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Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 29

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Village pump (technical) archive  

This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (technical). Please do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to revive any of these discussions, either start a new thread or use the talk page associated with that topic.

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class="sortable wikitable"

class="sortable wikitable" is part of a template which allows wikiusers to sort the table by clicking a button. Here is an example.

  1. Where can I find information on how to create class="sortable wikitable" on my own wiki? I can't even find the page where the coding for class="sortable wikitable" is.
  2. Is there a list of all template classes?
  3. How would I go about adding class="sortable wikitable" to my wiki? Template:navbar, which allows wikiusers to collapse templates, seems incredibly complex. Trav (talk) 10:03, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
Nevermind: Help:Sorting Trav (talk) 10:07, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

Category totals

Category:Living people: "The following 200 pages are in this category, out of 262,520 total." - thank-you, thank-you, to whoever made the change to display the total number of articles in a category! That is wonderful for large categories. Carcharoth (talk) 10:10, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

Do we have a list somewhere of the biggest categories? And this feature doesn't seem to work for Category:All non-free media, which says "The following 200 pages are in this category, out of 506 total." - which is just wrong. There are far more than 506 images in that category. Carcharoth (talk) 11:05, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
Yes I noticed that the last time I was there. The category totals are (IIRC) a new field in one or other database table, which are being populated by a maintenance script; I guess it just hasn't finished yet. I know there are still categories which don't display the numbers, presumably because the script hasn't counted them yet. Happy‑melon 11:26, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
Special:MostLinkedCategories ? — Werdna talk 11:30, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
That's it! One of the more fascinating lists. Add the "listas parameter" categories together, and you get the total for WPBiography (508,493 articles). Though not all people (lots of music groups, due to the history of how that template was set up and used). The discrepancy between WPBiography labelled articles on living people (227,943) and Living people (262,055) is interesting. Possibly another 35,000 articles that could get WPBiography put on them (maybe just before they get deleted as vanity articles, but still). All non-free media is 281,986, which is a figure that should be tracked over time. Is there a way to get the population of a category over time to be recorded in the database, rather than having bots record the numbers? Carcharoth (talk) 11:46, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
Cool! #3 and #15 depress me greatly :'(. As you say, that discrepancy is interesting. Clearly there's a tagging mismatch to be rectified there - surely there aren't 35,000 articles with {{db-a7}} tags on them :D Happy‑melon 12:09, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
Many of those biography articles are start or stubs (in case the #s change on that list - those are the #15 and #3 you were referring to) because there is not much information about them, and they got automatically (or semi-automatically) assessed that way by the various assessment drives. Some might actually be OK articles, but the assessors rarely felt knowledgeable enough to assess them as B-class. #12 - all articles lacking sources (118,806) is worse, though. Carcharoth (talk) 12:21, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

Another intersting category is those articles that are only in living people (or the years of birth and death categories). Many of those are, shall we say, borderline. See Dana C. Bradford - McCarthy Group, LLC for one example found at random. That need renaming for a start. Carcharoth (talk) 12:25, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

It looks like the SPA that maintains that and a few other pages hasn't been around for awhile to do the renaming, so those may need prod tags. -Steve Sanbeg (talk) 16:22, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

As for why some of the category totals are wrong at the moment, the pages in the categories will take some time for the server to count. The category totals will be automatically updated once the new category table has finished being populated; I'm not sure whether it's populated yet at the moment, but once it is all the totals should be correct (and until then some of the totals will be wrong). --ais523 14:06, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Article Title - Change Case

Howdy! I just posted my first article, and I have a stupid question. How do I change the title "Ann barnes" to "Ann Barnes"? Thanks! Rob Craig (talk) 13:20, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_barnes

There's a tab above the article that says "move". --Eleassar my talk 13:26, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
But that tag only appears four days after you have registered your account. However, another user has already moved the page for you. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:43, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
The OP's account was created in '06. Algebraist 18:18, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

Flash

I think Wikipedia would benefit from the ability to display flash in articles. We could use it to create educational graphics. Does MediaWiki have the ability to use it?--Awareshiftjk (talk) 04:46, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

There is a MediaWiki Flash extension, but it is not enabled at en.wikipedia. I'm not sure why not, but I'd guess either security or interoperability considerations. -- Rick Block (talk) 04:55, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
Wikimedia only uses open source software, Flash is proprietary. Mr.Z-man 04:59, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
In security terms, it'd be like enabling raw HTML. -- Tim Starling (talk) 05:58, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
Well that puts paid to that one then :D Happy‑melon 10:16, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Extra <p> generated

  • I observe a bunching problem in First Battle of Beleriand, probably caused by an Infobox immediately followed by a Campaignbox.
  • I notice the problem is not present in the similar page Dagor Bragollach.
  • Inspection shows that the latter puts the two boxes in a right-floating table.
  • I introduce "identical" (cross my heart) code into the first page. It clears up the bunching. BUT ...
  • An extra <p><br /></p> is generated in the single cell of the containing table, right before the Infobox, which pushes the Infobox down a line in the cell.

