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This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (technical).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

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Weird glitch

Click on User:Thorwald name, because it takes me to an article on Developmental Disabilities instead of his userpage or is it just me Weaponbb7 (talk) 00:59, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

Did you pipe the link as [[Specia|Thorwald]]? That does work in edit summaries, and the next undo you performed with a similar edit summary has a working link. PleaseStand (talk) 02:07, 27 April 2010 (UTC)
No i didnt bizzare thanx Weaponbb7 (talk) 02:09, 27 April 2010 (UTC)
When you clicked "undo" you first got (or should have gotten) a default edit summary saying Undid revision 358530693 by [[Special:Contributions/Thorwald|Thorwald]] ([[User talk:Thorwald|talk]]). I see you edited the summary field to add an explanation. I guess you accidentally deleted l:Contributions/Thorwald from the default part, reducing it to Undid revision 358530693 by [[Specia|Thorwald]] ([[User talk:Thorwald|talk]]) which renders as "Undid revision 358530693 by Thorwald (talk)". Here "Thorwald" is a piped link to Specia which redirects to Developmental disability. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:40, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

Linking

I only know of two ways to link within a page: HTML ids and the <a> anchor tag. I don't want to use ids and MediaWiki does not support <a>. Am I missing something? ---— Gadget850 (Ed) talk 01:25, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

Headers are automatically given an id, in case you're unaware of that. Algebraist 01:28, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
Have you seen Help:Link#Section linking (anchors) and {{Anchor}}? PrimeHunter (talk) 01:30, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
There is no reason NOT to use ids. Even the html headers in mediawiki use ids now instead of anchors with names. Your browser has to be REALLY old not to understand that. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 02:39, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
IDs should be used for this purpose, indeed. Gary King (talk) 02:56, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
Here's an example of linking within a page using wikitext:
  • link from here
  • to here
Examine the wikitext for details. For more info about this particular construct, see Help:Wiki markup and Template:Wikicite. Other constructs are possible; see e.g. Template:Ref. Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 03:30, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
That method still uses "id", though. Gary King (talk) 03:34, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
That method uses whatever the maintainers of the wikicite template use. Currently, that is id. That will probably remain the case, but there is no guarantee of that. Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 03:41, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
Already looked at the Help page; {{Anchor}} uses ids. I do a bit of work with lists, where lists tend to reuse references multiple times, to the point where the backlinks are ugly and unwieldy. {{Scref}}/{{Scnote}} was designed to resolve this but it duplicates ids, causing HTML validation errors. Perhaps the best solution would be to request a cite.php parameter to suppress backlinks for these instances.
For a very extreme example of the issue with backlinks, see List of allied military operations of the Vietnam War (you may have to do the logout trick to see this page); the article needs other fixes. I am aware of three different requests to expand the backlink labels beyond the current 702. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) talk 04:14, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
In Wikipedia:Featured lists, "General" references are used in situations such as this. See here, for instance: List_of_2010_Winter_Olympics_medal_winners#References. Gary King (talk) 04:52, 24 April 2010 (UTC)
But you can't use page numbers without an inline cite. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) talk 12:41, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

So why don't you want to use ids? This is like saying I want to write a book, but I don't want to use any words. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 16:46, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

Multiple inline cites to the same reference results in duplicate ids, thus invalid HTML. Cite.php automatically generates unique ids for each inline cite— can this be done in a template? ---— Gadget850 (Ed) talk 03:07, 27 April 2010 (UTC)
Ah, I see. Probably not. The template would have to know how many times it is transcluded previously in the page, which is not a feasible calculation. Can you not just supply a unique id via a parameter? {{cite|name=Smith95|id=2}}. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 11:30, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

{{ChemicalBondsToCarbon}}

[1]

Is there a way to remove the space on top of the periodic table?

Please give me a {{talkback}}174.3.123.220 (talk) 18:46, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

Class wikitable is styled with a 1em top margin. Set margin-top:0; ---— Gadget850 (Ed) talk 20:42, 27 April 2010 (UTC)
  • I changed the layout of the blank rows and it now looks good to me. The table is now drawing the top blanks all in the 1st period. I also modified row above the Lanthanides to remove the line that was jutting out to the right of the series. —Ost (talk) 20:53, 27 April 2010 (UTC)
As Gadget suggested, I changed the margins at the top and the bottom to 0. —Ost (talk) 20:57, 27 April 2010 (UTC)
FYI: <center>...</center> is deprecated. See my update to see how this should be done. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) talk 20:59, 27 April 2010 (UTC)
Thanks. I had noticed that and I had seen a script note that it was deprecated, but I'm old school and I had yet to look up the appropriate way to center. —Ost (talk) 21:23, 27 April 2010 (UTC)
It is mostly at Help:Table#Centering tables— that needs some tweaking for IE. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) talk 22:50, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

Extra space

Is there a way to remove the extra space between the columns-of-bullets and the lower bullets?[2]174.3.123.220 (talk) 19:21, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

A {{talkback}} would be appreciated.174.3.123.220 (talk) 20:12, 27 April 2010 (UTC

Sixteen is not a multiple of three, so I changed it to two columns. ―AoV² 04:35, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

Hmm, the space is still there.174.3.123.220 (talk) 06:42, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Newpages-summary

I've drafted a revision of MediaWiki:Newpages-summary, here: User:Rd232/newpages-summary. The discussion motivating it is Wikipedia:Village_pump_(development)#Save_and_Publish_Features. Rd232 talk 20:37, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

Conversion of date formats

Your attendance is cordially requested to a bot request for approval concerning the conversion of dates appearing in certain template parameters from linked or raw formats to a form using {{Start date}}. There's a controversy about whether dates from 1583 to 1929 should be processed. Emily Jensen (talk) 00:55, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

Why is each bar in this timeline so thick?

For the timeline here, how can I make each bar thinner? Gary King (talk) 23:54, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

Since the words does not actually render as selectable text, you might as well just upload your own image. I recommend SVGs as they’re easiest to update and adapt to other languages. In the year 2525 we’ll have some way to generate parameterized SVGs from the template namespace, and flaggedrevs will be only six months away. ―AoV² 00:19, 26 April 2010 (UTC)
Again with the riding of the (mostly volunteer) developers. Developers are part of our community as well in my opinion, and you are to observe WP:AGF and WP:NPA. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 00:59, 26 April 2010 (UTC)
Oh, relax. In the Year 2525 is a song, plus I did not mean to imply that developers are the ones at fault. ―AoV² 03:42, 26 April 2010 (UTC)
I'd be surprised if FlaggedRevs on the English Wikipedia were enabled by 2525. "Deliberate stalling" doesn't begin to cover it. --MZMcBride (talk) 05:33, 29 April 2010 (UTC)
According to mw:Extension:EasyTimeline/syntax you can add a width attribute to PlotData to change the thickness of the bars. Algebraist 01:01, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

Problem with B-class rating

I just rated the articles Autobianchi Primula and Bugatti Royale as B-class, but upon saving the talk pages, it displays C-Class in the project banner and places the articles in the C-Class category. What's going on? --Sable232 (talk) 23:58, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

Probably due to some work that User:MSGJ is doing regarding those banners. I'll inform him of this. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 00:07, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
Suggested fix now available at Template talk:WPBannerMeta#B-class checklist for an admin to implement. -- WOSlinker (talk) 06:49, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
Now deployed. Sorry for the inconvenience. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 06:58, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

Illegal URI characters

I need to provide a reference for the article, but the ref URI contains øvil characters, namely square brackets (hex 005b and 005d). Is there any way around it, so that I wouldn't have to nowiki the entire URI in plaintext? Algkalv (talk) 15:46, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

Yes, replace them with %5b and %5d respectively (URL encoding). :) Amalthea 15:53, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
(ec) You can use an URL Encoder or check out the page on URL encoding for the substitution characters. —Ost (talk) 15:54, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
Arrg, I tried decimal replacement, and mauled the link. Trying hex replacement just didn't occur to me. Thank you! Algkalv (talk) 15:57, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

If you want a machine to do it for you try mw:Help:Parser function#URLENCODE. This may be helpful if you need to encode the value of a template parameter e.g.:

[http://some.url/index.php?foo=bar&something={{urlencode:{{{1}}}}}&whatever=else {{{2}}}]

Otherwise you can use {{subst:urlencode:[x{y}z]}}, etc. for one-time replacement. ―AoV² 16:17, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

Deleting some edits

thumbnail doesn't match image

File:1000-2f.jpg shows a dollar bill that's at a slight angle. Click on it, however, and you'll see a perfectly aligned dollar bill. ie. it appears that the "thumbnail" doesn't match the actual image. Why not? TerraFrost (talk) 18:05, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

I have purged the image on it's Commons description page. If you bypass your browser cache the problem should be fixed. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:09, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

Seeing XfD's in a Category

Is there any way in which say a small icon could be made to display next to the article name in category listings when that article has been listed at XfD? This would be helpful to editors with an interest in the broad subject matter relevant to the XfD, and thus improve the quality of the debates. DuncanHill (talk) 16:41, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

Have a look at User:Anomie/linkclassifier. Happy‑melon 17:54, 27 April 2010 (UTC)
That doesn't appear to do anything, except make all links darker and dimmer. DuncanHill (talk) 00:13, 29 April 2010 (UTC)
You'll have to play around with the CSS to get it picking up AfDs as you would like to to, but I'm 95% sure it can handles them on category pages. Unfortunately I don't have the time to track down the exact line you need, but I use A.deletion:after { content:" (del)"; } in my user CSS. - Jarry1250 [Humorous? Discuss.] 18:49, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Robots.txt is supposed to exclude ANI subpages, but some are still being indexed by Google?

Further to Wikipedia talk:Administrators' noticeboard#NOINDEX subpages?, it appears Google is, for some reason, indexing subpages of Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard (including ANI subpages) [3] despite being excluded by Robots.txt. Can anyone lend any insight into this? –xenotalk 15:38, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

As far as I can see, Google indexes everything page that doesn't contain Template:NOINDEX. All our AN and AN/I archives have the template because Template:Administrators' noticeboard navbox all uses it, so I would guess the pages appearing in Google don't use either template. So, in short, our robots.txt doesn't seem to be working at all. --Conti|✉ 15:43, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
I don't think that's it. For example, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ojtnawi is not no-indexed directly, only excluded through robots.txt, and can't be found via google. Amalthea 19:45, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
On the other hand, Google finds 226 AfDs. Something's not working right. --Conti|✉ 20:16, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
I imagine this is an issue of character encoding with Google not understanding %27. The robots.txt could specify Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard instead? Regards, SunCreator (talk) 21:32, 28 April 2010 (UTC) Not that looking at the AFD list. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 21:35, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

These pages were around before the noindex feature was added to MW. You can't {{noindex}} a page already indexed -- it's akin to locking the barn door after the horse has bolted. You'll have to manually request Google to remove these from their search indexes. MER-C 04:28, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

I don't think that explanation is correct. , As far as I know, Google crawls Wikipedia regularly and removes (or should remove) any pages that have subsequently been marked as noindex. For example, This search returns no results, even though the phrase is used at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Shauri, which was created in September 2005, long before RFA's were noindexed in September 2007. Graham87 06:35, 29 April 2010 (UTC)
What Graham said: each of those exemplary searches found both very old and very new pages. Conti's search for example lists pages from 2004 through seven hours ago. Amalthea 07:30, 29 April 2010 (UTC)
I can confirm that I noindexed a bunch of my pages on other language projects and they disappeared from Google. –xenotalk 18:47, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

selecting which template to use with parser function

I am trying to use the same information in different table layouts.

I would like to create a parser function, using #if, which allows me to choose between using one template or the other. Here are the two templates:

Template:markers1 Template:tables1
(to be used in a larger table) 
{|width="200px" 

|{{{title}}}

|-

|{{{image}}}

|-

{{{issue}}}

{{{d}}}

|}


|-
|{{{title}}}

|{{{image}}}

|{{{issue}}}

|{{{d}}}

I created:

Template:Markersortables, which has both of these templates: 

{{#if: {{{t|}}} | {{Template:tables1}} <!--Parameter 1 is defined and not empty-->| {{Template:markers1}}  }}

So if t is not defined, then the template uses markers1.

The problem is, when I type: 

{{Markersortables|
 | title=The mist
 | image= [[File:Spider.jpg|200px]]
 | issue= 67
 | d = bad fog
 }}

All I get back is: 

{{{title}}}
{{{image}}}
{{issue}}
{{d}}

If I add and define "t", I only get coding also. 

|- {{{title}}}  {{{image}}} {{issue}} {{d}}

I think the best way to approach this, is I need to somehow create the 2 template choices in the main template, Template:Markersortables. But I am not sure how, For example, how do you add a |- or | or {| or |} or paragraph mark for the next line, within a template?

Any suggestions? Thanks in advance. 98.231.142.70 (talk) 07:00, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

The problem is that you're not forwarding the parameters to the other templates. You'd need something like
{{#if:{{{t|}}} | {{tables1{{!}}title={{{title}}}}} | {{markers1{{!}}title={{{title}}}}} }}
Using the templates {{!}}, {{!-}}, {{(}}, etc. you can insert the relevant bits of table and template markup into templates. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 11:14, 29 April 2010 (UTC)
Thank you orangedog, i will try this! 98.231.142.70 (talk) 12:02, 29 April 2010 (UTC)
What if I want to forward multiple parameters to the other templates?
I used this suggested format, and it partially worked! I got this:
For the markers1:
{{markers1|title=The mist}}
For the tables1:
{{tables1|title=The mist}}
I expanded what you showed me, adding multiple parameters:
{{#if:{{{t|}}} | {{tables1{{!}}title={{{title}}}}} {{tables1{{!}}image={{{image}}}}} {{tables1{{!}}issue={{{issue}}}}} {{tables1{{!}}d={{{d}}}}} <!--!--Parameter 1 is defined and not empty-->| {{markers1{{!}}title={{{title}}}}} {{markers1{{!}}image={{{image}}}}} {{markers1{{!}}issue={{{issue}}}}} {{markers1{{!}}d={{{d}}}}} }}
This was the result:
{{tables1|title=The mist}} {{tables1|image=[[File:Spider.jpg|200px]]}} {{tables1|issue=67}} {{tables1|d=bad fog}}
None of the formatting is working, how do I replace {{tables1|title= }} with formatting?
Do I need to change the template in tables1 with {{!}} also? 98.231.142.70 (talk) 12:27, 29 April 2010 (UTC)
You only want one instance of {{tables1}}. It probably would be easier to combine the two templates into a single one that creates the table syntax directly. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 19:33, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Is there a way to make various groups on {{Navbox with collapsible groups}} optional? Meaning, the template is set up with, say 4 separate groups, but, set up the template to have various parameters like group1, group2, etc and if group1=yes, then only show group1?

Maybe the reason why I'm wanting this will explain it better. Take a look at Sam Bradford#External links. Another editor is trying to combine multiple navboxes into one to clean it up a little. I am not convinced his suggestion is the best, so I came up with my own (see discussion here). Only, it has been a bit more difficult to implement than I thought. Taking the Sam Bradford example, there are many college football awards and a lot of times, one player wins a lot of them. So, I am wanting one CFB Award template that has every award. But, when I call the template, I can specify heisman=yes|maxwell=yes|o'brien=yes and then only those groups would show up on the page.

Any ideas?—NMajdan•talk 14:50, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Nevermind, I may have got it.—NMajdan•talk 14:58, 29 April 2010 (UTC)
Too slow, apparently, but I've replied at WT:WikiProject College football#Merging templates. Cheers, Amalthea 15:02, 29 April 2010 (UTC)
Saw that. Thanks. Looks like we had similar fixes. You put your ifeq next to the parameter name, confusing the template. I put mine on the other side of the equal sign, that way, if it is not called, nothing triggers it.—NMajdan•talk 15:06, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

template:Reflist

I want to move (a version of) a section from the article to the talk page. The section has refs, so I have added Reflist at the end of the section on the talk page. I want to limit the Reflist to the refs in that section. Documentation for Reflist suggests two approaches: (1) editing the section to add group="whatever" to all the refs so that those can be displayed as a group -- probably the right approach, but a lot of work, and awkward if editors want to copy bits from this section back to the main article; and (2) adding a parameter to Reflist (e.g., Reflist|close=1) "to force the parser to close previous references". I read (2) to mean that references picked up by Reflist with parameter will not be repeated in any subsequent Reflist. Two questions: (a) is that reading correct? (the doc is not exactly clear!); (b) is there a way to say "start here", other than including a parametrized Reflist ahead of the new section? -- Elphion (talk) 15:01, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

I think you want {{reflist-talk}}. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) talk 23:22, 29 April 2010 (UTC)
Yes, that does the trick, thanks. -- Elphion (talk) 06:18, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

iPhone app error

when browing on the iphone app, when a page is wide (for example List of CSI: NY episodes ) only displays the left side of the page and does not allow scrolling to see the rest of the page (ie, nearly everything to the right of the episode title is not visiable) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.145.148.2 (talk • contribs) 00:56, 28 April 2010

That's Steve Jobs' problem, not ours. By the way, digital restrictions management on the iPhone really sucks, because you can't run anything that isn't cryptographically signed by Apple without risky modifications. For instance, if someone wrote a web browser that displayed Wikipedia articles correctly on the iPhone, you couldn't safely run it. Imagine if your car could only be driven on roadways approved by the manufacturer :( I suggest switching to phone with a freer operating system, such as Moblin. Emily Jensen (talk) 01:09, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
That's some pretty shitty advice for his problem ("not displaying correctly? Get a new phone!"), especially when the official Wikipedia iPhone app not displaying things correctly isn't Jobs' problem. Not only that, but there are half a dozen (at least) Wikipedia-related iPhone apps that could be used as alternatives. EVula // talk // ☯ // 05:03, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
I cant be Steve Job's fault if its Wikipedia's app. Just to point out which app is in question, I have uploaded 2 pictures to show what app is causing the error. --Sghfdhdfghdfgfd (talk) 14:46, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
I don't know what you mean by "only displays the left side of the page". Example of the opposite: http://cl.ly/i82. Judging by the screenshot you posted, your phone is jailbroken and one of the modifications you may have installed is affecting the app functionality, therefore this is outside Wikipedia's area of responsibility. AndreasLengyel (talk) 17:46, 28 April 2010 (GMT)
Didn't I say this problem was caused by the defective nature of the iPhone, and its digital restrictions management? An iPhone can only run applications not cryptographically signed by Apple if it is "jailbroken", which is a dirty hack of the firmware and creates an unstable system, producing all sorts of errors, such as broken web page displays, or worse. By contrast, free operating systems permit you to run any application you like, without creating such a mess. In this situation, "Get a new phone!" is the correct advice (unless we should recommend returning the iPhone to an Apple store, pleading with them to restore the firmware to a virgin condition, and never again running anything that doesn't have Steve Jobs' blessing.) Emily Jensen (talk) 19:05, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
This is hardly the place to rail against the inequities of the iPhone versus open-source solutions. –xenotalk 19:10, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
there has been no problems with my phone since i got it jail broken, anyway, this is about the Wikipedia app, not my phone --Sghfdhdfghdfgfd (talk) 09:00, 29 April 2010 (UTC)
I don't know who develops the Wikipedia app, but I don't think it's us (it's certainly not me... I think) OrangeDog (τ • ε) 11:18, 29 April 2010 (UTC)
Don't use this app, use Safari to view Wikipedia. That is what I do! Regards, SunCreator (talk) 19:11, 28 April 2010 (UTC)
Or even try the new Opera app. It has some advantages over Safari especially for editing (in particular, focuses at the end of the edit box). It also compresses text through a proxy, I believe. –xenotalk 14:54, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

Another References Question

In Liverpool Road railway station the references work. The harvnb citations in the text, link to the Notes which link to the Bibliography. In Castlefield the Notes won't link to the Bibliography. I am suffering from wikiblindness- can someone tell me the difference between the coding- I can no longer see what has changed ? Thanks. --ClemRutter (talk) 22:00, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

The references in the bibliography of Liverpool Road railway station (Manchester) use {{Citation}} which automatically creates the needed anchor for the notes to link to the bibliography. In Castlefield the references mostly use {{cite book}} which doesn't automatically do this. You need to add |ref=harv to make it work, e.g.

{{cite book |last=Woodside |first=Arch et al. |title=Consumer Psychology of Tourism, Hospitality, and Leisure |publisher=CABI Publishing |year=2004 |isbn=0-85199-535-7|ref=harv}}. Dr pda (talk) 22:23, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Castlefield is using a mix of {{citation}} and {{cite xxx}} which should not be done as they use different styles. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) talk 00:36, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
Thanks for the pointers-I'll have a play.--ClemRutter (talk) 07:25, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

End of Special:ListGroupRights

What is the point of

  • Granted right
  • Revoked right

at the end of Special:ListGroupRights ? Only the (currently) granted rights are listed on the page, no revoked rights. Cenarium (talk) 14:38, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

Rights can, in principle, be revoked by adding a group (eg, we could in principle create a 'noupload' group which revokes the upload permission for the users it's assigned to). The explanation message doesn't know that there are no revoked rights set up on this particular wiki. Happy‑melon 14:41, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

New Skin

Just a quick question, because of my intended involvement in Wikipedia:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors/Backlog elimination drives/May 2010 I needed to load a user script to show the Page size button in the sidebar "Toolbox". I was using Monobook, but could not get the script to work in that skin. I tried it in "Vector" and got it to work. (you probably don't need all this information to answer my question but...). Now that I got the Page size to work after clicking page size and looking at the page there are "yellow highlighted" text, I can't figure out why are these areas highlighted ? I am also using a script that highlights the Save Button, Here but I don't think this is involved in my question, the highlighted areas, were there before I loaded this last script. Mlpearc MESSAGE 16:11, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

The script highlights the portions it considers "prose", just for visual verification. Amalthea 16:48, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

Secure server via mobile device

The secure server, when I attempt to access it from my iPod, redirects me to the mobile version of wikipedia, and when I choose to disable or view on the normal site, it redirects me to a page saying invalid target or to the non-secure version of the site, respectively. How can I fix this problem and access the secure server from my iPod? --Ks1stm (talk) [alternate account of Ks0stm] 17:22, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

I'll fix the script to bypass when on the secure server. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:02, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

Please, test my example for Bookmarklet in different browsers

Corrected example must work in all browsers (Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chrome, IE7 and IE8). Please test and report bugs on my discussion page.--Vladislav Pogorelov (talk) 21:09, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Ok Vlad, here are the problems I see:

  • escape() will not work properly for all search terms, and probably gives 400 bad request for every character above U+007F, so I changed it to encodeURIComponent().
  • Using environment variables wgServer + wgScript instead of a string-literal url makes it usable on the secure-login server (and on other mediawiki sites). You’ll want to phrase this section in a way which conforms to WP:ASR, or mark it as such.
  • Where the hell did you get “wiki.phtml”?
  • Syntax highlighting?
  • Spaces around operators?
  • On an unsuccessful search (one with no exact match), the list of results will have css body-class “page-Main_Page” (which hides the title and some other stuff) if you do not specify “title=Special:Search” in the url.
  • Defining a function to use it only once is a form of obfuscation, and it is not justifiable on any other basis as it requires about 20 more characters than does repeating the word “document” three times.

