Wikipedia talk:Editnotice/Archive 2

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

Archive 4

Archive 5

Unnoticeable notices are useless

If the consensus is that editnotices are to be bland, then I am opting out of the system. I have removed them from the few articles where I used the notice and will deal with issues as I have previously. --—— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk - 02:15, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Per-page editnotice

The per-page editnotices have been disabled. Please see Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Fyi on per-article edit notices and discuss there, if interested. --Amalthea 20:43, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

Editnotice load

OK, since the {{editnotice load}} template, as a reduced version of David's loader, is now a reality for two namespaces, I'd like to make some changes.
First of all, a number of namespaces are still missing per-page edit notice functionality. As far as I noticed Dragons flight only ported the ones in Article and Talk space. Talk space should technically still be working with the MediaWiki editnotices, but that's done in any case.
This leaves us, as far as I can tell, the following namespaces that don't have subpages enabled: File, MediaWiki, Template, Help, Category
I'd first of all recommend we enable the per-page notices on those pages, too. We have a couple of Editnotices in namespaces 8 and 10 that are currently not being displayed.
Following that, I'd really like to add the feature that unobtrusively displays the "view" link on top of every edit notice. It's mostly going to be used by admins, obviously, but a number of the current editnotices already have a custom backlink, and I'd rather have a consistent look.
We can gladly talk about more sophisticated features afterwards, but I'd like to get those two done pretty quickly. Opinions?
Amalthea 16:03, 17 March 2009 (UTC)

The following namespaces do not have subpages enabled: article, File, MediaWiki, Help, Help talk, Category, and Category talk.[1] Template space still has its editnotices, as subpages are enabled there; see for example Template:Non-free_use_rationale/doc. The one for Talk space should probably be removed until a subpage-handling loader exists. Anomie⚔ 22:30, 17 March 2009 (UTC)

Eh, right, thanks. Well, those then. :) --Amalthea 22:38, 17 March 2009 (UTC)

Long overdue, but I've made that change now. I know that that Help, Help talk, and Category talk will have subpages enabled before long, but I'd actually propose to enable the editnotice load functionality for all other namespaces as well, simply for consistency. Currently they are all over the place. --Amalthea 19:00, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Besides consistency, it would also future-proof things for when Domas decides that per-page editnotices for namespaces with subpages are as troublesome as mainspace notices were on some wikis. In order to preserve the current behavior WRT subpages, though, we'd need something a bit more complicated than {{editnotice load}}; it would also be nice to decide on some of the outstanding issues, such as whether there should be a way to specify both "for this page only" and "for this page and all subpages" notices and how exactly to handle User/User talk space that doesn't allow any vandal to do this sort of thing to victims' edit screens (I wonder if AbuseFilter could be (ab)used for that purpose?). Anomie⚔ 20:28, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Current behavior is "for this page and all subpages", with a bug thrown in that will show the same editnotice on User:AnomieBOT/shutoff/IFDCloser as on User:AnomieBOT-shutoff. Incidently that's one of the few places I can think of where subpage editnotices are useful, the other would be one for the subpages Template:Editnotices itself.
I believe David's {{editnotice loader}} could only define an editnotice for a root page and all its subpages, by using {{#titleparts:{{PAGENAME}}|1}}. That wouldn't work for yours. However, such a base editnotice can be used to work some parser function magic, and work as a proxy for proper subpage editnotices. If you place

{{#ifeq:{{#titleparts:{{PAGENAME}}|2}} | AnomieBOT/shutoff | {{User:AnomieBOT/shutoff instructions}} }}

or something in your group editnotice, it would replicate the old behaviour for you (sans the bug). What's more, it can be used to do much niftier stuff, like displaying an editnotice based on page prefix, like all pages matching with "User:Amalthea/Archive*":

{{#ifeq:{{str left | {{PAGENAME}} | {{str len|Amalthea/Archive}} }} | Amalthea/Archive | {{User:Amalthea/Archive editnotice}} }}

That could be optimized quite a bit of course. For all non-userspace editnotices it should be agreed to always place them as subpages of Template:Subpage editnotices or wherever, to keep them protected and organized. {{editnotice load}} must of course explicitly show those only for namespaces with subpages, cause #titleparts will split on all slashes no matter what.