What I want to know is: what's generating the extra paragraph? The markup looks identical. Oh, and of course: how do I get rid of it? Elphion (talk) 06:02, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

I fixed it by removing the newlines between </tr> and <tr>, they give excess newlines before the table.--Patrick (talk) 14:15, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
Many thanks! (At this stage I'm not going to try editing templates!) I'm puzzled though why the space didn't show up in the second article, which was using the same table + templates construction. Elphion (talk) 15:18, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
It seems that three consecutive newlines in the table code, outside tr-tags, give excess space at the top. So it depended on which parameters of Template:Infobox Me battle are defined.--Patrick (talk) 17:14, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

What links here — images using the ":" syntax ?

Is it possible to know when a page links to an image using the syntax [[:Image:Three checks chess.png]] ? I choose this particular example, because I knew it was linked from a user page, but could not find it using the What links here feature. In the meantime, I found the user page, but would still be interested in having a way to find such links in the feature. Any help ? Schutz (talk) 07:48, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

So I see that the current page now appears in the list of pages linking to the image; is there any reason why the user page does not ? Have I missed something simple ? Schutz (talk) 07:50, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
I think the purpose of the extra leading colon is precisely to prevent whatlinkshere from cataloging the reference. As far as I know, it has no other purpose. To find these, some sort of Google expression ought to be possible, perhaps: site:en.wikipedia.org Image:Three_checks_chess.png. —EncMstr 07:56, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
Both have the leading colon — which, as far as I know, means "display a link to the image rather than the imag itself". I have just seen a difference, though: the user page uses underscores instead of spaces: [[:Image:Three_checks_chess.png]], so this must be the reason: the link works, but not the backlinks. I don't know if there is a way around it ? Schutz (talk) 08:05, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
I made a dummy edit to the user page, now it appears in whatlinkshere. I don't know why there was this error in the first place, but I suppose it did not fix itself because the page has not been edited for years. The underscores for spaces do not seem to matter.--Patrick (talk) 12:15, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
It was a bug then. Many thanks for fixing it (at least in this case). Cheers, Schutz (talk) 12:55, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Problems with tab header

I have used the codes on Wikipedia:Tutorial/TabsHeader to create Wikipedia:WikiProject Bangladesh/Deshipidian tabs. But, I can't get the edit tag to show along with headers on the pages I used it in. You see, on Wikipedia you get little "edit tags" ([edit]) on the right hand side of every header and sub-header. It makes editing much easier, especially for longer pages. But, when I use the tab codes, that [edit] tag vanishes.

How can I keep the sections editable, without opening the whole page for edit (like ordinary Wikipedia pages)? Wikipedia:Tutorial/TabsTopWithEdit supposedly helps to have that. But, I couldn't figure out a way to use it. It could be a bug in the codes. I don't know who created the codes and can't get directly to that person. Would you take a look at the problem? Aditya(talk • contribs) 11:34, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

I fixed the problem; you needed to subst the PageTabs template and replace the {{PageTabsTop}} subtemplate with {{Wikipedia:Tutorial/TabsTopWithEdit}}, which doesn't include the magic word __NOEDITSECTION__, which was what was causing the problem. I also cleaned up the subst'ed code to remove unnecessary ParserFunctions (the {{#if:}} and {{#ifeq:}} stuff). Hope that helps, Nihiltres{t.l} 13:20, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
Thanks. This is really what makes Wikipedia so great. Thanks, really. Aditya(talk • contribs) 14:50, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Parser Functions in Monobook.css

Is it possible to use parser functions in Monobook.css? Do you need to do anything special to use them? And is it possible to change the colour of just one tab at the top of a page? If so, the code would be very useful :P —Preceding unsigned comment added by Tiddly Tom (talk • contribs) 12:55, March 28, 2008 (UTC)

Indeed, it is possible to change the colour of individual tabs at the top of the page; each is specified by a unique CSS id beginning with ca-. For example, the edit tab's CSS ID is ca-edit. I use Safari 3; if you use that, or, I hear, some versions of Firefox, you can use an element inspector to find the id of the tab. You also can handle for whether the tab is selected or not; selected tabs have the class selected which overrides border colour (and more, if you specify it) for those tabs as long as it's put in the right spot in the cascade. Nihiltres{t.l} 13:33, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Navigation popups

