Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 49

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Village pump (technical) archive  

This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (technical).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

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Filter for logs

How hard would it be to add to Special:Log a tickbox for admin logs only? Since the implementation of patrolled pages there are a lot of "mark patrolled" entries cluttering up the logs, which makes it harder to get a sense of an admin's work at a glance. What would be involved? Thanks, Chick Bowen 03:42, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

That actually sounds like a good idea. Though perhaps broaden it to having an option for each "user-right package". (I would imagine that looking at just bureaucrat actions or just bot actions, might be nice as well.) - jc37 03:49, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure why we're even storing those automatic entries in the patrol log. I'd think the log would be more useful if it only recorded pages that were deliberately marked as patrolled. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 20:06, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

I agree. The reality is that it's not so much that the pages listed have been patrolled is that they are exempt from patrolling. Chick Bowen 20:59, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Would prefer multiple selection for log types, instead of single selection with a list box. — Werdna • talk 03:27, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Special:UncategorizedPages

Is anyone else able to access this page recently, I have tried several times over the last few days and I get nothing. Is this a common problem or is it just my computer? - Icewedge (talk) 16:48, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

Just tried it. Chrome, FireFox, and Safari all show a blank page; IE gives one of two error messages- either one from Wikimedia or it's own default error message. I'm running under Vista if that matters. Weird. —Ashanda (talk) 22:07, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

There seems to be an invalid title in the results somehow. rev:41673 should prevent the error when the change goes live. In the meantime, the error seems to be in the first entry, so specifying an offset - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:UncategorizedPages?offset=1 should bypass it. Mr.Z-man 23:43, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

I wonder if it's the page with no title? Anomie⚔ 23:58, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

Same for Special:WithoutInterwiki. --Splarka (rant) 07:02, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Followup: Page with no title has been deleted but those special pages still appear to be broken. --Splarka (rant) 18:24, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

It probably wasn't deleted from the querycache table (or its a different page with an invalid title). Mr.Z-man 21:45, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Ahh, damn, those are "Expensive" special pages (curse you miser mode). --Splarka (rant) 23:15, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Tim just synchronized /includes/PageQueryPage.php to rev:41673 (mrzman's patch). It is (was) the empty title. --Splarka (rant) 03:59, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Actually that rev just passed null to link(), so any bad title would display the same way. I changed it in rev:41726 to display the title from the db, if you want to try get Tim to sync it again :) (there was also an intermediate fix in rev:41677). Mr.Z-man 04:40, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Image:JeremyDuncan.png

Image:JeremyDuncan.png is coming up at all for me. When I go see the file source, I get a 404 message. Any suggestions? -- Veggy (talk) 20:24, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

Looks lost. Still exists at archive.org though. Probably should reupload. --Splarka (rant) 07:10, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Yep. Reuploaded. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 17:21, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Ampersand cannot be deleted

When an article contains "&" in its title, clicking on the "(delete)" link on its AfD does not work; you get a "Wikimedia Foundation Error." For example, Schiel & Denver Publishing (see debate) cannot be deleted using the link. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 04:22, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

A URI on Wikimedia cannot contain an &amp; (neither raw or URLencoded): http://en.wikipedia.org/%26amp%3B ... this is blocked (and has been for around a year). When creating such a delete link, you simply use an &:

(<span class="plainlinks">[{{fullurl:Schiel & Denver Publishing|wpReason={{urlencode: [[Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Schiel & Denver Publishing]]}}&action=delete}} delete]</span>)

produces: (delete). --Splarka (rant) 07:27, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

English Wikipedia messed up on Firefox

I just noticed this yesterday. While viewing Firefox on Wikipedia v. 3.0.3, many of the pages do not load the sidebar:

http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e124/Nighthawk000/broken.png http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e124/Nighthawk000/broken2.png

I checked the French Wiki, and it is fine. The same pages also work on IE6. I have no idea what is causing this, any idea of what it is or how to fix it?Rcduggan (talk) 12:29, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

The skins at Special:Preferences have different page designs but I'm not sure which you have from the displayed part of the window. Maybe you chose a skin without sidebar (but some similar links elsewhere) in your English Wikipedia account. Which skin is it and do you get a sidebar in other skins like the default MonoBook? PrimeHunter (talk) 13:35, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Never mind, I fixed it. Cleared out the cache and it worked fine. Thanks for your help. rcduggan (talk) 15:06, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Non-autoconfirmed admin?

Resolved

 – my own stupidity Happy‑melon 12:37, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Is this me? I just tried to move a page, but got a warning that I think is used when non-autoconfirmed editors try to move pages... mightily confused! Any suggestions or shall I take it to bugzilla? Happy‑melon 12:31, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

I get the same warning with my alternate account. Happy‑melon 12:34, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

What page are you trying to move? --Chris 12:35, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Ok, no worries, I was trying to move a page to an interwiki prefix X-@. I wondered why there were no pages beginning with "TT:"... Happy‑melon 12:37, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Although, that warning is still very confusing... I think I will raise that at bugzilla. Happy‑melon 12:38, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Before being deleted by User:MediaWiki default as "No longer required", MediaWiki:Immobile namespace contained: "Source or destination title is of a special type; cannot move pages from and into that namespace." It's still listed at Special:AllMessages. Would the message have been displayed if it had not been deleted? (Maybe a bold admin would just restore and experiment) PrimeHunter (talk) 13:24, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

No, the message still exists, it is just at its 'default' value set within the MediaWiki software. Up to version X of MediaWiki, all [[MediaWiki:]] namespace messages had to exist, so they were created by the software when MediaWiki was installed. After the software was updated such that non-existant messages used the 'default' value, all the unnecessary messages were deleted by a maintenance script logging the deletions to that special user account. So if the message was triggered it would display as it appears in Special:Allmessages. I believe that message is used when you try to move pages which are in an 'immutable namespace' (one which has been configured to prohibit moves in and out of it). Happy‑melon 14:28, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

One-way sorts

In the Colleges of the University of Cambridge page, the Fixed assets category only sorts one way for me, unlike most of the others which can sort both ways. Is there any way to change this? It Is Me Here (talk) 13:40, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Sortable tables are not my specialty but [1] appears to help. Maybe there is a better fix, and the downwards sort appears to be alphabetical instead of numerical. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:22, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

For numerical columns with commas, the {{nts}} template must be used to get the sorting to work correctly. {{ntsh}} is useful for rows with non-numeric values in {{nts}}-using columns.[2] More information is available at Help:Sorting. Anomie⚔ 15:57, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Thank you very much! It Is Me Here (talk) 18:22, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

OpenID

Who wants to use OpenID on Wikimedia projects? Sign here!--Kozuch (talk) 14:17, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

What is OpenID? Little Red Riding Hoodtalk 21:30, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

Wow, if only there was some huge free encyclopaedia right at our fingertips in which we could look it up... would be even better still if the above words could actually be linked to the relevant topic... ;P _TalkIslander 21:31, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

:( Little Red Riding Hoodtalk 21:47, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

Heh, I was only kidding. No offence meant at all - appologies if you took it the wrong way ;) _TalkIslander 21:48, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

I believe work on OpenID support is already under way: see http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:OpenID -- The Anome (talk) 11:01, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

You are right - the extension is ready. Implementation on Wikipedia or other Wikimedia projects is a question though (read there might be little discussion and close to no plan). That is why I am asking if there is a demand for the service.--Kozuch (talk) 14:59, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

I would love OpenID in Wikipedia. NerdyNSK (talk) 10:17, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Can't edit any MediaWiki pages

The MediaWiki pages are protected by default. Why are they? Non-admins want to edit them. -Porchcrop ^{(talk|contributions)} 07:51, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

They are protected because if vandalized they would have far reaching negative affects due to there visibility, for example if MediaWiki:Tagline was changed to some string of obscene words every one who visited Wikipedia would see it and as WP gets thousands of views a second such a vandalism would greatly impact our perceived credibility as well as just offending thousands. - Icewedge (talk) 07:58, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

Non-admins can request edits to a MediaWiki page by using {{editprotected}} on its talk page. Graham87 08:21, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

Non-admins also probably want to delete pages and block users; a desire doesn't equate to a granting of the ability to do so. The only reason there's a distinction between editors and administrators is that there are several abilities that, if granted to everyone, would cause havoc; editing the MediaWiki namespace is one of them. EVula // talk // ☯ // 14:55, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Reference formatter

There's a discussion at Template_talk:Cite_journal#Discouragement_of_.22authors.22_parameter abut discouraging the use of the "author(s)" parameter in citations, and requiring editors to use the "last=..., first=..., last2=..., first2=..., ... .... .... lastN=..., firstN=..." syntax. I understand that databases work better with field-formatted data than with strings that contain a lot of potential data items, but IMO expecting editors to enter an indefinite number of mark-up params will just discourage editors. So if the proposal is to be implemented it must be accompanied by an easy-to-use citation formatter. To me that means a button on the edit toolbar that invokes some Javascript, not a separate and currently unadvertised page on toolserver. The Javascript required would not be difficult, but would be long and fiddly because of the vast range of citation options. I wouldn't consider even starting a specification for it without a commitment that, if such a script's functionality is agreed and passes testing, it really will be implemented. How can one go about getting such a commitment? -- Philcha (talk) 05:45, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

One of the other language Wikipedias (French? German?) already has a cite button on their edit toolbar. But for the larger question, I suggest a posting at MediaWiki talk:Edittools, to see what editors who watch that page think. If they're agreeable, then it will happen (because adding an icon isn't such a big deal). As for getting it exactly right, if it's pretty good, and useful, from the beginning, then there is always time to tweak things. I wouldn't expect perfection, or even universal agreement, immediately. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 18:02, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Nostalgia skin

Wikipedia and MediaWiki in general is best viewed, in my opinion, with the Nostalgia skin (which is what I use), but I find that Nostalgia has not been kept up to date with various enhancements and developments that work with the newest skins, particularly MonoBook. I think we should place more emphasis in improving the Nostalgia skin, making it compatible with more scripts meant to be used with MonoBook, particularly with the Wikipedia:Gadgets, and also making Nostalgia correctly display links to the user pages. NerdyNSK (talk) 10:15, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Search box enhancing

Sorry for my very poor English. Our (ru-wiki) technician redirects me here ("prefix list drop down box in search box uses request "opensearch" (see: api.php), which not supports neither marking redirects nor indiaction of list incompletion. Propose to change it probably better in English wiki technical forum"). So, I try to repeat my request here:

• increase prefixes list (from current 10 entries);
• for incomplete list somewhat (special entry at list bottom?) indicate this;
• allow to jump (through abovementioned special entry?) to next/prev list part.

Further enhancement:

• indicate entries, which are redirects, and show their targets;
• indicate entries-disambigs.

-- A^VB^talk 14:52, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Editnotices for set-index pages

Resolved.

It's come up at WP:SHIPS that set index pages (such as HMS Agamemnon) are being decorated with editnotices suitable for disambiguation pages. The problem is that set index pages and disambiguation pages operate under different rules. Is there a way around this? Thanks. Haus^Talk 15:50, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

This is from {{Disambig editintro}}, apparently a project of WP:DAB. I've posed the question in a discussion there. — Bellhalla (talk) 19:10, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

I was asked to take a look at this. I have fixed the problem for those templates that I could find. If anyone finds other "set index article" pages that shows the disambig editnotice {{disambig editintro}} then report that over at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Disambiguation#Disambig editintro vs set index articles and we'll fix it.

--David Göthberg (talk) 03:22, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Strange automatic categorisation

For some reason, the page Kutas is being assigned the category "IPA templates", despite being an article, and as such appears in Category:IPA templates at present, instead of {{IPA-hu}}, which is the actual template used on it. I did not see any actual category markers in the article itself and so could not remove them; does anyone here know how one might go about fixing this problem? It Is Me Here (talk) 08:41, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

This should fix it. --MZMcBride (talk) 09:20, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for that, but I'm afraid Kutas still appears on Category:IPA templates for me, even after purging. It Is Me Here (talk) 10:00, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

It's not in the cat for me. Have you bypassed your browser cache? Algebraist 10:01, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Just required a null edit to remove it. You can do the same for the others if you'd like. --MZMcBride (talk) 10:07, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Great, it's fine now. Just one thing, though: why are some IPA templates shown under "T" and some under "I"? It Is Me Here (talk) 10:19, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

If they don't have a sort key then they are sorted under "T" for "Template". Some of them transclude the sort key {{PAGENAME}} (a magic word returning the page name without the namespace in front) from a documentation subpage. It should probably be added to the rest. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:44, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

OK, done. It Is Me Here (talk) 06:27, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

How can I upload a shrunken album cover?

Can anybody give me any help with this? There's a shrunken cover of a record album from Alun Davies, from 1972. I need some assistance in uploading this fair use copyright cover to Wikimedia Commons, and still don't "get it"-- yes, I've read the templates, but to upload and access, I'm clueless. Anyone? --leahtwosaints (talk) 09:14, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Wikimedia Commons only accepts free content images, not non-free content or fair use images like album covers. So the answer is that you shouldn't upload that particular image. For help on transferring *free* images from the English Wikipedia to the Wikimedia Commons, see wikipedia:moving images to the Commons. Graham87 11:14, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

I assume you meant 'accepts' otherwise you're saying that Wikimedia Commons is exactly the place to upload non-free images. :) --129.169.154.82 (talk) 11:52, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Fixed! – ukexpat (talk) 15:56, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Whoopsies, yep, gotta love homophones. Graham87 04:39, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Question

Using AWB, how do you search/replace carriage returns and other special ASCII codes?

This would enable multi-line search/replaces, and searching/replacing strings at the beginnings or ends of lines.

If there is any other way to do this besides AWB, I'd like to know about that too.

Please copy/paste your reply to my talk page, otherwise I'll probably never see the answer. Thank you.

The Transhumanist 21:38, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

\n is a newline; you'll have to check the regex box. --NE2 02:18, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Display of difference of characters on watchlists

✓Created user script. Franamax (talk) 20:18, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

I was unsure if I should have filed this under the proposal VP first, but here it goes. One of my main activities on wikipedia is merging abandoned fiction fancruft. I use my watchlist and Recentchanges to keep track of my actions. Now, whenever more than ~1000 characters are removed from an article (as often happens when redirecting after a merger), the character difference shows up in bold red, sticking out like a sore thumb on watchlists. However, when a fan restores the article (nearly always without preceeding discussion or warning, and no improvement to article whatsoever), the character difference shows up in a non-bold green, which is much easier to miss although it is way more disruptive than merging. Is there a good reason to not bolden ~1000 characters additions also? Or should I use a personalized userscript instead (I have never written one yet though)? – sgeureka ^t•c 07:30, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

The problem is that the WediaWiki software is making the decisions. For a small negative change, it uses "<span class='mw-plusminus-neg'>(-84)</span>", for a large negative change it uses "<strong class='mw-plusminus-neg'>(-627)</strong>" ("strong" makes it bold), but for any positive number, it uses "<span class='mw-plusminus-pos'>(+19,269)</span>". This means that you can't do what you want by just changing your monobook.css styles.