The other potential concern is a browser which de-selects text as you click on the bookmark, causing the selection to be always null. I’m not sure bugs like that still exist, or ever existed outside poorly written w32 ports, but it might be worth checking into. ―AoV² 17:43, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

wgServer/wgScript aren't available on others websites though, so the script would only work inside MediaWiki installations. And the shortcut function was used again later in the script. Amalthea 18:18, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
wiki.phtml was the earlier index.php (like upto 2003 or 2004 or something). —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 00:20, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
I have corrected /wiki/index.php to /w/index.php. PleaseStand (talk) 02:22, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

I have only corrected the old code, it was quite terrible. I don't tried to make real bookmarklet, I have just add cross-browser code. I think example must demonstrate good programming practice, and shall not be a unportable stub, especially in Wikipedia. Thanks to all for corrections/improvements. (BTW: example is really not conform to WP:ASR. Maybe, change site to "http://www.google.com/dictionary..."?) (Function used many times, for all frame and iframe in document, and this code still can't get selection from "input:text" and "textarea" elements, see [4])--Vladislav Pogorelov (talk) 13:09, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

Spaces are not required (but size of bookmarklet are limited), and I have specially wrote code in extremely compact style, as example. I think sentence like "Size of bookmarklets are limited, for example IE 6.0 limit size to 508 chars, and bookmarklets often written in very compact way (omiting spaces etc.)" must be added to article.--Vladislav Pogorelov (talk) 13:09, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

Change server locations

Wikipedia is currently bound by U.S. law. However, if Wikipedia were hosted by the Swedish web host PRQ, this wouldn't be the case, making law-based censorship unnecessary. --75.33.219.230 (talk) 21:46, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

I can't think of anything wittier to say than, "No." Sorry. ╟─TreasuryTag►assemblyman─╢ 21:56, 29 April 2010 (UTC)
Why not? --75.33.219.230 (talk) 11:57, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
Because, while we're not censored, we're still ethical, and have no reason to be breaking the laws this would allow us to circumvent. (Plus, the "protection" didn't work well for The Pirate Bay). OrangeDog (τ • ε) 12:06, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
The Pirate Bay is still around, isn't it? Looks to me like the protection worked fine. Also, if Wikipedia had no reasons to break the laws this would circumvent, there would never be any office actions overriding community consensus (as happened with the Texas Instruments signing key controversy). --J4\/4 <talk> 12:50, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
If you can persuade the board that they want to go to prison for at least a year each and pay our sum of assets as a fine[5], consequently eliminating all our donations and forcing us to shut down, then OK. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 13:00, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
That would only happen if they do anything illegal under Swedish law. As Swedish law is somewhat less restrictive than American law, they would be able to have somewhat more material (though there would still be some prohibited stuff). And in the Pirate Bay Trial, there were significant problems with biased judges, and they've appealed the decision on those and other grounds. The final decision is still years away. --75.33.219.230 (talk) 17:38, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
While I'm not familiar with the Swedish legal system, if its anything like the American legal system, Wikimedia could not afford years of litigation, even if they "win" in the end. Mr.Z-man 17:50, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
Some of our lolicon and related images would be illegal under swedish law. Sweden's law on protected object would also conflict with our articles about millitry topics. As a result Swedish law is unacceptably restrictive.©Geni
Then host Wikipedia on an island in the middle of the ocean, outside the jurisdiction of any country. --75.33.219.230 (talk) 17:56, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
they tend to have unacceptably poor hosting and network setups. Aditionaly if you actualy do anything irritating some country or another will take an interest. Slight lack of unclaimed land left see.©Geni 18:02, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

Previewing or editing log summaries

After participating in the ongoing discussion regarding a feature to allow editing of one's own edit summaries under limited conditions (e.g., last edit to the page made no more than 5 minutes ago), I was prompted to think about a related feature: the ability to preview or edit one's own log summaries. Any thoughts? -- Black Falcon (talk) 20:34, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

Such as what exactly? A lot of log entries are automatically generated, and you can tweak stuff there anyway before committing the edit. However, I also think the parent discussion is a waste of time (it's far too much effort for far too little a payoff), so take my skepticism with a grain of salt. EVula // talk // ☯ // 20:44, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
The summary one enters when blocking, protecting, moving, uploading... It would be good to be able to preview those at least, IMO. While I'm not so much for the editing of edit summaries, administrative log summaries are a different story. I think it might be worth the trouble to allow admins to edit their block and protection summaries for example, due to their sensitivity. A summary made without enough thought for how it might be taken could be rectified. Equazcion (talk) 20:50, 30 Apr 2010 (UTC)
The ability to preview or edit log summaries could be useful, I think, in any situation that involves linking to another page (e.g., a discussion wherein consensus was reached for a particular action). For example, categories that have been merged or renamed are usually deleted, and it is useful to provide in the deletion summary working links to the new category and to the discussion page where the decision was reached. Since this information is added manually (with copy-pasting), there is a possibility for omissions and typos.
If there are concerns about editing of log summaries, I would be perfectly happy merely to have the ability to preview them. -- Black Falcon (talk) 21:05, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

The previous versions of log summaries should be kept on record, though, for transparency's sake. Tisane (talk) 21:22, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

You can preview your edit summaries. Just hit "preview" and the preview of the summary comes out under the Edit summary box. Stephen B Streater (talk) 22:18, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
Of edits, yes, but not of the customizable log entries produced by moves, uploads, blocks, deletions, or protections. Amalthea 22:32, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

Feature request for previewing only submitted; see bugzilla:23376. -- Black Falcon (talk) 02:14, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

italictitle

{{italictitle}}

[6]

Is there someway to make it so that the template doesn't create that extra space?174.3.123.220 (talk) 02:30, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

This appears to be now resolved. Plastikspork ―Œ(talk) 19:51, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

Football team name templates

Why do we have thousands of templates like {{Fb team Bor}}, which transclude e.g. "Bor" a string shorter than, and included in, the template name? Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 09:28, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

They're called by {{fb team}} and used in {{fb match}} and others in tables such as 2002–03 FA Premier League#Results. Nanonic (talk) 11:00, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
Thanks; but why do we need them? Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 11:51, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
Perhaps you should post your question on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Football. It seems that they developed a complex system of various small templates to help standardise football articles. Zzyzx11 (talk) 06:14, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

Editing

Why is it that I can edit all pages, but one specific one, (Trident (gum)), I can't? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Uniocto (talk • contribs)

The page has been protected, due to vandalism, so only autoconfirmed or confirmed users can edit it. - Kingpin13 (talk) 12:24, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

Colon template

Is there some template which finds out if a link needs a colon, i.e. for Files and Categories it needs one, the rest doesn't. This could be useful for some substituted templates, which always leave unnecessary colons in the source, à la [[:Article name]]. --The Evil IP address (talk) 22:49, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

You can use {{Linked}} for that, although I for one don't care about the additional colon. Amalthea 23:04, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

Bot to add Template:Portal

Hi all. I am an user active on it.wikipedia, where I use a bot (it:Utente:AushulzBot) that add it:Template:Portale on the pages (see for example here).
Template:Portal is the English analogous of it:Template:Portale, but I see that in it.wikipedia this template is used more frequently. Because this template attire a lot of readers on portals (as you can see here), I think it's very useful, and I want to activate my bot on en.wikipedia, too, to add the template in all the pages that need it.

  • Can I flag my bot to do it?
  • Then can I add the Template:Portal in all the pages it's needed, or I have to open a new discussion every time I want to add the template for a specific portal?
  • Can you link me all the pages related to Template:Portal that I need to read first?
  • There is a bot that do the same (or similar) work?

--Aushulz (talk) 23:12, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

  1. Get consensus for such a mass addition as you describe, including that this would apply to multiple categories and portals.
  2. Adapt your bot code to work on this wiki. You would have to limit yourself to working in one category of articles at a time since the name and image are different for each portal. {{Portal}} goes in the "See also" sections of articles, and you would have to check the outbound links from the article for any existing link to a portal.
  3. Apply for approval and flagging at WP:BRFA. For a potentially controversial task such as this one, you need to give a link to a discussion that demonstrates consensus in favor of the bot task. They will ask you to perform a trial run. For example, they might ask that you add the template to only 50 pages. If the trial goes well, they will approve the bot and a bureaucrat will give it the bot flag.
For information on our bot policy, please see WP:BOTPOL. PleaseStand (talk) 23:40, 26 April 2010 (UTC)
Thank you for answer. I posted a message here and to WikiProject Engineering, Chemistry and Physics. There is another page in which I have to reach consensus to satisfy point "1"? --Aushulz (talk) 12:45, 27 April 2010 (UTC)
Several wikiprojects have multiple portals, how do you handle these cases? 70.29.208.247 (talk) 04:25, 2 May 2010 (UTC)
I will add the more specific one. --Aushulz (talk) 23:40, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

Animation for large GIF

File:20100503164535!Cycloid f.gif
Cycloid 600px
File:20100503164535!Cycloid f.gif
Cycloid 700px


Since April 2010 animation for large GIF files (thumb mode) don't work. See pictures above. Only sufficiently large parameter Nx can help. LGB (talk) 11:00, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

The first version is thumbnailed, the 2nd version is actual size. Thumbnails are restricted to a maximum of 12.5Mpixels (width x height x frames). See also the pump archives. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:47, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
Before April 2010 everything was OK. LGB (talk) 12:03, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
Depends on your definition of "OK", they scaled client-side and always had to be downloaded full-size. See the many archived discussions, as DJ said, e.g. the this recent one. Amalthea 12:23, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

I've been having precisely this problem with a userbox I made - User:Strdst grl/ubx/bouncing. It uses File:Animexample.gif, which will not scale even though it is less than 12.5 Mpixels. I've noticed the same problem occurs with the same image in the WikiProject Animation template. I got directed here when I raised the issue at the help desk, but I still don't understand the problem with this image. Can I fix the userbox? strdst_grl (call me Stardust) 15:05, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

I fixed it by purging the image description page on the Commons. See: commons:File:Animexample.gif - I clicked the purge tab at the top of the page. The purge tab is put there by going to my preferences on the commons, and then the gadget tab. Then check the box for "Add a "*" tab to the top of the page which lets you purge the cache of the page."
Go slowly insane as you sit and stare...


I purged the image page, and then bypassed the cache on the userbox page (Ctrl-F5 with Firefox). --Timeshifter (talk) 17:29, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
Thank you very much! strdst_grl (call me Stardust) 08:48, 2 May 2010 (UTC)


CONTINUE DISCUSSION

Actual version on watchlist

I'm looking at my watchlist and it's full of rollback / reverts etc. So I can't see the last useful edit. I would find it very useful if the watchlist showed the first edit which resulted in the current version. Then the sorting by date would allow me to ignore all the articles which hadn't change since I last looked. As it is, there is no way of telling which of the numerous recent changes are genuine without laboriously going through every one and checking it through a history diff. Every minor vandalism must be followed by dozens if not hundreds of people checking for changes - a massive waste of time which could be spent improving the encyclopaedia. Stephen B Streater (talk) 20:33, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

Define "last useful edit"; that could be a minor edit or a major edit, and there's no way for the system to know the difference. Checking minor vandalism (your phrasing) isn't the laborious task that you make it out to be; I can check on something and revert it pretty easily enough, and I'd be pretty surprised to find out that hundreds of people were following behind my edits. EVula // talk // ☯ // 20:47, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
The first edit which gave the current version. This excludes all subsequent vandalism and reverts. Stephen B Streater (talk) 22:16, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
If you want to spend the time "improving the encyclopaedia" instead of checking for vandalism, no one is stopping you. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 22:12, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
I can't easily tell whether the article has been changed constructively or not changed at all in fact, so it takes much longer to find actual changes which may lead to engagement and debate about improvements. Stephen B Streater (talk) 22:16, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
Think about how long it would take to find if some last version of the page matches any of the versions before it. You are assuming this occurs, but in reality there often is no previous version that is exactly the same. Thus it is a VERY expensive operation to perform for the servers, because it has to make compares on the last version from now all the way to the 2001 version at the worst. Even if it was limited to just the last 50 versions, it is still a very expensive operation, because it needs to do a diff to check for changes, 50 times. And then it has to do this for each article on your watchlist, every time you view your watchlist. This is simply not realistic performance wise. Sure it can be done, if we double/triple server capacity perhaps, but that simply isn't worth the money. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:51, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
If you are after fast implementation tips I can suggest 2 which turn this into a net saving. The first is that the rollback button flags the version it was rolled back to - not perfect, but trivial computationally. The second is that a hash function for each version is calculated - again a fraction of the time taken to write the new version to disk. A 64 bit hash would be good enough in practice. The time not spent serving unchanged pages would exceed the time spent calculating hashes - a net saving in computer resources. Stephen B Streater (talk) 23:03, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
Well i guess a hash value could be calculated for any new versions, but adding a field to revisions for wikipedia is not a trivial thing I think. It might take a few hours before such a change is deployed. That makes system administrators not very happy to implement such a change. I'm not saying it cannot be done, but i'm saying it is unlikely to be implemented, because the developers just don't see enough value in it. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 23:50, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
Well, the developers haven't been consulted fully, and nor has the community at large. Developers may be more interested when they look into it more. I currently have 22 reverts on my watchlist and I have to go into each one to see what the last significant edit was - this may have just preceded the undone edit. The purpose of the watchlist is to show what has changed, not just an assortment of articles an editor is interested in. With some thought, it could do a better job at doing this by sorting in order of the last genuine change. Stephen B Streater (talk) 12:44, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
Purely curiosity speaking here, but how many items do you have on your watchlist? EVula // talk // ☯ // 14:18, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
I'll have a look... just over 1,000, or about 1 article in 3,000. Stephen B Streater (talk) 14:28, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
The usual way to see useful changes is to see all changes, by making a list of the articles you want and then using the "related changes" tool. The watchlist is not very good at this because, as you say, it only shows the most recent change. — Carl (CBM · talk) 14:26, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
That sounds interesting. How do you use the related changes tool? Stephen B Streater (talk) 14:38, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
I've enabled some Javascript now, and it's starting to look useful, at least on [7]. Stephen B Streater (talk) 14:43, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
You can change that by checking “Expand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent” in your preferences. Svick (talk) 17:39, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
Thanks - that was the last link in the chain I was looking for. Thank you all for your help. Stephen B Streater (talk) 22:10, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

Signbot

Has Signbot stopped working? I seem to be seeing lots of unsigned posts lately, which it isn't coming along and signing. DuncanHill (talk) 13:19, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

It has been down since 24 Apr. Best to ask user talk:Slakr. 14:35, 1 May 2010 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Xeno on an iPhone (talk • contribs)
So asked, but he hasn't edited since the 26th April. DuncanHill (talk) 14:42, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
Yes, he lives up to his name. –xenotalk 17:12, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
One thing that concerns me is that the bot's source code is not publicly available, preventing the start-up of a clone. Of course, even if the source code is publicly available, there can still be problems with that. For example, User:DYKadminBot went down because of the user agent requirement, leading to the complete rewrite as User:DYKUpdateBot. PleaseStand (talk) 18:24, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

Hi. I'm currently using the skin Chick which gives a wide screen view of the page. However, rather irritatingly the search bar is right down the bottom and I have to scroll down to use it. As I gather the people who designed these skins are immune to change (and still haven't changed to vector as standard yet promising they would in late April) could somebody with good programming knowledge please tell me how I can use this skin but programme it in to have the search bar in the top hand right of the page. It seems silly that at the moment there is no wide screen option with the taskbar placed conventially like the vector. In fact would it be possible for the developers to tweak the layout of Chick a little with the taskbar changes? Dr. Blofeld White cat 19:33, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you are asking for, but I did come up with some CSS code for Chick. (I normally use Vector.) It is at User:PleaseStand/chick.css. Take any or all of the lines of the code if you want them. The first one is the search box one you asked for. If you would like my help for any more changes, just ask me. PleaseStand (talk) 01:26, 2 May 2010 (UTC)
Re-reading your post, it is clear what you are looking for. You have a small screen (or small window) and want to have the greatest amount of screen real estate for content, but you want to keep navigation at the top. At User:PleaseStand/hide-vector-sidebar.js is a Q&D script I wrote for you to hide the sidebar in the Vector skin (you can get it back using the option under the arrow next to the search box or with alt-shift-a). Installation is adding importScript("User:PleaseStand/hide-vector-sidebar.js"); to Special:MyPage/vector.js. If you prefer Monobook skin (doesn't seem so), check out User:Gerbrant/hidePane.js, which is supposed to put all navigation into drop-down menus. PleaseStand (talk) 03:12, 2 May 2010 (UTC)
And about the above script, can anyone suggest a better accesskey to use other than "a"? That one doesn't seem to work in Internet Explorer; alt-a opens a menu. In Firefox, however, it is very convenient, especially combined with a fixed sidebar (as in User:PleaseStand/monobook.css, which despite the name, is actually for Vector in my case). PleaseStand (talk) 05:01, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

I use Firefox. I'll see how it looks shortly thanks. Yes basically I want the option to hide the side bar and read articles widescreen and still have the navigation bar in a normal place. In the top right hand corner is the most convenient for me.. Yes that works, thanks for that! Dr. Blofeld White cat 09:53, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

Thumbnails in Category:Images with coins to indicate scale

How do I change Category:Images with coins to indicate scale to show thumbnails instead of text links, like Category:Images with watermarks? --Beao 22:55, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

{{Image template notice}} adds __NOGALLERY__ to suppress the gallery, presumably because there may be non-free images that are not allowed in galleries. That template has an undocumented |free= parameter; if all the images in the category are free, then you can set |free=yes. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) talk 01:52, 2 May 2010 (UTC)
Thanks. --Beao 12:36, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

Ministry of the Military (Ritsuryō)

Can we fix the extra space below the hatnote?

It might have something to do with the templates.174.3.123.220 (talk) 05:51, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

Fixed. — Richardguk (talk) 08:18, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

Name change

Can someone with experience change the name of the article Appomattox Court House to "Appomattox Courthouse." I am have trouble with this since there is already a redirect with this name of "Appomattox Courthouse." Need to apparently DELETE this redirect BEFORE the article can be changed. Help please, thanks.--Doug Coldwell talk 18:00, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

Please see Wikipedia:Requested moves for the correct procedure to use. This isn't necessarily an uncontroversial move, so it will need discussion. — Gavia immer (talk) 18:07, 2 May 2010 (UTC)
Indeed; I've usually seen it spelled "Court House," and that brings up more hits on Google Scholar. Tisane (talk) 18:28, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

Image render failure: SVG containing JPG

Image rendering error: File:SuperDisk voice coil and eject.svg
A not very good JPG rendering of what it should look like. JPEG and reds don't get along for some reason so the red is all blurry and smeary.

A major annoyance with adding illustrative works to Wikipedia is that it is very hard to add annotations to technical images such as boxes, lines, and text.

  • GiMP doesn't support drawing tools. "It's a painting program, duh!" the documentation narrowmindedly proclaims. Oh, but there is a difficult half-a$$ed way to do it with the stroke tool, but this is not a very good option for being able to edit or move the visual markup information later, since the strokes become "baked" into the bitmap.
  • Inkscape does work, and it is possible to import a JPEG, add movable lines to the image, and save as an SVG. The result is also openable with GiMP. But it isn't working here for some reason.

I thought every open file format on the planet would tend to work here, but I guess not.

DMahalko (talk) 19:11, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

The SVG you uploaded contains a reference to the JPG on your computer (as file:///N:/DCIM/100CANON/IMG_2167.JPG), so there is no way for us to access the JPG file (it's not a part of the SVG). Even though you can reference a JPG on the web from the SVG (so that the file contains a reference to http://something), AFAIK, this isn't allowed on Wikipedia for security reasons. Svick (talk) 19:48, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
You can either do an export to PNG from Inkscape (and then convert to JPG using GIMP if desired), or you can choose Extensions → Images → Embed Images from Inkscape to convert the image to a data URI, which does work since the entirety of the original image is inserted into the SVG file instead of merely linked from it. See File:Raffaello Scuola di Atene numbered.svg for the proof. Using the latter option results in Wikipedia's MediaWiki software automatically generating a PNG version while the original SVG is available to allow for editing. PleaseStand (talk) 20:11, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

Test #2

Okay for this I uploaded the JPEG to the Commons, without changes:

Within the commons the actual html file reference is:

So I made a copy of the bad SVG and inserted that html reference in place of the ref to my flash drive:

I then opened it with GiMP and it works! It downloads the image from wikipedia and opens the SVG correctly.

Here is the result, which does not thumbnail correctly:

But if you view the raw SVG and scroll the huge result to the right, you will see it properly displays full-size in a Firefox browser window:


So..... this can work within Wikipedia, but this is not currently supported by the preview renderer.

DMahalko (talk) 23:26, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

I embedded the JPG file you provided into your SVG. Yes, as previously mentioned, this is less than ideal. The entire image must load before the outlines can even be seen, since they are later in the file. To reduce duplication it would be good to allow linking to other files on Commons. Wikipedia currently uses a security-patched version of the RSVG software to generate PNG previews of SVG files (namely, external resource loading is disabled). This would require relaxing the security restriction to allow loading from the upload.wikimedia.org domain but no others. bugzilla:3537 was already filed regarding silent rendering failure, and I have now filed bugzilla:23377 regarding your specific request. PleaseStand (talk) 04:30, 2 May 2010 (UTC)
That doesn't seem like a good idea. What if we ever wanted to change the domain that the image servers use. ? What if someone wants to download the actual image for reuse ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:36, 2 May 2010 (UTC)
Addressing the first point, yes that would require changing the SVG files but should not be hard to automate since SVG files are supposed to be valid XML. Addressing the second point similarly, that should not be too hard to automate either; if necessary, code could parse the SVG files and determine dependencies, which if deleted, we could handle similarly to how we handle template deletions: substitute (embed). In fact, I believe that making common diagrams such as colored-in maps should be as easy for the novice to do as inserting a template into an article, and someone (I don't remember who it is) has a Toolserver program he is working on that will do that. PleaseStand (talk) 19:53, 3 May 2010 (UTC)


EDIT
It appears the embedded JPG within the SVG is the way to go. That makes for a distinct file unit and makes editing it later easier. (Now I just have to figure out how to do file embedding with Inkscape.)
DMahalko (talk) 11:54, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
See my first post at the beginning of the section. PleaseStand (talk) 19:53, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Can floaters be made relative to screen size, not pixels?

