Commons:Village pump/Technical

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Welcome to the Village pump technical section

Technical discussion

Village pump/Technical

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This page is used for technical questions relating to the tools, gadgets, or other technical issues about Commons; it is distinguished from the main Village pump, which handles community-wide discussion of all kinds. The page may also be used to advertise significant discussions taking place elsewhere, such as on the talk page of a Commons policy. Recent sections with no replies for 30 days and sections tagged with {{Section resolved|1=--~~~~}} may be archived; for old discussions, see the archives; recent archives: /Archive/2025/01 /Archive/2025/02.

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Sorting audio files by duration

I'd like to sort audio files not by recency or relevance but by duration (maybe filesize would also work as a proxy for that). Is that possible somehow? I'd like to use it in a category of spoken Wikipedia audios for example to be able to choose between a very long or a shorter audio. It would probably be useful also for many other kinds of applications. Prototyperspective (talk) 16:39, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

Image duration is not an indexed field in the database I believe. It's only in the db's metadata structure of a file's record, which makes it difficult to query over a collection of files. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:42, 6 December 2024 (UTC)

I figured maybe it was in the searchindex, but I think it isn't in those indexes either. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:47, 6 December 2024 (UTC)

But you can sort by filesize from quarry: https://quarry.wmcloud.org/query/88499 —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:49, 6 December 2024 (UTC)

Thanks, that's helpful. However, that's just the filesize, not the duration and I'm looking for something that can be used in the UI (integrated into MediaSearch or SpecialSearch). Strange if it's not in the database since on the file page there is a field "Dimensions" which shows both the file-size and the duration (except for files with this bug). Prototyperspective (talk) 11:11, 6 December 2024 (UTC)

The file page is just one page, it can descend into the metadata relatively cheaply. Sorting is a 140+ million row operation and for that we need to pre-extract the information and put it into a separate column of the database and keep an index. We do this for width, height and file size, but not for duration. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:54, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

An extra column for duration like for media width would be very useful then. It would also enable finding & fixing more of the files that display a duration of 0 (and by now I also found a mp3 and an ogg file with that). Prototyperspective (talk) 16:07, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

And this is where it becomes difficult. Adding a column that for 95% of the files would be empty (because they are NOT audio/video files), is really wasteful for the database. I would ask you to make a Phabricator feature request. And then people can figure out there how to do this. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:32, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

Template:Q+/doc on Wikispecies

I imported {{Q+}} and Template:Q+/doc from this project into Wikispecies, but the latter is behaving very oddly, and the former not working as expected, and I cannot figure out why. Wikispecies is a small project with few technical editors; can someone assist there, please? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:07, 19 December 2024 (UTC)

Can anyone assist, please? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 11:18, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

Open files uploaded by a user all in new tabs

How to open x recent files uploaded by a given user in new tabs at once? It takes very long to click all of them. Alternatively, a way to replace a category based on the file title would be great as well but it probably doesn't work as well. Here's what I intend to do:

going through the recent uploads of Florin Talasman to replace category "Agricultural products" with whatever product the map is about which varies per file (e.g. kiwis).

For example, maybe it's possible to output files uploaded by a user with Wikimedia Commons Query Service in a column with the URLs, then select all those URLs (maybe copy pasting it somewhere) and drag them into the Firefox tabs to open them all in new tabs. That didn't work because I could only query for files created by the user but not files uploaded by that user (see also Make it possible to search by page author /contributor/ uploader).

I think this is generally useful, not just for this particular example case. Prototyperspective (talk) 22:58, 28 December 2024 (UTC)

If you have all the links (e.g. from Special:Log/upload), you can use an extension like Linkclump or [1] to open them all in new tabs. —‍Mdaniels5757 (talk • contribs) 23:11, 28 December 2024 (UTC)

I can just drag and drop the URLs once I have them all marked to open them all in new tabs in Firefox. The problem is in getting the plain URLs. Prototyperspective (talk) 23:17, 28 December 2024 (UTC)

for(const d of document.querySelectorAll('.TablePager_col_img_name a:nth-child(1)')) console.log(d.href);

output https://litter.catbox.moe/2we6sw.txt 999real (talk) 15:19, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

Is this javascript to be used in the Web console of the recent uploads page (Special:ListFiles) or where? Prototyperspective (talk) 16:49, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

