_comment' do I need to change everything that is 'comments' in the code you sent to 'Public_comment"?

So it would read:

addOnloadHook(function () {
 if (wgCanonicalNamespace === "Guidelines" || wgCanonicalNamespace === "Guidelines_talk") {
  addPortletLink('p-cactions', wgServer + wgScript + '?action=edit&section=new&title=' + 'Public_comment:' + encodeURIComponent(wgTitle), 'New public comment', 'ca-public_comment-tab', 'Post a new comment on this guideline', null, document.getElementById('ca-talk'));
 }
 if (wgCanonicalNamespace === 'Public_comment') {
 addPortletLink('p-cactions', wgServer + wgScript + '?title=' + 'Guidelines:' + encodeURIComponent(wgTitle), 'Guideline', 'ca-guideline-tab', 'View guideline', null, document.getElementById('ca-talk'));
 addPortletLink('p-cactions', wgServer + wgScript + '?title=' + 'Guidelines_talk:' + encodeURIComponent(wgTitle), 'Talk', 'ca-guideline-talk-tab', 'View guideline', null, document.getElementById('ca-talk'));
 }
});

Could you have a look at the modified code and send any corrections?

If we implement the code, can we jump back and forth between article, talk and public-comment-tab as seen on wikinews?

Last question: If we set up the custom namespace 'Public comment', do we still need to create 'Public_comment_talk" even though we don't want it or is this already specified in the code of the hack?

Sorry about all those questions. Thanks in advance. Juttavd (talk)

yeah, you still have to create the extra namespace. Mediawiki expects namespaces to come in pairs, and doesn't work well without the associated talk. However with this code the tab won't appear for it, and it will be mostly invisible. (for example on wikinews we have comments: and comments_talk:, but most people don't know comments_talk: exists) Bawolff 01:09, 31 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
p.s. as a side note, we (here) also now use liquid threads for the comment namespace, it might be something you might consider looking into. (can't remember if i mentioned that previously) Bawolff
Thanks for clarifying. So the code that you sent me includes the 'supression' of the 'comments_talk' pages? So is it ok if I change everything that reads 'comments' in the js-code to 'public comment? I think I need to learn code. Would be so much easier to understand it all...
Regarding Liquid Threads: Not sure if we can install it. I understand that you would need console access?! Unfortunately, we don't have that with our current web host, but we might be able to convince them to install it for us. I really like that extension...
yes, feel free to change the namespace names to whatever you want them to be. In the code above, the part that goes into mediawiki:Common.css is the part that suppress the links to comments_talk: page (Which no that I look at it is actually wrong..ok, fixed now, but you'll need to change the namespace number to whatever namespace you're using for the public_comments namespace). As for liquid threads - yes it requires shell access to install. This is to add tables to the database. Technically if you sql access you can do that by hand without the shell, but its a little more difficult (you have to add db prefixes to table names, and such). Bawolff 06:59, 31 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Arabic MakeLead

Hi there, Idk if you still remember me, I asked you a while ago to work on the Arabian Make Lead. Anyways, You posted on my talk page that i need to add

importScript('user:Bawolff/leadGen.js')

on the bottom of this page Common.js, But since I can only view the source and not able to edit, what do you think i should do ? Please reply on my Arabic Wikipedia page, Thanks. --عمرو (talk) 04:39, 30 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hi my friend! So sorry for disturbing but as you can see, Make Lead is not working on there It just looks different than the one you have, I'm sorry but what else do i have to do to make it working well? --عمرو (talk) 20:46, 1 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hey :) Thanks alot its working now :) But as you mentioned before, Google translate sucks! Please whenever your not busy do the following:

In English Make Lead In Arabic One Should be Note
Make Lead التحديث يؤدي المادة أنشئ كخبر رئيسي button
Lead Number التي تؤدي مكان الخبر
Summary method موجز الأسلوب موجز العرض
1st sentence 1 الجملة الجملة الأولى فقط
1st2 sentence 2 الجملة أول جملتين
1st paragraph الفقرة 1 أول فقرة
1st 250 letters الأولى 250 رسائل أول 250 حرف
1st 500 letters الأولى 500 رسائل أول 500 حرف
Make Lead as _#_ _#_ كما تؤدي إنقاذ عدد أنشئ كخبر رقم _#_ Button. Number should be after the text
Refresh Preview معاينة مجدد حدث المعاينة Button
Current Leads: مقالات الرصاص الأخبار الرئيسية الحالية Table
Article المادة الخبر Table
Position موقف الموقع Table
Age عمر منذ Table
And in the lead number field, Top-Left = أعلى يسار. Top-Right= أعلى يمين. Bottom-Left = أسفل يسار. Bottom-Right = أسفل يمين

Thanks a lot! Let me know if you need anything :)--عمرو (talk) 22:58, 1 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

A local JS function....

Hi Bawolff,

I received something like this:

A local JS function experienced an error on an API request. Please leave a note at User_talk:Bawolff. Details: badtoken: Invalid token <undefined:undefined> browser=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/5.0.375.55 Safari/533.4

What's it?

Thanks,--Notnd (talk) 10:21, 1 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hi. That happens when using one of the javascript gadgets that edit the wiki, and it fails. Normally if this happens it happens during easy peer review, as easy peer review is rather complicated and doesn't handle errors well. However considering you are not a reviewer, it probably happened after pressing the "Change this article from developing to requiring review" button, which is quite rare (can you confirm thats one it happened?). I'll have to look into the cause further. Thank you for reporting it. Bawolff 10:50, 1 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Sports Prefixes

Could you please take a look at Wikinews:Water_cooler/policy#Sports_Prefixes. Please give your thoughts there. Calebrw (talk) 18:25, 4 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Barnstar!

The Guidance Barnstar
This well deserved barnstar is awarded to Bawolff for his tirless work on IRC helping editors. Thank you so much for your continued dedication and kindness. Rum (talk) 00:28, 7 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you very much. Bawolff 00:34, 7 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Tool not sighting

[6] this article was reviewed, and published, but the tool left the article un-sighted. Thoughts? -- Cirt (talk) 23:04, 8 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Also, [7] this. --Pi zero (talk) 02:50, 9 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Another. --Pi zero (talk) 04:19, 15 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

IRC JavaScript

Would you please change that line to:

src_attr.nodeValue = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://" : "http://") + "webchat.freenode.net/?channels=%23some-channel&uio=MT1mYWxzZQ9a";

Liangent (talk) 03:37, 10 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

for mediawiki:Irc.js? or some other script?Bawolff 19:56, 10 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Small questioon about ticker

Sorry for disturbing you, but I just wanted to ask a question regarding the Ticker code. I've incorporated the ticker2.js onto another wiki and I was wondering on whether it's possible to remove the "Latest News (full list):" bit. I tried removing some part relating to it in the common.css before but then "nullnullnull" was displayed:". --Bigboss4 (talk) 15:29, 10 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

You can do something like:
<div id="singleTickerForPage" class="isATicker Ticker_speed-5 Ticker_strLeft-%20 Ticker_strLinkText-%20  Ticker_strRight-%20">
*First item
*Second Item
*Third Item
</div>

which makes:

  • First item
  • Second Item
  • Third Item

Bawolff 20:08, 10 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Username change

Thank you for the username change.--William S. Saturn (talk) 22:38, 10 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

No problem. Bawolff 22:39, 10 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Flagged Revisions

Please adjust your recent change to Common.css to use span.mw-fr-reviewlink to hide the link but not hide whole lines in user contributions. Thanks. 99.31.118.187 (talk) 21:43, 15 June 2010 (UTC) responded on wc. Bawolff 23:00, 15 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

review gadget

"A local JS function experienced an error on an API request. Please leave a note at User_talk:Bawolff. Details: Error: Error: 0 <undefined:undefined> browser=Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 6.1; U; en) Presto/2.5.24 Version/10.53" My internat was having a bad night, that probably has something to do with it. On 'Bloody Sunday Inquiry' publishes report into British Army killing of activists in Northern Ireland. Cheers, C628 (talk) 02:36, 17 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thats an odd error. I'm not sure how it could have an error named "0". Thanks for reporting it. Bawolff 03:57, 17 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

ER Error for ya

A local JS function experienced an error on an API request. Please leave a note at User_talk:Bawolff. Details: unknownerror: Unknown error: ``231 <241:http://en.wikinews.org/w/index.php?title=User%3ABawolff%2Fmwapilib.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript&scrver=7> browser=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3 ( .NET CLR 3.5.30729) Calebrw (talk) 16:23, 18 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

yay! one that is not my fault. Thats an error on the mediawiki (api) side. Tell me if it happens again. Bawolff 19:30, 18 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Got a new JS gadget project for you.

So I've got an idea for a new gadget for you to make, I call it "Auto-sight". A little JS that watches for every time you click "save" on an already sighted page, and sights the edit you just saved. I realize it might be tricky to implement, I can't think of how to get around the page reloading issue off hand, but then again I don't do much JS or MWAPI interaction. I also realize you're busy with other things and GSOC... but if you have an idea for how to do this / some time to do so... it would be _greatly_ appreciated. --ShakataGaNai ^_^ 19:54, 20 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

We could just ask for bugzilla:23948 reversed. ;). Bawolff 20:40, 20 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not even gonna get into the stupidity of that.. Maybe a separate group? --ShakataGaNai ^_^ 20:45, 20 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
At the very least it would be nice if stuff not in the main namespace was auto-sighted. Bawolff 21:05, 20 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Well main name space is exactly what I want to sight. Why do I need to take several extra steps to sight something where I'm simply correcting the title of a source? In general, people are always going to sight their own edits... so this entire thing is SNAFU. --ShakataGaNai ^_^ 21:42, 20 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
New gadget! basically just adds that review this revision checkbox but for pages already currently reviewed. The most annoying part of this no auto-sight thing is rolling back to a sighted revision does not sight (which this gadget doesn't help). Bawolff 21:56, 20 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

OS done

You can haz OS. --ShakataGaNai ^_^ 02:48, 21 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Whee. Bawolff 03:06, 21 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Dwarves vs Dwarfs

All agreed that this can go somewhere - I believe you have a collection...

<Scots_Don>	Floro had advice from invisible dwarves
<gopher65>	hehehe
<gopher65>	Ah the dwarves:)
<Scots_Don>	Dwarves! Dwarves! Dwarves! They provide sage advice when legislating from the bench.
<Dendodge>	Dwarves = Dwarfs
<Scots_Don>	Pshaw!
<Scots_Don>	Not a word I use often
<Scots_Don>	[[wikt:dwarves]]
<Wikilink2>	http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dwarves
<Dendodge>	Dwarves is the version Tolkien used
<Dendodge>	In all other contexts, one should use dwarfs
<Scots_Don>	Thank you J.R.R. Tolkien for indoctrinating me with a spelling error :P
<Dendodge>	:P

I'll point Amgine at it too, I'm sure it'll amuse. --Brian McNeil / talk 13:41, 22 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Later, ....
<Tempodivalse>	bawolff: Dwarves = plural of the noun dwarf. 
                Dwarfs = third person singular of the verb to dwarf.
<Tempodivalse>	Uh, bawolff's not here? Nvmd ...
 ...
 ...
<Scots_Don>	[[wikt:dwarves]]
<Wikilink2>	http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dwarves
<Scots_Don>	Recursion (n): See Recursion
 ...
 ...
<Tempodivalse>	scots, what?
<Tempodivalse>	oh
<Tempodivalse>	i was mistaken then
<Tempodivalse>	pesky english spelling
That without permission, just sarcasm. --Brian McNeil / talk 19:47, 22 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I thought, for a moment, that TdV was advocating Scots spelling. I am proud to slip some in now and again without realising. --InfantGorilla (talk) 14:23, 23 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

EPR bug

I was reviewing 2010 FIFA World Cup: Spain beats Chile; both go to second round and it threw the following error:

Details: unknownerror: Unknown error: ``231 <241:http://en.wikinews.org/w/index.php?title=User%3ABawolff%2Fmwapilib.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript&scrver=7> browser=Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-GB; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100423 Ubuntu/10.04 (lucid) Firefox/3.6.3

I was failing the article at the time. --Killing Vector (talk) 02:19, 26 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, Bawolff. I visited an article and got the following error:
A local JS function experienced an error on an API request. Please leave a note at User_talk:Bawolff. Details: Error: Error: 504Gateway Time-out <235:http://en.wikinews.org/w/index.php?title=User:Bawolff/mwapilib.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript> browser=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6 ( .NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Matthewedwards (talk) 22:09, 26 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]


Killing vector's happens when an edit (for easy peer review) does not save, but is not an edit conflict, Matthew's probably happens if a javascript gadget like reviewAlert can't connect to wikinews. Bawolff 21:36, 29 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

JavaScript Error

Hi there, I was instructed to report this following message on your talk page.

A local JS function experienced an error on an API request. Please leave a note at User_talk:Bawolff. Details: Error: Error: 12029Unknown <undefined:undefined> browser=Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)

PopMusicBuff talk 13:57, 28 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

EZ PR strikes again

EZPR failed to remove {{Review}} when I failed Former Lithuanian president Algirdas Brazauskas dies just now. Blood Red Sandman (Talk) (Contribs) 09:04, 3 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Updated Review/Lead tools

You must've known this was coming.... ;-)

Per our discussion in IRC, I'm going to lay out what I think is needed to compliment the NewPortal template I've been working on. -- Brian McNeil (alt. account) /alt-talkmain talk 07:25, 8 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Current Review/Publish/Lead workflow

At present, assuming an article is okay, this is what my memory tells me the workflow is:

  1. User puts {{review}} template on an article.
  2. Reviewer, using EzPeerReview, publishes article, and gets option to run MakeLead
  3. Reviewer runs MakeLead, copyedits to-be-displayed lead, and posts to a main page lead.

Where we're finding a problem with this is in that people can fight over what goes on the main page as most important, and there is no mechanism to keep portals up to date.

Reviews Review/Publish/Lead workflow

The revised workflow is going to take quite a bit of work, sorry! I'm laying it out as I believe it should flow, then following with several points that I suspect need clarified and resolved.

  1. User puts {{review}} on an article
  2. Reviewer picks this up, and reviews with EzPeerReview
  3. Successful review goes to a new, mandatory, step LeadUpdater.
  4. LeadUpdater offers a lead-formatting section, much like the current MakeLead one.
  5. LeadUpdater scans the full list of categories an article is in (excluding date categories).
    1. For each category an article is in, where the NewPortal template is in use, and sub-pages for portal-specific leads exist;
    2. A line, giving the portal name, and lead numbers is displayed. 1 thru 5 lead numbers may be displayed, the current lead article title and last updated date should be displayed.
    3. For each portal, the reviewer can check one of a number of boxes (one per lead, per portal) to be updated with the lead template.
  6. Following portal lead update, the user-formatted lead template should be passed to the current MakeLead where things go back to the current process.

Commments

  • At point 2, reviewers should be alerted when they pick up any article with <1 source, or <3 categories.
  • The NewPortal template needs additional changes such that 'stale' leads degrade out of sight. I'm assuming that, if carried out within a script, some sort of "display until" timestamp can be encoded into the portal leads, or into the actual template on the portal page itself. Hints on coding this appreciated.
  • There's likely a need to figure out how the NewPortal template can degrade, over time, from the max 5 leads down to none.

So, what's your thoughts on this? In some respects, I suspect it is a fairly substantial amount of coding to get it right. But', it will in the long run substantially improve Wikinews visibility in GNews. If we've multiple, relevant, portals pointing at major stories, then the way the GNews indexing works, that'll influence the placement of our stories.

And, demanding as ever, I'd really like to see this done with future translation for other language versions kept in mind. Based on Amgine pushing you through that on the Wiktionary Hover gadget, it would probably be very useful to document your experience on the process. I've done stuff meant for translation before. It is difficult to get right when you might have a string with two or three substituted variables which, depending on the language, could be reordered.

Up for it Bawolff? I take it for granted that Shaka can be pointed at this too for input. You two are, after all, the Wikinews Developer Team. ;-) -- Brian McNeil (alt. account) /alt-talkmain talk 07:49, 8 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that this will definitely improve things. However it will also take quite a bit of time. Translation in itself is not all that hard when all that needs translating is the interface. The Wiktionary hover gadget is hard to translate because each translation requires essentially re-writing the entire gadget as basically it parses the html output of mediawiki useing regexes (which is a rather bad idea in and of itself), but each language uses different conventions, so each language requires the html reader to be re-written (not to mention writing something to read stuff in a language you don't understand is never fun). With MakeLead this is not as bad. the formating conventions are much closer (a new line = new paragraph is a safe assumption in many languages), and its only a small part of the thing that reads in the wiki-syntax.

One potential issue with the work flow, is do we want all the leads the same. Sometimes we make main leads longer than subsidary leads. But then we'd have to get people to check to different length leads. Something to think about.