Many of you know Navigation popups. It seems Lupin is not so active anymore for the past year, and since popups was still using query.php and I wanted to learn about the new api, I figured it would be a nice and useful experiment to convert the tool to use the new api.php. User:TheDJ/apipopups.js is a direct conversion that adds a new mode (autoenabled) that "should" replace every single query.php call with an equivalent api.php call. No more no less. The goal was to prepare the tool for the time in which query.php might be disabled. So it is not a rewrite, and it adds or removes almost no functionality that wasn't there before. The only place that significantly differs atm, is detection of images that clash with commons images, and previewing the pages of images that are on commons (there is a significant change in the API that makes converting this almost impossible without rewriting key parts of popups). So I'm looking for some people who are already using popups and want to check this version of popups for any unsuspected significant differences. If you have tested the api.php version, then please drop me a line on User_talk:TheDJ/apipopups.js I'm interested in both "it works exactly like I expected" and "This preview is totally different now" type of comments. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:12, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Does there exist the technical ability to revise edit summary spam?

This user account, Eadgils (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log),
apparently a sockpuppet, performed many moves of articles with edit summaries which amount to comment/link spam. Is there any technical ability to purge items like this? (See the contributions of the blocked account). -- Yellowdesk (talk) 14:23, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

There is oversight, but that is only used in cases where someone has been endangered(such as the release of personal information) or seriously libeled. (1 == 2)Until 14:38, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
Thank you. That's good to kow, and also (unfortunately) good to know that edit summary link-spam is here to stay. -- Yellowdesk (talk) 16:14, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
At least external links don't work in edit summaries, so the links aren't actually "going" anywhere :D Happy‑melon 18:32, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
And search engines can't access the text in edit summaries, so putting linkspam URLs in edit summaries is really quite pointless.-- John Broughton (♫♫) 23:26, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Unified account?

I just now saw for the first time about the idea of having a unified global account for all Wikimedia projects. My username is Old English, so I doubt that there's anyone else using it on any Wikimedia projects, but I have similarly-named accounts on the Commons and on the German Wikipedia. If I decided to unify accounts, how would those two accounts be affected? Nyttend (talk) 16:46, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Before unifying your accounts you should check that they have either the same password or same e-mail address. If that's the case they will be merged. Before merging you will be shown a list of accounts to be merged and accounts with the same name that won't be merged. See m:Unified login for more information. The only accounts with username Nyttend are indeed the three you mentioned. You can check this with SUL Util. --Erwin85 (talk) 18:46, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
Note that if your accounts don't have the same passwords yet, that's ok! You'll just have to log into them again to confirm. --brion (talk) 21:03, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
So how does one get a unified account? DuncanHill (talk) 23:32, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
Unless one is an admin, one waits. Algebraist 23:36, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Henry Somerset, 2nd earl of Worcester

Can somebody explain why this whole article is inside the person box? Corvus cornixtalk 23:01, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Some bizarreness to do with the way the children were formatted, fixed now by [1]. DuncanHill (talk) 23:20, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
How weird. Thank you. Corvus cornixtalk 23:39, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Which translation tag, please?

Most of the key content of Moyshe Altman needs translating. Is there a suitable tag, please? BlueValour (talk) 23:25, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Category:Wikipedia articles needing translation has a template, as well as links to similar categories with their own templates. You should find what you want with one of those templates. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 23:38, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
Ah, yes, thanks that's helpful. BlueValour (talk) 23:58, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Coordinates are overwriting the top line

When I look at city articles today, the "Coordinates" are overwriting the gray line beneath the article title. This is in Firefox 2.0.0.13 (the latest), on Windows XP. Screenshot follows. Tempshill (talk) 19:35, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

 

I'm not sure if it is related, but I noticed the coordinate problem as well as the fact that the little image of a person next to "login/create account" no longer appears next to my username when logged in. The coordinates are not overlapping for me anymore, but the little image of the globe is. See Image:AUNoman.jpg for what I'm talking about. - auburnpilot talk 20:08, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
There is an ongoing discussion on whether that little man is racially biased, though as far as I know, no one has attempted to remove it, and it remains visible for me. Dragons flight (talk) 20:27, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
Racially biased? That's quite possibly the most ridiculous thing I've heard in my entire time at Wikipedia. It's no longer appearing for me, as you'll see in the above linked image, but I hope it comes back. Thanks for the link. - auburnpilot talk 20:34, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
The image was removed in common.css for a few hours, and sebsequently restored. — Edokter • Talk • 20:45, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
Although I've always (i.e. at the few times I've actually noticed it) found this little icon rather useless, I wouldn't want it removed because of silly political correctness.
That said, I should add that it would need to be darker to match with the Miami article. Its tan leaves a lot to be desired. :-D Waltham, The Duke of 03:45, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
I wouldn't want it removed because of silly political correctness. - How 'bout we remove it because (a) it's useless and (b) having useless stuff is confusing to new editors and (c) anything that simplifies Wikipedia for new editors without removing any functionality is a good thing. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 00:54, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
This is a completely different thing, Mr Broughton. Although I cannot really believe that a small piece of ceiling decoration can in any way confuse editors, I would not object to its removal on such grounds (I'm not that attached to it, anyway). Waltham, The Duke of 14:28, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Template inclusion question

