Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive AW

History of WP markup code
I am searching around for any (hopefully comprehensive) source that talks about the changes in WP markup syntax. For example, a while back, Wikipedia used the not-uncommon convention of CamelCase words as the way to specify wiki links. This was before the current convention of square brackets.

Also, I am looking for client-side implementations of WP wiki syntax parsers, engines that parse and convert to HTML, but are not based on PHP or web-server code.

Any info and archive links that you can provide will be most appreciated. Thanks. dr.ef.tymac 19:52, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
 * There is a parser written in Python, here ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 19:56, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
 * And another one written in Ruby, here ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 19:58, 22 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks much ≈ jossi ≈. Anyone have a link for the WP markup syntax revision history? Particularly of interest is when CamelCase specifically got phased out in favor of brackets. dr.ef.tymac 13:56, 23 September 2007 (UTC)


 * You may want to check the version history for MediaWiki for this, do a search for the history of the parser in the subversion repository, or even check the developer's mailing list to give you an idea of the timeframe. Grymwulf 05:20, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

particle filters in image processing
hello everyone! well.i want to know about the particle filters thoroughly.can any one please help me? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Goodgalpriya (talk • contribs) 13:05, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

Section headings conflicting with images
I’m here to raise a topic again that I raised a few weeks ago about section headings which seem to clash with images and infoboxes on almost every occasion, see this image. However, I’ve noticed that this problem doesn’t exist with horizontal rules and it doesn't seem to exist on foreign language Wikipedias (see this article to see what I mean), at least not with images anyway. Why does this issue occur, and, more importantly, what can be done to fix it? Max Naylor 19:59, 22 September 2007 (UTC)


 * I think it's do do with the fact that Section headings are generated by a &lt;h2&gt; rather than a &lt;hr&gt;. The &lt;h2&gt; has the CSS property

h2 {border-bottom: 1px solid #AAAAAA;}
 * You could disable this in your monobook.css (or relevant css page) by adding:

h2 {border-bottom: none;}
 * Alternatively, if you have a long infobox or image or something like that, you can force content to appear underneath a certain point with the template - or by typing &lt;br clear="all" /&gt;. --Dave the Rave (DTR) talk 21:05, 22 September 2007 (UTC)


 * I don't see anything wrong with your screenshot, although I guess you don't like the fact that the line under the header goes right up to the box around the image. The reason your French Wikipedia page doesn't seem to have the "problem" is that they put a 1.4em white border at the left edge of the image, which hides a bit more of the H2's bottom border line. To duplicate that behavior, you could add this to your monobook.css:


 * Anomie 23:39, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
 * OK, thank you, this is what I wanted, although I wondered if there was a Wikipedia-wide solution. Max Naylor 09:16, 23 September 2007 (UTC)
 * I still seem to be getting the problem. Max Naylor 09:18, 23 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Don’t worry, it was only a caching problem. Max Naylor 09:20, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

Rollback?
Exactly how does the roll back function execute. When an administrator presses the rollback button what goes on in the wikipedia database? Specifically I would like to know if the any of the data on the is sent through the inter tubes aside from the rollback request. Thanks for any answers I get. -Icewedge 06:03, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
 * It's basically just a regular edit, but with a pre-determined edit summary (" Reverted edits by User name (talk) to last version by " ). EVula // talk // &#9775;  // 06:06, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure that's right. Saying it's just a regular edit seems that you mean it is essentially the same as the automated scripts that are available. But these actually select a revision, 'press' edit, 'enter' the summary and 'press' save. I don't know the exact mechanism for doing an adminstrative rollback, but I'm 99% certain it is not of that nature at all, and is instead a direct instruction to go back to a previous revision without acting as an emulated 'press edit' procedure. Splash - tk 17:38, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Splash is correct as usual :D...the server queries the revision table for the last revision by a different user, then makes a new revision pointing to the same text ID, marked as minor, and with the autosummary. This is opposed to having to send and receive all the text and make a new revision pointing to a newly made text row, so admin rollback is faster.  Voice -of-  All  17:48, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Ok, thanks guys (and/or girls if any of your are female). -Icewedge 17:37, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

Copying an article, including its history, into userspace
How do I do this? (If you want to know why, see WT:CRIC) --Dweller 10:07, 21 September 2007 (UTC)
 * (NB I don't mean MOVE, I mean COPY) --Dweller 10:07, 21 September 2007 (UTC)
 * You persuade a developer to install mw:Extension:Duplicator here on the English Wikipedia. There's no way to duplicate edit histories at current without developer intervention. --ais523 10:10, 21 September 2007 (UTC)
 * There's an existing request, by the way; see 8833. (I've repurposed it to encompass enwiki as well as dewiki, based on the fact that someone indicates there'd be a use for it here.) --ais523 10:15, 21 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Hmmm. I take it from this that it won't be something that can be done any time soon. Maybe, we'll just have to go with one of the 'under construction' type tags and, erm, work fastish. Thanks for helping. --Dweller 10:39, 21 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Why do you need the history copied along with the page? You can simply cnp it to a Talk subpage, work on it there, and then get an admin to merge the histories of the temp page back into the main page once you're finished, can't you? AmiDaniel (talk) 06:49, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

editing toolbar buttons no longer work with Classic skin
I'm not sure if I'm the only one experiencing this problem, but the toolbar buttons no longer work when I'm using the Classic skin. This seems to be an IE-only problem; the buttons work correctly when I'm using Firefox. --Ixfd64 15:39, 15 September 2007 (UTC)


 * I will look into this. The simple solution is to upgrade to IE7 or, like you said, use Firefox. —Remember the dot (talk) 15:54, 15 September 2007 (UTC)


 * And I thought I was the only one having this problem. I just updated my Sun Java runtime environment with no success. Does the script require Microsoft Java? A fix would surely be appreciated (as there's no way I'm gonna "upgrade" to IE7) --Mud4t 20:26, 16 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Yay! It's working again! --Mud4t 06:22, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

I've noticed that only certain computers were affected. I tried editing on another computer while using Internet Explorer, but I didn't run into any problems. Anyways, it appears that this issue has been fixed! :) --Ixfd64 21:33, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

...need help with a script?
WikiProject User scripts/User-script manager isn't seeming to work for me no matter what I do... I copy and paste the script text that it says to onto my monobook.js page, and it's not working...? If there's anything that needs to be done, an admin can feel free to add it to my monobook.js. Thank you! Y0u | Y0ur talk page 00:56, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

Wiki stats not updated
Can the statistics for English language wikipedians please be updated? Not done since June 2006. [] 81.103.224.91 21:39, 24 September 2007 (UTC)
 * We wish... Tito xd (?!? - cool stuff) 21:41, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

Template params
Hey - is there any way to define a parameter within a template? As in say you want a new parameter - can you create it within the template?-- daniel  folsom  22:39, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure exactly what you're asking here. Template parameters are never "defined"; they are simply used. For instance, I have a Template:Foo whose content is "What a cool !", then that template expects the parameter "bar" (i.e., ). Does this at all answer your question? If not, please try to rephrase it. AmiDaniel (talk) 06:45, 23 September 2007 (UTC)
 * I'm working on I guess what would be an estoric template where I have to define a new parameter within the template and then use it (just likethe foo bar=bob example, but I have to do that in the template) -- daniel  folsom  15:12, 23 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Insofar as I know, there is no way to simply do a "let x = ..." inside of a template. The only way you can really accomplish this is through template stacking; that is, your top-level template determines the values of your variables and passes them as parameters to an included template. For example:

Indeed, I was going to say  myself, but you said  first.
 * If you then include, it will produce "Indeed, foo is a really awesome bar! I was going to say 'foo is a really awesome bar!' myself, but you said 'foo is a really awesome bar!' first." This is the closest we have, I believe, but you're also welcome to dig through m:Help:Advanced templates and the other documentation to see if you might find something a bit better. AmiDaniel (talk) 18:41, 24 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Using a temporary template as shown here is the only way to accomplish this at present. There's a MediaWiki extension that allows defining variables like you suggest, but it isn't enabled here; see mw:Extension:VariablesExtension, and 7865 (where devs explain why they won't install it). --ais523 18:46, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia robots.txt file flunks syntax check
I had occasion to run Wikipedia's own "robots.txt" file through a "robots.txt syntax checker". There were many errors reported, mostly due to blank lines in places where the syntax doesn't allow blank lines. Tried another robots.txt checker, and that, too, reported errors. Some cleanup is needed. Thanks. --John Nagle 00:16, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
 * The first checker seems to be broken; it doesn't understand comments correctly. However, the second checker seems right; there are some blank lines where there shouldn't be any, and there are some missing leading slashes on some of the lines. I'll see if I can report this to developers. --ais523 09:56, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

I am the author of the robots.txt tester on searchenginepromotionhelp.com.

The wiki robots.txt file has disallow statemnts which do not include a path, this is an error and the tester is correctly reporting it as such.

Example:

User-agent: IsraBot Disallow:

My interpretation of the RFC is that comments are not permitted between a User-agent: statement and ruleline so those comments are flagged as errors.

