Wikibooks:Reading room/Archives/2016/October

Formatting on thousands of pages will break in 2017
I wanted to touch base informally about a technical project that will affect your wiki: HTML Tidy is a tool that silently fixes some typos in HTML and some wikitext code after a page has been saved. Tidy is being removed as part of a multi-year plan to update the parsers and improve accessibility.

For example,  is an invalid HTML code (it should be   instead). This currently displays as if it were correct, but that will not be the case when Tidy is removed. You can see the pages affected by this particular error by searching for  in the regular search box. I've recently cleaned up this error in all the templates except for Template:Cite web/doc, which has a problem with the spam blacklist, but there are about 450 pages in the mainspace that still need to be fixed. And that's only one of the errors.

More information, and a list of the major changes, is available at mw:Parsing/Replacing Tidy. In December, there will be a tool that you can use to visually check previews on pages that you're concerned about (it'll probably be available in Special:Preferences, but turned off by default). In the meantime, there is a list of known errors at mw:Parsing/Replacing Tidy that you may want to review and check your wiki for.

Most of the information about projects like this is delivered via m:Tech/News. However, nobody at this wiki is subscribed to that weekly newsletter. If you aren't reliably getting this information via another wiki or mailing list, then you may want to subscribe and start watching for announcements like this. Also, if you work at any other project, please share this information. If you have questions or information to share with the devs about this project, please feel free to ping me. Whatamidoing (WMF) (discuss • contribs) 18:56, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
 * ✅ I've treated Template:Cite web/doc. Moreover, my bot could easily correct the 450 pages, however I think that the best would be to treat the maximum number of errors at each edition. JackPotte (discuss • contribs) 19:39, 4 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Thank you. You might have a look at w:en:Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Check Wikipedia (plus Bgwhite's user talk page).  The tech-savvy gnomes at enwiki have been thinking about this for the last week, and I think they already had several tools and scripts that address these issues.  Perhaps some of those would save you some coding time.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (discuss • contribs) 04:50, 5 October 2016 (UTC)

Creative Commons 4.0
Hello! I'm writing from the Wikimedia Foundation to invite you to give your feedback on a proposed move from CC BY-SA 3.0 to a CC BY-SA 4.0 license across all Wikimedia projects. The consultation will run from October 5 to November 8, and we hope to receive a wide range of viewpoints and opinions. Please, if you are interested, take part in the discussion on Meta-Wiki.

''Apologies that this message is only in English. This message can be read and translated in more languages here.'' Joe Sutherland (talk) 01:35, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

What are the exceptions of the policy on redirects?
Hello everyone,

WB:SPEEDY includes "Orphaned redirects that do not conform with Wikibooks:Naming policy or where the names are unlikely to be inadvertently searched for by anyone" as a speedy deletion criterion. While I find the rationale behind that rule reasonable, in practice I feel that there are some reasonable uses of redirects in specific circumstances, and in fact I have created a few of them in my work at Haskell ("a few", as opposed to, say, systematically setting up alternate names for every page in the book, which would be quite unreasonable). I am thinking of three special cases:


 * To begin with the uncontroversial one, there are the redirects automatically created for moved pages, which prevent link rot both within the book and across the Internet.
 * A related possibility are what we might call "clairvoyance redirects", which are created to prevent link rot and minimise maintenance work due to a planned future reorganisation of the book. One example in the Haskell book is Haskell/Applicative functors II. I created that because I predicted the target page would eventually have to be split, and so it would be somewhat useful to have a link for using at off-wiki places that wouldn't break after the split. (In this case, though, I currently believe the split will not be necessary after all, and so this redirect will likely end up deleted in any case.)
 * Finally, there are "shortener redirects", which exist merely for supplying convenient links (be them internal to the book or off-wiki) for pages with long titles. For instance, depending on the outcome of this discussion I will create Haskell/Applicative prologue as a redirect to the new and unorthodoxly-titled Haskell/Prologue: IO, an applicative functor (in fact, I might even add an information box to the top of the page telling readers about the redirect).

Are any of these use cases, or any others, acceptable?

