Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Wiki Syntax

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Archive from Nov 2004 to end of July 2005.

1 Double prime
2 Bad table format
3 Succession boxes
4 Things for the bot to remember on double brackets
5 Open quotes in infoboxes
6 Template:Election Summary Begin leading to unopened |}
7 Question
8 Suggestion - Category redirects
9 Line breaks
10 Newlines in wiki links
11 Broken links
12 Question about the syntax of disambiguation links
13 Project directory
14 spelling problem

[edit] Double prime

In the section What do I do if I encounter valid unclosed square brackets, or other wiki syntax?, the page says:

The use of '' as a symbol for inches or arc minutes

which I believe to be wrong. The two apostrophes should be a double prime symbol (Unicode U+2033 DOUBLE PRIME, HTML ″ or ″, looks like ″, as in a 15″ screen). Shouldn't this be fixed, even though the error's common? (I don't propose we go through and change all the nowiki'd versions, but that future versions, instead of being nowiki'd, are ″'d or ″'d.) Felix the Cassowary 10:44, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. I've updated that description, and suggested that people replace these with ″ which renders as ″ and is probably easier to remember than ″ -- All the best, Nickj (t) 03:38, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Bad table format

This page has a big table box for Completed items that does not render properly in Firefox. It does the right thing (aligning to the right with the long box down the right-hand side of the page) only if the Firefox Sidebar is dismissed. When the Sidebar is open (displaying my bookmarks, e.g.) the Completed box overlaps the right-hand box. Oops. Someone should fix this. 216.237.179.238 00:20, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

well, i fixed it; the "nowrap" attribute on every row was making the first column take up way too much space; but now it makes the center column pretty narrow on most window widths... but at least it's readable in firefox on screens less than 1280 wide. 216.237.179.238 20:54, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

okay, i put back the nowrap style on the center column; looks cleaner now. it still has overlap problems on the right when the window gets very narrow, but it's much better than it was; if i knew how to limit the center column to three columns of numbers or so, i'd do that and make it about as good as it could get... hope it helps whomever starts the next round of syntax edits. 216.237.179.238 21:11, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

Thank you! I asked at Template talk:Active Wiki Fixup Projects if anyone knew how to fix this (as I didn't know how myself), but drew a blank, so it's great that you were able to find a way to fix this. -- All the best, Nickj (t) 23:33, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Succession boxes

I just went over some of the triple quote items, and a lot of them are missing quotes in the {{succession box}} template. What seems to happen is that the fields are bolded by the template itself. However, sometimes someone wants to give further information about the person in the field that should not be bolded. So people have been added closing triple quotes, which are being found as errors because the opening quotes come from the template. (Of course, there really is an error: the original closing quotes in the template become opening quotes without closing quotes.) I've been fixing these by adding '''  to the end of the field. (See [1] for an exmaple of this.) The   is because otherwise transclusion yields a string of six quotes which the wiki parser does not interpret as wanted, and the fields seem to have extreme whitespace characters truncated, so we have to use this.

Anyway, I'd like to encourage everyone to use this solution. If anybody thinks of another way to handle this that might be better, please mention it here. Eric119 05:39, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

Eek, what a complicated mess the page authors have created! Hmmm... so to recap, the succession box authors have tried to be helpful by opening and closing the bolding, but the users have overridden that to close the bolding in order to have plain or italics text after the person's name - except they have stuffed it up, in that they haven't then closed their overidding, which means that the quotes are unbalanced. Given this, I don't know what else can be done other than what you have done; Maybe it would be marginally better if they had two succession box templates - one that works like the current one, and one that takes an extra argument for the stuff that the user wants in plain text or italics, which is just printed as-is on a new line after the name without any extra formatting. Then again, it might not be worth it, I'm honestly not sure. -- All the best, Nickj (t) 04:53, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Things for the bot to remember on double brackets

It needs to recognize line breaks ( ) in links, as well as when the <nowiki> tag is used inside links (certain characters mess up links, requiring this usage). Ral315

Can you possibly please give me an example to illustrate? -- All the best, Nickj (t) 04:58, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Open quotes in infoboxes

There are about 20 pages listed in double-quotes-009.txt with open double quotes inside infoboxes. Closing the quotes adds a blank line to the infobox, which is probably what the articles' authors wanted to avoid. The Infobox_templates page suggests using "some_field= " for empty parameters but this also adds a blank line. Is there a preferred method of handling these? - Gimboid13 23:00, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

An example of this is Ballindine, and deleting the unbalanced italics quotes in the "motto_latin" and/or "motto_english" fields. It uses Template:Ie citytown infobox. I just inserted some extra quotes, and that seemed to display OK (no extra blank lines), and it's valid wiki syntax, so maybe see if this works elsewhere too? -- All the best, Nickj (t) 03:21, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Template:Election Summary Begin leading to unopened |}

