Topic on Help talk:Lint errors/self-closed-tag

Hi,

Here's another that I'm failing to find, at he:Reaper.

The W3C validator trick doesn't help (or I'm using it incorrectly).

@SSastry (WMF)

Hmm .. Parsoid is, for some reason, pointing to the wrong substring. It looks like the wikitext that is generating it is this:

<ref>{{Citation|last=ABC News|title=Sia Performs 'Reaper' Live on 'GMA'|date=2016-01-29|url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMhLZjmC7Ao|accessdate=2017-10-08}}</ref>

That wikitext seems to be generating this fragment in its output. <span dir="auto">Sia Performs 'Reaper' Live on 'GMA'<span /></span>

Thanks!

That template seems use CS1, so pinging @Trappist the monk. If citation system adds a span tag to anything, then he'll know about it.

Not my fault.

he.wiki is using an older (don't know how much older) version of Module:Citation/CS1. Editors at he.wiki have substantially modified what they copied from en.wiki. The <span dir="auto"> ... </span> is not from en.wiki and is located at https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/Module:Citation/CS1 line 204.

I think that the fix is at lines 1047 and 1048. To prevent a leading or trailing single quote from converting the italic ('') markup into bold markup ('''), the older modules inserted a self-closed <span />. Because of html 5, that changed at en.wiki to <span></span>

@IKhitron, it looks like you edited the module last. Can you take a look at the lines that Trappist the monk identified as the likely source of the problem?

Hello all.

Yes, this is the problem, thanks a lot.

The module is very old indeed. It was imported a long time ago by User:Kotz. I took it from his hands and made a lot of changes to make it support Hebrew. User:Eranroz changed the metadata messages to be in Hebrew. There are also some changes to make it fit our grammatic rules - for example, we do not allow Hebrew text to be italic. As a result of all this, it became impossible to copy new versions from English module when it updates, because all the job of days or weeks should be done again for each update. We have no human resources for this, so we prefer to use the very old version - it's still wonderful and helps us very much.

So, when Linter started to show this problem, I just changed italic arguments from wiki markup to html tags, hoping one day we'll know how to fix the problem, about 30 times. Now, thanks to you, we can run a bot or AWB to remove all these fixes.

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T121470

So we need global templates to truly solve this problem.