Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 60

Drop-down box for reasons on moving pages
Is it possible/desired in the software or through javascript? –xeno talk 13:46, 25 April 2009 (UTC)
 * It would save me a couple of seconds on each move, but generally, there are not very many easy reasons to move a page. Most require a more detailed reasoning. What would you put in the drop down except "Capitalization" "Spelling error" and "per discussion at ___"? =- Mgm|(talk) 10:02, 27 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Personally, I wanted one for Userbox migration. Another one would be "Fulfilling move request". Per MOSTM. etc. =) –xeno talk 17:13, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

PDF version
Hi. In the spanish wikipedia village pump somebody asked about PDF versions in english wikipedia. Registered users can see a PDF version in Toolbox, at left. But IPs can not. In spanish wikipedia users and IPs can do it. Why not do the same thing in english wikipedia?

I went to your IRC channel, but my proposal was not supported:

(17:47:05) *******: XalD: Just because es does something, en doesn't have to do it too

(17:47:11) *******: different languages do different things

(17:47:15) xald: that is what the IP is asking in es.wikipedia village pump

I know that es: and en: are different projects, but if users can use the button, why not the IP? You just only need modify the Mediawiki Toolbox message. Thanks, ×α£đes 23:15, 26 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Because it's not yet enabled on enwiki. I know there was talk of doing it soon, after it's confirmed that it will scale ok to that many anonymous users. ^demon[omg plz] 15:45, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Bot naming policy
A discussion has begun on whether to change into a suggestion the current requirement that bot accounts incorporate the word "bot". Please comment at Wikipedia talk:Bot Approvals Group. Thanks. Anomie⚔ 12:18, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Temporary watchlisting
Is it possible (with scripts, monobook.css manipulation, etc., I don't know) to temporarily watchlist a page so that it would, for example, only appear in my watchlist for a day or a week? --Conti|✉ 14:39, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Template problem
This may not be where I address this. But the template at the top of Lois Lane looks weird. I'm sure Wikipedia wants it to be grammatically correct. Vchimpanzee ·  talk  ·  contributions  · 21:19, 27 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Added "date=" to the first argument. Separate issue; is that template needed? Nothing egregious leapt out at me. --AndrewHowse (talk) 21:33, 27 April 2009 (UTC)
 * I haven't read the article closely enough to see what needs fixing, but the template is still grammatically incorrect. Vchimpanzee ·  talk  ·  contributions  · 21:44, 27 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Well spotted; you pass. Seriously, some fool forgot to save his/her edit. --AndrewHowse (talk) 21:57, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Image uploading
I was uploading a new version of Image:Air Canada Jazz.svg, and the changes I made only seemed to take effect in the thumbnail at the top (although not in the thumbnail of the file history). When looked at the SVG itself by clicking on it, it was exactly the same as the previous version. This can be confirmed by opening it in a text editor. Only when I reuploaded the file, the change took effect, and then only in the past version, with the latest file the same as the original. Am I missing something, or is this an (un)known bug? Paranomia (talk) 22:36, 25 April 2009 (UTC)
 * This has happened to me a few times before. After you upload, the file is updated but your browser does not refresh the image on your screen because it is stored on your cache. Bypassing your cache fixes the problem. You can find browser-specific instructions for bypassing your cache at Bypass your cache. Also another note, Wikipedia also has a cache. You can purge that as well by typing ?&action=purge at the end of the URL. More info here if you're interested.-- penubag  (talk) 06:27, 28 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Heh, I just realised that and was about to post back here reporting my mistake. Thanks anyway. Paranomia (talk) 23:44, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

User creation dates
When did user creation dates begin to be recorded? Typically this may be found at Special:ListUsers. However, the date is not available for my account. I vaguely remember creating the account a long time ago, but have no idea even which year it was. I was inactive for a few years, and I am sure that I made contributions before my first recorded edit, as well. Dates seem to be available for much of 2001, which makes sense as the the project began then. Was there initially a period where dates were not recorded? Or were some records lost for some reason? Just curious and it has been bugging me for a while. Thanks, Bendono (talk) 08:20, 28 April 2009 (UTC)
 * The use creation logs only go back to September 2005, when the feature was added. The dates on ListUsers are new, and (for users predating the creation log) seem to just be the date of the user's first edit. Algebraist 08:29, 28 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the response. If the above is accurate, then under what circumstances would an active editor, such as myself, not have a recorded user creation date? I have almost 12,000 edits, but none of them are being picked up as an artificially generated creation date. Bendono (talk) 10:04, 28 April 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure, this might be possible if you registered before September 2005, but had not made any edits before that time, or possibly even if you had made a few edits between January 2001 and January 2002, when "Phase II of the software" was deployed. The original phase I software (January 2001-January 2002) was known to not accurately keep records of all the edits, so edits you made at that time might not be listed in your edithistory, and thus not have been picked up by the deployment of the 2005 functionality. I can ask the developers if you really want to know. For more info see History of Wikipedia. --Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 10:48, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

TimStarling: can it be that users registered before 2005, but with 0 edits until 2006, did not get, and still don't have a registration date for their useraccount ? < Splarka> hmm, yes, I remember something like that < TimStarling> yes < Splarka> if their first edit was after the new user log was implemented they don't get a guessed date I asked. --Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 11:02, 28 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the confirmation. I suppose that may be the case. Regards, Bendono (talk) 01:30, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Internal error
FWIW, I just got an internal error when submitting an edit. I've never seen that one before: LBFactory_Multi::newExternalLB: Unknown cluster "cluster22"

Backtrace:

Amalthea 09:46, 28 April 2009 (UTC)
 * 1) 0 /usr/local/apache/common-local/php-1.5/includes/db/LBFactory_Multi.php(139): LBFactory_Multi->newExternalLB('cluster22', false)
 * 2) 1 /usr/local/apache/common-local/php-1.5/includes/ExternalStoreDB.php(31): LBFactory_Multi->getExternalLB('cluster22')
 * 3) 2 /usr/local/apache/common-local/php-1.5/includes/ExternalStoreDB.php(36): ExternalStoreDB->getLoadBalancer('cluster22')
 * 4) 3 /usr/local/apache/common-local/php-1.5/includes/ExternalStoreDB.php(97): ExternalStoreDB->getSlave('cluster22')
 * 5) 4 /usr/local/apache/common-local/php-1.5/includes/ExternalStoreDB.php(69): ExternalStoreDB->fetchBlob('cluster22', '10106', false)
 * 6) 5 /usr/local/apache/common-local/php-1.5/includes/ExternalStore.php(31): ExternalStoreDB->fetchFromURL('DB://cluster22/...')
 * 7) 6 /usr/local/apache/common-local/php-1.5/includes/Revision.php(725): ExternalStore::fetchFromURL('DB://cluster22/...')
 * 8) 7 /usr/local/apache/common-local/php-1.5/includes/Revision.php(907): Revision::getRevisionText(Object(stdClass))
 * 9) 8 /usr/local/apache/common-local/php-1.5/includes/Revision.php(618): Revision->loadText
 * 10) 9 /usr/local/apache/common-local/php-1.5/includes/Revision.php(600): Revision->getRawText
 * 11) 10 /usr/local/apache/common-local/php-1.5/includes/Article.php(477): Revision->getText(2)
 * 12) 11 /usr/local/apache/common-local/php-1.5/includes/Article.php(339): Article->fetchContent(0)
 * 13) 12 /usr/local/apache/common-local/php-1.5/includes/Article.php(226): Article->loadContent
 * 14) 13 /usr/local/apache/common-local/php-1.5/includes/EditPage.php(953): Article->getContent
 * 15) 14 /usr/local/apache/common-local/php-1.5/includes/EditPage.php(2483): EditPage->internalAttemptSave(false, false)
 * 16) 15 /usr/local/apache/common-local/php-1.5/includes/EditPage.php(449): EditPage->attemptSave
 * 17) 16 /usr/local/apache/common-local/php-1.5/includes/EditPage.php(340): EditPage->edit
 * 18) 17 /usr/local/apache/common-local/php-1.5/includes/Wiki.php(510): EditPage->submit
 * 19) 18 /usr/local/apache/common-local/php-1.5/includes/Wiki.php(63): MediaWiki->performAction(Object(OutputPage), Object(Article), Object(Title), Object(User), Object(WebRequest))
 * 20) 19 /usr/local/apache/common-local/php-1.5/index.php(116): MediaWiki->initialize(Object(Title), Object(Article), Object(OutputPage), Object(User), Object(WebRequest))
 * 21) 20 /usr/local/apache/common-local/live-1.5/index.php(3): require('/usr/local/apac...')
 * 22) 21 {main}


 * Fixed. -- Tim Starling (talk) 10:23, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Expand two/three letter project code into full langage?
Is there a template or an otherwise clever way to expand a two/three-letter language code into the full language? I.e. pl = Polish, etc. Thanks, –xeno <sup style="color:black; font-family:verdana;">talk 14:04, 28 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes ISO 639 name pl gives "". I am also working on a common template ISO 639 name. So also gives "". But it's not completely finished yet. &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 14:11, 28 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Sexcellent! Were you doing this for a particular reason? I'm currently working up a standard iw-ref template and would hate to duplicate efforts. –<b style="font-family:verdana; color:black;">xeno</b> <sup style="color:black; font-family:verdana;">talk 14:25, 28 April 2009 (UTC)
 * I remember we used to have a lot of similar systems on meta ... Make sure you don't do any unnecessary duplicate work :D --Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 14:34, 28 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Okay, let's work together xeno ;) &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 15:01, 28 April 2009 (UTC)
 * See Template:Iw-ref which uses your Template:ISO 639 name. I have taken this on for the French Communes wikiproject, but also to standardize Category:Interwiki translation templates. –<b style="font-family:verdana; color:black;">xeno</b> <sup style="color:black; font-family:verdana;">talk 15:05, 28 April 2009 (UTC)


 * interesting. out of curiosity, is there a template that translates the name of region, nation or people into its adjectival form (which is usually the same as its language form?  for instance, Germany->German; Asia->Asian; Arab->Arabic...? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ludwigs2 (talk • contribs)


 * You would think that they would be in Category:Adjectival and demonym templates, but those are really just lists. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 18:14, 28 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Interesting. I can find the adjectival forms 'Saskatchewanian', 'Klingon' and 'Lilliputian', but not the ones for people from Belgium or the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  that's gotta say something about wikipedia.


 * I suppose I could write up a template (just be a huge switch statement, with the obvious maintenance problems). would there be any use for that, do you think, aside from the one use I have for it?  -- Ludwigs 2  19:23, 28 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Would it be reasonable to use the country data templates (ie: Country data Poland), or to set up a similar scheme, perhaps? – Luna Santin  (talk) 20:45, 28 April 2009 (UTC)


 * define reasonable.   for starters, I'd have to go to each and every country data template country data England, country data Argentina, country data Australia, etc. - all of which are fully protected pages - and request the addition of a new parameter/data combo.  well, I suppose I could get an admin to AWB it...  It would make sense to do it that way, I'd just want to research it some more, first, so we don't screw up half a gazillion flag templates in the process.-- Ludwigs 2  21:18, 28 April 2009 (UTC)


 * That is certainly a barrier. :p If we do add it, we can at least be pretty sure it won't change or need to be changed very often, but I certainly understand the hesitation. – Luna Santin  (talk) 06:25, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Seamlessly collapsing portions of a table
I am attempting to seamlessly collapse portions of a table, found here:


 * Template_talk:2009_swine_flu_outbreak_table

anyone is welcome to tinker with this. Thanks in advance. Ikip (talk) 02:40, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

I hate underscores in links
Is there any script that can automatically strip internal links of underscores when saving the page? –<b style="font-family:verdana; color:black;">xeno</b> <sup style="color:black; font-family:verdana;">talk 22:36, 23 April 2009 (UTC)


 * I'm sure that AWB can do this, but not exactly what you want. I use User:Cameltrader/Advisor.js for a lot of cleanup— perhaps this feature could be added. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 23:40, 23 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Sorry I didn't make myself clear, I meant maybe some kind of greasy monkies script that would strip the underscores on the fly as I'm saving the page... –<b style="font-family:verdana; color:black;">xeno</b> <sup style="color:black; font-family:verdana;">talk 23:44, 23 April 2009 (UTC)
 * I don't think it's a good idea to do it automatically, right now on this page there are at least 2 signatures with, and in articles some links may legitimately contain underscore as well (say, as a link to FILE_ID.DIZ). —AlexSm 15:53, 24 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Yea, you're probably right. I was hoping that there was some script that could intercept when I pasted a link with underscores and strip them. Probably too much effort for too little gain =) –<b style="font-family:verdana; color:black;">xeno</b> <sup style="color:black; font-family:verdana;">talk 15:59, 24 April 2009 (UTC)
 * It wouldn't realy break anyting though, as far as MediaWiki is concerned spaces and underscores are treated the same way in internal links (or rater all spaces are converted to underscores in the resulting HTML markup) so FILE_ID.DIZ and FILE ID.DIZ are both links to the exact same article. --Sherool (talk) 17:46, 24 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Well, I didn't say "break", just that it's not nice to change it automatically: in articles it might be intentional, and on talk pages it would creates unnecessary changes, resulting in more complex diffs. —AlexSm 16:27, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

Xeno, if you're willing to select some text and then press a button, you might want to try my script user:js/urldecoder with extra option urlDecoderIntLinks=true, although it does much more than just replacing _ to spaces. —AlexSm 16:27, 25 April 2009 (UTC)
 * I think this is exactly what I am looking for. Thank you. –<b style="font-family:verdana; color:black;">xeno</b> <sup style="color:black; font-family:verdana;">talk 14:32, 29 April 2009 (UTC)
 * ✅ You are a god among men. cheers, –<b style="font-family:verdana; color:black;">xeno</b> <sup style="color:black; font-family:verdana;">talk 14:37, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

backup
Does anyone know if wikipedia is backed up to a electromagnetic pulse resistant repositary? Andrewjlockley (talk) 23:16, 23 April 2009 (UTC)


 * No. A well placed EMP or asteroid strike would involve a degree of unrecoverable losses.  A large fraction of the data would eventually be recoverable via various mirrors and dumps and such, but doing that would be a side effect of our distributed information culture and not really part of a data protection plan per se.  Dragons flight (talk) 23:34, 23 April 2009 (UTC)
 * An EMP attack is pretty likely on a 100year timescale. There are many datacentres which offer pretty cheap EMP-resistant storage.  At the very least, an antipodeal backup should be provided to ensure that the strike doesn't destroy all of the sites.  Databarracks is one such UK provider. Andrewjlockley (talk) 09:09, 24 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Ha. Yes an eight-year-old organization should plan for a "100 year" event that has never happened in Florida (the main server farm) and pretty much can't be expected to happen save for nuclear war and the end of civilization.  Backups are good, distributed backups are better, but let's not get silly about this.  Dragons flight (talk) 09:32, 24 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Don't forget we also have a nice backup on the toolserver in Germany, so the disaster would have to take out Florida and Germany to be successful.  MBisanz  talk 09:46, 24 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Pssst: none of enwiki's text actually goes to Germany. Dragons flight (talk) 10:18, 24 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Neither do big chunks of the user table, or any deleted/oversighted revisions, or any media AFAIK. The toolserver is probably not a very useful backup mechanism: we'd have all 280 million revision entries, but no associated text! <b style="color:forestgreen;">Happy</b>‑<b style="color:darkorange;">melon</b> 10:39, 24 April 2009 (UTC)


 * There's a full copy of everything at the Toolserver/Amsterdam-data-center except for images; toolserver users just don't have access to everything for privacy reasons. Toolserver users have access to views of the normal database tables, the text is on clematis. Mr.Z-man 22:51, 24 April 2009 (UTC)
 * No, but this was fairly close. SharkD (talk) 04:11, 25 April 2009 (UTC)
 * They're looking to build a complete backup datacentre to run the site (not just store it) somewhere in the northeastern US. I don't know if that will incorporate database slaves that would retain the site content in the event of the unrecoverable loss of the database servers in Florida.  But in any case a huge amount of our 'current' content is stored in the memcaches of the Apache servers, which would definitely be duplicated 'up north', and on the squid servers in Florida, Amsterdam and Seoul; those are roughly evenly-spaced around the world.  Someone would just have to write an 'unparser' to convert from HTML back to wikitext.  And of course, anyone who's downloaded a copy of the database dump is storing a complete copy of the most important part of our data; that could easily be restored if necessary.  If an EMP were to hit right now, we'd probably just be set back to August 2008, when the last full enwiki dump was completed, or to March 2009 with the last current-version dump (and a lot of messy licensing issues on who to credit going from one to the other).  I'd say that between copies of the dumps, what data is replicated to the toolserver, and whatever's lying around on Brion's USB key (:D) we could probably recover pretty much everything up to a month or so ago; the most likely things to be lost are user preferences/watchlists, user passwords (which could be a bit of a bummer) and deleted pages.  The oversight table would almost certainly be lost (bah humbug :D). But as DragonFlight says, thanks to the information age, it would be a tall order to actually permanently lose much 'public' content, even in an end-of-the-world scenario. <b style="color:forestgreen;">Happy</b>‑<b style="color:darkorange;">melon</b> 10:39, 24 April 2009 (UTC)


 * The Seoul cluster, which was always the smallest of the three, is being decommissioned (or already was). It was part of a space sharing agreement with Yahoo that is ending / ended.  Also, the last full history text dump of enwiki was more than 2 years ago, and not in 2008.  We've had aborted dumps, partial dumps, and corrupt dumps since then.  Yes we could get off the ground with the current versions dump (from March) and stub-meta-history for author lists and copyright purposes (last completed in October), but if an act of God destroyed Florida there would probably be a lot of article history that we never recover.  Dragons flight (talk) 11:02, 24 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Ah, was it 2006 not 2008? Interesting also about the Seoul cluster; I wasn't aware of that. They're still listed on wikitech, so I guess the curtain's still up for the moment.
 * Actually, with the current versions dump from John Smith's computer, plus the revision and logging tables from the toolserver, we'd have all the info we needed for copyright purposes: a text to work from, and a complete list of its authors. So it would just set us back to March, and we'd have to delink everything before that magic 'first version' in page histories. It would be wierd, but not end-of-the-world. <b style="color:forestgreen;">Happy</b>‑<b style="color:darkorange;">melon</b> 11:29, 24 April 2009 (UTC)
 * I think it's entirely reasonable to protect WP from the consequences of a nuclear/EMP war. I don't think distributing the data would be sufficient.  I think that a nuclear-hardened backup should be specifically created. Andrewjlockley (talk) 12:17, 24 April 2009 (UTC)
 * If you want to put up the time and money to create such a backup, then you are certainly welcome to copy any and all materials from Database dumps to any repository you wish. As for Wikimedia working on such a project, I think it would be a waste of resources.  Dragons flight (talk) 12:46, 24 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Besides, would there be anybody left to read WP after a nuclear war? Let alone restore it? Yinta ɳ   21:46, 24 April 2009 (UTC)
 * We have most of our servers in a hurricane area and at sea level, and we're worried about an EMP? Mr.Z-man 22:50, 24 April 2009 (UTC)
 * What's the size of the backup? Bearing in mind that there are already easily accessible nuclear-hardened stores, what's the argument for not using them? Andrewjlockley (talk) 02:14, 25 April 2009 (UTC)
 * can you download the whole think to DVD's? they shouldn't be affected by an emp.  Is anyone doing this already?
 * Dye-based media such as CDs and DVDs have a limited shelf-life, especially when exposed to light. Not sure whether magneto-optical devices such as minidisks (which have a longer shelf-life) are also susceptible to EMP. I believe Sony is developing/has developed a high-capacity storage medium based on this technology, but intended for institutional needs. SharkD (talk) 04:32, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Concerns about Wikimedia's disaster recovery infrastructure should be directed to people who actually know what they're talking about, rather than random Wikipedians who read this page. You should also do your homework before asking anywhere. A lot of the information being thrown around here is third-hand "I heard it somewhere" kind of information. &mdash; Werdna  &bull;  talk  13:50, 29 April 2009 (UTC)
 * To where should they be directed? Andrewjlockley (talk) 23:16, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Vulnerability
The problem has been raised (in a very roundabout way, unfortunately) that short pages may be especially vulnerable to defamatory attacks, since material added to them is likely to show up on Google search result pages, and continue to do so (because of the Google cache) even after it has been deleted from Wikipedia. I don't entirely see this myself, but if anyone can add any enlightenment on the problem, please comment at WT:WikiProject Disambiguation/Vulnerability to attacks.--Kotniski (talk) 10:54, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Mysterious malfuctioning redirect

 * re:

Can someone figure out why the redirect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epoch_(geology) fails to forward one to the proper page... and fix it, please. // 24.62.190.234 (talk) 20:25, 29 April 2009 (UTC)
 * , what's it doing for you? –<b style="font-family:verdana; color:black;">xeno</b> <sup style="color:black; font-family:verdana;">talk 20:26, 29 April 2009 (UTC)


 * It redirects to Series (stratigraphy). If you consider that this is the wrong page, then you need to let us know what is proper. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 20:40, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

code broken on Rastafari movement
If I try to go to Rastafari movement I get this: <link rel="stylesheet" href="/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Print.c at the top of the page with the usual background but if I click Rastafari which redirects to Rastafari movement to works ok...

just though i should mention it. rdunn PLIB  14:35, 28 April 2009 (UTC)


 * I see no problem. Probably a caching issue. Try purging the page. — Edokter  •  Talk  • 14:48, 28 April 2009 (UTC)


 * I tried that already but it didnt work. I just kicked the computer and it loaded correctly afterward... rdunn  PLIB  14:51, 28 April 2009 (UTC)
 * The lesson here, boys and girls, is that violence is always the answer! EVula // talk // &#9775;  // 15:05, 28 April 2009 (UTC)


 * That's the true engineer's approach. If you can't fix it, hit it with a hammer! – ukexpat (talk) 15:06, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Bug in file history
The page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:H1N1_map.svg shows a bug in the file history.

The url of the links to each version in the date/time column are out of sync with the displayed date/time and with the displayed images. e.g. the date 13:33, 29 April 2009 links to a file with 1353 in the url. The 13:05, 29 April 2009 date links to a file with 1333 in the url and so on down the list. Charvest (talk) 14:08, 29 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Those are actually linking to the correct files. The way we currently name archive file versions is a little odd: it's got the timestamp of when the file was replaced rather than its original upload date. --brion (talk) 16:11, 29 April 2009 (UTC)


 * That's an insane system. Thanks for the reply. Charvest (talk) 16:37, 29 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Yes, yes it is. :) --brion (talk) 14:35, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Image toggling?
Does the English Wikipedia currently have a method for toggling between images? I'd like to add a button that toggles between two images of identical size for an article at FAC, the Euclidean algorithm. The idea is to allow the reader to shut off a GIF animation by replacing it with a still image of the same size. An FAC reviewer suggested that the animation, although helpful for understanding the algorithm, distracted them from reading the article. I do not want to convert the GIF into an OGG movie. The frames of the animation are available as SVGs. Thanks for your suggestions, Proteins (talk) 13:29, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

More than 20 groups please
Hey, an editor has spoken to me of his difficulty in creating a template for the singles of Prince because the template does not allow anymore than 20 groups. Can this please be increased, it seems harmless enough. Thanks. — R  2  16:14, 30 April 2009 (UTC)


 * There's some info on this at Template talk:Navbox. -- Amalthea 16:46, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Sorting navbox columns?
Is there a way to sort navbox columns in a way similar to a sortable wikitable? There is a an ongoing debate regarding the table at Template:2009 US swine flu outbreak table, some people feel that it should be sorted alpha by state, while others argue to sort by number of cases. If this could be made sortable it would solve the problem.