You seem to have two options here:

• Ask for a change in MediaWiki. VPP is likely not the best place, since it will affect more than just en:wiki. You could try placing a Bugzilla request (don't ask me how) or hope that a passing dev will see this (oh, Simetrical, wherefore art thou?)
• Or you could try writing a user script to loop through the various elements in the document and change their style. I was going to describe how difficult it would be, but instead I just did it. :) You can look in my monobook script to see how I change any positive text addition over 999 characters to bold and fuchsia-coloured, or you can try it yourself for a greater challenge. Franamax (talk) 01:03, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Thank you. Your monobook function works perfectly. – sgeureka ^t•c 12:09, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

You're welcome. For archive purposes, the permalink to my version of the script is here. I'll be disabling it now, that fuchsia colour is driving me nuts! Franamax (talk) 20:18, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Image not appearing

This was raised at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#List of Champ Car circuits but seems to be better suited here. In this edit Image:Detroit Grand Prix on Belle Isle route.svg is added but does not appear. In FF there is a blue link to the image and in IE there is a little box with an X. It seems to be related to the image size as an unsaved test at 73px caused the image to appear but another at 72px does not. Any ideas? CambridgeBayWeather Have a gorilla 09:15, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

I've asked this question over at Commons where the image specialists hang out. Let's see who comes up with the answer first! Franamax (talk) 19:42, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. CambridgeBayWeather Have a gorilla 04:56, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

I did some testing. This seems to be a new kind of bug. Usually we just have to change the size 1px to get MediaWiki to render a new version that works. Since if it has rendered a broken version for say 50px then that gets cached almost forever in the image servers, so you simply have to stop using that size. Or of course upload a new version.

But as you say, in this case anything below 73px does not work. So I think you have to upload a new version of the file. Preferably with some minor change so it isn't identical. Then each size should render again next time you use some size. With some luck that will fix it.

--David Göthberg (talk) 02:22, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

However, from the commons discussion, it would appear that no cached version exists for the smaller versions, for instance the 72px PNG image version is not there, rather than being a broken cached version. Perhaps somewhere deep in the bowels of the commons servers, there is an rsvg error message logged somewhere? Franamax (talk) 02:32, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Well, MediaWiki+Wikipedia+Commons is not a bug free system. Although it runs surprisingly smooth considered its complexity. But it is a known problem that some images have disappeared lately. So whatever the reason is that your image is missing, you need to make the servers try again. That is, you still need to upload a new version of the image. And then wait some minute to give them time to do their job, and then purge the pages involved.

Note to everyone: Sometimes the servers get the hiccups. So don't re-upload images immediately when there is a problem. Try purging and waiting some hours and see what happens. (Yes, the guys that manages the servers are great, they usually fix most things within some hours.)

--David Göthberg (talk) 02:53, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

User monobook.css

Hi. I was recently reminded of the existence of my monobook.css page, so tried customizing how {{Navbox}}es appear by adding

.navbox-group {
  white-space:nowrap;
  text-align:right;
  font-weight:bold;
  padding-left:1.0em;
  padding-right:1.0em;
  padding-top:0.35em;
  padding-bottom:0.35em;
  line-height:1.1em;
}
 
.navbox-list {
  border-color:#fdfdfd;
  padding-top:0.25em;
  padding-bottom:0.25em;
  line-height:1.4em;
}

to it. Everything seems to work fine once I've bypassed Firefox (v2.0.0.17)'s cache except the .navbox-list padding. What am I missing? Sardanaphalus (talk) 19:44, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

The CSS looks correct (except for the leading zeros, which I never use but shouldn't be a problem). have you tried adding '! important' flags? (e.g. padding-top:0.25em ! important;)

• I think that's made the difference -- curious. Thank you! Sardanaphalus (talk) 01:36, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

An odd infobox problem

Hey, I've just been onto the page for Nile (band), and noticed that the "genre" section wasn't showing on the infobox. I checked the source code, but the genre part was indeed intact -- so I concluded that someone had edited the box and messed up the coding or something, meaning that the genre wouldn't show up. I then copied the infobox from the Cradle of Filth page as a template, and changed the fields to fit in with the band Nile - but alas, the genre still didn't show up.

I was stumped, so I instead copied and pasted the entire infobox from Cradle's page again, and placed it in the Nile page, and - using the 'show preview' option - noticed that the genre still wouldn't show up, despite the fact that I'd copied the exact infobox and not even changed any of the fields from the Cradle page. All the while, on the Cradle of Filth article, the infobox works fine.

This leads me to conclude that there is some error in the Nile article itself, and not the infobox. Any thoughts or ideas? ≈ The Haunted Angel 15:10, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

The field has been removed. See discussion Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Music#Less_stringent_proposal_by_Rodhullandemu - X201 (talk) 15:18, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Ah, I see - why then is the infobox on the Cradle of Filth page still displaying the genre? ≈ The Haunted Angel 16:58, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

It shows up in the template parameters on Cradle of Filth when in edit mode, but because the field has been removed from the template, it is not displayed in view mode. If you are still seeing it in view mode, then you may need to purge. – ukexpat (talk) 17:06, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

But it is appearing in view mode - at least it is on my PC ≈ The Haunted Angel 18:21, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

It isn't for me - have you purged? – ukexpat (talk) 18:35, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

It has been removed completely from the box code. So it doesn't matter if the field appears in edit mode it will never show up on the 'final product'. Right now its up to editors to just go ahead and delete the field. A couple of admins are getting ready to fire up a bot to steamroll whatever is left away so we won't have to look at them anymore. Albums are also being wiped clean of the undesired field and a hope to cut down on the useless edit warring. Songs are exempt for now... they will likely be voted on next week and then... fingers crossed... rm'd as well. The Real Libs-speak politely 18:40, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Ah, now I have - problem solved, thanks! I was just a bit confused as to why the genre was showing for Cradle's page, and none of the other articles, despite me refreshing the page numerous times. Thanks again :) ≈ The Haunted Angel 18:41, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

What I was saying, Libs, is that it was showing up in the final product for me; but only on the Cradle page, strangely. Problem solved now, though. ≈ The Haunted Angel 18:44, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Ah. I am still seeing it show up in the odd page simply because I am viewing a cached version. As the day rolls on it gets better and better. The Real Libs-speak politely 18:46, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

<outdent I didn't expect this change to go through without some queries; however, for a major change, the outfall has been refreshingly small. If I had thought it would be majorly controversial, I would have put a global notice on the login screen. But as cached pages are refreshed, since it's not a subst'd template, I foresee that any disruption will subside in due course. --Rodhullandemu 23:35, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

What font is Wikipedia - I can't read it?

At home, Wikipedia is unreadable -- all boxes, numbers and characters. At work, it's fine. I've tried reinstalling some standard Windows fonts, searching the Wikipedia Help for "font" or "typeface", but if you can narrow it down for me and tell me what font is used for the majority of the pages here, I can try to get it reinstalled. Thanks! Nancywest (talk) 22:16, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Your character encoding is probably set incorrectly. I'm fairly sure it's in View -> Character Encoding in IE and Firefox; set it to UTF-8 and you should be good to go. As far as I can tell, Wikipedia only specifies when it wants a serif or a sans-serif font, so your browser configuration is actually what affects which font is displayed. -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 22:34, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Bullet separators for page categories

Why did the bullet character (•) start being used as a separator for categories listed at the bottom of a page? It's much too black, and distracts the eye from across the page. Better to use a typographic middle dot (·), or the web's traditional pipe (|) as a separator for links.

Anyone know where this was changed and where it is discussed? Thanks. —Michael Z. 2008-10-08 22:48 z

The great debate on this subject is currently at Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Categories_at_the_bottom_-_Dots_instead_of_.22. Icewedge (talk) 00:27, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. I've put in my 2¢. —Michael Z. 2008-10-09 05:42 z

Newbie edit can't be undone

A newbie made a good faith edit to this page (at the bottom), but I can't see how to undo it. Weirdly, it can be edited, but its section header can't. Fee Fi Foe Fum (talk) 05:08, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

There's a manually inserted section edit button near the "Wikipedia-specific help" section, but since I'm blind and use a screen reader, I can't tell you exactly where it is. The Wikipedia-specific help part transcludes Template:Ph:User contributions, and I've undone the edit to that page. Graham87 05:36, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia on small screens

I sometimes view and contribute to Wikipedia on small screens. Unfortunately, it isn't always easy because people seem to hard-code large screen designs into it (e.g. fixed rather than proportional layouts). Talk pages often use indents and this shoves the text off to the right. It isn't so bad if people use alternating indents such as:
Comment1

Comment2

Comment3

Comment4

But if people use increasing indents, less of the text becomes visible. I would strongly encourage people to use alternating indents and it also happens to be much easier to see when specific comments added later such as:
Comment1

Comment2

Comment5: Specific comment about comment2

Comment6: Another specific comment about comment2

Comment3

Comment4

Comment7

Comment8

Anyway, somebody told me that it might be possible for a change to the standard CSS to assist accessibility on small screens. Is this possible? Lightmouse (talk) 16:15, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure a change to the sitewide CSS would be a particularly good idea. How small of a screen are you talking about? Smaller than 800x600? Mr.Z-man 17:38, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

I don't know much about CSS so I am just going by a recommendation given to me on my talk page. I am thinking of 240x320 which is common on PDA and phones. Lightmouse (talk) 17:40, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

There is a new global MediaWiki:Handheld.css and there is always a possibility for personal CSS. Simple body.ns-talk dd, body.ns-4 dd {margin-left:0.5em} should make that indent (2em in Monobook skin) much smaller. Also could try a skin without sidebar, like Myskin. —AlexSm 17:47, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

It's the server script's responsibility to detect the client type (e.g. PC, PDA, etc.) and use the appropriate CSS. Unfortunately there's no standard for "user identification strings", which are the only info available to the server. If you Google for "user identification string" followed by the name of your handheld(s) and post the string here, it might be possible make some progress. -- Philcha (talk) 18:13, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

I don't think that's correct. Handheld.css is included as a <link> in every page load, its up to the device to use the CSS links with media="handheld" when available. Mr.Z-man 18:28, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

I prefer alternating indents anyway. I hate the increasing indent style, as it's really really annoying, even on a big screen. — Werdna • talk 02:51, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

problem with index.php in diff

I keep getting request to download index.php when I clicks on diff in history for past couple weeks, not sure what's going on there. Using Firefox 2.0.0.17 on Xubuntu. User_talk:TettyNullus —Preceding undated comment was added at 22:04, 8 October 2008 (UTC).

Make sure "Use external editor by default" is unchecked in the editing section of your preferences. Otherwise, I don't know. Graham87 01:26, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Ah it's only for diffs, so make sure "Use external diff by default", also in the editing section of the preferences, is unchecked. Graham87 01:28, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, that fixed it, was a bit bizarre for me TettyNullus (talk) 22:11, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

How to merge projects?

What methods can be used for merging two projects?

Scenario: Project A is a descendant of Project B. Project A is (long) inactive but has a number of subpages in addition to archives. You don't want to delete Project A because it has potentially useful material, and making it into a Project B task force would just create a dead task force. Is there an elegant solution available? Thanks for considering this! --Kleinzach 02:33, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Tag everything with {{historical}}. Keeps the pages around for reference, but everyone call tell that it's dead. EVula // talk // ☯ // 14:34, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. Much appreciated. --Kleinzach 23:24, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Current_daylight_saving_offset_in_Europe

Template:Current_daylight_saving_offset_in_Europe is reporting Expression error: Unexpected < operator and needs fixing. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.179.66.147 (talk) 12:54, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Fixed. Anomie⚔ 15:14, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Special:HideRevision

Although this is enabled at test.wikipedia, will it be enabled here for our oversighters?? It has some advantages, changing the revision visibility for logs that contain personal information so that developers don't have to delete a block log etc. but not rendering oversight as redundant.

I think it should be Wikimedia-wide enabled. --Walmwutter (talk) 13:01, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

A click produces "The action you have requested is limited to Oversighters." MER-C 13:13, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Special:HideRevision is oversight. You're thinking of single-revision deletion. — Werdna • talk 02:21, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Temporary password messages

On my alternate Simple English Wikipedia account, I recently usurped the English Wikipedia's username and have gotten sporadic "temporary password" requests. Since my SEW account is not active on the English Wikipedia, I suspect the original owner of that account is trying to get back into that account but doesn't know that the new username is now "xxxx (usurped)". Is there any way to change the login screen to redirect SUL-usurped usernames to their new account? Like, a general message like "If you have not logged into your account for some time, your username may have been usurped and is likely xxxx (usurpsed)." hbdragon88 (talk) 17:11, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

If there's a standard for the names, it might be possible to do that with some template tweaks customizing MediaWiki:Wrongpassword, but I'm not 100% sure offhand. --brion (talk) 18:43, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

EasyTimeline is very very slow . . . why?

I've been experimenting recently with graphical timelines created using the EasyTimeline extension (see Wikipedia:Timeline and mw:Extension:EasyTimeline/syntax). However, it's very hard to get anything done, since the time to generate a preview of a new or revised timeline is many minutes, sometimes over a half-hour.

To see the issue for yourself, take one of the pages from Category:Graphical timelines and make a small test edit to one of the graphical timelines (like adding the text "TEST" to one of the names in the timeline), then hit "preview". The graphical timeline is now vanished, replaced by your browser's missing graphic icon. Hit "preview" again every minute or two, until eventually many minutes later (wow!!!) the newly revised timeline shows up, including the "TEST" text wherever you entered it. I just did such a test again right now while writing this, and it took over 10 minutes for the revised timeline to appear.

Why is it taking so long to generate the PNG graphics? I assume all other users dealing with EasyTimeline are affected by this issue, too. Is this a recent problem only (I just started creating or editing graphical timelines within the last week, and the slowness has been there all week)? Or has it been that way for a long time? Is it worth submitting a bug report on Bugzilla? This is not really a bug, it's just super slow.

Thanks for any help you can provide. --Seattle Skier (talk) 21:36, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

My "skin" is persisting...

Any idea why when I try to change my skin on my user prefs, only the preference page changes? All other pages remain the same as before. I have cleared my cache and cookies completely, signed out and back in, and no luck. My current skin is one with a black background and green text and normal links. I forget the name of that skin when I selected it but I like it very much. I do have need to change it on occasion, but I must be doing something wrong... any ideas apprediated radiooperator 01:24, 10 October 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Radiooperator (talk • contribs)

Have you tried ? It probably won't work, but it's worth a try. =P Dendodge|Talk^Contribs 01:26, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Yep...no dice...any other ideas?

