Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 88

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Village pump (technical) archive  

This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (technical).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

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Planning Template:Spellnum for decimals in words

I have an offline version to re-create Template:Spellnum, but this time, to show either an integer or decimal amount, spelled out in the exact words, up to 19,999,999.12345. If there is already a template which handles decimals, then I would use that template instead; otherwise, this evening, I will re-create Spellnum, plus the /doc and talk-page. It would be as follows:

The Template:Spellnum spells the number in parameter 1 as the equivalent words in English. The maximum number supported is just below 20 million, with up to 5 decimal digits: 19,999,999.12345. Usage:  {{spellnum|345}} → three hundred forty-five {{spellnum|0.64}} → zero point six four {{spellnum|12.015|case=u}} → Twelve point zero one five Optional parameters are: case=U (or: case=L) show as upper-case capital or lower-case. See also Template:Numtext - to spell the size of a number, {{numtext|3700}} → three thousand seven hundred

I'm not sure if there is an undocumented parser function which already displays a decimal amount in words. Also, what other options should be provided by a Spellnum template? -Wikid77 19:13, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

Why would this be useful? OrangeDog (τ • ε) 20:12, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

Some users want to show "Eighty-four" (rather than "84") when the conversion begins a sentence: {{convert|84|km|mi}} → 84 kilometres (52 mi). -Wikid77 22:41, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

Whilst WP:ORDINAL (see below) does state "Numbers that begin a sentence are spelled out, since using figures risks the period being read as a decimal point or abbreviation mark" it then goes on to state "it is often better to recast the sentence than to simply change format". So instead of writing Eighty-four kilometres (fifty-two miles) away is the city of London I would write It lies 84 kilometres (52 mi) from the city of London. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:39, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

Use of such a template might violate WP:ORDINAL. Also please note that us Brits would say "three hundred and forty-five". --Redrose64 (talk) 20:14, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

Good points. I was wondering if we needed spelling options "sp=br" or "sp=us" (as with "metre" or "meter"). Also, we could have option "warn=MOS" to warn users when the number-in-words would violate WP:MOSNUM (or "warn=no" to suppress); however, if the number is "45.23" then omitting the decimal portion of "point two three" would be misleading, so it could issue a warning instead. -Wikid77 22:41, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

Re-writing the sentence to not start with a number is easier and would improve the flow generally. Or (shock horror) they could do the simple mathematics themselves and not use the most collosal template we have. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 22:49, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

Collate diffs from an editor

If I wanted to collect all of the contributions of an editor, or all of the edits to an article, is there a way to collect, collate, export, or download these in a single document or file?

Example: Go to Iraq War, export every diff from the article's history in a continuous file.

Thanks, Ocaasi (talk) 17:58, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

Use the API. In XML format, here is the Iraq War article. It's large, you have been warned. That's only limited to 1000 edits. Change the number in the URL to increase the number. Documentation is here. You need to use rvcontinue to get more than the maximum limit, if there is one (which there probably is). Gary King (talk · scripts) 23:07, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

That's not diffs as requested, plus Special:Export is a bit easier to use. P.S. I would change the API link above to &rvlimit=10 because you don't know how many people are going to click on it out of curiosity. — AlexSm 23:12, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the tips and links. I changed the url to fetch 20 diffs, just for convenience. I don't know how to use the API yet, but I can copy that url for all its worth and tweak the parameters as needed. Ocaasi (talk) 23:32, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

Cite.php footnote open issues

Cite has matured into a well featured citation system. It still has issues, of which the most egregious are listed below. What can we do to get resources working on this?

Nesting

Explanatory notes are used in tables, captions, navboxes, infoboxes and the like and can be created by using groups. Such notes may require a citation. Attempting to nest <ref>...</ref> tags results in an error.

• References can be nested per WP:REFNEST, but it uses the cryptic #tag:ref and fails when used more than once in list-defined references.
• T22707 - Nested refs fail inside references block

Over backlinking

Lists often use the same source a multitude of times. Named references allow reuse of a single reference and there are templates that allow insertion of page numbers. When a reference is used more than a handful of times, then the backlinks become ugly, unwieldy and useless. The extension now supports 1377 backlinks due to requests to fix articles that ran out of backlinks.

• Example: List of Eagle Scouts
• T25455 Cite extension: suppress backlink

MediaWiki interface markup problems

Cite uses a series of MediaWiki interface pages to display errors. Most of the error messages link to a help page. Certain interface pages do not properly handle markup, thus a link cannot be included.

• T19865 Some MediaWiki Cite error messages do not allow markup

---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 19:04, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

To fix nesting, you'll have to either deprecate <ref>...</ref> syntax in favor of something resembling (but more user-friendly than) {{#tag:ref}}, or fix T3310. One thing I'd like to see is something that gives a sane output instead of the awful {{rp}} template. Anomie⚔ 20:00, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

See T15127 Page number attribute for <ref> tags. The problem there is that no one has defined what the output should look like. Should the page number be placed after the in-text label, the backlink label or where? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Gadget850 (talk • contribs) 20:17, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

I thought I participated in a discussion on that topic at some point, but I can't find where now. My preference would be something like this:

1. ^ Smith, John. The Book. Blah blah.
   1. ^ Page 23.
   2. ^ ^{a b} Page 42.
   3. ^ Page 145. "Na na-na-na-na na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na na-na-na-na".

The in-page refs would probably wind up looking something like ^[1.3]. Or creative use of <li value="N"> could allow them to be numbered sequentially even while being indented. Anomie⚔ 22:19, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

Redundant Article and Read tabs (thread in Misc. forum)

• Hello. Please forgive me for cross-posting, but I think I initially went to the wrong forum. I have made an argument elsewhere (Redundant Article and Read tabs) that the "Read" tab is redundant (hence unnecessary) and misleading. Again, please forgive the cross-posting, but I think someone who has some deeper knowledge of GUI design etc. could be useful there. Be warned that the thread is long, and that my arguments are more crystallized in later posts than earlier ones. Thank you for your time. GlitchCraft (talk) 02:47, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Gif black squares in transparency

Animation of rabatment line with golden rectangle.

Why is this animation coming out like this?Smallman12q (talk) 23:53, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

It seems the cached 220px version is corrupt. Any other sizes work OK. I tried purging the cached file, without succes. — Edokter (talk) — 00:11, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Coming out like what? I see nothing wrong, so either it's been fixed, or it's a problem on your end, or there's something I'm not seeing because I don't know what to look for. --Carnildo (talk) 00:25, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Big black rectangles are appearing around the animation in the thumbnail. Perhaps this is a browser issue since not everyone is affected? Using Firefox 3 on a mac. GavinTing ^talk 10:20, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Looks fine in IE8 on XP Arjayay (talk) 15:49, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Also seems to be a problem on Safari 5 on a mac. GavinTing ^talk 19:23, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

I see it in IE8 en Chrome9 on XP. If you do not see it, you probably have a different thumb size set in your preferences. The problem only occurs with the 220px rendered image. It needs to be manually purged by a dev. — Edokter (talk) — 19:32, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

I see the same black-rectangle problem here, with Firefox 4.0 beta 12 on Debian Linux/x86. -- The Anome (talk) 12:57, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

Actually it occurs at various sizes. ―cobaltcigs 11:04, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

A bug report was filed: T29859.Smallman12q (talk) 15:09, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Can't seem to stay logged in

The past couple weeks I've noticed that I'm being logged out mid-edit with surprising frequency. This is happening both at my office and at home, so I'm wondering if it's a glitch in the WP system. Is anyone else having a similar problem? Thanks, Aristophanes68 (talk) 14:53, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

This has been happening to me as well - in multiple locations and regardless of whether I am editing in Firefox or IE. I'm randomly logged out mid-edit repeatedly throughout the day. --Jezebel'sPonyo^{bons mots} 15:19, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

It happens even when I'm not editing. Just now, I was scrolling through my Watchlist and the popups stopped working--I hadn't clicked anything--but I knew I had been logged out. Aristophanes68 (talk) 17:32, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

I have had this several times before, and it happened to me just now. It happens whether I'm in the middle of an edit or just browsing. Acalamari 19:06, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

Me too. Happens impartially in SeaMonkey or Safari. Bishonen | talk 04:32, 14 March 2011 (UTC).

I'm experiencing this too in Firefox and Chrome. SlimVirgin ^{TALK|CONTRIBS} 16:40, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

The weekly Technology Report

TL;DR: This is a reminder that the Signpost has a weekly technology report should interest users of this page. If it doesn't, all suggestions are welcome, and you can even fix it yourself.

Hey all. This is just my occasional reminder that there exists a "technology report", the bulk of which is currently written by me, in every edition of The Signpost. The Signpost is a weekly publication which tries to emulate the style of traditional news media in a wiki-friendly way, providing a summary version of all the news and happenings around the project (not just on en.wp), and usually with links to more detailed analysis. Reports often include the context required to understand those further analyses for readers unfamiliar with the subject matter, as often happens with the Technology report. If they don't, or there are other problems with the report, they can be fixed by suggestion of by direct editing - this is a wiki after all.

Why am I telling you this? Because I think there will be some people who read about this who would enjoy reading the report but don't know of its existence. If not, it's only 3 minutes of my life wasted :) Here, I am particularly addressing the occasional contributor to all things techie - geeks but not yet Wikimedia geeks - and in general those who think it useful to break down any sense of "us" and "them" with developers that might exist. By way of example, the change in the colour of the new messages bar was covered in an edition months ago, but the storm created came only a couple of weeks ago. Hopefully together the Tech Report can act as a two-way bridge between editors and developers, whilst simultaneously blurring the line between the two a little bit.

Thanks all and apologies for clogging up a fairly busy VPT. - Jarry1250 ^{[Who? Discuss.]} 10:24, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

• Thanks. I have created new essay WP:TECHREP ("Technology reports") and included just a list of recent tech. report issues, for quick wikilinks to some of the recent issues, plus the larger archives. It has seemed like WP:Signpost has been on another planet (for years), because everyone expects a typical "Category:WP Signpost technology reports" which still does not exist today. The confusion stems from "burying" the tech report in the larger Signpost, and I suspect techies often dislike reading a large Who's-News-in-WP to hunt for technical concerns. We know all the latest gossip about the "beautiful people" and "beautiful projects" does matter, but wading through all the other news has been a frustration for many. Does that viewpoint make sense? I would hate a navbox to list just tech-report issues, but it might be needed, and meanwhile, I have created the essay to link many recent (or upcoming) issues, while providing further essay space to elaborate about why Technology reports exist. The essay also tries to explain the "Archives" menu option, for the search-the-Signpost feature. Consider it just another way to spread the word about finding technology issues. -Wikid77 18:52, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

You don't have to read all the sections of The Signpost to get to the technology report. I routinely don't read several sections, for example. - Jarry1250 ^{[Who? Discuss.]} 19:15, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Crazy idea. Can someone make a revolving picture?

On Civilization there are a couple of photos of cities etc which keep getting changed by people with obvious national interests. Americans put pictures of Manhattan, and these get replaced by pictures of Hong Kong and so on. This is not so bad really, but obviously the danger here is of edit wars breaking out and getting silly. It therefore struck me that it would be nice if there were a way to make this kind of slow edit war happen in a controlled, artificial and therefore "fair" way. In other words, have the pictures change every few days. Is there any clever person out there who can see how you would do that?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 13:48, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

Sounds to me like a variation of WP:ENGVAR should be used in this situation. Whichever was used first. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 14:06, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

Technically, it would not be at all difficult to implement logic to display a different picture every few days, each day of the week, etc., using a #switch function. Whether this is a good idea editorially is, of course, another question entirely. –xeno^talk 14:12, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

I think it's a great idea. I hope someone implements it. Bus stop (talk) 14:16, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

What's wrong with using a collage? - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 14:18, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

Each component of a collage is necessarily reduced in size. Bus stop (talk) 14:26, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

If the pictures are named by the day-of-the-week, and you're OK with a generic caption, then it's simple: since the magic word {{CURRENTDAYNAME}} returns Sunday etc., create redirects to your seven images of the form File:Picture for Monday.jpg etc. then use this code in your page:

[[File:Picture for {{CURRENTDAYNAME}}.jpg|thumb|Picture of the day]]

But if you want to vary the caption, you need to test each day using a {{#switch: }}; if doing this you can use the same code to pick the actual image, as noted by Xeno, so you can also skip the redirects. Here's a bit of quick-and-dirty code based upon day of week:

[[File:{{#switch:{{CURRENTDOW}}
|1=picture of NYC.jpg{{!}}Somewhere in New York City
|2=a picture of Tokyo.jpg{{!}}Tokyo
|3=London skyline.jpg{{!}}London
|4=etc.jpg{{!}}Caption for Thursday's pic
...
|0|7=picture for Sunday.jpg{{!}}Caption
}}|thumb]]

The last one tests both 0 and 7 because I don't know which is correct - neither Help:Magic words nor mw:Help:Magic words give any indication of which number corresponds to Sunday. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:38, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

You could just use {{random subpage}} as we do on most Portal lead image rotations so that the image changes on (nearly) ever view or purge, but iirc we can't transclude in article space. Nanonic (talk) 16:04, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

I've seen transclusion in the article space before. EVula // talk // ☯ // 16:08, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

...but sub pages are disabled in article space. -- John of Reading (talk) 16:10, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

You could use subpages created in the Talk: namespace, if necessary. Gary King (talk · scripts) 17:35, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

Someone want to have a go? I suggest just posting a note to this discussion on the talk page. Someone asked what is wrong with a collage. The answer is that what we have here are proud good faith editors putting in pictures of beautiful cities they love. I don't think a collage is a beautiful solution.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 20:17, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Just curious; what would it take to get this implemented? Here it is in action.
⋙–Berean–Hunter—► ((⊕)) 02:30, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

FYI, this idea was not well received back in 2009. Plastikspork _―Œ^(talk) 03:13, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

"Insert Citation" in toolbar

I hope this is the right section I am posting in, apologies if it is not. I am using the old Wikipedia layout, and shortly after the new edit box was added a few months ago, it seems "Insert citation" became a standard feature in the toolbar, being before "Advanced" and after "Signature and Time stamp". Prior to this, it was an add on gadget that I had enabled. Anyway, since it became standard some features are missing from it that used to be part of the gadget. For example the gadget used to have a little button next to the URL field, where upon pressing it after entering the URL it would automatically fill in the rest of the fields (title, author, publication date, publisher) if it could. Also I notice some other citation styles are missing from it that used to be in the old gadget, like citing a press release. I am wondering if there is anyway to add some of that back or fix it. I thought it was still a gadget, but upon looking at the gadgets in my preferences, I no longer see this one. (And I also forget the name for it). Any help would be appreciated, I am mostly concerned with that missing button. Thanks --Greekboy (talk) 23:36, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

The tool is called RefToolbar. Graham87 01:40, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

Ahh thanks, I'll ask my question there then. Strange that it is not in the gadgets under preferences anymore though. Greekboy (talk) 02:46, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

You can still install it as a script even if it's not available as a gadget. Also, you may be looking for version one, which was how RefToolbar looked like before version 2. Gary King (talk · scripts) 05:30, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

Don't add it as a script. RefToolbar was made a feature a few weeks ago. There are three different icons— see WP:REFTOOLBAR. Version 2.0 does not yet have all of the features of 1.0. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 18:50, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

RefTools not working

So, I've noticed that the tool (or a newer version, at least) was turned on recently for users of the enhanced toolbar. However, it seems to have killed the functionality for those of us who don't use the enhanced 'bar. As well, the gadget has disappeared from the Gadgets list. Anyone have a link to a solution, if one has already been proposed? I use the ref tool frequently, but do not like the enhanced toolbar. --Ckatz^chat_spy 05:08, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

I use the enhanced toolbar and I don't see it either. The gadget was removed because it was enabled for everyone unconditionally... but where is it? Reach Out to the Truth 05:11, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

See WP:REFTOOLBAR, identify the version you might be using and ask on the talk page. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 11:15, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

This was discussed above at #Editing, and Kaldari did something to help me fix it. That discussion is here in case it's helpful. SlimVirgin ^{TALK|CONTRIBS} 16:16, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

I just disabled all my gadgets, and now it's working again. One or more of them must be incompatible. I'll try to figure out which. Reach Out to the Truth 16:28, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

The Multimedia Beta was the culprit. I don't really need it, so I'll keep it disabled. Reach Out to the Truth 16:35, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Where do I find the Multimedia Beta? I've been having nothing but trouble for weeks, so I want to switch off anything that might be dodgy. SlimVirgin ^{TALK|CONTRIBS} 16:37, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

It's on the Gadgets tab in preferences. Reach Out to the Truth 16:54, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Okay, thanks. I have all gadgets off at the moment because of these issues. SlimVirgin ^{TALK|CONTRIBS} 16:56, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

why is my cite toolbar disappearing?

I need it for named refs and all that? Why is it sometimes going away?TCO (talk) 08:45, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

Since it uses Javascript to load, I'm guessing the most likely cause is an error in Javascript execution, probably caused by one of the other scripts/gadgets that you are running. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:37, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

He doesn't have any user CSS or JS pages. Figure out which version of Wikipedia:RefToolbar you are using then ask on the relevant talk page. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 16:01, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

But he might be using a gadget or two. --Izno (talk) 03:22, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia Books API

Hi,

Is there an API for the Wikipedia Books creation feature ?

Thanks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 134.191.232.69 (talk) 06:24, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

On the left of your screen should be a "Print/export" box. If you click it, there is a "Create a book" link, which will enable the book creator. If you make an account, you will also be able to save books on Wikipedia. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 08:41, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

I'm looking for an API to write a piece of software with, that will be able to send a command to create a book, add articles and then retrieve the finished book. Like there is an API to query for articles, I'm looking for an API for the Books feature. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 134.191.232.68 (talk) 09:27, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

You can check http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Collection and http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:PDF_Writer for some details. Does that help? Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 09:36, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Section edits and references

When editing just a section a reflist should appear so that all can see the ref layouts before saving. Is this even possible???Moxy (talk) 23:38, 13 March 2011 (UTC).

Yes, you can put "<references/>" at the bottom during edit-preview (to show footnotes), but be sure to remove that before saving the edit. -Wikid77 03:15, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

The best way of doing this that I've found is to enable the WP:wikEd gadget. When editing a section, click the button with the magnifying glass icon to the right of the regular "Preview" icon. You will get a quick preview below the edit box with all refs defined in that section. Named refs from other sections will be blank. There are other tools available as well, but I've found them to be hard to use or unreliable. The wikEd preview is worth using just for the speed, even if the section has no references. —UncleDouggie (talk) 00:33, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

You can manually add {{reflist}} when previewing but remember to remove it before saving. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:41, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

I would like to point out that there are other tools:

• User:Anomie/ajaxpreview.js also displays named refs defined in other sections (by pulling the whole article from the server)
• User:Js/ajaxPreview just appends <references/> like WikEd but it has some other features: ajax "changes" button, preview of edit summary and other areas, executing sortable and collapsible scripts on the preview, etc. — AlexSm 22:05, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

I gave up on User:Anomie/ajaxpreview.js long ago because to get a new reference to show up, you first need to do a regular preview and then the ajax preview. Plus, the ajax preview takes a long time. Most of the time I need to see how a new reference is formatted and wikEd does this perfectly with lightning speed. Whenever I previously inserted {{reflist}} or <references/>, I always forgot to take it out. I've never tried User:Js/ajaxPreview, but after so many failures I'm happy to just stick with something that works. —UncleDouggie (talk) 07:06, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Section Editing format change

Why was the layout of the section-edit link changed? (Moved from the right edge of the screen where it didn't distract from reading to the immediate right of the section header where it confuses the view.) I don't like it. Please change it back. Rossami (talk) 13:39, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Looks all right from here. Look at My preferences, Gadgets, User interface gadgets: editing, Moves edit links next to the section headers Thincat (talk) 14:20, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

You should read this weeks technology report. – Allen4names 14:34, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Oh yes. The "exclude me from feature experiments" option is in My preferences, Appearance, Advanced options". Thincat (talk) 14:52, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Thank you both. An awful lot of changes since the last time I looked in My preferences. Rossami (talk) 17:23, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Error with chars that have accents

When I try to insert accented chars such as á into the edit box, the accented chars are appended to the edit summary - and yes, I'd put the cursor in the edit box. --Philcha (talk) 18:27, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

 Works for me OS, browser, skin? --Redrose64 (talk) 18:33, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Browser crashed while editing....