I know some editors here were able to help out yesterday on the table for the main 2009 swine flu outbreak article, so I'm hoping someone can give us a hand on the US article as well. Thanks! Wine Guy  Talk  17:05, 30 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Many thanks to Ludwigs 2  for your help!!  Wine Guy   Talk  19:45, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Comment requested
Comment is requested at Bots/Requests for approval/ListasBot 5, regarding whether or not there should be a bot that makes non-visible changes to WikiProjectBanners and WikiProjectBannerShell templates. The fixes would be made so that the KingbotK plugin for AWB would be able to properly handle the pages. Matt (talk) 17:42, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Tool for editing and viewing wiki markup, offline?
I use Linux (Ubuntu 8.04, Hardy Heron). I would like to be able to copy and save the plain text versions of Wikipedia articles (with the wiki markup) and edit and view versions of the articles at home. I want to practice editing tables, and so forth, without having to use the Sandbox. How can I do this? Thanks very much! Whatever404 (talk)


 * Set up a local MediaWiki: Installation. Amalthea  12:47, 20 April 2009 (UTC)


 * That sounds like fun- but can I spoil the party and ask, how. And if that question is too naive, how closely does the Turnkey Ubuntu version emulate our classes and settings, which are needed for table work? It does sound like a useful exercise. --ClemRutter (talk) 13:32, 20 April 2009 (UTC)


 * If you mean "classes" as in <tt>&lt;table class="wikitable" …</tt>, you'll just want to make sure you copy MediaWiki:Common.css, MediaWiki:Monobook.css, etc. to the same title on your wiki. — CharlotteWebb 19:14, 21 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks, everyone. Charlotte: if I install the items you mentioned, does that mean that the wiki environment on my computer will function in the same way as Wikipedia?  Whatever404 (talk) 00:39, 24 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Just adding my thanks for a simple answer to a question I had not yet asked --ClemRutter (talk) 12:25, 1 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Whatever404: I see that you have no subpages in your user space yet. The usual way we test things is to create test pages under our own user page. Here is a link to your first personal test page: /Test1. Numbering your test pages usually is a good idea, since they tend to become more over time. I created my /Test57 some day ago... And I hope you have discovered the button when you edit pages?
 * --David Göthberg (talk) 16:01, 24 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Thank you, David, but I was interested to edit tables in ways that would probably only be useful to me, and would probably not be used in articles. Some of these edits are related to medical information that I would rather not make public.  I guess it would be a more appropriate thing to ask the Wikimedia developers but I didn't really know where to go, to do that.  Thanks.  Whatever404 (talk) 16:53, 24 April 2009 (UTC)


 * I'll add that there are times I'd love a lightweight, offline app that I can use to test out tables, templates, and other wikitext structures without editing directly into wikipedia. it never actually occurred to me to set up a local wiki, and it sounds a bit like overkill.  but...    -- Ludwigs 2  17:22, 24 April 2009 (UTC)


 * You could maintain the text & markup in whatever editor you like, copy and paste it into an edit window, and use the "Show preview" button to view the results. Ntsimp (talk) 14:39, 27 April 2009 (UTC)


 * yes, I know, but that doesn't actually qualify as 'offline'. -- Ludwigs 2  15:26, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Searching for an account with a suffix
Recently, Mammamia9905 has been blocked as a sockpuppet of Petergriffin9901. BaltoPat9902 was blocked earlier. Naturally, I'm interested in finding usernames that end in 9903 and 9904 so I can see what they've been up to. Can anyone think of a reasonable search method?&mdash;Kww(talk) 12:10, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Not except for an exhaustive search. &mdash; Werdna  &bull;  talk  13:28, 1 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Sure, easy enough with grep and a list of usernames. The problem of course is that there are about 9 million usernames (9,577,482 in fact) on en.wiki, so any search of them not that's not optimized is a bit nasty. For your specific query, the raw data (all usernames on en.wiki) is available here: ~mzmcbride/all-users-2009-05-01.txt.gz (37 MB). I grepped the file for ".*990[0-9]$":


 * Err, have fun! :-) --MZMcBride (talk) 19:59, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

An embarrassment of riches, but not as bad as you might think. Relatively few are actually Name9902 and Name9903. It'll take a few hours, but I'll manage it some afternoon when I'm bored. Or maybe just submit a massive checkuser request to keep those guys on their toes.&mdash;Kww(talk) 22:05, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

History tab at the top
Precedent: Articles at the top have tabs with labels such as "discussion" and "history". The discussion tab leads to the talk page. The use of the word "discussion" is good because it is easy to understand and not jargon. Once someone clicks it, it shows the talk page (not named "discussion").

Suggestion: There is a "history" tab. Like the above, a history page is fine. However, the tab should not say "history" because this is jargon. Instead, it should say "authors".

Use of "authors" would give credit to editors, much as we give editors credit in the form of barnstars. It's just a nice thing to do to encourage writing, give recognition, and reduce jargon. User F203 (talk) 18:23, 1 May 2009 (UTC)


 * But that would be incorrect, implying that the page is a list of editors who have contributed to the current page text. But the history page also includes vandals, edits that were reverted, edits that have been totally overwritten, random drivebys by bots, protecting admins who have made no actual contribution to the content, etc etc.  All authors are listed on the history page, but not everyone on the history page is an author.  <b style="color:forestgreen;">Happy</b>‑<b style="color:darkorange;">melon</b> 18:37, 1 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Every editor listed was an author is some form, even if what they wrote was reverted. But this is the wrong forum per instructions at the top.  It also doesn't have to say "authors".  It could say "editors". Even admins who protect it get some credit because they shaped the article by protecting it.  Look at this suggestion as positive! User F203 (talk) 19:28, 1 May 2009 (UTC)
 * It's been called history for the longest time, I doubt we will change it now. Too ingrained in the gestalt. –<b style="font-family:verdana; color:black;">xeno</b> <sup style="color:black; font-family:verdana;">talk 19:31, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

I remember seeing another tab change about a year ago so change is possible. This is a positive change! Anyway, according to the instructions, this is the wrong forum so please end the discussion here. User F203 (talk) 19:37, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Special:BlockList : hide proxy blocks
Would it be possible to hide blocks by ProccseeBot from the blocklist? –<b style="font-family:verdana; color:black;">xeno</b> <sup style="color:black; font-family:verdana;">talk 18:36, 1 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Some JavaScript could do it pretty easily (a modified version of User:MZMcBride/hideentries.js, I imagine). To do it in MediaWiki core would be a bit more tricky. There's no bot flag in the logging table. You'd have to create an option to exclude a specific user using a URL parameter or something. Not really clean. --MZMcBride (talk) 19:42, 1 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Hmmm... It's not too important to be honest, I just noticed that ProcseeBot can sometimes monopolize the log. =) –<b style="font-family:verdana; color:black;">xeno</b> <sup style="color:black; font-family:verdana;">talk 19:45, 1 May 2009 (UTC)
 * We've all been there. ;-) --MZMcBride (talk) 20:01, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

How long does it take the search engine to catch up with changes to articles?
^^^^ –<b style="font-family:verdana; color:black;">xeno</b> <sup style="color:black; font-family:verdana;">talk 19:25, 1 May 2009 (UTC)
 * According to rainman when I just asked him on IRC, he said a day. --MZMcBride (talk) 19:44, 1 May 2009 (UTC)
 * thanks =) –<b style="font-family:verdana; color:black;">xeno</b> <sup style="color:black; font-family:verdana;">talk 19:45, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

auto signatures?
maybe I'm missing something obvious here, but wouldn't it be possible to have the software automatically add your signature? I mean literally - when you hit the 'Save Page' button, the software compares the old version to the new, checks to see if the last characters of the newly added bit (barring whitespace) are ~ and if not, adds them. you'd have to exclude changes marked as minor, and changes that occur in the middle of a paragraph, but with a little regexp it's certainly doable.

of course, I don't know what kind of impact that would have on server load, or how that would compare to the current load induced by sigbots... -- Ludwigs 2 16:27, 28 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Technically it would be trivial. Socially, it would be annoying as hell, when you get signatures popping up in places you don't want them.  How can the software tell between an edit that's unsigned because you forgot, and an edit that's unsigned because you don't want it to be signed?? <b style="color:forestgreen;">Happy</b>‑<b style="color:darkorange;">melon</b> 17:19, 28 April 2009 (UTC)


 * well, I was just assuming that the only times you don't want an edit to be signed are easy to identify programatically (minor edits, fixes, section headers, etc.). As a rubric, anytime you add one or more full paragraphs to the body of a section (in the sense of text that begins on a fresh line and ends on a fresh line, and excludes headers) you want a signature; anytime you modify an extant paragraph (or add something that's only a section header) you don't.  maybe there's odd cases (like adding a list item to someone else's example list) that need to be accounted for, but I bet we could account for 99% of talk and administrative edits using that rule.  plus, we could always add a checkbox to suppress signatures for abnormal cases.  I mean, the sigbots have rules for when they do and don't add signatures, and they seem to work ok.  this just does the same thing with the advantage of immediacy (the software has access to both the current and and revised versions in a way that sigbots coming in after the fact don't).  -- Ludwigs 2  18:00, 28 April 2009 (UTC)
 * This seems like an awful lot of effort for something that, ultimately, isn't the end of the world; the occasional unsigned comment is caught pretty quickly, and there are plenty of times where signing isn't needed. Typing "~" four times just isn't that hard. EVula // talk // &#9775;  // 03:49, 29 April 2009 (UTC)


 * I'm a fan of automating what can be automated. four characters may not seem like a lot, but multiply it by a couple hundred thousand edits per day and it adds up to a lot of collective wasted time.  but yeah, it's not a huge deal.  -- Ludwigs 2  04:18, 29 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Well, there's a rumor that we might shift the discussion pages to something more akin to LiquidThreads, which would negate the entire need for an automated signing system. But personally, I think automating it would cause far, far more trouble than its worth (and would take more collective time to fix false-positives than collective time spent typing four tildes). EVula // talk // &#9775;  // 05:47, 29 April 2009 (UTC)
 * yeah, that's a distinct possibility. good enough for me, unless someone else thinks it's a good idea and wants to chime in about it.   -- Ludwigs 2  06:08, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

I've been assigned LiquidThreads as my next task, so you can probably expect it over the next few months, probably towards the end of the year. &mdash; Werdna  &bull;  talk  15:46, 1 May 2009 (UTC)
 * <pre-emptive champagne>Woohoo!!! ... :D <b style="color:forestgreen;">Happy</b>‑<b style="color:darkorange;">melon</b> 11:06, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Autoconfirmation
Just now asked why Twinkle tells him that his account were "too new". His account however is far older and has far more edits than are normally required. His account is also far past the the $wgTorAutoConfirmAge and $wgTorAutoConfirmCount setting from TorBlock. There also is no entry for the user in the [ Special:AbuseLog], so he wasn't deautoconfirmed through that (would that be a permanent deautoconfirmation, BTW?). So I'm at a loss. Is there another way to lose autoconfirmation status that I'm missing? The user was apparently recently caught in an autoblock, and was. Can that have anything to do with it? Amalthea 11:46, 29 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Any abuse filter triggers? nope. – xeno   talk  20:27, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

On my preferences - it says I am autoconfirmed - but apparently not? Wikipedian2 (talk) 15:48, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

That makes it a twinkle bug, not a MediaWiki bug. &mdash; Werdna  &bull;  talk  16:37, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Precisely why I went to twinkle bugs, where my case was closed and I didn't come here immedietly. Wikipedian2 (talk) 17:15, 1 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Hmm. I'd be very surprised if there was a bug in that trivial logic, but I'll try to work it from there. Sorry for the noise. Amalthea  10:26, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Interface redesign mock-ups
Trevor Parscal has been creating mock-ups of a redesigned, more efficient interface. Some of the preliminary sketches are viewable here. Comments, suggestions, etc. welcome here or on the talk page there. Cheers. --MZMcBride (talk) 19:39, 1 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm a fan of those mock-ups. I personally think monobook is overused and outdated, and I think it would do good to give it a little face-lift that will improve usability as well as aesthetics. <span style="font-family:Zapfino, sans-serif; color:DarkBlue">cmelbye (t/c) 04:53, 2 May 2009 (UTC)
 * It looks like an improvement for newer users: it's simple. I like the aesthetic, but I'd probably customize it for myself: first, I hate drop-down menus (which, by the way, often fail on touch-only devices like the iPod Touch or iPhone, which don't have "hover" options), and second, I'm used to the general scheme of our current interface. It might be improved by a little tweaking using things we already have: for example, there should probably be a way to tell which tabs are active, like the orange border/bolding currently used through the "active" CSS class. Aside from that, my concern would be mainly in the implementation side of things: what technical features would it use to achieve the design features? Would these technical features degrade gracefully? Would they allow the sort of customization I'd desire? Would old customizations (user scripts) be broken? { { Nihiltres | talk | log } } 06:45, 2 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I don't think there is any getting around using dropdown menu's in the end. We just have too many options per page. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 11:14, 2 May 2009 (UTC)
 * The way to get around using drop-down menus is not to use them. Pretend they don't exist (which may be the case for some users). The only place they are used now in the edit page is for inserting characters. The mockups are nice, but they need to work for the vast majority of users if they're going to be the default. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 16:43, 2 May 2009 (UTC)
 * My point is rather that we need to make sure that those menus are effective. If a redesign means, for example, that everyone browsing on an iPhone or tablet (which can't hover on elements) can't access the menus, we have a problem; if a redesign means that a pile of user scripts break really nastily, we have a problem; if a redesign prevents users from customizing the interface at all … you see what I mean? My concern is that, although the redesign might help quite a number of viewers, we don't want to break things for the rest of them, myself included. I'd love to see a live mock-up. { { Nihiltres | talk | log } } 20:16, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Change tagging activated
Hi all,

After working out some minor performance issues, we've activated change tagging on Wikimedia. You can see the available tags, and filter by them at Special:Tags. Individual tags can be styled using the <tt>mw-tag-$tag</tt> class applied on changes lists (tag names are sanitised for this purpose).

Let me know if there are any problems! &mdash; Werdna  &bull;  talk  13:33, 1 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Looks interesting but... how do you tag pages? Is there documentation for the extension/addition? –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 14:43, 1 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Tagging is done by the software. Presently, this is done mostly by the Abuse Filter – the actions taken by a filter can include applying a tag to the edit in question. &mdash; Werdna  &bull;  talk  15:40, 1 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Okay; thanks. Sounds like another great feature! –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 15:49, 1 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Great feature indeed, though I'm a tad worried for the younger editors. The interface is getting more cluttered by the day.... —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 10:06, 2 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Any chance of wrapping tags in an identifiable class? I know that the whole li entry is given a class that identifies the tag (what happens if more than one tag is applied, BTW? Multiple classes?), but being able to style the "(references removed)" phrase itself would be useful. The same class should apply to all tags, as well, otherwise you have an open-ended set of classes to look for. Shall I open a bug? <b style="color:forestgreen;">Happy</b>‑<b style="color:darkorange;">melon</b> 11:03, 2 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes, open a bug (if someone hasn't already beaten you to it). --MZMcBride (talk) 22:22, 2 May 2009 (UTC)
 * <b style="color:forestgreen;">Happy</b>‑<b style="color:darkorange;">melon</b> 17:19, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

References removed automatically appended to edit summaries
See the editing history of Duran Duran. Just curious, since when did MediaWiki do this? Someguy1221 (talk) 04:50, 2 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Since Special:Tags were enabled (see a few sections up). --MZMcBride (talk) 07:09, 2 May 2009 (UTC)
 * See Village pump (technical). 199.125.109.77 (talk) 04:14, 4 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Can someone point to more information on these tags, how they are identified, and what they mean? Thanks. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 16:45, 2 May 2009 (UTC)
 * They're coming from AbuseFilter. For example, "references removed" comes from filter 61. Don't know if there's an easy way to see which tags come from which filter, though.... --MZMcBride (talk) 22:20, 2 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Ah! Thanks. I'll repost my comment from WP:AN - An obvious measure to reduce confusion would be to link the "tag" back to the filter which appends it. Was this change announced anywhere (other than the extremely vague note at WP:VPT)? It doesn't seem to be covered on WP:AF, unless I missed it. Expect more confusion. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 18:38, 3 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Agreed. I keep a pretty close eye on software changes and I was still "WTF?" when I saw it the first time. It needs a link or something. Or a tooltip or a CSS mark of some sort. --MZMcBride (talk) 18:40, 3 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I've taken it to Wikipedia talk:Abuse filter after being caught unawares; seems like a good place to have that discussion. 9Nak (talk) 19:11, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

(unindent) 18669. --MZMcBride (talk) 02:13, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

catchpa on archive
Why do I have to enter the catcha 5 times in order to archive a talk page??? 76.66.202.139 (talk) 07:32, 29 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Might be helpful if we knew which page you were looking at. Sorry to hear about your troubles; while I do strongly support the ability of anons to edit, I also generally think it's in the best interest of any regular contributor to register an account to avoid various issues, including this sort of thing. – Luna Santin  (talk) 21:39, 29 April 2009 (UTC)
 * This might be a stupid question but ... did you get the captcha correct the first 4 times? Mr.Z-man 23:43, 29 April 2009 (UTC)


 * I think the removal of large amount of text from a page triggers it for ip users. You can create an account to avoid this. Chillum  23:46, 29 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Sounds like you hit the external link CAPTCHA. (That's still activated, right?) --MZMcBride (talk) 22:37, 2 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Yeah it is, I hit it almost every time I'm writing up a manga chapter list from home (because of the sources I add). 「ダイノ ガイ 千 ？！」(Dinoguy1000) 22:01, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

question about parserfunctions, nesting, and processor loads
I made a template - do list - to standardize text lists and keep line breaks from occurring in the middle of phrases, but another editor (User:Edokter) suggested it might be too heavy on the preprocessor. The issue boils down to whether it's more efficient to use nested conditionals (so that unused IFs never get evaluated at all) or to use sequential conditionals (in which all the IFs have to be evaluated, but nothing gets stacked in memory). eg, which of the following is better?

or (alternately) should I just scrap this template as being too expensive either way you look at it? -- Ludwigs 2 15:02, 3 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Neither option would be dangerously heavy on the preprocessor in the quantities used in that template, IMO. Nested conditionals get very difficult to read in line-wrapping editors, and it becomes easier to get brace counts wrong. In principle, yes, nested conditionals are fractionally more efficient (the preprocessor isn't building a stack, it's recursively expanding objects inline, so the memory usage is probably comparable), but not overwhelmingly so. <b style="color:forestgreen;">Happy</b>‑<b style="color:darkorange;">melon</b> 17:07, 3 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I raised the question because the template was advertised on Navbox, so it would see it's primary use there. With Navbox so widely used, each page edit would IMV have a potential negative impact. — Edokter  •  Talk  • 17:18, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

Problem with the infobox
Hi, I'm contributing to the article, Saidabad. There is a problem with the infobox formatting. I'm not able to fix it. Any help is much appreciated. Randhir 18:48, 3 May 2009 (UTC)
 * The Zone and Ward variables take the value entered for Metro and wrap it like "List of corporation wards" for the template. Thus you can't wikilink the metro entry as it will break the template. Nanonic (talk) 19:06, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

If you mean the white box that tells you what tools are what, yeah. I'm having that problem too. Please; anyone; its not a minor issue!--Pr1nce0fDarkn3ss (talk) 00:21, 5 May 2009 (UTC)


 * as Nanonic said, you can't use links for that parameter - it needs to be plain text because it's used to create a different wikilink below. I've removed the link for the time being.  if for some reason 'Hyderabad' isn't sufficient, and the 'Andhra Pradesh' part needs to be specified, the template's going to have to be modified.  -- Ludwigs 2  04:51, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

Valid change tags
If you go to "Special:SpecialPages", there is a cryptic link to "Valid change tags", which can also be reached from the Special:Contributions page. One of the more unusual "valid change tags" is "nonsense movies". Not "nonesense books", "nonsense article", "nonsense Pokemon", but only "nonsense movies". Should that be instead, "nonsense article", or "nonsense moves"? Excuse me, it is "Nonsense movies?". What's up? Or should I say, "What's up, Doc?" 199.125.109.77 (talk) 23:23, 3 May 2009 (UTC)
 * This was a bit of a mistake, and I've gone ahead and changed a bunch of the visible ones (i.e., those with hits) for now, and have asked for the help of others (here and here) to do more. The tags, themselves, should probably in some form be renamed to their actual abusefilter numbers (or something else easily parseable), so that they can be easily traced back to their generator; or, at the very least, should be made neutral in all high-visibility areas. -- slakr  \ talk / 01:31, 4 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure what you mean by a mistake, but I now see that one sock has allegedly been using the edit summary "Nonsense movies?". However, in making this as a tag, I would encourage simply shortening it to "Nonsense?". 199.125.109.77 (talk) 16:25, 4 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Correction, I'm not sure where the list of Special:Tags "Internal tag name" names comes from, and if it is only from the Abuse Filter, then "the software" should be changed to Abuse filter 199.125.109.77 (talk) 16:33, 4 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Currently they only come from the abuse filter, as its a new feature and the abuse filter is the only thing that adds them now, but there's no restriction on where future tags may come from. Mr.Z-man 18:26, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

Is there a way to hide the tags? –<b style="font-family:verdana; color:black;">xeno</b> <sup style="color:black; font-family:verdana;">talk 18:27, 4 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Vote for ; when that's fixed, you'll be able to hide or style them with CSS. <b style="color:forestgreen;">Happy</b>‑<b style="color:darkorange;">melon</b> 18:29, 4 May 2009 (UTC)
 * See Tags. 199.125.109.77 (talk) 03:29, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

search bar!!
I would like to suggest a very useful feature to wikipedia, the search bar front and center (top) so people can find what they need quickly, which is the sole purpose of wikipedia. The articles can afford to move down a little bit for a more prominent search bar. Being a web developer, its important to create ui for the user that's the ultimate goal. Its kind of annoying to look for the tiny left column search bar and type your keyword that way. I hope you can fix this problem to better the best web resource ever created. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.73.168.77 (talk) 02:58, 4 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Some redesigns are in progress at our Wikipedia Usability Project, making the search box easier to get at will certainly be part of that! --brion (talk) 14:39, 4 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Making our search work as well as Google, or allowing Google to index all our pages should be a priority. Jehochman Talk 15:27, 4 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Is there any way to exclude user and talk pages from Google, yet still allow them to be searched from within Wikipedia? 199.125.109.77 (talk) 16:36, 4 May 2009 (UTC)
 * noindex –<b style="font-family:verdana; color:black;">xeno</b> <sup style="color:black; font-family:verdana;">talk 16:37, 4 May 2009 (UTC)
 * If that is added, can text be found from within Wikipedia? And I was looking for a global fix, not one that had to be added in a million places. 199.125.109.77 (talk) 17:11, 4 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Robots.txt –<b style="font-family:verdana; color:black;">xeno</b> <sup style="color:black; font-family:verdana;">talk 17:17, 4 May 2009 (UTC)
 * That does not affect Wikipedia's internal search function. As for global fixes, this can easily be done technically, but you'll have to get consensus first, which has proved difficult in the past. See Search engine indexing. Algebraist 17:22, 4 May 2009 (UTC)
 * So we end up with user pages showing up in the top 3 Google hits.. Is it worth raising again? Dougweller (talk) 17:49, 4 May 2009 (UTC)
 * As I read it the main objection before was that the internal search engine did not works so good, but it has now been fixed, thus removing that objection. If anyone wishes to pursue it, the place to bring it up is at WP:VPR, though. 199.125.109.77 (talk) 17:54, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

File:Daniel Roth.jpg
This is showing in Firefox but not in IE. I am also told it does not work in Safari. Why might this be? Stifle (talk) 13:43, 30 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Yeah, broken JPEG image (inverted b/w image). I've seen stuff like that before. I have no idea how you can fix it though. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 15:19, 30 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Image loads fine for me. Consider that B/W color inversion is often a matter of data corruption, which can occur if something happens to cause your computer to not download the image correctly. -<span style="font:bold 10px Verdana;display:inline;border:#000066 1px solid;background-color:#ECF1F7;padding:0 4px 0 4px;">moritheil Talk 00:47, 4 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Oh sorry, this case had been closed already. A user resaved the image in GiMP and that did the trick. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 00:58, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

urls containing ]
how do you include an url which contains [] as a reference? It seems to break cite web as well as a direct external link. dramatic (talk) 04:42, 2 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Either percent-encode the '[' and ']' characters, using '%5b' and '%5d' respectively, or use the magic word  . The latter might be a problem if "blah" contains certain special characters, such as "/", so it doesn't seem to be suitable for full urls. I've changed Russell Ward for you.- gadfium  06:18, 2 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Tangentially: No one answered my question earlier about whether it could be possible to allow percent-encoded square brackets in wiki-links, and hence in article URLs, like for example  Benzo%5ba%5dpyrene  ?  --83.253.251.229 (talk) 17:25, 2 May 2009 (UTC)
 * [, |, and ] will never be allowed in page titles, ever. You can put them in the link display text, though: Foo[bar]baz|boop --MZMcBride (talk) 00:16, 3 May 2009 (UTC)
 * That's what I expected. Thanks for the answer, which I take to be authoritative until someone says otherwise ;-) --83.253.251.229 (talk) 18:04, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Possible for bot to take wikipedia edit article history information to notify editors of AfDs?
Is it technically possible for a bot to take information off of wikipedia (or the below two webpages) and then contact editors with x amount of edits about an Article for deletion?: What bot expert can I contact about this? Thank you. Ikip (talk) 14:37, 2 May 2009 (UTC)
 * web page history,
 * wikisense contributors
 * Try WP:BOTREQ. --MZMcBride (talk) 22:18, 2 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks again McBride. Ikip (talk) 00:10, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Navbox issue
Does anyone know how to make the "v/d/e" links disappear from the navbox here? I don't see what's up with the template code at the moment. &mdash; Carl (CBM · talk) 19:36, 2 May 2009 (UTC)
 * An error has been made recently, which broke the paramater because it was renamed to Navbar instead of navbar. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 19:48, 2 May 2009 (UTC)
 * ✅ issue fixed. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 19:52, 2 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Apologies, I mixed up the Navbar template with the navbar parameter. — Edokter  •  Talk  • 20:46, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Code review
I need to know what's wrong with this code; IE throws an 'Object expected' on "line 5" (which could be anywhere):

— Edokter  •  Talk  • 16:40, 5 May 2009 (UTC)


 * can you point to a page where it throws the error? my first guess would be that   might throw an error if the className for the table is undefined, but that's just a guess.


