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I am uncomfortable with article tab labels or the consequences. This is because:
The 1st tab is called 'project page'. We do not use the term 'project'. We use the terms 'article' and 'page' (apparently synonymously). This is inconsistent.
The 2nd tab 'discussion' leads to a page called 'Talk:<article name>'. This is inconsistent.
The 3rd tab is sometimes called 'edit this page' and sometimes 'edit'. This is inconsistent. However, it has the best match between tab label and resulting page ('Editing <article name>').
The 4th tab 'history' leads to a page called '<article name>' with the sub-title 'Revision history'. This is inconsistent with the talk and history tabs. To be consistent, it should be 'History <article name>.
The 5th tab 'watch' is not actually a tab at all. It is a command. Tabs should not be used for commands. It should really be a button.
There is also an inconsistency between 'Talk:<article name>' and 'Editing <article name>'. One has a colon, the other does not. I am not sure which is best.
These thoughts may not be as important as the other issues that are live right now, but I decided to share them. Bobblewik(talk) 20:26, 10 July 2005 (UTC)
Nono, your questions are quite valid. Here's some simple answers...:
Everything in the Wikipedia: namespace is (as such) a project, for example Red Link Recovery or Tree of Life. The fact that THIS particular page isn't is not something we can fix. Without making yet another namespace.
pages use Talk: but put the namespace in front of it, for example Wikipedia talk:Foo. This is because Talk:Foo belongs to Foo rather than Wikipedia:Foo. The backlinking system cannot possibly cope with variable talk page "ownership".
I forget when the tab says that but there'll be a reason for that.
No, it doesn't. It leads to a generated page, which is why it's not in any namespace. It's the term appended to the &action attribute that makes it the history page, not the Wikipedia title of the page; =history is no different from =edit, =submit, etc. so it's not a subdirectory of any sort.
The Watch tab is separate from the others; nothing actually touches it, so you can see it's different. And if it was a button, where would it go?
As for Editing, it merely shoves Editing in front of the page name. Editing is not a namespace so doesn't have a colon, nor do we want it to appear to be a namespace, that could get confusing.
Anyway, hope that covers everything. And, if not, ask away! :) GarrettTalk 21:29, 10 July 2005 (UTC)
Almost everything. One note about the tabs for admins, though - the tabs for protect, delete and move are all next to history - with the gap between them and watch. Shouldn't the gap be between them and history, keeping the four commands together? And I'm also fairly sure that the original poster was right that some pages seem to have Edit this page" and others seem to have just "edit" - not sure how or why this could be so, though. Grutness...wha? 02:10, 11 July 2005 (UTC)
Thanks for bringing this up! I would propose the following changes, which shouldn't be too hard to implement(although they probably will piss off long time users who expect the way things are now):
The subtitle Revision history should be changed to History (See MediaWiki:Revhistory)
This will align the tab titles with their namespace titles as best as is practical. I think it will prevent one (small) source of newbie confusion, and won't harm anyone (although long time users may be surprised for a second). JesseW 17:03, 11 July 2005 (UTC)
just a quick note: the protect delete and move tabs all lead to warning/input pages they don't actually perform any actions in themselves. The watch/unwatch button does (although its a pretty harmless action) Plugwash 12:59, 12 July 2005 (UTC)
Image uploading bug
Uploading images with destination filenames which include periods (i.e. "E.S._Gosney.jpg") seems to trigger a "Filename must be at least three character long" bug. Just a note. --Fastfission 13:13, 10 July 2005 (UTC)
This is bugzilla:1758. Patches welcome. :) --Brion 05:59, July 12, 2005 (UTC)
Image bug
I've been busily adding maps to a lot of New Zealand geography articles (standardised location maps for small towns, wither with the thumb frame, like Motueka, or without, like Orewa). I've had two people write to me claiming they're causing glitches:
User:SimonLyall wrote: I'm getting a weird thing with some of the maps you are uploading recently. The seem to render in the middle of some pages if they are done as "thumb". This might be a brower issue (I am using firefox) or something. Compare the current version of Twizel with what you had previosuly. In the original version you image appears more or less directly under the "Northumberland, England" text with a big piece of whitespace to the right of it and the line under "history" going though the middle. See what you think. Maybe it's this bug?
User:Alan Liefting wrote: Hello James. Good to see your maps of NZ localities. I run Netscape 7.02 and Win98. The maps cause the text to be compressed since the image is not right justified even though it has the appropriate parameter set. If I give the image a label the problem goes away ie. the image is displayed to the right. Do you know if this a bug in the Wiki software? I have put a label on the image at Manapouri.
I'm adding the images using Mozilla, running on Mac OS X. This means I can't actually see what's going wrong, because all the images look fine to me. Is it perhaps the suggested bug, or is something else going on here? Grutness...wha? 8 July 2005 08:36 (UTC)
I use Opera 8.01 on XP and I see no problems. Just curious (and slightly off this discussion) -- what's the colour pallate you're using? I think 11kb is a little too high for the file size. User:Nichalp/sg July 9, 2005 09:04 (UTC)
Cut it down to 3.65 KB! It had a gamma channel and was 24-bit. I stripped the channel, made it 256 colors, and PNGcrushed it. So, altogether, it's a tiny file. Oh and I too am seeing no problems with image arrangement (Firefox 1.0.4/Windows XP). GarrettTalk 9 July 2005 09:37 (UTC)
Signatures stuffing up
The signatures are stuffing up. They should be in the format month day, year: they are appearing day month year. When the text wraps, it gets confusing what's happening. This is also not the behaviour before the upgrade. Can a developer please do something about this? - Ta bu shi da yu 8 July 2005 04:09 (UTC)
Um, no offence, but sigs have been running Day-Month-Year since at least May--before 1.5! Or at least the signoffs on talk pages, like mine or yours for example, are in this order.
I believe there's an option in the preferences to make them the other way around, or something. See what you think. Master Thief GarrettTalk 8 July 2005 04:54 (UTC) --oh and also see The post above yours which seems related. Hope that helps! Master Thief GarrettTalk 8 July 2005 04:59 (UTC)
Preferences - Date Format
My date format preferences have just gone wrong. I went to "special pages preferences date format" and saw it set to "no preference". I chnaged it to my choice (of ISO format), clicked save which was confirmed and pages were still the wrong format. Revist preferences and it is no preference again. Twice round loop and no improvmemt, hence this report. -- SGBailey 7 July 2005 11:54 (UTC)
ISO date format is working for me. Can you be more precise about where it's not working? Remember that unlinked dates will not be converted. This includes signatures. Bovlb 2005-07-07 13:12:02 (UTC)
Admiral Sir James Stirling (1791-01-28–1865-04-23) was the first Governor of Western Australia is what I see. Bovlb 2005-07-07 15:04:52 (UTC)
The dates in articles are written straight into the text. To the site and server, they're no different than any other text. Therefore you can't hope that their format (e.g. DD/MM/YY) will change by changing your preferences, if that's what you're hoping for. — Asbestos | Talk 7 July 2005 20:11 (UTC)
If you wikilink them (e.g. July 4, 1776 ) it is supposed to respect preference on date formatting. (Since I haven't changed my preference I've never tested it.) RJFJR July 7, 2005 20:27 (UTC)
"Admiral Sir James Stirling (28 January 1791–23 April 1865)" is what I see. So it would seem to be preference dependant. hydnjotalk 7 July 2005 20:34 (UTC)
What i see is "Admiral Sir James Stirling (January 28, 1791–April 23, 1865)" and what i want to see is Admiral Sir James Stirling (1791-01-28–1865-04-23)". And I did used to see it! -- SGBailey 7 July 2005 21:27 (UTC)
You're right. When I try to set to your previous (desired) format it gets rejected and replaced with "No preference". I'm using Classic skin and don't know if this bug persists with other skins. hydnjotalk 7 July 2005 23:24 (UTC)
I also use classic skin (with section edit and ToC turned off). -- SGBailey 8 July 2005 04:56 (UTC)
Bugzilla Account
It's been a few days. Anyone know how to go about ensuring that this bug is known and gets fixed? -- SGBailey 14:29, 12 July 2005 (UTC)
Bugs and feature requests should be made at BugZilla since there is no guarantee developers will read this page. (see top of this page) -- Gbeeker 15:56, 12 July 2005 (UTC)
BUT you can't do that if you don't have a bugzilla account. And that is a nuisance to have to get and less easy that a wikipedia account. Thus I am very inclined to not report bugs I find. there needs to be a way to report bugs WITHIN wikipedia. -- SGBailey 16:29, 12 July 2005 (UTC)
I found it easy to get a bugzilla account. If you search for bugzilla on this page, you will see that others have done the same thing. This page is the place to report bugs WITHIN wikipedia. But, as stated above, it's not guarenteed that the wiki software developers will read this page. So if you want it fixed, it's got to be reported. That is still no guarentee that it will be fixed, but there is a much better chance, if whoever finds the problem to be a nuisance takes the time to report it. Plus it may help others who may not care enough to report it, but still find the bug a nuisance. -- Gbeeker 17:05, 12 July 2005 (UTC)
TOC inline
Can the TOC be made to appear inline with the text? If so, what is the macro that needs to be inserted? -- Sundar\talk \contribs July 7, 2005 06:05 (UTC)
I believe {{TOCembed}} used to do that, but it appears to have been deleted. There still exists a {{TOCright}} template, which gets embeded anywhere you place it, but on the right. I haven't been following discussions on why this would be wanted.
I think the basic way to hard-code it is to use a floating table, such as
Thanks a lot, Asbestos. Actually, I wanted this for use in the Village Pump equivalent on the Tamil Wikipedia. -- Sundar\talk \contribs July 7, 2005 08:34 (UTC)
Actually, I notice that, having copied the code from the {{TOCright}} and swapped "right" and "left", I didn't swap the padding. With my version the text is all squished up against the TOC. Try swapping the orientation of the padding, or just play with it until it looks right. — Asbestos | Talk 7 July 2005 08:39 (UTC)
If you want a left floated TOC, you can use {{TOCleft}}. —Mike 06:52, July 10, 2005 (UTC)
Image resize
There seems to be a problem with resizing some images to very small sizes. I recently put the flag of Namibia in list of UN peacekeeping missions at 25px. When I look at it that small, there's some king of a jog in the image, where there should be a straight, smooth line (compare with the full size image). To see if it happens on other pages, I went to list of African countries by GDP, and saw that not only does Namibia do it, but so does the flag of Tanzania (which is a similar design). Is everyone else seeing this, and any idea what's going on? --Dmcdevit July 7, 2005 04:35 (UTC)
Yes I see that too. Perhaps the shrinking algorithm is flawed? I mean, there's only so much an algorithm can do to shrink an image and get a result. --NO, wait, not that at all. If I save it or view the image on its own it looks fine. It could be a browser error, but then why would it appear fine when I view it on its own? Also when I generate a crappy Notepad HTML page it displays fine.
Therefore, I assume it's something to do with the HTML/CSS/etc. used by MediaWiki to render that page. Hope that answers your question.File:Namibia flag large.png49
Well, it doesn't, as I don't know why or how to fix it. Did it do this before 1.5, or is this a continual problem? Well maybe you should report it on BugZilla... Master Thief GarrettTalk 8 July 2005 09:52 (UTC)
I don't know what you are seeing; to me it looks as if the bottom of the flag wasn't straight but slanted. That, however, is an optical illusion—see Image:Namibia 25px thumb enlarged factor 16.png. Lupo July 8, 2005 11:21 (UTC)
Here, I reproduced it at the largest it goes while retaining that bug (49px) right next to the normal flag (50px). There is a clear difference, and it's more than just an optical illusion. I have no idea if it happened before the upgrade; I just noticed it. --Dmcdevit July 8, 2005 20:39 (UTC)
Quite interesting. The 49px version has 49x33 as the image size, however the HTML specifies width="49" height="32", making the browser resize it again by one lone pixel. Looks like a MediaWiki bug. --cesarb 8 July 2005 21:42 (UTC)
Sounds like the code that resized the image and the code that creates the HTML use a different method of rounding when determining an appropriate height to match the specified image width. That totally explains what we're seeing in those embedded flags. Would someone file a bug report on bugzilla?—MichaelZ. 2005-07-10 00:03 Z
Okay, now it looks fixed here to me, but if I go to List of UN peacekeeping missions and look at Namibia's flag it has the same bug. Is everyone else seeing this bug still? --Dmcdevit 08:40, July 10, 2005 (UTC)
Nope, still broken! The easiest fix would no doubt be that rather than using rounding it should use the image size. I mean, if I have a 16x16 image then MediaWiki could take those dimensions directly from the image just as it always does. The images are resized before being rendered on the page, so why re-calculate? I don't know that MediaWiki can be patched to act like that, but certainly a manually-edited HTML page could be. Certainly a variety of HTML editors I've used all inserted the dimensions based on what the image actually stored, so I assume MediaWiki could also read them. GarrettTalk 12:37, 10 July 2005 (UTC)
Can't bring up page 3, items 41-52, in Gimbutas search
Hi there Techno Wizards,
I did a search on Gimbutas (Marija) and 52 items came up. I was able to acces pages 1 to 2 with items 1 to 40, but for some reason am unable to access page 8, items 41 to 52??
Any ideas?
Thanks so much. I think Wikipedia is wunderful.
Kris
I can reproduce this problem. Search for "Gimbutas", get results 1-20 of 52, and any attempt to get to page 3 gives "Sorry, there were no exact matches to your query." Is our total number of matches known to be inaccurate, say by including deleted pages? Bovlb 2005-07-06 23:46:56 (UTC)
The wikipedia search uses a cached version of the database, which does regularly get inaccurate. Google, or Yahoo, may(or may not be) more up to date. It's just something we have to live with, I think. JesseW 16:38, 11 July 2005 (UTC)
The line at the bottom should be colspan=1, but formats according to the three above. Somebody wanto dealwith? -SV|t 6 July 2005 20:14 (UTC)
It is colspan=1, do you mean it should span the 3 columns (i.e. colspan=3)? -- Rick Block (talk) July 6, 2005 23:04 (UTC)
subst
I'm a bit confused about using subst with templates. Can someone explain what it does, and why it is preferable to use on talk pages, but not on articles? Sonic Mew July 6, 2005 16:16 (UTC)
Placing "subst:" in front of the template name basically copies the code of that template onto the page. It is most useful for placing a message onto a talk page (such as the welcome message or vandalism messages). Not using it is the generally accepted way of adding notices to articles or their talk pages as they a) don't clutter the article code, and b) can be changed at the template source, thus updating every article on which they're used. A general way to look at it is that if it is a temporary message then it probably shouldn't be subst'd. violet/riga(t) 6 July 2005 16:34 (UTC)
Given that editing a widely used template creates a problem in terms of server load (because the cache becomes invalidated for a large number of pages all at the same time), it is my policy to always used subst: unless I think there is a good reason that this article will need any further updates to the template to be applied. In the talk namespace this is virtually never the case. The same is true for "needs attention"-type flags in the mainspace.
