Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive AA

Need help with tables
Hello, I need some help with table. I am trying to create something like Round16ext for a family tree, and here is my problem: I want the gap between "son" & "daughter" cells be 10px in height, so I specify it. But then I want to draw a thick black border connecting "son" & "daughter." That does not work if the gap is completely empty. So I have to put &nbsp. But then the gap becomes very wide. Is there a way to reduce its height and still have the border? Thanks!


 * Version 1: with thick border, but wide gap


 * Version 2: no border, but the gap is of right height

Renata 14:20, 20 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Sorry, I can see no difference using Firefox, both look good ; with an IE tab, I see no connecting line at all! The Round16ext template looks good in both browsers. Try again! -- DLL .. T 20:35, 20 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Well, never mind. I figured out how to do it where I needed it, but for whatever bizarre reason the above tables do not display properly at all. They display properly only when I am previewing them before submitting this comment... Weird, huh? Renata 00:12, 21 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Instead of using tables for your layouts use CSS DIVs instead.


 * Use familytree for a family tree. Tra (Talk) 14:15, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

Glitch on Rose Bowl Game article
Under Rose_Bowl_Game I've used the following code to place a panorama of the 1902 RB game in the article: For some reason it doesn't appear to format correctly and appears in the middle of a sentence and uncentered. Any ideas? --Bobak 19:55, 24 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Anyone??? --Bobak 22:06, 24 October 2006 (UTC)


 * I put it inside a table which seems to have done the trick, but that's probably not the best way. Tra (Talk) 22:23, 24 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I agree, it's done the trick. What's odd is that it worked at this article on Santo Domingo, Oaxaca with more or less the above command. --Bobak 22:29, 24 October 2006 (UTC)
 * It's probably something to do with the fact that Rose Bowl Game has a caption on it (requiring extra complications of divs being rendered to hold it) whilst the other article does not have a caption. Tra (Talk) 22:44, 24 October 2006 (UTC)
 * In the future, just use [[Image:Whatever|center]] . I've changed the article to use this. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 01:25, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

Support for SVGZ
I would like to request support for the SVGZ format. SVGZ is the same as SVG, except it has been compressed using gzip. -SharkD 09:34, 24 October 2006 (UTC)
 * See 4947. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 01:21, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

Category pages background
Can someone make the backgrounds "transparent" in the div or table markups (whatever they are) so all the category pages simply display in the light blue background color? They look pretty unprofessional now. Thanks, Rfrisbietalk 18:54, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I would also like this fixed for all users as I agree with Rfrisbie. I submitted this as a bug request in Bugzilla and got this reply from Simetrical:
 * "''The background of all pages is white in default Monobook. This issue occurs because the background of most non-mainspace stuff has been changed in the English Wikipedia with custom styles at MediaWiki:Monobook.css, but tables' backgrounds have not been changed. (Table backgrounds are white rather than transparent by default so that borders and backgrounds of unfloated stuff, especially the rule under headings, don't run into floated tables.)"


 * Adding the following to your Monobook.css should fix it:''

table { background-color: #F8FCFF; } .ns-0 * table { background-color: white; }

Harryboyles 09:18, 24 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Thanks! I don't know why a solution like that wouldn't work in the main .css :-) Rfrisbietalk 15:37, 24 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Because, as I said, the background of all pages is white in default Monobook, so there's no difference between the table background and page background. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 01:19, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

Image Problem
Yesterday, I loaded Image:Map of Georgia elevations.png and everything seemed fine. However, I have noticed that no thumbnail appears for it in Category:Georgia (U.S. state) maps. Additionally, my attempt to add it to List of highest mountains in Georgia (U.S.) as a thumbnail has resulted in just a narrow band appearing. I have tried to purge the image, but either did it wrong or it had no effect. Could someone please help me out?

There may also be two other images with similar problems. Image:Map of trails of Georgia.png which is not showing up correctly in Category:Hiking trails in Georgia (U.S. state) and Image:GA St park.png, which is not showing up correctly in Category:Georgia state parks.Tlmclain 18:19, 24 October 2006 (UTC)


 * I know there are some issues with thumbnailing very big PNG images (see this mail), your images seem to be right around the "magical" 3500x3500 size limit for the thumbnailing code. So I would guess that's the cause of your problems. --Sherool (talk) 20:33, 24 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Sherool - Thank you for your response - you seem to have nailed the problem exactly. I reloaded Image:Map of Georgia elevations.png at 3133x3500 (instead of the original 3400×3800) and everything seems to be working fine now. Tlmclain 21:18, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

Detailed statistics forbidden
Can someone do something about this? At least a comment. Thanks a lot. --Eleassar my talk 14:26, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

Addition to a MediaWiki: page
I'd like to link MW:Parameters_to_Special:Export from MediaWiki:Exporttext. The latter is the text shown at the top of Special:Export, the former is a page explaining the additional parameters of the export interface. Any objection to that? Tizio, Caio, Sempronio 12:21, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

Messed up image at 200px


Image displays perfectly well at other sizes, but not on 200 pixels. What happened? --GunnarRene 19:48, 22 October 2006 (UTC) Feel free to delete the old versions by the way. --GunnarRene 19:50, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I fixed it by purging the image description page. By the way, I've had to remove the thumbnails you placed above because they're fair use. Tra (Talk) 20:45, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Thanks.--GunnarRene 20:55, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

Still having problems with images
Intermittently of late I'm getting blue links instead of images. Is upload.wikipedia.org overloaded or something? I can't seem to pinpoint any good reasons for it (I tried taking the nowiki tags off above, and the 200px one worked fine while the 50px didn't show up at all!). Happens all over the place, no particular page to cite. -- nae'blis 19:26, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

Weird problem with deletiondebates template
I noticed this awhile ago and posted on Template talk:Deletiondebates but it's not exactly a high-visibility page. For at least two people, clicking on any of the links in Template:Deletiondebates first resizes the box (in my case, it gets smaller and narrower) but doesn't actually load the page. Clicking the link again in the now-resized box loads the page as normal. I'm not sure about other user who posted about this, but I'm using Firefox under Windows at 1920x1200. The resolution has caused other odd table-formatting problems with non-obvious causes, but I'm not sure that's the problem in this case. Anyboby else noticing this, or have any ideas on how to fix it? Opabinia regalis 03:30, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

Browsing to an article by means of its unique id?
Hello,

I am wondering, if it is possible to navigate to an article by using its unique id. I has examined the XML description of articles and found out, that every article has its own id.

Is it possible to access 'JavaScript' by means of an URL like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/index.php?id=2512 ?

Best regards, Dennis


 * To access an article via id, this URL seems to work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/index.php?curid=2512 I don't know about javascript. Tizio, Caio, Sempronio 18:31, 23 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Perfect! The id 2512 refers in the german wikipedia to 'JavaScript'. Thanks, again.

suggestion for easier/quicker reverting
I find it a little time consuming to revert articles, and ATM I don't want to use any of the addons for wiki, as I'm a fairly new user. At the moment I spot vandalisms by going to the recent changes page, looking at the history and comparing the last two versions (or the last two versions by different users), then going back to the last non-vandalised version and saving changs. It would speed up things a lot if there was a link in the 'compare selected versions' screen that read "revert to this version" and added a automatic summary "reverted to last edits by xxxx" (or similar), and maybe a link in the history page to do the same (though I think that may be a little too dangerous).

This could either be implemented as a greasemonkey script, FF extension or as an actual change to the wiki software.

Please let me know what you think, if I'm missing another simpler way of doing this, and which technology would be prefered. If GM is chosen, I think I can code it, otherwise someone will have to take over the technical side. --User24 17:52, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I see you have popups installed. On the recent changes or history page, find the revision containing the vandalism listed and hover over 'diff' or 'last'. You will see a box pop up. Click on 'rv' in the box and then wait. You will see lots of pages flash past and then you will see the article page. Once you see that, you have reverted it. Tra (Talk) 18:03, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
 * thanks, that's exactly what I was looking for. woot! I can even do it on the compare page. cheers and sorry for asking what now appears to be an obviously n00b question. --User24 18:16, 23 October 2006 (UTC)


 * What you are asking for is the Rollback feature, which is limited to use by admins. Does Reverting help?  User:Zoe|(talk) 18:05, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
 * yeah, I looked at Reverting but that just told me to do things the way I already was. --User24 18:16, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

WP:AFD/Old borked
All the entries on this page are displaying "0 open / 0 closed / 0 total discussions". I've tried refreshing and the same thing happens. Anyone know what's going on? --Sam Blanning(talk) 10:48, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Try asking User:Mathbot about that (or its operator; talking to bots is often slightly pointless); it seems to have put the zeros there. --ais523 13:22, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

CydeBot slapping me down
Hi there, I changed c**t to cunt (what's the point, I know, lol) in the Craig David article, in the trivia section, because of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Content_disclaimer and one of Cyde's bots changed it back or deleted it or something. I was going to tell Cyde but only registered users can post on his talk page, and right now I cannot be arsed. --207.216.10.77 07:21, 23 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Just do it again - the bot will assume you know what you're doing. Zetawoof(&zeta;) 09:03, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Yeah, generally anti-vandal-bots like Cyde's will only stop you once. &mdash;  Da rk Sh ik ar i   talk /contribs  10:46, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

A page I do not understand
I went to the page for High Sheriff of Cornwall and the references look a bit odd to me. Are they ok? Is there a problem? --Filll 00:32, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Fixed them. It took me a bit, but some had extra tag. Thanks for the heads up. Gotyear 00:52, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

Adding YouTube Video (with Player) to a Wiki Page
Sorry to bother with this question, but I looked around MediaWiki for an answer and couldn't find one. I'm sure it's simple (or impossible). My question is this. I want to add a YouTube video to a Wikipage. I found the code on YouTube, but am not sure how to make the player appear with the video ready to play. Can this be done? How? Thanks. MarshallPoe 21:53, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
 * No, that's not possible - Wikipedia doesn't support embedded objects (primarily for security reasons). Just link to the video. Zetawoof(&zeta;) 22:26, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

Further question: is that Wikipedia policy, or a limitation of Mediawiki? In other words, does Mediawiki support embedded objects on wikipages? I have a personal wiki that runs Mediawiki, and I'd like embed the YouTube video on pages there, if possible. Thanks again. MarshallPoe 23:48, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
 * MediaWiki does not support embedded objects at this time. Embedded Java will probably happen sooner or later for the benefit of Wikiversity or what have you, but there are no timeframes. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 01:26, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
 * You could install an extension that allows you to embed YouTube files. Tra (Talk) 01:35, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, Tra. I left a message on your user page. I confess I don't know how to install an extension... I'm I just way over my head, or can I do this? Btw, this request, though related to Wikipedia, is for another wiki project using Mediawiki ([MemoryArchive]). MarshallPoe 14:35, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

Just to expand a little, please don't link to a YouTube page if it's a copyright violation. User:Zoe|(talk) 18:02, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

History entries sometimes flipped
With Tawkerbot2 reverting at Procellariidae (history) on 20:14 UTC 22 October 2006. Tawkerbot's revert is before the edit it reverted, and Tawkerbot's diff makes it look as if it did nothing.

Same thing with AntiVandalBot and Texas (history) on 00:40 UTC 22 October 2006. Its diff makes it look like it did nothing.

Does this happen occasionally with edits a second apart and is nothing to worry about? Gotyear 20:54, 22 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Yes. --brion 02:37, 24 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Ah, you're the tech employee. Thanks! Gotyear 04:43, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

Talk:Main Page problem
I am getting a blank page when I click Talk:Main Page. I can see the most recent version and the history, but a normal click does not work. Anyone else having this problem or is it just me? Thanks, BanyanTree 15:15, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
 * It's working fine for me. Try refreshing, or clearing your browser cache. Tra (Talk) 15:35, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I'll be darned. I thought that because I'd closed my browser since I first noticed the problem that was already covered, but a simple reload does the trick.  Thanks! BanyanTree 15:41, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

Font size increase
Whilst editing today, I have twice done something with the keyboard and the mouse simultaneously (I think) that has enlarged all of the font sizes throughout Wikipedia. The first time I thought it was Wikipedia itself that had changed the font sizes (as happened a week or so ago with table formatting), but now it has happened again and the font size is ridiculously big. Does anyone know how I can return the font size to normal?--Diniz 20:54, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
 * What browser are you using? If Firefox, try Ctrl + "-" key. --Aude (talk) 21:13, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
 * IE 7, Safari, and firefox support font size enlarging. Ctrl + or - may solve the problem.

If you are using IE 6 and it doesn't solve the problem, go to View, font size, and choose medium. Lugiadoom 21:37, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
 * In Firefox, Ctrl + 0 will get you back to "normal" font size regardless of whether you're currently above or below it. —Angr 21:53, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I've got it back to normal through View->Text Size. Thanks for your help!--Diniz 19:20, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

Uploading graphic
I have created line drawings, nothing copied from a book or the internet, with some text, using Excel's drawing tools. The drawings are in an Excel worksheet, but I can copy and paste them to a Word or WordPad document as a picture ("enhanced metafile), or as just a picture. So from either the original Excel worksheet, or from a document, I can select the drawing. I can then put it on the clipboard by using Cntrl C.  I need to know how to upload this drawing to Wikipedia, so can use it for an article that needs editing.  I read that a drawing should be saved as a PNG file, but that doesn't appear in my "paste special" list of options.  Where do I paste the drawing on my PC so I can list the source link to it on your upload image page?  Regards, Thermbal Thermbal 20:29, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Just paste it into Paint and save it as a PNG, or preferably, save it as an SVG if possible. Drawings should always be saved in vector format (SVG) when possible. &mdash;   Da rk Sh ik ar i   talk /contribs  03:34, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Anyone know any good apps for getting vector images out of the windows clipboard into svg format? i tried inkscape but it didn't seem to take the paste Plugwash 20:54, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

Font problem
Hello,

Is there someone could help me in the font problem? I work in the ko Wiktionary and want to display ancient greek flawlessly. I've collected so many fonts and put in Monobook.css_ #bodyContent. But it doesn't work (see here) as I've wished. I don't know if this problem is only in my computer configuration. A obserber in assistance said, he couldn't find any problem. -- 아흔(A-heun) 16:45, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
 * It shows correctly for me. Could you provide a screenshot? —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 02:15, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

Edit sections
Is it just my browser, or did the MediaWiki for the edit button for sections just change? Instead of appearing small to the side of the page, the button appears before the section title! -- Gray  Porpoise Phocoenidae, not Delphinidae 16:41, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
 * No, it's happening all over. Monobook? --GunnarRene 16:58, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Yes, I'm using the monobook skin. Now, the edit button is back to the right, but it's larger than it originally was. -- Gray  Porpoise Phocoenidae, not Delphinidae 17:01, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I'm using Firefox, and the edit links appear to be the same size as they were before. Maybe this problem is limited to IE/other browsers? --T M F Let's Go Mets - Stats 17:07, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

I'm using Opera. But now the edit links are back to normal here too. --GunnarRene 17:13, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

It happened to me using Classic skin and Safari browser. I logged out and then back in and the problem went away. --hydnjo talk 20:24, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
 * This may have been an issue because of some behind-the-scenes mistakes with CSS importing and version numbers and stuff. Just do a forced refresh if it doesn't work for you, or wait and it will go away. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 02:12, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

Load of different wiki syntaxes
Which method of the following is more efficient in regard to the server load?


 * 1) Placing   or   (note 1, 3, 7), etc. into a page/article
 * 2) Using a template with   (, etc.; see ParserFunctions); example:   (note 1, 3, 7)

Greetings, Melancholie 15:04, 21 October 2006 (UTC)


 * I'm not exactly sure I understand the difference you're talking about, but assuming you mean using nested templates vs. using a single template implemented with ParserFunctions the ParserFunctions one is more server-load friendly. Fetching the content of a template requires a database lookup.  The amount of time required to do this dwarfs the time required to process the template's contents and consumes a much more precious resource (database time vs. Apache web server time - there's essentially one database, but dozens of Apache web servers).  -- Rick Block (talk) 16:04, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
 * There are many databases for the purposes of reading. Every slave server has its own database that can be read.  Your analysis might be correct regardless, but it doesn't matter.  Please don't worry about performance; just use whatever format is most convenient for you.  If it causes load problems, the developers and system administrators (who closely watch profiling data for resource hogs) will deal with it. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 02:05, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

Infoboxes are a mess
As commented above infoboxes are making a mess of pages. They are appearing on the left with a desert of white space to the right. It looks awful. I am using Firefox. Sumahoy 11:43, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
 * See my comment below. I'm using a nightly build of firefox, . The infoboxes have been broken for a few days now. ... aa:talk 06:14, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Please post screenshots. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 01:24, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

I have an idea that might help. I had the same problem, and my solution was to fix the common.css stylesheet. I was using some templates from Wikipedia, and so I copied the relevant infobox stylesheet info from the Wikipedia common.css, which you can find here: Mediawiki Common.css -cwmcelfresh

Tricky vandalism?
You know when an attempt is made to shrink down an image too far (in an image link), and a little error image is shown in its place? Well I think someone has replaced that error image with an ad:

Here's an example (click on it to see what I mean):



I don't know the name of the original error image, so I can't fix it. Perhaps one of you guys will know what to do.

