Commons: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/2025/04 /Archive/2025/05.

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Empty Wikidata Infobox

Hi everybody. I have a question about this {{Wikidata Infobox}}. I makes sense to create a category including this code . or, after, comment this code {{Wikidata Infobox}} when the wikidata is not existing yet or is not yet connect? An example here Category:Companies_based_in_Heemstede,_North_Holland. I don't want to start an editwar, but this kind of edit seem to not very wise, because when the wikidata element will be created it will be more difficult to connect it or, when already present, is not easy to find it, for example Category:Klouwer (surname), it was better to look for it instead of comment it . Thank you in advance for your answers. P.S. If not necessary, I would not insert at all {{Wikidata Infobox}} MrKeefeJohn (talk) 18:40, 22 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Create your category with {{Wikidata Infobox}} but without the HTML comment markup. The infobox is designed for such use. I have just done this on your example category. Note that the infobox there includes a "Create new Wikidata item" link, Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 19:01, 22 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Pigsonthewing: thank you for your answer. I understand what is designed for  and always add it creating new categories. The question was more about if wise to remove it when the wikidata element is not created yet. MrKeefeJohn (talk) 06:58, 3 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Usually a Wikidata infobox is not added when there is no Wikidata item to connect it to / that it's connected to. Adding an infobox nevertheless is I think an implicit suggestion/request for others to create a Wikidata item for the subject of the category. For these, I usually just create the Wikidata item but there are exceptions when it's not clear how the item would look like. In regards to your case (example?) I don't think there are Wikidata items for 'Companies based in {region}' but maybe I'm wrong or these could be created – however usually items are created for companies with some location information so there's no Wikidata item for that. They could maybe be created as dynamic list pages somehow though. Prototyperspective (talk) 09:51, 3 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

That is the context in which I gave my answer. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 11:29, 3 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Prototyperspective: I do understand your opinion, but in my experience quite often it's just a problem of missing connection. Just todady a couple of example Category:Companies based in Udine wikidata and Category:Companies based in Udine wikidata MrKeefeJohn (talk) 19:30, 11 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Don't know what you mean. This isn't what you wrote about earlier. Yes, there are categories that are not connected to their Wikidata items. You could for example always add the infobox and then check if the Wikidata item exists via search and if not create it or if not just leave the empty infobox as is. Prototyperspective (talk) 21:35, 11 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I mean that if you don't add a {{Wikidata Infobox}}, or remove it or comment like this , it will be more difficult to connect with wikidata elements and/or with already existing articles or categories in some wiki. And it seems to me that it makes more difficult the bots' operation. MrKeefeJohn (talk) 06:56, 12 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Why would that be the case, I don't think so. That infobox template is added by a bot. Prototyperspective (talk) 10:16, 12 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

HotCat and Cat-a-lot are adding categories inside template brackets

I added a category with HotCat here and one with Cat-a-lot here and for some reason the categories were added inside the brackets of the crop-template that was already there as if the categories were part of the template syntax. As a result, when another user cropped the image with CropTool the categories were (automatically) removed together with the crop-template, see here. That looks like a chain of things going wrong. Nakonana (talk) 18:20, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Several images are affected: see File talk:Bundesarchiv Bild 101I-133-0703-38, Polen, Ghetto Litzmannstadt, Kinder.jpg#Categories (and that list might not be comprehensive). Nakonana (talk) 18:27, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I suppose the tools' logic is to find the last [[Category:...]] and then open a new line after it and add the new cats.

The logic makes sense, since it seeks to put categories together.

I could imagine a little more could be added to the logic. It can try to find the last \n\s*\[\[Category\:.+\]\]\s* instead. RoyZuo (talk) 18:43, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think that it would work that function find_insertionpoint() in Gadget-Cat-a-lot.js line 916 would contain also following replace when it is cleaning the wikicode:

.replace( /\{\{Crop\|category=(\s|\S)*?\}\}/g, replaceByBlanks );

I think that HotCat is using similar cleanup.

