User talk:Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason/Archive 0

Notices

• If I don't answer something here or ignore you I probably just missed it or haven't gotten around to it yet, feel free to kick me as a reminder
• If you're asking something about my Cite.php extension you might want to look at Talk:Cite/Cite.php on meta. Other relevant stuff is the initial announcement

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Angela. 11:48, Mar 28, 2004 (UTC)

Regarding Little Belt Bridge (1935)

Regarding Little Belt Bridge (1935) - it's not a good idea to create a page until you have something to put in it. Empty pages often get deleted, to keep them from cluttering up Wikipedia. But I look forward to your article, since I have no idea what this is! - DavidWBrooks 17:35, 8 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for the advice, it wont happen again, i'm working on the article right now --Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 18:04, 2004 Apr 8 (UTC)

Thank you for fixing the link

Thank you for fixing the link on my user page, and for your work on the Baseball slang article. I have to warn you, though, that most Wikipedians get very protective of their own user pages; it's generally a better idea to leave a comment on their user talk page instead. - jredmond 15:10, 20 Apr 2004 (UTC)

No problem, i never edit other users pages unless it's a talk page or a small fix like this, like fixing a link --Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 18:27, 2004 Apr 20 (UTC)

Regarding the StarCraft articles

Regarding the StarCraft articles listed at Template:VfD-Command no clear consensus was reached on vfd but most people were generally talking about keeping and/or merging the articles. Since you said that you'd give it a go, do you fancy this job, because I have to clear the backlog in vfd and do not know the subject. If you're not up to it yourself please feel free to list for merging in the appropriate place. -- Graham  :) | Talk 22:12, 2 May 2004 (UTC)

Your formatting changes ( suck -Ed :)

Your formatting changes to the article Sexual slang (changing from plain lists to bulleted lists) make it harder to read and too vertical. --Andy5 04:34, 8 May 2004 (UTC)

Discussion continued on Talk:Sexual slang --Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 10:58, 2004 May 8 (UTC)

Flag of Iceland

That's a pleasure! I don't know where I picked up the phrase; I used to be a part time cinema projectionist, and know that different types of film (cinemascope, wide screen &c) have different aspect ratios, though I'm not sure I was aware of the phrase then ... and I recall the introduction of the new television aspect ratio 16:9, when previously it was always 4:3 ... still. I enjoyed reading the Flag of Iceland page ... thanks for editing it ... a very comprehensive treatment. best wishes --Tagishsimon

Thank you, however i'm not even half-finished;) --Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 17:34, 2004 May 14 (UTC)

Collation order

At Wikipedia_talk:Alphabetical_list_of_Wikipedians I made a note about expecting to see your name sorted in with the A's, as my dictionary would do so and some standards suggest. I'd love to hear your experience and thoughts on the question. NealMcB 02:56, 2004 May 18 (UTC)

Sysop

Congratulations! You are now an administrator. You should read the relevant policies and other pages linked to from the administrators' reading list before carrying out tasks like deletion, protection, banning users, and editing protected pages such as the Main Page. Most of what you do is easily reversible by other sysops, apart from page history merges and image deletion, so please be especially careful with those. Good luck. Angela. 00:55, May 25, 2004 (UTC)

Currently at a netcafe in Amsterdam, wont be very active for the next few days. But defenetly in the fall:) --212.123.202.81 10:22, 25 May 2004 (UTC)

Starcraft query request

Was the output that Angela provided on SQL query requests enough for the merge, or are you still waiting for a list from a more recent database? Would it be possible to copy the given list, to clean up the page a bit? --Ben Brockert 02:14, May 26, 2004 (UTC)

It was enaugh, hower its just so much work i havent gotten around to it yet

Vandalism

Hi. I reverted two anon edits on your user page. ([1] [2]) If you really moved to Ghana, then my apologies. As an admin you may consider protecting your page. Happy editing -- Chris 73 | Talk 01:03, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Thank you for your concern, actually i made them without logging in because internet connection here is sometimes not good and it can take 30secs sometime to load a page ( not at the location i am currently at though ) which means that sometime it can be quite painful to log in. To get some credability though i will henceforth try to log in to make such edits. About protecting it however; i will not do that, see the notice at the bottom, the worst that could happen is that there would be some misinformation here for a few days until i get online, no biggie. --Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 01:36, 2004 Jun 9 (UTC)

Oh, so you ARE in Ghana! My mistake, apologies. Have fun in Ghana! -- Chris 73 | Talk 01:53, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Messages!

The drought of messages has now been quenched! You have a new message on your talk page! Enjoy, mate! :D Mike H 22:01, Jun 29, 2004 (UTC)

Your name

How is one to pronounce your unusual name? Since the letters are not native to English could you please put up the pronounciation on your page? Thanks Nichalp 18:39, Jul 4, 2004 (UTC)

I've been working on that, hover i don't know how to make the Æ and r sounds in the International phonetic alphabet so my work on that is not yet complete. --Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 14:44, 2004 Jul 5 (UTC)

What do people in ICeland call the Letter Æ? Do they call it Ash? Also what do people in ICeland call the letter ö? What about accented letters? 24.128.149.7 21:19, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

The name of Æ (Æ) is pronounced similarly to "I" in English, as in "I see". Ö is similar to the danish ø but produced at the opening of the mouth rather than deep in the throat. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 21:26, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

I meant what people call the letter not how it's pronounced! 24.128.149.7 22:15, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

Hi, let me contribute to this discussion. We have a great table of the sounds in Icelandic in IPA at Icelandic language. Ævar's name is given by ˈaivar ˈartnfjœrð ˈpjarmaˌsɔn, note however that in making the tn for Arn sequence you should only cut of the airflow once, you close it as if you were making a t sound and open it for the nasal sound, see nasal release. Also, the letter Æ is really just called Æ in Icelandic, that is, the sound of it is the same as its name. Stefán Ingi 22:52, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the info. So you would just call it 'Eye'. But that sounds to much like what we call the letter 'I'. What about á, é, í, ó, ú, and ö? What do you call them? 24.128.149.7 13:39, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

Not that I have any experience and knowledge of phonetical alphabets, Im still, at least, an Icelander: All the vowels in Icelandic just bear the name of their sound, as in english. Á is therefore just called Á, and is pronounced like ow in Owl. É like Yeah, Í like ee, ó like oh, ú like oo and Ö like the u in under. The names of the consonants are just the letter and then "é" added after it. So the name of B is Bé (or pronounced Bye) IngaAusa

Comment from Tannin

I knew that (about msg and MediaWiki 1.3). My memory, alas, ain't what it ought to be. :) Tannin

Explanation and Apologies

Sorry, I said I couldn't contact you because I couldn't figure out how to make User Talk work for contacting you...but RickK had an icon for User Talk next to his name.

Anyway, hopefully the whole GenMay business can be resolved soon. It was in a period of vandalism, during which I did delete the VfD notice (my apologies for that, I have no idea why it didn't show up when I pressed 'edit'), but it seems to have stabilized now.

Ivan yulaev 23:01, 6 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Ahh, so that was why i thought you were part of this vandalism storm, anyway, welcome again. You've had a bit of raugh intro to wikipedia that page will 99.9% get deleted because it (probably) doesnt belong. But dont get discauraged, it's nothing personal, and yes, it's nice to sign your posts (write four tildes or press the signiture icon above the edit box);) --Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 22:47, 2004 Jul 6 (UTC)

Moving stuff

Hi there.

I've just tried to move "Category:Melée weapons" and it appears not to be possible. It tells me to contact an administrator. Could you perhaps help then?

The word is spelt mêlée. There is an argument for Anglicisation, but that would give "melee".

Thanks in advance. — Chameleon My page/My talk 16:54, 7 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Glad to be of help, actually categories can not be moved in the normal sense, the are magic pages that are autogenerated. You'll actually have to edit the articles that have [[Category:Melée]] to have [[Category:Mêlée]] instead. Just look at Category:Mêlée now, i've put my /tmp page in it ( feel free to remove it once you see how it works ).

This is of course, a bit of PITA, however thats how you'll have to do it. --Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 18:12, 2004 Jul 7 (UTC)

OK, I've done it all now. Can you now delete [[Category:Mêlée]] and [[Category:Melée weapons]] please? — Chameleon My page/My talk 14:20, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Linux

You probably have Linux Kernel 2.6.5, I was talking about the version of my disto (Mandrake Linux). Unfortunately, I personally have the 2.4 kernel...time to do some updating. Ilyanep (Talk) 15:33, 8 Jul 2004 (UTC)

It was just a parody on the fact that "Linux 9.2" is a pretty meaningless statement;=) --Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 15:40, 2004 Jul 8 (UTC)

IPA

If you would like help writing your name in the IPA, I can do it if you send or post a soundfile of you saying your name. It would be best if you said it several times at different speeds. --Darrien 04:48, 2004 Jul 9 (UTC)

Willdo when i get home, leave on a flight from ghana today. --Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 13:32, 2004 Jul 9 (UTC)

Deleting an image

Twice you've removed my request from Wikipedia:Images for deletion to delete Image:IONbig.jpg, but the image still seems to exist in the database... am I making an inappropriate request, should the image stay? Brian Kendig 22:57, 12 Jul 2004 (UTC)

At this point it seems it's a software error, all i see when i go to that page in the top bar is:

• Image
• Discussion
• Edit this page
• undelete 2 edits
• watch

Which would suggest that i have already deleted it, however i still see the image. I'll contact the MediaWiki developers because of this and file a bug report if approprite. --Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 23:07, 2004 Jul 12 (UTC)

Undeleted it, then deleted it again. It's still there though, will contact the devs. --Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 23:10, 2004 Jul 12 (UTC)

It's gone now! Thanks very much. It wasn't an important issue, but I was puzzled for a bit there. Brian Kendig 03:56, 13 Jul 2004 (UTC)

In the future direct all comments to bug 989827, thank you for reporting the issue. --Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 00:10, 2004 Jul 13 (UTC)

You deleted the image description page of Image:AshmoreandCartierFlagLarge.jpg but not the image. Please note that using the normal "delete" tab for articles does not delete the image. It will only delete the image description page. Instead, you need to click on the (del) tag in front the of the image upload history to hit both (if that's not what you've been doing). Cheers, Jiang 01:48, 14 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I followed by deleting a few images/files using the correct mechanism. Since my internet is running really slow, I'll leave it up to you to finish the rest. Let us know somewhere if you still need help. --Jiang 01:59, 14 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I went through the logs and copied the record of images I did not personally re-delete to here. I'll also list this under speedy deletions. --Jiang 07:34, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)

More vandalism

Lucky 6.9, myself and another have been hit by the vandal at 66.2.146.*, and you left a comment to contact you if it happened again. Noisy 19:18, 15 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I've blocked the range in question for 48hrs. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 20:18, 2004 Jul 15 (UTC)

More vandalism on User:Hadal, User:Lucky 6.9, User:TheCustomOfLife, User:Neutrality and Hadal says he's done another 24 hr block. (Just keeping you informed.) Noisy 10:58, 18 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I extended it to two weeks for the whole range, this has got to stop. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 11:27, 2004 Jul 18 (UTC)

I think that should have been 66.2.146.*, shouldn't it? Hadal seems to have blocked 66.65.70.246 for another reason. (I'm getting confused!) Noisy 11:43, 18 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I blocked /24 yes. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 11:53, 2004 Jul 18 (UTC)

And it was User:Maximus Rex who seems to have done the last block on one IP in the range. Noisy 11:48, 18 Jul 2004 (UTC)

MP3 ( Discussion -Ævar )

Thanks for calling people's attention to this issue. I think the proponents are probably just not familiar enough with the underlying philosophy of this project. Most likely they have a bunch of stuff in this format, and are just trying to be "helpful" in finding ways to contribute. They may not fully grasp why our commitment to open content makes such formats unacceptable.

The audiophile in me would disfavor MP3, even if it weren't proprietary, since it's such a low-quality format compared to the alternatives. So double thanks. --Michael Snow 05:43, 17 Jul 2004 (UTC)

No problem, indeed changing such core policies without _any_ consent was just uncalled for. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 06:09, 2004 Jul 17 (UTC)

Thorn and Eth

I don't like disagreeing with you, but I do believe that these letters should be listed under their normal English names Thorn and Eth. Evertype 09:51, 2004 Jul 20 (UTC)

Why? -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 09:56, 2004 Jul 20 (UTC)

We don't list the other letters under Ay, Bee, Cee... Ex, Wye, Zed, so why make an exception for þ and ð? They can be redirects. — Chameleon My page/My talk 10:39, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)

This is Public Domain

( Next two paragraphs moved from User talk:Roseba )

Okey, you seem to be the one that initially pasted the text at Clark Democrats, later that text was put on Copyright problems because a user had found it to be a violation of this sites copyright.

I've reinstated that it's a copyright violation, not to be mean, but until all doubt is off the case thats what it will be, now — i presume that you are in fact the author of the original article. What would ideal at this point is to get some proof that you are indeed who i think you are, in that case the article can be re-instated to it's original form for improvement by others. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 12:25, 2004 Jul 20 (UTC)

Knightrider, his first name is Dom. He lives in Maryland I believe..... Together, with about 14 other Clarkies, :we wrote this text. How do I provide proof that we did this? It's kind of ridiculous given the source.

We have a Yahoo group called "Clark Democrats" as well.

I am not going to email Dom to try to restore this.

Roseba, please sign your posts by writing --[[User:Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason|Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason]] 23:00, 9 October 2005 (GMT), you can get that text by clicking the little signiture button above the edit box. Look at this from our point of view for a second, someone puts a page on wikipdia ( we dont know who since he/she didnt register ), someone monotoring newpages does a google search on it and finds an exact copy on someones blog, hence we presume a copyvio. What you can do is put a little mention on the site it came from, or email me from a email address listed there or in some way give us proof that you are in fact who you clame.

Roseba Not sure how to sign my posts with my name.

However....

On Feb 14, just after Clark dropped out of the race, I came up with the idea that we needed a meme, so we wouldn't be forgotten, like Reagan Democrats.

The post below is evidence that we started brainstorming the idea behind it. http://roseba.forclark.com/story/2004/2/12/16750/2670

Then Knightrider (Dom) came up with a logo. http://knightrider.forclark.com/story/2004/2/18/13651/1916

And the OLD logo: NOT SURE YOU CAN READ YAHOO GROUP STUFF http://us.f1.yahoofs.com/groups/g_12071821/__tn_ClarkDemocrat4rd.gif?bcIdR_ABoTLA2naX

Sometime later, I complete revamped it. The Original Photoshop file resides here under my Yahoo name, divina27 as stated by Knighrider on this blog: http://knightrider.forclark.com/comments/2004/2/18/13651/1916/12#12

And Dom responded: http://knightrider.forclark.com/story/2004/2/20/0959/62337

Then we went private, as listed here: http://knightrider.forclark.com/comments/2004/2/18/13651/1916/31#31

NOT SURE YOU CAN READ YAHOO GROUP STUFF http://f5.grp.yahoofs.com/v1/QAn9QFguyUGojl0_DH5VNk-Ec0e62on3dSXqdnwAW9JqXcuhG95ES5EhrHRF42G6yqEXME6qIdV4xJH4Za3x4Q/ClarkDem.psd

NOT SURE YOU CAN READ YAHOO GROUP STUFF http://us.f1.yahoofs.com/groups/g_12071821/__tn_ClarkDemocrat4rd.gif?bcIdR_ABoTLA2naX

We went private back and forth on Yahoo Groups, using a word file, to iterate, what we wanted the oath, pledge, mission to stand for.

Clark Democrat openness doctrine. NOT SURE YOU CAN READ YAHOO GROUP STUFF http://f1.grp.yahoofs.com/v1/QAn9QG-IQxWojl0_tyZY62N9Er5ihEKen4Tsk4srg2InQheJRtbRTTXeIkF0uW3qQE6V6bwqgAM3f30SQW4MQQ/The%20Clark%20Democrat%20Openness%20Doctrine

Clark Democrat Oath NOT SURE YOU CAN READ YAHOO GROUP STUFF http://f2.grp.yahoofs.com/v1/QAn9QIY1Va-ojl0_uautE1RkLkltnc0Iyo5IbCafg1xBX0EXC2FjUHjf2lh7-9Ok1HSi5UUWfPNb1meDJVRK4w/The%20Clark%20Democratic%20Oath

Wes Clark alliance NOT SURE YOU CAN READ YAHOO GROUP STUFF http://f1.grp.yahoofs.com/v1/QAn9QNXj18qojl0_fo2jp3m4Doa4454qLDAlPk2xMPdghWfkctzYlvwk2nk7L21zJaLT0uXxa9W5C7S1T_RI2Q/WCA%20Proposal.doc

We starting spreading the meme all over the John Kerry forum, DemocratUnderground and numerous Clarkie centric sites as discussed here: http://knightrider.forclark.com/

Here I am specifically mentioned for my help: http://knightrider.forclark.com/story/2004/2/20/0959/62337

More discussion: http://knightrider.forclark.com/story/2004/2/15/15811/4296

Roseba 13:00, Jul 20, 2004 (UTC) Roseba 13:00, Jul 20, 2004 (UTC)~~

Okey, even if it isnt a copyright violation, which i belive. Do you think it's valid encyclopedia material? -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 13:03, 2004 Jul 20 (UTC)

~~Bold textfrom roseba~~

Yes. Because it is an active and growing movement of thousands of individuals.

Do a search on Google for the word "Clark Democrat" or click here: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=clark+democrat

I've listed it on Votes for deleteion, you can see this entery for the vote on it, note that this is in no way a personal attack against you, but rather a vote to see if thats a valid topic for inclution in the encylopedia. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 22:41, 2004 Jul 20 (UTC)

Re: removal of second Alþingi link

Hey there.  :) I just wanted to explain why I removed the second link to Alþingi in the Iceland article. Since the article is already linked in the first paragraph of the "History" section (with the spelling "Althing", which should probably be changed for consistency's sake), I did not feel it was necessary to link it again. From everything I've seen so far on Wikipedia, linking the same article multiple times within an article is discouraged. Perhaps this is something I'm not understanding properly? Beginning 19:37, Jul 22, 2004 (UTC)

Oops, didnt notice that first link, will fix it now -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 19:42, 2004 Jul 22 (UTC)

So we're still going with linking it twice? I don't know why, but I've been under the impression for awhile now that linking things twice isn't good. I've seen people leave messages in their edits before saying "stop linking things twice", but I guess I was wrong.  :) Thanks for correcting the spelling, in any case. Beginning 21:25, Jul 22, 2004 (UTC)

Not at all, i removed the second link now, i was just under the impression that you had already done that. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 21:30, 2004 Jul 22 (UTC)

Typo on protected page

There is a protected page I would like to correct. See Template_talk:Noncommercial.

Thanks. — Chameleon My page/My talk 03:42, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Fixed, thanks. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 03:52, 2004 Jul 23 (UTC)

No, only the first c needed to be changed into an s. The second one was totally correct and needs reverting. — Chameleon My page/My talk 04:07, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Righto, you might want to provide better instructions in the future, but all is well that ends well. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 04:13, 2004 Jul 23 (UTC)

I did! I did! I pasted the exact text I wanted to appear, and explained the orthographical issues below in case you weren't aware of them. — Chameleon My page/My talk 04:15, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Not to be a total bitch about it or anything, but this is what you said:

"License" is so spelt when it is a verb. This is not a US/UK difference: that issue affects the noun "licence", which Americans spell with an s just like the verb

And this was the text:

This image is not licenced under the GFDL. It is under a non-commercial-use only licence.

Now, we have two occourances of licence, (well actually licence and licenced) in that text, since you didnt specify fix the former occourance of licence or similar all one has to go by is verb , and we none-native speakers genereally tend not to remember the jargons of english grammar offhand... – Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 04:34, 2004 Jul 23 (UTC)

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Rock the vote

A vote has been initiated on the standard template for computer and video games. As a member of the Wikipedia:WikiProject Computer and Video Games, you are being solicited for input into the proposed template. Please cast your vote any make any comments at Rock the vote! Thank you! — Frecklefoot | Talk 14:31, Aug 6, 2004 (UTC)

VV´s block

VV is going crazy over your block against him; he has contacted Guanaco and RickK via their talk pages to try to get someone to unblock him and is calling you a ¨rogue sysop¨. I would suggest following up there with justification. -- Grunt 🇪🇺 22:27, 2004 Sep 1 (UTC)

Heading off to the sweet land of dreams, i'll write about it tomorrrow if he still has the desire to make a fuss about it. Cya -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 22:31, 2004 Sep 1 (UTC)

Believe me, I will. VV 22:55, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)

GoodForYou...Node 00:11, 2 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I reversed the block. Violations of the 3-revert limit are not currently recognized in Wikipedia:Blocking policy as grounds for blocking, unless the user is subject to an Arbitration Committee ruling (such as Cantus). Since VeryVerily is not currently under any such probation, you would need to state a different justification if you decide to block him. --Michael Snow 22:46, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[[Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/%C6var_Arnfj%F6r%F0_Bjarmason]] -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 00:29, 2004 Sep 2 (UTC)

In light of your comments on the RfC, I'm willing to just drop the matter. I've delisted you from RfC. Please note though that your "unblock" at 22:03 did not in fact unblock me. VV 00:35, 2 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Strange, must have been some bug in the system. Anyway glad i didnt make you too angry by my actions. Hope there are no hard feelings. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 00:37, 2004 Sep 2 (UTC)

No, I'm over the hard feelings now. In fact, I should probably apologize for forgetting to notify you of the RfC. VV 06:41, 2 Sep 2004 (UTC)

What you unblocked was the IP autoblock created when VeryVerily tried to edit while blocked. This would probably have been the first item in Special:Ipblocklist at the time. Unblocking the IP alone doesn't unblock the underlying username - what's necessary is to unblock both, as I did later, if you really want to reverse the action. I'm glad this was a misunderstanding that has now been resolved. --Michael Snow 04:22, 2 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Translations

Greetings Ævar!

There are two major translations underway:

• The 1,000,000 article global press release
• A Wikimedia newsletter

Perhaps you would be intersted in helping translate these?
Instructions and details are at m:Translation requests.