--The Transhumanist 00:19, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I don't know what you mean. If the problem still exists, can you perhaps upload a screenshot? — Mets 501  (talk) 00:41, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
 * The problem went away, seemingly by itself. Which is even more disconcerting.  --The Transhumanist 08:51, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I don't think i've ever seen a size parameter cause an "error image", it sounds to me like your PC has some scumware on it thats messing with images in your browser (possiblly trying to replace adverts with ones of its own) the example image you posted just looks like a normal image scaled to the size you specified here. Plugwash 20:47, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

Failed to parse - Unknown Error
In my talkpage, I tried to put in $$x ≠ 0$$ and I get an Failed to parse (unknown error) message in bold red. The error doesn't appear when I try to edit, and it is $$$$ like everything else on my page, I am at a loss and I put a and they were at a loss to. I was refered her by them, help? btg2290 23:40, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Enter it as $$x \neq 0$$ to give $$x \neq 0$$. WP:FORMULA tells you more about how to use tags. Tra (Talk) 23:51, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

Layout changes?
I've noticed that as of today, WP looks fine in IE on XP, but on an old version of Opera on a 98 machine, the layout seems to have changed somewhat. The globe logo is gone, the "article/discussion/edit/history" tabs have been replaced by a bulleted list right under where the logo was, the font size of the left hand menus is slightly larger, the boxes around the left hand menus are gone, and at the bottom of the pages there's a note that the articles were "Retrieved from 'http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/[article name],' like you sometimes see on one of those unauthorized mirrors. I've tried reloading and it still looks the same. Was there an update that the older broweser can't deal with? Dyfsunctional 17:57, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
 * It sounds like the css is not being displayed properly. Try using a newer browser. Tra (Talk) 18:39, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

Template ed
Suddenly all the little [edit] links are showing up in large size on the left side of the screen, rather than small and on the right. Can anyone explain what happened? --Metropolitan90 16:41, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Okay, now they're back in the correct position, but larger than usual. I expect that someone will probably correct that also. --Metropolitan90 16:43, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

Category problem
Category:Ecuadorian politicians automatically includes Category:Politicians by nationality, which is a redirect, and Category:Politicians by country, which it shouldn't. It should only be in Category:Politicians of South American nations because of the way the politicians category is set up. - GilliamJF 19:25, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Hmm... I've manually removed it from Category:Politicians by country, but Category:Politicians by nationality seems to be being generated automatically by the Fooian fooers template on the category page. That template isn't being used on any other category of politicians, so maybe you can just dispense with it. —Angr 19:46, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Thank you. - GilliamJF 20:01, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

left-aligned templates?
Did I miss some discussion about left-aligned templates? I noticed that between yesterday and today many of the infoboxes (examples: Lew Allen, Nissan X-Trail, Chevrolet TrailBlazer -- which I know used to have it on the right) appear on the left, above the article text, rather than on the right, with the article text starting to the left of the template. Could somebody point me to the reason for the change? I've been trying to avoid wikipolitics as much as possible, and would just like to know why. Thanks, '''... '''aa:talk 15:05, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Maybe it's a browser thing. All three of those examples are displaying on the right for me (Firefox 1.5.0.7 on Windows XP). —Angr 15:09, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

Image not displaying
Does anyone know why, which displays just fine when you go to its Wikipedia "pseudo" page at Image:Berlin Wall graffiti&death strip.jpg, isn't displaying properly on the pages where it's being used (Berlin, Berlin Wall, 1980s, etc.)? It's not the syntax used to put the image in the articles, because (1) it seems to be affecting all articles it's in, and (2) the syntax hasn't been changed, and the picture was displaying properly last week. Doing a "hard refresh" with Ctrl-F5 doesn't work, and I'm not the only person for whom it is failing to display. Any thoughts? —Angr 14:43, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

P.S. Purging the image description page, both here and at Commons, didn't work. —Angr 18:54, 20 October 2006 (UTC)


 * There was something wrong with the thumbnail image generated at Commons. I tried resizing it by a pixel so the software would make a new thumbnail and now it works.  I did change the & in the image to its URL-encoded version, maybe thats why it choked on the image?  --QTCaptain 03:09, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I had to do another hard refresh, but it seems to be working for me now too. Thanks for your help! —Angr 10:01, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

List of articles that have been deleted
Is there any way for a WikiProject to keep a list of articles that fell within the scope of their WikiProject and that have at some point been deleted, other than manually maintaining a list? Is there a list anywhere of all pages that have ever been deleted? Anyone have any idea how large the number is? Carcharoth 13:36, 20 October 2006 (UTC)


 * To answer one of your questions, there is Special:Log/delete. That is the deletion log and is a list of all the articles ever deleted. It searchable by title only. I'm not sure how you'd go about finding deleted articles relevent to your WikiProject unless you know the title. Hope this helps some.--Andrew c 15:10, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

Boxes on user page
Does anyone know what the syntax for  is? I'd like some of the 'boxes' that you see on fancier user pages on my page, but I don't know how to use them.--CarrotMan 09:49, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Div is a very diverse tag, used for divisions between content in pages. You may use css inside the div tags, and div also has a few other "parameters" as well.  You can do a google search for how to use div tags, you'll probably get quite a few results. — Mets 501  (talk) 10:59, 20 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Most userboxes are templates, instructions for creating and using them are at Userboxes. -- Rick Block (talk) 13:27, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

Continuing Search problem
I am editing a page called "Hay, New South Wales". In Australia New South Wales is almost always abbreviated to NSW, so anyone searching would probably use "hay nsw" to search for this particular town. My problem is that a search on "hay nsw" doesn't get the "Hay, New South Wales" page as the top result (or anywhere close to the top result). After some previous advice I added a re-direct on the "Hay, NSW" page to re-direct to the "Hay, New South Wales" page - this works fine. Despite this, however, the problem still remains - anyone searching on "hay nsw" will not get "Hay, New South Wales" (or even "Hay, NSW" for that matter) as the top result. Why is it so? And how do I fix it? --Ikeshut 04:24, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Make another redirect. Like Hay nsw which I just made. Garion96 (talk) 04:27, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Case sensivity : - Oh, Charles, your case tickles me so much! -- DLL .. T 20:38, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

Problems logging in
Lately, I am experiencing problems logging into Wikipedia from my PC. I am currently using a web browser called Crazy Browser and my PC is a Pentium II. Allow me to explain the weird situations that began to arise a few days ago. For example, the main page of the project presents the images in an incoherent manner and it takes me a very long time for the page to upload itself. On top of this, when I click on the Sign in option, the page fails to upload correctly and only shows the navigation toolbar on the left. I have not faced this problem when I am using a different PC from a different location. Can anyone help me with this? I have checked my PC for viruses and spyware and so far, my PC is clear from them. Is the Wikipedia website facing a bug or is it just my PC, which suddenly went bonkers? -- S iva1979 Talk to me 21:17, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I'm also having trouble, staying logged in. Is there something being updated, or am I just having problems at my end? -Royalguard11 (Talk·Desk) 00:15, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I think that I have solved this problem. I changed my default browser to Firefox and there were no problems. I feel that there is something which is being updated on Wikipedia that caused the problem. I guess that I have to get used to this new browser as soon as possible! -- S iva1979 Talk to me 03:57, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

Edit 'section'
Why has the 'edit' button gone up to the top-left, rather than the usual right of a heading section? - Mailer Diablo 19:51, 19 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Yeah, I've noticed a lot of weird things going on today, most importantly that, but also the random disappearance of the words "the free encyclopedia" from where it says "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" at the top of the page, and at one point the text below the edit window that currently reads "Content that violates any copyright will be deleted. Encyclopedic content must be verifiable. You agree to license your contributions under the GFDL." had turned into something completely different.
 * But as for the edit button... move it back, please. Causes a whole lot of unnecessary whitespace. -- NORTH talk 23:13, 19 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Everything appears correct to me. Tried purges and forced reloads? —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 02:22, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Forced reload fixed it for me. Ashi b aka tock 20:29, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

MOVING A SANDBOX PAGE TO A LIVE PAGE
How do I move a page that is currently in the "Sandbox" to a live page?
 * Sandbox isn't really an ideal page for drafting articles, as the only practical way to move them to mainspace is to copy-and-paste the edit windows (do this only if you've written all the text there, so as not to infringe copyright). If you create the page in a user sandbox, you can use the 'move' link at the top of the page if the article doesn't already exist. --ais523 15:55, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
 * It doesn't have to be the Wikipedia:Sandbox. It could be User:xxx/Sandbox.  The answer is: you have to have an account, be at least four days old, and can click on the "Move this page" link.  User:Zoe|(talk) 23:55, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

Parts of Wikipedia's computer thinks my article does not exist
HELP! I've emailed people not connected with Wikipedia to review my article Harry Aubrey Toulmin, Sr. and for some reason, they cannot pull up the article from the link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Aubrey_Toulmin%2C_Sr. Also, when I enter "Harry Aubrey Toulmin" or "Harry Toulmin" into Wikipedia's search, it says that no such article exists. I thought that it was because my article was missing something, such as de:Harry Toulmin, pl:Harry A. Toulmin, sk:Harry Aubrey Toulmin, sv:Harry Toulmin. I don't even know what these do, but I added them to the bottom of the article because I saw the code on some other article. That didn't change anything. Why can't outsiders pull up my artice Harry Aubrey Toulmin, Sr. and why can't I find my article via Wikipedia search? Mosty important, do you have a link that I can provide to those outside Wikipedia to be able to bring up my article, Harry Aubrey Toulmin, Sr.? Thanks.Jreferee 12:10, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
 * The problem appears to be something related with the final dot. The url http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Aubrey_Toulmin%2C_Sr%2E seems to work. The search function  is not always up-to-date, so it is not a surprise it didn't find your article. Tizio, Caio, Sempronio 12:26, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the help. The title of my article "Harry Aubrey Toulmin, Sr." ends in a period (".") which apparently is a problem according to this link.  I'll follow up with Bugzilla.  Thanks again.  Jreferee 13:35, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
 * As a work around, I've created redirect pages from Harry Aubrey Toulmin, Sr and Harry Aubrey Toulmin Sr, You can give other people links to these pages. –RHolton ≡ – 14:33, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

Making such redirects is generally a good idea. Recently I wanted to look up Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (not knowing it's actually What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, and as I very often do when going to an article, I just typed the expected URL into my URL bar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whatever_Happened_to_Baby_Jane? -- but of course the URL interpreted the question mark as an indicator that some parameter was about to come, and dropped it, taking me to Whatever Happened to Baby Jane. At the time, that was a red link, so I made a redirect. It would be good if a bot could be programmed to find all article titles ending with a punctuation mark and make redirects from punctuationless forms. —Angr 14:50, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

Aligning ? on taxobox
Hey,

I am currently trying to remove the bevelling on the title of Template:Taxobox. You can see an example of the taxobox being used here. Upon removing the bevelling (display:block;), the question mark on the right of the title appears in the top right of the article (where the FA star goes). I was wondering whether anyone knew a solution which involved removing the bevelling, but retaining the position of the question mark. To test, you can use my test page, it is up to date with the current taxobox (ignore the red link, when you press edit it is up to date). To test, use this page. Thanks --liquidGhoul 08:09, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I have created a solution, would people be able to test on my test page above whether it works in their browser/OS. Currently, I know it works on Firefox in XP and Linux. Thanks --liquidGhoul 12:52, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

creating an image link to wikimedia
I'm trying to insert http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Iris1.jpg into an article; ordinarily I'd use however there is already an image in the english wikipedia called Image:Iris1.jpg and it defaults to that image. How can I insert the correct image? Vicarious 06:59, 19 October 2006 (UTC)


 * You can't as long as there is a "local" image with the same name. You need to "move" the image that's blocking the commons image (that is: upload it under a different name and delete the old one). I would suggest moving the "local" flower image to commons with a more descriptive name, copy all the relevant history and then tag the old for deletion. --Sherool (talk) 07:20, 19 October 2006 (UTC)


 * ugh Vicarious 07:26, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

image tag problem
hi, i have found the image of via a YOUTUBE video which i "printscreen", from Gerry Alanguilan's blog but i dont know whats the right tag for the image. YOUTUBES can be embeded on anyone's site without a formal permission, so whats the right image tag for it? †B lo o d p ac k† 06:39, 19 October 2006 (UTC)


 * somewebsite (which is a speedy deletion tag). The fact that YouTube allows embedding doesn't mean that all their videos are freely licensed. Zetawoof(&zeta;) 06:58, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

Columns
Why does [bulleted list of items] work with Firefox, but not IE? And is there a way to use columns in IE other than using ... etc. I'd like to avoid having to hardcode breaks in my series. &mdash; Moondyne 06:27, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
 * "moz" within a property name has an overwhelming aroma of "Mozilla proprietary". Meanwhile, column-count is part of the draft for CSS3; as IE isn't so hot on implementing even CSS1, I think you can forget about CSS3. -- Hoary 06:36, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
 * is the one which works on Firefox, and (as the  prefix shows) it's a Gecko extension; it works almost the same as , which is on the CSS 3 draft (and AFAIK no browser implements). The use of both is for future-proofing (as other browsers can be expected to implement   but not  ). So, it's not that it does not work with MSIE; the problem is that it currently works only with Gecko-based browsers such as Firefox (but it can be expected to work with more browsers in the future, because of the future-proofing). --cesarb 17:56, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

Userbox Images
How do u use an image in the iD portion of the userbox? Kingalex56 02:37, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
 * If you're using Userbox to design it, set the id parameter to  (obviously replacing "Foobar.jpg" with the actual name of the image you want to use). Make sure it's not a "fair use" image. And although in my example I said to set the width at 45px, actually it's the height that should be 45px so you'll have to do some math to figure out what the width should be to get the height at 45px. —Angr 15:04, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

Dictionary Search + Wikipedia
I browse with Firefox and I have an addon called "Dictionary Search" that allows one to search dictionaries and other web sites through highlighted text and a right click. When I use this with Wikipedia it replaces spaces with plus signs. So if I search for "Wikipedia, the free encyclopdia" what is actually search for is "Wikipedia,+the+free+encyclopdia". Would there be a way to fix this on Wikipedia's end? I've posted a request to fix it with Firefox. Na uf ana  :  talk  01:19, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=$&go=Go&sourceid=Mozilla-search works well enough for me. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 06:22, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

Infoboxes broken
All sorts of layout just started breaking - infoboxes aren't showing borders or floating, tables aren't showing up properly, all sorts of stuff. I'm using Cologne Blue, FWIW. What changed, and can it be changed back? Nothing different on my side, as far as I know... Zetawoof(&zeta;) 00:34, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Never mind - randomly started working again. Go figure. Zetawoof(&zeta;) 02:03, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I still see this in pages like Islam and NHL. -- Jeff3000 02:53, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I don't see this anywhere. Did you try purging and force-reloading? —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 06:23, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I'm on monobook, and this problem appears to be affecting me as well. In fact, they are broken right at this moment.  -- WC Quidditch   &#9742;  &#9998;  18:15, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Please post screenshots. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 02:18, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

Columns, infoboxes, floating, and layout
As seen in this diff, the content section of the Gospel of Mark article used to create a two column layout. I, however, felt that using a browser specific, CSS3, non-standard bit of code was a bad idea (for obvious reasons, no?). So I converted the columns over to the etc templates. And everything was fine until this edit. On my laptop, with a fairly small resolution, the columns run over onto the two floating navigational tempaltes on the right. You can probably see this by simply decreasing your browser window size. Is there something easy that can be done to fix this? Or is using the CSS3 the best solution? You can't clear the float, because then the content won't start until under the templates. What if the columns were floating as well?--Andrew c 23:00, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

Simile Project
MIT has developed an awesome AJAX interface for timelines called Simile. It's under a free license (BSD) and would be an incredibly useful tool for Wikipedia. We should investigate what technical issue would be involved in integrating their technology with Wikipedia (if it's even possible). Kaldari 17:45, 18 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Looks intriguing (and a little inspired by Google Maps...?). Have you tried posting the above elsewhere, e.g. Wikimedia...?  Regards, David Kernow (talk) 09:13, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
 * "Simile" is the name of the research group, not of the Web API. The Web API is called "Simile Timeline", or just "Timeline". The research group has published many other tools.

RfA reform plan
Please see - a new idea for simple reform that needs more feedback. Rama's arrow 04:46, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

RSS watchlist
Is there any way to get an RSS feed of the articles on my watchlist? Nick.dilallo@gmail.com 00:56, 18 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Not automaticaly, there are RRS and Atom feeds for each article's history, but you need to subscribe to each one individualy. There is also a recent changes feed, but that one is not very suitable for human consumption because of the high trafic. --Sherool (talk) 07:12, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

StringFunctions
I think StringFunctions and DynamicFunctions should be added to the Wikimedia severs. They would be very useful in templates since they can operate with strings (for instance, I am thinking of a template that could automatically determine whether a particular IP adress is valid (ie. it would find that 72.76.122.155 is a valid adress while 132.277.76.9 is not). I think the developers should immediatly add them, because the code already exists). Polonium 19:09, 17 October 2006 (UTC)


 * I already answered this on m:Talk:ParserFunctions. -- Tim Starling 07:01, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

Images not appearing
Please have a look at the Monkton Combe article. I put a picture on this article yesterday, but it shows a red cross in the frame and no picture. If I click on the picture, the enlarged version shows completely normally so I know the picture is on the server. CTRL-F5 makes no difference. Is there a temporary fault on WP? (copied over here from the Help Desk at another Users suggestion)- Adrian Pingstone 15:54, 17 October 2006 (UTC)


 * ?action=purge on the article or image description page doesn't help either, and the problem is occuring on several different images, some from Commons, some from enwiki. Entering the image's URL manually gets an error saying that the PHP script exists but not the image. (CAT:CSD is a striking example of the problem at the moment, but as that category tends to change a lot it may not be by the time you read this). --ais523 16:03, 17 October 2006 (UTC)


 * OK, all's well now, the picture shows (on IE Version 6) - Adrian Pingstone 20:16, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

I'm having the same problem. On several articles, pictures aren't displaying. They were displaying just a few days ago, so I don't know what has changed. Any help would be appreciated. Thx! --71.37.111.75 03:35, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
 * NM I think everything is working fine again (no apparent reason, weird). --Dimblethum 04:15, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

Problem encountered when using search function
When I type in two or more words (usually) into the search function, I sometimes get a an special error screen that says "There was a problem with your search. This is probably temporary; try again in a few moments, or you can search Wikipedia through an external search service:" It doesn't seem to happen with single word searches, though it can be difficult to find exactly what I am looking for with just single word searches. So what is up with this? SkinnyZan 19:43, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I sometimes get this problem too - some days seem worse than others,usually repeating the search works. DuncanHill 10:27, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
 * A Yahhoogle search is quite more accurate that our internal search box. It does not care for diacritics and sometimes finds or offers bad spelling info.
 * I'm not in love with our poor search, too restricted "by technical limitations", which I duly understand, because a good search is costly. A Firefox search add-on : Wikipedia&Google, is something nice to have. -- DLL .. T 19:20, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

Staying logged on
I've been losing my session login a lot the last few hours. Are others experiencing this? Does anyone know what is happening? - Jmabel | Talk 18:42, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
 * This is question comes up quite a lot. My usual answers:
 * Make sure you have cookies on (unlikely to be the problem this time, unless you've turned them off, as you've stayed logged-in before)
 * Use the 'remember me' checkbox when logging on
 * If those don't work, there's a link in the FAQ section at the top of this page that takes you to a slower alternative connection that doesn't have these problems (it uses https, not to hide your edits, but to make the Internet connection behave; you'll have to accept the licence). --ais523 10:23, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
 * My Firefox version was stale, so I turned to InternetExplorer during some days and encountered the problem. Now I use Firefox (glory in heaven). -- DLL .. T 19:24, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

