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Village pump (technical) archive  

This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (technical).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

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Changes to monobook.css (underlining)

Today, suddenly and with no warning, all links on Wikipedia pages were no longer underlined in my browser (Firefox 1.0.6 on MacOS X). I immediately suspected a browser issue, maybe corrupt preferences, restarted it, no change; rebooted the machine, same. I tried a different WP skin, and the underlinig was back. I don't know a lot about CSS or the way WP does style, so I started reading, and found that apparently an editor changed the Monobook.css file and removed one line,

a { text-decoration: underline }

with the edit summary, "don't force underlining". Unfortunately, it appears to have broken underlining in my browser; even with "Underline Links" checked, Wikipedia links are not underlined after this change.

There is some discussion on the Monobook.css talk page, but it's from months ago. I posted on the talk page, and the user's talk page. I would have reverted pending discussion, but that's beyond my technical chops, since the Monobook.css page appears to be generated elsewhere and I can't edit it directly.

Does anyone have any idea why that change would have prevented underlining, rather than just making it default to what's set in the browser? Did underlining disappear for a large number of other Firefox users today, or is this just some glitch in my configuration?

I also tried to override this with a monospace.css file as a user sub-page, but weirdly, adding that one line as the monospace.css file only works inside the edit/preview cycle (underlines return), but not after I save the page (and purge browser cache, etc.). Ideas? Thanks, MCB 01:38, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

The correct name is monobook.css. ~~ N (t/c) 17:05, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

Thanks. Just a typo on my part (here), the change to monobook.css did not work. On the advice of ABCD who made the change to the system Monobook.css, I had to check "Underline links: Always" in my WP misc preferences, but I should not have to do that; "Underline links: Browser Default" does not work after this change. MCB 18:01, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

I also use Firefox (on Windows XP) and have noticed this problem. But I also checked Wikipedia on Internet Explorer and this problem occurs on that browser as well. --FlyingPenguins 20:52, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

Same thing here, Penguins. It's actually getting quite distracting. Bobstar 20:56, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

I just added the following to my user monobook.css (User:Ilyanep/monobook.css) and I think it makes wp a lot more readable...

a {text-decoration: none;}

It still underlines on hover, and that's how my own personal webpage works. I think it makes just reading a lot easier. — Ilγαηερ (Tαlκ) 21:02, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

And someone just changed this again. Look, if you want to change your personal stylesheet, go for it, but please stop screwing with things that affect the user experience of hundreds, maybe thousands, of people who did not ask to have it changed. As far as I'm concerned, this is tantamount to vandalism. The question marks are very annoying. They must be even more so for anyone using any sort of assistive devices. -- Jmabel | Talk 23:27, 22 October 2005 (UTC)

Edit page not "on top" option

Due to the speed of page dispaly and saving, I often edit several pages in parallel. When mid sentence on one page, having another page pop-up and steal my typing is a pain. Is it possible to set a preference to stop "new edit window on top" behaviour? -- SGBailey 09:08, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

This is hardly a specific Wikipedia question. Perhaps you should take this issue to the Reference desk. -- Ec5618 09:59, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

I beg to differ. This is very wikipedia specific. It isn't a bug, so I don't report it at bugzilla. It is a wikimedia software configuaration issue (I assume), so I request the ability to configure it in WP:VP Technical. -- SGBailey 15:47, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

No, it's your browser. ~~ N (t/c) 16:14, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

It's not our fault, but rather IE's. Wikipedia is not sending a z-layer command like pop-under ads do, it's just that WP edits are submitted using POST whereas Google etc. use GET, and IE seems to like giving focus to POST results pages. But anyway I do have a solution! I take it this is happening under Windows XP/2003? OK, first of all you need the handy-dandy Tweak UI, download and install it here. Once you've done that, you'll find "Focus" under the "General" tree. Merely check "Prevent applications from stealing focus" and then configure the flashing options as you like. Personally I find the repeated flashing annoying so leave it at 0 or 1 (3 is the default IIRC). Anyway, there's the solution. If you're not using XP/2003 I'm not sure the 9x Tweak UI has this option. Actually I don't remember if pre-XP even had focus-changing... Garrett^Talk 16:29, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

The original writer didn't actually say anything about what browser or platform he/she was using. I would, however, suggest that if you like doing multiple edits in parallel, a browser with tabbed browsing capability (e.g., Mozilla or Firefox) would be a good choice. *Dan T.* 16:45, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

True, but I can make sweeping assumptions! :) I've never known a non-IE browser to do this, and focus-stealing is most commonly programmed into (? or exclusive to) Windows programs, so that narrows it down quite a bit. But yes a tabbed browser is a good suggestion. I downloaded Firefox almost solely to see what the tabbed browsing was like, and I've never gone back. Garrett^Talk 17:53, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

Page history - Diff

When you click the Newer edit / Older edit links, it ends up as a diff between the next version (older newer) and its neighbour. Would it be possible/sensible to rig it so that you can step the left version and the right version independently. I often want to step through versions comparing them to one particular version. Thus we might end up with 4 links: Left older, Left newer, Right older, Right newer. -- SGBailey 08:58, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

Template bug

Hi, i was editing the article Huainan and using the template "{{Anhui}}" when problem occurred. No matter how i tried, the template wouldn't appear properly but instead appeared plainly as "{{Anhui". The same template has no problem on other pages (such as Ma'anshan or Lu'an). Please help. Great thanks! -- the baffled Plastictv 03:09, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

As I expected, it was an unclosed template somewhere else in the page. Fixed. --cesarb 03:38, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

Oh so that's what's been causing the problem! Thanks a lot mate. :) --Plastictv 04:41, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

"What if" vandalism question

What would happen if a vandal reverted as many pages as possible to their starting point in history? Is MediaWiki designed to deal with that threat?

Eje211 21:12, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

Same as any other vandalism; they'd get blocked and the pages reverted. --Brion 22:00, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

That's reassuring. I was afraid it was not technically possible to revert reverts. Eje211 14:23, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

It is impossible for any vandal to remove the revision history. They can blank, but only sysops can delete, and even that can be undone all the way back to the first edit. ∞Who?¿? 14:29, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

Username with Unicode right-to-left override character

Usernames with U+202E (Unicode right-to-left override) should be disabled. To see why, check out Special:Log/newusers at 15:57, 16:07, 16:21, 16:26, 16:32 for today, October 13. -- Curps 16:37, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

U+202B (Unicode right-to-left embedding) might not be such a good idea either. -- Curps 16:43, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

Or if you need to see a slew of usernames using them really quickly.. see Category:Wikipedia:Suspected vandalbots. ∞Who?¿? 16:46, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

Blocking anons only

My ISP (202.180.83.6) has been blocked three times today because of an anonymous vandal. Twice, I have lost work that i was doing because of it. If this keeps up, I may have to quit wikipedia until such time as I can get another IP (and given my financial lack of resources, that may be a considerable time). Surely there must be some way that anons can be blocked from using an IP while allowing registered users to continue using the same IP address? Please? Grutness...wha? 12:24, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

Wow, people are going to think you are my sockpuppet! See Wikipedia:Blocking policy proposal. thanks - Martin 14:40, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

At the risk of blowing my own trumpet, a sockpuppet with tens of thousands of edits is pretty impressive :) I note a similar comment re blocking anons only at proposals, BTW. Grutness...wha? 23:22, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

strange...

The vandal account TheVillagePumpIsOkay,ButImNot (talk · contribs) appears to have vandalized the Village Pump twice, but his contributions show that he only edited the Village Pump once. What's going on? --Ixfd64 09:19, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

• Extreme db lag. I got a request to look at history of a page earlier, and the IP didn't even show up, but it was in the IP's contribs. Only thing I can think of. ∞Who?¿? 09:56, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

Other templates to fix IE6 Unicode font bug.

When the font lists of Template:Unicode and Template:IPA were moved to MediaWiki:Common.css, it somehow broke Template:PIE and Template:IAST. These were apparently just copies of (an old version of) Template:IPA with different title and class parameters (and italicization in the case of Template:PIE). The templates had worked previously; broken they did not fix the IE6 Unicode font bug.

I was able to fix the broken templates by deleting the style parameters and changing the class parameters to either class="Unicode" or class="IPA". But now it occurs to me that this may prevent someone from customizing class="PIE" or class="IAST". Is it possible to specify Template:PIE with class="PIE" so that class="PIE" is by default the same as class="Unicode" (or class="IPA")? --teb728 08:19, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

You can simply use class="PIE Unicode" and class="IAST IPA". --cesarb 02:51, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

Placement of successive right-justified tables

Could someone take a look at Template_talk:Catalan-speaking_world#Usage_remarks? We seem to have a problem, and I'm sure there is a general solution that works in both Internet Explorer and Firefox (and, one hopes, everywhere else), but the two solutions we've tried so far have failed. The problem basically arises when we have two successive, large, right-justified tables or images. There might be a problem specific to how {{Catalan-speaking world}} is implemented. -- Jmabel | Talk 05:24, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

Restoring all revisions except one or two

Recently, I noticed that when restoring a page, there is no "select all" button or something of that sort that allows admins to select all the boxes automatically and then choose which revisions of a page not to undelete. It would be pretty useful for removing particularly bad edits that should not be kept in the page history (e.g. Jimbo Wales' personal info). I was wondering if was at all possible to add such a function? Sasquatcht|c 03:09, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

Sounds like something that should be easy to implement in Javascript. If you send me the raw html for the undelete page (for an article with more than four or five deleted revisions), I'll see what I can put together. —Cryptic (talk) 10:09, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

Proper functionality would be nicer, but it can be done without getting RSI: Delete everything, then undelete only the revisions you want to get rid off. Move those revisions to a dfiferent page name and delete them again. Then undelete all the good revisions. Remember to turn off "move talk page" when moving the bad revisions. --fvw* 20:28, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

Yea, I'm aware of that trick but it kinda seems like a pain... anyways, just throwing some ideas around =) Sasquatcht|c 04:26, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

Slower in Asia?

Hi, I live in Seoul and haven't been back in North America for quite some time. Just wondering if things are any faster over there or in Europe. When adding interwiki links from our Wikipedia I usually open up fifteen windows at a time right away just in case something weird happens and no pages open for ten minutes or so, which is what happened all day today. And for some reason Opera started turning up blank pages so I switched to Firefox which was a bit better even though pages only loaded properly for about 15 minutes at a time all day today. For some reason metawiki never had any problems though. Anyway, I was wondering if any of those problems have anything to do with being in Asia. I've seriously been considering having a bit of a presentation of Wikipedia over here because I live right in the centre of Seoul in an area just perfect for that sort of thing, but the thought of having to tell someone to wait and come back 15 minutes or maybe 30, maybe more...that scares me and I wouldn't dare try that until I was sure that things were going to work. Mithridates 18:44, 10 October 2005 (UTC) / io:user:mithridates

Wikipedia speed varies. As you can't control it, perhaps you should save the pages used in your presentation to local disk and do the presentation from there. For some of the same reasons why it is a good idea to store your other presentation graphics on your local disk. It also may be a factor that your timezone may tend to try to use Wikipedia during periods when low-demand-period maintenance is done. (SEWilco 20:00, 10 October 2005 (UTC))

It should never be taking 15 or 30 minutes to load a page. If that's happening, I guess something else is wrong. However, we've just installed over 20 new servers in South Korea, and the Korean Wikipedia is now running on those, so those you should find that wiki very fast. Other Asian language wikis will be moved there if no problems occur during this trial period with the Korean Wikipedia. Angela. 23:28, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

If it happens again, please contact a system administrator on the #wikimedia-tech channel on irc.freenode.net. -- Tim Starling 03:48, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

I only have experience of UK. Generally response is attrocious (Bad = >10s, Attrocious = >30s), often being 2 or 3 minutes. Saves are worse and not guaranteed to work (This is why my major gripe with the AfD process works - you can't guarantee to succeed in editing 3 pages in quick succession). One thing to note is that in UK daytime response is better by a factor of 2 or 3 than in the evening (when the US is awake). -- SGBailey 09:05, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

Yeah, actually I did notice that the Korean Wikipedia was amazingly fast yesterday. I do some work there but I'm primarily a sysop on the Ido Wikipedia which is much less fast. The past few days have benn all right, however. Mithridates 01:20, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

Lower Suwannee National Wildlife Refuge

I submitted an article on Lower Suwannee National Wildlife Refuge that is indicating possible copyright problems. As the manager of this Refuge, I wrote all of the text that is on www.fws.gov/lowersuwannee site and it was put on the web as public domain for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The main goal of listing this information on Wikipedia is to facilitate spreading word about the Refuge.

Can you assist? Please reply to me at

canoekat (at) earthlink (dot) net

Copied to talk page and Copyright problems page. — Catherine\^talk 03:18, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

Ok, now I've gone and cleaned it up, complete with pretty public domain pictures! — Catherine\^talk 13:22, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

Subst current date with a template

Is there already a template to subst the current date via another template. (Confused?) Ok, if I use a template {{test template}} and do NOT subst it, is there a way, to have it show the date that it was used? I created Template:Log date to use inside the other template, but every way I have tried fails. Ie.. subst:Log date, using noinclude, etc. Basically I need to be able to use template 1 w/o subst, and have it subst the date it was used.

Any ideas? Thanks. ∞Who?¿? 08:08, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

I'm guessing that you're looking for a way to respond to Wikipedia_talk:Categories_for_deletion#templates_need_updating. Unfortunately, I don't think there's an easy solution. One possibility would be to create new versions of the cfd, etc. templates that MUST be subst'd. These could use {{Log date}} as it exists, assuming the link to the WP:CFD entry should use today's date. Another approach would be to require the spelled out date be provided as an argument to the cfd, etc. templates. WP:AFD's approach to this problem relies on creatng a separate article for each AFD discussion (the link from the article goes to its AFD page whose name does not depend on the date and the AFD discussion page is then transcluded in a "by day" log file - this breaks down when a given article is renominated and requires 3 edits to make a nomination). -- Rick Block (talk) 19:32, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

Pretty much yea. I do not want to change the way the {{cfd}} tag functions, but want it to link directly to the day page. I thought I seen a template that did this awhile back, subst the date when used, but couldnt find one. So far all I have is User:Who/Test1, which shows the current date. ∞Who?¿? 01:34, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

Silly idea, but have you tried using includeonly in the template? As in <includeonly>{{subst:{{CURRENTMONTH}}</includeonly>? It should just subst on the page using the template only, and the substitution would of course be permanent, thus showing the time it was placed on the page. -- Ec5618 17:53, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

Nope, not a silly idea, but one I did try though :) thanks. It didnt like it too much. ∞Who?¿? 17:56, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

I'm not sure it's of any use to you, but you might try using five tildes (~~~~~ : 19:00, 10 October 2005 (UTC)). I realise that you are constricted by the format used to log the discussions. Since I've noticed similar problem before, I suggest we file a bug report (feature request) or something - Ec5618 19:00, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

I've considered it, but it's not necessarily a pressing matter. ∞Who?¿? 00:39, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

I think we would all love this feature

All editors have reverted a vandal, looked up his contributions, and found dozens of other edits. Sometimes not all of the damage has been undone by other editors, forcing a careful checking of the history of all the articles the vandal recently edited. Whenever I follow a link from the a vandal's contributions profile, the instance of vandalism may be the current version or another edit may have follow. Not wanting to allow an instance of vandalism to be buried, perhaps, by legit edits, I click the next edit link just to be sure the edit which follows is a revert. Doing this adds up if I am check 10+ edits. Wouldn't it be great if in the contributions profile, there could be a mark next to any edit that indicates an immediate rollback? lots of issues | leave me a message 23:06, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

• This is an excellent idea! It would be easy to implement (either by check if an admin clicked Rollback, or if the article that was edited and submitted was a version that predates those edits). — BRIAN0918 • 2005-10-7 11:45
• It would be easy to detect a rollback because they have a distinctive(though forgable) edit summary. However, it would not be reasonable to have the software compare the latest edit with every previous version every time you load a contribs page. Do you have any idea how big a use of resources that is? It would be reasonable to check whether the latest edit was the same as the page two versions ago. That requires only one comparison. Superm401 | Talk 01:21, 13 October 2005 (UTC)
• everytime there's an edit, check against the version two records ago. if they're the same mark it as a 'verified' revert (to stop forgers). then you only have to do the check once for every edit, instead of once for every history view. --71.112.11.220 01:33, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

Cross-namespace links

Is there any easy way to see a list of pages with cross-namespace links out of article space--for instance, pages that link from article space to User, Talk, or Wikipedia namespace? For the most part they shouldn't exist, so it would be good to have an easy way to monitor for them. --Aquillion 20:56, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

It would be reasonably easy to do a database query on this - looking for strings like "[[User:" or "[[Talk:" - but the current database dump is a bit old and may not be much use (since many of them will have since been changed) Shimgray | talk | 00:49, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

Here's a list for you to work on: http://kohl.wikimedia.org/~avar/tmp/crossns —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 00:18, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

Where can I get assistance setting up a mediaWiki site

We are about to start using MediaWiki in our teaching at the University of Southern Queensland in Australia and I have a number questions. e.g.

