Wikinews:Water cooler/technical/archives/2025/August

Infoboxes making the default page image

This article I recently wrote has the wrong page image. The file it chooses is from the {{Culture and entertainment}} infobox, because it's the first image parsed. I could add |class=pageimage to the relevant image, but I think something needs to be done about the infobox suite on Wikinews to make all infoboxes have their images suppressed, though I'm not very familiar with the way templates are handled on enwn. Could someone please add the notpageimage class to all images in infoboxes? See mw:Extension:PageImages. SWinxy (talk) 02:51, 4 August 2025 (UTC)

Where are you seeing this?

NYC DOT Summer Streets team with Mariachi Band.jpg is specified for our Main Page and that is what is being displayed when I view it.

We want the infobox image to be the page image on the main page when there isn't an image provided in the article.Michael.C.Wright (^Talk/_Reviewer) 13:01, 4 August 2025 (UTC)

On Special:PageInfo. Mediawiki puts that image to be the opengraph image for social media links. SWinxy (talk) 14:54, 4 August 2025 (UTC)

I think your best course of action is to add the class to the image you want to be the page image. That should be an approved edit, even once (if?) the article gets archived.

Modifying extensions requires an admin and we have very few active admin at the moment. @Leaderboard and @Gryllida are two of the more recently active admins that I'm aware of.

We should also consider, before changing the extension, how we deal with articles that don't have an image added. In those cases, we'd want to use the image from the infobox I think.Michael.C.Wright (^Talk/_Reviewer) 16:01, 7 August 2025 (UTC)

Email server dysfunctional

The certificate for our email server expired on July 20, which has broken webmail access again. It may still be possible to access accounts by manually bypassing the expired certificate in some email clients, though that’s not recommended.

I reached out to @Gryllida about this on her talk page [1] and on IRC about two weeks ago. She's recently been active and mentioned she's online daily, so I’m hoping she might have insight or plans for renewal. If not, it may be worth discussing whether we want to continue using that platform, given the maintenance challenges.

I also vaguely recall someone mentioning that Wikimedia may offer email services and a backend wiki we could use instead, but I haven’t been able to track down where that was said. Does anyone else remember this or have more info?Michael.C.Wright (^Talk/_Reviewer) 15:45, 7 August 2025 (UTC)

@Leaderboard maybe you mentioned the backend wiki and email service?Michael.C.Wright (^Talk/_Reviewer) 15:46, 7 August 2025 (UTC)

I did, yes. It's possible to set it up if that's what the community wants. Leaderboard (talk) 16:13, 7 August 2025 (UTC)

Do you think it might be worth setting up a basic version of the wiki just to explore whether it could help with back-end coordination? It could be useful to kick the tires a bit and see what it might offer. Is that something you’d be interested in or able to help support?

I’m not sure what kind of maintenance or ongoing support it might need, so if you know of any good documentation or overview pages, I’d really appreciate a link.

Email might be a bit more complicated. If you have any resources that explain how Wikimedia-hosted email works (or how we might integrate our current domain), that would be helpful too. Some questions we’ll likely need to look into are: can we use our current domain, who has access to the domain records, and who manages or pays for certificates, etc.Michael.C.Wright (^Talk/_Reviewer) 20:20, 7 August 2025 (UTC)

Hi @Michael.C.Wright this is confusing to me..please provide steps to reproduce and text of error message? Gryllida 22:55, 7 August 2025 (UTC)

The certificate has expired. It expired on July 20th.Michael.C.Wright (^Talk/_Reviewer) 22:58, 7 August 2025 (UTC)

Michael.C.Wright (^Talk/_Reviewer) 23:12, 7 August 2025 (UTC)

Text of the error message was provided on your talk page.Michael.C.Wright (^Talk/_Reviewer) 23:00, 7 August 2025 (UTC)

Alas, i did not read my talk page nor all of email for a few weeks. I read irc, Meta (would rather not have to), Newsroom, ...; so if I did not reply about an urgent issue like it, please query me repeatedly at the rate of at least once a day.

I fixed webmail now, @Michael.C.Wright. I hope it works for you now. If it does not, please let me know. Gryllida 21:03, 8 August 2025 (UTC)

I contacted you on IRC, your talk page, and here. It’s not my role to follow up with daily messages. If you're responsible for maintaining and supporting the server, that includes staying on top of tasks like this. The expiration date was known in advance.

As a practical step, consider setting a calendar reminder for October 1 to renew the SSL certificate, which expires in November.Michael.C.Wright (^Talk/_Reviewer) 21:56, 8 August 2025 (UTC)

Well, each person is different. I am being in a challenging (mildly put it) environment and this is noted on my user page. Maybe it will be fixed one day but it is not fixed now. Something to keep in mind when leaving me urgent messages.

Ok, I put note to renew in October 1, thank you. Gryllida 23:42, 8 August 2025 (UTC)

(FyI "Gryllida was online today" does not mean "Gryllida caught up on all messages", i have been online every day for more than a decade but i was behind on messages somewhere more than 80% of the time.) Gryllida 22:56, 7 August 2025 (UTC)

Site notice links to archived thread.