NavigationBar
Discussion moved to template talk:Navigation bar -- Rick Block (talk) 18:15, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

Underlining
If a Wikimedia project has all its links underlined (by default), how is it changed so that they aren't for all users and visitors? And before someone says that they're not underlined unless set in one's preferences, here are five examples: Welsh Wikipedia; Serbian Wikiquote; Danish Wikibooks; Romanian Wikinews; and Tamil Wiktionary. --Adam (Talk) 16:21, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
 * You have to modify $wgDefaultUserOptions in the wiki's LocalSettings.php file. If it's a Wikimedia project, file a BugZilla report. Tito xd (?!?) 19:13, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I've filed a BugZilla report. --Adam (Talk) 16:05, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
 * The report was met with this reply: RESOLVED INVALID, ask the sysops on the wiki to edit the stylesheet in the MediaWiki namespace appropriately. --Adam (Talk) 19:54, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

Statistics page
Am I the only user having trouble accessing the statistics page? It hasn't worked for several days now. Reem.--67.165.216.16 08:37, 13 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Nope, it didn't work for me either. Shards of metal  [ Talk •  Contribs  ] 18:57, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Doesn't work for me either William conway bcc 00:02, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

Top edittools location
A user on the Hindi Wikipedia asked me where the page was to edit the toolbar that shows up on top of the edit window. The one with bold, italic, underline, etc. Recently on en.wiki it had a lot more buttons, but again seems to have less. In any case a search through Special:Allmessages didn't turn up anything that I could find. Is there a good page explaining where all the Mediawiki space pages are? Help:MediaWiki namespace and MediaWiki namespace weren't terribly helpful in finding the location. Thanks - Taxman Talk 17:27, 12 October 2006 (UTC)


 * For the buttons see MediaWiki talk:Monobook.js. This edit removed the new buttons. You can add the buttons to your personal js file (I added some of them to mine). --Ligulem 18:47, 12 October 2006 (UTC)


 * I don't see them there...--//Mac Lover TalkC 01:59, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

Longest article name in wikipedia?
Wondering about some wikitrivia: What is the longest title of any article? And what is the techincal limit? "Gymnaslærer Pedersens beretning om den store politiske vekkelsen som har hjemsøkt vårt land" is the longest I've found so far. - Kris<font style="background:blue" color="white">to d 12:59, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I only know Category:Long words. Kusma (討論) 13:02, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
 * How about Krungthepmahanakornamornratanakosinmahintarayutthayamahadilokphopnopparatrajathaniburiromudomrajaniwesmahasatharnamornphimarnavatarnsathitsakkattiyavisanukamprasit (it's a redirect, actually). Tizio, Caio, Sempronio 13:08, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
 * According to the db dump of 25/09, the longest article appears to be Protocol Bringing under International Control Drugs outside the Scope of the Convention of 13 July 1931 for Limiting the Manufacture and Regulating the Distribution of Narcotic Drugs (183 chars). Also worth of mention is Talk:Lopadotemamachoselachogaleokranioleipsanodrimhypotirmmatosilphioparaomelitokatakechymenokichlepicossyphophattoperisteralektryonoptekephalliokigklopeleiolagoiosiraiobaphetraganopterygon. According to Title, the maximal allowed length of a title is 255 chars (excluding the namespace). Tizio, Caio, Sempronio 13:30, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Unfortunately, that Talk page's a db-talk, and now tagged as such... Feel free to detag it if you think it contains information useful in creating an article (presumably on ). --ais523 13:34, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
 * No problem. We still have Talk:Comparison of Internet forum software/w/wiki/Talk:Comparison of Internet forum software/wiki/Talk:Comparison of Internet forum software/w/wiki/Talk:Comparison of Internet forum software/ :-). Tizio, Caio, Sempronio 13:37, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

As of March 06, so some may have been renamed since then: Anything in Category:Articles whose titles are too long seems like a candidate. My favorite is Protocol Bringing under International Control Drugs outside the Scope of the Convention of 13 July 1931 for Limiting the Manufacture and Regulating the Distribution of Narcotic Drugs, because they can keep prepending follow-up protocols. --Interiot 14:15, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

Locating history of deleted pages
I am trying to locate the history page of an article that was removed back in March or April 2006. A search for the term reveals no article, and thus no history page. Is there a way to locate history pages of articles that have been deleted?

David (Cross-posted on Village Pump (assistance) page)
 * Do you know the article name? If not, I might be able to help find it.  If you do know the article name, the advice at Village pump (assistance) is good.  --Interiot 19:27, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

Help with an infobox
So, I created Template:Infobox religious building and I'm having trouble getting the template to align properly and for whatever reason it's completely missed up the TOC (table of contents).

Please see User_talk:Sapphire/Sandbox. I'd appreciate it if someone with far more knowledge of coding than I possess could take a stab at it. -- Sapphire 08:56, 16 October 2006 (UTC)


 * You hadn't closed the css { thing, causing the toc to get included there. It should be better now. - Bobet 09:45, 16 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Thanks, but I'm having one more problem. The template doesn't line up where it should and while the TOC problem is fixed it pushes multiple images down the page and makes everything look akward.  If you'd look at the my sandbox's talk page, scroll down and you should see the problem I'm talking about.  Thanks. -- Sapphire 15:11, 16 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Well, that's a problem with every template I've seen, not just this one (I didn't realize you meant that by your first post, since I've gotten so used to it). As far as I know, it's not possible to have an infobox and images that are right-aligned, but to the left of the infobox template (by using wikipedia's markup), same with the moving section edit links. As a workaround, people usually move the images to the left (which only leaves a small strip for the text) or start a gallery. Or just write more text so that the images will fit in neatly. - Bobet 15:41, 16 October 2006 (UTC)


 * I work on Wikitravel most of my time so I normally have a different UI experience, but I realize what the problem was shortly before reading your explanation and I'll just use the work around. Thanks. -- Sapphire 15:51, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

Top-level TOC template...?
Is there a template that produces a TOC listing only the top-level sections within an article (i.e. sections whose headings are created using the == Heading == syntax)...? There seem to be a fair number of templates that include "TOC" in their names, so apologies in advance if I've missed the one that fits the bill. Thanks, David Kernow (talk) 23:40, 13 October 2006 (UTC)


 * There isn't one, it would require css changes or changes to the mediawiki code. However, it wouldn't be hard to create one by adding some css to MediaWiki:Common.css, such as:

.toclimit5 li.toclevel-6 {display:none} .toclimit4 li.toclevel-6, .toc4 li.toclevel-5 {display:none} .toclimit3 li.toclevel-6, .toc3 li.toclevel-5, .toc3 li.toclevel-4 {display:none} .toclimit2 li.toclevel-6, .toc2 li.toclevel-5, .toc2 li.toclevel-4, .toc2 li.toclevel-3 {display:none} .toclimit1 li.toclevel-6, .toc1 li.toclevel-5, .toc1 li.toclevel-4, .toc1 li.toclevel-3, .toc1 li.toclevel-2 {display:none
 * And then creating a template to handle this:

<div class="toclimit">
 * You might convince them to add it to Common.css if you explain it is purely aesthetic and fails gracefully (worst case scenario: it displays all the levels). Alternately, you can remove the TOC via and create your own menu with anchor links (will have to be updated manually as sections change). A third option is to remove the section headers and use large text (not advised). --Splarka (rant) 07:29, 14 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your various pointers, Sparkla; I'm making a copy of your paragraph for possible future reference. Since the amount of code to be added seems minimal (and non-invasive), I wonder if it might be incorporated by the powers that be sooner rather later – assuming no objections. Which of the various routes (Bugzilla, Wikimedia, ...) do you think stands the best chance...?
 * Meanwhile, I'm happy to continue constructing the occasional manual TOC for those pages with many sub(sub)sections, but yes, it's not a long-term solution. Thanks again, David (talk) 01:13, 16 October 2006 (UTC)


 * The best route would be to propose it at MediaWiki talk:Common.css. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 04:24, 16 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Best case scenario: This would be a temporary css solution, just to increase demand for it, and possibly have it supported natively (such as adding parameters to exclude headings, like <H4 toc="false">, or having variations like __TOC2__ __TOC3__ etc). In the same way that HiddenStructure was replaced by ParserFunctions. --Splarka (rant) 07:20, 16 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Per Simetrical's pointer, have now copied the above to MediaWiki talk:Common.css. Best wishes, David (talk) 13:32, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

Improving an article
I am planning to completely rewrite an article. I figured that the best way to do this would be to create a copy in my personal sandbox, edit that, then copy the content back to the article. I figured I'd do that so that the article doesn't look bad in the meantime. However, I want to encourage people to help me improve the article. I would ask that it be done at my sandbox. But that means that when I copy the content back to the article page, only I get credit for the edits, and not the other authors. Should I move the page to my sandbox, and then immediately revert? Or is there a better way to completely rewrite an article? Thanks, Shards of metal  [ Talk •  Contribs  ] 22:35, 13 October 2006 (UTC)


 * If it's something to which you're likely to invite people, I think I'd create a separate userspace article for it (i.e. User:Shardsofmetal/Article name here), copy the article to it, revise it as far as you'd like / feel able, then invite folk to respond/contribute to your userspace revised version. If/when the moment arrives when you and any collaborators feel the userspace article is ready to replace the mainspace article, post a warning on the mainspace article's talk page, then replace (or not!) the mainspace article sometime later.
 * Hope that helps / is not tuition involving eggs and sucking, David Kernow (talk) 23:50, 13 October 2006 (UTC)


 * This approach needs some merging of page histories to preserve credit for all contributions. Carcharoth 01:30, 14 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Yeah, I was concerned about not giving credit to all contributors. That is why I thought If I moved the page, then immediately reverted, the new page would have the page history in it, while the old page would still have it's content. Then, I could post a message on the talk page pointing to my sandbox (or another subpage, wherever the new page is), recommending that they make any new edits there. Then, when the rewrite was completed, the new page could be moved (after making sure there weren't any new edits that would get overwritten) back to the article page. Would this work? Or would it be a bad idea? Thanks, Shards of metal  [ Talk •  Contribs  ] 03:22, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Why not copy and paste the current content into your work area, then when you're done, copy and paste it back again? The old history will still be in the article, but the new content will overlay it.  This is what I did with Porto-Novo when I rewrote it.  (although it was actually User:Xed who copied it back in).  User:Zoe|(talk) 19:04, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
 * He wants other people to join him at work in his work area, and wants them to retain credit for the work done in his work area when moving the new material over. Carcharoth 12:20, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
 * If multiple people work on the temporary copy before it is moved back into article space, then a history merge is required to properly integrate the two versions. As this process takes an administrator to perform, I would suggest placing a note on Administrators' noticeboard when the time to merge arrives listing the two files to be merged along with a short explanation of why you are requesting the merge.  If only a single person works on the temporary copy then Zoe's recommendation is the better way to handle the reintegration. --Allen3 talk 12:58, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
 * No need for a page history merge, just say in the edit summary merging changes from Talk:Example/Temp and change the temporary article to a redirect (with an edit summary like merged to Example so it will be known it should not be deleted). Page history merges can get ugly if the article was edited in the meantime (the history gets interleaved, which is very confusing). --cesarb 15:51, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Perfect. It should also be noted that leaving the edit history of the merged in text at a subpage of the article's talk page is better than leaving it at a subpage of a user's page. So I think the complete answer runs:
 * (A1) Copy current content to subpage of user page if you want to work on it yourself.
 * (B1) Copy current content to subpage of article's talk page if you want to run a collaboration on rewriting the article.
 * (A2) Cut and paste individual rewrite over article, remembering FIRST to check what changes have taken place since you copied the article, and incorporating them into your rewrite.
 * (B2) Merge subpage and article with edit summary as cesarb says above, remembering to incorporate changes since copying as explained in A2.
 * I would also add a note to the talk page explaining what has happened, and a note to the subpage explaining why it shouldn't be deleted (contains edit history). Just a blank page called Talk:Example/Temp might get deleted without anyone checking the final edit summary or even checking the page history at all. Carcharoth 16:46, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
 * That's why you change it to a redirect: while blank pages might get deleted or reverted without a closer look at the page history, that wouldn't happen with a redirect (and if you include the redirect in Category:Unprintworthy redirects, it's even neater). --cesarb 23:13, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

Moving something from my userpage to my talk page
An IP editor has left a question to me on my userpage, without signing it. I want to move it to my talk page, and somehow show who made it. How do I do this? DuncanHill 13:59, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Move and then sign it for them using the template unsigned. Martin 14:00, 16 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Thank you! Hadn't realised it would be that straightforward! DuncanHill 14:07, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

Chemical Romancers as templates
I was looking through Category:Band templates and noticed there are some extraneous entries that are listed (mostly due to users creating a template in their sandbox) - but I couldn't understand why Gerard Way and Frank Iero are listed as templates. There is nothing in those pages that have:

It's a bit odd they're both in the same band. I know the list of templates is dynamic as I've added items to it and cleaned up other that shouldn't be included.

Further: these Chemical Romance songs are also listed as templates, and there are probably more:


 * Helena (song)


 * Honey, This Mirror Isn't Big Enough for the Two of Us


 * Drowning Lessons

amnesiac 10:42, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

FIXED: Template:My Chemical Romance was missing the "noinclude" tag which causes every item in the template to become a template. Should've look there first! amnesiac 11:02, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

Template formatting issue
I've been trying to rework WikiProject Tropical cyclones/Navigation to use, but for some reason, I can't make it work well. I'm working on it at User:Titoxd/Sandbox T, but for some reason, the headers of the NavFrame div mess up the layout entirely. Can anyone see what's wrong? Help? Tito xd (?!?) 21:20, 15 October 2006 (UTC)


 * What/how much of the template are you wishing to become hideable – everything from the Cyclone_barnstar image downward...? Regards, David Kernow (talk) 01:26, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Actually, I'm trying to hide the "Assessment" and "Noticeboard" sections as "inner" divs, then hide everything but the barnstar and name with an outside div. I don't know I made much sense... Tito xd (?!?) 02:01, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

Images, ..., video, and sounds (hints about property rights)
Hello! Every WP help page about images &c. should show both hints and links : What to do next ? Listing those pages and those places. -- DLL .. T 20:55, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
 * 1) Kind of images than may be uploaded (free license required, &c.)
 * 2) Places where to search for such.
 * Candidate WP pages :
 * Help:Editing
 * Upload file (from the link on the left ; but, being a special page, there is no discussion tag - please help.)
 * Candidate places
 * List of ... "sites delivering or searching for free for use media", e.g. :
 * http://search.yahoo.com/cc/

Page Hits Statistics
Hello,

Just a little request. Down the left hand side of pages you have the very useful info on what links here etc. Would it be possible to track the number of page hits for each page and have a statistics page for each article telling you facts on creation date, number of hits, where the hits came from, graphs on hits etc? I would love to see this and it would bring great satisfaction to users to see how much their hard work was being used and referenced. Comments? Pluke 18:47, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Well, as for hit counters, there's no way that can be done without rewiring the server infrastructure, so it was disabled a long time ago. Creation date can probably be added, although I think it would be more useful to know the total number of revisions in a page, instead of the earliest revision. Tito xd (?!?) 19:09, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Thanks, I was looking for that clarification. Introducing an official stats page with number of edits, largest contributor etc could be ace.Pluke 19:45, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
 * There is a "off site" statistics of sort on the toolserver though. Basicaly they set up the global javascript to have a one in 10.000 (or whatver) chance of "pinging" a script on the toolserver. While somewhat random the result is a faily representative statistic over time considering the millions of hits the site gets. It doesn't show exactly how many views an article has but it does give us an idea of what the most populat topics are. Can't remember the adress at the moment though :( --Sherool (talk) 05:20, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

Purging CSS?
If e.g. MediaWiki:Common.css is changed, then the CSS still isn't updated always (or at least usually nothing does on sv-wikt). Is there a way of purging that CSS, so it'll work on all pages. If you don't do anything, will the CSS still be updated within 31 days? (I noticed that it says "&smaxage=2678400" in the source code, and 2678400=60*60*24*31) Shell-man 15:46, 14 October 2006 (UTC)


 * You could always ask users to purge it manually (reload browser, purge cache, disable caching, whatever), or leave a template "If this page displays incorrectly, purge your cache". Note that for /main.css, the devs have a trick for forcing changes instantly:

<style type="text/css" media="screen,projection">/*<![CDATA[*/ @import "/skins-1.5/monobook/main.css ?11 "; /*]]>*/
 * ...they just change that number, causing the previous browser cached version to be invalidated. I think there is some discussion on doing that for MediaWiki: and User: css sheets in the future. --Splarka (rant) 02:56, 15 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Either you didn't understand my question or I didn't understand you answer. I'm not talking about the browser cache, but about the MediaWiki cache. MediaWiki (obviously) creates a cache of the CSS files, and it's a bit strange I think. View and update it a few times in the browser. For me it changes practically every time (it changes also when I've got cache disabled). Is there a way to do so that it wont change (and be updated)? If you change the URL to e.g.  then only the correct version is shown. Shell-man 08:25, 15 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Your question as it was phrased only seemed to indicate your interest in client cache. The &smaxage= parameter defines the "Cache-Control" header which is sent by the server to the browser, which defines to the browser the maximum age it should allow the cached page to reach before reloading. For example, &smaxage=2678400 generates Cache-Control: public, s-maxage=2678400, max-age=2678400. I don't know Wikimedia's server cache setup enough to answer your rephrased question, but it could probably be a propagation issue (taking a few minutes/hours/days for every cache server to get the latest version). --Splarka (rant) 07:43, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

Style changes
Did anyone else notice a change in the padding around headings and the titles of pages? The padding increased significantly for me suddenly yesterday, logged in and logged out, so it's not my personal css. Did anyone else notice this? — Mets 501 (talk) 00:44, 14 October 2006 (UTC)


 * I've noticed this as well. Personally, I think the extra padding is unnecessary. --<font color="#CC0018">T <font color="#0000C0">M F Let's Go Mets - Stats 00:53, 14 October 2006 (UTC)


 * I agree, I hate it. It only seems to affect Firefox, also. Let's Go Mets!! — Mets 501  (talk) 01:09, 14 October 2006 (UTC)


 * I'm also not wowed by it and wonder if/where any consensus for it might be...? As I guess it's something requiring bureaucrat (or higher) level involvement, I've also posted a query here. Regards, David Kernow (talk) 03:12, 14 October 2006 (UTC)


 * I'm using Internet Explorer and it also affects me. --334 05:49, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

Yes, the recent changes look UGLY. I can't see any recent changes to MediaWiki:Monobook.css and MediaWiki:Common.css that might have affected it though. enochlau (talk) 05:58, 14 October 2006 (UTC)


 * This is most likely an unexpected consequence of the fix to bug 2013. This is the bug that caused large and small text to inheirit the line-height of parent elements (em should, apparently, never be used for defining line height; only a multiplier (##), a point size (##pt) or percentage (##%)). To verifiy that this is the cause, you can copy the old main.css values (most likely just the one for #content) to your user css. If this is indeed the cause, please experimentally determine some correct values (not containing em) to replace the existing ones and then relay them to User:Simetrical.


