Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 67

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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This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (technical).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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urlencode broken?

My templates are broken today. It seems that {{urlencode:Beyoncé}} is now producing Beyonc%C3%A9, when the targeted site is expecting Beyonc%E9. Anyone else having such problems?.—Kww(talk) 15:57, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

Since January 2005, "Beyonc%C3%A9" is correct: RFC 3986 specifies that text is to be converted to a byte string using UTF-8 before the bytes are percent-encoded. Considering that T9389 was filed in 2006, the urlencode parser function has probably had this correct behavior for quite some time. Anomie⚔ 17:54, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

My templates were working last week, and are broken now. Is there any simple method of getting Beyonc%E9 using parser functions?—Kww(talk) 20:43, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

Not that I'm aware of. Besides, wherever you are sending this to, should simply be fixed to support UTF-8. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 01:00, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

Routine edits to templates

To edit some templates it seems as if you have to be a software expert. And there are style issues and other things in templates that would benefit from editing by people who are not software experts. No one has relied to this. Can someone here say something? Michael Hardy (talk) 02:26, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

I've replied at Template talk:Infobox school. Warofdreams talk 02:36, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

Displaying commons images in external wikis?

{{resolved}} Is it possible to display images from commons on external MediaWikis? What is the syntax to use? SharkD (talk) 07:40, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

You need to configure Commons as an external file store in MW. See mw:Manual:$wgForeignFileRepos. Happy‑melon 07:47, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Useful bots of blocked users?

In the last year, we've seen BetacommandBot and Erik9bot stopped because their operators were blocked for reasons unrelated to the bots; while the operators deserved to be blocked, the bots performed very useful tasks. Is it possible for an editor other than their creators to operate bots such as these, using any and every opportunity aside from hacking the original operator's computer? Nyttend (talk) 01:02, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

If these bots' creators didn't and won't provide source codes or executables of their bots, someone would have to write them again. If that's the case, you can request them at WP:Bot requests. Svick (talk) 01:25, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanation; I don't know how bots work, so I didn't know if the coding was necessarily available or not. Somehow I can't imagine that two users banned for socking will be willing to provide the code without changes. Nyttend (talk) 17:06, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm now a bit concerned over this category. While I don't doubt it's usefullness, how does it appear to users who stumble upon it, click the link to Erik9bot and see he's a banned sockpuppet. Lugnuts (talk) 19:53, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

I've added an explanation to the top of the category page; what do you think? Nyttend (talk) 22:29, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

That looks good to me - thanks! Lugnuts (talk) 08:36, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Updated commons image partially updated on wikipedia

An image I updated on commons is sometimes updated on wikipedia, sometimes not. The file is File:Britain.circa.540.jpg. I've cleared my cache, etc., and can see no way around the problem. Suggestions or note of a possible technical cause welcome. To see the problem:

1. View this image in article section Gildas#The kings and kingdoms. Note the word "Cornwall" in the lower left. The is the old image that should no longer be available on wikipedia.
2. Click on the image to enlarge, and note the word "Kernow" in the lower left in place of the word "Cornwall". This is the current image, and should be the one displayed in the article.

Regards, Notuncurious (talk) 17:24, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

Fixed - As you noticed, sometimes the servers fail to rerender all sizes of an image when you upload a new version of it. It is a well known bug, it has been like that for years now. I guess it is low priority for the devs to fix. This especially happens when the servers are very busy, then I guess it is not a bug but instead image handling probably runs on lower priority than other more important tasks.

Anyway, the trick is to change the image size in the article with say 1px, to get a new not previously used size, thus forcing the servers to render a fresh copy of the image for the article. I have applied that fix to the article.

--David Göthberg (talk) 18:06, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the workaround, David. I will apply it to the other articles that use the file. And yes, I recall that wikipedia response time was quite long when I updated the file on commons. Regards, Notuncurious (talk) 18:16, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

This should work as well [1] to generate a new thumbnail for an image. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:12, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

Revised image not reflect to article

The height of en:Tokyo Sky Tree is altered to 634m from 610m in design and in under construction. The image file File:Tokyo Sky Tree - Silhouette & Cross section.jpg is up dated to 634m [2]. This update image, however not reflected to article such as en:Tokyo Sky Tree, ja:東京スカイツリー and other articles. Can anyone help, or remedy the trouble.--Namazu-tron (talk) 22:27, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

Posted to Wikimedia Commons English edition. I shall delete post here to avoid confusion in multiple post.[3]--Namazu-tron (talk) 22:46, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

Special:Allpages for toolserver?

Is there an index somewhere of all the programs available on the WP:toolserver, slightly similar to Special:Allpages here? Ikip (talk) 22:41, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

I think tools:~interiot/cgi-bin/tstoc should list all the tools. Svick (talk) 23:14, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

It does not. I don't think such an index exists. — The Earwig @ 00:11, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Delete image

An alternate version of File:RGBCube c.svg exists here. Someone please delete the former. SharkD (talk) 23:35, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

It seems the former is a slightly compressed version of the latter, which makes it a decision call. I have nominated it for speedy deletion {{db-f8}}. You would probably receive a faster response to CSD-nom it. Intelligentsium 00:03, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. SharkD (talk) 00:17, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Coding Question

I have a user requesting assistance with some coding for a Hide/Show template. The user, Mahitgar (talk · contribs), has posted their question at User talk:Mahitgar#help request Nov 2009, should someone with understanding of such things wish to have a look. Thanks! UltraExactZZ ^Claims ~ Evidence 15:14, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Bug in category assignment?

Can somebody help me figure this out? I think it's a bug in MediaWiki, but I may be missing something. I'd like to know, so I can file a bug if needed or just fix the issue.     — SkyLined (talk) 11:33, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

A null edit works. Algebraist 12:50, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Fixed, thanks!     — SkyLined (talk) 09:02, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

@ in usernames creating difficulties

I'm sure this has come up before, but I am unable to edit the userrights for an editor with that symbol, because the interface thinks you're trying to edit the rights on another wiki. To wit... Enigma^msg 20:31, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Using the form #user_id in the rights dialog will work. The Toolserver tells me that that particular user's id is 376014, so #376014 should work.

mysql> SELECT * FROM user WHERE user_name = "Rms125a@hotmail.com";
+---------+---------------------+-------------------+----------------+
| user_id | user_name           | user_registration | user_editcount |
+---------+---------------------+-------------------+----------------+
|  376014 | Rms125a@hotmail.com | 20050809230409    |          13111 | 
+---------+---------------------+-------------------+----------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

Enjoy. ~fl 23:34, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the help. I went to do it, but NuclearWarfare beat me to it. Enigma^msg 00:42, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

There are also some more public tools that can get the same information, such as this one. • Anakin ^(talk) 01:28, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Herr X name

I am user:Herr X. But i have not used it for a while. I usually edit on swedish wikipedia and i use Herr X as my universal nick in the wikipediaworld. How can i be Herr X on the english version to? Herr X123 (talk) 08:07, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

when i look at the Herr X page now, it is not there. But when I wanna reg it it says that there already is a person using the nick... Herr X123 (talk) 08:09, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

The fact that the page User:Herr X doesn't exist doesn't mean anything. That user exists on enwiki and is not attached to your global login (see [4]). You are saying that you don't know the password for this user? If that's the case, you can request usurping that account on Wikipedia:Changing username/SUL and since that user never made any edits, I think that request would be accepted. Svick (talk) 08:51, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Simple keyframe animation in SVG?

Some images such as this one could benefit from being converted to SVG, but are animated using simple GIF-style animation. Any chance on creating a hack to support this type of animation with SVG files? SharkD (talk) 00:34, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

animation in SVG requires scripting. The scripting in SVG can potentially have security concerns. Because of this, traditionally, these SVG files are not allowed in wikipedia. There have been people working on trying to find filters that will allow animation, but keep the "dangerous" stuff out, but it's not finished. The other issue is thumbnailing and browser support of course. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:28, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

OK, thanks. SharkD (talk) 23:37, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

There are some non-scripting ways to do animation in SVG as well, but it's all very limited and of course we don't actually display SVGs inline -- we show flattened PNGs for compatibility and bandwidth reasons. For now, SVG animation remains a 'future' feature. :( --brion (talk) 08:43, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

How to automatically update links to archived discussions

Are there any codes/templates/tags/fairy dust that I can add to internal (and external) links to discussions that will automatically update the links to the new page when it's archived? And is there a better way to find the correct archived page, especially when there's no search box on the page? When I do a lot of research, I'd like future editors to be able to reference and use the links without having to dig through archives. Thanks in advance. Flowanda | Talk 19:51, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't think there's an easy way to do this. I guess archive bot could do it (change all links to a section after archiving that section), if it was updated to do that, but I don't expect anyone tu put much effort into this, when LiquidThreads should be ready soon. They will solve this problem (and many more). Svick (talk) 22:50, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

ClueBot III does this already, for pages that it archives. Anomie⚔ 01:06, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

The Gimp and JP2 files

I downloaded the JPEG2000 plugin (openjpeg_v1_3_win32), but need help on how install it into GIMP (2.6.7 win32). –Moondyne 08:00, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Auto-complete unclosed bracket redux

A following up on Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 63#Auto-complete unclosed bracket. I we could use the following code on create new page screen as sort of a Did you mean suggestion.

{{#ifexist: {{FULLPAGENAME}})|<div class="searchdidyoumean">
Did you mean: [[{{FULLPAGENAME}})|{{fullurl:{{FULLPAGENAME}})}}]]?
</div>}}

— Dispenser 19:07, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

Sounds a clever little error-detection to add to MediaWiki:Newarticletext. It could be something like this, wrapped in that if statement (prominence is justified):

My only concern is that it might start a trend for increasingly complex error correction which might add up to some substantial computational burden... Rd232 ^talk 09:38, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm asking domas on IRC how bad this would be performance wise. Calling this on all our non-existing articles might be a problem :D —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:03, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Got my answer from domas: "< domas> go ahead < domas> we can always remove it" —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:39, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Would there be a way to have it display only if the referring link was the "create" link at the top of an empty page? Admins looking at deleted articles for revisions, for example, have no need of this - but someone wanting to recreate the article might. UltraExactZZ ^Claims ~ Evidence 15:17, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Correction: the message to modify is not Newarticletext (which is shown in edit mode) but MediaWiki:Noarticletext for registered users and MediaWiki:Nocreatetext for IPs, because on http links like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_(film you come to the "view" page first. — AlexSm 16:32, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

I know it's shown in edit mode. That's exactly what I had in mind. Rd232 ^talk 20:09, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Would you mind to clarify why you want it in edit mode, since the initial question was about links "pasted all over the web"? — AlexSm 22:08, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Oh. I didn't see the original thread, and I thought the issue was people creating bad titles on Wikipedia. Now I see it's bad inward links from other people's crocked software - hence the need to display it in 'view' mode. Not overly keen on bothering with that. Is it that big an issue? If people are just searching they should see the problem and correct it without any impact on Wikipedia, whereas if they do it when editing, the title then needs fixing via move + deleting the redirect, which is a workload worth doing without. Rd232 ^talk 00:16, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Well I've added it to Newarticletext. There's a lot more of this sort of error detection that could be done, but without parser functions, it's quickly going to get server heavy. Rd232 ^talk 10:58, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

A different but related project may be of interest: Wikipedia:WikiProject Red Link Recovery/Unlikely/brackets fixed 2603 redlinks with unmatched parentheses and retained 6 as valid. Certes (talk) 00:07, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Firefox display problem when viewing English Wikipedia

For the past day or two, when I access the English version of Wikipedia in Firefox (v3.5.4) I don't see the normal Wikipedia page. No navigation buttons at the top, no logo or menus down the left side, just the plain text of the article iself and of the box at the foot of the page that starts 'This page was last modified on..." and no CSS formatting. OS is Windows 2000.

All the other language versions of Wikipedia (or at least the douzen others that I've tested) work without problem - it only appears to be the English language version affected, and running Firefox running without add-ons in Safe Mode makes no difference. Everything displays normally when using IE or Opera.

Presumably this must be caused by some recent modification to the MediaWiki code on the English version. Perhaps the browser version checks called by the page header? Is anyone aware of this / doing anything to fix it? Surely it's not just me being affected by this? 88.108.144.158 (talk) 10:21, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Should have added that Commons, Wikiquote, etc aren't affected either - only the English language Wikipedia 88.108.144.158 (talk) 10:36, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm using FF (tho in XP) and haven't noticed any change. Tho the site does seem really slow. kwami (talk) 10:26, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

No problems here in FF3.5.5 on XP.--Kotniski (talk) 10:47, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Have you tried bypassing your cache? Svick (talk) 11:39, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

WP:DevMemo

I've created WP:DevMemo to further discussion about the software, and hopefully improve communication with the developers. See Wikipedia talk:MediaWiki/DeveloperMemo/November2009.

• There must be a lot of lingering bugs and issues, as well as brand new ideas, which we can discuss and then try to move forward through appropriate requests or questions to the developers. So please bring your software-related questions/requests there, or contribute to existing discussion, and see if we can make this approach work. Rd232 ^talk 12:52, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

It probably bears pointing out that one advantage of this is it might lead to less duplication/overlap of bugs, which would make life easier for devs in a very concrete way. Rd232 ^talk 10:46, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Signature without username

Not that this is a big deal, but does anyone know why my signature sometimes doesn't include my username? I thuoght all I had to do was type four tildas. Minaker (talk) 15:38, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Most likely those times you type 5 tildas instead of 4, for more info see WP:SIG. — AlexSm 15:49, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

If you mistakenly type five tildes, it produces 23:39, 6 November 2009 (UTC) (a timestamp). Intelligentsium 23:39, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Movenotices, protectnotices and deletenotices

Since FULLPAGENAME works on MediaWiki:Movepagetext, MediaWiki:Protect-text (or we use $1) and MediaWiki:Confirmdeletetext; we can create movenotices, protectnotices and deletenotices, similarly to what we did recently for emailnotices, derived from editnotices. They could be hosted at Template:Movenotices/Page/Name, etc. There are a few cases where this could be useful, one user already use such a notice for the protection of his userpage; but overall it looks like 'notice-creep'. I'm not sure if it's worth implementing, what do you think ? Cenarium (talk) 00:33, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Is it really necessary? Protection and deletion have clear procedures and can only be done by admins - that doesn't seem obviously worth it. Move notices might be helpful if we didn't have move protection... but we do. Need some examples of cases where there's no good alternative to be persuaded that it's worth doing. Rd232 ^talk 10:49, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

I think the same. Cenarium (talk) 15:18, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Editing zh wiki

I wanted to add the en wiki link to the zh article for Strayed (film), but the save button is greyed out. I have a global account and edit on many other wiki-languages, but I've never been able to save an edit on zh. Anyone know why? Thanks! Lugnuts (talk) 10:00, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

It was greyed out for me as well. Instead I clicked on preview (the second button), and then I got an active save button. I guess they have special display problems or something and therefore force all editors to preview before saving. Hans Adler 10:21, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

I think you're right. I have set english interface on that wiki and the greyed out save button contaied text "Save page （預覽後可用）". Google translated the Chinese part as "After the preview available". And the button wasn't greyed out anymore after previewing the page. Svick (talk) 10:29, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Ahhh, brilliant - thanks! Lugnuts (talk) 10:32, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

The save button is also greyed out for anonymous and maybe non-autoconfirmed users of the French Wikipedia, until they hit the preview button. French uses the Latin alphabet (with a few extra accents), so they'd have fewer issues with displaying characters. I don't know of any other Wikipedia languages where this occurs. Graham87 16:38, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Yep, zh-wiki doesn't let you save without previewing until you're autoconfirmed. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 18:48, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Blank revisions, tracking them

I just came across a blank 2005 revision of Pac-Man. I remember that Grahm87 was collecting them, but should we have some automated way of collecting this information. I'd be willing to write a Toolserver tool to allow the reporting of this problem until the developer fix it. — Dispenser 20:16, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm collecting them at bug 20757. An automated tool to collect instances of these anomalies would be useful, if the devs indicate that they need it. I've boldly added the problem to the November 2009 developer memo. While I'm here, I've just partially undone a history merge that involved some blank revisions, since they might need to stay together; see the history at "Massacre in Koniuchy". Graham87 05:37, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Spamprotectiontext

There's a thread at MediaWiki_talk:Spamprotectiontext#user-friendlier_message about rewriting that message, if anyone would like to comment. Rd232 ^talk 15:24, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

implemented now. Rd232 ^talk 00:55, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

How much do links affect load times?

I know that having lots of transcluded templates or just lots of text increases the load times for a page. Does having a lot of links have a major effect?

I raised a proposal at WT:FAC#Link from main FAC page to individual FAC, which would add more links to a page that already has occasional load time problems. So I'm just trying to gauge how much 40-50 links would affect load time. Thanks, rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 18:47, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't think that adding 50 links to a page that already has more that 4000 of them would increase load time noticeably. But if the load time is problem, you could consider not transcluding all the discussions and only having links to them instead. Or you could have two alternale WP:FACs: one big and slow that transcludes them, and one small and fast that doesn't. Svick (talk) 20:23, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Well, remember that templates affect initial parser and page generation time, but so long as the page is held in the server caches, they make no special difference to the subsequent load times, except the much lighter effect of having to download the content at all. I think the effect of adding several dozen extra wikilinks to a page is extremely negligible, both on parse times and load times, increasing the page size by only a few kilobytes. I mean, purging something like Wikipedia:Uncategorized biographies of living people/BLPPotential/12, which has 4½ thousand wikilinks, doesn't take more than 4 seconds. • Anakin ^(talk) 20:36, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Adding links is unlikely to cause significantly slower loading. The only thing that will help you is making the page shorter (post-template expansion). That's also only material if there's a parser cache miss, like if the page was just changed (maybe by you) or you have certain preferences set differently from the default. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 15:50, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

For your attention - DBpedia templates

I'm not sure where the best place for this is, but there is a discussion at ANI that some here may find of interest. I'm also going to post this at WP:VPP, but please feel free to move the discussion to the most appropriate venue. Thanks! TNXMan 19:18, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

That discussion should probably happen here, or perhaps even better would be the proposals page. Aside from not really being a matter for ANI, it would make things easier for most editors to conduct a central discussion at village pump, what with the larger loading time for the ANI page. This should be a broad community discussion. Equazcion (talk) 19:27, 7 Nov 2009 (UTC)

see below, please move, if not appropriate here SebastianHellmann (talk) 21:52, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

AWB RegEx

Say I am using AutoWikiBrowser and I am editing an album that is not wikified. Let's just say that it doesn't have a quotation mark after the number (wiki syntax #). What would be the RegEx code to put a quotation mark after every # sign?  Btilm  19:44, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Replacing # with #". No regex is needed, just find/replace. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 00:18, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

RegEx

For those of you that use AWB, would you help me test out a few RegEx codes? These two codes are designed to remove unnecessary carriage returns in a Wikipedia article, except when a category or template follows, where it will put two blank lines in between.

Find: \n(\n)+  Replace: \n(\n)+ Find: \n\n({{.*}}|\[\[:?[cC]ategory.*\]\]) Replace: \n\n\n$1

Thank you. Please get back to me on my talk page.  Btilm  21:13, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Those aren't going to work at all. For starters, you can't use quantifiers (+) in replace strings. In fact, AWB's genfixes does this for you so there is no need to write additional rules. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 00:21, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

And you don't need extra lines above navboxes. CSS rules now add whitespace above the topmost navbox. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 15:53, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Contributions

We should be able to see all the contributions to a article from an editor, weather it be on User contributions. Post on bugzilla.174.3.111.148 (talk) 03:41, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

You mean filter a page history by username (and/or a contribution history by pagename)? I guess that might be useful. There might already be an external tool to do this. Anyone? Rd232 ^talk 13:57, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, there is an external tool, Per-page contributions. You can also use the API for this purpose, as described at this archived discussion. Graham87 15:45, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Found this handy link to get a handle on available tools: Toolserver tools by tags. Rd232 ^talk 16:24, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Fancycaptcha-createaccount

There is a discussion at MediaWiki talk:Fancycaptcha-createaccount#Simplicity on removing the summary of username policy currently presented on the right-handside of MediaWiki:Fancycaptcha-createaccount (which is the text presented to users on the signup screen, if they're not logged in). Some say the text is unnecessary, others that it has an important function in guiding users on choosing usernames. Rd232 ^talk 11:35, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Border problem

I noticed the article content border is missing on 2009 flu pandemic timeline in Firefox (previous dicssuion). Further investigation shows this is dependent on the vertical dimension of the article's content, as is exhibited on this test page. Could someone help me report this if necessary as I'm not sure how to find if it's already been listed on BugZilla. --Pontificalibus (talk) 13:45, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

It seems to be a Gecko bug but it's present only in Firefox 3.0 and not 2.0 or 3.5. Not worth worrying about. • Anakin ^(talk) 14:54, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

In fact I'm pretty sure it's this and this, but again, it happens only in Firefox 3.0, and not its predecessor or successor. • Anakin ^(talk) 15:17, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Borders can disappear in any version of FireFox if the zoom is not at default. Try Ctrl 0 to reset it. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 15:46, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Ah, you're quite right, I hadn't noticed that. Seeing that clearly in 3.5 at least. • Anakin ^(talk) 16:08, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

User Contributions Page

On User contributions, when User talk: pages are listed, the user's contributions need to be shown. Post on bugzilla.174.3.111.148 (talk) 20:28, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Like on Special:RecentChanges? Don't see why not. Could be handy. Rd232 ^talk 20:37, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Am I doing something wrong?