Is there any easy way for you to recover a preview I had a few hours ago when my browser crashed? It seems not, but tell me if I'm happily mistaken. See Wikipedia:Help desk#Browser crashed while editing

Thanks, Interferometrist (talk) 18:29, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

If you hit Preview, and then your browser crashes, I believe your text should be saved when you reopen the browser. At least, it does for me. Firefox seems to keep the recently submitted preview data when reopening the browser. Gary King (talk · scripts) 19:10, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

I've noticed this too, with Firefox 3.5.xx and 3.6.xx under Windows Xp - twice now I've had a power failure (which I shouldn't, given what's right outside my kitchen window), and on restarting the PC then Firefox, the latter restores not only all the tabs and their "back button" history, but also all edit window content. I think it's a feature of XP, because MS Word does this too. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:18, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Thank you both! Of course that doesn't help with what I already lost, but I'll try some things differently in the future. I was using Opera (under XP), but I'll have to try different browsers and see what happens in those cases. Thanks again, Interferometrist (talk) 20:40, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Humanities refdesk has vanished

Help! Wikipedia:Reference desk/Humanities seems to have disappeared! DuncanHill (talk) 02:10, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Hmmm, it seems to have come back again all by itself, very strange. DuncanHill (talk) 02:14, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Indeed, I started a similar thread at the help desk, see Wikipedia:Help_desk#WP:RDH_messed_up_for_me..._not_sure_why.... --Jayron32 02:17, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

I noticed the same thing, but put it down to the usual glitches (though I did wonder briefly whether, as per a recent unfortunate typo - no names - it was due to "workers leaving the planet". ) AndyTheGrump (talk) 02:27, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Can an edit notice test who is using it

There's a discussion about a new edit notice for the Help desks at Wikipedia talk:Help desk#Edit notice, with a possible new edit notice being developed here. But the design is awful if you are editing with JavaScript turned off, because the "collapsed" text is not hidden; and ideally, to avoid confusing those asking for help, the extra content should only be displayed to those who need it. So:

• Can an edit notice test whether the current editor has JavaScript turned on?
• Can an edit notice test whether the current editor's user page is in Category:Wikipedia help desk volunteers?
• Can an edit notice test for the existence of a user sub-page such as "User:<current user>/HelpDeskEditNoticeOptIn"? ( {{ifexist Special:MyPage/Subpagename|yes|no}} does not seem to work)
• Any other bright ideas out there? -- John of Reading (talk) 12:05, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

• No, but you could set the style to "display:none;" and develop a global script that makes it visible. Perhaps we already have something like this... /me not sure
• No, an editnotice cannot do that. A userscript can.
• No, because then the page would not be cachable. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:39, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

Could an invisible portion of the edit notice be made visible by some magic in a help desk volunteer's vector.cs or vector.css? -- John of Reading (talk) 21:13, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

Yes. Consider the {{persondata}} template found on most biographical articles. This is normally invisible, but can be made visible using just one line in your .css file - see Wikipedia:Persondata#Viewing persondata. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:30, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

Thank you! I'll give that a try. -- John of Reading (talk) 21:38, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

At the next software update we will get r83292, which implements MediaWiki:Noscript.css, stylesheets included inside <noscript>...</noscript> tags. Which might be useful to you. Happy‑melon 22:58, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

New features

Since the 1.17 update, we have some new features to play with. I would care to highlight two of them, which I think are very useful and have been overlooked by most. The first is Special:ComparePages. This lets you compare revisisions of two different pages. This feature is already in use now in the {{Documentation}} template, to compare a Sandbox with the actual template. This feature replaces the previous pagediff.js javascript which we used as a temporary patch. The other features is Special:MyUploads, which shows you a list of all the files that you have uploaded to the MediaWiki site. This will mostly replace toolserver and javascript gallery software that was used for this before. These are very nice features that have been in high demand in the past, but they are tugged away a bit. Please integrate them into documentation, where ever you see fit to make them easier to find. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:04, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Nice. I just found the first bug for MyUploads though. The first page shows OK (/wiki/Special:ListFiles/Edokter), but the 'Next' button sends me to w/index.php?title=Special:ListFiles&offset=20080421210531&username=Edokter , which seems to list random files (with or without the offset). — Edokter (talk) — 12:24, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

I just found out that 'username=' should be 'user='. — Edokter (talk) — 12:27, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

FYI. Fixed in r84118. awaiting deployment. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:07, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Total project edit counts

I'm amusing myself with an analysis of the history of the BLP noticeboard, and I wanted to know if there was a way I could "normalize" the data against the total activity on the project. To do that, I would need a total number of edits to any page on Wikipedia on a month by month basis. Is there any way to get this data? Even better, is there a way to get total edits for a subgroup of articles, specifically BLPs? SDY (talk) 14:31, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Using the SQL on the Toolserver we can query for things like lowest/highest/average/stdev for watchers, edits, participants, estimate hours editing, reverts, script/tool usage, activity calendars, gender ratios, account age, and more. Finding something interesting in there is quite another challenge. — Dispenser 17:34, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Never used it. Just glancing at it, it looks like I'm going to have to learn some new syntax. Are there "canned queries" that can get me the information I want? SDY (talk) 17:42, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Just ask someone with TS access for the data you need, one of us can get it. ΔT _{^{The only constant}} 17:50, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

(edit conflict) WP:Database reports and you can ask for particular reports to be run. You might also want to try talking to someone on IRC. I got a couple saved from my Signpost gender report. — Dispenser 17:52, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 spam

There seems to be quite a few occurrences of that. The few first ones I already dealt with. Wondering what (if anything) should be done about it. Palosirkka (talk) 13:34, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

These seem to be added wide apart in time and by different users. Probably some sort of browser-hickup or script bug. Simply remove and forget. — Edokter (talk) — 14:01, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

• It appears to be some form of bizarre database corruption, although entries are dated between 2008-2010, because truly old entries, with glaring examples containing 1 or more lines of "Normal...false..false...MicrosoftInternetExplorer4" should have been corrected by now. For example, a user-space subpage, created on 5 July 2010, is named with 2 of those Normal..Explorer4 lines, as page name:

User:Sphilbrick/Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Denise Long Sturdy Andre Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4

Compare to User:Sphilbrick/Denise Long Sturdy Andre. I have an extremely vague recollection that when I started that draft I had some glitch, but don't recall any of the details. My normal sequence is to create a sandbox version of an intended article, and work on it gradually over time. I did create the one linked in this paragraph on 5 July, I can only assume I made an attempt, which I thought failed, but somehow created that monstrosity. It obviously deserves deletion, but I'll hold off a bit in case anyone wants to looks at it as part of the investigation. (I checked to make sure that's the only one; it appears to be so.)--SPhilbrickT 13:03, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

The search revealed 43 pages containing "MicrosoftInternetExplorer4" but some pages have been edited after the search-index was last updated. -Wikid77 18:00, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

• The second 5 July 2010 file (User:Sphilbrick/Denise Long Sturdy Andre) was created 3 minutes after the first file named "Normal 0 false...MicrosoftInternetExplorer4". Dated 2 years earlier (13 August 2008) as another example, a featured-article nomination was edited by another user, to expand their own comments, but adding quote-box "Normal 0 false" at the top of their comments (in this edit at 15:28 13Aug08), as their final edit to the page. No one else removed that bizarre quote-box "Normal 0 false" during the last 5 days of the failed nomination (13-17 Aug 2008), where it would seem logical how a WP:FA discussion would be kept clean of bizarre text during 5 days of further review. Perhaps we need to contact more editors directly and ask if anyone remembers those bizarre quote-boxes (of "Normal 0 false... MicrosoftInternetExplorer4") appearing during 2008-2010. It seems to be recent database corruption. -Wikid77 14:01, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

Apparently it happens in some condition when copy/pasting stuff from some Microsoft programs. Palosirkka (talk) 18:13, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

Need rough total count of red-link names

Does anyone have an estimate of the millions of red-link names in the database(s). I think they are NOT counted as article entries, where magic-word {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} = 6,908,433 is the total of text-page articles (excludes the count of redirect pages, right?) for each wikipedia (hence, it gives the English Wikipedia article count when this text is viewed on enwiki). There's no hurry, just curious about approx. count of millions of red-link names. -Wikid77 (talk) 00:09, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

I don't think this is possible and even if it were there is no way to know if the red links should or will ever have an article. Many probably would not meet the notability requirements IMO. --Kumioko (talk) 01:10, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

I'm not a technical bod, but I think we would only have populated namespaces in database. I don't think there can be a database of red linked names, as this is by definition wide open. Also don't know what you hope to use such a figure for. If it can be found, Rich Farmbrough might be the man to help you with that. This discussion might be useful. --Ohconfucius ^¡digame! 02:48, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

its doable just need to find the distinct list of pages in pagelinks table. ΔT _{^{The only constant}} 02:50, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

SELECT f.page_namespace AS "From Namespace", COUNT(*)
FROM pagelinks
JOIN page AS f ON f.page_id=pl_from /* exclude red links from deleted pages :-P */
LEFT JOIN page AS target ON target.page_namespace=pl_namespace AND target.page_title=pl_title
WHERE target.page_id IS NULL /* target does not exist */
AND pl_namespace=0 /* main space*/
GROUP BY f.page_namespace;

Running it will take hours mostly due to pagelinks table has over 420,647,819 entries. If you check dabfix's source code you'll find that heuristics I use get good red links. High value red links are from non-talk page whose title matches missing|encyclopedia|redlinks|wikiproject(?!.*Red_Link_Recovery). — Dispenser 03:59, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

Wow thats cool, I really didn't know this could be done. Although this will apparently show all red links and not just names this is definately cool. --Kumioko (talk) 16:57, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia super slow?

Is it just my computer/internet, or is Wikipedia loading really, really slow? It's been like this for a while. Even my watchlist takes several seconds. CTJF83 01:12, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

Everyone's watchlists take a long time to load. Its normal. Simply south...... 01:15, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

Any specific reason? It is extremely annoying. CTJF83 01:17, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

Ahh...it helps to cut watchlist from 7 days to 1 day...plus, I'm on enough where 7 days was ridiculous. :) CTJF83 02:13, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

• It's not just the watchlist, which isn't all that slow relative to the other pages. I have now been waiting for five minutes for this page to load. Same goes for every other 'large' article I have tried to open. Even getting into edit mode is taking an inordinate amount of time; the sidebar of this current edit window has still not yet loaded. Even after I wait for the save button below, it's another 5+ minutes before I get the sidebar. As to the script buttons, I might as well go and have lunch now while waiting. None of this is all that normal. All I can say is that its systematic (I'm glad it's not a problem local to me!) Ho hum... Must be them trying a new version of the MW software. Ohconfucius ^¡digame! 02:43, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

I've noticed a bit of slowness, but more so while pages do load fully, very often the little circle in the corner (on FF) continues spinning as if it's not done loading, especially when I'm looking at a diff. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 03:02, 12 March 2011 (UTC).

• I should mention I'm in Hong Kong, and I guess the japanese earthquake might also have contributed to the disruption of traffic. --Ohconfucius ^¡digame! 04:05, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia doesn't feel slower than it normally is. This page for instance loads actually much quicker for me than most large articles, such as an article about any country. Those take long to load because of the many templates they have. Gary King (talk · scripts) 05:41, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

Since 12 hours ago, none of my scripts are loading in the sidebar. I made a small change to one of them yesterday and another the day before, and everything was tickety-poo after those changes, until late last night. Right now, in this window, I have also lost the row of editing icons just above the edit box, although the problem seems sporadic. --Ohconfucius ^¡digame! 06:13, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

Thought I'd mention I having the same issues (on Safari on a Mac). Any reason for this? Jenks24 (talk) 07:47, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

I can corroborate the above statements, starting about 2 hours ago, and seeming to clear up just now. --Ancheta Wis (talk) 13:16, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

Does Wikipeida need an update to allow more, faster traffic through its servers? CTJF83 19:22, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

Slow access

Over the past week or so, en.wiki (I haven't checked any others) has seemed very slow. I've had the same problem at all times of day, on two different PCs at different locations, and using different browsers. It can take several minutes to update a simple edit, and changes aren't always visible immediately when the edit screen returns to the article after saving, even though the history shows the edit. is this me, or is more widespread? Does it make any difference where I'm working (on the current Middle East situation/Libyan pages mainly at the moment, which are pretty heavily viewed and edited)?. but I've never noticed such a protracted period of slow performance before. Thanks Lynbarn (talk) 14:21, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

Another manifestation of the issues described earlier, at #Purge. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:39, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

The changes not being visible immediately is because of the issue described at #Purge. But is the general slowness related to that too? SlimVirgin ^{TALK|CONTRIBS} 15:57, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

Steadily getting worse.--Old Moonraker (talk) 17:47, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

The slowness problems continue today for me. SlimVirgin ^{TALK|CONTRIBS} 15:25, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

Page loading never stops

Has anyone else encountered a problem recently where pages here at the English Wikipedia never stop loading? Every time I go to an article, user page, or talk page (for example), the page seems to load fine, but the activity indicator ("spinner") and red "stop" button never gray-out, indicating page loading has completed. (This is on the 32-bit "firefox-bin" 3.6.13 for Gentoo Linux, BTW.) When I reload the page, it fixes the problem, but then if I go back to the very same page through, say, a bookmark, the problem reappears (until I reload again). Oh, and simply clicking on the "stop" button or hitting "Esc" doesn't do anything. This just started happening recently (couple of days ago?), and happens on almost all types of pages, including page histories and the various Special: pages, like my preferences — except not on Special:Watchlist for some reason, and not on most edit pages (until I came here to edit this page). Same thing is happening more sporadically on other language versions of Wikipedia, but not on any Wiktionaries (that I've tried) or other projects, including Meta and Commons. I've tried the "obvious" remedies, such as "purging" the pages, resetting all my preferences to the defaults and blanking out my (very modest) "Custom CSS". Nothing has any effect. Anyone know what could be causing this? - dcljr (talk) 02:44, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

I mentioned this above, as I've been experiencing this as well. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 04:09, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

I've got Win XP, Firefox (problem has shown up in all of 3.6.13, 3.6.14 and 3.6.15) and it's been going on for weeks.

About 40% of the time, the spinner does stop but the red cross remains red, and bottom left the message "Waiting for upload.wikimedia.org" is still shown although it might change to "Transferring data from meta.wikimedia.org..."; either message might persist indefinitely. Usually the page appears to have completed loading, that is, everything looks "normal" apart from those status indicators; but on occasion (5% of the time?), some of the CSS fails to load. At best this means that I don't have my two gadgets ('Add a "Purge" tab to the top of the page, which purges the page's cache when followed.' and 'Add an [edit] link for the lead section of a page'); at worst, there is no skin information and this page looks like this (nb if you have defined your own "MySkin"), you won't be able to see what I mean)

About 60% of the time, when the spinner stops the red cross greys out and the "Transferring data" message changes to "Done".

It started for me round about the time of MediaWiki 1.17 deployment. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:07, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

It started for me about three days ago in Safari and F/Fox (Mac) in both monobook and vector. I think it's either the CSS or the final segment of php that doesn't load because when it finally does I then get a blank page. Kudpung (talk) 13:22, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

@Redrose: I was getting very similar (transferring data from... in the status bar never clearing but all else seemed OK) with FF 3.6 Win 7 and assumed it was a Firefox bug, [1]. However, as of yesterday (I think) everything has miraculously sorted itself out. Thincat (talk) 14:38, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

• It had been a smaller problem last year, especially if the edit-toolbar was enabled, but now the tedious page-loading delay is much, much worse. I often switch the browser offline, and re-click button "(x)" to stop transmission, then return online. When Firefox says it is downloading for geo-location or geo-positioning, then it sounds like snoops for homeland security are pre-watching you so they can pounce, at normal human speed, despite the Internet being so V-E-R-Y--S-L-O-W that a cyber-criminal is 500 miles away before the page says "Done". It is hard to believe there was a time when computer software had to respond, to a customer request, within 7 seconds, or else heads would roll. No normal balanced mind has time for this ultra-slow crap (aka crapnology), so that's why you hear of people loading a page, then leaving to run another errand. -Wikid77 14:58, 15 March 2011 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by SlimVirgin II (talk • contribs)

Yes, I've noticed this issue too in Firefox, but it seems to have sorted itself out. Lugnuts (talk) 10:16, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

I agree, the problem seems to have cleared up (for me). Thanks to whomever did whatever... - dcljr (talk) 12:36, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

The problem has not cleared up. pages load until the last php element, then go blank. It's been almost impossible to work now for several days. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kudpung (talk • contribs) 09:36, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

Try it while logged out. I suspect something in your custom JS or CSS is causing trouble with ResourceLoader. However, I agree with others that it had been happening for me after the MediaWiki upgrade and it no longer does. Switching to FF 4 may have helped. —UncleDouggie (talk) 10:58, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

At a glance, I see at least one thing in User:Kudpung/vector.js that would be causing the problem described: he/she imports User:VoA/monobook.js, which contains calls to document.write. Pre-ResourceLoader, that code was run before the document finished loading and so output into the page, while now that code is run after the page is complete and therefore replaces the page content. Anomie⚔ 15:38, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

Once again, hash codes for images being misreported on API

I reported this before, but it was one of those errors that disappears when you look at it twice . You will notice there are clearly two different images in the history of this image, and yet the API is reporting the same hash: [2]:

<api>
 <query>
   <normalized>
     <n from="File:Page_from_Doctor_Cooper's_Book.jpg" to="File:Page from Doctor Cooper's Book.jpg" />
   </normalized>
   <pages>
     <page pageid="3856138" ns="6" title="File:Page from Doctor Cooper's Book.jpg" imagerepository="local">
       <imageinfo>
         <ii sha1="b5541ade3bc111e311cde38839a220ac98f51c5e" />
         <ii sha1="b5541ade3bc111e311cde38839a220ac98f51c5e" />
       </imageinfo>
     </page>
   </pages>
 </query>
</api>

This is a fairly obnoxious error for the bot that I run, which uses hashes to compare image versions in the history. Magog the Ogre (talk) 21:43, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Solved by purging the image description page. This is caused by the initial introduction of this feature in 2007 and still affects a few images that had "new versions" uploaded within this introduction period. A possible solution would be to purge all images that had new uploads within that period, but no new uploads afterwards. This is probably more work than it is worth though. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:44, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

First off, thanks for the response. Actually that would be a simple act for my bot... any time it reads an image during said period, it could run a purge. May I ask what this time period exactly was? Magog the Ogre (talk) 18:46, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

Determining the time period would be the difficult part :D —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:48, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

Ew. OK, maybe a really large encompassing period for which nothing could possibly fall outside? It would be a shame to purge every image when I read it... surely the parsing servers have enough to do already. Magog the Ogre (talk) 02:56, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

my browser keeps freezing when I use cntrl-F on edit page.

Anyone else having this problem? If I use cntrl-F on edit page, browser freezes and I have to shut it down. Has happened with chrome and firefox... Casliber (talk · contribs) 21:24, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

I suggest you post at Wikipedia:Reference desk/Computing. StuRat (talk) 22:20, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

Works for me in both browsers. That's really weird. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 03:35, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

Me too, with Chrome 10. Regards, HaeB (talk) 10:37, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

Works for me in Chrome 10 and FF 4. Does the page actually stop loading? —UncleDouggie (talk) 10:49, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

It seems to be the same problem described above. Helder 12:23, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

Discrepancy in rendering margins between Firefox and Chrome?

I was playing around at User talk:Fetchcomms/Userpage sandbox and there seems to be a difference in how the margin-right/margin-left are handled between Firefox and Chrome. Firefox and IE 9 both render the image correctly ([3]) while it seems that Chrome and other webkit-based browsers (including Safari) fail to get the right/left margins right ([4]) while the top/bottom margins work fine. Any ideas? /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 03:42, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

Seems to be due to an inherited margin-right of 0px. Possibly due to the wrapping <center> ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:56, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

Ah, OK. Kingpin13 fixed it for me, so that's all solved now—thanks! :) /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 02:26, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

Salting a topic

How is "salting" of a topic done? (for preventing persistent article creation on a particular title?). I am an admin in Tamil Wikipedia and want to do this for some phrases there. Can someone help me out--Sodabottle (talk) 16:44, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

Hi Sodabottle, are you looking for this extension? You should have this extension enabled, so see the "Editing the blacklist" section. Or do you mean general protection, in which case you should be able to browse to a redlinked page, and then select the "protect" tab (this has already been applied to two pages, see here). That will allow you to "salt" that redlink from being created. - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 16:59, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks Kingpin, I have used the protection route (i hadnt noticed i can protect a redlink before :-)). Thanks again for the help--Sodabottle (talk) 17:27, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

Stats

FYI-This link is what's posted over at Henrik's page in regards to missing stats: User talk:Henrik#No stats since March 15 Just in case anyone else is having this issue.

-Maile66 (talk) 16:49, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

Scanning user creation logs

Is there a tool available which would allow me to find all users that match a regular expression? Or would I have to custom-craft one of my own?—Kww(talk) 15:03, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

I wrote one a year or two ago - if you ping me in the next 24 hours I'll remember to bring it out of retirement for you when I next get the chance (I can't right now, alas). If it's still of interest. - Jarry1250 ^{[Who? Discuss.]} 23:20, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

User:Gordon

What's up with this editor's existence or lack thereof? S/he has never made any contributions or deleted contributions, and his/her log has no "new user account" entry in it, so I suspected that nobody had ever registered this account — however, when I view the userpage, I don't get the User account "Gordon" is not registered. message that I get if I go to nonexistent usernames such as User:Gordonsss. Nyttend (talk) 02:32, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

I'm getting the message on Google Chrome. What browser are you using? Magog the Ogre (talk) 02:49, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

User:Gordon has history (which mortals like me aren't allowed to see). I don't get a "not registered" message (Chrome on WinXP0. DuncanHill (talk) 02:55, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

Non-mortal here- looks like some user (not Gordon) created the user page back in 2008 (with "what are the main imports and exports of china?" as the text), someone requested a speedy delete today, it was deleted then restored, then you deleted it again. I imagine that the presence of article history is what is stopping the system from thinking that that there's no such user when you go to the page- it's a deleted page, not a null page. --PresN 03:36, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

The account must have been registered some time before the new user log was introduced in September 2005, which wouldn't surprise me since Gordon is a fairly common name. The existence of the deleted user page history has nothing to do with the account's registration details in the Wikipedia database. Graham87 04:01, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

I don't get the comment "The account must have been registered some time before the new user log was introduced in September 2005" - no new user registration would have been required, and the page need not have been created by anybody whose username was Gordon; it could have been created by any registered user. I could have created the page User:Gordon, should I have so wished; I still could, since the page doesn't presently exist. Pages don't need to be listed in logs in order to exist - my own user page is not listed in any logs, and yet it exists. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:02, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

I see the account is not registered message. Ruslik_Zero 14:22, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

Here is proof from Special:Listusers that there is indeed a registered user named Gordon. The lack of a listed account creation date indicates that the username Gordon was registered before the new user log was created, and that it made no edits before the account creation date field was introduced to Wikipedia (I'm not sure exactly when that was ... it doesn't matter in this case, anyway). It is true that absolutely anyone could have created Gordon's user page. The fact that some users are seeing messages that indicate that "User:Gordon" is unregistered seems bizarre to me. Graham87 15:03, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

FYI, Magog, I'm using IE 8; I didn't expect that to be relevant, since the question is related to the website, but thanks for reminding me to ask :-) And about the userpage: I began to wonder about this user because I deleted the userpage just before posting this message: someone else created it with a little random text, and it had rightfully been tagged as a test page. Nyttend (talk) 03:24, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

Table style of Recent changes

At the moment Recent changes look like list:

• (diff | hist) . . N User talk:Singtogod‎; 14:02 . . (+1,293) . . Grim23 (talk | contribs) (General note: Adding spam links on Sound system (DJ). (TW))
• (diff | hist) . . List of science fiction films: 2000s‎; 14:02 . . (+8) . . 82.209.134.131 (talk)
• (Deletion log); 14:02 . . Future Perfect at Sunrise (talk | contribs) deleted "File:Ramjala'.jpg" (F9: Unambiguous copyright violation)
• (diff | hist) . . Wikipedia:Userboxes/Location/Japan‎; 14:02 . . (-621) . . Ahunt (talk | contribs) (→See also: not required, duplicates text in nav box)

I think that table style would be more appropriate:

diff · hist	N	User talk:Singtogod‎	14:02	+1,293	Grim23 (talk · contribs)	General note: Adding spam links on Sound system (DJ). (TW)
diff · hist		List of science fiction films: 2000s‎	14:02	+8	82.209.134.131 (talk)
Deletion log		File:Ramjala'.jpg	14:02		Future Perfect at Sunrise (talk · contribs)	F9: Unambiguous copyright violation
diff · hist		Wikipedia:Userboxes/Location/Japan‎	14:02	-621	Ahunt (talk · contribs)	→See also: not required, duplicates text in nav box

--Janezdrilc (talk) 14:14, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

Your suggestion above has the serious disadvantage that it is a table, and so the longest entry in each column determines the column width; thus the width of col. 3 is determined by "Wikipedia:Userboxes/Location/Japan‎" and the width of col. 6 is determined by "Future Perfect at Sunrise". This means that it needs a wide monitor, which we don't all have.

