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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

Make lead posting to wrong page [resolved]

• Hey.... when using make lead, I set it to lead 3 and when I saved it set the article to lead 1. That's a problem Irunongames•play 13:45, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

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)

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)

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

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

I'm using an iPhone. ;) Any other suggestions? Benny the mascot (talk) 14:52, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

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)

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)

Anything like a possible now?

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

Paragraphs should really be longer... Bawolff ☺☻ 02:47, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

Overcat is a crime on other wiki's - is it allowable here? (Australia and Western Australia) SatuSuro (talk) 02:49, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

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)

- we have an as reliable Geosciences australia :) http://www.ga.gov.au/earthquakes/SatuSuro (talk) 03:20, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

heheheh I like thatmaybe san diego slipping slowly into the pacific - on the edge literally :) SatuSuro (talk) 04:41, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

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)

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)

Thank you very, very much! It works. Thanks again for your fast help!

Nintendere (talk) 20:42, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

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)

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-talk • main talk'} 12:32, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

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)

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)

I've got the same problem too. --Diego Grez ^{let's talk} 00:48, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

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)

So far can't reproduce. Tell me if it continues to happen. Bawolff ☺☻ 05:43, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

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)

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)

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)

Use of the secure portal

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

[4] was done from the secure portal, so works for me. What error are you getting? Bawolff ☺☻ 03:16, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

Done Link was wrong, should be fixed now. Bawolff ☺☻ 03:34, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

• 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)

I came across some js on Wikipedia that would automatically correct URLs. w:WP:JS I think. Mikemoral♪♫ 22:53, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

I've imported 'pedia's js as a gadget. Bawolff ☺☻ 02:23, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

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. Gopher65_talk 02:06, 16 May 2010 (UTC)

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. Gopher65_talk 02:47, 16 May 2010 (UTC)

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... Gopher65_talk 02:25, 16 May 2010 (UTC)

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.Gopher65_talk 02:29, 16 May 2010 (UTC)

<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.

Gopher65_talk 02:43, 16 May 2010 (UTC)

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)

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-talk • main talk'} 02:06, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

{{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)

p.s. You can check for page existence using {{#ifexist:some page|exists|does not}}. Bawolff ☺☻ 05:03, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

• 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)

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)

<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)

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)

• Is that havkery that'd shrink [date] and leave the following, linked, article title? --Brian McNeil / ^talk 14:54, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

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)

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)

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)

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-talk • main talk} 00:00, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

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)

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)

• 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-talk • main talk} 03:45, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

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-talk • main talk} 03:58, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

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)

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)

• Shaka would've trouted me... MediaWiki:Common.css/Portal:Scotland was missing. Can I do Portal:* for the CSS? --Brian McNeil / ^talk 12:39, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

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)

• 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)

lol. Bawolff ☺☻ 14:35, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

Thank you very much. Bawolff ☺☻ 00:34, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

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)

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

Another. --Pi zero (talk) 04:19, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

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)

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

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)

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)

Username change

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

No problem. Bawolff ☺☻ 22:39, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

We could just ask for bugzilla:23948 reversed. ;). Bawolff ☺☻ 20:40, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

I'm not even gonna get into the stupidity of that.. Maybe a separate group? --ShakataGaNai ^{^_^} 20:45, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

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)

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)

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)

OS done

You can haz OS. --ShakataGaNai ^{^_^} 02:48, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Whee. Bawolff ☺☻ 03:06, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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-talk • main talk} 07:25, 8 July 2010 (UTC)

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-talk • main talk} 07:49, 8 July 2010 (UTC)

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)

• 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)

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)

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)

• That would be a nomination I've seconded. So get your ass over there and accept! --Brian McNeil / ^talk 08:01, 10 July 2010 (UTC)

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)

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)

• I have to ask, how much easier would Peer Review be if it were done in php, and server side? --Brian McNeil / ^talk 05:59, 19 July 2010 (UTC)

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)

election certificate

${\color {Blue}{\mathfrak {Wikinews}}}:{\color {Sepia}The\;Free\;News\;Source}$

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)

Cool. Thanks. Bawolff ☺☻ 17:02, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

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)

WN:ML weirdness

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

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)

lol. Bawolff ☺☻ 22:08, 13 August 2010 (UTC)

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)

? Bawolff ☺☻ 22:29, 13 August 2010 (UTC)

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)

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)

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)

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)

• 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)

protection amusement

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

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)

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)

Generally its added as a separate template after the source template. {{source|whatever...}} {{se}} Bawolff ☺☻ 18:42, 21 August 2010 (UTC)

<nod> But it would be cooler if we folded that in as an optional {{source... parameter. - Amgine | ^t 15:58, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

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)

Thanks for mentioning it. Bawolff ☺☻ 18:57, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

Peter Coti

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

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)

Um. How about "Our equivalent of Wikipedia's Village pump"? :-) --Pi zero (talk) 18:54, 27 August 2010 (UTC)

yep, I wasn't here, thanks for responding for me. Cheers. Bawolff ☺☻ 16:42, 6 September 2010 (UTC)

WiktLookUp bug report

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

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)

Reviewer nom

Yep, go right ahead. Thanks, WackyWace^talk 16:57, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

<chuckle> That's not a hack! that's a feature... - Amgine | ^t 17:32, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

• For future reference, the appropriate phrase is, "it's not bug! It' a feature!" --Brian McNeil / ^talk 18:11, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

responded at ru. Bawolff ☺☻ 19:24, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

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)

Now we have ticker. Thank you!--Akishin D. (talk) 10:15, 16 October 2010 (UTC)

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

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

Curly braces

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

• 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)

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)

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)

OK, and thanks for your quick answer. --Immortal King (talk) 17:48, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

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)

Hey, basically want to try to modify MediaWiki:Gadget-UserMessages.js, for Wikiquote. -- Cirt (talk) 10:37, 16 October 2010 (UTC)

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)

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)

Done Bawolff ☺☻

Thank you!!! -- Cirt (talk) 20:22, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

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)

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

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

Howdy. Welcome back. Bawolff ☺☻ 11:14, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

Bawolff bot@fa.wikinews

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

thanks. Bawolff ☺☻ 00:04, 31 October 2010 (UTC)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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

note to self - fa people need opinion page js.