The Template:Election Summary Begin, used on several dozen elections-related pages, includes an opening {|, but no closing |}. This seems to be because the table needs to continue beyond the template, and is only closed after including some other stuff. See, e.g., Hinckley and Bosworth Council election 1999 for an example. Hence, the closing |} is always included explicitly in the article itself, obviously resulting in incorrect Wiki syntax. I'm not yet experienced enough here to know of a good solution. Anyone else have any ideas? ··· rWd · Talk ··· 11:29, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

The same thing happens with Template:Election FPTP begin, used on some 280 pages, and Template:Election box begin, used on 1000+ pages. The solution is simple, really, as mentioned on Template talk:Election box: use Template:Election box end to close the table, rather than |}. ··· rWd · Talk ··· 12:30, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

I noticed this as well. I'm not sure this project is workable for me at the moment. The first page I went to (GeForce 4) was huge and would be time consuming to find the error, if it still existed. The second I very nearly I made removed an opened <nowki>|}</nowiki> that would have completely broken the page. If extra unopened/unclosed brackets don't break things, is there really a strong argument for removing them all? Stevage 22:55, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

I suppose the argument is that most of the syntax problems are real; Most of the rest are at least messy (e.g. using {| to start a table, and {{end}} to end it). In the case you mention, I suspect the solution would be replacing |} with {{end}}, which will most problably result in the number of {| matching the number of |}, and the number of {{ matching the number of }}, which is what the syntax checker is looking for in this category. As for whether this is a strong argument, I'll leave that value judgement up to you, but there are 3 things that I should point out:

The braces/tables category is the trickiest and fussiest category, and if you don't enjoy it or see the value then by all means don't do that category.
Problems that aren't fixed will pop up in the next run, so on one hand it's good to fix them so they don't come up again; but on the other it's a case of just do you best, and if there's something that gets missed, then don't worry about it because if it's something we check for it will get listed again.
Braces/table problems can be the ones that cause the most content to be hidden (e.g. I've seen malformed tables lead half of the content in an article to not be visible; and fixing them brings that content back). They may have updated the MediaWiki parser though to make it more tolerant of malformed tables, but I've certainly seen this happen in previous runs.

Hope that helps answer your question. -- All the best, Nickj (t) 01:23, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

Similar problems with pages that use Template:election dual-member and Template:CanElec1 - fixed by creating Template:election dual-member end and Template:CanElec1 end Kcordina 10:10, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

The {{end}} template contains the requisite characters to close a table, although intended primarily for succession boxes, it could also be used for other templates that need tables closing Kcordina

[edit] Question

This one appears to be a false positive:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle#Biology

The |} seems necessary for formating. So either it should be done another way to avoid the false positive or the script should handle this case as valid. Perhaps the template at the top of the section needs editing? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by WilliamKF (talk • contribs).[moved from project page by zenohockey 23:47, 24 December 2005 (UTC)]

This was fixed by Kcordina, and the problem was that the table was started with {{wrapper}}, but ended with |}. Changing the end to {{end}} instead results in the number of {| equalling the number of |}, and the number of {{ equalling the number of }}, which is what the syntax checked is looking for (i.e. it wants a table to end the way it is started - either with the wiki table syntax for the start and end, or with templates for both the table start and table end). -- All the best, Nickj (t) 01:28, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Suggestion - Category redirects

Maybe you want to add this to the next go-round. AFAIK, Category pages should never be redirected in the normal way (i.e. with #REDIRECT ). They should be redirected with the {{category redirect}} template. I've come across various ones that are not done the way they should be. It seems like it would be easy to generate a list of these bad Category redirects, and post them for people to run through and fix. Or this might even be done by a bot, if there aren't any sneaky corner cases to worry about... JesseW, the juggling janitor 08:24, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

Hi JesseW, This might be best as a query on the live database (it might be called asksql now, but I'm not sure). Here is the query I used, and the results (I'm using a MediaWiki 1.4 database, and a dump from the start of december, so some of this stuff may be out of date, but hopefully most will be current and should give the general idea):

Thanks, I'll get cracking on this... (I'll delete the ones as I fix them.) JesseW, the juggling janitor 02:28, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

mysql> select cur_title, left(cur_text,80) from cur where cur_namespace = 14 and cur_text like "#redirect%";

Original list replaced with list checked against the current database, as of 03:43, 10 January 2006 (UTC).

--All the best, Nickj (t) 02:23, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

Should this list be on the main project page? --zenohockey 03:54, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

Actually, truth be told, I should have just looked harder before asking for this. Wikipedia:Hard category redirects already exists, and I should just move this list there... JesseW, the juggling janitor 04:06, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Line breaks

I just fixed a bunch which were all caused by line breaks somewhere between column 60 and 80, in wikilinks or in templates. Isn't there some way to automate the detection? A big hint is when a missing ]] occurs on a line right before a line with a missing [[. I'm sure everything I just fixed could have been automated. --James S. 05:09, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

You are absolutely correct that many of those of the form line X malformed with unbalanced [[ + line X+1 malformed with unbalanced ]] can by fixed by removing the line break, but to be honest I know that I'm not going to have the time to write such a bot. The syntax checking source code is out there (and I can get an updated version to anyone who is interested), so if anyone out there is thinking of writing a bot like this, please let us know. -- All the best, Nickj (t) 05:38, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Newlines in wiki links

These comments were moved here from Wikipedia:WikiProject Wiki Syntax/miscellaneous-000.txt.

