Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 82

Bots and spam blacklist
Anyone know if there is a way to allow a bot to edit past blacklist restrictions? I finally figured out why CSBot sometimes goes crazy: once every so often it tries to point out a copy where the source is on the blacklist. The edit fails, so return to step one. I can just ignore tagging when it hits a blacklisted site, but those are arguably even more important to tag. &mdash; Coren (talk) 14:42, 6 November 2010 (UTC)
 * The blacklist also affects Twinkle users, who because of limitations of the script, do not get an error message. Of course, the logical workaround is to check if the edit was successful, and if not, omit the offending URL. PleaseStand (talk) 17:32, 6 November 2010 (UTC)
 * You could also wrap the problem URL in &lt;nowiki&gt;&lt;/nowiki&gt; tags, as done here for example. Anomie⚔ 05:18, 7 November 2010 (UTC)

overlapping lines
Template:Opinion paints the background around the text to whatever color you choose for the background but

if you set your line height to 1 then

it has the surprising effect of painting right over the dangling parts (gjpqy) of the text on the line above.

i.e. the top part of one line overlaps the bottom part of the line above.

If you put the text into a table and set the background to some color then it doesnt do this.

Do any of you guys see any way of modifying fontcolor so that it doesnt do this

(or some way of setting somekind of line height attribute in my css to prevent lines from overlapping?)

Lemmiwinks2 (talk) 01:29, 6 November 2010 (UTC)


 * I think you are referring to descenders. The issue is probably with fix. Example please. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 18:25, 6 November 2010 (UTC)

http://i205.photobucket.com/albums/bb102/nooneparticular/line-height.png

the character is a box drawing element so it should be the full height and width of the character. Lemmiwinks2 (talk) 07:12, 7 November 2010 (UTC)

that picture doesnt really show it very well.

when I use 36px font with 5px top and bottom margins it works perfectly.

when I use small fonts (and I like to use very small fonts) it gets screwy.

all I can do it fiddle with the margins and see if I can get it to work reasonably well.

Lemmiwinks2 (talk) 08:50, 7 November 2010 (UTC)

External link comes back to Wikipedia article
On the article Eoghan Quigg there is an external link, www.eoghanquiggmusic.com which takes you back to the Wikipedia article. Anyone any idea what's going on? DuncanHill (talk) 19:51, 6 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Looks like some one registered the domain and redirected it to the article. We can't do anything about the site, but the link is circular. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 20:03, 6 November 2010 (UTC)
 * The source code of the website sets it all up. I removed the link from the infobox and from the external links.--Bbb23 (talk) 20:12, 6 November 2010 (UTC)


 * It appears from Google's cache, http://www.eoghanquiggmusic.com/tesco/ and links from other sites that it really was the official site for Eoghan Quigg before most of the domain was redirected to Wikipedia. Perhaps by the subject due to career failure? PrimeHunter (talk) 20:50, 6 November 2010 (UTC)


 * OK, thanks. DuncanHill (talk) 12:34, 7 November 2010 (UTC)

Vector bug
Some time ago I saw that, in the vector skin, it was sometimes loading the page as I was logged-out. Now I've seen that bug appearing again. What is the problem? Is it a cache issue? It is really scary when I get fooled by the fact that the page is loaded as I'm logged-out, when in reality I'm still logged in (if I refresh the page, I am logged in). Hey Mid  (contributions) 22:15, 6 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Sometimes the session data are lost. BTW, I use Monobook and it happened to me so it is not a Vector bug. – Allen   for   IPv6  23:37, 6 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Is there a way to fix this? Also, can this be compared with the session data lost message which sometimes appears when saving a page? Hey  Mid  (contributions) 09:16, 7 November 2010 (UTC)

Text becomes "stretched" when non-English characters are present
When certain non-english characters are present, the text of paragraph that they are included in seems to stretch. For instance, look at the second paragraph on this section of the article on Prince's Lovesexy record. Notice everything from the start ("Side two...") until the beginning of italics (Camille-like vocals) looks different from the rest of the content of the page? Notice the inclusion of a special peace-sign symbol which makes up the title of another album. I've seen it with other characters (often Japanese or Chinese, sometimes other non-Arabic character languages) on other articles (the one above is one example of many). Anyone else notice it? Doc StrangeMailbox Logbook 06:18, 7 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Such an issue is with your browser, operating system and/or fonts installed on your system. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 12:38, 7 November 2010 (UTC)

my font size decreased
i was looking at an article and i tried to type ctrl F to find something but i hit something else and made the font size smaller. how do you get it back?--Gaius Claudius Nero (talk) 16:34, 7 November 2010 (UTC)
 * In Firefox, at least, try pressing control-0 (that's control-zero, not control-O). I think that shortcut works with many other browsers too, although I'm not sure about all. You can use control-mousewheel to change the size in general. --ais523 16:45, 7 November 2010 (UTC)
 * On my version (Firefox 3.0) it's Ctrl-minus to shrink and Ctrl-plus to expand. Antandrus (talk) 16:47, 7 November 2010 (UTC)
 * okay, it worked. i see how it happened. thanks.--Gaius Claudius Nero (talk) 16:47, 7 November 2010 (UTC)

New Census Figures Jan 2011
Question about Wikipedia planning for census data on all United States pages. The demographics will all be out of date as of January 2011, when the U.S. Census Bureau releases the 2010 census figures. That's a lot of instantaneously outdated information on Wikipedia. Does Wikipedia have plans to run an update Bot? I have noticed two different existing methods on the pages, one possibly due to human error. Taking Scotts Bluff, Nebraska as an example. Any insight out there as to what happens January 2011? --Maile66 (talk) 18:58, 7 November 2010 (UTC)
 * A lot of those pages correctly reference the U.S. Census Bureau Fact Sheet for their demographics.
 * Others, such as Scotts Bluff, Nebraska, don't reference the correct URL address to pick up the figures for the zip code demographics, so when clicking the reference, you only get the American Fact Finder main page.


 * Please re-post at the talk page of WP:2010 US Census.  — Dispenser 21:04, 7 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Done. Thanks for pointing me to the right place. Maile66 (talk) 21:46, 7 November 2010 (UTC)


 * You might contact User:Ram-Man to see if he's planning on updating his bot, which did the initial census parsing. Though he hasn't posted since June, so you might want to send him an email.   Corvus cornix  talk  22:36, 7 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Done. It's worth a try.  Thanks for the suggestion.
 * --Maile66 (talk) 23:04, 7 November 2010 (UTC)

Number of page revisions of Sandbox
I have been trying to find the number of revisions made to the Sandbox. I have tried using X!'s tool but there are to many revisions for it to load using this tool. Any help as to what this number is or how to find it is greatly appreciated. Sumsum2010 ·T ·C 00:32, 8 November 2010 (UTC)
 * That's hard to say, because the sandbox was moved several times and the history is kept by page_id, not by title. But some info I've manager to to dig out:
 * {| class=wikitable

! Current title || Sandbox during || Revisions
 * Sandbox || March 2008 – present || 330216
 * Sandbox/Archive2 || January 2008 – March 2008 || 33899
 * Sandbox/Archive || July 2005 – January 2008 || 326338
 * Sandbox/History || November 2004 – July 2005 || 32052
 * Historical archive/Sandbox || June 2004 – November 2004 || 20456
 * }
 * Svick (talk) 01:03, 8 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Sandbox/History || November 2004 – July 2005 || 32052
 * Historical archive/Sandbox || June 2004 – November 2004 || 20456
 * }
 * Svick (talk) 01:03, 8 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Svick (talk) 01:03, 8 November 2010 (UTC)


 * In general, to find the number of revisions in a page, go to the page history and find the difference between the revision with the lowest revision ID (which is usually the earliest revision or the first edit by Conversion script, but see below), and the current one. There will be a line showing the number of intermediate revisions; add two to that number and you can find out the number of revisions in a page. For example, at the time of writing, this page had 70,393 revisions. This trick will work in 99.999% of cases, but it does not work at Historical archive/Sandbox because the revision ID's are out of order. Before Wikipedia was upgraded to MediaWiki 1.5 in late June 2005, if a revision was deleted and then undeleted, it would get a new ID number as if it was a brand new revision. Most of the revisions at Historical archive/Sandbox were deleted in 2004 and undeleted in September and October 2007 (see the deletion logs of "Sandbox2" and "full cat litter box" and note that the linked deletion logs only go back to December 2004). IIRC, one of the old sandbox pages contained some history from June to August 2004 and October to November 2004, and the other one contained history from August 2004 to October 2004, so the history of the earliest sandbox archive page is rather disjointed! Also see Database reports/Pages with the most revisions. Graham 87  02:30, 8 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Thank you very much! After looking at the web address for the diffs. this solution makes a lot of sense to me.Sumsum2010 ·T ·C 04:08, 8 November 2010 (UTC)

Search not working?
All possible search queries at Special:Search return zero results. Is it something I mistakenly set, or is it actually malfunctioning? As far as I know, I haven't changed any settings.  — Soap  —  01:55, 8 November 2010 (UTC)
 * It must have been a glitch; it started working after about 5 minutes. I'll leave this up in case it's symptomatic of a larger problem.  —  Soap  —  01:59, 8 November 2010 (UTC)

02:48 <+nagios-wm> PROBLEM - LVS Lucene on search-pool1.svc.pmtpa.wmnet is CRITICAL: Connection refused 02:49 <+nagios-wm> RECOVERY - LVS Lucene on search-pool1.svc.pmtpa.wmnet is OK: TCP OK - 0.000 second response time on port 8123 02:52 <+nagios-wm> PROBLEM - LVS Lucene on search-pool1.svc.pmtpa.wmnet is CRITICAL: Connection refused 02:53 <+nagios-wm> RECOVERY - LVS Lucene on search-pool1.svc.pmtpa.wmnet is OK: TCP OK - 0.000 second response time on port 8123 02:53 -!- {Soap} [~Soap@wikipedia/soap] has joined #wikimedia-tech 02:53 < {Soap}> did the search function malfunction, or did I set something wrong? 5 Minutes seems on the money :D —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 02:10, 8 November 2010 (UTC)

Password recovery
Hi. I wanted to log into my Wikipedia account today and, realizing I forgot the password, I asked for a new one to be sent by e-mail. I can't remember which e-mail address I had associated to the Wikipedia account, so I checked all of them (I use several), but the password recovery e-mail is nowhere to be found. I looked in the spam folders too.

What can I do now? I'm worried that maybe I mistyped my e-mail (unlikely, but evidence seems to point to that). Is there any way to regain access to my account? I'm sorry if I posted this in the wrong place, btw. --85.186.76.207 (talk) 10:09, 7 November 2010 (UTC)
 * What is the name of your account? Otherwise I don't believe that much can be done about it. Hey  Mid  (contributions) 10:41, 7 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Why is that relevant? :) --85.186.76.207 (talk) 11:16, 7 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Because he's trying to help you get your account back.  Reh  man 11:22, 7 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I was hoping there would be some standard procedure to follow. But if it helps, my account is User:Urzică. --85.186.76.207 (talk) 11:34, 7 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Special:EmailUser/Urzică says there is no e-mail associated with that account. You may be able to bug the sysadmins to reset your password.  -- Cobi(t&#124;c&#124;b) 11:40, 7 November 2010 (UTC)
 * The user may have created h*s account with h*s e-mail address, but may have forgotten to confirm it. Hey  Mid  (contributions) 11:53, 7 November 2010 (UTC)

No offence IP85.186.76.207, but, what guarantee do we have that you actually are the rightful owner of that account? For security reasons, I have left a note on the talkpage, and hopefully s/he won't reply (since its you, IP). FYI, the account made the last edit on October 30.  Reh  man 12:07, 7 November 2010 (UTC) Hey wait a minute. It seems that you have created a global account way back in January 2009, with the first account created in November 2006! You are also a sysop at ro.wiki. No offence again but, what are the chances of you forgetting a four-year old password?  Reh  man 12:11, 7 November 2010 (UTC)
 * And especially considering that the username has edited as recently as yesterday (not at this wiki) suggests that this may be an impersonator. And the account is unified (SUL'ed). But Urzică may have been automatically logged in previously, and doesn't know h*s password. Hey  Mid  (contributions) 12:21, 7 November 2010 (UTC)
 * You have no guarantee that I am who I claim to be, which is what makes this difficult. My password was stored on my home computer, I logged in automatically for so long that I forgot it. I am now at a different location. I'm pissed off about this whole thing, I'm aware that I might have to make a new account and lose the sysop rights and/or credibility on my home wiki (that is why I didn't ask for help there in the first place, btw). All the same, it won't be the end of the world if that happens. I'll still be able to contribute, which is what matters.


 * Still, I'm definitely interested to solve this problem if at all possible. We can wait for "my" answer for as long as you wish, but then what? --85.186.76.207 (talk) 12:31, 7 November 2010 (UTC)


 * OK, I believe you – I'm currently assuming you're the one you're pretending to be. But how did you lose your automatic login? Did you clear the cache/cookies in your web browser? Or did you simply log out by accident? Or did you switch computer? Also, as Cobi suggests, try contacting a system administrator or "sysadmin". Hey  Mid  (contributions) 12:35, 7 November 2010 (UTC)


 * "but then what?", well, "I am now at a different location", so why not wait till you get back to the "earlier location" and hit the "forgot password" button?  Reh  man 12:38, 7 November 2010 (UTC)
 * And when you are logged in you can change your password by clicking on "Change password" in your preferences. Also, why didn't you think about this before you left your earlier location? And is it so severe that you actually have to edit Wikipedia right now? Hey  Mid  (contributions) 12:44, 7 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Will my saved password still work if I already hit the "forgot password" button? I assumed that changes it and sends the new password by e-mail. If the old password still works, there's no problem at all. --85.186.76.207 (talk) 13:00, 7 November 2010 (UTC)
 * As you seemingly either don't have an e-mail address connected to your account or have forgotten to confirm your e-mail address, nothing happens if you click on the "forgot password" button. That button only works if the account has an e-mail address. Hey  Mid  (contributions) 13:07, 7 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Oh, ok - looks like I panicked over nothing. Sorry for all this and thank you for your help. --85.186.76.207 (talk) 13:11, 7 November 2010 (UTC)

Just for the record - that was me indeed. Sorry again for wasting your time. --Urzică (talk) 19:07, 7 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Sorry for being harsh, it was for the safety of your account ;)  Reh  man 03:07, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

Coordinates not working?
I'm surprised no one has said anything recently, but the coordinates map seems to be broken. I click on the little globe icon and the map appears. Sometimes the red dot appears, sometimes not. The typical amalgamation of links and nearby attractions, however, never appear. Instead, "Loading" appears for a while and then changes to an almost illegible "Bad Gate" error with a link to Error. Am I missing something? --136.160.151.190 (talk) 15:34, 8 November 2010 (UTC)

IPA font update
SIL has released an expanded version of their Gentium font, which our class=IPA supports. However, they've released it under the name 'Gentium Plus'. The class should be updated to choose that over plain Gentium. (I have no idea how to do this myself.) — kwami (talk) 20:08, 8 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Done —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 21:45, 8 November 2010 (UTC)

Navboxes...
...are, all of a sudden, showing automatically expanded, and with no option to hide? - The Bushranger Return fire Flank speed 20:24, 8 November 2010 (UTC)
 * And now they're working. A few minutes ago HotCat - and cat piping when viewing Edit This Page - weren't working for a moment. Spoooky. - The Bushranger Return fire Flank speed 20:24, 8 November 2010 (UTC)
 * It sounds like your Javascript didn't load or encountered an error. And then it got fixed, somehow. Anomie⚔ 20:58, 8 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Ah, thanks. Wouldn't surprise me. I have a touch with computers...and sure isn't King Midas's. - The Bushranger Return fire Flank speed 22:01, 8 November 2010 (UTC)

http://geoiplookup.wikimedia.org/
For maybe a month, maybe a couple or so, I've noticed every time I preview a page and do some edits, and click preview again the page takes just a fraction of a bit longer to load, and it always connects to some website http://geoiplookup.wikimedia.org/ (I think, it's hard to see because it's only visible for a second). What is that? Why does it do that? Anyone know what this is about?--Brianann MacAmhlaidh (talk) 12:15, 6 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Actually, it isn't just previewing/editing, it's viewing articles too - like just refreshing my watchlist I'm noticing it. It's like 'Wikimedia Central' is keeping tabs on me, noting when I refresh pages and noting my location (?!). Kinda creepy.--Brianann MacAmhlaidh (talk) 12:25, 6 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Now that is really creepy. I don't know about you, but when I licked it, It shows my location, and I mean in coordinates! Creepy!  Reh  man 13:10, 6 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Alright now this freaked me out: I checked the coords and, its just 5 km off my dot!  Reh  man 13:13, 6 November 2010 (UTC)
 * The watchlist has had a similar service for ages. And you are being watched just as often by simply every single click you make on wikipedia (that would be called server access logs). All such "watching" is anonymized, per the privacy policy of the foundation. The geo service is included on every page in order to work around issues with caching for anonymous users. In looking into this however, it has become obvious that the geoip server does not do appropriate request caching, so for some people it will indeed download the geolocation page on EVERY single request (which is unnecessary). The ops team will now fix this I have been told. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 13:59, 6 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Funny, I was just about to start a new section about this same issue. It's extremely irritating, and causing slow, slow page loads for me, typically causing edit conflicts any time I try to post on a long page.  Each time there is a pause of up to ten seconds on "geoiplookup.wikimedia.org"; meanwhile my browser hangs up until it's finished loading.  I notice that page source has  in it.  On a little digging, I find this series of posts on the tech mailing list.  Does anyone know if this is a new thing?  Is there a way to make it stop?  If it is necessary for Wikimedia to collect our IP addresses and log our visits, can that information be processed in the background without slowing down our page loads?  Antandrus (talk) 14:18, 6 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Well first of all, don't use IE, that should help a lot. Also when the new Resource loader is done in a month or two, then all script loading should become a lot faster. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 14:56, 6 November 2010 (UTC)


 * The easy way to stop it is to put "127.0.0.1 geoiplookup.wikimedia.org" in your hosts file. I've done it at some point because of the long delays it was causing on loading any Wikipedia pages; it's reassuring to know that I'm not missing anything as the whole thing is bloody useless (or that's my interpretation of the above discussion).—Emil J. 12:29, 9 November 2010 (UTC)


 * I am getting this popup beginning last week; I will add 127.0.0.1 geoiplookup.wikimedia.org to my host file (C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc) but it should not be happening. Daniel1212 (talk) 15:55, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

Table markup conversion
I am trying to make a list of all named Maine islands. I received from the state of Maine a lengthy table in an .xls file which I think is Microsoft Excell format (I use a Mac and Microsoft is a foreign country that I don't want to visit). I need to convert the data in Microsoft .xls format to Wiki-format. How? I have been doing it manually, one table entry at a time, deleting the Microsoft formatting by hand and substituting Wiki table format--but there is just too much data for that. How do I process the whole thing in one batch?