Anyways, definitely do-able, but is going to take a bit of effort, and quite a bit of time. Bawolff 22:11, 8 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

  • Good, good. I didn't think it would be a five minute fix. The point was to lay out as a workflow which is probably a clearer way to communicate it. I assume a variety of bits from the existing system would be cannibalised for the new one. If you can point me at templates (like the review one presented when you start EzPeerReview), then I can look at these a bit and see how they might be improved/future-proofed. --84.13.118.107 (talk) 23:27, 8 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
The review template at the beginning of EzPeerReview is a big html blob in mediawiki:Gadget-easyPeerReview.js:
var html = '<form id="easyReviewForm" action="javascript:void 0" onsubmit="Bawolff.review.submit(); return false;"><table class="metadata plainlinks ambox ambox-notice EasyReview" id="EasyReview-mainAmbox" style="line-height: 1.2"><tr><td class="ambox-image"><a href="/wiki/File:Pictogram_voting_question-blue.svg" class="image" title="Pictogram_voting_question-blue.svg"><img alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/90/Pictogram_voting_question-blue.svg/60px-Pictogram_voting_question-blue.svg.png" width="60" height="62" border="0" /></a></td><td>' + Bawolff.review_i18n.form_rev_numb + wgCurRevisionId + '<ul style="line-height:1.6;"><li><b><a href="/wiki/' + Bawolff.review_i18n.form_copyright_page + '" title="' + decodeURIComponent(Bawolff.review_i18n.form_copyright_page).replace(/_/g, ' ') + '">' + Bawolff.review_i18n.form_copyright + '</a>:</b> <img alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/ba/Red_x.svg/10px-Red_x.svg.png" id="EasyReview-copyright-image" width="10" height="10" border="0" /><select name="EasyReview-copyright" onchange="Bawolff.review.selectChange()"><option value="pass">' + Bawolff.review_i18n.pass + '</option><option value="fail" >' + Bawolff.review_i18n.fail + '</option><option value="n/a" selected="selected">' + Bawolff.review_i18n.not_reviewed + '</option></select> <label for="EasyReview-copyright-comment" style="visibility:hidden">' + Bawolff.review_i18n.form_comment + '</label><input id="EasyReview-copyright-comment" name="EasyReview-copyright-comment" type="text" length="30" style="visibility: hidden"/></li><li><b><a href="/wiki/' + Bawolff.review_i18n.form_news_page + '" title="' + decodeURIComponent(Bawolff.review_i18n.form_news_page).replace(/_/g, ' ') + '">' + Bawolff.review_i18n.form_news + '</a>:</b> <img alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/ba/Red_x.svg/10px-Red_x.svg.png" id="EasyReview-news-image" width="10" height="10" border="0" /><select name="EasyReview-news" onchange="Bawolff.review.selectChange()"><option value="pass">' + Bawolff.review_i18n.pass + '</option><option value="fail" >' + Bawolff.review_i18n.fail + '</option><option value="n/a" selected="selected">' + Bawolff.review_i18n.not_reviewed + '</option></select> <label for="EasyReview-news-comment" style="visibility:hidden">' + Bawolff.review_i18n.form_comment + '</label><input id="EasyReview-news-comment" name="EasyReview-news-comment" type="text" length="30" style="visibility: hidden"/></li><li><b><a href="/wiki/' + Bawolff.review_i18n.form_sources_page + '" title="' + decodeURIComponent(Bawolff.review_i18n.form_sources_page).replace(/_/g, ' ') + '">' + Bawolff.review_i18n.form_sources + '</a>:</b> <img alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/ba/Red_x.svg/10px-Red_x.svg.png" id="EasyReview-sources-image" width="10" height="10" border="0" /><select name="EasyReview-sources" onchange="Bawolff.review.selectChange()"><option value="pass">' + Bawolff.review_i18n.pass + '</option><option value="fail" >' + Bawolff.review_i18n.fail + '</option><option value="n/a" selected="selected">' + Bawolff.review_i18n.not_reviewed + '</option></select> <label for="EasyReview-sources-comment" style="visibility:hidden">' + Bawolff.review_i18n.form_comment + '</label><input id="EasyReview-sources-comment" name="EasyReview-sources-comment" type="text" length="30" style="visibility: hidden"/></li><li><b><a href="/wiki/' + Bawolff.review_i18n.form_npov_page + '" title="' + decodeURIComponent(Bawolff.review_i18n.form_npov_page).replace(/_/g, ' ') + '">' + Bawolff.review_i18n.form_npov + '</a>:</b> <img alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/ba/Red_x.svg/10px-Red_x.svg.png" id="EasyReview-npov-image" width="10" height="10" border="0" /><select name="EasyReview-npov" onchange="Bawolff.review.selectChange()"><option value="pass">' + Bawolff.review_i18n.pass + '</option><option value="fail" >' + Bawolff.review_i18n.fail + '</option><option value="n/a" selected="selected">' + Bawolff.review_i18n.not_reviewed + '</option></select> <label for="EasyReview-npov-comment" style="visibility:hidden">' + Bawolff.review_i18n.form_comment + '</label><input id="EasyReview-npov-comment" name="EasyReview-npov-comment" type="text" length="30" style="visibility: hidden"/></li><li><b><a href="/wiki/' + Bawolff.review_i18n.form_sg_page + '" title="' + decodeURIComponent(Bawolff.review_i18n.form_sg_page).replace(/_/g, ' ') + '">' + Bawolff.review_i18n.form_sg + '</a>:</b> <img alt="" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/ba/Red_x.svg/10px-Red_x.svg.png" id="EasyReview-sg-image" width="10" height="10" border="0" /><select name="EasyReview-sg" onchange="Bawolff.review.selectChange()"><option value="pass">' + Bawolff.review_i18n.pass + '</option><option value="fail" >' + Bawolff.review_i18n.fail + '</option><option value="n/a" selected="selected">' + Bawolff.review_i18n.not_reviewed + '</option></select> <label for="EasyReview-sg-comment" style="visibility:hidden">' + Bawolff.review_i18n.form_comment + '</label><input id="EasyReview-sg-comment" name="EasyReview-sg-comment" type="text" length="30" style="visibility: hidden"/></li></ul><p><b><label for="EasyReview-commentBox">' + Bawolff.review_i18n.form_comment + '</label></b> <textarea row="3" id="EasyReview-commentBox" name="EasyReview-commentBox"></textarea></p><input type="submit" value="'+ Bawolff.review_i18n.form_submit + '"/> <input type="submit" value="Cancel" onclick="jsMsg(\'\');return false"/></td></tr></table></form>'

Bawolff 23:38, 8 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

ArbCom

Hi Bawolff! I've nominated you as an ArbCom candidate, please see this and say if you accept or not. Cheers, Tempodivalse [talk] 01:02, 10 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

EPR misbehavin'

I've never see this before — a published article that appeared on the main page with the {{review}} tag still visible. It wasn't there, it was just visible; a null edit fixed the problem. I'm not exactly sure how that could have happened in the first place, though. (There was BTW also an article that EPR failed to sight this evening.) --Pi zero (talk) 05:58, 18 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hi. For the first issue - I couldn't cause that if I wanted to :). Sounds as if for some reason something didn't work on the mediawiki end and the parser cache didn't get purged maybe. Bawolff 05:29, 19 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Some. If it was done server-side it'd probably be better for the simple fact that the devs wouldn't let spaghetti code go live on the servers. Some of the code related to sending stuff to the server and checking for errors (the part not well-implemented at current) would be slightly easier. However, by and large it'd be about the same. Bawolff 07:36, 19 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

election certificate




Election Certificate

The election committee for the 2010 Arbitration Committee election certifies that this user was elected to be an Arbitrator until July 31, 2011.


Benny the mascot (talk) 19:04, 2 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Cool. Thanks. Bawolff 17:02, 3 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I may have copied from your card template... isn't CC-BY just wonderful? :D Benny the mascot (talk) 17:05, 3 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

WN:ML weirdness

Please see User talk:Diego Grez#I don't know how this happened --InfantGorilla (talk) 09:30, 7 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

William_Pietri

You mean, I don't get to shoot Shaka? Damn. I'll keep tryin' ;) Blood Red Sandman (Talk) (Contribs) 22:07, 13 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

lol. Bawolff 22:08, 13 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
That's your problem right there. Said by Blood Red Sandman, "I don't get to shoot Shaka?" You already shot Shaka. Congratulations. 24.125.55.90 (talk) 22:21, 13 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
? Bawolff 22:29, 13 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
You are just one of those who are laughing while contributors to this web site are smitten like fleas. How long do you think you will be able, in the long run, to live off all copycat content, and by the way of having only copyright content being posted here, what does that mean for this web site? To me, it means that it is a pure rip off? That, in itself, which if it is true, and it is, is stupid.
Is it the purpose of this news site to be recording copyright content? If it is, you have your priorities all mixed up.
That might be the purpose of an encylopedia, to gather and record content, but, its certainly not a purpose of a news site.
If you want news to be pretty, I'm afraid you are sadly mistaken. If you want news to be real, then you are going to have to make a leap of faith.
I know. You are incapable of that. Then so be it. 24.125.55.90 (talk) 22:51, 13 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
You're of course free to have any opinion that you like. Well it is true that much (not all) of our content is based on content already published elsewhere, the goal of it is to combine information found elsewhere into a single spot, not simply to copy the information. As for copyright, IANAL, but my understanding is copyright can only cover the expression of an idea, not the idea itself. Thus re-writing and combining information from different sources is not copyright infingement. Anyways, if you don't like what we do here, you don't have to read it. Bawolff 23:01, 13 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, I read news, and then, I come here and read the same news again. This is stupid.
The only reports that should be published here are orginal reports. Otherwise, you're just an oxymoron. Please realize that the Internet cares not for stupidity. What you are doing here constitutes the very essence of stupidity by repeating what other people say. If you've not the ability to recognize the sheer stupidity of not having the balls to publish original reports for whatever reason you might come up with for not doing so, then , well, then I'm afraid you can't be helped. 24.125.55.90 (talk) 23:26, 13 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
You have the right to your opinion, however I'd point out that many other news sites are similar in that regard. If you don't like it, why are you here? Bawolff 00:31, 14 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Gee, we "can't be helped?" And you tried, how? Publishing polemic diatribe against hard-working contributors? Belittling significant efforts put in by others? Yes, you're right, ideally all content would be original; it is not, but your petty sniping does nothing to help that. It is you, Ed, isn't it? You have to accept that people need experience writing in a news style, particularly if you're talking about not-yet-needing-to-shave kids. Some fraction thereof will move on to doing original reporting, or substantially adding to synthesis material by doing the OR. In recent times, I've only seen Teh Intertubez laughing at us because we reported on spotty youf Justa' Baby publishing his memoirs. --Brian McNeil / talk 22:33, 16 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

protection amusement

http://www.wikirage.com/editor/75.47.217.91/ - Amgine | t 17:31, 15 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

easy peer review not refreshing page after review

Its stupid that easy peer review doesn't re-render page after making review. Bawolff 21:32, 16 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Adding language to source template

I don't remember, but is it possible to use a lang code in the sources template? |lang=se, for example? - Amgine | t 16:22, 21 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Generally its added as a separate template after the source template. {{source|whatever...}} {{se}} Bawolff 18:42, 21 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
<nod> But it would be cooler if we folded that in as an optional {{source... parameter. - Amgine | t 15:58, 25 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

fyi: EZPR untidiness

EZPR seems to be working well, except that today it didn't detect an appropriate place to put the {{Publish}} template, perhaps because I didn't use the 'source' template for some of the external links. --InfantGorilla (talk) 12:01, 24 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for mentioning it. Bawolff 18:57, 24 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

What's wc? I'm kinda new here. And how do you turn off vector? TeleComNasSprVen (talk) 18:01, 27 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think that Bawolff is around. However, redirects to userpages for accredited reporters are allowed AFAIK. What you can do? Create news articles. How do you turn off Vector? Special:Preferences, Skin tab. What's the WC? Our version of Wikipedia's Village Pump. Diego Grez return fire 18:14, 27 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Um. How about "Our equivalent of Wikipedia's Village pump"? :-) --Pi zero (talk) 18:54, 27 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
yep, I wasn't here, thanks for responding for me. Cheers. Bawolff 16:42, 6 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

WiktLookUp bug report

at MediaWiki talk:Gadget-dictionaryLookupHover.js#Place to function, just fyi. - Amgine | t 15:06, 9 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Username change

Wikinews:Changing username suggests I "post a note on the talk pages of all bureaucrats". I asked one who's on a bit of a break so, if you have time, could you take care of this. Thanks, Rambo's Revenge (talk) 08:41, 10 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Reviewer nom

Yep, go right ahead. Thanks, WackyWacetalk 16:57, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Police may have killed up to eight tourists in Philippines hostage crisis

Hello. Thank you for responding to my concerns regarding the news article that has now been renamed "Police may have killed up to eight tourists in Philippines hostage crisis". Unfortunately it is still misleading. From my understanding, of the 8 hostages that died there is inconclusiveness surrounding up to 4 or 5 of the deaths. It is within the realm of possibility that they may have been killed by friendly fire, but there is also the possibility they were all killed by the perpetrator. I think a better title would be "Police may have killed some of the eight tourist victims in Philippines hostage crisis". Lambanog (talk) 02:13, 15 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

MakeLead for portals

If I recall correctly, I think you were going to make a version of WN:ML for portals? Is it ready yet? If so, could you give me a link to it? Thanks. --Yair rand (talk) 19:28, 17 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I was planning to, but... it hasn't happened yet (I haven't even started working on it). Bawolff 22:25, 17 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Talk page attacks

Please go ahead and protect my user and talk pages for a while - I don't use them much anyway. Thanks, NawlinWiki (talk) 00:22, 20 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. NawlinWiki's talk pages are often vandalized cross-wikily because he's an impressively active admin on en.WP, and the vandals follow Nawlin everywhere. --Diego Grez return fire 00:27, 20 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Speaking of Wikthover...

I have to compliment how well it dealt with the WMF server-down error page. It served it, and I was even able to c/p the entire msg. Graceful. - Amgine | t 15:30, 21 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Trust me, thats not intentional and is the result of a hack to make something else work... :P Bawolff 16:58, 21 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]
<chuckle> That's not a hack! that's a feature... - Amgine | t 17:32, 21 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Re: User page

Thanks for the protect, I have been the personal target of some trolls lately. red-thunder. 00:49, 22 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

js errors on secure

I get about a half-dosen js errors on my phone accessing via the secure site. Many are missing reference stuff. Can you take a look? --Brian McNeil / talk 13:17, 22 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Without access to your phone, I'd need to know the exact text of the error (since the errors are not reproducible on firefox). As a work around, these errors are most likely caused by a gadget (specifically reviewAlert, or review Progress gadgets as they are the only one's that should be able to trigger an error on page load), you could perhaps disable these gadgets if you don't need them. Bawolff 17:17, 22 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Cache-like mispublish

This was in Articles mispublished because the published revision was supposedly unsighted. I eventually fixed it, but not by sighting the published revision: I tried that and it didn't take (and then I tried it again, because anything that doesn't work is worth repeating, right?). What worked was a null edit — which caused it to show up as having been sighted by BRS. So it seems EPR did sight it when published, but there was some sort of bizarre cashe-like problem. The incident vaguely reminds me of earlier thread #EPR misbehavin'. --Pi zero (talk) 22:50, 22 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm, thats really odd. BRS's original sighting from easy peer review did go through (as evidenced by the logs [8] ) but i geuss the tables didn't update due to some obscure mediawiki bug, and the null edit caused the flagged rev tables to update. In any case this one isn't Easy peer review's fault, but rather odd nonetheless. Bawolff 05:34, 23 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Tiker in russian wikinews

Hi, Bawolff! Can you help to make a Ticker for russian wikinews? We need in it. Thanks. --Akishin D. (talk) 15:58, 23 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

yeah sure, but not right now, maybe on the weekend. If you use irc, I'll probably be on the #wikinews channel this weekend as well (if you don't use irc thats ok to, but sometimes these thngs are easier to explain on irc). Bawolff 16:32, 23 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]
responded at ru. Bawolff 19:24, 26 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I did make everything correctly? It does not work. --Дмитрий обс+ 12:33, 29 сентября 2010 (UTC)
Did you try doing a hard refresh. It appears to work for me on ru. Bawolff 12:12, 1 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Now we have ticker. Thank you!--Akishin D. (talk) 10:15, 16 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Your defence of Brian McNeil

I find it a bit peculiar that you came to the defence of McNeil. Those assembled were demanding that he himself, not of some surrogate, give an account of his own actions. He still has not. He chose to stay away, in line with the suggestion he made to Diego, in the hopes that the storm against his patently indefensible actions would die down. In the small-circle environment which is Wikinews, it is quite telling that you guys are closing ranks when the Alpha male is under attack; the page now locked down.

McNeil
McNeil

Did I use Jimbo's name in vain? Well, I decided against 'god', it would have been too gratuitous of me, being an atheist. I used the founder's name as a reference point, to highlight the abuse of power that was taking place. Jimbo, of all people, does not consider himself above the law, but somehow McNeil appears to consider himself guardian of the constitution, judge, jury and executioner. His behaviour is well out of order; and your defence of him puts you in the same ball-park.

McNeil is greatly damaged by this episode. The whole fiasco is also a great discredit to Wikinews, and reflects badly on the apologists. I wonder how long it would be for one among you to challenge his position – he is extremely vulnerable. When will you deliver the coup de grace? --Ohconfucius (talk) 06:10, 28 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

WN:AAA is "closed down" because both sides are making it worse. I was _hoping_ that everyone would take it as a hint and go cool off for 24 hours. So please, instead of picking this fight up on random pages, take a day off. Go outside, enjoy the weather (if it is nice), relax... try to enjoy yourself. --ShakataGaNai ^_^ 06:35, 28 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Baaawolf accused me of taking Jimbo's name in vein (sic), and that needed to be addressed. Ohconfucius (talk) 08:44, 28 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Respectfully, I supported the block originally, and thus when brianmc was asked for his rationale for blocking, I thought I should give mine, since I supported it at the time. It seemed unfair to only ask brianmc for his justification, when others (or at least I) supported it at the time. (Since that time I have reconsidered my opinions. I was a little angry, and I allowed that to colour my opinions, which is bad. (Crossed out because that wasn't very clear). All I was trying to say is my comment (or at least the one you were referring to anyways) was primarily meant as a defence of my actions, not brianmc's. I'm willing to go through the more formal dispute resolution w/ a mediator if you (or Tony) think it would be helpful in bringing this drama to a close Bawolff 11:15, 29 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Others might well be angry, but that is not helpful on a wiki. I must say, I'm wondering why more established users here aren't taking their own action. Tony1 (talk) 06:20, 30 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Secure I/F crashes

Hai, you might be able to diff/spot a problem I've experienced today.

I access my watchlist or RC via secure & it crashes the Nokia browser. If needed, Skenmy can CU me to get the browser ID. --Brian McNeil / talk 18:37, 30 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

well thats weird. Not exactly sure what could cause that. Some mobile browsers have issues with really long pages and/or large amounts of js that overflow available memory. Not sure if nokia is one of them. Check if you can always re-produce the error, and see if it still appears on the small rc. Bawolff 10:42, 1 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Curly braces

pop template - Amgine | t 05:26, 1 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

  • Sigh, that means we're really unpopular. The script takes a list of all the popular articles on wikinews, then filters to just the 45 most popular, and checks to see which of the 45 are in category:Published. If less than 15 of those 45 are in category:Published, bad things happen. (I've upped the 45 to 80. Hopefully this won't happen again That caused problems. Investigating futher). Bawolff 10:47, 1 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Use the ExternalEditor without Perl

Hi Bawolff,

I see that you are the current developer for the ExternalEditor Extension. My company would like to use this extension to edit Flowchart .dia files with Dia (like it's described here or other file (MIME) types if it's possible. The problem is, the installation of an old Perl version on every computer isn't practicable. So my question is if you feel up to program an external editing extension for Mediawiki for my company. Of course you would be paid for your work. Contact me, if you're interested: --Immortal King (talk) 17:04, 7 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hi. Thank you for the offer. Unfortunately I already have too much on my plate as it stands, so I simply don't have the time to do something like that. The current client side external editor implementation (ee.pl) is definitely showing its age, not to mention almost impossible to set up for your average (non-technical) user, so getting it replaced with something more usable would be a big improvement for the external editor feature in general. Thus I wish you luck in your efforts. Bawolff 17:36, 7 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]
OK, and thanks for your quick answer. --Immortal King (talk) 17:48, 9 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Welcome template question

Hey Bawolff, I hope you are doing well. :) I have a quick question. I want to add some sort of gadget and/or script for Wikiquote, very simple: just to add tabs for adding {{subst:Welcome}}~~~~ or {{subst:Welcomeip}}~~~~ to a user talk page, as a new subsection on that page, with "Welcome" as the subsection header. Do you know how I can go about doing that? -- Cirt (talk) 08:15, 16 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hey, basically want to try to modify MediaWiki:Gadget-UserMessages.js, for Wikiquote. -- Cirt (talk) 10:37, 16 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, copy q:user:Bawolff/vector.js to q:MediaWiki:Gadget-UserMessages.js and set up the whole gadget thing with q:mediawiki:Gadgets-definition. Bawolff 18:19, 16 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you! Can it be changed, to add the Welcome message, in a newly-created ==Welcome== subsection? -- Cirt (talk) 20:40, 16 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Done Bawolff
Thank you!!! -- Cirt (talk) 20:22, 17 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I tried adding it as a personal script, here, m:User:Cirt/welcome/vector.js, but it did not work, why? -- Cirt (talk) 06:24, 20 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Nevermind, it works, thanks! ;) -- Cirt (talk) 07:01, 20 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

EPR

I have a couple of stray thoughts on how we might perhaps make things more fault-tolerant:

  • EPR when publishing an article should remind the reviewer to make sure the edit was sighted. (I don't remember seeing such a reminder...)
  • Could makelead check to see whether the article has been sighted? Most or all of those four articles were made leads even though they weren't technically published.