--radiooperator 01:33, 10 October 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Radiooperator (talk • contribs)

"Use a black background with green text on the Monobook skin" is under Gadgets and not under Skin. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:37, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

I am such a twit... thanks

radiooperator 01:42, 10 October 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Radiooperator (talk • contribs)

Special pages

[Taken from the New contributors help desk for a better response, hopefully]

Hi, when you click special pages on the toolbox, why is it that some of the features listed at Help:Special page are not available? For example there is no special:mypage or special:mytalk. I find this to be particularly frustrating because as an IP i am always changing and would like a quick way to see my contribs. I dont know why mytalk or mypage is not available on the special pages, was it ever there? If it was, why was it removed? Thanks, any help appreciated. 220.239.56.131 (talk) 03:35, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

They do exist, they just aren't listed there. Just enter Special:Mypage or Special:Mytalk into the search bar. Special:Mycontributions goes to your contributions. Calvin 1998 ^(t·c) 03:55, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Autoconfirmation

Is there any way to make an account have autoconfirmed status without waiting the four days and ten edits? J.delanoy^gabs_adds 23:25, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

There is no way to do this with out going to extreme lengths. An account would be for all practical purposes autoconfirmed if the user was made an administrator or a developer could change the accounts status by tinkering with the logs, but I doubt either of those options is a valid solution to whatever problem you have. Icewedge (talk) 23:32, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

If you can't edit a semiprotected article, you can always post suggestions on the article talk page. Similarly, if you want to move (rename) an existing article, you can suggest that on the article talk page. If you want to create a new article, you can start by writing a draft on a subpage that you can create in your own userspace. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 23:42, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

OK, thanks guys. J.delanoy^gabs_adds 23:53, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

I suppose it is advisable to create an article draft in one's userspace first, but one can still create an article as soon as one is registered, no? Waltham, The Duke of 22:15, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Might be implemented soonish, as the ability to remove autoconfirmed status already exists in the abuse filter, and a generic mechanism might be good. — Werdna • talk 02:53, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

David Irving

Ok, this is kind of weird. Take a look at Talk:David Irving. Look at the box for Wikiproject Crime. See the hammer and sickle? It's not supposed to be there and I can't find any code that puts it there. It's not there on any other talk page that features this project's tag. Now look at this link. This is what you get if you go to talk page history and click on the most recent version, in other words, the current version. It should be identical to the talk page except for the pink box at the top. But, it isn't; there's no hammer and sickle. I can't figure this out. I tried clearing my cache; same result. Any ideas?

Warning: David Irving is a holocaust denier and the talk page gets, well, heated. --Steven J. Anderson (talk) 17:16, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

I don't see a hammer and sickle - did you try a Wikipurge? – ukexpat (talk) 17:42, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Can't tell now because the page has been edited to compact the project boxes. Anyway, I guess it's fixed. Thanks. --Steven J. Anderson (talk) 18:11, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

[3]. Gimmetrow 13:17, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Checklinks

Can this tool be added in revision history?. This tool is very useful when it comes to checking dead links and adding this tool can help whole wikipedia community and make the wikipedia a better place. --SkyWalker (talk) 06:20, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

slow response

The Wikipedia servers are usually quite responsive, but just now I am seeing long wait times, like twelve seconds to display a common page like Community Portal or Signpost. --Ancheta Wis (talk) 08:59, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Log oddities with protection logs

I noticed this in the protection log today:

• USERNAME protected Test page ([create=sysop]) (vandalism)

when in the past the protection log used to be:

• USERNAME protected The weather in London ([edit=autoconfirmed]]) ([indefinite]) ([move=autoconfirmed]]) ([indefinite]).

I noticed this when I used the latest SVN build on localhost, does anyone know if this will be fixed because this looks a bit odd??

I know it's a small thing... but it probably would look good to fix it anyway. --Walmwutter (talk) 11:04, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

What's exactly odd about it, and about which entry? That we can now protect non-existent pages from being (re-)created or that expiry times can be set separately for move and edit protections? (Both of which are useful features.) Миша13 12:51, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

• Misza13, in response to your enquiry: it's the fact that the [create=sysop] or [edit=sysop] parameter has not been italicised, as it used to be when pages were protected. That's all it really is. --Walmwutter (talk) 13:09, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

I believe it's this commit, which completely revamped the protection system and also the log entries themselves (the changes to LogPage.php) - the protection parameters are no longer treated as part of the protection summary. Regardless, it's in fact more consistent given that only true summaries are italicised. Миша13 14:32, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

• Still should be italicised, as it used to be... purely because it looks better. --Walmwutter (talk) 15:38, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Spoken Wikipedia templates

Yo, something is screwed up with {{Spoken Wikipedia-2}} although it hasn't been edited for months. It does not seem to be closing properly, and sucks everything after it into itself. See Ayn Rand#External links for an example of the problem. the skomorokh 17:51, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Fixed (unclosed div). Algebraist 18:02, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Grazi. the skomorokh 19:41, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Corrupted images

Could someone with more knowledge on the subject than me have a look at Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard#Images_corruption. I think it is as a result of the image deletion a few weeks back. Thanks. Woody (talk) 20:16, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

The ability to block vs. "no big deal"

Please see Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#The ability to block vs. "no big deal". - jc37 23:42, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

User-friendly editnotice system

I have done some thinking and experimenting regarding editnotices. (That's the header message boxes that are shown above the edit window when you edit a page.) I have figured out how we can make a much more user-friendly system. It will be easier to use and edit for both admins and users, and it can supply several new functions that the current system doesn't have.

I have coded up all that is needed for the new system. I have installed a fully working demo of the system over at {{editnotice loader}}. See also discussion over at Wikipedia talk:Editnotice#Slash style editnotices.

I would like some input from people what they think about the new system. Please discuss this at Wikipedia talk:Editnotice, not here.

--David Göthberg (talk) 01:35, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

I don't really understand what you've done, but most functionality should be written into software, not hacked together with templates. — Werdna • talk 03:25, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Well, several users have asked the devs to make this system but the devs said they didn't want to. One reason was that they thought it only fits for more mature Wikipedias such as the English Wikipedia. And then I realised I could do it in template code only. (And it won't cost much server load since it only executes in the edit windows. Compared to most infoboxes and navboxes out there this code is very lightweight, so compared to the page content in the edit preview this doesn't cost much.)

And another benefit is that there are many template coders here that can help out and fine tune this code. If/when we have had a stable version of it for a long time the devs might consider to copy the idea to system code instead. Thus they don't need to spend all the work figuring out how people want it to look and feel. But why should they? It's the same situation as navboxes. Why should we ask the devs to move the navbox functionality to system code when it runs fine as template code? We have many template programmers, but just a handful of devs.

--David Göthberg (talk) 05:23, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Who are these mysterious devs and where are their reasons actually given? --brion (talk) 14:40, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

See Krimpet's comment at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 46#Custom edit messages. — CharlotteWebb 15:39, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Why should we ask the devs to move the [whatever] functionality to system code when it runs fine as template code? - So other people who use MediaWiki (smaller Wikimedia wikis, Wikia, other users) can use it without trying to figure out which CSS, JS, and half dozen templates to copy from us. Mr.Z-man 16:05, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

You haven't yet described what you've actually done. You've gone and given links to a zillion templates, but I still haven't seen a clear description of what you want to do, and what benefits it provides. I get this vague feeling from the reference to Krimpet's comment that it's got to do with using the namespace name rather than the namespace number. If you describe what the system is, then we might be able to work something out in the software end, instead of horrible template hacks. — Werdna • talk 02:11, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Werdna: My message above that started out this section was just an announcement. It has links to three pages that explains it all. I don't want to fill the Village pump with lengthy explanations. (Since it takes a rather long explanation, even though the system when used will be very user-friendly.) So for starters you can follow this link and read what you see there: Template:Editnotice loader. Then you can follow the two other links in my message above to learn more and discuss this.

--David Göthberg (talk) 03:41, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

I read the template documentation, but it didn't make any sense to me. The discussion page describes what you're actually on about when you talk about "hyphen-style" and "slash-style". My apologies for not finding that earlier.

On the substantive matter, if developers have really refused to implement what you call "slash-style" edit notices, it was probably for a reason. Note that the comments of a random developer don't necessarily reflect the opinions of the entire development team, and functionality should only be considered "rejected" if a bug has been closed as WONTFIX. In this case, the problem is probably that slashes in the MediaWiki namespace (which is, after all, for localisation), are used for language selection. Perhaps the same problems apply to javascript/template hacks that you throw together.

I contend that MediaWiki-namespace is a bad place to put edit-notices in the first place. They should be put in their own table in the database, as we store other data like page protection, blocks, and so on. If you want something implemented in software, file a bug. If the bug is closed with the outcome that a feature is not likely to be implemented for some technical reason, perhaps it shouldn't be done in template, either. — Werdna • talk 02:54, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

You guys have misunderstood this in several ways. But I won't bother to explain it to you since it will take too much time and effort, and I just remembered that I think editnotices probably is a bad thing anyway. That is; I like editnotices, but I think it is likely that people will overuse them and misuse them. So it might be just as well that editnotices continue to be hard to use.

--David Göthberg (talk) 12:21, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Chess pages will not load

I can't get pages that use Template:Chess_diagram to load. An example is checkmate, which I have not been able to get to load for two hours. Is there a way to get these pages to load, or is there a technical problem? Bubba73 (talk), 18:11, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Strange, they loaded just fine for me. Try these two section edit links:[4][5] The former doesn't use the template, the latter does. (I'm just trying to verify that it is indeed the template) EVula // talk // ☯ // 19:20, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

For me, the first oneloads in a second or two; the second one does not. Bubba73 (talk), 19:43, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Well, the second one does load in about 14 seconds. Bubba73 (talk), 19:55, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

I waited 4+ minutes on the main article and it would not load, even partially. Over the last few months, the diagrams have been getting slower and slower. When it works, I can see each square of the board being loaded. Bubba73 (talk), 20:01, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

The image on the Wikipedia main page doesn't load either, but the text does. Bubba73 (talk), 20:07, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Checkmate does not load in 14 minutes. Bubba73 (talk), 20:24, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Check (chess) will load in about 8 seconds, but has only two diagrams. Bubba73 (talk), 20:36, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Chess opening takes more than 50 seconds to load with action=purge (<!-- Served by srv134 in 54.371 secs. -->). Checkmate just dies with "X-Squid-Error:ERR_READ_TIMEOUT". The problem is probably just too many images on the page. Each chessboard is made up of 68 images (64 squares and 4 images for the sides), so on chess opening with 30 boards, there's 2040 images on the page. Checkmate has only 4 more boards, but that's an additional 272 images, plus a handful of other images. It would probably be best if these were done by an extension that generated just one png image per board, similar to the <math> notation. Some other options would be to just use one image for the chessboard, then position the images of the pieces (with a transparent background) over the board with relative positioning. Technically you could do it with no images at all with HTML tables and Chess symbols in Unicode, but the symbols probably aren't well supported and it would probably be easier to use an image for the board than a 10x10 table. Mr.Z-man 21:38, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

There are perhaps thousands of diagrams in the chess articles. Can such a change be made without breaking the diagrams? Also the individual squares used to be PNGs, but they were changed to the recomended SVGs a year or to ago, if my memory is correct. Bubba73 (talk), 21:57, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

We should really be using an extension, not a template. — Werdna • talk 02:04, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Can that be done without breaking all of the diagrams? There are about 2,500 chess articles. Not all of them have diagrams, and there may not be thousands of them, but there are certainly many hundred diagrams in the articles. Bubba73 (talk), 02:07, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

I don't think there are really that many distinct images on the pages. There are 6 pieces x 2 piece colors x 2 square colors + 2 colors of empty squares = 26 different images maximum. If both diagram sizes are used (Template:chess diagram and Template:chess diagram small) then this is doubled, but that's still only 52 images. I think this was just slow wikimedia servers. The chess opening page loads for me in just a few seconds right now. 165.189.91.148 (talk) 15:04, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

but it seems that the image for each square is requested from the server, even if it is the same as a previous one. I can see the individual squares filling in. BTW, the page is loading in less than 10 seconds for me today! Bubba73 (talk), 15:50, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Seems resolved, but I'm still interested in hearing what Werdna was talking about, with using an extension instead of the current set up. -- Ned Scott 04:31, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

In theory, Template:Chess diagram shouldn't be slow at all. It's not doing any fancy template processing, and uses only a small number of different actual images. It may be that use of individual images is being done inefficiently and this ends up being much slower than desired; this bears investigation. --brion (talk) 18:53, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

The problem did clear up for me the next day. Some other people had the same problem, others didn't. Bubba73 (talk), 20:21, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Well, yesterday and today the image of white knights on a light square doesn't load in the diagrams. Bubba73 (talk), 17:54, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

That's an unrelated issue -- it looks like one web server didn't get its software updated properly and may have been propagating the "sometimes silently delete an image file" bug. I believe the file's been replaced by now. (The rogue server has been fixed.)

Note that MrZ-man has been poking at the issue and is experimenting with a tweak to the parser which speeds up multiple uses of the same image on the same page. Looks good so far, will probably get integrated pretty soon. --brion (talk) 18:53, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks to both of you. The white knight on a light square still isn't working for me. Speaking of "silently delete an image file", the following three images quit working for me a couple of months ago. But it isn't too important because I replaced them by the equivalent svg files where I was using them. Bubba73 (talk), 01:44, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Well, now the white knight on a light square is back, both above and in diagrams. Bubba73 (talk), 05:17, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

And now all three of those images are back, after being gone for weeks. Bubba73 (talk), 18:16, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

detecting redirects in templates

does anyone know if there's a way to get the name of a redirect page in a template? I'm writing a template that will merge a bunch of foreign character text warnings, and it would be easiest if I could know where the redirect was coming from - otherwise I'd need to go back to all the original templates and add a parameter to specify its language. --Ludwigs2 17:54, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Not currently possible. Talk to the devs. — CharlotteWebb 01:23, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Default table

I don't know if I'm putting this in the proper VP forum, but I was wondering if we could change the default table layout that appears when the table button is used at the top of the editing window. It usually gives:

{| class="wikitable" border="1"

|-

! header 1

! header 2

! header 3

|-

| row 1, cell 1

| row 1, cell 2

| row 1, cell 3
 
|-

| row 2, cell 1

| row 2, cell 2

| row 2, cell 3

|}

But I think it should be:

{| class="wikitable" border="1"

|+ title

|-

! header 1 !! header 2 !! header 3

|-

| row 1, cell 1 || row 1, cell 2 || row 1, cell 3

|-

| row 2, cell 1 || row 2, cell 2 || row 2, cell 3

|}

In my opinion, it's cleaner and takes up less space. Plus, it also exhibits the title function, which I don't think is universally known. --Wizard191 (talk) 18:51, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Leaving the quotation marks off HTML attributes is a bad habit. In XML and XHTML leaving the quotation marks off produces malformed documents, so it's better to just get in the habit of using quotation marks whether or not a parser will come by later to clean up the code before serving it.

Also, </br> is not valid HTML or XHTML, as br is not a closing tag. The correct form is <br/>. Other than that, I don't see much problem with your proposed changes. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 19:28, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the head's up on the quotation marks. I just put the breaks in for visual purposes; those don't need to be included in the actual code. I'm more concerned about the layout and title. --Wizard191 (talk) 20:44, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Why is border="1" needed for this sample? The wikitable CSS class already has border: 1px #aaa solid;. I'd suggest removal of that markup also. — Andrwsc (talk · contribs) 22:20, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

MediaWiki talk:Common.css#Wikitable borders without CSS. Happy‑melon 22:41, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Andrwsc: The border="1" code is needed and should not be removed. See the link that Happy-melon gave above for the lengthy explanation and discussion about that.

