Wikipedia talk:Lua

Lua (talk) Help To do Resources Reference manual

I've hit an impasse and need a little bit of help with a module and a template.

Hello! I am currently in the process of creating an interactive template map of the 2026 Lebanon war. I am essentially "zooming in" on the relevant area from Template:Israeli-Palestinian conflict detailed map; see the image I'm using.

I have created both a module at Module:Sandbox/296cherry and a template in the Template:Template sandbox, although since that page is periodically cleared, I'll just paste the code from that page:

Extended content

Baraashit

Beit Yahoun

Ayta al-Jabal

Haris, Lebanon

Haddatha

Al-Hanniye

Zibqin

Jebal al-Bottom

Kafra, Bint Jbeil

Srobbin

Taybeh

Aadshit al-Qusayr

UNIFIL 7-1

Al-Qantara

Srifa

Burj Qalaouiyah

Al-Ghandouriyah

Yohmor, Nabatieh

Arnoun

Zawtar al-Gharbiyah

Zawtar al-Sharqiyah

Deir Siryan

Hula

Ayta ash Shab

Blida

Yaroun

Aitaroun

Rmaich

Rmaich

Meiss Ej Jabal

Yarine

Kafr Kila

Shaqra

Bani Haiyyan

Muhajbib

Jebchit

Khiam

Al-Majidiyeh

Al-Majidiyeh

Dibbin

Dibbin

Tyre

Al-Qlailah

Bazouriyah

Rashidieh

Naqoura

Al-Bayada

Aalma ech Chaab

Aalma ech Chaab

Qana

Deir Aames

Tebnine

Nabatieh

Kunin

Bint Jbeil

At-Tiri

At-Tiri

Maroun al-Ras

Odaisseh

Marwahin

Ramyah

Nabi Youchaa

Markaba

Ad-Duhairah

Zalloutieh

Boustane

Iskandarounah

Chamaa

Tayr Harfa

Tayr Harfa

Chihine

Bayt Lif

Debel

Debel

Hanine

Ain Ebel

Ain Ebel

Shebaa

Kfarchouba

Talloussa

Salhaneh

Rachaf

Wazzani (Arab al-Louaizeh)

Yatar

Burj el-Shamali

Jwaya

Mansouri

Rab Thalathin

Ebel as-Saqi

Majdal Zoun

Majdal Zoun

Map

TLDR: I just need help actually transplanting the coded map from the module into the template as a visual, interactive map, like the one on Template:Israeli-Palestinian conflict detailed map. Any help would be greatly appreciated. 296cherry (talk) 04:48, 28 April 2026 (UTC)

I've put it in a format closer to expected. I can't say what else needs to be done. Izno (talk) 05:12, 28 April 2026 (UTC)

Thanks, I appreciate it :) 296cherry (talk) 06:20, 28 April 2026 (UTC)

To anyone who sees this, I still need help btw 296cherry (talk) 19:15, 28 April 2026 (UTC)

First, make your life easier by putting the {{#invoke:Location map/multi|load|Module:Sandbox/296cherry}} in your sandbox.

At Module:Location_map/multi line 210 that module should load Module:Sandbox/296cherry. At line 211 containerArgs gets the contents of the same-named table in your Module:Sandbox/296cherry (line 3).

At line 214, Module:Location_map/multi looks at index '[1]' in containerArgs. If you look at containerArgs in Module:Sandbox/296cherry, you will see that index '[1]' is not defined so string.gmatch() gets nil. You somehow must redefine containerArgs at line 3 in Module:Sandbox/296cherry so that line 214 will be happy.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 19:59, 28 April 2026 (UTC)

Okay, I finally got the map of Lebanon to show, but I still need it to be zoomed in (see File:South Lebanon Map.svg). I tried putting in coordinates for the edges of the image but it did nothing. Any ideas? 296cherry (talk) 21:56, 28 April 2026 (UTC)

Probably the right place to be asking these questions, now that I think about it, is Template talk:Location map. Izno (talk) 22:19, 28 April 2026 (UTC)

Collapsed the map.

Don't you have to have a data file? Summat like Module:Location map/data/Lebanon but for Module:Location map/data/South Lebanon and then name 'South Lebanon' in containerArgs?