-- Zache (talk) 18:58, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your ideas. I have one suggestion: there could be one or more blanks between | and category= that needs to be considered. Kind regards, --Sebastian Wallroth (talk) Sebastian Wallroth (talk) 06:32, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The much simpler solution would be to move the category link inside the template and only write the category name when using the template. GPSLeo (talk) 08:41, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Whom/Where to ask to make that happen? Nakonana (talk) 08:38, 6 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I changed the template[1]. GPSLeo (talk) 09:05, 6 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you! Nakonana (talk) 09:06, 6 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Is this solved then? Prototyperspective (talk) 11:35, 6 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think? I haven't tested how CropTool is handling the change, though. Nakonana (talk) 18:00, 7 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@GPSLeo: Did you clean up existing usage? Without that, pages are broken, including those like Commons:Modèles that simply want to suppress the category (there’s no way to achieve that after your edit). I think your edit should be reverted and the tools should be fixed instead, ideally by not reinventing the wheel but rather using an API, which uses the same backend as VisualEditor for example – I fear no such API exists yet, though, so the solution for now is probably

fixing the regexes,
or simply telling users to put the crop template above the categories, which would not confuse the regexes.

Tacsipacsi (talk) 21:48, 4 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

or simply telling users to put the crop template above the categories — if a user is using the CropTool through the (tools) menu, the user doesn't get to place the template themselves, the tool "decides" where to place the template. The placement is automated. Something in this automated process would need to be changed to fix the HotCat/Cat-a-lot issue. Nakonana (talk) 17:09, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Multiple files uploaded under one name

When I use the mobile uploader, usually it succeeds in picking names for my files that don't overwrite each other (for example Category:Views from the Internationale chairlift). With File:Blewett Pass - Tronsen Ridge ski tour.jpg, they were just uploaded on top of each other. Weirdly I had just done a previous multi-upload for the name File:Alpental.jpg that worked perfectly. What's the easiest way to fix this? Buidhe (talk) 03:37, 5 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Buidhe I think this is a serious bug that you should write to https://github.com/commons-app/apps-android-commons , or follow Commons:Mobile app#Issues. RoyZuo (talk) 09:40, 6 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Image Rotation

Hello! I have submitted a request to rotate File:ATTRITOR GRINDING MACHINE - NARA - 17496809.jpg by 180° via @SteinsplitterBot. Now the thumbnail has the desired orientation, but the actual image still remains upside down. What is the correct procedure to handle such cases? --Aciarium (talk) 10:49, 7 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Aciarium: it looks ok for me. See COM:PURGE. Commander Keane (talk) 12:07, 7 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Commander Keane: My bad, I wasn't aware that I had to purge the site after this action. Now it looks ok also on my side. Thanks for clarifying!! --Aciarium (talk) 13:49, 7 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

File:Daniell Trekboer.jpg

Does someone have the means to extract the image from the British Museum's website? My usual methods are failing. JayCubby (talk) 14:49, 7 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@JayCubby https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/image/1613085647 maybe? RoyZuo (talk) 08:36, 12 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-15

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

From now on, interface admins and centralnotice admins are technically required to enable two-factor authentication before they can use their privileges. In the future this might be expanded to more groups with advanced user-rights. [2]
View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

The Design System Team is preparing to release the next major version of Codex (v2.0.0) on April 29. Editors and developers who use CSS from Codex should see the 2.0 overview documentation, which includes guidance related to a few of the breaking changes such as font-size, line-height, and size-icon.
The results of the Developer Satisfaction Survey (2025) are now available. Thank you to all participants. These results help the Foundation decide what to work on next and to review what they recently worked on.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

The 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon will take place in Istanbul, Turkey, between 2–4 May. Registration for attending the in-person event will close on 13 April. Before registering, please note the potential need for a visa or e-visa to enter the country.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 18:48, 7 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