Templates that actually contribute content however are ok with non-subst, because there is a genuine reason to keep them having the same wording/look'n'feel. Pcb21|Pete 9 July 2005 18:17 (UTC)
Also, if the template in question has a header, people might edit the template in error by responding using the section edit link. - Mgm|(talk) July 6, 2005 16:38 (UTC)
But note that in some cases, such as VfDs and copyvios, use of subst is required. Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 6 July 2005 22:06 (UTC)
Visited links color
Wha ... my visited links just changed from purple to hot pink. If I backtrack through my cache, the prior are still purple so I don't think my browser went "pink" on me. Unvisited links are still the same blue as usual. Anybody else? hydnjotalk 6 July 2005 01:10 (UTC)
This seems to be happening only with Classic skin, MonoBook is as it was, purple. hydnjotalk 6 July 2005 01:44 (UTC)
because the skin overrides the background colour, it needs to change the visited link colour to prevent text being illegible. is there a nicer shade than the current version to use for it? —kate
Anything more muted would do. The hot pink is, well, is too hot. Very distracting. I don't know how to enter color codes but if I did, it wouldn't be the current choice as it hurts my eyes. Thanks for your concern, hydnjotalk 6 July 2005 02:37 (UTC)
How about going back to where it was about 2 hours ago which was the same as is currently being used for the MonoBook skin. hydnjotalk 6 July 2005 02:53 (UTC)
what about this? 2 hours ago it wasn't specified, so it used the browser default colour. this doesn't work when the browser default colour isn't visible on the background the skin tries to use. —
This would be fine. hydnjotalk 6 July 2005 03:36 (UTC)
Here, bud. In your user CSS (User:Hydnjo/classic.css or whatever the classic one is) add the line
a:visited { color: #xxxxxx; }
and then change xxx to a colour. look here for some examples of purples. My personal preference is #7755dd, which produces this nice shade.BLANKFAZE | (что??) 6 July 2005 03:33 (UTC)
I looked around Preferences and couldn't find what you're talking about. How do I get to my User CSS? Also, the problem doesn't appear on other Wiki projects, only in WP. I like your personal preference just fine, I just don't know:
Also, I edited User:Hydnjo/classic.css as per your suggestion and nothing happened. Still Hot Pink for visited links. It was (until earlier this evening more like this color) I'd like for it to go back to the previous color. hydnjotalk 6 July 2005 04:30 (UTC)
User css for the classic skin is in /standard.css. Try putting it there; you'll also have to force a full refresh. (The user css for all the other skins is where you'd expect them - /monobook.css, /nostalgia.css, /cologneblue.css, and /myskin.css.) —Cryptic(talk) 6 July 2005 04:53 (UTC)
I'm still trying to find the root cause of this change. It didn't happen on it's own. Somebody changed something. I'm asking for help to identify the source of this change. I'm sure that someone was trying to make things beter but it didn't do so. I'm asking the more savy members of this community to direct me to the person who made this change (in good faith, I'm sure) so that I can comment to him/her as to my perceived results. And, I'm not having much success. Does anyone know who did this? hydnjotalk 6 July 2005 04:48 (UTC)
i changed it. basically, for the reason i explained above: leaving the default colour for some elements makes the page unreadable for some people (like myself). <http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/color> explains the problem a bit more. i'll change the colour to something a little nicer shortly... —kate (edit: done, you may need to force a refresh to get the new css)
OK, /standard.css does it for Classic skin. Thanks to all for you help. hydnjotalk 6 July 2005 18:16 (UTC)
Sorry, I find this new default too wishy-washy for my tired old eyes. Could someone take a look at User:Hajor/standard.css and tell me what I'm doing wrong, why I'm not getting a nice deep indigo? –Hajor 7 July 2005 01:09 (UTC)
The first line, Visited link color:, isn't valid css, and is probably causing your browser to bail. Remove it, or put it in a comment, like /* Visited link color: */ —Cryptic(talk) 7 July 2005 01:12 (UTC)
If you are using Classic skin then take a look at /standard.css. It's not a deep indigo but is close to the old default color. hydnjotalk 7 July 2005 02:22 (UTC)
Thanks for the assistance, Hydnjo and Cryptic, but still not working for me -- still with this horrid insipid blackberry jam stirred into rice pudding colour. And if we were to put the system-wide Classic skin back the way it was before this afternoon? After all, that was the set-up that won Wikipedia a couple of prestigious design awards, wasn't it? If people don't like it for whatever reason, they can always tweak their own and leave everyone else alone. –Hajor 7 July 2005 03:09 (UTC)
Did you force a reload of the css page? Some browsers (including Opera, which I use) are stubborn about caching css; you have to go to the exact address specified in the page source and specifically refresh that. —Cryptic(talk) 7 July 2005 03:16 (UTC)
My hero. And fellow Opera user. Thanks. Now using colour #800080 (basic Barney purple). Things look normal again. –Hajor 7 July 2005 04:26 (UTC)
You reverted too fast. That happens when the clocks on the servers are not perfectly synchronized, or when both changes were done in the same second. --cesarb 5 July 2005 21:07 (UTC)
When you encounter this problem you know you're truly vigilant. :-) Deco 8 July 2005 05:06 (UTC)
User contribs by type
Any reason for the disappearance of User contributions listed by type? I just looked up a user's contributions hoping to discover what templates he'd been editing, and found that I couldn't list his contributions to templates only. I also couldn't turn off minor edits. Is this a (highly unfortunate) feature of MW 1.5, or is it yet another bug? Grutness...wha? 5 July 2005 12:34 (UTC)
There two obvious problems with VFD being in Wikipedia: one is that it's inconvenient to exclude VFDs from google searches (we don't currently) while inside wikipedia:, and two it makes the search function in the wikipedia namespace useless. I would like to propose building a new namespace just for the VFD article subpages. Objections? Thoughts? Is there anything else we should move at the same time? Gmaxwell 5 July 2005 03:56 (UTC)
Sounds good. Don't know how we'll phase it in, but should work. Of course you'll have those who'll say "oh the WP namespace is fine for WP projects" as well as those clamouring for other moves and arguing about which should and shouldn't move.
Or, wait, unless we move Vfds to WP: (as opposed to Wikipedia: ) and block the WP: namespace from being crawled. That could work, and would stop people saying you shouldn't frivilously create namespaces. Master Thief GarrettTalk 5 July 2005 04:23 (UTC)
Here's a solution that will work now instead of waiting for a potentially vapourware new namespace. Instead of having the delete debate at Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion/PAGENAME have it at Talk:PAGENAME/Deletion (and do the usual transclusions for each day). The "pollution" of the talk namespace is much more benign (because VfD really is "talk"!) and solves the problems you describe. There will be a small technical hurdle as there are bots that operate on VfD that will need to be de-activated or updated. Pcb21|Pete 5 July 2005 07:34 (UTC)
Bots already need upgrading because of MediaWiki 1.5 Personally, I'm against excluding Wikipedia namespace from Google searches. It's useful when the WP search breaks again and you want to track down a specific WP namespace page. - 131.211.210.15 5 July 2005 11:38 (UTC)
I'd already considered that, ... but we would completely lose the ability to limit foreign search engines from indexing that data which is not desirable. And it would look fairly disorderly to have such pages scattered about the talk space as subpages of articles long since deleted... I think it would still be an improvement, however. Gmaxwell 9 July 2005 16:37 (UTC)
It would be no more disorderly than have having them under VfD/, IMO. In terms of electronic content orderliness is only really about consistency and linking. They wouldn't be orphans and people would know where to find them. I think your concept of orderliness is derived from the physical world rather than the electronic one. Brings a new meaning to Wiki is not paper :). I am with you on this. We should do something. But "something" should not be hanging around for a vapourware new namespace. I've looked at all the current namespaces and this stands out a mile as being the best solution, and way better than what we have now. Pcb21|Pete 9 July 2005 18:06 (UTC)
[[WP:]] is a pseudonamespace, and is actually part of the main namespace. Only redirects in it are allowed. Putting vfds there will therefore put them into the main namespace!!! All project pages should be in the Wikipedia: namespace. Dunc|☺ 5 July 2005 12:40 (UTC)
I would like to propose building a new namespace just for the VFD article subpages. Notice that I'm not proposing that vfd go into any existing namespace. Right now as things stand our own search engine is nearly useless on the wikipedia: namespace because you get soaked with old VFD archive pages. Although I agree that google is useful when our engine is down, it is a double edge sword... we do get complaints when people search for something on google and they get taken to our VFD page (often on a page that wasn't deleted or that was later recreated) and they yell at us for deleting it. :) Gmaxwell 7 July 2005 12:17 (UTC)
I know that people are busy on bugfixes and I appreciate their efforts but it does seem like a long time since the search index was updated. Searches include a lot of misses and false positives. What is the likelihood of having the index updated to improve search results? Bobblewik(talk) 4 July 2005 17:40 (UTC)
I'm working on improvements to the search system right now, hopefully it should be updating automatically soon. --Brion July 5, 2005 04:25 (UTC)
I was not expecting improvements such as automatic updates, so your answer is especially welcome. Thank you very much. Bobblewik(talk) 5 July 2005 10:12 (UTC)
Bug
Can anyone tell me why the screenshot above is doing this? It's happened on Wikipedia:No personal attacks, and I am running Windows XP, Mozilla Firefox 1.0.4, using default monobook skin. - Ta bu shi da yu 4 July 2005 02:25 (UTC)
Same problem for me (slightly different position; it's exactly below "my contributions" and "log out"). Debian GNU/Linux, Mozilla Firefox 1.0.4, default monobook skin. You probably should ask on MediaWiki talk:Monobook.css, which is where a lot of the previous discussion about this problem is. --cesarb 4 July 2005 02:35 (UTC)
I've been trying to upload an image , first to Wikimedia Commons and then when that didn't work, to Wikipedia, where it still didn't work. I don't know if this is a WM 1.5 bug (damned if I'm gonna go through the rigmarole of logging on there just to report one problem...)
When I tried to upload the image everything worked fine until I actually hit the Upload button, whereupon the image address disappeared from the top bar. Hitting Upload again resulted in an error message, confirming that the file had actually been deleted from the Upload function. Lee M 3 July 2005 21:42 (UTC)
Wikimedia Commons requires users to register before uploading. Did you do that? Is the image free and not copyrighted? What image are you talking about and what format is it? - Mgm|(talk) July 4, 2005 10:47 (UTC)
It seems to be fixed now. Either a temporary software glitch in the uploading procedure, or a momentary failure to recognise my login...for the record, the image in question is Image:Toft-spirit-of-contemplation-statue-vbig.jpg (haven't linked directly because I've forgotten how to do so without the image itself appearing) - a bigger version of the image I previously uploaded to the Albert Toft article. Lee M 4 July 2005 15:58 (UTC)
Alternate content for users with different date/time/measurement prefs
I have added the following bug to Mediazilla. Comments would be welcomed:
Right now MediaWiki has a rather crude method of allowing users to view dates in
their preferred format. It would be quite useful if this system were replaced
with a system of specifying alternate content that was tied to a users
preferences, for example:
the plane was shot at {{time|21:30|9:30 pm}} on {{date|15 January|January 15}}
causing the loss of {{measurement|89 liters|23 gallons}} of fuel.
Each user could then specify their preferred format:
time: 24-hour clock
date: European format
measurement: metric
This would solve several problems:
The 12-hour/24-hour time debate (see Manual of Style (dates and numbers))
Would no longer have the awkward convention of making all dates into links just so they are formatted a certain way
Would no longer have to show both standard and metric measurements everywhere in article contents, which makes them far less easy to read.
The actual bug report can be found here. Kaldari 3 July 2005 18:33 (UTC)
This has the disadvantage of requiring the editor to insert all valid formats. For example, I notice that you forgot to include ISO format dates in your example. How would you handle my preferences? And would the editor correctly insert all units, e.g. 140 pounds and 10 stone; 1 imperial pint and 1 US pint 4 ounces? See also bug 235Bovlb 2005-07-03 20:10:55 (UTC)
Stats 6 weeks old?
Does anyone know why the stats are 6 weeks old? Has Wikipedia (all) gone over 2 million articles? Nroose 3 July 2005 17:29 (UTC)
How to get thumbnail images to tile horizontally
At talk:Oolong I added three images that are now available so people can see if they want to change the images I added to the article. They are tiled one above the other down the right hand side of the page. How do I get them to go one next to the other horizontally but still keep them thumbnails? (I assume 'thumb' is why they are vertical instead of horizontal). RJFJR July 3, 2005 15:33 (UTC)
Didn't there used to be a search box on Special:Imagelist? It's been missing since about the beginning of May, I think. It was helpful in finding previously uploaded images, rather than digging through the categories. <>Who?¿? 3 July 2005 03:35 (UTC)
Yes, there was. I think it got taken out for performance reasons, but it could/can/should be put back in improved form I think. --Brion July 5, 2005 04:27 (UTC)
Thanks for the reply. No big hurry on re-development of it though, wish I could do it myself, but havent even bothered to look at any of wikicode yet, too many things elsewhere. It definately is a useful feature to have, saves a lot of time trying to figure out if images are already available. <>Who?¿? 5 July 2005 04:36 (UTC)
MathML: when?
When will WP get full-blooded MathML support? Perhaps browsers are not quite ready yet — but they will be very soon. Some combinations are currently pretty strong (e.g. mozilla on windows). This would have a huge impact on the quality of articles in mathematics, computer science, physics, and other areas.
the best way to get this implemented is to write the code :-) —kate
Supporting MathML is not as easy as it seems, as we must first make sure that we generate well-formed XML (see this threat on the wikitech mailing list for some details). Probably best is to ask again in some time, when most of the issues surrounding the transition to 1.5 are resolved. If MathML is feasible, I could perhaps be convinced to spend some time writing the code (though I fear it will need more than "some time"). -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 3 July 2005 15:57 (UTC)
Browser support for MathML has been coming "soon" for quite a while now. Right now I put it in the same class as the IPv6 rollout, Duke Nukem Forever, and any flying car from Moller. -- Cyrius|✎ 3 July 2005 16:58 (UTC)
I'd say the main thing stopping it is that the math module is written in OCaml which not alot of people know, although that shouldn't be any major setback for someone determined to implement it, also, as far as I know having inline mathml would mean that we would have to serve content under another MIME type than text/html such as application/xhtml+xml, and since we can't guarentee well formedness... —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason July 7, 2005 22:43 (UTC)
I assume that by "generate well-formed XML", you are referring to the entire page that WP generates, not just the math bits. In that case, what are the prospects for mediawiki/WP being able to generate perfect XML? After all, unless a major browser like Mozilla can read the document, there's not much point in having the MathML output. (which is a real shame.) DmharveyFile:User dmharvey sig.pngTalk 3 July 2005 19:12 (UTC)
I believe the usual pages are well-formed XML, but some of the special pages aren't. There certainly is some browser support: MathML claims that Mozilla, Firefox and Internet Explorer (the last only with an extension) can read MathML, and I can confirm that Firefox on Debian can display the test page correctly. However, I have hardly any experience with MathML as it is rarely used; perhaps Cyrius is better informed. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 3 July 2005 20:14 (UTC)
Frankly, I think the utility of such a change would currently be quite limited, considering that nearly all of our readers currently use IE, and MS has publically stated that IE will not support MathML any time soon (they say existing plug-ins are good enough — only trouble is, nobody has them installed.) The percent of the readership that would benefit is insignificant compared to other open bugs. On the other hand, a major website adding MathML support may provide an impetus for wider usage and support. Deco 5 July 2005 08:03 (UTC)
Maybe you can explain how come my installation of IE6, to which I have never knowingly added MathML support, displays the test page correctly? Where do I find out whether I have the helper installed? Nothing appropriate appears in the list of add-ons. --Phil | Talk July 6, 2005 09:26 (UTC)
Yeah, as far as I can tell IE6 supports MathML, although it doesn't support XHTML pages served with an XML (instead of HTML) MIME type, which is the only correct way to embed MathML... DopefishJustin(･∀･) July 6, 2005 18:16 (UTC)
Although it's true that only a small percentage of readers would be affected, I think the effect for those readers would be huge. It would make the difference between amateur-looking and professional-looking output. To be more precise, the main problem now is that it is virtually impossible to get good-looking inline equations, except in the simplest possible cases (where one can sometimes get away with HTML - yuck). Displayed equations are not so much of a problem, in terms of output quality. DmharveyFile:User dmharvey sig.pngTalk 5 July 2005 19:06 (UTC)
whilst it is true that our png equations look lousy inline, anything more complex than simple sub/superscripts with inline text will look lousy inline anyway due to the fact that the resulting equation will have to be taller than normal text to be readable. Plugwash 6 July 2005 11:00 (UTC)
I assume that plugwash is referring to the fact that sufficiently complex MathML expressions, appearing inline in blocks of text, will be too tall and will look lousy. I have two answers to this.
First is that although it may force the line to increase in height (i.e. the spacing between adjacent lines will increase slightly), it will guarantee correct font sizing and baseline alignment. This happens already if I use HTML: if I write an italic x, then the x is the right height and lines up correctly along the bottom. If I use MathML the same thing will happen (at least I think it should). If I use PNG, I lose both of these very desirable attributes. I should point out that even in professional LaTeX documents in academic journals, sometimes line spacing gets adjusted slightly to accommodate this kind of stuff. It's not such a big deal; what really contributes to readability is consistency in font size and baseline alignment.
The second point, which I haven't seen discussed in WP anywhere, is the fact that TeX actually renders things very differently inline than in displayed equations. The best example is when you write down an integral such as
What you're seeing above is the "displayed equation" form of this. The inline version looks like this (screenshot):
The main difference is that the integral sign is smaller. Notice that it hasn't affected the line spacing at all in this case. It would be truly wonderful if WP supported this. Of course somehow TeX would need to be told to render the inline version instead of the displayed version. (Another interesting point is that TeX automatically breaks inline equations if necessary and wraps them to the next line. Perhaps this is asking a bit much though.)
Creating new account error
I've been trying to create a new account and it keeps giving me a "Username is not valid" error no matter the username I use. Any advice?
Wikipedia software has just been updated, and currently overfloweth with bugs. I'd just wait a couple of days and try again. Joyous (talk) July 1, 2005 21:17 (UTC)
Probably you used a lowercase name; a temporary bug was rejecting those instead of automatically capitalizing them (as required for our system, currently). It should now take the name and automatically capitalize it without complaint. --Brion July 1, 2005 22:31 (UTC)
diff no longer working?
