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Table / Table talk namespaces

Now, how come we got namespaces 106 and 107? And more importantly... what are namespaces 102, 103, 104 and 105? Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 02:53, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

I also ask because pages are being created in these namespaces, and if they are removed, they will become inaccessible due to MediaWiki's database design. So, where was this discussed? What are we supposed to do with it? Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 02:55, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
Apparently the other numbers are still free. I have never seen anyone wondering where are namespaces 16-99 before. Is there any advantage in using Table instead of Template, or is it just being tested? -- ReyBrujo 02:57, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
No, digging deeper I think it is because of Bug 9304. However, that bug was to add a namespace to only the Spanish Wikipedia, so I presume this was some sort of miscomunication. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 03:01, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
Oh, and templates 16-99 cannot exist. See Custom namespaces. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 03:02, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
(edit conflictx2)The pages in the "Table" namespace are, you guessed it, tables. They actually look pretty nice, though. Just look at Table:Climate in Jerusalem. [[User talk:Sean William|]] 03:03, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
But that can be replicated in the template namespace, or any other namespace (as long as they're not blocked by wgNonincludableNamespaces, by that matter)... Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 03:06, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
Then probably namespaces 102, 103, 104 and 105 are customs in other Wikipedias. I think I remember a namespace WikiProject in one, 103 I think... let me dig around... -- ReyBrujo 03:09, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
Ok, WikiProject is 102/103 in eswiki, and 104/105 are Référence in frwiki. So that part of the mystery is solved. Now, the question is, do we want these namespaces? This was created in the Spanish Wikipedia because lists and tables are usually not considered "articles", so according to them they should not be in the main namespace. That is not the case here, so do I need to poke anyone to revert this? Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 03:14, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
There was a discussion (on WP:VPR I think) about this here. from what I remember, the general consensus was to do it, with the hope of eventually having some sort of fancy table editor in the future. I didn't think this would happen so soon though. Mr.Z-mantalk¢ 03:18, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
Uh, all I find is this archive of VPT, and the few users who commented there (me included) didn't like the idea. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 03:23, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
  • Gah, never mind. Bug 2194 has the juicy details. I still think it is an awful idea. Having a table namespace will not mean that a table editor will be created, and in fact, creates the illusion that it will, when the reality is the contrary. It won't be created until a MediaWiki developer is persuaded to do it, and there are many more pressing things to do right now than to do this. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 03:26, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
  • I pretty much fail to see why we don't simply use templates for those tables. I was under the impression that we already do. >Radiant< 08:33, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
    • At the moment the main advantage in my opinion is that tables in that namespace are isolated from the rest of the article, so future tools will be able to manipulate them. The namespace provides a collection of tables to tempt developers into developing tools for them. (SEWilco 17:24, 9 May 2007 (UTC))
  • Ah. Managed to get a list. :-) 13 pages in the Table: namespace so far. Anyone know whether this namespace will be added to the drop-down list at Special:Prefix index, or indeed what number this namespace is (mainspace is 0 in the URL generated by the Prefix index, for example)? Carcharoth 12:19, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

Personally, I like the idea. And I don't see why it's a problem to have namespaces that do similar, but different things. For example, now that any page may be transcluded, why do we need the template namespace? I think it's a circular argument. And if having this namespace is helpful in any way, we should do it. (But then, I also support having a List: namespace... Perhaps it's time to reopen that discussion as well.) - jc37 13:08, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

Also, I believe another reason for the creation of the table namespace was to make articles more user-friendly to new editors. A lot of times, new users that are unfamiliar with the wikitable syntax can get lost in an editing window that has a long and complicated table. I think it is a good idea personally.↔NMajdan•talk 13:22, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

The table namespace was meant to be a WYSIWYG table editor; I'm not a fan of WYSIWYG, but that's not relevant! I personally think that a table namespace would be useful for taking massive (and possibly uninteresting, to some people) data, that adds to an article in some way, and putting it in an external namespace. GracenotesT § 13:49, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

Here is the WP:VPR discussion about this, dug up from the page history. Mr.Z-mantalk¢ 18:20, 11 May 2007 (UTC)
Maybe a GPL'ed Javascript interface would help[1], for the people willing to use it. (SEWilco 18:58, 11 May 2007 (UTC))

Images "requiring attribution"

According to "Category:Images requiring attribution" — hey, why didn't that work? I mean, according to "Category:Images requiring attribution" — any image page is so tagged if it contains an {{attribution}} tag. That would make sense if {{attribution}} was the way to tag an image that needs attribution, but what the tag actually expands to is The copyright holder of this file [optional name here] allows anyone to use it for any purpose, provided that the copyright holder is properly attributed... In other words, depending on whether the name is provided, either the tag has nothing to do with attributing the image or else it provides an attribution for the image, the opposite of what seems to have been assumed by whoever set up the category.

Maybe this inconsistency was introduced by a change in the meaning of the tag or something; I can't say. In any case, it exists now, and it needs to be fixed somehow by someone capable of doing so. Thanks.

207.176.159.90 01:25, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

I wonder how hard it would be to rig it up so that {{attribution}} added the image to Category:Images requiring attribution only when the template's optional argument (indicating and attributing the copright holder) is absent? —Steve Summit (talk) 01:53, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
But that would still be the Wrong Thing, if the attribution was given elsewhere. The real problem may be that the template name {{attribution}} is misleading. 207.176.159.90 03:15, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
I think it's the category name that's misleading: I believe it's meant to be understood as "images with a license that requires the copyright holder to be attributed". The fact the it's a subcategory of Category:Conditional use images would seem to support this interpretation. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 22:28, 10 May 2007 (UTC)
Oh!! —Er, in that case may I suggest a renaming, then, to "Category:Images requiring attribution when used" to "Category:Images freely usable with attribution" or something? And for that matter, perhaps {{attribution}} should also be renamed in similar fashion. Thanks.
207.176.159.90 04:12, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

Access to passwords

I've been reading various discussions, so I'm wondering: Who on Wikimedia knows all of our passwords? Isn't it a possibility that those people could compromise our accounts?--Ed ¿Cómo estás? 03:05, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

Developers with shell access. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 03:09, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
Passwords are stored in hashed and salt database tables; anyone with access to those would have a far easier time wrecking the project by running deletion queries directly on the database. -- nae'blis 03:11, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
Heck, there's several ways to screw MediaWiki beyond all repair with shell access... but, oh crap, WP:BEANS. :P Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 03:13, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
Yeah, anyone with shell access could access the password fields, but they would have to create rainbow tables for every salt value, which is extremely difficult. It would take all the computers in the world to even attempt this, especially if a lot of salt is used. They would have a far easier time simply watching for your password in the connections to the servers. mrholybrain's talk 10:10, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
So, what you're saying is that the developers aren't leaking out our passwords here, right? But it is possible...--Ed ¿Cómo estás? 23:03, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

Nobody with access to the database is remotely interested in attempting to brute force your passwords, which requires a bit more effort than just reading a column value. They really, really have got far better things to do with their time. 164.11.204.56 04:43, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

H2

H3

H4

H3

References

I have a question about sources and references and all that stuff.

If what I have seen around is correct, it wouldn't be needed to add specific sources at each piece of more or less trivial information of almost public knowledge, as the article would become ilegible. For things such as music band line-ups, works an artist has worked into, years of each one, etc; it would enough just to mention as "Bibliography" the book or magazine or whatever source I have seen all that information.

On the other hand, for any kind of information that would seem obscure, mostly unknown, of a nature wich is not public or any other that someone would potencially ask where does that information comes from, I would have to use footnotes, citing a specific text of the source I have seen that thing into.

But I have seen a little problem: while gathering sources for an article I want to improve, wich is about a comic book from my country, I have found an article in a magazine (unfortunately, it does not exist at all in internet) wich would be interesting to add as well: it describes a great copyright dispute that took place among the creators and the editor, and it even involved legal actions, such as lawsuits, judgements, and all that stuff. I see no reason to hold in doubt the information that magazine bringed, but the problem with this is that the whole thing, not just details of here and there, are mostly obscure and unknown, things that took place at courts while us "mere mortals" were not even aware.

The question is, how should I cite my source? As bibliography, even if it's just of a specific issue and not of the whole article? (that doesn't seem enough, and makes a weaker relation of information-source). As a "footnote" at the end of the section, making a mention of the magazine issue all that came from? (but it would have to be just the that, it would be impractical and even illegal to reproduce the whole article's content as a citation). Citing parts of the article at every smaller part that would seem obscure on it's own (but I would be citing the same article all the time, and reproduce almost the whole of it in many parts, wich would border the risk of copyright infrigement as well...) Perón 02:43, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

There's no need for a source to be available on the internet; just cite it with one of the citation templates, and if someone wants to verify it, they have the capability of trying to track down the magazine in some way. As for where to cite it, I'm not sure. It should be fine as long as it's made clear where each claim in the article comes from. You can never have too many footnotes, although that would make it look like you're depending too heavily on one source, but that should be no problem if the source is reliable and if the information is not exactly controversial. Are the little bits of info all worthy of inclusion? I assume you're taking only the important points from the magazine article, which should make it free of copyright infringement issues. In case people want the exact full details, you'd list it in a Further reading section, even though it's hard for them to get to reading it. –Pomte 02:58, 12 May 2007 (UTC)
Well, the problem is that all the "small things" seem important to properly understand the thing going on: "the editor did this", "the author, under those circumstances, did this", "they signed a deal for this purpose", "the deal was later rejected by the other author who was not taken in consideration", "the first author was not legally allowed to sign such a deal under such conditions", and so on. It all seems important, it all seems as if the description would be incomplete without it. Of course, the article itself would be written in my own words, my doubt is if citing huge parts of a magazine's article at the "references" section wouldn't be an abuse of the right to cite and become a copyright problem. Perón 03:32, 12 May 2007 (UTC)
It sounds like you might be getting into too much detail. If this controversy is very important, it might deserve its own article, but most likely it isn't. If it doesn't deserve its own article then a three or four sentence summary of the court case might be sufficient. In that case you shouldn't have any referencing problems. In describing the case you used words like 'obscure' and 'unknown', which would tend to argue against notability. EdJohnston 15:11, 12 May 2007 (UTC)
If you want to cite offline sources on a magazine. Just write down the headline, the date, the author, the issue of the magazine, as well as the page number if possible. Then it is attributable. This is the same method used in citing radio programs and newspapers that can't be easily accessed and that you knew happened.--Kylohk 15:24, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

Blok new Articles by IP

Hi! I noticed here in enwiki an IP can not write any new Article. Can you please tell me what Mediawikifile do i have to edit to block this? I need it for a nother wiki. Thanks, 217.225.140.140 19:34, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

Hello. You'll need to edit your LocalSettings.php file, found in the wiki root, to add $wgGroupPermissions['*']['createpage'] = false; . You'll probably also have to add $wgGroupPermissions['user']['createpage'] = true; or else logged-in users will not be able to create pages either (though I am not sure if this is necessary or not). HTH. AmiDaniel (talk) 21:36, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

Command line problems for MediaWiki

I've got MediaWiki 1.10rc2 downloaded, and running on my WAMP server. However, I need to run some maintenance scripts from the command line. The command-line PHP is in the default directory of C:\wamp\php\php.exe - does anyone know what I should do in order to access these??

Note: I'm running a Windows XP Professional Home edition machine, if that's of any help.

All advice is appreciated. Thanks, --SunStar Net talk 18:28, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

Add C:\wamp\php\ to your path environment variable, and you'll be able to run it from command line like php update.php/ If you don't need to run scripts with parameters, you can associate .php files with php-cli.exe. MaxSem 18:52, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

Wrong dash used in watchlist

In the watchlist, the changes in size of articles are shown. At the moment, it looks like this (-50), but (−50) would be correct according to Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dashes)#Dashes and hyphens used on Wikipedia. It's certainly not a big deal, but I think that if the correct character has to be used in articles, it should also be compulsory for the watchlist. --Leyo 19:27, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

The manual of style doesn't apply to watchlists. --Deskana (AFK 47) 19:28, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
That is not the question IMHO. It's a bad style and should be corrected. --Leyo 19:32, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
That's an interesting proposal. You mean using &minus; instead of a plain hyphen (-)? Fvasconcellos (t·c) 19:39, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
Yes, that's exactly what I mean. I just used the minus from the "insert bar" below, which produces the same symbol as &minus;. --Leyo 19:44, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
Not going to happen. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 20:38, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
Oh come on! Don't be ridiculous, people. --brion 20:26, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
Yeah, thought so. Oh well. Fvasconcellos (t·c) 21:22, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

A couple of related minor issues: The watchlist would look neater if the times are listed to the left of the article names, organized like (diff) and (hist). Special:Contributions shows (hist) (diff), whereas Special:Watchlist shows (diff) (hist); this can be confusing after getting used to clicking on either side. –Pomte 20:03, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

(cur)/(last)/(diff)/(hist) interface problems

This has made me crazy for as long as I've been here:

  • The history of a page links to (cur) (last)
  • My watchlist links to (diff; hist)
  • My contributions page links to (hist) (diff)

Now, (diff) and (last) are the same thing, and I often want to see how a given edit differs from the (cur)rent version when viewing my (or anyone's) contribution page. And the semicolon thing is just inane. Does anyone have ideas on how to standardize these tools for a better interface? Obviously the (hist) link could be omitted on the history page, but there has to be a better way. -- nae'blis 20:32, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps a bit of a quirk. But when you think about it "diff" is more general than "last". For RC/watchlists/contribs pages, there is only one obvious diff, and thats against the previous one. On history pages, all of the revisions are right there and can be diffed, so (last) is a bit more specific. Voice-of-All 21:50, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
Well, "last" seems to me be fairly ambiguous. It could refer to the last edit made to the page (the "cur"rent edit), the last edit in terms of vertically scrolling through the history (the first edit), the last edit in terms of the immediately more-recent one (the next edit), or (what is actually the case) the edit that occurred immediately before this one, the "previous" edit. I think "diff", although a more general term, would tend to be far less ambiguous, as most people have come to expect it to mean the diff between this edit and the previous edit. Failing that, I think "prev" may also be more accurate. AmiDaniel (talk) 22:22, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
I think I'd like to keep (diff) over last - it's in the 'lingo' of the site and it shows up more often on the above interface pages. . I just want to see (cur) more often as an option. Do the semicolons make more sense, interface-wise? (diff; cur; hist) or (diff) (cur) (hist) ? -- nae'blis 12:41, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
Personally, I'd prefer diff in all three examples, and non-semicoloned links. (Note that my watchlist doesn't use semicolons; I wonder why yours is different? (probably something in the preferences)) I use 'last' in one of my scripts to mean 'the diff for the most recent edit to this page, which may or may not be the one you want' (as opposed to 'diff' which is the one you want). --ais523 13:19, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
The appearance of your watchlist depends on whether you've selected "Enhanced recent changes" in your preferences. (Yes, it's somewhat confusing that an option for recent changes affects the watchlist too, but the two features share code internally.) As for the "last" link, if there was consensus for changing the text, this could be done by editing MediaWiki:last. The semicolons and parantheses, however, are hardcoded in the MediaWiki source and could only be changed by a developer. If you want the change made, it might be worth filing a request on bugzilla. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 16:33, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
That said, before submitting a request, please make sure that people agree on what the desired format should be. Bug wars are dumb. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 17:13, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

Workaround for watchlist limit?

