Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive AM

Issue with Template:Protected title
For some reason, the protected title template (used at Protected titles) is now applying cascading protection to existent templates listed in this manner, despite the fact that they clearly aren't transcluded (but MediaWiki reports that they are): Protected titles/Today's featured article A

I'm baffled as to why this is occurring, and I was unable to duplicate this result by manually adding an ordinary link to a cascade-protected page (which is all that should be happening and all that appears to be happening). Can anyone figure out what's going on? —David Levy 14:13, 3 April 2007 (UTC)


 * See Code_execution.--Patrick 15:01, 3 April 2007 (UTC)


 * I'm still a bit confused. Why would this only affect templates (and not other pages)?  —David Levy 15:26, 3 April 2007 (UTC)


 * It is about side-effects of wikitext processing, other than rendering the page; it also affects the link table.--Patrick 16:19, 3 April 2007 (UTC)


 * What I don't understand is why this doesn't cause existent pages other than templates (articles, etc) to be protected. —David Levy 16:27, 3 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Do you have an example? It seems they are protected too.--Patrick 16:58, 3 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Oh, wow. You're right.  When I tested this earlier, the article that I selected at random (Cat) happened to be semi-protected, and this condition apparently prevents the cascading protection message from appearing when a sysop attempts to edit the page.
 * I'm nearly certain that this bug manifestation didn't exist when I created WP:PT (and was introduced in a subsequent MediaWiki revision). It isn't a big deal, but it should be addressed (if possible).  —David Levy 17:19, 3 April 2007 (UTC)


 * I'm not quite clear on what needs to be done to change this behavior. —David Levy 15:26, 3 April 2007 (UTC)


 * From the linked text:
 * put the whole parser function call inside the braces or brackets, e.g. instead of . If there is no else-part a dummy template such as  can be used:  instead of . If the parameters of a and b are not the same the parser function can be split up into one for the then-part, and one with inverse condition with the else-part becoming then-part (or the same condition and only an else-part):   instead of.
 * I think that can be applied here too.--Patrick 16:19, 3 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Yes, I read that suggestion, but I'm not quite clear on how to implement it. Any assistance that you can provide would be much appreciated.  —David Levy 16:27, 3 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Has a bug report been filed? —David Levy 15:26, 3 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Not that I know of. It may not be so easy to change, it is how parser functions are processed: by first processing the parameters (including noting that a page is transcluded, for, among other things, the purpose of cascading protection), and then applying the parser function itself (such as discarding the included template if the condition is false).--Patrick 16:18, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

For the record, Patrick devised a clever coding solution. Thanks again, Patrick! —David Levy 18:57, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

Image resize quality
I uploaded an image (click on the thumbnail): What I notice is that the resized version (800x530) shown on the image's page looks very unsharp. (If you look at the original size, you will see that it is quite sharp.) As a test, I uploaded the same image to my Flickr account. The resizing algorithm there seems to do a much better job. See:  or  (the wikipedia size is in between these two sizes).

Does anybody else notice this effect? It doesn't look like a JPEG artifact, but maybe a poor resizing algorithm. Josh Thompson 06:05, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Looks like an unsharp mask was used on the Flickr versions. I downloaded your Nikon D50 original, resampled this to 1024*678 and took the arithmetic difference with the Flickr version. The outline of the edges are clearly visible. Especially on a large zoom of the lighthouse antenna/lightning rod, So, can’t really blame the resizing algorithm, unless you expect an image filter to go standard along with it.. --Van helsing 09:05, 3 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Fair enough. It doesn't surprise me that Flickr does some processing. Thanks for your efforts. Josh Thompson 10:58, 3 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Yes, Flickr does some sharpening on resized images; we don't currently do that but have considered adding it, as a slight sharpening generally increases perceived quality. --brion 18:49, 3 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Any pointers on how one might insert an extra sharpening step into the rendering performed on a private Mediawiki site? Dragons flight 02:35, 4 April 2007 (UTC)


 * I would find the code that calls the "convert" program, and change it's command line. It is all imagemagick based. HighInBC(Need help? Ask me) 02:37, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

Moving a category
Why can't categories be moved?? Surely the developers should make them movable?? I can understand images not being like this, but categories... --Koyne Farllis 15:59, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Moving a category would involve changing all the inclusions to it on all pages that it contains. Such moves are done by bot (see WP:CFD/W). --ais523 16:39, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I still don't understand. Why couldn't there be redirect similar to an article being moved? --MZMcBride 19:41, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

Template clash
Currently, and  both put their symbol right in the upper right corner of the screen. They clash with eash other if a page has both, such as The Simpsons. Should one of these be changed? mrholybrain 's talk 00:23, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I've brought this issue up before on the relevant talk pages. My proposed solution was to create a single template that would accept as parameters the names of other templates, and would then space the images appropriately, rather than having many different templates use absolute values. This, of course, would require quite a bit of work to implement. There are some disputes going on at some of the protection templates right now, so it'd be pretty much impossible to get a word in edgewise regarding this problem. The three most common corner templates (spoken, fa, and sprotect2) used to be at different positions until the latest protection template changes. --- RockMFR 01:06, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

More on sortable tables
Ongoing discussion at Template talk:Sortablename. --Random832 13:10, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

Combined-category filtering
It occurred to me recently that it would be useful to have a tool, for non-technical users, whereby articles in two specified categories could be listed; for instance "all articles in category:Birmingham also in Category:articles needing cleanup" or "all articles in category: living people also in category:people from Birmingham". I have no idea how this might be achieved, not the skills to implement it,. Anyone interested? Andy Mabbett 07:09, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Try m:User:Duesentrieb/CatScan. It may have a problem with Category:Living people because it's so large; I tried an intersect of Category:People from Birmingham, England with that and it died on me after a few minutes.- gadfium 08:40, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
 * WP:AWB has a list comparer function, where you can load the articles in two categories (or from what links here and others) and find which are in both, one or the other. It will take ages to load large categories though. You could try scanning the data dumps offline for large categories, although the data might be slightly out of date. mattbr 10:55, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

Inputbox
Does the "editintro=" parameter work for comments added to an existing page using the inputbox function? The Help:Inputbox page seems to suggest it does, but I can't get it to work. Mr.Z-man  talk ¢ 01:06, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Never mind, I misread. All resolved. Mr.Z-man  talk ¢ 05:19, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

category weirdness
Can someone help me figure out why Category:Amz isn't showing up in Category:Candidates for speedy deletion? — coe l acan — 01:49, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
 * It probably has something to do with the job queue being at 2,339,644. --MZMcBride 01:57, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
 * 46 hours after it was tagged for speedy? I've seen other categories get tagged and untagged in the meantime, which did show up in the parent category. Doesn't make sense... — coe l acan — 02:04, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

Toyota Prius page layout is messed up on Firefox
The layout of the Toyota Prius page is bad on Firefox 2.0.0.3 on Windows XP. Looks okay on IE. The left column with the menus is missing and the menus are scattered over the left side of the text. Dougher 20:44, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I think I fixed it by closing the table used in the article. Is it fixed now? --MZMcBride 22:49, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

Error on selecting 'Save page' (Vista)
My new Vista-based PC is set up with multiple accounts – one for each of the family, plus one admin account. On accounts where Parental Controls have been enabled, I am seeing a problem when trying to save an edited page.

When 'Save page' is pressed, the updated page is not displayed. Instead, I get an essentially blank page saying the following:

Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage  Most likely causes: - You are not connected to the Internet. - The website is encountering problems. - There might be a typing error in the address.

The URL in the address bar is unchanged (it still ends 'submit'), but clicking 'Refresh' clears the error page and reloads the article page in edit mode. (This confused me for a while, until I realised that my previous edits HAD been accepted, and I had re-opened the saved page for a further edit.)

The problem is NOT caused by a page filter, as my account does not have any URL restrictions enabled. (My account has a time restriction set, to disable access at midnight in a desperate attempt to stop me editing WP late into the night :o. Disabling all restrictions and restarting the account cleared the problem, but re-enabling the time limit restriction brought the error back again. I never see the problem in my admin account, but see it 100% in restricted accounts.

The problem applies to both WP and 'Commons'.


 * So, any ideas?
 * Is it purely a Vista problem?
 * Were the WP tecchies aware of it?
 * Is there anything I can do to avoid the problem, short of disabling the restrictions?

EdJogg 19:45, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
 * The problem hasn't been reported to the bug tracker yet, as far as I can see; you can file a bug report at . I can't think of any solutions to this (maybe someone else at VPT can?). I suspect it's a Vista problem, or it would probably have been noticed before now. --ais523 11:59, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

Search result lisitings...
I notice that often when I search for something, several pages of results come back. However when I click on one of the page numbers or the "Next »" link, often it takes me to a generic "no results" page. For instance try searching for "fromthe". Currently four pages are returned but only the first seems to display. What's going on here? Is this a Wikipedia problem or a Mediawiki problem? No problem? Jason Quinn 17:16, 4 April 2007 (UTC)


 * I think what's happening is you're searching in only one or a few namespaces, but it still gives the total number of results in all namespaces. Checking all the checkboxes beside the namespaces gives all 4 pages of results. –Pomte 18:01, 4 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Thank you, Pomte. It appears you are correct that it is a namespace thing. The question now becomes is this behavior that is best? I think it is certainly confusing the way it is. Jason Quinn 21:31, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

Edit tabs
How do you remove the [edit] links that show up on the right from within a page? Think outside the box 09:41, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
 * my preferences -> Editing -> Enable section editing via [edit] links (first checkbox). –Pomte 10:05, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
 * For a specific article add: (see: Help:Magic words). --Van helsing 10:10, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Thank you! Think outside the box 10:33, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

Tab Priority/Position
I understand why focus isn't given to the search box on the Main Page (yes, I read the FAQ)....but how about putting focus on the item (or some other "placeholder") just prior to the Search box. Or perhaps giving the Search box a higher tab priority/index. Currently, one must Tab through nearly every hyperlink on the page before the cursor finally gets around to the Search box.

By adjusting the tab priority of the search box and/or the initial tab position of the cursor, one could still use the arrow keys to function as expected, and would only require a single 'TAB' to move it to the search box. (Incidentally, if the focus were in the Search box, the same action would allow the arrow keys to work...just "Tab" out of it.) It just doesn't make sense that the page requires a user to move his/her hand back to the mouse, click the search box, then move his/her hand back to the keyboard to perform a search. This could all be simplified with proper tab priority/position when the page loads. ++Arx Fortis 07:00, 4 April 2007 (UTC)


 * The accesskey attribute is set on that element, to "f" (see also WP:KB). You can also put something in your personal [ user js] to set focus right on it, like:

addOnloadHook(function {document.getElementById('searchInput').focus; return false;});
 * Or you could set the tabindex to 1 (note that diff pages, edit pages and other such pages already have an element with a tabindex="1" attribute, so you'd either have to except them or accept them):

addOnloadHook(function {document.getElementById('searchInput').tabIndex='1'; return false;;});
 * --Splarka (rant) 07:53, 5 April 2007 (UTC)


 * The Search access key in Firefox requires CTRL-ALT-F. That's an awkward combo for a fairly routine task.  I doubt most users know they have a user.js....much less how to edit one.  I still haven't heard a good reason why the tab index can't be changed to make search #2. ++Arx Fortis 13:42, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

Wikisource link
The wikisource: prefix leads to the English Wikisource. However, is there an interwiki link prefix that leads to a page on the multilingual wikisource (eg, this page)? Grace notes T § 20:46, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Tibi, Redemptor omnium. Interwiki map seems to be the canonical list. &mdash;Cryptic 21:03, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Ah, I thought I saw that page somewhere! Now bookmarked. Thank ye. Grace notes T  § 22:04, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Hit Counter?
Is there any way to add a hit counter to a Wikipedia user Page?

Thanx,

Kevinwong913 16:00, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Technical FAQ John Reaves (talk) 16:27, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

Thanx.

Kevinwong913 01:25, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

Job queue
The job queue is over 2 million. Isn't that sort of high? -- Prove It (talk) 03:46, 4 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Not really, and it's likely the result of an edit in a high-use template (maybe a cite template?). Jayden54 09:26, 4 April 2007 (UTC)


 * (cringes) - Well, at least part of it could be as a result of cleaning up user categories. I've been going through the userboxes and removing parent cats (essentially duplicative cats) from the programming/OS userboxes. Many of them did not use includeonly/noinclude, and often a userbox would add the transcluder to several cats. For example, if you have bas-3 on your userpage, you would have been added to bas-3, bas, and Wikipedian programmers. I've been removing the latter two as parent cats. I also removed the OS category from the userbox per WP:UCFD. (It's still not depopulated, after a few days...) Even so, I don't think that those actions would equal even close to a 20 thousand, much less, 2 million? - jc37 10:21, 4 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Oh, and Category:Teenage Wikipedians has been merged, and it's also a fairly good sized cat... Anyone else out there been fixing/altering templates? : ) - jc37 10:24, 4 April 2007 (UTC)


 * I edited some templates yesterday, including birth date and age. Any idea how long the queue would take to clear if there were no new additions at all?  There is a request to edit fact, which would add quite a lot. CMummert · talk 13:23, 4 April 2007 (UTC)


 * I wouldn't worry about it, and go right ahead and perform the changes that are requested. The developers will step in if there are any problems, see Don't worry about performance. Jayden54 15:24, 4 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Right, it shouldn't hurt performance, but it might frustrate people who are changing categories on templates to wait a week before the job queue gets to the articles that use the template. There is a related discussion at meta that seems to suggest 2 million is higher than normal. CMummert · talk 16:16, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

As I understand it, the reason for the job-queue remaining so full is that the server which would normally be servicing it is busy performing some rather massive updates to the database schema which are keeping it busy. This should be finished within a few days when normal service will be resumed. HTH HAND —Phil | Talk 09:19, 5 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks. I had the distinct impression that it wasn't going down. Is there a noticeboard somewhere with information like this? CMummert · talk 10:48, 5 April 2007 (UTC)


 * There's the Server admin log, but the information there is very technical (it's directed at the other developers); there's also the channel topic for #wikimedia-tech. However, most of the time, the information comes from lurking on #wikimedia-tech. --cesarb 22:36, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

Another Watchlist Problem.
I don't seem to be able to access my watchlist at all. Every time I go into it, it comes up with an error. Does anyone else have this problem? Acalamari 18:21, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Yes, see same problem. Also see job queue at 1.4 million and increasing. Gimmetrow 18:28, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Interesting; the job queue length has caused a lot of watchlist problems recently. Acalamari 18:30, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I was having problems with it along the lines of what has been said, but now it appears to be working again. Strange. -- Luigi Maniac  18:43, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Indeed, it's working again. It seems the watchlist problems last for up to half an hour at most (by my experience) to as short as a few minutes. Acalamari 18:47, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

Again. 2nd day running? Simply south 22:17, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
 * And now that it has come up it is 20 minutes behind present amazingly. Simply south 22:38, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Then not loading again. Simply south 23:00, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
 * It has been working for me again, except now it is suddenly over 5 hours behind. What is wrong this time with it? Anyone else having this sudden problem? -- Luigi Maniac  04:30, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Yes, see Village_pump_%28technical%29 Gimmetrow 04:48, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

Orange warning bar not showing up on IP talk page?
Has anybody else experienced this problem? A message posted to an IP talk page may not necessarily be received by the user. Some IPs experience it as the fact that the orange bar is stuck and won't clear out. Others have experienced it as the "new messages" notification does not show up no matter how many warnings are posted or if the cache is cleared. See here & here for more details. -- Hdt83 Chat 01:32, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
 * I had the orange bar stuck problem while I was temporarily an anon way back in Jan or Feb. It took perhaps 20 mins or so (can't really remember to be honest but it was a fair while) for it to disappear after I had visited the message. Purging etc didn't help nor was it cache related. There was at least one other report at the time Nil Einne 10:31, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
 * My problem is that they do not show up for me under a IP address. -- Hdt83 Chat
 * This is Bug 9213. Prodego  talk  02:11, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Has anybody else experienced this problem? I think that this is a major problem that is affecting many IP addresses. Please reply if somebody else has a similar problem with the "New Messages" bar. -- Hdt83 Chat 03:58, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
 * It affects all IP addresses, and has been doing so since January-- VectorPotential Talk 00:38, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