I don't know if it's just me, but when I do "diff", it compares a revision with itself, not the previous edit. --Ixfd64 2005 July 1 20:14 (UTC)
This just started happening for me too! --brian0918™ 1 July 2005 20:22 (UTC)
I think I know the problem. An example diff: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lord_of_the_Flies&curid=31584&diff=17881260&oldid=17881260 - it's the same diff id! --Ixfd64 2005 July 1 20:28 (UTC)
This should no longer be happening on new edits. --Brion July 1, 2005 22:33 (UTC)
I have a bug on my watchlist page. It won't update. I deleated my old files in my catch as well as bipassed my catch using Control + F5, but the page will not update. I edited a few articles today and it won't aknowledge the updates on my watchlist page. --Admiral Roo July 1, 2005 16:50 (UTC)
Go to bugzilla:2647 and let them know that you're having the problem too. Also, make sure to place a vote for the bug. That let's them know that you think it is an important bug to fix. The more votes, the more likely it is to be fixed soon. --brian0918™ 1 July 2005 16:44 (UTC)
Thanks. I will do that. --Admiral Roo July 1, 2005 16:56 (UTC)
Ouch. You need an email addy to sign up on for both pages. Mother does not let me go into the email, nor will she let me sign up for anything without asking first. She won't get home for another four hours. :(
Want a Gmail account? I have 100 invites hanging around... smoddy 1 July 2005 17:02 (UTC)
My watchlist is unusually quiet now also. Worse, after I edited an article which had a recent change that page vanished from My Watchlist. Maybe articles recently changed aren't visible. Updating bugzilla. (SEWilco 1 July 2005 17:20 (UTC))
The bug is already in the "Reported" section of the MW 1.5 bugs list. Only report something new; those working on it don't need a thousand "me too" emails to distract them from fixes. (SEWilco 1 July 2005 18:43 (UTC))
Watchlist was working fine for me until the last hour or so; now, no matter what interval of time I put in, I only get a watchlist for the last hour, which is nearly useless. -- Jmabel | Talk July 1, 2005 21:21 (UTC)
They recently implemented a new bug fix. This fix wiped out all watchlist entries prior to its implementation, which was an hour ago. --brian0918™ 1 July 2005 21:30 (UTC)
Great. Crap, but at least that explains it. Thanks B. TomerTALK July 1, 2005 21:37 (UTC)
I am grateful to the programmers who fixed it. --Fred-Chess July 1, 2005 21:40 (UTC)
My watchlist went silent at about 5:45AM CDT (UTC -5 I think) July 1, and then picked up a single edit at like 15:45 July 1. Later (unsure of time interval) it gives me only previous hour. Not only is it not giving more than previous hour, it skipped a whole bunch. (NOTE: It's possible that it is simply the same problem as Jmabel's: I didn't get the "only the previous hour" problem until after I'd closed and reopened IE (I clicked some insipid link in Circumcision which eventually made IE gobble up 98% of my CPU...). It may have had the pre-5:45 edits in the cache somewhere, and I didn't refresh my watchlist until after an hour later...) Bleh, and argh. TomerTALK July 1, 2005 21:35 (UTC)
Links to Wiktionary
Pages on Wiktionary are now no longer automatically capitalised, and so, for example, there are now separate pages for "Kat" (diminutive of "Katherine") and "kat" (variant of khat).
This means that links to Wiktionary from Wikipedia, where pages are automatically capitalised, in many cases, no longer work or will redirect to the page with the wrong name.
This requires action from Wikipedia, either to update the {{wiktionary}} template to link to lower-case entries, where appropriate (some links will still need to be to pages with initial capitals), or manual changes. — Paul G 1 July 2005 14:17 (UTC)
I've started switching from {{wiktionary}} to {{wiktionarypar}}, {{wiktionarypar2}}, and {{wiktionarypar3}}. User:Netoholic disputes our plan. Please contribute to the discussion at Template talk:Wiktionary. Uncle G 16:51, 11 July 2005 (UTC)
Problem with viewing certain templates
I don't know if this is related to the recent changeover, but I've noticed recently that I've been unable to view certain templates, particularly ones on TV stations in markets (See the bottom of a article of a station such as WGN-TV) when I'm logged in. I don't know if this is the result of some sort of preference option, or if it's a technical problem from the changeover. What is the case here? ErikNY 1 July 2005 11:20 (UTC)
Template:PAGENAME
I was curious about the code of {{PAGENAME}}, even though I suspect it to be coded and not a template. But then there is Template:PAGENAME. Originally was created with the text PAGENAME, and now redirect to .. uhm. Take a look. Any thoughts, or Tfd? <>Who?¿? 1 July 2005 05:39 (UTC)
I can't see any purpose in a broken redirect, which is, in fact, a CSD if I remember correctly. --Dmcdevit 1 July 2005 05:57 (UTC)
I worry that it may be more complicated. If {{PAGENAME}} is coded, and not the template, will it affect it by deleting the template. Also, i see admin Golbez rv the edits, possibly due to this post? <>Who?¿? 1 July 2005 07:03 (UTC)
I speedy deleted it. Since it's special cased on the code, it doesn't even look at that template. --cesarb 1 July 2005 13:29 (UTC)
I figured it was coded, just wanted to be sure, thanks for the speedy. <>Who?¿? 1 July 2005 17:57 (UTC)
Dynamic templates?
There's a minor edit war ongoing over several of the giant planet articles. For example, the various moons of Saturn keep being switched between the Template:Saturn_Footer and the Template:Saturn_Full_Footer.
Is there a way to write a dynamic template? What I'm envisioning would be, for example, a single template that would look like Template:Saturn_Footer but could expand, as a result of a single click on some "button" or hot spot, into Template:Saturn_Full_Footer. Another click would collapse it back. The "button" could be a feature like the "edit" link that already appears on those templates and others (which you'll note is being added by the Wiki, not by the templates).
After the curent upgrade, one can use Unicode in article titles. Does anybody know of any way (preferably in Perl) of stripping the accents from various letters in a Unicode string? The only solution I know is using GNU recode, which is a C program. But calling it from Perl many times seems to be very slow.
Perl should sort unicode just fine. Is it aware you're trying to use unicode data? (Try setting your local to something.UTF8) --W(t) 1 July 2005 02:58 (UTC)
I will try it, thanks. Oleg Alexandrov 2 July 2005 02:04 (UTC)
Disabling keyboard shortcuts?
Is there a simple way to disable the keyboard shortcuts?
I'm a sysop in HuWiki and when I'd like to move the focus to the address bar in my browser I type Alt+D (WinXP/Firefox) and I always get the "delete page" form. :(
Um, not that I know of. Can't you just click into it with the mouse like any other user? :) I mean, it doesn't sound like it's seriously getting in the way of things.
No, wait, I think if you use a non-Monobook theme you don't have the Alts. Yeah. Something like that. Master Thief GarrettTalk 1 July 2005 00:23 (UTC)
Or you can disable accesskeys in your browser. Or you can use wikipedia user javascript to rewrite the page not to use accesskeys. --W(t) 1 July 2005 00:35 (UTC)
I've always used Ctrl-L to get to the "L"ocation bar; it's standard on most browsers I've used (including firefox) --harmless
Page move problem
There's a nasty little stub called Alantic Soul, about a record producer called Atlantic Soul. I tried three times to move it to the correct spelling, but each time I tried I got the same result - an error message saying "Source and destination titles are the same; can't move a page over itself." What gives? Is this a MW 1.5 problem? FWIW there is no article called "Atlantic Soul", and the page history looks clean. Grutness...wha? 30 June 2005 11:40 (UTC)
Don't know what you were doing, but for me it just moved at first try. andy 30 June 2005 11:43 (UTC)
I had exactly the same problem on another move. Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 30 June 2005 11:54 (UTC)
You have noticed the move form has changed and there are two different fields to fill in now, destination and reason, right? I saw a reference somewhere where someone was getting this same error, but it was basically due to not really looking at the new form. -- Rick Block (talk) June 30, 2005 13:24 (UTC)
Yeah - and I thought "Misspelt name" was a good enough reason. But it still told me I couldn't move it. Grutness...wha? 1 July 2005 00:50 (UTC)
Page history last and first
Wikipedia recently upgraded to a new wiki software version, but there is a feature that I had hoped would be in it.
Whenever you click on the history tab, there are several numbers at the bottom - 10, 20, 50, 100, 500, etc. that gives you the "results per page" feature. However, I really want a "last" and "first" feature - that is - I can hop right to the beginning of a page's history to see how it began as an article. That way, I don't have to press the "next 500" button over and over again to see the article's beginning.
Hope this will be in the next version of the wiki software. — Stevey7788 (talk) 28 June 2005 20:18 (UTC)
File an enhancement "bug" in Bugzilla. -- Cyrius|✎ 29 June 2005 00:27 (UTC)
I'm having trouble with this feature. Whenever I click on the 'Earliest' link it doesn't do anything and just stays on the latest edits. – AxSkov (T) 1 July 2005 16:13 (UTC)
With User:Gdr temporarily away, I'd like to try using his DYKbot to update DYK, but I never used python before and although I appear to have all the modules, I still can't get it to run. Any help is appreciated.
Who are you and what exactly is the problem you are having? Do you have Python installed? RedWolf June 28, 2005 03:47 (UTC)
Oops, forgot to sign. I can run python now, but I still can't use command line arguments. I don't have cmd.exe Is that a Windows XP specific file? - Mgm|(talk) June 30, 2005 08:01 (UTC)
In fact, I am using Windows 98. I hate it when programmers assume you have the latest system. Even simple stuff like card games need Pentium 6 prcessors nowadays. I guess I'll have to make do with my IDLE GUI. Thanks for clearing it up. I'd still be looking for the non-existent file if it weren't for you. - Mgm|(talk) July 2, 2005 15:06 (UTC)
you can probablly use command.com instead if you are on a win9x system. Plugwash 12:44, 12 July 2005 (UTC)
Insert special character box should be closer to the edit box
The insert special character box should be right below the edit box (or alongside it), not below all the template links. - Omegatron 19:34, August 4, 2005 (UTC)
Yes. Below would be fine. And the members of the list of templates used should be separated with a regular character (like a pipe) rather than newlines. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 19:41, August 4, 2005 (UTC)
I agree about the templates. - Omegatron 19:59, August 4, 2005 (UTC)
yeah i agree we should put the insert chars above the templates not below them not sure if it should be above or below the buttons though. Plugwash 20:00, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
Yeah it could be in either position for me. Probably right below the buttons is most desirable to the typical editor. - Omegatron 20:06, August 4, 2005 (UTC)
Voted for. ;-) Should also have one for '"Templates used on this page:" should be separated by a pipe instead of a newline' - Omegatron 21:51, August 4, 2005 (UTC)
Don't-bypass Markup for Links
_ _ IMO we would gain from a markup, let's say (just as a straw man to use in these examples) [[:Claire Parker]] as opposed to [[Claire Parker]]. The equivalent HTML renderings would be identical (unless there were to be a color difference); probably What links here would take note of the difference (just as it annotates redirects); the main payoff is that most bots, and alert editors, would realize that the previous editor thot the link should not be bypassed. E.g., Claire Parker's content is
and a [[:Claire Parker]] markup means "Yeah, i know she doesn't have an article of her own, but IMO she should; please don't byp the rdr, but leave her name here, as a not-quite-red lk that solicits an individual article, just as the red-lk would if the redirect did not yet exist.
_ _ Arguably the goals of this could be met by a "think about whether that pipe indicates the need for an article" campaign, but IMO this near-SMOP would have more effect with less demand on the already overloaded human engineering systems of WP.
--Jerzy·t 17:06, 2005 August 4 (UTC)
Problem in Skin "Chick"
There's some problem in skin ' Chick' , where the search bar overlaps the wikitext , we have come to discover that this problem does not occur in Mozilla Firefox. But the same does persist in Internet
Explorer.
There are unfixed intermittent glitches that (at least in IE):
1) Cause Category boxes to become misplaced from the bottom of the page and obscure part of the text of an article. They are not free-floating and cannot be shifted by clicking and dragging. Refreshing the page usually corrects the problem.
2) Cause the User toolbar at top of the page, when mouseovered, to jump to the left and become partly obscured by the Wikipedia logo.
These glitches were originally reported several months ago. Is anything actually being done to fix them????????????Lee M 02:30, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
These are bugs in Internet Explorer. Please contact Microsoft about it. --Brion 07:54, August 4, 2005 (UTC)
Page names after disambiguation
(Pardon the reposting here. I accidently put it in Misc because the menu box is all wacky!)
What do you do when the pages you are making a dab for should have the same page name? e.g. Personology is both a New Age idea and the name Henry Murray gave to his type of personality psychology. However, they have nothing to do with each other. So I make a dab and since there can't be two pages with the exact name (correct), then what? Have each page be Personology (New Age) and Personology (Personality Psychology)? or some such? Thanks. Rsugden 19:36, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
That's pretty much it. There are two ways to do disambiguation pages, and you've described the more usual one perfectly. Either create two separate pages at Personology (New age) and Personology (Personality psychology) (note the lower case) or similar names, create Personology, simply with a link to each of those pages and the {{Disambig}} template at the bottom (if one of the pages already exists at this name, it may need to be moved using the move button at the top of the page). If you want to, you can add a note at the top of each of the other pages in italics linking to the other page (see Ranfurly and the pages linking off it for an example).
The other way to do a disambiguation page - usually used when one meaning of a word is far better known that the others, is to have the article about the best-known use at the simple name (e.g., Foo), and a link from that to a disambiguation page named "Foo (disambiguation)". (See Wellington for an example of how that is done). Grutness...wha? 02:43, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
Biography page age calculate
For more profiles (biographies) wikipedia could add a AGE Template where it would show the current age of the person or the age they died at. For example, if the person was born in 1900 and died in 1990, the script would subtract death year by birth year. On the otehr hand, if the person was still alive, WP could use CURRENTYEAR template. I do not have to explain the math of calculating age. However, this feature could be very useful. --Ali Karbassi 19:07, August 3, 2005 (UTC)
Templates can't do math. -- Cyrius|✎ 19:17, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
Is there a way to do this though. There has to be a way. --Ali Karbassi 20:33, August 3, 2005 (UTC)
I think he just said no, there isn't. Not without modifying the Mediawiki software. Perhaps in the future, but not right now. --Golbez 20:34, August 3, 2005 (UTC)
Computing an age is math. Templates can't do math. Therefore templates can't compute an age. -- Cyrius|✎ 21:31, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
Printing pages with several large images
In chemistry, and organic chemistry in particular, much of our information is graphical and can't be done any other way than images. It is difficult to manage these on a Wikipedia page, because different browsers and different browser widths move the images around, but often if you play with the edits enough you can get a workable version. (Often we also have data tables to include such as Wikipedia:Chemical_infobox. However when one comes to print these pages, it is disastrous! Take a look, for example at the page on the Wittig reaction that is more or less how we would like it. IE does a bad job when printing- chopping off odd bits of article or image, juggling the order, etc. Firefox made it a catastrophe- all of the images were either shrunk to almost nothing, lopped off entirely, most of the article was missing, and twice in a row the browser just crashed altogether! I'm sure I can't be the only one having such problems- but how many of us remember to look at the "printable" version of our pages when we edit, particularly in different browsers? However many of our casual users (not contributors) will want just to print the page they found, and they will conclude that Wikipedia is useless! I realise we can't do much about browser technology, but can the "printable version" be set up to reproduce the page better, perhaps the way a PDF does? Walkerma 16:21, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
Walkerma contacted me about this earlier. I've done some experimenting and achieved some interesting results. I believe that IE and Firefox both try to float images to the left in printed documents. Wikipedia images that are centered get floated left and the text flows correctly around them. However, it looks like in both IE and Firefox, wikipedia images that are floated left or floated right produce bad results. Both the image placement and the text flow get messed up resulting in an unreadable nightmare.
For an example, see Pictet-Spengler reaction where all the images are centered. The printout isn't bad at all.
Is this something that MediaWiki can take care of? ~K 19:34, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
This message has been cross-posted at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Mathematics, and will also be posted on the Wikitech-l mailing list (as soon as I figure out how it works).
Is it possible to see the edit histories of individual sections? sometimes it's really difficult to tell how a section evolved, and who added what. Madd4Max 11:30, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
No, there's no such thing. --Brion 11:42, August 3, 2005 (UTC)
Firefox search engine box no longer works for Wikipedia.
The Search Engine box in the upper right hand corner of a Firefox browser no longer has a working version of the Wikipedia search engine? When I try [Add Engines], and choose Wikipedia, nothing happens. Ancheta Wis 10:35, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
Finding out which thumbnails are cached
Given a wikilink such as Image:Sheep.jpg, how can I find out which thumbnailed images have been generated for it?
