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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This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (technical).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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Signature Problems

I follwed the advice on "this page" to create a signature. However, whenever I try to add this section "This is a subpage for examples" to my preference page, I received the following error message:

mOptions not defined Backtrace:

GlobalFunctions.php line 652 calls wfBacktrace() Parser.php line 2628 calls wfDebugDieBacktrace() - line - calls Parser::braceSubstitution() Parser.php line 2310 calls call_user_func() Parser.php line 2398 calls Parser::replace_callback() Parser.php line 3569 calls Parser::replaceVariables() SpecialPreferences.php line 242 calls Parser::cleanSig() SpecialPreferences.php line 118 calls PreferencesForm::savePreferences() SpecialPreferences.php line 15 calls PreferencesForm::execute() SpecialPage.php line 449 calls wfSpecialPreferences() SpecialPage.php line 310 calls SpecialPage::execute() Wiki.php line 155 calls SpecialPage::executePath() Wiki.php line 47 calls MediaWiki::initializeSpecialCases() index.php line 134 calls MediaWiki::initialize() index.php line 3 calls require()

Obviously, I replace the example with the details of my signature page, which can be found here, and yet...nothing. Any help is appreciated. Adasta 23:30, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

It's not your fault — the preferences page is borking up. æle ✆ 2006-05-01t00:14z

Under the signature the preferences page says "don't use templates or external links in this". Doesn't this qualify as a template, even if it's substituted? — Saxifrage ✎ 01:02, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

Technically, no, since the main problems with templates are server load and later vandalism. Substitution increases load when editing, but doesn't have any other major problems. æle ✆ 2006-05-02t20:11z

This is a problem which has since been addressed in source control, but the fix hasn't gone live at present. Rob Church (talk) 01:46, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

Magical reappearing underlines

Someone's probably already had this problem, but I can't find it in the archives. For some unknown reason, once in a while all the links will become underlined. My preferences are set such that they should never be underlined, yet it happens to reset randomly. A quick fix is to load "my preferences" and save them again, which only patches the problem until it happens again. What's going on here? Isopropyl 22:40, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

FWIW, I have the reverse problem :-) — I prefer to have them shown but they disappear and reappear every while. Something's definitely fishy. Duja 22:53, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

I should make a template response to this: the underlines appear when Wikipedia's CSS hasn't loaded properly. Just force a reload, or clear your cache, and it should go back to normal. It's usually not Wikipedia's fault -- sometimes the connection gets broken in the middle of loading it and then your browser gets confused. ~MDD4696 23:57, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

See the FAQ at the top of this page. --cesarb 09:25, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

Okay, this is embarrassing

I have four questions for those who can answer them:

1. How can I make an image into a thumbnail (or at least into a smaller version of an image), but keep the ability to change the color of the background? As it is now, the background of a thumb will always be white.Answered below.
2. How can I align text to the bottom of an element, specifically the bottom of a cell in a table, like the text on the left side of my talk page?
3. How can I change the text-decoration of a hover link on a page, not in my personal monobook.css, so that the underline doesnt show up in a link, like this underline?Answered below.
4. Is there a page somewhere on wikimedia that has info about commands like this {{fullurl:{{FULLPAGENAME}}|action=purge}}, and other stuff that gets you information about a page or allows you to edit it in a different way? I don't know what that code is called (is it PHP?) but I wanted to know more about it.Answered below.

Sorry if these are dumb questions, but it's easier to find out from somebody who knows than to spend lots of time getting nowhere :\ . Thanks. J. Finkelstein 19:58, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

I can answer #4: see m:Help:Variable. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 04:03, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

Thanks a lot. J. Finkelstein 04:07, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

The answer to #3 is class="nounderlines". --cesarb 09:29, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

Thank you. Are these classes predefined with MediaWiki, or is that a php thing? J. Finkelstein 18:26, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

These classes are defined in CSS, Common.css to be specific which can be viewed at MediaWiki:Common.css (and probably edited if you are an admin). Jeltz talk 23:25, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

There's a partial list of them, together with where they are defined, at Wikipedia:Catalogue of CSS classes. --cesarb 00:03, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

For #1, one way to do it is:

This is a caption.

{| style="float:right;border:thin solid black;width:75px"
| bgcolor="red" |[[Image:wikipedia-logo.png|75px]]
|-
| This is a caption.
|}

--iMb~Meow 15:04, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

Thank you very much. J. Finkelstein 18:26, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

#2 is easy (to do, but maybe not to figure out) just add "vertical-align:bottom" to the style attribute of the table cell. Jeltz talk 23:16, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

Template:Portalpar width

Is it possible to modify Portalpar so that you can control the width of the resulting box? It would look cleaner on March 2006 in Britain and Ireland et al if the boxes had a width of 250px. -- SGBailey 19:37, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

I've copied this to Template talk:Portalpar. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 03:59, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

Page Editing - Problem with IPA 'g'

I have noticed that on some computers, the special character 'ɡ' appears not as an open-tailed 'g', but rather, more similar to lower-case gamma (γ). This character is used only in the context of the International Phonetic Alphabet, and creates confusion because it is similar to the symbols for both the near-close near-front rounded vowel, [ʏ], and the voiced velar fricative, [ɣ].

After posting this problem on an administrators page, I was contacted by Future_Perfect_at_Sunrise, who responded:

Hi, regarding the technical issue you mentioned on WP:AN: The character offered in the toolbox is the IPA letter U+0261, which stands for the sound of "g" and should always be displayed as an open-tail g, like the normal letter g in fonts such as Arial. In IPA contexts, its use is normally preferred to that of the Ascii letter g, which is displayed with a curly closed tail in Roman fonts. For people using the Monobook style it shouldn't make much of a difference, as in non-Roman fonts the two characters mostly look identical. If your system doesn't display the character correctly, it's most likely due to a limitation of the fonts you have installed. Otherwise, as long as it's included in the proper {{IPA|}} template, the system should automatically select a proper IPA font for it.

However, the computer on which I had the problem was a relatively normal Windows XP computer running Firefox 1.5.0.2 and using the default fonts with the Wikipedia "MonoBook" skin. It was able to display all of the IPA special characters correctly except for this one, which could lead to more confusion than displaying none of them correctly (it's better to display nothing at all than displaying some characters wrong!).

So, it's possible that this one character does not display correctly on all the standard fonts on Windows with Unicode support. It's possible that one Windows font is broken or nonstandard. It's also possible that the computer I was using is just screwed up. This is something that needs to be thoroughly tested on different systems. In the long term, if it's a problem for a lot of users, it may be better to go back to using the standard 'g' character rather than risk confusing some large segment of Wikipedia's readership! Dave 17:16, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

Update:

It seems this has been discussed before. Please see Template_talk:IPA#CSS hackers needed and Talk:Voiced_velar_plosive. Apparently a specific Windows font, MS Reference Sans Serif, is the culprit. I can replicate that problem with that font here. Firefox 1.5 is reported to use this broken font by default, even when the CSS stylesheet contains preferences for better fonts. Firefox 1.0 seems not to be doing this. A workaround is reported to be to add your own specification to your monobook.css and add a tag "!important" which tells the browser to actually use the css font settings. Weird.

Fut.Perf. ☼ 17:45, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

The problem is that there is no preference for better fonts on the CSS stylesheets. When a given character does not exist on the font being used, the browser automatically gets the glyph from another font (and in this case, unfortunately it is coming from a broken font). The only browser which does not do that is MSIE; to avoid turning all the IPA into square boxes on it, there's a hack which forces IE to use a specific list of fonts (but only IE sees that list). The workaround simply makes the browser use a specified list of fonts (the !important is probably needed because of the standard CSS cascade precedence rules). --cesarb 09:43, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

Whatlinkshere idea

Is there any way pages on Whatlinkshere that only show up bcz they contain templates w/ links to the article in question can be removed? Tomer^talk 07:06, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

If it links there, it shows up on what links there. This has been filed as a bug before and WONTFIXed. Rob Church (talk) 16:36, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

I don't think it's a bug, it's just annoying when you're checking Whatlinkshere to remove double redirects to have a bunch of superfluous links that are the result of a nav template being put on a zillion articles. The articles don't actually link: they contain templates that do...i.e., there are no links until the template is resolved. Now, how that actually works at runtime is that it appears that the links are in the article, but (and now I'm going out on a limb bcz I don't know how the whatlinkshere tool works) wouldn't it be possible to look at the articles as they're stored rather than as they're displayed when implementing whatlinkshere? Anyhoo... it was just a thought. (the offending template that made me wish this to begin with was {{JewishLifeCycle}}, but what made me get hot and bothered enough to say something turns out wasn't even a template, it's just that a bunch of people have Wikipedia:Community Portal/Opentask on their user or user_talk pages, so, in that regard at least, my request is really moot, since the {{Opentask}} that got me hot and bothered about it, is just a redirect to Wikipedia:Community Portal/Opentask, which really ought not to be substed. Anyways, enough babbling. Thanks for listening.  :-p Cheers, Tomer^talk 20:39, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

I don't think it's a bug either, but making a checkbox (i.e. option) for "don't display template links" or something like that would be a nice feature enhancement. MCB 00:43, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, that sounds like a really good idea. Or perhaps a checkbox by each linkedfrom page that uses the template brackets, and if it links to the article via that linkedfrom page, it's treated like a "secondlevel link" (like redirected links), which can be collapsed using a javascript or something. Tomer^talk 02:11, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

Unicode (?) in Wikipedia URLs

The page Б, which is a redirect to Be (Cyrillic), has the URL http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%D0%91&redirect=no . I had always assumed that the numbers after the percent signs were the Unicode character codes, but the letter Be is U+0411, and U+D091 is a Hangul syllable, 킑. What does "%D0%91" mean then? Ardric47 22:51, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

D091 is the UTF-8 representation of 0411. -- Rick Block (talk) 23:01, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

Encoded using Percent-encoding. ~MDD4696 23:02, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

Interesting; after all the years of seeing, using, and reading about Unicode, I never really looked at how it was implemented. Thanks, Ardric47 01:44, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

Just for fun: hex. D0 91 is bin. 1101 0000 1001 0001. The two ones in 110... at the start say "two bytes". The 10... at the start of the second bytes says "continuation". Removing 110 and 10 the rest is 1 0000 01 0001. Putting that together with leading zeros it's bin. 0000 0100 0001 0001 or hex. 04 11. -- Omniplex 16:59, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

Incorrect result of ParserFunctions at local wiki

Could someone help me please. My local wiki (1.7 r13859, php 5.1.2, (apache2handler), apache 2.0.55 windows, mysql 5.0.17-nt) failed to display the proper result when using {{#if:}} (see this (slow connection)) and compare it to same page on test.wikipedia.org. Am I missing something?

The template:

{| border="1"
|name||{{{name}}}
|-
|address||{{{address}}}
|-
|phone||{{{phone}}}
{{#if:{{{city|}}}|<tr><td>city</td><td>{{{city}}}</td></tr>}}
|}

The page:

{{tes|name=Robert|address=Street|phone=987665|city=Bangkok}}

The result:

wrong result at local

correct result at test.wikipedia

Thanks borgx (^talk) 07:04, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

I'd say that the 3rd <tr> isn't being closed. Check the template. --SheeEttin 19:29, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

Note that the same code works correctly on test.wikipedia (second image) borgx (^talk) 23:43, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

Note that the Wikimedia mediawiki installations generally post-process content with htmltidy (there's an option for that in localsettings) which would heal defective html markup. I'm guessing your local install isn't doing that tidying. But as SheeEttin notes, the underlying cause is that something is generating bad html in the first place. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 11:54, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

After days of madness search and reinstalling, it appears that key to this problem is the missing parameter $wgUseTidy=true; (it has "false" as default value). Perhaps we shall propose this parameter to be "true" as default. Thanks to Finlay McWalter for his hint. borgx (^talk) 00:05, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

Designing your template in a way working without tidy-fixup is a good plan. You could try to insert |- before the {{#if:, that should close any pending <tr> of a previous row. You could also put the "missing" </tr> into the conditional row, but that's an odd strategy (if it works at all).

The WP:QIF example 2a is for the first row where |- is optional, no incomplete row before it. Maybe swap foo and bar everywhere in this example to demonstrate your "no-tidy effect" in WP:QIF. -- Omniplex 16:19, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

Font trouble

Hi, I'm having a strange problem - text within the edit window is MICROSCOPICand in a strange font - forgive any typos as I can't read what I'm writing here. Also, the "continued donations" text in the upper right of the fram appears in this same font, small and nearly unreadable. Any idea what's going on - my computer or the site, or what? Any help would be appreciated. Kaisershatner 19:13, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Sorry to be an idiot. This problem is obviously w/my browser, as it's happening with certain fonts on other sites. Still, anyone have an idea what this might be? Kaisershatner 19:25, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Hope you can read this - your browser may have changed its font size settings. Try holding Ctrl and scrolling your mouse wheel (works for most browsers) BigBlueFish 19:29, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Thanks - that's a good trick. It helps, but let me take this to your talk if possible - I appreicate your advice! Kaisershatner 19:38, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

2006 custodial workers' strike

This page above appears to have a bug or other problem. It is coming up in a bizarre, unformatted font. Problem started just a few minutes ago. Any assistance would be appreciated. Thanks! MiamiDolphins3 17:01, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Your browser probably failed to load one of the stylesheets. See the note at the top of the page. BigBlueFish 19:31, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Abuse of password requests

I'm currently getting mailbombed by "Password reminder from Wikipedia" emails originating from the IP address 195.8.168.6 (User:195.8.168.6 is currently blocked for vandalism, although I didn't block him so I'm not sure why I'm the target).

Would it be possible for blocked IP addresses to be prevented from requesting password reminders? Or for there to be a general limit on the number of password reminder emails that can be sent to an account or sent from an IP address per day? —Stormie 11:34, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

I just got a password reminder from the same IP address. I agree that blocked IPs should not be able to do this. Martin 11:40, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

He seems to be doing it to a variety of users and this isn't the first vandal to attempt to do this. Very much agreed that blocked IPs should not be able to do this. JoshuaZ 19:01, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

See Bug 5799. Titoxd^{(?!? - help us)} 22:25, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Userboxes

Can someone please make the Shore School userbox @ Wikipedia:Userboxes/Education/Australia into a proper template, etc. as I have no idea how to. 60.227.170.253 08:42, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Rollback bug

After trying to make anti vandal-bot java, I noticed that rollback does not work for moves. Each move has two edits, a move and a redirect creation. The redir article can't rollback b/c ther is only 1 contributor, the other one opens the article as normal but does nothing else when you click "rollback" for it. Are there any devs here who can fix this?Voice-of-All^T|@|ESP 05:17, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

You can revert a move by moving the page back to where it came. A redirect will be left, you can delete it if you're really keen. A shortcut for reverting moves is available by going to Special:Log/move and clicking the "revert" links. A bot could also extract these links. -- Tim Starling 05:51, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, my issue is just with those darn vandals that sometimes come in and move a whole botload of pages. I'll code in the Special:Log/move into my javascript.Voice-of-All^T|@|ESP 06:10, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

In the mean time, can someone either fix or remove "rollback" links for page moves please?Voice-of-All^T|@|ESP 20:43, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

how to edit the title

hi i did an entry on one of my professors, but misspelled his middle name! sorry! how do I edit that????

har — Preceding unsigned comment added by Harcle (talk • contribs)

I will move it, but I suggest that you first edit his page a bit, and bring it in line with the sytyle guide of wikipedia (see WP:STYLE). Be sure that you make clear that he is notable (see WP:BIO), otherwise, the page might not live long at wikipedia. KimvdLinde 21:21, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

you say you will 'move it'. ok, but to ask my question again, how do i edit the title. i have mis-spelled the name?????????

