Module talk:Authority control

Wikisource self reference

What is the purpose of the Wikisource self reference? It seems unusual to be on an author page and to be produced with a link to the same author page. Generally such circular references have been avoided in the past. Seeing this on author pages. — billinghurst sDrewth 22:49, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Highlighted from my own talk page: @George Orwell III: "I've been toying with the idea of adding us to the list of authorities 'recognized' by our {{authority control}} template using the internal 'wgArticleID' number". While I cannot speak for GO3, it would make sense from a "downstream" user point of view (in a similar sense, on Wikidata, I was advised to add a separate "full text available at" property to edition data items in addition to the site link to Wikisource, because other, downstream users may ignore the links but still pick up the statements). - AdamBMorgan (talk) 23:20, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

IMSLP: Thomas Category:Moore, Thomas

Something weird is happening at Author:Thomas Moore (1779-1852), on IMSLP link. It's displayed as IMSLP: Thomas Category:Moore, Thomas and directs to [1] instead of Category:Moore, Thomas and [2]. Lugusto 03:31, 4 November 2015 (UTC)

When you added the entity, you did not setup fullurl encoding (which is especially needed when you have parameters with [semi]colons, commas, parenthesis, etc. in the Url). Seems to be working now; I just copied the string being used by another wiki based authority in the Module so it still might not be the "optimal" fix in all cases. -- George Orwell III (talk) 04:58, 4 November 2015 (UTC)

Remove Freebase from the authority list

Freebase has been shut down since 2016. Should we remove it from this Module? Vinhtantran (talk) 08:26, 29 December 2018 (UTC)

wider than 100% width

On author pages, the width of this template is bigger than the 100% width of the {{license}} template (somehow!) Can someone please set it so that the AC template is the same width as the license temp[late. Thanks. — billinghurst sDrewth 05:10, 30 November 2019 (UTC)

Remove "VIAF not on Wikisource" categorisation

Can we please remove "VIAF not on Wikisource" categorisation, we haven't stored that data locally for many years, and tracking that category is unimportant, comapred with where the data is stored. — billinghurst sDrewth 04:42, 7 March 2021 (UTC)

@Billinghurst: Use of tracking category removed (tracking cats are added by the template, not the module, btw). I've left the category page itself pending the discussion at WS:PD. --Xover (talk) 14:45, 8 March 2021 (UTC)

"deprecated" links

Some while ago, this template started "inventing" worldcat identities links (based on either lccn or viaf). Worldcat identites is gone now, and in its place is Worldcat Entities. Maybe this template could reflect that change?--RaboKarbakian (talk) 18:36, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

Explain, please

@Jan.Kamenicek: Can you please explain what "something" is broken? This blind reversion is not the solution. Is there an example of this "something" I can see and fix? Thank you, —Uzume (talk) 02:01, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

Hello. I am sorry, it is definitely my fault. Yesterday the module caused an appearance of some red error message at Author:Vítězslav Hálek. After I reverted the last changes, the message immediately disappeared. I wanted to write about it at the talk page, but unfortunately I realized I did not remember what exactly the message had contained, so I did not write anything because I was not able to write more than I am writing now. I apologize for being too hasty with the revert, which prevented me from noting down what exactly had been happening. I can see you have returned the changes back, but the message has not reappeared, which is quite strange... So let's leave it now as it is. --Jan Kameníček (talk) 18:02, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

@Jan.Kamenicek: Thank you for the reply. Part of the reason my "reversion" did not cause the issue to reoccur was because I did not revert everything. I just now re-enabled the use of "strict" on the module and noticed there was an issue with that author page and I rectified that at the same time while saving the re-enablement of "strict". —Uzume (talk) 22:53, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

@Jan.Kamenicek: In general, posting a message describing what you do remember is always better. For example, that you saw a red error message is useful information. If it mentioned "Lua" is useful information. Regardless of whether you can recall details of the message as such. Similarly, that you only saw it on Author:Vítězslav Hálek is useful information. Whether you checked other pages too and saw / didn't see it there is useful. Etc.