 * As to what this bug fixed, compare these oddly sized pieces of text:

This is a line this is another line This is a line this is another line
 * To the same code on an older version of MediaWiki: . --Splarka (rant) 07:57, 14 October 2006 (UTC)


 * An update, after some experimenting, the following values return very close approximations to the previous state for general page layout (although not perfect). Note that I only edit some of the major ones, there were 17 total style changes. Also, here is an interesting explanation as to why this change had to be. "This is why it’s always strongly recommended that you use unitless numbers if you’re going to set a line-height on something like the html or body elements, or indeed on any element that is going to have descendant elements." ^_^ --Splarka (rant) 10:11, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

line-height: 1.05; } .diff { line-height: 1.46; } p { line-height: 1.46; } ul { line-height: 1.47; } ol { line-height: 1.47; } .portlet ul { line-height: 1.545; }
 * 1) content {
 * I've just added a .diff class above. — Mets 501 (talk) 13:08, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I've also added this to our local MediaWiki:Monobook.css for now. — Mets 501 (talk) 16:20, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

Has anyone else noticed that wikitables and such have been completely stripped of their padding? Whenever I look at a table now, the table cells and rows are scrunched together, making the table look extremely ugly. This may only be my computer, but with the recent rash of style changes, I don't believe the problem is limited to my computer. --<font color="#CC0018">T <font color="#0000C0">M F Let's Go Mets - Stats 17:58, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Yes, that's been fixed, we just have to wait for the damn css to refresh (I don't think there's a way to do that manually, but I may be wrong) — Mets 501 (talk) 18:08, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
 * OK, it's been refreshed. Everything should be back to normal: instead of implementing the above changes (which weren't ready yet, as you can see by the side effects) I just reverted the global changes locally until we can figure this whole thing out. — Mets 501  (talk) 18:14, 14 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Thanks to all for (seemingly) sorting all this out!  David Kernow (talk) 01:20, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

I've made some adjustments in r17038. Give it a day or so to take effect and then have a look at the smaller wikis (which won't have reverted the spacing change to begin with) to see if it works right. It looks correct on my test wiki. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 01:54, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

Well, I haven't dealt with tables yet, just headers. I'll take a closer look at what's happened to various types of markup and see what I can do. This will take some tweaking, but it's ultimately what we want. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 04:27, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Never mind, I've temporarily rolled the changes back. You can remove the manual overrides at the next resync; I won't readd the changes until I'm sure it looks the same as before the change (that is, except for where it's not supposed to, as in the example Splarka posted above). —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 05:32, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

w/index.php
What is with all of these pages which end in w/index.php? They always contain tons of spam. Is there something unique about such a page, or is it just one spammer or group of spammers who keep creating these pages? User:Zoe|(talk) 03:16, 11 October 2006 (UTC)


 * You mean like http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical) that's just the "real" URL for the script that display the pages, normaly it's "obscured" by a rewrite engine so it looks like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical) see Eliminating index.php from the url for details. Do you you mean actual article titiels with index.php in them? In that case it's probably a broken spambot... --Sherool (talk) 06:28, 11 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Actual article titles, ending in /w/index.php. But there are lots of them.  User:Zoe|(talk) 17:08, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
 * See, for example, if you have admin access, the history of Talk:Bad title/w/index.php. User:Zoe|(talk) 23:31, 11 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Yes, those are crappy spambots. --brion 01:22, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Just a quick google search for nuking the ones that slipped through the cracks: . MER-C 12:21, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia / Internet Explorer 6 problem
I am running Internet Explorer V.6.0.2900.2180 and I have a problem ONLY with Wikipedia pages and it used to happen to me with win98se before I changed to winXP so it seems independent of the OP and even maybe the browser version. It does not happen with any other sites that I am aware of.

It has to do with having the IE Security Settings Active Scripting set to "Prompt" (which is how I want to have it). If I set Active Scripting to Enable or to Disable, this problem does not happen. You would think that setting it to "Prompt" and then accepting the prompt would be the same as having it set to "Enable" but that's not how it works. Even setting it to "Disable" makes the pages work fine. But if I set Active Scripting to "Prompt", no matter what I choose when prompted, Wikipedia pages exhibit a strange problem: Then I cannot select and highlight text in the page using the left mouse button. Also, when I go to a box and try to type, like in a search box or when editing a page, it will not "take" and the box will remain as it was. Then I can right-click and "select all" and all the text will be selected and I can type in its place.

It only happens with Wikipedia pages, no other sites. I deduce that there is some script in Wikipedia pages which makes this happen. I can solve the problem by listing Wikipedia as a trusted site because there I have Active Scripting enabled and the problem does not arise but I am quite curious as to the cause of this problem. It seems it may be caused by some malfunction of IE in response to some specific script code in Wikipedia pages.

Can someone look at the scripts in the Wikipedia pages source code and find out where may be the cause of the problem? Any other ideas or workarounds?


 * I have no idea if this will work, but maybe you could try accessing Wikipedia through the slower secure server. I really don't know if this will work, but it's worth a try, right? Hope that helps, Shards of metal  [ Talk •  Contribs  ] 05:03, 15 October 2006 (UTC)


 * I tried using a secure server but the problem remains the same. As I say, I have found workarounds myself but I would think this problem affects many other people. I think the problem probably lies between IE andsome script.

Hidden "Extras" in JPG files costing Wikipedia unnecessary bandwidth
I've recently completed a program called "JPGExtra" that removes hidden "extras" from JPG files (eg. Comments, Thumbnail Images, Exif data, Photoshop data, Adobe XMP data, etc): http://www.fieggen.com/software/jpgextra.htm

I occasionally scan my own "Temporary Internet Files" folder to see what extras are in typical JPG images on web sites that I've been browsing. After visiting Wikipedia, I found some files with ENORMOUS percentages of "extras". For example, on Fg2's many photos of Japan, some had as much as 98% waste. In other words, the actual image data comprised only 2% of the JPG file!

120px-AsakusaShrine1443.jpg: Original Size: 202,412 bytes; Optimized Size: 3,991 bytes; Amount Saved: 198,421 bytes; Percent Saved: 98%.

My question is three-fold:

1. Does Wikipedia generate small preview images from large, full-sized images, and if so, does the resizing algorithm unnecessarily include these "extras"?

2. Is there any mechanism in place to reduce image overheads, either automatically or manually, thus reducing Wikipedia's bandwidth costs?

3. If I do find glaring examples of such bandwidth-wasting images, what's the best mechanism for correcting them? Contacting the contributor? Fixing the image and overwriting Wikipedia's copy with my corrected copy? Ian Fieggen 06:02, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
 * For the above example image, do you have a breakdown of what the "extras" are and their sizes? --TheParanoidOne 06:00, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Peeking inside the file, the "extras" comprise:


 * 1. An Exif segment of 8,530 bytes, including thumbnail image;


 * 2. A HUGE ICC Color Profile spanning Three segments, total size 174,002 bytes;


 * 3. A Photoshop segment of 9,724 bytes, including a second thumbnail image;


 * 4. An Adobe XMP data segment of 6,149 bytes.


 * Just to be clear, NONE of these "extras" is used by the browser when displaying the image, but they ARE nonetheless downloaded and thus consume bandwidth.


 * Hope that all makes sense, if not it's explained on my site. Ian Fieggen 06:23, 3 October 2006 (UTC)


 * (edit conflict) Wikipedia uses ImageMagick on the server side to rescale images on the fly. It's GPL'd software, so you can look to see what it does and what options it has.  — EncMstr 06:03, 3 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Okay, that probably explains the "extras" being migrated to the smaller images. In that case, it seems that we need only concentrate on ensuring that users' original full-sized contributions are as free of "extras" as possible. Perhaps I should release a GPL version of my program, with which Wikipedia could encourage users to optimize their photos prior to uploading? Ian Fieggen 06:45, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I think we should leave the originals as-is, but yeah it would make sense to strip out all the meta stuff from the generated thumbnails. --Sherool (talk) 07:12, 3 October 2006 (UTC)


 * This JPG file was an extreme example, but the full-size image also contained the huge ICC colour profile. The total "Extras" were about 68% of the full-sized image, so even there it makes sense to remove them.


 * Anyone from Wikipedia wanting to play with a full copy of my JPGExtra program to do their own experimentation, e-mail me (from the web site) and I'll send you a copy. Ian Fieggen 07:20, 3 October 2006 (UTC)


 * (edit confict again) Removing the information wholesale might not be the best solution. For example, if a PNG contains original photoshop layer information, it would be incredibly useful to retain in the stored image in case someone wants to make a derived work from it.  Once an image is flattened (the layers lost), it becomes very tedious to, for example, replace the text of a map with another language.  Is there any hint that this information is retained in the extra baggage?  If so, there needs to be two mechanisms for image retrieval:  one for display on a page, the other for downloading the whole nine yards.  Image display is obviously a candidate to remove the cruft, unless someone knows better.  — EncMstr 07:22, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
 * One worry is whether images are being used to store anything that we don't know about. For example, child porn can be embedded within a seemingly innocuous image! That concern aside, storing the full JPG file but only displaying the image portion sounds like a good option. From a purely historical point of view, it's interesting to hang on to as much as possible. Ian Fieggen 07:38, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Ian, does your tool do anything that Imagemagick doesn't do? Maybe Imagemagick needs some more options set when displaying an image?  — EncMstr 07:22, 3 October 2006 (UTC)


 * I'm no developer, just a stand-alone software programmer. My program is designed with a Windows user in mind whereas the ImageMagick seems to be something "embedded", or callable by Wikipedia. Ian Fieggen 07:38, 3 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Side note: You might want to also consider dropping a post to the wikitech-l mailing list (see also Mailing lists). More MediaWiki and WikiMedia developers read over there. --Ligulem 08:45, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

In any case, does anyone have answers to my questions 2 and 3? Ian Fieggen 08:32, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
 * 2) Not bandwidth no, there are a lot of caching and load optimising going on to keep the servers from blowing up under the preasure of all the requests, but I don't think the volume of data piped out is a major concern in the grand scheme of things (we haven't even disabled "hotlinking" to images) 3) Just upload the optimised version on top of the old one (as long as it's free licensed images). If possible I would suggest avoiding stipping away author information and such from the EXIF data though, it should not take up a lot of space compared to the embeded thumbnails and what not anyway. --Sherool (talk) 11:04, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

What are you talking about? We use EXIF data in the image description page, comments are good for storing copyright information, and extra content specific to a certain editor (Photoshop meta-data) can be used to make the images easier for others to edit. Please don't remove this data. Bandwidth is not a concern. Especially compared to ease of editing and maintaining images and image history. — Omegatron 13:27, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I'm talking about files that are 98% waste! Sure, an Exif data segment of only 200 odd bytes is quite acceptable, but one that contains a thumbnail image that's larger than the main image is just ridiculous, as is having a color profile with 10x the amount of data as the image itself. Even the main image, from which this smaller image was derived, was 2/3 "waste". This excess can surely be stripped back to something more reasonable? Admittedly, my program currently strips everything, but a modified version that strips selected portions would be advisable. As for bandwidth not being a concern, I recently halved a site's bandwidth consumption by optimizing their images. That's not to be sneezed at! Besides the cost saving, it makes the site that much faster. Never forget that Wikipedia is also for poorer people with slow Internet connections. Ian Fieggen 22:56, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Color is a major deficiency on Wikipedia, I think. At least some people are including profiles in their JPEG files. They should not be stripped under any circumstances unless they are sRGB profiles. I guess the data could be profile-mapped to sRGB, allowing a smaller profile. Notinasnaid 19:55, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
 * It seems people would rather that I didn't mess with the images, which was my feeling also, so I don't intend to do so. It should be up to the individual. However, shouldn't there also be an advice section for people uploading to ensure that their JPG files aren't overloaded prior to uploading? Also, where such heavily overloaded images are identified, shouldn't there be procedures in place for rectifying them and/or alerting the sender? Ian Fieggen 22:56, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I'll also reinterate that color and EXIF data are important to files, though adobe proprietary data sectors may not be useful, and may be a result of a file not being properly exported for 'web' by the application. (Macromedia Fireworks, for example, does some awful things to PNG files if you don't export them). --Kevin_b_er 00:33, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

If you want to get something useful done, post a patch on bugzilla and start a conversation on the wikitech-l list. The village pump is not a good place for development planning.

In general, we expect uploaded images to include EXIF metadata: this is both useful and desireable.

Generated thumbnails should, generally speaking, not include a lot of metadata. If and only if you see large metadata chunks being carried over into generated thumbs, then and only then do we need to do something about it. Please limit discussion and work to only this case; the above conversation includes a lot of useless-looking fighting which doesn't seem to address the actual issue.

Rendered thumbs for files other than SVG and DjVu are currently generated using ImageMagick. If you intend to work on this issue, please begin with the necessary basic research: checking the online documentation for ImageMagick for EXIF-related issues and options.

Once you know a) the problem space and b) a recommendation, then you can provide some specific suggestions in the appropriate developer forum. (Eg a patch on bugzilla and a post on wikitech-l to make sure people look it over.) --brion 00:59, 4 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Okay, this sounds too heavy for me. I'd need to determine the extent of the problem (presumably by browsing), learn how ImageMagick works and how Wikipedia implements it, figure out a solution, then familiarise myself with the various forums on Wikipedia and persons to whom to address such suggestions. Whilst I'm someone who likes to help, I don't want to be pushing my own barrow uphill. If Wikipedia couldn't care less about bandwidth and would rather just have all images kept intact, that's fine, I was only making a suggestion. Ian Fieggen 03:58, 4 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Of course we want to keep all images intact -- doing otherwise would destroy data. "Bandwidth", however, is going to be primarily a matter of inline thumbnails, not the original high-resolution files. --brion 19:39, 4 October 2006 (UTC)


 * I've just committed a very simple fix for this (use  instead of  ) to SVN.  This makes MediaWiki depend on ImageMagick 6, but since that was released in April 2004 I guess most people have upgraded by now.  Note that this fix will only affect new thumbnails (unless some server admin is kind enough to locate and delete all the old affected ones), and that it won't have any effect until the fix is deployed to the servers.  To purge affected images manually (once the code is deployed), append "?action=purge" to the end of the URL of the image description page and reload.  —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 15:12, 5 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Even though I don't understand all the technicalities, which will be more familiar to Wiki-techs, it sounds like this will provide a good solution. Ian Fieggen 01:30, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
 * ...aaand it's live! If you see any huge thumbnails, just purge the image.  (You may also have to purge your browser cache to see the effect.)  —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 12:15, 6 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Could this be causing the very slow image loading lately?  (See  below.)  &mdash; Catherine\talk 08:24, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Oh dear, I hope my suggestion hasn't made matters worse.Ian Fieggen 06:41, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

Correct info for Category:Band Templates
In [Category:Band templates] (why doesn't it work when i put 2 square brackets around that link??) it states:

To add a template, use the following code:

[Category:Band templates|]

When I copy and paste that code, replacing for the band name, it doesn't work. What I've seen in other articles is that people use which inserts the category template. Is the info in my link correct or mangled? amnesiac 02:27, 15 October 2006 (UTC)


 * You can link to a category with an extra colon: Category:Band templates -> Category:Band templates.
 * What you pasted above isn't a template, it is just the code to categorize a template into the category "Band templates". What you have to do is create Template:Band name here (not that one obviously) and utilize that to categorize the template as a band template. --Splarka (rant) 03:04, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Thank, Splarka - I see now - I thought that code was what one inserted into an article which would *include* the template, but now I see in fact it's code for the basis of the template being assigned to a category itself. I went ahead and copied an existing template. Thanks for the tip on linking to a category too! amnesiac 03:13, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

CSS error? External links
A rendering error in IE7 was discussed on Wikipedia_talk:External_links where it was suggested I raised the issue here. Basically, the icon for external links does not render properly in IE7 if the link spans two or more lines. Image here. Rawling 23:06, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

CSS or other formatting problem?
A few minutes ago, tables began to have much smaller padding and the line spacing in Template:Quotation and my watchlist and probably other pages as well is much smaller. How can I fix this? ~iNVERTED | Rob (Talk | Contribs) 17:59, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Don't worry, it's fixed now. The CSS will probably refresh soon. — Mets 501  (talk) 18:05, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

Deleting original page after #REDIRECT
I created an article on Ferozpur but accidently left a period on the end of the word. To enable links to work, I moved "Ferozpur." to "Ferozpur". Now there is the useless page "Ferozpur." which exists solely as a #REDIRECT page.

Can it be deleted, as it seems to me it is just clutter? Mattisse(talk) 16:38, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I've deleted it. — Mets 501 (talk) 16:42, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Thanks! Mattisse(talk) 18:14, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

Problem editing pages
I sometimes get this when trying to edit pages - any ideas what's happening? ERROR The requested URL could not be retrieved

While trying to retrieve the URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?

The following error was encountered:

Unsupported Request Method and Protocol Squid does not support all request methods for all access protocols. For example, you can not POST a Gopher request.

Your cache administrator is support.