• how to setup templates for different types of pages that people can use to start the page
• how do I put users into different groups which will be used to control access to certain pages

Where can I ask these types of questions or find answers or documentation?

http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l. kate.

Although, it sounds to me like you don't want MediaWiki, you want a conventional document management system; MediaWiki certainly isn't designed to restrict users from certain pages, it being built on the wiki philosophy, which is free and collaborative editing by anyone. In addition, we don't have the template features you're after, although you could theoretically use {{subst:XXX}} to achieve this. For more information, see Why should I use MediaWiki? on Meta. Rob Church ^{Talk | FAD} 10:55, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

Edit history of former redirects

I would like to know of the edit summaries of former redirects are available to be viewed with special:undelete/. For example, if an article with the title Fooer was moved to Fooder, making the original title Fooer a redirect. The move would generate an edit summary in the edit history of Fooer, stating there was a move, and the reasons why it was moved. If Fooder is later being moved back to Fooer, would the previous edit summary at Fooer be lost? Thanks. — Instantnood 19:27, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Yes. ~~ N (t/c) 20:06, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

Now if a page has been moved from Fooer to Fooder, and have been moved back from Fooder to Fooer, where can I find the edit history of the first move? Or is the edit history of the first move already lost? — Instantnood 18:20, 12 October 2005 (UTC) (modified 16:55, 13 October 2005 (UTC))

If A is moved to B then back to A. The edit histories are the same. Unless A was edited while it was still at B. At that point, goto special:undelete and you can select to restore the deleted portion (which was a redirect). ∞Who?¿? 17:00, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

Thanks. I am actually looking for the edit summary saying "A is moved to B: Reasons" for the first move from A to B. The special:undelete page in this case is blank. — Instantnood 05:50, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

Oh, I thought you were gonna ask that :) See Move logs, and search for the entry. ∞Who?¿? 07:33, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

Thanks so much. :-) — Instantnood 19:30, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

Is there an interwiki "You have new messages" feature?

I have a user page on es:wiki. Is there a way for me to receive that orange "you have new messages" alert, or to design/format one of my own, so that if a message is left at es:wiki, I get an alert at en:wiki?

Thanks.

paul klenk ^talk 17:22, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

No. ~~ N (t/c) 17:33, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

Thanks, Nick. paul klenk ^talk

If there's one wiki you use more than any of the others, you could simply redirect your other user talk pages to your user talk page on that one - say redirecting the usertalk:Paul Klenk at es.wiki to the same page at en.wiki. The only real drawback with that is the nuevo mensaje box wouldn't appear at all while you are working at es.wiki. Grutness...wha? 23:40, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

Oh, redirecting the whole page is a great idea. Thanks. paul klenk ^talk

It would be, if it worked. Sadly, cross-project redirects don't. Superm401 | Talk 01:23, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

Strange - the redirect I have from my mi.wiki talk page to my en.wiki talk page seems to work fine AFAIK... Grutness...wha? 01:34, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

Mmm. No - scratch that - it doesn't seem to work after all. A pity. Ah well, you could always leave a note at the top of your es. talk page saying "please leave any messages at [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User talk:Paul Klenk]. No guarantee that people would read that, but it's worth a try. Sorry that my suggestion didn't do the trick. Grutness...wha? 01:37, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

That's what I do, but I rarely edit on other projects anyway. Superm401 | Talk 02:19, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

From wikibooks I did "#REDIRECT [[Wikipedia: User_talk:ParallaxTZ]]" on my talk page. And it works -- it doesn't immediately redirect, but puts a huge link at the top of the talk page that you can't miss. Go see. ParallaxTZ 21:36, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

A very strange password/impostor problem

Today I created accounts, using my real name (Paul Klenk, just like my user name) at de.wiki, fr.wiki, ja.wiki, pl.wiki, it.wiki, sv.wiki, nl.wiki, and pt.wiki. (This is to protect/maintain my identity across these sites, and assist with a possible future project.)

At the exact moment I was creating these accounts, a vandal created an imposter account at the Spanish site, with my name, Paul Klenk (es:User talk:Paul Klenk). He claimed to be me, "Paul Klenk from New York". The vandal account has been blocked.

I am trying to figure out a way to solve this problem. I do have an inquiry at es.wiki, but because of the language barrier, it is a bit tricky to communicate.

How do we change this Spanish account's password temporarily so I can take over the account? Can the e-mail address be checked and or changed? (It is not set up to receive e-mail, or I would try to write the person.)

If you have expertise with this, please let me know.

paul klenk ^talk 23:38, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

I have set up a temporary account, called es:User:Temporary Username, at the Spanish site. I do not speak Spanish. If a Spanish/English-speaking user would like to correspond with me at that site, that is fine with me. I am checking messages there. paul klenk ^talk

Try looking at m:embassyDunc|☺ 21:35, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

dunc, thanks for reminding me I left this here! I am working with several admins at es:wiki. They are considering giving me the account, but have not reached a consensus and are still waiting for other admins to weigh in. We may be able to take care of this solely at es:wiki, but if an admin here would like to just fix the problem and give me the page, I certainly wouldn't object!!! LOL. paul klenk ^talk 21:41, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

An administrator has no control over user accounts other than blocking and unblocking them. Only a developer can hand the account over to you; it would require modification of the entry in the users table.

Incidentally, there is no way for anyone to see your password; it's hashed one-way, and so even the developer team can't actually go and get it/decrypt it. Rob Church ^{Talk | FAD} 10:47, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

IIRC beurocracts could rename the vandal account out of the way allowing it to be re-registered though. Plugwash 22:04, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

Example

Info	Play	help
This is my idea for how a play box should work and what it should look like.

This one is similar but without the text. Which is better?

There is a current problem with playing sounds. I have therefore devised a playbox which is here on the right. If it looks like an image box, that's because basically it is. It's not that pretty at the moment, but that can be easily fixed.

There are three columns each with a link and a button (which we'll have to get these made to look pretty but these placeholders are okay for the moment):

1. Indicates whether it is a sound file or a video file, e.g. be a copy of http://en.wikipedia.org/skins-1.5/common/images/icons/fileicon-ogg.png for ogg file. Clicking the link or icon takes you through to the image description page and more data about the file.
2. Clicking on the second play icon plays/downloads the file.
3. For help because these files are quite complicated.

The caption goes beneath the box, as with pictures.

There are also a few formatting issues that needs to be sorted out as all of it ought to be blue and there are white lines where the table is. I'm also not sure that the text and the icons are required, maybe just the icons with alt text would suffice.

Still, neat, eh?

Comments

Please comment here. If you like it vote for it and it'll get noticed. Please say whether you prefer the version with or without the text. I think I'm inclining towards the one without the text. Dunc|☺ 11:47, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

• I don't particularly like the example-image for the info, but the play button, could probably be included in {{listen}}. Also, I prefer a written example for people seeking help with their media. Why don't you like the current template? - Mgm|^(talk) 12:42, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

I think the problem with the current system are:

1. That [[Media:example.ogg]] encourages linking through without going through the image description page first (very important for fair use copyrights), but also misses out on lengthy caption which is possible on such pages
2. That the template does not offer the option of a caption to appear on the page.
3. That template does not lead to
4. That use of a template is rather messy

I have template:soundbox which is perhaps a little better, but I'd like to do this automatically. Perhaps I should get some proper icons drawn, since the ones above are placeholders. hmm. Dunc|☺ 20:09, 5 October 2005 (UTC)

I don't think you need the help icon that prominent. Most of the content we have here is provided with little or no explanation of its mechanics. For example the image enlarging has this tiny little double-picture image. If you see it you can work out what it means, and yet it's not intrusive if you know what you're doing. This isn't like MS Office's Tip of the Day that can be dismissed forever at the click of a button, whatever design is chosen will be unchangeable so we need to think about helping new users without constantly insulting the intelligence of regulars. Perhaps the help icon could be of the same scale as the magnifying one, or at the most 32x32 (though that's probably pushing it).

Also, future-proofing. Some day MediaWiki will no doubt have the ability to extract a first frame preview from video footage. Where then does that image go? Alternately, if the contributor decides to manually take a sample frame to include in the media box (this is being experimented with for the Cookbook Wikibook) how do they define the thumbnail image and yet still keep the other formatting aids this design allows without manually creating a template that recreates the code of the automatic one?

Also, customisability. In the See Also section there's no text in the way so the media box could be as big as needed without disrupting anything. However for in-paragraph usage you'd want a more discreet version. There would need to be a way to define this.

I think this is a great idea, it just needs to be made as robust and discreet as possible. Garrett^Talk 18:09, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

Signature

Hello. I have a question about my signature.

My wikiName is Serhiodudnic (12 characters). For the signature I use(in the field SpecialPages->NickName - I have checked "Raw signatures"): "[[User:UserName|nickname]] [[User_talk:UserName|(talk)]]", well there is like this "[[User:Serhiodudnic|nickname]] [[User_talk:Serhiodudnic|(talk)]]", but this is not work. I would my signature shows like this: nickname (talk), but in page it shows like this: nickname (talk)

Why?

Perhaps you are testing it on your talk page? If a link would link to the page it's on, it goes bold instead of linking as normal. --Ashenai 18:27, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

Oh, yes! Really! Thank you very much! :)

serhio ^(talk) 18:39, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

Happy to help! *bings* --Ashenai 18:40, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

Can I insert a image in the signature? (but the image links to my page)

You can, but it is suggested that you don't because of the load it causes on the servers. See: Wikipedia:Transclusion_costs_and_benefits#Emergency_measures and Wikipedia:Avoid using meta-templates - Trevor MacInnis (Talk | Contribs) 04:43, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

Thank you. If it is a servers question, I will not set a image in my signature; anyway, of "script point of view" I don't see in what way I can insert in the place of my nick name a image. I have tryed: " <a link="http://wiki/myWikiPage"><img src="http://mylocation/myImage.jpg"></a>" but this don't work...

serhio ^talk

11:29, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

I don't think there's a way to include off-site images. — PhilHibbs | talk 13:50, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

Due to copyright issues, remote loading/hotlinking issues, etc. the <img /> tag is one of those stripped out by the sanitising parser. Rob Church ^{Talk | FAD} 10:45, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

Problem: thumb for animated gif does not work

There is a problem with creating a thumb for animated gifs: The first frame is reduced in size, the follow-up frames aren't, and the image becomes a mess. Here is the sample code that I tried (for use in de:Charge-coupled_Device):

[ [ Image:CCD_charge_transfer_animation.gif|thumb|right|180 pxl|my_description ] ]

The image is from Wikimedia Commons.

IMHO, there should be an option to avoid animation on thumnails anyway, or maybe this should be the default. These flickering images are quite annoying when reading text. Currently, the only way out is a [ [ Media: ... ] ] link, but a thumb would be helpful for the reader. -Anastasius zwerg 17:41, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

Resizing animations doesn't work. I think this is because the server that produces reduced-size images can't handle resizing. Cheers, [[Sam Korn]] 17:43, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

I have found a workaround in the meanwhile, based on :en:User:Duncharris/playbox. I have created a non-animated thumb and uploaded as a separate image. The code is this:

<div class="thumb tright">
<div style="width:182px;">
[[image:CCD_charge_transfer_animation_thumb.png]]
<div class="thumbcaption">[[media:CCD_charge_transfer_animation.gif|Play animation]]</div>
<div class="thumbcaption">descriptive text...
([[commons:Image:CCD_charge_transfer_animation.gif|Source and more info]])</div>
</div>
</div>

Unfortunately, clicking on the thumb only opens the thumb, not the animation. "Play" animation runs the animation alone, "Source and more info" shows the Wikimedia Commons page with the animation. Better solutions are welcome. --Anastasius zwerg 18:42, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

Audio links

The problem: We want a way to briefly link to audio files, like so:

Bordeaux ( pronunciation[?]) is a port city in...

But if you click on the loudspeaker icon, you go to the image page for the loudspeaker icon, which obviously confuses a lot of people. So it currently looks like this:

Bordeaux () is a port city in...

Ideally, we would be able to use css or software changes to make a clickable icon for audio files. One way I found that works is to add the image to all ogg files, in the same way that external link icons are added after all external links:

#bodyContent a[href $="ogg"] {
    background: url("http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f7/Loudspeaker.png") center left no-repeat;
    padding-left: 16px;
}

This is probably a bad idea, though. We probably want the icons on a case-by-case basis. We should be able to make a class for this:

.audiolink {
    background: url("http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f7/Loudspeaker.png") center left no-repeat;
    padding-left: 16px;
}

This mostly works for me. Problems:

• This behaves a little differently than the other example. The loudspeaker is not actually clickable, which is better than going to the image page but worse than going to the sound file. Someone who knows css should be able to fix this. Probably because the style is a span now instead of being the actual a?
• We can't link to nothing and get a lone loudspeaker that links to the audio, since a link with no text defaults to a number: [1]. Maybe this is ok, though.
• It doesn't override the external links icon, so that would have to be added or else all audio files would get class="plainlinksneverexpand" also.

See Template talk:Audio#Possible solution and MediaWiki_talk:Common.css#Audio_links Omegatron (talk) 19:48, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

Formatting

Okay, when I refreshed a page a moment ago, everything went weird as if it had been reformatted in an XPish sort of way. It was too specific to just have been a loading error. What's going on? It went when I refreshed again.

Frequency of household power and it's relationship to electrocution risk.

Does the 50 Hz used in EU countries pose more or less of an electrocution risk than the 60Hz used in the USA?

The frequency wouldn't much matter (although it might have a slight effect on the degree to which muscle spasms cause the victim to hold onto the wire). The amperage is the most important factor, but voltage also matters. And, whether the skin is wet, whether the person is grounded, whether they have a heart condition, etc., also come into play. StuRat 02:36, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

information requested of flavor

Dear Sir:
 We have mixing plant and flavor business in Iran .
 We would like to have more information about raw materials
 of liquid flavors and powder flavors (e.g seasoning ) and
 circumstance mixing these raw materials and making flavors .

 Best regard
 Asgharinia
 manager director

You should ask at the reference desk. Dmharvey File:User dmharvey sig.png Talk 13:01, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

AFD does not display on Wikipedia:Articles for deletion

Hi all. I was putting up an article for deletion, Midwest lakes policy center, and I noticed that another article, Midwest Lakes Policy Center, was already on the list. They are two different pages, for the same topic. There is just a capitalization difference between the namespaces. However, only one of them shows up on the list, even though in the AFD list's source code both of them are there. I think this is a bug; can anyone comment? --mdd4696 14:27, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

The issue seems to be resolved now. Perhaps a cache issue? Next time, try to click on the "Purge server cache" link just above the Table of Contents. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 19:59, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

vandals

someone vandalised the page on Plato by inserting "Hi mom u rule" in the first sentence.

I cannot seem to edit the page.

Somebody please remedy.