Recent changes is intentionally styled like watchlist, page history, etc. ie as an unordered list. This avoids wasted space, and so allows for shorter lines. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:22, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

Yes, this is truth, but columns could be determined with "optimal" width (let's say width=15% or something). I think it is worthy to try once, just to see the reaction. I really belive it would be much easier tu "surf" on the Recent changes, no matter there would be few more rows in the table. --Janezdrilc (talk) 15:57, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

Hotcat problem

Look at my last few edits here. When I add a category using Hotcat, it is deciding for some reason best know to itself to remove another category I had previously added. What is going on? DuncanHill (talk) 15:33, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

This is probably best discussed at WT:HOTCAT, where similar issues have been reported in the past. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:31, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

None of Wikipedia's Gadget is Working

Since last two days none of my Wikipedia's Gadget is working, which includes Hotcat, Twinkle, Provelt, Toolbar,etc. I've to do everything manually. I'm using Google Chrome as my default browser, which i guess is of latest version. Also contribution page doesn't showing gallery of photos uploaded by me, but its working on Commons. I'm just stuck, please somebody help me. Bill william compton^Talk 17:31, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

Comment:The problem is just solved by itself, but it would be helpful if someone enlighten me.Bill william compton^Talk 17:48, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

Old versions of page do not display

I have been editing Fukushima I nuclear accidents and have a problem with the page history.

For some reason if you look at the page history and click on a version, it puts up a screen with the appropriate header at the top, but the page displayed is the current version not the one required. If you ask for a diff, then it does show the correct old version. This is most easily seen if you click on a version a day or two old, then when it comes up look in the summary section near the top where events are listed day by day. You still see the entries for days after the date the version was supposedly made. Does it for me with both firefox and explorer and another user has tried and got the same. Any ideas? Sandpiper (talk) 18:14, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

2004 article for deletion

I think I should tell someone about this, because I don't know how to handle it. I just created a Redirect page Fernando De Leon. I was checking "What Links Here" on the page I have it redirected to, which is Fernando De León (with the accent mark on Leon). I noticed an old 2004 page that links to the redirect Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Fernando De Leon, and there's a live internal link. It specifically says on the bottom of that page "Please do not edit this page". I don't think it's interferring with anything of mine, but maybe someone with authority should take out the live link on the "article for deletion" page.

-Maile66 (talk) 00:03, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

Lots of deleted articles eventually get recreated (often on a different subject matter that happens to have the same name, which I gather is the case here). I have never heard of anyone going back to archived AfDs to take note of the fact there. What would be the point? What you can do if you like is put a template on the talk page of the article itself, that says it was nominated for deletion, the result was delete, but then note somewhere that this is a new article. --Trovatore (talk) 00:09, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

I wouldn't bother with that. It's patently obvious to anyone checking out your new article and the deletion debate that the two pages are on completely different subjects. Graham87 01:39, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

JS in article

Is there any way that I can execute some JS inline (such as document.write()) at a certain point in an article? (Preferably without requiring the user to install anything in his xxx.js file, but if necessary...) Hgrosser (talk) 00:08, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

Some JS like function(){ SendAllMyLoginCookiesToAnEvilSiteSoTheyCanHackMyAccount(); } ?? I think there's a reason why the answer to that is a resounding "no". Happy‑melon 00:22, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

What JS do you want to run in an article? One of the few reasons to use JS is to hide content, which can be done with the {{hidden}} template. If you don't mind creating a .js file, which you said you are willing to do if necessary, then just create one, then add content to the page by grabbing IDs from the page, etc. Of course, only people who have your script installed will be able to use it. Gary King (talk · scripts) 05:43, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

Why are you even considering such a thing? OrangeDog (τ • ε) 16:12, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

I want to be able to do something like
document.write("<img src=somesite.com/someimg.gif width=x height=y />"); to include an image directly from an external site. If the user installs some code in his .js file to key off an ID on the page, it seems like I wouldn't be able to specify the image location right in the page. I tried this JS in my own .js file and it worked perfectly, putting it in the upper-left corner of every page. I left in document.write("Hello world!"); and it wrote that to every page but seems to have stopped working lately, maybe due to trying to switch from monobook.js to common.js. Hgrosser (talk) 23:58, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

The reason that doesn't work is security. If you would be able to do that, then YOU would be able to steal all of MY cookies, install a keyboard logger and other kind of crazy stuff. That's why you are only allowed to install JS for your own account in your own .js files. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:42, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

There should be no need to link in external images. If the image is free-use, it can be uploaded to Commons and linked in the normal way; if it's fair-use, upload it to Wikipedia (and link in the same way as for Commons); if it's copyrighted and you can't justify a fair-use rationale, it has no place in any Wikimedia project. See Wikipedia:Image use policy. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:31, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

You shouldn't use document.write for anything. It's highly dependent on when the script actually executes. Its only real use is with inline scripts, which you can't use here. Mr.Z-man 15:55, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

And why are you considering including an image from an external source? OrangeDog (τ • ε) 22:46, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

Document.write is an evil function that never workscorrectly, especially on a structured site like Wikipedia. node.innerHTML+=stuff is much saner. Anyways, you shouldn't havbe to use external images. If you can't upload it to commons, then it shouldn't be used at all. ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 13:52, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

New article creation wizard?

This would require a bit of work, but I think it might help with making Wikipedia more accessible. A "wizard", to borrow the Windows term, would be a semi-automated way to make a new article that would automatically generate the template for a standard article, including creating the references section, or for a specific type of article (i.e. a biography) generate basic section headers that would prompt users to include certain basic information. Automatically including some markup (with an explanation of how to delete unnecessary sections) would help with new users not knowing wikipidiese. It would also help identify "red flag" articles, like BLPs, at article creation. Explaining some of the notability requirements in the creation process might also help with the new user frustration of "why was my article deleted?"

Fancy tools like auto-suggesting categories or projects would probably take a bit more work, but also might be helpful to identify the new article to other people in the relevant projects.

Also, if there are problems, we can always say a wizard did it. SDY (talk) 16:06, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Do you mean this?: Wikipedia:Article wizard

- Maile66 (talk) 16:11, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, exactly that. Bizarre that I always missed it. I guess I can make a weak suggestion it be made more prominent since it's a tool for new users, given that I've created quite a few articles and never noticed it. Maybe an option to "create new articles using a wizard" by default in the user preferences that defaults to "on" for new accounts with an obvious disable switch? SDY (talk) 16:17, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

According to Wikipedia:WikiProject Articles for creation/Assessment there are at least 10, 787 that have been created using the Wizard. --Kumioko (talk) 16:43, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Or a clickable link perhaps as prominent as "Donate to Wikipedia". Don't know the statistics on how many new articles are created by unregistered editors. But would they have access to Preferences? Maile66 (talk) 16:26, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

While we're asking, is there any way to determine how many articles are created using the wizard? SDY (talk) 16:38, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

It depends which option is chosen at the end of the wizard. Option 1 puts the article in Category:Pending AfC submissions. Options 2 and 3 go in Category:Articles created via the Article Wizard. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 16:44, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

According to Wikipedia:WikiProject Articles for creation/Assessment there are at least 10, 787 that have been created using the Wizard. I agree that making it more prominant would be a good idea. Probably also adding it to the standard Welcome message too if its not there already. --Kumioko (talk) 16:43, 16 March 2011 (UTC

(edit conflict) They are placed in Category:Articles created via the Article Wizard but that cat can easily be removed from the article, since it's right at the bottom with the other cats, and is not pulled in by template. Therefore not every article created by wizard will be in that cat. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:47, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Redrose64....where is there an "edit conflict" tag at the beginning of your paragraph? Maile66 (talk) 17:51, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Because when I went for "Save page" first time, I got an edit conflict. Although my post is timed at four minutes after Kumioko's, and three minutes after MSGJ's, I started entering my post before either of theirs had been saved. Some of my time was spebt in verifying that Category:Articles created via the Article Wizard was indeed the correct category, and not merely something I half-remembered. You will note that my post partially duplicates Martin's; if I had seen that I would have written it differently. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:31, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Presuming you're referring to recent articles, the answer would be zero since unregistered users can't create new articles (since Wikipedia biography controversy). They need to get someone to create it first or for them. Nil Einne (talk) 07:54, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

Why are there user Pages in this category

I just noticed that in Category:Articles created via the Article Wizard there are a pile of user pages. I don't think that user pages should be in this. --Kumioko (talk) 16:52, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

See Help:Userspace draft. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 16:57, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Sorry I should have been a little clearer although I'm still not sure that I agree that a user page with the title of User:69.231.58.113/new article name here should be in there. Many of the pages listed have already been added thereby negating the need for the user page. One example is User:68.3.110.188/Verrado High School which has already been published as Verrado High School. Perhaps we should have a seperate subcat for the userpages to separate them from the actual articles. Category:User space drafts maybe. --Kumioko (talk) 17:40, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

What's more baffling to me is why there are IP user subpages when the creator (in the history) was using an account (logged-in). Also, there's a lot of crap in that category. I've deleted several pages from there. Someone with lots of time might be able to ++ their deletion stats. Killiondude (talk) 17:43, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

I didn't notice this before but there appears to be a subcat called Category:Userspace drafts created via the Article Wizard. I would think we would want to put these user page drafts in there. A couple recommendations:

1. Put the User space drafts in that category.
2. Delete the garbage ones
3. Delete the ones that have been published to article space
4. I review the remaining ones for deletion if they have been abandoned. I found several that haven't been touched in months.
5. I also found a couple at random that are associated to blocked IP's that we could probably eliminate. --Kumioko (talk) 18:19, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Need feedback/debugging help with IE8 JavaScript issue

Yesterday I updated the Wikiminiatlas code adding a few new features. However I got one single complaint about the update breaking IE8 script execution. I was unable to reproduce the issue and went ahead with the update after a small modification. The bug reporter is unable to provide further details. So I have no idea whether this issue really exists and how to get to the bottom of it. --Dschwen 13:05, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

So... nobody else has experienced that malfunction? Or does nobody care ;-)? Or both? --Dschwen 18:50, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

At this point even a "works for me" would help. --Dschwen 01:41, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

You probably won't find many frequent IE users around here. FWIW, I ran it in IE7 while logged out and it was fine. —UncleDouggie (talk) 08:14, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

Ha, or they are too embarrassed to admit it on this page :-). Thanks anyways. --Dschwen 12:27, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

iPad Safari blanking pages

I have been reading English Wikipedia for awhile on my iPad using the Mobile Safari browser. iOS 4.3. Starting today, when I navigate to a page, the page will display for a second or two, and then the page will go blank. If I refresh, it will repeat, be visible for a second or two, and then go blank. Has anyone else been experiencing this? VikÞor | Talk 23:51, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

Not me... The iPad gives me no problem with viewing, though, because it takes some time to load js, it gives me trouble while editing (If I write something in the editbox, it gets removed when the new toolbar loads.) ManishEarth^{Talk • Stalk} 13:53, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

Request that technical problem should be looked at

Hi, could some kind person here arrange, on my behalf, for a page layout issue to be added to the list of problems to be looked at by Wikipedia's technical staff? The problem is exemplified by this article. In IE there is a large and unsightly blank space at the top of the article, caused by the forced alignment of text to an image. Based on previous discussions, I believe that this blank space does not appear in some other browsers. Problems similar to this occur in many Wikipedia articles, causing those articles to look messy and broken to IE users. I believe this may because the editor adding the graphic is using a browser other than IE, and therefore does not notice a problem. I believe this is a significant issue across Wikipedia, and I would like someone to investigate whether the HTML that Wikipedia generates can be tweaked so that IE does not show a large blank space, and/or so that pages look the same in this respect in all common browsers. I am not asking for advice on how to fix individual articles. I already know how to do that in most cases. Thank you for your help. 86.176.212.251 (talk) 14:49, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

The page looks fine in IE9. Using Microsoft ExpressionWeb SuperPreview, IE6 mode shows the second paragraph pushed below the infobox. IE9 does show the issue in compatibility mode. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 15:11, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

Also found http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/ which shows the issue in IE5.5 through 8. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 15:23, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

Checking the above in a genuine copy of IE7 (I bought my PC second-hand for £10.00 and it came with Windows XP and IE7 already installed. I installed Firefox immediately, which I use most of the time; I've therefore never bothered "upgrading" IE7 to IE8 or 9 - in my experience all new versions of MS products bring more new problems than fixes to old problems) does indeed show the big blank space problem. This is something that I've observed on many pages, and is not confined to the use of the image: it can occur with any box-type object that is displaced downwards by preceding box-type objects; here is a particularly nasty example. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:36, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

Yes, this is a problem on many pages. What I would like is to have this issue logged so that someone will actually address it. I have asked about the problem a couple of times before over several years, and people agree "yeah, it's a problem in browsers X, Y, Z" but two years later nothing has changed. What can we do to get this fixed, or at least get someone to look at the problem to see if it's possible to fix it? 86.160.85.42 (talk) 18:40, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

I have a demonstration atUser:Gadget850/IE space issue. You stated that you can fix the problem per page— how? ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 20:15, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

Mystery solved but not fixed

See Mysterious glictch (cont.). 75.47.154.175 (talk) 20:31, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

Cannot Edit

Okay, so 99% of the time now, I cannot edit pages. The Editing Box goes small. I was even lucky to put this message. It's very bad. Could it be fixed very soon. I'm using Safari version 5.0.4. The problem started 2 days ago. Ebe123 Talk —Preceding undated comment added 21:41, 21 March 2011 (UTC).

Did you try another browser? CTJF83 21:48, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

Still nothing. ~~Awsome EBE123 ^talk_Contribs 21:52, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

What browser this time? CTJF83 21:53, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

Oh, now it's back to working on Camino. ~~Awsome EBE123 ^talk_Contribs 22:01, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

Purge

Why is the need to purge the server cache arising so much more frequently in the past couple of weeks or so? Michael Hardy (talk) 01:31, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

I haven't noticed that myself, but it might be related to the recent upgraded to MW 1.17, perhaps. Maybe caching has increased in frequency? Gary King (talk · scripts) 01:56, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

OK, I'm guessing that the "MW" in "MW 1.17" is stands for MediaWiki. That took a minute and a google search.

It's been happening to me a couple of times a day for maybe a couple of weeks. Before that the need for it was very rare. Michael Hardy (talk) 04:30, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

Deployment completed on February 17, 2011, so perhaps that was the same time that this problem started happening for you. Also, try clearing your browser's cache, perhaps. Gary King (talk · scripts) 04:52, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

What problem are you having that purging is fixing it? Mr.Z-man 04:55, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

I am assuming that pages don't update even after editing them, so he needs to purge the page so that he sees the new edits implemented in the article. Gary King (talk · scripts) 05:16, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

Okay, this is one of the problems I've been having all day that I tried to describe above, Gary. I post something, and it doesn't show up in read mode, even if I keep reloading. It takes quite a few minutes for posts to appear. Do you know what's causing it? SlimVirgin ^{TALK|CONTRIBS} 06:41, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

When you reload are you bypassing your cache? Have you tried purging the page? You could also follow these instructions to disable the cache in Firefox to see if you still have the problem. Disabling the cache should make websites load slower, but it should always be the most recent content. Don't forget to re-enable it afterward by following the same instructions. Gary King (talk · scripts) 07:30, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

Also in your " my preferences" section there is a tab called "Gadgets". There you have options you can pick to have one on all the time--Moxy (talk) 08:02, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

User interface gadgets

• Add a "Purge" tab to the top of the page, which purges the page's cache when followed
• Add a clock in the personal toolbar that displays the current time in UTC (which also provides a link to purge the current page)

Another factor may be that the Job queue has been very large for a couple of weeks (see Help talk:Job queue#Where's it gone?). This means that changes to templates and categories aren't getting processed until you purge each relevant article page. -- John of Reading (talk) 09:00, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

I just had this problem for the first time in a while. The Wikimedia guys say that the servers might just be lagging to update their content, so you're still seeing the old stuff temporarily. When the page doesn't update immediately, you might want to check your watchlist to see if you get the "Edits older than 100 seconds will not be seen here." message, since that often indicates a slow server. Gary King (talk · scripts) 18:12, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

To answer some of the questions above: the surmise was correct. I edit a page, then even after hitting "reload" several times, I see the page as it appeared before the edits. Then I purge the server cache and see it as it appears after the edits. This has been a daily occurrence for two or three weeks or so, whereas before that time it was rare. Michael Hardy (talk) 00:18, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

The Wikimedia guys usually recommend to file a bug report for problems like these. Gary King (talk · scripts) 16:26, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

I'm having these issues too. Nearly every time I make an edit, I have to purge the page or bypass my cache to see the edit appear. This has only been happening since the latest Mediawiki update, so I'm assuming that's what's triggering it. - ʄɭoʏɗiaɲ ^τ _¢ 17:41, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

I think that MediaWiki is somehow not sending a notice to the browser that the page has been updated. I don't know exactly how a browser determines when a page is updated so that it should bypass its cache automatically, but it appears as though the browser no longer realizes that a wiki page has been updated and will instead grab data from its cache until it is forcefully bypassed. Purging a page works not because it purges the page, but because the URL is different so the browser does not grab data from the cache and instead grabs it fresh from the server. Very odd. Gary King (talk · scripts) 18:04, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

Reported as a bug by someone from zhwp. Apparently not browser cache-related. Was an interesting theory anyway, heh. Gary King (talk · scripts) 18:09, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

Just noting that I'm still experiencing this, including on Meta. SlimVirgin ^{TALK|CONTRIBS} 09:58, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

It's happened to me several times today. This must be quite unfriendly to newbies. 128.101.152.136 (talk) 21:21, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

Created article; it wasn't there

This happened again. I created an article and, told there was a storm coming and I should save my work, I did. Or thought I did. When I clicked on "back", there was a less complete version. I was able to add back everything eventually.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 22:50, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

Similar to the thread below, probably related to the problem everyone's been having with edits not immediately appearing. Gary King (talk · scripts) 02:39, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

I should point out that the article wasn't yet created, so what I ended up with was what I had when clicking "Show preview" at an earlier point.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 20:42, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

Actually, I have discovered the article was saved, but I got the "no such article" message that may appear when an IP tries to create one. Look at this diff. It didn't occur to me to try that, because the article wasn't there.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 20:48, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

I too get this occasionally, more often recently than in the past. If it happens, I press F5 to refresh the page (this works in at least four browsers - IE7, Firefox, Chrome, Opera - all under Windows XP), and all is then as it should be. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:21, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

Just happened to me again with a new redirect. I refreshed and all was well.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 20:02, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

It's still happening.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 15:06, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

Slow edits

It's taking upwards of a minute for edits to show up on the page when I edit them. I keep refereshing the page, but nothing shows up until I actually re-edit and leave a null edit. Corvus cornix_talk 02:33, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

Already reported Gary King (talk · scripts) 02:37, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

This has only been happening to me today, not since the most recent deployment. Corvus cornix_talk 02:41, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

It's only been happening to me since yesterday or the day before, too. It doesn't mean it's not related. These things have been happening for a long time I believe, but it's just that with the new update, it's been happening with increased frequency. Gary King (talk · scripts) 04:57, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

It's just not updating immediately. Purging the page fixes it.—Kww(talk) 21:23, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

Saving an edit doesn't show changes immediately

Has happened four times so far today:

1. Edit a section
2. Click save
3. The old version of the page appears
4. Refresh page
5. The new version appears

I'm using Monobook, Firefox 3.6.15 and Windows Vista. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 20:15, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

Same problem, Monobook, Chrome on MacOSX. --joe decker^{talk to me} 20:23, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

Same here, windows XP, FF 3.6.15, Monobook; but this has been going on for some days, see #Slow edits above and other threads. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:44, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

I just moved the above and two other threads up the page, and guess what? On saving the page, the old version came back. A press of F5 pulled in the proper version. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:36, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

Unable to see an edit

Comments on this theme copied from Help Desk:

The last two edits I have made were "invisible". They immediately appeared in the article history and my contribs list, and were visible in edit mode, but the visible version of the article was/is the previous version. This fixed itself after about 30 minutes in one case but not yet in the other after about 15 minutes. I am using Firefox 3.5.4 on a Mac. Any idea what is going on? Ben MacDui 19:33, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

Now visible in the second article after almost exactly 15 minutes. The above edit was visible immediately. Ben MacDui 19:34, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

I have seen the same thing too, I think there are server issues. I have seen this and the replication lag is now at 7 hours. ~~ GB fan ~~ 19:39, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

A server purge usually fixes it. – ukexpat (talk) 19:52, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

I've had the same problem repeatedly in the last couple of days: I do an edit, it looks fine in "Preview", I save it, it disappears. Very disconcerting, I find myself thinking "Did I press Cancel instead of Save?" and "Surely I stub-sorted that one a few minutes ago". If I add a PROD or SPEEDY template, and save the file, I can't see the template with the message to copy to put on the editor's page. It's never happened to me until yesterday, as far as I can remember. Please, someone, fix it! (I'm using Firefox, with Windows) PamD (talk) 23:17, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

This is still happening - a feature is that on editing Wikipedia:WikiProject Scottish Islands/Monro's Hebrides the url has http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Scottish_Islands/Monro%27s_Hebrides#Slate_Islands_.281.29 with an extra ".281.29" at the end. Editing and adding "&action=purge" did clear it, but its a nuisance. Ben MacDui 11:31, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

Just noting that it's still happening with me. I also can't get Monobook to stay stable; the Classic skin keeps appearing, both in read and edit mode. Mentioning that here in case it's connected. SlimVirgin ^{TALK|CONTRIBS} 17:27, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

Monobook has been stable for me in the past few days. I edit quite a bit, and I've only actually had the purge problem about half a dozen times, roughly within the span of 24 hours from when I first posted that I was having the problem. Gary King (talk · scripts) 17:33, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

Still happening occasionally. Ben MacDui 12:32, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

Just happened to me, too. Nageh (talk) 12:42, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

Still happening to me. I do not recall this ever happening before the recent "upgrade" to the software, but it has happened at least a dozen times to me since. DuncanHill (talk) 15:36, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

Hopefully, the developers fix this soon; whenever I create a new page, about 70% of the time, it takes about 20 seconds before the change displays, so I'm told that no such article exists, until I reload (sometimes twice). Brambleclawx 00:52, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

Problem with Ctrl+f in Chrome

Is anyone having trouble using the 'find' function in Chrome? If I'm in the editing field and hit Ctrl+f to find something the usual box opens but once I start typing in there it only searches for the first character I type them everything freezes until I shut down the window. This only happens if the edit field is open. J04n(talk page) 22:11, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

I'm using Chrome 10 right now, and happily I don't have the problem.

