Commons:Village pump/Technical

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Welcome to the Village pump technical section

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Village pump/Technical

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This page is used for technical questions relating to the tools, gadgets, or other technical issues about Commons; it is distinguished from the main Village pump, which handles community-wide discussion of all kinds. The page may also be used to advertise significant discussions taking place elsewhere, such as on the talk page of a Commons policy. Recent sections with no replies for 30 days and sections tagged with {{Section resolved|1=--~~~~}} may be archived; for old discussions, see the archives; recent archives: /Archive/2025/08 /Archive/2025/09.

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Why is Category:Broken category redirects not fully populated?

One example I expect to be there is Category:Valea Crişului, Covasna, but I can't see it neither on UI nor through Petscan.

It would be useful for me to be able to find categories like Valea Crişului so as to clean them up – either fix the redirect or request speedy deletion. Gikü (talk) 11:23, 11 August 2025 (UTC)

These don’t show up in PetScan by default, because PetScan skips over redirects. The UI also doesn’t highlight them in the same way as normal categories. Incall ^talk 18:27, 27 August 2025 (UTC)

Mobile browser not showing subscribe button

As of today my Firefox mobile browser has stopped displaying the subscribe button for discussion topics (e.g. on this page) while I'm seeing the page in mobile view. When I switch into desktop mode in the Firefox app, the subscribe is being displayed. I've tried on two different phones (two different brands). If I use a no-name Chromium-based mobile browser, I can also see the subscribe button when in mobile view. Nakonana (talk) 15:19, 22 August 2025 (UTC)

Oh, wait, no, it's not the browser that makes the difference, it's the page. I can see the subscribe button here on Village pump/Technical but I can't see it on the normal Village pump page. Nakonana (talk) 15:22, 22 August 2025 (UTC)

Also take a look at other pages to see how it works and tell me, maybe then I will understand the reason. Incall ^talk 18:36, 27 August 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for looking into it.

It looks like the regular Village Pump is the only affected page. Maybe it's due to how the sub-headings are? VP has headings for each day and then there are several threads per day.

• File:Mobile browser showing subscribe button below last comment.png — this is how it's supposed to be. Showing VP/Technical.
• File:Mobile browser not showing subscribe button below last comment on Village Pump.png — this is the issue. Showing regular VP.
• File:Mobile browser in desktop view showing subscribe button below last comment.png — the subscribe button is there on the regular VP if I switch to desktop view. Note: the file name is wrong, the subscribe button is on the right of each thread.

Nakonana (talk) 19:40, 27 August 2025 (UTC)

Perhaps this problem comes from the JavaScript in your browser. May I suggest you try using a Convenient Discussions? Incall ^talk 07:05, 28 August 2025 (UTC)

It's browser-independent. The problem is present in mobile Firefox and a mobile Chromium based browser, and in both browsers the problem only appears on the regular VP page. It wasn't there in the past, so I'm not sure what happened. I don't know how influential JavaScript is on mobile (I think I am using Convenient Discussions on desktop, but I'm not seeing it on mobile). Nakonana (talk) 15:39, 28 August 2025 (UTC)

It seems the issue is not with the browser itself, but with the way the regular Village Pump page is structured. That page uses a special layout with daily subheadings and several threads under each section. On the mobile version of MediaWiki, this may interfere with how the «Subscribe» button is displayed, because the script does not recognize such “nested” discussions as separate topics.

To verify this, you could check other large pages with a similar structure and see if the same problem occurs there. If it does, then it’s likely a bug in the DiscussionTools extension for the mobile interface.

If you need the subscribe button all the time, you can temporarily use «Convenient Discussions» or switch to desktop mode. But ideally, it would be good to file a bug report on Phabricator so that the developers can fix the behavior in the mobile version. Incall ^talk 16:03, 28 August 2025 (UTC)

Do you know any pages that use a similar structure as the regular Village Pump by any chance? I can't think of any page of the top of my head. Nakonana (talk) 07:10, 29 August 2025 (UTC)

Do other users also have this problem? Probably something should be done about this. and since it's not necessarily a technical issue, a phab issue may not be good to create instead of editing the VP page / its templates. Prototyperspective (talk) 17:07, 17 September 2025 (UTC)

If you don't mind testing it, just open Commons on your phone in a mobile browser app of your choice, log in and go to the VP page. Can you see the subscribe buttons below the heading and the "Latest comment" note like in File:Mobile browser showing subscribe button below last comment.png or is the button missing like in File:Mobile browser not showing subscribe button below last comment on Village Pump.png? If you can see the button, which mobile browser app did you use? Sometodark mode may also affect the display, but I have tried switching into light mode and the issue still persists. I'm also guessing that it's something about templates or the page layout that's causing the problem. And it might have been introduced by a rather recent change, iirc. Nakonana (talk) 08:25, 21 September 2025 (UTC)

Search Link template for MediaSearch?