If you look at User:Piotrus/Talkheader you'll see my two floaters. They are designed to look nice in 1280x800, but apparently the lower the res, the worse they look, and at low resolutions (800x600) they prevent people from seeing toolbox on my userpage at all. Below is the code I am using (as my talkheader is pretty cluttered :>); let me know if it can be changed so that the floaters will stay the same size for different resolutions. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 01:37, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

{| id="toc" style="margin: 0 2em 0 2em;" ! align="left" style="background-color: #ffd700;" width="100%" | "You have new messages" was designed for a purpose: letting people know you have replied to them. I do not watch your talk page and I will likely IGNORE your reply if it is not copied to my page, as I will not be aware that you replied! Thank you. |}

{| id="toc" style="margin: 0 2em 0 2em;" ! align="left" style="background-color: #ccf;" width="100%" | Please add new comments in [{{fullurl:User talk:Piotrus|action=edit&section=new}} new sections] if you are addressing a new issue. Please sign it by typing four tildes, like this: <nowiki>~~~~. Thanks in advance. |}</nowiki>

Maybe "position:fixed; height: **%; width: **%;", but it seems that it also relates to the font size... --Hat600 (talk) 08:16, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
Uh... maybe you could just remove some of the stuff from the header? Not what you asked for, I realized, but you need to consider what your talk page is for: people communicating with you. It'd certainly look nicer if you didn't have the same information repeated twice on the page (both the "I won't watch your talk page" bit and the new section comment), plus again on your editnotice page. The floaters are totally unnecessary (and aren't any more likely to be read, to be honest; some people are just set in their ways, if you post on someone else's talk page, they won't know to follow up their comments with a note on your talk page).
Totally unrequested commentary, so you're completely welcome to tell me to sod off. :) EVula // talk // ☯ // 17:21, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Help with a table?

Can somebody help me to insert a row into the table at 2010 in film?

I want to insert the following:

| ''[[Casino Jack and the United States of Money]]'' || [[Jigsaw Productions]] || [[Alex Gibney ]] (director) || <center><ref>{{cite web | url=http://www.comingsoon.net/films.php?id=62724 | title=Casino Jack and the United States of Money| publisher=comingsoon.net | accessdate=2010-05-03 }}</ref></center>

at May 7, just below Babies, but when I do that, the formatting for Solitary Man, two rows down, comes out malformed. I know that the rowspan=3 needs to be changed to rowspan=4 just above Babies, but that isn't fixing my problem.

What am I doing wrong? Everard Proudfoot (talk) 20:44, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Done, you have to change the appropriate rowspans too. Svick (talk) 21:07, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
Oh, I see. I missed that one. Thank you. Everard Proudfoot (talk) 21:16, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

JavaScript - renaming tabs.

I am having some problems modifying the Wikipedia UI using JavaScript. I am an experienced software developer, but have never used JavaScript, so I am just coding by example and have probably made a rookie mistake. I am hoping someone can help.

I am trying to rename some of the tabs at the top of Wikipedia pages. The code I am trying is at User:JPMcGrath/vector.js. I based this on MediaWiki:Gadget-addsection-plus.js, and I have included that code in my vector.js file. That code works, changing the "new section" tab title to "+", but my new code to rename other tabs does not.

Thanks in advance for your help. -- JPMcGrath (talk) 22:54, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Your renameTab function works for me in monobook and vector (if I remove the document.write line). Have a look at User:Ioeth/friendlytabs.js too, it does pretty much that. And most importantly, use Firebug for javascript debugging if you don't already.
Cheers, Amalthea 23:12, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
Concerning rookie mistakes, you don't just need to bypass your browser cache, do you? Amalthea 23:18, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
I think I was clearing the cache correctly. With Firefox, I have a "Clear Memory and Disk Cache" button on my toolbar, and I was using that. Regardless, it is working correctly now. Thanks for your help. -- JPMcGrath (talk) 23:52, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

I notice that DumZiBoT hasn't made any edits since 2009. Are there any bots with similar functionality operating at this time? I think it was a useful tool. Tisane (talk) 23:05, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

What happened in March 2009?

http://stats.grok.se/en/200903/Special%3ASearch Did people just stop using wikipedia as much. Or did whatever counts as special:search change? Every month before it's like 15 million a day and every month after it's like six million a day. The change happened on March 25 and March 26. Please leave me a message as I'll forget to look for this. WAIT, I can just watch this page... Daniel Christensen (talk) 23:11, 2 May 2010 (UTC) I would also like to point out that very recently I've noticed a significant drop in editin in general. I have made several new pages that got no attention like new pages usually do. And the related changes thing on my userpage is only a few edits per day even though my userpage is full of links to suppossed high traffic articles. I think there's been quite a drop in editing as well as perhaps traffic in general. Daniel Christensen (talk) 23:13, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

I noticed on a list of most highly trafficked pages recently that there are two entries for Special:Search, so maybe that's the explanation. Rich Farmbrough, 10:12, 3 May 2010 (UTC).
This shows edits per day are decreasing, and since the number of articles has increased, that further dilutes the number of related changes. Also we have removed several zillion low value links in the last year. Rich Farmbrough, 10:30, 3 May 2010 (UTC).
Regarding the first point, it was 99% certainly the result of the code update that got pushed on the 25th/26th of March 2009 (a massive great big one, in fact). It included so many updates it's hard to trak down the exact one, but obviously it was something involving how Special:Search was run. - Jarry1250 [Humorous? Discuss.] 19:33, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
I've noticed that my watchlist is massively quieter than it used to be, even though it's got 3 times as many pages on it as it did a year or so ago. DuncanHill (talk) 19:40, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
Abuse Edit filter maybe? - Jarry1250 [Humorous? Discuss.] 19:43, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
Could be, I do see less IP vandalism than I used to, but I get the feeling that I see fewer good edits too, and certainly far fewer new good editors. DuncanHill (talk) 20:14, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
I've noticed that in general, Wikipedia editing seems to be a more solitary experience than it used to be. I think we've probably lost a lot of people due to the increased stringency of standards on WP:RS (and, by implication, WP:N). You can't get away with as much as you used to be able to. Pretty much everything you write has to be thoroughly sourced; and they can't just be any sources, they have to be what Wikipedia considers reliable sources. I think a lot of people just don't feel like putting in all the work required to do all those citations. Plus there are a lot of topics for which there aren't enough reliable sources to make the article pass WP:GNG, so people aren't able to cover their favorite topics. One could say that we've made progress as far as respectability and reliability are concerned, but it hasn't been without a cost. The empirical studies show that more and more effort is being consumed by "meta" stuff (e.g. edits in the Wikipedia namespace), so if you hang out mostly in mainspace, that could be part of the explanation. Tisane (talk) 09:20, 4 May 2010 (UTC)
Yeah I agree Tisane I've noticed it too. No doubts we've scared off thousands of potential editors with our "policies". Dr. Blofeld White cat 09:39, 4 May 2010 (UTC)
It's actually really ridiculous in fact it's just dumb. And a lot of the stuff that is allowed is allowed to be wrong. One example I've noticed a lot recently is all the lists of tallest buildings articles which mostly all rely only on emporis which is often wrong except for on the tallest or most publicized buildings. Daniel Christensen (talk) 23:02, 7 November 2010 (UTC)

User creation log on Recent changes list for a template

When I look at the list of recent changes to pages that link to or transclude {{portal}} ([8]), entries from the user creation log are shown there. Does anybody know why? Svick (talk) 15:54, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

Having looked at this a bit, and been quite puzzled by it, I've concluded that the answer is "because viewing related changes is useless for heavily used templates". What you're seeing is changes to every page linked from a page that transcludes {{portal}} (there are tens of thousands of transclusions, at least). Apparently, user creation is considered a change related to the user page of the user created - so if someone creates a new user account, immediately comments on a talk page that contains {{portal}}, and signs properly (or SineBot adds a signature, or some other editor adds {{unsigned}} - then the user creation will be considered a recent change to a page linked from a page that transcludes {{portal}}, and you end up with user creation logs in the related changes listing. Hope this helps. — Gavia immer (talk) 16:44, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
I don't think that explains it, because the users that are listed there didn't make any contributions and nothing links to their user or talk page. Svick (talk) 16:59, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
Maybe it's because one or more of the pages that use {{portal}} transclude the RecentChanges list with syntax like {{Special:RecentChanges/50}}. Graham87 02:39, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Revision history

When I look at the revision history of an article I can click on contributions (contr) only from registered users. IP users only show talk and block. Did something recently changed? Garion96 (talk) 16:17, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

I'm not sure if this is new (these old bones have a hard time keeping up with all these damnable changes), but the contributions for the IP can be viewed by clicking the IP itself. –xenotalk 16:23, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
Now I am doubting myself. :) I think it's new though, I used to only click on the IP address itself after rollback. Garion96 (talk) 16:29, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
No, that behaviour has not changed recently. It was introduced in July 2002. Graham87 02:30, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

deletion

Resolved

I need both my monobook .js and my vector .js pages deleted. I just started building my scripts and some are not working and I would like to start fresh. I posted speedy tag "by author" but because of it being that type of page, it looks like it's not posting to admin's page, if I'm wrong let me know and I'll re-post Thank you Peteypaws (talk) 18:43, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

There is no need to delete them, just blank them, wait a minute and then bypass your cache. Svick (talk) 18:49, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
On the off-hand chance that there was something in those scripts preventing you from blanking them, I've done it for you. Like Svick said, blanking serves the same purpose as deleting them. Just bypass your cache and you're good to go. EVula // talk // ☯ // 19:13, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
  • Thank you I will try again, I know I could of blanked the pages, I was thinking that the page itself might be the problem. Thanks I'll give it another try Peteypaws (talk) 19:30, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
  • Now it stopped working, My husban's works fine User:Mlpearc. We use two computers a laptop and desktop his work fine on both, I don't know if you guys could take a look and see if you can tell whats wrong. What I need to work is link classifier and hot cat, I would like to have it in both monobook and vector but vector would be my first choice. So if you can't help me out I'll keep working on it. Thanks Peteypaws (talk) 22:58, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
In this edit to your monobook.js and this edit to your vector.js you added a script that you copied from the wikitext of some page; when you did that, you copied part of the markup that was being used to format it. If you remove the text "lang=javascript>" from where you introduced it in both files (use the diffs for reference), they should work fine. — Gavia immer (talk) 04:21, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

pages with a slash in it: how to create the talk page? Is this a bug?

I suspect this is really a bug report, but I'm hoping it's something people have come across before and can identify as a bug or something that I'm doing wrong. Wikipedia:WikiProject Oregon has an article named Washington/Southeast 12th Avenue. The talk page should be Talk:Washington/Southeast 12th Avenue. However, that talk page appears to be a subpage of Talk:Washington. That means the navigation back to the article is incorrect, and changes to the talk page don't appear on a watchlist for someone who is following Washington/Southeast 12th Avenue.

It's fairly easy to test that things aren't correct with this. Simply add Washington/Southeast 12th Avenue to your watchlist and make sure Washington is not on your watchlist. Now, change Talk:Washington/Southeast 12th Avenue. That change will not appear on your watchlist.

Is this a known bug? Has anyone come across it before? tedder (talk) 19:08, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

It's a known bug - Wikipedia:Naming conventions (technical restrictions)#Other problematic characters. Nanonic (talk) 19:25, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
Excellent- thanks Nanonic. I figured I wasn't the first person to notice, but we couldn't find evidence of it. That link is what I needed. tedder (talk) 19:28, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

API question

The question is at WT:US#User:PleaseStand/prevnext.js, having to do with the "all pages" list as returned by the MediaWiki API in JSON format. Please respond there. PleaseStand (talk) 00:46, 6 May 2010 (UTC)


Inline template wikitext formatting

Please take a look at Wikipedia:Centralized discussion/Citation discussion#Inline template wikitext formatting and comment, when you have a chance to do so. Thank you. 08:54, 20 February 2010 (UTC−5)

PERL UTF8 and magic characters

When I make a list of, in particular, article names, using a UTF8 compliant app, then open it in an ascii editor I will see a few bytes of apparent cruft at the beginning. Presumably these are equivalent to a magic number that says "this is UTF8". However when I open it in PERL using UTF8 this is picked up as pollution in the first line. I could write a cliché to strip it off, and probably will, but it seems odd that I have to worry about it in PERL. Am I missing something? Rich Farmbrough, 10:10, 3 May 2010 (UTC).

This is the byte order mark, that may or may not be present in UTF-8 files. Apparently, there is a Perl module File::BOM to handle it. Svick (talk) 11:02, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
(edit conflict) It's called the byte order mark, and despite its name, it is used in UTF-8 exactly as you describe. One well-known program that adds the BOM to saved UTF-8 files is Windows Notepad. Even when opening the input file in UTF-8 mode (as it should be), Perl treats the byte order mark as a character, and it is possible to write a Perl script to remove it. PleaseStand (talk) 11:16, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
That is because the byteorder marker is a character. Just one with special meaning and that should be handled as a space character of zero width. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:21, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
Exactly, although according to the Wikipedia link, that is deprecated usage, except when it is at the beginning of the file and has the special meaning. Assuming the text file has been typed in and saved (without catting files together, etc.), it should be sufficient to discard the first three bytes (or first character) of the file if they are the BOM. PleaseStand (talk) 20:02, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
It is not allowed to use it as a zero-width non-breaking space, but it should behave like one (specifically because it was allowed before unicode 3.2). —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 23:48, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
Thanks for the notes, I have coded around it to some extent. I suppose I will have to capture the numerical value form the Wiki article and throw it out if its the first character, to be reasonably robust. Rich Farmbrough, 09:13, 6 May 2010 (UTC).

ifexist returns wrong value for files

File:Barack Obama signature.png and Talk:Barack Obama clearly both exists.

However, if I write 

*{{#ifexist:File:Barack Obama signature.png | Exist | Does not exist }}
*{{#ifexist:Talk:Barack Obama| Exists | Does not exist }}

This yields

  • Does not exist
  • Exists

Help? Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 17:14, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

Ah, you had me there for a minute. Failed assumption: File:Barack Obama signature.png does not in fact exist on Wikipedia, which is all #ifexist knows about. It is a file from the Commons. I don't think there's any way to detect if there's a Commons file. Rd232 talk 17:24, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
Though, there could/should be... after all the software knows to turn the wikilink blue...! Rd232 talk 17:30, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
Not sure why this works, but it does:
*{{#ifexist: Media:Barack Obama signature.png | Exists | Does not exist }}
  • Exists
—NMajdan•talk 17:21, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
I just tried a quick test with two other files, one from commons, and one from WP. I got "not exists" for the commons one and "exist" for the WP file.--SPhilbrickT 17:25, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
Oops, I see that I am too late.--SPhilbrickT 17:27, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
Interesting. Help:Namespaces#-2:_Media says Media: works differently from File:, even though it looks the same if you go to the page title... Anyone know more about that? Rd232 talk 17:29, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
Compare: File:Barack Obama signature.png vs. Media:Barack Obama signature.png... Not sure why it works for the "ifexist" versus file or image. –xenotalk 17:43, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
The code for {{#ifexist}} explicitly tests for the Media prefix, but not for File prefix. So I created T25412. For File, it tests whether the description page exists on this wiki, so it doesn't work if the file is on commons. Svick (talk) 17:44, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
Hm- this may be by design. Since if it's on the commons, the description page doesn't actually exist here. If your bug is fulfilled, then there would be no way to test if a description page exists here where it also exists on commons. –xenotalk 17:47, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
Ha, it's actually documented: mw:Help:Extension:ParserFunctions##ifexist. Svick (talk) 17:53, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
Serves us right, trying to figure things out from first principles rather than just rtfm'ing. –xenotalk 19:00, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
To be fair, you are usually fairly safe in the assumption that the relevant section of the manual is either incomprehensible, wrong or hasn't yet been written. This just happens to be a rare exception. Happy‑melon 23:14, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Setting up my Private wiki to reflect wikipedia's settings for experimental purposes

What do I need to set my private wiki to reflect the same settings as Wikipedia, such as User Rights and other core settings, this way I can experiment with new concepts and suggest as necessary any which I think would be useful to have on wikipedia. ThanksPaul2387 13:57, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

Most configuration files can be founder here: http://noc.wikimedia.org/conf Next you need a lot of time. And for true emulation a serverpark, separate sql servers, a few hundred squid servers etc etc :D —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:02, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
Maybe also see mw:Manual:Using content from Wikipedia. Tisane (talk) 00:35, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
Or test.wikipedia.org Rich Farmbrough, 09:18, 6 May 2010 (UTC).

Very slow loading

Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Trains is very slow to load on my computer. I get my browser's "Waiting for en.wikipedia.org" for nearly 30 seconds before anything even appears on the page. It's not that huge of a talk page so I don't know why it's so slow. Ten Pound Hammer, his otters and a clue-bat • (Many otters • One bat • One hammer) 12:01, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

It's the (collapsed) railway diagram in WT:WikiProject Trains#Réseau Breton diagram that takes ages to render. Amalthea 14:32, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

inputbox / preloadtitle ?

mw:Extension:InputBox

is it possible to set a default &preloadtitle using <inputbox> ? –xenotalk 15:49, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

You mean like this? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 16:34, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Yes...Not sure why it didn't work when I tried it like that! I was using comment and not commentttitle. Thanks. –xenotalk 19:03, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Sign-Bot doesn't like my tildes??

Several times I make edits (it may even happen to this one and put four tildes (NetScr1be 15:54, 6 May 2010 (UTC)) at the bottom on a line by itself.

The signature info is there with a whole bunch of sign-bot info after it.

I can go back, delete the sign-bot stuff leaving the signature info and everything's OK.

My signature info shows up on the preview.

Am I doing something wrong?

Have I triggered sign-bot's resentment module somehow?

<four tilde's below> NetScr1be 15:54, 6 May 2010 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Pboake (talk • contribs)

The problem is that you have no internal links in your signature as required by the guideline: Wikipedia:SIG#Internal links. This is especially important seeing as how you are signing with a name other than your username... –xenotalk 15:59, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
Thanx for the prompt response. I found [How to fix your signature] and hopefully it works now.

NetScr1be (talk) 18:24, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Yes, looks good (though I would suggest putting your signature on the same line or same indent level as your post). –xenotalk 19:02, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Show/hide in infoboxes

I'm having difficulty adding show/hide functionality to infoboxes at the top of articles, specifically at iPhone. Copying PlayStation 3, I jury-rigged iPhone using raw div classes (that I don't really understand). This took some trial and error with the show preview button, and I found that {{show}} and presumably {{hidden}} do not work, and that I can only hide one header (Connectivity, CPU, Input, etc.) per copy of code. I would like to hide several consecutive headers all tied to a single show/hide switch. Is this possible? And as a side question, is it possible to make adding this functionality easier? Thanks, HereToHelp (talk to me) 16:36, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

This is an interesting idea, and something we could maybe think about adding to the meta-template Template:Infobox if there was enough demand for it. Perhaps it's worth starting a discussion on the template talk page? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 16:41, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
Ok, see discussion thread. HereToHelp (talk to me) 16:47, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Anonymous users creating talk pages

I know that anonymous users can't create articles. I know that they have to be able to create talk pages if they want to comment on an article. But a problem that I'm seeing is that IP addresses create a talk page with no corresponding article and dump content there. And it can lie there undetected for a really long time.

Is the following a plausible idea: a way to prevent IP addresses from creating talk pages for articles that don't exist? As far as I know, this wouldn't interfere with WP:RA or WP:AFC. ALI nom nom 16:04, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Would an IP editor know to go to those pages? EVula // talk // ☯ // 16:15, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
Well, they do. I've tagged a bunch of no-article talk pages created by IP addresses. Most of them resemble articles that would normally be deleted via CSD. My best guess is that they create them in talk page space to avoid being caught and tagged. ALI nom nom 16:20, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
How about preventing any user for creating a talk page for an article that doesn't exist? I can understand keeping records of AfD discussions on talk pages, so editing an existing page is ok, but blocking creation, since I can't think of a legitimate use for it. HereToHelp (talk to me) 16:41, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
There are a few I can think of - if the page was deleted first, if the title is salted and an editor/IP wants to make an article or redirect, or if an editor wants to contest a speedy deletion after the fact. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 16:46, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
Also, this. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 21:43, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Tons. As a (less-active-than-I-should-be) member of AfC I sometimes try to view them in that light - toss a tag up on 'em, move 'em to the WT namespace, the review 'em if I can. Still, that can easily end up confusing for IP contributors who can't follow what happens, plus is often backlogged as is. The article wizard states it pretty clearly, I thought, but maybe a tweak could be made. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 16:43, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
Talk pages are not indexed by search engines, and MZMcBride has a database report listing those pages with some admins (Amory, for example) regularly going through them and handling them appropriately, so it's not that much of a problem. Amalthea 18:51, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
On enwiki talk pages are indexed. Only on dewiki talk pages are are excluded. On enwiki only user talk pages have noindex in robot policy. Merlissimo 23:26, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
Oh, okay. It might be that the ones that I caught were just missed with the rest of them, then. Perhaps this isn't such a pressing need. ALI nom nom 19:28, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

JavaScript: dontcountme

I have seen a LOT of user scripts using "dontcountme=s" when importing JS and I can't find any documentation about it. What does it do? --Locos epraix ~ Beastepraix 07:09, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

It does nothing and safely can be removed. PleaseStand (talk) 11:15, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
Thanks for your reply. --Locos epraix ~ Beastepraix 20:12, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

Please {{talkback}}

[9]

Is there a way to remove the whitespace below ==History==?198.161.203.6 (talk) 17:12, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

No. That's the spacing applied below a lvl 2 heading, plus the spacing above a lvl 3 heading. It's determined by the skin. If you want it to look less spacious then put some text in there. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 19:08, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

Database lag

Resolved
 – Lag is now back to zero. PleaseStand (talk) 00:07, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
  • Blame flagged revs.
    Blame flagged revs.
  • Panic!
    Panic!
  • Cookies for everybody!
    Cookies for everybody!