 * p.s. oh, wait - try    -- Ludwigs 2  17:51, 5 May 2009 (UTC)


 * That was it! Thank you. — Edokter  •  Talk  • 18:09, 5 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Well, the error is gone, but it does not do what I expected it to do (find the first table with classname=navbox, then assign id=first-navbox) and after the cache caught up, does exactly what is is intended to do. — Edokter  •  Talk  • 18:14, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

Links missing on userpage?
I spend most of my Wikipedia day looking at my Watchlist, and rarely look at my main Userpage, except upon browser start-up. However, today, after restarting my normal browser mid-day, I returned to find all the normal links on my Userpage were, uh, blank.

For example, the text looks like: Joined Wikipedia on,.

The source (as rendered in View Source from my browser) looks like:

<pre style="white-space:normal;"> &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;Joined Wikipedia on &lt;span class="mw-formatted-date" title="2007-08-16"&gt;&lt;span class="mw-formatted-date" title="08-16"&gt;&lt;a href="/wiki/August_16" title="August 16" oaugust=""&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/span&gt;, &lt;a href="/wiki/2007" title="2007" o2007=""&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/span&gt;.&lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt;

Obviously, there's no text in between the &lt;a ...&gt;&lt;/a&gt; tags, so nothing is displayed. But, to the best of my knowledge, I didn't change anything to cause this issue.

Also, upon further review, this happens in Safari as well, but only if I'm logged in. How might I fix it? Thanks! -- Mike Vitale  19:20, 5 May 2009 (UTC)
 * May be related to AN. –<b style="font-family:verdana; color:black;">xeno</b> <sup style="color:black; font-family:verdana;">talk 19:30, 5 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes, seems somewhat familiar. -- Mike  Vitale  20:24, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

Automatically generated links
What's going on here? I've just discovered that expressions like RFC 333, ISBN 9999-456-456 (I don't know what else) get automatically linked to various places. Is this something recent, or has it always been like that and I've only just realized it? What is the idea behind this functionality? Where is it documented? Surely this is the sort of thing we ought to be using templates for, not have links created when they might be totally inappropriate. (See WT:MOS for a recent discussion which shows the undesirability of this feature.)--Kotniski (talk) 06:35, 5 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Looks like new old feature from this link. --Stefan talk 08:43, 5 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Since 2003 at least . See Help:Magic and ISBN. -- Quiddity (talk) 08:58, 5 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Hmm, so it looks like another example of a not-too-great idea that got fossilized in. And of how some feature documentation is hidden away on almost impossible-to-find pages. (I've added the information to Help:Link to make it perhaps a bit more accessible.)--Kotniski (talk) 09:40, 5 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I used google advanced search for only en.wikipedia.org to find the page and I had to try with 2 or 3 combinations to find it. --Stefan talk 09:46, 5 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Remember, "a not-too-great idea" is your opinion, and is not necessarily true for all people in the world. I quite like it, and find it very handy, frequently.
 * If you search "isbn" from the main help page, Help:Contents, the results are instant. ;) -- Quiddity (talk) 18:09, 5 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes, true. But not if you start from "RFC" (and that was what raised the problem - it was a complete accident that I noticed the same thing was happening with ISBN on my way over).--Kotniski (talk) 08:13, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

I think this feature was created before templates existed. Generally speaking, our approach in the past was to automatically format things, rather than adding reams of template code to do it as we do now. I think a lot of people still consider the old approach far superior. &mdash; Werdna  &bull;  talk  17:35, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
 * It's a bit of a mess. ISBN 123456789X is picked up by the wiki-magic, but ISBN-10 123456789X isn't and a phrase like ISBN 123456789X, 987654321X is only half done.  There's a bug report out there somewhere.  Mr Stephen (talk) 21:09, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
 * That isn't a bug, it's a feature. You have to take out the -10 or -13 and just use ISBN followed by the 10 or 13 digit number, with or without spaces or hyphens. 199.125.109.75 (talk) 04:38, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Template:Boxboxtop not working correctly in Firefox or Chrome
I've recently come back to my Wikipedia page (User:Xnux) after a while to discover that the template I use to organize my userboxes isn't displaying correctly in certain browsers. When I click one of the first four "[show]" buttons on that template, the other "[show]" buttons are not moved down; instead, they overlap the userboxes. This happens in Mozilla Firefox 3.0.10 and Google Chrome 1.0.154.64, but not in Internet Explorer 8.0.6001.18762. Does anyone have advice or suggestions? Thanks, Xnux   the   Echidna  02:27, 6 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I have ran a test. The cause of this problem is the "float:left" that all the userboxes have. The HTML of UBX'es boggles my mind btw. I have no idea how that came to be, but it's truly beyond saving. I don't think there is any way you can quickly solve this problem. I'll ask AzaToth about some of the original decisions in userbox layout, perhaps he has a clue. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 09:31, 6 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I suspect the problem has to do with using collapsible divs inside collapsible tables. let me see if I can fix it by converting the inner sections to userboxtop format.  -- Ludwigs 2  13:08, 6 May 2009 (UTC)


 * yeah, that was it. I've fixed it on your page.  I'm debating whether I should add a note about it somewhere...  -- Ludwigs 2  13:35, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Watchlisting single pages
Can Special:Watchlist not be used to watchlist only the main article? It can be useful sometimes if e.g. a talk page has more traffic than its corresponding main page or vice versa and ideally only the latter is watched. -- Menti  fisto  03:36, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Nope. Though you could possibly hide them with css. --Splarka (rant) 07:17, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
 * You can create a user subpage containing links to only the precise pages you want to watch, and then look at the related changes of that page. Functionally, it's pretty much the same as a watchlist. You can link to the changes with Special:RelatedChanges/Pagename for quick access. Someguy1221 (talk) 07:22, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes but that would render an (ajax) watchlist notifier unusable. :-) -- Menti  fisto  08:32, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
 * This question came up a little while ago and resulted in Hide Pages in Watchlist. Algebraist 11:27, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks for that. -- Menti  fisto  13:04, 6 May 2009 (UTC)


 * A decent workaround, but why can't this just be sorted in the code? I have so many javascripts rewriting the look of pages it starts to get distracting. –<b style="font-family:verdana; color:black;">xeno</b> <sup style="color:black; font-family:verdana;">talk 13:40, 6 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Article & talk pages are always treated as a unit for the watchlist -- this is vital, since otherwise you would never see discussion updates that are relevant to your article, or article updates that reflect the discussion. It's a deliberate architectural choice and we have no intention of changing it. --brion (talk) 15:04, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
 * But sometimes a talk page generates so much discussion (trolling and the like) that you don't want your watchlist flooded with, although you do want to see if anything actually changes on the article itself (or it could be a policy page, for example). I don't think this is the kind of choice that the devs should be making for us - if it's easy enough to change, then please give us the option and we'll decide for ourselves whether we want to use it.--Kotniski (talk) 15:19, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I often want to watch, say, the FA of the day simply for any talk page stuff that comes up. There's also the most obvious example -- user pages, usually you wouldn't need to worry about the 'article' page in that case. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 17:08, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Code corrupts my talk page
Could someone take a look at the last few sections of my talk page as some code which I'm unable to debug makes all subsequent entries indent. __meco (talk) 08:56, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
 * It is the football squad template in User talk:Meco. I don't know why it is doing it, but you can comment it out or remove it. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 10:59, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
 * It's because the football squad template is a full width template and shouldn't be indented. Removing the indent fixes the page. Nanonic (talk) 11:39, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Much apperciated! __meco (talk) 11:46, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Opening Wikipedia in MIME
I rely heavily on Wikipedia but since recently updating to Windows Internet Explorer 8 I have been unable to open Wikipedia pages (in English). I am given: “Do you want to save this file, or find a program online to open it” followed by “Name: Viticulture, Type Unknown File Type, 18.1KB, From en.wikipedia.org”. A click on Find tells me: “Windows does not recognize this MIMI type.” !!! Note: I am a Wikipedia reader, not an editor. How can I return to accessing your pages? (I first tried to find a solution on the Help Desk and was told to try the Village Pump.) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.41.186.175 (talk) 10:28, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
 * 18.1 KB is roughly the size of the first image in the Viticulture article. It sounds like IE8 is unable to recognize the .jpg file type. I have no idea why that would be. Going back to IE7 might be your best bet until IE8 is a little more stable. Franamax (talk) 11:46, 6 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Make sure the box in the editing tab of your preferences entitled "Use external editor by default (for experts only, needs special settings on your computer)" is unchecked. Otherwise, I don't know. Graham 87 01:24, 7 May 2009 (UTC)


 * That would only be a problem if you were logged in. If you're logged out, you should be able to view all pages properly; if not, it's something to do with your computer or browser. IE 8 has been around for a while, and this issue hasn't been reportedt, so it probably doesn't occur in the default installation of that browser unless something else is wrong. Graham 87 01:30, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

tables and divs
has anyone else noticed that tables and divs don't play well together? at least not in Safari, and sometimes in Firefox and Google Chrome. see the changes I made from here to here on User:Xnux, and a similar problem I had on Template:WikiProject_Footer between this and this. the first case, the collapsible divs inside the userboxtop table were overwriting each other for no particularly good reason; in the second, WPCouncilRec (which is a table) was getting sucked into the outer div of the old version of the footer template on Safari. I think it might have something to do with the way 'float' elements work inside of containers, but I can't tell whether this is a rendering bug in Safari and/or Firefox, or an inheritance issue in wikipedia's CSS (or maybe just my bad luck to see similar problems in quick succession?). if others have noticed it, I'll set up a test case page so we can figure it out. -- Ludwigs 2 16:40, 6 May 2009 (UTC)


 * It's pretty old news. Tables and (floating) divs have never played well toghether, and not just on Wikipedia. Divs were heraulded as a replacement for tables when used for page layout, but have serious shortcoming. Whenever possible, whenever (a combinations of) boxes require more control over placement, we tend te deprecate divs in favor of tables. That is why most newer templates (ie. Navbox and Ambox) are built with tables using native HTML. — Edokter  •  Talk  • 16:51, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Yup, inherent to the widely differing boxmodels used for tables and div's. (Note that in some modern browsers, you can give a div "table-like" behaviour, by specifying "display:table" instead of "display:block".) All in all, the div model basically does not work as many people expect, and even more so in Wikipedia. This quickly leads to errors. Combined with the many bugs that used to exist in div rendering, tables simply behave more consistent among many browsers, and it is the reason why both *mbox and navbox code has been designed to use tables. But to reiterate the UBX issue: "Lack of design". —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 17:16, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Categorization of "books"
See Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion for the problem and discussion. Uncle G (talk) 23:01, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Unified login
This may have been asked before many times, so apologies if it has. Are there any plans to properly unify the login, so your edits are moved over & also, so if you want to, you can use the same userpage? Thanks. dottydotdot (talk) 19:59, 30 April 2009 (UTC)
 * What do you mean by "your edits are moved over"?? <b style="color:forestgreen;">Happy</b>‑<b style="color:darkorange;">melon</b> 22:09, 30 April 2009 (UTC)
 * So that if you have edited Wikipedia say 500 times, then those edits are mirrored on a different site? dottydotdot (talk) 07:40, 1 May 2009 (UTC)
 * But why would they need to be mirrored? The content that was edited is not duplicated to that other site, unless it is imported. <b style="color:forestgreen;">Happy</b>‑<b style="color:darkorange;">melon</b> 07:51, 1 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I do believe that some work has been done on creating global preferences. So that you would only need to set your signature and timezone once. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 09:48, 1 May 2009 (UTC)
 * So that somehow, it would show that you had 500 edits on Wikipedia & you're not completely new. I was just wondering if there were any plans to make it a bit more "unified" but I can see the want to keep them separate.  Cheers dottydotdot (talk) 10:16, 1 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Showing that you have made 500 edits when you haven't would be wrong. There are several tools people can use to see how new someone is more reliably than that anyways. &mdash; <b style="color:#309;">Mike</b>.<b style="color:#309;">lifeguard</b> &#124; @en.wb 19:18, 2 May 2009 (UTC)
 * The proposal to mirror edits across projects is consistent with the notion of a "unified identity" which is quite different from the notion of "unified login". "Unified login" is a user interface convenience, but "unified identity" changes in basic ways how the editor role is implemented. --User:Ceyockey ( talk to me ) 11:30, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

Well if you want to show somebody how many edits you have on all projects you can use something like this. — CharlotteWebb 16:28, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Preview page expiring
I've been having problems with edit preview pages expiring under Internet Explorer 7.0.6001.18000. If I navigate away to check a detail and return IE says that the page is expired. Sometimes even it claims not to bable to find the page when I finish an edit. This problem, has only appeared in the last couple of days.--Peter cohen (talk) 10:40, 1 May 2009 (UTC)
 * This is a general problem IE has with forms (it also tends to lose any changed values in the form). Your best bet would be to get into the habit of opening new tabs/windows for looking stuff up while you have an edit window open (or you could upgrade to a real browser ;) ). 「ダイノ ガイ 千 ？！」(Dinoguy1000) 22:06, 4 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the reply. I thought my question might have been missed for good. So last night I uninstalled three addons to try and fix some performance problems which have also appeared recently. Those improved straight away and now experimenting while typing this reply I do appear to have fixed the problem.
 * I wasn't paying proper attention to what I was being asked when I grabbed some trial software until I had already said yes to a couple of "do you want to install this?" questions - I had assumed they would be about the shareware and not other crap. Anyway uninstalling the lot seems to have fixed things. The culprit was one of Relevant Knowledge, Smartshopper or a toolbar that wasn't Yahoo or Google. Is it worth noting these candidates for future reference should someone else experience similar difficulties?--Peter cohen (talk) 22:39, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

You can check the FAQ at IE7.com. If you have this problem you need to avoid navigating away from the edit window. I believe this script will prevent loss of form data by forcing all links to open in a new window when accessed from the edit screen. It's been changed quite a bit since the original version (see previous thread) so I can't vouch for it offhand. — CharlotteWebb 02:56, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Please write me a script for "subpages of this page"
This is probably quite simple:

A button in "toolbox" called "Subpages" that leads to Special:PrefixIndex//

Thanks in advance, ye javascript wizards! –<b style="font-family:verdana; color:black;">xeno</b> <sup style="color:black; font-family:verdana;">talk 14:57, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

-- Mr.Z-man 15:19, 5 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Works great - youda(Z)man ! =) thanks. –<b style="font-family:verdana; color:black;">xeno</b> <sup style="color:black; font-family:verdana;">talk 15:50, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

I've been using something just like this except that it adds a tab at the top instead, and it uses something like: wgPageName.replace(/_\(.*\)$/, "") Instead of just wgPageName because I like to cut out disambiguation terms e.g. "_(song)" and "_(dance)" to make it useful in article space. Might cause problems if you're looking for sub-pages of the village pump so it's up to you. — CharlotteWebb 03:00, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

navbox class loses collapsible argument?
Crossposted from help desk

Has the navbox class lost the ability to use the  argument? That is, are constructs like:

now pointless with respect to the  part? When I use them, the resulting boxes look right other than there is no collapsibility there at all. Has something changed recently with the underlying code? Thanks, Baccyak4H (Yak!) 18:23, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

You can't collapse without a title:

---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 19:15, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Has it always been that way?  Baccyak4H (Yak!) 04:24, 7 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes. The show/hide button is added to the first header cell encountered, so if there's no header cell, there's no collapse button. Plus even if you could add a button, clicking it would hide the entire table... <b style="color:forestgreen;">Happy</b>‑<b style="color:darkorange;">melon</b> 07:42, 7 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks again. I'll keep that in mind although I suspect a wikisoftware hiccup, as it seemed the titles were always there.  Resolved  Baccyak4H (Yak!) 20:22, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Interwiki link problem
I was trying to link to my edit counter on my Userpage using an interwiki link like this. It seems that the interwiki markup converts &, ?, and =. Why is interwiki link rendered broken but the external link is fine? Is this behavior necessary for the interwiki links? —Ost (talk) 21:55, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
 * It seems MediaWiki treats all double-bracketed links the same way, as if they were internal links, so <tt>?</tt> and <tt>&</tt> are always percent encoded, as partly explained on WP:Naming conventions (technical restrictions). I would say this issue is similar to using a b which produce an URL with <tt>a_b</tt> search query instead of <tt>a+b</tt> —AlexSm 05:05, 7 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Thank you for the explanation. I see that 15274 deals with the underscores in google links.  Would it make sense to add the other characters into this bug or has the community decided that this is acceptable behavior for interwiki links? —Ost (talk) 19:42, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, it sanitizes the title just as it would that of a wiki page. You'd be better off just using a template for this. One probably already exists. That way you can update the url as needed, and by that I mean at least a dozen formerly popular edit-counter tools have for some reason quit working or become obsolete/next-to-useless. — CharlotteWebb 15:43, 7 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the advice. I'll look for a template to this edit counter. —Ost (talk) 19:42, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Tables versus divs with floating maps
I'm trying to improve the appearance of this article: 2009 NCAA Women's Division I Basketball Tournament. The site had a list of the automatic bids (in Qualifying teams section.) I created a map of the automatic bids to correspond to the teams. I also created a list of the At-large teams, and a map corresponding to them. However, placing the map as "float right" leaves the maps poorly placed relative to the lists. The first list is a two column list I tried changing it to one column, but that makes it worse, as the map floats further down the page. My current thinking is to convert the list to a table, so I have control over the width, and make it narrow enough so that the map is placed to the right of the list, then do the same for the second list. Is there a better way to ensure that the map of the automatic bids is tot he right of the list, and the map of the at-large teams is to the right of the list? (I wrote this question before noticing the discussion about tables and divs just above - it sounds like I should use tables, but please let me know if there are more elegant solutions.)Sphilbrick (talk) 22:19, 6 May 2009 (UTC)


 * To prevent the maps from being pushed down, you need to place them at the top of the section. That way, the rest of the section wraps around the map. I've moved them up, hope that helps a bit. — Edokter  •  Talk  • 12:29, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Text in watchlist but not in edit summary
Four articles on my watchlist (all Iowa counties) have showed up with unusual text. Here's one example of the format as it is on the watchlist, except with no links:

(diff) (hist). . Winneshiek County, Iowa‎; 19:17. . (+100) . . 63.85.46.11 (talk | block) (→External links) (possibly inappropriate external links) [rollback]

Two unusual and confusing bits here:
 * 1) How is it that the "possibly inappropriate external links" isn't in italics?
 * 2) Much more importantly, when you look at the diff, there is absolutely no edit summary at all.

Is this some new technical feature to help us spot spam? I'm a bit confused over this. Nyttend (talk) 02:30, 7 May 2009 (UTC)


 * It's the Abuse Filter. See Special:Tags for more of these new 'tags'. -- auburn pilot  talk  02:44, 7 May 2009 (UTC)
 * See also Change tagging activated and References removed automatically appended to edit summaries above. The new tags seem to have confused quite a few people. -- auburn pilot  talk  02:46, 7 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Sorry if this seems like an insulting comment, but I don't understand how anyone thought it would be helpful for these "tags" to suddenly appear on everyone's watchlist without explanation. If I understand the situation correctly, any admin can give themselves rights to edit the abuse filters. Perhaps one would be kind enough to edit the "tags" so that the link back to the filters that added the tag or at the very least to an explanatory page (i.e. no soup for you )? Delicious carbuncle (talk) 03:58, 7 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I'll be perfectly honest: yes, that is an insulting comment. It essentially discards the hard work of the numerous developers, many of them volunteers, who were responsible for developing a useful feature of MediaWiki, purely because the changes was not rolled out in a manner you thought was appropriate.  I'm sure many people would agree, myself included, that this improvement should have been better documented for maximum usability.  I don't think many people would take your view that you would rather avoid a few days confusion by not having new features at all.  The developers are writing software for 800 WMF wikis and thousands of independent ones; MediaWiki is not Wikipedia's plaything.  Werdna's comment above was more than enwiki deserved. <b style="color:forestgreen;">Happy</b>‑<b style="color:darkorange;">melon</b> 07:52, 7 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Hang on a minute there! This isn't about Mediawiki development and please don't try to turn it into that. My comment in no way relates to the potential usefulness of this feature, nor to the fine work done by developers. The confusion this has generated here on enwiki was entirely avoidable. Merely having the capability to tag edits doesn't mean that using that capability should precede informing the thousands of enwiki users who will be seeing them in their watchlists. Unless I'm missing something here -- and I might be -- interested editors can look at the filter hits (eg filter 3) or the tagged edits (eg "blanking") and see the same information, so not using tags at enwiki wouldn't actually delay anything. Did I miss a sitenotice saying that "you may notice new things in your watchlist"? Why can't the tags be linked to an explanatory page? These are each simple steps that seem to have been missed. Why is communication so lacking on a change which affects all users? This is meant to a collaborative project. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 14:58, 7 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Could someone please add a link to Tags from Special:Tags? Thanks. 199.125.109.75 (talk) 04:34, 7 May 2009 (UTC)
 * You may like to place an editprotected request for MediaWiki:tags-intro &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 07:50, 7 May 2009 (UTC)
 * ✅. It's MediaWiki:Tags-intro, for future reference. <b style="color:forestgreen;">Happy</b>‑<b style="color:darkorange;">melon</b> 07:52, 7 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I was thinking that a link to Abuse filter would also be helpful. &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 07:56, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

oops, template loop?
What happened here? It's all messed up! -- OlEnglish (Talk) 07:34, 7 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Sure is. This

(which would anyway be easier to write as ) makes the page transclude itself! &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 07:41, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Now you've done it, you've spilled the WP:BEANS. :) -- OlEnglish (Talk) 14:59, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Well lucky thing there's some protection against this. Tell ya what does make my head hurt, the way self-transclusion is okay on, err… self-documenting templates—you know (that I know that you know), the ones where the template transcludes the doc-page which transcludes the template which… never mind! — CharlotteWebb 15:18, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Not seeing system messages
A lot of system messages do not appear for me. For example, MediaWiki:Tags-intro was edited (two threads above) but I still see the default message.

Another example: MediaWiki:Uncategorizedcategories-summary was changed from the default (by WOSlinker's request) but I still see the default message on Special:UncategorizedCategories.