Hi, the template {{Search link}} uses Special:Search. Is there a similar template for Special:MediaSearch? Consigned (talk) 18:49, 24 August 2025 (UTC)

{{Special}} (example: {{Special|MediaSearch|search=name|title=Search images}}) Incall ^talk 18:22, 27 August 2025 (UTC)

Instead of a separate similar template, could a parameter please be added to that template so that one can choose the search engine (and probably it would be good to make the new MediaSearch the default soon afterwards) as proposed on the template's talk page? Prototyperspective (talk) 23:11, 17 September 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-35

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Updates for editors

• Template authors can now use additional CSS properties, since the CSS sanitizer used by TemplateStyles was updated. For example: width: fit-content; ruby-align; relative units such as lh; and custom strings in list-style-type. These improvements are a Community Wishlist wish. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]
• On large wikis, the default time period to display edits from, within the Special:RecentChanges page, has been changed from 7 days to 1 day. This is part of a performance improvement project. This should have no user-facing impact due to the quantity of edits on these wikis. [11]
• Administrators can now access the Special:BlockedExternalDomains page from the Special:CommunityConfiguration list page. This makes it easier to find. [12]
• Wikimedia Commons videos were not shown in the Videos tab in Google Search. The problem was investigated and reported to Google who have now fixed the issue. [13][14]
• One new wiki has been created: a Wiktionary in Betawi (wikt:bew:) [15]
• View all 39 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• Two fields of the recentchanges database table are being removed. rc_new and rc_type are being removed in favor of rc_source. Queries to these older fields will start to fail starting this week and developers should use rc_source instead. These older fields were deprecated over 10 years ago and should not be in use. This is part of work to improve the performance and stability of queries to the recentchanges table. [16]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• The latest quarterly Language and Internationalization Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: support for new languages in MediaWiki and translatewiki; the start of the Language Onboarding and Development project to help support the growth of new and small wikis; updates on research projects; and more.

Meetings and events

• The next Language Community Meeting is happening soon, August 29th at 15:00 UTC. This week's meeting will cover: the Avro keyboard developers from Wikimedia Bangladesh, who were recently awarded a national award for their contributions to this keyboard; and other topics.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 00:07, 26 August 2025 (UTC)

Lua errors in Template:Districts of Saarbrücken Navi

There are some Lua errors in Template:Districts of Saarbrücken Navi that affect 40+ subcategories of Category:Pages with script errors. The template itself did not change recently, so something else is causing them. Anybody want s to track down what? Jarekt (talk) 02:04, 26 August 2025 (UTC)

It appears to be caused by the most recent edit in Module:Catnav. Tvpuppy (talk) 02:23, 26 August 2025 (UTC)

Tvpuppy You are right, After I reverted most resent changes by User:Verdy p that fixed the template and subcats in Category:Pages with script errors. Verdy, After you make changes to templates or Modules can you keep an eye on Category:Pages with script errors to see if your changes created any errors? --Jarekt (talk) 19:29, 26 August 2025 (UTC)

I have looked at them, nothing appeared for a while. What I tried to fix (successfully) were a set of errors causes by too many costly parser function calls in various pages, due to excessive uses of the "exist()" function calls, even on pages using "all=1" to explicitly remove these tests of existences (for some reasons, in some cases the value all=1 was not detected (not passed across template calls due to looking at the incorrect call frame). I don't know why my added test caused such errors that did not appear after hours. verdy_p (talk) 21:57, 26 August 2025 (UTC)

OCR for lesser used languages

OCR for lesser used languages has improved immensely over the past few years. Four or five years ago Welsh language OCR was, rubbish, and not worth using. The improvement over the last few years has been spectacular. But when I try to upload a PDF or DjVu book to Commons with OCR it is rejected as a "corrupted file", I can't work out why. If the correct place to ask this question isn't here can I be advised where to raise the question. Not being able to load files with embedded OCR is holding this project back AlwynapHuw (talk) 04:12, 29 August 2025 (UTC)

Can you upload an example file somewhere else, so people can examine it? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 11:37, 30 August 2025 (UTC)

@AlwynapHuw sounds like a bug to report on phab:. RoyZuo (talk) 14:23, 30 August 2025 (UTC)

Where exactly did you get your file from? There are thousands of books with OCR here, so it's probably a problem with your specific book and how you made it/where you got it. — Alien  3
3 3 08:47, 1 September 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for the replies. I can't reproduce it now, because I re-uploaded the files without the problematic OCR layer, and deleted the Index page on which the problem existed. I have had the same problem on djvu and pdf files with OCR, with files taken from Archive.org, Google Books and those that I have scanned myself. I'll try again with a small book and use it to contact phab. AlwynapHuw (talk) 02:10, 11 September 2025 (UTC)

Upload wizard website upload

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T103876

Is there any technical reason why the Upload Wizard can’t directly upload from a whitelisted website, unlike the standard upload form? It can’t be because of copyvio spam issues as all uploadable websites would be copylefted. Anohthterwikipedian (talk) 11:06, 30 August 2025 (UTC)

@Anohthterwikipedian, probably to keep it simple for new users. JayCubby (talk) 16:47, 2 September 2025 (UTC)

But wouldn’t it be super useful for new users to be able to directly input a URL, instead of having to download it? I see numerous other image uploaders having the option to input either a file or a URL.