Harcle 09:47, 2 May 2006 (UTC)harcleHarcle 09:47, 2 May 2006 (UTC) 2/may/2006

You cannot edit a title. All you can do is move the article to a different page with the correct spelling. You can then request that the incorrectly spelt page - which will now be a redirect page - be deleted. I've deleted the duplicate question a few lines lower down. -- SGBailey 11:44, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Allowing blocked users to edit their own talk page

The Republican and I have started our Wiki, and I've noticed that blocked users on our Wiki are not able to edit their own talk page to try to contest their block. What do you have to do to allow them to edit their talk page? Funnybunny (^talk/_{This Wiki needs your help!}) 03:52, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

See DefaultSettings.php for all available settings. --Brion 06:41, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

So the address would be like this:http://austinpowers.wikia.com/wiki/DefaultSettings.php. Right? Funnybunny (^talk/_{This Wiki needs your help!}) 22:30, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

Err, no, you'd want to actually look at the source from the distribution you downloaded. /directory_mediawiki_installed_in/includes/DefaultSettings.php — Edward Z. Yang^(Talk) 00:58, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Ask Wikia to sort it. Rob Church (talk) 18:52, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

In the news - pictures

originally from Talk:Main Page. and then copied to Village pump (proposals), where it received no additional feedback

Further to people's complaints above regarding how it is confusing at first as to which article belongs to the picture; There is a little (pictured) caption in the text so it's not a huge issue but how about somethig like this?.. (Rough mockup, it might look stupid in your browser)

In the news
The 39th Canadian Parliament begins in Ottawa, with the newly-elected government of Stephen Harper commanding a minority in the House of Commons.	Zacarias Moussaoui
A jury finds Zacarias Moussaoui (pictured) liable for the deaths in the September 11 attacks. Moussaoui's trial now enters the penalty phase, where he may be sentenced to execution.
Former Liberian President Charles Taylor pleads not guilty to war crime charges at the Special Court for Sierra Leone.
The Kom Chad Luek newspaper critical of Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra agrees to stop publishing for five days amid protests about the way it referred to the King of Thailand.
Wikinews – Recent deaths – More current events...

...to highlight the appropriate article entry? --Monotonehell 06:30, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

And maybe a thin blue border for the picture to link them better intuitively. Great idea. --Quiddity 06:56, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

Heh I wanted to do that but couldn't work out the wiki-table layout >.> EDIT:messed with it a bit--Monotonehell 07:02, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

Sounds good to me – it won't make much of a difference to the page, but if people find the current arrangement confusing, it ought to be changed – Gurch 12:09, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

Personally, I'd still prefer just putting the pictured news on top. Seems like the easiest solution to me..

Still, I like your suggestion. Two questions though. Can the border on the pic be a bit larger? It took me a while to actually notice it. second, mort importantly, doesnt this makeup get messy once the news item moves more towards the bottom? The Minister of War ^(Peace) 13:40, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

This is just a QaD mockup in wiki:table markup, I imagine that the CSS for the front page could include a special element for the appropriate box somehow. So yes the border can be any thickness (I couldn't work it out in wiki markup though). It would get separated from the picture if it slid down yes. But if it were the only highlighted entry the viewer's eyes would be drawn to it more quickly than the obscured (pictured) tag. --Monotonehell 14:41, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

I'd still support some changes to show the link between text and picture more prominently. Is this one of those things that everybody is going to agree on, but gets archived without ever being implemented? The Minister of War ^(Peace) 09:06, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Well, there have been no negative reactions. How do we get this implemented? --Quiddity 18:42, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

I think it is better than including the pictured news bit at the top, as that maintains a sense of chronology which would otherwise be disrupted by changing stuff around. I'd say to go to MediaWiki:Monobook.css (or MediaWiki:Common.css) and ask someone that it be done. You might want someone with coding skills to make it prettier, though. Titoxd^{(?!? - help us)} 19:14, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

I have cooked up a draft implementation of this (still imperfect) at Template_talk:In_the_news#Highlighting_item_with_picture. Let's work on perfecting this, with the way it's coded. -Kmf164 (talk | contribs) 23:54, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

Flag of the Solomon Islands Construction on the Freedom Tower, a replacement for the World Trade Center, begins in New York City. Snyder Rini resigns as Prime Minister of the Solomon Islands, avoiding a motion of no confidence in parliament. As King Gyanendra of Nepal continues to reform his country's government in response to weeks of pro-democratic protests, Girija Prasad Koirala is appointed as Prime Minister of Nepal. Three explosions hit Dahab, a tourist town on Sinai Peninsula, Egypt. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad lifts a 27-year ban against women attending public sporting events in Iran. Darwin, Australia is spared a projected direct hit by Cyclone Monica, one of the strongest tropical cyclones ever recorded in the Southern Hemisphere.

A couple days ago, an attempt [1] at implementing this on ITN was made (in GF). But, it appeared to me that the coding needed more work. Per WP:DISCUSS, I'd like to see the specific implementation and it's coding refined before going live on the main page. Are we going for something like the example above, with the color extending 100% across to the border? or something else. Here's a draft that I began working on (see right). Please help improve it. -Kmf164 (talk | contribs) 20:05, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

Ugh. The highlighted box appears clunky and garish; what's wrong with the current method of saying (pictured)? Thanks! Flcelloguy (A note?) 20:37, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

The problem is that every few comments on the mainpage discussion are people being confused about which picture it is. Actually I'm starting to think the latest suggestion is the best; always have the topmost article corespond with the picture, if a picure isn't available just put the flag of the nation the even occured in or perhaps just put a wikinews logo. --Monotonehell 09:57, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

The div method works nicely. (i fixed to the usual colours here, and changed the highlight colour to a shade between that of the background and border.) I really like this, except for the uneven border around the image, which only appears at the sides, not at the top/bottom. Can that be fixed? -Quiddity 20:45, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

I think the mock-up looks crude. It's the best I could figure out without using tables, like the example at the top. The top example looks cleaner, but the markup may be more confusing for those updating ITN. My preference is to have a picture for the top story. The articles also need to be in chronological order. So maybe a flag would do, as suggested by Monotonehell. Though, a flag might not always be suitable... -Kmf164 (talk | contribs) 20:58, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Image not working

This image I have uploaded is not downloadable for me in Firefox, but works in IE. I have uploaded it to another server, where it works fine; so it is a problem related to Wikipedia. The image was saved from Photoshop, so I presume it is a well-formed png file. First of all, can anyone else re-create the bug? And secondly, how do we fix it? ~ Booyabazooka 08:31, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

By downloadable, you mean it is not displaying properly or is it something else? I can see it fine using Firefox 1.5.0.2/Mac. — Saxifrage ✎ 08:37, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

I'm on the same version, on Windows. The behavior is unlike anything I've seen. It doesn't receive an http error code or anything... it just downloads nothing. And the page displays only the alt text. ~ Booyabazooka 08:48, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

I get that sometimes. Some images only load as the alt text. I've found if you load the image page and then refresh the page where the image appears, it'll display correctly. It's really weird. --SheeEttin 19:26, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

This is strange. I've fixed the problem for myself by loading the image page with "efron" instead of "Efron" in the url. Now it works all the time. Craziness. ~ Booyabazooka 04:27, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

If you are using Adblock etc., check if you have a filter too broad. I had *ad.* as a filter for a moment before I noticed something. (uploAD.wikimedia.org *cough*) Shadikka 12:07, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

White Stripes Userbox

What is wrong with the White Stripes userbox? I can't really show it, so users who use userboxes, try putting "user The White Stripes" at the bottom of your userboxes. --S-man 21:25, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

I think the problem was that the div tag and the table weren't closed. I closed them. Unfortunately, the image used is copyrighted, and userboxes don't count as fair use according to policy, so I also removed that. BigBlueFish 15:59, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

New to wikipedia editing

Hope this is an ok place to ask a relative newbie question.

I wish to add a section discussing the actor Marvin Miller. The problem is there is already a section about a Marvin Julian Miller, someone connected with sports [baseball]. I created what should be a link to the actor, and it takes me to the sports section.

What do I do to create the correct variant and solve the anomaly?

tia

Charles Lasner clasys@... 18:11, 3 May 2006 (UTC)Clasystems

The page about the actor is at Marvin Miller (actor). If you have anything to add to what is already there then you can edit that page. I've added a link to the top of the Marvin Miller page so people can find it in future. --Cherry blossom tree 18:40, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Picture Boxes

I'm not sure exactly what they're called but they are pictures that are (Wow I sound really stupid) inside a box. The box usualy has a description. Its on just about every page. I need help. I'm a noob. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Jesusfreak (talk • contribs) 02:20, May 3, 2006.

A framed image.

Those are framed images. The frame at right was made with the following code:

[[Image:Wiki.png|thumb|right|A framed image.]]

I could have removed the frame and caption by dropping "thumb" and simply writing

[[Image:Wiki.png|right|A framed image.]]

For more information, see Wikipedia:Extended image syntax. Seahen 02:53, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Image:Flux5.jpg... wtf?

I am totally perplexed here. I was about to delete Image:Flux5.jpg, but then I saw there was something crazy about its summary. It looks like it was corrupted in the database or something. Any ideas? There's only one edit in the history, and the wikitext looks fine... crazy. ~MDD4696 23:38, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

That's summary is a link to a webpage isn't it? A long, and peculiar link, but it seems like a link to me. Have I got the wrong idea? --Darth Deskana (talk page) 19:25, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Links to external sites

I was just wondering why do links to external sites open in the same window? In my opinion it would be better if they opened in a new window. Lathrop1885

Opening links in a new window is contrary to how the web normally works. It's disruptive and destroys the normal workflow for users. If you want to open a link in another window, every browser makes this very easy to do when you want it. The rest of the time let our browsers work the way they're supposed to. --Brion 18:24, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

Amen. I hate it when links open in a new window (well, tab) without my middle-clicking. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 05:14, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia errors

In recent days I have been getting a large number of errors accessing pages. The typical pattern is I go to the page, it appears for a second, then a little message box appears saying something like "wikipedia cannot find the article...", I think. Then the page disappears to be replaced by an http error message. The "back" button then makes the page appear again. What is going on here? I have installed the POPUPS script, if that is at all relevant. Elroch 23:25, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

This has been reported higher up by an Internet Explorer user. What browser are you using and what version is it? — Saxifrage ✎ 01:05, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

I was very likely using IE 6.0 (having tried the IE7 beta and given up on it). I use Firefox 1.5 as well, but I think the errors were with IE. Elroch 10:34, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, I've been getting this too... I deleted popups from my monobook.js but am still getting the errors. I was tempted to totally delete my monobook.js but I thought that might be a bad idea... although it's totally blank, I know how things can get mucked up if you fiddle with them (damn my computing project)... --Darth Deskana (talk page) 19:29, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Improper bullet rendering by MediaWiki

Mediawiki seems to be doing some odd things with bullets, so I have filed a bug report at bugzilla. It is described in detail there, along with a nice image. Ingoolemo ^talk 19:38, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Bug closed as INVALID. Rob Church (talk) 21:18, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

User:Richardb43/idea for improved user navigation

As a contributor/administrator of some years at Wiktionary, and 28 years in IT, mostly as a person concerned with the interface between non-tech users and technological solutions, I have a suggestion/idea for some significant but probably simple improvement to the Wiki software. Please see User:Richardb43/idea for improved user navigation for the details.

I think this suggestion can go a long way to closing the gulf between inclusionists, deletionists and structurists.

Problem is, I don't know how to promote this idea to the right people in the Wikipedia/MediaWiki space. If anyone knows how to do this, and you think my idea may have merit, please pass this idea on freely.

Thanks.--Richardb43 14:04, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Actually, i've managed to put it into bugzilla [2] as bug # 5826

I disagree with some of the things that you've mentioned.

• First of all, the strange idea of the headers in an article having the possibility of being collapsed. Why would this be beneficial to the "dumb" users? "Dumb" users do not want to have to do anything with what I would describe as "power use" of MediaWiki. Being able to collapse headers is going to be very confusing, both when the users try to figure out what on earth those "1", "2", "3", "+", etc. tabs mean, and when they figure out that part of their article disappears when they click it. They won't manage to get it back to the state they want it to be in and will likely get lost in which headers are being displayed.
• Also, I think that it's a serious usability hamstring if you put the table of contents in a new window or even a frame. They're old methods of HTML that have fallen out of taste a long time ago. To quote Jakob Nielsen: "With frames, the user's view of information on the screen is now determined by a sequence of navigation actions rather than a single navigation action." [3] - this was written back in 1996 already. Most large sites tend to stay away from using frames even though one might think that they could be beneficial (Wikipedia, Google, Internet Archive, Yahoo, Free Software Foundation, Slashdot, et cetera).

And with that, I conclude that I don't agree with your changes. I believe that they would make it very difficult for those "dumb" users you describe to navigate this site. As it is right now, it's fairly inituitive, and although there's always room for improvement, I don't think that this would be beneficial. —Michiel Sikma, 18:51, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Attaching a photo to my article

Hi all. I'm new and I created an article on the Yamaha XJ900 motorcycle the other week. My first attempt and I thought I didn't do too bad. I also uploaded a picture of an XJ900 for the article, but I can't find a way to put the picture in the article. I must admit that I found all the help files a tad complex relating to images etc. I'm lost. can anyone help? Thanks JSL595 12:42, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

If you've read Wikipedia:Picture tutorial and are still lost, please post again. -- Rick Block (talk) 13:40, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Thanks Rick. I got there in the end, but it took me a few attempts. Phew! JSL595 14:49, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Global or universal 'new messages'

Obligatory image required when discussing the Commons

Hello self-confessed geeks of WP, I have a challenge for you. Create a kind of universal or global "new messages" notice that will let you know when any of your WM project talk pages have been changed. Just think of the advantages!--

• You'll know when your images at the Commons: have been nominated for deletion (those sly foxes, them) without having to check all the time!
• Uh...you'll know when your meta page has been vandalised...?

OK, so for most users this might not be that helpful. But the universal login is coming (we pray) and so far there's been no mention of a tool like this. It would be great to have something in operation if/when universal login is implemented. In fact, it would be great to have something like this right now, for Commons if nothing else. The prospect of RDRing en.wp free uploads to Commons automatically has been mooted (see wikien-l). If that was implemented, we'd really want to see some capability like this.

I leave it it in y'all's capable hands. --pfctdayelise (translate?) 11:30, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Yes, that will be available in the future. --Brion 00:04, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

regarding Mike Church - very strange

This is very strange. The logs show that an account named Mike Church (talk · contribs) was registered today and got blocked. Nothing shows up in the contributions. However, it seems that this user has made edits in as early as 2003. How is it possible that someone could register an account that already exists? And why do no edits show up even though this user has made many edits? Was there a name change that I'm not aware of? Also, it seems that the account that was registered today had no non-Latin characters. Anyone got an explanation? --Ixfd64 05:52, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Mike Church requested a username change on WP:CHU; see Special:Contributions/Wxlfsr. æle ✆ 2006-05-04t21:25z

What ahout subst:Special:Allpages?

{{subst:Special:Allpages}} gives

UNIQ321d91c5dc7385a-itemf05032033cf4802? Why is it this? Upssdr 05:13, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

None of the special: pages can be subst'd since they're not templates. The software could perhaps simply ignore "subst" if it's followed by "special:" but this wouldn't have the effect the user is presumably looking for (which I suppose would be to evaluate the page now and save the evaluated output). Perhaps a friendlier error message might be appropriate. If you'd like to enter a bug report about this, please see Wikipedia:Bugzilla. -- Rick Block (talk) 14:57, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Attempting to transclude a non-includable special page should return a blank. Will look into this. Rob Church (talk) 21:50, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Poked in version control. The response should now be more intuitive. Rob Church (talk) 22:05, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Category

I've confusedly created Category:Makaira, which is useless I think. Could someone unfix and delete it? Thanks. Brand 02:45, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

take it to WP:CFD and add it under the "speedy deletions" section. BL Lacertae - kiss the lizard 04:24, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Section edit links being moved all over the place

In a page like Pe (letter) (revision as of this writing), the section edit links appear to hold something against the various infoboxes floated to the right, and refuse to go next to their respective headings. Instead, they cluster under the infoboxes. Is there some CSS trick that will fix this? —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 02:24, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Sometimes I click edit section on the RfPP page, but it takes me to a different section in edit mode. Strange...Voice-of-All^T|@|ESP 02:28, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

If that page is constructed using templates/transclusion, then that's due to the software's handling of such things. A known issue for which there is no fix at this time. Rob Church (talk) 21:51, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

One hack, though undoubtably not ideal, is to used unclosed HTML headings instead. I think the lack of closure may cause problems in older browsers, but it does take away the edit link. This should work for some third-level sections that can still be edited from the second-level edit link. (The exact syntax: replace ===Header=== with <h3>Header.) It seems that closing it with <h3> instead of </h3> takes care of any odd problems that may occur.

