User talk:Whatamidoing (WMF)

Edit request
Hi, Whatamidoing. Would you kindly read Talk:VisualEditor/Portal/ja and help me to modify the page? Thanks.--miya (talk) 05:46, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
 * I have replied there. I think it is fixed now.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 14:26, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Re: A barnstar for you!
Oh, thank you, that's nice. I have expected no expressed appreciation. Just doing my work ;) Tar Lócesilion|queta! 22:19, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Another info. I didn't introduce myself and now is a proper moment. On the Polish Wikipedia, I coordinate all of metastuff (as I described on my user page) so I believe we'll collaborate. But now, I have to go offline for a few days and I won't be keeping my eye on VE pl.translating/lauching/proper namespaces/you know/and so on — so if you want to contact somebody interested, experienced and knowledgeable from plwiki with VE stuff, I suggest Matma Rex and PMG (our technicians) and Maire (translates into Polish). At the moment we 4 (or — in a few hours — they 3) can help and want to. As you know, an important thing is importing translated pages from mw to pl regularly — which, unfortunately, I cannot do (damn, I need more rights :P). So I have a question: who can we ask for import it except you? The Stewards? Tar Lócesilion|queta! 14:02, 12 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Unexpectedly, I'm back earlier. You're right, the translation is in PD, so I can copy and paste it and there's no problem with import right (yes, plwiki admins have it). Tar Lócesilion|queta! 11:31, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Re: Urgent small translation
'Done' and 'at your service' :) Tar Lócesilion|queta! 18:31, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Thank you! If pl.wikipedia really is on the list now, then those banners will be visible over there later today.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:37, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks for this info, it's obviously very important and very interesting ;) In summer, it's so sleepy on our project—many of us go offline or at least take a Wikibreak. I have brought the news (indeed, we have many communication paths) and I hope that most of us will read it and everything will be ok, after all :) Tar Lócesilion|queta! 20:05, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Re: Progress
Yes, I like it :) I've also noticed your page before :) I care about the translation, because I realize that the whole documentation must be translated not only before VE is launched, but as soon as possible—in order to provide complete information for those who are clicking on the CentralNotice banner even right now. Imho Wikipedia must be most reliable ;) Tar Lócesilion|queta! 21:05, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Hi
You took my name of the RFC list on English Wikipedia. Can you restore it please, and if possible add the missing RFC notifications to may talk page? Thank you. RFC&#32;watcher (talk) 20:55, 25 July 2013 (UTC)
 * You can do it yourself.
 * I am curious why a person who never comments on any of them actually wants people to ask him for his comments, though. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:05, 25 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Of course were I able to do it myself I would do so. I only asked for your help because it was needed. As to your curiosity, application of a little thought will doubtless satisfy you. RFC&#32;watcher (talk) 18:17, 27 July 2013 (UTC)
 * You are able to do it. The page is not protected.  Anyone can edit that page.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:50, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

Media Viewer: German translation
Hi, you commented on my little issue with the German translation "In Vollbild anzeigen" in Media Viewer and suggested, to remove the preposition to make it "Vollbild anzeigen", in case nobody would mind. But the section with the suggestion has now been archived. I thought, I remind you of the matter here, so it doesn't get lost. --Miss-Sophie (talk) 22:40, 11 July 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks, Miss-Sophie. I've made the change.  I don't know when it will reach the wikis, but I believe it's usually about one day.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 15:22, 14 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Danke! :-) --Miss-Sophie (talk) 17:59, 14 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Miss-Sophie, A translator at TWN has changed it to "Im Vollbildmodus anzeigen", which is an option that we hadn't previously discussed. I don't know what you think of that.  I've left a note for the translator.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:49, 17 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Heiya, once again thank for your pointer. I reverted back to the previous version of the translation hopefully before the scheduled translations update to the repo. Thus this would remain just at twn. "Im Vollbildmodus anzeigen" may perhaps be to technical for some tastes so I am fine with other translations, too. Cheers --&#91;&#91;kgh&#93;&#93; (talk) 19:35, 17 July 2014 (UTC)
 * I would have been fine with that version, too. If you read our discussion again, you'll find, that I had actually suggested "Im Vollbildmodus anzeigen" as an alternative, too :-) . I don't prefer one or the other, as long as it's not "In Vollbild anzeigen". --Miss-Sophie (talk) 23:18, 17 July 2014 (UTC)
 * I forgot about that; I'm sorry. Kgh, I'm okay with anything that makes both of you happy.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:15, 18 July 2014 (UTC)
 * I am not absolutely happy with the current solution, but what I did yesterday is not best of breed either. After more thinking I came up with the pair "Vollbildanzeige aktivieren" and "Vollbildanzeige deaktivieren". Since this is going to end up in Popups for informatory purposes this appears to me a good one. Miss-Sophie? --&#91;&#91;kgh&#93;&#93; (talk) 13:16, 18 July 2014 (UTC) PS Indeed "In Vollbild anzeigen" is no good.
 * I don't like the word "Vollbildanzeige". Better "Vollbildansicht aktivieren/deaktivieren"? --Miss-Sophie (talk) 20:52, 18 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Yeah, that's even better. Cool, I believe we should go for this pair. :) --&#91;&#91;kgh&#93;&#93; (talk) 20:06, 21 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks for making that update, User:Kghbln. You and Miss-Sophie make a great pair.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:50, 21 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Thank you for your effort to make us liaise. --&#91;&#91;kgh&#93;&#93; (talk) 07:30, 22 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Looks nice with "Vollbildansicht aktivieren", User:Kghbln, thanks. Would be even better, if one could actually also see the opposite (for deactivating) on mouseover (I complained about this and they opened a bug report, but grudgingly; it seems, there are too many larger problems right now or they consider it unimportant.) --Miss-Sophie (talk) 22:14, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Perfection is always possible. Good that we found ours here. :) MediaViewer is already a great improvement but basically just "2 months" old. So I expect heaps of changes anyway. Cheers --&#91;&#91;kgh&#93;&#93; (talk) 08:03, 26 July 2014 (UTC)

RE:A barnstar for you!
Thanks! Bye, --Elisardojm (talk) 22:07, 28 January 2015 (UTC)

RE: VE character inserter - Icelandic
I think you have misunderstood by post at the VisualEditor/Feedback page. That post was sent as an answer to en:Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Iceland. So let me re-summarize my previous post.

I don't think Icelandic needs an special character inserter. Icelandic has had keyboard support since the 1980's. Currently there is Icelandic support on mac, windows, android and iOS.

This does raise an question. Why is Icelandic in phase 5 on VisualEditor's roll-out schedule? Why is the VE team falsely claiming that Icelandic employs "characters or diacritic marks not supported by common keyboards in the region" ? (quote copied from VisualEditor/Rollouts) --Snaevar (talk) 16:49, 7 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Snaevar, is it your experience that all editors at is.wp have these settings enabled? Or do some of them work with (for example) English settings, and add the more complex characters through other means?  If using the Icelandic keyboard settings are very common, and if you'd all like to have VisualEditor enabled by default at is.wp now, then I could ask it to be done as early as Tuesday.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:06, 7 March 2015 (UTC)

Translation (VisualEditor Survey)
No problem at all. You can use those translations as you see fit.Lsanabria (talk) 22:12, 16 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Thank you! Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:25, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

Q4 triage meetings
Why only on Google Hangouts? Please justify. There should be some alternative method rather than just video, as not all users will be equipped with that feature and not everyone has reliable internet connection.

Or have I got it all wrong about how it is going to work, anyway please explain , it'll be helpful.