The occasion for these thoughts is that four of the past seven EPR passes (that I know of) failed to sight, and one of those four didn't even edit the article. ([9], [10], and [11] merely didn't sight, [12] didn't even edit the article.) --Pi zero (talk) 12:51, 28 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Wow, thats kind of pathetic that 4 of the 7 failed to sight. Implementing some post-publish sanity check hopefully wouldn't be too hard. (fixing the error handling code is what really needs to be done, but thats harder). Bawolff 13:42, 28 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]
And [13] makes 5 of 8. We'd have a filibuster-proof majority in the US Senate. --Pi zero (talk) 01:41, 29 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Popular articles

Hi Bawolff, Sahim Approved you, You Can help us, Please Use الگو:خبرهای محبوب instead of Template:Popular articles, and you should replace "hits last hour" Sentence with "بازدید در آخرین ساعت" and one more thing is these are Persian numbers "۰ ۱ ۲ ۳ ۴ ۵ ۶ ۷ ۸ ۹" Please Use they instead of "0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9", and Main popular Template on Home Page is الگو:اصلی محبوب‌ترین‌ها, Thanks a lot. Mjbmr Talk 22:04, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

Will hopefully do sometime this afternoon. Bawolff 11:15, 29 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Questions in regards to flagged revisions and comments

Hi, I would like to ask some questions in regards to flagged revisions. Is it correct that unregistered users will only see articles and article updates once they have passed the review process? We are just setting up a wiki for our organisation and need some good quality control. It would be great if you could let me know how it works. I find the documentation on mediawiki hard to understand...

Also, I am wondering what 'wikinews' did in order to create the 'comments' column. We would like to have an 'expert talk page'-column (only for registered users) and then a talk page-column for everyone in our wiki... I am wondering what we would need to program. Did wikinews install an extension to get this additional 'comments' column?

Thanks for your help! Juttavd (talk)

/me thinks i responded to this earlier elsewhere. If i didn't, feel free to yell at me. Bawolff 19:44, 8 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hell-o

Hello old friend, I see my article still is waiting for review :D Get your admins and work :D Hope you're well!Danger^Mouse (talk) 09:44, 29 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Howdy. Welcome back. Bawolff 11:14, 29 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Bawolff bot@fa.wikinews

Hello! Your bot has been flagged on fa.wikinews. Best regardsSahim (talk) 19:20, 30 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

thanks. Bawolff 00:04, 31 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

EPR fail

Again. Any idea what caused this (MW update, script update?) and if it's the latter, can it be undone until it is fixed? fetch·comms 03:24, 8 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I haven't touched the script in a while, so its definitely not a script update. I'm not sure what is causing the issue. You guys are not getting any errors, and getting the standard success message for all these reviews?
Just to clarify, you're reporting that the article didn't sight? I notice there was a previous (pre-publish) version sighted:
# (show/hide) 02:15, 8 November 2010 Fetchcomms (Talk | contribs | block) reviewed a version of Chilean miner Edison Peña completes New York Marathon ‎ ([Accuracy: Sighted])  (revision: 02:15, 8 November 2010) 

That is unrelated to the complaint right? (It doesn't look like that was caused by ezpr since it doesn't have the right sighting summary). Bawolff 04:20, 8 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Looking through the code I discovered that if there was no error reporting if the api both did not return an error, and did not return a success. If you suddenly start getting a whole lot of pop up boxes with the message: "Error sighting article" let me know. If (after hard refresh) there are still instances where the article does not get sighted with no error messages whatsoever, also let me know. Cheers. Bawolff 05:21, 8 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

OK. The pre-publish sight may have been accidental with the autosight gadget, but I'm not sure why ezpr didn't sight the published version. fetch·comms 17:20, 9 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yep, the not sighting the published version is definitely a bug. Bawolff 19:06, 9 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

note to self - fa people need opinion page js.

---^. Bawolff 04:08, 10 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Popular articles

What happened to your bot?... Its last edit was ten hours ago. Diego Grez return fire 13:21, 10 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Bawolff bot borken, blocked

thot you ought to know. - Amgine | t 17:45, 10 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Bot broken

As Diego has noted on Template talk:Popular articles, your bot is malfunctioning and I've had to do the dreaded emergency bot block. :( Blood Red Sandman (Talk) (Contribs) 17:45, 10 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, Check this out too, it stopped working on fawikinews too, thanks Mjbmr Talk 17:52, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

Hiding the centralnotice banners

Please don't do it. I've undone that.

The Wikimedia Foundation provides the hosting for this site, and once a year we run a campaign asking for money. I don't think that's such an unreasonable ask. If you'd like to discuss, I'm happy to, but please don't hide the banners again. You're welcome to hit the "x" and close them. Philippe (WMF) (talk) 21:37, 11 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'm surprised at you, Philippe. The false suggestion that Wikinewsies wish the fundraiser to go away altogether has been used once before, and is simple moral blackmail. As you know, I have expressed satisfaction at how the fundraiser is being handled this time around - and I am amongst WN's more vocal critics of previous efforts. The gadget is opt-in. People will not miss the fundraiser because of the gadget. Donations will not be affected. It serves the same purpose as the "x". I do not feel feel the gadget is particularly needed in light of that improvement, but given that it is largely redundant to the WMF's own addition I cannot see what basis you have to imply Bawolff wishes the WMF to cease fundraising on WN. Blood Red Sandman (Talk) (Contribs) 22:10, 11 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
How it is right now is perfectly fine. Opt-in gadgets aren't a problem. At the time Philippe did that because no one was being able to see banners on wikinews regardless and it appeared to be enabled globally. I'm seeing banners now after you've put the gadget back in so that is obviously not a problem anymore. Jalexander (talk) 22:14, 11 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
In that case, I withdraw my remarks. I apologise, Philippe. I was unaware it was an honest mistake, and remember being rather hacked off myself when Godwin tried to state as fact that I wanted to deny the WMF the ability to fundraise. Blood Red Sandman (Talk) (Contribs) 22:17, 11 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not sure what the issue was, but for some reason, the gadget earlier was affecting me, without it selected. It seems to now be working appropriately, in which case I (of course) withdraw my objection as well. I apologize for my tone above, obviously I was unhappy to have them disabled globally, but I have NO objection to them being disabled on a user-opt-in basis. Thanks! Philippe (WMF) (talk) 22:38, 11 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • You should have known this discussion would bring me out the woodwork. I quit ComCom before an effective "posse" was rounded up to throw me out. What, exactly is wrong with a 'gadget' for real contributors (as in content) to avoid the appeals?
I recall last year all-too-well. It was a shameless insult to every project other than Wikipedia. Part of the measures I instituted after that debacle is that there is a "please donate" link on the main page of Wikinews 365 days a year. It is a shameful, and groundless, accusation to insinuate that sister projects object to fundraising. We are ALL painfully aware how important it is; we all know full-well that Wikipedia is what will tug most at the heart strings.
Provision of a gadget for those who are wiki-savvy to opt out is trivial. You're forcing unwanted advertising on people who've probably "donated" hundreds, if not thousands, of hours to project content.
Jeez, Phillipe! Have a sense of perspective! If the WMF decides to arbitrarily remove 'opt-out' gadgets, then they're taking an editorial interest in the projects. I, implicitly, trust Bawolff not to make fundraiser opt-out trivially easy. On the other hand, I assume that whatever cookie counters the WMF uses will be, repeatedly, reset. So, for those who've made a donation, and dismissed the appeal, they will be subjected to it repeatedly - unless a permanent opt-out option is available.
I appreciate the work you're trying to do, I respect the importance of the fundraiser, but I am strongly inclined to say you are not showing appropriate respect to dedicated project contributors.
So, perhaps best to step back from this, no? --Brian McNeil / talk 23:25, 11 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Brian, not a thing is wrong with it. Which is what I said, just above this :) "...but I have NO objection to them being disabled on a user-opt-in basis." Philippe (WMF) (talk) 18:26, 12 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
The instant the fundraiser launches... I stop by IRC to see if the yearly revolt had started. Fun time, fun times. --ShakataGaNai ^_^ 19:20, 12 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry for the confusion folks. As an aside, I think my edit summary here was quite appropriate... Bawolff 03:40, 12 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Resolved?

Well, it seems better than last year - so far. Text-only 'banner', great. It might be better if it said "an appeal from Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, and the Wikimedia Foundation which helps Wikinews keep afloat." --Brian McNeil / talk 20:13, 12 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

EPR failed to sight this. This time it did give an error message:

A local JS function experienced an error on an API request. Please leave a note at User_talk:Bawolff. Details: Error: Error: 500Internal Server Error <235:https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikinews/en/w/index.php?title=User%3ABawolff%2Fmwapilib.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript&scrver=7> browser=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.12) Gecko/20101026 Firefox/3.6.12

(Actually, IIRC it failed to sight when I published something the other day, and didn't give any error message. I forget why I didn't mention that one to you at the time...) --Pi zero (talk) 15:59, 24 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Adding to Pi zero's error, this article Korean_Peninsula_on_the_'brink_of_war':_DPRK didn't sight upon review. EzPR threw an error, but I didn't copy it before I clicked away. Probably the same as Pi zero's. Thanks:). I'm going to review Deigo's water treatment plant article now. I'll leave you another note saying whether or not it auto-reviewed upon publish. (All Spanish sources. *sigh* This is going to take me forever to copycheck. My Spanish sucks.). Gopher65talk 02:19, 25 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I got a similar error, but with MakeLead... (thanks Gopher by the way!) Diego Grez return fire 02:26, 25 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I just got the same error with diego's article. Gopher65talk 03:32, 25 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

29 presumed dead after second explosion at New Zealand mine

Didn't sight. The time sequence was —as last time— that the MakeLead button was visible for maybe a second or so, and then it put up the error message

A local JS function experienced an error on an API request. Please leave a note at User_talk:Bawolff. Details: notarget: Cannot find a flagged revision with the specified ID. <241:https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikinews/en/w/index.php?title=User%3ABawolff%2Fmwapilib.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript&scrver=7> browser=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.12) Gecko/20101026 Firefox/3.6.12

--Pi zero (talk) 17:21, 25 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

bugzilla:26110. (I saw this on bugzilla, and thought, oh this is going to be fun). Bawolff 18:30, 25 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Devs say it should be fixed now. Bawolff 11:33, 26 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

{{Ticker}}

Hi, Bawolff. I'm sysop on the recently created eo.wikinews. I was trying to import your {{ticker}} template to there, but I was not able to do that. I copied the template (eo:Ŝablono:Ticker) and the .js page (eo:MediaWiki:Ticker2.js). Then, I've made these edits: [14] and [15], to point the right Esperanto URL and category for published articles. But, it didn't work. I don't knot what is the problem, maybe is missing other .js or something in our .css. Can you help me to handle with that? Did I forget something? Thanks in advance, CasteloBrancomsg 10:08, 30 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, you also need some stuff from mediawiki:Common.css and mediawiki:Common.js. Specificly:

Add to eo:mediawiki:Common.css:

/*Ticker2 (animated ticker)*/
ul.actualTicker li {list-style-type:none; list-style-image:none;}/*mostly for IE*/
ul.actualTicker li {display:inline;}
ul.actualTicker span.tickerIntroduction {font-weight:bold;padding-right:0.5em;}
 
div.isATicker, div#singleTickerForPage {display:none;}

Add to eo:mediawiki:Common.js

addOnloadHook(function () {if ((window.disable_ticker2 !== true) && (document.getElementById("singleTickerForPage") || document.getElementById('enableTickers'))) importScript("MediaWiki:ticker2.js");});

If it still doesn't work after adding that, let me know. Bawolff 23:51, 30 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It works, now, Bawolff, thank you very much! Nice job =) CasteloBrancomsg 00:58, 1 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
No problem. I should really write this all down on a page somewhere. Its a common question. Bawolff 02:52, 1 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

MakeLead improvements, tweaks

I know you're pretty busy but, can you at some point expand MakeLead to highlight articles that have pending changes when it's run? Just of those someone might choose to update onto a lead. --Brian McNeil / talk 10:25, 30 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

EPR failed to sight ([16]). --Pi zero (talk) 15:21, 1 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

ok. No error messages? Bawolff 18:24, 1 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Brian McNeil published, so I wouldn't know (though I imagine if there'd been an error message, you'd have heard from Brian directly). --Pi zero (talk) 20:48, 1 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Also failed to sight: [17]. --Pi zero (talk) 19:59, 3 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I just got a fail to sight message on the British government scrap planned rules on pay equality article. The error message said: "Sight error code: 4." Δενδοδγε τ\c 12:10, 4 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
ok, now i really don't know whats going on, as easy peer review actually worked correctly: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikinews/en/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALog&type=review&user=&page=British+government+scrap+planned+rules+on+pay+equality&year=&month=-1&tagfilter= Bawolff 21:29, 4 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
new theory. Success message appears before it actually sights the said article (that in itself is a wtf, how can something not done yet be successful), and then people navigate away from the page before the sight this page part goes through. I changed it so success message shouldn't appear so early. Bawolff 21:42, 4 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I had a pop-up appear informing me of sight error 4. Surely I wouldn't get a popup if I had navigated away too early? Δενδοδγε Tinsel\Christmas! 22:19, 4 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
No, I think earlier people had such issues. In your case you got the error 4, but the sight actually went through. Bawolff 21:09, 5 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Apparently, EPR didn't edit the article at all. The talk page edit went through, which is how I verified there'd been a legitimate pass. [18]. --Pi zero (talk) 16:13, 10 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I've been experiencing some weird javascript errors this morning (I had DragonFire confirm that it wasn't just me). I think it's just a mediawiki issue. Amgine said they were pushing out an update to something or other this morning, so maybe that caused some problems. Gopher65talk 16:19, 10 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm. Most of the stuff in [19] seem to be fundraiser related, but there is some mention of changing some flagged revs config. Are the issues still happening? Bawolff 19:34, 10 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think so. Some javascript controlled things weren't working on Wikinews this morning for an hour or two (like EzPR, and the edittools bar below the edit box). At about 9am CST it cleared up. I haven't heard anyone mention any problems since then. Gopher65talk 02:59, 11 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Weirdness

Do you see the following?:

  • I click on this page: http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Comments:Wolfsburg_player_draws_criticism_for_withdrawal_from_squad
  • It shows three tabs. The article tab, the Discussion tab, and the Opinions tab. All three are blue.
  • Click on the Discussion tab. Wikipedia like "there is no page here" message shows up.
  • Notice that blue Discussions tab has disappeared, and been replaced with a red Wikinews style "Collaboration" tab.
  • Click the red Collaboration tab. The (empty) Wikipedia-styled discussion page disappears, and is replaced with a Wikinews-styled (empty) Collaboration page, complete with the normal javascriptted warnings about page creation.

Do you see that, or is it just me? And is that normal, or is that some weirdness just on that page? Gopher65talk 23:07, 15 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah. I think the reasoning was that in general people aren't going to be on an opinions page if the talk page doesn't exist (due to the review template), so the check to see if the talk page exists isn't done. (aka whomever wrote the script was lazy). It says discussion instead of collaboration presumably because the script was written before we changed discussion to collaboration. Bawolff 04:40, 16 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
As a nitpick, the talk link links to talk:Wolfsburg player draws criticism for withdrawal from squad, where, ideally, it should link to Talk:Wolfsburg player draws criticism for withdrawal from squad. Just to give you a bit more work ! — μ 12:14, December 16 2010 (UTC)
To be fair, The first letter of the namespace names are case insensitive. Changed to capital (its still encoding the spaces in a non-canonical way if you want to be really nitpicky). Bawolff 16:31, 16 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Well, at least it says collaboration now:). Thanks. Gopher65talk 12:40, 20 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Merry Christmas!

fetch·comms 22:55, 19 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

EPR weirdness

This. I only clicked the button once... — μ 12:00, 11 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe easy peer review really hated that article. I have no idea what caused that, the code doesn't have any error handling that retries upon failure. Bawolff 01:12, 13 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Changing username

Hi, sorry to be a pain but if you have a free moment do you think you could check Wikinews:Changing_username#Tmorton166_.E2.86.92_ErrantX, much appreciated (I just grabbed your name as crat who had been active on that page before) --ErrantX (talk) 14:41, 17 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks a bunch! --Errant (talk) 10:09, 18 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

A Thought

I wish Neutralizer was still around; I'm sure he'd get a kick out off all this Wikileaks stuff happening recently. 24.229.102.138 (talk)

Nice try.μ 10:33, 18 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
yes, he probably would. Bawolff 16:24, 18 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Re: wikilink2 in #wikinews

Good (morning/afternoon/evening/delete whichever not applicable) :) I'm just leaving a note to let you know that around 01:03GMT this morning, Your bot, Wikilink2, caught signal 15 (SIGTERM) and exited the channel. I would assume from my knowledge of linux that it was probably a reboot or powerdown which did it, but Wikilink2 never came back to the channel. Could you please take a look at your earliest convenience and try and wake him up again please? :) Thanks, BarkingFish (talk) 01:59, 3 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, it needs to be restarted manually. Bawolff 11:40, 5 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Hey there, it would appear that Wikilink2 has gone down again. Regards, — μ 22:13, 24 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Special:Export question...

Hi,

I need to fetch the namespace (ns) property of a page (e.g. 0 for articles, 1 for talk pages, 2 for user pages, 3 for user talk pages and so on, see also this example) in order to separate "conventional" articles from the rest; unfortunately, Special:Export does not include said number into its XML output. Since I (ideally) don't want to execute two different queries for the same article, do you know by chance if the XML export assembled by Special:Export can also be reconstructed by using the api.php module? Cheers,Soccer-holic (talk) 12:39, 13 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Special export kind of gives you the information, as it gives the full title, with (written) namespace, and at the beginning of the output, it gives what id all the various namespace prefixes are. If you have a specific api query, you can export the results of that query using the export and exportnowrap parameters. For example https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikinews/en/w/api.php?action=query&generator=allpages&gaplimit=4&gapfrom=T&prop=info&export&exportnowrap
Thanks, your hint definitely gave me a push into the right direction. In the meantime (and after painfully realizing that the API's default output format is not XML – lost three days with that alone *grmbl*), the automated category determination works like a charme. Next up: Adding code for the various semantic enrichment tools. Thanks again! --Soccer-holic (talk) 12:48, 20 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Weird error

I clicked on a not-yet-created LQT comments page by accident when meaning to click on the talk page link. I got a popup with

ASSERT: Giving up waiting for the tab closing animation to finish (bug 608589)
Stack Trace: 
0:([object XULElement],[object XULElement],1)

Is this supposed to be happening? bugzilla:608589 doesn't exist, it seems. fetch·comms 16:33, 25 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It's a firefox issue. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=608589 Bawolff 19:16, 27 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

NewsWire in IRC

Hey Bawolff. NewsWire seems to be posting up review alerts of articles that have already been published. If you could please have a look or something, that would be great. :) Have a nice day, ~YTT T | C 22:59, 27 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

There was an issue earlier where the toolserver had a high replication lag for wikinews. I think it was fixed. The feed can be disabled by typing
Newswire: feed pause review

Bawolff 18:21, 28 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Request

Request

You seem to be active at the moment. Could you review Wikinews interviews Jim Hedges, U.S. Prohibition Party presidential candidate, I've been waiting for this for a while now. Thanks.--William S. Saturn (talk) 18:37, 28 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, can't at the moment. Bawolff 18:41, 28 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Pernickety EasyPeerReview suggestions

Hey there. Could I be very annoying and ask for two tweaks to the EasyPeerReview system? One is minor: could you add a space between the tick/cross and the confirmation message at the end of every (un)successful review? Secondly, is it possible to refresh the page before displaying the message: so that the final "product" is shown straight away instead of having to hit F5 to make sure that what happened was meant to happen? Regards, — μ 23:08, June 1 2010 (UTC) bumping so the stupid bot doesn't archive. Bawolff 06:12, 5 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Speculation on EPR upgrade

I've been meaning to ask whether you think it would be feasible to set up EPR so that it has a second check (akin to the one about reading the talk page) to see whether the revision being reviewed is the most recent revision. Of course one wouldn't want to prevent review of a less-than-most-recent revision, but one might require opening a diff in a separate window.