Generated Sat, 14 Oct 2006 15:22:57 GMT by mk-accel-2.www.uk.tiscali.com (squid/2.5.STABLE11)

DuncanHill 15:25, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

In the News
Is there a template to use when a page has been featured, please? BlueValour 01:03, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Yes, featured article. It goes at the bottom of the article, before the categories, not at the beginning. — Mets 501 (talk) 01:11, 14 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Or, perhaps you're looking for the templates used on talk pages that categorize articles in Category:Articles referenced by the press? These templates are listed on the category page. -- Rick Block (talk) 01:41, 14 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Thanks, folks. BlueValour 19:57, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

Keyboard shortcuts don't work in Firefox RC 2.0
I seem to have lost the ability to use alt-anything after upgrading from Firefox 1.5.0.7 to 2.0 RC. Known bug? (Alt-s is captured by the browser for History, but nothing else). &mdash; Rob (  talk  ) 17:05, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
 * There's some discussion and possible workaround mentioned here. It sounds like it's just related to Alt-S, and you can either use Shift-Alt+S, or you can fiddle with about:config to choose which modifier key you want to trigger the accesskeys. --Interiot 17:13, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I can definitely confirm Alt-P and Alt-I don't work either. But I can understand not passing alt past the browser. I'll just use alt-shift-? instead. &mdash; Rob (  talk  ) 17:22, 13 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Firefox has changed the way they do shortcut keys in 2.0. It's now alt+shift on Windows/Linux instead of alt. --brion 21:07, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

Template:NFL player
Template:NFL player seems to be broken. Can someone take a look? --ZimZalaBim (talk) 15:40, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I guess it's because HiddenStructure was disabled today. Every template that uses it is a mess now. (Although I don't think it can get much worse than the example you pointed out.) - Bobet 16:28, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

Interwiki problem
I found an unique interlanguage link problem at the article Three Kingdoms of Korea. The correct Neapolitan language link Tre Regni d''a Corea has been entered there, but the two apostrophes cause the software to create italics, and the link doesn't work as a result. - GilliamJF 14:52, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I fixed it by changing it to Tre Regni d%27%27a Corea . Tra (Talk) 18:05, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

Template issue
On this page, I want to get rid of the periods before the office names, but when I do, those whole lines go blank. Do I have to put in a rank for the offices to show up, or can I somehow leave the "order" line blank? Biruitorul 07:00, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I replaced them with &amp;emsp; (whitespace), seems to have done it? --Splarka (rant) 07:34, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Yes, thanks! Biruitorul 19:32, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

my page disappeared
i just made a new page by the name of Store Wars (Star Wars Parody) and it disappeared! I know i saved it, could someone please explain? Nichlok 23:59, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
 * That article was deleted by Lucky 6.9 as non notable film. See . I would ask him for more details. Garion96 (talk) 00:12, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

ok, thank you Nichlok 20:19, 13 October 2006 (UTC)Nichlok

text flow with multiple images
Is there a command to tell the layout software not to leave white space until the end of the current image? (I thought I saw a comment about it but can't remember where. I usually just move the images.) RJFJR 21:10, 12 October 2006 (UTC)


 * You mean like the caption space? It gives it to the image if you use the "thumb" command.  I think you can prevent it by not using it or the "frame" option. You can stil specifiy a smaller size, e.g. |250px|, but it won't give you the caption space. HTH &mdash; Frecklefoot | Talk 21:38, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

I don't think that's what I mean. See Stony Kill Falls. There's a block of white space after the first heading until the end of the first image. I'd like to have the next piece of text run next to the first image too.

I could shrink the first image (thumb) or rearrange where in the article the images are entered. I was wondering there was a way to do it without having to change the article. Thank you. RJFJR 16:16, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

Section Edit links now on left, not right
On many pages, suddenly, (but oddly not this one), section edit links are now appearing on a new line at the left, instead of at the right, where they have been for years. It is not a browser issue, since I exited Netscape 7 and restarted it and the aticle-dependent change is still there. Is this a new technical change that has not been adequately tested? Hu 21:10, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

Immediately after entering this item, the links on this page shifted. Seems to be something introduced by the editing process. To clarify, the edit link is on the left on a line on its own, and the section to edit is below it. Hu 21:11, 12 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Happening to me too, found it very confusing!DuncanHill 21:16, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

It looks like the code is now dropping the following: style="float:right;margin-left:5px;" out of the div class = "editsection". Please restore the code! Please test adequately before changes! Hu 21:19, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

The "edit" link used to appear to the right of section headers. Just now it moved two lins above the header. Was this an intentional change? -Will Beback 21:10, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I saw that too... just purging the cache worked to get rid of the problem for me. Tito xd (?!?) 21:17, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

'''The style was moved from inline to out of line. The CSS links have been updated now, but you may have to edit something or log in / log out if your particular cached pages show old things.''' --brion 21:34, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Thanks! -Will Beback 23:47, 12 October 2006 (UTC)


 * All the section edit links -- which used to appear floated right on a level with section headers -- are messed up, displaying left and above the section headers. If this is "the coffeemaker exploded" well, I'd help clean up if I knew how. If this is "bubbling test tube number nine", please put it back in Pandora's Box. Thank you. John Reid 21:18, 12 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Please see the section (two sections) above this one. Thanks! Flcelloguy (A note? ) 21:36, 12 October 2006 (UTC)


 * I've logged out, closed all browser windows, purged my local memory and disk cache, quit and restarted the browser, and logged in again. Looks like this works okay in Monobook and Classic but fails in Cologne Blue (the chosen skin of discriminating editors™). I really do wish that editors who make interface changes would please preview these changes in all skins before committing the entire community to them. Okay?


 * For impatient Cologne Blue users like me, I offer this edit to Special:Mypage/cologneblue.css:




 * This has restored proper function for me. John Reid 02:41, 13 October 2006 (UTC)


 * It's just fine in Cologne Blue as well. --brion 21:15, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

Changing the title of a page
I want my user page to not have the title of User:Clientele, but still retain the same URL. How can I change the page title? I saw this done on Uncyclopedia here, and I tried to transfer code here, but it dosen't work. Anyone know how to fix it?


 * If you mean Uncyclopedia:Template:Title, then you can copy the wikicode to your user page to tweak with it (do not create it as a template, someone will delete it). Example:

<div style="padding-top:0; padding-bottom:0; text-align:left; position:absolute; left:0.95em; top:0%; width:98%; background-color:transparent"><div style="margin-bottom: 0; color: black; background-color: #FFFFFF; font-weight: normal; padding-top: .5em; padding-bottom: .17em; font-size: 188%; border-bottom: 1px solid #aaaaaa;">Insert Title Here


 * It will look ugly for people using other skins, do not use it anywhere but your user page (and even that is probably not a good idea). --Splarka (rant) 07:28, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

My page keeps being deleted
I have made a page today called Bim (1975 film) and sum jackass keeps deleting it sayin its copywritten text when ive wrote the entire thing myself...can sumone explain 2 me who keeps doing this and why! Infamous_01


 * According to the deletion log, this article has only been deleted once (and has been recreated). As you mentioned, the reason given was "copyvio". The person who deleted it was Konstable. If you have any problems, you should talk to him on his talk page. Shards of metal  [ Talk •  Contribs  ] 01:58, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
 * This is the English Wikipedia. Please communicate in English.  User:Zoe|(talk) 03:17, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

Images
I have a quick question. On all of the computers in my house the articles load very quickley but sometimes the Images load very slowly or not at all, what cause the images to sometimes not appear? Please Let me know on my talk page-- Sea dog  .M.S  20:15, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
 * The slow and infrequent image loading has been an issue for some time now. Another section devoted to this issue can be found near the top of the page. --<font color="#CC0018">T <font color="#0000C0">M F Let's Go Mets - Stats 21:25, 12 October 2006 (UTC)


 * I seem to have been having image problems today also. Mostly, the images don't appear. Sometimes reloading fixes the problem, sometimes it doesn't. Earlier today, I wanted to view an archived image, and I got an error page, saying that the image wasn't in the cache, and viewing images that weren't in the cache wasn't allowed. It's the first time it's happened to me. Hope the issue is resolved soon. Shards of metal  [ Talk •  Contribs  ] 01:37, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

Policy question
A third party just wrote me: Please leave Rosencomet and his articles alone. Can this third party enforce this, especially given that the person in question, Rosencomet, has edited hundreds of articles, perhaps more? Any articles involving certain themes are being considered his, even if he did not originate them.

If this is not the right forum to ask this question, please point me in the right direction. Thanks! Timmy12 18:38, 12 October 2006 (UTC)


 * This is, as you guessed, the wrong forum for this question. Try Help desk or Village pump (policy) or Village pump (assistance). --cesarb 03:22, 13 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Thank you for your suggestions above. I tried them but none are appropriate for my problem which is becoming more critical. I need actual help and protection. I need access to a source that can give me some real information. A pattern of harassment is being repeated toward me that started a few weeks after I got an account at Wikipedia a month or so ago. That resulted in me being accused of being a sockpuppet. The charge was ruled false but it was a horrible ordeal for me. The same people have started again. Can you direct me to a source, place, or person before something bad happens. Timmy12 12:24, 13 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Don't let "Timmy" fool you, take a look at "his" contributions. He didn't try your suggestions at all. Also, talk a look at Suspected sock puppets/Mattisse, especially the note about posting on Village pump (technical) for help, and Suspected sock puppets/Mattisse (2nd) for why Timmy perceives this as happening "again". &mdash;Hanuman Das 13:03, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia blocking opera?
Hi everyone,

I'm an avid opera user and an avid wikipedia editor. Yesterday, as I was submitting my rewrite of the Graffiti article (trying to get its featured article status back), the page just hung for hours - opera would connect to wikipedia as I wasn't getting timeout errors, but it would just hang indefinitely. Thinking it might be my ISP or wikipedia going down for maintenance, I ignored the issue. Today, I tried to load the wikipedia frontpage, and the same thing happened. Frustrated, I tried it on firefox and the front page loaded in seconds. I then went into my opera site settings for wikipedia and told it to identify itself as mozilla, and that's fixed the problem.

I was just wondering, what's going on? Why can't one load wikipedia pages with opera identifying itself as opera anymore?

Thanks,

Ultra-Loser Talk 04:55, 12 October 2006 (UTC)


 * I am experiencing a similar issue. Wikipedia pages take minutes to load in Opera, but Opera loads other websites very quickly. Firefox loads Wikipedia pages quickly too. If this issue persists, I will report it on the My Opera Community Forums. --J.L.W.S. The Special One 05:29, 12 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Others who use Opera are reporting no issues. See the Opera thread on the Wikipedia-l archive. What version of Opera are you using? –RHolton ≡ – 12:46, 12 October 2006 (UTC)


 * I use version 9.00 and have noticed major slowdowns, especially after the browser has been active for a long time. I had assumed it was the system until I tried another browser. I've found that restarting Opera fixes the problem. -Will Beback 23:49, 12 October 2006 (UTC)


 * I'm on 9.2, I've just set it to identify itself as opera again and I'm not experiencing any problems anymore. Perhaps it's the browser working too much, like Will suggests. I just thought it was strange that I should have to set my browser to identify itself as mozilla. Ultra-Loser Talk 00:14, 13 October 2006 (UTC)


 * I'm using Opera 8.5. Today, Opera is loading Wikipedia pages at its usual speed, and I don't see any other problems. The problems only lasted two days; perhaps it's a temporary bug/glitch that has now been fixed. --J.L.W.S. The Special One 02:25, 13 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Had this problem for the past couple of days but it's working fine now while IDing as Opera. &#969;hkoh &#91;&#1058;&#93; 09:36, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

trouble displaying copied template from wiki
I'm trying to start up a wiki based on asian pop culture and would like to start off using the same exact entries in wikipedia for some pages but im having a problem making the pages look the same as on Wikipedia.

Specifically, I'm having trouble displaying the template "Template:Infobox idol" correctly. Please compare:

Wikipedia's site (the way i want it to show up):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Infobox_idol

Can you see the difference? the infobox version on my website is messed up. I've also copied and created the other templates parsed in the "Template:Infobox idol" but to no avail. I have the parsefunctions extension installed and ive created monobook.css and commons.css

I've been spending alot of time installing other templates that I thought would fix the problem but so far nothing. I've been thinking because of that it has something to do with Javascript or CSS, but I don't really know.

Could somebody please help me out?

Thanks, Ryan


 * I took a look and, while I do not know what is causing it, I can say it's not JavaScript or CSS. For some reason, your site seems to be behaving differently when HTML table row markup is used within a wiki table. I'd guess it's the HTML Tidy setup which is different on your site (AFAIK, the builtin markup sanitizer behaves quite differently when it knows the output will not be fixed up further by tidy). Try enabling the relevant MediaWiki option (after installing whatever it needs) and see if it makes a difference. An alternative workaround would be to use only HTML table markup instead of mixing it with wiki table markup as is currently being done on that infobox. --cesarb 05:43, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

Thanks CesarB. What exactly would the relevant MediaWiki option be? I was also wondering if I could be provided the table only in HTML table markup in case there is no other choice.

got it! see this: http://www.mwusers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2767

'Why isn't this box floating?
Is it is possible to float the box? I have the float attr. in the code but it is not being executed. Have I got the syntax wrong? Here is the code I have used:

<tt> </tt> Bardwell 14:50, 11 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Well, your syntax is wrong ("float: right;" should be in the style string), but there seems to be something about class="messagebox standard-talk" (defined in common.css) that also keeps it from floating. I'm not seeing what the class definition in common.css does that affects this. -- Rick Block (talk) 18:16, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

(edit conflict) You want float:right inside the style. However, class messagebox includes "margin:0 auto", which adds extra space to the right of the box. To counter it, you have to include margin-right:0 as well. See the example below. --Interiot 18:19, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Many thanks! Bardwell 19:12, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

Showing IP in edit history
How do I wikilink an IP address in an edit history (eg when reverting vandalism)? DuncanHill 09:20, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
 * The best method would probably be 127.0.0.1 ; I think User:127.0.0.1 would give enough information for people viewing the history to find the IP's contribs and talk (but I'm not sure, so I'm testing with this edit summary). --ais523 09:26, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
 * The pipe trick seems not to work in edit summaries, so it's the first method or just User:127.0.0.1 , depending on how much typing you want to do. --ais523 09:27, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Thank you!DuncanHill 09:37, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
 * The pipe trick never links to Special:Contributions for anonymous IPs, as far as I know. That only happens when viewing page revisions. --Interiot 18:32, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

Special:Shortpages
hasn't been updated in too long. Is it broken? - CrazyRussian talk/email 19:22, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
 * It's cached, so it's deliberately not updated often to reduce server load. Tra (Talk) 20:33, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Normally every three/four days. It's been two weeks since the last update. - ;CrazyRussian talk/email 22:59, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

Account recovery?
I had originally signed up in wikipedia with my traditional nick, but forgot to associate an email to it, and now i can't remember the password, i don't seem to be able to recover it, and mi original nick is lost!. Is there any possibility of recovering the account? Gorgonzola 15:24, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

Is it possible to get the list of all wikipedia articles? Aniceint pages sepecial page is picking up only 1000 articles. Please help me. I have to run it on the ml-IN version of the wikipedia. It have only 1173 articles

Tux the penguin 15:58, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Special:Allpages. --ais523 07:43, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

Turning on password request throtteling
A increasing number of people seem to be falling victim to disgrunteled vandals spamming them with new password requests, some even seem to write bots for this task resulting in several hundreds new e-mails for the unlucky victum per day, and there is nothing we admins can do about it since bocked IP's can still initiate a new password request.

I did a little digging on bugzilla and found that a "throttle" feature for this aparently already exist. I dropped a note about this on the wikimedia-tch IRC channel so hopefully it's already dealth with, but I figured I'd post here too to be on the safe side. So please O great and benevolent devs turn this feature on or throttle it way down. There is rely no legitemate reason for the same user to request a new password more than once a day. That should save some users a lot of anoyance, and keep our mail host from getting blacklisted (again). --Sherool (talk) 12:04, 10 October 2006 (UTC)


 * I think that this should be turned on as soon as possible, if a solution exists or could be easily created. It has not happened to me personally, but reports of it turn up frequently and it is a significant problem in severe cases. I think that three requests in 24 hours for each account (to make sure that there are no problems with spam filters and accidental deletions), five in a week (in case of additional forgetting) and seven in a month, if multiple restrictions can be made, would be good limits. A limit of one per ten minutes might be good, too. I think that this would prevent virtually all cases of legitimate requests being blocked while still making it an ineffective tool for harassment. If it is just left to three (or more) per day, then someone could make three quick requests every day that they come to Wikipedia and still be somewhat of a nuisance, especially for those with slow connections and those who are charged for time online and/or per email. If less than three requests are allowed, there is increased danger of legitimate requests being blocked. However, limiting it to three or even six requests per day would be a huge improvement. -- Kjkolb 12:57, 10 October 2006 (UTC)


 * I think at the very least, a captcha should be required to stop bots trying to do this and slow down humans who try to send repeated password requests. Tra (Talk) 20:35, 10 October 2006 (UTC)


 * I agree that this throttling feature should be enabled. In the meantime, the immediate victims can avert the issue by blanking their e-mail - then the software won't allow a password reset at all. Just don't forget your password. Deco 00:36, 11 October 2006 (UTC)


 * That doesn't help admins, who are expected to have email contacts available. -Will Beback 00:45, 11 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Admins can list their e-mail (appropriately spamproofed) on their user page. Deco 00:53, 11 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Um, Deco, did you think that one through? ;-) If someone is psychotic enough to send you hundreds of password requests, you probably do not want them to have your email address. They could send you threatening emails from a throwaway account or sign you up for spam. -- Kjkolb 06:59, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

What links here oddity
Hi. and thanks in advance for help! :-)

Executive is a dab, and so shouldn't have incoming (mainspace) links. However, its what links here page shows a number of them. On clicking one of them (e.g. South Australian Legislative Council; Queensland legislative election, 2001) I can't find any links to "Executive". The templates are clean, too: they point to Executive (government). I've tried ?action=purge on the pages and the templates. No effect. Any ideas? Cheers! --Storkk 09:31, 10 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Problems like this are generally cleared by null edits, not by purging the cache. I tried a null edit (edit the article and submit the "change" without making any changes or supplying an edit summary) on South Australian Legislative Council which removed the reference from this article. -- Rick Block (talk) 14:15, 10 October 2006 (UTC)


 * The link tables should have been updated automatically by the Job queue, but after this many hours it seems likely that something went wrong. --Russ (talk) 16:58, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your answer. I'll remember that for the future. --Storkk 09:17, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

Gallery tag messes up references
The gallery tag seems to be causing the references to reset. For instance, see Anastacia - the gallery in Discography clears the references, so they start numbering again at [1] and only the one after the gallery is listed with the references/ tag. This appears to have started happening in the last day or two. Gimmetrow 17:43, 9 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Ah, so that's what it is! I've been banging my head against the wall to figure out what happened to Timberline Lodge ski area's references.  They were working a few days ago.  And yet its <tt>  into the search box, and it automatically brings you to WP:VPT, even though the page is all caps. But if you type the same thing in the url after , you are brought to Wp:vpt. Shards of  metal  [ Talk •  Contribs  ] 06:23, 9 October 2006 (UTC)


 * I absolutely agree. The case-sensitivity of article lookups (via the search box "Go" feature) is totally stupid and should have been fixed on day 2. Matt 01:05, 11 October 2006 (UTC).