User:151.202.154.243

The block summary you gave for the blocking of this User:151.202.154.243, "asshole", is inappropriate. Please unblock him or correct your block summary to something more appropriate. Marcus2 23:02, 5 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Well great minds must think alike! I came here to say exactly the same thing. Remember that an IP address belongs to a computer not a person. There is a chance that another user will share the same IP. They will see the block summary if they try to edit so it's always best to be polite. Theresa Knott (Nate the Stork) 23:08, 5 Sep 2004 (UTC)

(later) I checked on his contributions and noticed that his talk page was empty. We always give a warning here first so that users know their behaviour is unnaceptable. It gives them the change to change it. Anyway because no warning was given I've unblocked the IP. Theresa Knott (Nate the Stork) 23:33, 5 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I admit to being slightly annoyed;) However i cannot fulfill marcuses request for obvious reasons. The user is also fully aware of why he is banned. But i'll try to be more polite in the future. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 08:17, 2004 Sep 6 (UTC)

Theresa: please look over what the user has been doing regardless of the mistakes the admin who blocked him did. Because of you unblocking him he continued his vandalism until RickK blocked him again, might i add without warning him on his talk page, pehaps you'd like to unban him again so we can continue the whole charade? -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 08:20, 2004 Sep 6 (UTC)

As far as I can see this user has repeatedly inserted a few links under the title of "parodies" in the Stallman article. He has done under more than one IP, but as far as I can tell no one has ever tried to explain to him (or her) why these links are unsuitable. I am not at all sure that this person is a simple vandal, but even if he is, temporarily protecting the article is far better than blocking (seeing as he is already using more than one IP). I will not however unblock him again, as I don't want to cause animosity between us. :-) Theresa Knott (Nate the Stork) 08:54, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Not to sound all snide or anything but in this universe its kind of given that inserting links that describe the man in question "play[ing] the skin-flute" (which i'll leave to your imagination what means) is an unjustified personal attack which has no place in a respectful article about any person on wikipedia and that is why we didn't burn too many braincells explaining exactly why inserting those links was inappropriate. I'm going to assume you didn't read the links in question. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 10:11, 2004 Sep 6 (UTC)

Well you have every reason to sound smug (if not snide) because you are correct. I skimmed rather than read the "essays". Even so, it's policy to give a warning first.Like I said before, my main concern is that we don't scare away possible innocents who happen to share the same IP. Theresa Knott (Nate the Stork) 11:01, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Well you are right that my ban message was out of line and i should have given the IP address the standard warning on the talk page, i was just highly annoyed at this constant vandalism at the time. It seems however that it's not a dynamic address as nothing but vandalism has come from it since its first contribution 21 days ago. However there is no question that the material they are inserting is inappropriate and they know it. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 11:13, 2004 Sep 6 (UTC)

Being "highly annoyed" is not grounds for abusing admin power. VV 14:33, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Hi VV. how have you been? -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 14:59, 2004 Sep 6 (UTC)

Fine thanks. VV 15:03, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Great. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 15:05, 2004 Sep 6 (UTC)

<Talking to VeryVerily> Admins are human beings. Nobody is perfect. Ævar has already said that his ban message was out of line, and he should have warned first.He's also said he'll try to be more polite in the future. I don't believe that he was trying to justify the ban, only explain it, when he said he was annoyed. As far as I'm concerned the matter is done with. Let's move on.Theresa Knott (Nate the Stork) 15:43, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Okay, but I see a pattern here, two instances in short time. Yes, he has been frank about the causes, but blocking is (a) an explicit not accidental act and (b) causes harm. Saying he's "not perfect" understates the case if users/IPs become banned for annoying an admin. But, I wouldn't have used the word abusing if I had it to do over. VV 06:32, 7 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Should we go through RFC again? It was phun the last time;=) -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 08:02, 2004 Sep 7 (UTC)

No Theresa Knott (Nate the Stork) 10:11, 7 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I think this banning stuf isnt for me, i'll promtly return to spreading love an happyness across the universe, cheers. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 15:45, 2004 Sep 6 (UTC)

You really dont need to go as far as that. The blocking procedure is very simple, warn politely, warn more sternly, block with sensible explanation for 24 hours (or shorter if you like) if they come back, check the IP and either a short term range block or long term block as appropriate. Once you've done enough of these, you lose the emotional factor and so don't become annoyed. It helps to remember that they always lose, even when we don't block them because there are so many more of us than them, we can simply revert them. Happy hunting! Theresa Knott (Nate the Stork) 20:09, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Picture

No, you don't have tits. Mike H 04:16, Sep 8, 2004 (UTC)

LOL -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 14:29, 2004 Sep 8 (UTC)

TI-84

...is not a real calculator. The person that added it to TI-83 probably meant TI-84 Plus. As a result some anon listed it on VfD. -- Grunt 🇪🇺 00:54, 2004 Sep 9 (UTC)

Thanks for the translation

Thanks Ævar for the translations I still have to work on it and I'll check once more so that I could finish. Lmb 16:02, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)

A few more words

Here I have more words to translate. Please, let me know in case I’ve made some spelling mistakes. These terms would help me to enrich articles about some Icelandic music bands that I’m writing about:

And I still have a few more to come. Thanks. Lmb 22:51, 11 Sep 2004 (UTC)

• Slöggur: It doesnt mean anything as far as i'm aware of.

• Þreita: Tiredness, but not "being tired" that would be "þreittur(male)" or "þreitt(female|gender netural)"
• Flughuhfið:This is some pseudo-word that doesnt exist (f never comes after h), are you sure you wrote it correctly?
• Kvaðje Jörd: Again, a pseudoword, could be "Kveðja, jörð" which would be an ackward way to say "goodbye planet earth" however it is not valid grammar in it's current form except if it were a list of words.
• En Ungur En: Another pseudo-sentance, "Er ungur enn" would be "I'm still young" or "[he is] still young" which is "hann er ungur enn"
• Rudið: pseudo-word, no idea what you mean
• Viní Mínir: You probably mean "Vinir mínir" which is "my friends"
• Í Tesrof: "in (untranslatable, the word does not exist)"
• Freyimdargretszchybusch: just some gibberish
• Bas: not a word
• Maggasyn: Could be a slang word for the vocalization of "Magazine" if it were written with icelandic phonology "Magasín"
• Tedrukkin: drunken on tea, or one that has drunk alot of tea, would not be used in any none-poetic language
• Ariareggae: not a word
• Ulfur: Úlfur, "Wolf"
• Iss: Not valid as a standalone word, however it is used a lot in common language, the equivalent in english is probably 'pff'. It is meant to show contempt.

-- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 12:19, 2004 Sep 12 (UTC)

Thanks for your assistance with improving the Exploding whale entry

Hi Ævar, I just wanted to drop a quick comment a) thanking you for your hard work in getting the exploding whale page up to scratch, and b) apologising if my difference in opinion has caused you any offense! I really have worked quite hard on the story and I do appreciate the feedback. I've tried to incorporate it as best I can into the story. Your modifications to grammar really are appreciated as this has helped us tighten up the story significantly. So though I guess I don't see eye to eye on all suggested changes and edits, I do appreciate your diligence and assistance on this article! - Ta bu shi da yu 02:32, 12 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Good work Ævar :-) Your edits and comments were valuable in clarifying some of the language I used in the article. In Australian slang: You've done good. :P - Ta bu shi da yu 10:50, 12 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Image:Gestapo Flag.jpg

Where did you get Image:Gestapo Flag.jpg, could you upload it as PNG without the drop shadows and provide info on the origin. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 15:04, 2004 Sep 12 (UTC)

As stated on the image discussion page, I created it on September 5, 2004. You may modify it under GFDL as you wish. I really do not see the need to remove the drop shadow or save the image in PNG format (which takes more space and longer to load for dial-up users) since it is such low quality to begin with. Davodd 16:49, Sep 12, 2004 (UTC)

P.S. -> I added the drop shadow on purpose - since much of the flag is white, i did not want it to disappear in the background. Davodd 16:52, Sep 12, 2004 (UTC)

Well it's pretty unstandard and we use PNG for these types of illustrations, do you have the original still? And could you upload one without the shadows and in PNG format? -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 16:59, 2004 Sep 12 (UTC)

Exploding whale is now a featured article!

Just wanted to say: thanks heaps for your help on this article! Your assistance was invaluable in getting this up to scratch :-) Ta bu shi da yu 14:39, 18 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Hmmm... just noticed that this is my third thanks to you. I must owe you a lot :P Ta bu shi da yu 14:40, 18 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Np, nice groundwork you made. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 15:23, 2004 Sep 18 (UTC)

IPU

Just a note - the IPU page is protected. You're not supposed to edit it. –Andre (talk) 03:43, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Perhaps you should take some of your own advide and not make trivial formatting changes like the ones that provoked this message while a page is under protection. Both our edits have one thing in common though, they both reverted changes you made which in the first case gave the page a horrendous look (the reason i reverted it), and in the second stipped newlines between category and interwiki links — an unstandard notion here in the english wikipedia.

You might be interested in reading the manual of style as well as look over some featured articles to learn how to best place pictures around text as well as how to make interwiki links.-- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 04:18, 2004 Sep 19 (UTC)

Now at User talk:Andrevan -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 04:18, 2004 Sep 19 (UTC)

Wow, what's with the hostility? I hadn't known that trivial formatting of invisible elements counted under protection until I made the mistake (I was made admin today). By contrast, you actually changed the page layout while the page was protected, and I just passed along a friendly note in case you didn't realize it was protected. As for your changes, I actually thought the image looked better where I put it, and in my opinion it needs a caption to explain what the hell it is. And as for the stripping of newlines, I can't find mention of that in the manual of style, can you point me to it? I was trying to get rid of the annoying whitespace that shows up on the bottom of the page sometimes, and of all the things I tried, that worked for some reason. At any rate, two wrongs don't make a right - I made a mistake in changing the trivial formatting while the page was protected, but that doesn't mean you can do it with impunity. –Andre (talk) 04:25, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Contrary to what Kingturtle might have convinced you of making any changes whatsoever to protected pages is not advised against, frequently in these edit wars things get moved around and errors get made which then have to be rectified later, like i did in this case — if you look at the diff between the revision as of September 18 2004 and September 19 2004 (today) you'll see that the only things changed are the addition of the vprotected message as well as a trivial improvement to the image syntax with changes to actual content or its presentation being none. My reverting of your image-move around is favoring the stable version of this page which has been undisputed for approximately 2 months and one day (as of today), your additions of moving the IPU logo to the left of section 0 are nonstandard, layout breaking and as well as the caption being factually inaccurate — the logo in question is derived from the one made by the frequenters of alt.atheism and not made by them (guess who made the improved version), therefore i reverted your additions until this whole situation cools down.

As for the stripping of newlines i was referring to the featured articles and other articles on wikipedia, they are placed one per line for readability and because of the difficulty of keeping them alphabetically arranged when they are all in one tag-soup, there is a guide somewhere on how to make those probably but i am unable to find it at this time.

And as for the hostility towards you i do admit that the first sentence i wrote could be interpreted as such, know however that i did not mean it as such and hope that that misunderstanding is hear by corrected. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 05:18, 2004 Sep 19 (UTC)

Had you explained that in a simple fashion at first, it would have been fine. I honestly don't care enough about it to argue further. –Andre (talk) 08:57, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I prefer to have merely messages sent to me, not full discussions, on my talk page. –Andre (talk) 09:28, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC)

However by doing so you take comments made by others out of context, i kindly requst that you remove them as they currently stand or copy them all over. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 09:33, 2004 Sep 19 (UTC)

Alright then, if you insist, I'll take 'em off. –Andre (talk) 09:35, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Copyright ?

Are you sure the information I put about esperanto on is:wikipedia was under copyrighht. I wonder. Now you have deleted the article, I can't controll. It's a pitty you only deleted a page. It's better you edit it again. Now there is no more article about is:esperanto in the icelandic wikipedia whatether ther are links from the articles in the all other languages (about 50). It's a great lake ! Arno Lagrange ✉ 10:14, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC)

The page was a direct copy from: http://www.ismennt.is/vefir/esperant/oftaj.html , to be honest we did'nt even bother contacting the owner about permission because the text was just so bad, it was highly unencyclopedic with heading such as are'nt there enaugh languages?, why esperanto? and so forth, you will however find that i've rewritten the original article at is:Esperanto to something more encyclopedic than the original ever was. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 10:37, 2004 Sep 19 (UTC)

Thanks a lot having edited the article about esperanto again and I better that I did ! I don't understand islandic (only a few words that are similar to german or to english). and I couldn't edit islandic but copying an existing text ;-) Arno Lagrange ✉ 17:34, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC)

IPU blurring?

May I ask about the reasoning in the blurring of the IPU logo? Why not the unmodified logo? Aris Katsaris 23:39, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)

It looks ugly if scaled up like that. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 23:39, 2004 Sep 20 (UTC)

Articles wouldn't use it scaled up -- indeed we probably really don't need to use *such* a large scale up at all. Will give it a glance, and put the unmodified logo, reduced in size. Then we won't need to explain in captions it's modified -- that's rather ugly too. Aris Katsaris 00:57, 21 Sep 2004 (UTC)

What are you making an issue of this at all? I slightly enhanced the photo, the caption doesnt have to say it is modified at all, and the original doesnt scale as well, just leave it. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 19:39, 2004 Sep 21 (UTC)

Gmail

I'd like a gmail invite if you have one left. You can mail to: removed address to counter spam --MacGyverMagic

Sure, have a spare one. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 19:41, 2004 Sep 21 (UTC)

Thank you very much. I never dreamt of an email service with so many options. I can save messages, find them, label them... I'll never lose a message again. Hope it'll stay free. :) MGM 08:37, Sep 22, 2004 (UTC)

kassar, tízkan

Hið illa ráðabrugg mitt um að fjarlægja Ísland úr NATO, EFTA og OECD fór útum þúfur, ég reiknaði ekki með að Ævar væri á vakt. En já, ég hef aðeins þau rök, núna eins og svo oft áður, að mér fannst þetta ljótt eins og það var með ótal kössum sem telja upp sömu löndin aftur og aftur. Það vill þannig til að þegar mér þykir eitthvað ljótt þá finnst mér það alveg fullnægjandi rökstuðningur... Reyndar ef maður skoðar síður um önnur lönd þá kemur í ljós að það er afskaplega misjafnt hvaða kassar eru hafðir með og hverjir eru látnir eiga sig en hvergi hef ég séð jafn marga svona kassa á einni síðu, nema hjá Tyrkjunum sem eru voða æstir í að tilkynna heiminum það að þeir séu með. En þú verður nú samt að vera sammála mér í því að það var nauðsynlegt að taka til í þessari external links hrúgu...--Biekko 18:26, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Já fólk dritar þessu bara niður þar sem því dettur í hug,annskotans villimennska og hryðjuverkastarfsemi. Hvað með að hafa Evrópu, atlantshafsbandalagið og oecd? Látum nú ekki sjá okkur með þessum færeyjingum þarna í einhverju norðurlandahipparáði. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 18:40, 2004 Sep 24 (UTC)

Hæ. Já Evrópukassinn er lágmarkið. Norðurlandaráðið er bara saumaklúbbur, það er nóg að hafa Ísland í Norðurlanda category held ég. Spörning með hitt dótið... --Biekko 19:11, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)

A personal request

I have a personal request. Please could you enter my name in icelandic? on my user page? Thanks ¶ ɳȉčḩåḽṗ | ✉ 20:11, Sep 24, 2004 (UTC)

Well according to a ruling made by the committee of peoples names [3] on August 16 2002 [4] "Nikolas" was found to be a valid form of the name "Nikulás" which is the more traditional version. You probably want the latter. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 15:18, 2004 Sep 25 (UTC)

Thanks, btw I couldn't discern anything from the sites you gave me :) ¶ ɳȉčḩåḽṗ | ✉ 20:00, Sep 25, 2004 (UTC)

How do you say Hunter Nicholas in Icelandic (I;m not saying my last name) 24.128.149.7 13:31, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

Seeing as it's customary to pronounce (most) foreign names like they're pronounced in the native language in Icelandic I'd say it just like you'd expect a native English speaker to pronounce it. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 13:36, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

dead languages in small use

Ah, good catch. I left out the word scholarly apparently. {Ανάριον} 14:29, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Coördinate

There's this book called a dictionary. In it you will learn about the diaeresis, which properly belongs above words like coördinate in order to mark that the word does not start with a 'coo' sound as in 'cool'. {Ανάριον} 18:28, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Jumbuck mangles diacritized letters

Jumbuck has attempted to add an interwiki link to Denmark, but instead of ks:Ḍēnamārka it has spelled it ks:??nam?rka. Perhaps you may also want to check if it hasn't made similar mistakes in other articles. -- Naive cynic 12:57, Oct 11, 2004 (UTC)

I'll fix it. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 15:34, 2004 Oct 11 (UTC)

A few lines to translate

Hello, I was thinking how to say the following expressions:

• “Hello, how are you doing?”

Halló, hvernig líður þér.

• “Thanks a lot XXX!!!”

Þakka þér kærlega fyrir, you dont say the name in that context, just address the person.

• “Happy birthday XXX!!!”

Til hamingju með afmælið, same, you just address without saying the name.

By the way, thanks a lot for the help. Lmb 23:09, 14 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Free software

Thanks for fixing Free software! Connelly 01:46, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Copyrights and new entries

From Mustang_dvs:

Stop posting copyrighted material which we do not have permission to use. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 11:01, 2004 Nov 17 (UTC):::

Ævar, perhaps you'd like to explain to me how I'm violating a copyright by posting this information with the expressed permission of the people and organizations profiled in the entries I've edited? If you'd have noticed, there was a common thread in a majority of my new page entries, starting with the JINSA post, which I substantially re-wrote on Oct 13, 2003. I've cited all the resources I've used for these new pages, and have made substantive and stylistic changes, as needed. --Mustang dvs 21:56, Dec 11, 2004 (UTC)

You are not, however it does always look quite suspicious when someone begins importing content from another website. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 11:29, 2004 Dec 14 (UTC)

Image:Blue-green eye closeup.jpg

The stock exchange is a provider of free images. At the bottom of the image it says: There are no usage restrictions for this photo., i.e. it is public domain. Occasionally, there will be a different message saying for e.g. that the user must be contacted before using this image for commercial work. Does this answer your question? Happy editing -- Chris 73 Talk 23:42, Nov 7, 2004 (UTC)

Sorry to bust into your conversation, but as Chris has explained to me, we currently can use images on the commons only through a search preference: if the software doesn't find an image on the local wiki (en: in this case), it looks on the commons. If you now delete that image on en:, a future uploader on en: who just happens to use the name of this image will get no indication whatsoever that he is overriding an existing image. I don't like that at all, it opens the door to endless confusions (and to a new kind of vandalism, too). Lupo 23:27, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Culture of Greece

Culture of Greece is this week's Collaboration of the week. Please come and help it become a featured-standard article.

Template:Commons

Hi. I added the <br style="clear:both" /> again to the Template:Commons. Without that the template was occassionally indented by other pictures. I just think it looks nicer (e.g. on Joystick). Let me know if you have a specific reasons for its removal. Thanks -- Chris 73 Talk 00:38, Nov 9, 2004 (UTC)

Problem solved, resized image on Joystick. -- Chris 73 Talk 06:54, Nov 9, 2004 (UTC)

Checking for dbl redirects

Hi, sorry! See my answer at my talk page (keeping the thread in one place). --Wernher 01:48, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Jumbuck interwiki corrections to zh:

Hi, I noticed that User:Jumbuck made several changes to links pointing to the Chinese WP. In doing so, it replaced the entity "&#183;" with "&middot;". This causes the links to the Chinese WP to break. For an example, see my recent corrections to Henri Cartier-Bresson. I'm not sure if this is a problem with the WP software; regardless, please leave "&#183;" unchanged for now. --MarkSweep 16:53, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Jumbuck interwiki minnan:

User:Jumbuck recently added a minnan: interwiki link to Journey to the West, which already had the same link as a zh-min-nan: link. I don't know which is correct, but it's something to watch out for (particularly as it resulted in a small bug in the interwiki link display). --Paul A 02:00, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Please, I need more of your help

I have more words and short sentences to translate. I don’t want to be constantly bothering you with this, but I’m making corrections and working on several articles on the Spanish version of this encyclopedia and another in Spanish related to Icelandic bands and artists and thus I came across with this terms that are so difficult to figure out. So instead of putting the messages here, I have a sub page at User:Luis_María_Benítez/Notes where you can see all the words and expressions. Thanks for your continuing assistance. Luis María Benítez 12:03, 30 Nov 2004 (UTC)

thanks for the gmail!

Says it all really. You are a kind and generous person, a wikihero. Seasons greetings. --Mrfixter 23:12, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Categorizing articles that define categories

I reverted your removal of Category:Intellectual property from Copyright. True, Category:Copyright law is in that category already, but an article that defines a category properly belongs to all the parents that its eponymous category belongs to. Copyright is one of a series of IP topics, as well as the defining article of its own series of copyright-specific topics. This properly classifies it and allows for navigation to the other articles of which it stands on equal footing as an IP-related topic. This is different from the general rule that an article should not be placed in all parents of the subcategory that it merely belongs to. As copyright misuse, for example, only relates to IP as a subtopic of copyright, it would not be properly placed in Category:Intellectual property in addition to Category:Copyright law. Let me know if you have any further questions on this. Postdlf 21:19, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Unverified images

Hi! Thanks for uploading the following images:

• Image:Icelandic_Charges.jpeg
• Image:Icelandic_Coat_of_Arms.jpeg
• Image:Icelandic_Coat_of_Arms_-_Cod.jpeg
• Image:Icelandic_Coat_of_Arms_-_Falcon.jpeg

I notice it currently doesn't have an image copyright tag. Could you add one to let us know its copyright status? (You can use {{gfdl}} if you release it under the GNU Free Documentation License, {{fairuse}} if you claim fair use, etc.) If you don't know what any of this means, just let me know where you got the imagesand I'll tag them for you. Thanks so much. [[User:Poccil|Peter O. (Talk, automation script)]] 01:46, Dec 10, 2004 (UTC)

P.S. You can help tag other images at User:Yann/Untagged_Images. Thanks again.

Translation of the week

Hi! This is Ronline from the Romanian Wikipedia. I would like to inform you that, at Meta-Wiki, there is a project running known as Translation of the week. This project seeks to translate an article into as many languages as possible every week, in order to strengthen collaboration between the different language projects and enable more article depth. The current translation of the week is Oradea, and it has already been translated into 17 languages. You can see more information here. It would be great if you could translate this article into the Icelandic language, even partially would be great! Thank you very much, Ronline 11:52, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Image tagging

Hi! Thanks for uploading Image:Ceal of Akureyri.jpeg. It currently does not have a copyright tag on it. If you know the copyright information, could you please supply it on the image page? If you need help please feel free to contact me. Thanks! --[[User:Whosyourjudas|Whosyourjudas\^talk]] 04:09, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)

No idea. I've deleted it, which we'll probably have to do for more of these Icelandic seals. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 11:21, 2004 Dec 11 (UTC)

Invariant sections

Ævar, I have seen you clarify things on Wikipedia_talk:Copyrights before, so I was wondering if you might have any insights on the subject at Wikipedia_talk:Copyrights#Invariant_sections. ~leif ☺ _HELO 00:21, Dec 12, 2004 (UTC)

Your wiki-skin

I wonder if I can use your customized skin for my wiki (nothing to do with wikipedia). Credits will remain in source of course.

One more question in case you know: How can I replace the categories box with a sentence saying "This article belongs to category-x and category-y"? Thank you :) Kontoauszug 14:20, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)

You are quite welcome to use it, also if your wiki is a public one it would be nice to see it "in action" if that's okey.

About the categories, do you mean to replace "Categories: foo | bar | smu" with "This article belongs to category foo and bar and smu" ? -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 19:06, 2004 Dec 13 (UTC)

Thank you; I'll let you know as soon as it's ready!