 * Example of .xls format I want to convert (in edit you can see the Microsoft markup symbols):

65-250	CABBAGE ISLAND LEDGE		BOOTHBAY	LINCOLN	U		0.5 63-032	CALDERWOOD		NORTH HAVEN	KNOX	R 63-791	CALDWELL		SAINT GEORGE	KNOX	R 63-794	CALDWELL (EAST MOST LT		SAINT GEORGE	KNOX	R		63-793	CALDWELL (LITTLE)		SAINT GEORGE	KNOX	R		63-542	CALF		SAINT GEORGE	KNOX	R		59-177	CALF		SORRENTO	HANCOCK	R


 * Example of manually reformatted Wiki-table (again--go to edit to see the substituted Wiki markup)

Thanks for your ideas ElijahBosley (talk &#9758;)  16:40, 8 November 2010 (UTC)


 * It should be very easy to do provided you have excel. Simply open in excel, copy-paste to http://excel2wiki.net and then copy-paste back to the wiki. If you can't open it, I (or someone) can do it for you. Simply upload the document somewhere (such as scribd) and post a link here.Smallman12q (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 21:01, 8 November 2010 (UTC).


 * WOW! It worked! Saving me and fellow editors MONTHS of tedious line-by-line transcription. There is a Barnstar for wonderfully helpful advice in your future.ElijahBosley  (talk &#9758;)  13:50, 9 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Happy to help, if you need any more tech-related help post here, or to my talk page.Smallman12q (talk) 00:43, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

How to synchronization between two cas servers?
Now I have two different CAS(Central Authentication Service) servers. Browser to access web servers may be dispatched to these two CAS servers. How can I do to achieve, so no matter where redirection CAS servers can be authenticated. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Vincen koo (talk • contribs) 02:30, 10 November 2010 (UTC)
 * This page is for dealing with technical issues related to Wikipedia. Try the computing reference desk. Graham 87 06:05, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

To Google Reader users: You may be missing items from your watchlist feed.
I want to apologize for my English in advance, as it's not my native language. I also want to apologize in case this isn't the right place to post this or if this issue has being already reported.

I'm following my watchlist updates through RSS feeds both in English and Spanish Wikipedia, but I've just realized that Google Reader was missing some of the updates. As "My watchlist" Wikipedia RSS feeds don't validate, I thought that, perhaps, changing to Atom I'd solve the problem. After all, "My watchlist" Wikipedia Atom feeds do validate. But then I found that Atom versions also miss items.

I have started a thread on Google Reader Help Forum to report this issue. I 'm "nornand" there.

Therefore, I'm tracking currently four watchlist feeds (RSS-Spanish, Atom-Spanish, RSS-English and Atom-English) and all of them have missed items in Google Reader. In my humble opinion, this is a serious problem because many people rely on GR to follow their feeds and Wikipedia editors aren't an exception for sure. When you add an article to your watchlist you do it for good reason (to control the quality of the updates, protect it against vandalism, etc.) so if your feed reader fails you'd better take precautions. In other words, I don't know if this issue is going to be solved some day or how big is its scope (my feeds are affected in two different languages), but I feel that it had to be reported.

It wold be nice if someone using Google Reader to follow his watchlist checked if he has the problem too.

Thank you and, again, sorry for my English and for the long post. I wait for your feedback.--Canyq (talk) 03:18, 8 November 2010 (UTC)


 * I think this is the same bug as . Svick (talk) 00:47, 10 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Hummm, yes, it may be the same bug, beacause although Atom feed validates, a warning about "entries with the same id" is given. As it is said in the bug page, Wikipedia feeds should use an unique ID instead of elements like article titles, which may appear in several entries. At this moment, my watchlist RSS feeds are a downright mess in terms of losing items, so my recommendation is using Atom versions although, as I have already said, they also lose some items. Anyway, I insist, this is a serious problem as it involves one of the most widespread feed readers, therefore either Google Reader or Wikipedia should try to fix it. But until that moment, my advice is that if you use Google Reader and are truly concerned about your watchlist, check updates manually in the webpage or try another feed reader. And if you want to keep on using Google Reader, at least, use Atom instead of RSS feeds (although you'll keep on losing entries). --Canyq (talk) 17:20, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

Can I opt out of geonotices?
I'm currently seeing a JS error when I load my watchlist, coming from the geonotice.js module, which I assume is linked to WP:Geonotice. As a result the shortcut links to section headers aren't working. I've seen this happen before and I see a thread above about "geoiplookup". How do I completely opt out of any geonotice processing? If there's something of compelling interest to my "area" I will either already know about it or not care. I don't want the extra processing and I especially don't want to lose functionality because of some obscure problem. I don't want geonotice.js to load or execute on my system, period. Is there a way to opt out? (Yes I refreshed my cache, yes I use IE, no I don't care - I don't want the (non-)functionality) Thanks! Franamax (talk) 21:19, 8 November 2010 (UTC)
 * You can't opt out as far as I know. Not right now anyway. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 21:30, 8 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks (I guess... :) Is there a place to discuss it? If it's only for watchlists it should be easily gadget-able. I'll try WT:Geonotice I guess. Franamax (talk) 23:29, 8 November 2010 (UTC)
 * The WP:Geonotice. say "It can permanently be hidden by adding "#WN_GEON { display: none; }" to your CSS file." not tried this to see if it works or not.--Salix (talk): 12:35, 9 November 2010 (UTC)
 * But hidden != disabling. Hidden will still run the code and load the resource in question. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 15:33, 9 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Precisely. Pages take long enough to load as it is. I'm sayin' don't bother to figure out where I am, I already know and I don't need or want the help. Hiding the results doesn't stop the processing and it doesn't fix the JS error I'm still seeing every time I check my watchlist. Franamax (talk) 23:42, 10 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Tools such as adblock plus for FireFox work great, Ive opt'ed out of several really annoying javascript addons. ΔT The only constant 15:47, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

Strange tripping of the spam edit filter
Here is a good one. Take the following div statement:, now switch the order of the "height" and "overflow" statements, and try to save it. In other words, try to write, but with 'height' correctly spelled. Currently, this trips the spam filter, and it won't let you save it! I have no idea what is going on with this. I was able to circumvent this problem by swapping the order, but it seems very strange that a div style statement would have anything to do with the external link filter. Thanks! Plastikspork ―Œ (talk) 22:45, 9 November 2010 (UTC)


 * The filter says the problem is with the phrase "overflow: auto; hight:", again with things correctly spelled. I can't seem to find any such entry on either the local or global blacklists. Hers fold  (t/a/c) 23:30, 9 November 2010 (UTC)
 * And to clarify, this is a spam blacklist problem, and nothing to do with the Special:EditFilter. Hers fold  (t/a/c) 23:31, 9 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I don't think it's the "standard" mw:Extension:SpamBlacklist blacklist either, even though it's giving the same message. It triggers even if you enter . Anomie⚔ 00:10, 10 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Google helped. MediaWiki talk:Spam-whitelist/Archives/2008/02. I'd have to agree with Isaac Dupree there. Anomie⚔ 00:32, 10 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Weird... I was apparently the one who brought all this up in the first place. Funny how that happens. <em style="font-family:Bradley Hand ITC;color:blue">Hers <em style="font-family:Bradley Hand ITC;color:gold">fold  (t/a/c) 07:38, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

To expand on "Blocking of this string occurs in the server configurations": InitialiseSettings.php.txt see the line  under wgSpamRegex. Also see $wgSpamRegex, this is the raw method of inserting spam trips, without extensions. --Splarka (rant) 09:39, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

Search engine feature questions
I'm currently surveying Wikipedia's coverage of ice hockey, and have been messing around with searches and search links.


 * Special:Search/intitle:"Ice hockey" -team -championships -Paralympics -Olympics

What I need to know is:

1. Is there a way to specify in the search itself how many results to display per page? (I'd like to set it at 500 or higher).

2. Is there a way to specify punctuation marks such as parentheses?

For example, this search:


 * Special:Search/intitle:"Ice hockey" -"(ice hockey)"

doesn't work.

I'd like to not see results with "(ice hockey)" at the end of the title like this one: Andy Murray (ice hockey)

The Transhumanist 23:04, 9 November 2010 (UTC)


 * The hard limit is 500 results, mainly because setting it higher can produce (sometimes unintentional) strain on our search backend during peak times.
 * No, punctuation marks and wikitext are by default ignored. I think it would be useful to have a raw-text search where both would be searchable, but as far as I know, no-one is working on it. --rainman (talk) 00:08, 10 November 2010 (UTC)


 * At Special:Preferences under "Search options" you can choose Hits per page. On a search results page you can click a number at the bottom to change the number of hits for that search, and to see what the url looks like. Afterwards you can manually change the number in the url. I don't know whether the number can be controlled with a wikilink to Special:Search. Help:Searching links Grep which can search punctuation in page titles (see regexp), but cannot search page content. I don't know whether it can be used to exclude "(ice hockey)" like in your example, or whether it can give many search hits. PrimeHunter (talk) 03:15, 10 November 2010 (UTC)
 * (Please feel free to answer between my responses below...)
 * The "Hits per page" preferences tip helped me a lot. Thank you.  I also changed "Lines per hit" to 1, but it didn't have any effect.  What is it supposed to do?  I'd like to get results that list only the page names.


 * Is there any way to get the results in wikicode? I'd like the results to include link brackets.


 * Grep is great. It returns page names without the extra contextual stuff.  And it gives many hits (though I haven't explored its limits yet).  I never knew it existed.  Thank you!


 * When I copy/paste results from Grep, there's an empty line between each one. Is there a way to get Grep results without these?


 * Is there an easy way to remove empty lines from a page?


 * I can't figure out how to use Grep to exclude strings. Eg., return titles with "Albania" in them but not those with "Superliga" in them.


 * But you can exclude characters from a string like the "(" from "(ice hockey)". For this I used "[^\(]ice hockey". It returns titles with "ice hockey" and not those with  "(ice hockey"


 * You have been very helpful. Again, thank you!The Transhumanist  01:00, 11 November 2010 (UTC)


 * It appears from my experiments and Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual/Customizing Wikipedia/Customizing with Preferences (which I found by searching "Lines per hit") that "Lines per hit" has no effect. I don't have answers to the other questions. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:05, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

Adding CSS code to one's personal skin page based on what server they're on
I've recently switched over to using the secure server to edit from, but I keep thinking that somehow I've managed to log onto the unsecure server by mistake and I'm on that one instead. To help reduce the panic, I'm trying to add some CSS code to my Monobook page to turn the backgrounds of pages a red tint (rather than the normal blue) if I'm on the secure server. Naturally, though, there isn't a whole lot of conditional logic in CSS (what there is seems limited to making Internet Explorer work) and my attempt to use parser functions also failed, likely because .css pages don't parse wikimarkup. Does anyone have any ideas for making this work, or is this an exercise in futility? <em style="font-family:Bradley Hand ITC;color:blue">Hers <em style="font-family:Bradley Hand ITC;color:gold">fold  (t/a/c) 23:25, 9 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I think probably, yes. You could achieve a similar result with custom js though I think. The same result if, for example, you modify the &lt;body&gt; tag directly. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 23:38, 9 November 2010 (UTC)
 * You would need to do it from the JS said and have it add/modify the css that you want. Peachey88 (T · &#32; C) 23:40, 9 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Not being terribly familiar with javascript, how exactly would I do that? <em style="font-family:Bradley Hand ITC;color:blue">Hers <em style="font-family:Bradley Hand ITC;color:gold">fold  (t/a/c) 00:18, 10 November 2010 (UTC)
 * This should do the trick —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 01:31, 10 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Login on the normal and secure servers is separate, so if you log out on the normal server, you'll be able to see the difference because some buttons go missing. Ucucha 01:04, 10 November 2010 (UTC)
 * (ec) Or, as OrangeDog said, you could use JS: this makes the text of User:Ucucha/sandbox appear in italics on the secure server but in normal font on the non-secure server. Ucucha 01:33, 10 November 2010 (UTC)


 * The javascript worked - thanks much, everyone! <em style="font-family:Bradley Hand ITC;color:blue">Hers <em style="font-family:Bradley Hand ITC;color:gold">fold  (t/a/c) 07:36, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

Strange glitch has been bothering me lately.
The standard toolbar (The one that goes Bold, Italic to <ref /ref>, ) occasionally loses all the buttons to the right of Horizontal line, and I need to refresh the edit page to get them back.-- occono  (talk) 03:26, 2 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Perhaps it's a browser-related issue? Do you have a recent version?&mdash;RJH (talk) 19:20, 3 November 2010 (UTC)
 * It has affected me across mulitple computers and browsers. I thought getting rid of some gadgets and moving to the new skin might have fixed it, but it's been happening again.
 * It's still happening. -- occono (talk) 03:00, 5 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I've copied this from the Archive because it's still happening.-- occono (talk) 01:42, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

Archiving issue
Hey, can somebody figure out why Talk:Risks to civilization, humans and planet Earth won't archive properly? I tried messing with Miszabot but suspect it was in vain. —K. the Surveyor (talk) 04:09, 11 November 2010 (UTC)


 * yeah, it's set to archive every 365 days. I'll set it to two weeks instead - give it a day or so to kick in.  -- Ludwigs 2  06:28, 11 November 2010 (UTC)
 * i did that...just a short while ago. it had been set i think to 90 days or something. and we have posts from 2006. well anyway, hopefully it will work now... —K. the Surveyor (talk) 06:35, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

New script: Print dialog
Tonight I wrote a script that I think many will welcome. It is called Print dialog and it changes the "Printable version" link into a "Print page" link. When clicked, you get a dialog that allows you to make some choices. You can print everything which is normally hidden (for instance interface, metadata etc), but also force background to disappear, make all text black, hide references and hide images. It's in very early testing, and only tested with Safari, and possibly it might never work very well on IE, but IE sucks, so who cares :D. Have fun testing it, and let me know what you think. Simply add  to your script page. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 03:36, 11 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Screenshot of the dialog earlier in the night, and a print to pdf version of printing with all interface elements enabled: HERE. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 03:40, 11 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I have now updated the documentation page with explanations and examples. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 20:38, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

Large reference list breaking mediawiki software
I hope I'm putting this in the right place, but having tried everything I can think of and asking questions elsewhere, I think this is a problem with mediawiki software. On List of civil parishes in Somerset there is an extremely large list of references which seems to be too many for the software to display - can anyone suggest any solutions?&mdash; Rod talk 09:21, 11 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Got the references to show up, although a bunch of them still are not displaying correctly (just displaying "cite web". I think the problem is the page is transcluding too many templates, which would explain why the cite templates aren't expanding properly, and also why the references didn't show up before (I switched the template reflist for a direct use of to my skin.css, which hides it completely (I do the same for much of the other clutter down there). Anomie⚔ 17:36, 18 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Well, just thought I'd ask. Thanks. It never or rarely happened before.<font color="Green">Vchimpanzee ·  talk  ·  contributions  · 21:14, 18 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I noticed the other day that the "Edit summary" link does the same when I bumped it going to hit "Save page". The workaround is nice, but usurping the edit window by default isn't a great approach for new users. —Ost (talk) 22:41, 18 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I wouldn't worry about new users, won't they have "Warn me when I leave an edit page with unsaved changes (Vector skin only)" checked automatically? - Kingpin13 (talk) 17:10, 19 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I was having this problem with IE a couple of years back; someone coded up a script for me that you could probably adapt for your browser/skin. 「 ダイノ ガイ 千？！ 」? · Talk⇒Dinoguy1000 19:55, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

Opening external links in a new window
Can any technically minded bod devise some code that I can add to my .css or .js file that will automatically open external links in a new window? I know the option exists as a gadget here on enwiki, but I'd like to have the functionality on other projects too. —  Tivedshambo   (t/c) 16:18, 20 November 2010 (UTC)


 * You could copy it from here: MediaWiki:Gadget-exlinks.js. ―cobaltcigs 17:07, 20 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Perfect - thanks. —  Tivedshambo   (t/c) 17:43, 20 November 2010 (UTC)

SVG Text
Could someone correct the text in the 3 svg illustrations at commons:Category:Federal Justice Statistics 2008–Statistical Tables? SVG Help seems dead.Smallman12q (talk) 18:31, 20 November 2010 (UTC)
 * You can ask at commons:Commons:Graphic Lab. -- N  Y  Kevin  @954, i.e. 21:54, 20 November 2010 (UTC)

Project page title problems at Star Trek WikiProject
Hi, the WP:WikiProject_Star_Trek project page is displaying "Special:RecentChangesLinked/Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Star Trek articles by quality log" as its title in IE8, instead of "Wikipedia:WikiProject Star Trek". I've attempted to fix this problem, but keep getting reverted, see: and. Is there a way to display the recent changes for the project's articles, as is done by the toolserver here: Wikiproject Watchlist - WikiProject Star Trek, and transclude the RCs onto the main project page w/o messing up the title? Thanks in advance, --Funandtrvl (talk) 20:15, 20 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I tried, but I could not fix it. This should go to Bugzilla. — <b style="color:#008">Edokter</b> • Talk  • 20:47, 20 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I don't have a bugzilla link, but this is a known bug when transcluding the recent changes feeds. Quite honestly, it's surprising enough that transcluding recent changes works at all; the bug is pretty minor compared to that. — Gavia immer (talk) 21:17, 20 November 2010 (UTC)

Update on the Article Feedback Tool
Hi all! On behalf of the Article Feedback Tool workgroup, I would like to announce phase two of the tool pilot. Here's a little background first, for those of you who aren't familiar with the Article Feedback Tool: So far, the ratings of only articles in the USPP WikiProject are being compared to their revision histories. Phase two of the pilot involves the AFT being used on a small number (about 50) of non-USPP articles in an effort to better analyze the value of these ratings. These articles are being listed at Article feedback/Public Policy Pilot/Additional Pages (please help by adding suggestions there), and are expected to undergo significant edits in the near future—such as upcoming elections and films. See also Article feedback/Public Policy Pilot/Design Phase 2 and Article feedback/Public Policy Pilot Phase 2.
 * The AFT is used for article rating and is used on articles that are part of WikiProject United States Public Policy. A full list of pages that have the tool enabled may be seen at Category:Article Feedback Pilot.
 * For an example of what the AFT looks like, please see any page in the above category, such as 5 centimeter band.
 * The tool was launched on 22 September and has since seen over 12,500 ratings submitted since that time. This page details the data that has been gathered up to 8 November.
 * The FAQ contains more information.