—Trappist the monk (talk) 22:46, 28 April 2026 (UTC)

You're right, I've done just that. It works now! Thank you everyone who helped, my request has been answered. 296cherry (talk) 00:32, 29 April 2026 (UTC)

WD or interwiki question

hi all.

i think i'm reasonably proficient with scribuntu, but one area i never dabbled in is wikibase.

i did RTFM, but failed to find the answer, so asking here:

given a wiki language (say, 'en', 'fr' or 'de') and an article name in that language, i want to get the WD item id (aka QID) of this article.

phase II will be checking to see if there is an article in some _other_ language for same QID, aka "interwiki". bonus points for name of said interwiki in 2nd wiki (in my use case, this 2nd wiki will be the local one).

i believe i'll be able to overcome phase II myself (though i'll appreciate guidance there too), but i hit a wall in step 1: given lang and article name, get QID.

rationale: in hewiki (and prolly elsewhere), we often attach link to existing "foreign" article next to "red" internal links. when writing an article about X, the author may add a red link to Y which does not yet exist in local wiki but does exist in some other wiki. in those cases, the author sometimes adds a link to the "foreign" wikipedia after the redlink (think "poor man's internal link" for readers proficient in this other language). we have a bunch of "foreign link templates" to facilitate those foreign wiki links. now, a year or ten later, someone may finally write article Y locally. this may or may not paint the redlink blue (it can fail if the spelling of the redlink differs from the actual article name - transliteration is not a precise science). when the redlink was painted blue, we simply want to remove the "foreign" link, and when it wasn't, we want to correct the spelling _and_ remove the foreign link. to facilitate this, i'd like to add a maintenance cat for "foreign link template where local article exists". the idea is to teach those "foreign link templates" to add a maintenance category to help with this gnoming task.

TL;DR given a language and article name, find wikidata QID of this article in that language.

thanks in advance,

peace - קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 22:46, 11 May 2026 (UTC)

Does this not do what you want?

mw.wikibase.getEntityIdForTitle('Abraham Lincoln', 'enwiki') → Q91 → Abraham Lincoln (Q91)

mw.wikibase.getEntityIdForTitle('Abraham Lincoln', 'frwiki')

mw.wikibase.getEntityIdForTitle('Abraham Lincoln', 'dewiki')

and:

mw.wikibase.getEntity('Q91').sitelinks.hewiki → אברהם לינקולן and Q91

mw.wikibase.getEntityIdForTitle('אברהם לינקולן', 'hewiki') → Q91

—Trappist the monk (talk) 00:07, 12 May 2026 (UTC)

thank you so much!

i'm sure this appears somewhere in the doc and it's only my flawed reading comprehension skills which made me miss it...

peace. קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 14:56, 12 May 2026 (UTC)

@Trappist the monk:

FWIW, you may want to look at the module i knitted. it's here: he:יחידה:קישורים לוויקיפדיות זרות.

this adds maintenance cats to pages which contain a "foreign wiki link" template which points to either non-existent page on the other wiki (we want to fix it) or a page which already has local interwiki (we want to remove the foreign-wiki link).

there are 2 weak points, but i do not expect a solution: when the template points to a "foreign" article which is not yet linked to WD, from the module point of view it does not exist (rare but occasionally happens), and a much more prevalent case, when the template is used to link to a redirect on the other side WD does not recognize it, and says "no such thing". so in some cases, the "links to nothing" test pops false positives

with those limitations, we (hewiki community) still think this is very useful, and again, please accept my gratitude.

peace. קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 23:30, 13 May 2026 (UTC)

@Trappist the monk (and everyone else):

The module works, and the comrades in hewiki think it's useful. kudos! You have my full gratitude.

One fly in the ointment, though: when the name passed to getEntityIdForTitle() represents a redirect, it returns nil (WD is unaware of redirects - all it knows is the name of the "real" article), ,and we raise the "link to non-existent page on foreign wiki" flag

Is there a way to query WD in a way that "respects" redirects? If not, do you know if scribuntu's "new title" works for titles in other projects? I assume this will be considered "expensive" if it's possible at all, but it may be worth it anyway. any other idea how can i ask "is article X exist in wiki Y" which will return the qid and work for redirects?

Peace קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 17:04, 15 May 2026 (UTC)

If there is a way to do what you want, I don't know of it. As I understand it, except for the specific cases of wikidata and commons, Scribunto has access only to the project where the module is running. So a module running here cannot see anything at he.wiki so cannot learn that the target is a redirect. You might ask at wikidata to see if there is a way to follow redirects to their canonical titles. I guess I'd be surprised ...

