Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive

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Village Pump - Archive

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Contents

[edit] Wikipedia is spelled wrong

The new spell checker is great; but did anyone notice how wikipedia, Wikipedia, WikipediA, no matter where you put capital letter is underlined with a red line? I think thats kind of weird and even though it doesn't matter that much, I still think it should be corrected. Pseudoanonymous 21:50, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

The new spell checker is part of your browser, not Wikipedia ;) All sorts of things are missing from its built-in dictionary (taken from openoffice), just right-click on them and "add to dictionary". --Quiddity 22:02, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

I'd like to take this opportunity to proclaim that Firefox is "for the fucking win", as they say. :) 164.11.204.56 20:49, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] no pictures shown!?!

There are no pictures shown!?! Is there a server problem or something??? Posted By User:JaJaon 165.95.18.61 22:14, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

Images are showing up fine for me; perhaps there is something wrong with your computer. — Knowledge Seeker দ 22:20, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
I'm also having this problem - both IE and Firefox seem unwilling to load from upload.wikimedia.org. I've tried changing block settings but the fact that both browsers are unhappy seems very odd. Any ideas? Greycap 23:09, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Name technical restrictions workaround

Someone pointed out above that the fr:IPod article displays its title as "iPod", rather than "IPod" as we do here. This looks much nicer than making the user read "due to technical restrictions, blah blah...". The french wikipedia accomplishes this by adding a site-wide javascript function that checks for the presence of their {{lowercase}} template, removes the lowercase notice, and changes the title to be the lowercase version. (search for "RealTitleBanner") If the user doesn't have javascript enabled, it just falls back to displaying the "due to technical restrictions..." blurb.

Gerbrant has managed to get this working on enwiki as well. You can make this work now by adding {{subst:User:Gerbrant/realTitle.js}} to your monobook.js.

This seems safe and useful enough that I'd like to see this added to MediaWiki:Monobook.js. Are there any concerns about this? --Interiot 01:24, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Two things: first, as an enhancement, it may as well fix the HTML title as well as the displayed one. Two, I strongly suggest that to avoid confusion, you be careful with something like C Sharp where the desired title won't work in wikilinks. It would be neat if this were committed sitewide, but for initial case only. Being unable to display lowercase is a silly flaw in the software, but it's a bad idea to make the name unpasteable. Maybe okay with an explanatory message, but not much point then, is there? You could still fix the title for the HTML title and for print, though, even where it's no good for pasting. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 05:22, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
So I guess I'd suggest this (untested!):
addOnloadHook(function()
{
        var rtb = document.getElementById("RealTitleBanner");
        if(!rtb ) return;
        var doctitle = document.getElementById("content").
                getElementsByTagName("H1").item(0).innerHTML;
        if(rtb.substr(0,1).toLowerCase() == doctitle.substr(0,1).toLowerCase())
        {
                rtb.style.display = "none";
                document.getElementById("content").
                        getElementsByTagName("H1").item(0).innerHTML =
                        document.getElementById("RealTitle").innerHTML;
        }
        document.title.replace("/^"+doctitle+"/", rtb);
});
No idea how much of that will break horribly, and no idea how to get different output for print, and certainly no idea how to get correct display for anything other than direct viewing of the article (e.g. edit pages). —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 05:36, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
Okay, the title works okay, see User:Interiot/js/RealTitle.js (I based it off of the french code, since it has a bit of error-checking and has been in use for a while). Per your suggestion, I made a new div id, "RealTitleBannerUnpastable", for when the title given is intended to not be pastable (in this case, I only change the document title, not the H1 as you said). (is it pastable, or pasteable?) However, it's not always straightforward to predict whether it will be pastable. Most articles tagged with {{underscore}} substitute a space in the name where an underscore would be, however a few do not (Shift-JIS) or can not (NSAKEY, though "_NSAKEY" is mostly pastable). Even with the more straightforward {{lowercase}}, articles can give a completely different title as the first argument... this is typical for (disambiguated) titles such as Occam (programming language). I'm not sure what to do about some of those.
Fixing the title for print would probably be done with something related to the CSS @media print thing, but it's not obvious right this second how to make the mechanics work. --Interiot 07:37, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
One thing that could be done to make sure the name is pastable is for the javascript to actually check whether one name maps to the other (eg. if you take the RealTitle, uppercase the first letter, change all underscores to spaces, if you get the current page name, then it's okay to display the RealTitle instead). Besides fixing small mundane issues, that would also prevent more extreme attempts to have fun^W^W confuse people. --Interiot 17:09, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
That's what I did in my JavaScript above, or at least that's what it's supposed to do. rtb.substr(0,1).toLowerCase() == doctitle.substr(0,1).toLowerCase() should only be true if they're the same except for their initial letter's case. Except looking at it again, that's totally stupid and wrong, and should be rtb.substr(0,1).toLowerCase() + rtb.substr(1) == doctitle.substr(0,1).toLowerCase() + doctitle.substr(1), I think. Other transformations could also be made, like underscores/spaces (although I guess only ones that are neither the first nor last character?).

Also, maybe something could be worked out for the messy cases that preserves pasteability (no, I don't know whether that e belongs there). Like, what if you did something funky with transparency and z-index? Put the real title on top but invisible, the display title underneath and visible. The problem with that would be if the real title is longer than the display title (C Sharp), people would be prone to select less of the title than they should. Also, it would be distinctly unexpected for the user. I'd stick with canonically equivalent names only for now. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 00:22, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

Simetrical's right - titles should remain pasteable. Any problems with usability veto things looking nice, as annoying as that may be. My personal suggestion, although it risks breaking format, would be to use a double title - note what the subject is with one and where it is listed with another. For articles like C sharp, we'll have trouble with intuitive links anyway - people knowledgable about the subject but not about Wikipedia may still write [[C#]] and hope to get to the right page. Nihiltres 00:44, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

Would it be possible to implement the fix for every article, and then add a mouseover or select event to the title text so that the pasteable text will either appear and/or be copied respectively? --DavidHOzAu 03:03, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

Sneaky, but I'm not sure I'm in favor. Some people will be inclined to type out a link to the title rather than copying it, and there's nothing we can do to stop that. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 01:11, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

Okay, I implemented the "check in real-time if it's pasteable, and only replace the <h1> if it is" code (see User:Interiot/js/RealTitle.js). At the same time, that solved another problem I had, that usually a page's namespace usually isn't mentioned in the "due to technical restrictions" blurb (but sometimes it is). So I also automatically detect whether the namespace is there, and add it if it's not (again, to make sure the name is pasteable). At this point, I see no obvious downsides to the script (other than possibly its complexity), so I'd like to try to add it to monospace.js soon unless there are objections. (the minor downsides are that I don't have printing working, and a few weird cases like lac operon don't work, but I think for 97% of its uses, it does the best thing possible) --Interiot 04:42, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

It sounds good to me. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 06:05, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Trouble with SVG image

Caption
Enlarge
Caption

I'm having trouble with the following SVG image. The file loads fine in IE and FireFox. Is there something I can do to fix it? -SharkD 09:41, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

It's a known bug in the version of libcroco (used by librsvg) that is used on Wikipedia. It's fixed in upstream in libcroco, but an old version is still used on the Wikimedia's servers. See the bug report for a workaround… –Gustavb 16:26, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
Thanks! I'll try using inline stylesheets. -SharkD 23:36, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
More bugs. Any way to resolve these? -SharkD 23:46, 16 November 2006 (UTC)


Unfortunately librsvg dose not support textpaths.[1] --Gary van der Merwe (Talk) 16:18, 18 November 2006 (UTC)


Better like this?
Enlarge
Better like this?

Workaround: convert the text to paths (in Inkscape under Path->Object to Path). Don't use line endings, these are problematic as well. Set the line ending to "none" and use separately drawn triangles or arrowheads, positioned appropriately.

BTW, as the image is supposed to show a sphere, I think a perspective similar to this picture, but rotated maybe another 30° to the right might be better. Lupo 12:05, 21 November 2006 (UTC)


[edit] Where are Wikipedia article authors located?

I posted this query on one of the help pages, and somebody suggested I try the Village Pump, too. I'd love to find information on something I know is technically feasible, I'm just not sure we actually do it. I'm interested in what countries' residents give back to the Wikipedia.

For instance, where do the people who contribute to en.wikipedia.org live? Are they primarily in countries where English is the first language? Or are there thousands in places where English is only a second language, but widely spoken, whether that means the Netherlands or India? I'm not interested in whether the contributors are really native English speakers or not (well, I am, but we can't really know that about each one without asking them.) I'm simply interested in where they are, because we can track that through their IP addresses. And of course I'm not interested in who they are, either, this is not an invasion of any individual's privacy. Yes, articles originating in India (according their IP address) could have been written by, say, a Briton temporarily (or even permanently) residing there, but if there are a few hundred thousand articles from non-English speaking countries, I think it would be safe to assume that they weren't all written by expats!

Where do the people live who contribute to es.wikipedia.org? Spain, South America, Central America, the U.S.?

Where do the people who contribute to zh.wikipedia.org live, or ko.wikipedia.org or ... are these people in their respective diasporas, socalled "overseas" Chinese, or Taiwanese, or people living in the People's Republic?

Wouldn't this be easy to track? And might it not give insight into why some Wikipedias grow so much faster than others?

Thanks

Prairie Dad 01:12, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

You could try to find out by checking nationality userboxes on those wikis that use them; you could also check 'Recent changes' for anons and check the IPs to see which country they came from. --ais523 09:40, 17 November 2006 (UTC)
I would suggesting taking a look through Category:Wikipedians by location. Could prove to be somewhat illuminating. Personally, I'm in Tennessee. EVula // talk // ☯ // 20:45, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
There have been some cursory statistics done on this; see meta:Edits by project and country of origin. No pretty graphs or anything, but the data is there. Perhaps most interestingly, for Chinese: HK: 28.6%, TW: 25.9% ... CN: 6.1% (though bear in mind that we'd have been blocked in mainland China for much of that time). Shimgray | talk | 20:54, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Changes in auto-summary feature?

I noticed that there is now a (replacing page with 'new page content') auto-summary when a vandal blanks a page (example); however, the one I really liked - the auto-summary that was provided when you make a redirect - is gone. Can the developers bring this one back? :-( Kimchi.sg 13:30, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

It works for me: [2] —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 01:18, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

I figured it out. Apparently the new redirect autosummary requires there be no space between the "#REDIRECT" and the [[. Kimchi.sg 05:35, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

The same code is used to check whether to generate an autosummary and to check whether something is a redirect. Could you link to an edit where the summary wasn't generated but the resulting redirect worked? —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 06:08, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] http://stats.wikimedia.org/

http://stats.wikimedia.org/ has been completely unaccessible for days now. What's up? --Derlay 03:16, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

The tool generated some information which was considered private. As a result, the statistics are unavailable until this information is purged, and the tool is corrected so that this does not happen again.
Inferring from a thread on wikitech-l, the tool's developer, Erik Zachte, and our CTO, Brion Vibber, are communicating to this effect, so the statistics might be restored in the near future. 164.11.204.56 20:41, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Reference problem

I've been converting a list I'm working on into table form, located at User:VegaDark/Sandbox and I've been inline sourcing every entry. There are so many football players that use the same source that I have gotten past bz on the reference count at the bottom of the page and it is showing some sort of error. Only a developer can add the ability for ca-cz and beyond (by the time I am done, I may need through the d's or e's). Any chance that can happen? Thanks, VegaDark 01:49, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

I just realized this could be considered a bug/feature request and should be posted on bugzilla, but I don't have an account there...anyone who does feel like submitting it? Thanks. VegaDark 02:10, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
It's not too hard to make the change, MediaWiki:Cite references link many format backlink labels needs to have ca cb cc cd ce cf cg ch ci cj ck cl cm cn co cp cq cr cs ct cu cv cw cx cy cz added to the end of it. However, this edit can only be done by an admin. Tra (Talk) 02:36, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
Thanks, that worked. It now goes through dz. However, now it stretches the page instead of word wrapping. Any way for it to word wrap without having the developers change the programming? VegaDark 07:58, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
Creating the pages MediaWiki:cite_references_link_many_sep and MediaWiki:cite_references_link_many_and (which needs to be done by an admin) and putting   in each of them might fix this. Tra (Talk) 16:59, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
Any admin care to make the pages? VegaDark 21:30, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
Done, let me know if it works (they're all on one line on your sandbox page for me). But seriously, maybe consider an alternative referencing scheme if you need up to dz for a single source. Opabinia regalis 02:51, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
It worked after I purged the page, thanks. I originally had a different referencing scheme but when I put the page through peer review it was recommended I inline cite every entry, or it wouldn't get to featured status. Feel free to take a look to see if you can come up with a better idea. VegaDark 04:11, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

I know nothing about featured lists specifically, but I'd say the inline citation creep lately has gotten way out of hand if we're getting up to dz in the footnotes. People have, in the past, evaded this problem by including individual notes with page/section/etc numbers and the author's name, and listing the full citation for the work in a separate section (I understand this is common in WP:MILHIST-supported articles). A simple option would be to use the old {{ref}}/{{note}} system, which is clunkier in some ways but doesn't produce individual notes for each time a work is cited, or just include a linked asterisk that goes to this particular oft-cited work in place of a note. Don't know if any of those would suit your specific purpose, though. Opabinia regalis 05:40, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

Something I think a lot of people don't know is that the ref tags already allow for named, multiply-referenced citations for the same source. -- nae'blis 18:21, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
Actually, that feature was exactly what this problem was about. VegaDark 20:30, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
Mmmmm. Hmmm, I see that now, but I'm inclined to agree there should be another solution then. Sorry for misreading the discussion. -- nae'blis 20:48, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] external link not appearing as external

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_recognition#Hidden_Markov_model_.28HMM.29-based_speech_recognition

Hi, on the above article section, there's a link that points to a postscript file on someone's web page, but when the article is viewed (using Internet Explorer), it does not show the usual graphic to indicate that the article is a URL rather than a wikipedia entry. --Rebroad 10:42, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

What version of IE are you using? The graphic show up fine for me with IE6. Do other external links show up OK? --TheParanoidOne 10:55, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
That's why one's generally not supposed to link to rich media content unless there's a specific notice of such (see WP:EL). Patstuart(talk)(contribs) 11:53, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
In IE7, I notice these external links show correctly when they are on one line, but if they wrap to another line then the arrow doesn't show. I think this could be due to aa problem with how the css is rendered. Tra (Talk) 14:48, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
Indeed. Maybe fixable with JS? —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 06:11, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Horizontal scrollbar

Since this morning I've been seeing a horizontal scrollbar in Wikipedia article pages (including user and talk pages, but not the watchlist) in Firefox 2.0. The horizontal scrollbar does not appear in IE. Does anyone know if the CSS or ouputted HTML has changed in MediaWiki. -- Jeff3000 23:48, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

Looks fine for me. Perhaps it's something with your personal js or css? —Mets501 (talk) 02:40, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
Maybe this depends if the text contains "pre" tags ; the line is not automatically cut at the end of a window line, and firefox then offers a scrollbar. --DLL .. T 21:39, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Saving, but not posting...

Hello I would like to say i am very upset that wikipedia does not have a "save, but do not post" button. If, in fact they do have such a feature it needs to be more prominant. I had a very upsetting moment when i was wokring on a new article and I walked to get a drink. When I came back, wikipedia had been closed and all of my hard work lost. It could be placed right next to the save changes and post button. The button would save the article to your contributions. please correct me if I am wrong but I do not believe there is such a way.--Gwakamoley 18:07, 20 November 2006 (UTC)Gwakamoley

All changes to wiki pages are immediately live, by design, so you can't save a draft and not affect the article while you're still editing. If you'd like to make a draft copy to work things out, you might try using a subpage either in articlespace or your userspace (like a personal Wikipedia:Sandbox). Copy all the text into User:Gwakamoley/Draft sandbox or Talk:Article name/Temp, for example, work out your edits there, then select all again and copy it back to the article, being careful to re-include any edits made in the meantime. Does that help? -- nae'blis 18:16, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

Yes, but I still think that such a feature should still be added... unless it is impossible (if thats what your sayin).--Gwakamoley 18:20, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

Pretty sure there isn't a way to do that. If you're doing a major overhaul of a project, I'd suggesting doing your writing in a program on your computer; you can save your progress as much as you want. Other than that, I'd suggest using a subpage of your userspace so that you can work on it anywhere. EVula // talk // ☯ // 20:36, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
Some more good reasons : WP is not your own archiving device ; any good text processor uses proofreading functions that are recommended before posting ; you are allowed to read again once (preview button) things that you would not like to post raw, &c. --DLL .. T 21:37, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
I've gotten hosed, too. The solution is to select-all, and hit ctrl-C to copy to the clipboard. And then paste it into Notepad or Word (or whatever) if you're extra paranoid. This has saved me a couple of times. It sounds like a low bang-for-buck as a Wikipedia feature, and I would think a 'save without posting' feature sounds confusing in any case. Tempshill 06:21, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
When I write a lot, I too copy the text to the clipboard before posting it. If something goes wrong, I can then try again. Sometimes clicking 'back' on the browser helps, but if the browser dies, or the computer dies, then there is not a lot that can be done. For major rewrites, working in an external program with 'save' functions is best. But, as others have said, remember to re-add edits made since you rewrote the text, and credit them in the edit summary (say something like 're-adding edits first added in version xyz'). Carcharoth 11:43, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Tiny images are too small to be read and high resolution download shows text rather than a larger image

Hello:

Some of the images on Wikipedia are too small to be read by the human eye alone. For example,the link: French monarchs family tree contains a very small image: Image:France-2ndCapet.png. This image is far too small to be read; And the high resolution download shows text rather than a larger image. How can these tiny images be made bigger and more legible for the human eye?