Please take a look at the edits I've made today (Sunday 8 November 2009). I had intended to undo vandalism by anonymous users. In at least one case I instead restored it. Have I done that systematically? Can anyone else who's already been through this tell me what I'm doing wrong and what I should do instead? Thanks. --Eldin raigmore (talk) 21:00, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

That anonymous user removed his vandalism and you undid that edit. Could it be that you saw a diff of an edit by anonymous user with the word "gay" in red and didn't realize that he removed it, not added? I think it's just that one edit. I don't think that you are doing something wrong, you probably just made a mistake. (We all do.) Svick (talk) 01:31, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

That's the explanation I hope is true. I'll assume it is until someone says otherwise. Thanks. --Eldin raigmore (talk) 01:44, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

monobook.js

Sorry, could you have a look at this: [5] Did i do sth bad? Guildenrich (talk) 21:28, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

No, your Monobook page looks fine. What are you trying to do? — The Earwig @ 21:53, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Don't forget to bypass your cache after saving your monobook to see the effects. Cenarium (talk) 01:53, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Deletion stats

What percentage of all the articles created by: a. Non-autoconfirmed registered users b. Auto-confirmed registered users get deleted via: 1. speedy deletion, 2. proposed deletion and 3. articles for deletion? Fences&Windows 00:14, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Multimedia Paris meeting

As some of you may know, there was a meeting in Paris last week to discuss/brainstorm/develop around all things Multimedia in the Wikipedia sphere. A summary of this can be read on the usability wiki. It at least saw the deployment of the Global Usage extension, something welcomed by many I presume. Another important element was a demo of the first forays into subtitling support. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:04, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

GlobalUsage has been disabled. Relevant bug: bugzilla:18059. --MZMcBride (talk) 01:59, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Bot editing while logged out

FYI, 91.198.174.201 (talk · contribs · WHOIS) is a bot editing while logged out. Mentioning here first rather than blocking. Thanks. Wknight94 ^talk 20:26, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Whose bot is it? You should probably discuss it with the botop. Intelligentsium 01:34, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

No idea. How do you tell? Wknight94 ^talk 01:41, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

That is the Toolserver IP, please DO NOT block it as you will take down dozens of bots. MBisanz ^talk 01:44, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

The bot is one of the HBC AIV helperbots. I have no way to know which one it is. I think it is not a terrible thing if it edits while logged out, not ideal but it is still being helpful and causing no harm. Even though I don't know which one it is(we have something like 5 copies running) they all run off the same source code. I will look through that code to see how it handles staying logged in. Chillum 01:47, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

According to the current source code it does not detect if it has logged out or not, but it does log in regardless of if it is needed every hour. So if it does get logged out somehow it will last less than 1 hour. In other words if you ignore the problem it will go away. Chillum 01:50, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

I thought we had the Toolserver IPs blocked from editing anonymously.... If not, it should probably be done. All bots running on the Toolserver are required to run logged in (cf. tswiki:Rules). --MZMcBride (talk) 01:51, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

To be frank, that is how I handle the IP of the server I run my bots from. I used the same framework of the name watcher bot, and dustabot, that I used for AIV Helperbot. Thus they all suffer from the same log-out issue(I really should fix that one of these days). I block the IP of my server(anon only) 1 year at a time . The IP in indefinitely under my control and if I ever give it up I can remove the block first. I see no reason why the toolserver would ever need to edit anonymously, however perhaps a message to the mailing list would be a good idea just to make sure it will no break anything. Chillum 01:55, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

It's almost trivial to prevent a bot from editing anonymously: just add "assert=user" to the POST that submits the edit and it will error out if the bot isn't logged in. Anomie⚔ 03:12, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Shouldn't it be "assert=bot" since my understanding is that all editing bots on en.wp have to be approved and get the bot bit? and why are their five versions of that bot running at the moment? Peachey88 ^{(Talk Page · Contribs)} 00:21, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, assert=bot would be preferable in general, but the question here was just about preventing a bot from editing while not logged in. Anomie⚔ 01:48, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Blocking anonymous edits from the Toolserver screws up some tools and disables read-only pywikipedia bots without an account. — Dispenser 13:37, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Why would a read-only bot need to make edits? OrangeDog (τ • ε) 18:50, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

They don't, but pywikipedia quits as soon as it detects a block. — Dispenser 20:17, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Sounds like a reason to fix pywikipedia. --MZMcBride (talk) 00:31, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Functions

Clicking on the back button on the browser shouldn't reset the number of revisions displayed or the position of the radio buttons. Report to bugzilla.174.3.111.148 (talk) 01:46, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

This must be something your browser does. Mine doesn't. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:57, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

I think Internet Explorer 7 does that. Not sure about Internet Explorer 8. Wknight94 ^talk 03:21, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Resetting form data when you click "back" is a hallmark feature of Internet Explorer. I'm not aware of any other modern browser that does it. --Carnildo (talk) 02:27, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Changing username ??

Will changing my username create any tecnical difficulties? --88.90.85.204 (talk) 19:28, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Probably not, but the page you want is this one. TNXMan 19:31, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

About Link FA

Recently I've found out that in Internet Explorer 8 if a particular non-English edition is featured, then the star next to the link can be shown correctly, but in Google Chrome 3.0.195.27 the star is now shown (but in both browsers the tooltip which indicate a non-English edition is featured can be popped correctly. I don't face this problem before when I use Google Chrome. Can anybody tell me why (the operating system I use is Windows XP Home Edition Service Pack 2)?--RekishiEJ (talk) 13:14, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

By the way, I don't counter this situation when browsing non-English Wikipedia. --RekishiEJ (talk) 13:20, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Are you using monobook, or the new beta vector skin ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:54, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

I use vector on both browsers. And one month ago I use vector as the skin, and use IE8 and GC3 to view Wikipedia pages, and the FA star can be properly displayed when a certain non-English edition is featured there.--RekishiEJ (talk) 14:47, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

I updated GC later to 3.0.195.32, and the same problem still exists.--RekishiEJ (talk) 06:39, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

There are 2 problems here. The first is IE8. It is showing the list bullet/star for the languages, even though it shouldn't under Vector. That explains the difference in behavior between the two browsers. Basically the linkFA star is not supposed to work with vector yet, and that is why Chrome is not showing it. I'm thinking of ways to display the star without making use of a list bullet. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:28, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

I hope I have this fixed now. Please clear your browser cache and see if there is an improvement now. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:56, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Now I use both IE8 and GC3 to check if the {{Link FA}}'s star is displayed correctly when using the new Vector skin, and now I found out both displays the expected result. The position of the FA star is somewhat now pleasing to look, though.--RekishiEJ (talk) 06:03, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

It's more the star that is the problem I think. With the new gray background it doesn't look as good. If someone wants to design a new one, I'd love to see some proposals. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:47, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Bug in feedback templates

I recently created the templates {{leave feedback}} and {{feedback link}}. There is a problem in {{feedback link}} (subsequently, in {{leave feedback}}) when the page (current or through {{{page}}}) contains spaces and Template:Feedback page/preload/page or Template:Feedback page/editnotice/page exists, for example {{feedback link|page=Wikipedia:Help desk}} returns (it breaks at the first FULLPAGENAMEE within ifexist). It works when page is url-encoded: {{feedback link|page=Wikipedia:Help_desk}} returns the expected . Any idea on how to solve this ? Thanks, Cenarium (talk) 04:40, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Add {{urlencode:string}}? Rd232 ^talk 09:13, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

"Wikipedia Forever" banner / Change in link styles?

The new banner seems to have screwed up my CSS. Links are supposed to be underlined, but now are not. Sach (talk) 05:09, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

I've just had the "Wikipedia Forever" notice—which at first glance, by the way, looks like the work of a vandal—start to crop up on pages. In the process, my link style has gone from underline to non-underline. Checking my preferences shows that "Underline links" is (still) set to "Always". This may be just a coincidence, but can someone check the notice to ensure that it is not responsible for the formatting change? — Bellhalla (talk) 05:09, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

I agree on the look of the banner. I really thought a hacker got to us. That thing needs to be toned down, and the slogan is just all wrong. Equazcion (talk) 05:11, 11 Nov 2009 (UTC)

I was just about to post here with the same thing, as I'm showing the same behavior. (AKK DAMN EDIT CONFLICTS) ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 05:13, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

(EC) Yeah, its something from the banner. I've left a note with Tomasz Finc. at Meta asking them to fix it...hopefully quickly. Ugh...this tiny font hurts my eyes.[6] -- Collectonian (talk · contribs) 05:12, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

I click on the banner and rien du tout, no matter where I click! Is this an IE problem, or just mine? Otherwise my pages look fine. Bielle (talk) 05:17, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Its an IE problem. Totally borked and untested code from the looks of it. -- Collectonian (talk · contribs) 05:24, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

The banner's a bit screwy but the rest of the page looks pretty normal to me on IE 8. Which version are you using? Dragons flight (talk) 05:30, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm seeing horrible changes in styling in Firefox 3 -- Collectonian (talk · contribs) 05:42, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

In FF 3, the underlines are gone, colors are wonky, and the fonts just appear off. Found the problem CSS and reported it. It looks like it is being looked into now. -- Collectonian (talk · contribs) 06:13, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

I can also confirm the same behavior in Opera 10 and Google Chrome. Nate • (chatter) 06:27, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

IE 7 Bielle (talk) 06:07, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

• Voice your aesthetic concerns at Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Abolish_the_silly_headers. Equazcion (talk) 05:28, 11 Nov 2009 (UTC)

Or at meta:Fundraising_2009/Launch_Feedback which also notes the CSS should be fixed RSN. TRS-80 (talk) 06:55, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

The linking issue should hopefully be resolved now (cf. this and this). --MZMcBride (talk) 07:17, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

The link still doesn't work when I hit it in IE8 - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 08:47, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Ahh, it does work, but not when you pres the text, which is what you'd expect to be the link... - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 09:07, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

DBpedia Template Annotations

There is a new draft available, please comment/modify here: Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/infobox_template_coherence SebastianHellmann (talk) 11:49, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Dear all, let me give you a short introduction to DBpedia (official page), before I come to the core. DBpedia is a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to make this information available on the Web. DBpedia allows you to ask sophisticated queries against Wikipedia, and to link other data sets on the Web to Wikipedia data. The project exists since 2006/2007 and shares the structured data under the same licence as Wikipedia. The project is mainly driven by the University Leipzig, the Free University Berlin, and the company OpenLink Software. The core of DBpedia consists of the extraction of property-value pairs from infoboxes created with templates. For instance, if there is a property "population" in the infoboxes, you could query for all cities, which have a population count between 500.000 and 700.000 with a query in SPARQL, which is similar to SQL.

Immediate use for Wikipedia, two examples:

• Structured search: try to find in Wikipedia all Musicians who play Guitar and come from Canada. This information is actually contained in Wikipedia, but can only be found by manually searching many pages. There are a total of 181 actually as you can see here in the facet based browser
• direct access with the query language SPARQL. About a week ago there was a Datamining Infoboxes thread on the Wikitech-I mailing list, where a user said "I would like to find all Wikipedia pages that use Template:Infobox_Language and parse the parameters iso3 and fam1...fam15", which can very easily be answered using DBpedia, see: SPARQL query result
• other applications

So there is a better way to query Wikipedia in general and it is possible to access the data (there is a public service hosting the data and the transformed dumps are downloadable).

Problem description

Properties of templates are not uniform in general. Some templates use bornIn, some birth_place, birthPlace, origin or hometown. To unify these properties, we originally created a database and created the mappings. As we are generally computer scientists, we can cover this domain quite well, but not others like medicine, pharmacy or linguistics. So the help of domain experts is needed.

Solution

We want to include annotation for templates at Wikipedia directly, so they are freely editable by anyone and belong exactly where they should be. The policy of DBpedia is to be as minimally invasive as possible. We were in contact with some members from the Wikimedia foundation, who proposed to include the Template annotations at the "doc" subpages of templates. With these template annotations it is possible to map existing template properties to uniform properties that make more sense and have a well defined meaning. For example the infobox musical artists has a property born, which is a mix of birthplace and birthdate. Note: we do not intend to change anything at the infoboxes or the templates, we just want to create a way to provide meta information, which says that the property "born" for example has actually two meanings, i.e. place and date. To give some idea, why this is useful, I would like to cite the same Wikipedia user from the Wikitech-I list, who entered this in our Bugtracker (see here: "Language infoboxes have language family fields fam1...fam15. The order of these fields encodes the heirarchy of the language family tree. DBpedia extracts the fields as as multiple "fam" elements in a random order with no sequence data." This information for example can be included into such a template annotation, e.g. as a parseHint=hierarchy which allows DBpedia to generate better data.

Some Notes on previous communication

We previously had discussion with Daniel Kinzler, where we came to the conclusion that the doc subpage of templates are the appropriate place. We were given access to live update stream by Brion Vibber (which means that we get updates automatically and do not have to do any extra calls to Wikipedia or crawl anything). There have also been some discussions about the exploitation of DBpedia for the toolserver. Nevertheless, we would like to have explicit permission that we can put the template annotations in Wikipedia (We already created a version and can provide examples). Former discussions have been on ANI, where a single user opposed our efforts. We would like to receive a broader opinion and hope to achieve fast consensus on this matter and are open for alternatives. On behalf of the DBpedia team SebastianHellmann (talk) 21:52, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Discussion

• Strongly Oppose as the one who first detected this concerted effort by several people from DBpedia folks to flood Wikipedia with these templates on a ton of infobox pages. Wikipedia offers its data for extraction, but it is not in the business of giving any one extractor, which is all DBpedia is, to adjust Wikipedia to make it any easier. This was done without any actual discussion nor permission. They were given access to the live stream. Any programming for scrapping should be done on their end and theirs only. By the OPs own remarks, they already had the appropriate programming. These templates only make it easier on their end, while glutting Wikipedia infoboxes with non-Wikipedia related content that has absolutely nothing to do with Wikipedia itself. And I object to the mischaracterization that I'm the only one who opposed the efforts. In fact, no one has supported them, which is why all of the additions have been reverted, and the accounts were all blocked, and only unblocked on the agreement that you all cease. I'm also not the only one who removed these inappropriate templates. I also object to this user modifying the ANI to claim the subject was "moved". -- Collectonian (talk · contribs) 22:05, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

To rectify one of your points: These templates do not make things easier for DBpedia. On the contrary, it's much harder to read DBpedia configuration from these templates than from local files. The goal of these templates is to allow Wikipedians to directly influence the way DBpedia works. They are not meant to make the extraction job easier. I know that this does not affect your other worries, but since you repeatedly raised this point I think it's important to be clear on this. Chrisahn (talk) 03:23, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

That is the obviously biased belief of those involved in this effort. Wowever absolutely nothing you nor the others did or want to do has anything to do with with improving Wikipedia at all. Adding bloated templates to the infobox doc pages purely for DBpedia's benefits does not aid Wikipedia. You can try rewording it all you want and continue trying to claim it helps Wikipedia - but it is purely for DBpedia's benefit. Wikipedia does not NEED those templates, it does NOT do anything to make our infobox templates more consistent, it does absolutely nothing for Wikipedia. Again, your methods were wrong and this entire thing is inappropriate. As several of you have repeatedly noted, you were extracting the data successfully. Adding these templates did make your lives easier as, by the explanations several have given, it would mean not having to continue to track the infobox inconsistencies. If you want to make proposals for Wikipedia's infobox parameters to be more standardized, then do that. But going around and making special templates with your logo and links prominently featured to benefit DBpedia to map parameters to your needs is not beneficial to Wikipedia.-- Collectonian (talk · contribs) 13:51, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

These templates will help Wikipedians to influence and improve DBpedia, so in this way they help DBpedia. But: DBpedia has a lot to do with improving Wikipedia, as mentioned above: it allows people to query Wikipedia like a database, it helps people find and fix inconsistencies in Wikipedia, it can be used to expand and compare Wikipedia data with other Linked Data sources, and last but not least, it places Wikipedia at the heart of Linked Data, which many (e.g. Tim Berners-Lee) think is the next big step for the Web. You are correct: Wikipedia does not NEED DBpedia. But Wikipedia does not NEED many other things it supports anyway because they HELP Wikipedia. Chrisahn (talk) 16:40, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

• Oppose Until explicit consensus is developed that is appropriate. FWIW, I do not think this is appropriate, for the reasons laid out by Collectonian above. TNXMan 22:22, 8 November 2009 (UTC)
• Support an improved version I couldn't actually fathom Collectonian's reasons for strong opposition though I did spot lots of invective, weasel words, rhetoric, and opinion: concerted effort, flood, ton, not in the business, all X is, scrapping [sic], glutting, inappropriate. It's obvious this user strongly dislikes DBpedia but it's not obvious at all why, at least not the technical reasons. Or perhaps I just haven't been informed of the evil behind DBpedia's intentions. Then again I'm not part of the Wikipedia cabal, just an old occasional contributor and a new discoverer of DBpedia which appears to be very useful and in the spirit of Wiki. — Hippietrail (talk) 00:56, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't strongly dislike DBpedia, never heard of it before today and have no opinion on it one way or another. I dislike the actions they took over the last few days and strongly disagree with any website modifying Wikipedia to make their scraping of data (which is neither an invective, weasel word, etc, but the actual technical term), versus their adjusting their programming to meet their needs, same as the 100s of other data miners do. Or do you honestly believe we should add such templates to every page of Wikipedia for everyone else who extracts data from Wikipedia so its easier for them too? -- Collectonian (talk · contribs) 01:01, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

See above: The goal of these templates is to allow Wikipedians to directly influence the way DBpedia works. They are not meant to make the extraction job easier. Chrisahn (talk) 03:39, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

I read this in the way Chrisahn states, that DBpedia was adding an open way for Wikipedians to determine how DBpedia would read Wikipedia infobox data. I would like to see some mention of the format of these things. It is not clear whether or not they would be only useful to DBpedia or also to the "100s of other data miners". I don't quite see the applicability of the "massive intrusion" analogy given the Wiki policies of "anyone can edit" and "be bold", but then again if these were automated edits as I suspect that would seem to qualify as running a non-approved edit bot. One more thing, nobody has said what exactly a "template doc page" or "infobox doc page" is. Since this is supposed to be a technical topic in a technical forum I would like to see more technical details. The pros and cons of putting openly editable data extraction hints in Wikipedia, the actual proposed methods of doing so, and the pros and cons of this particular method. Then we can all judge better whether it's a good thing or a bad thing. — Hippietrail (talk) 07:55, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

To clarify: We were not running an edit bot, but performed the edits manually. Regarding the use of DBpedia: It can be used by other data miners (which in some cases now query DBpedia instead of performing an extraction themselves), but the primary purpose is to provide a different view on data in Wikipedia and allow to query it beyond what a standard search method can achieve. For instance, you can browse through browse persons born in the USA in 1971, query for famous German musicians born Berlin etc. The data is freely available and conforms to standards (RDF), so we do believe that they add some additional value to the work done by Wikipedia contributors. I agree with you that the technical aspects you mentioned should be discussed. Jens Lehmann (talk) 09:31, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Now that I've seen one of these deleted things from an earlier revision I have to say they are very bloated and ugly, totally dominating the pages they were on. The enormous logo also gives a strong impression of spam. A more subtle approach would help your cause. Perhaps also putting them on their own subpage instead of invading the "doc" subpage. In principle I'm still in favour but I can see why these changes in their original form met with such hostility. I recommend making them more compact and with a less corporate look. Emphasize openness. Focus on how the whole public can make use of them besides just DBpedia. — Hippietrail (talk) 00:26, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

• Oppose Apart from the points raised regarding whether the proposal is worthwhile, I am concerned by the approach of the proponents. Even after a massive intrusion with the effort required to revert, text such as "as minimally invasive as possible" is included above, without the slightest acknowledgement of the trouble caused. Such an attitude means that collaboration is unlikely to be helpful to Wikipedia. Johnuniq (talk) 01:38, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

You are right, we should have started this discussion before we started adding the templates. I'm sorry about that. I've been around here for a while, and I still find the Wikipedia rules quite complex at times. I didn't expect that adding a configuration template to some (about 400) template doc pages (not articles or templates themselves) would be seen as such a massive intrusion. I'm not sure though that the effort to revert was necessary. A notification would have been enough for us to stop. I also offered to revert some of the templates that Collectonian hadn't seen, but she did that work before I had the time. But again, I'm sorry that we acted prematurely. Chrisahn (talk) 03:37, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

I can understand your concerns. However, "as minimally invasive as possible" is meant relative to other methods, which allow Wikipedia users to align information from different infoboxes (such as significant extensions of the underlying MediaWiki software or modifying the infoboxes themselves). In our case, we extend the doc subpages of infoboxes, which is, according to previous discussion, the most sensible place to add this information. Maybe, we should clarify why extending those pages is seen as intrusion of Wikipedia (apart from the problem that we did not discuss this with the right people), such that we can adapt our method. The DBpedia templates contain additional information/documentation about infoboxes, which can help to improve the quality of Wikipedia (e.g. one could add preferred names for attributes like birth_place in Metawiki -- of course this would have to be discussed separately first). Jens Lehmann (talk) 08:02, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

• Question - is there an estimate as to how many pages would need to be edited to support this? Mr.Z-man 02:12, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

When they did their edits, they edited roughly 300-400 infobox doc pages, creating some where they didn't exist. Doing a rough search, if the goal was to do this to every infobox on Wikipedia, then roughly 11,000[7]-- Collectonian (talk · contribs) 02:31, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

The search query above is not very useful. A few thousand results may be actual infoboxes, but the 11000 results also contain all sub-pages [8] and thousands of other templates [9]. DBpedia currently uses about 400 infobox templates [10]. Chrisahn (talk) 03:14, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