Or, if this isn't possible, does anyone know what the most common thumbnail sizes are? I have 180px and 120px on my list, but more common choices would be good. Lest you're wondering what this is for, it's to make my popup script run more smoothly (see advert above). Lupin 05:15, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
Other thumbnail sizes on articles on my watchlist are 200px, 210px, 230px, 250px and 300px. Of these 200px and 250px are the most common Thryduulf 12:48, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
Help with updating images
I would like to know how to update an image (e.g. a map). Do I need an "external editor" as it says? How can I find one? Revolución 22:53, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
That's not much help. I'm already using an image-editing program. I would just like to know how to update the image. I have tried, by clicking "upload a new version" , but it did not update and just showed the old version. Revolución 01:37, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
Assumming you uploaded a new version correctly, then it should be updated. Do you see your upload listed in the versions list at the bottom of the image page? There are some issues with image caching in the current Wikimedia hardware configuration that can cause new versions of images not to display even though they are in the system. It typically takes a couple of hours for the cache at their end to be refreshed when this happens. I've never seen it take more than 24 hours, though I did see it take more than 8 once. As long as your version appears in the list of uploads it should be fine eventually. Does anyone know if "action=purge" works on images? (P.S. I know it is a problem at their end because I've replicated the issue even when switching computers). Dragons flight 01:56, August 3, 2005 (UTC)
Please delete this account
Is there a way to delete this account I have right now? I want to use a different one and I don't want this one to exist anymore. Stancel 22:47, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
Accounts can't be deleted. If you don't want this one, stop using it. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 22:50, August 2, 2005 (UTC)
If you have not yet created the new account, it is possible to have this account renamed to the new name. See: Wikipedia:Changing_username. Dragons flight 22:56, August 2, 2005 (UTC)
Case-retentive titles?
Is there any particular reason why Wikipedia article titles can't be case-retentive?
This is how Windows operating systems have worked with file names, from Windows NT onward. The original case of the filename is retained but filenames are nevertheless not case sensitive... in other words, an file that gets named "eBay" at the time of its creation continues to be displayed as "eBay" in directory listings (rather than "ebay" or "EBAY" or "Ebay"), but filenames are nevertheless case insensitive (so you can't create other files named "ebay" or "EBAY" or "Ebay").
If Windows operating systems can make this work, why not Wikipedia? -- Curps 19:37, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
Because this is a database, not two million individual files. We need a perennial proposal for case-sensitivity. --Golbez 19:47, August 2, 2005 (UTC)
I don't understand this remark, can you clarify? -- Curps 00:03, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
Brion actually says he intends to eventually get around to making MediaWiki case-insensitive but preserving. I'd imagine it's rather more difficult than one would think given that there's the whole Unicode space to contend with. -- Cyrius|✎ 21:45, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
I'm not sure Unicode is an issue for capitalization, it seems to be handled already in the same way as ASCII or Latin-1. For instance, try to create an article named just "αβ" (lowercase alpha, lowercase beta)... you will get an article named "Αβ" (that's an uppercase Alpha, not an uppercase A). -- Curps 00:03, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
Also, there are already examples where capitalization is used as a form of disambiguation, e.g. Barn Owl (specific species) vs. barn owl (family of birds). Whether this is a good thing or not is certainly debatable. For example, after some debate consensus rejected the notion that Ice Age (movie) might be adequately titled Ice Age without conflicting with ice age (the glacial event). As far as I know there are no guidelines discussing this. If one were to pursue your proposal, such capitalization disambigs would have to be banned and existing ones sorted out. Dragons flight 19:55, August 2, 2005 (UTC)
Being able to have articles start with lower or uppercase would be very helpful. Just today two problematic article moves were partly because of this problem. The article god was moved to God (monotheism), and god was redirected to deity, when clearly the best solution would be to have two articles one called "god" and the other called "God". And E (mathematical constant) was moved to Euler's number, when the best solution would really be to have the article called e (mathematical constant). Paul August☎ 00:02, August 3, 2005 (UTC)
Note that the software now supports the capability, and the option was recently enabled on Wiktionary. Apparently there was a lack of coordination between the editors and the developers who enabled the option, as a result of which none of the necessary work had been done on the site to prepare for the change; the result was a bit of a mad scramble to fix things up, but no lives were lost. See the discussions in the Wiktionary Beer Parlour. Hv 12:08, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
How do I align a template which I am using?
I am using templates on a page, but the result is that they all are
centered (like at the end of this article: World War II).
How do I state that a template should be aligned to the left or right?
Regards, Dennis Nilsson
Dna-Dennis 15:55, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
Templates like that at the end of the the WWII article should be center aligned. All templates of that nature are center aligned. If you want the entire template to be moved to the left, use:
Hm, this is the second request for such a place in a short time... I'd say it fits at the meta page. Or just feel free to start a "power user scripts" project of some sort in your userspace, and let it grow from there--heck, that's how Schoolwatch started! Just tried it now, this is a neat little script!!! I'd like to see a hack made for pages--oops, didn't realise it did them too! From the illustration I took it to just be for users. Gah. That's my 12:30 PM logic for you. :)
One thing you could maybe do for the future is have a tiny (like, 60x60) thumbnail shown for photo mouse-overs. Shouldn't be too hard to hack in. And that would be really useful. GarrettTalk 12:35, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
OK I've found two flaws. First of all if you use the Watch function with a link that has a # in it, it won't work (not sure how that would be remedied). Also it would be nice to have an unwatch function, maybe like this... (un)watch ...to ensure the box remains compact. GarrettTalk 12:41, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
OK, one flaw down, I've hacked it in. See what you think. :) Yes I know it disrupts the almost perfect alignment, but what can you do? GarrettTalk 12:54, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
Looks great to me. I've now made it play more nicely with the existing popups from link titles. Wikipedia:Power tools sounds like a good page to have - maybe I'll start it soon. Lupin 14:24, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
Oh, and thanks for letting me know about # screwing things up. Will investigate when I have time. I'm not sure I understand your request for thumbnails - this doesn't seem useful to me if you can already see the image without the popup. Maybe for links to images which are not displaying the image.... hm. Sounds tricky. Worth thinking about, though. Lupin 14:30, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
I mean for textual links to the image, not for the inline image itself. For example on IFD I could just mouse over image to see thumbnails, whereas right now I have to click through to each and let the full size version load. There might not be a way to stipulate that thumbnails aren't generated when mousing over an inline image (which would be unnecessary) but I doubt that's a major issue as you're not as likely to activate the toolbar for them anyway.
As for being tricky, I assume you could just define the image in a left cell (or floating or whatever), drawing it from Wikipedia's intrinsic thumbnail-generation system (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/d/dc/imagenamehere/###px-imagenamehere.ext) but I don't really know if that will work. GarrettTalk 14:57, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
OK, that would be a nice feature. I don't know enough about the thumbnail system though - I see two problems. Firstly, how do I know that a thumbnail of a particular size exists? My impression is that they're only created if an article demands it. Secondly, the url is a bit more variable than you think: the d/dc component can vary - a quick look at Sheep reveals the following variants: 2/2c 4/4c c/c2 2/20 a/a1 6/6f 3/39. I have no idea how to predict them. Is the thumbnailing system documented somewhere?
Afterthought: my guess is that it's something like the first two characters of the md5sum of the image, which it seems I can't compute without downloading the entire image. Hopefully there's a way of extracting this information... Lupin 16:20, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
I figured it out.[1] You have to take the first two characters of the md5sum of the image filename, so this part at least should be doable in principle. Still I think there would be a problem with images which don't have existing generated thumbnails in the standard sizes - say 180px (default thumbnail size) and/or 120px (default gallery thumbnail size, as in Special:Newimages). Lupin 16:36, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
Swanky.
Images are now in. Enjoy, and let me know about the bugs. Lupin 05:26, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
"You have 36.5 pages on your watchlist"
How did this happen? How can it be a number other than a whole number? --pile0nadestalk | contribs 03:18, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
I have 768.5 on mine. My guess is that it's supposed to be 1537 pages (i.e., 768.5*2), which sounds closer to correct. TomerTALK 07:49, August 2, 2005 (UTC)
I suspect it has to do with talk-pages. When you watch a page, you watch both the article and the talk page, so that should add two pages to your watchlist. The 768.5 count should be how many times you have added a page to your watchlist, but instead it is simply the former number/2. This would work fine if not for the fact that not all pages have talk-pages which makes you watch only one page, not two. Atleast this is my theory. Has a developer explained it somewhere? gkhan 08:09, August 2, 2005 (UTC)
Hey, would you look at that [2]! I was correct. I rule! :D gkhan 08:15, August 2, 2005 (UTC)
OK, now my watchlist just jumped to 80 pages, and I know I did not add that many. I think it was almost that many anyway, and adding a few more fixed it. --pile0nadestalk | contribs 23:46, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
Edit history?
I don't know what's going on. Over the last couple of hours I made several smaller edits to Passing, but they have just vanished. They are not displayed in the edit history either. And right now all I get is the usual "Sorry we have a problem" message—but I didn't get that earlier. <KF> 01:16, August 2, 2005 (UTC)
Too many <big>'s crashes browser
I've tested this in the latest Firefox, and in Mozilla 1.7.7. This first test page consists of an over-sized smiley face (if you have the character set), the code of which consists of 13 bigs in a row:
This second test page adds a 14th big, which, when attempting to load, crashes the entire browser and all other instances of that browser. Lower-case letters seem to be able to do 14 bigs, but crash on 15, while upper-case letters can do 13 but crash on 14. Please test this on other browsers. I haven't checked bugzilla for this. -- BRIAN0918 21:52, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
Both pages load fine in Safari 2.0. No crashes. Joyous (talk) 22:06, August 1, 2005 (UTC)
IE for Macs 5.2 doesn't crash, either, but it doesn't have the character set. I do get a lovely nice big question mark. Joyous (talk) 01:10, August 2, 2005 (UTC)
No crash for me (Firefox 1.0.6 on Linux). --rbrwr± 22:12, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
Neither for me (Firefox 1.0.6 on Fedora Linux 3/4 (half-way upgrading))... Which OS are you using?—Pt(T) 00:11, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
It was Firefox 1.0.4 with Red Hat Linux. -- BRIAN0918 02:28, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
No problem with Firefox 1.0 on Windows 95 [specifically, Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win95; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0]. - dcljr (talk) 03:53, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
Both big smileys work fine with Firefox 1.0.6 on Windows XP SP2. Internet Explorer 6.0 SP2 on XP SP2 shows the smileys at regular size rather than huge, but it doesn't crash. - Thatdog 07:56, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
No problem here: Firefox 1.0.2, Mandriva Linux 10.0. Nickptar 07:57, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
No problem with either firefox nor ie 6 on windows 2000 and XP gkhan 08:03, August 2, 2005 (UTC)
No crash with Firefox 1.0.6 on Windows XP SP2. --pile0nadestalk | contribs 16:50, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
No problem with Firefox 1.0.4, Win2k. And we need to talk about your sig. Alphaxτεχ 11:01, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
Watchlist page count
My watchlist page currently says 'You have 229.5 pages on your watchlist'. When I click to display and edit the complete list, it says 'Your watchlist contains 459 pages'. Is there something seriously wrong with this function, or am I missing something important? - ulayiti(talk) 20:37, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
I've got that too. 1,847 on the normal page but the edit page shows 3,694 (which is more likely). There was a previous problem similar to this on the release of MW 1.5 - basically it's just halving the number. violet/riga(t) 21:30, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
Moving a page to itself should not be allowed
Currently it's possible for an admin to move a page to itself. This deletes the page and makes it a redirect to itself. This is bad. Deco 19:35, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
Causes an error for me. -- Cyrius|✎ 22:08, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
Watchlist not showing any article edited before current date
I have not seen this mentioned as a bug. My watchlist does not show any article that was last edited before the current date. As the days go by, articles are dropped from the list. Is it the same for other people? Bobblewik 14:37, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
Perhaps you have more than 1000 articles in your watchlist and have hit the threshold for reducing the cutoff from 3 days to 12 hours. -- Cyrius|✎ 17:01, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
I am under 1000. I have just added some and now it says: You have 191.5 pages on your watchlist. If I display the complete list, it says Your watchlist contains 383 pages.Bobblewik 17:22, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
Usernames
I would like to know how to stop people from using ~~~~ as a username, as -Ril- has been doing. This is not Ril's username, and it is very confusing to work out exactly who he is. On top of this, it is disruptive because if I copy and paste a whole section back to somewhere it will expand my username and password.
It's not ~~~~ it's ~~~~
How do we put a halt to this stupidity? (yes, you heard me, stupidity). - Ta bu shi da yu 07:30, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
That's a personal attack. Remove it please. ~~~~ ( ! | ? | * ) 08:26, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
Completly agree, it has been annoying me for some time. It is, as it happens, Ta-bu (sorry, couldn't help myself, I must be like the 345th person to make that pun. Really, I'm sorry :P) gkhan 10:37, August 1, 2005 (UTC)
Meh, that's nothing. If you put ll after bu and t after shi... we get to see WP:RPA in action once more! :) GarrettTalk 14:15, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
I agree too. I suggest taking it to an RfC and then if there is apparent consensus on that maybe write a line into the apropriate policy on disruptive behaviour (with apropriate discussion of course). Thryduulf 12:27, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
You can't write retroactive laws. No-one can be found guilty of something that wasn't a crime when they did it. ~~~~ ( ! | ? | * ) 08:26, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
An RfC is a bit overkill don't you think? It's not like the guy is a vandal or anything. Besides, this is basically an RfC that we are having here. Lets have the discussion here an see where it leads. gkhan 19:39, August 1, 2005 (UTC)
I too agree with the proposal. It stops me doing a text-search for that username on a page. Not to mention numerous poor newbies could be talking to him by name and ending up with their sigs five times per post. If any sort of policy is brought forward it needs to preclud other symbols, like ==== and **** and other such non-username rubbish. GarrettTalk 14:15, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
If you are actually writing, then what is the problem with copying and pasting my signature, it won't mess the page up. The only time the problem occurs is if you copy it before you click the edit this page link, which is a bit odd behaviour anyway. ~~~~ ( ! | ? | * ) 08:26, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
What's so hard in moving mouse over sig and see the real name in status bar? It's not like your signature perfectly matches your username. What if there would be some User:Garret complaining about your sig? Grue 14:23, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
It's not hard to move your mouse over the sig to see who it is, the point is that you shouldn't have to. A sig should show who the user is so you can easily follow who says what. I have the same problem with User:Eeqours signature. And besides, like Ta bu says, when you copy the text it expands as your own name. gkhan 19:39, August 1, 2005 (UTC)
The signature clearly identifies with me, no-one else uses anything like that. In the same way, we clearly know Eequor by Eequor's signature, and the guy with the cyrillic signature as that. ~~~~ ( ! | ? | * ) 08:26, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
That user has zero edits, and [[User:Garrett] (two ts) has four back in 2004. If there had been a chance of conflicts with an active editor's identity I would not have changed my display name to theirs. My display name is still part of my username though, it's not like I changed it completely to Captain Stupid or something... I would have had Garrett had not that other user taken it first... grrrr... :( And yes what gkhan says is all true. :) GarrettTalk 23:32, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
Yes, we do need some policy, or at least a guideline, disallowing wiki-markup characters in usernames; it's a form of subtle vandalism, and or a case of WP:POINT. I'm going to leave a message on -Ril-'s talk page. JesseW 01:03, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
As User:-Ril-'s user page now states: "My signature / I'm keeping it unless the arbitration committee ban it. Learn to cope. ~~~~ ( ! | ? | * )", I think an arbitration case is justified. This is in violation of basic policies (see the most recent comment on -Ril-'s talk page) and should not stand. JesseW 01:14, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
What policies? List them - there aren't any prohibiting it. ~~~~ ( ! | ? | * ) 08:26, 2 August 2005 You're making yourself look very stubborn. Anyway, I'm off, I've got better things to do than argue over tildes. GarrettTalk 09:56, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
First off, don't edit other peoples comment. JesseW was making a point which you have now removed. Second, yes there are no policies that specifically prohibit you from having whatever signature you please, but there is WP:DICK, you know. The heart and soul of wikipedia is not its policy library, it is its community. The policies where formed from consensus, and there seems to be a consensus against your signature. And since you refuse to change, I have to ask...well...is it because you really, really like it, or is because you are stubborn and will stick to the principle at all costs? gkhan 10:19, August 2, 2005 (UTC)
Ril's comments have made clear that unless he faces actual consequences for his actions he will not desist from them, regardless of the general community feeling about them. Christopher Parham(talk) 17:46, 2005 August 2 (UTC)
The important word there is actions. This is quite different to the word appearance, thus signature. ~~~~ ( ! | ? | * ) 20:17, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
Infobox creation
I've created a standard infobox I'd like to use for all of the Provinces of Cameroon articles. I've put the "beta" version here: User:BrianSmithson/Infobox. Can anyone point me to a tutorial about how to make this into a true template/infobox? I've tried to read the instructions [here], but they are way over my head. Likewise, Wikipedia:Infobox templates doesn't include much how-to. Thanks. BrianSmithson 20:35, 31 July 2005 (UTC)
I seem to have figured it out. Still, it'd be nice if a user-friendly tutorial existed on infobox-template creation. BrianSmithson 03:31, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
Mediawiki back-ups
I'm wondering how, and how often Wikipedia backs up its articles and databases. Thanks for any help, Mrtea 01:30, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
This is not a straightforward question to answer, the hardware configuration is described at m:Wikimedia_servers. The articles and databases are stored on RAID storage, which provides protection against a single disk failure so in some sense the articles and databases are continuously "backed up". In addition, I'm sure the content is regularly backed up to some sort of offline storage (although I don't know how often or how). I'm not sure it's the latest backup copy, but the entire database can be downloaded by anyone from http://download.wikipedia.org/, so anyone who's downloaded this has a backup. -- Rick Block (talk) 03:55, August 1, 2005 (UTC)
I now realize the question was a little vague. :-) Thanks for the links and always thorough response though- they are quite helpful for me. --Mrtea 05:22, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
Encoding
I looked up the Nicene Creed hoping to be able to read it in Greek as well as in English translation. I use Windows XP but cannot find an encoding that will give me all the Greek letters correctly. The "i" as in "kai" is rendered at best as a rectangle. I'd very much appreciate a suggestion on an encoding that'll give me all the Greek letters. Thanks. Diogenes@cyber-rights.net
Wikipedia articles are UTF-8 encoded, but it's not a matter of picking the right encoding. Rather, it's a question of font choice, and your browser (IE, I believe) is not smart enough to switch fonts when it needs to display characters from multiple writing systems. I've tried various things to get that Greek text to look right in my (non-Greek) IE, but no dice. It doesn't matter what fonts you choose. IE requires custom scripting and/or registry settings to set up the appropriate "font linking" to occur, and no one has bothered to figure out exactly how to do it for situations like this. The article looks fine in Firefox. — mjb 17:48, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
I believe you just have to use {{polytonic}}, which sets up the right fonts for IE (and only IE). See Template talk:Polytonic for more information. --cesarb 18:19, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
Posting Problem in New Install
We're setting up a MediaWiki system to chronicle minor league athletes. It installed pretty much to the text (MediaWiki 1.4.7). We set up some of the help and about areas without problem. We put in a couple of categories. When we went to add content, though, we keep getting shoved to a SPECIAL page without any ability to add or edit.
