MediaWiki talk:Citethispage-content

sitesubtitle

"{{int:sitesubtitle}}" needs to be removed from this page since the page "MediaWiki:sitesubtitle" has been deleted. Nicole Sharp (talk) 00:10, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

@Nicole Sharp Thanks for raising this issue.

What I deleted at MediaWiki:sitesubtitle was an override, not the interface message itself. This is defined in mediawiki/core.git:/languages/i18n/en.json, which contains: "sitesubtitle": "".

Likewise, the usage of this message in MediaWiki:Citethispage-content is also part of the default interface message, not only in the override on mediawiki.org. It is defined at mediawiki/extensions/CiteThisPage.git:/i18n/en.json, which also contains:

Publisher: {{SITENAME}}, {{int:sitesubtitle}}.

What this means is that you found a bug in the software. While it is okay for the software to output an (optional) message sometimes, this becomes a problem when it does it as part of a sentence structure that doesn't work without it. Here, it leaves a strange comma and full-stop dangling.

I've proposed https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/902831 to fix this issue.

This will automatically propagate to mediawiki.org and most Wikipedia sites in a few weeks unless they have overridden "MediaWiki:Citethispage-content". Note that on mediawiki.org, "MediaWiki:Citethispage-content" does not exist as an override. What you see when visiting MediaWiki:Citethispage-content is transparently passed through from en.json. This is not intuitive, but can be inferred from the lack of a "View history" button. The "Edit" button there actually functions as a "Create" button that pre-fills the default content to then fork/alter. --Krinkle (talk) 02:51, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

• I don't think this is a bug per se. "MediaWiki:citethispage-content" typically has to be configured for each individual wiki after installation, since the default parameters don't always apply to every wiki. For example, a wiki that does not have a subtitle simply needs to delete the string ", {{int:sitesubtitle}}" from "MediaWiki:citethispage-content" and it should work fine. If you have editing privileges for this page, this should fix the problem with a simple wiki edit, without needing to change any of the extension source code. It's only a bug in the sense that new wikis are not configured with a subtitle by default, which has to be added manually after installation, or have the citation page edited to remove the subtitle string. Likewise, a wiki by a single author instead of multiple authors also needs to have the citation page edited for that.
• That being said, there are a lot of other problems with this extension, such as creating redlinks for citation styles (which should link to the Wikipedia pages for each citation style instead). I would recommend fixing that as well if you can edit this page. See "https://www.nicolesharp.net/wiki/MediaWiki:citethispage-content" [1] for an example with copylefted source code that you can transwiki to MediaWiki.org.
• The other major change I made is adding the "<cite>" element to the site title. Using italics for titles is semantically incorrect for HTML 5.
• There is also a comma missing from the string "somewhere in the preamble), which tends to give" [comma added after parenthesis].
• Nicole Sharp (talk) 03:15, 25 March 2023 (UTC)

because ideas want to be free

MediaWiki: Because Ideas Want to Be Free

Just some food for thought, but I miss the old MediaWiki motto, "because ideas want to be free". It might be nice to add that back as a subtitle: "MediaWiki.org, Because Ideas Want to Be Free". Nicole Sharp (talk)