As some initial community input, I'm glad to see this being taken up, as I've been wanting T51087 to be addressed for a while.

This task relates to T248330, in that when a mentee potentially worthy of praise is surfaced to me, this feature would help me to be able to review the edits for which they were thanked when determined whether/how to praise them.

Very good point, @Xaosflux. The draft and user namespaces are very often where newcomers write articles, and we'll absolutely want the edit checks to come up when that's happening. Userspace may present a challenge, since sometimes it's just used to create one's userpage or to keep track of tasks, which are not scenarios where we want to prompt people to add references.

In T324730#8659298, @Mathglot wrote:

Description
This task involves the work of defining initially trigger the reference check to be activated and presented to people.

I don't understand this description. Defining what?

@Aklapper , sorry if there was any miscategorization. My understanding was that @Esanders' script represents the prototype version of a feature that will be rolled out as part of the talk pages project, which is why I categorized it here. Ed, feel free to forward/adjust the task so that it reaches wherever it needs to.

Do you think a page like Edit check/Ideas mediawiki.org would work?

Yes, that would be great! Really, the potential domain for this is everything that goes against best practice but isn't so universally guaranteed bad that we block it with an edit filter or fix it with a bot. That's a huge domain that encompasses a good portion of how experienced editors spend our time, and while not everything in it is potentially machine-readable, a sizeable portion of it is.

Ah, that makes sense!

In T327330#8586331, @Whatamidoing-WMF wrote:

if someone is trying to add references to the lead, they should probably be informed of LEADCITE and told they should probably place them in the body instead.

This isn't true. That guideline says things like "Any statements about living persons that are challenged or likely to be challenged must have an inline citation every time they are mentioned, including within the lead" and "The presence of citations in the introduction is neither required in every article nor prohibited in any article."

What rules ought to determine whether a change someone is making warrants the reference check being triggered?

I think the ideal situation here is one where there's a medium-importance issue — one not so dire that it warrants an abuse filter, but also not one so minor it can easily just be fixed up later. There are also some issues that are easier to fix when they're introduced rather than later on — citations is the big one here, since it's so much easier for someone to just add the source they used than for someone later to try to find it.

Thinking ahead, what other kinds of checks can you imagine being useful/valuable?

Oh, so many! I'd look through the editnotices to find a bunch of examples, as well as the abuse filters, maintenance tags, and guidance pages. Here are some (some for more specific situations than others):

• Adds a redlinked entry to a dynamic list
• Adds an image lacking alt text to an article related to accessibility, e.g. Blindness
• Links to a projectspace page from the mainspace body of an article
• Links to a disambiguation page from an article body (already implemented)
• Uses a word from a variety of English different from the one the article is tagged as having
• Uses a word that is likely a typo
• Adds a section titled "criticism" or "controversy"
• Adds a link to an article that is already linked in that section (very likely a WP:DUPLINK violation)
• Adds a reference with the same URL as an existing reference (likely a duplicate)
• Uses a relative time word like "recently" in an article body
• Use a word or phrase indicating a likely personal attack on a talk page
• Adds a reference containing only a bare URL
• Adds an external link in an article body
• Adds many entries to an external links section (likely a violation of WP:ELNO)
• Uses a phrase indicative of likely promotional language (e.g. "mission statement", "award-winning")
• Expands a section titled "Plot" beyond, say, 1400 words (recommend max length is 700)
• Uses a word or phrase listed at MOS:Words to Watch
• Adds a link to a word that is likely an overlink (e.g. a year, or a major country/language/ethnicity/etc.)
• Adds an image gallery to an article on an ethnicity (likely a violation of MOS:PEOPLEGALLERY)
• Adds a short description longer than 40 characters (see WP:SDSHORT)
• Adds a very long quote (likely a summary style violation, if not also a copyright one)
• Adds an article to a category when the article is already in a subcategory

You'd find many more examples talking to other editors. The potential extent of the applications is staggering, which is one reason I hope that once this feature is more fully developed it'll be possible for the community to create our own ones without developer assistance, just as we currently do for e.g. edit filters.

• What patterns have you noticed in the newcomers/edits you feel compelled to assist with (e.g. write a personalized message on their talk page, add a reference to a content addition that lacked one)?
• What patterns have you noticed in the newcomers/edits you do not feel compelled to assist with (e.g. revert the edits they made, post a templated warning message on their talk page)

What additional information/context might you find helpful in assessing the quality of an edit and the intentions of the person making it so that you can decide how best to respond to it/them?

• What edits that involve people adding net new content do NOT require an accompanying reference?

Bad edits.

@Jdlrobson I'm not quite sure what you mean. Is it this? I continue to think that this is the best design option we have with the current en-WP homepage:

Personally, that does not look at all good to me. It creates a blank space, pushing the actual content of the main page down.

