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/2025/06 /Archive/2025/07.

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	SpBot archives all sections tagged with {{Section resolved|1=~~~~}} after 1 day and sections whose most recent comment is older than 30 days.

How to search for text "404" / {{Dead link}} in the Source field?

There was a recent discussion on VP Do we do anything when the source is no longer available? – when I come across a dead or 404 page link in the source field of a file's {{Information}} template, I usually append (404) or (404) next to the link (some examples are in that VP thread). I think some users may have been adding {{Dead link}}.

It would be great if at some point there was a bot that checked links for 404 links. Regardless of whether or not that is being done:

Is there a way to see all files with such links via searching the Information template? Then maybe a bot could go through these and try to add an archived version of the site and human users go through the remaining files to look for an archived or new location of the site or to tag the file somehow.
Relevant once again: How to search the fields of the File information template on Commons?.
Prototyperspective (talk) 14:52, 25 May 2025 (UTC)

I think it could be done somehow using regex and the insource: search operator. Prototyperspective (talk) 16:46, 18 June 2025 (UTC)

This is already done by User:InternetArchiveBot. Wikiwerner (talk) 18:56, 23 June 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for the info! Do you or somebody else know why it doesn't tag many links that are offline - does it have a list of already-checked files and quickly go through new files to check for external links in the source field? In any case, this is just about links that are dead but not websites that are still online but whose contents have disappeared (404) like the examples here (which could be found via some insource search). Prototyperspective (talk) 23:44, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

Be patient ... Wikiwerner (talk) 09:02, 27 June 2025 (UTC)

This bot does not seem to recognize links that are 404 but still online. Prototyperspective (talk) 13:48, 27 June 2025 (UTC)

The examples you supply yield true 404s. Have you got other examples, so I may better understand it? Wikiwerner (talk) 11:23, 30 June 2025 (UTC)

Flickr update cc licenses to 4.0

See [1], may affect the use of some tools and scripts shizhao (talk) 03:44, 20 June 2025 (UTC)

it is. my uploads are licensing as undefined. manually changing them to 4.0

probably need a new script written to parse out if it is 2.0 or 4.0. SDudley (talk) 23:50, 29 June 2025 (UTC)

Thumbnail cache not updating after file overwrite

Hello, I uploaded a new version of the file File:Image collage of some of the deadliest aviation disasters since 2001.jpg on June 21, 2025 at 13:48 UTC. The file history shows the update correctly, and the new version displays on the file page when you click the most recent timestamp. However, the thumbnail that appears in articles and galleries is still showing the old version of the image, even though it has been more than 24 hours. I’ve already: purged the file page (?action=purge), tried viewing with different thumbnail sizes and in incognito mode, and performed null edits on pages using the image. The cache still seems stuck and is not showing the updated image thumbnails. Could someone please force a manual purge of the affected thumbnails or check if something’s preventing the update from propagating? Thank you very much! Undescribed (talk) 02:28, 23 June 2025 (UTC)

The image in the article appears to be the latest version to me. Perhaps it got updated since you asked the question, or it’s related to your browser’s cache not updating. Tvpuppy (talk) 17:27, 23 June 2025 (UTC)

Media Viewer author rendering issue

This might be a question for enWiki, but figured I'd start here! Having an issue where the author info from files on Commons is rendering in the Media Viewer on enWiki as HTML code instead of formatted, linked text. It's appearing with these two images as used on w:Melvin Edwards; when you view the files in the Viewer interface, the author details are just lines of HTML. Not sure if I did something wrong in the Art Photo template or if it's an error in the article. Thanks for any help! 19h00s (talk) 20:18, 23 June 2025 (UTC)

File as phab:T397704 —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:19, 24 June 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-26

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

• This week, the Moderator Tools and Machine Learning teams will continue the rollout of a new filter to Recent Changes, releasing it to the third and last batch of Wikipedias. This filter utilizes the Revert Risk model, which was created by the Research team, to highlight edits that are likely to be reverted and help Recent Changes patrollers identify potentially problematic contributions. The feature will be rolled out to the following Wikipedias: Azerbaijani Wikipedia, Latin Wikipedia, Macedonian Wikipedia, Malayalam Wikipedia, Marathi Wikipedia, Norwegian Nynorsk Wikipedia, Punjabi Wikipedia, Swahili Wikipedia, Telugu Wikipedia, Tagalog Wikipedia. The rollout will continue in the coming weeks to include the rest of the Wikipedias in this project. [2]

