Wikipedia talk:Linter

lintHint is failing with an error seconds after clicking the button, even on very short pages. It started yesterday. Is anyone else experiencing this? —Bruce1ee^talk 09:10, 6 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

Bruce1ee, I am too. It seems to be an error on Parsoid's end. — Qwerfjkltalk 12:53, 6 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

Thank you, that helps. —Bruce1ee^talk 13:21, 6 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

Working fine for me when used on Wikivoyage. Not here though. Zinnober9 (talk) 15:02, 6 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

I should clarify that I was working with talk pages, so wasn't looking at other types of pages where these templates are more likely. Any update on this issue getting fixed? Zinnober9 (talk) 15:43, 12 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

@Bruce1ee Yes, been getting HTTP 500 errors since yesterday as well. Special:ExpandTemplates works OK, though. Gamapamani (talk) 11:04, 7 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

Thanks. I wonder why it still works in ExpandTemplates. —Bruce1ee^talk 12:21, 7 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

Probably because it's not sending the source wikitext for analysis, but the expanded result.

I've experimented a bit, and this error seems to happen when you have any of the following on the page:

• {{SHORTDESC}}, which is used by {{Short description}}
• {{DEFAULTSORT}}
• {{Italic title}} or its Lua module, used by {{Infobox}} and it's derivatives (not all infoboxes)

There are probably more, but most wikitext appears to work OK when testing from the preview. Gamapamani (talk) 17:13, 7 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

lintHint appears to be working again. —Bruce1ee^talk 23:13, 12 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

Yup, Linthint's all good again. Too bad all HTML tags are no longer displaying in green for me when Syntax Highlighter is on. Started yesterday on WikiVoyage, today here. They are in a green in my browser's light mode, but in dark, they are indistinguishable from plaintext. Argh. Zinnober9 (talk) 23:43, 12 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

Zinnober9, see Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Tech News: 2024-37 — Qwerfjkltalk 14:45, 13 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

@WOSlinker and @Qwerfjkl, can your bots help with clearing some issues from Wikipedia:Linter/Signature submissions? Gonnym (talk) 16:28, 17 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

Gonnym, any in particular? It would take a while to go through one by one and come up with replacement code for all of them. — Qwerfjkltalk 16:28, 18 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

I'm not in the camp that it's all lint errors in one go, or nothing at all. That has proven it can't be done. To be honest, any on that page that you can will be of help. If you can get those with the higher error count, even better (I've made the table sortable so it's easier to see). Gonnym (talk) 18:27, 18 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

I would focus on any patterns that are straightforward, like this misnested tag sequence. They mean a foolproof regular expression. If you try to get fancy, there is always a risk of hitting false positives. Keeping the bot edits focused on the "misnested tag" table for now would be a way to reduce some of the higher-priority errors. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:57, 19 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

Jonesey95, Gonnym, for something like signatures, where the same text is used a lot, a simple find-and-replace plaintext (without regex) would probably be easier. If someone could make a list of find & replace (& search query) that would be really helpful, otherwise I'll see if I have time to look at this over the weekend. — Qwerfjkltalk 16:21, 19 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

The "Very Evil" bogus images and misnested User:Eyesnore would both be foolproof X to Y quickies. I'd suspect the "Wikicurious for Latin Music" mass message could be as well. Could all the various Newsletters be tackled with (verbose) X to Y replacements? Zinnober9 (talk) 17:03, 19 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

I started a "Replacement" column in the misnested tag table. I will probably have time to populate some of it in the next day or two. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:04, 19 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

My bot is not an automated bot and is really just javascript assisted editing, so was fine for me when going through some of the high priority issues that caused display problems. It is not really suitable for the bulk editing that MalnadachBot used to do. -- WOSlinker (talk) 17:49, 19 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

WOSlinker, could it be adapted for w:de:Benutzer:Schnark/js/bandersnatch (a script for JS mass editing)? — Qwerfjkltalk 17:54, 19 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

It's just scripts such as User:WOSlinkerBot/linttask21.js which is mainly full of regex replaces. -- WOSlinker (talk) 19:06, 19 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

Qwerfjkl, I have added a bunch of find/replace combinations to Wikipedia:Linter/Signature submissions#Misnested tag. Fixing them will fix many thousands of Linter errors. Other editors are welcome to add more find/replace combinations to that table and to other tables on that page. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:47, 21 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

