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A place to talk about tech related to a Wikimedia wiki.

Have a technical wiki question? Ask here. This can include, for example:

• requests for new tools, scripts, and bots;
• help with CSS or JavaScript;
• API help;
• and data collection help (including database queries).

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Why were musical scores (globally?) deactivated?

Can anyone point me to info on this? e.g.

• simple:Misirlou
• fr:Misirlou#musique

Is it permanent? temporary? I didn't find anything searching discussions here. SashiRolls (talk) 21:27, 25 April 2021 (UTC)

Temporary. See task T257066 Reedy (talk) 21:38, 25 April 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for your speedy reply, it seemed like it had been down for quite a while. That's really too bad that there was no funding, it's a cool function. Best, SashiRolls (talk) 22:53, 25 April 2021 (UTC)

Indeed. WMF should get its act together and learn how to contribute to its upstream software more. Some areas are getting a bit better (e.g. with Debian) but mostly it seems to get worse. Nemo 06:17, 26 April 2021 (UTC)

Looks like this hasn't been resolved. SashiRolls (talk) 18:20, 22 May 2021 (UTC)

Create a tag for commons:User:Jack who built the house/Convenient Discussions

Hi, more and more users are using this script, and I would like to move the tag from the edit description to the correct place. You can see what I talking about here. Can you create, please? :)
MediaWiki:Tag-convenient-discussions -> [[commons:Special:MyLanguage/User:Jack who built the house/Convenient Discussions|CD]]
MediaWiki:Tag-convenient-discussions-description -> Edit made using [[commons:Special:MyLanguage/User:Jack who built the house/Convenient Discussions|Convenient Discussions]]. Iniquity (talk) 17:46, 13 May 2021 (UTC)

Have you talked to @Jack who built the house about this? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:08, 13 May 2021 (UTC)

@Whatamidoing (WMF), yep, in Discord, he knows about this request :) Iniquity (talk) 18:08, 13 May 2021 (UTC)

Yep. If this is possible, a tag would be useful. Jack who built the house (talk) 18:15, 13 May 2021 (UTC)

Sounds great. I wish that Special:Tags were used much more often. When you finish this, maybe your next target will be Twinkle. ;-) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:30, 13 May 2021 (UTC)

@Whatamidoing (WMF), I have created phab:T282953. Iniquity (talk) 19:39, 15 May 2021 (UTC)

Categories

Hello! I'm an interface admin at SqWiki and I deal with a lot of workshops with new users in teaching them the technical basis of wikiwork. Much of my free time is also spent on creating new-user-friendly interfaces on Wikipedia which basically means to optimize the overall experience for new users by making things behave in an intuitive manner, reducing the need of "tutorials". In this aspect, an overall "complain" I get on these workshops is the way categories behave in general. Most (to not say all) new users expect to go to a certain category page, edit it somehow and from there to be able to make changes to the pages that are listed in it. For example remove a certain article from that category or create a new sub-category. But, as we all know, when they click "Edit" a whole different process takes place, which, according to their point of view, makes the list disappear and just lets you edit the category description. For anyone who has ever worked with categories more than a couple of times it would be clear as to what is happening, I just described it "strangely" to express the confusion new users experience in this situation. This leads to 2 negative outcomes:

1. It reduces fastness in learning, parting a bit away from the "wiki way";
2. If the category pages are not protected, they get accidently/unwittingly vandalized in different ways;

Considering all this, is there any way some tech changes could be implemented to the way category pages behave so the entries listed on them wouldn't just be "transcendental" to the pages but also accessible in a sort of way from these pages itself? I'm sure this problem has been discussed on other wikis as well considering that many wikis have automatic notices on their category pages now that tell users that they can't change categories in the said pages. - Klein Muçi (talk) 09:33, 22 May 2021 (UTC)

More advanced changes:

• Being able to get notified when new pages are added to a certain category would be good to have as an option for clean up/maintenance reasons. At my current knowledge you can't have something like that if you don't use "third-party" bots for that specific purpose.
• Again, at clean up/maintenance categories a "last clearance date" could be an encouraging thing for contributors to help clear it up again if the date is new. Or it could even work on the other way around, an encouragement to clear up a category that has been filled for years.

Other changes could also be proposed if the category pages were more "dynamical" from a technical point of view. At the current state we basically can only edit them to change the description and that's it. - Klein Muçi (talk) 09:51, 22 May 2021 (UTC)

@Klein Muçi: c:Help:Gadget-Cat-a-lot allows recategorizing pages from the category page, although its aim is probably more productivity for power users and less being intuitive for newcomers, but hopefully it can be built upon.

For a few years now, it’s possible to have changes (additions/removals) to watched categories shown on the watchlist, although no notification emails (or Echo notifications or anything else) are sent about these changes, and it’s only a best-effort solution when the said category is added through a template. —Tacsipacsi (talk) 14:07, 22 May 2021 (UTC)

@Tacsipacsi: thank you a lot for the fast answer! :) Yes, I am aware of that gadget but as you said yourself, the interface it's a bit confusing for a new user. I was hoping for an "organic solution". I could, of course, make the gadget active by default for every user on SqWiki but I don't believe new users would benefit much from it and we (administrators) would still be left reverting changes to every category page ever non stop. :P - Klein Muçi (talk) 16:56, 22 May 2021 (UTC)