Wizard191: I think I prefer the old table layout above since it is simpler to use. We don't need to show all the advanced options in the default layout that the table button inserts. Those double pipes "||" will probably only confuse beginners. They have no idea what CSS styles are.

Remember the dot: No, <br/> is not the correct form. The correct forms are either <br> or <br />. (Note the space between "br" and "/".)

--David Göthberg (talk) 11:40, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

You really think it is that much more confusing? If anything I think it's a little easier because each cell is laid out in relatively the correct location, where as with the old one you would have to think about the cell label to figure out where it's located. At the very least can we not include the title box? --Wizard191 (talk) 13:18, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

My contributions under a different name

I don't know how this happened, but when I was renamed to "SchfiftyThree" on 4 August 2007, my old contributions under "Schfiftythree628" stayed under that name. My edits under my current username go all the way to 2 April 2007. My real first edit was made on 12 November 2005. I saw this sort of happen when User:RyanCross was renamed (having his first edit made on 4 October), but his has been fixed. So, how can all my contributions on Wikipedia be made into my current username? I figured I should have posted here, but if I'm in the wrong place, let me know. :-) SchfiftyThree 21:50, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

That sort of - glitch, you might say? - happens occasionally. My first example I noticed was Special:Contributions/badlydrawnjeff. After he was renamed, all he had was a null edit to preserve the username; and then, somehow, eight edits before then were reattributed to his original name rather than bdj (talk · contribs). hbdragon88 (talk) 22:47, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Looking at a few of them, I'd say these edits were deleted before he was renamed, then undeleted afterward. The bug causing this has probably been fixed by now, but I'm not sure. Deleted edits are stored in the "archive" table rather than the "revision" table. — CharlotteWebb 01:38, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

__NOCATEGORY__

I think a magic word removing all categories from a page would be helpful. For example, in order to remove categories from a personal sandbox, and even in Wikipedia sandboxes, since they frequently appear in mainspace categories. There are also certain maintenance pages that shouldn't contain categories (e.g. Wikipedia:Main Page/Protection). Cenarium ^Talk 15:31, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

On a related note, I have often missed a general way to say at a transclusion that the transcluded page should not be allowed to add any categories. I know a parameter for this can be added to the code of individual templates but that is sometimes complicated, template tinkering can easily cause errors, and many templates are protected. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:47, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

The way to do it is to wrap the category code in <noinclude> tags. There isn't any other way to do it at present. — Carl (CBM · talk) 15:51, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

It can't be used on the sandbox since the content changes often, while adding a magic word to Template:Please leave this line alone (sandbox heading) would be easy. And for personal sandboxes, they are many times included in templates or dispersed in the page making it longer to fix. Maybe we should create a bug for a magic word ? Cenarium ^Talk 16:02, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Carl's suggestion assumes the category should never be added to transclusions. I'm thinking of cases where a template should usually add a category but it isn't wanted at some transclusions, for example when discussing the template and demonstrating what it will produce with certain parameters, or when developing articles in user space (where the proposed __NOCATEGORY__ could also be used if no categories at all are wanted). Some templates have an optional parameter to say that a category should not be added but a general solution not requiring recoding of each template would be much better. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:09, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Err, PrimeHunter was referring to templates that put the page into categories (like {{unreferenced}} adds the page to Category:Articles lacking sources), and the {{{category}}} parameter available in many such templates for use to prevent things like Wikipedia:Template messages/Talk namespace's miscategorization. A __NOCATEGORY__ magic word wouldn't help with that because it would also prevent correct categorization of the page. It could still be useful for sandboxes though. Anomie⚔ 16:15, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

bug15941 filled. On the function, more precisely, __NOCATEGORY__ should remove the page from all categories. However, whether the categories on the page itself are showed is not very important. In the Wikipedia sandbox, it may help new users to see how categories work, on other pages it doesn't really mater. Cenarium ^Talk 18:18, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

(unindent) Just as a general note, when discussing magic words, please wrap them in <nowiki>, even if they haven't been created / implemented yet. If they are created or implemented in the future, the archive of this page will suddenly be using the word. ;-) --MZMcBride (talk) 19:03, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

I too have been thinking about this problem. But I would prefer it like this:

<nocategory> Text and {{templates}} that won't categorise. </nocategory>

That would mean we could also prevent just parts of a page from adding categories. Thus for instance the pages under Wikipedia:Template messages could prevent the templates that they show from inserting categories, while we still can (manually) add categories to the page that we actually want to have there. If this is implemented the same way as the <noinclude> tags then this would also work for the sandbox case that Cenarium describes above. Just put a start <nocategory> in the sandbox header and the rest of the page will not categorise.

--David Göthberg (talk) 10:32, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Agreed, this would be even better. It has also been suggested at bugzilla. There' still the question of whether the categories should appear at the bottom of the page. In the sandbox, it would be helpful for new users, but in maintenance pages, it would be unneeded. Cenarium ^Talk 16:16, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Just to note that I've marked the new bug as yet another duplicate of the long-lived Bug 835, which seems to have generated much discussion, but no actual code in its ~4 year history. - IMSoP (talk) 18:54, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Oh dear, I looked at some of those duplicate bugzilla requests. Yeah, it seems to have been suggested many times. No wonder, this is a feature that would be very useful. I see there are suggestions for another version: {{nocat:template}}. That one wouldn't cover the sandbox case that Cenarium is thinking of but would cover the other cases, and would probably be simpler to implement than the <nocat> </nocat> I suggested. If combined with __NOCAT__ it would probably be easier to implement but would still cover both cases. Although <nocat> </nocat> is of course the more flexible alternative.

Cenarium: I see you mentioned that you want the categories to still show in the category footer box at the bottom of the page. That would be confusing on the pages under Wikipedia:Template messages, but as you pointed out would be good in sandboxes. So I did a little thinking: When hidden categories are shown (if you have enabled to see hidden categories) they are shown on a second line in the category footer box prefixed by the text "Hidden categories:". Your non-categorising categories could be listed in the same way, say prefixed by the text "Disabled categories:". I suggest you suggest that over at bugzilla. (I don't have a bugzilla account since I am way too busy here to have time for bugzilla.)

--David Göthberg (talk) 01:53, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

IP Addresses

Is this a valid IP address 222.198.50.265? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jcollins37 (talk • contribs) 00:17, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

No; IP sections don't surpass 255 (meaning the last valid IP would be 255.255.255.255). -Jéské ^{(v^_^v Kacheek!)} 00:18, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

You learn something new everyday :-) 220.239.56.131 (talk) 01:05, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

And we of course have an article IP address for people wanting to learn. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:14, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Note that invalid IP addresses can in fact be registered as usernames unless specifically mw:Extension:Username Blacklist'ed. So if you saw such a user editing somewhere, now you know why. — CharlotteWebb 01:19, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Something wrong with contributions?

Here we have a diff showing an IP editing an article [6] - he's made several edits (more than he should have had to, some overzealous editor reverted his removal of a duplicate quote). And here we have a list of his contributions [7] which doesn't include his recent edits. This is the 2nd time I've run into this problem. What am I doing wrong, or? Doug Weller (talk) 17:58, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

I am seeing that edit in his contribs now; perhaps the database was just lagging. Icewedge (talk) 21:35, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Ok, thanks. I've just run across another case of lagging while looking at an article's history. Doug Weller (talk) 05:54, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Problem with overlapping text

Under the Sept. 9 Help Desk archives, see if you get a mess with the topic "How to fix AfC review that I messed up?"Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 17:27, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Link. Nope, fine here on FF3. I assume Fr33kman's curious signature is causing the problem? Algebraist 17:31, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

It still looks like a mess to me, but on one line I did notice Fr33kman's signature had a row of periods far below the rest of the text. Thanks.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 17:40, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

I was going to ask him to fix it, and then I remembered signatures are permanent where they have been used. I looked at his talk page and his current signature looks fine.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 17:42, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Fr33kman fixed it on my request at User talk:Fr33kman/Archive 1#Misformatted signature. It appears it looked fine in many other browsers than Internet Explorer. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:35, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Code copying from here to Commons

I recently tried to copy the following from my talk page here to my Commons talk page:

{{tmbox | type = notice | text = I generally prefer unfragmented [[Wikipedia:Talk page|discussions]]. If you leave a comment for me here, I will most likely respond to it on this same page — ''my talk page'' — as an effort to keep the entire conversation in one place. Similarly, if ''I'' leave a comment on ''your talk page'', please respond to it ''there''. At the same time, feel free to send an alert to me on this page about a comment you have left elsewhere. }}

It resulted in a "box" without a border and no background color. You can see the result here. I even tried subst'ing the template (with and without the additional sub-templates subst'ed) and it still showed up the same. I went to irc to find out how to get the above box on this wiki show up the same on Commons. It was suggested that: "the problem is lack of the en.wp css styles". My main question is this: How could I go about making the above box appear the same on Commons? It doesn't matter to me if on Commons it actually uses the same template, I just want the end result box to look the same. I put this question on this page due to the possibility of the problem being the css styles.--Rockfang (talk) 21:23, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

You'll need to copy the tmbox styles from MediaWiki:Common.css and put them on Commons (if you're not an admin, you'll need to request one to do so). EVula // talk // ☯ // 21:49, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Canonical namespace change coming: Image: -> File:

Brion has just announced on the wikitech-l list that he's planning to (finally) change the canonical name of the "Image:" namespace to "File:". Please update your scripts and bots, and note that a lot of templates and MediaWiki pages are also likely to be affected. Please note that, if everything goes as planned, we'll only have about one week to fix things before the change goes live. More details in Brion's post and at bugzilla:44. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 02:35, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

I probably should be asking this elsewhere, but shouldn't the change result in Image: being an alternative value, just like how WP: now results in Wikipedia: ? If so, then at least some things won't be broken by the change. -- Ned Scott 02:50, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

I think this was answered before you asked it, in the email linked above. "This should go smoothly and transparently for most purposes. 'Image:' will continue to be an alias, and perhaps even recommended for inline usage.". Anyhow, this is a good change and it's about time... - Rjd0060 (talk) 03:05, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

The problems occur when a script expects to be handed "Image:Example.jpg" as page name, but instead gets "File:Example.jpg". --Carnildo (talk) 04:25, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Aaah, ok. -- Ned Scott 04:33, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Additionally, scripts that use the JavaScript variable wgCanonicalNamespace to determine the namespace will be given "File" instead of the expected "Image". Calvin 1998 ^(t·c) 04:40, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

←Yes, this is excellent! The bots can be updated relatively painlessly, and the namespace's new name should be significantly less confusing to newcomers. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 05:14, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Okay, I read up on the links Ilmari gave above. Nothing is mentioned about template programming. So I really hope that the magic words and variables {{ns:6}}, {{ns:image}} and {{NAMESPACE}} will be updated to return "File", and that they will be updated at about the same moment in time. Or a lot of templates will break. Well, Brion mentions in his latest bugzilla comment that he has not yet fixed {{ns:image}}.

To prevent that literally almost 1 million transclusions of image related templates malfunction I have updated {{image other}} and {{namespace detect}} to understand both "image" and "file". To make life simple I recommend anyone that wants to do namespace detection in template code to use one of those templates.

--David Göthberg (talk) 07:26, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

just glancing briefly at Help:Namespace. while I doubt that CSS namespace detection is used much outside of the skins and main css files, has it been accounted for? also, is there any way to check which templates use a given Magic Word (similar to the way we can check which pages a template is transcluded into)? I'm just imagining a few hundreds of minor templates with hand-written namespace detection code getting fouled up, with weeks or months passing before anyone actually notices or reports it. --Ludwigs2 07:48, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Since it was me who wrote that CSS namespace detection section in Help:Namespace I should probably answer this question. :))

Ludwigs2: CSS based namespace detection should not have any problems with this name change, since it uses namespace numbers, not names. In the Image case the CSS class to "detect" is "ns-6", and that won't change.

And a simple way to find usage of a magic word or for instance a CSS class name is to use Special:Search. Try to select only template space, and search for NAMESPACE Image . I got about 170 hits, and some of those are cases of "{{NAMESPACE}}" compared to "Image" that needs fixing. To search for cases of "{{ns:image}}" you do a search for ns image . For me that gave about 230 hits in template space, but none of them was a "{{ns:image}}" case, although one was a switch case with "{{NAMESPACE}}" compared to "{{ns:0}}" and "Image" so it needs fixing.

But beware, Special:Search seems to have some oddities: It doesn't find all pages that has a word, since it often misses cases that we know exist. Even if those cases have been on a page for months. And different users get different hits. And even more oddly the same user seems to see the same hits when searching some day later. I can only guess, but perhaps there are several search servers, each with a different incomplete database, and different users get connected to different servers thus sees different hits, perhaps load balanced based on user IP or so. Some of the tech people in here can perhaps shed some light on what is going on? Anyway, this means it usually is a good idea if several users search for what needs to be fixed, to find as many cases as possible.

Another and more complete option is to ask the very helpful people over at Wikipedia:Bot requests to do a full search, on an off-line copy of the database. But since Special:Search works fairly well I only ask for such a search when I need to do a more advanced search that Special:Search can't handle.

--David Göthberg (talk) 10:13, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

nothing like a neigh straight from the horses mouth. ok, now that I know how, I'm happy to pitch in looking for template problems once the transition is made. thanks. --Ludwigs2 21:50, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Several system messages that expect "Image:" as canonical namespace name (as in {{#ifeq:{{NAMESPACE}}|Image|...) also need to be fixed (like Confirmdeletetext and Noarticletext). The {{ns:6}} is a safe choice (now and later), but it's not very user-friendly, so I would wait for Brion to announce if {{ns:image}} would continue to work or maybe {{ns:file}} will start working some time before the switch. —AlexSm 15:00, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Would there be any way of tracking which templates/messages/etc would need to be updated? Maybe have a bot crawl through the template namespace and make a list (or just make the correction right then and there)? -- Ned Scott 04:29, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Fixing that so {{ns:image}} still works is a requirement before this gets implemented, so no templates will need updating for that issue. --brion (talk) 18:20, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Would it not be better to have Image and File as two separate namespaces, calling {{ns:file}}, so when people upload a file the MediaWiki recognizes which one it is - e.g. a png uploaded as image, PDF as file, OGG as file etc. That's my 0.02 cents --Walmwutter (talk) 13:03, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

The wiki already recognizes the file type, there's no real need to separate things by namespace. If we made them *separate*, then all the existing uses of existing non-image files would break. If we made them *interchangeable in use* but distinct, then, well it'd just be kind of awkward. :)

There's been some thought of just tossing on some more aliases such as Video: and Audio: to make things prettier for embedding -- [[Video:Cool thingy.ovg]] -- but they'd all be functionally equivalent, there's no real benefit to separating them at a syntactic point. --brion (talk) 18:51, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

To make it easy for people to know when what works, here is a table with the variables in question:

Code	Renders as
	At 10 Oct 2008	At 27 Apr 2024 (today)
{{ns:6}}	Image	File
{{ns:image}}	Image	File
{{ns:file}}	Template:Ns:file	File
{{ns:7}}	Image_talk	File talk
{{ns:image talk}}	Image_talk	File talk
{{ns:file talk}}	Template:Ns:file talk	File talk

The table last column above shows what those codes generate when you see this (last time this page was saved or purged), not when I wrote this.