There was an incident the other day where two reviewers both reviewed the same revision, and the first one failed it while the second one passed it — which is really bad form. A warning to the second reviewer sure would have been helpful. Less damaging, but still annoying, on two recent-ish occasions I've been one of two reviewers to both fail an article (one just now, reminding me that I meant to ask you about this). --Pi zero (talk) 19:49, 24 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm, well its supposed to give a warning if there is an edit conflict, so it should theoretically already do that. (I'm not sure how well that warning works though). Bawolff 19:17, 27 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I seem to recall once failing an article at the same time Pi zero did. There wasn't an edit conflict because the only thing that happened was insert {{tasks}} and add a section on the talk page for the Peer Reviewed template. Gopher65talk 15:13, 1 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
What about adding a link that, if clicked, plonks an {{inuse}} template (or rather, a new 'review in progress' template) at the top of the article? With (if it's possible), perhaps a timer that'll revert itself if the reviewer doesn't click the link every five minutes or so? — μ 15:53, 1 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The idea I'd floated —originally because it seems simple enough to be highly robust, but I also hope it wouldn't give any impression of time pressure during the review— was a gizmo similar to the check-talk-page business already in place, but opening a diff in a separate window. EPR wouldn't even have to determine whether or not there has been any change: just always present the check-box/open-separate-window combination, and if the diff shows no change, that's fine. --Pi zero (talk) 17:38, 1 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Template want

wikt:Template:PL:pedia <- small inline link to wikipedia. We got something like that? - Amgine | t 20:39, 28 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Pipe trick? [[w:Foo|]] turns into [[w:Foo|Foo]] automatically on save. Or do you mean the cutesy icon? Bawolff 20:44, 28 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Would like the full range of sister projects available as a cutesy pipe trick with logo, yes. I think the full suite of templates is called "projectlink" or some such. {{pl|project|title|[lang=fr]}}- Amgine | t 23:40, 28 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Appearently, {{W article}} which i just found out about. Bawolff 20:36, 29 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Gadget idea

Would it be worth, perhaps, to check all links to Wikipedia in a page to see if a local version exists? (Also, User:Microchip08/gadget-link.css borrowed from ptwikinews, would be nice as a gadget ;D) — μ 19:34, 29 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Such a gadget would presumably set up a proposed edit, for the operator to examine and perhaps manually customize.
I've long been mulling over whether to propose a rather lower-tech device: a template {{w|...}} (superseding the rather useless existing template of that name) that would check for a local link, and link to Wikipedia otherwise — and put the page into one of two hidden categories depending on which it did. That way, when starting a new category, one could hold off creating a mainspace redirect to it until it was reasonably well populated, and then switch all the text links over to it at once. One might also want a variant {{wikt|...}}.
We wouldn't want to recommend {{w}} for use by ordinary users; too difficult, not the wiki way. But I wonder if it might be useful for your gadget to use a local link if available, and otherwise use {{w}}. --Pi zero (talk) 20:01, 29 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I was thinking perhaps simply changing the formatting of the links; for example Paula RadcliffePaula Radcliffe, as a simple cue to reviewers that one can change the link if desired. Another vaguely hi-tech idea would be to make a TS tool the equivalent of [{Special:WhatLinksHere]] (but cross-project). — μ 20:10, 29 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
For Pi zero's idea. Do-able, but it would be limited to 100 such links on a page (due to expensive parser function limit). Personally I think we should just link to Wikipedia if we want to link to Wikipedia, link to ourselves we want that, and not change the article after its published. Bawolff 20:27, 29 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
(100, huh. I thought it was 50, back when I was learning templates.)
Even if it were possible for a Wikinews article to have 100 (or 50 :-) links in the text without being overlinked, it surely wouldn't be possible if we weren't so hideously under-categorized; the purpose of the hidden categories is that once the link becomes local, the template should be replaced with a hard local wikilink (and before, when the link is non-local, that hidden category facilitates finding candidates for new categories). One might want to limit the use of {{w}} to archived articles, to avoid confusing lay contributors with it.
I can't agree about not fixing non-local links after publication. Non-local links are a compelling (more so because largely subliminal) reason we appear to outsiders to be an organ of Wikipedia; in an independent project, wikilinks in the text of the main articles are to the same project. We have to be able to migrate in that direction. --Pi zero (talk) 21:24, 29 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm, I just checked, the limit is actually 500. Well the idea is certainly do-able. Bawolff 21:37, 29 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
mw:Manual:$wgExpensiveParserFunctionLimit says the default is 99. --Pi zero (talk) 20:34, 30 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
We're not using the default. The limit is listed in the html source of every page. See http://noc.wikimedia.org/conf/highlight.php?file=CommonSettings.php for where its set. Bawolff 20:38, 30 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

fix the document.write's in wikinews js

Bawolff 05:21, 1 February 2011 (UTC) Done[reply]

make ezpr consider edit conflicts to start from page load, not review time.

Bawolff 21:00, 4 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Talkback

BarkingFish (talk) 23:52, 7 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Feedburner RSS feed shows no titles

Hi. For some time (a few days?), there have been no article titles in the RSS feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/WikinewsLatestNews --AVRS (talk) 19:07, 12 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I don't actually maintain the Feedburner feed, but I'll look into it. Bawolff 22:38, 12 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
caused by rev:76127. Bawolff 00:13, 13 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

PeerReview Problem on Persian Wikinews

Hi, i got some error :

Details: TypeError: elm is undefined <744:http://fa.wikinews.org/w/index.php?title=Mediawiki%3Amwapilib.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript&dontcountme=s> browser=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.12) Gecko/20101026 Firefox/3.6.12

Thanks Mjbmr Talk 12:36, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

Which page were you reviewing? — μ 12:51, 17 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
an article, always in all articles Mjbmr Talk 12:56, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

Updating CSS for Htab Box

Coming back after a few years gone, I was curious as to what happened with Htab Box (Discussion), I remember one of the issues was that the boxes didn't look so nice in Internet Explorer and Opera. Now that CSS-3 is here, and all modern browsers support rounded box corners, could we update this? :-) -- kamnet (talk) 09:30, 21 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

If you're willing to do the updates :P. Bawolff 21:41, 28 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

DPL and CSS help

Hai!

What's the nofollow for a DPL? And, what's wrong with the CSS for my test subpage?

If I can fix these points, I can fix a lot of the review/GNews crud.

I may need help getting EzPR tweaked later. --Brian McNeil / talk 12:02, 10 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

You can set a nofollow=true option, and google won't follow the links (See mw:extension:DynamicPageList (Wikimedia) for the list of all options). Which user page is this? Bawolff 18:29, 11 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I think I found it. id's have to be unique within a page, don't use them for that sort of thing, instead use classes. The class attribute is a space seperated list of class names so you can have as many as you want. Bawolff 19:02, 11 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • My CSS-fu is weak. What I want is a replacement for {{Main headlines}} that goes back to the per-day style, listing reviewed articles so GNews grabs them, and self-published with nofollow, and only the last couple days, but with the suspect stuff coloured differently. The idea is to keep peer review but lower the bar to a front page listing. Meet Amgine's demands without losing the credibility when stuff goes to GNews. Any ideas on alternate publish templates welcome. --Brian McNeil / talk 00:04, 12 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Ok, what you want is a rule like .MainPage_latest_news_unchecked a { color: green } (or whatever colour). From a usability prespective though, I'm not sure how this is going to work. How would the end user know the green (or whatever colour) is the non-reviewed ones. Bawolff 00:51, 12 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Baking cookies now

Will need an address at some point... - Amgine | t 22:44, 14 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

lol, I didn't think you were actually serious about that. Bawolff 23:21, 14 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Serious enough... gives me motivation to send cookies to the kid as well. btw: does this accidentally remove 'googlenewssitemap_badfeedobject' from en, or is that my imagination? - Amgine | t 05:28, 15 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
No, that was intentional. I changed it to just die with an exception instead, since that error can only happen if its configured very very incorrectly (If the default category page name specified in LocalSettings contains a character like [ that isn't allowed in page titles) so there's not much point translating the message, since the user could never cause it. p.s. I'm emailing you my address. Bawolff 15:33, 15 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Huh. Well, its been translated further down in that translation wiki revision. - Amgine | t 15:40, 15 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The docs say only to remove from English (At least for core messages. I assume that applies to extension messages to). Bawolff 15:43, 15 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks

Thank you! --74.34.142.85 (talk) 02:12, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

"the million and one threads on the topic" on talk pages

"the million and one threads on the topic" on talk pages. Really! And talk page discussions are considered community discussions with impact? I wasn't aware of that. Two people exchanged comments, "the million and one threads on the topic" and that's it? Resolved? Sarcasm noted. It doesn't seem that you are concerned about attracting and retaining contributors at wikinews. Mattisse (talk) 00:28, 30 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The comment was not meant to be sarcastic (hyperbole maybe?). It was a serious note meant to help you find what BarkingFish was referring to. It was not meant to say that the issue was resolved. On the contrary discussion seems to be ongoing. Bawolff 00:39, 30 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Meeting in 'under an hour'?

That's really going to give people an opportunity to plan to attend. Out on the mailing list, what? Yesterday?

I know, not your fault, not you that lacks any patience whatsoever, but still...

You have to agree it is daft to assume this might work when n00bs don't get a chance to find out and no agenda is on the table. Nor are established contributors allowed to plan how to explain the arrival at current policy.

It might well not be an attempt to provoke conflict intentionally, but the shortsightedness will likely make it so. --Brian McNeil / talk 20:31, 30 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I'm somewhat leery of lack of an agenda. In my limited experience, IRC meetings that don't have clearly defined agendas tend not to work. But on the other hand maybe it might, who knows. At the very least I doubt its going to cause any new problems (at most it will only bring to the surface problems that already exist). Bawolff 20:38, 30 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Tamil wikinews

Hi Bawolff, currently we're using the following service to feed the news via the feedburner: http://toolserver.org/~mjbmr/rss/rss.php?title=Tamilwikinews&lang=ta&family=wikinews&cat=Published&lim=10&ns=0 But it's not working any more. It is greatly appreciated, if you can suggest any other services that can be used to feed the news? Thank you.--Kanags (talk) 11:04, 10 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, I've modified my feed to the following:

http://toolserver.org/~bawolff/rss.php?title=Tamil+Wikinews&domain=tawikinews&cat=Published&lim=10&ns=0 Any suggestions?--Kanags (talk) 12:11, 10 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The http://toolserver.org/~bawolff/rss.php?title=Tamil+Wikinews&domain=tawikinews&cat=Published&lim=10&ns=0 link should work fine. (or even something like http://toolserver.org/~bawolff/rss.php?title=%E0%AE%B5%E0%AE%BF%E0%AE%95%E0%AF%8D%E0%AE%95%E0%AE%BF%E0%AE%9A%E0%AF%86%E0%AE%AF%E0%AF%8D%E0%AE%A4%E0%AE%BF&domain=tawikinews&cat=Published&lim=10&ns=0 / whatever the translated version of Tamil Wikinews is). If you have any problems with it/ need any help, let me know. Bawolff 01:28, 11 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Technical question

How difficult would it be to implement the button on the develop template on enwiki, so that when clicked, it adds a template to the same page but does not remove the original template on which the button is located? fetch·comms 14:31, 13 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

On enwiki? Fairly easy if you're content on requiring users to add stuff to their user js. Bawolff 22:22, 13 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I mean, for everyone, on Common.js—although, could you get me the necessary code so I can test it out personally, and figure out how to use different templates with it? fetch·comms 03:33, 14 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
addOnloadHook(function () {
    var changeDevelopToReviewButton = document.getElementById('develop_to_review_link');
    if (changeDevelopToReviewButton) {
        try {
            //in a try since this makes some assumptions about the format of
            //the {{tl|develop}} template, which could change.
            importScriptURI('http://en.wikinews.org/w/index.php?title=user:Bawolff/mwapilib2.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript');
            var button = document.createElement('button');
            button.type = 'button';
            button.appendChild(changeDevelopToReviewButton.firstChild.firstChild);
            changeDevelopToReviewButton.replaceChild(button, changeDevelopToReviewButton.firstChild);
            button.onclick = function () {
                if (this && this.firstChild && this.firstChild.data) this.firstChild.data = "Loading...";
                api(wgPageName).getPage().
                    setDefaultSummary("Edit summary").
                    replace(/^/, "\{\{template to add}}\n").
                    savePage().
                    lift(function () {
                        alert("The article is now listed as needing review.");
                        location.reload();
                    }).
                    exec();
            }
        }
        catch (e) {}
    }
});

This will look for anything with the id develop_to_review_link, and replace it with a button. I took out the bit that removed the original template. This probably doesn't meet enwikipedias js standards (mostly do to the (my) external library). If your intention is to have it enabled there, it'd probably need to be re-written using jQuery. Bawolff 22:37, 15 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Can you look at this? Someone is getting errors "Empty string passed to getElementById" and "api(wgPageName).getPage is not a function". fetch·comms 02:07, 18 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Bug report

Behold! The strange, syntax-breaking linebreak of doom! — μchip08 16:45, 21 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

lol, I suppose it should strip new lines before putting it in the header. Bawolff 22:10, 21 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I know how much we all love feature creep

Could you make EzPR do a check to see if Comments:{{PAGENAME}} exists before publication (or, perhaps, even review in order to allow {{delete}} tagging by non-admins in a timely manner) to prevent Comments:Apple's data is dirtiest, says Greenpeace from happening in future? — μchip08 20:16, 24 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

At the moment it does check, and does nothing to it if it does exist (in comparison to potentially double adding the header). Is deleting pre-existing comments really the right thing to do? Bawolff 19:28, 28 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Well, at the moment we delete comments pages for unpublished articles precisely for this reason. Blood Red Sandman (Talk) (Contribs) 19:33, 28 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

JS function

While reviewing a article, the funtion had a problem to occur, and now the review notices show "A local JS function experienced an error on an API request. Please leave a note at User_talk:Bawolff. Details: Error: Error: 504Gateway Time-out <undefined:undefined> browser=Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/5.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; .NET4.0C; BOIE9;ENUSSEM)." --[[::User:Nascar1996|Nascar1996]] ([[::User talk:Nascar1996|talk]] • [[::Special:Contributions/Nascar1996|contribs]]) 16:09, 28 April 2011 (UTC)

Just having a quick séance

Is there anybody there??? :) Just checking you're still with us, Bawolff! Not seen you for a few days, here or on IRC. If you're busy, we understand. Regards, BarkingFish (talk) 19:20, 28 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I'm Alive! Just without internet for a couple days :) Bawolff 19:29, 28 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Review in monobook

I am not seeing the review tab come up to use easy peer review in monobook, can I do this? -- Cirt (talk) 11:36, 5 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thats weird. It does come up for me when using monobook and viewing an article that is reviewable. Bawolff 20:13, 5 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Okay, I shall try again at a later point in time, and get back to you. Thanks for the prompt response. Hope you are doing well, Bawolff. ;) Cheers, -- Cirt (talk) 20:15, 5 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I am soliciting your input please!

I am attempting a Dispute resolution at Wikinews:Dispute resolution/Brian McNeil and Mattisse and I am soliciting your input as to the problem. I urge you to give feedback. Soliciting input is the next step in the Dispute resolution process. Please do! I cannot copy edit or write articles until this is resolved. Regards, Mattisse (talk) 00:00, 6 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Spamming multiple users talk pages is generally frowned upon. Soliciting input is fine, but you should avoid bulk sending messages. As to your dispute with Brianmc, I've stopped paying attention to it as I'm tired of the drama (there's something to be said about picking your battles). However, from what I did previously read, As always, there's merit to both sides. Some of your complaints are legitimate, a large portion are not. Many things said to you, you seem to take them to mean something very different then what was actually said [Most people in my experience aren't very sympathetic when that happens]. I'd advise you to consider things from the other person's perspective. Bawolff 00:31, 6 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I did not realize it was considered spamming, as I was following the directions on Wikinews:Dispute resolution: Step three - soliciting wider community input.
Do you really think that I am a meatpuppet per Brian McNeil? "I am 90%+ confident this is the case, and appropriate diffs will prove such to the community's satisfaction. If I am forced to waste the time digging up such data, I will; those involved in such covert collaboration can rely on their imagination for the community's reaction to exposure of orchestrated disruption.[20]
Do you really? I have worked so hard at writing articles (59 on my own) and improved innumerable others. I have really tried. I have no contacts or "friends" here, just a few I trust like Pi zero. This is so bizarre. Whatever I have done in the past, the unfortunate use of sockpuppets on wikipedia, even there I was never accused of being a meatpuppet or of vandalising, or of harassing others. My sockpuppets, wrongly I know, made good edits and never vandalized. I have never had an agenda. I am a writer and editor. I admit I may over react when attacked. And I do not understand the rules here. I am not a child as Brian McNeil seems to think but an educated professional, retired continuing with my consulting business. I have a Ph.D. and have practiced my profession for over 30 years: forensic psychology. To be treated like a child who doesn't know who the Wizard of Oz is - that is humiliating. Because I am not British, I should not be punished nor forced to use British expressions or watch a British tv show on Brian's demand. I don't like tv. I thought this site was open to other nationalities also. Sadly, no. With regrets, Mattisse (talk) 01:05, 6 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
P.S. Check my edits. I have only been here since February 20 so that is not such a big job. I don't know what Brian McNeil's agenda is; I am not up on his past history, so I don't know what he thinks I am trying to do. It is very confusing. No wonder editors do not stay here. It is very sad, because, having done a great deal of writing in my profession and been considered one of the best copy editors and writers at wikipedia, it is a shame I cannot contribute here. Best wishes, Mattisse (talk) 01:05, 6 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Just for the record, I do not dispute that you have many positive contributions. I also do not feel you are a meatpuppet. As in almost every dispute, both sides are somewhat in the wrong. Bawolff 01:16, 6 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Comments tab

Hey there Bawolff :) I see you voluntered in bugzilla to help es.wikinews get the very-sought-after comments tab. I dunno when you'll do it, but anyway: if you need help with any translations, just say the words. Oh, and do tell any admin once you've "finished" the code so we can add it to Common.js.