I'm having trouble with my watchlist. Even when I set it to show 7 days of edits, I'm getting considerably less than a day. I'm monitoring and active in editing a couple of hundred pages, but the artificially set 250-edit cap is making it so that I can't even see edits from before I went to bed last, some 12 hours ago. Is there a workaround for the 250-edit cap, other than just trimming down my watchlist? I can't see a single page that lit up today that I feel comfortable removing. MrZaiustalk 05:50, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

Go to my preferences (upper right) → watchlist and change the value Number of edits to show in expanded watchlist: to some number greater than 250. -- MarcoTolo 02:32, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Twinkle

I have some errors with Twinkle. When I uninstall Twinkle, errors try to make viewing changeable. I close Mozilla Firefox and did system restore, but some errors came the the computer turn on. My OS is Microsoft Windows XP. Jet123 (Talk) 00:31, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

To finish uninstalling Twinkle (or any other script, for that matter), visit any Wikipedia page, log in, and then bypass your cache. As you're using Firefox on Windows, you can do this by pressing Control-F5. Report back here if that doesn't solve the problem --ais523 07:51, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

Including category contents within an article

Under Semantic MediaWiki, you can include a category's contents into an article by using an inline query with the following syntax: 

<ask>[[Category:Things that should be in this article]]</ask>

Is there any way to accomplish the same thing under the standard MediaWiki as implemented here? --Ssbohio 13:53, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

Pretend the category is a template and transclude it using {{:Category:categoryname}}, where categoryname is the category name. This will also transclude any categories of that category unless those are inside <noinclude> tags. –Pomte 01:39, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
That doesn't work (for instance,
is {{:Category:Wikipedia protected edit requests}}. (Note it only shows the category's header and not its contents.) To show the contents of the category, write <categorytree mode="pages" hideroot="on">Wikipedia protected edit requests</categorytree>:
Hope that helps! --ais523 07:54, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

Marking links to disambiguation pages

Following the recent change that allows links to stubby articles to appear a different colour, would it be possible to do the same for disambiguation pages? That would alert editors to links made incorrectly to a dab page. I constantly check for this sort of thing, but a distressingly large number of editors don't seem to check their links and instead leave links to dab pages. So, would this feature be possible at all? Carcharoth 16:29, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

Funny that you mention that; I recently set my stub threshold to 1500, which enabled me to find a link to a disambiguation page for today's FA (see here). While a disambiguation page isn't always short, the two correlate frequently enough in order to make the stub threshold useful for finding some disambig pages. Using #DISAMBIG to mark disambiguation page as non-articles (a proposal somewhere) may be a method to implement what you suggest. GracenotesT § 16:39, 13 May 2007 (UTC)
Nice. In a similar vein, maybe #REDIRECT (which is in use) can make redirects appear a different, though that would be less useful. Actually, make that useless. In most cases, redirects can (and should) be left alone (unless it is a double redirect), but links to disambiguation pages and stubs are useful to highlight. The thing about the stub threshold though is that it does not distinguish between articles that are genuine stubs (most but not all marked with a stub template) and articles which are short, but still nicely rounded and complete articles. Well, maybe I just have my threshold set too high. It's on 6000 at the moment. I'm lowering it to 4000 to see what changes I notice. Carcharoth 17:05, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

I wonder what it would take to have categorized redirects appear differently in category listings. This would be very useful in the cases where there are two equally valid ways to name an article that don't appear next to each other alphabetically. The article gets categorized normally, and the alternate name becomes a redirect, which can also be categorized. If it appeared in a different color (or in italics?) that would indicate that it is a redirect and not an article. Does the threshold have an effect on category pages? -- Samuel Wantman 00:39, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

Yes, but it doesn't have any effect on redirects. (Which makes sense. Redirects are usually very short, but they're not stubs.) On Special:Allpages, redirects appear in italics; it might make sense for that to happen in categories too. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 02:30, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
...and it's done. Once the change is live, we can add ".redirect-in-category { font-style: italic; }" to MediaWiki:Common.css and redirects will appear in italics on category pages. (In fact, we can add it already and it'll take effect once the revision goes live.) —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 03:28, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
Hm; I never liked it in italics. I'm more of a fan of distinct color changes (for example, here). Thankfully it's a CSS class :) GracenotesT § 04:01, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

Clicking save acts like preview

I've been having to click "save" three times lately in order to get it to take. Corvus cornix 22:53, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

I've had the same problem. There's a message about a loss of session data, and a suggestion to try logging out and logging back in. Sometimes I'll click on my watchlist, only to be told, "Please log in to view your watchlist." Clicking the back button and retrying has worked so far. I've only noticed this happening today. --Kyoko 14:58, 12 May 2007 (UTC)
Using the secure server can help to solve problems with session data and logging in/out. --ais523 15:01, 12 May 2007 (UTC)
It probably helps as much as logging out and logging back in to the ordinary server. I can't imagine any other reason why it would help. -- Tim Starling 16:35, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

There were some recent problems with one of the memcached servers, which caused session data loss. The problematic box has been depooled and a spare brought into service. Thanks should be directed towards Domas Mituzas. 164.11.204.56 00:28, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

SVG problem

An svg image i uploaded a few months ago still does not render, whereas others that i uploaded on the same date were done immediately, do you know why this might be. The image is Image:Oceanic_basin.svg. You can see it fine if you just view the image itself, but on any wiki page it doesnt generate the thumbnail. It is hosted on commons, if that makes any difference. Chris_huhtalk 09:36, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

It's just a JPEG image embedded into a SVG file. You can just as well upload the JPEG version, there are no advantages if you embed it into a SVG. -- Prince Kassad 15:39, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

What license is the Wikipedia robots.txt file under?

I wonder if someone could clarify the license of the wikipedia robots.txt file (i.e. the file actually served back to web crawlers, not the text of the robots.txt article).

In a nutshell, would it be appropriate to adopt portions of your robots.txt file (stating attribution) for a website whose other content is not under the GFDL ? Obviously the other content would not be a derived work of the robots.txt information.

It seems someone has put a lot of work into your robots.txt file, which would be a beneficial resource for other web masters.

Thanks Mermade 07:46, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

As far as I'm concerned, just do as thou wilt with it. :) --brion 14:39, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

Fantastic, ta! Mermade 17:44, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

New DB-lock appearance

Will it be possible to make the "edit this page" tag read "database locked" when the database is, in fact, locked? ~ Magnus animuM Brain Freeze! 22:18, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

I expect it could be done, fairly easily even. I'm not convinced it's actually worth even the minor cost of an extra stat call per page view, though. In any case, the appropriate place to propose such features would be on bugzilla. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 04:40, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

If you think about it, there is one big reason why this should not be done: the time that you need to know whether the database is locked is when you try to edit, not when you view the page. The two might be separated by some considerable time. HTH HAND —Phil | Talk 10:44, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

And thus it will not be done. --brion 14:39, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

Perlwikipedia

Currently, perlwikipedia is prevented from editing Wikipedia. I believe this was due to the admin hacks, and I think that this is reasonable. However, it is preventing one of my tools from running properly. Do we have any idea when it'll be unblocked? The agent string is currently "Perlwikipedia/version string (mine is 0.90)". Veinor (talk to me) 20:53, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

Could you not just change the useragent header to the name of your tool, or something similarly innocuous? Martinp23 21:06, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
Yeah... why do we always miss the really obvious stuff? Veinor (talk to me) 21:08, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

template issue

Hi, when I inserted {{current-section}} at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_%28TTC%29#Lower_Bay_opening_for_Doors_Open_2007 it caused an ugly text-only category link to appear in the section. Why was this? Could someone please look and see if it was a problem with the template or with the way I used it? Thanks, --unforgettableid | how's my driving? 17:33, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

I checked out your edit, and the page looks fine to me. Note that user Gracenotes has since edited the same page, altering your template. But the original still looks fine. Maybe it was a temporary Wikipedia glitch? Tugbug 22:47, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
The date parameter is usually not supposed to be the date, but the month, in the form of May 2007. It's sort of misleading but Gracenotes has fixed it so it doesn't matter what format you put in. –Pomte 00:14, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

How to embed a special page list in the text of another page

Is there a way to embed content from a special page directly into another page? I want to create a page that shows both the 5 most recent changes and 5 most popular pages on the same page. I originally asked this question here and someone said to try here. Thanks. Michaelmcandrew 16:09, 15 May 2007 (UTC).

It can be done for some special pages: {{Special:Recentchanges/5}} gives
List of abbreviations (help):
D
Edit made at Wikidata
r
Edit flagged by ORES
N
New page
m
Minor edit
b
Bot edit
(±123)
Page byte size change

25 April 2024

However, other special pages can't. There isn't a popular-pages special page on Wikipedia for server load reasons, but one example would be

18 February 2024

  • 03:1203:12, 18 February 2024 diff hist +9‎ Christofides algorithm ‎ →‎Algorithm: reword bullet point 3 to disambiguate (the previous wording could also be read as "find a perfect matching in the subgraph induced in the minimum spanning tree", which is how I read it originally, and it took me a while to realise there was a second potential meaning); also some minor grammar fixes

22 August 2023

3 April 2023

1 February 2023

30 January 2023

16 October 2022

8 October 2022

23 September 2022

17 August 2022

16 August 2022

13 August 2022

10 August 2022

9 August 2022

6 August 2022

5 August 2022

4 August 2022

2 August 2022

which shows as a link rather than as a transclusion. Hope that helps! --ais523 16:36, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

Warnings for removed named references?

I am sick and tired of finding empty footnotes in <references /> because someone, usually well-meaning, deleted the first occurrence of a named <ref> without checking to see if there was another <ref name="..." /> following which depended on the now-removed reference.

Is there any way to produce a warning when someone saves a page with a <ref name="..." /> which can't be expanded because the corresponding <ref name="..."> doesn't exist? Please?

This wouldn't be such a problem if it wasn't so difficult to find the deleted original reference by going through the history: For most deleted passages, you can just do a manual binary search. But for these kinds of missing references, if you want to search through the history you need to "edit" each version and search in the page source for the missing reference. 75.35.109.153 07:48, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

I don't know what you mean by manual binary search. Here is how I find deleted references: look at diffs between revisions made over a period of time, say the diff between the current revision and the 50th last revision, do this page by page of edit history until I find one in which the ref disappears (it appears on the left side but not on the right). Then keep closing down chunks of the time interval until the single diff is discovered. –Pomte 09:42, 6 May 2007 (UTC)
See binary search. --cesarb 09:33, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
Actually the "search space" can be reduced by a factor 3 each step, see Searching_for_a_particular_change.--Patrick 22:57, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
No: Looking at one diff to eliminate half of the search space is faster than looking at two to eliminate 2/3rds. Target on meta edited. 75.18.200.11 17:08, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

Watchlist

What's with the watchlist? I mean the lag and the message? Can the message be turned off and will this lag be around from now on? Aaron Bowen 17:56, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Set items of the class "mw-lag-warn-high" as invisible or hidden or such using your user .css page. Voice-of-All 19:30, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
Hi Aaron. The message is a notice which explains a preexisting, intermittent phenomenon which sometimes causes the watchlist and other lists to not display recent changes while various servers catch up with large amounts of changes. It only shows while there is a delay, and does not show at other times.
If you wanted, you could hide it anyway, though; scroll up for some hints on that. --brion 19:31, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

How to monitor all changes to Top-importance articles?

I want to monitor changes to all Category:Top-importance China-related articles. I looked at Special:Recentchangeslinked for the category, but the category actually includes talk pages, not mainspace. I thought about "Related changes", but I would have to create and maintain a page of over 150 links by hand. Is there some simple way I can do this? --Ideogram 00:15, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

I suppose "add them all to your watchlist" is not the answer you are looking for? ~ ONUnicorn(Talk|Contribs)problem solving 02:03, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
I couldn't think of a better method, so I created the current list at User:Pomte/Category:Top-importance China-related articles with recent changes. I can update it for you weekly or something, or you may want to ask a bot at WP:BOTREQ. –Pomte 02:27, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
How did you create the list? If it's a python script or something like that I can do it myself. --Ideogram 03:42, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
I didn't write a script (don't know python), but you can probably make one using the following steps:
  1. Preview this somewhere: <categorytree mode="pages" hideroot="on">Top-importance China-related articles</categorytree>
  2. Copy the list of talk pages.
  3. Replace Talk: with *[[
  4. Replace the end of each line with ]]. –Pomte 04:05, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
Oh yeah, I can do that in Emacs. Should have thought of that. Thanks! --Ideogram 04:15, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

Recent Changes RSS

Does anyone know how I could go about using a javascript to access the Recent Changes RSS for updating information? Also, how can I differentiate between registered and unregistered edits? Redian (Talk) 19:46, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

What do you mean by "registered and unregistered edits"? Are you talking about registered and unregistered users/accounts? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 22:36, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
Yes, that is what I meant. Sorry for being unclear. I'm trying to make a program to access the list of Recent Changes and allow filter options almost like Twinkle Except not Javascript (sorta) and not in a traditional browser. I'll need to figure out how to decipher the RSS feed I guess too, but for now getting at the RSS feed and separating registered/unregistered user edits is my prime concern. Redian (Talk) 00:45, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

Strange new behavior in Mozilla

I'm running Mozilla 1.7.8 on Debian Sarge and have MathML turned on in my preferences. Since today, or maybe yesterday, there's a strange disconnect at the top of most WP pages. For example, this is how I see the top of this page: File:WPMozillaBug.png.

More annoying than that is that my cursor disappears past about position 55 in each line, when editing a page. This doesn't happen when using Konqueror, but I don't have all the fonts available in Konqueror, so that's not a good option.

Anyone have any idea what might have caused this? --Trovatore 00:15, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

Have you tried restarting the browser, and, if that doesn't work, rebooting? —Daniel Vandersluis(talk) 18:55, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
I turn my computer off when I'm done with it and restart when I need it again (I never understood the whole uptime thing). The effect persists. (By the way I'm not sure if I entirely conveyed the context of the attached image -- it's a chunk out of the middle of the screen; I'm not saying that's all I see. But the sudden jump in the horizontal rule and in the letters above it is there.) --Trovatore 21:28, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

Now the effect is gone. Have there been any recent changes that would correlate with my observations detailed here? --Trovatore 01:42, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

Poem extension

As can be seen by some of my recent contributions, I've begun to make use of the poem extension in poetry-related articles. Before I continue, though, it might be good to ask these first:

  1. Should mass replacements for poems happen, as I've been doing them?
  2. Instead of doing "margin-left: 2em" to emulate the : indentation, how about a class (say, "poemindent") that emulates this behavior? The poem tag automatically produces a div with a "poem" class, but it may not be good to cause all poems to have an indentation like that.

GracenotesT § 00:11, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

  1. Yes, so future editors can see them and not bother anymore with : or spaces or <br> on every line, for poems and lyrics and maybe even dialogue or letters or extended quotes.
  2. Is there a scenario in which poems shouldn't be indented? If yes, I think there should be a class at say MediaWiki:Common.css for maintability and so users can define how they like to read their poems. –Pomte 00:25, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
Request made. GracenotesT § 22:01, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

Watchlist craziness

My Watchlist is suddenly showing a version of the Graham Dilley article instead of, erm, my watchlist. I've tried restarting, to no avail. I did edit said Mr Dilley's (dreadful) article earlier on, but cannot understand what's going on. --Dweller 15:39, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

Capitalization

Capitalization. For some reason I cannot get Wikipedia to capitalize Allan Rechtschaffen's second name in the title of the article. I certainly capitalized the name when I made my entry. This is frustrating.Richard Dates 14:34, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

I moved the page to Allan Rechtschaffen for you. —Daniel Vandersluis(talk) 15:00, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

Hidden text

When I type a non-existant page intop the search bar, the resulting text ("Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. Please search for..." etc.) is hidden. It's there, but it seems to be pale yellow text on the same colour background. I'm using classic skin in IE6. Could someone investigate this please. – Tivedshambo (talk) 08:51, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

Seems to be ok again now. – Tivedshambo (talk) 08:55, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

Secure server

The secure server has been desperately slow for the past few hours, to the point of being unusable. It sticks as"waiting for.." It's getting better now - heavy load from the US? 172.206.36.63 07:53, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

en.wikipedia article -> about:blank in own app

Hello,

I've recently had a problem with a self-developed app. In this app (developed in Dolphin Smalltalk 6.0), I can click on certain names etc and get the relevant English WP article displayed in an embedded browser window, which (as far as I know) is derived from IE in some way or other that I admit I am not quite familiar with (tbh I just dragged-and-dropped it from a menu in the development environment and, bingo, it worked). Navigation is done quite simply by setting a URL variable to i.e. "http:/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Sanger" and sending a navigate command.

This executable has worked for me for some time. Recently, however, immediately after displaying the article, the thing navigates on to "about:blank" which obviously makes the embedded browser window blank. The strange thing is that this only happens on English WP pages; ie entering eg "http/fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Sanger" (or "/de/", or "/no/", or...) into the address field of the embedded browser window perfectly displays the relevant article from the other-languate WP. All other web addresses I've tried also work fine. In IE itself, everything also works fine.

