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Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 42

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Village pump (technical) archive  

This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (technical).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

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Problems with List of National Basketball Association players

I've noticed a couple of problems with List of National Basketball Association players.

  • 1. I used to click on "Related changes" to check if any new player articles had been created, but now, the only results at "Related changes" relate to articles linked in the intro of the list. See [1]. (And it's not because no one is editing the player pages. They are; I can see some of the changes on my watchlist.)
  • 2. The list doesn't appear at the "What links here" page for each player on the list. See [2].

I realize that the list could probably be split apart and remade to resemble these, so you don't have to bring that up (unless, of course, the length of the list is the cause of the problem.)

Thanks! Zagalejo^^^ 23:01, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

....so, any ideas? Zagalejo^^^ 06:58, 4 July 2008 (UTC)
Never mind. The problem was still there, but I decided to split the list. Zagalejo^^^ 02:46, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

Implementation of new feature

Hi, the portuguese wikipedia community voted for a implementation of this guide and it was consensus [3] the guide is already tranlated, know we have to implement it, the only difference would be that, after the unresgistered user completes the wizard, the new article would be immediately created rather than being sent to revision, so the last link must be changed. Can you help me please? Thanks and regards. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jack Bauer00 (talk • contribs) 13:59, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

Wow, that's tacky. How long have we been using it??? I can't imagine why any other project would want to use this "wizard", but I'd suggest something like this:
Introduza o título do artigo:

Of course you could also add a pre-load template a generic article structure, maybe with section headings for references, and hidden html comments like <!-- add categories and interwikis here -->, etc. Maybe also some invisible code like a blank tracer template just to see how many people use this feature, I don't know. — CharlotteWebb 18:20, 5 July 2008 (UTC)
I added it to the Portuguese page. Hopefully they will clean it up a bit, e.g. "wikitable" doesn't seem to be in their css. — CharlotteWebb 18:43, 5 July 2008 (UTC)
Thank you! can you add this generic article structure and make the wizard start to work in our wikipedia? we don't have developers there. --Jack Bauer00 (talk) 20:13, 5 July 2008 (UTC)
Thanks, CharlotteWebb! There is already the kind of a template you were talking about at pt:predefinição:Artigos novos guia. So, how can we make it that the new article will pre-load this template? Cheers! GoEThe (talk) 20:24, 5 July 2008 (UTC)
Add a line with "preload=Template:Whatever" to the inputbox code, and the content of the template will be copied into the editing box when the user clicks the button to create a new page. — CharlotteWebb 00:18, 6 July 2008 (UTC)
More options can be found here. — CharlotteWebb 00:24, 6 July 2008 (UTC)
How would this tracer template work? Maybe an easier solution would be to add a specific hidden category to the article that says it was created through this process. GoEThe (talk) 22:32, 5 July 2008 (UTC)
I was thinking a blank/empty template that could be tracked using Whatlinkshere ("Páginas afluentes"). Hidden category would also work, either by itself or from within a template. Either way it would not have to remain there forever. You could have a bot remove it immediately and add it the article title to a "log" list somewhere for research purposes (to measure how helpful the "wizard" is). — CharlotteWebb 00:18, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

Weird image problem

After I deleted Image:Artist.jpg I uploaded a generic image like was done with Image:1.jpg. Something went wrong however, I ended up with the image I deleted but in the same same format as the generic image. Any idea's? Garion96 (talk) 20:37, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

How bizzarre. I've tried deleting the file (twice) and uploading both a fresh duplicate of Image:1.jpg and a nonsense image (me scrawling in paint for a few seconds). Neither work. I remember hearing something about image redirects... can't remember if it was "I wish we had..." or "woo we now have..." but if they work, it would save us having to upload that placeholder for every generic image name. I don't see why we can't just salt such common titles anyway - why do we have to have a blocker image? Is it a hangover from before creation protection, since the old method of page salting presumably wouldn't prevent image uploads...? Happy‑melon 20:57, 5 July 2008 (UTC)
Another interesting thing is that I do see your scrawling image in the "existing file" box when I try to upload the image over the other image. Garion96 (talk) 21:03, 5 July 2008 (UTC)
Yes, image redirects do work, and yes, they can be protected. So I recommend that we delete all the placeholders in Category:Wikipedia image placeholders for image namespace and replace them with redirects to the relevant Image:Image.jpg, Image:Image.svg, etc. Or we could redirect them all to one central Image:Please do not use this filename (are extensions required in imagespace?). Protect the redirects and the filenames are as secure as before. Happy‑melon 21:21, 5 July 2008 (UTC)
The file extensions are only required for uploading. You can create an image description page at any title, regardless of whether said title refers to an existing image or a valid file format (but unfortunately you cannot move it). — CharlotteWebb 00:30, 6 July 2008 (UTC)
Everything looks right to me. Did you try reloading the page after you uploaded the new image? --Carnildo (talk) 21:17, 5 July 2008 (UTC)
That's because I just (successfully) created an image redirect. I didn't manage to upload a new file. Happy‑melon 21:21, 5 July 2008 (UTC)
Yes, it looks good now, even in the deleted file history. No, it was not an issue of reloading since we both had the same issue. I did not try to purge though...either way, it is solved now. Garion96 (talk) 21:39, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

Can't align a cell in a table, and it's driving me nuts.

Take a look at User:Headbomb/Sandbox

The first ??? should be aligned with the others. I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong, and it's driving me nuts.

The template code is located at User:Headbomb/Sandbox. Useful pages would also be {{-Type}}, {{Article-Type}}, {{-Class}}, {{A-Class}}.

Note that these pages allow for some variations, so it's not because one writes "align:center;" and the other "text-align:center;" that the problem exists. I've tried every combinations I could think of and it still doesn't get it right. It's possible that I missed one however. Please help, I'm going insane here. Headbomb {ταλκ – WP Physics: PotW} 01:27, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

Fix - transcluding the template was putting VPT page in categories it didnt' belong in. hbdragon88 (talk) 01:40, 6 July 2008 (UTC)
These categories don't exist, it'll cause no disruption. I'll use brackets instead of curly bracket when the problem is solved, but right now it is more important that people are able to see the problem, I think. Headbomb {ταλκ – WP Physics: PotW} 01:53, 6 July 2008 (UTC)
It looks like the quotes are mismatched on the {{-Type}} template:

"background: transparent;" text-align:center;"

I don't think the quote after "transparent" is needed. Not sure if there are any other problems. --Snigbrook (talk) 02:41, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, that was it. I knew it was a stupid mistake, but after a while, you just can't see those anymore. Thanks a bunch. Headbomb {ταλκ – WP Physics: PotW} 04:04, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

RFCs not showing up on my watchlist

I have a bunch of the RFC sections watchlisted, but I never seem to get a notificaiton. The last week I did a RFC -- no notification. Now I've just done another RFC -- again, nothing on my watchlist. I suspect this is a global bug, and a major one. The last RFC I did got no comments. In general, many RFCs are getting little to no attention. II | (t - c) 05:35, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you mean by not getting a notification. The RfC you linked to had a minor typo that prevented it from jumping to the right thread, but it was still listed. -- Ned Scott 08:16, 3 July 2008 (UTC)
When you go RFC, you can "watchlist" certain RFCs. I have RFCpolicy watchlisted, yet I've done 2 and neither have shown up on my watchlist. If these things did show up on the watchlist, they would likely get a lot more traffic. II 07:12, 4 July 2008 (UTC)
The bot updates a template that is transcluded on the RfC pages. For example, Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Style issues transcludes Template:RFCstyle list. Template:RFCstyle list is the page that actually gets updated. However, when the bot does update it doesn't say anything specific, just something like "Update, 9 current discussions".
I don't know if this is because of people watchlisting or not, but I have noticed a decrease in activity with RfCs lately. I think it might be a good idea to find ways to attract more attention on them. I was thinking of asking someone to write a user script that would allow people to opt-in (as a gadget, to make it very easy) to a watchlist/site-style notice, but with rotating RfCs and notices. -- Ned Scott 04:47, 5 July 2008 (UTC)
I'm not following. Are you saying that the current watchlisting of the template is not meant to update you on the discussions? I agree that this is very important. I've never attracted outside attention with a RFC, and glancing over at others, this does not seem uncommon. It would happen much more if they initially popped up on a watchlist. It would be better if people didn't have to install a gadget; much better to have something naturally integrated with the watchlist. I've dropped a note on Wing's page about this -- hopefully he communicates to the developers. I wonder what project they are working on. II 01:06, 6 July 2008 (UTC)
There is a way to do this with the existing watch list notice, but editors there noted that there is reluctance to use the watch list notice in that way (see MediaWiki talk:Watchlist-details#Rotating notices). -- Ned Scott 05:58, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Database dumps failing

When will the backups stop failing? Gary King (talk) 18:42, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

Probably not until the backup process is fundementally redesigned. The current process for generating a complete dump for en takes weeks and fails if there is any communication breakdown during that time. Its a very long standing problem, but perhaps the devs can offer some views on when it might be "fixed". Dragons flight (talk) 18:52, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

Copied from wiki-research-l.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 17:59, 6 July 2008 (UTC)


Adding a random image to a page

I'd like to add a random image to a page. With Special:Random/Image I can create a link to a random image, but I don't want that. I want the image itself (and also add a parameter like 120px). Something like [[Image:Special:Random/Image|120px]] won't work. Any ideas? CaAl (talk) 15:45, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

You could do it with a userscript, but others would have to have the script installed as well in order to see it. You could also set something up with templets to give a similar effect, but it wouldn't actually be random, and you would have to define a group of known images first. -- Ned Scott 04:52, 5 July 2008 (UTC)
Even if we are unconcerned about Schrödinger's fair use violation, I don't think the "deep link" urls for the actual images (not the description pages) would be predictable enough to efficiently access, and you can forget about getting thumbnails of a specific size as they are generated by the server and not guaranteed to exist at any given time, so you'd be using full resolution which would take much longer to load in most cases. If this were feasible is there some reason it would be useful? — CharlotteWebb 18:02, 5 July 2008 (UTC)
I agree that there's not really any use for my requested feature on Wikipedia. However, I'd like to display it on my personal mediawiki install. Basically, just because it's nice to show a random picture. The template suggestion, taking a random image from a predefined group, sounds good enough for now. 91.107.68.158 (talk) 09:31, 6 July 2008 (UTC) (=user:CaAl)
Yes, that would definitely be easier in your case (with a relatively small number of images and no other users to keep track of). — CharlotteWebb 11:05, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

questions about "neutrality disputed"

Hello

I authored a wiki article and find that it has been tagged as "neutrality disputed". Wiki Info & faq pages on neutrality are helpful --- in general. Not so much in specific regard to my article.

This must be a simple question, but it's got multiple points --

What exactly about my article is disputed, what are the specific areas of contention ? How can I tell ?

Obviously I'd edit or re-compose whatever was proved to be biased or too opinionated, and I know how to do that, but what are the steps to counter-acting the charge of "neutrality disputed" ?

Suppose what I've authored just needs it's X changed to Y. I understand how to do the change, but not how to lift the charge of disputed neutrality after the appropriate changes are made. What are the steps there ?

Suppose what I've authored is true, but it makes someone think it needs it's X changed to a Y, and they tag it as "neutrality disputed". How do I prove the charge to be in error and refute their tag and have it removed ? What are the steps there ?

If it makes any difference, the tag of "ND" was placed at the very end of my entry/article, so I'm not sure at all what it refers to...

Thanks for help..

Xyzimpf —Preceding unsigned comment added by Xyzimpf (talk • contribs) 19:20, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Please ask this on the talk page of the article in question. The editors of that article will see the change in their watch list and are much more likely to respond than they are if you ask it here. In general, discussions over content belong on article talk pages. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 20:31, 4 July 2008 (UTC)
You can also look in the article's history to find out who added the tag, and then leave a friendly note on that person's talk page to ask them to come to the article's talk page to explain what their dispute is. Anomie⚔ 00:32, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

Hi again. Sorry if this is the wrong place to ask, I'm not asking here to discuss content. This is a question about how, the procedure, to handle a 'neutrality disputed' tag. Not about content. If my article gets an ND tag, how do I go about reversing that ? What is the mechanism for correcting / then removing the 'ND' tag. Does one have to wait around for someone who may have tagged it to respond ? Is there no basic procedure to correct and resolve the situation ? Thank you. Xyzimpf —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.91.197.88 (talk) 17:44, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

The editor putting the tag/template on the article page has the responsibility for explaining the tag, either in the edit summary or (preferably) on the article talk page. If there is no explanation, then remove the tag, with an edit summary of something like "Removing NPOV template; please do not put back without explaining on the article talk/discussion page". And then, if you want to be really nice, put a note on the user talk page of the editor who placed the NPOV tag in the article, saying that you're removed it, since there was no explanation, and that you welcome discussion of neutrality problems that are specifically identified, on the article talk page, since you're always interested in improving the article. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 01:38, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
Thanks very much for a clear answer. Just the info I was looking for. Appreciate your time ! ... (& figured out how to officially sign) ... rgds Xyzimpf (talk) 18:52, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

{{PAGENAME}} works funny with {{urlencode}}

See TEST section here. The first two lines are as expected, but the third is surprising - and somewhat problematic. Is this a bug? GregorB (talk) 00:57, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Use {{PAGENAMEE}}. That should give you the expected result. --- RockMFR 04:08, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
Actually, that won't help for what you are trying to do. Hmmm... --- RockMFR 04:20, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
Yes, the trouble here is that I see no way to arrive to the string that I need ("14961+d%27Auteroche") using {{PAGENAME}} as input. I don't think this is the intended behavior here... GregorB (talk) 08:24, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
Well, this is probably a bug, but short of filing one, I'd suggest trying a workaround of using {{subst:PAGENAME}}, which, for example, produces Village pump (technical) on this page. It might require using an awkward setup in a template, but it would probably work. {{Nihiltres|talk|log}} 13:32, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
Yep, #13288. A test case is here. Fortunately, in my case (14961 d'Auteroche) there is a workaround, i.e. I use a template parameter instead of relying on {{PAGENAME}} as the default value, so it's not that bad. GregorB (talk) 15:05, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Minor edit tickbox

Is it just me? The minor edit tickbox has moved to below all the wikimarkup gumpf, so I have to scroll down from the edit summary to find it. This is a strong disincentive to changing the box's default setting, which seems like a very bad idea. --Dweller (talk) 11:30, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

This must be due to some change in a javascript you are using. I still see the "minor edit" box directly below the "edit summary" box. — CharlotteWebb 13:23, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
Ugh. I don't understand most of that stuff, lol. I've not amended my monobook for at least a few days. Maybe I need to strip it out again? --Dweller (talk) 13:35, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
Perhaps you changed some preferences? For your monobook.js, you can empty it, do a hard refresh like the page recommends, then test it again (a hard refresh is also required for gadget changes to your preferences). Gary King (talk) 16:18, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
Well, your monobook.js imports a couple of other scripts, so when they change, the behavior of your browser will change as soon as the cache is refreshed. You may have other "gadgets" enabled in Special:Preferences as well. I think this would be 30 days at most, but it could be as often as you exit and reopen your browser, depending on the browser's cache settings. Be sure to clear it manually each time you add or remove something in trying to isolate the source of the problem, then contact the user who maintains whatever script is doing this. — CharlotteWebb 16:22, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Enhancement t MediaWiki

I would like to suggest an enhacnement based on MediaWiki: the inclusion of a new magic word (called {{USERNAME}} or something of similar nature) that reports the user visiting this page. It is NOT intended for use in the article namespace, but may draw attention in the user and user talk namespaces. Being as how several computers can visit the same page at one time, the USERNAME for each must be different for each visiting entity.

