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The problem is, my Date and Time Preferences will not save. I go in, check the format I want, save it, and when I check it afterwards it has changed back to 'No preference'. This has only been happening in the past several days. Be gentle - I am very computer challenged.
Everyone's having this problem. There's nothing we can do about it yet (check above for a few postings of this same problem). —Mets501 (talk)20:48, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
I am trying to upload the kalidas_smarak.jpg image on the article Kalidas. I tried to upload the image more than a week ago; however, the image still does not appear. How do I resolve this problem?
Thanks!--Wikindian14:21, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
I can't find your image at the commons on the link you've given above or in the article - are you sure it hasn't been deleted due to lack of copyright info etc? or could you provide me with a link?--Mcginnly | Natter15:00, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
I do not use CSS, do you ? It seems that you have here a template = Template:Dynamic_navigation_box, or Template:Hidden, using a NavFrame class that is referred to in a script = javascript:toggleNavigationBar. Looks like that one is defined in the general script for user preferences = MediaWiki:Monobook.js, with no attributes. These objects have their page here in Wikipedia.
Maybe you could invoke another script with more parameters to play, but few people shall try your invention, unless you publish it (in one of your user subpages). Does that help ? -- DLL .. T19:37, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
And see also the former section "Show/Hide bars"; which tells you about divs. If you, as I do, ignore everything about div, ask for more help. -- DLL .. T19:43, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
Sorry but I'm non the wiser. I know what CSS stands for and that's about it. I need instructions as to how to change the colour.--Mcginnly | Natter22:46, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
You could wrap the whole thing in <div class="charboxwhite"></div> but then *all* links would be white, so you'd have to use <div class="charboxblue"></div> for the content. Unfortunately the javascript doesn't seem to allow multiple classes (like class="NavHead charboxwhite") or wrapping just the header div in another div. See below for an example. Also, see MediaWiki:Common.css for all such available class colors. Note: these classes are for something else, but the only way to change link colors for this javascript-created element are to add anchor color changes to the global css, so they work for this example. --Splarka (rant) 07:38, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
Is there anywhere that Sunday (6 August's) Special:Export XML change is documented?
I use XML widely and the format change has caused chaos. Especially now the Wikipedia is at odds with other Wikis (here is an example where Wikinfo is trying to import a Wikipedia page: http://www.wikinfo.org/wiki.php?title=Doune - all the revisions are now there due to the XML change)
The only recent change I can see to it is revision 15959, which added an "experimental history paging API", and should not have changed anything on the output, except that you now do not get the full history by default. It's possible that your code was expecting to get only the top revision, without explicitly asking for it, and now that the code to get the history has been enabled again, it got confused by it; if so, your code is wrong (it should have asked explicitly for only the top revision). How are you using Special:Export? At least for me, it only returns either a single revision (when I ask for the top revision) or nothing (when I ask for the history); you must be doing something different. --cesarb21:57, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
I am using GetWiki 1.0 to retrieve the export page - as does WikInfo and many other sites. Coded this way, the Wikipedia Special:Export now has a different method than other Wikis. Surely this is bad news?
--Scotthatton07:59, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
I downloaded the code and took a quick look at it (it's getwiki.php on that package). The import code is an ugly and brittle hack; instead of parsing the XML structure, it waits for an element (for instance "title"), outputs a prefix, waits for its end tag while outputting all the text, and outputs a suffix (and, in an even uglier hack, the prefix for "title" opens a comment on the output, while the prefix for "text" closes it, this way hiding everything in between). It also completely disregards the fact that XML is case-sensitive, and also completely disregards the fact that MediaWiki's schema uses a namespace (which means that, if Tim decided to change the XML to use a namespace prefix, all correctly implemented parsers would still parse it, and it would have changed exactly nothing in the XML structure, but this parser would break completely). It's doing almost the same thing as treating the XML as a text file and parsing it by hand with regexps.
Since the code is so brittle, it's no wonder it breaks; it's expecting exactly one revision, formatted in the XML in exactly the same way, while there's nothing on the schema which requires it to have only one revision, or even exactly that formatting. For performance reasons, the export code used to return only one revision; now that the code has added a limit of 200 revisions, the performance issue no longer exists, and it helpfully returns more than one revision. The broken way the getwiki code was implemented is completely unable to even notice there's more than one revision, and it happily outputs everything it finds, printing junk which was meant to be in a comment outside of one (since the comment was closed before the first revision text, by the ugly prefixing hack; in fact you can see the comment closing just before all the other revisions).
Personally, I'd throw that whole file (getwiki.php) in the recycle bin and rewrite it completely from scratch — in a way that respects the structure of the XML data, instead of blindly outputting stuff in reaction to each known tag. And I would make it request only one revision from Special:Export (there's a parameter to request only the top revision, use it!), instead of second-guessing how many it would return. --cesarb14:40, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
I am trying to change to the "16:12, 15 January 2001" date format, but it doesn't save. I click on the save button and get the "Your preferences have been saved." message, but when I go to a page and bypass my cache, the date format doesn't change. I then go back to Special:Preferences and see that the date format has been reset to "No preference." What's going on? --MC Snowy18:37, 4 August 2006 (UTC)
Yes, I did try that. It seems to work, but I don't like that format. I like the "16:12, 15 January 2001" date format. --MC Snowy15:12, 5 August 2006 (UTC)
Odd, I have mine set to 'no preference' and I always see that format (16:12, 15 January 2001) in history. What format do you see? --Splarka (rant)
I can confirm the same issue. I have not tried other preferences, but my old date preference got switched back to No preference, and now when I select a new preference, it is not saved, although I get the standard Your preferences have been saved message. – Mipadi18:58, 6 August 2006 (UTC)
Me too. I would like [[2006-08-08]] to rend as "8 August 2006", but all I get is 2006-08-08. Changes to "My preferences" don't stick. It used to work as desired, but not for about three-four days. Mr Stephen13:28, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
I am having this same problem. I prefer "August 8, 2006" to "2006-08-08" and I cannot set this, or any of the other ones. Ryūlóng05:48, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
This appears to be a known bug, according to the last statement (just before the "please sign") in the heading box at the top of this page. Furthermore, this is a cross-project problem; I've confirmed it for en:Wikiquote and meta as well. Can someone identify what the problem is, and when it will be fixed? I've found no specifics discussed here or at Meta. The closest thing I've found in Bugzilla is bug #6830, which, given the response, is being treated as a server configuration error. (I would hope that MediaWiki projects haven't encountered a project-wide configuration error based on a single variable being incorrectly set that hasn't been fixed for several days.) Any specifics would be appreciated. ~ Jeff Q(talk)05:37, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
This is annoying behaviour when you're trying to find the deletion logs. In particular, a link to the corresponding Commons: deletion log somewhere along the line would be very useful. pfctdayelise (translate?) 13:09, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
Agree that that is annoying. The vast majority of people clicking a red image link are probably more interested in the deletion history than uploading a replacemen image. What might work as a nice compromise is: if there is a wpDestFile parameter, it could display a new message at the top (eg MediaWiki:Noimagetext) which would show something like "This image does not exist, you can upload it below. See also the [{{fullurl:Special:Log|page={{urlencode:$1}}}} logs] for this page." by default (which would be easy to add a commons link too). So, go file it at bugzilla as a request ^_^. --Splarka (rant) 21:29, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
I've not been seeing wikipedia images for the last couple of evenings; and can find nowhere on wiki a status report which mentions this. a) are images down or what? b) what's with status reporting? Don't we think it's important? It isn't done well, imo. (though kudos to the people who keep wikipedia up; don't get me wrong.) --Tagishsimon(talk)
Are you using Firefox? It's surprisingly common for people to accidentally block the image server. Right-click one of the empty image boxes and UNCHECK "Block images from upload.wikimedia.org". --Brion23:55, 18 July 2006 (UTC)
In the right-mouse-click context menu for images, "Save as" "Set image as wallpaper" "Block images from this server" and "Properties" are all next to each other. I've accidentally blocked images several time from a website, when trying to view the image properties such as size and image type (and there is no convenient keyboard method to do this that does not involve using the mouse to at least select the image). So, that is how that "accidentally" can happen. --Splarka (rant) 22:42, 6 August 2006 (UTC)
Ah. I don't see that option; I guess Adblock removes it (the Adblock option is at the very end of the list where you can't click it by accident). — Omegatron02:50, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
Emergency bot shutoff button
There is something wrong with the emergency bot shutoff button. It has different problems in different browsers. All of my browsers are the latest versions as is my operating system (Mac OS 10.4.7), which has all of the updates. (I have to use multiple browsers because they all have serious problems with one or more of the following problems: website compatibility, bugs, lack of features, ease of use and speed (both for loading web pages and large downloads from high-speed sites, a browser can be good at one but not the other). If they had an updated Internet Explorer browser for Macintosh with tabbed browsing, effective pop-up blocking and the ability to force pages to open in a new tab instead of a new window, or if they only made Firefox with good bookmark handling and greater compatibility, I would pay $150 for it, easily.)
In Firefox 1.5.0.6 for Macintosh, the link to "Special:Blockip/bot name" that is supposed to be in the button extends far past its boundaries. I am unable to click on the "history" link at the top of the template page, it goes to the block page instead. It interferes with the links on the pages it is used on, too. The link extends far below the button as well. Another problem is that the "Administrators: Use this button if the bot is malfunctioning." text is partially inside the button. On my screen, the word "button" is mostly on the edge of the circle and the tips of the "t"s are inside of it. Finally, there is a lot of space between "Emergency bot shutoff button" and the circle.
In Netscape 7.2 for Macintosh, it is the same as Firefox, except that the block link does not extend as far up, so I am able to click on the history link at the top of the page.
In Safari 2.0.4, the button is much smaller than in Firefox, perhaps smaller than it is supposed to be. Like in Firefox, the block link extends far beyond the boundaries of the button. Also, the distance between "Emergency bot shutoff button" and the button is large for the size of the button. Finally, there is a huge distance between the button and the "Administrators: Use this button if the bot is malfunctioning." text.
In Internet Explorer for Macintosh 5.2.3, the button is very small, the link extends beyond the button's boundary's and there is a large distance between "Emergency bot shutoff button" and "Administrators: Use this button if the bot is malfunctioning." text. The distance is so large and the button so small that the block link only extend's halfway to the text on the bottom and the top. -- Kjkolb04:51, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
I have two things I'm curious about, and I'm hoping there's a script for finding them out:
Is there a way to see a list of all articles I've created? It'd just be fun to see, but the user contributions page, unlike the watchlist, doesn't show the N flag for new pages.
Is there any way to see a list of page views for a given page? Essentailly, a tally of how often the page is loaded (by people using wikipedia, I know it'd exclude all the many users reading sites copying the wiki database), as you'd have in a log analyzer or page tracker. Again, this would be for fun, it'd be nice to see how much, if any, a given page I (or someone else) created has served the readers.
The MediaWiki page hit counters aren't enabled on Wikimedia due to performance issues (as the pages have to be cached to deal with the traffic, several thousand hits per second). Best thing to do is compare the number of edits. There is nothing you can do personally to log the hits (as it should be, as this would violate privacy issues).
Articles-I've-created is a resource-intensive query, and isn't available on-wiki (though Special:Newpages shows the last couple of days, per Splarka). However, I'm happy to run this query for anyone at any time if they ask on my talk page (example). --Interiot03:42, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
Category redirects appear as category members?
Is this really correct and default behavior? It doesn't sound right that a category would have a redirect to itself as a member. In the case of the Category:Enzymes hierarchy, many subcategories are listed both by common name and by EC number - but the membership oddity creates the appearance that an EC number category, whose meaning is not immediately obvious, contains an explanatory article when in fact it only contains a redirect. Opabinia regalis06:41, 6 August 2006 (UTC)
Wikipedia keeps switching to underlining the Wiki links and I can't figure out how to turn it off. Any help? Thanks! Sparsefarce20:31, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, it happens to everyone: it's unpreventable. When it happens, though, you can do a hard refresh to get rid of it temporarily; Mozilla/Safari: hold down Shift while clicking Reload (or press Ctrl-Shift-R), IE: press Ctrl-F5, Opera/Konqueror: press F5. —Mets501 (talk)20:42, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
I just click preferences, then click save, without changing any preferences. —MichaelZ. 2006-08-08 21:37 Z
It is preventable, just add a { text-decoration: underline; } to your personal css if it bugs you overly much. Also see the Frequently Asked Questions at the top of this page, this question gets asked twice a week. --Splarka (rant) 07:46, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
How to change the stub category on an article? - disease vs. marketing term
The article in question is Sisi syndrome. I know that I could just change it myself but that might be improper, given my objections to its being categorized as a disease given on the talk page. Is there a person/process that is in change of choosing what category a stub goes in? Mattisse(talk)14:34, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
I would say that, even if you're completely correct about it not being a real disease (personally, I don't consider AD/HD to be a real disease, or any other bundle of symptoms which can have many different causes), it still falls, technically, under the "disease" category, the same way that an article explaining a fraudulent fossil might still fall under paleontology or archeology. --Kaz17:35, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
I encountered the case, it is easily generated and unseen. Just move an article and replace its original name with a disambiguation page. The discussion is stuck with one of the pages and a redirect created on the other.