The robots.txt RFC is here:

http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots-rfc.html

Regards,

Bob

September 30, 2007 16:01 GMT —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bob seph (talk • contribs) 16:08, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I run a site evaluation system, and its robots.txt handler was unhappy with Wikipedia's robots.txt file.  It uses Python's standard robots.txt file parser, so anything written in Python will probably be unhappy with that file. --John Nagle 16:41, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Issues with the robots.txt file should be reported on bugzilla. There's nothing us mere admins (or mere svn committers, for that matter) can do about it.  File the report under "Wikimedia".  —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 17:09, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
 * It's not part of the Wikimedia code; it's a Wikipedia-specific configuration file. Who is responsible for that? --John Nagle 01:12, 1 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Shell-access developers. I've reported the problem; see 11508. --ais523 08:53, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Quoting from the RFC: Comments are allowed anywhere in the file, and consist of optional whitespace, followed by a comment character '#' followed by the comment, terminated by the end-of-line. So it is only the blank lines that are problems, not the comments. As for blank paths, this is the only way to specify 'everything is allowed', and the RFC actually uses blank paths in its examples, implying that they're acceptable too. --ais523 08:59, 1 October 2007 (UTC)
 * It's been fixed now. --ais523 12:27, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Special:Watchlist
Anyone else having trouble accessing their watchlist? I keep getting a 500 Internal Server error. — Edokter  •  Talk  • 15:57, 25 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Me, too. Is there a health page anywhere with status updates? (cross-posted from Village pump (miscellaneous))Ronnotel 16:00, 25 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Same problem here. DuncanHill 16:08, 25 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Same problem here... Everything else seems to be fine though —  iride scent   (talk to me!)  16:09, 25 September 2007 (UTC)
 * I've got it too, been getting different errors, at the moment it is

> Rugby471 talk &#9876; 17:08, 25 September 2007 (UTC)
 * I have an error as well with my watchlist. It should be fixed soon though. Acalamari 16:30, 25 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Same with me; I originally posted this on miscellaneous and didn't see the section above my new one, but later I saw it and I turned out to be the sixth one to reach this area. Anyone know the problem yet?? Georgia guy 16:31, 25 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Moreover, I also can't access Related Changes. Georgia guy 16:33, 25 September 2007 (UTC)
 * I get can't contact the server error too.Rlevse 16:35, 25 September 2007 (UTC)
 * I have also got the problem, with the error as quoted by Acalamari. Nihiltres ( t .l ) 16:49, 25 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Actually, it wasn't me who quoted it. :) The user who did forgot to sign. I've added the tag. :) Acalamari 17:03, 25 September 2007 (UTC)
 * It does this for me too. *Dan T.* 16:52, 25 September 2007 (UTC)
 * I guess it's safe to assume that all watchlists are malfunctioning. Very annoying. :-/ · AndonicO Talk 16:54, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

Added my sig :-) > Rugby471 talk &#9876; 17:08, 25 September 2007 (UTC)"

Special:Recentchangeslinked/Category:Living_people has the problem too, but Special:Recentchangeslinked/ shows the regular "no target" error. Anyway, this is not good because there's going to be a lot of undetected vandalism. Is there a developers' noticeboard? — Edokter  •  Talk  • 17:13, 25 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Working again?

It is for me... — Edokter  •  Talk  • 17:22, 25 September 2007 (UTC)
 * It's working again for me as well. There's still a lag, but at least it's back. Acalamari 17:24, 25 September 2007 (UTC)


 * The database server that handles watchlist requests was down for a while; it's back up now. --brion 17:25, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

Account created - deleted?! *SOLVED*
I created my new account yesterday and i cannot log in ?! Where can i see - and why - my account has been deleted - Thanks in advance - Bjorkfan —Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.217.157.113 (talk) 07:22, 25 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Accounts can't be deleted; maybe you're spelling the name wrong? You can see Special:Listusers for a list of all currently registered usernames, which is a definitive check on whether the account still exists or not. --ais523 07:26, 25 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks - I'm not in the list, strange! Yesterday I uploaded 2 or 3 images but they are not anymore over here : please where can I see the deleted images list? - Bjorkfan —Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.217.157.113 (talk) 07:30, 25 September 2007 (UTC)
 * + I found the "deletion log" page BUT did not find my images?! Why?! I'm 100% sure they have been uploaded yesterday (on "common")! - Bjorkfan —Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.217.157.113 (talk) 07:51, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

Ok, yesterday I created an account only in "common", so I found everything back Bjorkfan 08:11, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

&lt;renameuserlogpage&gt; /
User rename log seems slightly broken. -- VectorPotential Talk 20:42, 24 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Fixed, see 11446 —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 18:30, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

Automatically uploading a Wikipedia image to Commons?
After an image is uploaded into Wikipedia, is there a template or some other tag that can be used to have it also automatically uploaded into Commons? Or must I go to Commons and manually upload it there as well? - mbeychok 18:40, 19 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Actually, the best way would be to directly upload it to Commons; it then becomes available to all Wikipedia projects. (Note that Commons does not accept copyrighted or fair-use images.) — Edokter  •  Talk  • 18:55, 19 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Are you sure? Images released under the GFDL are still copyrighted.  Tempshill 17:13, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

wikEd now Greasemonkey compatible
The Wikipedia editor extension wikEd is now Greasemonkey compatible - that means it can be installed locally and then runs automatically on every MediaWiki wiki. wikEd is a full-featured edit page-integrated text editor with features such as syntax highlighting, MS-Word and web page import, powerful search and replace, and on-page preview and changes display. wikEd can still be installed by pasting a short code snippet to your User:Username/monobook.js page.

wikEd is currently only compatible with Firefox and other Mozilla-based browsers, but work is ongoing to make it work under MSIE 7 and Opera 9 - please see the developer documentation and discussion if you would like to help. Cacycle 01:08, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

where is the page...
where is the page where i can ask for a speed deletion of an image i uploaded?!? ...did not find it - thanks in advance kernitou talk 09:04, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
 * You can tag it with db-author. Graham 87 09:20, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
 * thanks: i put the so-called tag kernitou talk 06:23, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

Page history templates
I have a feeling there probably isn't, but is there any sort of template, magic word, or other variety of wikicode that is able to read the last contributor to a page, or the time of the last edit? I'm looking to set up a sort of "vandal alarm" for my userpage that will display some sort of warning if I'm not the last person to have edited the page, but haven't found any sort of template that will allow this. Thanks. Hers fold  (t/a/c) 05:47, 26 September 2007 (UTC)


 * See the section in the list of magic words pertaning to page info. There are several that might be useful for this, like could be done thusly:


 * And then the next person editing it would trigger the warning, unless they knew to use, or change it to #ifeq:1|1 ... or simply delete that section. Note that you may be tempted to use  for this, but  doesn't work, as the revision number is apparently not available during the substing. --Splarka (rant) 07:34, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

Rendering problem
I sometimes see pictures (and their borders) overlapping text. Here's what I see at the William Henry Harrison Battle of the Thames article:



Note the overlapped text at the top of the picture, and to the right of that, the "edit edit edit" text being overlapped by the words "General Harrison". I'm using Firefox 2.0.0.7, on Windows XP. Tempshill 16:44, 25 September 2007 (UTC)


 * See How to fix bunched-up edit links, for that part. --Quiddity 17:17, 25 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks. I tried this, and it simply removed the "edit" links in the section headers.  Tempshill 17:44, 25 September 2007 (UTC)
 * The bunch fix never removes the edit links if it is used correctly; did you save it or just preview it?  Adrian  M. H.  12:24, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

Special Upload pages in Malayalam Wikipedia
I am from Malayalam Wikipedia (http://ml.wikipedia.org).

We are having problems with some special pages that we are tring to create in Malayalam Wikipedia.

In Malayalam Wikipedia we are trying to create the special upload pages as in the English Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Upload).

As an experiment we started with the upload page http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Upload&uselang=en-ownwork. See the corresponding special page in Malayalam Wikipedia at http://ml.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Upload&uselang=en-ownwork.

But the license drop down list is creating problem for us.

The license that is used in English wiki is available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Licenses/en-ownwork. We have created the same license in Malayalam Wiki. See that at http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Licenses/en-ownwork.

But the license drop down list in the malayalam wikipedia on this special upload page is still showing the licenses that are defined at http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Licenses.

We want this special upload page to show the same licenses as in the English Wikipedia. How can we achieve this? Thanks in advance.--Shijualex 11:48, 4 October 2007 (UTC)


 * As far as I know, an administrator will need to edit the ml:MediaWiki:Licenses file to incorporate the edits you want. EVula // talk // &#9775;  // 13:46, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Help with buttons
Hi i need help to get my buttons to wrk again the buttons for internal link and bold text for example doesnt work at all. I wonder is it temporary or is it something wrong?thanks, cant sign this message since that button doesnt work either. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Zingostar (talk • contribs) 15:06, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Why not just type the syntax manually?  Adrian  M. H.  16:55, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

Toolserver down?
Seems that toolserver, or at least access to MySQL databases there, is down. Not sure who to report this to, if anyone is aware of this, etc. I'm not on IRC now. --Aude (talk) 14:05, 27 September 2007 (UTC)


 * I sent a message to ts-admins@wikimedia.org. --Aude (talk) 14:23, 27 September 2007 (UTC)


 * The toolserver is presently down for planned maintenance. No idea when it will be back up, but it shouldn't be too awful long. AmiDaniel (talk) 20:25, 27 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Seems to be back up now. AmiDaniel (talk) 21:41, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

non-Wikimedia interwiki codes do not work in URLs
I've noticed that non-Wikimedia interwiki codes do not work in Wikimedia project URLs. For example, the entry for "John" on Wiktionary can be accessed via  John  or through. However, the latter method does not work for non-Wikimedia wikis. For example, the main page of the Mozilla Wiki can be accessed via  Main Page , but results in a "bad title" error.