PDF upload broken

When I use the upload tool, PDF is not one of the options, and it does not recognize a PDF as a file type when I try to upload. When I fill in the information, the tool fails with nonsensical errors. This is especially problematic as Foundation policy directs that PDFs (which are heavily used on English Wikisource and other language Wikisource projects) which are free by Commons rules should be uploaded here and not locally. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 01:30, 9 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@TE(æ)A,ea. which tool do you mean? can you plz write down the link? RoyZuo (talk) 02:37, 9 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hello @TE(æ)A,ea., I assumed you have found a solution to your problem since you uploaded File:Japanese.pdf after you posted here. Tvpuppy (talk) 02:47, 9 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

RoyZuo: It’s the default upload tool, Special:Upload. Tvpuppy: I used the upload wizard to upload the file from my computer; I generally avoid this, as the wizard is an inferior upload tool. As I would like to avoid using the wizard in the future, this is still an issue. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 03:41, 9 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@TE(æ)A,ea. Special:Upload only up to 100 MB. RoyZuo (talk) 05:07, 9 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
it's clearly written "Maximum file size: 100 MB" right under where you pick you file. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ RoyZuo (talk) 05:09, 9 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Do you guys just not assume good faith here? RoyZuo: Even if the file size is too large, it still recognizes the file type; and, there is a separate option (on the default Upload tool) for uploading from a whitelisted (or allowlisted, whatever that means) Web-site, and that option doesn’t have a 100 MB limit. I had used that option, but it didn’t recognize PDF as a file type and never actually uploaded. TE(æ)A,ea. (talk) 12:31, 9 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@TE(æ)A,ea. i just uploaded File:Walksincitycant00graygoog text.pdf by upload from url.

when you dont give any useful info about the bugs, and make other users second guess the problem, the problem wont be solved. RoyZuo (talk) 12:50, 9 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Mysterious editing of page

on Special:Upload, there's a line "Permitted file types: tiff, tif, png, gif..."

after or around the page finishes loading, something deletes ", pdf" from the list of extensions. sorry my skill is too low to find out what does that. RoyZuo (talk) 08:16, 9 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The relevant code, and an explanation, is at MediaWiki:Upload.js#L-141--L-148. Omphalographer (talk) 00:14, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Overwrite a video file

I uploaded a video a while ago File:TTC Line 2 T-1 Subway arrives at Pape station (2023-08-08) 001.webm, it had some frame rate issues and never got around to fixing it, until now. However I am unable to re-upload it as the file exceeds 100MB. How can I overwrite the video file with the new one? PascalHD (talk) 02:02, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@PascalHD User talk:Rillke/bigChunkedUpload.js. RoyZuo (talk) 06:36, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@RoyZuo Thanks! It worked perfectly! PascalHD (talk) 21:38, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This is the reason why this issue exists: phab:T382814 Missing info on how to upload a file larger than 100 MB in the 'Upload a new version of this file' page – You're not the only one who doesn't know that. Prototyperspective (talk) 21:52, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Batch uploading of file

I have here files I ripped from the SLSA's website (Category:Files_from_the_State_Library_of_South_Australia), which are higher-resolution than the existing files.

The files are named as follows: stitched_John_L_Bonython_12yrs_1887-B7723_43.jpg.jpg corresponds to file:John_L_Bonython_12yrs_1887-B7723_43.jpg

The files are here: https://files.catbox.moe/nmqlbs.zip

Thanks a bunch JayCubby (talk) 18:39, 12 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I have uploaded them

999

REAL 💬 ⬆ 19:31, 12 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you very much, 999real! JayCubby (talk) 21:26, 12 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Edit protected template

Can somebody please take a look at my edit request for {{Created with}}? — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 21:09, 13 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-16

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

Later this week, the default thumbnail size will be increased from 220px to 250px. This changes how pages are shown in all wikis and has been requested by some communities for many years, but wasn't previously possible due to technical limitations. [3]
File thumbnails are now stored in discrete sizes. If a page specifies a thumbnail size that's not among the standard sizes (20, 40, 60, 120, 250, 330, 500, 960), then MediaWiki will pick the closest larger thumbnail size but will tell the browser to downscale it to the requested size. In these cases, nothing will change visually but users might load slightly larger images. If it doesn't matter which thumbnail size is used in a page, please pick one of the standard sizes to avoid the extra in-browser down-scaling step. [4][5]

