Project:Current issues

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@Kaldari: uploaded a new version of File:Wiki.png today. I don't like it. In fact, I thought it was vandalism at first. Can we get this reverted?

I like the idea of using special logos for special milestones and/or events and so on, but maybe it should be discussed first.

Discussion, it's not directly related to Extension:SemanticMustacheFormat, but just in case I "rescued" it.

It would be OK if it was explained somewhere... Most folks won't get such tech-jokes and therefore mistake them for vandalism or at least for a bad joke.

And this logo was used on https://www.wikimedia.org too until a few minutes ago ... I'm also not completely against changing logos for special occassions but there is no explanation about why it was changed.. I've checked various places but I still can't find anything about this.

Hmm, https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/181708 Okk but can we really have an explanation somewhere; maybe the logo's link could be changed..

Thanks, it has been reverted now. Apparently, people came over to #mediawiki wondering whether the site was hacked.. Unfortunately, as Patrick said above, most users won't get such jokes. :/

A good suggestion for improvement has developed from the deletion discussion of a template: At least in my reading there are several users who find it helpful to provide extension pages with an additional "used by" template.

What's this about? Similar to the already existing WMF template "OnWikimedia" the goal is to give extension pages a marker that this extension is also used in bundles, distributions, maybe even in larger websites or wiki farms. This way visitors of the page will see an information that the extension is "mission critical" or "best breed" in certain contexts. Especially since there is no real other way to know which extensions are widely used and which are not. This would hopefully also help us all to better understand which extensions need to be considered when technological structures change or which extensions need continuous maintainers. And, of course, in general, it is also positive feedback for the developers.

The deletion discussion made clear that such a template must be designed in a way that it does not promote a single project, but leaves room for as many projects as possible to be displayed in the template. And it could or should of course tend to bring together non-Wikimedia projects and Wikimedia projects, point to these projects, but must not overload the screen. It must also be clearly recognizable (in the documentation) that the template can be removed from the corresponding page at any time if the maintainer does not want the template there.

I have here a link for a first suggestion with three variants how this could look like, to give a visual impression of what we are talking about. First you see a variant with icons, a variant with text only and a variant with logo and text.

Now I would be interested in a first feedback, whether this intiative should be pursued at all and what advice and concerns there are about it. Then there is the question of whether the decision-making process should go through an RfC or whether we can already clarify this here, because everyone is for or against it anyway. I am looking forward to your opinions and help in order to move the issue forward in a timely manner.

> there is no real other way to know which extensions are widely used and which are not

That's not true. There's a "Check usage and version matrix" link in the extension infobox that tells you exactly that, and you can also look in which MediaWiki versions are being used.

If we're including such bundles or wiki farms, I guess we should also come with a policy about which bundles or wiki farms are considered relevant enough to grant them appearing on that template.

I like the idea of somehow providing a meaningful indicator of extension quality and support. Currently extension "status" is just up to the editor of the Extension page.

Also (a related tangential topic), the installer links to Category:Extensions by category - which has no filter capability (on quality or any other basis) and was first generated in 2007. The installer should be updated to direct users to a more meaningful directory of Extensions (and it would be nice if it had search / filtering capabilities).

@Ciencia Al Poder - I had seen that "Check usage and version matrix" link a thousand times but never thought to click on it! (Maybe because it's a boring name for a link.) I was surprised to see that it links to WikiApiary. It's certainly a useful link, and I'm glad it exists, but I think a "Used by" template would still be useful as a way to see additional information about usage.

The policy question is an interesting one, though. Even if there is a policy in place, the "Used by" template could still get overwhelmed by names (at least for certain extensions), if various consulting companies and/or hosting providers start to see this template as a way to advertise their services. If there's no policy, it could be worse - although then again, I can't imagine what such a policy would be. What could a consulting company provide to prove that they are legitimate, or large enough - a bank statement?

Any thoughts on this?

Thanks again for the reference to the link to WikiApiary. It is true that it gives you a first estimation about the distribution of extensions. But only via wikis that are accessible via the web. But not about systems that live behind firewalls. That's what I meant when I wrote that we only have limited possibilities so far. The extension bundles for public wikis and internal wikis are very different. And we have a view that takes both worlds into account.

@RichardHeigl - what do you think about the danger of this template getting overloaded? Perhaps it's not that big a fear; I don't know. One option is to have the template "collapse" if it has more than some number of values, like 20 values - if it does, it can say something like "This extension is used in many bundles and wiki farms; click here to see the full list."