—Trappist the monk (talk) 19:12, 15 May 2026 (UTC)

Links can be IDd as redirects via badge on Wikidata, but this is a manual process, so will be prone to inaccuracy. I don't know if those are discoverable in the JSON. Izno (talk) 20:06, 15 May 2026 (UTC)

@קיפודנחש doesn't Template:Interlanguage link do what you are looking for? It also has the category Category:Interlanguage link template existing link. Gonnym (talk) 16:58, 1 July 2026 (UTC)

thanks!

on first glance, it does not.

if i understand correctly, the maintenance category you linked to is based on testing the argument to the template (for local article). we already have something similar on hewiki, and as it turns out, it's very brittle: the editor who added the template may have guessed correctly the local article name, but this is far from guaranteed - we found many uses where local article (i.e., local interwiki of the "foreign" article) exists, but the category was not added because the template spelled a different name, and some cases where a local article was written, but it's not what was meant, and the "correct" one (i.e., matching the the linked foreign article) either doesn't exist, or differs from the one fed to the template.

FWIW, using the very helpful tip i got here (thanks again, @Trappist the monk!), i built a module on hewiki - He:Module:קישורים לוויקיפדיות זרות (easy read, 150 lines), and we added it to all templates of "ill" ilk (a generic one similar to {{ill}}, and a bunch of specific ones to link to specific wikis, e.g. "אנ" (= en) to link to enwiki and similar templates for links to dewiki, eswiki, ruwiki, frwiki and dozens more).

this module tests for 3 types of common errors:

• link to non-existent page on foreign wiki.
• link to article where local one exists (similar to the maintenance cat. you linked to)
• link to disambiguation article (this is almost always a mistake)

it is solely based on WD, so there may be glitches: for instance, it can happen that the page exists, but has no WD item, and there are both false positive and false negative in identifying disambiguations. to overcome this, we recognize optional "pardon" parameters saying "in this case it's not an error" (one such param for each of the error conditions).

this module populated 3 maint. categories with many thousands of articles, and busy wikignomes have corrected most of them already, and i expect these cats will empty soon.

the module is here: He:Module:קישורים לוויקיפדיות זרות - easy read, 150 lines.

the categories and error message names are in hebrew (sorry), but i tried to put all the language-dependent stuff in constants at the top so it can be (relatively) easily be used by other wikis.

(

note: the "complain()" func uses a different module, which does something similar to Module:Check for unknown parameters, except "ours" is based on the template's templatedata, and does much more thorough work (e.g., checks for missing "required" params and more. you may want to gleam he:Module:ParamValidator. actual code is some 260 lines). this module not only adds maint. categories, it also provides a convenient way for editors to pinpoint the rebellious template in the page, to assist gnomes in fixing them, and the new "ill sanitizer" module piggybacks on this method.

)

thanks again, everyone.

peace. קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 18:07, 1 July 2026 (UTC)

Edit request for consideration

Made an edit request at MediaWiki talk:Scribunto-common-error-category to split up that category a bit more to create Category:Articles with script errors so we can isolate just articles and clean those up. Will always be sandboxes and testcases with errors so would be helpful to be able to isolate the article errors. Zackmann (^{Talk to me}/_{What I been doing}) 16:54, 1 July 2026 (UTC)

FWIW, CategoryTree can be used to discriminate against category members based on namespace, and it's possible to use it on the category page.

following will show the members in article space only (i saw a link to petscan on the cat page, but did not see one using categorytree):

{{#categorytree:Category:Pages with script errors|namespaces=0|depth=0}}

generates:

Pages with script errors

(notice: the link will open the whole category, the little triangle on the left will show those in mainspace. as of now, there are none, so to demonstrate it actually works, i'll add the same for portal:

Pages with script errors

as to the request itself: i think you were misguided when told to come here. this is not a scribuntu issue - you are asking to edit a "system message" in mediawiki space, and sysop or interface admin permission is required. i am not an enwiki native so i may misdirect you even further, but i'd try WP:ANI or WP:IAN.

peace. קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 22:30, 1 July 2026 (UTC)

It's the tracking category for lua errors, so is relevant to this page. I think it was just for information rather than asking for help with the edit request — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 07:41, 2 July 2026 (UTC)

it's an edit request.

since it's for for a system message. I tried to point to the appropriate place for this request.

again, i'm not an enwiki native, so if there's a better place, please let OP know.

peace. קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 12:40, 2 July 2026 (UTC)

ooops - sorry. did not realize @MSGJ is an admin (or interface admin?) who can (and did) do the deed...

peace. קיפודנחש (aka kipod) (talk) 12:44, 2 July 2026 (UTC)