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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This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (technical).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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Uploading Audio

Could anybody out there tell me the way to upload small audio bits (in ogg or other formats), like a place name? Also please help me how to link that to the article. ThxAnil 07:12, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Visit Special:Upload, and I think the only audio file type accepted are OGG Vorbis files (maybe MIDI too). Within an article, you might want to include one of the following:

Code	Result
{{listen | title=Placename | filename=Placename.ogg | description=This is how you pronounce Placename. }}
[[Image:Placename.ogg]]	File:Placename.ogg

− Twas Now ( talk • contribs • e-mail ) 09:13, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

I need help...

I need help with my popup issues. One time I attempted to remove the popup script but it didn't work and I enter a code to get rid of the script but everytime I log on, it keeps redirecting me immediately to my monobook.js after I log on to and it refuse me to go to other articles (or edit). Can someone remove my script or give me advice on what should I do. Thank you! This IP adress is edited by PrestonH--69.236.29.100 04:01, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Disable javascript, log in, blank your monobook.js, clear your cache, voila ^_^. --Splarka (rant) 08:45, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

In the news ...

How do I submit an article for the In the news ... spot, please? TerriersFan 23:10, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Might want to look at this - there is quite a lot of information on this and related links. x42bn6 Talk 23:43, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Ah, very useful thank you. TerriersFan 01:18, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Proposal to create a comprehensible version of TfD-del'd [[Template:Text]]

_ _ I propose to create a template {{text}} whose handwritten text runs 21 lines on a steno pad.
_ _ This would arguably contravene a WP:TfD decision, but the new version i drafted (prior to realizing a former one had existed!) arguably answers all the objections raised at TfD. Historical details and opportunity to raise objections follow:
_ _ Template:Text was routinely deleted 08:38, 21 July 2005 by User:Radiant! per TfD debate, complete as of 08:31, 19 July 2005. Its complete content was the 7 chars "{{{1}}}". The debate follows:

TfD notice for Text is also on Template:Mapquest because the latter may use the former.

Huh? Note: the "What links here" page returns a couple of templates that call for a "text=" parameter, but they long predate this brand-new template. I don't think those intended to include this template. --Tabor 22:24, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

• Note: I am wary about putting {{tfd}} on this template, in case it is now inadvertently being substituted anywhere. --Tabor 22:28, 11 July 2005 (UTC)
• Delete very difficult to understand template. -Splash 00:28, 12 July 2005 (UTC)
• Delete. Entirely useless template. View source to see what I mean. --Blu Aardvark | ^{(talk) | (contribs)} 08:41, 15 July 2005 (UTC)
• Delete. Unexplained and unused. (SEWilco 02:32, 16 July 2005 (UTC))
• Delete - it is not a sub-template of Template:Mapquest, which just uses a parameter called "text". An old bug used to make such parameters as {{{text}}} appear and link to non-existent templates because of the way the innermost curly-braces were interpreted. Template:Text serves no purpose. -- Netoholic @ 16:20, 15 July 2005 (UTC)
• Mapquest template author note: That, was a parameter, like Netoholic stated. :--AllyUnion (talk) 07:05, 18 July 2005 (UTC)

_ _ Of the nominator & 4 other voters, only one has edited other than user talk pages in the last 2 months, and that one's user page features a bitter response to an arbitration verdict. This leaves me doubtful of the feasibility of reasonable reconsideration by any of the previous voters.
_ _ This is probably too trivial for attention, in which case i'll simply create my version & we can deal then with any objections. Add something here and leave a new note on my talk page, if you want to discuss it first here, probably including my initially keying the long <NOINCLUDE> portion here instead of onto Template:Text. (The included portion is the same old 7 characters.)
--Jerzy•t 22:21 & 22:28, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Edit box preview feature

When I highlight something in an edit box, it shows a mini-preview! Is this new, or am I just unobservant? Milto LOL pia 22:10, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

It's new. It's annoying as heck—it moves the edit box when I select something requiring me to scroll the window. How do I turn it off? —Doug Bell ^talk 22:18, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

It's from Popups. Put popupOnEditSelection=false; into your monobook.js to turn it off. Tra (Talk) 22:25, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. I think it's entirely unusable (at least in IE) and doesn't even work correctly since the selection size gets messed up by the offset created by the preview text. Back to the drawing board on this one. —Doug Bell ^talk 22:33, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

I also managed to get rid of it, but now I can't preview pages at all (using the show preview button), it just takes me straight back to the editing box (though it gives me a preview of my edit summary). Is there a way to fix this aswell? James086^Talk 08:39, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

The auto preview buggers up my browser, too (using IE 7). Where in the monobook do I put the above line? Proto ► 15:00, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Put it underneath the code that references popups. Tra (Talk) 16:00, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Ugh! I hate that thing. I will definitely be disabling it. It's almost impossible to edit with that on. Firsfron of Ronchester 21:54, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

<Feyn>

Hello. I've found a wiki-method to draw Feynman diagram. Here it is. I want to include this in the MediaWiki. How can I do that? Vinograd19 21:34, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

I believe last time the developers looked at WikiTex (which is what is being used) there were some possible security issues. Whether those have been resolved I don't know, but I would certainly like to see WikiTex or something similar on Wikimedia sites in future. the wub "?!" 17:54, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Refering

If want to have differenct search alternatives lead to the same article, what do I do? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Drogo (talk • contribs) 16:44, 14 February 2007 (UTC).

You can create a redirect from each of the different search alternatives to the article. Tra (Talk) 16:53, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Deleted Revisions

Currently deleted edits are retrievable up to June 2004, it is time that we actually start cleaning out the deleted old mainspace page revisions for up to, say 2 years? I was reading up this, I do not believe that anyone would really want to look up for something on mainspace that was previously deleted for more than two years, and I'm sure there are costs for maintaining this database. Over half of what is created today is deleted everyday, and we know that several of them are spam/vanity/copyright violations. Do we really need to keep and retrieve them in five years' time, for example?

At the moment images are not undelete-able for up to June 2006, but in future it's going to take up a lot of space if we don't have a cut-off time. Let's be practical, do we really need to retain imagevios, CSD#I4s, CSD#I5s for more than a year that takes up gigs of space and maintenance costs? - Mailer Diablo 16:40, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

It's not really disk space that uses up all the money. It's accessing the database that causes the problems. Since deleted content just sits on the server and doesn't need to be accessed except possibly very occasionally by an admin, it shouldn't really cause too many problems. Tra (Talk) 16:51, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Images are going to start adding up, however. They take up enough space to be problematic, unlike the deleted edits. Prodego ^talk 16:54, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

PRODs not showing up in Category:Proposed Deletion Over 5 days

I moved the following thread from the WP:AN. The articles in the pages named here have all been deleted, however it looks like this may be an ongoing problem in which there is a delay in updating Category:Proposed_for_deletion_for_over_five_days page. Any ideas? Kla'quot 04:36, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

The page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Proposed_for_deletion_for_over_five_days does not include articles from the following pages:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Proposed_deletion_as_of_6_February_2007
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Proposed_deletion_as_of_7_February_2007

Is this a problem with the software? Kla'quot 06:28, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

(pseudo-indent) I've noticed this before. Doesn't seem to be a problem with Template:Dated prod. The relevant part is...

{{#if: {{{day|{{{month|{{{year|}}}}}}}}}
|{{#ifexpr: {{#time:U}} > {{#time:U|{{{day}}} {{{month}}} {{{year}}} +5 days}}
|<span style="color:red">'''The {{#switch:{{NAMESPACEE}}|{{ns:2}}=user page|{{ns:3}}=user talk 
page|#default=article}} may be deleted without further notice since this message has remained in place for five 
days.'''</span>{{hidden-delete-reason|Expired prod, concern: 
{{{concern|{{{1|}}}}}}}}<includeonly>[[Category:Proposed for deletion for over five days]]</includeonly>
|The {{#switch:{{NAMESPACEE}}|{{ns:2}}=user page|{{ns:3}}=user talk page|#default=article}} may be deleted if
this message remains in place for five days.{{hidden-delete-reason|Prod, concern: {{{concern|{{{1|}}}}}}}}
}}

...and I know from experience that the red notice works correctly. The pages also categorise correctly. Purging the category doesn't work. Perhaps it's a job queue/large wiki lag thing.

Oh, and get deleting - there's two days worth of stuff that needs to be prodded over the edge. MER-C 12:25, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm not sure what to make of that, either. As MER-C said, the pages themselves all claim to be in the category, but the category page doesn't list them, and purging (both pages and category) seems to have no effect. Strange. The template seems fine, so it may be some odd trick of the server. – Luna Santin (talk) 23:01, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Purging does not affect links tables (e.g. category lists, what links here, etc.). Those are rebuilt either when the page is saved or the next time the page is rendered after its links cache expires (often, but not always within 24 hours). Some classes of things are also handled more quickly through the job queue, but I believe the problem discussed here would not be. For a specific page, you can force an update by making a null edit to it, but there is no practical way (that I know of) to do this across entire categories. Dragons flight 06:44, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

I saw a similar problem recently with another category in which pages were added accidentally by an oversight in a transcluded template. After fixing the template and purging it, the pages no longer had the category, but it seemed to take 12 hours for the category itself to update. Gimmetrow 04:43, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

I've seen that problem before (I wrote the prod code to do it). It's an issue with Mediawiki's category synchronization, I guess it's a task that gets put in the job queue but takes a while before it gets run. —Quarl ^(talk) 2007-02-14 05:34Z

Thanks everyone. Is the consensus that there is no feasible way to fix the problem? If we need to adopt an inelegant, brute-force workaround, I'd suggest creating a category for "prodded 3+ days ago" and another category for "prodded 4+ days ago". Admins can then check those categories and see whether they contain articles that were actually prodded 5 days ago. I warned you it was inelegant ;) Kla'quot 06:55, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Well, that would essentially be no different than checking the "Prod as of DAY MONTH YEAR" cats. Unless someone wants to sit around null-editing prod pages all day, there is no reason to have Category:Proposed for deletion for over five days, as it will never list more than a small fraction of the pages that should be in it. --- RockMFR 23:13, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

New section edit summary

This should have the /* */ added so that it becomes a section link. For example, instead of "New section edit summary", my edit summary here should be /* New section edit summary */ created section, that is, appearing as "→New section edit summary - created section". --Random832(tc) 16:12, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

"→New section edit summary - ← created section", surely? This would just get out of hand, though; better would be a modified autosummary like you suggest, and a method of providing an edit summary other than the new section title if desired (e.g. a 'Section header' box and an 'edit summary' box; if the box were left blank, it would fill in the AES, and if a summary were given, that would be used (with the section prepended).) --ais523 16:32, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

So can this be done by changing something in the Mediawiki: namespace, or will it need to be changed in the code (i.e. should file a bug report/feature request)? --63.173.196.33 13:38, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

It has to be requested on bugzilla:. --ais523 13:49, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Forms, scripts and interactiveness in a wiki

This is not really of relevence to Wikipedia, but it is to Wikiversity and it involves MediaWiki. I'm asking here as more people may read it. On standard web pages for education use, I regularly use forms for input of data and CGI scripts to analyse the data. In this way for example one can get the reader to answer simple quiz questions, get feedback on whether they are understanding the material, and run simple programs with the results presented back as a web page (actually we run very complex programs as well in this way, but that is another matter). These interactive uses are in my opinion crucial for web based education materials. I would like to use them on Wikiversity. Is it possible in MediaWiki? If so, where can I find the details? --Bduke 07:29, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

It can be achieved through <input> tags, however the use is uncommon and therefore I'm not sure about the exact mechanism behind. Maybe some developers could help. --Deryck C. 12:41, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

See MediaWiki extensions. There may be an existing extension that does what you want, or you might write or request a new one. You might also investigate other wiki software, such as TWiki which inherently provides more interactivity, database, access control, and groupware features than MediaWiki does. For Web-based education, as opposed to Web-based documenting and reference (MediaWiki's strength), you may be better off with a structured wiki such as TWiki. To avoid duplicating efforts, see if there are any existing wikis that implement the kind of features and philosophy you want already. See: wikiindex:Category:Education, wikiindex:Category:Universities. --Teratornis 22:44, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Many thanks. There are some usefull pointers here, but using a different wiki software is not on, as I want to add some materials to Wikiversity, which uses MediaWiki like Wikipedia. If MediaWiki's strengths are really only for documenting and reference, then work needs to be done by the technical folk to make it more appropriate also for education as that is what Wikiversity is all about. If that is not done, I suspect Wikiversity will fail. The software has to support all projects of the WM Foundation. Please keep the comments coming. Thanks. --Bduke 23:02, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

You could probably do a simple quiz by having each of the separate choices hyperlinking to a page that says if you got the answer right or not like this:

Question: 1 + 1 =

a) 1

b) 2

c) 3

And instead of linking to the pages 'Correct' and 'Wrong', you could link to a subpage of the quiz page that says if you got the answer right or not, explains the question and then links you to the next question. To avoid people cheating and looking in the status bar for where the link leads, you could link the choices to a redirect to the answer page. Tra (Talk) 23:28, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

See help:inputbox at Meta. You can do some quite nifty things with inputboxes. An example of their use on Wikipedia is at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/nominate. Creating quizzes would probably be possible with a combination of inputboxes and parser funcions. It's a pity that radio buttons can't be used. Graham87 02:18, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

And it looks like there is a MediaWiki extension for this Quizzes. Graham87 02:29, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

When I wrote that documenting and reference are MediaWiki's strengths, I did not mean MediaWiki is restricted to these tasks, rather that the default distribution is optimized for them. MediaWiki is highly extensible, as a look at MediaWiki extensions makes clear. Other wiki software may provide other kinds of features "out of the box" which would require installing, or perhaps writing, extensions to MediaWiki. To see what extensions are already installed on Wikiversity, check its special page: Special:Version; it looks like you can request more extensions here: Wikiversity:Request custodian action.

Your prediction of failure for Wikiversity will almost certainly come true, because every artifact eventually breaks or becomes obsolete, just as people die, nations collapse, species go extinct, and the Universe eventually experiences Heat death. However, if I were betting money on the question of whether Wikiversity will "fail" within, say, a year, I would first consider the Wikimedia Foundation's track record of stunning success. The Foundation's products do not solve every conceivable problem, but they are popular with many people, so they must be doing enough things right to at least make their continued existence and use highly likely. At the moment, at least, Special:Statistics and Special:Recentchanges pages suggest Wikiversity is pretty active.

My point was really that Wikiversity is about education in a way that Wikipedia is not. Too many people in the modern university think that putting lecture notes on the web replaces the lecture. The expert advice is that web education has to be highly interactive and the current software does not strike me as being that suitable, but then I may need to study it much more. So far, I see Wikiversity as just adding lecture note type material. It will be a success when universities actually use it. --Bduke 12:16, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

You can put custom JavaScript into the MediaWiki somewhere (Wikibits?) or you could have a script called in the monobook.js file of everone who wants interactive content. From there, the JavaScript can do anything. You might include special <div> tags for the JS code to use. — Randall Bart 20:17, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Common.js is where you can add JavaScript for every user for every page. — Randall Bart 21:09, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

I searched the site for "quiz" and found this: Test and Quiz. Maybe that helps. --Teratornis 04:48, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Weird behavior experienced in trying to edit a section

Weird stuff! --Itayb 13:14, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

fixed SGGH 13:30, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. Itayb 14:54, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

cutting out of contributions

Hey, my contributions list seems to have packed it, I've made contributions after the most recent one listed but they aren't showing, is there a case of the slave catching up and not displaying them? Or are some of my edits just dropping off the map? Cause that could mean trouble when it comes to chasing up my own work! SGGH 00:51, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

It's more than likely just a caching issue; is it updated now? Another scenario not as likely since you said it was recent, but contribs to deleted pages won't show up in the list. —bbatsell ¿? ✍ 00:53, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Ahhh, I did't know that second bit! It was deleted pages that I was looking for, because when I tag for speedy delete, i often look back in my contributions, find the article, and check that the author hasnt just wiped the tag off. Thanks Bbatsell! SGGH 00:58, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Linking to category

How do I link text to a category page? -TheMeatballX 19:51, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

Put [[:Category:Pagename|Your text here]]. Note the colon before the word 'Category'. Tra (Talk) 19:54, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

Thank You! That was driving me nuts! -TheMeatballX 20:11, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

User group "import"

browsing through the Special:Listusers there is a user class "import", which currently has no users in it. Was wondering what this was, is this a relic that was used and is no longer needed, or something new that I've missed.