Someone recently added {{db-redirtypo}} to the Wikipedia:Template messages/Deletion. There are what, 50 or so other templates on the page, but for some reason *this* one has included its categories. So now the page shows up in the Category:Candidates for speedy deletion, though it didn't before. Help? -- SatyrTN (talk / contribs) 00:48, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Why do you say that it didn't show up in that category before? Looking at (for example) the 10 November 2007 version, I see that same category. And when I looked at a different template than the one you mention, also listed on the template messages page, what I saw looked exactly the same with regards to includes/noincludes. (In short, I'm not convinced you've identified a problem; I doubt that any admin is going to blindly delete this page just because it's in a CSD category.) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 15:10, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Broken gadget

A clock in the personal toolbar that shows the current time in UTC and also provides a link to purge the current page gadget generates a malformed purge link - it doesn't URL-encode & character and probably something else. Can someone fix that? MaxSem(Han shot first!) 05:48, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Any admin can fix this. At the top of the file it says 
title=' + wgPageName + '&action
change this to 
title=' + encodeURIComponent(wgPageName) + '&action
--TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:59, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
The file in question would be MediaWiki:Gadget-UTCLiveClock.js of course. If someone with admin privs would be so kind... --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:19, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
I've corrected it as you suggested, but this change doesn't seem to help. MaxSem(Han shot first!) 14:32, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
It is likely that your browser has cached the script and that you need to clear your browser cache. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:59, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
Strange, I cleared Opera's cache manually, anf first it did'nt help (???), but now everything's OK. Thank you. MaxSem(Han shot first!) 15:02, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Changing a large quantity of links

I was just browsing, and found that the page Dosed, had two different articles on it, one about a band, one about a song. I thought this was extremely confusing, so moved the part about the song to Dosed (song). I then looked at what links here on the original page so I could change all the links, and then realised how many there were. Is there a quick way to change all of those links? Otherwise, maybe I should have relocated the article about the band instead, with less links to it? Thanks for your help, Alex9788 (talk) 11:59, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

AutoWikiBrowser can semi-automate the process, however, I don't think you quality to use it yet (less than 500 mainspace edits). The band should likely have the article over the song, so right now your best option is to either find someone that knows the band and that has AWB access that can do this, or just start working through this yourself (firefox and "open in new tab" will help.) --MASEM 12:31, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
The article on band is speediable under A7 in its present state. MaxSem(Han shot first!) 13:00, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
Yep, it was added recently by an anon, I've simply reverted it to last good version that described the song. Problem solved. MaxSem(Han shot first!) 13:04, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for sorting that out, Alex9788 (talk) 17:24, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Maybe I'm crazy...

...but I can't seem to figure out why Sylpheed is in Category:Requested moves. The category isn't linked to from the article itself or from any transcluded template I can find. I've tried purge the cache and bypassing my cache, but it's still there. Is my computer being crazy or is it the article? Thanks. JPG-GR (talk) 19:00, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Hmm... gone now, finally. JPG-GR (talk) 19:11, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
Categories always seem to lag a few minutes behind in my experience. — Edokter • Talk • 19:16, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
Agreed, but this one had been in there for the better part of the week. JPG-GR (talk) 19:32, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
Purging is not enough for some situations where an article is categorized because of former content of a transcluded page. Purging updates the purged page but not necessarily the category pages it appears in. An edit may be required to do that. It can be a null edit which doesn't show up in the page history. Maybe somebody made a null edit on Sylpheed after seeing your post. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:48, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

User merge

Hello, I have forgotten the password of my original username (SpeedKing) so I made this user (SpeedKing1980). Is there any way to merge these two accounts? --SpeedKing (talk) 15:16, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

No. I doubt anyone would mind if you redirected your user and talk pages, though. Algebraist 18:17, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
You can get an USURP, to get your old account back, if your edits are not GFDL significant. Soxred93 | talk bot 18:23, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
The issue is whether you can prove that you are indeed the person who owned the original account. That can easily be done if you have enabled email on the old account, but presumably you didn't (otherwise a temporary password could be mailed to you). So then the only way to prove identity is via matching IP addresses; I suspect that running a checkuser to find out wouldn't be approved. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 00:57, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
My IP has changed since then but if there would be a possibility to check my original IP (from when I registered), there is a possibility they could match (if the change didn't happen earlier). --SpeedKing (talk) 18:04, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

Suggested edits to Wikimedia press release

This isn't only about English Wikipedia, but I can't log in to Wikimedia Foundation. I suggest that someone who can log in there consider making the following suggested changes.