--David Göthberg (talk) 07:51, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

It looks like you made a minor error with two of the table cells. I've corrected them; FWIW, the two columns look identical as of this writing. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 07:16, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Ilmari: Thanks for fixing the middle column.

Gah! I go away for two days and people edit my comment and break it? And they didn't even leave a comment here that they had changed my comment. My version of the table didn't look at all like that, others have edited it and inserted the static middle column. And as Ilmari noted that new column was broken. Although that new column might have some use, so I won't revert it this time. (But I did some clean-up for readability.)

--David Göthberg (talk) 10:06, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Any update on when this is going to happen? --Carnildo (talk) 00:06, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

[show] template improvement

For the page Sinhala alphabet, I use the show-template

(Click on [show] on the right if you only see boxes below)
Stops
	voiceless					voiced
		unicode	translit.	IPA			unicode	translit.	IPA
velar	ක	0D9A	ka	[ka]		ග	0D9C	ga	[ga]		velar
retroflex	ට	0DA7	ṭa	[ʈa]		ඩ	0DA9	ḍa	[ɖa]		retroflex
dental	ත	0DAD	ta	[ta]		ද	0DAF	da	[da]		dental
labial	ප	0DB4	pa	[pa]		බ	0DB6	ba	[ba]		labial
Other graphemes
		unicode	translit.	IPA			unicode	translit.	IPA
fricatives	ස	0DC3	sa	[sa]		හ	0DC4	ha	[ha]		fricatives
affricates	(ච)	(0DA0)	(ca)	([t͡ʃa])		ජ	0DA2	ja	[ʤa]		affricates
nasals	ම	0DB8	ma	[ma]		න	0DB1	na	[na]		nasals
liquid	ල	0DBD	la	[la]		ර	0DBB	ra	[ra]		liquid
glide	ව	0DC0	va	[ʋa]		ය	0DBA	ya	[ja]		glide
retroflex	ණ	0DAB	ṇa	[na]		ළ	0DC5	ḷa	[la]		retroflex
Display this table as an image

This shows an image of a table for users whose computers do not support the unicode characters used in the table.

I would like to have a [toggle image]/[toggle text] template, to switch between text view/image view of the character table. This would mean that there would always be only one visible, either text or img. Is there some kind of WP:TEMPLATELAB analogous to WP:GRAPHLAB where one can make such requests? Otherwise, who do I have to turn to? Jasy jatere (talk) 12:37, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

You'd need to have the feature implemented in MediaWiki:Common.js first. The normal "collapsible tables" code can't do it: it can show or hide content, but it has no support for replacing one set of content with another. It'd probably be possible to extend it to handle something like that — just a simple matter of programming, really — but it might be better to implement a separate feature for this, since the requirements are likely to diverge in the details. (For example, you'd presumably want the button to say something other that "show"/"hide". And it might be nice to have support for more than two alternatives. And so on...) —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 17:55, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

How to turn off HTTP referal?

Is there a tag that can be used to turn off the HTTP referer feature for a certain link or page? The owner of Google Watch is detecting when Wikipedia is the referer and sending back a different webpage. -- Kendrick7^talk 16:57, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Can't be done with HTML, as far as I know. You can set your browser to completely disable HTTP referrals, though. Gary King (talk) 17:53, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

I have added a notice to that effect to the link, and added a link to the original site through a referrer-hiding service. --Richmeister_talk 17:54, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

I've de-linked it. Using Opera's "Go to URL" function does not send referrer information. Could someone try it using Firefox's Linkification? hbdragon88 (talk) 17:59, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

Rich has the right idea. I thought maybe there way some prettier way of doing this, but this is good enough for now. -- Kendrick7^talk 18:07, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

There are various services which will anonymously forward an http request. Here is one example [8]. The referral URL visible to Daniel Brandt will then be that of the 3rd-party service, not of Wikipedia. — CharlotteWebb 01:26, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

The Firefox RefControl addon lets you control what is sent in that field. Saintrain (talk) 15:40, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

What is the difference? I have tried visiting the page with and without the Referer and get the same page (except for the random image). --Itub (talk) 16:40, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Just a hunch, but if the site set a HTTP cookie then it will respond to requests the way it did last time, regardless of the referrer. Try with and without a referrer but clear cookies before each try. Saintrain (talk) 17:10, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

I didn't give it any cookies. I'm just curious what the observable difference is. Did it say "WIKIPEDIA SUCKS!!!" when you visited the site following a link from Wikipedia? --Itub (talk) 17:22, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Firefox? Easiest thing to do is to type in about:config in address bar, search for "referer" and set network.http.sendRefererHeader to 0, no referrer at all will be transferred then anymore (no problem actually). --- Best regards, Melancholie (talk) 01:11, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Article without any history or log data

Resolved

While performing cleanup work on a number of short article, i came across N-eicosanoic acid (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views). This article appears not to exist (no information in the article history or log) but does not generate the usual screen for a non-existent page. As per the instructions in the article text I am bringing this article to this page to help determine if this article is the result of a bug. --Allen3 ^talk 20:34, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Yikes I've never encountered this before. It should probably be a redirect to arachidic acid but I'm hesitant to edit the page in case I make things worse. A redirect from a similar title was created by User:Delta G. Note the high revision ID (the previous edit was from May 2005), and the borked diff. Maybe N-eicosanoic acid (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) was created at the same time by the same user, and a similar database corruption occurred. Note that I'm not a sysadmin, so I could be talking out of my hat here. Graham87 05:24, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Note:the message isn't the system-generated error message, but rather the page content itself (go to edit screen). Not sure if that's normal behavior. An API query [9] says that it exists (but has no content or revisions). Calvin 1998 ^(t·c) 05:36, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

It's likely that whatever bug caused this in the first place has long been fixed. I wouldn't worry to much about it. I think it's safe to put the correct redirect in place. --- RockMFR 05:43, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Heh, looks like it won't be that easy. Keeps complaining about an edit conflict lol. --- RockMFR 05:45, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Broken image - Image:AdobeDwCS3OSX.png

Need help with this. Broken image by the smell of it. -- Veggy (talk) 00:17, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Looks like one of those images lost in that accident a while back. I'll see if I can retrieve a copy of it from an external website. Calvin 1998 ^(t·c) 05:38, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Image reduction not working

I uploaded Image:Tyrannosauridaescale blank.png a few hours ago. It displayed OK at full size, but not at all if put in a container that implies down-sizing, e.g. a plain "image" tag with no parans is OK, but no image is shown if the "image" tag includes the "thumb" param. I had a similar problem yesterday with another image, which displayed OK an hour later. Image:Tyrannosauridaescale blank.png is still not showing at reduced size after 5 hours. -- Philcha (talk) 12:43, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Single image won't load

In User:Goodmorningworld/Bethmann family, all images but one load. And even that one loads when only "Image:" and the file name of the picture are specified. But when I add "thumb" as a parameter, the image does not load.

The picture is of Ludwig Simon Moritz Freiherr von Bethmann (1844-1902). Can someone please open up the article and try if they can reproduce my problem?

I read WP:PFAQ#IMAGE but it's not helpful to me. I'm at the public library and the machines here use some non-standard browser with no ability to change settings.--Goodmorningworld (talk) 14:51, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

See the section just above! Lupo 15:50, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Squeaky wheel gets the grease<g><g><g>--Goodmorningworld (talk) 15:58, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

640x480 support

Users here may be interested in this discussion on dropping support for 640x480: Wikipedia_talk:2008_main_page_redesign_proposal#640x480. Many thanks -- Pretzels^Talk! 23:26, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia/Commons duplicate images

I suggest adding Category:Images with the same name on Wikimedia Commons to Mediawiki:Shareduploadduplicate. As far as I understand, this notice is automatically added to images which are present on Commons and are identical. The addition of category would remove the need to tag such images with {{NowCommons}} manually. At the same time, Category:Images with a different image under the same name on Wikimedia Commons (presently added with {{ShadowsCommons}}) could be added to Mediawiki:Shareduploadconflict. Conscious (talk) 08:52, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

If it works to add categories to such MediaWiki messages then this seems like a good suggestion.

--David Göthberg (talk) 11:13, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

It works for the Cite.php error messages. The same should be doable for any MediaWiki message that is interpreted as wikitext. Anomie⚔ 15:17, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

I have tried adding a category to Mediawiki:Shareduploadconflict. There are presently 39 pages in this category. Conscious (talk) 16:15, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Unfortunately it didn't work for Mediawiki:Shareduploadconflict and Mediawiki:Shareduploadduplicate. I tried removing the namespace detection that Conscious added, but that didn't help. (But such detection normally is a good thing.) And I tried adding the other category to Mediawiki:Shareduploadduplicate. And I of course waited some time and purged the Image:Example.png and Image:Imbox style.png to see if the categories became visible on the image pages, but nothing happened. Oddly enough the MediaWiki parser cleanly removes the category code since there were no remnants of it on those two image pages. But the image pages did not get the categories. I left the category code in those messages for now so you can see for yourself. (Since they don't seem to do any damage.)

This is common with MediaWiki messages. They are parsed differently. I guess the next step is to file a bugzilla report asking that the devs fix so those two messages can use categories. I am not used to bugzilla, so could someone who knows how that works please file the report?

--David Göthberg (talk) 09:00, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Special:ListIPs

I know that this might sound really crazy or out of line, but isn't it possible to list all IPs with contributions on Wikipedia? You know, like Special:ListUsers. It would be very useful for tracking IP vandalism and/or socks, although there's already the MediaWiki:Gadget-contribsrange.js script for that (which has bugs and lists the IPs chronologically instead of by date as it should be). Shouldn't the chronological list be seperate? There are several blocks of IP ranges. The US Senate would be 156.33.0.0/16 (generate that on this website and you'll get all of the allocated IPs in that block). Now, that wouldn't be very helpful for finding the contribs, but the whole point is to find a way to see IP contributions chronogically, may be either by searching IPs by the first one numerically or by ranges or whatever is parallel with alphabetical listings for users (depending on how good you are with numbers). Should there be a proposal on this and how should it work (in theory)? Thanks, ~ Troy (talk) 02:07, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

My very rough estimate is that there are about 1 190 400 IP addresses with contributions. What purpose would this serve? It would require an estimated 40 MB just to store such a list, and generating it would take about a day of server time. Edits would be slowed down as a result of storing such a list, etc, etc. Range contribs is good enough. Werdna 08:16, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Anyone want to run

SELECT DISTINCT rev_user_text
FROM mw_revision
WHERE rev_user = 0;

On the toolserver database? Is this what you were thinking of, Werdna? If so, how big is the revision table to make the query take so long? Happy‑melon 12:32, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

A quick check on the toolserver indicates that the revision table for en.wikipedia currently has about 280 million rows. I'm not going to run that query. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 13:37, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

I got that number by running a query on a representative set of /16 subnets, and found that there were about 50 different editing IPs on each /16. I consulted xkcd's map of the internet, and figured out roughly how many active /16 ranges there were, and multiplied that number by 50. By doing that, I got to my above figure of 1 190 400. Werdna 00:14, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Ah well, just an idea. I guess if it's not even feasible enough to test, then there's no point. Back to using Range contribs ...~ Troy (talk) 00:30, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Defaulting search language in wikipedia's front page

This has been troubling me for awhile now, which is the front page of wikipedia is being very smart and able to default to my language to search...this is probably done by detecting the version of windows I'm using, I don't know. I know it's for convenient of different language user, but for me, as a chinese, I still almost always use wikipedia english for academic purposes. Having set to chinese all the time result my search receiving no results and needing to go back and change the language search setting. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has such problems, a lot of users still uses the english version of wikipedia. It would be nice (which I think is very possible) that we're able to set our language ourselves and probably save it in cookies of some sort. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.89.32.166 (talk) 09:30, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

See this similar discussion. Algebraist 09:34, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Recent mods to Wiki:Searching

This discussion was moved here from Wikipedia talk:Searching. --David Göthberg (talk) 11:20, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Recent mods in September/October 2008 to the search function have not necessarily been advantageous.

Amongst other things, around 5AM UTC, when Wiki search is presumably updating its lookup tables, the search function is turned off and finds nothing.

Try searching for the misspelled "diffrent". If a misspelling such as "diffrent" is corrected to "different" then the lookup table should ceasing finding the word under its old spelling and start finding it under its new spelling. Prior to September, this was as quick as pressing the "Refresh" button of IE or Firefox. Performing the search again, or moving from one page to another of the search results would also do a refresh.

Now this refresh seems to happen only once a day.

Tabletop (talk) 04:52, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

I think you are correct in the discovery that the search index now seems to update much less often. It might be because lately they have had several problems with the Wikipedia servers and databases, so they have been turning off lots of "luxury" functions to save load and to avoid triggering some of the bugs. Or at least that is what it seems to me they are doing, based on some of the server admin logs and other comments people have pointed me to. And for instance Special:MostLinkedTemplates haven't updated for a month now. It used to update about twice a week before. :(

Anyway, I will move this report to the Wikipedia:Village pump (technical), since the devs and some of the people who manages the servers take a look there every now and then.

--David Göthberg (talk) 11:17, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

End of section moved here from Wikipedia talk:Searching. --David Göthberg (talk) 11:20, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

The search index is being updated once a day for the last at least one year, and even less often before that. So there has been no recent changes to that. There has been some outage around 5am during the past week, this is since we are currently in process of migrating to new search servers and haven't really figured out how to do these as efficiently as possible. Should be better now, and get resolved completely in next couple of days. --rainman (talk) 14:09, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Image won't display

Resolved

A strange phenomenon as it occurs to me, I just changed the image in the infobox at David Irving and the new image won't display. It shows the outline of the image at first, but then collapses and disappears. __meco (talk) 11:41, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Image looks fine to me. (Mac OS, FF3) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 13:33, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Works for me (Mac OS, Safari 3). EVula // talk // ☯ // 13:43, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

It works for me also now. It must have been an intermittent glitch. __meco (talk) 14:50, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Genre missing from all Music Pages?

All of a sudden, all genre is missing from all music pages (ie bands, musicians etc) What happened? i used this as my bible when sorting my music?

