Site issues

Please list any site issues below. These issues are considered open, possibly needing investigations, and resolved issues are archived in a subpage. For more general long term maintenance or work, that require much more work and/or contributions/discussions, see Strategic Planning:To-do list. For the planned important translations needed, see also Strategic Planning:Translation.

Site usability issues

Phase 2 Redesign

We need to simplify the overall site usability and optimize it for Phase 2. Some initial thoughts:

Proposals
- Clarify intent, point people to key questions
- Point people to recommendations template.

Editing pages in Arabic/Hebrew

It looks like the new theme still does not support correctly the alternation of directionality of text input. Without it, some edits are quite tricky, notably when working with links in the middle of sentences (where the native script is constantly alternating with Latin). This is not really a problem specific to this site, but more generally in all MediaWiki sites, except possibly those that have been localized specifically for these RTL native scripts. We should listen for the Arabic and Hebrew Wikipedians/Wiktionarians/.... May be these localization issues should also be reported more generally as one of the issues to report as part of this planing process. Verdy p 14:02, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Look and feel and user customizations

E-mail me when a page on my watchlist is changed

Users shoud be able to enable this on thei preferences, like on small wikis (e.g. Meta): it's very useful to make users follow the activity on the wiki. Nemo 19:18, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

bugzilla:20513. Nemo 10:03, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

Site technical issues

Interwiki prefixes

(This is a re-reporting of this issue, as requested if the issue persisted): Some of the Interwiki link shortcuts work, but the one for wikinews still doesn't work. Notice the difference between these two links (the destinations should be identical): n:Main page wikinews:Main page. Please see m:Help:Interwiki_linking for a complete list of the shortcuts. Shortcuts to Wiktionary, Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Wikisource, and Wikiversity do not work. The following projects have shortcuts that are functional: Wikipedia, Wikispecies, Wikimedia Foundation, Meta-Wiki, and MediaWiki. I have no idea why some shortcuts work and some don't. Gopher65_talk 00:09, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

Reopened bug number 19994. -- Philippe 07:55, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

There's a workaround: use a language prefix first(with a leading colon) (the link will then go to this language edition of Wikipedia, that will bring then to the correct site.

For example: <tt>[[:en:v:Main Page]]</tt> goes to en:v:Main Page for Wikiversity. Yes this is not natural, but specifying the language after the project family will not work project.

It seems that the interwikis have been setup here as if we were in the Wikipedia family (that uses languages), instead of like in Commons (that is not split in language subdomains), and "strategy" is then handled like if it was a language within the wikimedia project family. There must be missing some flag in the PHP setup of this wiki (this is not a problem in the internet domains). So really, this is not a problem of the MediaWiki software itself, but of the specific setup of this site. -- Verdy p 12:43, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

MediaWiki extensions for this site

Timeline extension

The timeline extension used on Wikimedia wikis is an awful ugly thing. --MZMcBride 20:44, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

Can you suggest an alternative? --Eekim 22:52, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

EasyTimeline is added (use the <timeline> tag to work) but that doesn't mean we can't get something else. -- Philippe 22:56, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

And most of all IdeaTorrent (yes, I know you know, but these are interesting futurely-historical discussion links :-) ). --Nemo 20:36, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

DynamicPageList extension

We need DynamicPageList in order to display the sorted proposals by category. Bugzilla:20283. -- Philippe 23:28, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

ReaderFeedback extension

ReaderFeedback: now we have priority, impact and feasibility, and this is simply not complete: I see proposals which would have a great impact, high feasibility and therefore an high priority — if you want to destroy Wikimedia projects. Perhaps something like "desirability", "beneficialness", "suitability for our mission" would help. Thanks, Nemo 18:51, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

I support that. I've run into a few proposals like that as well. Gopher65_talk 20:27, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

Now I think that we should add also a "presentation" rating: many proposals are simply incomprehensible. Nemo 10:27, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

We badly need better reporting features in order for ReaderFeedback to be useful. We may also want to consider replacing ReaderFeedback with an extension that simply allows people to "Like" a proposal. Suggestions? --Eekim 18:06, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

Usability wiki uses mw:Extension:CommunityVoice, but only on few pages, and yet Special:CommunityVoice seems useless as well. Nemo 10:22, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

There is no a "desirability" flag...but the MW: message is unset. Voice of All 23:50, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

Site maintenance issues

Flood flag for admins

I'd like to have the Flood flag enabled so that admins can temporarily tag themselves when doing large-scale maintenance tasks (mass reversion of bot-vandalism, etc). When the flag is enabled edits will only appear in Recent Changes when the "show bots" option is used. This allows maintenance to be carried out without flooding Recent Changes. Gopher65_talk 03:23, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Open a bugzilla request, and point here if they need authorization. :) Send me the link to it or cc me. -- Philippe 03:32, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Bug submitted: Bugzilla 20347 Gopher65_talk 04:04, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Fixing redirects

To help maintain the coherent naming conventions within articles (especially for links found in translated pages) we need some bit to solve some redirects, and basic editing that can be performed without pain by simple bots.

I could run such a bot, if this does not create too much flood (because for now the contents are quite small and such bot will not generate much traffic), but for longer term, the now standardized Pywikimedia bots should be allowed to run for basic maintenance, in order to fix those pesky minor problems (that in longer term cause lots of maintenance problems, and difficiculties when interpreting result pages like the list of "linked pages", or when looking for lists of pages that need more work because of restructurations/splits/merges).

Note that page moves for now are disabled here for most users, but this does not mean that admins cannot move pages, creating redirects (or double redirects). The other problem with pages that can't be moved is that typos introduced by contributors can't be corrected by them themselves (including when they do not follow a naming convention). I've also already seen a few double redirects to fix manually. Verdy p 13:57, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Let's be clear here: page moves are not disabled here. They are active for all autoconfirmed users, and available under the drop down arrow next to View History. -- Philippe 15:44, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Autotranslate not working with LiquidThreads

The LiquidThreads discussion has disappeared from the Village pump. Apparently this change does not make the connection to the LiquidThreads portion of Village pump/en because it is stored separately from the base page and linked only is some sort of metadata.
Oh the joys of being a beta tester! ~ Ningauble 16:42, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

I have reverted the use of Autotranslate for the Village pump. HenkvD 18:41, 14 November 2009 (UTC)