User talk:John Vandenberg

 Dear, Welcome to MediaWiki.org !

Yes, Welcome! This site is dedicated to the documentation of the MediaWiki software, the software behind many wikis, including that of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation projects.

Please, take a look at the following pages. They might prove useful to you as a newcomer here:
 * Project:About
 * How does MediaWiki work?
 * Help:Editing pages
 * Help:Navigation
 * Manual:FAQ

If you have any questions, please ask me on my talk page. Once again, welcome, and I hope you quickly feel comfortable here, and find this site a beneficial documentation of the MediaWiki software. Thanks, and regards, .. Cometstyles 09:39, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

Eth Just-
Can you welcome me --Eth Just- 22:42, 21 May 2010 (UTC)Eth Just-

User talk:Splarka
John. Do you know of anyone who might be able to help us with this? — billinghurst  sDrewth  11:11, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

Image:Toolbar edittools id.wiki.png
What's happening there? I've never seen a worse toolbar. --Nemo 12:18, 15 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Mostly user:bennylin adding admin/patrolling tools to id:MediaWiki:Edittools because they dont have something like w:WP:TWINKLE. John Vandenberg (talk) 13:10, 15 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Cheers. Any suggestion/improvement would be greatly appreciated. Bennylin (talk) 08:20, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
 * I think Edittols in their normal position below the save buttons are just fine. :-) --Nemo 00:02, 24 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Wow! Excuse me, Mr. Nemo... it's become public (normal position) for wiki-id user since 2005. How do we replace them as you want and ignore the the public of wiki-id? Uhm... I think SnipManager is one of solutions. I plan to translate into wiki-id.  Ę-oиė   >>>  ™ 06:48, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

Browser testing "getting started" link
Hey John,

I promised you a link on Saturday to a "getting started" guide to automated browser testing from the QA team; they've suggested Quality Assurance/Browser testing as a good place start for you (or others) if interested.

Sorry for the slow response!

Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 18:52, 20 February 2014 (UTC)

Talk:Typography refresh
Hi John, I'm getting very depressed around this recent catastrophe. It's clear that the reports from users in other languages are going to be ignored, nobody is filing them in bugzilla. I don't have the energies to impact on this sad situation and it would take a lot of organising to make people in all languages file reports in bugzilla with all the required information (which is a lot). As I can't do anything about this tragedy, the only sensible reaction is to forget it and carry over, but I have no idea how to forget all this. Do you have suggestions? --Nemo 08:21, 11 April 2014 (UTC) P.s.: For now I unwatched all related pages and removed myself from cc of about 40 related bugs. I doubt it will be enough though....
 * I'm not surprised it has turned out this way, but refusal to accept the reality of how bad this was is mind boggling, and I also dont want to waste my time on it while there is such obstinance being demonstrated by a few people. I'm hoping that in a few days the WMF employees will revert this nonsense until they have a solution that is actually better (having done proper impact analysis) for a decently long set of use cases for not English/Latin as that is where most of the edge cases are.  If they intend to blunder on, bug reports are worthless as there are so many and most cant be fixed except by a revert or an upstream fix.  We can expect that soon a lot of sysadmins will be seeking help on mediawiki.org channels when they upgrade and receive complaints from their userbase.  Also chapters and other bloggers in the blog planets should write well illustrated posts showing the result in their language.
 * What sensible things to do, other than forget? Ask for this feature, which is obviously still beta at best, be put back in Beta features under preferences, default enabled if necessary to keep WMF staff feeling like they have done a great job and made progress.  Or create and popularise a gadget to do it?  Create a userscript?  Fork the Vector skin?  Promote monobook or another good skin.  The mobile skin appears to be part of the driving force behind this mess.  IMO having no skin choice for mobile is not good - users should be able to choose which skin is used for mobile, with at least two good mobile optimised skins, and the user should be able to select a non-mobile skin if they dont like the mobile skins.  Sort of related, Fonts can be migrated into Wikidata and a lot more data added, essentially describing what font stacks render each language correctly, and how Wikipedia's have used templates to alter the font stacks for snippets of text in languages other than the wiki's content language.
 * John Vandenberg (talk) 10:10, 11 April 2014 (UTC)
 * A lot of work with fonts was already done with ULS, each font being tested by native speakers. I don't plan to duplicate any of that. Wikimedia volunteers are completely subject to WMF whims, for the others perhaps the only sensible option is to tell everyone they should use monobook. WMF seems convinced that they need to use Vector as playground for their future English Wikipedia restyling, so the sooner people abandon it the better. --Nemo 11:41, 11 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Is the ULS work for fonts available publicly? I asked in IRC office hours/Office hours 2013-11-03 whether their IME work was public, and didnt get a response. John Vandenberg (talk) 00:06, 13 April 2014 (UTC)


 * See Milkshake. Fonts are in the fontrepo directory of the ULS extension, there is no human-readable version of it. --Nemo 18:33, 13 April 2014 (UTC)

Thread:Project talk:New contributors/English Wikipedia first
On wikimedia-l/2014-September/074303.html, maybe someone already linked it, but see the above thread just revived by Waldir. --Nemo 10:52, 6 September 2014 (UTC)


 * I was just reading a brilliant suggestion from user:Johnuniq a few months ago: Jimbo's talk page should be migrated to Flow, as an early adopter. John Vandenberg (talk) 11:30, 6 September 2014 (UTC)