72.88.150.208 05:43, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

The page looks fine to me. What OS and browser version are you using? As for Image:France-2ndCapet.png, after clicking through to see the image, using some browsers it does load to fit the height of the browser window, resulting in illegible text - clicking on it once zooms in to 100% size (at least in Firefox 1.5.x). The latter isn't an actual usability issue, of course. Tempshill 06:18, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Problem using link suggester for main page

Tried to apply the link suggester to the main page but it flagged a wiki syntax error in the wikitext underlying the main page. Please see http://can-we-link-it.nickj.org/suggest-links/suggester.php?page=Main_Page for the syntax error.

We can only use this link suggester when the syntax error has been resolved, please can someone help? Tom 13:11, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Problem using link suggester for main page

Tried to apply link suggester to main page but suggester noted there was a syntax error in the underlying wikitext: http://can-we-link-it.nickj.org/suggest-links/suggester.php?page=Main_Page

Please can someone fix it? Tom 13:14, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Active Watchlist items

When I make changes on a page, I add it to my watchlist, but sometimes I only want to watch it for a few days to make sure the page is not vandalized again. Would it be possible to create a temporary watchlisting option?

By this, I mean, you could add an item to your watchlist for 3 (or 7) days, after which it automatically would be removed. If you edit the item during the 3 (or 7) days, the item's time on your watchlist would be renewed, so that it would be on for 3 (or 7) days from that point.

One of the benefits is to prevent editor (particularly admin) burnout by automatically removing short-term watchlist items so the editor does not become overwhelmed by a tremendous watchlist that he feels responsible for. This would be especially useful in fighting short-term vandalism on article, which takes up half or more of an editor's tim on Wikipedia.--Chris Griswold (☎☓) 00:28, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Something you could do (but it is a bit more manual) is create a page like: User:ChrisGriswold/watchlist. When you edit a page, add a link to it there, and remove any more than 7 days old. You can check recent changes of the links on a page by clicking related changes, which would be -> Special:Recentchangeslinked/User:ChrisGriswold/watchlist. Now, if we could just get the devs to add a link to that on Special:Contributions.... --Splarka (rant) 08:34, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
I kinda like that idea. Whenever I go to remove user talk pages I've left various notices on from my watchlist I have a hard time remembering who I want to keep watching and who I just gave a "no image source" notice 3 months ago. The alternative would be to not watch the pages I guess, but sometimes people do reply to these things. Also my browser freeze for about 5 minutes when I click "remove selected items from watchlist" after a manual cleanup, and I "only" have ~8500 items on there. It should not be too hard to do either. Just add a "watch for X days" field next to the "Watch this page" checkbox, if left emtpy it's added permanently while if you type in a number an "expiration date" is added to a new field in the watchlist database. Then have a script remove all "past due" items for the user whenever Special:Watchlist is loaded. --Sherool (talk) 08:41, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
I find checking User Talk pages for replies is best done from my contribs rather than my watchlist. --ais523 09:03, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
I heartily agree. A "watchlist for X days" option would be utterly marvelous. Even if it used a fixed quantity, like 60 days. I wonder if it's possible? --Quiddity 09:52, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
I guess it's possible, but would require a change in the meta:Watchlist table, as every record have to contain the time the entry was added and the time for removal. Tizio 10:57, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
Time of removal would be enough, the system just need to know when to remove the item from the watchlist, not when it was added to it. And yes it would require a database change, but adding new fields is not a huge problem, we just need to file a request for change on MediaZilla, get a few people to vote for it and hope some dev can be bothered to implement it ;) --Sherool (talk) 18:09, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
Good feature. I would use that too. --Ligulem 09:33, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

No, not that way. I don't want to have to fill in a field or hit a check box every time I submit an edit. Also, I don't know that I can say, at the time of editing, how long I'll want the page on my watchlist.

I'd rather see a text column on the watchlist page telling me how many days since I last watched it. This needs to display as well when I edit the list. Then I can easily go down the list, saying, "Hm, I haven't had anything to do with X in 6 months and I can't think of any reason to keep it watched. Bye." That's how I'd like it. An export feature would be nice, too. John Reid ° 04:24, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Well obviously it would be optional. You wouldnt have to fill in or check anything, it would be an optional extra.
As mentioned above, a specific case like leaving welcomes/warnings on user talk pages is where it could come in handy. But your method is good too, and could work in conjunction with each other. -Quiddity 22:18, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

So where do we go from here with this? --Chris Griswold (☎☓) 06:15, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Sherool summed it up perfectly just above. Bugzilla makes me nervous, else I would do it. And expect to wait a long time, enhancements are low priority and devs are too few. --Quiddity 08:07, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
If the toolserver ever gets back up, I planned to implement exactly this. Basically, the recentchanges table keeps the last.. 7? days of edits. Basically, use recentchanges to get a list of all articles the target user has edited that are still in the table, and then check the recentchanges table again for all changes to those pages. I haven't gotten a chance to run the query on the toolserver to see how fast it is... I assume it's a little slower than the watchlist, but the recentchanges table is supposed to be fast... --Interiot 06:33, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
Please do. I almost took a huge break from Wikipedia but realized that the major weight on me when editing was trying to get through my watchlist. This will make things so much easier. --Chris Griswold (☎☓) 09:20, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Google indexing of non-article namespaces...

Without having put much thought into the matter, my understanding has been that only Wikipedia articles were supposed to be indexed by search engines (enforced by robots.txt or the equivalent). But I just noticed that my talk and user pages are the fourth and fifth hits on a google search for "opabinia regalis" - [3] - far outranking our article on the actual fossil, located at Opabinia and redirected from Opabinia regalis. Even my rarely-used Commons userpage outranks our actual article. This may make some sense, as my userpage is linked to more often, but all those links should be coming from sigs, which should also be in non-indexed talk pages.

I can't think off the top of my head of any other users whose usernames are plausible search terms, but I'm sure they're out there. Google giving unusually high ranks to Wikipedia articles is not surprising (see this signpost article), but doing the same to things out of articlespace is a bad sign, and just a further indication of how strict we should be on not allowing spam or advertising to stay in userspace long enough to get indexed. Opabinia regalis 05:12, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Wells there me User:Salix alba, and User:Quercusrobur --Salix alba (talk) 09:10, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
http://en.wikipedia.org/robots.txt only seems to block Special:Random, Special:Search, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion and subpages, and the whole of the /w/ pages (like edit screens and history pages), so it's busy indexing userpages. It sort of makes sense if you consider Google searches like http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=wikipedia+help&meta= ("wikipedia help"); Help:Contents and Wikipedia:How to edit a page are the top two hits here. Likewise, "wikipedia User:ais523" finds my userpage as top hit (which isn't very surprising). --ais523 09:33, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Right - I was trying to think of users with expectedly non-unique usernames - names of things you'd reasonably search for. Seems to be that it's a bad thing if we're just adding to the google noise by indexing userpages. Opabinia regalis 14:16, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
It would quite possibly be a good idea to exclude userpages from robots.txt; OTOH, I'd be against excluding Wikipedia:, Help:, Category:, Portal:, or Image:. Not sure about Template:, MediaWiki:, or the various talkspaces (I can just about imagine an instance in which people would be googling for article talkspace, but the technical namespaces should give hits on sites about MediaWiki rather than Wikipedia). --ais523 14:21, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Yes, I agree Wikipedia: (and WP:), Help:, Portal:, and Image: should be indexed - not sure how useful it is to search Category: but I don't see why not (possibly not anything under Category:Wikipedians?) IMO everything 'internal', such as User:, Template:, and the talk spaces ought not to be indexed. To be fair, the internal Wikipedia search function is poor enough that people might actually use Google to search these areas. Opabinia regalis 01:31, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
The problem with this is that if someone did want to search for discussions/user pages etc, they would be forced to use Wikipedia's search engine, and would not be able to use Google (which is better) because the pages they are looking for have been restricted by robots.txt. It might be possible to deliberately lower the pagerank of non-article space pages by perhaps putting rel=nofollow on some (not all) of the internal links pointing outside of article space. I'm not sure if this would work, though... Tra (Talk) 02:04, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

Maybe the problem is with the usernames? Though as my name is also that of an article, I guess I should stop right here! :-) Carcharoth 02:08, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

Opabinia, I think the answer is obvious. Google has simply decided that you are more interesting than a fossil ;-). For the record though a search on Opabinia gives the fossil page. It is only search for the more detailed Opabinia regalis that gives you first (which is after all the title of your page, but only a side item on the fossil page). I think this is probably something that the world can learn to live with. Dragons flight 05:41, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

Hmm. For Carcharoth, I'm seeing our article first on the Google search, and then my user page, suitably indented from the main result. That seems reasonable. Still, just to be sure, and as a matter of principle, I'm putting a WP:HATNOTE redirecting people to the article in case they come to my user page, or talk page. Carcharoth 12:16, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Userspace indexing is useful for one very good reason. I don't really know how to find the same volumes of spam without it. MER-C 12:26, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Discussion started at Wikipedia_talk:Username#Username_disambiguation. Carcharoth 13:31, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

MER-C, is that how you dig up all that crap? Here I thought you just had spam radar :) Too bad the internal search is so wimpy. Opabinia regalis 00:57, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
Yes. MER-C 06:15, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Making Images Smaller

How can you change the image size for something? I mean not forever, but for, say, a userbox. The current image is too large, and I want the userbox to be of a reasonable size.--Kookoo275 01:27, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Extended image syntax. You could put [[Image:Car.jpg|100px]] to get . Tra (Talk) 02:13, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Gah, now I remember. I did that for a volcano pic one time. Oh well, I'm an idiot. Thanks. --Kookoo275 03:14, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Remember, though, no fair use on user pages, and that means in user boxes too. To my surprise, Image:Rightswordguy.gif is fair use, and must not be used! Notinasnaid 10:08, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] <nocat> tag?

I've run into a number of situations over time on Wikipedia, especially those involving categories embedded within templates, for which it would have been incredibly useful to have a tag that would cause the MediaWiki software to disregard all categories within the tags.

  1. Is there currently a way to do this?
  2. If not, do you think that this should be a requested feature?

Thanks, Nihiltres 03:41, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Well, you can use <noinclude></noinclude>. Categories inside those tags will only categorize the template, but won't make articles to be categorized under them. -- ReyBrujo 04:53, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
Thanks , but that's not quite the same problem - imagine that there is a template on a page which would be cumbersome (or inappropriate) to substitute, but which contains an undesired category. The page will be categorized with that category unless nowiki or includeonly tags prevent the template from rendering - which I can't imagine a solution for. Nihiltres 05:48, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
Mediazilla:835 —Simetrical (talk&nbsp;•&nbsp;contribs) 06:13, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
Specific instances of this general problem are almost always fixable by using noinclude or an appropriate #if. What real problem are you trying to address? -- Rick Block (talk) 14:20, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
What's currently done is, on the template, to reference the category in the form: {{{category|[[Category:Example]]}}}. The template will still continue to work normally. Then, if you want to transclude the template without the category, you reference it in the form: {{example|category=}} Tra (Talk) 23:38, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] watchlist

Wouldn't it be great to have an RSS stream for your watchlist? Possible or not? yandman 10:19, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

While I'm sure this is possible, I think it's not enabled/active, for bandwidth reasons. Nihiltres 15:13, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
  • Bug #471 discusses the RSS/Watchlist idea. It looks like someone has a patch too. The biggest issue is that watchlists have normally been private, and therefore need password protection. The solutions seem to be (hopefully I'm summarizing these accurately) ... 1) those who read RSS within their browser probably already have a login-cookie, so they can just use that, 2) for those who use an external RSS reader, the only option is to have the user agree to make their watchlist semi-public, and then give them a URL with a semi-secret token in it to give to their RSS reader. --Interiot 15:18, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
Interesting. The cookie looks like a nice idea (although I'm uncertain as to how long the account will stay "open" enabling the stream). Nice to see all the work that's going on behind the scenes... yandman 15:25, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
The cookie would be the same one that you use whenever you access Wikipedia. Eg. You only have to log in every couple months if you never log out. --Interiot 21:40, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Uploading image problem

I want to upload a singles cover "kaw-liga_Hank_Williams.jpg" to the article Kaw-Liga (song). I have renamed it various ways but when I try to upload it I always get the message: The file you uploaded seems to be empty. This might be due to a typo in the file name. Please check whether you really want to upload this file. Yesterday I uploaded a similar file to Dust My Broom successfully. I don't know what I am doing wrong now. I have read the direction on how to upload. Any ideas? Thanks! Mattisse(talk) 16:26, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

I have changed the image name to "Kaw-liga.jpg". It is the same in the article name. I cannot figure out what is wrong. I've tried every conceivable combination. Thanks! Mattisse(talk) 17:30, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
Special:Upload asks you for two names: the first is the name of the file you have (e.g., the name of your file in your hard disk); the second is the name you want to give to the image once uploaded here. The error message means that probably you made a typo in the first name, that of your local file. I would also check whether the file you have and are trying to upload is actually empty. Tizio 19:49, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] What is the trick in naming images for uploading?

I get an error message that there is a typo in the image name about 99% of the time before I finally succeed. I know the general rules about naming images. Is there an extra trick? Thanks! Mattisse(talk) 20:02, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Most of the time when that happens for me it's because I used a space rather than an underscore ( _ ) between words. The underscore'll show up as a space everywhere outside of the URL, but the software likes to check that the change is fine with you before it uploads. GeeJo (t)⁄(c) &bull;&nbsp;09:45, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Multi Language article

How do you make an article in one language count as the same in another?194.80.178.1 21:26, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

What do you mean by "count"? Do you mean the links that you sometimes see at the left of an article which list other language Wikipedias with an equivalent article? Notinasnaid 21:27, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
Sorry. Yes I do.194.80.178.1 21:30, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
How do I do that?194.80.178.1 21:42, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
For the gory details, see Wikipedia:Interwikimedia link. To just see how it's done, pick an article which has these links, and use edit; look at the very end of the article. (Interwiki links don't have to be at the end, but that is strongly recommended). For example at the end of Blues I see [[wa:Blouze]]. You just need the two letter code for the other Wikipedia ("wa" in this example), and the name of the article ("Blouze" in this example). Notinasnaid 21:51, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
There are codes to do this, which corrospond with the first two letters in the particular wikipedia site. This, for example is en, since the webadress is en.wikipedia.org. Just link to that, by typing [[CODE:ARTICLE NAME]], where CODE is the two letters mentioned, and ARTICLE NAME is the name of the article you are linking to. Prodego talk 21:54, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks guys.194.80.178.1 22:08, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Search change

I've done a couple of changes to MediaWiki:Searchnoresults, to include links to site searches on the three linked engines - what with the index being so far behind (and the mediawiki search engine being so rubbish not very good). As this is likely to affect most people at some time, I'm posting here to invite discussion (crossposting to WP:VPN, please comment on this (WP:VPT) page). Thanks -- Martinp23 22:53, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

The links seem to work well. Would it be possible to also put the links on the footer of the results page, to cover the situation when results are found but they aren't the ones you want? Tra (Talk) 23:02, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
I'm not sure what the system message for the footer is (if there is one). The closest I can find is MediaWiki:Searchresulttext, where I've put the text, but commented out. This is the text at the top of search results which are successful - an admin can feel free to comment that out if there's a consensus to have it there (the footer would be much better, but I can't find the message). Martinp23 23:22, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Bot Needed

I'm editing pages such as 7, 8 and 265 to solve the WP:BUNCH problem. It's rather formulaic. I wonder if a bot/script/whatever could be written to save my time? The problem seems to carry on right up to and beyond 1876. See 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 362 to see what I've done so far.

Also, there is little consistency in the disambiguation; sometimes it's {{otheruses}} and sometimes it's {{otheruses-number}} and sometimes it's both. perhaps they should all just be {{otheruses-number}} and any such page as 5 (disambiguation) should be merged with 5 (number). --User24 00:01, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

User:Ligulem runs a version of Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser that can be given a scripted tasklist. He might be willing to do this for you. There's also Wikipedia:Bot requests. -- Rick Block (talk) 02:45, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
This can be done with Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser. --Ligulem 10:27, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Ok, thanks for the responses both of you, I've left a message on your talk page Ligulem. --User24 14:51, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Templates: Passing list of parameters as one parameter

Assume page A calls template B, which calls template C, which calls either of (X,Y,Z) depending on a parameter supplied by A. X,Y,Z have some parameters in common, which are supplied by C, but the remainer needs to be supplied by A.

So, in pseudocode:

  • Case 1
    • A calls B with params (X,1,2,3,4,5)
      • B passes these on to C
        • C calls X with params (p,q,1,2,3,4,5)
  • Case 2
    • A calls B with params (Z,alpha,beta,gamma)
      • B passes these on to C
        • C calls Z with params (p,q,alpha,beta,gamma)

Is there any way to pass the multiple values from A via B to C as one parameter, so that B does not have to know the maximum number of values that may be passed through? In other words, is there a way to place a piped parameter list into one parameter and then somehow make C "expand" the single parameter again into a list which can be fed into the X/Y/Z template call? Or am I stuck with passing them one by one? -- TeraBlight 07:25, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Can you give us a practical case to work on? Circeus 22:28, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
Hang on, I'll put an example on my user page... TeraBlight 22:39, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
There, have a look: User:TeraBlight/TemplateLab
The architecture is silly in this case of course, never mind that. The point is that a set of values needs to be passed along, in this case either four "booleans" or two numbers. Using (p1,p2,p3,p4) in the caller-side (/TemplateLab) and intermediary (/Month) code is quite ugly, while using (morning,afternoon,evening,night,first,last) all the way through is less ugly but quite clumsy. What I'd like is to be able to use a single param like so (pseudocode)
  • |timeType=1 |timeParams=[yes|yes|no|no]
  • |timeType=2 |timeParams=[12|16]
in the caller-side and like so
  • |timeParams={{{timeParams}}}
in the intermediary code.
The problem is that I would have to somehow "unwrap" this into the constituent values on the callee-side, either in /Day or in /Time. TeraBlight 23:29, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
Have you looked at ParserFunctions yet? Circeus 23:36, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
Sure, I'm using #ifeq and #ifexpr in the /Time templates... TeraBlight 23:47, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
It's not possible to split up a text string using ParserFunctions. You would just have to pass all the paramaters across seperately. This shouldn't matter too much if it makes the template look ugly, because they generally aren't viewed and edited as often as articles. You may want to look at m:StringFunctions which might do the job but is not enabled on any Wikimedia wikis. Tra (Talk) 23:53, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
Hmmm, yes, using direct string manipulation would kinda solve the problem, but since they're not currently available... I thought there might be some way to use a single container without turning the contents into a string (a sort of basic list or array functionality), or some way to turn a string back into wikitext so that the pipes and/or equals would work from some point on, like an inverse nowiki tag - anyway, thanks. TeraBlight 00:11, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

It is impossible to parse strings in any way / convert a singular parameter into multiple ones. You may want to either:

  • rethink what you're doing - is there an easier way?
  • not be so complex in your templating, does it really need this functionality?
  • as suggested, pass parameters along one by one.