Nnemo (talk) 01:19, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

Works for me. CTJF83 02:02, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

Works for me too (Chrome 10.0.648.133): the first instance is highlighted orange, the others in yellow (Firefox devs take note: this is a nice feature to have). --Redrose64 (talk) 15:23, 12 March 2011 (UTC)

I had this problem today, with Chrome 10.0.648.127. I think it was during a "Show changes" diff. Helder 22:47, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

• I use Chrome 10.0.648.151 on a new iMac, and the freezing described happens on a regular basis. It only usually affects the current window, so I don't have to restart yhe browser when there is a problem. --Ohconfucius ^¡digame! 17:06, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

I've been having this problem since upgrading to Chrome 10 for Ubuntu. It only shows up on really long pages; I think it's because Chrome starts to search immediately after you type in the query. So if I type in "hello", it will search for "h", and return all 30,000 results, freezing up the browser while it searches. Just a thought. Magog the Ogre (talk) 02:52, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

Hmmm, doesn't explain why it freezes though, rather than just show 'x number of f's or whatever. I'll try cutting and pasting a term to search. Casliber (talk · contribs) 03:12, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

Update - working fine in firefox. Casliber (talk · contribs) 03:28, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

I have the same problem with Chrome on Mac. is there a workaround? oddly it only seems to happen when I connect via wi-fi. Postrock1 (talk) 00:58, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

I've been having this problem for about a week or two, it's really annoying. When it freezes I have to close all tabs in which Wikipedia is open. – Alensha ^talk 17:18, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

Same problem here. I have to kill the page to recover. Both on Windows 7 and XP computers. Dr.K. ^{λogosπraxis} 17:58, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

I had this same problem when I was using Chrome 10; killing and then reloading the tab always fixed it for me. I haven't experienced the problem since Chrome updated to 11 (in case anyone is confused about that (because they're still on 10 and haven't received an upgrade notice for 11), I use the dev channel, which is usually one major version number ahead of the beta and stable channels), though there seem to be other search bugs now (mostly related to a search term appearing more than about 200 times in a page). 「ダイノガイ千？！」^{? · ☎ Dinoguy1000} 06:40, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

No HTML "title" on plain internal link

Hello,

I noticed today that the "plain" internal links, created by the [[Article]] syntax, do not have any "title" attribute in HTML, whereas I'm pretty convinced it previously did...

For instance, [[Article]] currently creates the HTML hyperlink <a href="/wiki/Article">Article</a> (Article) and not the hyperlink <a href="/wiki/Article" title="Article">Article</a> I thought I would get. The notable difference is the lack of mouseover text indicating the title of the article pointed to by the link.

What bugs me is that piped links, or links to redirect pages, still have their HTML title : [[Article|text]] creates <a href="/wiki/Article" title="Article">text</a> (text), and [[Articles]] creates <a href="/wiki/Articles" class="mw-redirect" title="Articles">Articles</a> (Articles). Both of them therefore still have the mouseover text indicating the title of the article (or redirect) pointed to.

Am I missing something? Is this normal, or has this been already discussed? There is the same problem on the French Wikipedia (and I guess probably on other ones), so maybe I should tell this on an other place, meta or mediawiki.org ?

Thanks for any answer! - Cos-fr (talk) 20:24, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

Yes, it's deliberate, and a recent change. The attempted behaviour is to not repeat any already visible information in the title attribute. This is, I believe, in line with the relevant WCAG spec. Were you relying on the old behaviour? - Jarry1250 ^{[Who? Discuss.]} 20:34, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for the explanation. I was not relying on it, it is just that I was used to see the mouseover text, and as I said I was surprised to see some links didn't have it whereas others did, so I thought it could be some kind of bug.

I am suprised with this decision, as it breaks some kind of consistent behaviour I noticed on nearly every hyperlink in the Wikipedia website, to feature a mouseover text explaining what it points to (this is also true for links to a history, or to edit a page or a section, links in the sidebar, etc.); I found this behaviour quite relevant, as one can get used to systematically check in the mouseover text what the link is leading to. The only links not to comply with this behaviour were the links to a specific section of the current page (like #this or a link in the table of contents), which had no mouseover text, and the links formed by images to their description pages, which could have the caption in the mouseover text instead of something indicating what the link was pointing to; but I precisely thought these could be corrected to get a consistent behaviour on every possible link (although in the case of a link to a section of the current page, the absence of mouseover text may correspond to the fact that following this link does not imply any page change).

Now I find the consistency of this mouseover text to be rather confused, as [[Article]] do not feature a mouseover text whereas [[Articles]] still do (with redundancy towards the already visible information), and [[Article|text]] do whereas [[#Section|text]] still do not.

Let me clarify my point, I am not trying to complain, just providing arguments which, who knows, some people may find useful.

Also, I would be pleased if someone knows which part of the WCAG spec was involved in this decision.

Cos-fr (talk) 23:14, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

Just FYI: the bug was mediazilla:542; somebody just complained in mediazilla:28182; and "WCAG" is Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. — AlexSm 16:04, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

yes, sorry, perhaps I should have been clearer. See specifically [5], which validates as "No duplication between the two", as I recall. I think that unfortunately for you "one can get used to systematically check in the mouseover text what the link is leading to" is going to be the casualty here. IMHO the guidelines broadly support the current behaviour, but it's not a static thing and if you can highlight that they don't in some way - I'm no accessibility guru - I'm sure it'll get changed: I'll do it for you if need be :) Regards, - Jarry1250 ^{[Who? Discuss.]} 16:56, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

These were really useful answers, thanks a lot!

I didn't find anything about duplication in the "Technique H33" you indicated, but it indeed states that the HTML title is supposed to give additional information, and I got detailed explanations in the mediazilla:542 comments. I don't really know which side I am on the matter now, but at least I understood why it is not so obvious as I thought.

Again, thank you very much for your useful and precise answers: just what I needed (as for "WCAG", we're here on Wikipedia and WCAG gave me the meaning ).

Regards, Cos-fr (talk) 19:44, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

Google hits on non-existing articles!

I just looked up Propicimex on Google, and its top hit was to a "create this article" link ( [6] ). I think I saw another link or two like that, just within the past few minutes - never before. Is this the result of anything done on our end? The new article patrollers should get ready for a stampede... Wnt (talk) 04:17, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

For me the Google hit says http://www.wikipedia.com/w/index.php?title=Propicimex&action=edit&redlink=1 which redirects to http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Propicimex&action=edit&redlink=1. All http://www.wikipedia.com/XXX appear to redirect to http://en.wikipedia.org/XXX Bed bug has a red link to Propicimex. PrimeHunter (talk) 04:53, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

So you think this happens if and only if articles are redlinked to? Did you ever see Google link to empty articles before? Wnt (talk) 07:18, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

I'm just making observations. I guess a redlink is necessary but far from all redlinked pages are indexed like this. I haven't seen it before and I still haven't seen it for wikipedia.org. Does your Google search results page really say http://www.wikipedia.org or is it http://www.wikipedia.com like mine? The Google search site:www.wikipedia.com gives me "About 19,900 results" when I click "repeat the search with the omitted results included." site:www.wikipedia.com/w/ gives the same count. None of the search results pages I have examined contain any blurbs from the pages except the first (and the only before "repeat the search with the omitted results included") on site:www.wikipedia.com which is http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?Janet_Reno. http://en.wikipedia.org/robots.txt contains Disallow: /w/. I don't know technical details but perhaps http://www.wikipedia.com/robots.txt should contain something similar or disallow everything instead of redirecting to http://en.wikipedia.org/robots.txt. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:37, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

You're right - it was pointing at www.wikipedia.com - which sends me to en.wikipedia.org when I click the Google search result. Wnt (talk) 21:16, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

Hmmm, I just got a hit on a talk page when searching Google for "Virginia snakeweed"[7] - not from Wikipedia.com but just plain en.wikipedia.org. I thought those pages weren't supposed to come up because of BLP issues &c.?

Failure to detect edit conflicts

I'm trying to test the new edit conflict logic in Twinkle and it's not working. It turns out that I can't even manually create an edit conflict right now. Here are two edits performed in different browser windows: [8] [9]. Both edit windows were opened before the first was saved. When I saved the second edit, it just overwrite the first edit even though the overwritten line was not loaded into my edit window. The same thing happened on an article a few days ago. In that case, I left a note for another editor that he had reverted my edit. However, he replied that he never got an edit conflict error. I have encountered several edit conflicts recently so it appears to work sometimes. What in the world is going on here? —UncleDouggie (talk) 07:22, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

I don't know exactly what the manual edit window does, but in my Twinkle code I'm setting both basetimestamp and starttimestamp properly when calling the API. It's like the API is just ignoring them. —UncleDouggie (talk) 07:28, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

Regarding your first two links: last time I looked, the code was written such that you don't get edit conflicts with yourself if you edit the whole page. See EditPage.php, line 1013. Lupo 08:04, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

• I have also experienced edit conflict messages with others on busy pages, but I can confirm my edit referred to UncleDouggie was indeed without warning. I have even had edit conflicts with myself, so I'm a bit mystified. --Ohconfucius ^¡digame! 08:15, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
  • I just created an alternate account UncleDouggieTest (talk · contribs) and reran the same manual edit conflict test. This time I did get an edit conflict. In the case of the article problem I referenced, it is an extremely busy page being a current disaster, so perhaps that had something to do with it, but it still shouldn't have happened. I'm back in business for now, but I agree with Ohconfucius that something is still fishy here. —UncleDouggie (talk) 08:36, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
    • MediaWiki's edit conflict resolver's behavior is...unpredictable sometimes. Its results "may vary depending on the phase of the moon and whether the [editing] gods noticed your latest burnt offering" (quoting User:Happy-melon, though from a somewhat different context). It's a known issue. T. Canens (talk) 11:24, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

Reminder to redisplay with action=purge

Remind people to re-display a page with "action=purge" (after they run an "action=edit"), due to a lag before the edited article page is reformatted (rather than users clearing their browser's cache). Pages have been slow to reformat [at this hour: 11:16, 22 March 2011 (UTC)], and other users have noted slow lags during the past weeks. Of course, a user could, instead, still clear their browser's cache of all temporary files (especially if there is excess clutter), but when working with pages which display hundreds of images or icons, then the re-download of all those images can be avoided by simply re-running the address line and substituting "action=purge" (replacing "action=submit"). Typically, re-editing a page will confirm that recent changes did, in fact, get saved into the wiki-databases (at edit SAVE), but again upon re-display, the prior version might still be re-shown, again and again. Hence, re-running the URL address with "action=purge" should be the quick solution, without wiping out all the other browser cache files. Are there any other issues to beware? -Wikid77 11:16, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

Remind people where? In the interface? That's not the right fix for the problem. If there's a general problem with the cache it should be fixed at the root of the problem in the MediaWiki deployment. Personally I haven't seen any cache problems recently. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward: not at work) - talk 11:29, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

I have had such probs, as have several others - see subthreads of #Purge, also #Page apparently not created just a few sections above this one. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:48, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

"Email new password" won't work for me.

• I'm User:Ling.Nut. I scrambled my password, but now hope to recover the acct. If you send an email from that page (not the one in my current sig, which is User:Ling.Nut2), I rec'v your message... I have tried the "send new password" button twice, and both times saw a Wikipedia message saying that a new password had been mailed to me. However, I never rec'd the email (I checked my junkmail folder too, of course). Thanks.  – Ling.Nut 11:58, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

I just tested "send new password" and it sent me a message. I just sent you a test message. If you don't get it then you have it blocked in spam filter elsewhere, mistyped your email or are looking at the wrong email account. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 19:10, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

• I rec'd your message, thanks... now could someone please fix my problem? Or this problem specifically; my personal list of problems is a tad longish...  – Ling.Nut 00:11, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

I don't know which junkmail folder you checked but your mail provider may filter your mail and the mails they filter out may or may not be viewable for a period if you log in to their webmail page, assuming they have one. They may also have filter settings you can temporarily change. If this doesn't help then the only chance seems to be trying again periodically to see if one of the password mails get through. PrimeHunter (talk) 03:18, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

• You're a genius! I didn't think to look in my Trash folder! I'm in! • Ling.Nut (talk) 03:29, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

"Documentation for this script can be added at..."

At User:Ucucha/common.css, the message "Documentation for this script can be added at User:Ucucha/common." is shown. It shouldn't be, because this isn't a standalone script, and the message is (correctly) not shown at User:Ucucha/monobook.css. I haven't been able to find out which MediaWiki message adds this text; does anyone know where it is? Ucucha 23:25, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

See Template:Script doc auto/core2, to get the common.css page to duplicate the behaviour of the other skin css pages, simply add | User#common to the switch statement at the top of that page, I guess. - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 23:36, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

Oh, so it was a template transcluded by a MediaWiki message; that's why I couldn't find it. Thanks; I've applied the fix. Ucucha 23:42, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

Color mismatch in an infobox

In the article Parliament of the United Kingdom, the infobox includes the graph to the right; the trouble is that the Conservative Party's color in the legend is a far darker blue than the cyan color used to illustrate its seats. I'm getting RGB values of 0, 204, 255 for the cyan, and 0, 135, 220 for the darker blue Conservative Party color. I can't fix it myself because these are marked as high risk templates that only admins can fix. Could someone fix this issue? Comet Tuttle (talk) 23:50, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

PS: Democratic Unionist Party's color is off, also. Comet Tuttle (talk) 23:51, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

{{Conservative Party (UK)/meta/color}} is used in many other articles and shouldn't be changed. Instead I manually added #00CCFF in the infobox instead of transcluding the template. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:06, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

Finding thumbnails

Resolved

For a given image in Wikipedia or Wikimedia Commons, there is a corresponding thumbnail image. Is there a defined way of determining the URL of the latter given the UR of the former? For example, the thumbnail for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:John-Madin.jpg resides on Commons as http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a0/John-Madin.jpg/90px-John-Madin.jpg.

On the other hand, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Census_Bureau_map_of_Bernardsville,_New_Jersey.gif has its current thumbnail on Wikipedia, at http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/af/Census_Bureau_map_of_Bernardsville%2C_New_Jersey.gif/120px-Census_Bureau_map_of_Bernardsville%2C_New_Jersey.gif.

How is the "a/a0" and "a/af/" part of the URL determined? How can I tell which domain the thumbnail resides on? Is there an alternative pattern, which always returns the current thumbnail? Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 17:39, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

According to User:Pilaf/include/instaview.js, its uses the md5 of the filename. You example: John-Madin.jpg hashes to a01e1f8f47214bb4ccfd39f999a880f3: "FirstChar/FirstTwoChars/filename". — Dispenser 17:49, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

Also please note that the URL contains the image width (90px for your first example, 120px for the second), which won't necessarily be the same for you as for others. --Redrose64 (talk) 18:09, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

If you need a programmatic solution, you can use the API to tell you where the thumbnail will be. - Jarry1250 ^{[Who? Discuss.]} 20:37, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

…and in wikitext, you can use the Media: prefix, e.g. Media:Example.png, to link directly to an image. {{Nihiltres|talk|edits|⚡}} 22:45, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

Next version of MediaWiki (1.18), {{filepath:Example.svg|300}} will produce a external link to the thumbnail. Useful for making computer wallpaper pages. — Dispenser 01:01, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

Example of API call mentioned by Jarry1250. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:05, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, all. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 11:13, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

Reference Desk Archives problems

The Reference Desk Archives from, 2006 November 10 to an uncertain date, is not linking to other reference desk sections properly. 99.237.87.20 (talk) 00:33, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

Fixed. Links were pointing toward dates in this years which haven't happened yet. — Blue-Haired Lawyer ^t 20:44, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

Moving files to a different namespace

Is it possible to move Files out of File: namespace? I thought I remember seeing that this was disabled, for obvious reasons (I don't want to experiment to find out). If so, would it be possible to make the "File:" part non-editable, and have it appear directly to the left of the text field when moving a file? Can the move page even be modified for specific namespaces in this way? It may not seem like a big deal, but if this can't be altered, then why present it as an option? I know it would make me less paranoid that I'm going to move a file to article space on accident... ▫ JohnnyMrNinja 10:25, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

Editing tools

Resolved

I'm not getting on with the new(-ish) editing tools at the top of the edit window; they're slow to load, and cause the window to dance as they do, no my netbook. Can they be disabled, or is there away to roll back to the old style? I found that more useful and feature-rich. I'm sure this has already been discussed somewhere, but a search proved fruitless. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 11:42, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

I think Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 87#Editing covers this issue. In summary: go to Special:Preferences, select "Editing" tab, and in the box "Usability features", make sure that both "Enable enhanced editing toolbar" and "Enable dialogs for inserting links, tables and more" are unchecked. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:15, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

Thank you. I find that unchecking the former and keeping the latter checked works best for me; but obviously that's a personal preference. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 12:20, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

Is Toolserver down?

I've been trying to get some whois reports for vandals today, each time I get a "Web page not available" or "Chrome could not connect message". The rest of the web seems to be working. DuncanHill (talk) 12:08, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

I would tend to agree. Two other kinds of links also fail, links that are unrelated to each other save that they're hosted on toolserver: these are (i) the coordiantes links found upper right of most articles about a fixed location; (ii) the "Edit count" link found at the very bottom of Special:Contributions/(insert name here). --Redrose64 (talk) 12:20, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

SoxBot

The SoxBot is crazy now. It revert the Sandbox every 12 seconds. these edits. ––虞海 (Yú Hǎi) ✍ 17:39, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

I've disabled this task and notified its operator. –xeno^talk 17:43, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

Firefox 4 and preview windows

I have installed Firefox 4 and now the preview windows do not come even close to working correctly. Can this be fixed? SMP0328. (talk) 21:26, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

Works for me. Can you get a screenshot of it? /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 21:32, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

I don't know how to do that. SMP0328. (talk) 22:12, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

alt + printscreen and then crtl + v into a blank MS Paint window, or if you're running a newer version of Windows, Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> Snipping Tool. Then upload to ImageShack or some other site. If you're in a Mac, use the Grab application or command + shift + 3. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 22:46, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

Strange template/doc to me

Please take a look at Template:Anatomical terms, and then click "edit" the documentation page. Am I the only one that received a (probably well written) code page? I expect the regular page, which is OK from this: Template:Anatomical terms/doc. -DePiep (talk) 22:22, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

I'm not seeing your problem; can you clarify, in case I misunderstood it? Alternatively, add a picture (1000 words and such). --Izno (talk) 22:33, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

Short 1st reply (pic can follow):

1: I open template page Template:Anatomical terms. Just a template, with a /documentaion (green) subpage. (note: I added the TfD template myself afterwards, imo not related.)

2: I click "edit" on the documentation subpage

3: I get: a code page, clearly XML:

Code, unexpected (XML)

<?xml version="1.0"?> <api servedby="srv188"> <error code="badurl" info="The URL to redirect to must be domain-relative, i.e. start with a /" xml:space="preserve"> ****************************************************************************************** ** ** ** This is an auto-generated MediaWiki API documentation page ** ** ** ** Documentation and Examples: ** ** http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API ** ** ** ****************************************************************************************** Status: All features shown on this page should be working, but the API is still in active development, and may change at any time. Make sure to monitor our mailing list for any updates Documentation: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API Mailing list: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-api Api Announcements: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-api-announce Bugs & Requests: http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?component=API&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&order=bugs.delta_ts (etcetera, by DePiep)

A4: Otherwise, if I click the /doc page directly, i.e. Template:Anatomical terms/doc, I get the regular /doc page as expected (& editable & so).

A5: I am using FF 3.6.11 on Win XP (eh, with recent updates, SP2+ sure).

A6: still need a screenshot?