--Leaderboard (talk) 20:47, 23 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Hi Leaderboard,
 * You don't have to use video to use Google Hangouts. I frequently have mine dialed down to zero, and I've used it to telephone people who were away from their computers.
 * The main issue is the cost–benefit equation. User:Elitre (WMF) and I have provided real-time summaries of the discussions this quarter, and AFAICT, no volunteers have shown up in the IRC channel for the last couple of meetings.  Zero joined the Hangout last week, either, and in previous weeks, the people who weren't present for their jobs tended to number just two or three.
 * Posting announcements, scheduling the meeting, and setting up the IRC channel takes me at least half an hour. Then there's the time of the meeting (originally an hour, but only 30 minutes more recently), plus about 10 minutes of time to shut down (e.g., posting the IRC logs).  I'm left feeling like I'm spending more than an hour each week on facilitating a meeting that is so unimportant to our tens of thousands of volunteers that exactly zero of them are showing up for it.
 * So we're working out a low-maintenance plan. The meetings will happen anyway, because the work needs to be done, and there's no need to keep them closed.  What we can eliminate is scheduling changes, weekly announcements, last-minute reminders, typing everything out in IRC, and posting logs.  That turns a 30-minute meeting into 31 minutes of work (one minute to login to the Hangout, plus 30 minutes for the meeting) for James F and 0 minutes of work for me, rather than 75 minutes of work for me and 31 minutes of work for James F (work that he'll be doing anyway, in case I want to drop in and ).
 * If you have other ideas about how to achieve the same level of efficiency, then please feel free to share them. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:59, 23 March 2015 (UTC)
 * In addition to this, you don't even need to be there to make sure tasks are considered. The procedure for nominating them is described on the meetings' page, and you can discuss them at any time on Phabricator itself and on IRC in the team's channel. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 11:02, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

Starting conversion of LiquidThreads to Flow at mediawiki.org
Hello. I'm sending this to you, because you've been one of the top 50 users of LQT on mediawiki.org over the last 360 days, and I wanted to make sure that you'd seen the announcement at Starting conversion of LiquidThreads to Flow at mediawiki.org. There are links in the topic-summary at the top, for other discussions (wikitech-l and Project:Current_issues), and a link to the planned process and timeline (scheduled to begin April 6, with smaller conversions at first). Please do test Flow out at Talk:Sandbox if you haven't tried it recently, and give any feedback/suggestions/requests at that main discussion location. Much thanks, Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 23:50, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

Talk:Content translation
Hey. I just noticed there is an unanswered query (1 day old) at Talk:Content translation. Not nagging, just pointing it out in case it's been missed. (I've left a comment that doesn't need an answer.) --Anthonyhcole (talk) 09:03, 4 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the note. It's easy to miss things here, especially in Flow.  User:Amire80 will have to answer that one, though, as I don't know the answer.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 05:20, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

T119457
Thanx! Naraht (talk) 14:17, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

Phabricator task:T120738 - List Of Contributors
Hello, I am planning to do my GSoC 2016 with Mediawiki Community. I recently came across the project -List Of Contributors in the phabricator task -https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T120738. I found it to be very interesting and would like to work on it for my GSoC this year. It is a useful feature that can be enabled in Mediawiki. But currently no mentors are assigned to it. So I wanted to know if you will be able to mentor this project for this year's GSoC.


 * Hi Devi, thanks for your note. I'm asking around to see who can help you with this.   Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 06:09, 1 March 2016 (UTC)


 * Devi, I have asked a developer at T120738. Let's see how it goes.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 14:24, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

Update
Yes. ? saw the bug was resolved, but thank you for the notification :)-- Fringio — α†Ω 16:18, 8 February 2017 (UTC)

==Kreyol Ayisien Translation== Hello! I got your message about translating an urgent message into kreyol. I didn't know where to send it so I will leave it here for you:
 * Fondasyon an Wikimedia pral fè yon tès nan sant done li yo nan Dallas. Sa a pral asire w ke Wikipedya ak Wikimedia rete sou entènèt menm apre yon dezas. Tès sa a pral demontre ke Wikipedya ka chanje soti nan yon sant done nan lòt la. efò sa a egzije pou ke anpil Wikipedya prepare yo pou tès la ak lojisyèl ranje nenpòt pwoblèm inatandi. Tout trafik Wikipedya pral chanje nan sant done nan Dallas nan Mèkredi, 19 avril 2017. Nan Mèkredi, 3 me 2017 yo, yo pral chanje tounen nan sant la prensipal done. Malerezman, paske nan kèk limit nan MedyaWiki yo, tout koreksyon dwe sispann pandan de switch sa yo. Nou ekskize nou pou dezòd sa a, epi n ap travay pou misyon pou minimize l 'nan tan kap vini an.


 * Ou pral kapab li, men se pa modifye yo, tout wiki pou yon kout peryòd de tan.


 * Ou pa yo pral kapab modifye pou apeprè 20 a 30 minit nan Mèkredi, 19 avril ak Mèkredi, 3 me. Si ou modifye oswa sove pandan moman sa yo, ou pral wè yon mesaj erè. Nou espere ke pa gen okenn edits yo pral pèdi pandan minit sa yo, men nou pa ka garanti li. Si ou wè mesaj la erè, tanpri rete tann jiskaske tout bagay se retounen nan nòmal. Ou ta dwe kapab pou konsève pou modifye ou yo. Nou rekòmande pou ou fè yon kopi chanjman ou jis nan ka.


 * Lòt efè:
 * Travay nan lòt zòn yo pral ralanti ak kèk ka pa travay nan tout. Lyen yo wouj nan atik ka pa mennen nan lòt atik kòm byen ke nòmal. Si ou ekri yon atik ki deja lye nan yon atik nan yon diferan, lyen ki pa kapab travay epi rete wouj. Gen kèk pwogram yo ap sispann. Li pral fè lòt kòd ki pa pral travay pandan semèn yo nan 17 April 2017 ak 1 me 2017. pouvwa chanjman sa a dwe ranvwaye. Ou ka li orè a nan wikitech.wikimedia.org. Nenpòt chanjman ki fèt pral anonse nan orè a. Li pral fè plis notifikasyon sou sa a.


 * I couldn’t translate “15:00 BST, 16:00 CEST, 10:00 EDT, 07:00 PDT” and “Non-essential code deployments will not happen.” because I don’t even know what the text means (she said with a red face).
 * Best Regards
 * Barbara (WVS) (talk) 18:55, 29 March 2017 (UTC) aka Barbara Page
 * Thank you! I was just thinking about sending a note to the translators mailing list about the timezones.  It makes sense to only include the ones that are relevant (that'd be the Eastern timezone for Haitian speakers).  And I'd have no idea how to translate that line about the technical side, either.  I know what they mean (every week, there's a whole dance that moves bug fixes and other recently written code onto the correct servers, and that's not happening during this test), but it's kind of specialized jargon, isn't it?  I think we can ignore it.  I'll go set up the translation page for Haitian.  Look for another ping from me in a little while...  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:14, 29 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Okay, I've got it started. What I'd like you to do is to click this link to see the translation page.  It should take you straight to a two-column layout that shows the original (English) on the left and the parts of your translation that I've pasted in on the right.  First, please check to make sure that I didn't screw anything up.  ;-)  If I did, then just click on the error, and it'll give you a box to fix that sentence/short section.  Click "Save translation" when you're happy with it.  If something's missing (I've only copied about a quarter of your work), then you can click the missing item, and you can add the translation yourself.  Each translated bit gets saved separately, and you can easily skip anything that you don't want to do (it lists the keyboard shortcuts for this near the save button, or just click on a different bit).  You can check the results at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/Server_switch_2017/ht – it updates immediately.
 * Two things to know: First, if you see wikitext markup ( bold, brackets for [links], etc.), then use that markup just like you normally would.  Second, the only thing that's likely to surprise you is the   system for links.  You'll need to edit "The test will start at [$time 14:00 UTC] (10:00 a.m. EDT)." to say in Haitian Creole that the test will start at 14:00 UTC (which is 10:00 a.m. in Haiti and on the East Coast).  If you keep the " " part the same, and the reader will see "14:00 UTC" there, and the link will let the reader figure out what the local time is.  The brackets are to mark the external link (just like always), and the   is so that the translation box isn't filled with a long URL.
 * Please let me know how you get along with this translation interface. And thank you so much!  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:37, 29 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Do you want me to do a more accurate cut and paste on the page you sent me to? It doesn't seem to line up correctly and I want to make sure I did it right. Did you get someone to translate into 'Simple English'? The list of top medical editors for 2016 is out now and somehow the ht wikipedya didn't get listed in my column. Not that it matters but it would be nice if that caught the attention of another potential medical editor.
 * Best Regards, Barbara (WVS) (talk) 19:17, 30 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Yes, I'd be happy to have you fix it all. You can see the current state at m:Tech/Server switch 2017/ht.  I haven't heard of anyone planning a Simple English translation.  Are you interested?
 * Odd that the editing stats weren't complete. Maybe they didn't include any small wikis?  Or they might be dependent upon WikiProject tags, which the small wikis don't use.  User:Doc James probably knows what the limitations are.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:31, 30 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Which editing stats are we wondering about? Doc James (talk) 22:57, 30 March 2017 (UTC)
 * The ones that count how many edits were made by WPMED folks each year. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:41, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Not sure what you are asking? The stats do include small Wikis via the intralanguage links. Doc James (talk) 14:00, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Barbara says that her work at ht.wikipedia.org wasn't included. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 15:26, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Hatian WP was listed for you
 * It only includes edits to article which link via Wikidata to an article tagged by EN WP. User:Barbara (WVS) do you have edits in 2016 that correspond to that? I can than follow up with Amir who generates the data. Doc James (talk) 15:37, 1 April 2017 (UTC)
 * It looks like some of her contributions there are at articles that don't have interlanguage links set up. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 15:42, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