 * Genius! --Nemo 16:54, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

I visited this site to lookup something and noticed the ping, so here is something else that's been on my mind (I haven't bothered posting this at en:WT:Flow because it has too much noise). The real problem with Flow is that there will be no way to test how it works as a system until it is working on many talk pages and noticeboards. After a year or two of paid development has got that far, it would be very hard to influence Flow's momentum and very hard to roll it back. Flow is a moving target and I do not know what the plan is now, but it seems the idea is that everything would be on one page—I would see this conversation plus others at various projects where I have deployed a module, plus talk pages of articles I'm following, and all the noticeboards and village pumps. That might be an unmanageable mess, although I can see it might suit a newbie who has just dropped in to perhaps four discussions and doesn't want to see anything else. The only testing I've seen has been completely fake "Hello this is a test" followed by "Me too"—we won't have any idea of what a watchlist or notification list would look like for a heavy duty contributor until after it happens. Johnuniq (talk) 01:54, 9 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Absolutely. I don't fear the software won't be very good; I expect it will end up being quite useful for limited usage, and very likely suitable for newbies, but I do worry how it will work for people who have large watchlist (e.g. mine on enwp, now sitting at 30,000).
 * It is the deploy that concerns me. If they don't get it right, it will end up rejected by at least the larger projects, which would be a shame. John Vandenberg (talk) 08:19, 9 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Cf. Community Engagement (Product)/Process ideas. --Nemo 10:47, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

Re: Pywikibot mentoring
I should really say no, I'm listed as co-mentor for most of the current featured ideas! But I really want to learn Python properly at last and I love working with you, plus the projects you added are great... I find myself saying yes, sure. I have one request though, please add a micro-task for each of them (possibly even the same), so that people get something useful done on their own before contacting us with generic and time-demanding requests. It's a really necessary filter. An idea could be to define a certain number of rows or columns of Comparison of wiki software they need to update and/or add references for. I only recently added an Import/Export column and we still lack columns for web API, internal API etc.; I added on talk some links to possible resources but there seems to be a depressing shortage of recent research. --Nemo 10:47, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

API-head vs. Properties page
Great that you solved the problem, but now that you've done that, I'm about to split the page, then do Meta so that we're doing things consistently. :) – Robin Hood  (talk)  04:30, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks for doing some of the links. I've got a bot-assisted list of what needs to be changed and I've done all the Meta ones that I can, but I don't know how to do the ones on the various translations of MediaWiki 1.24. Can you do those and I'll move on to section links to the Properties page? Thanks! – Robin Hood  (talk)  06:15, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Similarly, the Properties pages links have now all been updated except for the various translations of Extension:CommonsMetadata. – Robin Hood  (talk)  06:28, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks a bunch. Yes, I'll look after all the translated pages with links to both. John Vandenberg (talk) 06:35, 22 February 2015 (UTC)
 * ✅ MediaWiki 1.24. Still a lot more to be done to migrate the old translations in Special:Prefixindex/API:Lists, Special:Prefixindex/API:Properties and Special:Prefixindex/API:Meta to the new Translation system (which I am still learning).  Also Special:Prefixindex/API:Tokens and Special:Prefixindex/API:Parsing wikitext need migration.
 * We should also update Manual:MediaWiki Application Programming Interface API Guide, probably first updating it to use the structure at User:Titopao/Books/MediaWiki_API by user:Titopao. John Vandenberg (talk) 10:19, 22 February 2015 (UTC)

Edited your note
Meant to mention in my edit summary and I forgot...I edited your note slightly at API talk:Main page just to collapse the very long list of undocumented modules. Hope that's okay. If not, by all means, delete them again. – Robin Hood  (talk)  16:22, 24 February 2015 (UTC)

Siteinfo edits
Thanks for adding some of the version numbers to the Siteinfo page. That's actually my project for today (well, one of them) to continue updating all that info. Generally speaking, we haven't been adding version numbers to parameters or results when the version number is the same as the base version for the feature (in this case, 1.8). I can see the argument to do so, however, as it does make it very clear. Should we maybe make that the new standard? Any thoughts? – Robin Hood  (talk)  17:16, 19 June 2015 (UTC)
 * omg thank you for updating the rest of them. That is awesome!  As they are sorted by name, I think it is useful to have 1.8+.  Also the minimum version in the API-head is not visible on my screen when viewing the "Results" section, and probably other peoples screen too.  I dont think it makes as much sense to include it in the Parameters section, but as it only applies to   and   it doesnt bother me either way.  I feel it is especially beneficial when the API parameters and results change wildly over many versions.  Before declaring a new 'standard', I'll need to think about this more while looking at other API: pages.  John Vandenberg (talk) 01:03, 20 June 2015 (UTC)
 * Yeah, after deciding to work on these pages (albeit very slowly), I set up my system with a full-text search on PHP files, and then downloaded every major version of MW I could get my hands on (back to about 1.3, I think). It makes it really easy to figure out what version a feature was introduced in, though it's still a bit of a nuisance when it comes to parameters or results with non-unique names like "fallback", which also finds "fallback8bitencoding", since the Windows search doesn't include the option for full-word searches (that I'm aware of). As for the versions being general and namespace only, I'm making my way through every section in the siteinfo module when I find the time, updating the page as I go, so I suspect other sections will develop version info as I go. – Robin Hood  (talk)  02:14, 20 June 2015 (UTC)