...approaching 400 seconds. Equazcion (talk) 21:26, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

...530... Equazcion (talk) 21:29, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
Not again! NOT AGAAAAAAAAAINN!!! OrangeDog (τ • ε) 21:30, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
I actually kind of like it. It's like a city in a blackout. Chaos and good humor abound. Equazcion (talk) 21:31, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
1,000 seconds! Woohoo! Equazcion (talk) 21:37, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
1,333. I think we need to get the button out again. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 21:42, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
We are now above 1500 s (25 min) (current lag). Do any flagged-rev haters want to blame the recent software update? PleaseStand (talk) 21:45, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
This is no time to place blame. Just get out the candles and sing camp songs! Kumbaya, my lord... Equazcion (talk) 21:48, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
Aww, but I wanna blame the recent software update! (It really does look like it broke something, btw). — Gavia immer (talk) 21:55, 6 May 2010 (UTC
The update was over 2 hours ago, and the lag is only about 30 minutes old... Equazcion (talk) 22:06, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
(edit conflict) I'd only panic if the server lag reached over 9,000 seconds, but that's just me. — ξxplicit 22:07, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
On its way. Past 3000 already. Plus, a software update can easily break long after it's applied. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 22:13, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
  • "Due to high database server lag, changes newer than 3,675 seconds may not appear in this list." Dear god...it is the end of...everything. SilverserenC 22:25, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
...4000... OrangeDog (τ • ε) 22:28, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
Well, it's nice for vandals 'cos we cant see what they've been up to on our watchlists. DuncanHill (talk) 22:31, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
I KNOW! D: *panics* SilverserenC 22:32, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
It's all over, people! We don't have a prayer! Equazcion (talk) 22:36, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
...5000... OrangeDog (τ • ε) 22:44, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
It's coming down now. *whew* Equazcion (talk) 22:51, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
Heh - the first post in this thread just shewed up at the top of my watchlist :) DuncanHill (talk) 22:51, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

...slowly, but surely... SilverserenC 22:55, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Someone booked a bad trade... pushed 'b' instead of 'm' . . .  7  22:57, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
We're safe... until next time. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 23:00, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
Couldn't you all have rode out the storm by listening to some Deftones? --Dylan620 (contribs, logs) 23:09, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
I busied myself with some dabbing, thus missing out on the flaming row I had been intending to have with some admins elsewhere. DuncanHill (talk) 23:25, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
Maybe someone's making some coin on the side by renting out the servers to the NYSE on an emergency basis - whenever they have a high server load.--SPhilbrickT 01:43, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

Now that brings up an interesting idea. When the lag balloons like this, should we have an automatic semi-protect on all pages? It would largely protect the project from vandalism while also drastically limiting the growth of the backlog. LeadSongDog come howl 16:44, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

Well the lag usually happens because a database gets locked open. Don't know whether you'd be able to semi everything if that happens, or even if would make things worse.
We can still edit during a lag. I have a feeling protection would still be possible too, though I'm not entirely sure. The lag seems to only affect database listings, like recent changes, contribs, and watchlists, from what I know. Equazcion (talk) 19:47, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
I also don't know whether every lag is for the same reason, or if different databases get stuck, and whether this would have different effects. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 20:28, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
The Wikipedia database is replicated between a master and seven slaves. All writes go to the master, so if that's up, you can make changes, and if it's not, you can't (and people start screaming). Whenever you need to read some data, for instance to display a watchlist, it's retrieved from one of the slaves; there is a load-balancing system to try to ensure that they get reasonably equal traffic. Database lag usually happens when a single intensive process hits one of the slaves: the database dump thread is a major player in that respect. The single process can't be spread amongst the slaves so it hits just one heavily, causing it to get overloaded and lag. If the slave is at the same time asked to serve a watchlist, the data will be out of date by however long the server is lagged. Happy‑melon 03:36, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

Offline copy of Wikipedia

In light of recent events, I am interested in making and maintaining an offline copy of Wikipedia in case Wikipedia, such a useful resource, were to shut down. I know that I will need to set up MediaWiki and MySQL on my computer, but what are the best ways to get as complete an archive as possible (at least the latest revision of each article's text and possibly the revision history and linked images) within the amount of disk space I can reasonably afford and keep it up to date? There exist database dumps of articles, but they are only released infrequently, with no incremental updates. And I do not know of any "image dump" that exists. PleaseStand (talk) 21:09, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

I don't know what "recent events" you are referring to, but Wikipedia isn't going to shut down. ╟─TreasuryTag►Captain-Regent─╢ 21:10, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
Namely the Sanger Allegations, as well as the fact that sooner or later, Google will no longer financially support us. (I have no desire for porn, and I am still interested in storing article text even if I cannot retain images.) PleaseStand (talk) 21:34, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
My understanding was that PleaseStand might want to retain a copy of Wikipedia's current content, in case additional drastic policy rulings (perhaps specifically in the censoring department) change the content significantly. I could be wrong. Equazcion (talk) 21:39, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
To some extent that is true, but web sites go down all the time, so that is not my only concern. (I actually do, however, agree with the deletion of questionable images, especially when they are useless to the project.)
Google will no longer financially support us? As far as I know, Google only started giving us any significant (i.e. enough to warrant a press release) financial support this year. Mr.Z-man 23:15, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

Let's try again

How do I make a reasonably complete copy of Wikipedia (no images needed) that

  1. undergoes a complete update at reasonable intervals (whenever a new database dump is released)
  2. allows manual archiving of content on-demand (including images if desired)
  3. retains content even if it is deleted from Wikipedia (don't need every single revision)
  4. has to work on a standard desktop PC with at most 1 TB of storage for the database (for the first three years or so)

PleaseStand (talk) 22:47, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

Check WP:DUMP. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 23:30, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
Is there any reason why, say, Bazpedia wouldn't suffice? I take it you want images, but I don't think you'll be able to keep it under 1 TB if you include not only the Wikipedia images but also the Commons. Tisane (talk) 23:42, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
If you're asking whether a single program for all of this already exists, the answer is no. There is a program to import database dumps - mw:Manual:MWDumper. As far as I know, there's no program for on-demand archiving of a wiki page. If you just want an HTML copy of the page, you can just save it from a browser or use something like wget. If you want something that will mirror it into a local wiki, you'll probably need to write it yourself, to use the API to get the wikitext and image info. Whether it will fit onto 1 TB, I have no idea. Current versions only with no images should probably fit, but if you don't delete old versions when you update, it may start to fill up, depending on how often they release new dumps. Before they restarted the full history dumps, they were doing new ones nearly once a week IIRC. Mr.Z-man 23:40, 7 May 2010 (UTC)


Edit conflict I suppose this is over old Jimbo? Well the full history of all pages dump is 5.6 TB decompressed xml blob. For just current revision of articles its something like ~20 GB. Images are not available, but it seems to be about 8 TB (not compressed). The text is available at http://download.wikimedia.org — Dispenser 23:43, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
According to the latest download page, 4/16/2010, current versions total 10.9GB. Equazcion (talk) 23:59, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
I already knew that since I downloaded that dump for use with AWB. It is now almost two months old. PleaseStand (talk) 00:48, 8 May 2010 (UTC)
PleaseStand, I am working on a project that should fulfil your requirements. I expect to launch it within a month or two. Tisane (talk) 03:55, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

Website screenshots

I was just wondering how screenshots such as these are generated and was also wondering why they aren't very widely used on Wikipedia, screenshots like these have great encyclopedic value IMO, though I'm guessing it has something to do with copyright issues. Jeffrey Mall (talk • contribs) - 00:04, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

I would think that the majority of these are made by taking screenshots of the screen using basic keyboard functions (Print Screen on Windows, Command-Shift-3 on Mac OS X, etc.). Once taken, the image can be pasted into an editing program such as Paint and then be cropped and finally saved as an image. To get a full-length view of a long webpage using this method, multiple screenshots of the webpage can be taken and then just stitched together. That's how I would do it, at least. There may be certain plug-ins/add-ons for browsers such as for Firefox that also accomplish this easier. As for why it isn't common: people are probably too lazy (like me), unaware that articles can have screenshots of the homepage (I was unaware for a while), or perhaps they just don't know how. ~SuperHamster Talk Contribs 00:57, 8 May 2010 (UTC)
Additionally, you can look at Screenshot for more info. ~SuperHamster Talk Contribs 00:58, 8 May 2010 (UTC)
Using simple Google search, I found thumbalizr that seems to work fine. Svick (talk) 01:03, 8 May 2010 (UTC)
It is possible to take a seamless screenshot of an entire web page without installing any special software. PleaseStand (talk) 04:08, 8 May 2010 (UTC)
Take them separately and stitch them together in Paint, or whatever editor you have. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 21:32, 8 May 2010 (UTC)
Exactly. The bookmarklets are meant to eliminate the scroll bars and accurately scroll the page, eliminating overlap to make stitching easier. PleaseStand (talk) 22:07, 8 May 2010 (UTC)
Ah sorry, I read that as "is it" rather than "it is". OrangeDog (τ • ε) 22:17, 8 May 2010 (UTC)
Very insightful answers, thanks! Jeffrey Mall (talk • contribs) - 23:02, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

Will someone merge histories

Initially, the list of cutaneous condition was found at a different location than it is now. Initially, the list was found at what is now called "cutaneous conditions." However, after various moves and renames, the list if now at "list of cutaneous conditions." However, the history of the list is fractured, and I wanted to know if someone could tidy up the histories somehow? If that is even possible? Basically, I would like to see the history of edits starting from here to here moved over to the beginning of the history of the list of cutaneous conditions. Is that possible? I just want to be able to track the history of the development of the list in one place. ---kilbad (talk) 17:18, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

No, because the resulting diff makes no sense at all. Also, cutaneous conditions is its own article with a long history, and it should not have its history fractured. If you want, use a talk page message to indicate attribution, using a template such as {{Copied}}. Graham87 03:21, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

Is it possible to find...

Is it possible to find the number of new pages created within a certain time frame which are within the scope of a particular project. Restated, and more specifically, if I wanted to know how many new dermatology-related articles had been created since Nov 08, how could I find that out? Could I use the derm assessment data somehow? ---kilbad (talk) 19:05, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

1843. There is 1843 articles whose talk pages are in Category:Dermatology task force articles and that were created on 1 November 2008 or later. If you want, I can give you a table of all the articles from that category with their creation dates. Svick (talk) 21:09, 8 May 2010 (UTC)
Thank you so much! And a table would be great. Perhaps you could post that table at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Medicine/Dermatology task force/Missing articles. Also, would you mind posting how you generated that data? Thanks again! ---kilbad (talk) 21:55, 8 May 2010 (UTC)
The table is quite big, so I posted it on its own page: Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Dermatology task force/Article creation dates. I created it using the API: first, get list of all articles in the category ([10]) and then for each page there, get the timestamp of the oldest revision (e.g. [11]), all this using Powershell (but you could do the same in any programming language). Oh, and I found out that the count above is inaccurate, because I counted non-articles too. The actual number is 1758. Svick (talk) 23:19, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

Warning Anonymous Users

I watched this battle between an admin and an editor (and then later another admin) about whether an anonymous user deserved to be blocked or just warned. My question is how is an anonymous user warned, and how does the anon receive the warning? I've asked this in a couple of other places, but so far no one has answered.--Bbb23 (talk) 21:51, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

A message can be placed on the "User Talk:IP address" page. A recent random example. — Richardguk (talk) 22:26, 9 May 2010 (UTC)
I didn't know talk pages for IP addresses existed. Thanks very much.--Bbb23 (talk) 22:54, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

Question about traffic counter

Does [12] also count hits from links such as http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Book&bookcmd=rendering&return_to=Jason+Voorhees&collection_id=5be7c14069546e16&writer=rl ? Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 22:22, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

X!'s Edit Counter -- How to Analyze Results?

On this page are my results. Now, in the Edit Counter Section the "Unique articles edited" Line has the number 266 listed; but down in the "Namespace totals" Section the "Article" Line list the number as being 176. So: Exactly what am I missing here? The numbers for the "Unique articles edited" Line and the "Article" Line should be the same. Obviously, there is something that I am not understanding correctly here.<br. />—NBahn (talk) 02:37, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

Actually, the second number should be higher, unless you never edited the same article twice. The namespace breakdown shows total number of edits, not number of articles. Just to clarify the problem. I still don't have an answer for you though. It's not really possible to have edited more unique articles than your total number of article space edits... at least as far as I can tell. Equazcion (talk) 02:43, 8 May 2010 (UTC)
Perhaps X! means to say "Unique pages edited", as articles implies mainspace. Intelligentsium 02:45, 8 May 2010 (UTC)
That seems plausible. There's no breakdown of all unique pages edited, so no way to test that theory as far as I know. But that does seem a likely explanation. Maybe ask the author of the tool directly; if you're right, the tool could use some rewording. Equazcion (talk) 02:50, 8 May 2010 (UTC)
It's all the pages you've edited. A good way to check is to multiply Average edits per page by Unique articles edited and you should get Total edits (4.71x268=1262.2). ~ Amory (u • t • c) 19:06, 8 May 2010 (UTC)
I think Intelligentsium nailed it. I was going to suggest that X! make the fix, but unfortunately X! is taking a wikibreak, as of yesterday.--SPhilbrickT 14:03, 10 May 2010 (UTC)
Correct, if I'm reading the source correctly. I've used the translation interface to change it, and it seems to have accepted the new wording. Amalthea 14:36, 10 May 2010 (UTC)
Yep, looks good, thanks.--SPhilbrickT 16:37, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

"Preview" option in the appearance preferences

In the skin choice part of the Appearance section of the User Preferences, there is a link "Preview" to show what the skin looks like. However, it shows the front page of Wikipedia. Most editors, and I guess a majority of readers, care more about what articles look like. Can we have it display an article page instead, say Wikipedia? Zerotalk 08:24, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

You can add the &useskin=skin parameter to the end of any Wikipedia url that you want to preview (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia&useskin=modern). OrangeDog (τ • ε) 11:14, 10 May 2010 (UTC)
Maybe User:PrimeHunter/Skin test should be made into a real template and be mentioned in some places where skin differences are discussed. {{User:PrimeHunter/Skin test|Wikipedia}} produces:
Wikipedia displayed in different skins: Chick, Classic, Cologne Blue, Modern, MonoBook, MySkin, Nostalgia, Simple, Vector.
I'm not good with templates but feel free to work with it. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:29, 10 May 2010 (UTC)
We've had the templates {{previewskin}} and {{selectskin}} for some years now and they have been included in {{template test cases notice}} for testing CSS changes with various skins. — Dispenser 14:10, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

Israel's article

I noticed that when I have to edit in Israel's article, many times wikipedia is very slow in uploading or updating the article. Once I thought that the problem is in my computer or with my internet connection. But this is the only article I have any problems with, I'm connected via broadband internet connection and this is the second computer I'm editing from on this article. Again, it may be a problem with my internet connection and I must notice that sometimes (at least with the present computer) everything goes ok, but many times it's terribly slow. Can someone check whats going there? I don't think that the article is too heavy or something. Thanks--Gilisa (talk) 12:19, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

I think this was raised a few months ago, and I think it is the reference templates that cause the delay in loading. Fences&Windows 12:56, 10 May 2010 (UTC)
It's not the article, it's a technical issue that causes some heavily referenced or templated articles (United States is the worst offender, in my experience) to take up to half a minute to be generated server-side before they're even downloaded to you. --Golbez (talk) 13:13, 10 May 2010 (UTC)
George W. Bush has the same problem, also over 300 citation templates, and it takes 45 seconds before the server starts sending the page to the browser. We need to rethink our approach to citation templates. Hans Adler 13:25, 10 May 2010 (UTC)
I just tried opening G Bush - first time it timed out, second time it worked, but it took some time. I agree, we need to think through some alternatives, as our most read articles are likely to be those most affected - not a great user experience.--SPhilbrickT 14:14, 10 May 2010 (UTC)
Anons, who make up the majority of our readers, aren't usually affected by this problem. As far as I know, this is because the parser does not need to render a specific version of the page for each user, since anons have no user preferences, special links, etc., so they normally get their articles from the cache servers. Graham87 14:26, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

Graham, If I remember right, I once watched the article from my work place and had no special problems. However, it appear that large part, I don't know if most, but certailnly not a negligible porition of the readers, does have problems. It's a problem with the article itself. it should be solved, I think. --Gilisa (talk) 14:40, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

I suggest to detrmine a finite number of citation templates that can be used in any article, a finite number of citation for each argument and to clean up articles with too many of these and with lagging problems. What people think?--Gilisa (talk) 15:02, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

<- Is there a link available to the investigation that showed that it's the reference templates that cause the delay in loading ? There are 152 different templates transcluded into that article and only 7 or so are citation templates so it would be good to see evidence before anyone spends time on the refs. Sean.hoyland - talk 15:14, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

For a very rough test, go to your sandbox, paste the source of the Israel article, press preview, wait, check the comment at the very bottom of the source of the page to see how long it took to render (43.017 seconds for me), use a text editor to break all citation templates by e.g. replacing {{cit with {{FOOXXX, preview that code and check the time it took the server to render it again (9.057 seconds for me).
Doing the same with the George Bush article has a similar result, around 30 seconds for the 300-odd references.
I seem to remember more exact statistics mentioned here before. By User:Dragons flight, maybe? Amalthea 15:41, 10 May 2010 (UTC)
Nice. Thanks. Sean.hoyland - talk 15:46, 10 May 2010 (UTC)
There are 429 instances of 49 different templates on Israel (the count 152 you mentioned are different templates that are transcluded to the article, even indirectly through other templates). Of those instances, the most frequent templates are {{Citation}} with 297 translusions and {{harvnb}} with 46. Since {{Citation}} is quite complex template, I think it's quite safe to assume this template is to blame. Svick (talk) 15:50, 10 May 2010 (UTC)
Putting an arbitrary cap on the number of citations an article can have isn't really the best approach. For one, it will just mean that fewer sources are used or that less detail is given in sources in order to combine them. But the loading speed is also dependent on other factors like infoboxes, nav templates, and number of links, images, and categories. A better idea would be to reduce the overall size of slow-loading articles - The Israel article is more than 9,000 words and the PDF version not including the references, bibliography, or external links is 20 pages. Or, alternately, create less-complex versions of citation templates. I've proposed this several times but no one ever seems interested. Simpler versions would have only the commonly used fields in the templates and not use the overly-complex {{Citation}} or {{Citation/core}}. {{cite journal}}, for instance offers (at least) 39 parameter options, but the majority of uses probably use less than half of those. Mr.Z-man 17:05, 10 May 2010 (UTC)
Yes, that's my view too. The article is too long, the page loading time varies significantly over time for what could be any number of reasons and templates that cause performance problems should be amended. Sean.hoyland - talk 17:34, 10 May 2010 (UTC)
Sean.hoyland, there are many articles longer than this one and yet they don't lag. The length is one option, and not the most promising one.--Gilisa (talk) 17:53, 10 May 2010 (UTC)
If the article is shorter, presumably there will also be fewer citation templates used. Mr.Z-man 18:05, 10 May 2010 (UTC)
Note that all these nearly max out their post-expand size (just under 2048K) once NewPP is done with them. Also in common, they each have many high-resolution images and many interlanguage links. Let's not assume that the cites are where the problem lies, if indeed there is a problem. LeadSongDog come howl 18:17, 10 May 2010 (UTC)
This issue has been raised several times in the past, and such testing as has been done appears to demonstrate that the problem is not the citation templates. For instance, using this web site shows a difference of just under half a second in download time between the Israel article with citation templates and a version with the templates disabled. Malleus Fatuorum 19:13, 10 May 2010 (UTC)
The issue with using tests like that is that once a page is parsed once, it is cached by the servers for some time, and cached even more heavily for unregistered users. If you don't specify action=purge, you may get a cached version. In my own test (detailed on VPR), I found the difference to be more like 35 seconds for the uncached version. That site also seems to give download times, which are different from parse times (download times are heavily dependent on internet connection). Mr.Z-man 19:23, 10 May 2010 (UTC)
First, it should be checked if there are duplicates of references. This is a common problem in complex articles. Then it should be checked if same books are cited multiple times using 'citation' for each instance. Such books should be moved to Bibliography and replaced with {{harvnb}}. (I found one example.) Ruslik_Zero 18:40, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

Why isn't there a clickable diff on the first edit?

In Special:Contributions, if the edit is the first edit to the page, why isn't a clickable diff available (e.g.)? I realize that there is technically no difference between revisions, but there is a difference between nothing and something; and having to use popups to access a diff (by hovering over history) isn't ideal. –xenotalk 14:35, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

This has always bugged me too. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 16:08, 10 May 2010 (UTC)
Me three, and I too regularly use popups on the history to get to the diff anyway. The larger change would be to show the page source diff on a diff to the first revision, too, otherwise the diff link would only be helpful for people using popups.
Anyway, the links could certainly be inserted via javascript. Amalthea 17:04, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

can't have a URL that contains a template?

Any way to have a URL that contains a template? I don't like how the following no-wiki'd text --

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=WP:Sandbox&action=edit&section=new&preloadtitle={{RE:}}

gets rendered like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=WP:Sandbox&action=edit&section=new&preloadtitle={{RE:}}

AGradman / talk. See Wikipedia:Village pump (technical) at 20:27, Monday 10 May 2010 (UTC)

It's not via a direct link, but Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Nominate uses an inputbox tag to generate a page from a template. Not sure what you're trying to do, so I don't know if that's helpful or not. EVula // talk // ☯ // 20:36, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

So I went ahead and tried that. Unfortunately it isn't working either. I created Template:Agradman/test, consisting simply of: 

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title={{{A|}}}&action=edit&section=new&preloadtitle={{{B|}}}

But as you can see, when the input for B is a template, 

{{Agradman/test|A=Fish|B={{RE:}}}}

it still renders the template at the end of the URL: 

{{Agradman/test|A=Fish|B={{RE:}}}}

AGradman / talk. See Wikipedia:Village pump (technical) at 20:58, Monday 10 May 2010 (UTC)

It looks like what you're really trying to do is create a template that will give a url, namely a url that creates a new section with a specific, preloaded title. Try this 
[{{fullurl:{{{1|}}}|action=edit&section=new&preloadtitle={{{2|}}}}}]
That should do what I think you want to do. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 21:19, 10 May 2010 (UTC)
One minor fix: you should format the preloadtitle for use in the URL: 
[{{fullurl:{{{1|}}}|action=edit&section=new&preloadtitle={{urlencode:{{{2|}}}}}}}]
That will work more reliably. {{Nihiltres|talk|edits|⚡}} 04:20, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

Substitution or transclusion?

For my new template {{freeze}}, which makes a link to the top line of the specified page's history, is it better to substitute or transclude what is in {{Freeze/link}}? The intended use is on the talk pages of articles (just before or after signatures), where a link to the article as the poster saw it can be helpful. The merit of transclusion is that is allows a bot to replace the template with a direct link to the revision. The merit of substitution (per WP:SIG#NT) is that there is no transcluded template to add to load time or serve as a vandalism target. Which one is the better approach? PleaseStand (talk) 21:05, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

For example, a bot update could prevent breakage of the link upon a page move. PleaseStand (talk) 21:09, 10 May 2010 (UTC)
WP:SIG doesn't really apply in this case. I (personally) would not substitute as it would simply be cleaner wikicode unsubstituted. According to WP:SUBST, "templates that contain external links [should not be substituted] as the formatting of the URL to perform queries or look-ups may change", but that might not apply here. Intelligentsium 23:51, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

Flagged revisions labs

Don't ask me when it will be deployed, but I noticed that the interface for flagged revisions was greatly improved over the last 2 months. I advice those interested to take another look and see if you experience any other problems. dze link. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 00:35, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

Court painter

There seems to be no category link to Court painter. I added it to Uemura Shōen's categories... but no go...Paradise coyote (talk) 02:19, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

Try proposing the new Category:Court painter over at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Visual arts. At present we have an article, Court painter, but no category. EdJohnston (talk) 17:59, 11 May 2010 (UTC)
Thanks brotha'.Paradise coyote (talk) 18:37, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

Use of tag magic word to permit styles in template input

I'm generally familiar with the {{#tag:ref|reference text|name=refname}} method of placing references (as documented at mw:help:magic words), and have used that without problems. But when trying the same method with other tags (such as span, nowiki, etc., as described here and mentioned here), it doesn't seem to work.