• Support in principle, though with some reservations about method. On the face of it this seems a very sensible approach to making the information in Wikipedia more widely re-usable and for placing control over the details of mapping with the editors of wikipedia. older ≠ wiser 03:33, 9 November 2009 (UTC)
• Support I think we should put the "damage" (if at all it should be called like this) in relation to the benefit: As I understood, one of the primary goals of Wikipedia is to improve quality, consistency and coherence. Currently, it is quite difficult and troublesome to identify factual inconsistencies (such as outdated population figures, conflicting birth days etc.) in Wikipedia. The suggested annotations of infoboxes would greatly help Wikipedia authors to identify such inconsistencies, since they e.g. connect the attribute born used in one template with birthday in another. In the short term, this will be a very powerful instrument for Wikipedia authors to cross check information on a large number of pages, in the medium-term this can evolve into more advanced search and querying interfaces and in the long-term establish Wikipedia as a central hub on the emerging Semantic Web. From my point of view, it would be very sad if this opportunities would pass because we object some minor annotations on a few hundred templates. --Soeren1611 (talk) 10:35, 9 November 2009 (UTC) (member of DBpedia)
• Oppose Sounds like an intriguing idea, but I think, just like other outside projects that want to use Wikipedia's data, this particular project shouldn't be given any special treatment. I'm sure many projects would love to add code to our pages to make things easier for themselves; but we don't allow that, as far as I'm aware, and I don't see any special reason to allow it in this instance. I'm also concerned about the methods these people originally used, which causes me to doubt their future judgment. While we're at it, on a slightly less-relevant note, I'm not all too thrilled with whichever Foundation people were involved in this. Allowing access to the live stream, and giving permission to do mass-alterations of templates, without a broad discussion, or even a notification to the community beforehand? This wasn't handled correctly, IMO. Equazcion (talk) 10:51, 9 Nov 2009 (UTC)

I think you still misunderstand a little: the annotations of templates we proposed are not simplifying anything for DBpedia, but they create the missing link between bornIn in one template and born-in in another. Establishing this link should be in primary the interest of Wikipedia itself and actually would benefit Wikipedians in the first place and any mining/extraction project as well. If you are offended by the mentioning of DBpedia in the annotations we are more than happy to downplay or remove them. --Soeren1611 (talk) 11:40, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

The issue of "simplifying" versus "making possible" is a semantic argument. You want to alter Wikipedia pages for the benefit of an outside project, which is not something we generally do, and I again see no special reason to allow it here. I don't think Wikipedia editors shouldn't have to deal with code purely meant to aid an external project. If your goal can't be accomplished externally, then I don't think it should be done. Perhaps a more fundamental change to MediaWiki or template practices might be something to look into, in order to streamline data and have the added benefit of making data more available to outside projects in general; but to add code to Wikipedia's pages just to aid a specific external project is out of the question in my mind. Equazcion (talk) 11:49, 9 Nov 2009 (UTC)

If I read the previous discussion correctly, nobody gave them permission to do any alterations on English Wikipedia. Svick (talk) 11:55, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

One could view the project as providing an RDF view on Wikipedia, which is somehow related to Microformats already present in the doc subpages of infoboxes. In this sense, the annotations could be used by other projects as well. We could remove the references to DBpedia (although it is an open source, non-commercial project) and instead refer to RDF/OWL as Semantic Web standards. This way, the annotations would not be project dependant. (A disadvantage would be that it is harder for Wikipedia/DBpedia users to make the connection to DBpedia, which is a known project in the Semantic Web.) Jens Lehmann (talk) 12:42, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Microformats are not in the doc page btw. They are integral parts of the Infoboxes and article content themselves. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:52, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

• Weak Support It would be nice, if all infoboxes used the same parameter names for parameters with the same meaning. Then, this discussion would be pointless, as DBpedia wouldn't need any additional information. But, unfortunatelly, this isn't the case and it doesn't seem that this would change in the forseeable future. So, we could create some standard, how to tell scrapers, what the parameters mean (similar to microformats, only for Wikicode). If this standard was managed by the Wikipedia community (maybe on Meta?), I would support it.
  One of the problems I had with the templates DBpedia was adding, was that they were visually quite big and contained big DBpedia logo. If this template was hidden by default and didn't contain the logo, it would be much more acceptable for me. Svick (talk) 12:15, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

In previous discussions, we also concluded that Meta is probably the appropriate place for this. Properties like birthPlace and classes like Person have partially been added to Meta already. (There have been discussion with admins on Meta regarding the additions of those pages.) A significant amount of work has been done in the background such that we would be able to provide an initial version covering a number of imported infoboxes, which would then simplify further contributions from Wikipedians. Regarding the visual appearance, I think it is no problem to reduce the template size and remove the logo / replace it by a small icon (or even remove any reference to DBpedia if that is desired). Jens Lehmann (talk) 12:27, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

• Comment, hmm, too bad they started adding without discussing with the community... That said, I love a more standardized approach towards the data in Wikipedia; however:

• The method used should be a well defined standard, so that others can easily use the information as well.
• If it is a standard, there is no need to spam dbpedia name around with templates
• If possible, I prefer data functionality in the software core, over externalizing it. There are 2 ways, either this current approach becomes so popular that we NEED to implement it in the core, or because this works, no one will ever implement it in the core. I'm not sure which of the two is more likely. Then again, waiting out for "magic" to happen might not be the best alternative either.
• There are two general accepted methods of implementing this. The first one is parameter mapping, like proposed here, the other one is microformats. Since we already implement many microformats, I'm not sure if it is a good idea to both. I understand the reason for making hard matches like dbpedia is proposing. It is a simpler method of "scraping" the data into their database. However ease of use for the database developers might not be the best basis for a decision on how WE can best present data in our project.

All in all, i want to see more, discuss more and think more about this. I welcome new developments, but we should consider what the en.wp endgoal should be. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:43, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

• Oppose. Wikipedia is a standalone project that should not have any external dependencies, entanglements, or implied endorsements. The question of whether this arrangement benefits DBpedia is irrelevant, because any such arrangement with any external entity is a negative for Wikipedia. Bear in mind, I support reusing our content according to the license, and if there are technical barriers that make reuse difficult, or that simply prevent it from being easy, then I support removing those barriers. That is to say, if DBpedia makes a case for rationalizing infobox features to help others reuse their contents, I would absolutely support doing so wherever it doesn't conflict with editability. I can't support this current use of Wikipedia's resources, however. — Gavia immer (talk) 16:23, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

any such arrangement with any external entity is a negative for Wikipedia? Jimmy Wales begs to differ... :-) Here are some examples of Wikipedia endorsing / cooperating with external projects:

• Jimmy Wales announces cooperation between KDE Group and Wikimedia [11] [12]
• Wikipedia alliance with Library of Congress and USHMM [13]
• Jimmy Wales Announces $100 Laptop Partnership [14]
• Wikipedia and Yahoo announce alliance [15]
• Orange and Wikimedia announce partnership [16]
• efforts to bring OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia closer together - Wikimedia Deutschland are providing funds of 15.000 Euro [17]

Chrisahn (talk) 17:33, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Those are Foundation arrangements that don't affect on-wiki activity for editors. This is a very different sort of proposal. Equazcion (talk) 17:32, 9 Nov 2009 (UTC)

Yes, but all of those projects were developed outside of Wikipedia. None of them had to place their information on this website in order to make it work. TNXMan 17:40, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Again: these templates do not make it work (they actually make life harder for DBpedia developers), they allow Wikipedians to control DBpedia (and one of DBpedias goals is to help and improve Wikipedia, as stated above). Chrisahn (talk) 18:18, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

That's twisted reasoning. There would be nothing to control if the code wasn't there. DBpedia would only work according to your vision if the code is in the templates. Therefore, the templates make it DBpedia work like you want it to. Consequently, our changes to the data in the templates would then affect your available data; but that does not then mean you can decide that this is a worthy benefit to us. Honestly, that's like attaching an ankle monitor to someone and telling him "Look, you now have the control to make my detector beep!" An extreme example, I know, but you get the general idea. Don't twist this around. You need the template code there in order to make your DBpedia work according to plan. Equazcion (talk) 23:42, 9 Nov 2009 (UTC)

• No-brainer support. The goal of Wikimedia is to make knowledge freely available. We should make any reasonable accommodations we can to allow third-party sites to use our data as efficiently as possible. The proposed modifications don't interfere with the normal operation of Wikipedia in any way, and make it easier for computer programs to use Wikipedia data in a more structured format. It should be made clear, of course, that we don't specifically endorse DBpedia here, we're just trying to make our data more easily machine-readable in general, and DBpedia can provide useful help with that given their experience. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 16:44, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

• Comment Just want to clarify my position. I would absolutely be in favor of an effort to streamline template data for use by external projects (not to mention Wikipedia tools), as Svick describes above. I think he hit the nail on the head rather nicely. I just can't say I support the current proposal, to allow code that's just intended to help a specific external project; I think that would be a step in the wrong direction. Equazcion (talk) 17:41, 9 Nov 2009 (UTC)
• Weak support - Ideally, things like template parameters would be stored in the database as part of MediaWiki, but we don't have that yet and its probably not coming especially soon. But I agree with TheDJ that if we do this, it should be with some well-documented standard, and not something specifically designed for DBpedia. Mr.Z-man 17:55, 9 November 2009 (UTC)
• Oppose this implementation. I think that I support the underlying idea here (from what little of it I understand), but this implementation is just bad. The initial activity in beginning the implementation was obviously problematic, which I think everyone realizes now was a small mistake, but that's not my main concern. The main issue is that this should be implemented through a back end addition to the underlying software, with either a separate api or additions to the mediawiki api in order to access it. That may be difficult to accomplish, but difficulty is no excuse for using shortcuts. I don't understand how the idea to implement this through additions to the article space itself (through doc sub-pages, apparently) gained traction in the first place, since that content is so easily editable... this implementation is just bad for everyone.
  — V = I * R (talk to Ω) 19:04, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

There was already an approach which demanded more servere changes to Mediawiki - called Semantic MediaWiki. Deployment of SMW on Wikipedia failed because the changes would have unpredictable effects the performance. Of course it would be nice if the template annotation approach would ultimately be supported by MediaWiki, but this can be easily achieved in incremental steps starting with the approach we proposed. --Soeren1611 (talk) 22:27, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

The fix the issue(s) with "Semantic MediaWiki". This reply simply reinforces my view that there is an attempt being made here to make an end-run around implementing this correctly, simply because doing so would be difficult. This is hurting both the English Wikipedia and the DBpedia project more then it's helping anything.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 23:00, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Deployment of SMW has not "failed." It hasn't yet been installed due to unknown effects on performance but it is at most stalled due to lack of manpower to review SMW's giant codebase. It certainly has not been abandoned as an option. Mr.Z-man 23:46, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

So deployment of SWM has stalled, since the perceived benefits obviously do not yet justify the required efforts. That's exactly why the much less invasive template annotation approach is so important: Once it shows that semantic annotations make sense in Wikipedia and demonstrates the benefit to ordinary Wikipedians a deployment of SMW becomes much more realistic in the medium term. Actually, the DBpedia template annotation approach and SWM would work very well together: DBpedia template annotations create a critical mass of semantic content and with SWM finer semantic representations can be added directly within the Wiki texts. So you don't have to decide between one or the other - both together will be the winning team! --Soeren1611 (talk) 09:24, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

• Comment/(basically Oppose) To put it simply, WP:NOTWEBHOST. Yes, these templates may affect nothing. Yes, they make make things easier for WP users who chose to make use of DBPedia. But all said and done, any extra data in WP itself that's not being used FOR WP itself goes against policy. And as others said -- it's a slippery slope. If we allow DBPedia's code, we would have to allow anyone else who feels like adding this kind of thing. It's just...not a good idea. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 19:15, 9 November 2009 (UTC)
• Support. I think most of the opposition is based on a few minor misunderstandings (much of it due to arguing over semantics with these people who speak English as a second language). I Support per the reasoning given by Simetrical and older ≠ wiser and Svick particularly. -- Quiddity (talk) 19:46, 9 November 2009 (UTC)
  • I think most people support the idea, but I also think that most people are not yet convinced about the technical implementation. It is the responsibility of the dbpedia people to convince us that this is the right way to do it, and it is our responsibility to be vigilant, investigate and eventually approve/disapprove. That process has been skipped, and it needs to take place. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:57, 9 November 2009 (UTC)
    • I think that's right (if I understand you correctly): several steps have been skipped here. It's probably a good idea to have a general discussion about how to make Wikipedia easier to extract data from, and to develop ways that actually do that. DBpedia may figure strongly in that discussion as a lead example of a data extractor, but I don't think it's a good idea to basically let them do what they think is best within Wikipedia to facilitate their objectives, regardless of how those objectives fit with ours. Rd232 ^talk 20:40, 9 November 2009 (UTC)
• Support Opposition is based on the idea that it is not good to make Wikipedia as accessible as possible to outside users just because the direct wikipedia editors who will be contributing, might not see a direct benefit from it. Why should wikipedia restrict itself to users who access the site using http://en.wikipedia.org/. The idea about not being a web host is just to restrict people using wikipedia as their website. Incase you didn't look, the DBpedia project runs a very big website itself. It is funny that people refer to the use of Wikipedia's resources as if they know exactly how many watt hours are being spent in computer processor usage in this effort, and the expense is not worth the benefit to the editors here so it should be scrapped. Readers won't notice it either way, so it is only editors that are really feeling left alone. Slippery slope or not, the ultimate goal of wikipedia should be emphasising the benefits of free content, not trying to make it look like wikipedia is a big data silo that you can copy verbatim but you can only try to do extra things after you fork the project temporarily. Dbpedia has done that so far, but they thought it would be a useful idea to have the people who know how the infoboxes are designed actually have expert input into the process. Maybe that was the wrong thing to do, maybe not. For what it is worth, a common idea in free content that your only real right is to fork is a bit limited if the ultimate goal is to benefit as many people as possible with the data. Why is this discussion so completely tied up about the idea of Wikipedia being an entity that has to protect itself from outside influences as if free content was designed to be a closed box.
• For what it is worth, the example I saw of the annotations was clear to me, but it might be good for more people to debate alternatives here instead of having a simple vote where some people who would otherwise support have only provided limited summaries for why they have opposed the implementation of the idea. The idea of having this information put into the MediaWiki core is a pipe dream btw. *Everything* in MediaWiki is done using wikitext of some form, why would template annotations be an area that should be only able to be done some other way? Ansell 21:02, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

  Ansell, I don't think anyone it's saying it's not good to make WP as accesible as possible, but rather adding stuff to WP for the express purpose of helping out one entity is an antithesis to what WP is about. In other words, DBPedia is free to make use of WP's data all they want, but they aren't free to chage WP just for their own sake, any more than a user is allowed to use their user page as a personal website. Then again, maybe I'm missing something in the entire discussion... ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 21:16, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

• Oppose this particular implementation per TheDJ and TheDJ's reply to Quiddity, but I think we're doing a terrible job of explaining our message to the DBpedia people, who are only here to help. Here's the message: you're at least the 10000th organization that wants to add your logo somewhere on en.wikipedia in recognition of your special contributions, and at least 100th that claims or suggests that you have the blessing of the Wikimedia Foundation (if we include sister sites) ... so I totally understand your confusion at what seems like a harsh response, but it would be hypocritical of us to allow you to add your logo and claim a special relationship with DBpedia when we've denied that recognition to every other organization, including in many cases other Foundation sites. However, don't give up hope ... it's not out of the question that the DBpedia name will get wider recognition around Wikipedia over time, but if it's going to happen, it will take a long time and a lot of work, and it's never going to happen that we display your logo on Wikipedia pages (other than at DBpedia) or mention your website in a prominent way. Start off slowly; get involved in discussions about standardizing the language in infoboxes and make the case that this adds semantic value to Wikipedia pages. When people don't want to standardize language, there are many options for hidden tags that could accomplish the same standardization; a simple one would be {{anchor}}, which would have the advantage of letting us treat the metadata as a section link. - Dank (push to talk) 21:08, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Its very disappointing that so many of you think the primary interest of DBpedia is to get its logo on Wikipedia or act in its own interest. So far, we thought of ourselfs more of being part of Wikipedia. Most of the issues raised here are easy to solve: We already removed the DBpedia logo from the template annotation template and removing DBpedia from its name is easy. We will try to draft a more comprehensive proposal and explanations. The resulting template annotations will benefit everybody - extraction projects as well as ordinary Wikipedia authors alike. --Soeren1611 (talk) 22:08, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for your explanations and encouragement. We already removed the logo and we can also remove any reference to DBpedia and instead e.g. emphasize the role of RDF and OWL as W3C standards instead, so that DBpedia is only one specific implementation using the annotations. Promoting DBpedia was not a goal in this effort. We will use all input in the discussion so far and create a new proposal soon including explanations how we, as Wikipedians, can benefit. (I realize that Sören replied already, but leave the comment here.) Jens Lehmann (talk) 22:30, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

As I said, I think you guys are here for the right reasons, and thanks for understanding our strange ways. It sounds like you're on the right path. - Dank (push to talk) 23:51, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

• Weak Oppose I love what DBpedia is trying to do in making structured Wikipedia data machine-readable and queryable, but I share concerns about this not being the right implementation. It should be done in a more integrated fashion; MediaWiki really needs better support for structured/tabular data, which would both make editing and verifying the data easier for us and extracting the data easier for DBpedia and others like it. Any implementation should not be DBpedia-specific (although they and those like them certainly would be worth consulting on any implementation); Non-mainspace non-Wikimedia-related content does not belong on Wikipedia; no playing favorites (not that DBpedia is evil/commerical/monopolistic or anything like that, it's just the "sacred" principle of independence and neutrality we run on)]. For the time being, such mappings belong firmly on DBpedia. Software support would be a good request to make in the strategic planning process: WP:STRATEGY --Cybercobra (talk) 23:08, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Besides two things (the logo and the references to DBpedia), which are easy to change the implementation is not at DBpedia specific. Everybody would benefit, if the link between synonymous template attributes would be established. Please also see my comment responding to Mr. above: once we can show the benefit of this minimally invasive solution it can be incrementally refined into a more advanced approach later - we were working on and discussing this strategy for more than a year. In particular a combination with SWM would make much sense in the medium to long term. --Soeren1611 (talk) 10:28, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

• There is a new draft available, please comment/modify here: Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/infobox_template_coherence SebastianHellmann (talk) 11:49, 12 November 2009 (UTC) Change to proposal There seems to be some support for the general method of providing a template-based Semantic Mapping of infoboxes, which can be useful to extraction approaches. There also seems consensus that the template we created with the logo and links will not be accepted. Most of the opinions on this page disagree with the current form of the template, so we propose a new one for discussion, that tries to generalize the approach (and does not contain any mention of DBpedia or any other approach whatsoever). As an alternative approach implementation in the core of the system was mentioned. We propose a way, that does not involve any development effort for MediaWiki, but only for external applications and also does not cause extensive restructuring as in the case of e.g. Microformats, which require Template changes and propagation of modifications to possibly thousands of articles.

Here is the basic outline:

• a template will be created at Template:Template_annotation
• there will be three basic operations for infobox properties:
  • map one to one (e.g. bornIn can be mapped to birthplace) realized by Template:Template_property
  • split properties (born containing birthplace and date can be split into two), Template:Template_property can be reused.
  • merge properties (geocoordinates are often scrambled accross the whole infobox, sometimes using 6 properties) at Template:Template_merge_property
• there will be a vocabulary, i.e. a list of terms or words to basically tell the parsers how to extract the data in each of the 3 scenarios above. The list will be kept somewhere (any ideas?) and properly documented. Some initial "parsehints": date, links, text, geocoordinate, hierarchy, currency(euro, dollar), units(km, cm, kg, g, stone).
• we made some good experience with mapping several infoboxes to a common class or category, i.e. Template:infobox_mass_town_govt and Template:infobox_israel_municipality could both be mapped to a class "City"
• some requirements:
  • the template should be as unobtrusive as possible, small, no logos, slim and (if possible) collapsible
  • the template should contain clear guidelines and formulate the intent clearly

To make the discussion more concrete and not on an abstract level, we will create a mockup of the above mentioned pages and afterwards include them, filled with example values, at the end of the discussion on this page. The general purpose of these new templates will be to help extraction approaches extract cleaner data and also will allow Wikipedians to express how the data they entered in the articles should be interpreted and transformed by machines. Maybe, we can achieve consensus on how the template should look like and afterwards decide, where they shall be placed (if they are collapsed by default and only take up one line, the doc subpages might yet be adequate). SebastianHellmann (talk) 02:03, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Hello Sebastian. I think it is better to create a more comprehensive and self-contained proposal first to make it easier for others to see the whole picture before people now start to comment/vote on your idea of a changed proposal. @core-Wikipedians: Would it be appropriate to create a page (e.g. "Wikipedia:Ontology") in the Wikipedia namespace belonging to category "Wikipedia_proposals"? Or is it better to develop the proposal elsewhere and then copy it here in a separate section? Jens Lehmann (talk) 06:53, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

• Question - How does this relate to other consumers of Wikipedia templates who produce structured data? I know Freebase has been doing live extractions for years, but I imagine there are others as well. Is the intent for everyone to converge on a single set of annotations or each have their own? If a single set, how is consensus obtained? (directed here from DBpedia mailing list, so no account - sorry) 65.215.113.195 (talk) 05:01, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

As mentioned above, we plan a proposal update which is not DBpedia specific. The common ground should still be the W3C Semantic Web specifications (RDF and OWL). It is very likely that Freebase can and will make use of the annotations as well in this case. Consensus would be obtained by the standard processes in Wikipedia, i.e. Wikipedians decide how to annotate the data. (The DBpedia project can, however, provide an initial version, which we already developed and tested over the past year.) I would opt for a single annotation template per infobox. Apart from the overhead required for multiple annotations, it is also quite clear from the discussion above that annotations, which are specific to a commercial company like Freebase, probably won't find support. Jens Lehmann (talk) 07:22, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

break

I recommend drawing this thread to a close, it's getting a bit TLDR, and there seems to be agreement on taking a step back and talking about how to do data extraction generally, agreement on which would ultimately meet DBpedia's objectives but be designed with a wider audience in mind. I suggest starting a Request for Comment: WP:Requests for comment/data extraction. Sebastian could introduce his changed proposal there, but it might be better for a non-DBpedian to formulate the RFC. Rd232 ^talk 10:56, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Yeah for instance, i'm not so convinced that adding this to /doc is any better than adding it as microformats to the infoboxes themselves. I understand that "disruption" to the english wikipedia was one of the factors that was taken into consideration when choosing this implementation. There is nothing wrong however, with making changes to many infoboxes if this improves Wikipedia. The templates in their current form are not sacred, and although it would be annoying to make changes to so many templates, i'm not against it per say. There is nothing wrong with a disruptive approach, if it is the best approach our money and effort can buy us at this moment in time. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:57, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

It should be stable before being disruptive, there could be a lot of argument about whether Prime Minister is an occupation or an office, also classes and a hierarchy can be disputable. So this approach could be seen as a requirement engineering and also produce a stable version, which can be used to disruptively edit template definitions. I agree to your break, there will be another page soon, which will have a clear proposal to discuss SebastianHellmann (talk) 16:14, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Following your suggestion, an RFC draft for the topic was created. Please edit and/or comment on the page. We took the discussion input into account and tried to address the issues mentioned. We also made the page mostly self-contained such that everyone can comment without needing to read the entire discussion leading up to the RFC. I hope this is in line with the standard Wikipedia processes for reaching consensus. Otherwise, moderation from an admin would be welcome. Jens Lehmann (talk) 14:42, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Could this be delt with through DBpedia coming up with a standard, publishing an IETF style RFC and then us considering if it is something we want to adopt?©Geni 23:41, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

New "scientific refs" for Wikipedia

Article view when script SciRefs is running. Demo page - http://ru.great.wikia.com/wiki/Zinc

I wrote a new script for Wikipedia which replaces tags "ref". My script implements in the scientific (Harvard) style, but it is also compatible with tag "ref" and other markup.