Slow images?
Is it just me or have the images been loading reaaaaaally slowly for the last couple of days?  howch e  ng   {chat} 21:52, 5 October 2006 (UTC)


 * I've noticed it to, especially with thumbnails of newly uploaded images and SVG (though my observations could only by coincidences). Just letting you know you aren't alone. Text loads fine and fast, but then I have to wait quite a while for the thumbnails to load.--Andrew c 02:26, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I've been having those same problems as well, especially over the past day or so. --<font color="#CC0018">T <font color="#0000C0">M F T - C 21:33, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Me too, the loads completely stalled (se topic about that on this page). Just so you know. --Janke | Talk 21:45, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
 * The real puzzling thing about this is that only one site (upload.wikimedia.org, which handles the images) is slow; everything else is lightning fast. --<font color="#CC0018">T <font color="#0000C0">M F Let's Go Mets - Stats 22:58, 10 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I wonder if the browser has anything to do with it? I'm getting a lot of hangs in Firefox, but Opera (and wget, for that matter) loaded the thumbnails just fine... There is a delay, but the non-Mozilla software managed to grab the data nonetheless. Magus Melchior 00:51, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

Other image licences
So far I've stuck to USGS images which are public domain. I have a need for Canadian and provincial gov't images which have a long non-commercial use allowance, with small print. We're non-commercial, but can't guarantee that wiki-copies are good things. Is there a way to use these images? --Zeizmic 16:28, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
 * You'll have to be more specific. USGS is a United States government organization.  Anything a US federal governement organization produces (aside from organization logos, which are often still protected) is in the public domain.  Are you sure they're not just images that USGS has on their website which are actually produced by a canadian governmental organizaiton?  Kevin_b_er 20:32, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I meant I wanted to use Canadian gov't pictures that have a complex 'you can use this for non-commercial use' yada yada, type licence. --Zeizmic 21:06, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Note: "you can use this for non-commercial use" images are not compatible with the GFDL license, and in almost all cases (other than fair use) are not appropriate for this project. See Image_copyright_tags and Template:Noncommercial Template:NoncommercialProvided for the appropriate tags to use (eg: speedy deletion). --Splarka (rant) 07:41, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, I read that whole section, and everything is quite clear. --Zeizmic 19:06, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

comics template help
hi!, i would like to know the basic templates (links) for comic books box templates, superhero box templates, superhero teams templates, and any templates used in wikicomics project, thanks! Bloodpack 22:24, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

Search rating/ranking
Hi all

I'm sure this has been answered before however I have been unable to locate any info on this topic.

How is each pages' relevance ranked for searching ?

Cheers 203.56.62.4 01:01, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
 * The search engine used is Lucene. Its scoring mechanism is explained at http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/scoring.html.  -- Rick Block (talk) 01:49, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

Wikiversity Redlink
I don't know if this has been covered, although it has appered on the main page talk, but occationally the link to wikiversity on the main page turns red, and clicking on it leads to editing the page "V:" in wikipedia. I've found that on the wikiversity side, all links to wikipedia turn red as well when this happens. Anyone know what is going on?--Rayc 05:59, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

My Usertalk page
Hi,

I am new to the community and I received a welcome message from Booksworm with tips and suggestions (which were very helpful, by the way).

My question is how do I remove new messages after receiving them? Do I simply edit the page itself? Will that effect any new messages I receive?

Kester Teague 15:57, 28 September 2006 (UTC)


 * Help:Talk page might be of help. Yes, just edit the page.  If any other user edits your talk page (even if it's to remove a comma from their comment to you), that will cause the orange box to appear.  That will always happen, regardless of what you do to the page.  --Interiot 16:40, 28 September 2006 (UTC)


 * WP:ARCHIVE is another good page to check out, by maintaining an archive you can go back and easily find oldmessages without mucking around in the page history. Many editors simply leave their talk page messages up until they have a lot, then archive them. — <font color="#FF9933" face="monotype"> xaosflux   <font color="#00FF00">Talk 12:10, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

My Usertalk page
Hi,

I am new to the community and I received a welcome message from Booksworm with tips and suggestions (which were very helpful, by the way).

My question is how do I remove new messages after receiving them? Do I simply edit the page itself? Will that effect any new messages I receive?

Kester Teague 15:57, 28 September 2006 (UTC)


 * Help:Talk page might be of help. Yes, just edit the page.  If any other user edits your talk page (even if it's to remove a comma from their comment to you), that will cause the orange box to appear.  That will always happen, regardless of what you do to the page.  --Interiot 16:40, 28 September 2006 (UTC)


 * WP:ARCHIVE is another good page to check out, by maintaining an archive you can go back and easily find oldmessages without mucking around in the page history. Many editors simply leave their talk page messages up until they have a lot, then archive them. — <font color="#FF9933" face="monotype"> xaosflux   <font color="#00FF00">Talk 12:10, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

My Log in isn't holding either
I see another user is having the same problem I am. I've lost count on how many times I've attempted to stay logged in last night. I edited my personal profile and it promptly got deleted by an admin. because once again I was logged out. My cookies are enabled, my browser cache has been cleared, and Wikipedia still won't keep me logged in. Will someone please address this issue, as I'm not the only one experiencing it? This has never happened to me before. (By the way I'm on Direcway if that helps) Thanks.-- magialuna 02:42 28 September 2006 (UTC)


 * From what I've read in the past on this page, I believe that being on Direcway causes this problem. I think I also read that there is currently no solution to this problem. I'm sorry I couldn't really help you, Shards of metal  [ Talk •  Contribs  ] 00:22, 29 September 2006 (UTC)


 * If it's that sattelite ISP that's been mentioned here a few times, it's been reported that using the (much slower) secure server at https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Main_Page is a workaround. I'm going to add that to the FAQ. --cesarb 19:28, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

Two different images with the same name
I'm trying to add an image,, to Polyamory. Usually, when you add a Wikimedia Commons image onto regular Wikipedia, there's no problem. But when I type, it comes out as , which is (although similar-looking) not the pic I wanted.

The problem is that Polyamory.png is a different image on the different wikis. I can't rename the image on Commons OR Wikipedia, either, because there doesn't seem to be a "move" function for images. I figured I could re-upload my picture on Commons with a different name, and then delete the duplicate, but that's kind of tedious. Is there any other way?  Switcher <font color="#000">cat  talkcont 20:35, 29 September 2006 (UTC)


 * Not at this time; you'll have to delete it and re-upload it. --Brion 22:19, 29 September 2006 (UTC)


 * Damn. :P Okay, done. Thanks.  Switcher <font color="#000">cat  talkcont 22:31, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

Croatian & Serbian iekavian
I have changed my preferences to try out Croatian & Serbian iekav languages - and noticed a rather odd thingy. While it translates all the buttons, it leaves my preferences in the upper-right in English, instead of "moja podesavanja". Could we do something 'bout it? --PaxEquilibrium 10:23, 30 September 2006 (UTC)


 * Just a note: on hr.wiki, the interfece is fully translated. --Dijxtra 10:29, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

Sandbox
I have been having trouble with creating a project in the sandbox. I understand how to edit it but does anybody know how to create a project like the previous projects, hangman, poetry, and storytelling Omega34 21:27, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

Furlan editions look strange
When editing a page, the upper layout looks strange, you can see it by editing any page. If you have any comment or the answer, please, tell it to Pasqual (ca), or directly to Klenje (fur), who asked me about it, but my knowledges don't reach it.

--Sorry for my poor English-- Pasqual (ca) · CUT  09:44, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Usually this means there's a missing close tag (  or similar) in one of the user interface messages. In particular check fur:MediaWiki:Edittools, but some of the others on the edit page might be the problem. --Brion 10:36, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
 * fur:MediaWiki:Edittools is right, can someone help they? Pasqual (ca) · CUT  21:32, 25 September 2006 (UTC)
 * How can I know what mediawiki messages are used on an edition page? Pasqual (ca) · CUT  13:27, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
 * fur:MediaWiki:Edittools is right, can someone help they? Pasqual (ca) · CUT  21:32, 25 September 2006 (UTC)
 * How can I know what mediawiki messages are used on an edition page? Pasqual (ca) · CUT  13:27, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
 * How can I know what mediawiki messages are used on an edition page? Pasqual (ca) · CUT  13:27, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

Broken template
Can anyone figure out why the template at the top of Directive on the legal protection of biotechnological inventions isn't displaying? I don't see anything wrong... — Mets 501 (talk) 00:37, 1 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Looks like fixed it before I could.  S/he added a missing } and did some nice cleanup too.  — EncMstr 02:16, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Great! Thanks. — Mets 501  (talk) 03:23, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

Changed a Disambig to Redirect, but Disambig Still Appears
I found an unnecessary disambig page for Motorhead, and changed it to a redirect page, but going to the page still brings up the disambig, even though the code for that has been deleted... What's going on? G Rose 07:37, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
 * You may have a cached version, Motorhead currently redirects to Motörhead. — <font color="#FF9933" face="monotype"> xaosflux  <font color="#00FF00">Talk 07:40, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

categorytree
What is this about? As in this edit? Is this a legitimate use? What are legitimate uses? Seems to me to be a lot of clutter on article pages. older ≠ wiser 13:45, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
 * It's been reverted already, and no that tag is generally not useful in articles. it can be used in category or project space for organizational assistance. — <font color="#FF9933" face="monotype"> xaosflux   <font color="#00FF00">Talk 18:44, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Well, yes, I reverted it. I was asking about it here because I had never come across it before. Is there a way to disable it in the main article namespace? Is there at least a way to identify where it is used (similar to what links here for a template)? older ≠ wiser 19:01, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

Shortcut
Is there a keyboard shortcut for the "|" symbol --Longhornsg 17:47, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
 * That appears to be the pipe key, on most english keybaords it is a shifted backslash (\). — <font color="#FF9933" face="monotype"> xaosflux  <font color="#00FF00">Talk 18:42, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
 * It looks like two lines above each other, not like one line on most keyboards. — Mets 501 (talk) 19:53, 1 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Ahhhh! That's probably a difference among typefaces, especially since you probably have a Texas keyboard.  Some typesfaces show a single vertical line, others as two stacked vertical bars with a small space between them.  However there are disparate characters available—see The UK keyboard layout at International keyboard layouts:  One is at top left, the other is bottom left (just inboard the shift key).  When editing articles, ! can be used (that's a bang or exclamation mark inside double curly braces) which expands to |.
 * Oh no! Please don't use  in article text. This is only an ugly template hack needed in rare cases inside complicated template code (mostly done in infoboxes with optional fields where wiki-folks want wiki-table syntax). If you use that in articles, you get shot on sight you will be reverted and disliked. (Just being curious: What are "Texas" keyboards?) --Ligulem 08:36, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
 * If you're really having problems, type it {{subst:!}} instead and noone will know... --ais523 08:48, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Testing in the sandbox, substing ! seems to work even inside a template. --ais523 08:51, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

I've added a pipe to the wiki-markup section of the edit tools. These are displayed below the edit window. Just klick on the | symbol and a pipe is inserted. (Yes I know: there was already a pipe in the symbols section, but I think an additional pipe should be in the wiki markup). --Ligulem 09:15, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

Image categories
Does anyone know why some image categories show thumbnails of images (like this one) and others just show linked names (as this one)? Can something be done? YellowDot 18:17, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
 * It is on purpose, and done thoguh the use of __NOGALLERY__ tags. In a nutshell, we can't display a category of non-free (as in speach) images, as it violates the Fair Use rationale.  Certain fair use pages have an exemption to allow the display anyway, as authorized under Fair Use Exemptions. — <font color="#FF9933" face="monotype"> xaosflux   <font color="#00FF00">Talk 18:37, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Ok, thanks. YellowDot 01:59, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

Underlining
If a Wikipedia has all its links underlined (default), then how is it changed so that they aren't for all users and visitors? --Adam (Talk) 19:41, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
 * The links are not underlined by default, unless you have that set in your preferences. — Mets 501 (talk) 19:51, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Links are underlined by default on lots of Wikimedia projects. Five examples: Welsh Wikipedia; Serbian Wikiquote; Danish Wikibooks; Romanian Wikinews; and Tamil Wiktionary.--Adam (Talk) 20:22, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

Date format
Is there any way to allow a date to appear according to a users preference (e.g. 2 October or October 2), without putting it as an internal link (2 October). This might be for example where the same date occurs several times in the same article. &mdash; Tivedshambo (talk to me/look at me/ignore me) &mdash; 22:33, 2 October 2006 (UTC)


 * No. --Ligulem 23:24, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

watchlist items deletion
How is it possible that items disappear from my watchlist? Nobody else but me works on my PC. Is it technically possible that an administrator or somebody in the technical department does this? Antiphus 19:43, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I'm noticing watchlist strangeness as well. I have my user page and talk page watchlisted and they both have the "unwatch" tab available. But neither appear in my watchlist depite the fact that there were changes on both today (vandalism). The only way I knew this was the "New messages" banner and then looking at the contributions of the vandaliser. --TheParanoidOne 21:28, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
 * From my experience, items can disappear from watchlists if they are moved anld no other edits have been made to the article after the move. Try making an edit on the page and see if it returns.  Nacon  kantari  21:31, 2 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Correct. Certain log entries now appear in histories, such as moves and protects. If one of these is the top edit, it apparently doesn't appear in your watch list. --Splarka (rant) 07:22, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

Deleting Pages
Hello I was trying to delete 2 pages today WikiProject Stock Exchange World Wide and British American Football League system but I found out that it is harder to do than I thought. I tried to follow directions. The pages I tried to delete I created. Could you tell me what I did wrong. Thanks John R G 07:47, 3 October 2006 (UTC)


 * I've deleted Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Stock Exchange World Wide (per request of creator John R G). British American Football League system is now on AFD discussion and should run through there (you could have put a on that, but not now, since it is already on AFD). You can dig into the description of the process fungus at Deletion policy. For the Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Stock Exchange World Wide I would have blanked it and put db-author on it (but I'm not sure if this is completely in-line with current ceremony). If you are lost with all this, you can always ask your friendly neighbour wiki-plumber for help :). --Ligulem 09:07, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

I can't stay logged in
Hello, my username is Torvik. The reason I'm not posting with the name Torvik is because I cannot remain logged into Wikipedia. I know it's hard to believe me, but I hope you do because this is really getting on my nerves. Whenever I log into Wikipedia using either Firefox or IE, I am instantly logged out again upon visiting a subsequent page within Wikipedia. Help please? I have further info on my talk page. -- 67.142.130.25 22:19, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Are cookies switched off? That might cause the problem. --Salix alba (talk) 22:51, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
 * If you are using a satellite ISP, see the last FAQ at the top of this page. If you aren't, try removing all your wikipedia.org cookies. --cesarb 23:57, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
 * ...and the IP address given belongs to DirecPC. Guess where that redirects to? DirecWay again. Try the secure server as indicated in the FAQ, it should work. (Should we add a note about that to MediaWiki:Signupend?) --cesarb 00:02, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Already added to MediaWiki:Loginsuccess. --cesarb 15:41, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

requesting sidebar programming help
anything would help. The sidebar proposal has been approved. The discussion is at Wikipedia talk:Village pump (proposals)/Sidebar redesign/programming. Thanks. --gatoatigrado 15:56, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

language markup and template clutter
your input is requested at Template_talk:ArB. dab (&#5839;) 18:36, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

Weird page name problem
Any clue on what is going on with Requests for checkuser/Case/NuclearUmpf‎? It's a real page, its in my contribs, its listed on the WP:RFCU page, but when I copy or type out the name somewhere else to make a wikilink its a redlink. Is there a hidden character in the name or some other problem? I've never seen anything like this before. Thatcher131 16:28, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
 * There are special characters at the end of the name: Wikipedia:Requests_for_checkuser/Case/NuclearUmpf%E2%80%8E . I suggest moving. Tizio, Caio, Sempronio 16:32, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
 * How did you figure that out, and are there also special characters in User:NuclearUmpf's user name? Thatcher131 16:33, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I figured it out by hovering over the link in your contribs and looking at the destination (but Tizio beat me to it). User:NuclearUmpf has no special characters. I think that particular special character sequence is a direction mark (used to mix left-to-right and right-to-left text); people sometimes catch them inside a copy-and-paste range without realising (because they're invisible). --ais523 16:38, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
 * (EC) I watched the URL bar in my browser :-). As far as I can tell there is no special char in that username. The weird part is - I cannot move Requests_for_checkuser/Case/NuclearUmpf%E2%80%8E. The move form keeps adding these characters to the page name. Tizio, Caio, Sempronio 16:40, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I've just moved it for you (by going to the end of the new name with the End key and then backspacing one character). --ais523 16:45, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
 * You just reverted my move (presumably due to the same problems)... Do you want me to revert it back to the title without the characters again? --ais523 16:47, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Your most recent move has now put it back in the right place. --ais523 16:48, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I figured out that move was possible by editing a local copy of the move page, but removed the extra char from the old name instead of the new one. Everything should be fixed now. Tizio, Caio, Sempronio 16:52, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

This appears to be finally fixed now. The page is at the proper location, and the wierd character(s) aren't on the WP:RFCU page anymore since I just removed them. --Kevin_b_er 21:09, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

No way to express "Placed in public domain by creator other than oneself" for images
There's no way to express, during image upload, that an image was explicitly placed in the public domain by the creator, when the person uploading it was not the creator. I ran into this when uploading Image:Grandinheadrestraint.gif. The source of the picture says "This headholding device is in the public domain and can NOT be patented. Diagrams are published in T. Grandin 1993, Livestock Handling and Transport, CABI Publishing, p. 306. This was done to make this device readily available and to improve animal welfare." There's no way I can express that via the menu options, and since there are 'bots that read image uploads and delete them if they don't approve, this matters. I had to classify the image as a "political poster", which is the closest option available in the menus. --John Nagle 19:19, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
 * PD-release is what you're looking for. Specify a license of "None" when uploading, then go back and add that template in with <tt>  </tt> --Kevin_b_er 21:09, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

How to Prod for duplication of existing article
I see recent articles which duplicate existing articles under a different title. Justice of the victors is the same as the existing Victor's justice, and the new Electricity vampire is the same as the existing standby power. I expect that the editor/creator of the new article did not find the existing article and saw the need for an article on the topic, but their time would be better spent improving the existing article. I do not see a criterion for speedy deleting due to duplication. How should this be handled?Edison 20:18, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
 * No real speedy deletion criteria, per say, but they can just be deleted if they're just a sentence or two and are obviously complete copies. Otherwise a merge, prod, or AFD is in order. — Mets 501  (talk) 20:30, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
 * No need to prod. Changing the duplicate to a Redirect is the usually better solution in cases of duplicates that provide no new information. -- JLaTondre 20:32, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I wholeheartedly agree. Even if it's a mispelling: redirect! Someone else is bound to have made that mistake too. &mdash; Edward Z. Yang <sup style="font-family:serif;">(Talk) 23:35, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

Image disappeared from taxobox
I just noticed that the image that used to be part of the taxobox on Cyclamen is now a redlink. It seems that someone recently deleted the image from EN:WP because the image appears under the same name on WP:Commons - so the image itself is legit, but for some technical reason it's not showing up in the taxobox. What to do? Thanks. --woggly 09:28, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
 * The image never seems to have been deleted (it's got an empty deletion log). Are you sure that the image name in the taxobox is correct? --ais523 09:38, 4 October 2006 (UTC)


 * There's an Image:Wild cyclamens.jpg at commons. The image in the taxobox was changed by this edit to Image:Wild cyclamen.jpg (which doesn't seem to have ever existed either here or at commons). -- Rick Block (talk) 12:40, 4 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Huh. Weird. Thanks for helping me figure it out. --woggly 14:57, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

Has access by the blind been enabled by Wikipedia?
Has any provision been made to allow users that are blind to effectively use Wikipedia?