Crazynas ^t 13:25, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

That provides direct-upload access to Special:Import, which we do not generally use except for rare maintenance situations. --brion 16:55, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

Databases in MySQL

A simple/hard question: by default, MySQL creates a single ibdata1 when in InnoDB mode. This file extends itself as you add information. I am using a single mysql server, creating one database per language to execute some queries, and this means the single ibdata1 file holds every database:

mysql> show databases;
+--------------------+
| Database           |
+--------------------+
| information_schema | 
| afwiki             | 
| anwiki             | 
| arwiki             | 
| azwiki             | 
| bowiki             | 
| dewiki             | 
| enwiki             | 
| eswiki             | 
| fiwiki             | 
| frwiki             | 
| itwiki             | 
| jawiki             | 
| lawiki             | 
| metawiki           | 
| mysql              | 
| nlwiki             | 
| nnwiki             | 
| ocwiki             | 
| papwiki            | 
| pawiki             | 
| plwiki             | 
| ptwiki             | 
| ruwiki             | 
| simplewiki         | 
+--------------------+
25 rows in set (0.33 sec)

I would like (if possible) having a single ibdata file per database, since I am guessing that would speed some queries. Is there a simple way of doing this without having to manually change my.cnf every time I want to create a new database? I don't think every Wikipedia language is run in its own dedicated server (regardless of front ends). :-) Would forcing MySQL to create index files instead of adding them in the ibdata file make queries and updating faster? Are the MySQL configuration for Wikipedia servers public? Thanks in advance. -- ReyBrujo 00:33, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

Recent versions of MySQL have an option to use a separate file for each table I believe, but not per database. (Yes, you will have to change my.cnf, but only once.) It won't necessarily help performance, but if you import lots of data and then drop it frequently you might get warm fuzzies about the disk space recovery. --brion 16:57, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

Oversight question

I was testing my copy of MediaWiki, and found these in the DefaultSettings.php:

// Experimental permissions, not ready for production use
//$wgGroupPermissions['sysop']['deleterevision'] = true;
//$wgGroupPermissions['bureaucrat']['hiderevision'] = true;

I commented them out, and found they worked!!

The log comments appear as (example from my wiki): (Deletion log); 00:50 . . WikiSysop (Talk | contribs | block) (changed revision visibility for User:WikiSysop/Sandbox: changed 1 revisions to 0: test over: hiderevision extension testing done)

I'm surprised this wasn't used before they had the oversight feature! --sunstar net^talk 00:55, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

These were probably commented out because they hadn't been fully tested, therefore you might encounter some bugs when you use them. For a small wiki, this shouldn't cause too many problems but with a large wiki like Wikipedia, if a bug was found and a vandal exploited it, they could wreck havoc. As for oversight, the main difference between oversight and what you're describing is that any admin can hide revisions as you're doing, but special permissions are needed with oversight. Also, the oversight logs aren't public. Tra (Talk) 02:21, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

Indeed, it only sort-of works. ;) It's still under development; Oversight was added as a temporary solution which, while hackish, gets the job done for now. --brion 17:11, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

"With what text" in "What links here"

What would be the feasibility of having "What links here" return not just the name of the page that links to the target page, but also the text displayed by the link? For example, if the page [[John Doe]] contained the text "[[Richard Roe|his co-conspirator]]", then "What links here" for [[Richard Roe]] would show "[[John Doe]], with the text 'his co-conspirator'". This could be useful in making sure the principle of least surprise is followed, as well as catching subtle violations of NPOV. -- Antaeus Feldspar 14:53, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Not very feasible at this time; would require changes to the database structure and expensive rebuilding of all data. --brion 17:13, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

New Message box

This is related to the discussion going on at ANI and VPR, and see also this. but this specific aspect is a technical issue and belongs here.

How difficult would it be to change the code so that the New Message box appears outside the content box (i.e. above the title or entirely outside the main monobook "frame"), thereby making it easily distinguishable from parodies of it (which necessarily appear in the content box after the title header)? --Random832(tc) 21:36, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Changing the position of the new messages box will not stop it being forged, since a fake box can go absolutely anywhere with css. For example, remove the <nowiki> tags from this: <div style="position:absolute;top:-35px">You have new messages</div> and click show preview to see how text can be put anywhere.

What might help to stop the new messages box being forged is to make it include the current username, e.g. for me, it would appear as Tra: You have new messages (last change). That way, it would be much harder to forge as the person putting it on their user page would not know the identity of the person visiting. Tra (Talk) 22:09, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

I meant changing the position in the generated HTML source. By "content box" i meant <div id="content">. And moving the box up wouldn't move the title header down. --Random832(tc) 22:21, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

I think having both a personalization of the new messages message (i.e. User: You have new messages) and having it above the H1 are good ideas. Filing a feature request would be the next logical step, I think. --MZMcBride 00:55, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

I like the idea of adding the username, since as far as I know there's only a CURRENTPAGE variable, not one for the current user (which exists on other sites I know). Correct me if I'm wrong, please. LeaHazel : talk : contribs 12:10, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Photo problem

There is a picture on the page Vertical launching system that should show several destroyers firing missiles, but everytime I check the page all I see is a red "X" and the photo cpation where the image should be. I have no idea how to fix this, so any help anyone could provide would be apreciated. TomStar81 (Talk) 03:28, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

I don't have the same problem - have you done a hard refresh on your browser? If it still doesn't work, please let us know what browser you are running, and what the name of the image is. Cheers! Yuser31415 05:53, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Possible problem with the page Wikipedia:Citation templates

There may be a problem with the page Wikipedia:Citation templates. It appears to me as an almost blank page with the following fragment of text: "<script type="text/javascript" src="/w/index". Itayb 21:57, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Fine here... --brion 21:58, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Now it works. Thanks, i guess (i don't understand from your answer whether you mean to say "I've fixed it.", or "I don't see the problem you are referring to. Please clean your spectacles.") Itayb 22:04, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Brake Fade

The current Brake Fade article by "justanother" contains a major technical errors in that it attributes fade of drum brakes to two old wives tales:

Brake fade is caused by heat expansion of the drum.
Brake fade is caused by outgassing of the brake shoe causing a gas bearing between shoe and drum.

No explanation for how large the thermal expansion that might cause this is, especially in presence of ovalization of brake drums by braking forces.

The gas bearing hypothesis is especially incredible considering hao much gase would be required for such a levitation and that brakes can fade again after cooling, there being an infinite supply of gas.

That Drum brakes only work because they have leading shoes with a self servo effect to drive the shoes with their own braking force into the drum. This effect is recursive and leads to fade at the hot end and brake lockup on the cold and moist end. Turning a page in a newspaper with a wet finger gives an example of change in friction coefficient.

I have proposed that "justanother" give valid references for these two hypotheses by placing insertions with the alternative that I offer a rewrite of the article. The author's deleting the does not support the claimed causes of brake fade. The sources offered do not explain the phenomenon and coud just as well be the articel in Wiki.Jobst 21:41, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

NavFrame Won't Hide to Start

I've been having some difficulty with this code here, whenever I enter it to my homepage (which is where I want it), it doesn't automatically hide the template I've put in - unless I say style="display:none" in the navcontent - but then the hide/show starts out as hide even though the content is hidden. Any ideas?

<div class="NavFrame">
<div class="NavHead">User Talk Templates</div>
<div class="NavContent">
{{User:Pilotguy/Warnings}} </div> </div>

Thanks for any help you guys can give (oh and note: if I use {{Hidden}} and say 2={{User:Pilotguy/Warnings}} for the second parameter - it works, strangeness.Daniel()Folsom ^T|_C|^U 21:22, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

It works with two because the default is to collapse if there are more than one. You can change this in your personal monobook.js (although it will only show for you):

NavigationBarShowDefault = 0;

If you want auto-collapsible for everyone, see Wikipedia:NavFrame#Collapsible_tables. --Splarka (rant) 08:24, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

4-day restriction

How does the software know that a user has registered less than 4 days ago (for editing semi-protected pages)? Mr.Z-mantalk 00:05, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

There's a field in the user table that gives the date a user registered, so it probably uses that. Tra (Talk) 00:33, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

Yep, it uses that, and compares it with the server's time. If it exceeds $wgAutoConfirmAge, then the user is granted the autoconfirmed flag. For very old accounts (created before ~ December 2005), the field is blank, but they automatically inherited that user group. Titoxd^(?!?) 02:03, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia Moderators

Why are so many moderators on here given the power of moderator?Is there a place to complain about certain ones or would it be pretty much useless?Who's in charge say if,every moderator is unreliable and flaky?Im just curious,thank you if you read my question. Tyr 20:49, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

You mean Administrator? See Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard for more info.↔NMajdan•talk•EditorReview 21:58, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

yes,ones in charge of deleting articles and so forth. Tyr 05:35, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

If you feel an article has been unjustly deleted, you may want to consider posting on the Deletion review page. "If you want to make an open informal complaint over the behaviour of an admin, you can do so here. Hope this helps. --MZMcBride 05:46, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Also, I don't think "so many" is an appropriate phrase; there are only 1,117 administrators, compared to 3,574,927 users total (admins represent 0.03% of the editor population). EVula // talk // ☯ // 05:58, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

well I honestly didnt mean it as such a generalization..I have just encountered a few who are,im sorry to say in love with their own power on deleting articles that have validity,but thank you for the information. Tyr 07:36, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia deletes lots of articles. That's because the policies that govern encyclopedic content here are quite strict (WP:ATTRIBUTE says Wikipedia only wants content that has already been published in a reputable source, etc.). However, there are many other wikis, many with less strict requirements. I'd like to see the people who delete articles make a little more effort to find and recommend suitable alternate wikis for content not meeting Wikipedia's requirements, rather than just deleting things. I suggested as much here. I'm talking about content that isn't just advertising or vandalism, but content that some other wiki would welcome. Wikipedia is the world's largest and most famous wiki, so for many people it is the first wiki they edit on (it was for me). It takes a while to figure out that even though the wiki software lets you write anything you want, it's actually fairly difficult to write something that will stick. It would be nice if Wikipedia had something like the Lint programming tool which could automatically detect some cases of when a new article looks likely to fail to meet requirements here. Some cases ought to be obvious enough for a program to recognize (lack of the standard sections, little or no wiki markup, no citations, profanities, etc.) --Teratornis 07:22, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

I'd like to see the people who delete articles make a little more effort to find and recommend suitable alternate wikis for content not meeting Wikipedia's requirements How would that be feasible, unless the person doing the deleting knew the policies of those other, non-Wikipedia, Wikis? Are they supposed to be mindreaders? Corvus cornix 23:11, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Let alone that. Many wikis host content with licenses that are incompatible with the GFDL, so we cannot transwiki there. (WikiTravel comes to mind). Titoxd^(?!?) 02:06, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Weird template bug after pseudo-upgrade...

Hey all, I had a wiki installation (1.9) installed on my server, and decided I needed a new hard drive, so I followed the procedure outlined in the upgrade section of mediawiki, and all was well... except for a little bug. My Template:· suddenly turned into a Template:·! As all of the pages the template is included on still contained {{·}} and not {{·}}, I simply moved · to · and called it a day, since it looked like it was fixed. Imagine my surprise when bug reports came in saying that all of the {{·}}'s used didn't work! The link was red, but when I clicked it, it naturally went to the edit page for {{·}}.

It certainly looks like a table got corrupted... but I'd hate to go database diving unless I absolutely have to, and know what I'm looking for... :S

Help? Kareeser|^Talk! 08:35, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Thought it was resolved, but the bug came back... argh... it seems like even though {{·}} is typed, the mediawiki software treats it as · and calls for Template:·, which doesn't exist. Creating a Template:· doesn't work either, for some weird reason. Kareeser|^Talk! 19:15, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

I don't think it is the database (although it could be). It sounds like an internationalization/Unicode issue. Did you install a new copy of the Apache server? Did you change the character set of MySQL? Did you change anything at all, server-wise? Titoxd^(?!?) 02:09, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Article that fails to recognise log-in?

I've just followed a link from Seamus Heaney to the University of California, only to find that I was apparently no longer logged in; following a further link from the latter article took me to another page which did recognise who I was... I've repeated this a few times, and get the same effect every time. Does anyone else get this effect? If so, what's going on? (If not, the problem would seem to be with me, and I still don't know what's going on, but that's my problem.) --Mel Etitis (Talk) 11:39, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

WTF?!! I'm still logged in but when I visit that page, but it says I'm not, even when I reload the page. It shows my login when I click "edit" though. Funky... Grandmasterka 12:25, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

?Don't have that problem. --Van helsing 13:02, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

The problem is explained at #Constantly being logged out above. To clear the server cache of a page, you can make a null edit, or purge the page (I have a script that can do this), and that easiest way to otherwise do it is to click on the "Edit this page" button, change "action=edit" to "action=purge", and go. Gracenotes^T § 14:21, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Technical editing problem

I'm having a technical problem. I asked for help over on Meta but have gotten no responses thus far. I think I messed up my monobook profile or something. Now when I highlight a section while editing it pops up above the edit section area in a blue tinted version. Also it's very hard to highlight a section in order to cut and paste it or delete it, as it always includes other irrelevant paragraphs and pops them up above the edit section box. How do I turn this off? Quadzilla99 13:03, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

It's caused by Navigation popups; see Wikipedia:Tools/Navigation_popups/FAQ#Popups_appear_in_edit_mode. To disable, put the following in your monobook.js:

popupOnEditSelection=false;

—Xhantar^Talk 19:45, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Oh my god, thanks a ton. You have no idea how aggravating that was. It wouldn't be bad except every time you hghlight a section it always includes the surrounding sections that weren't highlighted. Quadzilla99 20:11, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Constantly being logged out

Whenever I leave the site, I am automatically logged out despite the fact that I have "remembered my password" checked. This has started happening even when I don'tthe site too. This has never happened to me before. (I'm using Firefox and a Mac.) Any ideas as to why? John Reaves (talk) 01:59, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

My guess would be that some automated security thing you have deletes cookies once you leave a site, to prevent tracking cookies. -Amarkov moo! 02:08, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Any ideas as to how I could reinstate the cookies? John Reaves (talk) 02:24, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm having the same problem too, but I have checked my cookies and bypassed caches. I am also a Firefox user, it just started happening now. Philip Gronowski ^Contribs 02:42, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

There's definitely something going on. My guess is the developers know about it. If it doesn't clear up in a few hours I'll be shocked. -- Rick Block (talk) 03:53, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

For me it only happens at the Main Page and its talk page. If I purge my cache it reloads with me logged in, but if I reload the page it goes back to being logged out. Weird. - Trevor MacInnis (Contribs) 04:41, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

It's been happening to me too. I don't even have to leave the site; browsing from one page to another sees me getting logged out (and then back in without logging in). ShadowHalo 05:14, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

I don't have such a problem. A Firefox bug, perhaps? Yuser31415 06:09, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

There was a bug affecting caching for a few hours tonight; it should be fixed now, though it's possible some lingering pages remain in cache. Purge pages as necessary if it still crops up from time to time. --brion 07:44, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Confirmed that bad cache entries are still around. :( They're harmless, though, just kind of annoying. :) --brion 08:20, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Have you updated Firefox? I've heard of Mac/Firefox having a different problem, and the latest stable version might be poorly named... EVula // talk // ☯ // 20:19, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

It's nothing to do with Firefox. --brion 21:08, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Correct. I'm using IE7 and if I go to David Weber or Wikipedia:Esperanza, I get logged out. –Llama man 01:34, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

I've been using IE7 and the issue is just about resolved now, though there has been an occasional page where it still happens. ShadowHalo 02:39, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Print Preview Lockup on certain articles

Selecting the "printable version" link of the article http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Aloe_vera&printable=yes, then doing a print preview, locks up Firefox 2.0.0.1 and SeaMonkey 1.1a. Works OK with IE 7.0.5730.11. Print preview on other articles' printable version works fine. MeekMark 22:17, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Worked fine for me (using Firefox and Safari). John Reaves (talk) 23:22, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Template help

Need some help to get Template:Topical archive and template:Ordered archive to work right. Here is the syntax we want. Here is the general idea. Im going to give a shot. -Ste|vertigo 10:19, 22 February 2007 (UTC) PS: Wikipedia:Topic archive -SV

Why "math" tag not italicizing?