-DePiep (talk) 23:03, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

It might be the version of Firefox you're using then. The current version is .15, and I'm not seeing errors using .15 on Windows 7. --Izno (talk) 23:09, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

I've got Firefox 3.6.15 under Windows XP,  Works for me. BTW, what's the redlinked Template:Hatnote templates now TfD for? --Redrose64 (talk) 23:12, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

1: will do FF 3.11.16 from now. 2: re the redlink: oops, template should be Category:Hatnote templates now TfD. Brackets. Should be OK by now. -DePiep (talk) 23:21, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

I can't get FF 3.11.16 now. If I re-experience under FF 3.11.16 I'll be back here. Let's wait. -DePiep (talk) 23:35, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

DePiep, can you let us know the url of the page where you see this API error, and also the exact link you are clicking to get to that page? Thanks. - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 23:49, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

So, regular Template page: [10]

From there, I click the (green /doc subpage): OOPS: cannot reproduce. Right now, it shows (step 1-2-3 above) the regular /doc page as expected. Cannot reproduce. Consider closed? -DePiep (talk) 00:00, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

This is my guess: Likely a problem with the new edit section links that WikiMedia were testing (placing the edit link on the left hand side and including a little pen logo see here). Apparently they are using the API's click tracking to track if they get clicked (because at the moment they want to track how many clicks the links get to see if it improves editing statistics). But somewhere, something or someone got the url wrong and included the en.wikipedia domain name in the redirectto parameter (it should start at w/index.php instead). Replacing class="editsection plainlinks" with style="float: right; margin-left: 5px;" at Template:Documentation/start box would probably fix the problem, but it really depends on how the trial of this new edit section link is being carried out (if that even is the problem, and only if it's specifically a problem with the way the documentation template creates the edit section link). - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 01:21, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

Al right. Gives me the idea that they are reading us, editors. Have a good night, someone could give this thing a closing notch I'd say. -DePiep (talk) 01:33, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

I don't understand what this "FF 3.11.16" is about. Mozilla have never used this version number for Firefox: for major version 3, the minor versions have been 3.0, 3.1, 3.5 and 3.6 - of these, 3.0 is no longer supported, 3.1 was renamed 3.5, and the other two are now up to revisions 3.5.17 and 3.6.15 respectively. I note that earlier you mentioned Firefox 3.6.11; this was released on 19 October 2010 (release notes), and was superseded on 27 October 2010 by 3.6.12 (release notes). To upgrade from 3.6.11 to the current 3.6.15, I suggest that you follow either of those links and click the green panel "Firefox 3.6 Free Download" upper right. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:38, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

Indeed, I introduced the (non existant) "FF 3.11.16" here. It is a mixup of numbers & digits. Sorry for the inconvenience. Anyway, it seems to have to do with URLs, not FF versions. Consider closed? -DePiep (talk) 17:59, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

Yes, this can be considered closed. If you look at a "normal" edit section link, it is <a href="/w/index.php...>, whereas the "fake" one at the documentation is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php...">. This is what's causing the problem, as the foundation is using the API to count clicktracking in the experiment I explained above, and then using the API to redirect the user to the edit section. The problem with that is the API redirectto parameter requires the url to start with "/" (i.e. be domain-relative). This problem could be fixed by changing the template link to stop pretending to be an edit section link, as I described above, or by changing the code which is modifying the edit section link to except the edit section link including the domain. However, I do not really think it is worth our time, since the problem will only last while the test is being carried out, and won't show up for most users (the chance of seeing the new kind of link is very small). - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 18:37, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

Will close then. -DePiep (talk) 19:16, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed and will soon be archived.

---

Cannot reproduce, allthough of possible interest in test & technical specifics (says User:Kingpin13)

 Done I say to get it to archive. -DePiep (talk) 22:28, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Intermittent connection issues

For the past hour, I've been having issues connecting to all regular WMF sites. First, it started off with bits.wikimedia.org being slow. Then, I just couldn't connect to the servers (although other sites were fine). I switched to the WMF secure server for a few minutes and that worked. Then I tried going back to the regular site and it worked. Five minutes later, I couldn't get it to connect again. And now I'm on the secure server typing this—and I can access the normal site again.

I'm on AT&T in the U.S.; is this just me? /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 21:21, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

Great, just stopped working again. I'm stuck on the secure server, I guess. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 21:23, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

I'm an admin, but I've never registered on the secure server, so I guess I'm stuck on logged-out editing...I'm having almost the same result, except that instead of connection problems being intermittent, I'm consistently unable to get any WMF pages except for the secure server. My browser is Internet Explorer 8 with a Windows Vista computer. 69.136.6.110 (talk) 03:36, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

You don't have to register on the secure server, because you're already registered. When you go for the "Log in / create account" link at upper right, you get to the login screen for the normal server. If you don't actually log in there but read down the page, you'll see "Consider logging in on the secure server. That takes you to another login screen, where you can log in using your normal ID and password. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:28, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Problems

1. There is a bug in HotCat where it doesn't work
2. The categories bar at the bottom doesn't appear if there is no categories. It makes it impossible to use HotCat too.
3. The tabs for "User" and "Page" do not give more options like history, Block Log, Move and others.
4. I put on the Qui and bypassed the cache and it still didn't appear.

I'm using Camino (web browser) version 2.0.7 on a Macbook (newest version) with Mac OS X Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 6.7) The interface is called "Modern". ~~Awesome EBE123 ^talk_Contribs 21:42, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

All related to the general ResourceLoader problems mentioned below, not bugs in the gadgets. Lupo 15:08, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Did something happen to popups?

Resolved

 – Temporary workarounds available below and bug filed (T30215). Bug has been marked as fixed!

My popups suddenly began showing without any formatting or backgrounds (just a long list of links now, instead of the little menus) about ten minutes ago. Anyone else having problems? /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 21:47, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

Can you explain a bit further? Popups have always shown the navigation/action links as a list if you use IE, whereas in other browsers they show in pop-down menus, so if that's what you're seeing than it's likely a problem with the browser detection. However, I'm not clear if that's what you mean? - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 21:49, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

In Firefox 4, it was working fine (menus) a few hours ago, now I have this. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 21:55, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

This also happens in Google Chrome and on both the regular and secure servers. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 21:57, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

I can't get anything like that, either in chrome or ff4, with both the navigation popups enabled in preferences, the experimental navigation popups enabled in preferences, or even duplicating your monobook.js. If you know how to use chome's developer tools (or firebug), perhaps you could take a look at the source, and figure out if the background is there in the code, and if it's some css property which is preventing it from showing? Also, if you have an alternate account, you could try from there, with only popups enbled, since it doesn't seem to be browser specific, it may be something to do with your account's common/monobook css or jss interfering. - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 22:11, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

I'm getting something strange that never happened until an hour or so ago. I have Firefox. Happens both in Modern and in MonoBook. Any Wikipedia page at all, as long as it has an infobox. Working in Edit, with a Preview. If my mouse crosses an image or map on the infobox, I get a "transparent" vertical lay-over pop-up over the infobox. The pop-up is a vertical miniature version the "Article, Talk, Edit..." etc menu bar from top. Never happened before. But it happens now.-Maile66 (talk) 22:24, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

I've gotten that view that Fetchy got, but after I installed popups on another wiki without copying the CSS page. No idea why that's happening on enwp, though. Killiondude (talk) 22:27, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

On my alternate account, I'm having the same issue. On Commons and Wikinews, popups work fine. I'm having trouble figuring out the code off Firebug, so I'll see if restarting helps later. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 22:29, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

Now that I looked at what Fetchcomms had, my transparent popup is the same thing. Except transparent, and it comes over the infobox. And I hadn't changed anything when it started happening. -Maile66 (talk) 22:31, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

This is very weird. Do you guys still get this problem if you enable pop-ups through the preferences page, rather than importing it to your js pages? You could also try going to a page where you are seeing the error, and then replacing the url bar with javascript: alert ("Popup version is: " + popupVersion + " style sheet is: " + popStyleSheet);, hitting enter, and letting us know what you see. - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 22:54, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

I tried your suggestion here. Pulled a page with the problem. Replacing the url bar and hitting Enter. Absolutely nothing happened. Nada. -Maile66 (talk) 23:26, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

I'm convinced this is a problem with your css, if I remove the popups_importStylesheetURI(popStyleSheet); line from User:Lupin/popups.js, then I get exactly the same problem. It would be good to know what your popStyleSheet is set to (you can get this by following the instructions I gave above). - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 23:00, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

Nah. I don't have Popups on a js. I only have one thing on a js, which is a DYK Check (word count). And that didn't get put there just a couple of hours ago. Nothing on my settings has changed recently, so that doesn't explain the sudden appearance of this phenomenon. -Maile66 (talk) 23:11, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

(ec) Same issue in Opera. Trying the javascript command throws an error: Uncaught exception: ReferenceError: Undefined variable: popStyleSheet Mr Stephen (talk) 23:16, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

I've finally managed to get the same error, over at es.wikipedia in ff4 (but not chrome). Mr Stephen, what happens if you try the same method of pasting js into the url bar, but use the code javascript: popups_importStylesheetURI('http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?action=raw&ctype=text/css&title=User:Lupin/navpopdev.css'); instead? Does that fix the error for you? - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 23:19, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

(od) It gives me Uncaught exception: ReferenceError: Undefined variable: popups_importStylesheetURI Mr Stephen (talk) 23:34, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

Meh, okay then, how about just adding @import url('http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?action=raw&ctype=text/css&title=User:Lupin/navpopdev.css'); to your local .css page? - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 00:00, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

That's fixed it. Well done. Mr Stephen (talk) 00:05, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

The same thing's started happening to my popups also, about 20 minutes ago; once it's brought up, it doesn't go away, even when moving the mouse. I've got texts cascaded all over each other. I use a gadget from "my preferences", not my own code. Have also lost access to the drop-down menu for page and user tabs (to access page history etc), as per gadget. All a bit weird. Gwinva (talk) 00:07, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Gwinva, could you try adding @import url('http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?action=raw&ctype=text/css&title=User:Lupin/navpopdev.css'); to your local .css page please? Thanks :) - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 00:10, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

I added that to my css page, and it cleared up the issue. -Maile66 (talk) 00:14, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks - added to my page. It's stopped the cascading, transparent text, but I get no popups at all. My drop-down tabs still don't work. Gwinva (talk) 00:24, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

What do you mean "no popups at all"? Are you sure it's still enabled in your preferences? If so please remove the css, and try again, just to confirm that it iss the css which is preventing it from showing. Also, don't forget to clear your cache and purge. - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 00:31, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

That didn't seem to fix it for me; let me try restarting my whole computer. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 00:19, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

You probably don't need to restart your computer, simply clearing your cache would be a better idea ;) - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 00:31, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

I did, both with ?action=purge and ctrl + shift + r. Neither worked. I tried this on Chrome and FF 4; after restarting, the problem still exists, albeit only on the secure server. So I'm just going to hope the problem goes away tomorrow, as I don't usually use the secure server. Thanks for your time on this, Kingpin—it was really weird. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 00:37, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Aha, now that is good to know, it also breaks for me on the secure server. Although adding the import code to my css stops that. What skin are you using? And you're welcome :) - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 00:57, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

@ Kingpin My popups went entirely - mouse over produced no popups (which was an improvement on cascading text, admittedly). I cleared caches, purged etc, to no effect. Have restarted computer, now working. Will disable my page tab gadget, since the drop-down menus don't work. Thanks for your help. Gwinva (talk) 00:44, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Odd, I guess this is some kind of problem with the resource loader, you should try adding popus to your js page manually. - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 00:49, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

I'm on vector and using popups through preferences/gadgets. I added the import code to both my vector.css and common.css. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 01:22, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Hmm, so you're saying that for you, on the secure server, you're still seeing popups, but just no background? So exactly the same as before (the image you linked to)? But you're still seeing the list of links, so it's not gone completely like it is for Gwinva? - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 01:34, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Same here, popups didn't work so well today with secure server, See FF snapshot here. FF 3.6.16 or MSIE 8.0, same story. Logging with non-secure server and popups works. Added Kingpin's suggested css fixed the secure server popups for me. Rayshade (talk) 01:39, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Kingpin: correct. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 02:16, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

No, strike that. It just broke again on the regular server. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 02:17, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Fetchcomms, do you think you could try manually adding popups to your local .js page? The reason the css wasn't loading appears to be a fault with the resourceLoader, so you may be getting the same problem with loading the js side of things. - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 02:21, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Yep, that fixed it for both secure and regular servers. Thanks! /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 02:34, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Great! You're welcome :) - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 02:38, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

That fixed popups, but other things aren't working either, such as the (User:Haza-w/Drop-down menus - activated as a gadget) "page" and "user" popdown menus at the top of Vector. —DoRD (talk) 02:41, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

My Vector on FF4 is now borked; I can't delete pages via the dropdowns, and I get Courier font in the edit window as if I'm logged out. Acroterion (talk) 03:13, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

(edit conflict)It appears to me to be a problem with the resourceLoader, which is used to load the gadgets. However, it appears it is not used to load your local.js and .css pages (either that or it works fine on those). So basically it's a matter of moving everything you want out of your preferences and onto your js page. If you want to quickly test that that is what the problem is, then go to a page where the drop downs are broken, replace the text in your url bar with javascript: importScriptURI('http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?action=raw&ctype=text/javascript&title=User:Haza-w/cactions.js'); and hit enter. If that fixes the problem, then all you need to do to fix it permanently is add importScriptURI('http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?action=raw&ctype=text/javascript&title=User:Haza-w/cactions.js'); to your local.js page. - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 03:16, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

I tried pasting the link in the URL bar and hitting enter--I can't tell that anything at all changed. Am I supposed to include the javascript: importScriptURI (which I did)? Thanks, Aristophanes68 (talk) 04:06, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Yes you did that correctly, but it shouldn't matter now that you have done this. Just purge your cache, and then check if those drop downs are working again :) - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 04:11, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

(unindent) My popups are broken, too, and I haven't done anything to cause this (I haven't even edited in a couple of weeks). Can someone please explain in plain English what is going on and when/how this will be fixed? Thanks! ElKevbo (talk) 03:20, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

ElKevbo, you seem to be using a different version of popups than everybody else, so just to clarify, is the problem you're having that when you hover over a link you get a list of links, but no background or anything (like this)? - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 03:24, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Correct.

And I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "[I'm] using a different version" but I'd be happy to change versions if that fixes the problem. I am guessing this may be related to me having begun using Popups before it was integrated into the standard gadget toolset...? ElKevbo (talk) 03:27, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

• Okay--it just started for me this evening, pretty much between pages: one minute there was no problem, the next I'm getting the transparent pop-up previews (that don't go away after you move the mouse) and my page-gadget drop-down box isn't working at all. But the problem isn't related to infoboxes--I first noticed it on my watchlist page, which is now pretty much unusable without actually opening the page histories individually. I have vector.css and vector.js, but the only thing I've changed in the style sheets is the background color for my page--otherwise, I haven't messed with any coding. So which of the above advice should I take? Thanks, Aristophanes68 (talk) 03:25, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Both of you: Add @import url('http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?action=raw&ctype=text/css&title=User:Lupin/navpopdev.css'); to your .css page to fix the popups gadget. Aristophanes68, add importScriptURI('http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?action=raw&ctype=text/javascript&title=User:Haza-w/cactions.js'); to your js page to fix the drop down tabs gadget. - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 03:29, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Update: That was in Firefox. The popups are illegible in IE as well, but at least the unpop once you remove the cursor. In FF, the popups don't go away until you reload or change the page. Aristophanes68 (talk) 03:31, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Bad news: @import url('http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?action=raw&ctype=text/css&title=User:Lupin/navpopdev.css'); isn't helping--is that not for Vector? I cut and pasted it directly from the message you gave me, so there shouldn't be a mis-typing problem. Aristophanes68 (talk) 03:40, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Okay, so has this fixed it? - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 03:37, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

That fixed it for me. I'm not entirely sure what I just did and if it is a permanent fix but I sincerely appreciate your help! ElKevbo (talk) 03:44, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

It should be a permanent fix, but hopefully the resourceloader (or whatever is causing the problem in the first place) will be fixed, and this fix will no longer be needed. - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 03:46, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

After I added the .js code, everything cleared up, so I'm not sure whether the .css code helped--would it have been delayed by a few minutes? (Oops, I just realized that you edited the code--that must have fixed the problem!--Thanks!) However, I now have two "page" drop-down tabs on the top of articles. OH, and this is great: now when it click "page history", I get taken to History!!! "Latest diff" takes me to Latest diff, etc. What the??? Aristophanes68 (talk) 03:51, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

What fixed popups for you was this, what made the page drop down tabs appear was this, I've removed that for you here, if you want it back let me know and I can help you with that :) - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 03:56, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Well, without the .js edit, the page-gadget isn't giving me a drop-down box, and also the tab between the Star and Twinkle--is that the Move tab? That's not doing anything either--not even a pop-up to tell me what it does. Aristophanes68 (talk) 04:01, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Okay, try going to your preferences > Gadgets and unticking the "Add page and user options to drop-down menus on the toolbar" option. Then go back to User:Aristophanes68/vector.js and undo my most recent edit there, so that you re-add importScriptURI('http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?action=raw&ctype=text/javascript&title=User:Haza-w/cactions.js'); How does that work out for you? - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 04:04, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Huzzah!!! Victory! All hail Kingpin13, Conqueror of Code!!! Thanks!!! Aristophanes68 (talk) 04:11, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Fantastic :) - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 04:12, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

I'm having the same problem, all of my previews to show edits when moused over are producing a strange result. Here is a screen capture of what is happening. On this I moused over the |Prev) link, and get a transparent list that won't go away until I refresh the page. This is happening with both the latest version of FireFox and Chrome. This happens with every mouse over I've tried so far. Is there anything that can be done by the individual, or is something wrong with Wiki scripting? Dave Dial (talk) 03:33, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Dave, please add @import url('http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?action=raw&ctype=text/css&title=User:Lupin/navpopdev.css'); to you Special:MyPage/common.css, and see if that fixes it. - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 03:37, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

I'm basically script illiterate, but I do believe that worked. The popups are working now. Thanks Kingpin! Dave Dial (talk) 03:43, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

That's okay :) - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 03:45, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Kingpin13, the @import url(...); patch you recommended DOES NOT fix the popups problem for me. I'm using Firefox 4 on an Ubuntu Maverick box. I quit and restarted Firefox, and I cleared the cache by reloading the watchlist page with the shift key held down, but I'm still getting the persistent, transparent popups. Richwales (talk · contribs) 04:42, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

This is odd, can you also try it while in the preview window editing your common.css (e.g. by hovering over the "user CSS" link")? Thanks - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 04:53, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

I am suffering from this same mouseover popup issue in Firefox 3.6.15.--TonyTheTiger (T/C/BIO/WP:CHICAGO/WP:FOUR) 04:57, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Hi Tony, could you try adding @import url('http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?action=raw&ctype=text/css&title=User:Lupin/navpopdev.css'); to Special:MyPage/common.css and seeing if that fixes it for you? Thanks - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 04:59, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Rich, this should fix it for you :) - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 05:02, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks! Yes, doing the @import at the top of my common.css (instead of at the bottom) seems to have fixed things. Richwales (talk · contribs) 05:05, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

The fix worked for me too. Thank you. Dr.K. ^{λogosπraxis} 06:08, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

The fix also worked for me thanks, however, is this going to be fixed automatically? Not all users will think of coming to the village pump to find out why things are going wierd.Polyamorph (talk) 09:24, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Yes, eventually the resourceloader will be fixed by the devs. - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 09:27, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

The same popup problems happen on the Dutch Wikipedia, but not on the German and French ones. Looks as if some buggy version update of the popup fucntion has been installed on some but not all language versions. HHahn (Talk) 09:49, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

No, that's not what happened. A buggy update was made to the resourceloader, not the scripts themselves. You can use any one of the temporary fixes suggested at the top of this page in other language Wikipedia's. The resourceloader will be fixed by the devs as soon as possible, - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 09:52, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Ok I've read all of the above but now will someone help me? I am at a total loss with all of the above. I am computer illiterate. I use IE and my popup is clear and unreadable thus unusable. I tried unclicking it in my preferences and saving and then reclicking and saving but it didn't help. I now have both clicked and still have the problem. I need help, but for me talk to me like I am completely stupid about this. I haven't a clue what to do and don't understand what is said above. I can't locate purge though I did reboot my computer and refreshed which didn't help. Help please, --CrohnieGal^Talk 10:04, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Hi there Crohnie, this should have fixed it for you. Just hit Ctrl-F5 to clear IE's cache, and see WP:PURGE for help on purging Wikipedia's cache - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 10:09, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Thank you, you are a darling. It does work. Do I still need to do the clearing of the cache? --CrohnieGal^Talk 10:17, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

You're welcome :). If it's working now, that means the cache is not a problem. If it's not working, it's most likely because there is a cache problem, so just goto http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Crohnie/common.css&action=purge (to clear Wikipedia's cache) and then hit Ctrl-F5 (to clear your local cache). - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 10:19, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

It's working now so I'm off for todays work. Thank you very much for your help and being so quick about it. I appreciate it very much. --CrohnieGal^Talk 10:23, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

I know it has been said above, but just to reiterate: Kingpin13, thank you for all the assistance to everyone with this issue! —DoRD (talk) 11:55, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Y I've added a drop-in replacement for the gadget that manually loads script and styles, works now again. Should be reverted/deleted once the resource loader is fixed. (1, 2). Amalthea 14:00, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

@Kingpin: If it is "only" the resource loader, I do not understand why the problem does not occur in the German and French WPs. Should be the same resource loader, I presume? On the other hand, I tried soem of the solutions above, but they did not work in NL WP. Is it possible at all to load scripts from a different wikipedia this way? HHahn (Talk) 15:23, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

I'm not quite clear on how the resourceloader works in the respect, you'd have to ask a dev. However, the reason it's not working at nl for you, is that you need to edit your css page, rather than the js page, and the @import url('http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?action=raw&ctype=text/css&title=User:Lupin/navpopdev.css'); needs to go at the top of the page. - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 15:29, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

HHahn, it always depends how popups is loaded on those wikis. DE-wiki for example have copied the scripts from here, and manually import the stylesheet, instead of loading the stylesheet by script instead of relying on the gadget definition file doing it for them. Since just that part appears to be broken right now it didn't affect them. Amalthea 16:07, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

The bug's been marked as resolved and fixed—is there anything else we should do now, or can all the added css stuff safely stay put? /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 15:50, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

You certainly can remove the CSS import here on en-wiki. I haven't checked whether my workaround from above can be reverted again. Amalthea 16:10, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Gadget grief - popups and blackscreen

Popups are displaying with no background, so virtually unreadable. Blackscreen not working. Both enabled through gadgets. Monobook, Chrome, WinXP. DuncanHill (talk) 09:11, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Please see two section above for popups, this a problem with the resource loader, so it will hopefully be fixed before too long. In the meantime you can use the fix I suggested there, and for the blackscreen, try also adding @import url('http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?action=raw&ctype=text/css&title=MediaWiki:Gadget-Blackskin.css'); to your css page - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 09:15, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, I spotted the popups fix after posting, seems to work. I'll try the blackscreen thing now. DuncanHill (talk) 09:20, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks again, the blackscreen fix seems to be working. What is this resource loader thing and why is it causing so many problems? Was it part of the recent "up"grade? DuncanHill (talk) 09:26, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

The resourceloader is a fairly new feature (we got it at the same time as 1.17), and is intended to optimise loading of javascript and css (and when working it does a pretty good job). Basically allows what the browser wants to be given to be specified before it gets given it, among other things. The result is faster loading times, less work for the servers, and faster rolling out of changes to the global css/js pages. Why it's broken at the moment isn't quite clear (if it was then it would be fixed ;D), but something which changed recently (it was doing a grand job before), so hopefully won't take long to narrow down and fix/revert. All that is just as I understand it, I'm sure there is some foundation page somewhere explaining it better ;) - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 09:32, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks - I doubt there's a Foundation page explaining it better - your explanation actually made some sort of sense :) DuncanHill (talk) 12:05, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

"Add page and user options to drop-down menus on the toolbar" in Preferences > Gadget

In my row of tabs, I have a read tab, edit tab, new section tab, a watch list toggle tab, a purge tab, and a final tab that has a whole bunch of functions, including page history. For some reason, I cannot access that last tab, which is there because of a preference I secected. When I mouse over it, nothing is show. When I click on it, nothing happens. It took all the functions like page history away from the left side bar, so now I don't have access to those functions. How can I fix this? Apparently, the "Add page and user options to drop-down menus on the toolbar" in Preferences > Gadgets is what no longer is working. Per the thred above, I unchecked it, added importScriptURI('http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?action=raw&ctype=text/javascript&title=User:Haza-w/cactions.js'); to my .js book, hit purge, and nothing. The page and user options no longer are in a tab. That doesn't seem to be a fix. -- Uzma Gamal (talk) 12:48, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Per the above, I added @import url('http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?action=raw&ctype=text/css&title=User:Lupin/navpopdev.css'); to the top of Special:MyPage/common.css and that didn't fix it. -- Uzma Gamal (talk) 12:54, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Can you try going to a page where it doesn't show up, and then replace the text in the url bar with importScriptURI('http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?action=raw&ctype=text/javascript&title=User:Haza-w/cactions.js');, hit enter, and let me know if that fixes it on that page (without reloading)? If it does then make sure you clear your browser cache. What browser and skin are you using (you've now added it to both skin pages, maybe the problem was that you're using vector not monobook)? Also, the User:Lupin/navpopdev.css stuff is for popups, which is separate from User:Haza-w/cactions.js (the drop-down menus), could you clarify which you are having difficulty with? Thanks, - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 12:56, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Apparently, I should have added the first fix to User:Uzma Gamal/vector.js rather than User:Uzma Gamal/monobook.js. I added importScriptURI('http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?action=raw&ctype=text/javascript&title=User:Haza-w/cactions.js'); to my vector.js book[11] and the "Add page and user options to drop-down menus on the toolbar" now seems to be working. -- Uzma Gamal (talk) 12:59, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Actually, I was seeing double tabs, so I unchecked the "Add page and user options to drop-down menus on the toolbar" option in Preferences > Gadget. -- Uzma Gamal (talk) 13:02, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Great. The way the css/js subpages work are by skin name. The default skin is vector, so code you add to Special:MyPage/vector.js only effects you when you're using that skin. Similarly code added to Special:MyPage/monobook.js only effects you when using the monobook skin. Code added to Special:MyPage/common.js will effect all skins. You can pick a skin at Preferences > Appearance. But you don't need to worry about any of that if you don't want ;). Just make sure you use the right subpage for the skin you're using (vector) or use the common.js/css page. - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 13:04, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

I have tried several of the options but I am still having problems.