Unknown exception in diff.
I was cleaning up vandalism and came across this. Up at the top left, it says "Unknown exception in diff". So, what's up? — coe l acan — 00:44, 6 April 2007 (UTC)


 * I've noticed when you make an edit to a page but don't change anything, the revision doesn't appear to append itself to the history. In this case, both revisions are the same (no changes) but somehow got put into the history - my guess.   x42bn6  Talk 00:51, 6 April 2007 (UTC)


 * But they're not the same. If you look at the ranged diffs around that edit, it looks like Theodore Unit on line 25 was changed to Theodore Unit . –Pomte 02:22, 6 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Hm, interesting; then I have no clue.  x42bn6  Talk 18:01, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

Problems uploading .svg images
I have created some images using inkscape and I save them as both plain .svg and inkscape.svg but neither uploads. I get no error message, but when I go to look at the image, I get the red X. Any advice? And if this is not the right place to get help for this, please suggest another forum. Thanks in afdvance. Argos&#39;Dad 18:48, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I took a look at Image:SimaVasileionEllados.svg and it appears to embed a PNG file located at C:\Documents and Settings\Steve &amp; Brian\My Documents\Steve's Pictures\Wikimedia\SimaVasileion4.PNG. Since we don't have access to your hard drive, it doesn't work that well. ;)  As for how to fix that, I wouldn't begin to know how to tell you except to just upload the PNG directly. --BigDT 01:26, 14 April 2007 (UTC)


 * You need to use Inkscape's "Trace Bitmap" function if you want the PNG to actually be converted to SVG. It looks like all you did was import the image which left the reference to the file on your local disk. Another option is to use "Effects -> Images -> Embed All Images", but then your SVG is not really a scalable vector graphic, since it contains an embedded raster image. Mike Dillon 03:01, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

CURENTUSER template ?
Hello. I there such a template wich replace by the current user name? I tryed :, , ... but and searched in help files but i didn't find a suitable one. It is for use in an input box such as : It is for a wikia project. Thanks by advance if you can help.--Ttibaut 22:47, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
 * No, there's no such magicword. At a guess, it's because it wouldn't be able to be meaningfully cached by the Squids. &mdash;Cryptic 00:29, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Ok thanks. I will try to find another way to do it. If someone has an idea it would be welcomed ^-^--Ttibaut 00:40, 7 April 2007 (UTC)


 * I think that using  could work, but you'd have to be on a site that is using a version of Inputbox that actually supports   to test that. The version installed on Wikipedia doesn't support it as far as I can tell; I'm not sure about Wikia. Mike Dillon 00:44, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Wikia support prefix. Thanks, i'll give you the result of the test in a few minutes^-^--Ttibaut 00:54, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
 * It works!!! Thank you very much Mike!!!--Ttibaut 00:58, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

American/British web page parser?
Sorry if this is question has previously been asked, but is there a tool I can use that will look at a wikipedia article and search for words that are distinctive between the American and British versions of the English language? I.e. cookie in American, biscuit in British; potato chip in American, crisp in British; center in American, centre in British; and so forth. I need to be able to search a long page and look for potential intermixing of the two. Thank you! &mdash; RJH (talk) 20:35, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

Funny Formatting In The Article About Amber
Amber

The formatting in this article gets strange about 1/2 way down starting at "Amber Inclusions". Everything is italicized from that section down. I looked in the source in a number of different places but I didn't see any stray "italic" syntax. Can someone take a look at this and see what is going on? 67.177.149.119 20:25, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
 * See Village pump (technical)-- VectorPotential Talk 20:25, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I've gone ahead and fixed the article, the problem was someone forgot to close a tag-- VectorPotential Talk 20:28, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

Template not quite working?
Here is a partial copy of post at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Indigenous peoples of North America: I was pecking away at the Category:Unassessed Indigenous peoples of North America articles and noticed something. It seems about a quarter of the articles are listed alphabetically by their names and about three-quarters of the articles are listed under "T" as Talk:XXXX, though all are shown as the Talk pages. I looked at the differences between the two and both types look identical with the   template in their Talk pages. Can anyone figure out why so many are being listed under "Talk"? Thanks. CJLippert 05:10, 27 March 2007 (UTC)
 * I think I know part of what is going on here. When we have the    template alone in the Talk: page, it files the article under "T" for "Talk" but if there are multiple templates on the Talk: page, then it files the article under the article's name.  This seems like an issue not of IPNA but with the Wikipedia system in general.  I will take this question to the Village pump or the Help and ask there how to resolve this issue. CJLippert 18:42, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

Can anyone here tell me how to resolve this issue I stumbled across? Help appreciated. CJLippert 18:50, 6 April 2007 (UTC)


 * You don't have to do anything; just wait for the job queue to catch up. The template was changed very recently, and it was not using  before; what you are seeing is still the old categorization. --cesarb 20:23, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

HTML Tidy?
Nevermind, post moved to Village pump (technical)-- VectorPotential Talk 18:54, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

Technical problems when trying to revert vandalism
I have several times tried to revert vandalism on the article Rockville Centre, New York, and my edit is keep being blocked when I click save as it says I am spamming the page. As the vandalism removed half the page content and reverting it meant restoring the external links, and it is classing these legitimate external links as spam. Why is it doing this, and how can it detect which links are inapropriate and which are not? Retiono Virginian 15:42, 6 April 2007 (UTC)


 * That's probably the Spam blacklist; take a look at the list to find which of the external links is causing the block, and do not restore it when reverting the page. --cesarb 20:35, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

My user page
Seems to have started displaying oddly today. Text in sections has become invisible, in Firefox and IE. Any ideas? --Guinnog 09:58, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Past versions appear the same way. You don't have closing tags after your headings e.g. Apologia. –Pomte 10:06, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
 * It's always worked fine until today, so I thought that maybe something has changed at the server end. I lack the skill to edit it; any help you can give me in that would be welcome. --Guinnog 10:18, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I've tried fixing the code. No warranty applies (grin). Valentinian T / C 10:43, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Thank you so much for your work. I wonder (as the coding hadn't changed in ages) what made the site less error-tolerant overnight? Oh well, I don't understand such things; I am glad I brought it here. --Guinnog 10:49, 6 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Are you using a different or upgraded browser than before? I've encountered a similar problem today: The entire bottom section here was crossed out for 5 whole days without anyone seeming to notice. It was also an improper tag ( instead of ) so I'm assuming that only some browsers manage to show these errors. Unless the site was autocorrecting and autoclosing tags for some reason, and just stopped. –Pomte 11:39, 6 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Both browsers I tried it with (Firefox 2.0.0.3 and Internet Explorer 7) displayed it correctly before. I wondered if something of the sort had happened. --Guinnog 11:51, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
 * See below for what happened. --cesarb 20:38, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
 * A couple of notes:
 * Tags should be closed in the opposite order they are placed (an example pulled from your page: it should be Apologia (close the font tag first, then the div).
 * Font tags, as I oh-so-subtly mentioned in the last example, shouldn't be used; the  (with a proper in-line CSS declaration) can apply the same effects without the odd inconstancies that they can introduce.
 * For that matter, the font tags aren't doing anything in those examples; you can easily put a "font-family" and "color" declaration into the div tag.
 * That's all I spotted; I just took a very brief look at the page, though. EVula // talk // &#9775;  // 13:44, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

Previewing
Coming here from a suggestion in my post at the Help Desk (here)... I don't know if this is happening to anyone else, but lately for me the show preview button hasn't been working. After clicking the button, it refreshes back to the edit window without the preview above it, and only previewing the edit summary. I don't use the button much, but I was working with templates and inserting images the other day and it would have been handy. I disabled Tools/Navigation popups for a while (preview still didn't work) but logged out it worked fine. Any thoughts/suggestions/comments? I'm not too fussed about it not working, but it should, so...  Cat tleG irl  '' talk 02:09, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
 * It seems to be working fine for me. Do you have a browser problem or something? Acalamari 02:28, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
 * No problems that I know of, everything else is working fine besides that button.  Cat tleG irl  '' talk 02:37, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Here are some tests you may be able to try, which would help isolate the cause of the problem:
 * Try another Web browser on your computer.
 * Try logging into your Wikipedia account from someone else's computer.
 * Make another (dummy) account and log into it from your computer.
 * Trying those tests could shed some light on whether the problem is in your account settings, or your browser or computer, etc. For example, if the problem always occurs in your account regardless of what computer or browser you are using, but it does not occur in the dummy account from your computer, then the problem is almost certainly in your account settings. Also, when you link to a post on the Help desk, your link will break when the Help desk page gets archived, unless you use a permanent link like this. --Teratornis 04:17, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

GNU/Linux Naming Controversy FAR
Can somebody figure out how to list GNU/Linux naming controversy for FAR and move my justification from the talk page? I have no idea what I'm doing. Qwertydvorak 22:43, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
 * See WP:FAR. If you have any questions, let me know below. Cheers. --MZMcBride 22:53, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Yes, I tried to follow those guidelines, adding the FAR tag apparently doesn't work because of the slash in the page name. Qwertydvorak 20:01, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Never mind, I did not know I had to create the page. Qwertydvorak 20:06, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

Really confusing
This really odd problem seems not to be isolated. Can anyone here comment? AndyJones 15:18, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

ping delay problem
Hi there,

I have a small problem in terms of networking.

I had a test setup consisting of two Cisco Routers and when I Ping from one Router to Another the delay time is being inconsitent.

This setup was setup in our office and when I try to ping from one Router the Average ping delay should be around 650mSec but it is surpassing the limit and even sometimes exceeding 700mSec, which is not acceptable by our Inspection Agency, all they want to clear the system is a very good reason for the cause of inconsistent ping delay as it is exceeding the Specification.

I would like someone to assist me in this regard at the earliest, for the product to get cleared.

Thank you D.ravikanth
 * The technical section of the village pump is used to discuss technical issues about Wikipedia. Maybe the reference desk can help. Good luck, Notinasnaid 07:32, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

Index.php query string
Where can I find the sintax of the query string for ? (For example, when I clicked for writing this post the URL was .) I would like to develop a web form for adding and similar templates on User Talk pages, and for performing other task which require editing multiple pages. Some time ago I noticed somewhere that there was a  (or similar) parameter which allow filling the edition text area with a predefined value, but I would like to know the whole spectrum of possibilites. Rjgodoy 04:11, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Try having a look at Manual:Parameters to index.php.Tito xd (?!? - cool stuff) 07:52, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Oops, didn't notice you snuck in an edit there Titoxd. My fault for taking half an hour to type this ^_^. --Splarka (rant)


 * The "whole spectrum" is pretty big, as each action and each Special page (as well as each extension Special page) can have its own unique parameters. Here is the best non-source-code (but incomplete) list you'll probably find: mw:Manual:Parameters_to_index.php. However, these aren't specific to 'index.php' as that is basically the long form of the same URI (/wiki/ is just an available alias set by .htaccess or something). For example: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Splarka?action=edit.
 * You can often have good luck finding usable URI parameter names by viewing the html. For example, on a delete page: &lt;input type='text' size='60' name='wpReason' id='wpReason' value="" tabindex="1" /&gt;
 * The name in this case indicates the parameter, so for example you can use  to preload a reason. However, sometimes you need to view the php source. The edit page (source) only seems to take 4 URI parameters:

$section = $wgRequest->getVal( 'section' ); $preload = $wgRequest->getVal( 'preload' ); $undoafter = $wgRequest->getVal( 'undoafter' ); $undo = $wgRequest->getVal( 'undo' );
 * 1) Get variables from query string :P
 * The rest are all POST, as far as I can tell. But, what you can do, is use &preload=Some_Template&section=new (because preload only works with new pages or new sections, and needs a template for 'preload').
 * What I've done before to circumvent this, is a bit of javascript (for example, see Wikia:User:Splarka/newwiki.js). You could write up a little script that would, with a properly formatted URI like say:
 * (I often use scripts like this to batch delete, batch move, batch block, and even batch upload files, with nothing more than Firefox)... one problem though, is it requires a user to edit their user js, unlike the preload above.
 * Anyway, HTH. --Splarka (rant) 08:10, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

List_of_protected_pages
This page has been broken since early yesterday - refuses to display. What's up? - Merzbow 17:55, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
 * It always takes ages to load whenever I try and load it... presumably because there are so many protected pages and the content of the page is huge? Perhaps your browser just timed out? --Deskana (ya rly)  17:57, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Actually it seems a bit broken. There's an entire section filled with stuff about the article lt, which seems to be an error relating to Template:lt, and there's also a lot of stuff about the article Article. It seems a bit bugged out. Maybe we should contact the bot owner. --Deskana (ya rly)  18:01, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
 * That is not a new problem, and it's not a bot problem; it's the template limits getting hit. Just check the HTML source for the page; the parser outputs plenty of warnings hidden inside HTML comments. As to the slow loading, it's no surprise, given that the generated HTML for that page is over two megabytes long, and that's without expanding a lot of the templates. --cesarb 20:32, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I don't even get any HTML source - browser spins for two minutes and then a Wikimedia Foundation error page comes up. - Merzbow 22:26, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

I'm guessing that this page predates the category system? Perhaps it should be moved to categories. - jc37 10:06, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

The Watchlist Again.
I assume everyone's watchlists are playing up again? I believe this is the third day in row we've had this? Acalamari 23:07, 5 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Nah, I hasn't been 3 days. This is the first day my watchlist is having problems. I can navigate around WP just fine...-- Ed  ¿Cómo estás? 23:09, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Same here. Any idea as to what's going on? Fvasconcellos 23:10, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I can navigate Wikipedia perfectly, but this is the third time this has happened within 72 hours. If you read some of the above posts you'll see this is a continually occuring problem at the moment. Some users think it's the job queue length. Acalamari 23:11, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
 * OK, thanks. Fvasconcellos 23:14, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I was just about to report this (: VectorPotential Talk 23:24, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I'm glad it's not just one user who's affected; by the fact all users are probably affected means that there is a problem somewhere that needs fixing. Acalamari 23:26, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
 * They seem to be working again now. Mr.Z-man  talk ¢ 23:34, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I was just about to say that. Thanks. :) Acalamari 23:37, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

Is there a place where there's up to date statuses about Wikipedia? There should be a place to report this stuff and to actually know what's going on. -- Ed  ¿Cómo estás? 23:37, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Besides this page, where answers may be slow, the best I can think of is the #wikimedia-tech IRC channel. Thats where the developers and other tech people tend to hang out. Mr.Z-man  talk <i style="color:navy; font-family:cursive;">¢</i> 02:28, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

Right now, the watchlist is "working" but is only reporting edits that are about four hours old. Gimmetrow 04:38, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
 * It's essentially useless with 4 hour edits. PTO 04:40, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

It seems to be catching up now... slowly... --- RockMFR 05:01, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

This lag is incredibly annoying - can't see the additions to WP:AIV on my watchlist meaning I have to actually check it! Viridae Talk 05:12, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Seems to be about 8 hours behind now. But this is the first time I've experienced it. Tvoz | talk 05:21, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
 * 8 hours? Mine is about 2:40! Viridae Talk 05:24, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
 * When my watchlist first fell behind, it was by about 5 hours. Now it has caught up to being about 2 and a half hours behind. Why have there been so many problems with watchlists lately? -- Luigi Maniac  05:30, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
 * No idea, but its happening again - 15 minutes behind atm. Viridae Talk 23:21, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
 * It is; and the contributions are updating slowly again as well. Acalamari 23:27, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Wow, this time I didn't even notice until Viridae's edit finally showed up on my watchlist (I have this page on my watchlist). Lag: it's a terrible thing. -- Luigi Maniac  23:48, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
 * The lag is making vandalism fighting very tough. I also noticed that there is a problem with the font size in some pages. It was happening in my talk page and in other articles, like Click (film) (scroll down). — An as  talk? 11:12, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I fixed the font problem in Click (film), which was caused by a missing close html tag for small. Since HTMLTidy has been upgraded on the Wikipedia servers (see message by Tim Starling below) tags don't get closed automatically anymore. Jayden54 11:52, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Uha, thanks for notifying me of that. — An as  talk? 17:48, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