Note, however, that I'm just mentioning this hack, not endorsing it. 198.237.47.196 22:07, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Images with the same name on en: and commons

When there're images with the same name on en: and commons (for example Image:Dimsum.jpg and commons:Image:Dimsum.jpg), the one from en: would be displayed. So is there any way to show the image from common besides renaming one of them? Thanks in advance! --Lorenzarius 07:27, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

No, I don't believe so. That's one reason why a vague name like "Dimsum.jpg" is inappropriate for both images. — Knowledge Seeker দ 07:31, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. Too bad MediaWiki doesn't support renaming files. --Lorenzarius 07:39, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Vote for Bug 889 over at MediaZilla. It addresses this specific issue. ~MDD4696 23:24, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

My monobook.js not working

Hi folks,

Could someone please open User:Deathphoenix/monobook.js and save it without making any changes? For some reason, whenever I try to edit my own monobook.js, when I try to view it while logged in, the characters appear completely screwed up. Strangely enough, this doesn't happen when I'm logged out, so I suspect it must be something with my own environment, but I'm not sure what. Thanks in advance, Deathphoenix ʕ 21:00, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

I did a null edit for you, but the characters are still there. It looks like you copied the code into some text editor that did not properly support Unicode and it replaced them all with the strange characters... ~MDD4696 21:20, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

Help with extremely complicated divs

In User:Walkerma/WP1.0, we're trying to create a somewhat-attractive categorical presentation of articles for WP:1.0, and it renders as intended on FireFox, but the first row, "Arts", shows transparent in MSIE 6.0. As I've spent about 30 minutes breaking my head trying to figure out why it doesn't work, can someone more experienced in CSS tell me what I'm screwing up? Titoxd^{(?!? - help us)} 07:18, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

Problem fixed, see User talk:Walkerma#RE: Request for help on Village Pump (technical). — Ian Moody ^(talk) 18:49, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, that sure helped. Titoxd^{(?!? - help us)} 18:56, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

Data Loss

What is going on here ? I edit some article, then I get a message in RED saying that Data Loss has happened when I hit the SAVE button. Also have a 1 minute processing time. Server down ? Makes Dial Up look good. Martial Law 19:10, 4 May 2006 (UTC) :)

Sometimes, the odd server glitch will cause some slowdown or partial downtime. When this happens, it's jumped on quite quick. Whinging about it here does no good. When you refer to a message in red referencing data loss, do you mean "loss of session data", which is a known issue that hasn't been stamped out completely? Rob Church (talk) 21:49, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Ironically enough, I've been suffering the same problem a lot today, and I've done all the usual things to fix it (clear cache, dump cookies, hard-reload pages, offer a sacrifice to the server gods...) and it is unusually resilient today. What exactly is causing the periodic data loss? Titoxd^{(?!? - help us)} 00:58, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

Happened to me too today, but then it seems to happen to me all the time... mostly after longer edits without inbetween saves. --Mmounties (Talk) 05:03, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

Had a red message say that "Loss of session data....", then had a lag time of 1 min. duration going on. Martial Law 08:59, 5 May 2006 (UTC) :)

renaming a photo

Thanks!

Hello. Where do I go to in order to rename a photo? Thanks __earth ^(Talk) 04:31, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Photos cannot be renamed except by uploading them again under the new name and then having old version deleted. -- Rick Block (talk) 13:48, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

And as an addendum to that, to have an image deleted as duplicate, use {{[[Template:Redundant image|newimagename.jpg|Redundant image|newimagename.jpg]]}}. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 04:29, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

Thanks to both of you! Here some flowers for you. It was also the photo that needed to be renamed =) __earth ^(Talk) 07:00, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

User:127.0.0.1?!

Who has made the edits attributed to User:127.0.0.1? How are they getting through with this address? Seahen 02:24, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

According to the userpage... 127.0.0.1 is the IP address of localhost, in other words the local computer. It cannot be used by normal users. It is sometimes used by developers to do local tasks such as mass uploading of text. --lightdarkness ^(talk) 02:34, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

I think it is a user who is being a bit smart, and that's their actual username. We have one at commons:. pfctdayelise (translate?) 11:21, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Nope. Nothing that matches an IP address can be used as a username. Try it: "You have not specified a valid user name." (Trying to register an existing username gets a different error, namely "Username entered already in use. Please choose a different name.") —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 04:21, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

Anti-aliasing of the Wikipedia globe

This has bugged me for some time now... the edges of the Wikipedia logo in the top left of the Monobook skin are anti-aliased for a background of white, which produces a white 'halo' when it's superimposed on the grey Monobook background, particularly around the bottom of the globe where the book edge behind is particularly dark. I couldn't find either a version of the small logo with alpha blending or a high-resolution version of the internationalised version, but if there is one available I think the logo in monobook should be replaced by one with the anti-aliased edges blended onto the background image (obviously keeping the fully transparent pixels transparent. BigBlueFish 18:19, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

Well, part of the problem is Internet Explorer not supporting alpha channels. — Edward Z. Yang^(Talk) 00:57, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

That doesn't really have anything to do with it. The format of the logo is an 8-bit palette PNG, which is identical to the GIF format except for the first few characters. This format can only define one transparent alpha channel, just like the GIF format, it's just that IE doesn't render transparency in PNGs. There's no reason why the image couldn't be adjusted to give the same effect as having alpha blending over the background image. With this kind of transparency people make versions of images all the time with different anti-aliasing backgrounds, usually on solid white and solid black, so that they look right on dark and light backgrounds. There's no reason why the same can't be done for a specific background image. BigBlueFish 13:04, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

1) It's shown on multiple different backgrounds. 2) It's currently optimized for a light-gray background. Potentially it could be slightly tweaked, or not. --Brion 21:43, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

IE's lack of support for alpha channels does have a lot to do with it. If not for that, the image could be antialiased over a transparent background, and the image saved as a PNG with alpha channel. The image doesn't have to be set to eight-bit color depth. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 05:20, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

I understand that currently the image is currently used on the white backgrounds of the Classic/Nostalgia skins too, but it would only take a tweak to the skin markup or stylesheet to change the image to another. I didn't realise the optimised background was actually light grey, but at any rate it's too light for me personally. Simetrical: of course alpha blending would be ideal, but that's the way it goes. Thank Microsoft. On the flipside, using that colour depth would almost triple the file size. These obstacles shouldn't stop us from striving for perfection. BigBlueFish 10:15, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

I'm a professional designer, and I think that this could be fixed without making the file size much bigger simply by changing the matte. I don't know how to reach that image, however. Can anyone give me the internal link? —Michiel Sikma, 06:25, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

The image is at Image:Wiki.png. Only admins can change it. Be aware that if you wish to make any changes, in addition to getting an admin to implement them, you'll have to explicitly give all copyrights unconditionally and irrevocably to the Wikimedia Foundation, and explicitly not release it under the GFDL or any other free license. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 04:18, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

I KNEW there was a technical term for it! (Matte). That was what I was trying to describe, albeit badly. The trouble with Wiki.png is that it's already anti-aliased onto the light grey matte. Image:Wikipedia-logo-en-big.png is the only high-res version I can find, but it's been recoloured and a couple of diacratics added to some pieces. I have to admit I hadn't noticed Image talk:Wiki.png before; I'll mention it there. BigBlueFish 17:08, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

putting the coordinates of a certain building or bridge in a special place

Hi, sometimes when I read about an interesting building or bridge or whatever, I wanna find it on google earth. When I do find it, I usually put the coordinates in its wikipedia page. Now usually I just put it somewhere where it seems to belong. However : the German wikipedia does this : http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triumph-Palace They put the coordinates in the upper right corner, very close to the title of the article. I like this, and I was wondering if I could do it too on the English Wikipedia. - Evilbu 19:10, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Yes, you just need to use the {{Template:Geolinks-start}} template or similar. Titoxd^{(?!? - help us)} 19:23, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Note that there is some controversy around whether this is actually a good thing or not. See also 2 questions above this one for more info that may be helpful. ++Lar: t/c 19:45, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Sorry I don't really understand practically how I can use a template like that? And why is that controversial? Because of terror threat? This is information that in general can still be obtained quite easily, so it doesn't increase any risks in my opinion (I see no ethical or legal issue, however if it is a wikipedia rule I will abide by it)

To see how to use similar templates, take a look at an article that uses one. For example, (I always pick my own articles because I know them best): Gaylord_Building#Management_and_location... this article uses {{Geolinks-US-cityscale|41.590813|-88.057861}} within it... take a look at the article and see if it's what you want. You may be doing non US locations though, if so go look at other templates in its category. As for the controversy? Some folk do not like having the coord displayed at the top right corner of the article page, and don't like how some templates have taken that control away from them... Style of presentation only. Nothing to do with terrorism. Hope that helps. ++Lar: t/c 21:03, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Coordinates?

On some articles, I've seen Coordinates (i.e. on pages about universities or geographic locations), with a specific GPS code. However, I'm unable to find the specific source link to figure out how to do this as well as put it where I want to. --Micahbrwn 07:40, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Hi! Are you asking how to find coordinate codes? What I often do is use Google Maps to find the area of interest, then click the "make a link" which changes the URL to one containing the (decimal) coords of whatever the map is centered on, which I then use as needed to fill in whatever template is taking lat/long parameters. (note that you can link to the map but you cannot capture the map image, it's copyrighted) If you are asking about templates themselves, try looking at the source for whatever template you're trying to use in order to see what templates IT uses, and look at the helps for those. If you're asking how to convert Decimal to DMS coords, I'm not sure but there have to be a lot of convertors out there. I think the MS Terraserver does it. If that doesn't answer your question, can you ask again? Hope that helps! ++Lar: t/c 15:26, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

But that's my point. The articles that I've looked at in the "Edit this Page" area don't seem to have the coordinates in the source. I even copy-paste the whole thing into a text file and search for the word "coordinates" and come up dry. --Micahbrwn 15:43, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, I'm still not understanding the question. I'll use an article I've worked on as an example. Take a look at the source for Kingston-Port Ewen Suspension Bridge. At the bottom of the infobox are two rows: |lat=41.91716 and |long=-73.984165 Those are the coordinates. (and yes, the word "coordinates" doesn't appear, a bit frustrating for you, I bet.) You'd have to edit Template:Infobox Bridge (which you can see in the list of templates used while editing, so it's easy to click on and go edit or view source of in turn) to see what it feeds them to, and so on down the chain. (sometimes it takes several layers of calls to get to the root). Does that help? If not, can you provide a specific article to look at? Sorry if I'm still not getting what your asking. ++Lar: t/c 15:55, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

But that's my point. The articles that I've looked at in the "Edit this Page" area don't seem to have the coordinates in the source. I even copy-paste the whole thing into a text file and search for the word "coordinates" and come up dry. --Micahbrwn 15:43, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Never mind. I found the {{CoorHeader}} tag. --Micahbrwn 16:02, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Moving page

Everytime I go to save a page, the page moves slightly up when I hit the save button. If I hit it again, the page saves. Is this on purpose?--Rayc 03:57, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Sounds like a known issue affecting some users of Firefox. 86.133.210.53 23:29, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

David A. Johnston page lost?

Can someone check the David A. Johnson page? It looks like most of it is missing. Mc6809e 00:17, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

no - it just hasn't been written beond being a stub yet. BL Lacertae - kiss the lizard 00:45, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Interwiki FA Star gone missing

In Georg Forster both the French and the German article have attained FA status. We have the template in there but I can either see only one star (the French) or none. I've fooled around a little trying to get it to work but to no avail. Can anyone help? (Not sure whether it matters but I run IE). --Mmounties (Talk) 05:00, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

It shows up fine in Firefox (which I'm sure you expected), but also works for me in IE version 7.0.5296.0 (Windows XP). Which version are you using? Perhaps they fixed that rendering problem by now. — Knowledge Seeker দ 09:21, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

I'm using IE6. I didn't think IE7 is out yet. --Mmounties (Talk) 22:28, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

It isn't on general release, but public betas are available. 86.133.210.53 23:33, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Portal formatting

On Portal:History of science and a number of other portals, images do not show up or are moved to the very bottom of the screen or otherwise misplaced, when viewed in Internet Explorer 6 (They are fine in Opera and Firefox, I have not tested any others). The problems I've notice for the history of science portal:

• The image in the "selected article" box does not appear.
• The images for the "selected scientist" and "selected inventor" boxes appear well below the rest of the page content.
• The "edit" link for the "Intro" box at the top is shifted right too far, so it is halfway cut off by the edge of the box.

However, the images in the "Intro" and "selected picture" boxes appear correctly.

Similarly image issues occur on:Portal:Technology, Portal:Society, Portal:Mathematics, Portal:Biography, Portal:Arts, and others. Please advise.--ragesoss 21:42, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

I think the problem may be with Portal:Box-header.--ragesoss 23:54, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

Something strange happened when I reverted

Something odd occurred when I reverted a page manually (that is, not using popups or rollback). Today, when I saw this diff via my watchlist, I reverted to this version manually since I wanted to put "rv unsourced speculation; WP:NOT a crystal ball" in the edit summary. I did not touch the edit box at all, merely saved the reverted-to version. Yet, the diff of my edit indicates a bunch of changes having to do with categories, which I did not touch at all. A diff of my edit with the version I reverted to indicates the same changes! I even looked to make sure I didn't revert to an earlier version. Can anyone explain this? I'm puzzled. MCB 17:51, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

Seems to me as if you did revert to an earlier version of the article- this one. --Lord Deskana ^{Dark Lord of the Sith} 20:20, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

citation needed

What I do when an article says [citation needed]? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 82.6.169.187 (talk • contribs) .

Try to find a citation :) The tag means that an editor didn't think the article is living up to Wikipedia's verifiability policy, and the way to cure that is to dig up one or more good sources that back up the tagged statements, or take out the statements if good sources don't back them up. WP:CITE explains how to do it. --iMb~Meow 16:51, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

One page rendered as source

Using Mozilla 1.0 (yes, old, I know; but the product of mozilla.org, not a museum-piece from Netscape) about ten hours ago and now, when I attempt to view MediaWiki talk:Common.css all I get is a dump of the source text. (I mean: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en" > <head> [etc etc] <!-- Served by srv11 in 0.154 secs. --> </body></html>.) I've never had this problem at WP before or since, and I've virtually never had it on any other site whose markup isn't truly horrendous even by commercial standards. Indeed, I'm contentedly using Mozilla 1.0 to write this. Granted, Mozilla 1.0 is a little-used browser, but I wonder about what that page, or other pages, might be doing to other earlier versions of Mozilla. -- Hoary 01:22, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

I've just now looked at the page via Mozilla 1.3.1 and Konqueror (on a different computer), and it displays fine. There seems to be no HTML syntax error, and only a single CSS mistake (in addition to lots of rather shoddy CSS practice). -- Hoary 03:27, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

Saving problem - doesn't save

I can't seem to make changes to the 'Watchlist' part of 'My preferences'. I want to increase the 'number edits to show in expanded watchlist' but whenever I make the change, save it and return, it never saves it. I want to increase it above 1000. Skinnyweed 23:01, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

There is a hard limit of 1000 on this preference. 86.133.210.53 23:31, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

That's ridiculous. Why? Skinnyweed 23:33, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Performance reasons, one imagines. Rob Church (talk) 01:27, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

Number of Pages Code?

Hi, I'm wondering if it's possible to have something similar to [[Special:Statistics|{{NUMBEROFARTICLES}}]] (which displays the amount of pages according to the statistics page). What I want is for the link to be able to retrieve the number of pages that link to another page and just display that number. Specifically, I want it to retrieve the number from the Most Linked to pages page. eg. ArticleX (300 links) to ArticleX has 300 pages. If you know what I mean. Is this possible? --124.254.66.221 03:56, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Not at the present time. A full list of available variables can be found at m:Help:Variable. If you would like to request a new one, you could file a feature request at our Bugzilla, but it would probably not be assigned a very high priority. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 05:06, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

multiple language log in problems

Is it really necesary to create a new user acount for every language I want to edit in; or am I being dense?