Anohthterwikipedian (talk) 21:18, 2 September 2025 (UTC)

New users aren't supposed to upload from URL, as these people are much more likely to ignore copyrights, as experience tells. Regards, Grand-Duc (talk) 21:52, 2 September 2025 (UTC)

That wouldn’t be an issue, as they can only upload from whitelisted websites, meaning that most files uploaded that way wouldn’t be a copyright issue (ignoring derivatives). But still though, my main question hasn’t been answered, that being if there is a technical problem with implementing such a thing.

Anohthterwikipedian (talk) 23:41, 2 September 2025 (UTC)

There is no technical reason why it couldn't. It would require additional work, and the UX might be complicated to get right. Its much more of a, "it doesn't seem like a good idea" type of issue than a technical one. Bawolff (talk) 08:04, 8 September 2025 (UTC)

But why isn’t it a good idea? Users can only upload from freely licensed websites, meaning most images uploaded would be freely licensed.

Anohthterwikipedian (talk) 23:08, 8 September 2025 (UTC)

well, maybe the people who think that are wrong. The worry is about overcomplicating the interface. The interface is already quite complex. Bawolff (talk) 17:19, 16 September 2025 (UTC)

@Bawolff: I personally believe that two buttons are not complex at all, and neither are three buttons and a textbox (while the other pages are more complex, this is the only page that needs to be changed).

Anohthterwikipedian (talk) 23:21, 16 September 2025 (UTC)

@Anohthterwikipedian If you have an idea on how to improve the UploadWizard, I suggest you propose it at Commons:Upload Wizard feedback, since you will more likely get the UploadWizard dev team’s attention over there. Thanks. Tvpuppy (talk) 23:59, 16 September 2025 (UTC)

@Tvpuppy: Apparently there is already a Phabricator task. Added now

Anohthterwikipedian (talk) 21:32, 17 September 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-36

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

• The Editing team wants to compile a list of templates, jargon terms, and policies used in edit summaries when a copyright violation is removed. This will help them identify the number of edits reverted due to copyright issues. We invite community members from the following Wikis to list these terms in T402601, or to share their list with Trizek_(WMF): Arabic Wikipedia, Czech Wikipedia, German Wikipedia, English Wikipedia, Spanish Wikipedia, Persian Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, Hebrew Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia, Korean Wikipedia, Dutch Wikipedia, Polish Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Ukrainian Wikipedia, Vietnamese Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia. This project is open until September 9th 2025.

Updates for editors

• The CampaignEvents extension has been enabled for all Wikisources. The extension makes it easier to organize and participate in collaborative activities, like edit-a-thons and WikiProjects, on the wikis. The extension has three features: Event Registration, Collaboration List, and Invitation List. To request the extension for your wiki, visit the Deployment information page. [17]
• The lists in the footer of the editing interface, such as "Templates used on this page," will now be organized into columns when there is enough space. This enhancement minimizes scrolling when editing lengthy articles on Wikipedia. [18]
• On September 3rd, 2025 we will increase the sampling percentages of our group by toggle experiment of the Special:RecentChanges, Special:Watchlist, and Special:RelatedChanges pages on the Chinese, French, and Portuguese Wikipedias to 100 percent, allowing more editors to be part of this experiment. This adjustment is intended to ensure we have sufficient data to make informed decisions when evaluating the experiment results. [19][20]
• Upon clicking an empty search bar, logged-out users will see suggestions of articles for further reading on English Wikipedia beginning the week of September 22. The feature will be available on both desktop and mobile. All non-English wikis received this change in June and July. The goal is to make it easier for users to find articles. Learn more.
• View all 37 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• Wikifunctions now has a new capability called "lightweight enumeration types", an enumeration type is simply a fixed set of values that's in the type's definition. This capability makes it quick and easy to define such a type, and allows for the reuse of values that are already present in Wikidata. Here is a newsletter to learn more.
• The latest Readers Newsletter is now available. This edition includes: the formation of two new teams — Reader Growth and Reader Experience; insights into declining pageviews and account creations; highlights from the Wikimania Nairobi panel on improving the reading experience; upcoming experiments to engage new and existing readers; and more.