Hi. It seems that the <math> tag does not consistently italicize text which it encloses. For example, compare "$Q=d$" and "$Q\neq d$". Why is the first one not italicized? This also occurs all the time for single letters like "$Q$". I just don't get it. Thanks for any insight. —Dfass 23:45, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

... It is, on my browser, Firefox 1.5 on Windows XP. What are you using? --Golbez

Firefox 2 on XP. —Dfass 00:31, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Interesting! I just tried it on IE7, and it looks OK. Now, I'm really perplexed! Is this a Firefox 2 issue??? Does Wiki generate a different HTML page for different browsers (cause it appears it's not working correctly for Firefox 2)? —Dfass 00:34, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Using Firefox 2.0.0.1 on XP here. It's italicised for me... Kareeser|^Talk! 00:39, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Unless you've set your preferences otherwise, Wikipedia will render some simple math expressions as HTML, which may display differently from stuff that gets rendered as an image. Zetawoof^(ζ) 00:43, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks everyone. I guess I must have something funky with my system. But as long as other people see it correctly, I'm not going to worry about it. Thanks. —Dfass 05:00, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm getting the same using firefox 1.5. It seems like mediawiki is serving different html code for the two equations one has <span class="texhtml"> and <i> around the equations and the other does not. It looks like a bug to me. --Salix alba (talk) 13:13, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Try experimenting with your Special:Preferences (click the Math tab). It seems different code is rendered depending on the "complexity" of the expression. -SpuriousQ (talk) 13:23, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Your continued donations keep Wikipedia running!

Can the "Your continued donations keep Wikipedia running! " be moved up onto the line under sign in/create account (-10px?) or over left to the middle (500px?), because it is covering up templates like the help contents back, the semiprotect templates and many others and its really irritating. Thank you, 00:07, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

I suggest asking at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical) - that's where the developers and technical folks hang out. (And please sign your questions by using four tildes, not five - if you sign with five, you leave only a date/time stamp, without a username.) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 02:26, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

I can confirm that this is a problem for logged-out users; there is no problemn for logged-in users. The problem is that people are using the same space for two different messages. For the time being, you could avoid the problem by creating an account, although I agree that a better solution will need to be found in the long term. --ais523 10:19, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

• Moved from the Help Desk. --Darkest Hour|DarkeBot 16:18, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Flaw in WP:PT?

Admins, take a look at Special:Undelete/Help talk:Starting a new page/w/index.php. Some anon managed to edit the page after it had been deleted to enable cascading protection. (Compare timestamp of last deleted revision with the time of David Levy's deletion.) I've no idea whether it's a problem with the {{protected title}} template which is used to transclude the deleted page, or even cascading protection itself. Awyong Jeffrey Mordecai Salleh 06:44, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm not an admin so I can't see the deleted revision you're referring to but I think the problem is because the template uses the #ifexist: ParserFunction which is not updated immediately upon deletion. Therefore, the cascading protection only comes in a short delay after the page is deleted. Tra (Talk) 13:22, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

I don't get it... when I add the deleted page into WP:PT, the notice that "this page is protected" will appear when I try to edit it just minutes later. How would that fit in with your reply? Awyong Jeffrey Mordecai Salleh 15:24, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

I just managed to create User talk:Skysmith/w/index.php, a page on the list. Upon purging the cache of the protected page list, I could no longer edit it. Someone with knowledge of how cascading protection is implemented could probably explain exactly what needs to be done to trigger protection. --- RockMFR 15:28, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

This is an educated guess, but I think that if the page is transcluded to PT first, then deleted, it won't be protected until next time PT is edited or purged, because otherwise PT's transclusion list won't be updated due to the ifexist. --ais523 18:07, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

I don't think that the "ifexist" element is the culprit. The template is designed to transclude the page if it doesn't exist (and display a message and deletion link if it does), and I'm certain that the transclusions began immediately upon the pages' deletion (meaning that the "ifexist" detection was functioning properly).

The problem appears to stem from a minor bug in the cascading protection feature, which causes it to work with deleted pages only when the deletion occurs before the cascading protection is applied or when the protected page's cache is purged. I'll add "purge" links and instructions to the PT pages. —David Levy 18:37, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Eh, cascading protection uses the templatelinks table, which is updated when the source page is edited. It's not really something I'd be willing to fix, seeing as it's a very obscure edge case that would result in non-trivial performance trade-offs. — Werdna talk 06:19, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Semiprotection notice

I was wondering if it would be possible to make the semiprotection notice when you go to edit or view the source of a semiprotected page be made more prominent and provide more information (when you do not have enough access to edit a page, a "view source" tab appears instead of the "edit" tab). The current notice on the "edit" tab is, "Note: This page has been semi-protected so that only established users can edit it." The notice on the view source tab is at the bottom of this post. In addition to being more prominent, I think that it should have the same information that is on {{sprotected}}. This would allow us to do away with the semiprotection notices on articles. The template puts the article in a category as well as notifying readers, but the template could be modified so that it just puts the article in a category.

I think that this would be a wonderful change. The semiprotection notice currently blemishes many otherwise excellent articles. In addition, for a significant number of articles, the semiprotection is permanent. It is not necessary for readers of the article to know whether an article is semiprotected or not. Editors can easily tell that they are unable to edit an article by the lack of an "edit" tab and the presence of the "view source" tab. If that is not enough, perhaps another tab should be put on protected articles. It could be called "protection" or something similar and it could give all of the information needed. Another option would be to have an easy to recognize symbol that an article is protected, such as a padlock. Clicking on the symbol would send you to a page with the information. The symbol should be at the top of the page, like the tabs are, not inside the article.

Notice on the view source tab:

This page is either protected or semi-protected.

• If the page is fully protected, only administrators can edit it; if it is semi-protected, only established registered users can edit it.
• Why some pages are protected
• Discuss this page with others or request unprotection
• You may sign in if you have not done so already

You can view and copy the source of this page:

Kjkolb 20:44, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

It is easy to do, MediaWiki:Semiprotectedpagewarning just needs to be edited. But you will need to suggest exactly what you want it to say, and gain consensus for that version, before an admin will change it. Prodego ^talk 04:04, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

I suppose that I could change it myself after I gain consensus, as an admin. ;-) Thanks for posting about how it is done. I never know what things are editable like that and what requires a developer. As for the exact form, I guess making it the same as the {{sprotected}} template would work (the template is what is in the box only, the rest is usage information). So, is anyone for or against making this change? I'll post notes on the Village Pump policy page and the semiprotection policy talk page. -- Kjkolb 04:51, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm in favour of doing away with the "view source" tab, which is unhelpful and confusing to new editors. Users should see an "edit this page" tab on every page, even if it's not possible for that particular user to edit the page (it would of course be explained, when they click the tab, why they can't edit that page). As Wikipedia is supposed to be "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit", newbie editors need to be told which pages have editing restrictions and more importantly why they have those restrictions.

As for the {{sprotected}} warning - if the objection here is that the warning is ugly and "blemishes" articles, then it could be made smaller and less obtrusive. There are undoubtedly more elegant ways to display such warnings, but I'm opposed to anything which hides the fact that the page is protected. For the sake of being open and helpful to newcomers, a page's protection status should be prominently displayed, not hidden away. You are correct to say that readers do not need such warnings - but editors do, and editors tend to start out as readers (perhaps not at first realising that the wiki can be edited).

Incidentally, I've come across a number of semi-protected articles which lack {{sprotected}}/{{sprotected2}} tags and which provide no reason for the semi-protection in the talk page or edit history. If this is deliberate, it is a worrying trend. I will always add {{sprotected}} to such an article whenever I find one. AdorableRuffian 16:04, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

In particular, with the addition of auto-expiring page protection, the more automated our protection notices are, then probably the better. I've seen proposals for a MediaWiki message to be displayed, in the place of templates like {{sprotect}} and the like -- would save us all time adding the templates, with the added bonus of avoiding manual removal of {{tprotected}} and such. – Luna Santin (talk) 07:31, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

For MediaWiki:Semiprotectedpagewarning, it could be very helpful to add "If you cannot edit this page, you can still suggest improvements to the article on its talk page", where "on its talk page" is a wikilink to the article's talk page. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 14:30, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

As often happens, I forgot about this discussion because there are so many to keep track of. Anyway, in response to AdorableRuffian, I strongly disagree with keeping the notice so prominent, and therefore necessarily unsightly, because some articles are to be permanently semiprotected. If it were temporary, it would not be nearly so bad. That is why I have no objection to cleanup, wikify and similar templates. To have such an unsightly template on a well written article is crazy to me.

There is now an image of a padlock that links to the semiprotection policy on pages that are semiprotected (I do not know how long it has been there). I do not see what is wrong with just having that image as notice, as well as an explanation when someone clicks on the "view source"/"edit this page" tab (the explanation could be what is currently in the notice template). The padlock image could be made larger, if necessary. Alternatively or in addition to making the image larger, text could be placed next to the padlock, perhaps something like "semiprotected". -- Kjkolb 05:59, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

My mistake. The padlock is an alternative template for the semiprotection notice. Therefore, it appears that this situation has been dealt with. -- Kjkolb 06:09, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Having an automatic notice at the top of each protected page would be trivial to implement. However, in my opinion, any message at the top of every protected page is highly undesirable; as such I don't intend to implement such a notice. I don't know how other developers feel about it, but I vaguely remember having a discussion about it a few months ago in one of the tech IRC channelsWikipedia:Requests for arbitration/The need for the existence of #mediawiki? and I'm not the only developer to have this view. — Werdna talk 06:14, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Page with directory-like name redirecting to main page

I was looking at Special:Newpages, and noticed a vandal page had been created. The page is [[:/..]] See also [1]. Trying to actually go to that article automatically redirects to the main WP page. I'm not sure if it's happening in my browser or if it's a server-side redirect. Either way, it seems possible to create a page that isn't easily accessible by normal means. Is this a known issue? eaolson 06:44, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

It's why we don't have a page called [[:.]], and why [[:/.]] redirects to Slash rather than Slashdot. I think it's most likely to be happening at Wikipedia's end, but independent of MediaWiki itself. --ais523 12:16, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Note that I've placed a colon at the start of the links that we're discussing, to prevent the special markup meaning that / at the start of a link has. --ais523 12:16, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Ref stuff

This is kind of a proposal (sorry if this has been proposed before). When using a <ref> multiple times in an article, the reflist automatically separates each instance into letters (see the first ref in Peter Jennings for example). This is nice. However, the refs in-text don't have the corresponding letter labels, which would be even better. Instead, all of them are labeled [1]. This makes it difficult for readers to return to where they were in the text, as I doubt many of them would keep track of how many times a reference had been used so far in the text. Making refs in text appear as [1a], [1b], [1c], etc. would be better IMO. Of course, using the back button works for most people, but clicking on a ref to return to the text seems more intuitive to me. What do you all think? Gzkn 07:23, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

The <ref> tag citations are done using an extension called Cite.php. You may want to look through that extension's talk page. --MZMcBride 03:04, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Edit merging feature

Is there any way I can turn off the "edit merging" feature that combines changes made by two users to the same page at the same time? The feature relatively often merges vandalism reversions with more vandalism (example). These merges are annoying as they may go unnoticed. I would rather just get the "edit conflict" message every time I edit a page simultaneously with someone else. --KFP (talk | contribs) 22:18, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

This is getting annoying

For some reason, on some Wikipedia edit windows (it only does it there) my browser randomly moves back a page. I am using IE ver. 6. Is there any way I can fix this? Mr.Z-mantalk¢ 02:39, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Most likely the backspace key is what's doing it. Backspace is a hot key for the browser's 'back' function. If you hit it while accidentally moving focus away from the edit area, it will shoot you back. SubSeven 08:29, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

It didn't use to do that, is there a way to turn it off? I don't use backspace to go back a page anyway. Mr.Z-mantalk¢ 17:37, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

It would depend on which browser you use, but I don't know of any way to disable it in either IE or Firefox. Maybe somebody will jump in here. SubSeven 04:11, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Error when viewed in IE

The title and tab arrangement on my Sandbox/Page1 looks fine in Firefox, but it's not so good in MS Internet Explorer v6, as can be seen in the images.

Neither problem is a disaster, and the one with "The Title" can be gotten around by reducing the size, but I'm sure there must be a solution. I'd like to get it fixed because the test version in my sandbox is a copy of the one in use on the energy portal. I've tried various ideas, but have reached the stage where assistance would be gratefully received...

Further documentation on this talk page Gralo 23:09, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Having resolved the original issues above, one more minor problem has now emerged. In Firefox the "edit" link appears as intended; in IE it doesn't. Probably needs someone who understands CSS to resolve? Gralo 17:22, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Category I can't seem to create

Hi, I'm following up on a recent checkuser result but seem unable to create Category:Wikipedia sockpuppets of Somethingoranother. Is creating such categories restricted in some way? WjBscribe 14:24, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Done. You couldn't do it because you tried to create a category with a null edit, which is not allowed. — Ambuj Saxena (☎) 16:48, 24 February 2007 (UTC):

Thanks for clearing that up. WjBscribe 17:06, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Geotagging Coordinate Info

Hello,

I'm wondering if there are any plans to integrate geographical coordinate information with Wikipedia entries.

I ask this b/c I would love to have my GPS receiver tell me all of the things that have a Wikipedia entry as I drive past them, so that I can pull over and look up the article if I want (in my case I'd use my blackberry for this, but soon more PDAs will have built in GPS, etc.)

I know there is a microformat (Geo) designed to do inline lat/long coordinates. So one option would be to simply create a wiki formatting style for coordinates to allow article editors to add them to places, etc.

However the use case that I'm imagining is that someone would want to download lat/long/article information for a given geographical area, such as California, the Southwest US, or Paris, for example...

So it might make sense to tag an article in the database with coordinates so that someone could easily search for all entries with coordinates between four points.

I'm a programmer and would gladly submit a patch to enable this, but I wanted to get an idea of whether anything like this is already in progress or if there are any constraints or concerns I should be aware of.

-matt

Mmmurf 19:35, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

The semantic extension of the media wiki software will have this feature. See the experimental installation of this at Ontoworld. This page on sugarloaf mountain has coordinates - [[2]] 81.187.181.168 16:59, 24 February 2007 (UTC).

Inter language links

I have just created a new page on Hydrogen in the Kannada wikipedia and put a link to that article from the English wikipedia (i.e., it shows up in the "in other languages" section). Is there a way to automatically get this inter-language link from other language wikipedias as well? or do I have to manually go and put [[kn:xxxx]] link everywhere (i.e., say in the Hindi wikipedia, Japanese wikipedia etc.)? I realize that somebody reading the Hydrogen article in the Japanese wikipedia might not be very interested in reading it in Kannada, but just thought I would ask. Thanks. --Sarvagna 17:26, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

There is a tool called the Interwiki-Link-Checker being used to create a database of articles that should be linked. The actual editing to add the links generally seems to be done by a variety of bot operators. As far as I know, there isn't a tool that will automatically propagate newly added interlanguage links (although this should be quite possible). You might want to bring this up at Wikipedia talk:Multilingual coordination. -- Rick Block (talk) 18:48, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. For now I will add the links manually. --Sarvagna 19:40, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Category I can't seem to create

Hi, I'm following up on a recent checkuser result but seem unable to create Category:Wikipedia sockpuppets of Somethingoranother. Is creating such categories restricted in some way? WjBscribe 14:24, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Done. You couldn't do it because you tried to create a category with a null edit, which is not allowed. — Ambuj Saxena (☎) 16:48, 24 February 2007 (UTC):

Thanks for clearing that up. WjBscribe 17:06, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Qala St. Joseph F.C.

I have recently made some editing to the above mentioned article on Wikipedia.

However after having saved such changes they were temporarily made visible but then when I checked the following day they were gone.

Why has this happened?

Thank You —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 88.203.67.110 (talk) 13:05, 24 February 2007 (UTC).

Check the "history" tab - next to the edit tab. when I look at this it does show edits being deleted or reverted recently so it may be that what you saw was a the preview and you didn't then "save page". Hope this helps. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 81.187.181.168 (talk) 17:18, 24 February 2007 (UTC).