When I am logged into my English wiki accont (Crocodulicus) all is well, but if I go to a Russian page and attempt to edit, I am shown as logged off. The same is true for the wiki commons. I cannot log into either the commons or the Russian wiki with my name and password. I temporarily fixed this by opening a separate account on Russian wiki. This seems wasteful. Any ideas? Crocodilicus 19:57, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

I've had the same problem, and have had to create separate accounts in each wiki (English and Spanish). I also find that if I'm logged in to one of the wikis and go to the same article in another language, my login is lost. Inigo75 11:10, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

For now you will need separate accounts for each language. I have a little here and there that the devs are working on ways to implement a universal login system but I have no idea how that is progressing. AFAIK they are just in the planning stages. --PS2pcGAMER (talk) 11:15, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

Technical help needed for Nigeria

The article on Nigeria needs help and fixing it is beyond ny Wikipedia skill level. Thank you Iwalters 21:20, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

It might help if you can describe what technical problems exist with this article. --Brion 23:29, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Pictures that won't paginate properly

I can't get the pictures in New_Lodge,_Belfast#Social_conditions to paginate properly, no matter how hard I try. Gerry Lynch 16:34, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Space in URLs

Over in Ruparel College I need to put proper character spaces in a URL so that it won't conflict with the file's title. What is the proper entity to use? Circeus 02:50, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

%20 —Ruud 02:56, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Greek font problems

File:Mozilla Greek font error.png

A screenshot of the error

I'm having trouble with browsing Wikipedia on Mozilla 1.7.3 for Linux. All the Greek letters appear as strange symbols, probably from the Symbol font.

Also, even though my preferences say to use MathML, the results are as if my selection were "HTML if possible or PNG". --Zemyla 00:22, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

MathML support doesn't work (yet). The font bug is bit weird, but might be caused by the lack of fonts supporting Greek on your system. You could try using "Always render PNG" as a work around. —Ruud 01:16, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

What distro are you running? I suspect its an issue of simply not having any suitable fonts installed. Plugwash 01:43, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

I am running some version of Fedora. And I have many of the fonts copied into the .fonts folder, which is how I got MathML to work finally. --Zemyla 02:27, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Any options for Special:Allpages?

Hello. Does Special:Allpages have an option to omit redirects and just show the articles? The code already seems to know the difference because it puts the redirects in italics. Thanks! Ewlyahoocom 23:29, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

Add .allpagesredirect { display: none; } to Special:Mypage/monobook.css. It replaces redirects with gaps. —Ruud 01:14, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Watchlist weirdness

While I can understand an odd article name appearing on my watchlist if an item has been moved by vandals and then restored to its rightful place, I can see no logical reason why, overnight, a brand new user's userpage appeared on my watchlist. Yet this morning I find User:Dr. Ke on my list. Any possible explanation? Grutness...wha? 22:50, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Are you quite sure that this isn't the rescuscitation of that rarity, a deleted username (and one that happened to be on your watchlist)? -- Hoary 01:25, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

"20:44, 5 May 2006 . . AndyZ (moved User:Dr. Ke to User:AndyZ: revert vandalism)" - If you have AndyZ's page on your watchlist then that should explain it. Thryduulf 18:59, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

Ah. Yes I do. Strange thing though - Dr.Ke's user page sprang up as new after this vandalism was reverted. Not sure what's going on there... Grutness...wha? 06:34, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Spelling a la Google

Hi all:

Just wondering if I can put a proposal out there. Recently, I have been having issues finding relavent information because I don't know the exact spelling of a name; rather, I know only an approximation. For example, if I were to desire to find out about Felix Mendellsohn, but did not know the complex spelling of his name, simply spelling it as "Felix Mendelson" would come up with nothing. In Google, if I make such an error, the search feature suggests a proper spelling of the terms I listed in my search box. Is there any way to apply this type of technology in Wikipedia?

Thanks,

bbalin1

There apparently is such a feature here, though the devs has turned it off for some reason, perhaps server lag.Voice-of-All^T|@|ESP 02:29, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

It's worth noting that where there is a common misspelling ofa name that is the title of an article, a redirect is often used from that misspelling. Felix Mendelsohn, for instance, is a rredirect to Felix Mendelssohn (two s, one l :) Grutness...wha? 06:40, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Try googling it, but with site:en.wikipedia.org. ;-) — Edward Z. Yang^(Talk) 22:14, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

Special:Random

I notice that while random page has the ability to tell the difference between talk pages, article pages, wikiprojects, and user pages, and thus only selects from things in article space, it does have a tendeny to occasionally call up {{deletedpage}}s, as well as other non-articles that just happen to occupy article space. Could not it be specified to avoid these pages?--{anon iso − 8859 − 1janitor} 18:06, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

Not reliably, or in a manner which wouldn't be screwed up or unnecessarily expensive to run on other wikis. A technical solution for protecting deleted pages might be needed soon. Detecting "non articles which happen to occupy article space" is also rather difficult. It's likely going to turn out more effective to just fix up the problems. 86.133.210.53 00:56, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

WIKIPEDIA ON MOBILE

Hi,

We are a mobile content provider company based in Mumbai,India. We have entertainment,sports and current affairs content on our service and the users can access this content on their mobile phones without GPRS. We are greatly interested in putting WIKIPEDIA as an additional service on our platform. IS there any way by which we can create an icon for Wikipedia in our menu of applications ? Please guide us on this issue.

Thanks,

Ranjit Pawar

Vice President- Technical Lehren Technologies Mumbai, India

e: ranjit@lehren.in w: www.lehren.in

You're on your own. Grab the favicon, maybe. But you're the ones providing your own content for your own profit, so that's up to you to work out. —Michiel Sikma, 10:18, 10 May 2006 (UTC) PS: note that nobody is going to take the time to send you an e-mail, so I'm assuming you provided it out of habit.

You can read Wikipedia with a Symbian mobile phone using the Opera browser. If you wrote your own web browser, could could brand this and your customers could use this too. Stephen B Streater 12:23, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

Need help with anti-vandalism feature idea

First off, I apologize, this probably isn't the right place to put this question. If there's a better place, please move it there & tell me where to go instead. Thanks!

I've noticed something about the watchlist / revision history on Wikipedia that I feel is a flaw. Specifically, the (diff) link on the watchlist page only shows you the difference between the two latest edits. Unfortunately, this seems to make it easier for a string of multiple vandalisms to go unfixed. For instance, vandal A blanks a section of an article. Then vandal B changes something else. Then vandal C adds a huge slew of profanities, let's say. Now an editor comes along, using the page history, and notices the changes vandal C made to vandal B's version. He reverts to vandal B's version, and vandals A and B's changes are left unfixed, for someone to eventually notice (or not notice). This happens all the time, at least on high-vandalism pages (like George Bush, or Democratic Party, or Ann Coulter, etc., etc.)

What would be more useful would be an option on your watchlist, to view the difference between the current version of the page and the last version you edited. This way an editor could see any and all changes and instantly spot vandalism, instead of having to load the history page of the article and hunt around. This can of course be done by going to the article history, selecting one's own last version and the latest version, and doing a compare, but that's much more time consuming. Has this already been implemented in some way that I'm unaware of? Has there already been a decision not to do this?

One possible objection I imagine is that having this option would make life easier for a vandal trying to WP:OWN an article. But it would also make life just as much easier for the editor trying to revert that vandal.

I've heard a great deal about counter-vandalism tools, but I've not been able to figure out where to download them. For that matter, I'm worried about installing anything on my computer just on the say-so of one Wikipedia user. Is there an anti-vandalism tool "approved" in any way by Wikipedia that includes this functionality? Or am I just out of luck?

-Kasreyn 22:07, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

What you've described can be done using page history. You select the two versions you want to compare and click "Compare Selected Versions". For example, in this, you can see that between those two edits, four RfAs have been added and two taken off.

I can't speak for implimenting what you ask for in the watchlist, but thought you might not know this already exists. --Lord Deskana ^{Dark Lord of the Sith} 22:21, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Hmm. Well, thanks, but I was kind of hoping for a faster way to do the same thing. I see the number of edits per month of some editors and it boggles my mind: how they can work so fast, and improve so many pages, when it takes me hours just to keep a few pages from backsliding into vandalized garbage, is beyond me. I assume they have access to some tools I don't have. Or is there a trick I'm not seeing? Kasreyn 22:56, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

I usually compare against my last version. Most edits cancel out because of vandalism, and this catches vandalism that may have been missed. See eg my edits on Solar eclipse. PS Some of us spend more time on WP than our wives might wish. Stephen B Streater 23:01, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Heh! Tell me about it... my girlfriend always heaves a sigh when I load my watchlist, because she knows I'll be dead to the world for a couple of hours. But I'm slowly getting her into editing, too.  ;) Kasreyn 04:35, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

There are a number of tools that you are free to use including Wikipedia:Tools/Navigation popups (which includes "diff since my last edit") and Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser. Both can be significant speed boosters for certain types of chores. Or maybe these editors just type fast. Mike Dillon 00:01, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

There's a whole stack of tools at Wikipedia:Tools, and there's one by User:JesseW, which I can't seem to find right now, that shows the differences between your edit and the most recent one with just the click of a tab at the top of the page. J. Finkelstein 00:42, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

I'll vouch that this is a problem. I've noticed it on many pages. Vandal patrol swoops down and doesn't do a complete revert. Sometimes, they don't even sanity check the page. — Edward Z. Yang^(Talk) 22:12, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

That's a problem with incompetent "RC patrollers" who are doing it to up their edit count and/or vandal-fighting reputation, not to help the 'pedia. Rob Church (talk) 16:28, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

CSS setting "background:none"

It's sometimes useful to create tables which have the same background color as surrounding text, but Wikipedia's CSS gives all tables a different background color unless a style="..." attribute is used. The obvious CSS setting, "background-color:inherit" does not work with IE6 and earlier, but IE6 does understand "background: none". See here for an example. Both work in Firefox (of course!); I have not tried any other browsers. I am far from the first to "discover" this, which leads me to my point.

I strongly suggest that the m:Help:Table and/or m:Help:HTML_in_wikitext pages should say something about this. But first, we should check other browsers to see if this "trick" works in them.

Comments, questions and corrections welcome. Cheers, CWC(talk) 08:48, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

I tend to use background: transparent; and it works fine in both IE7 and Firefox. —Locke Cole • t • c 09:13, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

It's also OK in IE6. CWC(talk) 11:04, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

If none and transparent are both valid and synonyms (I'm too lazy to check this) please tell us, none is shorter ;-) -- Omniplex 17:17, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

I've done some reading. The latest CSS 2.1 spec says background: none means background-image: none, whereas background: transparent means background-color: transparent. The spec says a valid declaration for background "first sets all the individual background properties to their initial values, then assigns explicit values given in the declaration". The initial value for background-color is transparent, so none and transparent are equivalent in compliant browers, and even in IE6. Since style attributes override CSS rules, background: none seems to be what we want. Cheers, CWC(talk) 18:35, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

Great, thanks. So "background:transparent" could be used to remove an inherited background colour for a background image, without killing the image. And "none" simply removes both. Greets from the only User css-0 ;-) -- Omniplex 19:32, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

Per CWC's request, I looked at List of indie game developers in Safari v2.0.3 (417.9.2) and saw no problems with the page render. Dread Lord CyberSkull ✎☠ 04:14, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

There also seems to be no problem with Safari v1.3.2 (v312.6). Dread Lord CyberSkull ✎☠ 22:24, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

It's also OK in Konqueror.
I've proposed creating a new CSS class in MediaWiki:Common.css — see MediaWiki_talk:Common.css#Proposal:_class_same-bg. Discussion can continue there. Cheers, CWC(talk) 07:16, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

JavaScript list wrapping

Hi, I'd like to propose a small development project to create JavaScript that would be added to MediaWiki:Monobook.js in order to allow users to wrap lists while maintaining contextually correct markup. Example:

<div class="multicol-list">
* Bullet 1
* Bullet 2
* Bullet 3
</div>

Becomes:

Bullet 1

Bullet 2

Bullet 3

Obviously it wouldn't be used for lists this short, but you get the idea. Some slightly tricky implementation details for ordered lists, but nothing unsurmountable. I'm pretty sure this has been done elsewhere on the web too. However, before I start implementing it, I'd like to see if people would find this useful. — Edward Z. Yang^(Talk) 00:12, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

Overlapping

File:Demo.PNG

Overlap

Just thought I'd mention this. I think the image says it all. I use Firefox, and 1280x1024px resolution. Any other questions just ask. ⇔Thunderbird⇔ 16:53, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

Wierd little thing

For some reason the arrow (→) that used to be at the start of edit summaries pointing directly to the edited section now display as: → what's up with that, messed up unicode in the latest patch? --Sherool (talk) 09:01, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

Hmm, and there it's back to normal, just a glitch I guess. --Sherool (talk) 09:38, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

Images

I it just me, or are all images currently unavailable (at of 19:30, 10 May 2006 (UTC)). The server [4] seems to be down. Does anyone know what happened?! --Primate^#101 19:30, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

Same for me. —Nightstallion (?) ^{Seen this already?} 19:31, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

Hey, it's back up! Still, does anyone know what happened?! --Primate^#101 19:37, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

And it's down again! What the heck! --Primate^#101 19:51, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

They were broken, then back for 20 minutes, and now they're broken again.... Jhonan ^talk 21:20, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

We've been switching the cache servers for uploads to reduce bandwidth use at our main hosting center. Hopefully it's all working now. --Brion 22:00, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

A few images are working for me, but most are still missing? Can I assume that this is a temporary problem?-Reuvenk_[T][C] 22:11, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

Not to complain, but it's still not working for me as well. Snoutwood (talk) 22:13, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

Weird, some images were working, and some were not. Anyway, it's back up now (permanently, hopefully) and all images are displaying. --Primate^#101 00:44, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

Mother's Day at Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries

I've got something interesting how to implement a code to render that day is Mother's Day or not. It's useful to use that in further years without change of that part of the code by using the ParserFunctions, and it's useful to add this kind of code for other days. For example of Mothers Day is at the second Sunday in May. Hence to getting the second Sunday at May, the following criteria maybe considered:

• Check the current month and day. (for 8 May to 14 May since these days are on the second week on May).
• Check is that day is on Sunday.

If both of these two criteria matches, it shows it is Mothers Day, otherwise it does not show up any texts. Anyone can implement this kind of the code using ParserFunctions? thanks :) --Shinjiman ⇔ ♨ 14:59, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

Please don't go ahead with this as in the UK Mother's Day is in March. Twittenham 16:16, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

I have to agree with Twittenham. Many, perhaps most, holidays (etc.) are observed on different days in different countries and cultures, and this would just cause confusion. MCB 21:53, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

So it can appear the message in different way, such as "Mother's Day in region a, b, and c, etc..." :) --Shinjiman ⇔ ♨ 00:52, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

This should do what you want:

{{#ifexpr: ({{CURRENTMONTH}} = 5) and ({{CURRENTDAY}} >= 8)
and ({{CURRENTDAY}} <= 14) and ({{CURRENTDOW}} = 1)
  |Today is Mother's Day in the US!  :D
  |Today is not Mother's Day in the US.  :(
}}

—Simetrical (talk • contribs) 03:30, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

I've now implemented the #ifexpr statement into those days except 10 May and 11 May, and I've inserted the statement as "Mother's Day in several regions". Free free to improve this statement. :) --Shinjiman ⇔ ♨ 04:43, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

It seems that when it's in Sunday, the CURRENTDOW should be 0, I've correct this from 1 to 0. --Shinjiman ⇔ ♨ 04:48, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

Right, I knew that. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 19:00, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

Blocking 66.240.57.80 through 66.240.57.95

Could someone block this IP range, as a test of a proposed Consented block policy? This IP range belongs solely to the Community High School District 117 of Lake Villa, Illinois. The network admin there has been patiently trying to dispiline any vandal he can identify, but wishes for a more permanent solution, without his school outright blocking Wikimedia's content. The requested block should last until 8 May 2007. -- Zanimum 16:48, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

This is OTRS ticket 2006050310008001; hmm... I'd do it myself, but I don't understand rangeblocks. Could we just block each one of the fifteen individually? Shimgray | talk | 16:32, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

...80 is ...0101 0000 in binary, ...95 is ...0101 1111. So you want to block 66.240.57.80/28. (There are sixteen addresses, by the way, not fifteen.  ;)) —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 03:07, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

Is this right? [5] -- Zanimum 19:01, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

Seems to be, but I would appreciate confirmation from someone who actually has some experience with MediaWiki range-blocking. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 18:59, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

Template confusion

I am trying to insert Template:Scrooge into the top of Scrooge McDuck but whenever I try, the entire article ends up getting smudged into the diameters of the template. What in the code did I do wrong / can someone fix it? Or, can this be turned into an infobox? Thanks. -- Wikipedical 00:59, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

The template starts 4 tables ({| starts a table) but only closes two. I haven't looked at it enough to figure out what you really intend, however I'd recommend using fewer tables (I don't think there's any particular reason one table shouldn't be sufficient). -- Rick Block (talk) 14:01, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