The "Project proposal for 2025" links to a current thread that doesn't exist and is actually at Wikinews:Water cooler/proposals/archives/2025/May. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 04:04, 8 August 2025 (UTC)

I will have a look tonight thanks. I will delete the link entry. (Requires admin access to implement) Gryllida 05:19, 8 August 2025 (UTC)

Thanks @Koavf. I've updated the latest request at WN:AAA by removing that line.Michael.C.Wright (^Talk/_Reviewer) 13:55, 9 August 2025 (UTC)

URGENT - Request for your assistance - phab tag for Wikinews development

Hello,

Hi @George Ho @Wikiwide @BigKrow @Lofi Gurl @Back ache @Md Mobashir Hossain @Almondo2025, @Dsuke1998AEOS, @Ternera, @Monsieur2137 @Asked42, @Sheminghui.WU, @excelblue (if you want yourself removed or someone else added to this list, please inquire here) A revision has been requested. Here is a list of what to do. (If/when you intend to start working on it, please Subscribe to this section and to this talk page, and post reply messages here when you started and finished editing) See below:

Gryllida, RockerballAustralia, Michael.C.Wright, Bddpaux, JJLiu112

I opened a request at phab:T402150 to request the creation of a issue tracker group for any Wikinews related volunteer development. If you agree this would be a good idea (and I am hoping this would also provide an access to a shared calendar for collaboration), am requesting your assistance with two things:

1) Direct links to any code which was developed by volunteers and is being used at Wikinews. I made a list at the phab ticket but they require direct links to code and I cannot accommodate their request at present. Please assist.

2) Please subscribe to the phabricator ticket (button at right top of its page) and reply here on-wiki noting that this would be a good idea.

3) Ping a user who may be interested in this who was not yet pinged, in your reply on-wiki, to attract attention of them to this request.

cc @Asked42 @Leaderboard @Koavf

Thanks Gryllida 19:12, 18 August 2025 (UTC)

re #2: subscribed and it's perfectly reasonable to have a parent ticket to act as a monitor for all relevant bug/feature requests. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 20:05, 18 August 2025 (UTC)

For the records: It's not some parent ticket request but a project tag in Phabricator. AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 22:50, 18 August 2025 (UTC)

Hi @AKlapper (WMF)

This is correct

Presumably each wiki group should have such a tag? Or how else would a Wikipedia or Commons or Wiktionary or Wikitravel user know how to get involved with bug fixing? I believe this should include both mediawiki and extension bugs, as well as user-developed scripts and utilities. Gryllida 23:03, 18 August 2025 (UTC)

Just a heads up that our travel guide is Wikivoyage, not Wikitravel. Very minor issue, but I figured worth correcting. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 23:05, 18 August 2025 (UTC)

Yup thanks Gryllida 23:06, 18 August 2025 (UTC)

No, only if groups exist and actually want to use Phabricator. Spending time categorizing tasks in Phabricator that nobody will look at won't help anybody and is not a good use of anyone's time - see several previous discussions in Phabricator tickets about this. AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 23:18, 18 August 2025 (UTC)

It would presumably allow to have a board like this:

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/release-engineering-team/

This would be pretty helpful right? A lot more helpful than tracking ticket Gryllida 23:06, 18 August 2025 (UTC)

@Koavf that's what I'm after not a parent ticket ^^ Gryllida 23:08, 18 August 2025 (UTC)

Gotcha. Yes, there are groups and tags that apply to multiple tickets. I'm not a huge ticket maintenance guy, so I also get a bit confused by the language sometimes (see above). —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 23:10, 18 August 2025 (UTC)

Hello,

The project tag has been created

• https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/view/8111/

Everyone is welcome to

• join 🙂 and
• add any technical requests which were stuck on-wiki for a while and were not solved, including anything "I wish .. " kind of dreams.
• add subproject for each app/script/software or by group eg "authoring tool" or "reviewing tool" noting i lack access to make subprojects. I asked this to be fixed.
• cross post to other wikis -- your help is welcome

I hope this will help to make it possible to develop new software for Wikinews, and make it easier to use.

Many thanks. Gryllida 12:27, 19 August 2025 (UTC)

Links and their icons for sharing

Hello, I was just wondering if anyone will ever update them? There are very few of them, and the icons are years or over a decade old. Ksenom O (talk) 23:42, 22 August 2025 (UTC)

These icons appear via {{Social bookmarks}}, which is a protected template. Many years back, I requested a revision to it, which an admin made. In fact, there was a discussion about changing the icons started a couple of years ago, which has a consensus to update them. Since this issue is coming up again and has essentially been open for more than two years, I agree that it's time for an admin to actually make the change. Furthermore, there are a lot of protected edit requests open, so I'm going to ping several of the more active admins to see if any of them are willing to handle these requests. @Bawolff, Bddpaux, Gryllida, Leaderboard, Microchip08, RockerballAustralia, William S. Saturn:. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 04:48, 23 August 2025 (UTC)

i'm here, what exactly needs to be done? Gryllida 06:03, 26 August 2025 (UTC)

I think it was your proposal itself, which is that Template:Social bookmarks/sandbox can replace Template:Social bookmarks. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 11:38, 26 August 2025 (UTC)

@Justin (koavf) thanks for taking action. —Ksenom O (talk) 17:55, 30 August 2025 (UTC)