When we do searches for topics not in the database, it does not offer us the ability to add them.
Is there something turned off? I have not been able to find anything in FAQ or help about this problem.
This is not a MediaWiki support site. Try mediawiki-l. -- Cyrius|✎ 00:11, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
Can someone please add the combo box that appears on Wikitionary below the edition box to Wikipedia to insert special characters?
I wonder if someone here can add the combo box with the special characters (IPA, Latin, Greek, Swedish and the such) below the edition box of edition pages here on Wikipedia. There already exists a combo box on Wiktionary. I wonder why they never added it to Wikipedia. 2004-12-29T22:45Z 18:53, July 31, 2005 (UTC)
Unable to move a page
I'm not able to move Stevens Thomson Mason (Michigan) to Stevens T. Mason. I get a message that "Source and destination titles are the same; can't move a page over itself." But I don't see why. It's not a big deal, just that there are quite a few links to that that page that refer to the boy governor from Michigan. His grandfather from Virginia with the same name is not commonly refered to as Stevens T. Mason. older≠wiser 17:51, July 31, 2005 (UTC)
You're putting the destination target in the reason box. Check the labels by the input boxes. [[smoddy]] 18:00, 31 July 2005 (UTC)
Doh! Thanks. older≠wiser 18:04, July 31, 2005 (UTC)
Don't worry: you're not the first. [[smoddy]] 18:08, 31 July 2005 (UTC)
Enough is enough; I've seen too many people getting confused by this. I have just changed MediaWiki:Selfmove to try to lessen the confusion. Feel free to improve my wording. --cesarb 20:32, 31 July 2005 (UTC)
Case Sensitivity & Spell-Check in Wikipedia
When a search is made on some topic , incase of incorrect spelling , either the user is directed to a site which is not the appropriate result or no page is displayed .
According to me the correct response by wikipedia to such a situation would be :
The user should be prompted by displaying a message "Did you mean ....( the correct word) ?" .
One problem i encountered was , when i searched for "bugzilla", it didn't show any results .However on a search for "BugZilla" , the correct page was displayed .
I have a suggestion regarding the features in Wikipedia. Many users of Wikipedia that i have talked to also face this problem . Whenever a user surfs through a page , there are many words in the text which are complex and not understood . For convenience , an enhancement could be added in Wikipedia , which is the Dictionary .There already exists 'Wiktionary ', for the same , but this site is not linked with Wikipedia.
In general, complex terms should be linked on their first appearance (like the word "linked" in this sentence). Are you not seeing these? Can you give specific examples of word that should be linked but aren't? Remember that this is a Wiki, so you can edit the text to insert links yourself. It is even possible to link to Wiktionary. Bovlb 15:41:48, 2005-07-31 (UTC)
hotkey conflict
bugzilla is down?
before i forget, hotkeys for delete and show changes are both alt+d. oops! - Omegatron 05:12, July 31, 2005 (UTC)
Yep, the machine Bugzilla is on is down at the moment. Should be back later today tommorrow. --Brion 09:42, July 31, 2005 (UTC)
Aye I'm not USING Wikipedia, but I'm using their philosophy really... We're writing our own code so we can make it do what we want when we want how we want...
Wikipedia System Abuse Question
I'm not 100% sure if this should go here... oh well...
I'm working on a project with a small group of friends... we want to use the same theory as Wikipedia (open to people editing content) but on a different subject, different use, larger system for users...
Problem is... we've seen Wikipedia keep track of their thousands of sites easily... nothing being messed up by someone. How does Wikipedia do this? Do they have 'bots' that check posts, if so what is their logical behavior?
One of the group members recommended the idea of Wikipedia and how to use it... the only problem is making sure people don't abuse it... I am going to require stuff like logins, passwords, profiles, e-mail data... stuff to make it harder to abuse, but I want to keep it open to everyone (so no use of credit card numbers and such to keep abusers down like some sites want to do)
Any help would be greatly appericated
There are bots, but none that manage vandalism. We simply have thousands of users with thousands of pages on their watchlists, and a much smaller cadre of folks staring at the Recent Changes page, prepared to revert any vandalism. --Golbez 04:30, July 31, 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia simply works on the principle that there are way more good guys than bad guys:P gkhan 12:45, July 31, 2005 (UTC)
You can use the MediaWiki software and lock it down to registered users. Bovlb 15:34:37, 2005-07-31 (UTC)
Image:Example.ogg
Can a safe placeholder file be inserted into ? I have just deleted a second suspicious looking file from this location that had been uploaded by suspected vandals. We either need to stop the possibility of files being uploaded to this location, or take the feature of adding this link to edits out of the menu bar that appears at the top of the editing window. -- Francs2000 | TalkFile:Uk flag large.png 20:08, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
I suggest recording a file along the lines of "This is an example Ogg Vorbis sound file from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia." I'd record and upload it myself, but I don't have a microphone. Thryduulf 20:39, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
Neither do I, which is a pity, I'd have loved for my James Bond accent to have made it to Wikipedia... -- Francs2000 | TalkFile:Uk flag large.png 20:55, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
"This is the Pedia. Wiki-Pedia." gkhan 23:06, July 29, 2005 (UTC)
I've uploaded a simple example to Media:Example.ogg, although it doesn't seem to have showed up yet, so I may have done it wrong. I just use Thryduulf's suggested text. JesseW 00:58, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
Search results are returned in order of the relevancy statistic that the search engine calculates. Whatlinkshere results are in no particular order.
Generally we can't make the order on these arbitrary as they may return hundreds of thousands of results, and the sorting step would be prohibitively expensive. --Brion 09:45, July 31, 2005 (UTC)
Thanks for the response. Bobblewik 10:59, 31 July 2005 (UTC)
Image layout with Classic skin - a proposed solution
Users of the Classic skin (the one true skin) are probably very familiar with image stacking problems, caused by incompatibilities between Classic and the default, the fanboi's fave MonoBook. I propose to change the stylesheet that drives the classic skin to fix this. I'd welcome comments at: MediaWiki_talk:Standard.css#Fixing_image_layout_incompatibilities. Note that this fix might also work for users of the CologneBlue (and maybe Nostalgia) skin, although I haven't tested it and don't propose to fix it myself. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 22:28, July 28, 2005 (UTC)
Try the "revert" link on the image page. :-) [[smoddy]] 20:51, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
Ah, thanks. It's called "rev", which misled me to think it meant "revision". Duhh. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 20:57, July 28, 2005 (UTC)
User Authentication?
Previously I used wget in a shell script to get my Watchlist and tell me if any articles I'm watching had been edited (It makes things a bit easier than always firing up a browser to check them). I took the cookies Wikipedia put in my browser and copied them into their own file for wget to use. The command I used was:
`wget -q --load-cookies cookies/wikicookie http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Watchlist&hideOwn=1 -O -`
The script then extracted the number of editied articles from the html. This worked fine before, but has stopped working for some reason; the html it downloads identifies me by IP address. Does anyone know why this would be? I tried the --http-user= and --http-passwd= options, to no effect. What else does Wikipedia use to verify a user's identity? --Dirk Gently 18:28, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
I have experience with this. The only cookies you need are enwikiUserID, enwikiUserName and enwikiToken (which is generated when you remember me). Perhaps the enwikiToken has expired: try logging in with "remember me" and take a look at your token cookie again. What's nice about Wikipedia is that it's really easy to extract content. I used PHP and have a cached version (only about five minutes stale) of my Watchlist. Very nice. — Ambush Commander(Talk) 19:56, July 28, 2005 (UTC)
Ah, enwikiToken was missing for some reason. It's all back to normal now. Thanks a lot, it's good to see exactly what is needed for this, as I've been doing it by trial and error before now. --Dirk Gently 02:38, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
Cannot find user contribs
Earlier today I found (while patrolling) a troublesome little user User:144.137.160.26. I had to go after {{d}}ing two of his pages and I came back later to check his contributions to see if he had done anything else. And, well, I can't! Neither [3] nor [4] works. Is this because all the pages he contributed to have been deleted? Thanks, --gkhan 11:40, July 28, 2005 (UTC)
What happened to this? Finding every image a user has uploaded can be very useful in clearing mountains of copyvio images. - Ta bu shi da yu 08:52, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
Can't you just go to the upload log and search with the user's name, like so? Or is that not what you're talking about? --Dmcdevit·t 09:08, July 28, 2005 (UTC)
This was turned off, because, in Brion's words, it was "unfriendly to the database". Do you want to fall out with the database? [[smoddy]] 19:27, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
The database can [personal attack against database deleted in advance by author]!! I'm sick of having to do tons of extra manual labor just because the poor little servers are being loaded down. How do we get this turned back on? - Omegatron 13:59, July 29, 2005 (UTC)
It is back up now. [[smoddy]] 16:08, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
HOW DO I CHANGE A DVD TO SOMETHING THAT WILL PLAY ON THE INTERNET?
I have a blurb from a DVD that i want to play on my website - how can I change the DVD format to something that will play on the internet (My website)
Questions not about Wikipedia should be placed on the Wikipedia:Reference Desk. Be that as it may, the answer to the question is a bit complex. The first step is that you "rip" the data from the DVD to your computer's hard disk. A good site that discusses this is http://www.doom9.org. The next part of the process is converting the ripped data, which is most likely far too big to be practical, into something that is a) smaller, and b) possibly suitable for "streaming" off a website (depending on how long the clip is - if it's short it may be practical to have users download the whole thing). This is a quite complex process, as there are tradeoffs to be made on accessibility, video quality, and size. You may need to do quite a bit of reading on codecs before you can find exactly what format you want. One free tool that is very useful for the conversion process is ffmpeg, which you can find at http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net, but it requires a bit of reading documentation to understand how to use it. There are a variety of other tools you can use, though.
Be aware that most commercial DVD's are covered by copyright, so unless you think what you want to do is fair use or you have permission from the copyright holder, you may be breaking the law by putting bits of it on the internet. --Robert Merkel 14:20, 27 July 2005 (UTC)
I understand that some viewers don't want to look at notes. I have therefore encased the contents of {{ref}}, {{mn}} and {{fn}} in a span tag, using a class called reference. For all those who don't want references, all that you need to do is add the following to your stylesheet:
I took the liberty of fixing your comment. Should we put this on the news page? — Ambush Commander(Talk) 19:31, July 27, 2005 (UTC)
Thanks :-) Don't have a problem with this being on the news page. - Ta bu shi da yu 03:29, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia's greatest kluge
Wikipedia has many kluges. In fact, its evolution seems to be largely a process of just kluging along until people take the time to think about things and rationalize them. So there's nothing wrong with kluges, until they get to be major kluges. One kluge that I think is certainly major, both for its kluginess and for its endurance, is the wikitax for Redirects. IMHO, it's pretty amazing that such a fundamental process as redirection is still accomplished by a tweak of the ordered-list syntax. (It's even more amazing that, until recently, it was actually rendered into HTML as an ordered list, but that's beside the point.) Isn't there a way we can do this with templates or something? --Smack (talk) 03:46, 27 July 2005 (UTC)
No, that's not an option. A template is just a page in the Template: namespace, it has no exclusive powers or attributes of its own. Therefore a {{redirect}} template would only be able to generate the #REDIRECT code anyway. As they say, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Yes it's stupid that you use a numbered list, but it just plain works.
Even if someone comes up with a solution we'll still need the old one. Much like how PCs still have floppy drives; there's a superior device (CD-R/RW) but you need backward compatibility.
But it would be interesting to hear what these other problems you've noted are; this one won't be fixed (too much effort involved for effectively no gain), but maybe some others can. GarrettTalk 05:12, 27 July 2005 (UTC)
These things aren't easy to come up with; you get used to them after a while, and you stop noticing them. The first one that comes to mind is the wikitax for the HTML <pre> tag (use a leading space at the start of the paragraph). I've seen this syntax occur by mistake at least once. --Smack (talk) 18:22, 27 July 2005 (UTC)
Page stats
Anyway to get page stats or a logfile analysis of a specific page? I found a file available from the wikistats section of the site but it was 300MB. Now, I get unlimited bandwidth from my ISP but if I download that file occasionally that has got to cost you guys some money? I also have a proposal about this on the village pump proposals page. Tubelius 22:41, 26 July 2005 (UTC)
Why do so many people want to see our logs? -- Cyrius|✎ 01:14, 27 July 2005 (UTC)
humans are curious by nature (seek unknown information).
humans are vain by nature (see the impact of their changes).
humans are social (empathic) creatures (want to help people find what they seek).
I've just spent a few hours (!) editing Graphics. I followed a window link to see where that goes, followed some other links, did some editing there and then went back. When I got to the window page at first it didn't go back any further (using Alt-leftarrow). So I pushed it a few times, then tried the back-button a few times and then suddenly I got there. But I got at the first, unedited page. When I went forward again, I went through several pages, probably representing the various previews I'd used, but they weren't previews of the edits; they're all the original, unedited page. I spent a lot of time on work I was rather proud of (ahem...) and now it's lost? I hope not, but how do I get it back? I use Konqueror on Suse Linux, but I don't think that will have anything to do with it. Help! DirkvdM 10:36, 26 July 2005 (UTC)
Moral of the story: Always open links in new windows/tabs when editing. Sorry. :( What MIGHT work is go to one of the preview pages and hit "refresh", which might ask to re-send the data to the server, and therefore you'll be sending some draft of what you did, and the resultant preview page will show that. That's all I can think of. --Golbez 16:34, July 26, 2005 (UTC)
Yep, that's it. At first I wasn't sure if I should do that, afraid that I might disturb some possible solution. Quite sillily (is that English?) I did duplicate the window and refreshed that (as if that would solve that), but that didn't work. But refreshing the original window did. Quite a relief. In the end it wasn't really all that much text I had written, most of the time was spent on research and other edits. But still thanks. DirkvdM 18:08, 26 July 2005 (UTC)
Two commands: Select-All, Copy. On IE and I think also Firefox that's CTRL+A, CTRL+C. Always do it before doing anything that might leave the page, including preview and submit. It's saved me enough times. Deco 02:06, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
Ttitle Capitalization under version 1.5
Has something changed in the way searches for titles are handled with respect to capitalization under wiki version 1.5? Are letters other then the first still case sensitive? RJFJR 02:19, July 26, 2005 (UTC)
With a quick experiment using French and Indian Wars (which has no redirect), I believe the rules are the same as they have been, described at Wikipedia:Searching#Search_is_case-insensitive_only_for_the_first_word_of_the_entry. Note that title search is only case insensitive if the article name is all initial caps or if only the first word is capitalized. For example, The Great Escape has all initial caps, so you can find this article by typing "the gReAT eScape" in the search box (but not from a wikilink). -- Rick Block (talk) 02:35, July 26, 2005 (UTC)
Move rollback doesn't seem to work
I tried to 'rollback' my move of Claus Spreckles to Claus Spreckels, and even tho' neither page has been editted, and no error message appears, when the screen refreshes, the article is still at Claus Spreckels, and my initial move is at the top of the edit History, with no other entries. Niteowlneils 01:17, 26 July 2005 (UTC)
So does a developer want to try to debug this, or should I go ahead and edit the article? Niteowlneils 14:02, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
Real-time search seems broken
It can't find any matches for simple things like "heron" or "Pigeon". Niteowlneils 23:05, 25 July 2005 (UTC)
WFM. There's also a list of commons words which cannot be searched for (somewhere) - or at least there used to be... Alphaxτεχ 02:16, 27 July 2005 (UTC)
Yeah, it's working for me now, as well. Niteowlneils 14:03, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
Inserting IPA symbols in articles with the help of IPA character names
Is there a way to insert IPA characters with their names, for example &ascript; for a {{ascript}} script a? I've been creating templates at Category:PostScript name template talk pages, but I'm not sure if it makes any sense, or if there is an easier way to insert characters without using Unicode numbers.
