User talk:Jdforrester (WMF)

Welcome
 Dear, Welcome to MediaWiki.org !

Yes, welcome! This site is dedicated to documenting 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 useful documentation of the MediaWiki software. Thanks, and regards,  Aude (talk) 15:52, 23 May 2012 (UTC)

You need no welcome, but welcome! ;) Aude (talk) 15:52, 23 May 2012 (UTC)


 * Thanks. ;-)
 * Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 17:42, 23 May 2012 (UTC)

Sorry
I thought that page was for a simple description. Sorry for being wrong.Jasper Deng (talk) 22:09, 21 June 2012 (UTC)


 * No worries. :-)
 * Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 22:10, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Monthly statuses in Template:Wikimedia project status line/blue link
Hey James. I noticed you edited that template to add a link to add a monthly status update. The gadget makes this very easy with the "include in the monthly report" checkbox when you add a new status update. I wonder, is the gadget not working for you? If so, we should probably fix the gadget rather than adding an extra link to all the activity pages that transclude the template. Also, the link you added seems to do nothing for people with the gadget enabled, so it might be confusing. guillom 16:35, 24 July 2012 (UTC)


 * Oh, I'm sorry, there's a gadget? It might help if someone had told me. :-) Will look now. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 16:40, 24 July 2012 (UTC)


 * OK, having now found the gadget it does indeed cause the template to break (it's over-riding both functionality but only replacing one of them with the pop-up); however, for non-gadget users (who we have to assume are the majority of users of the site, if you're not going to enable it by default for all users) this is confusing. How about I set the gadget as default and revert my template changes? Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 16:43, 24 July 2012 (UTC)


 * The gadget is linked from the top of Wikimedia engineering report/2012/July, but apparently not prominently enough :) I don't see an issue with enabling the gadget as default. guillom 16:48, 24 July 2012 (UTC)


 * ... and now done. :-) Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 17:05, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

Query on VisualEditor module
Hello, is the "VisualEditor Module" project still in its construction phase?I would liketo undertake this with your guidance --Rahul21 (talk) 04:40, 10 March 2013 (UTC)


 * Yes, the VisualEditor is still undergoing significant development and I wouldn't recommend deploying it to a production wiki unless you are prepared to potentially break things for your users. There is more information about how to experiment with it at Extension:VisualEditor. Hope this is helpful! Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 04:39, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

 * Thank you, TortoiseWrath, though my involvement in Echo was very slight! Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 15:17, 4 May 2013 (UTC)

GSoC / OPW IRC AllHands this week
Hi, you are invited to the GSoC / OPW IRC AllHands meeting on Wednesday, June 26, 2013 at 15:00 UTC (8:30pm IST, 8am PDT) at #wikimedia-office. We have done our best finding a time that works decently in as many timezones as possibles. Please confirm at qgil@undefinedwikimedia.org so I can add you to the calendar invitation and I have your preferred email for other occasions. If you can't make it's fine, but let me know as well. We have left a notice to all students, but your help is welcome making sure yours is aware about it. Thank you!--Qgil (talk) 20:35, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

Style guide
About this: Where's your style guide? International English Usage does not list that as an acceptable use of hyphens. The European Commission's English Style Guide (which does "EU English") specifically rejects it at 2.52, "In adverb-adjective modifiers, there is no hyphen when the adverb ends in -ly:" It is of course wrong in American, Australian, British, Canadian, Indian, and Irish English, so it seems unlikely to me that any "international English" standard would set itself directly against all of the major varieties of English. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:15, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Browser support
Hi James, thanks a lot for updating the browser matrix. Nemo_bis asked me whether FF ESR 17 would work with VE. I don't think I can test this for him, but even so there's a comment by Liangent that makes me think it wouldn't, so I thought I'd ask. Thanks. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:33, 4 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Thank you very much for clarifying further. The instructions should now be clear enough even for our partners' technicians. --Nemo 18:51, 4 December 2013 (UTC)
 * You're welcome; sorry it was unclear before. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 18:57, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

LQT new thread went to section header
Why does this happen, and what can I do to avoid it? Deryck C.Meta 16:25, 4 December 2013 (UTC)
 * 


 * It's caused by bug 41276 - LQT never implemented the catch on the API. :-( Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 18:00, 4 December 2013 (UTC)


 * But I clicked "Start a new discussion"! (The only difference I could think of is that I hit enter in the title textbox, rather than mouse-clicking the "save" button. Was that what was causing the problem? Deryck C.Meta 13:55, 8 December 2013 (UTC)