Now, I admittedly haven't yet had the time to go to the development version (which I haven't looked at for months) to dig out the details of how the browser window is connected to the rest of the app etc. Therefore, I'm not asking for deep technical help or anything -- I'm just wondering if anyone immediately can bring to mind a reason for this new behaviour?

Thanks for any help. OMHalck 20:30, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

Sounds vaguely like a recurring javascript-ish error. Does your app parse javascript and/or <script src=""> tags? --Splarka (rant) 07:18, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
My app actually doesn't do anything with the content at all -- just tells the browser window (which I didn't code) to navigate to a certain address. But yeah, some scriptish thing appears to be the trouble -- I get actual javascript error messages on some pages as well.
Anyway, I've just noted that things seem to work using the exact same .exe at my work computer, so I guess I'll just retest when I get back home tonight. If there's still a problem it's then obviously on my end. Thanks for taking the time to answer! OMHalck 08:43, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

Subpages link in the toolbox

This was recently added on commons and has proven very useful. It is a javascript that when added to MediaWiki:Common.js adds a "Subpages" button under the toolbox which links them to the page that shows all subpages of that page. You can see an example of this here on commons (look at the sidebar on the left, at the last link in the toolbox). Yonatan talk 02:29, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Time-based indexing of articles

I've begun work on forming a possible proposal for a temporal/time-based indexing effort for Wikipedia articles so that the the date when something happened could help categorize other articles of possible interest. It isn't immediately clear whether an implementation could be done with existing MediaWiki categorization or if it requires new features, so technical input would be welcome on the subject.

I've created a workspace at Wikipedia:Temporal Indexing for review. Best regards, CHAIRBOY (☎) 22:21, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

What happened to my diffs?

Sometime in the past day or so, the font size used for displaying diffs shrank dramatically. It's now about half the size it used to be, and much harder to read. I'm using the "Classic" skin, if it matters. --Carnildo 20:44, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

There's now an extra <div> inside each cell in the diff table, but I'm not sure why that would shrink the font size. It sounds as if there was some CSS rule with font-size: 50% that incorrectly matches the new diff format, but if so, I can't find it. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 20:53, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
The same default style rules are now used for diffs in all skins. This may be slightly smaller in the classic skin, but certainly it's not 50% smaller than before. --brion 21:08, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
So, what do I need to add to my standard.css to put things back the way they were? --Carnildo 21:09, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
Things are back to normal. The addition of diff.css explains why I couldn't find anything in standard.css or common.css. --Carnildo 22:04, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
(edit conflict x2) It may have been caused by r22204. Try clearing you browser cache and see if it still happens; if it does, we need to find the broken style sheet and fix it. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 21:10, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

Wrapping text around a thumbnail image?

Is there a bit of code to enable a text wrap around a thumbnail image? I have noticed that some pages contain large paragraph breaks due to a thumbnail image being there, and thought maybe I could clean up a bit by using a wrap option. Couldn't find that option on the cheatsheet or in any template that would apply. Thanks. Ebonyskye 19:19, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

Suggestion for Search Results.

Perhaps Wikipedia could adopt an approach similar to that of Google. If a search is unsuccessful, due to spelling or wording errors, there could be a suggestion made by Wikipedia (i.e. "Did you mean...?") to guide users.

Sounds like a great idea. But, sadly, while similar ideas have been suggested before, they have generally been turned down, with the explanation that it would cause too heavy a load on the servers. :-( --Tugbug 22:32, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

Scroll bars on diffs?

Is there some script I can put in my monobook to turn this update off?--VectorPotentialTalk 10:30, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

The answer is above. --cesarb 10:47, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Upload file links?

Why are there two upload file links? One is in the toolbox for "interaction" and another in "toolbox". Are we planning to change how the upload process works? If so the one in the "interaction" box looks more friendly to new users. The older one should then be deleted. -- Hdt83 Chat 01:44, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

  • The discussion of this has been announced repeatedly at the Village Pump. Please contribute to that discussion. Uncle G 08:51, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

IP Spoofing vandal

A user has been vandalizing a number of articles related to Jerry Falwell today from a large number of IPs. In this edit [2], he/she claims to be able to spoof his IP address. Can a dev/checkuser look into this and see if this individual is really spoofing IPs or if they are just exploiting open proxies? --BigDT 00:06, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

This was once possible, see User:Brion VIBBER/Cool Cat incident report, however, it was fixed. It is still possible someone could have gotten around this, so it can't hurt for a dev / checkuser to look (assuming we have the full header feature on our checkuser). Prodego talk 00:17, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
CheckUser does now have full support for xff headers; however, these are also not entirely impossible to spoof. My guess would be that a checkuser would not reveal much, but it may not hurt. More likely is that they are open proxies -- I saw the request on WP:OP, and I'll take a look at them in a bit. AmiDaniel (talk) 01:14, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
Woops, looks like Prodego beat me to it, and found all of them open except for one. AmiDaniel (talk) 01:34, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
I'm gratified to see that. I'm amazed that the same vandal knew about all those open proxies. The one address that wasn't open was an address the vandal was boasting he spoofed. If he does that again, how does one locate the open proxy through which he's spoofing? =Axlq 14:25, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Notes in Firefox overlap

More and more pages have notes in two columns, and often the notes of the columns overlap to the extent that they become unreadable and even unclickable. In Opera there still seems to be the one column version of notes. I checked logged off and with a new Firefox profile, but the problem is still there.[3]

What can I do to make this go away? Do a need a special stylesheet or something? Or is there actually a problem with that two colomn layout that seems to be more and more common.--Kornelis 14:01, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

I changed that page to single-column footnotes, since some of those URLs are clearly too long for the two-column form. I'm not sure what should be done to fix the general problem, though. --Derlay 14:21, 21 May 2007 (UTC)
Oof, those URLs do look ugly. The best solution, in my opinion, is to change the encyclopedia, rather than change your browser. {{cite web}} is useful. GracenotesT § 18:52, 21 May 2007 (UTC)
Exactly. Replace the long plain url's with the proper external link formatting, which will result in entries that can linewrap properly. Either {{cite web}} or just external links format. --Quiddity 19:10, 21 May 2007 (UTC)
Thanks. Since Opera displayed differently I suspected a browser related issue (being on Linux I could not check msie, IE NetRenderer[4] works only at the top of a page). Also I wasn't aware that the ref mechanism had an optional two column option (I now see it is CSS3). I find it difficult to keep track of all the options, so when other people use them I won't touch them even when the output is wrong (reading up on cite I see that that's an acknowledged criticism). To understand the modification made by Derlay I not only had to update my knowledge of cite.php, I also had to find a page on mozilla's work on css3 two columns and read the relevant page at www.w3.org. Not that I mind that (interesting read) but I didn't expect it would lead me there. :)
Thanks again. --Kornelis 08:51, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Infobox not displaying

Someone with time to check Seemless? The infobox is messed up, and can't see what is exactly not working (plus I am a little bit busy right now). -- ReyBrujo 03:46, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

Done. Cheers. --MZMcBride 03:54, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

segment copied from end of Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Wikipedia Logo.
  • There are at least 2 major character errors in the current Wikipedia puzzle-globe logo, and other minor problems.
  • User talk:Ambuj.Saxena/Wikipedia-logo is the most centralized discussion/link compilation that I know of. (There's even a petition at that link's projectpage)
  • Nohat has explained the problems with correcting the errors. But noone seems to have a solution.
  • Somebody with patience and brains (and either delegating or computer-graphics skills), needs to adopt this problem as a personal mission, lest it remain unsolved for another year. --Quiddity 02:53, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
This is a trademarked image. You have to consider those implications as well. You may want to ask whether there would be any issues replacing the old logo with a corrected one. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 03:16, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

Bug in article

the "Western Massachusetts" article appears to have a bug that freezes the page (at least with IE6). Looks like it's halting at <table id="toc

The "edit this page" tab never appears, so you kind of get stuck there. LADave 20:18, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Looks fine here (tested IE6, IE7, Firefox). --brion 20:35, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Ignoring Sections in TOC

Is there any way to ignore a series of sections in the table of contents - I'm integrated my archive with my talk page - and so far it's not working.danielfolsom 04:55, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

I've added class toclimit-2, which only shows level 1 headers. However, that also hides current discussions. (Revert it when you take a look.) One solution might be to put all archived discussions under level 3 headers once they become archived, and then use toclimit-3 for the TOC. GracenotesT § 20:32, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Search input box should be at located top/center

Almost anybody except wikipedia got this right: google, yahoo, amazon, msn, even IMDb fixed it some time ago. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 217.228.171.112 (talk)

If you get an account, you can go to Special:Preferences, and under the "skin" options, select the skin called "Standard". That has the search input box located at the top. Or, if that's not enough for you, you can write your own skin at a myskin user subpage, once again requiring an account. (Here is the default skin for positioning, called "monobook".) GracenotesT § 19:00, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for this info, it should be default however since most people don't know wikipedia is skinnable.
Yep, certainly is. People can even install their own scripts (see WP:JS) in order to enhance viewing and editing articles. It is useful to know, though. I actually prefer the search bar at the side, but that may be because I'm used to it.

I just logged out to look again. (I'm hardly ever logged out anymore, IMHO wikipedia "shure looks purdier", but is becoming practically unusable for anons :-/ ). Ayup, the default skin sucks as bad as ever ^^;;. It uses sans-serif fonts for body-text, and indeed doesn't have search boxes at top and bottom of page. Urk. Think of the anons, folks! --Kim Bruning 19:35, 17 May 2007 (UTC) I wonder if it was designed by a committee O:-)

Setting focus to the input box after loading a page

The focus should be set to the search input box after loading a page. Most importantly the search page.

Search sites like Yahoo, Google or MSN do it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.228.171.112 (talk • contribs) 17:48, May 17, 2007 (UTC)

Yes, and it should autofocus to summaries when deleting or moving. HighInBC(Need help? Ask me) 17:49, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
There's a good reason why it doesn't do this on the Main Page (it's so people can scroll with the arrow keys), but Special:Search is less of a problem. This might make a good feature request (see mediazilla: for feature requests). --ais523 17:51, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
I've made a feature request with bugzilla. Most search related sites set focus even for scrollable pages, if somebody really wants to scroll with up/down pressing tab to move the focus away from the input box should not be a issue.
Your claim is inconsistent with reality, as a simple test of major search sites will show. --brion 20:42, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
All three major search sites (google, msn, yahoo) set the focus, msn and yahoo are scrollable. Other info pages who set the focus and are scrollable: answers.com, dictionary.com. Which major search or info pages did your reality check yield? --Frank
Yahoo, at least, doesn't set the focus (there's no insertion point in the search box, and scrolling is possible). Somehow, though, the focus becomes set when I start typing, so presumably they're using some JavaScript/browser-dependent trick to cause the focus to act as if it were set. --ais523 14:39, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
www.yahoo.com sets focus here, at userscripts.org there is script for the greasemonkey firefox extension to set the focus to the input box for any page -frank

Research Design vs. Study Design

When one enters the term "Research Design", one is directed to the term "Study Design" The article discusses the design of epidemiological studies in medicine. The term "Research Design" has a much broader meaning which includes research in all the sciences, in the social sciences, and in other fields as well. It is a general term which encompasses a lot of types of research. I would like to start an article on "Research Design" but I don's want to combine it with "Study Design" because that doesn't make sense. How do I start a new article on "Research Design"?Richard Dates 18:44, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

When you enter "Research Design" and then get redirected to "Study design", there is a little line saying (Redirected from Research design) at the top, where "Research design" is a link. Click on the link, it will take you to the redirect page, which you can then edit. --Ideogram 23:32, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Pretty-printing of Special:Whatlinkshere

I'm a bit frustrated with randomly ordered output of Special:Whatlinkshere. I'd like to see the following features, so that it's more useful:

  • Default alphabetical sorting
  • More important, linking through template transclusion should be indicated. When the page contains e.g. navboxes transcluded through numerous pages, it's almost trivial to fix the link (in order to fix double redirects or link over redirect) by editing the template, but one can't see it by Whatlinkshere. Take this for an example: the sheer majority of links comes through Template:Municipalities of Serbia. How difficult is for developers is to fix the page so that it looks like:

The following pages link to Irig

...

...

etc. Duja► 11:04, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

I don't think the report is random, I think it's chronological. Corvus cornix 20:52, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Whatever it is now, alphabetical would be much easier to search/scan. -- nae'blis 22:03, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
If the output was in a table with two columns, and it used the class="sortable wikitable" tag, then we could easily sort the content to our liking. --Arcadian 22:12, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Protection status in wikicode

Is it possible to access the protection status of a page in wikicode? It would be nice if the templates in Category:Protection templates could notice when they are transcluded on unprotected pages, but I couldn't find any way to do that. --Derlay 09:25, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

You can see it in a pages logs (link on the history page) or when you try to edit. -- John Reaves (talk) 10:38, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
But the question was if there is some sort of magic word, variable, or parser function that could be used automatically in a template. Far as I see there isn't. Femto 12:28, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
This might make an interesting feature request (make requests at mediazilla:). It could make the small versions of the pp-whatever templates obsolete if used in MediaWiki space, among other things. --ais523 12:53, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
Filed as bugzilla:9947. --Derlay 23:24, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Lupin's anti-vandal tool broken?

Recently, this anti-vandal tool is not showing any edits of vandalism (even on level 3 Wikidefcon). Is it a bug? Can you please fix this anti-vandal tool? Thank you very much in advance!--PrestonH(Review Me!) • (Sign Here!) 03:20, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

P.S. I would normally contact Lupin for this situation, but he is inactive for nearly a month.

I e-mailed Lupin. Does anyone know about changes in the recent changes RSS? -- lucasbfr talk 17:07, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
This is such a helpful tool. Having it down is putting a damper on my vandal bashing! Strangely, it still filters my watchlist for me. There are a few others commenting about this at User talk:Lupin/Anti-vandal tool.—Gaff ταλκ 22:49, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Infoboxes and layout

Infoboxes are causing problems w/ layouts. Any article lead w/ an infobox of any nature lost its position as being at the top while the infoboxes got the left top side. Anybody else is experiencing this? -- FayssalF - Wiki me up® 17:06, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

No, not really. Try WP:PURGE and WP:CACHE, in that order, and check if that fixes. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 03:27, 18 May 2007 (UTC)


random article + refs tag

thought here would be an ok place to ask: is there a way to make a monobook script that adds two tabs to the upper right corner of the UI that are 'yes refs' and 'no refs'? when clicking on the no, it would tag the article with {{references}}, add as such to the edit summary, save, and then go to a random article; the yes tab would simple go to a random article. click-check-yes/no-repeat. a good way to tag articles that need refs eh? a boy do a lot need them. anyone else feel like this would be a good way to assess many articles in short amounts of time in a simple way? JoeSmack Talk 13:01, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

It is a hard thing to see if an article is unsoured in a few seconds. Sometimes (even often) the external links are really meant to be sources. It is hard to call the article unsourced when the sources are just mislabeled. In any event there already is a huge backlog on articles needing sources. I am not sure that we need to find everything that looks unsources and tag it for someone else to deal with. Jon513 15:36, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
i think it does only take a few seconds to glance for ref tags, non-labelled ELs used as refs in the article, and checking over the EL section (one official website, etc etc) to check. i've got the power of scroll wheel! ;)
there is a huge backlog, but that doesn't mean we should be ignoring labeling work it means we should be doing backlog work more. {{references}} is absolutely for finding everything without a source and tagging it. it isn't a 'let someone else do it' job, it's a 'there, half the work, identifying which articles need attention, is done now' job.
anyone know if this kind of coding is workable? JoeSmack Talk 16:28, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

Here is a quick bit of rough code to do mostly what you want (should work fine in Firefox/Opera, not tested in IE). 

if(wgAction == 'edit' || wgAction == 'view') addOnloadHook(refbuttons)
function refbuttons() {
  var yesref='/wiki/Special:Random';
  if(wgAction == 'edit') {
    var noref='javascript:reftag();';
  } else {
    var noref='javascript:edreftag();';
  }
  addPortletLink('p-cactions',yesref,'yes ref','ca-yesref','Go to random article');
  addPortletLink('p-cactions',noref,'no ref','ca-noref','tag with {{references}}');
}

function reftag() {
  if(document.getElementById('wpTextbox1').value.indexOf('{'+'{references}}') != -1) {
    alert('Warning: There is already a references tag present. \nNo action taken.');
    return;
  }
  document.getElementById('wpTextbox1').value = '{'+'{references}}\n' + document.getElementById('wpTextbox1').value;
  var saveme = confirm('A {'+'{references}} tag has been added to the top of this section.\nDo you want to save this page automatically?\n\nClick cancel/escape to abort, to move the tag, or to save manually.');
  if(saveme) document.getElementById('wpPreview').click()
//  if(saveme) document.getElementById('wpSave').click()
}

function edreftag() {
  var url = document.getElementById('ca-edit').firstChild.href;
  document.location.href = url + '&addreftag=true';
}
if(queryString("addreftag") == "true") addOnloadHook(reftag);

function queryString(p) {
 var re = RegExp('[&?]' + p + '=([^&]*)');
  
 var matches;
  
 if (matches = re.exec(document.location)) {
 try { 
 return decodeURI(matches[1]);
 } catch (e) {
 }
 }
  
 return null;
}

Notes:

  • Taking you to a random page after saving is a bit tricky so is not implemented in this version.
  • It asks you to confirm that you do want to automatically save.
  • It works from 'view' (normal top-edit viewing) and 'edit' (editing a page or section). No accesskey assigned, but you can do that (add it to the addportletlink() command as a new parameter).
  • Even though I wrote it, I do not condone the use of it ^_^.
  • Automatic save is disabled, it will only preview, unless you change the necessary code (try it out before you do though).