In the press release about the 10 millionth article, it says "worldby Alexa". It needs a space inserted between "world" and "by".

Perhaps more serious: The press release gives a link to a list of statistics, but due to technical difficulties gives an outdated number of articles for English Wikipedia: "(1418145) en English (!!Oct 2006!!)" Yet we have more up-to-date information right on our Main Page: "2,310,997 articles in English". If the automated statistics from the database dump can't give that information, then surely it should be added by hand, either to the press release itself or in the header of the file of statistics if it can't be added to the actual table for some reason; it should at least state that English Wikipedia has "over 2 million articles".

Another suggested edit to the press release: "The goal of the Wikipedia" I would delete the second "the". --Coppertwig (talk) 13:04, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

Your link on list is to meta:List of Wikipedias which has updated counts. The press release also has the link Detailed Wikimedia statistics, a page where the first link is Wikipedias which redirects to http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm where the mentioned "(1418145) en English (!!Oct 2006!!)" is. [2] shows that meta:List of Wikipedias passed that in Oct 2006. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:50, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
Sorry -- I gave the wrong link. Oh, there are two links that sound as if they'll give the numbers. I still think it would help if the header for the Wikipedias page of the "detailed Wikimedia statistics" would mention at least "over 2 million" for English Wikipedia, (or a particular number associated with a particular recent date), but I guess it may not be as urgent as I thought. --Coppertwig (talk) 14:48, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
The bottom of http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/Sitemap.htm has an email address. You could also try User talk:Erik Zachte/Statistics. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:03, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

Category problem

As part of a stub-sorting project, the West Virginia geography stubs have been divided into several regions with county-level templates. Recently, I created Category:Mountaineer Country geography stubs and moved the stub templates for the counties in the region over to that category from Category:West Virginia geography stubs. Articles such as Corinth, West Virginia, which has one of these stubs, is therefore in the category. However, when you look at the category, it supposedly has nothing in it except the stub templates, while articles such as Corinth are still in the state category. What's wrong? I've compared the coding to other West Virginia county stub templates that didn't and don't have this problem, and I can't find any difference. Nyttend (talk) 13:11, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

If a transcluded page changes categorization then it can be necessary to edit the transcluding page to update the category page. A null edit is enough but purging the page is not enough (purging can update the category listing at the bottom, but not the category page). If you want the category to be updated quickly then you can go through Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:PrestonWV-geo-stub. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:23, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
I've gone and done null edits to all of them, and seven pages are listed in the category now. On the other hand, there should be several dozen; and what's more, Wikipedia:Village pump (technical) and Wikipedia:Village pump (all) are listed! Any suggestions now? Nyttend (talk) 17:42, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
The VP was listed because you forgot to prefix the Category links in this text with : I have corrected these lines here. Not sure what is going on with the rest. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:00, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

Need replacement for WatchlistBot to build page of links to WikiProject-cataloged pages

In August, WatchlistBot ceased operating. This bot built pages for various WikiProjects that included links to all the pages (both regular and talk) cataloged for these projects for the sake of having project watchlists. Is there another bot that can be run regularly (like once a week) for this purpose? Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 16:05, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

There is JoshurBot that has recently been set up for the Sheffield project & has been run for the Yorkshire project, though it is a manual run. May be you could ask its owner if you think it is suitable. Keith D (talk) 18:13, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for the lead! Stevie is the man! Talk • Work 19:23, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
if you want I can get something like WP:BABS for a project that wants it. βcommand 2 20:30, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
Looking through the WikiProjects topic in the editor's index, there seem to be a couple of possibilities, with the most likely being User:AlexNewArtBot. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 22:17, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

Problem with Firefox

I don't usually use Firefox, but IE7, but because of the unrepaired problem in which IE7 takes an extremely long time to load pages, I've been forced to use Firefox almost exclusively when I'm at home. But now I've found a problem with Firefox that I don't have with IE7: If I'm on an article's history page, and I do a "compare selected versions", I can't go back to the history page and do a compare of selected versions for a different set of diffs without being forced to reload the page. A second attempt at a compare does absolutely nothing. Is this something to do with something in particular with my version of Firefox, or is this a problem that everybody who uses Firefox has? Corvus cornixtalk 21:22, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

I use Firefox 2.0.0.13, and don't have this problem. Does using MediaWiki:WikiProject User scripts/Scripts/Compare link.js and 'open in new tab' help? Algebraist 21:46, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
I use the same version of Firefox. I don't use any userscripts. Corvus cornixtalk 21:50, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

Export references to Bibliographic Management software

As a researcher, I find myself often perusing Wikipedia for information about topics, and then exploring many of the references cited in the well elaborated articles to gain a deeper understanding. When writing papers, I often have to go through the process of crafting bibliographies and managing citations, using tools like EndNote/RefWorks/*insert tool here*

It would be nice to have a tool that could export Wikipedia articles in various formats such as BibTex/EndNote, etc...and when we're feeling more ambitious, the references cited in them as well. Compendiums such as the ACM Portal and IEEE Explore offer such functionality...