Is this intentional? --Ixfd64 09:38, 27 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Probably. If someone clicks a Wikipedia link, we should never send them to a site not controlled by Wikimedia. --- RockMFR 18:21, 27 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Yes, it is. Wikitionary is a "local" interwiki (meaning that ext links of the form "/wiki/wikt:..." will be forwarded to wikitionary), whereas the MozillaWiki is not, so only internal interwiki links will be forwarded there. The distinction is made primarily for performance reasons. You might take a peek at mw:Help:Interwiki linking for some more info about how interwiki links are configured. AmiDaniel (talk) 20:39, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

[[[
Is there a reason that  [sic]  renders as [sic] instead of [ sic]? The later can be produced with  [ sic] </tt> but I don't see why that is necessary because "<tt>[</tt>" is not allowed in the titles of pages. &larr;Ben B4 04:09, 27 September 2007 (UTC)


 * I'd imagine (though I lack the details) that it's precisely because [ is forbidden in page titles that the triple bracket syntax acts the way it does: my guess is that the parser evaluates for the page title after the first two, finds the page title "[sic" invalid and displays the syntax as text, and then displays the closing ] . It would then be similar to the reason that [[ doesn't work properly and link to a redirect to vertical bar or to the Main Page. <font color="#275CA9">Nihiltres ( <font color="#000">t .l ) 14:21, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

wikipedia.org crashes mozilla on SunOS
Hello,

Entering wikipedia.org in the address bar promptly crashes mozilla with an Exit 11.

Mozilla 1.7.13 Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; SunOS sun4u; en-US; rv:1.7.13) Gecko/20060420

uname -a SunOS somename 5.6 Generic_105181-32 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-60

Thanks —Preceding unsigned comment added by 137.201.242.130 (talk) 19:35, 26 September 2007 (UTC)


 * This is likely a problem to be reported to the Mozilla devs. AmiDaniel (talk) 20:42, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

Blurry thumbnails
I've been noticing for quite some time now that some thumbnails are a bit blurry. However if I ask for a very slightly larger or smaller thumbnail that doesn't exist yet the blurriness goes away; likewise if I simply purge the cache for the image. So I guess this is due to the blurry thumbnails being generated by an older version of MediaWiki that didn't have a very good image resizing algorithm. I noticed this phenonemon a while back, but decided not to pay attention because the upgrade could have been recent and the thumbnails didn't have time to be updated yet. However I find that I still come across many blurry thumbnails, to wit this €2 coin -- this severely harms readability because a blurry 150px thumbnail contains about as much information as a smaller 100px thumbnail. Plus by clicking on a blurry thumbnail you don't expect to find a nice high-resolution picture. I have no idea how to solve this: it's not feasible to hand-purge the tens of thousands of faulty thumbnails, so I don't know if MediaWiki has a way to automatically rebuild old thumbnails without putting too much strain on the server. Hope some technically-enclined person reads this. --Ma Baker 16:06, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

(blurry) vs. (not blurry)
 * Yes, some sharpening was added to the thumbnailing algorithm a while ago, but as far as I know old thumbnails aren't automatically regenerated. To manually request the regeneration of thumbnails, it's normally sufficient to purge the server cache of the image's image description page. --ais523 16:15, 18 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Of course, but like I said it's not feasible to do that for each and every one of the tens of thousands of blurry thumbnails out there. And it would be definitely more taxing on server load (not to mention network bandwidth or human workload) than to use a simple automated script, so it's not like it would do any good to do it by hand. --Ma Baker 16:39, 18 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Well depends. I guess the devs could write a script that walks trough the filesystems and traces all thumbnails created before a certain date and delete them in a steady pace that is not too disruptive to wikipedia and the servers, but would still leave us with all new thumbs after about a month or two. If we ask nicely and if we really want it, i'm sure the devs could make something like that. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:20, 19 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Sure, but how are we supposed to "ask nicely" and to "know if we really want it"? --Ma Baker 13:49, 27 September 2007 (UTC)


 * I am glad they finally fixed that, blurry thumbnails are annoying. (( 1 == 2 ) ? ((' Stop ') : ('<font color="Green">Go ')) 14:19, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

Navbox hide
I'm lost, how to make Navbox hide? such as Template:Survivor_contestants ▪◦▪ ≡ЅiREX≡Talk 01:29, 29 September 2007 (UTC)
 * If you mean to ask how to made a navbox with that "hide" button on it, add the class "collapsible" to the table, as at the very beginning of that template. If you mean to ask how to make it collapsed by default, add "collapsible collapsed". Use "collapsible autocollapse" with navboxes to automatically collapse them by default if there are more than 2. Your example also uses Template:Tnavbar-collapsible in the table header, which is for left-justifying the "v d e" links so they don't conflict with the "hide" button. TCC (talk) (contribs) 01:49, 29 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Thank you Csernica that did the trick, the template expanded was bit over bearing, thank you again!▪◦▪ ≡ЅiREX≡Talk 03:17, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Addwiki.php
I found this file in my MediaWiki 1.11 installation - what exactly is it meant to do?? I'm not sure what to do with it... any advice?? Thanks, --<b style="color:green;">Solumeiras</b> <sup style="color:blue;">talk 17:28, 28 September 2007 (UTC)


 * You shouldn't need to touch that file at all. It's a script used only by Wikimedia systems administrators to create a new wiki with all of the correct settings and customizations. It relies heavily upon the configuration of Wikimedia's server clusters, and so is not going to be of any use as-is to anyone outside of Wikimedia. AmiDaniel (talk) 18:27, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

i do not see the image i uploaded?!
i just happened to upload : Image:Grand Funk Railroad We're An American Band.jpg i cannot see it : why please?!? is there any delay?! kernitou talk 06:30, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

another question : when i put the link in an article do i have to write Grand Funk Railroad We're An American Band.jpg OR Grand_Funk_Railroad_We're_An_American_Band.jpg ? kernitou talk

If you want to put the image in the article you add in front of the file name and  behind, like this:.

If you want to put a link to the image you add in front of the file name and  behind, like this: Image:Grand Funk Railroad We're An American Band.jpg.

Maybe Wikipedia deleted the image because you don't know the million rules about fair use.

--Kaypoh 06:49, 28 September 2007 (UTC)


 * thanks kaypoh
 * i did put the "fair use license (album cover)" + i know most of the rules...
 * VERY STRANGE: when i'm NOT logged in, i do see the image in the text you wrote after my question over here BUT when i'm logged in i do NOT see it ?!?!?!?!?!?
 * the number one question is: why i do not see the image on the page Image:Grand Funk Railroad We're An American Band.jpg ???
 * when you are in a box, you do not have to write ]]
 * kernitou talk 07:22, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

Maybe it's just a delay in updating the database. The difference between when you are logged in and when you are not logged in makes me think it might have to do with your browser cache. I can see the image fine, both here and on the image page. --Slashme 08:32, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
 * i purged every cache possible: i still do not see anything on the page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Grand_Funk_Railroad_We%27re_An_American_Band.jpg but links (i do not see the image) ?!?!
 * please go to my User:Kernitou/SandBox : i put 4 images and i myself me see only 2 (the live-evil one + vanessa paradis) - - - - ???
 * kernitou talk 11:09, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
 * It shows up fine for me. Have you cleared your cache? Are you getting confused by the  and   floating the images away?
 * Also, BTW, you will need to provide a fair-use rationale for that image; Album cover fur could help. Anomie 11:40, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
 * i can see "Image:Istanbul center.jpg"
 * i can see "Image:GFR American.jpg"
 * i cannot see "Image:Grand Funk Railroad We're An American Band.jpg" : why ? kernitou talk 11:47, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

I can see all the images that you uploaded. The problem is definitely something on your end. Either it has to do with your browser cache, your internet connection, something to do with your software setup or something else entirely, but it is not a problem with the Wikipedia software, and should not be discussed any further on this page, which is specifically for the discussion of technical issues about Wikipedia, and not for user support. --Slashme 13:24, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
 * thanks kernitou talk 15:06, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