Meetings and events

• Spotlight on some Wikimania 2025 Sessions:
  • Identifying AI-generated text by searching for ISBNs whose checksums fail: Mathias Schindler of WMDE shared tools to help communities search for these.
  • La durabilité du mouvement Wikimedia face aux défis actuels et futurs: This session explored how Wikimedia can stay a trusted source of knowledge in the age of generative AI, information overload, and disinformation.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 20:45, 1 September 2025 (UTC)

Blurry thumbnail on JPEG diagram

ScissorFlat.jpg

500px

300px

100px

I encountered this diagram at w:en:Scissor section flat and was baffled at how blurry it was on the article. After clicking to view it on Commons, I discovered it appears normal only on the file description page, and is blurry when used in articles at any size (see figure). The blur seems far too extreme and if I open the file on my computer and zoom out to a comparable size, the text is still legible. What's going on here? Is it a weird quirk of JPEG or something specific to the MediaWiki thumbnail generator? Dan Leonard (talk) 06:01, 4 September 2025 (UTC)

The image width is 893px, viewing it as a generated 893px JPEG thumbnail adds blur as well (original here). I tried to download it and the image is interestingly PNG-ish (no typical JPEG artifacts at borders, solid one colour areas...). My guess was some error in MIME type (e.g. PNG image uploaded as a JPEG), but MIME seems to be correct... — Draceane ^talk_contrib. 06:58, 4 September 2025 (UTC)

I'm not sure if it's related, but the file is apparently a CMYK (cyan, yellow, magenta, black) JPEG file rather than the much more common RGB (red, green, blue) type. Aside for pedants: yes, I know they're really YCrCb. identify says ScissorFlat.jpg JPEG 893x400 893x400+0+0 8-bit CMYK 726497B 0.000u 0:00.003. I wouldn't be surprised if the thumbnailer handled such weird files poorly. It might be worth converting it to a more normal JPEG or a PNG. --bjh21 (talk) 09:09, 4 September 2025 (UTC)

This diagram should probably be redrawn from scratch as an SVG anyway - some of the floors are crooked, and the stairs don't match the slope of the floor under them. Omphalographer (talk) 22:46, 6 September 2025 (UTC)

If you display it on something that doesn't support colour profiles, the text and the background are almost the same colour. If the scaling is being performed not in the colour space, maybe the text and background being almost the same colour causes them to blend together Bawolff (talk) 08:17, 8 September 2025 (UTC)

PNG seems to work + it's lossless compression — Draceane ^talk_contrib. 13:02, 4 September 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-37

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

• The Editing team is working on a new check: Paste check. This check informs newcomers who paste text into Wikipedia that the content might not be accepted. This check is an effort to increase the likelihood that the new content people are adding to Wikipedia is aligned with the Movement's commitment to offering information under a free content license. This check will soon be tested at a few wikis. If your community is interested in this test, please tell us in this task, or contact the team.

Updates for editors

• Later this week, users of the "Improved Syntax Highlighting" beta feature will be able to use a linting tool to see errors or other potential problems in wikitext in real time. See the help page for more information. [21]
• When browsing a wiki (like en.wikipedia.org), the software responds in one of two ways: a desktop page, or a redirect to a mobile version on an "m" domain (like en.m.wikipedia.org). Over the next three weeks, MediaWiki will start displaying the mobile version to mobile devices directly on the standard domain, without this redirect. This change does not affect existing m-dot URLs, or the "Desktop view" opt-out. Learn more. [22]
• When an edit changes the categories of a page, the changes to the category membership counts are now happening asynchronously. This improves the speed of saving edits, especially when moving many pages to or from the same category, and reduces the risk of site outages, but it means that the counts can show outdated information for a few minutes. [23]
• Edits on Wikidata to qualifiers (properties and values) and references (properties and values) in a Wikidata item statement will now not add entries to the RecentChanges or Watchlist pages on all other Wikis. This is a temporary change to improve performance while other solutions are created. Wikidata's own pages remain unchanged. Learn more. [24][25]
• Japanese-language wikis have had a major upgrade to the way that search works. The new search should generally give more accurate and more relevant search results. [26]
• View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 01:09, 9 September 2025 (UTC)

Template:Protected padlocks displaying incorrectly

Problem: Currently, Template:Protected has a semiprotected padlock topicon for me, and it's tooltip is the same. The Main Page has an autopatroller padlock topicon, but the tooltip says "This page is protected from editing", and the Edit source link is available, and when I edit the page the Edit notice correctly says "This page has been protected so that only administrators can edit it."

I checked again now one hour later, even in Incognito mode Template:Protected shows semi-protected padlock, with semi tooltip, yet it's cascading protected. Waddie96 (talk) 22:38, 9 September 2025 (UTC)

Could this be due to this? This is intentional; checking cascade protection status is quite an expensive operation, so we avoid doing it when it's not needed, i.e. on page views - when the edit operation commences, we do a full check. – phab:T13700 Prototyperspective (talk) 21:28, 17 September 2025 (UTC)

Autotranslate template issue?

