User:DGG/tech notes

12/04/06
*A new ParserFunction,, was added this past week. Given a relative page name such as /Subpage, it will return a fully qualified page name such as Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-12-04/Technology report/Subpage. This can be used as input for other functions, such as or. There is a new preference to have the "E-mail me a copy of my message" set by default on the e-mail form.
 * Automatically-linked ISBNs can now contain spaces.
 * Multiple left-aligned images placed near each other will now stack vertically, not horizontally, just as right-aligned images do. (
 * The interface for the undo option, introduced last week, has been improved. An automatic summary (which can be changed) is now filled in on the edit screen, and a message has been added to the top of the undo screen to make it clearly distinct from a regular edit screen.
 * A "next page" link was added to the bottom of Special:Allpages/ in addition to the link at the top. (Rob Church, bug 1331, r18064)

12/11/06

 * Special:Recentchanges and Special:Relatedchanges now display the number of characters added to or removed from a page for each edit. This will hopefully allow simple vandalism, such as page blanking, to be more easily spotted. Third-party vandalism-fighting tools have included such counts for some time. (Leon Weber, bug 1085, r18237–8)
 * Redirects to sections now work, using text such as #REDIRECT Main Page#Other areas of Wikipedia. The feature should be used cautiously, because users may be confused by being sent to the middle of a page when clicking an ordinary-looking link, and the redirect notice will be obscured by the jump.
 * Diffs over multiple revisions now note the number of revisions they cover. Previously it was impossible to determine from the diff page alone whether the changes were made in a single edit or in multiple edits. (Ilmari Karonen, bug 5485, r18194)

1/07
The ImageMap extension by Tim Starling has been enabled on Wikimedia sites. It is now possible for images to be easily used to link to pages, including with different areas linking to different pages. Users should remember to keep in mind the needs of browsers not capable of handling graphics well, such as screen readers and perhaps some handheld devices.

3/07

 * On Special:Log, it is now possible to search for log entries relating to pages beginning with a particular prefix rather than just being able to search for exactly one specified page.
 * It is now possible to use Special:Linksearch for URLs beginning with https://, ftp://, irc://, or news://, in addition to the standard http://. Existing links to such URLs will not be indexed until the page is edited. (Raimond Spekking, bug 8324, r20530)

interesting unicode
2670 9761 ☡	9762 ☢	9763 ☣	9764 ☤	9765 ☥	9766 ☦	9767 ☧	9768 ☨	9769 ☩	9770 ☪	9771

2710	10000 ✐	10001 ✑	10002 ✒	10003 ✓	10004 ✔	10005 ✕	10006 ✖	10007 ✗	10008 ✘	10009 ✙	10010 ✚	10011 ✛	10012 ✜	10013 ✝	10014 ✞	10015 ✟

ref update

 * There is a new template providing a solution to the problem of an article cited many times and which you want to provide the page numbers but keep the citation as a single entry. Follow the instruction of Mr.Z-man above, but after each subsequent cite (i.e. after each iteration of ", just add . This will make it so that in the text the footnote citation has a page number appended. As an example, if you were citing to page 282-3 of the article's third citation, the footnote would look like this: [3] :282-3. Fuhghettaboutit 00:06, 28 April 2007 (UTC)
 * That's great-- I had been doing it manually by putting in the page number in parentheses following the
 * And the other way--the truly professional way, in my opinion, giving results very close to professional composed material-- is Harvard referencing, but then the whole article has to be done that way, and most people find it more work.

notred
 A cute template, which only shows a link to an article if the article exists. However, it's a bad idea - red links show that a page is wanted, both to people reading the article that the red link is in and to people doing Wikipedia:Most wanted articles]
 * Keep very interesting! You could use it to link in-universe articles and the links automatically get added as the articles are created!
 * Keep I didn't know we had this. I'm glad we do, & I'll give it a try. -- :DGG
 * Keep It's good as long as it's used in the right way. For example cult films that are likely never to get an article. --
 * Another example of good usage is a new actor with a small career. Even an experienced editor can't predict if he or she will gain bigger roles in the future and get an article of it's own. Maybe a longer explanation in the template itself would do the trick.

This is not to be used to get rid of redlinks. Only use this template if, for example, you are linking to a relatively unknown actor. This way, when and if he gets famous in the future the link will automatically change blue when the article is created. It could also be used for small towns or companies that still haven't grown."
 * Keep, for some things this really is a better solution. For example in the wiktionary, this is used for Latin and Icelandic declension tables, a wonderful way to solve that you can link to some noun forms (most often genitive or nominative plural) and not link to those for whom an article does not exist. I.e. here and here. This is absolutely NOT an easy solution for red links, mind you! -
 * Explanation:

page titles

 * It is now possible to specify an 'editintro' on a link to edit a page, which changes the text above the edit box; the syntax is to put &editintro=URLencoded_name_of_editintro_page at the end of the URL. (r22905, bugs 5175 and 10215)

interwiki links

 * It was also realised this week that at some point it became possible to write universal interwiki prefixes; that is, an interwiki prefix that works no matter which Wikimedia wiki the prefix is rendered on. The link should be written m: project:language:page name (e.g. m:w:en:WP:POST); this routes the parsing of the links via Meta, thus making them universally correct. (bug 4285) 16:49, 18 January 2008 (UTC)