This is not a cache issue before anyone asks. I can see these messages on my alternate account, but not on my main account. I've cleared all the gadgets and scripts in case they were interfering. Is there another option somewhere that I've not noticed? Thanks, &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 08:02, 7 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Have you changed your account's language setting, to en-gb for example? Algebraist 19:05, 7 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Wow, thanks. That was it! &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 20:12, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

menu for Commons images on English Wikipedia
If we go to any file page that is linked to a Commons image, like File:Stellar aberration.JPG for example, one of the menus on the top of the page shows "Create this page". I understand that Commons images are not editable on en.wikipedia, hence we don't have the "edit this page" menu when we view it here. But "Create this page" is totally confusing when we're already seeing the page. Is there any meta article which has got a clarification? Jay (talk) 08:25, 7 May 2009 (UTC)


 * "edit" on file/image pages means editing the file or image description page, not editing the file/image. For commons images, one could still create a local image description page. -- User:Docu
 * You might rather be looking for something like mw:Manual:Image_Administration, but more is still to be written. -- User:Docu
 * I was looking at the usability aspect of it. For this specific case I would consider the "Create this page" menu a usability bug, since the user is already "seeing" the page. Further, on clicking the menu, it takes to a page which says "Please do not manually create this page." and I don't know what that could mean. Also the page title now says "Editing File:xxx". It's all confusing. Jay (talk) 11:20, 7 May 2009 (UTC)
 * You could edit the mediawiki message that says "create this page" to blank it for that namespace. -- User:Docu
 * Actually, it is useful. You can put a Commons image into a Wikipedia category. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 13:11, 7 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Exactly, this is what I was attempting to do! I added categories to Wikipedia images without a problem, but hit a block with the Commons images. "Create this page" is not intuitive when you want to add an already existing page (that's what a user sees) to a category. Moreover there is this warning of "Please do not manually create this page." The warning brings up the doubt - as opposed to creating the page in what other way ? Jay (talk) 13:19, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

I think for a commons image, the "edit" button should probably be hacked to use a url which edits the commons image (and the other tabs should behave similarly). Of course anything short of disabling page creation in namespace six without upload will be inherently sloppy. Supposing there is some compelling reason to create a local non-image image page corresponding to a commons image, there is no local notification when the latter is deleted, no way to get a list of local pages orphaned in this fashion, no red link in local talk pages where the now-deleted image was once discussed, etc. Also if I wanted to figure out what percentage of locally uploaded images are "fair use" or what percentage are free and should be moved to commons, discrepancies like this will royally scupper up my numbers.

Of course I've often wondered why so many people are hesitant about making commons-related edits on that site rather than here (well I do have a few theories I won't get into right now).

I know categorization of images is a widely neglected task, and I can't fault anyone for being interested in doing it but I'd offer the following rules of thumb based on the license status of the images in the category you are creating: (a) If they are all "fair use", just ignore my advice. (b) If some of them are "fair use" and some of them are free images on the commons, create a category here and a category there (both with the same name) and link between them with something like commonscat. (c) If some of them are free images despite being uploaded locally, move them to commons (so that they can be shared with other projects) and go back to "b". (d) If they are all on commons but you want a category to exist locally (just in case "fair use" images might be added in the future) I personally think a visibly empty category with a link to commons (using commonscat or even softredirect) would be more useful than a category chock-full of empty local image pages, ones which contain nothing but a link back to the category (and which as far as the software is concerned are not associated with any particular image except by coincidence). — CharlotteWebb 15:09, 7 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I understand the problem you mentioned about creating local categories for the virtual Commons pages. But is it allowed today to create the local categories? If so what is happening to the local (description?) page when the Commons image is deleted?
 * In your solution (d), what do you mean by a visibly empty category? Can you give an example of such a category. Jay (talk) 18:17, 7 May 2009 (UTC)
 * A1: I'm sure it's allowed but I think it's a bad idea for the predescribed reasons (and I consider the software flawed for smiling and nodding when an description page has no image, or vice versa in a few stranger cases). A2: Probably nothing until somebody navigates through the category by chance, clicks on the file-name and discovers that no image exists—this could take years. A3: In this context I meant a category where the lack of local images belonging to it is obvious. A4: (If you mean one that is kept perpetually empty with a link to commons) no, none offhand but it might be worth considering in certain cases. — CharlotteWebb 19:20, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

How about adding a link to edit the commons description at MediaWiki:Sharedupload? It should make clear in one way or the other that one starts editing there. -- User:Docu

Implementing the Bottom class for a WikiProject
Hi there, we at the WikiProject Chess would like to implement the occurence "Bottom" in the importance ladder for the assessment of the articles in the scope of our project. Other projects like WikiProject Dungeons & Dragons or WikiProject_Rocketry have already implemented it successfully, but when we tried to modify our Template:Chess-WikiProject it just, well, failed. Would someone knowledgeable enough please explain to us how to do it (or do it straight away) ? SyG (talk) 18:02, 7 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Already thanks to User talk:MSGJ. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 18:07, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Revert
Hi I made this revert using Twinle it appears to have removed what I wanted, but when I look at the article page the text is still there, but if I go to edit it the text is not there. I have refreshed the page a couple of times but it still appears. Any ideas what is happening. BigDunc Talk 21:48, 7 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Try CTRL+F5? &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 21:55, 7 May 2009 (UTC)
 * It is sorted now but I had pressed F5, I use Opera as my browser and have it set to always check if cached paged is updated on the server, maybe going a bit slow thanks for the reply. BigDunc  Talk 22:05, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Review of user script
Would anyone like to give feedback on User:M/monobook.js? You can import the script in the usual ways. It uses jQuery and a couple of other libraries. Part of it simply cleans up the main edit page. The more interesting part is a 'shortcut editor'. When you highlight a phrase of text (sometimes works with links), an alert box will pop up asking you to rephrase what you selected. Cancel abandons, ok saves your new wording to the page. An edit summary is automatically generated, you can look at some of my contribs for examples. (e.g. ', in total about' → ' totalling aproximately '). Invalid highlighted text will pop up a debug alert, as will success upon hitting ok. These can be commented out. The script reloads the page when done, but this can be commented out also. Suggestions and patches are appreciated. If something doesn't make sense, I can comment it. –MT 23:31, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Banner
You know the banner displayed in the Wikipedia pages for users? The one with the greenish-blue lettering and a " [help us with translations!] " on the side? I accidently dismised it, and can't find how to brng it back...<span style="font-family:Verdana,Arial,Helvetica"><b style="color:black;">Res</b> Mar 21:45, 5 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Try clearing your cookies. If you're not sure how to do that, please say which browser you're using. Tra (Talk) 22:12, 5 May 2009 (UTC)


 * The vote it was advertising ended on May 3. Mr.Z-man 00:12, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
 * IE8. <span style="font-family:Verdana,Arial,Helvetica"><b style="color:black;">Res</b> Mar 18:51, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
 * If you get this problem in future, you can clear your cookies by going to Tools &gt; Delete Browsing History &gt; Delete cookies &gt; Yes &gt; Close. Of course, this won't help you now as the vote has ended. Tra (Talk) 19:46, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Cant change template class
Hi. Iam having difficulties changing the Military history WikiProject's template on the following page: Talk:Angolan War of Independence. I did change the class variable to C, but it keep saying the class is Start. Iam experiencing this problem on other pages also. Please answer me on my talk page. THANK YOU!!! Slapsnot (talk) 15:37, 6 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Reading the documentation for WPMILHIST will lead you to WikiProject Military history/Assessment. Here you will find that there is no C class for this template. Lessons to learn: don't expect different templates to work the same and read the documentation when it does not work. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 15:43, 6 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Gadget850 is correct: does not accept the C-Class rating. The broader reason is that the WikiProject Military history did not adopt the C-Class rating when it was introduced, and the outcome of a !vote on its adoption in March 2009 was "no consensus". — Bellhalla (talk) 16:08, 6 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Thank you for the advice! Ill look into the Military history assessment. Slapsnot (talk) 15:44, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Can I change my font size using monobook.css?
I have trouble reading Wikipedia's very small font size and my browser does not make it any bigger when I zoom in. Is there a way to use my custom css page to make the font larger? Thank you! --Andrew Kelly (talk) 22:28, 7 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Add somthing to Special:Mypage/monobook.css (assuming monobook) like:
 * Note the default is 127% so anything less than that will actually shrink your text. --Splarka (rant) 07:48, 8 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Note the default is 127% so anything less than that will actually shrink your text. --Splarka (rant) 07:48, 8 May 2009 (UTC)


 * That doesn't seem to be true as I happen to have mine set to <tt style="white-space:nowrap;">#bodyContent { font-size:125%; }</tt> and it does enlarge the text. I haven't measured it but I know it's noticeably smaller when I log out so I'm guessing what I see is 125% × 127% = 158.75% of the default size. — CharlotteWebb 14:03, 8 May 2009 (UTC)


 * It is true, the default on #globalWrapper is already 127%, so changing that font-size to anything smaller than 127% will not increase in growth. But, by changing #bodyContent, you're increasing just the font size of that element rather than overwriting the size declaration of the global div, so it does multiply, but only inside that div (and not the whole page, as the original suggestion will do). CSS cascades, but not for multiple percent declarations to the same element. In that case it simply overwrites. --Splarka (rant) 16:22, 8 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I see what you mean. I must have thought you meant the globalWrapper was inheriting the 127% from somewhere else, I don't know, the &lt;body&gt; tag maybe. — CharlotteWebb 17:20, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

<-- Thank you very much, it feels good to be able to read without squinting! --Andrew Kelly (talk) 21:08, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Filter certain users from Special:Contributions/newbies?
Is there a way to filter certain users out of the display for []? It's a great tool for detecting vandalism and spam from new users but the amount of newbie vandal-fighters' contributions is making it less useful than it could be. Kimchi.sg (talk) 02:37, 8 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Well, one might argue that the latter group should also be viewed with suspicion. There's no easy way to filter them out. I guess you could create a javascript that hides/removes lines from the page based on whether they match a certain white-list of usernames and/or edit summaries but you'd have to create and maintain this list. And of course if you are viewing 50 edits and hide 12 of them you'll only see 38 rather than an extra 12 from the next page, etc. I'm sure anything like this could be done more cleanly outside the "human" interface sent to normal web browsers. Your best bet might be to see if Huggle, Twinkle, AWB, or similar video-game software has a feature like this, or otherwise request it. — CharlotteWebb 14:23, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Weird headings
On my browser the section headings on WikiProject Christian music/Christian songs are coming out in the form
 * UNIQ2f0e26917e753482-h-0--QINU Scope
 * UNIQ2f0e26917e753482-h-1--QINU Participants

etc. but there is no sign of these codes in the wikicode. Can other people see the mess as well, and what is wrong? Cheers, &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 15:21, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Same for me. No idea why. Peter jackson (talk) 15:38, 8 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Same here, tried both purge and null edit, but didn't seem to matter. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 15:39, 8 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Caused by categorytree usage on that page. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 15:42, 8 May 2009 (UTC)
 * 16744 --Splarka (rant) 16:12, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

IRC PHP code
I was writing a short application for a couple Wikipedian IRC users (it will be an RC notice script to keep users quickly informed of edits to their watched pages), but I have a problem in the test bot; it can't write data to the socket. If anyone would like to, I'd be very grateful if you could give us some hints as to what's wrong with the code. I can't apparently I'm "calling a property of a non-object" with the command fwrite( $YamaBot->manager->bot[$yid]['socket'], $msg . "\r\n" );  I even tried a global variable. I feel guilty for making a few users wait so long as well, so if you could help me. --Yamakiri 01:16, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

Hisense Kelon
Is the visible text of Hisense Kelon manipulated on purpose by sysops to prevent legal difficulties or was it manipulated by somebody else? Please compare the visible text and the text you see when you edit. Obviously the change was made in the interest of Gu Chujun. --Cethegus (talk) 05:33, 9 May 2009 (UTC)
 * A [ purge] fixed it. --Splarka (rant) 06:07, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

Cosmetic changes (Wikitext cleanup options of pywikipediabot)
On my talk page someone disagrees about some specific issues involved in the cosmetic changes-script (which is applied when my bot adds interwiki's). Because I am mostly active on nl.wikipedia, I am not sure if there is any policy on these topics on en.wikipedia. Can anyone help me out on this issue? Thanks in advance. Kind regards, --Maurits (talk) 21:59, 2 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Just speaking personally, I'm not a fan of extending "WP:" to "Wikipedia:", editors usually choose one or the other for a reason, even in the piped portion. I'm not sure what our current mind on changing Image: to File: when making other edits is. –<b style="font-family:verdana; color:black;">xeno</b> <sup style="color:black; font-family:verdana;">talk 22:07, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

In recent days, I examined several changes the script can do, I think the following settings are more or less safe to use on en.wikipedia and could probably be recommended for interwiki bots as default settings for English wikipedia:

(updated 01:01, 3 May 2009 (UTC))

It would be nice if there was way to let it apply the general fixes from AWB (see Wikipedia talk:AutoWikiBrowser#AWB general fixes module for python). I don't think "translateAndCapitalizeNamespaces" should be a problem in article namespace, as the only one it's likely to be applied is "Category:". -- User:Docu


 * The complaint likely resultd from this edit to the Wikipedia: space. –<b style="font-family:verdana; color:black;">xeno</b> <sup style="color:black; font-family:verdana;">talk 00:28, 3 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Given that sample, the option is probably more useful for languages with localized namespace names. It should probably be turned off too. -- User:Docu

The changes made are minor and, I agree, for some part quite irrelevant. However, I only apply them to pages when interwiki's are changes. The main problem, I think, was on the file: vs. image: question. From the discussion on I conclude that Image: has indeed been deprecated by File: and therefore, the changes were correct.

For some part, I like the "safe version" proposed bij Docu. However, the hyphenation of IBSN-numbers -for example- are useful in my opinion, and that goes fore most options. Because the bot works on various languages, some changes might be less relevant on the en.wikipedia indeed. Switching them off would however switch them off for all languages. Note that the qualification is "more useful" against "less useful" and not "not useful" or something worse. Thanks for your reactions. Kind regards, --Maurits (talk) 15:16, 3 May 2009 (UTC)
 * For the namespace part, I think when it was written, shortcuts like "WP:" were redirects and not a $wgNamespaceAliases. As for the file/image question, I rather not enter it. Ideally one could just use just the "Capitalize" part. As for the ISBN settings, I'd have to look into it in detail.
 * It shouldn't be too complicated to modify the script that it doesn't apply all settings to all languages (e.g. there is already some code for nl and de). -- User:Docu

I'll check out the possibilities of "nationalization" (although we should be careful in applying it), indeed I noticed some nl-code at the bottom of cosmetic_changes.py. I excluded 'wp' and 'wikipedia' from translateAndCapitalizeNamespaces to solve the actual issue. Kind regards, --Maurits (talk) 17:14, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

My solution didn't work, perhaps someone with better Python skills can help me out. There is already a line that excludes main namespace:

# skip main (article) namespace if thisNs and namespaces: text = wikipedia.replaceExcept(text, r'\[\[\s*(' + '|'.join(namespaces) + ') *:(?P<nameAndLabel>.*?)\]\]', r'' + thisNs + ':\g<nameAndLabel>', exceptions)

(the whole is like this):

def translateAndCapitalizeNamespaces(self, text): """       Makes sure that localized namespace names are used.        """ family = self.site.family # wiki links aren't parsed here. exceptions = ['nowiki', 'comment', 'math', 'pre']

for nsNumber in family.namespaces: if not family.isDefinedNSLanguage(nsNumber, self.site.lang): # Skip undefined namespaces continue namespaces = list(family.namespace(self.site.lang, nsNumber, all = True)) thisNs = namespaces.pop(0)

# skip main (article) namespace if thisNs and namespaces: text = wikipedia.replaceExcept(text, r'\[\[\s*(' + '|'.join(namespaces) + ') *:(?P<nameAndLabel>.*?)\]\]', r'' + thisNs + ':\g<nameAndLabel>', exceptions) return text

Probably a variant of the main namespace exclusion is needed to exclude wikipedia namespace. I tried to list it as an exception, but the script didn't accept that. Thanks in advance, --Maurits (talk) 17:31, 3 May 2009 (UTC)


 * You could change the line above to  in the sample above, but then you still have to deal with the "WT:" pseudo-namespace. At "Namespace", I listed a series of titles for the same pages. You can use it to test which ones get normalized to "Wikipedia" ('WP', 'Project', 'wikipedia', 'wP', 'project') and which ones don't. As this isn't ideal, I'd skip the function. -- User:Docu

Thanks for your advice. As there shouldn't be any links to talk pages in articles, I think that this solution will do. If it doesn't, I will skip it when appropriate. Kind regards, --Maurits (talk) 21:39, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

In the same edit, cosmetic changes.py also changed Image: to File: in three locations. Using Image: vs. using File: for images is totally personal preference, although I would strongly recommend it, as it emphasizes that it is an image. There are very few situations where File: needs to be used instead of Image:. One is the stats tool http://stats.grok.se/ According to the release notes for MediaWiki 1.14.0, "Image namespace and accompanying talk namespace renamed to File. For backward compatibility purposes, Image still works. External tools may need to be updated." According to Images, "The "File:" prefix may be used interchangeably with "Image:":", so as I see it is is totally personal preference, and should not be changed by a bot, or just to change it. 199.125.109.77 (talk) 01:41, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

Problematic edits
Without trying to read python, these are the edits which in my opinion are problematic. There may be many more. Please add to or comment on each. In general, en:w is not a dictatorship, and unless it is explicitly in a guideline, I do not see that a bot should be making "cosmetic changes". 199.125.109.77 (talk) 16:19, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

Expanding WP: to Wikipedia:
This is a mapping - it is not even a redirect, and changing for example, WP:RS to RS is not only silly, but counterproductive. 199.125.109.77 (talk) 16:19, 4 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Agreed, on this point. –<b style="font-family:verdana; color:black;">xeno</b> <sup style="color:black; font-family:verdana;">talk 16:22, 4 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Agree, the current function (written before we had WP: and WT:) doesn't function as it should. -- User:Docu

Adding a space next to the header = sign
"Example: ==Section title== becomes == Section title ==
 * NOTE: This space is recommended in the syntax help on the English and
 * German Wikipedia. It might be that it is not wanted on other wikis.
 * If there are any complaints, please file a bug report."
 * And just how does one file a "bug report"? I would amend the above to "This space is recommended on the German Wikipedia only." There is nothing that I am aware of that recommends it on the English WP. WP:MOSHEAD States "Spaces between the == and the heading text are optional (==H2== versus == H2 ==).", meaning that a bot should not be changing this, although I would have no objection to changing unmatched spacings, such as ==H2 ==. 199.125.109.77 (talk) 15:11, 4 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I think it's an advantage adding this space, I just wouldn't add it to the recommended settings. -- User:Docu
 * Agree that if an editor likes doing them this way it is fine, but a bot? No thanks. 199.125.109.77 (talk)
 * It appears this script will no longer run on en.wikipedia (see bot talk). However, while spacing etc is trivial, it is an issue that some editors care about. Therefore, it is totally inappropriate for a script to impose changes unless supported by policy. For example, as I understand policy, no script should insert or remove spaces in <tt> ==Headings== </tt> because it's bound to irritate some careful editors. Johnuniq (talk) 09:07, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

====Changing to ==== This is wiki markup, not rendered HTML, and if the software wants to pedantically render as have at it, but  is easier to write and more readable, and does not get split up onto two lines, so I see it simply as personal preference and not something that needs to be corrected by a bot. 199.125.109.77 (talk) 16:19, 4 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I agree. -- User:Docu


 * The Wikipedia display is rendered as XHTML (look at the source for any page). is the proper output. Wikipedia runs all of the output through HTML Tidy, which will, among other things, convert HTML breaks to XHTML breaks. There is no real difference in which you use, as they are all tidied. ---—  Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 17:32, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

saves 2 keystrokes on something that rarely needs to be used in normal wikitext, so I really don't buy the "easier to type" argument (and the "/" is generally right next to the ">" on a qwerty keyboard; its not like you have to move your fingers all over the place). Mr.Z-man 04:16, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Outside the scope of this question, but Wikipedia output is HTML rather than XHTML (look at the HTTP headers for any page). The fact that it sends rather oddly formed HTML with an XHTML doctype declaration and s that look like  s is of course our old friend Appendix C rearing its familiar, but still ugly, head again. 8-) It's documented under the W3C's XHTML specification, but if you send it out under , then that's HTML not XHTML and you're a brave chap to try and parse it with an assumption of XML. Why MediaWiki uses Appendix C rather than HTML 4.01 is a (long-standing) mystery to me.
 * As to 199.125.109.77's original question though, this is wikitext markup, not rendered HTML. Either is equally correct (they have to be, we'd break very badly otherwise) and so it doesn't, shouldn't and mustn't matter. In that case, why force &lt;br /&gt; ? Andy Dingley (talk) 17:57, 5 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Purposely or accidentally using broken code because Tidy fixes it just makes it harder and adds more dependencies for anyone who isn't us to reuse our content. One of the more frequent complaints in the #mediawiki IRC channel is from people trying to use Wikipedia content in their own wikis (primarily infoboxes and other templates) and having them be horribly broken because they don't have Tidy installed. Using over
 * Also, for some of the reasons we don't use an XHTML Content-type, see XHTML, there's probably some more extensive discussions in the wikitech mailing list archives. Mr.Z-man 04:25, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Why we can't use XHTML as a content-type is obvious to any clueful web developer (and it's IE again). The question is why the impossibility of generally publishing XHTML on the web still causes developers to fake it with Appendix C rather than staying with HTML. In particular, why the general clueful MW people fall for this. Andy Dingley (talk) 14:17, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

Changing Image: to File:
If this is an image it should stay as Image, if it is an audio file or video file, feel free to change it, but how would a bot know which it is? 199.125.109.77 (talk) 16:19, 4 May 2009 (UTC)


 * There isn't an advantage in making this change. It shouldn't be a recommended setting. -- User:Docu

Expanding ISBN numbers with a guessed spacing, such as 0356047113 to 0-356-04711-3
These are mainly clicked on, and it seems completely pointless to change how an editor entered them. In fact, running them together makes cut and pasting them easier, but I would not object to any editor who preferred using them with the dashes. 199.125.109.77 (talk) 16:19, 4 May 2009 (UTC)


 * The ISBN manual suggests to use hyphens or spaces to make it human readable. As spaces would be a problem, hyphens are clearly the option to choose. -- User:Docu
 * I think that refers to the barcoding itself, or at least how the ISBN should appear in the book itself. I'm not sure that it is a directive to the rest of the uses of ISBNs. I also note that it states that there are always 5 groups, 3 of which are of variable length and I suspect that refers to the newer 13 digit coding. I'm a little curious how the bot thinks it knows that it should be 1-871082-13-7 or 0-02-871380-X. You will note that book sources mechanically takes out all the dashes (or spaces), taking you to if you click on ISBN 0 02 871380 X, or ISBN 0-02-871380-X. 199.125.109.77 (talk) 17:30, 4 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Docu is quite right, the ISBN manual recommends hyphens or spaces, with a readability preference for hyphens. The positioning of the hyphens/spacing is not 'guessed', but based on simple rules.  Mr Stephen (talk) 20:55, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
 * If a bot sees a hyphenated ISBN, it should leave it alone. Unhyphenated ISBNs should be left alone as well. Conceivably it might be justified to add proper hyphenation to an ISBN that did not yet have it, but it would be a low-priority task (a cosmetic change) and surely not worth a separate edit. EdJohnston (talk) 03:03, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Conclusion
I added a summary to Bot_policy. -- User:Docu (May 6, 2009)

pages whose proper rendering depends upon html-tidy
Said Mr. Z-man several sections above:
 * Purposely or accidentally using broken code because Tidy fixes it just makes it harder and adds more dependencies for anyone who isn't us to reuse our content. One of the more frequent complaints in the #mediawiki IRC channel is from people trying to use Wikipedia content in their own wikis (primarily infoboxes and other templates) and having them be horribly broken because they don't have Tidy installed.