In the 3rd case, you should work out the maximum parameters that are likely to be passed, and code for just those. --Alfakim-- talk 06:11, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Newpages

Is there any piece of Javascript or equivalent I could use to filter out any entries on Special:Newpages below a certain size threshold? I do a fair amount of searching there for potential DYK entries, and being able to avoid having to scroll over the 80% of articles smaller than 3kb would be very handy. GeeJo (t)⁄(c) &bull;&nbsp;09:53, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

I've written User:Ais523/filternewpage.js in response to this; prequisites are 'add LI link' and 'add tab', available at WP:US/S. --ais523 11:50, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
Thanks very much! Certainly going to save a good deal of time, and it looks like I really underestimated the number of small articles being created. Seems to be closer to 95% on running this tool. GeeJo (t)⁄(c) &bull;&nbsp;13:51, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Category is a member of another category, in a circle

I just found that Category:Ethnic cleansing of Georgians in Abkhazia was a member of itself, so that a tree of a category's subcategories would go on for ever. One of Wikipedia's bots should be programmed to look for circular subcategory chains (as well as for #redirect circles). (I have now removed the self-membership line in Category:Ethnic cleansing of Georgians in Abkhazia; see this old version). Anthony Appleyard 10:52, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

This is not necessarily a problem, please see Wikipedia:Categorization#Cycles should usually be avoided. Categories do not have any specific formal meaning and have the formal structure of only a directed graph, in particular they do not form a tree and may include cycles. -- Rick Block (talk) 16:29, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Redirecting categories

It would be useful if this feature was put into Wikipedia. If e.g.:-

  • Some people put articles in Category:Rebreather diving.
  • Some other people, acting independently, put articles in Category:Closed circuit diving.
  • It is decided to merge these 2 categories.
It would be useful to be able merely to alter the text of Category:Closed circuit diving to read
#redirect [[:Category:Rebreather diving]]

and that one act would automatically make membership of Category:Closed circuit diving be treated as membership of Category:Rebreather diving, instead of having to edit every member of Category:Closed circuit diving. Anthony Appleyard 11:05, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

This can be done using a "soft redirect", please see Template talk:Category redirect. After adding the template, a bot (run by a user) will eventually edit the articles to change the category. -- Rick Block (talk) 16:20, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] A pipe format with two | signs, for words and languages with nominative singular endings

The usual pipe format is e.g. "[[scuba set|my old aqualung]]", as is well known. The trouble arises with inflections. In English, most inflected word forms have a bare-stem form, so linking from an inflected form is easy: e.g. "the [[cat]]'s tail"; "the [[patrol]]men were [[shovel]]ing seized kit into their incinerator."

The trouble comes with words where the bare stem is not a valid word. That occurs more in other languages, such as with nouns in Latin and Lithuanian and Icelandic, and with feminine and neuter words in Slavonic languages, and verbs in Romance languages, where in some inflected forms the end of the listed form drops out. That results in having to repeat the whole word at the link, e.g. "[[incineration|incinerator]]", "[[inflate|inflating]]". This is very common in some foreign Wikipedias, adding up to many megabytes of extra text. It would be useful to be able to write e.g. "[[incinerat|ing|or]]", "the star ξ [[Sagittari|us|i]]", "[[inflat|e|ing]]", instead. Anthony Appleyard 11:11, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "Disabled to edits???" from Talk:Michael Richards#Disabled to edits

Why does the page say what it says at the top and yet this clearly newly registered user had his way with the article? BabuBhatt 15:52, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

It is possible that the User:Curtisaallen account was registered some time ago but never utilized till today. When such accounts are layed away for nefarious purposes they are usually known as sleeper account on Wikipedia. (→Netscott) 16:01, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
What would it require for the program to be changed so that users with no edits so far would be treated as if they were brand-new? Wahkeenah 16:07, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
Hmm, that's not a bad idea. My recommendation is to post it to: Wikipedia:Village pump (technical). (→Netscott) 16:11, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Wahkeenah 16:15, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm not entirely certain that the change would be that helpful. Vandals who use sleeper accounts have already shown some degree of sophistication. All it'd mean is that they'd have to make a single superfluous edit before laying the account to rest for a while. GeeJo (t)⁄(c) &bull;&nbsp;16:29, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
I bet you're right. It wouldn't take them long to figure out another way around it. Wahkeenah 16:32, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
Then again, anything which creates work for the vandals is inherently a Good Thing. GeeJo (t)⁄(c) &bull;&nbsp;16:54, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
What if we set it to 100 edits? - Tutmosis 17:07, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
An excellent idea. Or 50, or 250, or something that would at least require them to expend some time and effort... especially if the number of edits needed is kept secret somehow (probably not an acceptable idea, but worth fantasizing about). Wahkeenah 17:21, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
  • There's no way to get an editcount directly within MediaWiki, as the number of edits is not recorded anywhere in the database (that means, there is no editcount table, or editcount field in the user database table). It can be derived through a separate expensive query, like it is done in the Toolserver, but it would be IMO too expensive to make the same query until a certain number of edits are made to the site, and the user gets the autoconfirmed flag. Titoxd(?!?) 23:59, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
    • In short, it would require not just a program change, but a database change... and thus it's a rather lower likelihood that the project managers would make this kind of task a priority. :\ Wahkeenah 02:23, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] English text displays as Hindi or something ... .

I have a couple of users on Apple PC's who have (or currently are) seeing the text in articles displayed in Hindi or some Indo-Dravidian text.

I know I've turned this error off in the past but can't seem to remember how.

They are all using Tiger, and Safari. Problem does not come up in other browsers. Also seems to effect Craig's List and some few other sites.

Any help will be appreciated! Thanks

Merel O'Rourke (e-mail removed for privacy reasons) Wed 22 November 2006

This seems like an error in you default browser settings. Go to the Safari menu, down to Preferences... (⌘,). Then click on the Appearance tab on top. At the bottom of the Appearance options you will see "Default Encoding." Set this to Unicode (UTF-8) and you shold be all set.—WAvegetarian&bull;(talk) 13:40, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Can't log in

Every time I try to log in from my PC I get a prompt to download a file after I click log in. I do not have Use external editor checked in my user preferences and they shouldn't have an affect anyway, I think? Does anyone know what is wrong? 81.104.37.81 20:29, 22 November 2006 (UTC) (usually user:Lcarsdata)

Don't worry, it must be something to do with my PC and Firefox as I have logged into WP on a PC at my school. Lcarsdata (Talk) 10:05, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Suggestion about cached special pages

The pages Special:Deadendpages, Special:Uncategorizedpages, Special:Uncategorizedcategories and Special:Wantedcategories are created regularly and remain unchanged in the intervals. I understand that compiling these lists dynamically would take too much time, but once they exist, it shouldn't be too demanding to monitor changes to listed pages and remove those that no longer belong. This would make these special pages more useful, because currently it can be quite challenging to find anything in them that hasn't been fixed already. --Derlay 00:29, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

What could be done is to paste the contents of the special page in a regular, editable page in Wikipedia: namespace, where fixed entries can be manually removed. This is already done with some pages such as WP:MWA which is an editable version of Special:Wantedpages. Some other pages designed like this are Wikipedia:Dead-end pages, Category:Category needed and Category:Orphaned categories Tra (Talk) 01:15, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Aligning an image to the right

How do you do this? I want all my userboxes to be on the right side of my user page, like the babel box. --Kookoo275 23:41, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

Like this. It's CSS. —Simetrical (talk&nbsp;•&nbsp;contribs) 01:22, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. --Kookoo275 02:33, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Corrupted history

(thread moved from Help desk)

I've been around for a year and a half, was given admin chores, performed some history merges, and I still have no idea whatis going on here. I can see diffs in the history that don't appear when comparing diffs. Look at this diff] and then hit the next link. Look at the resulting diff, particularly the time gap between them. Then look at the history of the article. It skips ~30 edits made by others and attributes all their changes to an editor ~30+1 edits later. Since all of the edits do appear in the history if one compares diff by diff I guess it isn't too much of a concern, but I don't understand why it is doing this. I also have a personal concern as 25 of those 30 are mine, making a large expansion of a stub.—WAvegetarian&bull;(talk) 12:54, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

  • When I look at this and click through, edits through May 25-June 22 are attributed to Jumbo Snails, but I can't find him nor the person with the May 25 edit in the history either. I think it is indeed corrupted. - Mgm|(talk) 13:08, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
Here's a different URL for the same diff: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Garfield_High_School_%28Seattle%2C_Washington%29&oldid=15642652&diff=15643044. I'm writing it out in full so the oldid and diff numbers are visible; note that they only differ by 492: it's hard to believe there would only be 492 edits in this time period. Querying the database with http://en.wikipedia.org/w/query.php?titles=Garfield_High_School_%28Seattle%2C_Washington%29&revids=15642652|15643044&what=revisions&rvcomments&rvstart&rvend reveals that these values are nonetheless in the database, so there would seem to be some sort of a cockup here. It may be worth copying this thread to the technical village pump to get more input. --ais523 13:17, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
edit conflict: User:Jumbo Snails is formerly CAPS LOCK. His first edit to the article was on the 22nd of June. This shows up if you look at the history page. Prior to my edits on the first (representing the 5th-... edits to the article) it was edited in February, March, and May. The two edits in May don't appear when you use the next diff links either. Is there someway to uncorrupt such problems, like deleting everything and manually restoring? All of the edits this article has had to it appear in the history, they just don't show up in the next diff continuum. This article has resided at around half a dozen different titles in the last year and a half. Should I take this to WP:VP/T?—WAvegetarian&bull;(talk) 13:21, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
Eesh, that's worse than I thought. I will copy this over to WP:VP/T. Thread continued there.—WAvegetarian&bull;(talk) 13:27, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
Just to add the confusion, I've run this database query by timestamp: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/query.php?titles=Garfield_High_School_%28Seattle%2C_Washington%29&what=revisions&rvcomments&rvstart=20050525064236&rvend=20050622192200. The oldids are suspicious looking consecutive integers (did no-one edit any other pages in Wikipedia during this timespan?), and the first edit is now attributed to WAvegetarian (who also has two vandalism reverts over that time period). --ais523 13:49, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Man this is getting old

Great, just great. 1. Because I am now on DirecWay (with no other options for a server because I am in the deep woods) I cannot stay logged in *PERIOD*. 2. Before this I went to the trouble to take a photo of J. sambac in my yard, and I edited the size (bytes) for a quick load. I added it (5 months ago) to the Jasmine page. 3. Now the Wiki Police remove it, and I cannot stay logged on to put it back! It's not my fault Wikipedia has some glitch that won't recognize Direcway users, and yes I went to your help desk to no avail. Will someone PLEASE go to my website and get the pic: http://www.MagiaLuna.net/jsambac1.jpg and put it back on the darned page? The removed text under the pic read: "J.sambac in bloom along with an unopened bud. The flowers smell exactly like the tea." Please excuse my frustration. Thanks, and BTW I can't find my user page now?? And of course I logged in to post this and now I'm not logged in... Magialuna 20:34, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

The user page for Magialuna is at User:Magialuna. The talk page for the ip you're using now is at User talk:69.19.14.41. To make sure you stay logged on, try making sure that you have cookies enabled in your browser, and you have enabled the option to remember you. If this fails and you still can't log in, please give the source and license of the image so that the uploader can note it on the image page. Tra (Talk) 02:05, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

Been there, done that re: cookies enabled. Source? You mean my actual name? Uh uh. I took the pic, and I can put the HUGE unedited original digital photo on my website if no one believes me. License? Huh? Magialuna 21:19, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Ok, dial up warning, lol. Here's the original pic: http://www.MagiaLuna.net/DSC_0001.JPG Magialuna 21:45, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Users on satellite ISPs often find an improvement when they use the https server (which doesn't give any extra privacy, but makes satellite connections more likely to work); there's a link at the top of this page (WP:VPT), and also on my userpage (User:ais523). --ais523 09:27, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
By license, I mean are you willing to release it under the GFDL or another free license? I can only upload it if you say yes. Tra (Talk) 18:01, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

Yes. Please use it. Thanks! Magialuna 19:36, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

Someone using HughesNet found instructions to bypass the Turbo Acceleration proxy: [4]. This *may* work for some of the other satellite providers. --Splarka (rant) 21:13, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
I've uploaded the high resolution version to Image:Jsambac.jpg. The MediaWiki software will automatically convert it to the correct resolution for thumbnails. Tra (Talk) 17:52, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

Magialuna, I think you were doubly frustrated and posted two questions in one section. Your image is OK as I understand, but it would have been fixed quicker if treated separately. As for your connnection, good luck! --DLL .. T 20:08, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

Note: I originally removed the image because there was a big &copy; on it. It goes completely against our image policy to have images with big &copy;'s on them. Bastiq▼e demandez 15:06, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Coordinate links gone awry

Something has happened with the links we have for coordinates. See most geographic articles, for example Milwaukee has a link to [5] where we used to find various online mapping tools to get an overview of the area, but all those pages have now been replaced with a variation of {{deletedpage}}. What happened? Sjakkalle (Check!) 10:26, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

The cream city look good by now ... maybe a slight space-time continuum distorsion occurred. --DLL .. T 20:04, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Variation in how Monobook and Classic skins align inline images

I've discovered that the Classic skin (which I have used since time immemorial) and the slightly more common Monobook skin have a difference in how they vertically align inline images. I was passing through Wikipedia:WikiProject Stargate and saw that the glyph in the title there was way out of alignment with the rest of the line, as illustrated by this partial screenshot: . I "fixed" it, but was then told by someone using Monobook that for him the fix had thrown the image out of alignment in the opposite direction: . I don't know my way around CSS very well and so haven't found the root cause of this different behavior and haven't been able to fiddle my way around it blindly. Does anyone have advice on how I might resolve this? Bryan 06:37, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

(The page has since been updated with an all-image banner, for reference the two versions where this problem first showed up are [6] and [7] Bryan 08:00, 24 November 2006 (UTC))

known issue. one posible fix is here.Geni 15:58, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Userboxes

How do I put an image into a userbox just like the windows series from The Raven's Apprentice? I only know how to put text in. Please let me know on My Talk Page. Thanks, Ard0 22:48, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

A userbox is a small box that looks like this.
WP:UBX gives general information. For images, you could start with {{userbox|orange|yellow|[[Image:Crystal kthememgr.png|40px]]|A userbox is a small box that looks like this.}} which gives the userbox shown on the right then modify it to show the correct text and image. Tra (Talk) 01:55, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Technical question re: categories

As you all know, on category pages, each subcategory has a plus sign next to it, with which one can view that subcategory's next layer of nested subcategories. I've heard, however, from at least one user who's said that doesn't work properly for him; instead it stalls on "Loading" and doesn't actually produce a list. It works properly for me, however. Is this just an issue of needing to upgrade his javascript, or is there something that the technical team should look into? Thanks for any help. Bearcat 00:08, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

What browser is this user using? Tra (Talk) 01:41, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] access wikipedia data via php?

Hi, all. I'm wondering if it is possible to request particular page sections via a php script. For instance, how might I include the (more or less) plaintext of a page's contents box or summary without all of the of the wikipedia chrome or the rest of the article? Possibly, dare I say it, with functioning links? I imagine such a mechanism exists, due to the neet-o wikipedia lookup finctionality in the Trillian chat client, but my best efforts have turned up very lttle in the way technical details for including wikipedia content on another page. I saw somebody mention using 'action=raw' in the url, but that seems to be only part of the answer, if any answer at all.

anyway, any help or direction as to where this question might be answered effectively are much appreciated

for the record, I looking to develop what amounts to a wikipedia skin/reader with some nifty browsing developments, not just to leech wikipedia's content. 69.114.196.13 18:43, 25 November 2006 (UTC)Mike Weber

-- 01:42, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

You could try getting the page with &action=render on the end, then scrape these results to get what you want. For example, for the summary you would want everything up to the first &lt;h2&gt; tag; for the contents you would want everything inside &lt;table id="toc"&gt;. If you are thinking of doing this for lots of Wikipedia pages, however, you might find the database dumps useful. Tra (Talk) 19:03, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

-- I am in no position to host my own wikipedia mirror, but action=render may indeed be handy (very possibly the tool I need). But is there any central repository for information about querying wikipedia? what types of parameters can be passed and the like? for instance, I see that there is a 'section' parameter that can be passed, but it only seems to work for edits. Were can I learn more about this sort of thing? (alternately an explanation of how to work the 'section' parameter or something like it would do too, in "give me a fish, but no fishing skills" sort of way). Thanks, and stay beautiful, folks.