VE user guide
Hullo! Since you have at leasta uploaded most of the screenshots used on the VisualEditor guide page, I'm guessing you're kind of "in charge" of it maybe? When recreating Norwegian-language screenshots for it, I noticed that the following images don't seem to be current anymore, so maybe you should make new screenshots for them? I may add some more if I come across any. :-) Jon Harald Søby (talk) 12:32, 9 April 2017 (UTC)
 * File:VisualEditor references more.png
 * File:VisualEditor cite menu default.png
 * Hmmm, when I think about it, those may perhaps be current, but using different systems than what we have in the Norwegian Wikipedia. If that's the case, do you know of any wikis (maybe some labs wikis) that use the various systems, so I can go there to take screenshots? Jon Harald Søby (talk) 13:05, 9 April 2017 (UTC)
 * First of all: thank you for doing this work!
 * There are three different citation systems in VisualEditor. No, I'm wrong; there are four, depending on how you count:
 * the one that you have at nowiki (uses the citoid service),
 * the one that you see at etwiki (citation templates, but no citoid service),
 * the one that you see at dawiki (like etwiki, but without citation templates), and
 * the one that you see here at mediawiki.org and most of the sister projects (like dawiki, but the button is hidden at the end of the Insert menu).
 * It's a nightmare for documentation. I started a couple of sub-pages before option #4 was created, but I haven't touched them for a long time.  My idea was that a wiki could pick the relevant section, and ignore the rest (but it's a lot of work, and it's not easy for translations).  Do you have ideas/advice/suggestions?  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:06, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

VE and math formulas
Hi Whatamidoing, I am currently creating a small survey w:de:WP:Umfragen/Math-Tags concerning Extension talk:Math/Roadmap and intrested in what the WMF-developers think about the issue. If you can address the problem somewhere, I'd be happy to provide more detailed questions, translate the survey for you or add a WMF-proposed-solution.--Debenben (talk) 18:20, 30 April 2017 (UTC)


 * Hi Debenben,
 * As a quick reply, I suspect that the devs will not be happy about any change that breaks all the existing wikitext (e.g., requiring that all math formulaes include an explicit "inline" or "block" setting), unless somoene is volunteering to fix it all first.
 * Additionally, the use of  to produce a visual effect is wrong (produces invalid HTML and annoys people who use screen readers) and shouldn't be done.
 * Beyond that, I'm not sure whether the devs have developed views yet. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:20, 1 May 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the quick reply. I would have guessed, that they do not like invalid HTML formatting, but that inevitably means changing all existing wikitext. Personally, I can only see a benefit of doing that if it does not mean changing to a system that is broken in a different way (having an incomprehensible, wrong default format). Please let me know if they come up with a solution.--Debenben (talk) 20:15, 1 May 2017 (UTC)
 * Right now, AFAICT, there are three 'styles'. The three styles do not look the same (to the reader).  It might be possible to reduce this to two styles (block and inline), with "block" being used whenever the style is not specified in the wikitext.  What do you think of this approach?  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:21, 3 May 2017 (UTC)
 * It should be reduced to two styles, but I think whenever the style is not specified, "inline" should be used. When looking for example at Pythagorean theorem, most uses of are indeed block-equations and plain HTML or w:en:Template:Math is used inside the text. This is because the  is not very well adjusted to the typography of the surrounding text (see w:en:WP:Rendering math for comparison). This approach is specific to the English Wikipedia. In the German Wikipedia, the equivalent math-template does not exist. Instead, it is encouraged to write all mathematical symbols in TeX with the argument that TeX is the proper way of typesetting them and the shortcomings of browsers and the MediaWiki software in displaying them nicely can hopefully be overcome in the future. As a result Satz des Pythagoras has a lot more inline formulas. Replacing all of them with  would make the wikitext much more difficult to read and type and in my view is not a good solution. A solution could be to introduce a new shortcut, e.g. <$> for inline equations or making "inline" default and adding display attributes to all block equations, which is much less obtrusive. A different solution that I have not yet added to the list, would be to introduce new templates. The advantage would be that the math tags do not need to change its behavior and the German Wikipedia community can name and customize its templates independently. For the VE however, it means supporting a bunch of new templates in the future. I am sure, ultimately everyone would like to have a behavior as close to LaTeX as possible. People will only have different views on how to get there and what trade-offs to accept.--Debenben (talk) 20:57, 3 May 2017 (UTC)

Hmm:

Default looks like this: $$ c = \sqrt{a^2 + b^2}. \,$$

Inline looks like this: $ c = \sqrt{a^2 + b^2}. \,$

Block looks like this: $$ c = \sqrt{a^2 + b^2}. \,$$

Do we really have three styles in use (at this wiki)? I see a slightly difference in the number of blank pixels above the superscripted numbers, but... Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:27, 4 May 2017 (UTC)
 * Sorry for the confusion, I misused the word "style". With "should be reduced to two styles" I mean two display-formats: One to be used inside the text (inline) which should be the default format, and one that creates a new paragraph (block). There are in fact at least four different "styles" of which only two are really relevant:


 * displaystyle $$\displaystyle e^x = \sum_{n = 0}^\infty \frac{x^n}{n!}$$ this should be the default for block equations
 * textstyle $$\textstyle e^x = \sum_{n = 0}^\infty \frac{x^n}{n!}$$ this should be the default for inline equations
 * scriptstyle $$\scriptstyle e^x = \sum_{n = 0}^\infty \frac{x^n}{n!}$$
 * scriptscriptstyle $$\scriptscriptstyle e^x = \sum_{n = 0}^\infty \frac{x^n}{n!}$$


 * In fact the difference between the current "default" display-format and the "inline" display-format is that "default" puts a \displaystyle in front. In most cases, where no exponent or large operator is used, it is the same as \textstyle. I guess a lot of people actually know how to change the style and thus theoretically how to get the current "default" display-format from an "inline" display-format, but they would expect the VE in a "default" setting to automatically switch to inline and use \textstyle.--Debenben (talk) 16:41, 5 May 2017 (UTC)

Sorry in advance for the following lengthy answer. I'll start with an explanation how I think the problem was created, because it helps to understand why changing the CSS unfortunately is not enough to solve it:

In the very early days there was no math extension and people used HTML in the text and for more complicated block-formulas ASCII with a space in front. Then was introduced to create images replacing the ASCII formulas. The images were not intended for use inside the text (they did not have proper size or alignment). The layout was left to the editors, so they could use the images in tables etc. which lead to the use of  for indentation.

Because some math-characters were not available in HTML and the editors used to write mathematical expressions in TeX as well as for consistency and the same visual appearance of characters, was increasingly also used inside the text.

The two use-cases in principle have different requirements: Block equations are \displaystyle by default, can get a label and LaTeX adds (1) (2) ... by default. (Side-remark: w:en:Template:EquationRef unfortunately has quite a few deficiencies and is not compatible with the display="block" format.) To solve this, a display variable was introduced, implementing the LaTeX way of centering block equations and \textstyle as default for inline equations and eliminating the need for -indentation. The "default" format was kept for backwards-compatibility. The new display variable did not get an editor-friendly wikitext-interface, therefore it was not known, not used, and there was no need to change anything for the editors.

Then the VE editor was designed to support all three display-formats, but not the solely used  indentation and the current problem is complete, namely: (1) Almost all mathematical and scientific articles can only be edited to a limited degree with the VE, since it does not know how to add or remove leading  -indentations. (2) New editors get frustrated, trying to produce the  effect with the VE. I can give several examples, my final motivation to create the survey was this. (3) New editors are confused by the "default" format, since the VE always shows them "default", even though they clearly edit inline or block formulas in existing articles and cannot use "default" for creating block formulas themselves and switching between "default" and "inline" often does not change anything. (4) The result is inconsistent layout, (5) inconsistent wikitext and in case inline math would be changed to on a large scale, also hard-to-read.