I invite anyone to debate this topic thoroughly, and the community to come to census on such an enhancement. Thank you, Graham Northup (Graham (talk, contrib) 16:31, 7 July 2008 (UTC))

This has been suggested before. See previous discussion for an example of how this could be abused. — CharlotteWebb 16:39, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
It appears that the link you left there (to "here", some place with root my.server.lol) is broken, CharlotteWebb. Do you know if there is any update on this URL? Graham (talk, contrib) 16:55, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
It was intended as a self-explanatory example. If that was "my server, lol" I would be able to harvest the IP and browser information of you and everyone else unfortunate enough to click on that link, and know exactly who was who. — CharlotteWebb 17:23, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
Ha! I was trying to do nearly the same thing...if I'm viewing this page, show the link to my tempspace; otherwise, hide the link. Is there any other technique to work around this? Graham (talk, contrib) 18:03, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
Use some Javascript code to make the link appear. If nobody else installs the same code, you will be the only one who sees the link, because it's not part of the page itself, just something your browser adds to the page based on the instructions in your JS. If you can be more specific about what you want, surely somebody will be able to write some quick code for you. Once you understand how it works you can change it to suit your exact needs. — CharlotteWebb 18:23, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Will not be implemented. Breaks caching. — Werdna • talk 02:39, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Template problems with C-class

I tried updating Template:WikiProject Louisville‎ to reflect the new C-class, but it still doesn't register. The page to show C-Class Louisville articles was already created, but shows nothing. Any help to get C working is appreciated.--Bedford Pray 19:53, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

The politest way to describe that code is probably... "messy"... :D. I'd personally recommend you use {{WPBannerMeta}} and move any code-problems 'upstream'. It would necessitate you renaming eg Category:Louisville templates → Category:Template-Class Louisville articles, but I wouldnt' expect that to be too much of a hardship, even if the names are a little counterintuitive. Happy‑melon 17:00, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
Well, I didn't write it, so I'm not offended. I asked the guy who wrote it to add C, but he's only semi-active now, so who knows if it'll ever get done.--Bedford Pray 17:09, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
WikiProject Oregon recently rewrote and reorganized our template to make it more automatic and easier to understand its internals. It was trivial to add C-Class to it. See {{WikiProject Oregon}}. —EncMstr (talk) 17:19, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
I converted the banner to use {{WPBannerMeta}}, so if you like the style, all you have to do is create the categories it says it needs (in the big orange box under the template). Happy‑melon 17:35, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
Thanks.--Bedford Pray 17:38, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Style attribute to let an object 'fall out' the bottom of a table cell

Is there one? I'm placing an inner wikitable within a larger one; and it's impossible to avoid both whitespace and fragmentation unless I can let at least one object 'spill over' into the next cell down. Is this possible? Happy‑melon 20:17, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

You're not being terribly clear. An example would help. Do you want the rowspan attribute? —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 20:46, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
Well it would apply to any large block of content, not just an inner table. Say I have a table that looks like this:
A BB
BB
BB 		C
D E
F G H I

But I want to put some content in an "L-shaped" block containing D, F and G. That's not possible with rowspan. What I want to do is this:

A BB
BB
BB 		C
DD EE

I'll stick a large floating transparent div in the top-right of D and top-left of E to block the content out of the way, and allow B to overflow into the cells below. Does that explain things? Happy‑melon 21:07, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

I can make it go into a scroll bar with overflow:auto, but not just spill into the next row... Happy‑melon 21:15, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

How about a div spanning D, F, G, and bottom-left BB (rectangle shaped), and set an appropriate Z-index so that this is the lowest layer you will have, and then another div spanning... wherever you want it to, as your explanation still isn't completely clear to me? Is this for something in User: namespace? An off-wiki project? :| Gary King (talk) 01:46, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
I think I solved it using position:absolute - it works in FF3 and IE7 anyway. I just hope it's not going to go horribly wrong on older browsers... Happy‑melon 10:11, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

CSS is based around boxes. Anything that tries to use shapes other than boxes is going to be tricky, in general. Something like this might be possible with floats, since those have the (rather unique) property of shortening line boxes in a not-necessarily-boxy fashion. What was your solution, in the end? —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 15:47, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

I wrapped the contents of "BB" in <div style="position:absolute; z-index:1;"></div>, then positioned <div style=float:right; vertical-align:top; width:45%; height:18em; background:transparent;"> </div> in "DD" (and the same for EE, floating left). Seems to work fairly well in the browsers I've tried it on. Happy‑melon 16:55, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

When did this become possible?

Take a look at the block log for this IP: 69.19.14.32 (talk · contribs · logs · block log). When did it become possible to indef block IP's? Xenon54 12:13, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

As far as I'm aware, it's always been technically possible. Wikipedia:Blocking IP addresses#Block lengths advises that it should 'almost never' be done. Algebraist 12:30, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
The IP has been blocked a few times before, and the last block was for 1 month, which is not usually followed by indefinite. It looks like it may have been a mistake, as it was blocked as a "vandalism-only account" when it's not an account. Snydale (talk) 12:34, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
Like Algebraist said, there's no technical reason an IP can't be indefinitely blocked. That's what we do with open proxies. EVula // talk // ☯ // 04:15, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

RFC on allowing Admin Bots and with what rules for them

Please speak up at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Adminbots. Thank you. rootology (T) 13:12, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Skinning the main page

I have added necessary CSS classes to MediaWiki:Common.css, and created a version of the main page using the classes rather than hardcoded styles at Wikipedia:Main Page/skinned. The version needs to be thoroughly checked on all browsers to check that it renders identical to the current version, so any assistance in doing so from people with wierd and wonderful browsers would be greatly appreciated. If all is good we can change the main page over after 16:35 August 7 2008. Happy‑melon 16:48, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

There's a few background colour differences in FireFox 3.0. Algebraist 17:11, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
Some at least of these are because it's in the WP mainspace, where things are done differently. Algebraist 17:13, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
Note: CSS changes reverted. See Talk:Main Page#Skinning the main page. Algebraist 19:52, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Being logged out

Both yesterday and today, when I came to Wikipedia for the first time in the day I had to log in, despite not having logged out before. I have the box ticked for logging in automatically, an have had no problems with other websites which have a similar thingy. DuncanHill (talk) 11:23, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

Could your login have just timed out? It does that after 30 days or somesuch. Algebraist 12:29, 5 July 2008 (UTC)
That was my first thought when it happened yesterday, but it then happened again today, and I did oversleep this morning but I think not by a whole month! DuncanHill (talk) 12:31, 5 July 2008 (UTC)
It seems an old bug is rearing it's head: When coming to the main page, it shows Login/Create account, and when clicking it, the normal user toolbar reappears at the login page. — Edokter • Talk • 14:28, 5 July 2008 (UTC)
I've encountered this problem as well over the past few days, on several different browsers and operating systems. My bookmarks point to Special:Watchlist, but lately it has been getting the "log in" notice. Any fix in sight? --Ckatzchatspy 22:10, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Problem with non-breaking space

I edited the article Gilroy, California using HotCat to remove a category in this edit: [4] and what I think was a non-breaking space in the link to the Arabic Wikipedia was changed into an ordinary space. I have tried to change it back but without success, even when I edit an old version of the article. I don't know if the problem is with Wikipedia or the browser I am using (Firefox version 2.0.0.15). Any ideas of how to fix the link? --Snigbrook (talk) 00:19, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

You could use %C2%A0 instead of a space in the interwiki link. Granted I don't know whether the nbsp has any significance in Arabic, but I doubt it. I'm surprised this isn't a "bad title" error or an automatic conversion to underscore as with all other white space. — CharlotteWebb 00:52, 6 July 2008 (UTC)
The problem has been fixed now (by OverlordQ): [5]. --Snigbrook (talk) 02:21, 6 July 2008 (UTC)
What kind of browser are you using Snigbrook ? Seems like it has a bug. or perhaps you have something like wikEd or a "format" fix script active ? --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:31, 6 July 2008 (UTC)
I'm using Firefox (version 2.0.0.15) and it does seem to be the browser that is causing the problem. Although I used HotCat for that edit, that is not the cause of the problem. If I go to the page Gilroy, California in Firefox, click on the "edit" tab and "show changes" without making any changes, it shows the non-breaking space has changed to an ordinary space. In IE 7, if I do the same thing it shows no changes. --Snigbrook (talk) 13:06, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

Once again, could somebody explain whether or not there is some practical reason for a page title (in arabic or any other language) to contain a non-breaking space instead of a regular space? — CharlotteWebb 13:16, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

I think such names are usually created by mistake. Grep search showed about 200 articles with non-breakable namespace in Arabic Wikipedia created by the same bot, so I notified the bot owner. —AlexSm 05:09, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Firefox 2 and earlier cannot submit nbsp's in text fields. If you try, it silently replaces all nbsp's with regular spaces. Use Firefox 3 or some other browser that isn't completely broken in this regard. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 15:30, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the message guys, so is this going to be a big problem ? Wuts the solution ? creating redirects? or moving the pages?
--Lord Anubis (talk) 15:24, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
Unless the non-breaking space has some significance in the Arabic language (I have no idea, you tell me) I strongly recommend moving all the pages to use regular spaces, and I would also ask the developers to make non-breaking spaces equivalent to regular spaces and underscores when used in a page title.
I happened to notice that there was previously something at the regularly-spaced title (which Snigbrook accidentally changed the link to), see [6], but you deleted it with the reason روبوت - حذف كل الصفحات من التصنيف Del2506. Obviously I don't know what this means, but what was deleted? Was it a redirect or a duplicate copy of the article, or something completely different? — CharlotteWebb 16:35, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
See T3414. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 20:42, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
Might be fixed in another 3½ years, no? I agree with your point though, about being able to use a different type of space in a situation where it makes some sort linguistic difference (which may or may not ever happen—I've been asking for days), without explicitly requiring several redirects to avoid duplicate page-creation or 404 (cosmetic issues being secondary to navigational ones). On the other hand it could be simpler to auto-convert all spaces to %20 and let DISPLAYTITLE (or whatever DISPLAYTITLE evolves into) cope with exceptional cases. — CharlotteWebb 18:25, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Thumbnail of Image:Red cylinder.png

Something seems to strange about the way Image:Red cylinder.png displays, if you look at the the source image [7] it shows a complete cylinder, however in a thumbnail

 
should show a complete cylinder

only a portion of the image is shown. Any ideas? --Salix alba (talk) 19:24, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

p.s. I've tried purging and using different thumbnail sizes. --Salix alba (talk) 19:36, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

I've uploaded a new version of the image that seems to fix the problem. Either it was an issue in the original file, or it is a bug in whatever software MediaWiki uses to generate thumbnails. --- RockMFR 22:34, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

I agree that the cylinder appears to be open on the end, if that's what you mean.   — CharlotteWebb 16:43, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
It's an optical illusion: the way the shadows are aligned makes the image look open when the image is small, when the image is larger it becomes less apparent to your brain that it's open. I would suggest fiddling with the lighting / shininess / brightness, etc., until the optical illusion goes away. Calvin 1998 (t-c) 04:32, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
Actually it still looks hollow at full size. — CharlotteWebb 18:28, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

log in to wiki

Hi everyone,

I want to be able to login to wiki through my website. I mean, when i log into my website, it should share the same login credentials into wiki. hence, when i click a link to wiki's page it will be automatically in login state.

any idea please.

many thanks in adv. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Purawiki (talk • contribs) 15:57, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

One way I can think of is for your web site to play "man in the middle," passing the username and password on to Wikipedia's login page and handling user requests. Unfortunately, the cookies probably can't be shared between the website and the end-user so you'll have to play "man in the middle" for the wiki-browsing as well.
Another possible technique: Use a client-side script to do the login to Wikipedia right before it logs into your site. As for how this script should be written, sorry, that would take more time than I have to.
If you do this, be sure you tell your users what is going on.
davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 17:16, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
(see article Man-in-the-middle attack). — CharlotteWebb 18:55, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
Just have your form submit a POST command to Wikipedia with the login credentials. Gary King (talk) 19:24, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
got here http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AutomaticREMOTE_USER . many thanks for suggesstions. will let everyone know once i will use it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Purawiki (talk • contribs) 13:20, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

So, they creating a pseudo-SUL for users to use the same "credentials" to log into their site and Wikipedia too (thereby supplying their Wikipedia username and password to a third party web-master)? Hopefully one needs not explain why this is a bad idea. — CharlotteWebb 18:55, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Moving over a salted page

Is there any way that a warning could be given to admins who try to move a page over top of a salted page? For example, "Bob Smith" is salted because it is a repeatedly recreated A7 page. Someone comes along and creates "Smith, Bob" to circumvent the protection. An admin in good faith sees the "incorrectly" named article and moves "Smith, Bob" over top of "Bob Smith" and they receive no warning whatsoever from the interface that the title is salted. It would be nice if mediawiki could give some kind of warning that the title is a protected redlink. --B (talk) 20:18, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Is such a page be protected from editing after being moved to a "protected title" currently, or does that get cleared? The former case would make it more difficult to tag as re-posted content (which is sure to be noticed by anyone who has it watchlisted from the previous time).
On the other hand a few years down the line we might decide that Bob Smith is in fact "notable", and in this case it would be helpful to have all the pertinent revisions in one place, shrug. — CharlotteWebb 18:44, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, there should be a warning when you're creating something at a protected title, whether it's via move or direct creation. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 22:48, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Enable Rating

Like Uncyclopedia I support to enable Rating for articles.This also reviews how the users like or dislike the article
Also I like to add the site counter for the popularity of the article (# of times it has been visited)
Thanks--• Autographed by RRaunak • Wanna meet him ? • 05:27, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Page hit counters are actually possible now, due to Domas' wikistats system. Whether or not it is worth the manpower needed to get it going, and the performance hit is another matter. — Werdna • talk
RRaunak, maybe we should enable a similar feature for users' sigs. (-5) — CharlotteWebb 18:34, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

messed up InfoBox

I haven't done much with InfoBoxes, so I'm not sure why the one I just ran across on this page is so messed up, and I can't get it to work. Beeblbrox (talk) 06:36, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

I just copied and pasted an old version of the box, and it's working now. Beeblbrox (talk) 06:41, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
Your death_place line was broken, messing up the whole infobox:
| death_place = [[Williston, Vermont|, [[Vermont]], [[United States]]
You can identify this type of problem (as I did) by removing lines from the broken version and doing a page preview until the box displayed correctly. Hope this clarifies the what was going on. TimR (talk) 06:53, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Special:Undelete

Is anyone else having issues with the pagesizes for deleted revisions when viewing Special:undelete? For example, admins can click here and see a page with four deleted revisions. Instead of showing a pagesize of (62 bytes) for one, it instead displays ({{PLURAL:62|1 byte|62 bytes}}). UltraExactZZ Claims ~ Evidence 15:44, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

I see it too. That is strange. Must be a recent alteration to the software. —EncMstr (talk) 16:17, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
Fixed by dev in rev:37403. —AlexSm 16:35, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Template:AutoArchivingNotice ignoring small=yes paramater

  Resolved
 – Change undone until the standardized stuff can handle the small paramater. –xenocidic (talk) 18:16, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Anyone know why it seemingly ignores the small=yes paramater now? It just started happening today. No changes were made to the template. –xenocidic (talk) 17:05, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

It was this change, but I don't know how to fix it. –xenocidic (talk) 17:07, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
Undid for now. –xenocidic (talk) 17:11, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
The issue is that {{mbox}} cannot yet be used for talkspace templates because {{tmbox}} is not usable yet (among other things, it does not - as you've just seen - support the small style. Happy‑melon 17:23, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
Argh. My bad. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 18:12, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
No biggie. –xenocidic (talk) 18:15, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Weird hack?

What's up with the Daft Punk article? The vandalism doesn't appear in the article source so I can't fix it. --Mwongozi (talk) 20:56, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Probably on a transcluded template, but I don't see it. Is it the Avril vandalism again? –xenocidic (talk) 20:58, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
Well I've never seen it before, but it does indeed mention Avril.--Mwongozi (talk) 20:59, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
He's been vandalising transcluded templates all day. It's gone now, far as I can see. –xenocidic (talk) 21:01, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Help_desk#Vandalism_on_Gregory_Peck? - Trevor MacInnis (Contribs) 21:05, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

How to change capitalization of the title of an article?