Cheers, Duplode (discuss • contribs) 13:37, 9 October 2016 (UTC)


 * A general observation: in my experience, most projects aren't terribly red-tape-ish about speedy-deletion criteria; mostly, these sorts of criteria make it safe for an admin to exercise common sense in deleting various kinds of pages without risk of getting in seriously hot water for doing so.  (En.wp tends to red tape, so I suspect their criteria may be treated more as directives than mere permission; of course, en.wp also notoriously has no regular mechanism for revoking adminship.)
 * Link rot &mdash; how important it is to leave a link after moving probably depends on whether it's the main page of a book or merely one of its subpages, and how long it sat around under the old name, and various issues of old/new page content. Afaik the wiki software, at least in the non-mobile interface, provides a trail of breadcrumbs so it's usually possible to follow a link to the new location of the page after the redirect has been deleted.  If someone involved with a book requests deletion of redirects left from moves, I'd probably honor the request in most cases.
 * Shortner redirects &mdash; within a book, and within reason, this seems to me like mostly an internal choice for the book's contributors.
 * --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 14:54, 9 October 2016 (UTC)


 * That sounds entirely reasonable -- and it's of course great that we can avoid excessive red tape by trusting our admins!


 * (The only thing I would add is that I tend to care rather more than you suggest about external links to subpages. That is mainly because, despite our efforts to the contrary, people often talk about and share links to the Haskell book as if it was a collection of tutorials, rather than a cohesive book with a less pragmatic outlook. I believe that is in part thanks to cultural factors, and so there is not much we can do about it other than making the book even more cohesive and hoping readers appreciate the results. With such a state of affairs, I think it is worth it to play nice and see it that the links to the "Haskell tutorials at Wikibooks" across the Internet keep working, even if calling a chapter of the book a "tutorial" is, to my ears, akin to nails on a chalkboard...)


 * Thanks, Duplode (discuss • contribs) 23:00, 9 October 2016 (UTC)

Phrasebook question
Where do phrasebooks for travellers belong? The question has come up in a Wikivoyage discussion and Wikibooks has been suggested. 2607:FEA8:E2A0:757:B093:6FBB:AD61:B5CB (discuss) 14:36, 9 October 2016 (UTC)
 * Quite a few language books here have a section that's a phrase book. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 14:57, 9 October 2016 (UTC)

Editing News #3—2016
Read this in another language • Subscription list for this multilingual newsletter

 Did you know?

Did you know that you can easily re-arrange columns and rows in the visual editor?

Select a cell in the column or row that you want to move. Click the arrow at the start of that row or column to open the dropdown menu (shown). Choose either "Move before" or "Move after" to move the column, or "Move above" or "Move below" to move the row.

You can read and help translate the user guide, which has more information about how to use the visual editor.

Since the last newsletter, the VisualEditor Team has mainly worked on a new wikitext editor. They have also released some small features and the new map editing tool. Their workboard is available in Phabricator. You can find links to the list of work finished each week at mw:VisualEditor/Weekly triage meetings. Their current priorities are fixing bugs, releasing the 2017 wikitext editor as a beta feature, and improving language support.

Recent changes

 * You can now set text as small or big.
 * Invisible templates have been shown as a puzzle icon. Now, the name of the invisible template is displayed next to the puzzle icon.  A similar feature will display the first part of hidden HTML comments.
 * Categories are displayed at the bottom of each page. If you click on the categories, the dialog for editing categories will open.
 * At many wikis, you can now add maps to pages. Go to the Insert menu and choose the "Maps" item. The Discovery department is adding more features to this area, like geoshapes. You can read more at mediawiki.org.
 * The "Save" button now says "Save page" when you create a page, and "Save changes" when you change an existing page. In the future, the "" button will say "".  This will affect both the visual and wikitext editing systems.  More information is available on Meta.
 * Image galleries now use a visual mode for editing. You can see thumbnails of the images, add new files, remove unwanted images, rearrange the images by dragging and dropping, and add captions for each image.  Use the "Options" tab to set the gallery's display mode, image sizes, and add a title for the gallery.

Future changes
The visual editor will be offered to all editors at the remaining 10 "Phase 6" Wikipedias during the next month. The developers want to know whether typing in your language feels natural in the visual editor. Please post your comments and the language(s) that you tested at the feedback thread on mediawiki.org. This will affect several languages, including Thai, Burmese and Aramaic.

The team is working on a modern wikitext editor. The 2017 wikitext editor will look like the visual editor and be able to use the citoid service and other modern tools. This new editing system may become available as a Beta Feature on desktop devices in October 2016. You can read about this project in a general status update on the Wikimedia mailing list.

Let's work together

 * Do you teach new editors how to use the visual editor? Did you help set up the Citoid automatic reference feature for your wiki? Have you written or imported TemplateData for your most important citation templates? Would you be willing to help new editors and small communities with the visual editor?  Please sign up for the new VisualEditor Community Taskforce.
 * If you aren't reading this in your preferred language, then please help us with translations! Subscribe to the Translators mailing list or contact us directly, so that we can notify you when the next issue is ready.

—Elitre (WMF) 17:49, 15 October 2016 (UTC)