Everyone's help is appreciated in taking a few seconds to rate an article! Please leave any feedback about the tool at this page. Please try to keep questions below this thread to avoid fragmented discussion, but User:Howief should be able to answer any private queries. Thank you! / ƒETCH COMMS  /  01:44, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

Pywikipediabot error
I get an error message with a Python Pywikipediabot script: Uploadmultiple.py. All of the other scripts including Upload.py work but not this script.

I was attempting to upload two images and here is the error message:

C:\Users\t\Desktop\pywikipedia>Uploadmultiple.py unicode test: triggers problem #3081100 Traceback (most recent call last): File "C:\Users\t\Desktop\pywikipedia\Uploadmultiple.py", line 62, in    import wikipedia, config, mediawiki_messages ImportError: No module named mediawiki_messages

pywikipedia.py/mediawiki_messages.py "Allows access to the MediaWiki messages, that's the label texts of the MediaWiki software in the current language"

Unfortunately there is not a big support structure for pywikipediabot. I posted my question on the IRC channel and emailed the creator of this script with no response. Thank you so much in advance! Adamtheclown (talk) 18:31, 19 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I gave up, too complex for me to understand and no one anywhere has volunteered to help. I am now trying to run commonist, which is presenting its own problems. * sigh * Adamtheclown (talk) 21:03, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

Talk page size issue
I'm pretty sure that my talk page is not the fifth largest talkpage among all project spaces, despite what Database reports/Talk pages by size claims. Is this a DB issue or an issue with the bot? Veinor (talk to me) 21:58, 20 November 2010 (UTC)
 * The bot says it counts all the subpages so I guess it is counting all this which includes link count pages. <b style="color:#E32636;">Rambo's Revenge</b> <b style="color:#FFA500;">(talk)</b>  22:05, 20 November 2010 (UTC)


 * It's counting everything listed in Special:Prefixindex/User talk:Veinor, not only your talk page archives, although I can't tell if it's counting page history or only the last revision. Really, though, this just makes the more general point that I already raised due to the bot spam on Talk:Main Page : These notifications are useless nonsense, except where they are harmful nonsense. I don't know how anyone thought this was a good idea. — Gavia immer (talk) 22:09, 20 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Well, they reminded me that the link count pages exist and should probably be purged as useless, so they weren't completely useless! Veinor (talk to me) 22:11, 20 November 2010 (UTC)


 * What is the possible purpose of this report? And what is the message at Wikipedia talk:Reference desk to be more efficient in the use of kilobytes? Archiving is archiving, it's a page that has been around almost since the start of the project. Franamax (talk) 23:41, 20 November 2010 (UTC)


 * I think the primary purpose is to satisfy some people's curiosity (including mine). And I would ignore that massage, there is no problem with large archives. Svick (talk) 13:27, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

Another secure server/interwiki issue
Issue: I am logged in to the same Firefox session as both User:Jclemens and User:Jclemens-public. Both are global logins. When I click interwiki links from this (Jclemens, administrator, secure server-using) account, I end up on the other project site as Jclemens-public. I've seen and adopted a monobook.js script that looked like it would fix this for external links, but I've not seen any improvement. Anyone else had this and/or know how to fix it? Jclemens (talk) 02:05, 21 November 2010 (UTC)
 * There is a script installed on English Wikipedia and Mediawiki Commons for ALL users now that rewrites such links these days. Perhaps your own script is interferring with the default script, preventing proper execution. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 12:53, 21 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Problem with that is that I didn't have any script installed at all previously, and I was still having this problem. It also happens when I type "m:foo" or "wikt:foo" into the search bar. I can take all scripts off and see, but it's not like I had anything going on before when I first noticed this... Jclemens (talk) 16:21, 21 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Well that should no longer happen (for the past months). The only thing that cannot be fixed is the addressbar, because that is a hardwired redirect in the server configuration. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 17:15, 21 November 2010 (UTC)
 * By addressbar, do you mean the browser address bar, or the "search" bar on the Monobook skin? If it's the former, I completely understand, but the latter seems a bit disappointing.  I've confirmed that if I follow a meta: link it comes across as secure, but if I enter "Commons:User:Jclemens" then it dumps me back into the insecure mode. Jclemens (talk) 00:19, 22 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I mentioned this back in July at Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_78.Smallman12q (talk) 01:22, 22 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks for that. I'd looked, but there were a  lot of hits for those terms in combination. Jclemens (talk) 01:28, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

Edit on arrival
I know I brought this up before, but I would like a second go on community views on a new feature to "edit on arrival"; immediately enter the edit window upon clicking any internal link. Meta has it; I wonder how difficult is it to implement it here too.  Reh  man 04:19, 21 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Seems terribly confusing to me in daily usage. Why don't you try using something like Navigation popups instead ? —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 12:51, 21 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Popups require clicking/pausing over the links, which takes time. It also doesn't work well on crappy browsers like IE, when you got no choice. Is it hard to add the option in preferences, like Meta did?  Reh  man 14:25, 21 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Of course it's not hard, but stuff there does need to be used by a substantial amount of people. Otherwise the list will become gigantic and hard to understand. For smaller utils, people best use their own script file. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 17:13, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

A saner gadget would prepend “( [ edit] )” links to each row of category content listings and to certain special pages (whatlinkshere, recentchangeslinked, and a few others). ―cobaltcigs 20:22, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

This would be best done as a user script because most users would be horribly confused and annoyed at a feature that doesn't let them read an article upon clicking a link. / ƒETCH COMMS  /  21:13, 21 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Ok. So if I have to do it as a user script, how exactly do I do it? (I have no clue of these user script stuff)  Reh  man 00:23, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

Intermittent 403 Forbidden errors when returning to articles using the back button
Four times in the past three months (the fourth time was earlier today), I've been on a Wikimedia site (Wikipedia the first two times and the fourth time; Commons the third time), gone to a non-Wikimedia site using the same browser tab, and then clicked "back" to return to Wikimedia, only to be confronted by an error page saying:

"Error 403 Requested target domain not allowed." "Requested target domain not allowed." "Guru Meditation:" XID: 896226428

Varnish cache server

(That number changes each time.)

The error page does not go away on a refresh, nor on access to other pages on the site; it takes a while before I can use the site again.

The first two times, I assumed the site was down; the third time, I got suspicious, partly because of the lack of comments on ezyang's Wikipedia Status page the previous time, and partly because all three times it had been fine before going to the external site. So I tried viewing the Recent Changes through a proxy site, and... I was able to access it that way, even though accessing Commons directly was still failing. (I also ran a tracert to Commons, which worked fine.) The proxy worked the fourth time as well.

Presumably, something is going awry in filtering bad HTTP requests, resulting in perfectly legitimate accesses being denied.

A few more potentially relevant data points:
 * I was using Internet Explorer 7 during all four incidents. (This has happened both on XP and Vista.)
 * I wasn't logged in during any of those incidents (but I'm not usually logged in).
 * The only program I have on my system I can think of that could be altering my HTTP requests is Norton 360, but as far as I know it's set up not to do that.
 * On the second and third incidents, the external page was the same (http://www.oregonbirds.org) but that might just be coincidence as those two occurred close together. (I don't remember what page it was the first time, but it may have been http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=34637, because I remember that the Wikipedia article I was trying to go back to was Kepler Mission, and I remember reading that linked page. The fourth time it was http://www.lscheffer.com/malbolge.shtml, which is linked from the Malbolge article.)
 * My ISP is Comcast.
 * In every case, I was on a perfectly ordinary Wikipedia/Commons page of the form http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/[page title] (or commons.wikimedia), not something that one would expect to be 403 Forbidden.
 * I have never seen this specific message on any non-Wikimedia site, and those four are the only times I've seen it on a Wikimedia site.

Lucky Wizard (talk) 02:37, 18 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Anyone looking at this? This just happened to me again -- and this time it didn't fit the profile I sketched above.
 * I was on http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Main_Page&diff=397962046&oldid=397956117, and clicked "back" to return to http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Main_Page&action=history, only to get the message. This is the first time it's happened when clicking "back" from somewhere on a Wikimedia site; the other four times I got this message, I was on an external page before I clicked "back".
 * Incidentally, when I have the problem, I can still access other Wikimedia sites like de.wikipedia.
 * Lucky Wizard (talk) 04:14, 21 November 2010 (UTC)
 * It's almost certainly a problem with your ISP rather than Wikipedia. T. Canens (talk) 16:47, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

Rendering problems in Firefox
Several pages rendes wrong in my version of firefox(version 3.6.12). The only plugin that shows in my list is F-secure Browsing protection Toolbar. For example see this screenshot File:Screenshot-WP-19-11-2010.jpg of Coliseum at Richfield. Taemyr (talk) 09:31, 19 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Loading the page gives the following warnings, in norwegian:

Advarsel: Ukjent pseudo-klasse eller pseudo-element '-webkit-input-placeholder'. Regelsettet ignorert på grunn av ugyldig selektor. Kildefil: http://bits.wikimedia.org/skins-1.5/vector/main-ltr.css?283-12 Linje: 368

Advarsel: Klarte ikke tolke verdien for 'filter'. Deklarasjonen ble sløyfet. Kildefil: http://bits.wikimedia.org/w/extensions/UsabilityInitiative/css/vector/jquery-ui-1.7.2.css?1.7.2y Linje: 18

Advarsel: Klarte ikke tolke verdien for 'filter'. Deklarasjonen ble sløyfet. Kildefil: http://bits.wikimedia.org/w/extensions/UsabilityInitiative/css/vector/jquery-ui-1.7.2.css?1.7.2y Linje: 74

Advarsel: Klarte ikke tolke verdien for 'filter'. Deklarasjonen ble sløyfet. Kildefil: http://bits.wikimedia.org/w/extensions/UsabilityInitiative/css/vector/jquery-ui-1.7.2.css?1.7.2y Linje: 76

Advarsel: Klarte ikke tolke verdien for 'filter'. Deklarasjonen ble sløyfet. Kildefil: http://bits.wikimedia.org/w/extensions/UsabilityInitiative/css/vector/jquery-ui-1.7.2.css?1.7.2y Linje: 282

Advarsel: Klarte ikke tolke verdien for 'filter'. Deklarasjonen ble sløyfet. Kildefil: http://bits.wikimedia.org/w/extensions/UsabilityInitiative/css/vector/jquery-ui-1.7.2.css?1.7.2y Linje: 283

Advarsel: Ukjent egenskap 'zoom'. Deklarasjonen ble sløyfet. Kildefil: http://bits.wikimedia.org/w/extensions/UsabilityInitiative/css/vector/jquery-ui-1.7.2.css?1.7.2y Linje: 285

Advarsel: Klarte ikke tolke verdien for 'filter'. Deklarasjonen ble sløyfet. Kildefil: http://bits.wikimedia.org/w/extensions/UsabilityInitiative/css/vector/jquery-ui-1.7.2.css?1.7.2y Linje: 347

Advarsel: Ukjent egenskap 'zoom'. Deklarasjonen ble sløyfet. Kildefil: http://bits.wikimedia.org/w/extensions/UsabilityInitiative/css/vector/jquery-ui-1.7.2.css?1.7.2y Linje: 360

Advarsel: Ukjent egenskap 'zoom'. Deklarasjonen ble sløyfet. Kildefil: http://bits.wikimedia.org/w/extensions/UsabilityInitiative/css/vector/jquery-ui-1.7.2.css?1.7.2y Linje: 398

Advarsel: Ukjent pseudo-klasse eller pseudo-element 'first'. Overflødig kombinator. Kildefil: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coliseum_at_Richfield Linje: 0

Advarsel: Klarte ikke tolke verdien for 'background-position'. Deklarasjonen ble sløyfet. Kildefil: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coliseum_at_Richfield Linje: 12 —Preceding unsigned comment added by Taemyr (talk • contribs) 09:39, 19 November 2010 (UTC)


 * These warning are really just messages that Firefox produces when it comes across css that it doesn't understand. In this case mostly css designed for other browsers. I have the same version of Firefox (albeit on a MAC), it produces the same warning messages without the rendering problems. Is this problem limited to just this page? You might want to try reloading the page while pressing down the shift key. — Blue-Haired Lawyer t 11:14, 19 November 2010 (UTC)
 * The problem shows up on several pages. I doubt it's an issue of cache since I arrived at the page by clicking the random article link a couple of times until I got the problem.  Taemyr (talk) 12:49, 19 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Is it only articles with coordinates on them? Does it go away if you disable that F-Secure plugin? Anomie⚔ 16:49, 19 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes, it seems to be only on articles with coordinates. No it does not go away if I disable F-secure.  Taemyr (talk) 07:54, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

Link re-writing
I'm working on a test mirror of Wikipedia for my own amusement. Are there handy regular expressions for matching all the links that need re-writing? I've got the /wiki/ ones sorted, but the /w/ ones are proving troublesome. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 21:26, 21 November 2010 (UTC)


 * For future reference,  ->   deals with most of them, but the css has to be sent to the index.php directly. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 19:03, 22 November 2010 (UTC)
 * You need to exclude "?" in the first match or the replacement wont work correctly ;-). In GeoHack we use replace   with what we want to start the url with.  — Dispenser 03:22, 23 November 2010 (UTC)

References within navboxes?
Is there a way to add references to navboxes? I get broken output no matter what I try. SharkD  Talk  23:36, 21 November 2010 (UTC)


 * References and templates in general don't mix well. Also, I think references do not belong in navboxes. — <b style="color:#008">Edokter</b> • Talk  • 23:44, 21 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Why would a navbox need references? OrangeDog (τ • ε) 09:41, 22 November 2010 (UTC)


 * You didn't give any examples of problems so I don't know what you are trying but I'm not aware of technical problems with references in navboxes. Note however that as for all references, there must be or

Looking at your contributions, the template in question appears to be X-COM (haven't played those games in a long time). You should have noticed that the error message has a link to the help page at Help:Cite errors/Cite error refs without references, which addresses reference issues in templates (unless your language is set to other than en - English). Many infoboxes and navboxes have references or notes. If the help page is not fully informative, leave some feedback so I can improve it. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 13:32, 22 November 2010 (UTC)
 * You can also use the "group" parameter and have the ref listed in the "below" section. Femto Bot, (possibly the smallest bot in the world)

Templates for linguistic examples
In an effort to do something against the deplorable state of many entries on linguistic subjects, one thing permanently hampers me, and, I imagine, similar-minded editors: Editing linguistic examples. There is a standardized format to which a linguistic example has to conform:
 * The first line gives the number of the example and the original text in the source language. It should be in italics to offset it optically from the following two lines
 * The second line gives glosses for each word in the first line; each word of the second line is aligned exactly with the corresponding word in the first line.
 * The third line gives a free translation of the example into the meta language.