┌───────────────────────────┘
Jonesey95, I think I should be able to do these tomorrow. — Qwerfjkltalk 19:51, 21 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

  BRFA filed. — Qwerfjkltalk 16:09, 22 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

Does anyone know anything about the status of these invalid signatures? Possibilities include (1) user has fixed the signature; (2) status unknown because the user hasn't edited for a long time, or since user was asked to fix signature (3) user active, request made on the user's talk page to fix the signature but user hasn't complied; (4) user active and hasn't been asked to fix the signature. Are there any signatures in category 4? How about category 3? Would it make sense to add another column to the tables to show this status, or an improved version of this status? –Anomalocaris (talk) 01:16, 24 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

What signatures are you talking about? If you are talking about editors' signatures that have Linter errors in them, there should not be any new ones being created, AFAIK. There were a couple of software changes implemented in early 2024 that were intended to prevent editors from saving signatures with Linter errors in them. See T355462 and its related tasks. If you are seeing recently posted signatures with Linter errors, please post example diffs in a new section on this page. I can't recall seeing active editors posting with Linter-error-laden signatures in a long time. – Jonesey95 (talk) 03:59, 24 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

Right. Back in October 2017, I began my effort to notify users with linty signatures and ask them to change to non-linty signatures. I contacted several hundred users. Most complied. Some ignored. A very small number were nasty. I continued to contact linty signature owners as I discovered their linty signatures. Again, most complied. Gradually I forgot about the project. When I came to this discussion and clicked the link to Wikipedia:Linter/Signature submissions, I wondered if any of these are still active. I'm glad to hear that linty signature postings haven't been seen in a long time. —Anomalocaris (talk) 05:19, 24 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

No user should have an active signature that is causing lint errors. The ones on the list are just old on on pages that need to be fixed. Gonnym (talk) 08:18, 24 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

Wikipedia:Requested moves/Current discussions is maintained by a bot that causes lint errors. Discussion at Wikipedia talk:Requested moves#Current Discussions bot needs to do better than copy, wrap, paste. —Anomalocaris (talk) 00:46, 24 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

Opportunities are still out there for big, easy fixes! First, a minor celebration: I just fixed 3,000 errors on about 200 pages with a single template edit. That's 0.1% of all remaining errors with one edit. Hooray!

An opportunity: I have been manually fixing missing div tags at the end of welcome messages on User talk pages for a while, and it occurred to me today to try to figure out a regex pattern and estimate how many pages are affected. At least two welcome templates were missing closing div tags until 2018, and it appears that those templates were substed on about 300,000 User talk pages. A bot that uses regular expressions may be able to fix 300,000 missing end tag errors in a single pass. That's 10% of all remaining errors! Do a search for "WelcomeMenu" at Wikipedia:Linter/Signature submissions for more details. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:07, 26 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

In case you missed it, there's a new linter category at Special:LintErrors/duplicate-ids. (This link may time out, so here's the mainspace only one: [1].) Get them while they're hot! Izno (talk) 20:46, 26 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

Cite-generated IDs should probably be discussed at Help talk:Citation Style 1/Archive 96#New linter category for duplicate IDs if anywhere. Izno (talk) 21:35, 26 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

I have removed them from the usual reports until smarter nerds than I get them sorted out a bit. If they get down below a million instances, and they are things we can and/or should fix with our normal de-linting processes, we might consider including them. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:02, 27 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

Is there any way to adjust my Linthint settings to ignore this type? I don't wish to mess with these and don't want to be seeing these with this tool. Zinnober9 (talk) 17:45, 27 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

I believe many of these errors are bogus. This minimal snip of markup generates this lint error: {{tq|A}} Foo {{tq|B}} —Anomalocaris (talk) 10:00, 30 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

I've also seen this. A single {{tq}} on a page doesn't generate a duplicate id error, but two or more {{tq}}s generates duplicate id errors on the second and subsequent {{tq}}. What's odd about this is that expanding {{tq}} in Special:ExpandTemplates shows that the template has no id attributes. —Bruce1ee^talk 10:41, 30 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

I noticed that as well. When I put that code in my sandbox and save it, I do not get duplicate id errors, and expanding {{tq}} in Special:ExpandTemplates shows me no use of |id=. It's an odd one. Let's see if the problem happens on this page: A Foo B. Answer: No, not for me. – Jonesey95 (talk) 12:48, 30 September 2024 (UTC) – Jonesey95 (talk) 12:48, 30 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