Geotagging Coordinate Info

Hello,

I'm wondering if there are any plans to integrate geographical coordinate information with Wikipedia entries.

I ask this b/c I would love to have my GPS receiver tell me all of the things that have a Wikipedia entry as I drive past them, so that I can pull over and look up the article if I want (in my case I'd use my blackberry for this, but soon more PDAs will have built in GPS, etc.)

I know there is a microformat (Geo) designed to do inline lat/long coordinates. So one option would be to simply create a wiki formatting style for coordinates to allow article editors to add them to places, etc.

However the use case that I'm imagining is that someone would want to download lat/long/article information for a given geographical area, such as California, the Southwest US, or Paris, for example...

So it might make sense to tag an article in the database with coordinates so that someone could easily search for all entries with coordinates between four points.

I'm a programmer and would gladly submit a patch to enable this, but I wanted to get an idea of whether anything like this is already in progress or if there are any constraints or concerns I should be aware of.

-matt

Mmmurf 19:35, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

The semantic extension of the media wiki software will have this feature. See the experimental installation of this at Ontoworld. This page on sugarloaf mountain has coordinates - [[3]] 81.187.181.168 16:59, 24 February 2007 (UTC).

How to categorize

How does one categorize articles? Thanks in advance. N734LQ 21:54, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

See WP:CAT. In general, you just place [[Category:Name of category]] at the bottom of an article.↔NMajdan•talk 21:59, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Simply put a category link on the page (by convention these are usualy placed at the end of the page, but technicaly it can be anywhere). For example adding [[Category:Living people]] to a page will add that page to Category:Living people. If you want to link to a category rater than including the page in the category you add a colon at the start of the link like so [[:Category:Living people]]. See Help:Category for more details and info on sorting entries within a category and such. --Sherool (talk) 22:08, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Has Wiki functioning changed?

Things seem to be in different colors now than before a week ago. Also the contrast is very faint (I can't see commas and footnotes etc.) The print seems small and faint. Also I can barely see the bars on the side (to move the page up and down with). I upgraded my Firefox browser to 2.0.0.1. Could that be it? Thanks! --Mattisse 20:32, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

It looks the same to me. Try anothe browser. - Peregrine Fisher 20:46, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm using the same IE that I have been using for a while and see no changes. But when I use a different PC with a newer IE, different colors are noticable, so it probably is your browser. Mr.Z-mantalk¢ 20:47, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

That's what I'm beginning to think too. Just have to get used to it I guess. Thanks! --Mattisse 20:50, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

SVG rendering (again)

Sbrools was good enough to follow up on my request to replace a fair use map with a "home made" SVG version. However he's having some trouble getting MediaWiki to render thumbnails for the image (Opera at least can render the raw SVG just fine). Can anyone see any obvious problems in Image:Europejews.svg that prevents it from beeing "MediaWiki compatable"? I know next to nothing about SVG syntax and what MediaWiki supports and not, but I guess the standalone="no" bit in the header may be a problem, and if xlink:href="EmancofJews.gif" does anyting (as far as I can tell the map is made up of "path" elements not a embeded gif) I guess that would be a no-no too... Is there a page somewhere that list SVG features you need to avoid to make SVG's work properly under MediaWiki? --Sherool (talk) 08:50, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

AFAIK Mediawiki does not render SVGs with external references for security reasons - the GIF has to be either removed or embedded in the SVG. --Dapeteばか 10:47, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, removing the xlink bit seems to have done the trick (the GIF is not actualy used, so not a problem). Thanks. --Sherool (talk) 12:52, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Special:Random

i'm doing a little personal research into the types of articles on wikipedia, and have been using Special:Random to get a random sample of pages (and getting a surprising percentage of soccer club articles and small-county-in-minnesota type stubs). i'd just like some confirmation that this feature does, indeed, return a random (or near-random) article.

• obviously it isn't returning user: or wp: or talk: pages. but does it return lists or categories or anything else with a ":" in it? (it appears not to)
• is it skewed towards more recent or older articles?
• is it filtered or censored in any way to avoid freaking out the faint of heart?
• if i understand correctly, once a day (or every hour or once a week; can't find the info now) an indexing bot looks thru all the new articles and makes them searchable, but this isn't instantaneous. does a new article title have to be indexed (or whatever it's called) before it can show up?

to cut to the chase, does every article in the main article space at the instant the button is pushed have an equal chance of being returned? any info is appreciated. thanks much. -barneca 19:36, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

No, not all articles have an equal chance. We have an index called page_random, which is a random floating point number uniformly distributed between 0 and 1. Special:Random chooses a random floating-point number with 2^-64 quantizaton, and returns the next article with a page_random value higher than the selected random number. Some articles will have a larger gap before them, in the page_random index space, and so will be more likely to be selected. So the actual probability of any given article being selected is in fact itself random, with probability unrelated to age or quality. I seem to remember doing some analysis of the distribution at some time in the past, I've probably got an Excel spreadsheet around somewhere if anyone is interested. -- Tim Starling 20:17, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

thank you, tim. i guess i'm not as concerned about true randomness as i am about "probability unrelated to age or quality", so that answers my main question. i originally got to thinking about this because i believe (can't be positive, but i really think it happened) that Special:Random sent me to the article Shelob twice in the same week. the odds on that seem astronomical if it is truly random.

if anyone has insight on my other, more minor questions, re: colons and indexing bots, i'd welcome that too. -barneca 20:51, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

It returns any non-redirect in the main namespace, which is not quite the same as articles with no colon in the title. There are no categories but there will be list pages. See Help:Namespace for more information. Articles can be returned instantly after creation, there is no delay. -- Tim Starling 21:02, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

thanks again, tim, that's the info i was looking for. if it ever returns Shelob again, i'm immediately going out and buying a lottery ticket, and i'll share the winnings with you. -barneca 21:28, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Just a note that Probability is famously misleading to intuition, even among probabilists. If you pick two articles at random from a category that has 10, "with replacement" (what you're doing by clicking "random page"), the chance they are different is 90%, only a 10% chance you'd unluckily get the same article both times. What if you chose 10 articles from 100? The chance they are all different would be about 63%, almost even odds. Wiki has on the order of one million pages. If over the course of two weeks you chose 1000 randomly, what are the chances they would all be distinct? 61%. Hardly any different from picking 10 from 100. I expect you examined fewer than 1000 but getting two the same may not have been so unlucky as it seemed. Also, of course, Shelob is inescapable, unless you happen to have a magical elven dagger handy :-) Pete St.John 22:20, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

What's with the highlight thing?

Over the past few days, I've noticed that if I highlight a section of text while editing an article, the text appears (mostly) as it would in the article in a purple box, similar to a preview. When was this feature added and what purpose does it serve that we didn't already have? The box gets rather annoying when I'm trying to cut and paste large sections of text, as it has a tendency to push the edit dialogue off the screen. When it previews the wikicode, it doesn't even display everything correctly. I've had instances where the preview in the purple box is different from the actual preview I get by pushing the preview button, which has always worked just fine for me before. I'm sorry if I'm missing something, but I really don't see the purpose of this highlight code. Hersfold ^(talk/work) 16:28, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

It's a new feature of navigation popups (one about which there have been many complaints recently). See #Technical editing problem, above, for how you can turn this off. --ais523 16:33, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Ah, ok. Thanks! Hersfold ^(talk/work) 23:01, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Settings in MediaWiki:common.css disappear when mod_rewrite is turned on...

As stated in the title, all of my settings in common.css (a#new, #personal colour changes, etc...) disappear when mod_rewrite is activated in apache's httpd.conf, even when I don't use the rewriting engine at all. Is this a bug?

I'm using WAMP5 Server 1.6.6

Apache httpd 2.0.59

PHP Version 5.2.0

mySQL version 5.0.27

TIA! Kareeser|^Talk! 14:58, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

You want mediawiki.org. Mediawiki isn't supported here. --kingboyk 12:20, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Page layout problems

For me (and this may to some extent be browser dependent), the article British_coin_One_Pound has some layout problems. Between "The reverse designs are as follows" and the text following is a huge piece of vertical white space. I know why this is happening (I think). The ordinary text (terminating at the line "The reverse designs are as follows") can "wrap around" the right hand infobox, and so fit into the space to the left of it. The text after this is a table, which can't. By adjusting the % width of the table until it just fits in the space I can fix the problem. However, this seems an unpleasant ad hoc solution, dependent on the precise measurements of things which may change, or be different in different browsers. What is the correct way to fix this robustly? Thanks, Matt 02:47, 21 February 2007 (UTC).

I removed the width spesification on the table with eliminates the vertical whitespace problem (but will make the table look "squashed" on small screens). If you want to have the text in the table flow around the infobox you have to remove the table though. The entire table is one "layout element" so all of it is "squashed" to fit beside the infobox as long as part of it is next to it. The easiest "fix" would probably be to break the table into lots of small tables (one for each row for example). Then each mini table would be sized independently and the ones that are located beyond the infobox would expand to use all available horizontal space. --Sherool (talk) 09:06, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Hi Sherool, thanks for the info. Matt 00:39, 23 February 2007 (UTC).

Focus stealing feature.

When editing an article, I sometimes have to highlight text in the text box. Recently, I noticed that highlighting text in wikilinks (i.e. [[double square brackets]]), the focus is taken away, and the text is echoed just above the text box. What is the purpose of this feature? More importantly, how can I make it stop? It is rather annoying to have the focus repeatedly taken away from what I was editing. --Cheers, Folajimi (leave a note) 21:31, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

I think its a new feature of popups. If you add

popupOnEditSelection = false;

to your monobook.js it seems to go aways. It could be useful for checking you have got the wikilink correct. --Salix alba (talk) 23:15, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the tip; it was a wee bit too aggressive for me. --Cheers, Folajimi (leave a note) 19:21, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

The feature was fantastic before (select a link in edit mode and get a small popup). Now I have to turn it off? Motto: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. --kingboyk 12:22, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Counting articles in categories

Could we display the total number of articles in a category? For instance, it would be nice to know the total number of disambig pages. This total might include or exclude articles in subcategories, or maybe we could get both counts. --Smack (talk) 06:11, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Preload links

Is there a page that documents how to use preload links? (like this one) I've noticed some of the params don't do what I'd assume they should do (autosummary, autominor). Are these disabled or something? --- RockMFR 05:56, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

I think you're looking for Special:Allmessages; things such as autosummary are listed there (under "autosumm-replace"). --MZMcBride 06:02, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

I can't imagine that there is any way to do just a link like that (One click vandalism!). I can write up some Javascript for an automatic tab if you'd like. -Amarkov moo! 06:05, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Right aligned

Can somebody add {{tnavbar}} so that it is at the right in the top row of {{Harry Potter characters}}? When I tried to put it in, it appeared a line break down. Thanks. --Fbv65edel / ☑t / ☛c || 05:40, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Done. --MZMcBride 05:51, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Italicized type is shifted by two letters

When viewing Wikipedia pages, I've noticed that the letters in italicized (or oblique) words are shifted "downstream" by two letters. In other words, "apple" now reads "crrng." As one can imagine, reading pages with a lot of italicized words becomes impossible!

I'm using a Macintosh G4 with OS 10.4.8 and Safari version 2.0.4. Is there a setting I need to make in order to correct this problem?

Thanks, Bill Pitts (E-Mail removed for security purposes) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Bill Pitts (talk • contribs) 02:05, 25 February 2007 (UTC).

Seems to me you have the wrong encoding set on your browser, or a corrupted font. I am viewing this with a Safari and Mac OS X 10.4.8 and I do not see that problem. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 02:07, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Media icon with audio files

It was a positive step to add icons next to media files showing their type (eg. audio), without having to click or hovering mouse over the hyperlinks. However, I found that even the links to the deletion log pages of such files show the icon, even when the media doesn't exist in the first place. (ex. this). Shouldn't these be shown as normal external hyperlinks? — Ambuj Saxena (☎) 16:57, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

This is due to some "clever" css selectors (see main.css):

** keep the whitespace in front of the ^=, hides rule from konqueror
** this is css3, the validator doesn't like it when validating as css2
*/
#bodyContent a.external,
#bodyContent a[href ^="gopher://"] {
 background: url(external.png) center right no-repeat;
 padding-right: 13px;
}
#bodyContent a[href ^="https://"],
.link-https {
 background: url(lock_icon.gif) center right no-repeat;
 padding-right: 16px;
}
#bodyContent a[href ^="mailto:"],
.link-mailto {
 background: url(mail_icon.gif) center right no-repeat;
 padding-right: 18px;
}
#bodyContent a[href ^="news://"] {
 background: url(news_icon.png) center right no-repeat;
 padding-right: 18px;
}
#bodyContent a[href ^="ftp://"],
.link-ftp {
 background: url(file_icon.gif) center right no-repeat;
 padding-right: 18px;
}
#bodyContent a[href ^="irc://"],
.link-irc {
 background: url(discussionitem_icon.gif) center right no-repeat;
 padding-right: 18px;
}
#bodyContent a.external[href $=".ogg"], #bodyContent a.external[href $=".OGG"],
#bodyContent a.external[href $=".mid"], #bodyContent a.external[href $=".MID"],
#bodyContent a.external[href $=".midi"], #bodyContent a.external[href $=".MIDI"],
#bodyContent a.external[href $=".mp3"], #bodyContent a.external[href $=".MP3"],
#bodyContent a.external[href $=".wav"], #bodyContent a.external[href $=".WAV"],
#bodyContent a.external[href $=".wma"], #bodyContent a.external[href $=".WMA"],
.link-audio {
 background: url("audio.png") center right no-repeat;
 padding-right: 13px;
}
#bodyContent a.external[href $=".ogm"], #bodyContent a.external[href $=".OGM"],
#bodyContent a.external[href $=".avi"], #bodyContent a.external[href $=".AVI"],
#bodyContent a.external[href $=".mpeg"], #bodyContent a.external[href $=".MPEG"],
#bodyContent a.external[href $=".mpg"], #bodyContent a.external[href $=".MPG"],
.link-video {
 background: url("video.png") center right no-repeat;
 padding-right: 13px;
}
#bodyContent a.external[href $=".pdf"], #bodyContent a.external[href $=".PDF"],
#bodyContent a.external[href *=".pdf#"], #bodyContent a.external[href *=".PDF#"],
#bodyContent a.external[href *=".pdf?"], #bodyContent a.external[href *=".PDF?"],
.link-document {
 background: url("document.png") center right no-repeat;
 padding-right: 12px;
}

Example: #bodyContent a.external[href $=".ogg"], #bodyContent a.external[href $=".OGG"],. The $= selector matches the end of an element attribute value. In this case, <a class="external" href="blahblahblah.ogg">. You can defeat this with a simple query string rearrangement: like this. Congrats though: you have a ~CSS3 browser! --Splarka (rant) 08:23, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the info. I use Firefox. I tried to see this page in MSIE 6.0 and it turned out that the log page link appears as a normal hyperlink. Even my UTF-8 signature doesn't render correctly in MSIE. — Ambuj Saxena (☎) 11:48, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Template problem

I've created this template. But I can't seem to get certain pieces of info (such as Man of the match) to appear in it. Buc 14:04, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Working on it. Gimmetrow 15:35, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

My monobook.js -- something's wrong with it.

Not quite sure if this is the right place to ask, but anyway: I've had navigation popups installed for quite a while, and I just installed 3 more scripts, those being navigation shortcuts, speedy deletion tabs, and edit intro section. They work just fine, but the instructions to clear my browser cache are gone in my monobook.js, and the formatting looks all weird. It even has a random speedy deletion tag stuck in the middle of it! How do I fix all these problems? Here's a link to my monobook.js page: User:Pyrospirit/monobook.js. Thanks, Pyrospirit ^{Flames Fire} 00:59, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

I sometimes see that immediately after I edit my monobook.js. It normally goes away after a while but to make it go away now, put //<pre> at the start of the page and //</pre> at the end. Tra (Talk) 01:23, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

You can also press Crtl +Refresh. (or Command + Refresh on a Mac). ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 02:08, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

The actual way to fix this is to purge the squid cache on the Wikimedia servers. Clicking here will purge the cache of anyone who clicks it. Prodego ^talk 02:22, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Thank you very much, I will try both of those. Pyrospirit ^{Flames Fire} 18:40, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

It worked! *randomly starts dancing* Pyrospirit ^{Flames Fire} 19:00, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Error when viewed in IE

The title and tab arrangement on my Sandbox/Page1 looks fine in Firefox, but it's not so good in MS Internet Explorer v6, as can be seen in the images.