Screen/Window Size
hello, I have a monitor resolution of 768x1024. Wikipedia is displaying pages with a width of 1024, forcing me to scroll side to side to read an entire page. how do I get Wikipedia, and other pages that do this, to use my screen width, and not whatever the site uses for screen width? ++++ 16:41, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia uses a dynamic layout that works correctly in narrow viewports, so your comment surprises me. The issues that can occur are due to long unbroken lines of text in the edit windows and diffs (such as long URLs) which can force a horizontal scrollbar. Some poorly designed user pages can have the same effect, but regular WP pages should not be affected unless someone has made a technically problematic edit such as a very wide table.  Adrian  M. H.  16:53, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Works for me, also... Do you see that on all pages or only on some? -- lucasbfr <sup style="color:darkblue;">talk 21:37, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
 * I see this on all Wikipedia pages, but not on other websites.. actually, I just realized it might have been a script that I was running. I looked through greasemonkey and stylish, and stylish was the problem. I disabled the stylish script (wikipedia.org - grey lady look) and it works perfectly now —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jon joy 1999 (talk • contribs) 02:59, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
 * I'm Glad to hear that! :) -- lucasbfr <sup style="color:darkblue;">talk 07:05, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

back in time?
Is something wrong with my computer, or have other people been noticing this as well? Right now Wikipedia default loads in the "nostalgia" skin, like it looked right back when we launched this project six years ago. And no, I haven't changed my preferences or anything. Sometimes it toggles back and forth between ordinary and old-style. Any idea what this could be?? <font face="Edwardian Script ITC" size="3">K. Lásztocska 00:21, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
 * It could be that the server accidentally sent the wrong stylesheet (which happens occasionally) and then your computer cached it. Try bypassing your cache and see if the problem goes away. --ais523 09:48, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

Filter choices
In using my watchlist, and my (and others) contributions lists, among other things, I think that adding 2 lines to the "Namespace" filter choices would be most helpful: (If anyone can think of a better way to phrase them, that would be welcome : )
 * All pages (no talk)
 * All talk pages (only)

There are times when it would be helpful to just view an editor's talk page edits, and sometimes, to just view an editor's edits that aren't talk edits. - jc37 08:15, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
 * A filter that would combine results from the 1st, 3rd, etc. options in the list, to show all non-talk edits from all namespaces? Yes, I can see how that might be useful, but it doesn't take much to add up the numbers from an edit counter (the two best are the River tool and Wannabe Kate, though the River tool is always out of date). There is a JS script that allows you to right-click any user name (or user page, can't remember which) and view an edit count result for that user.  Adrian  M. H.  12:11, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
 * It's not for counting edits, but viewing the edits as a clickable list. - jc37 20:19, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
 * If all that you want is links, then I fail to see what is so bad about the current filtering options. You can only click one link at a time, so it matters not a jot whether the displayed list is all non-talk edits or just one namespace. The only advantage in your request is the ability to judge quantity because it does not improve one's chances of finding specific entries or types of entry.  Adrian  M. H.  20:38, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Actually, I would find it helpful. There are something like 9 different namespaces (and 9 talk namespaces). When looking at my watchlist (for example) it would be much easier to look at all talk namespaces to see if any talk page discussions have continued. It also helps when going through someone's contributions list to see what what discussions they are or have been involved in. (Which is very useful when trying to track a multi talk page discussion. There have been discussions which have wound through template talk, category talk, image talk, several Wikipedia talk pages, and many user talk pages. And that's just a single incidence.)
 * On the converse, it would be useful to see what edits a user may have made, without the distraction of a myriad of talk pace edits. Tracking vandalism is just one application. It also would help when trying to undo a slew of POV edits from a user. And for my watchlist, it would make it much easier to check watched pages (such as articles, categories, templates, Wikipedia policy pages, etc), without the distraction of a myriad of talk page discussions.
 * One typically only views so many edit instances on a single page. This would also aid in page by page viewing of edits (such as for the applications above, for example). Etc.
 * Hope this helps clarify. - jc37 21:05, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

Now listed as bugzilla 11499. - jc37 04:26, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

'Save and close' button to improve contributor's productivity
Save page reopens the page with saved data, for sure if save fails then the window should not be closed but if it saves perfectly then the page should close.on choosing 'save and close' option. Vjdchauhan 13:01, 29 September 2007 (UTC).
 * For all but the most minor edits, this could be a bad idea. Sometimes even the "preview" doesn't show you the full result of your edit, so it's a very good idea to look at the page after saving to see that you didn't mess something up. But I guess if you are making a minor edit, just changing a comma or spelling, maybe it might be good to have the option to just save the page, especially if you are paying per byte for your internet! --Slashme 13:40, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

multiple entries?
I tried to upload 3 .doc files today but found out that the file type is not acceptable. i do not know how to convert, tried some manipulations on my own to convert it to jpeg, not sure if i succeeded. anyway, bottom line is i asked a friend to do it since she had some experience. i just want my uploads to be rejected and hers- beverly maniago - to be accepted, since the important thing to have it posted. pls. advice... --Pamexz 07:52, 29 September 2007 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Pamexz (talk • contribs) 07:51, 29 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Actually, posting document files in that fashion may be a copyright violation. You may want to instead provide a link to the content in question by citing the statements instead (although the sources in question may not be reliable enough for Wikipedia.)  --Sigma 7 10:02, 29 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Also, please do not upload text as images. Rather go to the page where you want the text to be and click on "edit this page", then cut and paste the text out of your word processor into the edit window.  If you need help formatting the text, click on the "discussion" tab and ask the other editors to help.


 * As for getting the duplicate entries deleted, go to the image page, click on "edit this page" and type at the top of the page, and an admin will come along to remove them.--Slashme 10:11, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Did I overload the thumbnail capability?
Image:Monosialotetrahexosylganglioside.PNG shows up as a gray box with "Error creating thumbnail: Invalid thumbnail parameters" in the center. I purged and bypassed my cache, to no avail. The same thing happened when I moved it to Commons, which makes me think this is some sort of software quirk. shoy 04:22, 29 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Yes, in uncompressed form it has a size of 14 MB! Try to scale it to a width of about 1000 - 1200 px and save it a black/white (1 bit/px) instead of 256. Please see WikiProject Chemistry/Structure drawing for instructions. Cacycle 05:00, 29 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Or even better, create an svg image. I know the link above advises against using general vector drawing programs, but IMHO a neatly done inkscape tracing of a png is much better than a large png bitmap. --Slashme 09:57, 29 September 2007 (UTC)
 * OK, I couldn't help myself. I created an svg version.  See Image:Monosialotetrahexosylganglioside.svg--Slashme 12:19, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

How do I make sure I stay logged in?
Hi. This annoying thing has happened at least twice on wiki so far within the past year or so, and I don't want it to happen again. This happens occasionally, and I mean very occasionally, but when it happens I lose my privacy. I am asking for help now because I'm still annoyed that it happens. Sometimes, when I edit, and I save, instead of staying logged in, the site for some reason logs me out, and I end up having my edit saved as an anon. This can happen on only the history, or sometimes worse, on a page where I sign my name. I'm very concerned about this because I have heard all the horrible stories about people being able to hack someone's computer or enter someone's house through an IP. However, sometimes the IP shows only a country, or occasionally perhaps a city that is incorrect, but nevertheless I'm still concerned. I will not tell you when or where this happened. What causes this to happen, and what can I do to prevent it? After it happened the first time, I have found myself constantly pressing page preview to make sure I was logged in still, and checking the history afterwards to make sure it saved under my username. However, sometimes I am busy or forget to preview, and one time it happened again. Are there signs of soontobeloggedoutaftersavingwikieditsageness, and is there anything that could be done to prevent it? I know pagepreviewing has prevented this from happening at least once. What can I do? Thanks. ~ A H  1 (TCU) 22:14, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
 * No, no one can find your house from your IP address. They can use it to find your computer on the network as long as your computer keeps it (it changes periodically unless you pay extra for it not to) but hackers don't really care whose computer they hack and have no reason to target you. There are far more efficient ways of locating active IP addresses than randomly trawling through anonymous Wikipedia edits.


 * On the login page, do you check "Remember me"? TCC (talk) (contribs) 22:39, 27 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Hi. Thanks for your reply. No, I don't check "Remember me". What does it do? If it remembers your password, then no, I don't want it. I don't have trouble remembering any of my passwords, and my wikipedia password is rather hard to guess but easy for me to remember. Does checking or unchecking it affect the ability for someone to find my IP, or does it affect the ability for me to stay logged in, etc? Thanks. ~ A H  1 (TCU) 23:34, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Assuming the appropriate cookie permissions and careful use of things like CCleaner, it will automatically log you on upon each visit. I would not be without it, but it's probably not directly applicable to your issue.  Adrian  M. H.  23:44, 27 September 2007 (UTC)


 * No, it isn't. I thought I knew what it did, but misremembered. Just want to add that it doesn't do this by saving your password. It does not open up your IP address.