I'm thinking of whipping up a PHP script to do exactly that and here's approximately how I envison it:

function getCitation($wikiUrl, $requestedCitationMode) { 

  switch($requestedCitationMode) //still learning PHP, unsure if it supports string switches...if not, replace with if/else
  {
    case "BibTex": return createBibTexCitation($wikiUrl)
    ...
  }

}

function createBibTexCitation($wikiUrl) { 

 // 1. use MediaWiki API to create a new Wiki object for the given url...cursory 10 minute glance at API did not reveal an easy way to do that, so
 // elaboration would be welcome
 // 2. Check if the object contains a "references" section, if not bring up a popup alerting user
 // 3. parse citation and create an output to be returned in a "target = _blank" new window

}

...or something similar...but I wouldn't want to reinvent the wheel. Does something like this already exist? Do people know of similar projects? Besides the obvious RTFM, what are the relevant sections I should look through the manual?

I've written a tool zeteo.info which (at the moment) contains all mathematical references (some 5000). I'm about to pull out the physics references as well... The zeteo database has a structure adapted to WP's needs (distinguish between author's information, journals etc., provide wikilinks, a little bit of preformatting, incorporating certain templates such as Template:MR, and the like). It seems that WP more or less urgently needs something in this direction. Maybe we can set up something more broad in scope. Jakob.scholbach (talk) 21:55, 24 March 2008 (UTC)
See also this documentation. Jakob.scholbach (talk) 21:58, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

I am looking for reverse i.e. I would like to import entries from Bibliographic Management software (e.g. BibTex) to wikipedia - is it possible? Otherwise the task I would be facing (create wiki article based on an article I have in LaTeX) looks rather daunting... As a next best thing is there any application which would convert .bib files to {{cite}} format? Ryszard.czerminski (talk) 20:23, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

Single user log-in

See also: Wikipedia talk:Changing username/Usurpations § Single User Login: thoughts?, Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard § Single User Log-in, and Wikipedia talk:SUL/Consultation on renames

I just got round to reading Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-03-24/Single User Login (strangely, I thought I was reading last week's story, but then I ended up at this week's story - which has only just been published). Anyway, I went to meta:Help talk:Unified login, but wanted somewhere on en-wikipedia to discuss this. Unhelpfully, WP:SUL is a soft redirect to meta. So I thought I'd start this Village Pump post. As the story says, only admins so far, but still, it would be nice to discuss this somewhere. I have some questions I'd like to ask before I enable my global account, and as I don't have a meta-account yet, I'd like to ask the questions here. So, should it be here or should WT:SUL be opened for business? Carcharoth (talk) 20:54, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

Lets keep it here until it grows too big. MBisanz talk 20:56, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
Oops. I was bold. Still, I'll add a note on the Signpost talk page. Two or three parallel discussions never hurt anyone. Well, not yet anyway. Carcharoth (talk) 20:59, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for mentioning this - I would otherwise have sailed through the test period blissfully unaware that I was missing the opportunity to be a guinnea-pig :D! Makes me want to go log onto some obscure wiki now just because I can hehe! Took me long enough to remember my password at http://test.wikipedia.org though! Happy‑melon 21:14, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
I found it a rather easy process. What happens is someone on the Albanian wikipedia registers Carcharoth now that SUL is open but before Carc declares his global account? after he declares it? Should we encourage admins to login to as many pedias as possible to pre-empt squatter vandals? MBisanz talk 21:57, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
Anyone (ie any admin) who goes through Special:MergeAccount has their username reserved on all languages on all projects where it's not already taken, and has all accounts with the same username (which they can prove is theirs by comparing password hashes) linked to their main account. So no one can register ca:User:Happy-melon now. There's a horribly complicated four-stage usurpation process documented somewhere on meta which explains how conflicts like the one you describe would be sorted out - except in controverisial cases, the account with the most edits 'wins', and the other account is forcibly renamed by a 'crat (or a MediaWiki maintenance script posing as a 'crat). The real problem is that you can't (AFAIK) have different usernames between projects, so if you're active on the english, arabic, russian and chineese wikipedias, and have a username which means the same, but is in a different script, on each, you're in big trouble :D! Happy‑melon 22:12, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
Some combination of renaming, registering both accounts, redirecting user and talk pages, and setting up the signature to display the script you want it to display, should work. Or maybe not. I took ages to find out that ".el" was the Greek Wikipedia. It looked Greek, but there was surprisingly little to confirm this in a language other than Greek... Carcharoth (talk) 22:40, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