 * Oh. :-( In that case, probably a (different) odd bug with LQT? Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 20:18, 9 December 2013 (UTC)


 * Tried lots of stuff on the LQT test page. Can't replicate the bug. I have a feeling that it has something to do with middle-button-clicking the "start a new thread" button, which does cause weird behaviour, but I couldn't make the textbox post to the header rather than the thread list. Oh well :) Deryck C.Meta 22:43, 9 December 2013 (UTC)


 * Thanks for trying to reproduce, at least! Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 23:31, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

Also, if this was you (I couldn't tell because there's a known bug though the log suggests it was you), thank you for being the first person ever to thank me using the "thank them for this edit" button! [Nobody] thanked you for your edit on VisualEditor/Feedback. 1 day ago | View edit Deryck C.Meta 16:52, 11 December 2013 (UTC)


 * Ha. Whoops, didn't know about that bug; yes, 'twas I. :-) Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 19:10, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

VE and WYSIWYG
I stumbled upon Extension:WYSIWYG, and it appears to me that it was working well enough on most browsers, even several years before the first VisualEditor beta, and various sites were – and some still are (including Wikia, AFAIK) – using it. While I do thank you all for the awesome work done on VE, I was just wondering why the Wikimedia Foundation has focused the development on a visual editor so lately. Were there any issues with CKEditor that prevented it from being installed or used on WMF servers? Or has the Foundation recently changed its mind on the matter, and thought it was worth starting a new project from scratch? I don't know whether this question has already been asked somewhere else, in case you can simply link a detailed answer ;-) -- Ricordi  samoa  09:40, 2 February 2014 (UTC)


 * Hey. Thank you for the comments. Yes, there were a number of issues with existing HTML editors (including CKEditor) which meant that we felt that our only option was to write our own. Most notably, proper rich generated content support is lacking from all HTML editors we evaluated, including CKEditor as used at Wikia (and in other extensions and CMSes) – having puzzle pieces, or "sorry, we can't edit this page with this editor" messages was considered not good enough. A principle design objective for VisualEditor is that a user could edit all our content and do anything they could do in wikitext, with exceptions only where we actively stop them from doing silly things (like adding both  and   to the same page). There's also significant issues with language support – in general, MediaWiki supports not just more languages than other software, but a super-set. I agree that it would have been much easier if we could have just simply extended an existing editor, but it didn't turn out to be possible from our research. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 02:38, 15 February 2014 (UTC)


 * But what if a good WYSIWYG extension had been available, say, in 2009, would the WMF had adopted it? Or do you believe that the interest in visual editing is only a recent trend? -- Ricordi  samoa  03:16, 15 February 2014 (UTC)


 * We've been talking off-and-on about a visual editor for MediaWiki for about a decade, but we only seriously started work in 2010. Had there been a great extension that met our needs (or mostly so) then we'd probably never have thought to build our own. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 19:14, 20 February 2014 (UTC)


 * Thank you very much for your time. Regards, -- Ricordi  samoa  19:47, 20 February 2014 (UTC)

Careful with FlaggedRevs
Please check better the diffs you review, here you approved an almost vandalic, ridiculously wrong edit by an unregistered user:. It mistated dependencies and installation steps and very funnily stated that Translate is part of the Semantic Bundle; a user got very confused. Also, please don't use the "quality" setting unless you "maintain" a page or there is consensus about it, because it effectively protects the page for anyone but the highest levels in user groups. --Nemo 19:24, 23 February 2014 (UTC)


 * Eurgh. Why can't we switch the stupid extension off? It's actively unhelpful to demand in big bold letters at the top of every users' watchlist that they should review changes, and then not actually show the changes that are intended. Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 16:37, 24 February 2014 (UTC)


 * I sometimes find it useful for some changes I can let someone double check without pressure but yes, I rarely enable it myself on a page. I've never felt bored enough to question its broader usage and the review stats don't look too bad, though. --Nemo 17:14, 24 February 2014 (UTC)


 * The review stats don't look bad because we've an active editor base who get screamed at by the interface if they let unreviewed edits sit around. It doesn't mean it's adding value… Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 17:16, 24 February 2014 (UTC)


 * Sure, I'm just saying that we lack the easiest argument one can win a "let's disable the extension" battle with. --Nemo 17:22, 24 February 2014 (UTC)