Explicit numbering is looking good, closing this investigation.

This is stalled on T179769. Minor wikis are not going to change magic links while any VisualEditor change can change them back to magic links. It should be an obvious non-starter.

Tbh I don’t think it is that much of a tragedy if some smaller wikis do not have those links for some time. Bot support is definitely needed, but these sorts of replacements are easy to do just with tools like AWB/JWB. So someone just needs to come up with a documentation page on how to do a switch using those sorts of tools. They do not require some very complicated bots, so if magic links do not work until someone runs a bot, that’s fine. It’s not like ISBN data will combust when magic links are not there.

For smaller of almost 1000 WMF wikis it is hard enough to migrate current pages towards {{#isbn:}} in all pages. While larger wikis do have bots, many small projects have just three or four regular article authors. A global support by bots in foreign wikis will be needed.

• When migrating, all 1000 wikis would need to maintain a template implementation of {{ISBN}} which might collide with existing implementations.
• A {{#isbn:}} is not local, but maintained globally and present everywhere.

In T145604#8631274, @Legoktm wrote:

So...why do we need a parser function? Back in 2016 you had proposed using a template (c.f. T148274#2788218), which I agree with and prefer.

I will advocate for ‘why’s for a parser function here:

1. does not increase template size limit as much as a template would (which is important in citation templates since many are still wikicode-based, not Lua based, so having a template that does [[Special:BookSources/{{{1}}}|ISBN {{{1}}}]] will be much more expensive the more citations you use);
2. does not add additional hundreds of thousands of rows to template links table on all big wikis;
3. seems correct at least for ISBN since it links to a special page anyway.

Change #1083394 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/core@master] docs: Mention wgParserEnableUserLanguage in release notes

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1083394

Change #1083395 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/core@REL1_43] docs: Mention wgParserEnableUserLanguage in release notes

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1083395

Change #1083395 had a related patch set uploaded (by XtexChooser; author: XtexChooser):

[mediawiki/core@REL1_43] Mention wgParserEnableUserLanguage in changelog

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1083395

Change #1083394 had a related patch set uploaded (by XtexChooser; author: XtexChooser):

[mediawiki/core@master] Mention wgParserEnableUserLanguage in changelog

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1083394

In T4085#10239021, @jhsoby wrote:

In T4085#10238970, @Quiddity wrote:

@tstarling Thanks! Is there a documentation page#section that it can link to?

I added an entry to https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News/2024/43

It should have been in https://mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Magic_words , but it seems there's nothing there yet.

In T4085#10238970, @Quiddity wrote:

@tstarling Thanks! Is there a documentation page#section that it can link to?

I added an entry to https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News/2024/43

@tstarling Thanks! Is there a documentation page#section that it can link to?

In T4085#10235030, @Quiddity wrote:

Please could someone suggest wording for this proposed Tech News entry, including what documentation it should link to. Thanks.

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2024-10-17T02:18:42Z] <tstarling@deploy2002> Synchronized wmf-config/InitialiseSettings.php: T4085 Enable {{USERLANGUAGE}} on Commons and Meta (duration: 06m 34s)

Change #1079680 merged by jenkins-bot:

[operations/mediawiki-config@master] Enable {{USERLANGUAGE}} on Commons and Meta

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1079680

Please could someone suggest wording for this proposed Tech News entry, including what documentation it should link to. Thanks.

Change #1079680 had a related patch set uploaded (by Tim Starling; author: Tim Starling):

[operations/mediawiki-config@master] Enable {{USERLANGUAGE}} on Commons and Meta

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1079680

Untagging design projects since this seems like a bug where some internal links are being marked as external.

Change #508295 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/core@master] parser: Add a new {{USERLANGUAGE}} magic word for use in wikitext

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/508295

Change #508295 restored by Tim Starling:

[mediawiki/core@master] Add a new {{USERLANGUAGE}} variable for use in wikitext

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/508295

The major issue on this kind of magic is that they are a nightmare on parsing.

• And hard to understand and teach and describe to authors as well.
• It is blowing up syntax description and make things even more complicated.

In T145604#9804569, @Jonesey95 wrote:

In T145604#9804125, @Rich_Farmbrough wrote:

Why, since the comments on the RFC were overwhelmingly against this proposal, was it implemented?

It was not, AFAIK. See the part of https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Future_of_magic_links#Proposal where it says "Update: this part was controversial, and will be re-evaluated based on the response to disabling by default."

Magic links were made enable-able on a per-wiki basis instead of a built-in feature of the core code that could not be turned off or on.

The English Wikipedia overwhelmingly decided to turn them off: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)&oldid=772133164#Future_of_magic_links

@Legoktm: German Wikipedia discontinued to use RFC magic in article space for almost a year now.

No response, assuming so.

Can this be considered resolved by T340201: Use custom language code to find i18n XSS issues