A simple example uses nowiki:
<nowiki>{{foo}}</nowiki> → {{foo}}
{{#tag:nowiki|{{foo}}}} →

A more complicated (and relevant) example:
<span style="text-transform:lowercase">STUFF</span> → STUFF
{{#tag:span|STUFF|style="text-transform:lowercase"}} → STUFF

So what's going on here? Am I doing it wrong, or is there some quirk of MediaWiki that makes this impossible?

For reference, I'm trying to duplicate a style that is defined in fr.wikipedia's stylesheet, but not here, or on Commons. What's the best way, short of convincing a developer to stick this in the Common.css file (not a serious consideration), to apply the following styles to text that's being passed to a template? 

/* Affichage des chiffres romains, voir [[modèle:Rom]] ou [[modèle:Romain]]. */
.romain {
 text-transform:lowercase;
 font-variant:small-caps;
}

/* Éviter d'obtenir un interlignage de taille variable. */
.reference, .exposant { 
 vertical-align:text-top;
 position:relative;
 font-size:.8em;
 top:-5px;
}

(And by the way...{{#tag:syntaxhighlight|...|lang="CSS"}} works, as above.) TheFeds 06:11, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

#tag only works with parser extension tags (but is a bit odd with nowiki for some reason). It turns parser extension tags into parser functions. This means you can pass parsed output to them (which you can't do with the native syntax unless you build a custom wikicode parser rule for each such extension). Parser extension tags bypass normal parsing (their inner content is replaced with a strip marker and returned after template expansion). You don't need them for HTML-ish tags like <span> because parsing occurs normally in them (note that <pre> is a special case, it is a parser extension tag and not an HTML-ish tag). --Splarka (rant) 07:15, 11 May 2010 (UTC)
You don't need a developer to change MediaWiki:Common.css (any admin can do that) and lots of template-specific code resides there, so you should have no problems changing it, if there's a good reason (and consensus) for your change. Svick (talk) 12:47, 11 May 2010 (UTC)
Thanks for the clarification of how span differs from ref (etc.). Any ideas why nowiki behaves differently?
In my case, I realized what I was doing wrong—in using the span, I introduced an equals sign character into the template input, which caused it not to work. (Fixed by prepending 1= to the template parameter.) I'd originally thought that the problem was a result of the span tag within a template, and that I needed to #tag it to make it work (by analogy with ref).
That's interesting about Common.css—although introducing French styles on en.wikipedia sounds like a bad move, my actual target wiki was commons in this case, and it might actually make sense there (because of all of the inter-language stuff). TheFeds 18:05, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

Template:Chemical formula

Hi everyone. I'd like to have some feedback on {{Chemical formula}}, which I just created (example usage in Vivianite). I am sure some of you can think of ingenious ways to make it more user-friendly :) Any ideas? --Waldir talk 22:20, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

{{drugbox}} has a system for displaying chemical formulas, with color codes and stuff. I'm not sure if that exists as a separate template yet, but maybe you could extract the relevant code from there. See DXM for an example (or most any other drug). Equazcion (talk) 22:25, 11 May 2010 (UTC)
I actually did start off from there (see the template's history if you're curious :)), but it didn't allow positioning of the parameters in specific positions. That is, since you'd have to pass the parameters as |H=2|O=1, they would always be processed by the order they appeared in the template code. If they are in alphabetical order, it works for H2O, but not for H2SO4, for example. --Waldir talk 22:31, 11 May 2010 (UTC)
Does that same problem exist when using the drug box template? It seems odd a problem like that would've gone unnoticed... Equazcion (talk) 22:37, 11 May 2010 (UTC)
I never used drugbox before, but I copied the code for the chemical formula exactly as it was there (I only formatted it with whitespace to make it readable). So I would guess the issue happens there too, but I might be missing something. --Waldir talk 22:41, 11 May 2010 (UTC)
The problem is apparently present there, see my test as User:Equazcion/sandbox. I guess this isn't seen as a problem for drug info, but I could see it being an issue generally. Equazcion (talk) 22:50, 11 May 2010 (UTC)
This presents an interesting challenge. Your solution of requiring placement in the odd and even parameters is novel but a bit unfriendly I think. I wonder if there's some template guru out there can cook up a method for getting a template to determine which order its named parameters were entered in, so they can be displayed accordingly. Equazcion (talk) 23:08, 11 May 2010 (UTC)
No, there is no way to find that out, also there is no way to specify one parameter multiple times, so you would have problems writing CH3CH2OH. Svick (talk) 23:22, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

Site notice won't hide

"Wikipedia's getting a new look" won't hide, no matter how furiously I click the button. –xenotalk 22:04, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

Just tried to post the same thing. --.:Alex:. 22:05, 11 May 2010 (UTC)
Same problem here (Chrome on WinXP). Every bloody time we get one of this "from on high" notices they fuck it up. DuncanHill (talk) 22:08, 11 May 2010 (UTC)
Adding the following to Special:MyPage/skin.css will block this, as well as any further broken crap given the same class:
.central-notice-banner {display:none; }
Algebraist 22:11, 11 May 2010 (UTC)
Thanks, but I always worry they'll say something important up there. –xenotalk 22:12, 11 May 2010 (UTC)
Just came here to report the same thing. I hope they have tested the new features better than they did this notice... - Dumelow (talk) 22:15, 11 May 2010 (UTC)
Don't worry, they never say anything important. On the off-chance that they do, this page will be full of posts detailing how it's broken anyway. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 11:10, 12 May 2010 (UTC)
Every so often the Wikimania one replaces it. I can dismiss the Wikimania one, and then the "new look" one appears when I refresh or go to another page. Then, randomly, the Wikimania one will reappear. Who is responsible for these things? And have they ever managed not to screw it up? DuncanHill (talk) 22:26, 11 May 2010 (UTC)
Same bug here on IE8 & FF3.6. I hope this bugged banner isn't part of the new look 0.oSmallman12q (talk) 22:34, 11 May 2010 (UTC)
I have actually asked that on the feedback page. DuncanHill (talk) 22:59, 11 May 2010 (UTC)
Same problem here IE8, Windows 7. --Tyw7  (☎ Contact me! • Contributions)   Changing the world one edit at a time! 22:51, 11 May 2010 (UTC)
Looks like they have taken it down for the time being (or is it just hidden for me?) - Dumelow (talk) 23:11, 11 May 2010 (UTC)
Duno, I followed Algebraist's advice. –xenotalk 23:12, 11 May 2010 (UTC)
Seems to have gone for me too. No idea if this is because the "hide" button is working or if it has been taken down. DuncanHill (talk) 23:15, 11 May 2010 (UTC)
Its hiding now. --Tyw7  (☎ Contact me! • Contributions)   Changing the world one edit at a time! 23:46, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

Xfd log template

I recently noted some XFD log templates, like {{Ffd log}}, {{Puf log}} or {{Log chrono}} or {{Tfd log}}, and since all logs pretty much use the same formatting, I was wondering if it would be fine to simply use one template which shows the process depending links/formatting automatically. One sole template wouldn't only make it easier to use it, in case the bots aren't there, because one only needs to remember one name, not several names, but also be less confusing, since some used parameters and some didn't. I've created a draft of such a template in my userspace; any opposes in using it? I know that several bots use hardcoded code for this, but this is nothing that can't be changed. If necessary, I also wouldn't mind if the template were fully protected once in use. I'd be happy to hear some opinions on this. --The Evil IP address (talk) 15:26, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

Question about archiving

Hi, I set up my talk page to be automatically archived and set up an Archive 1. However, I just noticed that the MizaBot III archived to an Archive 8, so I changed my Archive 1 (unused by MizaBott) and pasted Archive 8 to where it was. Is there a way to change the archive to Archive 1. Or should I just leave it be and let MizaBot create archives as needed? Thanks, Xtzou (Talk) 18:01, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

The "counter" parameter in miszabot's config setting was what was throwing you off. That's what determines the archive number used. I fixed that, moved the archive it created to Archive 1 (a simple page move), and changed your link to point there. Equazcion (talk) 18:09, 12 May 2010 (UTC)
Thank you so much! Does MizaBot III automatically create the archives as needed? Thanks, Xtzou (Talk) 18:11, 12 May 2010 (UTC)
No problem :) Yes it does. When one page "fills up" according to your max size setting, it creates the next archive and increments your "counter" setting automatically. Equazcion (talk) 18:13, 12 May 2010 (UTC)
That's wonderful. Thanks. Xtzou (Talk) 18:26, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

GIF thumbnails in fact greatly increase file size!!!

Beginning of this topic
I have studied this problem and now I know answer. Thumbnail algorithm is buggy, and don't work properly with animated GIFs. It decompress/unoptimize optimized animation (size is greatly increase), and then consider (full_framesize*frames) as image size. If it exceed 12.5Mpx, only first frame is used, if not — frames resized, and then saved unoptimized!!! In fact, after this "thumbnail" greatly exceed size of original file. Examples from previous post:
(700px-65.9 KB), (120px-129 KB!)
(82px-2.09 КБ), (60px-4.29 KB!).
So if you want to use animated image of ANY size, you have only two ways: do not use thumbnails (this will greatly decrease load time and server loads) or you can resize your image, save it optimized and then upload as different file.
Please, send this bug to developers, thumbnail algorithm must optimize animation before saving, or it will only increase server load! --Vladislav Pogorelov (talk) 19:04, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

This is not 100% correct. Bandwidth and storage space is hardly a burden, CPU much more so. As such, unoptimized is actually easier on the servers that optimized images most likely. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 23:38, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
That's an interesting comment. CPU should not be a problem here because the optimization needs only be run once for each used dimensionality. Bandwidth, however, is consumed every time the file is displayed (pace client and net caching) and really is worth saving, both for the Foundation, the Internet as a whole and readers - some of whom are on dial-up even these days. Rich Farmbrough, 03:55, 4 May 2010 (UTC).
He was talking about server load, not load in general. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:17, 4 May 2010 (UTC)
When the animation is long, or its size is too large, you'd better make a video out of it. It will be much better for the Wikimedia servers. It will be also much better for several users, for example users who has trouble to focus their attention or showing symptoms of attention deficit disorder. See the W3C's guideline on this topic. In conclusion, the best practice would be to transform Gifs into Ogg videos. Yours, Dodoïste (talk) 20:50, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
The bouncing ball is not a long animation though. I agree with converting GIFs to videos, but we still have the issue with garbled video thumbnails that must be fixed. PleaseStand (talk) 21:19, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
This was fixed today btw. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:11, 4 May 2010 (UTC)
Why, when I open the full-size GIF in GIMP, am I in "indexed" color mode with 165 colors in the color map, but when opening the scaled-down version, GIMP says that it is in RGB mode? The server is generating a GIF. The only explanation I can think of is that ImageMagick is quantizing each frame individually, each with its own local CLUT. But using GIMP to generate an optimal color palette, I get 182 colors. We are not, by chance, using an interpolating resize algorithm or dithering on GIF files, are we? PleaseStand (talk) 21:19, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
There is still some optimization to be done here indeed. I'm thinking of suggesting to change the GIF conversion from "-coalesce " to " -coalesce -fuzz 10% -layers OptimizePlus +map ". That should be substantially more efficient. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 23:35, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
bugzilla:23398 —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 23:44, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
Thanks for working on this. Are there ImageMagick resource pages or WikiProjects that people could join or help out at? See also: commons:Category:Commons image resources. An ImageMagick resource page (with users listed, too) could be created. A task force could be added to Wikipedia:WikiProject Images and Media. The tabs there are sub-projects. An animated GIF resource page could be created too. --Timeshifter (talk) 19:10, 4 May 2010 (UTC)
Help out doing what? This is a MediaWiki/server setup issue, it doesn't require manual modification of any base images. Amalthea 19:28, 4 May 2010 (UTC)
If you really want to help out, i could use a list of good testcases to test these proposed changes with. So that means highly optimized originals and unoptimized originals, large and small files, many colors and few colors, diagrams and movies. If you have time to create such a set, I highly welcome it. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:49, 4 May 2010 (UTC)
User:Greg L can probably help there. He creates optimized GIF animations. Wikipedia:Graphic Lab has some skilled ImageMagick people, I believe. See also: commons:Category:Animation editors. I just started this resource page: commons:Commons:Animated image resources. --Timeshifter (talk) 05:07, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

When feature, intended to save space and time, terribly increase both (imagine thousands of blowed GIF's * millions of requests) — and this all due to stupid implementation, and completely ruine established Wikimedia functionality, used on thousands of pages, this is a CRITICAL BUG and should be immediately fixed. (For first-time fix, I suggest change [[Image:]] behavior. Let it return <img src="...commons/thumb/... > for static GIF's and <img height=thumbh width=thumbw src="...commons/... > for animations.) Vladislav Pogorelov (talk) 17:29, 4 May 2010 (UTC)
You may block scaling animated GIF's there: [13] --Vladislav Pogorelov (talk) 19:46, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

You are drawing a false conclusion based on too small a sample size. Consider Commons:Category:Animated_diagrams. There are 39 animated GIFs referenced there. At full size, these GIFs range in size from 8.3 kB to 27 MB, with a median size of 194 kB. The current thumbnail algorithm produces thumbnails of 30 of these and renders the remaining 9 as single still frames. The 9 still frames occupy 24 kB and displace 34 MB of animation. The animated thumbnails occupy 1.9 MB and displace 7.5 MB of animation, a 75% reduction in mean file size. The animated thumbnails range from 2 to 101 frames, and occupy from 4% to 150% of the original file size. The median is 35% of the original file size.
On average, the thumbnailing algorithm is decreasing bandwidth and load times. Could the algorithm be improved? Absolutely. Is it some sort of critical failure? No. Dragons flight (talk) 20:33, 4 May 2010 (UTC)
100% agreed with Dragons flight. People make too many assumptions about usage of these images. Wikipedia is however everything but normal, it is a top 8 website, please keep that in mind. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:47, 4 May 2010 (UTC)
Dragons flight. I believe Vladislav Pogorelov was talking about optimized images mainly, and only the ones that increase in kilobytes when thumbnailed. My suggestion is to pass through the original animation in those cases, and let the browser resize the animated images. Is there anything that can be learned from the browser? --Timeshifter (talk) 03:59, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
Neither party can claim how often each kind of image is downloaded without checking the server logs. A near-actual answer could be achieved by cross-referencing every image's "File links" with stats.grok.se. Just looking at a single category page (which very few people ever see) or a single image are not valid positions to argue from. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 18:00, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
Well not entirely. There is just no way the developers will ever want to return to a situation where a single page (no matter how little it is viewed) takes over 40MB of download traffic. That is a fact. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:05, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

Some questions

I have been looking into this quite a bit now. I will try to explain some of the problems and propose some plans and like to hear what you think. The problems:

  1. Currently animations are 0% optimized. Each frame and each color is stored, in many cases with per frame colortables.
  2. Scaling without expanding the colortables quickly deteriorates quality on the more complex frames. This is not desirable.
  3. We need a somewhat allround solution, and making double or triple passes of the image is not desirable
  4. Images in imagemagick are fully decoded into memory (including all frames). (and i'm not fixing that, but you are welcome to try it yourself)

The proposals:

  1. First i want to add "-fuzz 10% -layers optimize" to the conversion properties. This should greatly reduce filesize of generated animations, by storing as little information per frame as possible. The fuzz factor basically tells the optimizer to forget about certain pixel changes if the colorchange is within the 10% fuzz factor. This makes the assumption that this "loss of information" in an animation is hardly noticeable for most people.
    Actually more specifically, i wanna add -layers OptimizeTransparency. the normal optimize is a bundle of routines that seems to include +map.
  2. I have pondered about adding +map to the options. This removes the per frame colortables and reduces the image back to a single 256 colortable. The problem with this option however, is that it doesn't account for the transparency color (so that one might suddenly disappear), and on the more complex animations (think videos converted to GIF animations), the quality starts to degrade rapidly.
  3. It is an option to create PNG thumbnails for non-animated GIFs. There are few benefits, other than that PNG supports more colors, so you have a nicer, more accurate thumbnail representation of the original GIF file. There is almost no way to to properly scale a GIF without significantly raising the amount of colors it uses. It is true that in many cases, thumbnails of GIF files will hardly differ in filesize and sometimes even be larger than the originals. On the larger and more complex GIF images however, there are definitely bytes being saved.
Regarding 2, presumably there is a way to tell whether the original has a single colourtable, and thus +map can be added to only those images animations, to prevent detail loss in more complex images animations. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 22:39, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
The whole point of +map is to reduce multiple colourtables into a single one. Using it for images that already have only a single colourtable is therefore no necessary. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:43, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
I was under the impression that the rescaling algorithms were adding per-frame tables in order to use pixel interpolation. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 23:02, 5 May 2010 (UTC)
Yes, if you don't add colors when you scale, you will have all sorts of problems. I wouldn't want to use such an image in an article at least. +map analyzes all the generated colortables and the original and reduces them to a single one, throwing away colors and imagedetails where needed to achieve that goal. But the whole thing is mute, since using the option breaks transparency, so i don't see how we can use it at this point in time. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 00:24, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Suggestion

The GIF “animation” is a 160-frame, 400-pixel-wide file, thumb-forced to 120 pixels. As of today, it doesn’t spin.
  • I have a suggestion that few, if any, programmers/developers are gonna like. Let’s take the example of File:NURBS 3-D surface.gif at right. This 160-frame GIF animation has a native resolution of 400 pixels wide × 285 pixels high and is being forced to 120 pixels wide. It has a total -pixel count (#frames × PxHeight × PxWidth) of 7.7 million pixels. As of this writing, it doesn’t animate when force-thumbed.

    I created this animation in Cobalt, pre-processed it QuickTime Pro, and built the animation using GIFBuilder with 6-bit (not 8) gray scale and frame optimization to keep the thing as compact as possible. Still, the full-size version has 3,152,116 bytes. When I use QuickTime Pro and GIFBuilder to directly create a 120-pixel-wide thumb with the same settings, it comprises 440,621 bytes. As a 120-pixel-width native file, it can be used directly by Wikipedia’s server engine and by the recipient browsers with no scaling. So…

    Here’s the part the developers won’t like. I’m sure there is open-source GIF-building apps available; most likely Linux apps. Why don’t we (as in “not me, but a developer”) take (steal) the functionality of such a GIF builder and use it to re-scale GIFs and create and save them in these exceedingly common, 120-pixel thumb widths whenever a page layout is saved that calls for a gallery? For that matter, why not use such a technique for all scalings; not just 120-pixel galleries? This technique has the virtues of A) having the smallest file size for storage on the server, B) the smallest upload size for transmission, C) the least processing power and RAM requirement for a browser.

    Indeed, I can imagine that this would be a lot of work. If there is a nice work-around, great. I would like, however, to suggest that if the work-arounds are likely to be temporary because of various shortcomings, we (you) might instead consider biting the bullet and building smaller GIFs at page-layout-save time.

  • This gallery thumb spins.
    This gallery thumb spins.
  • This gallery thumb doesn’t.
    This gallery thumb doesn’t.

Greg L (talk) 01:06, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

P.S. If I can be of assistance in any other way (that is, besides offering unpopular suggestions) please don’t hesitate to ask. Greg L (talk) 01:43, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

The problem with GIFs is that you can only create proper scalings of them, by using the original material. Any scaling based on a GIF is doomed in terms of quality, unless you heavily expand on the amount of colors used. We generally do not have original animations. Other than that, I have trouble understanding what you are proposing. Can you try explaining it again ? Do you want to use separate uploads for thumbnails ? You can already do that now can you not ? There is nothing wrong with downloading high resolution files and scaling them yourself and uploading these lower resolution renderings. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:18, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

Has there been a “decree” that >12.5 MP animations on Wikipedia will here-forth "no longer be allowed"?

User Esemono has done a surprising move. Surprising to me, anyway. He went to Featured Pictures and created this nomination: Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/delist/File:CSA states evolution.gif to delist (strip away its Featured Picture status) this animation of the United States’ map. Note that this map is only 260,560 bytes and has only 42 frames. But, because the creator made it at high resolution, it is always placed in articles at a scaled size. Note too that at it currently falls victim to the 12.5-megapixel bug (it is 28.4 MP) and does not animate as currently placed in articles.

Curiously, Esemono also created this Commons category and titled the category “Animated gifs violating 12.5MP rule”. Rule? And on his nomination on Featured Pictures to delist the animation of the map, he wrote as follows:

Wikipedia used to follow Moore's law and allowed large detailed animated gifs to be uploaded to various wiki projects. However in April of 2010 this Village Pump ruling decreed that large animated gifs will no longer be allowed as some people now view wikipedia on mobile phone browsers that have difficulty looking at images. Since this ruling has taken affect the image is no longer animated on Wikipedia and only shows the first frame. As such since it can't be used on Wikipedia and it should be delisted.

I note these key words and phrases: “ruling”, “decree”, and “will no longer be allowed.” Would someone please point to a thread on this page that can be construed this way. As far as I can tell, developers are still working on this problem; is that a fair characterization of the situation? Greg L (talk) 14:23, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

This has nothing to do with any discussion, "ruling", "decree" or anything else on this pump or this community. It also has little to do with the developers; this is a sysadmin-level action. Developers are working on improving both the quality and size of the finished thumbnails, and the efficiency of the thumbnailing process. Allowing larger images to be thumbnailed will be a side-effect of that latter work. Happy‑melon 15:47, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

P.S. It seems that throwing the software switch to liberate browsers of the need to scale animations and to instead burden Wikipedia with the scaling task has really opened a can of worms. Is it too late to just go back to the way it was? Greg L (talk) 14:57, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

It has created some problems and solved others; arguably greater ones. It might not seem that way, but that's because the solved problems are, well, solved, and so aren't being complained about any more. The new problems can also be solved, both by work from the developers, and by users fixing the most egregiously oversized files. "Going back to how it was" is not the best way to proceed overall. Happy‑melon 15:46, 8 May 2010 (UTC)
Thank you for the update. I very much appreciate your to-the-point, pithy answers. Greg L (talk) 16:35, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

Apple torpedoing animated GIFs?

I’ve been a long-term user of Macs and have long seen a curious pattern where Apple has been undermining animated GIFs. Curiously, Apple’s e-mail client software, Mail, for all its whiz-bang ease of use and features, has never displayed animated GIFs. All the user sees is the first frame.

Speaking more to this entire thread, Apple’s browser program, Safari, has for years now, displayed animated GIFs pig-slow. An animation that should take 8 seconds to loop takes 16 seconds. All one has to do is use any other browser like Firefox on a Mac and animated GIFs work plenty fast. And just last night, I went to a store and saw my first iPad. I went to Wikipedia’s Thermodynamic temperature article and the animated GIFs there were running pig slow.

It seems to me that Apple is not only going to war against Adobe’s Flash, but doesn’t seem interested in making GIFs work the way they are supposed to; something all the other suppliers of browsers have figured out how to do (display each frame for the specified number of milliseconds).