Are there any other possible solutions to the problem? I'm tired of having to look up a Unicode number every time I wanna insert an IPA character that is not part of the HTML basic characters. I'm also tired of having to remember the Unicode numbers by heart. It's tedious in the long run.
Could someone who knows about the MediaWiki program please add the extended character names to the wiki mark-up? 2004-12-29T22:45Z 21:51, 25 July 2005 (UTC)
So, I did some experimenting, and was able to add to the character set that occurs in the funny-characters box at the bottom of edit pages. If you use the monobook skin, this should work, just copy and paste it to your monobook.js file, ie: User:USERNAME/monobook.js.
function CharPalette()
{
var toolbox, charbox, spc;
var toolbox = document.getElementById( 'editpage-specialchars' );
if ( ! toolbox ) return; // not an edit page
charbox = toolbox.getElementsByTagName( 'a' )[ 0 ].parentNode;
function Spc() { charbox.appendChild( document.createTextNode( ' ' ) ) }
function Rtn() { charbox.appendChild( document.createElement( 'br' ) ) }
function Chr( n )
{ c = String.fromCharCode( n );
var a = document.createElement( 'a' );
a.href = "javascript:insertTags('" + c + "',,)";
a.appendChild( document.createTextNode( c ) );
charbox.appendChild( a )
}
Rtn();
Chr( 593 ); Chr( 594 ); Chr( 595 ); Chr( 596 ); Chr( 597 );
Chr( 598 ); Chr( 599 ); Chr( 600 ); Chr( 601 ); Chr( 602 );
}
if ( window.addEventListener ) window.addEventListener( 'load', CharPalette, false );
else if ( window.attachEvent ) window.attachEvent( 'onload', CharPalette );
Let me know if that works for you, and then let me know what characters you need. Func( t, c ) 00:52, 26 July 2005 (UTC)
Thanks for your help. There are some problems with this. I copied the javascript instructions to my MonoBook javascript page at User:2004-12-29T22:45Z/monobook.js like you told me. I hope I copied them correctly. First of all, the ten places at the end of the paragraph that starts with "Insert:", they only show ten squares instead of the actual ten characters you numbered from 593 to 602. That's possibly because of Internet Explorer, but I'm not sure. So then, to see if I can see what the characters are about, I hover with the mouse pointer over the hyperlinks of the ten spaces and then look at Internet Explorer's status bar. The first
hyperlink shows javascript:insertTags:('{{ascript}}',,). In other words, the character called "script a". But then the other nine hyperlinks, they show the same thing, but instead of the "script a" they show sort of a thick vertical bar, whose name I don't know. So the next thing I try to do is to test the buttons. But when I press on any of the ten buttons, I see no character getting inserted in the text box, even after I make sure the insertion point of the mouse is in the text box. The status bar shows the text "Error on page", and the details are the following:
Line:
1
Char:
16
Error:
Syntax error
Code:
0
The URL is the current URL where I'm trying to insert the characters.
Then I tried to do the same with the TimeWarner browser (Netscape Navigator). This time, the characters of the "Insert:" paragraph got displayed, but, then again, when I tried inserting them, I saw nothing. I even tried to see if blank spaces got inserted, but that wasn't the case either. Nothing gets inserted in the text box, regardless of the browser.
Just in case, I deleted all the files and offline files of the Internet Explorer hidden directory, and then I also refreshed pages with Ctrl+F5, but it doesn't work. 2004-12-29T22:45Z 02:23, 26 July 2005 (UTC)
Hi, 2004-12-29T22:45Z. Could you tell me what versions of IE and NN you are using? There seems to be a problem with using html entites in JavaScript code, which is why I directly used the Unicode chars themselves. This works fine in my Mac versions of Firefox 1.0 and Netscape 7.1. The characters come in fine in Safari, but the actual insertion functionality into the text area doesn't seem to work, (because of a regression bug affected both Safari 1.3 and 2.0). Also, could you sign your name with four tildes: ~~~~? It's hard to tell which is your username and which is the date. :) Func( t, c ) 16:22, 26 July 2005 (UTC)
I have Internet Explorer 6.0 and Netscape Navigator 7.1, both on PC, not Apple Macintosh. I do sign with four tildes. 2004-12-29T22:45Z 17:42, 26 July 2005 (UTC)
It's odd that it would work in my NN 7.1 but not yours. I'll try to figure it out tonight. :) Func( t, c ) 20:07, 26 July 2005 (UTC)
For anyone who is interested, I managed to throw together a solution for User:2004-12-29T22:45Z. It adds the Unicode IPA extension characters to the special characters palette that appears at the bottom of edit pages. The script is located here: User:Func/wpfunc/addipaextensions.js. Func( t, c ) 02:53, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
Categories
Why are they appearing at the top of the article now instead of just the bottom? --Michael Snow 21:42, 25 July 2005 (UTC)
Undoing a cut and paste move, preserving edit histories
Hi,
In November, the article at Copy protection was cut-and-pasted to Copy prevention. It has stayed there since, resulting in there being a good edit history accompanying both article names. I recently put it up to a vote to move it back to Copy protection; the vote has passed. Is there a way to move the article back and preserve both edit histories? I'd prefer not to choose which one to obliterate. The guidance at Wikipedia:Merging and moving pages implies that an administrator may be able to resolve this? Thanks - Tempshill 16:51, 25 July 2005 (UTC)
When an admin checks through the requested moves that are five days old they make a decision and, where necessary, move them and merge the histories. That's been done for that article now. violet/riga(t) 17:03, 25 July 2005 (UTC)
Excellent, thanks. Tempshill 23:31, 25 July 2005 (UTC)
How do you Chronological Organize all articles in a Category by Date?
For my wiki, how do I organize articles in a category by Date only?
How do I change the order to earliest to oldest or vice versa?
Thanks.
A
Categories are sorted by the title of the page or by the text entered in the category link, e.g.
The Helicopter article is sorted in its categories under H.
The John Major article would be sorted under J, but because it is conventional to sort people by surname, the category link is [[Category:British Prime Ministers|Major, John]] so it is sorted under M.
Where a category has a main article, that article is placed at the top of the list by sorting under *, e.g. the Somerset article in Category:Somerset is linked as [[Category:Somerset|*]]
It is not possible to display them in any other order. Thryduulf 18:23, 25 July 2005 (UTC)
Thank you Thryduulf.
Are there any second opinions out there? Is it possible if the articles titles were dates formatted in a way that they can "appear" chronological (01 = Jan, 02 = Feb,..)? Is there a better way?
You can have them appear in whatever order you want, but it's by including the sort key in the category reference in the article (like Thryduulf says above). You don't have to change the title, just add a sort key following the category name (see the second, third, and forth examples above). -- Rick Block (talk) 00:33, July 26, 2005 (UTC)
Thank you Rick - we are getting somewhere. The problem I am still facing is that it sorts by the first alphanumeric term (How do you dictate to the sort key a new format like day/month/year?). If in the case of August and April, the dates would appear in A section and in the case of number (ex. 2005), it only registers "2". I am doing something wrong or is wiki not built for my request?
If it is only month sorting that you want, then:
I just created a Template that allows you to convert months into numbers, and visa versa. eg:
Month number 1 is: January (from: {{convert_month|1}})
Month number 2 is: February (from: {{convert_month|2}})
Month number 3 is: March (from: {{convert_month|3}})
Month number 4 is: April (from: {{convert_month|4}})
...
Month number 12 is: December ({{convert_month|12}})
This can be used to create an index on the first 9 months. eg
[[category:{{convert_month|1}}|1]] OR visa versa...
[[category:January|{{convert_month|January}}]]
(I can set this up for you with a two digit month format... eg 09 for September)
Saddly month 10,11,12 will be indexed by the first month character of "1".
But (maybe) I can convert (with a template) the numbers 1 to 12 (and/or month_names) into a character from the list "123456789ÓÑÐ", maybe this would be month ordered... I would have to check. If it sorts OK, then you would have a nice month index.
BTW: The reason I am interested is because of the experimental page: Category:Timeline of New Zealand, which IS date order sorted, but only the millenium is used as a index key. And in NZ the majority of our history is thus in millenium "1" :-(
The software currently uses an alphabetic sort on either the article name (if no sort key is specified) or on the sort key if one is specified. To sort by date, you have to create a sort key that will sort alphabetically by date. One way this can be done is to put the date in YYYYMMDD format, always using two digits for the month and two digits for the day (e.g. today would be 20050726). If you want more precision than day, then you can add hours, minutes, seconds, milliseconds on the end to achieve whatever precision you'd like. The trick to think of the key as a string, not as a number. If you do this, the articles will be listed under the first character of the sort key so all dates since Jan 1, 2005 will be listed under "2". You can add whatever character you want them listed under as the first character of the sort key (even " " works). Hope this helps. -- Rick Block (talk) 14:08, July 26, 2005 (UTC)
BTW - if you want inverse date order, one way to do this is to use a sort key that's arithmetically 99999999 (however many digits is appropriate) minus the YYYYMMDD number (simply adding "-" in front doesn't work since the sort is alphabetic rather than numeric). For example, today (20050726) would be 79949273. I wouldn't do this unless there's a really good reason since someone coming after you looking at the sort key in the article is not very likely to understand what it means. If this is necessary, please add an explanation to the category's talk page and you could add a comment after the category link in each article as well (comments are <!-- comment -->). -- Rick Block (talk) 16:35, July 26, 2005 (UTC)
Feature request:Automatic categorization
There are many efforts to create some nice and comprehensive categorization system. And I think this feature would help enourmously. That is: every new page would be automatically assigned some "Category:Need categorization" or "Category:No category yet." Then users would need to replace this "category" with the right one. Now wiki uses reports that take a lot of effort (and time) to generate and quikly become out-of-date. Whom should I talk to? Renata3 23:31, 24 July 2005 (UTC)
On Help:Contents (linked as "help" on every page), under "Getting in touch", there's a link to the bug reports and features request page, which is Wikipedia:Bug_report. -- Rick Block (talk) 23:42, July 24, 2005 (UTC)
I mean, is there anyone in particular? Some user/admin/developer/etc.? Because I posted on one of those "Bug report" sites and got no answer. And I think it's a really important feature. Renata3 17:35, 25 July 2005 (UTC)
The best way to request a software feature enhancement (which I think this would be), is to create a bug report as described at Wikipedia:MediaZilla. You should probably search first to see if there is a similar enhancement request that already exists. Please don't feel slighted by any lack of response from previous entries on bug report sites. The people who are developers for the mediawiki software are volunteers, just like the editors (just like you). In fact, if you are a programmer the absolute most reliable way to get a feature into the software is to implement it yourself. -- Rick Block (talk) 18:28, July 25, 2005 (UTC)
I reported it there. Hopefully someone will notice. Thanks for replying. Because you feel so discouraged when nobody answers you... Renata3 20:38, 27 July 2005 (UTC)
How to locate ground water ?
Dear Sir
Is there a technology available to locate abundant ground water for agricultural purpose ? I saw somewhere that it is possibel through satelite mapping ? Could some one guide me on this point.
Thanks in advance
Sukumar
Please visit Wikipedia:Reference desk and post your question there - it's the place on Wikipedia that is visited by people interested in finding out answers for people who have requests like this. Tempshill 16:54, 25 July 2005 (UTC)
Monobook Skin not appearing
I'm not sure if someone is having the same troubles I am, but the CSS for the Monobook skin isn't showing up at all. I'm only getting the HTML, but no styles whatsoever. I just switched my skin to "Classic" for the moment. --LBMixPro(Speak on it!) 11:24, July 24, 2005 (UTC)
No problems with monobook here. Did you try to perform a "hard-reload", or empty your browser's cache? (Also, the Safari web browser sometimes inappropriately stores css and js files even after a hard-reload, I have no idea why). func(talk) 13:51, 24 July 2005 (UTC)
I am having the same problem. July 24, 2005 (UTC)
The same thing happened to me a few weeks ago, but it went back to normal after a few minutes. --pile0nadestalk | contribs 04:14, 26 July 2005 (UTC)
How about a page of MediaWiki tech-speak somewhere explaining what protections (if any) Wikipedia has implemented to prevent the UK government from acquiring lists of people who read about explosives here?
For example, do we offer HTTPS access for reading? Ojw 22:21, 21 July 2005 (UTC)
tries shoving HTTPS:// in front of this page's URL* Well, apparently we don't. As for the other problem, um, hm, our servers are in the US so I'm sure they couldn't access anything and they can't take out a court order either. But I really don't know. GarrettTalk 23:02, 21 July 2005 (UTC)
How computationally-expensive would it be for some proxies to do HTTPS? It would hide the name of any pages requested from networks between wikipedia and the user, and combined with a reasonable timeframe on purging web-stats (if any are kept for reading articles), might make some people more comfortable about reading here. Ojw 23:18, 21 July 2005 (UTC)
Like terrorists, maybe? What kind of nutjob are you?
You could just simply not read about explosives to begin with if you're scared about being watched. - Mgm|(talk) 10:23, August 2, 2005 (UTC)
Watchlist
Can watchlists be configured to automatically "hide my own edits" by default? Radiant_>|< 08:44, July 21, 2005 (UTC)
No they can't. I wish they could. – Quadell(talk) (sleuth) 15:22, July 21, 2005 (UTC)
Is it possible to get a version of Special:Allpages with all redirect pages filtered out? Radiant_>|< 13:21, July 13, 2005 (UTC)
Oddly enough, there is!!! I was surprised to see it, but on the individual Allpages pages, the redirects have a "class=allpagesredirect", which means you can pop this into your skin.css file, ie: User:USERNAME/monobook.css.
Unicode in signature turning to question marks when others edit
I've got some Unicode characters in my signature, which turn to question marks when certain other people edit a page with my signature on it. (See Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Matthew 1:verses for example) Why is this? — Ливай | Ⓣ 2 July 2005 13:26 (UTC)
some old browsers can do this but those are supposedly blacklisted (from talking to the developers). My suspicion is that this is actually caused by people copypasting the text to an editor that is not unicode aware. can you try and ask some of theese people what they are using to edit? Plugwash 2 July 2005 13:53 (UTC)
The workaround is now in place, IE for the mac and a very old version of netscape for linux are currently the only browser the workaround is currently being applied to so if you find unicode being messed up in future please try to find out the user agent of the problem browser and file a report on http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org asking for that user agent to be added to the default $wgBrowserBlackList Plugwash 21:01, 30 July 2005 (UTC)
css problem since upgrade
I added the line
li#t-upload { text-decoration: line-through; }
to my user css to cross out the upload link to remind myself to upload to commons. It doesn't work since the upgrade, even though the id tag on the upload link hasn't changed... What stopped this from working? - Omegatron July 2, 2005 01:49 (UTC)
Someone knows this... - Omegatron July 5, 2005 23:26 (UTC)
Very beleted response: you don't need the "li", just the id:
Hmm..., I don't get it. :) It works on Safari and the Mac versions of Firefox 1.0, Netscape 7.1, and even Internet Explorer 5.2. Sorry, Func( t, c ) 00:48, 27 July 2005 (UTC)
I don't get it, either. Both versions work on Meta and Wikibooks, and used to work here, too, but since the upgrade it just stopped working. In Firefox, which should have no problems with anything. - Omegatron 02:02, July 27, 2005 (UTC)
Stamping Library
I have a problem with finding an article related to 'Stamping Library'.Could somebody please provide me with information or tell me where i could find data regarding it . I have googled but can not find any.All i know is that it is somehow linked to the mapping strategy of non-straight objects .