As for the mockups you created - I think I prefer the 2nd one, which is just a list of text terms. The 1st one, with the logos, is nicer-looking, but it can be unclear: first because most people won't recognize the logos, and second because a single logo might not communicate enough. What if a company produces more than one bundle? (Hallo Welt might be in that situation, actually.) If you want to clarify which bundle(s) this extension is part of, that would be difficult to accomplish with just a logo.

The 3rd option I don't understand. What does "as needed" mean, and what would the other options be?

WikiApiary gives you an unsorted list of random wikis, I don't think it's sensible to expect people to glean any useful information from that. Although the same can be true for "used by" templates - the extension is part of MyMediaWikiBundle, so what? Does that imply some level of support? Does it imply some level of testing? Does it mean someone evaluated it? How long ago, against what criteria? UsedByWikimedia is not super helpful but at least tries to characterize what can be inferred from the presence of the template.

@Yaron_Koren: A good developer's question: What happens when there are a large number of entries? It can be done the way you suggest: So open a complete list at the push of a button. But at the moment I think this is still a luxury problem. And I also don't see the template as an instrument that should represent "completeness". I would be glad if five / six projects would voluntarily start to enrich extension entries with this additional information. "As needed" is only a placeholder for more entries.

Which brings me to the objection of @Tgr. What does it mean that an extension is part of a bundle or a project? For me it is the statement that the function is operational and its basic function is tested ("runs for me"), that its functionality is at least probably, if not guaranteed with other extensions and that through these projects people can be found who can remove incompatibilities, contribute patches or function extensions if necessary.

This has pretty much the same function for me as the hint that extension XY runs on Wikipedia. That means for me: It is tested and maybe even maintained there.

But there are many extensions that Wikipedia does not use or that only work on Wikimedia servers. In this respect, I see the added value of such a template in the possibility of being able to research whether an extension is also used in others and in which contexts. Unfortunately, Mediawiki.org does not offer any further possibilities to store and evaluate corresponding metadata.

Actually the problem is, I can see that, that the entries have to be kept up-to-date. That would be a showstopper.

Rereading Tgr's post again: Do I understand you correctly that such a template like the Wikimedia template should include a hint, which is implied? e.g. "This probably means that the extension is stable and works well enough to be used in <context>".

• A template mentioning multiple "used by" entries should show those entries in random order.
• I see the risk (as with any other human maintained list) that over time a lot of orphaned entries will render the list useless.

@Planentenxin: I disagree - I think the list should always be in alphabetical order, to make it easier to see if some specific company/package/farm supports this extension. If "Acme Consulting", or whoever it is, benefits by always being first, so be it - I don't think being first is that important.

I also have to disagree with, I guess, both Planetenxin and RichardHeigl that out-of-date entries would ruin this whole feature. There's a lot that's out of date on mediawiki.org in general, but that doesn't make the site useless. People who use "Used by" to find a package to download, a wiki farm to use, etc. will quickly discover if they were given bad information. And of course, it's a wiki, so it's easy to update things.

But I'm curious now about the fact that the proposer of this idea, RichardHeigl, now thinks that there's a big flaw in the plan. Does that mean that this idea is dead?

Hello, Yaron. The idea isn't dead and I don't think it has a fundamental flaw. We now have a number of good suggestions and advice, so I would make a revised draft (I think until next week). I personally prefer a text/picture version with notes and documentation as requested above. But these are then design issues.

The only problem I find so far is that I don't know how we should or can introduce this. It doesn't make much sense if we now put the new template on extension pages. That would then lead to further discussions. We would need the approval or commitment of some stakeholders in this process. So do we have to do an RfC after all? What is the best way forward here?

Okay, great. I'm looking forward to seeing the demo! After that, yes, an RfC might make sense.

@Yaron: position matters, see Serial-position effect. So the only fair way would be a changing random order.

I know that position matters (that's why there are so many companies in the English-speaking world named "Ace, "Acme" or "AAA", not to mention "Zenith"), but I think the benefits of having a consistent alphabetical order outweigh the drawbacks.

Reminder: This new template is all about making projects visible and bringing people together. And I'm largely there with all the proposals. To be honest, I don't like the random order, and not because I care that BlueSpice comes before Fandom. I really don't care about that at all. We can also put BlueSpice somewhere in the middle. But there should be a consistent, easy to follow order that doesn't produce arguments and long discussions. Except alphabetical order I can't think of anything else. Is random distribution technically possible? Relevance criteria are completely out of scope, that's causing a lot of trouble. But as I said, the order is not that important to me. I consider that at the moment a secondary topic. Let us focus on the main challenges. One of them: Who will actively support this template?