I thought I’d mention this observation. I’ve already given Apple feedback on the issue. The iPad’s abysmal handling of animated GIFs seems to be driving some other discussions here. Wikipedia may have to either cave to the apparent de facto pressure from Apple and drop animated GIFs entirely from Wikipedia, or accept that the will perform very slowly on iPads and other, key software Apple produces for their products. Greg L (talk) 14:23, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

Apparently Safari follows Internet Explorer in changing all delays in GIFs less than 60 ms to 100 ms delays. Firefox, in contrast, follows the GIF standard. If you use Firefox, go to my user page and install the Greasemonkey script, which makes Firefox follow more-or-less the exact behavior of Internet Explorer, and you will get the same results as Safari. Now that the Theora thumbnailing bug is fixed, we can convert animated GIFs to Theora. If we do that, however, forget iPad support since the iPad has no support for Theora, Java, or Flash, making it impossible to implement a Wikipedia video player applet. Perhaps we could convert to 10 frames/s GIF specifically for the iPad, at the expense of file size? PleaseStand (talk) 16:40, 8 May 2010 (UTC)
Check the file history of File:Newtons cradle animation book 2.gif to how jerky the animation of a 10 frames/s GIF is. PleaseStand (talk) 16:48, 8 May 2010 (UTC)
Looks like it's WebKit-specific; I just loaded File:Newtons cradle animation book 2.gif in Safari, the most recent WebKit nightly, and iCab, and it ran slow in all of them, compared to Firefox. Apple relies WebKit quite heavily, but they're not specifically targeting animated GIFs; that's a little paranoid (in my opinion). EVula // talk // ☯ // 17:28, 8 May 2010 (UTC)
Have you tried either using Internet Explorer or using the Greasemonkey script on my user page to compare? PleaseStand (talk) 17:38, 8 May 2010 (UTC)
IE for the Mac is hopelessly out of date, but I just fired it up and it appears to be just a little bit faster than WebKit's animation. I haven't tried the Greasemonkey script because, honestly, I don't care enough about this to start installing anything, whereas I had all of those browsers sitting in my dock. :) EVula // talk // ☯ // 18:47, 8 May 2010 (UTC)
Every single current (not IE) browser that runs natively on an Intel Mac (other than Safari) runs precisely as it ought to. GIF frame delays are specified in hundredths of a second. I typically use 0.04-second frame rate (25 fps) and they all work fine. Safari appears to precisely double the frame delay (to 0.08 second) and the resulting 12.5 fps frame rate is abysmal looking. The iPad runs them like molasses—which might be attributable to difficulties associated with the near-infinite, pinch-type scaling capability of the iPad. Then there is their Mail program, which doesn’t support animated GIFs at all. Greg L (talk) 01:36, 10 May 2010 (UTC)
Lack of proper support from Apple is no reason to burn all our animations. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 11:26, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

Animations to videos

The original animation is 1Mbyte, converted to a video it is 140Kbytes

At least some of the things which are currently animated gifs would benefit greatly from being converted to high quality videos. For more continuous-tone images file size reductions of 100 fold are not at all surprising, smoother motion is possible, and the videos aren't limited to 8 bit indexed color. Of course— the site doesn't know how to thumbnail these at all right now, but at lest it doesn't do it poorly. Videos on the site also don't play without user intervention— this is sometimes an improvement (many animations are distracting when unwelcome and almost all horribly slow down page loads while not using wired broadband), and sometimes a limitation. I just though I'd remind people that this option exists. --Gmaxwell (talk) 14:11, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. I'd like the animation version to at least be an option, because it plays on my mobile phone, which doesn't support the video option in the same way. Wikipedia promotes accessibility, after all :-) Stephen B Streater (talk) 16:46, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
FWIW, my mobile phone automatically switches to my 10Mb/s WiFi when it is available, so bandwidth is less of an issue that it might seem. Stephen B Streater (talk) 16:48, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
The caption on that video is extremely misleading; the video only has about one-fifth of the full animation. So no, a 1 mb GIF was not compressed into a 66k video. --Golbez (talk) 18:26, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Gah. Thanks. I managed to upload a truncated copy. The full thing is 140KBytes which is still a pretty enormous reduction and, of course, the video could be made smaller still at the expense of quality File:Jack-in-cube_solid_model,_light_background_lq.ogv, is 66Kb. A reduction from 1MB to 66k wouldn't have been surprising however: Greyscale or few colored (and thus undithered) noiseless computer graphics would show the smallest improvement (things like the above circles animation are probably smallest as gifs, too) but for more video-ish things, look out! --Gmaxwell (talk) 19:37, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Ahh, much better. I apologize for assuming malice in my previous comment. And it makes sense; videos have a codec, whereas a GIF is, in my understanding, just multiples of a compressed image. In other words, while each frame is individually compressed as per the GIF format, the video itself is not, leading to the inflation. What program did you use to create that? That might be useful for my maps. --Golbez (talk) 19:59, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
On the other hand, the nature of my maps won't lend itself well to the lossiness I'd find in video... so maybe it won't work out that well... --Golbez (talk) 20:01, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
GIFs, at least properly-optimized ones, use a Delta system; Each frame is based on deviation from the last. That's actually the whole problem that we had at the start of the post; ImageMagick doesn't optimize it right. Riffraffselbow (talk) 23:12, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

Upcoming Changes to the User Interface

As many of you already know, the Wikimedia Foundation's User Experience team has been running a beta program focused on improving the user interface for over six months now. More details may be found here, but our main goal has been to reduce the barriers to participation in Wikipedia by making it easier for new contributors to edit.

Since the start of the program, over 635,000 users across all Wikimedia projects have participated in this beta program - testing and providing feedback on the new interface. Roughly 80% of the test users who tried the beta are still using it (view details). On the English Wikipedia, almost 270,000 users have tried the test interface and about 84% of those users continue to use it. On April 5, the beta features became the default experience for users of Wikimedia Commons, a wiki similar to Wikipedia that hosts the millions of free image and media files within our projects. The summary of feedback from Commons users may be found here. The WMF blog and the tech blog also provide more information on this project.

This new user interface will become the default for users of the English Wikipedia during the second week of May. We are currently scheduled to make the switch at 5:00am UTC on May 13. Once we make the switch, all users will begin to see the new features [1]. These features include an enhanced toolbar, a new skin (which we named 'Vector'), and a number of other features we're very excited about (FAQs may be found here). If you prefer not to make the change, there will be 'Take me back' link to restore the original features. Those who would like to experience the new interface sooner may do so via the 'Try Beta' link at the top of the page.

We understand that the English Wikipedia relies heavily on custom user scripts and site-specific JavaScript. Information on how to test gadgets is included in the FAQ page. If you encounter issues using the new skin, please share your feedback.

We're looking forward to rolling out the new features next week. In the meantime, if you have any questions/comments, please share them here.

Howief (talk) 22:11, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Wikimedia Foundation User Experience Team

[1] Users that have opted out of the beta will still get the new features. We apologize in advance for this inconvenience, but these users may restore their features via the 'Take me back' link.

Will this take me back link get us out of Vector? Everard Proudfoot (talk) 03:18, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
Yes, the 'Take me back' link will take you out of Vector and restore original editing features. Howief (talk) 07:50, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

Maybe we should consider giving the main page a facelift too. I know though that the 2008 proposals ended up being a waste of time. A shame as I feel it could be improved graphically... The French wikipedia main page is better I think.. Dr. Blofeld White cat 16:19, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

I just switched over to Vector, to beat the rush. I have the option enabled to add an edit button to the first section. In Mono, if I am looking at an FA, there's a fair amount of real estate separating the FA star and the edit button. In Vector, they are overlapping, and if you didn't already know it was a star, you might not know what it is. Less importantly, but worth noting, is that the "watch" tab is now a star. Different color to be sure, but if you are trying to explain how to find an FA symbol or the watch tab, telling them to "look for the star in the upper right corner, no not that one the other one", is not exactly user friendly.
  • Can the location of the FA star next to the edit button be fixed?
  • Can the symbol for "watch" be reconsidered? (maybe a stylized eye?)--SPhilbrickT 18:09, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
One more (is this the right place to note these?): On the Help desk page, the "Skip to the Bottom" Link is almost completely overlapping the "Any Questions" link.--SPhilbrickT 18:18, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
Strange, the edit link for first section doesn't overlap with the FA star on Queluz National Palace for me even with your user Javscript both in Firefox and Internet Explorer.
I don't like the watch/unwatch star either, so I disable it for myself with the following Javascript:
addOnloadHook(function() {
  el = document.getElementById("ca-watch");
  if (el == null)
    el = document.getElementById("ca-unwatch");
  el.className = '';
});
 
wgAjaxWatch.setLinkText = function( newText ) {
	for ( i = 0; i < wgAjaxWatch.watchLinks.length; i++ ) {
		changeText( wgAjaxWatch.watchLinks[i].firstChild, newText );
	}
};
Svick (talk) 19:04, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
That might help me, but it doesn't address the concern that Vector has two stars in very close proximity with very different meanings.--SPhilbrickT 19:58, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
The issue was raised repeatedly in the past, but the "usability" people seemed to just ignore it. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 20:26, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
I recall having seen some long discussions about it, just with no conclusion ("no consensus" on an alternative icon). - Jarry1250 [Humorous? Discuss.] 21:11, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
I provided the background why the star was selected for watch/unwatch tab here. In short, the tab space is scarce especially for languages with long words such as German and Greek, and using a body-part as a symbol such as an eye is not suitable universal solution as it has different meanings for different culture. --Shuhari (talk) 23:53, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

Bump. MER-C 09:11, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

The assumption is that because 84% "continue to use it" it is liked. I am worried that 16% actually bothered to switch back, and wonder how many of the 270,000 users never came back, like many of out supposed 12,326,376 registered users. Rich Farmbrough, 16:23, 13 May 2010 (UTC).
Clew - active users in the past 30 days - i.e. have preformed at least one action, 153,993. Rich Farmbrough, 16:47, 13 May 2010 (UTC).

Browser size

Here is a useful link: http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/. (I am watching for replies here.) -- Wavelength (talk) 23:25, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

What is highlighted seems to depend on how large your browser window is (the page wraps depending on the window size, and Google admits this on the about page). In 1920x1080 resolution on Monobook skin, IE 8, and Windows 7 (with Windows Vista style taskbar), it "says" that 90% of viewers see the top of DYK. However, opening the window to the different marked sizes reveals that 60% of viewers never even see DYK at all. PleaseStand (talk) 00:58, 8 May 2010 (UTC)
I suppose that Wikipedia prioritizes items on the main page and on other pages according to careful decisions. Unfortunately, it seems that the new skin (called Vector), which is about to be the new standard in several days from today, will have the "Go" and "Search" buttons hidden from some visitors, unless they scroll the pages. -- Wavelength (talk) 04:24, 8 May 2010 (UTC)
[I am revising my comment of 04:24, 8 May 2010 (UTC), by wikifying "Vector". -- Wavelength (talk) 04:29, 8 May 2010 (UTC)]
If your statement about Vector's search box is based solely on the browser size tool, it is incorrect (see my post above). What is important is where visitors are looking for the search box. Upper-right is the de facto standard location for search boxes; the middle of the left sidebar is hard to find. PleaseStand (talk) 04:33, 8 May 2010 (UTC)
The search box in Vector isn't placed in some fixed position, it will adjust based on the screen size. In my quick test, I was able to reduce the horizontal resolution to <750px before the tabs/search box began to overlap or require scrolling. Anything smaller than that will likely be a mobile browser, which won't use the new skin unless the user specifically chooses to. Mr.Z-man 15:43, 9 May 2010 (UTC)
Thank you both for your replies. -- Wavelength (talk) 15:05, 10 May 2010 (UTC)
My N900 screen is 800x480, and the search box still appears on the top right. Stephen B Streater (talk) 13:09, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

420.8k views per day

According to Henrik's article traffic statistics tool, Elena_Kagan recieved 420,800 views yesterday. Is this a possible glitch...or do some pages receive hundreds of thousands of views per day?Smallman12q (talk) 00:52, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

I assume it has something to do with the fact that "On May 10, 2010, President Obama nominated Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court to fill the vacancy from the impending retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens at the end of the Supreme Court's 2009–2010 term." –xenotalk 01:03, 11 May 2010 (UTC)
Hundreds of thousands of views is nothing unusual, and in fact, Wikipedia frequently gets far higher numbers. For example, Michael Jackson got 5.9 million views on June 26, 2009. —Lowellian (reply) 08:27, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

Hide doesn't hide

Using the hide option to the far right of the top line "Wikipedia's getting a new look | Learn more" does not hide the line. I've read the "Learn more" link - how do I get rid of it? Shen Iko (talk) 22:42, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

Then is there some way I can load the old Monobook, without the goofy light blue gradient and with the working hide? Shen Iko (talk) 01:18, 12 May 2010 (UTC)
You can hide it now, the notice has been moved from CentralNotice to the sitenotice. You can go back to Monobook using the "Take me back" link at the top right, to the left of your username. --Catrope (talk) 12:22, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

Ornery "Rollback" button?

During the past few days I've noticed a strange phenomenon. When I look at a diff, nothing happens if I click on "Rollback". If I go to the page history and click on "Rollback", or click on "Rollback" on my Watchlist, the diff is rolled back.

I've experienced this using (a) Firefox 3.6.3 and Windows XP, (b) Firefox 3.6.4 and Windows Vista, and (c) Firefox 3.6.4 and Windows 7. I've got Twinkle, Popups, and Friendly installed. I tried uninstalling them and clearing my cache, but I experienced the same problem. Any suggestions? — Malik Shabazz Talk/Stalk 23:23, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

FF 3.6.3 and XP works for me. Just tested in the sandbox. I'm not sure what to suggest but it does sound like a problem with your wiki account, which you probably already knew. So I'm no help. Equazcion (talk) 23:33, 12 May 2010 (UTC)
Scratch that. I thought it worked but it didn't. I got the usual success page but the edit wasn't actually made. Equazcion (talk) 23:36, 12 May 2010 (UTC)
Ok, I just tested at another page, and both the history rollback link and the one on diff pages functions fine; the edits do show up. I'm not sure what was going on in the sandbox. So back to square one. Equazcion (talk) 23:42, 12 May 2010 (UTC)
Rollback won't operate when the effect of a rollback would leave the page identical to if the rollback had not been performed. For example where there are two edits, one adding text and the other removing it, so that the net effect of deleting them both is zero. At least, that's my experience. - DustFormsWords (talk) 06:54, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
I found the problem. I disabled all my scripts and enabled them one at a time. For some reason, User:Lenore/autolink.js doesn't play well with the "Rollback" button. — Malik Shabazz Talk/Stalk 19:06, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

Preview warning now in black

The warning you get when previewing a change

"Remember that this is only a preview; your changes have not yet been saved!"

now appears in black, which makes it look as if it was part of the text. It should be re-colored, either red as it used to be or with a colored background like the "new messages" bar, to elevate it from the actual preview text. Skäpperöd (talk) 09:39, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

You can always change it. Put div.previewnote { color: #c00; } in your skin's css page, and you can play around with the colors to get one you like. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 12:53, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
I had not noticed this in all 8 months of use. Good catch, logged as bugzilla:23519. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:39, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

Why the difference between these two contribution histories, one with new interface?

I found two pages of contributions which aren't quite same - [14] and [15] - why the difference? Dougweller (talk) 11:26, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

The first one is a cross-wiki contribution tool hosted on the toolserver. The "skin" for that is hard coded and independent of what happens on WP. MER-C 11:34, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
It doesn't show as many contributions though. Dougweller (talk) 17:35, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
The contributions history on WP shows all of them because they are less than 50, which is the default number displayed. The global contributions history only displays the most recent 20 from each wiki. Hans Adler 18:01, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

Automatically show toolbox

Is there a way to get the toolbox in the left-hand toolbar to show rather than hide by default? Ucucha 11:33, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

Click on the arrow to make the items drop down. The setting is apparently automatically saved thereafter (I'm guessing in cookies, but I haven't checked) whenever you surf to any other pages. —Lowellian (reply) 11:56, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
You're right, missed that. You have to do it separately in the edit window, though. Ucucha 12:13, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

Visits?

How can I find out how many visits a particular article is receiving? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Meyerj (talk • contribs) 13:26, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

Click on View History, then on "page View Statistics"--SPhilbrickT 13:38, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

Visit counters

Is there some means of seeing how many visits a particular article is receiving in a 24 hour period? I have seen reference to some articles receiving "over 10,000 visits per day". Meyerj (talk) 13:39, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

Answered above.--SPhilbrickT 13:40, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

TFA-editnotice

I recently created {{TFA-editnotice}}, and I was just wondering if there's a better way to do this. Currently it needs an admin to edit each WP:TFA's editnotice to add the template (albeit the template knows only to show on the specified day, so it can be done as soon as the TFA queue is decided). Rd232 talk 14:39, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, that looks good to me. As for how it would work, since the queue is decided in advance, then the edit notice could be added at the same time--Unionhawk Talk E-mail 15:36, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
We can probably find some way to automatically load the TFA if an article title == TFA title. Is the page title of the TFA article available somewhere ? Not sure how that is performance wise however...—TheDJ (talk • contribs) 00:45, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

Problems with editing under New features

Hi. When I edit when the "New features" are on, the edit toolbar buttons do not function. When I turn "New features" off the old-style edit toolbar works fine when I press any of its buttons. I use Explorer 8 and Windows 7. Can anyone explain this? Dr.K. λogosπraxis 14:46, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

I'm having the same problem, with IE8 and Windows 7, none of the buttons on the edit bar work, like the 'sign' button, etc., so I guess I'll be going back to the old style until it's fixed. Funandtrvl (talk) 16:04, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Thank you very much Funandtrvl. Yes, the sign button, the bold button etc., no button works. Funny thing is the "New features" edit toolbar works with Windows XP and IE 8. So it must be a Windows 7 incompatibility. Dr.K. λogosπraxis 16:14, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
They aren't working here either, using Vista and IE8. And surely there must be more than three people with either of those combinations, who are therefore having the same difficulty? Are they all raising the issue somewhere else? N-HH talk/edits 16:49, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Good question. I would like to know if there is another forum for such problems to be raised and hopefully resolved. Dr.K. λogosπraxis 16:56, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
I have switched back to the old also. There does not seem to be any discussion. There is just a feedback form to fill out, but no responses to questions. I am very disappointed in the "new look". It is not worth losing functionality to have an interface that is harder to read. Xtzou (Talk) 17:04, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
I had bad experiences with the "new look" on commons. Failure to clearly indicate the place community can discuss the "new look" is disappointing; I turned it off after few minutes. It may be good for new editors, but I don't see why any old hand would want to use it. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 17:31, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
I have tested this in IE8 on both Windows XP and Windows 7 Starter, both in normal mode and compatibility mode, and it worked every time. I have purged the JS cache to be sure, so I'd appreciate it if you could try again. --Catrope (talk) 17:56, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Okay, I went back and set 'my preferences' back to default, purged IE8 and my Java settings, and then the edit bar buttons worked in IE8/W7. Then, I starting adding options back to 'my preferences', and everything worked until I added the gadget "refTools", and then the edit bar buttons did not work anymore. When I removed the "refTools" option and purged the page, then the buttons worked again. --Funandtrvl (talk) 18:22, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
The gadget "refTools" is one I use frequently so I consider it crucial. Xtzou (Talk) 18:31, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
I don't have the "refTools" gadget but after I purged the IE8 cache the edit toolbar works in the "New feature mode". Thank you very much for the suggestion. Dr.K. λogosπraxis 18:37, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
It is very much possible that a good cache purge is required. reftoolbar was only fixed late yesterday, so if you don't purge, I guess you might still get the old version. Also, only the gadget and MrZman's version are fixed, if you are using another version directly, it might be broken as well. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:50, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Okay, now it's working, however, I had to turn off "enhanced toolbar" in 'my preferences' to make REFTOOLS work, and unfortunately, refToolbar 2.0 for the enhanced toolbar doesn't work in IE (as of yet). --Funandtrvl (talk) 19:53, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
FYI - I did find a page where you can comment about the new toolbar: [16] and the new Vector skin: [17] on 'Wikimedia Usability Initiative', for those interested. --Funandtrvl (talk) 20:05, 13 May 2010 (UTC) ...one more: User experience feedback. --Funandtrvl (talk) 20:10, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
If you just want to leave feedback to them team, there is a specific [18] which is linked to from the 'learn more' and 'new features' pages and also more or less the same as what you get with 'take me back'. While it doesn't provide a method for discussion, it may be the best way if you just want to provide general feedback. (Well that must be what it's designed for right?) Nil Einne (talk) 22:30, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Well, thanks for finding that link!! Hopefully, they won't use the feedback forms for TP!!! Although, I'm still getting some weird stuff, when I click on the button at the bottom of the Wiki markup insert page, I get the warning window about navigating away from the page. Is anyone else getting this too?  :-) --Funandtrvl (talk) 22:54, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Yes I get that too. I think you can turn it off from edit options in preferences. Dr.K. λogosπraxis 23:07, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
You know, I can't find the option to turn that off (the warning box about navigating away from the page) in the preferences area. Do you know where it might be? --Funandtrvl (talk) 23:43, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
My preferences -> Editing -> Warn me when I leave an edit page with unsaved changes (the last in the long list of "advanced options"). Hans Adler 23:47, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Thank you, you know I've been resetting everything to get the reftools to work and I think some mischief-making thing went in there and goofed everything up. --Funandtrvl (talk) 00:06, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

User Contribution History

Where can I find the link that used to be in the left column of user pages that allowed us to check the contributions of any editor? It was very useful in catching up with vandals on the move. Bielle (talk) 14:52, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

Click on the arrow next to toolbox. I think, but I'm not sure, once clicked it remains open. Addedum, I believe it remains in the last position selected - open it, then it is open for the next user page you vist, close it, and it remains closed. --SPhilbrickT 15:01, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Thanks. I had done that but didn't see the title. It is definitely there now, though. Thanks again. Bielle (talk) 15:07, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

"Enable template collapsing"

I've just found this in my preferences, as a "Labs feature", under Editing: "Enable template collapsing". I'm sorry, what? What the heck does that do? I've enabled it and can't identify any effects. Can we have a better explanation in the Prefs please? Rd232 talk 16:36, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

That is not yet available and thus should not be in the prefs really.... I'll inform the usability team of this. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 17:04, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
I've removed it. Thanks for reporting this. --Catrope (talk) 17:25, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

panel before content

currently #content occurs before #panel, which makes it impossible (short of some fancy greasemonkey scripting) to restyle the panel to float by the content. i propose the order be #head, #panel, #content, #footer. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.16.102.206 (talk) 17:33, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

This is intentional (and similar the approach used with the previous layout). Placing the content first gives it priority for screen readers, search engines, and other processes that determine the importance of text based on when it appears on the page. Dragons flight (talk) 19:59, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
One can still make the panel float though using:
#panel {
   position: fixed;
   top: 160px;
   left: 0;
}
Dragons flight (talk) 20:02, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

Sigh...