It seems to only report duplicate id errors for {{tq}} when the page is in edit mode. If you put this page in edit mode, Jonesey95's addition of {{tq|A}} Foo {{tq|B}} above gives a duplicate id error. —Bruce1ee^talk 13:02, 30 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

That may be a problem with the LintHint script then. I submitted a message to the LintHint talk page. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:00, 30 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

If anyone is wondering, the sudden explosion of 22k fostered table errors is due to Template:S-s being nominated for deletion. In the nomination, there's talk of these being a fostered issue with the intended redirect (to Template:Signpost/item) so I'm wondering if either that template could adjusted to accommodate these cases, or if not, these pages could be addressed by a bot? @Jonesey95 @Qwerfjkl Do either of you know if this is botable if the template fix isn't feasible? And for a little humor, I'm feeling a bit like Bob Parr in the Incredibles interview after I cleared up the fostered issues earlier this year. :) Zinnober9 (talk) 22:36, 30 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

That's a minor disaster. I have put the TFD notice in noinclude tags for now. Pinging HouseBlaster, who might be able to link to the discussion that motivated them to TFD this template. What is the plan or consensus for replacing it? Was this brought up at Template talk:S-s or Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/Technical recently? I don't see anything. – Jonesey95 (talk) 23:22, 30 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

There was no discussion beforehand; the TFD is the discussion. My idea is to gain consensus at the TFD to use a bot to put a pipe before the uses of the template (which eliminates the fostered content issue), before redirecting {{s-s}} to {{signpost/item}}. See example edit, which adds a pipe before the <!-- markup and thus is lint-free. We don't need two templates which do the same thing, so I nominated {{s-s}} for deletion.

I am cleaning up three-letter templates, most of which should be renamed per WP:TPN. However, I am also TFDing the obsolete/redundant/useless ones (such as {{s-s}}). Best, HouseBlaster (talk • he/they) 23:54, 30 September 2024 (UTC)Reply

OK. Sorry for overstating the number of affected pages in my edit summary; it looks like about 2,800 is the right number, not 20,000 (that's the number of Linter errors caused by the TFD tag, since there are apparently an average of 9 transclusions per page, or something). – Jonesey95 (talk) 00:11, 1 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

Eh, as long as it is fixed :) HouseBlaster (talk • he/they) 00:13, 1 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

I've had a few months off from linting fixes, but when I fixed a missing close italics tag on William Haygarth and clicked on "lintHint" I received a message saying "Future problems detected". I've not seen this before, is it new? What should I be looking to fix - I couldn't see any guidance. LicenceToCrenellate (talk) 17:23, 6 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

It's likely "Duplicate IDs", a new linter category. LintHint normally reports them as "Duplicate IDs", but occasionally they show up as "Future problems detected". When I click lintHint on William Haygarth, it reports three "Duplicate IDs". —Bruce1ee^talk 23:24, 6 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

Thanks, I'm now seeing the duplicate IDs message. LicenceToCrenellate (talk) 08:28, 7 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

Now that we have a bot running, I think temporarily removing the protection from the pages Wikipedia:Linter/reports/Protected pages by Lint Errors will enable the list of be dramatically reduced. Gonnym (talk) 14:44, 17 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

Probably, but I could also see the bot being brought up to access their level as well. I know I've greatly dwindled that list manually with the help of Primefac, especially when I was eliminating the Tidy Fonts, but also in days since when I did some targeted request sets for dropping that list down to 21 or fewer. I hadn't found many protected pages in my more recent errortype eliminations, so hadn't felt the urge to target these pages since my previous set in July. I can hop back onto clearing those pages up. And I don't know about "temporarily removing protection", as temporarily lowering has been very effective and doesn't allow IP/low level vandals any access to these pages. Zinnober9 (talk) 17:46, 17 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

Just 6 of the 54 pages with 21 errors have something other than obsolete tags, and Qwerfjkl (bot) is not fixing those errors without a different error type present at this point. Legobot might be able to fix a few of these pages, but IIRC, it limits its actions to pages on which it can fix every error, which may be unlikely for those pages. With such a low hit rate, I think it might make sense to focus energy elsewhere. That report contains 717 pages with 5,010 counted errors, and we still have over 3,000,000 counted errors left to fix. – Jonesey95 (talk) 18:08, 17 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

We could wait, for example, until the bot operator returns to us with a list of pages that could not be edited by the bot because of protection, or we have fixed all of the unprotected pages with high-priority "HTML5-incompatible misnesting" errors, then request lower protection for that set of pages. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:06, 17 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

There were only I handful I saw from the logs, fewer than ten of 15-20 thousand. Qwerfjkltalk 20:21, 17 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

Just a heads up that the four Bogus Image Option issues on User:Thryduulf/sandbox right now are intentional, and part of the discussion Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Warn on inline image usage. Please ignore these four per discussion with user, and contribute to the Pump discussion if you have any input. Thanks. Zinnober9 (talk) 20:10, 27 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

800+ pages are showing a bogus image options error that shows only on 31 October.