I see nothing like that on Plato. Are you talking about another page? --Craig (t|c) 13:37, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

Subst'ing templates

A bot is under production to automatically subst certain templates. It is generally accepted that certain templates should always be subst'ed rather than transcluded, for page stability and to reduce server load (see WP:AUM for details). If you have suggestions for templates that should always (or never) be subst'ed, please contribute them to Wikipedia:Subst. Radiant_>|< 23:00, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

Bad rendering at Category:User_en-N

In the article Category:User_en-N garbage appears right after its own self-cite; this appears to not be a browser problem, but some template gone deeply amok. Alas, I have not the technical wherewithal to diagnose whence the problem actually is. --moof 13:18, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

That's because somebody placed a tfd on Template:User sco N. See Wikipedia:Templates for deletion#User sco templates. Lupo 13:37, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

Vandalism report

I was looking up Greek history on wikipedia tonight and came across this Plato page with a picture of a penis on it:

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

I don't know what to say other than to report it and hope it gets fixed immediately.

thank you.

I think you're confused. The last edit of that page was about 12 hours before you posted your message, and there are no pictures of penises on the page. In any case, if there was you have the ability to edit that page yourself to remove it, which is the whole point of this encyclopaedia. --Craig (t|c) 04:46, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

The vandalism was to the {{Otheruses}} template. It was reverted after two minutes, and unfortunately you were one of the users who looked at an article which used that template in that time.-gadfium 05:27, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

Interesting. Thanks for pointing that out. Learn something new every day. :) --Craig (t|c) 05:50, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

Uploading New Version of Image

Hi, I am trying to upload a new version of an image over the top of the earlier one, which I have done many times before. The specific file I am trying to upload over is Image:Yarralumla_IBMap-TEST-MJC.png. I am getting a page that tells me "A file with this name exists already; please go back and upload this file under a new name." and doesn't give me the option to overwrite like I used to get. Is this a problem with the code? --Martyman-(talk) 03:02, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

I have received the same error on Image:A1a_at_ksc_small.jpg. I cannot find any options to change, and I am able to make revision changes to other images. Figure it must be a misconfiguration. --Mcmillen76 04:15, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

I've talked with Tim Starling and Brion Vibber, and they told me that it is because they've disallowed it while they're fixing problems with the rendering of images. That restriction will be lifted as soon as they finish the transition to a new server. Titoxd^(?!?) 05:12, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

I just asked again how long it's going to be down, and they estimate a few hours. Titoxd^(?!?) 05:21, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

It's back. Go wild! --Brion 06:44, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

Artificial delay (very brief block) after username registration

Would it be possible to introduce an artificial delay between the time a username is registered (and appears in Special:Log/newusers) and the time the newly-registered user can make their first edit? It should be at least 60 seconds, perhaps a few minutes, and perhaps this could be enforced in the software by automatically applying a very short block (one that doesn't affect the underlying IP).

This would not inconvenience normal users, who normally only register one username, ever. However it would help to deal with certain abusive sock usernames. Obviously, vandals can register innocuous-sounding sock usernames, but very often the whole point is to create a throwaway single-use username to leave a (taunting or sometimes even obscene) "message" in the contribution history. It would be nice if such "messages" could remain confined to the newusers log.

Right now, vandalbots can make their first edit only seconds after registering, and that's often too fast to block by manual or artificial means. Since the throwaway name is only used for a single hit-and-run edit, there's little benefit to blocking it after the fact, although we do so anyway.

As mentioned above, this wouldn't stop all vandalism, just "taunting username" vandalism. It would remove much of the motivation for even trying to registering "on wheels" or "is communism" sock names, since routine RC patrol would catch these in plenty of time. Right now, such names are often created in bursts, where the vandals engage in a race against time trying to get their edits in before each sock is blocked. We could put an end to that particular bit of nonsense, at least.

-- Curps 19:59, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

i certainly find i get highly pissed off by any form registration delays on sites (mainly in the form of waiting for e-mails) and i'm far less likely to actually contribute to a site if i face such a delay. Maybe wikipedias allowing of anon edits would mitigate this a bit but i still think it would piss off prospective contributers. Plugwash 20:16, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

It's only 60 seconds. I think this is a good idea. ~~ N (t/c) 20:20, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

If it's 60 seconds and we tell them why, maybe it would be acceptable, especially as I'd think genuine contributors would often take nearly that long to go (back) to the article they want to edit, read relevant bit, edit, and save. However a simple IP block would lose edits made before 60 seconds are up, wouldn't it? Whereas in that case we'd want to say "hang on, this will appear in 37 seconds because it's your first edit (unless you're blocked between now and then)." Rd232 ^talk 20:36, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

I agree; 60 seconds is reasonable. A minute goes by quite quickly when you're navigating a new website, and this delay would be helpful in fighting vandalbots. Antandrus (talk) 23:46, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

• Maybe an even better idea would be a delay that depends on how many usernames were registered from that IP in the past day or so. 1st user name - 10 seconds. 2nd user name - 1 minute. 3rd user name - 2 minutes. Etc. Prevents massive account creation. Radiant_>|< 01:45, 31 October 2005 (UTC)
  • There would have to be some special provision for shared IPs, or the delays could easily become quite large in some cases. Rd232 ^talk 21:55, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

Editintro with new section

No links in the format http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=PAGENAME&action=edit&section=new&editintro=INTROPAGE will work unless PAGENAME doesn't exist. As an example, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Reference%20desk/Humanities&action=edit&section=new&editintro=Wikipedia:Reference%20desk/How%20to%20ask doesn't work. They still load a section edit page, but the edit intro does not display. Is this a feature, bug, or "issue"? :) Superm401 | Talk 18:52, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

SVG image not rendering

Can anyone suggest a reason why Image:UK_IT_and_NIC_2005-06.svg will not render correctly in Wikipedia? The file itself renders correctly in Firefox 1.5 (beta2), Opera 8.5, Adobe SVG viewer in Internet Explorer and Adobe Illustrator CS -- but not in Wikipedia. I would be grateful of any suggestions. --Throup (talk) 17:34, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

I've got it working now (at Image:UK Tax.svg). The problem was that my text editor (TextPad) was saving a UTF-8 BOM which was obviously confusing the server. Thanks to the W3C Validator for solving that one. --Throup (talk) 20:59, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

Uploading .pdf files

No response on Policy in 5 days, so I'll try here:

I've been patrolling images the last few days and noticed a few instances of people uploading .pdf files. Image:Turinys.pdf is an example from today. What is the intention of letting people do this? It won't show up as an image in our pages. (And, probably beside the point, it's not really a free format.) Tempshill 22:06, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

Using Contributions page to track Related changes

It appears that currently, we can't click on "Related changes" on a contributions page. This would be a useful feature, especially for tracking the edits of anons. I'm trying to reply to an anon that uses a small range of IPs, but have no way of knowing what their current IP. They are only editing a small number of articles, so I could check the history of each article to find the new IP. It'd be much easier to just click Related Changes. — BRIAN0918 • 2005-10-30 13:51

External Link Icon Problem?

I am using Opera 9 tp1 and it is displaying external link icons after internal links for all but the menu, tabs, and class .plainlinks. This didn't happen in 8.5 iirc. I can't find where this icon is put in (in the CSS) so I can't see why it's doing this. Please help me as this is getting really annoying. — Ilγαηερ (Tαlκ) 03:53, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

Fixed by adding something to User:Ilyanep/monobook.css, thanks User:IceKarma. Perhaps adding it to the sitewide stylesheet would help? — Ilγαηερ (Tαlκ) 04:31, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

editcountitis

I've noticed that the User edits counter doesnt work, which is a shame, because I want to see how much of a life I haven't got :) Sceptre 03:21, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

My understanding is that it was intentionally disabled. (It was never a supported application, and it was up to Kate (talk · contribs) whether or not to provide it.) You can still figure out your edit count on your contributions page by hand! — mendel ☎ 04:27, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

It appears to be working now. -- DS1953 ^talk 23:00, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

no, it was never intentionally disabled (well not recently, anyway :). please stop spreading this rumour. kate.

subst: problems

There are two issues I have with subst; it is not exactly equivalent to simple template transclusion.

First of all, it doesn't process <noinclude> and <includeonly>, which means some templates will behave differently if they are used as {{subst:template}} instead of {{template}}.

Second, parameters with default arguments remain in the substituted text. For example, in {{{2|Blah}}}, if the subst'ed template did not have a second parameter, it will insert {{{2|Blah}}} in the wikimarkup instead of Blah. This isn't a problem (currently), but it looks pretty silly. I can't seem to get in BugZilla at the moment, otherwise I'd have put this there. — squell\^talk 22:34, 29 October 2005 (UTC)

• • Both issues are listed on BugZilla. squell 23:29, 29 October 2005 (UTC)

Current SVG support?

What's the current state of SVG support in Wikipedia? The meta page m:SVG image support seems to be rather outdated. I've been trying to use SVGs for the first time (at polarizer), but the server-side renderer seems to have problems. Sometimes my images don't appear, and when they do render, the text (despite the glyphs apparently being properly embedded) doesn't use the correct font. My picture look ok off-line in the Adobe SVG renderer. I'd like to convert some of my diagrams (e.g.: image:Abbe-diagram.png) to SVG but not if the text doesn't render correctly. Is this as good as it gets at the moment, or am I doing something wrong? --Bob Mellish 16:57, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

At the moment we're using a slightly out-of-date version of librsvg to render SVGs; we'll upgrade that soon the latest goodies which should fix some bugs. In the future we may move to Batik as a renderer, but this requires some more footwork (setting up a server of some sort to get decent performance, etc). --Brion 21:06, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

I should also add that our librsvg is patched to disable external image references; this will cause files with such references to fail to render. (Otherwise it will happily grab any file off the filesystem and try including it as an inline image; this could be a security risk.) --Brion 21:08, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

No Google search of Commons

Google searching for "Rosa Parks" in en.wikimedia.org search or commons.wikipedia.org search produces no results. A .wikipedia.org search only produces 40 results, many from "Kate's Quickview". (SEWilco 15:19, 28 October 2005 (UTC))

The English Wikipedia is at en.wikipedia.org (with a 'P' not an 'M': pedia, not media), Commons is at commons.wikimedia.org (with an 'M' not a 'P': media, not pedia). Adjust and re-search. - Mark 15:26, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

Oops. I had started with commons.wikipedia.org search (produces no results) and forgot to change domains for wikipedia.org. So "en" still works, while "commons" does not. (SEWilco 15:35, 28 October 2005 (UTC))

Were there any Rosa Parks images on commons when google last spidered it (sometime in the last month, probably)? Searching commons for Monument Valley works fine. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 15:48, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

Help fixing a link

For the Reference desk, I'm trying to create a link that will help people ask their questions. To that end I've created a link, which is supposed to lead to an edit page with an special page at the top, to explain the rules.

The syntax is [{{SERVER}}{{localurl:Wikipedia:{{PAGENAME}}/science|action=edit&section=new&editintro=User_talk:Ec5618/Laboratory/Dog link] or variations thereof.

The odd thing is that Wikipedia:Reference_desk/science does work (although it's useless as it points to a page named Wikipedia:Reference_desk/science (uncapped science). The correct link should point to Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Science, but that one doesn't seem to work. The template that should explain the rules does not appear (and neither does the standard template).

Does anyone have any idea what I'm missing? Is it a bug or am I misusing something? -- Ec5618 10:14, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

It seems to have something to do with the fact that the page already exists, in which case there is no need for the standard Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name.-banner. Is there any way this can be enabled/bypassed? It would help to be able to do this on pages such as WP:RD, WP:HD , WP:AFD and the like. -- Ec5618 10:22, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

It's a great idea and could have many uses, but I think you've figured the problem yourself. Perhaps it's just a mediawiki tweak. violet/riga (t) 10:33, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

Drat, I really wasn't looking to spearhear a campaign to change the Mediawiki software. How would I go about fixing this? Who do I see? - Ec5618 17:29, 29 October 2005 (UTC)

Remove one licensing choice from Upload page

Hi,

On the "Upload file" page, can we remove the "Images copyrighted by Wikimedia" choice from the "Licensing" popup menu? That choice tags the image with "CopyrightByWikimedia", which says:

This image is copyrighted by the Wikimedia foundation. It is one of the official logos or designs used by the Wikimedia foundation or by one of its projects. Notwithstanding any other statement on this page this image has not been licensed under the GFDL. © & ™ All rights reserved, Wikimedia Foundation, Inc..

No ordinary user will ever use this tag, so it shouldn't be in the popup menu. Obviously the tag should exist, but anybody who will be using the tag will be familiar with using {{double brackets}}.

This came up when a user tagged Image:Le Marche.JPG with this tag from the popup menu because she wished to donate the photo to Wikipedia, and thought "CopyrightByWikimedia" would be nice to use. Thanks - Tempshill 04:04, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

Posted to Wikipedia:Bug reports. Tempshill 18:13, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

would like to place a link

Dear Sir/Madam, I am representing my client who owns a website on "coins and coin collecting". We would like to place a link in your website,please let us know how we go about it. Thanks for sparing some time. sukumar

Sorry, that's not appropriate for Wikipedia. If you have an incredibly notable website that an unrelated person would feel inspired to write about, then an article would be appropriate. I know the article title is offensive, but see Wikipedia:Spam. Thanks - Tempshill 04:10, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

If the site is quite comprehensive then adding a link to it under "External links" in coin collecting might be worthwhile. violet/riga (t) 10:35, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

Slow, sluggish and database problems

I've noticed that, over the last three days, Wikipedia has been rather slow, and the database is down 30% of the time Sceptre 18:03, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

Well, hop on #wikimedia-tech on irc.freenode.net and give us a hand. I see from your user page that you're a PHP programmer. Why not help out with some optimisation work? -- Tim Starling 19:15, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

I figured out the problem, it was something with Greasemonkey, not with Wikpedia Sceptre 08:49, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

Back and Forwards Button Behaviour with Articles with Same Name and Different Capitalisation

I ran into an interesting thing when looking at two articles: ETA and Eta. I have duplicated the same problem in both Firefox and MSIE on Windows.

To see this problem for yourself you need to have visited some other page (anywhere on the Web) before going to one or other of the above pages. Then load one or other of these pages. If you load ETA first you'll see that there is a disambiguation link at the top to Eta; if you load Eta first, the first link in the second section is to ETA. Click through to the "eta" page that you did not load. Now click your back button. You will go back two pages; the back button will skip the intervening page. Then click the forwards button; with Firefox you will go to the first "eta" page you loaded, but the forwards button will then be disabled, not allowing you to go forward to the next "eta" page; with MSIE you will go to the second "eta" page you loaded, skipping the intervening "eta" page.

Actually, here's an even more straightforward demonstration. Open a new browser window (Firefox or MSIE), type in the address for one of the "eta" pages, then click on the link to the other "eta" page. Look at your back button; it is still disabled, so you can't go back to the first "eta" page you loaded.

I'm not going to run an exhaustive survey of all the possible permutations and results, as I think I've made my point. It's also interesting that it happens in the latest versions of both Firefox and MSIE, so perhaps (since Windows is not a case-sensitive operating system) it's a Windows problem. Anyone out there running a desktop Linux system who can duplicate the problem?

Suggested solution: Perhaps the powers that be (forgive me; I'm new here) should restrict creating articles that have the same name, but are capitalised differently. Any thoughts, or am I missing something or the 50 billionth person to bring this up? :) I did look around but didn't see anything similar.