Updates for editors

The Wikimedia Foundation are working on a system called Edge Uniques which will enable A/B testing, help protect against Distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS attacks), and make it easier to understand how many visitors the Wikimedia sites have. This is so that they can more efficiently build tools which help readers, and make it easier for readers to find what they are looking for.
To improve security for users, a small percentage of logins will now require that the account owner input a one-time password emailed to their account. It is recommended that you check that the email address on your account is set correctly, and that it has been confirmed, and that you have an email set for this purpose. [6]
"Are you interested in taking a short survey to improve tools used for reviewing or reverting edits on your Wiki?" This question will be asked at 7 wikis starting next week, on Recent Changes and Watchlist pages. The Moderator Tools team wants to know more about activities that involve looking at new edits made to your Wikimedia project, and determining whether they adhere to your project's policies.
On April 15, the full Wikidata graph will no longer be supported on query.wikidata.org. After this date, scholarly articles will be available through query-scholarly.wikidata.org, while the rest of the data hosted on Wikidata will be available through the query.wikidata.org endpoint. This is part of the scheduled split of the Wikidata Graph, which was announced in September 2024. More information is available on Wikidata.
The latest quarterly Wikimedia Apps Newsletter is now available. It covers updates, experiments, and improvements made to the Wikipedia mobile apps.
View all 30 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

The latest quarterly Technical Community Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: an invitation for tool maintainers to attend the Toolforge UI Community Feedback Session on April 15th; recent community metrics; and recent technical blog posts.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:20, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Media missing infobox template

Does somebody know how Category:Media missing infobox template gets added to files?

Because it seems to be missing for quite a few files, such as this. For various structured access to files such as via the Commons app, the MediaViewer, an API, etc, having a standardized populated information template is very useful. It could (and to some extent) can also be searched / queried and metadata be gathered via the standardized format.

If whatever added that category and its subcats is not running anymore it would be good if it was restarted or if it's running improved so that more files are added to it.

Additionally, is there any effort to add the {{Information}} to files at scale? The cat currently contains as many as 334,529 files. For most of these, some script could add the template and add the source, author and description data from whatever has been added instead if there is anything. Prototyperspective (talk) 19:50, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Looking at a few random images, the category was added by User:JarektBot and User:YiFeiBot. @Jarekt and Zhuyifei1999: Why did your bots stop adding it? —Tacsipacsi (talk) 22:20, 4 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Tacsipacsi and Prototyperspective: I created Category:Media missing infobox template category and added it to all the files missing any of the main infoboxes in November 2014. The files were found as files without {{Infobox template tag}}. I used my bot account because I was using AutoWikiBrowser in a "bot" mode. Back then the idea was that once identified we will figure out some way of adding the {{Information}} template to those files. We did add some templates to large batches of similar images but for most files we did not figured out a way to add them. I guess at some point YiFeiBot was tagging new uploads, but to my knowledge there is no effort to use this category for any corrections. Even worse, for many of the files we do not know anything about them, like who is the photographer or why do they have a license they do. Many of those files, uploaded in the early days of Commons, would be deleted under the current rules. --Jarekt (talk) 00:05, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Many of those files, uploaded in the early days of Commons, would be deleted under the current rules. Even more reason for why that tagging is useful.

but for most files we did not figured out a way to add them. I guess at some point YiFeiBot was tagging new uploads, but to my knowledge there is no effort to use this category for any corrections. That's an issue but it's somewhat separate from the tagging. Restarting the tagging of files only long after may make it more difficult to tag the files. Moreover, it can also slightly reduce the number of files with that issue because some of the uploaders are made aware of that being an issue / discouraged so they use the standard UploadWizard / Information template for their later uploads. In any case, if any of you can, please restart the bot tagging – that being used to correct those files is a separate issue and it could be many years until something is being done but another thread about that could be made right after this one. Prototyperspective (talk) 12:50, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Understanding AbuseFilter code

Looking at AbuseFilter 153 - Cross-wiki upload filter the way I understand it is that it prevents uploads of files matching that specific edit summary that are not images, or they are pngs, or jpegs less than 2Mpix or under 60kB.