This use to be under "background" of the artist—Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.49.232.126 (talk) 00:09, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

It was removed following this discussion (which I have not read). Algebraist 00:14, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Recent Changes Transcluded only

Special:RecentChangesLinked/whatever will show all changes pages both linked to and transcluding the target whatever. Is there a way of hiding the linked pages to show the transcluding pages, for example Special:RecentChangesLinked/Template:whatever&hidelinks=1 does not work ? Peet Ern (talk) 12:08, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

It's been on my "to do" for some time (to be precise, ever since I fixed Special:RecentChangesLinked to show changes to transcluded pages at all). It shouldn't be very hard to implement: the query building code already takes in a list of link types (normal, transclusion, image display, categorization) to show, all it needs is an interface for modifying that list. Someone just has to sit down and code it. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 23:40, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. I have a lot of manual sifting in the mean time then . . . Peet Ern (talk) 02:05, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Recent changes

Each time I click on recent changes, no page loads (or a Wikimedia foundation error). Any help? --Fixman^{Praise me} 22:29, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Special:RecentChanges works fine for me, what's the exact link that's giving errors? Mr.Z-man 02:01, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Neighbors in a category

Is there any sort of wikicode that will output, say, the alphabetically next member of a category? For example, I want a piece of code that I can put on the Montana page (which is in Category:States of the United States), that would output Nebraska. (This isn't actually what I want it for, but it's an illustrative example.) Thanks.--Pharos (talk) 23:34, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

There's not. If you explain what you really want it for, you may be able to persuade the devs to add such a feature. — CharlotteWebb 01:08, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Basically, so I could have a little template at the bottom of an image page showing images ahead and behind in the category, which might be useful for a future iteration of commons:Commons:Photo scavenger hunts. I was hoping there was some sort of workaround that might make this possible.--Pharos (talk) 01:18, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Hmm... Javascript might be your best bet (iframes or ajax, pick your poison). — CharlotteWebb 01:29, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

I'm afraid I'm not a programmer myself. Could you give me a first step on how to get started on this? Thanks.--Pharos (talk) 13:48, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Before getting into that, the main problem looks to be actually finding the siblings. The next one can be found via the API easily enough: ...cmlimit=2&cmnamespace=0&cmdir=asc&cmcontinue=Montana|... but finding the previous sibling via the API currently doesn't seem to work ...cmdir=desc... (possibly a bug?). The only way I can think of, is if you were to load *all* categorymembers (limit of 500 per query, so with say, 200,000 members, you're looking at 400 individual queries to the API, on _each_ pageload) and then loof for the current page in the compiled list, and go back one. --Splarka (rant) 07:25, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Hmm... these types of categories are relatively small compared to those numbers. Almost all would be <500 members, and it's unlikely any would be >1,000.--Pharos (talk) 22:56, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

I was thinking of some of the larger ones on commons, per your use. It would have to scale up to be useful. --Splarka (rant) 07:08, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Our photo scavenger hunt use would deal only with categories of a limited size. We use a different category for every team, so no matter how many teams we attract, the size of individual categories is unlikely to go beyond a couple of hundred, e.g. commons:Category:Images from Wikipedia Takes Manhattan by official-ly cool. Thanks.--Pharos (talk) 05:12, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Does Wikipedia take Berlin next? If the category page is already your starting point this would be easy. You would just have to add dummy parameters to each image url e.g. change

href="/wiki/Image:Untitled_3.jpg"

href="/wiki/Image:Untitled_3.jpg?dummyprev=Image:Untitled_2.jpg&dummynext=Image:Untitled_aardvark.jpg"

This would be ignored by the server but you could set a second script to catch these parameters and add links accordingly. The code would be pretty simple unless you need thumbnails to boot. — CharlotteWebb 21:03, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

This sounds like an easy thing to fix but the database layout makes it surprisingly difficult. I have an idea how I can do it for small categories, using toolserver. If I get it working, I'll let you know. — Carl (CBM · talk) 22:33, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Thumbnails would help, because the idea would be to see the next few images ahead and behind in the category, which will help with labeling. Let me know how things work out. And yeah, Wikis Take Berlin is on for this weekend!--Pharos (talk) 01:09, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

The difficulty is in the fact that the only (sensible) sort order that we have indexes for is by the category sort key. So you first have to pull out the sortkey for the target article, and then find the next and previous entry in the category. Difficult (though probably not impossible) to do in a single SQL statement, but easy enough if you don't mind spending three.

For example, let's say you want to find the articles flanking George W. Bush in Category:Living people. First, you need the page ID and the sort key:

SELECT cl_sortkey FROM page, categorylinks
 WHERE cl_to = 'Living_people' AND cl_from = page_id
   AND page_namespace = 0 AND page_title = 'George_W._Bush';

Once you have the sortkey ("Bush, George W.", as it happens), it's easy enough to find the flanking articles:

SELECT page_namespace, page_title FROM page, categorylinks
 WHERE cl_to = 'Living_people' AND cl_from = page_id
   AND page_namespace = 0 AND cl_sortkey < 'Bush, George W.'
 ORDER BY cl_sortkey DESC LIMIT 1;

and similarly:

SELECT page_namespace, page_title FROM page, categorylinks
 WHERE cl_to = 'Living_people' AND cl_from = page_id
   AND page_namespace = 0 AND cl_sortkey > 'Bush, George W.'
 ORDER BY cl_sortkey ASC LIMIT 1;

A minor problem with this approach is that sortkeys are not always unique. It would be nice to disambiguate pages by the title (or some other value, such as the page ID, which happens to be conveniently indexed) in this case, but that requires some additional complexity. Incidentally, once you do all this, you might as well show a few more links in each direction: they come almost free, all you need is to increase the limit value.

Oh, and the answers are George P. Bush and Grand L. Bush, in case you were wondering. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 17:46, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

just as an FYI - I reported the API issue over at bugzilla, and the nice developers there added new parameters so that you can get lists by sortkey as well as timestamp. haven't tested it myself, but the changes are reflected in the API documentation if anyone wants to play with it.

Move image

I am not sure if this is the right place to request an image to be moved - please correct me if I should post this elsewhere.

I would like Image:Endeavour.jpg moved to another name because there is an image with this name in commons, and I can not move it myself (by the way can I do it as an registred user?). Prillen (talk) 13:37, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Only way to move images is to reupload and delete original.Geni 13:57, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Two-fer: hidden archive question and minus signs in sortable wikitables

Two technical issues I need help with please.

I'm on IE7. At Talk:Intelligent design, other editors report that the archive box shows a drop down hide/show button. I'm not getting that at all. The archive box on my browser only shows dead black text, with the exception of the FAQ, which is a live blue link. Other than going in to edit mode to find the archives, I have no live link to talk page archives. (Since my understanding is that IE is the most widely used browser, that means most readers can't access the talk page archives on this article.)

Also, there is an issue with how sortable wikitables deal with negative data. See the sortable table at the top of Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates/archive31. The negative data currently has a hyphen (-) and sorts correctly. If I change it to a correct minus sign (−) or an ndash, it doesn't sort correctly as a negative, so I'm forced to use an incorrect hyphen to indicate a negative number.

Thanks in advance, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:18, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Just to say that in Camino there are small [show] links down the right hand side of the Talk:Intelligent design archive box, which when clicked drop down bulleted lists of linked archive names. . . dave souza, talk 21:53, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

For the first, it looks like it might have been a problem with {{WikiProject intelligent design}}, this change has done the trick for others with the same symptoms. Is it fixed for you?

For the second, {{sort}} would be a quick fix, or you could file a bug to request changes to wikibits.js. User:SharkD has done some of this in the past, you could ask him for help. Anomie⚔ 23:06, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes, first is all fixed now (thanks, Anomie). On the second, sorry, Greek to me :-) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:18, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Second issue was already reported a month ago: bugzilla:15890 descending tablesort broken for negative numbers. —AlexSm 00:13, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

It looks like that bug was fixed in r40379. This bug is slightly different, U+2212 should be equivalent to U+002B with respect to numeric sorting. Anomie⚔ 00:35, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Can individual blogspot pages get whitelisted?

I just posted a request at the mediawiki whitelist project[10]. They suggest posting here to because there's no traffic over there. Can somebody have a look at the request for me? Thanks. NJGW (talk) 21:44, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Stupid parser function problem

I want to write something akin to "if any of these conditions are true, then give me a parenthesis, else don't do a thing"

My code is

{{#if:{{#expr: {{{date|}}} or {{{year|}}} or {{{origdate|}}} or {{{origyear|}}} }}
 |(
}}

However this returns a parenthesis no matter what. See below.

(

Halp? Headbomb {ταλκ – WP Physics: PotW} 05:22, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Try

{{#if:{{#expr: {{{date|{{{year|{{{origdate|{{{origyear|}}} }}} }}} }}} }}
 |(
}}

—Remember the dot ^(talk) 05:26, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Well that returns nothing unless they all are true. Headbomb {ταλκ – WP Physics: PotW} 05:30, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Hum, nevermind, it works. Wonder why I didn't work on first try. Headbomb {ταλκ – WP Physics: PotW} 05:38, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Actually, it only return something if {{{date|}}} is true. I'm so confused.Headbomb {ταλκ – WP Physics: PotW} 05:50, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

{{#if:{{{date|}}}{{{year|}}}{{{origdate|}}}{{{origyear|}}}|(}}

If just cares if there is *anything*. --Splarka (rant) 07:25, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Yeah this works. Thanks a bunch. Headbomb {ταλκ – WP Physics: PotW} 03:32, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Stupid parser function problem take 2

Now a similar problem; I want to write something akin to "if (A or B) and (C or D) is true, give me a dash "

{{#if:{{#expr: {{{date|{{{year| }}} }}} and {{{origdate|{{{origyear|}}} }}} }}
 | – 
}}

Still give me a dash no matter what. See below.
 – 

Headbomb {ταλκ – WP Physics: PotW} 05:44, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

You probably actually want something like this:

{{#if:{{{date|{{{year|}}} }}} | {{#if:{{{origdate|{{{origyear|}}} }}}
 | – 
}}}}

--- RockMFR 06:04, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Nope, that only works if "date and origdate" or "year and origyear" are true. Headbomb {ταλκ – WP Physics: PotW} 06:12, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

I don't know the specifics of MediaWiki's parser functions, but based on the previous answer, wouldn't it be something like:

{{#if:{{{date|}}}{{{year|}}} 
  | {{#if:{{{origdate|}}}{{{origyear|}}} 
    |  – 
  }}
}}

As in, "IF¹ (date OR year) THEN IF² (origdate OR origyear) THEN '-' ENDIF² ENDIF¹" - IMSoP (talk) 15:20, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Yeah this works. Thanks a bunch. Headbomb {ταλκ – WP Physics: PotW} 03:32, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Crash

They said on the IRC channel that the crash we just had was due to a problem with the image servers. Any relation to the problems with the tools on Commons? Ashanda (talk) 21:48, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Can I also assume that the problem with images not being rendered at thumbnail sizes is also related to the crash? Ed Fitzgerald ^{t / c} 00:42, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Uploaded images not appearing in articles

I uploaded these two images (one a new version of an existing image) about 5 hours apart, and neither is showing up in their respective articles:

• Image:Mitchell Leisen credit card.jpg - Mitchell Leisen
• Image:Turnabout title.jpg - Turnabout (film)

I can see the image on the image page in the full size version, but even there the thumbnail in the edit history isn't appearing. I've cleared my cache a number of times, so it's not that, and confirmed that the problem's still there under a different browser (Firefox as opposed to my normal IE).

Any thoughts? Ed Fitzgerald ^{t / c} 12:46, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

See previous post - they're OK if shown at full size, but not in any wrapper that implies re-scaling. -- Philcha (talk) 12:55, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, I saw your post right after I posted mine, looks to be the same problem. (BTW, I deleted the image you posted here, since it's a non-free image utilized under fair-use, and therefore only supposed to go into the mainspace articles it's got a rationale for.) Ed Fitzgerald ^{t / c} 12:58, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

It's a server-side problem. See this mailing list announcement and the server admin log. They changed something with the server setup to do image scaling, and apparently that doesn't work like it should. Lupo 14:00, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

But it will be fixed, yes? I'm having this issue with two images for Stephen Crane, which I was hoping to nominate for FAC soon... María (habla conmigo) 16:17, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Should be fixed now. PeterSymonds (talk) 17:19, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes, thank you. :) María (habla conmigo) 17:19, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

It seems to be working now, at least on my two images above. Ed Fitzgerald ^{t / c} 20:30, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

I think I'm having the same issue.. perhaps I have failed in some other way? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_P3600 Roggg (talk) 11:43, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

The problem still exists, here is one example: ru:Аблесимов, Александр Онисимович. It's interesting that the same scaled picturel here uk:Аблесімов, Олександр Онисимович looks OK. --Vladimir Ivanov (talk) 00:10, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Same exaples else: ru:Царёв, Вадим Юрьевич, ru:Дубова, Ольга Борисовна, ru:Панкин, Борис Дмитриевич, ru:Свободное слово (клуб) --Vadim Tatarinov —Preceding undated comment was added at 12:07, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Still half of the image thumbs are not displayed.DonaldDuck (talk) 11:27, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Slow loading of history

I'm having a problem when I click on history for any page. It's very slow to load, which holds everything up. It's been happening for the last few days. There's no problem with anything else. Any suggestions? I don't experience the problem on wikiquote. Ty 13:51, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Hmm. Does anyone know the place to report this or find someone who would know why it's happening? Is anyone else experiencing problems? Ty 04:07, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

No. History loads ok for me. It may be a browser problem. Dr.K. (talk) 04:22, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

I've been seeing this too. Especially noticeable on a slow machine that it is doing a background number crunching task as well, with something fast it is not so noticeable, but still there. The delay does not seem to be the time it takes to load the history, I can see the entries long before the PC unfreezes and it is not just on long lists that have scrolled off the end of the screen, even an article with a short history that entirely fits on one screen is still frozen for a period (admittedly shorter). The delay seems to be a wait before dotted lines appear around the two entries checked for diff display. I might be mistaken, but I do believe those dotted lines are a new feature and are probably responsible for the decline in performance. Personally I would rather have the performance than the dotted lines - do they have any purpose? SpinningSpark 22:32, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Link maintenance

Is there a way to set some sort of preference or monobook/CSS thing so that different types of links show up as different colours to help with link maintenance? What I want is to have an easily switchable option for things like redirects and disambiguation pages to show up as a different colour when looking at a page. The reason for this is that it is surprisingly easy for subtle changes in the destination of a link to go unnoticed. Some examples are:

• (1) Someone edits a redirect so that instead of pointing at the correct article, it points to the wrong article. Editors watching an article with a link to that redirect don't see anything in their watchlist, and the link in the article stays blue. They will find out something is wrong if they click on the redirect and suddenly find they are taken to the wrong article. Is there any other way for them to spot this change, other than putting the redirect on their watchlist or checking "related changes"?
• (2) Someone edits a redirect so that instead of pointing at the correct article, it points to a redlink (non-existent article). If that redirect is used in articles, again, it will remain blue and no-one will notice unless they have the redirect on their watchlist or check "related changes" regularly. The redirect might even get deleted as a "broken redirect" if no-one notices in time. At that point, of course, the pages "using" the redirect will have their link turn from blue to red and someone might notice at that point.
• (3) Someone changes a redirect (or indeed any link) into a disambiguation page. See here for an example. Again, editors of articles using that redirect will not see any visible change on the page. The blue link will still be blue, despite the destination having changed from a redirect to a disambiguation page.
• (4) A redlink on a page suddenly turns blue and you rejoice, thinking someone has created a stub on that obscure (or maybe not so obscure) 19th century scientist you were thinking of writing an article on. But then you discover that the article is on a Canadian politician instead. So you end up creating the other page anyway. But you note, with some annoyance, that the person who created the article had failed to check "what links here" to check that any redlinks they were turning blue were correct ones.
• (5) An article (call it "article A") has hundreds of incoming links from other articles and there are lots of edits being made to those other articles. You can follow those edits by "inverting" related changes to apply to incoming links, rather than outgoing ones, but it is still difficult to spot important changes among the noise. In particular, when someone edits one of those articles to remove a link to article A, it should be possibly to flag up that change in particular. This might, now I think about it, actually be very difficult to do. Is it possible to do this?