--Craig 11:03, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

Another example: from any Wiki page (say Main Page), go to CAT, then from CAT go to Cat (another article). Now hitting the "Back" button takes you back to the Main Page and not CAT. This is in IE6 on WinXP. --Bruce1ee 11:20, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

These are simply bugs in IE and Firefox (not exhibited by Safari on Max OS X, BTW). The hostname portion of a URL is case insensitive (because DNS is case insensitive), but the rest is case sensitive. Instituting a naming restriction in Wikipedia to cater to software bugs strikes me as completely unnecessary. -- Rick Block (talk) 14:53, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

Well, I agree with you 100% from a technological point of view and am aware that the host name is case-insensitive by definition. From a practicality and usability point of view I disagree with respect to the URI; what is right in a perfect world isn't necessarily right in the real world. In addition to that, I think that having articles with identical names but with different capitalisation (ETA/Eta, CAT/Cat, and probably lots more) is just confusing, especially to the masses who have forgotten where their "Shift" key is, so I would think that would tip the balance in favour of avoiding the issue. That said, if there are thousands of such articles out there then perhaps it's more work than it's worth, but I do think it's worth the consideration of whoever would actually make such technical and policy decisions. --Craig 15:12, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

Sorry if my answer sounded overly flippant. I meant in this case, not in general, I don't see a reason to change Wikipedia for these specific bugs. I'm not sure how many sets of articles there are with names that differ only in capitalization, but I suspect it's at least thousands. In all of these cases I think it's important to include a link to articles with titles in other capitalizations to address the confusion factor. With the 1.5 version of the software, article titles can now even include non-ASCII characters - I strongly suspect moving to case insensitive from where we are would be very unpopular (there's even a subset of users unhappy that the first character of an article title is always converted to upper case). And, if you're wondering, technical decisions are generally made by the volunteer developers who work on the project (anyone who can help is more than welcome to join the effort) and policy decisions are generally made by community consensus. If you feel strongly enough about this to pursue it in either the technical or policy arenas, please do so. I'm a user, just like you (perhaps I've been around longer) - ultimately your opinion counts just as much as mine. -- Rick Block (talk) 00:41, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

No worries about the almost-flippant reply. :)

It's not a life-threatening issue (the browser bug, that is) and I will sleep well tonight... assuming I actually go to bed for a change. (Thankfully the weekend is coming and I'll get away from the computer for a bit.) By the lack of response it seems I'm the only one (or one of two) who was rather alarmed by the discovery -- more "Cool, I found a bug!" alarmed than "Oh my god!" alarmed, mind you -- because the structure of Wikipedia URLs is rather unique compared to most other Web sites, so it's not something you'd usually run into on other sites. But balancing usability, technical and administrative issues, based on what you say it makes the most sense give the most weight to the administrative issue of retroactively dealing with a whole lot of articles with the same name and different capitalisation.

I will clarify though that I wasn't implying Wikipedia use a case-insensitive system; I've seen that issue addressed elsewhere. Although I didn't elaborate, my suggested solution (using "ETA" as an example) would have been to make both "ETA" and "Eta" a single disambiguation page and then require the "ETA" article on the Basque terrorist organisation to have a different title, either the full name (in Basque, Spanish or English, depending on existing guidelines) or something like "ETA (Basque organisation)".

Finally, thanks for the reminder about the Wiki organisational structure vis-a-vis consensus decisions on technical and policy matters. You correctly noted that I am rather new, and one of the things I am still learning is how to participate effectively and where, besides the obvious task of editing and creating articles.

--Craig 03:39, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

I reported the bug a few days ago and someone said it should be fixed in the next release of Firefox (1.5). -- Kjkolb 12:43, 29 October 2005 (UTC)

Great! Now can someone let Bill know? :) --Craig (t|c) 13:57, 29 October 2005 (UTC)

Works for me on Firefox 1.5 beta2, so the bug should already be fixed. --cesarb 15:11, 29 October 2005 (UTC)

HTTP 500 errors

I keep getting "HTTP 500 - Internal server error", over and over again, whether I want to view a page, edit it, delete it, whatever. I have to keep trying five or six times before the task finally takes.

Also, if I use my Back arrow to go back to the Recent changes page, instead of taking me to the most recent version of the page, it takes me to the first version of the page I saw tonight. User:Zoe|^(talk) 03:49, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

I'm not experiencing any such problem, is it over? --Brion 06:16, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

I've been getting this a lot for the last couple days. "Refresh" usually works though. What is interesting to me is that it is a new error; I'd never seen it until a couple days ago. (Occasionally I get the "sorry we have a problem" error on a refresh of an HTTP 500 error page.) Antandrus (talk) 15:26, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

This doesn't seem to be happening tonight. User:Zoe|^(talk) 03:27, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

Missing entries in Watchlist

No matter how much I fiddle with my watchlist, some edits are missing. If I look at my contributions, all edits they appear, and the page history, they're all there too, but not in the watchlist. In fact, it seems like the most recent edit of a page is listed, but earlier edits aren't. If I edit a page, the listing gets updated to that edit, and any previous ones disappear.

I saw an old bug on bugzilla that was fixed, so its not that. I try Ctrl+F5, restart FireFox, restart PC to no avail. Also happens in IE. --K. AKA Konrad West TALK 03:34, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

That's not an error, that's normal! By design, the watchlist shows only the most recent edit. It's a short overview of what's been changed, not a complete list of all changes. --Brion 06:13, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

Bizarre. I guess I never noticed that that's how it works. Anyway, I wish it would show all the edits; then I can monitor pages just with the diffs from the watchlist. Oh well! --K. AKA Konrad West TALK 06:29, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

Non Isolated High Voltage DC Testing

Looking for procedures, experiences and practices on how to complete a non-isolated 24kv DC test placing a engineer/human at equal potential to the 24kv DC test object without personal protective equipment (PPE) utilized.

Please reply with any technical references, practices, references, etc.

J. Harvey

<email removed>

This question should be asked on the reference desk. --cesarb 15:14, 29 October 2005 (UTC)

Internal Links

I'm curious, I made an article WITH internal links but without any categorization (I'm new at this), and then somehow the logger didn't record any of them and then the admin reinstated some (not all) of them, along with the categorization. I'm very curious as to why the logger would remove them? Is it because I didn't put a categorization? I'm just confused because I wouldn't want to go through all of it and put internal links all over again in another instance. And my friend doesn't believe me when I tell him I did indeed put them in.

• What is the name of the article? Joyous (talk) 01:37, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

• The reference to "the logger didn't record any of them and then the admin reinstated" suggests to me that perhaps "the logger" may be "my watchlist". As the watchlist only shows the most recent change, the person only saw someone else's edit which added categorization. The editor may be unaware of the ability to go to an Article and using the History feature to see all edits. (SEWilco 14:54, 27 October 2005 (UTC))

Article not appearing in category

Article Ça Va has category Category:Avant-progressive rock albums, yet it does not appear in Category:Avant-progressive rock albums. What gives? --Bruce1ee 06:04, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

It showed up after I null-edited the article. I've noticed that sometimes "failed" edits go through on the article, but related things like category listings, whatlinkshere lists, and image links don't get updated. —Cryptic (talk) 06:37, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for that. The last edit I did on the article (which was to add the cat) did give an error and it logged me out - hence the anon edit. BTW how do you do a "null edit"? --Bruce1ee 06:51, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

Edit the article and hit "save" without changing anything. —Cryptic (talk) 07:08, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

what if the page i want to create is already created, but the already created page feautres a different definition/information?

i'm very sorry if this is mentioned somewhere else on the site, but i can't find it.

please help.

Say you wanted to make an article about "Joe Taylor", a baseball player. But there was already an article at "Joe Taylor", for a politician. Then you'd create "Joe Taylor (baseball player)" instead, and you'd put a little note on the top of both Joe Taylor pages pointing to the other, saying "For the baseball player, see Joe Taylor (baseball player)". More details at Wikipedia:Disambiguation. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 23:59, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

(the following post was written at the same time as the one above e.g. i got an edit conflict)

see wikipedia:disambiguation for details but you basically have 3 choices depending on the relative merits of the two topics.

add an inline disambig link to the existing article pointing at your new one.

move the existing article and put an inline disambig link at the top of your new one (be VERY carefull with this choice though you are likely to ignite flamewars but sometimes it is the write option)

move the existing article and put a disambiguation page in its place. Try not to do that if there are only ever likely to be two articles on that disabiguation page though that just means everyone has to navigate to a second page rather than a portion of them (and hopefully that portion should be less than half if you choose the primary topic correctly)

remember when moving articles always do so by using the proper page move feature. If you can't do it yourself go through requested moves or ask an admin directly. Plugwash 00:05, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

reverting an image

A new user uploaded a new pic replacing the image "Resurrection.jpg". How do I revert the image? (I already told the new user about this and asked him to upload his image under a different name.) Thanks - Tempshill 18:27, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

Click on the (rev) link next to the revision you want to revert to. ~~ N (t/c) 18:33, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

Thanks. Tempshill 23:35, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

Commons image problems

See User:SPUI/wtf. Image:Amtrak schematic.png exists on commons, and I can embed it full-size or in a frame, or even thumbed as part of the text. But thumbing it in a frame gives a red link. --SPUI (talk) 09:23, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

• See above, where I had the same problem. They no longer thumbnail images larger than 3500x3500. For you, your best bet is to make a smaller version and add a link to the larger version on its Image: page. — BRIAN0918 • 2005-10-24 11:50
  • Argh, what bullshit. A smaller version won't show everything. --SPUI (talk) 21:40, 24 October 2005 (UTC)
    • In this case it may be a good idea to adopt the scheme that was used before thumbnailing was implemented. Create a super-simplified fat-line version with no text (maybe with a simple US coastline - I can give you a vector of that if you need one) but the same basic scheme (colors etc.) as your mega-detailed version. Put that in an image-frame on the target page, and link to the full version from both the frame caption and the small image's imagepage. Even if the thumbnail code did work on your Amtrak map, the thumbnail would inevitably look spindly and blocky and generally nasty. It would be particularly cool if SVGs had adaptive level of detail, but (right now) one has to do that stuff manually. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 18:48, 25 October 2005 (UTC)
• I made a smaller version of commons:Image:Tectonic plates.png, so the thumbnail in Plate tectonics would work. It got reverted. Maybe that means more poorly-announced changes are about to take place. (SEWilco 20:42, 26 October 2005 (UTC))
  • Further activity no longer implies any changes. (SEWilco 14:49, 28 October 2005 (UTC))

Block link in the toolbox

There's now a block link in the toolbox for administrators when visiting user and user talk pages. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 09:10, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

It doesn't appear to work in the Classic skin, however. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 18:53, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

Whitespace issue

File:Toomuchwhitespace.PNG

Too much whitespace

Far too much whitespace! what is going on? - Ta bu shi da yu 08:20, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

Maybe somebody inserted a <br clear="all" /> tag? Just for testing, I inserted that tag between your post and mine. Thue | talk 12:25, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

I just came across this on another article (Hugo Chávez). The problem is the two images, one directly above each other, each "connected" to a different paragraph. The formatting, as it's given, requires that each of their tops be aligned with their respective paragraphs, and the only way for it to manage that is to add a bunch of whitespace and shift the lower image's paragraph downwards... Anyway, to avoid it, you can either move/remove/resize one of the images, or move one of them over to the other side. Or add more text, of course. Also note that one reason why this problem isn't usually caught is because you won't see it if you just use section editing on one of the two paragraphs involved; whoever added the image that "broke" it didn't notice because of that. --Aquillion 07:24, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

I have seen the same problem on a lot of pages. They look fine in Firefox, but "spaced out" in MSIE. I have solved the problem, especially if the text to images ratio is low, by putting the images together at the top of the article rather than attaching them to paragraphs. Hard to explain, but if you look at the before and after results and look at the code you'll see what I mean. Sorry, the only page I've edited recently that I can remember had this problem deals with the vagina, so you have been warned:

• Before
• After
• Diff

If you look at these pages in Firefox, they will be identical, but in MSIE 6 on Windows XP you will see that the "before" look is spaced out and the "after" looks fine.

--Craig 10:21, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

Bad Section Edits

A few minutes ago, I made two section edits that went awry and erased everything but the edited section. It may have happened to others; I'm not sure. The diffs I could find, all showing the trademark "section edit" summary, are http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Superm401/Sandbox&diff=26228979&oldid=26228910 and http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Reference_desk&diff=26228252&oldid=26228181 --Superm401 | Talk 01:59, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

Can you describe the editing and submission process for these edits? On both, you had made the previous edit shortly before. Was there simultaneous editing going on? Back/forth clicking? etc --Brion 02:22, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

I didn't ever have either open for editing in more than one tab(or window). I also didn't use the back button in these cases. First, I edited the RD talk and posted a section(I think manually, not with the new section button[I don't think it matters, but...). Pretty quickly I realized I had a typo, but I am confident that it was after the page had fully loaded. I clicked the section edit button and added the "?". I think I previewed it, just because I hate to have to make two (or more) minor edits after a meaningful one. It previewed fine; the rest of the page wasn't there, but that's normal for section edits. I then saved, and everything vanished but the section. I then modified my sandbox page to have a few sections. I saved, and I'm pretty sure waited for it to load completely(though I'm slightly less sure about this one), clicked the edit section button again, made a nonsense edit, then saved. I was very careful to pay attention to what I was doing, so I know I didn't click preview(why would I). However, it forced me to preview 3 times, the most I've ever had. Finally, it saved and erased the rest of the page, as expected. In both cases I definitely used the edit section button. I'm sure some of that detail is extraneous, but I hope I've clarified. Superm401 | Talk 03:34, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

Numerous times on a very old, slow laptop I have found that if I don't wait for the entire page to render in Firefox (any version) then the submit button will act like a preview button. It's very annoying. - Ta bu shi da yu 10:55, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

It also happens on newer desktops. I've been getting this every now and again - especially accompanying the "preview" glitch mentioned a bit further up this page. If I'm editing one section of a long page and press save and it comes back with preview, I've learnt to copy what I've written to clipboard, reload the article and re-edit the section - otherwise I'm liable to lose the rest of the page. This happens in IE, in Safari, and in Mozilla. Grutness...wha? 22:47, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

Image display problem???

Can anyone figure out why the first image at Great Lakes Storm of 1913 won't display? It does exist, if you go directly to the image page, but it won't show up in the article, just as a red link. It also doesn't show up at Gallery of 1913 Great Lakes storm images/Other images. — BRIAN0918 • 2005-10-21 03:15

The problem is that it's a PNG which is over the 12.5 megapixel limit. Please reupload it in a format that won't kill the servers, e.g. a JPEG or small PNG. -- Tim Starling

Way to break our shit. --SPUI (talk) 21:42, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

Same to you. You crash the site, I'll break your shit, fair deal? -- Tim Starling 18:31, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

The Mystery of the Disappearing Watched Page

I've noticed that some of the pages in my watchlist occasionaly get removed. In particular, I have to add Wikipedia:Administrator intervention against vandalism to my watchlist on an almost weekly basis. Has anyone else noticed this? - Trevor MacInnis (Talk | Contribs) 00:34, 21 October 2005 (UTC)

I've had this same problem with a couple of the pages on my watchlist. Wikipedia:Templates for deletion seems to be the most often one to disappear from my watchlist. BlankVerse ∅ 02:30, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

I wonder if it's at all related to Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous)/Archive 46#Watchlist weirdness... —Cryptic (talk) 07:09, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

Disabling the new skip to navigation and skip to search links?