I just created an article about a local politician, and the title of the article has his last name in all lower case, rather than capitalizing the first letter of his last name. Is it possible to change the letter from lower case to upper case? Chrysanthememe (talk) 23:39, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

You could always create the new page correctly, and then merge the redirect the article Jez Arnold ☎ ✉ ✍ 07:33, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
You can move the page to a different name, if your account is autoconfirmed. By the way, new sections go at the bottom of talk pages, not the top. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 18:52, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Problem with a 3 level #switch

I'm writing a Generic WikiProject Banner template (located at User:Headbomb/WPBanner), which is rather complex due to the scope of what this banner would do.

I'm writing a section that would categories articles according to the following scheme.

  • Type
  • Class
  • Importance

Right now, the categorization works, but a section of the switch code is visible on transclusions (see User talk:Headbomb/Test Article to see the "visible" section of the switch code) and I can't figure what I'm doing wrong. I suspect it has to do with a usage of | when it should be {{!}}.

Feel free to meddle around with both pages. The switch code is at the bottom of the banner code, in a section called <!-- X-Type x pages of Y-Class of Z-Importance -->

Thanks. Headbomb {ταλκ – WP Physics: PotW} 01:07, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Haven't looked at your template yet, but how does it differ from the current {{WPBannerMeta}} meta-template? --—— Gadget850 (Ed) talk - 14:50, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
Oh BTW, someone came and fixed my problem.

The banner is very different in scope than the Meta banner. I'm currently working on WikiProject X, which is meant to an easily adaptable bone-structure of a well-structured WikiProject. The goal is that by replacing X by "Something" and "x" by "something", about 95% of the work is done if you want to start WikiProject Whatever. There are also new features that hopefully will be adopted by the WP 1.0 Editorial Team, such at the "-Type" (so you can specify is a page is of Article-Type, List-Type, Category-Type, Template-Type, WikiProject-Type, Portal-Type ...) as well as an an automatic categorization scheme that will classify any pages in "X-type x page of Y-Class of Z-Importance" categories. The way things are now, every WikiProject has its own code. WikiProject-wide bot maintenance is very hard to achieve. If we standardize the WikiProject templates "core" code, then Bot-assisted maintenance will be much more easier. We could even have each WikiProject "Current Activities" sections bot-updated as well, to monitor AfD, GAC, FAC, FLC, RfC, Peer reviews, GA-promotion, FA-promotion, FL-promotion, etc... I'm going at it solo for now, as I want to have a rough draft of most things before presenting it as the "WP 2.0". Headbomb {ταλκ – WP Physics: PotW} 15:25, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Triple redirects

I know double redirects are stopped, but are triple (A→B→C→A) or n-size loops (A→B→C→ .... N→A) redirects a problem? I'm asking because I'm debating whether or not use a triple redirect in order to have a self-updating template documentation. It sounds like a terribly bad idea, but I want to confirm. Headbomb {ταλκ – WP Physics: PotW} 02:04, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

A triple redirect A → B → C → A includes two different double redirects A → B → C and B → C → A, so it won't work. Same for longer redirect chains. — Carl (CBM · talk) 02:33, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Redirects will never follow their target if it's a redirect; they'll return it regardless of whether it's a redirect. Chains of any length above one simply fail, with all links after the first ignored. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 18:54, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. Then what I have in mind just might work and can't break a thing.Headbomb {ταλκ – WP Physics: PotW} 02:52, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

Problem with {{tl}} in section headers

There seems to be a problem with the {{tl}} template in section headers that causes some garbled text. After some preliminary testing (see User:CapitalR/Test), it appears the problem does not appear in the first section of a page. In addition, the problem does not manifest itself when previewing an edit; only after the page is saved and viewed does it appear. The problem seems to have popped up in the past few days (according to the person who reported it, see Template talk:Tl). It looks to me like this is a MediaWiki error, not a template error, as this has just become a problem recently and since it doesn't show up in preview. Can someone else take a look to see if they can find the problem? Also take a look at User_talk:Aegean_Boy which is where it first came to my attention. --CapitalR (talk) 02:43, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Definitely MediaWiki. --- RockMFR 03:35, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
rev:37299 is to blame. --- RockMFR 03:38, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

A more minimal test case is at User:Simetrical/Tl test. See also User:Simetrical/Tl test 2. It depends on the contents of the template; {{navbox}} has problems, {{test}} does not. (It's not related to whether it's the first section of the page, as you thought.) I'm able to reproduce on my local install by copying the contents of {{navbox}}, on HEAD as well as Wikipedia's current revision. {{tl}} is also unnecessary: the bare wikitext =={{[[Navbox]]}}== will cause it.

As RockMFR says, it works in r37298 but not r37299. I have not the foggiest idea why. It also works in HEAD with r37299 backed out, so I've done that in r37528. Hopefully it's not causing more serious problems elsewhere that will crop up before the fix goes live. Thanks for the report. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 19:19, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Regardless of this issue, it's not a good idea to use templates in section headers. This creates non-working section anchors in automatic edit summaries. Then you cannot jump directly to the section e.g. from your watchlist. —AlexSm 19:31, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Video: Maximum streaming speed of wikipedia/commons?

What is the maximum download streaming speed of wikipedia and/or the commons? I am venturing into adding video into articles and I want to know what these servers can reliably handle.

Here is my first ever video upload to the commons, which streams at about 1000 to 1200 kb/sec, which is of course insanely high, but which my idle 3 megabit pipe should be able to handle: Image:High Moisture Round Bale - Pickup and Wrapping.ogg. But alas this video frequently stutters, pauses, rebuffers, etc, so I assume the Commons cannot handle 1000+ kbit video streams.

I reprocessed that video, capping it at about 300 kbit for the video stream, and this smaller 320kbit stream (300kbit video / 20kbit audio) works much more smoothly with no stuttering or pausing:

Does anyone know exactly what the reliable bandwidth speed limit is for video clips? This information would be a useful addition to Wikipedia:Creation and usage of media files. DMahalko (talk) 07:47, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Just because your connectivity is advertised as 3mbit/sec that does not mean you are able to transfer 3mbit/sec to any particular location. Commons is not at all bandwidth limited and the file transfered to me at 14.08mbit/sec. Something in the order of 300kbit/sec would probably be a realistic target for reasonably reliable streaming to most broadband users (youtube targets 200kbit/sec I think). Of course, we welcome you to upload both a high quality 'original' and a lower quality streaming targeted file. --Gmaxwell (talk) 19:47, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Template:Ft to m is out of order

At Cloud Gate {{Ft to m|33|66|42|wiki=yes}} is suddenly generating huge erroneous text. I had to add a precision parameter {{ft to m|33|66|42|wiki=yes|precision=1}} to unbreak it there, but it is surely causing problems elsewhere. Supposedly {{rnd}} has been redesigned recently, which may explain the problem.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 15:59, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

I cannot see photos in my Wikipedia

Hi I have not seen photos or other images in Wiki articles in quite some time. I know this might not be the kind of question they like here but I have looked in the help area and i cannot see anything about this problem. Do I have to change my preferences? Whats up?

Ger —Preceding unsigned comment added by Kelopee (talk • contribs) 16:52, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

If you are not able to see any image you may have a hyper-aggressive advertisement filter which is not allowing the images on Wikipedia because they are loaded from another domain name (upload.wikimedia.org). You could attempt switching any ad filtering off, and failing that try another browser such as the excellent Firefox browser if you are not already using it.--Gmaxwell (talk) 19:41, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
If using Firefox, you may have accidentally clicked "Block images from upload.wikimedia.org" in the right-click menu on an image at some point. Right-click on one of those broken images and uncheck it. --brion (talk) 22:42, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Substing magic words in references

Substing magic words in refences (e.g. {{subst:CURRENTYEAR}}) doesn't seem to work within <ref> tags. I have a demonstration at User:Quadell/scrap. Is there a workaround? Thanks, – Quadell (talk) (random) 19:41, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

The #tag: magic word does it.

{{#tag:ref|
{{subst:CURRENTYEAR}}
}}
--MZMcBride (talk) 20:52, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
Aha! Thanks much. – Quadell (talk) 01:29, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

Special:Blockip

No other non-admin is getting this? Calvin 1998 (t-c) 20:29, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

The template in question MediaWiki:Badaccess-groups hasn't been edited recently. MBisanz talk 20:31, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
Odd, works for me, oh but I am an admin. When I log out and do it I get the same error you do. 1 != 2 20:31, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
The problem is likely on the Mediawiki:whatever page that contains the content for the that message. 1 != 2 20:34, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
Is MediaWiki:Badaccess-group1 working? It seems like it's not transcluding correctly or something (instead of transcluding MediaWiki:Badaccess-groups, Special:Blockip just printing out the raw contents of MediaWiki:Badaccess-group1. Calvin 1998 (t-c) 20:45, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
Looks like parsing behavior for the MediaWiki: messages changed again. I've 'fixed' MediaWiki:Badaccess-groups, MediaWiki:Badaccess-group1, and MediaWiki:Badaccess-group2. --MZMcBride (talk) 20:50, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

This also seems to have been caused by rev:37299. --- RockMFR 20:51, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Yep, it's working correctly again. Calvin 1998 (t-c) 20:53, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Translating infrastructure (e.g. image EXIF metadata boxes)

Hi - I'm new to translating... I noticed that the translation of the Wikipedia infrastructure (tab headings, exif data field descriptors, etc.) are incomplete for the Afrikaans language. I would like to improve this aspect, but can't find out where one can change or improve the translation of actual Wikipedia infrastructure. Just to reiterate -- I'm not talking about translating the content of articles, but rather translating the wikipedia navigation and infrastructure text -- Can someone point me in the right direction? FMalan (talk) 07:28, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

Try BetaWiki — Werdna • talk 09:05, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

WikiProject banner help

Hello, I need some help. I recently modified {{WikiProject Lithuania}} to recognize C-class and DYK articles. If parameter "dyk=yes" is entered on the banner it should include the article into category:Lithuania Did you know articles. It does that but this category also has a lot of articles that are not DYKs. For example, Kazys Boruta or Prienai. As far as I can tell all those non-DYK articles in DYK category have one thing in common - they are missing the "comments" parameter. But I cannot figure out why that would have any kind of impact. Ideas? Renata (talk) 17:08, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

It looks like you had a bug earlier that caused this. You fixed it, but with the job queue standing at three million, it'll take a while for this to filter through to the category page. You can do it page-by-page with null edits if you want to. This problem is the reason it says 'Updates to this list can occasionally be delayed for a few days.' on Category pages these days. Algebraist 17:29, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
Hm, ok. I will wait few days to see if it resolves itself. Thank you! Renata (talk) 17:47, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
In this a few days usually means three or four, in my experience. Headbomb {ταλκ – WP Physics: PotW} 17:54, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

Problem with wraping URLs

When I place this URL in an External Links section, it fails to work. E.g.,

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?CMD=search&DB=pubmed&term=katsanis%20n%20AND%20(2005[Publication%20Date]%20OR%202006[Publication%20Date]%20OR%202007[Publication%20Date]%20OR%202008[Publication%20Date])

It seems to have a problem and the line wraps prematurely. So the active link finds only a part of the querry (about 9 papers) and doesn't show the link text correctly.

However, if I put the same link (copy it directly from the Wikipedia EDIT page to get the correct text) into my browser, it works just fine and finds about 29 papers. Any ideas on how to fix this? N2e (talk) 22:14, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

Brackets "[" and "]" inside URLs have to be replaced either with entities &#91; &#93; or with URL-encoding: %5b %5d (example). Another solution: problematic URL parameter can be fully decoded and then placed inside {{urlencode:}} (example). (Look at wikicode). —AlexSm 22:43, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

A diff says I did something I didn't do

I was looking through my user contributions and noticed this. It says I added a ; in a comment not my own, but I was only changing the wikiproject assessment. 4Russeteer (talk) 22:55, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

You can be sure you didn't make a mouse slip and then hit an accidental key, two weeks ago? Wish I had that kind of memory. (Or, maybe I don't.) --Trovatore (talk) 23:02, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
I'm sure I wasn't looking at the middle of the page, several screens down from my edit. It's conceivable it's human error, but I think it unlikely. No big deal here, but is this a known glitch? 4Russeteer (talk) 23:36, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
I had also encountered this bug (I use Opera, btw). Once it screwed up Wikipedia's main page[8]. MaxSem(Han shot first!) 06:20, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

"Optional" line break inside a link

  Resolved
 – Gary King (talk) 03:25, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

Is there a way to have a "optional" line break inside a link? For a visual you can look at the top two templates on User:Chandler/Sandbox the top one all the book titles have <br/>'s to break the links. Without them [the bottom one] at resolutions 1024x* or smaller the template becomes wider than the screen, the title does not break on it's own (probably because all titles are indifferent to eachother, so to speak). Is there a way to fix this? So it only breaks when it has to. — chandler — 00:03, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

There may be another way to do it, but at this point (11:45pm where I live), the only way I can think of to do that is to "hard-code" all the stuff in the {{Navbox}} template into a standard wikitable. I'll take another look at it tomorrow, but that's all I can come up with for now. (Oh to be able to use the Javascript screen.availWidth property in wikitemplates...) Thingg⊕⊗ 03:49, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

Hmmm... very interesting. I think I've got a way to do it, though it has been complicated by the apparent fact that, according to the CSS2 spec, inline elements can't use the white-space property at all, but in CSS 2.1, that was changed. This was interesting, too. --- RockMFR 04:31, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

I just added a method of doing it to your sandbox, though unfortunately it doesn't work in IE7. I think a good solution to this problem would be to add a parameter to the navbox templates to disable nowraplinks. --- RockMFR 04:55, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
Thanks, should be able to work from here (and for me when I tried, it worked in IE7) — chandler — 19:56, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

userbox

  Resolved
 – Gary King (talk) 03:22, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

I put a userbox in the Taxonomy section of Greater Crested Tern. When right aligned, it had a narrow white space between the box and the adjacent text. I've now moved it to the left for aesthetic reasons, and the text is effectively touching the user box. Is there anything I can do about this? jimfbleak (talk) 06:42, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

I don't see a userbox on the page, but perhaps I'm missing it? Or is there another sort of template you're describing? - jc37 06:45, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
It's the cladogram captioned "Relationships in the genus Thalasseus" in the first section after the lead jimfbleak (talk) 06:47, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
Interesting usage of Template:Userboxtop. While userboxes are only to be used in userspace, since that template is a userbox grouping item, I dunno. Someone else here may be able to point you to a better "framing" tamplate.
In the meantime, see is this is what you're looking for:
<br clear="all" />
(the "nowiki" tags you may see when editing this page allow the showing of the syntax.)
If it doesn't help, we can see about trying something else : ) - jc37 07:02, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
This seems to be the standard way of showing clades. Adding the <br clear="all" /> forces all the text below the box, so now there's a huge area of white space instead, looks even worse. jimfbleak (talk) 07:18, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
Well, there's always the obvious <br I suppose.
I've dropped a note for someone else who's fairly expert with this to help, but it seems he's offline atm. (and anyone else, is welcome to join in with suggestions : )
I'll let you try that first, and if that doesn't work, I'll go "play" with it some, and see if I can fix it. (If I were forced to guess, I might that it's probably due to some "class" definition somewhere.) But that doesn't help us atm.
Anyway, let me know how it goes : ) - jc37 07:25, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
OK, thanks for trying, jimfbleak (talk) 07:47, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

(unindent) Fixed by another user using the margin CSS property. --MZMcBride (talk) 08:12, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

Thank you very much for following up on this. (And my apologies for any inconvenience.) - jc37 08:20, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
And thanks again jimfbleak (talk) 08:39, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

Extension:StringFunctions

Is there any chance we can get StringFuctions turned on? It would be really handy for formatting image captions, to allow short captions to be centred and long captions to be left-aligned. This has applications right across Wikipedia, and in particular in the design of ever-more prevalent infoboxes. --Rlandmann (talk) 20:32, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

That sounds like a terrible use for it. --- RockMFR 22:34, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
Really? Why? --Rlandmann (talk) 22:45, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
Assuming that the extension would not have DoS potential or security problems, it could be very useful. Just because the example use is trivial shouldn't discount its better uses - there are many possible useful applications of these text-manipulating functions. I support its installation. {{Nihiltres|talk|log}} 01:12, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
So where's the right place to ask about getting this turned on? --Rlandmann (talk) 03:53, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
T8455 was filed long ago for this purpose. It hasn't yet happened. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 18:42, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

“This page is xx kilobytes long.”

