User talk:Tim Starling

where is the ISO 8601 page? it was speedy deleted, can you undelete? the wrong implementation still exists.

As Tim did not delete the page, here is not a suitable place to ask this question. It is also inappropriate for you to spam the whole wiki with the same question. If you register, login, and place a request on my talk page then I will copy the most recent version of the deleted page on your user page. You can then report it on Bugzilla if it has not already been reported there. --HappyDog 13:24, 2 April 2007 (UTC)Reply

with whom did you think you spoke? You may know that Tobias was blocked. Furthermore a private discussion between Tobias and Tim took place. And since when it is the wrong place here? Tim is an admin who could undelete it. It's strange that User Tobias asked at different places where he could write about ISO 8601 and it was suggested he could create a page for it, but then one admin can delete it without discussion and with obviously false claims.

And with a lie ( #REDIRECT MediaWiki This page has been salted and protected due to excessive vandalism and trolling re-creations of nonsensical content. )

I am ignoring your request until you start acting in a civil manner, and I suspect the other admins will too. --HappyDog 15:53, 22 April 2007 (UTC)Reply

HappyDog and Tobias: please find some other page on which to conduct your arguments. -- Tim Starling 08:20, 25 April 2007 (UTC)Reply

Hi Tim - I'm sorry, that this problem flared up again here. Was not intentional. --HappyDog 23:45, 20 May 2007 (UTC)Reply

Thanks a million!

Maybe it would be a good idea to describe performance concerns on the talk page so that people will be aware of the issues and maybe even hep solve them. Dovi 21:25, 23 June 2007 (UTC)Reply

Tim, please take a look at Extension talk:LO Parser Functions for some fixes I made. In its official incarnation, LOParserFunctions crashed my MediaWiki. Basically, the i18n file is missing, so I created the i18n file and had it called properly from the main extension file. Thanks. Listrophy 18:31, 15 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

As per Aaron's comment here, it would be great if both could be made live at testwiki so that any potential conflict could be noted and dealt with. Thanks! Dovi 16:41, 17 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

Hi Tim.

How can I add CheckUser rights to one user on my own wiki (linux OS)? Extension is already installed. Thanks. Kaster

You should install Extension:CheckUser - VasilievVV 14:38, 14 January 2008 (UTC)Reply

Dear Tim; « id="wpTextbox1" » is an anchor available for

1. editing pages as [1]
2. viewing the source code for protecdted pages as [2]

It would be a great improuvement for directional editing having the same anchor also at:

1. editing an email as in testwiki:Special:Emailuser/I18n
   1. ‎→ bugzilla:012082 · "add « id="wpTextbox1" » to the « textarea » at « special:Emailuser/Foo »"‎
2. uploading a file as in testwiki:Special:Upload
3. viewing the source of a deleted page as at [3]

I hope it neither does require to much of your time nor are there other reasons not to implement this. Thanks for all your efforts in advance! Best regards Gangleri 07:37, 16 February 2008 (UTC)Reply

Use the existing IDs. There's no need for the ID to be consistent, for either JS or CSS. -- Tim Starling 08:24, 16 February 2008 (UTC)Reply

Thanks Tim! It is really the best solution. Best regards Gangleri 00:11, 17 February 2008 (UTC)Reply

Hi tim,

I just install a second wiki (same database, different table prefix and seperate localsetting.php). How do I transfer specific pages from one wiki to the new wiki. I know you can use import /export from the GUI but how do you do it using the maint script.

Any suggession will be helpful

Thanks

Hello, someone on #mediawiki say to me you maintain this scipt. I would like to had the bot flag on the irc RC. For the moment the irc robot only display n:new and m:minor flag. For me this flag bot is very helpful, i can do without, but its harder. What do you think about that ? If you show me where i can see the code, i can send you a patch. I can open a bugzilla too, or what even it need. What do you think about that, and can you help me ?

Thanks a lot. Bayo 18:13, 12 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

The relevant code is getIRCLine() in RecentChange.php. -- Tim Starling 10:54, 13 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

Thank.