Updates for editors

• Last week, temporary accounts were rolled out on Czech, Korean, and Turkish Wikipedias. This and next week, deployments on larger Wikipedias will follow. Share your thoughts about the project. [3]
• Later this week, the Editing team will release Multi Check to all Wikipedias (except English Wikipedia). This feature shows multiple Reference checks within the editing experience. This encourages users to add citations when they add multiple new paragraphs to a Wikipedia article. This feature was previously available as an A/B test. The test shows that users who are shown multiple checks are 1.3 times more likely to add a reference to their edit, and their edit is less likely to be reverted (-34.7%). [4]
• A few pages need to be renamed due to software updates and to match more recent Unicode standards. All of these changes are related to title-casing changes. Approximately 71 pages and 3 files will be renamed, across 15 wikis; the complete list is in the task. The developers will rename these pages next week, and they will fix redirects and embedded file links a few minutes later via a system settings update.
• View all 24 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed that had caused pages to scroll upwards when text near the top was selected. [5]

Updates for technical contributors

• Editors can now use Lua modules to filter and transform tabular data for use with Extension:Chart. This can be used for things like selecting a subset of rows or columns from the source data, converting between units, statistical processing, and many other useful transformations. Information on how to use transforms is available. [6]
• The all_links variable in AbuseFilter is now renamed to new_links for consistency with other variables. Old usages will still continue to work. [7]
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• The latest quarterly Growth newsletter is available. It includes: the recent updates for the "Add a Link" Task, two new Newcomer Engagement Features, and updates to Community Configuration.

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

MediaWiki message delivery 23:17, 23 June 2025 (UTC)

URL2Commons down?

Hi!

I experienced that logging in to URL2Commons does not work for days. Do you have similar issues?

Thanks --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 09:42, 24 June 2025 (UTC)

i confirm it's still down, for several days now. :( RoyZuo (talk) 11:28, 24 June 2025 (UTC)

@RoyZuo Seems to work again :) --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 07:15, 30 June 2025 (UTC)

Language fallback chain for translated templates not working correctly

There is currently an issue with the language fallback chain of translated templates. It seems that it is not working correctly for templates that are using the Translate extension, but the underlying issue is not quite clear yet. If you are familiar with the Translate extension, your input would be greatly appreciated here: Module_talk:Autotranslate#Fallback_de-at_->_de_not_respected. Thanks! ChrisiPK (Talk|Contribs) 11:47, 25 June 2025 (UTC)

Rotate video

Is there any way to rotate any video files just like we invite a bot to rotate photos. I need to rotate a video 180⁰.––KEmel49^talk,Uploads 08:20, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

 Done. I did that using external software.––KEmel49 ^(📝,📤) 07:18, 1 July 2025 (UTC)

There should be a better way, as your file size is now half the size it used to be. Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 11:54, 1 July 2025 (UTC)

Seems like that's the only thing i stumbled upon, It loses size while converting from .webm to .mp4 then i rotated that and it loses nothing at that process, again loses while converting to .webm. anyway my goal is complete. Hoping for a rotate tool till then.––KEmel49 ^(📝,📤) 03:17, 10 July 2025 (UTC)

Renaming a Category

I read "Commons:Rename a category" and not sure how to accomplish this myself so here I am... To me the Commons "Category:Wilmington insurrection of 1898" seems to be mis-named, it should be "Category:Wilmington massacre". There isn't more than one event of this type on more than one date that happened in Wilmington, NC and to call it an insurrection mischaracterizes the mass murders and toppling of a municipal government that happened there on November 10, 1898. See the Wikipedia article "Wilmington massacre". And I really would do the linking thing but cannot figure out how to do it over here on Commons. Shearonink (talk) 17:55, 27 June 2025 (UTC)

You might need to go to COM:VP. Incall ^talk 07:42, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

Silly me, I thought this was the appropriate section of the Village Pump to post in... I'm sure you're right though, will post at the main VP, maybe that will do the trick. – Shearonink (talk) 14:28, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

Oauth 2.0 : server to upload files under the contributor's account ?