I agree 100%. Would it be easy enough to configure the html-tidy to put wiki-pages with invalid html into a hidden maintenance category (similar to the one which alerts us of ref-tag errors)? Surely it would be better to correct the source (once) rather than correct the final output (at each page-load/edit—of every article using the template and on every wiki they are copied to). — CharlotteWebb 17:06, 8 May 2009 (UTC)
 * An interesting idea. Of course that would be one hell of a cleanup directory. Also, HTMLtidy does a lot of semi-cosmetic stuff, that we wouldn't want to be marked as "broken". (moving pre and postfix whitespace in span elements outside of the span elements for instance.) —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 00:54, 9 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Be sure to note that Tidy isn't as necessary as it historically has been. --Splarka (rant) 06:14, 9 May 2009 (UTC)
 * And how incredibly annoying it can be... —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 11:59, 9 May 2009 (UTC)
 * By that I guess you mean that some of the features of the html-tidy extension are now handled directly by the MediaWiki software, and that you don't mean wiki users have gotten any better at writing html [[Image:Smiley.svg|15px|]]. Still I think the principle of writing good code for its own sake would apply regardless of the exact mechanism by which bad code is repaired. So when I say html-tidy I'm referring more broadly to any part of the software that makes broken code less broken. — CharlotteWebb 22:48, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

Yes, the non-cosmetic changes are what I was referring to—cases where it has to add, remove, escape, or change the order of tags on the basis that the previous code was clearly no-good. I don't know how well html-tidy differentiates between these steps and ones which only change white-space, but it should. — CharlotteWebb 12:28, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

What links here Page
For the What links here pages, you get filters, but one thing is missing: Show only redirects, Show only transclusions, and Show only links. Please post this to bugzilla; I don't have an account, thanks.68.148.149.184 (talk) 09:43, 9 May 2009 (UTC)
 * <b style="color:forestgreen;">Happy</b>‑<b style="color:darkorange;">melon</b> 11:18, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

Page not appearing in category
I've recently edited a few templates to use the documentation subpage feature (example), which meant that I also moved the category, Category:Temporal templates, from the template page to its subpage. The category is appearing correctly at Template:Future amusement ride, but the template has disappeared from Category:Temporal templates. Did I do something wrong, or does the wiki just need to catch up? --Conti|✉ 11:37, 9 May 2009 (UTC)
 * It appears now, after a null edit of the template and a purge of the category page (in that order). — CharlotteWebb 12:50, 9 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Awesome. Thanks! --Conti|✉ 13:00, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

Apparent problem
I noticed that the following wikitext:
 * abc
 * def
 * 123
 * 456

renders as:

<ul> <li> abc </li> <li> def </li> </ul> <ol> <li> 123 </li> <li> 456 </li> </ol>

The generated HTML is: <ul> <li> abc </li> <li> def </li> </ul> <ol> <li> 123 </li> <li> 456 </li> </ol>

-- Boracay Bill (talk) 02:33, 8 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Looks like htmlTidy assumes you can't possibly want to put list elements inside a span, which seems reasonable enough. You'll want to use a div tag instead. What's this for? — CharlotteWebb 02:54, 8 May 2009 (UTC)


 * abc
 * def
 * 123
 * 456


 * Yes, this is tidy being tidy. Try  and you'll get  . --Splarka (rant) 07:51, 8 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I guess that means don't ever try to put a block element inside an inline element? — CharlotteWebb 14:07, 8 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes, it's invalid HTML. <b style="color:forestgreen;">Happy</b>‑<b style="color:darkorange;">melon</b> 15:47, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the info and the fix. The observation grew out of this, which I'll change to use a DIV instead of a SPAN. -- Boracay Bill (talk) 03:30, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

Filter recent changes
A question: Is it possible to filter the recent changes list to display changes by a particular user, or more specifically, IP addresses beginning in a certain number? I have a dynamic IP-vandal who keeps inserting false information into football-related articles, so I'd like to be able to bring up the recent changes made by IPs beginning 91.109. I has a little play with related changes, but couldn't make it do what I wanted. Any ideas? – Toon (talk)  15:40, 9 May 2009 (UTC)
 * There isn't a way to do that on recent changes, but there is a gadget that allows you to search for contributions based on an IP range. Enable the "Allow /16 and /24 – /32 CIDR ranges on Special:Contributions forms" under the User Interface Gadgets section of your preferences.  Nakon  16:05, 9 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Ah fantastic! Thanks! – Toon (talk)  16:12, 9 May 2009 (UTC)
 * OK, this brigns up another issue: is there a way to set a date to display contibs after? E.g. display contributions for May 2009? The field at the moment is limited to year (and earlier) and month (and earlier), which brings up a lot of contribs for 91.109.*. – Toon (talk)  16:32, 9 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I would just view the page without a date filter and then ignore anything after X date. Nakon  16:34, 9 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Yeah, but the problem here is that I get a list with hundreds of IPs, most of which wouldn't appear if there was a filtered date as they haven't edited in May 2009. Also the IPs aren't sorted by the date of their contribs, but numerically by IP. This means that not only does my browser wheeze for a while, but I have to go through each IP looking for ones which have edited recently. – Toon (talk)  16:40, 9 May 2009 (UTC)
 * The limitation is in what the API is able to output. It is horribly inefficient to query multiple usernames or a prefixindex of users sorted by date, so it returns the data sorted by user and then sorted by date. I could have had the gadget sort by date after in-browser, but this would make your browser quite a helluvalot more prone to wheeze.
 * What could be done is to give a very narrow date range, eg: &ucend=20090506235959&ucstart=20090509235959 (3 days). This is beyond the scope of the gadget as it (for simplicity) just uses the existing User Contribs UI, but you could fork the gadget to support this as a personal userscript. It would be easy to just have two input boxes for timestamps as those above, though a more complex one could have interactive date selectors (ew). --Splarka (rant) 07:43, 10 May 2009 (UTC)
 * That sounds useful... but I have no knowledge of writing scripts or code or such sorcery. I am limited to simply appreciating and wishing for such things, unfortunately! – Toon (talk)  22:39, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

Drop-down menus
I know that there is the Add LI menu script, but I'd like to take it a step further (which I've tried but failed to do): Add tree-like maneuverability, where one can hover over an item on the list and another list of items appears out to the side, similar in function to this. Plenty of other Web sites use this configuration, but I can never disentangle the code and make something of my own. So can a friendly JavaScript coder offer me a hand? —<b style="color:#002BB8">Animum</b> (talk) 01:44, 10 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Have you seen the "Add page and user options to drop-down menus on the toolbar" gadget? It takes some of the interface options and moves them to drop-down menus on the tab bar, including sub-menus as you've described. The code may help with what you want to do. (The creator's page is at User:Haza-w/Drop-down menus. --Ckatz <sup style="color:green;">chat <sub style="color:red;">spy   09:51, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

169:1 ratio of page download vs. content size
I conducted a little test that might interest you: Wikipedia’s pages too big for Africa? Regards--Kozuch (talk) 10:47, 10 May 2009 (UTC)


 * This is also being worked on. See blogpost and MediaWiki_talk:Common.js. Recently JS/CSS compression was enabled, bringing the size of wikibits.js from 30KB to 9 KB. The upcoming scriptloader system will minify the CSS and JS, further reducing the size of the downloads.
 * Also, lets not forget that normally, all JS and CSS is cached in the browser, and is in shared use for all our 16.7 million pages that we have on en.wikipedia, thus significantly reducing total traffic and the size of our pages in general. The idea is definitely, to keep our HTML as simple and as it can be, with as much accessibility as possible, and concentrating any CSS and JS into specific centralized pages that can be cached and well maintained. Also scripting is now starting to become more and more conditional, with editpage and watchlist JS being loaded only on those specific pages. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 12:21, 10 May 2009 (UTC)


 * 169:1 is a little misleading. That's for a page with no content. Except for a few special pages, the size of the JS/CSS is going to be a constant for all pages, so the ratio will not stay the same. Mr.Z-man 19:46, 10 May 2009 (UTC)


 * "The upcoming scriptloader system will minify the CSS and JS" -> The developers have repeatedly stated that skin/site/user JS will not be minified: 12250 12250. In that techblog post, Brion refers to the jQuery being minified as it is foreign code and is supplied that way already. This was clarified in irc. Note that minifcation removing all linefeeds affects usability and even drastically slows js parsing in some browsers. --Splarka (rant) 19:57, 10 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the clarification Splarka —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 22:32, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

redirect=no
I was trying to set a template to suppress a redirect by automatically adding "redirect=no" after the URL. I know it doesn't redirect with the RfD tag on it, but after it is closed as "keep", the redirect creates confusion. See this edit. It was reverted because I apparently didn't code it correctly. I am requesting that someone remake the edit, however, in a way where it works correctly. Hopefully, what I was intending to to is obvious from looking at the code. -- IRP ☎ 18:02, 10 May 2009 (UTC), modified -- IRP ☎ 18:07, 10 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Personally I think I putting a mess of templates and parser functions inside the section heading creates more confusion. I suggest you just use something like noredirect and put it on the next line, outside the section heading. — CharlotteWebb 18:35, 10 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I've given it a slight overhaul. — CharlotteWebb 18:49, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

ordered list offset
This may be the first time I had any success with the bugzilla search engine, but I was able to find this bug 4281 from several years ago. It has to do with being able to start an ordered list from a number other than "1" using pure wiki-text.

This seems to be stalemated on the basis that there are two ways to do this, but the start/value attributes are "deprecated by W3C" and there is some arcane way to do it with css but it isn't accepted by most browsers (as of 2005). Not sure whether either of these things have changed since then, but assuming they haven't, which of them would we rather ignore? — CharlotteWebb 18:23, 10 May 2009 (UTC)
 * HTML 5.0 is "undeprecating" this option So I think that the main concern here should no longer be a problem —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 18:37, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

Okay, so I guess we'd want to decide what the best syntax would be. Perhaps we can make the value tag work like this: That would at least be similar to what's used for wiki-tables. Not sure what would be best for the "ol" element because there is nothing in the wiki-text directly corresponding to it. Maybe we can make it optional to explicitly use it as a wrapper for the wikitext list (?!): </ol> Of course if we're going clearly define where the list begins and ends, we no longer have to rely on the lack of blank lines. For example this should be ok:
 * 1) value="5" | Five
 * 2) Six
 * 3) Seven
 * 4) value="20" | Twenty
 * 1) Five
 * Six
 * 1) Five
 * Six
 * 1) Seven

</ol> This usually happens more with unordered "bullet" lists and I fix them because having several lists with one item each is bad html, but people usually revert it because they like having more space and they don't understand the difference. If we could let something like this render as one continuous list I wouldn't have to fight them so much:
 * 1) Eight (not 1 or 5 mind you)
 * 2) Nine

Firefox crashes while searching for a specific word
I'm using Ubuntu 9.04, Firefox 3.0.10. If I enter 'trans' into the search bar to the left and click "Search" Firefox crashes, but doesn't if I click "Go". Can anyone else replicate this? <span style='font-family:monospace,tahoma;font-size:90%;'>~ Ameliorate ! 03:02, 11 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Works fine for me, using Firefox 3.0.10 on Ubuntu 8.04.- gadfium 06:06, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

Green type
What's with the green type at Manual_of_Style? GeorgeLouis (talk) 00:31, 9 May 2009 (UTC)
 * xt and xt2. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 00:52, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, but those two pages don't seem to explain why and where the green type is used. Or maybe I missed it. Yours in puzzlement, GeorgeLouis (talk) 19:51, 9 May 2009 (UTC)
 * It seems someone decided that green was a good indicator of quotations. Feel free to make it more normal, or indeed visible. OrangeDog (talk • edits) 17:03, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

Changing map in location template
The article Romakloster, on a small settlement on Gotland, looks terrible. It started out with only the national map, which takes up a lot of space on the page and still does not show the location of this small place with any precision. The red "pinhead" covers a territory equivalent to a medium-sized metropolitan area to mark the position of a place with a few hundred people. I changed it to the Gotland map, and another user restored the Sweden map along with the Gotland map. So this short article on a tiny place now has two huge maps to show where it is.

I asked Erik Frohne over at the German Wikipedia, who has uploaded the location maps for Swedish counties, if one could make a modified location map that has a small map of Sweden in the corner, thus avoiding the perceived need for a large map of the country in the infobox. He made one (seen here to the right).

The problem is that still I can't figure out how to make this work with the Template:Location map Sweden Gotland and the infobox in the article. Changing the name of the image file in the template code to point to the modified image (the one seen here) seems to make no difference; it still shows the other image. Why? Where is one supposed to make the needed changes to get it into the article page? --Hegvald (talk) 20:39, 10 May 2009 (UTC)


 * You should see the change once saved (and purged). Note you will not see the change in the preview as it uses Location map/Info to display the template itself. I also have to say that this image uses way too much detail for the corner image, which are subsequently lost in the infobox; the SVG spans 2.8 MB against the original 63 KB, I wouldn't recommend using it. — Edokter  •  Talk  • 21:23, 10 May 2009 (UTC)


 * OK, thanks. I only previewed and did not try to save it. I assume the size can be reduced in some way? --Hegvald (talk) 21:48, 10 May 2009 (UTC)


 * The SVG is 2.8 MB, true, but the rendered PNG image, which is what is actually downloaded, is only 20 KB. The file size of the SVG itself isn't important—that only matters to people who are going to download the SVG source. —Bkell (talk) 05:11, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

I made a new template, Template:Location map Sweden Gotland with small map, but I still couldn't get the map to show, despite purging. Image to the right shows what it looked like on my screen. I then moved the template to Template:Location map Sweden Gotland modified and used a renamed version of the map (image:Sweden Gotland modified location map.svg), in order to get the image name and template name to correspond exactly the way they did before (I wasn't sure if it mattered, but thought it worth a try). It still does not seem to work. What's wrong? --Hegvald (talk) 06:29, 11 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I also don't know, what went wrong with your changes. After some testing with your modified template, I made a copy of Romakloster here using the new template. Seems to work fine ... --Erik Frohne (talk) 09:46, 11 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Funny... when I now "walk" backwards in the history of Template:Location map Sweden Gotland modified, even the earliest version looks good. Apparently, some patience is all that is needed. I purged the page before, but have shut down and restarted my browser completely since then; that may have had some effect. Thanks for all the help! --Hegvald (talk) 10:24, 11 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Attention: The history of the template looks good, because the current template version is evaluated and inserted by Location map/Info. Thus any historic version of a location map contains the actual location map. As I told before, I don't know what went wrong and you may discover the same effect on the next template you are creating. Yours, --- Erik Frohne (talk) 12:38, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

Interwiki links
Is there a way to get a list of direct (without a template) interwiki links? --NE2 19:42, 11 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Of an article ? Or do you want all the interwiki prefixes ? —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 20:01, 11 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Something like Special:linksearch. --NE2 20:15, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

Interwiki Transclusion
This is one that I have been trying, without luck, to figure out for a while. How can one transclude (in this case their User page) to other wiki sites? I have a global account, and I am active on several of the other sites off and on. I would love to just have my Wikipedia User page ported to the other sites so that when someone clicks my name, they can see some info about me. At the moment, I just have redirects that don't auto-redirect on there. Any ideas? Pages in question are User:Tigey and v:User:Tigey. Tigey (talk) 14:53, 12 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure your only option is to copy/paste every now and a gain...--Unionhawk Talk 14:59, 12 May 2009 (UTC)


 * We just had this discussion fairly recently: you can't do it. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 15:27, 12 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Very well. Not a real problem.  I would imagine that it could be a security/bandwidth problem if it were implemented. Thanks, guys.  Tigey (talk) 16:50, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Secure server
I use the secure server (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki) to access Wikipedia. It is annoying that interwiki links and user-created diff links go to the normal server, effectively logging me out and making SUL useless. Are there any scripts/other such technical solutions that will do URL rewriting to fix this?

Thanks!

[[Sam Korn ]] (smoddy) 19:03, 12 May 2009 (UTC)


 * User:Anakin101/alwayssecurewikipedia.js might work for you. (does not fix all interwikilinks though...) —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 19:13, 12 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Wonderful. Some small changes mean I've got most of the projects.  Thanks!   [[Sam Korn ]] (smoddy) 19:40, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Slow Server
Hopefully it will be fixed quickly - but has anyone else noticed the drag in the servers in the last hour or so? Athanasius • Quicumque vult  21:40, 11 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I've got around 1400 seconds of lag going. I noticed a considerable slowdown two days ago, with lag notices popping up every other time I checked my watchlist. Maintenance maybe? -- Commdor    { Talk }  21:49, 11 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Same trouble here. It's stopping my bot from working; and it's driving me nuts! The Earwig  (Talk &#124; Contributions) 21:54, 11 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I have over 1500 seconds of server lag. There's been lag for the last several hours but it's got bigger over the course of the day. I suspect it's something like maintenance as well. Acalamari 21:57, 11 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Me too - Pointillist (talk) 22:23, 11 May 2009 (UTC) [[Image:en wikipedia server lag 2009-05-11 230x.png]]
 * I heard something big got deleted. MuZemike 22:58, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

The database server that houses the en.wp watchlists, is being dumped. Nothing to worry about, when the datadump is done, performance will be normal. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 23:00, 11 May 2009 (UTC)


 * That's weird. I must be missing something, because download.wikimedia.org says that an en.wiki dump is in progress, but look at the feed:

2009-05-11 22:31:35 enwiki: Dump in progress 2009-05-06 11:14:55 in-progress Extracted page abstracts for Yahoo 2009-05-11 22:31:35: enwiki 14360998 pages (30.387/sec), 14361000 revs (30.387/sec), ETA 2009-05-15 02:46:38 [max 22702415] abstract.xml
 * Huh? It's been going on for the last five days and is expected to go on for another four? That can't be right... The Earwig  (Talk &#124; Contributions) 23:28, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

It seems better now. The Earwig (Talk &#124; Contributions) 00:22, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Still lag, seems like the ETA of 2009-05-15 is probably correct. --Saddhiyama (talk) 09:34, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
 * So we have three more days of completely disruptive lags that are frankly bad looking for the project for what exactly? - <small style="border:1px solid #990000;padding:1px;"> NeutralHomer •  Talk  • 14:26, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Most of our readers won't even notice, as they don't keep watchlists. –<b style="font-family:verdana; color:black;">xeno</b> <sup style="color:black; font-family:verdana;">talk 14:30, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
 * At the worst period yesterday it could hardly load the articles (I got several Wikimedia time-out messages). Some kind of general announcement before and during this would have been nice though. I even searched Wikimedia but couldnt find anything. --Saddhiyama (talk) 14:52, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
 * This should be done during overnight hours so it does not disturb editing. - <small style="border:1px solid #990000;padding:1px;"> NeutralHomer •  Talk  • 15:02, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Lol, whose overnight hours? My overnight hours? Your overnight hours? Australia's overnight hours? The nature of the project makes it unfeasable, and restricting it to a few hours a day would just inconvenience a certain portion of editors for much longer. – Toon (talk)  15:08, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
 * This should be done during overnight hours so it does not disturb editing.
 * Oh dear. A  v  N  15:14, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
 * OK, time of least disruption. That would be around 2 to 5 am EST.  I have found that few edits are made during those periods.  Either way, something needs to be done because at the present point some people are having much trouble editing, edits aren't going through (personal experience included there) and other problems are arising from this server lag....plus it just looks bad on the project. - <small style="border:1px solid #990000;padding:1px;"> NeutralHomer  •  Talk  • 15:16, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
 * That would be "do it at noon in in Europe and Africa, and mid evening in Asia and Australasia, because people outside America don't matter", I take it? –  iridescent   15:25, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Never said that. From what I have seen on Recent Changes, the least amount of edits happen during that time period.  That's the best I can come up with so that this problem doesn't upset anyone.  Someone is going to be upset, but if we can upset just a few, it would better than half shutting down the site with lags. - <small style="border:1px solid #990000;padding:1px;"> NeutralHomer  •  Talk  • 15:44, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I take it, NeutralHomer, that you're American. A  v  N  16:22, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

(unindent) Yes, I am. - <small style="border:1px solid #990000;padding:1px;"> NeutralHomer •  Talk  • 16:23, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I thought so. Maybe we should sacrifice the connectivity of one country so the rest of the world can connect without lag? If you're a RC patroller, you'll know that most of the vandalism takes place during the day (EST). A  v  N  16:31, 13 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Less editing happens on this project from something like 500-800 UTC. That's a fact. I'm sorry you see it as nationalism. Cool Hand Luke 18:12, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

The lag level measures the extent to which the slave database servers have fallen behind the master. The s1 cluster, which houses only enwiki, has one database master and five slaves. Most read operations (reading and loading pages, compiling special pages, etc) are done on one of the slaves, which are read-only, while all write actions are done on the master. The slaves are continuously synchronised with the master but, if the rate of write actions to the master is high, they may not be able to keep up. Since your watchlist is loaded from one of the slaves, it may not reflect changes that were made to the master more recently than the slave was synced; hence the need for the message to inform you. But the extent of the database lag shouldn't affect, for instance, the speed of loading pages (although slow loading and high lag may share a common cause). The dump process is always a high-load operation, which has consistently failed in the past: dumping the 'big three' (enwiki, dewiki, frwiki), enwiki in particular, is a huge operation. There's not a whole lot of point in identifying the least active part of enwiki's day when the dump process routinely runs for a fortnight, when it runs at all. Brion has said that the dump load on the watchlist server has been removed, so any further lag is probably unrelated. <b style="color:forestgreen;">Happy</b>‑<b style="color:darkorange;">melon</b> 20:03, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Number of pages in a category...
...is supposed to be shown in a standard message on the category page ("The following abc pages are in this category, out of xyz total.") However, this "xyz" figure is not always correct, i.e. if you browse the category in question page by page, the total number of entries shown (i.e. 200+200+...+number of entries on the last page) is not equal to xyz. E.g. Category:Mid-importance Croatia articles is stuck with one article missing, and it's been that way for at least a couple of weeks. Is there a way for it to get "unstuck"? Of course, dummy edit to a particular page would do the trick, but how to find that exact page? GregorB (talk) 19:31, 12 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Probably the same thing as in /Archive 59#Categories reporting wrong number of members. — AlexSm 21:09, 12 May 2009 (UTC)
 * That's it, thanks! The pages were probably deleted at some point, and while this is mildly annoying, it seems that there is nothing one can do about it at the moment. Hopefully it will get fixed one day. GregorB (talk) 21:34, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Adjust your template to populate a different category, and then change it back again. This should add the contents to the job queue which will flush them out. That's what I did and it seemed to work. &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 12:00, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

double escaped pipe?
I am working on a template, and I need to know how to do a double-escaped |

Here is the actual text:

| {{#tag:imagemap| Image:Wikiquote-logo.svg{{!}}30x35px

This is what I get after I wrap it in an if:

{{#if: {{{news|}}} | {{!}} {{#tag:imagemap{{!}} Image:Wikiquote-logo.svg{{!}}30x35px

The problem is, the second ! was already escaped the first time around, so now I need to double-escape it. Possible? -Zeus-{{sup|u|c}} 01:07, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I don't fully understand; that code has unbalanced braces that will screw up most things. Can you give a larger code snip (or just the template you're working on)?? <b style="color:forestgreen;">Happy</b>‑<b style="color:darkorange;">melon</b> 14:56, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Original (this is inside a {| :
 * | {{#tag:imagemap|

Image:Wikibooks-logo.svg {{!}}   30x35px default [{{fullurl:Wikibooks:{{{page|{{PAGENAME}}}}}}}] desc none }}

What I need:
 * {{#if: {{{books|}}} | {{!}} {{#tag:imagemap{{!}}

Image:Wikibooks-logo.svg{{!}}30x35px default [{{fullurl:Wikibooks:{{{page{{!}}{{PAGENAME}}}}}}}] desc none }} }}

As you can see, I have no idea what to with that {{!}} present in the first case. I have to convert all of the |s to {{!}} to make the if work, but I don't know what to do with the one that is already {{!}}. -Zeus-{{sup|u|c}} 18:26, 13 May 2009 (UTC)


 * If I understand correctly, you want to place an image inside a table, and the image should link somewhere, and the whole thing conditionally. You don't need an imagemap for that, and can do with a fair bit less escaping. The following will work just as well:

{{#if: {{{books|}}} | {{!}} }}
 * Amalthea 18:46, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Toolserver requests
When I go to my Watchlist there is a request made to http://toolserver.org/~para/geoip.fcgi that seems to be timing out. It take something like 20 seconds for this to happen. It looks like it might be something for detecting the geographic location of my computer's IP address. Perhaps someone could investigate or turn it off until the problem is fixed? Barrylb (talk) 06:53, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Works for me. It is not uncommon that some of our services are offline at times. The internet breaks :D (And it indeed determines your location based on IP. Then if you are in a certain zone, you will get invitations for local Wikipedia/MediaWiki events for instance. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 11:04, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
 * It does seem to be working now. If there is anything we could do to avoid the timeouts when services are offline it would be nice... frustratingly slow otherwise. Barrylb (talk) 11:44, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Looking for a value colorizarion template
Hi,

I'm looking for a template that takes a value and outputs a color (green, yellow, red) depending on that value (and other parameters). The idea is to color a table background depending on the number of pages in a category (the kind of stuff User:Dragons flight/Category tracker/Summary did). I'm pretty sure someone created something like that before, but I can't find it. Any clue? -- Luk  talk 12:31, 13 May 2009 (UTC)


 * This would be somewhat tricky, but it's possible. The idea would be to use RGB colour values formatted in CSS using the rgb notation, e.g. "background-colour:rgb(255, 255, 255);" for white. Since you then have decimal values instead of the usual hexadecimal notation, you could use the #expr: ParserFunction to compute the weighted average of a starting and ending colour given a range. I'm a little busy at the moment, so I won't code up an example, but it's certainly possible. Whether it would look pretty is another issue that would probably require significant tweaking with exceptions and multiple ranges. { { Nihiltres | talk | log } } 17:42, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Piped link propblem
In |This version of Lorem Ipsum, there was a piped external link to la.wikisource. However, the first word after the pipe was taken to be part of the link, and taken away from the displayed text, resulting in a "Titulus Malus" (bad title). I sorted this out by putting a space after the pipe, which didn't put an extra space in the displayed text. Why did this happen. Should I report this to Bugzilla? Thanks, God Emperor (talk) 15:57, 13 May 2009 (UTC).