Here are some examples of how my script is used:

[name] - is link, e.g. [Smith 2009] or [Smith 2009| p.121]

[*name] - is an anchor, e.g. [*Smith 2009]

For compatibility reasons, an editor should insert the template {{SciRefsOn}} somewhere in the page to turn the script on.

Additional details (description with screenshoots) can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:X-romix/SciRefs

Demo Wiki with working realisation - is here: http://ru.great.wikia.com/wiki/Zinc

I would like to help make Wikipedia more user-friendly. When using this script, backlinks may be accessed via the "Back" button in the browser or the backspace key on the keyboard. This backlink will be highlighted.

This reference style is simpler than the current convention, and it corresponds to the scientific standard (author-date Harvard referencing system).[18]

Jimbo Wales commented on my work the following way: I strongly support making refs easier to read and easier to use. You might want to pass this along to the usability team?--Jimbo Wales (talk) 22:32, 5 November 2009 (UTC) [19]

X-romix (talk) 12:04, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

I have some smaller problems with your proposal (I find the long notes ugly; it will break many articles that contain some text in square brackets; showing the pipe character before page is also ugly) and one HUGE problem: it requires JavaScript to work – it doesn't work AT ALL without it. I also don't see what your proposal tries to solve: The Back button already works, some articles use the Harvard style (see e.g. Albert Speer) and I don't think that <ref>{{harvnb|Smith|2009}}</ref> clutters the article that much. Svick (talk) 19:59, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

JavaScript is one of possible implementations. Another possible realisation - in PHP. Please note, that problem with square brackets is not exist: there is switcher template {{SciRefsOn}} to turn script on (default state - it switched off), and there is no effect if you want to write something, e.g. [xxx] without pair tag [*xxx]. You can test this cases here. Note, that button back in current ref implementation already works, but backlink is not highlighted. It is difficult to user to return on his reading point by eyes. X-romix (talk) 21:27, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Stop: Was using this proposed or discussed anywhere before hand? I have a real problem with this, for all of the reasons that Svick mentions. Besides, you know that something is on the wrong track when the proposer is invoking the name of Jimbo or the Foundation... I admire the clear thought in trying to improve the encyclopedia, but this is the wrong way to go about things.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 21:00, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Script do not take any effect if there is not required tag pair [xxx] and [*xxx] where xxx - is equal sequences (labels). In known for me articles [*...] sequences is not exists, but I use a switcher {{SciRefsOn}} (default it is off) for precaution as shown above. Proposing is discussed in the Russian blog ru_wikipedia. Working test article you can see on the references above. You can edit the test article http://ru.great.wikia.com/wiki/Zinc if you want to test the script and the markup (I've unprotect it). X-romix (talk) 21:44, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

I think this is just a solution looking for a problem. The caret (^) by every footnote leads back to the note (this might be a problem if one note is used more than once, but then again, you proposed system is pretty much the same). Intelligentsium 21:47, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Well, it seems his solution does solve this problem – if you have more notes that point to the same footnote, his script aparently remembers which one you clicked and returns you to it when you click to the equivalent of caret in that system. But this couldn't be done without JS (as he said that this could be done in PHP too). Svick (talk) 22:03, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

There is not problem to reproduce usual format of backlinks. Highlighting can be writed only in JavaScript, but this is an optional extra. I can mix both PHP and JavaScript to make most convenient refs. X-romix (talk) 22:21, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Main purpose of using square bracket links - is move book descriptions to the end of the article, and make book references (with page numbers) more simple and intuitive to the author. <ref>{{harvnb|Smith|2009}}</ref> is a good idea, but why not write [Smith 2009] in body of the article and [*Smith 2009] labels in biblbograhy section? There is not incompatibles anyway as shown above. X-romix (talk) 22:45, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Labeling refs?

I think the specific implementation being proposed above is ultimately a non-starter (requires Javascript for starters), but I'd like to ask about the general issue of labeling. Would people like / appreciate the option of replacing the ^[1] with a more informative label, e.g. ^{[Johnson, 1905]}? It wouldn't be hard to add that option to the existing ref system in a way that is backwards compatible with the current system. Dragons flight (talk) 21:11, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

JavaScript implementation I can rewrite on PHP. Backward compatible there is in my realisation. You can use "ref" tag for footnotes, and mix it freely with "Harward" references to books and articles. And make refs from other refs. Footnotes and References - is different things! For example, you can use ref to any book from the footnotes, and footnotes from the refs. X-romix (talk) 22:03, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

We can already use ref to create separate footnotes and references. They can be placed in different sections by using the group attribute of the ref tag. Dragons flight (talk) 23:05, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Sometimes—depending the reason why I'm reading a topic—I'd like citations to be handled differently, e.g. using ^{[Smith, 2008]}, or displaying the reference as a sidenote, or even in a javascript floating box when I hover over the citation anchor. But I wouldn't want the article's authors/editors to make that decision: it should be the reader's choice for a particular session. Ideally, I'd like to see a far more radical overhaul of the reference/citation model, storing all sources in a database (common to all languages) so the article author finds/creates the source in the database, adds citation-specific details (chapter, page, quote) to the article and leaves rendering to the user preferences. I need to think this through and write it up properly, but you see what I mean. BTW, your proposal to define reference names in the ==References== section is a step in the right direction. Thanks - Pointillist (talk) 22:31, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Pssssttt, WP:LDR has been live for a while now. Dragons flight (talk) 22:54, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

I know! That was just to thank you for having made the original proposal :-) Pointillist (talk) 23:27, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, one can think of more radical solutions, but I'm not sure how well one could sell them to the community. For example, I work on a wiki where all references exist in a separate Reference namespace, such that adding a citation to an article (assuming the reference already exists) only requires {{Reference:Harper and Block 1994}}. The corresponding Reference space entry then has a combination of include-able citation data and noinclude additional data such as a copy of the abstract and categories on the reference for organization.

Anyway, if someone wants to come up with a more radical solution, and can sell the community on it, then I am willing to work on such things. Dragons flight (talk) 23:00, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Heathhunnicutt suggested a "sources in a database" approach back in 2007 but it didn't take off. To sell it to the entire community in one shot is a tall order, but success in a niche area could be a sufficient starting point. Active support from a major content provider (e.g. BBC, NYT, FT, Springer, Lexis etc) might be helpful, but that would be difficult for anonymous volunteers like us to organize. It would make all the difference if we could demonstrate a decent prototype, but it would probably take months to build one, and we all have other priorities in RL. - Pointillist (talk) 23:53, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Everything here is already available through the use proper of the existing Cite.PHP extension. If you want to have more then ^[1] show up on a reference, then just use a group= parameter for the ref tag. For example: <ref group=Johnson name=1905>Page 10</ref> will produce references exactly as is being described here. Let's not reinvent the wheel. For example, see: Moon landing conspiracy theories
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 22:50, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

The longer labels (that I personally don't prefer) are something completely different than the group parameter. Your solution won't produce ^{[Smith 2005]}, but ^{[Smith 1]}, would require lots of {{reflist}}s and would force the references to be grouped by author. So, implementing this wouldn't be reinventing the wheel at all. Svick (talk)

Please see how your test <ref group=Johnson name=1905>Page 10</ref> is works:

My tests is works better. X-romix (talk) 17:04, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

That's not the point of the group attribute though, it creates different reference groups such that each one requires a unique <reference group="foo"> or {{reflist|group=foo}}. It's meant for separating references from notes, not for labeling individual references. Dragons flight (talk) 22:52, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

If you look at how the group paramater is actually used you'll discover that your mistaken. That's why I included the link to an example article which uses the format being discussed.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 23:05, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

And they need 7 different calls to reflist to do what's on that page. I don't think anyone would go for having one reflist for every unique entry, which is what would be required in other to add a unique label to every entry. It also defeats the purpose of having built-in sorting functionality. As I said, the group attribute is not designed nor intended to label every reference (and a certainly hope no one uses it that way). Dragons flight (talk) 23:11, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't understand where the "need 7 different calls to reflist" comment is coming from. I'm getting the distinct impression that I have no clue what is really being discused, here. :(
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 23:37, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Where is group= documented, anyway? - Pointillist (talk) 23:20, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

WP:CITE.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 23:38, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Not if I search (FF 3.0.15) for the word "group" on the page. Can you be more specific? Pointillist (talk) 23:51, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Try WP:FOOT and Help:Footnotes. Neither are very detailed, but they do mention it. Dragons flight (talk) 23:54, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm not really sure what more could be documented, anyway. The group parameter only does one thing: placing references into a different grouping then the 0th one. Is there a specific question that you're wondering about?
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 00:12, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

No, just trying to decide whether it is a useful approach. The Jane Austen example mentioned in WP:FOOT actually uses the {{Cref2}} technique which looks intricate and isn't widely used anyway. Thanks for asking, though. - Pointillist (talk) 00:33, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

The Jane Austen example brings up a corollary point to what I think I'm trying to get across here. I don't understand why {{Cref2}} is needed at all. I don't see any new utility to it's use which isn't available through using the group parameter.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 00:49, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Don't ask me! - Pointillist (talk) 00:58, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

I think that most uses of {{ref}}, {{cref}}, {{cref2}}, {{scref}}, {{hcref}}, {{note}} and other variants can be replaced by the cite.php group feature. I suspect most uses were added before the group feature and continue to be proliferated because of a lack of knowledge of group. The only use for any of these is where a named reference is used so many times that the backlinks become unwieldy and ugly. It might be appropriate to start a separate discussion on merging and deprecating these templates. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 01:02, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Incorrect block status (+ a block request)

Looking at the user contribs for 24.109.207.40 (talk · contribs · WHOIS) brings up a notice that the user is blocked. Except they aren't. They were blocked for 6 months in September 2008, so their block expired months ago and they are now able to edit, as evidenced by their recent edits. I assume this notice is automatically added, but whatever calculates the status seems to be broken. If an admin could block the IP after this is fixed, that would be great - it is the main IP of Swamilive (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · nuke contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log). Thanks. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 18:21, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Peculiar. Doesn't appear to be any range or global blocks in effect as far as I can tell... –xeno^talk 19:31, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Well, it seems to be working as expected today (i.e. no block notice). I have no idea if my posting here prompted a fix somewhere or if this is a bug that occurs intermittently. I'll take the block request to ANI. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 18:49, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Twinkle stalling

Multiple users - myself included - are reporting that Twinkle is stalling during tagging. Any issues?  7  02:03, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Also, I'm receiving the message "Reverting page: couldn't grab element "editform", aborting, this could indicate failed response from the server" when trying to "restore this version" when comparing diffs. Undo and rollback seem to be working Declan Clam (talk) 02:09, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Seems like its everybody since no (TW)s show up in recent changes. Friendly is also not working, but HotCat and Popups seem fine. I still see (HG)s in recent changes, so I guess Huggle is fine. Any other tools broken? --Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 03:02, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

This was due to an experimental switch to an HTML5 doctype last night. It turns out this breaks magical behavior in browsers, which only support named entities in XML for a small fixed list of doctypes. The switch was turned off after about two hours, so all should be well now. If any problems persist, try purging the relevant pages. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 16:31, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Cite errors...

Is it possible to maybe make the cite error dialogues a bit more...less scary looking for the noobs? I was thinking stuff like this:

Or something around these lines. ViperSnake151  Talk  02:53, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

I think that this is a good idea. Support

You should move this to the (Proposals) portion of Village Pump, though. Simply open this section for editing, open another tab for WP:VPPR and add a new section there, then select all of the text in this section and cut and paste it there. Then save both, with the edit text for this (the Village Pump (technical) section) empty.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 03:23, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

The problem is that the first would have to go at the end of the article, and the second wherever in the middle of the article (possibly mid-paragraph) the problem ref occurs; and were that not the case, would it be at all useful when it gives no indication of which ref is the problem? I don't think that's quite what you intend. Anomie⚔ 03:26, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

But, the current (angry, large, red) messages already show up at the end and in the middle of the article. Regardless of what the message is or how it's formatted, it should only exist on the article for minutes.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 04:03, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Wasn't the proposal here to replace the current messages with these boxes? If not, I misunderstood. But (without software modifications) the boxes would still have to be inserted where the error occurs, while boxes like this normally go at the top of the article/section. Anomie⚔ 12:33, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

"Cite error: There are <ref> tags on this page, but the references will not show without a <references/> tag" is generated by MediaWiki:Cite error refs without references. That MediaWiki message does not support wikimarkup, nor do two other messages; see T19865. BTW: The Cite error part of the current error message links to the relevant section at Help:Cite errors via an anchor. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 19:01, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Okay, maybe I'll start this fresh on the correct board, I got a better idea... ViperSnake151  Talk  19:15, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Interwiki links broken?

Is it me or are all interwiki links broken? Regards SoWhy 18:36, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

It's not just you - also links to Commons.Nigel Ish (talk) 18:38, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Correct. Also the link to Terms of Use beneath the edit summary box is now a redlink. Enigma^msg 18:39, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Also links to BugZilla and the MW support desk are now redlinks at the top of the page. Enigma^msg 18:40, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

That was fixed quickly, at least. The links are working again. Interwikis still broken, though. Enigma^msg 18:42, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Pages may need to be purged, or the templates transcluding the interwiki links. Cenarium (forever) 18:50, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

• This is a known issue and they're working on it. –xeno^talk 18:42, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Interwikis back now as well.Nigel Ish (talk) 18:43, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks a lot that the change has been reversed, it was simply horrible! -- 84.47.59.184 (talk) 18:45, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

See the Server admin log. Cenarium (forever) 18:47, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

If anybody's still having problems, purge the page cache and bypass your browser cache.--Unionhawk ^{Talk E-mail Review} 18:52, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Template size limit

Is there a limit on the size of a template?—NMajdan•talk 19:52, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

The template page itself has the same size limit as any other page: it cannot be over 2 megabytes in wikitext. However there are other limits on how much data can be dynamically included in any page via templates. These limitations are described at Wikipedia:Template limits. — Carl (CBM · talk) 19:58, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Two megabytes. That's what I needed. Thanks.—NMajdan•talk 20:10, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Rollback Rights

Hi everyone

I've recently had rollback rights added and I'm using Twinkle for other reverts. I understood that using the rollback rights that I got an automatic message when I reverted but it would also display TW for Twinkle at the end. However my messages aren't displaying that. Any ideas? --5 albert square (talk) 21:30, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

According to your contributions, Twinkle is summarizing normally. When you use WProllback, there is no TW suffix. Intelligentsium 23:38, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Text under the edit window

Using IE8 on a WinXp and two Win7 systems. When editing a section that has already been created, I am seeing text between the bottom of the edit window and the edit summary. Any ideas? My main system with FireFox is down for an upate. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 02:06, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

When I open the section for editing, the text is "(UTC)" and changes as I type. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 02:08, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

No clue from the description given so far... could you post a screenshot?
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 04:35, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Not showing with fireFox 3.5. Not showing with IE8 if I log out, so it is probably some personal CSS issue. The text under the edit box that starts with "Content that violates any copyrights will be deleted" is being replaced. --— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 06:11, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Help with random text

I need help with generating random phrases. Actually, much simpler, I just want my user page to alternate between a series of phrases. I know there is a code to do this, but what is it? --67.180.161.183(talk)_{05:14, 17 November 2009 (UTC)}

You can use something like this code:

{{#switch:{{#expr:{{NUMBEROFEDITS:R}} mod 3}}|0=first alternative|1=second|2=and third}}

that currently produces: "and third". The text will change every time you edit or purge the page. You have to change the 3 to the number of alternatives and list them, starting from zero. Technically, it's not random, but I think it will suffice. Svick (talk) 05:42, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Expanding template

This template gets wider when you open one of its sub-menus instead of remaining the same size. I can I eliminate this undesired behavior? SharkD  Talk  03:09, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Done. By increasing width: to 19em, the box is wide enough to allow the list contents to be shown without it necessitating an increase in size. Since the width is based on the lists not being shown, it was sized smaller than it needed to be to properly display the contents. --tennisman 03:24, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

This is not a good solution. Please suggest a fix that doesn't involve increasing the overall size of the template. SharkD  Talk  05:01, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

The problem is that {{Sidebar}} applies the "nowraplinks" class to its table, which via rules in MediaWiki:Common.css causes links to not wrap, which makes the box expand when those long links are shown. The fix seems to be to use {{normalwraplink}} for the links that are too long, or to pipe the links to shorten the displayed text. Anomie⚔ 12:58, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

wow... you know, someone should take a stab at simplifying the various .css files for the site (and, of course, all of the derivative pages) when they get a chance to do so. This sort of thing (technically) just sucks.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 13:36, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

The case of the missing revisions

Odd one here. Does anyone have any idea why the revisions from here to here (inclusive) are empty? Doesn't look like they were oversighted, and there was talk activity during that period, but so far as the revision history goes the page was apparently blanked at the start of that period, edited several times while still empty, and then restarted afresh (with a bunch of new comments) at the end. Database problem? Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 14:32, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

bugzilla:20757 —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:50, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Great, cheers (and thanks for adding this instance to the bug report). Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 15:34, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Now, if we could actually get someone interesting in addressing the bug report...
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 16:43, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

How to con lazy admins into deleting Wikipedia's images

Let's play with the picture at Motojirō Kajii, it's easy as 1-2-3:

• 1: Make any small change to the filename just to break the picture.
• 2: Let some dumb bot just flag it as "orphaned non-free" without any sort of check.
• 3: Let some lazy admin just delete it as "F5" without any sanity check (even though the picture's description links to its home article, where the infobox displays a red link picture)

Voila! Bravo! Repeat as much as you like: it's free! Have fun! 62.147.25.212 (talk) 02:33, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

If you feel the deletion was in error, go talk to the deleting admin, always the first step if you feel a deletion may have been made erroneously or there might be good cause to reverse it. You will probably find that will work better if you stop making personal attacks and are a bit more polite about it, though. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 02:44, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

The IP has a point though. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 03:09, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm not really sure it's a valid point, and certainly not one deserving of that level of venom. The bot tagged the article, the deleting admin found that it is indeed orphaned and has been for some time, and deleted it. At that point, there's not necessarily even any way of telling what article it was used on, and some were used on several articles before orphaning. There's a week's lag between the image going orphan and the deletion, so I think by that point, it can be easily enough presumed that silence indicates consensus. I'm not sure it'd be reasonable to check the (sometimes multiple) pages an image used to be on to find the occasional screwup that no one over a week's time noticed or cared enough to fix. (I'm also not sure why we'd need a nonfree image for that article, there's nothing in it that really indicates that the guy's looks rather than his books are the subject. That's not why it was deleted, of course, but could have something to do with the lack of objection.) Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 03:20, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

The use of SILENCE in relation to deletion worries me, here. That sort of justification can only lead to confrontational guardianship/ownership of articles and files.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 04:28, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

The point of waiting a week is to give people time to fix things like this. It is not the role of the admin doing the deletion to research every page the image has been used on. If the image is tagged as orphaned for a week and is still orphaned at the end of the week, it can be deleted. Of course, if it turns out there was a mistake, the image can be undeleted as well. And if the image was not orphaned when it was deleted, that is a problem. But in this case it appears there was simply a strange gap in the people watching the page, so that nobody noticed the broken image. — Carl (CBM · talk) 04:35, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm not particularly concerned with the specifics, simply the idea that it's OK to delete the <whatever> because nobody has said not to within a set period of time. The idea there just bothers me... a lot.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 04:52, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Considering no one even noticed the vandalism to the article between August and November...not sure the image being deleted is the biggest issue here... -- Collectonian (talk · contribs) 04:59, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

That's probably what's giving me the most trouble with this. You'd think that the person would look at the article/file history prior to using the deletion button. That sort of carelessness doesn't exactly inspire confidence (what little actually exists) in those who we've given access to the tools.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 05:04, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

PS.: I wouldn't really call the original edits which created the issue here "vandalism", since it seems to me that the person was simply unaware that the file name is important.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 05:06, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

You would also think someone from Wikiproject Japan would have this on their watchlist. As Collectonian says, there are bigger problems with this specific article, since the image was deleted in August and apparently nobody noticed until now. Really this incident is an argument in favor of a reviewing system to ensure edits aren't missed, but that's another issue. — Carl (CBM · talk) 05:22, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

