Topic on Talk:XTools

Fix has been deployed

As User:Minderbinder already reported earlier on this page, the German Wikipedia community held a vote on the question whether the WikiWho tool in XTools should be linked from each article, in order to make article authorship prominently visible to readers. The vote ended five days ago, and the link was subsequently added to the desktop UI page footer via de:MediaWiki:Wikimedia-copyright. Pretty much directly after the link was added, the tool started to fail showing authorship data; instead, it displays an error message Error querying Wikiwho API: Unknown for most of the requests.

There are several users on German Wikipedia complaining about this problem, and there is some speculation that there may be simply too many requests so that a request quota to the WikiWho server might be exceeded most of the time.

Can you please give some insight into the problem? What can be done to fix this situation?

(I have no idea whether someone else has already contacted you; if that is the case, please link to related discussions.)

Hello, to add from my observations: It seems "Authorship" has always problems at daytime (in Germany), while it starts to work in the evening/night. So it does not seem to be broken completely, but every day temporarily. I would also be pleased, if someone could give insights or maybe even has a solution to the problem. Thanks!

According to api.wikiwho.net (not linked due to spam filter) there are API limits in place:

"Currently, there is a limit of 2000 requests/day for unregistered users, and also a 60 requests/minute limit for all users."

It is possible that we are now running into either one of those.

Hey, sorry for the late reply. I think your assessments are probably right... regardless I will contact the WikiWho maintainers and get this sorted out. I am pretty sure they support this initiative. I am on holiday right now so I may not get to back to you for at least a few more days. As far as I can tell XTools is not suffering in any way, so it's up to you if you want to disable the link in the meantime. Apologies for the disruption!

If necessary, it seems that running the code on wmflabs may be possible as well: https://github.com/wikiwho/WikiWho

Thank you MusikAnimal for looking into this topic. I am sure after living so long without the credits of the authors, de-wp can live some days longer without a working tool. So first enjoy your holiday. But XTools is affected too: When the api is not working, then the section "authorship" in the XTools is empty too (and the Top-Editors are not a surrogate, because they don't deliver useful metrics about authorship). It would be great, if the API limits could be deactivated or maybe even as suggested the tool could be transfered under our own responsibility. Greetings.

This should be fixed now! \o/ Apologies for the long wait. All the best,