4:41, 25 November 2006 (UTC) Mike Weber
I'm not aware of any documentation of that type, but you might be interested in query.php which is useful for getting machine-readable lists of, say, pages in a category. Tra (Talk) 22:29, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Salting categories

Is this possible? I've noticed that various people keep recreating Category:2010 films (amongst others). It carries the somewhat confusing tense confusion "Films originally released in the year 2010." Pretty much every article that's been in it has been mostly rumour, or so scant on verifiable information that they've been deleted or repointed. Semantic arguments about including films which "were released in the future" aside, there won't be enough verifiable information on any film slated for release at that time for at least another year or so, so is it possible to prevent such categories from being recreated and repopulated any time soon? Chris cheese whine 19:04, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

See Category:Protected deleted categories where the category page is salted, then a robot makes sure that no articles are added to that category. Tra (Talk) 19:24, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
Salting prevents recreation of the category's wikitext, but I believe it can't prevent repopulation of the category if someone really wanted to... --Interiot 20:26, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, but the robot empties them again if anyone puts anything into them, keeping the orphaned and satled. Martinp23 20:54, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Faulty image alignment in Firefox

Has anyone ever experienced any problems with poor image alignment in Mozilla Firefox?

When I open the Newcastle Central station article in Firefox, two of the images (Newcastle_Central_Station.jpg and Newcastlestationext.jpg) overlap some of the article text. When I open it in IE, there is no overlap. AdorableRuffian 11:39, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

My Firefox has no problem with that page, but the "How to list..." section of Wikipedia:Articles for deletion has text overlapping the boxes, so it probably has not so much to do with images as with text wrapping. --Derlay 00:02, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] broken redirect

Charon-1,205km across is just the text ((hangon))- yes, in parentheses. If you go to the edit page, however, it's a redirect- and if you finish editing it it shows a successful redirect page- but if you (for some reason) typed in charon-1,205 km across, you would *not* be redirected, just see ((hangon))... we could probably delete that redirect altogether, fix it cleanly, but wtf? Cantras 17:23, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

It's working fine for me. I suggest clearing your browser's cache and trying again. It may not think the page has changed and you need to force it to download the newest version. -- JLaTondre 17:29, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
that worked. /sheepish Cantras 17:36, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] noinclude

What do <noinclude> and </noinclude> do? --Shanedidona 19:17, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

These are tags used on templates. If you put text between these tags, they show up when you view the template page, but not when the template is transcluded onto another page. Tra (Talk) 19:23, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

ok. Thanks. :-) --Shanedidona 19:48, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

What does <includeonly> do? Is there a page that talks about these tags? --Shanedidona 19:52, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Templates#Noinclude_and_includeonly. --Ligulem 19:54, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Whitespace of unknown origin

I cannot seem to locate the source of the whitespace atop the Satveer Chaudhary article. It doesn't seem to come from extra line breaks, nor from the templates. Anyone care to investigate this further? Circeus 01:33, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

Removing the infobox makes it clean. Hmm. Can't see what's messy with that, though, if it displays okay elsewhere... Shimgray | talk | 01:38, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
Yes, the problem is in Template:Infobox Politician. Richard Henry Lee is another article that uses the same infobox, has the same space at the beginning, and has no apparent reason for the space. If you blank the office2, term_start2, and term_end2 parameters to the template [8], that gets rid of the space at the top. If you run it through Special:ExpandTemplates, you notice that several blank lines are created in between the &lt;/tr&gt;..&lt;tr&gt; near the office2/term_start2/term_end2 arguments. If the template can be tweaked so these blank lines aren't generated, it will fix the problem. But the template is pretty complicated, it's not clear to me what changes are needed. --Interiot 03:59, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
I have a version in User:Rick Block/Sandbox3 that seems to be better. I think the issue is somehow related to mixing the wikitable syntax with the standard HTML table syntax. Eschew obfuscation. -- Rick Block (talk) 04:57, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

Fixed [9]. --Ligulem 13:22, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Adding a link to the Cheatsheet in editing-mode helpnotes?

I'd like to propose we add a link to Wikipedia:Cheatsheet, in the editing-mode layout, next to the "Cancel | Editing help (opens in new window)" links. eg:

Cancel | Editing help & Cheatsheet (opens in new window)

Friends of mine who only edit very occasionally, have expressed frustration concerning finding reminders for basic wikicode easily (eg piping links); and are either daunted-by or disdainful-of the size/complexity of the Help:Editing page.

Thoughts? --Quiddity 06:25, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

Cross-posted from Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Adding a link to the Cheatsheet in editing-mode helpnotes? who suggested I bring it up here too. Please give feedback there. Thanks :)
Thoughts ? Strong support! Alas, there's so much to know : you still have to learn few by few. Did you try Wikipedia:Starter toolset : it's huge and still not enough. --DLL .. T 20:39, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
That starter toolset page horrifies me ;) I pity the newcomer that gets directed towards it. Utterly overwhelming and unorganized.
But, the Introduction and Tutorial are getting good, and the cheatsheet and Help:Contents menu span the edges (of simplicity vs in-depth). :) -Quiddity 04:48, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
Strong support. I'd actually rather see Cheatsheet replace "Editing help," with a link on editing help to advanced help, but this'll do as well ;) --Wolf530 18:58, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

Seems to have strong support (VP(proposal) archive), where or how do I ask for this to be implemented, or are there any objections or improvements? Please and Thanks! --Quiddity 21:56, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

Modify MediaWiki:Edithelppage and MediaWiki:Edithelp, whenever you feel it has consensus. Titoxd(?!?) 07:50, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
How?: I'm not an admin, and I don't know how to code a suggested change for those 2 pages (I can see how it's linking "Editing help", but can't I derive how one would add an unlinked "&" and a 2nd link into it...)
I'll post a note on their talk pages pointing to here, but additional help would be appreciated. :) --Quiddity 20:24, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
I've added {{editprotected}} to MediaWiki talk:Edithelppage, which is the usual method to attract attention to a requested change in MediaWiki space. --ais523 13:45, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
It looks like we can only replace the "Editing help" link, but not add next to it. I think a greater consensus would be needed to perform that change. -- Renesis (talk) 00:24, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
Ah, software change required, I believe is meant. Bugfix submitting isn't my area - I'll stop championing this idea for now then, though anyone else is welcome to pickup and run with it. (Learning Mediawiki is on my to-do list, but not at the top ;) -Quiddity 02:18, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
I actually meant we'd need greater consensus to replace the current link, instead of just adding to it. I don't know if anyone even wants that, I was just mentioning it as an option. -- Renesis (talk) 06:45, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
Well, I'd be for that, but I've already herded this idea through VPp and VPt twice, with only 6 people giving feedback, so I don't envisage greater consensus occurring (unless another route is open/suggested? I guess perhaps I could promote the proposal simultaneously via the CBB?) Hmm. Would you support that change? ;) -Quiddity 20:14, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
Honestly, I don't think I ever noticed that link until I saw this discussion, so I have neither an attachment to it, nor a strong opinion of how it could be improved. The Cheatsheet link does look more like what you'd want to find when in the middle of editing a page however, so I would probably support. Another thing we could consider is placing it in the list below the "Your changes will be visible immediately text", below. -- Renesis (talk) 16:43, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Altered proposal resubmitted at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Replace "Editing help" with "Cheatsheet" link. Please comment there :) --Quiddity 22:00, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Shoddy SVG versions

I'm writing to complain about shoddy SVG versions of raster graphics being uploaded, then shoved into articles. Sometimes SVG versions are okay; often they're not. I'm not going to cite specific examples because this will only lead to people defending on a case-by-case basis and taking their work personally. This is a general problem.

Don't download PNG images to your local machine, run them through some sort of car washer, and upload an inferior SVG. You aren't actually achieving anything; the engine will render a PNG to most browsers anyway. You're not saving any storage, since the PNG remains -- and deleting it won't solve anything except to upset the uploader. We're not so strapped for cash that deleting 100 Kb will put us in the money.

SVG is a problem format. It has its advantages, yes. But it handles fonts poorly. It can be used well but I don't like some of the work I see. I create some graphics with a vector editor, Macromedia FreeHand, and rasterize an exported EPS in Adobe Photoshop. If you want to convert the EPS to SVG, I'll gladly make that available. But if you try to re-draw vectors from a raster image, you either need to do a great deal of unnecessary work or you mess it up.

PNG is a fine format for images; unlike GIF, it is completely free libre and there are no fears of Unisys coming to bite our balls over it. If you have nothing better to do with your time and the amazing tools on your desktop, go ahead and see if you can squeeze a few bytes losslessly out of existing PNGs. Please do not replace them with SVGs unless you can show real benefit and no harm. Thank you. John&nbsp;Reid&nbsp;° 09:27, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

SVGs are, in principle, much easier to maintain and update than PNGs, and of course scale much better. At some point we'll probably have in-wiki editing of SVGs, and maybe some kind of semantic metadata so that we can (for instance) auto-standardize map colors and so on. If a good-quality SVG should be made of a PNG, it should be, just for future advantage. (Font handling is certainly a problem, I admit.)

Note that you can use PNGs or GIFs in place of autogenerated SVG thumbnails where the behavior is currently faulty, like so:

Enlarge
(Apparently not without the border, though.) —Simetrical (talk&nbsp;•&nbsp;contribs) 02:54, 12 November 2006 (UTC)
SVG is no more of a "problem" than any other vector format. And, given its wide range of capabilities (transparency, filters) and its fully open and documented status, it is definitely better than any other vector format in a lot of cases. Its font handling is neither better nor worse than that of HTML, because they both use CSS. The ability to specify a generic substitute for a missing font (such as "sans serif") via CSS is a great advantage of SVG, and for the Web it is actually a more important advantage than exact font fidelity (which you, as a graphic professional, may value more). I agree that simple automatic tracing of a bitmap into SVG is almost always a degradation, and even manual redrawing of an image may be a degradation unless certain effort is spent and relevant skills are in place, but your attitude towards SVG as a format seems unfounded. Trapolator 22:37, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

Let me stress: I'm not talking about the preferred choice for original work for someone with tools that can create both formats. In some cases, SVG may be better; I can't say -- I don't have those tools. They aren't common.

I'm only upset when I see people coming along, taking an existing PNG, uploading an inferior SVG imitation, then forcing it to replace the better-quality PNG. You cannot do a straightforward conversion of a raster PNG to a true vector SVG. In some cases, the creator of the PNG may have left the community; nothing you can do about that. If you put enough time and trouble into the re-creation, you may come up with an acceptable SVG; that's fine too.

But please do not butcher PNGs into inferior SVGs when the creator is available! You -- yes, you -- can always contact me, if it is my work under consideration. I will be happy to make available vector format workfiles for any PNG that was created entirely in this fashion. You can convert to SVG to your heart's content. This is fine. I only want to express how annoying it is when I spend hours producing a beautiful graphic and somebody else comes along in 15 minutes, does a crappy conversion, then pushes my work aside. I put it here into the common bin and license under GFDL; anyone can edit, yes. But please make it better, not worse. Okay? John&nbsp;Reid&nbsp;° 07:45, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

Oh, I agree completely with that. A higher-quality PNG should be used over a lower-quality SVG. But all things being equal, SVGs are superior. It would undoubtedly be appreciated if you converted the images to SVG yourself, or provided them to someone who could do that (it should be very simple to convert something like a PSD to SVG, I would imagine, although I could be wrong). —Simetrical (talk&nbsp;•&nbsp;contribs) 05:09, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
tools that can create both formats... aren't common? It's not quite true. Inkscape is pretty common, especially here on Wikipedia where thousands of images are created with it. Adobe Illustrator in the latest versions can also export valid SVG. Both of them can rasterize to PNG too, of course. (Freehand is not SVG-capable as far as I know, unfortunately, but it's rather an exception than a rule these days.) As for your request to coordinate with you any vector conversion efforts on your images, I completely sympathize, but I think your user page and/or the pages of your images may be better places to place such requests. Trapolator 22:37, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

All things are rarely equal. I hardly ever do a straightforward conversion from vector to raster; I twiddle and tweak in Photoshop. Sometimes, the Photoshop side of the job is major, although the result may look as if it came right out of FreeHand. SVG stinks for rasters. I'm not sure I agree that vectors have any real practical use to the reader anyway; most browsers can't display SVG (or any other vector format) directly and MediaWiki serves a PNG anyway.

In any case, I don't have the niche tools that output SVG. Like other graphics professionals, I work in the industry-standard EPS format. We may not like that format and we can grump around all day about how it's "not free" but it is widely supported. I'd be happy to upload EPS and let somebody try to convert to SVG. It's not allowed. John&nbsp;Reid&nbsp;° 21:46, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

SVG stinks for rasters how exactly? Are you saying that it is not appropriate for images that are raster by their very nature? True, but the same applies to any other vector format. Still, with its transparency and filters (e.g. blur), SVG can efficiently approximate a much wider range of imagery than, for example, EPS.
most browsers can't display SVG: you have a strange definition of "most". By the last count, only one of the major browsers didn't support SVG.
For heaven's sake. That (IE) is the browser still used by an overwhelming majority of users (and I say this as someone who avoids it whenever possible, but recognizes the obvious need to support it). (There's an Adobe plug-in but precious few people have it.) If you have an image, or any content, worth contributing to a Wikipedia article, supply it in a form that more than 20% of people will see. --Largo Plazo 16:36, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
niche tools that output SVG: I don't want to start a holy war, but neither Adobe Illustrator, nor Corel Draw, nor even Inkscape can really be called "niche tools". All of them do SVG. Inkscape in particular is completely free - try it out and you may like it.
Finally, if you have EPS originals of your images that you would like to convert to SVG, I'm sure you can get help from folks at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Illustration. Trapolator 22:37, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
Update: Wikipedia:WikiProject_Illustration on English WP seems rather dormant, but look what a lively page the French wikipedians have in their Atelier graphique. There are many requests for SVG conversion there, and the vectorized images are shown and discussed side-by-side with the originals. I think we should start such a forum in English wikipedia too. Trapolator 22:54, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

I sympathize with John, the best version of an image should be presented to the reader. The creation of crappy SVG versions of uploaded PNGs rarely benefits anyone. If the SVG is actually superior then it should be used, but this seems to rarely be the case with SVGs created after the fact from uploaded raster images. A lower quality SVG might be linked from the PNG image description, but it should not replace the PNG simply because "vector graphics are better". The overriding consideration should be which version is better from the point of view of the reader. Dragons flight 04:36, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestions. I stand corrected on the range of SVG support. Still, I personally can't do it until you buy me a new toy, Inkscape doesn't run on my box, sorry. In any case, I prefer reasonably high-resolution PNG for distribution, period. We're not running out of bytes. I don't see value in hosting/serving vector graphics. This is another case of carrying a philosophical ideal to an extreme. Anyone can edit a PNG and it's a libre format, too. John&nbsp;Reid&nbsp;° 11:16, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
Well, in principle anyone can program in machine codes... yet high-level programming languages do exist :) Same with SVG. Of course there are many types of graphics that simply do not fit into (modern) vectorial formats. But many others do fit, and vectorizing them has many advantages. For example, if you want to translate a drawing, clicking on a text object and retyping it in another language using Inkscape is so much easier than wiping out a label in a bitmap editor and creating a new one instead (especially if it's not over a white background). To borrow your own example, replacing the too-thin letters by something bolder and nicer in this SVG image takes a couple of minutes; doing the same in the PNG original is infinitely more work due to the checkers.
So, if an image is of the vector nature (such as a technical drawing, a diagram, a map, etc), I think that the advantages of converting it to a vector format tend to outweigh the possible loss of some polish and gloss that the bitmap version had. Of course sometimes, SVG may be so shoddy that it's not the case, but even in these situations it's not a big deal to take the bad SVG file and improve it. In fact, perhaps the main reason for preferring SVG on Wikipedia is because it's more wiki-friendly than bitmap (although setting up the "external editor" for mediawiki is admittedly a pain, but it's not SVG's fault).
As for Inkscape, can you elaborate a bit on what exactly prevents you from running it? It works fine on Windows, OSX, and Linux, and does not require exorbitant speed or memory (unless you're editing very complex graphics). Trapolator 19:55, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
Update: I went ahead and cleaned the SVG of the billion cubes image, see here. I used a bolder font, fixed stroke widths, and improved the shape of the connecting swooshes so they now look even better (IMHO) than in your PNG. I also used clones for the 4 copies of the swooshes - which is another vectorial nicety: edit one of them, all four update automatically. Altogether it took maybe 10 minutes of my time. With PNG, I wouldn't be able to do any of this without a disproportionate amount of tedious labour. Here's SVG advantages for you :)
And there's another important reason to prefer SVG for this particular image: the tiny copies of checkered cubes in the corners of big cubes are barely visible in PNG, even at full size. Yet they are important for understanding the concept. So if I'm going to use this image to explain the idea of a billion to my son, I will very much prefer to load the SVG into Inkscape where I can freely zoom in and out. Trapolator 20:37, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Great work. Put it into the appropriate article and that job is done. Then we can move on to the other shoddy SVG conversions. John&nbsp;Reid&nbsp;° 21:01, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Accidentally and prematurely saving a page

Twice recently I've accidentally pressed "Enter" while in the edit summary box and saved the page before I meant to. I don't think this ever happened to me before the recent (and very welcome!) changes to the summary box. Am I just becoming more butterfingered, or has some change been made along the lines of "save page" becoming a default option that it wasn't before? --Blisco 10:40, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

Butterfingers. I remember having to be cautious "down there" ever since, lest to prematurely ...can I reword that? Femto 11:01, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
There was a thread here some time ago on this issue. The default of web forms is that pressing enter in any field that is not a textarea causes the default button (or the selected button, if any) to be pressed. I also made such mistakes here and there; make a null edit to post your full edit summary. Tizio 12:45, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
Actually, pressing enter is not the same thing as pressing the default button. Many websites (including Wikipedia) handle them both the same, but it is possible for a different action to take place depending on whether you press enter or click the button. For example, Google gives you a 'tip' message if you click the search button, but not if you press enter after searching from the homepage (compare this to this). Tra (Talk) 18:07, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

Could not the default action/button then be made the "Preview" button? btw kudos to whoever was responsible for implementing Edit summary previews :) Zunaid©Please rate me at Editor Review! 14:47, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

I personally prefer having Save as the default button, because it allows me to just press enter once I've filled in the edit summary and minor edit fields without having to tab all the way to 'Save page'. It might be useful to allow this setting to be changed in the preferences, however. Tra (Talk) 14:38, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
I use ctrl/alt/s for that. I click 'save' otherwise, and the warning preference prevents me from posting prematurely. Leaving the edit summary till last is then the most efficient way of avoiding accidental saving. qp10qp 03:49, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Uppercasing of non-Latin letters

I understand, in general, why the first letter of an article title is automatically converted to uppercase:

  1. The WP convention is that the dog article should have its title rendered "Dog".
  2. We want links to dog to go to the right article
  3. We certainly don't want "dog" and "Dog" used distinctively; that is, we don't want two different articles.