---^. Bawolff ☺☻ 04:08, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

Popular articles

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

Bawolff bot borken, blocked

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

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)

Popular articles template on fawikinews

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

• 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)

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)

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)

---

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

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)

Guyanese shadow finance minister Winston Murray dies aged 69

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)

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.). Gopher65_talk 02:19, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

I got a similar error, but with MakeLead... (thanks Gopher by the way!) Diego Grez ^{return fire} 02:26, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

I just got the same error with diego's article. Gopher65_talk 03:32, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

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)

bugzilla:26110. (I saw this on bugzilla, and thought, oh this is going to be fun). Bawolff ☺☻ 18:30, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

Devs say it should be fixed now. Bawolff ☺☻ 11:33, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

{{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, CasteloBranco^msg 10:08, 30 November 2010 (UTC)

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)

It works, now, Bawolff, thank you very much! Nice job =) CasteloBranco^msg 00:58, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

No problem. I should really write this all down on a page somewhere. Its a common question. Bawolff ☺☻ 02:52, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

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)

Empire Strikes Back director Irvin Kershner dies aged 87

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

ok. No error messages? Bawolff ☺☻ 18:24, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

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)

Also failed to sight: [17]. --Pi zero (talk) 19:59, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

Leaked cables cause Australian concern

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)

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. Gopher65_talk 16:19, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

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)

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. Gopher65_talk 02:59, 11 December 2010 (UTC)

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? Gopher65_talk 23:07, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

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)

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)

Well, at least it says collaboration now:). Thanks. Gopher65_talk 12:40, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

Merry Christmas!

May your family have
a joyous holiday season
and a new year blessed
with hope and happiness.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

The Ceremonies for Christmas Day (Robert Herrick) Kindle the Christmas brand, and then    Till sunset let it burn; Which quench'd, then lay it up again    Till Christmas next return. Part must be kept wherewith to teend    The Christmas log next year, And where 'tis safely kept, the fiend    Can do no mischief there.

If you don't celebrate Christmas ... Happy (belated) Hanukkah! Happy Eid al-Adha! Happy Kwanzaa! And of course, Happy Festivus! May this holiday season bring you the music of laughter, the warmth of friendship, and the steadying hand of love. ☃

—fetch·comms 22:55, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

EPR weirdness

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

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)

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)

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

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)

yes, he probably would. Bawolff ☺☻ 16:24, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

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)

Yeah, it needs to be restarted manually. Bawolff ☺☻ 11:40, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

Hey there, it would appear that Wikilink2 has gone down again. Regards, — μ 22:13, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

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)

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)

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)

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

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)

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)

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)

Sorry, can't at the moment. Bawolff ☺☻ 18:41, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

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)

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)

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)

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. Gopher65_talk 15:13, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

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)

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)

Template want

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

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)

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)

Appearently, {{W article}} which i just found out about. Bawolff ☺☻ 20:36, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

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)

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)

I was thinking perhaps simply changing the formatting of the links; for example Paula Radcliffe → Paula 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)

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)

(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)

Hmm, I just checked, the limit is actually 500. Well the idea is certainly do-able. Bawolff ☺☻ 21:37, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

mw:Manual:$wgExpensiveParserFunctionLimit says the default is 99. --Pi zero (talk) 20:34, 30 January 2011 (UTC)

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)

fix the document.write's in wikinews js

Bawolff ☺☻ 05:21, 1 February 2011 (UTC) Done

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

Bawolff ☺☻ 21:00, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

Talkback

Hello, Bawolff/archives/6. You have new messages at User_talk:BarkingFish#noindex_on_WC. You can remove this notice by removing {{replied}} from your talk page.

Hello, Bawolff/archives/6. You have new messages at User_talk:BarkingFish#noindex_on_WC. You can remove this notice by removing {{replied}} from your talk page.

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

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)

I don't actually maintain the Feedburner feed, but I'll look into it. Bawolff ☺☻ 22:38, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

caused by rev:76127. Bawolff ☺☻ 00:13, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

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)

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)

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

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)

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)

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)

• 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)

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)

• Will worry about that later. But, is there a wikicode way to tell if a page is reviewed? --Brian McNeil / ^talk 09:08, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

• I've moved this test/concept to {{Main stories}}. Can you help sort out some of the tech issues around CSS and so on? Would also value your input on workflow (which I'm just going to add to the talk). --Brian McNeil / ^talk 14:38, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

Baking cookies now

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

lol, I didn't think you were actually serious about that. Bawolff ☺☻ 23:21, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

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)

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)

Huh. Well, its been translated further down in that translation wiki revision. - Amgine | t 15:40, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

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)

Thanks

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

"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)

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)

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)

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)

Tamil wikinews