Although I can now see two versions of the User and Page tabs, the only one I can use (the l/h ones) all link to wikipages instead of the special pages (If I hover over the l/h user and click "History" I get taken to History)

I have wiped my vector js page and put everything into the common js page. I have unticked both the Navigation Popups and the "Add page and user options to drop-down menus..." on the prefs gadgets page.

I added the Hazard cactions.js script at the top of User:Chaosdruid/common.js Chaosdruid (talk) 15:02, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Seems that wiping/reinstalling Javascript and Wiki's cookies and clearing the FF4 history and site prefs seems to have fixed it Chaosdruid (talk) 15:08, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Lookahead feature insufficiently differentiates the watchlist itself from a preview of the changes

For the past four years, I have place the cursor on "diff" in the watchlist and obtained a pretty good summary of the change. I was able to quickly tell whether I wanted to look at the change in full or not.

This failed for the first time this morning. When I use the cursor, the returned change is not differentiated from the watchlist itself. It is therefore impossible to read.

I am now getting material imbedded in this report making it hard to read.

I use Firefox. I have just done a reboot and experienced the same things.Student7 (talk) 12:58, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

I presume you are referring to popups (see WP:POPUPS)? If so please see the box at the top of #Did_something_happen_to_popups.3F for a fix. Best, - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 13:00, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks! That did it! Student7 (talk) 13:59, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Stray maintenance category

Can anyone figure out how Cork (city) has ended up in the redlinked Category:Articles with unsourced statements from October 2,010?

So far as I can see, all the and other sourcing templates in the article are correctly formatted, and a template glitch seems unlikely because it's the only article in the category. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:56, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

It's the {{cn}} in the infobox (next to the |population_metro = 274,000. I think there's some auto-number formatting going on there with the infobox, but I'm not sure how to fix it. I just removed the tag, though, as I doubt such a source would be hard to find. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 15:53, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, Fetchcomms! That's great.

This auto-formatting thing is a nuisance, and should be removed. I have encountered it with other templates, and what the effect of it is always that the data cannot be referenced. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:56, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Ongoing discussion at Template talk:Fix/Archive 1#Dated categories and formatnum. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 18:00, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Sidebar toolbox

I run a number of scripts which are activated by buttons residing in the left-hand sidebar. The collection of scripts is stable in both membership and functionality, yet the button order seems to change with some randomness each time I go into edit mode. The order of appearance is not a complete scramble each time, as some buttons tend to appear for example towards the bottom, or more frequently in the same position. I usually run them in the same order, and would like to manage the buttons from a workflow point of view. I am totally mystified as to why they don't consistently appear in the same order each time, but would love to have them appear in a predictable order. --Ohconfucius ^¡digame! 16:11, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

The varying order possibly is caused by the fact that script loading through importScript is asynchronous. Lupo 16:22, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Smartyllama

User is seeing "Blocked" and says xe cannot edit; screenshot supports this; [12]

There are no active blocks on the account - in fact, just one entry from 2008 (and xe has edited since) [13]

• Smartyllama (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · page moves · block user · logs · block log · arb · rfc · lta · SPI · cuwiki)

Any ideas?  Chzz  ►  18:15, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

I don't know if it's relevant or a coincidence, but user's last edit apart from own talk page was to Uconnjoseph (talk · contribs) at 17:23, and he was indef-blocked at 17:36. JohnCD (talk) 18:21, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

• Uconnjoseph (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · page moves · block user · logs · block log · arb · rfc · lta · SPI · cuwiki)

More info, I was not being blocked until around 1:30 PM (EDT) today. And I am unable to edit the Sandbox or any other page except my own talk page. I have verified this. Smartyllama (talk) 18:22, 24 March 2011 (UTC)  Chzz  ►  18:28, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

• Can't make heads nor tails of this. Maybe flag someone in #mediawiki-tech. –xeno^talk 18:30, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Yes, most odd. I am talking to tech now. See User_talk:Smartyllama#I_Got_Re-blocked_from_2008 for updates.  Chzz  ►  18:46, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

It seems from that talk page that Smartyllama is on the same University network as blocked Uconnjoseph - could SL be caught in an autoblock? JohnCD (talk) 18:53, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Yes, possibly. Tell them to try again. –xeno^talk 19:03, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Was autoblock. See user talk for details.  Chzz  ►  19:13, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Resolved

Can you make a poll on WP

Is it possible to make a poll/questionaire in wiki markup? I'm imagining something like "Do you like this?" "Yes/No" "Comments". Possible? Aaadddaaammm (talk) 21:53, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

No. Most "polls" simply have two sections, one for "Support" and another for "Oppose", then asks the reader to enter their signature in one of the sections to indicate their preference. Gary King (talk · scripts) 00:55, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

mw:Extension:Quiz, but that's not going to be installed on here because we don't need it. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 02:54, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

Strange timeouts between European bits cache and Firefox

For a few days Firefox 3.6.15 has been unable to load Wikipedia pages for me. It just gets stuck, with the page staying blank indefinitely. The HttpFox traffic diagnostic extension shows this is due to requests to bits.wikimedia.org timing out (meaning it's ESAMS because I'm in Europe). Via the secure server (without ESAMS) everything loads fine. Safari 4 does not seem to have problems with this at all. --Morn (talk) 14:07, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

I had this today, but for less than an hour; it began to be difficult at some point after 14:15 UTC, and normal service (ie still not as quick as MediaWiki 1.16) resumed about 15:15 UTC. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:09, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

I've noticed this for a few days now. At some points even Safari stalled, but right now it's only Firefox that's causing problems. Oh well, maybe I should just use the secure server in Firefox. --Morn (talk) 19:16, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

I'm on Firefox in the UK. I sometimes use a dial-up connection mid-week and have noticed that bits.wikimedia.org often takes an inordinately long time to complete. It's not so bad on a broadband connection but on a slow connection is almost unusable on some days (by slow, I mean a 3G connection at 7.2Mb, or sometimes a 2G connection, not a landline modem). This problem seems to have started fairly recently. SpinningSpark 09:56, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

HotCat

I have HotCat checked in my gadgets, and yesterday it was working just fine (as you can see from the massive categorization binge I went on), but now it isn't working - the little signs next to categories that would allow me to edit them aren't appearing, and on articles that aren't in categories, the categorization bar isn't appearing (where normally it would appear but be empty). Is this an issue others are having at the moment? Possibly something wrong with my browser? (I haven't made any changes.) Roscelese (talk ⋅ contribs) 03:26, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

User:Billinghurst recently changed the way the gadget is loaded, which has the unfortunate side-effect that all HotCat users should now refresh their browsers' caches. Lupo 08:43, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

Aha! Now it's working. Roscelese (talk ⋅ contribs) 16:10, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

Page apparently not created

Also, sometimes I make a new page (I've only noticed this happening on redirects or categories because that's what I've been doing) and the changes don't go through - the page loads and I get a "Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name" result. Roscelese (talk ⋅ contribs) 04:04, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

How do you create the new page? Through HotCat? Or is this some unrelated issue? Lupo 08:43, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

This is exactly the same issue that I've been having. It's not HotCat related (I'm dead sure of that because I don't have HotCat). There are several similar threads under #Purge above. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:43, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

This is when I try to create a page normally, not through HotCat (how does one do that?). Anyway, I'll see if it keeps happening now that I've cleared my cache. Roscelese (talk ⋅ contribs) 16:10, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

Re:how does one do that? On a non-existing page, HotCat will still display the (empty) category bar. When you add categories, the page is created. Lupo 20:04, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

I've had this problem repeatedly over the last few days when creating user talk pages via Twinkle. I think (but not certain) it also happened when creating a page in the normal way. The newly created page always then appears immediately when the redlinked tab is clicked so I don't think it is lag in actually creating the page. SpinningSpark 10:03, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

Needs some bot on Buginese Wikipedia.

Hi, can some bots in this international language wikipedia help some Buginese in that wikipedia. Thank you bug:.Kiteretsu 23 (talk) 11:12, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

Untracked edits sometimes appear?

I've seen this a couple of times recently. In the first instance, a page I'd edited recently and seemed fine a week ago was defaced, with the hack appearing to have happened on April 1st (!) of last year, but with no log of the actual edit.

Today, I see GNU GRUB has been defaced between here and here. Between the two edits, "discontinued" appears in the infobox with no visible corresponding edit.

What's the appropriate action to take when something like this is encountered? Report it? Fix the page and move on? And is there a known cause that is shareable? (I'm not asking how, just what.)--NapoliRoma (talk) 15:15, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

Here's the diff between those two revisions. One of the changes is that the infobox "discontinued" parameter has been changed from blank to non-blank, and according to the {{Infobox software}} documentation that is enough to make the word "Discontinued" appear. If that's wrong, you need to fix the "discontinued" parameter. -- John of Reading (talk) 17:15, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

D'oh! You're right. I was completely misreading the diff. Still curious about the April Fool's hack, but that's another story. Thanks.--NapoliRoma (talk) 17:49, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

This can only be speculation since you gave no example, but maybe your "April Fool's hack" is caused by a transcluded template which has been edited since you saw the article a week ago. If the template was added 1 April 2010 (or parameters to it were changed that day) then the problem could appear to have started there when you look at the page history. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:52, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

You're right, that turns out to be exactly what happened. Thanks for the explanation; that kind of vandalism will be much easier to recognize if I encounter it in the future.--NapoliRoma (talk) 19:38, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

Link to section not positioning to beginning of section

When I click on a link, such as this one, to the discussion page section Talk:Grateful Dead#Band membership, the browser positions to the bottom of the page, instead of positioning to the beginning of that section, which is higher up on the page. I then have to scroll up to get to the beginning of the section. What's up with that? Is there something on that discussion page that's making it happen? I'm seeing the same thing in Firefox 3.6 and Internet Explorer 8.0. — Mudwater ^(Talk) 01:31, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

I get the same problem with that page using Firefox 3.6. It appears to position correctly to start with, then jumps to the bottom when the page is fully loaded. Keith D (talk) 02:00, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

No problem with Google Chrome 10 but Mozilla Firefox 4 goes strait to the bottom. – Allen4names 04:41, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

P.S. I am going to try this logged in using Chrome as the link worked correctly when I logged out using Firefox. – Allen4names 04:53, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

P.S.2 Work correctly using Chrome when logged in. Try IE next. – Allen4names 04:58, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

P.S.3 Internet Explorer jumps to the bottom. If anyone is using Opera please check for this problem. – Allen4names 05:04, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

It's because of the collapsed boxes. This has been an issue ever since ResourceLoader was deployed and has been discussed many times on this page. The amount of overshoot is dependent on the total height of the collapsed boxes. The behavior is different in different browsers, but none do it correctly. —UncleDouggie (talk) 06:06, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

Collapsed boxes? You mean the collapsed WikiProject banners, that are inside the WikiProject banner shell? — Mudwater ^(Talk) 06:31, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

It is caused by any type of graphical region that is vertically collapsed through the use of JavaScript, including WikiProject banners. —UncleDouggie (talk) 23:39, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

Convert/doc still open but Template:Convert/FAQ locked

Every few months someone decides to "full-protect" all subtemplates of the measurement converter, Template:Convert. Last time (on 2 January 2011), they locked Template:Convert/FAQ and I can no longer update it for common user questions. What if I created a doc/FAQ subpage, as Template:Convert/doc/FAQ, instead. Are subpages of a /doc less likely to get set to full-protect status? Is there a script that protects all subpages except those /doc/xxxxx? -Wikid77 19:47, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

I unprotected it, but yes, we could also move it to a subpage of "/doc", then redirect or transcluded it as well if it becomes a continuous problem. Thanks! Plastikspork _―Œ^(talk) 20:42, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

By the way, if it shows up on Wikipedia:Database reports/Indefinitely protected templates without many transclusions, then it should probably be considered for unprotection. Thanks! Plastikspork _―Œ^(talk) 20:45, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

Puella Magi Madoka Magica

I have no idea who did what to this page, but on my browser (its firefox) the page layout has gone to hell and back. If someone could take a look at it figure out how to make it presentable again (assume that the issue is on your end and not my end) that would be awesome. TomStar81 (Talk) 02:15, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

It looks OK to me in all 4 tested browsers: Firefox, IE, Google Chrome, Opera. Which problem do you see? PrimeHunter (talk) 02:45, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

There is too much space open in the article (white space I mean), and it looks like the infobox is massive (like way off the side of the page massive). In addition, the episode description infobox has a one line way off the to the right side of the page description. Its possible that its just on my side, but to be safe I wanted a second opinion. Now for the fun part: I have to figure out what the issue is on my side :) TomStar81, editing under the isp address 70.251.56.106 (talk) 03:09, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

I don't have those issues. The infobox is vertically longer than most but that is due to lots of source code. Try to clear your entire cache. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:54, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

Ok, I figured out what the problem was on my end: the update for the firefox add on stuff didn't fully load and sync due to reasons I can not quite fully explain. I rebooted my computer and now everything looks fine, so it was an issue on my end. Thanks for the assistance at any rate, I do appreciate it. TomStar81 (Talk) 04:15, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

"Page is protected" - but it is not, and I can edit anyway via View Source

top of page in firefox

Something strange has started happening recently. I haven't edited Wikipedia for a while so I don't know when this started. I am not blocked and have no sanctions or anything that I am aware of.

A bunch of pages don't show an "Edit" tab for me at the top of the article, and instead have a "View Source" tab. If I point at the tab, a tooltip says "This page is protected. You can view its source."

If I click on "View Source", at the bottom of the page is the edit comment box and the "Save Page" button, which is unexpected if it's supposed to be protected. And so I edit the article and click save, and it saves as usual, the edit shows in the history, etc:

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

Is this a bug in WikiMedia? DMahalko (talk) 03:39, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

X Window System is move protected, but not edit protected. Does this only happen on move protected pages? I don't see the problem using Vector. Even when you see "view source" in the menu, the link always has "action=edit". So if the page really is editable, you will get the edit window when you click on "view source". —UncleDouggie (talk) 07:37, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

I have this problem with many pages when logged out (even the sandbox, once). It first happened to me after the 1.17 upgrade on my iPod Touch, but I've seen it on Chrome and Firefox, too. I think that 1.17 can see if your IP is blocked and change "Edit" to "View source" automatically, but I'm not sure, because this happens when my IP is not blocked and when the page has no protection whatsoever. Is the View Source thing generated via js or something? This is a really weird occurrence and I'm thinking it's a bug. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 23:56, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

Without JavaScript running, on a protected page I get "View source" for the tab. With JavaScript running, it gets changed to "Source". It appears that the decision as to whether to show "Edit" isn't JavaScript related. —UncleDouggie (talk) 00:24, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

IE6 and music articles

Scientific pitch notation (and I assume other music articles) has a problem with the accidentals (♭ and ♯) not showing up in IE6. It looks fine in Firefox. I have tried adjusting the coding settings in IE but cannot find anything that works. There is a discussion at Talk:Scientific pitch notation#If it's a problem, all b/# should be replaced by flat/sharp. but no solution. Does anyone here have a recommendation? SpinningSpark 09:50, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

Use the {{music}} template to render musical symbols. That template uses the .unicode class for font-selection which should solve most display problems. — Edokter (talk) — 10:16, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

"anyone have a recommendation?" - sure, use Firefox :-)

See also Template_talk:Music#Flats_and_Sharps.  Chzz  ►  10:19, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

Looks fine to me on IE8.Nigel Ish (talk) 10:24, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

Actually, I do use Firefox, I'm just trying to fix the problem. The facetious suggestion to use another browser is just infuriating for those who are using something else and not very helpful. Some readers will not be able to change browser because of their company IT policy or because they are reading in a library etc etc etc. We should make every effort to be as widely compatible as possible. Anyway, the template renders everything correctly in IE6 (even the really obscure stuff) except for the widely required flat (♭), sharp (♯), and natural (♮). SpinningSpark 11:37, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

Some things simply cannot be fixed on IE6 (at least not without heavily burdening the other viewers with extra scripts etc). That's reality and any IE6 user should expect nothing else. There is a reason why google no longer actively supports IE6. We cannot install proper fonts on the machines of people using IE6, which is where support kinda ends. (unless we do like with the math, where we render everything to png images, but that has a HOST of other issues (accessibility). —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:32, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

IE6 is obsolete. Given that it was introduced almost ten(!) years ago, it's about time users upgrade. It shouldn't be necessary to include lots of extraneous code simply to support an obsolete browser. See http://www.ie6countdown.com. I have no problems with Firefox 4. DRAGON 280 (TALK/CONTRIBS) 22:13, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

Security certificate expired

I have been using the secure.wikimedia.org connection, and apparently our Certificate expired on 3/27/11 2:57 PM (20:57 UTC)—about 15 minutes ago. Does anyone know what is going on? --Diannaa ^(Talk) 21:11, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

Just coming here for same reason (same question)...I feel better about adding the certificate exception now, seeing that I'm not the only one getting this.
⋙–Berean–Hunter—► ((⊕)) 21:15, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

I guess we shoulda paid that invoice... :-P --Diannaa ^(Talk) 21:20, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

No, they bought a shiny new one months ago, that's valid until August 2015. They just forgot to install it :D Happy‑melon 22:09, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

The new certificate has been installed. It is valid until August 22, 2015. DRAGON 280 (TALK/CONTRIBS) 22:36, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, I was prompted to add an exception earlier and fortunately it was an OK situation. Silly devs! :P /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 23:53, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

Project templates preventing TOC

While setting up page archiving, I noticed that something was preventing the TOC from being shown on Talk:Moon landing. I experimented by removing the Project templates one by one but couldn't get it to show...so I've temporarily removed them all until I have found out what the fix is. I ran into the same problem on Frederick III, German Emperor and removed those for the time being. In preview mode, I used __FORCETOC__ but it still wouldn't work. I'm presuming that something is being transcluded with the templates that is breaking the TOC. Any suggestions?
⋙–Berean–Hunter—► ((⊕)) 00:38, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

This sort of problem is almost always caused by someone putting section headers on a comments subpage (in this case Talk:Moon landing/Comments). Anomie⚔ 02:21, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

So, is Talk:Frederick III, German Emperor/Comments supposed to exist, or should those comments be moved back to the main talk page? Aristophanes68 (talk) 02:44, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Discontinuation of comments subpages. Graham87 02:56, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

That comments page is an Assessment Summary--which project is in charge of cleaning it up? Aristophanes68 (talk) 03:01, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

...Many thanks for the answers...but how weird that pulling the WP Project templates seemed to restore the TOC when the subpage seems disconnected from those.
⋙–Berean–Hunter—► ((⊕)) 03:11, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

Okay, I substituted the /Comments page onto the Talk page. Do I now use a speedy deletion for the /Comments page? Do I remove all the content first? Is there a different deletion procedure for these pages? Thanks, Aristophanes68 (talk) 03:14, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

Navbox madness - or: Template size exceeded for stub

Milan Máčala

NewPP limit report

• Preprocessor node count: 39512/1000000
• Post-expand include size: 1541346/2048000 bytes
• Template argument size: 2048000/2048000 bytes
• Expensive parser function count: 0/500

I suspect the navboxes must be very inefficient somewhere, (the text is pushed down at least 45 levels - e.g. Czeh manager - national manager - history line - nowrap - navbox, but even so, there shouldn't be 400k of template arguments.

If anyone has time to look at this (which I don't right now) it seems to be the main cause of articles in Category:Pages containing omitted template arguments right now. Rich Farmbrough, 12:04, 21 March 2011 (UTC).

The expansion starts to fall over when processing navbox {{Czechoslovakia national football team managers}}, more specifically, when expanding the {{navbar}} inside that; and the four subsequent navboxes are similarly affected. It might be puzzling why such a small article requires 13 navboxes (12 of which are nested inside two more) - but it seems that the article subject is mentioned in all 13.