 * The same thing happened with my link above. God Emperor (talk) 16:00, 13 May 2009 (UTC)


 * In external links the target and the title are seperated by a space, not by a pipe: This version of Lorem Ipsum  Amalthea  16:02, 13 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks. I just found that out and then went to correct the page to see you'd already done it before coming here. God Emperor (talk) 16:11, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Applying one special page to another
When I click on "What links here", the "Related changes" tool vanishes from the toolbox. Is it possible to apply "Related changes" to a "What links here" page? Ntsimp (talk) 17:25, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
 * What do you actually want to do? If you want to view recent changes to pages on the 'what links here' list, that option's already available via related changes. Algebraist 17:30, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I didn't know about that. Ntsimp (talk) 18:12, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Temporarily hiding the "create a book" interface
Following concerns raised in the Usability Study, and the proliferation of books of questionable utility, there's an ongoing discussion at VPR about temporarily hiding the "create a book" interface from the sidebar, until the system can be redesigned to be more user- and site-friendly. All welcome to the discussion and straw poll. <b style="color:forestgreen;">Happy</b>‑<b style="color:darkorange;">melon</b> 17:27, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Firefox won't show images
At a library, I never see images.

When I sign on the computer, it often tells me what version the most recent update was, and lately it is telling me 3.0.10. Vchimpanzee ·  talk  ·  contributions  · 21:12, 11 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Most likely the library has disabled the downloading of images for bandwidth/porn reasons. Try asking them. OrangeDog (talk • edits) 23:53, 11 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I was told they haven't blocked any images. It's just Wikipedia that has the problem. Vchimpanzee ·  talk  ·  contributions  · 13:45, 12 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia's images are not hosted on the same domain as the text. If they have a firewall with strict security settings, then this might be forbidden by their security settings. If you visit different websites, do you see advertisements on ANY webpage ? Advertisements are often also hosted on different domains, and would thus also not be visible. 82.75.218.92 (talk) 13:56, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

As I said, it's only Wikipedia (and Excite. I checked my email and things look so different. I also can't reply to any emails, but that's a Reference Desk problem). They said they'd get someone to look at the situation, and it has been fixed. I'll have to report back on what they did when the person gets here. Vchimpanzee ·  talk  ·  contributions  · 14:09, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

He's here now. He said he reset the preferences on Firefox. Vchimpanzee ·  talk  ·  contributions  · 14:30, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

The Excite problem is solved too. I needed to click in a different place. Vchimpanzee ·  talk  ·  contributions  · 20:55, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

Magic word for redirect source
Per this discussion, it seems it would be useful if there were a magic word or something that returns the page the user was redirected from. That way we could write conditional hatnotes ("X redirects here; for other uses...") that would be displayed only if the user came through that particular redirect. Any idea whether this is feasible, or whether it's ever been suggested before? I wouldn't have thought it would be particularly difficult, since a link to the the redirect source is displayed under the title, so the information is obviously being forwarded. --Kotniski (talk) 17:34, 12 May 2009 (UTC)
 * A similar idea was recently discussed at Proposals and garnered some degree of support. Personally, I like the idea because it allows for removal of the hatnotes that pertain to a redirect instead of the article's title. —Ost (talk) 18:11, 12 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Will not be implemented, because it would invalidate any parser cache of the page for each access request. 17121 —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 18:43, 12 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks for linking the bug and describing the difficulty. How is the "redirected from" note currently inserted onto pages when redirected and could this method be expanded to longer messages?  Could the message be incorporated into the redirect syntax instead of on the destination article?  The last post on the bug recommends JavaScript; is that a possiblity? —Ost (talk) 19:23, 12 May 2009 (UTC)
 * That message is added directly by the php that generates the webpage. The parsercache is basically the "evaluated" (HTML) version of the "raw" wikicode you see in the edit window. When you view a mediawiki page, the webserver generates the HTML page, and inserts the "cached" version of the article content from the parsercache. There is virtually complete disconnect between the HTML of the interface and that of the article, so it is difficult to do what you suggest. With Javascript you can do almost anything, but it also adds to the load of a page and it needs a plain HTML "fallback" method, because not everyone has Javascript enabled. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 19:43, 12 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Where/how did you get all your insights into the response process? Is there something we should be reading, or are you familiar with the source code?  - Pointillist (talk) 21:07, 12 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I lurk around a lot on the IRC channel of the developers :D —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 22:09, 12 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Maybe you could write some of it up one day...? Pointillist (talk) 22:15, 12 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Well, these things are described somewhere, it's just that wikipedia/wikimedia is very complicated and hard to summarize. Perhaps you are interested in this diagram created by User:Mr.Z-man. MediaWiki-render-flowchart.svg —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 23:59, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

OK, I thought caching might be a problem (not insurmountable, I would have thought - there are plenty of other magic words which have different values per request). But how about solving it from the other direction: have tags on the redirect page which cause transclusion of wikitext to the target page. Something like <tt> some-wikitext </tt>, which would cause some-wikitext to be HTML-ed and inserted at the appropriate place in the returned page (under the title and before the HTML from that page's wikitext, I suppose). Has that sort of thing ever been considered?--Kotniski (talk) 08:11, 13 May 2009 (UTC)


 * This was proposed recently; while it's not possible to implement as you describe, we can change the "Redirected from foo" message (MediaWiki:Redirectedfrom) to potentially include other stuff, even transclude templates etc. It's just a question of where to put the text so it can be easily but safely included. <b style="color:forestgreen;">Happy</b>‑<b style="color:darkorange;">melon</b> 14:53, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
 * So we could add to that message something like ? (Then we would have to fix the CSS so that the small, under-the-title style was applied only to the fixed message and not to the transcluded bit.)--Kotniski (talk) 05:58, 14 May 2009 (UTC)
 * That would clutter article space with those pseudo-subpages, so it's probably not a good idea. More likely to work well would be something like what is done for per-page editnotices in namespaces without subpages since domas disabled the storage of those in the MediaWiki namespace: Store them as subpages of some appropriate template. Also, it would be user-friendly to use a "loader" template that would wrap the notice in a div and include something like vde. Anomie⚔ 11:52, 14 May 2009 (UTC)
 * In addition, you might get some heat from a dev for a change like that. They didn't like a very simple parser function in MediaWiki:nstab-main, they probably won't like an expensive one on every redirected page. Amalthea  12:08, 14 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Maybe it would encourage the devs to actually come up with a solution instead of forcing us to use workarounds all the time... Can it really be that difficult to program something like the <include...</include solution proposed above?--Kotniski (talk) 12:42, 14 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Well there's always the chance that us doing something crazy might prompt the devs to actually provide appropriate functionality rather than knee-jerk against the hack. We could do something like this:
 * <tt> Redirected from $1. </tt>
 * Then we could put at the top of a particular article itself:
 * <tt> &lt;onlyinclude>&lt;/onlyinclude> </tt>
 * This transcludes the entire contents of the page into the redirect message, but only if it's less than 200 characters. So You can use the <onlyinclude ></onlyinclude> tags to ensure that only the hatnote is included in the message; and a #switch to select between possible redirects.  No expensive parserfunctions, and reasonably safe. And you can put the onlyinclude section anywhere you like on the page, maybe at the bottom would be better than the top.  This would probably fail spectacularly with templates, but this is only really useful for articles, which shouldn't ever be transcluded AFAIK.  That particular string function is not horribly expensive like most of the padleft: based hacks.  Thoughts? <b style="color:forestgreen;">Happy</b>‑<b style="color:darkorange;">melon</b> 12:54, 14 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Hehehe. Smooth. I like it. I don't think that transcluding the page + the string hack is actually cheaper than the #ifexist, but it's good that the hatnotes can be placed in the article itself. Of course, having them in the redirect would be even better, but that needs a MediaWiki change I guess. Amalthea  13:17, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

String length function
On a side note, why is there no string length function in MW? Presumably it would take about ten minutes of coding for someone who knows what they're doing. Another case where a tiny improvement to the software would eliminate the need for ugly and costly hacks like the "str ≤ len" one that had to be used in the above.--Kotniski (talk) 16:08, 14 May 2009 (UTC)
 * mw:Extension:StringFunctions, as requested by for almost three years now.  Please, do go vote for it over at bugzilla; the more the merrier! <b style="color:forestgreen;">Happy</b>‑<b style="color:darkorange;">melon</b> 16:11, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

error trying to submit to a discussion
I do not know if this is a one-shot error b/c I've gotten 2 different errors in the last 10 minutes. This is what I got the 2nd time:

Wikimedia Foundation Error

Our servers are currently experiencing a technical problem. This is probably temporary and should be fixed soon. Please try again in a few minutes.

You may be able to get further information in the #wikipedia channel on the Freenode IRC network.

The Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit organisation which hosts some of the most popular sites on the Internet, including Wikipedia. It has a constant need to purchase new hardware. If you would like to help, please donate.

If you report this error to the Wikimedia System Administrators, please include the details below.

Request: POST http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template_talk:2009_US_swine_flu_outbreak_table&action=submit, from 208.80.152.35 via sq33.wikimedia.org (squid/2.7.STABLE6) to 10.2.1.1 (10.2.1.1) Error: ERR_ZERO_SIZE_OBJECT, errno [No Error] at Fri, 15 May 2009 04:10:01 GMT

I waited 10 minutes after this and the submission went through. I though I should report this, nevertheless.

Scratch that: I just got a similar error trying to report this:

Request: POST http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)&action=submit, from 208.80.152.41 via sq19.wikimedia.org (squid/2.7.STABLE6) to 10.2.1.1 (10.2.1.1) Error: ERR_ZERO_SIZE_OBJECT, errno [No Error] at Fri, 15 May 2009 04:20:15 GMT

Earthsound (talk) 04:22, 15 May 2009 (UTC) == Those errors will need to go through their bugtracking system though (and might have been reported already of course). Amalthea 19:56, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I have a hack to get pass the javascript problem. I had reported it to Bugzilla but it hasn't been fixed yet.

In this code, I am removing quotation marks from some text. As it is in a regxp, I backslash it. The backslash escape isn't recognized, and I have to put another backslashed quote to rectify the coloring.` Manish <i style="color:green;">Earth</i>Talk • Stalk  —Preceding undated comment added 15:31, 15 May 2009 (UTC).
 * I believe this has already been fixed in recent versions of GeSHi, but Wikimedia is using an older version. Mr.Z-man 20:51, 13 May 2009 (UTC)


 * 10967 tracks the request for updating GeSHi. We need to double-check the current deployment setup and see what's sitting in source now... --brion (talk) 18:34, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

Minimizing the Browser window makes the text goes beyond the frame
I was going through the wikipedia article related to MXML - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MXML

When the browser size is minimized to half of the browser window size, the "sample mxml application code" was going beyond the outline and the page was getting extended. Its not a problem though, except that the window stretches to the right beyond the page width. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 122.183.242.174 (talk) 08:52, 15 May 2009 (UTC)


 * This is a common and deliberate formatting although some of the source code lines in that particular article may be a little long. Your browser probably has a horizontal scroll bar where you can scroll to the right. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:39, 15 May 2009 (UTC)
 * You do not HAVE to use the scroll bar. When the text goes out of the box, just highlight it ad drag your mouse to the right. Try it here:

This is particularly useful when you are reading a long script and want to see what is after the cutoff without having to go down to the scrollbar and scroll. <BR> This feature was added so that code looks the way it should. For example, in most programming languages, if the cutoff was put on the next line, the meaning of the code could change. Manish <i style="color:green;">Earth</i>Talk • Stalk 15:18, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

Gavin & Stacey
If I click on "edit top" here, I am directed to Gavin, rather than the infobox/lead. It's late here, and I can see no obvious reason for this. Anyone care to figure it out? Thanks. Rodhull andemu  00:32, 16 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Where is the "edit top" you refer to? I don't see that text. Maybe it is made by a gadget or something else. If it fails to percent encode '&' in the title then the effect is what you describe, for example if it makes the url http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gavin_&_Stacey&action=edit&section=0 instead of http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gavin_%26_Stacey&action=edit&section=0. I use the gadget "Add an [edit] link for the lead section of a page" which works correctly by percent encoding. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:14, 16 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Found and fixed the problem diff —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 01:40, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

WhatLinksHere show-hide toggles don't work
The options e.g. "Hide transclusions" don't seem to work at all at the moment. See e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:WhatLinksHere/Lubuntu&limit=100&hidetrans=1 - I think just about all of those links are transclusions. - Fayenatic (talk) 13:11, 15 May 2009 (UTC)
 * What do you mean? Lubuntu does not exist. Where do you think it is transcluded? Maybe you are confusing a page that is transcluded with a page which is linked from another transcluded page. Lubuntu is linked from Template:Ubuntu which is transcluded on many pages, so Lubuntu is also linked from those pages. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:03, 15 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes, but when looking at "What links here", if I choose "Hide transclusions", shouldn't the articles that include the template disappear from the list? i.e. it should then only show the pages, like this one, that have a specific link to Lubuntu. However, it doesn't work; it still includes all the pages that only transclude the template. - Fayenatic (talk) 21:37, 15 May 2009 (UTC)
 * That's not the meaning of the filter. Pages can either be linked to on a page (Foo), they can be transcluded onto the page, or they can be redirects to the page.  Lubuntu is not transcluded anywhere: there is nowhere on Wikipedia that contains the code <tt>  </tt>.  There are a few pages that link to the page, so they show up as links, as expected.  How the link comes to be on the page is irrelevant. <b style="color:forestgreen;">Happy</b>‑<b style="color:darkorange;">melon</b> 21:42, 15 May 2009 (UTC)
 * OK, thanks - I misunderstood. I think it would be useful to be able to exclude pages which only link through a transcluded template. Can I request that feature somewhere? - Fayenatic (talk) 16:26, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

Redirect editing
Anyone have a quick way to click on a redirect link and open it for editing without having to go to the redirected page, back up to the redirect and edit? ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 01:45, 16 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Hover with popups and select edit from the menu. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 01:51, 16 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks! ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 11:39, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

Even without that you could use a javascript to add <tt>&redirect=no</tt> to the url of all links with <tt>class="mw-redirect"</tt>. — CharlotteWebb 01:49, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

Can someone please fix Template:Essay?
Can someone please fix Template:Essay? It's supposed to automatically add a page to Category:User essays but it won't auto-categorise anymore for some reason. Noone seems to know why. -- OlEnglish (Talk) 09:02, 16 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Hmn, looks to work now. I'm not sure if my tweak had anything to do with that; it shouldn't have. <b style="color:forestgreen;">Happy</b>‑<b style="color:darkorange;">melon</b> 09:54, 16 May 2009 (UTC)
 * It looks like a bot screwed it up in with "cosmetic changes". PrimeHunter (talk) 10:33, 16 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Hmm. Looks like that bot got taken to ANI for bad "cosmetic changes"... <b style="color:forestgreen;">Happy</b>‑<b style="color:darkorange;">melon</b> 10:58, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

Incorrect Icon
Heya ... for the 2009 Super 14 page the current sports event icon features a football ... is it possible to change this to a rugby ball ... ... which is more relevant ? Cheers :1 Boomshanka (talk) 11:19, 16 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Best to ask on the article talk page, especially since the current image is noted as the "official logo". Frankly, I see little difference in the two images of the balls. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 11:38, 16 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Boomshanka refers to Current sport which has a soccer football as default and lists File:Rugby current event.svg for rugby so I used that. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:12, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

Secure server using insecure images
When using secure wikipedia, the images are incorrectly uploaded from an insecure location. Example: for the main page at the secure server, the media is uploaded from an insecure connection at http://upload.wikimedia.org/ which is insecure. Smallman12q (talk) 22:03, 16 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I'm certain this has been discussed before- see the talk archives. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 22:33, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

According to Greg Maxwell this can be solved by having both servers use "protocol-relative urls" e.g. <img src="//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/bc/Wiki.png" /> Browsers supporting this will use "http" or "https" depending on the url of the referring page. — CharlotteWebb 01:44, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

Keyboard shortcut to the edit box
What is the keyboard shortcut to the edit box (the big box everyone writes edits in), I am trying to program Autohotkey without using the mouse.

Keyboard shortcuts doesn't help, and the tab key doesn't help either.

Thanks in advance. Ikip (talk) 03:58, 16 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Looking at the page source, I see that the access key is defined to be a comma. In Firefox 3 and IE 7, the key combination would be Alt+Shift+comma.  -- Tcncv (talk) 04:12, 16 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I have ie 6,
 * alt + ,
 * thanks a lot! Ikip (talk) 04:17, 16 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I now switched to firefox, Alt+Shift+comma does not work in firefox 2.0. Any suggestions? Ikip (talk) 09:40, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

WTF?
"A database query syntax error has occurred. This may indicate a bug in the software. The last attempted database query was:

(SQL query hidden)

from within function "Revision::insertOn". MySQL returned error "1205: Lock wait timeout exceeded; Try restarting transaction (10.0.6.22)"."

I'm trying to add info to a blocked sickpuppet page to assist the unblocking admin here. This doesn't help. Any ideas? Rodhull andemu  03:12, 17 May 2009 (UTC)
 * The whole database was locked for about 7 minutes, it seems to be resolved now though. <span style="font-size:14px;font-weight:bold;font-family:verdana;color:#800040;filter:Shadow(color=#000000,strength=1);height:15px;">ZX81  talk  03:13, 17 May 2009 (UTC)
 * OK, just got it again, but the error message is less than helpful. Thanks. Rodhull  andemu  03:15, 17 May 2009 (UTC)
 * The message is useful to those who can actually resolve the issue: the MediaWiki developers. I agree it's not particularly useful to normal editors. <b style="color:forestgreen;">Happy</b>‑<b style="color:darkorange;">melon</b> 10:26, 17 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Actually the message is more clear than some. A lock in a database prevents other processes from writing to it while a particular process that holds the lock makes a sequence of changes. Your edit was waiting to acquire the lock, but it had to wait too long, so it gave up. This means something is holding the lock too long, or there are too many processes trying to get the lock at the same time. The system admins with access to the database can use the db administration features to diagnose what's going on with the locks, and then try to remedy it. There is nothing that can be done on our end except to let them know that the error is happening. &mdash; Carl (CBM · talk) 19:26, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

An important TFD discussion
Notice is hereby given that there is a TFD discussion concerning whether template:R from other capitalisation shall be deleted. Erik9 (talk) 00:09, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Page source search
I'd like to search all non-File: pages for the text " Non-free TV-related media rationale ". Is there a way to do this? --Carnildo (talk) 23:01, 15 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Not an easy one. You could use a database dump; the next all pages/current version dump for enwiki has an ETA of about 15 hours from now. Or you can use the API with generator=backlinks, looking for links to Non-free content in every namespace except for 6. According to a db query, there's 178491 links to it outside of ns:6, so that would be a minimum of 357 queries with a sysop or bot account. The vast majority of the links are in ns:3 and ns:1. Mr.Z-man 01:37, 16 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I can do this from a database dump; give me a few hours to download it. &mdash; Carl (CBM · talk) 19:44, 17 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I did not find any non-file pages. I found 47 files, listed below. &mdash; Carl (CBM · talk) 01:00, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

File:Tvraven0.jpg · File:MorganJones.jpg · File:RandallHopkirk10.jpg · File:Randall17shot.jpg · File:Szkłokontaktowe.jpg · File:Allstarcup1.jpg · File:RichardandJudyshow.jpg · File:Kung Mahawi Man Ang Ulap screencap.JPG · File:Fifteentoonecircle.jpg · File:Kieltyalmostlive1.jpg · File:ZackMorris.jpg · File:SavedbytheBell3.jpg · File:MalibuCA.jpg · File:Kelly Kapowski.jpg · File:Jamie's School Dinners.jpg · File:Hell's KitchenUK.jpg · File:BadInfluence.jpg · File:NamRood.jpg · File:My-only-love.jpg · File:Kamandag01.jpg · File:Pinoy-records.jpg · File:Kaunshadrukh.jpg · File:RandallHopkirk13.jpg · File:RandallHopkirk16.jpg · File:RandallHopkirk22.jpg · File:RandallHopkirk23.jpg · File:RandallHopkirk24.jpg · File:RandallHopkirk25.jpg · File:RandallHopkirk9.jpg · File:RandallHopkirk11.jpg · File:RandallHopkirk12.jpg · File:RandallHopkirk14.jpg · File:RandallHopkirk15.jpg · File:RandallHopkirk17.jpg · File:RandallHopkirk18.jpg · File:RandallHopkirk19.jpg · File:RandallHopkirk20.jpg · File:RandallHopkirk21.jpg · File:RandallHopkirk26.jpg · File:Randall and hopkirk deceased (original version) dvd box set cover.jpg · File:Randall and hopkirk deceased (new version) dvd volume 2 cover.jpg · File:SK Screen.jpg · File:Maging-akin-ka-lamang.jpg · File:Thefivethirtyshow.gif · File:Ittadi.jpg · File:Magdusa.jpg · File:ChingBBCHD.jpg
 * Thanks. I was hoping to find the template that produces that text, but it looks like it's either generated by a meta-template, or it's off-wiki. --Carnildo (talk) 23:28, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I believe it is generated by some edited version of Template:Filmr, possibly copied and pasted. I'll look to see if I can find anything more, but it seems unlikely. The best bet would be to as User:Dr. Blofeld if he remembers where it was. &mdash; Carl (CBM · talk) 23:33, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Tables
I have two issues involving the tables found at List of Holden vehicles by series:


 * Table of contents: because I do not use the TOC contents within list body as section names, they do not link. What I would like, is to have the "48" in the TOC to link the "48" part of the table (but not to the section "First generation (1948–1956)"). Is there some way of linking this way, and if so, could someone please do one for me so that I can see how it is done?


 * Width: of the table found under the section "Tenth generation (1997–2007)" is rendered much wider that the other tables when viewed in Safari and Opera and IE 6, but is fine under Firefox 3. From what I can see, the "width" parameters are identical in each table, and I can not work out the problem. Basically, I need to have all the tables and all the cells of each separate table to line up exactly. Thanks in advance. OSX (talk • contributions) 08:05, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

I have one more request on top of these two: it it possible to have a link at the bottom of each section titled "Table of contents" and a link back to the TOC? OSX (talk • contributions) 08:13, 17 May 2009 (UTC)


 * You could use Anchor but the TOC is supposed to link to sections and not to table rows. PrimeHunter (talk) 10:24, 17 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks, but I can not get this to work. Could something who does do one for me as an example? Cheers. OSX (talk • contributions) 06:45, 18 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure about the best placement when the first cell spans multiple rows and there are column headings at varying distance above. is a possibility for List of Holden vehicles by series. PrimeHunter (talk) 08:45, 18 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Cheers. That works well. I moved the "anchor" template to the table heading so that these are included. Any way, many thanks. OSX (talk • contributions) 09:11, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Usability Study
Is there some place that we are discussing this? I think it's a big deal, but since it's over at wikimedia there doesn't seem to be a place to discuss it. The only thing I've found so far is this. Thanks. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) (contribs) 00:46, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Have a look at this discussion going on at the foundation-l mailing list. Dedalus (talk) 08:09, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
 * There is also some discussion going on at the Village Pump (proposals). Input on "new article" and "books functionality" greatly appreciated. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 09:49, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Wikibits.js is slowing down WP pages?
in File:Carbon Monoxide timings Jorge Stolfi 2009-05-17 20-30.png please find a screenshot showing the tmings and duration forloading each component of the Carbon Monoxide article.

The displayed plot spans the entire download, 5.9 seconds. Notice that the load of the page itself takes 0.99 seconds. Halfway through its download (t ~ 0.5 sec) there begins a spurt of parallel dowloads, apparently CSS files, which end at t ~ 1.5 sec. Then there is a long chain of serial downloads that takes off where MediaWiki:Common.css (?) ends. The chain begins with wikibits.js and ends with MediaWiki:Wikiminiatlas.js, at t ~ 4.0 sec. Finally all the images are dowloaded, almost in parallel; the last one to finish is the wikipedia logo.

Thus the chain that begins with wikibits.js is responsible for about 3.5 seconds of the total 5.9 sec download time.

The useful contents (main text and images) could have been downloaded in about 2.5 sec, or perhaps as little as 2.0 sec if images could be downloaded in parallel with the text.

It looks like one could cut the user-perceived download time by 50% or more just by repackaging the js/css files in that hain info a single file. Is that feasible?