By the way, which is the particular extension of liquidthreads that you guys use here in en? Julián (reply) 11:42, 18 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Alright, what you need to do:
  1. Copy over mediawiki:Comments.js to es:Mediawiki:Comments.js
    1. There's a couple lines near the top that need translation. Ask me if you're unclear on what any of them should be. OpinionNS should be 100 instead of 102. (comments on en is namsepace 102, on es it is 100).
  2. add the line if (wgPageName !== 'Portada') importScript( 'Mediawiki:Comments.js' ); To es:Mediawiki:Common.js
  3. Add the following to es:mediawiki:Common.css:
/* hide the Comments_talk namespace */
body.ns-100 #ca-talk {display:none;}
body.ns-101 #ca-edit {display:none;}
body.ns-101 #ca-addsection {display:none;}
body.ns-90 #ca-talk {display: none;} /*thread pseudo ns*/

Lets me know if you have any trouble or need any help. Bawolff 00:37, 19 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Seems to be working well. Doing some testing around on different cases to see if it shows any bug/loop and if we have to do some troubleshooting regarding that. But otherwise it seems to be working ok. Btw, do you have any local/particular configuration for LiquidThreads? Julián (reply) 01:24, 19 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Yes. Its kind of hacky though. The easyPeerReview script automatically creates the page with a stub template header on review. Additionally we have a script to modify the readfeedback extension (feedbackhack.js) that adds a comment box, which auto creates the comment pages (With #useliquidthreads) when someone makes a comment. Last of all we have some css and a little bit of js that changes the interface a bit to hide complex parts. We've found the users get very confused by the Search in this thread, and sort by fields, so we hid those. We also (recently, like as of an hour ago) made the start a new thread button front and center, because we found users skimmed the page and totally missed it. Bawolff 02:58, 19 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

EPR Error note

A local JS function experienced an error on an API request. Please leave a note at User_talk:Bawolff. Details: unknownerror: Unknown error: ``231 <241:http://en.wikinews.org/w/index.php?title=User%3ABawolff%2Fmwapilib.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript&scrver=7> browser=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1

Calebrw (talk) 06:03, 19 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

This error is caused by something wrong on the mediawiki side of things (from the docs a "This usually means some kind of race condition or DB weirdness occurred."). In a perfect world this would cause Easy peer review to retry saving the page, but the world is not perfect ;). Bawolff 18:38, 19 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Tab in the es wikinews

Hello Bawolff, I just wanted to thank you your help to the spanish wikinews, It looks very nice the tab. Thank you again--Lcsrns (Talk) 22:18, 19 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

No problem, glad to help. Actually it gave me a good excuse to fix the issues with the script that we've been using on en that have been bothering me. Bawolff 05:13, 20 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

EPR sight fail

First time in a while, that I recall. EPR failed to sight this for Ashershow1. --Pi zero (talk) 01:55, 20 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm. hopefully its an isolated incident. Bawolff 02:02, 20 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
EPR failed to sight this for Wackywace. --Pi zero (talk) 16:54, 12 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I was just thinking its been a long time since this happened. Bawolff 00:22, 13 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
For reference, I have no idea why this is happening at this point (unless user navigated to another page in the middle of a peer review). If anyone gets any errors while reviewing stuff let me know. Bawolff 00:26, 13 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Another. --Pi zero (talk) 16:07, 10 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Another. --Pi zero (talk) 23:59, 8 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Welcome script not workin on Meta

This stopped working on Meta. Any thoughts as to why? Thank you for your time, -- Cirt (talk) 02:07, 21 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Any ideas? -- Cirt (talk) 00:11, 31 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm, seems to work for me [21]. Do you have any other scripts or gadgets enabled that might cause problems? Bawolff 02:42, 31 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Just clock in corner, small edit lede section thingy, and hot cat. None of those conflict on other projects. Thoughts? -- Cirt (talk) 05:51, 31 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Caused by meta:Mediawiki:Gadget-edittop.js (tries to use the function get_query_value on edit pages, which does not exist, and breaks all other js when on an edit page.). Bawolff 15:50, 31 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Okay thanks, I will remove that and try without it. -- Cirt (talk) 20:42, 31 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
That fixed it, thank you so much!!!! -- Cirt (talk) 20:43, 31 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

GNSM

It is as far as i know. The relevant url that google would use is http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Special:NewsFeed?hourcount=48&notcategories=AutoArchived%7CArchived%7CNo_publish%7Cdisputed (This will be any sighted article in category published, in the last 48 hours, not in the notcategories.) Bawolff 06:06, 26 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Block pls

Special:Contributions/Orso, getting boring. fetch·comms 19:06, 25 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I was waiting to see if he would continue after the warning. Now blocked. Bawolff 19:07, 25 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]
ty, now I hope he excuses me if I have a little fun with this. fetch·comms 19:08, 25 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Question from de.wikinews

I'm from German Wikinews. Could you help us to install a page like your Template:Popular articles for the German wikinews project? We would be grateful if you would like to help us with this topic. --Wolf-Dieter (talk) 15:37, 2 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Template:Official website

Any ideas why this works on en.wikipedia, but not yet here locally? -- Cirt (talk) 15:51, 3 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

IANAB, but maybe it has something to do with {{official website/http}} not existing? DENDODGE 16:12, 3 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
That seemed to have fixed it, thanks! ;) -- Cirt (talk) 16:15, 3 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
rofl on the IANAB. Bawolff 03:02, 11 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Review gadget

Got a notification on Eritrea accuses four Britons of espionage and terrorism that said it was unable to determine the revision id of the article and was falling back on the last one or something to that effect. Using IE9. C628 (talk) 00:47, 11 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Error message when changing leads on home page

Hello. I've gotten this message twice already:

A local JS function experienced an error on an API request. Please leave a note at User_talk:Bawolff. Details: permissiondenied: Permission denied <undefined:undefined> browser=Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5

I'm assuming the problem is that I'm not a reviewer? Ragettho (talk) 14:42, 19 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, that's probably the problem (assuming that the edit went through and just wasn't cited). It should handle errors much better then it does. Bawolff 01:08, 20 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, The script that checks if an article is in category:Published doesen't decode fancy characters properly. Bawolff 21:40, 20 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
It would be great if we could get that fixed, it seems to be a fairly regular problem. I think my old Python script was ok with the weird characters, but can't remember. I may have a play around with it tomorrow. (Also, is that really what the iPhone's user-agent looks like? That's horrendous!) the wub "?!" 00:25, 21 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]
In theory the hacky piece of crap i have should be fairly easy to fix (in theory). Its trying to compare percent-encoded characters with non-percent encoded characters for equality, which doesn't work well. Bawolff 00:28, 21 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks

Thanks for your helpfulness. Now, the ticker is working on Turkish Wikinews, too. Have great day. Koc61 (talk) 13:09, 26 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Glad to be of help. Bawolff 23:50, 26 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

WikiLove

Hey Bawolff! Quick question: how much effort would it take to get a WikiLove button on Wikinews? Ragettho (talk) 05:51, 1 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure if the WikiLove people are deploying it outside of enwikipedia yet (They might want to keep the deployment small at first until the initial bugs are shaken out, I'm not sure). I'll ask around tomorrow when the WikiLove folks are on irc.
Excellent. As you may have noticed, I like sending thank you notes, so a WikiLove button would definitely make the task much easier, yet equally meaningful. :) Thanks for all the tech work you do here! Ragettho (talk) 06:10, 1 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
We aren't currently planning any further deployments until we have a better idea of the tool's impact. You can always ask for a deployment on the tool's talk page on MediaWiki.org but I know that localization is going to be a major hurdle for it.--Jorm (WMF) (talk) 19:25, 1 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
WikiLove? Sounds dreadful :-). (Also, shouldn't that be "Wikilove", unless we want to train everyone to spell the project names wrong?) /me wonders if some people wouldn't be willing to pay not to be on the receiving end of something called "WikiLove"... and if that mightn't be a source of additional donations. --Pi zero (talk) 19:45, 1 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
As long as you add an entry in the prefs to switch it off, as I have already done at enwp, I wouldn't mind this being here. BarkingFish (talk) 21:28, 1 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Ticker

Any ideas re this wikinews-l post? — μchip08 20:22, 10 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

ArbCom nomination?

Would you accept nomination for another year on ArbCom? The deadline for nominations is 2000UTC on the 17th. --Pi zero (talk) 17:26, 14 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I have nominated you in absentia. --Pi zero (talk) 18:31, 15 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for the nomination, I'm quite flattered to get nominated in absentia, not to mention all the votes I got while I wasn't even here. Bawolff 18:03, 15 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Extracting Image Metadata

The question when we can expect more meta-data raised anew in commons:Commons:Help_desk#IPTC_Information.

Did you know about Exif-Tool? It's licensed and written under/ using perl license. Sincerely -- Rillke (talk) 08:57, 19 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Make Lead problem :(

A local JS function experienced an error on an API request. Please leave a note at User_talk:Bawolff. Details: Error: Could not determine which revision to sight <undefined:undefined> browser=Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5

Ragettho (talk) 18:17, 23 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Comments.js for russian wikinews

Hi, Bawolf. Could you help us to install it? I copied the code, and translate part. Then I followed the advice for Spanish Wikinews (by changing the namespace), but there were errors. --Akishin D. (talk) 07:59, 4 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

downloading WN archives

Would you mind responding to a question on Wikinews:Water cooler/assistance#Is there a downloadable archive? Best, Ragettho (talk) 03:28, 18 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Responded. Thanks for letting me know about the question. Bawolff 15:52, 18 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Count articles a DPL will return

I could have sworn there was some way to simply get a count of articles that a DPL would return; but, even prodding the code doesn't show up anything for it. I assume that implementing mode=count to return an integer value up to the max allowed for the DPL install wouldn't be that difficult to implement.

Oh, and there's bug:30621 which could do with some vote-loving care. This is just to get the relevant RSS/Atom/sitemap feeds spat out. --Brian McNeil / talk 01:59, 30 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

For mode=count - currently not. However if its for a single category, you can do {{PAGESINCAT:catname}}. /me looks at the bug. Bawolff 14:55, 31 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I know there's the straightforward PAGESINCAT, that's not what I want. In doing the portals (see Africa) I found some wouldn't have a full-length list of "news" if archived stuff is excluded. I'd wanted to have a list of the unarchived, followed by the most-recently archived in a different colour, to give a constant list length. --Brian McNeil / talk 15:57, 31 August 2011 (UTC)[reply]

EPR sight fail

[22]. --Pi zero (talk) 00:16, 2 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

By Gryllida's account, the gadget went on its tea break and never came back. --Pi zero (talk) 06:32, 2 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

MW Extension development

Hai!

You maybe saw BRS's musings on the WC about a "database of experts" for OR use stored on the Wikinewsie closed wiki.

If this were added as an additional table in a MediaWiki install, with relevant code to support reasonable integration, how challenging would that be to turn into an extension?

Sort-of "thinking aloud", I'm envisaging the following table as the start of such an extension:

Firstname
Lastname
Title
Email address (several: office, personal, &c)
Phone number (several: office, personal, &c)
Location
Area of expertise
Wiki page
Category list

I'd imagine there's already a really, really basic FOSS contact management system that could be converted into an extension to do what we'd need. If the on-wiki display of material, and space for freeform notes, is a special namespace I think such a system could be an interesting extension. I found PIM Support (experimental) on the MediaWiki wiki, but effectively abandoned.

The ideal is to be able to browse a Rolodex: namespace, have an "email this contact" link similar to "email this user" (but, with drop-down of emails registered), and in the Rolodex: page a list of who emailed, when, and links to a log/copies of the emails.

Anyway, the relevant questions are: 1. Know anyone who might like to work on such an extension? 2. Know any FOSS package that'd make a good foundation and not be too difficult to integrate with MediaWiki? 3. Where do you see the gotchas in actually defining a specification for this? --Brian McNeil / talk 23:55, 13 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

That really depends on what you want to do with that information (How different from just sticking it in normal wiki pages would this be. Is it just using mediawiki's email feature + a private log of who emailed whom? [that's relatively easy] Or do you want to do other stuff with it). Integrating already existing programs with MediaWiki cleanly can sometimes be a challange (Its often easier to start from scratch if you're looking for something to be really cleanly integrated).

Ticker

I saw you have created Template:Ticker, but we need scrolling text for Turkish Wikinews. If it was HTML, I could do it but I don't know Wikitext or Wiki Marking Language. --Westnest (talk) 15:19, 19 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Help

Could you please answer me on here? AMERICOPHILE 18:02, 20 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Odd EPR glitch

I've a theory why this happened. It's a new one in my experience, though. Publishing an article, the gadget didn't remove the breaking-review tag. My theory is, the gadget didn't recognize the tag because it used redirect {{breakingreview}}. diff. --Pi zero (talk) 13:13, 24 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

that would be correct. Should be fixed now. Bawolff 17:27, 24 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Popular News bot

Hello, your bot in Persian wikinews is not functioning proper. This is the version which is ok, but in later versions (like this) some meaningless characters are shown. I've protected the page temporarily as it was over-widening the main page, so if you want to check it please do it on a test page, then if it was working proper please let me know on my talk page. I will unprotect the Popular news page. Thanks for your help --Wayiran (talk) 10:23, 15 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for letting me know, looks like things are being quadrople encoded somehow. Bawolff 23:02, 15 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks!

As it seems from bugzilla list, you solved "the bug of persistent djvu page thumb". Thanks from Italy (and it.source)! --Alex brollo (talk) 01:20, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, but I actually just marked it as a duplicate of another bug. The bug was actually solved by Mark Bergsma, who discovered that one of the programs that removes old cached things for folks in europe, wasn't turned on. Bawolff 13:57, 18 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Fa(r)cebook updates

Hola, my Canadian geeky friend!

Facebook have, finally, disabled updates being pulled-in via an RSS feed. This means enWN articles only appear there if someone mucks about and manually posts them.

Would you be able to help in terms of pulling some code together to auto-psot stuff from Wikinews to Fa(r)cebook when it gets published here? We're losing as many as 10k readers for each article as a result of this. --Brian McNeil / talk 20:14, 23 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

problem

hi bawolff. how are you. thank you for attention to fa.wikinews. your bot have problem. If possible, please check. thanks bawolff.--Sahim (talk) 17:35, 26 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

oh, thank you bawolff :) --Sahim (talk) 18:37, 27 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
/me actually hasn't done anything yet. The issue is more with the data the script is receiving so is intermittent.
Yes, you say correctly. thanks for attention bawolff.Sahim (talk) 09:52, 30 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Notification gadget

Hi, I used your code and modified it in fa.wiki and i have two problems

  1. I wanted to use it for tagging templates in namespace=0 but it shows me errors that name space is incorrect.
  2. in fa.wiki we have this gadget (as default for notify in talk pages) but my new revision is mixed by fa.wiki gadget and they have conflict. what should i do?

I save my revision on w:fa:کاربر:Reza1615/vector.js.
thank you for your time.Reza1615 (talk) 11:27, 14 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I'm guessing you might know why this category doesn't exist, and more importantly what should be done about it. (I wouldn't care to manually create something that would then gum up the works of the automation.) --Pi zero (talk)

User:Zach used to run a bot that took care of those back in the day. Now it appears user:GrondinBot has created many of the recent ones. I wouldn't worry about any manual creations screwing things up. I suppose we should ask Grondin about it (He's generally active on frwikinews if i recall). Bawolff 11:23, 1 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Ticker

Hello Bawolff, if you can please contact me. I would like to improve this project [23] main page with "your" ticker. I am really not a skilled programmer and a cant run it. We will be now set you up as admin :) 85.246.108.149 (talk) 20:14, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Comment From portuguese Wikilusa our recognition to you as person and as a great wikipedian that make us all proud. ... WikiSysop

Caching

Seems like lately Google News isn't caching articles, not as many show up there, such as Santorum neologism gains prominence during US election cycle. Any ideas as to how to fix it? :) -- Cirt (talk) 04:45, 7 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

hmm, not sure. That article seems to be the only recent one though, everything else on the main page seemed to be crawled by google [24]. Bawolff 06:29, 7 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Okey, let me know if you think of something. -- Cirt (talk) 06:36, 7 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Hexmode gave me a list of crawl errors, but the article wasn't listed on it. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Bawolff (talkcontribs)
Hrm, okay, thanks. -- Cirt (talk) 23:53, 7 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

dictionaryLookupHover.js

Hi, I wanted to install this gadget on fa.wiki but it show me this error This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.. what should I do? please help me.Reza1615 (talk) 10:58, 9 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

thank you it solvedReza1615 (talk) 01:31, 10 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I didn't do anything, but that's good to hear. Bawolff 12:07, 10 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Please see my heads up at ArbCom talk page

Please see Wikinews_talk:Arbitration_Committee#FYI:_Heads_up_regarding_Viriditas. Just wanted to keep you in the loop, -- Cirt (talk) 19:32, 11 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

RSS question

Hi Bawolff, I saw your name on the toolserver for RSS feeds, and so I thought you might know the answer to this. What would be the code I would use for Feedburner for the "original feed" if I were to create one for a category of a Wikinewsie? Lots of writers here make categories, like Category:Crtew (Wikinewsie). The feed I'm looking for would generate x number of articles from that category by date. Thank you for your help, Crtew (talk) 01:11, 14 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Use something like https://en.wikinews.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NewsFeed&feed=atom&namespace=0&count=30&hourcount=-1&ordermethod=categoryadd&stablepages=only&categories=Crtew_%28Wikinewsie%29 The different parameters mean different thing. namespace=0 limits it main namespace, stablepages=ony filters out non-flagged pages. mw:Extension:GoogleNewsSitemap has some docs on the different parameters. Bawolff 20:17, 14 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Redlink cat on my user page

Quick question, any ideas on why there is a redlinked category "Cirt", on my user page? -- Cirt (talk) 05:21, 14 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

That's probably my fault. The bots (whatever they are) that used to set up our various date pages stopped working, and I've set up an infrastructure to make it very easy to do manually (centered, in an only slightly flawed way, on Category:Pages requesting maintenance). As part of that, I created a template to set up the DPLs on the date pages, but I'm guessing it doesn't work right when the date page is transcluded elsewhere. I suppose I'll have to work on that in my copious free time (but atm if I had that kind of time for Wikinews I'd be reviewing...). --Pi zero (talk) 06:51, 14 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, okay, no worries, thanks for the explanation! ;) -- Cirt (talk) 17:42, 14 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

AFD

Hello Bawlff, could you please try to help with your opinion here [25] Regards

Sorry, I didn't notice this at the time when it was relavent. However, in general I don't like to meddle in Wikipedia's deletion process. Bawolff 21:48, 2 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Fix a bug?