Is there any way to disable the new links at the top of the page that take you directly to the search and navigation sections? I don't need them because I can already use keyboard shortcuts to access the sections, and the links are a distraction for me. Also, was there a discussion page for this change, and if so, where was it? - Graham/pianoman87 talk 04:21, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

They are hidden in the CSS, and are designed for text-mode and voice browsers. If you're seeing them unexpectedly, can you provide details of your browser configuration and preferences? --Brion 04:25, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

I am using a screen reader to navigate wikipedia, so I guess it means I should be expecting them. I'm using internet explorer 6 with windows xp Service Pack 2 and jaws for windows. - Graham/pianoman87 talk 04:39, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

I'm also using the monobook skin. I only started seeing them today. - Graham/pianoman87 talk 04:41, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

See User talk:Tom-#Jump links. --Brion 01:30, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

Hi there, I'm now back after a week away in sunny Edinburgh, going to look into this in the next few days. May well make an option to disable these, but they really need to be enabled by default. Tom- 15:58, 21 October 2005 (UTC)

It would be best if they were enabled by default, for novice users of accessibility products. As I can use shortcut keys to accomplish the same function, they are not needed. How is it determined whether or not I am using a screen access program? Graham/pianoman87 talk 11:45, 22 October 2005 (UTC)

These can now be disabled with a new preference: Enable "jump to" accessibility links. Tom- 00:42, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

Can't make new pages with IE

Here's another strange one... ever since the block I mentioned above was listed, I've been unable to make any new pages with IE. Every time I try, I get "HTTP Error: Resource is not found". I can still create pages OK with Safari and Mozilla, but I don't always have access to them. Editing existing pages with IE seems to be fine. It's got me stumped - anyone got any idea what's going on? (I haven't changed my preferences at all, so it's unlikely to be anything to do with that). Grutness...wha? 14:22, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

Interesting - sounds like it may be related to the recent change to make non-existent pages correctly return 404 Not Found. When exactly do you get this message (steps to reproduce)? And do you know if you're using a proxy server? Tom- 15:31, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

Actually, my bot has been getting the same error. If I create the new category, it runs fine, but if I dont' I get the 404 error. I thought it had to do with using this link en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=NON-existant-article&action=edit instead of en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=, but I got the same error with both. This is only when trying to create a new file. ∞Who?¿? 15:38, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

You use Macs, don’t you? There is special processing for Mac IE now, see bugzilla:2676. Susvolans ⇔ 15:42, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

Oh yea, no, no proxy server for me. Windows XP btw. The page works fine with Mozilla, but shows up different in IE. When my bot runs this command:

GET http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Category:Bosnian_football_managers&action=edit

It gets this in return response. I think the new changes send a 404 code with the page, IE sometimes will igonre the server side 404 page and use its own, Mozilla will use the server 404. Perl on the other hand just sees the 404 and dies. ∞Who?¿? 15:50, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

I'm also having trouble creating new pages. Will try another browser and let you know the results. paul klenk ^talk 22:48, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

Yeah, it's an IE thing. Just created a new page with Mozilla. paul klenk ^talk 23:09, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

FWIW, I do use IE and Mac (IE5.2.1 and OS10.2.8), but creating new pages was no problem at all up until yesterday. As I said, it's fine if I try to create new pages with Safari or Mozilla, but not IE. I don't know if I'm using a proxy server (sorry), but the step in the process is identical to that mentioned above. If, say, I tried to load either [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mippity-moppity-moo] or [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mippity-moppity-moo&action=edit] it would try to load but would be unable to, coming up with the message as mentioned above. Grutness...wha? 23:32, 13 October 2005 (UTC)

I have the same problem. When I click on a red link, I get a 404 error instead of an edit page. And I'm on Windows Me. User:Zoe|^(talk) 03:11, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

Yep, it works fine with Firefox, but I've been having problems with Firefox lately and hate to use it. BTW, with IE I also get the 404 error when I try to "delete" a page that somebody else has already deleted. 172.184.238.193 03:16, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

Whoops, that was me. User:Zoe|^(talk) 03:26, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

Windows ME? Egads! Which version of IE? android79 03:28, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

6.0.2800.1106. I can't afford to upgrade my operating system.  :( User:Zoe|^(talk) 03:51, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

Our article on the 404 error says IE will ignore a 404 if it's less than 512 bytes. A quick look at the sample Who's linked to above shows it's almost 25 kilobytes, so it shouldn't be a problem. We really need to do something to reduce the bloat. --cesarb 03:47, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

A quick look shows more than 10 kilobytes are used by the <charinsert> bits on MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning. --cesarb 03:54, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

Works fine for me in IE 5.2.3, Mac OS X 10.4.2. --Brion 22:00, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

strange - still no go in IE5.2.1/OS10.2.8. Grutness...wha? 01:12, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

Still happening for me. User:Zoe|^(talk) 03:53, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

Zoe, I had this problem before, but have since been able to create new pages. Now I just tried it again, and was unable to. paul klenk ^talk 05:13, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

I've switched back to Firefox in order to access Wikipedia, though I hope it isn't going to hang my computer up like it has been doing. But this is unacceptable for people who have no choice but to use IE, the largest browser in the world. User:Zoe|^(talk) 03:47, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

I cannot find any report on bugzilla about this problem. If it is still happening, someone should file a bug report there. --cesarb 23:14, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

Okay. (Embarrassed silence) So... erm... how do you do that? Grutness...wha? 00:17, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/, you have to register with your email (which is visible to anyone, unlike here), chose "Enter Bug", "MediaWiki", and enter the details. I'd do it (I already have an account there), if not for the fact that I do not have a computer with MSIE, and so the bug report would end up like "someone said somewhere MSIE has some problem with something related to 404s on the edit pages". --cesarb 00:29, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

Did you already report it? It's not necessarily an IE issue, as perl's get function is now receiving the 404, where as it didn't before. I have a temporary workaround, but think they must have changed something in the response headers for this to happen. I don't think it has to do with a Microsoft update because it effected people with Macs too. «»Who?¿?^meta 10:07, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

I found this report bugzilla:3161, it deals with the Special:Export function, but it discusses 404 header on the GET function but not with post. I am not sure this is the same issue or not. «»Who?¿?^meta 10:15, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

Now submitted as bugzilla:3730

This is still happening. This needs to be fixed now. Not only does it make it impossible to warn vandals before I block them, I can't create new AfD entries, I can't see the contributions of users whose edits I see on Recent Changes, and it's going to drive away new users who will almost surely be using IE. 22:52, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

Since Tom hasn't made any further response on this I've gone ahead and reverted the change for now. Please let me know if it's all working properly now. --Brion 02:48, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

Now works fine using PERL using GET, described above. Thanks. «»Who?¿?^meta 03:46, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

Thank you! I can now make new pages in IE again! Whee! Grutness...wha? 11:11, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

Me, too! Huzzah! User:Zoe|^(talk) 02:29, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

Broken redirects

A lot of redirects are listed on Special:BrokenRedirects because they have a weird non-template after them:

 #REDIRECT [[Decision tree]] {{R from part of subject}}

is typical. Why are they there? Is it OK to just remove the stuff after the last "]" ? -- SGBailey 17:35, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

This is an attempt to categorize redirects, so that we can filter them if necessary. (For instance, for a print Wikipedia, we might want to build an index that includes redirects for common alternate names, but not for misspellings). In the past, additional text could be included after a redirect link, so long as it was on the same line (before a line break), so that's where the redirect templates were placed. This functionality was broken during the MediaWiki 1.4 upgrade -- a bug has been filed Bug 927. These may need to be deleted, but talk to the people at Wikipedia_talk:Template_messages/Redirect_pages before you do it; they've done a lot of work that would be hard to recover if it turns out there is a technical fix for this. — Catherine\^talk 19:08, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

Image tag won't work

OK, I know I'm going to make a fool of myself when someone points out some really obvious thing I've missed, but I've tried. Can anyone explain why the image tag at the top of the section at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Condom&oldid=27243082#Proper_use is not working? Even if reduced to an absolute minimum of parameters (i.e., just using the image name), all you get is a link. The link works and the image is there, but it does not show up as intended on the page. I even tried moving it somewhere else on the page (right to the top) in case some bug was causing a problem with an open tag somewhere, but the same thing happens.

The mark-up:

[[Image:CondomUse.jpg|thumb|100px|right|Male condom application.]]

results in:

<a href="/wiki/Image:CondomUse.jpg" title="Image:CondomUse.jpg">thumb|100px|right|Male condom application.</a>

Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks.

--Craig (t|c) 04:53, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

Hmm. Since I've tried inserting the image the regular way, I presume it is on the Bad image list. I'll check. Titoxd^(?!?) 05:51, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

There it is: MediaWiki:Bad image list. Sorry, it just can't be placed there. Titoxd^(?!?) 05:52, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

Interesting. Thanks. On that page it says, "These images are prohibited by technical means from being displayed inline in articles." Is it just my imagination, or is it sheer coincidence that all of the images (a grand total of 7 of them) that cannot be displayed in-line for "technical" reasons, all display the human male penis? There are plenty of other such images in relevant articles, so I'm at a loss to see the technical reason for this. Any idea? --Craig (t|c) 13:27, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

OK, I just re-read that. It says "... by technical means..." not "... for technical reasons...". Still my question stands. In the penis article there are other pictures (some copies of the "bad images") displayed in-line, so the existence of this list seems very odd to me. Still interested in comments from someone who knows why this list exists. Thanks. --Craig (t|c) 13:31, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

That list includes images which are often used on vandalism. The original reason for the creation of that hidden MediaWiki feature is still the first image on the list, Image:Autofellatio 2.jpg. The images displayed inline on penis are reduced versions of the full-sized images (which are on the list), which makes them less useful for vandalism (it doesn't have the same effect as a full-sized one would). And no, I have no idea why the images most often used on vandalism are images of the human male penis. --cesarb 14:10, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

Ah, OK. Thanks for the explanation. --Craig (t|c) 14:49, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

Limit search to own watchlist

In the search tool we can limit a search to specific namespaces. Is it possible somehow to limit a search to the pages on one's own watchlist? If not, is this bug-worthy? --Eddi (Talk) 01:33, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

It's not possible now, and while you can make an enhancement request at http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org , I don't think the developers will make it a priority. Superm401 | Talk 01:43, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

Confirmation prompt for cache purge

Why do we now have a page asking us if we really want to purge the cache for a specific page? Are users really purging too often? It seems to me that the confirmation page would add more to the server load as it has to load and display the new intermediate page before taking action. slambo 16:26, 7 November 2005 (UTC)

Note that this only happens on certain pages - i.e., those that are large but frequently visited and frequently modified (like WP:AFD's subpages, for instance). I don't fully understand the technical side of these things, but I can see that if the cache was purged every time someone visited those pages it might actually be more strain than only doing so intermittently when asked. Grutness...wha? 23:51, 7 November 2005 (UTC)

It needs to be a POST request so that search engine spiders don't purge our cache when they follow the links that people seem to be putting everywhere. Humans can hit the button as often as they like, within reason, I don't think that'll cause any significant server strain. Feel free to add a purge tab using user javascript, like what Alphax has done: User:Alphax/monobook.js. -- Tim Starling 04:19, 8 November 2005 (UTC)

If it is indeed mostly if not entirely due to the spiders is there a way to bypass it using your custom js file? Jtkiefer ^{T | @ | C} ----- 19:49, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

Tabs

I've noticed that the tabs at the Spanish Wikipedia have a little bend in the upper-right corner, which makes them look more like tabs. Just wondering, is there a reason why we don't do that here? Because the site would look a little bit nicer in my opinion. Titoxd^(?!?) 05:44, 7 November 2005 (UTC)

It's a Mozilla CSS extension - not guaranteed to work on all browsers, and besides, we've ALWAYS had square tabs. If you want, you can add the following to your monobook.css:

.pBody 
{
   padding: 0.3em 0.1em;
   -moz-border-radius-topright: 0.5em;
}
.portlet h5 
{
   background-color: #e0e3e6;
   border: thin solid silver;
   -moz-border-radius-topright: 0.5em;
}
#p-cactions ul li, #p-cactions ul li a 
{  
  -moz-border-radius-topright: 0.5em;
/*  -moz-border-radius-topleft: 0.5em; */
}
#content
{
  -moz-border-radius-topleft: 0.5em;
}

HTH, Alphax ^τεχ 08:37, 7 November 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia Source Code

Hi; Is the source code open? Where do I find it? TIA, beno

Yes, it is. See Mediawiki, our article about the software that runs Wikipedia. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 22:51, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

Or perhaps more usefully, http://www.mediawiki.org. Rob Church ^Talk 19:55, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

y with macron problem

y with macron, ȳ, Unicode 233 hex, which is used in Old English morphology, appears as a box on my computer even though it is enclosed in Template Unicode. The same problem occurs with Template IPA: ȳ

I use MSIE 6.0, and my fonts include Arial Unicode MS, Microsoft Sans Serif.

The problem appears to be that Arial Unicode MS appears before Microsoft Sans Serif in MediaWiki:Common.css, but Arial Unicode MS doesn't support codes 218-24F. --teb728 10:46, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

You should ask about it at Template talk:Unicode. --cesarb 18:52, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

Kates Tool

I have just used Kates Tool and it only credited me with 592 when the last time I checked I had 617. That is 25 edits lost. I don't want to lose edits. Help. Thanks.--Dakota ^{t e} 08:18, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

(replied on Wikipedia talk:Kate's Tool. kate)

Error is back

The "Internal error: no valid response from search server (10.0.0.17)" error is back. -42istheanswer 04:45, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

So it is. Personally, I just always use a google site search. I.E. "site:en.wikipedia.org <terms here>". Superm401 | Talk 04:51, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

Loss of session data

I've been getting this error all day, and logging out and back in doesn't make it go away. Server troubles?

Sorry! We could not process your edit due to a loss of session data. Please try again. If it still doesn't work, try logging out and logging back in. --Rayc 22:46, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

You could try deleting all your wikipedia.org cookies. --cesarb 04:56, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

bot to delete self reference redirects

Looking through WP:RFD, there are many votes for deletion of redirects to the wikipedia namespace to WP:ASR. I propose there to be a bot to search for redirects from the main to the wikipedia namespace and to delete them. There could be other combinations as well between various namespaces. Can this be done? --Zondor 19:17, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

Wikilink problems in template

• I'm trying to have a Wikilink be generated from a template but the [[ opening brackets interfere with the enclosing template. The entire template becomes displayed instead of only the brackets. {{show1|1=[[}}Horse]] should produce a wikilink to article "Horse". Closing brackets behave as expected. (SEWilco 07:04, 5 November 2005 (UTC))

• Second problem: How can a pipe symbol be within a template? '''[[Horse{{show1|<nowiki>|</nowiki>}}Cow]]''' [[Horse|Cow]] does not produce a recognized wikilink. The nowiki seems to be needed to express a pipe symbol within a template, but I think the nowiki is emitted and interpreted within the attempted wikilink. (SEWilco 07:04, 5 November 2005 (UTC))

• Incidentally, I just realized a way to work around these problems, at least for my situation. Created Template:Wikilink which contains the troublesome characters in raw form so they don't need to be part of a process to assemble a Wikilink. {{wikilink|Horse|Cow}}: {{wikilink|Horse|Cow}} (SEWilco 07:28, 5 November 2005 (UTC))

Why do you need either of these templates? ~~ N (t/c) 02:16, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

Yes, what were you trying to do with the original template? Superm401 | Talk 03:33, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

Optional Authorlink parameter on Template:Book reference for linking to an author's Wikipedia article. Original attempts involved inserting the troublesome characters where appropriate. (SEWilco 04:11, 6 November 2005 (UTC))

copyright dates?

My son is trying to make a bibliography card and I don't see anywhere where I would find the author or a date, etc... can you assist?

See Wikipedia:Citing Wikipedia. ~~ N (t/c) 00:57, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

Romulus Augustus

Can someone please clean up and remove the vandalism on the Wiki article about Romulus Augustus? Also, make it easier to report site vandalism please.

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

Since anyone can revert vandalism, this usually isn't a problem. To revert vandalism, just click on the history link, at the top of any page, and look for the most recent unvandalised version. When you then edit that out-of-date revision of the article (click on the edit link at the top) and simply click save page. You'll have saved a vandalism free version over the vandalised one. -- Ec5618 23:47, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

...Baby One More Time

I cannot access the article on the song "...Baby One More Time" by Britney Spears. I get the error message "The Document contains no data" when I try. I am using Firefox on OS X -- anyone else having this problem? -- I've tried it with safari and it doesn't work there either. -- i sent the link to two of my friends, one running XP and the other on OSX (not sure what their browsers are) and both were able to load. Anyone with any ideas? I first noticed the problem at around 10:30 today -- i've never tried to access the page before so i dont know if this is a new problem for meTastemyHouse 18:18, 4 November 2005 (UTC), edited 18:21

• Seems OK to me. ...Baby One More Time redirects to Baby One More Time correctly. This is using FirebertFox on WinXP. --Bob Mellish 19:45, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

• • K, correction: the problem i've having is with THIS link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...Baby_One_More_Time_%28single%29 -- the song, not the album TastemyHouse 22:21, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

• • Works for me in Windows XP IE. WauloK 22:41, 4 November 2005 (UTC)
    • this really makes no sense. -- I just set up popups, and if i mouseover the link to the page ...Baby One More Time (single) -- the popup loads fine, and i'm able to click the redirect and get to ...Baby One More Time (song), but i get an error if i try to load the (single) article directly. I dont get it. TastemyHouse 23:31, 4 November 2005 (UTC)
    • Okay! This makes even less sense! I can only get to the ...Baby One More Time (song) article by clicking the link to it in the popup. even though its identical to the link I just placed on this page not 4 minutes ago, if i attempt to get to the article by any means other than clicking on the link in the popup, i get the same error. I can't get to it by typing in the URL of the article directly or by using the "search" box. I can access it ONLY by clicking on the link in the popup. this means that the issue isn't really a problem, since i can access the article... its just... why?! TastemyHouse 23:38, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

• • • • The page for the album of the same name does not work for me or other people behind the same router as me either. is there something special about these articles? why can't get get to them? TastemyHouse 23:47, 4 November 2005 (UTC)
      • Maybe somehow your router blocks links with two or more dots together for some bizarre reason? (just guessing) WauloK 12:31, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

• Perhaps try Baby One More Time (single)? It is a redirect, without the dots. --Fastfission 19:43, 5 November 2005 (UTC)
• seems like its the dots thats screwing me over.. but why is the popup able to properly load it if its my the network not handling the dots properly? oh well. one of those weird things. TastemyHouse 00:44, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

  I'm not a user of the popups, but I'd guess they use /w/index.php?title= instead of /wiki/, which could make a difference. --cesarb 04:22, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

An Error

The search feature has recently been giving the error

Internal error: no valid response from search server (10.0.0.17)

What does this mean? How can it be fixed? - 42istheanswer 02:20, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

One of the search servers had gotten a bit sluggish with too much memory usage. I've restarted them and they seem happier now. --Brion 06:27, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

Can you insert a photo to go with words about pareidolia?

i wrote some words on your pareidolia page and would like to show the example of what i am talking about, without the reader going to the link. Is that possible? i think it would look good on the page. Thanks fred ressler.

