Wikipedia: Sandbox | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia: Sandbox

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93 pointszaptrem37 comments

I was learning about Wikipedia recently and thought it was interesting there was a global, public page specifically for writing random stuff to learn how to use their editor. I assumed there would be something like this on a per-user, invisible to the public level, but not a global level like this page.

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It's interesting to think about how complex the wikipedia text is compared to something like github flavored markdown or even standard html tables (although I guess it eventually renders into standard html so it's not more complex than the latter when all other html elements are considered in addition to <table>)

For example the swatch internet time infobox is dynamically updated

{{short description|Alternate time system by watch maker Swatch}} {{Infobox | image = [[File:Swatch beat Logo.svg|200px|alt=Logo of Swatch Internet Time]] | caption = Logo of Swatch Internet Time | title = Time{{efn|at page generation }} {{purge|(update to view correct time)}} | label1 = 24-hour time (UTC) | data1 = {{nowrap|{{#time:H:i:s}}}} | label2 = 24-hour time (CET) | data2 = {{Time|CET|dst=no|df-cust=H:i:s|hide-refresh=yes}} | label3 = .beat time (BMT) | data3 = {{nowrap|@{{#expr: floor( {{#expr:{{#expr:{{#expr:{{#time:H|now + 1 hour}}3600}}+{{#expr:{{#time:i}}60}}+{{#time:s}}}}/86.4}} )}}}} }}

I’ve spent countless hours at employers fixing Xwiki syntax errors mixed with HTML. The parsing engine must be complex

That's putting it lightly, since Mediawiki templates are Turing-complete.

I'm not up to speed on my parsers anymore, but I believe Parsoid remains the most complete implementation, while mwlib is a reasonable compromise.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Alternative_parsers#Known_imp...

I always found it ironic that the table syntax is designed to resemble ascii-art type tables, and then literally nobody writes it in a way that looks like an ascii art table.

Yeah, because it’s a PITA to align everything by hand.

But the spaces around | make it easier to read, than, say, CSV.

Honestly it continually surprises me how people forget about TSV

It's the perfect format, more or less! CSV, but no difficulty around commas, and the only major risk being an editor that converts tabs to spaces

I agree it's great, but that risk is so major that I stopped using it. "There's a 50% chance that your editor will invisibly corrupt the data you enter, and another 30% chance to corrupt the entire file" is just not usable...

Especially in Zed where the only way to switch hard tabs is buried in the settings menu, and impossible to change per buffer.

You'd think more editors would be smart enough to recognize that it's a TSV file and therefore should preserve the tabs, in much the same way that you'd think editors would be smart enough to recognize that something's a Makefile and therefore should preserve the tabs.

It gets tricky when you have a TSV inside Markdown. I don’t think I’ve ever seen tabs used for indentation in Markdown in the wild, though it probably does work.

We could, however, make the Tab key insert spaces if the cursor is in the beginning of a line, and a literal \t if it’s in the middle. This way, you can write a TSV table pretty much anywhere you want.

Lack of control over your editor's behaviour shouldn't be acceptable on this level. Just like making tabs/spaces visible, control like this ahould be a basic feature of every editor.

> Especially in Zed where the only way to switch hard tabs is buried in the settings menu, and impossible to change per buffer.

Even vim lets you set that per-buffer so that's more of an editor problem than anything else, lmao

> Yeah, because it’s a PITA to align everything by hand.

For now. I get the feeling we'll have tooling everywhere that does this soon.

I was recently tab-completing a Markdown table and whatever autocomplete model I had just fixed the table up without any intervention.

Yeah, it’s not terribly hard to do that even without AI (Prettier can do it, for example). But there’s a lot of places where the tooling just isn’t available. Then again, it’s probably not a big deal if your GitHub comment markup isn’t perfect.

I think the root of the problem is, almost everything else you use in Markdown is easy to do by hand. There’s just no good syntax for tables like this, I guess.

Often enough I just make a regular html table, the 'pandoc -f html -t mediawiki' or 'pandoc -f html -t markdown' as the case may be.

It's basically wordpress era PHP templating.