I am wondering where the Code Lyoko template:

is located Lyoko is Cool 02:41, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

Um. Template:Code Lyoko. Mike Dillon 02:44, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

Change to MediaWiki:Common.css requested for references

Could we get a font size change added to the style for references? Something like

ol.references {
   font-size: 90%;
}

Right now a lot of people are putting a div around reference invocations to get the size made smaller (notes and references just look better smaller)... that would save this effort and unify the appearance. Thanks! ++Lar: t/c 21:15, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

note, this is a re-request... see this thread: Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)/Archive#proposed_change_to_css_.28.references.29 ++Lar: t/c 21:17, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

I concur, because Sean Black made me. Don't ask how. He has evil powers and was mean to me. I mean, uh...I am saying this entirely of my own free will, and under no duress! Yay CSS! Rob Church (talk) 21:19, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

Strong support. CSS is better than everything else. --Ligulem 21:34, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

Strong disagreement. First of all: why 90%? 85% looks much better on a lot of operating systems from what I can tell. Also, why should everybody be FORCED to use a certain font size?? We've already got {{FootnotesSmall}}. And really... a LOT of featured articles already put a div at a smaller size around their references, and this would break all of those articles! So no, for one thing, this forces people to use a certain style while reference style is purely subjective, which is awful enough already, but it also breaks existing articles. I see that this change was brought forth already. PLEASE revert it! —Michiel Sikma, 06:22, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Note that setting a smaller font size in common.css can easily be overridden in your own monobook.css, while I don't beleive this is the case with the current method of doing it per article. And there is the advantage of seperating of content from layout. —Ruud 14:29, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Me changing my monobook.css is not going to help the other members of Wikipedia and is not going to help the guest visitors of Wikipedia. This is a bad change, period. Yes, I could change my own style sheet, but that doesn't make it less of a poor decision since now guests have to face the consequences of this bad decision. Yes, I could close my eyes and pretend like the change isn't there, but how's that going to help them? Please do not suggest that I do so; my interest is also to write the largest and most comprehensive encyclopedia in the world, but the appearance on the Internet is also very, very important in order to make it accessible! —Michiel Sikma, 18:21, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

• Someone operated a site-wide fixed size reduction for footnotes recently (I don't know what percentage, but definitely too small);
  • It's actually only a minor 90%, but the problem is that a lot of articles already manually change font size for references. A 90% footnotes references after it's already been downscaled to the commonly used 85% means that the size will become a really tiny 76.5%. Of course, one could argue that it's simply a matter of removing all custom formatting that downscales the references in the articles, but then what about all the articles that would benefit from having 100% as reference size? And what about the fact that there are hundreds, if not thousands of articles (a lot of them very good articles or at least very well-cited ones, since the only articles that typically have small references are the articles with lots of them) that need to be (manually) changed? That's the main reason why I'm opposed to this. It just kind of disallows users from choosing 100% as their reference font size and at the same time breaks existing articles. —Michiel Sikma, 08:55, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
• There was no consensus to do so: afaik all prior discussions ended on "standard size for footnotes preferably 100%"
• As for my opinion: indeed, standard footnote size should be 100%.
• See also wikipedia talk:footnotes#Resizing footnotes - what is going on? --Francis Schonken 08:13, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

I support this change as well. It's much better to standardize this in CSS than to use a template to do it. —Locke Cole • t • c 20:32, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

There is no good reason to have a global change to footnote font sizes. It is done in print to save space, but we don't have that problem on Wikipedia. If you want to change it, please do so in your personal stylesheet, but don't do it to everyone. --Blainster 21:19, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

I disagree, and support the change. There's pages in which the references section is three pages long, even at a reduced size. Having pages and pages of references looks unprofessional, even if Wikipedia doesn't have the space problem. Besides, the change shouldn't be applied to all articles, but those few that merit it should be consistent. Titoxd^{(?!? - help us)} 21:25, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

I disagree as well, on the grounds that the font size used for references should be consistant regardless of the size/length of the references section. A consistant look on Wikipedia makes us appear more professional, as opposed to some articles having full size references and others displaying the smaller references. —Locke Cole • t • c 21:40, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

There are some things that you don't seem to understand.

First of all, this change was made without proper consent. Only a few people had commented on it and nobody had waited to see if a lot of people disagreed. It was only in here for a few days, as I understand, before the change was made live.

Second of all, this change breaks lots of good articles by rendering their references unreadable!!! What should we do? Edit ALL of those articles? Or should we just leave it as it is, because it was fine the way it was before these rather phathetic changes were done? As I understand it, there is NO CONSENSUS on doing a site-wide CSS change! Yes, there are some who agree, but there are obviously also people who disagree. Only a grand majority should warrant a CSS change.

Third of all, this hamstrings the editor's ability to make references at 100% size! I'm a professional designer, but I don't need to be that to tell you that it's often a very good idea to simply have normal sized references in an article where there are only a few simply for reasons of consistency and legibility.

I think that it's utterly disgraceful that this site-wide change that breaks articles was put through without waiting for consent. This is not what Wikipedia is about! I strongly suggest that this is rolled back for now until it's determined that this is really what the community wants, and as far as I can tell, this is NOT what the community wants or needs.—Michiel Sikma, 06:26, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

This change was made after at least two discussions which seemed to support the change. That "few people had commented on it" is nobodies fault, so quit trying to imply there was some great effort to circumvent discussion; I can't imagine a more public place to discuss this than the village pump. Regarding existing articles, we should probably see about getting bots to remove DIV tags from existing pages so their references will appear at the now-standard size. If there's something specifically wrong with this new standard, we should discuss alternative sizes which address the concerns of those affected (where practicle of course). Finally, I think "consistancy" suggests that we have them all the same size (which is what I've suggested from the very beginning). It looks very unprofessional for some articles to have smaller references and other articles to have larger references. Regarding lack of control, well.. I'm sorry. But this is why MediaWiki:Common.css exists in the first place, to enforce certain standard styles. Having this look different in various articles is very unprofessional. This is why, for example, editors can't change the Wikipedia logo in the upper left corner depending on the article; otherwise Star Wars articles would have a Death Star in the upper left corner (an exaggeration I'm sure, but you get the idea). Similarly, I argue that references should have a uniform appearance in articles no matter how many references are in use. This change does that. —Locke Cole • t • c 07:28, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

After just one discussion in which only two people supported the change. It was then done. That doesn't really make it fair. If you can find the second discussion (the link that was given further up does not work) then please give it. Even if you do, is it really appropriate to point to an old discussion? I could make a major change to something and use "but there was consent to do it two months ago!" as argument; that wouldn't really be fair either, would it?

As for the consistency aspect: sure, it's true that references need to be consistent, but not always. Consistency is just a subdivision of readability and usability. Making all of the references smaller hamstrings usability because articles that have previously set div size or do not need a smaller font size are also affected. Again, I must point you to the fact that if you wanted this to be different, then you should have modified your common.css. Not change the one that the entire community uses. The fact that you think that articles should all have a font size of 90% for references and not just the ones that have more than about 20 of them is your opinion and not necessarily that of the entire community! (Update as of 10:30, 5 May 2006 (UTC): fixed the references being way too small in Solar eclipse which had the font size of the references set to 85%; it is today's featured article.)

And will you please respond to the fact that you need to have a major agreement in the community to make such changes? I still don't think that it was sought, and now that it has been done, you are simply not listening to the dissenters and completely ignoring all other opinions. What kind of an attitude is that? —Michiel Sikma, 08:27, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

Aha. I've found the old discussion. Do you call this a consensus? There was a gigantic amount of discussion there, and a lot of people did NOT support it. That means there was no consensus. In the end, everybody decided that there wasn't and disbanded. To quote Ligulem from that discussion: "There will stay articles where wikipedians want small references, and other articles where they want normal size references". So the first discussion failed to reach consensus, and thus there was no change. Then there's another discussion in which you waited for a grand total of just two people to vote yes before you hastily changed this. That's called avoiding discussion, and I disagree with that very, very strongly. —Michiel Sikma, 08:38, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

I like the change. Kudos to those who were bold. We should hijack a bot to remove all the page specific font size adjustments from reference sections. Content should be seperate from presentation, and consistency across the project looks more professional. Gentgeen 07:12, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

Agreed and agreed, I'd like to think it wouldn't be too hard to have a bot run through and remove DIV tags from all references (to remove any font sizing). Assuming this isn't rolled back, we should look into this next to fix up the issues reported above. —Locke Cole • t • c 07:28, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

I'm fully in favor of anything that avoids the daft (to my mind) tendency to crush footnotes to 85% or even less of the size of standard text. But I disagree with the need to bring it down even to 90%. Look at Hiroh Kikai, for example. The notes contain a lot of kanji, which (assuming your computer is set up to display them at all, of course) are likely to be harder to read at 90% than at 100%. So 100% is a good size (for media:screen, at least). I thought I'd change it back to 100%, via <references style="font-size:100%" /> but no, that throws up a syntax error ("Cite error 6; Invalid parameters; expecting none"). For media:screen, I see no need to make the font for footnotes any smaller than that for the main text. (It's not as if web pages were printed on paper.) And for WP, I think small print in footnotes could be a Bad Thing: it might suggest to editors and potential editors (as well of course as non-editing readers) that sources and "sourcing" really aren't important or are a tiresome chore normally deserving no more than token attention (cf boilerplate legalese). -- Hoary 08:34, 6 May 2006 (UTC) PS Aha, at least one person agrees with me! -- Hoary 10:34, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Please add further discussions to MediaWiki talk:Common.css#Please revert "resizing of footnotes by CSS" in order to keep the discussion in one place. Thanks. --Ligulem 09:18, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

*Reminder*

Could a sysop please remove these lines from common.css:

/* make the list of refence material look small */
ol.references {
font-size: 90%;
}

...which appears to be the consensus here and at MediaWiki talk:Common.css#Please revert "resizing of footnotes by CSS".

Further, I suggested and implemented (as far as my non-sysop powers allow me) a solution described on the same page, MediaWiki talk:Common.css#Proposing other solution (at least part of a solution for the future), which is a solution that as far as I can see covers the concerns expressed here and elsewhere, but is dependent from not having an over-all ol.references resizing in the css.

The only thing then still left to do is remove the resizing div tags in article space, per the suggestions above. Thanks! --Francis Schonken 09:47, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

I should have been watching this discussion more closely, I guess, I missed it blowing up into non consensus! I was happy to see footnotes go to 90 and started removing divs, but then I saw them go back to 100, and stopped removing divs... I am in the camp that thinks footnotes are stylistically supposed to be small. But I'm also in the camp that thinks that doing so individually, article by article, is the wrong way to do it. If the consensus is that they should be the same size as article text, so be it, but I now think maybe all the divs that are resizing things should be removed. ++Lar: t/c 01:26, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

Multiple templates for one box

Hi all. Is there any reason to split up a navigational box into three templates, as is done with {{start CityTrain box}}, {{Brisbane CityTrain}}, and {{end box}} on Doomben railway station, Brisbane? The increased maintenance cost of having several templates to do one thing seems to offset any possible benefits from this coding technique. This is really a WTF? moment for me, so I'd appreciate any insight. ~MDD4696 23:44, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

It's a way to allow for more than one line in the box (for some stations which have more than one line). --cesarb 23:55, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

{{subst:template}} in monobook.js

Does anyone know how to use {{subst:template}} in monobook.js without the contents of template being placed in it? I'd like to use 't.value = "{{subst:template}}"' in my monobook.js, but I can't figure out how to do that. If I just use "{{subst:template}}" the contents of template will be placed in my monobook.js and if I use nowiki tags the value of t becomes "< nowiki >{{subst:template}}< /nowiki >". I just want the value of t to become "{{subst:template}}" using a link. Erwin85 19:42, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

t.value = "{{subst:" + "template}}" æle ✆ 2006-05-08t20:42z

Thanks, it worked. Erwin85 08:16, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

Always put //<nowiki> before your monobook to be sure. Voice of All 19:07, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

Title-changing template thing

On Chinese Wikipedia there is a quasi-template, -{T|var}-, that changes the visible title of the page. You can see this in action here. So, for example, if I wanted the title of User:Ashibaka to show up as "Ashibaka's Userpage", I'd just put -{T|Ashibaka's Userpage}- at the top of the page and that name would show up in the <h1> heading.

Why doesn't this work on English Wikipedia? I looked at meta:Help:Page name and all but could not find any explanation. Any help? Ashibaka tock 03:24, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

I think what you are talking about is the same thing as Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#I think I have a solution to articles with initial lowercase letters..-gadfium 06:15, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Nope-- it's not a template. It actually replaces the text of the <h1>. Ashibaka tock 23:11, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

This is something to do with the language converter used on Chinese sites.

Exactly, it's explained at meta:Automatic conversion between simplified and traditional Chinese. --cesarb 22:28, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

So, uh, why this particular feature isn't used to fix the lowercase problem? Ashibaka tock 05:12, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

Off by one section error when editing

Hi, I've a lot of sections in User:Lar and in order to cut the length I've put a fair bit of the material inside collapsable show/hide divs, using constructs of the form:

===Some Heading===
<div class="NavFrame" style="border:0px; padding: 0px;">
<div class="NavFrame" style="{{{global_style}}}">
<div class="NavHead" style="background:none;
{{{title_style|border:0px; padding:0px;}}}"><span
style="font-size:{{{title_size|12}}}pt">This is probably too long...
I do go on at length when bragging... </span></div>
<div class="NavContent" style="text-align: left; display:none;">
  ... content content content ...
</div></div></div></div>

This gives the desired effect, much of the stuff is initially collapsed. But when I try to edit sections, starting with the first section so collapsed, I'm off by one. For example clicking the edit for "Projects" actually edits the "Awards" section just below it. I have to manually change the count to section=6 to get it to edit the right thing. Once I manually change it, it's fine. Comments welcomed! Have others seen issues like this? Should I be doing show/hide a different way? Or is it due to something unrelated? Or is this a bug? (not likely, it has to be me!) Thanks! ++Lar: t/c 15:21, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Fixed it, the error was being caused by User:Lar/Contact. — Ian Moody ^(talk) 15:59, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Thanks Ian! For those following along at home, the problem was caused by that box using an <h3> tag instead of the more common === wiki way of doing headers. I blame Kelly Martin, whose code I cribbed, and myself, (laughs at self) for cribbing it and not checking what it did more closely! Thanks again... ++Lar: t/c 16:06, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Just out of curiosity, why not <div class="NavFrame NavHead" style="border:0px; padding: 0px; {{{global_style}}} background:none; {{{title_style|border:0px; padding:0px;}}}">...</div> instead of three separate divs? —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 05:08, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

These are magical divs used by JavaScript code at MediaWiki:Monobook.js. The code there expects all these divs. --cesarb 18:25, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

Fixed the overlong. — Edward Z. Yang^(Talk) 20:01, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

I know how to use SQL dumps, but not XML dumps. help!

Hi,

How do I use the new dumps in xml format? Previously I used a WAMP (Windows+Apache+MySQL+PHP) and the SQL dump. But the SQL dumps are gone! How do I access the new dumps in xml format? --User:Mdob

I presume you have seen Wikipedia:Database download there are a few references there to ways to process the dumps. Posibly the easiest would be to install a local copy of MediaWiki and use the maintanance/inportDump.php script which will import the data into MySQL. --Salix alba (talk) 18:01, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

Hint: there is a link to a page full of documentation at the top of the page with the downloads! --Brion 22:26, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

Centering?

I've recently gotten into a bit of trouble with tables, which seem to default to the right hand side of any page and disregard any borders set by the "== My stuff ==" tags. Is there a way to restrict tables to an interval between said tags, and if so, what tags do I use to center a table? Terek 02:38, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

If you add "align=center" on the line starting the table, the table will be centered. I'm not exactly sure what your other question is, but adding "<br clear=all/>" before a header will make the header drop below any tables or pictures. Hope this is helpful. -- Rick Block (talk) 04:16, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

I'll experiment with the "align=center" tag, and I thank you for providing it. However, my question is not relating to the contents of a table, but rather, the alignment of the table itself. Provided below is an example.