Hello. As you know, when you edit a long page in Wikipedia, you see a warning like: This page is 44 kilobytes long. But in fact, this is wrong. Because this warning really means that the page’s size is 44 kibibytes (44 * 1024 bytes). When you see it’s “44 kolibytes long” you can guess it means 44 thousand symbols, and you’ll be right, because kilo is always 1000. --77.241.45.56 (talk) 11:13, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

See WP:MOSNUM#Quantities of bytes and bits. The IEC terms are new and unfamiliar to many readers, and are generally avoided. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 11:49, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Kibibyte#Adoption: Adoption of this term has been limited. In most cases the "kilo" prefix is used even if the meaning is a power of two. Anyway, I don't think a 2.4% uncertainty in reported page size is important. PrimeHunter (talk) 11:51, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

What's my name again

Alright, I've stumbled across a more than strange error. I am editing on my friend's computer. He has an account which he's only used a few times. Now I am 95% sure he was signed out, as the "log in" button appeared at the top of the screen. I logged in under my name. Now, my signature points to my user page and talk page, but uses his screenname (Chrissekely). I have been monkeying around in the preferences, but this clearly should not have happened. Here is my signature, created with 4 asterisks: Chrissekely (talk) 22:02, 13 July 2008 (UTC). I have left the signature intact, so that the developers watching this page can inspect it; however, I will change it back shortly, or you all could get it from the server location. The Evil Spartan (talk) 22:02, 13 July 2008 (UTC) (signature forged)

It might be something to do with the browser automatically filling in forms incorrectly. Go to Special:Preferences whilst logged in as The Evil Spartan and find the 'signature' field and make sure that it contains your username and not 'Chrissekely'; then click save. Tra (Talk) 22:54, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
Yes, it appears the browser recognized that there was a password field, saved the data, and filled some in, even though I didn't mess with that page. How odd. The Evil Spartan (talk) 06:13, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

ℏ (h-bar) character barely readable

There used to be a "faint" version of this character which would've been readable if it was darker. It recently changed to this

ℏ or zoomed in ℏ

This is barely readable, curly and very ugly unless you extreme-zoom on it. Why not make similar to a a regular h?, or an unitalicized version of  ? Headbomb {ταλκ – WP Physics: PotW} 13:41, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

The appearance of "ℏ" depends entirely on the font you use. Wikipedia does not specify any particular font for normal text; what gets used is the default sans-serif font configured for your browser. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 21:01, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
There's no really good solution, but technology will fix this as time passes and monitor resolutions increase. The primary challenge is the low detail of most monitors. When we reach a point of have a 300 dpi monitor (about three times the usual right now) you won't have these troubles. Note similar problems affect detailed Chinese and Arabic fonts unless they are huge. DMahalko (talk) 04:25, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

robots.txt

Can we edit robots.txt? And if not, who can? - jc37 22:32, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

Users with shell write access or root users can. It's not currently possible to edit the robots.txt file from the wiki. To request a change, file a bug. Cheers. --MZMcBride (talk) 22:41, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
Ok, thank you. - jc37 22:46, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
(Note: MZMcBride helped and posted the bug here. Further help expediting this would be welcome : ) - jc37 04:10, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
Ok, this is kinda important. Any suggestions as to whom to "bug" about this bug? - jc37 21:10, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

What-links-here screwiness

  Resolved
 – Gary King (talk) 01:09, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

Can anyone figure out why every individual tarot card article (e.g., The Tower (Tarot card)) shows up here, in the list of pages that link to The Emperor, a dab page. I thought I fixed all the links that previously pointed to The Emperor so that they now point to The Emperor (Tarot card). I even located and fixed the link in Template:Major Arcana. Any thoughts?--The Fat Man Who Never Came Back (talk) 17:35, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

They just need to be refreshed. Pick a random page that {{Major Arcana}} is transcluded onto, hit "edit" and then "save". It is removed from the list. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 17:42, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
That worked! Thanks; it was driving me a bit crazy.--The Fat Man Who Never Came Back (talk) 18:02, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
Or you could have waited for the job queue to fix the whatlinkshere table automatically. I usually wait a few days after using whatlinkshere in situations like that to find out the proper result of my edits. Graham87 12:42, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

Talk page link on 4 tilde

Hi. I notice the four tilde (~~~~) now have talk page link. What configuration is needed for this? Other wiki doesn't have the talk page link on the four tilde. Borgx (talk) 10:03, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

It's defined at MediaWiki:Signature. Algebraist 10:08, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

!!!sdrawckab

SOMETHING IS REALLY MESSED UP HERE! WHENEVER I TRY TO TYPE SOMETHING ON ANY WIKIS THAT USE MEDIAWIKI MY TEXT COMES OUT BACKWARDS UNLES I HOLD THE SHIFT KEY DOWN! WHAT THE @$%#% IS GOING ON HERE???

☃Wyatt915✍ 17:33, 14 July 2008 (UTC) never mind. it fixed itself.

☃Wyatt915✍ 17:57, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

Frequent "not logged in" issues

Is there a reason why the system isn't retaining logins? I'm finding that i have to log in every few days, despite having selected the "remember me" option. I'm inclined to think it is an issue on Wikipedia's end because it is happening on multiple platforms (Windows, Linux, mobile OS) and with multiple browsers (Firefox, Opera, IE). What's more, it seems to happen at the same time; that is to say, when I encounter the problem on one system, I usually find I have to re-log in on the others as well. Thoughts? --Ckatzchatspy 18:24, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

Yes, it's most likely server-side. Whatever cookie is being stored client-side is being refused by the server and so a new cookie must be instantiated by re-logging in. And, since IE doesn't share cookies with Firefox, etc. and, of course, a client-side cookie won't span across client machines, a new cookie would have to be instantiated for every environment. Why the server is refusing cookies is a different issue. There could be legitimate reasons or maybe just servers generally freaking out. —Wknight94 (talk) 18:33, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

Editing Modern skin

Hi,

I love the Modern skin but unfortunately te working wikilinks look far too similar to plain black text to me... I've been looking into how to edit that skin and have found http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Skins which links me to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cognatus/modern.css which says "If you are unsure whether code you are adding to this page is safe, you can ask at the appropriate village pump." Which links here.

So, looking over the questions on this page it looks pretty clear that my question does not run in the same thread as the (actually important) issues raised (and razed :P) here... But, well, I figured if the message is on modern.css then maybe someone will be kind enough to help me.

Basically I want to make working, unvisited wikilinks #OliveDrab[9] and bold.

I searched through http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Modern.css using what CSS knowledge I have for some kind of color code, but couldn't find anything. Can a kind soul help me out by pointing me where to look?

Thanks oodles! — chirographum cognatō (alternis sermonibus) 04:18, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

Tables: How to define alignment for an entire column?

I would like to know if it's possible to define the alignment for the entire column in the first cell of that column. Html specification allows that with COLGROUP property. Wikipedia tables have such property? thanks Ark25 (talk) 17:30, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

COLGROUP and COL are not whitelisted in /includes/Sanitizer.php so can not be used, apparently because the behavior across browsers is not reliable (see Bugzilla:986). There isn't much you can do, other than copy/paste styles for each td, or use classes already in MediaWiki:Common.css (or request additions). --Splarka (rant) 07:16, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

We could enable a quasi-col/colgroup tag that is interpreted as a directive to copy all attributes to the appropriate cells, e.g.:

You save this on the page:
<table class="wikitable">
<col style="color:red;"/>
<col style="color:green;"/>
<col style="color:blue;"/>
<tr>
<td>October</td>
<td>Mile</td>
<td>Lagoon</td>
</tr><tr>
<td>Robin</td>
<td>Acres</td>
<td style="font-size:larger;">Danube</td>
</tr>
</table>
but this is sent to browsers:
<table class="wikitable">
<tr>
<td style="color:red;">October</td>
<td style="color:green;">Mile</td>
<td style="color:blue;">Lagoon</td>
</tr><tr>
<td style="color:red;">Robin</td>
<td style="color:green;">Acres</td>
<td style="color:blue; font-size:larger;">Danube</td>
</tr>
</table>

The idea being that once we reach a point where col/colgroup are "widely supported", we can disable the hack and enable the actual tags without having to update any wiki-text. — CharlotteWebb 08:22, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

Sorry I dont understand much from what you say. What hack are you talking about? A workaround? I can't see any working example, and I might be slow-thinking but I can't deduce one from what you said. Now, you sugest that I should use colgroup and let the cells not aligned, but when it will be implemented, they will be (aligned)? you gave me 2 examples, but for showing a diference, please give me an example of how you think I should make it. Thanks. Ark25 (talk) 05:11, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

By the way, I saved that on a page, and I haven't got what you said. Ark25 (talk) 05:14, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

All I'm saying is that while we might not want to enable the actual html tag (because many browsers don't recognize it), we can allow the tag to be used in wiki-text markup, and define it in such a way that it produces functionally equivalent html that will be usable by more browsers. This should be pretty easy to do. — CharlotteWebb 17:57, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
As I outlined in T2986, I don't think it would be easy to do at all, not correctly. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 18:41, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
The answer to your question is, no you can't. The simplest workaround is to align each data element. eg. using wikitable markup:
This is right aligned
This is left aligned

Code: 

{| class=wikitable width=25%
|-
|style="text-align:right;" | This is right aligned
|-
|This is left aligned
|}

Moondyne 08:42, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. Aren't you people tired of aligning all the cells of the same columns? Or even sick about it? I mean, most of the time you want them aligned in the same way. It takes more time and also the code looks much more ugly this way. I wish a group of angry web developers will bash into the browsers developers heads untill they implement the darn colgroup element :) Ark25 (talk) 23:44, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

To: CharlotteWebb. Maybe I got it totally wrong, but if I didn't, then your point is: The way Wikipedia works can be changed/adapted in such a way that by adding a tag that asks the browsers to apply an alignment or other changes to all the cells in a column, it will work in the Browsers that support colgroup (i.e. IE) and once the other browsers (Mozilla, Opera) will implement the colgroup feature, the page will show the cells aligned as intended. That would be wonderfull, I think. So even if I make a table and the cells will look aligned in IE and not aligned in Mozilla, one day they will look aligned in Mozilla too. I prefere the whole world wide web looks ugly (in Mozilla & others) if that can convince popular browser designers to implement basic features so it will look good in their own browsers too. It's not me who has to do all that manual alignment and fill my html code with crap, but it's them who have to implement such a fundamental thing, that people asked for since ages ago. In this case, where shall I ask for adding such a feature in Wikimedia? Anyways, if I got your point totaly wrong—then please correct me - if worths spending time :) Ark25 (talk) 04:53, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

About Deletion of pages and users and userpages

- How can a user (that is atleast on of the Autoconfirmed users) delete a page. (for example MyEmptyPage) - How can a user delete his/her own account ? (for example JohnDoe doesn't like Wikipedia anymore) - How can a user delete a page that belongs to him/her (for example User:JohnDoe/Blabla)

I know I can get an answer somewhere on wikipedia, but all of it is getting really big. And there is still not a seperate search engine for the helppages (yes, I could uncheck article pages etc. in the search, but it doesn't search fine. For example booleans like + "" and () don't work.).

Anyway, I think there should be an easier way for users to find all of this. Anyway, I couldn't find an answer to any of to 3 questions above in 1 hour time.

TijhofGraphics (talk) 11:03, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Non-admin users can't delete pages. They can request that they be deleted by admins through various means described at WP:Deletion policy and various pages linked from there. It is impossible to delete a user account, though one does have the right to vanish. Users can request that their own pages be deleted using the tag {{db-user}}. The best way to find out this sort of information about Wikipedia is the editor's index. Algebraist 11:14, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for your super-fast reaction TijhofGraphics (talk) 13:54, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
Yes, Wikipedia is (for editors) fairly large. You can get very quick answers (normally) at the help desk. Or you can try using the editor's index. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 16:44, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

Tabbed view

Need help for making the simplest tabbed view possible. Also if there is any guide explaining this, would be wonderful. For example I need:
Tab 1 ——— Tab 2
Text 1 ——— Text 2

Thanks Ark25 (talk) 23:28, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

If you mean that "Text 1" and "Text 2" occupy the same area of the same page, but only one text is visible at a time (depending on which tab is selected), this would require javascript. It would also probably be undesirable in article space unless there is some way to get it to print properly, besides printing a separate (and mostly duplicate) copy showing the contents of each tab.
Or if you're talking about something like this, it is not really a tabbed view but a set of interlinked pages that share a common visual "wizard" interface.
The best approach would depend on what you intend to create with it. — CharlotteWebb 23:44, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
This template is probably what you are looking for. If you can't figure out how to use the template, feel free to leave a note on my talk page and I'll be glad to help you. Thingg⊕⊗ 03:56, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
To be honest I like the Template:PageTabs for the simplicity and pure "wikipedia code" (no extra html/css tricks) but I'm not sure its possible to change much of its apearance (colors, height, width, font etc)—and I would be happy to find out if it's possible. So I think for the moment Wikipedia:Articles for creation/Wizard-Introduction is better for me because even if it has extra "<div>s" and such, I can quickly change the visuals. Thanks to both. Ark25 (talk) 04:35, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

Background image on div

G'day villagers. I'm currently working on my proposal for the main page redesign, and have had a bit of difficulty with my code. It turns out in Wikicode you can't use url() declarations in your CSS. Any idea how I can set background-image:url('http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c4/Faded_globe.PNG') because of this? Many thanks Pretzelschatters 13:57, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

You need to get the style added in MediaWiki:Common.css. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 14:01, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
Mmmm. I would think it quite unlikely to get accepted, being a proposal and all. Any techie workarounds? Pretzelschatters 14:05, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
You simply can't, because mediawiki is designed to filter all such images. The only images you can use inline are those uploaded here or to commons, and only via [[Image:]] (or some extension tags like <imagemap>). What you can do is an overlay via [[Image:]] with CSS offsets but that is fragile in some browsers. You should probably put the relevant CSS into your monobook.css, but if your design requires Common.css changes, it seems unlikely to be accepted.
Side-note, you could have people using Firefox (and other mozilla-related browsers) view your page and load your CSS via URI command on the page in question, eg: javascript:var i=importStylesheet('User:Pretzels/proposal.css'). --Splarka (rant) 09:02, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

Namespace naming conflict...

I need to make an article called "Portal: Still Alive" (an expansion to the game Portal (video game) announced at E3). However, that gives me, well, a portal namespace page if I create it that way. Is there any around this? Is there a way to add a "Main:" before the name to force it to article space? --MASEM 18:30, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

And just for the record, I found that while ":" can precede an article title to point to the right place in searching, that colon is ignored when I then click to create a new page after failing a search (it still thinks its making a Portal page). --MASEM 18:38, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
Portal - Still Alive is the usual way to do it. --- RockMFR 18:47, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
Also see Template:Namespace. --- RockMFR 18:48, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
Great, that's what I needed to know. --MASEM 19:01, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
You can check the Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:Namespace for other examples, if you haven't already. — CharlotteWebb 15:09, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

Using inputbox

How exactly do you take full advantage of all of the features of (<)inputbox(>)? Graham (talk, contrib, SIGN HERE!!!) 06:58, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

See mw:Extension:Inputbox --—— Gadget850 (Ed) talk - 14:52, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

\operatorname and \bmod don't space...