But none of these considerations apply when the first letter is not a Latin character. It is a continual annoyance in the math and science areas of WP that we cannot have articles starting with a lowercase Greek letter; in these cases, the letter in question is never uppercased; it would be quite wrong. Moreover, the cases may even be used distinctively -- for a long time I've been about to write an article Real Soon Now on W. Hugh Woodin's Ω-logic (for a description see Woodin, W. Hugh (2001). "The Continuum Hypothesis, Part II". Notices of the AMS 48 (7): 681–690. But there's an entirely different notion called ω-logic (see for example Weaver, George (Summer 1992). "Unifying Some Modifications of the Henkin Construction". Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic (3): 450–460.)

So in my opinion, in en.wiki at least, the rule should be modified so that articles beginning with Latin letters are uppercased but those beginning with non-Latin letters are not. There might be an exception for near-Latin letters like the Polish l-with-a-slash-through-it, or umlauted vowels (actually I'd be happy if just Greek letters were excepted from uppercasing). Obviously things would have to be different on Greek WP, but surely the software is agile enough to allow that, or easily could be. --Trovatore 07:25, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

In the medium-term future, it will be possible to mark articles to display with a lowercase title. In the longer-term future, we should eventually migrate to a cleaner case-insensitive title system. (This is not a trivial problem given back-compatibility with millions of pages, so don't hold your breath on that one.) --brion 20:46, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
It does not sound like either of those solutions will allow us to have one article called Ω-logic and a different one called ω-logic, which we really ought to be able to have. Can't we have case-sensitivity when the first letter is non-Latin? --Trovatore 05:28, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
No. Use a disambiguation marker to make the difference clear; remember that failing to do so will also complicate searches, linking, etc. --brion 01:12, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
As a software engineer myself, I really cannot believe this is an insurmountable technical problem (though I can believe you don't really want to mess with it :-) and I see no advantage, in en.wiki, to automatic uppercasing of Greek letters. Can anyone tell me why we should want to, taking English wikipedia as a standalone? If not, can anyone tell me what problems, specifically, would be caused in the interaction between English and Greek WP, by the difference in rules? --Trovatore 16:41, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
Mainly, I figure, you would have to write your own case-checking functions. Regex functions with case-insensitivity switch? Nope, need to rewrite them if you want to handle Unicode and at the same time only respect some uppercasing, presumably in C(++) as an extension. Likewise for all string library functions that care about case. Doable? Certainly. Something that we probably want to do? Not really, not for the sake of a couple of articles. Your best bet is finding a slightly different name for one and having disambig links. Which you'd want anyway, since the names are so similar. —Simetrical (talk&nbsp;•&nbsp;contribs) 02:33, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
That slightly different name is easily enough done, too. Just keep it at Omega-consistent theory, for example, instead of moving it for the sole purpose of justifying the "lowercase" template that had been removed as being improper. Gene Nygaard 19:19, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
Gene's version of the facts is quite incorrect. The move was not intended to justify the "lowercase" template (which was proper even where it was). The purpose of the move was to use the Greek letter rather than the Latin name for the letter.
Gene's suggestion to "keep it at Omega-consistent theory" is a non-sequitur as a response to the problem of distinguishing between Ω-logic and ω-logic, as neither of these would point to Omega-consistent theory (ω-logic is somewhat related to ω-consistency, but not closely enough to go in the same article -- in particular "consistent in ω-logic" is quite a bit stronger than "ω-consistent"). --Trovatore 20:20, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
It would probably not be difficult to change, but it requires a developer to make the change, and they are somewhat busy. However, if you know how to program in the language MediaWiki is written in you could submit your code and a request to impliment it at bugzilla. The source code of the wiki software is accessible here. Prodego talk 16:53, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Left-aligned images bunch up

This may be a perennial question, but I didn't see the answer anywhere. On wider screens, sometimes left-aligned and sometimes right-aligned images will bunch up and pull away from the side of the page, creating a gap with no text. I ran into a particularly bad example tonight, on a featured article, no less. Four images stacked up, consuming over half of my 1920px wide browser. I've seen case-by-case fixes that sometimes work, but they never seem conclusive (eg. even if I fix an article now, if I upgrade to a 30" Dell/Apple display, will it break again?). Is there a good way to definitively fix this issue for all possible resolutions? --Interiot 09:13, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

&lt;br style='clear:both'&gt; might be the solution. Put it after an text and it will create a blank line that extends to both sides of the page, avoiding that class of gaps.

This will be the result:

Lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum too lazy to see how lorem ipsum continues.

Lorem ipsum.

More lorem ipsum.

Anyways, that article is now formatted using mixed alignement. But this can also be useful

—Nethac DIU, always would speak here—
11:44, 25 November 2006 (UTC)


Or you could put the images in a table, but that might not look so good on the article; it has a lot of images on it. JDtalk 11:49, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

You indicate that the first picture bad example surely you mean a good example as it precisely demonstrates your point. This is a good example of a very commmon gramatical mistake :) Dainamo 14:01, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
Personally, I'd use the {{clear}} template. I've adjusted the example above to use it so you can see what I mean. 'Course, the template is just a shortcut to the br code you listed. It's just easier to type for those that don't know HTML. --Brad Beattie (talk) 15:52, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
And for the really lazy, there's {{-}} (and technically the two are different tags; {{clear}} is an empty div tag, while {{-}} is a br tag). EVula // talk // &#9775; // 16:20, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

You might want to read WP:BUNCH. -- Rick Block (talk) 16:38, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

Actually, this is just miscoding in the MediaWiki CSS: Bug 6016 on Bugzilla. Circeus 01:28, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
Which I've just fixed in trunk, so this shouldn't be a problem anymore. —Simetrical (talk&nbsp;•&nbsp;contribs) 02:45, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia will not load in Firefox or IE, only on AOL

Hello everyone, I was hoping you could help me out with this little problem I've been having. I am unable to access Wikipedia when I use Firefox or IE on my computer. The strange thing is, it works fine in the AOL browser. I use Firefox practically all the time so this is quite frustrating as I visit Wikipedia quite often. I have tried uninstalling all the add-ons in Firefox, but seeing as the same problem occurs in IE, I'm pretty sure that isn't the cause. I don't have the knowledge to even guess what could be wrong. All I know is that I made no major changes to either browser that I think could cause this. Thanks to anyone that can help me out!

Cereal Killer 07:45, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

What does "unable to access" mean? Do you see anything at all? Did it ever work previously on that computer? How about uninstalling Firefox and reinstalling? — EncMstr 08:00, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

Nothing loads at all. It stays blank in Firefox and continues to show the little "Loading..." message. In IE, after about a minute of not doing anything, it takes me to a "Were you looking for..." page which just lists the link to Wikipedia.

Cereal Killer 08:42, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

I think I know the problem. You probably have your internet options set incorrectly. If it is Windows, try Windows Update, as it may patch IE. You may also need to patch Firefox, but I don't know how, as I don't even know what the company is called. As for me, that sounds pretty weird, as I am using Internet Explorer to edit this thread. The version # is 6.0.2900.2180. In addition, because you can only access it via AOL, your standard IP address may be having problems with WikiPedia, as AOL uses several different IPs. Of course, I cannot be certain, as I have never experienced this problem. Oh, and "unable to access" probably means just that, the browser cannot find the page on the Internet.

Signing off, as a cricket and computer expert,
--Cricket Boy 01:55, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Possible virus?

This was just posted on my talk page by Acalamari (talk • contribs):

Dear Mr. Chris Griswold (ChrisGriswold),
You said that I could contact you if I had something to ask or talk about. Well, I was recently on the “Christina Aguilera” Wikipedia page looking her up, and then I went onto the pages about her singles’ and then her albums.
One of the pictures, either on her main page, on her singles, or her albums’ pages, is infected with a virus. I believe it’s the “Dirrty” or “Stripped,” although it could be one of the others. My virus checker certainly picked up a virus from one of those pages.
This is extremely important. I thought that it would be a wise idea to immediately alert you about this. Viruses are no more welcome on Wikipedia than vandals.
I know you’re on a Wikibreak, but you’ve been talking on your Talk Page. You’re the first administrator I could think of, and the only one who has left a comment on my Talk Page. This is an urgent issue. I am not fooling around: my virus checker did pick up something from the Christina Aguilera sites (the main one, singles, or albums.)
I hope that this is sorted out quickly, before other people get the virus. Acalamari 19:05, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

I don't know a thing about this sort of business, and I need to head out right now, so I am bringing this to you. Can someone follow up on this? Thanks. --Chris Griswold (☎☓) 19:08, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

I don't think there's anything to worry about, as webpages shouldn't do any harm to you, as long as your computer has all the right updates etc. Tra (Talk) 19:21, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
Yes, but what about users who do not have the updates. Wikipedia should not be spreading viruses. --Chris Griswold (☎☓) 12:18, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

Which image is it that is causing the problem? Without knowing this, the discussion is a little pointless. --TheParanoidOne 13:36, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

I believe it was either the "Dirrty" picture or the "Stripped" picture. User: Tra said that they edited the pictures. However, if the virus reappears on my virus checker, I will find out which file it was. Acalamari 16:24, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
See also this section of my talk page for discussion regarding this. Tra (Talk) 16:55, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
Have you considered the possibility of the virus coming from something else, like a different website or a different computer program? JDtalk 16:26, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
I didn't need to. My virus checker clearly pointed out that the virus came from one of the "Christina Aguilera" pages on Wikipedia. I hadn't been to any other website when the virus appeared, and since I've never been to Christina Aguilera's website before, it wasn't difficult to work out that the virus came from a picture on Wikipedia. If it appears again, I will report it again; and hopefully, I'll have some more evidence. The thing I want to know is this: how did the virus get onto Wikipedia in the first place? Acalamari 17:17, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
What anti-virus software are you using? JDtalk 19:31, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
I don’t see the relevance, but my virus checker is AVG; Program Version: 7.5.431 (at the time of this writing, that is the most advanced version, as of November 27th, 2006.) Might I ask why there is disbelief in my warning? Why are we discussing my virus checker when we should be trying to isolate the virus? I will attempt to isolate the virus myself (assuming it’s still on Wikipedia) and find out exactly where it is very soon. Acalamari 22:09, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
Sorry, I forgot to sign my previous comment. Anyhow, I've corrected that. I returned to the Christina Aguilera pages (main page, albums, singles) to look for the virus. The pictures are all clean. User: Tra obviously fixed the problem when doing the "printscreen" trick with the pictures. For now, this debate should be over, unless someone has something else to say about it. Acalamari 22:09, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
It's not a matter of disbelief. It's a matter or corroboration of facts. --TheParanoidOne 22:51, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
You should also be aware that virus checkers constantly produce false hits - claiming a virus is there when there isn't one. This doesn't mean that things aren't to be taken seriously, but it does mean that careful examination is necessary with a number of different tools. Notinasnaid 09:45, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
There was a virus, and my virus checker picked it up. I doubt that this occasion would be one where my virus checker would lie, and a good virus checker shouldn't register "false hits." As I said this isn't a subject to be treated lightly, and, for now, the pictures, and other data in the Christina Aguilera pages, are all clean. Acalamari 15:59, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
What kind of an image, a JPEG? A JPEG, like a GIF, a BMP, or a PNG, isn't executed and the only thing a browser does with it is display it. It can't cause any kind of harm. Meanwhile, the way virus checkers find viruses is, in many cases at least, by finding patterns of bytes that match patterns of bytes found in known viruses. Once in a while, a file that isn't a virus is going to happen to have a set of bytes that match some such pattern. In other words, a false positive is possible. --Largo Plazo 15:49, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
Sadly this is not necessarily true, because your browser isn't necessarily bug-free and because downloaded data isn't protected against inadvertent execution. See for example [10]. —Blotwell 18:31, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
The file was likely to be a JPEG, but I don’t see haw that is relevant. The virus is gone. I been to the Christina Aguilera sites, and they are fine. Nothing is wrong with those sites now. I don’t see what the big deal is over the virus at the moment. The virus was removed, and I said that if it came back, I would report it again with more evidence. I don’t know why you’re all disbelieving both my virus checker and I. I’ve been to many sites and not once has it picked up a virus. Someone uploaded a virus-infected picture to Wikipedia. You should be finding how the virus got onto Wikipedia instead of implying that I lied. I didn’t register with Wikipedia to tell lies. Acalamari 19:53, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
As for how the virus entered Wikipedia, the two images were uploaded by DCEdwards1966 (talk • contribs) and Strokeofluck (talk • contribs). Tra (Talk) 20:13, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Your virus scanner picked up an infected file. According to the book "Troubleshooting, Maintaining & Repairing PCs (Second Edition)" (ISBN 0-07-913732-6), Section area "Virus Symptoms and Countermeasures" part "Virus Myths" (Page #1329), and I quote (from the bottom):

  • A virus cannot hide inside a data file Data files (such as images) cannot spread a virus on your computer. Only executable program files (and files containing executable macros) can spread viruses. A computer virus could infect a data file, but it would be a useless effort---because a data file is not executed, only loaded, the virus would not be able to run or replicate itself.


An image is a data file. Images cannot have macros. An image is only loaded, not run. Those three statements sum up the paragraph of text above. There is nothing to worry about. But...

  • If it had the infection on it upon uploading, the computer should be scanned.
  • If it didn't have the infection on it upon uploading, all the WikiPedia servers should be scanned, in addition to a virus notice being given out instructing everyone to scan their computers for possible viruses (very unlikely, as there are no runnable applications on WikiPedia, but it is javascript-powered - javascript is like one big macro)



If you need any other information, contact me. Don't forget to help me (details on user and user talk pages).
Computer and Cricket master,
--Cricket Boy 03:35, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

Your book is, quite simply, wrong. It omitted the critical proviso "if there are no major flaws in software on the target's computer". If you don't know what a buffer overflow is and how it can be exploited to spread a virus via a data file, I suggest you drop the appellation of "computer master". —Simetrical (talk&nbsp;•&nbsp;contribs) 07:30, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
I have promised that if a/the virus comes to Wikipedia, I will report it, and have more evidence to prove it. Acalamari 17:16, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Random page from a given category

Is it possible to grab a random page starting from a given category, e.g. random singles, actors, politicians, etc.? Chris cheese whine 01:16, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

No. Tra (Talk) 01:49, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
How about listing the category, covering your eyes and clicking? — EncMstr 07:06, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
It would be nice to have a Random category option. User:Zoe|(talk) 19:47, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
A random category (as opposed to a random page in a category) is Special:Random/Category. --ais523 17:25, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
Mediazilla:2170 —Simetrical (talk&nbsp;•&nbsp;contribs) 03:23, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Developing Wikipedia Bot on Mac OS X

Is there any libraries for bot developing on Macs? I know a Python library out there, but if any Mac-friendly library such as Automator or AppleScript extensions, Safari helpers... available? Yao Ziyuan 09:51, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

If you're working on a fully autonomous bot, use Python - code is available, and it works perfectly under OS X. Zetawoof(&zeta;) 20:23, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Unexpected Edit Due to Lost Connection

First, let me say that I find about 15% of the above comprehensible. I know this is a technical discussion page, but please "dumb down" any replies. My background is as an old 8-bit BBS sysop, the web was new when I was in school, I have used Windows and Mac computers at work (desktop publishing, GIS, cartography, &c.), but had little to do with maintenance, and I got my first "real" computer (Windows 98, which I am still using on a salvaged computer) a little over two years ago. I am relatively new to Wikipedia.

Here's the problem (and I'm not sure if this is the right place): I had a large talk page open for editing when I lost the connection to my (dial-up) server and was logged off. (It may have been the other way around.) I decided to call it a night, and when I checked the talk page later, a chunk of the section I was editing was deleted by an IP address associated with my server. I was not in the process of deleting the missing material, and nothing that I had added was saved.

I can understand a dropped connection saving the work in progress as it was, but why would anything have been deleted?

A problem that may be associated with this one is that sometimes the same large talk page will not load completely in my browser (Firefox), although my status bar reports "Done". Several attempts (clearing the cache in between) resolves the problem, but I have to pay international rates (the price of living in paradise) to access the internet.

What I do to get around the problem is that I usually compose any edits offline and paste them in. However, I am just learning how to use the interface, so I spend a lot of time on formatting. I am also going to archive the page in question now that I know how.

Comments please.

.s

X ile 11:52, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

First of all, I also have a dial-up connection, and I feel your pain. About your question, it is possible because of the way Wikipedia saves edits. When you edit a page, it saves the whole contents of the page as a new revision. It is because of that that it is possible to blank a page. When you lost your connection, it saved a little of the content of the page, but not all of it. Therefore, it appears that it deleted some content. One way around this might be to use section editing. Instead of clicking the "edit this page" tab, you can find the place you want to edit on the page, then go up and find the closest headline. To the right, you can click the "edit" link, and it will only edit the content of the page within that section. That should help to prevent this happening in the future, and even save time when loading the edit page and saving the page. Hope this answers you question. &nbsp;Shardsofmetal&nbsp; 03:14, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
Got it. Now that I think about it, there's no way not to be overly technical dealing with a local telephone exchange-radiotelephone-sattelite phone-dial-up server-&c. connection. There's too many confounders. It's a wonder this doesn't happen more often. I was worried about frivolous complaints of "vandalism", but it looks like this is a known issue.
Section editing is a good tip, and I have used it (sometimes I forget). In my case, even the section I was editing had gotten rather long. Thanks for your help.
Unfortunately, I had gone to another editor's Talk page to ask for a comment on part of the section that was deleted. I was a bit disappointed that he or she did not revert the (obviously--and I also let him or her know that there was a problem I did not know how to fix) missing section before making comments.
I did a cut-and-paste revert. What's the etiquette on this? There is a discontinuity that readers should be aware of, but I don't know the appropriate way to point it out on a Talk page. If it was the article, the edit summary would seem to be sufficient. Is that enough where the deletion has disrupted the discussion on a Talk page? Should I insert [bracketed] editorial notes within someone else's comments? Should I do more? Less? Nothing other than the edit summary?
I don't want to be accused of some sort of mischief, but I could see myself making similar accusations if I (as a new user) was on the other end.