The fix is to change the middle "px" to "x". Let's go, team! – Jonesey95 (talk) 00:06, 31 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

I was just coming to mention that this had just gone live and was also on the Wikipedia:Linter/Signature submissions page. While I had hoped they'd be nabbed by bot before today, they won't lasting too long. Zinnober9 (talk) 00:29, 31 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

104 remain, all one per page. I'm tapping out for the evening, will hit any that remain (if any) when I'm free again later tonight. Great work everyone!! Zinnober9 (talk) 22:11, 31 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

All done, with 25 minutes before Halloween is over! Nice work, everyone. – Jonesey95 (talk) 23:35, 31 October 2024 (UTC)Reply

Depending on the rate of edits for Qwerfjkl(bot) Task 31 , we'll be under 3 million Lint errors in the next day or few. 3,008,823 errors from previous Firefly update. Let's go! Zinnober9 (talk) 05:27, 3 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

The bot hasn't been editing for a couple of weeks, probably because I haven't provided another batch of find-and-replace strings for its operator. Instead of doing that useful task, I've been plugging away at easy edits on AFD pages, which are each transcluded at least once, which means that every batch of 100 edits with five or so fixes in each edit has netted at least 1,000 fewer Linter errors on the Firefly page. We are getting close to a nice milestone. I've also been slowly working on the high-priority misnesting errors, which are one-by-one edits that are typically not in any sort of pattern. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:31, 3 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

Ah, I hadn't looked at the bot's recent contributions, and had just been seeing that the total had been steadily dropping by a decent rate daily and had incorrectly assumed. Nonetheless, still very impressive and exciting. I've been hitting some of the misnested ones too, but since they widely vary in execution, it's been harder to settle into nice edit session focused on those. Zinnober9 (talk) 06:19, 3 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

Sorry about that, I'm a bit too busy to do much right now. I'll try to get another batch running sometime soon. — Qwerfjkltalk 11:15, 3 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

We made it under 3 million. Whew! I need a break. – Jonesey95 (talk) 00:49, 5 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

Good job! Gonnym (talk) 08:31, 5 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

I wish broken templates would be tracked as lints. The edit previous to my fix here made the whole editing window colored with syntax highlighting. Gonnym (talk) 07:48, 8 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

It looks like that is Error 43 at Wikipedia:WikiProject Check Wikipedia/List of errors, although the list that shows when I click through shows only articles (1,700 of them!). I don't think that Linter was designed to catch every type of error; the Check Wikipedia project has existed for a long time. We need a much larger army of gnomes just to keep up with CW errors in article space, let alone in the 90% of pages that are outside of article space. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:03, 8 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

Hopefully not related to this, can you see any text when trying to edit 15min? I get a blanked uneditable window. Gonnym (talk) 14:07, 8 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

Managed to edit the page with a section edit and after fixing the page loads. So seems some of these are pretty serious errors. Gonnym (talk) 14:30, 8 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

Yes, error 43 is listed as "High" priority (the highest priority on that page) with the symptom of "Display problem". So many gnomes are needed (or edit checks when saving, or something else). – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:54, 8 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

That would be nice for sure, or at the very least they could do extension tags in addition to HTML. Gamapamani (talk) 04:34, 10 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

Since @Jonesey95 mentioned edit checks when saving, I was wondering what the rationale might be for not doing them, at least for Linter errors. I'm guessing it has something to do with linting every preview being too expensive; and then, even though the page gets linted upon saving anyway, it would feel weird to users to suddenly get a linter error notification if they didn't get it for preview.