Yes, that's what I mean ("This article belongs to category foo and bar and smu"). Any ideas who it could be done? Kontoauszug 09:51, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)

You'll have to change MediaWiki:Categories to "This article belongs to category" and then edit the sourcecode to output "and" instead of "|" between categories, you're on your own there. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 21:55, 2004 Dec 15 (UTC)

Lasesr tag

Heya, did you catch my response at Talk:Lasesr tag? There does appear to be some precedent for deleting it, however all in all I'd rather not go through the WP:RfD process. --fvw* 19:31, 2004 Dec 13 (UTC)

Browser

I'm using IE 5.1 for the Macintosh. I don't think I can support a more up to date IE until I upgrade to Mac OS X. Can you suggest any plug ins etc that I can use to resolve the problem?AndyL 01:38, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Any idea how I can acquire the font? I also have a netscape browser - I'll see if using that avoids the problem but if you know how I can import the necessary fonts to my IE browser I'm all ears. AndyL 01:47, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)

If it's a systemic problem then perhaps the wikipedia software can be modified in such a way as to handle it?AndyL 03:03, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Moving the name of a person

Fine by me. – Quadell ^{(talk) (help)}[[]] 13:01, Dec 14, 2004 (UTC)

Image tags

I've come across one or more notes from you on other users' talk pages asking them to note the copyright/license status of images that they've uploaded. That's great, but it would help even more if you specifically mention tagging the images and include a link to the image copyright tags page. Many users are not aware of these tags or the importance of using them. A note on an image description page stating that it's GFDL or some such is good, but it doesn't help with the automatic sorting and winnowing of the images so we know which ones are licensed. (I don't see your name on the Untagged Images project page – we could use your help there if you're not already.) Thanks for helping keep Wikipedia "clean"! Kbh3rd 15:26, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Hinn

Shouldn't "Eiríkr hinn rau<eth>i" be more accurate Old Norse? (Eric the Red?) Just like Leifr hinn heppni... Switisweti 22:48, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I don't know old norse well enough to answer that, -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 16:16, 2004 Dec 24 (UTC)

The other three earthquakes

See 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake#Quake characteristics -- Curps 03:22, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)

User:Geogre

Maybe User:Geogre is under GNAA attack. Please protect it. utcursch 12:40, Dec 29, 2004 (UTC)

Japanese tsunami animation copyright status

I left a message for you on your talk page at the Commons wiki, but I don't know how often you log in there. -- Curps 10:21, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Halo edits

I'd like to thank you for all of your work on the Halo: Combat Evolved pages. That is all :) LockeShocke 17:06, Jan 9, 2005 (UTC)

Free content

Thanks for your reply to my request for clarification. I responded to your points. —Alexander 21:06, 2005 Jan 14 (UTC)

Hope you don't mind...

Remember that screenshot of the admin toolbar you took for me once? Well, I sort of bastardized it. It's getting thrown on Meta:Cabal as a joke, so if you don't want to be associated with zee ebul kabal, let me know and I'll throw someone else's name onto the image. →Reene^✏ 08:01, Jan 20, 2005 (UTC)

I'm fine with it, though I must point out that the contents of the image are unfactual, the real cabal interface has a obliberate user option, delete page without a trace, summon sockpuppet with an auto-generated edit history etc. --Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 11:06, 2005 Jan 20 (UTC)

Template talk:Sisterproject#Survey

On WP:TFD, you voted for keeping Template:Sisterproject. However, another vote is needed to ensure it is used. Please state your opinion at the above link. — Itai (f&t) 15:05, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)

GCOTW

I'm giving you this message because you have been active on Gaming Collaboration of the week in the past. The collaboration had a bit of a hiatus, but it's now active again. A new article will be chosen this Sunday. It would be greatly appreciated if you visited the page to vote and/or make new nominations and worked on next week's GCOTW. Thanks. --Slowking Man 08:16, Feb 4, 2005 (UTC)

Image request

Your request for an image on article death erection has been fulfilled. I am attempting to extract a source from the poster - they accurately sum up the concept and article. --Oldak Quill 15:29, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)

The most valuable translation - ever

Thanks for translating Let's trim our hair in accordance with the socialist lifestyle. I think that's pretty funny and am glad others can now enjoy it! Nrbelex 03:00, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Eth character in your sig

Some users seem to use a browser that converts special characters in unpleasant ways, for instance your sig got broken and was made non-linked: [5]. I have heard that using some versions of Lynx browser will do that.

I dont know if changing literal ð to &eth; in your signature will help prevent this sort of thing, but it might. -- Curps 03:45, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I've been using Template:OS9 to make people who do this aware of the problem, this is a constant PITA on Icelandic and old-norse related topics. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 20:34, 2005 Feb 15 (UTC)

Google search rename

Did you read the lengthy talk page discussion about all the moves that took place this morning? Someone made some moves earlier today that others were considering rolling back. I am not necessarily against the rename of google search to Google (searche engine) that you made but it may just add to confusion and ultimately might be invalidated by a rollback of the moves that happened this morning. Basically, I guess I am asking if you made the rename in support of the moves that took place this morning or did you just notice an inaccurately titled article that you just wanted to fix? zen master T 23:45, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Bah!, do you mean this, anyway, I just checked the Google search talk page and moved the page because its an article about a search engine called Google, not Google search, and becouse it conflicts with other articles I moved it to Google (search engine). So yeah, i just noticed an inaccurately title article and moved it. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 00:04, 2005 Feb 18 (UTC)

Surtsey

Hi, just wanted to say thanks for your comments on peer review - I'd been meaning to drop you a note to let you know I'd put it there and see if you had any suggestions, but you got there before I got around to it! You're right that the fact a lot of literature is in Icelandic makes things tricky - unfortunately my Icelandic vocabulary extends only to 'takk' and 'pyslur'...:( Worldtraveller 01:16, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)

15 London Street, Edinburgh

Hi, saw your image requests in Talk:Edinburgh - I swung by for a trip today and took some pictures - here's a wide shot and here's a closeup shot. Hope this helps! Qwghlm 21:26, Feb 18, 2005 (UTC)

Your user page

Well, your userpage is back now. I don't know if you want it back or not, but I would like to say something:

Your complete lack of a userpage makes it a fair bit more difficult to access you. You might want to make it a redirect to the talk page, just so that it shows up as a real link.

Or you might not. It's up to you. [[User:Ingoolemo|User:Ingoolemo/Sig]] 01:53, 2005 Mar 1 (UTC)

Artsakh: Help to restore correct name for the page

Hi Ævar,

I picked your name by chance from the list of administrators. I just wanted to ask you for a favor. Could you please help me to move page Artzakh to Artsakh, which is itself is a redirect to Artsah.

All these three entries signifify actually the same historical region of Caucasus Albania, an ancient state in the territory of present-day Azerbaijan. This confusing change was introduced by User:Rovoam, who intentionally omitted the most widely used term Artsakh and instead, created two separate entries (i.e. Artzakh and Artsah).

In short, I want to have one single entry named Artsakh and I want all other less used spelling versions (Artsah, Artzakh etc.) to be redirected to this page. I hope you can help me in this.

Btw, here's the Google results for all three naming variants:

Artsakh - 44,100 results; Artzakh - 398 results; Artsah - 139 results.

This demonstrates that the variant I propose (Artsakh) is the most correct and widely used one. Hope you can hlp me. Thanks! --Tabib 14:55, Mar 1, 2005 (UTC)

Moved it. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 16:22, 2005 Mar 1 (UTC)

Mercury interwiki links

As User:Jumbuck you added a bunch of interwiki links to Mercury, but I suspect a number of them are not useful.

In English, Mercury is a disambiguation page. There's Mercury the chemical element, Mercury the planet and many more. But in other languages, this ambiguity doesn't exist. In Russian and Chinese, for instance, there are entirely separate words for the planet and for the chemical element, and interwiki links to them only make sense from Mercury and Mercury.

In general, a disambiguation page shouldn't have interwiki links unless it's to a disambiguation page in another language where the same ambiguity exists (as in French fr:Mercure). -- Curps 04:58, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing it out. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 05:01, 2005 Mar 13 (UTC)

OK. In Russian, there is a disambig page at ru:Меркурий (for the mythological figure and the planet), but the chemical element is ru:Ртуть. If your bot linked Mercury to the former it might be OK, but it was linking to the latter.

The problem is, each language can use its own version of a disambig tag. The Russian wikipedia actually uses {{disambig}} just like English, but the French wikipedia for instance uses {{Homonymie}}. If you could build in knowledge of detecting a disambig page in each Wikipedia language, you could do disambig <-> disambig interwiki links. But it seems that a simpler solution is to make the bot skip any English page that has a {{disambig}} tag. -- Curps 05:15, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Jumbuck Added/changed/deleted some wrong interwiki lnks

Hi, just letting you know that your Jumbuck bot added the wrong Norwegian (no) interwiki link to the article Function (mathematics). The link it added to the article was to no:Bilde which is actually Image. I have removed this interwiki link from Function (mathematics).

Also, Jumbuck changed the Ukrainian (:uk) link from uk:Відображення (which is a redirect page to uk:Функція (в математиці) (Function (mathematics)) to uk:Функція which links to the English page Function (which is a disambiguation page). I thought about changing the interwiki link on Function (mathematics) to uk:Функція (в математиці), but then, I discovered that uk:Функція (в математиці) does not have any interwiki links, and that there exists a Ukrainian article uk:Ін'єкція (в математиці) that has an interwiki link to Function (mathematics), so I changed the Ukrainian interwiki link in Function (mathematics) to point to uk:Ін'єкція (в математиці).

Sometimes when an article is written about a subject with many meanings, the page eventually splits up, and not all of the interwiki links are updated properly. This can cause confusion to anyone else trying to maintain the interwiki links, and also to some bots that try and update them.

Also, I noticed that in the article Friday, Jumbuck deleted the interwiki link to the :nds article nds:Freedag. I do not think it should have been removed, as when looking at nds:Freedag, it looks like it is an article about Friday.

Jumbuck has changed toomany articles for me to check, but could you make sure that the bot does not cause anymore wrong links, and if possible, check (or get someone else to check) to see if the links it has changed are correct? I've also checked operating system, and there, Jumbuck has added the correct links.

Ae-a 23:58, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Ask, and ye shall receive

commons:Image:Grid illusion.png Foobaz·o< 01:14, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Collation of interwiki links

I was under the impression that interwiki links should be collated by the abbreviation rather than the language name (i.e. :fi: should be sorted under F rather than S for Suomi). User:Jumbuck does not do this (and I could not on first inspection detect just what the collation strategy actually is). Am I wrong, or is Jumbuck, or are both of us? --Phil | Talk 10:05, Mar 14, 2005 (UTC)

Mediawiki:Sharedupload

Thanks for doing that – its a lot better now. I didn't think anyone would notice my comment actually, hidden away in Mediawiki talk:! Cheers, Smoddy (_t^g_e^c) 19:33, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Yes, I saw. Nicely done. Smoddy (_t^g_e^c) 19:51, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Twi

Hi Ævarab. Actually I do think that the article about Twi language needs to be at Twi language — see Wikipedia:WikiProject_Languages#Structure, where three reasons are given besides ambiguity to choose this variant. Consistency is the most important one for me; I always try to make language articles compliant with Wikiproject Languages. But if you insist, I won't push this, I don't think it's that crucial. Cheers, — mark ✎ 20:45, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)

ðþ...

Hello.

On March 19, you left a note on my talk page to the effect that my browser was changing "ð" and "þ" into <eth> and <thorn>. I looked at Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion/Google_test and couldn't find any instance of this activity. Furthermore, I can't even find any occurrence of "ð" or "þ" at all, anywhere on that page. I exclusively use Firefox, and I've never had a problem with scripts before.

Could you perhaps take another look at the google test page, just to be sure you weren't mistaken? If there's a problem with my browser settings, I can't seem to find it. Notice that my eths and thorns appear to be in full working order:

ðþðþðþðþðþðþðþðþð

Binadot 21:09, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)

• Huh. That's odd. I have absolutely no memory of making that edit, although I remember reediting my own comment. It doesn't seem like something I'd do (I ought to know how to insert special characters), but there it is. Sorry if I caused any problems with the link. I really don't recall doing it, though. Binadot 21:26, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)

• Aha! Never mind that--I just figured it out. I was editing on my old iBook that day. It's running some ancient version of IE. Thanks for bringing it to my attention. I won't ever use that computer to edit VfD pages again. Binadot 21:33, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Halo 17 DVD cover

Please see Talk:And All That Could Have Been. --Tripps 02:13, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Interwiki

Hi. Just picked you name on the Bot owner listing. I've ran NTBot (pywikipediabot) on the portuguese wikipedia, and found some warnings that you could feed to your bot, since it's managing interwikis. Is Jumbuck a pywikipediabot robot?. Are you interested in the the listing? Please reply on my pt: page. Nuno Tavares 11:10, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)

VFD template

Very nice touch :). Thue | talk 18:16, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Translation request

Dear Ævar, I am trying to do some fact checking for Swedish semi-legendary kings. Would you mind translating this piece of Old Norse for me?

Synir Bjarnar járnsíðu váru þeir Eiríkr ok Refill. Hann var herkonungr ok sækonungr, en Eiríkr konungr réð Svíaríki eptir föður sinn ok lifði litla hríð. Þá tók ríkit Eiríkr, sonr Refils; hann var mikill hermaðr ok allríkr konungr. Eiríks synir, Bjarnar sonar, váru þeir önundr uppsali ok Björn konungr. Þá kom Svíaríki enn í bræðra skipti; þeir tóku ríki eptir Eirík Refilsson. Björn konungr efldi þann bæ, er at Haugi heitir; hann var kallaðr Björn at Haugi. Með honum var Bragi skáld. Eiríkr hét sonr önundar konungs, er ríki tók eptir föður sinn at Uppsölum; hann var ríkr konungr. Á hans dögum hófst til ríkis í Noregi Haraldr hárfagri, er fyrstr kom einvaldi í Noreg sinna ættmanna. Björn hét sonr Eiríks konungs at Uppsölum; hann tók ríki eptir föður sinn ok réð lengi.

Hopefully, --Wiglaf 19:45, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Take this with a grain of salt, I'm no expert in Old Norse, the prose in these old texts is difficult to say the least:

• Bjarni jánrsíða was a millitant seafering king, he had two sons, Eiríkr and Refill.
• After Bjarni's death his son Eiríkr took the throne, he was shortlived.
• After his demise Eiríkr son of Refill took the throne (Refill was presumably dead), he was a gret soldier and (allríkr konungr) (no idea what this is, something-king)
• Eiríkr son of Refill had two sons, Önundur uppsali and Björn konungr, after his death Sweden would again be divided between brothers, Björn got the town of Haugi and was after that called "Björn at/of Haugi"
• "Með honum var Bragi skáld" = With him was Bragi the poet (wtf?)

• Önundur uppsali had one son, Eiríkr, who inherited his fathers throne and his kingdom at "Uppsalir" (this is some area in Sweden, can't recall the translation), he was a rich king, during his reign Haraldr the hairfair came into power in Norway, Haraldr was the first of his kin to reign as monarch in norway.
• Eiríkr of Uppsalir had one son, Björn, who inherited his fathers throne and reigned for a long time.

Thanks :). Bragi refers to Bragi Boddason and Uppsalir refers to Gamla Uppsala.

Are you sure about Eiríks synir, Bjarnar sonar, váru þeir önundr uppsali ok Björn konungr.? Could it be Erik Björnsson's sons were Önund Uppsali and Björn?--Wiglaf 18:03, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Yeah, you're right, it's "Erik Björnsson's sons were Önund Uppsali and Björn". —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 18:40, 2005 Apr 7 (UTC)

Thanks! :)--Wiglaf 20:22, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Harlequin fetus warning

Moved to Talk:Harlequin type ichthyosis#Harlequin fetus warning —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 14:47, 2005 Apr 7 (UTC)

MSIE on Mac OS 9

Hi, Ævar. I notice you left a note on my user page. I'm afraid I can't comply with your request, however, as my iBook is currently running OS X. Binadot 20:44, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Thats okey, I think I got it anyway, thanks anyway. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 20:48, 2005 Apr 15 (UTC)

Surtsey and Eldfell

Hi Ævar - you might remember that a while ago when Surtsey was on FAC, you mentioned a book you had which had some info about the name of the island and criticism of the coast guard. Just wondered if you had that book to hand to confirm some currently commented-out stuff I had written, based on your recollection of what was in there?

Also, was just wondering if you can answer a quick question about Eldfell - would 'The Wanderer' be Flakkarinn or Flakkarann in Icelandic? I've seen both around the web, and wanted to make sure I've got the right word in the article. Takk! Worldtraveller 21:00, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Flakkarinn, and regarding the book I was unable to find it the last time I looked for it. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 22:00, 2005 Apr 15 (UTC)

Cool, thanks for that. Worldtraveller 22:41, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Oi!

Do you like Nirvana?

5535 Annefrank

I removed your image of the 5535 Annefrank from the actual Anne Frank article - the article is about her, the "other Anne Franks" section is solely for redirect disambiguation links only. No images should be posted pertaining to the other kinds there. I thought it was experimentation, but I realised it wasn't, but you shouldn't post images of asteroids in the main Anne Frank article, even if it deals with the Anne Frank asteroid - the images should be solely in the article pertaining to the asteroid. This makes it more aesthetic and less cluttered. Thanks. -- Natalinasmpf 19:49, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Welcome

Welcome to wikipedia, now sod off!

Cylinder (geometry) graphic help

Many thanks; i dread diving into RTFM mode, especially since i have so little occasion to tinker with the graphics. But even if i can't quite reconstruct this syntax from memory, i expect i'll be able to track down your example again when the occasion arises. [smile]
Sod on, Ævar!
(Now you answer, "Sod on, Jerzy!", OK?)
--Jerzy (t) 17:37, 2005 May 5 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Wiki Syntax

What is this huge list you posted at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Wiki Syntax? The page is almost unloadable in its current form! Could this be placed in its own page somewhere perhaps? K1Bond007 23:20, May 15, 2005 (UTC)

Hope this is OK, but I've changed your list over to use 8 subpages, with sections. I've done this both on the Wiki Syntax Project talk page, and also on your project page as well. The reason for this is that a huge list is too hard to edit - basically you need to split big lists up into manageable chunks, otherwise it just doesn't work, and people get frustrated and give up. Divide and conquer is your friend! So for example the big list has been split into 8 subpages, and each of those subpages has been split into around 100 or so subsections. This allows people to pick a page, pick section, and work through those 5 problems, and then delete it from the list. Also, as a suggestion, you may want to somewhere suggest a tag line or something that people can use as an edit summary - e.g. "[[User:Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason/msg|Help us fix obsolete msg: links]]"; this helps to create a positive feedback loop, thus giving more exposure, as well as explaining why the edit was made. -- All the best, Nickj (t) 01:07, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

Yay, looks good. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 06:19, 2005 May 16 (UTC)

Your signature

Please do not use templates as signatures. See [[WP:[[User:Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason|Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason]] 23:00, 9 October 2005 (GMT)]]. r3m0t ^talk 09:47, May 16, 2005 (UTC) Begging your pardon but are your deletions part of some cleaning up project I do not know about ? - Skysmith 10:32, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

No. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 11:10, 2005 May 16 (UTC)

Why did you delete all those images? A lot of people are going to have to volunteer their spare time to repair your damage. silsor 17:06, May 17, 2005 (UTC)

They were a bunch of low quality stuff I uploaded a while ago. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 17:14, 2005 May 17 (UTC)

What about the missing image links in pages? Couldn't they go through IFD first? silsor 18:30, May 17, 2005 (UTC)

(note)

(See User:Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason/msg.) -- Beland 00:36, 23 May 2005 (UTC)

Your adminship

Hi Avar. Can you clarify to the community whether your mass-deletion of images and pages was an indication of an intention to leave the community? We've all been left rather confused, as I'm sure you understand. If you intend to stay and the page and image deletion was in good faith, then your temporary/emergency desysopping can be reversed and we can all get on with working on the 'pedia. - Mark 04:29, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

Not at all, I explained why I deleted them on the administrators noticeboard. Regarding the adminship, It doesn't really matter for me either way, so whatever you think is right, do it;) —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 20:16, 2005 Jun 11 (UTC)

Another Icelander!

Sæll Ævar.

Það er ekki oft sem maður hittir á annan Íslending á wikipedia.

Ef þig vantar krækju á nýorða safn þá mæli ég með http://herdubreid.rhi.hi.is:1026/wordbank/search

- Zarutian 20:45 24. júní 2005

Language update?

Hey Æva. Can you tell me whats going on with the language update for the Macedonian Wikipedia? In here you were the only one to reply, so I guess you're responsible for it? --Misos 1 July 2005 20:05 (UTC)

See my comment at the bug. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason July 4, 2005 21:52 (UTC)

Film related terms in Icelandic

Please, could you tell me the meaning of the following terms? I tried to find them through external sources, but as they seem to be a little bit technical I didn’t success. Once I have these terms translated into English I would be able to expand the article of Rokk í Reykjavík (the credits sections specifically).

• Aðrir kvikmyndatökumenn: Other cameramen
• Tónlistarupptaka: Music recording
• Hljóð: Audio
• Klipping: Editing
• Framkvæmdastjörn:: Management
• Hljóðblöndun: Audio mixing
• Hljóðvinnsla: Audio processing
• Filmuvinnsla: Film processing

That’s all. Thanks, Luis María Benítez 2 July 2005 13:17 (UTC)

Translated it. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason July 4, 2005 21:52 (UTC)

Help desk wikiproject

I have created a new Wikiproject which aims to bring computer veterans and people who need help with software tools they use on Wikipedia together. I'm writing this to you because I saw you on the bot list and wanted to know if you would be willing to help. There is already an open case: WikiProject help desk/20050702 Dmcdevit. The Windows tool that Dmcdevit uses to perform Transwikis has broken since the software upgrade. Triddle July 6, 2005 22:32 (UTC)

Banjo-Kazooie...

AEvar,

In your Banjo-Kazooie article, you state "Banjo-Kazooie has more unusual features than just the aforementioned items, however. One of the most prominent is the existence of two doors with knockers shaped like a goblin's head. When they were opened with a GameShark, they led out a few steps and then collapsed into a bottomless pit."

Where are these doors, and where did you get this information from? I cannot find anything on Rare Witch Project.

Thanks.

Adam.