My Table

Blah Blah	More stuff
Bleh Bleh	Stuff More

As you can see, the table itself is on the right-hand side of the screen. I would like it on the left or center; anything but the right-hand side. Terek 05:17, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

Comparison of video editing software has lots of centred tables. Stephen B Streater 08:18, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

My Table

Blah Blah	More stuff
Bleh Bleh	Stuff More

The table I'm forced to work with is an "info-box", actually, and I can't get the align="left" or align="center" commands to work within the first line. I have reproduced it below:

| class="infobox bordered" style="width: 36em; text-align: left; font-size: 95%;" Terek 08:38, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

I don't know enough about these to know if this is possible. If no one comes up with a better suggestion, you could search for "info-box" and look through some articles which have one until you find one which is not right aligned. Stephen B Streater 11:11, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

Infoboxes are at least ordinarily displayed on the top right of an article. This is done with the "float: right;" style, which you can override with "float: none;" (which also makes text not flow around the object). -- Rick Block (talk) 14:49, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

My Table

Blah Blah	More stuff
Bleh Bleh	Stuff More

Ahh, excellent! Yes, thank you all, that helped rather nicely! One final note: how do I make use of the <blocktext> tag? Terek 20:44, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

More accurately, I'm looking for a way to have "invisible indent bullets". There's a page I'm working on that indents the first line of a block of text with a single bullet, denoted as "*" and every successive line with two bullets, "**". The "**" indents the sentences, but they still have a bullet in front of them. Terek 21:49, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

Try this HTML markup, which you can see used on the main page in the "Did you know..." section:

<ul style="list-style-type:none;list-style-image:none;">
<li>Hi</li>
<li>There</li>
<li>Terek</li>
</ul>

Which gives you something like this:

• Hi
• There
• Terek

This makes the list items have no image at all. I know because I scopped the Main Page style on my own userpage, because I like it so much :D. J. Finkelstein 23:18, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

Setting a background image in a table

Is there a way to change the background color of a table using an image?--Coro 23:39, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

As far as I know, this has been intentionally suppressed, so that the following are ignored (do not work):

• HTML-image-tag (<img .../>) – see also “image maps”
• CSS (cascading style sheets – “background-image:url(...)”)
  – see also “meta:Help:Cascading_style_sheets#Supported CSS”

-- ParaDox 11:54, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

Insert line break in very long external link

Example

{{{
 |http://www.google.com/custom?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&cof=BGC%3A%23FFFFFF%3}}}{{{
 |BT%3A%23000000%3BLC%3A%230000CC%3BVLC%3A%230000CC%3BALC%3A%230000CC%3BGALT}}}{{{
 |%3A%23008000%3BGFNT%3A%23000000%3BGIMP%3A%23000000%3BDIV%3A%230000CC%3BLBG}}}{{{
 |C%3A%23FFFFFF%3B&domains=en.wikipedia.org&q=%22long+external+links%22&btnG}}}{{{
 |=Search&sitesearch=en.wikipedia.org}}}

Result

http://www.google.com/custom?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&cof=BGC%3A%23FFFFFF%3BT%3A%23000000%3BLC%3A%230000CC%3BVLC%3A%230000CC%3BALC%3A%230000CC%3BGALT%3A%23008000%3BGFNT%3A%23000000%3BGIMP%3A%23000000%3BDIV%3A%230000CC%3BLBGC%3A%23FFFFFF%3B&domains=en.wikipedia.org&q=%22long+external+links%22&btnG=Search&sitesearch=en.wikipedia.org

Nobody asked me, so Someone gets the answer ;-)  -- ParaDox 17:18, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

Even simpler

 http://www.google.com/custom?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&cof=BGC%3A%23FFFFFF%3<!--
 -->BT%3A%23000000%3BLC%3A%230000CC%3BVLC%3A%230000CC%3BALC%3A%230000CC%3BGALT<!--
 -->%3A%23008000%3BGFNT%3A%23000000%3BGIMP%3A%23000000%3BDIV%3A%230000CC%3BLBG<!--
 -->C%3A%23FFFFFF%3B&domains=en.wikipedia.org&q=%22long+external+links%22&btnG<!--
 -->=Search&sitesearch=en.wikipedia.org

http://www.google.com/custom?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&cof=BGC%3A%23FFFFFF%3BT%3A%23000000%3BLC%3A%230000CC%3BVLC%3A%230000CC%3BALC%3A%230000CC%3BGALT%3A%23008000%3BGFNT%3A%23000000%3BGIMP%3A%23000000%3BDIV%3A%230000CC%3BLBGC%3A%23FFFFFF%3B&domains=en.wikipedia.org&q=%22long+external+links%22&btnG=Search&sitesearch=en.wikipedia.org

-- ParaDox 17:55, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

Fixed overlong. If a user wants to, they can test it out themselves on a different page. — Edward Z. Yang^(Talk) 20:03, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

Doesn't look fixed to me. -- ParaDox 23:12, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

It seems that the problem isn't one for all users, but depends on the browser one is using. I'm using Firefox exclusively, and other Firefox users might like to know of an individual solution I've found:

• Wikipedia:WikiProject User scripts/Scripts/Fix diff width
  • If you want to support having this bug fixed, please read Wikipedia:Bugzilla and then register here if you like, to then be able to vote here (Bug 1229: Balance diff display more evenly).

-- ParaDox 10:28, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

References

I am trying to come to grips with the new way of doing references. At least I think its new. I was editing Edith Jones and wanted to give a reference to her (in)famous concurrence in McCorvey v. Hill. The official transcript is here (PDF). I believe it is courteous to tell people when a link isn't to a regular html page. (It doesn't bother me but I see it often enough to tell that it bothers some people.) I think this needs to be done right next to the link, as at the article McCorvey v. Hill which still uses the old reference system. However under the new system it looks like any extra text (i.e. apart from author, title and access date if applicable) has to go after the reference, outside of the {{}}. This means random info (such as this is a pdf file, quicktime, whatever) has to go at the end. Is there any way round this so as to put it at a more logical place? I can't see anything at Help:Footnotes. Thanks Stroika 15:49, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

Well, using a template such as {{cite web}} inside the reference usually does the trick. All you have to do is add format=PDF as a parameter to the template. Does that help? Titoxd^{(?!? - help us)} 20:04, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for your help so far but I am going to need a little more. If I just put {{cite web}} into an edit I get

{{cite web}}: Empty citation (help)

How do I get from that to this? (from Peter Principle):

• Lazear, E. (2001). "The Peter Principle: Promotions and Declining Productivity". Working Paper 8094. NBER.

Am I supposed to be copying and pasting from the template or what? I once noticed my father centered text in WordPerfect by counting the number of characters in the heading, subtracting it from the number in the line and dividing by two. CTRL-E (or whatever it was) changed his life. I just have this suspicion that copying and pasting would be my equivalent.--Stroika 07:17, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

Later : It occurs to me that we might be at cross-purposes. I am asking about a system of references to footnotes in use in the article Edith Jones. All the relevant matter is included in the text but is so arranged that it appears at the end of the article. {{cite web}} seems to be some way of making bibliographies uniform and the template is inserted where you expect it to appear in the article.--Stroika 08:09, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

Images not scaling

On my own wiki GIF and PNG images don't seam to scale properly like they do on WikiMedia projects (for example http://www.gmcfoley.com/wiki/index.php?title=Sonic_the_Hedgehog_2). What is causing this? Thanks, Gerard Foley 15:42, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

What exactly is the problem? is your wiki set up to use the php image libraries rather than imagemagick (which is likely to lead to different results from the scaling)? Plugwash 19:09, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

Here's a screenshot:

The one on the left is from my wiki and the one on the right is from Wikibooks. It's MediaWiki 1.6.2 and should still be using its default settings. Gerard Foley 21:51, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

Is your MediaWiki using the php image libraries or is it using imagemagick? That may be the source of the difference. — Saxifrage ✎ 22:10, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

I don't know, how do I check? As I said it should still be using whatever the default is as I haven't changed anything in this area. Gerard Foley 22:36, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

I should also add that jpeg works fine, the problem is only with GIF and PNG. Gerard Foley 00:28, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure what the default is now, but you can look in includes/DefaultSettings.php of your MediaWiki installation to find out. From my own version 1.4.3 install:

/**
 * Resizing can be done using PHP's internal image libraries or using
 * ImageMagick. The later supports more file formats than PHP, which only
 * supports PNG, GIF, JPG, XBM and WBMP.
 *
 * Use Image Magick instead of PHP builtin functions.
 */
$wgUseImageMagick               = false;
/** The convert command shipped with ImageMagick */
$wgImageMagickConvertCommand    = '/usr/bin/convert';

If yours is similar, to switch image engines you would need to make sure ImageMagick is installed and add $wgUseImageMagick = true; to your LocalSettings.php file. — Saxifrage ✎ 00:42, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

1.4.3? Good god, upgrade! Rob Church (talk) 00:50, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

When I have the time, I intend to. :-) It's a very low-traffic wiki used by a half-dozen people, so I'm not worried about it catching fire and sinking into the swamp before I get to upgrading. — Saxifrage ✎ 01:24, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

It looks like I need to install ImageMagick firt before it will work. How do I do it? Gerard Foley 13:38, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Is this your own server or a shared server? If the former you should just be able to install it using your distros normal package management. If not then you will either have to get the servers administrator to install it or try and get it to work with a copy placed locally (and the path changed in the mediawiki config). I don't know if anyone has tried that setup though. Plugwash 23:43, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

It's set up on GeoCities. Gerard Foley 18:09, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Would it be possible to let the full image download (for png and gif) and be resized by the users browser? Gerard Foley 01:15, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

I think its possible but browser scaling sucks just as much as the php gd library so you won't gain any quality and will increase download times. Plugwash 23:29, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

Disambig.

Hello, I think this is the right place to ask this: Where should one go to ask for a change in disambiguation. The page concerned is Joe Cole, and I believe that Joe Cole (footballer) is far more important than the other Joe Cole, a groupie (there may be a fair deal of POV, but all the "links to" pages back me up. So can I get the Joe Cole (footballer) page moved to the Joe Cole page? If possible, please reply both here and on my Talk Page, and I'd appreciate it a lot. --Dangherous 12:40, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Requested moves. Start a discussion on Talk:Joe Cole, and add an entry to the list on Wikipedia:Requested moves. -- Eugene van der Pijll 12:45, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

I've been bold and fixed it. Having a page to disambiguate only two other pages serves no purpose. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 05:54, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

Question mark not working in URL

Question marks are no longer working in the URL. For example, when placing "? (Lost)" in the URL, instead of leading to ? (Lost), it goes to the Main Page. ⇒ JarlaxleArtemis 02:58, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Naming_conventions_(technical_restrictions)#Question_mark. —Ruud 03:17, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

The question mark is permitted in the title, but can't be entered raw in the URL because, unescaped, it has a specific meaning as part of HTTP. Note the escaping if you hover over the link above. Rob Church (talk) 15:02, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

Redirection Question

Greetings all :) I have questions about redirection. Everything Must Go (1996 album) was moved to Everything Must Go (Manic Street Preachers album), as was Everything Must Go (2003 album) to Everything Must Go (Steely Dan album). Many references still exist to the old versions. Should I leave them, or should I move the references to the direct page? Does it matter? Any thoughts?

I posted on Talk:Everything Must Go as well. -- Irixman ^{(t) (m)} 22:40, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

I think the consensus once discused was roughly that editing a page just to fix such a thing is not necessarily worth it because it takes more database operations than using the redirect as is. If you fix them, at leats fix other stuffin the articles, I'd say. Circeus 19:29, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

TeX Font Size

This is an equation created with Wikipedia's font for math markup:

$Q\;=\;C\;A\;P\;{\sqrt {{\bigg (}{\frac {\;\,g_{c}\;k\;M}{Z\;R\;T}}{\bigg )}{\bigg (}{\frac {2}{k+1}}{\bigg )}^{(k+1)/(k-1)}}}$

This is the same equation created using WikiCities' font for the very same math markup:

A suggestion has been made at Bugzilla that Wikipedia make the smaller font TeX version, used at WikiCities, available as an alternative option to the current larger TeX font used in Wikipedia. It is quite obvious that the WikCities TeX font is smaller, neater and tidier. It is much closer to the size of the regular text so that the overall look of an article that uses TeX equations is more balanced. Also, the smaller TeX font allows for displaying longer equations, within the display screen width, than does the Wikipedia font.

The larger font would remain just as it is. Users would still use the <math> and </math> tags. If they wanted to use the smaller font, they would use <maths> and </maths> or some similar technique. In other words, when a user creates an equation, he or she would decide which font they wanted to use.

If you agree with this suggestion, visit Bugzilla Bug #4915 at here, scroll down and vote for the proposal. - mbeychok 18:06, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

The smaller one is also definitely harder to read. I would strongly recommend against forcing it smaller. --Brion 00:15, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

Brion, with all due respect, the proposal does not ask for any change "or forcing it smaller" in the current font size. It distinctly asks only that the smaller font be made available as an optional alternate for the users. As you know, it is currently being used by all of the Wikis in WikiCities. If I may ask, what is your real reason for being against having an optional alternate? - mbeychok 00:52, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

You mention including a tag like <maths> which would force the rendering to be small. I might support an option to allow the end user to choose the smaller size, but cannot get on board any proposal by which editors can force smaller sizes on a per-formula basis, with an end result of inconsistent choices of size across different articles or even in a single article. You seem to be conflating editors with readers. Readers don't write any math tags, and wouldn't have any option to change tags. -lethe ^{talk +} 01:34, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

I think now I understand what you mean by "force". To me, force means making a person or an object do something under duress like forcing a person at gunpoint to give you his life's savings or forcing a square box through a smaller round hole. I gather what you mean, in ordinary English, is that you don't want the authors or editors of articles to have the choice of font size because it would lead to inconsistent usage in Wikipedia. At the same time, Lethe, you might agree to allow end-user readers to select the font size they wish as they view an article. Do I understand you correctly?

That's right. If you provide two tags which render to different sizes, and someone uses one, then all readers are forced to view the equation at that size. This is about choice for readers, not choice for editors. I would be more inclined to consider this proposal if it had some way of dealing with that. For example, if users could in their preferences choose what sizes to render what tags. Of course, this doubles the amount of equation images that the server has to render and store. I have no idea if that entails a performance hit. I would expect not. -lethe ^{talk +} 16:08, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

That means that a consensus would be needed to decide which font the authors and editors would use to write their articles, does it not? It seems to me, that it would be virtually impossible to achieve such a consensus.

I admit you have a point about wanting to avoid inconsistent usage if two fonts were available. Would it perhaps be useful if our key developers were to confer with their counterparts at WikiCities and find out how they arrived at the decision to use the smaller font? Or has Brion already done that? - mbeychok 05:18, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

Why don't we do both? We could introduce a <maths> tag for editors, and a "No small math fonts" prefs option for users. The default would be off. Any user who objected to the small fonts indicated by the editor tags would select the option and retain the current behavior. Ryan Reich 13:04, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

One small additional point: don't call it <maths>, but instead <smath>. Anyone from a country whose English is the Queen's will do a double take on the first one. Ryan Reich 13:11, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

That means that a consensus would be needed to decide which font the authors and editors would use to write their articles, does it not? No, Lethe's proposal does not require that. He is suggesting having the option for an end-user instead of in the editing process. So there would be no change as far as editing goes, and so no consensus on that is necessary. Instead, the end-user would be able to specifiy in his/her preferences what is preferred. Additionally, I don't think it's good to follow Lethe's suggestion and the original proposal. Anons that cannot choose preferences would be stuck with the smaller size if reading some article (or paragraph even) that some editor decided to write using the smaller size. I do believe, as Brion does, that the smaller size is harder to read on the screen. I think the normal option should be one which maximizes readibility, while users who think another size is neater, tidier, prettier, etc. can sign up for an account and modify it at their end. I think it's best to leave the aesthetics up to the end-user as much as possible. --Chan-Ho (Talk) 04:21, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

Chan-Ho Suh: If I understand you correctly, what you are saying is leave the math markup just as it is now and leave the font size just as it is now ... but give readers the option of seeing the output equation in the either the larger or the smaller font.

