User:Davidgothberg/Test63

MediaWiki messages
We need a single place to announce discussions about MediaWiki messages. Every now and then someone wants a change to a MediaWiki message, say MediaWiki:Sp-contributions-footer. Then the normal thing to do would be to discuss the suggested change on its talk page. (And perhaps add editprotected if the user is not an admin.) Problem is that there are lots of MediaWiki messages, and each of them is only watched by a few or no users at all.

It would be nice to have a central page that we who are interested could watch. But having all those discussions on a central page would probably be too crowded. So I suggest we mostly use the central page to just announce the discussions (link to them), but we keep the discussions on the talk pages of the respective MediaWiki messages.

We have the interface explanation at the top of many MediaWiki talk pages. We can add a link to the central announce page in that template. We can also add a link in the editnotice that is shown for all "MediaWiki talk:" pages. That editnotice currently links to Help desk and Village pump (technical), which I think are bad choices for this. The Help desk is far to general, and the Village pump is to crowded.

For the .css and .js pages in MediaWiki space we should of course recommend MediaWiki talk:Common.css and MediaWiki talk:Common.js, since they are already used as central discussion pages.

I suggest we use this page Wikipedia talk:MediaWiki as the central announce page for the rest of the MediaWiki messages.

--David Göthberg (talk) 23:33, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

MediaWiki messages
We need a single place to announce discussions about MediaWiki messages, since the "MediaWiki talk:" pages are not watched much. If you are interested in this, see Wikipedia talk:MediaWiki.

Oh, and please don't start a discussion here, instead follow that link.

--David Göthberg (talk) 00:04, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Secure server
Wikimedia has a secure server that can be used to access the different Wikimedia projects with an encrypted connection.

To use the secure server you can go to its start page: https://secure.wikimedia.org/

There are several reasons why the secure server can be useful:


 * Some companies, schools and ISPs have proxy servers that meddle with the connection between your browser and Wikipedia. This can make editing impossible. Connecting through the secure server can bypass such proxies.


 * European users are connected to the Wikipedia servers in Amsterdam. When the Amsterdam servers are down or unreachable, then European users can bypass the problem by connecting to the secure server, since the secure server is placed somewhere else (probably Florida).


 * Using the secure server gives some protection against eavesdropping, and most of all protects against others snooping your Wikipedia password. Eavesdropping is especially a problem if you connect over a wireless network. And there have been cases of schools complaining when students have surfed to the "wrong" pages. (Note that the secure server doesn't give you full protection, see more on that below.)


 * Some schools, companies and even entire countries have blocked Wikipedia. But sometimes you can still reach Wikipedia if you connect through the secure server.

АБВГДЕЖ ΑΒΓΔΕΖΗΘ أبجدية عربية
A test section, with Cyrillic, Greek and Arabic text in it.

User:Davidgothberg/Test63

--David Göthberg (talk) 09:19, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

Anchor links
Testing anchor links on this page:

















New magic words needed
Lately I have been working with sister project links (links to other projects like Wiktionary and Wikibooks). And I have worked with such links for the secure server. Thus I noticed that MediaWiki lacks the magic words to properly encode links between the projects. So I want to explain and discuss that here to get feedback from other editors before we file a bugzilla request for the new magic words.

When doing a link to say Wiktionary, we can do like this: " " which renders wikt:Project:São Paulo, and like this: " ". So far so good. But we can't do a link like this: " ". And a link built by using " " doesn't work as we want when using the secure server.

So we have to resort to using full URLs and encode the different parts. But the only good way we have to properly encode the page name is a hack, like this:

For the full explanation of that hack see Template talk:Sec link.

To encode an anchor we at least have a magic word:

But we have no way to automatically encode query parameters. So we must ask users to hand-feed them and manually change every space in them to a " ". So we could have good use of a magic word like this:
 * which should render "search=São+Paulo&ns0=1" or "search=S%C3%A3o+Paulo&ns0=1" (both encodings work).

We would have good use of templates that could take parameters like " " or " ". But there is no way in template programming that we can split up the pagename and the anchor or query part. So we currently can't encode those links. This means our templates have to take the data as two parameters, like this:
 * page = Project:São Paulo
 * anchor = an anchor

So it would be nice with a magic word like this:


 * = Project:S%C3%A3o_Paulo#S.C3.A3o_Paulo_anchor


 * = Special:Search?search=São+Paulo&ns0=1

Note that the magic word should not translate namespace names to local names, so it should not change "Project:Page" to "Wikipedia:Page" when on Wikipedia.

If we had the two magic words  and   then we could do the rest in template code to handle pretty much any kind of sister project links and secure server links. Those two magic words don't depend on what project they are on, or what server they are on, they are just string conversion functions. So I guess that they can't be to hard to implement in the MediaWiki software.

Of course, the ideal would be if the wikilink handling was updated so it could take query parameters, like this: " ". And so that link would be a secure link if on the secure server. But that is probably a lot more coding. And as I said above, if we get the two magic words described above, then we can do the rest in template code until the wikilinks have been updated.

And in case anyone doubts that, I have already done almost all of that in template code. See sec link auto and its sister templates, they are fully functional and already used in some interface messages, the Main Page and thousands of other pages. Only thing is they can't automatically encode the query links which prevents several usage cases, and we currently have to feed the anchor and query parameters as separate parameters.

--David Göthberg (talk) 12:43, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

Testing heading colour 1
background-color: #fbe54e;

Testing heading colour 2
background-color: #dfe6ff;

Testing a HTML h2 heading, not wikimarkup

Some text.