Here is a rough example:

This would be so much easier and faster if there was a template for it. I would make one, but I'm not very experienced with wiki formatting, so I imagine there are people out there who wouldn't take a fraction as long as I would. Anyone? I'd be grateful for any help with this. Watasenia (talk) 09:10, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

Is this a bug with "What links here" (on Commons)?
Hi, try going to Commons:Category:Waterfalls of Chile (a deleted category on Commons) and click the "What links here" link on the sidebar. It (currently) gives 6 hits for pages like Commons:Category:Chile in the 1970s. However I cannot see why it is returning those links. Is this a bug with the way "What links here" works? Jason Quinn (talk) 22:07, 22 November 2010 (UTC)
 * its some bug with If you add that to a page it creates a link in the what links here. ΔT <sup style="color:darkred;">The only constant 22:47, 22 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Confirmed. It has something to do with Commons:Template:Places_by_decade. Still don't know how it's happening. I wrote a note on the talk page there asking pointing them here. Jason Quinn (talk) 23:33, 22 November 2010 (UTC)
 * commons:Template:Places by decade/main is where the category is coming from; I'm guessin whatlinkshere is just slow at updating in this circumstance, but I'm not fully sure. / ƒETCH COMMS  /  03:35, 23 November 2010 (UTC)

Formatprice
Per the request "Hi there. Regarding Formatprice, I would be most grateful if you could change it so that thousands are displayed as e.g. £123,000 rather than "£123 thousand". Thankyou. -Ashley Pomeroy (talk) 22:46, 19 November 2010 (UTC)", would someone please add some of the coding from Template:Inflation to Template:Formatprice to provide that option for Formatprice? Thanks. -- Uzma Gamal (talk) 14:22, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

Extremely slow servers
Hi, I'm currently logged in through the secure server - something I have never done before (because I believe that it's normally slower than the normal server); however, at the moment it's the only way: the normal Wikipedia server just won't retrieve any page without about 15+ minutes of repeated timeouts and retries - and then the page loads without any skin at all, it looks like it's fully HTML 3.2 compliant, with no 4.0+ features. Windows XP, with both Firefox 3.6.12 and Opera. My internet access to other websites is absolutely fine and normal. So, is there a technical issue? -- Red rose64 (talk) 21:05, 22 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Same for me. I know I'm fairly near you; I suspect an exchange has gone down somehow, as nobody else seems to be having problems. – iridescent  21:11, 22 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Same here - Chepstow, S Wales. Ghmyrtle (talk) 21:13, 22 November 2010 (UTC)
 * It's a Europe-wide problem. Danese says: "There is an outage in progress for people accessing Wikipedia over esams. Ops is working to restore normal service" the wub  "?!"  21:36, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

Now working OK. -- Red rose64 (talk) 19:55, 23 November 2010 (UTC)

Defaultsort and ref tags
If you add a category from within a ref tag, it doesn't seem to obey the defaultsort setting. (see User:WOSlinker/Sandbox2 for an example.) Just wondering if there is a bugzilla item for this. Couldn't find one when I did a search. -- WOSlinker (talk) 22:43, 23 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I don't know of one, but I did notice that if you put before the, then it does seem to obey. Anomie⚔ 01:12, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

Bug in wiki software for autoblocks
Alright, I think I'm going to report this here; I don't know if y'all are knowledgeable about it.

Recently, I blocked ; I happened to know his IP is due to WP:DUCK issues. When I went there, the top read the following:

For 97.77.103.82 (talk ¦ change block ¦ unblock ¦ block log ¦ logs ¦ deleted user contributions ¦ filter log)

Hmm, Mediawiki seems to know the IP is autoblocked, and is telling me this. In fact as an administrator, if anyone goes there right now, they'll see this error.

Now, it's gotten even worse now that I've placed a more recent block on CAtruthwatcher's sock,. Now it's displaying a pink box that anybody, including non-admins can see:

For those of us that can do math, 6 November + 48 hours != 16 November. The mediawiki is telling the entire world right now that this IP is autoblocked. I've refrained from placing the longer block on that IP to enforce the ban until enough people have been able to see it. Magog the Ogre (talk) 08:46, 16 November 2010 (UTC)


 * The pink box sometimes displays older blocks instead of the current one. I once encountered a notice about a 24-hour block from 2005 while checking the contributions for a user who is indefinitely blocked; I can't remember the name of the offending user though. Graham 87 10:13, 16 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Hmmm, perhaps a similar problem occurs with range blocks as well. Graham 87 10:16, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

What's really got me is the fact that it's occurred twice. The first time I blocked CATruth, within a minute the message went from "block" to "change block" on the IPs page; as such, it was clearly related. And now there's this time. Magog the Ogre (talk) 10:20, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Couldn't we just unblock the IP, then immediately re-block it? It would remove the previous blocking box. <font face="Verdana" color="003B48" size="2px">Eagles  <font face="Verdana" color="003B48" size="2px">24/7  <font color="003B48" size="1px">(C) 21:42, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

I think you misunderstand. It isn't a problem with blocking. It is simply a problem with the Mediawiki software accidentally giving us more information than it should be, i.e., indirectly confirming that there is an autoblock on this address, i.e., indirectly giving us a way to check if a user is editing from an IP. That's a privacy issue.

Also, should I take the lack of response here to mean I should post a bug at Bugzilla? Does anyone know of an existing report? Sorry I've never lurked Bugzilla. Magog the Ogre (talk) 00:29, 18 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Let's face it. If you don't know what the IP is in the first place you won't be able to link the two. To be able to draw the link, you must (1) know that the IP is likely them, and then (2) check that the IP shows up as blocked after you block the account. But even if MW doesn't show that information, you can still link the two simply by blocking the IP first, then block the acccount, and check to see if an autoblock shows up (if there is an existing block on the IP, there will be no autoblock). So, it doesn't really give you any information you cannot get without relying on the interface change. T. Canens (talk) 09:59, 20 November 2010 (UTC)

I don't understand; how would blocking the IP allow the admin to see if an autoblock shows up on a user? Only if the user tries to edit and puts an unblock-auto template up would it become obvious... if the user is smart, then that won't happen. Magog the Ogre (talk) 21:07, 21 November 2010 (UTC)
 * If the account has edited recently when you block it, the IP will be autoblocked and you can see that there is an autoblock from Special:BlockList - unless, that is, the IP has been blocked already. So instead of (1) block account and (2) go to the IP you suspect to see if it's been autoblocked, you can simply (1) block the IP you suspect; (2) block the account; (3) see if your block also brings up an autoblock. Both give you the same information, and the latter will always be doable unless we stop showing autoblocks in Special:BlockList (not a good idea). In short, merely knowing that an IP is autoblocked gives you no usable information unless you are already suspecting something to begin with. T. Canens (talk) 01:08, 22 November 2010 (UTC)


 * If the user is currently blocked (indefinitely or for a time-limited period doesn't matter), if you go to the user's very first contributions in their contribs list (prev, not the latest contributions), that account's first block will be displayed in the pink box. If you go to the contribs list of an IP address with block history (even if it currently isn't blocked), if the IP is covered in a range block, the latest entry in that log will show up in the list. IPs with block history that are affected by an autoblock also have their latest block show up in their contribs logs. Also, if you have been blocked yourself, and then unblocked, and your IP is affected by the autoblock (if it's not been lifted), if you are logged in and go to your contribs list, the unblock will show up in the pink block box. Hey  Mid  (contributions) 22:04, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

Move, - with some links not updates why?
I decided to try and pitch in by cleanup up some of the backlog in Requested Moves. I ran into a snag on my very first one. The request was to move Stars and Stripes Forever to The Stars and Stripes Forever. What could be easier?

After moving, I decided to check "what links here". Quite a few entries. I wondered if there's a time lag, and sure enough, the next day some were gone. But this page still has many links. Tnxman wonders if there's a bot that runs when things are slow, but I don't think that's the case. I don't even think the change is done by a bot, but I could be wrong. My current thinking is motivated by the fact that in many of these examples, the original wikilink was surrounded by quotes, either the usual double quotes, or pairs of single quotes to make it italic. I'm wondering if there is a rule, not unlike that for correcting misspelling, to avoid updating whenever a term is in quotes? I assume I can use AWB to clean these up, but I'd like to know if my theory is correct, and if there is some other clever way to do the update, or if my original move was done incorrectly.-- SPhilbrick  T  21:56, 22 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Whatlinkshere takes forever to update, often. I wouldn't worry too much. / ƒETCH COMMS  /  22:05, 22 November 2010 (UTC)
 * The links are updated automatically. Moreover, linking to redirects is a normal practice, and the links to them do not need to be updated. Ruslik_ Zero 14:03, 25 November 2010 (UTC)!

Usage of an image redirect
I recently got File:Old corn mill ar Rhydowen.jpg on the Commons renamed to File:Old corn mill at Rhydowen.jpg. Now I cannot find any way of finding out which articles use the old name! (Note, this is a suggestion for developer action. I have solved this specific question via another route.) &mdash; RHaworth 15:28, 23 November 2010 (UTC)


 * If you go to the redirect page (from the old name) and click "What links here" in the left menu, doesn't that give you what you are looking for? Jason Quinn (talk) 17:12, 23 November 2010 (UTC)


 * What links here for File:Old corn mill ar Rhydowen.jpg shows Wikipedia:Village pump (all) (links), Wikipedia:Village pump (technical) (links), User:Anomie/VPA (links). --Uzma Gamal (talk) 14:51, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

Image only showing as file name
The following image File:Grand Theft Auto IV Episodes From Liberty City.jpg is only appearing as a link on the file page and isn't appearing in any form on the article pages that it should be on. I've tried purging the page etc but to no avail. Any ideas? - X201 (talk) 12:17, 24 November 2010 (UTC)


 * It's working OK for me.--Brianann MacAmhlaidh (talk) 13:01, 24 November 2010 (UTC)
 * As a fair use image, perhaps there is coding that prevents the fair use image from being shown within the Infobox. You may want to post at Template talk:Infobox video game as well. -- Uzma Gamal (talk) 14:47, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

Right click open Discussion tab into new Internet Explorer tab, How do I
When I right click a Wikipedia discussion tab from a Wikipedia page, I would like the option to open that Wikipedia discussion page into a new Internet Explorer tab. I'm able to right click linked terms in an article and open them in a new INternet Explorer tab, but can't do that for Wikipedia discussion tabs from a Wikipedia page (and can't do that a Wikipedia page tave from a Wikipedia discussion page). What do I need to change to be able to open a Wikipedia discussion page into a new Internet Explorer tab by right clicking on the tab? -- Uzma Gamal (talk) 14:52, 24 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Those tabs are ordirairy links, I can right-click and choose 'open in new tab' without problem. Perhaps there is some other software in the way. I spoke too soon (I'm using Chrome). Internet Explorer is indeed not showing the correct context menu. (Edit:) It seems that the span containing the link text does not trigger the right menu for some reason. However, if you right-click just next or below the text, the menu works correctly. Aditionally, you can also shift-click (open in new window) or ctrl-click (open in new tab). — <b style="color:#008">Edokter</b> • Talk  • 15:04, 24 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Right clicking seems to work correctly for me (IE8, Windows XP Home edition SP3).Nigel Ish (talk) 17:49, 24 November 2010 (UTC)
 * You also could click on the link with your mouse wheel, if your mouse supports it, and this will open the link in a new tab.Smallman12q (talk) 13:06, 25 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Thanks everyone! Right-click on the Internet Explorer tab text, no. Right-click just next or below the the Internet Explorer tab text, yes. That was a surprise. Also, I never knew that I could push on my mouse wheel to cause some action (click on the link with your {mouse wheel). The shift-click (open in new window) and ctrl-click (open in new tab) worked as well. Thank you! This is great. I'm coming back with more questions! -- Uzma Gamal (talk) 14:37, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

A disappearing post?
From this diff, a recent posting of mine seems to have disappeared in the next edit. It could have been an accidental deletion by the next editor, but is it also possible that it is a bug? I've reposted it anyway, but I thought I'd ask... AndyTheGrump (talk) 13:51, 25 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Seems like the editor had accidentally overwritten it. I doubt it's a bug; if it's an edit conflict, then well, we'll get an edit conflict notice.  Reh  man 13:57, 25 November 2010 (UTC)


 * I'm guessing the other editor got an edit conflict and then saved without resolving it appropriately. I would have asked the editor if I wanted to investigate. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:03, 25 November 2010 (UTC)


 * No, it's a bug that happens regularly when two people post to a page close to each other, but just avoiding an edit conflict. Seems to especially happen on large pages.  If you search the archives here it appears a number of times.  There's a bugzilla for it somewhere, as well. Here's a previous report. Black Kite (t) (c) 00:08, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

Design assistance
Could somebody good at these things give a hand with New contributors' help page/header-redesign (discussion here)? The central boxes new improving, at least to get the alignment right, if not more substantially. Thanks. Rd232 talk 14:21, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

Need Help With New Article
I just created the article European Demographic Balance 1939-1947

How do I update the article to include the blue “Content” box at the top?--Woogie10w (talk) 17:33, 25 November 2010 (UTC)


 * The table of contents automatically appears when there are more than three section headings. I'm not sure why you want it now when the only headings are already at the top. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:31, 25 November 2010 (UTC)
 * From Help:Magic words you can use to force the display of the  table of contents.--Salix (talk): 23:43, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

MfD nomination of MediaWiki:Talkexists
MediaWiki:Talkexists, a page you substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; please participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/MediaWiki:Talkexists and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes ( ~ ). You are free to edit the content of MediaWiki:Talkexists during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. :| TelCo NaSp  Ve :|  05:03, 26 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Clarify your pronoun antecedents, paleface. ―cobaltcigs 06:21, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

Inflation
There are several requests at Template talk:Inflation that are in want of attention. Alexander Gieg, of template Formatprice and Inflation fame, appears to be away for awhile, so I posted here. -- Uzma Gamal (talk) 14:27, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

Liquid threads treated like a forum/blog?
Can a liquid threads conversation be embedded in another page? If so how?

The ability to embed one conversation page in another conversation page.
 * one

In the alternative, can you embed all of the postings with a particular category onto one page?
 * two

For example, the "news" section on http://deadrising.wikia.com/wiki/Dead_Rising_Wiki ?

There the wikia adds: <bloglist summary="true" summarylength=300 timestamp="true" count=5 type=box> News plain date News

...to the main page, and all of the postings with the category:news appear on the front page.

Adamtheclown (talk) 15:21, 26 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Hm, this is a very interesting new feature. I've long desired a more suitable method of posting messages on the various talk pages of Wikipedia. However, I'd prefer to see a more fleshed out example first. Would it be possible to place some generic placeholder text on your MediaWiki talk page so we can see what a larger discussion would look like? I agree it would most definitely have to be done on a case-by-case basis though. -- Dorsal  Axe  16:06, 26 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I wish I knew the answers :/. Maybe I can ask the creators to respond here.
 * Play with it now on mediawiki.org on your talk page. Simply add Adamtheclown (talk) 20:36, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

Shortened form of Special:Contributions
Hi everyone,

Does a shortened form of [Special:Contributions/XX] exist?

For example, [Wikipedia:User_access_levels] has [WP:UAL]

Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 16:51, 26 November 2010 (UTC)


 * For a number of reasons, redirects to the Special: namespace don't work. That means that it isn't possible to create such shortcuts. — Gavia immer (talk) 17:11, 26 November 2010 (UTC)


 * I looked at Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Soft redirect and found sp:new and SP:AF but I'm not sure these or many other of the currently 129 soft redirects in article space are a good idea. If one was created for Special:Contributions then it couldn't include a username. You can create a clickable link with Contribs, for example  to give  (of course we have a User:XX among  usernames). There is also User and variations to make additional links. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:16, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

Marking Edits as Minor Using API
So I am using the API in-code, and want to mark my vandalism reversions as 'minor'. But the API doesn't seem to agree with this. Here is my method:

public static InputStream edit_revert(long rid, String title, 			String summary, boolean minor, pair<String,String> edit_token,			String session_cookie) throws Exception{ // Building post-string is straightforward. Fields known not // to contain special characters are not encoded. String post_data = "action=edit"; post_data += "&undo=" + rid; post_data += "&title=" + URLEncoder.encode(title, "UTF-8"); post_data += "&summary=" + URLEncoder.encode(summary, "UTF-8"); if(minor) post_data += "&minor"; else post_data += "&notminor"; post_data += "&token=" + URLEncoder.encode(edit_token.fst, "UTF-8"); post_data += "&starttimestamp=" + edit_token.snd; post_data += "&format=xml"; return(api_post.post(post_data, session_cookie).getInputStream); }

Even when I pass "minor=true", it doesn't mark as minor. The undo will commit fully as expected. The "&minor" will be in the HTTP post. It just doesn't mark as minor. Does anyone have an idea why not? Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 03:38, 27 November 2010 (UTC)


 * For example, this string to the API:

action=edit&undo=399058219&title=Pilot+%28The+Vampire+Diaries%29&summary= Reverted+edit%28s%29+by+%5B%5BSpecial%3AContributions%2F67.121.121.63%7C67.121.121.63%5D%5D+ identified+as+test%2Fvandalism+using+%5B%5BWP%3ASTiki%7CSTiki%5D%5D&minor&token=88577c4d41ae 8115fb0ac4deec0b16c0%2B%5C&starttimestamp=20101127034510&format=xml


 * Produced this edit. Strange, ehh? West.andrew.g (talk) 03:49, 27 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Okay, I've resolved this issue. Turns out you just don't include "&minor" in the HTTP POST, but you need to include "&minor=true". I'd blame this on my own ignorance, but the examples over at the API page indicate this "=true" bit isn't needed. If others find this misleading, maybe we could poke the maintainers over there for clarification on this point? Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 04:30, 27 November 2010 (UTC)


 * GET parameters (it's GET, not POST) that don't have a value are supposed to be ignored; that's part of the basic spec. I agree that the documentation is needlessly bad, so now that you've reported the correct working value it ought to be changed. — Gavia immer (talk) 04:41, 27 November 2010 (UTC)


 * API *write* statements must be POST-ed (edit, rollback, move, etc.). Basic API *reads* use HTTP GET. Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 05:24, 27 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Well, I've never written anything to query the API, I was just commenting on what you wrote above. Anyhow, as I said I fixed the documentation where I could find it. — Gavia immer (talk) 05:45, 27 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I think you have that backwards, Gavia immer. At least when communicating with a PHP script, GET will keep unvalued parameters while a POST will drop them. Anomie⚔ 05:55, 27 November 2010 (UTC)
 * We're way off topic at this point - but what I'm saying is that the server is not supposed to interpret such a parameter as meaning anything (by contrast with something like  meaning that the parameter foo has the value of the empty string). That's all. — Gavia immer (talk) 06:32, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

Lines through infoboxes
I originally asked this at the Help Desk, but it has been suggested I ask here:- I see from the archive that this question has been asked before, but without a helpful reply.