Those of us writing an equation for an article are also readers. If we set our own reader option as being the smaller font, when we click the Preview button during the writing of the equation, would we then see the smaller font version? If that is so, that would certainly satisfy me. In fact, I think that is an elegant solution that ought to satisfy most of us ... if it can be done. - mbeychok 18:44, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

Yes, that's what I mean. I'm not familiar with what technical challenges exist in this approach, but I agree that if the preference would work into the preview, then that would be ideal. I don't see why it couldn't be done, but as I said, I have no idea on what the problem would be. --Chan-Ho (Talk) 12:18, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

One thing that would be cool would be if you had two tags, one for inline math mode and one for display mode. This isn't a difference in the font choice, but rather in how large the equation is formatted. Inline rendering fits better in paragraphs. However, as KSmrq points out on the bugzilla page, improving wikipedia's texvc support is a bit of wasted effort; we're hoping for Blahtex to replace texvc in 2006. -lethe ^{talk +} 16:02, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

In principal I like the idea of a smaller font so that the equations render the same size as the main text, although in the above examples the fonts are quite as clear in the smaller versions as the larger, hopefully this is a fixable bug.

From a mathematical POV the current implementation is broxen in a nuber of ways. The inline formula should ideally comply with the convention that variable names render in italic and use the same font as display formula.

Of course we could go the whole hog and forget the PNG rendering and use the meta:Blahtex extension which produces MathML output, rather than PNG. Most of en wikipedia and several other wikipedias have now had their math output fixed to be compatable with Blahtex. There is a test wiki where you can see the Blahtex output Help:Formula is probably the best example of the output.

Is their a process for moving towards getting Blahtex implemented, should we start a proposal or submit a bug report? --Salix alba (talk) 19:36, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

CSS float/clear breaking edit-links placement

As at User:HereToHelp/sandbox, the 2nd box on the right is floated below the 1st with a "clear:right". This causes the "edit" link for the Notices header to appear lower than it should.

Is there an easy fix for this? Or can someone recommend another way to obtain the same layout using a different CSS coding technique? thanks. (this bug can also be seen at Wikipedia talk:Community Portal following an archive) -Quiddity 21:35, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

I fix this problem (which is only present in firefox AFAIK) by moving the second box/pictures below the troublesome header. However, this might cause the layout to look strange at other resolution/fontsizes and so on, and should be done with caution. Circeus 19:31, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

That fix works for firefox, but breaks it in IE(5.01) (see User:Quiddity/sandbox). The original problem is present in opera8 also, but not in IE. Any other suggestions? thanks :) -Quiddity 20:40, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

IE 5.0 is notoriously problematic with floats, AFAIK. I'd have a deeper look, but I only have access to 6.0. However, it's probably not too problematic in itself, since 5.0 is probably the less used of all the IE versions. What happens exactly to break? It ignores the clear command? Circeus 21:42, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

It treats it like a clear all, leaving a 2inch gap under the Notices heading. The IE bug i can happily ignore if it just affects 5.0, but having that "New Pages" section right under the "Notices" header in the source still makes things very confusing (for editors just looking to post a notice). Hmmm. I'm not quite sure what to try next. -Quiddity 00:02, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Article validation

Does anyone know the status of this idea, to allow a particular version to be tagged as validated? Such a feature would give greater confidence to someone who wanted to use wikipedia as a reference tool and wanted to have reasonable assurances that the current version did not have something slipped in by a vandal. Eiler7 12:14, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

There are lots of ways of validating articles, but none of them definitive. Featured articles, Good articles are a good guide to the general accuracy of the article. Of course it could have just been edited by a vandal, but a system which required validation of every single revision would be impossible (thousands of revisions a day). The handiest tool is a bit of common sense and a check of the history page if you're suspicious. The Wikipedia 1.0 project is on its way to producing a set of properly verified articles, but the best thing about Wikipedia are the recent changes! BigBlueFish 18:29, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

Tangentially related to this is the automatic listing of assessed articles for the Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team. It works through templates on talk pages and categories, if you're interested. Titoxd^{(?!? - help us)} 18:47, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

Well, having a 1.0 would be good but such versions are, I suppose, only likely to happen every year or so. Someone who wanted the latest information on a person without the vandalism would be stuck. Has validation being rejected? Is this the consensus view of wikipedians? One reason for my interest is that the Tony Blair page got a poor review ("It is opinionated and written from an anti-war point of view" Wikipedia:External_peer_review) because the reviewer looked at the article when in an inferior state. The relevant changes were rolled back soon after but it would be nice for there to be a mechanism to allow someone to look at the latest validated version of an article. Eiler7 16:52, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

The proposed validation feature (Meta:Validation) is uninspiring. Nobody's really pushing for it; some are ignoring it and hoping it goes away, while others are assuming it'll get implemented one day, and then the devs will make a bunch of incremental fixes until it does something useful. The code is even all there, there just isn't anyone who likes what it does enough to try to get it implemented on en:. It's dead in the water.

I think what we need is a new proposal that works better with the Wiki model and a developer who will implement it. And it needs to be proposed on en:, because nobody reads meta, being unable to watch it. Meta is where proposals go to die.

rspeer / ɹəədsɹ 21:28, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

Images in Wikipedia Commons

I cannot make two of the 4 images in Commons appear in my "Color Organ" chapter of the main encyclopedia article. Also I would like to double the size to 300.

Thanks for your help.

jpjoneswv@yahoo.com

Are you using the file names exactly? MediaWiki is case sensitive so a common mistake is to upload "some image.JPG" and then try to add "some image.jpg" wich are actualy two different files as far as the server is concerned. If you get a different image than the one you wanted it's also possible that there is a image on Wikipedia with the same filename, in wich case the "local" image is used rather than the commons version. See Wikipedia:Extended image syntax for how to resize and possision images on a page. --Sherool (talk) 18:20, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Ack! Templates

Who’s been screwing with the site? At first I thought it was a problem with MonoBook but I don’t see any recent changes in the history. The problem: At least one template that used to float right on its own no longer does, and the boxes around header templates like {{cleanup}} and {{unreferenced}} no longer appear. What could be causing this and where should I go to see about getting it fixed? -- WikidSmaht (talk) 12:58, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

The boxes came back... does anyone know what’s going on? -- WikidSmaht (talk) 13:59, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Things like that (or links being underlined when they shouldn't, or vice versa) tend to be caused by your browser not fully loading the CSS style sheet. Reloading, purge, etc. clears it up. That's my guess, anyway, and it's been true for a lot of formatting issues. MCB 22:48, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Strange trouble with template

Could somebody have a look at notes #8 and #19 at World Trade Center cross? I can't seem to be able to find the problem. Circeus 23:20, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

#8 had an extra [ before the url; #19 had a newline character in the middle of the title. Fixed both. --cesarb 02:50, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Overlaps in Template:Quotation

Any simple fixes for overlapping blockquote boxes? Example: [6]

Thanks, GChriss 18:10, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

You can force the quote below the image by adding <br clear=all/> immediately before the quote. -- Rick Block (talk) 19:10, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

Is there a way to have the right edge of the block end just before it hits the other element? This would be the most visually appealing. GChriss 23:05, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

At first quick look, I'd say it might have to do with how the navigator handle styling of the <blockquote> element. Circeus 19:24, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

This happens because of the way floats work in the CSS box model. It's only the text that wraps around the floated element; the box containing the text, however, extends beyond it. If it weren't this way, a paragraph could not be part to the side of a floated element and part below it. See this example:

float float
float float

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

If you were to move the right edge of the block to before it hits the floated element, you would have something like:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

float float
float float

Which is preventing the text from wrapping below the floated element. It does not look as good. (If the examples above do not appear correctly and you are using MSIE, try with another browser; MSIE does not understand the CSS I used in the second example [7] [8], and is known to have trouble with floats [9] [10]).

It would work the way you want only if it were possible to have a non-rectangular box in CSS. As a trick, you could try setting the border on the floated element, which however only looks good if it's smaller than the text:

float float
float float

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

However, if the float is taller than the text, it wouldn't look good, and you would have to move the right edge of the text to the left of the floated element (as in the second example). The problem is: how can you know which one is taller? --cesarb 03:29, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Ooo, that's a clever solution! J. Finkelstein 03:44, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Copyvio template can't handle URL syntax

The {{copyvio}} template can't handle general URL syntax. URLs containing a "?" or "=" or "&" (the standard syntax for URLs with parameters) will break the template. --John Nagle 15:57, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

For =, you should use it like {{copyvio|url=http://example.com/...}} (notice the url=; you can also use 1= instead). For &, it should always be escaped as &amp; (not only on URLs, but everywhere). I don't know of any problems with ?; perhaps it's the same problem as with =. --cesarb 16:36, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

I don't think HTML entities work inside URLs. You use percent escapes for that. rspeer / ɹəədsɹ 21:35, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

The HTML entity is in the HTML, which is parsed before the text is treated as a URL. If the & on the URL is followed by the wrong sequence of characters (which ones are problematic depends on your browser), it will get converted on something unexpected before the URL parsing starts. On the other hand, & is always converted into &, which is then passed unchanged to the URL parser. See the wiki code for this example link. --cesarb 03:50, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Template won't work

I can't get this template to work: http://simple.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Template:colorbox&oldid=6573

<span style="background-color: {{{1}}}; width: 20px; height:20px; display:inline-block; {{{2|}}}"> </span>

The template should display a simple box of a particular color, however after looking at the page source for one the pages it should have appeared in, I noticed it wasn't there at all. It looks like MediaWiki decided to skip the template. Is this a bug in MediaWiki or have I got something wrong? Gerard Foley 22:11, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

I'd guess either the Sanitizer or HTML Tidy decided to skip the empty span (try replacing the space with a &nbsp; to see the difference). However, a empty div makes more sense, since you are giving a explicit width and height. --cesarb 22:50, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

IE6 won't turn a div (a block element) into an inline-block. It will only turn inline elements into inline blocks. Gerard Foley 23:42, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Saffron featured articles star problem

Saffron related pages seem to be experiencing a problem with their featured star. Beside the star appears a red link which is cut off. It links to Wikipedia:Featured topics. I am not sure why this is and other featured article seem to be fine. I have included a picture with the problem circled in red and an example of another featured article which is fine. See Image:Saffron pages featured star problem.JPG. User:MONGO did some edits today to Template:Featured article and im not sure if this is the problem since other featured articles seem fine. I am using Avant Browser 10.2 build 52 under Internet Explorer 6.0 if I'am the only one experiencing this problem. - Tutmosis 22:01, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Search never works?

Certain phrases seem to never work under the search. "There was a problem with your search. This is probably temporary; try again in a few moments, or you can search Wikipedia through an external search service". I've tried over and over again, but it always gives me that error. How come? --69.204.179.124 17:26, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Including other pages

I've tried googling for this but for no avail. How do I have one article include another (just like C++ #include)? I don't want a link, I want one article to contain the full text of another article, in addition to other stuff.

Thanks, Ripper234 08:26, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Inclusions search the template namespace by default. To include any other page, just specify the namespace, eg: {{User:Ripper234}}. To do this with the article namespace (a null string), use just a colon: {{:Main Page}}. Splarka (rant) 08:38, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

But don't do that. An article being included in another is highly confusing. Instead, give a link to the other article (with something like {{main}}). --cesarb 16:33, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

There are of course, several instances where non-template inclusions are being utilized, such as Wikipedia:Featured_article_candidates. Better to say "Don't do that unless you have good reason to, and know what you're doing!" ^_^. Splarka (rant) 21:23, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

They are not articles. They are pages in the Wikipedia namespace (and not only that, they are subpages of the transcluding page, which avoids a lot of the confusion). The problem is mostly with pages in the main namespace. --cesarb 22:13, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Contribs page for varying IP addresses

Is it possible to get a contributions list on one page for a range of IP addresses? Someone has been adding Holocaust denial rubbish from a dial-up or DHCP connection, so the last number of the subdomain is always different. I tried using DOS-style wildcards (ie Special:Contributions&target=111.111.111.??? Special:Contributions&target=111.111.111.*) but that doesn't work. Any ideas? --Squiddy | (squirt ink?) 07:12, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

It isn't offered as a feature of Special:Contributions at the moment, although an appropriate feature request for it might be fulfilled. Rob Church (talk) 14:47, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. I'll do that. --Squiddy | (squirt ink?) 16:00, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Floating text to right of index

In the article Comparison of programming languages, I decided to float the intro to the right of the index, but when I click the "hide" link to hide the index, the first section below the intro is raised and overlaps the intro. Any way around that? -Barry- 05:02, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Have you tried {{TOCleft}} or {{TOC float left}}? Splarka (rant) 05:20, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, {{TOC float left}} worked. I just had to put the text on the same line as the TOC tag to prevent space at the top.

There are two more minor things. I put these comments in that same article to explain them:

<!-- The double space above is needed, at least in IE 6 -->

Without the double space, the heading "See also" wasn't flush left. And:

<!-- If anyone can make this a relative link, please do. It wasn't visible (in IE 6) when I tried -->

-Barry- 05:53, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

To link categories, prefix the title with a colon (same for Images): [[:Category:Whatever]]. For the other, you might try a <br clear="all" /> (which usually separates things), don't have IE handy to test. Splarka (rant) 07:15, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

User templates css?

I've watched the User templates (see Category:Internal_link_templates) that contain non-external external links (really, semi-internal links that require parameters) go from normal external to class="plainlinks" to stealthed with <font> (which I changed to <span> yesterday). To me they looked good with class="plainlinks". With a color change attempting to disguise them as pure internal links there are two main problems: a) they do not change color when visited, b) the underline (if a user is using underlined links) does not change color in certain browsers as it is not being defined. I therefor propose that either the color should remain as external (but with class="plainlinks" for verbosity) or that a new class be added to MediaWiki:Common.css to make them more completely stealthed, for example:

#bodyContent .stealthexternallink a { background: none !important; padding: 0 !important; color: #002bb8; background: none; }
#bodycontent .stealthexternallink a:visited { color: #5a3696; }
#bodycontent .stealthexternallink a:active { color: #faa700; }
#bodycontent .stealthexternallink a:hover { text-decoration: underline; }

This would also remove the internal span: <span class="plainlinks">[{{SERVER}}/wiki/User:Interiot/Tool2/code.js?username={{{2|{{{1}}}}}} <span style="color:#002bb8">count</span>]</span> could become <span class="stealthexernallink">[{{SERVER}}/wiki/User:Interiot/Tool2/code.js?username={{{2|{{{1}}}}}} count]</span>.

Affected templates (I think): Template:Proxyip Template:Proxyip2 Template:IPvandal Template:Admin-abbr Template:User1 plus Template:User2 Template:User2 plus Template:User2a Template:User3 Template:User5 Template:User6 Template:Userblock Template:Vandal Template:User-full

Thoughts? Splarka (rant) 05:13, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

New common.css style for infoboxes

I've suggested a new pair of styles for infobox entries. Please comment at MediaWiki talk:Common.css#Segmented infoboxes. -- Rick Block (talk) 04:09, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Unblocking a number?

What does it mean when the block log shows a number, like #166211? ~MDD4696 04:03, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Also, how do entries like these appear? ~MDD4696 04:06, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

A number in the block log indicates that an autoblock is being performed. We can't expose the IP address during the block due to issues with personal information and privacy, etc. - the number, for the curious, is the block's identifier in the block table.