I'd like to stay in Vector but there were a few new items not in the beta that I dislike. How do I:

  • make the search bar go back to how it used to be in the beta (not this rectangular thing)
  • disable to collapsible sidebar sections (which breaks an NPP script)

I already got the old logo back, thankfully. —fetch·comms 20:48, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

  1. That I don't know
  2. There is an option to disable collapsibility in the preferences somewhere, though i'm not sure if that is the cause of the NPP bug. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:54, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

If you want to make the search box a bit bigger, you could check User:PleaseStand/vector.css for the code to do that, replacing 15em with whatever you like if the box is still not big enough. PleaseStand (talk) 21:16, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

I just fixed the NPP script from Josh. Bypass your browser cache, and it should start working (though it will not yet collapse, but i'm asking about that now with the usability team. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:26, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
bugzilla:23515 —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:32, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
A bazillion thanks. Must be one hectic day for y'alls :P —fetch·comms 23:01, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

Incomplete localization

Right now, my top line reads "Take me back New features Kww Mijn overleg Mijn voorkeuren Mijn volglijst Mijn bijdragen Afmelden". Can anyone point me at where the Dutch versions of "Take me back" and "New features" are supposed to reside so that I can fix them?—Kww(talk) 23:50, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

Translations are made on Translatewiki.net —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 23:54, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

Strange Problem with Apostrophe in Wiki Term

I suspect there is a bug lurking somewhere, but I really don't know where it is. I updated three Wikipedia pages the other day, one each on the English, Breton, and French sites. The pages were all related to the same individual (Professor Rene Galand) and included updated biographical information he provided to me to use. The Wiki term in question is René_Galand (for the English and French Wikepedia sites) and his Breton name, Reun_ar_C'halan (for the Breton site, br.wikipedia.org). All three pages showed as correctly updated after I saved the changes. When I told Prof. Galand, he used Google from within Internet Explorer to check the updates. When he typed in "René Galand", and clicked on the English and French site links, he got to the updated pages. But when he typed in "Reun ar C'halan", and clicked on the Google-provided link, he got to the "old" (pre-update) page. He asked me for help.

I went to the Breton wikipedia site, and typed in "Reun ar C'halan" and got to the correct (updated) page. I thought he was mistaken. So I tried Google, and ended up at the incorrect (old) page. I compared the URLs in my Google Chrome browser address bar, and they were identical. Both URLs were: http://br.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reun_ar_C'halan. It turns out, however, that although the URLs displayed the same, they probably weren't exactly the same -- at least not when they were retrieved through HTTP. I didn't believe what I was seeing until I did an experiment and used Internet Explorer instead of Chrome. Here, when I went to the page through the wikipedia search, I ended up at http://br.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reun_ar_C%27halan (note the URL-encoded apostrophe). When I went to the page through Google, I ended up at http://br.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reun_ar_C'halan.

The interesting thing is that typing both of those two URLs into Internet Explorer got me to two different pages. It was *not* a cacheing issue on my end and I verified this by letting a few others try this out using Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Firefox. And no one else who tried this had ever heard of this guy, and needless to say, had never visited these wikipedia pages. Also interesting is that the problem didn't exhibit itself in Firefox -- only in Chrome and Internet Explorer. Chrome, however, didn't show any difference in the URLs, while Internet Explorer did. (Firefox got to the right page regardless of how I specified it).

Now here is the reason why I think there is a real problem lurking somewhere. How did I fix this? I did something I should be hanged for. I edited the "bad" page and replaced its contents with the contents of the "good" page. Once I had updated the "bad" page, both pages now showed the correct (updated) content. This is clearly a hack solution since it seems like there are TWO different pages on the Breton wikipedia site, both (now) with the same content. When the next person updates one of these, the other, of course, won't get updated.

Can anyone opine where the bug is? How can we get this fixed?

Updated: I just updated this to include my signature.

Eswenson (talk) 00:26, 14 May 2010 (UTC)Eswenson

There was probably an old copy stuck in the squid caches. I purged the page, hopefully that will fix the problem. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 00:42, 14 May 2010 (UTC)
All the three URLs you provided above point to the same article: br:Reun ar C'halan. And you ever edited only that one article on brwiki (at least when logged in). And there aren't any pages with similar name there. I don't see any other explanation than it's some caching issue, maybe the computers are using a proxy? Svick (talk) 00:54, 14 May 2010 (UTC)
Thanks much. Ok, but it was strange that I went to the bad page, clicked the Edit button (or the Breton equivalent), I believe I saw the old (bad) text, which I simply replaced en mass with the "good" wiki text. When I saved the page, it then showed the correct contents. But I suspect you are right. Thanks for checking into this for me. Eswenson (talk) 01:04, 14 May 2010 (UTC)Eswenson

Vector search issue (no, ANOTHER one)

Just to add to all the other random problems with the search function, it appears that real autocompletion is broken now. It used to be possible, if you wanted to search on (let's say) "the end", to simply type "th", wait for "The" to be autosuggested, press the down arrow to select it, press the right arrow, and get "The" as your typed input, with autosuggestions based on the whole word rather than the two characters of the word that you typed. For long, but common words, that's a real timesaver. Likewise, you could formerly select "The Egg" from the autocompletion menu, delete the last two characters, and amend it to "The End" if that's what you wanted to do. Quite useful if you get an autocompletion that's almost correct.

For some reason (the reason being bad design, a lack of testing, and arrogance aplenty to explain why the bad design was never tested) this no longer works; you can only search on suggested autocompletions, not amend them. That is serious damage to usability, which could have been avoided simply by avoiding it: the functionality was there, and someone removed it. That someone was being paid actual money to improve usability, needless to say. Most of the usability degradations (like the inexplicable star in place of the simple word "watch") are easy to fix on my own, but I don't have a spare search function lying around, so I would hope the one we have gets fixed. — Gavia immer (talk) 02:17, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

Filed as bugzilla:23521, but without all the editorializing. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 02:33, 14 May 2010 (UTC)
Bah. The editorializing was the good bit. — Gavia immer (talk) 02:47, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

Preload when page isn't empty

Hi, I'm mucking around with the idea of enabling people to click somewhere in an editintro and save the page as a draft. The below only seems to work if the target page doesn't exist - unless I add "&Section=new". Is there any way to force the preload to overwrite the existing page?

  • This template must be substituted. Replace _'"`UNIQ--nowiki-00000066-QINU`"'_Currentuser ..._'"`UNIQ--nowiki-00000067-QINU`"'_subst:Currentuser ..._'"`UNIQ--nowiki-00000068-QINU`"'_.,%2010%20November%202024 Save a sandbox draft - page doesn't exist
  • This template must be substituted. Replace _'"`UNIQ--nowiki-00000066-QINU`"'_Currentuser ..._'"`UNIQ--nowiki-00000067-QINU`"'_subst:Currentuser ..._'"`UNIQ--nowiki-00000068-QINU`"'_.,%2010%20November%202024 Save a sandbox draft - page does exist

Rd232 talk 09:36, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

It probably wouldn't be a good idea to have such a feature because it might well lead to other people's work or comments being overwritten. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 10:20, 11 May 2010 (UTC)
Yeah, it's not a good idea to force an overwrite of something; too much room for accidental abuse. EVula // talk // ☯ // 15:36, 11 May 2010 (UTC)
Yeah, I suppose. You see what I'm trying to achieve though. I guess what I'm really after is Extension:Drafts. Is this at all ready to put live on Wikimedia (it says "beta")? if so, can we propose doing that? Rd232 talk 16:44, 11 May 2010 (UTC)
Although in principal it works, it kinda adds to the user interface clutter. I believe the usability team has expressed interest in seeing how best to integrate the draft feature into Wikipedia. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:19, 11 May 2010 (UTC)
OK. but if your "hide the template transclusion list" script were ever added to Common.js, we'd have so much less clutter we could afford it! :) Rd232 talk 23:23, 11 May 2010 (UTC)
I'd like to see a template transclusion tree instead of a list. Rich Farmbrough, 07:39, 14 May 2010 (UTC).

Reducing whitespace above row at top

At the top of the page there is a row of links for various functions ("[username]", "My talk", "My preferences", "My watchlist", "My contributions", "Log out"). Below that is a row of tabs for various functions ("Project page", "Discussion", "Read", "Edit", "New section", [star], [down arrow], [search box]). Under the new Vector skin, there is a large gap of hideous whitespace between those two rows, significantly more than the whitespace between the rows under the old Monobook skin. This whitespace is not only ugly in and of itself but also shoves down the layout of the entire page, significantly reducing the amount of text seen onscreen on small resolutions. How do I edit vector.css to reduce that whitespace gap? (I would prefer for that whitespace to be killed entirely in the base skin, but for now I'll settle for someone helping me find a way to reduce it via my user CSS.) —Lowellian (reply) 08:16, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

I think 
#page-base { height: 3.6em; }
does it. --The Evil IP address (talk) 10:35, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
No, that shifts the page up into the tabs. The massive waste of space is between the tabs and the Username line. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 11:26, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Yeah, confirmed that #page-base CSS line does not work; it reduces the space after the second row, not the space between the first and second rows, resulting in the page title getting shoved into the tabs. —Lowellian (reply) 11:58, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
User:Dragons_flight/vector.css shows tweaks for my personal preferences, including moving the page up (the first four blocks do this). Dragons flight (talk) 12:03, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Ah, okay, thanks, User:Dragons flight! I've figured this out now, and can offer some simpler code than what you have for those that just want the tabs moved up. It appears that Vector defaults to
#left-navigation { top: 40px; }
#right-navigation { margin-top: 40px; }
#page-base { height: 80px; }
wherein #left-navigation controls the left-aligned tabs, #right-navigation controls the right-aligned tabs, and #page-base (#head-base can be substituted here for #page-base for an identical effect) is the background area above the article content. So to reduce the extra whitespace, just reduce the three values above by the same amount. For example, reduce the above three values by 20 pixels:
#left-navigation { top: 20px; }
#right-navigation { margin-top: 20px; }
#page-base { height: 60px; }
and we end up with the requested effect. :) Again, #head-base can be optionally substituted for #page-base instead. —Lowellian (reply) 22:58, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

Just to add my twopence worth - I knew if I came here and typed "whitespace" into page search I'd find this thread. No self respecting page designer can hope to get away with such stuff on a public site! I can't believe you need any more help but if you do, I'm watching this thread. And here's a screen shot for anyone who can't see it: File:watchlist_whitspace_screenshot.png Trev M ~  13:28, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

Back button doesn't work to retrieve edit in edit conflict

The back button doesn't work to retrieve an edit in and (edit conflict). I have just had to write the same sentence three times. Now I know to copy it before I save it. Xtzou (Talk) 20:30, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

P.S. In order to post this I had to move back to monobook. Xtzou (Talk) 20:32, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Now I see my edit was posted above on the third try. I didn't know it at the time, as I was still receiving an (edit conflict) message. Xtzou (Talk) 20:33, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Browser? –xenotalk 20:45, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Firefox 3.6.3. I get this irritating message asking me if I want to navigate away from the page and lose my edits, or stay on the (edit conflict) page. Gah! Xtzou (Talk) 20:51, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
By the way, it happened again with the above edit, which I was stupid enough not to save a copy first. Xtzou (Talk) 20:53, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
I don't really get how you lost your message when you got an edit conflict. When you get an edit conflict, you should have two edit boxes, one at the bottom with your version, including any changes you made such as any new message and another (at the top) with the new version. The idea is you integrate your changes from the version at the bottom, to the version at the top then click save. If this is a new message, this is easy just copy the new message into the right place and save. If you're having difficulty finding it but did sign search for ~~~~ would be a simple way. In addition the edit conflict window also shows a diff, so you can often use that to copy your message (easy if it's one line, if not it may be easiier to use the edit windows). Of course if you don't want to do this way, once you've copied your message when you get an edit conflict, you're free to go back or whatever. (You could always open a new tab or browser window too.)
As I said, this isn't a solution and I appreciate it is annoying having messages disappear when you click back. And there are ways you can lose a message (some server submission errors or dead internet connections as well as blacklisted links the later of which I've filed a bug report on before suggesting a edit box be shown but this hasn't I believe been fixed yet) if you can't click back. In addition, if you're use to using back, I appreciate you might not realise at first if this doesn't work anymore, even with the warning.
However since it's apparent you did understand you would lose your message after you realised back had problems, and did receive the warning so hopefully would have remembered if you had forgotten, I'm just a bit surprised you did lose your message since I would have expected you to realise you were going to lose your message so even if you didn't save before you hit submit, this isn't one of the instances I described where you should have lost your message since you can just copy it from the edit conflict window or use the edit conflict window to resolve the edit conflict and save your edit.
Nil Einne (talk) 21:41, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Here is the problem: The edit conflict interface is almost completely unusable on a big page such as this one because it gives you the entire page, not just a section, and in the time you try to fix it the odds are you will get another edit conflict. It would be much faster to just mark the text in the diff and copy that. But if it's more than one paragraph you can't. So the natural thing is to use the back button to get to the section edit form where you entered the text in the first place.
It appears that the silly warning dialogue doesn't just warn you that you might lose something, but actually takes care that you do! So it kills the one half tolerable method for dealing with edit conflicts. Hans Adler 21:51, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Well, of course I realized I would lose my message, Nil Einne. It's the aspect of having no choice but to lose it that I don't like. If I were to use the new Vector, I would have to copy every edit I made. I would not be able to make multiple changes at once, like change all instances of X, as that sort of edit is impossible to copy and place again because of an (edit conflict). As far are the edit windows you describe, I don't seem to have those. I have gone back to the old skin with relief. Vector has no advantages for me, and many disadvantages. I don't like repeatedly losing edits. Being sure to copy edits before saving doesn't work for complex edits. Thanks for answering though. I appreciate that there is motivation to get people to use the new Vector. It's just not worth the hassle for me. Xtzou (Talk) 21:53, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Hans is exactly right. (Sorry, I didn't see your edit before.) Xtzou (Talk) 21:56, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
The problem should of course be solved by making sure that the warning dialogue doesn't destroy anything. (Note: I haven't verified myself that it does, since I would have to try getting into an edit conflict for that purpose.) But it's annoying anyway, and therefore the most logical thing to do is this: My preferences -> Editing -> Uncheck "Warn me when I leave an edit page with unsaved changes". This should fix the problem; at least I have had edit conflicts since I did this and there was no such problem. (Firefox 3.6.3) Hans Adler 22:08, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
(EC) Sorry but I still don't understand how you lost your edit. As I explained, I'm not denying that use the back button may be easier. But once you have gotten the edit conflict window, I don't really get why you would lose your edit since realising you would, if your edit matters to you you can just copy it from the edit conflict window then go back if you desire and do that. This may still be harder but it does stop you losing your edit. And you don't have to copy your edits every time you make them due to the risk of edit conflicts (although you still risk losing them in other circumstances as I described), you only have to copy them after you get the edit conflict (as I said, I'm not saying this isn't harder, but it's not as you suggest that you are always going to lose them since if you didn't save them, you can still recover them from the edit conflict window even if it takes more time).
Incidentally I have never really used the edit conflict window but I suspect if you do try to use them, it would work better then you may think for pages where you leave comments. As I mentioned finding them isn't that hard, you could probably do it in 10 seconds provided it's only one comment and signed. As a case in point, I had no problem doing that for this comment (it was only one paragraph but I didn't copy it from the edit diff but search for it). Just to repeat, I'm not saying you should have to this simply that I still don't understand why you would lost your edits.
BTW, while I have no idea why some people lose their edits, and it could have something to do with the warning, this isn't a clear cut problem. I personally have been using the skin for about 8? months and have never lost edits on Firefox IIRC. And I do get edit warnings, I just ignore them, since it's never been a problem for me.
Nil Einne (talk) 22:17, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
I lost my edit repeatedly. At least three times here, and also somewhere else on this page. I don't know of the windows you are talking about. I get no extra windows as you discribe. I had no choice but to continue (hopelessly) on the (edit conflict) page, or to navigate away and lose my edits. I have changed back to the monobook skin, as not being able to use the back button is to humongous a loss. It is not ok not to be able to use the back button. I think it was the usability expert, Jakob Nielson, who said that the back button was the most used button of all. (It happened again with this edit, but thankfully my back button is working in monobook.) Xtzou (Talk) 22:24, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Do you mean you don't actually get two edit boxes when you get an edit conflict? What does your edit conflict screen look like then? Perhaps take a screenshot and show us? If you don't get two edit boxes, it sounds like there's a serious problem with your setup which you probably should resolve. Perhaps turn off all gadgets and make sure your js is clean. May be also try turning off all Firefox plugins Nil Einne (talk) 22:28, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
I just got another one, thanks to your edit above. The window shows your edit in a diff, but does not show mine. It is not possible to "ignore" the edit warnings as you suggest, as they are accompanied by a forced-choice message box. either "Cancel" and remain on the (edit conflict) page, never being able to save an edit, or navigate away and lose the edit. If you do not choose one, you cannot continue editing. Xtzou (Talk) 22:31, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
And I have unchecked the box under Preferences - Editing, as suggested above. Xtzou (Talk) 22:36, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
You should see your changes in the second edit box as I mentioned above. As I also mentioned if you are having trouble finding them, try searching for ~~~~ (you will find mine as well which wouldn't be normal. I'm also pretty you should also see your changes in the diff, are you sure your looking at the correct side of the diff (which is on the left in this case). BTW, you should see this in whatever skin you're using. By ignore the warning, I mean I just click 'ok'. Nil Einne (talk) 22:49, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

Once more, if you are annoyed by that new feature: My preferences -> Editing -> Uncheck "Warn me when I leave an edit page with unsaved changes". Hans Adler 22:36, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

As I said above, I have done that already, and it does not prevent the scenario from happening. What you suggest does not apply to edit conflicts. By the way, I am using Windows 7 with Firefox 3.6.3, the combo that seems to be encountering the most problems with Vector. Xtzou (Talk) 22:38, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Do you mean you still get a warning or you don't but you still lose your changes? Nil Einne (talk) 22:52, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Did that fix the problem for you? Is that why you think it's related to the warning that you lost your changes? If so, you probably should file a bugzilla report specifically mentioning this. (As I mentioned, AFAIK it's never been a problem for me and I do get the warning just ignore it, and I've purposely tried using the back button a few times here just to make sure I wasn't remembering wrong but I wasn't. Losing my changes was one of the reason I migrated from IE so I think I would have noticed anyway.) Nil Einne (talk) 22:49, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
(edit conflict) I am back to monobook. So I don't have the problem anymore. I don't intend to go through that kind of stress and hassle. I think it is the combo of Windows 7 and Firefox 3.6.3 as many complaints seem to be coming from those users. Xtzou (Talk) 23:02, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Well I have FF 3.6.3 and Windows 7 (Ultimate x64) and it doesn't seem to be a problem for me. I do have some gadgets but I also tried as a logged out user (with an edit conflict on the sandbox) and it still the same for me, my edits stay. Actually something just occured to me. Do you mean when you click back your edits are gone? Or you click backed and got the warning you may lose your edits, then closed the window because you assumed your edits were gone or perhaps didn't bother to check if your edit was the and just kept clicking back? If it's the later, then I suggest you actually make sure your edit is gone. The warning is only to tell people (primarily new users) they may (note it specifically says may) lose their edit since it's true on some browser particularly IE. It doesn't mean your edit is definitely gone. If you aren't sure your edits were gone, but just assumed they were, we haven't actually established there's anything worse about the new skin in this regard (well there was once [19] but it appears to have been fixed) in other words, people are more likely to lose their edits then they were previously. While perhaps the wording on the warning could be improved, it's not likely to go away since as I suspect and would agree with the usability team this would be a useful warning to new users. Nil Einne (talk) 23:10, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
I can't click back because there is a forced choice message box in Vector, do I want to stay (hopelessly) on the edit conflict page, or do I want to lose my edits. It forces me to "navigate away" and lose my edits if I do not want to remained deadlocked forever in an edit conflict. Surely you know that once you are in an edit conflict, the only choice (in monobook) is to cancel and use the back button to retrieve your edits, right? Well, if the back button has lost functionality, then there is no way to save edits. Xtzou (Talk) 23:21, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Er as I said above, just go back, click okay to the warning that you may lose your message and you should see your edit unless you're really losing them but it doesn't seem we have established you are. There's no deadlock. The message box doesn't say you will lose your edit, it doesn't destroy your edits, as I said above, it's solely intended to warn users that they may lose their edits since this is true on some browsers. I'm even more convinced now we simply have a case of confusion. As far as we know, there's no greater chance you'll lose your edits. You just get a warning you may lose your edits. If you click okay and try your luck, on good browsers like Firefox you don't lose your edits. On bad browsers like IE you do lose your edits. Users who are experienced may want to turn it off, or leave it on and click okay whenever they really want to navigate away e.g. by going back perhaps not concerned because they're using a browser which they trust not to lose their messages like Firefox, or perhaps using a browser like IE which they don't trust but not caring if they lose their message. Nil Einne (talk) 23:28, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Well, with Vector, if I click "Okay" then I navigate away as the message warns and I lose my edits. If I click "Cancel" (the only other choice) I remain deadlocked forever in an edit conflict and Firefox is non functional. So the only choice, if I ever want to edit again, is to click "Okay". However, with Monobook and Windows 7, the back button works in Firefox 3.6.3. Xtzou (Talk) 12:16, 14 May 2010 (UTC)
(ec) No that's not how it is under normal circumstances, not in Vector and not in Monobook. When you get into an edit conflict there is a diff between the page as it has become while you were editing, and the page as you have changed it. There are two big edit boxes. One at the top contains the source code of the page as it is now. Another, at the bottom, contains the page as you have edited it. You are supposed to copy your changes from the lower edit box and paste them into the upper one at the appropriate place. Usually that's too much work, so people just use the back button and try again. But you can do it.
And the warning is just that, a warning. If you previously had a procedure for dealing with edit conflicts that worked, then you should simply try exactly the same procedure under Vector and ignore that warning.
I agree with Nil Einne, it just looks like a case of confusion. Hans Adler 23:33, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
My previous procedure was the back button, which "navigates away" in Vector and I lose my edit. Xtzou (Talk) 12:18, 14 May 2010 (UTC)
(edit conflict) As I said above I never had the problem in the first place. I assumed that that was because I didn't have an edit conflict before I turned the new feature off, but maybe the real reason is that it's not a universal problem. In light of this I have removed the bolding. Hans Adler 22:55, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
In Vector, if you try to ditch an edit, meaning cancel an edit and not implement it, you get that pesky message box, saying "Are you sure you want to navigate away etc." Really a pain, and I'm sorry for those poor IPs and newbie users who can't or don't know how to turn it off. The nanny state. Xtzou (Talk) 21:33, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

The new editing toolbar

Is there any way to change the editing toolbar back to the old version? Even though I'm working in monobook the toolbar is still different. It's way too bloated: I shouldn't have to wait a second for the "special characters" dropdown box to load. I also preferred not having my monitor blacked out when citing sources. I find this overly intrusive, less streamlined, and less simple when compared with the old version. Is there a code that I can use to get the old editing toolbar back? I suppose it's not worth my while to ask about putting it back by default, since we all know how much everybody loves bloated interfaces</sarcasm> ThemFromSpace 21:01, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

Clicking the link at the top of the page (I forget its title) to undo the changes seems to work. Algebraist 21:04, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Or just disable the new toolbar in your Preferences under the "editing" section. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:09, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
"Enable enhanced editing toolbar" and "Enable dialogs for inserting links, tables and more". PleaseStand (talk) 21:09, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
For the cite script, the black background can be disabled, see the documentation. This can also be disabled sitewide if desired. Mr.Z-man 21:12, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Thanks guys, everything is back to normal now! I was sure to tell the Foundation exactly what I thought of the changes in the survey they gave when I undid them, although I assume that they're just planning on using the surveys for toilet paper anyhow. :\ ThemFromSpace 21:18, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Thanks PleaseStand! Now it's nearly as good as it was. Except that the broken ball picture has shrunk in size and I can barely see the jigsaw traces... East of Borschov (talk) 15:03, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

Modifying row of tabs at top of articles via CSS

Three questions related to changing (via my vector stylesheet) the row of tabs at the top of articles:

  1. Is there any way to change the text of the tabs? I want to change "View history" back to the old text of "History".
  2. Is there any way using CSS to take the options out of the dropdown menu (Delete, Move, Protect) and turn them into the flat tabs that they used to be? I know there's User:Amalthea/VectorMenuToTabs.js, but it seems like there should be a way to do this using just CSS, with no JavaScript.
  3. Because I find the search box clutters up the row of tabs, I made it disappear via 
    #p-search { display: visible; }
    . The problem is that having done so, the down-arrow tab is now at the right of the screen, so the dropdown menu disappears off the right side of the screen, since the dropdown menu's left edge is aligned with the left edge of the down-arrow tab. How can I instead align the dropdown menu's right edge with the right edge of the down-arrow tab? I'm currently using 
    #p-cactions .menu { margin-left: -33px; }
    , but that is only a partial workaround since it fails if the menu options are different (for example, for protected pages wherein the option "Protect" is instead replaced with "Unprotect", changing the width of the menu and thus ruining the alignment). I'd like to perfectly align the dropdown menu's right edge with the right edge of the down-arrow tab instead of doing positioning by using a pixel calculation that only works on some pages.