Yes in console on Special:ListFiles pages

This one you can save as a bookmark and it will write to clipboard directly

javascript:(function() { navigator.clipboard.writeText(Array.from(document.querySelectorAll('.TablePager_col_img_name a:nth-child(1)')).map(link => link.href).join('\n')) })(); 999real (talk) 22:42, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

Thank you! That's very helpful and I guess solves this issue. It should probably be in some relevant Help page so people looking for this functionality can find it. I think one can't filter files to only copy files that are videos of a specified resolution that way (which would be a workaround to solve phab:T377606) so a way to search files uploaded by a given user would still be useful. Prototyperspective (talk) 22:47, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

I tried write one but Special:ListFiles does not show the resolution directly, this is very slow because it has to load video metadata to fetch the width and height

(function() {
	function getVideoDimensions(videoUrl) {
		return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
			const videoElement = document.createElement('video');
			videoElement.src = videoUrl;
			videoElement.addEventListener('loadedmetadata', () => {
				const width = videoElement.videoWidth;
				const height = videoElement.videoHeight;
				resolve({ width, height });
			});
			videoElement.addEventListener('error', (e) => {
				reject(`Error loading video: ${e.message}`);
			});
			videoElement.load();
		});
	}
	const uploads = document.querySelectorAll('.TablePager_col_img_name a:nth-child(2)');
	const toCopy = [];
	const promises = [];
	for (const d of uploads) {
		const url = d.href;
		if (url.endsWith('.mpg') || url.endsWith('.mpeg') || url.endsWith('.ogv') || url.endsWith('.webm')) {
			const promise = getVideoDimensions(url).then(dimensions => {
				const minimumWidth = 1000;
				const minimumHeight = 720;
				if ((dimensions.width < minimumWidth) || (dimensions.height < minimumHeight)) {
					toCopy.push(url);
				}
			}).catch(error => {	
				console.error(error);
			});
			promises.push(promise);
		}
	}
	Promise.all(promises).then(() => {
		if (toCopy.length === 0) {
			alert('Nothing to copy');
		} else {
			navigator.clipboard.writeText(toCopy.join('\n')).then(() => {
				alert('Copied ' + toCopy.length + ' items');
			}).catch(err => {
				console.error('Failed to copy: ', err);
			});
		}
	});
})();

Then I found VisualFileChange interface actually shows video dimensions, this is much faster

(function() {
	const toCopy = [];
	const titles = document.getElementsByClassName('jFileTitle');
	const dimensions = document.getElementsByClassName('jFileSize');
	
	const minimumWidth = 1000;
	const minimumHeight = 1000; 
	
	for (let i = 0; i < titles.length; i++) {
		const url = titles[i].href;
		if (url.endsWith('.mpg') || url.endsWith('.mpeg') || url.endsWith('.ogv') || url.endsWith('.webm')) {
			const ds = dimensions[i].textContent.replace(/^.*KiB/, '').replace('px', '');
			const width = ds.replace(/^.* x /, '');
			const height = ds.replace(/^ x .*/, '');
			if((minimumHeight > parseInt(height.replaceAll(' ', ''))) || (minimumWidth > parseInt(width.replaceAll(' ', '')))) toCopy.push(url);
		}
	}
	if (toCopy.length === 0) {
		alert('No videos with width below ' + minimumWidth + ' or height below ' + minimumHeight + ' found on this page');
	} else {
		navigator.clipboard.writeText(toCopy.join('\n')).then(() => {
			alert('Copied ' + toCopy.length + ' items');
		}).catch(err => {
			console.error('Failed to copy: ', err);
		});
	}
})();

999real (talk) 00:09, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

@Prototyperspective for this specific case, since what you want can be extracted from the title, you could use com:vfc to batch replace "Category:Agricultural products" with "Category:{{subst:#invoke:String|sub|s={{subst:PAGENAME}}|j=-22}}s", and then fix any possible errors. RoyZuo (talk) 08:30, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

Thanks so much! I'll spend some time trying to use this to fix videos at a later point. I linked it here. I haven't uploaded so much that this wouldn't solve the problem for me but it's not ideal to have to go through each page manually; maybe at some point this could be a Web UI tool on toolforge where one enters a username and then something to search for where this js is then used to find all the results. The earlier script / the txt also work as intended; already added some categories to filepages opened using that and will get to completing that later. Prototyperspective (talk) 17:28, 16 January 2025 (UTC)