~~Arsenic trioxide : Unopened or unclosed [[ : On line that starts with: | [[Standard enthalpy change of formation|Standard enthalpy of~~
~~Arsenic trioxide : Unopened or unclosed ]] : On line that starts with: formation]] Δf''H''<s>o</s>solid~~
~~Arsine : Unopened or unclosed [[ : On line that starts with: | [[Standard enthalpy change of formation|Standard enthalpy of~~
~~Arsine : Unopened or unclosed ]] : On line that starts with: formation]] Δf''H''<s>o</s>gas~~

NB - These four errors result from the appearance of a in the middle of a link declaration - removing it makes the right table far too wide, and this usage does actually seem to be supported by the current parser - perhaps we could declare this not to be an error with the syntax checker? -- comment added by Bosmon

They need a " " but it can be in one line, i.e. "[[Standard enthalpy of formation]]". r3m0t ^talk 17:34, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

Yep, it's the newline ('\n') that is upsetting the syntax checker, not the . Some wiki links will display OK with newlines, some do not. For example, [[this will

stuff up]], and [[this-will stuff-up]]-too, but This will not stuff up, although [[WP: WS|This will stuff up too]]. I.e. if there is a pipe ('|'), and the new line appears in the label text, not the link text, then it will render correctly. However, my feeling is that removing the line break is the way to go, because it:

makes the wiki text more readable.
removes the idea that newlines in links are a good idea (usually they're not, because as can be seen above out of the 4 possible ways of using newlines in wiki links, only one renders - and IMHO the renderer is being too tolerant of input in that one case).

-- All the best, Nickj (t) 00:11, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Broken links

So I was going through the contributions of OleMaster, and she seems to "fix" a lot of wikilinks like this first one I noticed: Femme fatale (disambiguation) → Femme fatale (Disambiguation), thus breaking the link. I checked a few of the first few pages, fixing where I could see obvious ones, but they got buried. This has been addressed on her talk.

So my suggestion is to fix redlinks of the form [[Ambiguious-article-name (Capitalized stuff)]] where the uncapitalized actually points to an existing article. I imagine this is a common problem with newbies. --Christopherlin 07:52, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

The syntax checker isn't concerned about redlinks, so changing capitalization won't have any effect on whatever it was unhappy about. The edits you're talking about, do you think they were made because those pages were listed by the Wiki Syntax Project? If not, then those redlinks will probably get caught by Wikipedia:WikiProject Red Link Recovery, which looks at links that are redlinks, but which are very similar to non-redlinks, and suggests that maybe the link should be changed accordingly. -- All the best, Nickj (t) 05:32, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Question about the syntax of disambiguation links

I have seen numerous articles with a disambiguation link like this (from Bugsy):

:''For the Pokémon character, see [[List of  Johto Gym Leaders#Bugsy]].''

Some others use (from Changeroom):

{{dablink|For the play ''The Changing Room'', see [[David Storey]].}}

I think that the latter form is correct, and the former form is wrong. Although it might not look wrong to someone looking at it using a graphical browser, it is semantically incorrect. If you look at the HTML output, it is actually being represented as a definition list, not as a disambiguation link (class="dablink"). I have concern that this could cause accessibility problems for users with screen readers such as Jaws. Am I correct? Invitatious 03:31, 10 June 2006 (UTC)

Look closer at the source for Changeroom. The indenting there is accomplished the same way. It's just how the wiki translates ":" indenting .. --Q Canuck 00:04, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Project directory

Hello. The WikiProject Council has recently updated the Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory. This new directory includes a variety of categories and subcategories which will, with luck, potentially draw new members to the projects who are interested in those specific subjects. Please review the directory and make any changes to the entries for your project that you see fit. There is also a directory of portals, at User:B2T2/Portal, listing all the existing portals. Feel free to add any of them to the portals or comments section of your entries in the directory. The three columns regarding assessment, peer review, and collaboration are included in the directory for both the use of the projects themselves and for that of others. Having such departments will allow a project to more quickly and easily identify its most important articles and its articles in greatest need of improvement. If you have not already done so, please consider whether your project would benefit from having departments which deal in these matters. It is my hope that all the changes to the directory can be finished by the first of next month. Please feel free to make any changes you see fit to the entries for your project before then. If you should have any questions regarding this matter, please do not hesitate to contact me. Thank you. B2T2 14:33, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] spelling problem

Hi, I'm not sure I should post that here but I don't know where to go. I'm trying to translate articles from french to english. I'm sure I'm making spelling and style mistakes. Is there a category to put into the article in order to make sure some people will have a look at it and correct the mistakes? I looked for some kind of Category:Spelling_to_check or Category:Grammar_to _be_checked but I didn't find out. Thanks for your help. --Ajor 17:56, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

Try looking at {{copyedit}}. I think that is equivalent. --Gwern (contribs) 18:13, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

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