--Splarka (rant) 07:40, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

Please split what could be misinterpreted template transclusions in scripts, to stop the scripts showing up in categories with certain methods of installing them. I've done it above. --ais523 07:59, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
It seems like most people will eventually figure out they have to wrap most scripts in <nowiki> without having to baby them. --Splarka (rant) 12:15, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
(This sort of thing actually screwed up AfD on a couple of occasions before now; people's AfD-filing scripts kept appearing in the 'uncategorised AfDs' section. Even worse, I think it might have been my fault...) --ais523 10:30, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
Awesome! Thanks so much, I've incorporated it into my monobook as placed the script here! It works darn well for me, but I was wondering: is there any way to mark the edits as minor and put {{references}} - this article or section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. in the edit summary? Again, thank you for coding this! :D JoeSmack Talk 18:53, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
Eureka! With some tinkering I got it to do both myself. JoeSmack Talk 21:24, 17 May 2007 (UTC)


Bizzare non-alphabetical listing in stub cat

Was just browsing through Category:Cornwall geography stubs when I noticed that they are not listing in anything like alphabetical order, also the 'next 200' takes me to the page I was already viewing. Anyone know what's up? DuncanHill 00:24, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

I removed the sorting by |* from the stub template. The articles should become sorted over the next few minutes. –Pomte 00:41, 25 May 2007 (UTC)
Thanks seems to be working now! Had spent ages 'defaultsorting' lots of Cornish Saints, and suddenly it all went doolally! DuncanHill 00:46, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Special:Search drop-down

I've suggested code here that adds a drop-down box to search pages. Links are already used for no results, but I'm wondering what people think about this; it's just a convenient enhancement, really. GracenotesT § 22:44, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

I went ahead and fulfilled the editprotected request. It seems to work great. Cheers. --MZMcBride 23:53, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
Great :) Hopefully no one will be inconvenienced by it. GracenotesT § 00:02, 25 May 2007 (UTC)
Hm, the box looks only a tad off-kilter in IE. Could just be me, though. GracenotesT § 00:31, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

URGENT: Twinkle bug

There's a bug crept up in twinkle. After each revert, the first thing that appears except the restored version is "undefined". No clue why that is. Look here, here, and as part of the nonsense text, and here after I separated undefined from the rest of nonsense.

This is pretty urgent, because you have to remove this by hand. I can't write a little bot that automatically removes "undefined" from every twinkle revert, nor fix the bug. This may turn into more than a little mess. Evilclown93 00:59, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

An article in the namespace with the same bug.
Please contact the creator of the script. The script is not a part of the MediaWiki coding and as such, you are unlikely to receieve a response to your problem from this page. --Deskana (AFK 47) 01:04, 19 May 2007 (UTC)
I know that. The creator is offline, and I doubt he'll be online until later (around 12-14 UTC, maybe), and I'm just drawing attention to the fact the Twinkle is a bit bugged. I'm almost done with the email and going to post a message to Azatoth's talk, no worries. Evilclown93 01:08, 19 May 2007 (UTC)
We can shut down the script if needed, by blanking it. Do you think that is necessary? Prodego talk 01:23, 19 May 2007 (UTC)
Hmm, maybe I'll review the code. Voice-of-All 01:34, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

I have an article called Dragons escape the game and everybody keeps posting it for that stupid 'speedy deletion' and that is innapropriete to delete aticles on wikipedia because they will be blocked and eventualy be a vandal to delete and mark articles for speedy deletion.any posts of comments must be sent to --Tub city adventures 03:16, 19 May 2007 (UTC)'s talk page.

I believe that the problem is that 

 var form = this.responseXML.getElementById( 'editform' );
 var text;

should be 

 var form = this.responseXML.getElementById( 'editform' );
 var text = '';

"text" was concatenated with the article text, although it was not initialized to anything, so it was represented as a string with the value of "undefined" (and not "null", since it's a primitive data type). GracenotesT § 04:34, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/COPYING

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/COPYING (linked from Special:Version) has media type application/octet-stream instead of text/plain, and this makes it a bit hard to read with many browsers. --Derlay 22:24, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

MAJOR IP issues

Apologies for the Caps, but there's some really odd stuff going on. There's been a flurry of edits from IP's like 66.230.200.145 (this is currently the most consolidated discussion of this event), which is registered to Wikimedia. Autoblocks have been affected a wide range of users, coming from as far apart as Illinois and Montana. Someone connected with the Wikimedia servers needs to investigate. --YbborTalk 22:13, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard#Anomalous_auto-block_message seems to indicate the problem has cleared up. --YbborTalk 22:20, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
Beat me to it :) Martinp23 22:21, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
This discussion is really scattered. Also some at Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents#Category:Requests_for_unblock. --YbborTalk 22:24, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

I am using Wikimedia as an open proxy? Yay! Either that or I just got really lucky and found a non-hardblocked TOR exit node. Apologies for being happy, I know this is hard on others. Thanks, Armed Blowfish (mail) 01:35, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

This may or may not be related to Wikipedia_talk:Administrator_intervention_against_vandalism#Bug_ID_9213. The bug report there also mentions a problem with the Squid caches that results in anons not receiving messages on IP talk pages. -- Hdt83 Chat 01:41, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
Maybe a WP:BEANS but this sounds like a Wikimedia squid that was temporarily unlisted on the trusted XFF servers (all the squids are technically open proxies, but are always trusted not to forge XFF headers, so are always transparent).
No WP:BEANS there. That is essentially what happened. Nothing was unlisted, just new machines were not listed. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 19:41, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

Operation_Sea_Scan

Why doesn't this redirect work? Nardman1 17:12, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

It should be working now as I took out the percent-encoding, which can break wikilinks sometimes. - MTC 17:21, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

New patent template - suggestions wanted

I just set up a very simple template "patent" that takes a patent number and publication code (US/EP/WO) to create a reference string. An example of its use is at SEAgel. I was wondering what people think of this idea - am I reinventing the wheel, or can something be changed or improved? For instance the interaction with ref or cite might be improved. Also, I currently have the nationality of patent after the number so that if it's omitted it defaults to "US", but maybe that's silly - it might be more standard to have the prefix before and not bother with having a default. Mike Serfas 15:10, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

undo/revert

Just wondering how you can revert/undo edits; such as if someone vandelises a page, to undo the vandelism edit to take it back to how it was. Either leave a comment here or on my talk page please. Thanks :) J S Firefox 11:13, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

I have answered on their talk page- feel free to expand on it. GDonato (talk) 14:05, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

Issue with User:Lupin/Filter recent changes

User:Lupin/Filter recent changes does not appear to be working. At least one user has confirmed this over there. Any ideas? Navou 00:27, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

I have fixed the recent2.js script and filter recent changes works again. Cacycle 06:21, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

problem with IE

The login pages for orkut and gmail are not getting opened.Please help me out to solve the problem.Is there really any problem with IE or that to OS or to the internet connection?—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Jayamailbox (talk • contribs) 03:45, May 20, 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, but this board is for issues related to Wikipedia itself. You need to look elsewhere if you're having problems with other websites.
That said, I'd recommend you switch to Firefox. So much better than IE in every conceivable way. EVula // talk // ☯ // 05:06, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Workaround for watchlist limit?

I'm having trouble with my watchlist. Even when I set it to show 7 days of edits, I'm getting considerably less than a day. I'm monitoring and active in editing a couple of hundred pages, but the artificially set 250-edit cap is making it so that I can't even see edits from before I went to bed last, some 12 hours ago. Is there a workaround for the 250-edit cap, other than just trimming down my watchlist? I can't see a single page that lit up today that I feel comfortable removing. MrZaiustalk 05:50, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

Go to my preferences (upper right) → watchlist and change the value Number of edits to show in expanded watchlist: to some number greater than 250. -- MarcoTolo 02:32, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Displaying only part of an image

I remember seeing a page (can't find it now), where an image was displayed "cropped", i.e. the total height of the actual image was about 1200px, but of those, only a segment of 100-200px was displayed. What markup achieves that, b/c I couldn't find anything on Wikipedia:Picture tutorial. Thanks in advance, —AldeBaer 13:28, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

You pretty much have to "cheat". There are two basic options AFAIK, you can do a CSS hack, putting the image into a fixed sized div element with the "overflow:hidden" style set (not ideal the full image is still loaded, and won't work in all browsers). Alternatively you can just upload a cropped version of the image and use it as the thumbnail for the full version (so that clicking gives the full version) using the thumb=image syntax: [[Image:Example.jpg|thumb=Example_cropped.jpg|some camption]]. --Sherool (talk) 13:59, 20 May 2007 (UTC)
I did not know about the thumb= command. Aldebear, I used to have a template that did that, but all it did was display the entire image but only allow part of it to be visible. I deleted the template when I realized that trick is really hard on peoples browsers. (H) 14:03, 20 May 2007 (UTC)
Thanks a lot to both of you. Going to play around for a bit, see what works best. —AldeBaer 15:09, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Oldest in logs

Can the devs make "oldest" and "newest" buttons in user logs that go to the oldest logs of a user and the newest ones, the same way it does for contributions? --R ParlateContribs@ (Let's go Yankees!) 18:03, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Maybe if we move logs over to use the Pager class, but there is no unique key to sort on. Voice-of-All 00:46, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Hebrew Link bug?

Screenshot: [5]

Any ideas what might be causing this? Cheers, Tompsci 13:06, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

afd and mfd closings

What is the category or page listing the templates to close an afd, an mfd, etc? I want to try my hand at some non-admin closures of these (which are allowed in unambiguous keep cases). Thanks. -N 11:00, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Deletion process gives instructions for closing XfDs. --ais523 11:01, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Onlinesource template

Can anyone add the small=yes parameter to {{Onlinesource}}? There has been a request at the talk page for a long time, but no one has done it. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:47, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

It looks like it does. However until just now {{Onlinesource2005}} and the other year specific templates did not. --Salix alba (talk) 23:56, 20 May 2007 (UTC)
Thanks! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 12:14, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

An idea to fix the backlog at Category:Disputed fair use images

This category is tough to clean out because any admin who goes through it has to check manually on each image to make sure it's been there for 7 days. It also contained, at my last pass through the beginning of the alphabet, disputes which were over 6 months old. I think it'd be a good idea to date the associated template, {{non-free use disputed}}, and have a bot create dated categories for it. Problem is I don't have the technical expertise as far as template coding or bot-making to actually implement this myself. Is anyone out there who does, and wants to help? (ESkog)(Talk) 18:46, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Deleted edits of renamed users stay associated with the old name

I was browsing deleted edits (unfortunately I don't remember the article) when I noticed that deleted edits of renamed users stay associated with the old name. This can be explained as follows: 1-User:X edits an article. 2-The article is deleted (after an AfD for example). 3-User:X is renamed to User:Y. 4-The article is restored (after a deletion review). Now what happens when the deleted edits are restored? Are they automatically assigned to the new name or what? I saw such deleted edits stay with the old name but I don't know what will happen when they are restored. Is this normal or is this a known bug? --Meno25 12:25, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

It's known. I think the code to reattribute deleted edits during renaming exists but is disabled for performance reasons. --ais523 12:40, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
Right, there is no INDEX on user_text for the archive table, the same reason why we don't let people browse user's deleted contributions. Voice-of-All 14:41, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
And once the edits are restored, they remain attributed to the old username. See special:contributions/Pianoman87 which is my old username - in the case of both Template talk:If and Air Force Amy, my edits were deleted when I was user:Pianoman87 and then restored after my username change. Graham87 12:56, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

I don't know that much PHP, but I believe that the code ais523 is referring to is: 

global $wgRenameUserQuick;
if( !$wgRenameUserQuick )
	$this->tables['archive'] = 'ar_user_text';

...I think. GracenotesT § 13:54, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Usage calculation tool

Is there any tool to calculate the usage of an article? --♪♫ ĽąĦĩŘǔ ♫♪ walkie-talkie 08:41, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Technical FAQ#Can I add a page hit counter to a Wikipedia page? Tinlinkin 11:07, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
Thanks buddy :) --♪♫ ĽąĦĩŘǔ ♫♪ walkie-talkie 13:25, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
There is this. Quadzilla99 18:23, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Downloading a font to view one of its characters

Even though this is more of a matter of policy (etended from Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Is it appropriate to make people download a font to see an "unfree" unicode codepoint?), it is appropriate to require an additional font in order to view just one character within the font? I am asking this from the technical point of view, because I cannot recall a need to download nonstandard fonts in order to view Wikipedia articles correctly. The situation is about the International Symbol of Access and involves Template:Access icon and Help:Displaying the international wheelchair symbol. Tinlinkin 04:52, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Those examples are for language support, which is an expected download if you want to view particular languages and alphabets/characters. (I have those fonts, by the way, and I did not have to do anything special to get them–but that may be because I specified a full installation...) The fonts are included with and easy to install with Firefox and IE (I am assuming). In this case, I think the expectation to download one font to support one character (this is my main contention) as opposed to an entire character set is close to nonexistent, and impractical as you have to go out of your way to install it. Tinlinkin 05:24, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
  • The East Asian character sets are not provided in IE, one must install them with a Windows installation CD. I guess I don't see that your main contention as something to be contended. If editors insists upon using the International Symbol of Access, if said symbol is not freely licensed, if using the Unicode font is what we need to do, then so be it. (That is my opinion.) --Iamunknown 06:02, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
If I want one egg, but eggs only come packaged by the dozen, I have no choice but to buy the dozen. I don't see why that sense has to apply here. That's how I see it, and even I don't think that is the best rationale against the font. If the final resolution is to use the font, I'll bow to it, but not at this time. Tinlinkin 11:04, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Cascading Protection

Can a page be semi-protected with cascading protection? Also, how many levels does it go cascade? --R ParlateContribs@ (Let's go Yankees!) 00:03, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Semi-protection does not work with cascading. After all, if it did, an autoconfirmed non-admin could semi-protect any article he/she wanted by transcluding it on a semi-cascade-protected page. Cascading goes as many levels as there is transclusion, although I'd assume there is a numerical limit; I'd imagine pre-expand size kicks in at some point as well. GracenotesT § 00:15, 21 May 2007 (UTC)
I thought they changed it so that cascading sprotected pages were sprotected? --Deskana (AFK 47) 14:44, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
Obviously I was mistaken. God knows where I came up with that idea. --Deskana (AFK 47) 14:46, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
Well, that is sort of true. I disabled cascading protection for non-full, but changed the way it works so that *if* it was enabled, it would actually cascade semi-protection. Voice-of-All 15:43, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

New Messages

The orange bar won't go away, even after I cleared my browser cache. 75.20.220.134 01:26, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

This is why. Many people are frustrated at this. --R ParlateContribs@ (Red Sux!) 02:04, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Hiding the contents box

Hello. I was wondering how I could hide the contents box in one of my user subpages. Please could someone enlighten me?--Diniz 19:38, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Put __NOTOC__ at the top of the page. x42bn6 Talk Mess 20:14, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
Thanks!--Diniz 21:19, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
Point of interest: it can be placed anywhere on the page, not just the top, and it'll still work. Minor detail, but I just thought I'd mention it. EVula // talk // ☯ // 22:23, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Vanishing watchlist

Hi!

