Editing Help:CS1 errors (section)

=== Error and maintenance messages ===

<section begin="show_error_messages_help_text" /><section begin="show_all_messages_help_text" />By default, {{cs1}} and {{cs2}} <span style="color:#d33">error messages</span> are visible to all readers and <span style="color:#3a3">maintenance messages</span> are hidden from all readers.

To display <span style="color:#3a3">maintenance messages</span> in the rendered article, include the following text in your common [[Cascading Stylesheets|CSS]] page ([[Special:MyPage/common.css|common.css]]) or your specific skin's CSS page and ([[Special:MyPage/skin.css|skin.css]]).

(Note to new editors: those CSS pages are specific to you, and control your view of pages, by adding to your user account's [[CSS]] code. If you have not yet created such a page, then clicking one of the <code>.css</code> links above will yield a page that starts "Wikipedia does not have a [[user page]] with this exact name." Click the "Start the User:''username''/''filename'' page" link, paste the text below, save the page, follow the instructions at the bottom of the new page on bypassing your browser's cache, and finally, in order to see the previously hidden maintenance messages, refresh the page you were editing earlier.)

<syntaxhighlight lang="css">.mw-parser-output span.cs1-maint {display: inline;} /* display Citation Style 1 maintenance messages */</syntaxhighlight>

To display hidden-by-default <span style="color:#d33">error messages</span>:

<syntaxhighlight lang="css">.mw-parser-output span.cs1-hidden-error {display: inline;} /* display hidden Citation Style 1 error messages */</syntaxhighlight>

Even with this CSS installed, older pages in Wikipedia's cache may not have been updated to show these error messages even though the page is listed in one of the tracking categories. A [[WP:NULLEDIT|null edit]] will resolve that issue.

After (error and/maintenance) messages are displayed, it might still not be easy to find them in a large article with a lot of citations. Messages can then be found by searching (with Ctrl-F) for "(help)" or "cs1".

To hide normally-displayed <span style="color:#d33">error messages</span>:
<syntaxhighlight lang="css">.mw-parser-output span.cs1-visible-error {display: none;} /* hide Citation Style 1 error messages */</syntaxhighlight>

You can personalize the display of these messages (such as changing the color), but you will need to ask someone who knows CSS or at [[WP:VPT|the technical village pump]] if you do not understand how.

{{lang|la|Nota bene}}: these CSS rules are not obeyed by [[Wikipedia:Tools/Navigation popups|Navigation popups]]. They also do not hide script warning messages in the Preview box that begin with "This is only a preview; your changes have not yet been saved".<section end="show_all_messages_help_text" /><section end="show_error_messages_help_text" />