Talk:XTools

This page is a feedback forum for XTools. For reporting bugs, it's preferred that you use Phabricator.

If the issue is urgent and you're unable to use Phabricator, feel free to ping one of the active maintainers.

Whenever I go on Ergebnisse der Kommunalwahlen in Bremen und Bremerhaven - Authorship - XTools I get an error Message like this: "Error querying Wikiwho API: Revision ID (233996187) does not exist or is spam or deleted!" The ID number is the latest revision, which certainly exists, is not spam and wasn't deleted. Is there anything I can do to fix this? Do I simply have to wait? If this isn't the right place: where should I report it?

on the page statistic xtools give this notice on top of the page "Some information in the revision history has been removed from public view. As a result, some data may be inaccurate or misleading."

is this a warning? and how to get it fixed as some pages didn't have this notice

Yes, it is just a warning. There is no "fix" as it this is expected when suppression or revision deletion is used. I will add some info to the docs and have it link to it so that it's more clear. In most cases, you can still rely 100% on what XTools gives you, but especially for suppression, things can be really off. A prime example is xtools:articleinfo/ru.wikipedia.org/Вторжение России на Украину (с 2022). In this case all usernames were removed, so we show a more specific message. But even if just one username is removed, or one edit summary, or the content of one revision, the numbers XTools gives you could be off.

Pages Created for IP ranges won't be supported in XTools, unfortunately.

Is it possible to search for creations by a range of IP addresses? E.g. 2A01:4F8:C17:FA54:0:0:0:1/29

For the Pages Created tool, you can only use single IP addresses. I could fix this, but IPs and ranges will only continue to be a thing for about another year or so. See meta:IP Editing: Privacy Enhancement and Abuse Mitigation.

Thanks. Meantimes, it would still be useful to be able to see deleted contributions for a range. Helps us to decide what to block.

That is phab:T183457. My guess is this will probably never be implemented, as it doesn't make much sense to introduce a new table into MediaWiki that will only be used for the next year or so. We'd need to get clearance from the database administrators first, as well as set up replication, among other prep work. That alone will take months.

Sorry!

Hmm. That ticket is about Special:DeletedContributions. Given that that tool is only available to admins, and the current proposal is to continue to allow admins to access IP addresses, it doesn't seem like that ticket should go away.

The issue is all IP information will live solely in Extension:CheckUser. I think it's too early to say how the Anti-Harassment Tools team will handle the issue of ranges. That might be left to just CheckUsers, I'm not sure. But you're right, it would still be possible to introduce a new table in CheckUser, so the ticket is valid in that sense, just that it wouldn't be part of MediaWiki Core anymore.

One thing is certain, however: the CheckUser tables will NOT be replicated, so all IP information will not be available to XTools :(

Fixed

The new release of the Edit Counter (v.3.17.3 - r.5f375bd4) is not displaying the Namespace Totals pie chart and the Time Card. I'm using Firefox on a Win10 desktop, but I'm getting the same result with Edge. Clearing my browser cache & cookies hasn't helped.

Thanks for adding "Use local time" to the Time Card, it's just that I'm not seeing it!

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T335211

Thanks, I should have searched Phabricator first.

Sorry about that! I am completely baffled how this broke, as it must have been working when I implemented the "Use local time" feature! Upon closer investigation, the question is how it ever worked… but whatever, it's fixed now :)

3rd party installations are no longer supported

Hi, Please i need XTools on my wiki, although its not a Wikimedia wiki, but uses MediaWiki software

Hello! I'm afraid support for 3rd party wikis has long been dropped, as simply no one seemed to have interest in it. There is a possibility we will restore support, but it won't happen anytime soon. For now, you can try using an older version of XTools, I'm guessing around version 3.7.0 or earlier (see docs). Hope this helps.

@MusikAnimal:I hope using an older version doesn't make it outdated??

It is highly dependent on your version of MediaWiki, so maybe. If you're running the latest (1.35), and you only care about the Edit Counter (the most popular tool), using the latest XTools should probably still work. Just be sure to disable the other tools, or at least ones that won't work for 3rd parties such as the Authorship and Blame tools. If you run into any issues, let me know and I can try to help.

Yes the version of MediaWiki i'm using is the latest (1.35)

I'll keep you posted please. @MusikAnimal:

Hi,

The hope is the roll it out to all Miraheze wikis. We'd like it to not require DB access. Could you advise how we can set this up?

How untimely that, after all these years, it's right after we officially drop support for 3rd party wikis that you all start asking about it! =P We can revive support, but it will take a bit of work. Unfortunately the WMF system is very customized in such a way that providing configuration for other MediaWiki installations is complicated. But it can be done...

To answer your question, RhinosF1, there is no way for XTools to work without some sort of database access. A replica is fine (that's how it works for WMF), so long as XTools is able to talk to it.