The article I am trying to improve is Henry McCullough where the section line under Biography cuts through the photo in the infobox. I initially thought it related to a recent change in the img_size= parameter, but Franamax has pointed out that the line appears/disappears depending on the pane width. I am using IE8 and Vector, the most common browser and most common skin, so this affects many, if not most, readers.

Can this line be avoided or overcome? Arjayay (talk) 10:49, 26 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Hi. I think this is mostly to do with the display resolution; what's your resolution? I use Firefox on 1440×900, and it looks fine...  Reh  man 10:57, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

Arjayay (talk) 12:17, 26 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I'm on 1152 x 864, I don't know about Franamax. Have played some more, and at full screen there is no line, but like many people I use a "Favorites" sidebar. The line appears and disappears as I vary the pane width.

Arjayay (talk) 13:27, 26 November 2010 (UTC) Arjayay (talk) 15:41, 26 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I followed this from Arjayay's original post on the Help desk. I saw the line too, and have encountered this problem before.  When I add the "frame" parameter to the infobox, as I did in this diff, it now displays correctly for me, but I don't know enough about Wikimarkup to know whether this is a dirty fix, and if it causes problems for other browsers and resolutions.  Do please revert me if it's a poor edit.   Ka renjc 12:50, 26 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks for trying, but there's no change on my screen - still got the line (yes I've bypassed my cache etc.).
 * Hmm, ok. I went back in the edit history, and the display problem seems to start with this edit.  I tried reverting the changes one at a time, and found that if I removed the "px" after the image size, the line vanished, reappearing if I put it back.  I've changed it in the article - how does it look now? (NB: if it works, I have not a clue why!)  Ka renjc 14:11, 26 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Sorry - no change.
 * This is 23663. So turn of IE8 compatibility view mode. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 18:42, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

Liquid threads as a user preference?

 * If this is better suited at WP:VPP please move.

When is Wikipedia going to enable the Liquid threads extension? On www.mediawiki.org/ they have this extension and editors can use it if they wish. Here is my talk page:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User_talk:Adamtheclown

I started liquid threads on my talk page simply by adding.

If Wikipedia allowed editors and projects the freedom to use it on a case by case basis, it would not be very disruptive at all.

what I love about liquid threads is that if someone responds to your comment on another page, you get an alert on the main bar on the top right. Adamtheclown (talk) 15:21, 26 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Due to lack of WMF engineers available to work on it, development of LQT has been on the backburner a tad. It's expected that this will be one of the bigger projects earlier next year. A redesign of the interface is planned. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 13:18, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

Spurious pending changes message
For the past 6 hours or so, my watchlist has always been giving me the pending changes message ("There are currently pending revisions to pages on your watchlist"). However, when I click through, there are no pages shown. When I choose to see all the pending changes (not just those on my watchlist), then there are either a few pages not on my watchlist as expected, or no changes at all. This may be another instance of this bug. The comments in the bug imply that it may be a lag/caching problem, but this has been going on for hours. Orange Suede Sofa (talk) 23:18, 26 November 2010 (UTC)
 * FWIW, the problem persisted for a few more hours, and then went away. Orange Suede Sofa  (talk) 22:50, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

About PDF files here (on "Download as PDF")
Is there a way to do either of the following for a downloaded PDF from here? (It's for a user page of mine.)

1) Get the "align" functions to work: If I have two tables, if I align one to the left and the other to the right, it won't apply to the PDF. Is there a way to do so?

2) Force a page-break somewhere. If 1 can't be fulfilled, then what I would end up with is that one table is broken up at an undesirable point.

Aurora  Illumina  04:11, 27 November 2010 (UTC)
 * This functionality is provided by PediaPress. Best to ask on Help:Books/Feedback, which they actively watch. I note that normal web print already supports this and that most platforms have a method to print to PDF these days, so you might be able to use that in the mean time. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 12:48, 27 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Will copy discussion over there. Aurora   Illumina  12:54, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

Broken IUCN links
In some articles we have links to IUCN Redlist that are broken due to Redlist update in 2008. For example Andean Negrito. I'm not sure about how many broken links there are, but is this something a bot can fix? --MiPe (talk) 10:06, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

Reference tags
Hi, can someone look at this recent edit I've made amd work out what I've done wrong, such that the reference tags are not displaying. Thanks. Eldumpo (talk) 17:32, 27 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Fixed. Such errors can often by located by searching the source for the last displayed text before things go wrong. In your edit this was "The tournaments featured all 22 teams from Division Three South." PrimeHunter (talk) 18:13, 27 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Thankyou. Eldumpo (talk) 20:39, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

Global suppress display of the fundraising banner?
Is there any way to suppress display of the scary beggar fundraising banner across all my Wikimedia accounts? Bit fed up of getting a nasty surprise at the top of the page when I click on a link to commons, or wikiquote, or another language wiki and having to go into preferences on each. DuncanHill (talk) 22:50, 27 November 2010 (UTC)
 * This blog post by the creators of Adblock describes how to block it (a few different ways). Only works with Firefox, though. Killiondude (talk) 23:03, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

Safari Extension
Could some one please create a Safari Extension similar to the Wikipedia Toolbar for Firefox? I find the toolbar very useful, and it would be great if a version for Safari could be created. ~  Nerdy <font color="#0F0">Science <font color="#8d7">Dude  22:48, 24 November 2010 (UTC)
 * If I get time...ǝɥʇ M0N0 farewell 02:30, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Spam Links
Is there a way we can make auto-confirmed or some other criteria of user, to allow said user to link to black listed links? It is a ridiculous when I can't show a link in a GAC to a website, because other users, use it for spam. <font face="Kristen ITC"><font color="#ff0000">C <font color="#ff6600">T <font color="#ffff00">J <font color="#009900">F <font color="#0000ff">8 <font color="#6600cc">3 chat 00:24, 25 November 2010 (UTC)


 * The blacklist only prevents saving working links, and not URLs that don't happen to be linked. You can share relevant links by surrounding them with  tags, or just don't put them in brackets and leave off the http:// prefix and the parser won't notice that the URL is supposed to be linked. Of course, that means that someone reading your link will have to copy and paste it if they want to see what it says, but that's only a minor inconvenience. — Gavia immer (talk) 00:32, 25 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Spam blacklist links to MediaWiki talk:Spam-whitelist. Administrators can edit the spam whitelist. A permission to directly add blacklisted links to an arbitrary page would be problematic for several reasons even if it was restricted to admins. Don't circumvent the blacklist by adding non-linking url's to article pages. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:36, 25 November 2010 (UTC)
 * So basically this can't be done? I suppose using nowiki tags would be fine too. <font face="Kristen ITC"><font color="#ff0000">C <font color="#ff6600">T <font color="#ffff00">J <font color="#009900">F <font color="#0000ff">8 <font color="#6600cc">3 chat 00:44, 25 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Outside mainspace you can use nowiki tags if you want to discuss a link. If you want it added to an article then you can make a request at MediaWiki talk:Spam-whitelist. nowiki tags and other circumventions are technically possible in mainspace but the blacklist is there for a reason and shouldn't be circumvented like this. PrimeHunter (talk) 01:52, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

I think a more reasonable solution would be to have one list for sites which are unsuitable for sourcing encyclopedic content (albethey interesting enough to discuss on talk pages or the village pump, etc.) and one list for urls which should not be present anywhere (because they host malware or otherwise present some danger to viewers). Of course, the software would have to check for this before allowing a cross-namespace page-move. ―cobaltcigs 02:09, 25 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Spam occurs in all namespaces. MER-C 02:07, 26 November 2010 (UTC)


 * It's probably impractical (leaving aside whether or not it's desirable). The problem is that the blacklist functions on all subsequent edits to a page - if a privileged user adds it, and a non-privileged user later edits the page to do something else entirely, it will reject their edits until the blacklisted URL is removed. (This allows URLs to be blacklisted when already in articles, and forces them to be "weeded out" over time). As a result, this would have to be substantially more complicated than a simple per-user override - you'd need to have each URL recorded as "approved" or "non-approved" from the point of addition onwards, and I can't see an easy way to do that. Shimgray | talk | 15:29, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

Template help (dabbing)
The template Template:History of Georgia generates a link to History of Georgia, which is a dab page. It should link to History of Georgia (country). Help! Thanks, DuncanHill (talk) 11:20, 28 November 2010 (UTC)
 * says to use the  field. DMacks (talk) 11:25, 28 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Thank you, that fixed it. DuncanHill (talk) 11:53, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

Multi-language image descriptions
I noticed this on the picture of Earthrise, but I'm aware this will relate to every Commons-hosted file with multiple language descriptions (and/or POTD tagging).

If you view the local file description page File:NASA-Apollo8-Dec24-Earthrise.jpg, as a logged-in or logged-out user - you see all 16 language versions of the POTD caption (and the English one twice). You also see 5 different language file descriptions. However, as a logged-in Commons user accessing I only see the English language file description and POTD caption.

It would be extremely useful if we could make the local file page display only the English language info in cases like this. en.wiki users only care (normally) about the English description, so getting rid of all the foreign language "junk" would make the page much more valuable for Wikipedia readers.

Is there any way this could be done?--Nilfanion (talk) 12:05, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

Can you get image File:Vc116 to appear between the table and the Listen box
On Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel, can you get image File:Vc116 to appear between the table and the Listen box so they all lie in the same row. Thanks. -- Uzma Gamal (talk) 15:20, 28 November 2010 (UTC)
 * You could do it using a table, but I don't think such layout is a good idea, we don't have to fill every bit of empty space. Svick (talk) 15:33, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

Bizarre sig error
In this diff I removed a stray reftag which was blanking the rest of the page after it. As you will see, as a result my signature got inserted where Bugs' sig should have been (I fixed this with my next edit). Is this a known bug? DuncanHill (talk) 15:39, 28 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes, it is a known bug that signatures and other similar stuff don't work inside tags, which was what caused the problem you are describing. Svick (talk) 15:56, 28 November 2010 (UTC)
 * OK, thanks. DuncanHill (talk) 01:17, 30 November 2010 (UTC)

iPhone App Problem
When I go a search for Weird Al and select his page, the page does not load and then crashes a few seconds after. Able to repeate. <font color="#ff0000"> S <font color="#ff6600">o <font color="#009900">p <font color="#0000ff">h <font color="#6600cc">i <font color="#CD2682">e   ( Talk ) 13:23, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

iPod touch version of Wikipedia
Wikipedia is not working on iPod touches. (the normal version of Wikipedia. Saying something about a Cascading Style Sheets error. Thanks! Perseus,  Son  of  Zeus  13:56, 24 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Can you provide the exact error it is giving? — <b style="color:#008">Edokter</b> • Talk  • 14:00, 24 November 2010 (UTC)
 * On my iPod Touch I find that both the regular and the mobile versions of Wikipedia are working, as of this moment. EdJohnston (talk) 15:49, 25 November 2010 (UTC)
 * same with me. Maybe should should also ask apple Breawycker (talk) 00:36, 30 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Working fine for me too, as Breawycker said try contacting Apple, they should be able to help you. Or if you have an Apple ID you can also try asking people on the Apple Forums where I hang out. - <font face="Century Gothic" color="#2B65EC" size="2">Dwayne  was here!   &#9835;  01:41, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

glossika.com
http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http://www.glossika.com curently say that glossika.com is "suspicious". Could some computer security expert check this? If it is confirmed, then I will ask for a bot. Visite fortuitement prolongée (talk) 22:25, 29 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Website is inactive. The message that comes up is that the hosting service has suspended the site. Nothing to look at. / ƒETCH COMMS  /  16:07, 30 November 2010 (UTC)


 * In my opinion, any link which gets added to a page should be checked against the Google Safe Browsing lists. Consider the malware attack which occured on the German Wikipedia a while back. I've run a comparison as part of my research, and I'd estimate ~5 links a day get added that are on the list. While FireFox integrates the SB lists nicely, those on other browsers might not be so fortunate. Perhaps a bot with this kind of functionality should be constructed (or I could trivially build it into the edit-processing of my WP:STiki tool). Thoughts? Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 18:07, 30 November 2010 (UTC)


 * We could just add more listed attack sites to the external link blacklist. We already block major URL shortening services due to the potential for a malware attack. / ƒETCH COMMS  /  02:00, 1 December 2010 (UTC)


 * In the case of the Google lists, that isn't possible. Google only provides a MD5 hash of the blacklisted URLs. Every URL encountered needs to be hashed and compared against the list (and at multiple granularity -- i.e., just the domain, 1-level deep into the directory path, n-level deep in the path, etc.). A bit too much computation for the blacklist extension, IMHO. Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 17:46, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

User Scripts
Hi :). About a month ago, all my user scripts in my monobook.js stopped working (bar Twinkle, Friendly and HotCat - all enabled through my preferences). I checked my JavaScript, it was on, Firefox is up to date (3.6.12), and after I tried to install every script I always purged and bypassed my cache. Especially now with the December drive coming up, I'd find proseize useful, and I'm really starting to miss FurMe and AFC helper, so if anyone knows how to get them working I'd be very grateful. Thanks :) Acather96 (talk) 16:51, 30 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Are you running the vector skin? they will need to be moved to vector.js in that case. Peachey88 (T · &#32; C) 21:37, 30 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure why exactly it stopped working, but if you follow these two edits I made to a copy of your monobook.js, it should start working again. Svick (talk) 22:41, 30 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Wow Svick, thanks so much :) Acather96 (talk) 07:36, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Email from a network engineer offering to donate time
2010111310002415 is from a network engineer offering to donate his time and coding abilities to help Wikipedia. Where should I refer him?--Chaser (talk) 23:13, 30 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Danese Cooper or irc://freenode/mediawiki ΔT <sup style="color:darkred;">The only constant 23:21, 30 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Or How to become a MediaWiki hacker. Graham 87 06:55, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks all.--Chaser (talk) 15:19, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

How do I hide this bloody "A personal appeal from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales" banner?
If I turn Javascript off, it doesn't appear, but otherwise it comes up after the page loads. --NE2 23:51, 10 November 2010 (UTC)
 * There's a barely-visible X in the upper-right corner. Or you could try user CSS something like  Anomie⚔ 01:02, 11 November 2010 (UTC)


 * A more general solution using user CSS is: which will hide the entire sitenotice permanently. I've never suffered any injury from doing so, and the ratio of useful information to nonsense has always been pretty bad with that feature. — Gavia immer (talk) 01:21, 11 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Someone higher-up fixed something, since it's gone again. I have something in my user CSS/JS that had successfully hidden it until today. --NE2 02:56, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

The script loads from Special:BannerController, so you could have Adblock Plus target urls containing that title. ―cobaltcigs 09:32, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
 * By the way, the X isn't much use, because it'll just come back up the next time you come on.  Enigma <sup style="color:#FFA500;">msg  00:57, 18 November 2010 (UTC)
 * by far this is the most annoying banner I have ever had to deal with or seen. Adamtheclown (talk) 18:23, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

Any way of blocking it on the page itself? It clashes with a bunch of Top icons that I have on my user page, and any page with icons or geo-coordinates (see Fucking, Austria for example). This wasn't exactly planned so well... &mdash; Deon<sup style="color:purple;">talk 07:14, 20 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Special:Preferences -> Gadgets -> "Suppress display of the fundraiser banner". T. Canens (talk) 10:02, 20 November 2010 (UTC)
 * You, T. Canens, are my hero. --Bobak (talk) 19:24, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

Since we all benefit from the money that comes in from this banner, perhaps we could put up with it for a few weeks every year. -- Bduke   (Discussion)  11:56, 20 November 2010 (UTC)

And if I pay I still have to look at this obnoxious banner? I paid/donated in the past but won't do this year. Largely due to this - imho - too intrusive ad. And I also don't want to see jimmys face every time I look something up in wikipedia. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.67.232.210 (talk) 10:59, 24 November 2010 (UTC)


 * IMHO, the banner is not doing good; it's really actually pushing away readers (and reducing any possible $$$). I actually force myself to sign in when I lookup random articles, just to get that horrible (no offence to Jimmy or Wikipedia) banner off. I really really think something has to be done to make it more user friendly.  Reh  man 13:51, 24 November 2010 (UTC)
 * To 91.67.232.210: all you need do is create a login, then when you are logged in you get an option to hide that banner. -- Red rose64 (talk) 19:29, 24 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I like the new banners with real editors shown, more attractive and more interesting.
 * We see Jimbo all the time (often in rather unflattering pictures which users make), it seems rather egotistical of him that he be plastered atop 3 million plus pages. Jim had to relinquish his user rights this year, making him less of a leader, and more of a figurehead. The older and more mature wikipedia gets the less wikipedia is about Jimbo, the more wikipedia is about the individual editors as a whole. So these new banners showing one editor are more the future face of wikipedia than pictures of Jimbo. Adamtheclown (talk) 00:19, 25 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Ugh. Is it really necessary to make the banner cover the entire window and force me to scroll down? Divebomb is not British 17:35, 25 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Click on the "X" button top right -- Red rose64 (talk) 21:00, 25 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I did. I was just asking whether it is really necessary to make it so huge. Divebomb is not British 07:20, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

Where does it say what they need the money for?Chrisrus (talk) 07:40, 26 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Basically? Staff and servers. Slightly longer version? see the FAQ. Even longer version? See the 2010-11 Annual Plan. A le_Jrb <sup style="color:blue;">talk  11:16, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

Seriously. For how long will this campaign last? The next time, a less intrusive and more productive ad would be appreciated. Or is it a permanent feature? Hexmaster (talk) 22:30, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

If the intrusiveness of this were not sufficient to deter me from any thought of donating while this person was in charge, the ostentatious, brazen revisionism of the whole "founder" lark certainly would. Perhaps we can have a sponsored WikiCoup as the next fundraising event? Smartiger (talk) 05:32, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

Request for search data
I have another one. 2010110810009795 is a request for search data, specifically how much time users take between searches. Any ideas?--Chaser (talk) 15:19, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Try the wiki-research mailinglist. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 20:19, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Oh, I had no idea about the existence of that mailing list. Thanks! When people ask for (private) data for research, I usually forward the email to a tech staffer. Killiondude (talk) 21:35, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

Maybe a bug?
I'm not sure if this a bug, or an error with my Wikipedia account or what. First off, I feel it might be worth mentioning that I Usurped this nickname a couple of months ago.