--203.109.124.164 09:48, 10 August 2005 (UTC)Munira
SSL secure login
Has any thought been given to implementing secure logins (SSL) to prevent password sniffing? Perhaps paranoid, but the consequences of impersonation could be quite drastic. -- Curps 14:17, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
That's bug #225. But forget SSL, a secure password module would be a much better thing to give priority. Before bug #621 was fixed, it even allowed empty passwords! Now it only allows trivial passwords... I hope no administrator has "password", "secret" or their account name as their password, but you never know... JRM · Talk 15:54, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
Footnoting template...
... er, I think I broke {{mn}} and {{mnb}}. Sorry! Can someone assist? I was trying to change the id to be in line with {{ref}} and {{note}} for interoperability. - Ta bu shi da yu 06:46, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
Blahtex: now compiles on Linux
Blahtex 0.2.1 has been released. It now compiles and runs on Linux thanks to Jitse Niesen.
Jitse has had some initial success with integrating blahtex into mediawiki: check it out.
I've created an ogg file for Wikiproject Spoken Wikipedia, but when I try to upload it the error message says that the "file is corrupt or the extension is incorrect." I'm certain it's an .ogg file and I can play back the file without problems through Mint Audio. I'm not sure what the problem is. I'm running a Macintosh Powerbook G3 with Mac OS 9. I used Audacity to export a .wav file that was converted by Ultra Recorder into an intermediary .aif file before ending up as an .ogg file through Ogg Drop. -D. Wu 18:29, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
its either a bug in the ogg encoder you used or in mediawikis ogg file testing code. probablly best to report this on bugzilla (and attach the file there) if you can't figure out how to track it down yourself. Plugwash 19:08, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
"Can't open PhotoParade Album" Error
When I pick "edit this page" at the top, I ALWAYS get an error that it is trying to open "index.php", which it identifies as a PhotoParade Album. It then says I lack sufficient software to open this file. I was expecting a standard text/HTML page. This error NEVER occurs when I pick "edit" next to a section name. I have a very old, underpowered IBM Laptop, running Windows 98, with only memory of 64Mb and speed of 433. I don't run any anti-virus software like Norton or Macafee (mainly because my underpowered system can't handle them), but do have rather strict security settings, such as disabled Java, to prevent little nasties from invading my system. Any help would be greatly appreciated !
I found the problem. I had a preference setting of "Default to an external editor", which apparently causes this bizarre problem. StuRat 03:40, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
HTML question
I've seen the HTML entity <br/> used several times on the wiki. What does it do? --Smack (talk) 15:22, 7 August 2005 (UTC)
It's a line break, in XHTML syntax, where "empty tags" (with no content) are required to be "self-closing" by having the extra slash at the end (indicating that there is no need for a closing tag such as </br>). *Dan* 15:30, August 7, 2005 (UTC)
Belts
I am looking for capstan belts for Aiwa AD6550 and Teac A-170. Both are cassette decks. Who sells them?
Dennis
pendragon_3@excite.com
I've found that any good hardware store will sell a selection of replacement rubber belts. Bovlb 05:22:38, 2005-08-07 (UTC)
it seems whoever implemented the pulling over of the description page from commons didn't make it work for the file history. this probablly should be reported as a bug if it hasn't already been. Plugwash 21:28, 6 August 2005 (UTC)
Nah. I don't really care if it's mirrored, now that I realize I can get the history on commons(I missed the tiny box before). In fact, I thought I deleted this question, but it doesn't matter. I'm not going to make it a bug either way. Superm401 | Talk 22:53, August 6, 2005 (UTC)
you did delete it. I put it back and answered it because i belive this is an issue that needs to be dealt with. Plugwash 16:07, 7 August 2005 (UTC)
Watchlist is spotty
Hey, newbie Sean here, asking why so few of the changes to my watched pages actually show up on my watchlist? Major changes are absent and then subsequent minor changes show up. I'd like to know how to more reliably keep tabs on the history of these pages. --joveis 22:06, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
A watchlist only shows the most recent edit to an article. --Golbez 22:19, August 5, 2005 (UTC)
RSS feed?
Is there any way to get an RSS feed set up for Wikipedia featured articles? Or articles as they're featured on the main page? (Cross-posted at "proposals".) – Quadell(talk) (sleuth) 19:42, August 5, 2005 (UTC)
<font style="color:#005A89">[[Image:Wikimedia-logo.png|20px]] The '''[http://www.wikimania.org Wikimedia Conference]''' takes place in [[Frankfurt]] [[August 4|4]]-[[August 8|8 August]]!</font></br>
My watchlist only lists pages edited within the last month, even if I select 'all'. For example, the list today (5 Aug) shows articles edited between 6 July and 5 Aug. When I select 'display and edit the complete list', the list includes articles edited before 6 July. It says there are 367 pages in my list. Any ideas what is happening? Bobblewik 11:50, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
Changes to Classic stylesheet for images
I'm proposing a change to the stylesheet for the classic skin, which will change how images are layed out (making it work like monobook). I've been using the fix for a week without issue, and ALoan has for several days too. Absent objection, I'll make the change on Monday. Please see MediaWiki talk:Standard.css, and tell me if you experience any problems that militate against making this change. Thanks. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 11:17, August 5, 2005 (UTC)
User name in sister projects
I don't know if this is the right place to ask this, but shouldn't user accounts be shared in the sister projects and the different language Wikipedias? I would very much like to have a single watchlist for en:wikipedia, es:wikipedia and ja:wikipedia, and why not Wikibooks.--Lacrymology 10:54:06, 2005-08-05 (UTC)
People have been asking for this (single sign-on) for a long time, and unified watchlists have also been requested. So far the software has no support for doing either. So far no developer has found time to do it, and there's a lot of details that would need to be taken into account to get it to work smoothly. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 11:26, August 5, 2005 (UTC)
Not least of these is that the same usernames exist on different databases. For example, I have registered the username Thryduulf on the english and dutch Wikipedia's (and possibly the Welsh as well, I can't remember), Wikinews:, Wikibooks:, Wikimedia Commons, Meta: and Wikiquote:. It should be easy to ascertain that they are all me as I registered with the same email address for all of them and Thryduulf is not a common name (9 of the top 10 google hits are me), however consider a username like Chris - it is possible that this is registered by different users on different wikipedias/projects. Registering with an email address is not required, and people may use different ones for different projects/languages so you cannot guarantee that it will be possible to find out who is who. You could ask, but if Eric on en: is a respected user, but Eric on de: is a vandal, the German user will want to be associated with the English user's edits, but not vice versa. Thryduulf 12:30, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
There could be some kind of "merging process" in which, user Eric from the english wikipedia wants to "absorve" his user EricLonrot on de: and then, he get's a message of the kind Eric already exists in de:, do you want to change your username in en: instead? and if he doesn't want to for some reason (e.g. he has a reputation in en:) he can just go on and not do it. Maybe some kind of compromise can be taken. Different usernames but with an unified watchlist. Finding out who is who (systemwise) would be as easy as asking for both passwords. What I see as the hardest part of this merging process are the cases where the username changed, and all of the updating links and signatures. I have been given 358921 as my internal ID number and I am pretty sure my contributions have been "signed" with that number rather than my username, so the internal structure of the history and such should not be a problem. I would like to check the software structure and stuff.. any ideas of where can one check that up? --Lacrymology 14:04:22, 2005-08-05 (UTC)
I just thought I'd mention, that there is lots of discussion about this over on meta:, spread around various pages. meta:Single login links to them all, but it's all rather higgledy-piggledy to be honest. (It seems we need to first unify the discussion about unifying logins ;)) - IMSoP 01:31, 6 August 2005 (UTC)
Displaying certain characters
I notice that Wikipedia (or possibly my PC)does not correctly display certain characters, such as á é and the euro symbol etc... (in case these do not display properly, they are "acute accents" and others such as cedillas and "grave accents") Any ideas?
What OS and browser are you using? --Golbez 21:43, August 4, 2005 (UTC)
Win XP Service Pack 2, and IE 6
In your View menu, go to Encoding, and make sure that Auto-Select is ticked, and UTF-8 is selected. Susvolans(pigs can fly) 16:45, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
MIME type of .ogg media
.ogg media files seem to be getting served as MIME type "application/octetstream". Isn't there a more specific MIME type for Ogg format? Anyway, isn't "application/octet-stream" supposed to have a dash in it? *Dan* 12:08, August 4, 2005 (UTC)
The media server seems to have been configured incorrectly. It should be right now (but note the caching servers may show the old type, so try forcing reloads if necessary.) --Brion 07:48, August 7, 2005 (UTC)
Move Page not working
Hello,
I tried to move the page "Heather Monroe-Blum" to "Heather Munroe-Blum" and got the message "Source and destination titles are the same; can't move a page over itself". Since the two titles are obviously different, it seems that there is something wrong with the Move Page feature. Any idea what's up?
You were most likely putting the destination in the reason box. -- Cyrius|✎ 06:27, 31 July 2005 (UTC)
I take it I am not the only one who gets caught out by that on a regular basis. Presumably it is only a problem for oldbies though? Pcb21|Pete 07:20, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
The problem is that it fills in the new name field with the old page name. How could that possibly be a good idea?Superm401 | Talk 05:34, August 7, 2005 (UTC)
Watchlist other than 3 days?
Is it possible to set the watchlist to show other than 3 days' worth of changes? --pile0nadestalk | contribs 16:01, 25 July 2005 (UTC)
Yes, open your watchlist page and look under the line that says "Below are the last X changes in the last 3 days." Just beneath that is a line that says "Show last 1 | 2 | 6 | 12 hours 1 | 3 | 7 days all " Click the number that suits your fancy. Joyous (talk) 16:17, July 25, 2005 (UTC)
OK, what I meant was setting it so that Special:Watchlist shows changes of other than 3 days. Is there a way to do that? --pile0nadestalk | contribs 16:59, 25 July 2005 (UTC)
If you add enough pages (>1000), it'll change the default period to 12 hours. But for any other purpose, you'd have to either edit the source (which is only an option if you have your own wiki) or use a bookmark. --Pidgeot(t)(c)(e) 21:51, 25 July 2005 (UTC)
If you use the monobook skin, you can copy this to User:USERNAME/monobook.js. Just set the DAYS variable to what you want.
function ForceWatchlist()
{
var DAYS = 7; // can also be/include a fraction of a day, ie: 0.25 == 6 hours
var a = document.getElementById( 'pt-watchlist' ).firstChild;
a.href = '/w/index.php?title=Special:Watchlist&days=' + DAYS;
}
if ( window.addEventListener ) window.addEventListener( 'load', ForceWatchlist, false );
else if ( window.attachEvent ) window.attachEvent( 'onload', ForceWatchlist );
Let me know if you have problems, (I'm a Mac guy, and there are a limited number of browsers I can test on). Func( t, c ) 01:06, 26 July 2005 (UTC)
It does not work. Was there supposed to be some javascript there already? Because mine was empty. --pile0nadestalk | contribs 01:38, 26 July 2005 (UTC)
Sorry about that. First, no, there shouldn't be any javascript in any page you create that ends in ".js" unless you put it there. Secondly, just to cover all bases, could you try to do a "hard-reload" of your browser after saving the js page, (some browsers are better about clear cache than others). Assuming that doesn't work, can I ask what operating system you use, which browser, and which versions? Thanks, Func( t, c ) 01:54, 26 July 2005 (UTC)
Oh, my mistake, I thought the script was supposed to make Special:Watchlist load the last 7 days of changes. It does change the "special page" link at the top, appending days=7 to it. It did work. BTW, I am on Windows XP, Firefox 1.0.6. --pile0nadestalk | contribs 02:07, 26 July 2005 (UTC)
Oh, my fault, actually, I didn't explain how it worked, sorry. :) Hmm...you could have a script check to see when it is on the Special:Contributions page and ensure it reloads itself if the day setting isn't 7, etc. Hmm.... :) Func( t, c ) 02:11, 26 July 2005 (UTC)
Well, if it just changes the link, I already have a bookmark with days=1 in it, which changes that link anyway. --pile0nadestalk | contribs 02:23, 26 July 2005 (UTC)
How can a bookmark change the target of the "my watchlist" link? Pcb21|Pete 10:58, 27 July 2005 (UTC)
Go here: [5], and move the mouse over the "special page" link. It will say "days=1" at the end in the status bar. --pile0nadestalk | contribs 02:40, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
wiki search broken
Hi,
Can anyone help? For some reason our wiki search does not return any results.
Even if I search for the exact wiki page - no results are displayed.
Last week it was working fine and produced the correct results. I have checked with our
Systems Administrator and had confirmation that nothing was changed over the weekend.
Thanks in advance for your help
Lena Quin
Um...Search isn't working for me, either. Anyone else? func(talk) 18:29, 25 July 2005 (UTC)
I wouldn't say it's broken, but didn't it used to use Google? And lately it just doesn't seem to work as well as it used to. And I think it would make sense to automatically insert quotes around a multiple word query that is drug over to the search box, since queries without quotes return a lot of trash. Spalding 03:24, August 6, 2005 (UTC)
Article heads
My browser (IE6) displays 3-heads (as defined by HTML H3 tags) more emphatically than 2-heads (H2 tag), so that article hierarchy is not readily apparent unless one consults the Table of Contents. The source code seems to indicate that rendering H2 and H3 is left up to the browser defaults. Would it not be better to define a Style that would exhibit article organization more clearly... at least by showing 3-heads in smaller typeface? Anyway, is this the appropriate place to ask this question? Myron 11:06, 12 August 2005 (UTC)
No, it's not left to browser defaults. The styling is defined at http://en.wikipedia.org/skins-1.5/monobook/main.css. The rules are setting a font size of 150% for h2 and a font-size of 132% plus bold for h3. The full rules are:
Oops, or, rather, ah! Thank you. Now I realize that the style definitions for h1-6 were not explicit on the page whose HTML I peeked at. Also, now that I look at a rendition, I see the absence of border below h3. Problem is that h3 being bold and h2 not, and the reduction in size of h3 vs. h2 being so small, h3 still looks more prominent to me -- even larger -- than h2. I've run into such issues when composing print material and I've handled it by italicizing, say, a 3-head and making it considerably smaller. Inasmuch as h6 and h5 (and even h4) are not used all that much in Wikipedia, perhaps it would be good to augment the distinction between h2 and h3 by bumping h2 up (make it bold?) and h3 down (font-size: 120%) and "cascade" the latter reduction down the line through h6 ? Myron 14:38, 12 August 2005 (UTC)
By editing User:Myron/monobook.css, you can change your personal stylesheet. ~~ N (t/c) 14:40, 12 August 2005 (UTC)
Wiki never ceases to amaze me. But I'm more concerned about people in general who are trying to comprehend an article. The guidance provided by hierarchical headings can be an effective orientation aid. Of course there are weaknesses with the structure of Wikipedia articles involving aspects other than section heads. A competently formatted article can take advantage of all kinds of typographical tricks including color changes, can use diagrams and illustrations, can have callouts, pop-ups, audio, animation, etc. I realize that most such ploys are totally inappropriate for Wikipedia for many reasons and some are technically too difficult to make author-friendly. However, improving the styling of section heads should be easy. Does it make sense to do this (I mean globally, not just for me personally)? Has the formatting of the section heads gone through the agony, controversy, scrutiny, struggle and triumph that seems to be the history of so many aspects of this wiki family? Myron 15:54, 12 August 2005 (UTC)
I think it hasn't. Looks like most people don't see any problem with the current scheme (yes, h3 gains the bold, but it loses the divider). A good place to discuss that would be at MediaWiki talk:Monobook.css, where most people who care about the interface CSS are watching. --cesarb 16:03, 12 August 2005 (UTC)
Namespace Counts for Dumps Files?
When one obtains a wiki dump file, there is an md5 provided to allow checking that it was received satisfactorily. But what if one has questions about whether the re-inflated file was all properly loaded into a mySQL file?
Is there published anywhere a list of the number of entries, by namespace (or even just grand total), for a given wikipedia dump file? Even just the latest? From the 23 June 2005 Wikipedia en cur_table, I am showing--
NameSpace 0: 414,280
NameSpace 1: 55,696
NameSpace 2: 11,464
NameSpace 3: 20,235
NameSpace 4: 3,824
NameSpace 5: 1,459
NameSpace 6: 45,492
NameSpace 7: 681
NameSpace 8: 580
NameSpace 9: 40
NameSpace 10: 1,318
NameSpace 11: 128
NameSpace 12: 2
NameSpace 13: 2
NameSpace 14: 0
NameSpace 15: 0
--which looks like it might be a little low. (I am not using wikimedia, I am just downloading and decompressing the file, then loading it into a mySQL db.) How could I verify those counts?
Thank you. But, though it's good to know that there are discrepancies, my base question remains "Where can one reliably find the by-ns counts for a given--or just the current--wikipedia cur_table dump?"