Changing the CSS solves (2) and (4), but the other problems will persist and only get worse in the long term.--Debenben (talk) 23:12, 5 May 2017 (UTC)


 * Hi Debenben,
 * CSS changes solve (1) as well as (2) and (4), because then you can remove the semantically incorrect formatting from all the existing articles. I'd like to do this anyway, regardless of whatever else is done.  But I hesitate, because there is a tendency for each group to believe that their preferred style is objectively the best, and removing the centering might upset some people.
 * Are scriptstyle and scriptscriptstyle truly never needed on any wiki (even for a mathematics textbook at Wikibooks)?
 * I really appreciate your patience in explaining this to me. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:08, 15 May 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks for taking a look at the problem. I agree with the CSS change as a first step. Indenting and centering are common in literature but not a mixture of both. For the German Wikipedia community I can safely say that the CSS change will largely remain unnoticed (display="block" is used 4 times) and people will be happy with a consistent layout. From the English Wikipedia I remember a little RFC after which MathJax was switched to left-indentation. I don't expect people to have a strong opinion on the centering or indentation question. In general they tend to agree that the objectively best style in print is standard LaTeX or similar to it. They disagree on how to get this into a standard browser with the least drawbacks.
 * Sorry, in case I caused confusion with the styles again. All styles are used, but for different purposes. \displaystyle and \textstyle are two variants for the "body of an equation". \displaystlye being "the most beautiful and easy to read" and \textstlye is shrunk vertically such that LaTeX can fit all "common equations" into a text without additional spacing between lines. \scriptstyle is used for things like exponents. In
 * $$e^{\int_a^b\mathrm d x}$$
 * the $$\mathrm d x$$ should be \scriptstyle and $$a$$ and $$b$$ \scriptscriptstyle. Those styles are selected automatically and not changed in normal use. When changing them like
 * $$e^{\displaystyle \int_a^b\mathrm d x}$$
 * the $$e$$ looks like a fancy notation for some boundary. Therefore, instead of adding further "super- or subscripts" one rewrites e.g. $$\textstyle\exp\left(\int_c^b\mathrm dx\right)$$ with $$\textstyle c=\int_d^e\mathrm dt$$. You will find a lot of abuse of \scriptstyle in Wikipedia that dates back to the time when the alignment and size of was worse and \scriptstyle, although formally incorrect, resulted in an almost correct size and alignment in the text. Very recently someone also fixed size and alignment of SVG for different font sizes e.g. in image captions. Whoever did it: Thank you for that! Since then I don't know any example where \scriptstyle is needed or abused since explicitly changing styles is possible, but generally not needed and not encouraged in LaTeX.--Debenben (talk) 16:39, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

I finally managed to complete the explanation of the problem and start the survey, see w:de:WP:Umfragen/Konzept für mathematische Formeln.--Debenben (talk) 22:07, 16 September 2017 (UTC)

TemplateData pretty on template doc pages
Hi, on T137443 you complained about cluttered TemplateData presentation in cases where no details appropriate for parameters.

German Wikipedia introduced an enhancement this year, and shifted about 80 % of TemplateData specs already.

Find more: Greetings --PerfektesChaos (talk) 19:59, 14 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Module description (English)
 * Test overview
 * Presentation mix

Help:VisualEditor/User guide/Citations
Is this really still a draft? --Nemo 08:03, 29 August 2017 (UTC)


 * Unless someone who isn't me has improved it since the last time I looked, then it's unfortunately still a draft, and unfortunately still a mess. Part of the problem is that there are three different "cite" systems in the visual editor now, so we need three separate sets of explanations.
 * BTW, would you please look at the section above and at Topic:Tvyz5k6ki39kba6t and think about how to share that information with editors who will be interested? (It's not most people, but I think that if an editor is interested, then s/he will be very interested, so some thoughtful targeting is needed.)  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:07, 29 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Ok. For the gadget, at first glance I'm not sure how to carve a specific audience for this gadget, but maybe I'll have some idea while sleeping. --Nemo 20:16, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

w:de:WP:Umfragen/Konzept für mathematische Formeln
Hi Whatamidoing ,

the result of the survey:
 * the  indentation should be replaced
 * local templates like w:Template:NumBlk, s:Template:MathForm1, s:Template:MathForm2... are a bad solution
 * local templates like w:Template:math, w:Template:Tmath, ... are a bad solution
 * changing commons.css received some neutral and contra-votes because it is only a "pseudo-solution"
 * the preferred solution is changing math without parameters to be inline
 * the less favored alternative: a new syntax

In both cases it means:
 * Step 1: We need a math-extension that can replace all  indentations and templates like w:Template:NumBlk.
 * Proper text-parsing inside formulas, such that $$\text{this}$$ just $$\text{looks}$$ like $$\text{a}$$ normal $$\text{sentence}$$. This is especially important for languages that use non-ASCI-characters (in LaTeX it requires additional packages). At the moment they cannot write things like $$\underbrace{\forall}_\text{for all}$$ in their language. Because display=block creates a paragraph with a line-break (as it should), they cannot use it for block-formula with a word or text-element. (side-remark: $\text{th}$ is sho$\text{uld}$ never break like th-is. For me it frequently does, often resulting in new lines starting with a full stop or comma.)
 * A way to create a reference to a formula, eliminating manual numbers like (1) which require placement on the same line.
 * Step 2: Working out plans on how to get them replaced and put them up for discussion.
 * Step 3: Replacing them.

For me, the most difficult is Step 1 because I cannot do it. I guess it is a lot of work, needs someone with good knowledge of the MediaWiki software and probably requires from an software-engineering-point-of-view painful decisions concerning the interaction of a formula with the text. If Step 1 cannot be solved, the  indentations will persist and the VE remains incapable to fully modify most mathematical and scientific articles.--Debenben (talk) 20:51, 23 October 2017 (UTC)


 * Does replacing the  'indentation' mean that the math formulae (some of them, anyway) are currently written as , and you want the wikitext to be   (i.e., without the leading  ), but still visually indented?
 * If so, then I'm pretty sure that User:TheDJ could tell dewiki how to change the CSS to make that happen (enwiki did something similar a couple of years ago), and User:Magioladitis could doubtless create a bot that would change all lines that begin with  to lines that begin with  .  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:38, 24 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Whatamidoing (WMF) Sure. -- Magioladitis (talk) 17:45, 24 October 2017 (UTC)
 * No, I mean it has to be possible to replace for example
 * $$a+b=c\quad$$for all $$a\in A$$
 * $$a+b=c\quad$$für alle $$a\in A$$
 * $$a+b=c\quad$$для любого $$a\in A$$
 * with

$$a+b=c\quad\text{for all }a\in A$$ $$a+b=c\quad\text{für alle }a\in A$$ $$a+b=c\quad\text{для любого }a\in A$$
 * and $$\text{for all}$$ looking like "for all". Most readers see the SVG images because they do not have browsers capable of decent MathML rendering and do not use scripts to render the formula with MathJax. In those browsers, the non-ASCII-characters wrapped in  are often not readable at all.--Debenben (talk) 10:17, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

Any updates? I have a more detailed plan for the proposed transition in my mind, but in order to not introduce further workarounds it requires Step 1 to be solved. I dont want to blame any of the volunteers like Physikerwelt that continuously maintain and improve the math-extension because without them it probably wouldn't work at all. Still, it feels like every other website has better math rendering than Wikipedia and the WMF does not seem to care about it at all. Just to give an example, you can go to math.stackexchange or mathoverflow and paste the following text: and you will see that everything that people here are asking for is implemented and has been working for years on every browser and operating system that I have come across.--Debenben (talk) 21:40, 30 October 2017 (UTC)


 * I talked to a dev, who says that some of these are known bugs (see links above). I still need to find someone who understands the illegible "für alle" problem.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:28, 2 November 2017 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your patience and for linking the bugs. I want to give another example: scholarpedia.org. You might have to click a few times on "Random article" because not every article contains mathematical formulas.
 * I also don't want to force the developers to use any particular solution like MathJax (see T99369). My point is: Like stackexchange, every single one of the bugs I mentioned and even more minor bugs I did not bother to list are working and have been working for at least 10 years by now and website is even based on MediaWiki! In coparison to Wikipedia, where bugs like T50032 (a bugzilla-import tagged with "high priority") have been known for at least 10 years and have not been fixed yet.--Debenben (talk) 16:15, 3 November 2017 (UTC)
 * It looks like m:2017 Community Wishlist Survey/Reading/Functional and beautiful math for everyone is at least 25 votes short of winning. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:38, 6 December 2017 (UTC)
 * There is continued interest from editors in improvements in math. w:en:Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) might interest you.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:36, 12 January 2018 (UTC)

On-Wiki Surveys
Jan Dittrich (WMDE) (talk) 08:35, 5 January 2018 (UTC)
 * 1)  If you know of any people/projects that might be interested in on-wiki free-form feedback, drop me a line. Me and our UX team sometimes would like to ask question like "What would be your next step in the process" or "How do you think this function works?" (To not derail phab T183955, I'm commenting here)
 * 2) If you feel you need exchange/feedback on UI or functions for the quickSurveys, write me. Even without free text input I think it is a great feature for UX/Product questions and it is likely I (as well as  Charlie (WMDE) and Hanna (WMDE) will use it.

