Wikinews:Water cooler/technical/archives/2018/December

Inherently unhelpful protection message
Consider the Main Page. The message that comes when an user tries to edit it (see left) is pretty generic (infact, it's the Mediawiki default).

That message won't even tell you whether it's semi-protected or fully protected.

Most other Wikimedia sites do it properly; see Wikibooks' main page. It also tells you why the page is protected, and what one can do about it.

Shouldn't the messages be changed (i.e, by importing it from elsewhere) so that they are more helpful? Leaderboard (talk) 16:37, 26 October 2018 (UTC)


 * Makes sense. Do you, perchance, know what the MediaWiki-space hooks are for this? (In the longer term, I hope to devise a mechanism so that when someone tries to edit a page that's protected, they'll get a semi-automated assistant and may be given an opportunity to "edit" the page thereby generating an editprotected request on the talk page that, in turn, offers a semi-automated assistant to a user with higher privs that they can use to examine the proposal, and accept reject or modify it.  This would be a very cool facility.  Not there yet.) --Pi zero (talk) 16:53, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
 * For Wikibooks, it's here. Hence Wikinews' equivalent is at here, and it's barren, as expected. Leaderboard (talk) 17:54, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Looking at the hard-to-read code on Wikibooks, and comparing it to the differently obscure code on Wikipedia, it seems clear to me this needs to be done carefully, to modularize it in a way that supports the sort of customizations we'll want for Wikinews. I'll try to focus on this and work it out promptly (though stuff on the review queue tends to take priority). --Pi zero (talk) 19:31, 26 October 2018 (UTC)
 * See my sandbox; I've copied the code from Wikibooks and made it more Wikinews-y (though I should note that the template is dynamic and doesn't show its full capabilities inside my sandbox). I've also copied a template (with its documentation) as part of it (you'll need to perform a history merge to it). Leaderboard (talk) 12:45, 27 October 2018 (UTC)
 * I have some thoughts on this, but am atm in the midst of one of those moments of being overwhelmed with immediate priorities. (Nowadays we don't use the traditional types of boxes at Wikinews; I favor xambox as a general-purpose device; and there's a very-long-standing low-level debate running here over whether it's okay to import "code"-type infrastructure from Wikipedia, as opposed to content... but really those are side issues.) --Pi zero (talk) 17:21, 27 October 2018 (UTC)
 * I've tried something. Further customizations should be primarily in template space. --Pi zero (talk) 08:01, 6 November 2018 (UTC)
 * It's a significant improvement, however, the same message is displayed whether the protected page is semi or full. Leaderboard (talk) 14:20, 10 December 2018 (UTC)
 * One Wikinewsie (off-wiki, as I recall) said it's worse, rather than better; but, as I recall &mdash;admittedly it's been a while since I did this&mdash; it's designed so that customized templates can be created for various specific situations, and then there's a default used in specific situations where no customized template has been provided. --Pi zero (talk) 14:29, 10 December 2018 (UTC)