I was referred to this page at the helpdesk with my problem. And my problem is that recently some articles have become "unwatched" i.e. vanished from my watchlist. One fellow told me that nobody can remove items from my watchlist (except for those who have access to the page's database I guess...) and restore them either. Do you think that there's something which can be done about it? Coolkoon 18:55, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

I believe there's a not-quite-yet-resolved issue where some operations such as protection and unprotection don't show up properly in the watchlist. Try checking the "Expand watchlist to show all applicable changes" option in your preferences; this may help work around that by displaying the preceding edits for those pages. --brion 19:36, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for the hint, now the watchlist appears to be complete, but do you think that it affects the number of the items I have in the watchlist? And also, how can I prevent the vanishing of the articles from the watchlist?

Watchlist

What's with the watchlist? I mean the lag and the message? Can the message be turned off and will this lag be around from now on? Aaron Bowen 17:56, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Set items of the class "mw-lag-warn-high" as invisible or hidden or such using your user .css page. Voice-of-All 19:30, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
Hi Aaron. The message is a notice which explains a preexisting, intermittent phenomenon which sometimes causes the watchlist and other lists to not display recent changes while various servers catch up with large amounts of changes. It only shows while there is a delay, and does not show at other times.
If you wanted, you could hide it anyway, though; scroll up for some hints on that. --brion 19:31, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Request for Information.

Hello,

Is there a way to scan an article for keywords? I was looking into the idea of possibly auto-formatting an article after scanning for desired keywords. --Aarktica 22:11, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

It's possible in Mozilla (scans the keywords in the article's body within the edit mode), but not in IE. --Brand спойт 22:52, 21 May 2007 (UTC)
How about within WP? For example, is there a way to scan multiple articles for the word "tundra" and format it with italics? --Aarktica 23:10, 21 May 2007 (UTC)
You could potentially find a bot that performs a similar function, or maybe any bot and ask the operator for advice, or get them to incorporate the function into the bot. -- Tompsci 23:43, 21 May 2007 (UTC)
I think theres a feature in Google to search for keywords within an article. -- Hdt83 Chat 03:25, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

I think wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser has this built in. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 03:28, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback; hopefully one of these options will allow for mass-formatting of multiple articles. --Aarktica 23:39, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Captcha on login

I gotta say.... I'm all for strengthening the login process but multi-step logins suck. If there is no one-step alternative I'll only be logging in to create articles and I'll be doing all my editing as an IP. It will suck not using a true signature - but I'm sure I can come up with some off-line signature that I can drop in to the end of a message easily enough, like this: I'm not signed in right now but this is me Garrie

Garrie 21:47, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Mutlistep logins? I've noticed no change in the login process recently. --Deskana (AFK 47) 21:49, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
There must be something weird with cookies. Garrie, you may want to try clearing your cookies. I'm not sure the exact steps to reproduce it, but I have noticed that when I have changed my password and then go to another machine where I was logged in, I am first prompted for my password as normal, but then, after I enter it, I get prompted to enter it again with a captcha. --BigDT 22:00, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
I guess I was spooked by all the increased talk of strong passwords... at pretty much the same time as my post I had recovered from a phishing attack which partially dumped a rootkit on my PC. I think BigDT was spot on with the cookies because I lost a couple of cookies for a little while. Everything is "normal" now.Garrie 22:57, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Compare selected versions button

I have a script which used to fix the compare button so that it became a link capable of being middle clicked in Firefox, so that it opens in a new tab. Recently it has stopped working. Is there another way of doing this, maybe a css hack? Steve block Talk 11:07, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Works for me (on test.wikipedia and a local copy of en.wp). What browser/version are you using? Do you get any JS errors? --Splarka (rant) 07:47, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
Firefox 2.0.0.3, and no, no js errors. Steve block Talk 21:21, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

superscripts arent "super" in Firefox

They appear below the text. See the screenshot of Toronto Raptors here: http://img95.imageshack.us/my.php?image=ffyg9.png —MC Snowy (Talk / contribs) 21:43, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

That is odd, but it can't be firefox that's at fault, because the page looks fine in my browser--VectorPotentialTalk 01:27, 10 May 2007 (UTC)
Then what is it? It looks fine in IE7 and Opera 9.10. I'm using Firefox 2.0.0.3 btw. —MC Snowy (Talk / contribs) 15:33, 10 May 2007 (UTC)
Can somebody help me? —MC Snowy (Talk / contribs) 01:38, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
Nobody else has this problem??? —MC Snowy (Talk / contribs) 01:27, 21 May 2007 (UTC)
Not me. Have you tried clearing your cache? Do you have custom CSS that may interfere? -- ReyBrujo 02:34, 21 May 2007 (UTC)
Yes I have cleared it. No custom CSS. —MC Snowy (Talk / contribs) 01:09, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Lag issue?

Generally I have Wikipedia loading fast, but it takes a time for preview and saving (a long waiting for wikipedia.org). Is it due to server lag or simply because of my LAN? --Brand спойт 08:24, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

AFAIK, it is due to the server lag. -- FayssalF - Wiki me up® 14:57, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Notes in Firefox overlap

More and more pages have notes in two columns, and often the notes of the columns overlap to the extent that they become unreadable and even unclickable. In Opera there still seems to be the one column version of notes. I checked logged off and with a new Firefox profile, but the problem is still there.[6]

What can I do to make this go away? Do a need a special stylesheet or something? Or is there actually a problem with that two colomn layout that seems to be more and more common.--Kornelis 14:01, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

I changed that page to single-column footnotes, since some of those URLs are clearly too long for the two-column form. I'm not sure what should be done to fix the general problem, though. --Derlay 14:21, 21 May 2007 (UTC)
Oof, those URLs do look ugly. The best solution, in my opinion, is to change the encyclopedia, rather than change your browser. {{cite web}} is useful. GracenotesT § 18:52, 21 May 2007 (UTC)
Exactly. Replace the long plain url's with the proper external link formatting, which will result in entries that can linewrap properly. Either {{cite web}} or just external links format. --Quiddity 19:10, 21 May 2007 (UTC)
Thanks. Since Opera displayed differently I suspected a browser related issue (being on Linux I could not check msie, IE NetRenderer[7] works only at the top of a page). Also I wasn't aware that the ref mechanism had an optional two column option (I now see it is CSS3). I find it difficult to keep track of all the options, so when other people use them I won't touch them even when the output is wrong (reading up on cite I see that that's an acknowledged criticism). To understand the modification made by Derlay I not only had to update my knowledge of cite.php, I also had to find a page on mozilla's work on css3 two columns and read the relevant page at www.w3.org. Not that I mind that (interesting read) but I didn't expect it would lead me there. :)
Thanks again. --Kornelis 08:51, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Autoblocks

If a user is unblocked, and the autoblock hasn't expired yet, is the autoblock automatically undone also. And since autoblocks only last 24 hours, a user can just create new accounts and edit again from their IP in 24 hours? --R ParlateContribs@ (Red Sux!) 02:23, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

No and yes. Prodego talk 02:31, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
Thanks. --R ParlateContribs@ (Let's Go Yankees!) 02:33, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Tableless Web Design?

Does anyone know if there's movement anywhere in the Wikimedia world to move to Tableless web design? Vagary 02:22, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

The default Monobook skin is already a tableless design. In general, I don't see many places on Wikipedia or other Wikimedia sites that use tables for things other than tabular data. Mike Dillon 02:48, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
It was mostly the infoboxes I had in mind. I suppose many of them are partially legitimate, as some of the data is tabular. But once an infobox is a table, the table gets used for layout. :-/ Vagary 03:47, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
I, personally, try to eschew tables whenever possible; for the Mortal Kombat WikiProject award, I was able to do it as a highly stylized definition list, rather than a table like most awards (like {{The Original Barnstar}}) use. I'd whole-heartedly support any effort to ditch superfluous tables. EVula // talk // ☯ // 04:48, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Rollback on watchlist

Admins do not get a rollback button on their watchlist, and for good reason, you cannot tell what the edit actually is unless you look.

But that has changed, now there are automatic edit summaries and we see things like "←Replaced page with 'donkey balls!!!!'" showing up on our watchlist. It would be really handy to be able to one-click repair this type of vandalism instead of loading the diff first. What do people think? (H) 01:03, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

I don't know if this would be possible to sort out, but I would say only have it if the automatic edit summary arrow is displayed. --R ParlateContribs@ (Red Sux!) 01:09, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

A distinct possibility. (H) 01:10, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

I find that I misclick random links on my watchlist far too frequently to be comfortable with this. (Though I've been meaning to make a javascript "are you sure?" popup for rollback anyway.) —Cryptic 01:11, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

They could be placed in a CSS class for easy removal, size changing, or script access. (H) 01:17, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

How about if the rollback button were on the left instead of the right? I probably accidentally hit it 10 times in my first month as an admin. I was used to being able to hit the wheel button to go into scroll mode. Well, in Firefox and IE7, wheel opens a link in a new tab. So if you hit the wheel wanting to go into scroll mode and just so happen to be over top of this brand new rollback button, you fire off the rollback. It would be great, though, if there were a rollback on the left side by the diff/history links, both on contributions AND on the watchlist. --BigDT 01:18, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
Hmm... I use mouse gestures, with a top-down gesture to open in a new tab. So, I put the mouse cursor at the top and gesture down through all the (diff) links, opening them in as many tabs. A rollback link there may be dangerous for me. Talk about massively rollbacking by mistake... -- ReyBrujo 01:22, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Proposed change to "dot" template

A recent change to {{·}} was proposed, regarding the arrangement of spaces. As this is a widely used template, I thought I should link the discussion from here. Current discussion is at Template talk:·#trailing_space. – Luna Santin (talk) 00:58, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Prose size script

I installed Dr pda's prose size script a while back and it worked fine for a while. However, recently it stopped working on certain pages such as Lawrence Taylor and History of the New York Giants among others. I asked Dr pda and he said it works fine for him on those pages. The bottom left of my computer screen says done but with errors on page, with a yellow triangle with a black exclamation point in the middle. The page size button doesn't appear at all. Can someone help me with this? Quadzilla99 18:07, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

In case anyone can help, the problem has been narrowed down (Dr pda's script is now broken when section headings begin with numbers, due to some change at the meta level). See discussion here. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:48, 20 May 2007 (UTC)
One issue I can see is that the output of the search page now says "KiB" instead of "kB". This was introduced by Cyde in two changes on May 13 and 14. I don't have Internet Explorer to reproduce the actual issue, but this change will break the getWikiText() function as it currently stands. Mike Dillon 01:13, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

I think I may have committed a fix; reload your JavaScript and see if it's working now? --Cyde Weys 12:26, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Cyde, sorry, but you're talking to a techno-dummie here. I did ctrl-F5 on my monobook — is that what you mean? Or does Dr pda have to do something to his script? No, not fixed yet. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 12:29, 21 May 2007 (UTC)
Ah well, had my changes in the MediaWiki namespace been what caused this bug, that would have fixed it. --Cyde Weys 16:19, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

I didn't mean to imply that fixing the "KiB" thing would fix the problem, I just noticed that it was broken.

I just attempted to recreate the problem in Internet Explorer and I got a JavaScript error about "link.href" not being defined, but the document statistics were still shown. I was using Internet Explorer 6 and I was not logged in, so I put: 

javascript:importScript("User:Dr pda/prosesize.js");getDocumentSize()

into the URL bar to test it. The error about link.href was supposedly on line 99, column 5 of something, but I couldn't find it. There is a reference to link.href in wikibits.js, but It wasn't on line 99... Can someone exactly describe what happens when this "breaks" and which specific version of Internet Explorer is affected? Mike Dillon 00:11, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

I have the problem on both IE6 and IE7, and the "break" is simply that the Prose size link is gone from my toolbox for any article that has a section heading beginning with a number (but not for article titles beginning with numbers). Dr pda's ArticleHistory script is also gone — they are both there for all other articles. He says he made no changes, and they were working before, and they continue to work on other articles. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:22, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
Would you mind getting the JavaScript error message and posting it here? You can find it by double-clicking the error icon in the status bar and clicking "Show details" (not sure about the exact wording since I don't have IE handy at the moment). Mike Dillon 03:47, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

I suspect that this issue is related to the recent addition of MediaWiki:Wikimediaplayer.js to MediaWiki:Common.js (added on May 13 by Cyde). When I load History of the New York Giants in Internet Explorer, I get the aforementioned error about "link.href" on line 99. If you look at line 99 of MediaWiki:Wikimediaplayer.js, the code is attempting to do something with "link.href.substr". I'm not exactly sure why this would only happen in articles with numeric headings, but that does indeed seem to be the case.

...Time passes

I'm pretty sure I just figured out the problem with MediaWiki:Wikimediaplayer.js. The for loop that iterates over the HTMLCollection of "A" tags ends up having fairly weird values for the keys. Unlike the behavior in Mozilla, where the keys are sequential numbers, Internet Explorer has "length" as the first key. In the case of "A" tags, the keys used in a for each loop start with the sequential numbers and then are followed by text values related to the link href or anchor value. I think that code can be fixed by changing the loop from this: 

for( var key in links ) {
    link = links[key];

To this: 

for (var key = 0; key < links.length; key++) {
    link = links[key];

The reason that it breaks when there are numeric headings is that Explorer is attempting to use any string that starts with a number as a numeric index. For example, "1986: Super Bowl Champions" is treated as the number 1986. If there is no link at that array index, the "link" variable is undefined and thus calls to "link.href" generate an error. I don't know if this is causing the problem with Dr pda's scripts, but I could see an error in this script preventing subsequent JavaScript from executing. Mike Dillon 15:43, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Mike, I'm not sure if you still need input from me, or if I should show this to Dr pda to see if what you describe fixes it? I'm sorry; I don't really speak this language. Pr pda is busy in real life for about two weeks, but if you think that's it, should I ask him to peek in here? I'm not getting an error anywhere: I just get ... nothing. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:37, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
Sorry for getting overly technical. The fix needs to be made in MediaWiki:Wikimediaplayer.js by an admin. I don't know if it will fix the issue with Dr pda's scripts, but it will fix the "link.href" error I was seeing in IE6 on the History of the New York Giants page. One step at a time.
P.S. Would you mind getting the error message that I asked for earlier? Mike Dillon 17:00, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
I don't have an error message; I don't know where/what to get. I just have a missing link in my toolbox. But Quadzilla99 (talk · contribs) does get an error message, I think; I'll ask him to look in here. Thanks so much for all your help. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:29, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
If you're getting the yellow icon with the exclamation point in the status bar, double click it to see the error message. When the dialog comes up, click "Show Details". If there is more than one error message, hit the "Next" button to see additional messages. Mike Dillon 17:47, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

(undent)Hi Mike, the message says (when I double click on the icon and hit show details):

Line: 99
Char: 5
Error: 'link.href' is null or not an object
Code: 0
URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_New_York_Giants

Hope this helps. Quadzilla99 18:04, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

If that's the only message, that's the same one I got. I believe my fix above will correct that one. Hopefully that's actually the source of the problems with the prose size script. Mike Dillon 18:30, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
So I should cut and paste this into my monobook? Or does the change need to be made by Dr pda? Quadzilla99 18:56, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
It needs to be fixed in MediaWiki:Wikimediaplayer.js by an admin. Mike Dillon 20:19, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

I looked into this briefly, and noticed that in the source html, most anchor tags have ids, except those with names starting with numbers. Not sure what the id is used for or if this is related, but it seemed a curious coincidence. Gimmetrow 19:34, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

The ids are added by HTML Tidy; they are not generated by the MediaWiki source. The reason that the ones starting with numbers don't have ids is that XML ids can only start with a letter or underscore:
Definition: A Name is a token beginning with a letter or one of a few punctuation characters, and continuing with letters, digits, hyphens, underscores, colons, or full stops, together known as name characters.] Names beginning with the string "xml", or with any string which would match (('X'|'x') ('M'|'m') ('L'|'l')), are reserved for standardization in this or future versions of this specification.
See http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#sec-common-syn. Mike Dillon 22:40, 22 May 2007 (UTC)
So what's the status on this?Quadzilla99 19:11, 23 May 2007 (UTC)
It should be fixed. Bypass your cache to see if things are cool now. Mike Dillon 20:53, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Map images not updating despite purges and BYC

Four most recent versions of maps on Commons are not updating on Wikipedia (or Commons) as the images or thumbnails or in templates. User:VerruckteDan and I have tried purging the maps and bypassing our caches. For example this map Image:Pennsylvania Locator Map.PNG is used in state park infoboxes (like Little Pine State Park).