I browse the recent changes list a lot and hand out warnings to vandals of our fine encyclopedia, a lot of them being IP addresses. It seems, though, that everytime I edit and add a warning to an IP address' talk page, Mediawiki adds that talk page to my watchlist. I've checked my settings for my watchlist, which I can verify here: http://img602.imageshack.us/img602/8839/wikipediasettings.png are set so that only pages I create are added to my watchlist, but I typically don't create these talk pages. For example, when I added this edit to User_talk:195.195.4.202 page, it added that page to my recent changes. What might be going on? JguyTalkDone 02:58, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Are these manually-added warnings, or warnings added by a script such as Twinkle? Some scripts add the talk pages of users whom you warn to your watchlist. I'm not sure why this happens, but you could ask on the talk page of the script you are using. If these are manually added warnings, is the "Watch this page" box checked? <font style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'"> Intelligent  sium  04:08, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
 * hi, thanks for the speedy reply. Some warnings have been from my Twinkle install on this laptop, some warnings have been from my desktop, which does not have Twinkle (IE 8). I'll keep an eye out on if this makes a difference. thanks again. JguyTalkDone 16:00, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

New username patrol???
I was aware of WP:NPP, but this is... rather odd: [] (and very old...) 2 admins blocked this user within the same minute the account was created. Does anyone know where said admins monitor new accounts? (and if you're wondering about where I got that username from, see the image for WP:AUTOBLOCK). -- N Y  Kevin  @314, i.e. 06:32, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
 * There is the User Creation log. Looking at the block log for around the time of that block, there appeared to be a user or number of users creating accounts with names asking to be blocked. -- Kateshortforbob  talk 11:57, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Special:Log/newusers is the way to navigate there easily. There are bots (on-wiki & on IRC) that report those as well as people who peer over the creation logs. Killiondude (talk) 21:37, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

Font?
Is it just me, or did the default Wiki font change recently. I'm using a different computer than usual. IE8 browser. I typically use firefox. Any help is appreciated. Thanks, Ham  tech  person  13:39, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
 * The default font is set to 'sans-serif', which ususally in Arial being used. But another computer or browser may use a different font. — <b style="color:#008">Edokter</b> • Talk  • 13:53, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

Pyrospirit metadata script
Pyrospirit metadata script is a User interface gadget provided to each Wikipedia user (all 13,515,834 of them) through their My preferences. It is gaget option "Display an assessment of an article's quality as part of the page header for each article. (documentation)". Pyrospirit last posted 18 May 2010 and posts at User_talk:Pyrospirit/metadata after that date have gone unaddressed. Would someone please continue Pyrospirit's good work with the Pyrospirit metadata script and address the posts at User_talk:Pyrospirit/metadata. Thanks. -- Uzma Gamal (talk) 14:07, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I have put the page on my watchlist, but I have no idea if and when I'll get around to it. Someone else is free to be a lot quicker than I am :D —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 20:27, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

Wrong placement in Speedy deletion category
Several unrelated pages are present in Category:Speedy deletion, mostly Turkish footballers. They probably got there because of a wrong edit to some template, but i can't find which one. Can anyone help me find it?

More generally, is there a convenient way to find such things in the future without having dive into each transcluded template?

Thank you. --Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 14:40, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I just used Special:RecentChangesLinked on one of the affected pages to identify the offending template as probably being Fenerbahçe SK 100th Year Champion Squad. Algebraist 14:59, 2 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Sometimes there are hints. In this case the badly edited template Fenerbahçe SK 100th Year Champion Squad was itself in Category:Speedy deletion (deleted admin only diff: ). I have fixed it. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:00, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

Syndication bugs
Several editors, including me, have noted various problems at Wikipedia talk:Syndication, but it does not appear that this page is being watched by many people that can fix the problems, or even answer the questions. I'd like to bring it to your attention (and in particular, my recent reported problem there). --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus 16:27, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

Image thumbnail problem
Right thought I could solve this myself and have failed in epic proportions. File:DohaKhalifaStadium.jpg was uploaded in Feb 2010. Then some new images (un-free with no change of license) were uploaded over these. I reverted to the old version and deleted the non-free intermediate revisions. However, it keeps displaying the thumnail of the deleted image and even did so after I completely re-uploaded the correct image. No deletion/restoration combo seems to have worked (and any admin will see I've tried a few!). I can never get the top (most recent) thumnail to display the correct image. Any ideas? <b style="color:#E32636;">Rambo's Revenge</b> <b style="color:#FFA500;">(talk)</b>  16:42, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Cache? it looks OK to me. -- Club Oranje T 16:50, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Not cache. Could you check the Khalifa International Stadium infobox then. That still displays the deleted thumbnail despite purges/nulls. Which version does it display for you, the arial view or the one with from the stand with fireworks? <b style="color:#E32636;">Rambo's Revenge</b> <b style="color:#FFA500;">(talk)</b>  16:54, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Infobox has the one with from the stand with fireworks. -- Club Oranje T 17:19, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

Banners refuse to close
Chrome 6.0.472.63, Win XP. I've always been able to hide the banners by hitting the [x] but it's not working this time. This is with the "Lilaroja" banner. Any ideas? / ƒETCH COMMS  /  18:50, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Using Firefox. Hopefully it's a quick fix, because it's driven me mad. --<b style="color:Navy;">Jezebel's</b> Ponyo <sup style="color:Navy;">bons mots 18:59, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

Special:Preferences -> Gadgets -> "Suppress display of the fundraiser banner"
 * Me too. And other banners are popping up as well, but those are able to be closed. It used to be they only popped up when you logged on, which was OK... - The Bushranger Return fire Flank speed 19:00, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Aha. In the top subject of the page, T.Canens says:
 * And it works. - The Bushranger Return fire Flank speed 19:01, 2 December 2010 (UTC)


 * I'm encountering the exact same problem with one banner from "Lilaroja". No matter how many times I click "close" it doesn't go away. I'm using the more recent version of Firefox on Windows 7. —Farix (t &#124; c) 19:02, 2 December 2010 (UTC)


 * The banners are back to normal now for me. And yes, I know there's a gadget, but I like seeing what banners they're using :) TheFarix, maybe try again? If you keep reloading, you're bound to get one of the banners that should close. / ƒETCH COMMS  /  19:02, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
 * No matter how many times I try, they still one stay closed, with the "Lilaroja" banner not closing at all. —Farix (t &#124; c) 19:04, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I'm having the exact same problem as the folks above. Firefox 3.6.12. - Burpelson AFB ✈ 19:08, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

Me too. This is killing me. I even checked the preference gadget to hide them completely and the obnoxious things are still there. Gigs (talk) 19:10, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Back to borked for me as well. The issue I think is that one single Lilaroja banner has some coding issue which does not let it be hidden. I hid the other banners, and that one still pops up half the time. Perhaps wikimedia-tech? / ƒETCH COMMS  /  19:11, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
 * It's definitely the Lilaroja banner that's causing the problems. I can close any of the others, but then she pops up. Nothing against poor Lila personally, but it's driving me to distraction. --<b style="color:Navy;">Jezebel's</b> Ponyo <sup style="color:Navy;">bons mots 19:13, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
 * You can permanently disable them by adding to Special:Mypage/skin.css -


 * Of course, doesn't help people who like to see what they're using. – xeno <sup style="color:black;">talk 19:15, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Tried to wp:clear your cache? LeadSongDog come howl!  19:28, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I'm having this problem as well, and to be honest, Xeno's solution is unacceptable. This needs to be fixed, or the banner needs to be taken down until it can be fixed. -- Sh i r ik ( Questions or Comments? ) 19:31, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
 * More of a workaround than a solution. I've made a posted at meta:Talk:Fundraising 2010/Messages. – xeno <sup style="color:black;">talk 19:36, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Oh I know, and what I said wasn't directed at you but more of a "I hope someone's still looking at this and hasn't given up because of this workaround being posted" -- Sh i r ik ( Questions or Comments? ) 20:06, 2 December 2010 (UTC)


 * I even blocked all images from bits.wikimedia.org trying to get rid of this banner; only setting the gadget worked. I hope someone at the Foundation is paying attention because problems like this will only discourage editors to contribute their names & faces in future fundraisers. (And I too hope no one will take out their frustration over this screwup on Lilaroja.) -- llywrch (talk) 19:43, 2 December 2010 (UTC)


 * The fundraising staff team is aware and is currently addressing this issue, which should be resolved shortly. Peter <b style="color:#02b;">Symonds</b> ( talk ) 19:47, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Fixed, shouldn't happen again in the future, and thanks for those that pointed this out to us. If you use IRC, you can almost always find at least one staff member in #wikimedia-fundraising.  Keegan, Wikimedia Fundraiser 2010 (talk) 20:43, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Thank god that's gone. That was horrible. AtticusX (talk) 20:36, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks Keegan and everyone else; I didn't have time to hop on IRC or I would have poked someone faster. / ƒETCH COMMS  /  01:15, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

ProveIt reference management tool released
Georgia Tech has just completed a new tool for managing Cite.php based references, ProveIt. It provides a convenient GUI that eliminates the need for beginners to learn Wikipedia syntax before assisting with referencing. It supports adding and editing references, as well as adding additional citations to existing references. Additional information is available on ProveIt's website.

We encourage people to use it and let us know your feedback. Bug reports can be submitted here, or you can comment on our talk page. Superm401 - Talk 04:03, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

Conscientiously reading "recent changes" syndication
I'm goofing with a little personal program (using Python and Feedparser) to extract some statistics about edits. I'll be retrieving the XML (or ATOM) feed of Special:RecentChanges. Looking at what I'm getting from that gives me a few questions about the correct, conscientious ways of doing this: while True: get_changes_since(last_time -1minute) last_time = now process_received_stuff wait(5 minutes)
 * Firstly, it appears (from the docs at m:Help:Recent_changes and from experimentation) that the query string supports a "from" field but not a "to" - so I can't submit a request like http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&from=20101202224800&to=20101202224859&feed=atom and get exactly all the edits that fell in that given minute (where I'd want the edits for a single minute just a few minutes ago). Is my understanding here correct?
 * So this means that, if I want to keep a complete log of ongoing edits (say be retrieving the feed once every five minutes) I'll end up doing something like:
 * (where I have to do that -1minute because the previous fetch won't have retrieved all of the edits for the last minute)
 * Is there a smarter way to do this?

Thanks. -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 23:49, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
 * The above scheme means that subsequent fetches will see some of the edits detailed in the previous fetch, so it'll be my responsibility to skip duplicates. It looks like I can use the field as a unique identifier (from e.g. the entry id url "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ibadan&diff=400219658&oldid=prev"). Is this a safe assumption?
 * In practice how frequently should I retrieve the feed? I don't care at all about real-time performance (no-one will be actively watching the program, and it won't respond in any way), so I don't care if it updates every 10 minutes or every hour. But as there isn't a "to" field, I end up always retrieving the last N edits, so I might as well get it once every few minutes. Ideally I'd use a query string that retrieved a recent-changes served from cache rather than making the DB do a unique query just for me, but I can't think of a way of writing that query string. It seems to me that, unlike article views, the RecentChanges page (and the corresponding feeds) won't be cached.
 * The above scheme is a bit ad-hoc, in that it doesn't react to the wiki getting busier or quieter. And doing all this is a bit of work. Has someone already coded a library (ideally in Python) that simplifies the fetch in a smart way: that is, that it conscientiously queries the feed at an adaptive rate and and yields a complete, unique stream of entries?
 * Or am I overthinking, and overlooking a really obvious way of getting a unique update stream without all this extra processing?


 * There's an IRC feed of recent changes (or at least there used to be) at #en.wikipedia. Maybe that would be useful? the wub "?!"  12:07, 3 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Thanks, yes, that's easier and lighter-weight. Is the format officially documented somewhere - I've mostly figured it out, and it's vaguely like the HTML rendering of the same data described at m:Help:Recent changes, but I'd be nice if there was a real specification, so I could be confident I'd handle rare occurrences that I haven't seen.  -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 19:31, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

See Mediawiki API: Recent changes and get back to the API team if there is something you want to do that isn't covered there. Note particularly the rcstart and rcend parameters. --TS 00:41, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Infobox writer influences parameter, show/hide
In the Infobox writer template, there is a parameter called influences. When you use the parameter, the template apparently creates a show/hide toggle icon. See Justin Cronin. The template documentation doesn't say anything about it. Any way to not show the toggle, meaning always show the influences? I can see wanting to hide influences when the list is long, but, otherwise, it seems silly to hide them.--Bbb23 (talk) 01:56, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Where to report this bug?
I tried uploading a file with a colon in the name on commons; it didn't disallow it, but I got this really unfriendly message:

Internal error

key '2muj1nywb867g7yba09qnnr99h4qos5.' is not in a proper format

Backtrace: # 0 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/upload/UploadBase.php(557): UploadStash->stashFile('/tmp/phpnXpjgd', Array, NULL) # 1 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/upload/UploadBase.php(569): UploadBase->stashSessionFile(NULL) # 2 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/specials/SpecialUpload.php(322): UploadBase->stashSession # 3 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/specials/SpecialUpload.php(413): SpecialUpload->showUploadWarning(Array) # 4 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/specials/SpecialUpload.php(167): SpecialUpload->processUpload # 5 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/SpecialPage.php(560): SpecialUpload->execute(NULL) # 6 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/Wiki.php(254): SpecialPage::executePath(Object(Title)) # 7 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/Wiki.php(64): MediaWiki->handleSpecialCases(Object(Title), Object(OutputPage), Object(WebRequest)) # 8 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/index.php(117): MediaWiki->performRequestForTitle(Object(Title), NULL, Object(OutputPage), Object(User), Object(WebRequest)) # 9 /usr/local/apache/common-local/live-1.5/index.php(3): require('/usr/local/apac...') # 10 {main}

Is this a known bug? If not, how do I report it? Magog the Ogre (talk) 00:34, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
 * bugreport submitted. Thanx for the proper description. Can you perhaps add which browser/version you were using ? might be handy in case it is a Javascript bug. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 20:22, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

Google Chrome for Ubuntu, 32 bit. Magog the Ogre (talk) 08:56, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Help:Searching
How come Help:Searching isn't linked from Special:Search? I thought it used to be. Rd232 talk 17:47, 3 December 2010 (UTC)
 * It's linked from MediaWiki:Searchmenu-exists and MediaWiki:Searchmenu-new. The only way not to get the link is to go to Special:Search with no searchterm. Algebraist 17:53, 3 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I see. That doesn't seem ideal - those users should see it too. It could be a link like the one at Special:Contributions - small, top right, consistently there in addition to other references to Help. Rd232 talk 02:04, 4 December 2010 (UTC)
 * As far as I know, there is no persistent MediaWiki message that we can abuse for this purpose. That's why MediaWiki:Searchmenu-exists and MediaWiki:Searchmenu-new are used right now. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 21:57, 4 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I think there should be a persistent MediaWiki message to enable this. Do we agree it's worth filing a bug? Rd232 talk 01:26, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

Feedback
I noticed while browsing GFAJ-1 that there's a feedback section at the bottom of the page. I've never encountered this before and I feel like I've missed something here. Could someone explain what this is all about, and why only very few articles (I assume) seem to feature this function? -- Dorsal  Axe  18:53, 3 December 2010 (UTC)


