Shirt a Phobia

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Page history tools

I’ve noticed page histories tend to get cluttered with minor edits. Has anyone made a keyframe viewer for edit histories? This would identify stable versions of the page that remained unchanged (apart from small edits) for an extended period of time.

  • Manually tagging stable page versions might also work. Is this supported by MediaWiki?
  • Another approach would be to develop a Git-style blame tool for Wikipedia. The standard edit history “blame” tool links Wikiblame and Blame – XTools are certainly useful, allowing text strings to be traced back to their corresponding “keyframe” edits, but don’t support Git-style blame, where the aim is to understand the provenance of each part of the page.

Searching https://www.google.com/search?q=github+wikipedia+blame found a few more useful references:

More generally, to find out what’s going on with Wikimedia community-driven tech initiatives, see https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Tech.

And in fact, as of May 2023, WWT is a fantastic resource, and seems to work properly on the vast majority of pages (it stops working 20% of the way through negative binomial distribution, but that’s a very long article). It would be nice if it worked on Wikipedia meta-pages (MOS:MATH, Template:Math). Extending it to wikis for other languages was one of the top-voted proposals in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey, and is currently being worked on, but wiki meta-pages aren’t covered by the current work.

Wikitext

  • {{val|e=5}} 105
  • kcal·mol<sup>−1</sup> kcal·mol−1 (uses the interpunct character, U+00B7, as well as the minus sign character, U+2212)
  • {{chem2|M<sup>•</sup>-}} M•− (uses the bullet point character, U+2022)
  • {{chem2|C60(CN)}}<span class="template-chem2-su"><span>•−</span><span>2</span></span> C60(CN)•−2
  • Simpler (though superscript located slightly higher than the chem2 template): {{chem2|C60(CN)}}{{su|b=2|p=•−}} C60(CN)•−
    2
  • &NoBreak; (zero-width version of &nbsp;), particularly useful to prevent wrapping before citations in tables

Chemical formula workarounds

{{chem2}} doesn’t support stacked multiple arrows to represent multi-step chemical transformations (e.g. Image:Übersicht Lossen-Abbau V1.svg). Some possible workarounds:

  • A ⇶ B (unicode and HTML tricks, seems to work the best)
  • A ⬱ B (similar output, but semantically messier)
  • A B (blurry, wrong number of arrows, not staggered)
  • A → → → B (legible but amateurish)

Special pages

  • Special:Diff Everyone knows about diffs. But did you know you can use the same tool to compare two different pages?
    • E.g. Special:Diff/1325544361/1110746965 compares the 17:58, 3 December 2025 revision of Perstraction to the latest (ignoring moves) 07:56, 17 September 2022 revision of my long-neglected userspace draft User:Preimage/Perstraction
  • Special:GoToComment Link directly to a talk page comment, e.g. Special:GoToComment/c-Zefr-20251031195700-Preimage-20251031181400
  • Special:TopicSubscriptions List of all talk page topics I have subscribed to, ordered by descending subscription date (swappable to ascending, but otherwise not sortable or searchable)
  • https://wikipedia.cheminfo.org Search/browse enwiki chemical articles by (sub)structure. Unfortunately there’s no way to combine this with category information. Also has a regularly-updated list of articles with SMILES errors.
  • d:User:Preimage Includes examples of chemical search queries using regular WD search, as well as SPARQL (much more powerful). Unfortunately the SPARQL Image Grid view only supports Commons images (I assume for security reasons), rather than being able to render SMILES on the fly using any of the CDKDepict websites that are available. Which makes it very annoying to use.
  • https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/#structure_search_type=substructure E.g. substructure search for diasterane derivatives.
    • PubChem Advanced Search allows you to draw substructures, which is nice. And PubChem pages usually have associated WD pages, even if we don’t yet have an enwiki article. Trick is to order the results by increasing complexity.