I just request a simple change if it's possible. Changing the line :

$flag = ($rc_minor ? "M" : "") . ($rc_new ? "N" : "");

by

$flag = ($rc_minor ? "M" : "") . ($rc_new ? "N" : "") . ($rc_bot ? "B" : "");

Bot can also delete, rename a page, upload an image (first part of the if), but maybe its not often, its less important, and it need a more big change. If it need i can do something to display both.

I also see a problem with RC on a long page name, long user name and long comment. The output line is cutting and can broke a multi byte utf-8 charactere, with problem to decode. If i have time, i can do something and and you a patch ? Bayo 12:14, 13 April 2008 (UTC)Reply

Hi, I noticed your new WikimediaDownload template, Ive also put a post suggesting a template providing general information for the installation of extensions from the wikimedia SVN here, specifically the template should provide command line svn checkout instructions. I can make a start on it. --Zven 10:57, 18 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

Replied on Talk:Subversion. -- Tim Starling 12:27, 18 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

Hi Tim,

in the Help_talk:Extension:ParserFunctions#Rand.28.29_for_.23expr:.3F you stated, that there once was a rand() function, but it was deleted because of the parser cache. Now, i'd like to use it with subst - which i think should work. So if you got that code lying around somewhere nearby, I'd be very happy if you'd share it - please ;) --Sidcom 09:14, 6 July 2010 (UTC)Reply

Thank you for the recent extension review work at review queue. I really appreciate it. --MZMcBride 04:52, 2 April 2011 (UTC)Reply

Please see bugzilla:28363. NomoNest 15:20, 3 April 2011 (UTC)Reply

Hello, Tim,

I would like to bring a re-written wikidiff2 to your attention, which is supposed to avoid some of the shortcomings of the current standard diffpage.

Recently Sumanah contacted me on this issue.

Please note that the new code is already working locally on string base, that means, I can feed the program with some dummy wikitext pairs and will get the HTML code I did expect. However, there was no broad test in the field yet, experiencing some more real situations than my constructed examples.

I have absolutely no idea how to establish compiling C++ and test environment on a test wiki.

Rather to attract notice than to win a virtual decoration for my CV I filed this story on Coding Challenge, but that one faded away somehow.

Have a successful 2012 --PerfektesChaos 20:01, 27 December 2011 (UTC)Reply

And/or email.

thanks a bunch - קיפודנחש 22:03, 14 January 2012 (UTC)

On the list of information, when it says User record last touched:, what actions trigger the date for that?

Specifically, is it only actions by the user, maybe logging in, or would an action such as blocking the user also trigger it?

Inquisitor Sasha Ehrenstein aus Sturmkrieg Sektor (Talk) (Contributions) 21:11, 1 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

Sumanah say me to talk you my question : In WM, have you already talked about the call from Templates/JS/Lua to each others ? And perhaps also use variables in templates. I explain in Talk:Lua scripting and hope this can help. Rical (talk) 17:41, 8 April 2012 (UTC)Reply

The current version can not work with mediawiki 1.14. It needs a lot of functions and classes defined in version 1.18.

hi i have Script and Lua Problim in this wiki

this is copy from my LocalSettings

plz help me

thanks

Hi, do I understand correctly from Architecture committee/2017-03-01 that you have something to do with the job posting for a Product Manager (MediaWiki)? Are you interested in getting the posting distributed more widely? For instance, I was thinking it would be nice to tell the top N bug closers/triagers of bugzilla time. --Nemo 08:17, 10 March 2017 (UTC)Reply

Hallo, can you tell us, who maintains the score extension? We deal with it here: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T161293 Cheers -- Roomsixhu (talk) 19:56, 4 April 2017 (UTC)Reply

I liked your points at Wikimedia_Developer_Summit/2018/Participants. It's very hard to fight those antipatterns. (For instance the successor of the example you make seems to get even worse; meanwhile, the solution which was developed a decade ago and abandoned a few years ago still works, but is unused.) --Nemo 14:33, 3 December 2017 (UTC)Reply