 * But now I'm curious about whether the session cookies are hashed from the IP address of the user's machine, so that if the address changes it becomes invalid. If that's the case, he might just have a fairly short lease on the IP address from his ISP, and gets logged out when a new one is obtained. Just a guess; I'd like to know how this works myself, and trying to track this stuff down in the source is annoying. TCC (talk) (contribs) 00:36, 28 September 2007 (UTC)


 * No: I'm on dynamic IP at home, and Wikipedia remembers me between logouts. --Slashme 14:08, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
 * &lt;satire&gt;
 * Might I suggest the use of a Tin-foil hat to deter hackers?
 * &lt;/satire&gt;


 * If you're using Firefox and the Greasemonkey extension, you can install a simple user script to make this unlikely to happen. If not, that could be good reason to consider starting.  (Full disclosure: I wrote the script in question.  I make no guarantees that it works in every possible case, but it should at least stop you from simply forgetting to log in.)  —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 01:02, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

This problem has been known to happen to me as well, although I haven't noticed it recently, both on Wikipedia and another Wikimedia wiki. (Hmm... it only happened back when I had no browser choices but IE6... but I don't know whether this is the problem or not.) 'Remember me' definitely solves the problem, if it's not a security risk for you to use it in your case. To prevent actually saving an edit when logged out, previewing and then saving immediately is the best advice; it tended only to happen when I'd left my browser on the same page for a long time period without changing it. Maybe it's a problem with cookies? --ais523 17:16, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
 * That's interesting. I use Firefox exclusively and have never had this problem. TCC (talk) (contribs) 23:06, 28 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Hi. Yes, one of the times, I left my browser on the same page for like, 45 minutes, and didn't preview. Another time, however, I tried to log in, but I got like, an HTTP 500 error or something like that. I pressed the back button, then logged in again. This time it works, but it's slow. Then, when I edit a page for like, 10 minutes only, I forget to preview and press save, and it saved under my IP, but it even saved my IP signature on the page! Then, everybody thought I was an anon. The reason I don't check "remember me" is because I don't want someone to be able to come to my house and automatically edit under my username, and I also don't want to forget the password by not using it enough, and if I forget it, I wouldn't be able to log in to another computer if this one breaks. Thank you for your suggestions. I use IE, BTW. Anything I can change in my settings, monobook, etc, that prevents me from logging out? Thanks. ~ A H  1 (TCU) 17:23, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
 * If you don't want random strangers wandering into your house and using your computer, lock it down with login passwords (assuming you're using an OS with actual security like Linux or a WinNT derivative like XP and not one where it's merely cosmetic like Win98.) To let other people use your machine while still keeping your private material private, create a secondary "limited" account for their use. TCC (talk) (contribs) 23:06, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
 * I don't know what's causing the problem, so I can't really help you there. Monobook.js scripts almost certainly won't help you with this, because anons can't use them anyway and so they couldn't automatically log you back in... 2237 may be related, but that seems to affect only users on satellite ISPs (who generally end up logged out much faster than you're experiencing; see the FAQ at the top of this page). One method that does often solve this sort of login problem is to log in via the experimental alternative connection at https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/w/index.php?title=Special:Userlogin; unfortunately, that connection's much slower than the 'real' one, and you have to be careful not to click on a link that goes to en.wikipedia.org (because clicking on such links will log you out). --ais523 17:37, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

An alternate method, if you are using firefox, is to edit your local userContent.css file (google for instructions) and stylize the MediaWiki:Anoneditwarning, sort of like this: That should get your attention. --Splarka (rant) 07:44, 29 September 2007 (UTC)
 * 1) anoneditwarning { border:3px dashed #ff00ff !important; background-color: #ffff00 !important; font-size:200% !important; color:#ff00ff !important;}

Wikipedia robots.txt file flunks syntax check
I had occasion to run Wikipedia's own "robots.txt" file through a "robots.txt syntax checker". There were many errors reported, mostly due to blank lines in places where the syntax doesn't allow blank lines. Tried another robots.txt checker, and that, too, reported errors. Some cleanup is needed. Thanks. --John Nagle 00:16, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
 * The first checker seems to be broken; it doesn't understand comments correctly. However, the second checker seems right; there are some blank lines where there shouldn't be any, and there are some missing leading slashes on some of the lines. I'll see if I can report this to developers. --ais523 09:56, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

I am the author of the robots.txt tester on searchenginepromotionhelp.com.

The wiki robots.txt file has disallow statemnts which do not include a path, this is an error and the tester is correctly reporting it as such.

Example:

User-agent: IsraBot<BR> Disallow:

My interpretation of the RFC is that comments are not permitted between a User-agent: statement and ruleline so those comments are flagged as errors.

The robots.txt RFC is here:

http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots-rfc.html

Regards,

Bob

September 30, 2007 16:01 GMT —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bob seph (talk • contribs) 16:08, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I run a site evaluation system, and its robots.txt handler was unhappy with Wikipedia's robots.txt file.  It uses Python's standard robots.txt file parser, so anything written in Python will probably be unhappy with that file. --John Nagle 16:41, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Issues with the robots.txt file should be reported on bugzilla. There's nothing us mere admins (or mere svn committers, for that matter) can do about it.  File the report under "Wikimedia".  —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 17:09, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
 * It's not part of the Wikimedia code; it's a Wikipedia-specific configuration file. Who is responsible for that? --John Nagle 01:12, 1 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Shell-access developers. I've reported the problem; see 11508. --ais523 08:53, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Quoting from the RFC: Comments are allowed anywhere in the file, and consist of optional whitespace, followed by a comment character '#' followed by the comment, terminated by the end-of-line. So it is only the blank lines that are problems, not the comments. As for blank paths, this is the only way to specify 'everything is allowed', and the RFC actually uses blank paths in its examples, implying that they're acceptable too. --ais523 08:59, 1 October 2007 (UTC)
 * It's been fixed now. --ais523 12:27, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Change to Template:Expand list
Input is sought for a major style change to expand list. The discussion can be found here: Template_talk:Expand_list. Thanks, ---J.S (T/C/WRE) 19:25, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

Recommendation for secure password but no encryption?
That's pretty much my question. The page to create a wikipedia account has references to information on how to create a secure password. Why does the page then not use encryption? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 166.70.55.149 (talk) 07:30, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
 * If you wish to use a secure version of wikipedia you can do so from this address: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Main_Page . It uses a high-grade 256bit encryption. ---J.S (T/C/WRE) 19:32, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

Finding portion of new user log
I'm trying to get a list of all users created in a two hour time frame (9AM to 11AM Jan 28 2007 UTC, to be exact). However, the user creation log doesn't seem to be adjustible by timestamp, only by numerical offsets and the users or pages involved. It would be very tedious to get to that date by clicking next over and over. Is there an easier way to get the usernames of all users created in this timeframe, or the whole day if 2 hours isn't possible? I would appreciate it very much if someone could help me out with this. Picaroon (t) 22:47, 29 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Well, you could always try a binary search. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 23:09, 29 September 2007 (UTC)
 * ...except that it seems Special:Log doesn't handle large offsets very well. :( My alternative suggestion would be to download a database dump of the logs and parse that.  Be warned, though: the file is almost 300 megabytes even compressed.  —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 23:17, 29 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Actually, looking at the source, there seem to be some undocumented options for searching the log by date ranges. So [ here is the list you wanted].  Have fun!  —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 23:29, 29 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks! Picaroon (t) 19:34, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
 * There are also some great tools in the MediaWiki query interface: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/query.php ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 19:49, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

searching properly
I have a page on my wiki entitled "Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)" but when I search for "CSS" this page is not reported. How can I make a search on "CSS" find this page? What code do I have to put on the page? Thanks!

--Anamacha 08:47, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
 * That will depend to some extent on what search extension (if any) your wiki is using. Creating a redirect (see Help:Redirect) is likely to help no matter what search system your wiki uses, though (and it's the only way to help 'Go', rather than 'Search'). One hint: the word CSS is only three letters long, so some search systems won't index it. --ais523 09:30, 8 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Check FAQ; there's a section on the MySQL search engine and adjusting it so short words work. --brion 15:58, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

IP ranges
Is there a way to simultaneously check the contributions of an entire range of IP addresses? Like 127.1.0.0/16, or something. Someguy1221 18:40, 1 October 2007 (UTC)
 * No, there was for a few hours and it was reverted. Too inefficient ;). In the long term a rev_ip_hex column with an index might be used...maybe. But adding indexes to the revision table is no small change.  Voice -of-  All  19:59, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

bot question
I want to interwiki as follwing


 * 1. interwiki today updated articles
 * 2. interwiki last 7 days updated articles
 * 3. interwiki taday updated articles by user:abcdef
 * 4. interwiki last 7 days updated articles by user:abcdef1 user:abcdef2

how to? --  WonYong <sup style="color:#1F860E;">Talk  12:40, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Image: Upload New Version Problems
Thomas Lessman A while back I uploaded several historical maps and put them on several history articles. Later I found some inaccuracies on those maps, so I corrected them on my computer and used the "Upload New Version" feature on the images' homepages. SOME of those new versions appeared with no problems; others still aren't showing the corrected versions (even after more than a week). I've tried to re-upload new versions on a couple of the maps, but still no change (even after a day or more). What makes the images show corrected versions? One image example is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:East-Hem_475ad.jpg Thomas Lessman 21:29, 27 September 2007 (UTC)


 * You might try purging the images. Navigate to the image page for the image in question, add "?action=purge" to the url, and hit enter. I purged the one you link to in your message, and it would appear (correct me if I'm wrong) that the correct version of the image now appears on the two articles in which it's used. AmiDaniel (talk) 21:37, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

Thomas Lessman Unfortunately it's still showing the old version of the map. The new version shows the title of the map in the top left corner of the map, between Iceland and Scandinavia. If you click on the version next to the first "revert" option (right under the "current" version"), it shows the correct version. But even when I click on "Revert", it still shows the incorrect version (without the title, and with some boundries showing incorrectly). Also I tried the Purge feature you described (which I didn't know about earlier), but it still shows the older version. Thomas Lessman 22:24, 27 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Settle down, guy! You've uploaded the same version of the image twice and reverted to it 4 times. Really, it's fine. here is the original version, and here is the current version.