Old revision bug (from Wikivoyage)
Hi, and thanks for offering to look into this :-)

There aren't really any more details as such that I can provide, other than how things go for me. Editing Wikivoyage on mobile, and I click from my watchlist or recent changes onto the diff of the latest revision of a page. If I want to then edit the page, I must either click on the arrow pointing to the section which was last edited, or if that's not present (for instance if the last person edited the page as a whole, rather than a subsection), I have to click on the page title.

The bug only occurs when I click the page title. Once into the article, I get a red box saying "This is an old revision of this page, as edited by [user] at [date]. This even when it's the current revision of the page. Consequently, when I click any of the edit buttons on the page, it goes into 'read only' mode, i.e. viewing the source of the page rather than being able to edit.

Hope this info helps you. Best wishes, ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 11:41, 31 October 2018 (UTC)


 * It looks like you're not the only person who has encountered this. I can reproduce it by following your description exactly, and User:Cirdan had reported a set of related problems in August.  Cirdan, do you think that I've linked the most relevant bug for TT's problems?  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:57, 2 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the ping! I think that both T200969 and T200804 are equally relevant here.--Cirdan (talk) 11:24, 3 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Thank you for answering this! I sort of forgot about it for a week, then tried to look for it on WV, WP, Meta... until eventually remembering it was here. You've both identified the issue, which is great, and it's good to know it's being worked on. Thanks again :-) (If you have any reply to this I need to see, just ping me on any WMF wiki, as I'll likely forget about this page as soon as I click off!) --ThunderingTyphoons! (talk) 20:38, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

Nope
... and WMF are there making everything just harder, and just pushing pushing away. Primarily 2006 toolbars, which should have had a ready solution rolled out to the wikis where it was used, instead in conjunction with the removal of .js/.css access has just made it even harder. Tin ears! You made communities that were using a tool, and using it well as it was a better tool for their work to just sink. I heard it all as a very polite FU through the whole process, which I am sure wasn't the intention, but from Forrester that is what I heard, and from you it was "sorry about that". I am just not willing to jump through any more hoops to return to my normal editing, just feel like walking well away. I don't find the developers/WMF are making anything easier. Had. it. up. to. here. — billinghurst  sDrewth  09:53, 9 December 2018 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the note. I've been feeling like you were more stressed than usual.
 * I'm concerned about the int-admin thing. Yes, it makes sense to have this feature, and so forth.  But the English Wikisource ought to have several of them, and even though I poked some folks about it, it doesn't seem to have happened.  I don't know if I should keep asking or if there's a particular problem.  I mean, I could understand if nobody wanted it – it's sort of like painting a target on your account for the hackers – but Wikisource has technical needs that are best handled locally, by people who know what they're doing.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:46, 10 December 2018 (UTC)

Wouldn't have said stressed ... fed up and surrounding emotions, with significant inputs coming from WMF; though that may be just my irritation and my expectations, however, with or without that I cannot simply edit in my haven, as my toolkit got removed, and that cycles on itself.

I have no particular issue with the toolbar's removal from core. I do, however, feel it unreasonable that the toolbar was removed, without a functioning equivalent that was just plugged in, or could be just plugged in. The dismissing by developers of the feedback from editors as seeming irrelevance and having core easier was all that particularly mattered.

The Wikisources have typically not had tool developers and those few that have full skills to basic skills are limited and/or overburdened. The expectation from core developers is that this adaptation should just happen locally, not their problem if it doesn't or cannot be the case in individual wikis. It is not an insignificant amount of work, and if one's nascent and non-natural scripting skills are tested, then what? What direction then? Forwards? No.

Do you know how tiring/wearing/frustrating, it can be having to continually proffer the case for WS or non-WP communities. Continually feeling that you have to justify your community's existence, or the impact of WP-inspired decisions that do not suit your community. Weight of numbers loss! Burn out. — billinghurst  sDrewth  11:27, 11 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Your comment about needing a "haven" resonates with me. Wikivoyage has been one of mine, and this month, it's struggling with a few long-term abusers plus people wondering whether the admins are being too hard on the LTAs or too secretive about their attempts.  I think they're doing their best with a difficult job and too few tools, but I imagine that the admins are feeling attacked from both sides right now.
 * Contributors/Projects/Removal of the 2006 wikitext editor lists a "plug and play" replacement for that toolbar.  Wikisource hasn't been able to install it as a gadget that is easily available for all users, because there are still no int-admins there, but the script exists.  Also, I'm hearing that the script is in French, and that customizing it (e.g., displaying a "B" for bold rather than a "G" for gras) requires more than just installing the script itself.
 * I had noticed that you stopped editing at Wikisource a couple of weeks before the toolbar was removed. What else is going on?  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:16, 11 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Had tried that in my personal common.js, and failed, it isn't plain vanilla. AND I don't want it to have to be me (AGAIN) to have to ride to the rescue for something that should have been done as part of the removal process. (see earlier commentary)
 * Re spam, I know, I have been still working at meta. And have changed the strategy to less patience, and more blacklisting; something similar in titleblacklisting; more domain with stem regex. Noting that the ability of spambots to so easily get through our security defences is one of my previously mentioned WMF/developer irritations
 * Re int-admin, the enWS community decided that in the best interests of security (WM request) that it was best to only add it as needed, so it is set with an expiry. I have already had it.
 * Confluence of the complex and complicated. About then that hard deadline came and I lost my tolerance for WMF; sick kids, single-dad; working, long-commute, fully-committed dad; and the outside entered its needy time. — billinghurst  sDrewth  08:09, 12 December 2018 (UTC)


 * The bird song recording is wonderful. I listened to it twice before even trying to reply.  I hope the kids are feeling better.  (But if they're not on the mend, then please remember that volunteer-me takes suggestions for medicine-related articles to improve at the English Wikipedia.)
 * Do you think that the epic "Fix CAPTCHA" project would help with the spambots? I understand that on the organizational side, it's the kind of thing that everyone wants some other team to spend a year or two working on (or four, since this is the estimate before applying the rule that everything takes twice as long as it should), but would it help, or is that only a trivial factor?  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:20, 13 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Why I live where I live, just wish I could do decent sound recordings. I am trying to get a good recording of the kookas as their juvenile(s?) learns the call (it takes months!). Kookaburra adults are usually morning and evening calls, and very occasionally during the day; with the juvenile they call a little more through the day, and the juvenile practices throughout the day, though timidly when one is out and about, so harder to get. Always the competing noises, though the competition changes through the time of the day, depending what is on the block or actively on the block. From my somewhat sheltered position, it seems that organisationally little is done to manage spam, or spambots. No changes made to make it harder to get through the front door; and all pushed to the volunteers to restrict and/or remove, and the efficacy for system approach is negligible (again as it seems from the outer). Tried that conversation when I was a steward, and trying to manage with little WMF responsiveness (beyond being an annoyance) was one of the reasons that had me just move on. At least now I can dip in and dip out depending upon my frustration levels. AND when one does a good job as a volunteer, then the impact is lessened for the public so it gets less resources for development. One should just walk walk walk away. — billinghurst  sDrewth  03:09, 14 December 2018 (UTC)
 * I started writing this yesterday, but apparently never posted it. I don't know if you happened to be aware, but volunteer-me has spent some years with enwiki's External links guideline.  I don't know where enwiki would be without Beetstra.  He and I occasionally disagree on general questions, but mostly we 'specialize':  he's the spam expert, and I'm the writing-it-down-in-wikilawyer-language person.  One of the policy-ish problems that I've been seeing is that we seem to be losing our shared definition of "spam".  We used to have a pretty clear notion (more or less that spam is an unwanted external link that tried to sell something [whether that "something" was a cell phone or a fringe-y POV), but now it's more like any and all unwanted edits, including articles about people of borderline notability or whose views I disagree with.  (I should get back to the spam policy.  I've completely ignored it for years, and apparently everyone else has, too.  I recently discovered that it defined video spam as any link to any video-containing page that also contained a link to anything that tried to sell anything, e.g., the entirety of YouTube.)  I'm assuming that you're using the old definition.  Anyway, I know a fair bit about the policy side, but very little about the technical side, so feel free to tell me what the right answers are, or even what the good questions are.  This is the time of year to start thinking about the annual plan.  I'll remind a few folks that this is a real problem.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 05:20, 16 December 2018 (UTC)
 * BTW, I think that New Readers/Raising Awareness in India (or perhaps it's a related project) has a component for promoting the Bengali Wikisource. Have you heard anything about it?  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:08, 19 December 2018 (UTC)
 * (confused look) I am not sure if you are referring to something general, or something specific that I have done. If you were asking me about "spam", I would have said that I use it a variety of fashions, mostly around the unwanted/undesired/... smattering; and I probably span a few generations of internet spam. I would usually qualify my use of spam, the most usual I see is link spam, which would often be qualified with link to w:WP:EL. Much of what we are managing these days globally is spambots, and that is usually straight out that way, or straight deleted. All this qualified with me looking at spam globally through the WMF wikis. — billinghurst  sDrewth  05:16, 19 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Nope, I don't do subtle hints. I'm no good at them, so I've pretty much given up trying.  If I ever think you've screwed up, you'll probably get an e-mail message that says something like "Hey, I might be wrong, but I think you might have screwed up."  I hope that works for you.  (OTOH, I do seem to ask questions like "Have you read the previous work on that?" when someone proposes a supposedly new idea.)
 * I like the explanatory value of the phrase "generations of internet spam", and volunteer-me will probably steal the more specific phrase "link spam" for policy writing.
 * I hear that Audiences is going to talk about CAPTCHAs. "Talk about" might involve less than five minutes' actual attention, but that's more than we had before.  What should I know about spambots?  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:44, 19 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Re generations of spam, I was working with RootsWeb in the *cough* 90s and was dealing with spam back then to mailing lists—some bot, some poor workers in the Asian countries doing piece work. Re spam, I see: Link—includes clueless, and directory—(sigh), CoI (harumph), Paid (ffs), and Spambot (grrrr/kill). Re spambot: There are tickets in Phabricator, and m:Special:Abuselog will show the regularity of the attacks (500 in last day and a half) having got through the defences by means not evident, either API or CATCHA-solved. All I see is the end result of abuselog, and/or edits, so I can judge is that failure. If anyone is responsible for this coordination, it isn't evident, and it seems to fall between the cracks (though my stepping back from an activist/political role may just have me blind to things). — billinghurst  sDrewth  23:39, 19 December 2018 (UTC)
 * I could be wrong, but I think it's always Somebody Else's Problem. I'm not even sure whether spam theoretically ought to be considered a "Product" or "Ops" problem, much less which team would work on it.  Developers/Maintainers says that Editing owns the spam blacklist, but I don't remember any of them talking about it (except in the context of VisualEditor needing to generate a suitable error message), and I've been following that team for more than five years now.  It's a problem.  (So's that maintainers' list:  incomplete, perpetually out of date, and not really a commitment anyway.  It's more like a 'first person to ask who could fix something' than actual maintainers.)  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:40, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