I'm sorry but I have no idea what that is, I didn't add that line, have never owned a Gameshark, and have no recollection of this door. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason July 9, 2005 02:07 (UTC)

Edit summaries

Your bot is busy editing articles without leaving proper edit summaries. As an example, this edit to "Month" has only the edit summary of "robot". Could you fix this? --Carnildo 21:54, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

Sigur

Hello. Why A decent start rather than alright? I was led to believe alright was the 'official' translation as it is found on the SR website. -ZepAn

Historically the translations on that page have been wrong most of the time or extremely inaccurate, I just thought that was the case and decided to fix the translation for Ágætis byrjun from allright to a decent, which is b.t.w. how most native speakers also fluent in English would translate it (Ágætis byrjun doesn't sound casual, and neither does A decent start, An allright start however sounds casual and just .. wrong). —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 22:32, July 13, 2005 (UTC)

Image sizes

Hi, I was wondering about your deletion of the sizes of images on the grounds that users can choose their own thumbnail sizes in their preferences. Most readers won't know how to do this, and won't want to be bothered, so isn't it better to allow the editors on the pages to choose the sizes, either for aesthetic reasons, or for reasons of editorial judgment? SlimVirgin ^(talk) 16:13, July 24, 2005 (UTC)

Not in my opionion no, if you choose a size you're enforcing it on everyone else, this would be similar to using font tags rather than approved markup (CSS). —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 17:31, 24 July 2005 (UTC)

commons:Image:Map-of-human-migrations.jpg in bigger size

I would really love to, if we had a high resolution dymaxion map. I´ve put a request in the requested pictures but had no answer. Maybe you could help? --Alexandre Van de Sande 22:33, 24 July 2005 (UTC)

I don't know how to make a map like that. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 23:03, 24 July 2005 (UTC)

Image:Teller-Ulam device 3D.png

Please protect this image on Commons (I've already done it locally) as it will be on the main page as part of the new DYK on the next hour. Thanks.--Pharos 23:13, 24 July 2005 (UTC)

done. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 23:16, 24 July 2005 (UTC)

Cardinal number

Hi there. I still believe that the html version is preferable to inline PNG. This seems to be the consensus of the mathematicians around here. I posted a request for comment at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics#PNG vs HTML. Wonder if you could drop by and state your view on the issue. Thanks. Oleg Alexandrov 22:41, 26 July 2005 (UTC)

PNG vs HTML, again

I requested a poll at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject Mathematics#Inline PNG formulas - a poll requested. Please feel free to join in the discussion. However, if it turns out that there is some consensus about the issue, please follow it. If there is no consensus, please don't revert a page which was originally written either one way or the other. Thanks. Oleg Alexandrov 15:29, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

And please understand, it is not about whether I want to see HTML. It is about how users who use the default settings see the pages. The consensus is that PNG images show up way too big at some resolutions and such should not be inline. Oleg Alexandrov 15:36, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

renameuser extension

Hi,

I saw your m:renameuser extension is integrated in some deployments.

I suppose it's intended to rename users that have entered a too bad name, or may be also to transfer anonymous (IP based) contributions to a real user ?

It just renames users, transferring contributions is a bit harder to do properly since you'd ideally have to log everything you did.

Any chance to get the source? Anything that is related to the user model is interesting for me.

It's avalible on sourceforge

Are you specially dealing with the user model in mediawiki? I just put online a very small special page at m:Permissions. The next small step will be m:ReleaseArticleVersion but my real interest is too make m:Trust based on fuzzy relationships.

Do you know the current status of the m:Patrol (?) feature. I was not able to really make it running. May be I didn't understood. May be it's just because it is beta?

Not really, I don't keep up with it. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 19:42:20, 2005-08-03 (UTC)

Regards, --Marc.M 19:15, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

---

Thanks for the link and for the update on meta. I am a (very ?) old computer scientist but I am completely new to mediawiki so it helps me to read your code and, so, learn the mw architecture.

There is a small bug. I prefer you correct it yourself. Eveything is detailled below. It had no real consequences until now as only somme happy fews had access to your feature.

			
			$olduser = User::newFromName( $oldusername );
			$newuser = User::newFromName( $newusername );

		/****
		// It won't be an object if for instance "|" is supplied as a value
	if ( !is_object( $newuser ) || !is_object( $newuser ) ) //// < ======= HERE IS THE TYPO
		// !BUG due to a typo : one of both should read : $olduser
		// bug found by Marc when trying erroneously to rename
		// 127.0.0.1 into a nicer contributor name...
		{
				$wgOut->addWikiText( wfMsg( 'renameusererrorinvalid', $newusername ) );
				return;
		}
		****/
			// It won't be an object if for instance "|" is supplied as a value
			// !FIX : anyway we need a separate message for each
			if ( !is_object( $olduser )  ) {
				$wgOut->addWikiText( wfMsg( 'renameusererrorinvalid', $oldusername ) );
				return;
			}
// also move here the newuser instanciation
// (no need to process if olduser is already an error + report the newuser error ASAP)
// $newuser = User::newFromName( $newusername );
			if ( !is_object( $newuser ) ) {
				$wgOut->addWikiText( wfMsg( 'renameusererrorinvalid', $newusername ) );
				return;
			}

Regards --Marc.M 16:26, 4 August 2005 (UTC) (btw, the photo published on my user page was taken 11 years ago in your country, when boating on the Vatnajokull lake. nice country! nice people!)

Thanks for the bug report, I've corrected it in CVS (the source url I gave you won't updated immitiately though since public sourceforge CVS server lags behind a bit)

If you have any further questions about mediawiki, my extensions or anything, please feel free to ask. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 18:05:19, 2005-08-04 (UTC)

Hi! I'm a sysop in Greek Wikipedia and saw that you have integrated the renameuser extension. Please give permission to one (or both) of the two active sysops [Ank and Geraki (me)] to rename users without contacting you. Until you give this flag please rename user Cordis to Sklavos. Thanks. Then I realised it just needed a beaurocrat. Thanks anyway. --geraki 10:02, 24 August 2005 (UTC)

---

Hello,

I would like to Add your Extension (RenameUser) to my hebrew private wiki... I see the source, but I have a beginners question - Where should I copy it in to ? should I copy the lines into the LocalSettings.php? or should I create a new php file in the /includes, as I did with the Special:UserPermissions extension?

Thanks ahead!

Peleg

---

Hi - I'm trying to install your renameuser extension under 1.7.1 and have had no luck. It seems to require extensionfunctions.php, which isn't in my installation and doesn't turn up when googling. Can you advise what I'm doing wrong?

Cheers, Verloren

Skin

Hi

Just wanted to say I like your "Milky" skin, so I copied it over to my User space (but without the bit that moves the user menu). Thanks :) MyNameIsClare talk 12:53, 8 August 2005 (UTC)

Jumbuck edit summaries

Can you get your bot to add some description to the edit summary? Even as little as a generic "interwiki links" would be helpful. Rl 14:38, 9 August 2005 (UTC)

Help needed

Hi Avar, since you asked for some details regarding this bug, I presume that you can fix it too. Can you please take note of the latest details given by me and Ravi and take some time to fix it? Thanks. -- Sundar ^{\talk \contribs} 07:56, August 10, 2005 (UTC)

Vandal warning

Don't vandalize user pages. [6] <drini ☎> 06:51, 15 August 2005 (UTC)

That was actually the result of a chat in #wikipedia where I asked EvilMonkey if I could vandalize his user page, he said yes, so I did;) —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 08:04:09, 2005-08-15 (UTC)

So you're some kind of developer?

Hi :-) I have noticed that when I upload images that exist already, they first get uploaded, and then I get the question if I want to replace the image. Supposing I don't want to, that is a waste of band width? Regards, --Fred-Chess 21:50, August 18, 2005 (UTC)

Old Norse Wikipedia

While waiting for the creation of the Old Norse Wikipedia, I would like as much people as possible to come on this page to dicuss the "neologisms" we should use on it. Please take a look. Yours sincerly. 82.235.122.163 09:34, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

Bot

Is your bot very much dead or very much alive? Just checking. --AllyUnion (talk) 07:36, 6 September 2005 (UTC)

I haven't run it in a while, and when I do it's usually on the Icelandic Wikipedia. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 19:33:21, 2005-09-07 (UTC)

"(We don't need EVERY detail about his family tree, okay?)"

Hello Ævar: I am almost in an editing war regarding an article [that I did not write] about Einar H. Kvaran. The last edit came with the comment "(We don't need EVERY detail about his family tree, okay?)" I figured that if every Icelander on wikipedia suggested that in fact we do need every detail - or at least a lot of them - then perhaps this person would back off a bit. If you go to the article and look at the history you will pick up the thread. Carptrash 17:28, 6 September 2005 (UTC) PS I just added myself to the Icelandic wikipedians list as being associated with Iceland, as oppoesed to living there. You might want to consider it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedians_in_Iceland

Plural form support for Belarusian language

Could you please add plural form support for Belarusian language (LanguageBe.php)? Code below is copied from LanguageRu.php (plural forms are same for Russian and Belarusian).

 function convertPlural( $count, $wordform1, $wordform2, $wordform3) {
 	if ($count > 10 && floor(($count % 100) / 10) == 1) {
 		return $wordform3;
 	}
 	else {
        		switch ($count % 10) {
                		case 1: return $wordform1;
        	       		case 2: return $wordform2;
        	       		case 3: return $wordform2;
        	       		case 4: return $wordform2;
        	       		default: return $wordform3;
 		}
 	}
 }

Please notify me when plural form will be avalable for using.

BTW: What is the best way to transfer translated messages from Belarusian Wikipedia to LanguageBe.php? Manually or some automated tools exists? Some not translated English messages are different so straightforward copy'n'paste are not very good idea.

Thank you,

EugeneZelenko 14:43, 9 September 2005 (UTC)

Thank you for license selector!

Thank you so much for the new licensing selector on the Upload page -- it's going to make life so much simpler! We've got a couple of questions over on MediaWiki talk:Licenses, one about an entry that's not displaying correctly and a few about where else this might be useful. Could you have a look, when you have a moment? Thanks! — Catherine\^talk 03:52, 13 September 2005 (UTC)

Changing username

Hi - just wondering why you changed the maximum number of edits for changing usernames to 6,800 - is there a reason for this figure? Warofdreams 11:00, 13 September 2005 (UTC)

That's the current figure, don't know who changed it, you can see it in the source of Special:Renameuser just before the <form> element if you have access to that page. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 17:30, 13 September 2005 (UTC)

CSS extension

If you do feel able to enable this again, can I suggest the following enhancement. To support a uniform look for wikiprojects, can we have syntax that looks like

      <css stylesheet="Wikipedia:WikiProject Tree of Life/infobox_style.css" />
or
      <css [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Tree of Life/infobox_style.css]] />

With regard to XSS, as a stop-gap the extension could only work on protected pages. That would at least get it to work for the main page. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 19:50, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:NUMBEROFFILES

What is Wikipedia:NUMBEROFFILES? I presume it is not updated. Should it be deleted? -- Beland 03:33, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

I was using it for a script to count the # of articles on this and another project, I'm not using it anymore however, so go ahead and delete it. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 14:29, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

New user logging

Thank you so much for this one! It's been fantastic for spotting sockpuppetry in action when using Special:CheckUser - David Gerard 14:21, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the comment;) —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 14:29, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

Ð & Þ

I'm all out of reverts. The current version of the MOS forbids Ð and Þ and dictates that both should be replaced with "th". Perhaps you are interested.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style&action=history

See also my comment on that talk page.

- Haukur Þorgeirsson 10:13, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#New pages by article space

See my comment about having a Namespace selection box interface. -- Curps 17:24, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

Your robot made a mistake

Hi, your robot removed the hr: interwiki from Category:Hungary, although the referred category does exist. It may have happened because your robot was given an unusual error sign when it was searching for the corresponding page, and it interpreted the sign as if the requested page didn't exist. This problem also emerged with YurikBot around September 25, see its discussion page. I think that to avoid this error, you'd best remove this feature from your robot which can remove interwikis.

Adam78 17:42, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

Your RFA

Hi Ævar. Just a heads-up, in case you miss it - I've left another question on your RFA, about self-sysoping. (Also, you might want to recheck your answer to FLcelloguy's, as I think you missed the first part of the question). Thanks. Shimgray | talk | 13:06, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

deleted talk page history

I have taken the liberty of restoring your talk page history in accordance with the fact that general wikiquette strongly frowns upon deletion of your talk page as well as the fact that all edits are of old discussions so they should be kept for historical reason. I know there is no policy reason behind this however I am using my judgement also if you disagree let me know either on my talk page, by email or on IRC. Jtkiefer ^{T | @ | C} ----- 22:28, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

Thanks, I just restored everything that's ever been said on my talk page. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 23:03, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

Exif tags

I just saw your note on the RfAr, and I'd like to assure you that not everybody hates the Exif tag display. I find it quite useful for figuring out if an uploader's claims of the copyright status of an image are correct or not. --Carnildo 05:15, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

Unicode

I don't get it, why did you remove the Unicode on Srinivasa Ramanujan? Isn't it Wikipedia standard to convert things *to* Unicode? Ávila 13:58, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

I didn't actually remove anything, I merely rewrote it, previously we didn't have UTF-8 support (only ISO-8859-1) and had to write nasty things like &#3000;&#3021;&#2992;&#3008;&#2985;&#3007;&#2997;&#3006;&#3000; &#2960;&#2991;&#2969;&#3021;&#2965;&#3006;&#2992;&#3021; &#2992;&#3006;&#2990;&#3006;&#2985;&#3009;&#2972;&#2985;&#3021; instead of simply ஸ்ரீனிவாஸ ஐயங்கார் ராமானுஜன. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 16:31, 14 October 2005 (UTC)்

Ok, then I don't get it. Why are people converting to the &#3000; form? Isn't that form more flexible for different browsers and fonts than having the text pasted directly in without the codes and in some font people may not have? - Ávila 20:32, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

Because:

1. It's actually readable as opposed to a stream of xml escape codes
2. It makes no difference for accessability

—Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 20:41, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

Template:Computer and Video Games

I was looking for a box template to use for a computer game (Lords of Chaos (video game)) and found Template:Computer and Video Games which you worked on around July 2004. Do you know if this is the current standard for boxing stats on computer games? It doesn't seem to have been used before I added it. Is there a more standard one? What do I do if I don't have an image (is there a blank image I can use)?

Should it be renamed something like template:cvgbox instead? Bear with me, please, I haven't done much with templates but use them before this. RJFJR 03:28, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

I found the standard template, it's Template:Infobox VG (I think). Do you think your similar but unused template should be removed or at least marked example or something? RJFJR 03:34, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

I was just about to point out Template:Infobox VG !, By all means mark it as obsolete. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 03:36, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

Done. Thank you. RJFJR 04:57, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

logging redirects (similar to logging page moves)?

See Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Redirect and un-redirect log. Redirecting a page is fundamentally a different concept than editing it, it's much more like a page move, except the "page move" target already exists.

By the way, it's a shame about your RfAdmin... doesn't make sense to me. -- Curps 04:17, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

Would it by any chance be possible to implement a redirect log outside of the Special:Log hieararchy, similar to Special:Newpages (which lists new pages created both by logged-in and anonymous-IP users) ? -- Curps 02:46, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

Increasingly, Willy vandals are using page-redirect vandalism instead of pagemove vandalism, creating a clone of the new page and redirecting the existing one to it. The clone can sometimes be detected at the newpages log, but a redirect log would still be very desirable. I guess one of these days I'll have to take a look at the Mediawiki source. -- Curps 18:34, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

iPod article.

Why did you revert from the new(legal) video iPod image to an older one? You mentioned using one that is free instead, implying that the image I used wasn't. It's Apple's press image and it was marked correctly.

The images in question are Image:IPod 4G.jpg and Image:05ipod fam.jpg, the former is an image we can use for any purpose and the latter is a fair use press image from Apple, given a choice of the two the former is preferrable. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 16:46, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

Quick favour for WP:PNT

Would you be able take a look at Torfbær (ten-word article in Icelandic) and Verslostelpa (two-line article in Icelandic), and let us know if they are nonsense or not? You can leave your comments at WP:PNT#Torfbær and WP:PNT#Verslostelpa, or simply translate it if you think it is worth the while. Thanks! Physchim62 13:01, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

Done. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 17:01, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

Blocked user accounts

Hi Ævar, is there a way to delete user accounts that have been created only to leave insulting messages? see [7]. --Duk 21:00, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

Yes, however that's unwise for a number of reasons. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 00:42, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

Appeal

Hello. Can your bot help with one issue? The issue is double-interwikis in "births" and "deaths" categories (for example look at Category:1983 deaths and Category:1847 births). Some of the interwikis are already in the "birthyr" and "deathyr" templates. - Darwinek 10:54, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

I have fixed it. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 11:46, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

Easy-to-type redirect?

I went looking for your user page, but had trouble remembering the diacritics and typing the eth (I even have trouble typing English :P). Have you considered registering, say, avar or somesuch and redirecting the user and user talk pages? alerante ✆ 00:58, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

BTW, I just noticed User:Ævar. Which works for me with my Mac keyboard (Æ is Option-Shift-'), but some less-entitled ;) users may have problems. æle ✆ 01:39, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

I just listed that for deletion, I don't own that account (or Avar) so I don't think it's right that either redirect to my user page. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 09:58, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

request status

Hi.. I just dont know where to ask these questions, I then found your name on developer list, so could you provide me with some information and last status regarding our request for id.wikisource.org language subdomain creation please ? Is these request being processed ? postponed ? or have been denied ? Is there any other requirements ? Thanks Borgx(^talk) 14:45, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

Eh, I have no idea. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 14:53, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

Commons links

Moved to Talk:John Day Dam —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 09:30, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

That note applied to ALL articles that you add the Commons tag to, like Fish ladder, not just John Day. WikiDon 09:43, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

Can you? You moved it back up, which pushes the text down. WikiDon 09:50, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

Do you feel that it is beneath you to communicate with me? Is there a reason you can’t or won’t answer my question (s)? WikiDon 10:01, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

Isn't there a way to eliminate the WHITE SPACE created when you add the Commons box??

Thank you for your repeated and extremely loud question, me not answering you for 11 minuites was not an act of disrespect on my part, I was merely doing something else. Now, back you your question I don't see the whitespace at that particular point (this is how it looks in my browser). What brower are you using? —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 10:21, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

Archive

Please archive, your talk page is to fat. WikiDon 09:20, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

I like it this way. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 09:23, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

"External links" vs "External link"

Some editors use the header "External link" if there is only one link, but others use "External links" in all cases. There is currently no consensus on which is better. Editors who always use the plural form may prefer it for any of the following reasons:

1. experience shows that future editors often add links without changing the section heading
2. people may be dissuaded from adding links to a section titled "External link" since it seems that there should only be one link
3. using "External links" gives greater stylistic consistency to Wikipedia

The converse arguments are:

1. Wikipedia's community-editing leads to prompt correction of such oversights.
2. There is no evidence that a significant number of people would be dissuaded from adding links. Besides, additional links would often be redundant.
3. Use of "External links" to is fundamentally incorrect, a poor precedent to set in an encyclopedia

FROM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:External_links#.22External_links.22_vs_.22External_link.22

Thanks, but I had already read that. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 10:00, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

The beauty of "LINKS" is that it works for one or 1000, it works all the time. With "LINK" it is wrong as soon as you add the second link, and 98% of all contributors forget to change the header after adding a new link. WikiDon 10:04, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

Actually links' isn't correct English when you have one, since plurals in English are only used when you have >1 of something, so External links should be used only when there are more than one and External link should be used when there's one. I really don't buy the argument that we should use plurals for singulars in this specific case, just like we don't use plurals in other cases when singulars should apply "only because someone might add something later". B.t.w., is the 98% statistic real or did you make it up? —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 10:27, 4 November 2005 (UTC)

I've left some comments apropos to this discussion at Wikipedia_talk:External_links#"External_link"_versus_"External_links" --RoySmith 14:19, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for bringing this to my attention. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 14:31, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

Slovene Wikipedia

As you're one of the developers I'm turning to you with request to translate some on MediaWiki software, used on :sl. As of now we're still using english command for categories, but we wish to use slovene version (Kategorija instead of Category); some of associated commands were already translated, but this wasn't. Another translation is of Template to Predloga. Could you please inform me here when it's done or you have any other questions? Regards, --Klemen Kocjancic 17:36, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

Please be nice

[8]. Radiant_>|< 16:20, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

I liked my version better. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 16:40, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

Norse mythology naming convention up for a vote

A new naming convention for Norse mythology articles is now up for a vote. Several voters are objecting on the grounds that they don't want non-English characters in article titles. Your opinion would be valued. I'm contacting you because you've commented on related votes in the past. - Haukur Þorgeirsson 12:25, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

Question on "Milky" skin

Hey there, I've been using your Milky skin on my MediaWiki page and it's been great so far. I just have two questions though, both regarding moving the personal toolbox from the upper right to the left sidebar. One, how do I get the personal toolbox to display below the navigation toolbox, and two, my Safari users are complaining that the toolboxes are being displayed in the left sidebar but below the bottom of all of the text in the main article. Any ideas? Thanks! --Cyde 19:05, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

You'd probably have to move it with javascript since that would require rearrangeing the output html, I've had that safari issue as well, didn't bother to fix it since I don't use that browser, cheers. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 19:12, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

You can see the Safari error I'm talking about here. Do you have any idea what might be causing this? I know it has something to do with moving the personal toolbox because when I leave the personal tools where they were it works in Safari. --Cyde 10:11, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

Probably some margin or padding issue. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 10:29, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

Teach me ICelandic

Can you teach me ICelandic? I know a little broken ICelandic, but I just can't find the write things to help me understand it more. 24.128.149.7 21:16, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

Eh, It's a pretty large task to teach someone a whole new language, I don't know if I'm up for it, will this be paid for tutoring? —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 21:28, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

No... 24.128.149.7 21:20, 25 November 2005 (UTC)

Category:Information science

I don't agree with the removal of :Category:Science and :Category:Academic disciplines from :Category:Information science. According to you argument we should also remove physics from these categories, because it is a subcategory of mathematics. —R. Koot 14:17, 25 November 2005 (UTC)

Information science is an academic discipline in it's own right. It is also listed under:Category:Computer science because of the historical overlap. —R. Koot 14:19, 25 November 2005 (UTC)

Some questions

I don't now where to ask them but I know you're a developper, so you should know ... Firstly, how is it possible to give someone the sysop status on a wikipedia who hasn't yet any ? Secondly, how far is it with our request for an old norse Wikipedia ? Thirdly, why is there a gothic wikipedia and wikibooks but no wiktionary ? Please answer me on my french page -- Sajasaze 18:26, 25 November 2005 (UTC)

You have to ask the stewards on meta for sysop status when there's no bureaucrat on your wiki, I don't know how the non requast is going, there's a request page on meta for it. There's no gothic wiktionary because they're not created automatically along with the wikipedia but on request, and you'll have to ask for that on meta somewhere too. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 18:32, 25 November 2005 (UTC)

Thanks a lot. Could you give me a link to these pages please, because I don't know them. -- Sajasaze 11:41, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

I didn't give them to you because I don't remember them offhand, just use a search engine to find them. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 17:59, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

OK. Thx ! -- Sajasaze 09:49, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Citation variables

I noticed on the Village Pump that you had created a new FULLPAGENAME variable. I wonder if you would consider giving attention to another problem that requires some new variables: the automatic citation.