Hello Wikimedians, @Pushkar7077 is currently revamping Lingua Libre and migrated to Oauth 2.0 to authenticate our Wikimedia users. Our app is on a server (toolforge), with a script which upload the contributed files to Commons, but it does it under the bot's username as uploader. (We hard coded the bot username and its login on the server). This is not satisfactory.

Is there a way to query some user id token, pass it to our script, so the upload are done in the contributor's name ? (It was possible under Oauth 1.0a) Yug (talk) 15:05, 29 June 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-27

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 CampaignEvents extension has been enabled on all Wikipedias. 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.

Updates for editors

• AbuseFilter maintainers can now match against IP reputation data in AbuseFilters. IP reputation data is information about the proxies and VPNs associated with the user's IP address. This data is not shown publicly and is not generated for actions performed by registered accounts. [8]
• Hidden content that is within collapsible parts of wikipages will now be revealed when someone searches the page using the web browser's "Find in page" function (Ctrl+F or ⌘F) in supporting browsers. [9][10]
• A new feature, called Favourite Templates, will be deployed later this week on all projects (except English Wikipedia, which will receive the feature next week), following a piloting phase on Polish and Arabic Wikipedia, and Italian and English Wikisource. The feature will provide a better way for new and experienced contributors to recall and discover templates via the template dialog, by allowing users to put templates on a special "favourite list". The feature works with both the visual editor and the wikitext editor. The feature is a community wishlist focus area.
• View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed that had caused some Notifications to be sent multiple times. [11]

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 23:37, 30 June 2025 (UTC)

Remove block notice for notices about unused userpage images etc.

I made a suggestion about removing block warning when the deletion reason is not related to copyright violations her: Template_talk:Speedynote#Block_notice!

But the sandbox system does not agree with me. Perhaps someone can help figure out why it did not work? MGA73 (talk) 07:33, 5 July 2025 (UTC)

I think I fixed it, the switch statement wasn’t working properly before. Tvpuppy (talk) 11:19, 5 July 2025 (UTC)

EXIF model with broken link to English Wikipedia

Hi all,

In File:Santa_Maria_Maggiore,_la_berta.JPG (and others), "Camera model" from EXIF is showing as "[[w:en:Special:Search/<Digimax i50 MP3, Samsung #1 MP3>|<Digimax i50 MP3, Samsung #1 MP3>]]", rather than "Digimax i50 MP3, Samsung #1 MP3". I'm assuming it's due to the presence of "<>" in EXIF - which could safely be ignored. How do we go about fixing this?

Cheers.

Rkieferbaum (talk) 00:36, 7 July 2025 (UTC)

Flickr images undefined licensing

Flickr auto license detector don’t work, user often required to manually to insert {{Flickrreview}} to avoid auto deleted. 6D (talk) 02:00, 7 July 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-28

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

• Temporary accounts have been rolled out on 18 large and medium-sized Wikipedias, including German, Japanese, French, and Chinese. Now, about 1/3 of all logged-out activity across wikis is coming from temporary accounts. Users involved in patrolling may be interested in two new documentation pages: Access to IP, explaining everything related to access to temporary account IP addresses, and Repository with a list of new gadgets and user scripts.

Updates for editors

• Anyone can play an experimental new game, WikiRun, that lets you race through Wikipedia by clicking from one article to another, aiming to reach a target page in as few steps and in as little time as possible. The project's goal is to explore new ways of engaging readers. Try playing the game and let the team know what you think on the talk page.
• Users of the Wikipedia Android app in some languages can now play the new trivia game. Which came first? is a simple history game where you guess which of two events happened earlier on today's date. It was previously available as an A/B test. It is now available to all users in English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Turkish, and Chinese. The goal of the feature is to help engage with new generations of readers. [12]
• Users of the iOS Wikipedia App in some languages may see a new tabbed browsing feature that enables you to open multiple tabs while reading. This feature makes it easier to explore related topics and switch between articles. The A/B test is currently running in Arabic, English, and Japanese in selected regions. More details are available on the Tabbed Browsing project page.
• Bureaucrats on Wikimedia wikis can now use Special:VerifyOATHForUser to check if users have enabled two-factor authentication. [13]
• A new feature related to Template Recall and Discovery will be deployed later this week to all Wikimedia projects: a template category browser will be introduced to assist users in finding templates to put in their “favourite” list. The browser will allow users to browse a list of templates which have been organised into a given category tree. The feature has been requested by the community through the Community Wishlist.
• It is now possible to access watchlist preferences from the watchlist page. Also the redundant button to edit the watchlist has been removed. [14]
• View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

• As part of MediaWiki 1.44 there is now a unified built-in Notifications system that makes it easier for developers to send, manage, and customize notifications. Check out the updated documentation at Manual:Notifications, information about migration in T388663 and details on deprecated hooks in T389624.
• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

• WikidataCon 2025, the conference dedicated to Wikidata is now open for session proposals and for registration. This year's event will be held online from October 31 – November 02 and will explore on the theme of "Connecting People through Linked Open Data".