Issue with restored DjVu files

Hi, Restored DjVu files do not work, i.e. File:Rothschild Extinct Birds.djvu and first versions of File:Jameson - Montesquieu et l’esclavage.djvu. Any idea? Yann (talk) 17:42, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

here also. Yann (talk) 18:34, 1 January 2025 (UTC)

The Rothschild file may just be broken. The other two display fine for me. DjVu files get a thumbnail from ddjvu, which is available for linux, which then sends a PPM file to imagemagick that generates the resulting thumbnail. Either one of those programs failed to read the file. Snævar (talk) 00:15, 5 January 2025 (UTC)

Twinkle

Hello, I’ve noticed that some files have been created solely for advertising purposes. When I used Twinkle to request speedy deletion under criterion G10, the tool displayed the message: "Tagging page: The edit was disallowed by the edit filter: 'Protect page section headings'." I’m unsure what this means, and in this case, the tool wasn’t able to apply the speedy deletion template. I would greatly appreciate it if you could help clarify this for me. Thank you so much, and have a nice day! P. ĐĂNG (talk) 07:43, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

You tried to replace the hole page content with the speedy deletion template. All deletion templates have to be added at the first line of the page content and the content must not be removed. GPSLeo (talk) 10:15, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

Just because something was upladed for advertising purposes does not mean that it is not usable. --MGA73 (talk) 18:19, 27 January 2025 (UTC)

Sideways upload

Can anyone explain why File:Cheese (3263135345).jpg was uploaded with a 90-degree rotation, and had to be corrected by a bot? Is it a bug with the upload tool used, Flickr2Commons? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:07, 4 January 2025 (UTC)

Most likely, conflicting rotation information between the different levels of embedded metadata. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:25, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

Upcoming Commons conversation about tool investment priority on January 15

Hello everyone! The Wikimedia Foundation will be hosting the third round of a series of community calls to help prioritize support efforts from Wikimedia Foundation for the 2025-2026 Fiscal Year.

The purpose of these calls is to support community members in hearing more from one another - across uploaders, moderators, GLAM enthusiasts, tool and bot makers, etc. - about the future of Commons. There is so much to discuss about the general direction of the project, and we hope that people from different perspectives can think through some of the tradeoffs that will shape Commons going forward.

Our third call will focus on tool investment priority. There are constant calls from the community for the Foundation to adopt community-made tools in order to maintain workflows for the contributors that depend on them. The range of these tools varies widely, and includes media upload (e.g. Video2Commons), editing (e.g. CropTool), curation (e.g. Cat-a-lot) and metrics (e.g. BaGLAMa) tools. Batch upload and metrics tools are said to be critical for the affiliates and Wikimedians in Residence who partner with libraries and other cultural institutions to illustrate Wikipedia. They need to be able to contribute files efficiently at scale, and report on the impact of these contributions. However, community surveys have identified more than 30 different tools that are used for content partnerships.

More specifically the questions will be:

1. Does it make sense for the Foundation to invest in supporting the wide range of community-developed tools that don’t have active maintainers, or should a smaller set of critical workflows be enabled through new or improved features in core products?
2. Which tool would you recommend to prioritise? Something community-facing or GLAM-facing or video-related or something else?

The call will take place at two different time slots:

•  The first one will be on January 15, at 08:00 UTC, and it will be hosted on Zoom by Senior Director of Product Management Runa Bhattacharjee; you can subscribe to it on Meta;
•  The second one will be on January 15, at 16:00 UTC, and it will be hosted on Zoom by Chief Product & Technology Officer Selena Deckelmann; you can subscribe to it on Meta.

If you cannot attend the meeting, you are invited to express your point of view at any time you want on the Commons community calls talk page. We will also post the notes of the meeting on the project page, to give the possibility to read what was discussed also to those who couldn’t attend it.

If you want, you are invited to share this invitation with all the people you think might be interested in this call.