<math>a \sin \theta = a \operatorname{sin} \theta \,\!</math>

produces

 .

This way, \operatorname is useless, being essentially synonymous with \mathrm:

<math>a \mathrm{sin} \theta = a \operatorname{sin} \theta \,\!</math>
 .

For now, I use the workaround

<math>a \sin \theta = a\,\operatorname{sin}\,\theta \,\!</math>
 .
<math>\phi = \operatorname{artanh}\,\beta \,\!</math>
  (notice the \,s).

\bmod has the same problem:

<math>n \bmod 2 \qquad n\,\bmod\,2 \,\!</math>
 .

Is this a bug in the TEX to PNG rendering? --A r m y 1 9 8 7 ! !  10:41, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

Maybe you should post this query to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics. Michael Hardy (talk) 12:57, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

Vandalism monitoring tools on another wiki

I know we have a number of vandalism monitoring tools that can do some nice filtering of recent chances (such as whitelisting users, etc), but most or all of them seem to be using IRC for the RS feeds. I'm trying to find something that could be used on vending machines another installation of MediaWiki, such as those hosted on Wikia. These wikis are a lot smaller and don't always have constant traffic, so there really wouldn't be a need to set up an IRC RC feed for them. Most of the time the need is to check edits already made, instead of watching live edits. Anyone have any suggestions for possible tools, or know of any that might work on another MediaWiki wiki? -- Ned Scott 21:27, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

I know that huggle might work in the future, but it gets either the IRC or Special:Recentchanges feed... so it can't review edits made before it started picking up Special:Recentchanges. It might be able to be tweaked to work on any wiki... but it's not going to happen anytime soon... Calvin 1998 (t-c) 21:31, 15 July 2008 (UTC)
Sorry, don't completely understand. Do you want to monitor all changes to a wiki? If so, then Special:RecentChanges will show them. And if you want to only monitor changes to selected pages, then why not just use the standard watchlist?
To be more constructive - User:Adodge/WLWP uses a custom-created RSS feed; perhaps that's what you're looking for? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 23:12, 15 July 2008 (UTC)
Someone asked me to help them find a way to filter trusted users from recent changes. -- Ned Scott 01:57, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

Odd(?) behavior of TOC links in a redirect page

  Resolved
 – Saintrain (talk) 01:26, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

Hi! Clicking on West Point redirects to United States Military Academy.

But, while in USMA, the links in the TOC point to "West Point#..." (which, weirdly, works!?). Going directly to the USMA article, the links point to "USMA#..."

Bug or feature? Enjoy. Saintrain (talk) 23:56, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

I think feature. Notice that the current URL still has "West_Point" in it. So those are just in-page anchor links. I think leaving the current URL the same as the redirect name was part of getting anchor redirects to work. A redirect no longer does an actual round-trip redirect. If it did I don't think anchors would work. Maybe I'm remembering incorrectly though... —Wknight94 (talk) 00:10, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

The HTML source, as you can see by inspecting it, only contains <a href="#Appointment_process">, etc. No page is specified before the fragment. Per the HTML standard, this refers to the element of that ID on the current page. Your browser is kindly inserting the URL of the current page when you hover, to make it more consistent. The current URL is "West_Point", not "United_States_Military_Academy", so the current behavior is quite correct. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 00:16, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

Good catches! Not wp at all. Thanks. Saintrain (talk) 01:26, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

Question on the SEARCH function.

I am trying to find some specific guidelines and essays but I keep getting my search flooded with HUNDREDS of archive pages from ANI's and RFAR's and such ... I have limited my search to the WP: and WT: namespaces but that does not help.

Is there any way to filter these "litigation" pages out of search results or else filter so that only policies, guidelines and essays (and related talk pages if the WT: namespace is selected) are to be seen in the search results (perhaps using some category tags as a filter criteria) ? Low Sea (talk) 05:22, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure what kind of policies, guidelines, or essays you are looking for, but you can find a lot at Category:Wikipedia official policy, Category:Wikipedia guidelines, and Category:Wikipedia essays. You could also try google. Good luck, Face 12:25, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
You can filter by keywords or page titles with a Google search like this one. The "inurl:/Wiki/Wikipedia" tells it to search in all sites which contain the URL "/wiki/Wikipedia", hwich in this case is the Wikipedia and Wikipedia talk namespaces. If you wanted to leave out the Wikipedia talk namespace, add "-intitle:talk". The "-intitle talk" specifies that it should not search for pages titled "talk", and the other intitle parameters in the above URL filter out other keywords. A program that searches within a specified category would be neat, but I don't know of one. Graham87 12:33, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
Virtually all guidelines, and most of the important essays, are in the editor's index. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 16:31, 15 July 2008 (UTC)
Graham, Thanks for the google lesson, I knew about site:en.wikipedia.org but not about the others. Very helpful.

Face and John Broughton, The stuff I am looking for is part of some old discussions that I remember reading many weeks ago. At the time I had no pressing need but now it looks like some of that material (if my memory is accurate) might prove helpful in formulating a proposal I am considering. Thank you anyways, it was kind of you to point out the links you did. Low Sea (talk) 16:05, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

"What's this?" link next to the minor edit checkbox should open in a new window

I've accidentally clicked this link more than once when trying to mark an edit as minor, and subsequently had to redo my work. For that matter, I've accidentally clicked on it when I was going to preview/save a major edit and then lost my work. I don't understand why this link doesn't open in a new window, when the "Editing help" one does (and is even labeled as such). For that matter, I also have reservations on the links in the two licensing lines, but these tend to be somewhat harder to click on accident. Are there any prior discussions or bug reports on this? —Dinoguy1000 20:45, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

Which browser are you using? I use Safari and the back button preserves text I've entered, which can be a real life saver. -- Ned Scott 06:59, 15 July 2008 (UTC)
Sounds like Internet Deplorer or possibly AOL, neither of which will include form input when caching (caching only the original version of the document before you began adding text to it), at least by default (this is, if anything is cached at all by default, shrug)... maybe it's in the settings somewhere, but I never found it. Suggest installing a different browser or a newer version of your current one if you cannot make this work properly. — CharlotteWebb 15:22, 15 July 2008 (UTC)
It's IE, and I know full well that the issue is browser-related more than anything... and I'd've upgraded to FF long ago if I could have, but these are library computers... =P —Dinoguy1000 16:08, 15 July 2008 (UTC)
Same problem here. There's not a lot I can do about the library's browser policy. Pretzelschatters 16:16, 15 July 2008 (UTC)
If the first label looked like this: This is a minor edit, rather than having a separate "(What's this?)" parenthetical comment, would people be less likely to accidentally click on the link? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 16:24, 15 July 2008 (UTC)
I don't think so... As I said before, the problem lies with the proximity of these links to the save/preview/changes buttons, especially when you're moving a little faster than you should be for whatever reason. Granted, most of the time I use the keyboard shortcuts, but sometimes I get (less?) lazy and just click the buttons. And there's been at least one time I've gone to mark an edit as minor only to click the link; in this case, since clicking the text "This is a minor edit" works the same as clicking the checkbox (and is the method I usually use ;) ), merging the "what's this?" link inline with the text would only exacerbate the problem, not to mention the difficulty you would face trying to get support for changing such an ingrained part of the UI. —Dinoguy1000 17:26, 15 July 2008 (UTC)
I really don't think the correct solution is to have web pages deciding where my new windows should go over my head. A better solution might be swapping the watchlist and minor options, which would move the link off well to the right os both tickboxes. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 17:34, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

Could something be set in the user .css file that would change the appearance? At the very least that would help out Dinoguy. -- Ned Scott 21:18, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

We could special-case IE here, and make an exception to our usual policy of no target attributes using IE-specific JS. Well, I say we, but it would have to be enwiki admins, not devs, because this message only has a link on enwiki. Unless we want to add target="_new" to all <a>'s on the edit page, which initially strikes me as horrible overkill. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 00:06, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

It does affect some other browsers in certain configurations, especially when using the secure server. --Splarka (rant) 07:21, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
This actually sounds like a good idea in general. If a user follows a link from the edit (or preview) screen to any another page but does not open it in a new window or tab, they probably meant to (for example, clicking on the preview of some wikilinks to see if they point to the right target, or if they need to be "disambiguated"). In the remaining 1-2% of the time where they have purposefully decided not to save the edit, they can just close the previous window or tab. Of course if this behavior annoys other people it might be better to implement it as a user-specific preference/js/gadget/whatever. — CharlotteWebb 13:05, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
I would support the creation of a script or gadget for this problem, it's certainly better than nothing. —Dinoguy1000 16:52, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

For starters you could try this, which would make every link IE-safe when in "edit", "show preview", or "show changes" mode (possibly also a few other situations that I haven't tested): 

function dont_lose_edits_by_stray_click(){ 
  if(wgAction == "edit" || (wgNamespaceNumber != -1 && wgAction == "submit")) {
    a = document.getElementsByTagName("a");
    for(var i = 0; i < a.length; i++) a[i].setAttribute("target", "_new");
    }
  };
addOnloadHook(dont_lose_edits_by_stray_click);

Of course maybe there should be a few exceptions such as "Cancel" and "Log out". If this is important the target attribute can be cleared from these after the for loop. — CharlotteWebb 19:27, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the script, I copied it to User:Dinoguy1000/safeIEeditlinks.js (to allow for easier future edits) and then added it to my monobook.js. —Dinoguy1000 19:58, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
Same here! Very cool. —Wknight94 (talk) 20:01, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

Cratless wikis?

10 days ago, I added this to the namechange page in an effort to help SUL hunters. I'm beginning to think that I wrote bollocks however. Not every wiki shows up in the 'languages' box at Wikipedia:Bureaucrats. But are there actually wikis without crats? I've removed the text for now. Cheers, Face 09:18, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

Yes there are plenty of wikis without 'crats, on these wikis 'crat functions are handled by Stewards. MiCkE 09:36, 15 July 2008 (UTC)
Here's the complete list of Wikipedia languages from Meta, as linked from the "Wikipedia languages" section of the Main Page. Graham87 14:51, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

Is it possible to construct templates with tabs?

 
Example: The imaginary picture of a final product, a template containing tabs. (Written in Chinese since the original discussion is moved from the Chinese Wikipedia.)

Hello, is it possible to construct templates with tabs (See the figure as an example)? It will be very usful in all wikipedia project, making many articles in different but related aspects more organized, especially for those involving generations of objects (Example: One tab for the related topics of one generation). In the original discussion, some technical problems appeared when the template is constructed. So I moved the discussion here to ask for help. The following two are the embryonic forms of the required templates (Written in Chinese since the topic is brought from the Chinese Wikipedia). Since my English is not good enough to describe the technical situation, please do try to click the tabs of the embryonic forms.

An embryonic forms of method 1(Using <ref>, whose disadvantage is more difficult to arrange typesetting):

  1. ^ 一部 | 丨部 | 丶部| 丿部 | 乙部 | 亅部
  1. ^ 二部|亠部|人部|-{儿部}-|入部|八部|冂部|冖部|冫部|-{几部}-|凵部|刀部|力部|勹部|匕部|匚部|匸部|十部|-{卜部}-|卩部|-{厂部}-|厶部|又部
  1. ^ -{口部}-|-{囗部}-|-{土部}-|-{士部}-|-{夂部}-|-{夊部}-|-{夕部}-|-{大部}-|-{女部}-|-{子部}-|-{宀部}-|-{寸部}-|-{小部}-|-{尢部}-|-{尸部}-|-{屮部}-|-{山部}-|-{巛部}-|-{工部}-|-{己部}-|-{巾部}-|-{干部}-|-{幺部}-|-{广部}-|-{廴部}-|-{廾部}-|-{弋部}-|-{弓部}-|-{彐部}-|-{彡部}-|-{彳部}-
  1. ^ -{心部}-|-{戈部}-|-{戶部}-|-{手部}-|-{支部}-|-{攴部}-|-{文部}-|-{斗部}-|-{斤部}-|-{方部}-|-{无部}-|-{日部}-|-{曰部}-|-{月部}-|-{木部}-|-{欠部}-|-{止部}-|-{歹部}-|-{殳部}-|-{毋部}-|-{比部}-|-{毛部}-|-{氏部}-|-{气部}-|-{水部}-|-{火部}-|-{爪部}-|-{父部}-|-{爻部}-|-{爿部}-|-{片部}-|-{牙部}-|-{牛部}-|-{犬部}-
  1. ^ -{玄部}-|-{玉部}-|-{瓜部}-|-{瓦部}-|-{甘部}-|-{生部}-|-{用部}-|-{田部}-|-{疋部}-|-{疒部}-|-{癶部}-|-{白部}-|-{皮部}-|-{皿部}-|-{目部}-|-{矛部}-|-{矢部}-|-{石部}-|-{示部}-|-{禸部}-|-{禾部}-|-{穴部}-|-{立部}-

And this one, an embryonic forms of method 2 (I don't know whether it had used the Anchor function):

一部 | 丨部 | 丶部| 丿部 | 乙部 | 亅部

二部|亠部|人部|-{儿部}-|入部|八部|冂部|冖部|冫部|-{几部}-|凵部|刀部|力部|勹部|匕部|匚部|匸部|十部|-{卜部}-|卩部|-{厂部}-|厶部|又部

-{口部}-|-{囗部}-|-{土部}-|-{士部}-|-{夂部}-|-{夊部}-|-{夕部}-|-{大部}-|-{女部}-|-{子部}-|-{宀部}-|-{寸部}-|-{小部}-|-{尢部}-|-{尸部}-|-{屮部}-|-{山部}-|-{巛部}-|-{工部}-|-{己部}-|-{巾部}-|-{干部}-|-{幺部}-|-{广部}-|-{廴部}-|-{廾部}-|-{弋部}-|-{弓部}-|-{彐部}-|-{彡部}-|-{彳部}-

-{心部}-|-{戈部}-|-{戶部}-|-{手部}-|-{支部}-|-{攴部}-|-{文部}-|-{斗部}-|-{斤部}-|-{方部}-|-{无部}-|-{日部}-|-{曰部}-|-{月部}-|-{木部}-|-{欠部}-|-{止部}-|-{歹部}-|-{殳部}-|-{毋部}-|-{比部}-|-{毛部}-|-{氏部}-|-{气部}-|-{水部}-|-{火部}-|-{爪部}-|-{父部}-|-{爻部}-|-{爿部}-|-{片部}-|-{牙部}-|-{牛部}-|-{犬部}-

-{玄部}-|-{玉部}-|-{瓜部}-|-{瓦部}-|-{甘部}-|-{生部}-|-{用部}-|-{田部}-|-{疋部}-|-{疒部}-|-{癶部}-|-{白部}-|-{皮部}-|-{皿部}-|-{目部}-|-{矛部}-|-{矢部}-|-{石部}-|-{示部}-|-{禸部}-|-{禾部}-|-{穴部}-|-{立部}-

The original discussion is from the Chinese Wikipedia, as a reference if you can read Chinese.