Neither problem is a disaster, and the one with "The Title" can be gotten around by reducing the size, but I'm sure there must be a solution. I'd like to get it fixed because the test version in my sandbox is a copy of the one in use on the energy portal. I've tried various ideas, but have reached the stage where assistance would be gratefully received...

Further documentation on this talk page Gralo 23:09, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Having resolved the original issues above, one more minor problem has now emerged. In Firefox the "edit" link appears as intended; in IE it doesn't. Probably needs someone who understands CSS to resolve? Gralo 17:22, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Edit merging feature

Is there any way I can turn off the "edit merging" feature that combines changes made by two users to the same page at the same time? The feature relatively often merges vandalism reversions with more vandalism (example). These merges are annoying as they may go unnoticed. I would rather just get the "edit conflict" message every time I edit a page simultaneously with someone else. --KFP (talk | contribs) 22:18, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Sublists?

Is there any tool or such that can be used to create a sub watchlist; IE if you just want to be notafied on one type of article you're watching.

Take me for example, recently, I tagged a ton of articles about a proposed merge, but i need to keep an eye on the talk pages; however, I'm already watching a ton of pages not related to the topic, I don't want to remove them from my watch list, but I also wish to view 'just' the changes in articles I'm recently tagged. Is there anyway of doing this?--Honeymane_{Heghlu meH QaQ jajvam} 19:49, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

You can make a user subpage with a list of links to of the articles that you're interested in, save the page and click on 'Related changes' in the sidebar, to see the recent changes to just those articles. Tra (Talk) 20:23, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

If you don't mind going off-site you can also hook an aggregator or some such into the RRS feeds from selected page histories. Maybe the new Yahoo! Pipes thing or whatever (never tried it myself though). --Sherool (talk) 22:05, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Not exactly what you are looking for, but to make sure you know it: You can create a page, let's say User:Honeymane/watch1, with links to pages and then use Special:Recentchangeslinked/User:Honeymane/watch1. This also works for categories: Special:Recentchangeslinked/Category:Retired Atlantic hurricanes. --Ligulem 23:50, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

SVG problems?

We seem to have problems converting SVGs to PNGs for display. See here and here. They render fine in Camino, Firefox, Opera, and Inkscape. The second one looks like this when it should look like this. What's going on? --M1ss1ontomars2k4 ^{(T | C | @)} 07:25, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia uses rsvg to generate PNGs from SVGs. Rsvg doesn't support any way to do superscript/subscripts (eg. the baseline-shift="sub" attribute is used in the examples given), so you need to use some sort of workaround to achieve the same effect... either change the text to a path (which increases the filesize by quite a bit, and makes it a little harder to edit), or make a separate text box and try to align it (though it's frequently difficult to make sure that the text lines up properly). --Interiot 07:56, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Are subscripts not part of SVG 1.1? If it's just an rsvg flaw I'd be reluctant to create a workaround. --M1ss1ontomars2k4 ^{(T | C | @)} 19:01, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

I tried to copy an SVG into a Powerpoint and the bottom showed up black. Please advise. ThanksElatanatari 01:59, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

It could be that PowerPoint can't handle SVGs correctly. Try pasting in the PNG file that is automatically generated instead. Tra (Talk) 02:06, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

This is getting annoying

For some reason, on some Wikipedia edit windows (it only does it there) my browser randomly moves back a page. I am using IE ver. 6. Is there any way I can fix this? Mr.Z-mantalk¢ 02:39, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Most likely the backspace key is what's doing it. Backspace is a hot key for the browser's 'back' function. If you hit it while accidentally moving focus away from the edit area, it will shoot you back. SubSeven 08:29, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

It didn't use to do that, is there a way to turn it off? I don't use backspace to go back a page anyway. Mr.Z-mantalk¢ 17:37, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

It would depend on which browser you use, but I don't know of any way to disable it in either IE or Firefox. Maybe somebody will jump in here. SubSeven 04:11, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

CSS hover

I want to use CSS hover effects in a navigation template I'm working on. Is there any way to define a CSS class on a wikipedia page? Is there a template or something that would directly let me do hover effects (I'm specifically looking for a change of background color on hover) --froth^T 01:34, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

You would have to create a site-wide class on MediaWiki:Common.css. That's the only way I know of. Titoxd^(?!?) 02:45, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

In CSS3 you can do it with inline style I believe, but unfortunately that's not here yet, so as Titoxd said only mediawiki:Common.css (Or special:mypage/monobook.css if its for yourself). Bawolff 03:05, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Delete tab for your own user space

Would it be possible to add a feature that allows non-admins to delete and restore pages in their own userspace? This would bypass having to add more pages to the backlog of speedy deletion candidates to get a subpage deleted. Talk pages might need to be exempt to prevent malicious deletions. John Reaves (talk) 10:24, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Anyting is possible, but I suspect such a feature request would not be given very high priority, since it would probably involve a fairly substantial rewrite on how the delete access is handeled (currently you can either delete everyting or nothing at all, no way to filter by namespace, let alone spesific subpages) for very little gain (it's not like deletion of user subpages is the biggest cause of backlog at CSD). --Sherool (talk) 10:56, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Then you could delete any page that's not move-protected. So.... I'm gonna say no on that one? :) --brion 18:13, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Explanation: users can move pages to under their user space (this is called "userfying" in wikipedia slang). So if this would be implemented, John could move Earth to User:John Reaves/XXX and zap that page together with its complete history. A good reminder for admins to look at the history of pages before deleting them... --Ligulem 18:43, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Just leave it simple. I'm sure the admins don't mind :P. Yuser31415 19:30, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Okay, thanks for the feedback. I should have thought that one through a little bit. That's the last time I propose anything at 5:00 am. John Reaves (talk) 20:13, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

It would be interesting to get feedback from admins as to how much of their time is spent doing speedy deletes in user space. Lingulem has pointed out a flaw in the original proposal; the solution (which makes the proposal more complicated) would be to only allow users to delete pages where 100% of the edits were done by that user. I suspect that would still be to hard to write into the software.

An alternative would be to give an admin bit to a bot that would do speedy deletes of pages where the db-author tag was in place and the bot confirmed that 100% of the edits were by the same user (ergo, by the user placing the tag). I realize the repulsion that a part of our community has at the thought of an admin bot of any kind; that's why it would be interesting to find out how much admin work such a bot would actually eliminate. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 02:47, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Just to be clear: it was Brion who pointed out the problem with John's idea. I just wrote down an example use case (which I hadn't thought of myself when I first read John's idea). Thank you John and Brion for the lesson :-). --Ligulem 08:46, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Seems like a waste of developer time to me. We have plenty of other stuff to work on (per-page blocking, title blacklist, tor blocking come to mind as being on my to-do list). This provides very little benefit and would probably take a few full days of developer time to create and perfect, which is about as long as it took me to do my protection rewrite. — Werdna talk 06:22, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

How about a non-admin bot that checks speedy-deletes to verify whether all edits are by the same user, and marks them as such for admin attention, saving the admin the trouble of doing the checking "manually"? --Coppertwig 04:55, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Problems displaying List of medical topics (S)

The referenced article is very large (286 KB, I think the edit window said on one of my edit attempts). I had considerable trouble editing it -- when I saved the page, it would not be redisplayed after the save -- and now I can't display it at all. The page load terminates without displaying any content at all. Using Shift+F5 doesn't help, and neither does adding &action=purge to the URL. Is this to be expected with such a large article, or is something else going on? Thanks. --Tkynerd 00:59, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Interesting. The history works, maybe you hitted Wikipedia' sweet number for wikilinks :) -- ReyBrujo 01:02, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Apparently was a cache issue. -- ReyBrujo 01:05, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Had it been a cache issue, I would have expected one of the two remedies I mentioned above to have worked, but they didn't. At any rate, it seems to be working for me too (more or less) now. Thanks. --Tkynerd 01:17, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

I inspected the headers with LiveHTTPHeaders (unfortunately I did not save them), but apparently the squid was returning "No changes" with a cache miss. I have suffered from this in the past (will pay more attention next time), but from what I see the squid detected there were no changes in the page, and returned an empty page due the cache miss. -- ReyBrujo 01:30, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

OK, thanks for the additional detail. :-) --Tkynerd 01:54, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you mean by squid and whatnot, but that page doesn't display in my browser. - Peregrine Fisher 04:58, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

I was talking about Squid cache. The page works for me, maybe you can try a full refresh. If that does not work, try appending ?action=history to the URL, and then trying to see a revision, or ?action=purge to purge the content (note that these work with the en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ urls, not with the en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php ones, which require & instead of ?). -- ReyBrujo 05:10, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

To be honest, this article is much too long anyway, and should definitely be split or deleted. It eventually loaded in my browser (Firefox 2.0.0.2) but my CPU spiked to 100% for several seconds and my whole browser locked up, which is obviously not something we want happening when viewing an article. Jayden54 18:20, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Job queue records

Hi, I've been noticing the job queue more and more recently, and it seems to be an issue with the size it gets. Right now it's at 140,000, and its occurred to me (and others) that we should have an archive and graphs to highlight those times when it's all going wrong. A few people have asked stuff like "is 33,000 a large queue?", and without some sort of easily interpreted data archive (eg. a graph), the job queue is just a meaningless number, and there's no point in displaying it to none techies - Jack · talk · 11:22, Sunday, 25 February 2007

The raw number can still be quite useful, if you for example rename a stub category and want a rough idea on how long it will take for the change to propagate fully so you can check back if any articles are still lingering in the old cat (substed templates, manually added cats etc.), and things of that nature. One thing that could be useful would be some kind of log over edits that trigger more than X job queue jobs or something like that. I've seen the job queue as high as 500.000 which makes me wish I could track the source and see if someone is edit warring on a common template or something. --Sherool (talk) 12:32, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

How could we create this log? Would a request need to be made to developers? How would we do that? Jack · talk · 12:53, Sunday, 25 February 2007

It was at 700k (or so) when I checked earlier today. I know modifying the album infobox creates a 30-50k one. I agree that some actions may need a confirmation (in example, when saving the infobox, stops you with some message like "Saving this page may generate a 30k queue log. Save again to accept." However, we should protect all those that may be used for vandalism (we would be telling people "Dude, modify this template, save it, and you will have the servers processing for some time"). -- ReyBrujo 02:15, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Heh, good point. But that's not what I meant, I just wanted to know how to get a graph created to see the job queue? The following table is something I found on my travels (in Wikipedia:statistics), but I'm not entirely sure if it's what I want - Jack · talk · 00:10, Tuesday, 27 February 2007

Requests	hourly	daily	weekly	monthly	yearly
Traffic	hourly	daily	weekly	monthly	yearly

I recall seeing something like 1.8 million, but that was caused by a Mediawiki bug. Dragons flight 17:06, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Alphabetical

Bear with me, I am an old refugee from the eight-bit world. I took the link supplied by Soporific and what I found was somewhat opaque to me. Does it tell me, somewhere on that page, that I can enter a command that will make all the lists alphabetical by last name when I see them? I did not find anything in "my preferences" about alphabetization.

Dynamic lists are alphabetical by first name (or title, if that comes before the first name) in Wikipedia and other Wikis I have consulted. Alphabetizing by first name is ok for a 13-year-old's address book but I find it monstrously off-putting. I think there is a practical argument in favour of my attitude too, not just a cultural one: it's not a good idea to to have to work one's way through a long line of "John"s.

• If I understand your question, just see several sections above: #Sortable tables - sort keys?. The only think that I can think of is to have two columns: one for first name, one for last name. This makes sense, as most databases store people's first and last names separately.

First name	Last name
Abby	Smith
Charles	Guy
John	Can
John	Smith
Sarah	Can

Hope this helps. Gracenotes^T § 23:44, 26 February 2007 (UTC) Or this, which makes the names look more natural:

First name	Last name
Abby	Smith
Charles	Guy
John	Can
John	Smith
Sarah	Can

Gracenotes^T § 23:47, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Weirdness at the Help Desk

There's something strange going on at Wikipedia:Help desk. For some reason, section edit links have disappeared from the page; I've looked for an errant __NOEDITSECTION__, but haven't had any luck with that. A few other users have reported that as well. Any ideas? Titoxd^(?!?) 22:14, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I've noticed it as well. Someone on the Help Desk said that if they logged of they saw the section links, but this didn't work for me. Mr.Z-mantalk¢ 22:33, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

"Weirdness at the Help Desk" would be a really good album title. (Sorry, but somebody had to say it.) Have you tried going back through the page history to find the latest working version? That would help locate the problem. Raymond Arritt 22:37, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

No, section edit links don't show up on history revisions (I already tried). The only thing I can think of would be to keep reverting back one revision at a time until we finf one that works. I would do it but the vandal fighters might not like it. To prevent that, we would have to have an admin lock the page and then do it. Mr.Z-mantalk¢ 22:42, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Indeed, section edit only works in the top revision. Going back and reverting things sounds like a recipe for agony... Titoxd^(?!?) 22:43, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Found the problem. The page User:Darkest Hour/TAB was being transcluded in it, and that page transcluded Wikipedia:Tutorial/TabsTop which contained the __NOEDITSECTION__ command. Tra (Talk) 23:11, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

align bulleted text with other paragraphs

Is there a way to make bulleted text align with non bulleted text. This is specifically an issue in the last parts of Mount Hood#Incident history, but is easily demonstrated here:

• This is a lead for this section. It introduces the subject.

These lines are the meat of the section, and expand and clarify with full gory details, and should be aligned with the lead paragraph. There is one indent on this paragraph for the closest alignment.

No indentation, like this paragraph looks much worse. —EncMstr 01:45, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

My suggestion would be to write such a section with normal paragraphs, instead of a bulleted list. Bullets don't really belong in such a setting. —Bkell (talk) 02:07, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

• This is the lead section.
  These lines are the meat of the section, and expand and clarify with full gory details, and should be aligned with the lead paragraph. There is one indent on this paragraph for the closest alignment. --MZMcBride 02:48, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! Two excellent suggestions. —EncMstr 03:28, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Ref stuff

This is kind of a proposal (sorry if this has been proposed before). When using a <ref> multiple times in an article, the reflist automatically separates each instance into letters (see the first ref in Peter Jennings for example). This is nice. However, the refs in-text don't have the corresponding letter labels, which would be even better. Instead, all of them are labeled [1]. This makes it difficult for readers to return to where they were in the text, as I doubt many of them would keep track of how many times a reference had been used so far in the text. Making refs in text appear as [1a], [1b], [1c], etc. would be better IMO. Of course, using the back button works for most people, but clicking on a ref to return to the text seems more intuitive to me. What do you all think? Gzkn 07:23, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

The <ref> tag citations are done using an extension called Cite.php. You may want to look through that extension's talk page. --MZMcBride 03:04, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Changing background color for transparent PNGs

I just uploaded Image:Population density.png to replace Image:Pop density.jpg, but now the oceans are white (because the PNG has an alpha channel and it's composited against a white background by default). Is there any way to change the background to blue? I could always just upload a separate pre-composited PNG with no alpha channel, but that seems like a needless waste of space. —Keenan Pepper 04:08, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

You could put it on an element with a blue background, but to make it a blue background 100% of the time you'd have to disable the alpha layer (as it is contrary to the goal). --Splarka (rant) 08:32, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Adding the number of bytes of each edit to the history of articles

I am proposing that we add the number of bytes of each edit (as seen in watchlists) to the history of articles. This would make it far easier to spot vandalism and blanking of large sections when looking to revert an article, especially when deciding which revision to go for RyanPostlethwaite^{See the mess I've created or let's have banter} 01:50, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

I would be worried that will lead to even more reversion of any sort of content removal, even if it was justified. -Amarkov moo! 01:53, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

I agree with that, but good faith suggests that users will still check the history diffs RyanPostlethwaite^{See the mess I've created or let's have banter} 01:57, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Assuming good faith doesn't have any effect on whether people act in good faith or not. AGF refers to individual actions, not patterns (from different editors). Nonetheless, I want to see those little numbers everywhere! They're quite helpful. And people can edit their monobook.css to disable it (display:none), as always. Gracenotes^T § 02:23, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

• This information is not stored anywhere. The only place it is buffered is in rc_old_len and rc_new_len, which stores it for at most a month (usually less), and then it is discarded. A field for this could be added to the revision table, but that would entail having to calculate it for all of the 100 million revisions in the English Wikipedia. I have no clue how many revisions there in all of the other Wikimedia wikis, but I imagine we would be talking about 250 million revisions here. While it is doable, is it really that necessary? Titoxd^(?!?) 02:51, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
  • One way around would be to make the process dynamic. Whenever the history page of an article will be accessed by a user, the byte changes for the hundred-or-so revisions will be calculated on the spot. While this would save on storage space and facilitate implementation without amassing a backlog, it will probably be more expensive on the servers because of the frequency with which the history pages are accessed. I am not sure how the MediaWiki displays the history pages, but it is quite likely that it maintains a separate index for it. Adding byte count would mean to change the basic structure of the way these details are stored and accessed. Possibly someone with a better understanding of the software can detail the technical complications involved. As far as the issue of necessity goes, I can tell from personal experience that I had been doing fine for more than a year I have been here without the bye-count support. But now, it is a necessity for me and I feel handicapped using the history pages of the articles. — Ambuj Saxena (☎) 07:36, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
    • It would surely be possible to fetch the numbers out of the Recentchanges table for those changes recent enough: anything older than that is somewhat moot. HTH HAND —Phil | Talk 15:41, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Mouseover text

How so you add mouseover text to a link? For example, a link to an external website where if you mouseover the link, it gives a specific string instead of just a URL. Like explained (sort of) here: Help:Link#"Hover box" on links. Mr.Z-mantalk¢ 01:00, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Span titles currently do that. Check out this code:

• [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page <span title="Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia">Wikipedia</span>] is [[Cool (aesthetic)|<span title="OMFG it is!!!!!!!!">cool</span>]]

And its result:

• Wikipedia is cool.