We hope to see you and/or read you very soon! Sannita (WMF) (talk) 14:57, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

A "sticky" category

Hi. Have no idea if this has been discussed before, but how do you remove a "sticky" category? I use the term because I simply can not get rid of the category attached to a file, even though the category is not shown in the edit. The file in question is File:Anonymus Dutch Painter, Maritime view,-circa-1850.jpg. It is clearly marked as belonging to Category:1850s marine paintings, but it also keeps appearing in Category:Marine paintings, resulting in over-categorization. Can anybody explain what is going on? Cheers Rsteen (talk) 15:21, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

Sorry for the trouble. Just found out that the offending category was looming in an earlier redirected file that had not been properly cleaned up. You (hopefully) learn something every day. Cheers Rsteen (talk) 15:37, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

Manual license template in UploadWizard hangs

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T383415

When I enter a manual license template in the UploadWizard, and want to move on, the Wizard hangs on validating the license template. Looks like a bug --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 09:17, 10 January 2025 (UTC)

These messages appear in console:

Uncaught TypeError: status.getErrors is not a function

jQuery.Deferred exception: this.getUsedTemplates is not a function TypeError: this.getUsedTemplates is not a function

jQuery.Deferred exception: status.getErrors is not a function TypeError: status.getErrors is not a function

Google Chrome 126.0.6478.126 Radmir Far (talk) 15:50, 10 January 2025 (UTC)

@Ebrahim: is this related to your recent changes? —‍Mdaniels5757 (talk • contribs) 19:58, 10 January 2025 (UTC)

UploadHelper.js is unrelated to the UploadWizard, sorry. —‍Mdaniels5757 (talk • contribs) 20:04, 10 January 2025 (UTC)

Also experiencing this PascalHD (talk) 20:17, 10 January 2025 (UTC)

This is on Phabricator now. —‍Mdaniels5757 (talk • contribs) 22:22, 11 January 2025 (UTC)

Bugged cache

Please purge the cache of File:Color Multicircle.svg. Unfortunatley 4 "null edits", two "action=purge":s, two reverts and 4 moves were not sufficient. The circle below "File:Color Multicircle.svg has 15 code variations:" is still showed with wrong colour. Taylor 49 (talk) 21:50, 11 January 2025 (UTC)

The problem is not visible anymore. Still the increasing phenomenon of various fact-resistant and purge-resistant caches on wikis should be addressed. Taylor 49 (talk) 13:10, 12 January 2025 (UTC)

It is likely that this was browser cache (client cache, instead of server cache). —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:26, 14 January 2025 (UTC)

Also, i don't know who came up with the idea of using arbitrary language values in order to vary an SVG, but... please realize that this isn't supported functionality and ma break at any time. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:31, 14 January 2025 (UTC)

Several people have come up with the idea. IIRC, there's even a Phab ticket. Such files should be deprecated. Glrx (talk) 22:37, 14 January 2025 (UTC)

Problems with file upload when inserting templates from different sites

Good day! My files stopped loading instantly when I inserted a template from a specific site (for example, kremlin.ru). Can you explain the cause of the problem? MasterRus21thCentury (talk) 10:50, 12 January 2025 (UTC)

I don't understand the request. No WMF wiki can invoke templates from "kremlin.ru" if such happened to exist. Taylor 49 (talk) 13:10, 12 January 2025 (UTC)

Seems to be a problem with the UploadWizard, see phab:T383415. Radmir Far (talk) 13:55, 12 January 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-03

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

• The Single User Login system is being updated over the next few months. This is the system which allows users to fill out the login form on one Wikimedia site and get logged in on all others at the same time. It needs to be updated because of the ways that browsers are increasingly restricting cross-domain cookies. To accommodate these restrictions, login and account creation pages will move to a central domain, but it will still appear to the user as if they are on the originating wiki. The updated code will be enabled this week for users on test wikis. This change is planned to roll out to all users during February and March. See the SUL3 project page for more details and a timeline.