.s

X ile 23:42, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] External editors, markup language, file type

I'm attempting to use an external editor (any of the several that I have) for editing. I can get the data from the edit box window and into the editor, but it is input as a text file rather than *.wiki (The instructions for vim, for example, are to program vim to autodetect a file of type *.wiki so that the markup language will be used) Is there a special way to pass this this data on as *.wiki? SFinside 04:53, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Can't see my userpage

I am having trouble viewing my userpage. All I can see is in very small font up the top of the page:

<script type="text/javascript" src="/w/index.php?title=-&action=raw&smaxage=0&gen=js

I cannot see anything apart from that including the edit this page etc. buttons. It was perfectly visible yesterday. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thank you, Jam01 06:51, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

I can now see the page. Sorry for the inconvenience. Does anybody have any idea why it happened though? Thank you, Jam01 06:53, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

Could have been an intermittent server problem: Wikipedia is a complex array of interoperating servers to dish up pages. The ball could have been fumbled in dozens of ways, which doesn't happen too often, but often enough that we all occasionally see weird stuff like that. You might try clearing your browser cache and clearing the server cache next time you see it. — EncMstr 06:59, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
Ok, thank you for the advice! I will try that should it happen again. Thanks! Jam01 08:45, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Featured articles not visible in classic skin

Hi, for people who are using classic skin, there is no hint that an article is a featured one, because the little star in the right upper edge is not visible. Is ist possible to fix that? --Nina 10:14, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

No, because of the way interwikis are done in classic. In monobook, the page has a sufficiently ordered structure that some horrible CSS hacks can be used to put a star in the corner; in classic, the number of interwikis varies by page (as in monobook), but they're displayed above the page, so the star would be in the wrong position on some pages. (Correct me if I'm wrong; this answer is given from memory.) --ais523 10:19, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
Mhh, ok, so it's the interwikis. But I don't mind if it is a little star or a category that indicates the featured article. For example, in de: the FA-template includes a Category:Featured article. Maybe it is possible that this category would be visible only in classic? --Nina 12:02, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
You might want to suggest something of the sort on Template talk:Featured article;. --ais523 12:07, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
Actually, you can add some css to your standard.css file (subpage of your user page) to make the star will show up in classic. See, for example, User:Hydnjo/standard.css. -- Rick Block (talk) 14:30, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

Thank you, I will try that. But I thought that it is of general interest to indicate featured articles, so I hoped that someone could fix that for every classic skin-user. --Nina 13:16, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

Compare FA with no interwikis, FA with 2 interwikis, FA with 31 interwikis, FA with 59 interwikis (if I've counted correctly) using the classic skin (included in the URL) and with the CSS fix linked above; the position of the star relative to the page depends on the interwiki count. This could cause problems (especially on the last link) if the font size used by the browser for the interwiki links happens to cause the star to overlap the name of a language at the end of the line. It might be able to get the CSS to fix the interwikis too so this doesn't happen, but I'm not sure. --ais523 13:41, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
Can't we get away with using it after MediaWiki:Tagline? Titoxd(?!?) 16:30, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I see the problem. A category instead of the star would solve that. There is a lot of discussion on Template talk:Featured article, and I didn't read all this to find out if they have decided about a category already. --Nina 13:48, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] links to wrong items with same name

I found three links to elementary schools on one page which are directed to other elementary schools in various parts of the country (rather than within the county.) How can I kill that link, but keep the text in red; as though it's a dead link?

Sorry for the laymanspeak.

If you want to see specifically what I mean, go to "Loudoun County Public Schools" and under elementary schools, click "Horizon Elementary". Note how you're now in BC, Canada.

You could change the link in the Loudoun County Public Schools article to [[Horizon Elementary School (Loudoun County, Virginia)|Horizon Elementary School]]. I would, however, just remove the link until such a time as someone writes a meaningful article about the school. (And it should never be "Horizon Elementary", but "Horizon Elementary School". User:Zoe|(talk) 19:53, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] include bot should not make changes inside nowiki tags

I had on my user talk page

<nowiki>{{welcome}}</nowiki>

The WinBot Bot turned the "welcome" into "subst:welcome". That seems wrong. But I guess a work-around is for me to do more like what I have done in this posting. I.e. break up the template code into separate nowiki sections. Is that going to be the recommended course-of-action for the foreseeable future, or will the Bot be taught to understand nowiki context? I could believe recognizing that context would be very difficult. And perhaps occasionally inappropriate.--SportWagon 15:25, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

The welcome template itself expands to include
<code><nowiki>{{helpme}}</nowiki></code>
I'll test with code tags, but I can't believe that makes the difference. Obviously the helpme template is not designed to be used with subst, but if later it was changed to be, would it be correct to retroactively change a whole bunch of supposedly expanded welcomes?--SportWagon 15:38, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
Leave a message on the bot owners talk page. The bot shouldn't subst inside &lt;nowiki> or &lt;pre> land. That's an error. --Ligulem 15:42, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
On my talk page, as an experiment I also had a welcome template without subst. The claim is that when WinBot came to fix that, it erroneously fixed the nowiki version too. I.e. the problem would not have occurred if only the nowiki version had been created. I'm not certain whether the problem is fixed or not, but this information qualifies the problem even further.--SportWagon 13:52, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

A further experiment suggests the problem, per se, has not been fixed. However, the incorrect substitution will not happen unless the process which activates the Bot first finds a genuine "welcome" template without "subst" on the same user talk page. I.e. my experimental "bad" use of the welcome template, caused the "subst" to be added in my nowiki non-use. My suggested obfuscation for nowiki did "protect" another example, too, as one would expect. So this will, in general, be a minor problem for people who have incorrectly used templates, and the revision log does show what is done, so this is mostly just FYI now.--SportWagon 17:25, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] New diff feature? (undo)

When you're at a diff of an old edit you've made, there's a new option: "undo." What does this do? I tried it out in the sandbox but it said it couldn't undo the edit due to intermediate edit conflicts or something.

Also, the footer at the bottom of the page, in Safari 2.0.4, is far wider than it used to be. On all pages the horizontal arrow stretches farther than the text, which is out of the ordinary. --Fbv65edel / ☑t / ☛c || 22:21, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

I imagine it's a self-rollback? Though it might not be working correctly at the moment? It only seems to appear for older edits, but of course in that case, it gives the "The edit could not be undone because of conflicting intermediate edits" message. One would think it's supposed to give the undo on new edits only. --Interiot 22:37, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
I suppose that's it, but I wonder how it could possibly have been run live in its broken state without someone stopping it. I am looking through svn for it, but I don't see it yet... Prodego talk 22:49, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
See the Singpost story. Kusma (討論) 22:59, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

Ah! I still don't understand how it works, but now I am wondering why that signpost hasn't been delivered to me yet! Prodego talk 23:06, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, I understand the function now, but it still doesn't work for me. --Fbv65edel / ☑t / ☛c || 23:30, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

It only works when the software can unambiguously figure out how to do the older revert, without accidentally messing up the newer changes. I finally got it to work when User A made a change to one section, User B made a change to a different section, and then User A was able to undo their change. (but the sections have to be pre-existing...) Now everyone is going to call for MediaWiki to have better AI powers to properly discern how to fix conflicts. --Interiot 23:39, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
Since I don't have two account like you, I made an edit to User talk:InteriotAWB. Can you edit another section and then I'll try to undo my edit? Thanks! --Fbv65edel / ☑t / ☛c || 23:44, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

I wrote this feature. What account you use has no bearing on whether or not the undo will succeed. undos will work if the software can figure out how to unambiguously revert a single not-on-top edit. This means that the edit to be undone needs to be the LAST unreverted edit to make changes to that particular paragraph. I'm considering making the (undo) button only appear if one is possible. &mdash; Werdna talk criticism 07:07, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

I've tried to add a bit of documentation about this to m:Help:Reverting, and would appreciate it being improved by someone more aware of what this does (I didn't know it only worked on paragraphs, for instance). --ais523 13:58, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
As far as I understand, "undo" only undoes a single edit. If so, it should not appear on diffs covering more than one edit, as the user may get the impression that they are undoing all these changes. Tizio 16:25, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Nested templates

From my understanding of templates, their use on any page increases the time taken for that page to be assembled from the database. Navigational templates are continuously being refined, and often, people decide to shunt off repeatedly used parts of a template into a separate template. This wrapping can take on extremes where (I have seen) three templates are folded inside one another. Is this going to cause a performance problem for Wikipedia in the long term, and should it therefore be discouraged? Should a guideline be written to address this question? - Samsara&nbsp;(talk&nbsp;•&nbsp;contribs) 23:12, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

If nesting templates five levels deep helps editing and management of any article to be more straightfoward and easier to accomplish the goals of editors, let the system suffer! I'm mostly serious: Any structure which promotes better articles is to be commended and copied—not discouraged. One good example is periodic table. To the uninitiated, the wikilogic is bewildering. But once the inner templates are understood, it's awesome! It would be better to reengineer the system to more efficiently pre-transclude (for example) articles to make it perform better than worry about what is efficient and isn't. — EncMstr 23:59, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
(edit conflict * 2)
Pre-transclusion will only mean that changes are delayed. Not a sensible option. - Samsara&nbsp;(talk&nbsp;•&nbsp;contribs) 00:17, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
Maybe, but I was envisioning a template edit would trigger the pretransclusion. If I'm understanding the job queue's purpose, that's very close to what happens now. — EncMstr 00:47, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
Okay, that sounds sensible. - Samsara&nbsp;(talk&nbsp;•&nbsp;contribs) 02:34, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
Please, not this again. This has been debated to death already, almost entirely by one persistent, disruptive user, who was banned twice for it.
Our lead developer has said that it doesn't cause any noticeable problems, and even if it did, we shouldn't concern ourselves with technical issues like this. Focus on content and ease of use. If the servers start to clog up, the developers will handle the problem on their end by making the code cleaner or limiting things in a technical way. By all means, use nested templates if it makes the encyclopedia better. — Omegatron 00:11, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
Indeed, one of the fundamental policies of Wikipedia is Don't worry about performance. Laïka 10:54, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Deletion review archive boxes

Anyone with more CSS and wikicode knowledge than me can help me out at Template:Drt? I'm trying to do two things: 1. I'd like to hard code the time stamp into the template, but the time displayed should be the time when the discussion is archived so, when template is substed (or translcuded) into the log. And 2. I'm thinking about creating a separate CSS class for debate boxes. ~ trialsanderrors 00:12, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

Quite a few templates record the time of substing... eg. Template:Prod is one. I believe it involves some magic like: {{<includeonly>subst:</includeonly>CURRENTYEAR}} --Interiot 00:59, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
Thanks. I think I figured it out. ~ trialsanderrors 02:30, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
As a side note, a template cannot record the time it was placed if it was just transcluded, it has to be subst'd in. A common workaround for this is to save the time as a parameter. Either by using a signature to autogenerate it: {{foo|~~~~~}} or an intermediary subst'd template: {{subst:bar}} with contents {{foo|{{<includeonly>subst:</includeonly>CURRENTYEAR}} etc etc}} for example. Using the cheesy subst-detection method with parserfunctions (it will be nice to have native subst detection) it is even possible to show a timestamp only if the template is subst'd in, and show nothing (or 'please subst!') if it isn't. --Splarka (rant) 08:21, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] A new project

I have an idea for a new project for the Wikimedia Foundation. It is a wiki dedicated to equations: mathematical, physical and chemical. This project can be very useful. It can be a free opponent to MathWorld and the mathematics section in Yahoo! Answers. We can also depend on the database of exampleproblems.com. What can I do to make the Wikimedia Foundation start the project? Thank you.

--Meno25 07:47, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

See m:Proposals_for_new_projects and incubator:Main_Page. You may also want to look at Wikia:Math. --Splarka (rant) 08:25, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Sortable tables

To replace the countless Pokémon lists I have created a table (test version here) of Pokémon which is sortable by their various "Pokédex numbers" (a serial number assigned by Nintendo). However, not all Pokémon have certain types of Pokédex Numbers; only around 250 out of 400 have a Johto number, for instance. What I'd like to be able to do is that when sorting by Johto number, all Pokémon with Johto numbers appear at the top of the list, and all those without appear after these. However, no matter what I try using to represent blank numbers (hyphens, nulls, "N/A"s), the blank fields appear first. I've come up with a rather inelegant solution (assigning all Johto Pokémon a value of 999, in the same colour as the table), but is there any more normal, less-hackish way of doing this? Laïka 10:34, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

A quick glance at the js seems to indicate it uses a rough regex to determine the column type, and if it chooses ts_sort_numeric then it always defaults to zero for all non-numbers: if (isNaN(aa)) aa = 0; ... so you could try making it not numbers, maybe. --Splarka (rant) 08:35, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
I've tried to sort the test version out; placing # at the start of each number makes each column detect as text, and because # comes ASCIIbetically before -, using a hyphen works when there isn't a number. --ais523 09:10, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
(Now how did this end up in the totall wrong section, thanks for moving it Ais523). --Splarka (rant) 11:07, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] (undo)

I've just noticed an "(undo) button while paging through diffs. What does it do, exactly? Adam Cuerden talk 16:48, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

Described above. Titoxd(?!?) 16:52, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Why "Go" *and* "Search"?

Why does the "search" widget, shown on virtually every Wikipedia page, have both "Go" and "Search"? Is there a difference between the two?

(and, yes, I already scoured the FAQs and Helps, etc, but couldn't find a relevant answer)

With only basic evidence to go off of, I think that Go sends one directly to a mainspace article if it exists at the title typed, while Search always sends one to a "search results" page. That's my guess, anyway. Nihiltres 21:28, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
That's correct. Pressing 'return' or 'enter' etc. means "Go" and will take you straight to any page (not just main namespace) if it exists. Search will show you all results of a keyword (even if it has its own article) in every field that you check in the search options. --Fbv65edel / ☑t / ☛c || 21:38, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] not sure if bug or not

Kurdish people was protected; it then disappeared from my watch list. Is it supposed to disappear from the list?

see edit summary "(Protected Kurdish people: Some sort of IP madness [edit=autoconfirmed:move=autoconfirmed])" --Ling.Nut 01:43, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

Known bug, introduced when move/protect log entries were added to the history of articles. See MediaZilla:4898. --Splarka (rant) 08:23, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Can't upload picture. Help?

I tried starting an article about Cape Gopher Snakes. I successfully uploaded my own picture of my snake, but when I tried to embed it to the article it wouldn't work. The preview showed a red link that automatically directed me to the upload section. When I attempted to re-upload it, I was directed to a page which told me that I was trying upload a picture that had been previously uploaded but deleted... the reason cited: no source... ok, so i tried to upload it another time from photobucket.com. Now, everytime I attempt click 'upload' with the source leading from photobucket, nothing happens. If I click 'browse' anytime after that, the page freezes and has to be shut down. This is really bothering me, i spent a long time typing the article about the snake and luckily i saved it before everything shut down... all i need now is the picture. help me out please. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Mileshillie (talk • contribs).

cape gopher thumbnail example
Enlarge
cape gopher thumbnail example

If you mean Cape gopher and this image, everything seems okay. Or do you mean another image? — EncMstr 03:25, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

Actually, I figured it out shortly after I posted the help comment.... only took a few hours... Now I have trouble with the redirect page. I created a page titled Baja Gopher in order to redirect to the Cape Gopher page, but the link is red. ?? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Mileshillie (talk • contribs).