Day 1: we’ll adopt a simple markup language because our users are not programmers

Day 2: our users have complicated needs so we’ll basically reinvent Lisp expressions, but worse.

Day N: whatever this markup language is

——

I’ve seen this happen so many times it’s not even funny anymore. Well, at least it’s not YAML.

> so we’ll basically reinvent Lisp expressions, but worse

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule

Ironically it wasn't even intentional. Wikipedia users discovered a way to create an if statement by themselves, originally there was no conditionals.

Anyways, now a days you can use lua, so most of the wikisyntax is just glue code calling a lua program

I just went back to check whether I have a sandbox on Wikipedia. Turns out I do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Susam_Pal/sandbox

I am not a regular contributor to Wikipedia but the little time I have spent contributing there has exposed me to its very elaborate culture, with barnstars being one artefact of that culture, alongside policy acronyms everyone seems to know by heart, WikiProjects organised around every imaginable topic, userboxes that are little badges that say something about you, etc.

By the way, I added a few userboxes for the Logo programming language, in case there are any Wikipedians out here who happen to love Logo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:User_logo

Tried to edit on my mobile (T-Mobile - US) and got this:

  Your IP address has been blocked     from editing Wikipedia.

  Blocked by Xaosflux

  Block will expire in 7 months

Curiosity led me to Xaosflux's Wikipedia page where I see they have been active since 2005 with over 85k edits!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Xaosflux

I've had the desire to contribute so many times, but each time I was blocked. I don't think Wikipedia accurately measures how much contribution they lose because of the hostile treatment of new editors and what I believe are poorly implemented editing policies. Their policies likely haven't been revised since a decade or more, they should do a survey about it.

in most cases you should be able to create an account and edit even if your IP address or range is blocked

I'm not trying to defend Wikipedia at all costs, but you should also think about how much spam and trolling would happen on their platform if they didn't have these annoying blocks for non-registered users.

I run a pretty simple SaaS with a free tier and the amount of spam that I have to manage is high; I don't want to even imagine how difficult it must be to run a website where anybody can edit pretty much anything.

Unfortunately large IP groups like mobile phones often need to be blocked because it’s the only possible way to constraint anonymous spammers.

Typically this just means you have to create an account.

Mobile ips are often blocked because of the sheer amount of spam and they switch so much that its difficult to block individual offenders.

They block logged in users too.

Sometimes yes, but usually not at a mass range level except in extreme circumstances.

The block in this case appears to be this one: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:GlobalBlockList?targ...

In that specific case, logged in users are still allowed, however you cannot create new accounts when visiting from that range, so you have to already have an account, or go somewhere else to create one.

The error message blocked users get should link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Advice_to_T-Mobile_I... with more info on how to still edit.

I can never edit Wikipedia when I have private relay enabled unfortunately :(

Well yes, the entire point of a private relay is to make it impossible for websites to be able to distinguish between you and a spammer.

There are exceptions to this policy, but you generally need to have a really good pre-existing reputation to qualify https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IP_block_exemption

I mean, I am logged in, I feel like that is pretty strong signal of who I am

When anyone can create a large number of sleeper accounts, it isn't really. Its not like you provided ID when you made your account. So the compromise is that if you accured enough reputation you can ask for an exception.

There are both, every user has their own sandbox. But this one is there to encourage first time visitors and the uninitiated to make changes , so they know that anyone can contribute uninhibited.

Though, just to be clear, the per-user ones are also public. They're just a convention where if you make a subpage of your user page and call it "Sandbox", nobody is going to complain about the encyclopedic value of your edits.

True , though I just discovered category scans still hit your user sandbox. Kind of silly

If you really want something private, there is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ExpandTemplates (or of course just hit preview and dont save)

Pretty much all wikis would have a "Sandbox" page for trying out that particular wiki's individual syntax and features.

I'd wager that most wikis use the MediaWiki software, which is what Wikipedia runs on.

One particular thing that comes to mind though, is that Fossil (https://fossil-scm.org/) has a private local-only sandbox: https://fossil-scm.org/home/wikiedit?name=Sandbox. It saves to your browser's persistent storage, but never on the server.

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