Updates for editors

• On wikis with PageAssessments installed, you can now filter search results to pages in a given WikiProject by using the inproject: keyword. (These wikis: Arabic Wikipedia, English Wikipedia, English Wikivoyage, French Wikipedia, Hungarian Wikipedia, Nepali Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia) [2]
• One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Tigre (w:tig:) [3]
• View all 35 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, there was a bug with updating a user's edit-count after making a rollback edit, which is now fixed. [4]

Updates for technical contributors

• Wikimedia REST API users, such as bot operators and tool maintainers, may be affected by ongoing upgrades. Starting the week of January 13, we will begin rerouting some page content endpoints from RESTbase to the newer MediaWiki REST API endpoints for all wiki projects. This change was previously available on testwiki and should not affect existing functionality, but active users of the impacted endpoints may raise issues directly to the MediaWiki Interfaces Team in Phabricator if they arise.
• Toolforge tool maintainers can now share their feedback on Toolforge UI, an initiative to provide a web platform that allows creating and managing Toolforge tools through a graphic interface, in addition to existing command-line workflows. This project aims to streamline active maintainers’ tasks, as well as make registration and deployment processes more accessible for new tool creators. The initiative is still at a very early stage, and the Cloud Services team is in the process of collecting feedback from the Toolforge community to help shape the solution to their needs. Read more and share your thoughts about Toolforge UI.
• For tool and library developers who use the OAuth system: The identity endpoint used for OAuth 1 and OAuth 2 returned a JSON object with an integer in its sub field, which was incorrect (the field must always be a string). This has been fixed; the fix will be deployed to Wikimedia wikis on the week of January 13. [5]
• Many wikis currently use Cite CSS to render custom footnote markers in Parsoid output. Starting January 20 these rules will be disabled, but the developers ask you to not clean up your MediaWiki:Common.css until February 20 to avoid issues during the migration. Your wikis might experience some small changes to footnote markers in Visual Editor and when using experimental Parsoid read mode, but if there are changes these are expected to bring the rendering in line with the legacy parser output. [6]

Meetings and events

• The next meeting in the series of Wikimedia Foundation Community Conversations with the Wikimedia Commons community will take place on January 15 at 8:00 UTC and at 16:00 UTC. The topic of this call is defining the priorities in tool investment for Commons. Contributors from all wikis, especially users who are maintaining tools for Commons, are welcome to attend.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 01:38, 14 January 2025 (UTC)

Broken image, probably access-related

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T384128

The image File:Cassowary_Diversity.jpg doesn't display at most resolutions. The page looks okay, but if I click on "Open in Media Viewer" I see an error message: "Sorry, the file cannot be displayed: There seems to be a technical issue. You can retry if it persists. Error: could not load image from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4b/Cassowary_Diversity.jpg/1920px-Cassowary_Diversity.jpg". If I try to go to that URL, or go to any of the other resolutions on the File: page, I get "Unauthorized: This server could not verify that you are authorized to access the document you requested."

This breakage can also be seen at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassowary on Wikipedia. Danbloch (talk) 03:18, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

This is also a problem at File:Status_iucn3.1_CR.svg, and File:NuclearReaction.svg, as reported at the enwiki Teahouse by @MtBotany: . It looked like maybe only SVGs were impacted but it appears it's also other filetypes. Berchanhimez (talk) 03:43, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

It is phab:T384128, the Swift container holding 4b thumbs is corrupted. Dylsss (talk) 04:34, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

Thanks. I noticed you added the tracked onto the Teahouse right before I came here with it. I swear I wish those tracked boxes had a little bit more different background, because I totally missed it. Hopefully the technical gremlins get put back to rest soon :) Berchanhimez (talk) 04:41, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

Broken image, thumbnails not available

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T381594

File:E-3. Mormon Monument (I-80 Rest Stop, Lyman, WY) on the Mormon Pioneer National Historic Trail (2007) (46fef7c9-2a82-42db-be2d-389b214ca161).jpg doesn't display any more. --Bean49 (talk) 13:33, 22 January 2025 (UTC)

This is actually a different unrelated issue: phab:T381594. Dylsss (talk) 01:21, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-04

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Updates for editors

• Administrators can mass-delete multiple pages created by a user or IP address using Extension:Nuke. It previously only allowed deletion of pages created in the last 30 days. It can now delete pages from the last 90 days, provided it is targeting a specific user or IP address. [7]
• On wikis that use the Patrolled edits feature, when the rollback feature is used to revert an unpatrolled page revision, that revision will now be marked as "manually patrolled" instead of "autopatrolled", which is more accurate. Some editors that use filters on Recent Changes may need to update their filter settings. [8]
• View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the Visual Editor's "Insert link" feature did not always suggest existing pages properly when an editor started typing, which has now been fixed.