Template:Link GA not working
It seems that Link GA fails to work properly. For example, after I added to Flag of Hong Kong, the GA icon doesn't show up in the part of the interwiki links. However, Link FA is fine at the moment. -- Kevinhksouth 10:08, 5 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Did it ever work? The reason that Link FA works is because of supporting JavaScript in the  function in MediaWiki:Common.js and a CSS definition for   in MediaWiki:Monobook.css. Mike Dillon 05:03, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

It looks like there is a bullet image for this purpose already at Image:Monobook-bullet-plus.png. I've also created Image:Monobook-bullet-ga.png, which is a downsized version of Image:Symbol support vote.svg. The resulting lists would look something like this:

Deutsch Français Italiano
 * Image:Monobook-bullet-plus.png

Deutsch Français Italiano
 * Image:Monobook-bullet-ga.png

I had to fake this since the HTML filter for Wikipedia strips out the "style" element on  tags. If there is support for this change, User:Ruud Koot would be the one to ask about getting it done since he maintains the Link FA support. Mike Dillon 05:35, 6 April 2007 (UTC)


 * I believe this has already been rejected in the past (at least we chose not to mark our own GAs with an icon at the top, why would we then try to draw attention to GAs in other languages?) —Ruud 09:52, 6 April 2007 (UTC)


 * But the fact is that this template is used in several language versions already. If English Wikipedia decides not to use it, please delete this template, and also lock this title, so that noone else, who doesn't know such policy, would be able to create it again. -- Kevinhksouth 06:43, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

Strange corrupted Diff
[] This shows as a corrupted diff brining in text from several months ago. What is causing this? SchmuckyTheCat 17:20, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

Wikisource links backlog
This has probably already been brought up, but there are several links to Wikisource that are broken. That's because pages in http://wikisource.org where deleted and moved to http://en.wikisource.org, http://fr.wikisource.org, http://de.wikisource.org, or others. More obscure languages have stayed at the subdomain-less Wikisource. A general backlog of non-functional links is available here; if anyone wants to help, he/she may replace broken Wikisource links with interwiki prefixes, or the Wikisource template. Grace notes <sup style="color:#960;">T § 20:54, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Here is filtered and alphabetically sorted list. I'll start from the bottom. Max S em 08:32, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Heh, why didn't I think about doing that? I actually started with the goal of converting Wikisource external links to interwiki links, but found this problem, which is more immediate. Grace notes <sup style="color:#960;">T  § 17:35, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
 * In addition, some links may be valid, to more obscure languages. Those could be prefixed by "oldwikisource:", methinks. Grace notes <sup style="color:#960;">T  § 17:36, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

Monobook.js
Does the monobook.js make my user account broken? I want to know. Jet123 My talk page 23:17, 7 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Your monobook.js seems not to exist, and so it can't be broken. CMummert · talk 23:22, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

Administrators editing signatures
I always thought it'd be good if (somehow) administrators could edit people's signatures, so we could deal with blatant violators of WP:SIG. Perhaps something like Special:Changesignature/Deskana? Just a thought. --Deskana (ya rly)  01:47, 1 April 2007 (UTC) Well, the answer to that last question is "yes", but my point still stands: we've got a solution and we're looking for a problem. EVula // talk // &#9775;  // 21:31, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Tony Sidaway had had a RFC because he edited signatures everywhere. Apparently, some agreed that in certain situations was fine, but many others rejected the idea. But, in trhuth, I don't think this is really necessary. -- ReyBrujo 02:22, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
 * That's what user talk pages are for. EVula // talk // &#9775;  // 17:03, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Something needs to be done, to stop people producing signatures that are eiether unreadable, comprised of deprecated HTML, or both. Andy Mabbett 17:28, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I agree, but that "something" should start with talking to the problem editor. You don't need to be an administrator to leave a note on someone's talk page (well, if it's protected you do, but you get my point). EVula // talk // &#9775;  // 18:38, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Well, I would propose we amend WP:SIG to deal with the specifics of exactly when administrators should edit people's signatures, for example, only if the user was asked politely first. I wouldn't suggest we add this feature and not impliment no set of rules dictating when it can be used. I don't think it'd be abused. If we implimented guidelines on when to use it, would you agree with the software addition? --Deskana (ya rly)  19:00, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I'd agree with it, personally, but there would have to be strict policy about its use, and possibly a log. You're just changing a variable in a database somewhere, as far as I'm aware. Grace notes <sup style="color:#960;">T  § 20:44, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Good idea; guidelines should be set down. Asking a user to change their signature before changing it without their knowledge is better than just changing someone's signature without them being given a chance to change it. Acalamari 20:55, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I think that's getting a bit creepy. Is there a specific instance where a user has been told by another editor (on their talk page) that their signature was disruptive and they ignored it, to the detriment of the community? You're talking about a largely cosmetic issue; personally, I dislike sigs that have super- and sub-scripts in them, as they distort the line spacing; is that a blockable offense? What about my own signature; is the &#9775; offensive to someone? Is someone using a &lt;font&gt; tag instead of a &lt;span&gt; tag going to bring about the end of the encyclopedia; is using full color notation (ie: #336666) as opposed to simplified color declarations (ie: #366) causing people to leave the project? Should someone be banned indefinitely from the site for using the &lt;blink&gt; tag?
 * It's a problem I've been addressing, albeit on a small scale, for a couple of years. Andy Mabbett 21:37, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
 * A few days ago I asked to change his excessively long signature. He asked me if he *had* to, and I reluctantly said no. Apparently he didn't get the hint that he should, so there should be a way for us admins to give him the hint. Threats of blocking make no sense, so special:changesignature is a great idea. It would've prevented the whole -Ril- mess, too. Picaroon 21:41, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Yes, my thoughts exactly. We'd, of course, also need something that prevents people from changing their signature back too though, since otherwise our changes could be undone, if the user just refuses to accept it. Maybe just Special:Resetsignature/Deskana, then, which resets the signature to it's default when the account was created? --Deskana (ya rly)  21:43, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
 * It probably won't be that useful to prevent someone from changing back their signature, since they could just paste in their (unacceptable) signature manually for each comment they make, if they really want to. Tra (Talk) 21:59, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
 * True, and putting in a guideline that says that users shouldn't paste it back in could create instruction-creep; an issue we want to avoid. Acalamari 22:26, 1 April 2007 (UTC)


 * If done, I'd absolutely want some log of who changed what, and when, along with some strict guidelines about when sigs can or can't be edited. By the end of the day, it may be easier to implement some technical restrictions (on images, or perhaps length, for example). If the goal is to avoid useless cluttered code when editing talk pages, then a character limit length would seem to address a large portion of the problem, no? – Luna Santin  (talk) 22:31, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Restrictions would not really work, anyone can just paste a long signature if necessary (after all, I type the four tildes myself everytime I sign). Maybe we should start a WP:AIV/SIG to report extremely long signatures ;-) -- ReyBrujo 22:34, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Another problem with restricting long signatures is that if that kind of change was made to the software, the existing long signatures would need to be automatically removed through an SQL query which could use up a lot of memory, and additionally, what would they be changed to? If they were just truncated, that could make the html invalid, whilst simply resetting them to the default value could upset a lot of users. As for the 'signature change log', it would only really make sense if users' changes to their own signature are logged as well. Tra (Talk) 22:47, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Such a tool would very likely be problematic especially if adminstrators sharing the POV of someone like User:Tony Sidaway were to have access to it. Sidaway changes all signatures indiscriminately and given the number of times he is called to task about that on his talk page, doing that is disruptive. Who's going to be making the judgement call? I don't appreciate my signature being altered and I especially wouldn't appreciate the altering of signatures enmasse by some power tripping adminstrator with a tool like this. There is a long tradition on the project for upstanding and highly contributory users to utilize distinctive signatures to better identify themselves and the commentary they make, this thinking goes counter to that tradition and is likely to alienate these valuable folks. 00:55, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I would just observe anyone alienated by changes to their signature wouldn't seem to have all that deep of a commitment to the project. Also, a limit on the length of signatures can easily be enforced by simply not allowing anyone to change their signature to one longer than the prescribed limit.  No need to change all the existing long signatures, eventually they will be weeded out. —Doug Bell 01:21, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Is this not a deep enough commiment to the project Doug Bell? I agree that there are signatures that are too long and or too garish (literally I've seen signatures that due to their high contrast nature have interrupted a given talk discussion) but as others have said here, the best way to address this is through discussion with the concerned user. 01:38, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I wasn't directing the comment at you, but rather at anyone that would become alienated (i.e. significantly disturbed as to impact their participation in the project) by a change to their signature. I'm not assuming that characterization applies to you. —Doug Bell 06:56, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
 * It does come off as incredibly disrespectful. Remember we're volunteers here - if we feel a lack of respect, or believe our contributions are not welcome, we can quit at any time. Tito xd (?!? - cool stuff) 03:40, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Not possible. I can set my signature to, and have all the HTML code I want at that subpage. -- ReyBrujo 01:25, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I've got two thaughts on this. 1) this is to much creep. If someone's signature is disruptive, blocking is available.  2)Enabling the other extreme (e.g. Special:Prefences/Targetuser) would allow for this, as well as assiting users with other preerences related challanges.  This would need to be resticted to sysops and the email settings should probally be left alone.   —  xaosflux  <sup style="color:#00FF00;">Talk  04:04, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

Questions: <span style="font-family:Papyrus; letter-spacing:-1.2px;font-weight:normal; background:#F0F8FF;white-space:nowrap;cursor:help;">&#8212;M (talk • contribs) 20:43, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
 * 1) How would this be an improvement to the encyclopedia?
 * 2) How is this not just another attempt at an administrative power grab over editors?
 * 3) With administrators now busying themselves making sure everyone's sig is perfect, how will they have time to create and edit articles?
 * 4) Does Deskana understand the ill-will this will engender in those editors who have their well crafted sigs edited, or is he simply that callous that he doesn't care?


 * To address #3: a lot of administrators don't contribute to article creation, and focus more on the "nuts and bolts" of running Wikipedia. I don't see this as a bad thing (I, for one, have never created an article from scratch). At most, I think it would be administrators watching a noticeboard (maybe just using WP:AN so it wouldn't be a new board) and addressing issues as they come up; to suggest that policing sigs would somehow significantly impact an admin's workload is a bit silly, in my opinion. EVula // talk // &#9775;  // 23:34, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

Suggested solutions
I'm sure that these have been suggested previously, but how about just:


 * disallow images in signatures (this should be a no-brainer especially with the recent clarification from the board). Also consider that we still have people putting fair use images in userboxes, having to go and clean up such signatures, would be needless work that just shouldn't be necessary. One can be creative and unique without an image.


 * disallow transclusion of pages in a signature (Honestly, I thought that that was already disallowed...)


 * set a shorter length. Yes, a user "could" then paste the signature, and there is no reason to set an actual "rule" against it (I really don't want to find that we have editors sitting there counting characters in a signature...), however, just removing the "convenience" of the "extreme" lengths should be enough to cut down on thoughtlessly long signatures. I've seen quite a bit of discussion about how to concatenate/shorten lengths, and I think that this would just add an extra "suggestion", without having "instruction creep" of requirements.

Hope this helps. Interested in further discussion, obviously : ) - jc37 00:20, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

Link color Table
Is there anyway to set the color of links for an entire table? daniel folsom  ©  18:17, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

Watchlist customisations?
Or, more specifically, is there any way to display the date on which each item was added to my watchlist? I would find this useful as a memory aid. Adrian  M. H.  16:45, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I don't think that information's recorded by the server, so there'd be no way to display it (and Watchlist table confirms this). --ais523 16:48, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Oh well, thanks anyway. I wondered if that might be the case. Back to the notepad and pen! Adrian   M. H.  16:52, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
 * You could add links to a user subpage. This way, your edit history will tell you when you added each link, and you can use Special:Recentchangeslinked as a pseudo-watchlist. –Pomte 17:11, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
 * That's not a bad idea. Thanks. Adrian   M. H.  17:46, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

Horizontal TOC
Is there such a thing as a horizontal toc? I've looked a lot of places now - and I can't seem to find one, but I figure if anyone knew you guys would. One problem is I can't do this like a css type of thing - any user that comes has to see it horizontally. I was hoping for something like this (with less space in between words): Thanks for any help! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Danielfolsom (talk • contribs)


 * There are horizontal ones at Template messages/Compact table of contents, but these are for long alphanumeric and similar lists. –Pomte 16:34, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
 * What about this?


 * It's a new feature that's being worked out at the moment. --ais523 16:50, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Wow - thanks for te quick response! daniel  folsom  ©
 * You're lucky in the timing; that wouldn't have worked a week ago. There are still some problems with Internet Explorer 6 that need to be worked out. --ais523 17:05, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

SVG rendering with opaque background instead of transparent
Could a developer look at  and confirm whether it is a browser problem or wiki problem (and if it is the latter then hopefully fix it). Thanks in advance Theresa Knott | Taste the Korn 12:14, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

Something wrong
Something wrong with the colors in Wikipedia. In my userpage, some of the blue and black color texts was turned into white. And not even that. This part I took from User:Snowolfd4's sign. Previously it was green and now its blue. ( talk ) Original version can found on here. ♪♫ ĽąĦĩŘǔ ♫♪  walkie-talkie  08:34, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

wikimedia diff function
I have several questions on diff program used for page historirs.

1) Is the diff program specifically developed for wikipedia?

2) Is it almost the same as the "dif" program under unix/linux?

3) If it is different, what are the major differences?

4) Is it obtainable from wikipedia or any other resource?

5) Is there any technical paper on how to reimplement it?