Spambots
1600 account creations via koWP in 30 minutes, which means at minimum of 300 IP addresses. Obviously created through the API. Why oh freaking why? — billinghurst  sDrewth  13:19, 28 December 2018 (UTC)


 * User:Trizek (WMF) has some contacts at that wiki. I think he'd have said something if a big event was being planned there, though.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:12, 28 December 2018 (UTC)


 * It got worse, we had the spambots bot move here, and it ended up trying to create about 16k accounts, we think we stopped about 15k, as rough numbers. Numbers of wikimedia-operations ppl were involved including Danny_B, Bawolff, and godog.  They should be congratulated for coming to my aid.  All my similes for how our CAPTCHA &lt;deleted&lt;/s>.  #pwned  T212667 with a write up at meta for the stewards. We even had our own defences counter-attacking us as the abusefilters were busier than the allowed hit rate. Joy.   Re contacts, by now, I have an absolute bagful at many wikis, been around long enough to be reasonably familiar. — billinghurst  sDrewth  06:51, 29 December 2018 (UTC)

Google translation announcement
What is different now with Google translate compared to what we have had so far? Barbara (WVS) (talk) 20:33, 21 March 2019 (UTC)


 * Which wiki? There's some stuff happening only at the Indonesian Wikipedia.  (A link to the particular announcement might be useful.)  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:11, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

WMF Editing Team: about Visual Editor
Hi! The German Wikipedia community agrees with the editing of their sandbox by Visual Editor. The problem is, that the Wikipedia namespace seems to be not supported. However, some weeks ago was the page de:Wikipedia:Spielwiese (our sandbox) editable by Visual Editor, and we want to get back this functionality. Is there a possibility for an exception to make this page editable by Visual Editor? Kind regards, Doc Taxon (talk) 15:50, 23 April 2019 (UTC)


 * Hello, Doc Taxon, and thanks for the message.
 * VisualEditor can't be enabled for individual pages. It can only be enabled by namespace.  So this means that it could be enabled for every page in the   namespace – or for none of them.  At the English Wikipedia, the Wikipedia: namespace contains high-traffic discussion pages (such as w:en:WP:ANI), so it would be better to keep the visual editor off in the English Wikipedia's Wikipedia: namespace.  I don't know whether the German Wikipedia has similar pages, or if discussions always happen on the discussion page.
 * I'm not sure what happened to the over-ride tool you were using. I asked the devs, and they denied doing it (on purpose, at least).  Let me look around... If I figure it out, I'll ping you.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:17, 23 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Thank you for your reply. Some weeks ago we could edit the page de:Wikipedia:Spielwiese by VisualEditor and only this page in the Wikipedia namespace. How could it be, if you say, that it only can be enabled for the entire Wikipedia namespace? Doc Taxon (talk) 21:59, 23 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Look at this list. Something obviously has changed, because now instead of it being possible, it's not working.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:43, 24 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Doc Taxon, this is supposed to be fixed "soon". Maybe Thursday, in practice?   Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 02:14, 14 May 2019 (UTC)

Question about Talk pages consultation 2019/Phase 1 report/Survey
Hello, i'm curious you didn't allow title page for translation, any particular reason ? Regards. - Tomybrz  Bip Bip  17:20, 27 May 2019 (UTC)


 * The translations will be imported into third-party survey software (Qualtrics), so the page title will not be used.
 * I just imported some of the pre-existing French translations from other pages. Would you please look over Talk pages consultation 2019/Phase 1 report/Survey/fr and making sure that I did it correctly, and add any missing translations?   Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:31, 27 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Sure. Thanks. Tomybrz   Bip Bip  17:34, 27 May 2019 (UTC)

I notice there isn't a question asking how much of the phase 1 report the respondent's read. Would this factor influence how respondents answer the survey? Would it be possible to infer this based on the other responses? Jc86035 (talk) 18:05, 28 May 2019 (UTC)


 * Well... You and I have both seen instances in which people responed to RFCs at our home wiki with !votes that amount to " We can't do X, because X must be done!" It will therefore sometimes be possible to infer from the answer whether the person understood the proposals.  If nothing else, a vehement self-contradictory !vote tells you something about how the person is feeling.  It can also tell you something about how you've written the question; as an example, volunteer-me is getting complaints about the RFC question at w:en:Talk:Santa Claus this month.  In this case, I expect to get useful information both from people who understand the proposals and from people who don't.
 * And I'm not sure what I'd do, in practice, with that information. I'm not going to ignore those responses, and I'd probably just worry that the self-reported data would be unreliable (e.g., with people from more self-deprecating cultures claiming that they didn't understand anything, while some of our bolder colleagues might overstate their understanding).  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:54, 28 May 2019 (UTC)

Help HausaWikipedia to get improvement
Hello! i`m Anas contacting you from hausaWikimedian please we will like to have a liitle bit tips and turtorial on how to make the hausa wikipedian userpage excellently good in terms of making refrences,uploading pictures and making good infobox, we are little in hausawikipedia but we are working on it to be better. i do hope you will grant me the privilage. Yours faithfull Anasskoko (talk) 09:35, 17 September 2019 (UTC)


 * Unfortunately, I don't think there are any good tutorials for this. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 15:16, 25 September 2019 (UTC)

Log In
Hi User:Whatamidoing (WMF) User:Vikiçizer, Bureaucrat User:Xeno and Steward User:HakanIst about this. If I learn my e-mail address, I can set a new password. I can learn my e-mail only from someone who can access the database. Can you help me? User:Abecesel.