It would definitely be helpful to have this, especially since the section editor mode gives people the misleading appearance that everything is fine with their edit even when they have an unclosed table or {{div col}}, which then messes up the stuff following the faulty section. I used to think the people making these errors very incredibly sloppy, but now I think in a great many cases they simply get misled by the section editor where everything looks OK, and aren't aware they should also double-check the full page after saving. Most people would likely be interested in fixing an issue they've introduced if they got notified about it, it's not like they want to mess things up and leave it to the gnomes to clean up. Gamapamani (talk) 05:34, 10 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

Also along these lines: is there a reason why a "This page has Linter errors. You can help by fixing them." message with a Special:LintErrors titlesearch link can't be placed on relevant pages the same way all kinds of other notification banners are? I'm sure the presence of a linter error can be stored/cached with the rest of the page metadata so an extra DB lookup wouldn't be needed. I mean, sure, what would we do with our lives   if this were fully crowdsourced instead of hiding it in Page information and Special pages and having a dedicated gnome force for it, but seriously, what would be the downside of this? Gamapamani (talk) 06:22, 10 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

I think that we need to get the lint errors down to zero before we can ask for this feature. It would be very annoying to get this message when the lint error was already on the page and added by someone else. I've edited some old template documentation pages that used TemplateData and had a bad JSON syntax which was apparently saved before saving bad JSON was disallowed and when I tried saving changes I had to fix someone else's errors. That isn't fun. But when it does reach zero, I'm all in favor of such a feature. Gonnym (talk) 11:27, 10 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

@Gonnym Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting blocking the save on this, just letting people know that the problem is there instead of hiding it under the rug (maybe even in view mode as well, not just when editing). I mean there are already all kinds of this-or-that-needs-fixing-on-this-page messages all over, adding the lint error information into the mix as well wouldn't be a big deal, I think. Gamapamani (talk) 11:58, 10 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

It's still might be a message that was meant for someone else's errors, not the user saving the edit, which I find in bad taste. If someone wants to gnome, that's fine, but we shouldn't force it upon them. We should however force it upon the user creating the errors. Gonnym (talk) 12:03, 10 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

I'm not sure it should be forced on anyone, as that could end up with less experienced users abandoning otherwise good edits. As for being in bad taste, well, I sort of get you, but would it be more in bad taste than the red cite errors, etc.? Maintenance templates are usually about someone else's problems, it would be a similar suggestion to help out if you can and feel like it. And the wording could be different for pre-existing errors and those introduced in the current edit. Gamapamani (talk) 12:24, 10 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

Yes it would be worse than red cite errors. Gonnym (talk) 12:42, 10 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

Perhaps we could have warnings in preview only, similar to what a lot of templates do using Module:Check for unknown parameters. You don't see anything when reading, but you do see a warning when you preview the page. Those warnings are also "someone else's error" (usually a parameter that was removed from a template at some point), and you're free to ignore them, but at least they're more visible to regular editors. --rchard2scout (talk) 12:38, 11 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

@rchard2scout For my purposes, something like this when previewing, something like an editnotice when editing, or something like a maintenance template when reading are all valid possibilities, as long as the errors (their presence, not necessarily the details) are shown somewhere without having to take additional action to see them. Prefs could have an option to disable this display if it's an annoyance. Gamapamani (talk) 13:10, 11 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

I think most of the performance issues will go away once we have Parsoid read views. It would probably be doable to trigger only when new lint errors are detected, whatever the action ends up being. I agree that the risk is showing errors to users who don't understand what they did wrong.

But I'll posit a different way of solving your problem: we should get rid of templates like div col; editors shouldn't need to manually balance templates together and they don't work with the visual editor, etc. Legoktm (talk) 18:52, 11 November 2024 (UTC)Reply

@Legoktm From what I've seen, it actually happens a lot more with tables, and you probably aren't going to get rid of those. :) It's quite easy to miss the deletion/replacement of |} because it's so short and only has a single character difference from other table syntax.

As for eliminating {{div col}}, I have nothing against the idea, but since it's basically just a <div> + attributes, how are you going to eliminate the need to close HTML tags? A plain </div> can get lost just as easily. I don't think you'll be able to get everyone to go VE-only (and AFAIK it still doesn't support multi-column lists – could be wrong since I don't use it much). Or are you talking about mass-converting to {{columns-list}} or always using |content=? This sort of thing would indeed make it obvious for the editor when the template hasn't been closed, but my understanding is that it can't be used with table code, and most begin/end pair templates seem to be table-based. (I'm obviously not as experieced with all this as you and the regulars here, so please do let me know if I'm mistaken in my reasoning.) Gamapamani (talk) 01:42, 12 November 2024 (UTC)Reply