The DE, IL and LA maps display the correct version on their own, but have similar issues of displaying an older version when used in Geoboxes as locator maps:

Update: In each of the three cases (DE, IL, LA) the map (first link) displays the most recent version, but the Geobox City (included in the second link) displays an older version (different border colors, edge of water not a darker blue). These are calibrated maps (so entering the latitude and longitude in the Geobox automatically calculates the position of the locator dot) so could that somehow be freezing in an older version?

Thanks in advance for any help / advice with this problem, Ruhrfisch ><>°° 03:59, 17 May 2007 (UTC) I updated the description above to offer more information. Ruhrfisch ><>°° 14:25, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

  • I added the Delaware map to White Clay Creek State Park today. The current version shows when I look at the map itself, but an older version showed up in the infobox. This is not a Geobox template. Ruhrfisch ><>°° 03:22, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

'Upload file wizard'

Shouldn't that probably read ' File upload wizard ' ?--VectorPotentialTalk 18:58, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

There's some discussion at MediaWiki talk:Sidebar (and numerous other places, it seems). --- RockMFR 20:25, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

Exporting watchlist

Is it possible for me to export my watchlist from an old account of mine to this one?--Seraphiel 07:26, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Well....anyone?--Seraphiel 10:36, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

Not at the moment, although it might become possible in the future. 164.11.204.56 11:26, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

I would also like the ability to periodically save and restore my watchlist. It's already filed in bugzilla: bug 7959. CMummert · talk 11:41, 26 May 2007 (UTC)
Thank you for opening the feature request. This is a feature that should have been there since a long time ago itself. Hope it gets approved.--Seraphiel 12:03, 26 May 2007 (UTC)
I didn't open it. One way to bring attention to bugs that you are interested in is to "vote" for them in bugzilla. CMummert · talk 12:53, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

Scroling Across Diffs

Why all of a sudden, do the diffs have left to right scrollers on each part of the diff instead of just having it longer on the page? --TeckWiz is now R ParlateContribs@ (Let's go Yankees!) 21:07, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

Because people don't like having 99% of the diff be completely unreadable due to page widening. --brion 21:09, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
I don't like the scrolling. I like the wide diffs. Is there a css way to override it? --TeckWiz is now R ParlateContribs@ (Let's go Yankees!) 21:11, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
I'm not sure making 80% of the diff hidden was the answer here; usually Column 1 was narrow and Column 2 was page-width for me, so I just used Column 2 as my guideline for seeing what changed. I hate the scrollbars and they mess with certain wheelmice (which will try to scroll when the cursor is over the bar). -- nae'blis 21:13, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
If you wish, you may restore the old, broken behavior by customizing your user CSS. See the new diff.css for the current styles; the bits you'd want to "reverse" are the overflow: auto (change it to visible, I think) and the table-layout: fixed (change it to auto). --brion 21:22, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

Personally, I think it's a huge improvement. Hats off to the developers. Thanks for your efforts on our behalf. --Dweller 22:05, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

I think it is as well: I found it annoying when checking differences that I had to scroll the broswer. This new feature makes it a lot easier to check differences. Acalamari 23:51, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

Only the first line of each paragraph is being shown in Mozilla, with no scroll bars. (I can still sort of scroll by highlighting the text and moving the mouse up and down.) It's kind of extremely annoying. -Nogood 06:08, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Which browser version? This particular failure mode is a new one for me. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 06:51, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
This failure (Just the first n bytes of the diff being displayed) is currently occurring with my browser: Netscape 7.0 on Solaris 8. It makes the diff essentially useless for any paragraph with more than n bytes. It's clearly a CSS problem as the entire paragraph is there in the HTML source of the page.
Atlant 17:00, 21 May 2007 (UTC)
Thanks. I've managed to reproduce this, and have attached a screenshot to bug 1438. Since the problem only occurs on Netscape 7.0 and not on 7.1, this seems to have been a browser bug that has since been fixed. At this point, my advice to affected users would be to upgrade. (That doesn't mean I don't want to know if this occurs on other browsers as well, just that there's not much I can think of that we could do to work around it in MediaWiki.) —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 17:39, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
However, a simple user-specific workaround is to put "table.diff td div { overflow: visible; }" (without the quotes) in your monobook.css (or the appropriate .css page if you're using some other skin). —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 17:42, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Librarians must be hiding something.

I heard that Jimbo and Steven Colbert had an interview and something was said about mass vandalism on the phrase "The Librarians are hiding something." I am finding a ton of this for over an hour. Anyone know how to write a bot to catch this? I added the phrase onto the Lupin antivandal tool. thanks. —Gaff ταλκ 04:23, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Bizzare non-alphabetical listing in stub cat

Was just browsing through Category:Cornwall geography stubs when I noticed that they are not listing in anything like alphabetical order, also the 'next 200' takes me to the page I was already viewing. Anyone know what's up? DuncanHill 00:24, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

I removed the sorting by |* from the stub template. The articles should become sorted over the next few minutes. –Pomte 00:41, 25 May 2007 (UTC)
Thanks seems to be working now! Had spent ages 'defaultsorting' lots of Cornish Saints, and suddenly it all went doolally! DuncanHill 00:46, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Special:Search drop-down

I've suggested code here that adds a drop-down box to search pages. Links are already used for no results, but I'm wondering what people think about this; it's just a convenient enhancement, really. GracenotesT § 22:44, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

I went ahead and fulfilled the editprotected request. It seems to work great. Cheers. --MZMcBride 23:53, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
Great :) Hopefully no one will be inconvenienced by it. GracenotesT § 00:02, 25 May 2007 (UTC)
Hm, the box looks only a tad off-kilter in IE. Could just be me, though. GracenotesT § 00:31, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Possible to fix inline references so they aren't copied?

When you ctrl-C a section of text on Wikipedia, it gets filled with all the superscripted [5]s and [2]s and [57]s from the references. This is very aggravating to many casual users of Wikipedia who are excerpting small sections of text or the like. As the articles are filled with more and more references, it becomes more and more annoying, even though the references are clearly a good thing. Would there be a technical way to make it so that when the text was copied, the reference tags would not be copied? Clearly once the text is copied off Wikipedia, the tags are useless as the references they point to are gone. —Dark•Shikari[T] 22:36, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

One possible solution would be to temporarily add
.reference { display: none; }
To your monobook.css, and then clear your cache, and then copy the text, and then remove it. While a JavaScript function could toggle the display of objects in the class "reference", this temporary solution would at least work. People might want to copy the references, so making them unselectable (if it's possible, I forget how) may inconvenience other users. GracenotesT § 01:01, 25 May 2007 (UTC)
Would people want to copy them, really? If people care about copying anything to do with references, they would probably prefer if the superscript were expanded to the full reference text in brackets.
The first technical solution that comes to mind is to generate the superscript using the CSS content property, the results of which are not selectable. But the content property cannot have HTML in its value, so Javascript would have to be used to make it clickable. Personally, I'd just wait till CSS3 which is designed with footnotes in mind. Vagary 03:31, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Cartoon Network template

I'm looking for assistance with {{Cartoon Network}}. My knowledge of parser functions is patchy at best and require someone who's capable of adding new classes for list-type articles, other templates associated with the project and adding the code for handling importance levels within projects. Completely dealt with now, thanks to Gracenotes for the heavy lifting and MZMcBride for some small after sales support. --treelo talk 00:30, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Animated GIF not displaying

Hi,

I uploaded an animated GIF to Uncyclopedia here, but thumbnails of the image do not display. In the place where a thumbnail would be, it says, 'Error creating thumbnail: /usr/wikia/source/wiki16svn/bin/ulimit-tvf.sh: line 4: 23995 Segmentation fault "$@".' You can see the message here. Anyone know what could be causing the problem?

Thanks,

Squaw 93 00:45, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

I'm only ¾ sure, but I think I heard that MediaWiki can't scale animated GIFs. Nihiltres(t.c.s) 03:31, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

It can, it just fails on ones that have been optimized by dropping unchanged portions of the frame, because it doesn't scale the droppings correctly. Uncyclopedia is entirely separate from wikipedia, anyway, so this isn't the place to ask. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 03:33, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Actually, MediaWiki has scaled even optimized animations properly since almost a year ago. The resulting scaled animations will not be optimized, but should look correct. Since the thumbnail cache wasn't purged when the change was made, it's possible that some old animations still have broken scaled-down versions in the cache; if found, those may be purged manually.
In this case, however, I suspect that the problem is that the file is simply so big that the image scaling program is running out of its allotted resources. Either that, or something in the scaling setup is simply broken. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 20:27, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Wide Diffs

Hi, don't know if this question has been asked before, but why is it that sometimes a diff will come out many times wider than my browser window, Here's an example of what I mean [8]. I'm using IE 7.0. Is there something I can do to keep these from happening? Thanks! —Elipongo (Talk|contribs) 17:40, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

The reason for the wide diff is the long URL contained near the end of the diff. There is no whitespace in the URL for the diff text to break on, which causes the display to extend to the width of the URL. I don't know if there's anything that can be done about this. —Daniel Vandersluis(talk) 18:53, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
For a while, I used a "diff enhancer" which solved this problem. I stopped using it because it was sometimes too slow. I don't remember where I got it from, so I am unable to give credit where it's due. See [9] for the code. For most people, you need to put this in your monobook.js file, ie in en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:YOURUSERNAME/monobook.js. I haven't used it for almost a year, so there's a possibility that some change in user interface may have broken it in the meantime.-gadfium 20:46, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
Found the original: see Wikipedia:WikiProject User scripts/Scripts/Fix diff width. It's probably been updated since the copy I used, so use this link, not the one I gave in the previous paragraph.-gadfium 20:51, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
Thanks! I'll see if that works for me. —Elipongo (Talk|contribs) 21:43, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
I also used that for a while, but nowadays I simply use the following on my user CSS: .diff-context, .diff-deletedline, .diff-addedline { overflow: auto; display: block; }. The note on my user CSS's history says it came from Wikipedia talk:WikiProject User scripts/Scripts/Fix diff width#Very simple CSS fix?. Since it uses CSS only, it's much faster (because it uses the browser's highly optimized CSS engine). --cesarb 23:39, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
I didn't know about that. I've just tried it, and it works well enough that I'll keep it, at least for a while. It's fast, as you say. The only problem for me is that pressing the "End" key to move to the bottom of the article while the diff portion is showing wrecks the screen display. Pressing PgUp and then PgDn again fixes it. There may be further problems if the article and diff was only a couple of screens long. I'm using Firefox 2.0.0.3 on Linux.-gadfium 01:48, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
This is now fixed. --brion 19:34, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
Yay! Thank you. --Iamunknown 19:43, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
I've seen this problem, but not actually thought fixing it, let alone how to. Thanks :) GracenotesT § 01:33, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
So, quick question, how do you disable this? I hate when Sourcesafe does that, and so I hate when Wikipedia does it :-( -- ReyBrujo 01:57, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
See here. The relevant code is:
table.diff td div {
  overflow:auto;
}
You'd probably want
table.diff td div {
  overflow: visible;
}
GracenotesT § 02:15, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
I've made an additional tweak this morning[10] which makes the extra-wide cells wrap attractively instead of scrolling in Internet Explorer and Safari. Unfortunately Firefox and Opera don't appear to support this style setting, so they'll continue to scroll. --brion 15:11, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
I also find the change to be annoying...it seems like I have to scroll much more now than I had to before, and so reading diffs is no longer something I can do without horizontal scrolling on a regular basis, and that's more work. This is with Firefox 2.0. I'm not sure if the wrapping isn't working right, or what. Is there support for adding a preference box for this? Also, is diff.css versioned somewhere in the wiki? I can't seem to find it. Thanks. jhawkinson 22:25, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Issues with Cartoon Network Wikiproject assessments

After the update to the template as indicated above, the assessments made on every article has been removed and are now considered unclassified even though the articles still have the classification mentioned in the template on their talkpages. I've run the WP 1.0 bot manually but doubt waiting for it to assess automatically would yield different results. Is the code within the template correct? --treelo talk 17:52, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

I've edited the template to recategorize the talk pages (they weren't being categorized previously). It should work in a while. –Pomte 18:20, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

[11]

This link is very worrisome to me. Perhaps someone could fill out a bug report. I won't, because I'm leaving. However, when I even hover over the contributions history of the user in popups, it really screws up my screen, let alone just going to the page makes it impossible to delete. The Evil Spartan 18:50, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

Already deleted. Also, get a better browser :-) Just teasing :-) -- ReyBrujo 18:57, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

templates with span style="display:none"

I'm getting some curious behaviour with {{Mathematician data}}. Its used to record data about mathematicians in {{Talk:Blaise Pascal/Data}} which are themselves templates, and allow extraction of the data. For instance

  • {{Talk:Blaise Pascal/Data|key=dates}} gives 1623 – 1662
  • {{Talk:Blaise Pascal/Data|key=sortname}} gives Pascal, Blaise

And with no parameter a longer description is produced

  • {{Talk:Blaise Pascal/Data}} gives This subpage contains data about Village pump (technical) which is used by the Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics to produce tables of mathematicians. Edit this page to add or update the sortable name (sortname), date of birth or death (dates) and field (contribs) of Village pump (technical).
  • Name: Pascal, Blaise
  • Dates: 1623 – 1662
  • Contribs:


{{Talk:Blaise Pascal/Data}} looks like 

{{Mathematician data|{{{key}}}
|dates= 1623 – 1662
|sortname= Pascal, Blaise
|contribs= 
}}

Everything works fine, until we have tried to work with BCE dates. To get these to sort properly in Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0/Mathematicians, we have include a working sort key inside span tags. For instance 

{{Mathematician data|{{{key}}}
|dates= <span style="display:none">*615</span>384 – 322 BCE
|sortname= Aristotle
|contribs= 
}}

Extracting the date field works fine

  • {{Talk:Aristotle/Data|key=dates}} gives 384 – 322 BCE

but no output is produced in the no-parameter case.