Fixed. The redirect linked to Cape Gopher instead of Cape gopher. — EncMstr 16:45, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks a lot. It was case sensitive. I have a problem noticing the obvious when the possible technical solutions are endless. Being new to this whole thing doesn't help either. --the oreo 00:17, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] if function in subst'ing templates

When I save {{subst:Narniainterest|Aslan}} to a page, and go back to edit it again, the markup looks like:

Hi{{#if:{{{me|}}}|,|, {{PAGENAME}},}} {{#if:Aslan|and thanks for your contributions to the article [[Aslan]]!|I noticed that you have some interest or expertise in [[C. S. Lewis]]' ''[[The Chronicles of Narnia]]''.}} I thought you may be care to know that there is a [[WP:PJ|WikiProject]] working to improve articles about Narnia, and your help would be greatly appreciated. {{#if:{{{me|}}}|However, you should [[WP:WHY|register]] at Wikipedia first, because IP addresses will be removed from the participants list at the project page. Then, you should p|P}}lease consider joining the '''[[WP:WPNAR|WikiProject Narnia]]'''. {{#if:{{{me|}}}|If and when you do register, let me know on [[User talk:{{{me}}}|my talk page]].|}} Thank you! '''[[User:Fbv65edel|Fbv]]'''[[User:Fbv65edel|65]]''<font color="green">[[User:Fbv65edel/Esperanza|e]]</font>[[User:Fbv65edel|del]]'' / [[User_talk:Fbv65edel|☑t]] / [[Special:Contributions/Fbv65edel|☛c]] || 03:42, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

How can the template markup be changed so that there are no #ifs? Isn't there a way so that it appears just as the markup of what it looks like when you see it in its saved version? That is, is there a way for the markup of the page after saving to read: Hi, {{PAGENAME}}, and thanks for your contributions to the article [[Aslan]]! I noticed that you have some interest or expertise in [[C. S. Lewis]]' ''[[The Chronicles of Narnia]]''. I thought you may be care to know that there is a [[WP:PJ|WikiProject]] working to improve articles about Narnia, and your help would be greatly appreciated. Please consider joining the '''[[WP:WPNAR|WikiProject Narnia]]'''. Thank you! '''[[User:Fbv65edel|Fbv]]'''[[User:Fbv65edel|65]]''<font color="green">[[User:Fbv65edel/Esperanza|e]]</font>[[User:Fbv65edel|del]]'' / [[User_talk:Fbv65edel|☑t]] / [[Special:Contributions/Fbv65edel|☛c]] || 03:42, 30 November 2006 (UTC) Thanks! --Fbv65edel / ☑t / ☛c || 03:47, 30 November 2006 (UTC)


Perhaps you could use a subst based on the text given as an input? E.g. {{subst:Narnianinterest-{{{1}}}}}? Adam Cuerden talk 11:46, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, I don't follow you… There is an unnamed parameter, which in this case was defined as "Aslan," so {{subst:Narniainterest|Aslan}} entered Aslan as the first parameter. --Fbv65edel / ☑t / ☛c || 18:21, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Inserting dashes

I find that if I insert a dash from the insert menu below the edit box, it doesn't replace selected punctuation but lodges alongside it. This probably applies to all inserted items and I suppose there must be a good reason for it. Is there a way to type an em dash directly into the edit box without using the intrusive (for editors to read) and unintuitive &emdash; method? (Not --, which I dislike.) qp10qp 04:03, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Scalable SVG?

I do not know if this is a Wikipedia question or a Firefox question, but here goes:

When I look at an article that has a SVG image , e.g. Unix System V, I see an image that is too small to read. But SVG is scalable, so I figure I will just click on the image. OK, now I'm on the image page: still too small, so I click onthe image there. Now I have an image that is far, far too large, and I have no way to scale it.

So, I need either

  • a simple way to scale wuing my browser, or
  • Wikipedia should have a way to serve a scalable image.

If the first is not obvious to the casual reader, the perhaps we can implement teh second with a template that creates and serves the image embedded in an HTML page the scales? -Arch dude 15:28, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

Well, there are a few solutions to the problem. The first is to wait until Firefox supports scaling the SVG in the browser. The second is to install the Adobe SVG Viewer plugin, which should give you some additional features for SVG control. The other solution is on the backs of those who create SVG files. Because they are scalable, it doesn't matter what the 'default' image size is. So, for ease of viewing, SVG creators can specify "100%" as the width, meaning it will just fill the browser window, or they can specify a fixed size. In the case of the image on the Unix page, the default width was set to 6500px! I just downloaded, edited, and reuploaded the image to have a default width of around 1000px, which should be easier for the general user to utilize.
I don't think a feature change to Wikipedia is in order at the moment... Browser support for SVGs is moving fast, and there are probably things we should fix sooner, rather than work on something that should be better supported by browsers in a few years anyway. Phidauex 16:52, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] monobook not working?

I have a few things in my monobook that I've copied from here and there that are supposed to customize one's Wikipedia experience somehow. They used to work just the way they were supposed to. The last few days they don't seem to be working at all. Am I the only one with this problem? ~ ONUnicorn(Talk|Contribs) 21:21, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

There have been some changes to the global MediaWiki:Monobook.js (e.g. it is now at MediaWiki:Common.js and some other changes). Nothing that should break user's local monobook.js (yet), though. —Ruud 21:27, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Searching through contribs

I have 40 pages of contribs (20,000 edits) and am unable to search through them by date, user or anything else because I cant get all the edits up on 1 page and use a search button. Searching through 40 pages is not a practical option. Is there any chance of getting an "all contribs" page for each user. It would help tremendously, SqueakBox 01:41, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

On one page, no. You can get them on 4 by sorting them every 5,000 edits, by clicking here. Titoxd(?!?) 01:45, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

Well thanks. Is there any reason why you can get them all on one page or is it just because most people dont use their search buttons and nobody has asked before? SqueakBox 01:47, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] What links here oddness

When I checked What links here for a recently created article David Stuart, I saw there were dozens of talk pages listed, including many about Mesoamerican topics. When I look at those talk pages, I cannot find any link to David Stuart. What is causing this? older ≠ wiser 02:11, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

It's from the embedded template: Template:WP Mesoamerica tasklist. —Pengo talk · contribs 02:17, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
Ah, thanks. I didn't even notice that the to do list was hidden on the template. IMO, just another reason to figure out a way to prevent (or at least moderate) whether links on transcluded templates show in 1) What links here and 2) Related changes. Having to sift through the seemingly ever-increasing multitude of links from these templates greatly reduces the utility of What links here and 2) Related changes. older ≠ wiser 03:05, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Is it possible to tell the number of users watching a given page?

A question forwarded from the Chinese Wikipedia: is it possible to tell the number of users who have a given page on their watchlist? This may be used as a gauge for article credibility. Might such a feature be added in future versions of Mediawiki?

Thanks.

-- ran (talk) 03:49, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

Not a good idea to publish which articles have few people watching them as they would just be vandal targets, SqueakBox 03:51, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
I think there's a feature in a MediaWiki extension to do this, but it's turned off for the reasons SqueakBox suggests. Admins have a list of unwatched pages they can access, but it's turned off for non-admin editors. --ais523 08:52, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
The info action can be used for that, but it's disabled by default for performance reasons (if enabled, you could use http://en.wikipedia.org../../../index.html; see MW:Manual:$wgAllowPageInfo for some more details. Tizio 16:12, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Number of new articles

Is there a way to see how many new articles I've started? It's possible to search by user name on Special:Newpages, but that list only goes back one month. Punkmorten 11:18, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

This would be a good idea; unfortunately, it appears it would be too expensive to do using the current database schema (see bugzilla:4150). Tizio 16:36, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for answering. I quote: "That would be one bloody nasty query. I pity the bugger who writes that." So I guess no. Punkmorten 21:22, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
user:Interiot will run such queries on request (against an offline copy of the database). -- Rick Block (talk) 23:33, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
I can't run the query currently, since the toolserver has no data for en.wikipedia.org at the moment. I can run it for other wikimedia sites though, and can run it once/if the toolserver starts working again. --Interiot 23:46, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Link tags

I think it would be neat if Wikipedia's software added more of the LINK tags to the header of the site's pages, so that users of browsers that support it (e.g., SeaMonkey, Opera, and, with the proper add-on, Firefox) had some navigation possibilities. As it is, there is one for "Copyright" (which shows up in the "More" menu in SeaMonkey), and also one for "Search" (but that goes to some XML thing, not an HTML page). "Top" would be an obvious addition, and if some of the "Up", "Next", and "Previous" values could be filled in for particular pages based on such things as category structure and succession boxes that could be useful. As an obvious case, pages on years, decades, centuries, etc. should have "Next" and "Previous" go to the succeeding and preceding ones. Who knows; if such a high-profile site as this uses these tags, it might even encourage browser developers to actually support them. (It's been a chicken-or-egg thing so far, with browser makers not doing it because few sites use them, and site developers not doing it because few browsers support them.) *Dan T.* 13:08, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

"Up" would be useful, if hand-added to articles (eg. #PARENT [[Wikipedia:Village pump]]) If it were actually widespread, it seems like the sort of thing that might fit in on the CD/DVD version. Some articles have multiple succession boxes, most have none. Alternatively, previous/next could be similar to Special:Allpages... I don't know how useful that would be, but it would be nostalgic at least. --Interiot 20:32, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Firefox memory leak on some Wikipedia pages?

I've run into an odd problem. When I navigate to some Wikipedia pages, Firefox seems to go into some sort of mode that chews up processor time and memory. If I go to Comparison of web browsers, I find that my scrolling goes to hell. Task manager tells me Firefox is using ~50% of the processor, and is leaking memory. Note this is after the page load completes, and it continues, apparently indefinitely. In fact, it continues even when that page is not my active Firefox tab! It's not unique to that page...the same symptoms happened to me last night, and I didn't go to that page (sorry, I don't know what other page/s triggered it last night). I don't know if it's unique to my setup, or something more general. I'm running Firefox 2.0 under WinXP SP2. Can anyone confirm/deny the behavior? &ndash;RHolton≡&ndash; 13:57, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

Update: This seems to be related to a Firefox add-in (Linkification, in "thorough mode"). I'll update again if I find out more. &ndash;RHolton≡&ndash; 14:17, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Referencing articles

I'd like to use <ref name="lastname-year-firstword">{{cite ...}}</ref> for my entire bibliography at the top of an article, and then use <ref name="lastname-year-firstword"/> as I need to throughout the article, and finally have <references/> include everything that I have at the top (it would be nice if it was everything that I cited but it's okay if not). Is there a way I can hide such a section from the top of an article? --Chris Pickett 23:10, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

I discovered a way to hide such a section using span tags, and someone informed me that it was bad to do so. I wrote a how-to without the span tags (i.e. no hidden section) on Wikipedia:Footnotes. --Chris Pickett 02:46, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Wiki is too difficult for casual users

I have recently made some edits and improvement to the "US Declaration of Independence" article that I think have been well received. As I monitor the article over the past few weeks I have become aware of what a pain vandalism is. (This is obvious vandalism, vulgarity mostly, but also sneakily changing dates to nonsense, inserting persons own names, etc.)

However, my main complaint is how difficult it is for casual users to make contributions to the articles. Wiki seems to rely on way to many details that users (such as editors) can't possibly know. I think more of the process needs to be automated. For example you rely on users to indicate if something is a "minor edit" with an "m". Or "reverted", etc. Why not make those MANDATORY items that must be selected when doing an edit, and the page won't be accepted until they, and the summary field, has been filled out? Further you rely on way too many "tags" in your own little language. Just what the world need: more bored computer science people inventing their own, "perfect" language to end all languages!

Also, I find the editor bizarre. It's the worse of both HTML and NOT-HTML. It's great the you can select a word, and make it ITALICS (for example), but to translate this into a bunch of quote marks is an editing nightmare after that. Frankly, I think all that stuff should be hidden from the user. Something that is bolded and italicized is just a mess of serial quote marks....six I think. I guess that I am off in another direction on your editing philosophy since I don't understand it.

Further I find the way that users document and have "talk" inconsistent. Someone unknowingly reverted my edits, I went round and round just trying to communicate to him that I thought this was wrong. Finally I stumbled onto it (but have been unable to duplicate my "stumble" since then.) Later, I found that he HAD admitted his error, but it it a nightmare to use.

So, in summary, I find the whole "back office" portion of Wikipedia an arcane mess. I realize this is a volunteer effort, so you should be applauded for that. But I think (while keeping the article content in tact) you need to re-evaluate how *casual* editors use the system, and make that process easier. There is a wealth of knowledge out there that I fear is not being shared, because the editing/revision process is so difficult. Improve that, and in turn, you'll improve the whole process.

p.s. It's not even obvious why the "village pump" is the place to go to post this stuff. NateX 23:56, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

For what it's worth, there are a number of people, including Jimbo, who agree with you, and who are pushing for a WYSIWYG way of editing Wikipedia, called Wikiwyg. [11] You can try a demo of it here. It converts to and from wikitext, so it may even be more comfortable for you to edit using that now. I don't know what the plans are for it to become integrated with Wikipedia's software though. --Interiot 00:07, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Major edit glitch 1 Dec 2006, around 23:00 UTC

The edit at [12] was certainly not intended, and I don't believe [13] was either. Was this some sort of known glitch or database hiccough, or should we be concerned? I changed my password as a precaution. -choster 00:23, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Maybe I'm just going crazy, but the previous few edits I made (or actually, semi-bot (not bot) User:AZPR) were messed up. When I edited Wikipedia:Peer review/Distillation, this occurred (when I meant this). Similarly, this happened when I tried to start a redirect page. Even more weirdly, take a look at Wikipedia:Peer review/Automated/December 2006. Then, click "Edit this page" and look at the source code… there's something in there about some Flight 940. I tried bypassing my cache several times as well as other things, but nothing seems to fix it (though now when I edit, everything is back to normal). What is happening?! AZ&nbsp;t 00:29, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

  • Okay, so I'm not the only one. It turns out that John Calder Brennan, created just 2 days ago, exactly matches the result of this edit. Glitch (and is there a way to fix this easily - I don't want to have to type Wikipedia:Peer review/Automated/December 2006 all over again, and the raw version isn't right either)? AZ&nbsp;t 00:33, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
    • Yeah, hey, I got the same error here. I certainly didn't add a page on John Kerry to the afd. Is something wrong? -Patstuart(talk)(contribs) 00:34, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
      • Saw something similar at Cream (band). Previous revision showed as blank even though the edit was very minor. Seemed to have fixed itself in the past 10 minutes. *Spark* 00:35, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

It seems to have been widespread, although perhaps short lived. —Doug&nbsp;Bell&nbsp;talk 00:37, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Recently I edited my user page and changed a small amount of the code (simply changing the 'stress-level indicator'), however later I discovered that the edit had deleted everything on the page and replaced it with some conversation I have never seen before. This conversation comes from somewhere in Wikipedia, but I have no idea how it came onto my user page. The edit that put all of the weird information on my userpage is listed as an edit by myself User:DanielBC, however I am certain I did not put that text in the edit box, I was changing a small amount of code at that time.

  • The edit glitch that originally occurred is here
  • The edit that I was attempting to make (and is now my user page) is here
  • The history page is here, we are looking at the edits of 1 December 2006

Why did this occur and how can I be sure to avoid it happening in the future (especially if I am editing mainspace articles). Thanks, DanielBC talkcontrib 00:37, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

This may be the same thing I just noticed. I added a short comment on a users talk page, and noticed on my watch list that he reverted it with the comment 'huh?' I went to the history to see what he reverted, and it was truly bizarre. Instead of my short comment showing up on his talk page, 'my' edit had removed his entire talk page and replaced it with the content (text and photos) from the page Shamu. I swear I'm not making this up. And I've never even been to the Shamu page. Here is the dif: My edit. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Priyanath (talk • contribs) 00:45, 2 December 2006 (UTC).
  • So is there a way to fix the problem, especially for pages that were just created and can't simply be reverted? Wikipedia:Peer review/Automated/December 2006 is a new page w/ 18000+ characters, so it can't be easily reverted... AZ&nbsp;t 00:47, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
    • I don't know, hopefully somebody who does will be along shortly. —Doug&nbsp;Bell&nbsp;talk
See Brion's note on wikitech-l. 309 edits on enwiki were found bad and are being fix-ed (full breakdown). --Splarka (rant) 01:30, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
Yes I got hit with this for some weird edits. Rich Farmbrough, 22:37 2 December 2006 (GMT).

This happened to me a while ago. When I saw this at the Manchester article, and no sign of an edit like that in the edit history, I tried reverting. Nothing worked, then I protected the page and this happened, which is quite obviously impossible for the page protection function. Turned out it was something to do with different mirrors unsyncing or something? I can't remember exactly. --Deskana talk 02:05, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

Here are two more examples: [14], causing some confused discussion and this one by myself where I did a section edit and the whole page was replaced by some AfD discussion. In both cases, the strange edits have disappeared from the history. If it was any manual intervention that repaired the wrong diffs, it would have been appropriate to label the items in the history, because this way it was really, really, confusing. Han-Kwang 22:01, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure, but possibly it's related to this. —Simetrical (talk&nbsp;•&nbsp;contribs) 22:19, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Odd category URL

Can someone tell me what's up with this category? [15] Why is it different from this one: [16], and how do I fix it? Why is the %E2%80%AC tacked onto the end of the URL? -Freekee 06:15, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

This is due to an invisible unicode character (%E2%80%AC - POP DIRECTIONAL FORMATTING (whatever that means)) in the category tag on those pages. You can fix it by deleting it from the pages in question (which someone obviously cut-paste in accidentally). Might be easier to delete the line and replace it with: [[Category:Moonspell albums]]. --Splarka (rant) 08:02, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
Addendum: after you empty the typoed category, go ahead and add {{Db-c2}} to the category and category talk page. --Splarka (rant) 08:05, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
I've orphaned and deleted the category with the stray Unicode mark in its name. Kimchi.sg 13:56, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
Thanks, all! -Freekee 16:29, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
MediaWiki supports bi-directional text. These invisible unicode characters are text direction indicators that are displayed in some contexts. When you copy a link you can sometimes accidentally include one of these in what you copy (since they're invisible, it's sort of hard to tell when this happens). This happens often enough that I've entered a bugzilla entry for it, see bugzilla:8124. -- Rick Block (talk) 20:37, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Blank Cell for Table

I'm running into a roadblock with the following table. On the bottom three rows, I have subdivided cells (on the left hand side), but on the right, they're one whole cell. I'd like to standardize both sides to be solid cells, rather than subdivided ones. The problem is, deleting "|" before the "Monstrous Strength" parameter just bumps the "Monstrous Strength" parameter left across the rows, resulting in one giant cell on the bottom and to the right of said parameter. Terek 10:09, 2 December 2006 (UTC)


Master: Shinji Matō Sakura Matō Sex: Female Color: Black
Alignment: Chaotic Good Chaotic Good Height: 172 cm Talents: Equestrianism, acrobatics, stalking
Noble Phantasm: A+ A+ Weight: 57 kg Likes: Alcohol, reading, snakes
Strength: C B Magic Resistance: B Dislikes: Mirrors, height measurement
Endurance: E D Independent Action: C Nemesis: Saber, Sōichirō Kuzuki, Assassin
Agility: B A Mystic Eyes: A+ Breast: 88 cm
Mana: B B Riding: A+ Waist: 56 cm
Luck: D E Divinity: E- Hip 84 cm
Monstrous Strength: B


Are you looking for something like this? (I just added "colspan" in the column before Monstrous strength to make a single cell stretch across multiple columns.