Updates for technical contributors

• The Structured Discussion extension (also known as Flow) is being progressively removed from the wikis. This extension is unmaintained and causes issues. It will be replaced by DiscussionTools, which is used on any regular talk page. The last group of wikis (Catalan Wikiquote, Wikimedia Finland, Goan Konkani Wikipedia, Kabyle Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikibooks, Wikimedia Sweden) will soon be contacted. If you have questions about this process, please ping Trizek (WMF) at your wiki. [9]
• The latest quarterly Technical Community Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: updates about services from the Data Platform Engineering teams, information about Codex from the Design System team, and more.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 01:33, 21 January 2025 (UTC)

UploadWizard mistaking license on Flickr uploads

So earlier I used my alt account to upload this file (https://www.flickr.com/photos/presidenciaecuador/54268607515/) with UploadWizard, and when I finished and clicked the file page open the license it showed was PD-US instead of the normal CC0 license on Flickr. Special:Diff/985808004. Did anyone else encounter this as well? Not sure whether it is related to the earlier cases of UploadWizard messing up licenses above. 沪A 05683D_S5A-0043 07:34, 21 January 2025 (UTC)

That file is licensed on Flickr as PDM, not CC0. I don't think Upload Wizard was ever updated to reflect that licensing. The correct license tag is {{PD-author-FlickrPDM}}, which I add manually whenever I have time to revisit such uploads. RadioKAOS / Talk to me, Billy / Transmissions 07:45, 21 January 2025 (UTC)

Oops, read wrongly (facepalm). I’m pretty sure UploadWizard does have the PDM though-or at least back in 2023 when I uploaded this file. 沪A 05683D_S5A-0043 09:58, 21 January 2025 (UTC)

So is this issue solved? Prototyperspective (talk) 15:33, 26 January 2025 (UTC)

Not quite. See Special:Diff/990789717 which I newly uploaded. S5A-0043🚎^{(Leave a message here)} 09:19, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

Minor deletion request: that two intermediate files be removed

Hereditary Chief Na'Moks

Hello community. I reworked two versions of the same underlying file — and it would probably be tidier to delete those earlier superseded versions:

• version 5 not needed
• version 4 not needed

The background removal mask used in the above two files was improved in later uploads. Now I understand that this is a minor request and it may be better not to proceed. Best, RobbieIanMorrison (talk) 10:38, 21 January 2025 (UTC)

Any takers for this request? TIA, RobbieIanMorrison (talk) 21:13, 25 January 2025 (UTC)

We generally don't delete old versions of files unless there's a pressing need to make the old versions unavailable (e.g. if they contain copyright violations or personal information). Omphalographer (talk) 23:17, 26 January 2025 (UTC)

@Omphalographer: Many thanks for responding. As you indicate, there is no pressing need to delete the stale versions. Best, RobbieIanMorrison (talk) 23:48, 26 January 2025 (UTC)

Resolved

This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. Prototyperspective (talk) 09:23, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

syntax error

On this file. I am not sure what the problem is. If someone is able to please explain it that would be great! Best, SDudley (talk) 04:32, 22 January 2025 (UTC)

@SDudley: I did not see any issues. Can you be a bit more specific? The image is quite low resolution. Personally, I would not place double quote marks (") in a file name — very likely to defeat automated processing unless such processing has been specifically designed to cater for this corner case. Ditto for fullstops (.) that do not separate file extensions. HTH, RobbieIanMorrison (talk) 21:20, 25 January 2025 (UTC)

Just noting that the "File usage on Commons" section links back to that same file. That is odd. My only thought is the " char and its percent encoded %22 record as different files. Perhaps someone else here knows what's up? (Cute photograph!) RobbieIanMorrison (talk) 21:32, 25 January 2025 (UTC)

@RobbieIanMorrison: "File usage on Commons" linking to the same file is extremely common for files imported from external sources - I don't know why it happens but I guess it's normal behaviour. See for example 1, 2, 3, 4. MKFI (talk) 12:43, 29 January 2025 (UTC)

@MKFI: Okay. My systems programming began on UNIX so it still seems odd to me! RobbieIanMorrison (talk) 14:06, 29 January 2025 (UTC)

@SDudley: Just keeping you in the loop. RobbieIanMorrison (talk) 14:08, 29 January 2025 (UTC)