To remove the template, you have to access the disamb link : click on the link following the words "redirected from" - or add &redirect=no to the address. Does that help ? -- DLL .. T19:12, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
For some weeks now the article on the town of Edessa, Greece shows a strange message: "The database did not find the text of a page that it should have found, named "Edessa, Greece". etc. etc. In the page history you can see the version of 3 July, but it's impossible to save edits. What's wrong? Markussep17:47, 4 August 2006 (UTC)
i dont know if this has or has not been asked (and if it has, sorry!). also, sorry about this, but it has very little to do with wikipedia and more with mediawiki (but i have not found the answer yet).
in a mediawiki-driven wiki, is there a way to create a "new page" template, so that when a new page is created it is automatically populated with a basic framework?
thanks in advance. if you dont want to clutter this area up with a response, please post it to my talk page.
You can do it easily, by making it voluntary: In MediaWiki:Newarticletext add a link like <span class="plainlinks">[{{fullurl:{{FULLPAGENAMEE}}|action=edit&preload=Template:Outline}} Preload outline]</span>, and then create the outline in Template:Outline. People clicking the link will be returned to the same nonexistant page with the template preloaded. You can add a whole menu of different styles if you want (probably by making subpages of Template:Outline, laziest/easiest method).
I don't know an easy way to force the issue, however. A javascript to add &preload to all a.new links might work, but be messy. Possibly an extension could do it with minimal changes to MediaWiki. Or, you could make the message in MediaWiki:Newarticletext so annoying that people have no choice but to click the link to the preload (not advised ^_^). --Splarka (rant) 21:34, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
PS: you can also add a &editintro= to the url which will show a template above the edit form (where preload shows it inside the edit form textarea). --Splarka (rant) 21:43, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
I think that this is done in Wiktionary (you can select a predefined format for a word type), so there must be a way. —Daniel(‽)21:00, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
That is done via Wiktionary:MediaWiki:Noexactmatch, using <inputbox>. This still is voluntary, and doesn't show when someone clicks a red link (only shows when someone uses the search box). There are also ways to insert frameworks via MediaWiki:Edittools (also voluntary, as opposed to "automatically populated"). --Splarka (rant) 07:23, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
Dynamic page/section/list
Does anyone know how to create a dynamic page, or section or list?
Sometimes I have to maintain more than 1 page, of each contains the same information as another. It would be great if something like this can be done:
Article A
.....
.....
.....
==See also==
xxx
yyy
zzz
Article B
.....
.....
.....
==See also==
{{dynamic link of Article A#See also}}
I used {{subst:AfDx|second}} and got to step two, but when I go to step three, it returns me to the old afd instead of allowing me to log the article. The article is Syrnia but I end up at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Syrnia even though I completed step two and have written up my own reason. Mattisse(talk)21:03, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
I saw the problem and completed it, putting it into the log. There are a few bad links left out there that don't go to the right place for the daily log. What did you click on to try step 3? Fan-196721:24, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
I clicked on the usual arrow on the template placed on the article. (Just where I would if it were a first time nomination.) Mattisse(talk)21:34, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
Thanks! Probably what happened is that when I nominated it I did not know that it already had a nomination history. I changed the template once I was directed to the first nomination. Changing the template probably screwed things up. Mattisse(talk)21:48, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
Actually the template was already screwed up, and you probably got confused when it dropped you into the wrong page instead of the daily log. It's been fixed now, for the next person. Fan-196721:52, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
Userboxes in Babel template
I am trying to use generic userboxes in the Babel template.
e.g. this is a sample code {{ Babel|header = User Affiliations|: IND citiz | degree/BE}}
This works fine.. however i am trying to understand how to use a generic userbox like this
e.g. {{Babel|header = Computing | programming-!4|MATLAB }}
can anyone help me do that.. this doesn't seem to work for the cases where the userbox code expects an argument with a |. In other words, I don't know how to pass an argument to the userbox inside the Babel template
The bug with breaking up long pages in Firefox with the Google toolbar, bugzilla:5643, has been resolved for almost a month now in version 2.1.20060713W of the toolbar, however the message about the bug is still displayed when editing long pages. Maybe someone can remove the message from MediaWiki:Longpagewarning or replace it by a hint to upgrade to the newest toolbar version. JePe16:43, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
Print and show links
Is there a way to print an article and have the links show up as underlined (or otherwise marked)? I've been adding many articles on U.S. Navy ships of WWII, and learning a lot as I go. Now I want to go back through all the articles and check for the proper links (many obscure locations in the Pacific, many changed place names, etc.).
I know I could do it online, but for various reasons I'd much prefer to have printed copies of the articles in front of me. Lou Sander22:52, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
The print style sheet is here. But you can try forcing it by adding to your monobook css (if that is the skin you use):
@media print {
a, a.external, a.new, a.stub {
color: blue ! important;
text-decoration: underline ! important;
}
}
It's enough of a headache to upload|describe|tag|fight bots and paranoid admins in order to include worthy images into an article, especially when you find --to your astonishment-- that the work has already been done by another uploader working in a Wikipedia in another language.
QUESTION: how to refer to|include an image already existing in another Wikipedia? I cannot find the right syntax, or example, on how to do that. The need is very real, and simple enough to understand - so there ought to be a simple solution. Thanks, AVM18:44, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
There is no simple solution. If it's a free (public domain / copyrighted with all rights released etc) image then you can upload it to commons to use over all Wikipedias. If it's copyrighted you'll just have to upload it again to each Wikipedia you want to use it on. Fight those paranoid admins! --Lord Deskana (talk) 18:50, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
You can't. Each Wikipedia has its own image policy. If it's under a free license (public domain, free use, GFDL, CC-by-sa are common examples), and suitable for use on multiple Wikipedias, you should upload it to Commons, which we can use images from directly. Otherwise, you will have to upload it separately to each Wikipedia on which you used to use it, after ensuring that it is conformant with local image policy, and possibly risk deletion. Deco19:29, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
CURRENTMONTHGEN
The magic {{CURRENTMONTHNAMEGEN}} is currently broken, as it generates "<august-gen>" instead of "August". Actually, this magic word is not listed at Help:Magic words, but is used in some templates (Liberatore, 2006). 12:31, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
Actually, it is listed (here), for use on other language wikis. Might be nice to set up a bot to replace it with {{CURRENTMONTH}}. SB_Johnny | talk15:48, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
Apparently, it used to be the same as {{CURRENTMONTHNAME}} on en: I don't know why exactly it was used instead of this (which is also shorter) (Liberatore, 2006). 17:20, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
What happened to the index?
Hi,
I just noticed that articles no longer show an index. The show/hide button doesn't appear either. Any thoughts? Thanks. Dr.K.04:45, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
Still keen to get some logging data so we know of which of the 10,000 maths articles most deserve our attention. I just though of a sneeky way to do it which would not impact on our servers and give a relable count.
It could be done using this new fancy ajax stuff. A little bit of javascript could be added which sends an XXLHttpRequest to some logging server, with nothing more than the page name. It would not impact on the main page servers as the funcionality is handled by the users browers and a seperate logging server. Problems with all the squids are overcome. Thoughts? --Salix alba (talk) 19:31, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
This could be done much simpler than that (on a purely temporary basis). If you had, for example, a template that was used exclusively on those 10k math articles (such as for a category or navigational template across the math project), you could add something like <span id="math-log"> </span>. And then a similar something to the MediaWiki:Monobook.css: #bodyContent #math-log {background: url(http://some.site.with.referrer.logging.on.images.com/spacer.gif) center right no-repeat; }. However, there are three problems with this: 1) You'd need a host that was trustworthy *not* to divulge IPs, and you'd need to convince a checkuserer that it was trustworthy, as they are the only ones trusted to check IPs. It might be easier to make one of them perform this logging by setting up the site and css themselves, but good luck with that ^_^. 2) You'd need a host that could serve the image and log the referrers *and* take the pounding. 3) You'd have to add the template to all the articles, which is ~10k edits. Good luck convincing anyone that this needs to be done ^_^. But really, it is much less invasive than trying to add something to the javascript (which would, at least, have to execute 'if()' on every single page load by every user, to check if it was a math article (unless it was going to do all page hits... up to a few thousand per second...)). --Splarka (rant) 23:23, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
dewiki has something like this working already... [1] Visitors to dewiki sometimes (1/10 or 1/100 chance due to load problems) load a 1x1 .gif from the Toolserver with something like ?title=..., and then Leon has a tool that combs through the resulting Apache logs. I think they changed the logging to discard IP addresses because that was certainly a concern (people on-wiki don't necessarily realize their IP addresses are being given away to another host). The folks at #wikimedia-toolserver would probably be willing to discuss it more.... the dewiki version just got started, and they're working the kinks out. --Interiot02:14, 18 July 2006 (UTC)
I am user Desertsky85450 but I have lost my password, and the 'email new password' button on the login page is not sending me a new password. Could some one please get it to send me a new password, or my old one? 216.161.151.9015:47, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
This is probably due to you not putting an e-mail address on file in your preferences, or it not being confirmed. I am afraid that without that having happened, there is nothing anyone can do to recover your password. If you decide to create a new account, remember to put an email address on file and confirm it. Hope this helps. ><Richard0612UW14:52, 29 July 2006 (UTC)
Writing musical notes
Hello. I would like to upload to Wikipedia pictures of musical notes in order to explain some issues in classical harmony.
Are the programs "Finale", "Sibelius", "Sonar" legal for my use? If not, can anyone suggest a different program?
In addition, I would like to add some explanations or signs in the picture. Is there a program which can help me with that?
I've been working on reviewing Article for Creation requests lately, and the process is very repetitive. Each submitted article (or at least the majority of them) occupies its own section on the page. Most submissions need to be declined, which is simply a matter of adding particular templates ({{subst:afc top}} and {{subst:afc b}}) to the section, and one of a list of other templates explaining the reason for the decline, along with a signature.
Here's an example lame article submission:
==Fox==
{{subst:afc top}}
A fox is a type of canine.
===Sources===
www.fox.com
{{subst:afc exists}} ~~~~
{{subst:afc b}}
And here's how it would be edited to decline it:
==Fox==
A fox is a type of canine.
===Sources===
www.fox.com
The {{subst:afc exists}} might be replaced with another template depending on the reason for the rejection, but other than that the format is always the same.
To me, this jumps up and down and screams for some sort of semi-automated solution, where a reviewer could click on a section on the AfC page, choose a reason for the decline (exists, dicdef, etc.) from a menu, and have the section automatically edited to insert the appropriate templates. Are there any existing Wikipedia automation tools that could be adapted for this task? Kickaha Ota12:00, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
What about a bot that automatically closes any AFC entry that asks for an article that already exists, or is put up by a registered user? I notice there are a lot of these, and such a bot would probably lower the workload of the Wikipedians on that page by at least 10-15%. Dark Shikari17:48, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
A bot that closed AfC entries that already existed would be cool, but the consensus of a recent AfC discussion seems to be "If registered users want to prescreen their dubious articles through AfC, so much the better." :) Kickaha Ota17:50, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
While we're at it, why not have a bot that auto-closes empty submissions or those with an empty source selection? I've already dealt with four unsourced AfC's today and it is very repetitive (and that's during one of the quietest times around here). MER-C10:30, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
How do you write a bot?
Okay, so I thought I was following the instructions on the m:Using the python wikipediabot page just fine. I copied the little Sandbox example script and, after figuring out I had my script in the wrong folder, was able to append text to the sandbox. Now I want to be able to scan the sandbox (actually, I want to scan other pages, but I'm still learning the ropes) for string matches, but I can't figure out how to do that. If I write this:
p=wikipedia.Page(s,'Wikipedia:Sandbox')
p.get()
print p
Well, in this instance, p is an object, in the OOP sense. You set p as 'Wikipedia:Sandbox', and then used the object's get method, which is all correct; however, the get method only returns the content of the page, and as you are running p.get() without assigning the returned text to any variable, it just disappears into nowhere.
What you actually want is: q=p.get(), and then print q, which will return the actual contents of the sandbox, as it assigns the returned text to the variable q. Jude (talk) 06:09, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
Unable to manually reset sandbox
For some reason I am unable to use the manual reset links for the Sandboxes. I was able to do this until last night, and also last night, I decided to list my monobook.js page for speedy deletion under [[{subst:tl|db-user}} because of a failed attempt at trying to find my edit count. Should that have altered my ability to use the reset, is it just some new software, or is it something else entirely different? Ryulong02:13, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
Wikipedia e-mail newsletter hyperlinks include ending ")"
the e-mail I get for Wikipedia each day includes a URL to the entries for the articles. For all articles after the main article in the newsleter of the day, this URL is surrounded by parantheses, and lately, the html I've been getting has been including the final ")" as part of the URL, which causes Wikipedia to display the page with the message "Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name." plus the usual suggestions. It's a small matter to remove the ")" and get the intended article, but having to do it again and again becomes . . . . irksome.
How do you get a "Wikipedia e-mail newsletter", anyway? Is this one of the Wikipeda-related mailing lists? If it's in plain text form, any hyperlinking is done by your mail program, not by the sender, and things like whether trailing punctuation is considered part of the URL would be decided by the receiving mail program based on its own rules. It's best, when writing URLs in e-mail, to set them off with whitespace to avoid the risk of unwanted punctuation being appended. *Dan T.*21:05, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
The newsletter I refer to is more formally known as "The Article of the Day" by e-mail, the sign-up page of which can be found at
As you will note from the included part of today's (Sunday, 16 July 2006) e-mail, it is not plaintext, it is html, and the offending punctuation is, in fact, included inside the HTML Anchor tag, and the behavior extends down to the WikiQuote, as well.
copied from "The Article of the Day" e-mail
_______________________________
Today's selected anniversaries:
622:
Beginning of the Islamic calendar.