Angelalive (talk) 13:24, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

Template:PageTabs, perhaps? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 16:33, 15 July 2008 (UTC)
 
Another imaginary example in English. Hope it helps explain.
I have tried using Template:PageTabs, but seems not work. Template:PageTabs really gives an outlook with tabs, but involving the changes of different pages when clicking another tab (i.e. In Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/biographies/M, the page changes to Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/biographies/S after clicking the tab-S). So it's not suitable for the required template.Angelalive (talk) 17:20, 15 July 2008 (UTC)
See also: zh:Wikipedia:互助客栈/技术#有可能編寫出有分頁的模板嗎？.--PhiLiP (talk) 17:29, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

I think the only really elegant solution for this would be to use Javascript (otherwise, you're relying on really ugly hacks like the two you have above). If you can get the necessary support and find someone to write the script, this would be a really nice addition to {{Navbox}} and company. —Dinoguy1000 17:56, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

I've written a few JS tabbers for mediawiki, the latest was on wikiality.com. Perhaps it could be adapted as a starting point. Several things to keep in mind: it should show all by default if there is no JS enabled (and you could have all but the first hidden by default even before page load, using appendCSS before addOnloadHook, preventing annoying page-flash when the document loads), and all sections should display when printing, unless the whole object is meant to be hidden. --Splarka (rant) 07:25, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

Vandalism via Twinkle

As many of you are aware, an "Avril troll" has been vandalising as of late, creating numerous sock-puppet accounts. Lately, she has been using twinkle to remove backlinks to article using this programme as pure vandalism e.g. the links do not need to be removed. I think we shouldn't make Twinkle available to anyone, maybe possibly have it limited to certain groups. The fact that people can vandalise using twinkle is for cause of concern. D.M.N. (talk) 15:49, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

Probably better posted on the proposals page. (Regarding the proposal: other tools, such as AWB and Vandal Fighter, are restricted in who can use them.) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 16:16, 15 July 2008 (UTC)
The vandal claims to be using a local version of Twinkle anyway (embedded in his browser). –xeno (talk) 17:46, 15 July 2008 (UTC)
It is obviously not TWINKLE's fault, since a determined vandal could be using some other automation tool. More important issue is that vandal was able to make 466 edits in 63 seconds. This API query shows me that, as a non-admin, I can only make 8 moves per 60 seconds. I think the project needs some ratelimit on edits. Of course, Wikipedia:Abuse filter would be even better solution, but it seems some people are not going to let it happen. —AlexSm 18:04, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

Anyone who knows how to program can write a twenty-line Python script in an hour that does everything they need it to. Restricting things like AWB and Twinkle will do more harm than good, since it will reduce the pool of vandal-fighters more than vandals. Besides, the community has no ability to decide who a private person gives the program he wrote out to. The correct solution here is to consider edit throttles for non-bots. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 00:14, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

It should also be pointed out that any half decent programmer will be able to comment out the code that check if the user is part of group x or on approval list y --Chris 04:11, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
I agree with edit throttles for non bots and non admins. Not even hugglers should be making more than say 15 edits per minute, that's giving them 4 seconds to review the edit and do the needful. –xeno (talk) 12:52, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
I'd settle for more (higher rates rollback can be needed for non-admins, 10 was too low), but leaving it at more than 50 per minute is crazy anyway. -- lucasbfr talk 13:05, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
Hrm I guess if we think of it in those terms, 10 for non rollbackers and say 25 for rollbackers... –xeno (talk) 13:08, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
Rollback has its own ratelimit, so if devs could keep it this way, then there is no need to worry about rollbackers. —AlexSm 16:16, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
Any chance of reinstating the unlink feature now it's been determined that this sort of vandalism can be done with or without Twinkle's help? Thanks, Steve T • C 15:18, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
I'd suggest directing that question to User talk:Maxim. –xeno (talk) 15:20, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
Thanks; the facility has now been restored. Steve T • C 19:48, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

What links here blues

To clean up after moving Blue Mountains to Blue Mountains (Australia) and moving the disambiguation into the former's place, I've used WhatLinksHere for Blue Mountains to identify and correct lingering references to the new disambiguation page. However, try as I may, several entries confound me. For example, WhatLinksHere says Portal:Australia/Anniversaries/January still links to Blue Mountains, even though it's been 14+ hours since I changed the obvious wikilinks. I've tried WP:PURGE, WP:BYPASS, bowing to the east, pinky extension, etc., but I can't figure out why several such pages (Portal:Australia/Featured picture/2007, etc.) refuse to leave the list. Am I seeing the same thing others see? Is there really a link there somewhere? What's going on? —EncMstr (talk) 17:55, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

I don't see the listings currently. In some cases a null edit is required to update listings and a purge isn't enough. Maybe somebody made null edits or maybe it automatically updated since your post. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:30, 15 July 2008 (UTC)
Thank you very much. A null edit cleared up Portal:New South Wales. I didn't think null edits were needed since about the time I became active. It kinda makes sense though: transclusion complexities not propagating onto combined pages. Thanks! —EncMstr (talk) 21:41, 15 July 2008 (UTC)
Null edits aren't normally required, but the job queue's running long at the moment. Algebraist 10:59, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

Text gettting smaller

Hey. Is there some keyboard shortcut that makes wikipedia font smaller/larger? Lately, I've been using Crtl+C and Crtl+V to paste alot, but every once in a while, the font goes smaller. It only makes the font smaller in the English Wikipedia. Im using Firefox 3.0 on Windows Vista. Thanks. TALKIN PIE EATER REVIEW ME 02:13, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

(Ctrl +) and (Ctrl -) or (Cmd +) and (Cmd -) usually change font size. Go the View menu and go to Zoom. There are options there for increasing or decreasing the page zoom. Cheers. --MZMcBride (talk) 02:16, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
I believe those commands are dependent on the browser being used, not on Wikipedia. ·:· Will Beback ·:· 04:44, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
Holding Ctrl and using the mouse wheel also zooms if you have a scroll mouse, and I often do that by mistake when using other Ctrl- shortcuts. But you say it only affects the English Wikipedia? No other websites, other language Wikipedias, or sister projects? I can't think of what that would be, I'm afraid. Olaf Davis | Talk 11:11, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

Missing page history

What happened to every July post on my talk page? All of them got wiped out. The only traces left by those discussions were found at this Google cache. Alexius08 is welcome to talk about his contributions. 12:25, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

Deleted by SlimVirgin, citing a BLP complaint. Algebraist 12:29, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
Who complained about it? Alexius08 is welcome to talk about his contributions. 12:36, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
Ask SlimVirgin. Algebraist 12:48, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

File size limit for photo submissions?

I just talked to a friend of mine who is not a Wikipedia editor, they just use the site for reference. The person tried to send some photos to photosubmission wikimedia.org, but the message was rejected by the Wikimedia mail server due to file size (the person thought the e-mail was about 6-7 MB in size with the attachments). What is the limit for e-mails sent to Wikimedia? Should it be disabled for photo submissions? Kelly hi! 13:52, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

If you don't get an answer here, try posting at Wikipedia talk:Contact us/Photo submission. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 00:52, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
6-7MB should work as far as I know (at least on the mail server), but you might have problems on your server's end getting them sent out. --brion (talk) 06:31, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

"otheruses-number" template may be malfunctioning

I believe the template Template:Otheruses-number isn't working properly. I went to the 211 article and otheruses-number) linked to the 210 (number) article instead of the 211 (number) article. I started looking at other nearby year articles and in the 209 article otheruses-number links to the 200 (number) article instead of the 209 (number) article. Naufana : talk 16:30, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

The template is explicitly designed to behave this way. Specifically, if a number is less than 200, it links to Number (number), if the number is between 200 and 300, the template links to floor(number,10) (number), and if the number is 300 or more, it links to floor(number,100) (number). —Dinoguy1000 17:00, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

I've reverted recent changes at Template:Otheruses-number. This behavior is clearly incorrect. --- RockMFR 17:02, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

Thank you RockMFR, I should have thought to look there first. Naufana : talk 18:56, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

The [edit] link for the lead section disappeared !?

I have been turning on the related option in "my preferences", but now I cannot find it in any English Wikipedia article. At this moment I am using Windows XP and browsing with IE7. Is it my own fault or a Wikipedia's problem? --Quest for Truth (talk) 18:15, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

It's there for me using FF 2.0.0.15 on Win XP. – ukexpat (talk) 18:46, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
Possible causes: JavaScript is disabled in your browser; there is a JavaScript error in your monobook.js (doesn't seem to be the case here); option "Enable section editing via [edit] links" is unchecked in your preferences; a page doesn't have any [edit] section links; a page is using {{wrongtitle}} template. —AlexSm 19:23, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
One more thing, the link also won't appear when looking through a page's history. —Dinoguy1000 20:03, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
Also on some pages with the "skip to bottom" code (such as the help desk), the box obscures, or partially obscures, the edit link. – ukexpat (talk) 20:50, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
That's true of any number of templates and scripts that put stuff up in that general area, since most of them aren't designed to check for conflicts like that (if it's even possible to do so). —Dinoguy1000 21:07, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

Thank you very much for all of you trying to help. Finally I know what is the source of the problem. In "my preference", I have selected "wikiEd" and "Friendly" in the Gadgets menu as I usually use Firefox. After lots of trials, "Friendly" is the cause of the problem. No matter how I set the other items, the lead section [edit] link disappear if I enable "Friendly" and the lead section [edit] link reappear if I disable "Friendly". In addition, I notice that occasionally there is a warning symbol which is an exclamation mark inside a yellow triangle at the bottom-left corner. When "Friendly" is enabled, three errors occur. When "wikiEd" is enabled, one error occur. When both "Friendly" and "wikiEd" are enabled, four errors occur! --Quest for Truth (talk) 23:07, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

I use WikiEd and Friendly (and Twinkle too, plus a bunch of other scripts) and I still see the edit link (except as noted above and on pages where the protection padlock is displayed). I have the scripts installed in my monoboo.js rather than as gadgets - I wonder if that makes a difference. – ukexpat (talk) 23:45, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
Well you are using FF and he is using IE7. I'm quite sure neither twinkle nor friendly support IE, though they should degrade gracefully. If they don't someone ought to investigate. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:55, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

"Comments" section disappearing from album boxes

Hi. In attempting to implement the new "C" grading into the existing {{album}} boxes, I'm finding that the "comments" subpage is disappearing. Here's one example, with comments subpage showing and without. The only change to the box was that "B" was altered to "C". I'm pretty useless with templates. I had a look at the coding, here, and thought that the problem might be so simple as adding " C | c |" to BOTTOM_TEXT (here). However, that didn't seem to do it in my first test, and being scared to death of templates I figured I'd better revert and ask for help. I kind of wonder now if I just panicked too quickly, but I'm not about to monkey around with it. Help? --Moonriddengirl (talk) 13:32, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

I'm not a template expert either, but I note that template changes propagate slowly (this is so a change to a widely-used template doesn't overwhelm the servers, which otherwise might stop doing every else and start changing all the affected pages). Also, there is a specialized page for requesting changes to existing templates as well as new ones: Wikipedia:Requested templates. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 13:53, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for that warning! I will henceforth make no changes to templates unless they're "subst" templates. :) I guess I'll take this question over there, then. I'm not sure how this change is implemented, but I suspect that the editors who contribute there can figure it out. Appreciate the pointer. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 14:15, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

Removing extra lines in a template?

I've been working on {{Infobox Artist Awards}}. Take a look at the documentation for how to use it. The problem, though, is that if the code on the left is entered, then the box on the right is created. The problem is that the rows are longer than they should be for BRIT Awards and Meteor Music Awards. The reason this is happening is because in the code, there are ifeq for each row and if the row does not exist (such as the Grammy award, which comes after the BRIT), then it creates an empty line. One empty line is fine, it does nothing. However, two or more empty lines creates a new paragraph and so that's why the rows get stretched.

I've tried several methods to try and fix this but most end up squeezing the table so much that the wikitable code does not work because rows cannot be on the same line; this includes trying to add comments to comment out extra lines and putting ifeq opening statements on the same line as the previous ifeq closing statements.

If you think you can solve this then free feel to experiment at the sandbox, here: Template:Infobox Artist Awards/sandbox. Gary King (talk) 17:03, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

This is a common problem for infobox templates. The two usual ways of getting around it are to either put {{!-}} at the end of the of the #if (not going to work in this case), or to use HTML. --- RockMFR 17:32, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
I don't think using HTML is an option because {{won}} and {{nom}} use the wikitable syntax. Gary King (talk) 17:38, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
Or you can put |- outside of the #if and the extra rows will get removed by HTMLTidy. --- RockMFR 17:39, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
Excellent, that did it. Gary King (talk) 17:44, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

Very unusual bot-created redirect

I was randomly browsing wikipedia when I came across a very oddly titled redirect article, "SchlA$?fli" (which redirects to Ludwig Schläfli). It's categorised as Category:Redirects from title without diacritics, and it looks to me like it may be some kind of error, but I can't be sure so I wanted the opinion of others. I hope this was the right place to post this! Xmoogle (talk) 19:17, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

In UTF-8, ä is 0xC3 0xA4, which in ISO-8859-1 means ä, which is what the edit summary contains. Not sure whether the redirect is of any use, though... --A r m y 1 9 8 7 ! !  19:37, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
I personally still think it's a glitch, though that does explain it a little. Xmoogle (talk) 19:41, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
The intended redirect title, then, was probably Schlafli. —Dinoguy1000 19:47, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
Most likely problems with ISO-8859-1(Western) to UTF-8(Unicode) conversion. English Wikipedia is in UTF-8, I suppose some bots are accidentally using ISO-8859-1. Calvin 1998 (t-c) 19:50, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
(e/c). Probably Schläfli but the ä did not render properly in the OP's browser. – ukexpat (talk) 19:54, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
Schläfli and SchlA$?fli are separate pages. Calvin 1998 (t-c) 19:56, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
Yes, they're both redirects to Ludwig Schläfli :) Xmoogle (talk) 21:34, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

I've deleted it as bloody useless (see CSD R3 and WP:SNOW). For anyone interested, it was created on 15:13, 23 March 2008 by Eubot (talk · contribs) with the edit summary "Schläfli". —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 23:25, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

What I suspect happened was that:
  • The bot seems to have been creating redirects to articles with diacritics in their title from the corresponding titles without diacritics. (Hard to tell exactly, since it was never formally approved for that specific task, but that's what the contribs and the note on the bot's user page suggest.)
  • It stumbled across the page Schläfli, which had been created earlier as a redirect, and tried to convert the title to a US-ASCII equivalent. The conversion "¤" → "$?" seems to have been a bug. (Probably whoever set up the conversion table though "¤" might be equivalent to "$", but they weren't sure so they entered it as "$?"...)
  • Observing that Schläfli was already a redirect, the bot, in order to avoid creating double redirects, redirected SchlA$?fli directly to the target page Ludwig Schläfli and noted the original title in the edit summary.
In short, the bot made a minor mistake (among a whole bunch of good edits) and created a useless redirect, it sat without causing any trouble for a few months until Xmoogle spotted it, and now it's been deleted. Someone might want to mention it to the bot's operator, Eugene van der Pijll, so that the bug can be fixed, but other than that, everything seems to be in order. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 23:46, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

Blocking pages from Google search? How is it done?