If you've got the picture on your computer, upload it at Special:Upload. You can then put the image into the article by using the following notation: [[Image:file_name_of_your_image.jpg]]. You can also do fancy things with your image using the extended image syntax.

Hopefully that clears things up, but if you're still confused we can try again.

--Cherry blossom tree 23:59, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

That assumes, of course, that you created the image yourself, and therefore own the copyright on it. -- Jmabel | Talk 01:56, 7 November 2005 (UTC)

I can't stay logged in

Sorry to re-open this question, but every so often I have difficulty staying logged in. When I go to IRC to check it out, I am informed that the problem is my side, even though when I am experiencing this it doesn't matter where I am logging on to Wikipedia from, it happens. It's just started happening again, I'm fed up with it, and I really don't want to go through the same "it's something wrong your side/no it's not" discussion all over again. What causes this and how can I make sure it stops happening? -- 86.134.201.199 21:07, 27 October 2005 (UTC) (Francs2000)

I experienced the same problem recently. Although I can't tell just what the problem was, it seems the cookies get corrupted somehow (just a guess); the problem went away as soon as I deleted them. Ddawson 12:59, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

This has been happening to me with extremely monotonous regularity over the past couple of days, and it's getting worse. It's now reaching the stage where I get logged out mid-edit (the edit session complains that it's "lost session information" when I save and invites me to re-try the save, which sometimes works). Quite how this is down to cookie corruption at my end I can't see, since a) it comes and goes (if my machine had a problem I wouldn't expect it to cure itself) and b) the only site where I see this is WP. Tonywalton  | Talk 17:27, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

Yep. I've had this happen so many times. I created an account so at least my articles would be traceable to me, but by the time I've finished writing it I've been logged out. Occasionally I'm lucky and it's just lost the session info and I have to re-submit it 5 times for it to take. In fact, I was just logged out while typing this!!! WauloK 22:35, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

"Save page" showing a preview instead

Lately, I've been having a recurrent problem with page editing. I'll make the changes I want, then click on "Save page", but instead of the changes being recorded I get a preview, like I would if I had clicked on "Show preview" instead. Sometimes this will happen four or five times before I can get the changes to register. Is this a known problem, or something on my end? —Josiah Rowe 17:21, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

You're not the only one; I get this a lot, and others have said the same thing. Don't know what is causing it, but if you keep trying eventually the page will save. Antandrus (talk) 17:23, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

Still doing it -- SGBailey 15:34, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

It happens when the servers are slow. I'll venture an educated guess based on my understanding of how this whole thing works, but without having looked at the sources and the configuration: when you click "save", your request goes to a front-end server handling HTTP requests. It sees that you want to save and contacts a database server to store the new text. If the database servers are too overloaded and can't fulfill that store request, the front end server gets a time-out. It knows it couldn't save the text and does the next best thing: it treats it like a preview. (A preview is essentially just a save without storing the changes in the database.) There you are. Maybe someone truly knowledgeable will pipe up now and correct all the errors in this description... Lupo 18:55, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

Allright, I have now taken a look at the sources, and it seems my guess was not correct. That's what happens when you speculate out into the blue... It's got nothing to do with timeouts from the database. Instead, what happens is the following: when you log in, the servers create a so-called "session": you get assigned some identification number (stored in a cookie in your browser and given back to the Wikipedia servers with each request you make). On the server side, the Wikipedia servers use this ID to associate with it certain data that should persist across several requests: stuff that should remain while you're logged on, i.e for the duration of your log-in session. One such data item associated with your "session" is a random string of 32 hexadecimal digits: a so-called "token". This token is included in every "edit" screen and sent back to Wikipedia when you click "save". (It's also sent back when you click one of the other buttons, but that's besides the point here. The purpose of this token is explained on the mailing list.) If the token sent back to Wikipedia doesn't match the token the servers have stored with your session, the software refuses to save and handles the request as a preview. For some reason, the servers seem to temporarily "forget" what token they had assigned to your session, and thus get a mismatch, and you get a preview instead of a save. Why the servers have this problem is unknown. However, I stand by my claim that it primarily happens when the servers are (over-)loaded or slow. I've never had it happen when Wikipedia was running smooth and fast. And retrying usually succeeds eventually. Lupo 13:09, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

And yes, it's a known problem, and yes, retrying will eventually succeed. Lupo 18:55, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

Apparently now it says "We could not process your edit due to a loss of session data." I've been seeing that a lot in the past few days. Pfalstad 19:20, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

Edit inconsistency

Over in VP(policy) some text vanished between two edits. The inserted paragraph and the preceding paragraph in this edit [2] do not show up in the next edit [3]. (SEWilco 14:58, 11 November 2005 (UTC))

Standard wikilink colour

I posted a query about this a while back - what is the code (e.g. #FFFFFF) for the standard colour of wikilinks? I can't trace it on the list of colours and 'blue' is slightly off. If anyone knows, I'd be very grateful. Thanks, --HighHopes ^{(T)⋅(+)⋅(C)⋅(E)⋅(P)} 23:37, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

You should be able to find this and everything else in the style in the style sheet. Look for the 'a' (anchor) definitions. --Brion 05:18, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

Found it - thank you very much. --HighHopes ^{(T)⋅(+)⋅(C)⋅(E)⋅(P)} 14:13, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

HMTL issue - width of boxes

The page is question is Portal:Politics. I'm trying to do two things - firstly, I would like the box with the pictures of a ballot box and Plato to line up vertically with the 'Politics Portal' box (and the other boxes beneath it) - so it just needs to be a little wider. How can I do this? Similarly, the boxes where the page is split into columns are nicely aligned - the gaps between boxes and header boxes are uniform, but I cannot get this to work for the big box at the bottom with the list of aritcles - the gap between this and its header is too large, and as before, it isn't wide enough. What do I need to change, and is there a WP guideline page teaching HTML to morons like myself? Thanks in advance! --HighHopes ^{(T)⋅(+)⋅(C)⋅(E)⋅(P)} 17:53, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

I accidentally managed to correct all of the above myself, though I don't know how. It used to look like this (scroll down to 'Comprehense overview...'.

But now it looks like i want it to.

I tried to copy the code out on to this page, but couldn't. Apart from the colour changes etc, can anyone spot why the earlier code made it look messy and inconsistent? Your help is much appreciated! --HighHopes ^{(T)⋅(+)⋅(C)⋅(E)⋅(P)} 00:30, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

Floating Category boxes issue still not resolved

I first posted about this months ago but I'm still getting the problem. Sometimes when loading a Wikipedia page in IE6 the Category box appears in a separate window in front of and partly obscuring the main text, instead of below it. The box can't be moved with the mouse. Refreshing the page usually cures the problem, only for it to recur later when loading other pages. Lee M 17:17, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

List of subpages

Is it possible to somehow get a list of all subpages an article has? In this case, it's Portal:Politics - I just wanted to clear out unnecessary ones and know which ones I can use etc. Many thanks, --HighHopes ^{(T)⋅(+)⋅(C)⋅(E)⋅(P)} 20:05, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

Try poking around with Special:Allpages, specifically this search... Shimgray | talk | 20:11, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

Thank you - worked perfectly! --HighHopes ^{(T)⋅(+)⋅(C)⋅(E)⋅(P)} 17:47, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

Signature templates

Maybe this isn't the best place to ask, but I couldn't find anywhere else to. I usually sign conversations with a template to avoid tedious typing. However, my signature lacks the date. At first, I tried {{CURRENTDATE}} and {{subst:CURRENTDATE}}, but these constantly refresh, not indicating the original posting time. What variable should I put in my template to timestamp my signature? Also, is there a way I can make a personal shortcut to my signature? - ElAmericano | talk 05:37, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

Well, it's easier if you don't use templates for your signature, but rather copying the contents of your template subpage to the "Nickname" box in your Preferences, and clicking on the "Raw Signature" checkbox. That's the way I produce my triple-link signature. Titoxd^(?!?) 05:47, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

To make mine(nearly identical to the way you just signed), I put "[[User:Superm401|Superm401]] | [[User_talk:Superm401|Talk]]" as my nickname and checked "raw signatures". Then I just sign ~~~~. --Superm401 | Talk 07:23, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

Personally I'm not a fan of signature templates because any changes to signatures are not captured in time as they evolve; you can only see what they look like at present. In contrast I can take a glance at something I signed myself and guess that I wrote it 12-15 months ago, even without checking the date. (Additionally I suspect server strain whenever the templates are edited, but that's probably not a big issue...?) Anyway, without templates and even without the "raw" property we can still have non-trivial signatures by putting a code like "nickname]] [[user talk:username|<small>(Talk)</small>" in the nickname field. (Without the "raw" property, the leading "[[user:username|" and the trailing "]]" are implied.) When signing, ~~~ gives just the nickname, while ~~~~ gives the nickname plus time and date. --Eddi (Talk) 14:43, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

Actually, transcluded signatures are a real drain on things. Users should avoid using them; there's some presently informal discussion between some developers as to whether we should cut down on the markup allowed in signatures. Rob Church ^Talk 19:53, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

Thanks, I appreciate all the advice. I had no idea you could format the signature box like that. - ElAmericano | talk 01:33, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

Complex templates

On the Jehovah's Witnesses pages, we're trying to get a way to link to online JW Bible translation, and I'm wondering if it's possible to get this done in a template like {{NWT-Lookup|book=Ecclesiastes|chapter=9|verses=5-6}}. Problem is the url format is rather complex:

http://watchtower.org/bible/ec/chapter_009.htm?bk=ec;chp=9;vs=5-6;citation#bk5 (Ecclesiastes 9:5, 6)

The chapter and verses are straightforward, but the book names are abbreviated, and it would be a pain to ask Wikipedians to remember the JW abbreviations. It would be great to be able to convert full names to the required abbreviations in the template. Is this possible? If not, is there any other way of getting it done? --K. AKA Konrad West TALK 03:44, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

{{bible_jw_abbrev}} will have the value contained in [[Template:bible_jw_abbrev]]. Understand what happens if you use a variable instead of "abbrev"? The method is used to alias country names in {{flag|US}}: US (SEWilco 05:34, 9 November 2005 (UTC))

Thanks for the tip; I've got {{LookupNWT}} working with at User:Konrad West/LookupNWT#Testing. Only problem is that the URL requires the chapter in a 3-digit leading zero format and a plain format. I can't work out a way to get the 3-digit version from the plain; any ideas? --K. AKA Konrad West TALK 01:40, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

In templates the only apparent solution requires 99 aliasing templates. Examine whether the target web site has a search capability which has a simpler URL incantation. (SEWilco 01:53, 10 November 2005 (UTC))

Yep, thought so. Thanks for the help! --K. AKA Konrad West TALK 03:09, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

With the special trick of m:Help:Template_names,_variable_names_and_parameters_depending_on_a_variable_or_parameter#Alternative_method, three templates are enough.--Patrick 11:05, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

I think you're suggesting a template which requires the 3-digit chapter be supplied as three one-digit parameters. I'm aware of that option but it seemed like an undesirably awkward requirement. Or is there a way to separate individual digits? (SEWilco 15:03, 11 November 2005 (UTC))

I mean an array where e.g. the 28th element is "028", or just "0", to be inserted in the URL before "28".--Patrick 23:16, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

New extension that adds programming language features to Mediawiki

I've created an extension I think a lot of wiki admins may find useful to run on their mediawiki wikis.. take a look:

[Winter scripting language]

71.141.249.228 08:22, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

access denied in program

Hi I just installed the program and every time I try to open it, it says access violation at address 00C475E0 in module 'Active~2.0CX'. Read of address 00000000 How can I fix this??

The program you have installed is trying to dereference a null pointer. It's a fairly common programming error. You need to report it to the producer of the program in question.-gadfium 07:39, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

Created pages - but they don't show up in search results

Hi there!

I had created two pages - Vaucluse College FCJ and also Faithful Companions of Jesus - they are working fine but when I search for them using the search box, they do not come up in results.

I was wondering what causes this? The pages have been up for a while now. :)

Thanks!

The search indexes are updated once every couple of weeks currently. --Brion 09:42, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

WP:SIGHELP

There's a short page now available that may be helpful to editors who have had problems with the display of their signatures. Very kind regards encephalon 02:15, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

IE6 hangs while navigating

When I navigate by clicking in wp, not only the wp window, but also other windows in the same IE process also hangs as well. I tried win2k and winxp, and with no luck. --Skyfiler 02:31, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

Contact Microsoft for technical support. --Brion 09:43, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

Images not displaying

I know the image servers on Wikipedia have been slow recently, but today and last night they just do not seem to be serving any images and pages are constantly tryign to download them and not getting anywhere. This happens here and on commons, even with articles that I would have thought to be in my cache. Is there a problem with that part of your network?

A huge problem it seems, but I don't know what's wrong. I'm not even sure if the upload process worked. Please give us an explanation, but refrain from adding the usual "It works fine with me" tag. Thanks in advance. KF (and my signature is broken, too), 16 Nov 05.

The image server super sucks. A new one is being set up (hopefully very soon, it's been alleged that the machine is online and working; if the disk array is configured right we can copy stuff over to it within the next couple days). --Brion 02:26, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

Thanks! <KF> 09:25, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

I believe the problem could be reduced by avoiding using images in stub messages, since they don't really provide any significant benefit considering how much 'bandwidth' (not talking data-pipe specifically, just overall page/image serving) the shear number of them takes. See Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)#Unnecessary_images_are_killing_performance.2C_and_should_be_banned. Waterguy 20:28, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

Redirecting discussion from Policy Pump

For those of you who follow the Technical Pump but not the Policy Pump, a vigorous discussion has been going on there, which was referenced above by User:Waterguy. There is a distinct and immediate need for numbers that can tell us what impact images of different types (for example, associated with stub templates vs. all other images) have on performance of pages being served. In the Policy Pump discussion there are numerous suggestions as to what numbers would be helpful. Could one or more of the technical folks please weigh in with some of these numbers, posting their responses here, at the Technical Pump, where they should probably be found? Thanks very much in anticipation of your help. Courtland 23:38, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

Apparent bug

If I try to edit [[x (y)|z]] to just [[x (y)|]], when I edit the saved file again it's back to [[x (y)|z]] (and if no other changes were made to the file, the edit doesn't even show up in the article's History--I assume there's a 'check if anything changed' routine that is checking at a point in the process where [[x (y)|z]] and [[x (y)|]] have been translated to appear the same). Wikipedia seems to have started having this problem in the past two or three weeks. (and no, I don't report bugs in any bug database if it displays submitter's email addresses. Waterguy 19:59, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

It'll have been like that for the last two or three years, I think. That's the "pipe trick". --Brion 02:28, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

can't view SVG on wikistats

At http://en.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/Sitemap.htm , the graphs are available in both PNG and SVG format. But the way the SVG is embedded in the stats pages (via the <embed> tag), it always demands a plugin, even if you're using Firefox 1.5, which can view SVG natively. Shouldn't the HTML be changed so that it works in Firefox as well as IE-with-a-plugin?
P.S. When viewing the SVG directly to avoid the embedding problem above, the text is overlapping/unreadable at the bottom. That might be a problem too. Phoenix-forgotten 18:36, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

What is up with Special:Shortpages?