(<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_calendar)" target=_blank >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_calendar)</a>
(snip)
_____________________
Wikiquote of the day:
"If you build it, he will come." -- "The Voice" in Field of Dreams
(<a href="http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Field_of_Dreams)" target=_blank >http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Field_of_Dreams)</a>
Also: We got a complaint on OTRS that "The mail is formatted using 0x0A (LF) which is fine for Unix mail clients, but not for others. (the which use 0x0D - CR)." Could this be fixed? --Timichal
Unable to remain logged in
For some reason, I am unable to remain logged in. Sometimes, I am able to remain logged in, most times, I am not. Martial Law17:25, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
Youve already sought help for this several times; as you know, it seems to be a bug with Hughes Satellite internet, nothing on Wikipedia's side. I know someone suggested you post here about it, but they probably didn't realize you've been posting here, there, and everywhere about it already :-) — Bunchofgrapes (talk) 18:27, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
Thanks, though I purged cache on the image, article, template, eveywhere else I could think of, had the same issue in sandboxes with this image. Must have been a temporary problem somewhere. — xaosfluxTalk21:17, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
WikiProjects and Bots
I've noticed a recent issue with WikiProjects. I've noticed it in the one I work on, Wikipedia:WikiProject_Anime_and_manga, but it probably applies to all WikiProjects. When an article is declared a "Good Article" or any other article class, editors add the appropriate tag on the Discussion page, but they often forget to add the appropriate Wikiproject tag that says "this is a good article for Wikiproject whatever". This means that the Wikiproject statistics page that shows how many Good Articles and the like the Wikiproject has may be drastically off, and the categories sorting the Wikiproject's articles may show tons of "good articles" and the like in the "unassessed" section.
Would it be possible for a bot to regularly peruse the Wikiproject article discussion pages and find ones that have a GA tag but no Wikiproject GA tag, and the same for all article assessment tags? Dark Shikari12:34, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
That sounds like a very possible thing for a bot to do. I'd be happy to make a bot to do exactly that, right after I figure out how to make my bot download a specialpage. (Did you post this on the bot request page?) Xaxafrad03:56, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
Strictly speaking, this may be a rather impolite thing to do in some circumstances. While I don't doubt that most of these cases are simply due to someone forgetting to update the tags, it's also quite possible for a project to make a conscious choice to avoid the use of the GA "level" in its own rating. If this were to be the case, a bot that tried to force the project templates into this configuration would likely be distinctly unwelcome. Kirill Lokshin05:58, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
In the {{Infobox afl player}} template, there seems to have been a problem with the image in the image field not displaying (see the Owen Abrahams article for an example). It seems the user User:Ed g2s may have removed that functionality. If anyone could help, please drop me a line or explain on the talk page of the template. RogerthatTalk04:27, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
Hi. I think I may be posting this question in the wrong section but I was hoping you could tell me how to report another user for abuse? Thanks!Jack3049100:07, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
See WP:AN and read the "Are you sure this is the page you are looking for?" section to figure out where your complaint belongs. If you think that the complaint may be better described as a dispute than outright abuse, give WP:DR a look also. --iMeowbot~Meow00:15, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
Not sure if this is in the right place or not.
I've been developing the articles on Jonatan Cerrada, his songs are all in French. Is it worth adding English Translation of his song names? Tipexcom218:50, 15 July 2006 (UTC) tipexcom2
Not sure whether there's a specific convention/policy on it, but I would, following this sort of format:
Rien Ne Me Changera ("Nothing Will Change Me")
Libre Comme L'Air ("Free as the Air")
etc...
BTW, in future, this sort of question would probably be better for the Wikipedia:Help desk than here! :)
I think this is okay, but carefully note in the text that the translated titles are by the authors of the article and are not "official". Deco04:26, 16 July 2006 (UTC)
Thoughts? Can this be easily fixed (class="noprint"), or substituted with something like "citation not provided" in the printible version? Thanks, GChriss14:38, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
How to get rid of article NOT on my watchlist but turns up there anyway?
Leo Steel and the Aztec gold is togged not to be on my watchlist but turns up anyway? How to get rid of it? KarenAnn12:00, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
Nevermind, I figured it out. It was a redirect page, and the page that it was redirected from was on my watchlist. Learn something new every day! KarenAnn12:06, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
{{free screenshot}} Use this if the software itself you are screenshotting is under a free license, and note the software's license. Again, check out Wikipedia:Image copyright tags for more.
Hi, I'm particularly interested in this one, but not due to the technical aspect. As the blocking admin, I'm wondering why this is the first I'm hearing of this. Additionally, as one of two checkusers who have checked the edits coming from this IP (you know, the ones you can't see with Special:Contributions/195.188.152.16 because they were done by logged in users with usernames like User:I vandalize using an Intel Core Duo, User:Stop giving google blowjobs you wikislut!, User:The admin raping championchips, User:Get ready for a WoW attack!, and User:Wikipedians are FUCKING BASTARDS, among others), I'm wondering why you're overtuning my checkuserblock without consulting me; surely the big template that says "This IP is blocked because it's being used to create vandal usernames" would indicate that perhaps I know something more about the situation that would be worth asking about. Could you indicate which of the legitimate users listed above (and it has to be one of them, because I just checked again and there are no legitimate users on this IP in the last month, period) emailed you and made such a convincing arguement as to warrant unblocking without discussion with the blocking admin or either of the two checkusers involved? Essjay(Talk)08:08, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
Should be resolved now. There was a slight slave desync on the blocking table, and a different block record was listed for this IP. --Brion08:12, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
A how-to article from WP was just transwikied to WB, where I'm working on re-wikifying and standardizing it for a WB chapter.
My technical question is this: The article's former namespace here (Proper_care_of_a_cactus, now tw'd to this page) just shows a deleted article, though the talk page is still there. Shouldn't there instead be a pointer to the WB chapter? After all, someone worked on the article to begin with, and might wonder where it went. SB Johnny01:05, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
No. Cross-namespace redirects are denigrated, cross-project redirects would be howled down. Put a link in the Talk page, put it on the original author's Talk page, but don't redirect to the Wikibooks page. User:Zoe|(talk)01:37, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
Wasn't necessarily thinking about a redirect, just a different template for deleted pages that have been tw'd (so instead of saying "Wikipedia has no article...", it would say "Because (reason), this article was transwikied to (project), etc." and then have the redirects on the other project if needed.
The problem is that I can't find the original authors, because it was deleted. (I did leave a link on the talk, but I'm a little confused about how the talk page is still there even when the article has been deleted). SB Johnny02:37, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
Doesn't show up on Eknudsen's contribs... why do you say that?
I suppose this might be more of a policy question after all, since this would involve leaving the article up (with it's history intact), but providing a pointer-link to WB, and locking the page. SB Johnny17:57, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
Page deletions remove themselves from contributions. Gadfium checked the deleted page history with his admin powers.
How do I make the caption appear at the center below the image? The caption usually appears at the left. If you know where I can find this help topic, please tell me. Thanks for your help.--Wikindian23:39, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
The help is at Wikipedia:Extended image syntax, but as far as I can tell there is no convenient way to center the caption. <div style="text-align: center;">caption text</div> seems to work, although I really don't think it's worth the trouble. -- Rick Block (talk) 00:05, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
How's that? Just edit the color in the border: parameter. Also you can change the table background color via the background-color: parameter. --Splarka (rant) 07:22, 19 July 2006 (UTC)
I was refering to the very first image, the one that was a thumb and had the caption in the center at the bottom. I thought that the entire image would look better without a rectangular frame around the caption (I mean only around the caption, I still want the image to be a thumb), but I still wanted the caption included in the thumb frame, and not outside it or below the rest of the thumb frame, like in the image that you had shown me earlier.--Wikindian20:59, 19 July 2006 (UTC)
"Pump"
OK, I finally figured it out. You have to use [[Image:Villagepump.png|right|thumb|150px|<div style="text-align:center;border:none">"Pump"</div>]] As in the image to the right. Wikipedia definitely needs to improve its image syntax, and create better help pages. Thanks a whole lot for helping me!
How do I get my signiture to be a link?
I have checked and unchecked my "raw signiture" box. Nothing makes a difference. Trunk 18:45, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
A move war a few months back left Template:ASUE organisation at a different title. Somehow, when trying to move it back, the good version has been lost, leaving two redirects pointing at each other. I tried restoring the deleted page, but although it says the restoration has occurred, the histories have not merged, and the template seems to have been lost. Can I get it back anyway? smurrayinchester(User), (Talk)14:11, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
I managed to get the source code back from Special:Undelete, but I still can't see where the history has gone. smurrayinchester(User), (Talk)14:39, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
Hello,
I recently uploaded this an image to Bromo-Seltzer. All I see is a white box instead of the image. If I click on the box, the image appears. What might the problem be?
Thanks,
68.225.92.19707:56, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
The wiki software seems to be having trouble generating resized images. I guess there's nothing we can do but wait for it to be fixed. ~ Booya Bazooka09:01, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
shortcuts
Is a shortcut the same as a redirect? I ask because we are told not to use double redirects from Wikipedia articles, but at the same time the WP namespace seems to be full of "shortcuts". The linked page then comes up with "redirected from name of shortcut", so these links to other WP namespace articles appear not to be formatted correctly.--Shantavira07:54, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
Shortcuts are, indeed, just redirects with a particular form of name. However, these aren't necessarily double redirects unless the Wikipedia-space page gets moved and the shortcut isn't updated accordingly. Zetawoof(ζ)09:14, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
Hi,
I've been reading about some breaking news in which AOL has began using XFF headers or something like that. Now I've read the XFF article several times, gone to other resources, and it's still way over my head. So, what exactly is going on with these "XFF headers"? (Keep in mind that I know nothing about computers). Thank you for your help in advance AdamBiswanger103:43, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
If I understand it correctly, it means AOL users will be identified by their IP address, and not by their proxy address (which keeps on changing). In other words, AOL users will have the same IP address, at least for their login session. Again, I'm not an expert, so I'm not sure if this is right. -- Where04:20, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
Here's a non-technical explanation - every computer has an IP address which is sort of like your home phone number. Everyone has one, including AOL users. When AOL users connect to web servers (like Wikipedia), they connect indirectly through a bank of "outside lines" (proxy servers) which have their own IP address. There are fewer of these "outside lines" than AOL users, so each one is used by one user for only a very short period of time. Web servers (like Wikipedia) can always see the IP address of who is directly connecting, but for AOL users it's the IP address of the proxy server (outside line) rather than the actual user. If the XFF header is provided, we'll be able see both the proxy server's address (in the existing, normal, way) AND the actual end user's address. Unlike home phone numbers, most IP addresses aren't really permanent (if you use a dial-up connection your computer may get a new one every time you connect to the internet, if you have a broadband connection you might get a new one when you turn your computer's power on), but I suspect you get the general idea. -- Rick Block (talk) 04:53, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
What it really means is that we now have the means to block individual vandals who are doing their dirty work from behind AOL proxies. Before, an AOL vandal might get a new proxy IP address every time s/he viewed a new page, making him/her almost impossible to block effectively. Also, any blocks that were put in place were almost guaranteed to affect innocent editors who happened to be assigned a proxy IP that had been previously used by a vandal. Therefore, blocks on AOL proxy IPs had to be given short durations to minimize collateral damage.
Now we can track and treat vandals from AOL like we do any other vandal, without inconveniencing all the helpful editors! This, combined with the recently added ability to allow registered users from a blocked IP address to log in normally, is removing the technical hurdles that have kept us from dealing decisively with some problem users in the past.
Hi,
I am the original author of the Hendrik Wade Bode article. I have noticed lately that the edit buttons of every section of the article now appear in German. So instead of edit they appear as bearbeiden . The problem is the article is in English and in English Wikipedia. Any idea why this happens? Thanks. Dr.K.02:28, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
I ran into this problem over at Wikimedia Commons, but I have seen it here, also. In a gallery, some of the images do not appear, nor is there a workable link to them. I know the images exist, because I can copy and paste the script to the search box and it goes to the image page. I was told at commons that the problem is at my end because they can see my gallery without difficulty. I use Internet Explorer 6.0, and yes, I have purged the browser cache. --Joelmills01:52, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
I'm encountering somewhat of the same problem. As of this writing, on New York State Route 131, the NY 131 and NY 37 shields will not display even though the images exist. I've tried everything, purging the images, purging the NY 131 article, with no luck. --TMFT - C 06:49, 14 July 2006 (UTC) The issue I described earlier has since been fixed. --TMFT - C17:14, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
Cross-wiki template
Is there any way to transclude something from one wiki to another? Clearly, the normal curly-brackets method does not appear to be working... ~ Booya Bazooka17:29, 13 July 2006 (UTC)
Hmm.... then it seems to be because that template is actually a redirect to another template. This is apparently fooling the job queue in the image links department. What you can do is null edit all those articles. However, since that involves editing them anyway, you might as well change the template tags to the proper link like this. I'll leave a note on your talk page. --Splarka (rant) 00:19, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
Changing this table
I want to know where/how do fix the type of table, like the one i create in this post:
That is called a <pre> tag. You can find that out by viewing the html source of a rendered page and see that it is wrapped in pre. Now, to see where the CSS is, view the same source and look for CSS pages loaded. In this instance it is via this line:
Now, you could go to the skins directory and change that, but usually one doesn't have such access on a wikimedia wiki (unless you have a local install or direct access) so, one edits MediaWiki:Common.css (or optionally the default skin css which is usually MediaWiki:Monobook.css, but as this is an in-content element, Common.css is more appropriate, unless you are on an older version of mediawiki where it does not exist). Go to the editable css file you chose (probably Common.css), and copy that block of css in, and edit it as you wish.