I was checking up on Zachary Jaydon, a persistent fraud that uses hoax Wikipedia articles to bolster his resume, and discovered an interesting thing: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Zachary Jaydon (3rd nomination) no longer comes up via Google search, even though it used to be their second listing. I even tried specific search phrases from the article to guarantee it would come up on the first few listings for the phrase. Is there something that has been done on our side, or did he manage to trick Google into removing the page from their search tree?
Kww (talk) 19:44, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

No, only http://en.wikipedia.org/robots.txt controls what Google's webcrawlers can and can't see. AFD and all it's subpages are blocked, I believe. Calvin 1998 (t-c) 19:47, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
I vaguely remember some discussion about excluding certain things from Google - AFDs with not-so-nice things said about article subjects, etc. But I don't know of more details... —Wknight94 (talk) 19:49, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
Only devs with shell access can change robots.txt, and there isn't any other way to exclude pages from webcrawlers like Google's. AFD and all subpages are blocked (search for Wikipedia:Articles for deletion at http://en.wikipedia.org/robots.txt/ Calvin 1998 (t-c) 20:00, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
Right, I saw that. I just thought I remembered a discussion of adding AFD to that exclusion list. But I couldn't begin to tell you where that discussion was/is. —Wknight94 (talk) 20:07, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
Funny thing was the listed reason for removing AfDs from search bots wasn't the subject of the articles, but the commenters. Apparently on another language wiki there were complaints about how editor's AfD comments were the top results for their names. Personally, I'd rather have them be searchable simply because of the limitations of our own internal search, but I can understand some of the reasons to exclude them. -- Ned Scott 02:10, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
Oh, but there were at least a few discussions after the fact, once people started to notice. -- Ned Scott 02:12, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
This tool seems to work well for its intended purpose. We should ask Eagle_101 to make a similar one for searching AFDs. — CharlotteWebb 18:29, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

Sidebar

Is there a way for individual users to change their sidebar? I know admins can change Mediawiki:sidebar to change the sidebar for everyone, but can an individual user use their monobook.js page to add links that they commonly use to their own sidebar? --Andrew from NC (talk) 10:11, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Tools/Navigation shortcuts. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 12:50, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
Ohh cool, i never knew. Gotta try this out. — chandler — 19:36, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for that! --Andrew from NC (talk) 22:25, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

Misssing entry in deletion log

I deleted ca half an hour ago VulGarrity completing another editor's closure of Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/VulGarrity, but the deletion does not seem to be logged. Can someone please confirm my perception and illuminate me if that happens more often etc... FWIW, i deleted via Twinkle.--Tikiwont (talk) 12:16, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

It happens, yes, but I'm almost certain it could not have made a difference whether you used a javascript tool or clicked the button manually, as the same form data is sent to the server in any case. If it is valid and received properly, two database changes occur: 1. moving the edits from the 'revision' table to the 'archive' and 2. adding a log entry with the page title and your name, time-stamp, and purported reason for deleting. For some reason the step 2 never happened, but there is nothing you can do to make this more or less likely to happen (or maybe I'm wrong, or maybe you have "oversight" rights and just don't know it yet  ). — CharlotteWebb 13:56, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
I reckoned the same regarding it being independent of the way the deletion is launched. I'll now restore and re-delete.--Tikiwont (talk) 14:22, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
This just happened to someone else the other day (couldn't tell you where I heard it off-hand). Maybe a bug report is in order. —Wknight94 (talk) 14:28, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
Look at that, I found it: Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Archive155#I deleted a page, but I don't see it in the log... Guess it's not as rare as Ral315 would have you believe!  :) —Wknight94 (talk) 14:31, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

There was already a related bug report, 14826 [10], to which I have added.--Tikiwont (talk) 05:51, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

Image:Hex_game_over.png

Where ist this picture? It has no description page on en and no description page on commons and no history. Perhaps it is possible to move it to commons? Greetings --Heiko (talk) 12:20, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

It's on this wiki, just it has no description page. That's probably because it's incredibly (relatively) old (it was originally uploaded in 2002!). Given that DreamGuy's rotation of it in 2005 was commented with "{{pd}} Hex game board, after game", it's probably safe to say that the image is in the public domain. I'd appreciate knowing from someone what our image licensing policies were like back in 2002 (I joined in 2005) to confirm whatever possible about the license of the image, but the solution is clearly just to create an image description page with a license tag (presumably {{PD-user}}). {{Nihiltres|talk|log}} 13:23, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
the image use policy was created a few days before the file was uploaded. This is how it was when the file was uploaded, clearly showing that only freely licensed images were acceptable at that time. Graham87 04:46, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

Strange message

When I went to the article Horton Hears a Who (film), I got a strange message that filled up like most of the screen, with a black background. It said, "This is the Zodiac speaking. You people seem so smart, yet I get away with so much. Here is a letter for you smart people:", and then it had a bunch of weird symbols and a big Celtic cross on the bottom. I took a screenshot of it, but I don't know if I'm allowed to upload it. It wasn't in the edit history, and even if you scrolled down, it would still follow your screen. It only seemed to be in that particular article though. Does anyone know what's going on? Green caterpillar (talk) 16:22, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

The transcluded {{Box Office Leaders}} was vandalised by a now blocked IP. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:28, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
Just some person being strange, there are a lot of them out there. Chillum 16:31, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

They've also vandalised something being transcluded to Czechoslovakia and British Raj, but I can't work out what. --Rlandmann (talk) 02:18, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

It was {{WPFCevent}}. I fixed the articles by purging. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:31, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

Spread list over multiple columns

  1. item 1
  2. item 2
  1. item 3
  2. item 4

I would like to spread a long numerated list over 2 or three columns, since otherwise it takes up an awful amount of space. The problem is the numeration of the items. Does someone have a solution to this problem? The desired result in the above example would be that item 3 and item 4 are listed as 3. and 4. Tomeasytalk 16:37, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

Unclear, but I think you want to use wikitable syntax instead (described at Help:Table) possible with colspan=. Example:
item 1 item 2 item a
item 3 item 4
—EncMstr (talk) 16:52, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
Thanks, but that's not it. See, I want to use the '#' to produce the ordinal, rather than typing it by hand or leaving it out as you did in your example. My problem is that with the Columns the hash restarts counting at one, instead of counting through. BTW, which problem did you think you were solving? Tomeasytalk 17:29, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
I think {{Columns-list}} may be what you are looking for. Edit section to see code.
  1. a
  2. b
  3. c
  4. d
  5. e
  6. f
  7. g
  8. h
  9. i
  10. j
  11. k
  12. l
  13. m
  14. n
  15. o
  16. p
  17. q
  18. r
  19. s
 – ukexpat (talk) 17:48, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
Except that it won't work in IE. If all else fails, you could try <ol start="#"/>, so for instance, your example would be as follows:
  1. item 1
  2. item 2
  1. item 3
  2. item 4
—Dinoguy1000 17:56, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for the heads up about browser incompatibility. I have added a note to Template:Columns-list. – ukexpat (talk) 18:09, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

Great, that's what I was looking for. Tomeasytalk 18:19, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

Infoboxes

I currently run an internal wiki tool for my company and would like to add infoboxes to client profiles. I have viewed multiple pages on this matter and tried to use some of the infobox templates already made but none of them seem to work. I'm looking for any insight into this matter. --76.246.107.198 (talk) 22:20, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

First make sure the wiki runs MediaWiki and not something else. If you are sure it is, you might want to check out Help:Infobox and make sure that you are taking into account the different CSS classes from Mediawiki:Common.css and Mediawiki:Monobook.css that the wiki-tables used rely on, and the fact that they all use the meta-template Template:Infobox. Calvin 1998 (t-c) 22:33, 16 July 2008 (UTC)
Another reason infoboxes and other Wikipedia templates may not work is that Wikipedia has a customised installation of MediaWiki, which may affect things. If you look at Special:Version, you'll see some of the extensions used - ExpandTemplates looks like it might be one culprit. Wikipedia also uses HTML Tidy, which fixes a lot of issues in converting wikitext and templates to HTML, which could also be responsible. Confusing Manifestation(Say hi!) 02:41, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
No, ExpandTemplates has no effect on the way pages are parsed. — Werdna • talk 02:49, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
To ask the obvious, have you installed mw:Extension:ParserFunctions? This extension is necessary for {{Infobox}} to work. —Dinoguy1000 16:08, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

I've downloaded ParserFunction... how is this used. Do I need to Upload it to the wiki or is having it on my computer all that is required? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.246.107.198 (talk) 22:56, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

Yes, it has to be uploaded to the Extensions subfolder on your wiki, then called from LocalSettings.php. There are more detailed installation instructions on mw:Extension:ParserFunctions. —Dinoguy1000 15:35, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

Tour de France

There seems to be a problem opening several of the Tour de France pages:

In each case, all I can see is a completely blank page, and this is the same from both my laptop and PC. Other years e.g. 2005 Tour de France seem fine. Can someone take a look to see if the problem can be fixed. Cheers. Bikeroo (talk) 10:03, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

Confirm in Firefox 3.0.1. Fine in IE and Opera. Fine logged out, broken logged in on all three. Algebraist 10:08, 19 July 2008 (UTC)
1995 Tour de France fine before this edit, 1994 fine before this. Related to WP:HD#Problem viewing Hexapoda perhaps? Algebraist 10:18, 19 July 2008 (UTC)
1995 now broken logged-in or -out. I suppose that's a caching issue. Algebraist 10:34, 19 July 2008 (UTC)
Thanks - all seem fine now. Bikeroo (talk) 11:19, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

timeline

Just a short notice, on this and other servers are pages with timeline tags not working, see Wikipedia:EasyTimeline. The page mw:Extension:EasyTimeline was working 10 minutes ago, but not any more. --wimmel (talk) 10:24, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

See previous section. Algebraist 10:25, 19 July 2008 (UTC)
Thanks, it is solved now. --wimmel (talk) 11:08, 19 July 2008 (UTC)
What was the problem? Algebraist 11:25, 19 July 2008 (UTC)
Unknown exactly, but mark (knams sysadmin) simply put in place an older version of the timeline extension, and hopefully another admin will sort it out when they have the time (with wikimania and all that going on remember?) --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:49, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

George W. Bush

What the hell has happened to his page? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Bush Phalanxia (talk) 21:20, 19 July 2008 (UTC) Hmm, it seems to have gone now, but it was : http://i291.photobucket.com/albums/ll286/Phalanxia/Zodiaz-1.jpg —Preceding unsigned comment added by Phalanxia (talk • contribs) 21:26, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

Template vandalism. A lot of it about lately. Algebraist 21:28, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

Mathematical Expressions

How would I "wikify" the expression Cos(42°)=(Sqrt[10+2Sqrt[5]]+Sqrt[15]-Sqrt[3])/8? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.12.42.36 (talk) 02:49, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

Use LaTeX. SharkD (talk) 02:57, 20 July 2008 (UTC)
Using the information at WP:MATH (and a Google search for help on the degree symbol, the parser doesn't like just sticking "°" in there for some reason), something like this: <math>\cos(42\,^\circ)=\frac{\sqrt{10+2\sqrt{5}}+\sqrt{15}-\sqrt{3}}{8}</math>. This results in  . Anomie⚔ 03:09, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

Vandal hack?

Okay, I'm having trouble recreating this, but I need to bring this to someone's attention. It looks like a vandal attacked the page for Avatar: the Last Airbender tonight [no surprise; it's a television series that ended tonight], but when I was going through the code, I found no actual code to support what I saw with my own eyes. The version I'm linking below appears to come up with the vandalism reliably, but I definitely did not see the code for it between that version and the previous, so I really have to wonder if it's a hack. A friend of mine opened it in IE and saw nothing, but found it in Firefox. I've spotted it in Firefox and Mozilla.

I took a screenshot of the vandalism, if you can't see it on this link I will be happy to upload the image. 71.48.190.42 (talk) 04:35, 20 July 2008 (UTC) http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Avatar:_The_Last_Airbender&oldid=226741718

Most likely a template used on that pages was vandalised. This sort of vandalism has been happening frequently the last few days. Raven4x4x (talk) 04:43, 20 July 2008 (UTC)
[edit conflict]It could be template vandalism (where a vandal will mess up the code of a page that is included in the page, such as an infobox). I believe there has been a spree of that going on lately. It seems to be fixed now. - Icewedge (talk) 04:45, 20 July 2008 (UTC)
It was likely {{Contains Chinese text}}. [11] -- RattleMan 04:52, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

CSS question

Folks, would someone please post the CSS code to disable the "You have new messages" bar? Thanks in advance. – ukexpat (talk) 21:28, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

It doesn't have an id, just a class.
.usermessage {display: none}
will kill it, but I've no idea how much collateral damage is involved. Hopefully someone knows a smarter way. Algebraist 21:43, 19 July 2008 (UTC)
.usermessage is only used for "you have new messages". At least at present, and I don't see it changing anytime soon. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 17:30, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

+ tab

Am I just imagining it, or didn't there use to be a "+" tab at the top of the "edit this page" page of Discussion pages (<-- sorry about the number of "pages" there!). It enabled one to start and head a new discussion quickly and easily. The option seems still to be there in other-language Wikipedias, so why has it gone from en:wikipedia? Is the disappearance deliberate, or a mistake? -- Picapica (talk) 23:46, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

The '+' tab, that used to live next to 'edit this page', lives on under the name 'new section'. Algebraist 00:17, 20 July 2008 (UTC)
There should still be something. Maybe you have a "new section" tab which can be changed to "+" at Gadgets in Special:Preferences. If you don't see any of them then which skin are you using? PrimeHunter (talk) 00:17, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

OK, thanks! I was so intent in looking for the + tab that I didn't spot "new section". Must have been doing too much editing in other-language Wikipedias of late..! -- Picapica (talk) 21:53, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

Interlanguage links

Where should I ask for adding the interlanguage interwiki links to the translations of Wikipedia:Deletion policy? For example the french project, fr:Aide:Comment supprimer une page has only the link to the english project. Ark25 (talk) 09:21, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

Edit the English page Wikipedia:Deletion policy and look for the interlanguage links - they're near the end. Select them and copy them to the clipboard, and paste them in to the French Wikipedia - you can delete the "fr:" link from the French Wikipedia page, since it would just link back to the French page. The best place to ask questions like this is the help desk or the new contributor's help page. If you are asking if you need permission to add interlanguage links, then the answer is no ... anyone can add any interlanguage link to any page they see fit, as long as they can edit it. Graham87 09:36, 20 July 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for the detailed answer. I don't have accounts on all that languages, I prefere someone else do all that interwiki job. Also I don't feel confortable to edit anonymously — without having a user on a wiki. So there is no place where you can ask this things, and then someone takes the request and start a bot for fixing all the interwiki links, I guess? Ark25 (talk) 09:49, 20 July 2008 (UTC)
Not that I know of. But the bots will come around fairly soon and fix the links automatically. Graham87 10:23, 20 July 2008 (UTC)
Two years before, the english project had links to other 12 languages – [12]. The italian one had links to only 4 - [13]. Today the italian project still has only 4 links. So I think there is not many chances a robot will come anytime soon. Ark25 (talk) 12:22, 20 July 2008 (UTC)
In such case you can ask someone who operates an interwiki bot. You can find an interwiki bot using Wikipedia:Bots/Status, looking through history of some article with interwiki, looking through Recent changes with bot edits shown, etc. --Martynas Patasius (talk) 21:12, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

Interactive maths

Before I invest any time in coding an idea that may not come off- can I ask if this idea is feasible. Instead of applying a parameter to a template-{{mortgage_repayment|sum|years|rate}}, Is it possible to display a datainputbox on the page, that the reader fills in- clicks a submit button, which refreshes the page (passing the parameters to the template) and the page displays the calculated information? Is this documented anywhere? What are the constrains et c.? I have Help:Advanced template and one on input boxes put the problem seem to be passing the data as a parameter to an url rather than passing the data as an url. Initially, I this would be used on wikibooks.ClemRutter (talk) 11:19, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

No, there isn't any feature I'm aware of that can do this (and that includes the arcane things like ImageMap and inputboxes). I would be very surprised to find one. It's probably possible using JavaScript, but that's limiting to those who can use JavaScript. Perhaps you should file a bug requesting such a feature. {{Nihiltres|talk|log}} 14:44, 20 July 2008 (UTC)
OK, thanks for confirming my suspicions. I will work up a couple of examples, and ponder over the specification- I had looked at inputboxes, but not to the extent of examining the php. I would be nice to present the solution when filing a bug request. ClemRutter (talk) 18:49, 20 July 2008 (UTC)
It might be possible using an edit inputbox preview. But it would be very bad looking, (e.g. there would be an editbox on the page). Prodego talk 19:22, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

User signature goes to article instead of user

I changed the color of my user name from "007FFF" to "navy". I changed nothing else. Now suddenly my user signature goes to Henri Matisse instead of my user page. How to fix this? Change the color back? ( Doesn't make sense.) Thanks, —Mattisse (Talk) 22:55, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

Copy your whole signature code here for us to look at. — Carl (CBM · talk) 22:58, 20 July 2008 (UTC)
My whole signature: —[[Mattisse|<font color="navy">'''Mattisse'''</font>]] ([[User talk:Mattisse|Talk]]) —Mattisse (Talk) 23:04, 20 July 2008 (UTC)
It should be —[[User:Mattisse|<font color="navy">'''Mattisse'''</font>]] ([[User talk:Mattisse|Talk]]) . Algebraist 23:05, 20 July 2008 (UTC)
Hum, don't know how that happened. Thanks! —Mattisse (Talk) 23:10, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

"This is the Zodiac speaking. Tell all the other websites that they are in for a big treat."

