Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2016 May 16

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May 16

Make Search/Landing page user friendly

I think this is a cool idea. First, I love Wikipedia, and appreciate the dedicated volunteer effort that enables it.

OK! When users go to Wikipedia, we expect to do a search, and we expect the cursor to automatically focus at the search entry box. Why, you ask? Because that's what we have gotten from 48 Trillion searches, over 97 Gazillion web-sites, for the last 623 years since the internet was developed.  :) lulz poking some fun here.

Basically, why the hell is Wiki the only site in the history of the Abacus where you have to physically click on the search entry-box for each of the 38 times a day you enter the site? Personally, I love time-saving ideas. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dwaynewhoward (talk • contribs) 07:36, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

You can add some JavaScript to (for example) Special:MyPage/common.js to achieve this. I'll try to find the code. The Quixotic Potato (talk) 09:13, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

if (wgPageName == 'Main_Page') {
    addOnloadHook(function() {
        document.getElementById('searchInput').focus();
    });
}

This works. The Quixotic Potato (talk) 09:21, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

Might have to do with how poor the Search function was (and n some respects still is). You either had to spell an article name exactly right, or there had to be a redirect to the article created by a volunteer for whatever spelling you did use. So, back then we often searched Wikipedia using Google, with this command to search for a misspelled Lincoln, for example:

"Abraham Linking" site:Wikipedia.org [1]

Wikipedia search still can't figure out this one. So, with such a crappy search, we didn't want to make it the default click. StuRat (talk) 17:01, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

I do not recommend using the code above: it contains deprecated functions and variables that will stop working soon. Ruslik_Zero 18:04, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

Do you mean TQP's code ? StuRat (talk) 18:57, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

The gadget is probably better, it will get updated, I have posted instructions on how to enable it below. The Quixotic Potato (talk) 01:48, 17 May 2016 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/FAQ for the official reason. Tevildo (talk) 19:19, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

Ah, even easier, there is a gadget. Log in, click on the "Preferences" link in the top-right of the screen, click on the "Gadgets" tab, click on the checkbox next to "Focus the cursor in the search bar on loading the Main Page", scroll down and click on the "Save" button. The Quixotic Potato (talk) 01:47, 17 May 2016 (UTC)

System to receive photos from the public

Hi - I work for a volunteering charity. Once a year we hold a big day of volunteering across America. Community groups, churches, temples and so on organise their own volunteering projects under our banner. We encourage them to take photos of their project and send them in to us.

We would like to find a system that lets them upload photos easily, without having to sign up for accounts or anything, to a secure folder, and allows us to access the photos centrally categorised by who uploaded them. DropEvent is the sort of thing we want but it's imperfect because it just gives us a big glut of photos without them being categorised into folders based on who uploaded them.

Any thoughts? We are happy to do things that require some technical stuff from our end. Thanks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.92.204.35 (talk) 13:21, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

What makes email not reasonable? If you have people email you the photos, each group of photos is attached to a message which has info about who sent it. I suppose i say this without good knowledge of what other systems are out there, but if i were in your shoes i might consider this route. It's less complicated and it doesn't take much time or technical knowledge to set up. Many upload and share methods available online do not track who uploaded the image, and so i imagine you would object to those, as you have for DropEvent. If it DOES track the uploader, then usually it is because they have an account somewhere, which you also don't want to have to deal with. Most people have already signed up for an email account somewhere at some point, so you can use the fact that they have ALREADY signed up with some email provider, and this saves some annoyances caused by account signup.

To aid in finding photos for which event, have people put the event name in the subject line of the email.

216.173.144.188 (talk) 14:19, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

This weekend, (May 14), we had our annual alumni organization volunteer day. In a similar fashion, thousands of independent volunteer programs worldwide were all organized and conducted under the umbrella banner of our school's alumni association. The question of aggregating a bunch of photographs is interesting: our central planning committee advised a few hashtags and otherwise recommended that we self-share the photos via email.

I'm absolutely certain we could have rounded up some smart computer folks to design a complicated technical solution. We probably could have afforded to hire a contracting company at great cost to build us a specialized web technology... but that would have consumed money and time and effort that might have been spent being productive.

In other words... email works!

I might somewhat cynically comment that the only reason to put photos of charity/volunteer work on social media, except in furtherance of self-inflationary "feel-good" narcissism, is to appease the sponsors and make them feel that their money is being well-spent... but in our case, we are the sponsors, and we already have our own photographs, so ...