And I also think that it can be designed in such a way that nobody feels cut off here, especially because I assume that only a small number of projects will be shown, at least for the foreseeable future, because the main effort is to enter them and that has to be done first. This will surely remain rather clear at the beginning. The luxury problem of too many entries I would like to have first.

As I said, I hope that next week I will be able to deliver another draft and then we will see if the existing reservations can be removed. Personally, I would like to see a variant that offers colored pictures/logos and text. This makes recognition much easier and projects do not disappear in a text landscape. But let us see.

And then we will hopefully create a small contribution through which the sub-projects will become more integrated and refer more to each other. In no other community this seems to me to be as difficult as with MediaWiki. But we should overcome this quickly if MediaWiki is not to disappear outside of Wikimedia.

Well, no need to be dramatic. :) But I'm looking forward to the next drafts.

done; ok so no function behind for amelioration of further translations.

Hi all, when I translate Mediawiki pages into FR, sometimes in the suggestion frame, an Apertium proposal appears. I rarely use that because it is often far from the usual use and make me smile although I recognize it holds the idea of the text.

To make things in an intelligent way I wonder if it is not worth clicking on this text to bring it back in the main frame and then correct/adapt it. Is there a learning process behind that ? I mean receiving the translated text and returning it corrected can feed a function of amelioration for further translations.

...or is that only a one way mechanism ? and in this case it is worth to translate directly on the flow without referring to the suggestion.

Thanks.

Christian 🇫🇷 FR (talk) 10:33, 30 July 2020 (UTC)

I don’t think it would send back any data to Apertium, but Nikerabbit should know it better.

Apertium developers can use Content Translation dumps. We do not track or store the machine translation output in Translate which makes it impossible to produce similar dumps. One reason behind poor quality Apertium translations is that Translate is configured to allow to do translation through an intermediate language.

Change the top-right area of [[Wikipedia:User pages|user pages]] or articles to the top-right area of a page; Top icons are in fact used on pages that are not user pages or "articles" (does that last term even mean anything on MediaWiki.org?)

I think "articles" on mediawiki.org would be documentation pages of the software. Changed the wording accordingly.

Trying to create a page for Founder of One Stage but not able publish. It says new user.

MediaWiki.org is not Wikipedia to create articles. Even on Wikipedia, the subject must meet the notability criteria for biographies.

Thanks for the information. The person is Vice President (MH) of Human Rights Council of India and Journalist.

How can I progress on that?

You need to cite enough secondary reliable sources (minimum three that discuss the subject in great detail, not passing mentions) to prove that a subject is notable. Anyway this isn't the forum to discuss this. You might want to ask your question on English Wikipedia TeaHouse. If you prefer a live conversation, join w:en:WP:DISCORD to chat with me live.

Thank You for the help & knowledge

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T258756

Can we mark module documentation pages (Module:*/doc) for translation? (They have never been marked.)

Sophivorus wants to prepare Module:Transcluder/doc for translation.

Page names will be inconsistent with template documentation pages:

	source page	translation pages
Template documentation (without Translate)	Template:(name)/doc	Template:(name)/(language)/doc
Template documentation (with Translate)	Template:(name)	Template:(name)/(language)
Module documentation	Module:(name)/doc	Module:(name)/doc/(language)

I don't see why module documentation pages shouldn't be translatable.

So, can we give it a try?

My only other comment is that they have to be treated as templates (given the #switch:<translate></translate> wrapper), because they are implicitly transcluded by the module they are documenting.

Hi! I just did another attempt to mark the module documentation for translation. Unlike my first attempts, I think I did quite a detailed markup this time. However, I couldn't quite understand the #switch:<translate></translate> wrapper and I couldn't find documentation about it either, so I would really appreciate if someone more familiar with it could tweak my markup to comply with that, or give me some hint so I can do it myself. Thanks!!!

See Module:Transcluder. There are many <translate> tags.

Hence my previous comment about treating it as a template, doing something like Special:Diff/3976778 (see the edit summary of that edit, I'm aware that Module:Transcluder is currently erroring with a template loop).

Unable to create Module:Transcluder/doc/ja by translating.

And FuzzyBot failed to create Module:Transcluder/doc/en as well. I think you've run into a software bug that should be reported on phabricator.