 * I think it's part of this. – ukexpat (talk) 19:21, 3 December 2010 (UTC)
 * That must be it. Thanks. -- Dorsal  Axe  12:18, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Mobile Site Formatting Problem on Palm Pre
I have a Palm Pre, running Palm's WebOS. Since Thursday (12/2) morning, wikipedia mobile pages have been coming up with different formatting. Instead of the usual, easily readable, single columb. The pages have been spread out quite a bit wider, requiring zooming and subsequent side-to-side scrolling. In order to stop the inevitable, "it must be your fault" responses, I've double checked, and it is the mobile site at which I'm looking. Furthermore, a quick web search reveals that I'm not the only Palm user that has noticed this, so it's not relugated to an error on my phone. Palm's browser doesn't have formatting options, so it's not that, besides, I didn't change anything from when it was displaying properly to when it stopped. I'm writing this in the hopes that the powers that be that control the actual Wikipedia mobile site will find out, and fix this. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.226.217.101 (talk) 03:07, 4 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Filed as 26239 —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 21:46, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Ugly link in printable version
The wikitext  renders as "over " in an article, and as "over 3,500 (http://toolserver.org/~verisimilus/Timeline/Timeline.php?Ma=3,500) million years ago" when using  the sidebar "Printable version". Unfortunately, the template is used frequently in some articles (example Evolutionary history of life or printable) and the result is unusable. The issue was raised here. Is there some way of fixing that in ma? Johnuniq (talk) 03:17, 4 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Replaced deleted class plainlinksneverexpand with nourlexpansion to prevent the URL showing when printing. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 04:37, 4 December 2010 (UTC)
 * And I see you've done that. Excellent, thanks. Johnuniq (talk) 07:22, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Bot stalking!
Hello, I have a little problem. Everytime I post, and sign (either with the button or manually) SineBot seems to unrecognize it and automatically sign for me later. What's happening? I'm quite an experienced user at es:wiki and this never happened to me before. Fernando 15:04, 4 December 2010 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Fernando (talk • contribs)
 * Looks like your sig is linking to User:Fernandopascullo but your actual user name is User:Fernando. That's why. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 15:09, 4 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes, Melodia is right. You can change your signature at Special:Preferences. Reh  man  15:12, 4 December 2010 (UTC)
 * *facepalm* Thanks guys! Fernando 15:39, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Invalid HTML in fmbox
The script User:Ucucha/autofc.js, which I just created, apparently is unable to edit WP:Featured article candidates because of some invalid HTML in the edit notice for that page. The error seems to stem from Template:Fmbox. Does anyone know how to fix this? Ucucha 17:01, 4 December 2010 (UTC)
 * It turns out the problem at Fmbox is unrelated (I believe it relates to empty ul's created by Vector). My problem was instead caused by something somewhere that caused the HTML for the FAC editnotice to first close the, and only then the < li> and < ul> for "Finally, to help resolve...". I solved this by adding an nbsp, which solves the problem with my script. However, it would be better if the underlying problem could be resolved. I reproduced it here at User:Ucucha/sandbox. Ucucha 17:26, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Search Everything
Why aren't media files included when you search with "everything"?Smallman12q (talk) 17:47, 4 December 2010 (UTC)


 * They are included. What makes you think otherwise? PrimeHunter (talk) 17:58, 4 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Just checked again and you're right...must've made a mistake.Smallman12q (talk) 20:19, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Is there documentation for the recent changes IRC feed?
Sure I can look at it, and in the limited exposure I get pick out some format that will allow me to read some of it. But is there a full documentation, describing the format of anything that the rc-pmtpa will throw at me? 930913 (Congratulate/Complaints) 20:33, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Table Help
Please look at the Anne Hathaway article, in particular the 2009 row for the Simpsons. In the Role column, I want to vertically top align that cell so that Jenny appears at the top. I looked at various stuff intended to help me understand tables to no avail. How do I do it?--Bbb23 (talk) 23:34, 4 December 2010 (UTC)


 * You can use the HTML  attribute (preferred over the deprecated   attribute) to add code like this:   to the row, like this:

<pre style="margin-left:2em">|-style="vertical-align:top"
 * Content
 * Content
 * Why doesn't the default style for wikitables include this though? It seems to me that would be a more useful default. --Mepolypse (talk) 00:11, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Could you please be more specific as to how to add it to the Hathaway entry? Sorry.--Bbb23 (talk) 00:14, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I made a typo and also improved the suggestion above. I'll apply this change to the first row in the article as well, so you can see it in use. --Mepolypse (talk) 00:17, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Got it, thanks, I've removed your change from the article and incorporated it (along with some white space) to the relevant row. Looks much better. Hopefully, the editor who found it confusing before these changes will leave it alone. Thanks again.--Bbb23 (talk) 00:27, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Oh, I see what you were trying to do now. I think what you want is two rows with a  attribute on joined cells. I've made that change, feel free to revert if you don't like it. --Mepolypse (talk) 00:50, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Oh, I see what you were trying to do now. I think what you want is two rows with a  attribute on joined cells. I've made that change, feel free to revert if you don't like it. --Mepolypse (talk) 00:50, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

Pulling data from external API
What I would like to do is scrape a single integer from an external site (via an API), and make it visible within a Wikipedia article. In particular, I would like to update WP:STiki with the number of vandalisms it has undone to date (which requires a DB query on my local machine). Is this possible?

Obviously, templates like are doing this locally. Is an external pull possible? Can someone point me to documentation on how this might be done? Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 16:34, 3 December 2010 (UTC)


 * It's not possible. variables like are part of MediaWiki or one of its extensions. Graham 87  03:24, 4 December 2010 (UTC)


 * In your scenario it sounds suitable to just make a template with the number, edit it periodically and say "as of (time)". Do you really need a live number? PrimeHunter (talk) 21:37, 4 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Thanks everyone for your help. No, a live number isn't at all required -- I was just as interested in whether or not it was technically possible. Alternative to this "pull" approach, I could always write a 'cron' job to "push" the change, by using the MediaWiki API. Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 04:16, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

Stricter semi-protection availability
Over the past year I have been victim to a large number of vandalistic and extremely harsh edits on my talk page. These edits make fun of my spinal condition and general state of ill health. Several administrators have come in and semi-protected my pages for a period of time, but the vandal simply waits to be autoconfirmed (10 edits and four days) and continues this pattern of harassment. If I knew the real-world identity of this editor I would likely contact the police. Here is what I propose: Autoconfirmed users coming from Tor networks have stricter autoconfirmed threshold of 90 days and 100 edits. I ask that a new level of semi-protection be created that would restrict editing to those who have this type of history. Call it Semi Protection Level 2 or whatever. I don't just ask but I beg for this to happen. It's truly weighing very heavily on me to have my user and talk pages so frequently vandalized and in such a traumatic manner. Thank you. Basket of Puppies 01:56, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Users cannot edit from Tor nodes without exemption, per policy. Hence both TorBlock and TorNodeBot. -- Sh i r ik ( Questions or Comments? ) 02:00, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I realize, Shirik. I am asking that a new level of semiprotection be made that won't let someone edit until they have 90 days and 100 edits. This is separate from Tor. Basket of Puppies  02:02, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I think the point Shirik is making is that since people can't edit from Tor anyway, there wouldn't be much of a point in creating an additional level of semiprotection that would restrict people that use Tor. Ucucha 03:26, 5 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Sorry BoP for having to go through so much, it's vandals like those that want to make me use a particular editor's "scare a vandal for life" technique. I have also wanted protection on the occasion, also from other established editors, such as userpage protection so that only I could edit it. Could it be implemented so that the owner of the userpage may set criteria for their user namespace, for who can edit given variables such as edit_count, account_age and user_name. My page, while it would blank if someone other than I edited it, would only take a little know how to change say, my PGP key. Being able to customise who can edit will give great security. Naturally, it would inherit regular page protection, (and not be able to stop admins from editing?) 930913 (Congratulate/Complaints) 02:34, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Technically, you can restrict pages to being edited only by yourself (and admins) by using .js or .css pages. For example, you could put your userpage at Special:Mypage/userpage.css, and have your actual userpage (Special:Mypage) just be and fully protected. Ucucha 03:24, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Right, but this doesn't work for me. I want editors in good standing to be able to communicate with me. I simply want them to be on the wiki for 90 days and have 100 edits. Please. Basket of Puppies  03:33, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
 * How about creating (or adding to) an abuse filter? That delivers a more targeted solution to this long-term abuse without affecting the protection system. <font color="#00AA11">Netalarm <font color="#FF9933">talk 03:53, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
 * 6 of one, half-dozen of another. I'll let the developers decide which is easier to implement, but I think the community consensus is important to gauge. Basket of Puppies  04:15, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
 * But that still doesn't stop someone from changing it from to  930913 (Congratulate/Complaints) 09:27, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
 * It does, if your actual userpage is fully protected. Ucucha 13:41, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
 * With full protection it disabled editors-in-good-standing from communicating with me. With a new level of semi-protection it would only enable editors with 90 days and 100 edits to do so. Basket of Puppies  17:49, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

There may be other ways to deal with Basket of Puppies' specific problem, but I can see merit in having another tool at our disposal to handle vandals who learn how to game our system. An intermediate level of protection between allowing any account with 10 edits and allowing only admins could be very handy in special situations, tho it should be used very sparingly. --agr (talk) 02:34, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

Where are these capital letters coming from?
I've just edit a user's talk page, see User talk: OneDalm0, where I now see "Maybe You Could Also look for sources and Stock pointing out the time frame That Does not make it totally impossible for this to Have Been" although I wrote, and you can see that when you click edit, "Maybe you could also look for any sources pointing out that the time frame doesn't make it totally impossible for this to have been sourced ". I see it in Chrome v.8, not in Firefox or Opera. Dougweller (talk) 06:37, 5 December 2010 (UTC)


 * I don't see it too. I suspect it is something to do with Chrome settings... Reh  man  06:39, 5 December 2010 (UTC)


 * There's a translation service (Spanish to English, even though only part of the page is Spanish) in Chrome that introduces those caps. --M ASEM (t) 06:41, 5 December 2010 (UTC)


 * That makes sense. Thanks. Dougweller (talk) 07:06, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

Special:Whatlinkshere
Does anyone know if there is a way to hide links from templates without physically editing the templates themselves when looking at what links to any article? This way it would be possible to see what links there from an article or page itself and not from navigation. Simply south (talk) 16:33, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
 * It's not possible with the special page, as far as I am aware. Ucucha 16:44, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
 * You can filter out the templates themselves by selecting the 'Article' namespace, but it wil not hide the links the those templates produce on other articles. — <b style="color:#008">Edokter</b> • Talk  • 16:52, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Could it be done? (Original query) Simply south (talk) 16:57, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I'm afraid not, unless a "Hide transcluded links" option were built into MediaWiki. — <b style="color:#008">Edokter</b> • Talk  • 17:14, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
 * That would certainly be helpful. Rd232 talk 17:23, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Do you think someone would do that? Simply south (talk)
 * We can't do it. You would have to request that feature on Bugzilla. — <b style="color:#008">Edokter</b> • Talk  • 17:30, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Perhaps someone could make that Bugzilla request (see also Help:Searching section up the page). Rd232 talk 17:47, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
 * How do we get someone to write the report? I'm not a programmer. Simply south (talk) 23:36, 5 December 2010 (UTC)


 * See 3241 and an earlier discussion at Village pump (technical)/Archive 69. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:26, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

New str templates
I was trying to write new string templates to count preceding numbers and letters in a given string. But it looks like I exceeded the functions' limits. I have tried for the past two days to just undo my edits, and revert to the last good versions, but I keep getting an "Our servers are currently experiencing a technical problem" error. If anyone would like to give it a try, please undo my 4 December edits to Template:Str number and Template:Str letter. Thanks, 117Avenue (talk) 03:48, 6 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Please please PLEASE go add a vote to 26092 so we can just get rid of these ridiculous hacks already. I was unable to revert either template myself (I couldn't get Str letter to load at all), so I deleted Str number and restored the pre-December 4 revisions. 「 ダイノ ガイ 千？！ 」? · Talk⇒Dinoguy1000 04:26, 6 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Thanks for fixing the one. You can try this backdoor link to get to the other one. 117Avenue (talk) 04:43, 6 December 2010 (UTC)


 * ✅. Can't believe I didn't think of that... If you still need the contents of the deleted revisions for some reason, just ask, but I'd recommend against trying to re-save them as live code. ;) 「 ダイノ ガイ 千？！ 」? · Talk⇒Dinoguy1000 06:09, 6 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Thanks again. But I was hoping to keep the code, since it took a while to write. I was thinking of putting it on a page that wouldn't affect others (I think part of the problem was having documentation), and playing around with it to see if I could make it work. Do you have any other ideas to make it better? Currently, because of the excessive use of #if's, it only works up to 25 characters, and if transcluded, even less. I was hoping for at least 80. 117Avenue (talk) 07:47, 6 December 2010 (UTC)


 * A better solution is to re-evaluate the problem you are trying to solve. What is your intended use for a "number of digits at the start of a string" function? OrangeDog (τ • ε) 12:40, 6 December 2010 (UTC)


 * The only use I have applied it to is Template:Infobox election/sandbox, where it extracts the specified width of an image, if width and height have been specified. For example:  will produce 200. I imagine there could be other uses, which is why I created a corresponding number of letters template. 117Avenue (talk) 21:29, 6 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Please, if it's possible, try to avoid using string templates in their current form. It seems you have some image template and want to accept parameters like, right? In that case, I think it would be better if you used two parameters, e.g.  . That way, you don't have to use string functions at all. Svick (talk) 21:57, 6 December 2010 (UTC)


 * It is a widely used template, I can't do a parameter change on my own. I haven't come across any cases where  isn't in the   format, but I want to be able to use this parameter in setting the box width. 117Avenue (talk) 00:32, 7 December 2010 (UTC)
 * You can use a bot to rewrite the pages to use parameters of the proper format. Using elaborate string functions is NOT the method that you should use to fix this problem. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 22:22, 7 December 2010 (UTC)

Editor says IP is blocked, looks unblocked to me
was blocked this morning for recreating an article that was thought (wrongly) to be a hoax. He's been unblocked but says is still blocked. It shouldn't be, I've checked and it doesn't show up as blocked, and I thought I'd lifted the autoblock this am. Why is he still getting a block message when he tries to edit from his account? Thanks. Dougweller (talk) 17:47, 6 December 2010 (UTC)
 * http://toolserver.org/~nakon/autoblockfinder.php?u=Ottsby ΔT <sup style="color:darkred;">The only constant 18:22, 6 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Weird, I did that this morning. I didn't think to check. Thanks. Dougweller (talk) 18:39, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

Database download down?
When will http://download.wikimedia.org/ be back?Smallman12q (talk) 01:50, 7 December 2010 (UTC)


 * See what changes at Dataset1. Until then...? – Allen4names 17:27, 7 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Per wikimedia-tech IRC channel, the vendor is taking long to respond (and fix), and the guy dealing with those systems is a volunteer, so it can take some additional time in communication and execution there as well. The hope is that this week it will become known what the ETA with the vendor will be. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 22:39, 7 December 2010 (UTC)
 * OK, apparently the problem is that the parts require firmware updates that can only be run from a server with Windows installed, which this server OF COURSE does not have. Updates will be posted here. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 22:45, 7 December 2010 (UTC)

Google caching not picking up BOT vandalism reverts
Various flavors of this topic have been discussed a handful of times in the past, but I wanted to resurrect the conversation with a specific new twist: Bot reverts are not triggering the same refresh in google that regular edits do.

An OTRS ticket pointed me to the issue in relation to this vandalism. ClueBot NG reverted the vandalism in the same minute, but none the less google picked up and maintained the vandalism for a number of hours. I followed procedure and logged into google webmaster tools and requested removal, but it was denied as google claims that the page is not available in their cache (which is incorrect). So I made a few cleanup edits and within 30 seconds the cached and preview version on Google had been updated.

This is leading me to believe that there is something unique that we have (perhaps intentionally) done in the feed to filter out bot edits. Any thoughts? 7 06:18, 7 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I can understand how that could be. The bot is maybe looking only at the diff page or through the API rather then look at the page as a human browsing would do. Regards, SunCreator (talk)
 * I don't think Google would be able to see that. What Google is probably doing is ignoring edits by bots (or using a recent changes feed that excludes bots). That makes sense for things like interwiki bots, but not for ClueBot. Ucucha 13:12, 7 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Google sees. No reason to exclude bots unless Google told somewhere i.e robots.txt or noindex on page. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 00:30, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I think we are all agreeing that there is no reason for google to exclude bot changes in its refresh, the question now (perhaps for the developers) is whether this is something that needs to change on WP side or on google's side.  7  00:37, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I think there is a difference but I don't know how the reverting bots work exactly so I can't be sure. I think the revert processes are generally as follows:
 * (Bot process) From recentchanges, open a diff page, hitting undo and save, goto next recentchanges item
 * (Human process) Browse to view an article page, go into history, hitting undo and then save and then view the amended page
 * The above two processes are different, first process is by a bot, while second is always human. In the first process the actual article is not viewed directly - either before or after. In the the second the article is viewed twice, once before and once after the change, Google can pick up on this viewing and give it be reason to know the page contents has changed and change it's copy accordingly. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 01:02, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
 * How would Google know that someone views a page on Wikipedia? Ucucha 01:07, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Google gets the information from ISP's who are serving the page to the end user. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 01:13, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
 * My understanding is that Google sent the Foundation a server that just sits in Florida and runs Googlebot really fast over every changed page. Even though there's no way for this setup to detect directly whether a page has been viewed, what Google sees will probably be the last version of the page that was saved in the SQUID cache. Logged-in users (such as all approved bots) never view pages from the cache, so they might not cause the page cache to be refreshed when they view a page, but logged-out users always view pages from the cache and can cause the cache to get refreshed. If a vandal on an IP causes the page cahce to be refreshed, and the bot revert immediately afterward doesn't, that would account for the observed behavior, especially as CluebotNG is now responsible for such a large percentage of vandalism reverts. Assuming I'm right, there's a reasonable fix: if CluebotNG explicitly purges pages after it reverts, that would assure that its reverts were the most recent version in the cache, at the cost of stressing the cache servers a bit. On the other hand, I'm not a server admin, so I can't guarantee that this would fix the problem. — Gavia immer (talk) 01:24, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Interesting. Could even be a hybrid of the two situations, external knowledge of user viewing article causing internal googlebot to re-read page off Florida server. Whatever is happening it sounds like there is reason to believe that a bot revert and a human edit is not going to have the same effect on Google getting the latest copy of an article. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 01:40, 8 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Could this be due to something as simple as the fact that CluebotNG marks its reverts with the minor flag? Conceivably GoogleBot might presume that timely google DB updates aren't needed for "minor" edits. -R. S. Shaw (talk) 03:53, 8 December 2010 (UTC)


 * According to Cobi and Tim Starling |this is likely a conincidence. Cluebot apparently doesn't use the Bot flag or the minor flag.  I was also able to see a cluebot revert in the recent changes RSS feed... so it doesn't seem like it's anything under our control.  Nothing left to do I guess.   7  04:32, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

Article won't load
The article Football League Trophy that I've previously read/edited is not currently loading. Anyone else having the same issue, and if so, any ideas on the problem? Thanks. Eldumpo (talk) 12:59, 7 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Loaded fine just now. Do you get an error message or no response. Something from server slow, proxy error threads above perhaps? Regards, SunCreator (talk) 13:14, 7 December 2010 (UTC)
 * No problem for me either. What exactly is the problem you encounter? Ucucha 13:32, 7 December 2010 (UTC)
 * It was just going completely blank, no Wiki logo or anything, but anyway it's working fine for me as well now. Always the way! Thanks. Eldumpo (talk) 13:39, 7 December 2010 (UTC)

Broken userpage
My userpage is broken. Scroll down in the userboxes, and my stuff is there. Can you fix that? Thanks! -- Perseus  (<font color="#99CC66">t  •  c ) 17:57, 7 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Depends what you are trying to do. I've made a change that hopefully is what you wanted. <b style="color:#E32636;">Rambo's Revenge</b> <b style="color:#FFA500;">(talk)</b>  18:01, 7 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I want my userboxes on the right, separate from everything else. Perseus  (<font color="#99CC66">t  •  c ) 18:03, 7 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Looks like this right now. Perseus  (<font color="#99CC66">t  •  c ) 18:13, 7 December 2010 (UTC)
 * It's yet.  Perseus  (<font color="#99CC66">t  •  c ) 18:49, 7 December 2010 (UTC)
 * One, you need to wait more than 36 minutes before complaining that your userpage hasn't been fixed. Secondly, I honestly don't know what you're trying to do; it's obvious that you've thrown together a bunch of HTML code that you don't actually know how to use. Perhaps start from scratch? (and don't transclude the userboxes until you've got it looking the way you do; part of the problem is that I can't tell which HTML code needs to be fixed) EVula // talk // &#9775;  // 21:25, 7 December 2010 (UTC)

When I try to edit the "references" section on this link, the box that comes up is completely blank!
Hi. . . I'm a pretty experienced contributor and have never run into this issue before. I tried to edit the "references" section on the following existing article:

Sandy and Beaver Canal

Though five references are listed when you simply go to the article, when you click "edit" here, the box that appears onscreen is empty! So I'm spooked about editing it because I don't want to accidentally delete something that's already there.