We have {{REVISIONID}} and {{CURRENTMONTH}} etc., but we are currently unable to generate page citations automatically according to the various styles at Wikipedia:Citing Wikipedia, because several of the citation styles call for both the date of publication (or its latest update) and the date on which the information was retrieved.

We would need additional variables that give the info for the dates of the last revision: {{REVISIONMONTH}}, {{REVISIONMONTHNAME}}, {{REVISIONMONTHNAMEGEN}}, {{REVISIONDAY}}, {{REVISIONDAYNAME}}, {{REVISIONYEAR}}, and {{REVISIONTIME}}.

If these variables were available, we could create a MediaWiki:Citation or Special:Citations page that could be included on or linked from every article page, automatically creating a citation for the current version which is easily copied to suit the reader's needs.

If this is something you are interested in, please see the discussion at Bug 800, especially comments #7 amd #8. There's a lot of "what-if" ideas there that muddy the issue a bit, but I think that once the variables exist, the rest can be hammered out by consensus.

I know you work hard on many different areas, and I don't know how difficult this request is to fulfill, so of course it's up to you whether it's worth doing. I appreciate your consideration, regardless! Thank you — Catherine\^talk 00:29, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

I wrote a tool to do this, it's now deployed on enwiki, see WP:VPT#Cite this article —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 03:14, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

I can't tell you how grateful I am that you solved this problem! It has been a nagging issue for a long time, and I think everyone who deals with new users in any way has to deal with "how do I cite this?" sooner or later. I'm very excited to have such a simple, elegant solution. Thank you, thank you, thank you! And thank you for the promptness of your response as well. I appreciate everything you do! — Catherine\^talk 05:43, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

No problem, glad to be of help. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 05:49, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Small problem with the Cite page -- it's no longer displaying MediaWiki:Sitesubtitle properly. It's the only Mediawiki tag on that page (the rest are {{VARIABLES}}, but it has been working correctly since this went live -- afraid I can't tell when it stopped working. Can you tell what we need to do to fix it? — Catherine\^talk 00:19, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

You mean From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.? Works fine for me, what exactly isn't as it was before? —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 00:49, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

That's from MediaWiki:Tagline; however, MediaWiki:Cite text uses MediaWiki:Sitesubtitle, which should just display "The Free Encyclopedia."

On my screen it says "Publisher: Wikipedia, ." -- with no text, just a space between the comma and the period. (I use Firefox 1.0; displays the same on IE 6.0.) I was alerted to it by a comment at Wikipedia talk:Citing Wikipedia#New Special:Cite page!, so I'm not the only one. Thanks for looking at this, — Catherine\^talk 05:56, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

When I view the source of MediaWiki:Cite text I see:

* Publisher: ''{{SITENAME}}, {{MediaWiki:Sitesubtitle}}''.

And when I view the Special:Cite page I see [9]:

Publisher: Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.

Do you see:

Publisher: Wikipedia,

In that case? —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 14:58, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

That's what I was seeing, yes. I finally tracked down an edit to Sitesubtitle; for some reason the MediaWiki default bot removed the text "The Free Encyclopedia". I restored it on the 24th, and things seem to be fixed now. So on the one hand, I'm sorry to bother you with something I ended up solving myself -- on the other hand, it might be worth knowing if this was a glitch, or if the blanking was an intentional act with an unexpected side effect. Thanks again! — Catherine\^talk 23:08, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

That message got blanked in the MediaWiki software because it doesn't make sense to have "The Free Encyclopedia" there on a stock install, most installations have nothing to do with Wikipedia, and since MediaWiki:Sitesubtitle had no local modifications it got updated (blanked) appropriately by message updateing maintenance scripts. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 23:22, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

Reference Desk/Help Desk

I'm not sure you are the person to talk to, but I'm not sure what my options are: On pages such as the reference desk, it would be useful to enable a function that seems to be inexplicably disabled. Check [10] and [11]. As you can see from the code, the links try to produce an edit window, with the Wikipedia:Reference desk/How to ask page as an explanatory text at the top. The first link refers to an existing page, however, and will not display the explanatory text, while the second link refers to a non-existant page. The second link will display the explanatory text. Pages such as the Reference desk use a link to allow readers to ask questions. It would be useful to remind these people of the rules, for example. Is there anything you can do? -- Ec5618 17:50, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

Again, I'd like to suggest someone toggle something so that every edit window can or will contain a header explaining procedure (editintro). Currently, when one tries to edit a nonexistant page it will display text explaining that Wikipedia does not yet have a page called x. Editing an existing page does not display any text, which is a shame: displaying such text would be fantastic on pages such as the Reference Desk and Help Desk.

Its very counter intuitive that links such as [12], which cleary contain editintro= don't display the specified editintro.

If you can't/don't want to fix this, could you point me in the right direction? -- Ec5618 15:33, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

File a bug if there isn't one already, I might take a look later. –Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 15:42, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

Collation algorithms

I looked for discussion on this but couldn't find anything useful so I thought you might know. At Talk:Níðhöggr people are arguing (among other things) about the sorting order in categories. As far as I can see, even on the Icelandic wikipedia, non-ascii characters are always put last in the sorting. I know there is the Unicode collation algorithm and is seems to me that it would be very useful to use that and not go around 1000's of articles and change the sorting manually, that would probably only make the problem worse if and when the algorithm will be used. Is the use of it being planned or is there perhaps a techincal reason not to? If you know there has been discussion of this you don't have to answer again, I can try and look harder for it. Thanks, Stefán Ingi 16:28, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

See bug 164. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 02:49, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

Darth Vader

As you have contributed to the discussion previously, I invite you to comment on my proposal as to the fate of Darth Vader. You are welcome to make a counterproposal as well. — Phil Welch 21:38, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Semi-protection policy

Hi, Aevar. I saw that you're asking for things to do to kill time [13] - so, could you look at what is being proposed at Wikipedia:Semi-protection policy and say if it is technically feasible (and if it is, code it so we can give it a test run)? Titoxd^{(?!? - did you read this?)} 07:58, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

Done. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 08:19, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

Hello again. Now most of the "opposition" (which really is support with a quesion) is based on a technical issue: whether the χ% approach used for page moves is better from the developers' perspective (technically feasible, less expensive, easier to code, etc.) than measuring the user's account age. Could you comment at the talk page again there to clear the confusion? Titoxd^{(?!? - did you read this?)} 01:08, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

Pure Wiki deletion system?

Maybe I'm asking for too much, but perhaps you want to try to tackle the pure wiki deletion system (MediaZilla:3843). It's probably not going to become allowed on en: anytime soon, judging from the discussion and the entrenched-ness of AfD, but I think it could be very useful on sparser wikis like Meta where the RfD process seems just silly.

I think the way this could work is that it's implemented and made toggleable in the site preferences, and then a site can have a policy discussion for whether to turn it on.

Oh, but implement semi-protection first. That's more important.

rspeer 08:14, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

Native language interwiki tool-tips

Hi

So you want some ideas for new development tasks.... open the flood gates...

Here is a little suggestion I made a couple of months ago which might appeal to you. Basically I have trouble reading the more obscure interwiki labels. So I think it would be helpful to have popup labels on the left panel interwiki links to show the destination language in the language of the current wiki.

That is to say on the English Wiki if a page has a ja interwiki link it currently shows up as 日本語, but a popup tool-tip saying 'Japanese' would be helpful, whilst on the French wiki the popup would read 'Japonaise', etc. -- Solipsist 10:09, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

Bugs to do

Could you take a look at bugzilla:4076/bugzilla:450 (different aspects of the same problem). As a non-developer it feels to me like it shouldn't be too complicated, but 450 in particular has been sitting around a long while. Thryduulf 13:15, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

MediaWiki suggestiions

Hi. What would be really useful would be a downloadable Wikieditor (Wikipad ?) which incorporated software so that changes could be seen on the editor's browser, without the need to go back to the server each time an alteration was made. Tbis means that work could be composed offline. I use NoteTab Pro which I have customised to incorporate the Wiki markup codes we use. But I still have to go online and paste it onto a Wikipage to see what it looks like. As I am dialup this can be a pain if the servers are slow.

Much of my time is spent on Wikisource, where we have special editing needs. For example we use javascripts to show the pages we work on in prose format (12 words to line) so it can be read like a book, or verse format. This makes edting far less tiring, as the line length on the monitor can be 20-30 words. To do this editors need to run scripts on their machines. Also we have a much greater need for special characters than the reguklar WP editors.

If you are willing to do this as your next project I can start a discussion of Scriptorium (the WS village pump) to get a better idea of what might be required. Kind regards Apwoolrich 13:19, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

Take a look at User:Sverdrup/Wikipreview.html (you can download it using this link) which provides an off-line version of User:Pilaf/Live Preview. HTH HAND —Phil | Talk 14:49, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

MediaWiki Footnotes support

You asked for Development suggestions. I've been working on Wikipedia:Footnotes as a way to improve the Wikipedia:Verifiability of articles. There are a couple of relatively simple changes which would help referencing and citation.

• Add an alternate-numbering-variable. External links are automatically numbered, and this characteristic is used by {{ref}} to create automatically numbered footnotes. But if an external link is added to a footnoted article it messes up the following numbers. One way to work around this problem would be to have a Help:Variable which can be put in the code for templates such as {{ref}} which will cause a secondary counter to be used instead of the external-links-numbering counter.
  • I made an extension for a variable ({{AUTOINCREMENT}}) that starts at 1 and increments every time it's called, I'm going to make some final tests on it when I have time and deploy it. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 22:29, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
    • I also came here to suggest an auto-footnote feature. Perhaps you could make it even simpler to deploy than SEW suggests, and build it in the same way as your PageCSS function (which I really liked; I was disappointed that there were XSS issues). So having <reference>Reference text, perhaps with fields to allow for preferences</reference> would place a footnote in the footnotes section. [[Sam Korn]] 17:25, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
    • {{AUTOINCREMENT}} would be used simply to emit a number, with {{ref}} then using a Wiki link rather than an external link? So when within an old revision of an article, "oldid=" would be automatically included so all links would work within that same article version? I tried adding "oldid={{REVISIONID}}" to {{ref}} but someone encountered odd linking with that version of the current external-link incantation. (SEWilco 21:11, 12 December 2005 (UTC))
• Bugzilla feature 2745: Allow the Edit page to have at least two edit windows, with the second one being used to edit a section called "References" (if that section exists in the article). This will make it easier for editors to update citations while updating a section. The name of the section "References" should be configurable both for site consensus reasons and language localization.

(SEWilco 16:01, 3 December 2005 (UTC))

AUTOINCREMENT status?

Moved out of its own section to prevent duplication. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 05:26, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

How's AUTOINCREMENT proceeding? (SEWilco 04:56, 14 December 2005 (UTC))

Finished since 2005-12-03, I'm not sure I like it though, it's such a hack..—Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 05:30, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

It's a small and useful hack. At least it will fix two big problems: the internal and footnote number conflicts, and the old-revision-with-links-to-current-revision problem. If AUTOINCREMENT does not become available I'll go back to trying to make REVISIONID work, and I have no idea what "qif" tangle may be needed to make that work right :-). (SEWilco 04:08, 17 December 2005 (UTC))

You can check out how it works at my testwiki —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 06:38, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

OK, sequencing works. See what I did to your Template:ref. Links now work in Preview and in old revisions of the page. Nice. (SEWilco 07:48, 17 December 2005 (UTC))

Numbering within one little image test is in same sequence as in the source. That's good. Better than "[1]" in the image caption here[14]. (SEWilco 09:05, 17 December 2005 (UTC))

What else needs to be done to get AUTOINCREMENT implemented? (SEWilco 14:38, 19 December 2005 (UTC))

Nothing.. ;) —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 14:43, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

What else needs to be done to get AUTOINCREMENT implemented? to go live? (SEWilco 22:45, 19 December 2005 (UTC))

Nothing, it's ready, I just don't like it because it's an evil hack (even though I wrote it), I'm working on something better though. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 10:31, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

At least AUTOINCREMENT quickly fixes several problems, and makes the existing site work better. <ref>{{news reference |firstname=Bill |lastname=Thompson |title=What is it with Wikipedia? |date=December 16, 2005 |org=BBC |url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4534712.stm }}</ref> (SEWilco 04:41, 21 December 2005 (UTC))

• My ability to convert "ref/note" to "cite" has been restricted by the ArbComm. Can AUTOINCREMENT be installed so the 3,000 articles using ref/note will function better? (SEWilco 02:02, 27 December 2005 (UTC))
  • The arbcomm restricted your ability to carry out braindead maintenance tasks? Anyway, I've found out that Autoinc. would break some other stuff so... —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 17:20, 27 December 2005 (UTC)
    • Yup. [15] It depends upon what people's definition of "convert" and "citation" is. Some people think a URL is a citation. Some people think what is usually in the "References" section is a citation. This conversation about "cite" might be a violation because it might cause "conversion" of something. (SEWilco 02:52, 28 December 2005 (UTC))
    • AUTOINCREMENT would break other stuff? Parser.php is a Wiki-to-HTML translator; does it interact with something else, is there a cache invalidation, or is something being emitted which confuses CSS? (SEWilco 04:01, 29 December 2005 (UTC))
• Has template usage within "cite" been enabled, so WP:CITET can be used? (SEWilco 02:02, 27 December 2005 (UTC))
  • Yeah (just try it), see this. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 17:20, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

I was thinking of doing something like:

Apollo 11's moon landing was a hoax <reference>[[Encyclopedia Putannica]], page 11..</reference><reference>[[The T1mes]], November 2008 issue</reference>

which would insert the citations into a buffer and then flush them out with:

== Citations ==

<citations/>

at the bottom of the page, the formatting would them be controlled in Mediawiki:Citation, perhaps something like the current:

* <cite id="endnote_{{{1}}}">[[#ref_{{{1}}}|'''^''']]</cite></nowiki>

—Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 05:39, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

Interesting. Automatically merge duplicates so Jew or Alchemy would be similar to their current versions? (SEWilco 08:04, 14 December 2005 (UTC))

I guess having:

Statement<reference id="unique id">some journal</reference> ... another statement <reference id="unique id"/>

Would be the simplest way to handle that. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 08:21, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

Setting aside for the moment this reinvention of m:Wikicite: Improvement of the present tools can be done fairly simply. Look at how {{ref}} and {{ref_label}} are used in Jew for multiple numbered references to the same citation. This usage of ref_label requires knowing the correct reference number (the number automatically assigned to the ref with the same ref value) and the count of repetitions of this ref value (currently a counter whose first values are None,a,b,c). Now remember that PHP arrays are associative. {{REF|USAToday20051031}} could remember an autoincremented value when first invoked (the note number which is displayed such as "[1]", perhaps stored with something such as $ref['USAToday20051031'] = $refincrement++; ), but also a second array can remember an autoincremented value for the key itself for use in identification of each REF value ( $ref_group['USAToday20051031']++; ) REF incantations can use those values to produce wiki syntax similar to produced by ref_label. Then {{NOTE|USAToday20051031}} can produce wiki syntax similar to {{note_label}} but can emit the sequence which counts through the $ref_group['USAToday20051031'] values. A conversion tool would only have to ensure that ref_label and note_label parameters are using the a-z sequence as repetition identifiers (because there are other uses for ref_label and note_label). Obviously REF and NOTE would be PHP tools, not Mediawiki Templates. (SEWilco 05:30, 15 December 2005 (UTC))

Notice that ref_harvard is actually a copy of ref_label. If REF emits something used for a footnote link, whether an HTML Anchor or a wikilink, the preceding paragraph would only cause it to emit numbered links. If there is an optional text label which replaces an autoincremented number (that implies $refincrement++ would not happen), then Harvard notation would also be supported. (ie, {{REF|USAToday20051031|USA Today, 2005}} ). Note that ref_harvard and ref add a wrapper of "()" instead of "[]" and the former is full text size while the latter uses a superscript notation. Such formatting could be done by very simplified templates ref, note, and ref_harvard which would properly wrap REF and NOTE incantations (whether REF uses {{REF}}, <ref>, or ^ref syntax, depending upon implementation). See Alchemy for examples of Harvard style usage. (SEWilco 06:03, 15 December 2005 (UTC))

I take it by finished though you don't mean we can use it yet? =) If not, a brief explanation (or an example) of how it works would be welcome. —Locke Cole 07:20, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

You can, just not on Wikimedia sites, it's Autoincrement.php in the extensions module in CVS HEAD. For an explanation of how it works, see above. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 08:21, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

See also Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#New Cite extension .—Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 01:34, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

Technical ideas

Thanks very much for your assistance with Special:Cite, and thanks for your invitation for more challenges -- I hope you are not overwhelmed with questions!

A few little things that might (or might not) be simple:

• MediaZilla:2971 - tidy display of (diff) & (hist) on RC/Contributions/Watchlist
• MediaZilla:4150 - mark the creation of new articles in Special:Contributions
• MediaZilla:1534 - provide language-specific article-count variables
• MediaZilla:1723 - show article size in history/recent changes
• MediaZilla:477 - provide a way to turn off accesskeys.
  • There's a JavaScript solution for copying into a users ".js" at Wikipedia:Keyboard shortcuts -- could that somehow be turned into a checkbox in Special:Preferences?
• Apply solution from closed bug MediaZilla:2318 (not yet live?) to MediaZilla:759, MediaZilla:2814 and MediaZilla:2872, if applicable?

Also, at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (disambiguation pages)#Abbreviations, we've been discussing whether to provide sub-categories for Category:Disambiguation. Are there any performance reasons that this very large category should be divided? Most feel that sub-division is unhelpful, since this is not a reader-oriented category, but it would affect our decision if there are any technical complications to leaving everything in a single massive category. Your opinion would be valuable. Thank you very much! — Catherine\^talk 16:52, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

Since paging was introduced for categories having many items in them is not taxing on the servers, so no. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 18:50, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

Request for rollback privileges

Could you take a look at wikipedia:requests for rollback privileges and bugs 3317 and 3801? Cheers, Talrias (t | e | c) 16:52, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

So you're bored?

How about resolving the blocking conflicts issue? When two people try to block the same person, all blocks are released when the shortest block expires.

I think that ideal behavior would probably be that if someone attempts to place a block on an already blocked account, then they get sent to a confirmation page that shows the previous block and are asked if they want their new block to replace the old.

Relevant/Related bug reports: 2492, 1496, 3206

Oh, and there is always 1150, which is annoying, but perhaps hard to fix.

Dragons flight 22:06, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

Development ideas

The ability to sort my contributions by "new pages" as well as by namespace would be really good! thanks Martin 22:16, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

This one's a bit of a hurdle since newness isn't tracked by the revision table which is what Special:Contributions uses. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 01:23, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

Devel suggestion

Hi, I noticed your request for things to keep you busy... how about bug 4133? Thanks for your time. Another thing you might consider doing if you're really bored is to write a guide to the wikimedia code so that people like me (who don't actually know any php but could learn it) can poke at the code too. Lupin|talk|popups 22:27, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

Bug 2867

Hi Ævar.
Perhaps you could have a look at 2867, a way to get the order of the interwikis sorted according to the languageskills of the reader/user, so I can get the languages that I can read on the top of the interwikilist, and ditto for everyone else.

Helsing
Jorunn 01:54, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

Save button problem in preferences

This isn't a big problem, but it's an inconvenience. My screen reader believes that the save button in the preferences is labelled "[alt-s]" rather than "save" or "submit". Could this be fixed?

Done, thanks for the suggestion. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 01:45, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

Also, I think the watchlist should be extended so it can show all revisions made to an article since the last login. I know "related changes" can be used that way, but having that feature in the watchlist would be good for those who don't want to make their watchlists public. Graham/pianoman87 talk 06:41, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

YES. Please please please introduce this change! If it happens for Recentchanges, it should happen for watchlists! pfctdayelise 13:29, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

Make Enter key on Edit screen default to Preview instead of Save

I think it would cut down on mistaken saves, which would also help address the 'churn' rate on recent changes concern. (And if "Show preview on first edit" controls that, the label on the Prefences page should state that more clearly.) 24.17.48.241 20:59, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

I disagree. Saving with just an Enter on the edit summary field is very useful. --cesarb 14:48, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

More consistent Diff link placement

Currently we have:

User contributions: (hist) (diff)

Revision history: (cur) (last)

Recent changes: (diff) (hist)

Changing Recent changes to match User contributions would make the right column equivalent for all. 24.17.48.241 21:02, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

Funky problem with redirs and version history

I believe this is new, and makes it hard to revert a page back to a redirect. I had to make this edit[16] manually, because if I clicked on the User:Antandrus version I would see the redir, but when I clicked Edit, I got User:McBeer's content. You can kinda repro the problem if you go to the History of Liquor and click on the 03:31, 1 December 2005 63.19.152.234 version, then click Edit--note you are viewing the current content, not the redir to George Liquor that that edit actually made. 24.17.48.241 21:14, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

If [Foo (bar)|Foo] is edited to [Foo (bar)|], save the change

I think it gets saved in certain cases, but mostly not. 24.17.48.241 21:31, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

If [[Foo (bar)|Foo]] is edited to [[Foo (bar)|]], save the change. 24.17.48.241 21:50, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

Enable 'pipe-trick' for comma, as well as parens

EG Have Seattle, Washington just display "Seattle". 24.17.48.241 21:32, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

Yep! That would be a nice one. pfctdayelise 13:30, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

Tell search engine robots to NOT index AfD, etc. pages

Look at these google hits[17]--it's not the first time I've seen WP AfD/VfD pages pop up high in general internet searches. I don't think that serves anybody very well. Probably applies to all 'xxx for deletion' areas, if not all the Wikipedia namespace, and maybe even all namespaces except Articles. 24.17.48.241 21:44, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

AFD

I signed. Tnx for the warning. Garion96 (talk) 00:48, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

Development suggestion

I saw your request on the pump, and I'm amazed your talk page isn't more deluged than it is. :)

Given the new inability of anons to create new pages, being able to filter Special:Newpages with the current mechanism already implemented for Special:Contributions/newbies would be a huge help. 3226 is related. —Cryptic (talk) 01:15, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

Suggestions

Hi there, thanks for volunteering to take suggestions! And thanks for showing me the section=new feature, I didn't know about that.

One thing that we've really been hoping for for a long time is a built-in mechanism for dealing with references and citations, as well as footnotes. Currently we use ad-hoc solutions built using templates which suffer from some technical issues and conflict with the external link autonumbering (see here).

Would an {{AUTOINCREMENT}} variable be sufficient for this (see above). —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 03:34, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

Probably not. I think this should have explicit support in the wiki syntax, to make it easier to read/write and to enable it to be rendered properly in print, among other advantages. Deco 23:22, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

Can you elaborate on what kind of syntax would be needed? —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 10:25, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

Another thing I'd love to see is for the software to have a global setting allowing a fixed order for interlanguage links on all pages. The order of these links, and the annoying inconsistency caused by everyone doing their own thing, has been cause for considerable debate.

That system needs a complete redesign in general, it's messy. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 03:34, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

A way to perform palette reductions on generated .png images would be an invaluable way of reducing filesize for the poor modem downloaders. Currently I often find myself in a quandry deciding whether to upload a size-optimized image or upload a full-size image (better for print) which is then shrunken to a too-large in-article image by the software. Other neat image features might be a way to crop/zoom sections of images or convert to B&W.