@MarkTraceur, you are listed as the contact person for the UploadWizard. Could you look into addressing this?

Thanks for making the request, @Koavf. We're in the ridiculous situation where we have to request this every year because T271968 has not been handled.

Agreed with MusikAnimal.

As can be seen from previous comments, the community asked for something , discussion ensued, a solution was not yet found.

(unsubscribing to reduce my notifications, but feel free to ping me in replies)

Overall, this seems like it'd be a nice feature to have!

@matmarex , the unsubst module can be used in most cases to prevent inexperienced editors from accidentally using substitution erroneously. Beyond that, a better version of TemplateData would allow for instruction about substitution for each template.

You're welcome to have a purist view of styling on Wikipedia, but until consensus develops otherwise, such styling exists, and even if it were banned on Wikipedia, there are plenty of other MediaWiki projects that use it. Unless we plan to disable the ability to recolor table backgrounds, we should work to make them accessible.

That's not a viable solution. Currently, the only available arrow color is black, so the only background colors that would sufficiently contrast with it would be light ones. But there are plenty of MediaWiki applications that use darker backgrounds with lighter text, which is a perfectly valid and accessible design choice — except for the current arrows. This task should be taken up to resolve that issue.

I have some concerns about the notifications that were just introduced for topic archiving. Quoting myself from here:

@Whatamidoing-WMF appears to be the community relations person for that team; could you point us to the right person to ask about this?

Here's another possible use case that is blocked by this bug.

@DLynch, it was here. Thanks for looking into this!

I've previously raised a similar thing here. @Whatamidoing-WMF pointed out that there's already a notice of sorts for new editors trying out VisualEditor. We made some adjustments to the wording, stored here (see the talk page), so I'm not sure there's all that much else to do.

I'd like to see this ticket (or another related one) include an exploration of design options, not just name options. I'm not sure you'll ever find a word that's completely unambiguous, but there are lots of other ways to set it off to make it clear it's not a section. Brainstorming some of those:

I'm fully with @Xaosflux here — the major distinction is things about the page vs. things about the topic, and coordinates are clearly about the topic, compared to protection icons/GA and FA stars/etc. which are about the page. One way to conceptualize it: If Wikipedia didn't exist, would this thing still be relevant? If so, it's about the topic, not the page.

In T281974#8093067, @Sdkb wrote:

@Xaosflux, I really like your thought of separating content from meta things.

Regarding the meta things, I think for protection, that should be associated with the edit button, since the main question for most people related to protection is "can I, with my current permissions, edit this page"? Minerva Neue handles this quite well, where if you can edit the page, you get an edit button, and if not, it's grayed out or locked or something and explains why. There's a bit of value also for just letting readers know the protection level so that they can understand how vulnerable the article they're reading may be to vandalism, but that's secondary and I don't think requires a very prominent notifier.

For good/featured indicators, I've been advocating for a while that they should be moved to the end of the article title to make them more prominent. I touch on that a bit here with links to prior discussion.

@Xaosflux, I really like your thought of separating content from meta things.

I'm not sure about the technical aspects, but once the field is created, just lmk and we'll be able to implement the behavior we want (as shown in the mockup) on-wiki.

Thanks, @ppelberg! Trying it out, I like it. The main areas for improvement are things around the edges.

Thanks for merging the task, @Esanders! I thought I'd seen something about this before, so glad to know it's being actively considered. I'll unsubscribe from here to avoid a notification blizzard, but feel free to reach out here/on-wiki if you'd like feedback about the feature as you develop it.

@Xaosflux I'd guess the programmatic definition of an article category is one that's not tagged with the maintenance category template. But for our purposes here, I think we can consider any category that's not Category:Wikipedia drafts or one of its subcategories to be something suppressible in draft space.

Thanks; that's exactly what I have in mind!

I fully concur with AlexisJazz and Ahecht here. This has a clear issue to resolve: make the search results ignore the bad image list. The possible bad outcomes are really bad—@Jdlrobson, can we note that this is a blocking issue for the deployment of New Vector?

@Jdlrobson, per the prototype image that I referred you to, and that I'm attaching below for good measure, the approval is for the language switcher button within the Main Page top banner. There is no approval for placing it above the banner, as in your options above; that would require us to run a brand new RfC, which I predict would fail.

English Wikipedia has just approved placing the language switcher button near the upper right corner of the Main Page (at the right end of the top banner, as depicted in the prototype image) as part of a suite of changes to reduce the prominence of portals. Would you all be able to handle the technical end of development to make this possible?

Thanks, @ppelberg; glad to see it's already on the radar!

FYI, this task was independently raised as a suggestion at the English Wikipedia Village Pump.