@RobbieIanMorrison: I'm really not certain what purpose it serves, I suspect some template might cause the link, but the self-link does show up in Special:WhatLinksHere/File:First_Lady_Michelle_Obama_Greets_Students_After_Reading_"Green_Eggs_and_Ham"_by_Dr._Seuss_at_the_Library_of_Congress.jpg as well. MKFI (talk) 14:45, 29 January 2025 (UTC)

Hi @MKFI: I spent some time trying to find file names that differed as strings but rendered identically to humans — to no avail. So I remain puzzled. RobbieIanMorrison (talk) 14:53, 29 January 2025 (UTC)

Resolved

This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. Prototyperspective (talk) 09:23, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-05

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

• Patrollers and admins - what information or context about edits or users could help you to make patroller or admin decisions more quickly or easily? The Wikimedia Foundation wants to hear from you to help guide its upcoming annual plan. Please consider sharing your thoughts on this and 13 other questions to shape the technical direction for next year.

Updates for editors

• iOS Wikipedia App users worldwide can now access a personalized Year in Review feature, which provides insights based on their reading and editing history on Wikipedia. This project is part of a broader effort to help welcome new readers as they discover and interact with encyclopedic content.
• Edit patrollers now have a new feature available that can highlight potentially problematic new pages. When a page is created with the same title as a page which was previously deleted, a tag ('Recreated') will now be added, which users can filter for in Special:RecentChanges and Special:NewPages. [10]
• Later this week, there will be a new warning for editors if they attempt to create a redirect that links to another redirect (a double redirect). The feature will recommend that they link directly to the second redirect's target page. Thanks to the user SomeRandomDeveloper for this improvement. [11]
• Wikimedia wikis allow WebAuthn-based second factor checks (such as hardware tokens) during login, but the feature is fragile and has very few users. The MediaWiki Platform team is temporarily disabling adding new WebAuthn keys, to avoid interfering with the rollout of SUL3 (single user login version 3). Existing keys are unaffected. [12]
• View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• For developers that use the MediaWiki History dumps: The Data Platform Engineering team has added a couple of new fields to these dumps, to support the Temporary Accounts initiative. If you maintain software that reads those dumps, please review your code and the updated documentation, since the order of the fields in the row will change. There will also be one field rename: in the mediawiki_user_history dump, the anonymous field will be renamed to is_anonymous. The changes will take effect with the next release of the dumps in February. [13]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 22:11, 27 January 2025 (UTC)

Regions of Belarus

Hi! Could you help with the module for categories by year for regions of Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan on {{Region year}}? This is the equivalent of the template {{Oblast year}} for Russia and Ukraine. MasterRus21thCentury (talk) 20:23, 29 January 2025 (UTC)

Lua error in Module:Institution at line 545: attempt to index field 'datavalue' (a nil value).

Crossposting from Module talk:Institution since I'm not sure about the error's cause. Multiple {{Artwork}}s currently show a Lua error message (see title) instead of the Infobox. Yifeibot is collecting the affected files in Category:Pages using Information template with parsing errors. Details:

Lua error in Module:Institution at line 545: attempt to index field 'datavalue' (a nil value).

Backtrace:

1. Module:Institution:545: in function "harvest_wikidata"
2. Module:Institution:609: in function "institution"
3. Module:Wikidata_art:661: in function "renderInstitution"
4. Module:Wikidata_art:768: in function "get_institution"
5. Module:Artwork:1005: in function "harvest_wikidata"
6. Module:Artwork:1159: in function "create_infobox"
7. Module:Artwork:1317: in function "chunk"
8. mw.lua:527: ?
9. [C]: ?

The strange thing is that there were no recent changes to the Lua Modules / Templates involved, as far as I see. Mostly artwork from Tate Britain seems to be affected. Can anybody help with this? Fl.schmitt (talk) 14:29, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

It looks like the reason is this edit. Module:Institution should handle such a case better I think. --Marsupium (talk) 22:03, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

Solved, thanks a lot @Marsupium -

This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. --Fl.schmitt (talk) 06:13, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

Fl.schmitt (talk) 06:13, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

Category for City by year

How do I go about creating or editing a new category for a city/town by year? For example, when viewing Category:Oshawa by year, select 2024 for example and hit 'Edit' all you can see is "CanadaYear|Oshawa|202|4" which automatically adds the bar at the top to filter by year and categories. Is there a template somewhere? PascalHD (talk) 20:46, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

Creator Possible error

Unless I'm missing something, it seems that Template:Creator possible isn't properly putting things in Category:Creator templates to be created by a bot when it should be. ToxicPea (talk) 04:42, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

"Defective" files

There's an issue with a lot of video files on Commons where, if a video file does not have metadata associated with it, it shows as "0.0s" in length. This issue's intensity can vary from the video file being watchable but not entirely technologically readable across WMF projects, to a video file not even being able to skip forward, but only play in one go.