Image manipulation in the image syntax would be neat, yeah:) —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 03:34, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

Speaking of images, there's also been considerable debate over censorship of offensive images. Some people have suggested a feature that would allow flagging of potentially offensive images such that they're only shown to users who enable some setting in their preferences (some also prefer opt-out to opt-in, since Wikipedia is Not Censored, this could be a global setting).

I would also like to see a Recent Changes filter for "young" users created recently or maybe with a small number of edits.

Something like Special:Contributions/newbies ? —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 03:34, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

Yeah, just like that! Please add a link to Special:Recentchanges. Deco 23:22, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

Add a link to it where? —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 10:25, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

Oh, and a way to change one's username without losing all of one's user contribution history might be nice.

You can request a rename with Special:Renameuser at Wikipedia:Changing username. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 03:34, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

Afraid I can't, I have too many edits and I already registered the name I want. Oh well. Deco 23:22, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

Hope this helps, that's all I can think of right now. Thanks for all your hard work. Deco 03:03, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

Thanks again! Deco 23:22, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

sysop on mediawiki !

Hi, I'm a wikipedian from chinese wikipedia and I'm a sysop both in chinese wikipedia and wikimedia commons. Now, I'm doing some translation to chinese version on mediawiki.org. Could you make me a sysop on mediawiki please? --Vipuser 02:46, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

Development suggestion

You're crazy - letting people suggest features because you have too much spare time?! :) I, like some others, would be keen on more information available in diff summaries. Would it tax the servers to record, for instance, the number of words changed? So far we have a distinction between minor and major edits. What if the history could display "Rewrote section [163 words]" or "Typo [1 word]"? Feasibility? Stevage 10:26, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

Well first of all are you just talking about having it in diff views or page history views? The latter would require a change in the revision schema. Second, how would you define a word? This is much harder than it seems at first, you can't even count on them being delimited by whitespace in English ("it's" expands to "it is" and counts as two words, but "Master's degree" would only count as two) and the problem gets much harder for some other languages which we'd have to support, greenlandic for instance doesn't delimit words on any token at all, and even though Unicode provides tokens to mark the seperation of words these aren't in wide use as far as I'm aware. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 10:34, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

Yes, I meant the latter. I take your point about whitespace, but accuracy really isn't important for the goals I envisage. Simply a way to differentiate from the history page between a 3 word and a 180 word edit (even if the former was actually 1 word, and the latter was really 237) would be great. Even taking the number of diffed characters and dividing by 5 would be fine. (or 10 for unicode :)) Stevage 10:41, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

I had a similar idea, which was to automatically distinguish between large and small additions and deletions in page histories. This would hightlight deletion vandalism, and make the most significant changes stand out. An addition of over 25% would add "+++" to the end of the line, over 5% "++", and over 1% "+". Deletions would show the same number of "-"s for the same size changes. Being a developer myself, I was able to implement this in MediaWiki but there was a big performance hit since all page versions are compressed, so you have to uncompress them all to get the real page sizes. However, if there was a better way of doing it, I would love to see it in place! GeorgeStepanek\^talk 03:21, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

Presumably they could be worked out at the time of saving the diffs and saved with the comment. I'm a big fan of any suggestion to make diff summaries more informative. Stevage 23:34, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

Filter language link updates

Another suggestion: My watchlist has a fairly large amount of activity from semi-automated updating of language links. Eg, "Add ko". This has almost zero interest to me. A way of detecting, flagging and ultimately filtering out such edits would be appreciated. Stevage 10:30, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

Easy edit/revert from the diff page

Last one :) Here I'm definitely talking about the diff page where you see the old and current version side by side. A link to edit the current reversion would be great. Also helpful (but possibly controversial as it would facilitate revert wars) would be a "revert this change" link. It would certainly make vandalism easier to control. Perhaps it would only appear for anon edits...but that's a political question.

As it is, you have to click the name of the previous version, then edit, then add a comment, then save. A one click method...mmmm. Stevage 10:44, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

The one click method you describe already exists, it is the "rollback" function, which is available to administrators only. I think the reason for restricting it is to avoid facilitating revert wars. Thryduulf 11:22, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

The rollback function doesn't do that, it does something very similar however. But it isn't guarenteed to rollback to the revision that's currently being viewed on the left side of the diff. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 11:32, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

You asked for suggestions

Wikipedia:Blocking policy proposal and its related bug report listed in the first paragraph would go a long way towards fixing a lot of problems we are having with not being able to block IP's that really need it. I'm an admin and I've been blocked at times because the IP I get assigned has caused problems, and this has happened to a lot of other good users. - Taxman ^Talk 18:23, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

Numbering contributions

It would be nice if "my contributions" were numbered from 1 being the earliest. Easy to do? Stevage 01:55, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

You mean in Special:Contributions? —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 09:04, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

Yes, there. I was proud when I hit 500, but now I can only count by screenful :) Stevage 23:32, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

Where to get data

Hi there! I saw this post by you on the village pump. Is there a method of obtaining data for the times articles are created on Wikipedia? I would be very interested to analyse it with much more detail, and ideally, as many data points as possible. Could you direct me to an appropriate source for this? Thank you very much! --HappyCamper 04:43, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

You can get creation times and more from the XML dumps at http://download.wikimedia.org —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 06:01, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

AfD vote removal

Please be aware that it is common (and courteous) practice to go through the page history and find out who made an unsigned comment and then place that information after the comment rather than simply striking out that vote altogether. Kurt Weber 12:49, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

But that history is loooooooong. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 12:59, 12 December 2005 (UTC)

Keywords

It would be great to have better control over the keywords that appear in the meta tag. Currently I couldn't guess what the behaviour is. I looked at Jimmy Carter, the keywords were Jimmy Carter,1924 births,Alpha Phi Omega honorary brothers,American diplomats,American farmers,American writers,Baptists,Born-again Christians,Georgia State Senators,Governors of Georgia [18] which is his name and all the categories the article is in until the humanist category where his name was indexed incorrectly, so I corrected the indexing but now [19] only his name is a keyword. I would expect the categories to give keywords.

Also it would be great to be able to add keywords, I am especially thinking of examples like Cat flap where it would be a leap forward to be able to add other common names as keywords, such as Doggie door and the PC Pet door. It would probably be a strain on the servers to go through the list of redirect pages and add them as keywords automatically, but some manual control over the keywords would be more or less just as good. The recent comment on bug 846 is related Stefán Ingi 12:36, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

one suggestion

I saw that you're gathering ideas for software development. I'm sugesting a rather easy (I think) idea: could you put the Special:Allpages right below the search box, since this page is often used for searching purpose. CG 21:47, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

Another suggestion - image reuploads appear on watchlist

Having spent some time reverting image overwrites on Image:BlairL.jpg (one of the vandal accounts claims to be WoW, so this may be an augury for the future), it would be very nice if reuploads on a watched image showed up in the normal watchlist, with output something like this:

23:27 Template talk:Did you know (diff; hist) . . Titoxd (Talk | block) (→December 11 - add pic (GFDL-self))
23:23 Image:BlairL.jpg reuploaded (prev, cur) . . Mr.Firefox (Talk | block)
23:27 Wikipedia:Village pump (technical) (diff; hist) . . Android79 (Talk | block) (→Redlinks)
23:27 Deaths in 2005 (diff; hist) . . 81.77.50.28 (Talk | block)

where prev is a link to the previous state of the image, and cur its new state.

Does this sound like a good idea? -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 23:36, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

Feature Suggestion: Browse in "Skeptical Mode"

Allow users to browse with a little, minimized (say 10 entries) history box on their page. I realize this could probably be done via GreaseMonkey or JavaScript, but it would be much faster if it was all served up at once. A user wishing to use it would enable it in preferences, and wherever they browsed, they would see the history too. This would make it a lot easier to figure out whether or not their version is good: was the last contributor anon? Just a thought... if you don't plan on doing it, it's a good chance for me to hone my JavaScript skills. — Ambush Commander^(Talk) 01:10, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

Heads up display suggestion

My enjoyment of wikipedia would be even greater with a kind of 'heads up display' (javascript presumably) that would give quick info when you hover over a link. For a user, basic summary of number of edits etc. For any other link, maybe the size of the page, whether it's a redirect, whether it's a disambig page or not etc. Maybe even the first sentence of the page? Stevage 23:36, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

Form suggestion

A suggestion/question wrapped into one. =) Is there a way to use form input in regular articles? If not, would this be something that could be exposed as a special Wiki markup? (I'm specifically thinking of single line edit boxes, and a way to access the data entered). Here's a psuedo-example (quick and dirty, so it should get the idea across, but obviously there's details here that may need to be discussed)–

<wiki-input maxlen="20" name="testinput"></wiki-input><!-- an input box with a max length of 20 characters -->

<wiki-button action="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title={{input:testinput}}&action=edit>Test</wiki-button><!-- a button with the caption "Test" which, which clicked, edits (or creates) a page based upon the input in the input box above -->

Already possible? Bad idea? =) Really hard to do? It would have limited uses and should probably be restricted to (at least) articles in the User or Wikipedia namespace. —Locke Cole 01:02, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

Nevermind, I see there's <inputbox>, though I haven't found any docs describing how to use it, heh. —Locke Cole 12:20, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

Coding...

I tried to create a extended syntax for wiki, but I have problem how to hook it, mostly how to get it interact with template parameters. Here are the code as for now: m:User:AzaToth/Logic

_→AzaToth 08:15, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

You probably want to hook it in to work on text right after $this->replaceVariables() in internalParse() in Parser:: finishes or somewhere inside Parser::replaceVariables() —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 01:44, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

Ok, thank you, an other, is ther a easy way to get paramters without using {{{1}}} etc..., I would likly to be able to access them from a normal assoc. _→AzaToth 02:23, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

It's probably stored in some internal array, don't know which. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 02:41, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

Reverted your edit on Perl6

The code

 while ($x = <>) { ... }

is not a suitable replacement for

 while ($x = <STDIN>) { ... }

because the text specifically refers to "reading from STDIN" (as does the Perl6 code it mimics). The first code here might also read from the files named from the command-line, not just STDIN. If you need further explanation, I can recommend a good book --Randal L. Schwartz 16:25, 16 December 2005 (UTC)

Rewritten Writing a new special page

Hi, I recently added an updated section about MediaWiki 1.5 at meta:Writing a new special page. Being a senior MediaWiki developer, I would appreciate it greatly if you bestowed your expertise on the article and cleaned up (or at least told me about) some things that I may have gotten in my new section. If I learn enough, I'll rewrite the entire page, but I'd like to make sure I've got the initial idea right. — Ambush Commander^(Talk) 00:25, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

KDE

Hi Ævar,

just read your changes in the KDE article:

"It is a violation of the GPL to produce applications which link to the QT library (as most if not all KDE applications do) without acquiring a commercial license from Trolltech, even if the application is noncommercial."

Counter-example: writing a GPL application which links to Qt (btw it is Qt not QT) without having a license is not a license violation, as Qt is GPLed. At best the above sentence is highly misleading. Or do I oversee anything?

Best regards from Germany -- mkrohn 23:51, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

I made an error while re-arranging it, I meant to write "It's a violation of the GPL to produce & distribute applications which link to the Qt library which are not themselves under the GPL without..." —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 00:56, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

Hello Ævar,

I just made a change to [20], and wanted to see if you agree.

All the best, from France. Karderio 14:40, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

Hi again,

I've just edited [21] and [22], I would really appreciate your opinion if you don't mind taking a look.

Thanks, and Merry Christmas! Karderio 18:36, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

WP:AUM

Read the talk page and look especially for comments from Jamesday. He has asked us to actively not use meta-templates, and Taxobox is the worst offender I've seen. CSS is a reasonable approach which works without straining the servers.

As far as CSS support, I have read nothing that we "aim to support" them, and every major template relies on CSS. Even still, it won't break for that one guy without CSS, he will simply see all the rows. -- Netoholic @ 19:55, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

Ref

Thanks for this; it should, hopefully, obsolete all uses of the old templates. =) One question: I used this on Blu-ray Disc, and it looks like when I call <references /> it's placing additional whitespace at the end. Can you look at Blu-ray Disc and let me know what you think? Thanks! —Locke Cole 01:28, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

Odd, can't reproduce it on my local installation, even with tidy turned on, some WM oddity. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 01:48, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

Fixed it with a live hack, still have to figure out why it happens though, the parser is adding two newlines after the parsed text on WM but not on my installation. –Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

Thanks, it was just a minor issue, but it makes formatting a bit difficult (assuming you don't place <references /> at the end of the article; at the end of the article it's probably a non-issue). Thanks for looking into it so quickly tho! —Locke Cole 03:36, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

its bull that i cannot sort by filename. i believe the only way for it to sort by file name is by adding the filename to the id tag in the TITLE box and removing everything else. oy

Block log

I was wondering if it were possible to add a log of blocks to the Special:Blockip page, as it's great to have that on the Page Protection page, and it would be greatly helpful on a Block page. Is this possible? Or do I have to waste precious seconds in the logs? Thanks, Mysekurity^{(have you seen this?)} 06:45, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

I can tell you are still busy with Cite issues, but can you help me out with this block log request? Or is Bugzilla a better approach? -Mysekurity^{(have you seen this?)} 21:01, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

As always it's a good idea to file a bug report since others might want to work on it. –Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 22:37, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

It's filed at Bugzilla:4434. If you could just take a look at it, I'd greatly appreciate it. Thanks! (I don't think it should be too dificult, no?) -Mysekurity^{(have you seen this?)} 21:56, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

New cite extension problem

There is a problem in the new cite extention. The numbering may be correct in the refs, but the numbering in the generated reference section do not match the inline citation numbers, specifically when you use <ref name=Myref /> to note additional citations to a ref previously included. This problem is clearly visible in Sant Mat, which I recently converted to the new cite format. You can see there 9 entries in the reference section, but 13 inline citations. A possible way to resolve this would be to use a ^1a, ^1b format for the inline links, rather than sequential numbers. ≈ jossi ≈ t • @ 19:54, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

It wasn't designed to match up at all, that doesn't mean that it shouldn't though. Basically you could do it in two ways, you could have:

The quick<ref name=agility>NASA</ref> brown fox jumped<ref name=agility/> over the lazy<ref>Discovery channel</ref> dog.

Generate, as is the current behaviour:

The quick[1] brown fox jumped[2] over the lazy[3] dog.

and

1. 1 2 NASA <!-- 1 & 2 are links -->

2. Discovery channel

Or, as you'd propose:

The quick[1] brown fox jumped[1] over the lazy[2] dog.

and

1. a b NASA <!-- a & b are links -->

2. Discovery channel

For the latter I'd have to add a new MediaWiki message that defined the characters to use for backlinks ("a, b, c, d...") since it's not feasable to automatically generate that like numbers. That's no problem though, changing it is *no problem at all*, but I don't want to change it just based on one or two requests for it since other people might want to have it the other way around, and since I have no idea what people want then, uhm..., hold a vote for it or something;) —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 20:21, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

Obviously, the current implementation does not work... You cannot have a [15] point to a reference labelled [7]. Can you imagine when you print an article? It will be amazing if this can be fixed and allow for correct correspondance of number. ≈ jossi ≈ t • @ 04:25, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

I changed the format, see m:Cite/Cite.php for the new one, the numbers now match up and the same number is always used for the same reference. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 22:25, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

Excellent! You are a genius! ≈ jossi ≈ t • @ 23:15, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

Slightly different cite problem

As it happens, there is also a slightly different (and hopefully less controversial) problem; after a repeated reference all the following references are wrong (i.e. not connected). i.e. foo<ref name=foo>foo</ref>, foo 2<ref name=foo/>, bar<ref name=bar>bar</ref>, baz<ref name=baz>baz</ref><br><br><references/> Both bar and baz are numbered wrong; even if deciding what to do about "foo 2" is tricky, bar and baz should match, right? And as of now, they don't. I think we need to use an ul, not a ol, and include the actual footnote numbers, instead of "^". BTW, THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR WRITING THIS! Much appreciated. JesseW, the juggling janitor 20:33, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

I definitely think it's important that what is identified as [1] and [2] correspond with the reference targets listed as 1. and 2. in the references list. I actually don't think backlinks are important to have because a) it's so likely that the article length or browser quirks will prevent repositioning back at the reference (which is after all not a pointer but just a scroll position most of the time) and b) because when there are multiple backlinks you won't know which references "a", "b", or "c" correspond to anyway. In most browsers, if you've clicked on an anchor location and get repositioned here, the "back" button will take you back where you were anyway (in fact a better backlink might just be a little javascript snippet for "back"). Anyway, without backlinks:

  The quick<ref name="foxjump">Foxes and Jumping, 2005</ref> brown fox
  jumped<ref name="foxjump"/> over the lazy.<ref name="gblazy">The Good,
  the Bad and the Lazy, 2005</ref>

The quick^[1] brown fox jumped[1] over the lazy dog.[2]

1. Foxes and Jumping, 2005.
2. The Good, the Bad and the Lazy, 2005.

Anyway, if backlinks are desired you might instead use "1.1, 1.2, 1.3" instead of "a, b, c" to help with autonumbering. Another possibility is that every reference is a new number, and repeated references are merely repeated in the reference target section:

The quick^[1] brown fox jumped[1] over the lazy dog.[2]

1. ^{1.1 1.2} Foxes and Jumping, 2005.
2. The Good, the Bad and the Lazy, 2005.

Another less optimal possibility is to just repeat references:

The quick^[1] brown fox jumped[2] over the lazy dog.[3]

1. Foxes and Jumping, 2005.
2. Foxes and Jumping, 2005. (Or Ibid.)
3. The Good, the Bad and the Lazy, 2005.

I, also, thank you so much for writing this. Demi ^T/_C 21:04, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

Feel free to ignore me if this is obvious, but, looking over the code, the basic problem of non-matching numbers can be solved by replacing the line:

$wgContLang->formatNum( ++$this->mOutCnt )

with something (psudo-code) like this:

if $num and $num > 0 :
   $wgContLang->formatNum( $this->mRefs->index($key) )
else :
   $wgContLang->formatNum( ++$this->mOutCnt )

i.e. if it's a repeated ref, use the index of the key, not a new number. Otherwise, use a new number. Hope this helps; I can write it up in PHP if that would be helpful. JesseW, the juggling janitor 22:25, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

qif into code

Hi Ævar. Could you help to make template:qif a MediaWiki built-in? No change in syntax, just as it is. A pseudo-template. It should behave like the old qif template but the wiki parser knows itself what to do when it encounters a qif (or "if" - the name does not matter). No data-base access. What a wonderful wiki-world this would be.... Reason: 30'000+ articles in :en at the moment depend on qif and we simply do not know how to replace this. Just a dumb newbie asking silly questions :-) Adrian Buehlmann 22:37, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

Cites again

Hi. I was looking at the cite stuff http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cite/Cite.php and wondered: is it possible to use this to generate inline citations but with the info at the end? Ie, so that in the text you just get [12] or whatever, as a hyperlink to whatever the URL is, just like you do currently, and at the end it auto-generates the biblio info you provided? This should be then customisable... ideally as user preferences I suppose... as to whether you see inline type links or footnotes? It would be really useful to solve various reference style wars!

William M. Connolley 21:02, 28 December 2005 (UTC).

I don't quite get what you mean, you mean the info at the end as in what's flushed out by <references>? If you don't want to see the inline stuff you can always hide it with your user css file. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 21:52, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

Ah. Sorry. Let me try again... At the moment, if one references an external URL, then the reference is either inline, with the info (journal, say) optionally at the end; or the reference inline can be to a footnote, which contains the external URL and the journal info etc. I find the footnote style annoying, because its then two clicks to get to the reference. Other people like the footnote style. At the moment, with the inline style, tying the info to the references at the end can be difficult. But your cite thing can fix that. It seems to me that with your "cite" extension it should be possible to have the same page text generate either citation style, depending on user or page preferences. And this would be a good thing. If its possible to do this already via CSS, I don't know how to. William M. Connolley 22:07, 28 December 2005 (UTC).

I would second this, as a lovely feature request (after we get the current mis-numbering problems fixed) - it would help refocus the attention now going to fights over reference formatting back to the real work of referencing. JesseW, the juggling janitor 02:09, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

WMC wants an inline external link for every source with a URL. As Cite is not aware of the contents of the citation, the URL may have to be given to Cite through a parameter such as "url=". Could Cite then emit two links, one to the below citation and one to the URL, and could CSS then display/hide each of those two links? Would that cause problems for accessibility tools? (SEWilco 08:43, 29 December 2005 (UTC))

How do you propse this url be formatted inline & in the reference section? Examples? —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 19:21, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

Hmmm, well, to take a concrete exampe: Kyoto_Protocol, the link in the text to http://unfccc.int/essential_background/convention/background/items/1353.php is currently formatted inline as UNFCCC-2 and as a reference as "* UNFCCC-2 FULL TEXT OF THE CONVENTION, ARTICLE 2. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. URL accessed on 2005-11-15". So what we need is "cite, tag=unfccc-2, url=http://..., access_date=..., text=..." and so on: thats what the writer puts into the text, and it contains all the info. Then at the end, the references/ tag unloads all that. What needs to be adjustable is what the "cite" tag does inline: it should either add [url tag] (and label the ref at the end with "tag" too) as an inline link; or add a link down to the footnote. Which it does should be selectable; ideally via user preferences overriding page preferences overriding global settings. Ideally I suppose if "tag" is omitted it should use the next free number; but being forced to use a text tag won't do too much harm. William M. Connolley 20:21, 29 December 2005 (UTC).

1. Why are references shown in italics? Shouldn't the editors of the reference have the option to format the reference, including possibly italicised quotes? I would support the references being reduced in size, to say 95%, to set them apart from normal content.

   Answer to both: Because that's the default formatting, it can be changed with the appropriate MediaWiki messages though, see m:Cite/Cite.php. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 22:20, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

   I see. Could you point me in the direction the relevant MediaWiki message then? -- Ec5618 23:04, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

   They're listed on the above page;) It's pretty much all of them. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 23:11, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

   Right, I figured it out. They're at [23], got it. I'm not sure which governs the italicising (and would govern size), but I did find the one that controls the bolding of the ^. I'm not an editor though, and so can't make the changes themselves.

   It's italic because the default rendering for <cite> (the xhtml/html tag) is usually (always?) italic in most browsers. If you want to change that the right way would be to alter the CSS not to remove the tag since it's reccomended for use in citations. If you want to change the font size for the whole section you could for instance do that with ol.references { font-size: ... } in CSS. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 00:11, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

   As an aside, is there a specific Talk page I should be making style suggestions on? You, as the developer in this case, shouldn't be expected to make simple style changes. -- Ec5618 00:03, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

   The respective MediaWiki talk pages maybe? Or the manual of style. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 00:11, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

2. Currently, using a specific name= causes the reference to appear with a number, even if only a single reference uses that name. Would it be possible to use numbers only when a reference is used more than once?