  • {{Talk:Aristotle/Data}} gives This subpage contains data about Village pump (technical) which is used by the Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics to produce tables of mathematicians. Edit this page to add or update the sortable name (sortname), date of birth or death (dates) and field (contribs) of Village pump (technical).
  • Name: Aristotle
  • Dates: 384 – 322 BCE
  • Contribs:

I've been scratching my head trying to workout why the span tag causes problems. Any ideas? --Salix alba (talk) 13:55, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Well, anything with its display set to "none" will never show up in any circumstance; saying as the span tag is properly closed, though, that shouldn't be an issue (I tried adding the closing semicolon at the end to Artistotle, but that didn't do anything). Are the quotes (in the span tag) throwing it off, maybe? EVula // talk // ☯ // 15:19, 20 May 2007 (UTC)
Not showing the *615 is the intended action. What we would like is for blah...384 – 322 BCE...blah to appear, but for the full text to be there for sorting purposes. Whats curious is that no text appears even in the html source. --Salix alba (talk) 15:38, 20 May 2007 (UTC)
(edit conflict) What I've noticed is that the text won't show up at all, even when looking at the page source. I think it's the equals sign that's causing the problem, since removing it causes it to display correctly and adding it in other locations to other parameters causes a blank output. This would probably therefore indicate a problem with the template parameters or perhaps the #switch: ParserFunction, rather than the formatting. Tra (Talk) 15:40, 20 May 2007 (UTC)
I did experiment to see if it was the equals sign. Changing the span to <span foo="bar"> while still having a = sign actually displayed correctly. --Salix alba (talk) 19:45, 20 May 2007 (UTC)
I'm guessing that might be because MediaWiki doesn't recognise foo as a valid HTML tag parameter and consequently strips it out before evaluating the wiki-code. If you change it to <span style="display:inline"> which is valid, then it doesn't work. Tra (Talk) 20:34, 20 May 2007 (UTC)
Urgh, not HiddenStructure again. display: none does show up in several circumstances; text browsers, plaintext rendering, search engines, and anything else which ignores either CSS or its display property. It would be better, if possible, to use a separate field as the sort key, defaulting to the date if it's not available. --cesarb 18:32, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

The problem, for sortable tables, is that there is not currently other way to customize the sorting of certain cells. For example it is common to see things like: 

{| class="wikitable sortable"
|-
| <span style="display:none;">Bush, George W.</span> [[George W. Bush]] || 2001-present

If we can get a built-in way of doing this, it would be easy enough to convert all the display:none's at the same time. Until then it's better than nothing. — CharlotteWebb 19:32, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Yes I'm coming to that conclusion about having a sortdate key. Hidden structures seems to be the only way to get the table to sort right and display sensible dates, indeed they are discussed extensivly in Help:Sorting. None of the files are in main space, so the associated problems are minimised. --Salix alba (talk) 19:45, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

I've now implemented a more elegant workaround. An extra sortdates key is used for pre 1000AD dates. The table code in wraps this up in the hidden span, sort sorting works and dates display correctly. Thanks for everyones help. --Salix alba (talk) 20:32, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Lag-warn-normal

Why is MediaWiki:Lag-warn-normal showing up on the watchlist and contrib list? Is it really necessary to know that the list is 1 or 2 seconds slow? --- RockMFR 20:37, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

This was a result of mediazilla:9628. For lag of less than 30 seconds, MediaWiki:Lag-warn-normal is displayed. MediaWiki:Lag-warn-high is displayed for significant lag. I'd imagine some users might want the following in their user css:
div.mw-lag-warn-normal { display: none; }

GracenotesT § 21:52, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

In response to your question, though, this feature is a bit too useful to disable. (Check the archives of VPT for many, many threads on watchlist lag.) If you don't like it, don't display it! GracenotesT § 21:56, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

informing the user of a one-second lag is clearly a bit ridiculous. it'll only show up for >15 seconds now. (that number can be changed if needed). kate.

The dark background color is really irritating. What happened to the light color? Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 02:55, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

I think even the light color was emphasising it too much. Can't it be toned down? Petros471 19:46, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

This should be at the bottom of the page or somewhere not in the way... lag notices are a very minor thing and it's not something that needs to be in your face. --W.marsh 19:49, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

What would be nice is if we could change the formatting in the MediaWiki page. Right now, all it has is the text, and the box with its colors looks like it might be hardcoded somewhere? —Centrx→talk • 21:50, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

Yep, in main.css... could be overwritten, of course. GracenotesT § 23:47, 22 May 2007 (UTC)

I too got the "Changes newer than 1 seconds may not be shown in this list." Took me a bit of searching to find this topic too (should be easier with this quote). Anyway, I can see how this helps certain people. Perhaps, to make it even more useful for some of the more persistently clueless and technically challenged, a script could update the number of seconds. It could say "WARNING: This page has not been updated for 12 seconds." with an ever-increasing font size. And then it could start beeping if you didn't refresh it quickly enough!! Anyway, sorry for the rant, I just wanted to get the message over how annoying the current message template is. I'm sure it's just growing pains. Mfb52 21:09, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Top 100

Is it possible that in the next month or so on the Top 100 most visited sites in Wikipedia to exclude the Main Page, as technically it is not an article? Simply south 14:07, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

Yet another reason to move the Main Page into Portal space comes up... --ais523 14:21, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

Upload file wizard

I noticed the new "upload file wizard", similar to that of Commons. I just think this link belongs in the "toolbox" group, rather than the "interaction" group. —Anas talk? 12:27, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

The toolbox cannot actually be added to from the MediaWiki user interface. It has to be done through MediaWiki extensions. Gutworth 13:05, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

Lupin's anti vandal tool again...

Even though the Lupin's anti-vandal tool is working now, it dosen't catch as much vandalism as it used too (it used to catch 4x the vandalism it does today). The RSS still updates every 30 seconds, but it dosen't catch as much as vandalism as it used too. Is this a bug? Can anybody fix it?--PrestonH(Review Me!) • (Sign Here!) 03:16, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

P.S. Please see the relevant discussion here.

I am working on it, when it is done you have to click Shift-Reload to update. Cacycle 05:17, 26 May 2007 (UTC)
It should work now, please click Shift-Reload to update. Cacycle 08:06, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

Exporting watchlist

Is it possible for me to export my watchlist from an old account of mine to this one?--Seraphiel 07:26, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Well....anyone?--Seraphiel 10:36, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

Not at the moment, although it might become possible in the future. 164.11.204.56 11:26, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

I would also like the ability to periodically save and restore my watchlist. It's already filed in bugzilla: bug 7959. CMummert · talk 11:41, 26 May 2007 (UTC)
Thank you for opening the feature request. This is a feature that should have been there since a long time ago itself. Hope it gets approved.--Seraphiel 12:03, 26 May 2007 (UTC)
I didn't open it. One way to bring attention to bugs that you are interested in is to "vote" for them in bugzilla. CMummert · talk 12:53, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

Redirects in categories

I've recently seen redirect pages showing up in categories, being listed in italics. Could somebody please point out to me when this was implemented, and if there was any discussion about it? Thanks. >Radiant< 11:38, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

It was briefly mentioned right here (now in /Archive#Marking links to disambiguation pages). The change was in rev:22156, 10 days ago. --Derlay 11:57, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
I noticed them too - and like them! DuncanHill 11:59, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
  • Perhaps we should discuss this some more. Me and a few others think this is a bad idea. Apart from a bit of meta-data, in general redirects shouldn't be categorized, certainly not in categories meant for articles. If the page redirected to is in the same category, that means the item is now listed twice, which is confusing. If the page redirected to is not in the same category, that means that the page you get to is not in the category you expect to be browsing, which again is confusing. >Radiant< 12:49, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
The ones I noticed are for several Disused railway stations, which used to have seperate articles, but have now been combined into one larger article. They now show as italicized links in the relevant category for rail transport or for stations, this is extremely helpful for someone looking for particular stations. See Category:Disused railway stations in Cornwall to see what I mean. DuncanHill 12:57, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
This is clearly useful for some categories (DuncanHill has a good article-space example, and as a project-space example Category:Speedy deletion templates would be more useful IMO if the redirects into it were categorized in the same way). In other cases (e.g. categorising typos), it could be harmful, but there's nothing forcing cats to be put on such redirects. Leave the cats off if it's confusing, put them on if it's helpful. Surely this is a positive change if people are careful about how they categorize redirects? --ais523 13:03, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
  • I would suggest that cats are not intended as an exhaustive list of topics. This trick is probably useful in some cases, but it is certainly confusing in others. >Radiant< 13:56, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
    • I'd agree with that. I don't think it's a reason to disable this feature, though. --ais523 14:11, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
      • You'll note that I asked for people to discuss it, not disable it :) >Radiant< 14:52, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
    • OTOH, what is the earthly point of having categories at all if not to collect all articles (<> topics!) that fall into the category? Insofar as this feature helps to do that, I like it. --Tkynerd 15:14, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

In terms of implementation, this feature is innocuous. All it does is add a <span class="redirect-in-category">...</span> around redirects in a category. If there is a decision to remove the special styling, it's as simple as doing this in the site-wide CSS: 

.redirect-in-category { font-style: inherit }

So there's no need to do anything with the feature itself. Mike Dillon 15:00, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Also, it's possible to do even more specific stuff, like disabling/enabling style on a per-category basis:
.page-Category_Speedy_deletion_templates .redirect-in-category a { color: red }
There would have to be some assessment of the relative cost/benefit of adding such styling site-wide, but I could see this being justified for some of the project-oriented categories. Mike Dillon 15:07, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
While not all redirects should be categorized, if we're going to adopt a mergist philosophy that aggregates minor articles into lists and subject-area articles, we absolutely need to categorize those redirects in order to facilitate navigation through categories. Misspelling/variant spelling, and other housekeeping redirects should remain uncategorized. See also Wikipedia_talk:Redirects#Categories_on_redirects_needs_clarifying for recent discussion on the matter. -- nae'blis 15:23, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
True enough, although personally I see this as a good reason to avoid excessive merging in the first place. But then, that has been my stance for a long time. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 17:54, 24 May 2007 (UTC)
This is an excellent innovation and it removes a major problem that has always annoyed me. There are lots of things that don't have their own article that a reasonable person might expect to find in a given category. Hawkestone 20:39, 25 May 2007 (UTC)
Precisely. I think it is an extremely good thing to be able to categorize redirects in cases where the redirect covers only a historical or minor aspect of the target article and it would be confusing to categorize the article with the same category. older ≠ wiser 12:00, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

The ability to add redirects to categories and their presence there is nothing new. Only the italic styling is new and it was added on-wiki at MediaWiki:Common.css (see MediaWiki talk:Common.css#Italicize redirects in category). Any discussion about whether or not the guidelines for having redirects in mixed categories should be changed belongs at Wikipedia talk:Redirect, not here. There is nothing technical about this discussion except how to change/disable the italics if that is what consensus determines. Mike Dillon 14:55, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

Internal Server Error

I get the following message when I try to move more than two pages in a row: "Internal Server Error: Sorry, the server has encountered an internal error. Please wait a moment and hit "refresh" to submit the request again." I have to wait few minutes in order to move the next page. It's been like this for few days. Does anybody know what's wrong? Jogers (talk) 12:41, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

A move rate limit of 2 moves per minute for non-sysop or non-bot users was introduced by Tim Starling on May 15th "in response to vandalism on Wikiquote". 86.140.128.210 22:32, 18 May 2007 (UTC)
It makes my work much harder. Is it going to be permanent? Jogers (talk) 05:45, 19 May 2007 (UTC)
The limit was increased to 8 moves per minute on May 22nd, again, by Tim Starling. 164.11.204.56 11:46, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

Shortpages

Could Special:shortpages be modified to remove, or at least highlight, things such as redirects, disambiguation pages, and copyvio pages? — Swpb talk contribs 03:59, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

Ref family template alternatives which would not assign the ID attribute

I brought this up here, and would like to see more comment before I jump in and create these alternative templates and update the documentation. Comments welcome -- this is probably a better place for the discussion than the template talk page. -- Boracay Bill 01:47, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

The idea seems sound to me. It might be better to just add a parameter to {{ref}} that disables the ID, rather than making a second template that would get out of sync. CMummert · talk 02:25, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

Template:WikiProject Rugby league

I am trying to add some syntax to Template:WikiProject Rugby league.

I am trying to add a peer review section to the template.

I have done that and saved and all seemed well.

When I tried to test it out on Talk:Karmichael Hunt, nothing happened.

It should come up with something like "A request has been made for this to be perr reviewed.

But on Karmichael Hunt it hasn't come up. (I also tried it on Brisbane Broncos, but it didn't work)

The category's supposed to come up also don't come up. I think I've done something wrong.

"old-peer-review" doesn't come up either. SpecialWindler 10:19, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

I've looked at it and I can't figure out what's wrong, although I haven,t actually tested whether the problem is that there is no option given for if {{peer review}} does not equal "yes".Circeus 20:37, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

I don't think there is a problem. I played around with Special:ExpandTemplates and the parameters look fine. I also see the text you're looking for in the article history:

Perhaps the problem was related to caching or database synchronization (i.e. lag). Also, Talk:Brisbane Broncos is currently listed in Category:Old requests for Rugby league peer review. Mike Dillon 00:42, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

I just noticed that this is a couple days old... Mike Dillon 00:43, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

Using the skin to create a banner

Hi, I am wondering if somebody could point me in the right direction to create some form of text, banner, or box near the top of my wiki page through my monobook.js file. I'm just looking for the code that could do what I need to do! I want to make a bit of text that changes to reflect the current UTC date and time. I know that I can use {{CURRENTTIME}} etc, but how can I make this appear near the top of the page. I am just sick of converting my local time to UTC when I want to compare with edits etc. Thanks, DanielBC [talkcontribstats] 09:28, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

There's a script that does this at Wikipedia:WikiProject User scripts/Scripts/Time. Tra (Talk) 09:53, 27 May 2007 (UTC)
Thanks very much Tra! I am also looking forward to implementing your watch other users contributions script! Coincidentally I have been looking for that exact script for several days! Thanks again, DanielBC [talkcontribstats] 13:17, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

Lupin

The rollback and filter recent changes script does not appear to be working properly. Navou 02:41, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

As the script is not part of the MediaWiki software, you're unlikely to get answers here. --Deskana (talk) 02:42, 28 May 2007 (UTC)
I figured that may be the case, however, since a number of users use this script to maintain the integrity of the encyclopedia proper, I think it may fit the element of exigent per the page header for this page. Navou 02:51, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

Template:Coord in Classic skin

There is a problem with the template "Coord" (and related templates) when viewed using the classic skin. I copy below discussion from Template talk:Coord. I cannot find a "Classic skin talk page", so I am posting this here on VPT. -- SGBailey 18:12, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

This will need to be fixed at MediaWiki:Standard.css. I'm surpised it was added in the first place, since it is broken in Firefox/Mozilla as well. The declaration is pretty much the same for Standard and MediaWiki:Monobook.css, except that Standard has top: 7em and Monobook has top: 3.7em Since it looks like the space at the top of this skin can be variable, I don't know that there is any "top" value that will work across the board in Standard/Classic. It probably only works on pages with no interwiki links. Mike Dillon 18:54, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

Languages and page position

Using Classic skin and Win XP with MSIE7, the coordinates are up near the top right of the page. Unfortunately, so is the list of interwiki language links. If the language list is more than one line long, then the coordinates get zapped by the ---- line or by the link text itself. Can the coordinates be placed level with the page title, but on the right and below the line? (If requested, I'll upload a picture of what I'm talking about.) -- SGBailey 19:07, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

Oh yes, this also applies to {Coor} -- SGBailey 19:08, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

Here is a typical example of the problem. The "Coord" appears to be in a fixed relationship to the search box in the top right. File:Coord clash.png -- SGBailey 08:57, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

Since it isn't just coord which is affected, it might be better to bring this up on the talk page of the relevant skin. Andy Mabbett 09:52, 27 May 2007 (UTC)
This change, to remove the FA star from the Classic skin, was at my request before I was an admin, with similar reasoning. Classic doesn't have a consistent 'top' for coords due to the way that interwikis are worked out, so the recent change to MediaWiki:Standard.css is inadvisable. --ais523 16:16, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

Further changing the display of redirects in category pages

For background, see Wikipedia:Categorizing redirects and its talk page.

I'm afraid I don't have the revision number, but there was a fairly recent change that made redirects in categories display in italics (can anyone supply the revision number?). The italics mark-up is better than the previous mark-up where the redirect links displayed the same way as normal articles. However, the italics mark-up only marks the redirects out as different. It doesn't tell the reader why these links are in italics. Possibly some text could be added to the boilerplate category page explaining this, but I am wondering whether it would be possible to try something slightly more ambitious.

Would it be possible to have redirects display on category pages like this?

Name of redirect page
see name of destination page

Or to use a real example:

Paris Township, Kent County, Michigan
see Kentwood, Michigan

This is exactly how such "redirects" appear in paper indexes, so there is ample precedent for the usefulness of this kind of set-up. This would also solve the problem that sometimes when clicking on a redirect you are taken (via an anchored link) to a subsection of an article, and so are not given the helpful "redirected from" bit at the top. This solution would, at least for categories, change the message from "you have been redirected", to "you are about to be redirected", just changing the point at which the message is displayed to the reader. (For redirect links clicked on in article namespace, the "redirected from" bit at the top is still very useful, and anchored redirect links clicked on in article namespace will still be disorientating unless well-designed, but this would reduce the disorientation when clicking on redirects, both normal and anchored, in category namespace).