But the bit (user_age < 3600*24*180 | user_editcount < 50) indicates that uploaders must be at least 180 days old (or have at least 50 edits)? (mw doc page says user_age is in seconds). Unless they are confirmed or autopatrolled. I am guessing that the Commons abuse filter can't see the user_age and user_edits in outside projects and that is why there was a propsal to block new users from uploading (that meant Wikipedia non-autoconfirmed right?). But if that user_age is applied to an uploader's Commons age and edit count, how do ~500 edits per day get through? For example File:Guillotina de 1789.jpg's uploader wasn't 180 days old anywhere and didn't have 50 edits (global account info). I must be misunderstanding something.

I will ping @Billinghurst as they last edited the filter. Commander Keane (talk) 08:47, 19 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Commander Keane So I looked into this and realized that the statement !("confirmed" in user_groups | "autopatrol" in user_rights) also matches autoconfirmed users, see https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T181024. This means that the filter has de-facto been exempted for user accounts more than 4 days old, which is unfortunate because it means the filter has probably been missing a very large number of files. This is a good catch and we should change this immediately, however given that the filter has been like this since 2016 it might result in a large increase in filter hits (maybe complaints from other wikis). Dylsss (talk) 23:54, 19 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Moved to Commons:Help desk#COM:ADVERT

Tech News: 2025-17

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

Wikifunctions is now integrated with Dagbani Wikipedia since April 15. It is the first project that will be able to call functions from Wikifunctions and integrate them in articles. A function is something that takes one or more inputs and transforms them into a desired output, such as adding up two numbers, converting miles into metres, calculating how much time has passed since an event, or declining a word into a case. Wikifunctions will allow users to do that through a simple call of a stable and global function, rather than via a local template. [7]
A new type of lint error has been created: Empty headings (documentation). The Linter extension's purpose is to identify wikitext patterns that must or can be fixed in pages and provide some guidance about what the problems are with those patterns and how to fix them. [8]
View all 37 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

Following its publication on HuggingFace, the "Structured Contents" dataset, developed by Wikimedia Enterprise, is now also available on Kaggle. This Beta initiative is focused on making Wikimedia data more machine-readable for high-volume reusers. They are releasing this beta version in a location that open dataset communities already use, in order to seek feedback, to help improve the product for a future wider release. You can read more about the overall Structured Contents project, and about the first release that's freely usable.
There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings and events

The Editing and Machine Learning Teams invite interested volunteers to a video meeting to discuss Peacock check, which is the latest Edit check that will detect "peacock" or "overly-promotional" or "non-neutral" language whilst an editor is typing. Editors who work with newcomers, or help to fix this kind of writing, or are interested in how we use artificial intelligence in our projects are encouraged to attend. The meeting will be on April 28, 2025 at 18:00–19:00 UTC and hosted on Zoom.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:56, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

How is the pixel size your Flickr photo upload to Commons at (4,438 × 6,101 pixels), larger than the maximum size on this Flickr account?

User talk:Basque mapping#How is the pixel size your Flickr photo upload to Commons at (4,438 × 6,101 pixels), larger than the maximum size on this Flickr account?

Can someone explain how photo uploads grow in size from a source that has a smaller size. Please, see the link above and it's associated links to help me understand how these changes occur.