I am using Firefox 3.0.8 under Linux Madriva 1.9.0.8-0.1mdv2009.0. The timings were obtained with the Firebug add-on for Firefox. The page was fetched with shift-reload which (AFAIK) ignores the browser's cache and fetches every component from the net.

By the way, for the last week or so, WP downloads often hang halfway and stay there forever. I still cannot figure out the culprit, but "waiting for upload.wikimedia.ord" often appears in the status bar at those times. Has this been discussed anuwhere?

All the best, --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 01:05, 18 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I can confirm the behaviour as observed by Jorge; it doesn't happen consistently, though. Often it is so bad that it makes editing impossible, and then pages load with normal speed again. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 06:36, 18 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Yesterday, it was slow on saving long pages too. I supposed that it might had something to do with the filters. -- User:Docu 08:24, 18 May 2009 (UTC)


 * This has much to do with the way how Firefox processes Javascript btw. On Safari, everything runs much more in parallel. However change is comming. Actually for a large part this is already done. It's just that the website has not been synced with the sourcecode for over 2 months now (Busy developers). —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 09:46, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Compared to WebKit (Nightly build), logged out, empty cache and shift-reload. File:Carbon Monoxide timings TheDJ 2009-05-18 10-00.jpg But let us not forget that most of this stuff is all cached subsequently. Wikipedia is a large website, there just is no denying it. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 10:06, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Add link to Abuse Log in Special:Contributions header
How do I add a link to the abuse log to the header of Special:Contributions? Note that I am an admin, so I can edit the MediaWiki: namespace myself. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 07:53, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm fairly certain that we can't configure the whole line, only the labels, but you can add it to the footer through MediaWiki:Sp-contributions-footer and MediaWiki:Sp-contributions-footer-anon. Amalthea  08:13, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
 * As Amalthea says, you can't do this as an admin -- you'll need to file a feature request on . [[Sam Korn ]] (smoddy) 08:36, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
 * On another project, I did just that with some JavaScript, for sysops only. It is actually quite convenient, so you might try suggesting it at MediaWiki_talk:Sysop.js. Meanwhile, it's been implemented in MediaWiki (18423), but we haven't seen MediaWiki updates live for quite a while. — AlexSm 19:08, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Hiding Template
I have a template. . I want to display it on some pages- in full (such Cotton mill and on other pages collapsed (such as Lancashire Loom), using a simple syntax  . What is the syntax? So the question is how is it done? --ClemRutter (talk) 08:33, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Do I wrap the call on the article page
 * Do I add a special class into the template
 * Do I write a container template
 * You just need something like class="collapsible " on the table. HOWEVER. this also requires the table uses a header. Atm, your infobox is using a caption (! vs. |+) Also, Infoboxes tables and collapsible tables don't really like eachother. You might consider using a collapsible table in one cell of your infobox table. However, in general, it is a bad idea to hide CONTENT (opposed to hiding meta-/navigationdata which we commonly do). —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 09:10, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks. It is not actually ever used as an infobox- it just happened to work- so that can be hoiked out. It has served its purpose- proving the concept that this may be useful on multiple pages and giving a home for the .svg graphics in a table. The opposition to hiding content needs thinking about- it could provide an alternative solution. --ClemRutter (talk) 19:50, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

WikiBiff
Ladies and gentlemen,

I submit, for your approval, a new application for all you WikiAddicts out there -- WikiBiff.

You know it's happened to you -- someone left a message for you on your user talk page. Normally, the next browse to another page on Wikipedia would have alerted you to the new message, but you weren't on Wikipedia at the time -- you were off typing up some paper in Word or playing some flash game on the numerous websites that have flash games on them. You finally saw the message, five hours later, and you realized that the person who left you the message went to bed 15 minutes after they left you the message, sorely disappointed that you never answered them.

Now those days are over, because now WikiBiff is here! WikiBiff will sit silently in your system tray, and alert you with a friendly balloon whenever you have new messages waiting for you! Multiple accounts on the same Wiki site? NO PROBLEM! Multiple accounts across multiple Wiki sites? NO PROBLEM! Just plug your account info into WikiBiff and relax!

Now, on a more serious note, it's 8:25 AM here, and I've been up all night finishing this up, so I'm going to wait on doing things like getting Wiki pages set up for it until later. Also, I'll make the disclaimer -- THIS IS A BETA-QUALITY PROGRAM. However, all the same, I'd appreciate having people who are curious try it out, tell me if it works, and give me their feedback on it. While I await SourceForge to approve the project, I have the binary temporarily posted to http://mikaey.dlinkddns.com:8080/WikiBiff.exe https://sourceforge.net/project/downloading.php?group_id=262865&filename=WikiBiff-0.1.exe&a=25358567, and the source at http://mikaey.dlinkddns.com:8080/WikiBiff.zip https://sourceforge.net/project/downloading.php?group_id=262865&filename=WikiBiff.zip&a=98717785. System requirements (I think) are a Windows 2000/XP/Vista computer with the .NET Framework 3.5 installed.

And if you tell me someone else already did this, after I searched all over for it, and spent all this time writing it, I'm going to be really mad. :-P

Enjoy! Matt (talk) 13:22, 18 May 2009 (UTC)


 * That's pretty neat! A couple of things, from a glance at the code:
 * For SUL accounts, having to enter the same account & password for a dozen accounts is a bit stupid, in particular if one changes ones password regularly. The accounts screen should let me tick a whole number of projects where I want to check for messages. Personally though, I'd want to check for messages per default only once per day, on a handful of wikis once per hour, and only on en-wiki every couple minutes, so that would still need to be configurable somehow. :) Even better, I'm sure there is some toolserver tool somewhere that lets me query on which projects my SUL account is registered, so that I don't have to check them myself at all. Amalthea  15:51, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I think something about that (having to enter information for each account) had passed through my mind. I'll take a look at how I can fix that.   Matt (talk) 18:32, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
 * There is an option in the main window to have it check for messages every X seconds, but that's a program-wide setting, not a per-project setting. Are you saying you'd rather have a per-project setting?  Matt (talk) 18:32, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes. Thinking about it a bit more, I probably don't ever want to check for messages at some projects where I have an account at all, e.g. fa: or no:. And checking on mw: or meta: more than once per day, or commons: more than once per hour, would be a waste for me. I'd only want to check en: every ten minutes or so. Amalthea  19:01, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Passwords are stored in the registry, I gather? You might want to offer an option to not store it anywhere, but to ask it on startup. Again, for my SUL account, I would much rather input it once on startup. Amalthea  15:51, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
 * The option to make all requests via https would be very nice. Essential, for some. Amalthea  15:51, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Hmmm...that's a challenge...perhaps in a future version. Matt (talk) 18:32, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Well, I believe HttpWebRequest would be really helpful there. ;-p Amalthea  19:01, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
 * You know that there is System.Net.HttpWebRequest, right? You don't have to write the HTTP header yourself, and don't have to parse and decode the response yourself. Unless you really really want to of course. ;) Amalthea  15:51, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I know. :-) I tried HttpWebRequest with my bot and was disappointed with its behavior -- basically, it was throwing exceptions for things it shouldn't have.  A portion of my code was copied from that bot, so the old saying "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" kicked in.  Matt (talk) 18:32, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
 * When I just tried it and left myself at User talk:Amalthea2 a message, the tray notification claimed that both my de.wiki account and my en.wiki account had messages, and a click opened both pages. I've entered account credentials for both projects. Was that wrong? Also, how do I get rid of the notification once I read it? It shouldn't still pop up once I clicked it, right? Amalthea  15:51, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
 * *smack*. Whoops.  That would probably be a problem with the HTTP request that I stupidly left setting at "en.wikipedia.org" in a couple of places.  I'll post the updates in a few minutes.  Matt (talk) 18:32, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
 * *double smack*. Just discovered another bug that would explain why the balloon keeps popping up.  I posted a new binary at SourceForge.  Matt (talk) 22:36, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
 * "User talk" is the canonical namespace name, and works on all projects, by redirecting to the localized namespace name (e.g. de:User talk:Amalthea2). So you wouldn't have needed to figure out the localized namespace. Amalthea  15:51, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Good to know! I'm not terribly familiar with all the international wikis.  Didn't know they did that.  Matt (talk) 18:32, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
 * What's a Biff? Amalthea  15:51, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
 * biff — Gavia immer (talk) 16:54, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes, sometimes I forget where we are. :) Thanks, Amalthea  18:18, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Gavia immer hit it on the nose. Matt (talk) 18:32, 18 May 2009 (UTC)


 * UPDATE: The SourceForge project is up. See http://www.sf.net/projects/wikibiff .  Matt (talk) 20:10, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Weird behavior when editing
I have recently "upgraded" my Windows Vista PC to Internet Explorer 8. My first problem was that popups stopped working, but that was quickly fixed due to some great work by User:TheDJ, and as a result I have been able to turn off "Compatibility View" mode. Another three problems with the edit textbox have now become annoying: Obviously, this behavoir could be unrelated to the IE8 upgrade, but it only started happening after the upgrade. It would be good to know that I'm not the only one experiencing these kinds of problems. Any help would be appreciated, but please no "use Firefox/Opera", "switch to Mac/Linux" or "reinstall Windows" suggestions, thank you. Astronaut (talk) 18:19, 17 May 2009 (UTC)
 * 1) I have difficulty placing the caret at the end of the line. I used to be able to click the mouse in the white space to the right of the line and the caret would be placed after the last character on that line.  Now, the caret is often placed at the start of the next line, though this behavoir is not consistant.  Yes, I can click within the text of the line I want to edit and press the "End" key, but why should I have to type this extra key when I didn't before the upgrade?
 * 2) When I place the caret in the middle of the text and I start typing, the text box often scrolls so that the caret is on the last line in the window. For example, suppose the textbox is displaying the last 30 lines of the hundreds of lines in the article and I want to edit the 5th from last line.  I click on that line and start to type.  The textbox will scroll so that the line I am editing is the last line displayed in the textbox.  That is really annoying when I still need to read the following few lines.
 * 3) I keep getting undesired scrolling in the edit textbox if I move the mouse quickly (eg. to move it out of the way, to click preview, or to move the caret). Thankfully, the editing caret stays in the same place, but the textbox scrolls by a few lines so that I can no longer see the caret.


 * What do you want us to say other than "get a proper browser"?? These sound just like the sort of quirks and 'features' of Internet Explorer that piss so many people off with it.  There hasn't been a change to the MediaWiki software running WMF wikis for weeks now; the only thing that's changed is your browser. If you'd raised these issues with Firefox, I'd say to go over to Mozilla's bugzilla, and in all likelihood they'd be fixed in good time.  But oh wait, Microsoft doesn't have anywhere for users to file complaints in an organised way.... :D <b style="color:forestgreen;">Happy</b>‑<b style="color:darkorange;">melon</b> 18:28, 17 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Well, I sort of expected a "We know IE is crap, but have you tried setting the xyz option in Advanced Options" or maybe a "Since IE8 is now (supposedly) standards compliant, we are working on removing some of the IE-specific kludges we had to put in the Media Wiki software". Trouble is, the standard response from too many people seems to be "get Firefox".  And yes, I would like to take it to Microsoft's equivalent of Bugzilla but as you correctly pointed out they don't have one.  I'm not looking for you to fix the problems with my computer, however, I am trying to let someone know of a potential problem that could affect high percentage of Wikipedia editors.  Astronaut (talk) 19:20, 17 May 2009 (UTC)


 * You have got a point with the IEfixes; maybe try editing without javascript and see if any of the problems go away? Other than that, and given that IE8 is pretty new, there aren't any fixes specifically designed for it.  I hope it fixes some of the more egregious IE7 bugs to compensate for this whole new raft of errors... <Tt>:D</tt> <b style="color:forestgreen;">Happy</b>‑<b style="color:darkorange;">melon</b> 19:32, 17 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I am curious about these supposed bugs in IE7. Apart from not being able to use some of the flashier Wiki gadgets due to deficiencies in IE7, I haven't experienced any unexpected behavoir while editing or simply surfing the internet in over a year of using it.  Astronaut (talk) 20:02, 17 May 2009 (UTC)


 * That's because we web developers have been bending over backwards to support IE for all these years. —Remember the dot (talk) 01:07, 18 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I can confirm the behaviour of IE8 as observed by Astronaut. After the admirable fix by The DJ, which allowed WP:POPUPS to work in IE8 in strict mode, IE8's scrolling behaviour in Wikipedia edit boxes is highly erratic. Aside: I find the attitude towards IE users shown above inconsiderate and counterproductive. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 06:35, 18 May 2009 (UTC)


 * It wasn't my intention to contemn IE users, although my disdain for the browser itself knows no bounds. As RTD notes, web developers have for many years (and it appears, will for many years still) going far out of their way to hide as much of IE's faults from its innocent users.  IE's reputation for brokenness is well-deserved; it seems that IE8 - heralded by Microsoft as finally being a standards-compliant browser - is no different.  Sooner or later, we'll identify exactly what problems can be fixed by web developers, with JavaScript, wierd conditional hacks, whatever, and fix them; and even further down the line Microsoft will bring out an IE9 which might fix some of these issues in core (although in all likelihood introducing a host of new ones).  My comment is essentially that: we have no IE8fixes as yet, so there is nothing I could recommend to fix these particular issues.  But there's a world of difference between bitching about IE being broken, and in abandoning it for that reason. We may do the former, but we'll certainly not do the latter.  Not while it remains the world's most popular web browser, anyway. <b style="color:forestgreen;">Happy</b>‑<b style="color:darkorange;">melon</b> 07:57, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

I'm almost certain that this is caused by fixIEScroll in MediaWiki:Common.js. Please test disabling Javascript when you visit wikipedia. If that fixes it, then I'm relatively sure that it is the cause. Then I only need to find a way to limit this Javascript to Pre 8.... —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 09:36, 18 May 2009 (UTC)


 * @Happy-melon: Thank you for distinguishing between IE users and the product. I have tested FF (3.0.10 & 3.5b4) and it doesn't suit my habits as a quotidian browser (unintuitive tab switching, non-sizeable dialogues, plugin-hell, no support for Table Data Control (I know that no support for ActiveX is considered a plus, but in the Real World™ … )).
 * @The DJ: After disabling Javascript (or Active Scripting as IE calls it) the above described symptoms still exist. The most common symptom is that starting to type somewhere in the editing window will scroll the text in one big jump so that the cursor is now in the bottom row of the editing window. At other times the text scrolls one line further down with each character typed, until it stops scrolling when it has reached the bottom line, or sometimes it stops at the fourth-last line. I'm not reporting this with an expectation of it getting fixed, only as tidbit for the terminally curious. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 13:15, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Sounds like this bug. Now we need to work around it —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 14:30, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Try adding

to Special:MyPage/monobook.css.. Perhaps that will help... —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 14:41, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
 * That didn't help, but working on the guy's diagnosis at eggheadcafe and looking at the HTML code, particularly

<textarea name="wpTextbox1" id="wpTextbox1" cols="80" , narrowing the browser window to about 80 columns did work. That's (almost) good enough for me. Thanks. Michael Bednarek (talk) 15:10, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
 * The editbox width can be set in your preferences. Mr.Z-man 15:35, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
 * OK, this might be an idea. Try setting your columns to "100" in the editing tab of your Special:Preferences. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 17:58, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
 * After setting the columns to "100" in my preferences, I could not detect any marked improvement. After playing around with various settings, I arrived now at a preferences setting of "132" :-) —anything >100<200 would do— and a width of my editing window of 900px, which accommodates 111 characters; this gives a relatively stable scrolling behaviour. By relatively I mean that erratic scrolling occurs only about 50% of the time. The discussions you pointed to above seem to me to indicate that this is a fundamental problem of IE8 and I suspect there's not much that can be done about it, but I may of course underestimate your ingenuity. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 10:12, 19 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I have raised the issue with Microsoft's technical support. Maybe they will get back to me with something or send out another update/patch.  I'm still waiting for a reply - hopefully something along the lines of "Congratulations, you have found a genuine bug. Here's your bug ref. number" - but it could take them months, so I'm not holding my breath.  Astronaut (talk) 13:30, 19 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Would you mind leaving a note on my talk page if/when you hear something? I would like to take this page (VPT) off my watch list. Thanks. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 13:41, 19 May 2009 (UTC)


 * More info/update Village pump (technical)/Archive 61 Astronaut (talk) 17:43, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

Usage of in a template
If article names consist of multiple words, is there then a parameter to refer only to the second or third of these words? Phoe talk  11:11, 19 May 2009 (UTC)
 * No. If the words are separated by slashes (i.e., if they are subpages) then you can split them with the #titleparts parser function, and you can theoretically try to use the string manipulation templates to split it at the spaces, and if you have a limited list of words you expect then you do some tricks as well. What is it you are trying to do? Amalthea  11:20, 19 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I would like to insert a #switch in a table, based on a disambiguator. Say I have articles about athletes, then the heading of a table's column should change depending the occupation given in the article's name. Originally I had tried to use  for this, however, as PAGENAME obviously requires the full article name, it didn't work.   Phoe  talk  12:18, 19 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Which template exactly? If it's an infobox template, they usually get the name without the qualifier already, so that you can compare . Two templates that do this and similar things, with somewhat different methods, are Taxobox name and italictitle. There also is str endswith for generic input, but for your case it could be written a fair bit more efficient. However: For athletes, the page title does not usually have any qualifier, right? So an automated function like that would only match on a minority of all athlete bios. If the template you have in mind is Infobox Athlete, then it already has a sports parameter that could be used to switch, I assume?  Amalthea  12:55, 19 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I forgot to mention that I have this rather not intended for Wikipedia, but mainly for my own PC, and I should have also accentuated that athletes was merely an example as I want use such switches preferably in various topics. However I will take a look at your suggestions and will check if I can adapt those to my purposes. In any case thanks for your efforts.  Phoe  talk  16:08, 19 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Gnah. On your private wiki you can simply install mw:Extension:StringFunctions and parse them as you please. Amalthea  16:14, 19 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Uh, believe me or not, I had overseen this one ... and of course #explode was the key. Thanks for the link.  Phoe  talk  17:30, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Left period off new article name ending in "Inc"
I didn't start a new article because when I went back and fixed the disambiguation page after seeing what I had done, the link was blue.

Nathan Manufacturing, Inc and Nathan Manufacturing, Inc. both have me in the history as the creator, but I only created the first one. They are only redirects because whoever wrote about the company just made it a section of an existing article (surprisingly, apparently only Nathan-AirChime Ltd. had redirected), though maybe I can change that someday. But it's an interesting feature if it really exists. Vchimpanzee ·  talk  ·  contributions  · 18:38, 15 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I guess you forgot something from last year. In November 2008 your account created a redirect at Nathan Manufacturing, Inc. with a period, and added a link to it to Nathan. Somebody else removed it in January. Today you created  another redirect at Nathan Manufacturing, Inc without a period, and added a link to it to Nathan. You then changed  the link on Nathan to be with period so it matched the 2008 redirect instead of the new. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:13, 15 May 2009 (UTC)


 * On the assumption that all those redirects should point to the same section of the article, I edited two of them to redirect to Train horn. – ukexpat (talk) 03:33, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Auto archiving problem
Hello, I am trying to get Miszabot to archive my talk page automatically. I believe I have inserted the code correctly there, and have waited the 24 hrs to make sure the bot has 'run' a cycle. Did I do something wrong? (Is this the wrong place to ask?) Thanks for your help Dougofborg(talk) 20:19, 15 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Miszabot is pretty particular about the config format. I wouldn't be surprised if was enough to make him ignore it.  Amalthea  20:41, 15 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Silly bot... Thanks for the help, I'll report back tomorrow Dougofborg(talk) 20:46, 15 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I seem to recall there's also a minimum number of threads parameter, which defaults to 5. Since you have 5 threads at present, the bot might leave your talk unchanged. I'll add a thread as a way of testing. --AndrewHowse (talk) 15:26, 16 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks, appreciated Dougofborg(talk) 15:41, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

google can't find them
hi together, i have asked here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Computing#google_can.27t_find_her but they had no idea. So again: Why google doesn't index the articles Daniel Schuhmacher and Annemarie Eilfeld? I guess, the template is not OK. Regards 78.48.76.36 (talk) 14:31, 16 May 2009 (UTC)


 * It can take days or weeks for Google to index new Wikipedia articles; we have no control over this. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 14:54, 16 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Especially since both pages existed as redirects until a few days ago. I suspect that Google does not index redirect pages, thus it may take a bit longer for these to index. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 15:01, 16 May 2009 (UTC)


 * sigh :-). Well, let's give them some more days.. but I don't believe google will find them. Regards 78.48.76.36 (talk) 15:32, 16 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Google certainly indexes redirect pages, as shown by this search results page. Google sometimes refuses to index Wikipedia pages for no apparent reason; see this archived thread. Graham 87 03:19, 17 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I'm just going to go with "I don't know" here. I dealing with a user page that was created yesterday and is now indexed, but the two articles in question here still don't show in Google. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 15:30, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Template:Spoken Wikipedia boilerplate
is editprotected. Please replace the click template with imagemap functionality. See Template talk:Spoken Wikipedia boilerplate. --Quest for Truth (talk) 19:16, 17 May 2009 (UTC)
 * ✅, with link in the image tag rather than imagemap (which is for complicated link structures). In future, you can use the template to draw administrators' attention to such edits. <b style="color:forestgreen;">Happy</b>‑<b style="color:darkorange;">melon</b> 19:29, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

Search Engine Problem
Using the wikipedia search engine for 'centrifugal force' sometimes leads straight to the 'centrifugal force' article. But mostly it will lead to a branch article entitled centrifugal force (rotating frames of reference). Is there anybody who knows how to fix this problem? David Tombe (talk) 07:19, 19 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Centrifugal Force with capital F was redirecting to Centrifugal force (rotating reference frame) because of an old page move. I have changed the target to Centrifugal force. PrimeHunter (talk) 08:20, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

PrimeHunter, Thank you very much for your help. David Tombe (talk) 12:50, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Too small formulas
Recently, I noticed that some of the formulas changed size for me. In particular simple formulas with only a subscript or only a superscript got smaller. I heard that equations are displayed differently depending on settings. Is there a way that I can fix the equations so that they display the correct size. Barring that what settings do I need to change. TStein (talk) 18:19, 19 May 2009 (UTC)
 * See Special:Preferences Math tab. For example, <tt> $$2^2$$ </tt> with "HTML if very simple or else PNG" will render as <tt> 22 </tt> while with "Always render PNG" it will render as this image: http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/2/6/3/2634e97d99e0957e8bb021f4081e90d4.png -> $$2^2$$ ... --Splarka (rant) 07:35, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Strange math bug
In Particle physics and representation theory, there's a parsing error Failed to parse (&lt;math_output_error&gt;): \{g|p_0\rangle|g\in G\}. in the math formula on the page, which I copy here (don't know if it will work):
 * $$\{g|p_0\rangle|g\in G\}.$$

I don't know what's wrong with the formula, but fine. Here's the weird part. When I view the exact same version of the page through the permanent link to that version, here, or the difference between that version and the previous version here, it parses correctly! It also parses correctly when I view the exact same page in "Edit --> Preview" mode. Do other people reproduce this? Any ideas why this would happen or how to fix it? Thanks!! :-) --Steve (talk) 16:49, 20 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I purged the page and the problem went away for me. Do you still see it? Gimmetrow 17:05, 20 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I'd guess there is a problem with the math parsing on one of the servers; which caused it to parse incorrectly. Previewing or purging would likely hit a different server, that doesn't have the problem. -Steve Sanbeg (talk) 18:23, 20 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes Gimmetrow, the problem has gone away for me too, thanks! --Steve (talk) 22:26, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

So...
Happy to see that the wiki is editable again... any ideas as to why that happened? –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 21:14, 20 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Well, it gave me time to Google " " – I don't know if Village pump (technical) (further up this page) was caused by anything similar ... Cycle~ (talk) 21:24, 20 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Hmm... maybe. I think that it was about 7 minutes this time, too. –Drilnoth (T • C • L) 21:31, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

SQL error
When trying to edit the page Template:@@ I get the following error:

A database query syntax error has occurred. This may indicate a bug in the software. The last attempted database query was: (SQL query hidden) from within function "RecentChange::save". MySQL returned error "1205: Lock wait timeout exceeded; Try restarting transaction (10.0.6.22)".

Probably it is my fault (a rather weird wikilink) but I am nowunable to fix it. Could someone please help ? Thanks... --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 04:47, 21 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Seems to be working now. Thanks. --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 04:59, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

&lt;ref> and subst:
I don't know whether this is a bug with me or a bug with wikipedia (and if it's with wikipedia then whether it's with &lt;ref> or with &#x7b;{subst) but there's definitely a bug in here somewhere.