Master: Shinji Matō Sakura Matō Sex: Female Color: Black
Alignment: Chaotic Good Chaotic Good Height: 172 cm Talents: Equestrianism, acrobatics, stalking
Noble Phantasm: A+ A+ Weight: 57 kg Likes: Alcohol, reading, snakes
Strength: C B Magic Resistance: B Dislikes: Mirrors, height measurement
Endurance: E D Independent Action: C Nemesis: Saber, Sōichirō Kuzuki, Assassin
Agility: B A Mystic Eyes: A+ Breast: 88 cm
Mana: B B Riding: A+ Waist: 56 cm
Luck: D E Divinity: E- Hip 84 cm
Monstrous Strength: B

--Interiot 17:13, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

When collapsing columns on the right hand side of the table, the colums are formatted in a cell that looks simmilar to the cells above it in terms of border; it's a light border. On the bottom row of cells there is a "thick" border; what I'm trying to get at is this light border on the left hand side, not the bolded heavy border with or without cells. Terek 18:06, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
Ahh, I got it. I just added a "rowspan" parameter to achieve the desired effect. Thanks! Terek 18:14, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
I don't know what browser you're using, but is there a reason for the extra row on the bottom of the table? I saw the extra row on some of the pages you're working on. Unless you're going to fill it out with columns in the near future, it should probably be removed. This may be the cause for the "darker border" that you're describing. --Interiot 18:37, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Stuck in Chick

Is there a direct way to access Special:Preferences &rarr; Skin. Because I just switched to Chick to check if layouts work in other skins than Monobook, and it turns out I can't click on the Skin link from Preferences, so there is no (obvious) way for me to switch back. ~ trialsanderrors 21:14, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

As it says in the FAQ at the top of this page, click on this link then click Skin. Tra (Talk) 21:36, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
Thanks ~ trialsanderrors 21:48, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Republic (Plato)

Someone deleted the Plato's Republic article. How do I restore it? - Darkhawk

It's still there. ~ trialsanderrors 21:48, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
That's because I just fixed it by purging the cache. Tra (Talk) 21:51, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Eh?

Ethel_Smyth#Operas - Why does the link to The Wreckers (opera) show the code? Adam Cuerden talk 22:00, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

A ) was mistyped as a }. I've fixed it. Tra (Talk) 22:07, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] An element allowing for different content in a given box

Navigational templates allow the reader to "show" or "hide" a certain block of wiki syntax. I was wondering if a similar gadget would be possible inside the wiki/html syntax which would allow the user to browse through several possible contents of a box. That is, there would be a certain list c1, c2, ... , cn of blocks of wiki syntax in the article source (inside the html syntax that would do the trick), and by clicking on a simple control the reader would be able to show successive ci in the given space. This would be useful in situation where one would like to present many tables with same headings at once - listing 20 tables at once would look really bad and the huge animated pic instead of a table is awful for many obvious reasons. Ideas, comments? Thanks --Dzordzm 04:14, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

Possibly useful for non-content (maintenance, administration, configuration, discussion, etc) pages, but content pages should generally be printable rather than interactive. --Splarka (rant) 08:37, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
Maybe it should be set so that for non-javascript enabled browsers and when printing, the sections are put one above the other, but on screen, there could be tabs to select between the different sections. It could perhaps be implemented in a similar way to how the tabs in Special:Preferences work. Tra (Talk) 14:37, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
That would be a simple CSS trick, which shouldn't be too hard to impliment (I would assume). That could prove most helpful for large templates; for example, {{Mortal Kombat series}} could have individual tabs for the games and characters, while taking up a fraction of the space. EVula // talk // &#9775; // 22:56, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
It would be JS, actually, not CSS, but still simple. —Simetrical (talk&nbsp;•&nbsp;contribs) 01:58, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Template won't close

Template:HP-project seems not to "close" when transcluded… all the text following it seems to be put into the manilla box. (See Talk:Harry Potter.) I don't know how to end the template. --Fbv65edel / ☑t / ☛c || 17:12, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

I fixed it; it needed another |} at the bottom. Tra (Talk) 17:27, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
Phew, thanks so much! --Fbv65edel / ☑t / ☛c || 17:28, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

Also, in that same template, it appears it doesn't show when the article is not assessed by importance. It's like the importance parameter is optional. Can you change that so that it appears whether it's rated or not? Thanks. --Fbv65edel / ☑t / ☛c || 17:51, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

Done. Tra (Talk) 18:14, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
Thanks a lot, you've been a lot of help! --Fbv65edel / ☑t / ☛c || 18:17, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Viewing user contributions to deleted pages?

When a page gets deleted, edits to it no longer show up in user contribution lists. Is there anyway to see them? My interest is for evaluating vandals. Often, I'll look at the user contributions of a suspected vandal and see that they have made very few edits. In reality, they've created many junk articles, all of which have since been deleted. There doesn't seem to be any way to tell one case from the other. -- RoySmith (talk) 20:09, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

One used to be able to see the edit summaries of people's deleted edits, but we had problems with vandals putting stuff (like personal info of other users) in edit summaries so this feature has been disabled. There isn't any way to see them other than for admins and then only by going to the page history. That is, afaik.—WAvegetarian&bull;(talk) 20:15, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Blind Wikipedia editors - optimised skins for their assistance

Hello! I am trying to help an blind user edit an installation of MediaWiki at work. The available skins are identical to those on this Wikipedia but it causes some screen reader problems with finding the article text first rather than reading down the columns in the navigation sidebar. Contributing to article edits is also problematic in that it is hard to locate the tabs at the top of each page and the save and preview buttons at the bottom. Two questions - are there any blind editors/tech support for blind editors and 2) can I see a copy of their monobook.css/custom skins to see if it will help my guys at work, please? (aeropagitica) 20:21, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

User:Graham87 is blind and accesses Wikipedia using JAWS (screen reader). -- Rick Block (talk) 20:26, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
They can go to their Special:Preferences and change the skin to MySkin or Chick, both of those have minimal header text, and have most of the navigation-box links at the bottom.
You can even view an article without any skin at all, using action=render. Though I don't know if that's more useful or not... certainly the extra links in the skin are useful sometimes. Also, I'm not sure whether there's an easy way to stay in "no skin" mode, since clicking on a link takes you out of it.--Interiot 22:33, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
What screen reader are they using? I still use JAWS 5.1 which doesn't read wikipedia's CSS properly (basically because it's Internet support is unstable even without full CSS support). I use the monobook skin because I've become used to its quirks. To find the text of an article I just move to the first heading - in wikipedia's case "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia". It sounds like the software the blind user is using doesn't do much to virtualise webpages to optimise them for speech. In the edit page, I have learnt to filter out the text of the sidebar when arrowing through to find where to place an edit. I locate the other forms (edit summary, watch this page, ETC) by pressing tab. To find the "article" and "discussion" tabs I go to the "Views" heading, but if the software has a find feature that would also be useful for finding the tabs. Do the access keys work? Like "alt-c" for article, "alt-t" for discussion". Graham87 05:28, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

I believe that they are using the latest version of Dolphin, a UK screen reader programme http://www.dolphinuk.co.uk/ over IE version 6. I know that it has a focus option but I think that one user has a problem where the focus starts in the navigation sidebar and not the article pane. I will ask for more details from them and make the suggestions that you have recommended above. Any other assistance is very much appreciated! Regards, (aeropagitica) 20:51, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

I can't get the demo installed here, but I've been able to read the help files which can be found here. The find feature (activated with f3) seems to be useful, as well as the heading navigation links of dolphin key+insert and dolphin key+delete (dolphin key is probably caps lock). Control+shift+left arrow might be useful for skipping links. Dolphin screen readers might process the user monobook.css or common.css correctly so fiddling with that to turn off the sidebar with display:none might work for the user. The Chick skin or MySkin may work, as well as the classic skin. If using the classic skin, dolphin key+delete should get to the first heading and thus the page's contents without the sidebar clutter. Graham87 04:56, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

OK, I will see what I can get done today with your suggestions. I'll be back when I get further feedback! Regards, (aeropagitica) 05:57, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Category:Determinists

Category:Determinists comes up as a totally blank page for me. What's up? Rfrisbietalk 01:15, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

I guess all I had to do was ask a pointless question about it here. Nevermind! :-) Rfrisbietalk 01:20, 4 December 2006 (UTC)


[edit] IP blocking vs registered users

Is there a way to blcok an IP without blocking registered accounts that use the IP? I know we can autoblock the IP when specifying a registered account but what about the other way?

The particular case I am interested in involves an anonymous vandal that targets a single page. His actions trigger semi-protection whichdeprives all non-registered editors from editing it. What I would like is a way to block the IP but allow a user to register an account and edit with the account while the IP is blocked. Then we could leave a "Please Register" message on the IP page but implement long blcoks without fear of depriving legitimate users access. --Tbeatty 04:30, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

Yes, it is possible. There are three settings that can be changed when users are blocked. When an IP address is blocked, either all users or just anonymous users of that address can be blocked. In fact the default behaviour is only to block anonymous users. Account creation can also be enabled or disabled for an IP address. (The third option is to enable or disable autoblocks, which applies only when blocking a registered user). An administrator will take all of these things into account when blocking a user, so there's no need to worry – Gurch 07:40, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Getting a list of pages I've edited?

Is there an easy way to get a list of the pages I've edited? Special:Contributions shows all my edits, but many of them are to the same pages over and over again. I want just a list of uniqe pages I've edited. I managed to get what I need by asking for the last 500 edits (close enough for my purposes), then saving the page as a text file, grepping all the lines with "title=", and running it through sed | sort | uniq, but that's hardly elegant. Is there some way within the MediaWiki software to do what I want? It seems like this would boil down to something like "select uniq pageName from whatever where userName = 'RoySmith'" query against the database. -- RoySmith (talk) 18:00, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

I tried checking m:Query, but there's nothing useful there. This would seem like a perfect fit for the toolserver, except that it doesn't work on en.wikipedia at the moment. --ais523 18:05, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
There is a relatively easy way, at least for the pages you have put the most work into. You want Interiot's "wannabe kate" edit counter tool. You can find it at WP:TOOL. It will give you a bunch of editing stats including the 15 pages you've made the most edits to in each namespace.—WAvegetarian&bull;(talk) 20:22, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
I've looked through your contributions list and here's a list of every page you've edited, along with the number of edits to that page. I've put the table in a show/hide box because it's a bit big. Tra (Talk) 21:40, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
Cool, thanks! How did you generate that list? -- RoySmith (talk) 01:28, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
I opened your user contributions, set it to show the last 5000 edits (this caused it to show all your edits since you have less than that), then went to view source, copied the HTML from the actual list (not the top and bottom of the page or the sidebar) then pasted it into Excel, then wrote a formula to extract from each line the name of the page, then with this list of page names generated, I pasted it into Access as a table, then made a query and switched on Totals, added the page name field twice into the query, once as group by, once as count, then ran the query and pasted the results back into Excel, then wrote a formula to turn each line into table syntax, then pasted this into the edit box, added the top and bottom of the table, put it in a show/hide box and posted it. Tra (Talk) 21:40, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
Pages edited

[edit] Unnecessary autoblocks?

Am I the only one wondering about how the autoblock feature works and why? Having just had a conversation with yet another blocked user who unnecessarily stumbled into one ([17]), I'm asking myself if the whole feature isn't too trigger-happy and whether it could be revised. In particular:

  1. Many users who get blocked apparently don't become aware of it until they actually try to edit - in which case they'll have earned an autoblock already, on top of their regular block, without doing anything wrong. How and when do blocked users actually receive a warning from the software?
  2. Is it true that an autoblock is triggered already when a blocked user merely opens an edit window, not when he actually tries to save the edit? If so, this strikes me as wrong, because even a blocked user might have a legitimate interest in viewing the source of some page.
  3. Why are autoblocks applied to the same account that got the original block anyway? An autoblock makes sense if a blocked user tries to edit from the same IP under a different username or anonymously; but why would we want it if he is still using the same account that got the original block anyway? As long as he does that, there's no need to prevent him from dodging, after all.
  4. Why are autoblocks always applied for a fixed period of 24h even if that extends beyond the length of the original block? Shouldn't they be restricted to expire together with the original block?

In effect, what seems to be happening an awful lot is that users who get blocked for some reason accidentally stumble into these autoblocks without doing anything wrong - simply because they haven't yet noticed the block, or because they just want to try out what happens, for simple curiosity, or because they want to view a page source. Or am I getting something wrong here? In all these cases, the software gives them what they will see as an arbitrary block extension for no reason whatsoever, and without a warning. This can result in quite a feeling of aggravation, and of course it creates more work for the admins who have to lift them afterwards.

Do you guys think this feature could be changed, or has it been discussed anywhere? Fut.Perf. ☼ 22:29, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

  1. I've never been blocked, so I can't say. ;) Quite possibly they aren't blocked until they try to edit.
  2. Yes, it is. It's triggered to ensure that the user doesn't try evading the ban, not as some kind of punishment. It's triggered when a user tries to edit because that happens to conveniently tell us their IP address. Logically it should probably be triggered on any other action as well, but the code is currently set up to only make an autoblock when it's checked whether the user is blocked or not, which is possibly only done when trying to do something like edit.
  3. The idea is that we should block his IP before he logs out, when we actually know the IP he's using right now. If he tries to edit under another account or anonymously, we won't know it's him without doing a comparison to all the IPs in the recentchanges table, which we don't (whether or not we could is another question).
  4. Autoblocks should automatically expire when the main block expires, to my knowledge. If this is incorrect, please file a feature request on Mediazilla. —Simetrical (talk&nbsp;•&nbsp;contribs) 07:37, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] BIG EVERYTHING on Wikipedia

Everything on the site looks really LARGE. The text, the links, the pictures, everything! It is not like this on other sites. Why? 70.104.161.104 02:31, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Could you post a screenshot, please? Karl&nbsp;Dickman&nbsp;talk 03:02, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
This is probably due to your browser. Did you press ctrl+"=" or ctrl+scroll? It also might depend on the skin you're using and/or items in your skin.css GeorgeMoney (talk) 03:06, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
The pictures look large as well? As I recall, Opera has a feature that expands everything, not just text; perhaps you accidently bumped it up? *shrug* EVula // talk // &#9775; // 03:43, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

1. Don't know how to post screenshots. 2. Am not using skin (no idea what it is!) 3. Never heard of Opera. 4. My bad, it is on other sites. 5. HOW DO I FIX IT, GEORGE MONEY?? 6. Sorry for the CyberYell. 70.104.161.104 22:45, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Well, what browser are you using? EVula // talk // &#9775; // 22:47, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
That can be readily inferred from the answer to question 3. (Okay, it could be a Mac user too. *nix is also out due to 1–3.) —Simetrical (talk&nbsp;•&nbsp;contribs) 01:59, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
Pretty much what I was thinking, but as a Mac user (who hates IE with a burning passion), asking that question was about the only thing I could contribute to the topic. :-) EVula // talk // &#9775; // 02:11, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

I am using Internet Explorer. I am trying to do a very important project and this is getting annoying, seeing as this is only happening to text on the internet. 70.104.161.104 01:53, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Go to View → Text Size and make sure it's "Medium". —Simetrical (talk&nbsp;•&nbsp;contribs) 01:59, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Thank you, Simetrical!! *I am bowing to the computer wizard in front of me!* ;) Little brothers...

[edit] DB2 Technical Discussion

Hi All

This is the sample thread. 
Is it possible to reply this thread.
Yes, it is possible to reply. If you want to test how threaded comments work, try Wikipedia talk:Sandbox. Tra (Talk) 17:55, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Hey, can somebody fix the article on Lecithin? I have tried to edit it but its "hidden". I tried to reload the article as suggested and that't not working either. I don't want to e-mail the Wikipeople since they so adamantly request that we don't do so.

I can't see any problems with Lecithin. Tra (Talk) 17:55, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Information on range blocks

Would it be possible to get a range block to block out all or some of the anon IPs listed here. They are a permabanned user who keeps vandalizing using a dynamic IP. I don't think a two week range block (hopefully he will have given up by that) would cause much collateral damage considering the user's location. I'm not asking anyone to implement one, I'm just asking if it's technically possible.--Euthymios 13:51, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Technically, yes. It may be possible depending on the range. What range is he vandalising from? --Deskana talk 13:53, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
I'm sorry, I had linked to the category but without the ':'. I've fixed it now.--Euthymios 13:54, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
If I'm reading those WHOIS results correctly, it's 85.72.0.0/14 and 87.202.0.0/15 - i.e. two really big ranges. Dynamic DSL connection IPs from the largest ISP in Greece. Probably too much for a range-block. Fut.Perf. ☼ 16:34, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Finding deleted edits

There's been a policy proposal for usurpation of user names, but it's gotten snagged on the fact that MediaWiki doesn't reattribute deleted edits correctly. Is there anyway to find out if an account that appears to not have any edits does, in fact, have edits to deleted pages?--Kchase T 21:42, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

There's some discussion above about a new version of Special:Contributions that can show deleted edits but is not working properly at the moment. Tra (Talk) 22:25, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
Thanks.--Kchase T 22:28, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Colored border of a table IE fix

I'm working in my userspace on a template that uses a a border. I've got the following line: style="border-collapse: collapse; border: 1px solid blue; margin:1em auto; padding: 1em 1em;-moz-border-radius:23px;" which looks fine in FireFox. I checked it out in IE, and, aside from being square (which is to be expected since the corners is a mozilla only style), the right border side is just missing. I've tried a few fixes, but to no avail. Can someone who is more familiar with CSS (I just pretend) please help me out? I really just want the border fixed in IE. Thanks in advance for any help. See User:Mecu/SingleGameHeader. You are free to edit with it to try and get it to work if you need/want to. --MECU≈talk 00:16, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Thank you Tra for fixing it. You had it right the first try, you just needed to purge the page to get the examples to work. Thanks. --MECU≈talk 00:48, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
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