(unindent) As it is only admins who can register global accounts, those can't be squatted. God knows what will happen when it is rolled out to everyone. I don't really care if someone cybersquats my name on the Albanian wikipedia - I'll be the only one with a global account - I don't think another account exists called Carcharoth that is an admin... The real problems come with common names, eg. User:Daniel and the like. My name, although not that common, has actually been used on other wikis. I don't mind giving a few details, as I trust squatter accounts (and unintentional clashes, as is the case here) will be dealt with appropriately (though some reports, over on that meta page, are saying that squatter accounts need to be dealt with before going ahead with a global account). Anyway, I ran this tool (found out about it at meta), and found five sets of contributions under my name: German Wikipedia; Greek Wikipedia; French Wikipedia; Commons (this is different from commons:User:Carcharoth (Commons)); and en-Wiktionary. Now, the strange thing is that I only ever remember trying to register an account at Commons, and finding that the name was already taken, so I registered the "Carcharoth (Commons)" account I linked to above. And two of the accounts above are clearly a different person (some French person), namely the French Wikipedia and the Commons account. But the other ones, the Greek Wikipedia one and the German Wikipedia one and the en-Wiktionary one, seem to be some of my edits from en-Wikipedia that have been exported over to those projects, somehow. Examples are this edit compared to this edit (note the one hour time difference); and this edit with this edit (no time difference here); and this edit with this edit (all edits I've quoted from other projects are here being compared with the same edits found on en-Wikipedia). Does Special:Export do this when transwikiing? Does anyone know what is going on here? Do those accounts (other than the French and Commons ones, with French edit summaries) actually exist? Does this affect single user login? Should I just go ahead with creating a global account anyway? Carcharoth (talk) 22:36, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

this edit link says that en:wikt:User:Carcharoth is not registered, which must be a really wierd result of the transwiki procedure, as you guess. It makes sense given that the Export/Import feature must feed directly into the revision/page tables - presumably any users who co-incidentally shared the same username on wiktionary as one of the wikipedia-editors of the article that was transwikied, would have found themselves with extra edits. Once you visit Special:MergeAccount, of course, the question becomes moot, as your username is reserved (and logged) on all wikis and languages. Recovering all your lost transwikied edits is a nice reward, actually. Once they get their head around centralised edit counts (and interwiki redirects), we'll be in business. What will most likely happen, unless one of the other Carcharoths is an ArbCom member on de.wiki or something (:D), is that de:User:Carcharoth will be renamed to something like de:User:Carcharoth_renamed_2, the French guy will get fr:User:Carcharoth_renamed and commons:User:Carcharoth_renamed (or another name of their preference), and a 'crat on commons will rename commons:User:Carcharoth (Commons) to commons:User:Carcharoth and then merge it with your global account. You'll probably be asked to put a note on your commons and fr.wiki userpages to note that the poor french guy had his name pinched, because there'll be an awful lot of signatures floating around which point to the wrong place after this is all over. Happy‑melon 23:13, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
Just a note, if you are merging accounts, they all need to have the same username. If you need to have an account renamed, do so before merging your accounts as it is currently not possible for bureaucrats to rename an account to a name reserved by a global account. Mr.Z-man 23:06, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
Right. Thanks. So I will need to try and get Commons:User:Carcharoth (Commons) to usurp Commons:User:Carcharoth before creating the global account, but I wouldn't need to usurp fr:User:Commons before creating the global account, or would I? Both accountslook fairly inactive - the fr one has about 160 edits between June 2006 and January 2007 and the Commons one has about 18 edits between November 2006 and August 2007 - can't see deleted edits for either). Would I need to register a different account at fr before usurption or not? What about these strange transwiki contributions at de, el and en-wiktionary? The user creation logs ([3], [4] and [5]) seem to indicate that these are phantom edits or some kind, even though a contributions log exists. Really strange. Ah, I see Happy-melon has answered above. Carcharoth (talk) 23:21, 25 March 2008 (UTC)
The transwiki contributions are definitely a result of a full history export. For an example see my contributions on the German Wikipedia, only a few of which I actually made there. You can already get your global edit count with this tool]. Graham87 00:14, 26 March 2008 (UTC)
<3 hostile takeovers. This should be great fun for common names like mine (per Carcharoth above). Daniel (talk) 01:21, 26 March 2008 (UTC)
When I checked to see if my username was registered on other Wikis, I found my own accounts on Commons, etc., but also found my username on a non-English language wiki. The name was registered in 2006, but has no contributions. It would be helpful if there were an automated way to request usurpation in such cases without trying to navigate the request in a language the admin doesn't know. — ERcheck (talk) 00:09, 27 March 2008 (UTC)
The simple way is to submit a request to meta:Steward requests/Usurpation. Unfortunately the page is currently shutdown "due to technical difficulties". --Allen3 talk 21:43, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