Thanks,

Ramazan.
 * I don't know, but if someone doesn't come along with an answer, perhaps you could look at the source. The database is available at Database download, but points to the frontend source at MediaWiki, which says it's at http://sourceforge.net/projects/wikipedia/.  I agree, it acts a lot like the Linux diff utility.  —EncMstr 05:33, 8 April 2007 (UTC)


 * 1) kind of, 2) no, 3) it makes HTML and does word-level diffs, 4) C++ version (used on Wikipedia), PHP version (used on other MediaWiki wikis). 5) Possibly, try an abstract search. It's based on a diff module from PhpWiki, which was based on a Perl module by Ned Konz (now obsolete), which was loosely based on GNU diffutils. Various features and optimisations were added along the way. See the comments in the source. -- Tim Starling 07:31, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

New messages bar
My new messages bar has popped up at least 5 times in the last 20 minutes but I haven't been receiving new messages at all. What's wrong? The Evil Clown my contributions 16:22, 7 April 2007 (UTC)


 * It just happened to me too, while viewing a diff. Femto 18:20, 7 April 2007 (UTC)


 * BTW, I forgot to mention that, it happens during diffs, and when I finish the revery, it still is there until you go to your talk. The Evil Clown my contributions 18:22, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Well, that function is happening as it is supposed to; the message appears until you view your talk page, no matter what. If it is still appearing after that, though, that would be a different problem.
 * Also, it might be that someone made a minor edit, but not a new post per se; the system can't distinguish between the two, and so gives you a message no matter what. EVula // talk // &#9775;  // 23:21, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
 * There was no edit made at all. Or esle I won't be complaining. The Evil Clown my contributions 00:20, 8 April 2007 (UTC)


 * In my case, there hasn't been an edit to my talk page in the last 20 hours before the phantom message bar popped up. Not even a deleted edit in the revision history ...unless a revision was removed by Oversight. Would the new message flag remain in those cases? Anyone here with permissions to check the oversight log for User talk:Evilclown93 and User talk:Femto? Sounds unlikely though. (And no, it wasn't one of those fake practical joke messages on people's user pages, just to be clear.) Perhaps there was a major glitch in the synchronization of the server times, something like that. Femto 12:12, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I think that might be it; I know there have been a lot of strange time-delay glitches here lately, such as the contribs page being out of date and whatnot. EVula // talk // &#9775;  // 16:27, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

It's On (Dr. Dre) 187um Killa
Do other people see this article as I do &mdash; with the line that's normally under the title actually going through it? If so, does anyone have any idea why this is happening? (If not, does anybody have any idea why I'm seeing it that way?) --Mel Etitis ( Talk ) 09:33, 7 April 2007 (UTC)


 * I also see the line going through... may be because of the superscript? Rjgodoy 10:11, 7 April 2007 (UTC)


 * I assume so, but I can't see how to get rid of it; nothing shows up on the Move screen. --Mel Etitis ( Talk ) 23:28, 7 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Looks fine to me. Try previewing the article after removing the downsize line. This might be a reason to disallow tags like  on the title line. –Pomte 01:13, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, that worked. I agree about superscript tags. --Mel Etitis ( Talk ) 09:21, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

Diff error
For some reason, the diffs on some edits I'm making in AWB aren't displaying right. For the article İskenderun I changed Category:Port cities to Category:Port cities in Turkey. The category was changed but the diff shows the category simply being removed. It did this for some other articles that I changed but not all (see ). I have made similar edits with AWB (slightly different category) and never had this problem. Mr.Z-man  talk <i style="color:navy; font-family:cursive;">¢</i> 04:38, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
 * According to the history for this one, the article already had both categories prior to your change (see this revision just before yours). So instead of replacing the one category with a duplicate of the other one, the first one was apparently just removed. – mcy1008  ( talk ) 05:01, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
 * That must be a quirk of AWB; because when there are two of the same category, it changes both of them. Mr.Z-man  talk <i style="color:navy; font-family:cursive;">¢</i> 05:40, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

Repeating my questions
I hope it is alright to do this. I asked some questions on this page that were never answered, and seeing as how they are in the archive now, I would like to repost them in hopes of getting some responses. Here they are, as copied and pasted from the archive:


 * I need some help with my userpage. I got bored and started looking around when I came across Misza13's Status Switcher script. I decided to use it, but after I put everything in I now have two problems. Problem one is that it says Example's Status on the template on my userpage. How do I get that to say LuigiManiac's Status? My second problem is that before I put in the template, my userboxes were on the far right side of the page. Now they moved to the left of the Status template. How do I get them back where they were? Thank you in advance. From 24 March 2007


 * Okay, while I'm waiting for my five day old problem to be solved, I have a new one. It also has to do with scripts. I just started helping the fine folks at Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links, and I tried out Barticus88's dpl.js (it's shown on WP:DPL's talk page). It actually is working just fine. What's the problem? Well, I also have the popups tool in my monobook.js, and it was working until I put in dpl.js. Now I can't get any popups to, well, pop up. After using it for awhile, I put dpl.js out, purged my cache, tested my popups, put it back in, purged my cache again, and tested popups again, and I can say with great certainty that the dpl.js is blocking the popups tool. I like both of them, so is there is some way to have both enabled at the same time? Thanks in advance. From 30 March 2007

I hope that these will finally be answered, as they still have not been resolved. -- Luigi Maniac  02:38, 9 April 2007 (UTC)


 * The first one is done. The second one is more complex. Prodego  <sup style="color:darkgreen;">talk  03:07, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

Suggesting additions
I want to propose a new feature that would involve a built-in moving/renaming tool for categories, similar to the one we have for pages. Where do I propose this and/or who do I contact about this? --Hemlock Martinis 23:04, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Well, you can use AWB :) If you moved Category:A to Category:B, then all of the pages in Category:A would still say Category:A, and Category:B would be empty, even if the wikitext and revision history of Category:A was moved. Is the latter what you're looking for? Grace notes <sup style="color:#960;">T  § 00:46, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I guess that works. I was hoping for a built-in feature, but I doubt that'll happen. Thanks! --Hemlock Martinis 00:50, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

Edit and editor count
First, is there a way to determine the number of edits an article has had, and second, the number of editors that have edited the article. I wanted that info for this without having to count. Thanks. KnightLago 20:14, 8 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Yeah here's the article statics page. -- ♪♫ ĽąĦĩŘǔ ♫♪  walkie-talkie  20:23, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. KnightLago 20:41, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

What happened?!
All of a sudden, my scripts quit working. Any idea what's up? <font family="Trebuchet MS" color="#D2691E" size="2">~ <font face="Vivaldi" size="3"> St ep tr ip   00:10, 8 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Hi. I seem to have had a similar problem. When I added new options of popups to my monobook, they didn't change anything. When I bypassed my cache, it stopped working altogether. When I removed it, it worked just fine. I guess some scripts are problematic. I might need some help with this too. Thanks. – A  stroHur  ricane  00  1 (Talk+Contribs+Ubx) ( +sign here+How's my editing? ) 00:55, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I had this problem after a recent firefox upgrade, kicked up javascript option to off, try reseting that setting in your browser. — xaosflux  <sup style="color:#00FF00;">Talk  00:57, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

kan't login
wen i try to get in mi account, i get the 404 message. so i kan't login

nd yes, i deliberately tiping like dis, so mi ip isnt associated wit my accoutn.

-75.26.3.100 16:51, 9 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Ummm? How will changing how you type do anything? If it is a 404 you should just try again, it is probably on our end. Prodego  <sup style="color:darkgreen;">talk  17:12, 9 April 2007 (UTC)


 * I had some trouble logging in too, something about technical difficulties. The problem went away after I executed the  command, which I assume assigned my computer a new server to work with. —Remember the dot (talk) 17:18, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

Adding attributes to links
Can we add "class " and/ or "rel" attributes to internal and external links? This is needed for certain microformats, as outlined at WikiProject Microformats. Andy Mabbett 08:56, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

Something wrong with the codes I copied
I have copied from User:Storkk, where User:Storkk/Quotes led to User:Storkk/Quotes2 or User:Storkk/Quotes3. Then I altered it to on User:Aditya Kabir, where User:Aditya Kabir/Devil's dictionary leads to User:Aditya Kabir/Devil's dictionary. I also have copied the switch to 30 quotes on User:Storkk/Quotes2 and expanded it to 100 quotes on User:Aditya Kabir/Devil's dictionary. But, it is not working, and my limited knowledge can't figure it out. Can anyone take a look at the codes and figure out the problem? If you respond here, please, leave a note on my talk page. Aditya Kabir 08:19, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I'm not an expert on Wiki parser functions, but I think your codes are correct. However, Wikipedia aggressively caches page content. If you try to edit one of the pages, and then replace "&action=edit" in the URL with "&action=purge", you'll see a new random quote. I don't know how you get around page caching other than by this manual method.- gadfium 09:04, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Thank you very much. The manual method is not working either, it's showing as a red link. Every time I click on it it gets me to - http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Aditya_Kabir/Devil%27s_dictionary1&action=edit. When I replace "=edit" with "=purge" it's back the redlink again. No quotes anywhere. The code is working fine the page I copied it from. What to do? Aditya Kabir 10:37, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I guess, I have been able to figure it out. The trick is to have multiple pages with the same switching code. It gets me to User:Aditya Kabir/Devil's dictionary0, User:Aditya Kabir/Devil's dictionary1 and User:Aditya Kabir/Devil's dictionary2. It doesn't seem to use the original User:Aditya Kabir/Devil's dictionary page at all. Aditya Kabir 10:46, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Technically you're supposed to have User:Aditya Kabir/Devil's dictionary3 too. The idea is to have different sets of quotes on each of these dictionary pages. But that's an inefficient way of doing it. If you want to keep all the quotes on one page, get rid of, so you can stick to User:Aditya Kabir/Devil's dictionary without bothering about the numbered pages. –Pomte 11:19, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

Non-ASCII characters
I'm trying to clean up Han. It includes many non-ASCII characters, which display as question marks in Firefox (2.0.0.3, encoding Unicode UTF-8). I've heard that, in some cases, non-ASCII characters can be "corrupted" and actually stored as question marks or other gibberish characters in the database. How do I know whether or not that's the case here? --Smack (talk) 03:54, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
 * The easiest approach is to install and use a font that include Asian characters, see Help:Multilingual support. -- Rick Block (talk) 04:21, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
 * None of the character on that page appear as a question mark. In the past I've made such a corruption: copied article text into an editor, made changes, and when I pasted it back into the edit box, the characters appeared as question marks. –Pomte 09:54, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

css pseudo-classes
another css note: we will need css language pseudo-classes for lang to work properly (notably font selection for CJK "de-unification").

This will mean introducing pseudo-classes into common.css along the lines of: :lang(grc) { font-family: Athena, Gentium, "Palatino Linotype", "Arial Unicode MS", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Grande", Code2000; font-family /**/:inherit; } this will allow us to just use lang as usual ( ἑλληνικὴ γλῶσσα ) instead of polytonic.

see a proposed list here. dab (𒁳) 13:09, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

Merged watchlist?
Hi all - I spend 99% of my Wiki time on en:Wiki, but also occasionally hop over to meta and to one other language wiki (Maori). Since I only go to meta and mi:wiki every week or two, I often miss new things which are on my watchlist there. Is there any way of adding pages from Meta and mi:wiki to my en:wiki watchlist? Grutness...<small style="color:#008822;">wha?  07:31, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
 * You'll have to wait for SUL to go live. Max S em 07:36, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
 * In the meantime, Meta can be configured to send you an email whenever a page on your watchlist changes. --ais523 14:51, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

Mm. Useful. Thanks, both of you! Grutness...<small style="color:#008822;">wha? 

Regaining an old user account
Could a developer please take a quick look at User talk:Jimbo Wales and say whether my suggestion there is acceptable?. Thanks.- gadfium 05:25, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

Scroll Box for references
not sure where to put this suggestion, but on the bigger pages, a scroll box would look better for the references, then one whole screen full of references. Oldag07 22:42, 15 April 2007 (UTC)


 * If you think that it would be appropriate in an article, you can use the following code:

This is a scroll box with a height of 100. It may not work everywhere.

Filler text

Filler text

Filler text

Filler text

Filler text

Filler text

Filler text This is an adaption from Beethoven that will work for all screen widths. You can alter the height; currently, it's 100px. Implementing this on every article with a large reference section may annoy some people, but please others. Grace notes <sup style="color:#960;">T § 00:01, 16 April 2007 (UTC)


 * The scroll box also appears in the Printable version, which probably causes only what is visible in the box to be printed rather than all the information to be printed. I did not test what happens when trying to jump to an anchor within the box.  (SEWilco 04:09, 16 April 2007 (UTC))

collapsing two css classes
having combined IAST, semxlit, ArabDIN and others into a new transl, I suggest that the "IAST" css class in MediaWiki:Common.css be removed, and the "latinx" class used generically for all romanizations of non-Latin scripts.

latinx at present suggests:
 * Code2000, "TITUS Cyberbit Basic", "Microsoft Sans Serif"

while IAST suggests:
 * "Arial Unicode MS", "GNU Unifont", "Lucida Sans Unicode"

note that this is a bit unfortunate, since it will be a matter of chance whether the result is in serif or sans-serif. Code2000 and TITUS are serif (TITUS has no cursive!). Microsoft Sans, Arial and Lucida Sans are sans-serif. The purpose of the class should be to render as much Latin Unicode as possible, but I think font suggestions should be ordered so as to prefer either serif or sans-serif. Maybe
 * Code2000, "Free Serif", "GNU Unifont", "TITUS Cyberbit Basic"

Since most systems now come with reasonable Unicode support out-of-the-box, these classes will be largely redundant soon, anyway. dab (𒁳) 15:28, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

Definition of newbie on Wikipedia

 * Please see Help_desk

Hi, I was wondering, in the context of [] what is meant by the word "newbie"? WP:NEWBIE and WP:NEWBIES don't define the term, and I initially thought that it may be the first edit of each user, but I've now seen people logged there after over fifty edits, and my 24hour theory fell through too — <font face="Verdana">Jack · talk · 23:19, Saturday, 14 April 2007
 * Just speculation, but it may be users who have not reached the 4-day "autoconfirm" threshold (required to move pages and edit sprotected pages). Mr.Z-man  talk <i style="color:navy; font-family:cursive;">¢</i> 23:44, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Nope, that's not it either. I've seen page creations by newbies show up there, and that's mostly why I use it, most of the fresh junk pages show up there. — <font face="Verdana">Jack · talk · 00:09, Sunday, 15 April 2007
 * Page creation isn't actually restricted to established users. Mr.Z-man  talk <i style="color:navy; font-family:cursive;">¢</i> 00:10, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
 * What do you mean? AFAIK, page creation is restricted to only those who have held an account for four days — <font face="Verdana">Jack · talk · 00:24, Sunday, 15 April 2007
 * Nope. Anyone can upload an image or create a non-talk page once they get an account. After four days (or more specifically, 345600 seconds), they can move pages and edit semi-protected ones. It can be reasonably inferred that software makes the differentiation between "newbie" and not based upon autoconfirmed-ness. Grace notes <sup style="color:#960;">T  § 04:43, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

Tecnically, newbies are those who registered among last 1% of users. Max S em 05:37, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

question about user creation log
When I look at the user creation log for most users, it shows when the account was created. For instance, if I look at it shows that my account was created on 28 November 2005. What does it mean when a user's log doesn't say when the account was created? Is there a way to find out when it was created? --Akhilleus (talk) 03:48, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Er, could you provide an example? If the creation log doesn't say when the account was created, it might mean that it wasn't (ie: you can find blank contrib, user, and user talk pages for accounts that don't exist). EVula // talk // &#9775;  // 03:50, 10 April 2007 (UTC)


 * It's also possible that the user account was created before the user creation log was enabled. The Newuserlog extension doesn't seem to have been created until August 2005. Mike Dillon 03:54, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

I don't think either one of these apply. I'm looking specifically at, a user who has an edit history; it looks like he became active in summer 2006. --Akhilleus (talk) 03:56, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Hmm, curious... if I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that they created the account before the Newuserlog, but didn't actually use it for anything until after (or their first few contributions were deleted). EVula // talk // &#9775;  // 04:21, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I suppose that's possible, but this user's first edits were pretty newbie-looking. I should explain what's going on: Mnyakko and another user, Zeeboid were recently blocked for violations of WP:SOCK. I'm trying to figure out if another named user created the Mnyakko account. --Akhilleus (talk) 04:27, 10 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Going by approximate UserIDs, they seem to have created the username just a bit before the log was started.
 * Splarka - UserID: 230000 ±200 - (6 April 2005)
 * Mnyakko - UserID: 343000 ±200 - (??)
 * User creation log created - (August 2005)
 * Akhilleus - UserID: 615500 ±200 - (28 November 2005)
 * Zeeboid - UserID: 1789100 ±200 - (13 July 2006)
 * So probably they were just camping.--Splarka (rant) 06:35, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

Infobox spacing
Would it be practical to make "margin-top: 5px;" part of the default style for Infoboxes? I know that's bad karma and all to force style on things, but it would help keep infoboxes from being too close to things; like disambig notices and templates. - RoyBoy 800 02:12, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Might not the template family do enough if used appropriately when needed? Nihiltres 04:38, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

Timestamp overlap

 * Copied from Talk:Main Page, 20:19, 9 April 2007 (UTC)



The timestamp on this talk page is overlapping with the "Your continued donations keep Wikipedia running!" that appears when not logged in. It has "display:none" in the style attribute, so I'm a bit confused about why this even appears at all... 164.107.166.227 18:18, 6 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Yes, I see this as well. It really looks rather ugly... but I don't know how to fix it. Help? Gold fritter 16:11, 9 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Does this only appear when one is not logged in ? I don't see it now. I have seen it before and it disappears when I reload/refresh the page. Rather odd.... --PFHLai 19:21, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
 * It's a conflict between the style class "metadata topicon" which is used to locate the date on this page and the wiki-wide begging message that is only shown when logged out. The begging message is shown with javascript with a style of "text-align:right;" in the div id="siteNotice". The result is they slap on top of each other. One or the other element needs to be rethought. --Monotonehell 19:31, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Can we move the clock a little bit down to avoid this conflict ? --PFHLai 19:41, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
 * If we move the clock down (only on this page as it's a wiki-wide style class) it will conflict with the horizontal rule when people are logged in. The div that is visible for those not logged in adds extra space. I'm not sure what to do as everyone's browser renders a little different depending on what browser they have and how it handles fonts, not to mention personal font settings. --Monotonehell 19:45, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