(indent reset) Regarding silence being consensus, we have an entire deletion process based upon that very concept, and realistically, most editing is done that way (if I do something, and no one argues, it can be presumed to have consensus until and unless someone does object). Images for deletion quite often works that way as well—an image will be proposed for deletion, and if no one argues it shouldn't be deleted, it is. Only if someone raises an objection does a full debate take place, otherwise it's presumed that, again, silence is consensus. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 05:45, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

I am really glad that editors are becoming more vocal in a deletion problem which has existed since at least 2004. Those interested in this topic may find Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment/new users and Wikipedia:Newbie treatment at CSD valuable. Ikip (talk) 06:33, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Silence and consensus have nothing to do with this. Admins are supposed to make some basic verifications before deleting, especially speedily deleting, such as checking the history. It's very clear from the image description that it's supposed to be used on Motojirō Kajii. You just had to make one simple click to get to that page, and you would immediately see the redlink image and see the problem. Maybe it should be noted at MediaWiki:Filedelete-intro. Cenarium (forever) 17:16, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Um, I guess I should add that there is a proposal at WP:BRFA to delete these files automatically. Would you like to make a suggestion as to how to improve that method (since bots can check histories and so forth, taking it out of fallible human hands)? I don't think any checking for this sort of vandalism is currently proposed. - Jarry1250 ^{[Humorous? Discuss.]} 17:27, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

FWIW, I feel that automating these sorts of things is an excellent idea, as long as its not really a quick process and that a human being could relatively easily interject at any time to prevent deletions. My gut feeling is that the existence of large backlog queues creates an unnecessary sense of urgency in these matters (and not only for deletion, by the way). We have created a monster, so to speak (both in the sense of urgency problem and the sense of overwhelming workload, actually), and so it's up to us to deal with the problems that it's causing.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 17:46, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

That was not vandalism, but a mistake by a new user. There is not really a feasible automatic way to check this. I've commented at the BRFA. But isn't there semi-automatic ways to make such deletions ? Cenarium (forever) 23:33, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

In the case of orphaned fair-use images (F5), where the file clearly has a fair-use rationale that includes (as required by policy) a link to the article where the file is purportedly being used, it is not at all unreasonable to expect the deleting admin to take a glance at the page to confirm that the image really is not being used there, which should identify scenarios like this. With file redirects now live on WMF wikis but not entirely bug-free, it is possible for files to actually be in use on pages, displaying entirely correctly, and still not appear in the list of file links. A few seconds of extra care is entirely appropriate. CSD, as has been said many times, is not about deleting the greatest possible number of pages in the shortest possible amount of time. Happy‑melon 23:12, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Table / conditional parser nuances

Anyone able to look into a sticky problem with trying to use conditionals with wikitable syntax in {{talk header/sandbox}}? Have a look at the middle of the code, where I've had to hack around the problem by using HTML elements. The basic problem is that there doesn't seem to be a way to stop the parser treating a new line as a line break and adding <p><br /></p> in. The test cases page has tests for the various permutations. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 16:09, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

• *guffaw* Sorry, you're on your own with that damn template... *rolls eyes*
  — V = I * R (talk to Ω) 16:44, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
  • If you're not actually going to help, why comment? This is the technical village pump after all; technical questions are to be expected. Mr.Z-man 18:10, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

It's likely the issue could be prevented by switching completely to Html and judicious use of comments... --Izno (talk) 17:52, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

That's as much of a non-answer as the comment above. I'm looking to see whether the parser can handle what I'm asking; I'm perfectly capable of hacking around it already, as shown by the working state of the current sandbox. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 22:54, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

It's a non answer because I doubt you're going to get the answer of "yes, you can do this". I was simply providing the alternative to mixing wikiml with html. Simply put, wikiml isn't made for parserfunctions. /shrug. --Izno (talk) 23:40, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm not posting on VPT because I want hedged bets which tell me things I already know, but thanks for responding anyway. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 23:56, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

.js code problem

I am trying to add a script from another wiki (fr:) that allows easy evaluation of articles. Unfortunately, this script does not exist here, which means I have to copy and paste the rather lengthy full source code; a problem aggravated by the fact that line breaks "disappear" when I hit save. The code does not work without the breaks. How do I prevent the line breaks from disappearing? Intelligentsium 23:50, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Javascript isn't whitespace-sensitive; if it's not working, it's for reasons other than the whitespace being swallowed. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 00:02, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

That is not true: The ECMAScript specification suggests that the scripting engine should automagically insert missing semi-colons (chapter 7.9) when encountering line breaks in white-space. This suggests that the problem might be fixed by putting semi-colons at the end of lines.     — SkyLined (talk) 00:15, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, but there are many, many lines at the end of which to insert colons. Intelligentsium 00:23, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

In this case the code did not work because it was hidden behind // comment. The solution is simply to copy from the edit mode, that is click "view source" tab on top first. P.S. importScript(':fr:User... will not work, to import the script from other Wikipedia you need importScriptURI('http://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:xx/scriptname.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript'). — AlexSm 00:50, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Add link to search help

(For previous discussion, see #Search page above.) We have now established which MediaWiki pages needs to be edited in order to ensure that the search results page contains a link to the help on searching (Wikipedia:Searching), so I've proposed doing it. I'd have thought this was a no-brainer, but there seems to be doubt, so please indicate if you support or oppose the idea. Namely that before the line that says either "There is a page named X on Wikipedia" or "You may create the page X but consider checking the search results", there should be a line that says "For full information on available Search options, see Wikipedia:Searching." (It pretty much has to go in that position; well it could go below the other line, I suppose.)--Kotniski (talk) 14:39, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

• Support own proposal; completely obvious that there should be such a link, otherwise casual searchers have no obvious way of finding out about the sophisticated(ish) search functionality that we have.--Kotniski (talk) 14:39, 31 October 2009 (UTC)
• Neutral - as I said, I don't think it is impossible for people to find help on searching, because it is exactly where one would expect it - among help pages on Help:Contents. But if you do add a help link, please keep the wording as short as possible. --rainman (talk) 12:38, 1 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm not convinced, based on that page being way too unfriendly to the average user. It's a shopping basket of everything related to searching; it doesn't highlight key things and hide complexity. It's too big and too technical. And some people are opposed to making these messages any longer than absolutely necessary. I'd rather use extra text for a link (on MediaWiki:Searchmenu-new) to the Article Wizard, but that change was rejected a month ago [20]. If a friendly Search help page existed, that would be different. Rd232 ^talk 14:46, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

You seem to be confusing two things: the other change was for one of the two messages to be made longer; this is to add another message above it. (I'd be happy to see the other change made too, but the two issues are not connected.) And if the help page isn't perfect, then having a link to it will have the other positive effect of getting more eyes on it and more people making improvements. Somehow it isn't penetrating my brain how anyone for an instant could oppose this change; it's one of the most obvious things I've ever had to ask an admin to do.--Kotniski (talk) 15:02, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

• Support. But I would suggest Help:Searching as a better link, this page is more pertinent to the search button - as always needs a little attention. Failing that we could create and link to a dedicated help page. I would also suggest al we need is the a wikilink called 'help' next to the search button. Lee∴V (talk • contribs) 17:27, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, that would certainly be even more useful, but would probably involve huge discussion and then waiting years for the developers to change something (though I've asked for it at T23391, just in case), whereas this proposal can be done now. I'm not sure that Help:Searching is better, since it doesn't seem to be up-to-date documentation, but it doesn't matter - that page can always be updated with the new information. (As I've suggested, the technical documentation could be at the MediaWiki site like most of the software documentation, then we could just have a single user-friendly help page on en.wp.)--Kotniski (talk) 18:23, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

Help:Searching should be merged into Wikipedia:Searching (or vice-versa), having two pages makes if harder for readers to know where to look for the best/more relevant info and it's more difficult to maintain. I'm not sure if the sections on External search engines, Browser-specific help and Searching with TomeRaider need to be there, it makes the page too big imo and isn't very useful globally, moreover it's the kind of things that grow constantly; they could be spun off. Cenarium (talk) 18:57, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

I just had a bash at tidying up 'help:searching' and after cutting out the chuff it really doesn't cover much if anything extra to the WP:searching, Agree that a merge is required - or just basically Move WP version over to help:. Also agree to seperating external searches to another page. I'll setup the merge request and then the move once that's done. I also have a merge proposal for 'Help:Go button' as it is very short and would add context. Note: not really bothered where the help link is, just that one is there somewhere !Lee∴V (talk • contribs) 19:10, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

Good, we should wait to have all this sorted out before linking it. Cenarium (talk) 18:45, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

• As it's mostly unneeded, it may be too obtrusive if placed there, though a well-placed discrete link could be useful, but it'd require developer intervention. It should be possible to add a link in the advanced form of the interface, though, even when no search has been entered, (e.g. in the empty space below Check: All None.) Cenarium (talk) 18:57, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure what this refers to - what is "mostly unneeded", and where is "there"? (If you mean the link in the place that I'm proposing, then I disagree strongly - help on using a function is surely very needed by many people using that function, and there has to be a very transparently accessible link - ideally on the original search box AND on the search results page, but certainly in at least ONE of those places, and my proposed solution seems to be the only one we can implement ourselves without waiting months or years for the devs to change something - of course when they do, we can change our thing as well.)--Kotniski (talk) 08:30, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

If we put it at the top of MediaWiki:Searchmenu-new; readers will less likely read what follows, 'there is a page...'/'you may create...'; it would be too prominent for a link we need not all the time. I'd prefer a discrete link similar to what we have for Special:Contributions. I think we can do this with css. Cenarium (talk) 18:45, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

OK, how do you propose doing it? (But I don't think this link is any less needed than the message that follows - link to help on the function the reader's using is surely much more likely to be needed than the incidental message about creating a page, or the even more incidental message that there is a page of that title which the reader can see at the start of the search results anyway. It's those messages that need to be discrete, not the link that millions of readers might actually want to use.)--Kotniski (talk) 18:52, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

Well, I'm not sure. I've asked Rainman. Cenarium (talk) 18:58, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Requested at T23391. It has been assigned to the usability team. Cenarium (talk) 21:51, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

OK, so while that goes through the mechanisms, is there any remaining objection to my original proposal to add the link to the MediaWiki pages that we can edit? (The change is easily reversible once the devs come up with something better, but since that could take literally years, we have to do something to give readers the link in the meantime, and my suggestion seems to be all we can do at present.) --Kotniski (talk) 16:06, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Well, in the absence of any objections, I'm renewing the edit requests at MediaWiki talk:Searchmenu-new and MediaWiki talk:Searchmenu-exists.--Kotniski (talk) 12:09, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

I still think it is unnecessary and too long, and makes the average user (again remember he just wants to find stuff, not to ponder on advanced ways of searching) another line of text to distract him... --rainman (talk) 12:17, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Well if you can help (as a developer) get the help link placed somewhere more appropriate, as discussed then that would be great. But for now, this is the only solution we have (and I don't think anyone wants to suppress this link completely - that would be ridiculous).--Kotniski (talk) 12:24, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

In fact if anything's distracting and unnecessary, it's the line that says "there is a page on Wikipedia called..." Doesn't that page automatically show up at the top of the search results anyway? (If not then it should.)--Kotniski (talk) 12:26, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Well I agree... but it was put there by usability people because, well, the exact match is not *always* the first hit (especially on default mediawiki install) and it amends to UI consistency, so that the user knows to expect an article creation link in that place when the article doesn't exist.. Which I guess is fair enough... --rainman (talk) 12:43, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't object to the link in principle, but I think the target page needs to be improved first. It needs to be better organised, friendlier, and more focussed. It needs illustrative images too. Rd232 ^talk 12:43, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Another reason for including the link, then - more eyes on the page means more potential improvers. (But I don't think the current version is so bad that we have to be embarrassed about it.)--Kotniski (talk) 13:14, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

Look, is anyone actually seriously opposing this, like to the extent that they think it would make things worse, not just that it wouldn't make things as good as they might ideally be? I consider it tantamount to vandalism to deprive users of the information they need on how to use a software function - it's still absolutely unbelievable to me that this wasn't simply done when first proposed. Just what are you guys hoping to achieve? If a help page has to be perfect before we link to it, then we'd never link to any of them.--Kotniski (talk) 17:59, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

For what it's worth, I support this proposal. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 18:16, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

I've added T23391 to WP:DevMemo. I think that's a better solution. But I suppose this will do in the mean time, and as Kotniski said, linking it prominently will make it more likely it gets improved. It really needs improving though - I'd do a complete rewrite and try and make it more like the WP:Tutorial perhaps. Rd232 ^talk 18:42, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

We should go ahead with the merge and split discussed at Wikipedia_talk:Searching#Merging.2C_renaming_and_splitting, before adding it - so it's stable. As for the link, can we add it through MediaWiki:Searchmenu-new and MediaWiki:Searchmenu-exists in the form of coordinates ? There's a bug in display for the help link at Special:Contributions in vector style and on IE which could happen here too. Cenarium (talk) 01:39, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't understand - the proposal is just to add an ordinary sentence of text - why would doing it in the form of coordinates avoid any bug? More likely it would cause bugs.--Kotniski (talk) 11:29, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

I've been unclear: I inquire if we would have a bug if the link were added in coordinates there. I believe as before that the initial suggestion would make the amount of text too important between the search box and the search results, and that the "there is a page named.../you may create the page..." is important enough to not be removed. Cenarium (talk) 02:58, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Script to convert wikitables to CSV?

Are there any scripts (browser or software) that will convert wikitables to CSV files? Thanks. SharkD (talk) 06:10, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Copy table from browser, paste table into Excel, save excel file as CSV. Happy‑melon 07:48, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

You usually end up with a bunch of formatting junk when you do this. SharkD (talk) 15:32, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Not if you are viewing the table in your browser. You have to do a Paste Special and select Text. You aren't trying to copy the markup are you? ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 15:37, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

I know what he means, links are still linked, bold is still bold, etc. To get round that, copy from Excel, paste into notepad, copy back from notepad and back into Excel: notepad discards all formatting but Excel still recognises the cell separations when it's pasted back in again; notepad's great for stripping formatting from anything. Sounds time-consuming, but actually it's the work of a few seconds to do Ctrl-A/C, over to notepad, Ctrl-A/V/A/C, back to Excel, Ctrl-V. Happy‑melon 14:21, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

In Excel, instead of a normal paste you need to do a special paste as text; this way you get rid of all the formatting. -- Codicorumus  « msg 18:26, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

It still doesn't get rid of the extra spaces that sometimes appear. SharkD (talk) 03:02, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

while (<>){
   s/\|\|/,/g;
   if (/\|-/ || /\|}/){}
   else {
      s/^\|/;
      print;
   }
}

Fiddle until it works. Rich Farmbrough, 22:40, 15 November 2009 (UTC).

Need big auto-move in CAT:SVG

Hi, all images in Category:Other images that should be in SVG format with the {{Non-free logo}} tag should be moved to Category:Fairuse images that should be in SVG format. I guess a bot is needed. This would really help the categorization. --Beao 14:52, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Done.

Well.. doing... Rich Farmbrough, 22:42, 15 November 2009 (UTC).

Bugs in categorization (still)

As I mentioned before, {{FormattingError}} can add pages to Category:Pages with incorrect formatting templates use. However, I have been seeing a lot of random category assignments; I recently fixed all of them using null edits and made sure the category was empty. 5 minutes later I check again and many pages are added back to the category without any change to them in the mean time. This sounds like a bug in MediaWiki, but I have no idea what to file - I can find no reason for this behavior. Anybody know what's causing this or what I should put in a bug report? Thanks!     — SkyLined (talk) 16:57, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

• It's not a bug, it's just a caching issue. You can force a reload on your end (if you're using FF, for example, simply pres [ctrl-shift-R] in order to force a page reload). The server should re-cache most pages when you try to edit them, so the null edit ought to have taken care of the potential server side issues.
  — V = I * R (talk to Ω) 17:09, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Unfortunately, that cannot be true: if this is a caching issue, one would expect a page to remain in a in a category after it has been removed from it. By refreshing/null edits/purge you could fix that. However, in this case the page is actually out of the category at one point and 5 minutes later it is back in the category, without there being any reason for it to be in it...    — SkyLined (talk) 00:11, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, this is looking weird. This query shows timestamps of yesterday around 16:50 for all of the pages in that category - does that mean the system did some kind of automated repopulation at around that time, and used out-of-date data for it?--Kotniski (talk) 10:50, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

(I've just done a null edit on Alpha particle, which successfully removed it both on the category page and in the results of the above query. Let's see how long it takes to reappear.)--Kotniski (talk) 10:57, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Interesting... the theory that some sort of batch job may be changing things is probably a good one. I'm not exactly sure how to check on that, but I'm fairly sure that whatever it is would be on the toolserver. I have no clue what we'd look for, however.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 11:28, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

I suspect it's something to do with the job queue, but I've no idea what to look for either.--Kotniski (talk) 11:57, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Update - someone just made some unrelated edits to Foot-pound (energy), and that caused the page to disappear from the category (as expected). But the weird thing I've noticed is that User:Kathryn NicDhàna/Admin Toolbox has popped up on the category page a couple of times, then disappeared again, despite not having been edited recently. (Unfortunately that page won't load for me, so I don't know if it ought to be in this category or not.) --Kotniski (talk) 15:50, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Now User:Pigman/Admin toolbox is doing it. I think I'm starting to believe in ghosts...--Kotniski (talk) 15:55, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Yesterday I had May 10 and March 22 absent from Category:Days of the year. All very odd. Rich Farmbrough, 23:59, 15 November 2009 (UTC).

This all sounds like we have a hard-to-track down bug in the categorization of pages. Does anybody know who might be able to help track down the cause, file a bug, and/or get it fixed? Thanks!     — SkyLined (talk) 11:03, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Mysterious added <p> in multiline <div>

This code:

<div>a
b
c
d</div>

generates this HTML:

<div>a
<p>b c</p>
d</div>

Is there a reason for the added <p>, enclosing everything except the first and the last line? If the <p> wasn't there, it would solve some problems in Template:Navbox. Svick (talk) 22:38, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

The "<p>" is the equivalent of hitting "return". XHTML does not recognize manual line breaks (i.e., added by the use of the "return" button). Intelligentsium 23:54, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

The question, presumably, is why line breaks 1 and 3 cause the parser to open and close a paragraph element but line break 2 doesn't. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 23:59, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

In wikicode, one line line break shouldn't create a new pargraph. Normally, you have to use two line breaks to crate a new paragraph (<p>). Svick (talk) 03:41, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

Wiki div tags have been a pet peeve of mine for awhile. It's not the linebreak that causes the p, it's the div; the linebreak is just a placeholder, so the paragraph markup will be placed at the 1st and last linebreak in the div. It would look less weird if you put the line breaks immediately after the div tag. To suppress it entirely, you'd need to change the div to something like <span style=display:block> which is just an ordinary html tag, without special wiki handling like div has. -Steve Sanbeg (talk) 23:02, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Why does <div> have this very strange special handling? Svick (talk) 23:32, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

New Subpages

It would be very useful to have a way to see all new subpages of a given page. It could be used to see new XFDs, RFAs, Wikipedia books, spam bot reports, SPIs, portal subpages, articles for creation, etc. I don't believe we have a way to get new subpages ? If not, I'll fill a bug pointing here, for a special page Special:NewSubpages, or a way to filter Special:NewPages. Cenarium (talk) 01:24, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Also peer review, WP:FAC, WP:FPC, WP:BRFA, etc. Cenarium (talk) 04:33, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't know about some of those, but as for XfDs, PR, FAC, BRFA, RFA, and SPIs, new subpages of those are all transcluded on the main page, so there's already an easy way to see all the new subpages. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 05:53, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

When they are transcluded, some are not (created by new users, oversight, etc). Orphan XFDs, RFAs and such are regularly deleted. Besides this, it's an alternative way to find new ones. Some of those (WPbooks, AFCs) are specifically categorized (except accident), but portal subpages, bot reports are not, so we have no way to find new ones. Cenarium (talk) 16:49, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

• Go to Special:PrefixIndex, then enter the article name that you are wondering about. For example, for RFAs go to: [21]
  — V = I * R (talk to Ω) 07:48, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

To add a Subpages link in the toolbox, add this to your JS:

addOnloadHook( function () {
  addPortletLink("p-tb", wgServer+wgArticlePath.replace("$1", "Special:PrefixIndex/"+wgPageName+"/"), "Subpages", "t-subpages", "See all subpages of this page");
});

---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 13:20, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

I know how to see subpages, I do it all the time. What I mean is new subpages of a given page, a way to filter Special:Newpages to subpages of a given page. Similarly, it would be nice to have a way to filter recent changes for subpages of a given page. Cenarium (talk) 16:49, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

You can just sort a list like this by pageid parameter. Higher pageids are newer pages. As a generator you can also do some fun tricks with it (probably). --Splarka (rant) 08:20, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

How to keep nested <div> tags from messing with one another?

In things like

<div style="something"> bla bla bla

bla bla bla bla <div style="something else">stuff stuff</div>

bla bla bla</div>

the first closing </div> tag seems to close both of them. See, for example, this AfD close, where the div tags within a {{quote}} template caused the archiving (<div class="boilerplate metadata afd vfd xfd-closed" style="background-color: #F3F9FF; margin: 2em 0 0 0; padding: 0 10px 0 10px; border: 1px solid #AAAAAA;">) to close early—if you scroll down a ways, you can see that the nice blue box ends rather suddenly. Is there a way to stop div tags from behaving in this way?