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

MediaWiki message delivery 00:01, 8 July 2025 (UTC)

<inputbox> is directing search queries to Special:MediaSearch

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T378756

I noticed <inputbox> is directing search queries to Special:MediaSearch rather than Special:Search. This means users much change the "Special:MediaSearch" to "Special:Search" in the URL to do a text search. Can someone please look into this? Ixfd64 (talk) 04:47, 10 July 2025 (UTC)

@Ixfd64 This is a fix to how InputBox works, for this wish. It makes InputBox honour the "Choose your search interface" preference. If you want to use Special:Search, you can change that preference. It defaults to MediaSearch because that's the default for Commons. Sam Wilson 05:05, 10 July 2025 (UTC)

Is there an attribute for <inputbox> to force the use of Special:Search in specific cases?

<inputbox> is currently being used to search archives on pages such as Commons:Administrators' noticeboard and Commons:Village pump. Ixfd64 (talk) 06:01, 10 July 2025 (UTC)

@Ixfd64: I'm afraid I'd not actually taken in that prefix searches don't work in MediaSearch! Sorry, that's quite annoying isn't it. There was a discussion to add a searchengine=Search|MediaSearch parameter, but I argued that it was redundant to the preference, but it sounds like it's really not (or at least, not yet). I've got a patch for that, so will get it back up to date. Sam Wilson 06:50, 10 July 2025 (UTC)

Thank you. This will be very helpful! Ixfd64 (talk) 15:59, 10 July 2025 (UTC)

I see it's merged - should someone add the searchengine=Search parameters now, or is it better to wait until the code is live? Mathnerd314159 (talk) 05:02, 20 July 2025 (UTC)

@Mathnerd314159: Perhaps best to wait till later this week when the new param is available. Just in case there's any issue! Sam Wilson 07:01, 20 July 2025 (UTC)

Bot requests not working?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T399331

I've experienced problems trying to file a Bot request - instead of generating a request, the form seems to redirect to a search form. Is this a known issue? Are other users able to reproduce this strange behaviour? Fl.schmitt (talk) 14:25, 11 July 2025 (UTC)

Seems to be a side-effect of phab:T378756, left a notice there. Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 15:55, 11 July 2025 (UTC)

Indeed, filled phab:T399331. -- CptViraj (talk) 17:08, 11 July 2025 (UTC)

No signature at COM:QIC

Hi!

For some weeks, the automatic signature is not added when I enter the for ~. When I do this in other pages, etc. the automatic input works. How to fix that? Thanks PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 18:21, 11 July 2025 (UTC)

wrong target name at file rename request displayed

On the file page File:Exobasidium giseckiae.jpeg, there is displayed File:Exobasidium gisekiae.jpeg as the rename target, but I put into the template the name File:Exobasidium gisekiae.jpg, as you can see only in the source text. Why is this so? Isn’t it possible to rename a .jpeg file to a .jpg name? (There also is a misspelling in the file name now, it’s not only the extension.) I tried already to put the template new onto the page, then I purged the page and tried a null edit, but nothing works. Therefore I wrote the problem into the template instead. What kind of problem is this? I think that a normal ".jpg" extension would be better, because the file name will be named exactly as the category (it is named this way already except that typo) and to prevent two different files only with the difference ".jpg" vs. ".jpeg" in the extensions in the future. What do others think about that? —176.1.5.162 18:41, 12 July 2025 (UTC)

Looks like they are different formats. Maybe you need to upload a new version? Henrydat (talk) 11:38, 13 July 2025 (UTC)

I don’t think that this can be the reason here. The file had been displayed correctly with .jpeg and now, that it has been renamed correctly by Inertia6084 to the .jpg name, the file still displays correctly on the page. And I can’t see that the renaming user had any problem with renaming it from .jpeg to .jpg. Then it should also be possible that this file name displays correctly on the file page before renaming it. Thus, a new upload wasn’t needed for it.