My earlier upload from the exact same Flickr page is equal too the maximum size file available from the United States Department of State Flickr account here: [9] https://www.flickr.com/photos/statephotos/54295399868/

Thank you, -- Ooligan (talk) 03:02, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Ooligan: The history of File:Official portrait of Secretary Marco Rubio.jpg says that it came from https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Official-Photo-Secrertary-Marco-Rubio.jpg which now appears to have been moved to https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Marco-Rubio.jpg and which is 4438x6101 and matches the file that was uploaded. So I guess linking it to Flickr was just a convenience, as it's perhaps considered more stable than a WordPress attachment, and is the same file. Sam Wilson 07:44, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

How to check whether PDF has text layer？

given a random pdf here, how to check if it contains a text layer (that has a lot of text)?

i found https://www.reddit.com/r/pdf/comments/npz1ak/how_to_identify_which_pdfs_contain_a_text_layer/ . not sure if something already does that for commons files. RoyZuo (talk) 17:20, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

the practical use of this for me is, for a certain book category, there're a dozen different pdfs inside.

now i wanna know which one of them might already have the text. if some of them do, i can extract that and feed into wikisource directly, instead of wasting my time to ocr page by page. RoyZuo (talk) 17:23, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

You can use the API, it will return the text layer contents of a pdf. For example: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/api.php?titles=File:Serial_Programming.pdf&action=query&prop=imageinfo&iiprop=metadata Bawolff (talk) 20:08, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Should we not run a bot, to categorise as, say, "PDFs with text layer" and "PDFs with no text layer"? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:17, 27 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

That would be much better handled by structured data than categories. Nosferattus (talk) 17:29, 4 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

New Autowikibrowser (6.4.0.0) is malfunctioning

I am using AutoWikiBrowser version 6.4.0.0 at Commons. I've found the software is almost useless because I cannot input the "replace with" field in the advanced settings.
Options --> Find and replace --> Advanced settings --> Find --> Replace with:
Find field can be inputted, but Replace with field cannot be. Please fix it as soon as possible. Thank you. --トトト (talk) 05:01, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It has been already reported at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T391609. I hope it will be fixed soon. --トトト (talk) 11:44, 27 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-18

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

Event organizers who host collaborative activities on multiple wikis, including Bengali, Japanese, and Korean Wikipedias, will have access to the CampaignEvents extension this week. Also, admins in the Wikipedia where the extension is enabled will automatically be granted the event organizer right soon. They won't have to manually grant themselves the right before they can manage events as requested by a community.
View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

The release of the next major version of Codex, the design system for Wikimedia, is scheduled for 29 April 2025. Technical editors will have access to the release by the week of 5 May 2025. This update will include a number of breaking changes and minor visual changes. Instructions on handling the breaking and visual changes are documented on this page. Pre-release testing is reported in T386298, with post-release issues tracked in T392379 and T392390.
Users of Wiki Replicas will notice that the database views of ipblocks, ipblocks_ipindex, and ipblocks_compat are now deprecated. Users can query the block and block_target new views that mirror the new tables in the production database instead. The deprecated views will be removed entirely from Wiki Replicas in June, 2025.
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization Newsletter is now available. This edition includes an overview of the improved Content Translation Dashboard Tool, support for new languages, highlights from the Wiki Loves Ramadan campaign, results from the Language Onboarding Experiment, an analysis of topic diversity in articles, and information on upcoming community meetings and events.

Meetings and events

The Let's Connect Learning Clinic will take place on April 29 at 14:30 UTC. This edition will focus on "Understanding and Navigating Conflict in Wikimedia Projects". You can register now to attend.
The 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon, which brings the global technical community together to connect, brainstorm, and hack existing projects, will take place from May 2 to 4th, 2025, at Istanbul, Turkey.

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MediaWiki message delivery 19:28, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

File revision url format

I'm gonna try making a tool that goes from file revisions or previews back to file description page (in case you land on those direct links). does anyone know of any documentation on this? RoyZuo (talk) 12:02, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Two digits from a hexadecimal MD5 hash and prefixed dates. See MW:Manual:MediaWiki file usage.

previews have similar information

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/06/Tartaric_acid_2.svg/525px-Tartaric_acid_2.svg.png?20250419191557

The 525px-... states the image size. SVG files may have lang prefixes (this one is made up for German as spoken in Switzerland):

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/06/Tartaric_acid_2.svg/langde-ch-525px-Tartaric_acid_2.svg.png?20250419191557

Of course the lang and size would be easy to strip.