I have a problem with Wikipedia. I constantly save pages to my hard drive for review later. But all the time I do, I can only save one at a time. If I try to save more then one, my browser freezes. For example, I got to chemistry and download the page, then I go to schizoaffective disorder and download that, my browser freezes up, so I have to first get out of my browser after I got the chemistry page, then reload my browser, then go the the schizoaffective disorder page and download it, and do the process all over again. Is thier a way to get around that? I have IE 6.x on Windows XP Home Edition with Service Pack 2. Admiral Roo (Talk to me)(My Contributions)(See lyrics I created)17:55, August 11, 2005 (UTC)
I would suggest Firefox. Lupin 20:28, 12 August 2005 (UTC)
cross-space page moves should be specially flagged and separately logged
The "rules" for creating pages in user space are much more lenient than for article space. For your home page or talk page, pretty much anything goes.
However, this creates a backdoor for creating unencyclopedic articles. A user could create a silly article in user space and then move it into article space. This evades the monitoring of Special:Newpages by many users; it would only show up buried in the page move log among hundreds of normal page moves, with far less scrutiny.
I believe this happened when User:Stewart Browermoved his talk page to article space, creating Stewart Brower. I reverted this page move, but it's just coincidence that I happened to be looking at the page move log at the time and noticed this.
Proposed solutions:
the page move log should mark (in boldface or some other way) page moves that cross from one space to another
perhaps the Special:Log page should even have a separate drop-down menu selection for "cross-space page moves" in addition to "move", "protect", "block", "delete", etc.
Special:Newpages should be modified to show all pages that have newly appeared in article space: not just the ones created from scratch, but also ones that were moved into article space from somewhere else.
Those of us who do RC patrol tend to watch page moves. Kelly Martin 13:15, August 11, 2005 (UTC)
Rest assured that moves from the user name space to the artice namespace are checked especially carefully. - Mgm|(talk) 15:53, August 11, 2005 (UTC)
Strange interwiki redirect
Check out (the old version of) Wikistress and User:Omegatron/Sandbox. I don't understand what's going on, but I can't edit these pages. - Omegatron 13:51, August 8, 2005 (UTC)
For some reason, it only works about half of the time (but it's useful when it works). It also will not work on MSIE (which is probably no surprise). I'm posting it here because other people might find it useful.
Beautiful. I suggested it to the developers and they said it was bad HTML and brushed me off. So I don't know what to do. There's gotta be a really simple, valid, way to add this to the software. I think it really needs to be dealt with somehow. Breaking long lines, if necessary. - Omegatron 16:44, July 29, 2005 (UTC)
cooool... that's going right into my user JS! :) Needs some tweaking, but otherwise a great idea. I'm sure it can be fixed and implemented, I've already seen it in use on forums--and that worked fine under IE. GarrettTalk 23:44, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
Side note: is there anywhere we can showcase our bits of useful user javascript for others to find them more easily? The page on meta deals mostly with full styles. --cesarb 00:46, 30 July 2005 (UTC)
Not that I know of, but you could launch a WikiProject for it. :) Right now we only find out about these different hacks by chance. So a centralised hub would be great. :) GarrettTalk 10:39, 31 July 2005 (UTC)
New version, which tries to avoid the flickering on large diffs. --cesarb 00:59, 30 July 2005 (UTC)
I've copied this into my monobook.js; it also contains lots of useful things, some of which I've written and some of which I've gotten from others. JesseW 00:27, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
I actually haven't tried this javascript because Firefox seems to scroll strangely when many things have overflow:auto; turned on. Kind of a bummer. Also someone on IRC said it's bad HTML to have a div inside a td. There's probably a legitimate way to do it, but I don't know how. - Omegatron 19:28, August 4, 2005 (UTC)
I don't know how to read that, but I'll take your word for it. Bug 1229 - Omegatron 00:12, August 6, 2005 (UTC)
If you use my popups script then you can watch or unwatch a page directly from any link to it. (You may like the simplePopups option if you think that this is overkill). Lupin 20:23, 12 August 2005 (UTC)
Unwatch from watchlist
I think it should be possible to unwatch pages from the watchlist itself, rather than having to click on the page and unwatch it from there. Or maybe I'm just being a lazy bugger... Borisblue 14:37, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
(Slightly late response...) It's possible now. Your watchlist has a link at the top titled "display and edit the complete list" which will let you remove pages. Ken 00:46, August 5, 2005 (UTC)
Image sizing issues
I have been trying to add to an article a reduced-size version of an image I uploaded. According to the imaging tutorial, to size an image differently from the file's actual size one needs to add a: 300px, or whatever size, to the command adding the image. This works fine, HOWEVER, if I try and then add a frame and a caption, then it ignores the size specification and reverts to the full size image. I could use a thumbnail, but then it is too small. I have been actually uploading smaller-sized images to circumvent this problem, but it would be nice to be able post a high-res image, and then display a smaller version, with a frame and a caption. Am I missing something? The image I last posted was Image:SynapseIllustration.png for the article Synapse. I originally had a larger version, but I had to post a low-res version in order to have it display properly in the article. Any suggestions? Thanks! Nrets 17:05, 15 August 2005 (UTC)
Say "image:foo|thumb|300px|right|Caption text" -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 17:27, August 15, 2005 (UTC)
That's really silly! Thank you so much! --Celestianpowerhab 12:23, 15 August 2005 (UTC)
Divbox upgrade
{{divbox/2|blue|Sample|This is a sample of one of the new types of boxes made possible with the new version of this template.|right|200px}}
Not all users enjoy the flexibility of the CSS box model; some go so far as to forget the plural of "box". Other users rely on boxes, especially those generated by pairs of <div> tags, to handle formatting tasks that were formerly done with tables. CSS is considerably more powerful than the old ways, though, and a bit tricky, too.
I created {{divbox}} to offer editors rapid, standard access to the box model, including a set of color-coordinated styles. Many have found a use for this and one editor created a new style. However, I've come across requests for more flexibility -- particularly, in floats and widths. (I've wanted these myself, but been content to substitute and edit.)
Please see the notes and demonstrations at Template talk:Divbox/2. You also might like to play with the new version and try to break it. Please leave your comments there before you go.
Thank You! — Xiong熊talk* 04:14, 2005 August 15 (UTC)
Shared IPs
I'm using the Direcway internet service, and its not working too well with wikipedia. At this moment, I'm currently logged out. When I clicked the edit link, I was logged in as Workman161, which is who I am. I'm finding it very very annoying that this is happening, as I am not getting credit for my contributions. Heck, look at my own User Page. Those two IPs in the history are mine, but if you view the contributions for them, there are about a hundred. Viewing the contributions under my name, you will find very few, because of wikipedia logging me out when I am actually logged in. --Workman161
There should be a function to list articles that are not being watched, or being watched by less than x number of people. - Omegatron 00:07, August 15, 2005 (UTC)
Excellent suggestion! -- Samuel Wantman 00:23, 15 August 2005 (UTC)
see bugzilla:3128 - don't forget to vote for it if you want it implemented. Thryduulf 01:16, 15 August 2005 (UTC)
What is the use for the list? The list can also be called "Best pages to vandalize". (SEWilco 02:31, 15 August 2005 (UTC))
Voted. I was thinking more of a "this article is not being watched by anyone. Would you like to take it?" notice when a logged-in user visits such a page. - Omegatron 03:36, August 15, 2005 (UTC)
Perfect. And administrators should be able to see the whole list. ~~ N (t/c) 03:48, 15 August 2005 (UTC)
Anyone should be able to see the whole list. Superm401 | Talk 03:59, August 15, 2005 (UTC)
I've copied these comments to the Bugzilla page - Bugzilla:3128 - please make all further comments there, not here. Thryduulf 08:10, 15 August 2005 (UTC)
No favicon?
Recently, Firefox has ceased to show a favicon for Wikipedia pages. I've changed nothing. What is causing this? ~~ N (t/c)
Some people have also seen a light blue circle with blobs inside it as a favicon. (SEWilco 16:48, 14 August 2005 (UTC))
Everything is fine here (at least in the URL box, don't know about favorites). — Ilγαηερ(Tαlκ) 17:01, 14 August 2005 (UTC)
It's probably a Firefox bug. I've been seeing the Yahoo! logo as a favicon on Wikipedia links. — Nowhither 20:53, 14 August 2005 (UTC)
Preemptive contribution of redirects: a possible bot-task
I've been thinking about this problem for a while and after pondering different ways of solving it, I think it might be a task best handled by a bot.
The problem is this: No one has yet stepped up to write a particular article, but there are redirects that should be created when the article does get created -- alternate spellings, known aliases, etc. It's possible to create the redirects before the article is created -- but this makes each redirect turn blue, giving the false impression that it contains content. Creating a bare stub for the subject amounts to almost the same problem.
Proposed solution
A public page is created to list "clusters" of redirects that should be created when one of them is made into an article. These clusters may include moves and/or one-way redirects (for example, if a page is made at the misspelled name Micheal Morgan, the article can be auto-moved to Michael Morgan, but creating the article Michael Morgan will not create Micheal Morgan as a misspelled redirect.) The page is publicly editable so that all users can see what moves and redirects are proposed to happen, and can raise objections before it becomes a fait accompli; if there is a naming conflict, it may well be resolved before the article exists.
A bot periodically scans the page to see if any redlink in any cluster has become blue. If it has, and the moves/redirects are not flagged as controversial, it carries out the moves and creates the appropriate redirects. If it is flagged as controversion, it adds a notice to the subpage for the cluster, so that anyone who has it on their watchlist will be notified that an article now exists. -- Antaeus Feldspar 16:15, 13 August 2005 (UTC)
seems workable, i'd wait until the new page has been left unedited for a few hours though before moving it to avoid conflicts with the editor that created it.
Good idea; the bot could be programmed to do that. -- Antaeus Feldspar 18:06, 13 August 2005 (UTC)
Nice idea. I'd always been hesitant to pursue anything like this because a mere redirect shows up as a "blue link"; your proposal of a way to do this without actually creating the ridirects in advance is great. -- Jmabel | Talk 01:11, August 14, 2005 (UTC)
Won't work. Many languages have minor variables of spelling for names. Wikipedia policy is to use the version most used by English speakers, not the one necessarily in English. A bot like that would cause chaos with such names. For example Micheal may be a mis-spelling, or it may be the Irish language version of Michael. Eamon may be a misspelling or it may be the Irish language spelling of Eamonn. Willem may be a misspelling or it may be a foreign language of William. One prominent writer was called Patrick O'Brian. O'Brian is not a valid name normally but it was his correct pen-name. If a bot automatically a Micheal Morgan to a Michael Morgan there would be war from Irish users, if it turned out he was called Micheal (pronounced Me-hawl) not Michael. This is one bot that needs to be strangled at birth, before native language users of Wikipedia do the strangling of it themselves.
I'm afraid you've entirely misread the proposal. The bot does not make any decisions. Period. The bot only carries out instructions set for it in advance by the users; it is of course possible that the bot might carry out a mistaken set of instructions but since the same human would have made the same mistake if doing it manually, there is little sense in blaming the bot. You're writing as if this bot would make its own decisions, moving articles based on its own ideas of what the "correct" spellings are; you're right that that bot would be a bad idea, but you're describing something unrelated to the bot that was proposed.
Let's forget my poorly chosen imaginary example and use a real example. Pretend that no one had yet created an article for Patrick O'Brian, and a forward-looking editor who wasn't ready to write such an article themselves nevertheless realized that someone probably would write such an article at some point. This editor thinks, "Gee, if someone creates an article at Patrick O'Brian, I should probably create Richard Patrick Russ as a redirect. And if they created it at Richard Patrick Russ, well, Patrick O'Brian should probably be created as a redirect. If they created it at Patrick O'Brien, however, it should be moved to what I know is the correct spelling, Patrick O'Brian. Moving it would create a redirect from the incorrect spelling to the new location, but I don't think it would be a good idea to create that misspelled redirect just because someone created the article under one of the two correct titles." (No, this is not a great example either, because there is a Patrick O'Brien, who is different from Patrick O'Brian. Please pretend.)
That editor could regularly check back to see if one of those articles exists yet, and if so, manually create all the redirects. And be strangled, if he happened to be mistaken about a spelling. =) Or he could create a new sub-section/sub-page of the page the bot looks to for its instructions, stating "If an article is created at this title, optionally move it to this title, and create these redirects for it." This page is publicly readable and writable, so in case that editor did make a mistake, and proposed moves and redirects that shouldn't be made, others have a chance to see the plan, say "Hold on wait a moment", and thresh it out before the dook hits the fan. This bot could really result in fewer stranglings. -- Antaeus Feldspar 23:35, 15 August 2005 (UTC)
Bullets and photos; white space after colon
While editing the page on Gautama Buddha section on Personality and character, I could not have a picure on the left and show bullets on the left as well. Is that unavoidable or a glitch? Also, there is a big white gap after the colon in "The Buddha as presented in the Buddhist scriptures is notable for such characteristics as:" that leads to the bullets. Is that because of the picture size and the text being stretched to accomodate? Rsugden 20:00, 12 August 2005 (UTC)
Pictures on the left generally don't work very nice; I'd recommend keeping them all on the right. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 20:38, August 12, 2005 (UTC)
Depending on skin, images are going to look this way or that if floated left or right. You don't really have as much control over the final look as you think. That said, you don't want to float an image left of a list (unordered or ordered; HTML <UL> or <OL>; wiki markup * or #). You can try this a couple of different ways:
Once again, it looks like a demand for a more flexible {divbox}. I really do wish we could move the template transclusion mechanism into the 21st Century, or at least into the 1960s. — Xiong熊talk* 02:15, 2005 August 15 (UTC)
Divbox/2 solution
{{divbox/2|none||
* Did this with {{divbox/2}} -- no substitution.
* Used style keyword "none".
* Float keyword follows content.
|left}}
And here's more text, mostly for the purpose of showing what it looks like after the float is cleared. Please comment at Template talk:Divbox/2. Thank You! — Xiong熊talk* 05:41, 2005 August 15 (UTC)
Somehow, the section editing is off by two on that page. The fact that it transcludes Template:Did you know might have something to do with it or not, or maybe the funny secion headers using variables (the ones on the current time). I don't know how to fix it, but it sure is annoying. One user already added an entry under August 9 that he probably wanted to add under August 11 (and should have placed at August 10). Can some experienced hand go take a look, please? Lupo 18:48, August 11, 2005 (UTC)
It was a result of h3 HTML headers included in the template. Now that the main page and the template all use wikipedia syntax this should no longer happen. - Mgm|(talk) 13:38, August 15, 2005 (UTC)
Two Category-related peeves (from newbie)
1. I was browsing the Category "Pets" for some child-friendly material and was taken aback seeing an entry for "User:SPUI/dogshit" under "U". Upon investigating I realized SPUI had copied the "Dog" page and was just using it as a personal sandbox, probably not realizing it was still linked via "Category" to the outside world. Would it make sense to disable Category linking from User pages / from anywhere outside the Main wiki space?
2. Browse any Category list containing people and there'll always be a number of entries misfiled under their given name rather than their family name, due to an editor coding [[Category:CATEGORY]] instead of [[Category:CATEGORY|Familyname, Givenname]] . I wish there were a way to declare "This article is a person's name and should be alphabetized like so in all Categories it belongs to automatically." Or, maybe there's some other solution?
About 1: There's also categories to categorize wikipedians, so disabling categories outside the main namespace might not be the best idea. 2: A while back (no idea if it was resolved) there was a dispute about whether to categorize people like Baron von Munzhauzen (sorry about the spelling) under the v or the M. Automization would cause a problem here if the dispute hasn't been resolved yet. - Mgm|(talk) 15:58, August 11, 2005 (UTC)
You can generally edit any page(even a user space page) to remove it from a incorrect category. Assuming it was an accident, most people will be grateful for the help. If it's protected, mention the problem on the Admin noticeboard, and an admin will do the same thing. I fixed a few mistakes like that in the Category:Museums a few days ago. JesseW 19:10, 14 August 2005 (UTC)
Disabling categories outside the main namespace could be done if the categories that need to contain pages from elsewhere can be identified with a tag. You could calso spider Category:People to find pages missing sort keys or with badly formed sort keys (accents and CamelCase). This would also report non-people in categories meant for people. Susvolans(pigs can fly) 14:32, 15 August 2005 (UTC)
How do you change a temp page to a regular page?
How do you change a temp page to a regular page? Thank you.
If you’re logged in, rename it using the “Move” button. If you aren’t or the system won’t let you, put a request at Wikipedia:Requested moves. Susvolans(pigs can fly) 17:11, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
However, this caution: If you developed a new page in a private sandbox over the course of many edits, and now you want to move the page to a public space, you may want to copy-and-paste the markup instead of using page move. Create the new page with the single edit summary "new". Otherwise, the history for the new page will show all the trivial edits you made in your private sandbox. — Xiong熊talk* 01:17, 2005 August 15 (UTC)
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