I used to be known here as User:Woodym555, an account which I still hold. I also use that name on commons:User:Woodym555, meta:User:Woodym555 and on km:User:Woodym555. None of these accounts are admin accounts but User:Woody is. Do I need to get all the other accounts usurped to Woody before I attempt unified login? Woody (talk) 21:56, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

I'll stick my neck out here and say yes - if the software were smart enough to be able to combine unlike useraccount names, there would be no need for usurpation at all, and we wouldn't be having this conversation. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 15:36, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

I went and got the single login for my account (User:Sam) and discovered that there are more than sixty accounts in other projects that have my user name! -- ☑ SamuelWantman 09:57, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

SUL and renames

Wikipedia:SUL/Consultation on renames

The implementation of Unified Login may mean that bureaucrats should agree to perform renames in circumstances where our practice is currently to decline them. I have created the above page in an attempt to get a feel for community consensus on SUL and how far bureaucrats should go to accommodate SUL-based rename requests. Input from all welcome and appreciated. WjBscribe 01:20, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Signal it on your userpage

Of late, I've been more off Wikipedia than on it; so, I do not know how the community reacts to SUL. I personally feel that SUL is indeed a good system in non-controversial cases where there is no conflict of 2 users having the same username on different Wikimedia projects. I also believe that it is important that people who have gone for SUL signal that their username is unique on all Wikimedia projects - I created the template {{Unified login}} to signal that. Pl. feel free to use it/ improve it. --Gurubrahma (talk) 09:30, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Happy-melon formatted it as a userbox: {{User SUL}}. —David Eppstein (talk) 15:35, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

Transclusion of lead section

I would like to create in an article some links to the Lead section of some other articles. My intention is to use this feature in some Project pages. Are there some special Variables or Magic Words that could do that, please ? SyG (talk) 12:23, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Since the lead is always at the top of the page, why would you specifically link to it? Anyway, you can try linking to the first header, which is also the article's title, like [[Article#Article]]. — Edokter • Talk • 12:28, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for the suggestion, but it does not seem to work. For example if I write a transclusion like {{:Alexander Alekhine#Alexander Alekhine}} it will add the whole article Alexander Alekhine and not only its Lead section. I would like to be able to transclude only the Lead section, and even possibly without the TOC. SyG (talk) 13:03, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
You would have to prepare the article for this usage: everything beyond the lead could be made conditional depending on a parameter, see e.g. User:Patrick/example of page prepared for transclusion of the lead section (talk, backlinks, edit). A complication is that the section edit links disappear in the full article; they could be put explicitly.--Patrick (talk) 14:07, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
I see... Adapting all the articles for my goal is clearly too much of a burden given the usage I intended, so I will look for something else than refering to the Lead. Thanks for the explanation and the clear example! SyG (talk) 14:16, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
I really hope that we don't encourage the kind of article modifications mentioned by Patrick; adding a special template in the lead section and then putting in explicit edit links for sections because the template removes them is - to my mind - particularly off-putting to most editors coming upon such an article and looking at the underlying wikitext. At minimum there really should be some invisible comments to help out editors unfamiliar with the concept (that would be almost every editor here).
To be more constructive - what we really need is to have mw:Extension:Labeled Section Transclusion implemented. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 15:19, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
Mmm, interesting one. Are there any plans somewhere to implement this extension in Wikipedia ? SyG (talk) 15:31, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
It doesn't look like a bug report has been opened yet for this feature on the English Wikipedia (it is currently installed on all language Wikisources and English Wiktionary). Most project pages (and portal "featured article" sections) usually include articles by copying and pasting the lead. GracenotesT § 17:32, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
This sounds awesome. -- Ned Scott 03:10, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
It is an interesting extension, which may have some advantages over the method I mentioned, but note that the article to be partly transcluded requires a similar preparation, and that there is the same problem with missing section edit links.--Patrick (talk) 09:47, 30 March 2008 (UTC)
The extension shouldn't have any missing section edit links. The main part of the extension, which is used on the sites noted above, does require some preparation on the page to be transcluded. There is another part which allows transclusion by the visual headings, although I don't think that's ever been reviewed for use on these projects. -Steve Sanbeg (talk) 17:50, 31 March 2008 (UTC)
You are right, edit links are present and work fine, so it would be good to have this extension installed.--Patrick (talk) 18:38, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

It might be more useful and intuitive if the syntax were simply {{:Mozilla Firefox#History}} (transclude Mozilla Firefox#History into the current page). {{:Mozilla Firefox#}} could be used to transclude just the lead section. —Remember the dot (talk) 18:24, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

I'm still a bit leary of transcluding arbitrary sections by their heading, since it's unlikely someone would realize when they change a heading that they're breaking transclusion. Transcluding the introduction should be a little cleaner, unless the article has an infobox. -Steve Sanbeg (talk) 19:28, 31 March 2008 (UTC)
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