Something is broken, see this diff and other similar messeges from user talk:Velopilger. {{Autotranslate}} is broken or what?—KEmel49(📝,📤) 18:42, 10 September 2025 (UTC)

@KEmel49 Perhaps the error is caused by the talk page being too long? I can see the sections properly if I preview them individually, but when I preview the entire page, the sections at the end aren’t displaying properly like you said. However, if I remove some contents (at the beginning), they start showing up properly in the whole page preview. Tvpuppy (talk) 19:33, 10 September 2025 (UTC)

This happens because there are too many templates on the page (ie the page is too long so Tvpuppy is right on that). This also happens on Wikipedia if you have too many references on a page which makes all references starting at some point in the article disappear which I think is a big problem that should be fixed even if there aren't many articles like that (in part because people then split them up or remove references to work around this problem). See the issues at Help:Template limits#Post-expand include size. Prototyperspective (talk) 21:21, 17 September 2025 (UTC)

Idea for mass DRs - make it easier to view all files

VisualFileChange is extremely helpful for putting together large DRs containing many files. However, one challenge of this is that it's difficult for readers of the DR to assess each item in the DR - today I have to click each one to open them. Am I missing some really helpful tool (that's available to non-admins), or does everyone else struggle with this?

Recently I've been playing around with a few tricks to try to help with this by using {{Search link}} and and a unique string that was applied to each file in the {{Delete}} template:

• In this DR, after submitting the DR, I used {{Search link}} on a unique string in the DR statement to generate a search link to see all the files in that individual DR ({{search link|"The descriptions do mention the artist John Ehn"}} resulting in the link "The descriptions do mention the artist John Ehn") which shows all nominated files in Search; I added this link to the bottom of the nominating statement in the DR page
• In Commons:Deletion requests/Files uploaded by Langsa Putra I added a timestamp to the DR nomination, and a search for the DR page title and timestamp identifies the files ("Files uploaded by Langsa Putra" "22:48, 10 September 2025 (UTC)") which I added to the DR page

Is it worth considering implementing something like this in VisualFileChange, for it to apply a unique code when adding {{Delete}} to files (just a timestamp might be unique enough, when used in conjunction with the page name of the DR) and automatically add a search link to view those files? Are there other options that should be considered, like this unique code being built right into {{Delete}}, or categories, or something else? I'm asking here on the technical page since at this point it seems to be more of a technical question than an actual proposal. -Consigned (talk) 08:55, 11 September 2025 (UTC)

great work.

i've considered this problem and potential solutions too:

1. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Deletion_requests_September_2025&from=08%23Files%20in%20Category:Old%20Trapper%27s%20Lodge for your example. the point to jump is constructed by dd (date of request made) + %23 + DR subpage title.
2. make a gadget that, when you click it, displays all the [[:File:...]] links on a page in a gallery style.

RoyZuo (talk) 14:15, 11 September 2025 (UTC)

here's a maybe more precise search method based on your idea.

hastemplate:delete insource:"DR subpage title"

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=hastemplate:delete+insource:%22Files+in+Category:Old+Trapper's+Lodge%22&title=Special:MediaSearch for your example. RoyZuo (talk) 14:23, 11 September 2025 (UTC)

Wouldn't the solution be as simple as to include a gallery, maybe in a collapsible box, above the itemised list of files in the DR? That way, anyone who parses the DR and encounter a mass DR will be able to get a visual display of the nominated files at will, and having code that wraps these files into {{collapse |title= Gallery of nominated files |1= <gallery>FILES NOMINATED</gallery>}} shouldn't be difficult to implement into the VFC, I think. Regards, Grand-Duc (talk) 14:33, 11 September 2025 (UTC)

Including a gallery in the DR - even in a collapsed box - will cause all of the images to be loaded when someone views the daily DR page. This isn't great from a server load perspective, as daily DR pages can contain a lot of files; it also means that, if an image containing illegal content like CSAM is DRed (which it shouldn't be, but it happens sometimes), users will end up loading thumbnails of that image. A better solution will probably be to create a Javascript gadget to view DR images, or to <noinclude> the gallery so that it only appears on the individual DR page. Omphalographer (talk) 18:48, 12 September 2025 (UTC)

Option 1 is interesting, never seen that functionality; that it continues after the DR is a bit annoying. -Consigned (talk) 09:06, 15 September 2025 (UTC)

• RoyZuo's more precise search is helpful but hits another issue (admittedly an edge case) - when multiple DRs are open as sections in the same DR page. For example, Commons:Deletion requests/Files uploaded by Caterpillar84 by Grand-Duc had multiple DRs opened at the same time (which was helpful by putting all discussions in one place and at the same time splitting into smaller groups to be more easily discussed). But the {{Delete}} on each file just points to the top of the page (e.g. File:Sculpture 4 amelia.jpg) which was tricky when multiple big DRs were open at the same time, and even pointing to section titles usually wouldn't help because section titles are almost always identical (though in this case, helpfully, they are not). It would be nice if each individual DR (section) had a unique identifier that could be used for matching both the file's {{Delete}} to the correct section and also back from the DR to the file via a gallery or search link (though I would not want to add any extra steps or complication/confusion for users who are creating DRs manually - 99%+ of the time linking to the page name rather than section is perfectly usable). -Consigned (talk) 09:14, 15 September 2025 (UTC)