As a first step, I would suggest amending {{Football manager list entry}} to change the single instance of

{{·}}

to

 '''·'''

which should eliminate one level of expansion. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:44, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

The problem is the massive abuse of {{str find}} in {{Infobox football biography}}, combined with the large size of {{{managerclubs}}} with all those flag templates. That alone uses over 90% of the limit (1878992 of 2048000). The navboxes "only" account for about 23.6% of the limit (482598 of 2048000), which can be cut to around 12% by simply using something like {{hidden top}}/{{hidden bottom}} for the two collapsing boxes. Anomie⚔ 16:22, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

That's illuminating. Rich Farmbrough, 11:58, 22 March 2011 (UTC).

I removed the str find stuff. It was there only temporarily while I was cleaning up some of the parameters, but that is basically finished now. Plastikspork _―Œ^(talk) 05:19, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

A better alternative to replacing {{·}} as described above would be to revisit mark-up for making horizontal lists in navboxes, which I started with {{flatlist}}. 13:37, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

Redirects not displaying current revision

I'm not sure if this is related to the purge discussion above, but I've noticed some issues with redirects. When I use the "WT:VG" redirect to access Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Video games while logged off, it displays an older revision of the page. But if I then click on the "Discussion" link at the top of the page (so that the url uses "wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Video_games" instead of "wiki/Wikipedia_talk:VG") the current version displays. I thought it might be a caching issue, so I would purge the page. I thought that fixed it at first, but the problem kept repeating when used the redirect again. I noticed that when I purged, I did so to the target page, not the redirect. I also found that this url (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:VG) displays the current revision. I did this in Firefox and IE on two different computers running Windows 7. I've noticed this on other project pages as well:

• WP:VG/PA and Wikipedia:WikiProject Video games/Reference library/Online print archive
• WP:FA and Wikipedia:Featured article candidates

I found those relatively quick too, and I'm sure I could find articles that this happens on. User:Reach Out to the Truth suggested that this might be squid caching issue and recommend I post here. Any thoughts? (Guyinblack25 ^talk 18:04, 25 March 2011 (UTC))

It has always been that way. Only the 'true' page is purged from the squid caching servers (which provide the pages for non-logged in readers) when you update a page. Any redirects, alternative encodings etc of the page do not get purged automatically. It is issue: bugzilla:10173 —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:55, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the response. I have a few follow up questions if anyone knows the answers.

1. The bug was reported in 2007. Will it ever be addressed?
2. Is it a design choice to minimize server strain?
3. If it is not automatic, does that mean it is at least purges on a regular basis?
4. And if so, how does the server determine when it occurs?

Thanks. (Guyinblack25 ^talk 03:35, 27 March 2011 (UTC))

1. Some bugs are more difficult than others to solve. There are currently about 6000 open bugs and feature requests. On average, 1 bug per day is fixed. So....
2. Well the whole system has that purpose yes. The reason that alternative encoding spellings aren't purged is mostly, because there are so many permutations of it. The reason redirects aren't purged is that getting the list of redirects for a page is an expensive database operation (relative to the amount of purges we have).
3. The cachings have an 'expiration period', but I'm not exactly sure how long that period is. (addendum; According to a sysadmin the period is a month)

Hope that answers some of your questions. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:40, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for information.

One more quick question. I did "ctrl+f5" in my browser and that seemed to display the current page. Would doing that fix the issue every time? (Guyinblack25 ^talk 14:15, 28 March 2011 (UTC))

HotCat preventing us from putting articles in both parent & subcat?

I just added categories to the new article Brando Skyhorse, and in keeping with the category policies, I placed him in Category: American novelists and then in Category: Hispanic and Latino American novelists. The reason we want to use both categories is because there's no category for White novelists, and if we sort all the non-white/Anglo American novelists into their ethnic subcats, the main category will be left with ONLY white novelists--which isn't fair to the minority authors. BUT... When I added the second category, HotCat removed the first one; when I tried to add it back, HotCat tried to remove the second. Only by adding the two categories through the page-edit feature was I able to get them both in. I tested it again in my sandbox and had the same problem using Category:American novelists of Asian descent. Has HotCat done this to anyone else? Is this a new feature for HotCat? Thanks, Aristophanes68 (talk) 00:23, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

This appears to be a feature of HotCat, not of Wikipedia, so you should probably ask at Wikipedia talk:HotCat. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 08:02, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

@Aristophanes68: reload your browser's cache. HotCat has no such feature. You hit a bug that was corrected long ago, but apparently your browser still has an old version of the script in its cache. Lupo 08:22, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. I just tried it on a different computer and it worked fine. I'll try clearing the cache next time, and for any other problems I'll use the HotCat talk page. Aristophanes68 (talk) 15:32, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

IPv6 Support

Is there any plans in the near future to allow users to access and edit Wikipedia via IPv6 protocol?--Netheril96 (talk) 04:24, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

We have a search box at the top of this page for that. —UncleDouggie (talk) 05:02, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

I searched. I just want to know more updated information.--Netheril96 (talk) 05:29, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

Read this. Otherwise, there's no point in bugging the devs again so soon. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 17:54, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

Checkboxes and Radio-buttons not showing up (Chrome v10.0.648.204) for first time

Never had this show up before, but noticed from other recent posts that various server/devs issues have also cropped up.

Details: When in "Edit" mode, neither the "Minor Edit" nor "Watch this page" checkboxes show up (if you "tab" from section to section, they "ghost in" and you can click (without the "tick mark" showing). Neither page-refresh nor Preview screens solve the issue. (Strangely the checkboxes are showing up below on THIS edit!)

Also, when in "View History" of a page, the "radio button" selections for "cur/prev" don't show up either. (Didn't show up for this page, either, just now.)

I'll fire-up my MS IE browser and see if the symptoms are the same. — DennisDallas (talk) 04:56, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

• UPDATE: Checkboxes & buttons okay in IE, but also working now in Google Chrome. (Checkboxes showed up while "buttons" were still gone in Chrome, right after IE test, but now all is well. — DennisDallas (talk) 05:05, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

• Next time this happens visit some other website with checkboxes and you'll see this is NOT Wikipedia's problem. This happens in Chrome for some users, just search "chrome checkbox" on the web or see this discussion. — AlexSm 15:45, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

Navbox populated from category?

It's been suggested that I should ask this question here; please excuse if that was not a good idea. I'm trying to create a Navbox template that will derive its link content from a category, so that the Navbox does not need to be manually edited each time a page is added to or removed from the category. Obviously I'm not the first to have thought of this, but I have failed to find any help or instructions for achieving it. Can anyone point me to simple instructions? Or even offer advice? My failed attempt is at Template:Horse breeds of Italy; I want it to look something like Template:Spanish horses, with the links on a few lines and separated by bullets. Presumably I'm getting the data from the category in the wrong way? Can this in fact be done? Many thanks, Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 11:09, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

It cannot be done. Category trees should not be used in articles or templates intended for articles. Navbox links should be maintained manually (or possibly by a bot but I don't know whether that is ever done). Manual additions also gives extra options such as grouping items and piping links, for example Haflinger instead of Haflinger (horse). In a navbox of horses I would also pipe Noriker horse as Noriker and so on, like Andalusian in Template:Spanish horses. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:25, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

By the way, article categories often contain miscategorized pages from wrong namespaces like userspace drafts, article versions copied to userspace, and discussion pages where somebody failed to put a colon in front of a category they tried to link. This would be extra ugly in navboxes. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:34, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for your reply, and all the ancillary good points made there. I'm trying to get the two horse pages you mention moved, but piping them for now is something I should have thought of sooner. For a long way down the line when there's nothing else left to fix, better interchange tools between lists, templates and categories might be something to consider, perhaps? OK, manual labour it is, then. Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 14:40, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

Take a look at Extension:DynamicPageList, which is used on some templates of Wikibooks to keep pages like b:Subject:Engineering updated without manual edits to the page itself. Helder 17:20, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

Horizontal lists in navboxes

Many thousands of Wikipedia articles have navboxes, in which lists of links are presented, horizontally, without using list mark-up, but instead using {{·}} or suchlike as a kludge. This is semantically poor and has implications for accessibility.

I created {{Flatlist}} in an attempt to begin addressing this, but previous discussion (two-and-a-half years ago) petered out before various concerns were resolved. Now that CSS an browsers have moved on, I'd like us to find a solution. Please contribute to centralised discussion on MoS (accessibility). Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 14:00, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

Time is wrong for my timezone.

Hi!
I'm using GMT and the time is an hour off.
We have just gone into summer time and therefore that could be expected.
Does the server follow those changes in time or should I set the time offset in my preferences to compensate?


TIA - Puremation (talk) 14:14, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

The server uses UTC, which does not change with the seasons. If you set the time offset in your preferences to "Europe/London" from the dropdown box, you will never have to worry about changing your Wikipedia time zone to match daylight saving time again. Graham87 14:38, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

Some of my edits are not listed on "My Contributions" page.

I have made 4 contributions/edits to Wikipedia so far. I understand that I need 10 edits to become "Autoconfirmed". However, only the earlier 2 edits (in 2007 and 2008) are listed on "My Contributions" page. The other 2 more recent ones are not. They are on the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_skills page. Here are the details: 16:15, 11 October 2010 74.12.120.154 (talk) (23,085 bytes) (→Survival manuals) (undo) 16:12, 11 October 2010 74.12.120.154 (talk) (22,770 bytes) (→Mental preparedness) (undo)

How do I get them added to my "My Contributions" page?

Thanks

CraigNic — Preceding unsigned comment added by Craig9n (talk • contribs) 15:24, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

They can not be added. Technically they were made by a different user(IP). Ruslik_Zero 16:07, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

Testing on MediaWiki:Fancycaptcha-createaccount

Hello,

As I continue my work with the Account Creation Improvement Project, I have taken a longer look at MediaWiki:Fancycaptcha-createaccount and its talk page to see how we can improve it. I would like to test a few things, so I wanted to give you a heads up. More information here.//Hannibal (talk) 23:56, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

Template:Derefer

Today I had to disable the derefering in Template:Derefer (because of Wikipedia:HD#Unable_to_get_rid_of_.22cite_error.22_message), it used anonym.to, which is on the (meta) spam blacklist (It has to be there, cause such services can be used to bypass the spam blacklists). Now there should be a permanent solution for this, we could either fully delete the template and set direct links or no links (the question is, should wikipedia really link on pages we know we can't trust), or find another derefering service (which will be blocked sooner or later as well). - Hoo man (talk) 13:27, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

Info: The specific problem was when trying to do this to fix the ref error on Zoophilia, which triggered the blacklist due to the link to http://anonym.to on template:Derefer, which was removed with this edit, to allow the fix to the article. Chzz  ►  13:47, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

Try MediaWiki:Spam-whitelist? T. Canens (talk) 02:48, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Templates_for_discussion/Log/2011_March_29#Template:Derefer Thanks, Tim Chzz  ►  21:29, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

How to only list created articles for a specific user?

How to only list articles I created (or anyone else)..? Electron9 (talk) 09:41, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

At the bottom of the contributions page for the user (example Special:Contributions/Electron9), click "Articles created". Johnuniq (talk) 09:44, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks!, how to sort by creation date? (newest first) Electron9 (talk) 09:59, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

Table question

Is it possible to set it so that individual rows and columns in a table will only appear if you set a switch? For example, this comparison table of DS systems. I'd like to have "Production status" appear on the table on the Nintendo DS article, but not on the 3DS article. I also don't want the 3DS column to appear on the DS article. Is there any way of going about this? --Dorsal Axe 13:29, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

It is possible, but either requires: coding the table using html, or using hacks such as {{!}}. I would advise against both. To be honest, that table really doesn't seem fit for being used in more than one article. You should also attempt not to place section headings in templates, as that can confused other editors. --Izno (talk) 15:29, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the response. Hm, that sounds a bit ugly. Might just leave it, I suppose. I removed the heading, but I've now found it that it was so that people could more easily access and edit the template. I'll put in a seperate link for that, I think. --Dorsal Axe 23:18, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

Pages incorrectly appearing as edit-protected

I quote my comment originally posted at Wikipedia_talk:Reference_desk#Reference desk pages edit-protected:

Something seems to have gone screwy today with the reference desk pages. They are all read-only to me (not logged in), until I append "purge=yes" to the URL, when they become editable again. Then when I remove "purge=yes" they go back to being protected. Local refresh (F5 etc.) makes no difference. I think something is messed up.

This has since happened several more times to me with different talk pages, the latest being Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style.

There is a problem here that needs investigation. 86.183.4.56 (talk) 17:38, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

"User" and "Page" menus not dropping down in MonoBook

Same under Firefox & IE. Haven't checked other browsers. Click on the tab and nothing happens. Beyond My Ken (talk) 07:17, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

This was discussed briefly above. Simply add importScriptURI('http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?action=raw&ctype=text/javascript&title=User:Haza-w/cactions.js'); to your local.js page to get the drop-downs to work again - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 08:22, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Doesn't work. I added the script. I still can't get the drop-downs. `Maile66 (talk) 08:32, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

It needs to be on your .js page, not your .css page :). - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 08:36, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

OK, now this got incredibly strange. I got the drop-downs back by putting it on my js. When I go to my main user page, it gives me duplicates of "User", and the dropdown "Userspace", the first time, it takes me to a page that says Wikipedia does not have a user page with this exact name (Maile66), and tells me to create one. If I try it again, it takes me to User space. If I go to any given Wikipedia page I get two "page", one a duplicate of the other."History" under "Page", it takes me to History, not the page history. Anything else under "page" takes me to "Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name." -Maile66 (talk) 08:53, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

You need to uncheck the drop down options in you Preferences > Gadgets, as well as having it on your js page, that should get it all working smoothly. - Kingpin¹³ (talk) 09:03, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Ta! Da! Works now. Thanks. -Maile66 (talk) 09:08, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Worked for me, too. Thanks. Beyond My Ken (talk) 17:31, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

I, on the other hand, have the same problem, but I don't seem to have a .js page. Am I looking in the wrong place, or do I need to create it? -- Jack of Oz [your turn] 02:22, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

"Preferences > Gadgets" was mentioned just 3 messages above, you know. — AlexSm 03:19, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

No need to be like that. There's nothing on Gadgets that talks about a ".js page" - well, nothing obvious to this user. I have absolutely no idea what a .js page is, or even what "js" stands for. I am just a non-technical user who has a problem with a drop down box, and I would like to find out how to have it fixed so that I can get on with editing, the way I used to. None of the suggestions I was offered anywhere else have worked, and I was sent here for help. If it helps you to think of me as a dummy, then go right ahead and treat me as a dummy and spoon feed me with words of one syllable. Whatever works, I don't care. -- Jack of Oz [your turn] 23:41, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

You don't have any .js pages. Please be more specific as to exactly what problem you are having, confirm that you're using the monobook skin, and tell us if you have "Add page and user options to drop-down menus" checked in your preferences -> gadgets. —UncleDouggie (talk) 00:15, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

I was sent here from Wikipedia:Help desk#Edit drop down box stuck, where my problem is outlined in detail. I am indeed using the Monobook skin. "Add page and user options to drop-down menus" was not checked, but I have now checked it. -- Jack of Oz [your turn] 00:56, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

Now I see. Does the same thing happen with the vector skin? Please try turning off all checked preferenes here and here as a test. You should double check that they really got turned off, sometimes I've needed to make and save the changes twice for unknown reasons. You will also need to do bypass your cache when loading the edit page you are testing. Using vector with no preferences will pretty well simulate logged out behavior. Assuming that this works, re-enable your preferences one by one and let us know which is causing the problem. I use vector with many preferences and don't see this problem. Another alternative you could test first is to login with Firefox. —UncleDouggie (talk) 02:12, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

Wanted: Script to copy blank templates to clipboard

Could some kind soul please devise a script, which could be added to template documentation pages which include pro-forma blank templates, and which would generate a button that, when clicked, would copy the blank template to the clipboard? Ideally, it would be capable of being used twice on a page, such as with {{Infobox settlement}}, where there are two or more versions of the blank template. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 09:17, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

I created this, which converts text in PRE tags on template documentation to TEXTAREA tags, which is exactly like the boxes you use to edit pages. This allows you to edit the examples to suit whatever you need to do, before copying them over, etc. To install, edit Special:MyPage/skin.js and copy the following to it:

importScript('User:Gary King/editable template examples.js'); // [[User:Gary King/editable template examples.js]]

Cheers Gary King (talk · scripts) 01:18, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

Ah, if I now understand you correctly, you want this to be added to documentation pages to be visible to ALL users? Would need editing to MediaWiki:Common.js then, so perhaps request there. Gary King (talk · scripts) 01:19, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

Thank you, but that's not what I want to do. I want a button that copies the blank template to the clipboard, with one click. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 21:09, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

This makes the blank template easy to copy. Just click somewhere in the blank template box, then select all and copy. Gary King (talk · scripts) 00:10, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

Wikimedia error

Yes, I should have copied details of the error. Here is what I know.

I edited a very long article, and it did not come back up when I finished. I got a "Wikimedia error" screen, then used ALT-left to go back, and the edit screen had an earlier version of my edit, from when I previewed but then added more. I tried to save and got an edit conflict. I gave up and looked at the article. My edit was there in full.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 18:56, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

So your edit was probably successfully submitted and accepted by the server, but when the server tried to redirect you back to the article, it failed and then gave you that error when trying to display the article, not submit the edit. Gary King (talk · scripts) 20:56, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

Apparently. I had no way of knowing that at the time, or whether this was a sign of something more serious that needed to be reported. Apparently not.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 18:17, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

Wikisource

I'm asking this here, because this is where I feel comfortable. When I go to Wikisource, I can access it and add, no problem. At the top of the page, my user name and "My Talk" are red links, while the other items are blue links. If I clock on my user name, or "My Talk", the message that comes up is:"Wikisource does not have a page with this exact name". It says Permanent Link on the toolbox in Wikipedia will avoid this. Here's where it just becomes very unclear to me. So, I click Permanent Link while I'm on my user page at Wikipedia. So?????? How does this clear it up with Wikisource, because I don't see that it did. Can anybody clarify this for me? Thanks. -Maile66 (talk) 00:48, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

So, never mind. I created the pages from scratch. Not as smooth a process as connecting to other Wiki. Maile66 (talk) 12:29, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

For me at wikisource:User:PrimeHunter the message includes "there is a link titled Permanent link in the toolbox on the left", with no mention of Wikipedia. The message comes because your user page was not created, resulting in a red link. The only way to avoid the message and red link is to create the page as you did. The part about the permanent link was not relevant in your situation. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:44, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

Has there been any progress on fixing bug 9790 ?

It's been open for years, and I still find it to be a real annoyance. See bug report here: [14]. StuRat (talk) 03:18, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

Probably not, unless someone fixed it and forget to close the bug, but I doubt that. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:50, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

I meant, is anybody working on it ? Is it still open, but low priority ? Or has it been closed as not worth fixing ? StuRat (talk) 23:21, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

The ticket is open, indicated by the label NEW at the Status line. At any time, there are about 5500 open bugs (and slowly increasing). If everyone of them was being worked on, we would require about 60 fulltime software engineers, we are lucky if we have about 20 hobbyists and 3 fulltime mediawiki/wikipedia software engineers. So unless you spike someone's interest, most low priority (everything that doesn't make Wikipedia content unavailable) bugs and feature requests reside in 'eternal limbo' awaiting the lowly developer that at some point gets annoyed by the problem enough to fix it himself. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:01, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

Wiki markup

Resolved

Hi, for some reason, my Wiki markup has stopped working whenever I edit a page. In the past I've been able to click any of the icons and it would be automatically imported into the article; however now it won't, and I have to manually add it instead. Is the problem clear enough? I bet I sound like a right noob... Thanks in advance, GiantSnowman 03:27, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

Worked it out thanks to BilCat (talk · contribs). GiantSnowman 12:39, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

Can HTML be auto-forced to end of page?

In applying a particular layout to a talk page, is there a way to force a closing div to be automatically moved to the bottom of a page after a new comment or section is added?

My current implementation has a closing div placed manually, which is then fixed where I placed it, putting new sections outside the design specified by the div tag pair.

It's no biggie, but I'm a nerd and I'd like to know. Regards Peter S Strempel | Talk 03:18, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

You can use absolute positioning in the style. For example: position:absolute; top:-45px; left:-165px; will place the div at the top left. You might really want an editnotice.[15] ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 12:46, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

What type of space used in this article?

In this diff I converted what appeared to be spaces into actual spaces so that the infobox displayed as expected. I've been unable to find a tool to tell me what actual spaces were in the infobox before: some kind of Unicode non-breaking space or similar – I can't tell. Can anybody link to a tool to give me the answer (I'd like to check for any other occurrences). Thanks Rjwilmsi 12:50, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

It was Unicode Non-breaking space. I'm not aware of any existing tools but it is possible to write a script that would alert you to non-breaking spaces when you start editing a page. — AlexSm 15:21, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

Javascript problem?

For the last few hours, Wikipedia has been near unusable for me. Every time a load a page, click a link or start typing anything, the whole window goes white for about a second. The toolbar at the top also blinks on and off every second. (with my us I've found it's marginally better without the clock gadget. I'm guessing it's something to do with javascript, since it's affecting every page except my preferences. I'm not having this problem anywhere else on the web (including other WMF wikis). I'm using Google Chrome (latest) and Monobook. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 18:52, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

The problem doesn't seem to be any better in another account. Any help would be appreciated. Whisky drinker | HJ's sock (Mistake? let me know) 19:08, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

Try disabling JavaScript in your browser to see if it really is JavaScript first. Assuming you're using Vector and therefore have no scripts installed, then try resetting your account's preferences. Probably best to do that on your test account. Gary King (talk · scripts) 19:11, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

Context per line

In the search preferences i can put a number in "Context per line". I tried changing it and no matter what i put there, nothing seems to change on the results page.