	기술 반스타
	Thank you for creating Extension:SyntaxHighlight. I wondered who made this. It's very useful when I write codes. :) Have a nice day! Gcd822 (talk) 00:05, 23 April 2020 (UTC)Reply

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18:17, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

Hi Tim, long time no see! Hope you're doing fine. 😊

As far as I can tell, you're the one who has done most of the "back-end" collation stuff in MediaWiki. We have a small problem with the ICU collation used on the Norwegian Wikipedias, and I would like to ask your advice about what approach we can take. The issue is that for Scandinavian languages, the letters "aa" should sort as "å". They do with the ICU collation, but the problem manifests itself for non-Scandinavian names. For instance, you have "Haag" (the Hague) sorted as "Håg" and "Aaron Carter" sorting as "Åron Carter". A and Å are on the opposite ends of the Norwegian alphabet, so the difference is very noticeable.

Before we switched to using ICU collation, we would solve this on-wiki by "manually" specifying "å" as the sortkey for "aa" where necessary, using DEFAULTSORT. Now, however, this is "built in" to the collation, so we have to go the opposite route: We need to specify "a'a" (note the apostrophe) for non-Scandinavian names in order for those to sort correctly, which feels both hacky and less intuitive. So what we would like to do would be to just exclude the aa=å rule from the collation.

Now, these are the two routes I think we might be able to take:

1. Override the ICU collation somehow. As far as I can tell, this is not really currently possible with the tools we have available. There is the "custom collation" route similar to BashkirUppercaseCollation.php, but that leaves out other good features we would want from ICU (such as numerical sorting, for instance).

   In the ICO collation demo it was very easy to fix this issue – I can simply add this line in the "append rules" field, and things turn out as expected: &A<<aa<<<Aa<<<AA. So maybe it would be possible for us to add a local override like that somehow?

2. Try to fix it upstream in CLDR by adding a second sorting option to CLDR's no.xml. This would probably be better, but getting changes into CLDR can be tricky. I notice that Swedish has two alternatives in its collation file, so it is technically possible, I'm just worried about it potentially being difficult to talk CLDR people into doing that.

Maybe there is some other approach we can take as well that I haven't thought about. Do you have any advice? Thanks. Jon Harald Søby (talk) 13:10, 18 November 2022 (UTC)Reply

Hi Tim,

I was looking into the messy situation of the RationalWiki ImageFilter extension yesterday. The extension page here hosts a very outdated copy of the extension which can't work on any supported versions of MW, and though RationalWiki is mentioned on the page, there's no link to the version you cleaned up several years ago, hosted on the RationalWiki GitHub. Though these days MW core has changed a bit and even the version on GitHub needs at least some tweaks to make it fully work on MW 1.43+.

Now, my questions about both ImageFilter and the other RationalWiki MW extensions in general:

1. Would you be opposed to importing the ImageFilter extension to WMF gerrit? If not, I'm more than happy to post such a request on the relevant page here and wait for the import process to take place.
2. What about the other RationalWiki extensions? You fixed up the Wigo3 extension years ago as well, and the Extension: page here links to the version on WMF gerrit, which has received some actual code-level maintenance commits from other devs over the years...though the extension's GitHub repo under the RationalWiki organization still exists, hence the question :) I'd rather contribute to the canonical source and avoid unnecessary forks, but I'm not too familiar with how RationalWiki works, so I figured I'd ask you first.

Thanks in advance for your reply! Jack Phoenix _(Contact) 12:52, 17 August 2025 (UTC)Reply

I reviewed the RationalWiki extensions and made a judgement as to their potential value to other wikis, that's why only Wigo3 ended up in Gerrit. The others are generally small and/or idiosyncratic in some way that limits their value. When an extension is in GitHub, I can just push commits, I don't need to open PRs to merge my own changes, and I don't need to worry about potential other users aside from RationalWiki. Having Wigo3 in Gerrit meant Daniel apologised to me before he broke it, rather than just breaking it by accident, which was nice I guess. It is completely non-functional since 1.38 and nobody has complained about that or offered to fix it despite the continuing maintenance commits. If you think ImageFilter has some value, I guess you can import it, although its name overstates its purpose -- it's a bit of a name squat. In GitHub we can have many ImageFilter extensions but in Gerrit there can only be one. Wigo3 at least has a distinctive name.