Glrx (talk) 18:57, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tech News: 2025-19

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 Wikimedia Foundation has shared the latest draft update to their annual plan for next year (July 2025–June 2026). This includes an executive summary (also on Diff), details about the three main goals (Infrastructure, Volunteer Support, and Effectiveness), global trends, and the budget and financial model. Feedback and questions are welcome on the talk page until the end of May.

Updates for editors

For wikis that have the CampaignEvents extension enabled, two new feature improvements have been released:
- Admins can now choose which namespaces are permitted for Event Registration via Community Configuration (documentation). The default setup is for event registration to be permitted in the Event namespace, but other namespaces (such as the project namespace or WikiProject namespace) can now be added. With this change, communities like WikiProjects can now more easily use Event Registration for their collaborative activities.
- Editors can now transclude the Collaboration List on a wiki page (documentation). The Collaboration List is an automated list of events and WikiProjects on the wikis, accessed via Special:AllEvents (example). Now, the Collaboration List can be added to all sorts of wiki pages, such as: a wiki mainpage, a WikiProject page, an affiliate page, an event page, or even a user page.
View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

Developers who use the moment library in gadgets and user scripts should revise their code to use alternatives like the Intl library or the new mediawiki.DateFormatter library. The moment library has been deprecated and will begin to log messages in the developer console. You can see a global search for current uses, and ask related questions in this Phabricator task.
Developers who maintain a tool that queries the Wikidata term store tables (wbt_*) need to update their code to connect to a separate database cluster. These tables are being split into a separate database cluster. Tools that query those tables via the wiki replicas must be adapted to connect to the new cluster instead. Documentation and related links are available. [10]
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

The latest Chart Project newsletter is available. It includes updates on preparing to expand the deployment to additional wikis as soon as this week (starting May 6) and scaling up over the following weeks, plus exploring filtering and transforming source data.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:11, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

API for accessing Data: namespace or other .json files

Is there a special API or other way to get a raw data table from outside of MediaWiki? Chemistry articles on enwiki (and maybe others) link to an external program to display a graphical representation of chemicals, but the data-set that program uses is limited and not always containing the details that *wiki want. That program can load external data, so I was hoping we could have the data on commons, as we do for map-data and similar back-ends. JSON, CSV, even raw wiki-source would be fine. DMacks (talk) 01:31, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

You can make a request like [11] and then parse the output as json. GPSLeo (talk) 06:57, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

We will be enabling the new Charts extension on your wiki soon!

(Apologies for posting in English)

Hi all! We have good news to share regarding the ongoing problem with graphs and charts affecting all wikis that use them.

As you probably know, the old Graph extension was disabled in 2023 due to security reasons. We’ve worked in these two years to find a solution that could replace the old extension, and provide a safer and better solution to users who wanted to showcase graphs and charts in their articles. We therefore developed the Charts extension, which will be replacing the old Graph extension and potentially also the EasyTimeline extension.

After successfully deploying the extension on Italian, Swedish, and Hebrew Wikipedia, as well as on MediaWiki.org, as part of a pilot phase, we are now happy to announce that we are moving forward with the next phase of deployment, which will also include your wiki.

The deployment will happen in batches, and will start from May 6. Please, consult our page on MediaWiki.org to discover when the new Charts extension will be deployed on your wiki. You can also consult the documentation about the extension on MediaWiki.org.

If you have questions, need clarifications, or just want to express your opinion about it, please refer to the project’s talk page on Mediawiki.org, or ping me directly under this thread. If you encounter issues using Charts once it gets enabled on your wiki, please report it on the talk page or at Phabricator.

Thank you in advance! -- User:Sannita (WMF) (talk) 15:07, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]