 * What's likely happening is that your browser's cache needs to be flushed, not Wikipedia's cache. In other words, your web browser saves a local copy of the file on your hard drive so it doesn't have to download it again every time you navigate to it. Sometimes when an image changes (and depending your browser settings) it doesn't detect that the version on the web is different from the one you have cached, and displays the cached version instead of re-downloading it. You can force your browser to re-download it by holding down the shift key when you click on reload.


 * In the image links above, for the "current version" I linked to one of the identical reverted versions. Hopefully this will bypass any local cache issues. TCC (talk) (contribs) 22:33, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

Thomas Lessman LOL! Actually, I clear my browser cache at least 1-2 times per day (I work in a tech support dept). If you go to the Roman Empire article and scroll about 3/4 of the way down, you'll see 3 of the maps I uploaded a while back. The middle one (476ad) updated just fine (shows the title and correct borders) but the 1st and 3rd ones (475ad & 500ad) don't show the updated versions. Even when you click on the thumbnail, the 1st & 3rd maps open to show the old versions, but the 2nd one shows the correct version. Sorry man; I'll try to settle down! LOL Thomas Lessman 22:43, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
 * They look OK to me per your description of the new versions. If what you mean is that they're not showing up correctly in the article rather than not showing up correctly on the image pages, then try the purge procedure at Roman Empire, not the image page. Click purge Roman Empire.


 * You may have another problem though. See WP:IUP about watermarks or credits on user-created images. Should be OK until some policy maven notices, but copyright information, author, and license are what the image page is for. TCC (talk) (contribs) 22:58, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

Thomas Lessman Even from another computer, I still saw the older version and not the newer. It's possible however, that the reason is because the filename changed from older to newer (I started adding "_web-sm" onto the maps on my computer when finished editing them, to differentiate from the originals).

Also, thanks for the heads up about the credits part, TCC. I only added those on there because I've been receiving feedback about inaccuracies on the maps, and I wanted to let people know how to contact me to let me know any changes that needed to be made. That and I also give the maps to local schools, and one of the teachers requested that I put "author info" on the image so they could see where they were from. Thomas Lessman 14:35, 28 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Was that other computer on the same network? If so, are you sure you're not behind a caching proxy server? TCC (talk) (contribs) 01:53, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Thomas Lessman
 * No; the other computer was my home computer. I tried it from a 3rd computer (my friend's laptop) over the weekend and same thing. It's showing the old version, not the new version. When I click on the version next to the revert option, it shows the correct (updated) version, but when I reverted to it, the old version still shows. It's almost like Wikipedia isn't showing the updated versions (like it somehow isn't refreshing on their servers). I'm stumped...

If you go to the Roman Empire article and scroll down about 3/4 of the way down, you'll see 3 of the maps I put on the article. The middle map shows the title in the top-left corner (that's the updated version). The 1st and 3rd maps don't show the title (still showing the old versions). I don't understand why one of the maps udated just fine, but the others don't. Thomas Lessman 16:23, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

A minor and strange problem.
I would like to point out a minor problem with regards to the FA template shown on this talk page. When I click show the date is shown as November 2007. But when I click edit to this talk-page, the date is shown as November 2006. I just cannot comprehend this anomaly. Does anyone have any answers with regards to this? The template should be fixed but I do not know how. This is indeed a bit strange as well. For more information please view this comments. -- S iva1979 <sup style="background:yellow;">Talk to me 01:28, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Hmmm... I'm going to guess it's a bug that has resulted from the recent PHP upgrade on some of the servers, due to the inconsisent nature of the bug. sometimes shows "November 27, 2006" and other times shows "November 27, 2007", but it looks like  always shows "November 27, 2006". --- RockMFR 02:33, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Ahh, it looks like strtotime's implementation has changed in one of the recent PHP releases, so the behavior of the function on incorrect formats has changed. I guess we'll just have to hunt down any improper usages of #time that may have been covered up before. --- RockMFR 02:45, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

Tab limit?
Is there any sort of limit to the number of tabs that can be displayed on the top of a page? My monobook.js page has enough scripts to give me almost 20 tabs, but even though my screen resolution is set high enough to probably display 25 tabs, some of them don't display. Is there some function built into Firefox or MediaWiki that's preventing the tabs from displaying? Pyrospirit ( talk  ·  contribs ) 15:38, 1 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I wouldn't have thought so; try checking to see if you have any JavaScript errors (on Firefox, type javascript: in the address bar to open the Error Console that reports errors with a website), which may be limiting how many tabs you have. The tabs are displayed in a list, and many lists have more than 20 elements (CSS is used to cause them to look very different to the normal appearance of lists); adding new tabs works by manipulating the DOM to put extra tabs in the list. --ais523 15:42, 1 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I looked through my scripts again, and apparently there's only one tab that isn't displaying, the tag tab from User:S/tags.js. I'll ask S about it. Pyrospirit  ( talk  ·  contribs ) 13:51, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

permanent id (fingerprint) for an article on watchlist
I am wondering if there is a way to assign or simulate a "permanent id" for articles and items that a user has on his or her watch list.

For example, if the user has Millet on her watchlist, and someone changes the title of that article to something else [e.g., Millet (grain)], is there an unambiguous and failsafe way for that user to know that Millet (grain) is just a re-titled manifestation of Millet?

The purpose is to determine the possibility to automate certain aspects of watchlist management, hence the request for a "permanent id" field (or anything similar) to make this possible. dr.ef.tymac 10:09, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
 * The articles do have unique IDs that move with the article; see the wgArticleId variable near the top of the HTML source when viewing any article (this value moves with the article, I've just tested). You can also determine this number by looking for the curid= parameter in the URL of any 'diff' link on that article (such as the 'diff' links provided on the watchlist when the article has been changed). --ais523 10:24, 30 September 2007 (UTC)


 * On another note: page moves show up in your watchlist. ---J.S (T/C/WRE) 19:34, 30 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Having just tested it, page moves do not show up in the watchlist. They should but currently they don't. - MTC 16:20, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Special:MIMEsearch
Is Special:MIMEsearch supposed to be disabled? I recently added a note to MediaWiki:Mimesearch-summary to reflect this page's current status - I'm just wondering why it is not working. --- RockMFR 16:35, 29 September 2007 (UTC)


 * To work efficiently, it requires a change to the database indexes which hasn't yet been applied. I've put it in my queue of things to apply next time we do an update, but it could be a while yet. --brion 11:03, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

scrolling through multiple images
I'm interested in having an infobox which allows scrolling through multiple images. For example, check out this link:. The arrows right above the image allow scrolling through images without reloading the page. Clever AJAX I assume? Anything similar been done on WP? If not, any thoughts on how difficult it would be to implement? AndrewGNF 01:28, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
 * It would require someone to write the Javascript, CSS, and any appropriate templates, people to test it on whichever browsers we consider "important" enough to support, and then consensus to have it added to the appropriate javascript and css files.
 * Personally, I don't think something like that is that useful for an encyclopedia. People normally just use commons to indicate the presence of additional images. If the images can't go on Commons, then you're unlikely to be able to satisfy non-free content criteria 3 and 8 to use that many images anyway. Anomie 02:51, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

CommonSettings.php
OK, so I got MediaWiki 1.11 working on my WAMP server, now all I need to do is ensure my other two wikis (when I install them) have the same settings. I created CommonSettings.php, as shown below: <?php
 * 1) Settings common to all wikis
 * 1) Settings common to all wikis

$wgStyleSheetPath = '/skins; $wgArticlePath = "/w/index.php/$1";
 * 1) $wgStyleSheetPath = '/w/skins';

$wgScriptPath = '/w'; $wgStockPath = '/images';

$wgDBerrorLog = '/home/testwiki/logs/dberror.log'; $wgCheckDBSchema = false;

if(!isset($wgLocaltimezone)) $wgLocaltimezone = 'UTC'; if($wgLocaltimezone) { $oldtz = getenv('TZ'); putenv("TZ=$wgLocaltimezone"); $wgLocalTZoffset = date('Z') / 60; putenv("TZ=$oldtz"); }
 * 1) Ugly hack warning! This needs smoothing out.