The canonical location of extensions from RationalWiki's point of view is defined by the get-source script which was used to build the production source tree. For Wigo3 that is Gerrit. Tim Starling (talk) 23:03, 17 August 2025 (UTC)Reply

Thank you for the swift reply, I appreciate it! It seems that at least some people also see value in ImageFilter, hence why it would make sense for it to be a more "general", discoverable extension hosted on gerrit. As such, I've submitted the request at Gerrit/New repositories/Requests and included a reference to this conversation. There's a pending patch I intend to submit to update ImageFilter for 1.43 and to make it use HookHandlers and Dependency Injection, plus some cosmetic tweaks and i18n things; it'll probably be slightly easier to add the extension to TWN and have it receive more frequent i18n updates as well.

You make some fine points in favor of GitHub, although I do think that usually one primary user for whom a piece of software is maintained isn't necessarily anyone's loss, and at the end of the day, the maintainer makes judgement calls on things which aren't clear-cut programmatical, "easy"-to-review changes like "fix fatal typo", "remove unused function", etc.

So while there can be a conflict of interest when it comes to what RationalWiki wishes an extension does and how it behaves vs. how a random 3rd-party reuser wishes things to be, I don't think it'd be fair to you or anyone else to think that you have an obligation towards them. It's nice if we all can agree on how things should behave, but that's also a very unrealistic goal for the most part. Still, for a long while I pushed towards openness when it came to major and minor third-parties using MediaWiki; as I believed, and still do, that having more code available to everyone is for the greater good. And let's face it, sometimes it's just fascinating to see how things work. :)

Well over a decade ago I had a nice little chat with Chad about the advantages and disadvantages of WMF code hosting, and...a lot's changed since that, but I do sincerely wish that extension maintainers still retain the "final say" over the version they are maintaining. If someone's unhappy with a decision, they can always fork. Some of the biggest advantages of gerrit and having somewhat of a wider community to maintain things are also the biggest disadvantages: well-meaning people can and all too often do merge patches that break more than fix, and this is solely due to a lack of testing (as well as sometimes unusual development models and the like; for example, when it comes to social tools and the other things I maintain, I test and develop them against the latest LTS release, not master).

The advantage of this, IMHO, is that when there's that one "canonical" version, it probably is sorta maintained and even if not, qualified people with skills can pick it up and continue where the previous maintainer(s) left off; but unlike with GitHub, you don't need to wonder which fork is the most current and up-to-date one.

Speaking of untested stuff and Wigo3...I submitted this patchset, which as of now is untested, to pave way for unbreaking the extension fully — at least I assume that the removal of sajax from MW core is the biggest reason as to why Wigo3 is currently broken on newer MWs? I'm hoping to test Wigo3 in general as well as my patch in the coming days or weeks, but of course preliminary CR is always more than welcome!

Relatedly, some more follow-up questions inspired by this conversation:

1. Is there any kind of a roadmap/plan/etc. on when RationalWiki would be upgraded to a...newer version? And what would that version be, maybe (hopefully) 1.43? Now, I don't even have a RationalWiki user account or anything but if you need a hand in fixing up the extensions, I'd be glad to participate in the effort. After all, in an ideal world the upgrade process would be very smooth and require virtually no manual fixing of extensions etc.
2. What about (extension-specific) bug reports? Back in 2017 when the Wigo3 gerrit repo was brand new, there was phab:T171441 but it was closed fairly soon afterwards without the Phab project being created. Somewhat more recently, in 2022, Andre was asking about Wigo3's bug tracker on Extension talk:Wigo3. Should(n't) the Phab project be created, if and when gerrit is the canonical location for Wigo3's source code, and there is interest in reporting bugs in the extension so that they can be properly tracked? What about the other RationalWiki extensions not on gerrit, should GitHub or RationalWiki's tech support page be the bug tracker for those?

Thanks again for any and all input! Jack Phoenix _(Contact) 23:32, 19 August 2025 (UTC)Reply