(For a short-term fix on this particular page, I just changed the quote template to a <blockquote>. But it would be nice to be able to fix the problem instead of avoiding it.) rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 04:20, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Mayhaps your problem is the same as that which I addressed at Wikisource:Wikisource:Scriptorium/Archives/2008-12#div needs to go on a separate line. Hesperian 04:58, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

I saw something like that on bugzilla, too.... in {{quote}}, putting the div on its own line seems to correct that problem, to an extent, but it introduces a new one (it makes the <blockquote> within that template stop working), so I don't know how feasible it is.

For what it's worth, the only reason that template has divs in it is to allow multiline blockquotes (without a need to type <br/> or <p>. But that might be more of a big deal than this one div issue, so I don't know if it's worth removing them just for that. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 05:07, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

I think the problem in this case is that the opening <div> is at a different level of ":"-indentation from the </div>. That generates raw HTML tag soup something like <div><dl><dd><div>.....</dd></dl></div>; note how the </div> highlighted in blue is outside of the block that its matching <div> is inside. Tidy fixes by inserting an extra </div> (highlighted in red) as <div><dl><dd><div>.....</div></dd></dl></div>. But this leaves the </div> highlighted in blue to incorrectly close the archiving box. Anomie⚔ 00:49, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

Change in "Save page" behavior

When editing a section on the daily TfD pages, one used to be returned to said section after clicking save. Recently, however, clicking save returns you to the top of the page. Is this an intentional change? If so, why? Or am I missing something? JPG-GR (talk) 05:34, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Just made a change to Template:Tfd2 that should fix this for future nominations. — RockMFR 12:40, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

ads not shown without javascript?

Is there a reason why ads are not shown when javascript is disabled? --87.78.20.139 (talk) 17:04, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes. If they were simply embedded in the HTML, then varying the ads would interfere with the server-side caching of pages, which would be unacceptable. So Javascript is used to insert the ads as an alternative. Dragons flight (talk) 19:32, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

What ads? We don't have ads. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 16:16, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

I think they meant ads for the "Wikipedia Forever" fundraiser. Svick (talk) 16:44, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Urch. I wouldn't complain about them not displaying. For reference, disabling them in your preferences is probably more convenient than turning off JavaScript. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 17:15, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

What's up with upload?

Is there some sort of trial system in operation at Special:Upload? There is loose code – "<fogg-for_improved_uplods><fogg-please_install>" – on the main page, trying to upload connects you to some prototype subdomain and gives you a progress bar entitled "<mwe-upload-in-progress>", stuck at 0%. Could someone fix this absolute joke of a usability initiative, or at least explain it? Thanks,  Skomorokh, barbarian  19:57, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't see anything like that there right now. Maybe it was fixed? Svick (talk) 03:56, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

I tried a purge and upload and it worked fine. Can you take a screen shot next time? MBisanz ^talk 08:22, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

Skomorokh, were you using Safari or Chrome ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:30, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

I'll bet that's the case. I see loose code in Chrome all the time. Webkit needs to get its act together. --King Öomie 22:09, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Infobox Template Coherence Proposal

proposal wiki page: RFC draft

Following the discussion at WP:VPT#DBpedia_Template_Annotations, an RFC draft for the topic was created. Please edit and/or comment on the page. We took the discussion input into account and tried to address the issues mentioned (apologies for our initial errors and the problems caused by them). We also made the page mostly self-contained such that everyone can comment without needing to read the entire discussion leading up to the RFC. The user Rd232 suggested to create a new thread here, since the old one has passed the WP:TLDR point and the RFC justifies creating a new one. We hope for a fruitful discussion and finally consensus on the proposal. Jens Lehmann (talk) 08:40, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

• Given that there doesn't seem to be a particularly high awareness of the semantic web among wikipedians, I suspect that appropriate examples, (including pointers to third party semantic reuse?) in the template documentation are going to be very useful in getting people on board with these kinds of changes.Stuartyeates (talk) 06:07, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

We included some pointers in the demonstration of benefits section. Most significant semantic reuse happens in the background of third party tools (Open Calais, Muddy Boots, Faviki, Zemanta, LODr, Topbraid composer). --Jens Lehmann (talk) 11:12, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

That's exactly what I mean, Jens Lehmann. If templates have links (if necessary to third parties) with the data from that actauly template being reused, then it will help people see the point of the changes. Stuartyeates (talk) 00:35, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

I agree with you and technically it would be simple to generate two or three template-specific links, which show how the information in it is actually used. The problem is more a policy/political one. Some users argued against pointing to something not hosted on wikipedia.org or an officially related project. It could be seen as promotion of the "external" project (be it DBpedia or any other application using the information). I believe there is/was also interest in deploying DBpedia or DBpedia applications on the Wikimedia toolserver (which could be considered as strongly related, since it is run by the German Wikimedia with assistance from the Wikimedia Foundation). But even then, an application would probably contain a logo or project name, so each template would be at risk to be deleted as spam. What can be done in the short term, however, is to add a link from each template to a documentation page describing the template (the RFC could be seen as the starting point for such a page), such that users can read the page to find out more. That's not as good as having links specifically for a particular template, but a good compromise. --Jens Lehmann (talk) 09:02, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Is the problem 'pointing to something not hosted on wikipedia.org or an officially related project' or is it 'being perceived as recommending one third party over another'? If it's the latter, we resolve this the same way we did with ISBN etc: we make a special page that takes as an arguments the page name and wikipedia namespace and gives pointers to the representation of this page each each of a set of third parties. Stuartyeates (talk) 19:31, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Simple skin has no links to the disclaimers

Hi all. I've been using the Simple Skin on my BlackBerry Storm because navigation is easier with it than with Monobook on the device. At today's New York City Meetup someone was discussing the standard disclaimers - when I tried to show an example of how the disclaimer's linked to from every page I realized that there are no links to the disclaimer in the Simple skin. I am hoping someone could rectify that and maybe see if the issue exists with any of the other skins? Thanks! —Elipongo (Talk contribs) 05:59, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Hi again. Could someone please address this? Not having links to our site disclaimers would seem to be a potential liability problem to me. —Elipongo (Talk contribs) 00:24, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

I assume they were left out for "simplicity". However, their omission is a problem. Also a legal issue too - the copyright statement does not appear either. This looks like a non-Wikipedia-specific issue: I suggest you file a bug at Bugzilla. — This, that, and the other (talk) 06:31, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Signature Overhaul

Hi all,

I've been doing some discussion on the LiquidThreads feedback page about the future of user signatures.

Here's a summary of the discussion to date:

Signature vandalism is difficult to trace and prevent in LiquidThreads. This is compounded by the fact that at present, when a user changes their signature, it propagates across all threads they have posted.

A few solutions have been proposed:

• Allowing administrators to reset and lock a user's signature.
• Resetting a signature when a user is blocked.
• Limiting the customisability of signatures.
• Technically limiting signature content.
• Removing the functionality whereby signatures are automatically updated.
  • Storing the signature in the wikitext.
  • Storing the signature separately.

At present, the final option is considered more sane, but further feedback is being sought.

I'd like to solicit further feedback from the community on where we want to go with regard to signatures. Please leave comments in the thread on the LiquidThreads wiki, to keep things central.

— Werdna • talk 12:16, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Apparently no one cares?  ;-) On reflection, it seems like a potentially interesting feature to allow people to update their signature (useful for user renames and similar things). So, I think I am in favor of option 1. Perhaps put the signature code in an user space page that is automatically protected the same way userspace CSS and JS is, that way it could be edited / locked by admins in addition to editing by the user himself. My second choice is option five (i.e. having things fixed as they are now). That is certainly a reasonable option that would avoid surprises. Dragons flight (talk) 00:50, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

I would support option one. Having a dynamic signature is a great feature, it greatly simplifies renames etc. Putting the signature in a userspace page would be a good option (the revisions would help keep track of admin and self-vandalism of the signature), but putting in a feature in which the page will not save it is over a certain length would be advisable. The only thing that annoys me about the signature being in the userspace is the name of the page could overwrite already existing userpages (what if user "Q" already has a page called User:Q/Signature). Perhaps implementing the signature page as Special:Signature/Username would be better. ~fl 09:11, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

• PSST: "Please leave comments in the thread on the LiquidThreads wiki, to keep things central."
  — V = I * R (talk to Ω) 10:13, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Odd links

I've noticed a few odd links and can;t puzzle out where they come from. A good example is this - I can see nothing in the source pages that would cause these links. If anyone has a moment to check, I'd like to be sure I'm not just being dim please. - TB (talk) 16:18, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't see any articles that link to Help talk:Cite messages. I made a slight mistake on 21 September that caused such a link, but it should be clear by now. Purge any page where you might see such a link. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 16:45, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

And lo, the problem was fixed. The ways of mediawiki are weird and wonderful. Cheers. - TB (talk) 18:58, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Help required (user account)

I need ur help people. There is a problem with my wikipedia account User:Brainlara73. i get logged in, it logged in, and suddenly when i open my wachlist or any other page of wikipiedia, it is logged off automatically. I think it has been hacked or any other problem. Please Help me out.

Thanks. Talha

--121.52.145.185 (talk) 19:23, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

See the tips at Help:Logging in. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:28, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

The problem is probably that you don't have cookies enabled. Intelligentsium 00:10, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

cookies are enabled, i think they are expired, due to change of date(once i changed and forgot to chaneg back), Now what to do?

--Talha^{Discuss ©} 11:43, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

above edit of mine was made from lab, User:Brainlara73. --121.52.145.177 (talk) 11:47, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Suppression of admin actions in watchlists

(Forgive me if this has been addressed before; I'm not a regular on VP. I didn't find any similar discussions after a brief search.)

Is it technically feasible to add a gadget or script to allow users to filter out administrative actions (such as protection/unprotection, revision deletion/suppression, and the like) so that they do not display on a watchlist? I'm imagining a simple check box such as the ones used for ignoring minor revisions, bot revisions, and the like? When our *favorite* </sarcasm> long-term vandal runs amok on the admin noticeboards, I end up with a page full of deletions, something which I really don't care to know about. Creating a new toggle to ignore them would be appreciated. Horologium (talk) 22:43, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

This would be nice. I'd like to also be able to filter out specific users. In particular, I don't really need to see Edwardbot deliver the Signpost to the 30-40 talkpages I have watchlisted. --King Öomie 22:05, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Bot actions actually shouldn't "pop" pages up on your watchlist though. Of course, the bot needs an actual bot flag...
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 22:51, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

They do if you don't exclude them. (I ordinarily keep watch over minor and bot edits, because they sometimes mask other vandalism (or, in the case of Sinebot, obscure talk page queries). Horologium (talk) 23:08, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Well yea, but you have to actively turn the option on. The default is to hide bot edits.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 00:16, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

RecentChangesLinked in MediaWiki API?

I looked, but didn't find Special:RecentChangesLinked in the API. Did I just miss it? Is there a way to query this through the API? Here's an example query using RecentChangesLinked. tedder (talk) 00:59, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Reedy pointed me to bugzilla:14869. --MZMcBride (talk) 01:07, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Somewhat helpful, though it doesn't mention RCL itself. I think it might be possible to do it using 'links' as a generator to 'recentchanges', but I have yet to get it working. tedder (talk) 01:14, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

3.5 times faster preview

Some days ago I found a user script that is so fantastic that I just have to share this with everyone:

It gives you about 3.5 times faster edit preview. This is especially useful if you have a slow computer or a slow Internet connection, but it is a noticeable improvement even on faster computers. The script works in most web browsers, and the documentation for the script is at User:Js/ajaxPreview.

Personally I placed this code in my personal /monobook.js:

/* Shows both "preview" and "changes" with Ajax, 
   much faster than standard preview/changes buttons. 
   [[User:Js/ajaxPreview]]   */
importScript("User:Js/ajaxPreview.js");
ajaxPreviewPos = 'bottom';  //Buttons on the bottom, replacing standard buttons.

You can place the same code in your personal /monobook.js too. Then you need to wait one minute, and then bypass your browser cache for the change to take effect.

There are many other user scripts here at Wikipedia, but this is one of the nicest I have used and it seems virtually unknown by other editors.

--David Göthberg (talk) 17:57, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Works wonderfully. And is less of a load on the servers! Marvelous. Thanks for the pointer. -- Quiddity (talk) 20:02, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

As a note. This will be incorporated by default in the upcoming LiquidThreads discussion system, and it is also being looked at for the new editor (There are some problems with it listed here). wikEd has a similar feature. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:17, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

How does this code deal with redlink-checks and template transclusion? I take it that its operation is completely offline. --King Öomie 22:03, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

King Öomie: No, most of it is done by the servers. If I understand the code correctly: The script calls a Wikipedia server and sends the content of the edit window (the text that you are editing), the server renders that with templates and all and returns it, then the script cuts away the preview area and instead inserts what it got from the server. This means the server only has to render the content of your preview area, not the surrounding menus and not the edit window, and it means less HTML to send over the wire, and less HTML for your browser to render.

The Wikipedia servers have something called the MediaWiki API which scripts can call. It can do all kinds of nifty things, like returning the raw page code (the wikimarkup) for a page, or even some simple database queries. Many of the bots use the API for most of their work.

--David Göthberg (talk) 00:25, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Is this possible in any way?

I've created an imagemap (with appropriate alt texts for the visually impaired / the stubborn users of computers that are 20 years behind the time) of a jurisdiction, Southern Ontario. The image shows the outlines of all 40 odd counties making up the province, and the imagemap links each of those counties. My question is, if I were to put text links to the right of this image (sort of as I have done in my sandbox), is it possible to have the appropriate text link highlight or go bold when the cursor is over the corresponding area of the imagemap?

I imagine its not as it would probably be some sort of Javascript, but wondering if perhaps parser functions could pull off dynamic webpages? - ʄɭoʏɗiaɲ ^τ _¢ 21:11, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Something like this CSS or jquery ? The problem is that it requires central css or js I think for almost any of the implementations, and it's unlikely we will do that if it is only usable in the fewest of locations atm. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:28, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Sort of, except that instead of the imagemap itself highlighting or showing text, I want the text link that is to the right of the image to become bold. - ʄɭoʏɗiaɲ ^τ _¢ 17:03, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Statitics of donations decreasing??

Hello. I've been keeping an eye on http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:ContributionStatistics for several days now. And recently, the statistics for previous days began to decrease. For example, on 2009-11-13, it was about "112,000$", and now it's less than half of it. It is also decreasing for other days. Does anyone know why those statistics are unstable ? Thanks ! :-) Dodoïste (talk) 22:50, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Hello. We are working on all our reporting data from the beginning of the Annual Fundraiser. We had two problems...one of which is mostly fixed and the other is close to being fixed. I am not technical enough to explain why there is a slow decrease in our donation totals over time...but it is an illusion. We'll be rebuilding the table shortly and will continue to verify results as they come in. Public reporting and transparency is important to us. Rand Montoya (talk) 00:14, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Erik mentioned a problem with how the new credit card process software was recording amounts when the original currency was not US dollars. The $112k was totally bogus. Dragons flight (talk) 00:31, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Agreed. Those have been fixed and updated in our system. When we update, those should show correctly. Rand Montoya (talk) 00:35, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the infos ! :-) Dodoïste (talk) 00:38, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Readability and accessibilty of lists

Hello. I order to improve the readability when reading and editing as well, I often find lists in the following wikicode:

*Book 1: Preludietto, Fughetta ed Esercizio...

*Book 2: Preludio, Fuga e Fuga figurata...

*Book 3: Giga, Bolero e Variazione...

The result creates a space between each item in the list, making it easier to read compared to previous version. The problem is, MediWiki produces a HTML code that is not accessible (see Wikipedia:Accessibility#Lists and This explanation from Graham87):

<ul>
<li>Book 1: Preludietto, Fughetta ed Esercizio...</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Book 2: Preludio, Fuga e Fuga figurata...</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Book 3: Giga, Bolero e Variazione...</li>
</ul>

MediaWiki produces three different list of one item, instead of one list of three items. Instead, MediaWiki should produce:

<ul>
<li>Book 1: Preludietto, Fughetta ed Esercizio...</li>
<li>Book 2: Preludio, Fuga e Fuga figurata...</li>
<li>Book 3: Giga, Bolero e Variazione...</li>
</ul>

In order to improve readability, MediaWiki could add a class to the lists, and add margin-bottom: 5px in a style sheet. Do you think it's a good idea? Is it feasible? Yours, Dodoïste (talk) 01:14, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't see how adding classes and margins solves the basic problem that these things that should be grouped as a single list aren't. How about instead we provide a filter that warns users when their edits are creating starred items with unnecessary blank lines between them? —David Eppstein (talk) 01:46, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Ideally, cleanup of these problems with the HTML code should be done by HTML Tidy. Both the solutions above sound interesting, but an edit filter might scare off new users unless it's carefully worded. Graham87 03:07, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

The first examples ARE three lists, so the HTML is correct. I don't see how the Sanitizer (tidy is something else) would ever be able to tell the difference between the intentional and the unintentional case of two consecutive lists. We can't guard in the core between incorrect usage of wikicode. An editfilter I can see being useful, but that's it. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:22, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Does anyone want to create a template containing the appropriate code (along the lines of {{*mp}})? — This, that, and the other (talk) 07:02, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Fairly simple to scan for occurrences of bullet lists separated by blank lines. Rich Farmbrough, 09:47, 20 November 2009 (UTC).

Well there are 106 thousand such lists. Some are bulleted prose, some are spaced lists, some are lists with breaks. Rich Farmbrough, 10:08, 20 November 2009 (UTC).

This discussion so far ignores the problem of the difficulty of editing bullet lists with items that wrap when the items are not separated by any white space. It seems to me that when there is a list of bulleted items which are all separated by a single blank line, one could assume that it is a single list, not multiple lists. (This is quite common practice in printed material.) If there are instances of groups of multiple (2 or more) single-spaced items, each group separated by a single blank line, then one would say, yes, it consists of multiple lists. Allowing a bullet list with a single blank line between items would greatly improve edit-ability. (If double blank lines occurred in a double-spaced list, this would end one list and and start a new list.) In the case of a bullet list with blank lines between single items, the WikiSoftware could assume that the editor desires a single list with some white space between items and add the extra 5px and maintain it as a single list in HTML. Perhaps it is difficult to code, since it cannot be processed in a simple sequential manner; and the software will have to look at the surrounding context; and it may be difficult to anticipate all possible cases. But I think it is something that should be given some consideration. Perhaps there is a simple set of rules that could reasonably deal with most of the existing cases. --Robert.Allen (talk) 18:54, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

SVG not rendering properly using internal renderer?

Have a look at this svg: [22]. As rendered by the internal MediaWiki renderer, the text is completely jumbled. Just look at the text at the top left of the image, next to the (big) red circle and the (smaller) pink circle: it's incomprehensible. (FYI it should read "Site de construction" and "Site logistique", respectively.) Same is true for many other labels on this map (Cadiz, Pauillac etc.) The same problems are present with the (thumbnail) version on a page, as here. However, here's the thing: when I open the svg file itself, i.e. [23], on my Firefox (3.0) it renders perfectly! All the text is perfectly readable, including all accents on place names. So the problem appears to be not with the SVG file, but rather with the renderer used to turn SVG into PNG in your current MediaWiki setup. -- 89.52.176.229 (talk) 05:03, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Interesting; I also have this problem. ╟─TreasuryTag►draftsman─╢ 07:02, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, we know, the SVG renderer is lousy at text. Dragons flight (talk) 07:30, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

The linked SVG uses font-family:Arial but that is not one of the available fonts on the Wikimedia servers. Could that be the problem? —David Eppstein (talk) 07:32, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Using a supported font improves one's odds but there are still a range of ways that text can come out poorly even then. If one can't get things to work otherwise, we recommend converting text to outline shapes. Dragons flight (talk) 07:38, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Maybe it's time to propose that Wikimedia hire a programmer to fix this? Or find someone in the free software community willing to do it. --Beao 07:48, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

It's not a Mediawiki problem. It's an issue with the linux RSVG utility. RSVG was the best renderer option (considered across several metrics of output quality and performance characteristics) at the time we last reviewed the options. Dragons flight (talk) 07:55, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

It is well known that librsvg is pretty awful in certain areas. It's a compromise solution. Maybe the original poster should just upload a PNG version for the time being. — This, that, and the other (talk) 06:57, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Or just convert the text to a path, as has been suggested above... ╟─TreasuryTag►directorate─╢ 07:01, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Missing talk page section

I've puzzled over this quite long enough! At the bottom of my talk page should be a section, "Hubert Latham". Why is it that I can see it in the diffs ([24] [25]) and I can see it when I edit the page, but when I view just my talk page, the last section is missing? It was there before, but, since my last edit to it, it seems to have disappeared. Do I just need to wait for . . . something? Maedin\^talk 07:55, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Nevermind, it's back. Ho hum. Maedin\^talk 07:55, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

If something like that happens again, try purging the article. --King Öomie 21:57, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Tool server bug ?

Is this a bug? File:Editcounttoolserverbug.jpg Why is the percentage over 100% ? -- penubag  (talk) 09:57, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Try reporting that here. — This, that, and the other (talk) 06:55, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

suffixes

Is there a way to search for the ends of titles? Sort of an opposite for Special:PrefixIndex... a Special:PostfixIndex or Special:SuffixIndex ?

SELECT pagename
FROM pagenametable pnt
WHERE pnt.pagename LIKE '%suffix'

Or something like that, if Wikimedia's DB doesn't use SQL

76.66.197.2 (talk) 12:23, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Not with the Wikipedia search engine. You can search using prefix, intitle or incategory parameters; see Wikipedia:Searching. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 16:10, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

This has been brought up numerous times without resolution. See mediazilla:10808 for reasons for and against. — This, that, and the other (talk) 06:52, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

It seems to boil down to (A) it's very easy to do ; (B) it takes a few hours to set up ; (C) no one is willing to build a second index to pages, since it's a string reversed version of the regular index. 76.66.197.2 (talk) 10:41, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Is the search box regexp compatible? 76.66.197.2 (talk) 10:47, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

JPG image render error.