Amalthea 10:57, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

I don't see any need to duplicate the bug, but whoever moves all the notices out of the MediaWiki namespace should be aware of it to get the notices at the correct names. We can (to an arbitrary maximum depth) duplicate the current behavior with something resembling [2] if we decide to go that route; I'm not sure whether that's preferable to the way {{editnotice loader}} works. For that matter, we could just have {{editnotice load}} always use {{NAMESPACE}}:{{BASEPAGENAME}} and force all subpage handling into the base page editnotice.

It would be easy enough for {{editnotice load}} to correctly detect when a page is a subpage: {{#ifeq:{{PAGENAME}}|{{SUBPAGENAME}}|(not a subpage)|(is a subpage)}} Or we could just create {{editnotice load subpages}} and use the correct one depending on the namespace. Anomie⚔ 17:26, 22 April 2009 (UTC)

I've drafted a new loader now at User:Amalthea/test12/Template:Editnotice load. It does the following:

• Load a namespace notice from Template:Editnoices/Main/{{NAMESPACE}}. I took that from David's loader (along with the classes and styles) since it makes sense to pack all editnotices into a common div, which would be uglier if it had to happen in MediaWiki:Editnotice-X
• Load a group notice from Template:Editnotices/Group/{{FULLROOTPAGENAME}}. That notice can contain whatever is useful for a page group. In particular, one might want to place in it
  • {{Editnotice subpages|Shutdown}}, which displays [[Template:Editnotices/Group/{{FULLROOTPAGENAME}}/Shutdown]] on [[{{FULLROOTPAGENAME}}/Shutdown]] and all subpages (well, 6 levels deep or so). (draft)
  • {{Editnotice prefixpages|Archive}}, which displays [[Template:Editnotices/Group/{{FULLROOTPAGENAME}}/Archive]] on every page starting with [[{{FULLROOTPAGENAME}}/Archive]]. (draft)
• Load a simple page notice from Template:Editnotices/Page/{{FULLPAGENAME}}. That's what we already have.

The group notices are quite powerful, and not hard to use: to create a notice for a page and all subpages, you create the notice page as usual, and then register it at the main group notice. They do however make it rather hard to place proper "view editnotice" links pointing back to the editnoties since they could come from all over the place. So I'm thinking it would be better to place the "view" links inside the editnotices themselves, similar to what navboxes do (something like this or this).
Some open questions:

1. Is is OK to pretend that namespaces Help, Help talk, and Category talk have subpages, and allow group notices there, even though bugzilla:18437 is still open?
2. Do we want users to build page group editnotices for their user space, at e.g. Special:MyPage/Editnotice group?
3. My sandbox version allows to create editnotices for every user space subpage, through a /Editnotice subpage of that page. The current system only allows notices for the root pages. Do we want that?
4. Is it OK to have a new editnotice template not relying on {{fmbox}}? I tried to make it still use most of the styles form it, but I had to hardcode them for now since I used divs is outer elements. I kind of like having the "view" link as a clear part of the notice (even though two view-links might point to the same page if there are two editnotice templates put into one editnotice page). If anyone can make a nice editnotice box still built upon fmbox I'd probably prefer that.
   

Amalthea 16:32, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Looks pretty good to me. To answer your questions:

1. I haven't tested it, but it looks like your current version automatically detects whether group notices should be enabled or not. I'd say that's correct behavior.
2. IMO, all editnotices should be fully-protected in some manner or another. If we want userspace editnotices editable by the corresponding user, someone should figure out how to abuse AbuseFilter to deny all edits from other than sysops and the user in question for those pages. But is there really a use case for general user-editable userspace editnotices that an occasional {{editprotected}} wouldn't handle well enough?
3. Ditto. Also, I'd personally rather see User:Example/Editnotices/{{PAGENAME}} than User:Example/{{PAGENAME}}/Editnotices if we go that route.
4. No opinion.