I think this is probably some kind of bug in the Wikimedia video software. If a file was not given metadata, you can fix this by using the following FFMPEG command in your terminal. For example:

ffmpeg -i The_Crisis_\(1916\).webm -metadata title="The Crisis" -metadata year="1916" -metadata artist="Colin Campbell" -metadata genre="Drama, Historical" -metadata description="A silent historical drama film directed by Colin Campbell, based on the novel by Winston Churchill." -metadata comment="Silent film classic from 1916." -c copy The_Crisis_\(1916\)_metadata.webm

I feel like any bogus data being thrown in there should be fine. I did this for File:The Crisis (1916).webm and the issue was fixed immediately.

This issue, with "defective" files (that are in my opinion not fully defective but the software treats them as if defective) can lead to video files being dangerously deleted, such as File:Old Ironsides (1926).webm once was, before I saved it with a higher quality version. This sets a precedent for these "0.0s defective files"—of films that are often quite rare finds and may no longer exist anywhere but Commons!—to be simply speedied without notice.

I think the solution to this problem is to add to the list of Commons bots a "fix defective file bot", that simply adds some metadata to the video file (possibly based on what's in the Commons description or just random data), so that the number of files with this problem doesn't keep building up. Or, we could fix the WMF video technology, to where the backend automatically populates the metadata of a metadata-less file.

At the very least, is there a category that keeps up with files listed as "0.0s"?

Nevertheless, this is a recurring issue, and I want to see if there's some way to fix this problem quickly using a systemic method (bots, site code, etc.)? Pinging @Racconish and Yann: who have noticed video files with this kind of defectiveness before as well. SnowyCinema (talk) 16:28, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

The solution is either a solid investment of hardware, software and staff in being able to handle video decoding in a more efficient way or stop uploading video all together. This is such a recurring topic and we're just wasting resources at the moment. Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 17:51, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

‘-i---i-’ prefix in filenames

I happened to see the ‘-i---i-’ prefix in filenames in different contexts, so I had a look. There seem to be a lot of files where their names all start with ‘-i---i-’ and they were all uploaded using Flickr2Commons, but they are otherwise unrelated. What’s going on? Brianjd (talk) 07:11, 3 February 2025 (UTC)

Probably some bad import from the Flickr. I ocasionally rename some of these files, but it's a Sisyphean work. Some bot action would be really appreciated, e.g. renaming the files with the Description field as a filename. — Draceane ^talk_contrib. 09:07, 3 February 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-06

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Updates for editors

• Editors who use the "Special characters" editing-toolbar menu can now see the 32 special characters you have used most recently, across editing sessions on that wiki. This change should help make it easier to find the characters you use most often. The feature is in both the 2010 wikitext editor and VisualEditor. [14]
• Editors using the 2010 wikitext editor can now create sublists with correct indentation by selecting the line(s) you want to indent and then clicking the toolbar buttons.[15] You can now also insert <code> tags using a new toolbar button.[16] Thanks to user stjn for these improvements.
• Help is needed to ensure the citation generator works properly on each wiki.
  • (1) Administrators should update the local versions of the page MediaWiki:Citoid-template-type-map.json to include entries for preprint, standard, and dataset; Here are example diffs to replicate for 'preprint' and for 'standard' and 'dataset'.
  • (2.1) If the citoid map in the citation template used for these types of references is missing, one will need to be added. (2.2) If the citoid map does exist, the TemplateData will need to be updated to include new field names. Here are example updates for 'preprint' and for 'standard' and 'dataset'. The new fields that may need to be supported are archiveID, identifier, repository, organization, repositoryLocation, committee, and versionNumber. [17]
• One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Central Kanuri (w:knc:) [18]
• View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the OCR (optical character recognition) tool used for Wikisource now supports a new language, Church Slavonic. [19]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 00:05, 4 February 2025 (UTC)