You've poked your head into API list=logevents does not correctly unserialize log_params, do you think you could poke your head into it? -- MarkAHershberger (talk) 19:45, 28 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

That bug looks fixed? Bawolff 00:06, 29 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Bawolff for your answer at http://www.mediawiki.org/?curid=84252! I have thousands of curid based urls. Please see listing some of the WikiMedia pages http://www.librarything.com/topic/135064#3320851 . In a larger sense this is related to the usage of Authority control number also used at wp.no and wp.nn. Best regards Gangleri (at LibraryThing) ‫·‏לערי ריינהארט‏·‏T‏·‏m‏:‏Th‏·‏T‏·‏email me‏·‏‬ 17:37, 1 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Bawolff for your answer at http://www.mediawiki.org/?curid=84252! These days I realized that I do not have enough knowledge to modify existing /common.js JavaScript code as created today at http://test2.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2827 : The .js page should be useable without modifications on any wikis of the WikiMedia Foundation. Could you please give me a hand? Thanks for any help in advance. Best regards user:Gangleri ‫·‏לערי ריינהארט‏·‏T‏·‏m‏:‏Th‏·‏T‏·‏email me‏·‏‬ 08:52, 3 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

FYI: I posted m:User talk:RobLa-WMF#shortesturls. Best regards ‫·‏לערי ריינהארט‏·‏T‏·‏m‏:‏Th‏·‏T‏·‏email me‏·‏‬ 09:37, 3 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The js file is using some of the deprecated js functions, but it should still work as-is on all wmf wikis. btw, are you aware of bugzilla:1450 which will probably get enabled soonish. Bawolff 13:41, 3 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the answer!
I inserted some anchors: #shortesturls and #shortesturls:JavaScript Could you please help at the part in italic at #shortesturls:JavaScript? Thanks in advance! Best regards Gangleri
‫·‏לערי ריינהארט‏·‏T‏·‏m‏:‏Th‏·‏T‏·‏email me‏·‏‬ 12:19, 6 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Hey Bawolff! I came across this page a few years ago and I thought it was super cool. Now, though, wikizine is no longer an option. Could you possibly rewrite it to work with webchat? Is that feasible? I think it'd be awesome to port to other wikis (WMF or otherwise) who use irc. Thank you and have a nice Sunday! :) Killiondude (talk) 06:16, 15 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The thing basically just loads a second page, so provided the webchat thing can be preloaded from a link, it should be feasible. Bawolff 04:29, 16 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Ticker@wn.ar

Hi Bawolff, sorry for such an unprofessional question: why does your ticker not work in Arabic Wikinews? I tried to simply copy and paste the code from the template here, but to no avail. --PICAWN (talk) 17:10, 3 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It needs a whole bunch of js too. You need to copy mediawiki:Ticker2.js and add the following to ar:MediaWiki:Common.js
addOnloadHook(function () {if ((window.disable_ticker2 !== true) && (document.getElementById("singleTickerForPage") || document.getElementById('enableTickers'))) importScript("MediaWiki:ticker2.js");});

And add the following to ar:MediaWiki:Common.css:

/*Ticker2 (animated ticker)*/
ul.actualTicker li {list-style-type:none; list-style-image:none;}/*mostly for IE*/
ul.actualTicker li {display:inline;}
ul.actualTicker span.tickerIntroduction {font-weight:bold;padding-right:0.5em;}

div.isATicker, div#singleTickerForPage {display:none;}

Let me know if you have any trouble. Bawolff 12:06, 4 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you! Since it's a mediawiki edit, I'll have to ask an admin for help, which might take some time. But I'll feedback you in any case. --PICAWN (talk) 15:34, 4 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Great! Now it's working. Still needs some minor tweaks, of course, but we'll do it! Thank you again! --PICAWN (talk) 18:02, 6 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Hi! I discovered a bug that seems specific to Arabic right-to-left languages: when using link= the following happens:

  • if link contains spaces (which are to be replaced by underscores) the link cuts off the last word; the underscore is added, for some reason, to the beginning of the link. For example, when I link to ويكي_اﻷخبار:غرفة_اﻻجتماعات (equivalent to _Wikinews:Water cooler here), the actual link is _ويكي اﻷخبار:غرفة (would equal _Wikinews:Water here).
  • if link does not contain spaces (like in Special:Random = خاص:عشوائي), then the ticker template does not see it and links to default destination.
  • I found a temporary solution: to insert an additional underscore after the link (i.e. link=Wikinews:Water_cooler_).

The same problem seems to exist in farsi, another right-to-left language (tried it in their sandbox). --PICAWN (talk) 08:50, 10 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

(Sorry I have limited internet access at the moment, so might take me a little while to give a full response). At first glance I would guess this is the Unicode BIDI algorithm being painful when RTL and LTR text mix and moving around the underscores or something of that nature. Bawolff 20:00, 11 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

MediaWiki:Gadget-easyPeerReview.js

Hi Bawolff, I come back to ask you about a function that we do not have in el.wikinews. We have discussed that on Bugzilla. So if you have the time and still willing to help, we would very much like your help to enable this function on our local wiki. Our best regards, Glavkos (talk) 17:11, 14 June 2012 (UTC) for the Greek Wikinewsies Community.[reply]

broken story on make lead

For some reason, trying to post African Olympians and Paralympians prepare for their London odyssey breaks the formatting on the lead 2.0 template.. --Patrick M (TUFKAAP) (talk) 06:11, 29 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Appears that the html comments (&lt!-- -->) Confuse it, because there's a period inside one of them, so that's the point it cuts off the summary at, so the closing --> is cut off, which screws things up. Bawolff 12:09, 29 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

ArbCom nomination?

Would you accept nomination for another year on ArbCom? The deadline for nominations is 2000UTC on the 17th. --Pi zero (talk) 01:04, 13 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for asking, but I feel I'm no longer active enough here to reasonably be on arbcom, so I'm not going to accept any nominations this time. Cheers, Bawolff 12:32, 13 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Hello. I request renaming my following accounts:

  • محمد الجداوي → Avocato
  • GedawyBot → AvocatoBot
  • Confirmation link: [26]
  • Reason: Privacy reasons

Thanks in advance.--M.Gedawy 07:42, 15 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

arwikinews

Can you have a look at ar:User:Bawolff/leadGen.js? It currently throws an error because apparently there is no element with 'lSetup' id. Ruslik0 (talk) 09:43, 20 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Roan and Robla are working behind-the-scenes on this right now.

Might want to catch them in IRC and run through what the new jQuery could break ;-) --Brian McNeil / talk 21:44, 22 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I commented on the bug (btw don't be afraid to add my name to the cc list on wikinews related bugs). Bawolff 21:55, 22 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

EzPR

Hai,

I've has two JS errors in a row from using EzPR. Not easy to capture them with the message actually being a pop-up. I can tell that it's where the option to access MakeLead would be offered, which was working yesterday. Now, a bit of a 'tricky' question on that is keeping the pop-up, but making it more usable. Is it possible to reposition the mouse pointer over the Makelead button when you put through a passing review? Because, once you get the mouse over the pop-up, it stays. --Brian McNeil / talk 09:48, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Just captured the error:
A local JS function experienced an error on an API request. Please leave a note at User_talk:Bawolff. Details: TypeError: $.parseHTML is not a function <30:https://bits.wikimedia.org/en.wikinews.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=en-gb&modules=ext.centralNotice.bannerController%7Cjquery.client%2Ccookie%2CmwExtension%7Cmediawiki.legacy.ajax%2Cwikibits%7Cmediawiki.notify%2Cutil%7Cmediawiki.page.startup&skin=vector&version=20120906T065348Z&*> browser=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:15.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/15.0
Hope that helps. --Brian McNeil / talk 10:29, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I had what was probably the same error the last time I reviewed yesterday (my time), that'd be the earthquake article; but I wasn't quite able to capture the error message because it was in the popup, which went away just before I would have clicked 'copy' for copy-and-paste. --Pi zero (talk) 10:35, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Interesting, I don't remember using that function. I wonder if that is a MediaWiki issue. Bawolff 15:48, 6 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Just published an article this evening and the automatic handoff to Makelead worked correctly, for the first time in about a week. --Pi zero (talk) 02:38, 13 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Help

Hi bawolff, your simple reviewing tool does not work correctly in fa.wikinews.org, please check it. sincerely.--H.b.sh (talk) 12:54, 13 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

You, Git?

As I believe we briefly touched on in IRC, I'm rewriting some of the F-ugly code to use the MediaWiki API for bots. If you're interested in access to the github for this, which is at https://github.com/Brian-McNeil/NewsieBot-WikiInterface, then let me know. --Brian McNeil / talk 02:33, 3 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I spend only about an hour a week on the computer currently, so don't do much programming -bawolff
O_o <picks jaw off floor and heads for the bar> --Brian McNeil / talk 19:52, 3 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I've written a bunch more functions into my classes for this, at the same time getting a better grip on PHP.
Not as-such seeking a full code review, just any remarks, or suggestions as-to possible improvements, from what's in the classes would be most-welcome.
--Brian McNeil / talk 14:36, 25 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

MakeLead on ar.wn

Hi Bawolff,

Some time ago (can't be more precise, as we don't update leads frequently) the Make Lead tool at Arabic Wikinews stopped displaying the 'lMetaTable' with current lead article positions, titles and ages, and it no longer knows which of them is oldest to set it as default for update, so now we have to manually review the history of lead article templates to determine that. At first I attributed this to deleting some critical template(s) which looked unused. Several candidate templates were undeleted to no avail.

In addition, today I edited Bawolff/leadGen.js to translate user interface messages, as the original ones sounded like machine translation and were hard, and sometimes impossible, to understand. I am no expert in JS but I thought replacing strings should not have deleterious effects.

Could you please tell me if any critical components (e.g. templates) were deleted and need to be restored? And how to make the human UI translation appear in the tool? Thank you. --PICAWN (talk) 16:40, 7 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Replacing strings definitly should not have such effects. However single and double quotes, and back slashes are treated specially and can cause issues. Do you have a link to precise edit that broke it? The lMetaTable issue appears to be due to a change in mediawiki where open search suggestion js is no longer available. I fixed that issue. —Bawolff 17:12, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you, everything is fine now. All my changes to strings were after the script actually stopped to work, so I didn't think I spoiled it (otherwise, I would just undo my own changes). What I suspected was that I deleted one of the seemingly unused templates, but now I see it was not the case. Thank you again. --PICAWN (talk) 18:06, 11 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

FaWikiNews

hi. your bot Sabotage in fawiki news and in popular news. please fix it. thanks/--Mahdiz (talk) 19:19, 16 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Hi. I'm not sure what happened there. Some how the character escaping wasn't decoded. It seems like its working now. Bawolff 23:52, 16 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]
unfortunately is not fixed(link, i think the code is wrong and can't decoded.please checked.--Mahdiz (talk) 17:11, 17 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

toolserver src

Hi! Are your toolserver tools in source control somewhere? Do you use any bug tracker for them? If so, I suggest adding links from the footer of your tools. Now for what I initially wanted to talk about: Your gerrit stats tool is cool, but could you split the first table into two: core + extensions? I think that could be useful. Also, formatting the date to return the age rather than a timestamp may make that column more readable. Cheers, Waldir (talk) 15:11, 4 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Oh cool, I didn't even realize anyone actually looked at any of them :D. At the moment they're not in source control, and best place to report bugs is on my talk page (realistically the tools I have on toolserver are all quick hacks). I've been meaning to add a link to a source code tarball for the gerrit stats one for a while, but haven't got around to it yet (atm that's actually running on my local computer, and an html file is scp'd to the toolserver at regular intervals) [Note: if you want the source before I get around putting in some link, let me know and I can email it to you]. I'll try to make the changes you suggested next time I get around to working on that script. Bawolff 16:12, 4 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Request for reviewing and other assistance

Hi. Next week is the start of the IPC Alpine Skiing World Championships and two Wikinewies will be attending to cover the para-alpine skiing ahead of the 2014 Winter Paralympics . This is part of an effort outlined at Wikinews:IPC Alpine Ski World Championships. Immediately following this event, there will be a Meetup in Barcelona where Wikinews, the Paralympics and efforts to similar sport coverage will be discussed. At the moment, there are only two active reviewers on a daily basis. Demonstrating an ability to get reviews for these types of events done quickly is important for Wikinews credibility and gaining access to these types of events. I would really appreciate it if you could sign up on the IPC World Championship page to review, promote articles published during this period, assist in translating these articles into another language or attend the meetup in Barcelona. Thanks. --LauraHale (talk) 09:26, 15 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

im sorry but I don't have much free time currently. --Bawolff 12:41, 15 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Question about welcome script at Wiktionary

Hey there, Bawolff, I hope you're doing well.

I've got a question about using the welcome script over at Wiktionary.

Their "welcome" template for "welcomeip" is in lowercase for the first letter, and so when I try to welcome an IP with the script, it shows up with {{subst:Welcomeip}} on the page, instead of the substed template itself.

I tried modifying it here, but that didn't fix anything yet.

Any ideas?

Thank you for your time,

-- Cirt (talk) 15:20, 6 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm, what you did should of worked. Did you clear your cache and that sort of thing? Bawolff 18:22, 6 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Seemed to work for me - http://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3ABawolff&diff=19696129&oldid=19696126 Bawolff 18:27, 6 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks very much, most likely was a caching issue, thank you ! -- Cirt (talk) 22:00, 6 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

"simple" question about on-wiki javascript

If I use importScript on page A to import page B, declarations on page B are not there when I look for them on page A. What am I missing? --Pi zero (talk) 18:21, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

importScript is asynchronous. So js doesnt wait for it to load before continuing on, even though the Imported file isnt loaded yet. The new (well not so new now) resource loader has things that deal with this better using callbacks (mw.loader.load or something like that). Bawolff 01:23, 8 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Aha. That makes a lot of sense. Thanks; I should be able to chase it down with that much of a hint.
I'm underwhelmed by the documentation on this stuff, but one thing I found especially nasty was that the documentation notes importScript is going to be deprecated, but isn't deprecated yet because there isn't a really good substitute for it. How useless is that? You should avoid this, except that there isn't anything else you can use instead? Good grief. --Pi zero (talk) 01:54, 8 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
people have been saying legacy js will be "deprecated" real soon now since roughly mw 1.17. I doubt it will happen due to how much that will break things. It looks like the method I was thinking of was mw.loader.using, but that only supports core modules. Guess you will have to implement your oen callback system to trigger when files are fully loaded. There is some limitted docs at mw:ResourceLoader/Default modules. Bawolff 03:10, 8 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
bugzilla:25845. --Pi zero (talk) 04:45, 8 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I must admit, I loathe ResourceLoader. For big stuff it's probably worth all the misery of untangling it, but I aspire to keep what I'm doing relatively small. Now that I'm better attuned to the issues, I'm thinking jQuery.getScript(). --Pi zero (talk) 05:09, 8 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Wikinews Writing contest 2013 is here. :) Please sign up to participate?

We've created the Wikinews:Writing contest 2013, which will start on April 1 and end on June 1. It is modeled on the successful 2010 contest. Unlike the previous version, points are available for people who conduct reviews. (With a University of Wollongong class currently contributing articles, extra assistance is appreciated at this time.) It presents a great incentive for you to renew your reviewing chops, contribute some original reporting not being done by the main stream media, and write some synthesis articles on topics that could use more attention. People should be around to review to prevent a backlog if you just want to write, and several reviewers have access to scoop to make it easier to review any original reporting you do. If you are interested in signing up, please do so on Wikinews:Writing contest 2013/entrants. There is at least one prize on offer for the winner along with the opportunity to earn some barn stars as a way of thanking you for your participation. :D --LauraHale (talk) 10:35, 25 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Hi,Bawolff

Moved from userpage to talkpage by 213.154.239.2 (talk) 13:54, 31 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

If you know how, can you help me made this template for Hebrew wikinews? Vipetthegreat (talk) 18:10, 29 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

You need to copy over mediawiki:Ticker2.js, the Ticker2 related stuff in MediaWiki:Common.css, the Ticker2 loader code in MediaWiki:Common.js. Bawolff 20:30, 25 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Help with welcome script on Wiktionary

Any ideas why my welcome script on Wiktionary suddenly disappeared? -- Cirt (talk) 20:17, 25 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Seems to work fine for me. Bawolff 20:30, 25 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Nothing shows up on left side toolbar under "languages". Tried on multiple browsers. Disappeared relatively recently. Maybe they changed their overall gadgets somehow and that impacted it, or something like that? -- Cirt (talk) 20:36, 25 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Are you still using MonoBook? I tried it today and it still worked fine. Bawolff 00:50, 26 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah I'm using monobook, does that make a difference in how to fix it? It's only that one website, the others work fine. -- Cirt (talk) 05:34, 26 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Only because you have the script in you User:Cirt/monobook.js (instead of common.js) so it would only load for monobook. Bawolff 15:14, 26 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
But ... I'm using monobook over there, so shouldn't it still be working? -- Cirt (talk) 19:39, 11 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Template:Popular articles

Hi! You have new messages at Template talk:Popular articles. ThanksVanischenu (talk) 09:09, 10 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Activity Bounce?

So obviously I've been keeping a VERY low profile for a while. I thought the project was practically dead a while back, now it looks like there is a fair amount of life? Are things picking back up? --ShakataGaNai ^_^ 21:28, 14 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Aiming for thematic org status. See meta:The Wikinewsie Group. --LauraHale (talk) 06:41, 15 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Its certainly not dead. However activity is less than wikinews had at its peak. To be honest, I haven't kept up with happenings over here all that well. I've mostly switched to doing dev related things on MediaWiki. Bawolff 16:28, 18 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I've asked a question at the above regarding bots. I figured if anybody might have a clue as to the answer it would be you, o I'd appreciate you having a look. :) Blood Red Sandman (Talk) (Contribs) 00:25, 29 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Does sound like a task for pywikipediabot. I'm not really familiar with who is running bots these days around here. [/me imagines a day with transitive category queries. Wouldn't it be nice. Part of me still thinks that it would be cool to instead of manually categorizing things, have templates like {{cat:Nuclear Proliferation}} that included the category and all its parents]. Bawolff 01:50, 29 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Heh. Sort of like my thought. --Pi zero (talk) 02:14, 29 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Meh. I always puzzle over why you'd choose to use a different language to implement an API-accessing library from the language the API itself is coded in.
That's why (and I've no idea if it'll still work as-robustly) I wrote NewsieBot's Wiki Interface. Take a look, when you've time, Bawolff. --Brian McNeil / talk 14:26, 16 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

HotCat and internal categories

Hey, would it be possible to modify HotCat so that categories marked {{internal cat}} (such as Category:Musicians) don't show up when adding cats to mainspace articles? Blood Red Sandman (Talk) (Contribs) 11:54, 16 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Image link

Hi. I need some assistance with image coding, and my understanding is you did the make lead software. I'm working on Wikinews:Education and some of the sub pages have subpage navigation which is clicking on the arrow button. These are not working because the |link = parameter is not apparently work. The person who works on the education program extension has tried to get it to work at User:Sage_Ross_(WMF)/sandbox. I was wondering if you had any ideas how to fix this? Thanks. --LauraHale (talk) 13:57, 11 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

the sandbox page appears to work for me? Bawolff 14:37, 11 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Popular articles

Hi Bawolff! Your bot places in every update of Template:Popular articles (which is transcluded on Main Page) 8 visible brackets at the end. Greetings Bigbossfarin (talk) 21:26, 13 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Should be fixed now. Bawolff 18:19, 19 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

very buggy gallery

I want to use the gallery for my images: de:Benutzer:Mariofan13. But there are LOTS of bugs:

  • The attribut widths is ignored, I have to use heights.
  • The attribut perrow does not work!
  • The last two pictures on my user page aren't scaled correct, they're much smaller than others.
  • Centering the gallery does not work correctly. The headline is centered with <center>-Tags too, and it is centered correct; but the gallery ignores the babelbox and because of this the gallery is not really centered.

