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"Search" sidebar element in Geohack covers most of the page (as <div role="search" id="p-search">` lacks class="portlet")
Closed, InvalidPublicBUG REPORT

Description

Steps to replicate the issue (include links if applicable):

  • When people visiting the Dutch Wikipedia, and click on the coordinates link in the top right corner, they now end up on a not working page.
  • Example url
  • Nothing has changed in the used template nor in the system messages on Wikipedia.
  • All actions to solve this on Wikipedia have failed.

What happens?:

geohack toolforge error.PNG (959×1 px, 274 KB)

We haven't requested such a map (also map is blank and not working), it should not be there, and it blocks most of the page. It suddenly appeared on the geohack pages around 5 February 2026.

Event Timeline

Romaine triaged this task as Unbreak Now! priority.Feb 8 2026, 10:57 AM
Aklapper renamed this task from Geohack includes (blank) map, unwantedly to "Search" sidebar element in Geohack covers most of the page.Feb 8 2026, 3:07 PM
Aklapper renamed this task from "Search" sidebar element in Geohack covers most of the page to "Search" sidebar element in Geohack covers most of the page (as <div role="search" id="p-search">` lacks class="portlet").Feb 8 2026, 3:13 PM
Aklapper closed this task as Invalid.
Aklapper added a subscriber: Magnus.

https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php seems to use the Monobook skin, and the <div role="search" id="p-search"> element supposed to only have the width of the sidebar that it is part of now seems to take the whole width and cover other content.

This happens in any language, e.g. https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?language=cs&params=52_21_40.0_N_4_52_25.0_E_type:landmark_scale:3125_region:NL&pagename=Vondelkerk&title=text_coordinates

This does not happen on wikis though when using the Monobook skin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santiago%E2%80%93Rosal%C3%ADa_de_Castro_Airport?useskin=monobook

Looking at the HTML source, replacing <div role="search" id="p-search"> with <div role="search" class="portlet" id="p-search"> would fix this.

Per https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/GeoHack#Source_code, this needs to be reported at https://github.com/magnusmanske/geohack/issues/2 as the Geohack project does not use Wikimedia Phabricator to track its issues.

Geohack loads GeoHack.js, which didn't exist on nlwiki. Copying from the version on enwiki and changing the appendCSS value to #p-search {display:none !important;} seemed to be working.

For the other languages trying to fix this while GeoHack hasn't updated: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:GeoHack.js

This fix was brought to my attention by Wimmel

@Aklapper
It's broken even on enwiki.
It's a bug and it should be treated as High priority.

What has changed to Geohack, if the JS file wasn't required all the time until now?
Enwiki has JS file and it still renders incorrectly.

image.png (935×2 px, 287 KB)

TheDJ closed this task as Invalid.EditedFeb 10 2026, 10:23 AM
TheDJ subscribed.

@Draceane this is not a MediaWiki or WMF problem. This is a problem in the tool of a community member. The tool extracts part of the page and reuses that. That makes it very vulnerable to problems like this.

No one here can fix it, other than Magnus, who is the maintainer of that tool. As stated before, this is tracked via https://github.com/magnusmanske/geohack/issues/2

The Javascripts change should not be needed, the page itself should not even have these user interface elements.

It's a bug and it should be treated as High priority.

Indeed, and as my previous comment says, you're telling this to the wrong people in the wrong place.