Terry


 * Spoken articles. Martin 16:15, 4 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Since the site design is standards-compliant and generally well-structured, and the images have ALT attributes, the site should work decently well with speech browsers and screen readers. *Dan T.* 16:54, 4 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Although there are a number of problematic infoboxes, see WikiProject Usability/Infobox accessibility. -- Rick Block (talk) 18:28, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

Very rough idea
A very rough idea, born of the discussion on Expert Retention.

It's User versions, for an idea on a way to deal with edit creep, and better enable expert editors to monitor content in their subject area. Among other things. It's an extension/generalization to the "stable versions" system. And it's completely democratic, and in the wiki spirit. I'm mentioning it on both VP:POL and VP:TECH as it has implications for both.

It is very rough at this point, so please don't consider it a proposed policy, yet.

--EngineerScotty 19:55, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

Subcategory alphabetical sorting problem
I added a subcategory "Libraries in Nebraska" to the category "Libraries in the United States." It filed under "L" for "Libraries." How do I make it file under "N" for "Nebraska"? For example, "Libraries in New Jersey" is under "N" and "Libraries in Vermont" is under "V." What did I do wrong? Angela Kroeger 19:20, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Nothing, those just have a sort key added to them. You can it to yours by typing <tt> </tt>, in the Libraries in Nebraska page, and the extra text will sort it properly. Tito xd (?!?) 19:36, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Awesome! That fixed it. Thank you so much! Angela Kroeger 20:45, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

Look
Information is appearing left-aligned which should appear right-aligned. How do I correct this? --194.82.45.23 23:14, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
 * What information? Please leave a link to the article you're working on. -- Rick Block (talk) 23:08, 4 October 2006 (UTC)


 * If everything is appearing thusly for you, see the third point in the FAQ at the top of this page. --Splarka (rant) 07:18, 5 October 2006 (UTC)


 * If all the links in the articles suddenly become underlined (or the opposite), or red links instead end with a red question mark (or the opposite), or paragraphs are fully justified instead of left justified (or the opposite), it's probably because your browser failed to load one of the stylesheets (or the server sent you a wrong one). Do a forced reload or bypass your cache.

Page cannot be displayed
When I go to William S. Burroughs, the page appears briefly, and is then replaced with a 'Page cannot be displayed' IE error report. most other pages appear correctly - what is happening? DuncanHill 12:37, 26 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Are you using popups? This happened often to my friend in IE6 when he used popups. If you click the back button right after it happens, that should load the page correctly. My friend switched to Firefox, which fixed the problem. Also, when I went to the page, it displayed correctly, and I also use Firefox. Shards of metal  [ Talk •  Contribs  ] 21:30, 26 September 2006 (UTC)
 * I don't think I'm using popups - I must admit I didn't understand a thing on the link you gave though. I've tried hitting the back button, the page loads again and displays briefly, and again I get the IE 'Page cannot be displayed' thing. DuncanHill 00:13, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Looking at your Monobook.js, you aren't using popups. —Scott5114↗ 18:16, 2 October 2006 (UTC)


 * I'm still having the same problem, have noticed it on a couple of other pages. Often, not always, it is accompanied by a warning from my Norton that an attempt has been made to attack my computer. DuncanHill 09:05, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

Autoshow hidden in print view
Hi. Would it be a good idea to auto-show hidden text and boxes (like some country infoboxes, and some information inside infoboxes) when choosing the print view of an article? For example: "Other networks" in Rurouni Kenshin. It looks strange in the printout to have a header and [Show] button without the possibility of showing. Is this a problem that is very minor for the regular priting of one or two articles, and can be solved by automation when printing out larger selections from the encyclopeida? --GunnarRene 11:43, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

Single license
This one is very minor:

When choosing a license on the "upload file", there is no single cover license. But if you choose the album cover license, it gives you an "album/single cover" template on the image page. Michaelas10 12:36, 5 October 2006 (UTC)


 * You may want to take this directly to MediaWiki talk:Licenses. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 13:49, 5 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Done. Michaelas10 15:03, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

The correct title of this article...
How hard is it to make titles of articles display correctly? In a day or so, I could probably write a javascript to re-format the titles of articles correctly, as specified by the presence of lowercase or bracketed or wrongtitle or whatever templates, and I am quite the amateur programmer. How hard is it to specify the correct title with a special code inside the article and have it displayed correctly by Mediawiki? These templates are embarassing. — Omegatron 02:30, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
 * There was already a template that used CSS that would fix what you describe, but it was deleted. Short of software modifications, it may be harder than you like to get it to work properly, though I'd love to see a solution that isn't abusable. --Kevin_b_er 05:09, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Got a link to the old template name or the deletion discussion? Was it incredibly hacky, or why was it deleted?  --Interiot 05:13, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
 * . It was horribly hacky, and just didn't work. Tito xd (?!?) 05:27, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Take note taht Title is now a redirect, but the deletion discussion I linked before. It was some really hacky CSS overlay. Its still around, as user:1ne/Title, and there's issues with it working between anonymous and logged-in users as of not too long ago, so even as a userfication its still buggy. Kevin_b_er 07:03, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Doing it with CSS is probably inadvisable (I have many of the recent edits to User:1ne/Title, trying to adjust it for various sitenotice changes; now that anons and registered users have different messages, it's impossible to keep it correct for both). However, it would probably be quite possible to change in MediaWiki:monobook.js (the userfication doesn't work in non-Monobook skins anyway); I'll work out the code and post on its talk to see if this is considered a good idea. And yes, it was horribly hacky. --ais523 08:54, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
 * OK, here's some title-changing JavaScript for monobook.js (works on IE, and should be reasonably portable (I hope)):

//Title override addOnloadHook(function { if(document.getElementById('titleOverride')!=null)  {    var h1s=document.body.getElementsByTagName("h1");    var i;    for(i in h1s)      if(h1s[i].className=="firstHeading")        h1s[i].replaceChild(document.getElementById('titleOverride').firstChild, h1s[i].firstChild); } });
 * It replaces the original title with the contents of an element with the ID titleOverride (which should presumably be a display:none-hidden &lt;DIV>, or even better a visible &lt;SPAN> within a wrong-title template); see User:ais523/Sandbox as an example. I'd appreciate users checking this on other browsers. --ais523 09:17, 27 September 2006 (UTC)


 * There is a magic word to fix this in MediaWiki called . It's turned off by default and doesen't work when it is on. The screenshot shows what it looks like when it does work. Gerard Foley 16:42, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

That's what I'm talking about. A "magic word" that Mediawiki uses to display the title correctly. So it already exists, but is turned off? Why?? Help:Magic_words, MediaWiki:Displaytitle,

I said it could be done with javascript just as an example of how easy it would be to implement, but I'm saying this because it should be part of Mediawiki. It's a trivial thing to implement that would solve a very old problem that makes our software look bad. — Omegatron 17:23, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Even if it is turned on it doesent work. If you visit my WikiKnowledge User page you will see User:Gmcfoley as the title even though <tt> </tt> is still in the page code. See also 7255 and 6253. Gerard Foley 21:00, 27 September 2006 (UTC)


 * Ah. How appropriate. — Omegatron 13:36, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Seeing as the magic word doesn't work, why don't we use a JavaScript solution? --ais523 13:40, 3 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Because it's kludgy and there's no way to implement it site-wide and because articles will appear different to people who don't use javascript, etc. etc. The magic word needs to be fixed.  Apparently Brion doesn't like it.  — Omegatron 13:50, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

OK, then. How about a case-swap of the first letter then? --GunnarRene 20:12, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

Tagging pages
How do I tag a page so that a banner appears at the top, like "It has been requested that this page be moved," or "This page requires cleanup?" Lord GS-41 23:58, 5 October 2006 (UTC)


 * These are templates, there's a whole list of them at Template messages/Cleanup. To use one, you add (for example)   as the first line of an article. -- Rick Block (talk) 00:00, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

Bad interwiki code
The Interwiki link to the Wipipedia does not appear to be working correctly, perhaps as a result of their change in domain name? Example link: Wipipedia:Help:Contents directs to http://www.lfshosting.co.uk/wipi/index.php/Help:Contentsinstead of http://www.londonfetishscene.com/wipi/index.php/Help:Contentswhere it should. — <font color="#FF9933" face="monotype"> xaosflux  <font color="#00FF00">Talk 04:52, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
 * You'll need to poke a Meta admin to update the Interwiki map to point to the new address, or post on m:Talk:Interwiki map. :) <font color="#1198e8">jam <font color="#125a07">es (talk) 04:55, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Thanks, added to the troubleshooting section there. — <font color="#FF9933" face="monotype"> xaosflux  <font color="#00FF00">Talk 05:16, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

Finding articles, images, templates, redirects, etc I created
I know in the My Watchlist view, new pages have a little N next to them, but in the My Contributions view, the N is gone and there isn't an option in the drop down menu to show only page creation edits. So is there any way to figure out what articles I (or another user) created?--Andrew c 02:24, 6 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Special:Newpages, although it only goes back a few weeks. Also, you can ask User:Interiot (see this --Splarka (rant) 07:30, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

Pipe trick now works with commas
For your editing convenience, the "pipe trick" has been extended to work with page titles containing commas (see 6826). In layman's terms, what this means is that you may now type " " (note the trailing " ") to get a link that displays simply as "Boston". Similarly, if you were editing the Boston, Massachusetts article, you could simply type " " (note the leading " ") to produce the link "Springfield" (note link target). This should be a nice little feature for those of you working with geographical articles a lot.

For a detailed explanation of what the "pipe trick" is and what it does, read the help page(s) linked to above. Note that some of the pages may not yet properly document the new usage described above. All the previously supported usages should still work pretty much as before. The handling of some page titles containing both commas and parentheses, as well as some other odd cases, may have changed as a side effect, but mostly even those cases should work "as one would expect". For those who are interested, there's a pretty comprehensive set of test cases here. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 13:43, 6 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Ooh! Shiny! We likes it. older ≠ wiser 13:55, 6 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Yay! Does that work on all mediawiki projects? -- SB_Johnny |talk|books 14:32, 6 October 2006 (UTC)


 * And yet my poor little proposals go unfixed or dismissed... :'(
 * See also 3058, 845. — Omegatron 15:18, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
 * You think your suggestions get ignored for a long time? See . Zocky | picture popups 15:28, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

Search
I expect someone has suggested this in the past, but what are the chances of getting a "regular expression" article search? EG search for articles which contain lines matching /^=[^=]/ for articles including headings at level 1 which are generally not used. -- SGBailey 18:48, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Someone may have suggested that before, but I know it's not going to happen anytime soon. Let's work on getting the search running all the time and maybe spellcheck, then we'll worry about regexes. I also don't see on Lucene's feature list (Lucene is the seach engine Wikipedia uses). It would be a good feature though. — Mets501 ( talk ) 23:23, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
 * A regex search would probably be very hard because as far as I know it would involve a search of the full text every time a search was run. &mdash; <FONT COLOR="#0000FF">Da</FONT><FONT COLOR="#0000CC">rk</FONT> <FONT COLOR="#000099">Sh</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000066">ik</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000033">ar</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000">i</FONT> <font color="#000088">talk/contribs 17:18, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
 * It's probably better to search a database dump for that sort of thing. --ais523 17:30, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

Reference/endnote how-to
Hi. I've been contributing to Wikipedia for a long time — mainly through writing stubs, adding researched information, expanding articles, copyediting, etc. I want to learn how to add material and put an endnote to it and have a numbered reference show up in the "References" section of the article. I'm pretty confused as to how to do this. Can someone help me?

Directing me to contributors' instructions within the Wikipedia would be great. I'd be even more gratedful if some kind Wikipedian were willing to walk me through the process for my first go at it.

Thanks. Joel Russ 13:40, 6 October 2006 (UTC)


 * The contributors' instructions you are looking for are at Footnotes. --cesarb 16:31, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

I need advice on rapid columnization
Is there a tool for automatically columnizing lists that appear on a page or set of pages? There are hundreds of lists which need column-formatting, but it is extremely tedious to do by hand. The current list I need to columnize is the List of academic fields. Here is a sample section with markup code to show you wnat I need to do:

Astronomy
Any comments on better markup code would also be appreciated. --The Transhumanist 15:50, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

If you are using Firefox, the following works:


 * Astrobiology
 * Astrophysics
 * Gravitational astronomy
 * Black holes
 * Interstellar medium
 * Numerical simulations in
 * Astrophysical plasma
 * Galaxy formation and evolution
 * High-energy astrophysics
 * Hydrodynamics
 * Magnetohydrodynamics
 * Star formation
 * Physical cosmology
 * Stellar astrophysics
 * Helioseismology
 * Stellar evolution
 * Stellar nucleosynthesis
 * Observational astronomy
 * Gamma ray astronomy
 * Infrared astronomy
 * Microwave astronomy
 * Optical astronomy
 * Radio astronomy
 * UV astronomy
 * X-ray astronomy

This is the same style used in the two-column references you might have seen in some articles (usually when the references list is too long). It does nothing on other browsers, but since it's part of the CSS3 draft, you can expect it to work in all browsers in the future. --cesarb 16:16, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

Logo?
Has anyone else noticed the Wikipedia logo disappear from the top-left corner of the screen? I've done a hard refresh, and it's still gone. --ais523 16:18, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I haven't seen it since I cranked up my security settings in Internet Explorer. Maybe that's relevant to you... Notinasnaid 17:48, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

Floating template obscuring gallery
Look at this edit. The long infobox fills the whole page, and the thumbnails for the gallery get pushed under the template. I tried to fix it by clearing the float right above the gallery, and this works, only it pushes the gallery down under the infobox. Would floating the gallery to the right work better? or is there a better fix that I don't know of?--Andrew c 22:56, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

Redirecting to article sections
OK so a redirect to lets say Star Trek will simply redirect to the Star Trek Article. Can someone explain why this idea won't work:


 * 1) User requests Cultural impact of Star Trek page.
 * 2) That pages contains <tt>#REDIRECT Star Trek.
 * 3) The user is sent a HTTP redirect to "en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_impact_of_Star Trek#Cultural_impact"
 * 4) This time MediaWiki sees the #Cultural_impact bit in the URL
 * 5) *This is the bit that won't work — MediaWiki doesn't see that bit, since it's not sent to the server. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 08:53, 7 October 2006 (UTC)
 * 6) The Stat Trek page loads up and this time the browser will go down to the Cultural impact because #Cultural impact is in the URL

Would this work or am I talking crap? 83.70.106.136 02:09, 7 October 2006 (UTC)


 * This doesn't work because MediaWiki redirects don't actually HTTP redirect, they just transclude the page contents to the current location, so the URL cannot magically have a # appended to it, for the browser to notice. In order for it to work, fundamental things would have to be changed in MediaWiki. Some methods that might do it:
 * Links to redirects containing # would have the # and target appeneded. But, the redirects would then have to invalidate the cache of any page linked to them when they were edited (nasty, something for the job queue maybe).
 * Real HTTP redirects (302, meta refresh, etc) could be used, but I believe there are security issues with this (or were, last time I asked about this).
 * Javascript.
 * A # link added to contentSub (which shows a standard "Redirected from" message). Example: If Foo is a redirect to #REDIRECT:Bar, then clicking a link to Foo could generate something like: Redirected from Foo. The Section you want is probably 
 * The best thing to do at the moment, is replace all the links to  Cultural impact of Star Trek  with  Cultural impact of Star Trek  as it is unlikely to require a stand alone article anytime soon. --Splarka (rant) 07:23, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

I've noted the major problem with your proposal (MediaWiki doesn't see the anchor in the URL) above. That said, it could probably be made to work by encoding the relevant information ("this URL already has an anchor, don't try to add one") in some other way, such as by appending a query parameter to the URL, or by doing the redirection with JavaScript, which does see the anchor part. Both approaches have their disadvantages: the first makes for ugly URLs, while the second needs a fallback mechanism for browsers that can't or won't run JavaScript (but we could perhaps just retain the current behavior for those). Still, it's been on my "to do" "think about trying some day" list for some time. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 08:53, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

The pipe trick now works with commas!
Thanks to Ilmari Karonen, you can now type Richmond, Virginia and get Richmond on saving. Awesome! --NE2 19:56, 7 October 2006 (UTC)
 * And the reverse pipe trick is semi-useful here too... when editing the Richmond, Virginia article, you can type <tt> |Roanoke </tt> and it will expand to [[Roanoke, Virginia|Roanoke]].  --Interiot 20:50, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

Mozilla censored
The firefox main page, http://en-us.start.mozilla.com/, is now censored in the UAE as far as I can see. The browser still works if you put something else in the address bar. It could be some sort of error, but can anyone possibly see a reason for offence on that page? Marskell 08:44, 8 October 2006 (UTC)


 * It redirects to Google for me, and I'm in Britain. The mozilla site still works, http://www.mozilla.org. Alan Pascoe 13:28, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

Ref Desk - Science
It's lost it's link again, from the physics symbol to the page. --Zeizmic 22:04, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I assume you mean this link. Seems to be working fine. Antonrojo 14:08, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

Searching for a category
I cannot for the life of me understand why I cannot search for a category that I know exists. For example, from the home page, entering "British science fiction films" and hitting "Go" does not prominently list the page "Category:British_science_fiction_films". Even if I go to the bottom of that match page, and check the box that says "Category" to explicitly search that space, the search still fails. I am forced to enter the URL by hand to get to that category page. Can someone please fix category searching?