I think all the above scenarios are detectable using "related changes" (which can be applied to outgoing or incoming links), but what I wondered was whether it is possible to have a version of related changes that is restricted to certain types of changes, specifically: (a) changes to redirects, (b) page moves, (c) page deletions, (d) page creations. In other words, not just any old change to the page the link is pointing to or from, but ones that qualitatively change the semantic meaning of the link (the "destination"). Is that possible at all? Ideally, this would show up on a page when you look at it (in the case of direct links, page creations and deletions show up by the link turning red and blue, but the other changes do not show up - blue links still stay blue).

What I'm thinking here is that if I load a page that was previously all blue links, I would be able to look and see that some links had turned green (had become links to disambiguation pages), some had turned red (pages had been deleted), some had turned into italics (had become redirects), and so on. Not everything would be visual - a link turning blue wouldn't say when it had turned blue, and similarly a redirect turning into another redirect wouldn't show up visually, but a function similar to "what links here" would show the recent changes in the destinations of the links on a page and when the changes took place. I'd also toss in some way to flag up piped links as well, but that's not as important. Could these sort of visual flags for types of link destination be done at all easily, or has it been done already?

The reason I'm asking, in case anyone is curious (details in one of the links above), is that for three years a redirect was happily doing its job at Royal Medal, but when the redirect got changed in June this year, the link stayed blue and for four months I thought the link was fine. It was only when I clicked it recently that I realised it now pointed at a disambiguation page. So I hope there is some way of making types of link destinations more visible on a page for editors (readers are another matter). Is there any easy way to do this, and does anyone share my concern that such changes as I describe above are rather difficult to spot? Carcharoth (talk) 23:58, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Redirects and broken redirects having different styles should be possible with a software change - put something on bugzilla: listing what things you want to trigger extra styles (e.g. redirect, broken redirect, ...). Matt/TheFearow (Talk) 00:22, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Never had a bugzilla account. Would someone else be able to file a request? I'm also looking at User:Pyrospirit/metadata, which can detect disambiguation pages. I'll ask that user if they have anything that will help here. Carcharoth (talk) 00:36, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

As far as styling links to disambiguation pages (and pages at XFD), User:Anomie/linkclassifier.js might help you. You can style redirects without any script now, the software automatically adds a class mw-redirect to links to redirects. Anomie⚔ 02:12, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

(1) through (3) might be addressed by a sort of Recent Changes Patrol approach, one that looked only at edits to existing or new redirect pages. The MediaWiki software already knows which pages are redirects, since such pages show up in page indexes in italics rather than normal font, so what is needed is (a) another filter for the Special:RecentChanges page, and (b) some editors interested in doing this type of monitoring. Or maybe just adding "R", on the left side of Special:RecentChanges, for any page that has become a redirect, and "r" for an existing redirect page that has been edited? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 19:43, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

My script just checks document.getElementById('disambig'), which is only useful for determining whether the page you're on is a disambiguation page or not. I don't know any good way of determining whether a large number of pages are disambiguation pages or not when all you have are links to them. Pyrospirit (talk · contribs) 22:08, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

API query requesting all templates used on the list of titles (using generator), then cheking those templates against MediaWiki:Disambiguationspage; this is already implemented in User:Splarka/dabfinder.js. —AlexSm 04:22, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

You could also query the categories for the list of titles and check for Category:All disambiguation pages. All dab templates should be putting their pages in that tracking category. Anomie⚔ 13:29, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Delay in display of changes to transcluded Current events portal

For the past few weeks, it takes a number of minutes for changes to show up in the transcluded Portal:Current events, though they show up without a problem on individual elements immediately, such as Portal:Current events/2008 October 17 and Portal:Current events/Sidebar. It doesn't appear to have anything to do with the Wikinews transclusions, as the delay also shows up on WP:ITN/C, where Wikinews is not transcluded.

It's more of a curiosity than a problem, but if it can be fixed, that'd be nice. Galatee (talk) 19:13, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Have you tried purging? — neuro^(talk) 10:23, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

I was just informed of it recently, though this seemed to be happening continuously. Naturally, as soon as I complain, it stops happening. (A change went through immediately) I'll try purging next time. Galatee (talk) 17:39, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Botify the bare refs in Plug-in hybrid, please

Featured article Plug-in hybrid now has ten sub-numbered URL-only references (ref. 38 appears as "[1], [2]") and nine occurrences of "http:" in the references. Who runs the bot that converts numbered sub-references into named links to the title of the linked document? If you know, would you please ask them to run their bot on Plug-in hybrid? Thank you. Orange Knight of Passion (talk) 02:23, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Well there's DumZiBoT that checks the website that's linked to and puts in the header text as the reference. While that's better than nothing, it's sub-par as a reference. To format references properly, I myself like to plug the information into citation templates. The advantages of the templates go beyond ease of use and standardization of output, they output microformats that machines can parse. You or someone should really fix the references manually. —Elipongo (Talk contribs) 07:17, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

{{PAGENAME}} and parts of page names

How can I do something like {{PAGENAME}} that will only output, say, the last three characters of the page name? Thanks.--Pharos (talk) 13:25, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

You can't, until (or unless) the StringFunctions extension is enabled on Wikimedia Foundation wikis. I guess it hasn't been enabled due to server load. Graham87 15:30, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

See bugzilla:6455. Anomie⚔ 15:52, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Accidental edits to articles?

I've been seeing a steady stream of random edits where anonymous users mess up pages by garbling the text and inserting odd tags. Every time I see it the edits are coming from a different address. For example, see Hellboy diff, Mäkinen diff, and Mommsen diff. I think it might have something to do with Google Translate. Has anyone else seen this? Might there be a way to block these edits automatically? Wronkiew (talk) 17:40, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

We could ask the server admins to add some distinctive part of the garbage — like class="google-src-text" — to $wgSpamRegex. Probably best to file a request on bugzilla. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 17:57, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

I've stuck a chunk of the wrapped code into the general spam regex, which should block such edits. Will see if we can find a better lower-level block... --brion (talk) 19:50, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Awesome, thanks. Did you add it to the Wikipedia $wgSpamRegex? What regular expression did you use? Is it possible to see the contents of config variables without privileged access to the server? Wronkiew (talk) 20:23, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

http://noc.wikimedia.org/conf/ --brion (talk) 21:06, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Thus answering a long-standing question of mine - that's gold! Is there any way we can see what else is on noc.wikimedia.org? The home page is umm, uninformative. Franamax (talk) 21:19, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

ROFL!! I don't think very much material is actually stored on that domain, it's dynamically extracted from the live configuration files. Right? Happy‑melon 12:49, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

There are a few bits and pieces of other stuff. If anything else was very important, you'd know about it. — Werdna • talk 22:35, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

I've been taking a look at this, because it interested me. This seems to be part of a WordPress exploit, that tries to get access to people's Google Adsense accounts or something. It was probably inserted by someone trying to edit wikipedia from a Wikipedia live mirror that is infested with malware. It's really difficult to find an actual full explanation on it, but this seems to be one of such an infested page. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 01:02, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

Redirects on main navigation template

Right under the WP logo, Wikipedia:Community Portal redirects to Wikipedia:Community portal. And Wikipedia:Current events redirects to Portal:Current events. No big deal, but thought someone in WP's nuts and bolts might want to change them to their targets since they're so prominent. Galatee (talk) 19:58, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

The sidebar already links directly to the pages without using the redirects just as you want. So I checked the edit history of MediaWiki:Sidebar, MediaWiki:Currentevents-url and MediaWiki:Portal-url and that was already fixed long ago.

We have had other reports where the sidebar for some minutes was showing its default settings some days ago. This seems to be a similar case.

--David Göthberg (talk) 22:02, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

"Log" for Newbies

I was here before about possible special pages; obviously lacking knowledge in how they can run. But I can't help but think that there's some sort of feasible way of testing it. ...Is there a way for there to be a Special:Log/Newbies like there is a Special:Contributions/Newbies? It would be quite useful for tracking new things going on; blocks on newbies, moves (does "Grawp" ring a bell?), etc. Any feedback would be nice; I'm still not in tune with how things work, exactly, and whether it would take up too much space. Thank you. ~ Troy (talk) 18:23, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Not a bad idea; seems (to me, anyway) to be fairly straightforward, technically. I suggest you post at WP:VPPR (without the first two sentences, and the last sentence, above, which don't seem quite on point, proposal-wise). -- John Broughton (♫♫) 01:14, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

Alright, I went ahead with that. It should be important to note that it's a small "n", not a capital (User:Newbies exists as an account, but [11] is set up as a special page for all contribs by new editors). Just wanted to point that out clearly enough. Thanks. ~ Troy (talk) 02:09, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

FTP upload

Is there a way I can use FTP to upload files to commons? =Nichalp «Talk»= 06:11, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

By special arrangement with technical staff, for big files, yes. — Werdna • talk 22:34, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

Template:WikiProject Reggae

Something wrong with Template:WikiProject_Reggae. Can somebody check and correct? --89.218.22.6 (talk) 16:57, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

Fixed. --- RockMFR 17:19, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

Odd cite behavior (maybe a bug)

When looking on this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitComet you can see that the 10th cite link is missing from the article body, and that from cite link 11 it redirect to a cite note that is one below its numeric representation.

When looking on the page code the missing cite link has is under a ref element with name="No advertisements in current versions". Trying to play with the code, I was noticed that when removing the "advertisements" word from the name, the cite link was then working just fine.

Is this a bug or am I missing something? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.110.126.208 (talk) 12:58, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

It works fine for me in IE6, both the current version and as it is was before today's edit. SpinningSpark 16:13, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes. I didn't notice it before, but it seems that the "blame" is on the Adblock Plus plugin on my Firefox browser, that filtered it since it contains that word :-) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.110.126.208 (talk) 20:37, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

Duplicate AfDs

Resolved

I created an AfD for Kuzhinapurath Family using Twinkle on 15:49, 20 October 2008. Although the article didn't show the AfD template, I thought it was simply my cache as that's what I was told the last time something vaguely similar happened (template on article showed redlink to Afd article). But in fact Twinkle doesn't seem to have done the trick, or..? Anyway, how do we merge [12] which I created, with an AfD created today for the same article and showing as a 2nd nomination here [13]. Thanks. Doug Weller (talk) 14:35, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

Maybe the 2nd should be speedy deleted, housekeeping? I've redirected the notice to the running AfD (I hope that's ok) Verbal chat 14:42, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

Seems to have been fixed now. Verbal chat 14:51, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. I don't know how the software counts AfDs and wasn't sure if I deleted the 2nd what would happen. Doug Weller (talk) 15:04, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

OnionCat

Would someone be willing to take a look at OnionCat and try to format and/or copyedit it as a typical article? I was going to take a stab at it, but I am utterly perplexed by the technical content and am not sure where to start. Thanks, Iamunknown 04:44, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Odd spacing

Talked to Roux and Gracenote on IRC, they don't seem to have the same problem, but I am seeing odd spacing for the whole of a sentence (up until a full stop) when {{pron-en}} is used (examples: [14], [15]). I'm running Firefox 3.0.3, and I cannot reproduce it in IE. I am running the DownThemAll, ChatZilla, and Adblock addons as well. Any ideas? — neuro^(talk) 10:21, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

See #Chinese characters change character spacing. --—— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk - 17:30, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Edit a range of sections?

Here's the situation: I want to merge a section into it's previous section, mostly by removing the section's heading and by changing the previous section's heading. Now this is a large article, and I'd rather not edit it in it's entirety...

So the question is this: Is it possible to edit these two sections simultaneously, without editing the entire article? Rami R 13:12, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

If they're both subsections of the same section, you can edit that. Algebraist 13:39, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

Unfortunately that's not the case. Rami R 13:50, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

This isn't possible with the current software. Probably won't be, because it would be difficult to create an interface for. — Werdna • talk 13:56, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

I don't see why you could not do that by opening two browser windows (or tabs), one editing the first section and the other editing the second. Be careful not to edit the same section with both windows though, that will likely generate an edit conflict - the software will treat your two edit sessions as being two separate users. A simpler thing to do though, if the two sections are contiguous (and you implied they were), is to first delete the second heading. After saving that edit both sections will be under one heading and can be edited in one window. If they are not contiguous I would suggest that you first copy one section on to your clipboard or a local text file and then delete that section in the article. Next, paste the deleted text back in to the target section and again, you have both blocks of text in one section which you can proceed to merge. Hope that helps. SpinningSpark 16:06, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

If SpinningSpark hadn't posted a good three hours before me, that's what I would have suggested. The downside, however, is that there might be an extra linebreak that gets inserted into the article. EVula // talk // ☯ // 19:05, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Changing the logo

Because I seriously want this in the corner :3

I'm aware there is some way to change the logo with CSS in monobook.css, but how do you do it? ViperSnake151 14:50, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

Well, you'd have to change the background image of #p-logo a, which is styled inline. Presumably the simplest way to do it would be something along the lines of

#p-logo a {background-image: url(URL OF YOUR IMAGE HERE) !important;}

Though granted, I don't remember off the top of my head whether !important would be enough to override it. {{Nihiltres|talk|log}} 15:24, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

"!important" at the end of any CSS line will cause it to override any related declarations, regardless of their position in the cascade. EVula // talk // ☯ // 19:03, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Missing images

All the images of the entire wikipedia are not displayed. This is most likely a change in our firewall settings at work, but I was wondering if anyone else had this issue. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bobarino (talk • contribs) 22:47, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

^{Moved from T:MP. ffm 23:16, 21 October 2008 (UTC)}

Same problem. I'm at work too. Wikipedia brown (talk) 12:23, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

WikiProject Canada banner

Resolved

I need help with the problem mentioned at Template_talk:WikiProject_Canada#Bug; for some reason, only the FA-class link on the assessment table is incorrect. Many thanks, --Jh12 (talk) 03:08, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Has been fixed thanks to User:Anomie and User:CBM --Jh12 (talk) 18:38, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Bypassing Special:NewPages

I suspect the answer is no, but is there any way of bypassing Special:NewPages for pages created by a bot? I often create large numbers of Polish village articles/redirects all at once with Kotbot, and this leads to complaints that it floods NewPages.--Kotniski (talk) 09:10, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Well, it has a "Hide bots" option (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:NewPages&hidebots=1). Any reason people can't use that? As for the original question, no, there's no way to bypass being listed at Special:NewPages. --MZMcBride (talk) 09:21, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, I'll pass that message on.--Kotniski (talk) 09:39, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

please help remove vandalism

Resolved

 – EVula // talk // ☯ // 21:20, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