  Today I learned that section headings with identical titles are numbered and can be linked to that way, this can be seen when navigating to that section via the table of contents. It would be cool if when one of our tools creates a DR as a new section to an existing page, the {{Delete}} tag would be linked to that section heading (e.g. if the {{Delete}} tag on File:Coldingham.png linked to Commons:Deletion requests/Files uploaded by Kellycrak88#Files uploaded by Kellycrak88 (talk · contribs) 3 rather than just the overall page). Consigned (talk) 20:01, 20 September 2025 (UTC)

"Error: An exception occurred: DownloadError: b'ERROR: [youtube] wAI7avge5SM: Video unavailable. This content isn\xe2\x80\x99t available.'"

Have anyone found a way around this in video2commons? Trade (talk) 20:32, 11 September 2025 (UTC)

Audio files embed code needs updating

I recently used the embed code for an audio file with closed captions (via clicking the "🌎 Use this file" button; you can test yourself by pasting code like <iframe src="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maryana_Iskander_self-narrated_biography.ogg?embedplayer=yes" width="300" height="20" frameborder="0" loading="lazy" allow="autoplay; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> into a code sandbox). There are several issues with it that should be fixed:

• The current code uses a height of 20px, which cuts off half the bar. This can be fixed by changing the code generated, but we should be generating the correct code by default.
• When larger heights are used, such as 150px, there is room to include the closed captions, but these are displayed in a miniscule font size, since I think they're set to take up a percentage of the available space, rather than rendering at a reasonable size, filling up however much room is available.
• Even when larger heights are used, the file name is never put anywhere, so e.g. if you're embedding a song there's nowhere in the embed that gives the title of the song.

I'm not sure exactly how the embeds are currently generated, and I don't know how to fix these things myself, so would appreciate help! Sdkb ^talk 18:20, 12 September 2025 (UTC)

For reference, this comes from MediaWiki:Gadget-Stockphoto.js Bawolff (talk) 05:06, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

Good find; could you create the issue(s) on phabricator? Another case of low support for audio and outdated audio player; relevant: m:Community_Wishlist/Wishes/A_proper_audio_player. I think one can also not see the subtitles with audios embedded the normal way in articles and so far I haven't found a way to show the file titles of audios embedded in Music genres. Prototyperspective (talk) 21:32, 17 September 2025 (UTC)

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T404934

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T404935

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T404937

@Prototyperspective, sure, created Phabricator tasks:

phab:T404934 (Audio files embedding cuts off half the bar)

phab:T404935 (Audio files embedding results in miniscule closed captions)

phab:T404937 (Embedded audio files should include a title)

Cheers, Sdkb ^talk 02:42, 18 September 2025 (UTC)

Thanks! I don't understand why issue "Audio files embedding cuts off half the bar" was closed for being caused by the gadget – the "🌎 Use this file" button is displayed by default also for logged-out users so I think such issues also be tracked there and fixed by devs even if it's from a gadget (and as is the case for some other gadgets). Krinkle is the current developer/maintainer of that gadget – could you please fix the issues that can be solved within the gadget code? Prototyperspective (talk) 09:22, 18 September 2025 (UTC)

The gadget is unmaintained. While Krinkle was the last person to touch it, it's unlikely that he is going to look into this. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:18, 19 September 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-38

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Updates for editors

• References lists that are made using the <references/> tag will now automatically display with columns in Vector 2022 when readers are using its 'standard' settings for text-size and page-width. [27]
• Starting in the week of October 6, on small wikis and medium wikis that have the CampaignEvents extension enabled, all autoconfirmed users will be able to use Event Registration as an organizer. No changes will be made for large wikis unless requested in Phabricator. This change is being made to make it easier for more people to use Event Registration, especially on wikis that are less likely to have policies related to the Event Organizer right. Learn more.
• Users that search using regular expressions (regex) can now use additional features including:
  • for the intitle: keyword: metacharacters for start-of-line (^) and end-of-line ($) anchors [28]
  • for both intitle: and insource: keywords: shorthand character classes for digits (\d), whitespace (\s), and word characters (\w); and escape codes for line feed (\r), newline (\n), tab (\t), and unicode (e.g. \uHHHH). [29]
• When you search for text that looks like an IP, the system will now show search results. It used to take you to the contributions for that IP instead of showing search results. [30]
• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 24. This is planned at 15:00 UTC. This is for the datacenter server switchover backup tests which happen twice a year. You can read more about the background and details of this process on the Diff blog.
• View all 24 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed that affected users who used the page-tabs to switch from wikitext editing of a section into the visualeditor. [31]