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help me with these issues.

—Lowellian (reply) 23:29, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

I believe that some of my scripts might be able to help you, if you don't mind using JavaScript:
  1. Go to Special:MyPage/vector.js and add the following: 
    importScript('User:Nihiltres/nothingthree.js');
  2. Go to Special:MyPage/nothingthree-config.js and add the following, then bypass your cache:
addOnloadHook(function () {
nothingthree.util.linkFix("ca-history", "History");
//quick and dirty span-adding routine because items in the tabs now need a span element to be formatted properly:
document.getElementById("ca-history").firstChild.innerHTML = "<span>" + document.getElementById("ca-history").firstChild.innerHTML + "</span>";
nothingthree.tabMove.core("ca-move", "ca-history", "p-views");
nothingthree.tabMove.core("ca-delete", "ca-history", "p-views");
(document.getElementById('ca-protect') ? nothingthree.tabMove.core("ca-protect", "ca-history", "p-views") : nothingthree.tabMove.core("ca-unprotect", "ca-history", "p-views"));
});
You can't move just the move, protect, delete tabs with CSS alone, as far as I know. Also, if you're interested, you can get more fun stuff from nothingthree.js. Check out the documentation at User:Nihiltres/nothingthree. I personally use the main routines I made, which have slightly smarter behaviours e.g. moving the delete tab out if the page has a deletion template on it. Also, if you're using Internet Explorer, these scripts might not work—I don't have access to Internet Explorer and can't debug for it. {{Nihiltres|talk|edits|⚡}} 19:45, 14 May 2010 (UTC)
Thanks, but as I stated in my original post, I'm trying to avoid JS and looking for CSS solutions. —Lowellian (reply) 20:50, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

How to disable autosuggestions?

Is it possible to disable autosuggestions in the search box? The issue I'm encountering is that the list does not populate/update as quickly as I type. For example, I type "WP:VPT" and push the return key only to be taken to the disambiguation page WP. Thanks, -- Black Falcon (talk) 00:29, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

Please see higher up the page #Search_clips_off_last_few_letters_in_Vector. This will probably be high on the list of things to fix. There is also an option to turn search suggestions off, but as I have just discovered, it is broken bugzilla:23520. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 00:51, 14 May 2010 (UTC)
Me too on the second one. BTW if you're looking for it, search options, Disable AJAX suggestions Nil Einne (talk) 01:00, 14 May 2010 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Thank you, I will follow those bug reports. I had found and tried "Disable AJAX suggestions", but assumed that it was for something else since it did not have an effect. -- Black Falcon (talk) 01:03, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

May I remark that "Disable AJAX suggestions" is a rather un-user friendly way of describing this, even when listed under the "search options" tab. *I* know what AJAX is, but to a lot of other people it's a type of cleaner or a Dutch football club - nto to mention even more possibilities listed at Ajax. Rd232 talk 10:42, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

Logo is terrible

The fixed logo
The Japanese and Hindu characters are fixed.

This has been mentioned before, but I have something different– a solution. A while ago I made this in Photoshop:

Here's my project page: User:Awesomeness/Fixing_the_Logo

I shall revive this project! No longer shall it be a failure! This way, there are no errors in the logo, and the logo doesn't make me gag, either.  Awesomeness  talk  02:56, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

You may continue if you like, but it won't be very fruitful: this has been decided by WMF, and they have the final say. Choyoołʼįįhí:Seb az86556 > haneʼ 03:02, 14 May 2010 (UTC)
(edit conflict)The Japanese is still suboptimal, unfortunately - it should look like ウィ, and should not be confusable with クィ. The new logo does get this right, regardless of any other problems. On the other hand, the Devanagari (Hindi) script has always been the biggest issue, so any version with that fixed is good. — Gavia immer (talk) 03:05, 14 May 2010 (UTC)
I'll fix that.  Awesomeness  talk  16:45, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

Old logo "fix" in Classic skin

I've been doing some experimenting in my personal css files. The fixes suggested by Prince Kassad (here) and Smallman12q (here) works with monobook, but not with classic skin (yes, I did use standard.css). Can anyone suggest how I can get this to work? —  Tivedshambo  (t/c) 08:58, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

It seems that this is not skinable in the classic skin (like many other things in that skin, i notice). —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:28, 14 May 2010 (UTC)
It might be skinnable if you use JavaScript instead of CSS. Try the following, perhaps?
document.getElementById("quickbar").getElementsByTagName("img")[0].src = "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7f/Wikipedia-logo-en.png";
Hope that helps. :) {{Nihiltres|talk|edits|⚡}} 20:17, 14 May 2010 (UTC)
Doesn't seem to work for me (Firefox 3.6.2). Thanks anyway. —  Tivedshambo  (t/c) 22:00, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

Edit bar

There is an edit bar error in my user page. I am not able to edit artciles. Even my signature is not getting registered. Can some one help rectify the problem so that I can continue writing artciles. Thanks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Nvvchar (talk • contribs) 14:29, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

Do you have any gadgets enabled in your preferences ? Try disabling them one by one until it works. Also, it would really help if you could say which browser+version you are using. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:26, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

catmain & amends

Not sure whether this is the right place, but: I've been ambushed by a couple of v recent changes. Firstly, the catmain template (as used in the Category:Recipients of the Order of Ushakov, and elsewhere) now results in "redirect Template:Main". Secondly, when I amend an article and, before committing with "save page", I select another article in the same pane or "show preview" any amends made are lost when I return to them. These have cropped up today. The second issue is a problem. Are these intended? Folks at 137 (talk) 18:58, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for spotting the Template:catmain problem, it's fixed now. --Funandtrvl (talk) 20:28, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

On my computer if you copy and paste an article title and put it in the search bar you get 0 results but if you type it in it's fine. Marcus Aurelius (talk) 20:09, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

And what kind of computer would that be ? (Always include your OS and browser version please in reports ! ) —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:21, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Mozilla. Not sure where I can find the version. Marcus Aurelius (talk) 20:26, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Perhaps you are affected by the same problem as the person below this post. Try waiting a second before hitting "search" and please report if that works ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:07, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Doesn't help. I switched computers to use Internet Explorer and now anything that I copy and paste that is wikilinked redirects to Null. It would be interesting to see if the page null gets an enormous number of page views tomorrow. Marcus Aurelius (talk) 21:18, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Do you have any gadgets enabled in your preferences ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:28, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
To many to list but i'll try the process of eliminatation... Marcus Aurelius (talk) 21:32, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Actually realized it wouldn't matter because it occurs whether or not I'm logged in. I'm switching back to my other computer now.74.207.73.20 (talk) 21:35, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Wait a minute, with "results", do you perhaps mean "suggestions" ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:03, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
It takes me here as though I hadn't typed anything in. Marcus Aurelius (talk) 22:08, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Just got this problem too. When I right click and paste something in the search box and then press enter it searches for nothing. However if I use ctl-v to paste it or instead of pressing enter I click go it works. Pretty strange (not to say annoying) - Dumelow (talk) 22:09, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Windows 7, Firefox 3.6.3 by the way - Dumelow (talk) 22:11, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Bingo. Filing this as a bugreport. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:12, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
bugzilla:23517. I renamed this section btw, to be more on topic. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:17, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
I had trouble reproducing this bug because initially I clicked the search icon, in which case the search works as it should. Could you add to the description that to reproduce the bug one needs to press the return key after pasting? Hans Adler 22:26, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Oh, and I can confirm the bug as reproducible with both Firefox 3.5.3 3.6.3 (sorry for the typo) and Internet Explorer 8.0. Hans Adler 22:29, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
And FF 3.6.3 WIndows 7 x64. Well at least this bug I don't care so much that I never noticed as a long term beta tester of the skin, I hardly ever use right click paste only ctrl+v :-) Nil Einne (talk) 00:40, 14 May 2010 (UTC)
Am now using Firefox 3.5.7. Running back over to the University to see what browser i was using there. Marcus Aurelius (talk) 22:21, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
...Windows Internet Explorer 7.0.5730.13. Marcus Aurelius (talk) 22:32, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

I do like the new Vector skin, and I believe this issue should have never happened. The new search box was put into the Vector skin at the same time as the May 13 rollout of Vector to both readers and editors—with seemingly zero testing.

  • It is not possible to turn this "feature" off, not even the pop-up suggestions through "Disable AJAX suggestions" in Preferences.
  • Also, the search box is way too narrow (10em). We are not limited to the width of the sidebar, so can easily make the search box 15em, 20em, or even 30em.

Yes, the workaround for now for the "zero results" issue (that doesn't help readers) is easy: just press the space bar before you press enter to search. If we can't get this working very quickly, why not just ditch the pop-up search suggestions and avoid such a problem? PleaseStand (talk) 01:48, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

If we can't have the ideal, we shouldn't have it at all? I don't see that any of the problems are so major that we should just remove it entirely. Mr.Z-man 16:33, 14 May 2010 (UTC)
They did it, temporarily replacing the new, buggy search suggestions code with the old, working code. PleaseStand (talk) 15:03, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

Search clips off last few letters in Vector

Let me preface this by saying I've already moved back to monobook.

When a search query is quickly typed in to the new search box, hitting enter quickly as you reach the end, the last letter or few letters are clipped off the search. My best guess as to why this happens is that the autorecommend script holds up addition of the new letter/s until it finds results. This results, for me, in a search of WP:GIF ending up being WP:, and a search for WP:ANIMATION coming out as WP:ANIMATION. Riffraffselbow (talk) 20:27, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

I can duplicate this. Typing at a natural speed in Firefox 3.6.3 on Windows 7 sometimes results in the search term being clipped. Dragons flight (talk) 21:11, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
Just came here to report the same. In fact I was redirected to WP:VP when I typed WP:VPT because of it. I am running the same specs as Dragons Flight above. Please fix this, it is very annoying not being able to go straight to an article around half of the time - Dumelow (talk) 21:20, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
I thought that it was just me; it happens in Chrome 4.1 on XP, too. —Ost (talk) 21:55, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
This is logged in the bug reports as bugzilla:23498 —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:19, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

I do hope this gets fixed soon as I'm finding it extremely annoying. Yet I want to give vector a chance to see if I can get used to it. It does have its redeeming qualities. -- Ϫ 08:45, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:PleaseStand/vector.css —Preceding unsigned comment added by Svanslyck (talk • contribs) 15:49, 15 May 2010 (UTC)
I saw that, and am using that CSS that enlarges the search box, but that doesn't fix the clipping text bug. bugzilla:23498. -- Ϫ 22:03, 15 May 2010 (UTC)
Using any sort of unusual font, such as Junicode? kcylsnavS {screech} 22:09, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

Revert made sense?

I reverted this edit because it seemed to insert some sort of code. I'm not sure what it is, so I reverted it to be safe rather than sorry. My reasoning is that the edit was not made by the user, and because it inserted non-wiki and probably non-html coding. Could someone tell me if I did the right thing? Brambleclawx 03:20, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

Looks like the user probably did make those edits, but neglected to log in. The original userpage was filled with code too. It should probably be deleted per WP:NOTWEBSPACE. Equazcion (talk) 03:24, 14 May 2010 (UTC)
And to answer your question; yes, you did the right thing. -- Ϫ 08:55, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

Return to page logged in from

How do I get login to return me to the page I logged in from, e.g. Main Page, instead of dropping me into a "login successful" page and forcing me to return manually? kcylsnavS (kalt) 14:23, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

No one's answered, but here's what I was told
          You can force the redirection on your monobook.js / vector.js by adding<br />
          <br />
          if (wgCanonicalSpecialPageName == "Userlogin")<br />
               addOnloadHook( function() { document.location =<br />
          document.getElementById('mw-returnto').getElementsByTagName('a')[0].href; }<br />
          );<br />

kcylsnavS (kalt) 22:45, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

The reason it doesn't auto redirect, is because it has to do the cross project login (which is the loading of the small images). —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 23:52, 14 May 2010 (UTC)
Can't it do that and then come back? It needn't do it via wiki redirect. It could do it via LocalSettings.php or something. In any case I haven't logged out since updating my vector.js and monobook.js, but we'll see what happens. kcylsnavS (kalt) 23:55, 14 May 2010 (UTC)
It works fine, no interferance with unified login. kcylsnavS {screech} 15:47, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

Template:Help Out

Hi, could someone give me a hand with Template:Help Out? I've added a parameter, projcat, and I can't quite get it to work exactly. See the problem in action at Wikipedia:VEN#How_can_you_help, the first line under the heading "Use the project". Basically, can't get the piped link to work. Rd232 talk 11:36, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

Try replacing this:

{{#if:{{{projcat|}}}|*Monitor discussions on talk pages of articles covered by the project. [{{fullurl:Special:RecentChangesLinked/Category:{{{projcat}}}}}] Recent Changes to the project's talk pages]}}

with this:

{{#if:{{{projcat|}}}|*Monitor discussions on talk pages of articles covered by the project. [[Special:RecentChangesLinked/{{FULLPAGENAMEE:Category:{{{projcat}}}}}|Recent Changes to the project's talk pages]]}}

I've implemented this with some other minor fixes. Hope that helps.

— Richardguk (talk) 17:30, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. urlencode was producing + instead of %20, which surprised me. Rd232 talk 20:37, 15 May 2010 (UTC)
In fact, since the template now links to Special:RecentChangesLinked/ internally, [[Special:RecentChangesLinked/Category:{{{projcat}}}|...]] should work as well (unlike external links, which break at the first space or closing square bracket, internal links will automatically convert spaces and most special characters in the wikitext, so there is no need to encode the article title with FULLPAGENAMEE after all). — Richardguk (talk) 23:33, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

Anyone know the CSS I'd use to move the tabs (PAGE EDIT --- on left then --- TALK HISTORY on right --- with no READ tab)

and/or also the CSS to lengthen the size of the search field (it's too short)? kcylsnavS (kalt) 12:25, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

For lengthening the search field, see User:PleaseStand/vector.css, which you can add to Special:MyPage/vector.css. The setting there is fine for me, but if you desire a super-long search box, try using 20em or 30em instead of 15em. The second line of search box CSS tweaks where the top of the search box is so it looks slightly better. PleaseStand (talk) 14:41, 15 May 2010 (UTC)
Thank you so much for pointing out your modification scripts. A larger search box is SO MUCH better. I wish that all these scripts that can modify the skin were all on a single page, so we could go there and see what we can change, instead of having to search around quite a bit. Thanks, --Funandtrvl (talk) 18:18, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

Search string bug?

I think I've found a strange bug in Mediawiki but I'm not sure and need to know if anyone can reproduce it. For some reason I seem to be getting ERR_READ_TIMEOUT errors when searching for the string the brand and only when searching for this specific search string. For details on the troubleshooting I've done so far please see User:OlEnglish/the brand. -- Ϫ 15:52, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

I can confirm identical behavior. I'm using Firefox 3.6.3 with the Vector skin, and searching on this exact phrase times out for me after a long wait, but only while logged in. When logged out, useful results are returned in seconds. — Gavia immer (talk) 18:32, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

Same thing happens for me in monobook so it's not an issue with vector. Also, results appear when doing an Advanced search and selecting specific namespaces to search in. Any idea what may be causing this? Should I report it as a mediawiki bug? -- Ϫ 21:24, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

bugzilla:16236 seems to be related. -- Ϫ 05:44, 16 May 2010 (UTC)

CSS help please

Could some kind soul point me in the right direction to tweak the font size of the time column in my watchlist? It's a bit small for my liking with the new Vector skin. I don't use CSS that often, so whenever I do, I have to go back to first principles to remember what's going on with selectors for html elements, ids, classes, and the combinations ... could take me a while. NB I have my prefs set to "Expand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent", so it's that layout I'm referring to. PL290 (talk) 19:32, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

If anyone's interested, I did some digging and have changed it with
table.mw-enhanced-rc {font-size:13px}
Dunno what else it will affect... PL290 (talk) 21:10, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

I have "Navigable table of contents" enabled in my preferences, but i don't actually see it when i am editing. Is something wrong? --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 19:42, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

No the feature hasn't launched yet. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:51, 15 May 2010 (UTC)
Issue registered as bugzilla:23538 —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:14, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

Extra space between tag and article title?

Is it just me, or is there now extra space between the tag (Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) at the top of the page and the article title below it? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Madman Marz (talk • contribs) 20:09, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

Safari v slow; fine on internet explorer and firefox

Alpha Quadrant (talk · contribs) reports that Wikipedia is VERY slow (but does work) on Safari, but is fine on Explorer and Firefox - on two different PCs. Windows OS. Safari version 4.05 Build 531.22.7 (latest).

Exactly the same when logged out or logged in.

In Safari, if they try to change their skin in prefs, it says it has changed, but when they look again it is back on 'myskin'. When they changed the skin in preferences in another web browser, it did not change it in safari.

This has only happened in the last couple of days - with the 'skin' issue, I wonder if it relates to the recent changes to the interface. They normally use the default skin.

They have reset everything.

If they go to Wikipedia through Proxify, it works in Safari.

I asked them to try secure server, and it said, "Safari failed to open page https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/" - but internet explorer and Firefox similarly could not access that URL ("Page does not exist").

They do not appear to have any form of proxy normally; they have Windows firewall enabled.

Normally uses default skin. Any ideas?  Chzz  ►  23:13, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

I just checked Safari (same build) on a box running XP and both the regular server and the secure server load just fine. –droll [chat] 01:47, 16 May 2010 (UTC)

Having trouble accessing alt text on mouseovers

I've asked this question at Wikipedia talk:Alternative text for images#Having trouble accessing alt text on mouseovers, and I thought it would be a good idea to ask here, as well...

I have tried restarting my IE 8.0, I also rebooted my computer, I even switched over to Firefox, and I still cannot see the alt text when I mouseover an image that contains the alt command. The mouseover works when I hover the mouse over a link, but not when I try to view the accessibility alt codes for images. What am I doing wrong? Is the alt code mouseover function blacked out? Is this adversely affecting blind users of Wikipedia?
 —  Paine (Ellsworth's Climax)  07:53, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

Alt text is what its name says it is – an alternative. It is meant to be displayed, if the image can't, e.g. you have images disabled or use a screen reader. If the thumb parameter isn't used, the image description is shown in a tooltip: Description. Svick (talk) 14:10, 10 May 2010 (UTC)
    • What many people miss, is that there is a difference between a tooltip (which is the title of a link), and alt text, which indeed replaces the image if it cannot be displayed.—TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:21, 10 May 2010 (UTC)
Thank you all. Here's what I seem to be missing. According to the conversation referenced by Colin, which gives a link to a Microsoft explanation here, and which took place in early April of this year, IE8 does not display the alt text as a tooltip. I've been using IE8 for several months, and have added alt text to several images, all the while able to mouseover the image and see the alt text as a tooltip. On 19 April, I uploaded an image and inserted it in two articles, both with alt text. At that time I was able to see the alt text as a tool tip when I mouseovered the image. And now, as of 10 May (or sometime between 19 April and 10 May) I can no longer see the alt text when I mouseover the image.
I checked, and there have been three updates from Microsoft since 19 April, so I removed them to see if one of them was responsible for the change. Even after removing them, I still can no longer see the alt text as a tooltip, so now I don't know what to think.
The downside to all this is when editors are out hunting for images that need alt text, they will not be able to just mouseover an image to see if alt text has already been added. Now they will have to go into the code on the edit page to find out if alt text has been added. Some of them might be deterred by this.
 —  Paine (Ellsworth's Climax)  09:10, 11 May 2010 (UTC)
Can you link to the pages and identify the images where you noticed the alt/tooltip behaviour changing? I use a Firefox add-in to display alt text as a tooltip. There's also Altviewer, which you can run on a per-article basis. Colin°Talk 10:43, 11 May 2010 (UTC)
Yes, the image is of Napoleon Hill later in life. You'll see it on the left side lower down. I also placed it in the article about Hill's book, Think and Grow Rich. That is the image I uploaded on the 19th of April, and at that time, I could mouseover the image and read the alt text in a tooltip in my IE8 browser. Altviewer is a good tool and will do the job. Thank you very much for that, Colin!
 —  Paine (Ellsworth's Climax)  14:24, 11 May 2010 (UTC)
It may be related to removal of .wikipedia.org from IE8 forced compatibility view list. — Dispenser 16:49, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

Again, browsers aren't supposed to display alt= as a tooltip. Instead title= is the tooltip. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 11:12, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

That's all well and good, OD, but I just mouseovered the Napoleon Hill image and am again seeing the alt text as a tooltip. Go figure.
 —  Paine (Ellsworth's Climax)  03:14, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

Yet another reason to use this fabulous greasemonkey plugin. http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/13657 Riffraffselbow (talk) 20:12, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

I only said "supposed to". All the major ones that I know of will display the alt as a tooltip if there is no title defined. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 21:13, 16 May 2010 (UTC)
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