It it supposed to do anything at all? If it doesn't do anything on Wikipedia, then why is the preference still there? --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 07:57, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

Reported a bug: bugzilla:28343. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 06:57, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

Move Log out link in Monobook

Is there a script to hide (or move to sidebar) the log out link at the top of the page? ^Avic_ennasis @ 07:31, 25 Adar II 5771 / 31 March 2011 (UTC)

Go to Special:MyPage/skin.css and paste the following there:

#pt-logout { display: none; }

That should hide it. Gary King (talk · scripts) 16:59, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

I think it would be better to use #pt-logout a { color: white; } instead of #pt-logout { display: none; } so that the link can still be used. – Allen4names 18:25, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks again, Gary. :)

And thanks for the suggestion, Allen, but I want to disable the link, not just hide it. (I guess I should have stated that better before.) Sometimes I go to click "my contributions" before the page is fully loaded (and thusly, before the UTC clock is loaded,) and when the UTC clock does load, it moves the links over, so instead of clicking on "my contributions" I'm now clicking on "logout". Hope that clearly explains my problem. Besides, one can still visit Special:UserLogout to log out. ^Avic_ennasis @ 02:40, 26 Adar II 5771 / 1 April 2011 (UTC)

(for anyone curious -

li#pt-logout { display: none; }

is what worked for me. ^Avic_ennasis @ 01:33, 11 Elul 5771 / 01:33, 10 September 2011 (UTC)

HTML, or XHTML?

The page Help:HTML in wikitext tells its readers how HTML [sic] may be used in pages here, e.g. that a line break may be effected with the four keystrokes <br>. This comes as rather a surprise to me. I've commented in its talk page, but when I did so was told Talk pages in this namespace are generally not watched by many users. Therefore this note alerting people here about the matter. Please comment on that talk page rather than here. (I'll crosspost this message to the help desk.) -- Hoary (talk) 00:06, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

Robots.txt

I posted a question at MediaWiki talk:Robots.txt, but since it seems rather dead so I'll repost it here.

Both WP:Copyright problems and now WP:Suspected copyright violations are listed there to try and avoid them being quite so visible on public search engines. Can someone take a look and tell me if the daily subpages are being noindexed also (or fix it if they aren't)? VernoWhitney (talk) 14:28, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

WikiProject Saskatchewan newsletters filling up CAT:CSD

For some reason a lot of WikiProject Saskatchewan newsletters are appearing in CAT:CSD, though I don't see any request to delete in the histories of those I have looked at. A lot of talk page archives are also appearing which have WikiProject Saskatchewan newsletters in them. JohnCD (talk) 16:42, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

fixed, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3AWikiProject_Saskatchewan_Monthly_Assessment&action=historysubmit&diff=421842858&oldid=421836996 ΔT _{^{The only constant}} 16:46, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

Ah, okay. It's a problem where the newsletters are referencing the moved page due to its misplacement as a separate WikiProject in the Wikipedia namespace. The redirect need not be deleted if it breaks those newsletters. Logan _Talk ^{Contributions} 20:52, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

Miszabot problem

I posted on Misza13's talk page a couple of hours ago but no one seems to be home so perhaps someone here knows the fix. What happened here? The bot appears to try to archive to a non-existent target page. I've double-checked the spelling and configuration bits but must be missing something. I've reverted the bot for now but left the configuration setup in the hopes that by the next go around, we'll have the problem fixed. Please help. Thank you,
⋙–Berean–Hunter—► ((⊕)) 19:35, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

• Blacklisted link: [16]. Should work tomorrow. –xeno^talk 19:42, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

Cheers! Did you just know that or is there a way to scan a page automatically to reveal that sort of problem? I wonder if the bot could be programmed to give error feedback for something like that. Danke,
⋙–Berean–Hunter—► ((⊕)) 19:48, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

You just copy the whole page and (try to) paste it into the sandbox, and if there is a blacklisted link it will inform you about it. –xeno^talk 19:49, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

Preloaded talk page section + "Prompt me when entering a blank edit summary" = prompt

Specifically with the "Ping User" links on WP:CHU, when I try to leave a preloaded message (with a header) in a new section, it prompts me because I didn't manually enter a header (but one was provided). I'm guessing I should take this to bugzilla, but if anybody has anything to say about it, feel free. For a convenient link to test it yourself, here:

• Current username: Demize/dev/null (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · target logs · block log · list user · global contribs · central auth · Google) (ping user)
• Target username: Newname (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · target logs · block log · list user · global contribs · central auth · Google) (advise user)
• Previous renames: current user, target user, Queue: open req, closed req
• For renamer use: Email target username, usurp user, rename user

Just use the ping user link, don't worry about leaving me a message (since that's just my sandbox). Thanks, demize (t · c) 20:00, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

Slow page rendering in Firefox

With Firefox (so far Firefox 3.6, but now also Firefox 4.0 with a brand new profile) I keep having the following problem:

Most of a page is rendered immediately, but some elements are added by scripts and take a bit longer. At some point it looks as if everything is complete, so I click in a certain location. Then after I clicked, JavaScript adds another element, which shifts part of the page, and in the location where I clicked there is suddenly a different user interface element.

Usually nothing too bad happens and I only end up having to use the back button because I opened some page that I didn't want. But a few moments ago I clicked on "undo", and then Twinkle's red "rollback (VANDAL)" button ended up in this location.

This kind of thing is incredibly annoying. Am I the only one who has this problem? Has anyone found a workaround for this Firefox bug? Hans Adler 19:02, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

It's not a bug, it's the logical result of dynamically adding page elements. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:41, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

It's still a Firefox bug. If I click somewhere on the page, but instead of acting on this the browser decides to first continue changing the page, then it must (1) ignore the click, or (2) take a note of which element I clicked to send the event there once it has finished. Finishing the page and then treating the mouse click as if it had happened after the change is not a reasonable option. Hans Adler 18:30, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

I do agree it is really annoyng.

See also these previous topics: Jumping page and Jumping to the wrong section. There is also the Bug 27488. Helder 20:56, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. Hans Adler 18:30, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

I've experienced much of the same problems. It's not so much a bug as a structural flaw in how Wikipedia's software is designed and written. Too much JavaScript (jQuery for heavens sake!), too much dynamic content, and too much content added after the "onload" event. A mess that will probably just get worse as more JavaScript and jQuery is added over time. — Blue-Haired Lawyer ^t 20:16, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

This problem became much worse with the recent change in MediaWiki versions. Beyond My Ken (talk) 04:16, 2 April 2011 (UTC)

We all know that this is a problem, but only the developers can do something about it. While most JavaScript can be processed later, anything that collapses GUI elements needs to be performed right up front. I know the problem very well and yet I still accidentally rolled back Jimbo's talk page without even knowing it. I have found that things are somewhat improved, but not solved, with Firefox 4. —UncleDouggie (talk) 06:29, 2 April 2011 (UTC)

Actually, collapsible elements could be solved by using css to hide content before it loads instead of JavaScript after it loads. We don't need developers to change our css. And doing so would at least prevent some of the content jumping problems that we have at present. — Blue-Haired Lawyer ^t 12:42, 2 April 2011 (UTC)

Right, but anyone with javascript disabled can't then read that collapsed content anymore. Amalthea 13:05, 2 April 2011 (UTC)

I'm tempted to say "so what!". Registered users could override the css, and rest would probably hardly notice. — Blue-Haired Lawyer ^t 13:11, 2 April 2011 (UTC)

In that case i'm tempted to remind editors that JS is not a requirement of our website, and that all content should be readable without Javascript. It was one of the guidelines that led to the current implementation of collapsible items and I doubt we would have had them at all if that requirement had not been satisfied way back in 2005. I would argue that having collapsible elements by default, would sooner mean the end of collapsible elements than a fixed problem. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:25, 2 April 2011 (UTC)

• I think the last-minute jumps happen with other browsers, as well. This problem is similar to typical, enormous mega-magazine webpages, where readers have learned to wait for the massive page to display, before anxiously clicking on partial window links. In general, advise readers, as in other websites, beware clicking on links near images or video-inserts, because text can shift a few seconds later and take the browser to the wrong webpage. -Wikid77 19:37, 2 April 2011 (UTC)

• I think you may be missing the salient point that before the software change, the problem was negligible, which inevitably leads to the supposition that something in the new version isn't working as well as it did in the old version. If that's the case, it should probably be fixed, as an upgrade which degrades performance is hardly a good thing. Beyond My Ken (talk) 22:05, 2 April 2011 (UTC)

Template:El

Why does Template:El redirect to Template:External links and not to the Greek language icon? EL is the official ISO language code of Greek. Unlike other languages where you can use e.g {{en}} for English, {{de}} for German and {{fr}} for French you have to use {{el icon}} because {{el}} misdirects you to Template:External links. SpeakFree (talk) 23:15, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

Replied at template talk:el, discussion is misplaced here. Amalthea 12:49, 2 April 2011 (UTC)

Image question

Okay, so I've got the article Tough Love: Best Of The Ballads, and there's supposed to be an image in the infobox, but it's not showing up for me, but the image shows up fine when I go to the actual file page. This happens in IE9, Chrome and Opera. I'm not the only one this happened to, L1A1 FAL (talk · contribs) mentioned it on my talk page. I'm pretty much clueless with images, so if a smarter person knows what's going on and could explain/fix it, I'd appreciate it. Thanks, C628 (talk) 03:08, 2 April 2011 (UTC)

It looks like something's wacky with images in general. The last 5 images I uploaded on Commons tonight show up in full resolution on the image page, but do not render as thumbnails in articles or in category pages. I imagine to has something to do with the problems they were having with the thumbnail server yesterday.

...I just tried taking your image out of the infobox and looked at it in the article at full size, and it rendered just fine, so a thumbmail problem seems like the likliest explanation. Maybe one of the developers could take a moment and let us know what's going on. Beyond My Ken (talk) 04:14, 2 April 2011 (UTC)

The Operations folks are aware of this intermittent problem and are working it now. Thanks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wikiwooster (talk • contribs) 04:55, 2 April 2011 (UTC)

Glad to hear this is being worked, i've encountered what appears to be the same problem, in Explorer 8 and in Firefox 4. Richard Myers (talk) 05:45, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

Extending SUL to private wikis

If I remember correctly, there once was a discussion here or at Meta (or bug report at BZ) regarding the extending of the SUL account to private wikis that use MediaWiki. Anyone knows where that took place, or what happened to it? Rehman 12:53, 2 April 2011 (UTC)

External tools link to transclusion count broken

The External tools link to the transclusion count for a template leads to a dead page. For example, when one clicks on "Transclusion count for Template:WPUSA, one is directed to a dead page, see: [17]. Is the tool down permanently? --Funandtrvl (talk) 16:15, 2 April 2011 (UTC)

Nope, I just broke it without realising yesterday. Ooops :P Fixed now. - Jarry1250 ^{[Who? Discuss.]} 18:12, 2 April 2011 (UTC)

TYVM! --Funandtrvl (talk) 18:19, 2 April 2011 (UTC)

File:URL

[18] This page is supposed to be just a plain redirect but the software is treating it as media in File: namespace. For example it's mistakenly showing up at the bottom of this category. Is there a way of making it ignore the File: prefix so it will function as a regular redirect page? -- œ^™ 20:23, 2 April 2011 (UTC)

From what I've learn from Commons, there is no way to ignore the prefix. IMO, the only way to fix this now is to delete the "file"... Rehman 01:08, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

"Rate this page"

I read the Sharon Osbourne article and noticed the "Rate this page"-box at the bottom (it's gone now, but can be found on all pages in Category:Article Feedback Pilot). May I request that that box has a link to the project page for the ratings project so anyone interested in it can read more about it? --Bensin (talk) 03:12, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

I couldn't see any pages in the MediaWiki namespace that dealt with the messages for that. You'll have to poke User:Jorm (WMF), who maintains that, or post to mw:Talk:Article feedback/Public Policy Pilot/Workgroup. Killiondude (talk) 03:33, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

OK. Done! Thanks for the link! --Bensin (talk) 05:49, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

Image server problem?

Is there a problem with the image servers? I have to bypass/purge a number of times to make images display. And no, my browser image settings have not changed. Thanks. – ukexpat (talk) 19:21, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

On Commons the image are very slow to display at the moment. Keith D (talk) 20:19, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

I'm getting the same problem, no browser settings problem or change. Thanks. Same problem with me.♦ Dr. Blofeld 21:20, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

Seems to be getting worse.--Old Moonraker (talk) 12:02, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

Commons now has the following notice. "System notice: The thumbnail server is currently undergoing maintenance. Thumbnails may be broken. We will restore full service as soon as possible." Keith D (talk) 18:57, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the update.--Old Moonraker (talk) 21:30, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

Is this related to Commons image issue?

An image I want to use from Commons was uploaded as (all caps) JPG, rather than lower-case jpg. If I put the all-caps JPG in an infobox (I've tried a couple of different infoboxes), it will not display the image. If I use a lower-case jpg, no problem. If I try to manually change the extension from all-caps to lower-case, the infobox displays a red link instead. Since I've tried it on more than one infobox, the issue is not specific to a given infobox. I can use the all-caps JPG on a page, as long as I don't put it in an infobox. However, the infobox is what I want the image for. If this is not an issue with Commons, how do I work around this and still use the image in an infobox? -Maile66 (talk) 15:08, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

Image extants both here and on Commons are case sensitive, so a "jpg" image is not considered to be the same as a "JPG" image -- it all depends on what extant was given the file when it was uploaded. If it's your file, you can ask an admin or a file mover to rename it with the extant you prefer, and see what happens. If it's not your file, I doubt anyone's going to make the move just to change the extant. And, no, this is not in any way related to the Commons image problem, it's just the way the WikiMedia wikis are set up. (Articles names here are case sentitive as well.) Beyond My Ken (talk) 15:55, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for your response. Wikipedia is a continual learning curve. -Maile66 (talk) 16:38, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

Template:Atn

Something is wrong with the template. See User talk:Editorofthewiki/Archive 39. ~EDDY ^{(talk/contribs)}~ 23:43, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

There is a limit to nested functions and templates - all of the "ifeq" parser functions are nested in Template:Atn/Prev and it reaches the limit when used in Archive 39. It's possible that these can be used separately with the same effect (if an page is Archive 2, it can't also be Archive 1) or it may be better with the switch function as used by Template:Talk archive navigation, which seems to combine this and the talk archive header template. Peter E. James (talk) 10:36, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

Link autocomplete script

I didn't really know where to put this, so I'm putting it here. Wikia has a neat little extension that autocompletes links in the edit form. I rewrote it as a user script without the need to install it server side and without the yahoo js library bloat. It's a bit rough around the edges, but it works. If anyone is interested, the code is here, I don't know if I'll have time to develop it further. -- Nx / talk 08:21, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

Errors saving new pages

I get the following when adding new talkpages: "Wikipedia does not have a talk page with this exact name." It takes 2 or 3 attempts to save for each article. Please fix it. Lugnuts (talk) 09:07, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

I'm having the same problem. I usually loose the entire contents of the new page because I can't get the old edit box back. It seems to be only a problem using the GUI because I successfully created a new page with the API on the first try. —UncleDouggie (talk) 10:52, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

What you are seeing is that the first save is successful, it just takes a lot of time before you can see that the save was successful. It seems it takes long atm to let changes trickle from the master database towards the slave databases and serving you the updated page. Might be related to all the image issues ? Anyways, this is called replication lag. Other causes can be that the backups are running and taking up a lot of the normal resources, connection issues between florida and amsterdam etc etc etc. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:46, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

Icons not rendering

A few minutes ago, most icons from commons stopped rendering, including the globe in coordinates and File:Information.svg at 25px: . However, File:Information.svg works at 50px: . This is in two of my many browsers whether logged in or not. —UncleDouggie (talk) 10:48, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

The thumbnail server has had a rough time the pas 48 hours, this is another example of this. A new version of the thumbnail cannot be created atm and that is why you see the 'missing image' indication. Only thing to do is to wait while the system administrators try to stabilize and repair the problem (They have been continiously working on it for more than 10 hours now). —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:41, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

The [edit] link next to section headers has disappeared

Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)/Archive_49#The_.5Bedit.5D_link_for_sections

Per discussion in May 2009, a useability feature was added that moved the [edit] link so that if appeared immediately at the end of header text should the user so desire this feature, which is standard on de-wiki. The button to turn this on is to be found under My preferences > Gadgets. I'm not on my regular computer atm, but the feature is not working. I have checked my preferences and the feature is enabled. Mjroots (talk) 16:54, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

Oh FFS! Have tried to fix the bleddy link 3 times! I give up!!! Mjroots (talk) 16:57, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

Still works for me, but it takes a while since you have to wait for all images to be loaded before the gadget kicks in, and with the current server overload (see #Icons not rendering) that can take minutes. Amalthea 17:06, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

BAG Recruitment

The Bot Approvals Group is responsible for reviewing and approving bots on Wikipedia. However, for an extended period of time we have been staffed at below the optimal number for reviewing bot requests. Therefore, I am asking experienced members of the community with an interest in reviewing bots to consider submitting themselves for membership at Wikipedia_talk:BAG#Requests_for_BAG_membership. Thanks. MBisanz ^talk 01:14, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

ndashes and other similar things

Under what circumstances do things like ndashes and non-breaking spaces appear in the edit window as "& ndash;" and "& nbsp;" (without the spaces) rather than as those particular things? Normally I get the former, but occasionally I see dashes with "n" or "m" written above them in the edit window.

Secondly, would it be possible to force the latter? If so, I would be in a position to request this be done at some other venue. Grandiose (me, talk, contribs) 10:49, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

– is the unicode version of the character. &ndash; is the HTML entity representation of the same character (we prefer the unicode char these days). And if you have a little n above it in the editor window, then you are using WP:WikEd. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:38, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. Is it possible to get the HTML version to display in the edit window as the unicode? Let you type it in HTML form, but have subsequent editors see it in unicode form? (Clearly whether we want to is another matter.) Grandiose (me, talk, contribs) 13:44, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

This old thing might be adaptable by someone, using ranges instead of a list. It converts certain unicode to entities while editing, and converts those back during save. It temporarily corrupts the edit token so that the converted information cannot be submitted back unless the reconversion takes place. Probably broken now. --Splarka (rant) 07:41, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

Expanded watchlist, new section not as +, popups

Hi

For some reason my watch list is not collapsing, it is fully expanded. Also the New Section tab is not displaying as + but rather as the full text version.

I have tried turning them both off, saving then turning them on again - each time flushing both server and browser cache. It is still not displaying correctly. The problem was not there earlier this afternoon.

I am using Firefox 4.0 with java console 6.0.24

And now popups are not working either....Chaosdruid (talk) 18:19, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

See one section above. Amalthea 19:02, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

? How does that relate to my problems? Do you mean the section above this one, or one above the one above this one I am not sure... Chaosdruid (talk) 19:14, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

Having the same issues and also don't understand which above section you are talking about. Please be more specific. Also, no toolbar in the edit window, and probably all other nice gadgets too. Muhandes (talk) 20:15, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

A number of the sections above discuss server lag (and major efforts to address the problem) - my guess is that the gadgets you're looking for require server updates that currently have a lot of latency. -- Scray (talk) 23:35, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

Yes, the section directly above, which also mentions a gadget not working. Amalthea 06:39, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

Oh, I'm sorry, to someone with as little knowledge as I have on the subject, it did not even register as something to do with a gadget. I just read something about a discussion in May 2009. I guess we'll just need to be patient. --Muhandes (talk) 07:03, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

No worries. It should be better now though (at least for me it is) Amalthea 07:41, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

I have reinstalled Javascript and it seems to be ok in IE9 now, but still not working in Firefox. Firefox's error console gives me lots of warnings:

Error messages
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
(50 of these) Warning: Expected 'important' but found 'ie'. Expected ';' or '}' to terminate declaration but found 'ie'. Declaration dropped. Source File: http://bits.wikimedia.org/en.wikipedia.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=en&modules=mediawiki.legacy.commonPrint%7Cmediawiki.legacy.shared%7Cskins.vector&only=styles&skin=vector Line: 1 And these error messages: (2) Error: _fn is not defined Source File: http://bits.wikimedia.org/en.wikipedia.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=en&modules=jquery%7Cmediawiki&only=scripts&skin=vector&version=20110403T141640Z Line: 108 (1) Error: hookEvent is not defined Source File: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Gadget-popups.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript&418104345 Line: 7607 (3) Error: importScript is not defined Source File: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Gadget-Twinkle.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript&301263369 Line: 4 (4) Error: addOnloadHook is not defined Source File: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Gadget-addsection-plus.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript& 14303502 Line: 7 some other javascript errors and lastly (1) Error: appendCSS is not defined Source File: http://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Gadget-UTCLiveClock.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript&smaxage=21600&maxage=86400 Line: 26

Any help on whether this is Wiki related or Firefox related would be appreciated, to reinstall Firefox with a fresh version will mean a lot of work...Cookies, passwords, etc. Chaosdruid (talk) 15:40, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

← You can't "reinstall Javascript" in Internet Explorer. And those Firefox error messages are likely old. Clear them, please, and then press Ctrl+F5 to force-reload this page. Wait until it has finished loading. Does popups work? Is your new section tab back to a plus sign? If not, which error messages are you seeing now in the Error Console? Amalthea 16:00, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

? Please try and assume that I am not a noob. I was not loading Javascript for IE9, I reinstalled both the 64 and 32 bit versions.

No, they are not old, they were the ones that were there when I had cleared the list and then reloaded this page. They are exactly as they were listed above, every time I load a page it adds the same 70+ errors to the list.

No, nothing is fixed, no popups, no + instead of New section, no toolbars in the editor, everything expanded on watchlist - In the editor (symbols/Latin/Greek/Cyrillic/IPA) expanded and all normal special tools gone, no simple Wikied at the top of the page, toolbox has no tools in it apart from basic ones (What links here/Related changes/Upload file/Special pages) and no expand button for them. Chaosdruid (talk) 16:19, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

All I can say is, ditto, same symptoms, with very similar errors on the Javascript error console. If this helps, everything works fine on my other machine with Firefox 3.6.16, it's only the firefox 4.0 machine. Muhandes (talk)

Sorry, Chaosdruid, that was my standard mode of operation.
One other idea, I hear that the resource loader version of Popups is broken in FF 4, and will halt loading of all other scripts during start up. Does either of you perchance have that gadget activated? Amalthea 18:07, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for that little gem and your help :¬) I know they were making some changes and we had workarounds in place, but we were told it was ok last week or so ago ... It only started three days ago when the thumbnails started dissapearing and has been getting steadily worse until it gave up on Saturday late evening I suppose they are "fiddling" with it again lol.

I have disabled the Navigation popups resource loader version from gadgets and removed one of the workarounds from my vector jscripts page and everything seems back to normal again (so far lol).

Cheers for that! Chaosdruid (talk) 19:27, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, it solved the problem for me as well. --Muhandes (talk) 05:42, 5 April 2011 (UTC)