This may not work on all browsers (it does on Firefox, with normal user preferences). Can't guarantee that it'll always work; it's a bit quirky. My advice is to not mass-implement this on mainspace or in project space, but it's still nifty (and {{tltt}} uses it.) Gracenotes^T § 01:16, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

There is a wierd error

There is a really wierd thing going on. I am FreshFruitsRule but every time I try to log in it says that I entered an incorrect password. I did not mistype it (I typed it really slowly, just to see if that was the problem, and it wasn't) and I definitely remember it. Is this an error that happens frequently? --216.106.109.30 23:52, 27 February 2007 (UTC) (Although I am FreshFruitsRule, again I am not logged in due to this issue)

Fixed the issue by the means of the "email me a new password". --FreshFruitsRule 23:57, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Cascading protection bug

{{bots}} is protected, so its edit page says, because User talk:Redvers is protected with cascading. However, the latter is only semi-protected, and it's caused full protection on the template! Surely this is some sort of MediaWiki bug, but the BugZilla link on this page isn't working for me at the moment. Any ideas on what's going on or how best to report it? Thanks. --Tardis 16:56, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

This is a known issue. Cascading protection applies full-protection to all included pages even if semi is used. Dragons flight 16:59, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

It's bug 8796. Cascading protection should only be used with full protection. I've looked through the logs and found two more pages which were incorrectly protected; I disabled the cascading protection on them and warned the sysops responsible. --cesarb 23:17, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Page with directory-like name redirecting to main page

I was looking at Special:Newpages, and noticed a vandal page had been created. The page is [[:/..]] See also [4]. Trying to actually go to that article automatically redirects to the main WP page. I'm not sure if it's happening in my browser or if it's a server-side redirect. Either way, it seems possible to create a page that isn't easily accessible by normal means. Is this a known issue? eaolson 06:44, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

It's why we don't have a page called [[:.]], and why [[:/.]] redirects to Slash rather than Slashdot. I think it's most likely to be happening at Wikipedia's end, but independent of MediaWiki itself. --ais523 12:16, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Note that I've placed a colon at the start of the links that we're discussing, to prevent the special markup meaning that / at the start of a link has. --ais523 12:16, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

5 images per row in gallery

I thought I read that there is a formatting to add to <gallery> that will allow five images per row instead of the default four. If this is so, what is it? Thanks! --Mattisse 01:17, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

I would prefer the gallery to automatically fit to the window, so that users with high and low resolutions will not have their pages defaced :-) -- ReyBrujo 01:36, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

[Gracenotes is a poor 800x600 sufferer, when he wants to be] The Signpost does a better job at explaining this than I care to, knowing that the explanation exists, so the first paragraph should answer your question. ("perrow" is the parameter, by the way) Gracenotes^T § 01:40, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! I guess there is no way for everyone to be happy as in my browser all the gallery images are bunched to the left and the other half of the page is blank! Thanks for the reference. That's the one I was thinking of. Regards, Mattisse

Can I blank my own talk page?

Am I allowed to blank my talk page? N734LQ 00:04, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Yes, but it is generally frowned on. A better option is to archive it. Prodego ^talk 00:08, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Werdnabot is an elegant solution. Xiner (talk, email) 03:28, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Broken/

Thought I would ask here, found nothing useful at Meta. I read some comment that Wikipedia:Broken/ is generated due a bug with unicode or so. I spend my time deleting these pages from smaller Wikipedias, and am curious as to why the page is generated by an ip and gets full protection by default. Thanks -- ReyBrujo 04:36, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

If you are asking about all the pages with names prefixed by Broken/ (in all namespaces, but most often found in the article and talk namespaces), they are all (with one exception) pages which formerly had an inacessible name (broken page titles, page title conflicting with an interwiki prefix, and several other reasons) and which were renamed (directly in the database, so it does not appear in the page history) by a special script ran by the developers. If it seems to have been created by an IP, it's because it was created by an IP, but with a different page title. Unless the script has changed, they aren't protected either (unless they were already protected before).

When you find one of these, it's best to check the prefix index on all the namespaces (to find more of these) and decide what should be done with them (they might be legitimate pages which should only be renamed; they might be duplicate or useless pages which should be deleted; and sometimes a page history merge is the best solution). --cesarb 22:38, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanation. So far I have only found that one, but I will pay attention to see if other appears as well. -- ReyBrujo 01:43, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

numbering & MOS

Is there a way to convert a clean number (iE 10000) to a styled number (iE 10.000) in a template? (or the other way around) The clean number would be needed to make calculations. (see here for background) Agathoclea 11:13, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

{{formatnum:10000}} gives 10,000, so I'd suggest using raw numbers in the parameters and converting to formatted numbers using formatnum. --ais523 11:16, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

thanks. Agathoclea 11:20, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Errors

Has anyone else been getting errors like this lately, I just got 2.

WIKIMEDIA FOUNDATION Fout Fel Fallo 错误 錯誤 Erreur Error Fehler エラー Błąd Errore Erro Chyba English The Wikimedia Foundation servers are currently experiencing technical difficulties.

The problem is most likely temporary and will hopefully be fixed soon. Please check back in a few minutes.

For further information, you can visit the #wikipedia channel on the Freenode IRC network.

In the meantime, you may be able to view Google's cached version of this page.

Wikipedia is now one of the most visited sites on the Internet by traffic and continues to grow, and as a result the Wikimedia Foundation has a constant need to purchase new hardware. If you would like to help, please donate.

If reporting this error to the Wikimedia System Administrators, please include the following details: Request: POST http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:68.42.20.1&action=submit, from 68.41.148.42 via sq24.wikimedia.org (squid/2.6.STABLE9) to 10.0.5.3 (10.0.5.3) Error: ERR_ZERO_SIZE_OBJECT, errno [No Error] at Tue, 27 Feb 2007 03:38:33 GMT

Mr.Z-mantalk¢ 03:41, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, intermittently. Which is strange, because I hadn't seen that error in half a year or so. I guess that is a good thing and speaks volumes about the good job the devs are doing. Titoxd^(?!?) 03:45, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

I get that occasionally but it disappears soon after. x42bn6 Talk 22:00, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

I've gotten it twice today (only when updating articles), once from home and once from work. The last time was about 2 minutes ago. Caknuck 23:31, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

It's basically just a better looking version of an older error message (displayed because of a 'zero sized reply' - i.e, sq24 is either overworked or on the blink) This particular error (see the details at the bottom of the message) only happens when saving pages, so you can just hit the back button in your browser and save it again - simple solution :) --Michael Billington (talk • contribs) 11:38, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

New level of protection/block

I've been observing a slow-motion edit war for some time now, discussing this with somebody I came to the conclusion a new layer of protection or "soft block" would be pertinent. The solution would be to enable administrators to a block certain user(s) from making edits to a certain page for a certain amount of time, or even enforce ArbCom decisions, etc, this would in turn allow other users to edit said page free of protection and would bring those in an edit war to the discussion page, when a consensus is reached an administrator can lift the "UB-protect"

At present we have {{editprotected}}, this can from observations go several days before being checked (which is not great in the long-term), and from my knowledge does not comply with the GFDL 100%.

I believe that a solution like this can only benefit articles, I'm unsure as to the technical implications and as to if it is possible, thus I've brought it here for comments/discussion. thanks/Fenton, Matthew Lexic Dark 52278 Alpha 771 18:02, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

I seem to remember Ligulem proposed something like this in the past. It would be useful to have a method of allowing certain users to edit certain protected pages as well (for instance, one template I created is protected as high-risk, so I have to use {{editprotected}} to make changes to it). --ais523 18:11, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure someone (maybe User:Werdna?) is working on per page protection. John Reaves (talk) 18:20, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

The timeouts and everything

What's wrong with the Wikipedia servers in the past two days. The timeouts and "technical difficulties" page when submitting edits are driving me NUTS. Please, any info? Thanks. Xiner (talk, email) 17:16, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, very annoying. John Reaves (talk) 18:19, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Incorrect Title

I just posted a new article titled Winnowing Barn or Winnowing House. I used the or because I see it used in both ways, but they are the same thing. However, the only way to bring it up in a search is to search it the exact same: Winnowing Barn or Winnowing House

A search of winnowing barn or winnowing house it turns up no results, which has created a linking problem since many articles mention these but it will not link to the article. I guess I could simply change the article title to Winnowing Barn but there seems to be now way to do so

Any help is appreciated

Related articles include Mansfield Plantation and wind winnowing —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Namey Design Studios (talk • contribs) 15:07, 28 February 2007 (UTC).

See Help:Redirect. --cesarb 15:36, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Images on some articles

In wikipedia, some of my images do not load. I sometimes i need to click on the image, and then reload the page, so that the image can be loaded. Other times, the image does not load at all, even after being clicked. I'm using Firefox 2.0.0.2, and zone alarm as my firewall. I have allowed all of the settings on my zone alarm. Can someone please help me? IMPS 00:09, 28 February 2007 (UTC) IMPS

Perhaps a Firefox extension is tripping up the system? Sorry I've no idea. Xiner (talk, email) 18:42, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Is if feasible?

There's been a proposal on WP:VPR for a new way to prevent vandalism. It seems to involve some non-trivial software changes, though. Do people think it would be feasible? Thanks. Canderson7 ^(talk) 01:36, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

A much simpler and at least equally effective option, which is already available and well-tested in the MediaWiki software, is for Wikipedia to join the rest of the wiki world and require users to log in before editing. (If you started your own wiki, would you allow anonymous users to edit it? That might have made some sense in 2001, when very few people knew what a wiki was, and the most important thing was to sell the idea to people who had never seen a wiki before, to gain critical mass, but today wiki users are much easier to attract, and vandals and link spammers are fully up to speed.) However, for some reason I cannot yet fathom, Wikipedia has a remarkable amount of institutional fondness for the idea that every adolescent on the planet must be free to anonymously participate in the creation of an encyclopedia, and evidently this begins at the very top. As I opined at length, there is a certain Potemkin Village disingenuousness in the notion that Wikipedia must appear to be free to everyone, because just behind those apparently unlocked and beckoning doors lurks an elaborate array of protection schemes, some of which are, unfortunately, labor-intensive. There has been a gradual tendency for a seemingly reluctant Wikipedia to add progressively more protection over time (see: John Seigenthaler Sr. Wikipedia biography controversy#Wikimedia Foundation reaction). The number of articles receiving some form of protection from anonymous edits seems to increase monotonically. Instead of protecting Wikipedia one article at a time (at some incalculable cost in volunteer labor which could have gone instead into editing articles), why not just require users to log in before editing? I think it's time for Wikipedia to get over its apparent inferiority complex, and be confident that its status as one of the world's most popular Web sites should be enough to attract new editors even if we ask them to fill out a form and click a button first. --Teratornis 18:21, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

With the exception of a few places such as the sandbox, the help desks, and user pages that users elect to make open to unregistered editors. According to Special:Statistics, there are 3,688,880 registered user accounts as I write this, so there doesn't seem to be any shortage of users willing to register. --Teratornis 18:49, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Roughly 75% of those "accounts" have never made an edit at all. In the typical month there are only about 5000 editors with > 100 edits. These account for the majority of the edits. The main argument against banning anons (for me) is that only 10-20% of anon edits are vandalism, the majority of anon edits are constructive and many committed editors started out editting anon. Dragons flight 18:55, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

The fact that some committed editors started off editing anonymously tells us nothing about how many of them would have started off anyway had registration been required. We lack empirical data to tell. We can't tell how many constructive editors do have accounts and simply forget to log in before editing, inflating the apparent benefits of the current policy. We also don't know how many potential editors left after having seen the ease with which anonymous vandals can waste their time. My impression (although I don't have hard figures) is that the vast majority of public wikis require users to log in before editing (if anyone knows better, please correct me). If my impression is correct, they do this because the vast majority of wikis have found, empirically, that the resulting reduction in malicious edits outweighs the loss of constructive anonymous edits. Wikipedia could try requiring logins for a few months, and see whether its experience mirrors that of everyone else. If not, then at least the current policy would be on a rational footing, based on actual data instead of personal hunches. --Teratornis 22:24, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

You've asked a policy question in a technical forum: I'm confused about the kind of response expected.

I think of the open-wiki policy as a test of the goodness of humans—and whoever else uses the internet.  :-) Clearly the noise level could be reduced by closing the wiki, but what would happen to the signal strength? Would it remain steady? Would it fade out from attrition? I agree that wikis have entered mainstream thinking, but how many valuable potential editors still out there won't jump through the registration hurdles? I, myself, refuse to register at news websites which require it, even though they (probably) don't check the information.

Good question, but one that Wikipedia does not seriously ask. What would happen to the signal strength if Wikipedia began requiring users to log in before editing? Nobody knows, until we try it. Perhaps the closest thing to a test would be the incremental increases in security which have snuck in. For example, after the John Seigenthaler Sr. dust-up, anonymous users had their editing capabilities significantly curtailed - they can no longer create new articles. How many new editors did this drive away? Did making Wikipedia less open cripple its growth? Was there any discernible reduction in the pace of growth of articles, user accounts, visits, or any other measure of site vitality? --Teratornis 22:24, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

If you're approaching burnout by patrolling for and removing vandalism, back off a little! Someone else will look after it, though maybe not quite as quickly. —EncMstr 18:58, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

It would be best if the proponents of the current policy of keeping Wikipedia hospitable for anonymous vandals would take it upon themselves to clean up the mess their policy creates. Then no one else could have reason to object to the policy. The policy receives perennial complaints because the people who keep the policy in place are not absorbing all the costs it generates. The "someone else will look after it" idea had better not get too popular, or we will run out of someone elses to absorb the external cost of not requiring users to log in before editing. --Teratornis 22:24, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps, GA, A and FA's should all be semiprotected. Snowman 18:27, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Sortable tables - sort keys?

For sortable tables, are there any future plans to allow the use of sort keys? I'm specifically thinking of tables with people's names, where you might want to display "John Smith" but sort by "Smith, John". I posted this question to the meta Help:Sorting talk page a few days ago, with no response. Is there some place where sortable table functionality is being actively discussed? Or should I submit it as a bug report? Jwillbur 22:45, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Aha, someone already has submitted it to the bug tracker. Bug 8288: Sortable tables don't properly sort lists of names Jwillbur 01:13, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Is a sort key possible? It seems that because the sorting is done client side, it can't use anything that doesn't show up in the normal way in a browser. - Peregrine Fisher 20:50, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

There could be a hidden field (style.display = 'none') for sorting a visible field. — Randall Bart 17:06, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Okay, here it is: The sort key must be enclosed within <span style="display:none"></span>, so the cell entry containing "Harry Truman", for example, becomes:

<span style="display:none">Truman, Harry</span> [[Harry Truman]]

See National debt by U.S. presidential terms for an example. Jwillbur 18:41, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Formulas in Wikipedia does not display correctly in Firefox

I am not sure if this is a bug in the newer versions of Firefox, but formulas does not render correctly in Wikipedia pages.