$wgShowIPinHeader = false; $wgUseGzip = true; $wgRCMaxAge = 30*86400;

$wgLegalTitleChars = "+ %!\"$&'*,\\-.\\/0-9:;=?@A-Z\\\\^_`a-z~\\x80-\\xFF";

$wgUseImageResize              = true; $wgUseImageMagick              = true; $wgImageMagickConvertCommand   = '/usr/bin/convert';

$wgSVGConverters['rsvg-convert'] = '$path/rsvg-convert -w$width -h$height -o$output $input';

$wgAllowUserJs = true; $wgAllowUserCss = true; $wgEnableCreativeCommonsRdf = false;
 * 1) For attaching licensing metadata to pages, and displaying an
 * 2) appropriate copyright notice / icon. GNU Free Documentation
 * 3) License and Creative Commons licenses are supported so far.
 * 1) License and Creative Commons licenses are supported so far.

if( $site == 'wikinews' ) { #$wgRightsPage = "";# Set to the title of a wiki page that describes your license/copyright $wgRightsUrl = 'http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/'; $wgRightsText = 'Creative Commons Attribution 2.5'; $wgRightsIcon = 'http://creativecommons.org/images/public/somerights20.png'; } else { #$wgRightsPage = "";# Set to the title of a wiki page that describes your license/copyright $wgRightsUrl = 'http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html'; $wgRightsText = 'GNU Free Documentation License'; $wgRightsIcon = '/style/images/gnu-fdl.png'; }

wfProfileOut( "$fname-misc1" ); wfProfileIn( "$fname-ext-include1" );

include($IP.'/extensions/timeline/Timeline.php'); include($IP.'/extensions/wikihiero/wikihiero.php'); include( $IP.'/extensions/SiteMatrix/SiteMatrix.php' ); include( $IP.'/extensions/CharInsert/CharInsert.php' ); include( $IP.'/extensions/CheckUser/CheckUser.php' ); include( $IP.'/extensions/Newuserlog/Newuserlog.php' ); require( $IP.'/extensions/Makesysop/SpecialMakesysop.php' ); include( $IP.'/extensions/Makebot/Makebot.php' ); include( $IP.'/extensions/ParserFunctions/ParserFunctions.php' ); require( "$IP/extensions/Oversight/HideRevision.php" ); $wgGroupPermissions['oversight']['hiderevision'] = true; $wgGroupPermissions['oversight']['oversight'] = true;

// and  and wikicode with   (example); also see mw:Manual:Parameters to index.php ∴ Alex Smotrov 19:13, 3 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Fantastic! Raw is perfect for me. Thanks! --Anthony5429 19:23, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

.thumbinner min-width
editprotected Please add  to the definition for .thumbinner, so that on boxes for narrower images the caption text isn't squeezed down --Random832 15:54, 18 September 2007 (UTC)
 * All changes must have consensus on WP:VPT or WP:VPR for security and consensus reasons, GDonato (talk) 17:00, 18 September 2007 (UTC)
 * And yet you didn't feel inclined to make the request there for me - I didn't check back because I didn't imagine there could be any possible objection to it, until I saw a page that still had the visual problem this would fix - citing "security" is nonsense, you can tell it doesn't contain javascript. And, besides, consensus here isn't required for widely used templates, how is the css different? —Random832 16:49, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
 * From the page itself: Any changes to Monobook.css or Common.css should be first proposed to Village Pump. I appreciate this is very minor but I do not want to override well-established processes. GDonato (talk) 17:01, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I see "MediaWiki:Common.css is a message page which forms part of the MediaWiki interface. Because of their visibility, such pages are protected and can only be edited by administrators. To request a change to the page, add to this page, followed by a description of your request. The purpose of this message is explained on its MediaWiki manual page." Where do you see what you quoted? Anyway, the other proposals (other than, arguably, the ambox one) don't appear to have been discussed elsewhere, so it's not really such a well-established process —Random832 17:04, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
 * The quote was on the actual common.css page. Anyway, I've ✅ it now. GDonato (talk) 17:15, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

Anyway, does anyone here have any objections? —Random832 16:49, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

"move warning"
A useful feature would be the ability to put an invisible comment on a page that will show up when someone attempts to move the page, telling them e.g. a consensus was reached about the current title, or is currently being discussed on the talk page, etc - for certain cases where the existing title appears incorrect (language variants, awkward constructions, etc) and a good-faith editor may assume they can simply move it without discussion. This would be similar to placing HTML comments in problematic areas on articles in case someone who doesn't know about the controversy tries to edit it - while you might say that since moving is limited to autoconfirmed users that shouldn't be a problem - but it's not that hard to go four days without running into a controversy or being aware one exists in some cases. I thought of this in response to a thread on ANI. —Random832 16:25, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

Help with colors?
I am trying to make my signature colorful, but it isn't working. Can I have some help? This is what I have in my prefs. Pupster21, Talk To Me  —Preceding signed but undated comment was added at 12:18, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

Ah crap. Forgot to sign. -- Pupster21, Talk To Me 12:19, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Place the spans inside the links, around just the bit after the pipe, or the default link colour overrides them. --ais523 12:22, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
 * It works, but I got the wrong color... -- Pupster21  Talk To Me  12:25, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Yes!!!! It works! -- Pupster21  Talk To Me  12:28, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! -- Pupster21  Talk To Me  12:29, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

Password problems
It seems recently that when I try to log into Wikipedia from either the Seattle Public Library or the University of Washington Libraries, it fails. Login from my home machine is fine. Only obvious difference is that my home machine uses FireFox, whereas UW uses IE and the SPL uses some weird proprietary thing that is pretty clearly IE underneath. Does anyone have any idea what could be going on? - Jmabel | Talk 23:36, 2 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Can you describe what happens when it fails? --brion 23:41, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

It gives me the page with a captcha, suggesting that I might want to create an account. - 69.17.114.183 16:56, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

ah crap...
I was doing something important when the database locked up a few seconds ago. Oh well. --Pupster21 Talk To Me 11:51, 1 October 2007 (UTC)
 * When that happens, just click back, wait, and keep trying. Nothing lost, then. <font color="Gray">Adrian <font color="Gray">M. H.  12:26, 1 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Actually if you are on IE, clicking back is likely to mean you'll lose whatever you've already done Nil Einne 13:59, 1 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Nil is overly pessimistic. My experience is that by far most of the time, the edit panel is still intact after "back" in IE. &minus;Woodstone 14:06, 1 October 2007 (UTC)
 * In my experience, unless one has done a Show preview, clicking "back" loses everything you've entered. I'm using IE 7.  Corvus cornix 16:03, 2 October 2007 (UTC)
 * It works fine with any other common browser (and some not so common). IE's propensity for over enthusiastic refreshing is just one if its many faults, but it can at least be overcome (in a slightly sledgehammer/nut way) by opting not to refresh pages automatically. Or by using another browser.... <font color="Gray">Adrian <font color="Gray">M. H.  16:13, 2 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Yes my experience is similar to Corvus. I forgot to mention IE7 on Vista in particular, I can't remember if if IE6 was better. I know FireFox is a lot better at preserving stuff when you hit back. I'm still using it (edit:by it I mean IE7) and have been for a few weeks now so it's not a one off experience. I have found if it fails to aubmit or you have a database error, if you click the refresh button it sometimes works. Unfortunately I have the habit of clicking on the URL bar and entering. Nil Einne 10:51, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
 * IE6/7 do manage to retain your data sometimes, it just isn't perfect. Using back without navigating anywhere else (and then forward, if necessary) seems to be safest, but your results may be different. Copying the information to the Clipboard before submitting is a much more reliable way to do things. --ais523 11:11, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I have IE6 and if I am doing something major, I will copy it. --Pupster21 Talk To Me 11:47, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

possible to insert working HTML?
Is it possible to insert HTML into wiki pages in such a way as the viewing browser will interpret and execute the code? I can put things in a  box but that turns off execution as well. thanks! --Anamacha 04:43, 11 October 2007 (UTC)


 * The MediaWiki software disables scripting and such, but simple things like tables, spans, and divs should work. —Remember the dot (talk) 05:17, 11 October 2007 (UTC)


 * It has the feature to do so, but is disabled for security reasons. (( 1 == 2 ) ? ((' Stop ') : ('<font color="Green">Go ')) 05:19, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

fonts and faces
i did not find in the help section the list of the "faces" (courier, arial...) for the font function (i'll use it only on my page, right!) - thanks in advance kernitou talk 20:22, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure what you're expecting to find. The available fonts are dependent on the client machine; they have nothing to do with the server. It's therefore wise that you not specify any fonts that are unlikely to be present on a user's machine, or if you do then don't write your page in a way that relies on them. If a specified font is missing, the browser falls back on the default font for the encoding and generic family.