As to the second question, well, that's due to use of the New User Log extension installed on Wikimedia wikis. The entries linked to in particular are the result of a user visiting Special:Userlogin and using the "create account" feature while still logged in. Rob Church (talk) 14:50, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Tracking Page Sizes

This has probably been brought up before, but is there a way we can view historical page sizes for a page? What I'm envisioning is that you hit "history" and in addition to all the other details, you see the page size (in kilobytes) for each edit. Somebody could then create a graph plugin so that you could see how the page size has changed over the last couple of hundred edits. This could be helpful in tracking large-scale blanking by vandals. Wikipedia brown 01:41, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

By the way if this is available in one of the vandal patrol tools, let me know! Wikipedia brown 02:19, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

It is from RC patrol. However, vandal patrol bots like User:Tawkerbot2 should be able to detect obvious page blankings with great effectiveness. — Edward Z. Yang^(Talk) 02:29, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Well, technically, the functionality you asked for in the first part doesn't exist, but I don't see how it would be useful. — Edward Z. Yang^(Talk) 02:30, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

D'oh, my apologies if I didn't explain myself (or maybe this really isn't that useful!). So, for example, somebody blanked the suicide article quite substantially and it stayed that way for a week, until I went back and reverted and added some more of the content back: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Suicide&diff=51473426&oldid=51319631

The reason that this happened was that another user had reverted to the incorrect state, which was not a clean version but was considerably reduced. When I saw the article a week after this revert was done, I knew that it was missing content as I had worked on it before, but I had to go through the history and manually track down when this happened. It would've been easier to see by looking for when the page size dropped precipitously. Moreover, with page sizes in the history, a reduction in size from one edit to the next may be indicative of a vandal, especially when the edit is done by an anonymous IP. Non-vandalizations where editors are justifiably removing content would hopefully include a comprehensive edit summary. Anyways, if it's too much work, no worries. It would be nice to know if anyone else might find this useful though ... Wikipedia brown 03:21, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Writing Backwards

Is there a way to write things backwards? I've searched through all of the editing help sections and have found nothing. — The Man in Question 22:54, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

I don't think so, why would you want to? Prodego ^talk 22:57, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

To write "Hotel Denouement" backwards on the Hotel Denouement page (only once, used as an example), since it's written that way in the book it comes from. — The Man in Question 23:05, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Not really there are some reversed latin letters in various parts of unicode but i doubt there is everything you'd need to make nice looking mirrored text and lack of font support is an issue too. Plugwash 23:35, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

J. Finkelstein 23:39, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

The best I can give is <bdo dir="rtl">Hotel Denouement</bdo>; however, since it's not supported by MediaWiki, here's the CSS equivalent: Hotel Denouement. --cesarb 00:49, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

I created a template to make it easier (replacing the unsupported <bdo> tag): {{bdo|rtl|Hotel Denouement}} results in Hotel Denouement. --cesarb 00:57, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

According to the article, it's actually mirror writing, not just reverse-order. That is, each letter is backwards as well as the whole word. If you only wanted to write the letters in the opposite order, it could be typed out by hand.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure that there's any functionality for actual mirror writing in HTML/CSS. I have to say, though, I can't see it as a huge loss to the article. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 01:19, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

(edit conflict) That is pretty nifty, I must say! — Knowledge Seeker দ 01:20, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Section editing

suddenly it seems that the links to editing individal sections have disapeared for me. Is that the case for other people as well? Still there in the German wiki. Agathoclea 22:46, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

They are still there for me, make sure you have "section editing" on in the "Editing" section of your prefrences. Prodego ^talk 22:49, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

And that the page doesn't have __NOEDITSECTION__. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 01:14, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

3 months of history and editing lost on Trouvère

I am aware of the problems with Intermittent database lags, but the article Trouvère has lost 3 months of its history and editing, and this has lasted for at least 7 hours. Former versions can be found cached on google. (I am running Safari, but have emptied my cache, just to make sure it's not a cached version error). Any suggestions? --NYArtsnWords 21:40, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Leave it as it is. The revisions were deleted as copyvios. This means that all edits since then have to be deleted as they are derived from copyvio'd materials. A shame, but unavoidable. --Lord Deskana ^{Dark Lord of the Sith} 21:42, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Wouldn't it be sensible to blank the part that was copyvio'd, note in edit summaries all contributors in the interim, and then delete all the revisions? That way the GFDL is satisfied, but edits not to the copyvio'd part wouldn't be lost. Unless the entire article was replaced with a copyvio? —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 01:12, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Edit conflicts?

I’m no longer getting edit conflicts. If someone edits an article while I am, my edit overwrites it when I save. Why is this happening? -- WikidSmaht (talk) 14:01, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

It could be that between the time that you visited an article and clicked the "edit this page" button someone edited and saved the page... ~MDD4696 21:14, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

I don't think that'd cause overwriting. I think if there was a delay between edit and view then what would happen is that you'd get the other person's edits in the edit page, thus your edit would be added on at the end, rather than overwriting the other edit. --Lord Deskana ^{Dark Lord of the Sith} 21:18, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

If the software can merge the edits together, it will. You might be having a case of good luck. Rob Church (talk) 21:51, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Well it’s not merging, just overwriting, which is problematic because it looks like I’m reverting other edits when I don’t mean to. -- WikidSmaht (talk) 19:59, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Template: How can the conversion of greater-than-char be suppressed?

I've become stuck with a template I'm working on, because I can't suppress the conversion of “<” and “>”.
The template should build a “<span>” tag, but the result is always “&lt;span&gt;”. Any ideas?
 
The calling code is:
{{TemplateName|2u|span|border:3px gray solid;padding:0 4px 2px 4px;}}
 
The template code is:
<includeonly>{{
  switch
  |{{{2}}}
  |case: span=<nowiki><span style="</nowiki>
  |default=<nowiki>style="</nowiki>
}}<nowiki>background-color:#</nowiki>{{
  switch
  |{{{1}}}
  |case: 1u=F3F3F3
  |case: 2u=E6E6E6
  |case: 3u=DADADA
  |default=FFFFFF
}}<nowiki>;</nowiki>{{
  switch
  |{{{2}}}
  |case: span={{{3}}}<nowiki>"></nowiki>
  |default={{{2}}}<nowiki>"</nowiki>
}}</includeonly>
 
The result is:
&lt;span style="background-color:#E6E6E6;border:3px gray solid;padding:0 4px 2px 4px;"&gt;
 
But should be:
<span style="background-color:#E6E6E6;border:3px gray solid;padding:0 4px 2px 4px;">
-- ParaDox 08:10, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Well... Maybe if you didn't have these<nowiki> tags...

I doubt that the tags have much to do with it: <nowiki> alone can't convert < into <. I suspect that it has something to do with ParserFunctions. We'll find out when ParaDox tests out your proposal. 17:23, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

I'd already tried all combinations (with and without <nowiki> tags)(and very many more) that I could conceive – before asking here. This version is the closest to a solution I could get to by myself – with my very limited “knowledge” of Mediawiki's software-internals (ParserFunctions etc. etc.). The template can now be found at User:ParaDox/temp, and a calling test page at User:ParaDox/test. -- ParaDox 21:13, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

The <nowiki> treats the text as a literal string, which later in the processing (when the nowiki placeholder is replaced) gets escaped (I didn't check the code, but given what I know of how it works, I think it's where the escaping takes place). There's no way to get an unescaped < with a nowiki. Of course, without a nowiki, you'll probably confuse completely the parser, so you can't have it either way.

You should instead try to do it inside out; instead of trying to create the <span style=" (or style= in the other branch), followed by the style, followed by the "> (or "), you should use <span style="{{second template|as|many|parameters|as|needed}}"> (or style="{{second template|as|many|parameters|as|needed}}" in the other branch), and have the second (inner) template do the rest of the work. This way, you shouldn't confuse the parser (since the element is completely there); it's (almost) how {{unicode}} worked in its older versions. As a bonus, you completely remove the code duplication. --cesarb 22:15, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Thx a lot :-) for explaining – should be able to get the job done now. Seems – I don't understand what you mean with code duplication? -- ParaDox 23:30, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

You were duplicating the {{switch|{{{2}}}|case: span=...|default:...}} part twice. It's a good idea to avoid such duplication, because it makes later maintainance harder. --cesarb 00:37, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Ok, cesarb, thanks to your help it works now: temp0 will now call either temp1 only – or temp1 through temp2

The calling code is:
   {{temp0|2u|span|border:3px gray solid;padding:0 4px 2px 4px;}}
temp0 
    {{
      switch
      |{{{2}}}
      |case: span={{temp2|{{{1}}}|{{{3}}}|}}
      |default=style="background-color:#{{temp1|{{{1|FFFFFF}}}|}};{{{2|}}};"
    }}
temp1 
    {{
      switch
      |{{{1}}}
      |case: 1u=F3F3F3
      |case: 2u=E6E6E6
      |case: 3u=DADADA
      |default=FFFFFF
    }}
temp2 
    <span style="background-color:#{{temp1|{{{1}}}|}};{{{2}}};">
The result is:
    <span style="background-color:#E6E6E6;border:3px gray solid;padding:0 4px 2px 4px;">

Perhaps a look there will help to understand what I'm aiming at. Point about that color-table is, that when converted to gray, all the colors are the same gray as the gray row (not tested elsewhere or much yet), which should be useful for printing in gray - for example.
-- ParaDox 04:59, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

One last note FYI – if the German language doesn't completely “turn you off”: I've just included the usage of this template-trio (the German word for template is Vorlage) in the German article Heterosexismus (Heterosexism). -- ParaDox 17:15, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Looks like a missing <nowiki> in one of the comments above caused the rest of the page to disappear when another template-related question was posted below. I added the missing nowiki. --cesarb 22:35, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

How to search for material in WikiMedia

If I create a link in a talk page or elsewhere to m:Help:Footnotes as I have just done here, it works and it takes me to that help page in the MediaWiki Handbook. However, if I enter that same link into the search box on the Wikipedia Main Page, I get told that the page cannot be found. In fact, if I go to http://www.mediawiki.organd use the search box there, I also get told the page cannot be found.

I have had the same sort of trouble trying to search for images in Commons using the search box in Wikipedia.

How should pages or images not in Wikipedia itself be searched for? Where is there a write-up or a help page that tells us how to access material in Commons or in Wikimedia?? - mbeychok 20:07, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

How to link to sub-sub-paragraphs

Is it possible to link directly to sub-sub-paragraphs?

I can link to Security interest#Types of Security fine, but if I try to link to Security interest#Types of Security#Pledge it just leaves me at the top of the screen. I have tried subsituting in "##" and "+", but I can't make it work. Can it be done? Legis 16:40, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

Yep: Security interest#Pledge — EncMstr 16:53, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

The one thing I didn't try. Thanks a lot. Legis 17:17, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

Incidentally, if you want to see how to link to the anchor for a section, just roll over the link in the table of contents (or use whatever your browser's method is to determine the target of that link). — Knowledge Seeker দ 18:20, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

Sibling username problem

A user named User:Clyde Miller apparently edited under my username. It seems that he used the same computer I had been using, and did not log out in the top corner of the screen until after he had edited his userpage under my name. Clyde is my little brother, and doesn't edit on wikipedia too often, so he didn't realize he was under my name until he had completed an edit under it. He started freaking out over it, and apologizing for using my name. I was always under the impression that a computer would automatically log out of my username if I closed the browser and walked away, which apparently did not happen. What do I do? Is there a way we can attribute my edit on his userpage to him? I told him it's not a big deal, but he is quite upset.--The ikiroid (talk)^{(Help Me Improve)} 22:15, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

It's theoretically possible to reattribute the one edit, but it would require a system admin to go into the database, track down the revision, confirm it, change it, etc etc. To be frank, it's too much effort for a single edit. Rob Church (talk) 22:31, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Ok, no big deal.--The ikiroid (talk)^{(Help Me Improve)} 16:59, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

Adding Image license to uploaded image after it is marked for deletion

I added an image, neglecting to put the license info. It was tagged for deletion, so I tried to edit it to correct this. The edit page came up blank, saying the file did not exist, although it was still viewable in the article linked to it. I just re-uploaded the same image with a slightly different filename (Erythronium_albidum.jpg instead of Erythronium_albidum.JPG), but I'm wondering why I couldn't fix the original (it had 5 days left before deletion.) The original is Erythronium_albidum.JPG and is no longer linked anywhere, so is there a way to remove it now (even though it will automatically be removed in 5 days)? -- PJV 16:27, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Image:Erythronium albidum.JPG was uploaded to the Commons, whereas Image:Erythronium albidum.jpg was uploaded to Wikipedia. You'll have to go to http://commons.wikimedia.org to edit the image or request it to be deleted. Images on Commons can be accessed from Wikipedia, which is why you can see it here. ~MDD4696 03:28, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

Page not included in searches

I submitted an article to Wikipedia in March but the page has never come up in the search engine, even though it still exists in the exact same form.

How can I get the wikipedia search engine to recognise the page?

Thanks. --87.81.62.126 20:02, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

• The search function typically takes a while to recognise new pages. It'll be there soon hopefully, provided the page hasn't been deleted of course. --Lord Deskana ^{Dark Lord of the Sith} 20:03, 9 May 2006 (UTC)
  • I know the Wikipedia search engine is lame but 2 months? Perhaps User:87.81.62.126 could grace us with the name of this page? Ewlyahoocom 21:45, 9 May 2006 (UTC)
• it'll either be one of these Special:Contributions/87.81.62.126, or more likely one of three deleted edits. BL Lacertae - kiss the lizard 00:58, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

The search index is rebuilt only when a developer manually initiates a rebuild, which has not been done for several months. I don't know why it's been so long. -- Rick Block (talk) 03:38, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

It's been done several times in the last couple months. English Wikipedia is a bit finicky, though. --Brion 22:01, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

Why is the search engine only updated so infrequently? When so many new and updated articles would be missing out? Is there any form of timeframe on how soon an article will appear after being created? Wouldn't it be worthwhile to either track new articles in the search, or have even a update every few days (NB: I have no concept of the power that would take btw)?DanielBC 10:56, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

Bad thumbnail

The 70 pixel thumbnail for Image:I-5.svg seems to be broken (it comes out as a fully transparent/blank image). Is there any way to force it to regenerate? Thanks. Mike Dillon 19:06, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Same thing with thumbnails of Image:Wiktionary-logo-en.png (image on Commons). It may display, or may not, depending on the size of the thumbnail. For example, the 200px thumbnail displays fine, but not the 20px version or 705px version. ~MDD4696 21:37, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

In case it matters, Image:I-5.svg is also a Commons image. Maybe it is only affecting Commons images or maybe not. I just thought I'd point out that both noted problems involve Commons images. Mike Dillon 22:08, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

I just noticed the same problem on Commons itself while browsing commons:Category:Interstate Highway shields. Many of the 120px thumbnails are missing. Mike Dillon 22:55, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

This seems to be an ongoing problem with SVG images. Sometimes simply waiting will work; if not, adding ?action=purge to the image page URL (on the wiki where the image is uploaded, so on Commons for Commons images) will give you another shot at getting the thumbnails generated. You will also need to make sure that you clear your cache to see the latest version of the thumbnail. (BTW, to clear images on all but the latest versions of Safari, you need to make sure that the thumbnail is not being displayed in any window before you empty your cache.)

I see that this is already in Bugzilla as #5463. --iMb~Meow 00:36, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

I just did this for the 70px thumb of commons:Image:I-5.svg. I had tried the action=purge thing before, but it didn't work the first time. Mike Dillon 00:40, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

• A good idea, but not yet on this image. Will wait and see... in the meantime, to bugzilla we go. :-) —Rob (talk) 19:21, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Another one, from Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#Bug?:

Check this version of Macedonia (Greece) vs the next one. The image (flag) dissappears if it has 195px width, and reappears with 194px. I hope the problem is less significant than a narrower flag by 1 pixel!  NikoSilver  ^{(T) @ (C)} 14:19, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

--cesarb 19:37, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

And: Thanks. Btw I think the purge procedure ruined the good version of 194px too! Check the article now... NikoSilver  ^{(T) @ (C)} 11:27, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

(both copied from WP:AN#Bug?)  NikoSilver  ^{(T) @ (C)} 11:31, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

Captchas

I notice that mediawiki.org gives you a Captcha to fill in when you try to add an external link. Is this part of MediaWiki and how is it turned on? What anti-spam measures does MediaWiki 1.5 and 1.6 have? Gerard Foley 22:55, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

It's probably the ConfirmEdit extension. See meta:Anti-spam Features for other anti-spam measures. --cesarb 23:17, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

Thank you. Gerard Foley 23:35, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

CategoryTOC doesn't display

While using Monobook skin recently, I noticed that {{CategoryTOC}} was not displaying on my screen, e.g. Category:Year of birth missing. I can see the source in the edit window, but there is nothing in the preview or the article. Trying to track this down, I emptied my monobook.css and monobook.js with no effect. I've now changed to each of the standard skins in turn, but still no change. All this happens in both MS Internet Explorer v6.0.2900.2180.xpsp_sp2_gdr.050301-1519 and in Mozilla Firefox v1.5.0.3. However, if I logout, then the CategoryTOC is visible in both MSIE and Firefox. Can someone point me in the direction of another variable that is or could be affecting this behaviour, please. Thanks, Ian Cairns 08:29, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

Check your preferences for "Show table of contents (for pages with more than 3 headings)". {{CategoryTOC}} uses the same CSS classes as a normal TOC. I don't know whether that preference hides the TOC via CSS or disables generating it, but if it is hidden with CSS, it would cause the symptoms you are seeing. --cesarb 18:52, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

Bingo! All working now. Many thanks for spotting that. Now all I have to do is to resurrect my .css and .js file. Thanks again, Ian Cairns 21:54, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

Template weirdness

It'd be nice if a developer took a look at Wikipedia talk:Navigational templates#Bug in template system?. -- Rick Block (talk) 03:41, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

Suggested one explanation there. Rob Church (talk) 10:34, 18 May 2006 (UTC)