Updates for technical contributors

• The MediaWiki Interfaces team is redesigning the Wikimedia REST API Sandbox with Codex. If you have feedback on improvements for the API documentation or what makes developer experiences smooth (or frustrating), you’re invited to join an upcoming discovery interview, or leave feedback onwiki. Learn more.
• Edits to Wikidata aliases (an alternative name for an item or a property) will now be shown in RecentChanges and Watchlist entries on other wikis less often, reducing unnecessary notifications. This will reduce the overall quantity of 'noisy' entries. Wikidata's own pages remain unchanged. Learn more. [32]
• The new Unicode 17.0 version has been released. The datasets on Commons for the Module:Unicode data have been updated. Wikipedias that do not use the Commons datasets should either update their own data or switch to the Commons datasets.
• Users of the Wikimedia Enterprise Structured Contents endpoints can now access Parsed Tables. The new Parsed Tables feature extracts and represents Wikipedia tables in structured JSON. This improves machine accessibility as part of the Structured Contents initiative. Structured Contents output is freely available through the On-demand API, or through Wikimedia Cloud Services.
• A dataset of English Wikipedia biographical information from Wikimedia Enterprise has been published on Kaggle, for evaluation and research. This provides structured data from more than 1.5 million biographies, including birth and death dates, education, affiliations, careers, awards, and more (from a June 2024 snapshot).
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• Scholarship applications for Wikimania 2026 in Paris, France, are open until October 31.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 17:02, 15 September 2025 (UTC)

Something not mentioned here that might be of interest to commons. Starting Wednesday, newly uploaded png files will have embedded exif data extracted (provided it is embedded using the official eXIf chunk). Previously only XMP and png textual data was extracted. Bawolff (talk) 17:16, 16 September 2025 (UTC)

Wishful thinking: will this display the metadata which identifies ChatGPT-generated PNG images? Omphalographer (talk) 16:58, 19 September 2025 (UTC)

I believe chatgpt uses C2PA metadata which we currently don't support. Bawolff (talk) 20:02, 19 September 2025 (UTC)

Oh, that's unfortunate. Hopefully that data can be surfaced in some way - even without full C2PA verification, just knowing that the claims exist would be incredibly helpful in identifying images which are likely to be AI-generated. Omphalographer (talk) 23:06, 19 September 2025 (UTC)

For reference, this is phab:T387075 Bawolff (talk) 00:37, 20 September 2025 (UTC)

I did just take a gander through Category:PD-algorithm and the majority do not seem to have C2PA metadata (I tried about 10 recent ones at random, only File:GPT-4o Studio Ghibli portrait of Donald Trump.png had it). So i guess its just ChatGPT and not other AI providers. XMP (IPTCExt) also has a property called DigitalSourceType [33] which can be used to mark images as AI generated. This would be easier to extract since we already have support for other IPTC metadata so we just have to add an extra property not a whole new metadata format. Unfortunately it doesn't seem like that property is used very much in the wild. Bawolff (talk) 02:20, 20 September 2025 (UTC)

Which files did you look at? A couple of recent AI-generated uploads which do have C2PA metadata include:

• File:AI generated Woman in Welcome pose.png
• File:File 00000000ccbc61f6804586ff8eb8fa34.png
• File:SKYGOSPEL.png
• File:Blason Famille Abzac (d').png (not ChatGPT, interestingly)

Omphalographer (talk) 02:38, 20 September 2025 (UTC)

I picked about 10 at random from the list at https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=categorymembers&cmtitle=Category:PD-algorithm&cmsort=timestamp&cmlimit=max&formatversion=2 . Maybe my random picks just weren't very good. The File:Blason Famille Abzac (d').png is interesting. All it seems to say is its signed by "Galaxy S24 FE c2pa-rs/0.37.0", so maybe its not AI at all but just an image editor that actually supports c2pa. The signature was untrusted when I tried with https://contentcredentials.org/verify and gave errors when i tried with exiftool, so perhaps it was someone testing things (Edit: After reading more, it looks like the timestamp signature is invalid but the main one isn't. The main signature is associated with com.samsung.android.visual.cloudcore, and all the C2PA data says is that the provenance of the original file is unknown. So I guess all that means is it was edited on a phone). Interestingly, a lot of the chatgpt files give invalid when i use the web app or c2patool (error: first action must be created or opened), but work fine with exiftool. Bawolff (talk) 03:26, 20 September 2025 (UTC)

Template:Regions of Ethiopia

Hi everybody. Can someone help me to check this Template:Regions of Ethiopia. It doesn' work. Thank you in advance. MrKeefeJohn (talk) 12:31, 16 September 2025 (UTC)

@MrKeefeJohn, I just took brief look and it seems all the prefix parameters are missing a vertical bar, I think it should be {{{prefix|}}} instead of just {{{prefix}}}. Thanks. Tvpuppy (talk) 13:37, 16 September 2025 (UTC)