Anomie⚔ 21:02, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Nobody else seems to have an opinion on this (and David's taking a break), so I'm just going to do it next week. I agree with you on #3, it should work the same way it does at Template:Editnotices (even though I think it's slightly less intuitive).
The AbuseFilter could easily autoprotect them the way it works for .js/.css. However, I'm quite sure that if we autoprotect User:([^/]*)/Editnotice( group)?($|/.*), then this new subspace would pretty soon see pollution for other uses, just like the .css/.js pages do. Those would be even better since wikitext works in them, and nobody would protect any of those at RFPP. So what I'm wondering is whether we should take the extra step and create a more general autoprotected naming convention, like autoprotect any page in userspace that starts with a ".", or ends with ".protected", or is a subpage of User:Example/secure.
That's something that needs to go through WP:VPR though. Amalthea 09:02, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Works for me. Whoever writes the rule needs to take more care than they did when attempting Special:AbuseFilter/99, though; i.e. test substr(article_text,0,strlen(user_name)+1) against (user_name + "/") rather than just whether article_text contains the username. Otherwise, for example, User:B could edit any page that contains a "B". Anomie⚔ 12:23, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Heh, yes.
And hmm, having thought about this for a while longer, I'd actually again favor only allowing user-editable editnotices for the base pages again. In general, most editnotices for user subpages would probably be pretty pointless, and if we allow them to be created, they will be created. In the very few cases where it's useful to have one at a subpage or for a group, it can still be loaded from Template:Editnotices; as you say, the occasional editprotected is no big deal.
So it's back to only protect those two pages. Amalthea 13:52, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

I still wonder whether there is even a point to user-editable editnotices for the base pages. Since the existing misfeature hasn't really been advertised AFAIK, only 256 users (323 notices total) seem to have made any use of it. Most of the userpage notices are variations on "don't vandalize" and/or "messages go on the talk page" and/or "good edits welcome/please don't edit" and/or "I have a quirky editnotice!"; only 3 say anything even slightly interesting that a global "You probably want the talk page" notice wouldn't say, and some are just idiotic (such as one user whose notice is a 800x1032 jpeg). The talk page notices (at least for usernames beginning A-C) are slightly better, but many just reiterate WP:TALK or say "If I reverted you/blocked you/deleted your page, I had a good reason". I do find the "I will reply here" messages interesting, though; I may create one of those for myself once we do this thing. Anomie⚔ 23:18, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

I don't use them myself, but if 256 users find it helpful to have editnotices on their userpages, and if it can be implemented easily (which it is) then it should be. I also don't see a distinction between them and user subpages. If users can edit their basepage editnotices then I don't understand an argument that says they shouldn't be able to edit their subpage editnotices. It would be simpler and more consistent to have all pages in the user and user talk namespaces treated in the same way. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 13:45, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

My point (somewhere way above) was that an {{editprotected}} isn't really that onerous of a requirement for userspace editnotices. It could also help prevent abuse of the "make it difficult to edit my talk page" variety. Anomie⚔ 17:15, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

By the by, I've done this over the past couple days. Next and important step is to redo the {{editnotice}} template. In addition to providing a backlink to the editnotice, I'd like to standardize it somewhat. Currently, they are using all kinds of different attention-grabbing formatting, it'd be nice to classify them in different levels depending on urgengcy. Amalthea 15:47, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Help page updates

I did a lot of rework today. Except for the history section and how to get lists of editnotices, I think it is complete. I would appreciate some eyes on it to ensure its accuracy. Thanks to Amalthea for straitening me out as I remembered and discovered how this thing works. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 21:12, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Would you mention where the edit notices for dab pages and BLP articles are defined? -- User:Docu

I figured out how these work— these are editintros and not editnotices. Need to figure out where to document these. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 16:16, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Since the templates were added without explanation, I added documentation. I don't know if this needs to be somewhere else. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 14:41, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Heh, I suck at documentation. Thanks for keeping track. :) Amalthea 13:56, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. I might even take up tech writing as a profession... oh, wait... ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 14:42, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

Incorrect or outdated info?