Ok, it has been renamed, and I still would like to know, why displaying the correct name has been a problem, if anyone has any idea about that. But I think that .jpeg and .jpg are the same format as also .JPG or .JPEG would be, and maybe also .Jpg or .Jpeg or other spellings. If noone has another idea, what can be done in such a case, then this can be archieved after a while, because now after renaming the wrong display of the template can’t be seen anymore. In that case, if noone has another idea, I’ll try that again next time like now with writing the problem into the template. —176.1.3.87 12:52, 13 July 2025 (UTC)

Or if anyone wants to report the problem on Phabricator, then just go ahead. But the problem with that would be to reproduce this error. I don’t know, if the display is a problem every time, someone wants to rename something from .jpeg to .jpg or maybe other extensions. Perhaps it’s better to watch that for a while, if it will occur again. —176.1.3.87 12:59, 13 July 2025 (UTC)

Commons has preferred file name extensions. If you rename to .jpeg, it will automatically use .jpg as the suggested target. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:26, 14 July 2025 (UTC)

That’s good. Then I don’t have to write this into the template anymore. @TheDJ: Thanks for the information. Then the display problem is not so important, but noone will see before renaming on the file page, if the target already exists. What does the software, when such a target name with .jpg already exists and a user hasn’t noticed that before renaming, perhaps because of the display problem? Is the rename then done to another .jpeg name, as the template says? Or does the renaming user get an error message then and the rename isn’t done?

And is this the same when renaming a .JPG or .JPEG file that they both will automatically get .jpg then? .JPG is quite often used, I don’t know what kind of software creates such names. Are there other such combinations and can all preferred file name extensions be read anywhere on Commons? —176.1.19.92 16:20, 15 July 2025 (UTC)

Info: I’ve had some file renames from .JPG to .jpg in the last days. In those cases, the .jpg target was correctly displayed. Perhaps only .jpeg to .jpg or .JPEG to .jpg may be problematic then for the display in the template. Maybe that could be written into the doc page for the template?

@TheDJ: And where can these preferred file name extensions be found? Does there exist any page for it on Commons or elsewhere? —176.1.5.189 18:10, 21 July 2025 (UTC)

Tech News: 2025-29

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

• Featured templates, a new feature related to Template Recall and Discovery will be deployed this week to all Wikimedia projects: With this feature, editors will be able to quickly access a list of templates that are likely to be useful. These templates will be displayed in a list, under the "featured" tab of the template discovery interface. Administrators can define the list via the Community Configuration interface. The feature fulfills a request by the community through the Community Wishlist. [15][16]
• View all 31 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the request to add Malayalam fonts in the Wikisource Book Export Tool was resolved and now, the rendering of Malayalam letters in exported Wikisource books are accurate. [17]

Updates for technical contributors

• Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

In depth

• Developers, designers, and all Wikimedians are invited to submit a project idea for the Wikimania Hackathon 2025. Read this Diff blog post for more details.

Meetings and events

• WikiIndaba 2025 scholarship application and program submission is open until 23:59 GMT on July 20. WikiIndaba is a regional conference for African Wikimedians both on the continent and in the diaspora to unite and grow together. Submit your scholarship application and program proposal now!
• WikiCon Brasil 2025 will take place on July 19-20 in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. The Brazilian community members are encouraged to register and attend!

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

MediaWiki message delivery 20:05, 14 July 2025 (UTC)

RotateBot not working

The bot has stopped working since June 30, and the backlog in Category:Images requiring rotation by bot is continuing to grow. I left a message at the talk page of @Steinsplitter (owner of the bot), see User talk:Steinsplitter#RotateBot, but it appears they haven't been active since June 25. Is there anything we can do, or do we have to wait for Steinsplitter to fix it? Thanks. Tvpuppy (talk) 00:53, 17 July 2025 (UTC)

Aircraft cat

Hi there. For some reason, {{Aircraft cat}} is self-categorizing lots of categories. Category:Aircraft of Senegal is an example. Could someone with more knowledge than I have solve it, please? Thanks in advance, Alavense (talk) 15:57, 17 July 2025 (UTC)

Error 4914820

Hi! I've used a Python application to upload images for years, and now the API returns the following message:

If you report this error to the Wikimedia System Administrators, please include the details below.