If however, you are not an administrator, you'll have to a) be content to edit your user CSS, or b) edit the tag directly each time, example:
Thank you Splarka, you have given me greate advice, now i have one more question for you how do i,
without using the <br /> tag or hitting enter, make the text wrap around, instead of continuing on the page, like your
pre box started to.
Fixed...i went into main.css because im using the monobook skin, and added white-space: normal; to the pre class -wildboyz_21110:39, 13 July 2006 (UTC)
I think you completely miss the point of <pre>, the point being that it stands for pre-formatted text, meaning, it should never wrap text itself. If you want wrapping text with proportional spacing, you can use <tt> or <code> ^_^. --Splarka (rant) 07:23, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
One thing I've run foul of two or three times when deleting pages is forgetting to check whether there was a discussion page... sometimes leaving a lone talk page floating in the void. Is it possible to put a message in large friendly letters on the "page deletion complete" page which will come up if there's an undeleted talk page that needs dealing with? Grutness...wha?06:22, 13 July 2006 (UTC)
MediaWiki:Deletedtext could be modified, but I don't know how you'd parse (with wikicode) $1 -> Talk:$1 for any namespace but main (I tried {{#ifexist:Talk:$1|You may wish to delete [[Talk:$1|the talk page]] as well.}} but it does not parse). So, all you could do is add Something like "[[Talk:$1|talk page]]?" and it would only work for main article space. Other than that, it'd need to be a feature request most likely (either a parser function or edit to the mediawiki code to return a talk page as $3). --Splarka (rant)
Hmm, good idea, one could modify the current magic word (or make another) to take parameters, like {{MAKETALK:$1}}, where $1 is any string (if it contains a colon and if Namespace of Namespace:Pagename exists as a real namespace, insert _talk after it. If not, prefix string with Talk:). Ok, someone write it! ^_^. --Splarka (rant) 00:36, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
Depending on the reason for deletion, you may want to remove [[Special:Whatlinkshere/{{FULLPAGENAME}}|links to this page]] and the [[{{TALKPAGENAME}}|talk page]].
This is sort of like CSD-R1 (redirects to articles that have been deleted). When I last looked, there weren't many CSD-R1, I presume that others are running queries on offline dumps and periodically cleaning them up? --Interiot12:36, 13 July 2006 (UTC)
Special:Brokenredirects shows them and some people run bots to delete them (redirect.py). On orphaned talk pages, someone has a huge list somewhere in userspace I'll try to find it. Sadly, people are rather overzealous in deleting them (and I'm not exactly sure why they need to be deleted?) and numerous pages with old VFDs or even talk page archives get deleted. User:R3m0t/Reports and User:Rory096/orphanedtalks, but they are a little out of date. Kotepho12:59, 13 July 2006 (UTC)
If there are enough people going round cleaning up then it's not as urgent an iea, though it could still be worthwhile eventually. Grutness...wha?00:41, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
What this feature would allow/force, though, is for the decision to be made when the subject is deleted. This would insure that most orphaned talk pages remaining would have some value (at least, in the eyes of the person who deleted the subject), and not 'accidentally' left over and needing cleanup. Perhaps, once a feature is worked out, a policy (excluding User space) of placing a template on spared talk pages like {{deletedsubject}}, allowing the non-deletor to briefly state why the page wasn't deleted, might be handy. Eg: {{deletedsubject|this page is continually VFD'd and recreated}} => The subject of this talk page was deleted, however, this talk page might still have value. The reason given: this page is continually VFD'd and recreated. 2 cents. --Splarka (rant) 07:16, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
Update #2: Ok, after some consultation with gurus, there is a way to make parserfunctions work: as an include. This could be in a sub page like MediaWiki:Deletedtext/include or it could be in a template like Template:Delete_talk_check. It could be added to the top of MediaWiki:Deletedtextand/orMediaWiki:Confirmdeletetext (as a simple {{MediaWiki:Deletedtext/include}}). The contents of the include should be something like:
{{#ifexist:{{TALKPAGENAME}}|{{#ifeq:{{SUBJECTPAGENAMEE}}|{{FULLPAGENAMEE}}|'''Note: A [[{{TALKPAGENAME}}|talk page]] exists for this page.'''<br />}}}}
This checks if the talk page exists, and also checks to make sure you are not *on* the talk page of course (the inverse could be done too for subjectpage, but not really as useful). However as it is now technically possible (and more drastic), it isn't really a technical point and should probably be moved to the message talk pages, or to the proposals portion of the Village Pump ^_^. --Splarka (rant) 08:36, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
Is there a standard way I should cite a book giving the ISBN or a key only, something like {{cite isbn=1234|page=56}}, and then modifying a single entry for this book somewhere? Do you have to create a template yourself? -- Nils Grimsmo21:28, 30 March 2006 (UTC)
I'm not sure exactly what you're asking, but I don't think there is a way to specify a book by the isbn and have all the details come up. If you want to cite a single book, just use {{cite book}}, if you need to do the same book several times, you could create a page in your userspace, which contains the specific use of {{cite book}} you need for that book, and then wherever you need to use it, use subst:, eg {{subst:User:Nils Grimsmo/mybook1}}. AlbinoMonkey(Talk)12:51, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
Thank you for your answer. Keeping something like this in my user space strikes me as a bit odd. Would not others hesitate to change it then? I think it would be great if there was a standard "built-in" way of doing this, as some books are cited many hundred times, as for example Introduction to Algorithms. Assume that somebody would want to make a page about a specific author. Instead of finding all references by searching, and updating them by hand, she could just update the template. Having one instance of the {{cite book}} would also minimise the number of unfixed errors. Citing by ISBN avoids misunderstandings with mismatching page numbers in different versions and such things. Considering the amount of trafic on this page, I assume it was not the right place to ask. What would be? Village pump (technical)? -- Nils Grimsmo16:13, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
It does not give the references using the {{cite}} templates though. And my main issue is not finding the information, it's just that I am allergic to redundancy :) Nils Grimsmo18:32, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
This is an somewhat interesting situation, since the images are official logos, which we generally shouldn't alter. Of course, presumably there are official non-animated versions of these logos as well. Incidentally, neither of these images has been properly sourced; presumably they're from a website somewhere, but it's hard to tell. I've tagged both as lacking source information and notified the uploaders. — Ilmari Karonen (talk) 04:58, 12 July 2006 (UTC)
I find it next to impossble to belive that either London or part of the Federal Judiciary would have a flashing logo... 68.39.174.23822:53, 12 July 2006 (UTC)
Well, here's an unoffical, unanimated one. As to the offical sites, I think that some of them don't entirely understand web design, or the people they hire to do it don't, or they did it back when more flashy things were fashionable. I've seen some governmental organizations who definately should've known better go down that road ugghhhhh... 68.39.174.23805:22, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
reclaiming deleted articles
I'm sure this has been asked many times before, but...
A list article was deleted, with the major argument being that it was redundant to a category. This is untrue as there is no similar category. I'd be happy to create it, but I don't know what was on the list. Is there any way for anyone to see the deleted article? -Freekee20:13, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
admins can - but to redo a deleted article you need to go to WP:VFU first otherwise it'll be speedy deleted. also, if the argument was "redundant to a category" then it would make more sense to make the category than to remake the list wouldnt it? BL Lacertae - kiss the lizard23:13, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
I don't think Freekee means to undelete the article permanently, only temporarily so that he can add all the listed articles to a new category. If the list is very long, maybe there's a bot that could help him? SeahenNeonMerlin23:31, 4 July 2006 (UTC)
Yes, I only need the text of the list article in order to start the category. There were less than 40 subjects listed, but I can't remember all of them, and it took a few weeks to find them all. I'd rather not lose that work, but it's not the end of the world if it's all gone. On the other hand, there's a question about the impropriety of the deletion, and it may get reinstated on those grounds. -Freekee03:09, 5 July 2006 (UTC)
If you give me the name of the article, I will pull up the deleted history and get the list out for you. Prodegotalk03:11, 5 July 2006 (UTC)
How do I add the following notice?Can someone do it for me?
Disney fans rejoice, WikiProject Disney has been propsed, just add your name to the category of interested Wikipedians to join here(it's at the bottom). Make sure to spread the word and bring the project to a good start! Julz
I have added the preceding information to the bulletin board, but it is easy to do yourself. Just click the 'edit this page' button at the top of the page, scroll to the relevant section and add it in. ><Richard0612UW10:01, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
Adding article name to category
I'm new to WP so I'm sorry if I missed the answer to this somewhere. My article's name is a person's name. There is a category that I'd like to link to showing other similar articles. When I click on edit the category page, the entries on the page do not show up and there doesn't seem to be a way to add my title to the category page. Thanks for any suggestions. Also, how does the date/time and the "edit" button get added to this post? Joschus
My monobook file (see history) was getting unwieldy, so I decided using includes would be useful. It appeared to work at first after refreshing and purging each change, but near the end, I suddenly started losing the purge tag and extra edit buttons. What am I doing wrong? - Mgm|(talk)15:22, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
IP address confusion
Over the last two days, I am suddenly getting messages that I am blocked due to an IP address; the user name Nookdog - a blocked user - frequently comes up and an IP address that is not my own. If I retry, the block disappears, only to come back at some random time later. I am the only one to use this computer, I always use the user name Hgilbert, the IP address doesn't match anyway...any clue what's going on? Hgilbert12:13, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
Check if you are using any proxy (possibly even a transparent proxy). If you are not, it might be a caching problem somewhere (the pages with the message getting cached). --cesarb14:20, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
It could also be a pool of random proxies (such as used by some ISPs, like AOL, NTL and pol.co.uk, although AOL is no longer blocked by proxy IP). Try going to whatismyipaddress.com about 10 times, and see if the IP is the same each time, or different. If different, you might have to request that the autoblocks on Nookdog be lifted. --Splarka (rant) 07:19, 22 July 2006 (UTC)
Something broken
Not sure where to report this, so I don't know if it is already in hand. The history and watchlist features are not working reliably. At least not for me; as it may be an issue with proxies at Wikipedia, some people may see it differently. Consider Tom Cruise. When I visit I see that it has been replaced with the text of the article on the book "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich". Ok, go to the history. The last edit shown is at 22:47, 20 July 2006, a revert. Click on Compare selected versions. We see the last edit was benign. But we also see an unexpected "Newer edit link". Click on it, and we get an error (The database did not find the text of a page that it should have found, named "Tom Cruise (Diff: 64926897, 0)".) My attempts to actually revert fail with an edit conflict. Notinasnaid10:45, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
I had the same problem when I tried to revert vandalism to evolution. My edit seemed to be accepted, and the page reloaded with the reverted text, but the history didn't show my edit, and a reload of the page brought back the vandalism. I retried several times. Finally, after a few hours, someone else managed to do what I tried to do. -- Ec561810:56, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
This has the potential to require a restore of the database back to before the problems started. I recommend keeping copies of any significant contributions! Notinasnaid11:08, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
Actually, it could be a slave out of sync issue. Ask a developer to take a look; he can recreate the slave database if needed, and nothing is lost (since all edits can be found at the master database). --cesarb14:25, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
Can someone take a look at this? Manchester. It appears to be a totally different article! The only problem is, the revision that it's on now is nowhere in the page history and whenever I try and revert to an earlier version I get an edit conflict. This is crazy. --Lord Deskana (talk) 10:26, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
I seem to have fixed it. I protected the page, reverted to an earlier version, and unprotected. What a hunch! I took a screencap of the weird page version, I'll upload it in a minute. It's pretty crazy. --Lord Deskana (talk) 10:29, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
And look at this [3]. That's what happened when I protected the page? The only thing is, it was like that before I protected the page. I think we all know that doesn't happen when you protect a page. Something is seriously wrong here. Is that the software's weird way of coping with a peculiar problem? --Lord Deskana (talk) 10:36, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
We have an internal wiki for our club, but its sitting on a windows machine using a hacked together PHP/MySQL/MediaWiki (MW 1.6). We've just got ourselves a linux machine that we want to use for the website and wiki, and are wondering what the best way is to migrate a wiki from one comp to another. Any thoughts? --Kdmurray06:37, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
I'm planning on writing an article about a certain music website and I'm trying to figure out how to create an appropriate infobox. Does anyone have a quick guide to creating them? — Preceding unsigned comment added by FreeLance FoX (talk • contribs)
After using "show preview" and editing as necessary to get the correct effect, use "save page".
Edit the article again, but now the template contents appears in the wikimarkup, so you can change any and all of it.