The page currently says:

Editnotices can be created for any namespace or page, but not subpages

Yet Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents for example, a subpage of Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard has an edit notice. This info is outdated or otherwise incorrect then I presu,e? Nil Einne (talk) 18:29, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

And then we go and show an example of an editnotice for a subpage. Good catch- removed. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 01:57, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

Editnotice security - we now have a solution

In continuation to the section above #Editnotice security - I think that we can use the abuse fiilter to prevent such problems. Filter should disallow any edit by a non-admin to an other user's edit notices. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 12:25, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Yes, that's what Anomie suggested above. It might make sense though to instead of only protect the one type of page to create a whole class of autoprotected user subpages that can only be edited by the user and admins, e.g. any user space subpage of User:Example/protected/, or any user space subpage starting with ".", or any user space subpage ending with " (protected)" or ".protected".
Personally, I would support such autoprotected pages, and I think I'm going to ask for some input at WP:VPR.
Amalthea 12:42, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

I've done so at WP:VPR#Autoprotected user space pages. Amalthea 13:41, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Dismissibility and per-category editnotices

I added a section on this. As of now, it's still at the state of enhancement requests, but it could be a major development for editnotices. Cenarium (talk) 13:58, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

Adding this feature in other wikipedias

Hi, I was looking for the insertion point for this template in the mediawiki messages, but could not find it. How does mediawiki know when to show the template? technically, which pages would I need to alter to import this feature to another Wikipedia? Yonidebest Ω Talk‏ 08:49, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

The MediaWiki messages used are e.g. MediaWiki:Editnotice-0 or MediaWiki:Editnotice-2-David Göthberg. The number stands for the namespace id. If it has no name, it's the editnotice for the hole namespace, if it has a name, it's only for all pages that start with that name. Note that slashes "/" are converted to dashes "-", so the editnotice at MediaWiki:Editnotice-2-Foo-Bar is used for all pages that start with either "User:Foo-Bar" or with "User:Foo/Bar".
Amalthea 09:47, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

Oh, or are you specifically referring to user editable edit notices? Then you're probably set with this old revision of MediaWiki:Editnotice-2 and the equivalent from MediaWiki:Editnotice-3. Amalthea 09:58, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

Wow, a lot of templates are involved... Let me make sure i got this right. I need to fill MediaWiki:Editnotice-0 throught MediaWiki:Editnotice-15 with the loader tamplate. I can't see where MediaWiki:Editnotice-2-David Göthberg is used - the codes seems to use pages in "template:Editnotice/page/". Yonidebest Ω Talk 12:24, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

Yes, just wanted to mention it for the sake of completeness, since I don't know what exactly you're planning to do. :)
If you want to load the editnotices from somewhere else, which you have to now that the per-page notices have been disabled for namespaces with subpages disabled, then yes:

1. Copy the {{Editnotice load}} over (which uses {{FULLROOTPAGENAME}} and {{Ns has subpages}})
2. Place the loader template in he:MediaWiki:Editnotice-0 through he:MediaWiki:Editnotice-15 plus he:MediaWiki:Editnotice-100 ("פורטל") and he:MediaWiki:Editnotice-101 ("שיחת פורטל").
3. Limit editing of all editnotices to admins, by adding an entry into the he:MediaWiki:Titleblacklist like

   Template:Editnotices\/.* <noedit|errmsg=titleblacklist-custom-editnotice>

   (or wherever you plan to load the notices from), which in turn displays an error message pulled from MediaWiki:Titleblacklist-custom-editnotice if a non-מפעילי מערכת trys to edit a page starting with "Template:Editnotices/".