Anyone have any idea what is happening with the list of short pages? Is this just a side effect of a larger problem, or are the page blank vandals just being given a few days to have more fun than usual?

I've found this problem as well. Pages that have been deleted for many months are suddenly listed on it in great numbers. Special:Shortpages is an important tool for detecting vandalism, and it is essentially useless in its current state. - SimonP 16:05, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Special:Shortpages is not dynamically generated anymore, doing so is too expensive. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 23:17, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Why? There's a page_len field specifically for that. Unless the index is broken, it should be very fast. --Brion 02:29, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

Ah, but that's the gotcha! It doesn't just compute a list of pages by their length in ascending order, it computes a list of pages in the main namespace which are not redirects, and to get 500 pages that fit that criteria it has to scan through a lot of rows, or to get 507 pages: 175,416 rows.

mysql> SELECT COUNT(*) as count, page_namespace FROM page WHERE page_len<45 AND page_is_redirect = 0 GROUP BY page_namespace ORDER BY page_namespace DESC;
+-------+----------------+
| count | page_namespace |
+-------+----------------+
|     4 |            101 |
|    45 |            100 |
|   828 |             15 |
| 14536 |             14 |
|     2 |             12 |
|   336 |             11 |
|  7259 |             10 |
|     1 |              9 |
|  1190 |              8 |
|   855 |              7 |
| 83514 |              6 |
|   194 |              5 |
|   224 |              4 |
| 16994 |              3 |
| 16123 |              2 |
| 32804 |              1 |
|   507 |              0 |
+-------+----------------+
17 rows in set (12.29 sec)

—Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 03:08, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

Deleted page without log entry

The page Cameron Kerry has deleted revisions but doesn’t appear in the deletion log. How? Susvolans ⇔ 11:23, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

It's from before the current log was implemented. --cesarb 15:07, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

HTML untidy

Fonts & colors are going crazy

What is happening? Like newly edited pages get some crazy fonts, backgrounds and colors. Who is messing up? 150.210.226.7 22:00, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

• Looks like something is peculiar with signature parsing. Unclosed "super" tags, thngs like that. --jpgordon∇∆∇∆ 22:23, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

Actually, it's happening everywhere: peoples' sigs that are closed are being sliced in half. I tried to clean it up WP:ANI to no avail when Jtdirl told me that it had happened before. Can you technical wizards clean it up?--Sean|Black 22:36, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

HTML problem on Wikipedia talk:Babel, possibly elsewhere

This is very odd. Last night, I've made some edits to that page, and it was appearing normal for me then. However, on this edit, most of the text have been blacked out, and no-one else has edited the page after me. The only rational explanation would be that someone changed a template used on that page. However, there are no templates where the problem began to appear (at the "messages" headline). However, adding a </span> tag fixed the problem. I swear that the page was displaying properly earlier.

Anyone have an idea what's going on? Oh, I'm using the Classic skin, by the way. --Ixfd64 22:40, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

Sigs screwed up, possibly by bots or command errors on WP

What is going on with the sigs? Mine has been screwed up again, though it has not been changed and has worked perfectly for months. The last time a bot went wrong and screwed up. Please fix it. Entire pages are appearing as size 3 font. Talk:Côte d'Ivoire is now unreadable. FearÉIREANN 22:49, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

PS: Why are the commands now showing in my sig? They never did before. I haven't changed anything. FearÉIREANN 22:50, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

And Oh lookie. Everything is getting smaller here now too. Weeeeee!!! FearÉIREANN 22:51, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

Your signature's code is really broken, please fix it. The code in the Wikipedia servers which scrubbed such mistakes has been temporarily disabled. --cesarb 23:02, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

You need to close the font element just before closing the "sup" element :) I did the modification in the above signatures. Hashar 23:04, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

Another reason why we should clamp down on what is acceptable in a sig. violet/riga (t) 23:07, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

Try the following code for your signature:

[[User:Jtdirl|<span style="background-color: orange"><font color="#006666">'''Fear''ÉIREANN'''''</font></span>]][[Image:Ireland-Capitals.PNG|15px]]<sup><font color=blue>[[user_talk:Jtdirl|(caint)</font></sup>]]

Titoxd^(?!?) 23:11, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

Seriously, this has caused major problems and has highlighted the need to block html tags in signatures (example). violet/riga (t) 23:13, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

It's not just sigs causing the problems though. the wub "?!" 23:54, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

No, but HTML sigs are the least necessary source of problems --Tabor 00:10, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

If we did HTML validation on signatures, and refused to save a user's changes if the tags are unclosed, out of order, start a new line, etc., that could prevent problems. Phoenix-forgotten 18:42, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

We do now. See Wikipedia:How to fix your signature and below. --cesarb 19:06, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

HTML errors

Hello !

We disabled tidy extension tonight. It caused some troubles on the servers.

The immediate result is: the site is back up. The side effect is that incorrect HTML is no more fixed automaticly.

People should have a look at their tag and close them. </font> your stuff !!

Hashar 23:01, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

And this is what led to {{afd}} causing so many problems! violet/riga (t) 23:07, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

Solution: fix the messed up HTML in your sigs. HTML tags must be properly nested or they are ignored and stuff stays on and messes up all that follows. If you're gonna use HTML tags in your sig, do it right. If you don't know how, then don't use the fancy stuff. :-) Vsmith 01:34, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Actually, I'm quite sure that my sig was properly nested, but it still caused all sorts of problems. The main glitch seemed to be that the < character didnt get rendered correctly. In effect, that disables HTML in a sig, and for the time being I guess we'll have to live without. The Minister of War 07:21, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Table question

I have no idea where to ask my table questions, so I guess I'll ask here. How do you make a td fully expand to fit its container, minus the margins. I thought having a margin of, say, .5 em would expand the td to the full size of its parent container, but doing so hasn't worked here. I'm not sure why. What am I doing wrong? - ElAmericano | talk 20:15, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

Is there a bot to check external links?

I am working on an article that has many "ephemeral" external links and would very much like to be able to use a bot to check them periodically, if one exists ... If someone knows of such a bot, I would greatly appreciate learning about it. Thank you. Polaris999 09:39, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Dead external links. -- Beland 03:08, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Putting Wikipedia in a HTML frame

Curious - I just tried putting Wikipedia inside an HTML frame (just a low-tech "open four web pages at the same time" page for my own use - WP's Search Page, Google, Yahoo Search and Weather.gov.) The other pages are acquiescing but WP isn't having it. When WP loads the frames disappear and WP loads as a single page. Is this behavior by design? I'm using IE 6 (no cracks!) Thanks! --RevWaldo 18:38, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

Yes, though in my opinion it's a rather immature and pointless one(it certainly hasn't stopped illegal mirroring, nor could it). At any rate, the relevant Javascript lines are below.

// Un-trap us from framesets

if( window.top != window ) window.top.location = window.location;

Essentially, it's saying, "Is the URL in the address bar the same as the document URL of the page this script is in? If not, have the whole page go to the document URL." There's no easy way around this besides disabling Javascript, which has many side-effects. Superm401 | Talk 18:58, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

The main reason for implemening frame jumping is to deal with dubious search engines webmail sites etc that wrap your site in an annoying advertising or linkback frame thus making it difficult for the user to get the url of the page and taking up valuable screen space. Plugwash 19:05, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

HTML capability

I have a suggestion for you: Please add full support for HTML (and JavaScript) when editing articles. I've noticed that although some tags work, like <div>, many do not. Please add support for HTML and JavaScript in articles. I hope you can also add support for JSP and PHP. Thanks!

Flarn 18:06, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

unlimited html and javascript would be a security nightmare and is never going to happen sorry. If there are any specific features you need please ask for them specifically. Plugwash 18:13, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

The Colony Tx

Part of the Article has been deleted. The Map is gone. I think I did it on accident and I don't know how to put it back!!!

• Don't be alarmed. I've restored the version with the map. There aren't many things that you can do by accident that can't be easily fixed. If you have any other questions, feel free to ask, either here, or at my talk page.
• Actually, on Wikipedia, if you're not an administrator everything you do by accident can be easily fixed. So relax and enjoy contributing. Superm401 | Talk 12:05, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

Impossible to login as English speaking user

Q - Hello. I have an acount created through the French part of Wikipedia. I wound like to contribute to other parts of the encyclopedia, such as the English part and the Wikisource. But until now, I have been unable to login with my usual username and password. And no decisive answer came from the French counterpart of Village pump. Thanks in advance for helping.

User Baruch : http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilisateur:Baruch

A - :You have to create a new account for every wikimedia project.Martin 13:26, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

Q - Thanks for the answer! When you write "a new account", do you mean with a new name ? I tried to create a new account with my usual name but it is already taken. Baruch.

A - :You could have used the same name if someone hadn't already taken the one you wanted. Now you will just have to make up a new name of your choice. Martin 14:05, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

Q - The fact is that I've searched for a user that has the same name in the English part, and there isn't any. Of course there is me in French... It would be easier if I had the same name of course. Thanks anyway!

There seemed to be no Baruch, but I had to make up a new one... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Baruch1677 ... Best!

There is a User:Baruch - [4] - but they have no contributions, thus explaining why you couldn't find them. However, the account is still registered, and I'm afraid it can't be reassigned. Shimgray | talk | 03:21, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

Some students prevented from creating accounts due to a "10 account" limit

This is copied from Wikipedia:General complaints and is soemwhat old. Can anyone suggest what the issue might be? DES ^(talk) 22:57, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

While trying to get students set up with Wikipedia accounts yesterday, some of the students were unable to create accounts because of some sort of limit on the number of accounts that could be created. The error message (sorry, this isn't an exact quote) said that a given student was unable to create an account because s/he had already created 10 accounts. This was not at all the case; there's no way that any one student even had time to create that many accounts.

Is this some sort of security feature that monitors the domain from which accounts are created? I realize that the computer lab in which we worked might be using some sort of sub-domain that makes it look like one IP address, but that's not the case.

How can this be avoided in the future? It's usually best for me to supervise the students when they create their accounts, but I might be able to turn this into a homework assignment that's done from home or from different labs on campus.

Any help or suggestions on this matter would be greatly appreciated. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Raymond Meredith (talk • contribs) 09:00, 26 January 2005

There is a limit of 10 accoutns per IP address, as i understand matters. I don't know why the system was perciving your connetion as a singel IP Address. DES ^(talk) 22:57, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

It's 10 account creations per IP per 24 hours. It is intended to block bots from automatically creating large numbers of accounts. Dragons flight 23:09, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

Most likely either a web proxy (either configured or forced) or nat that is causing them to hit it. Plugwash 02:20, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

Template not showing up

Klaipėda district municipality, Jurbarkas_district_municipality and some other articles are not showing the Template:infobox savivaldybe even though the template looks perfectly ok on say Kelmė district municipality. Any ideas why? Renata3 20:03, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

I fixed the two mentioned, there were links without closing brackets as parameters.--Patrick 23:38, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

Oh, ok. Thank you, a lot! Funny thing - it worked just fine before. Renata3 05:19, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

This seems the same as the first para in #Wikilink problems in template above, a new bug with the new software, I added it to m:Help:Template#Restrictions_on_parameter_values.--Patrick 09:23, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

Display bug in a "Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name" page

RFC_1036 gives (several times in a row, with IE6):

RFC 1036&action=edit">Start the RFC 1036 article or put up a request for it.

RFC 1036">Search for RFC 1036 in other articles. Look for RFC 1036 in Wiktionary, our sister dictionary project. Look for RFC 1036 in the Commons, our repository for free images, music, sound, and video. RFC 1036">Look for pages linking to this page

---

If you have created this page in the past few minutes and it has not yet appeared, it may not be visible due to a delay in updating the database. Try RFC 1036&action=purge">purge, otherwise please wait and check again later before attempting to recreate the page

Apokrif 20:30, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

• This is a known bug because of the magic handling of RFC references. See bugzilla:1344. Bovlb 16:05, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

How can I make the "callto" protocol work?

I made a template about skype, and I think we can use it in Babel. But unfortunately, I don't know how to make the "callto" protocol work. Is there anyone can help me to solve it? by Weihao.chiu 08:12, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

meta:Help:URL says that the only protocols supported in URLs are http and ftp. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 12:59, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

There isn't any "callto" protocol, according to the official IANA list of URI schemes. There are "tel", "fax", and "modem" schemes for expressing phone numbers in the form of URIs. *Dan T.* 14:53, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

callto isn't official, but is used by Microsoft's Netmeeting and by Skype. It'd be a neat thing to have, as Weihao suggests, but I think the opportunities for abuse this would afford mean that we shouldn't enable it. Firstly it could be used to harass or DOS someone (a vandal could change or add enticing looking exlinks which actually is a callto, and that person would be pestered with lots of calls from unwitting Wikipedia visitors). Secondly it could be used to defraud Skype Out customers (the callto would be a number of a premium line run by the vandal). -- Finlay Mcwalter | Talk 19:59, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

Okay!I see. I agree with Finlay Mcwalter. Thanks your opinion. by Weihao.chiu 11:05, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

Clickable maps

Is there any way to get clickable maps into Wikipedia articles? Any system of images or table markup that could create one? I've tried, for instance see Downtown_Ottawa#Map, but the best I have managed is essentially no better than ASCII art. - SimonP 20:37, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

Nice, see for some other possibilities m:Help:Images_and_other_uploaded_files#Navigational_maps.--Patrick 12:41, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

.OGG sound files

How do I play these? --Revolución (talk) 15:54, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

All you need is Winamp, which is free - then just click on the file and either download it or run it; either should work. Hope that works, --HighHopes ^{(T)⋅(+)⋅(C)⋅(E)⋅(P)} 16:18, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

Read more about Winamp. Visit Winamp website.

-=# Amos E Wolfe ^talk #=- 23:54, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

If you're on OS X or another platform that can't run winamp, check out VLC http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ TastemyHouse 19:01, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

Some older versions of Winamp don't support .ogg format directly and may require download of a separate, free plug-in. --Quicksilver^{T @} 18:20, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

Slow server

Why is your server so BLOODY BLOODY SLOW? This must be one of the slowest servers on the internet! At times, it takes AGES to load a page! And this is supposed to be a popular site! Sure, Wikipedia is great, but the server is way, way, way TOO SLOW!!! 131.111.8.101 21:25, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

That's because it's such a popular site. The server is continually overloaded. Want to donate some money to buy new hardware? ~~ N (t/c) 22:32, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

A little off-topic, perhaps, but whatever happened to the notion that Google might host Wikipedia? Could Google not magically take care of the hardware problem? -- Ec5618 22:38, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

It would be good if something was done. For such a supposedly prestigious site it really is shockingly slow. Sometimes I try to convince myself that it's maybe getting a little better, but I really don't think it is. Why doesn't Wikipedia host sponsored ads to raise some money? As long as it's clear what's an ad and what isn't I have no problem with that. Then maybe enough money could be raised to get sufficient server power to run the site properly.

There is also the issue of software. Response times, database access, and so on are heavily dependent on the efficiency of the software, especially since wikis require a lot more "interaction" with the server than most sites. Here, we have the problem that a) there is no other wiki of this scale in existence, and b) Wikipedia (and the other Wikimedia projects) run on MediaWiki, which is pretty much written for this specific task. A lot of the scaling issues we encounter have never really cropped up before, so the software will inevitably not be working at its best efficiency at any given time - as we adapt to traffic, the traffic keeps growing. It'll probably begin to flatten out soon (if it doesn't, I'd be amazed), which should help - we'll have our resources growing faster than they're used once that happens.