   Could be, I just didn't see the point since there's no point in using name="" at all if you're just going to have a one-time reference, you can just use <ref> —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 22:20, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

   I can imagine that a reference that is used twice may not always. If a single reference is removed, currently, the other reference must be edited as well. Still, hardly a real problem, editors will just need to be careful. -- Ec5618 23:04, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

3. To address William M. Connolley's point, perhaps references that refer to external sites could include a letter, or an icon, similar to the standard external link icon. Users would expect such an oddly marked reference to lead to an external website. I'll agree that users should have the option to either follow the link directly, or to be referred to the references section first. Perhaps (I'm not a developer) CTRL+click could lead to the external site directly, while a normal click would refer to the references. The option needn't be apparent to casual users, nor at all problematic, while more experienced users would be able to quickly open all links directly. -- Ec5618 21:02, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

   Could be done, that would require specifing a url="" paramater manually (could make it lazy and make it extract the first url if it wasn't specified manually but that would require url=no or something like that, which would be lame. How do you see that being formatted though? Like this^[1][1]? The ctrl-clicking isn't really an option since it would be too browser specific (ctrl+click is reserved on some systems). —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 22:20, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

   I'm not actually sure. Providing links to both the reference section and the linked page seems redundant, but being forced to visit the references section seems tedious.

   It might be easiest to treat ref-tags without text (so just a link) as separate entities ('external links'), which would still be numbered with the normal references. If a page is linked to, it is clearly a reference, and should be mentioned in the reference section.

   For example, an ordinary reference may look like this ^[1] (governed by MediaWiki), while a reference leading to an external page might look like ² or ³ (also governed by MediaWiki). The reference note could then still be included under 'references/', with a link up to the point from which it was refered. There would be no direct link from the reference to the reference note, though it should be easy enough to find seeing as it is numbered.

   Just thinking out loud though. -- Ec5618 23:04, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

   • If both a citation and external link are emitted, let's say with a default appearance as ^[1][1], can each link have a different HTML tag which would allow CSS to hide one or both of the links? This would allow the servers to emit one (cachable) version which would be reformatted by the browsers. A secondary question is the appearance of the two links, such as whether CSS can control things such as an external link appearing as ^[1] or as an image. (I had been testing just this type of incantation for {{ref}} but was interrupted by AUTOINCREMENT's implementation) (SEWilco 07:31, 30 December 2005 (UTC))

Request for comment on stable versions

Hey there, sorry to add to your burgeoning spam of a talk page, but I was wondering if I could get your input on the technical feasibility of the ideas being discussed at Wikipedia talk: Stable versions. The basic concept is to have two versions of each article, a "working" version and a "stable" version, in analogy with the working and release versions of software projects. The stable version is protected against editing in some way, and readers could navigate between the two. There's some dispute on whether no changes or only minor accuracy changes should be admitted to the stable version. Some software features which would support this effort, as well as be more generally useful, are:

• The ability to "branch" an article, copying it to another name along with its history;
• The ability to merge a set of differences from one article into another (just imagine while you're viewing a particular diff there's a link or button for this)
• Protecting an article from all (non-admin) users except for a selected group of users (who would act as "owners" or "maintainers" for the stable version).
• UI elements to navigate back and forth between a page's "working version" and its "stable version". (ordinary links can be destroyed by vandals)

Please comment on the page cited above. Thanks a lot for your feedback. Deco 23:33, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

I haven't worked on this myself but Tim Starling has, although I don't know the current status of his work. Last I knew he was only adding a boolean stable/unstable field to revision though as opposed to full branching support. I think the latter would be neat as it would allow for maintaining an arbitary number of branches for the same file like Subversion, CVS and most other version control systems support. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 19:20, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments. I've posted them on Wikipedia talk: Stable versions; I hope you don't mind. I'll see if Tim Starling can tell me more. Deco 22:34, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

Regarding template default parameters and nesting

I saw you reply to bugzilla:364 regarding template default parameters. I'm not sure if you're fully aware, but that feature has given rise to a number of conditional functions (see Category:If Templates and Category:Boolean Templates). From a practical standpoint, I don't see where, unless it is the intention to support conditionals, that any practical use of templates would be harmed by the following changes:

• Default parameters - There should be no more than 2 levels of evaluation of a parameter default. {{{A|text}}}, {{{A|{{{B}}}}}}, and {{{A|{{{B|text}}}}}} should work, but {{{A|{{{B|{{{C}}}}}}}}} and deeper should not. Additionally, parameter defaults should not accept template calls in the form of {{{A|{{template}}}}}}. That would be an avenue to skirt the restriction.
• Template nesting (WP:AUM) - The parser should not evaluate more than one level deep on any template. For example, if a page uses Template:X, which in turn has a call for Template:Y, it works, but if Template:Y in turn calls Template:Z, then Z is not evaluated. This prevents the more outrageously complex meta-templating practices, but gives a little flexibility in certain areas.

I'd like to know if this is something you would look into and perhaps address. -- Netoholic @ 07:57, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

Doesn't really make sense to include a limitation like this in the parser in my opinion. It's not the task of the software to enforce usage patterns. The core problem here seems to be that there's no syntax provided by MediaWiki for basic control structures in templates, it would make more sense to add those than reduce the current functionality. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 19:15, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

My position, and so it seems many developer as well, is that we generally do not want basic control structures incorporated in template/transclusions because that has inherent security concerns. We have the "default parameter" already, which honestly is very helpful and not overly complex. What's happening though is that, without limitations, that new syntax is being misused in ways not intended. I'm not asking to "reduce the current functionality", only to restore it to a practical state which can't be used to do anything except what templates are meant to be. The recent default parameter functionality opened this hole, and I'm asking for it to be closed again. -- Netoholic @ 06:47, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

Actually, the default parameter functionality did not allow creation of flow-control tools, they have existed for months in other forms. "qif" is merely a recent and elegant member of the family of tools. One major usage which seems to fit intended purpose of template transclusion is to emit certain strings only when a parameter exists, such as emitting a "comma and space" ahead of an optional field. There has been an increase in visibility of logical constructs due to the default parameter feature due to an increase in usage of optional fields and the need to hide associated optional formatting markup. Browse through the History of WP:CITET to observe the consolidation of those templates when optional parameters became possible. Perhaps a construct such as {{{volume?, Vol.  }}} (if "volume" has a value emit ", Vol. ") would help reduce the need for this type of usage. (SEWilco 07:16, 30 December 2005 (UTC))

Some conjectures of the effects of such incantations may be helped by information about how much they are actually used. Statistics could be collected about commonly used templates and depth of nesting, perhaps by memory-mapping a data structure for often-used templates and depth of nesting (i.e., template_stat["qif"][3]++). (SEWilco 07:16, 30 December 2005 (UTC))

Netoholic wants to break template:qif. And indeed, if his proposal would be implemented, that would break it. 32'000+ articles depend on qif today (according to what links here of qif). I wonder if this proposal wouldn't qualify as a DOS attack, which has explicitly been condemned by Jamesday on WP:AUM. Adrian Buehlmann 10:40, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

This abuse of qif (and related meta-templates) on the citation templates seems like a strong argument, except that the creators have been informed for quite some time that they need to move away from them. Template:Conference reference works just fine without meta-templates, and so can this method work on the others. Take a look at other templates like Template:Language and tell me that is what was intended when parameter defaults were instituted. -- Netoholic @ 18:47, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

Just a general, "if you're bored" thing

Special:Whatlinkshere/Namespace would be nice. Thanks for all the dev work you've done here. Ral315 (talk) 22:07, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

mm, I've been meaning to do that, and Special:Whatlinks here too. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 22:11, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

Userboxes

Mh, you support the EU, yet distrust it? ;) —Nightstallion (?) 07:51, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

Read: I think it sucks less than the alternatives. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 20:10, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

nods Fair enough. —Nightstallion (?) 13:22, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

editintro= doesn't display when editing existing pages

I have filed this as a Wikipedia:Bug report, however there seems to be little activity at that page. Perhaps you could help (directly or through providing insight):

Using links, it is now possible to create links such as this one:[24] which allow one to add a new section to a page. Unfortunately, it only works partly: the editintro is useless in links to edit existing pages. In fact, the above link should use Wikipedia:Reference desk/How to ask as an explanatory text above the edit box, but it does not. The same link does work if it points to a nonexistant page:[25].

Explanatory text would be a great way to remind users of the rules on pages such as the WP:RD and WP:HD. Also, many newer users are unfamiliar with protocol, or seem to be under the impression that the reference desk is a search engine, for example. Thanks in advance for any help, and for your help so far. -- Ec5618 01:30, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

Bump. I'm sorry, but as far as I see it, my request is quite simple, and should be relatively easy to implement. Could you please help or direct me to someone who can?

Following a redlink leads to an edit window, headed with MediaWiki:Noarticletext, while editing an existing page has no header. I'm requestion that the system be expanded so that even existing pages can be headed, so that [26] would show the Ant article as a header, above the edit field.

This way, the Reference Desk and Help desk can be streamlined, as I mentioned before. It might also be useful for other pages, such as semiprotected pages. Some pages currently contain commented-out warning text, so that any editor must read it. Perhaps what I am proposing could make that work-around unnecessary.

Please. -- Ec5618 18:22, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

Should be pretty easy, file a bug for it. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 19:26, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

still want suggestions? :)

I'd like a link to unwatch any page that I haven't edited in say, the last 30 days. I have 300+ pages on my watch list and it is sooo tiring and slow to remove the ones I don't care about any more. Stevage 19:54, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

Photo on Audrey Tang

Didn't know that the "commonscat" tag existed. Very neat. Thanks!

I sorta prefer the new post-various-operations photo (more at http://pugs.blogs.com/photos/audrey/) to the old black-and-white one, but I'll defer to your judgement if you consider the original one to be more appropriate. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Autrijus (talk • contribs)

I do too, I didn't mean to switch them. I was editing the previous revision to get the name of the old photo for categorizing it on the commons, forgot that I was doing so, and saved it, which reverted to the old image. I've inserted the new image again, sorry about that and thanks for the notice. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 20:46, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

Cite.php again

Hi, just in case you're not monitoring m:Talk:Cite/Cite.php, I thought I'd mention here that using <ref> in image captions misrenders disastrously. Snottygobble | Talk 05:53, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

That problem is mentioned in Wikipedia talk:Footnotes and I already told him that I tested that the problem does not happen with Cite. (SEWilco 13:14, 3 January 2006 (UTC))

Lynx browser

Hi, I read that you had found a problem in Lynx with the 'hiddenStructure' CSS trick which is being used to replace some meta-templates. Can you tell me if the translation of {{taxobox}} at User:CBDunkerson/Sandbox3 works correctly in Lynx? Some example calls to this version can be viewed at User:CBDunkerson/Sandbox. Thank you. --CBD _☎ ^✉ 22:28, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

They look just fine since they don't rely on CSS to hide content. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 23:18, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. I don't have Lynx and just wanted to confirm that this method of removing meta-templates worked there. --CBD _☎ ^✉ 23:29, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

Anon talk page creation

I'm not sure if you can help me, but I'll inquire anyway. A few Wikipedians have noticed that anonymous users have been creating a lot of talk pages for nonexistant articles because they no longer have the ability to create the actual articles. I don't know how widespread this issue is, I don't know if it's causing any problems, and I have no idea what kind of MediaWiki changes might be involved. But your comments would be appreciated in the discussion. Thanks. --TantalumTelluride 23:55, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the comment. --TantalumTelluride 02:11, 5 January 2006 (UTC)

could this be possible?

A enchantemnt for subst, simlar to includeonly. see http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4484 _→AzaToth 03:26, 5 January 2006 (UTC)

Need your input

Could I get your input on a proposal from a devs point of view? See here: Wikipedia talk:Requests for rollback privileges. Basically, would it be easy/hard to implement so b-crats could give out (and remove, if necessary) the right? Thanks! —Locke Cole • t • c 04:45, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

Cite

Just to start, I'm slightly bemused by this edit: is <onlyinclude> a new variation on <includeonly> or did you actually intend the latter?

Intended, not really that new, but most users that know about includeonly/noinclude don't seem to know about it. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 09:11, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

The main reason I actually asked is that it doesn't seem to be making any difference: the tags are hidden, presumably because they're "unrecognised tags", but the text is not, and if <onlyinclude> meant the same as <includeonly> you would expect that text to be invisible when viewing the article directly. HTH HAND —Phil | Talk 10:01, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

I'm well-impressed by this new feature. I wonder if I could suggest an addition to it which would make it rather easier to convert existing references, and also make more sense to people like myself…picky b*st*rds in other words .

I would like to suggest a further tag, <ref_def>, which would define the text used in the actual footnote without displaying a link at that point.

You might use it like so; instead of this:

blah blah <ref name=blah>well-known article about blah</ref>
.
.
.
==References ==
<references/>

you might do this

blah blah <ref name=blah />
.
.
.
==References ==
<ref_def name=blah>well-known article about blah</ref_def>
<references/>

This would lend itself to replacing the current multiple systems, where the definitions are all collected together like this, with your new system. I also think it clutters up the article text rather less, but YMMV.

Oh, and one more thing: could you make the error message rather more friendly if one misses the final "/" from the <references/> tag, please? "Cite error 5; Invalid input; expecting none" isn't the most friendly, or indeed explanatory, we've got . HTH HAND —Phil | Talk 12:40, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

I agree with making the error message more friendly (though possibly more in your face; could it disable the save button, to prevent errors being introduced into articles?)

This would be totally unlike any other feature in Mediawiki: you can always save your wikitext, even if it's complete cobblers right now. Amongst other things, this allows you to create tests for features in development. HTH HAND —Phil | Talk 10:07, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps a disabled submit button would be a bit too much, but a warning label should appear, and not merely in the body of the text. -- Ec5618 12:01, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

I don't think I agree with making it possible to put the references at the bottom, like this, as it would basically mean that there would be two possible ways to organise the references. While it would take some time to re-organise references, that's not a bad thing. This proposal would give us a quick fix, but may lead to edit wars. An editor may spend a lot of time to change one format to the other, only to be reverted because another editor prefers the original format. -- Ec5618 23:50, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

Then how about the following, or some variation, for hidden references? —Michael Z. 2006-01-10 09:45 Z

  <ref name=blah content='well-known "article about blah"' />

I don't believe I see the difference. Is the reference not still in two parts; one in the body of the text, and one in the list of references? -- Ec5618 12:01, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

No, just one part in the body. But the text of the reference is hidden; instead of being enclosed in the <ref>...</ref> tag it's in its content="..." attribute. —Michael Z. 2006-01-10 15:21 Z

There are very few things for which there is "only one true wiki-way": the whole point of this new system is that no matter what order you put the references in, you get something sensible out. I think this is a good thing, and I applaud it thoroughly. If people are going to get into stupid edit-wars over the placement of references, then they can get banned until they can learn to behave. HTH HAND —Phil | Talk 10:07, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

The point wasn't so much that warring might ensue, as it was that converting takes a lot of time. When an editor takes that time, ve should have some assurance that he isn't going to be reverted, even if the reason for reversion is just as valid. That editor would have no way of knowing (except asking, of course) whether the conversion would be appreciated.

Perhaps I am nitpicking, but I'd hate for anyone to expend such effort, only to be reverted. -- Ec5618 12:01, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

I think the relevant point here is that currently a great many lists of references are already collected at the bottom in the ==References == section. It would be much preferable to be able to convert these to the new syntax without scurrying around the article cutting/pasting the collected references all over the shop. HTH HAND —Phil | Talk 09:40, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

Idea that was missed

(I moved this from above, didn't get a response, so wasn't sure if you saw it or just thought it was too awful to be worthy of response, heh).

Quick suggestion: unless I've missed it, there's no way to add a ref without having the link show up in the article (for example, to include a reference for the entire article, not just a specific paragraph or sentence). I'd like to propose extending the <ref ...></ref> syntax with an additional optional parameter, "display"–

Value	Effect
none	Suppresses display of the reference link (e.g. – [1]). Nothing is displayed.
autoinc (default)	Displays the automatically assigned number for this reference link (e.g. – [1]).
name	Displays the value specified by the name parameter, if any, or the automatically assigned number (e.g. – [name]).

(That last one may be of limited use, or of no use at all, it was just a random idea, heh. :P)

This would be useful if people wanted to use the more "academic" type of reference (like ^[Wirth1995] to refer to a paper by Wirth from 1995). HTH HAND —Phil | Talk 13:13, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

With this syntax, the following–

<ref display="none">L. Couturat, L. Leau. Delegation pour l'adoption d'une Langue auxiliare internationale (15-24 October 1907). Coulommiers: Imprimerie Paul Brodard, 1907</ref>

Would merely add the entry wherever <references /> was called (or if not called, whatever the behavior is now).

Thoughts? Or is there a way to insert a reference without generating any output already? =) —Locke Cole • t • c 10:27, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

What exactly would be the advantage? Couldn't such references be added manually after the references-tag, as a bulleted list? -- Ec5618 12:01, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

To maintain the numbering used, was my intent. Otherwise you'd have to keep the numbering updated manually (if that'd even be possible without the manually added entries looking out of place, and I suspect they'd look out of place, heh). —Locke Cole • t • c 12:03, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

I agree, although I prefer my <ref_def /> version. This would have the advantage that you could create a "general" reference, and then later on add links to it, rather than forcing the order of creation. This would appear to be more "wiki" to me. HTH HAND —Phil | Talk 13:13, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

I still don't understand what the advantage would be. When should a reference not include a link to the references section? What is the point of inserting a reference, if it merely shows up as a reference, without any link to the text, and without stating what it references? -- Ec5618 15:51, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

OK, see if I can articulate an example (I know what I want to say, but I can't figure out how to say it :-). If you are writing an article about a book, the book itself is a reference which is relevant to the whole article, so you would want to have it appear in the references list. However you would conceivably need to have a link to it on every sentence, which would come to look rather cluttered: it would be better to have it simply sitting in the references list. Or if you were writing an article about a film, the IMDb page might be a general reference. It would be kind of nice if {{Infobox Film}} could be tweaked so that instead of the IMDb link sitting in the bottom of the infobox, it appeared with all the other references at the bottom of the article. You would then have the possibility of referring to this reference within the text if you wished. HTH HAND —Phil | Talk 16:34, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

As general reference is easy, just add a bulleted list after the references tag. As I understand you, you want to add the reference to the references section manually. For example, couldn't just just use:

<references/>

• General reference.

I see no reason to number such references, or keep then in a specific order. -- Ec5618 23:26, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

I see no reason to have seperate reference listings that would only serve to confuse the reader. Better to have them all in one listing (and, if possible, in the order specified) rather than in seperate lists. —Locke Cole • t • c 01:24, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

Ok, I can see this being useful in templates and the like, as per your IMDB example. Naturally, the default seting will remain 'visible'. Displaying a reference as hidden (only useful, as far as I can see, in templates) could be formatted like this: <ref hidden></ref> or, more complicatedly <ref display="hidden"></ref> -- —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ec5618 (talk • contribs) 11:57, January 11, 2006

First, maybe this should be moved to m:Talk:ite/Cite.php?

I was thinking about something like this myself. I see three possible reasons for this:

1. For general references, as discussed above.
2. For making conversion from {{ref}}/{{cite}} easier.
3. For reducing clutter of articles! Huge blurbs of references might scare new users, but with this you could have only in the article, while you could list actual references at the bottom.

I also like the idea of showing something else instead of number. This way, for example, footnotes could be split from references as well. Nikola 09:19, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

---

Ævar, thank you for this great extension I couldn't live without! I was thinking about writing something similar, but you got me to it... It will certainly improve the articles and make Wikipedia a better encyclopedia. I was considering giving you a barnstar but there is no developer one, and you probably deserve many more... say, do you pass WP:BIO? ;) Nikola 09:19, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

Well I hack on MW and we were sourceforge project of the month once;), but probably no. –Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 06:02, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

Any progress?

Just to tweak your new-message alert: feel free to delete :-) —Phil | Talk 11:32, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

users by userboxes

• I saw your impressive code that listed users by number of userboxes, but i noticed that it didn't update. Seeing as you're very talented with that sort of thing, and I'm not, could you possibly provide an updated version? Thanks a lot - «ßØÛ®ßÖѧ3» ^{Talk | Contrib's} 17:04, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

I made an rss feed of the top 50 updated every 24 hours, enjoy. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 21:27, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

You could filter out the top two, they aren't using the boxes on their userpage, perhaps only filter those using the boxes on their userpage. _→AzaToth 22:49, 10 January 2006 (UTC)</nowiki>

Thanx for the new one - «ßØÛ®ßÖѧ3» ^{T | C} 15:37, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

Heya

For the record, I would hug you if I ever met you for making that footnoting system! I've come up with an idea on how to make {{ref}} and {{note}} backwards compatible, but it would require a code enhancement. See User talk:Ta bu shi da yu/footnote-idea. Is this feasible? I know it means more work for you, but you would have my undying gratitude if you could work your coding wizardry to make this happen! - Ta bu shi da yu 14:29, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

See the answer below, it's a limitation in the parser. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 15:36, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

Cite : trying to put "ref" in a template

Hello Ævar,

I was trying to put the <ref> in a template on the French Wikipedia, as it makes it easier to use for newcomers (and for many of us who feel uncomfortable when we see something looking like HTML !). But I'm currently struggling a bit, and I would like to know if you could help. The "template" I have is on fr:User:Korrigan/Modèle:Ref and the tests I've done are on fr:User:Korrigan/Brouillon (feel free to edit those pages). Basically, the template gives the good result but then the <ref> tag is printed as it is : the "<" are rendered as "&lt ;". Is there anything I can do about this ?

You can reply on fr: or here. Thank you, le Korrigan ^bla 22:52, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

It's happening because you're using a template argument in an argument to an extension, this is not supported by the MediaWiki parser. See current issues with Cite and bug 4529. –Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 15:33, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

Just an idea : could it be linked to m:Help:HTML in wikitext ? le Korrigan ^bla 23:59, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

It isn't HTML, it uses angle brackets but just because something uses angle brackets doesn't make it HTML, or XML or SGML for that matter. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 15:33, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for your answer. I'll have a look at the bug report. You reckon it is possible to solve this ? le Korrigan ^bla 16:49, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

Your Amazon Wishlist

Hi there,

Takk for your answer about Perl 6 Chained Comparison!

As an expresion of gratitude, allow me, if you will, to take the liberty to debug your user page a bit: The link to your Amazon wishlist lead to my wishlist instead of yours, so i corrected the link. I'm terribly sorry if it's wrong.

Ah, thanks. I should have checked if the url was linked to my session. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 00:32, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

P.S. I love Kukl/Sykumolarnir/Björk, gusGus, Múm and Sigur Rós. What is it that makes Icelanders create music that is so gorgeous, emotional and deeply affecting?--Amir E. Aharoni 21:22, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Honestly I have no idea;) —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 00:32, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

Odd behavior for the new meta:Cite/Cite.php extension

First, I would like to take a moment here to thank you for the new Cite extension. I have been experimenting with it in various articles in Wikipedia, and it is working rather well (even aestetically, as far as I am concerned).