Nimur (talk) 17:36, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

Email has the advantage that they likely already know how to attach a pic to it, but a disadvantage if somebody has to open and download every email manually. Also, all those emails may make non-pic emails get lost in the crowd. This could be solved with a separate email address for pics, but the first problem requires an automated system to open emails and download pics at night, tagged with the email address, sifting out extraneous garbage like company logos (maybe based on file size ?). StuRat (talk) 17:58, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

Not to mention images of questionable nature... FrameDrag (talk) 20:32, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

I see a conflict with "upload anonymously" and "categorize by who uploaded them". You can have one, but not both. 209.149.114.175 (talk) 19:52, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

You could categorize by who uploaded them, but assign each uploader a random ID. This would be problematic if they upload more than one batch though, as figuring out if it's the same uploader as before without using their name of logon ID would be tricky. You could use I/P address, but that's not anonymous unless they have a dynamic I/P, in which case it won't work to identify that they are the same uploader as before. Or perhaps "anonymous" here just means that we don't post their email address, even though we store it. StuRat (talk) 22:43, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia presentation: pages within slides?

Hey all--I can use your help. I'm preparing a presentation about some aspects of Wikipedia. What is an easy way for a luddite like me to a. have a list of links to Wiki pages and b. put those on screen? I suppose I can make a PowerPoint and stick the URLs in there, and then sort of click back and forth between Firefox and PowerPoint. I need something that is not much more complicated than that to make--I don't need Prezi or anything that fancy. And I guess another option is to simply make an HTML document that has all the links. I do need the option to click around in the Wikipedia/internet pages, so I can't do screenshots incorporated into PowerPoint. Your help is appreciated, as always. Drmies (talk) 18:00, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

I suggest the HTML route. You can have links to your own pages on the side or top, and click on them to change the "slide" (HTML page). Within each of your pages you can have hyperlinks to Wikipedia, or anywhere else, and once you click on them you can navigate all you want. You can then use the back button to get back to your own HTML pages, or you can bookmark it to go back more quickly. I can help you with any technical questions about doing this. If want to use some abilities in PowerPoint which HTML lacks, like a certain type of graph, you can always create it there, take a screen shot, and upload that to your HTML page. If you want the slides to move by automatically, you can do that with HTML Javascript. StuRat (talk) 18:08, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

• Stu, as I am playing around I started to lean that way, yes, especially since I don't need the fancy PowerPoint options. Even making slides, with titles and then inserting links via some functionality, is more bothersome than simple HTML. You know, I could just do this in my user space--unless you're going to turn me in for a NOTWEBHOST violation... Thanks! Drmies (talk) 18:14, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

• That's probably OK, as long as it relates to something in Wikipedia, like answering this Q. StuRat (talk) 18:55, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

Project Ara

Hi, does anyone know when Project Ara is set to be released? I've looked online for this info, but I can't find it — and the release date has been postponed on a few occasions. There's a report from ibtimes.com.au here from February this year that says that it may be announced at Google I/O this year on Wednesday. Apart from this, and other reports saying it'll be released this year, I can't find anything. If you could find anything about this, it'd be greatly appreciated! Thank you!  Seagull123  Φ  18:41, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

Why not send a direct email to their developer public relations team? Their email is listed in the contact section of their website. Nimur (talk) 18:47, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

Merging Firefox profiles, GThumb question and Evolution problems

I have now successfully upgraded from Fedora 20 to Fedora 23. Now I have some questions.

Firefox decided to create a new default profile for me even though I had copied the old profile from the previous disk. All my old profile information is still there but Firefox isn't using it. I have thus effectively lost all my bookmarks and log-in information. Can I somehow merge the old profile with the new one?

GThumb's interface has changed. Nowadays, clicking on a picture's thumbnail automatically opens that picture for viewing. Previously, I had to separately click on a "full screen" button. Also, the picture's filename and date information is no longer displayed at the bottom of the window even if I select the picture. The previous version of GThumb used to display it. Now I have to separately click on the "Show details" button. Is there any way to get the old behaviour back?

As a left-over from my Internet connection problems, Evolution sometimes decides there's a network outage when I start it and work off-line, even though the connection is working fine. It shows a "go back on-line", but it's disabled. Restarting the network connection doesn't help. I can use Firefox to browse the web all OK but Evolution thinks there's no network connection. I have to restart the whole computer and then hope Evolution will recognise the connection. Is there any way to make Evolution understand that yes, there is a network connection working all OK?

When trying to debug the network problem, I kept switching between my old Fedora 20 disk and my new Fedora 23 one. As a result, some of my received e-mails are now left on the old disk. Evolution deleted the mails from the server as it downloaded them. The mails are safe, but they're on the old disk. How can I copy them to the new one so that Evolution can open them? JIP | Talk 19:38, 16 May 2016 (UTC)

Use CTRL+H to show hidden files and folders. The new FF profile was not excessive used? Just click all pages, the history stored, copy the URLs and paste them into text file. Close FF, restore the old profile, located in the folder .mozilla, located in the user's home folder and have a look into the profiles.ini file. Then open FF and retrieve the URLs from text file to do it the quick way. --Hans Haase (有问题吗) 22:47, 16 May 2016 (UTC)