Topic on Extension talk:WikiEditor

Notice the 66 kB indicator above the edit field.

I found this 2009 screenshot from the German Wikipedia. I couldn't help but notice "Diese Seite ist 66 kB groß.", which indicates that the page has about 66 thousand characters.

I looked today and the indicator appears missing. But the feature may still exist in MediaWiki. I could not find a documentation of it on this site.

Is there any way to enable the size (kilobyte) indicator which shows above the edit field for all users of my MediaWiki installation? What do I need to change in LocalSettings.php?

IIRC the software used to provide a notice if the text content of a page was over 32kb in size, due to many browsers of the time having trouble properly loading/displaying pages of that size. I have no idea if the notice is still displayed, or if not, what version of MediaWiki saw its removal.

Alternatively, that may have been a gadget or user script used by the person who took the screenshot, in which case your best bet would be to ask that person if they know/remember what gadget or script it was.

The feature was inside core (not specific to WikEditor), and was regrettably removed around 2010-ish. Since then we've seen people abuse the technical limit of 2 MiB as if that's a reasonable guide for what makes for a good page length. Oh well.

I can still see that size indicator inside the #mw-edit-longpage-hint HTML division on German Wikipedia:

<div id="mw-edit-longpage-hint">
<p>Größe der Seite bzw. des bearbeiteten Abschnitts: 97 KB.
</p>
</div>

Ah, interesting, you're right; I thought it was removed, but instead in 0b92d6261 it was just turned into an optional feature. To enable, set the longpage-hint message to something other than - (i.e., edit your wiki's [[MediaWiki:longpage-hint]] page to something like "This page is $1 kilobytes long; consider making it shorter.").