When I (apparently mistakenly) thanked Raul654 for the new extension, he mentioned that you are the one who deserves the credit. Well, I have encountered what appears to be an error in using the extension, so here I am. :)

I just finished some edits to the Celt article, which you can look at here for the diff. comparison, and after doing so I noticed that the MacKillop reference and the Lluyd reference both result in just the Lluyd reference text being added to the == References == section in that article. Do you have any idea why that error has happened?

→ P.MacUidhir (t) (c) 07:04, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

This seems to happen everywhere (and also happens in huwiki): the references are shifted one place, with the first disappearing and the second being referenced as #1 instead. See also Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Question about the new Cite.php feature. --Tgr 08:35, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

It seems the problem has been solved. See the Village Pump. -- Ec5618 10:27, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

Bug 2001

I work on list articles and it'd be really great to see this working. Any chance you could have another look at it and bug 2866? I might be able to play around with the sorttable.js and the sorting methods myself but getting the extension working in wikipedia is way over my head. Discordance 04:43, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

You should split this user talk page into some archives!

--Greasysteve13 11:28, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

Participant alert regarding Wikiproject on Advertising

The Wikiproject No Ads, created as a backlash against the Answers.com deal, has served an important function in providing a space for users to express their disagreement with the Foundation proposal. While the current controversies about userboxes raise questions about political and social advocacy on Wikipedia, there should be greater flexibility regarding advocacy about Wikipedia in the Wikipedia namespace. Reported and linked by Slashdot and other press sources as a unique and spontaneous occurence in Wikipedia history, it has apparently had some impact as, despite being scheduled to begin in January, not a peep has been heard about the trial and proposed sponsored link since the deal's controversial announcement months ago. Currently, however, there is an attempt to delete the project or move it off Wikipedia altogether. Since the Foundation has provided no additional information and has not attempted to answer the specific questions that participants in the project raised, it is unclear if the Answers.com deal has been abandoned or simply delayed. Until the situation becomes more clear, I believe the group should still have a place in the Wikipedia namespace. Sincerely, Tfine80 00:00, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

SVG handling; 'live links

Recently registered, I’d like to upload svg files (maps) using links to wikipedia articles. Example on the right

...

. Objects (circles) should be clickable links to respective articles. The links are supported locally (bith IE and Firefox) but ‘dead’ once uploaded to wiki. I understand that you transform .svg to .png either on the fly or in a batch rather than serving them to the server(?). Are <a> tags xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" transformed to image maps? Is there any way to have clickable maps?

If you’re not the right person to ask these questions please point to someone else / doc. Thank you .Eurocommuter 14:30, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

testwiki link is broken

Yes, that's what it is. Probably based on the fact that the 'mw' directory appears TWICE in a sequence. Just spotted -andy 217.91.47.231 13:34, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

Article for Deletion

Greetings. You may be interested in voting on Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse (image free). Thanks. --Descendall 01:27, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

Proposed "Cite" Style Changes

I've just proposed some changes so feel free to comment. BTW your talk page is in danger of hanging my computer. ;) --Dv82matt 16:15, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

Patches

I've got some patches on bugzilla which are feeling lonely... please could you review them and maybe put them into CVS when you have a moment? This would be greatly appreciated - thanks in advance! Lupin|talk|popups 18:08, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

bugzilla:4838	Patch: relative oldids (prev, next, cur) for raw pages
bugzilla:4855	Section edit links should have section name in title attribute
bugzilla:4273	"New section" editing page should not submit when user hits enter
bugzilla:4832	Patch: hide own edits from Recentchanges and Recentchangeslinked
bugzilla:4856	Hide talk pages in watchlist

Caret has disappeared

Just noticed this a couple of hours ago. I initially thought it might be a problem specific to the page I was working on, but since then I have looked at several other pages using the <ref></ref> system and it is missing on them also ... Polaris999 20:29, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

Can you show me some specific pages that have this problem? —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 22:46, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

The one I am working on is Che Guevara. What makes this so strange is that it had never had this problem before. The "Source Notes", which is where we put the references generated by <ref></ref>, was still perfect as recently as 14 hours ago. I was away from the computer for about eight hours and then when I looked at the page again all of the carets on the Source Notes had disappeared. (I didn't make a note of the other pages that I glanced at where I saw the same problem occurring, but will try to find at least one of them again ...) Thank you for checking into this! Polaris999 23:10, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

Here is another page where the carets are missing: Evolution Polaris999 23:13, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

Theyve been replaced with arrows, the arrows appear fine for me. Its probably something specific to your setup. Discordance 00:11, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

I checked my other computer which is running 98SE and they do show up there. (IMHO the caret is more instantly understandable and therefore better. I am wondering why the change was made?) However, on my other computer which is running XP-SP2, only the horizontal line shows up where the caret used to be ... Polaris999 04:43, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

Vil gjarnan ræða við þig

Blessaður og sæll, Sveinbjörn heiti ég og mundi gjarnan vilja ræða við þig -- hins vegar finn ég ekki netfangið þitt hér. Gætirðu sent mér póst á netfangið sveinbjornt hjá simnet.is ?

Finding articles that use Cite.php

Ævar, is there a way to generate a list of articles which utilizing the cite.php extension? —Encephalon 05:05, 3 March 2006 (UTC) PS. Please archive or refactor your talk page soon. —Encephalon 05:07, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

Cite suggestions

As per your suggestion, I have added some stuff to the meta page. HTH HAND —Phil | Talk 14:19, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

Small favor to ask

Could you kindly shed some light, does Isidor pass the nn-band test? If that is something you might know about, that is. --Grocer 21:59, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

What is the nn-band test? —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 09:40, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

If it is in line with WP:BIO [27]. Basically, nobody at Articles for Deletion can tell if Isidor is a vanity page. Since I've seen your name around, I thought I'd ask.. Have you (or has anyone) heard of these guys before? :) --Grocer 15:08, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

I haven't heard of them, they're released one album though which got reviewed on the website of Morgunblaðið. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 15:23, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

Thank you --Grocer 17:21, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

cite.php: handling multiple references

i posted this on the cite.php talk page [28] and on the english wikipedia footnotes page Wikipedia talk:Footnotes#multiple_references_problem but have also been told to ask you about it.

problem: if you have multiple references to the same note, only the first one is used for the actual note text. this causes problem when you are shifting blocks of text around, as you are likely to end up with the former "first reference" ending up coming after a subsequent reference. so you end up picking up the dummy text from the former subsequent reference.

possible resolution: a user suggested the software could be changed to only pick up the first "non-empty" reference text. then, as long as all the others are defined as empty, shifting the references around could be done safely & easily, no matter where the "first reference" ended up in the article.

Zzzzz 14:13, 11 March 2006 (UTC)

Re: Aprils fools

Hello! I deleted the redirect page that you created as it is unlikely that someone searching for April Fool on the English Wikipedia is going to search on that title deliberately. It looks more like a non-English speaking translation error. Lastly, please archive your Talk page! 244kb is far too long for any page on WP. Regards,  (aeropagitica)  15:50, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

Cs wiki

Some time ago, I did a mistake in the czech modification of Administrator's board, I announced name of someone, who lately denied to it (but it is quite hard to explain, there were some difficulties). Althought the sysops removed it after some time, still it remained in history. So, as a developer, you have power to erase this even from history of the article (as the person which was named demands). The exact first edit where the confident information was added is [29], next versions all contain such information. History is on page: [30]

I hope this situation will be solved soon, because we have quite problems with it.. --Aktron 17:53, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia_talk:Censorship

A watered-down version of the proposed policy against censorship is now open for voting. Will you kindly review the policy and make your opinions known? Thank you very much. Loom91 12:11, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

Monoobok no longer working

Hi! I used your excellent monobook skin until, for some reason, it changed today to very big and annyoing characters. Can you give a hint to how and where to modify your skin code in order to change character dimensions (and, eventually, type)? Thank you very much.Attilios 13:10, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

Bug

Just want to check that you have seen [31] /Grön ^sv 18:46, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Cite/cite.php

I am writing you because I note in the Talk page for cite/cite.php at [32] that you have answered many questions regarding Cite/cite.php and I am hoping that either you can answer my question or you know someone who can.

I am a Wikipedian who has written quite a number of chemical engineering articles. I have been using <ref name=whatever>some reference</ref> to define my references and then <references/> to get them displayed in the References section.

I notice that when I use a reference only one time, the vertical arrow in the Reference section listing is very thin and spindly and hard-to-see. But when I use a reference multiple times, the vertical arrow and the accompanying superscripts (a b c ..) are quite bold and really stand out well. My question is why can't the arrow for a single-use reference look just as bold and well-defined as the arrow for a multiple-use reference?

As an aside, I must say that Cite/cite.php at [33] needs to be completely re-written by a non-computer guru so that we ordinary mortals can understand it. It is virtually incomprehensible at the moment. - mbeychok 18:00, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Regarding your comment about the Wesley Clark Page

I reduced the JPG (not Gif) image of Wesley Clark. It is a lot smaller than a PNG format.

Regarding Copyright issues. The author ArkySue (Sue from Little Rock Arkansas) took this picture. I have provided the information in the comment tags of the article itself to contact her. She DOES give permission to use this photo, at least for Wikipedia.

Evidently, I'm unable to tag the photo properly. Can you please do this?

Better RFC auto-links

Hi Ævar, have you seen MediaWiki talk:Rfcurl#Better URL, a suggestion about auto-linking to HTMLized RFCs from IETF? That would seriously help editors of RFC-related articles, and help point Wikipedia readers to current versions of outdated documents. For example, RFC 822 is so well-known that few people realize it was superseded by RFC 2822 already 5 years ago, and implementing things along RFC 2822 is actually simpler than trying to match RFC 822 special cases for obsolete systems. In addition, as Omniplex wrote, the IETF webmaster approves of this move [34]. You seem to be the right person to ask; tell me what you think. -- JFG 14:19, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

Why am I the right person to ask? I can't change that, but any admin can. –Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 00:32, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

Because you are the one who changed this pointer in the past, from faqs.org to ietf.org. I'm not an admin so can't do it myself. Do you agree to try this as an experiment? -- JFG 06:12, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

merge

Hallo. i want to merge my two useraccounts. who can i ask, or wath can i do? De:Benutzer:Robinhood andDe:Benutzer:Robinhut --58.84.79.95 01:51, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

Cite.php is ruining Wikipedia!

I do not want to let you down, but Cite.php is really no good. The problem with it is that, when casual users (i.e. those people who do not hang out on Wikipedia al day long) try to edit the references, it simply takes too much work. The effect, in general, is to deter people from editing references. I find this to be quite unfortuante, and I wish that Cite.php had never replaced the "ref" and "note" tags that could be easily edited by casual users. (TAY)

Image Tagging Image:Banjo-Kazooie - Boxart.jpeg

This media may be deleted.

Thanks for uploading Image:Banjo-Kazooie - Boxart.jpeg. I notice the 'image' page currently doesn't specify who created the content, so the copyright status is unclear. If you have not created this media yourself then there needs to be an argument why we have the right to use the media on Wikipedia (see copyright tagging below). If you have not created the media yourself then it needs to be specified where it was found, i.e., in most cases link to the website where it was taken from, and the terms of use for content from that page.

If the media also doesn't have a copyright tag then one should be added. If you created/took the picture, audio, or video then the {{GFDL-self}} tag can be used to release it under the GFDL. If you believe the media qualifies as fair use, consider reading fair use, and then use a tag such as {{Non-free fair use in|article name}} or one of the other tags listed at Wikipedia:Image copyright tags#Fair_use. See Wikipedia:Image copyright tags for the full list of copyright tags that you can use.

If you have uploaded other media, consider checking that you have specified their source and copyright tagged them, too. You can find a list of 'image' pages you have edited by clicking on the "my contributions" link (it is located at the very top of any Wikipedia page when you are logged in), and then selecting "Image" from the dropdown box. Note that any unsourced and untagged images will be deleted one week after they have been uploaded, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you. Vic Vipr 12:56, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

Footnotes

Hey man, please see discussion on Wikipedia_talk:Footnotes. Thanks :) - FrancisTyers · 15:02, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

Password Hieararchy Scheme

I've designed a password hieararchy scheme that allows for password protected wikis to manage admittance of a lot of people easily. There's a description of it at http://www.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~gfcoppol/onn/Password_Hierarchy_for_Wikis.html. I know that Wikipedia does not restrict the ability to edit but due to vandalism or irreconcilable differences in bias, many groups making use of this technology could use a good password scheme. One notable example is the Ubuntu Linux User Guide (http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Dapper), that, due to vandalism, needed to incorporate passwords. I don't know enough to write this thing myself. If you have time to read it, can you tell me how I might be most likely to get this implemented? Thanks. gfcoppola@gmail.com --70.29.2.252 03:43, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

Cite.php and the "pipe trick"

Sorry, maybe I should've started a bugzilla report this, but I thought better to ask you first:

The "pipe trick" auto-converts, for example, [[Roger Taylor (author)|]] to Roger Taylor

When enclosing the some between "ref" tags...

...it is again rendered as if enclosed in "nowiki" tags in the references list.

Is this something easy to address, or is this a fundamental issue inherent to the cite.php technology? --Francis Schonken 11:08, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

Patches for Cite.php

I'm just getting started in MediaWiki hacking, so I figured I'd begin with an extension. I ended up settling on Cite.php (not too many choices: am I going to improve MakeBot?). Anyway, I filed enhancement requests at Bugzilla:6199 and Bugzilla:6271, and filed patches for both; the first just added a new error message, the second added a second property to the tags ("group", allowing different sections of references to be grouped separately). I was just wondering if you were interested in reviewing the patches; if not, I figure I'll try locating a bug to work on that's more interesting to the devs. Thanks either way. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 23:48, 12 June 2006 (UTC)

Organic compounds database

Is it posible to create script that will use the values for the parameters of OrganicBox_complete to insert them into a database? This database will allow a new type of search for organic compounds articles (or their "data_page"s - we could make searches based on say molecular weight value/range, occurence of a particular structural element in the formula, pharmacological properties, etc.) and can also have an educational purpose when used to create quizes with a different level of dificulty. Please post your replay on WikiProject_Chemicals. -- Boris 06:04, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

Download your CSS

I absolute love your skinn at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:User_style_Fredrik.png. I have tried changing the CSS on my wiki based on your remarks at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:%C3%86var_Arnfj%C3%B6r%C3%B0_Bjarmason/monobook.css. However it did not work out. Probably because my lake of CSS knowledge. Is it possible to download the whole CSS somewhere Regards Peter Poortinga (pp@poortinga.net)

New User Log - how can I get it?

New User log is not installed in my default wiki 1.7.1 install (that's normal though, right?) and I am wanting to install it. I can't seem to find any documentation on installing it. Is it a simple download and some tweaks? or is it pretty tricky? Either way, I'm interested in it. Any way you could point me in the right direction? Thanks! --Clf23 01:54, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

I can't even find the code for this extension; it's not listed under your extensions on Meta. Any help would be appreciated. :) --Emufarmers 01:31, 28 July 2006 (UTC)

See references in preview

Hi, from reading your userpage I thought I would make a media wiki suggestion. Would it be possible to show the notes/references section when you preview an edit when you edit <ref>'s in a section. With some pages, like List of HIV-positive people, it's inconvenient that one has to edit the whole page to see the changes in the references/notes section. Garion96 (talk) 23:39, 29 July 2006 (UTC)

Never mind...I just couldn't imagine that no one else mentioned it before and I was right. It already is mentioned here. Must have missed it the first time. Still, it would be nice. Garion96 (talk) 23:48, 29 July 2006 (UTC)

Re:Eliminating index.php from the url

First I would like to say "thank you" for all of your hard work with mediawiki, it is amazing how much better you have made wikipedia.

I have a question regarding something you wrote here:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Eliminating_index.php_from_the_url#Yet_another_way.2C_without_mod_rewrite

Due to the way apache works putting this in a .htaccess file in the root path also works:

<FilesMatch "^wiki$">
    ForceType application/x-httpd-php
</FilesMatch>

So if my .htaccess looks like this:

RedirectMatch temp ^/$ http://example.com/wiki

Would I simply replace the:

RedirectMatch temp ^/$ http://example.com/wiki

with:

<FilesMatch "^wiki$">
    ForceType application/x-httpd-php
</FilesMatch>

thanks in advance, best wishes. Odessaukrain 17:36, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

That might work, it worked for me because af some oddities in my apache conf. It probably doesn't work in all apache configurations and versions. I reccomend something less hackish like apache url rewrites. --Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 18:21, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

Hmm...maybe I am doing it wrong, it doesn't seem to work, well, thanks for your response anyway, best wishes. Odessaukrain 21:38, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

eh?

Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_adminship/Ævar_Arnfjörð_Bjarmason Nobody else has appeared to figure it out. Anomo 07:21, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

Four way talks for the 21dec panel

Hi, I'd like to discuss a general outline for the Wikipedia panel as well as other issues.  :)

This is what I have at the moment. Feel free to reply, and at least acknowlege you had seen it.

Just a reminder: The panel will happen in Ankara, Turkey on 21 Dec 2006. --Cat out 17:02, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

That outline looks pretty realistic, I'll have to do further research on flights. For other issues there's IRC, my Wikipedia talk page is not a good place to get timely hold of me, I just stumbled upon this:) -Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 01:19, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

Image copyright problem with Image:Ævar_Arnfjörð_Bjarmason's_desktop.png

Thanks for uploading Image:Ævar_Arnfjörð_Bjarmason's_desktop.png. The image has been identified as not specifying the copyright status of the image, which is required by Wikipedia's policy on images. If you don't indicate the copyright status of the image on the image's description page, using an appropriate copyright tag, it may be deleted some time in the next seven days. If you have uploaded other images, please verify that you have provided copyright information for them as well.

For more information on using images, see the following pages:

• Wikipedia:Image use policy
• Wikipedia:Image copyright tags

This is an automated notice by OrphanBot. For assistance on the image use policy, see Wikipedia:Media copyright questions. 09:42, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

error report

• Hi, sir, I'm studying Mediawiki, and have tried your Newuserlog extension in my newly setup website www.wikiers.net. It works not very well, whever I created a new account, there's always a reminder occored on the top of the sumit page, which says:"......wfnewuserloghook()in ...../extensions/Newuserlog.php on line 46." and several seconds later, the page will return normal. I don't know how to do with it, would you give some advice? thanks!--Test1124 04:54, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

• My second question: how could this edit page shows this bar:File:Editbar.GIF, I mean that the right side 10 tags is not what the Mediawiki default settings. How could you do it? Could I add them on my website? Thanks!--Test1124 04:54, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

I'm not him, but I tried your website to check your version and it's not responding. It's also not using a short URL but the ugly mediawiki default, so that needs to be fixed, plus it's redirecting to some garbled unicode renaming of the main page, which maybe is if you're foreign. Anyway, make sure your mediawiki version is up to date. Some people use real old ones. 1.8.2 is the latest last at this time. I only know of one wiki that actually has it (everyone else is using 1.7.1 still or 1.9alpha for wikimedia's sites)Anomo 05:25, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

Dimmuborgir

Hi; the article about the band Dimmu Borgir says that the band's name means "Misty Castle/Citadel" or "Dark Fortress" and the article Dimmuborgir about the lava formation translates "borgir" as "castle/fortress". Well, I'm trying to learn Icelandic, and to the best of my knowledge, "borgir" is plural. So it would translate rather as "Dark Castles", am I right? Also, my Icelandic dictionary translates "borg" only as "city" and calls a fortress (resp. in German Festung, it's a German-Icelandic dictionary) "kastali". Can you as an Icelander confirm this? I would change the translation in Dimmu Borgir, Dimmuborgir and in the respective German Wikipedia articles to "Dark Castles" resp. "Dunkle Burgen" (German) if "borg" can mean "castle", otherwise to "Dark Cities". Gestumblindi 00:18, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Let me butt in here. Borgir is indeed plural of Borg. Icelandic borg, German Burg, English Borough used to mean a fortified area of some sort, a fortress or a castle. Then many people settled there and it became a city. So the dictionary is correct in saying that the usual meaning of Icelandic Borg is city but certain places the old meaning remains and that applies here. Stefán 18:06, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, Stefán :-). Gestumblindi 18:37, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

The meaning of borgir is somewhat seperate from borg (aside from being a singular/plural form of the same word). Borgir is often used for a certain type of rock formation(s) in Icelandic (see lame image search). I'm no Icelandic linguist but I'd guess that the etymology of Dimmuborgir has more to do with rock formations than it has to do with a city, citadel or some sort of fortified area. Although I'd further speculate that the fortification part is where the usage of borgir for those rock formations came from.

Wouldn't an accurate translation of Dimmuborgir into any given language be dark/shadowy + equivalent word for such rock formations? -Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 11:32, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

Older Version of renameuser for mediawiki 1.6.9 available?

Hi, i have a little problem with my own private wiki. I like to change,. or exactly i have to ;), my Admin Name, but because i am using mediawiki 1.6.9 your renameuser ext. doesn't work. Is there a chance to get an older version of your ext. wich works with 1.6.9? --89.12.245.27 19:43, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Orphaned fair use image (Image:Invisible Pink Unicorn Logo.png)

Thanks for uploading Image:Invisible Pink Unicorn Logo.png. The image description page currently specifies that the image is non-free and may only be used on Wikipedia under a claim of fair use. However, the image is currently orphaned, meaning that it is not used in any articles on Wikipedia. If the image was previously in an article, please go to the article and see why it was removed. You may add it back if you think that that will be useful. However, please note that images for which a replacement could be created are not acceptable under fair use (see our fair use policy).

If you have uploaded other unlicensed media, please check whether they're used in any articles or not. You can find a list of 'image' pages you have edited by clicking on the "my contributions" link (it is located at the very top of any Wikipedia page when you are logged in), and then selecting "Image" from the dropdown box. Note that any fair use images not used in any articles will be deleted after seven days, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. Thank you. --Durin 05:36, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

Replacing inefficient use of LIMIT/OFFSET by querypage

Hi Ævar, I noticed from your edits on #4699 and #2415 that you have an interest in an issue that has been bothering me as well: the current requirement to restrict querycache queries due to the use of LIMIT/OFFSET for paging results. A couple of months ago I submitted a fairly trivial patch (although it requires adding an indexed column to querycache) which would solve this problem, making it cheap to do reads on an arbitrarily large querycache by using indexed range scans rather than LIMIT/OFFSET. But I haven't heard anything back. I understand nobody is getting paid to worry about this stuff, but I'm wondering if you think there is something more I could do to move things along. (It would be great to be able to patrol orphaned articles besides the ones that start with 'A'!) I would be glad to work more on this problem, and other mediawiki issues as well. But I'm finding it hard to get my foot in the door. If you can shed any light on this, please let me know. If I'm bothering you needlessly, please let me know that as well. -- Shunpiker 07:56, 17 March 2007 (UTC)