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

ummm... what's the deal here? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.175.13.160 (talk) 02:12, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

It was vandalism of a transcluded template. If you still see the vandalized version of the article then try to bypass your cache. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:14, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

-Thanks —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.175.13.160 (talk) 02:15, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

User script idea

I posted this at WT:User scripts, but it doesn't seem to be very well-watched. Anyhow, my idea is thus: basically what it does is allows you to right click on a (user/wikipedia/article) talk page section and it adds a link-to-that-section to a user subpage of your choosing, to remind you to return to threads you're need to check back on. Whaddyathink? Any takers? –xeno (talk) 15:37, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure how to make it react to a right-click, but it would be easy to add a [bookmark] link next to the section [edit] link which would do the same thing, which is to automatically add it to some sandbox page in your user-space. Of course these links will fail if the == Headline text == of the section is changed, or if the section is sent to an archive, etc. Stepping back a bit, however, one could argue in favor of giving the current Special:Watchlist feature a major overhaul, especially if you don't want everyone and their pet poodle to know which threads you are watching. — CharlotteWebb 16:17, 21 July 2008 (UTC)
That would be great too. the watchlist thing seems like a can of worms I don't want to open. I don't really mind if people snoop on what I'm doing, heck I'm a talk page stalker myself =) –xeno (talk) 17:36, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

Firefox and Mozilla bug with wikimedia templates?

For some months I have seen templates and images overlapping or "crashing" together on wikipedia with Firefox 2 (and Netscape). See Template talk:Infobox Weather#overlaid by other templates bug?. I put this down to a Mozilla bug because Opera displays them correctly, but as the weeks went by and I upgraded to Firefox 32.0.0.16 only to see the "bug" persist, I wonder if there is some interaction between Mozilla parsing and the wikipedia HTML? Or is this a known problem with Mozilla? -84user (talk) 17:32, 21 July 2008 (UTC)correction., I had upgraded to 2.0.0.16 and not FF3!-84user (talk) 20:29, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

The problem appears to arise when wikitables are close to HTML tables with style="float:right;" so I posted this question on Help talk:Table. -84user (talk) 19:43, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

 
What I see with Firefox 2 or 3 or Netscape in Vista or Firefox 1 on DSL

I was mistaken, I had upgraded to 2.0.0.16 and not FF3! I have duplicated the problem with Firefox 1.0.6 under Damn Small Linux via QEMU on a Vista PC, and will soon try FF on Ubuntu, and maybe even really upgrade to FF3. -84user (talk) 20:29, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

I am now running Firefox 3.0.1 on Vista and the tables display correctly. I guess it was a long-standing problem as far back as Firefox 1.0.6.-84user (talk) 20:53, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

Why (hist) (diff) in "my contributions" tab?

Why "(hist) (diff)" in "my contributions instead of "(diff) (hist)" as elsewhere like "my watchlist" and "recent changes"? Why are they switched? Is this is mediawiki bug? Jason Quinn (talk) 01:53, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

It isn't a bug, in that both links work, and all the information is available on all 3. It is simply that the 3 do not use the same function to generate the links. It was reported over 3 years ago in 2971, so is probably considered nothing more than an aesthetic annoyance. --Splarka (rant) 02:05, 20 July 2008 (UTC)
Great thanks. Bugs aren't limited to broken features but the semantics don't matter. I just read bug 2971. That's what I was looking for. (Sigh) Another "user inertia" argument against changing something that should obviously be changed. Jason Quinn (talk) 02:22, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

I've fixed this in r37872, so it should switch soon if the change isn't reverted. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 17:44, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

Which it was. Brion points out in T4971/r37898 that the current behavior matches the non-enhanced recent changes, while the changed behavior matched the enhanced recent changes. Whichever one is decided to be preferable should be used for all of them. (And enhanced recent changes should be merged into normal RC, dangit.) —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 22:50, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for your attention to this, Simetricial. This change will eventually make it. After they "look around at other things" they will eventually realize that it's the right thing to do and sort out whatever remaining issues there are. Now I at least have the information I needed to follow the development. It's funny, the only other Mediawiki bug I ever found was also with "my contributions" where it wasn't being bolded when selected. It took months for that to get fixed after somebody reported it to the Mediawiki bugzilla on my behalf. Jason Quinn (talk) 15:38, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

div background image

Hi all, I'm trying to specify a div background image for inclusion on a portal. Currently I am using the id="EnWpMpBook" parameter which displays an image of a book, but is it possible somehow for me to specify the image used? A url parameter of course doesn't work, but is there anyway I can code it so that a picture that is hosted on Commons can be used as the div background image?

Previously I have tried <span>, with z-index parameters, which worked OK but had issues with layers, and certain things overlapping things it shouldn't. Does anyone know about that method as well?

I'm trying to do this at User:Joowwww/Sandbox3. Many thanks --Joowwww (talk) 16:12, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, no such feature. If it's really really important, you could request an edit to site CSS, which doesn't have url() stripped. -- Tim Starling (talk) 15:31, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

Should the 'resolved' template be substituted?

Here is an example:

  Resolved
 – This is an example

At WP:SUBST we see lists of templates that should be substituted or not. {{resolved}} is not listed there. Since 'resolved' expands into something very large and ugly if it is substituted, I've always thought it should *not* be substituted. This is what gets added to the wikitext of the page when you add {{subst:resolved|This is a test}}:

<div style="margin: 1em;" class="resolved"><span style="border: 1px solid #aaa; background: #f9fcf9; margin-right: .5em; padding: 6px;">[[Image:Yes check.svg|20px]] Resolved. </span>{{#if: This is a test.<span style="font-size: 85%;">This is a test.</span>}}</div>

Adding 'resolved' has a useful function on noticeboards, as a way to express an opinion that an issue is resolved without having to box up the whole discussion using templates like {{discussion top}} that are forbidding and seem to reject any further input on the issue. Using 'subst' with 'resolved' explodes the wiki-text and is 'diff-unfriendly', since when you click on a diff where somebody added the 'resolved' template you need to go through a process of deduction to figure out what was added. Can anyone give a technical reason on whether 'subst:resolved' should be preferred to 'resolved' in this case? EdJohnston (talk) 19:51, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

There is no significant reason to prefer substing it to not substing it, technically. Just don't change it gratuitously, if it's used on many pages, and the servers will be fine. This kind of scenario is a large part of what templates are meant for. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 22:14, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

There is a special optimisation in the parser for templates invoked with no arguments, because some such templates are very heavily used, such as {{·}}. So {{resolved}} is quite fast as long as you don't include a message. -- Tim Starling (talk) 15:50, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia password limits

Wikipedia's page for creating an account or logging in has a link to the article "Password strength". I have the following questions:

-- Wavelength (talk) 05:08, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
Question cross-posted to Wikipedia:Help desk#Wikipedia password limits. Please answer there. – ukexpat (talk) 13:32, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
  • Any UTF-8 character should be acceptable in a password. In fact, probably if you submitted any binary string it would be accepted, UTF-8 or not, since PHP is not Unicode-aware.
  • The allowable length is determined by the POST limit, last I checked. Probably something like 20 MB. I don't suggest you use a password that long, though.
  • No, the password is stored MD5-hashed (and salted with userid), so there's no need to truncate it.
  • Most people don't care whether they can submit passwords that contain Swahili characters or are 37 KB in length, so it's probably not useful to put any of this on the account creation screen. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 16:52, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
He said answer on Wikipedia:Help desk, Simetrical. -- Tim Starling (talk) 18:09, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
That's why cross-posting should be discouraged - you end up with disconnected threads on several boards. – ukexpat (talk) 18:15, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

Nav bars

Is it possible to do nav bars that change color on hover on Wikipedia? I haven't yet found an example on site, and haven't yet trawled the css sheets to check. Hiding T 11:01, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

Would you want to? The project is tending away from darish use of colour in templates. Rollover effects wouldn't exactly be following that trend. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 11:44, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
It's for a main page redesign. I like the fact you instantly assumed any use I made of it would be, I'm guessing, garish.  ;) 84.92.54.229 (talk) 16:11, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
It probably would be. --- RockMFR 16:47, 22 July 2008 (UTC)
I am so tempted to create a flashing sig now!  – ukexpat (talk) 16:59, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

You could do this with a change to MediaWiki:Common.css, for browsers more advanced than IE6 or so. For broader compatibility, my recollection is you'd have to use JavaScript, depending on what sort of element the nav bar is. It can't be done without editing an interface page, until browsers start implementing some version of CSS3 style attributes. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 16:55, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

If you're testing something in your userspace, you can add a :hover element to your monobook.css file for testing purposes. Dunno what the exact class name for the nav bars is, but it's really easy to do. EVula // talk // ☯ // 02:13, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

Issue with search bar on the left

I dont know if this has been covered before, but I've just noticed that if, by way of example, you type this J. G. D in the search box, you get slightly different results than if you type this J G D It seems to me that the addition of full stops, after initials, should not affect the search results. Could this/Should this be corrected? Setwisohi (talk) 17:57, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

Good point, and worth mentioning. I would say that the search bar should ignore punctuation marks for this reason; the only non-letter/non-numeric character that should still be considered is the space. However, the problem with this is that it could put more of a strain on resources when searching. Gary King (talk) 19:57, 22 July 2008 (UTC)

main page = blank?

I purged my cache repeatedly; main page is blank. Antone else? Ling.Nut (WP:3IAR) 02:02, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

It was a CSS issue that got fixed.[14] EVula // talk // ☯ // 02:03, 23 July 2008 (UTC)
Good, thanks. Ling.Nut (WP:3IAR) 02:05, 23 July 2008 (UTC)
That was my fault...I am honestly, very truly sorry. —Remember the dot (talk) 02:13, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

SSL for UserLogin?

I read on WP:BN about admin accounts being hacked. Why isn't SSL implemented for Special:UserLogin? =Nichalp «Talk»= 08:50, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

There's always Wikimedia's semi-secure proxy server, though I too would like to see SSL more tightly integrated into Wikipedia. —Remember the dot (talk) 14:51, 23 July 2008 (UTC)
BTW, I don't think that's what happened in this case. Someone got a hold of two administrator accounts' passwords through some other means. Guessing correctly perhaps. We had several admin accounts compromised a while back because their passwords were "password" or "wikipedia" or something else that was easy to guess. —Wknight94 (talk) 15:51, 23 July 2008 (UTC)
The Secure server always throws errors when I try to log in, requiring actually strong passwords would be much better, but inthis case, it was just a user having a dumb password that would've satisfied most strength requirements. MBisanz talk 07:37, 24 July 2008 (UTC)

references in preview

Would a programmer please make the result of the preview button appear as if it were followed by "<references />"? The references themselves should appear below the previewed text, I should think, rather than the bottom of the page, unless there is already a references tag in the output.

This might need assignment at the start of the preview function and the "references /" tag, with a test to determine placement of references output and a reset assignment at the end of the preview output. Thank you. 76.231.191.217 (talk) 16:20, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

You wish to see references when previewing a section by itself? Temporarily adding {{reflist}} at the bottom of the section before hitting 'Show preview' will let you see what you want. Then just remove the added 'reflist' before saving. EdJohnston (talk) 16:40, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

This should be the default. There is no reason that people should need to figure out {{reflist}} before being able to proofread their references. Fortnight Wanderer (talk) 18:56, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

This is already requested: bugzilla:5492. — Carl (CBM · talk) 19:14, 23 July 2008 (UTC)
In the meantime, you might want to take a look at User:Anomie/ajaxpreview.js – quick AJAX preview, also displays footnotes in the preview when editing a section. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 15:28, 24 July 2008 (UTC)

maximum size of watchlist?

Is there an official maximum size of a watchlist? While it's in its early phases, I'd like to have all the pages associated with the Gene Wiki on my watchlist. I have 10,846 currently, but just realized that a recent change to improve readability (through template transclusion, e.g., [15]) increases the number of pages I want to watch to 19,693. When trying to add those pages, I get this error: 

PHP fatal error in /usr/local/apache/common-local/php-1.5/languages/Language.php line 242:
Allowed memory size of 83886080 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 74 bytes)

Any thoughts? AndrewGNF (talk) 17:27, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

Try using Special:Recentchangeslinked instead of the watchlist.— Carl (CBM · talk) 19:16, 23 July 2008 (UTC)
Brilliant, this works perfectly... [16] Thanks much... AndrewGNF (talk) 19:39, 23 July 2008 (UTC)
Yes Recentchangeslinked is the next best thing to being able to use multiple watchlists on the same account, so that you can separate pages you actually care about from pages which where you revert vandalism because nobody else seems to be watching and the pages that you edited once to fix a typo. Unfortunately the lists of pages must be publicly visible. — CharlotteWebb 17:05, 24 July 2008 (UTC)

Weirdness

I was looking at the logs for a user who requested rollback on WP:RFPERM, and I saw this. I actually looked at my own logs to see if I had been sysopped by mistake, (and the tab in the background of the screenshot that says "error" is a result of me clicking on the "block" link to see if it would work). Am I supposed to be able to see that "block" link next to his "new user account" entry? It doesn't show up when I look at any other people's logs, just his. Have any idea what's going on? J.delanoygabsadds 20:39, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

It's there for me, too... No idea what might be causing it, though. —Dinoguy1000 20:43, 23 July 2008 (UTC)
Non-picture form. [17] No idea, though. ~ JohnnyMrNinja 20:50, 23 July 2008 (UTC)
It looks like this is a historical thing. All the creation logs have that up to June 2006, then it switched to just userpage/talk/contribs. Algebraist 20:52, 23 July 2008 (UTC)
OK, thanks. J.delanoygabsadds 20:57, 23 July 2008 (UTC)
Specifically, the 7th of July (though there's no precise cutoff). Possibly this edit did it. Algebraist 21:01, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

Problem with "Update any redirects that point to the original title"

  Resolved
 – fixed in r37999. — CharlotteWebb 16:57, 24 July 2008 (UTC)

This is a great feature, but there's a bug - it screws up redirects to sections: [18] --NE2 00:43, 24 July 2008 (UTC)

You filed it as bugzilla:14904. — Carl (CBM · talk) 02:44, 24 July 2008 (UTC)

Right format fix

Hiya! Can anyone help me out? I tried to "shorten" a list (to put to halves next to each other instead of a long list) at the article about the New York dialect. I got a message from another use that now I messed up the format. Can someone help me out? Thanks in advance for any input! --Soetermans | is listening | what he'd do now? 19:56, 24 July 2008 (UTC)

Fixed. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 20:08, 24 July 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for you help, Chris, but now I can't see the right half of the list. Does this have something to do with my system? --Soetermans | is listening | what he'd do now? 20:43, 24 July 2008 (UTC)
The {{Columns-list}} and {{Reflist}} templates do not render properly in IE, but they do in Firefox and other CSS3 compliant browsers. – ukexpat (talk) 20:58, 24 July 2008 (UTC)
Should be fixed now (at least insofar as the complete list appears in both IE and real browsers). The problem, as ukexpat has pointed out, is that the only elegant way to do this (CSS columns) doesn't work in IE. I'd seriously recommend punting that whole list to its own article. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 23:28, 24 July 2008 (UTC)
Haha, funny you should say that! I did, to much criticism. Eventually it got merged back in. See the discussion here.
Anyway, I guess we'll just leave at this. Thanks for the help everybody! --Soetermans | is listening | what he'd do now? 23:39, 24 July 2008 (UTC)
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