It might be preferable to create a new template if this infobox is going to be used in any other articles. Indeed, even if it is used in one article, separating the box logic from the article makes some sense and is useful. —EncMstr06:38, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
Is it possible in Wiki to make an automatized page which will take certain parts from certain pages and add them end to end in itself? Say, for instance, there are a number of articles about albums of a music band which all have "Professional Critics" section in them ==Professional Critics==); and our automatized page (title:Professional Critics on band X) will take what writes under that section in all those pages and list them in a single page? I don't have much clue about coding, all i've been doing is editing pages and trying to figure out whats going on; maybe i'm asking too much? Thanks. --Farukahmet00:06, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
It sort of depends on what you mean. There are a variety of people who write Wikipedia:Bots which do automated edits. If you mean in real time, whenever the "derived page" is displayed Wikipedia templates (see Help:Template) do this, but they basically are meant for content that is repeated on many pages. Perhaps it might help to explain exactly what you want to do and on which articles. -- Rick Block (talk) 00:30, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
Okay. It's for another wiki called SuWiki which is for a 3d modeling program. There are seperate pages dedicated to program's "tools". For instance: Eraser Tool. In that article (and all other tool articles), as you see, there is a "Tips and Tricks" section. I want to gather all Tips and Tricks section in one page which is now being updated manually: Tips and Tricks. I want this page to be updated automatically. Whenever anybody adds something to the Tips section of any tool, it will be displayed properly in that page. Thanks for the reply. --Farukahmet00:55, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
I think I'd probably do this with a bot that reads all the relevant articles and generates the Tips and Tricks page, and then schedule it to run as frequently as you want the Tips and Tricks page updated. I do some things somewhat like this here, at Wikipedia, but not quite with a bot (see, for example, Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by featured article nominations or the by month archives at Wikipedia:Categories for deletion/Archive debates). These are done with scripts (that are posted) that read a collection of articles and process them into some other form (they're not quite bots because the output is not automatically posted). -- Rick Block (talk) 02:59, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
I have no idea how to do that right now, but i guess i'll have to learn! Starting with your script...At least now I know it is possible, i was not hopeful.Thanks for the help --Farukahmet03:38, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
You could make a template that does what you want, but you'd have to have all the tips on that one template. If you had (or may be able to get?) m:ParserFunctions you could have a parameter that showed the appropriate trick when called:
{{#switch:{{{1|}}}|all|1=<div style="border:1px solid green;background:#eeffee">This is tip number one</div>}}
{{#switch:{{{1|}}}|all|2=<div style="border:1px solid green;background:#eeffee">This is tip number two</div>}}
{{#switch:{{{1|}}}|all|3=<div style="border:1px solid green;background:#eeffee">This is tip number three</div>}}
If the template was called with {{templatename|1}} it would only show trick #1, if it was called with {{templatename|all}} it would show them all. You could give them names instead of numbers too, or use {{PAGENAME}} if you only ever had one per page.
Which would transclude the trick subtemplate named after the page, plus a paramter, eg: {{tricks}} would call the one with the exact title (Template:Tricks/Some_Article_Title), and {{tricks|2}} would call the one with the exact title with the number 2 appended (Template:Tricks/Some_Article_Title2). Then, when all the tricks are categorized, you could maintain a list of them with m:DynamicPageList (although they wouldn't automatically transclude).
As it looks like you don't have either of those installed, and as it looks like you just have one trick section on each page, what you might try instead is making a template for each trick based on the exact page name:
Link to it as [[Template:Tricks/{{PAGENAME}}]] on the article, click it, create it (with <noinclude>[[Category:Tricks]]</noinclude> at the end!
Change the link to a transclude on the article: {{Tricks/{{PAGENAME}}}}
Use the special transcludable special page: {{Special:Prefixindex/Template:Tricks/}} to automatically generate a list of up to 200 (not much better than a category, but can be put on any page as a block).
Alternately, you could keep a manually updated transclusion list of all such templates (by putting them on an index at the same time as you put them in an article, but without duplicating any text, just a transclude). Probably easier than the current method. --Splarka (rant) 07:45, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
Hello, I run the Wiki in question here (suwki.org) and am interested in this topic. Faruk has been helping out a bunch getting things up and running. Currently there various articles about different tools the the program offers. Some articles have a Tip that we want to put on the page. So it's being done with a ==Tips and Tricks== heading. Then we list with bulleted lists under that the different tips. I've got a category called "Tips and Tricks" that every page that has a tip on it is supposed to get filed into that category. Then on the main page of the wiki, there is a link to [[:category:Tips and Tricks|Tips and Tricks]] which takes people right to the Category page. This is what we are currently doing and prehaps trying to overcome. I think Faruk would like to find a better replacement for the way we have the category page acting as a menu system. I can certainly install any extensions needed to get things going. I'm just not sure if any of these options are better than simply using the category page the way it's set up right now over there. Go to The Sketchup Wiki main page and click on the Tips and Tricks category to see how it is right now. Thanks everybody! --Clf2300:17, 24 July 2006 (UTC)
What happens when you nominate an article for deletion
Then when you get to step 2 (reasons) you find out that you can't put your reasons down because the same article was nominated May 5 and the discussion closed? Thus the templete is on the article, but I can go no further. KarenAnn18:15, 19 July 2006 (UTC)
I've noticed for the past 15 or so minutes that Wikipedia's favicon seems to have disappeared. (If you're wondering, I'm still getting pictures everywhere else on Wikipedia). IMacWin9521:42, 19 July 2006 (UTC)
I uploaded three pictures of Mt. Shasta and can get two of them linked into the article, but the third one is being stubborn, and I can't get the article link to "see" the picture. Also, linking the second picture took forever before the article "saw" the link to the picture.
I followed the exact same procedure all three times. Is there some built-in lag or delay that's keeping the article from seeing the third picture (and what caused the delay in seeing the second picture)?
The automatically generated TOC is great - it provides order in a document. For a large document it would be good to be able to reflect the automatically generated TOC numbers in the actual section titles appearing within the document eg (within the body) 5.1.2 network neutrality. That way readers of hardcopy versions would be able to refer to the TOC and then find the appropriate section within the hardcopy document relatively easily. To simply insert them into the section or sub-section title creates a duplication of the numbers in the TOC eg you would get 5.1.2 5.1.2
I have been unable to find any "magic words" or HTML fix to accommodate this capability. Any thoughts?
Don't know if this is acceptable to you, but 1) Create an account. 2) Log in. 3) Click on "my preferences", 4) then "Misc" and, 5) check the option "Auto-number headings". —EncMstr04:21, 19 July 2006 (UTC)
Superb - solved the problem thank you very much. 203.9.200.3
For some reason, Volta (Tekken) is appearing in CAT:CSD even though no speedy template is in the article, nor does said category appear as the bottom of the article to indicate the article's inclusion in said category. Why is this, and what can be done about it? --Spring Rubber01:50, 19 July 2006 (UTC)
It's gone now. I'm pretty sure it has something to do with a deleted tempate that was just removed from the page. I suppose that's all there is to it. --Spring Rubber02:33, 19 July 2006 (UTC)
Ford Anglia in Hebrew
Hello all,
I would like to announce that Ford Anglia is now available in Hebrew Wikipedia ( http://he.wikipedia.org ), under the title פורד אנגליה . Please help me and add "Hebrew" to the languages list of that entry, for I didn't succeed in doing so (How it's done, by the way?). Thanks and have a nice day.
Well, i succeeded at last.Thanks anyway.
Id tag in toolbar
I've been doing some work on User:MarkS/extraeditbuttons.js, and I would like to add some buttons into the standard toolbar order. In order to do this, however, I think I will need to use CSS to suprress the standard toolbar and rewrite the toolbar script at my local js. I can't seem to find a MediaWiki file for the toolbar? Is there any way I can access it to add a second id tag, or can someone else do it for me? (It currently says <div id='toolbar'>; I would like to amend it to <div id='toolbar'><div id='toolbar_standard'>.)
There is no message to change that, you'd most likely have to convince the devs of the need to change mediawiki. Tangent: The easiest way I found to suppress the default toolbar output is to add an overwriting addButton() to my user .js (warning, bad hack). --Splarka (rant) 07:43, 19 July 2006 (UTC)
function addButton(imageFile, speedTip, tagOpen, tagClose, sampleText) {
whatever you wanna do here (for each button)
if(!(speedTip =="Bold text")) return;
whatever you wanna do here (once)
}
Article "Disappeared"
I may have shot myself in the foot by getting too fancy. Here's what I did: (1) Moved the article "Pennies from Heaven" to "Pennies from Heaven (1978 television drama)"; (2) Changed (or tried to change; maybe this is what went wrong) the redirect page that was created in the previous step to a disambiguation page; (3) listed "Pennies from Heaven (1978 television drama)" as one of three items on the disambig page. The result: (1) somehow another redirect page "Pennies from Heaven" was created to point to the "Pennies from Heaven" disambig page, and (2) clicking on the link "Pennies from Heaven (1978 television drama)" brings up the "Wikipedia does not have an article..." page for editing. Stranger, in another browser (Firefox) window, if I go to "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennies From Heaven (1978 television drama)", the correct page comes up (after the URL is at some point encoded)--and sometimes it doesn't! I tried in a different browser, as well as reloading pages from the server. Same problem. Most of the time the article seems to have disappeared, and of course we don't want that. Could somebody please help me understand what is going on here so this can be fixed? --Alan W23:56, 18 July 2006 (UTC)
Thank you! It's always some silly little thing you overlook, isn't it? I've spent half my life catching such mistakes made by others, but of course one is too often blind to one's own similar slips. I appreciate the help! --Alan W01:52, 19 July 2006 (UTC)
External articles
Why does the homerunner wiki, which is nothing to do with the wikipedia foundation apart from its use of media wiki get to have links of the form [[HRWiki:pagename]]? It means the links come up as blue rather than the external grey/blue I would expect. -- SGBailey22:12, 18 July 2006 (UTC)
You create a template just like you would create any other article. If you want to create a {{foobar}} template, you create an article named "Template:Foobar". Kickaha Ota21:01, 18 July 2006 (UTC)
I'm sure this is a question that is easily answered, unfortunately, I don't know it so, here is the question: How do I add a name to the "20th Century Philosophers" page? The "edit this page" tab does not get me to the list.Bob em16:17, 18 July 2006 (UTC)
It's a category. See Help:Category. Items are not added or removed on the page itself, but each individual page decides whether to include itself in the category or not. To add a new page to the category, add [[Category:20th century philosophers]] to the bottom of the page that should be included in the category. --Interiot16:24, 18 July 2006 (UTC)
I am seeing that the Wikipedia logo on the top left appearing in all pages has been replaced by "A WIKIMEDIA project" logo. Are they finally changing it, or is it some other issue. — Ambuj Saxena (talk) 05:50, 18 July 2006 (UTC)
What it currently looks likeWhat it could look like
Audio files are treated a lot like images by Mediawiki, but this has some disadvantages. Images are displayed right in the article and don't require any special/external software to play. Clicking on the image shows the image description page and shows license information, which is mandatory functionality. Audio files, on the other hand, require you to be able to:
download the file directly, just like you can see an image directly in the article
view the license information
get help on how to download and play the file, since we don't have an inline player yet and we use unpopular, but free formats.
In order to get all of these functions for a single file, we are resorting to multiple links, so the beginning of an article might look something like this:
One link goes directly to the file, one goes to the description page, and one goes to media help. A lot of people complain that this is cluttering up articles and that the links can be confusing. I've proposed that we keep the speaker icon and the direct link to the file, and hide the rest with javascript until the reader hovers over it. Then a little pop-up "tooltip" will appear, allowing them to view the image description page or the media help page. It could even have a sentence or so of media help in the tooltip itself, to explain that they are looking at a sound file, and "click here to get more information on how to listen to it, or to see information about the file itself".
I made a little mock-up javascript to demonstrate the idea, and User:Lupin filled in the cracks to make a workable demonstration. You can try it out by adding it to your user javascript file and visiting an article with lots of inline audio links. The style and behavior can of course be tweaked if people don't like certain aspects of it; I'm just asking how people feel about the general idea. Here's a site with a very complex javascript "tooltip" system, which might give you ideas about functionalities these audio links should or shouldn't have.
It would obviously be designed to degrade gracefully for people who don't have or want to use javascript. The current mock-up uses the audio template exactly the way it is, and then uses js to remove the parentheses and rearrange things a bit. Users without JS would just see the regular template as it is now.
The template refuses to place the star on the featured articles... is there anything else we need to implement (e.g. any mediawiki, etc.) apart from placing the {{Featured article}} template at the end of the article (we tried it everywhere....)? would appreciate. tnx. - Alsandro (T / ka-T) 02:01, 18 July 2006 (UTC)
/* For positioning icons at top-right, used in Templates
"Spoken Article" and "Featured Article" */
div.topicon {
position:absolute;
z-index:100;
top:10px;
display: block !important;
}
The div is not displayed by default, and then is re-displayed for users of the default skin, so that it only appears for them (otherwise it can appear quite out of place). With that it should work --Splarka (rant) 07:13, 18 July 2006 (UTC)
Ever since we lost the bots for running CfD (by AllyUnion) and TfD (by Cryptic), I've been the daily bot there (by hand). AllyUnion refused to release his code.
Why does the "pipe trick" not work on place names?
I have found the "pipe trick" to be very useful when linking to state highways. For instance, to link to State Route 40, one only needs to type State Route 40 (Georgia)|, and the software expands the link when saving. This however does not apply to place names like Folkston, Georgia; one cannot type Folkston, Georgia| and get a link like Folkston. Why is this so? Should the articles be at titles like Folkston (Georgia) to make the "pipe trick" available?