If you want to try to get this to work, I recommend using 3.10.19 or earlier. Installation docs can be found on xtools.readthedocs.io.

Hi @MusikAnimal,

So far, our teams have been against database access because of the risks it poses and the complexity of replicas.

Would there be any consideration of allowing XTools to use the API?

Thanks.

No, it would be extremely inefficient if not impossible to provide the same functionality with only the API.

Wow

A tooltip and alt text has been added to the icons, and they've been updated to use the standard OOUI design.

"Is administrator?:" shows a X-like symbol. I am puzzled what it means. For US people it might say "no" but for europeans it could mean "yes" like crossing a selection box. Would you please replace it by something equally understandable by everyone like simply "yes" or "no"?

It is (or was) the standard positive / negative symbols used on Meta as well as here and many other wikis (see Template:Cross (Q7317837) and Template:Tick (Q6154014)), but it should be changed to the new OOUI icons such as with N. A red cross I thought was pretty obviously "no" across the globe, as opposed to a green check. German Wikipedia seems to have the system to some degree (see w:de:Vorlage:Häkchen). But, as requested, we can certainly also add "Yes" or "No" text.

The w:de:Vorlage:Häkchen is a page in German language but it is misleading. Its contents is taken from the US. I will add the problem on the talk-page there.

I can tell you that in real life, e.g. in companies in Germany the crossed box is used for selection (meaning yes) whereas leaving the box empty means no.

Another example in Voting: You cross the box to vote for someone and you leave it empty for others. At least in Germany it works like this:

Oh I understand! The usage of X as you describe is a thing other places too, including the US :) The next version of XTools will have a tooltip that says "yes" / "no". This should be released very soon, if not this week then next.

I should also mention this design in XTools came from German volunteer w:de:Benutzer:Hedonil, the former maintainer of XTools. But you having any bit of confusion is enough for us to clarify what the icons mean, so consider it done :)

Is there any way to view 200 contributions for specific wiki. ex: i want to view & download my first 200 contributions from english wikipedia.

What do you mean by download? To view contributions, just use the on-wiki Special:Contributions page, i.e. for your account on enwiki: . I'm not sure what you want to download, though.

@MusikAnimal "What do you mean by download?" As csv, txt file. "I'm not sure what you want to download, though." To submit for iabot job batch.

Okay, so you want just page titles? I wasn't sure if you meant the diffs, or timestamps, or what. Anyway I think using quarry: is your best bet. I've created quarry:query/72843 for you. Since you want it for IABot, I'm assuming you only want mainspace (article) pages. You can fork the query and change the username and database accordingly. Hope this helps.

user:MusikAnimal One simple query resolved my issue. Thank you.

Hi. Thank you for the great Authorship XTool. But it's currently available only in the de, en, es, eu, tr Wikipedias. How could it support other languages, please? Especially pt. Thank you.

Long-term we want to support all major Wikipedias, including Portuguese. However we first are being forced to bring the backend in-house to WMF infrastructure (it currently relies on an external service). The task for this is at phab:T288840 and you can follow it for updates. Only after that is resolved (hopefully sometime in the next few months), will we be able to consider adding more languages.

Hi ! This Authorship tool is a great complement to the XTools Page History when analyzing the relative impact of users on articles. However, the language list is an important limit to its use. Do you have a bit more visibility on when / how other languages will be added ? Is there any way we can help ? Thank you for your attention

I've looked at the page links API. I'm not sure how to interpret the values. For instance, when I look at the article w:Sandrine Rousseau, the API returns 30 external links (https://xtools.wmflabs.org/api/page/links/en.wikipedia.org/Sandrine%20 Rousseau). If I look at the article, I only find 8 external links. Is this value reliable and what is the good interpretation? More documentation on the interpretation of the results would be very useful.

It refers to external links anywhere content area of the article (not other places on the page such as the sidebar, etc.), as reported by the externallinks table in the database. This would include any external link, be it in maintenance templates, navboxes, etc. I believe it also counts any non-fully qualified link as external, i.e. interwiki links are probably counted as external, and even internal links if they are full URLs, such as the "expanding it" link in the stub template at the bottom of the page.

Using xtools pages created, I've created a tool which compute gender statistics about the list of articles created by a user. It's pure Javascript.

See here https://observablehq.com/@pac02/user-level-gender-statistics-for-wikipedia

It could be useful to add this information on https://xtools.wmflabs.org/pages in the future. PAC2 (talk) 20:00, 25 September 2021 (UTC)

What could that be useful for, and how would you calculate it?

All computations are here https://observablehq.com/@pac02/user-level-gender-statistics-for-wikipedia. The idea is :

• get the list of articles created
• get the value P21 on Wikidata using Wikidata API
• compute gender statistics