Another example is the Bi-musicality redirect, which currently appears in Category:Ethnomusicology. Currently, when you click on Bi-musicality in that category, you jump deep into an article, which is disorientating. This disorientation would be removed if the category entry displayed as:

Bi-musicality
see Mantle Hood#Bi-musicality

Or even bettter:

Bi-musicality
see Bi-musicality section of Mantle Hood

But that would require detection and parsing of the anchor (#) character and piping of the display, which might complicate things (or not, I really don't know). Another advantage of this is that it changes the URL displayed in the browser window from "Bi-musicality#Bimusicality" (if you click the first displayed link) to the more correct "Mantle Hood#Bi-musicality". Indeed, there is an argument that the actual redirect could be bypassed altogether, leading to:

Bi-musicality
see Mantle Hood#Bi-musicality

For some more examples, see Category:Messier objects, where the redirects are well-organised and so don't really need this extra level of explanation, but I think the advantages in cases where such explanation is needed outweighs considerations like this. Some other examples and possible displays:

Bibliography of J. R. R. Tolkien
see Bibliography section of J. R. R. Tolkien

Or even (delink first line, double link second line):

Bibliography of J. R. R. Tolkien
see Bibliography section of J. R. R. Tolkien

To sum up, even if the more nuanced displays described above are not possible (I prefer the final display format given above), the destination article is always in the first "#REDIRECT" part of the redirect page, so I hope a simple "display of the destination article for redirects, when redirects appear on a category page" (ie. when redirects are categorised), should be doable. Do people here think this is doable? If so, can anyone submit a bugzilla request on this? Carcharoth 10:32, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

Anything is possible, but is it necessary? Most of us had no idea what a red link was at some point. If there are many redirects in a category, you could manually add a comment like "listings in italics are redirects", but I don't even think that is necessary. For the most part, people will click on redirects that are listed and end up at an article and not care that they clicked on a redirect. The downside of the formatting you propose is that it will clutter up category listings when there are numerous redirects. If there were an entire category of redirects it would be a mess. This kind of formatting is great for a book because you actually have to look elsewhere to find what you want. Since everything here is automated we don't actually have to "see" anything at all, you just click on the link and you get there. Telling people to see a different listing might be very confusing, especially in the cases when the alternate listings are not in the category (like the J. R. R. Tolkien example). -- ☑ SamuelWantman 10:48, 27 May 2007 (UTC)
Well, I see your point about more text cluttering up pages, but I do find the anchored redirects very confusing. At the least, couldn't the redirects display like they do in "what links here":
Name of redirect page (redirect page)
That at least would indicate that the italicised pages are redirects. Carcharoth 11:09, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

Having just created and populated Category:Burns, I'm having second thoughts about my proposal above. Any input on how well that category works (a mix of redirects and articles), plus whether the main proposal is useful, would be appreciated. Carcharoth 16:25, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

rev:22156 --Splarka (rant) 07:12, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

Article redirecting to category

Among the articles in Category:Cinemas and movie theaters is List of cinemas, which is a redirect to the category. I've never seen something like this before, and I don't know what to do with it. What can properly be done — does this work well? It seems to be an odd kind of loop. Nyttend 15:55, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

It strikes me as being somewhat inadvisable. Taking the redirect to RfD would seem likely to find the best solution (which is probably just deleting the redirect). --ais523 16:03, 26 May 2007 (UTC)
I think the problem is that the redirect had #REDIRECT [[Category:Cinemas and movie theaters|*]] rather than #REDIRECT [[:Category:Cinemas and movie theaters|*]] with a colon. With the latter, the redirect does not appear in the category. Gimmetrow 16:57, 26 May 2007 (UTC)
What a coincidence. I just came here thinking of mentioning this issue. I recently made this very change to African-American actors which redirects to the category. I put in the colon to remove the categorization. After doing so, I started thinking about if this sort of redirect is a bad thing. It doesn't mess up any categories and it might be helpful. There is nothing that stops such a redirect from developing into an article or list. I couldn't think of a good reason to delete it. Is there a problem I am not considering? -- ☑ SamuelWantman 23:16, 26 May 2007 (UTC)
I don't think it's a bad redirect to have (although having a bot fix the probably-numerous missing :'s is probably a good idea). Lists and categories are a related concept, and this is not the usual sort of 'cross-namespace' pollution I'm worried about. -- nae'blis 15:16, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

404 for Image:Map of Finnish Petsamo.png

I'm getting a 404 for Image:Map of Finnish Petsamo.png (the actual image, not the image description page). I tried reverting to an earlier version to see if that would fix it, but that causes an internal error because it can't find the image file. —Bkell (talk) 23:05, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

It should be fixed now. I did sort of a manual revert (to 20:41, July 19, 2005 . . Sonitus (Talk | contribs) . . 250×320 (12,563 bytes) (changed colour of towns so it doesn't seem as if the USSR annexed them in 1940 as well) ) by opening the old version (clicking on the date link), saving the file to my computer and then re-uploading it with the same name. Mr.Z-mantalk¢ 23:35, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

'Upload file wizard'

Shouldn't that probably read ' File upload wizard ' ?--VectorPotentialTalk 18:58, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

There's some discussion at MediaWiki talk:Sidebar (and numerous other places, it seems). --- RockMFR 20:25, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

list of new pages

There is a template that can be placed on a user page which allows you to select a listing of newly created pages. This template can reach back to number 4000 and beyond. I can't remember it exactly. Does anyone know? Thanks JodyB talk 22:35, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

Probably {{Special:Newpages}}. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 23:24, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
You can put {{Special:Newpages/number}} to change the number of pages shown in that list. However, I've tried and it won't let you put in as many as 4000 but it works with something like {{Special:Newpages/100}} Tra (Talk) 23:32, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

No, that's not is. There is another one which gives you an option to select the number you want It's something like newpageslist If I find it I'll post it back here. JodyB talk 23:42, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

Here it is. It's a template {{newpagelinks}} JodyB talk 23:59, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

Just a Coding Question

Does anybody know what part of the JavaScript makes WP:ARV (source) only compatible with FireFox? Is there a way around it? --əˈnongahy ♫Look What I've Done!♫ 20:35, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

MediaWiki cue for deleted edits

Is there a way to change the interface, short of a software change by developers, to make it more explicit to users w/o the sysop bit when a page title has deleted edits? At this point I'm not talking about access to Special:Undelete, but something changes the page header to show the link for certain access levels, and I was wondering if an explicit link to the deletion log entry could be substituted in that space for normal/anonymous users. -- nae'blis 15:50, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

There's no way without either expensive (in the sense of causing too much server load) client-side scripting or a change in the software to give a link to the deletion log iff it has entries for non-admins. The change in the software would be the only practical way to implement this. If you want a link to the deletion log on every page, regardless of whether it's been deleted or not in the past, that's easy enough, but you don't seem to want that and I don't think it would be a good idea. --ais523 16:13, 28 May 2007 (UTC)
Interesting. I agree that's not useful, but I see that some other wikis have enabled deleted edits for all users, so maybe I'll look for that configuration option... -- nae'blis 17:07, 28 May 2007 (UTC)
You would need to modify $wgGroupPermissions in your LocalSettings.php. I assume that you mean for a private wiki; for Wikimedia wikis showing deleted edits to everyone is pretty much out of the question. Your original suggestion for the software change is probably not that hard to implement. Titoxd(?!? - cool stuff) 23:30, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

Due to high database server lag, changes newer than 229 seconds may not be shown in this list.

Is it possible that this new feature is actually the cause of all this lag? It seems the more stuff that gets crammed onto the special:contributions page, the more the servers lag--69.118.235.97 13:18, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

What new feature? --brion 13:48, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
No, I think the database reports how far behind its information is anyways. I would say that the lag is just more visible now. (H) 14:09, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
Check current database lag. (I've known it to go over 300 even without the new feature.) --ais523 14:35, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

Also have a look up here. Mfb52 07:16, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

Taxobox template assistance requested

Could someone knowledgable in template jargon assist on the protected {{Taxobox}} page? It appears in an update, someone removed a width restriction and taxoboxes that used to wrap text (captions, etc.; see Stylidium debile for an example) now don't, so we get large taxoboxes. The editor(s) that made the updates aren't available at the moment and the issue should be fixed ASAP. Didn't know where else to post this--hope it's appropriate for the village pump. Thanks! --Rkitko (talk) 06:57, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

The template is protected, so I've made an edit request. –Pomte 07:05, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
Fixed.-gadfium 08:51, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
Thanks! --Rkitko (talk) 01:32, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

Image rendering

[[Image:Cities destroyed in Jericho TV series.svg|250px|thumb|right|Destroyed Cities in the USA]] renders OK for me, but

[[Image:Cities destroyed in Jericho TV series.svg|255px|thumb|right|Destroyed Cities in the USA]] doesn't. Only the size is different. I'm using the default Monobook skin. What's up with that? - Bevo 21:04, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

There was some sort of problem with the upload.wikimedia.org server yesterday (I've had the problem myself and I've seen various reports), but all reported problems are gone, so I assume it's working again. --Dapeteばか 07:14, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
Both sizes look OK right now. Thanks for the confirmation. - Bevo 08:33, 7 June 2007 (UTC)


Table syntax documentation?

I'm looking at the country infobox code and I see it starts with:

<table class="infobox geography vcard" style="width:50ex; margin-top:0.75em;">

Where can I find documentation for this syntax? In particular, what is an "ex" and what other units can I use to specify a width? --Ideogram 04:09, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

CSS Spec. –Pomte 06:33, 5 June 2007 (UTC)
Uh, really? I think the question has to do with specific CSS classes defined by Wikipedia…I also would like to know where they're documented. I use class="wikitable" and class="wikitable sortable" all the time, but don't know what else is out there. -Pete 06:39, 5 June 2007 (UTC)
MediaWiki:Common.css for those and other classes, and it leads you to the stylesheets for specific skins. –Pomte 06:42, 5 June 2007 (UTC)
Excellent, thanks. That page links to Wikipedia:Catalogue of CSS classes, which I think is what we're both looking for. -Pete 06:49, 5 June 2007 (UTC)
Ems and Exes explained: [14]. Adrian M. H. 17:07, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Image lining up

Not sure where else to post this... but I just inserted an image into Amazing Grace - I'm convinced the image at the top makes the article much more asthetically pleasing. But I can't figure out how to get the lyrics below the image, not to its right. Does anybody know a way that won't mess up the page? Any help here would be great. The Evil Spartan 00:19, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

You would embed the image within the DIV content and left-align it. - Bevo 04:38, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

User page not appearing

I went to check my user page but when i got there it had a plain wiki background and no toolbars. Later when i tried it was fine. What happened?

Oysterguitarist 18:13, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

No idea. I doubt anyone can replicate the problem... I can't. --Deskana (talk) 19:31, 4 June 2007 (UTC)
It happened to me sometimes when viewing other people's userpages. I'm guessing it was a cache problem. - BANG! 01:57, 5 June 2007 (UTC)
Do you have a slow internet connection? Sometimes this happens when your browser thinks the page data has ended but it really hasn't. Gutworth 21:09, 6 June 2007 (UTC)
It sounds like it might be a bad cached stylesheet, or possibly the wrong preferences were sent out. Bypassing your cache will solve both problems. --ais523 15:51, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

My uploaded images

How do I get a list of images I have uploaded, please? BlueValour 04:09, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

[15] --Deskana (talk) 04:09, 4 June 2007 (UTC)
Splendid, thank you. BlueValour 15:50, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

Kennedy Family Tree template

{{kennedyfamilytree}} I have a problem with this template while using IE. Either on my computer or my sister's. Another editor suggested I change browsers, but I do not think that is fair. As there are many others who use IE. I don't know if everyone who uses IE, as their browser, has a problem with it. But when I attempt to edit these articles, my browser hangs, I lose control of the mouse, and becomes very frustrating because I can't move out of the page. It's very frustrating, that I have to change browsers to FireFox just to edit these articles with this template. Even just accessing them is probmatic.

While I believe the template is very interesting, but the frustration caused by it over-rides the interest. Anyway, the articles already have the geneology information and adding this template, that is huge, and does not fit the screen without having to scroll, with a mouse that won't work, BECAUSE of the template, it is frustrating (have I said that before?) My preferred browser, IE, has all my "stuff" on it, and I, nor anyone else should not be told or made to use a specific browser to view or edit articles on Wikpedia.

This is the ONLY template I have a problem with. There is something wrong with it, IMO, that is causing this problem. It is not my computer, I do not have a virus, as I was told by this user, who insists on reinserting the template after I asked him not too. Thanks for any help with this. - Jeeny Talk 21:33, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

This is a peeve of mine too, things that only work in IE or only work in FF. Templates should definitely work in both. Rlevse 21:45, 3 June 2007 (UTC)
Yay. Reason! Thank you. Okay, so what should I do now? Yell at him for reverting me? lol Or just remove the templates, or just wait here for more input? I'm lost. ugh. :) - Jeeny Talk 21:53, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

In my opinion, a template like this does not belong in individual biographical articles. It is ridiculously large and mostly irrelevant to any article except Kennedy family. That article actually has a textual version of the genealogy, not a tree. Having a large genealogical template like this inevitably runs into sourcing problems, since genealogy is very often a matter of educated guessing based on ambiguous or unreliable sources.

As for browser problems, I don't think there is anything browser-specific in these templates, they're just really big. I've nominated this template for deletion at Wikipedia:Templates for deletion/Log/2007 June 4#Template:Kennedyfamilytree. Mike Dillon 15:23, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

Follow-up

Hi Jeeny. Could you tell me whether you see the same issues when you look at the template or a containing article if you are not logged in? I don't see any user scripts in your monobook.js file, so I would guess you see the same behavior whether or not you are logged in. Also, could you give some idea of the specs of your computer, particularly the amount of RAM (right click on "My Computer" and open "System Properties"). Mike Dillon 18:36, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

How to request a deletion of a misspelled redirect page?

I accidentally created http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=CKX.&redirect=no How do I request to delete it? - Bevo 18:43, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

  • {{db-r3}} works. -N 18:45, 3 June 2007 (UTC)
Place {{db-redirtypo}} (for a misspelled redirect) or {{db-author}} (for a page you created by mistake) on it. --ais523 18:46, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

New Messages Bar

I have heard of this problem before, but don't know (and possibly can't) fix it. Anyways, the You have new messages bar will not go away from my browser. Isn't there something you have to put in my monobook.css file? Can you do that on an IP address? Is there another way to fix it? Thanks, 24.4.25.168 20:03, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

This problem has been affecting IP addresses for a while on Wikipedia. Some IP addresses never get the new messages bar while others have the bar "stuck" there. There is currently no fix to the problem except to register an account with us. See Category:Wikipedians_who_are_terribly_frustrated_about_Bug_ID_9213 & Wikipedia_talk:Administrator_intervention_against_vandalism#Bug_ID_9213 for more info. -- Hdt83 Chat 20:14, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

Transclusions list wrong?

When I view Wikipedia:Today's featured article, the text for today's and tomorrow's FA appear as expected, but when I click edit, the transclusion list for "the current version" says:

Pages transcluded onto the current version of this page:
  • Wikipedia:Today's featured article/May 23, 2007 (protected)
  • Wikipedia:Today's featured article/May 24, 2007 (protected)
  • Template:FCpages
  • Template:Fapages
  • Template:Shortcut (protected)
  • Template:TFAfooter (protected)
  • Template:TodaysFABar2007
  • Template:Tomorrow

But the FAs for 23rd and 24th can't possibly be the ones I'm viewing. Resurgent insurgent 14:52, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

I have purged the page's cache; the dates now appear updated to me. GracenotesT § 17:06, 2 June 2007 (UTC)
Now the list is stuck at June 2 and June 3. I purged, then hit edit, and Ctrl-Shift-R'ed the edit page (all steps using Firefox), and lo and behold the list is stuck again. :( Resurgent insurgent 12:10, 3 June 2007 (UTC)
I messed up the page title of one of the transcluded pages, previewed Wikipedia:Today's featured article, fixed the page title, and made a null edit. [...] GracenotesT § 21:44, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

Another search engine

Someone had proposed to me the addition of a search engine to the drop-down list at Special:Search. If you have the time, please comment here. Thanks, GracenotesT § 01:22, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

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