Sounds like ytou only know half the "pipe trick", as you call it. Piping will automatically remove the bit in parentheses but nothing else if you do it the way you mention. BUT that is not the only way to use it. To pipe "Folkston, Georgia" to "Folkston" you'd type [[Folkston, Georgia|Folkston]]. Anything written after the vertical bar appears on the article, which is how I could link to the Main Page of Wikipedia like this if I wanted to. As for what the article should be called, there is a convention that all towns in the US (and in most other countries) take the form "Town, State" (see Wikipedia:Naming conventions for more info). Grutness...wha?01:08, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
Probably not a good idea - it'll make people who use the naming conventions regularly think that Folkston is something other than a town. In any case, linking to a redirect will only make more work for the folks who go around changing redirect links to article links. Grutness...wha?02:12, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
If there are no objections, I'm going to start creating redirects and linking to them. Is there any preference between Folkston (Georgia) and Folkston (GA)? Wait... the latter already exists; it looks like I'll go with that then. --NE219:00, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
Still don't like the idea, but still. As to which to use, that depends - is the place in Georgia or is it something connected with Garuda Indonesia airline, Gamblers Anonymous, Geoscience Australia, General Atomics, Geographical Association, Genetic algorithms, General Availability... Most people outside the US wouldn't have a clue GA is short for Georgia, so I'm not sure that's a wise thing to use. Grutness...wha?06:35, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
Well, hopefully a few examples should help. Say you were looking for an article on Kingston, Pa Province, Burkina Faso. If you type in "Kingston (PA)", you might well expect to go there, not Pennsylvania. And would "Milton (WV)" go to the Milton in West Virginia or the one in Wolverhampton? And those are just place names. Since commas are uually used for towns, but parentheses are usually used for anything and everything except towns, it would be natural for someone typing, say, "Post (TX)" to looking for an item about posting transmissions in telegraphy, rather than Post, Texas. Admittedly these confusions wouldn't apply with a town name like Folkston, Georgia, but it's not really wise to have a system applying to some places but not to others (that's why we have naming conventions in the first place). Grutness...wha?00:45, 29 July 2006 (UTC)
Yes it would, but it is relatively rare for a name to be that of a town in two places with similar abbreviations - it is far less rare for a name of a place to also refer to something else in a general context outside geography, and the number of non-geographic uses for two-letter abbreviations is often considerable. For every case like "Milton, WV", you are likely to find quite a few instances like "Post (TX)". Differentiating between town names and general terms (by using a comma or parentheses respectively) makes such confusion far less likely to occur. Which is one of the reasons why (as I said before) we have naming conventions for such things. Grutness...wha?13:38, 29 July 2006 (UTC)
That trick is apparently only applied to: Interwiki links ([[Wiktionary:Foo|]]), Interlanguage links: [[:en:Foo|]], namespaces ([[User:Splarka|]]), and the standard disambiguation syntax of containing clarification in parentheses (as you mention). These are all intuitive to parse. It probably wouldn't be appropriate to apply it to comma separated links, as links can contain commas for various reasons beyond town/state combinations, which would be hard to parse correctly. --Splarka (rant) 01:04, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
Doesn't seem like it would be hard to parse to remove everything after and including the last comma. Or the first, whichever's easier to code, really. If it didn't work for a particular multi-comma title, it doesn't really matter, since you never have to use the pipe trick. —Bunchofgrapes (talk) 04:14, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
I sure wish there was a pipe trick for place names concatenated with a comma. It'd make editing much easier. If, for example, [[Brentwood, Los Angeles, California|]] resolved to just "Brentwood" it'd be super. -Will Beback08:58, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
I've written a patch to fix this, and have submitted it to bugzilla as bug 6826. I don't really want to apply it before I've had some more feedback on this, though. In particular, if this change goes in it'll affect all the Wikimedia projects, and ultimately all sites using MediaWiki, not just the English Wikipedia. Due to the way this syntax works this isn't likely to as much of a problem as one might think (see the bugzilla entry for details), but I'd still like to see some cross-language and cross-project feedback. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 20:07, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
Hmm. The way I wrote it, a comma anywhere in the title takes precedence, so those would become "Foo (bar)" and "Foo" respectively. I'm certainly open to changing it, though, if you think some other behavior would be better. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 22:42, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
Can anyone tell me: What is this? My user page does not link to that image, and AFAIK it never has done. And isn't there something fishy about the file history? Where is the history page? Is this putative image page really a blank page? If so, why does it does not appear to be blank? ---CH22:06, 24 July 2006 (UTC)
and if I went and edited "section one" and pressed save, the software will make it look like I was the one who removed the lines even though I had no idea it would happen, so I then have to edit te entire page. It is not like null edits when you add new lines to the bottom and your edit doesn't show up in history or RC, this is the opposite, where you expect nothing to happen and it does. GeorgeMoney(talk)20:26, 24 July 2006 (UTC)
Due to the way it's implemented, section editing always normalizes the number of blank lines at the end of the section. It's an implementation quirk.
If you're just trying to fix the spacing before a new header, after a table or image, use {{-}} (or {{clear}} if that's easier to remember) -- both force the next header to begin below the bottom of the block item. — Catherine\talk02:55, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
Section one
blah
spaces to make it more seperate for various reasons
new lines
sometimes when I make a null edit to a section of a page with multiple new lines at the bottom which are there to seperate it from the next section more, it automatically deletes the lines when I save without me doing anything. For example if there was
Template inclusion categorization isn't working in one case
They should not usually be necessary. The categories will update when the job queue at Special:Statistics can get to it (currently it is very high), which invalidates the cache page for things like Whatlinkshere, categories in templates, and image usage links. However, a null edit still sometimes needs to be done for categories in redirected templates, or if you are too impatient to wait for the job queue ^_^. --Splarka (rant) 00:40, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
Using sub-pages
I have been working on an article ( Lynton and Barnstaple Railway ) which I think is about complete as a general introduction to the subject. I have also been working on a much more detailed item listing each of the 80 bridges five stations and various other features along the line, with locations, dimensions, descriptions current state etc. This may be of interest to enthusiasts, but most likely not to the casual browser, so I don't want to blur the focus of the main article. The sub-page is currently in my Sandbox. I have worked out how I can link the two by saving the new section as a sub-page from the main entry, ( e.g. Lynton and Barnstaple Railway/detailed route features ) BUT I'm not sure if this is (a) allowed by policy, (b) good practice or (c) the best way of providing this additional information. Can anybody advise? Many thanks Lynbarn19:24, 24 July 2006 (UTC)
Subpages within the article namespace are not allowed per Wikipedia:Subpages, and in fact the feature has been disabled. Daughter, or spin-off, articles are fine, however, and the typical format is to title the article "...of (main article name). In this case Route of the Lynton and Barnstaple Railway would be a good name. That being said it may be worth considering whether detailed information would be sufficiently noteworthy to a general audience to warrant inclusion in a general encyclopaedia (have a look at Wikipedia:Notability to see whether it would meet the typical crtieria). In any case, really good work with the article, though there's a few issues which I've raised on your talk page. --Daduzitalk20:39, 24 July 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for your input, and your comments about the article - I'm working through them, and will be making more changes as I go! (the article is also 33kb, so I need to cut back a little somewhere!) Lynbarn11:41, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
Is there any way I can incorporate a wikipedia search field in my website? I want someone who is reading my site to be able to type in an unfamiliar term and have it open up a new page with the search results on wikipedia.
John
Sure, just view the page source and copy the form code for the search box. All you should need to change is the action="" parameter to be external instead of internal. Simple example:
I've created a line drawing logo using the program xfig, and exported the logo in svg format for wikipedia. It would be great if wikipedia users had access to the xfig file, so that they can make minor changes or improvements to the logo without having to redraw it. Where can this xfig file be uploaded so it's available to the community? It would be a shame if wikipedia didn't allow this. Klafubra15:44, 24 July 2006 (UTC)
Anything that is freely licensed and could be useful in any Wiki projects can be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. You might also want to consider uploading the logo itself there, though you should be careful to make sure the logo isn't copyrighted (in which case you'd also need to change the copyright of the image on here to a fair use license). --Daduzitalk16:35, 24 July 2006 (UTC)
I should have looked at Commons:File types before making my genius suggestion. It seems that the file type isn't supported. If the file type in question is free (ie not subject to patent) then it might be worth asking at Commons talk:File types where, if anywhere, it can be uploaded. Sorry for the lousy initial advice, that'll teach me not to assume. --Daduzitalk22:46, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
Signature Problems
Due to my inability to Fix my signature, I must ask help from you. Please! I buggered it up beyond recogniton!
I want it to be this:
[User:Dfrg.msc|User:Dfrg.msc] [Image:DFRG. MSC.jpg|45px] (Exept with double ]['s) and a date and time.
Be sure to check [x] Raw signature just below that input box. Otherwise it auto-links it to your user page (seems to be the problem you have) --Splarka (rant) 08:01, 24 July 2006 (UTC)
Vanity signatures get overused already. A signature with an image four lines high? Please don't! Femto13:26, 24 July 2006 (UTC)
Hiding the page header?
Hey, I was thinking about proposing an improvement to the Portuguese Wikipedia Main Page, and i would like to know: How does the main page hide the article header? (How there's no... Main Page - From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia on it) Is it something you can do with wiki markup or is it set by an admin control panel?
It is done via some evil JavaScript code at MediaWiki:Monobook.js, which adds a few extra style hacks when the page title matches the Main Page. There's no way to do it with wiki markup. --cesarb22:34, 23 July 2006 (UTC)
You can also remove the text "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia". Many Wikipedias are not using that sub-title. I suspect that those community think that there visitors will know that the are on Wikipedia because of the logo so there is no need to put it on every page again and again. --Walter21:59, 24 July 2006 (UTC)
Locating boxed sections at end of some articles
I've come up against a couple of instances where the content of a box of information at the bottom of an article does not appear in the article itself when edited. From what I've seen, it appears both <reference /> and {{info id}} are used to create these. I haven't been able to find out how to get at them. Would anyone be able to explain that for me and, if possible, explain the difference between the two (why use one vs. the other) or explain what's actually going on and why if my guesses are wrong.
I did a good amount of searching for answers to both questions unsuccessfully. I realize I could very easily be unaware of how to get to the info I need. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Richard G. Shewmaker19:51, 23 July 2006 (UTC)
<references/> generates the text for footnote-style references, see wikipedia:footnotes. The curly brace syntax is used for wikipedia:templates. When you edit an article, if you scroll down to the very bottom of the page (below the edit box) there is a list of links to all the templates that are used in the article. A template is fundamentally a collection of wikisource that can be used in multiple articles. -- Rick Block (talk) 21:05, 23 July 2006 (UTC)
I have all 35 novels by the author Jo Clayton and I'd like to add cover images to her article. Showing them on the article itself obviously would be unacceptable. Is there a way I can create an image document for each of the 35, associate it with the article, and just provide a text link next to the appropriate title? I've been unable to find information (I could make any sense of) regarding associating internal docs with an article and the text linking. If it would be possible to put both front and back cover images in the same document, I'd do that also. (If you can't already tell, I like the author's work, lol.) Richard G. Shewmaker19:51, 23 July 2006 (UTC)
It would be more appropriate to link the cover images to the articles about the books. Fiar use would not allow them to be used on an article about the author. It would also not be appropriate to create a gallery of book cover images, as that, too, would violate fair use. User:Zoe|(talk)21:09, 23 July 2006 (UTC)
It has nothing to do with the template; Template:Mario characters is not hidden by default. What happens is that Fawful has two templates which use the hide/show code; when a page has more than a certain number of hide/show sections, the JS code (see MediaWiki:Monobook.js) hides them all automagically:
// set up max count of Navigation Bars on page,
// if there are more, all will be hidden
// NavigationBarShowDefault = 0; // all bars will be hidden
// NavigationBarShowDefault = 1; // on pages with more than 1 bar all bars will be hidden
var NavigationBarShowDefault = 1;
There's no way with the current code to make it hidden by default, other than the ugly hack of using it twice in the same place (which will break if NavigationBarShowDefault is ever increased). --cesarb16:00, 23 July 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for the answer! That's a little weird, tho. I already wondere why the tiny mario-template is hidden, while the big half-life one is not. Why not hide all templates with a hide/show button by default? --Conti|✉16:31, 23 July 2006 (UTC)
Like cesarb said, the templates only hide when there's more than one on the page. So if there were two Half Life templates they'd hide like so:
What about using HTML commenting code, i.e., <!-- newline content newline //--> and indicate this in appropriate part of the article? This seems too simple, so it's probably a bad idea, lol. Richard G. Shewmaker19:58, 23 July 2006 (UTC)
I may be wrong, as I have only two days experience at using Navigation bars, but wouldn't the following code force the template over the nav bar threshold and make it hide?
This would avoid the need for duplicating the templates, as shown here. Before I make use of this code though, can anyone see any flaws with this approach? Thanks. Road Wizard22:22, 24 July 2006 (UTC)
That is nothing more than the "ugly hack of using it twice in the same place" I mentioned above. It is using two nested NavFrames, which happens (possibly by chance) to not have any negative effect other than being counted as two uses by the code. --cesarb01:24, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
Thank you for the advice, and sorry if I regurgitated 'nothing more than the "ugly hack of using it twice in the same place" [you] mentioned above'. I misinterpreted your 'using it twice' comment to mean the way Daduzi showed above, whereas mine avoided duplicating the same template. However, as the use of the code still seems to be frowned upon, I will make sure not to use it. Thanks again. Road Wizard18:11, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
Google question
Can anyone answer the following question: if my userpage has been deleted, and a redirect created in its place, will the old revisions, currently visible in Google, go away after Google crawls again? - CrazyRussiantalk/email05:27, 23 July 2006 (UTC)
google search in an algorithmic manner, meaning regardless if its new or old page, as long as its in the web, itll still be visible Bloodpack11:08, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
The job queue (from what I have seen) sometimes has trouble with redirects. A null edit to the redirect cleansed it. --Splarka (rant) 07:41, 23 July 2006 (UTC)
Somewhere between Windows XP Home, Character Map, Firefox 1.5.0.4, and Wikipedia several non-visible characters got inserted into the "move target" box. So I actually moved the page to Coup_d%27%C3%89%C2%90%C2%90%C2%90tat which seems wrong somehow.