Request served via cp6016 cp6016, Varnish XID 578202189

Upstream caches: cp6016 int

Error: 429, 4914820 at Fri, 18 Jul 2025 13:45:23 GMT

I've tried multiple times for the past few days. Any help appreciated. Thanks, Romainbehar (talk) 19:26, 20 July 2025 (UTC)

I've also been using a Python application for Wikipedia for quite a while without problem until the past few days, where I've also been getting the 4914820 error. What I've noticed is that if I open the URL in my browser, I get the correct results and am not given an error. Panamitsu (talk) 05:50, 21 July 2025 (UTC)

Someone else created a Phabricator ticket for the same issue. API seems to require a user agent now. Romainbehar (talk) 06:49, 22 July 2025 (UTC)

Confirmed! Using Python requests, it works again after adding second line below:

• session = requests.Session()
• session.headers['User-Agent'] = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/125.0.0.0 Safari/537.36'

Romainbehar (talk) 18:47, 22 July 2025 (UTC)

Abkhazia technical puzzler

Abkhazia
Countries of Europe Abkhazia Albania Andorra Armenia Austria Azerbaijan Belarus Belgium Bosnia and Herzegovina Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Georgia Germany Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Kazakhstan Kosovo Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Moldova Monaco Montenegro Netherlands North Macedonia Northern Cyprus Norway Poland Portugal Romania Russia San Marino Serbia Slovakia Slovenia South Ossetia Spain Sweden Switzerland Transnistria Turkey Ukraine United Kingdom Vatican City Constituent countries Denmark (DK) England (UK) Faroe Islands (DK) Netherlands (NL) Northern Ireland (UK) Scotland (UK) Wales (UK)
Countries of Asia Abkhazia Afghanistan Armenia Azerbaijan Bahrain Bangladesh Bhutan Brunei Cambodia China Cyprus East Timor Egypt Georgia India Indonesia Iran Iraq Israel Japan Jordan Kazakhstan Kuwait Kyrgyzstan Laos Lebanon Malaysia Maldives Mongolia Myanmar Nepal North Korea Oman Pakistan Palestine Philippines Qatar Russia Saudi Arabia Singapore South Korea South Ossetia Sri Lanka Syria Taiwan Tajikistan Thailand Turkey Turkmenistan United Arab Emirates Uzbekistan Vietnam Yemen
Main topics related to Abkhazia activities architecture culture economy geography history nature objects people politics science society time views

Selected maps are included in the  Wikimedia Atlas of Abkhazia.

I was trying to debug {{Country category}} and {{Country label}} templates, used by 780k pages and typically maintained by @Joshbaumgartner and Sbb1413: , since those templates seem to be throwing Lua errors in all categories related to Abkhazia. See Category:Abkhazia by topic and Category:Pages with script errors. I see the same errors when running {{Country category |1=Abkhazia}}:

I think the issue is with Wikidata Abkhazia (Q23334) item which for country (P17) lists both Georgia (Q230) and Republic of Abkhazia (Q31354462), and the error states that your template is requesting date from Wikidata item "Q230 and Q31354462". However none of those items changed lately. Some page was changed within the last week to cause all those errors, however I can not find which one. Anyone wants to look at this? Jarekt (talk) 00:45, 21 July 2025 (UTC)

Maybe it’s due to {{Country navbox}}, which has recently been changed? Tvpuppy (talk) 00:34, 22 July 2025 (UTC)

@Tvpuppy: You are right, after undoing changes to {{Country navbox}} template made by User:Verdy p to restore version from 14 April 2025, all errors were resolved. @Verdy p: , I am not sure what issues were being addressed by your changes. Feel free to try again but please test on Category:Abkhazia by topic and similar categories. --Jarekt (talk) 03:53, 22 July 2025 (UTC)

I made a sandbox and tested it, you've removed the support for loading the sandbox (notably in subtemplates)... Basically there are errors that were solved elsewhere (notably loading flag images and other subtemplates), there was no change in structure (just made the code clearer, removed unnecessary HTML comments to hide newlines that are stripped automatically make the editing much easier and clearer; and used rank="best" in queries (instead of two successive tests on "rank=prefered", whcih fails, then without it which loads the incorrect image...), and I added some basic translation. verdy_p (talk) 07:23, 22 July 2025 (UTC)