You might be able to work around the problem (if my hunch as to what caused it is correct) by unmarking the page for translation, creating Module:Transcluder/doc/en and Module:Transcluder/doc/ja with the wikitext content model using Special:ChangeContentModel, and then marking the page for translation again (but of course that dance will need to be repeated the first time the page is translated into a new language, which kind of defeats the point)

Maybe we can move the documentation to Help:Module:Transcluder and then transclude it at Module:Transcluder/doc using: {{#invoke:Template translation|renderTranslatedTemplate|template=Help:Module:Transcluder|noshift=1|uselang={{int:lang}}}}? Thanks for all the help and sorry for the trouble!

In any case, Shirayuki did my dance and made things work.

Thanks guys! I just did a full translation of the documentation to Spanish and also a minor tweak to the source text. This may help to fully test the translation process.

Making a change to the source text appears to have worked. Translating the page into a Spanish seems to have run into the same problem as the initial marking for translation and Shirayuki's translation into Japanese: Module:Transcluder/doc/es needs to be created manually by an admin doing the dance I described a few comments ago.

Awesome, thanks! I'm a bit concerned that the dance may slow the translation process, so I went ahead and created Module:Test to try out the strategy I outlined above. Module:Template translation wouldn't transclude the languages header, so I added Template:Languages to compensate. Other than that, I think this approach is simpler and more reliable, unless I'm missing something. What do you think? (If you agree, could you move Module:Transcluder/doc and subpages to Help:Module:Transcluder?) Cheers!

Be careful of moving things to the help namespace, due to Project:PD help. Otherwise, I like neither the current situation nor your proposed solution, but of course one of them will have to do.

I agree neither is perfect, but I think I prefer using Help:Module:Transcluder to avoid issues like this one that are bound to happen again and again. Noted Project:PD help, but I think for now moving to Help namespace should be fine since so many extensions have their user documentation under a similar format (like Help:Extension:Translate). That being said, I cannot move the module documentation myself since I need to be a translator admin to do so. What do you think, Shirayuki? If you agree, would you do the move? Thanks!

I was also concerned for FR page => Topic:Vqozv56evmbmp9ra

Christian 🇫🇷 FR (talk) 10:06, 24 July 2020 (UTC)

I am running a survey to find out how MediaWiki can be improved for the typical non-Wikimedia user. The survey was reviewed by several MWStake folks, who are also sharing it on their own platforms. Having a banner here on MediaWiki.org would be fantastic.

You can read more about the surveys on my company blog at https://professional.wiki/en/news/mediawiki-survey. Note that the surveys themselves are not branded in any way.

I'd like to run a banner that links to the surveys for a few days starting later this week and am posting here as a request for permission.

-- Jeroen De Dauw (talk) 08:43, 24 April 2020 (UTC)

(Repost of https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_talk:Sitenotice#MediaWiki_survey)

This seems like a reasonable idea to me; do others agree?

I think this is fine. In my volunteer capacity I helped run a similar survey in 2015 regarding MediaWiki and would find it interesting to have updated information.

It took a while but I just added a request to participate in the survey to the site notice. Thanks again for accepting it.

There is no information who is requesting my participation, and the link in that banner just sent me to a third-party website without any warning (or link to a privacy policy before I clicked that link). :-/

Uh, yeah, I just disabled the sitenotice. There's no warning that you're going to Google before clicking the link, nor any information about who is conducting the survey, who the data will be shared with, how long it will be kept, what results will be made available, etc.

I suggest creating a wiki page with all of that information and a prominent link to the survey, then we have the site notice link to that wiki page so people are informed before they end up at Google.

Category:Survey privacy statements has plenty of examples of what kind of information should be disclosed to people before they take a survey.

Also to be clear, I have no objection to promoting the survey in the sitenotice, just want to make sure we're respecting everyone's privacy and being upfront/transparent about what's happening.

Thanks for the feedback. Probably it is better to send people to a landing page on this wiki which contains the relevant links instead of adding three links to the banner. I am sorry for the issues this approach had.

2015 MediaWiki User Survey might be a past example to expand on.

Sean Hancock (born 29 May 1977) is a American professional arm wrestler. He is a five-time international champion arm wrestler and is a former champion triathlete. Hancock is sponsored by Mazurenko arm wrestling equipment and Frog Fuel liquid protein supplements.

MediaWiki is not Wikipedia to create articles.

Reference added.

Is it possible to move the page Extension:BlueSpiceQrCode to the archived page Extension:QrCode since most users might look for a current extension there?

I added a reference to the BlueSpice extension there. As pages in extension namespace should mirror the extension's internal name, the extension page itself should not be moved.

Hello,

I am creating a page same as my username. But, was unable to do. My content is shown below. Please tell me how to add this contsnt to wikipedia?

<Edit: spam removed>

Please post your content elsewhere. This is offtopic on mediawiki.org