All I want to do is add information about The Sandy & Beaver Canal, a book co-written by william H. Vodrey III & R. Max Gard. It's been out of print for ages, but is available on CD-ROM and can easily be found on Ebay.

Ideas?!? Thank you! —Preceding unsigned comment added by Beaverkettle (talk • contribs) 18:18, 7 December 2010 (UTC)

Just   Perseus  (<font color="#99CC66">t  •  c ) 18:23, 7 December 2010 (UTC)


 * You need to add the in-text citation within <ref ></ref> tags. See Wikipedia:Referencing for beginners. ---— Gadget850 (Ed)  talk 18:26, 7 December 2010 (UTC)


 * (e/c) It's not empty, it consists of reflist, which inserts formatted references given in tags appearing above in the article text. This is quite standard. You can safely insert other references below the reflist, though then it might be better to split the section to "Notes" and "References".—Emil J. 18:27, 7 December 2010 (UTC)

Weird behaviour when trying to transclude "special:" pages
I have stumbled onto this accidentally, so this is again something more of a "completely useless curiosity". A user (Silenzio76) tried to transclude the "Special:Recentchanges" page on his user page using. It was later removed. Here is the version without it, and here is the version with the transclusion (this is the diff that removes it). Now, with removed the page looks and reads perfectly fine. But when that code is used, several strange things happen:


 * The title of the page changes to Special:Recentchanges/100.
 * More mysteriously, the two sections on the page acquire weird strings, starting with "UNIQ" and ending with "QINU", with a random sequence of characters/numbers between, e.g. UNIQ151b7add547bbd-h-0--QINU and UNIQ151b7add547bbd-h-1--QINU (with some framing unicode characters which I am unable to reproduce).

I guess transcluding "special:" pages is something of a Bad Thing(TM)... shouldn't it perhaps be entirely disallowed, rather than leading to such bizarre results? -- 80.135.1.231 (talk) 20:43, 7 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I think this bug has already been reported at Bugzilla somewhere—can't find it back though. Ucucha 20:52, 7 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Found it: 23293. Ucucha 20:56, 7 December 2010 (UTC)
 * It is marked as fixed though, and was so before the changes that OP notet. Taemyr (talk) 21:06, 7 December 2010 (UTC)
 * The fix may not have been deployed yet on the version of MediaWiki that Wikipedia is running. Ucucha 21:11, 7 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks everyone -- according to the Bugzilla page "Wikimedia sites are running a version of mediawiki before the version where this is fixed." (2010-10-07) -- this explains why the problem is still present. I guess this will be fixed when we upgrade to the newest version of MediaWiki. -- 80.135.1.231 (talk) 21:16, 7 December 2010 (UTC)
 * More precisely, it will be fixed when r69820 gets reviewed. Ucucha 21:20, 7 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Not quite. Unless someone specially applies that revision to the site, it could sit as reviewed for quite some time until the next "regular" update. IIRC, the last "regular" update was in April 2010; those in charge of such things are hoping to do better once they catch up with the backlog. Anomie⚔ 21:39, 7 December 2010 (UTC)

Template loop warning
I got a "template loop warning" at this current AfD page: Salesian High School (Richmond, California)Cullen328 (talk) 04:57, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Mostly because it was calling to transclude itself. I've fixed the page. If you'd like to fix the rest (explanation of who started the AFD, etc), feel free. Killiondude (talk) 05:07, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
 * This page still doesn't appear to be properly transcluded: the comments at Articles for deletion/Log/2010 December 8 are not showing up at Articles for deletion/Salesian High School (Richmond, California). This is beyond my meager understanding of how the AfD templates and transclusions work.  --Arxiloxos (talk) 05:40, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I see what happened. I think I've fixed it. I'm not too familiar with how AFD is formed (I usually just use Twinkle), so I tried to mimic what other AFD discussions are doing. Killiondude (talk) 05:47, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Looks like it's fixed now--bravo, and thanks, Killiondude.--Arxiloxos (talk) 05:49, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

Secure server slow
The secure server https://secure.wikimedia.org, is taking a long time to load Wikipedia pages, about 10-30 seconds to load a page and often fails to save pages, meaning that you retry often - and less included inclined to preview. Anyone else having the same issue? Regards, SunCreator (talk) 18:07, 4 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Fine for me in London... <font color="#FFB911">╟─TreasuryTag► You may go away now. ─╢ 18:09, 4 December 2010 (UTC)
 * It's has still been going slow but noticed it waits a long long time on images. I recently switched off images on my browser and all is nice and fast now. My firewall has logging many errors of traffic to unopen ports coming from secure.wikimedia.org, so perhaps that is mis-configured or something. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 23:34, 4 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Hm, fine for me on my end, I recently got a new internet service. - <font face="Century Gothic" color="#2B65EC" size="2">Dwayne  was here!   &#9835;  03:06, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Was horribly slow for me in Sri Lanka a few months back. But it's fast enough now. Regards. Reh  man  03:21, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I get about 50% failure rate on reading pages. The page never comes up and I have to reload and try again. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 01:49, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

502 proxy error
Received the following a moment ago when hitting 'save page' "502 proxy error

Proxy Error

The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server. The proxy server could not handle the request POST /wikipedia/en/w/index.php.

Reason: Error reading from remote server

Apache/2.2.8 (Ubuntu) mod_fastcgi/2.4.6 PHP/5.2.4-2ubuntu5.7wm1 with Suhosin-Patch mod_ssl/2.2.8 OpenSSL/0.9.8g Server at secure.wikimedia.org Port 443" Regards, SunCreator (talk) 18:00, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

I have also seen this error a few times, and got it again today, with the same error message SunCreator got. Ucucha 15:46, 7 December 2010 (UTC)


 * The secure server is almost continuously at maximum load. The service will be moved soon (to the new datacenter in virginia), and the hope is that this should be a less frequent occurrence. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 22:42, 7 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Thank you. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 00:25, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

Bug page on Bugzilla --vgmddg (look &#124; talk &#124; do) 23:25, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

No orange bar
I've received three new messages over the past 24 hours, but not a single orange bar. Could someone please look into this? --Dylan620 (t • c • r) 01:17, 7 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Works for me... Reh  man  13:47, 7 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Make sure you aren't using some custom css or js that could be preventing the banner from showing. I think there is an option in user preferences for enabling/disabling this, so check in to that as well. -  ʄɭoʏɗiaɲ  <sup style="color:#3AAA3A;">τ <sub style="color:#3AAA3A;">¢  20:29, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

Msnbot
Out of a completely useless curiosity, why does the toolserver disallow msnbot ? Magog the Ogre (talk) 19:21, 7 December 2010 (UTC)


 * http://journal.toolserver.org/entry/2009/06/09/wherein-msnbot-behaves-badly-and-is-banished/ — Gavia immer (talk) 19:27, 7 December 2010 (UTC)
 * That article seems confusing. If the 3.5 million articles(and other pages) from Wikipedia are on toolserve then a bot looking at the original source would need to be reading at those rates per second otherwise it will soon be out of date. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 19:48, 7 December 2010 (UTC)
 * This isn't the main wiki servers we're talking about, and they don't serve a public copy of the encyclopedia; see Toolserver for the sort of things that are hosted there. — Gavia immer (talk) 20:00, 7 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Okay, how many pages would Toolserver have? Less then a million I take it. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 00:26, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Read the link I gave again - msnbot was supplying random query parameters to the tools hosted on the toolserver. It doesn't take all that many permutations of such parameters for the total number of page requests to grow very large. — Gavia immer (talk) 00:36, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Depends if those parameter where logically crawl-able pages. i.e pages that humans could be expected to visit, if they are then bots crawl them, if there not then how did msnbot know about them? Regards, SunCreator (talk) 02:43, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I don't know anything that isn't in the page I linked, and I doubt that anyone else here does either. If you want to know something that specific, I'd take it up with the toolserver administrators. — Gavia immer (talk) 02:48, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

Random parameters? They're liable to find a security hole and bring down the whole server. Very interesting that the bot would do something so obnoxious. And not surprising at all that MS was too big of a bureaucratic nightmare to do anything about it. Magog the Ogre (talk) 23:12, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

Javascript help
Anyone know why the div I insert on a diff page in this code doesn't work? If I set it to a specific px value (i.e. "width:500px"), the div works. If, however, I set it to a percentage (i.e. "width:100%"), it doesn't. Maybe I'm just missing something?--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 01:42, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Nvm I did it a different way. Still would like to know what caused that width discrepancy, though...--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 00:37, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

Need a template to change color of section
At Talk:United States diplomatic cables leak I added a copy of a mainspace section using. Is there some code or existing template wrapper that I could also employ to give this text a ligher or different background color to clearly set it apart from the surrounding discussion? __meco (talk) 16:22, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
 * accepts style attributes:

<blockquote style="background-color:lightgreen;">
 * Algebraist 16:26, 8 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Great wonder! __meco (talk) 16:36, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

ParserFunction errors
Can someone have a look at Odontogriphus. The first clue that there is a problem, is the red error at the bottom of the page. However, this is not the core issue. If you look in the references, you will see loads of errors before that. Essentially, it appears that some parserfunction expansion limits are being broken, which is causing errors downstream. To help track down the cause, you can do a "show preview" on just the lower section, to see that the last red error message is not the issue. You can further copy sections of the article into a sandbox to see what is causes the error. I was not able to figure it out with my limited tests. Thank you! 134.253.26.10 (talk) 16:54, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Update, I think it might have something to do with the taxobox or automatic taxobox. 134.253.26.10 (talk) 17:04, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I don't know why, but moving that section above the references section seemed to solve the problem. &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 17:08, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
 * No, it didn't solve the problem. Read the references, loads of "WARNING: argument omitted, expansion size too large" errors. :( 134.253.26.10 (talk) 17:12, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Fixed by removing the automatic taxobox, which is probably using so many templates that the parser doesn't like it. Might the fact that you called Lophotrochozoa subphylum instead of a superphylum have confused something? Ucucha 17:16, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I don't know, I didn't fill out either taxobox. I was just cleaning up Category:ParserFunction errors.  Thank you for fixing it.  Hopefully the taxobox folks will be able to fix the "automatic taxobox". 134.253.26.10 (talk) 17:20, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

Trouble at WP:VPA
Currently the Technical Village Pump isn't showing up at all at WP:VPA. I don't know enough to figure out the problem. Ntsimp (talk) 21:27, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Fixed. Algebraist 21:31, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

consolidating logged-out edits
Is it possible to consolidate logged-out edits into my account record? It's happened a couple times, but the main IP was this one. (No-one else has ever used it.) Not just for edit-countitis, but also for anonymity. — kwami (talk) 21:32, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
 * No. You can rev-delete away the IP number, though. Ucucha 21:34, 8 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Not any more. :-) Graham 87 02:06, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

2 sections in 2 side by side columns
Is it possible to put see also and external links (or any other 2 sections or subsections) in 2 side by side columns. Just granpa (talk) 23:02, 8 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Nevermind. Template:Multicol seems to be working fine.
 * Just granpa (talk) 00:44, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

Higher protection level
Could a higher protection level be applied to certain pages that would only be overridden by a bureaucrat and would prevent admins from performing any actions regarding such a page? Creating this new level can ideally prevent wheel wars such as this and edit wars like this from occurring between sysops on a particular bureaucrat-protected page. :| TelCo NaSp  Ve :|  06:00, 9 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Hmm, something interesting. But I wonder if the amount of work required to do this is worth considering the number of pages that require this type of protection... Reh  man  06:36, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

Long-time donator and really annoyed by the banner
Hello,

I've donated to the Wikimedia Foundation every year since I became an active contributor and user (and thus an utlilizer of the Foundation's bandwidth and resources).

So this year I was again proactive and donated as soon as the donation campaign begun (I was actually looking forward to it, as I know the fundraising run takes place around December, when we anyway think about giving gifts). I closed the banner after I had donated. I always donate generously to the Foundation, as Wikipedia is absolutely invaluable to me personally.

Since then, I have had to close the donation banner really multiple times, and it is really starting to annoy. Every time I close the banner, it keeps reappearing after a seemingly random period of time, even if I am logged-in and the system surely knows that I have already donated / clicked the close icon. The random time period after it bugs me again is a telltale sign that this behaviour is purposeful, something akin to the psychological irritation tactics that advertisers use against the public in TV commercials to force their message on them.

I don't think the Wikimedia Foundation needs this kind of tactics; its success is based on the users trusting and appreciating the Foundation, and aggressive fundraising tactics can turn the public's opinion, especially as the Foundation's current finance is fine: it has over $12.7M in reserves, more than all Foundation expenses combined between 6/09 and 6/10.

I read some other dissatisfied comments to learn about the gadget that hides the banner. This is, however, not really a nice solution for multiple reasons:
 * I won't be able to see the next years banner (same goes to AdBlocking it)
 * The solution requires work and possibly luck to find
 * It is counterintuitive that closing the banner does so only for a random period of time, and then it will reappear again on every single page

Can you please make it so that logged-in users can just hide this year's banner simply by closing it? I don't think we need to be subjected to confrontational / aggressive advertisement just because we contribute to a free online encyclopedia, or?

Also, the biggest sufferers of the status quo are of course the anonymous users, who don't want to, or haven't had time to, create an account, and thus have no way to close the fundraiser banner except temporarily. We might be bugging off valuable future contributors by giving a wrong image of the values Wikipedia stands for and how it treats its users. --hydrox (talk) 05:59, 5 December 2010 (UTC)


 * I have agreed to the same topic before, and I will again. I've been an active editor for quite some time now. And there's no word to say how annoying it is (even though there is an option to suppress it at Special:Preferences). Reh  man  06:17, 5 December 2010 (UTC)


 * If the code is working as written, the close button will shrink the banner for 7 days. Is your complaint that 7 days is too short, or is it reappearing more often than that?  Dragons flight (talk) 05:45, 6 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Sometimes it appears once a day, sometimes it'll appear again on the next page after I "X" it. Rarely, if ever, has it remained hidden for a full seven days. I feel the donation I make is in the myriad of content which I add to the encyclopedia; I have time, I don't have money. I'm tempted to write a piece of css code that will permanently hide it from my sight. -  ʄɭoʏɗiaɲ  <sup style="color:#3AAA3A;">τ <sub style="color:#3AAA3A;">¢  20:22, 8 December 2010 (UTC)


 * What I find even more annoying is that not all projects have an option to suppress these banners -- or at least not one I can find under "Preferences". (And I have looked. Carefully & often.) What I am forced to do is to stop contributing to -- & viewing -- those projects until the fundraiser is over. Some of us volunteers believe improving the content is a sufficient donation to Wikimedia projects that we shouldn't be hounded for money, too. (I found having the box to click to make these banners go away was a very nice thing -- while those boxes worked. I can only guess that the reason these boxes are no longer part of the banners is that donations weren't generous enough.) -- llywrch (talk) 19:51, 9 December 2010 (UTC)
 * You can still hide the banner on any wiki by adding "#centralNotice{display:none;}" to your .css page. Ucucha 20:01, 9 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Oh well. Bye bye fundraising banners, you did it to yourself. What is the link to the discussion on the implementation of this banner? Where is the community consensus to have these pop up at random? -  ʄɭoʏɗiaɲ  <sup style="color:#3AAA3A;">τ <sub style="color:#3AAA3A;">¢  00:17, 10 December 2010 (UTC)