And that should be it.
Amalthea 12:40, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

Cool, thats exactly what I've done so far :-) another question: if I want to display an editnotice when editing user:yonidebest/bar and when editing user:yonidebest/bar/foo, I need to create two editnotice pages - user:yonidebest/editnotice and user:yonidebest/bar/editnotice? Yonidebest Ω Talk 12:53, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

← Ah, well. Maybe it'll be useful in the future. :)
Here on en-wiki, we explicitly only allow user-editable editnotices for the base pages, all other pages have to be created by admins and live as Template:Editnotices subpages. If you want a more liberal approach, the loader template needs to be changed.
There's currently the check
{{#switch:{{PAGENAME}}:::{{NAMESPACE}}
  | {{BASEPAGENAME}}:::{{ns:User}} | {{BASEPAGENAME}}:::{{ns:User talk}} =
    {{#ifexist:{{FULLPAGENAME}}/Editnotice | <div id="editnotice-ns-{{NAMESPACEID}}" class="editnotice-page">{{{{FULLPAGENAME}}/Editnotice}}</div> }}
  | #default =
    {{#ifexist:Template:Editnotices/Page/{{FULLPAGENAME}} | <div class="editnotice-page">{{Template:Editnotices/Page/{{FULLPAGENAME}}}}</div> }}
}}
which makes sure that the current page name and the base page name are equal, i.e. we're at the root page. If you change that to
{{#switch:{{NAMESPACE}}
  | {{ns:User}} | {{ns:User talk}} =
  [...]
it will look for a subpage called "/Editnotice" for every user (talk) page.
Untested. Amalthea 13:30, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

If you want to display the same edit notice on a page and all subpages, you can use the group editnotices: e.g., on User:AnomieBOT and every subpage of it, Template:Editnotices/Group/User:AnomieBOT is displayed as an editnotice. Here on en-wiki there's no feature to have such group edit notices automatically loaded from user space. Amalthea 13:36, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

Oh, I see. I'll check what our community wants before I change it. Thanks for the help! Yonidebest Ω Talk 13:39, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

Emailnotice

Following discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 66#edit notice for special:emailuser, it's now possible to author an editnotice for ones Special:Emailuser subpage, by creating Special:MyPage/Emailnotice. The magic is in MediaWiki:Emailpagetext. Amalthea 16:31, 19 October 2009 (UTC)

I checked the code: It is efficient and it only runs when one is at the e-mail page. It doesn't use the namespace notice, thus it costs no server resources at all on other page loads. And it is a usable feature. So this seems to be a nice addition.

--David Göthberg (talk) 17:30, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

Flexible editnotice groups

This discussion was moved here from my talk page. --David Göthberg (talk) 16:52, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

I don't suppose there's any way of defining a Group, for editnotice purposes, in a completely flexible way? What I'd like is to have, say List of pages with editnotice X, and somehow pages listed there get that editnotice. This would make it much easier to apply editnotices (eg to notify of an ARBCOM restriction). Obviously, the list would have to be fully protected. Anyway, there isn't currently anything like that, is there? What do you think of the idea? PS editloader seems like a good idea. Rd232 ^talk 15:08, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

First of all, in case you don't already know it: We already have a simple group function in place, that can load the same editnotice for a page and all its subpages. For instance on "Wikipedia:Example" and Wikipedia:Example/Test" and so on.

But to answer your actual question. Assuming we code it with template programming only, then:

Technically we could make such a centrally loaded list, that gets checked when you edit any page. Actually very easy for me to code up. But that would have to run on every page edit, on every page. And if we put in many page names in the list it would cost some work to do the list check each time, and thus too much server work in total. We could limit the function to for instance only the "Wikipedia:" namespace and some more namespaces, but not article space, then maybe it would be reasonable. (But I think our server admins/devs would veto it.)

But if it is a limited number of pages, then you can make a template with the message, then put that template in the editnotice for all those pages. Thus you can update the message in one single place by simply editing that template. We could even very easily make that template smart, so you can select which of the pages with the template shows what message. (Basically by putting that list into the template itself, in the form of a #switch case.) But as I said, it would only be reasonable to have that template on a limited number of pages. I hope this would be good enough for your needs?