--Mariofan13 (talk) 17:43, 23 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

prrrow and widths not working is intentional (and documented as such). How wide and how many perrow is dynamically determined and varries. You can make it take up only part of the page by putting it inside a <div style="width: 60%">The behaviour of the last two is supposed to try to avoid them being "huge". It could probably be tweaked. The gallery should be centrered by default, can you clarify which parts aren't being centered. Bawolff 20:25, 23 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Your admin status

Hello. I'm a steward. A new policy regarding the removal of "advanced rights" (administrator, bureaucrat, etc.) was adopted by community consensus recently. According to this policy, the stewards are reviewing administrators' activity on wikis with no inactivity policy.

You meet the inactivity criteria (no edits and no log actions for 2 years) on yiwiktionary, where you are an administrator. Since yiwiktionary does not have its own administrators' rights review process, the global one applies.

If you want to keep your rights, you should inform the community of the wiki about the fact that the stewards have sent you this information about your inactivity. If the community has a discussion about it and then wants you to keep your rights, please contact the stewards at m:Stewards' noticeboard, and link to the discussion of the local community, where they express their wish to continue to maintain the rights, and demonstrate a continued requirement to maintain these rights.

We stewards will evaluate the responses. If there is no response at all after approximately one month, we will proceed to remove your administrative rights. In cases of doubt, we will evaluate the responses and will refer a decision back to the local community for their comment and review. If you have any questions, please contact us on m:Stewards' noticeboard.

Best regards, Rschen7754 04:31, 10 March 2014 (UTC) hi Rschen7754. I was given those rights randomly, i have no objections to them being removed. Bawolff 15:27, 11 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Done --Rschen7754 20:42, 12 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Wikinews novice's question

Hello, I don't know where can I ask this question, so I'm asking you, an admin. I'm planning to write few articles about current Presidential election in Slovakia, however, the most of my sources are written in Slovak. I want to ask, if Wikinews have reviewers understanding Slovak language (or Czech language, it's very similar), so they can make an review (inter alia checking Slovak sources) after I finish article. And also: can I make and add to an election article (two) infoboxes containing some basic info about (two) presidential candidates? --DavidStefanSK (talk) 02:58, 24 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, DavidStefanSK. (Not my talk page, but saw your note here.)
  • Regarding Slovak/Czech sources. We may be able to manage, with help from you on the translations of the sources. Here's what I mean.
We don't have reviewers here at the moment who know Sovak/Czech, I believe. The reason we can't just rely on automatic translation is that the output of automatic translations is often very bad, and the precise meanings are always lost; and for review we often need the precise meanings. So, what sometimes works is, you leave us notes, on the talk page of the article, about translating of the sources. If you find this would involve too much of the sources, so that you start to worry about copyright, then instead you could email the translation notes to scoop (that's "scoop at wikinewsie dot org") and, on the article talk page, just say that you sent translation notes to scoop.
  • What sort of templates do you have in mind?
(By the way, our common area for asking questions is the "Water cooler"; perhaps the assistance water cooler, for this.)
--Pi zero (talk) 12:19, 24 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you very much! About infoboxes: I was thinking about something like this (link to uploaded picture), maybe also with added portraits, but after looking through templates I'm not sure it can be created on Wikinews. Maybe I can add this background info about candidates somewhere in article, or just give a link to Wikipedia. --DavidStefanSK (talk) 18:20, 24 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Search namespaces

Wondering if you happen to know what controls the default namespaces for Special:Search. As it's occurred to me we're set up to search mainspace and portal space, which doesn't make sense because our portals are really deprecated in favor of the categories. --Pi zero (talk) 18:11, 30 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Its controlled by wgNamespacesToBeSearchedDefault in https://noc.wikimedia.org/conf/InitialiseSettings.php.txt - To change it is the standard procedure (gather consensus, file a bug with shell in the keyword field). Bawolff 21:56, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Bawolff! Please see d:user:Bawolff. I will try to contact you on irc these days. Best regards gangLeri ‫·‏לערי ריינהארט‏·‏T‏·‏m‏:‏Th‏·‏T‏·‏email me‏·‏‬ 11:14, 23 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Pretty much everything is broken

Excepting HotCat [oh, and UTCLiveClock works too afaics].

  • EzPR is not available.
  • Make lead doesn't work.
  • {{hidden}} doesn't work.
  • Gadget "Open links to external sites in a new window" doesn't work. At Amgine's suggestion, updated from en.wb (where it was updated in 2011).
  • Gadget "Review progress" doesn't work, notwithstanding the fix last night.

--Pi zero (talk) 20:00, 11 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

An important message about renaming users

Dear Bawolff,

I am cross-posting this message to many places to make sure everyone who is a Wikimedia Foundation project bureaucrat receives a copy. If you are a bureaucrat on more than one wiki, you will receive this message on each wiki where you are a bureaucrat.

As you may have seen, work to perform the Wikimedia cluster-wide single-user login finalisation (SUL finalisation) is taking place. This may potentially effect your work as a local bureaucrat, so please read this message carefully.

Why is this happening? As currently stated at the global rename policy, a global account is a name linked to a single user across all Wikimedia wikis, with local accounts unified into a global collection. Previously, the only way to rename a unified user was to individually rename every local account. This was an extremely difficult and time-consuming task, both for stewards and for the users who had to initiate discussions with local bureaucrats (who perform local renames to date) on every wiki with available bureaucrats. The process took a very long time, since it's difficult to coordinate crosswiki renames among the projects and bureaucrats involved in individual projects.

The SUL finalisation will be taking place in stages, and one of the first stages will be to turn off Special:RenameUser locally. This needs to be done as soon as possible, on advice and input from Stewards and engineers for the project, so that no more accounts that are unified globally are broken by a local rename to usurp the global account name. Once this is done, the process of global name unification can begin. The date that has been chosen to turn off local renaming and shift over to entirely global renaming is 15 September 2014, or three weeks time from now. In place of local renames is a new tool, hosted on Meta, that allows for global renames on all wikis where the name is not registered will be deployed.

Your help is greatly needed during this process and going forward in the future if, as a bureaucrat, renaming users is something that you do or have an interest in participating in. The Wikimedia Stewards have set up, and are in charge of, a new community usergroup on Meta in order to share knowledge and work together on renaming accounts globally, called Global renamers. Stewards are in the process of creating documentation to help global renamers to get used to and learn more about global accounts and tools and Meta in general as well as the application format. As transparency is a valuable thing in our movement, the Stewards would like to have at least a brief public application period. If you are an experienced renamer as a local bureaucrat, the process of becoming a part of this group could take as little as 24 hours to complete. You, as a bureaucrat, should be able to apply for the global renamer right on Meta by the requests for global permissions page on 1 September, a week from now.

In the meantime please update your local page where users request renames to reflect this move to global renaming, and if there is a rename request and the user has edited more than one wiki with the name, please send them to the request page for a global rename.

Stewards greatly appreciate the trust local communities have in you and want to make this transition as easy as possible so that the two groups can start working together to ensure everyone has a unique login identity across Wikimedia projects. Completing this project will allow for long-desired universal tools like a global watchlist, global notifications and many, many more features to make work easier.

If you have any questions, comments or concerns about the SUL finalisation, read over the Help:Unified login page on Meta and leave a note on the talk page there, or on the talk page for global renamers. You can also contact me on my talk page on meta if you would like. I'm working as a bridge between Wikimedia Foundation Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Stewards, and you to assure that SUL finalisation goes as smoothly as possible; this is a community-driven process and I encourage you to work with the Stewards for our communities.

Thank you for your time. -- Keegan (WMF) talk 18:24, 25 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

--This message was sent using MassMessage. Was there an error? Report it!

Being bothered by User:Pi zero

He is bothering me with rubbish each edit. He is never contributing. He deletes articles comments sites here, although the article is existing. Articles under development are clean up articles. I might not write about RB Leipzig. My started articles have interest and he says that other archived articles are which from amateur clubs, university clubs or something else. He wants to rename my name here and is not rename me. My articles are written after the style such as about other proven football match reports. He is psychic unable to name reasons. Please remove him from the board! He neither productive nor socially competent or educated, for a globally representative on public free sites. --Nikebrand (talk) 21:40, 6 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

please don't use name calling ("psychic") when talking about other users. Im not an active user here anymore, you should discuss dispute resolution options with someone whois active. Bawolff 22:54, 6 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

heh...

Double-clicked on a word in wikieditor text box, and wiktionary opened in another tab. <eyebrow raise suggestively> - Amgine | t 23:17, 22 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Wasn't me. Bawolff 00:37, 23 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

French Wikinews

Hi(sorry for my english), could you update the script for that. The setting "|date" and the list under "<noinclude>[[Catégorie:Modèles utilisés sur la page d'accueil]]</noinclude>". Thank you. --SleaY (talk) 03:22, 14 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, I did some changes but, there still is a bug with the template {{W}}(We use it to make links) that is erased by the tool. --SleaY (talk) 17:22, 14 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
@SleaY: what sort of issue are you having with the {{w}} template?
I'm talking about the tool Wikinews:Article principal. I think I fixed it [27]. I added also the setting "|date". Now I'm trying to do the same thing with "|theme". --SleaY (talk) 16:58, 16 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Minor, obscure(?) technical question

I'm trying to understand js functions importScript and importStylesheet a bit better, and was wondering if you could shed light on them. My specific questions atm, fwiw:

  • Is it even possible to get the same effect by laboriously assembling a full url and passing it to mw.loader.load, or is that still going to do something subtly different?
  • If it's possible, is it worth the trouble for a function described as 'we'll be deprecating it as soon as we have an acceptable modern alternative' (but they still haven't had the guts to actually deprecate)?
  • Where would one look to find the source code defining importScript/importStylesheet? (Which seems like the most direct way of understanding just what they actually do.)

Any suggestions appreciated. --Pi zero (talk) 21:06, 16 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Popular articles?

Is the popular articles bot down for the count? (I see it's been out since January 28.) --Pi zero (talk) 22:30, 11 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Halifax ArtAndFeminism Editathon, March 7 or 8

Not sure if you're already aware of this, if you like we can put you in touch with the event organizers there: w:Wikipedia:Meetup/Halifax/ArtAndFeminism/NSCAD.--Pharos (talk) 20:40, 18 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I invite your attention to a thread at my user talk page, here. --Pi zero (talk) 02:16, 19 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I'm leaving for lyon tommorow morning. I'm not sure when I'll have a chance to look at this. Bawolff 08:34, 20 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Updated scripts

Hi Bawolff. I edited your chick.js to update you to the latest version of TemplateScript. You were using a much older version called regex menu framework, so the main difference you'll see is an improved regex editor and cleaner custom scripts. I also updated deprecated functions and made your scripts HTTPS-compatible. Let me know if anything breaks. :) —Pathoschild 19:05, 09 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Major breakages

Hi. Almost all the major automation on Wikinews has gone away. Even WN:Make lead is broken, this time. (Make lead didn't break last Friday, when they decided to stop loading gadgets that don't use ResourceLoader; at that time we temporarily lost all the important things except Make lead, getting them all back by declaring in MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition that they do use ResourceLoader.) I'm glad to see my dialog tools haven't broken yet (modulo declaring that the gadget uses ResourceLoader)... though I admit I'm pretty worried since they seem to have gotten extremely reckless about breaking things that aren't theirs (after all, if it's software and it's someone else's, it can't be important, right?).

Sorry, I guess my patience with the Foundation has gotten stretched beyond the limits of its elasticity.

Anyway, if there's anything you can suggest to bring any of it back — and if there's anything you can suggest to make the tools I'm developing more robust against future breakage by software "improvements" — it would be greatly appreciated. --Pi zero (talk) 19:44, 12 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Its due to [28]. I didn't realize my scripts actually used that. Guess they do. Bawolff 04:24, 13 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Using IP, this error message is displayed on CAT:REV, after I click OK for purge

ReadyAlert gadget fails at life, please tell Bawolff. error: ReferenceError: sajax_init_object is not defined
14.139.242.195 (talk) 21:41, 13 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I think I've got it fixed (mimicking at MediaWiki:Gadget-readyAlert.js bawolff's fix to User:Bawolff/mwapilib.js). --Pi zero (talk) 22:05, 13 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Popular articles

Hello. Long time no chat. I was just writing to inform you Template:Popular articles has been broken since June. Is there a chance it might be fixed? Cheers. DragonFire1024 (Talk to the Dragon) 21:49, 14 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@DragonFire1024: Fixed. Tool labs admins in their infinite wisdom decided it would be a good idea to disable all scheduled jobs :s Bawolff 18:10, 22 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

This is a message from the Wikimedia Foundation. Translations are available.

As you may know, the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees approved a new "Access to nonpublic information policy" on 25 April 2014 after a community consultation. The former policy has remained in place until the new policy could be implemented. That implementation work is now being done, and we are beginning the transition to the new policy.

An important part of that transition is helping volunteers like you sign the required confidentiality agreement. All Wikimedia volunteers with access to nonpublic information are required to sign this new agreement, and we have prepared some documentation to help you do so.

The Wikimedia Foundation is requiring that anyone with access to nonpublic information sign the new confidentiality agreement by 15 December 2015 (OTRS users have until 22 December 2015) to retain their access. You are receiving this email because you have access to nonpublic information and are required to sign the confidentiality agreement under the new policy.

Signing the confidentiality agreement for nonpublic information is conducted and tracked using Legalpad on Phabricator. The general confidentiality agreement is now ready, and the OTRS agreement will be ready after 22 September 2015. We have prepared a guide on Meta-Wiki to help you create your Phabricator account and sign the new agreement: Confidentiality agreement for nonpublic information/How to sign

If you have any questions or experience any problems while signing the new agreement, please visit this talk page or email me (gvarnum@wikimedia.org). Again, please sign this confidentiality agreement by 15 December 2015 (OTRS users have until 22 December 2015) to retain your access to nonpublic information. If you do not wish to retain this access, please let me know and we will forward your request to the appropriate individuals.

Thank you,
Gregory Varnum (User:GVarnum-WMF), Wikimedia Foundation

Posted by the MediaWiki message delivery 23:33, 15 September 2015 (UTC) • TranslateGet help

Can you help us out?

Please see User_talk:Green_Giant#OneClickArchiver.

Any idea how to fix my OneClickArchiver to get it working? -- Cirt (talk) 21:32, 22 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Any thoughts on this?

...since my technical expertise drops off sharply around the edges.

WN:Water cooler/proposals#Podcast

--Pi zero (talk) 13:59, 13 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Could really use your help with GA Reviews

Bawolff,

At English Wikipedia we are suffering a six (6) month backlog of the time it takes between Good Article nomination to getting a review.

I think that part of the problem is people's lack of familiarity and unease about how to review.

If Wikipedia were to have a similar type of review-script that you created, here at Wikinews, that we could add to Gadgets at Wikipedia or even just as an optional user-script, the reviews would probably make much more sense to people.

Please see:

  1. w:Wikipedia:Good article nominations/templates
  2. w:Wikipedia:Good article criteria

Is there any way you could create something for Wikipedia, similar to "Easy Peer Review" gadget?

Thank you very much, we really need help with this,

-- Cirt (talk) 18:05, 15 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

In the long run...
A particular target for my dialog tools is to rewrite the review gadget, in a souped-up form that could, moreover, be grown by the community since it's all in wiki markup. Once I get the tools into full production mode (my punch list is actually moving forward, though not uniformly shrinking), I mean to also port the tools to en.wb (where I'm also an admin) and get some breadth of experience using the tools for tasks outside the Wikinews workflow (as well as experience porting them to another project). I've always had in mind that Wikipedia could massively benefit from the tools — as I suspect any wiki could — but I want to get more of the kinks worked out first, which I'd expect Wikinews and Wikibooks between them to do.
Just a thought. --Pi zero (talk) 18:23, 15 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Bawolff (t · c · b), Pi zero (t · c · b), truly any help at all converting "Easy Peer Review" to work with at least one of the templates at w:Wikipedia:Good article nominations/templates, or simply the six (6) GA criteria at w:Wikipedia:Good article criteria (and their sub-points), would be extremely valuable for Wikipedia. Thank you, -- Cirt (talk) 18:29, 15 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
ezpr was made before i really knew what i was doing, and as a result is not very modular. I think it would be easier to write a new script than try to adapt ezpr. Bawolff
Would it be possible for you to please help write a new script, keeping in mind w:WIAGA and perhaps utilization with something similar to w:Template:FGAN, w:Template:GANOH, w:Template:PGAN -- and/or like others at w:Wikipedia:Good article nominations/templates ? -- Cirt (talk) 21:31, 15 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I have a vague (perhaps altogether faulty) memory that Gryllida was thinking along these lines a while back. --Pi zero (talk) 21:44, 15 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I've dropped off all my Quality improvement projects on Wikipedia to zero. Instead I've been focusing all my efforts on trying to review GA candidates and clear the GA Review massive backlog of six (6) months, at least for a few topics. Any help with a tool to make this process go more smoothly, would be greatly appreciated! -- Cirt (talk) 21:56, 15 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
This is an ugly javascript-free solution I found reasonably useful for reviewing new articles queue at Wikipedia, but in the long run I intend to write a desktop client for the wiki - it is easier to program for than JavaScript. (The environment here has been unstable for the last half a year, so I am afraid that I'm unlikely to resume programming any of this until at least a couple weeks later.) Gryllida 22:15, 15 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Wow, Gryllida (t · c · b), thanks, please do keep us posted! -- Cirt (talk) 00:47, 16 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Ive got a lot going on right now, and dont want to overcommit to doing stuff. I might be able to help sometime down the road.Bawolff 05:01, 16 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Okay, no worries, no pressure! I'm doing fine right now reviewing GA candidates with the templates already present, but this idea could help out the wider Wikipedia community. Perhaps Gryllida (t · c · b) could also help out down the road. -- Cirt (talk) 07:33, 16 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

This is a message from the Wikimedia Foundation. Translations are available.

I wanted to follow-up on an message I sent you in September regarding the need for you to sign a confidentiality agreement by 15 December 2015 (OTRS users have until 31 December 2015) in order to maintain your access from Wikimedia to nonpublic information.

As you may know, the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees approved a new "Access to nonpublic information policy" on 25 April 2014 after a community consultation. The former policy has remained in place until the new policy could be implemented. That implementation work is now being done, and we are transitioning to the new policy.

An important part of that transition is helping volunteers like you sign the required confidentiality agreement. All Wikimedia volunteers with access to nonpublic information are required to sign this new agreement, and we have prepared some documentation to help you do so.

The Wikimedia Foundation is requiring that anyone with access to nonpublic information sign the new confidentiality agreement by 15 December 2015 (OTRS users have until 31 December 2015) to retain their access. You are receiving this message because you have access to nonpublic information and are required to sign the confidentiality agreement under the new policy. If you do not sign the new confidentiality agreement by 15 December 2015, you will lose your access to nonpublic information.

Signing the confidentiality agreement for nonpublic information is conducted and tracked using Legalpad on Phabricator. We have prepared a guide on Meta-Wiki to help you create your Phabricator account and sign the new agreement: Confidentiality agreement for nonpublic information/How to sign

If you have any questions or experience any problems while signing the new agreement, please visit this talk page or email me (gvarnum@wikimedia.org). Again, please sign this confidentiality agreement by 15 December 2015 (OTRS users have until 31 December 2015) to retain your access to nonpublic information. If you do not wish to retain this access, please let me know and we will forward your request to the appropriate individuals.