The other day, I tried removing vandalism from the bottom of the page concerning policy page on Wikipedia: profanity. For some reason, I couldn't get all of the vandalism to disappear; neither editing nor purging seemed to do the trick. Although I know that Wikipedia changes are usually seemingly instantaneous, I gave the article some time to see if the changes would go into effect -- but they haven't. I don't know how to proceed. (I was able to get rid of most of the vandalism, and what remains looks more like a typo rather than the once obviously deliberate vandalism. However, go to the page and you'll see what I mean.) Minaker (talk) 19:57, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

has this been fixed? I don't see anything that looks like vandalism on that page. --Ludwigs2 20:08, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Sorry to be blunt but "you'll see what I mean" is a really, really poor way to describe a perceived problem. What people see can depend on a lot of things (browser, other software, own cache, ISP cache, Wikipedia cache, page edits, template edits, ...). And what people perceive as a problem can also vary a lot. If you still see a problem then please say exactly what it is. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:40, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes, it was taken care of.[16] EVula // talk // ☯ // 21:20, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

PrimeHunter, it's not like "you'll see what I mean" is the only way I described the problem, so I don't see your point in implying otherwise (unless you're grumpy that you went to the page after the correction was made and then couldn't find the problem, I suppose that's a semi-legitimate gripe); I also specified the page and that the problem was on the very bottom of the page and looked like a typo. EVula and NJGW found it without problem or confusion because they went to where I specified and saw what I meant. Conclusion: My request was accurate enough to get the job done despite your protest otherwise. Ha! Minaker (talk) 22:04, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

hey, if you guys are going to start a little verbal fencing, can I sell tickets? --Ludwigs2 22:13, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

As long as PrimeHunter and I both get a piece of the action. Minaker (talk) 22:57, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Game on! Now we just have to make the show go on to capture the audience. If the only problem was that the page contained the text "gang g" then I don't understand why you didn't remove it, or said the text was "gang g" instead of using more time and space to write less specific things. You wrote "I gave the article some time to see if the changes would go into effect -- but they haven't." I don't see an attempt to remove "gang g". When users say they have tried to remove vandalism but it didn't work, it's usually for other reasons, for example because they have cached a pre-vandalism version, or new vandalism was added after their edit, or the vandalism was to a transcluded template, or they edited the wrong section, or it's not vandalism but something they misunderstood. And yes, after a few thousand help desk edits I may occasionally get a little grumpy over all the hours I spend trying to guess what users have problems with when they don't say it. Sorry about that. Usually I'm actually quite nice and this may have been my worst outburst. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:11, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

There was originally a lot more than just "gang g." I attempted to delete the whole thing -- you can see my deletion of most of the vandalism in the article's history -- but for some reason I don't understand, while most of it was deleted, "gang g" remained. So then I AGAIN used the edit function to delete "gang g" and again it was still there when I reviewed my changes. So I tried purging the document to see if maybe the problem was simply the display on my screen. But no, gang g was still there. I tried to edit it out a third time, but to no avail. I don't understand why 1) it didn't delete along with the rest of what I deleted, since it was all a part of the same edit; 2) why the subsequent attempts failed, when I was following the exact same procedure as all of my successful edits; and 3) why neither the second nor third attempt to edit out the "gang g" failed to be recorded in the article's history. Maybe it's a moot point since the problem has been resolved, but it really is quite mysterious to me. Minaker (talk) 23:45, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

The vandalism was added [17] in two places, but it rendered on the same line because the things between the two places are rendered on other special parts of the page. I guess you saw a vandalism line on the rendered page and assumed it would all be fixed by editing in one place (a natural assumption). That would explain your first (and only recorded) edit [18]. I don't see why removal of "gang g" in a new edit would not work. If you somehow failed to remove "gang g" or make any other change before clicking "Save page" then it would be a null edit which is not shown in the page history. So I may be able to explain 1) and 3) but not 2). By the way, if you see vandalism on a page then it's often a good idea to check the page history to see whether there is a recent vandalism edit which can be reverted without manually having to fix the vandalised parts. That would have worked here. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:15, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

I'll add (in the spirit of commiseration) that I have accidentally made null edits without realizing it and been completely confused when I didn't get the result I expected. sometimes the wiki gets you, nasty beast that it is.

E-mail spamming

Would someone who knows how Wikipedia blocks attempts at spamming on e-mail care to look at this thread on ANI and post a comment? SpinningSpark 11:24, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

I don't know the answer, but one relevant page is Wikipedia:E-mailing users. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 13:47, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

Research

So I compiled some research on the number of new accounts registering at En.Wiki each month since the user creation log was brought online in Sept 2005. Below are the graphs of my results. If anyone wants the base data, I can email them the excel sheet I used. MBisanz ^talk 01:39, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

• 
  Line graph of new users
• 
  Bar graph of new users
• 
  Line graph of the date of each sequence of 5 million edits
• 
  Line graph of the time required for each sequence of 5 million edits

I've added some new data showing the time required for each block of 5,000,000 edits to be added to Wikipedia. It shows that over time it is taking about the same amount of hours, if not longer, for the community to produce the same number of edits. This to me indicates a stagnant if not declining community size or a decrease in productivity per editor. MBisanz ^talk 16:48, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

How are you deriving the edits? On the broad point, yes I think there are variety of metrics that the community peaked, contracted some, and then plateaued (more or less). Dragons flight (talk) 17:06, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Using the Oldid associated with each edit, I took the date+time each edit in the sequence, like edit 195,000,000 for example, and then Bjweeks ran a script that figured out how many hours were between each date on the chart. For the new users, I used the account creation log, finding the user id of the first user to register each month (since the log is sorted by date + time of registration, and then figuring out the differential between that number for each month, giving the number of users who registered that month. MBisanz ^talk 17:11, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

User:Katalaveno/TBE did something similar to the third and fourth graphs, but for 10,000,000 edit blocks. It does seem clear that the rate of edits has dropped off since the peak in May 2007, which I think is a bad thing. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 13:54, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

Chinese characters change character spacing

Has anyone else noticed that Chinese characters inserted into a paragraph causes the spacing for the whole paragraph to change?

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. 北京

This seems recent. --—— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk - 16:36, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Looks fine to me. Are you by any chance using a set of mystic stones to view the text? Happy‑melon 16:59, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

I should have mention that I am using FireFox 3. It does look OK in IE7. --—— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk - 17:11, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Something similar was reported for Firefox 3.0.3 in #Odd spacing above. (I don't know anything about it) PrimeHunter (talk) 17:18, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Yep: the lead of Thou has the same issue. --—— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk - 17:30, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Opera 9.61 displays both paragraphs correctly. -- Prince Kassad (talk) 18:36, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

They look fine in Safari 3.1.2 as well. --Ludwigs2 20:05, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Now that I am home, FF3 works properly. This XP box does not support unicode characters though; I tried a bunch of thing and never go it working. My PC at work does support unicode and has the spacing issue. This is a recent change, as I regularly work with another editor who has unicode characters in his signature, and there is where I first noticed the issue. --—— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk - 23:07, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

You say it is recent? Sounds like an FF3 bug, but possibly MediaWiki's fault. Captain Obvious says: You (or anyone else with access to a version of FF3 causing this, and some time on their hands) might try finding the smallest test-case. Save such a page (text only) locally as a .htm file, insert <base href="http://en.wikipedia.org/" /> into the head, and open it with a file:/// URI. Then start removing tag elements (being careful to preserve xhtml integrity) such as wrapping divs, the UI, script and stylesheets, undoing any removals that fix the problem and continuing on to the next tag. If it is a <link rel="stylesheet"> tag at fault, you can replace it with a <style> containing the relevant CSS and remove the tags in a binary fasion. In this way it is usually possible to narrow down the problem significantly.

Or you can skip to the end first and try something simple like: http://p.defau.lt/?c3ny5IrpxBRW4ZPR8CiR_w (it is domas' pastebin, before anyone complains about "spooky offsite pastes")... if that displays the same problem FF3 bug! --Splarka (rant) 08:03, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

OK: it is working today with no changes on my part. --—— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk - 17:05, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

Typo in Article name

Is Move the only way to correct it? thanks —Preceding unsigned comment added by Stwiso (talk • contribs) 21:39, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes. What article has a typo in it's name? EVula // talk // ☯ // 22:02, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

I guess it was this move at 22:05 and the problem is resolved. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:17, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. But would you add some details aabout how it is done? thanks —Preceding unsigned comment added by Stwiso (talk • contribs)

You made the move I linked so I'm not sure what you want now. Maybe a link to Help:Moving a page? PrimeHunter (talk) 16:33, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

citations that requires a subscription to read

Are citations that are not accessible because a subscription is required to look at the document, suitable for Wikipeida?--scuro (talk) 15:59, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

Obviously if more easily accessible citations are available, they're preferred. But there's no problem with citing databases or books or other "inaccessible" sources if that's only what's available. --MZMcBride (talk) 16:08, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

Broken image

Image:Pensaddlogo.gif is throwing up a 404 error, and has been for around a week now. I could just reupload the logo, but I'm rather curious as to what happened to this image. Resolute 15:29, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

It's one of the images listed as lost due to the recent image handling bug. Please go ahead and reupload if you can. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 17:47, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Well, that would explain it then. A fairly impressive oops there.  :) I've replaced the image, thanks. Resolute 19:35, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

By the way, I just went through the 2008-10-19 report and tagged all the images on enwiki that are still missing with {{September 2008 image loss}}. There's a category for anyone who'd like to help review them all, or you can just check WhatLinksHere.

I also have a separate list of oddballs, including both images that have either been fixed or deleted since the 19th as well as a whole bunch of images that are broken in all sorts of weird and wacky ways (some of which might not have anything to do with this particular bug at all). Any help in sorting through those is also welcome, but be careful with the "size mismatch" ones: I'm still not sure what's happened with those, and careless fixing attempts might just make things worse. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 23:08, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Nazem Al Jaafari

Anyone got any ideas as to why Nazem Al Jaafari hasn't been indexed by Google after over a week? Google query "Nazem Al Jaafari" site:en.wikipedia.org" returns no results. --A bit iffy (talk) 21:01, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

That is not unusual. As far as I know it can take up to 3 weeks to be detected by google. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 23:51, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

How do I transclude a non template page?

How do I transclude a page to another page without the first page being a template? Pleas post the awnser to my talk page as I rarly get here--Ipatrol (talk) 02:01, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Answer posted to asker's talk page by Gimmetrow, FYI. Calvin 1998 ^(t·c) 03:15, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Total Size of Wikipedia

Where can I keep track on the total size of the wikipedia database, ie. total gigabytes or whatever measuring unit is used? Also, is there a graph or stats on over-all size of the database over time? Just being curious. Juve2000 (talk) 05:45, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Size of Wikipedia and the pages linked from there. Graham87 06:13, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Hack? Diff

Hack? shows me deleting 5 of my previous edits and someone else's. If it had been one paragraph on its own, or even 2, I would have written it off as my mistake. But it would have been a lot of work to do this, I would have remembered, and well, I just wouldn't have done it. Anarchangel (talk) 01:13, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Your link isn't working. --Carnildo (talk) 01:24, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Here is the diff he is trying to give. [19] Icewedge (talk) 01:40, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. Didn't spot that. Will add a Citations section here if you don't mind. As long as that's up, the link and any others above the Citations section will work. Anarchangel (talk) 06:04, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Or instead of cluttering up the page, we can just make it a normal link... Mr.Z-man 06:49, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Although citations require more work here on the part of editors than they do on main pages, they are as valuable here as there.

Having said that, it isn't an issue I wish to pursue. The hack is the issue. It has happened again.
Please someone help me on this. If it isn't possible to deal with it here, can you please direct me to where it can? I don't want to be banned for these edits: they are very extensive removal of editor's statements.
Obviously the more important issue by far is that someone has the power to insert edits under someone else's username. Although the usage of it is trivial, and my account, as much as it means to me, is nothing to the integrity of WP, this is potentially a threat to Wikipedia.
Please contact me/investigate this/point me in the right direction/discuss ...something, please. The diff (using outside link) [20] More and more I believe that the diff doesn't help, as it is just my word that I didn't make it anyway, but there you go, I am in a tight spot, and the diff is all I can provide as evidence. I do note also that the fact that the hacks have subverted the Wiki code means that they are by definition hard to trace, but something has to be done, or at least tried. Anarchangel (talk) 03:38, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

No new hacks, but I have added the above to VP Misc for additional chance of a response. Anarchangel (talk) 07:07, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Did you try changing your password? Banaticus (talk) 17:49, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Whitelisting snafu

An admin kindly agreed to whitelist a page for me so I could develop an article, but I'm still blocked from linking to the site. After speaking with the admin he suggested I turn to this page for assistance.--otherlleft (talk) 12:07, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

I added \bwww\.suite101\.com\/about\/\b to the spam whitelist but it doesn't seem to be working. Have I messed up the regex? Stifle (talk) 13:33, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

In the interest of avoiding this thread being archived without any help offered, I'm commenting.--otherlleft (talk) 06:58, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Users with no Javascript problem

Apparently, if a user lacks Javascript or Javascript is disabled and the user clicks on the Javascript-based "expand" links in their watch-lists, deletion-log etc., some sort of error occurs. Pigsonthewing/Andy's solution was to create two article namespace pages that provided help instructions. Those two pages were deleted and the technical issue now is at DRV. See RCI0 & RCI1 DRV. To make a long story short, DRV is not equipt to derive a solution to the technical problem. Pigsonthewing/Andy desires that the article namespace pages RCI0 and RCI1 be kept as an interim solution to the problem. That is not going to happen at DRV. Please use this thread to determine whether there is a problem that needs a solution and come to a consensus to implement that solution. Thanks. -- Suntag ☼ 20:07, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Modifying my comment from the DRV: A browser should not treat:

<a href="javascript:toggleVisibility('RCI0','RCM0','RCL0')">

as

<a href="/wiki/RCI0">

as that makes no sense at all. It seems like a problem with a Firefox extension. This code is generated from the "Enhanced recent changes" option in preferences, which states (though not very clearly) that it requires JavaScript. I don't believe that this preference defaults to "on" (if it does, then its an issue), so users would have to turn it on for this to be a problem. This is not a bug, at least not a MediaWiki one. Mr.Z-man 20:45, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

The ideal fix for the problem (if there is to be one) is for someone to change that code to use onclick event handlers rather than "javascript:" URIs, for example

<a href="#" onclick="toggleVisibility('RCI0','RCM0','RCL0')">

or better yet

<span class="jslink" onclick="toggleVisibility('RCI0','RCM0','RCL0')">

(if the "jslink" class were created). I can't say it strikes me as a particularly high-priority fix, though. Anomie⚔ 21:57, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Filed, T18073 Happy‑melon 10:47, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

Fixed, r42514. Mr.Z-man 23:18, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Fix (from r42576 and some subsequent revs) is live now. The links are no longer shown if JS is disabled. Mr.Z-man 04:19, 26 October 2008 (UTC)