I believe I have now repaired all the damage but somebody more experienced with the pedia should check it over just to be sure.
And when the dust settles Coup d'état should be moved to Coup d'État, which is currently occupied by a redirect page, so I couldn't have moved it over anyhow.
You did repair all the damage; I deleted the broken redirects, did the correct move and fixed all the double redirects. --cesarb01:29, 23 July 2006 (UTC)
16:55:56 Port Scanning has been detected from 207.142.131.228 (scanned ports:TCP (4749, 4748, 4746, 4742, 4744, 4745))
15:59:46 Port Scanning has been detected from 207.142.131.228 (scanned ports:TCP (3179, 3146, 3181, 3184, 3182, 3183))
(timestamp is in gmt-4) This is a Wikimedia IP. I've been getting this intermittently for the past 12 hours. Just thought I'd make a note of it someplace. — Nathan(talk)/ 20:47, 22 July 2006 (UTC)
This is almost certainly a false alarm caused by broken firewall software. Please provide exact details of the 'scan'. --Brion23:05, 22 July 2006 (UTC)
My firewall is certainly not "broken". Outpost Firewall's logs are just as I've pasted; I have no further information. I don't have any sort of ultra-sensitive/paranoid options enabled. Can we please deal with the problem rather than point fingers and blame the software, which is certainly not the case? I don't make outrageous claims of portscanning for no reason, nor am I in the habit of falsifying information. Let's deal with the immediate problem. If you are unwilling to deal with the problem, just say so instead of telling me my firewall software is "broken". You can contact me on my talk page, I don't feel like sticking around here in case I get accused of manufacturing this just to cause trouble (which is probably what will happen next). If you're unwilling to deal with this, I can always report it to the upstream ISP. — Nathan(talk)/ 23:09, 22 July 2006 (UTC)
False positives to port scan detectors aren't unheard of; see for instance [4]. These log lines are also useless; they don't specify if what was detected was RST packets (which can happen legitimately), FIN or FIN/ACK packets (which can happen legitimately), ACK packets (which can happen legitimately - see a pattern here?), SYN packets (the ones more likely to be a real port scan), or something else. Even in the SYN case, the source IP address can be easily spoofed, so it cannot be trusted (the only way to be sure would be to complete the three-way handshake, which your firewall probably does not do). Given all that, I find it unlikely that it isn't a simple case of your software crying wolf. The best way to know the truth would be to run a sniffer, which will probably show the stray packets to be nothing more than leftovers of connections you recently made to the Wikimedia image servers. --cesarb01:42, 23 July 2006 (UTC)
Here's another example of a false positive with the firewall software you're using: [5] In this case, the likely instigation was that the user had installed some trojaned software on his own computer. If you'd like us to investigate, we really need more details about what these 'port scans' look like; please contact the manufacturer of your firewall software and tell them you need to provide more detailed logs including source ports, packet types (SYN, ACK, etc) and if possible actual packet captures. --Brion06:53, 23 July 2006 (UTC)
I should point out that the manufacturer would most likely like to know about and fix any false positive problems. Please do contact them. --Brion07:13, 23 July 2006 (UTC)
And for what it's worth, I have done some quick packet sniffing checks on our end and see no unexpected outgoing connections from the address you give. The port numbers look like normal random port sequences on the client end, as expected from the connections from the client to the server. --Brion07:33, 23 July 2006 (UTC)
FWIW, a second account, sort of. Sorry, no details, it was several months ago and I didn't sniff further. I tried whether a newer version of the Kerio firewall [6] would be an improvement to my ancient system. It also gave me port scan alerts that resolved coming from a Wikimedia image server. (A hyperactive firewall being more likely than an attack from the Wikisevers, I finally 'solved' that problem by staying with the more stable older version which doesn't give such detailed warnings… :) Femto15:04, 23 July 2006 (UTC)
search function
i would just like to note that the wikipedia search function sucks balls. like, completely and utterly is a total piece of shit. if you misplace a single letter, the actual thing you are looking for will not be found in the list of options. as well, i searched BJAODN, and couldnt find the (massive) article for the life of me. why is it such a piece of crap? thanks-- Benji6419:59, 22 July 2006 (UTC)
if i had a admin power i would give you a warning any ways. soeone who dose plz do!!!
Nah, the person just needs to learn civility. You're more than welcome to write a new search function, if you'd like. Our programmers are, with only a couple of exceptions, all volunteers who do the work for free in their spare time. User:Zoe|(talk)20:19, 22 July 2006 (UTC)
Try searching for "WP:BJAODN" (a lot of the commonly accessed articles in the inner workings can be found using WP: codes). That or when the search results come up go to the bottom of the page and where it says "Search in namespaces" check "Wikipedia". Articles about the running of Wikipedia are found in that namespace, which is not searched by default as the majority of users are looking for articles about things in the real world rather than in the inner workings of Wikipedia. In any case, ball sucking is a perfectly valid lifestyle choice and is even being considered as a possible Olympic sport for the 2012 games, please don't besmirch it by comparing it to the Wikipedia search engine. --Daduzitalk20:52, 22 July 2006 (UTC)
hahaha no im not angry, and i didnt mean to offend anyone (sorry), i should have used more appropriate language. anyways, its just that after prolonged use the function, it becomes increasingly clear that it is deficient. im not a programmer, and i dont know anything about it, except what ive noticed (if i was a programmer, with an understanding of the principles, i would certainly attempt to remedy the situation). i thought the issue was something which merited mentioning, as it is something that is so essential to the functioning of the encyclopedia. Benji6421:37, 22 July 2006 (UTC)
What does it mean when a sockpuppet plaque appears on your page?
It is suspected that this user might be a sock puppet or impersonator of SirIsaacBrock.
This was put on my page. What is a sock puppet? Is it O.K. if I remove this from my page or not? Capit19:09, 22 July 2006 (UTC)
{{Infobox Indian urban area |
native_name=Nagpur |
latd = 21.06|longd=79.03|
locator_position=right|
state_name=Maharashtra |
district=[[Nagpur district|Nagpur]] |
Leader_title=Mayor |
Leader_name= Naresh Keshaorao Gawande (2005)|
altitude=310|
population_as_of = 2001 |
population_total = 2,129,500 |
population_as_of = 2006 est. |
population_total = 2,420,000<ref name="Estimated Population of Nagpur urban area in 2006, Nagpur 114th largest city in world in 2006/"> {{cite web |url=http://www.citymayors.com/features/largest_cities_2.html|title="The world's largest cities"|publisher=[[City Mayors]]|accessdate=2006-06-26}}</ref> |
population_density = <br />12,300 |
area_magnitude=1 E? |
area_total=218 |
area_telephone= 91-712 |
postal_code= 4400xx |
vehicle_code_range= MH-31 |
footnotes = |
}}
In this infobox, I am trying to find a way to list both the estimated population of 2006, as well as the population as per the 2001 census. Currently, only the 2006 population comes up. I'll appreciate your help.
You're overwriting the result of the population_as_of and population_total parameters, and as a result, it only reads one. Titoxd(?!?)18:18, 22 July 2006 (UTC)
Is there a way to put both population figures into the infobox without them conflicting? How do I change the syntax for this? --Wikindian20:41, 22 July 2006 (UTC)
There's a few options, none of which are particularly good:
You could modify the Template:Infobox Indian urban area template itself, adding new "population_total_2" and "population_as_of_2" parameters. But modifications to widely-used infoboxes like this one should be made with extreme caution.
You could replace the {{Infobox with {{subst:Infobox and save the article. That would replace the infobox template in the article with the actual wikicode used to display the infobox. Then you could add new rows to the table to hold your additional population info. But that would be A Bad Idea for two reasons: it will mean that the infobox in this article will not get updated if the template for the infobox gets improved later, and it will make it harder to correctly update the figures in the article in the future.
I would suggest that you reconsider whether trying to do this is a good idea to begin with. There's a constant temptation to shove more information into an article's infobox; but doing too much of that undermines the point of having the infobox to begin with -- namely, to present the most basic information about the subject in a consistent, easy-to-read format. Putting two sets of population figures in an infobox is probably overkill in this regard. I would stick to one set of population figures in the infobox (whichever is considered to be more important), and place the other set in a footnote. Kickaha Ota02:04, 23 July 2006 (UTC)
I can never find the pages I want when I need them! Now I want the one that lists the different templates for Speedy Delete -- can't find it. Massmato17:22, 22 July 2006 (UTC)
Have the lines underneath level 2 headings changed? I don't remember them running through tables in the manner they are now doing. This is affecting articles in the en Wikipedia, but the effect can be easily seen for example in this de article: Arconciel. The line underneath 'Geographie' runs right through the middle of the table on the right. I don't remember it doing that. As I say, it's affecting en as well, and with both IE and Firefox. (Bugzilla report 6035 seems to be related.) --BillC12:12, 22 July 2006 (UTC)
2 questions only
cant remember the exact date/time i registered here in wikipedia, any clue as to where to find it?
how do i change the style of my signature (colors, fonts, etc.)
The User Creation Log has the information about account registration times. For information on customizing your signature, I would recommend you take a look at WP:SIG#Customizing your signature and WP:SIGHELP. Looking at the markup code used by various user's signatures (use the edit function to view signatures on talk pages) can also help provide useful ideas on how to do things. --Allen3talk12:43, 22 July 2006 (UTC)
thanks, finally figured it out, all you have to do is to check the RAW signature option so you can insert your codes Bloodpack10:40, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
"Main Section"
I didn't know whether this was too technical for the other pump, so I posted it here.
Please note here. If you look at the main article feature, it currently reads: "A-League 2006-07#Pre-Season Challenge Cup". Is there any way I can still make it link to that article and section whilst having it simply read "2006-07 Pre Season Cup" (like the feature when you can write "[[User:Daniel.Bryant|Daniel.Bryant's user page]]?" Thanks in advance, Killfest2(Talk)04:08, 22 July 2006 (UTC)
(edit conflict) I believe the answer is "don't do that then". It's "main article", not "main section". In fact, {{details}} might be even better in this case. --cesarb04:30, 22 July 2006 (UTC)
A side effect of the database issues earlier?
See Molly Moon Stops the World. If you go to the page's history, you'll see that the lastest edit was from me, where I added the {{stub}} tag to the page. The oddity is that the current page does not have the stub tag I added, meaning that the original version of the page is still showing. I tried clearing my cache and using the purge function for the page, but the original version is still showing. Is simply re-applying the edit the only way around this? --Spring Rubber02:34, 22 July 2006 (UTC)
I have pasted below a section from the article Term symbol. The second bullet point, starting "Fifth..." appears to be indented more than it should. (In the actual article, the text following this section also appears to be indented more than it should.) I have been working on trying to get it at the same indentation as the previous bullet point; I have tried things like adding whitespace and breaks, but I have not been successful. It seems that the colon used for indenting the tables is causing the problem, but this problem did not seem to occur with a simple test I did without complex table formatting. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.--GregRM22:13, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
Looking at the HTML that's generated, there's an open <dl> that's not closed. Adding a close dl after the table (which I did in your example, below) "fixes" it. This seems like it's a wikimarkup problem of some sort. I've entered this as bugzilla:6776. -- Rick Block (talk) 23:57, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
Fourth, extract smaller tables representing each possible term. Each table will be (2L+1)(2S+1), and will contain "1"s as entries. The first table extracted corresponds to ML ranging from −2 to +2 (so L = 2), with a single value for MS (implying S = 0). This corresponds to a 1D term. The remaining table is 3×3. Then we extract a second table, removing the entries for ML and MS both ranging from −1 to +1 (and so S = L = 1, a 3P term). The remaining table is a 1×1 table, with L = S = 0, i.e., a 1S term.
S=0, L=2, J=2
1D2
Ms
0
Ml
+2
1
+1
1
0
1
−1
1
−2
1
S=1, L=1, J=2,1,0
3P2, 3P1, 3P0
Ms
+1
0
−1
Ml
+1
1
1
1
0
1
1
1
−1
1
1
1
S=0, L=0, J=0
1S0
Ms
0
Ml
0
1
(another </dl> line follows)
Fifth, applying Hund's rules, order the states by increasing order of energy:
3P0 < 3P1 < 3P2 < 1D2 < 1S0
Clearing autoblocks
Does blocking a range for 1 second really work, or is it just a Wikipedian urban myth? If it does work, then how? -- King of♥♦♣♠04:54, 28 July 2006 (UTC)
The block code has been changed recently; the reason it worked was that an expiring block in an IP address cleared all blocks for that IP address. So, if you blocked a IP for an year and the same IP for a second, the shorter block would expire first and clear the longer block. The correct way to clear an autoblock is to unblock the IP address, which clears all blocks on it including autoblocks. --cesarb15:58, 28 July 2006 (UTC)
Infoboxes
Can somebody point me to a tutorial on infoboxes? I want to know how to create one and how they work. Thanks! --Bookgrrl03:20, 28 July 2006 (UTC)
I don't think there's anything that can clearly be triggered on, like there is with sections (eg. not all <div>s should have an [Edit] link, and not all {{templates}} should have an edit link either). In the general case, edit the page, and see the "Pages transcluded onto this page:" list at the bottom. Alternatively, infoboxes can force an [edit] link to be displayed [7]. --Interiot02:20, 31 July 2006 (UTC)
edit conflicts with self
I notice sometimes if I edit something, and it gets submitted and I decide to go back to the previous page to change something one more time, it may or may not give me a edit conflict if no one else has edited it in between. Is there a reason whether it might not or might? Elle vécut heureuseà jamais (Be eudaimonic!) 02:49, 28 July 2006 (UTC)
You'll notice this more often than not on talk pages, because of the signature (~~~~) expanding (using subst: could also cause this). I think if all you do is edit lines not edited before, the edit merger can handle it. (maybe?) --Splarka (rant) 07:13, 28 July 2006 (UTC)
On my computer here, my watchlist and page versions have not been updated for about 2 days. This is not true for another computer on which I operate. Anyone know why?