 * Welcome back! I have no advanced privileges or access beyond what any normal user has.  People like User:Vikiçizer, User:Xeno, and User:HakanIst know much more about this than I do.  Good luck,  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:35, 20 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Reply in Topic:Vf6hzy6jha01yw4c recommends to contact Trust and Safety, and I agree with that comment. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 07:40, 20 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes, that's the right answer. Thank you, User:Masumrezarock100. – xeno ( talk ) 13:28, 20 January 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm afraid I'll never understand why some people post the same comments on multiple talk pages and don't follow the procedure. This is the kind of situation that can not be and should not be handled onwiki, a public space. They should just contact T&S via email (ca@wikimedia.org) instead of posting on talk pages of multiple WMF staff members and volunteer Wikimedia contributors. 😗 Masumrezarock100 (talk) 14:17, 20 January 2020 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!
Thank you for the kind words. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:27, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

Question
Hi WAID. I am from the English Wikipedia and am interested in the talk page beta. I was wondering does this require community consensus on enwiki or can it just be silently added to preferences? Aasim 22:01, 13 April 2020 (UTC)


 * Hello, Aasim. I don't think that the Editing team is prepared to test the English Wikipedia yet.  Right now, they are primarily looking for communities that will provide feedback and answer questions, so the mid-sized communities are probably a better fit.  I do hope to talk the team into enabling testing on the English Wikipedia (because I want it   ) but I don't know when they will agree.  In the meantime, please consider putting w:en:Wikipedia:Talk pages project on your watchlist, as it's one place that I'll use for updates.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:30, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

Chinese Wikipedia decides to join the trial stage of new talk page design
Few weeks ago, I raised a discussion: will Chinese Wikipedia want to join the trial stage of new talk page design? According to the result, most users agree to join this test. We wish that Chinese Wikipedia can join the next trial stage. Thanks. Taiwania Justo (talk) 05:03, 26 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Thank you, Taiwania Justo. The team is just starting to talk about which communities to include in the next group.  I will let you all know if zhwiki is chosen for the next (small) group.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:18, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!
Thank you, BoldLuis. I believe that WikiLove can be installed at any project. You just need to have a discussion at the wiki showing that this community wants to have it installed. When WikiLove isn't installed, you can do the same thing just by copying and pasting the wikitext from a barnstar on another page. It's just a colored table with two columns and an image. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:21, 20 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the info. :-) BoldLuis (talk) 20:42, 20 May 2020 (UTC)

Discussion Tools in Korean wikipedia
Hello. Can you add function named Discussion Tools in Korean Wikipedia? Accoring to this talk page, many users want to add Discussion Tools(Beta). Thank you:) --Leemsj2075 (talk) 14:27, 11 June 2020 (UTC)


 * Thank you for the note, Leemsj2075. I have put the Korean Wikipedia on the Editing team's list.  I'm not sure when they will make a decision about the next group.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:25, 11 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Thank you for reply the request :) Leemsj2075 (talk) 23:33, 11 June 2020 (UTC)

activate replying in vec.wiki
Good morning, the message has just arrived on the coffee page of vec.wiki and it is interesting that we can ask for the activation of replying in the wiki --> vec:Wikipedia:Ciàcołe. I think they are much more useful and easier to use than the typical very complicated discussions for new users. I would like to request its activation on the discussion of the home page and on coffee (which we call Ciàcołe), so as to increase and facilitate the participation of visitors to the Wikipedia in the Venetian language. I don't know if it's possible, but it would be very useful to be able to activate it in the discussions of the user pages and all this because I don't know if it can be activated everywhere (or if it messes up all the previous messages).! Thank you very much for reading, I apologize for the bother and thank you in advance for the answer! --Fierodelveneto (talk) 15:13, 29 June 2020 (UTC)


 * Hello, @Fierodelveneto, and thank you for your note. The tool is "all or nothing" – it will work on all the talk pages (that it can identify), or on none of them.  So we can't turn it on just for two pages.  Have you tried it out there?  Click on https://vec.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ciàcołe?dtenable=1 (the 'secret code' should enable it when you click the link, but it will not remember it the next time you go to this page, or on any other page) and let me know what you think.
 * I'll tentatively put your name on the list. The team has not yet set a date for the next offering. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:39, 3 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Hi, I opened the link you sent me, but nothing changes. Everything is as before! However, if you can activate it on vec.wiki, in case there are problems, I will contact you on your user discussions page in vec.wiki, so I can contact you more easily! I look forward to your kind reply and thank you very much for your kindness! A good job Fierodelveneto (talk)

VisualEditor/Feedback
Hi WAID, could you take a look at my "Listing indentation on Italian Wikivoyage" post and involve who may be able to support? --Andyrom75 (talk) 12:42, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

VisualDiff tool
Regarding [//www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Topic:W4bct11t0fsx2if1&topicsummary_revId=w5ob0kpmu2y7yn9j&action=view-topic-summary this edit]: thanks for opening the Phabricator ticket on the Visual Diff issue! Isaacl (talk) 21:47, 22 March 2021 (UTC)


 * You're welcome, @Isaacl. Nobody seems to be actively improving that tool right now (and apparently some of this is a "need a PhD in math" level of complicated – fortunately, they happened to have one of those handy when it was originally written   ), so I don't know if it'll get fixed any time soon.  But at least it's in the system, which gives us a chance.  Thanks for telling me about it. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:50, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

Typographyrefresh gadget
Hi Whatamidoing, Hope you're well, The gadget "Typographyrefresh" now decreases the font sizing at EN/Commons dramatically as does my Commons vector CSS page, I don't suppose you know how to fix this ?, I cannot find the gadget coding anywhere and Talk:Typography refresh is apparently an archive page now so figured before I lost the will to live I'd ask you lol, Many thanks, Davey2010 (talk) 20:56, 20 May 2021 (UTC)


 * What a terrible situation, @Davey2010. I think you're talking about @Edokter's gadget at w:en:MediaWiki:Gadget-VectorClassic.css.  Help:Locating broken scripts may be helpful in figuring it out.  There's a related thread at w:en:WP:VPT. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:46, 20 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Hi Whatamidoing, Thank you so much for your help, Unfortunately Phab were all but useless with my ticket but I'll spare you the ranting and raving lol. Anyway unbeknown to me someone had created a far more technical request at Phab
 * Anyway I've watchlisted that page you linked above so if I get anything similar I know where to go :),
 * Sorry for coming to your talkpage but quite honestly I begun to lose the will to live and just got tired with jumping through endless hoops, Anyway thank you so much for your help it's greatly appreciated :),
 * Take care and stay safe, Warm Regards, Dave /// Davey2010 (talk) 23:51, 20 May 2021 (UTC)
 * I'm glad you reached out to me. It looks like the problem has been identified and a patch written.  I don't know if they got it out the door yet, though. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 04:51, 22 May 2021 (UTC)

Test section
If you want to test the Talk pages project/Notifications feature, go to Special:Preferences and turn on "Discussion tools". Then come back here and reload the page. If there's a [subscribe] button, click it, and then leave a message here (so that other people who are subscribed will get a notification about your message). If enough people subscribe and leave messages here, then everyone should have a chance to see a notification this week. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:26, 3 July 2021 (UTC)


 * Subscribed, curious how it works. Kusma (talk) 20:03, 3 July 2021 (UTC)
 * It works like this! Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 03:40, 6 July 2021 (UTC)

Talk pages - Auto-subscribe to the discussions I start
Hey there! I've always thought that somehow I'd be auto-subscribed to all the discussions I started but apparently that's not the case. Is there a reason for that? I can't think of any cons to that feature but my overall logic may be shortsighted. - Klein Muçi (talk) 15:37, 3 November 2021 (UTC)