The obvious error is effectively in Wikidata: Abkhazia is listed has having in TWO *preferred" values for its countries property: itself, and Georgia (this is an error in all cases in the Wikidata item for Abkhazia). After editing the Wikidata item to have only ONE preferred solves the problem. So the real change was not mine in the template, but in the Wikidata item for Abkhazia. If in some corner cases you need to have two preferred values for the same property in the same Wikidata element, my edit or the existing code was not ready for that situation, and the Country box should use smarter queries to avoid such unexpected errors coming from unexpected property values from Wikidata. Your basic revert did not help at all and just broke what was solved elsewhere, because you did not know at all the effective reason. verdy_p (talk) 07:30, 22 July 2025 (UTC)

Wouldn’t it be more suitable to have Republic of Abkhazia (Q31354462) as its preferred value? Since currently it’s displaying the flag of Georgia. Tvpuppy (talk) 09:39, 22 July 2025 (UTC)

The fix I made to add the missing (but required) "numval=1" fixed the issue with categorys related to Abkhazia. However if in some cases you may want to display alternate flags (de facto and de jur), you need further edits to the template (or related modules). For now, the "numval=1" filter is needed (even with the "rank=best" filter), as nothing is ready to accept a (comma-separated) list a values when there are two preferred values returned by the data query. I know no cases where the same item may have two property values with the "rank=preferred" to get an alternate "de facto" flag also displayed in the "Country template" (in addition of the "de jure" which should be the default as it is recognized by hundreds of countries, whereas the regional flag is not recognized as being "national" except by Russia), you need an additional query. Before my change that fixed other cases, there were two successive queries, one using the "rank=preferred" (which could still return two values), and if there was none, a 2nd query without this filter (any values would be returned at any rank, so there was more... including other historical flags).

I've not broken anything in my edit the "Country navbox" template: the bug was already present (since long in Wikidata) even if it was not visible (because pages were not refreshed when the Wikidata item was updated to have two "preferred" values). I have secured the template to make sure the queries returned only one 1 value at most (and not a list), as currently expected. verdy_p (talk) 09:55, 22 July 2025 (UTC)

verdy_p, I do not know much about geography of Abkhazia, but the item Abkhazia (Q23334) is for the territory of Abkhazia, which is split into or claimed by 2 countries, so the Wikidata value was probably correct. Also country (P17) does not have uniqueness constraint, so multiple values there are allowed and our software should not crash because of this. Quite likely at some point someone will notice your "fix" of Q23334 and revert it and than we will be here in the same situation. We had the same issue with {{Wikidata Infobox}} where errors caused by correct but inconvenient Wikidata statements were being fixed by deleting them from Wikidata, which was latter reversed causing recuring problems here, see Template_talk:Wikidata_Infobox#Lua_error. --Jarekt (talk) 13:31, 22 July 2025 (UTC)

There was nothing wrong at all in the template that you reverted. In fact all effectively came from the fact that the template was alling Wikidata which returned a couple of values. This was not detected before, just because the change had occured in Wikidata and was not detected by this wiki that did not update the page (so the bug could have occured at any time, without me changing anything. Now that I've secured the template to make sure that it returns ONLY a single value (and not two in a list),nothing bad can really happen. Still, I have NOT deleted the two values in Wikidata , but only 1 is marked as "preferred" (as needed in Wikidata rules: this was already a violation of Wikidata, and was already reported there); if someone reverts that status in Wikidata, it will still not break this wiki, only one will be used. If one wants to display the two flags (1 for "de jure", the other for "de facto"), we'll still need to change the template to make that correctly without crashing and even if this case we'll still need the "numval=1" filter in addition to the standard "rank=best" filter, by adding another filter to detect "de facto" values and conditionally display this secondary flag and your revert was simply just non-sense: you had not understood the real issue. verdy_p (talk) 13:48, 22 July 2025 (UTC)

Apart from the main topic, disputed territories shouldn't be on the country navigational list (same for South Ossetia, Transnitria, Kosovo). We should treat them separately (as disputed territories in the same template?), otherwise we inherently come to the mentioned conflicts with P17 and other stuff on WD. — Draceane ^talk_contrib. 14:07, 22 July 2025 (UTC)

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