Joel Rudnick, third picture in the gallery. --Beao 15:39, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

The would be File:TheLeap.png, whic is a PNG file on Commons. What is the problem? ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 15:46, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

There are no JPGs in that article... OrangeDog (τ • ε) 00:29, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

local interwiki map?

This may seem like a dumb question, but it is possible to define local interwiki prefixes without having to add them globally at m:interwiki map? --Ixfd64 (talk) 18:53, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

It's possible, by directly changing the databse, as documented at mw:Manual:Guide to setting up interwiki linking. I think that for Wikimedia wikis, only developers can directly write to the database, so adding the prefix to the global map would probably be a better solution. Svick (talk) 20:10, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

PDF

When I download an article as a PDF file, the infobox is always centered at the top of the article. Is there a way to change this so that the infobox is to the right of the lead as currently in articles? --William S. Saturn (talk) 19:41, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

No, tables are always fullwidth in PDF view atm. You can give feedback here—TheDJ (talk • contribs) 01:43, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

New usability features; how can I mess with them?

Some new usability features that I've seen in previews appear to now be live on the English Wikipedia, at least in the Vector skin. The "watch" item now appears to be a star icon, and remains out of the drop-down menu, and if the screen width is, or becomes, too low, tabs will migrate back into the drop-down menu where applicable to prevent tabs from overlapping.

I'm slightly miffed at the star appearance of the "watch" action, not least because I objected to it earlier. I'd like to restore the earlier appearance for this: is there anyone else who would feel the same way; is there a case for a Gadget, here? I'd presume that it's as simple as a short routine to change some classes around (technically, the tab still has the text "Watch" or "Unwatch") but I'm leery of interfering with the system there, as I'll explain below.

Second, is there someone who knows enough JavaScript to understand the workings of the migration script that moves tabs in and out of the menu? I've been selectively moving tabs out of the menu previously (e.g. if there is a deletion template on the page, the "Delete" item pops out for quick access) but this interferes slightly with the migration routine, and appears to cause a few errors or oddities (but fortunately no serious breakage yet), noticeably that ones that my scripting moves out don't move back into the menu (presumably because they don't have the "collapsible" class at any point). Can someone please give me advice on that front? I know some JavaScript, but I'm a newbie for most purposes. You can also check out User:Nihiltres/vector.js if you want to see the pile of flaming code that I'm using at the moment (need to clean that up properly sometime :/).

I sincerely appreciate the work of the Usability Initiative, though I admit a certain amount of frustration here. {{Nihiltres|talk|edits}} 21:45, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

I think the use of a star for watchlisting is particularly unfortunate because the encyclopedia has been using stars for years to designate featured articles. 99.191.75.22 (talk) 21:11, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

There's a star? Is that what the mysterious blank tab next to the drop-down menu is for? I browse with images set to "on demand", so any purely image-based UI elements are unlikely to show up for me. --Carnildo (talk) 22:15, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

A random star that already means other things instead of anything that might symbolise or contain the word "watch"... what are we paying these usability people for? OrangeDog (τ • ε) 23:09, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

I agree, unless the symbol is common usage in everyday situations (like symbols for "play", "pause", "stop" on media players), any symbol should be accompanied by text. Mr.Z-man 23:32, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

That was the first thing that I thought about when I saw the star as well. I've been wondering why it's not a picture of an eye, myself.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 00:17, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Star means featured ... sigh... Rich Farmbrough, 10:11, 20 November 2009 (UTC).

Some progress…

I see that people seem to agree with my assessment that a star was a poor choice of symbol, among other things… but the most important part of my question is "how can I change the behaviour of those new features?". I still don't have a complete answer to that. The JS2 used doesn't help me muddle through, in particular. As far as I can tell, I can call a few useful things, $j.collapsibleTabs.moveToCollapsed and $j.collapsibleTabs.moveToExpanded in particular being useful. I found these here. However, these functions don't work on cases where I move a new tab from the menu, e.g. I move out the delete tab if the page contains a deletion template or is a redlinked redirect. This seems to be because these tabs a) don't have the appropriate classes, since the function shuffles around which tabs currently have the collapsible class on them, and b) don't have collapsible tab data assigned to them.

I can easily fix the classname issue in a kludgy manner, and it wouldn't be excessively hard to do it nicely, but I'm lost on how to assign the right data to tabs so that the script knows how to move them. Can anyone help, please? It would be particularly useful to see how the data gets assigned to certain tabs in the first place. {{Nihiltres|talk|edits}} 14:55, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Main space right-aligned title elements broken again

With the fund-raiser banners disabled in my preferences, the geodata and FA star elements have fallen over the title line and into infoboxes, etc. See Death Valley National Park in FF 3.5.5 for an example of both. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 01:37, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

as expected. each year the banners are different and we cannot account for that. It's minor as far as I'm concerned. Alternatively, you can use the new Beta which has a bit better support, though it breaks in some other cases again. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 01:41, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

I know it's expected, but I thought adjusting them to compensate was high-priority in mainspace. Anyway, is there any reason we can't ask the devs for some proper support for adding things outside of article content, instead of the volatile js and css hacks we have to use everywhere? OrangeDog (τ • ε) 20:19, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Scripts are down

User:Splarka/dabfinder.js, User:Shubinator/DYKcheck.js, and User:Dr_pda/prosesizebytes.js have all stopped working at the same time, so are there any scripts that still work? I use the Flock browser and Windows XP, but it isn't just me. When I try any of them, instead of giving results they say:

You are looking at the HTML representation of the XML format.
HTML is good for debugging, but probably is not suitable for your application.
See complete documentation, or API help for more information.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<api />
Art LaPella (talk) 03:21, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Same thing with OptionText.js over at Wikisource. Hesperian 03:30, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

User:Dr_pda/prosesizebytes.js is working fine for me. It most likely is not a global problem. Intelligentsium 03:33, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

I have javascript problems too. At first it was only when loading my watchlist while logged in to my main account (my admin account). But now I get it also on some article pages, and when using my other account (normal user). I have tried to blank my personal /monobook.js and turn of all gadgets, then wait a minute and then purge my browser cache, and even restarted my browser, but nothing helps. I use Firefox 2.0 on WinME and I get this message: "A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding." I haven't tested yet if I get these problems with my other browsers and when not logged in. There have been some really slow image loading the last few hours, so my guess is that this is some server problem. Or perhaps the donation banners are acting up again? :))

--David Göthberg (talk) 03:56, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

(ec)When I tried to use my prosesize script just now (I'm using monobook, Firefox, Linux) I found the same error (after seeing the expected result for a fraction of a section). However the url of this error is http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=clicktracking&eventid=leftnav-monobook-t-page-size&token=38312dac78eac92ae09e436918a715dd&redirectto=javascript%3AgetDocumentSize%28%29

thus it appears to be due to/related to the Click Tracking feature which I think is part of the Usability Initiative. See http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:UsabilityInitiative and http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/10/click-tracking-on-edit-toolbar-deployed/ So it probably is a bigger issue than a few scripts not working for a few users. Dr pda (talk) 04:02, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

It's working for me on Safari and Firefox now that I have removed the banners by using my preferences... —Ed (talk • majestic titan) 04:22, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Disabling the donation banners doesn't help me. And as far as I have seen the click-tracking is only loaded for some users, and not all the time. Which is consistent with that only some users have problems with their javascript today. And the click-tracking is also new code. So I think Dr pda is right.

--David Göthberg (talk) 05:00, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Yep, you're right; just tried it again and it does not work. —Ed (talk • majestic titan) 06:06, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

I think I have resolved this issue. In future, when reporting problems, please be more specific, including what script you were using, what you did, what happened, and what you expected to happen. — Werdna • talk 10:46, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, it's fixed for me, thank you. Sorry I wasn't more specific, but I don't know how to accommodate you (I listed 3 scripts, I listed what happened, and the only thing I know how to do with a script is to click the link.) Art LaPella (talk) 14:56, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Who or how many users are watching an article?

I know this was discussed here. I was just wondering whether there are news about this. Can I find out who is watching a page, or at least how many? Tomeasy _{T C} 10:33, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

The number of accounts watching a page is partially available. If you go to the page history of the page you are interested in, you will find a line of (currently four) "External tools" near the top of the history display. These tools reside on the toolserver and the second tool from the right provides a count for the number of page watchers. It should be noted that for pages with fewer than 30 watchers there is a default response that does not provide an exact count. --Allen3 ^talk 10:48, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks a lot. Tomeasy _{T C} 11:24, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

See also - Centijimbos  7  11:46, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Ah - I looked at how many people are watching my talk page. Bad move. Rich Farmbrough, 10:17, 20 November 2009 (UTC).

watchlist sections Reference desks

It seems to me there ought to be a way to watchlist sections on the Reference desks that one wishes to follow. It is cumbersome to check back and very easy to miss changes in such sections even though one has watchlisted the Reference desk itself. Bus stop (talk) 14:03, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

• The recent discussion at Wikipedia:Village Pump (proposals)#Sub-pages for Village Pump seems as though it would be relevant, here.
  — V = I * R (talk to Ω) 14:25, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

A Semantic Media Wiki

I know there exists already an extension for Mediawiki to include semantic information in wiki pages. However, I have thought about another approach which tries to get the most out of the semantic world and combine it with wiki functionality. I illustrated my idea in a PDF document semantic-media-wiki.

The document does not discuss in detail how wiki functionality is used in the application, because the idea is more focused on the establishment of semantic structures. However, OWL supports histories through annotations, so OWL (as a notation) can be used to describe the wiki content. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 134.245.253.141 (talk) 15:43, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

enwp.org

Hi Everyone, I'm wondering who the admin of enwp.org is, and if anyone knows, do you think you could please pass this suggestion along to them?

enwp.org/ is currently a shortcut for en.wikipedia.org/wiki/. I have an idea to create a php file or something in the root directory, called s, such that enwp.org/s/ would be a shortcut for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search/.

What do people think of this? Anyone know who the admin is or how to get in touch?

Thanks! 75.10.154.66 (talk) 01:57, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

The owner of that domain is Thomas Kjoerberg from Sweden. More information about him, including e-mail, can be found here. The addresses in the form of http://enwp.org/something seem to be redirects to corresponding Wikipedia articles (in this case something), http://enwp.org/s/ redirects to non-existent article s/. Svick (talk) 02:28, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Information on enwp can be found at User:Tl-lomas/enwp.org. Hesperian 02:46, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Random page

Is there a way to link to a random page in a given category? Intelligentsium 03:21, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Select "Show link to random page" in the Action box at http://toolserver.org/~erwin85/randomarticle.php. PrimeHunter (talk) 03:40, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

larticles not working

larticles is reporting a 500 Internal Server Error. Is this a known problem? John Vandenberg ^(chat) 12:05, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

It just opened ok, for me. In my experience this often happens when editing a .htaccess file. Since it's quite noticeable, whomever usually fixes it quickly. Cheers, Jack Merridew 12:29, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Damn; then I tried to use it and it failed. Jack Merridew 12:31, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Based on a little poking on toolserver, I think you will need to contact the tool maintainer (escaladix). — Carl (CBM · talk) 12:53, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Is this a bug?

User:UselessatScrabble shows up in Category:Miscellaneous_pages_for_deletion because it transcludes a deleted template that was once nominated at MfD. Do deleted transclusions with categories always cause this, or is this a one off thing? Gigs (talk) 16:34, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

I am guessing this was a caching issue. I don't see it in the category right now. Plastikspork _―Œ^(talk) 17:01, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Two months to update? Heh. Oh well. Gigs (talk) 18:30, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Print/export section in sidebar

I suggest that the items in the Print/export section on the left side are reordered. Printable version is most commonly used, so that should be first. Then Download as PDF and last Create a book. Especially the "Create a book" item is known to confuse users who are really looking for something else, often create a new article. Actually, I don't think such a specialized tool should be linked from the sidebar at all. --Apoc2400 (talk) 18:50, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

This requires a software change -> bugzilla: —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:46, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Why would Printable Version be the most used? It doesn't do what most readers think it does— see Help:Printable. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 15:35, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

It could be done with sitewide javascript. That would be pretty ugly, though. Algebraist 19:01, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Computing reference desk not scrolling down right

Resolved

After I post, I start out in the right place, but then the computer decides to scroll down, without any action from me, to somewhere that seems random.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 20:48, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

This sounds like something your browser does with no control from Wikipedia, maybe if the browser gets confused by a large page still being downloaded after initially placing you in the right place. You may be able to get back to the right place by clicking in the browser address bar and press the Enter key. After editing a section, the address bar should contain the character '#' followed by the section heading (possibly encoded if it contains special characters). This tells your browser to place you add that anchor name on the page, like if you click in the table of contents. The MediaWiki software automatically places an anchor at each section heading. See Help:Section#Section linking. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:37, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Let's see if that works.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 22:09, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

It does. Thanks.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 22:12, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

MediaWiki messages

We need a single place to announce discussions about MediaWiki messages, since the "MediaWiki talk:" pages are not watched much. If you are interested in this, see Wikipedia talk:MediaWiki#MediaWiki messages.

Oh, and please don't start a discussion here, instead follow that link.

--David Göthberg (talk) 00:18, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Meanwhile, since the current practise says we should use the Village pump for this:

I would like to add a CSS id to MediaWiki:Youhavenewmessages, so we can handle it better in JavaScript. See discussion at MediaWiki talk:Youhavenewmessages#CSS id needed.

--David Göthberg (talk) 02:47, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

reloading old page after saving a new edit.

whenever i save a new edit it reloads the old version of the page. i have to hit 'reload' to get my new version. this has been happening for days. is it just me? i've recently upgraded xubuntu to the newest version. could that be it? Lemmiwinks2 (talk) 00:41, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

I just checked and page caching has been disabled all this time, so that cant be it. I just now re-enabled it. I'll see if that has any effect. (nope. its still doing it) Lemmiwinks2 (talk) 00:45, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Problems with keeping login & unified login...

I have noticed that since about 3 days ago, I have been having trouble staying logged into WP and the Wikimedia Foundation projects. I have unified login set up, and it appears to log me in to the Wikimedia projects, but I have to go and manually log in anyway. If I right-click on the icons that show the status of your unified login & click "view image", the corresponding logo's site will respond with a logged-out page stating:

Automatic login
Token is invalid or has expired

The login works on the site I logged in on, but none of the other sites. This "half-login" state lasts only one session, and on one computer (I have Mozilla FF 3.5.5 with Mozilla Weave, shared between my home and school server account). Is there some reason my login is having "technical difficulties"? Hmmwhatsthisdo (talk) 01:08, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Do you have cookies enabled? Intelligentsium 01:46, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Believe so. Is there a certain meta site that also needs cookies allowed, different from all the other WM Foundation projects? Hmmwhatsthisdo (talk) 22:04, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

I've been seeing this too. I don't think that there's any real problem, per se. I'm guessing that someone has been (possibly unintentionally) resetting something that causes login cookies to expire. Best guess is that it has to do with technical aspects to the fundraising campaign.
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 22:11, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Does yours throw back an error when attempting to view those images in the WP login page (the little icons for the other WM projects that are all lined up) standalone? Hmmwhatsthisdo (talk) 22:36, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Regarding vandalism only accounts

How hard would it be to code and create a "nuclear" option for dealing with vandalism only accounts? That is to say, the blocking admin could hit a button and rollback all the user's edits in, say, articlespace, that are currently the lead edit, or all within a certain timeframe, etc. Ray^Talk 02:20, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Using a tabbed browser, I can roll back 20 edits in a few seconds. Most vandalism-only accounts don't get that far. It's a bit tougher with move vandalism - maybe someone else has a quicker way to do that. Otherwise, it's not worth the trouble to create such a function. I'd rather time were spent developing a better way to spot vandals in the first place. Wknight94 ^talk 02:45, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Also, there's a script called the 'Mass rollback function', written by John254 that can be added to your monobook that does this. Nja²⁴⁷ 07:26, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

Note: Link to script. Nja²⁴⁷ 09:46, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

November 2009 Great Britain and Ireland floods

Can anyone explain why the November 2009 Great Britain and Ireland floods article is apperaring in Category:Flood articles needing a picture? The article has pictures, and no doubt more will be added over the coming weeks, but it shouldn't be in the category anyway. Mjroots (talk) 17:55, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

The category is added by {{Infobox flood}}. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:02, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Ah, so if there isn't an image in the infobox then it adds the cat, regardless of how many images are in the article itself then? Mjroots (talk) 19:14, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, but it probably shouldn't do that so I have removed it.[26] Subcats of Category:Wikipedia requested images are normally filled by manually adding a template to the talk page of an article. See also Wikipedia:Requested pictures. If such categories were intended for articles and not talk pages then the categories should be hidden. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:12, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Why languages?

Why do we have Special:Preferences → Language? As far as I can tell, the language preference changes only the interface messages. For example, when you modify your CSS, the English message at MediaWiki:Usercsspreview is:

Code that you insert on this page could contain malicious content capable of compromising your account. If you import a script from another page with "importScript", "mw.loader.load", "iusc", or "lusc", take note that this causes you to dynamically load a remote script, which could be changed by others. Editors are responsible for all edits and actions they perform, including by scripts. User scripts are not centrally supported and may malfunction or become inoperable due to software changes. A guide to help you find broken scripts is available. If you are unsure whether code you are adding to this page is safe, you can ask at the appropriate village pump.
This code will be executed when previewing this page.

But the British English message at MediaWiki:Usercsspreview/en-gb is:

Remember that you are only previewing your user CSS.' It has not yet been saved!

This is because the English message has been customized, but the British English is the default. Another example: reference backlinks use a ^ in English, but a ↑ in British English or German or an other langaue. There are 6412 messages and 355 languages. Each language has been translated. So— if you select one of the German languages, you will see German interface messages mixed in the English content.

We frequently get issues where someone from the UK has selected British English and does not see the same messages as everyone else. Why would you want to select German so that in English articles, the edit link shows as [Bearbeiten]? Browse through the languages at Special:Allmessages. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 02:58, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

I find the language preferences useful when I'm editing a non-English version of Wikipedia, so it's easier for me to use the interface. They probably help non-native speakers of English when editing the English Wikipedia. I agree with you that the situation with British English is not ideal at the moment. Graham87 03:37, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

As Graham87 said, when you visit a Wikipedia in a language you don't speak, then you'll understand how good it can be to set the preferences there to some language you understand. For instance, I sometimes add interwiki links in other Wikipedias, and sometimes I'm asked to come check some issue with some template I built that has been transferred to another Wikipedia. I don't speak Russian or Greek, and I don't even have the fonts needed to see text on the Japanese and Thai Wikipedias. And I know we have editors who come to us to fix interwiki links, in spite some of them not speaking English at all, since I have communicated with them. Ever tried to have a wiki conversation with a Portuguese or Arab user, by using some automatic translation service and cutting and pasting in the text to his talk page? Its pretty hilarious, but it works if both users really are interested in it.

And regarding choosing British English when one visits a US based website: Then one is asking for trouble and should learn better. (And I say this even though I myself prefer British English.) Why do we even have the British English option? Our articles are in mixed English.

By the way, I wish that one could have some global settings in the global account. I would like to use English as default on all Wikipedias, except some where I speak the language. And it is annoying that my email address gets auto-copied to all the other Wikipedias, but not the setting to disallow emails from other users.

--David Göthberg (talk) 11:12, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Your last request is bugzilla:14950. Algebraist 12:50, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

move table of contents to very top of page

is there anything i could add to my css or js page that would cause the table of contents to go to the very top of the page rather than at the first subsection? i can get my own pages to do that by writing __NOTOC__ __TOC__ at the very top of the page. Lemmiwinks2 (talk) 05:39, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't know, but if you do this globally on a page, it breaks accessibility for screen reader users. Graham87 07:42, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Adding the following code to your user JS should work (tested in Vector):

addOnloadHook(function() {
 var toc = document.getElementById('toc');
 var jumpToNav = document.getElementById('jump-to-nav');
 var bodyContent = document.getElementById('bodyContent');
 if (toc)
  bodyContent.insertBefore(toc, jumpToNav);
});

Svick (talk) 11:14, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Thank you but when i inserted it into my monobook.js page it made the sidebar links (which due to hidepane.js is in my browser at the very top of the page) not work. I had to remove it. The reason i want this is because i have made my toc float to the right and it sometimes is pushed very far down the page by infoboxes and stuff. Lemmiwinks2 (talk) 19:11, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

The code broke other scripts (like hidepane.js) on pages that don't have TOC, I changed the code above, so you can try it again. I hope it works this time. Svick (talk) 22:52, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. Its working perfectly except for one thing. Instead of being the very first thing on the page the table of contents is the very very last thing on the page. :-) Lemmiwinks2 (talk) 03:34, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

Collaborating all ones efforts together

Archival retrievalPtw007 (talk) 12:40, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm sorry? Intelligentsium 00:40, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

France's Concert Records

Hello. I created the page for France's Concert Records. When you try to search for it, it does not come up directly. Also, when I try to put it with a link on my user page, it stays red and does not link. In both cases, it provides a "you may create the page" option. Thanks. Paradise coyote (talk) 18:48, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

You created the article at France’s Concert Records, with a closing quotation mark rather than an apostrophe. I've moved the article to France's Concert Records for you. — Gavia immer (talk) 18:57, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks.Paradise coyote (talk) 23:22, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

db14 is replagging?

For at least the last few days I've looked [27], db14 looks to be an enemy of en:wiki. The lags bounce up into the 30's and it almost always shows some lag. I realize this is not the best place to discuss WMF server ops, but if anyone's in the data centre, could they check if there's smoke coming out? :) Franamax (talk) 01:59, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Resolved at #wikimedia-tech. Probably a failed battery in the RAID array. Workaround is in place and maxlag is back to its normal behaviour. Franamax (talk) 02:47, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

Bug: IE5 displays anchors incorrectly

Anchors (<A> Content </A>) in Wikipedia articles are not being displayed correctly in my browser (Microsoft Internet Explorer Version 5.00.2314.100 running under Windows 95 Version 4.00.950 B).