 * Hi, @Klein Muçi. Auto-subscriptions are in the works but not here yet.  At least initially, it will be available in Special:Preferences as something that you have to turn on separately/on purpose.  @PPelberg (WMF) will be glad to know that you're interested in this idea.
 * The main thing that worries me is that auto-subscriptions will speed up interactions. Speed is not always helpful during disputes.  With subscriptions, you'll be told every time you open any page (not just when you check that page, or when you go to your watchlist) that the other guy has replied.  If the interaction is generally pleasant ("Can you help me?" – "Here's the link you need." – "Thanks!"), then speed is okay.  If the interaction is generally bad ("That's a policy violation!" – "No, it isn't" – "Yes, it is!" – "No, it isn't!" – "Tis!" – "Tisn't!" – "I'm going to tattle to Jimbo!"), then speed is a problem.  It makes it easy for the dispute to escalate before a third editor notices it.  It makes it hard for people to get some distance emotionally before they discover that the other guy has replied.  It means that you're reminded, every single time you visit any page, that the other guy is yelling, even if you've made a conscious decision to ignore that until you're better prepared to deal with the problem.
 * There are some other, more boring reasons to be a bit concerned about it. For example, high-volume editors may find that Special:Notifications isn't up to the task for them.  (I've got 16 more pings and 95 more comments/threads waiting for me today, and that's just in my work account.)  But I think that the possibility of speeding up unpleasantness is the most important one.
 * That said, the minute it's available, I'll be enabling it, and I know other people who work across multiple wikis who will be doing the same. It might cause some problems, but it will also solve some problems. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:40, 3 November 2021 (UTC)
 * Interesting... I hadn't thought about the quarreling aspect. (I'm still laughing about the scenario though. XD) I mean, you have you have a point in that but how are we exactly dealing with this situation? By just hoping that people forget to subscribe to their own discussions? :P (To be honest, that does work.) My knee jerk reaction would be to say "if that's a problem, we put a delay timer" (describe it as needed to prevent notification overflow) but I'm not sure how much I believe that to be a good solution myself. As for the high number... I don't know what to say there. My idea is that everyone should be a priori interested in knowing replies in its discussion because why else would they start a discussion? But maybe there are situations I'm totally overlooking here. I'm glad that it is a thing that it has been taken into consideration though. Thank you for your explanation! :)) - Klein Muçi (talk) 19:21, 3 November 2021 (UTC)
 * I think that the solution to my dispute story might be social. We might have to tell ourselves that it's better to let the dispute wait, to set personal limits of one comment per day, or invent mechanisms to help us slow down.
 * Peter suggested that a second notification could be delayed (a little similar to how mailing lists let you subscribe for a once-daily or once-weekly digest?), but I'm not sure that would be popular.
 * If you have other ideas (now, next week, next month, next year – any time!), please share them. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:44, 3 November 2021 (UTC)
 * Well, yeah. Having a delay timer would solve a lot of these kind of "minor" problems. I think Discord was one of the first social media that started to apply something similar in order to make conversations readable because of the groups having hundreds if not thousands of members. Messages are delayed in their showing so they can be manageable. Facebook started lately applying something similar in group comments. You can only comment once in X time. I believe Messenger also has something similar with Discord.
 * Thanks a lot for the opportunity! :) Usually I write when I think something (as I've done in the past) but I'm also aware that I'm not part of the teams so I'm not informed on the general direction the workflow is going so I "worry" that what I might suggest might be totally outside of the current workflow (for different reasons) so... :P - Klein Muçi (talk) 20:03, 3 November 2021 (UTC)
 * I've just written up the delay-timer idea at T294982, which you are invited to help with. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:33, 3 November 2021 (UTC)
 * I'm just dropping to say:
 * @Whatamidoing (WMF) is correct when she says @PPelberg (WMF) will be glad to know that you're interested in this idea. :)
 * @Klein Muçi within the next week we should have a prototype that includes the "Auto-subscribing" functionality you described ready for testing. I'm thinking I will ping you on Talk:Talk pages project/Notifications...does this sound okay to you? PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 20:40, 3 November 2021 (UTC)
 * @PPelberg (WMF), glad to hear that. And yes, please do. :) - Klein Muçi (talk) 20:49, 3 November 2021 (UTC)
 * Wonderful; I will. PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 21:16, 3 November 2021 (UTC)

See number of subscribers in a discussion
Hello! Would it be interesting to have a way to see the number of users subscribed to a discussion? (Or maybe to have it always shown.) Why would that be needed? I'm not really sure. Just thought that we can see the numbers of watchers of a certain page (right?) so maybe the reasons that feature is needed, whatever those reasons may be, may apply to this case as well. I wasn't too sure on my rationale so I was reluctant to start the discussion at a more "public" page. - Klein Muçi (talk) 11:45, 17 November 2021 (UTC)


 * Hi, @Klein Muçi. Thanks for sharing a new idea with me.
 * We don't show the number of watchers unless it's fairly high. I wonder if that would also be a relevant consideration for individual discussions.  What do you think? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 04:47, 18 November 2021 (UTC)
 * Hmm, I didn't know that detail. I don't really know. My experience has always been with small wikis and for us, things work differently. We always worry about not having enough attention, not the contrary. For example, the auto-subscribe feature would be an 100% expected-to-be-taken-for-granted-thing for us because we rarely open discussions to begin with and when we do, they take months to generate 1 single answer so we want to know when that happens. The problem that we might get overflowed with notifications just doesn't make sense for us.
 * Even in this case, I was thinking that MAYBE it could be helpful to know that no one is subscribed to your discussion even after many days have passed and then you could maybe start pinging some people manually for opinions? In EnWiki that's a kind of behavior that's not really looked in a good way, in some cases may even be considered canvassing but in small wikis that's the norm. Canvassing it's usually seen as part of the duty of the user who started the discussion/voting with the rationale that "if it doesn't care even for notifying people, why would we go and take part in that discussion/voting?"
 * But I'm not sure of anything that I'm saying because watchlists are rarely used in small wikis beside for getting email notifications. Many users don't even know of their existence. So this feature in general wouldn't help us much. I suspect to be more of interest to big wikis but my experience there is limited, hence this discussion. - Klein Muçi (talk) 10:20, 18 November 2021 (UTC)
 * @Thryduulf is talking about a related problem at enwiki, because there are so many pages that nobody notices a question being posted.
 * At a smaller wiki, you can just look at Special:RecentChanges, limit it to talk pages, and see that almost nothing ever gets posted. At sqwiki, there have been 10 edits to Talk: pages in the last week, and a total of 47 if you count all of the discussion namespaces.  I think you would not be surprised that nobody was watching/subscribed to your post, just because so few people are around.  Perhaps it would feel discouraging to know that someone was subscribed to your discussion but didn't answer your question.   Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:43, 23 November 2021 (UTC)
 * Okay then, let's scrap that idea. :P - Klein Muçi (talk) 07:47, 23 November 2021 (UTC)

Reply tool - Bullet points
Hello! Recently I've put a candidature as a steward and while replying to the questions in Meta related to the elections (a standard procedure) I noticed that I can't really use the reply tool for that because it would break the structure of the discussion the community likes to follow there.

These are two occasions where I've had to manually edit some of my answers after having used the reply tool to make them follow the standard:


 * 1) https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Stewards/Elections_2022/Questions&diff=next&oldid=22630052&diffmode=source;
 * 2) https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Stewards/Elections_2022/Questions&diff=22635636&oldid=22635635&diffmode=source;

I'm not sure if the tool can or can't understand to continue the bulleted list but even if it can, the added indentation level would be unfortunately unwelcome in that kind of discussion. I am aware that there are already Phab tickets open for modifying the indentation levels on the go but I thought I'd report anyway because I haven't seen a lot of users talking about discussions that are rendered in a bulleted list manner. - Klein Muçi (talk) 12:43, 19 January 2022 (UTC)


 * These are known limitations. T259865 is the real solution, but either T276510 or T265750 would make a big difference.
 * @PPelberg (WMF), this is a voting-shaped discussion section, but it's not really "a vote". Similar styles are seen in RFCs/equivalent discussions in several larger communities, including the English Wikipedia. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:23, 19 January 2022 (UTC)

I can't find where we've been discussing my concerns about the reply tool
It doesn't show up in my global contributions, which is odd. So I'm commenting here instead. I've been a bit of an idiot, forgetting noticeboards. Edit summaries can be very important on notice boards. I was editing the enwiki Fringe noticeboard this morning and went to add my usual edit summary explaining what I'd added and the penny dropped. Doug Weller (talk) 08:16, 10 February 2022 (UTC)


 * Hi, @Doug Weller. GUC doesn't pay attention to Flow threads, which is a shame.  You can still find them in Special:Contributions/Doug Weller.  You're probably looking for either Do subscriptions expire? or Reply tool does not allow edit summaries. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:08, 11 February 2022 (UTC)
 * (This edit to FTN?) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:09, 11 February 2022 (UTC)
 * Yes, that sort of thing. I presume Flow is not going to be rolled out? I'd think it would be unacceptable if it doesn't show contributions at GUC. Doug Weller (talk) 08:18, 11 February 2022 (UTC)
 * @Doug Weller, Flow isn't going to be rolled out because the WMF stopped development on it several years ago, and nobody else is big enough to handle a MediaWiki project of this complexity. Flow's goal was to be able to replace AFD at enwiki with a purpose-built workflow tool that included features for automatically flagging discussions that met certain criteria (e.g., 7 days old, at least three responses) as needing to be closed, having a built-in system for deletion sorting, even automatic vote tallying, if that were wanted (I'm not sure that it is wanted for AFD, but it would be nice to have that for ArbCom cases).  They got as far as being able to post comments on talk pages before they stopped working on it.  It will probably be removed from WMF wikis at some point in the medium-ish future (maybe several years from now).  It will be missed by many editors when that happens.
 * I don't know why GUC doesn't 'see' Flow comments. My experience with GUC is that its volunteer maintainers are willing to review and merge patches to fix problems like that, assuming that someone else writes the code. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:45, 11 February 2022 (UTC)
 * I didn’t know the goals, I just remember that for some reason it didn’t work at all for me. The goals sound good. Doug Weller (talk) 19:48, 11 February 2022 (UTC)
 * Strange, I don't recall anything about AfD. I thought it was all about talk pages. Doug Weller (talk) 13:50, 12 February 2022 (UTC)
 * Seems as though the Flow people have to do something first. This issue has been around since at least 2015 and still not fixed. See https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T88753 Doug Weller (talk) 15:37, 12 February 2022 (UTC)