Sincerely,
AdamBiswanger120:43, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
I guess this is the place to post this...
Well when the chick skin is chosen for me, the search box and the "go" and "search" buttons on the main page are not formatted correctly. They stick out into the page and block out some of the news content. Should this be changed? Am I the only one with this problem? Is perfection necessary here on wikipedia?
Wikipedia causes problems with Opera
I am using Opera 8.5. Today, and only today, Wikipedia regularly crashes Opera, usually by clicking on a "diff" link in my watchlist.
This reminded me about a complaint posted on the My Opera Community forums, by a user who could not access Wikipedia using Opera (but succeeded IDing as Mozilla). [8]
Advice or comments on both issues are appreciated.
P.S. I posted on the My Opera Community Forums regarding a plan to collate a list of websites that work with Opera. If Wikipedia is verified to work and render well - without any problems - in Opera, we can add Wikipedia to the list. So have you noticed any problems using Wikipedia with Opera, or can you certify Wikipedia as an Opera-friendly site? So far, I've not noticed any significant problems except for today's crashes.
If you want to download Opera to verify, the download link is http://opera.com.
Certainly the crashing part is Opera's issue (no webpage, no matter how broken, should be able to crash a browser). --Interiot16:43, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
A crash in Opera is a bug in Opera. Report the bug to Opera, and/or upgrade to a non-crashing version. --Brion04:19, 28 July 2006 (UTC)
I'm glad that Wikipedia adheres to W3C standards. However, I don't know why Opera crashes only when clicking on Wikipedia links - other websites don't have this problem. I agree it could be an Opera bug. I've posted on the My Opera Community Forums regarding this issue, so several anons or new users may reply here. The link to the thread: http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=149179 (I'm Ace Jack Neo). --J.L.W.S. The Special One06:07, 28 July 2006 (UTC)
Websites should not be able to crash your browser. If Wikipedia can do it accidentally, then a malicious website could figure out how to do it intentionally, so hopefully the crash issue is or will be fixed in a newer version of Opera. That's true regardless of whether the pages on Wikipedia are standards compliant or buggy. --Interiot06:42, 28 July 2006 (UTC)
So far, no crashes in Opera 9. I'll try editing with Opera 8.5 and see if it still crashes. Opera 9 has another problem. If I go to another site for a while, and come back to Wikipedia, it will log me out! This doesn't happen in Opera 8.5. --J.L.W.S. The Special One08:45, 29 July 2006 (UTC)
Wikipedia logs you out automatically after some time; it's not specific to Opera. Try checking the "remember me" box and see if it makes any difference. --cesarb16:37, 29 July 2006 (UTC)
I must have forgotten to check "Remember me" when logging in with Opera 9. I did check the box when using Opera 8.5. I'll try it and see if it helps. I noticed another problem: sometimes the editing toolbar doesn't seem to load, or when it does, it takes too long to load. --J.L.W.S. The Special One02:20, 30 July 2006 (UTC)
History order bug?
Is there a clock-synch problem or something? Several times today I've thought I've seen my Watchlist acting funny, and just now, looking at this history page, It's showing my two July 27th comments in the wrong order, with a timestamp on the "earlier" (actually later) one that's got to be 30 minutes to an hour behind what it should be. —Bunchofgrapes (talk) 03:10, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
Whatlinkshere on Images incomplete/nonexistent/odd
So Special:Whatlinkshere/Image:KarazhanInterior01.jpg refuses to acknowledge that the image is included in two articles, World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade and Karazhan Tower. Image:KarazhanInterior01.jpg otoh, tells the whole truth and has the files in the "linked to" section. Is this a known 'feature' of WLH for images, that I happen to have been ignorant of, or did something slip? It's a little inconvenient because it prevents the use of WLH to see if an image is orphaned or not. (Clearly, the image page would do, and has to be visited anyway, but it makes the process more mistake prone. This image got deleted, for example.) -Splash - tk02:41, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
WLH and Image file links have worked this way for quite some time... (for what it's worth, category links work the same way, they don't show up in WLH but instead show up at the bottom of the Category: page). --Interiot04:46, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
I believe it is fairly well known that whatlinkshere does nothing for images, wich is why we have the {{not orphan}} template to alert people about media that are linked but not inlined. Images displayed inline in the article should show up as file links though, if they don't it's usualy the result of an image added to a transcluded template rather than to the article directly, though in the later software versions the job queue should take care of that eventualy. Otherwise making a null edit (or a normal edit for that matter) to the article(s) in question will normaly fix such problems. --Sherool(talk)06:25, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
Firstly, can someone please add a id="SearchSearchButton" (or something) to the search box, such as the "go" button (<input name="go" class="searchButton" id="searchGoButton" value="Go" type="submit">) because I rarely use the "search" button (I don't like the on-wiki search feature) and would like to hide it through css, but can't.
Also, would there be a way to bypass special:search when you press the go button. I just want to add my query to /wiki/MyQuery or /w/index.php?title=query (which would be possible) and remove the name="go" from the go button or else it would be ?title=query&go=go. I want to do this because sometimes I want to go to a page that i know doesn't exist and don't want to go to a search page and click on the redlink to the page and cut off &action=edit in the url. Or if I want to edit a page or view the history directly from the search (maybe by searching "page?action=edit or "&" "). I think this should be an option in "my preferences".
Removing the go=go from the url however would not be as easy. Changing the name to "" just results in &=go. Changing the value to "" as well results in &=. However, with the css and js above, it is functional and almost what you seem to want. --Splarka (rant) 08:06, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for the code! And, the css was a little ugly because the go button was sitting there on the left, so I changed it to the following and it worked great:
#searchform input.searchButton {display:none}
#searchform input#searchGoButton {display:inline !important; font-weight: normal; /* I didn't like the bold */ }
Also, about the go=go, I didn't mean changing name="go" to name="" or value="go" to value="", I meant totally removing both parameters and I have tested it and it works.
Also, the only problem with the JS code is that if I try to do bob&action=edit, the search form will automatically urlencode the '&' (well, it does in Firefox), and it won't work. If only there was a way to reconvert the urlencodes back into non-encoded and meta-refresh to the article. I am pretty sure it could be done in php, but the only php i know is <?php echo $something ?>. I will work on that........
Ok, I just solved the go=go and the '&' problem by making http://wikipedia.georgemoney.com/search.php . It redirects search.php?title=bob to en.wp(short for full url)/w/index.php?title=bob and search.php?title=bob%26action=edit to en.wp/w/index.php?title=bob&action=edit. It also ignores any go=go. GeorgeMoney(talk)15:50, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
Hmm. That seems a bit overly complex. I think I found a much easier way (at least it seems to work for me), try this:
This changes the go button to view, and the search button to edit (the value and label should stay at these words), and the name of both to action. The consequece of this is: clicking edit takes you to /w/index.php?title=WHATEVER&action=edit, and clicking go *should* take you to /w/index.php?title=WHATEVER&action=view ... however, it takes me (at least) directly to /wiki/WHATEVER, even if the page does not exist (and not to the edit page). Note that this still does not let you manually type &action=edit but it does let you just click 'edit' instead. You could of course add more buttons for history, raw, etc (but that uses advanced javascript inserts). Also note: To see or use the edit button, you'll have to remove the display:none from the above css. --Splarka (rant) 01:46, 28 July 2006 (UTC)
There's a lot of folks out there who write stupendously stupid bots, which happily churn out hundreds of requests per second with no concern on how this affects our ability to serve other people. A number of default User-Agent strings, as well as the lack of one, are blocked to reduce the impact.
Please set a User-Agent string which is specific and if possible includes contact information for you (e-mail address and/or URL). --Brion02:12, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
Image:BART logo.svg keeps appearing in C:CSD
Why on earth does Image:BART logo.svg keep popping up in C:CSD? Even more spookily, it refuses to disappear even after it is deleted and the C:CSD category page purged. Do we have a ghostbuster that kills ghost images around here? Kimchi.sg11:38, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
Possibly leftovers from the database borkage last week. I've taken that server back out of rotation, and it'll get rebuilt again in a couple days. --Brion21:54, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
reverting images doesn't show up in list of contributions
Also, say I wanted to link to the above image without making it a remote link. How would I go about doing that? TerraFrost00:35, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
Regarding the image link, just add a colon to the start of the link (i.e. [[:Image:Hatak.jpg]] results in Image:Hatak.jpg). As to the contributions issue, I can't say why it happened, just that given some of the comments on here and Wikipedia:Help Desk it seems something screwy is going on. --Daduzitalk00:55, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
Try clicking on "Logs" after you click on My Contributions...it is towards the top of your contributions page (at least with the default skin). I think this may be what you are looking for.--GregRM01:05, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
I have PNG versions ready offline, but how do I replace the old JPGs? Do I upload the new images into new image pages and have the old ones deleted? Or do I simply upload the new as a new version of the old images? My concern is that the latter route will monumentally screw things up. CaptainVindalootce22:26, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
Why are you converting these images? If it's to get rid of JPEG compression artifacts, you need to take the screenshots again, not simply convert the JPEG to a PNG. Converting these images straight to a PNG will result in no improvement in image quality, and a much larger file size. (In fact, by the nature of these pictures, even the original screenshot saved as a PNG will probably have a larger file size than a JPEG.) I don't understand what you mean about thumbnails. —Bkell (talk) 22:49, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
I'm not trying to remove artifacts, and I have originals in BMP anyway. The images are currently in the article as thumbnails (code: [[Image:Example.jpg|thumb]]), because when they are placed into the article in frames ([[Image:Example.jpg|frame]]) they for some reason ignore any scaling parameters and fill the entire page with the full size image. All I'm trying to do is get a scalable image in a frame really, so if you can tell me how to do that with the current JPGs, then all's well. As PNGs, unless I am mistaken, can be more easily scaled than JPGs, PNG seems a good way forward. CaptainVindalootce23:17, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
If I'm reading you correctly, you can acheive what you want by adding a size parameter. So, for instance, you could change [[Image:Swat_3_0004.jpg|thumb|right|Engaging a suspect]] to [[Image:Swat_3_0004.jpg|thumb|250px|right|Engaging a suspect]]. I've added an example of this syntax in action to this section so you can see what I mean. All the various things you can do with images are covered at Wikipedia:Extended image syntax, which is an actually comprehensive and useful tutorial on Wikipedia (which can sometimes be a rarity). --Daduzitalk23:56, 25 July 2006 (UTC)
PNGs and JPEGs can be scaled equally well (though if a JPEG is rescaled and saved as a JPEG again, it will gain more compression artifacts). Both are raster formats, which represent an image as a collection of pixels. Perhaps you're thinking about SVGs, which can be cleanly scaled to any size? You're not going to be able to save a screenshot as an SVG, though, since a screenshot is a raster image. —Bkell (talk) 00:44, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
Gah! I see what I'm doing wrong now! I'm just arranging the image parameters in the wrong order! And I must be confusing PNG with SVG, although being Bitmap-based (according to the article), I would have expected PNG to be a bit more tolerant than JPG. Graphics is not my area of expertise. Thanks, CaptainVindalootce15:12, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
Like I said, I'm no expert! :-) If I remember the GCSE IT lesson about three or four years ago now, don't JPGs just use, in effect, slightly larger pixels than bitmaps? The article is fixed now though, thanks! CaptainVindalootce15:33, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
JPEG compression works by dividing the image into "blocks" of pixels; usually these blocks are 8×8 pixels in size. It compresses each block of pixels independently, I think. Perhaps this is what you're thinking of. The underlying pixels, though, are the same pixels you would have in a PNG image. The primary difference between JPEG and PNG is that JPEG compression is lossy, which means that the image after JPEG compression is not quite the same as the image before. This difference is usually unnoticeable in photographs, but can be quite visible (as "fuzz") in images with large blocks of solid color; see Wikipedia:Preparing images for upload for an example. PNG compression is lossless, so the image that comes out is exactly the same as the image that went in. This means that PNGs can be edited and resaved over and over with no loss of quality, whereas doing this with a JPEG will cause a decrease in image quality each time the image is saved. JPEG compression tends to work best for photographic images; PNG works best for flags, maps, diagrams, logos, line drawings, charts, and so on. Another difference between JPEG and PNG is that PNG images can have transparency (and even different amounts of transparency), but JPEGs must be completely opaque. The underlying image in both formats, though, is composed of the same pixels; this is why it's possible to convert an image from either format directly to the other. —Bkell (talk) 15:45, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
"Pump"
--201.17.164.229 00:41, 24 July 2006 (UTC)