How about: ? The text will be a little smaller. Cheers, [ sd ] 22:07, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

Image sizes
"Specifying the width of an image can screw up the layout for some readers so much as to make the article unreadable. Wikipedia is used by people who may have very good reasons for specifying smaller, or larger images than what looks good in your browser. Since specifying an image size overrides the preferences they may have set, it should not be done without a very good reason. Essentially the guidelines say that it should only be done if shrinking the image to default size will make the image unusable."
 * Is it a difficult problem to fix WP's image handling routines so that browsers aren't screwed up by specifying image sizes? Paul venter 15:31, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

TeX is UGLY
The images containing renderings of any TeX used in articles generates them in a font that is completely different from the article font. In a size that is too big, and on a background that is always white. Is there anything that can be done to make these images blend in more with the articles, i.e. use the cmbright package to render the equations sans serif - and turn the font size down a bit. Also would it be possible to use a transparent background for the images? Conrad.Irwin 09:35, 9 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Serifs are useful to differentiate between similar symbols. Complicated expressions need the large font size.  Consider the normal distribution:
 * $$f(x;\mu,\sigma) = \frac{1}{\sigma\sqrt{2\pi}} \, e^{ -\frac{(x- \mu)^2}{2\sigma^2}}$$
 * --Smack (talk) 05:16, 10 April 2007 (UTC)


 * TeX is ugly, I argued that when it was first introduced . But I disagree about the sans serif, I'd rather see the whole article in a serif font to match the TeX rather than the other way around. -- Tim Starling 13:41, 10 April 2007 (UTC)


 * We can't control what font the article is in - the user does that with their web browser. I think that the biggest impediment to getting rid of TEX is that there is no reasonable support in pure HTML for anything except subscripts and superscripts, and until the browsers have a way to format math natively we are stuck with TEX images for complicated expressions. As a test, try to show the formula that Smack has above without using TEX in a way that most browsers will display correctly. CMummert · talk 13:45, 10 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Tex does not look ugly to me. It looks nice. Using a different font for math symbols than text is a common practice. HighInBC(Need help? Ask me) 13:47, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

Sorting Names Aphabetically in Categories
In Georgian Wikipedia in order to have peoples' bios sorted aphabetically in their categories we have to name articles as "last name, first name" (e.g. Washington, George, etc., which is unnatural for the language, see example), but here in English Wikipedia it's not required. Can anyone tell, what do we need to do to rectify this? Will very much appreciate. - Alsandro · T · w:ka: Th · T 07:05, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
 * What you can do is use category sort keys on individual articles. AFAIK, there's no way to do this wiki-wide. Tito xd (?!? - cool stuff) 08:12, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
 * thanks. - Alsandro · T · w:ka: Th · T 07:15, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

Inputbox
Does the "editintro=" parameter work for comments added to an existing page using the inputbox function? The Help:Inputbox page seems to suggest it does, but I can't get it to work. Mr.Z-man  talk <i style="color:navy; font-family:cursive;">¢</i> 01:06, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Never mind, I misread. All resolved. Mr.Z-man  talk <i style="color:navy; font-family:cursive;">¢</i> 05:19, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

SVG Music Score Creator
I would like to notate music in SVG format. I downloaded LilyPond and successfully created some notes on a staff in .ly format, but when it came time to convert the .ly files, the LilyPond program gave me a PS (PostScript) file even when I asked the Command Prompt (DOS) for -fsvg. Then I went on a search for PS to SVG converters and found pstoedit and Ghostscript, which produced an error message in Command Prompt that pstoedit was not a recognized command ( lilypond, which converted LY to PS, was recognized though).

Does anyone know of a free program that can create music in SVG (preferably directly)? Make sure the SVG file can be opened in Inkscape! Otherwise, is there a way to convert PS to SVG or PDF to SVG? Thanks in advance. -- King of &hearts;   &diams;   &clubs;   &spades;  06:03, 9 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Have you tried using ImageMagick to convert. I have not looked for th answer to this problem specifically but am reasonably certain that if lilypond cant do it, then nothing else will. Conrad.Irwin 18:25, 10 April 2007 (UTC)


 * It looks like you want to use the  option, not  . Just downloaded a couple of example scores and successfully converted them to SVG. The strange thing was that the weren't viewable in Inkscape, but they were viewable with rsvg-view (albeit with some graphical issues). I'm not sure what it takes to make these SVG files viewable in Inkscape. Mike Dillon 01:39, 11 April 2007 (UTC)


 * There seems to be a couple of issues:
 * Lilypond creates multipage SVG files, which are not supported by Inkscape (at least in version 0.45.1)
 * The font stuff is a little bit tricky
 * It's possible to work around the multi-page issue with a little hacking by splitting the pages into their own SVG files. I found a few references to getting the embedded font support to work, but I didn't take the time to actually do so. Mike Dillon 02:07, 11 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Also, if you do decide to convert PS to SVG, I believe that Scribus can do this with varying levels of success. I've used it to convert a few EPS files to SVG in the past. Mike Dillon 04:58, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

Linking to an article with a slash in the title
If you're outside the main namespace, how can you link to an article with a leading slash? By default, the leading slash causes the link to be interpreted as a subpage of the current page, e.g. /etc/network/interfaces. en:/etc/network/interfaces (gives en:/etc/network/interfaces) is one (hackish) way of doing it, are there any others? See also Articles for deletion/Ifdown, where we're trying to figure out how to get this to behave with la. Thanks! cab 02:24, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
 * The leading colon is the proper way to do it.  (/etc/network/interfaces) should work as well. Tito xd (?!? - cool stuff) 02:25, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the quick reply. Based on m:Help:Parser function, I guess there's no way to strip leading colons? Just wondering since I'm trying to figure out if there's any way to fix la/lx to deal with this; e.g. doesn't quite work, gives:
 * [ [:] ] ([ edit] &#124; talk &#124; [ history] &#124; [ protect] &#124; [ delete] &#124; [ links] &#124; [ watch] &#124; [ logs] &#124; views)


 * Cheers, cab 02:43, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Never mind, I guess StringFunctions is what I want, except they're not installed over here. So I suppose no solution for now. Cheers, cab 02:56, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

Strange lines in Skarloey Railway (viewed with IE7)
Just noticed a problem in Skarloey Railway. There is a heading and a spoiler warning box sandwiched between a TOCleft box and a map image (this is not the problem!). However, in IE7 the lines from the spoiler warning and the underline for the heading stretch across the page, overwriting the TOC and the map. This does not occur in IE 5.5 and IE 6, in which I created/maintained this layout for the page.

Anyone got any ideas?

EdJogg 23:32, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Weird lines in IE7 for me, none in Firefox. I have no idea why, just confirming it's a real problem. Nardman1 23:48, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

The Firefox rendering is most likely correct, but in any case I spaced out the text so there is no longer a problem. —Remember the dot (talk) 03:22, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

Photo won't move to right
In Badami Cave Temples, the last image at the bottom of the article will not move to the right as told to do. I have moved it around to see if placement makes a difference, but I can't figure out what is wrong. I would appreciate any help you can provide. I'm sure it is just a stupid mistake I am overlooking. Thanks! Sincerely, Mattisse 23:08, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Nevermind - I figured it out. (A mistake in a reference not several sections up was affecting it.) Thanks!--Mattisse 23:16, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

Monobook.css - better rendering for .diffchange in diff's...
I recently proposed a better method of highlighting diff's in Monobook.css at MediaWiki Talk:Monobook.css. It can be of great use when trying to locate what has been removed or added in a page change when it is just a period, comma, dash or other very small single character. I thought I would post it here, since it is suggested on that page that any changes be brought up here as well. Maybe make your replies/comments at the Monobook.css talk: page linked above? Thanks. --MattWright (talk) 21:37, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

User: Pupster21/monobook.js
I added admin-like revert to my mono book and now it won't let Pupster21 log in! --Pupster210 19:10, 10 April 2007 (UTC)


 * In that case, shouldn't we ask an admin to erase your monobook? If you agree, you could make a post at WP:AN/I, or I can do it for you. Valentinian T / C 19:16, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

Please do it. I didn't know that would crash my account. I mean, it says at the RC patrol that will give you admin like reverts. --Pupster210 19:20, 10 April 2007 (UTC)


 * I can't think of a way that your monobook.js would affect logging into your account. Could you elaborate on what happens when you try to log in?  Error messages, etc?  — bbatsell   ¿?   ✍  19:21, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

It won't go to the login successful page. It did until I added that to my monobook. --Pupster210 19:22, 10 April 2007 (UTC)


 * I have blanked your monobook.js page per your request. If it is the script causing your problems then refreshing your cache should help. Not sure how this could be caused by the script though. If it turns out to be something different you can just RV my blanking. HighInBC(Need help? Ask me) 19:23, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

I'll try. If it works I'll post with User:Pupster21 --Pupster210 19:24, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

Victory!!! THANKS!!!! --Pupster21 19:25, 10 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Ahh, good. HighInBC(Need help? Ask me) 19:26, 10 April 2007 (UTC)


 * For future reference, disabling javascript in your browser, logging in, and removing your monobook.js file yourself is a lot more reliable; depending on your browser, your newly-blanked-by-an-admin .js file may not get reloaded on its own for quite some time. &mdash;Cryptic 19:28, 10 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Gratz, but I wish the code had been commented out, instead of deleted, so we could diagnose the problem. Pete St.John 19:29, 10 April 2007 (UTC)
 * It was blanked, not deleted. Here's the problematic revision. &mdash;Cryptic 19:31, 10 April 2007 (UTC)


 * I am a little confused as to how a login issue could happen to Pup, but not to everyone else. I don't see any fault with the inclusion code. HighInBC(Need help? Ask me) 19:33, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

Deleting a chapter
Is there a way to delete whole chapters in a long article, without having to go line by line? I'm trying to fix a long article part of which must go to Wikipedia, part to Wiktionary.Makaokalani 12:09, 11 April 2007 (UTC)


 * This question is difficult to understand, because WP:LAYOUT says nothing about "chapters" in Wikipedia articles. Perhaps you refer to large sections. What browser and operating system are you using? The ones I use let me select large blocks of text with the mouse, and then cut them to the clipboard or delete them. It's also possible to delete a whole section quickly: click the edit link for the section, then right-click in the edit window, select "select all", press the delete key. If you need to make large-scale edits that are inconvenient to do in a browser, copy the whole article into an external editor, then paste back the result. --Teratornis 17:48, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

Watchlist lag, again...
Anyone else experiencing a lag of about ten minutes?-- VectorPotential Talk 15:31, 18 April 2007 (UTC)
 * VPT is on my watchlist, and your post here is showing on my watchlist at the moment (substantially less than 10 minutes after your post), so no for me. --ais523 15:36, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

Firefox issues
I'm not sure if this is the right forum for discussion, but I wonder if there is any specific project aimed at resolving issues between different browsers showing templates etc. differently. For example, this template is practically illegible in FF but fine in MSIE. I want to have a go at resolving it, but wonder if there is a place where I can get assistance? — superbfc  [  talk  |  cont  ] — <em style="font-size:10px;">11:19, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * It seems to be resolved now - somebody had removed a parameter which was redundant in MSIE, but required for Mozilla. —  superbfc  [  talk  |  cont  ] — <em style="font-size:10px;">16:24, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Did you mean...?
I'd love to see Wikipedia with a "did you mean...? feature on the search engine.

R. Morris Valencia, Spain


 * Google Search on Wikipedia does that. See: User:John Broughton/Editor's Index to Wikipedia for more search options. You might also want to try searching Wikipedia with Clusty, which has a Wikipedia search option now. --Teratornis 17:52, 11 April 2007 (UTC)


 * If you had read the FAQ section above, you would have known that Wikipedia does have spell checking as a feature, but that it has been disabled because of the strain it would place on the servers. <b style="color:darkblue;">Harryboyles</b> 12:31, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

User contributions
What's the deal with the new boxes on the User contributions page? I see vandalism, I go to look at the IP address's page to see what other vandalism has been performed, and I don't see any contributions at all, even the vandalism I just reverted. And what are the purposes of those two boxes? Corvus cornix 18:38, 19 April 2007 (UTC)


 * I think that the reason the contributions aren't showing up is good old-fashioned lag. As for the boxes, they're a new feature on contributions pages. I think they're supposed to make it easier to go from contributions page to contributions page. -- Luigi Maniac  18:42, 19 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Now when I try to see the contributions made by a user with an extensive history at Wikipedia, it's taking godawful amounts of time for the contributions page to come up. Only the newbie IP addresses actually show up in a quick amount of time, and they're empty.  In fact, when I try to see my own contributions, I get the "The Wikimedia Foundation servers are currently experiencing technical difficulties." error screen, even though Wikipedia is up and running.  Corvus cornix 18:46, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Yes; the contributions are slow again, and I think the watchlists might be a bit slow as well. Give it a 15 minutes to half an hour; it should be fine by then. It normally takes about that long for the problem to go away. Both the watchlist and the contributions are taking some time to load at the moment. Acalamari 18:48, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

Whew, seems to be fixed. Maybe it just needed a lunch break. :) Corvus cornix 20:23, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

Patrol log
What exactly is the Patrol Log for? Mr.Z-man  talk <i style="color:navy; font-family:cursive;">¢</i> 22:50, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * See Help:Patrolled edit. It is disabled here, but have a look at, let's say, wikt:Special:Log/Patrol... Tito xd (?!? - cool stuff) 22:55, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Use of the + tab or "new post" link versus using an existing section link
I almost always use the + tab when adding new sections to talk pages, but I wondered whether doing so always succeeds in avoiding edit conflicts when someone else is contributing to the last existing section. Recently, I have been on the receiving end of a few edit conflicts on the Help Desk when answering the last question (thus having to go back, copy my post, refresh the page and try again) and in every case, it was because someone had posted a new question. Of course, I can't say for sure that they failed to use the + tab or "post" link, but I suspect that this might be the case. I would like to post a polite and helpful suggestion on the user's talk page when this occurs, but I don't want to do that if they did in fact use the correct method. Adrian  M. H.  20:56, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

You might be able to tell by the way the headings are set up. The + button to add new posts always sets them up the same way.

Heading
Text There are always apaces between the == and the heading title, just as there is always a space between the heading and text. Mr.Z-man  talk <i style="color:navy; font-family:cursive;">¢</i> 22:33, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I haven't noticed any differences (but wasn't looking out for them). Thanks for the tip. Adrian   M. H.  22:37, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * A more telltale sign might be the edit summary. If you created a section called "Kittens", your edit summary would be the text "Kittens", with nothing else after that. (Those that create sections with + have no choice with regards to edit summaries.) Combined with other factors, you may have a good guess. Grace notes <sup style="color:#960;">T  § 20:59, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Ah, with regards to the help desk question: you know, whenever you get an edit conflict, the edit box containing your intended version is down at the very bottom of the page, after a diff between the two versions. So you only need to copy the text from the second textbox to the first, and click save. Grace notes <sup style="color:#960;">T  § 21:02, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
 * The submitter of this question, Adrian M. H., surmised that one could avoid edit conflicts by using the + tab. I don't believe this is true. (The '+' button gives you the illusion you are editing a 'sub-article', but there is one single edit history for the entire article, so the sections don't get saved back to the database independently). EdJohnston 00:58, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

Wikisource link
The wikisource: prefix leads to the English Wikisource. However, is there an interwiki link prefix that leads to a page on the multilingual wikisource (eg, this page)? Grace notes T § 20:46, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Tibi, Redemptor omnium. Interwiki map seems to be the canonical list. &mdash;Cryptic 21:03, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Ah, I thought I saw that page somewhere! Now bookmarked. Thank ye. Grace notes T § 22:04, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Copied from Help desk
Copied the following here, because the devs may be interested, and I don't think they read the Help desk... Tito xd (?!? - cool stuff) 19:32, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

en.wikipedia.org dns problem
Dear wikipedia!