Also, in general, you should prefer to notify the contributor making the change, or another technical contributor, to reverting. For one thing, reverting may not in all cases be safe (it's not always obvious what changes are interrelated), and for another it makes it that much harder to figure out what the problem was and fixing it. For sufficiently severe problems, sure, we have to try reverting to minimize the disruption, but for most problems we can live with errors for a while as we figure out and fix the problem.

Incidentally, keep in mind that those who work in our technical areas are also just contributors like everyone else. When we revert their changes, even if it is a technical page like a template or Lua module, it comes across the same way to them as reverting other users in content namespaces. Whenever possible it is better to bring concerns up with the contributor first, and preferably let them self-revert if a revert is needed. Xover (talk) 07:29, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

@ShakespeareFan00: Can someone please explain what "something" you claim is broken? This type of blind reversion is not the answer. Thank you. —Uzume (talk) 15:42, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

I was seeing a complete absence of the authority control box on Author:Robert_Tucker_Abbott and a Lua error about id2 being undefined. It has not manifested again , following your variable scoping changes. ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 16:03, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

@ShakespeareFan00: That's a perfect example of what I wrote above. Authority control not showing on Author: pages is annoying, yes, but it is hardly a "revert everything immediately" kind of problem. Report the problem with as much relevant detail as you have, to the most relevant person or venue you can find, and let them figure out how to deal with it. Narrowly scoped problems (auth control is a secondary feature, and it was constrained to one namespace, and not even main) we can live with for a while before taking drastic measures like reverting. Breakage would need to be pretty serious and widespread before an immediate bulk revert would be justified, IMO. Xover (talk) 16:40, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

Oh, also, this problem is a good example for another reason: this error would most likely only have manifested on Author: namespace pages, so no amount of testing on a sandbox in the Template: namespace would have caught it. Due to MediaWiki not being itself a full development toolchain there are limits to what on-wiki technical contributors can achieve in terms of quality control and testing. Some things like this will slip through from time to time. Xover (talk) 16:46, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

@ShakespeareFan00: Thank you for the report. Yes, I managed to ascertain some potential issues there (without having seen any errors or reports thereof). I have been trying to scrub the module of its very bad programming practices of using undeclared variable accessed which Lua turns into valid global variable accesses (but this has huge maintenance issues in the future). For example, in this particular case multiple functions were using the global id2. Luckily this was functional without issue but that is not really guaranteed. To rectify this I was using the strict package to taint global variables and generate errors when they are used inappropriately. Unfortunately, once the global variables are tainted by strict it can have repercussions on any module in the entire require package chain. Such things are particularly difficult to debug before deployment but they are also very worthwhile to fix. —Uzume (talk) 18:40, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

@Uzume, @Jan.Kamenicek:Authority control is not working. On The Tower (Yeats) (newly created in the mainspace), I am getting a Wikisource value of 0. --EncycloPetey (talk) 01:15, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

Addendum: Once I created a Wikidata item, the WS ID populated. So I'm guessing the issue is that the template borks when a Wikidata item does not yet exist. --EncycloPetey (talk) 01:36, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

@EncycloPetey: The so-called "Wikisource ID" is just the article (wikipage) id reported by MediaWiki (the id you see if you ask for a permalink, or in the cur and oldid parameters on diff views). When you first create a page that id doesn't exist until after you have actually saved the page, and if you added a {{authority control}} it will already have been parsed and rendered to cache with the missing value at that point (i.e. shows "0"). But the next time that page is parsed the id will exist and the template will update. That happens on a real edit, a null edit, or a purge; and also happens periodically or triggered by certain software events. You can very by creating a test page that includes {{authority control}}, save it, observe it shows "0", null-edit or purge it, and observe it shows the relevant article id. Xover (talk) 05:48, 11 April 2024 (UTC)