@MrKeefeJohn, I noticed that most of these are regions in Italy, not Ethiopia. Perhaps wait until the template is ironed out, before adding it to other pages. -- Gyrofrog (talk) 16:38, 16 September 2025 (UTC)

spanish templates

I made a spanish version of 2 Commons templates at PD-US-alien property/es and PD-US/hr it doesn't come up, what do i do? Ilikeyoshi (talk) 20:33, 16 September 2025 (UTC)

@Ilikeyoshi, I’m not sure what do you mean by “it doesn’t come up”. I can see both translations appearing properly in the template page and in the images that includes those two templates. Tvpuppy (talk) 20:47, 16 September 2025 (UTC)

That, e.g. (though it's actually the reality) in the Croatian template's documentation there is no thing that says

hrvatski

(croatian in croatian) and in the Spanish alien property template it doesn't say español or spanish in the section that says that it's autotranslated with {{Autotranslate}} — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ilikeyoshi (talk • contribs) 00:01, 17 September 2025 (UTC)

@Ilikeyoshi I understand what you mean now. For the language name to appear in the documentation, you have to add them to {{PD-US-alien property/lang}} and {{PD-US/lang}}.

For {{PD-US/lang}}, since the page is protected, you will need to put a {{Edit request}} to the talk page. Thanks. Tvpuppy (talk) 00:41, 17 September 2025 (UTC)

@Ilikeyoshi: when you changed Template:PD-US-alien property/lang you marked the spanish translation with the japanese /ja subpage. I fixed that. I also added {{Translated tag}} to Template:PD-US-alien property/es. MKFI (talk) 10:19, 17 September 2025 (UTC)

Template:String templates see also

Anyone know why {{String templates see also}} repeating every list's contents 5 times? Waddie96 (talk) 13:01, 18 September 2025 (UTC)

• The template uses Module:Navbox with collapsible groups, which in Wikipedia it uses the new code of Module:Navbox. However, here in Commons, both modules are still using its old code from Wikipedia.
• Since I afraid it will mess Module:Navbox up if it updates to the current version used by Wikipedia, I created a temporary module: Module:Navbox 2, which is a copy of the latest version of Module:Navbox in Wikipedia.
• In the future, this module should be replaced by updating Module:Navbox or adapting sections of it just for Module:Navbox with collapsible groups to work.
• I have changed Module:Navbox with collapsible groups to use Module:Navbox 2, so {{String templates see also}} should be displaying properly now. Thanks.

Tvpuppy (talk) 16:21, 18 September 2025 (UTC)

Copyright details from list of files

I have a list of (currently 45) files and I want to gather add license and creator of each one for proper reuse. How can I get them except one by one? Geraki ^T_L^G 16:41, 18 September 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-39

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

• On September 24th at 15:00 UTC, all Wikimedia sites users will experience a brief read-only period due to a scheduled datacenter server switchover. The Wikimedia Foundation's Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team will redirect all traffic from one primary server to its backup. You can listen to the switchover using the "Listen to Wikipedia" tool, where you will hear edits stop for a few minutes during the read-only phase, then resume. This twice-yearly datacenter server switchover ensures reliability by testing the backup datacenter, so that our sites can stay online even if the primary datacenter fails. You can read more about the process on the Diff blog.

Updates for editors

• Editors of 60 more Wiktionaries will soon be able to call functions from Wikifunctions and integrate them into their pages. A function takes one or more inputs and transforms them into a desired output, like adding numbers, converting miles to meters, calculating elapsed time, or declining a word into a case. They will join the other 65 Wiktionary language editions, which already have access to embedded Wikifunctions calls. Later this year, plans are in place to expand to more Wiktionaries and the Incubator.
• A new parser function has been added: {{#contentmodel}}. Template editors and admins can use it to get the localized or canonical name of the content model of a specific page. The function makes it easier to create and edit system messages, such as MediaWiki:editinginterface, even when you switch types of pages, like wiki, JavaScript, CSS or JSON page. [34]
• Adding or editing a DISPLAYTITLE for an article using VisualEditor will no longer be broken. Editors who use VisualEditor mode to modify the {{DISPLAYTITLE}} would no longer have the literal text "DISPLAYTITLE" or its localized variant added to their articles. A list of pages that may have been affected and might need cleanup is documented in this ticket.
• Beta users of the Wikipedia Android app can now try the redesigned Activity tab, which replaces the Edits tab. The new tab offers personalized insights into reading, editing, and donation activity, while simplifying navigation and making app use more engaging.
• View all 12 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• Wikifunctions users can now import many essential facts involving geo-coordinates, quantities and time values from Wikidata. This is made possible by the creation of Wikifunctions types for these values, which makes them available for use by functions in Wikifunctions. Learn more about how this works in this video and Wikifunctions' August 1 newsletter (for quantities) and August 22 newsletter (for geo-coordinates).

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 22:51, 22 September 2025 (UTC)