Please review situation with your zone file wikipedia.org especially in part of en.wikipedia.org.

Your current practice: vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv en.wikipedia.org. 3600   IN      CNAME   rr.wikimedia.org. rr.wikimedia.org. 600    IN      CNAME   rr.knams.wikimedia.org. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Multilevel redirect 'A' request is poor and do not improve reliability, more useful using easy 'A' record for manage moving webservers between IP, if need.

Some time I do not resolve en.wikipedia.org, see for instance: host -v en.wikipedia.org 145.97.39.158 Trying "en.wikipedia.org" Using domain server: Name: 145.97.39.158 Address: 145.97.39.158#53 Aliases: Host en.wikipedia.org not found: 2(SERVFAIL) Received 34 bytes from 145.97.39.158#53 in 44 ms

Best regards —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 84.237.168.50 (talk) 19:28, 12 April 2007 (UTC).


 * rr.wikimedia.org is a virtual hostname for geographic load balancing. It resolves to rr.pmtpa, rr.knams or rr.yaseo depending on which is closest. This has nothing to do with the brief downtime in DNS service today, which was due to a configuration error in the wikipedia.org zone file. -- Tim Starling 21:33, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Font help
Why did the font change all of a sudden? Everything looks weird! --Smokizzy 18:54, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Did you accidentally hold down CTRL when moving your mouse's scroller wheel? That increases/decreases font sizes in web-browsers — superbfc  [  talk  |  cont  ] — <em style="font-size:10px;">22:11, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * No, The font itself is different, and the settings for my browser show no change is the font settings. --Smokizzy 22:25, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I have no idea - is this on every page? It could be that your monobook (your 'skin' settings) is somehow corrupted, perhaps by a bad syntax on a page which has rendered an error which has not been resolved.  If this means absolutely nothing to you, though, I'm sorry!  Just a stab in the dark —  superbfc  [  talk  |  cont  ] — <em style="font-size:10px;">22:32, 12 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Did you try clearing your browser's cache? —EncMstr 22:36, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * It appers to only affect the "monobook" and "chick" skins. I'm now using the "Cologne Blue" skin, and everything is fine. Where can I get more help for this problem? --Smokizzy 22:48, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I would start here. A bit technical, but I don't know where else —  superbfc  [  talk  |  cont  ] — <em style="font-size:10px;">22:56, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Never mind. Turns out I had messed with the fonts folder right before the problem started. Used System Restore, now everything works like a charm. Thank you guys for your help. Cheers. ;) --Smokizzy 01:13, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

Tidy upgraded
Our copy of HTML Tidy has been upgraded. This has apparently caused some minor changes to the way wikitext is rendered, such as in the user page in the village pump section above. These changes are probably here to stay, unless someone can identify clearly broken behaviour in the new Tidy that we can apply to have fixed. Also posted to wikitech-l here. -- Tim Starling 15:01, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I notice as of today, a number of very small html coding errors in signatures and templates are causing major issues on large pages. Particularly templates/signatures lacking closing tags are causing a lot of trouble. Has it stopped autoparsing html tags?-- VectorPotential Talk 18:41, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I noticed a strange behavior in HTML ordered lists that have code examples between list items. A code example now renders before the list item it is after in the source. See my Help desk question for a complete example, along with the temporary work-around I've been using:
 * WP:HD (permanent link)
 * --Teratornis 20:35, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Rtl-lang, please review
please note my comments in the "Usage" section at rtl-lang. Unless I am badly mistaken, the template is based on the flawed assumption that the "dir=rtl" parameter is needed for any string in a rtl-script, while in reality, it is only required for very esoteric stuff like Arabic letters as symbols in math or similar. If I am correct, the template should probably be deprecated, and a bot should be sent in to replace all instances with simple lang. dab (𒁳) 17:45, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

Talk Page Glitch
Can somebody take a look at User talk:Jeffhardyfan*17 and see why it is acting screwed up. When you click each edit section, it opens actually opens the section below it. When you click edit section for the last section, it gives you a new section (i.e. an empty section). Is this a system glitch or what? -- Chrislk02 (Chris Kreider) 17:02, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
 * There's probably something in that massive welcome kludge which is causing the problem. I don't want to tangle with trying to resolve that, though.  Maybe delete the whole welcome?  Corvus cornix 17:19, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Just swapped it for a straight welcome message; Bobs your uncle and Fannys your aunt - problem solved! Ryan Postlethwaite talk/contribs 17:24, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

articles for deletion
Hi: Today's Articles for deletion log  is somehow munged up. I (and a few others before me) added new articles and they're stuck inside an archive box for a different discussion. I can't figure out what the formatting problem is. Could someone help? --nathanbeach  15:20, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
 * for example, Mark Driscoll, Gavin Spittle, etc (at the very bottom) shouldn't be inside that box...  --nathanbeach   15:21, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks to whoever fixed it...  --nathanbeach   15:30, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

Skin
I want to alter the monobook skin (for personal use) to resemble the ones used on fr and es Wikipedia. Please see more detailed question at the Help desk and answer there. Any help is greatly appreciated. - Mgm|(talk) 11:12, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

Oldpages
What has to be done to get special pages updated? The one I'd like to see updated is Special:Ancientpags. Thanks. --Montchav 23:11, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Donating cash to buy new servers. These queries are not being made due to performance concerns. Tito xd (?!? - cool stuff) 04:25, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Titoxd has pretty much stated it all. The Wikimedia Board of Trustees has approved a resolution to purchase more servers (link) which once it comes to fruition, could mean that we are able to enable these features. However money does not grow on trees and we will always need more donations.  Harryboyles  08:19, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

Links
I'm just wondering how you can change what inter-wiki links say, yet still lead to the same place e.g: To make Buckden Towers just 'the tower', yet still lead to the Buckden Towers article. J S Firefox 09:47, 12 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Use the pipe character, e.g. the tower produces the tower. Jayden54 12:00, 12 April 2007 (UTC)


 * And if you want to learn more about this syntax, have a look at m:Help:Piped link. Jayden54 12:02, 12 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks man, that helped a lot! :D J S Firefox 13:57, 12 April 2007 (UTC)


 * That's not an Interwiki link :) - Mgm|(talk) 11:14, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

Problems uploading .svg images
I have created some images using inkscape and I save them as both plain .svg and inkscape.svg but neither uploads. I get no error message, but when I go to look at the image, I get the red X. Any advice? And if this is not the right place to get help for this, please suggest another forum. Thanks in afdvance. Argos&#39;Dad 18:48, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I took a look at Image:SimaVasileionEllados.svg and it appears to embed a PNG file located at C:\Documents and Settings\Steve &amp; Brian\My Documents\Steve's Pictures\Wikimedia\SimaVasileion4.PNG. Since we don't have access to your hard drive, it doesn't work that well. ;)  As for how to fix that, I wouldn't begin to know how to tell you except to just upload the PNG directly. --BigDT 01:26, 14 April 2007 (UTC)


 * You need to use Inkscape's "Trace Bitmap" function if you want the PNG to actually be converted to SVG. It looks like all you did was import the image which left the reference to the file on your local disk. Another option is to use "Effects -> Images -> Embed All Images", but then your SVG is not really a scalable vector graphic, since it contains an embedded raster image. Mike Dillon 03:01, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

Strange corrupted Diff
[] This shows as a corrupted diff brining in text from several months ago. What is causing this? SchmuckyTheCat 17:20, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

Toggle sections in infoboxes
[copied from help desk]

Is there a way to create infoboxes with toggleable sections? I want to achieve that, so infoboxes will be able to contain more information, without taking more space. For example, a politician infobox, could contain all one's previous public offices, with only the 1 or 2 most important ones expanded by default.

Here's a template I'm working on for politicians. It allows for unlimited offices to be put in. That creates the need of hiding the unwanted offices by clicking the title of the office.

I presume JS can't be integrated to the template in order to achieve that. Correct me if I'm wrong. Geva Zeichner 14:57, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
 * JS can be used in some form in templates (such as in Template:Hidden for example), but I am not familiar with the method. You could ask at the Village Pump (technical) help desk (link at the top of this page). Help:Template is worth a read, but only gives fairly basic info. Adrian   M. H.  16:56, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

[/copied from help desk]


 * I've now tried using the NavFrame thing, but with only some success. It works but the div finds its way outside of the infobox. Use of style="float: none" didn't help. I've also tried using the collapsible tables, but cascading the table breaks the larger table it's in. Geva Zeichner 09:53, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Look at the infobox at Neon Genesis Evangelion. Are those [show/hide] links what you're looking for? –Pomte 10:37, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

Wikisource links backlog
This has probably already been brought up, but there are several links to Wikisource that are broken. That's because pages in http://wikisource.org where deleted and moved to http://en.wikisource.org, http://fr.wikisource.org, http://de.wikisource.org, or others. More obscure languages have stayed at the subdomain-less Wikisource. A general backlog of non-functional links is available here; if anyone wants to help, he/she may replace broken Wikisource links with interwiki prefixes, or the Wikisource template. Grace notes <sup style="color:#960;">T § 20:54, 13 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Here is filtered and alphabetically sorted list. I'll start from the bottom. Max S em 08:32, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Heh, why didn't I think about doing that? I actually started with the goal of converting Wikisource external links to interwiki links, but found this problem, which is more immediate. Grace notes <sup style="color:#960;">T  § 17:35, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
 * In addition, some links may be valid, to more obscure languages. Those could be prefixed by "oldwikisource:", methinks. Grace notes <sup style="color:#960;">T  § 17:36, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

Definition of newbie on Wikipedia

 * Please see Help_desk

Hi, I was wondering, in the context of [] what is meant by the word "newbie"? WP:NEWBIE and WP:NEWBIES don't define the term, and I initially thought that it may be the first edit of each user, but I've now seen people logged there after over fifty edits, and my 24hour theory fell through too — <font face="Verdana">Jack · talk · 23:19, Saturday, 14 April 2007
 * Just speculation, but it may be users who have not reached the 4-day "autoconfirm" threshold (required to move pages and edit sprotected pages). Mr.Z-man  talk <i style="color:navy; font-family:cursive;">¢</i> 23:44, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Nope, that's not it either. I've seen page creations by newbies show up there, and that's mostly why I use it, most of the fresh junk pages show up there. — <font face="Verdana">Jack · talk · 00:09, Sunday, 15 April 2007
 * Page creation isn't actually restricted to established users. Mr.Z-man  talk <i style="color:navy; font-family:cursive;">¢</i> 00:10, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
 * What do you mean? AFAIK, page creation is restricted to only those who have held an account for four days — <font face="Verdana">Jack · talk · 00:24, Sunday, 15 April 2007
 * Nope. Anyone can upload an image or create a non-talk page once they get an account. After four days (or more specifically, 345600 seconds), they can move pages and edit semi-protected ones. It can be reasonably inferred that software makes the differentiation between "newbie" and not based upon autoconfirmed-ness. Grace notes <sup style="color:#960;">T  § 04:43, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

Tecnically, newbies are those who registered among last 1% of users. Max S em 05:37, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

Protection not functioning?
While on vandal patrol, I've come across a couple of edits that were made to "semi-protected" pages by IP addy users. This shouldn't be happening, should it? Refer to the edit 22:51, 14 April 2007 172.129.232.152 on Microscope as an example. Sorry I didn't note the previous occurences, but I'll be sure to return and post notes of any others I find--unless there's a better place to be posting notice of this? Best Regards, Wysdom 00:05, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
 * The article actually wasn't semiprotected. Merely having a template on a page, like or, doesn't make it protected or semi-protected; if a page has this at the top when you try to edit it:


 * then it's semiprotected. If not, then it's not. This is a good indicator. Grace notes <sup style="color:#960;">T  § 00:18, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
 * How weird. Sorry to be a noob--I just assumed that things tagged semi-protected were. Why would someone put the tag up on a page that's not semi-protected? Or, I suppose, more to the point, why is there a 'semi-protection' tag which CAN be put up on a page which isn't? It would seem to give vandals the idea that they can actually flout Wiki's protections--i.e. that said protections do not work. The repeated vandalism of Microscope shows the vandal over-and-again replacing the page with "too bad I can't edit this semi-protected page" and "look what I can still edit!!!" etc. Just my thoughts--thanks for your time! Regards, Wysdom 01:57, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
 * In this case, it appears as though tagged the article as semi-protected, even though it wasn't. It is somewhat of a misconception that tagging an article as semi-protected will make it thus. Others might tag an article as semi-protected to drive vandals away (without asking for admin help), or to prevent others from editing the article. These generally don't work. On the other hand, administrators might protect or semi-protect an article without indicating it with a template. The templates that can be used are indicated here. If a page is semi-protected, feel free to tag it with the appropriate template at the top. It would be great if protection notices were built into the article interface: that is, if protecting an article automatically put the notice on that article, rather than having to make two separate actions. But this is not so.  Grace notes <sup style="color:#960;">T  § 03:02, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

collapsing two css classes
having combined IAST, semxlit, ArabDIN and others into a new transl, I suggest that the "IAST" css class in MediaWiki:Common.css be removed, and the "latinx" class used generically for all romanizations of non-Latin scripts.

latinx at present suggests:
 * Code2000, "TITUS Cyberbit Basic", "Microsoft Sans Serif"

while IAST suggests:
 * "Arial Unicode MS", "GNU Unifont", "Lucida Sans Unicode"

note that this is a bit unfortunate, since it will be a matter of chance whether the result is in serif or sans-serif. Code2000 and TITUS are serif (TITUS has no cursive!). Microsoft Sans, Arial and Lucida Sans are sans-serif. The purpose of the class should be to render as much Latin Unicode as possible, but I think font suggestions should be ordered so as to prefer either serif or sans-serif. Maybe
 * Code2000, "Free Serif", "GNU Unifont", "TITUS Cyberbit Basic"

Since most systems now come with reasonable Unicode support out-of-the-box, these classes will be largely redundant soon, anyway. dab (𒁳) 15:28, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

time
Hi, I want to have my current time posted at the top of my talk page. I used this template: but it does not always work - right now for example it is several hours off. Am I using it improperly, or is there a better template I can use? I know I can purge - but do I really have to purge every time I want to clock to update itself? Is there no alternative? Thanks, Slrubenstein  |  Talk 13:17, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
 * There probably isn't an alternative. I've got something similar; mine instead says the time the page was last purged or "refreshed". I know there is Javascript, but that would be for your personal use only; you can't have Javascript on normal pages for security reasons. <b style="color:darkblue;">Harryboyles</b> 13:34, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

Background colours
Have the background colours been changed recently? Articles are still white, but all other pages (special, discussion, project, etc.) have a slightly blue (annoying) tinge. I didn't see any changes recently in Common.css or Monobook.css, so I'm not sure what's going on (I've got a local Monobook.css copy but it only has one style rule which does not concern background color). I tried using two different browsers (Firefox and IE6), to the same effect. I have also tried purging the server cache and force-reloading. What is going on, and how do I fix it? Thanks. &mdash;Daniel Vandersluis(talk) 07:03, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
 * It's been like that for ages. I think you might have only realised that recently, but the non article pages have been like that for longer than I can recall. <b style="color:darkblue;">Harryboyles</b> 07:43, 15 April 2007 (UTC)


 * edit conflict
 * It is defined in MediaWiki:Monobook.css and looks like it has been that way for almost three years. You can fix it with a little user css (take the .ns-0 stuff and define it for .mediawiki). --Splarka (rant) 07:55, 15 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Huh, strange. I completely never noticed it until suddenly last night. Is .mediawiki the css class for the page backgrounds? Never mind, I figured it out. Thanks for pointing this out to me. &mdash;Daniel Vandersluis(talk) 14:34, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

Questions for Vandalism study
We are working on conducting our second vandalism study here WikiProject Vandalism studies/Study2, and I had some technical questions that I thought someone here could help us with. Is there anyway to determine the amount of data added or subtracted from an article from a specific edit? I know that this is displayed on the recent changes page, but can you get that information for any edit? Also is there any way to easily measure the size of an article at a specific point in its history? If anybody has any expertise in these areas please let me know. Remember 02:44, 15 April 2007 (UTC)