On sponsored ads... generally speaking, they're viewed with great suspicion by the community, and as it stands now we don't need the money; the project can survive (albeit not perfectly) on donations and volunteer work. It's a can of worms it's probably best not to open. Shimgray | talk | 02:11, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

And today, for me, it is atypically fast. -- Jmabel | Talk 01:55, 7 November 2005 (UTC)

For me today, it's abnormally slow. If sponsored ads would help, I'd suggest that a compromise might be to put them on the search page, and only there. That seems to me the place that advertisers would most want them, and the place that would produce the least damage to the user experience. IMHO, of course. Regards, Ben Aveling 22:20, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

I dislike it when people who express frustration with the mind-numbingly slow wikiservers are told "Why don't you donate money to help speed them up", as the original poster to this thread was told. We just had a fundraiser. We did donate money. Wikipedia raised what, two hundred thousand dollars? And the site is still one of the most miserably slow on the internet. People are right to be frustrated, and I think it's wrong to smugly dismiss their concerns. Babajobu 14:43, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

If you'll spend some time looking into the issue you'll reallize that Wikipedia's popularity increases faster than we could spend money on it. It is safe to say that if a million dollars were spent on hardware right now, the servers would again be overloaded within a year, and the site would again be intolerably slow. In fact if you look at the hardware budgets the estimates are for spending over $1 million over the next year. The administrators have in fact done a tremendous job keeping the hardware running given how fast traffic has been increasing. Check out the traffic stats. In a year the traffic has increased from an average of about 50 million hits a day to 250 million. That's insane. I hope the next (set for Dec 1 so far) fundraiser is set to ask for at least $300k or we'll be screwed before the next one. - Taxman ^Talk 14:53, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

I do tend to agree with you, Babajobu. I agree that the comments of 131.111.8.101 could have been made in a nicer manner, but I do agree with his sentiments: these last few days the Wikipedia servers have been intolerably slow. I'm aware the site is immensly popular, but the speed of the servers is seriously starting to affect usability. And it does seem the case that the only answer ever given is one that we should give money. I'm one of many whom I'm sure did give money in the fundraiser, and I can't think of a better use of the money raised than getting the system working a bit faster. I'd be dead against advertising, but if that's what it takes then so be it, because the response times of these last few days is pathetic. UkPaolo 17:18, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

Yes, and considering how slow the site is right now, I say niceness is a lot to ask. Babajobu 18:15, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

Today has been unbelievably bad in relation to slowness and timeouts. In my opinion Wikipedia's integrity is being harmed much more by this than any small google ads that could be included to generate revenue as they use in Uncyclopedia. Arniep 23:39, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

Arniep, agreed. We need to find out how much it would cost to achieve a reasonable server speed. Or if it's just a matter that wikis turn out not to scale well past a certain point, we need to face that and adjust the goals of the project downward accordingly. Because this is a joke. Babajobu 23:45, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

Based on some technical information presented in a discussion elsewhere here on the Villiage Pump, I have been experimenting with reading Wikipedia while logged out and only logging in for editing. Based on my experience in the past couple of days, being logged out makes a tremendous difference in the response time for Wikipedia. For instance, while logged in I opened this article section for editing and it took a loonnng time to load but I tested to see the time it took for the same section to load for editing while not logged in and it was almost instantaneous. If you do a lot of editing, working in this schizophrenic manner with one hand logged out and the other logged in can make the difference between accomplishing something and not getting anything done at all. I am not an apologist for Wikipedia's slowness; rather I'm a pragmatist who wants to keep contributing even if it means using workarounds like this. Courtland 01:51, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

I've also noted that the time of day makes a huge difference - not surprisingly. In the mornings here in Finland, the delays are small, but around noon, (10:00 UTC) it starts to get a lot slower. So, a suggestion for US users: Do your editing in the wee hours of the morning... ;-) --Janke | Talk 10:27, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

Being logged in means that every page load requires a read from the database servers (which are prepetually overloaded). Being logged out means your traffic can be handled exclusely by the squids. That is why being logged out makes such a big difference. Raul654 21:04, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

Maybe we could do a comparison by country. I'm from the Netherlands (Amsterdam, so close to the node that connects to North America - I don't know if that makes a difference) and from around 8 in the morning Wikpedia is usually not too slow. I haven't noticed a difference after noon, surprisingly, because that's roughly when the North American east coast wakes up. But at night it slows to a crawl, probably because that's when the west coast wakes up. DirkvdM 08:37, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

Not sure...

I wasn't really sure where to put this post so I put it here. I was wondering, do administrators have a little list of newly added articles that they can review quickly to weed out the "unfactual" ones? A friend of mine said that he put up a stupid article (imagine that) and that you guys had it gone in less than 5 minutes. That's pretty fast even before considering how many articles there are and I am sure there are a lot added every day.

• Special:Newpages list them. It's not admin-only, anyone can read it. Special:Recentchanges also list new articles, though there they are mixed in with all other edits. --Bob Mellish 19:36, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

Why isn't Wikipedia available in Spanish?

Spanish is spoken in almost an entire hemisphere,

Ah, but it is. Leithp (talk) 13:19, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

The plus mark next to "edit this page"

Some articles have a tab containing a plus mark ("+") next to the tab labeled "edit this page". The "+" tab adds a new section, complete with headline, while the other tab edits the whole article. This seems to have no relation to the size of the article. Why this difference? Can one force one or the other? Is there some policy on the topic? Too Old 04:32, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

iirc the + only appears in talk pages. Do you have any counter examples? Plugwash 04:46, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

You seem to have answered my question. Sorry for being so dense. Too Old 04:51, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

Number of articles in one category

Probably this has been discussed before but I wonder whether it's possible to make a list or count all the articles in one category, articles in subcategories included. I've searched for that kind of feature and couldn't find anything like this. Thanks. --Tone 22:50, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

I'm not aware of anything in the MediaWiki software that supports this, but there are users who download the database and run a variety of offline analysis tools. Beland runs a variety of category-related analyses and is generally quite willing to entertain special requests. GregRobson has done some work on mapping the entire categorization structure and might be someone else you could ask for help. I doubt the developers would implement a category membership counting feature available for general use since I suspect it can't be done without consuming large amounts of resources (categories do not form a tree structure, or even a directed acyclic graph, so the counting algorithm would have to keep track of all the categories previously visited to avoid infinite loops). -- Rick Block (talk) 19:37, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

Along those lines, I'm also wondering if it's possible to create a view of all the first level sub-categories in a category and have it list on a page? 72.131.44.247 23:45, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

Categories already list their direct subcategories, so assuming you mean the sub-sub-categories I believe the answer is no. -- Rick Block (talk) 19:37, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

discussion for pneumatics article

When I clicked on the discussion tab for the article "Pneumatics" (which has some minor vandalism, BTW), the page that came said: "There is no article called Pneumatics." Just wondering if this is a bug.

Talk pages don't exist until the first comment is added to them. This article's talk page has never been used, so doesn't exist yet. -- Rick Block (talk) 18:44, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

Slow pics

Has anyone else noticed that the pictures aren't loading? I was working on stubs last night and forgot to stop one of them from loading. I came back in the morning and the little picture that was embedded in one of the stub templates still hadn't loaded. It's been like this with pictures for about 2 weeks. The searchs are fast and the text loads right away for me, but no pics. Is there a problem with the media server, or with firefox?--Rayc 01:14, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

See #Images not displaying further up this page. Thryduulf 07:48, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

Funky headers

Erm.. Why are headers all of a sudden showing up in the middle of pages instead of the left side? I liked it better the other way, for what it's worth.--Sean|Black 19:24, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

Never mind, seems to have been a temporary hiccup.--Sean|Black 19:28, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

Templates broken?

Hi, this might be a temporary problem related to apparent stress on the servers, but it seems that my signature has been broken. (My talk page is no longer linked properly.) Just trying to let someone know. ---CH [[User_talk:Hillman|(talk)]] 17:10, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

See WP:SIGHELP.--Sean|Black 19:24, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

About audio files

Some article has audio files, that read-out the article. Is there any category for files that has an audio files? If yes, could you mention it. roscoe_x 15:49, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

• Category:Spoken articles is what you're after, I think. Shimgray | talk | 15:54, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

Preview? Changes?

Something odd's going on -- the "show preview" and "show changes" buttons don't do anything anymore; they both just act like I've only refreshed the page (no preview, no show, just the edit box). Clues? --jpgordon∇∆∇∆ 18:20, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

Go to the 'editing' tab in special:preferences and see if "Show preview before edit box" is checked. It's possible you unchecked it, in which case the preview or diff will show underneath the edit box and you probably have to scroll down to see them. --Brion 08:30, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

Y'know, when I dick with preferences I oughta read what I'm dicking with! Computers have this annoying tendency to do exactly what you tell them to do. --jpgordon∇∆∇∆ 04:05, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

Village Pump Archival Bot

It strikes me that the village pump pages can become rather lengthy and aren't always archived in time, especially because the ordering of sections here does not generally indicate which sections are still active, making archiving somewhat arduous.

It turns out to be feasible to create a bot that would automatically archive any section that hasn't been edited for a week, judging by the timestamps in signatures in that section. Of course the limit of "one week" is an arbitrary choice. Does anyone else think this may be useful? Radiant_>|< 16:58, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

Well, I've been the only one actively archiving for the last six months, or thereabouts, and I don't mind. Steve block talk 05:48, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

It suddenly occurs to me to ask, can the bot empty out the archive page as well as place the posts to be archived there? Steve block talk 05:50, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

And another one, how does it deal with subsections of topics, I've had problems with that manually, can a bot work out third level sections belongto second level sections? Steve block talk 05:54, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

The archives here are treated like a normal page needing archival - 14 days since the most recent timestamp, the section is removed from the page. The only differences are that they don't get inserted anywhere else, and that they're removed at the same time sections from the main pages are being archived there.

The bot, as currently written, ignores subsections entirely; they're seen as normal text inside their enclosing sections, so a section wouldn't be touched if there was a recent-enough timestamp either in the section itself or any of its subsections, and all would be archived at the same time. —Cryptic (talk) 14:58, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

That seems pretty straight forward then. One last thought occurs to me, would they still archive using a header section = Sections archived on ~~~~~ = ? Steve block talk 15:27, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

Yes (at least until someone complains), since that's practice on the archives here. I'm personally not convinced of their utility once the archives are no longer being maintained by hand, and since the bot will be running once per day, there'll be more of them. —Cryptic (talk) 18:09, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

I would think it's best to carry on doing that way until we get a consensus not to. I would prefer it personally just for legibility I guess, it would make it more obvious what new discussions had been added. But yes, if the bot isn't already running I would say start it up. Should we place a notice to the effect that archiving is now by bot on each VP page? Steve block talk 20:50, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

Converting HTML entities into Unicode characters

Does converting HTML entities into actual characters cause problems anywhere?

1. It is beneficial because it makes the wikisource much easier to read.

But...

1. It does make it more difficult to edit in external editors(/clipboards?) that don't support the extra characters.
   • Are there any browsers that have the same problem with textareas that will strip out characters they don't understand?
   • Could we selectively convert the information into HTML/unicode entities for presenting to these browsers while presenting them as actual characters to other editors? (Or make it a user preference?)
     • We already do. See bugzilla:2676. Susvolans ⇔ 11:19, 4 November 2005 (UTC)
2. Another problem is that you can't tell at a glance the difference between similar characters in the markup:

   • —, –, −, -

   • µ, μ

   • ⋅, ·

They are already being used quite a bit.

1. By people who type them in directly; especially for non-English languages.
2. When people press the buttons in the Insert special characters box underneath the edit box.
3. I, User:ABCD, and others have written scripts to do automatic conversions to the special characters, and now I am worried that I might be doing a bad thing. Is this ok? Omegatron (talk) 21:38, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

Not exactly sure, I recall some people complaining that "non standard" characters just displayed as question marks in theyr browser, but if they have such a senile old system I don't know if the HTML entities work much better... --Sherool 21:54, 3 November 2005 (UTC)

I'm not talking about how it displays. I'm talking about what it looks like in the edit box. If it renders them as question marks then it will replace all special characters with question marks when they save. That would be very bad. Omegatron (talk) 01:53, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

Problem symbols can better be converted to TeX, or to a symbol that is almost the same, e.g. replace problem symbol "⋅"="⋅" by some other dot. Do you have an overview of the codes you think of converting, and the proposed result of the conversion?--Patrick 02:30, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

Converting em/en dash, minus sign, mu/micro, Ω, °, and some other entities to their unicode characters. See also User:ABCD/monobook.js — Omegatron (talk) 03:20, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

Problem symbols which can better be converted to TeX, or to a symbol that is almost the same, are, for example, those that no not display in Verdana, IE, see the boxes below:

File:Special characters Verdana IE.png--Patrick 10:59, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

See also some problem symbols in m:Image:Special characters under edit box, IE.png.--Patrick 02:43, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

Some editing and Wiki tools have problems with Unicode characters. (SEWilco 03:09, 4 November 2005 (UTC))

Aha! This has already been taken care of.

"After en switched to utf-8 and interwiki bots started replacing html entities in interwikis with literal unicode text, edits that broke unicode characters became so common they could no longer be ignored. A workaround was developed to allow broken browsers to edit safely provided mediawiki knew they were broken.

Browsers listed in the setting $wgBrowserBlackList (a list of regexps that match against user agent strings) are supplied text for editing in a special form. Existing hexadecimal html entities in the page have an extra leading zero added, non-ascii characters that are stored in the wikitext are repreresented as hexadecimal html entities with no leading zeros." - m:Help:Special_characters#The_workaround

So I'm not going to worry about it. It would be nice if we could selectively access the entities version for use in external editors, though. — Omegatron (talk) 16:30, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

if you wan't your editing tool to get the version with entities you can do so by sending a user agent of "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Mac_PowerPC)". If you do this though remember to return the extra hidden field or you will end up with entities in the saved wikitext. Plugwash 19:14, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

I would like this to be an option changeable on a per-edit basis. — Omegatron (talk) 15:38, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

There are still difficulties with editing Unicode. Despite various options, I haven't persuaded vim to edit utf-8 in a way compatible with Wikipedia. If others are encountering such difficulties, Unicode cleanup bots might often have to repeat updates to articles. Have bots noticed often having to repeatedly update the same articles? (SEWilco 20:21, 13 November 2005 (UTC))

Wikimedia button image no longer linked to on Meta?

I've noticed that the Wikimedia button that appears on the bottom of every page (except in the Classic skin) is no longer linked to the image on Meta. Was this a recent change? Just curious. --Ixfd64 10:55, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

What does this mean? --Brion 21:58, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

Pinging Wikipedia

Is there some way to just ping wikipedia to see if a certain article exists? I have a wiki that some frineds and I have been working on, and I've notice a lot of article have "Link to Wikipedia Article" in it. So I was thinking of writing a script that would do a GET and see if it contains "Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name.". If it does, the "Wikipedia Link" will not be generated (or I'll made it red so people know there isn't an article). Results would be cached for a certain amount of time. But, while I would like that extra functionality, but I don't want to needlessly overload wikipedia with unneccesary gets. Is there an address where it just returns the title or not, or something like that so that it's not a big transfer or anything? Also, I could just download a server dump, but that'd be kinda a waste of space on my little server, since all I need to know is if the article exists or not. Any suggestions? Jeshii 04:33, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

If I have understood what you are trying to do, you could use Wikiwax, which is an index for Wikipedia. It "rotates" titles such that The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul is also rendered as Long Dark Teatime of the Soul, The and Teatime of the Soul, The Long Dark etc. It also does not distingish between articles and redirects - e.g. you cannot tell from Wikiwax which of Tynemouth Castle and Priory or Tynemouth Priory and Castle is the redirect and which is the artcile. Thryduulf 07:48, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

Wikiwax runs on a slightly out-of-date list, though - two weeks behind at least, possibly more. As for downloading dumps, note that (I think) there's a list only of article titles here (8.4mb); it's dated the 17th, so I assume it's updated every week or so. Shimgray | talk | 22:13, 21 November 2005 (UTC)