Here's the test case code which I entered, escaped so you can see it:



Here's the output:
 * Today is 17 May 2009

Note how the fails to substitute in the references list. So, what gives?

--ClickRick (talk) 23:32, 17 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I have filed this as 18825. &mdash; Carl (CBM · talk) 23:47, 17 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks - I'll bookmark that and follow it there.
 * --ClickRick (talk) 23:51, 17 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Which turns out to be 2700. With a title like "Pre-save transform skips extensions using wikitext (gallery, references, footnotes, Cite, pipe trick, subst, signatures)", no wonder I couldn't find it. &mdash; Carl (CBM · talk) 23:59, 17 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Indeed. Makes me feel better about not finding it too.
 * Given the nature and age of that bug, is it worth adding a Known bugs section to the documentation of the affected areas, such as WP:Subst, to explain the restriction, or at least to link to the bug report?
 * --ClickRick (talk) 00:06, 18 May 2009 (UTC)


 * See FN. Gimmetrow 00:09, 18 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Yes, that's exactly what I meant. Should something similar go in other places as well?
 * --ClickRick (talk) 11:02, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Workaround
If you use the following syntax, all is well.
 * Today is

The #tag parserfunction acts like a pair of ref tags here, but the content is actually parsed. &mdash; Carl (CBM · talk) 00:11, 18 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Great - thanks for that.
 * --ClickRick (talk) 11:02, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Where is the documentation on the #tag function? ("Search" in various namespaces didn't help...) --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 05:22, 22 May 2009 (UTC)
 * mw:Help:Magic words Mr.Z-man 06:32, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

Is it possible to give it a name?
Extending the above query: How can I get a template to expand the contents and the name of ? --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 04:42, 21 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Found the answer (I Think):
 * ... but a little detail was missing: in <ref name="NNN">, the NNN cannot be just digits 8-( --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 03:28, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

Is it possible to suppress/modify the ref link?
Is it possible to suppress the link generated by (that is, the [ 12 ] marker) without supressing the STUFF entry in the ? Or to replace the number within the brackets by something else? --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 05:45, 21 May 2009 (UTC)
 * No. You could hide the whole reference with inline CSS, but then you'll end up with a backlink from the References section that goes nowhere. Which, BTW, is why I think source list is a bad idea. Anomie⚔ 10:54, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Judas Iscariot appliance error
Trying to view the article Judas Iscariot, I receive "Appliance Error (internal_error)" using IE8/XP. All other articles appear fine - Judas for example displays no problem. XLerate (talk) 02:08, 21 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I'm getting Database query errors while trying to edit Lifeboat (film). I'm aqlso having difficulty trying to upload images on Commons. Ed Fitzgerald t / c 04:39, 21 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Judas Iscariot appears fine now thanks. XLerate (talk) 11:32, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Weird display
Looking at Help:Special pages in Firefox, I'm seeing strange codes before the section titles (in the ToC as well). Anyone else seeing this? Any ideas why? --Kotniski (talk) 10:47, 21 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Well, resolved it by commenting out the transclusion of . Still don't know what was going on though.--Kotniski (talk) 11:07, 21 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Sounds like . Anomie⚔ 12:04, 21 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Seems so, thanks.--Kotniski (talk) 12:07, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

which planned feature was that again?
hello, some months ago, a Wikimedia announcement talked about planned implementation of a feature where display of video start points/images/other media could be triggered by text links, quite similar to those green links in http://proteopedia.org.

As I can't find the proposal anymore, can you please point me to it or new information about it? --Ayacop (talk) 17:43, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Constant server hangups
About half of my operations on Wikipedia begin normally but hang indefinitely at some random moment. There are no error messages; the cursor just keeps spinning forver, as if the server had just "forgot" about a request that it just accepted. I then have to abort the operation and retry. The retry almost always work fine, but sometimes it hangs again, at a different point along the transaction. I cannot see any definite pattern, but it seems. It is not general slowness: the transactions that do not hang usually complete at the normal speed. These hang-ups happens while reading pages, editing and saving, history and watchlist lookup. It started one or two weeks ago and happens at at all hours of the day. It happens with Firefox and Epiphany. I cannot exclude a local or network problem, but this behavior does not seem to occur when I access any other site. At first I assumed that it was due to the WP dump in progress, but the dump is over (so it has been said) and the hang-ups are still there. Is this happening to anyone else? Where --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 02:45, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

Archive policy
Can I put a notice that the archive policy applied at Village_pump_%28miscellaneous%29 also applies here? Currently, there does not seem to be a clear policy. If I don't get any objections within a week, I'll do it. JesseW 04:55, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Part of page lost
The section Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Unwatch from watchlist has a stray signature of mine, which was part of a discussion about Javascript and diffs. Somehow part of the page seems to have been lost and the sections ended up being merged. --cesarb 21:27, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

Rename Article
What's the best way to change/edit the name of an article I created? I thought I would solve the problem of a non-uniquely named poet by titling the article using the middle name. This creates more confusion, so I'll learn how to create a disambiguation page. Meanwhile, taking baby steps, I need to rename the article from Tom Poeller Mandel to, simply, Tom Mandel, the non-unique name. Many thanks, Gaelyn


 * Click on the "move" tab at the top of the article page. This moves the article contents and history to a new name and leaves a redirect in place of the old title.  EncMstr 22:36, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

Why Not Archived If There's No Time Stamp?
Why are sections not archived by Werdnabot if there's no time stamp?100110100 09:07, 5 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Because Werdnabot doesn't know how old the section is unless it has a timestamp. &mdash; Werdna talk criticism 09:11, 5 September 2006 (UTC)
 * This is only an issue if neither the question nor the response have timestamps (right?). I imagine it's pretty common for questions not to have one, but responses should always be signed and timestamped so I'd think this would very rarely come up. -- Rick Block (talk) 16:37, 5 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Why can't Werdnabot check the page history, then?
 * By the way, take a look at User talk:Angie Y.. I tried to get this page Werdabot-archived, but it doesn't seem to be working, even on sections that are timestamped. ~iNVERTED | Rob (Talk | Contribs) 20:58, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

Refraction of the light
Moved to project page - 04:10, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

Trouble with table
I was hoping someone could take a look at the table in Visible spectrum and let me know why the final row "red" doesn't show up. Thanks! -AED 22:34, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
 * The template it was using only allowed a maximum of 5 items. I've changed it to allow 6 to make the red show up. Tra (Talk) 23:33, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Much obliged! -AED 23:43, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

Head section
Tips given here should include :
 * Always tell what browser you use when your question is about what you see on your screen. This information shall improve help. People here are used to some details or bugs, or are able to reproduce your case in some of the most popular browsers. --82.227.17.30 19:23, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

"Disabled to edits???" from Talk:Michael Richards
Why does the page say what it says at the top and yet this clearly newly registered user had his way with the article? BabuBhatt 15:52, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
 * It is possible that the User:Curtisaallen account was registered some time ago but never utilized till today. When such accounts are layed away for nefarious purposes they are usually known as sleeper account on Wikipedia. (→ Netscott ) 16:01, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
 * What would it require for the program to be changed so that users with no edits so far would be treated as if they were brand-new? Wahkeenah 16:07, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Hmm, that's not a bad idea. My recommendation is to post it to: Village pump (technical). (→ Netscott ) 16:11, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Wahkeenah 16:15, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Redirects
Try as I might, I can't figure out how to do simple coding, here, and redirects are no exception. I've read the pages on redirects, thoroughly, but to no avail. What I'm trying to do is redirect Meridian Township to Meridian charter Township, MI. Help! --Criticalthinker 03:26, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Done. Make sure you type  in exactly one line. Although you probably wanted to put this on WP:VPT, not its talk page... Tito xd (?!?) 03:30, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
 * But, how does one do this? I'm still confused.--Criticalthinker 03:57, 1 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Click Meridian Township (you'll be redirected to Meridian Charter Township, Michigan). At the very top, under the title, the words "Redirected from ..." appear, with a link that will actually take you to Meridian Township (without being redirected).  Click this link and then "edit this page".  This page's contents are a single line starting with , as indicated above.  To make another one of these, edit the article name you want to be a redirect and add just one line, like the one in Meridian Township. -- Rick Block (talk) 02:20, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Semi-protection recommended for this page
I have to suggest semi-protecting this article. We have a open-proxy or sock puppet user that is vandalizing this article and other one (this message is posted there as well). The edits include ones like 02:57, January 5, 2007 (Good-bye clowns: U.S Feds stop propagandizing on Wikipedia. You're not wanted here. half trillion $ annual budget can't defend us from 19 guys with box-cutters 'cause you waste too much time here). These posts are always identical. I suspect it may be a bot that moves onto a new IP everytime it is blocked. Will (Talk - contribs) 09:11, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Absolutely disagree. Anons may have legitimate technical questions that they need to ask.  Occasional reverts are no problem. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 19:58, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

When I posted that, the user was posting every few minutes. As soon as they found their text had been reverted, it was back. It took longer when they found they had been blocked, but only a couple of hours. So it would have been more than a "occasional revert". Will (Talk - contribs) 00:28, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

Extremely slow tools.wikimedia.de
I find that any link to tools.wikimedia.de has an extremely slow response time, I think minutes to tens of minutes. (I haven't measured it lately; it takes too long to bother waiting.) This didn't matter so much when it was just Kate's tool, but now the geographic coordinate links have moved to t.w.d as well.

It seems to me that others must be getting reasonable response times, or no one would have accepted the migration. Can anyone explain why t.w.d is responding so slowly for me? I'm using Mozilla on Debian stable. I recall once long ago getting a reasonable response time from Kate's tool on t.w.d, when accessing it from Windows. --Trovatore 20:05, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Just a hunch: try disabling ipv6 in your browser (its in firefoxes about:config somewhere). Plugwash 02:37, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
 * I can't find it in about:config (Mozilla 1.7.8). Thanks for the suggestion, though. Could you give me an idea why you think it might help? --Trovatore 06:00, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
 * I have found  in 1.7.13. But I don't think that's the problem, I have it set to false and I don't have problems with the toolserver. Tizio 15:30, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

Picture Placement
Hi, how is it I can choose where on the page I'm editing where the picture I want to add is placed? Whenever I try to place one, it always appears at the top of the text, not in the desired location. Cheeseah (talk • contribs) 21:08, 19 March 2007 (UTC).


 * You might want to take a look at Manual of Style and Extended image syntax; Picture tutorial might also help. -- John Broughton  (♫♫) 00:32, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Request for direction.
What is the difference between this section of the Village pump and the MediaWiki space? I would like to have a discussion on managing conversation sprawl, but I would like to make sure that I am using the right channels for such a discussion. --Aarktica 13:04, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
 * The MediaWiki talk namespace is for discussing a particular interface message (for instance, if you want to change the wording of the warning below the edit box); WP:VPT is for general technical comments, questions, and discussions (such as asking questions about how to achieve something complex in wikimarkup, asking about a particular sort of login problem, or wondering whether a particular proposal is technically possible). --ais523 15:42, 27 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the feedback. Just so that I understand, the proper course of action is WP:VPT -> WP:VPR -> MediaWiki ? --Aarktica 15:17, 28 April 2007 (UTC)
 * No. Pick the most applicable page, and expect to get an answer. If you don't, or if a knowledgeable editor suggests you post elsewhere, do so. The only reason to plan to go to multiple places is if you're checking about the technical aspects of a proposal before proposing it elsewhere. -- John Broughton  (♫♫) 15:37, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

Finding out if articles are watched
Adding this here as well since feedback at Help:Watching pages is slow:

From a maintenance/anti-vandalism point of view, it would be helpful to know how many people, if any, are watching a given article. Is there any way to ascertain this information? I can find nothing on Help:Watching pages suggesting it is. If there isn't, I think it should quickly be added as a feature so that editors can locate unwatched articles to help maintain the quality of the encyclopedia, as unwatched articles have little defense against drive-by vandalism.

Unregistered users should not be able to see this information as it would help vandals locate unwatched pages and make a mess of them. Only established (semi-protection criteria) users should be able to view this information.

Hopefully those of you here will be able to give me a quick response. Thanks, Richard001 00:15, 2 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Already exists, but it requires admin status Special:Unwatchedpages. dr.ef.tymac 00:20, 2 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your quick reply. Could you specify to what extent it exists for administrators? Can they tell who watches the page as well as how many?
 * I think this needs to be extended to all users that have held an account for a few days. It's harmless to let people know how many are watching an article without specifying who they are, and helps people identify unwatched articles so they can better focus their efforts. There is the risk of higher vandalism from those few cunning vandals though, so I don't think it should be applied to non-account holders. Is there any harm you can think of in extending it to account holders? Richard001 01:04, 2 May 2007 (UTC)
 * As far as I can tell, it lets admins know what the first 1000 unwatched pages in alphabetical order are, and not how many people are watching watched pages. (As it only goes up to 1000, it's kind-of useless; I wonder if this is a bug?) --ais523 12:50, 2 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Re extending this to all account holders: Perennial proposals. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 15:33, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

It does abruptly stop at 1000. That means if an unwatched page is not in the early part of the alphabet, it's excluded. Michael Hardy (talk) 20:16, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

WP:CSD template
Hey! When did we discuss, and agree, to change the CSD warning template from pink to white? And if we did not agree, can we change it back ASAP, please? --<b style="color:red;">Anthony.bradbury</b><sup style="color:black;">"talk" 17:35, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
 * See WP:TS. --Golbez 17:43, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

Trouble with wikilink
I wanted to wikilink Joseph M. Scriven (there is an existing article on Wikipedia under that name) in this article He Is Beautiful. I was not able to get Joseph M. Scriven to be recognised as a link (in blue) until I copied the heading Joseph M. Scriv­en from the original article's heading and pasted that into the article He Is Beautiful. This does not make sense to me except for the fact that Joseph M. Scriven appears as Joseph M. Scriv-en in the wiki tab and address. How could this happen and is it a common problem? Address will need fixing. --User:Brenont 19:35, 30 September 2007 (UTC)


 * I have no idea what the problem was or why it occurred, but moving the page to its own apparent name appears to have solved the problem. Nihiltres ( t .l ) 20:12, 30 September 2007 (UTC)


 * There is in fact a character in the middle of the old title; a soft hyphen. Software that makes use of them will not display them unless it needs to put a line break in the middle of the word, but you can see it if you copy and paste it into a more naive text editor like Notepad. It may be that the article was created not by typing the name in, but by pasting it from a word processor, or perhaps from an online article at a website that likes to right-justify its text and so uses hyphens to make them come out looking better. TCC (talk) (contribs) 20:54, 30 September 2007 (UTC)


 * (conflicted) I was going to say the same thing. I suspect that it was some other article that was created in that way, and someone later clicked a redlink there to create the Joseph M. Scriv­en article. Anomie 21:17, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

I can't use the buttons above
For some strange reason, I can't use the buttons that are above when editing on a page. I can't make the text bold, cursive, or sign my nickname, unless I do it by manually typing the script. This seems to be a problem on this computer, only. Does anyone know if I need to change something? When I move my cursor over the buttons, a textbox appears with the explanation for what it means, but I just can't click the damn thing! Ugh! -- User:Anittas —Preceding signed but undated comment was added at 17:31, 10 October 2007 (UTC)
 * What browser are you using? There's some code in place to fix problems with image transparency in Internet Explorer 5.5 and 6, and there were some reports that it interfered with the toolbar in those versions. I thought those problems were fixed, though; try bypassing your cache, and if the problem goes away, then that was the reason and the cache bypass will have applied the fix. --ais523 17:35, 10 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Wee, now it works. Thanks! It seems that I was using IE6. I now installed 7 and everything is fine. :) --Thus Spake Anittas 18:19, 10 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Yes, I thought we had that fixed for IE6...but in any case, IE7 will work a lot better for you with Wikipedia. It will actually load pages faster and in general work better than IE6. —Remember the dot (talk) 21:05, 10 October 2007 (UTC)


 * For the record, it turns out that we did have them fixed, but the script was improperly modified (without being tested) and it broke the editing toolbar again. —Remember the dot (talk) 00:36, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

Arabic text
Not for the first time I've run into problems trying to edit articles which contain Arabic text. On this occasion I've been trying to add the date of death (1992) into the brackets in the first sentence of Youra Eshaya. The preceding Arabic text interfers with the Roman text in the edit box - try it if you want to see what I mean. PS I'm currently editing with IE 7. Any ideas? Greenshed 20:02, 20 October 2007 (UTC)
 * No problem here, using IE6. — Edokter  •  Talk  • 21:33, 20 October 2007 (UTC)
 * But if you were to attempt to change "(born 1933, died 1992)" to "(1933 – 1992)" (in line with the MOS?) then I think that it would all go wrong. Greenshed 23:23, 20 October 2007 (UTC)


 * If you are using Windows XP, you might need to install complex script and right-to-left language files. Windows Vista I know comes with all this built-in, and I'm sure that Linux and Mac OS X would also have it. —Remember the dot (talk) 23:34, 20 October 2007 (UTC)


 * I use Windows 2000/IE6 and only had the "Japanese" font installed once. Since then, most languages requiring unicode display just fine. I had no trouble editing the first line. — Edokter  •  Talk  • 00:09, 21 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Oops, I see what you mean; editing numbers makes the numbers jump around and reversing. — Edokter  •  Talk  • 00:17, 21 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Fun with bi-directional text. The Arabic name starts a right-to-left context, and when you remove the word "born" (which begins a left-to-right context), the remaining punctuation and numbers inherit the Arabic's right-to-leftness. One easy solution is to insert the character U+200E just after the name; this invisible character has the strong left-to-right property that is needed to prevent the punctuation from being interpreted as right-to-left. Anomie 01:37, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

Accessibility testing
Could you please give me some scenarios for doing accessibility testing.. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Banunaik16 (talk • contribs) 09:54, 11 February 2008 (UTC)
 * See Accessibility. PrimeHunter (talk) 12:14, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

Links question
how can I make a link to a specific paragraph of some other article? For example a link to the paragraph "Tampa Jook Music" of the article "Music of Florida" from a different article.. Thanks-- Lykantrop (Talk) 14:35, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
 * See Help:Link - or maybe you only have to see how I made that link! PrimeHunter (talk) 14:55, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Nice one! thanks..-- Lykantrop (Talk) 15:27, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

Image problem
I have been trying to make the image in the infobox in this article Flores, Buenos Aires display properly. The image is off commons (Image:Flores-Buenos Aires map.png) and should display in the same way as the image used on Floresta, Buenos Aires. The image seems to work perfectly well on Spanish wikipedia (es:Flores (Buenos Aires)). Neither myself nor another experienced editor see to be able to figure out what the problem is. Does anyone have any ideas? English  peasant  21:05, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Fixed. The thumbnail was corrupted.  I just purged (and again) the caches to make mediawiki regenerate the thumbnails. JackSchmidt (talk) 21:18, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
 * The image still doesn't seem to display in the infobox here Flores, Buenos Aires. English   peasant  21:25, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Because you have already visited this page today, you need to clear your browser cache. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:31, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Cheers,sorry for being dim! English   peasant  21:47, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

HotCat Gadget bug
I'm not sure if this is the place to report it, or if it has already been reported, but HotCat breaks on "view source" pages (example), causing all my other javascript to break also. The exact error is "document.editform has no properties", for obvious reasons. — Bob • (talk) • 22:32, 11 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Speak to TheDJ? I know how to fix it  but there's probably a better solution, one TheDJ would likely know.  x42bn6 Talk Mess  22:46, 11 April 2008 (UTC)
 * (editconflict) The place to report would be at WT:HOTCAT :D I'll fix it right away. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:47, 11 April 2008 (UTC)
 * [ecx2]I'm assuming it's a permissions problem; as an administrator with the script installed, I don't have any problems with it. EVula // talk // &#9775;  // 22:49, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Problem should be fixed now, but you might have to trash your browsercache in order to get the latest version. Thx for the report. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 23:02, 11 April 2008 (UTC)
 * It works now; thanks! — Bob • (talk) • 15:52, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

merging account and usernames
Hello, I own the Username Ataraxie on the french wikipedia. It's taken here by someone who has not contributed for quite some time. Would it be possible to rename it in order for me to merge accounts ? Thank you.--Ataraxiel (talk) 13:54, 9 June 2008 (UTC)
 * Try asking at WP:CHU/SUL, that's where the English Wikipedia handles all SUL-related rename requests. --ais523 14:13, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

IE8 activities (moved by author)
Sorry guys, misplaced post. Moved it to the "proposals" section after discovering my mistake. Feel free to delete this.ThorinMuglindir (talk) 06:23, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Parson's Function Question
I would like to discuss with someone who is an EXPERT on PARSON FUNCTIONS how to get them "activated" on a Wiki site. - Ixthis888 (talk) 00:33, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
 * The basic parser functions are built-in, the others require installation of mw:Extension:ParserFunctions. Follow the link for instructions. This assumes the wiki uses MediaWiki. Calvin 1998 (t-c) 05:31, 17 July 2008 (UTC)


 * lol @ 'parson functions' -- 144.32.177.148 (talk) 11:07, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

How about...
How about on top of the header for the page, have a list of ongoing technical issues (like the missing image thing) so we don't keep getting the same question? --Random832 (contribs) 21:05, 14 September 2008 (UTC)


 * My guess is that most new users wouldn't know to check it. It's just as easy to say "we know about that" as it is to say "look at the top of the page", but the first option is more friendly than the second. &mdash; Carl (CBM · talk) 21:11, 14 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Can't hurt to try it. Could make sure it screams "The following are known problems and we are working on them". -- Philcha (talk) 21:18, 14 September 2008 (UTC)


 * How about like Centralized discussion? Not only a list of current issues, but a link to the discussion. --—— Gadget850 (Ed)  <sup style="color:darkblue;">talk  -  11:40, 11 December 2008 (UTC)
 * In Template talk:Infobox VG you'll see that a particular topic has been archived separately in order to group like-topic threads and cut down on duplicate proposals. I think this would be the best approach, but also the hardest. (Probably near impossible for the Village Pump, unless someone were to step up and take a definite interest in the task.) SharkD (talk) 21:43, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Talk archiving
If a talk page references itself, then the link(s) may go dead once a page has been archived. I was wondering if more sophisticated methods of archiving Talk pages have been pursued in order to prevent such errors? SharkD (talk) 21:38, 30 December 2008 (UTC)
 * We really should bring Wikipedia up-to-date. Semantic MediaWiki, a better design and increased HTML support would help - the internet's advanced, we haven't. Unfortunately cut-&-paste-ing the threads to a subpage is the only method we have. We should make Wikipedia more 'flowing', and all our problems will be solved! TLDR - No, there is no more sophisticated way of archiving talk pages. <em style="font-family:Bradley Hand ITC;color:blue">Den <em style="font-family:Bradley Hand ITC;color:red">dodge  Talk Contribs 21:56, 30 December 2008 (UTC)
 * mw:Extension:LiquidThreads, coming soon to a blue moon near you... <b style="color:forestgreen;">Happy</b>‑<b style="color:darkorange;">melon</b> 22:29, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Page histories returning SQL errors
For any Talk pages in any namespaces, I am seeing the following message when trying to view the page histories: ""

Any idea what's up? --Dynaflow  babble  22:23, 24 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes, and it's actually all histories (modified header). – xeno  ( talk ) 22:27, 24 February 2009 (UTC)
 * See all the threads under here Village_pump_(technical) Foxy Loxy  Pounce! 22:28, 24 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I totally posted this in the wrong spot. Whoops.   --Dynaflow   babble  22:30, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

Category page size limit
The current limit on number of category page items to display per screen (200) seems unnecessarily low to me. Would it be a big deal resource-wise if it were raised to, say, 500?--Kotniski (talk) 10:40, 18 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Note: Since 4970 this can be set per-site via mw:Manual:$wgCategoryPagingLimit. --Splarka (rant) 07:37, 19 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I imagined it could be - that's why I was asking, with a view to proposing that it be changed. It partly depends what people find most convenient when browsing categories (shorter or longer pages), but I wondered if there were any server-load concerns as well.--Kotniski (talk) 09:11, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

I don't see what's stopping us from allowing category urls to accept parameters like <tt>&limit=500</tt> to override the config'd amount. However as far as aesthetics go it might be useful to allow the paging limit to be specified on a per-category basis, e.g. where the member pages have long titles, one may want fewer per page. — CharlotteWebb 12:18, 23 May 2009 (UTC)