 * You might be able to get the content of two revisions, calculate their length, and then subtract the two values. Using api.php for this seems best, since it's quick. For example, take the following function in JavaScript, which returns the change in size between revisions using Ajax in Firefox (I should learn another programming language for doing this rather soon):

var XMLobj; var XMLdoc; var diffNum;

function getNumDiff(title, crevid) { try { XMLobj = sajax_init_object; XMLobj.overrideMimeType('text/xml'); XMLobj.onreadystatechange = getDiffContent; XMLobj.open('GET', wgServer + wgScriptPath + '/api.php?action=query&prop=revisions&rvprop=content&format=xml&rvlimit=2' + '&rvstartid=' + crevid + '&titles=' + encodeURIComponent(title), true); XMLobj.send(null); } catch(anError) {} }

function getDiffContent { if (XMLobj.readyState != 4) { return; }

if(XMLobj.status != 200) { alert ('There was an error.'); return; }

var XMLdoc = XMLobj.responseXML.documentElement;

if(!XMLdoc) { return; }

alert(getRvData(XMLdoc.getElementsByTagName('rev')[0]).length - getRvData(XMLdoc.getElementsByTagName('rev')[1]).length); }

function getRvData(rvObj) { var rvNodes = rvObj.childNodes; var rvString = ''; for (nodes in rvNodes) { rvString += rvNodes[nodes].nodeValue || ''; } return rvString; } Then try, say, getNumDiff('Kitten', 122843426). This alerts the difference in revision size&mdash;in this case, 39 characters&mdash;in .25 seconds. There is probably a better way of doing it... an actual programming language may be an option. Then there's always wget. Grace notes <sup style="color:#960;">T § 04:34, 15 April 2007 (UTC)


 * For the first question, you could wait until revision 20221 of MediaWiki is activated on Wikimedia Foundation wikis which will add the number of bytes add/removed to all edits in article histories. However this requires an update of all the rows containing edit information (over 127,000,000 on the English Wikipedia alone at time of writing), so it hasn't been activated yet. Graham 87 12:00, 15 April 2007 (UTC)


 * See special:version for the current revision number. Graham 87 12:01, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

Supressing reference tags
I've ran into a reader that finds the completion of each sentence with a link to a reference harder to read. As the best articles have the most reference links, they appear the hardest to read for that person. Would there be a way to add a feature that allows users to selectively suppress the reference links for an article as they read it? Sancho 08:02, 14 April 2007 (UTC)


 * This might be possible. See Help:User style. You can make things go away with Help:User style. Viewing the page source in a Web browser shows references have this in their HTML code: . You might be able to set that classname so it does not display. --Teratornis 21:03, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Ya, it placing  in the monobook.css works, but it's pretty permanent and tedious to change back and forth. I was thinking of a tab that changed this on the fly. I suppose now that I figured out what class of element I need to hide/show, it's not much more work for me put this into a tab at the top of the page. Sancho 07:35, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

Regaining an old user account
Could a developer please take a quick look at User talk:Jimbo Wales and say whether my suggestion there is acceptable?. Thanks.- gadfium 05:25, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

Pages being truncated
Have there been any complaints of this happeing again. The IP was trying to link in the article and it deleted 1/2 the page when they saved it. It appears that it's happend to them before. CambridgeBayWeather (Talk) 02:23, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
 * If I understand what you're saying correctly, I've seen it happen to the article on Good Eats before. It was caused by a reference that was improperly closed, if I remember correctly. -- Luigi Maniac  02:27, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Never mind, I just checked the diff and it didn't happen like that (the truncation didn't show on the diff in the case of Good Eats). -- Luigi Maniac  02:30, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
 * There used to be a notice at the top of some longer pages saying something about that being caused by Firefox but I thought that it had been fixed. CambridgeBayWeather (Talk) 02:50, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I do use Firefox, but the thing with Good Eats was back on April 4th, so it might have been fixed since then. I still can't think of a reason for what I see in the diff. All he did was do some internal linking, and the links were closed properly. It's quite odd, to say the least. -- Luigi Maniac  03:00, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

Scroll Box for references
not sure where to put this suggestion, but on the bigger pages, a scroll box would look better for the references, then one whole screen full of references. Oldag07 22:42, 15 April 2007 (UTC)


 * If you think that it would be appropriate in an article, you can use the following code:

This is a scroll box with a height of 100. It may not work everywhere.

Filler text

Filler text

Filler text

Filler text

Filler text

Filler text

Filler text This is an adaption from Beethoven that will work for all screen widths. You can alter the height; currently, it's 100px. Implementing this on every article with a large reference section may annoy some people, but please others. Grace notes <sup style="color:#960;">T § 00:01, 16 April 2007 (UTC)


 * The scroll box also appears in the Printable version, which probably causes only what is visible in the box to be printed rather than all the information to be printed. I did not test what happens when trying to jump to an anchor within the box.  (SEWilco 04:09, 16 April 2007 (UTC))

css pseudo-classes
another css note: we will need css language pseudo-classes for lang to work properly (notably font selection for CJK "de-unification").

This will mean introducing pseudo-classes into common.css along the lines of: :lang(grc) { font-family: Athena, Gentium, "Palatino Linotype", "Arial Unicode MS", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Grande", Code2000; font-family /**/:inherit; } this will allow us to just use lang as usual ( ἑλληνικὴ γλῶσσα ) instead of polytonic.

see a proposed list here. dab (𒁳) 13:09, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

Merged watchlist?
Hi all - I spend 99% of my Wiki time on en:Wiki, but also occasionally hop over to meta and to one other language wiki (Maori). Since I only go to meta and mi:wiki every week or two, I often miss new things which are on my watchlist there. Is there any way of adding pages from Meta and mi:wiki to my en:wiki watchlist? Grutness...<small style="color:#008822;">wha?  07:31, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
 * You'll have to wait for SUL to go live. Max S em 07:36, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
 * In the meantime, Meta can be configured to send you an email whenever a page on your watchlist changes. --ais523 14:51, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

Mm. Useful. Thanks, both of you! Grutness...<small style="color:#008822;">wha? 

HELP
How the FUCKIN' HELL do you get to this link?

Could ANYONE WHO SEES THIS MESSAGE HELP ME?

Deathgleaner 02:44, 16 April 2007 (UTC)


 * It's not a link, but a parser function. It means if the value of the parameter "small" is "yes", then output "small" from the template, or do whatever with it that it's supposed to do. Otherwise, "standard" takes the place of "small". –Pomte 02:58, 16 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Yeah, what Pomte said. Basically, if it's in double brackets, it's a link, and if it's in , it's either a template or a parser function. Oh yeah, but templates also have links. If you want to edit a template, type   into the search box, replacing "templatename" with the name of the template. If you want to provide a link to a template, use  , again replacing "templatename" with the name of the template.  Pyrospirit  Flames  Fire 03:28, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
 * It also could be a magic word; those can confuse people ("there's no Template:PAGENAME!") Grace notes <sup style="color:#960;">T  § 13:32, 16 April 2007 (UTC)


 * To make the parser functions work on another wiki, install the ParserFunctions extension. Mike Dillon 03:34, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

Problems posting messages on talk page
There is a problem when I post messages on someone's talk page. Here the problem.

Example
Test test test test test test test. Jet123 (Talk) 21:08, 14 April 2007 (UTC) Test Test test test test test test. Jet123 (Talk) 21:08, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

That is the problem
When I do this, the text looks like HTML. Maybe my account is like that. Jet123 (Talk) 21:08, 14 April 2007 (UTC)


 * The leading space in the second line of tests stops MediaWiki from formatting the line. See Help:Editing_tips_and_tricks.- gadfium 23:15, 14 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Also see Help:Talk page. --Teratornis 17:20, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

"Skip to end" link in long TOCs and articles
Could there be a link at the top-right of each TOC, to "skip to end of TOC" (or somesuch). That would be useful on pages with long TOCs, like Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents. Likewise, a "skip to end of article" link at the top of each article? Andy Mabbett 23:13, 7 April 2007 (UTC) Not trying to be a dick, I'm just pointing out that, if there isn't a serious need for a system-wide change (which adding a function to the TOC would count as), the developers just won't do it. EVula // talk // &#9775;  // 06:20, 8 April 2007 (UTC) I'm 99% sure that all keyboards have those buttons, so I'm not particularly concerned about that. :)
 * Well, you can always use the "hide" link on the TOC to get that out of the way (or use the Page Down key), and the "End" key on your keyboard to go to the end of the page. Incidentally, I can't think of a reason why going to the very end of an article is of use; the only time you might do that is to add a new section to a talk page, which can be done with the "+" link at the top of every talk page. EVula // talk // &#9775;  // 23:19, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Hiding the TOC won't help, if it's the last item(s), in a long TOC, which a user wishes to reach. Jumping to the end of a page finds the last additions to a talk page, or the end of a long table or list, or the categories, or external links, or... Andy Mabbett 23:28, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
 * In that case, the End key still works.
 * "the End key still work" - How does the End key take a user to the end of the TOC? And you know that all user have systems with end keys how, exactly? In any case, the end key requires the user's hands (assuming they have hands...) to be on the keyboard. What if they're using a mouse?
 * I mentioned the End key in regards to your "how does someone get to the bottom of the article" comment. To get to the bottom of the TOC, you can still use the Page Down button.
 * sigh* Look, I'm just saying how you can achieve the same functionality you're asking for without a change to the system. There might be a legitimate need for a "skip TOC" function for non-traditional browsers (ie: screen readers or people who use a Blackberry to surf, etc), but for what I suspect is the vast majority of Wikipedia users and editors, I think the current system is sufficient. If they've got their hands on the mouse but not the keyboard (ignoring the fact that it isn't difficult at all to move your hand back and forth between the two), then the mouse-enabled user can just click in the scroll area of their browser. EVula // talk // &#9775;  // 16:40, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
 * "I'm just saying how you can achieve the same functionality you're asking for without a change to the system." The functionality I'm asking for is for a single-click solution to take a user to the last entry in a TOC or the end of a page. All of your comments seem to assume an able-bodied user with a typical PC/ mac system. Andy Mabbett 11:05, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Erm, not stating the obvious, but there already is this function... Just try clicking the first link in a TOC - this will take you right to the end of it ;) Thanks, Jonabofftalk 08:25, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

monobook is not changing toolbox
I am trying to use Vandal's RC Patrol and when I put it into my monobook.js, my toolbox does not change. Is there something I could be doing wrong? I tried refreshing m brower's chache, and adding action=purge onto monobook.js?


 * Which browser are you using? And please sign your posts with ~ <b style="color:#990000;">Dvyjones</b>t&middot;c&middot;e 15:39, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

DELETE MY ACCOUNT
I am Eapos and find is SICKENING that I can do everything under the sun here EXCEPT delete my account! Can someone please tell me how to delete my account! I do not want to be apart of this kind of sickening and prejudicial online community. Princess Elisabeth Vantar 09:01, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

I also want to delete my account, After a certain time of not logging on does wikipedia remove your account? Someone help. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by You05 (talk • contribs) 06:03, 19 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Just stop editing. No one's forcing you to.- gadfium 09:09, 14 April 2007 (UTC)
 * There's no way to delete your account. This is because if you did, someone could create an account with your name, causing all sorts of legal issues for Wikimedia. Like gadfium said, just stop editing. Pyro  spirit  Shiny! 13:27, 18 April 2007 (UTC)
 * There's something wiki sites like to call the right to vanish. And I only wish this 90-day implementation were working right now. Sorry—nothing we can do about it at this moment. --Sl g randson (page - messages - contribs) 20:59, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

As part of the right to vanish we can rename you to something meaningless and remove redirects. See WP:CHU for renaming. Secretlondon 23:46, 23 April 2007 (UTC)
 * WP:CHU, you mean.  x42bn6  Talk 23:54, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

High Speed Bot Editing
A discussion that has involved in to having bot accounts edit at much increased rates (e.g. 3600 edits/hour) is taking place at Bot_owners%27_noticeboard. Comment is welcome there. Thank you, — xaosflux  <sup style="color:#00FF00;">Talk  07:18, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

Image question
This is probably not the place to ask this type of question, but how do you scan an image from TV show or movie? I'd like to scan a few fair use screenshots for some film/TB articles. Incidentally, I looked into the rationales needed and policies. Aaron Bowen 06:55, 22 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Your question probably would be better here. Cheers. --MZMcBride 07:04, 22 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks, I'll ask it there too. Aaron Bowen 07:11, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

Undo CSS change to smallcaps
The CSS directive that controlled the size of text rendered in smallcaps was changed some while back. This change needs to be reversed or at least modified. It has resulted in text that is nearly illegible (and certainly crappy-looking) in Safari at default font and size (sample). At a blown-up font size, one can see that the smallcaps are much smaller than they should be, regardless what the scale of the base font size is (sample2). — SMcCandlish &#91;talk&#93; &#91;cont&#93;   ‹(-¿-)› 03:10, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

Flag in userbox
Hi. On my page, User:The Behnam, I want the Iranian flag to be small like the US flag. How do I do that? The Behnam 16:40, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I replaced " [[Image:Flag_of_Iran.svg|88px]] " with " [[Image:Flag_of_Iran.svg|40px]] " to reduce the size of the image. Tizio 17:24, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Makes sense. The Behnam 17:24, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I actually wanted the userbox to stay the same height. The Behnam 17:26, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Done. The Behnam 17:34, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

SVG problem

 * question moved from village pump (policy)

hi, I don't know where to ask about my svg promlem, so I hope to be allowed to ask in here. well, I created my first SVG image Image:Pixel aspect ratio pixelseitenverhaeltnis ntsc480p pal576p hdtv720p hdtv1080p uhdv4320p by hdtvtotal com.svg and uploaded it into the commons, but in there, it doesn't look like I created it and like it looks onmy pc. what went wrong and how can I change it? thx in advance! --Andreas -horn- Hornig 11:22, 17 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Hello, three things:
 * I've moved your request here as being the more suitable forum
 * I've had a similar problem. The Wikimedia renderer that converts SVG into displayable graphics apparently cannot deal with text elements created as "flow text" in Inkscape. You need to change all text items from "flow text" to simple "text" elements.
 * On a different note, you should fix the image description page on commons, it says something entirely unrelated to your graphics.
 * Fut.Perf. ☼ 11:34, 17 April 2007 (UTC)


 * hi, last thing first: aaahhh! thx, didn't notice that. I copy and pasted it from my previous upload. okay, I will do it right now. --Andreas -horn- Hornig 11:39, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
 * so, done.
 * now for the svg problem. I am using inkscape, but I am a real newbie in it. Do you know, where to change it from flow text to text, which button I have to push, or what parameters have to be changed in the xml editor? greets, --Andreas -horn- Hornig 11:52, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
 * In my German edition of Inkscape it's "text->Fließtext aufheben (Shift-Alt-W)". Contact me on my talkpage if you need further help (in German if you prefer.) And I really don't think you meant to be suing Inkscape, right? ;-) Fut.Perf. ☼ 12:05, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
 * hehee, nope, just scrabbled the word and mixed using to suing ;).okay, I will cantact you on your talkpage. cya, --Andreas -horn- Hornig 12:11, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

Special:Log/move
What ever happened to the (Revert) button that used to show up on the move log?-- VectorPotential Talk 23:59, 15 April 2007 (UTC)


 * It apparenty will be back, whenever we scap up. --Splarka (rant) 07:13, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
 * "scap up"? Corvus cornix 23:27, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
 * When the WikiMedia sites update the running copies of the software to svn (the working repository).  Voice -of- All  15:51, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

Sidebar issues
After some recent updates to MediaWiki:Sidebar, there are a few problems that I'd like to see fixed. I've written up an analysis at User:Mike Dillon/Sidebar. None of these issues are too critical, but I think they stem from an incomplete understanding of the way that the sidebar works. I put an editprotected tag on MediaWiki talk:Interaction and made a note at MediaWiki talk:Sidebar, but I was asked to post at the Village Pump for more input. From my perspective, the more involved fixes discussed at User:Mike Dillon/Sidebar don't really change anything critical for a normal user's experience, but they integrate better with the built-in handling of the sidebar. As far as user impact, I've detailed the few cases of users who would be impacted on my analysis page.