E.g in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newtonian_foundation_of_general_relativity

All the formulas look almost like its original LaTeX syntax if displayed in Firefox. (something like : R = R_{\|} = -{2GM \over {c^2 r^3}} = -{8 \pi G \over {3 c^2 } }\rho (r) )

The problem is on a desktop PC with Firefox 2.0.0.2 and Windows 2000 SP4. In IE6 the the rendering of the formulas is correct.

The test was also conducted on a Notebook PC with Windows XP SP2 and Firefox 2.0.0.2. There was no problem with the rendering of the formulas on the Notebook PC. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 196.31.141.163 (talk) 06:50, 28 February 2007 (UTC).

I have a Windows 2000 SP4 system and I run Firefox 2.0.0.2. I have no problems displaying that formula, nor any other that I've come across. Perhaps the server was overloaded or something? --Ojan 13:59, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Check the math section in your Preferences. The default is "Recommended for modern browsers"; if it's set to something else, set it to the default. Also check if you don't have images from the image server blocked; these formulas are rendered as images. --cesarb 14:39, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Problem logging in another Wikipedia

Meta is huge and there is not a simple way to access its information ("If you can't log in in a Wikipedia, post a note here, if you think you have found a serial spammer, post here, etc"), so I am asking here for either the right page to ask about a problem logging in a Wikipedia, or for an answer :-) I registered as ReyBrujo in ne.wikipedia.org, received the confirmation e-mail (which expires on March 4), and after clicking, I got the Your e-mail address has been confirmed. You may now log in and enjoy the wiki. message. However, my user and password is not recognized, and clicking the "Email" button gives me a आगमन त्रुटी
Login error: There is no e-mail address recorded for user "ReyBrujo".: ईमेल पठाउदा त्रुटी भयो Error sending mail: There is no e-mail address recorded for user "ReyBrujo". However, how could I get the confirmation address if there were no e-mail recorded? Suggestions welcomed :-) -- ReyBrujo 01:23, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

IP vandalism

I'm curious how many reverts of IP edits are performed and how many addresses blocked each day. Can someone whip up some stats? Thanks. Xiner (talk, email) 02:47, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Blocks you might be able to get, but I'm not sure about reverts. I believe they are recorded as regular edits. The block log ahs details of blocks, but there is probably a faster way to count it all up than by hand. Mr.Z-mantalk¢ 22:37, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Apparent DEFAULTSORT bug

Resolved

The DEFAULTSORT magic word appears to work perfectly on article pages, but is malfunctional on talk pages. See Category:All cue sports pages minus snooker for a big example of how it goes wrong. Instead of sorting Talk:Vilmos Foldes (with {{DEFAULTSORT:Foldes, Vilmos}} at the top of that page) under "F", it instead sorts him under "V", and so on, for all bio article talk pages DEFAULSORTed this way. It's obviously doing something or the page would have been sorted under "T" for "Talk:" (like the /Comments pages at the top of the "T" section, which did not use DEFAULTSORT). It just is not doing what it should be doing. This isn't catastrophic but I would hope it could be fixed. I guess having them mis-sort by given name instead of family name is better than having them ALL sort under "T", but it's not ideal. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 02:37, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Nevermind! I was being a bonehead. The WPP talk page template that was assigning the categories was using |{{PAGENAME}} which of course was overriding DEFAULTSORT. Duh. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 05:52, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Spell Correcting and/or Phonetic Search

Is there a spell correcting and/or phonetic search capability in Wikipedia?Emesz 12:36, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Userpage Templates

I spent 4 hours creating a pimped up userpage. So, I figured, it might be useful to have userpage templates - essentially, a template a user can copy-paste into their userpage, fill out, and substitute, then go back and edit it as required.

So, I decided to create this template. I'm not that great a coder, however, so I'd appreciate some help checking it over, adjusting it, and so on.

Some of the things I'm struggling with:

• Fields in a preview of the template are listed as {{1}}, {{2}}, {{3}}, etc.
• I can't create an option that determines how many of each item (if any) there will be.
• Finally, I'm trying to create labels, similar to the layout of Template:WPBiography.

Anyone willing to help out? Scalene^{•UserPage•Talk•Contributions•Biography•Є•} 09:34, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

To display something in a preview other than {{{1}}}, write the parameter in the form {{{1|text to display in preview}}}.

To name parameters, write {{{name of parameter'}}} rather than {{{1}}} (and you can pipe named parameters the same way you pipe numbered parameters).

Creating a 'how many of each item' option is difficult; basically you write lots of copies of the item (the maximum number), using different parameters for each (e.g. {{{language1}}}, {{{language2}}}, etc.), and then write {{#if:{{{language2|}}}|(the language 2 item goes here)}} around each item so that it's hidden if the relevant parameter isn't given. :Hope that helps! --ais523 09:39, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

It does. Thanks a lot! Scalene^{•UserPage•Talk•Contributions•Biography•Є•} 09:52, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Allrighty! All finished!

...

...

...

Now, what should I do with it? Here's the final version. Scalene^{•UserPage•Talk•Contributions•Biography•Є•} 10:36, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

You might want to try adding Category:User namespace templates to the noincluded section, which will increase the chance that an interested user will come across it. --ais523 11:35, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Parameters for user warning templates

I was wondering about the community's opinion on what parameters to use for the newer user warnings (such as {{uw-vandalism3}} or {{uw-delete1}}). The following are all possibilities.

Parameter name or option	Description
1	A numbered parameter; the value would be the page name that the template-receiver edited. This must stay in place; apprently it's ancient. :)
#ifexist hack	This is a way to code the template so that if "1" exists, text similar to "as you did to [[:{{{1}}}]]" shows up, but if it doesn't, text similar to "as you did to {{{1}}}" will appear. This is helpful for listing multiple pages. Suggested by Gracenotes (talk · contribs).
diff	A link to the diff of vandalism. Can be used as a substitute for, or in conjunction with, 1. Suggested by AzaToth (talk · contribs)
oldid	This is an extension of diff, but it's not really needed, since it's much easy to copy an entire link than a specific page revision Suggested by AzaToth (talk · contribs)
header	An option to have a header above a template. It does minimize customizing said header, however. Boldly implemented by Esprit15d (talk · contribs), but then discussed and reverted by Khukri (talk · contribs).
2 (or "sig")	Puts a notice at the end of a template
subst	all ParserFunctions in all templates are preceded by "{{{subst}}}". So if a template is substituted, and "subst" is set equal to "subst:", the messy syntax will disappear. Suggested by AzaToth (talk · contribs) (known bugs: even if 1 doesn't exist, the ParserFunction will pretend that it does)

So which ones do you like, and which ones are you less partial to? Gracenotes^T § 19:06, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

I made a note of this discussion at WT:UW. I think it would be useful to have the diff in the template. I'd say no on the header because I like the way WP:UW proposes we handle these - creating a ==Warnings== section with month subsections and having each warning numbered. A section heading in the template would throw this off. Unless it was optional as it is with many of the speedy delete templates (such as {{empty-warn}}).↔NMajdan•talk 19:14, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

All of the parameters above would be optional. Gracenotes^T § 19:30, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

The diff and oldid parameters might be useful, especially if automated tools are being used to revert vandalism. I don't think the header should be added, for reasons Najdam gave. The #ifexist hack would be useful, but unless it's substituted, it would mean that if the vandalised page is later deleted, the red link would eventually be removed, so there would be no easy way to access the deletion logs of the page. I think a good way of dealing with messy template code would be to use <includeonly> tags to make the subst: commands only work when the template is used, but this would break the template if it's transcluded and not substituted. Parameter 2 would probably only be useful if it's the type of message that goes in a box, like some image-related warnings. Tra (Talk) 19:37, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Please see my comment at Template talk:Nn-warn-deletion#Section edit problem regarding the optional header feature on {{Nn-warn-deletion}} which causes a section editing problem where the header is used. Thanks, mattbr³⁰ 11:59, 1 March 2007 (UTC) This has been solved. Thanks, mattbr³⁰ 12:13, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

CSD problem

There's several non-article namespace pages that are stuck in the CSD category but aren't in it. I've tried clearing the cache. Luigi30 (Taλk) 18:48, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Special:All pages

Special:All pages is almost useless. It is so choked by redirects and subpages that it is almost impossible to browse base pages with it.

Is there a way to view "Special:All pages" without pagination? 500 at a time is just not enough.

Is there a way to see the wikimarkup version of the output? The screen output is columnized, which makes cutting and pasting useless. Redirects are italisized, but I know of no way to search for italicized strings except in the sourcetext.

Is there a feature for viewing non-redirect base pages only? I.e., no redirects nor subpages included.

Basically I need a list of the Wikipedia namespace's pages, with all the redirects and subpages stripped out. The latest one I could find is a year old.

The Transhumanist   16:18, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

None that I know of. I can create a list of all Wikipedia namespace pages, dismissing redirects, but subpages become a little tricky to filter out. You should download the page.sql.gz dump, import it in a MySQL database, and throw the queries you need :-) -- ReyBrujo 20:04, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Category Pages

Im a bit of a wiki novice, I usually restrict myself to correcting typos, grammar and tidying up text but I found a partially populated catagory and gave it a go. I tried adding Boris Johnson to the 'Current Conservative MPs (UK)' category page by pasting the tag provided into johnsons links, however unlike the other pages in the cat, it was listed under B for Boris rather than J. Am I doing anything wrong ? or what am I not doing ? Dondilly 16:31, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

You need to provide a sortkey, eg. [[Category:Bananas|Yellow]] or [[Category:Primates|small]] Xiner (talk, email) 20:26, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Language Translation

Would be useful to have a Google like automatic machine translation capability. Is that somehow possible WITHIN Wikipedia? Of course one can do that by entering the Wikipedia page URL in Google ... Maybe all that has to be done is to build a script on top of the Google capabilityEmesz 12:39, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

It's so inaccurate that human translation will work best, especially with all the wiki markups. Xiner (talk, email) 20:28, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

ISBN numbers dropped by edit with Firefox

While editing Wikipedia pages I noticed that in my edit window only "ISBN" shows for what showed in a Wikipedia page as a full, punctuated ISBN number. I am using Firefox 2.0.0.1. Did anyone else encouter this problem? Any suggestions? (Meanwhile I switched to Internet Explorer)Emesz 12:20, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Someone else had a problem some time ago that something was dropping ISBN numbers (and other phone-number-looking numbers) on all edits he made. If after saving your edit the ISBN numbers have been removed (check the diff), you might be having the same problem. --cesarb 16:04, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Do you know how the problem was resolved?Emesz 19:02, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

I think it wasn't. Unfortunately, I'm not finding it anymore (should be somewhere in my contributions, since I commented on it, but there are too many of them) to check. --cesarb 20:57, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Wikimedia Error

Hello, this error is occuring incredibly often and is getting very annoying. Usually, the first and second times I try to hit the "Save Page" button on an edit, I am faced with a error message that can apparently be displayed in about nine different languages. Only by pressing the back button and trying again (often twice) am I able to complete the edit. The error came with this information I'm supposed to include in the report:

Request: POST http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_King%27s_Way_%28book%29&action=submit, from 71.248.93.23 via sq20.wikimedia.org (squid/2.6.STABLE9) to 10.0.5.3 (10.0.5.3)

Error: ERR_ZERO_SIZE_OBJECT, errno [No Error] at Wed, 28 Feb 2007 22:27:50 GMT

If it helps, I use Firefox 2.0 and have the popups nav feature and Interiot's edit counter installed in my monobook.js. If this isn't the place to report this, please let me know where to do so and I'll pass the message on. Thanks. Hersfold ^(talk/work) 22:32, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Its not just you. I started a discussion here earlier about this (its above somewhere). I have found that it is often faster to refresh the page instead of back and forward. I don't know how that will work in Firefox though, I use IE. Mr.Z-mantalk¢ 22:39, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

I'll give it a try. Thanks for the suggestion. Hersfold ^(talk/work) 01:32, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Change all previous signatures

Is it possible for me to have all of my previous signatures changed to my current signature with little effort on my part? Sanchom (talk) 03:25, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

No, sorry. You will have to use AutoWikiBrowser or something similar to make it easy, but even then, it will be hard. -- ReyBrujo 03:36, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

It would also be a bit uncool. While you're allowed to change talk page text you wrote, there's an expectation that you do it soon after you wrote it, not days or weeks later. If someone has responded to what you wrote, it's important to preserve what they responded to. Also, for those watching thousands of articles, someone updating every one of their signatures would be somewhere between alarming and time consuming. —EncMstr 03:51, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Ya... I probably won't do it. It would have just been removing my last name from all of the signatures. It's just that all of my wikipedia posts are turning up in Google when you search for me now... Sanchom (talk) 06:42, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Edit problem in List of law clerks of the Supreme Court of the United States

If the first section of List of law clerks of the Supreme Court of the United States (the Chief Justice part) is edited, editing seems okay. If you try to edit the section below that, for Seat 1, what actually comes up in the edit box is the section for Seat 8. If you attempt to edit lower sections, all you get is a blank edit box. This was reported as a problem on the article's Talk page over 6 months ago, but hasn't been addressed. I'm using IE 7. Corvus cornix 18:49, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

I think the problem is that {{start SCOTUS clerk table}} contains headers, which are available to edit (so are counted), but do not actually exist in the page text. If the headers are removed from that template, I think it would work. A few tables were not closed (and probably some still are not) - it can be difficult to follow when some tables are started inside templates but closed outside. Gimmetrow 19:14, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Yes, that fixed the immediate problem, but the names are not listed in subsections. At least you know the cause; you're welcome to revert. Gimmetrow 19:17, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

IPs and the new-message bar

See Wikipedia:Help desk#IP address. This probably needs to be brought to wider attention, so I'm posting it here. Does anyone know whether the developers are aware yet? Can anyone reproduce the problem easily? --ais523 15:00, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Happens to me occasionally (i.e., the orange bar gets stuck there, viewing the diff. page appears to make it disappear however). thanks/Fenton, Matthew Lexic Dark 52278 Alpha 771 15:04, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

That happens to me all the time when browsing Wikipedia when not logged in, at school. The orange box remains there even when I go to the talk page. There is one IP address and hundreds of computers. Gracenotes^T § 18:19, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

I'm getting the opposite problem. On another MediaWiki wiki running version 1.10, I sent my own IP a message, but the new-messages bar didn't come up, not even when I bypassed my cache. --ais523 18:25, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

If you wait long enough the new messages flag will appear, but won't go away, this seems to take anywhere from several hours to several days, during which time new messages will probably go unnoticed --VectorPotential^Talk 19:02, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

I've alerted the developers via BugZilla: bugzilla:9213. --ais523 16:08, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

Defaulting show preview and edit summary prompt upon account creation

In this discussion at WP:VPP, a user suggested that we make show "Show preview" mandatory before saves. There is no apparent support for that change. However, this sparked in me a far less drastic idea that a few users have supported involving modifying the default preferences setting upon account creation in a way that would address this issue as well as the perennial proposal that users always be automatically prompted for missing edit summaries. I am seeking second opinions, as well as a feasibility report from you tech gurus, for the following:

The options in user preferences under the editing tab allow a user to choose "show preview on first edit" as well as to "Prompt me when entering a blank edit summary." Currently these default to unchecked upon account creation. I imagine it would not be difficult to change the software so that upon account creation, these options would instead default to checked.

For "Show preview", I am betting this would lead to a not inconsiderable reduction in error-filled edits, and for the edit summary prompting, not only would it serve to teach new users what an edit summary is, but go a long way toward getting them to use them from the get-go. Many new users might get used to those defaults before they ever realize they have a preference page, and never uncheck them after because they are used to that state of affairs.