Instead of displaying the content of an anchor inline where the anchor occurs, the content is displayed right-justified on the following line. The content of multiple anchors that occur left-to-right in a line are displayed on the following line right-to-left in reverse order. The individual words in the content of any anchor are not reversed.

The same problem affects the printable version of a Wikipedia page as well as the menus on the left side of a page and the instructions on the Village Pump page that I'm using now.

This problem started in the last few weeks.

This makes it really difficult to understand articles.

Thanks for quickly fixing the other bug that I reported a few months ago regarding incorrect HTML formatting under IE5.

Bill Park —Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.69.248.244 (talk) 02:44, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't believe we use anchor tags in our articles; unless you mean something different? Intelligentsium 02:51, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Our articles use a great many anchor tags. They're the standard way of making hyperlinks in HTML. Algebraist 02:54, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Oh, yes of course; I had misunderstood. I thought the OP meant directly in the articles, as one would link or bold text (but we don't use <a href="..."></a>). To the OP: Your IE seems a bit outdated (IE8 is the most recent now, isn't it?). Intelligentsium 03:24, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

This is most likely due to the odd behavior of IE5 in parsing css. It will treat ">" the same as "," (the IE5 css engine predates child selectors). So a rule like div.somethingspecific > a {display:block;} will be parsed as div.somethingspecific , a {display:block;}, which then will apply to all anchor tags. This happened just a few months ago. So check the applied CSS for such a thing, find who did it, and file a bug (as it should also affect IE6, except IE6 will simply not apply the rules). --Splarka (rant) 08:06, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Only case I have been able to find that does this is Usability CSS —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:50, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

bugzilla:21603. Perhaps it's time we put IE5 users into a separate (text only/simple) skin ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:54, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't believe upgrading IE is going to be an option for the OP. It looks like Internet Explorer 6 would require Windows 98. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 13:10, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

<nowiki>producing nonsense text

Often when I use <nowiki>, odd text such as ":/nowiki!--_Do_not_include_the_""_or_"";_they_are_for_emphasis_--nowikiFile:Name_of_image (ctrl-click)">:!--_Do_not_include_the_""_or_"";_they_are_for_emphasis_--nowikiFile:/nowikiName_of_image (ctrl-click)">" appears for no apparent reason. Is this a known bug? If not, should I file a report? Intelligentsium 02:48, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

I often use nowiki and haven't seen this. It sounds like something which may happen if you use <nowiki> in a specific context, for example where something attempts to convert the characters '<' and '>' or to interpret them as belonging to something other than "nowiki". Can you give a diff to a real edit where it happened, and say whether you subst'ed any templates in the edit? In your example, I guess the two strings of form !--...-- originate from source comments of form <!--...-->, but at some point something "ate" '<' and '>' in the comments so the rest became displayed. Maybe nested nowiki's could cause things like this in some circumstances, or overlapping comments and nowiki's where none of them are completely included in the other. But if the source and not just the rendered text looks like your quote afterwards then it may have required use of subst, or a bug. PrimeHunter (talk) 03:33, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

My Wikipedia connection is extremely slow today so it's hard to investigate but I found your edit here. Did you copy the text to an external program while making that edit? Which browser and version did you use? It looks like something converted several non-letter characters. PrimeHunter (talk) 03:59, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

(edit conflict)For example, if I type some code (File:Example file) and hit the nowiki key (because I might want to bold text inside the File syntax) on the toolbar (maybe that's the problem?) it produces ''':'''example_filenowiki (ctrl-click)">[[File:example file]] Intelligentsium 04:04, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

And no, I did not copy anything to an external program. I was using the latest version of Safari (4.0.4, I believe). I have wikiEd enabled, though I used the standard toolbar nowiki. Intelligentsium 04:07, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't have Safari but see Wikipedia:Browser notes#Safari_3. Do you have Check Spelling as You Type enabled in Safari? The browser note mentions "Control-click" and your bad edits add "(ctrl-click)" to the text. The browser note mentions underlining and your bad edits convert spaces to underscores. Maybe the spelling feature and toolbar can interfere. PrimeHunter (talk) 04:56, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Not logged in

Currently, you are prompted to go to the log in page when you reach a page requiring logging in. Is it not possible to just show the log in field instead of the prompt? Also, when you successfully logged in, it prompts you to go back to the original page. It should just force the redirect. --220.255.47.116 (talk) 22:59, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

It used to do the redirect, IIRC, so it's likely people wanted it changed. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 23:07, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Users at Wikipedia:Help desk/Archives/2009 October 30#Automatic "return to" after login? reported different experiences about being redirected after login. It doesn't redirect for me. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:24, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia used to redirect the user to the original page five seconds after they logged in, but that was changed with bug 9153 in 2007. Graham87 07:07, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

Help needed emptying Category:College basketball

The category Category:College basketball is being renamed to Category:College basketball in the United States. I haven't been able to find how Portal:College basketball is categorized in this category. I would like someone to either update the categorization of this page (if the relevant page is protected, it can be done through an {{editprotected}} request), or tell me which page transcludes the relevant category. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 13:23, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

 Done. It was just a [[Category:{{PAGENAME}}]] at the bottom. Algebraist 13:29, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

Search limits

If I use any preferences setting other than 50, the Search function is nonetheless displaying only 50 pages. At the bottom of the first page, the buttons previous 100 next 100 (or whatever number I have selected in my preferences) are displayed, but not linked, and do not work, and show the same first 50 results. Monobook, Safari, fast connection, OS 10.5. Has this been temporarily disabled? DGG ( talk ) 18:28, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

< rainman-sr> thedj, yes [temporarily disabled], until we get new servers at least... although i think 500 is way too much anyways. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:09, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

There are many non-obvious uses--such as my frequently search for a particular phrase used in a policy argument when I may not know or remember the exact wording DGG ( talk ) 21:55, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

Help with preferences problem

Not sure if this is the correct place to report this or not as I've never had any such problems before. Yesterday in the Editing section of Preferences, I ticked (and saved) the "Enable enhanced editing toolbar". When I then opened an article to edit, I decided not to use that particular toolbar and so went back and "unclicked" it. However, now whenever I go to edit any page, the editing window is significantly smaller (as if it has been condensed in width on the screen), with a large random blank space to the right of it, that I seem unable to get rid of. In addition, below the editing window, the last six characters also appear below the window - immediately below the window and above the line that begins "By saving, you agree to irrevocably release your contribution under..." For instance, the article Charlie Cairoli - the last six characters in the editing window are owns]] - and they also appear Any ideas, suggestions? Thank you.--♦Tangerines♦·Talk 19:01, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

On the same preferences page uncheck "Enable navigable table of contents" —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:07, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

Thank you, that sorted it.--♦Tangerines♦·Talk 20:07, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

need to make table borders disappear

I need 3 consecutive cells in one column to appear to be a single cell. Can i do it by imbedding a table inside a table? How do i make make the borders disappear? Lemmiwinks2 (talk) 21:22, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

|rowspan=3|Blah

^easy peasy. –xeno^talk 21:24, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

No that wont work. each of the cells has 3 parts. i need each of the parts of the cells to be inline with the corresponding parts of the other cells. I could make the borders white but then that wouldnt work for people with non-white backgrounds. Lemmiwinks2 (talk) 21:29, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

style="background:none;border-width:0px;" ? –xeno^talk 21:33, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

Of course. Why didnt I think of that? Lemmiwinks2 (talk) 21:35, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

=) Best of luck, –xeno^talk 21:35, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

Turn on spellcheck in summary field

Firefox and Opera both support the spellcheck attribute (spellcheck="true", information) could we get this implemented here? — Dispenser 06:05, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Oh yes, I'd like this too. I am not a native English speaker, so I have very good use of spell checking. It is very annoying to have to manually turn on spell checking every time I fill in an edit summary. Perhaps we can add the "spellcheck=true" attribute to the summary field by using JavaScript? Then this could for starters be a user script or even a gadget. What do our JavaScript gurus say, can we add that attribute with JavaScript? Here's how I think the code should look:

/* Adds spellchecking to the edit summary field, if using Firefox 3, 
   or using Firefox 2 with dictionary add-ons. Perhaps works in Opera too. */
addOnloadHook( function() {
  var wpSummary = document.getElementById( "wpSummary" );
  if ( wpSummary && typeof wpSummary.spellcheck != undefined ) {
    wpSummary.spellcheck = true;
    // wpSummary.spellcheck = "true";
  }
} );

Not sure if it should be quotation marks or not around "true". Neither works for me, but I only have Firefox 2 with a spell checking plug-in.

--David Göthberg (talk) 10:10, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

I filed bugzilla:21604 for this. And yes, this could be done with Javascript in theory, though your if condition needed fixing. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:24, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Fixed - mw:Special:Code/MediaWiki/59360 —Reedy 18:41, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

TheDJ: Thanks for filing that bug.

Reedy: Thanks for updating the MediaWiki code. So I guess that means it soon will be available here on Wikipedia. (That is, then we don't need to use the JavaScript above.)

But meanwhile: Oh, silly me, I had some junk in my personal javascript page that stopped the script from running. Now it works even for my Firefox 2 with dictionary add-ons! And it works both with and without the quotation marks. And already my simpler version of the code worked. But TheDJ's addition is good, if I understand it right it prevents the code from causing problems in other browsers.

So, all Firefox users out there, if you want this fix right now, then add the above code to your personal /monobook.js, then wait 30-60 seconds, then bypass your browser cache.

I have not tested if this works in Opera. But if anyone uses Opera, feel free to try the above code and report here.

--David Göthberg (talk) 21:17, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Soon, yeah ;P —Reedy 11:17, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

Reedy: What do you mean? That it will be very soon? Or are you ironic and mean that it might take ages before it is deployed? It would be good to know which you mean, since if it is likely to take a long time then we should add this as a gadget during the wait.

--David Göthberg (talk) 12:54, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

For half of this year code changes didn't should up until October. Plus HTML 5 wont show up until HTML 5 is enabled (it is disabled because of bugs). I would suggest we add the above code to MediaWiki:common.js with a comment to remove when HTML 5 is enabled. — Dispenser 14:54, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

Agreed, we should add this to MediaWiki:Common.js/edit.js. That file is only loaded when on the edit page, thus the code above will not be loaded when viewing other pages. I have left a message at MediaWiki talk:Common.js#Spellcheck in edit summary so those that watch that page can have a look and a say too.

--David Göthberg (talk) 16:51, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

Y Done - We have now added this to MediaWiki:Common.js/edit.js. So ladies and gentlemen, if you are using Firefox, then bypass your browser cache and you will have spellchecking in the edit summary field.

--David Göthberg (talk) 17:03, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

Wow, that has been bugging me for ages, and someone actually did something about it. Thanks. ^Chillum 17:07, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

SVG images

As on Commons, our Image pages for SVGs now contain links to PNG renders of those SVGs in several sizes. For an example, see File:Wine grape diagram en.svg —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:41, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

Tags

I have noticed that tags (such as <includeonly>, <noinclude>, etc.) are processed before parsers. Is there a way to reverse this, or at least imitate the reversal? If I write a parse that includes something like: {{#if:foo|<includeonly>bar</includeonly>}}, but when I transclude it, "bar" only appears regardless of "foo". Is there a way to prevent this, so that it is possible to prevent very big templates from accidentally being substituted? Intelligentsium 03:53, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

#if:foo will always be true, because #if: checks whether its first parameter is empty, and the string foo never is. If you want an #if: clause to execute only when parameter foo is non-empty, you need #if:{{{foo|}}}. Hesperian 04:05, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

Not sure about exactly what you're trying to do (your examples are confusing), but what springs immediately to mind is the #tag ParserFunction, which lets you call tags as ParserFunctions, so e.g. {{#tag:ref|Foo|name=bar}} is equivalent to <ref name ="bar">Foo</ref> but plays nicer with templates and transclusion and such. {{Nihiltres|talk|edits}} 04:22, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

Add Google Analytics to Wikipedia

Wikipedia has the potential to provide incredible information about the way people use the internet. I think by implementing Google Analytics and making the information public, a whole new knowledge base would be available to the world. It would show what browsers are popular, their resolutions... any hundreds of other metrics that could help web designers and people all over the world.

I would happily volunteer my services and help create a free, open source website that people can use to access this information and present it in a way that's simple and user friendly.

Jpony (talk) 00:28, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

This page is for asking questions. You want the place for making proposals. Intelligentsium 00:36, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Disregard the above. MediaWiki provides a function for tracking page hits; it is disabled on en.wikipedia for a reason. We have a function for pages hits already. Intelligentsium 00:39, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Between http://stats.grok.se and http://stats.wikimedia.org/ we already make a huge amount of information available. It doesn't cover everything that Google Analytics does, but it could be expanded further. For example: browser stats, operating systems. However, Wikimedia won't be using Google's service. The managing Wikimedia Foundation considers that to be a violation of our pledge not to give personally identifiable data (in this case IP addresses) to any third party (e.g. Google). So whatever stats we have will mostly be internally developed. If you'd like to work on that effort User:Erik Zachte is the one leading it. Dragons flight (talk) 00:52, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

"However, Wikimedia won't be using Google's service." Thank god for small favors!
— V = I * R (talk to Ω) 01:15, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Jesus Christ no -- a worse privacy violation there is none. • Anakin 23:36, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

Proposal: Option to block users from leaving messages on their talk page

I brought my own thought up on MBisanz's talk page - the idea of allowing a user to prevent (or block) another user from editing their talk page. This is contrasting to the main blocking function, and it's kind of like a user preference. I developed this idea because I saw the behavior of users such as WebHamster and the infamous sockpuppet Grawp; if the user found them untrustworthy, or if they have a deep opposition against them, they may block them from editing their talk page. Any thoughts about my idea? Schfifty3 05:02, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

There is already a check box on the blocking form for exactly that purpose. Graham87 07:47, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

But it's impossible to block users from editing their own talk page, but still allow them to edit the rest of Wikipedia, if that's what you meant. I don't see the point of that. Graham87 07:50, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

I think the heading is wrong. The idea seems to be that non-admins can block their own user space for a specific other non-admin who is harassing them. I don't think it's a good idea, though, as we would get lots of disputes about whether this feature was abused or not. Hans Adler 08:02, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

Not a good idea. If someone won't quit harassing, they, and all their socks, should be blocked. If it's a lot of anon vandals, specific user blocking wouldn't help anyway and the page can be semi-protected. Apart from harassment, there is no legitimate use for such a tool (focus on edits, not editors, etc.). • Anakin 20:35, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

Category lag/What links here

I thought about adding a line like the one below to Wikipedia:FAQ/Categories#Why_might_a_category_list_not_be_up_to_date.3F

Another way to list category members is to use the What links here feature, which might be updated more frequently.

But first, I would like to ask here to ensure that the information is precise. The word I'm unsure about is "might". Is "What links here" always quicker? Iceblock (talk) 18:05, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

I wouldn't have thought so. I wouldn't have thought it would list category members at all; does it?--Kotniski (talk) 19:23, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

It worked for me, at least. Category:Chemicals articles needing expert attention and Special:WhatLinksHere/Category:Chemicals_articles_needing_expert_attention. Iceblock (talk) 20:08, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

It does seem to work there, but compare Category:Articles lacking sources from November 2009 and Special:WhatLinksHere/Category:Articles lacking sources from November 2009. The WhatLinksHere list is improperly sorted and almost completely unnavigable. And compare the cat at the bottom of this page: Category:Non-talk pages that are automatically signed and Special:WhatLinksHere/Category:Non-talk pages that are automatically signed -- that doesn't seem to work right at all. How strange. • Anakin 20:25, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

Javascript for references?

A lot of what I do here is finding references for articles. Is there a javascript tool to make adding references easier and to ensure that they are well formatted and uniform in style? Sam Barsoom 18:42, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

There's the refTools gadget, enableable in your preferences. Algebraist 18:45, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

That was fast, I will check it out. Thank you. Sam Barsoom 18:48, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

#tag (See: ↑)

Am I missing something? The {{#tag:...}} parser seems not to support many basic HTML and some MediaWiki tags, such as <span>, <div>, and even <i> (understandable, if it is meant only to be used with tags peculiar to MediaWiki), but also not tags such as <includeonly> and <noinclude>. Is this a bug, or an intentional omission? Intelligentsium 21:29, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

As the documentation states, {{#tag:}} is: “Alias for XML-style parser or extension tags, but parsing wiki code.” So it works only for the like of <math>, <ref> and <source>. Svick (talk) 21:54, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

It's actually a good thing it doesn't support <noinclude> and <includeonly>. I think those tags get parsed a bit differently, to ensure they are processed only at the transclusion level where they're actually written, otherwise you could craftily drop a </noinclude> into a protected template via its unprotected doc subpage, etc. • Anakin 22:04, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

I see. Well, I suppose having to manually unsubstitute accidentally substituted large template is the cost of preventing vandalism to highly visible templates. Intelligentsium 22:17, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

Searching for blocks by over a range of IP addresses

I'd like to be able to search for all the blocks placed on IP addresses within a certain range — a particular /16, let's say. Are there any tools for doing so? TenOfAllTrades(talk) 05:05, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

Parse and transclusion

Related to the above question. Is it possible to parse a transclusion? That is, make the includeonly, onlyinclude, etc. tags only work is a certain condition is met? Intelligentsium 04:15, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

If you're just trying to prevent substitution, something like this would work:

{{#if:{{<includeonly>subst:ns:0</includeonly>}}|Template code goes here|{{error|Please don't subst this template!}}}}

• Anakin 15:31, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

Special:ListUsers regex search?

Hi. There's a series of sockpuppet-vandals such as U999, V333 and H444 – is there anyway to regex-search the user list for any other names of this pattern? Thanks! ╟─TreasuryTag►belonger─╢ 06:59, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

I don't believe so, but I have a toolserver account so I'll run the regex against the database. Results soon. ~fl 08:22, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

Query finished, results:

mysql> SELECT user_name FROM user WHERE user_name REGEXP '^[A-Za-z](111|222|333|444|555|666|777|888|999)$';
+-----------+
| user_name |
+-----------+
| A222      | 
| A333      | 
| A666      | 
| A999      | 
| B222      | 
| B333      | 
| B666      | 
| B777      | 
| B888      | 
| C222      | 
| C555      | 
| C666      | 
| C777      | 
| C888      | 
| C999      | 
| D222      | 
| D333      | 
| D666      | 
| E777      | 
| E888      | 
| F222      | 
| F333      | 
| F444      | 
| F666      | 
| F777      | 
| G222      | 
| G444      | 
| G777      | 
| G999      | 
| H111      | 
| H333      | 
| H444      | 
| H666      | 
| H777      | 
| I222      | 
| I777      | 
| J222      | 
| J333      | 
| J555      | 
| J666      | 
| J999      | 
| K222      | 
| K333      | 
| K777      | 
| K888      | 
| K999      | 
| L333      | 
| L444      | 
| L666      | 
| L888      | 
| L999      | 
| M111      | 
| M222      | 
| M333      | 
| M666      | 
| M777      | 
| M888      | 
| M999      | 
| N333      | 
| N888      | 
| N999      | 
| P222      | 
| P333      | 
| P777      | 
| P888      | 
| Q333      | 
| Q777      | 
| Q888      | 
| Q999      | 
| R333      | 
| R444      | 
| R666      | 
| R777      | 
| R999      | 
| S111      | 
| S222      | 
| S333      | 
| S555      | 
| S666      | 
| T222      | 
| T888      | 
| U999      | 
| V333      | 
| V666      | 
| W666      | 
| W777      | 
| W888      | 
| W999      | 
| X222      | 
| X333      | 
| X444      | 
| X555      | 
| X777      | 
| Y777      | 
| Z333      | 
| Z555      | 
| Z777      | 
| Z999      | 
+-----------+
98 rows in set (2 min 34.33 sec)

Hope it helps. ~fl

Thanks very much indeed for that—I'll get investigating! ╟─TreasuryTag►hemicycle─╢ 13:31, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

How may I show more than 200 entries at a time in large categories?

I'm been cleaning up category entries but having to click next and previous to scroll through the category entries 200 at a time is tedious. Is there a way to show more or even all entries on a single page? Jason Quinn (talk) 15:03, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

I believe there is a way to query the API for more hits, you might also consider using AutoWikiBrowser to generate a list of category members for you. –xeno^talk 15:08, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

(ec) Try CatScan and CatScan 2. • Anakin 15:10, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

I've been working on something for this. It's still very beta and comes with no warranty, but see User:MZMcBride/yanker if interested. (The current hard limit is 5,000 (browser crashes suck), however when an "output to file" option is implemented, you'll be able to get the full list for any category.) --MZMcBride (talk) 03:52, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

Astra 300

My uncle was in WWII in Germany and obtained a pistol from an SS Officer with the following information on the pistol. 9m/m & 380, serial number 543793, date code WaA251, which does not appear on your list. Also above the date code is the German eagle. Please let me know about the date code information since it does not appear on your list. Email - [blanked] —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.151.205.31 (talk) 16:46, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

Please do not provide your personal contact information. This is the Village pump (technical)/Archive 67, where questions about the technical operations of Wikipedia are posed. Your question seems as if it would be better suited to the Miscellaneous Reference Desk. 76.230.214.29 (talk) 16:51, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

Web-search for non-autoconfirmed users

Would it be worthwhile to automatically run a Google search for random snippets of new articles if those articles were created by non-autoconfirmed users, then log the positives for further COPYVIO investigation? davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 05:24, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

CorenSearchBot? — The Earwig @ 05:33, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

Hmm, it must've been off about a month ago, I've taken care of several copyvios that should've been caught while patrolling the tail of Special:Newpages. Carry on. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 05:42, 28 November 2009 (UTC)