 * Instead of entering "British science fiction films", enter "Category:British science fiction films". -- Hoary 04:16, 4 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Anon: That's a good point since currently users need to know that the category exists to search under "Category:whatever" or they stumble upon the category by clicking on the category link below one of it's members. Since categories neatly organize a variety of content, bumping them up to the top of the results would make sense to me since they have the highest signal-to-noise ratio. I suggest making a formal proposal for this if it hasn't been done and this isn't listed as a wikipedia bug. Antonrojo 14:00, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

re downloading an earlier version of an article
To anyone who can help me I would be gladly appreciate and would even pay you or make a donation to Wikipedia if that is more appropriate.

I need some help and have been trying to solve this problem for several months and that is the following:

Is there anyone out there that could could give me step by step instruction on how to download a fairly current version of Wikipedia with images that will fit onto a 2GB memory stick leaving about 100 mg free for other applications, but the exception being in that download I must have an earlier March 2002 edit version of a specific article.

In other words a current version or close to it with images but with this specific article showing the earlier March 2002 edit version and not the cuurent version.

I have a SONY CLIE PEG TH 55 with a 2 GB memory stick and it uses the Palm OS 5.2 system. of course It would be viewed by TomeRaider 3.

Looking forward to hearing from someone om this.

Best David
 * Wikipedia, completely compressed, with no edit history (i.e. not a March 2002 version of a page) is about a gigabyte, all 7zipped at extremely high compression. With edit histories, its more like 6 gigabytes.  With images, you'll probably need a few hundred gigabytes. &mdash;  <FONT COLOR="#0000FF">Da</FONT><FONT COLOR="#0000CC">rk</FONT> <FONT COLOR="#000099">Sh</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000066">ik</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000033">ar</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000">i</FONT> <font color="#000088">talk/contribs 17:17, 6 October 2006 (UTC)


 * You might try Special:Export and just grab what article you need, it should be able to export the full history of a page. Then see Wiki_on_a_stick. --Splarka (rant) 07:04, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

David, it sounds like you're asking two questions. 1) How to download an edit history for an article (as stated in the title) and 2) downloading a mirror of wikipedia. Since the body of your question concerns the latter it sounds like Dark_Shikari has pointed you in the right direction. Two other resources you might check out if you're flexible regarding the media to store wikipedia on: Wikipedia-CD/Download, Database_download Antonrojo 13:49, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

WP usage statistics
I'm looking for WP usage statistics. Are the logfiles public? Is a statistical analysis available - e.g. for selected articles or a range of the most popular ones? --tickle me 01:58, 7 October 2006 (UTC)


 * If you read the linked FAQ at the top you'd see there there are no page hit counters. Accurate bandwidth statistics are limited to total wikimedia usage. However, there are some things you can look at: Special:Mostlinked and Special:Mostrevisions (when they are working) give some good indications of popularity, and LeonWP has set up a top 100 counter for some Wikimedia projects (like this one), which use a fractional sampling rate via javascript. --Splarka (rant) 07:17, 7 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Check out WP:S for an overview. Antonrojo 13:41, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

what the heck image license tag do I use....
...for something that apparently has no copyright?! I realize I should totally know this by now, but I don't want to screw anything up. The pictures I'm looking for are on www.hungary1956.com and it seems to me (and other editors) like they have no copyright, but it's really hard to tell and I have no clue what to do. Please help. K. Lastochka 01:34, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
 * The site seems to have a copyright notice on the bottom of every page, and they apparently take "donated" photos. You could try sending them an email asking about the copyright status of their images, but it looks to me like the copyright status of the images on this site is murky (at best).  Wikipedia must have clear copyright status, so unless you can get something definitive from the folks at this site (like they add a copyright page declaring "all images on this site are public domain" or something) I'd recommend you not upload any of them. -- Rick Block (talk) 03:02, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, OK, that's what I figured. Rats. I've tried e-mailing them twice, no response. :( Thanks for clearing up the issue. K. Lastochka 20:39, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

Stalling, breaking up & downloads
Very sluggish performance the past few days, has anyone else noticed? As I'm writing this, I'm still waiting for the small icons above the text window, will have to put in the four tildes myself... Janke | Talk 07:49, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Maybe a donation to Wikimedia Foundation would be in order? The user base for wikipedia has shot up quickly and I suspect that the server infrastructure hasn't quite kept up with some of the heavier loads this creates. Considering the budget they operate under and that they only have five fulltime employees, it's pretty amazing that the site functions as well as it does. Antonrojo 13:38, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

Map resources not available
The map resources are missing again. Clicking on a coordinate generates a browser error page. Alan Pascoe 13:31, 8 October 2006 (UTC)


 * It is working for me. --cesarb 10:49, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

Contents Box
I recently created the article about "Sativa Hybridz", but the contents box seems to be working incorrectly. Can someone help me out?--Dreamm 15:00, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I fixed the table of contents on Sativa Hybridz, but the article got deleted. It's best not to write about yourself and try to stick to things that are more notable. Tra (Talk) 15:16, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
 * For future refrence, how did you fix the table of contents?--Dreamm 18:20, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
 * There was an unclosed &lt;table&gt; tag that I removed Tra (Talk) 18:54, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

Spelling suggestions when searching?
I was curious if there was any way for wikipedia to use similar spelling suggestions that google does. There are many times that I'll have to first type in the spelling of something just to get google to suggest the correct spelling so I can type it in here. Otherwise wikipedia just comes up with no entries. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Excalibur313 (talk • contribs) 15:20, October 8, 2006 (UTC)
 * See 974. Feature exists but is disabled for performance reasons. This is a perennial proposal. Use Google with site:en.wikipedia.org as a workaround. &mdash; Edward Z. Yang <sup style="font-family:serif;">(Talk) 23:54, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

Reference
I have seen references set up in two ways:, but it's not accessible to anyone without shell access. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 06:15, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

thumbnails keep disappearing for this image, very weird, help appreciated
Image:SPARCstation_1+.jpg

Image_talk:SPARCstation_1+.jpg (examples of disappearing thumbnails)

The thumbnails successfully show up when first referenced. After an hour or so, not sure exactly how long, they disappear and I get a red X. Not all of them are disappearing though, as shown on the talk page. Any help GREATLY appreciated. Purge does nothing to clear this up.Fourdee 10:31, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
 * I've noticed the same thing happening with several images. Take a look at the gallery on my user page for example, one of the images there does that.  The other day I was in the article on halloween and one of the images was like that.  I don't know what's causing it, but you aren't the only one experiencing it. ~ ONUnicorn (Talk / Contribs) 16:40, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

Headline as edit summary
I have enabled the prompt for edit summaries in my preferences. However when I start a new section by clicking on the + at the top of the page, the headline I put at the top, also acts as the edit summary. The problem is, when I forget to put a headline, there is no prompt either for the edit summary or for the headline itself. As a result, the edit ends up as a continuation of another thread plus there is no edit summary. Won't it be easy to turn on a feature that prompts me just like it does for an edit summary. Or is it already there and I have missed it? -- Lost (talk) 10:05, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
 * You could try using the code in WikiProject User scripts/Scripts/Force edit summary in your monobook.js but swapping the line

if(/&section=new/.test(window.location.href)) return;
 * for

if(!/&section=new/.test(window.location.href)) return;
 * Tra (Talk) 18:04, 1 November 2006 (UTC)


 * Thanks, but didnt work... Any other suggestion? -- Lost (talk) 08:42, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
 * I filled a bug: 7788 Tizio, Caio, Sempronio 11:59, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

Rendering of character with ümlaut
Something has happened to the way pages with characters with umlauts are rendered. The Scandinavian characters Å, Ä, and Ö are included in the ISO/IEC 8859-1 or Latin-1 characted set, and should be represented as normal 8 bit characters. The characters are now replaced by unicode values. An example is V%C3%A4in%C3%A4m%C3%B6inen_%28ship%29. Note the difference in the ways the name of the ship Väinämöinen is presented. It seems to me that this is a result of a change in the software sometime this or last week.

The change has negative effects: When the text is edited, the characters still look normal: åäö... -- Petri Krohn 05:59, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
 * 1) Links to anchors get a weird form.
 * 2) On IE the characters are rendered in a different font, making them look like bold in subtitles. (Note the ü in the subtitle above; it is not bold though it may look like it.)
 * Wikipedia has been UTF-8 based with links using UTF-8 values for some time so that shouldn't be related to any recent changes. Looking at the source of that page i can't find anything unusual about the characters in that subtitle nor do they render oddly in IE for me. Plugwash 08:08, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Links to anchors that you manually add can be typed normally. For instance,  works: it's autoconverted to point to "#Rendering_of_character_with_.C3.BCmlaut".  It's illegal to put anything other than a subset of ASCII into anchor names at present, and we can't even use normal percent encoding, so we made up something using periods.  Wikimedia sites haven't used any encoding other than UTF-8 in text for at least a year now, I believe. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 06:13, 2 November 2006 (UTC)


 * The subtitle text appears four times in the HTML source text
 * Twice in the <a ... > anchor
 * name=" .C3.BCmlaut "
 * id=" .C3.BCmlaut "
 * Twice in the header
 * Ã¼mlaut
 * title="Edit section: Ã¼mlaut "


 * There is no reason why the header text should be anything but 8-bit ISO/IEC 8859-1. Using UTF-8 is of course a good reason :-)
 * Anyway, something has changed since yesterday, the Ü in the subtitle no longer looks bold. Today, the source for the ü is Ã¼ ". I am not quite sure what it was yesterday, as I may have just looked at the 2 first ones, and missed the text.


 * The issue may have something to do with the rendering of ;Uuml and ;Auml on some browsers. On IE they sometimes use a different font from Ü and Ä, making their appearence bold. It may of course also be a temporary problem in my browser. -- Petri Krohn 06:53, 2 November 2006 (UTC)


 * P.S. "Ã¼mlaut" is naturally what you see when viewing the HTML source text in a 8-bit text editor. I guess it would look like ü on an UTF-8 text editor. -- Petri Krohn 07:07, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

Image Positioning (complex)
Hate to be a bother again so soon, but I can't figure out how to position the images on Topsyturveydom where I'd like them. As you can see, there's a long, blue text box (actually a table) on the right containing the poem Gilbert based the play on. The images Gilbert used to illustrate the poem are in the main text, but left aligned. I'd LIKE them to be between the main text and the text box that is, right-aligned with the text box right of them, but just telling them to float right sends them down to under the text box. Any advice? Adam Cuerden talk 23:37, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Put them in mini-tables. Adding that trick to the help page. Adam Cuerden talk 00:17, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

edit function in COTM template
I have created a Collaboration of the Month box for the WikiProject Nursing see WikiProject Nursing/cotm & I would like it to have a direct link to the "edit" function of the page of the month as can be see on WikiProject UK geography/cotm when I copy the code "If you see ways in which this article can be improved please edit it" & replace with  is gives a very funny appearance like "assessment&action=edit edit it" Is this because our article of the month is two words & the UK geo usage is only 1 word - or am I doing something wrong? Any ideas about how to fix this would be gratefully appreciated.&mdash; Rod talk 22:51, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

I've got this. Adam Cuerden talk 23:17, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

Okay. It's quite simple: "Nursing assessment" is two words. That means the text is seeing: assessment&action=edit edit it Since a link to a website is broken off at the first space, it thinks the link is "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nursing". Don't worry! this shouldn't be too hard to fix. Let me just check the help files. Adam Cuerden talk 23:21, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
 * thanks for the help it actually shows as the second word ie "assessment&action=edit edit it" so it's picking up the second word&mdash; Rod talk 23:24, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
 * User:Ligulem seems to have done it by the use of [ editing] . Thanks &mdash; Rod talk 23:27, 31 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Yup. Fixed. does the trick . --Ligulem 23:29, 31 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Heh. Figures. Just when I had found the right help page. Still! Glad it's all fixed up =) Adam Cuerden talk 23:30, 31 October 2006 (UTC)


 * For future reference,   only escapes the spaces in the first parameter (always title=). If the parameter is not the title (what links here, related changes), you can use the    magic word.
 * Example, say you want to create a link in a template to the block log for blocked usernames -> " ". This won't work with spaces in the name like "Willy on Wheels" (unless they are manually underlined) as you'd get: "'", so what you can do is escape it with: "  ", giving you "'"
 * Also, the magic words for page name like   etc all have 'escaped' versions:    etc. These are useful to know when constructing external URLs. --Splarka (rant) 08:32, 1 November 2006 (UTC)


 * Good example. I've added that on meta . --Ligulem 09:05, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

Links to Wikipedia:Sandbox have been redirected
The links to the Wikipedia:Sandbox aren't working properly or have been redirected to another page containing:

"Miyavi composes, arranges, and produces his own music. He has been playing guitar for 11 years. As far as guitarists go, he says he respects Toshiya (Dir en Grey) and Kazuki (Raphael (Japanese Rock group))"

Janus 21:38, 31 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Are you sure that wasn't just someone using the sandbox to figure out an article on Miyavi? Adam Cuerden talk 22:20, 31 October 2006 (UTC)


 * I've reset the sandbox, so it should appear normal now. Tra (Talk) 22:49, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

Login cancels all the time. Why?
I can log in fine, but as soon as I move to another page my login evaporates. I have set my cookies to accept cookies. What is wrong??

It appears to deal with my satellite connection. The secure server appears to work.

Jeff Dean, 10-31-2006


 * It's probably a problem with the network somewhere that prevents you logging in. If the secure server works, use that instead since it was designed for these kinds of problems. Tra (Talk) 22:52, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

It's some kind of glitch affecting only the Main Page for me--it says sign in there but I'm logged in at every other page. A Runyon 05:34, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Try refreshing the main page and clearing your cache. Tra (Talk) 17:28, 1 November 2006 (UTC)


 * Do you check "remember me"? —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 06:09, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

Extra space
I sometimes see an extra space between an external link and the next word or punctuation mark in the article's body while editing and previewing. Is it because of viewing in IE (I also noticed it puts an extra space to my user page, while it doesn't exist in Mozilla)? --Brand спойт 17:38, 31 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Is there an extra space between the two words here: "foo bar." and not here: " foo bar. "? Do you see a little image there? --Splarka (rant) 08:17, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Yeah, an external link arrow. --Brand спойт 13:18, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

Is it possible to change the logo?
Is it possible to change the logo on the monobook skin into Image:Wikipaedia.png? -- ¿¡Exir  Kamalabadi?! <font color="mediumseagreen">Join Esperanza! 13:00, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
 * If you would like to change the logo to something else for your personal viewing, adding  to Special:Myprofile/monobook.css will do what you want.  If you mean sitewide, similar methods could be used, or someone with shell access could be asked to set up a specific on-wiki image as the logo. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 06:00, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

Special:Export not working properly
Special:Export exports the items properly, but when I uploaded Template:Usernameblock and Template:Sockpuppet into my own copy of MediaWiki, it didn't have the full edit history - can anyone find out why this is?? Thanks, SunStar Net 22:13, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Usernameblock is currently a redirect to UsernameBlock, where the full history is located. Not sure about the other one, it works for me.   Nacon kantari  22:37, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
 * It didn't work with Template:Sockpuppet, I didn't get the full edit history. 82.42.237.71 22:51, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
 * (the above was posted by me, accidentally logged-out!) SunStar Net 23:01, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
 * What do you use to upload these templates in your wiki? I think the correct solution is to enable Special:Import and use that. Tizio, Caio, Sempronio 13:33, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Is Special:Import enabled by default?? --SunStar Net 23:28, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
 * As far as I can see, it's not: the variable  seems to regulate this, and is an empty array in  . I don't have mediawiki installed so I cannot be sure, but I think you have first to be sure that wikipedia is in the interwiki map you use, and then you have to add its interwiki prefix as an element of the array   in  . Tizio, Caio, Sempronio 11:28, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

Image:Ella in Yonkers.jpg
This image will not show up as a thumbnail on its own description page no matter what I do. It will sometimes show up on other pages if the thumbnail size is specified (it "likes" some sizes more than others), but the infobox at Yonkers, New York, which should auto-generate the thumbnail, won't. I've purged the image cache about a dozen times and even uploaded a smaller version of the image, thinking that it was a bit big for the software to handle. Any ideas? Dyfsunctional 14:34, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Doesn't work for me as well. The image description page contains an image at url  and the result of loading it separately is:

File not found Although this PHP script (/w/thumb.php) exists, the file requested for output (/mnt/upload3/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/b5/Ella_in_Yonkers.jpg/800px-Ella_in_Yonkers.jpg) does not.

Change the special page names
For some reason our special page names have allthewordssmashedtogether, apparently whoever wrote that part of the software felt that they were easier to type that way or something. I've introduced a software change which means this no longer needs to be the case -- we can change the default name, and leave a redirect in place for the old name. You can suggest changes to the special page names at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special_page_names. For more information, see my wikitech-l post. -- Tim Starling 13:43, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

Incorporating babel language without header/footer
Hi. How can I incorporate the "en" babel/userbox into my userbox top/bottom template without the babel header/footer? Thanks Peppery 02:21, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Not quite sure what you mean, but just user en by itself will produce

Also boxboxtopuser enboxboxbottom will produce the table shown at right, which has the header but no footer.

— Mets 501 (talk) 02:24, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Thats precisely what I was looking for, thanks! Peppery 02:25, 31 October 2006 (UTC)