Thank you,
Gregory Varnum (User:GVarnum-WMF), Wikimedia Foundation

Posted by the MediaWiki message delivery 08:11, 16 October 2015 (UTC)TranslateGet help[reply]

Breaking change to Wikimedia API may affect you soon

Hey, just making sure you've seen https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-api-announce/2015-November/000098.html? Should impact your bot here. Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 12:40, 13 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

This is a message from the Wikimedia Foundation. Translations are available.

I wanted to follow-up on an message I sent you in September regarding the need for you to sign a confidentiality agreement by 15 December 2015 (OTRS users have until 31 December 2015) in order to maintain your access from Wikimedia to nonpublic information.

As you may know, the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees approved a new "Access to nonpublic information policy" on 25 April 2014 after a community consultation. The former policy has remained in place until the new policy could be implemented. That implementation work is now being done, and we are transitioning to the new policy.

An important part of that transition is helping volunteers like you sign the required confidentiality agreement. All Wikimedia volunteers with access to nonpublic information are required to sign this new agreement, and we have prepared some documentation to help you do so.

The Wikimedia Foundation is requiring that anyone with access to nonpublic information sign the new confidentiality agreement by 15 December 2015 (OTRS users have until 31 December 2015) to retain their access. You are receiving this message because you have access to nonpublic information and are required to sign the confidentiality agreement under the new policy. If you do not sign the new confidentiality agreement by 15 December 2015, you will lose your access to nonpublic information.

Signing the confidentiality agreement for nonpublic information is conducted and tracked using Legalpad on Phabricator. We have prepared a guide on Meta-Wiki to help you create your Phabricator account and sign the new agreement: Confidentiality agreement for nonpublic information/How to sign

If you have any questions or experience any problems while signing the new agreement, please visit this talk page or email me (gvarnum@wikimedia.org). Again, please sign this confidentiality agreement by 15 December 2015 (OTRS users have until 31 December 2015) to retain your access to nonpublic information. If you do not wish to retain this access, please let me know and we will forward your request to the appropriate individuals.

Thank you,
Gregory Varnum (User:GVarnum-WMF), Wikimedia Foundation

Posted by the MediaWiki message delivery 20:17, 16 November 2015 (UTC)TranslateGet help[reply]

Unreliable javascript

Hi. I've been observing a puzzle for... I think a few months now, and was just wondering if you might have any thoughts on it.

Aside: This is only indirectly related to my dialog tools, which as usual are shaping up slowly (I' trying to figure out, atm, whether it's premature for me to start building an interactive assistant for building-and-maintenance of interactive assistants). From the very first I designed the dialog tools to be as robust as possible, including especially robust against all but the most unlikely of changes to the underlying wiki platform. And so far the dialog tools haven't shown the anomaly I'm about to describe. But anything that shows instability in javascript worries me.

What I've observed is that sometimes, apparently randomly, when loading a page — on both en.wn and en.wb — some of the javascript gadgetry doesn't load. I'd first noticed this about UTCLiveClock, but then gradually became aware that when it happens it also applies to the collapsing of the legend on RecentChanges. I think I remember the problem also applying to HotCat; I really need to try to remember to notice, next time I see it happen, whether or not it also applies to the "Review progress" gadget. I'd first wondered if it had to do with UTCLiveClock being a very old gadget (or am I mistaken in believing it easily predates ResourceLoader), but I wouldn't have thought a problem with collapsing the RC legend would fit that profile. At any rate, if you've any thoughts on what sort of cause it might have and perhaps how to avoid it, I'd be most interested to hear. --Pi zero (talk) 12:05, 1 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Hm. When javascript fails — which happens a fair fraction of the time, these days, search-box completion is absent too. --Pi zero (talk) 11:25, 7 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Some observations about this, that might shed some sort of light on it.

  • On en.wb, User:JackPotte did a lot of updating of javascript on-site, and javascript now usually works there. I think it still fails some of the time, but things have gotten much better.
  • Here on en.wn, I wrapped the body of every gadget in a try block, and when that didn't eliminate the problem I wrapped try blocks around the various sections of code in Common.js, which also didn't eliminate the problem.
I've thought about a major push to eliminate some specific deprecated things from our javascript, such as importScript, but it's not clear if it's worth the effort since I've a pessimistic feeling it'd just be a huge amount of work that still wouldn't eliminate the problem. After all, the en.wn Common.js makes intensive use of importScript.
  • As of a few days ago (I think; perhaps Tuesday, if that's still when they deploy changes), javascript is much more likely to fail in my Opera browser than in my Firefox. Seems suggestive of something about the nature of the problem, though the something eludes me.

--Pi zero (talk) 14:44, 9 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

new code gets deployed on wednessdays here (tuesday is mediawiki.org and test.wikipedia.org. Wikipedia is on thursday). Bawolff 18:22, 9 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Aha. I'd thought I first noticed the discrepancy more recently than a Tuesday deployment would have predicted. --Pi zero (talk) 18:56, 9 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Fwiw: I've replaced all the uses of importScript with mw.loader.load. Behavior might have improved slightly as a result. There are still lots of wg variable uses that should be rewritten with mw.config.get. --Pi zero (talk) 10:22, 22 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

... and fixed all the wg* variables to use mw.config.get (except 1 2 3, which I didn't touch because the code baffled me). --Pi zero (talk) 01:24, 24 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
My suspicion is that lots of older javascript is written with implicit assumptions about how things are scheduled relative to each other when using importScript, and the real cause of the problems is that work related to ResourceLoader has changed the overall landscape of scheduling in a way that violates the old assumptions. (Alas, I'm not familiar with whatever positive benefits may accrue from most of what the devs change, so that I tend to resent these sorts of problems as side effects of mostly-blameless devs carrying out spectacularly bad policies imposed by the WMF.) --Pi zero (talk) 15:45, 24 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
You should generally not make assumptions about load order of different scripts. importScript is asyncronous (That's always been the case, even before RL), so timing of it can be random, and will vary depending on if the user has it cached or not. RL (and subsequent changes, especially "ResourceLoaderStorage" [aka caching scripts in LocalStorage]) changed a bunch of core scripts to be very asynchronous. In the event of caching, scripts may even load before the html of the page is fully loaded. Anyhow - If you need to use functions defined in a specific RL module, use mw.loader.using( dependency, callbackFunction ) which will call the callbackFunction only after the module is loaded. If you need access to anything from the HTML DOM, use $( callbackFunction ); which will make sure DOM is loaded before calling the callback. If for some reason you need the page entirely loaded (i.e. all images fully loaded), you can use $( document ).ready( callback );, but generally speaking images can take quite a while before fully loaded, and you almost never need them loaded before doing stuff. Bawolff 09:11, 26 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
It's all very well to say 'don't make assumptions about load order', but I think getting things to work in practice is usually more a matter of finding a way that works (as the system behaves when you're debugging). For example, the progress-review gadget has some funky code in it for scheduling that I can't even altogether decipher but, amongst other things, seems to be checking to see if Bawolff/mwapplib2 has loaded yet and, if not, insert a one-time 0.8 second delay. With a comment I didn't understand either that mentions Google Chrome. (I actually tried to improve that code, but wasn't at all surprised when my improvement didn't work since I really didn't understand the code in the first place.)

I had a vague impression that mw.loader.using would only work with a registered module, and I was completely defeated by trying to figure out how to register a module; it sounded like something only a WMF employee was allowed to do, which would be consistent with my general impression that WMF really wants to be closed-shop. So I've never even tried to use mw.loader.using. --Pi zero (talk) 11:17, 26 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, module registration needs MediaWiki on the server side to be involved. If you want to make your own, the only way currently (That I'm aware of) is to make a gadget. You can have hidden gadgets that don't show up in preferences by specifying a right that doesn't exist in the option field. - e.g. [ResourceLoader|rights=hidden] (You can see some examples of this on enwikipedia). Alternatively, if one doesn't want to use MediaWiki's loading and module system, one can make their own system for verifying that a dependency loaded (Somehow anyways. I have no idea how MW actually does that, but presumably one can copy whatever it does). (As for the delay in process-review. That's probably bad practice. After all, people on slow internet might have more than a 0.8 second delay. There's lots of historical javascript that doesn't exactly do the best thing). Bawolff 11:38, 26 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Useful info; thanks. Btw, re progress-review, there might have been a thought there that if the connection is so slow 0.8 seconds isn't enough then you probably don't want to use that gadget anyway. --Pi zero (talk) 13:05, 26 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]
lol. the whole problem seems to be MediaWiki:Gadget-extlinks.js; de-select that and I've got no problem. --Pi zero (talk) 03:56, 3 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

That script is old and will stop working later this year. In the worst case scenario, it would throw JavaScript errors that prevents not just itself, but even other JavaScript from working. We should fixe it or remove it. --SleaY (talk) 14:20, 12 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@SleaY: What is it about it, that will stop working? Also, when does "later this year" mean? I've heard a bunch of stuff will stop working but there never seem to be specifics about why. We have a very heavily automated project here and I suspect most of it depends on that library that you're saying will stop working later this year (although we do have a replacement in the works, it's just not clear if it'll be ready in time).

Btw, we already have JavaScript intermittently failing to work, and so does English Wikibooks. --Pi zero (talk) 14:42, 12 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

i'm aware its old, i wrote it a long time ago. Im not really doing anything beyond the bare minimun of maintinance for it anymore, my interests primarily moving on to other things. What is the nature of your concern? Bawolff 17:28, 12 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Mayhap a bit of time to move deprecated/unmaintained scripts to userspace to maintain the history? - Amgine | t 15:01, 21 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I guess maybe. Although i think there are some cross-wiki scripts that assume its at that particular location. I don't think its bothering anyone where it is. Bawolff 17:24, 21 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

static and dynamic template scope

I recall you'd once linked me to a bugzilla request for a magic word that would return the name of the page on which it was actually called, that was closed as WON'T FIX. I was therefore somewhat bemused to realize that scribunto provides a way to do that, if you're willing to use the somewhat more unwieldy module-invocation syntax. Which iirc makes their technical justification for the long-ago refusal look as silly as it was. I've just implemented a small module to do that and also to let a template pass along all of its parameters to another template without having to explicitly list all the possible parameters (e.g. diff); I find a certain grim humor in realizing that the use of Lua as a way to encourage people to not use wiki markup to implement templates has, in the process, made it possible to implement using Lua features that make it more feasible to use wiki markup to implement templates. --Pi zero (talk) 14:34, 13 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Export Easy Peer Review to Spanish Wikinews

Hi, I see that you are inactive, I do not know if you can answer but I'll leave the question to you as well. I would like to know if it is possible to export Easy Peer Review to Wikinews in Spanish. I wait your answer. Regards. File:Alvaro Molina.png Alvaro Molina (Let's Talk) 03:30, 12 January 2017 (UTC) PD: Sorry if my English is not good.[reply]

Hello. There are several articles awaiting review. You may go to either WN:Newsroom or Category:Review to check. Thanks. --George Ho (talk) 05:50, 21 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Wikinews:Make lead

Dear Bawolff (ping), Wikinews in Dutch language has reopened yesterday and there is something that I don't feel I should do myself, because one should know how to deal with scripts. As a matter of fact I have tried to translate Wikinews:Make lead which you have started. There you mentioned "Report any non-workingness to User:Bawolff" so I was wondering if you have time to help with the Dutch version of 'make lead" that I started here: nl:Wikinews:Inleiding maken. I would like to use it at the main page. There you see at the right top corner of each block 'bewerk' (Eng. 'edit'). Per block the corresponding categories with news articles are overhere:

A seventh block of "Actuele Onderwerpdossiers" doesn't have a corresponding category. This one should be fed with Special:NewPages. Can I ask for your help? Is it a lot of work for you to complete the last parts so we can have our own 'make lead' at our project? Your help would be very welcome. Thank you in advance! Best regards, Ymnes (talk) 05:02, 7 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I wonder why this error

Got this error while not-ready'ing an article. What is it about? Easy review script has uncaught exception [tell Bawolff]: TypeError: Cannot read property 'edit' of undefined.
•–• 13:33, 25 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The tell bawolff part was from when I used to be actively supporting the script ;). Basically the error is the javascript version of what in c would be called a null pointer derefernce. Generally, something called foo.edit where the variable foo was undefined. Bawolff 14:00, 25 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Growing Wikinews to counter the Balkanization of the body politic

Hello:

I'm asking all the Wikinews administrators for their thoughts on how Wikinews and the Wikimedia Foundation more generally might respond more effectively to the challenges to democracy and world peace that many people perceive in the rise of the xenophobic right in the US, Europe, India, the Philippines, and elsewhere. I've proposed a workshop on this subject for WikiConference North America, October 18-21, and I've engaged User:Pi zero and User:Gryllida in discussing this at Wikinews:Water cooler/proposals#Retaining contributors with compatible projects. Pi zero and Gryllida think the numbers I scraped from meta:Wikinews are wrong. That may be, but I don't think it changes the fundamental question.

I hope you will contribute your thoughts to this discussion -- both online and hopefully also at WikiConference North America.

Thanks, DavidMCEddy (talk) 01:10, 17 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Hey Bawolff. If you've got a moment, would you mind closing Green Giant's RfA? I think you're the only bureaucrat on this project that both a) hasn't participated in the discussion, and b) is still active on Wikimedia projects (if not this one). Thanks, Microchip08 (talk) 21:32, 9 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

wikinews administrators noticeboard

whats link to it; you are broad news outlet; you should have one!!!

???Bawolff 20:52, 21 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

LQT vs nuke

You might find this somewhat amusing (or bemusing): WN:WCT#LQT vs nuke. --Pi zero (talk) 21:24, 29 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, I'm from Wikisource Turkish. I want to use your "Gadget-dictionaryLookupHover" (I saw it here for the first time)gadget in Turkish wikisorce. I wrote on Meta but they said "has no tr code component." Can we make this gadget compatible with Turkish Wiktionary? --Satirdan kahraman (talk) 12:45, 1 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@Satirdan kahraman: The gadget doesn't even work in english anymore. Sorry I'm not really maintaining it anymore. Bawolff 03:26, 8 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Wikinews logo?

How would we go about turning the wikinews logo black (or perhaps substituting the obit version of the logo) for a while? (Three days has been suggested as appropriate, given brianmc's role on the project, and I'd really like to do it, but honestly don't recall how.) --Pi zero (talk) 00:34, 28 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

you can override the logo with css like .mw-wiki-logo {background-image: url(put url here) !important;}. Bawolff 01:31, 28 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
What's our sourcing for the information about brianmc? Not to put too fine a point on it, how do we know? --Pi zero (talk) 01:34, 28 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
But will it work for everyone? You mean, to edit site's CSS, right
103.254.128.138 (talk) 01:35, 28 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, i mean edit mediawiki:Common.css. Source is a facebook post. Bawolff 02:04, 28 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
The platform interface is twitchy as all get-out, but I've found a combination that works. Thx. --Pi zero (talk) 05:17, 28 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Using Wiktionary lookup gadget on own MW site

Thanks for your work on the Wiktionary lookup gadget. I would like to use it on my own MW site in a way that it executes a search on my site on double-clicking a word. How could I do that?--Spiros71 (talk) 12:12, 2 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The script is a little broken right now, because the API no longer allows framing. It would be possible to work around this with a proxy, but I'm not really maintaining the script anymore. If it weren't for that issue, you could just load the following JS file on your site: https://en.wikinews.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Gadget-dictionaryLookupHover.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript&scrver=1 . but i haven't tested it in a long time so there might be other issues. Bawolff 14:13, 6 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Bawolff, hope you're well, I was wondering if by any chance you know what this category has started to appear on various pages. It's seemingly random, but I don't think anyone is quite sure what's up. —chaetodipus (talk · contribs) 03:51, 29 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

hi User:Chaetodipus. Recently there was an issue on ruwikinews, where a large import combined with dpl resulted in all wikimedia sites going down (phab:T287362. Developers want to get a better idea how dpl is used, and especially of the wikis that have it enabled which ones actually use it, in order to better asses risk of the extension. To that end they added a tracking category to better keep track of DPL usages. Since it was just added it might take a little while for the category to populate. Bawolff 04:19, 29 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the response, it had seemed a little strange that a cat popped up out of nowhere like that. Does this seem like it was just a one-time issue with ru.wikinews doing its large import, or is there serious consideration in the removal of the DPL extension on the wikimedia sites? —chaetodipus (talk · contribs) 04:34, 29 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
ruwikinews is having dpl permenantly removed. I think there is a high liklihood it will also be removed from some larger wikis like en wiktionary if it turns out the community there doesn't use it. Ever since dpl was first made it was always acknowleged that it was doing inefficient things and would not work after wikis got past a certain size, and ruwikinews with 13 million pages is way past that limit (also, their refusal to take any responsibility for their part in this mess, and their little episode of yellow journalism over this issue, really has not endeared them to the devs. But that's secondary to the real issue that the approach taken by dpl does not work once wikis get too big). Beyond that, discussions are still ongoing and i'm not sure what the outcome will be. I suspect enwikinews will be safe or at the very least should dpl be removed across wmf, i would suspect a replacement would be made available. (Disclaimer: i dont work for wmf anymore, all just my opinion, i have no special insider knowledge outside of what i pick up from my social circle) Bawolff 04:53, 29 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Hello. Just wanted to check if this account is still in use as a bot because it seems the last edit was in 2015? --Cromium (talk) 22:01, 13 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

its only used on mediawiki.org. Bawolff 22:59, 13 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Cheers for getting back to me so soon. I’m going to remove the bot flag then. If you need the flag again, it would need to go through a fresh request. Thank you for the contributions made through this account. 🙂 --Cromium (talk) 01:08, 14 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

How we will see unregistered users

Hi!

You get this message because you are an admin on a Wikimedia wiki.

When someone edits a Wikimedia wiki without being logged in today, we show their IP address. As you may already know, we will not be able to do this in the future. This is a decision by the Wikimedia Foundation Legal department, because norms and regulations for privacy online have changed.

Instead of the IP we will show a masked identity. You as an admin will still be able to access the IP. There will also be a new user right for those who need to see the full IPs of unregistered users to fight vandalism, harassment and spam without being admins. Patrollers will also see part of the IP even without this user right. We are also working on better tools to help.

If you have not seen it before, you can read more on Meta. If you want to make sure you don’t miss technical changes on the Wikimedia wikis, you can subscribe to the weekly technical newsletter.

We have two suggested ways this identity could work. We would appreciate your feedback on which way you think would work best for you and your wiki, now and in the future. You can let us know on the talk page. You can write in your language. The suggestions were posted in October and we will decide after 17 January.

Thank you. /Johan (WMF)

18:14, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

Temporary change to article length

Hello. As a reviewer, this note is just to let you know we are implementing a trial from February 1 to April 30 to encourage more articles to be published per the outcome of a current proposal. The minimum requirements for article length will be one paragraph of at least a hundred words. At the end of the trial the requirements will return to normal (3 paragraphs etc) and there will be an evaluation discussion about the trial. Happy reviewing! [24Cr][talk] 23:19, 31 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Temporary change to freshness

Hello. As a reviewer, this note is just to let you know we are implementing a trial from July 4 to October 4 to enable more articles to be reviewed per the outcome of a current proposal. The freshness window is being extended to about five to seven days. At the end of the trial the window will continue to be at 5-7 days while we discuss whether to adopt the change permanently or not. Happy reviewing! [24Cr][talk] 17:40, 4 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]