As a heads up, there is discussion taking place at English Wikipedia on removing the portal links from the top of the Main Page, which would open up a convenient place to put the language switcher, perhaps like this:

1. I'd see myself using it most on large talk pages with a lot of threads. That could be talk pages of controversial topics, e.g. Donald Trump, or user talk pages of active editors. It could also be pages used for discussion that aren't technically talk pages, like the village pumps or Administrators Noticeboard.

One thing I'd like a good talk table of contents to do is to note how many different editors have participated in each discussion. This is because, often, when glancing at a large talk page, I'm looking for the discussions that involve a significant change with a realistic likelihood of passing (things like RfCs or major structural changes), and I'm looking to filter out discussions that are just straightforward edit requests, nonstarter ideas, and other cruft. The threads in the former group will often have many participants, whereas those in the latter will have few.

Thanks for the explanation, Santhosh! I'll just hope it's something Chrome developers eventually fix, then.

Thanks for opening this, Whatamidoing! As background, see this discussion.

@DLynch, someone else replying to the comment would be something I'd want to know, but so would someone else replying at the same level as the comment I'm replying to. In other words, sometimes replies happen by indenting a level further, but sometimes they happen by just making another comment at the same indentation level.

The "polling every X seconds for new changes" approach, if it's not too resource-greedy, appeals, since the sooner I know someone else has commented, the sooner I can start adapting mine to whatever they said. It'd be even better if there's an easy way to load their comment without feeling like the software is going to discard mine.

Awesome; thanks so much!

For the first one, it's normally because I'm looking for a discussion I've contributed to to check if there are updates (less frequent now that I can subscribe) or to link to it from another discussion. (Now that I think about it, having a link icon that would copy the wikilink to a discussion would be super useful.) I currently do that by ctrl+f and typing in my username, but a box would make that easier.

@Aklapper is there anyone at WMF currently working on the page history interface who I could ping about this? It seems like it ought to be a very simple tweak.

@Aklapper, this seems like it should be a very straightforward task. Who at WMF can I ping to get this unstuck?

The number of discussions in the archives seems a little useful, although we currently have a pretty good idea just from the number of archive pages. The number of active discussions is already clear just from the table of contents/length of the page. The last time someone contributed might help make it clearer when a page is inactive/unwatched, but there might be better ways to accomplish that.

I think it'd make most sense to have this done through software, if possible. See T299286.

From the en-WP community angle, the important things to communicate in talk page headers are encapsulated in Template:Talk header, which we are increasingly moving toward using universally. While I don't think any of these really rise to the level of importance needed to be included in a sticky header, they're worth keeping in mind as the stuff we want editors going to a talk page to know/have access to:

Finding a suitable freely licensed IPA --> speech engine is likely to be a primary hurdle here. If we can do that, then it's just a matter of coding and implementing. There's a clear potential benefit if this is taken up (enough so that it might be worth making a wishlist proposal for it).

@Majavah @Zabe, does the uploaded patch resolve the underlying issue, or just push it a year down the road? Per @AntiCompositeNumber's comments at T271968, we have Template:Not-PD-US-expired-min-year and Template:PD-US-expired-max-year, which are made for this exact purpose and should be being used instead.

@Lydia_Pintscher, I added a TemplateData description after creating this ticket, but it's impossible to do more than that until T54582 is resolved (and even that might not be enough—it's a very complicated template). And even if the TemplateData was perfect, there'd still be no link that'd allow someone who clicks on a value to actually update it, which is what they're presumably trying to do.

I mentioned this here at en-WP VPT. It'd be very nice if this could be implemented in a way that'd apply beyond just the help panel, since there are situations where we want to differentiate between e.g. source editor and VE beyond there. There are some presently existing templates like {{If mobile}} that might work.

It's done for various reasons. Sometimes articles on schools do it to theme with the school's colors. Sometimes TV shows do it to help differentiate different seasons. Etc.

FYI, this was brought up here, demonstrating continued interest in the feature from newcomers.

If CodeMirror 6 is a whole new system, hopefully that'll resolve the issue. It's not the most annoying thing in the world, but wikilinks within captions are an extremely common occurrence, so it's very widespread.

FYI, there has been continued interest in this feature at this thread. Cc'ing related tickets T31793, T123517, T121797, T167947, T230561, T251026, and T120453, and @Quiddity who helped point to them.

@Pikne, thanks; it's helpful to know what's happening here. Which OSM relation types are currently supported?

Yeah, I'm not too surprised to hear that. It seems there are other higher-priority tasks for Mapframe, but I just wanted to create this ticket so that this idea will be on the radar as a possible improvement down the road.

One potentially similar thing that occurs to me is the related articles extension. Are you familiar with that, and if so, what is the connection/difference?