To be clear, I am not proposing any change making these two options automatic, just that the two existing preferences default to checked upon account creation (as we already have for other options in editing preferences, such as Show edit toolbar, etc. It would not force anything on anybody; all users would still have the option of changing their preferences, but many will I am hoping, be gently and invisibly guided by starting with these defaults.

I also think it might have at least a mild vandalism reduction side effect. Some vandals must hover over the submit button for a moment thinking "do I really want to do this?" Now they get a second chance to turn back, and may be more likely to after seeing their changes right up there on the screen in preview mode. It is even more likely this would cut down on test edits of the "can I really edit this page in real time" variety. Those new users will see the red-colored "Remember that this is only a preview; changes have not yet been saved!" at the top of the page and will be more likely to not hit save because they realize from that, that it [really] will save to a live change.--Fuhghettaboutit 06:25, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

You have to remember that anons can't change their preferences, so they'd be stuck with whatever defaults were set until they created an account. There's some worry, I think, that anons might be put off editing by having to save twice and by having to enter an edit summary. --ais523 11:20, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Is there some technical reason why the default preference settings upon username account creation necessarily must also be the default setting for anons? If the answer to that is a categorical yes, it could be one or the other. If only one is a better choice because of this, I think "show preview" would have more good effect than would the edit summary prompt.--Fuhghettaboutit 13:38, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Why do you want anons to be able to edit without previewing but not new users? Anyway, it seems that there's precedent for something like this; go to fr:Special:Random (a random page on fr:) and go to the editing screen; you'll find that that the 'save' button is disabled for anons unless they've previewed first, which I think is what the thread above refers to. 'Show preview on first edit' loads the article up on the edit screen as if you'd clicked 'Show preview' without making a change (I've just tested), but lets you save immediately. --ais523 13:46, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

No. It's not a matter of wanting different things between the two. It's a question of choice. If anons can't access preferences, and changing the preference default for new accounts necessarily affects them as well (which I don't know is true), then anons would have this change forced on them while new accounts would always have access to their preference settings, notwithstanding the fact that many new users will not discover they can change their preferences for a time. If anon and user account default preferences are slaved together, and cannot be divorced, then the consideration of whether to implement this becomes different because of the choice issue. It may be that making all anons have to preview before saving without choice would have too much of a chilling effect--Fuhghettaboutit 14:19, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

The preferences for anonymous users and the default preferences for new users should always be the same, else it's confusing (new users should be able to expect that nothing will change when creating an account for themselves). --cesarb 14:25, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

• Comment: on the French Wikipedia, anons always have to preview before saving. Gracenotes^T § 14:29, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
  • I mentioned that above. I wonder what sort of chilling effect it's had on anon edits to frwiki, and how well it's prevented anon vandalism to frwiki. --ais523 14:54, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
    • • Ah, so you did mention it. My apologies, I just saw the general content of this discussion and wanted to add something in case it wasn't mentioned. I guess that it was :) Gracenotes^T § 18:16, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
    • Points well taken. Both would be too much and anons shouldn't see a change in their preferences when they create an account, which could have a different chilling effect, on account creation itself, i.e., new users going back to editing under their ips because they don't like the "change." It probably would lead to a flood of "what gives" posts when first signing up too. So I guess this discussion must shift to only the show preview default, "French option" for all. How to explore the actual effect this has had on the French Wikipedia is not clear to me.--Fuhghettaboutit 15:06, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Checking it's safe

Hello again, it's me, the only guy who is determined to learn CSS and java through Wikipedia alone! I just wanted to double-check some CSS before saving it, can someone please assist me with this as I don't want to find the page breaks after I've saved it. Obviously I've borrowed this from elsewhere, and I've previewed the skin and it looks moderately okay, but, given my previous form, I would like to know if this is all "grammatically correct", as it were.

/* standard link colors */
a { color: #F0F0F0; }
a:active, a.new { color: #00FF00; }
a.interwiki, a.external { color: #F0F0F0; }
a.stub { color: #F0F0F0; }

/* put scrollbar on pre sections instead of ugly cutoff/overlap in firefox */
pre { overflow: auto; }

/* make a few corners round, only supported by moz/firefox/other gecko browsers for now */
#p-cactions ul li, #p-cactions ul li a {  
  -moz-border-radius-topleft: 1em;
  -moz-border-radius-topright: 1em;
}
#content { 
  -moz-border-radius-topleft: 1em; 
  -moz-border-radius-bottomleft: 1em;
}
div.pBody {
  -moz-border-radius-topright: 1em;
  -moz-border-radius-bottomright: 1em;
}

/* same following the css3 draft specs, any browsers supporting this? */
#p-cactions ul li, #p-cactions ul li a {  
  border-radius-topleft: 1em;
  border-radius-topright: 1em;
}
#content { 
  border-radius-topleft: 1em;
  border-radius-bottomleft: 1em;
}
div.pBody {
  border-radius-topright: 1em;
  border-radius-bottomright: 1em;
}

/* don't use a smaller font */
td.diff-addedline, td.diff-deletedline, td.diff-context { font-size: 100% ;}

/* underline just the text that's different */
span.diffchange { text-decoration:underline; }

div { line-height: 1.2;   font-size: 10pt }   /* number */
div { line-height: 1.2em; font-size: 10pt }   /* length */
div { line-height: 120%;  font-size: 10pt }   /* percentage */

/* default skin for navigation boxes */
table.navbox {
    background-color: #f9f9f9;
    border: 1px solid #aaa;
    clear: both;
    font-size: 90%;
    margin: 1em 0em 0em;
    padding: 5px;
    text-align: center;
    width: 100%;
}

There is one final change I want to make to the skin and that is to alter the Navigation, toolbox, and interwiki link bars in the sidebar to #000000, and the text to #F0F0F0, but I don't know how to do this. Any help would be very much appreciated. Bobo. 05:25, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

You had one typographical error, a transposed } and ; (fixed above). The W3C CSS validator says the rest is fine (except it doesn't recognize the border radiuses, but you can ignore that). One problem is, you are making *all* links very light grey, which makes it hard to use a wikipage (be aware).

Anyway, to make the portlets white on black, try:

.pBody { background-color: #000000; border-color:#444444; color: white }
.pBody a { color: #f0f0f0 }
.pBody a:active { color: #f000f0 }
.pBody a:visited { color: #f0f0f0 }

--Splarka (rant) 08:24, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Once again Splarka, thank you very much for your help, especially after the relative debacle of last time. I will ensure that I alter the links to a sensible colour given the brightness of my computer screen. It's nice to realize I'm learning something! And thank you for the link, that will be useful for bookmarking for the future. Bobo. 16:37, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Translations of episode names

The translations of the titles/names of a TV episodes of a serie (for example), have some kind of copyrights for the translator? Is necessary to request permission to the translator to use this titles in wikipedia. I'm taking specifically of no official translations. (Sorry about my english) 64.237.177.229 00:12, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Highly doubt it. If you are still worried, it might actually be better to go to another language Wikipedia and get a "free" translation by asking - for example, fr:Wikipédia:Oracle or if you wish to stick to English, perhaps Wikipedia:Reference desk/Language. x42bn6 Talk 01:11, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Very Simple Question

How many hits does Wikipedia get daily, monthly, yearly? If any of this data is available I would be grateful. Thank You — Preceding unsigned comment added by Paulmath (talk • contribs)

Check WP:STATS. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 16:43, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

html

I am currently trying something and would like to find out how I could insert html onto a page - I am not planning on adding any to any articles, this is a pure expreiment

For security reasons, you can't insert just any HTML tag but there are a few that you can insert and there is also the basic wiki markup that you can use. What exactly are you trying to do? Tra (Talk) 13:55, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

A list of allowed HTML can be found here. --MZMcBride 01:32, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

Deletion log entry not showing up

I deleted Category:Wikipedians by alma mater: Saint Petersburg State University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics as an empty category and it isn't showing up in the deletion log. Is this a bug? I'm guessing it has to do with the length of the category name. VegaDark 01:09, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

When did you delete it? -- Tim Starling 02:52, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

About two minutes before I posted that message. VegaDark 03:37, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

So, any word on this? Any admin can click on the above link and see the "one deleted edit" thing, and then if they click on it they will see that there is no deletion history. I have a theory as to what could be the reason. It could be the length of the category was too long, combined with the fact that my edit summary was somewhat long. The two combined may have screwed something up to make it not show up. A way to test this would be to recreate the category and delete it and see if it does the same thing, and then create a category with an almost identical name and delete that and see if that shows up in the log. If you want to test it with my edit summary, it was "WP:CSD#C1 - Empty category that has been empty for at least four days". VegaDark 21:18, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

I would guess it has to do with the fact the category had a colon, which may have confused the software. -- ReyBrujo 21:37, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

At first I thought it might be that, but Category:Wikipedians by alma mater: University of Copenhagen shows up in the deletion log and that has a colon. It may be a combination of having a colon and a comma, however. VegaDark 21:41, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Firefox keeps downloading Javascript scripts

I'm running Firefox 1.5.0.9, and have loaded two fairly large scripts into my monobook.js page as follows:

importScript("User:Lupin/recent2.js");

importScript('User:Lupin/popups.js');

They both run fine (thanks Lupin!), but every time I reload a page (using the buttonbar or F5 - not Shift-click), both scripts get re-downloaded (nearly 400kB). This slows things down and also causes unnecessary load on the servers, I guess. Does this happen to anyone else and is there any way I can persuade Firefox to always use the cached copies? TIA

--Smalljim 23:31, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Check if your browser.cache.check_doc_frequency setting is something other than 3. You can access it by typing about:config in the URL, and then searching for it. -- ReyBrujo 23:43, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

And remember to do one hard refresh (with ctrl+f5, not shift+f5) at least to update your cache stamp. -- ReyBrujo 23:45, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the quick reply, ReyBrujo. Just checked that setting - it is default - integer - 3. I have done several hard refreshes, and even cleared out the whole cache, but it still happens. Should say I'm running Windows XP Home. When I reload a page I can see, with Explorer, the files being re-downloaded into Firefox's cache. The odd thing is that it doesn't happen when I open a new page - only when I reload one that's already opened. It's as if the Reload button has been reprogrammed to do a full refresh.

Thanks for the pointer to about:config, which I'd forgotten - I'll have a browse around in there and see if there are any settings that change the behaviour of the Reload button. I do have a number of Extensions installed, so perhaps it might be a clash with one of them?

Failing everything else, does anyone know if can I store the scripts on my hard disk (as .js files) and get monobook.js to point to them somehow? --Smalljim 00:21, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

I haven't tried it, but it might be possible to convert the popups.js to a greasemonkey script. That way the script will always be on and you wouldn't even need to be logged in! — Ambuj Saxena (☎) 05:06, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, I can look into greasemonkey scripts - but it may be a bit beyond me! Incidentally I've found that the same thing happens with Opera, so I guess it actually happens to everyone and I'm just particularly fussy about download times!

I have found that a partial workaround is to click the article tab instead of the Reload button. This seems to update the article without re-downloading all the .js files. --Smalljim 12:10, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Yes, you can call scripts from your hard drive if you install a web server on your computer (any small webserver will do). Put into your monobook.js

document.write('<script type="text/javascript" src="http://localhost/my.js"><\/script>');

and the scripts inside my.js will be executed as if they were inside monobook.js. Also, this seems to be the best way to develop new scripts without all those extra edits. — Alex Smotrov 00:50, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

How to Extract text from Wikipedia to Display in another WebSite?

Hi. I have a web site that lists various scholars and their writings. All the links there currently go to Wikipedia articles, but I though it would be nice to provide some kind of "preview" of the Wikipedia article in a DIV (or OBJECT or IFRAME) on the web page itself. Does Wikipedia offer any (API) method by which an article can be embedded into another web page without the navigation bar and other space-consuming paraphernalia. I would just want the "contents" of the Wikipedia page to show up, since there will be very limited space, and it's just a preview anyway. I see that other sites (like Ask.com) seem to be able to do this, but I don't know if they use some elaborate back-end engine that parses and reconstructs the Wikipedia information. I don't have time to program something like that; I'm looking for the easy way! Any ideas? Thanks a lot. —Dfass 18:59, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

You could maybe Special:Export the page and parse the XML, I don't know if automated mass queries are permitted however. thanks/Fenton, Matthew Lexic Dark 52278 Alpha 771 19:05, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. Actually, the "print" version is pretty close to the stripped-down version I want. So I can link to a page as, for example, "Zoroaster preview", and I think that will be good enough for my purposes... I hope. —Dfass 19:42, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Could also try Zoroaster&action=render — this parameter gives you exactly what you asked for; you just need to apply some CSS cause it doesn't look good without it. — Alex Smotrov 05:25, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

OGG

Hi. I was going to play a video from an article and I was wondering: are these OGG files automatically scanned for viruses when they're uploaded? Thanks.--Ol' Blue Eyes 07:54, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

The server does not sanitize anything. Not even Javascript, as far as I know. -- ReyBrujo 08:10, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

ok. Thanks.--Ol' Blue Eyes 08:18, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

Images

I've been having some trouble seeing images I've uploaded to commons. Photos display fine, but when I've tried to add plans which I've coloured up in photoshop and then saved as jpg's they don't seem to display - I just get the X at the top left of the screen. Is it just my browser (IE7) or is there something wrong with them - the image I've just uploaded is Image:Royal Palace Monaco plan2.jpg. Cheers. --Joopercoopers 03:55, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

Hmm, I do see an image, but the colors on the thumbnail are all mixed up. Might be corrupted. Try uploading again, and preferably in PNG format. Jpegs are a bad choice for images like that. --Sherool (talk) 04:22, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

I see a red cross - just like you said, could be corrupted, try reuploading. Af648 07:40, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for that. Right, I think I've got it sorted now. PNG seems to result in too large a file size. I switched the mode from CMYK to RGB in photoshop before saving and that seems to have done the trick. Regards --Joopercoopers 13:05, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

Provision for showing a reason for redirection?

People have been having a lot of fun at Conservapedia's bee in its bonnet about British spellings in Wikipedia. Nevertheless, there is a real issue here, or two issues. First, a redirect does not show the user any reason for the redirection. Second, we don't know what inference an average user makes when they notice that a redirect has occurred.

Many redirects are mistakes and misspellings. When you type in paralell and get a page on Parallel it is reasonable to interpret this as "you misspelled it."

It does not seem impossible that a user who types in phonograph record and gets an article on gramophone record could interpret this as "Dummy! it's called a gramophone record, not a phonograph record." Or, conversely, someone who types in sulphur or colour could feel chided (even though all of these articles open by giving both versions).

I don't think you'd have to be totally paranoid to get that impression. That impression would be wrong, and experienced Wikipedians know this, but a redirect does not give a reason or link to an explanation. And it should.

It seems to me that it would be feasible and wise to expand the redirect mechanism so that a redirect could include a reason. Most reasons would probably be stock reasons from templates. I

I don't know whether the target page should give the full reason following the "redirected from" line, or where it would just say something like "Redirected from Sulphur. Why this was redirected"

Some examples of typical reasons might be:

"Redirected from Phonograph record, because "Phonograph record" is the U. S. term and the editors of this particular article have chosen to use the British term. See style policy."

"Redirected from Lady Mendl, the term by which Elsie de Wolfe was commonly known after her marriage, because "Elsie de Wolfe" is the form commonly used by her biographers."

"Redirected from Paralell, because Paralell is a misspelling." Dpbsmith (talk) 14:10, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

I did some poking around, and what do you know. Some explanatory mechanism appears to be already in place, although it is subtle (perhaps far too subtle). For example, Help:Magic word is a redirect to Help:Magic words. The redirect page shows the text: "(Redirected from Help:Magic word)", with the text after "from" a link to the redirect page without redirection. Clicking that link, and then clicking the edit tab on the resulting redirect page shows that the redirect page transcludes the template: {{R to plural}}, which, if the hapless user could actually see it, explains the reason for the redirect. Thus it appears the explanation you seek is buried, or could be buried, in the redirect itself, but the odds appear to be remote that a new Wikipedia user would be able to find it. MediaWiki allows the user to customize some aspects of its appearance, through skins; wouldn't it be great if, in addition to being able to make frivolous cosmetic adjustments, a user could select an actually different functionality? For example, a beginning user might select a "Beginner" skin, with a "What's this?" feature that would pop up explanatory text over every mysterious GUI object. --Teratornis 18:18, 4 March 2007 (UTC)