I'd prefer to discuss the changes at MediaWiki talk:Sidebar, but feel free to respond to me wherever you think is appropriate. Mike Dillon 05:39, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

I hate to violate WP:BEANS...
Are any of the vandal bots running? I've been seeing lots of vandalism having to be reverted manually today. Corvus cornix 01:38, 18 April 2007 (UTC)


 * MartinBot was down for about three hours, but is now back. It's beaten me to reverts a bunch of times in just the last ten minutes.  Antandrus  (talk) 01:40, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

Template pages displayed with data
I'm looking to make a template that will display a custom page when sent data - specifically to illustrate the position of a certain time in the geological time scale. I've written a template which will perform as I wish, and whilst I can include the template in a page, I hoped to be able to link a date using Template:Ma so that clicking on the year would take the user directly to a timeline with the specified year marked. I've spoken to a couple of experienced editors who are unaware of a solution to this problem. Is there any way I can carry this out? (I hope I've explained what I want clearly enough...)

Many thanks, | Verisimilus 21:12, 17 April 2007 (UTC)


 * That does not seem possible. We would need #arg: - instead of including a page for given parameter values, this allows linking to a page for given parameter values.--Patrick 00:42, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

The Byte count feature (Page History / Contribs vs. RC / Watchlist)
Hi. I've been wondering: Recent Changes & my watchlist display those handy red or green numbers showing the net contribution of bytes an edit makes (+1 for adding a period; -20,000 for a big archiving; etc). I think that info would be equally useful in specific page histories, on User Contributions pages, and even on diff pages. Any reason that hasn't happened or can't happen?

I guess this could amount to a feature req for MediaWiki, but I clicked that link at the top of the page & couldn't make heads or tails of the site. Plus I can't be the first person to bring this up. Thanks, &mdash; Turangalila talk 13:18, 17 April 2007 (UTC)


 * It has been implemented but not yet activated, see 1723 and above.--Patrick 13:45, 17 April 2007 (UTC)


 * So, will it ever be activated? It sounds like it could come in handy. -- Luigi Maniac  13:57, 17 April 2007 (UTC)


 * It's a matter of when, not if. Brion Vibber in this mailing list post has stated that it's not fully implemented on the Wikimedia servers. Part of the reason is, as stated, it's running in the background. <b style="color:darkblue;">Harryboyles</b> 14:56, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

I'd much rather see a short snippet of the diff itself than some meaningless numbers. I think this would really help cut down on vandalism and make it a lot easier to go through our watchlists. — Omegatron 14:59, 17 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the updates.&mdash; Turangalila talk 01:24, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

Watchlist lag, again...
Anyone else experiencing a lag of about ten minutes?-- VectorPotential Talk 15:31, 18 April 2007 (UTC)
 * VPT is on my watchlist, and your post here is showing on my watchlist at the moment (substantially less than 10 minutes after your post), so no for me. --ais523 15:36, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

editing a redirect
I am wondering what the policy is on editing a redirected page? On the help topics it mentions when it is ok to create a redirect and gives technical assistance, but it wasn't clear when it was ok to change the page that is being redirected. The specific instance is Swami Ramdas. I want to add a biography of him, but when you enter in his name you are automatically redirected to a page talking about the ashram that he founded. Is it acceptable to change that orignial page on Ramdas and expand on it, linking of course to the ashram somewhere in the text? 74.130.10.192 14:48, 18 April 2007 (UTC)temp07
 * Generally speaking, this is a perfectly acceptable thing to do, and even encouraged (the exception is in cases when the redirect was added because the subject isn't notable enough for an article; I don't know if that's the case here, because I'm unacquainted with the subject). You can edit a redirect by clicking on the 'redirected from' message near the top of the page. Hope that helps! --ais523 14:53, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

How frequently is the Wikipedia software updated?
Just cuirous. I noticed none of the changes that where anounced in the Signpost on April 2 where actualy "live" (yeah I know the page says they may not be implemented here yet). I'm just curious. That namespace selection option on whatlinkshere would be quite usefull just about now. Also why "tease" us with news of updates before they are actualy implemented on this Wiki. Those that are intetested in the state of the MediaWiki software in general are probably watching it's project page and/or the SVN tree rater than the enWiki signpost. Meh, anyway hurry up already ;-P --Sherool (talk) 08:54, 18 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Usually the software stays pretty current with the fixes and feature additions coming live. However, recently a change was implemented in regards to having the "bytes changed per diff on recent changes and watchlists" feature implemented on all revisions that have been made. This required a change in the underlying database schema meaning all 128,000,000 or so revisions need to be updated. It's being done in the background so as not to disrupt the site. This mailing post by Brion Vibberis related to the change. <b style="color:darkblue;">Harryboyles</b> 09:20, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

Problem with Template:Ice Hockey Game
While we were using this template on 2007 Stanley Cup Playoffs, we noticed that there was a large gap being inserted just before the table created by this template. After looking at the HTML that was generated, I realized that something was adding three paragraphs that contained a single line break each. The resulting HTML looked like this:

<table...

I asked User:Mecu and User:Nmajdan to look at it, but neither could find a reason for it. Both then suggested that I ask here. The original of the template is here, though there is a sandbox with the code here and another with test data here. Previous discussions of the problem can be found here and on the above mentioned user's talk pages. <font style="color:#1e90ff;font-weight:bold">z4ns4tsu \<font style="color:black;">talk 21:30, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I think I fixed it. Let me know if there are any other problems. Cheers. --MZMcBride 23:42, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Perfect, thanks. <font style="color:#1e90ff;font-weight:bold">z4ns4tsu \<font style="color:black;">talk 15:22, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

Monobook scripts broken
Hey, my monobook.js just broke. I just made a few changes that I thought were purely formatting changes and wouldn't affect anything, but now none of my scripts work. Could someone take a look at the last few diffs and see what went wrong with the JavaScript? Thanks, Pyro  spirit  Shiny! 23:24, 16 April 2007 (UTC)


 * May I ask at what time you first noticed that it stopped working, for the benefit of other readers as well as myself?   It will probably help if you add your changes one at a time, rather than all at once, going by the look of the diff between the latest version and the one on April 13. When I had problems about a week ago, I took the chance to go through all my scripts and weed out the ones I wasn't happy with. Start with one script at a time and test it before adding the next one. This should quickly identify the offending script(s). <b style="color:darkblue;">Harryboyles</b> 11:33, 17 April 2007 (UTC)


 * I'll go back and redo the stuff one at a time. The last diff where it worked (which I just reverted to) was this one. Anyway, if the problems persist, I'll ask again. Thanks, Pyro  spirit  Shiny! 15:05, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

It works just fine now, but I have another question. In my monobook.js, what is the difference between this: importScript('User:Example/examplescript.js'); and this: document.write('<script type="text/javascript" src="'            + 'http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Example/examplescript.js'             + '&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript&dontcountme=s"> '); Also, in the second example, do spaces at the beginning of the line change anything? Pyro spirit  Shiny! 15:31, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
 * They both do the same thing, but the former calls a function that wrote (you can see it at MediaWiki:Common.js) to make the code a bit cleaner...  Grace notes <sup style="color:#960;">T  § 00:21, 18 April 2007 (UTC)
 * The spaces at the beginning are purely formatting. The interpreter uses the ; character to determine the end of a statement. <b style="color:darkblue;">Harryboyles</b> 09:24, 18 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Pyro  spirit  Shiny! 13:31, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

Little bug on a page?
Millions...

At the very end of the article, it seems to have an indelible "l". It won't go away as far as I can tell. Just a minor little thing, of course, but it's just odd. Anyone know what's up? Vordabois 02:56, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Fixed. Stray character in a category link. EVula // talk // &#9775;  // 02:59, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

Strange image behavior
According to the Mediawiki software, this image does not exist: Image:Willie-Wagtail-thumb.jpg. It has no history, no description, and the "image" link is red. Pretty strange, huh. —Remember the dot (talk) 02:45, 19 April 2007 (UTC)


 * There's no point in worrying about fixed bugs. -- Tim Starling 03:00, 19 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Out of curiosity, could I see the information about this bug and when it was fixed? —Remember the dot (talk) 03:24, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

Alignment problem
Hi. I've put a few userboxes on my user page, however, one of them refuses to align right along with the others. Can anyone tell me what the problem is?? Thanks. Pandora 20:15, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

Limiting the TOC display level
This is copied here from MediaWiki talk:Common.css to make sure that anyone with objections can voice them; please reply to this comment there.

Sometimes, it's desired to remove very-low-level section headings from the TOC. (This could be useful in some project pages with low-level subheadings used for edit-section purposes; there are probably list-like articles that would benefit (e.g. ones which have a long list of sections each corresponding to a different country, and this sort of thing would also allow section headers to be used at RfA without noinclude tricks). The code to do this would be .toclimit-2 .toclevel-2 {display:none;} .toclimit-3 .toclevel-3 {display:none;} .toclimit-4 .toclevel-4 {display:none;} .toclimit-5 .toclevel-5 {display:none;} .toclimit-6 .toclevel-6 {display:none;} .toclimit-7 .toclevel-7 {display:none;} (I have tested this in my own userspace, and it validates according to W3C); it would allow to remove any headings below level 3 (assuming level 1 headings aren't used, which they shouldn't be on most pages), etc. Does anyone object to me making this change? --ais523 14:04, 18 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Seems like a good idea to me, and as long as it doesn't break anything, I don't see any problems. Jayden54 14:07, 18 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Sounds good to me, so long as it's only used in mainspace sparingly (if at all). Yet another CSS class doesn't affect anything that currently exists in the wiki. Although, I'm not that fond of having both classes toclimit-x and toclevel-x. Grace notes <sup style="color:#960;">T  § 20:35, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

"restore this version"
Am I the only one whose "restore this version" javascript is missing form "differences between revisions" because it was there a couple of days ago but now its gone and it has only dissappeared for Mozilla Firefox...-- Cometstyles 15:58, 19 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Thats impossible. Even I using Firefox but it works perfect for me. -- ♪♫ ĽąĦĩŘǔ ♫♪  walkie-talkie  16:52, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
 * To be fair, most automated reversion tools are written specifically for Firefox or other non-IE browsers, so there are a number of instances of features not working on IE, but working for everyone else-- VectorPotential Talk 16:55, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Actually its hasnt disappeared from IE but I dont use IE because its too slow..-- Cometstyles 18:20, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

Weird page history
See page history for Vladimir Voronin: Number of changed bytes is different for every vandalism and its reversion, though diffs show that the reversions were correct. What's wrong? Max S em 15:20, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
 * 18:55, 19 April 2007 VoABot II (Talk | contribs) m (7,843 bytes) (BOT - Reverted edits by H.olesea {vandalism} to revision #124091879 by "Indon".)
 * 18:54, 19 April 2007 H.olesea (Talk | contribs) (7,934 bytes) (→Main goals of political agenda)
 * 18:38, 19 April 2007 Indon (Talk | contribs) m (7,843 bytes) (Reverted 1 edit by H.olesea identified as vandalism to last revision by MaxSem.)
 * 18:38, 19 April 2007 H.olesea (Talk | contribs) (8,468 bytes)
 * 18:20, 19 April 2007 MaxSem (Talk | contribs) m (7,843 bytes) (rvv)
 * 18:17, 19 April 2007 H.olesea (Talk | contribs) (7,957 bytes) (→Main goals of political agenda)
 * It's 7,843 bytes all 3 times, maybe you're looking at the wrong numbers? Alex Smotrov 15:42, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Added: the numbers show the articles sizes. Don't confuse them with numbers in Recent Changes and Watchlist (those have + or - in front). Alex Smotrov 15:49, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Ah, my fault. Max S em 15:53, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Ipbreason-list
Could someone take a look at this page? I've been trying to add and  to the list of standard block descriptions. I'm running into trouble, though, because the templates are transcluding onto Special:Blockip. Thanks! alphachimp 14:55, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

Search for Contributions
How long has that "search for contributions" box been up on contributions pages? I don't think I've seen it before this morning. Is it some kind of new feature? -- Luigi Maniac  13:31, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
 * And now we have the amounts of bytes showing in the page histories? Did we get an upgrade or something? -- Luigi Maniac  13:43, 19 April 2007 (UTC)


 * We are often upgraded, we have expiries on protected pages now too. HighInBC(Need help? Ask me) 13:47, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
 * See below :) <b style="color:darkblue;">Harryboyles</b> 14:12, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

Bot Approvals Group "election"
is seeking admittance to the Bot Approvals Group. Comments are welcome at Wikipedia_talk:Bots/Approvals_group. --kingboyk 12:21, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

Article patent_troll links to notes incorrect:1->2, 2->3, 20->22 etc
When you click a note, the page should scroll so that the note is at the very top of your browser window, and it should also be highlighted. In article Patent_troll a higher-numbered link is the one that gets highlighted at the top.

Does anyone else get this on this article or elsewhere?


 * Works fine for me. Tizio 15:00, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

query page protection
Is there any way to determine the protection status of a page without screen scraping? CMummert · talk 12:39, 18 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Right now, the current api appears not to offer such feature. -- ReyBrujo 13:09, 18 April 2007 (UTC)
 * query.php can determine whether the currently logged-in user can edit a page: . However, this information is kind-of useless if you happen to be an admin (a bot might find it more useful). --ais523 13:14, 18 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I was afraid of that. I can get around the admin problem, but what I really want is to query the date that protection was placed and the date it expires. Special:Export doesn't seem to include it and neither does query.php. Too bad. CMummert · talk 13:34, 18 April 2007 (UTC)
 * This feature has been requested at meta:Talk:API, but the programmer who maintains API has not been very active recently. Tizio 14:56, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

Special:Randomredirect/Image
Why does clicking Special:Randomredirect/Image sometimes lead me to the Main Page, of all pages? Is it my browser, or is MediaWiki doing something funny? :-) On average when I hit Special:Randomredirect/Image ten times, it will bring me to the Main Page at least once. Go figure... &mdash;Resurgent insurgent 2007-04-14 12:05Z 


 * It just happened to me as well, so I'm inclined to believe that it's MediaWiki doing something funny, and not your browser. I'm running Firefox 2.0.0.3 on Windows XP SP2. Jayden54 12:30, 14 April 2007 (UTC)


 * I just got it for the first time on Special:Randomredirect/Category as well. Still have no idea why. &mdash;Resurgent insurgent 2007-04-14 12:50Z 


 * "It's not a bug, it's a feature!"

# Catch dud titles and return to the main page if( is_null( $title ) ) $title = Title::newMainPage;
 * So, why is Special:Randomredirect returning null titles? --Splarka (rant) 07:57, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

Followup: At test.wikipedia I set up 9 redirects in a previously-redirect-free namespace ("Help:") with the following properties:
 * 1-3: Normal
 * 4: interwiki (Meta:)
 * 5: null ( #REDIRECT: )
 * 6: special (Special:)
 * 7: loopback (self)
 * 8: red page (MediaWiki:Blahblah)
 * 9: multiline (category on second line)

After, I clicked Special:Randomredirect/Help about a hundred times, and #5 and #9 above never came up (but I did get a lot of vists to the Main Page). #5 is no surprise, but #9 is odd. I would hazard to guess then that the title parsing in this Special: page is not intelligent enough to handle multiline redirects? --Splarka (rant)


 * Actually, what's happening is that Special:Random and Special:Randomredirect will send you to the Main Page if they happen to pick a random number that's higher than the page_random value of any otherwise applicable page in the database. The average frequency (over all possible choices of the page_random values) at which this will happen is one in N+1, where N is the number of applicable pages in the chosen namespace, so for namespaces with few pages/redirects this will tend to happen fairly often.  I've just fixed this in SVN as part of a general restructuring of the code, so this should hopefully stop happening soon.  —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 10:30, 19 April 2007 (UTC)