But what kind of pages are you thinking of? That is, in what namespace would they be? And how many pages do you expect might end up on that list?

--David Göthberg (talk) 21:14, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

That sounds impractical. I've created Category:Editnotice templates, and that helps a bit. But an Arbcom restriction on a topic could easily affect 1000 or 10,000 articles. Which makes me suddenly think, actually, you'd want to be able to add categories onto the editnotice's list, with every page in the category getting that editnotice. Or something - you see what I'm after. I don't think it's feasible without a software change anyway. Rd232 ^talk 21:20, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Ouch, 1000 to 10,000 pages in the same list would be way too much to process from template code. (I'd say a list with tops 100 pages in would be okay to process if we only did it for the non-article spaces. To keep the list short we could have one list for each namespace.) But you say "articles", thus meaning article space. So yes, a software change would be needed, since doing it from the MediaWiki software might be reasonable. And template code can not detect what categories are used on a page, so then it would have to be done from the MediaWiki software.

Of course, if you only rarely need to add and remove such notices, then you could ask a bot owner to add your notice (in the form of a template) to all those pages. The people over at Wikipedia:Bot requests are usually very helpful! They also do other things such as advanced searches on all pages, on off-line copies of the Wikipedia database, and so on.

--David Göthberg (talk) 21:48, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Ah, a bot would work, actually, to do that! You'd have a protected list the bot works from, of pages/categories, and it adds a reference to the relevant template to the pages referenced. I'm going to propose that at WP:VPR. Thanks. Rd232 ^talk 22:27, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Yes, and I have joined the discussion over at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Flexible Groups for Editnotices.

--David Göthberg (talk) 23:16, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

For what it's worth, you can do a somewhat more sophisticated things in the group notices if you use parser functions. You can for example show an editnotice on all subpages starting with "Archive". There are even two templates to help, {{Editnotice prefixpages}} and {{Editnotice subpages}}.
I agree with you two though that for a collection of page titles without any identifiable and easily testable criterion, bot maintained editnotices driven by lists of pages would be best.
Cheers, Amalthea 14:30, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

End section moved here from my talk page. --David Göthberg (talk) 16:52, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

The simple list function I was thinking of in my earlier messages above would simply mean making the list in the form of a switch case, like this:

{{#switch: {{FULLPAGENAME}}
| Wikipedia:Examle/test = {{testedit notice}}
| Wikipedia:A-how-to-guide = {{howto notice}}
}}

But when doing it with template code, then we can only have about 100 items in such a switch case before it becomes too heavy to process. So to be useful (to allow more page names) such a list function would have to be implemented in the MediaWiki software instead.

Amalthea: Ah, your code is very nice and it is efficient. If some one has a need for such "pattern matching" in page names then we perhaps should offer it in the editnotice loader. And matching on archive pages like that is a splendid example!

To make it clear for Rd232 and anyone else reading this: We can efficiently pick apart a page name and check each part individually, like for "Template:Example/doc" we can match on each of those three words separately. So we could for instance match on "/doc", as in all /doc pages.

And we can check the beginning of a string, like match on "Archive*" meaning any page name starting with "Archive" and ending in anything. Unfortunately we can not efficiently match on "*text", nor on "*text*". But since we can pick apart the page names we can match on for instance "*:*/Archive*". Thus only matching on subpages that begin with "/Archive".

But note that we can only have say 30 different patterns in total for one namespace, or it becomes too heavy to process. But since it is patterns it can at least match any number of pages. The limitations I mention here are of course just very rough estimates, and depends on how we implement it.

--David Göthberg (talk) 16:52, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

Theoretically, a list of pages could be manageable by splitting the workload in subtemplates (switching on the first character of the page name, for example), but since you'd then have to distribute your list of pages over many sublists, you can just as easily create the editnotices. Amalthea 17:44, 30 October 2009 (UTC)