 * Bear in mind that in a style element you can specify a list of font families in order of preference, separated by commas. TCC (talk) (contribs) 21:00, 4 October 2007 (UTC)


 * I just looked at your userpage and noted the code at the bottom. The tag is deprecated. You're better off using style elements as I had imagined you intended above. If you can't find a good reference on them, just ask. TCC (talk) (contribs) 21:05, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
 * thanks tcc kernitou talk 22:37, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Edit counts
Not sure if this is the best forum for this, but here goes: why is the preferences/user profile edit count much higher than the wannabe_kate (not sure if that's actually what it's called) counter? It's obviously not the most pressing issue, but I'm curious. Thanks. Freshacconci | Talk 17:11, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
 * wannabe_kate counts your edits to pages that are visible in your contributions. The edit count in your preferences (also visible here) counts all of your edits, both those visible in your contributions and those made to now-deleted pages. If you've made an edit to a page which is now deleted, your preferences edit count should be higher than the wannabe_kate count. See WikiProject edit counters for more information. Grace notes T <span title="Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)">§ 17:44, 4 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the quick reply! Makes sense now. Freshacconci | Talk 18:18, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Rendering of a cite web template
Why is the cite web template in the ref#5 in the Special:Search/HDi interactive format article not rendering properly? I am not seeing any syntactic error! --soum talk 16:04, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
 * The problem was that there was a line break in the  parameter. That is, it was fragmented like so:


 * This produced a link like [http://www.google.com this
 * one]. Grace notes T <span title="Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)">§ 16:14, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Oh, ok. Thanks a lot. Cya l8r. Cheers. --soum talk 16:52, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

My JScripts
For some reason I think it's either Azaoth or Voice of All's script, but for some reason the pop up (where it says action and user with a drop down menu) won't bring down the menu. Is there an update to anything that I should be aware of? --Amaraiel 14:38, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

How to find lone talk pages?
Talk pages with no corresponding non-talk page may be eligible for deletion per WP:CSD, but I can't find any easy way to search for such pages. I imagine that could be implemented as a special page without too much trouble. --Derlay 12:58, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
 * You may want to ask here: Wikipedia_talk:Special:Lonelypages — Edokter  •  Talk  • 13:39, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
 * It would be possible to make a bot that combs through the API version Special:Allpages in the talk namespaces, and posts lists on-wiki of talk pages without non-talk pages. However, there are quite a few exception to G8, and so an admin going through to delete the pages will have to use caution (and the bot will have to recognize some of the exceptions). Grace notes T <span title="Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)">§ 16:05, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Special Upload pages in Malayalam Wikipedia
I am from Malayalam Wikipedia (http://ml.wikipedia.org).

We are having problems with some special pages that we are tring to create in Malayalam Wikipedia.

In Malayalam Wikipedia we are trying to create the special upload pages as in the English Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Upload).

As an experiment we started with the upload page http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Upload&uselang=en-ownwork. See the corresponding special page in Malayalam Wikipedia at http://ml.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Upload&uselang=en-ownwork.

But the license drop down list is creating problem for us.

The license that is used in English wiki is available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Licenses/en-ownwork. We have created the same license in Malayalam Wiki. See that at http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Licenses/en-ownwork.

But the license drop down list in the malayalam wikipedia on this special upload page is still showing the licenses that are defined at http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Licenses.

We want this special upload page to show the same licenses as in the English Wikipedia. How can we achieve this? Thanks in advance.--Shijualex 11:48, 4 October 2007 (UTC)


 * As far as I know, an administrator will need to edit the ml:MediaWiki:Licenses file to incorporate the edits you want. EVula // talk // &#9775;  // 13:46, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Help:Contents: URGENT
Could someone please 1) conrifm my vision that there are currently indeed red links on Help:Contents or more specifically this verision, 2) revert if so 3) clarify why the links don't seem to work if their appearance is changed? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Tikiwont (talk • contribs) 10:13, 4 October 2007 (UTC)


 * I fixed it, there were some spaces which looked normal but were converted to %C2%A0 in the link.--Patrick 10:43, 4 October 2007 (UTC)


 * It was a non-breaking space, normally coded as &amp;nbsp;, but here coded such that even in the edit box it showed up as a space. I cannot reproduce it here, because when I try to copy it it is converted to a normal space.--Patrick 11:04, 4 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Which means that I could have fixed it even simpler than I did: copy the wikitext and paste it back.--Patrick 11:10, 4 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks, so I came to the right place and will try to remember the last hint. --Tikiwont 11:58, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Non-linking image
What is going on with my image Alcoalogo.svg? If you go it's page, it says that no pages link to the picture. However, if you go to the Alcoa page, you can clearly see the image in the infobox on the right-hand side. What is going on? Thanks, <font style="color: green">Weatherman1126 (<font style="color: orange">talk ) 01:59, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
 * It says it is linked from Alcoa for me, maybe it was a refresh issue. -- ReyBrujo 02:10, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Maybe you clicked "What links here"? To see where images are used, you should click "File links" at the top. PrimeHunter 13:04, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Well, its working now. --<font style="color: green">Weatherman1126 (<font style="color: orange">talk ) 20:53, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Stupid yellow bar
I got one message, and the dumb yellow bar won't go away. I tried everything. I went to my talk page, I even resopnded to the message. I tried going to new pages, and an option about purging my cache. But nothing is helping. This is a public IP, and someone else is going to be getting that message forever. Please make it go away. 71.58.97.225 19:13, 2 October 2007 (UTC)
 * This is a known bug which appears to only apply to anonymous accounts. Why not create a User ID?  They're more anonymous than displaying your IP address all over the place, and you can set your preferences, too.  Corvus cornix 21:45, 2 October 2007 (UTC)
 * See 9213 for the known information about the problem. --ais523 09:09, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
 * According to which the problem may now finally be fixed! :-) Nil Einne 11:10, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I noticed that, but Special:Version says that the change hasn't been scapped yet, and looking at the change we'll have to wait and see if devs use it, or whether they revert it as breaking performance. (At least Tim Starling seems to have figured out what was causing the problem, which is quite some way towards a solution, even if the change isn't accepted.) So I decided to hang back on telling everyone about the fix. (A "WARNING! NEEDS CAREFUL DEPLOYMENT" message isn't particularly reassuring...) --ais523 12:08, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
 * True but I think the comment and warnings are more of a case of, 'I think this should be okay but it's a substanial enough change that it may cause major problems so deploy and monitor carefully' rather then a 'This may fix the bug, it may also kill performance, deploy carefully and let's hope for the best'. Hopefully anyway Nil Einne 12:30, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I've updated the software; so far so good as far as performance. However I should warn that this won't entirely resolve the issue with anonymous visitors. While it should fix the problem where incorrect notification state info gets cached and you can't clear the notification at all, there's still a basic caching problem. Clearing the notification won't have a direct affect on other pages in your browser's cache, so you may still see the message notification box on other pages unless you force reloads or clear the browser cache. --brion 18:06, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
 * That should be easy to fix: whenever there's a talk page notice on a page, put <meta http-equiv="Expires" content="(current time + 1 minute)"> in the HTML header. --Derlay 12:02, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Syntax errors
When I first load a page in IE, it is fine. When I refresh it, there is a syntax error. It says there is an error with line 2, character 1. This happens both when logged in and logged out, so it is not a monobook.js error. When using Firefox, an entry appears in the error console, saying that there is a syntax error with the following line:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

Does anyone else have this problem? - BANG  !  00:58, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
 * The correct DOCTYPE for Wikipedia pages (and the one that I'm receiving on both IE and Firefox) is <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> (XHTML 1 Transitional). The HTML markup output by MediaWiki isn't designed for HTML 4 Strict, so it's not surprising that you get errors when Firefox tries to interpret the document as that type. What I don't understand is what caused the DOCTYPE to change between the Wikimedia servers and your computers, though. --ais523 09:35, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Monobook.css changes
Proposed changes to Monobook.css are being discussed here. Input is sought and welcome. --MZMcBride 02:49, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Where do pages go when they are deleted?
Yesterday an article, Psychiatric abuse, was deleted after heated debate. The article talk page had a lot of information on it. Has it disappeared along with the article? Or do deleted pages and their talk pages go somewhere? Thanks! --<font color="007FFF">Mattisse 01:46, 6 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Deleted pages are generally available for admins to view and/or restore. But the developers warn that they may purge deleted pages at any time, so we cannot think of deletion as a sort of permanent archiving. If you would like, I can send you a copy of the last version of that talk page. Just leave a note on my talk page. &mdash; Carl (CBM · talk) 01:57, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks! I left a note on your talk page. --<font color="007FFF">Mattisse  02:17, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Have deleted pages ever been purged? 1of3 02:21, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Maybe once, a long time ago. But it generally never happens.  Voice -of-  All  02:26, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I remember reading that at some point in the past deleted pages were lost (whether this was intentional I do not know). I also remember reading an email (as I remember, from Brion Vibber) explicitly warning that this could happen again at any time, so we cannot trust that deleted pages will be available indefinitely. But I have no link to that email, unfortunately. &mdash; Carl (CBM · talk) 02:45, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
 * The message you are talking about can be found in this diff. The archive table was last cleared out unintentionally on 8 June 2004; prior to that it was cleared out on 3 December 2003. More information can be found at the bottom of Deletion review/Archive. Graham 87 04:01, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Interaction between CSS class over a span and template calls
I'm not sure if this is a bug or something I'm doing wrong, so I'm posting here first before I (maybe) go to Bugzilla. I am trying to extend the flagicon template to permit users to disable them. (This was a request made by more than one editor.) I had surrounded the existing rendering output (found in Template:country flagicon2) by , so that the following could be put in a user's monobook.css (or whatever) settings:. This worked perfectly for any tranclusions of  made directly from main article text, but not for certain transclusions when the   call was made from within another template. For example, at 1954 FIFA World Cup, the Round8-with third template is used to format a table of match results. (Actually, Template:fb is used here, but it is built on the same system as .)  This table was totally munged, as every parameter that used   was passed an empty string.

I have discovered that this problem only happens when  etc. are used as positional parameters to other templates (as was the case for  ). Using the flag templates as named parameters works as I expected. Here are some sandbox test pages to illustrate this point:
 * User:Andrwsc/sandbox flagicon contains the desired expanded output for . The CSS setting to set   works as expected if this page is transcluded directly.
 * User:Andrwsc/sandbox template contains simple template code to echo the first positional parameter passed to it
 * User:Andrwsc/sandbox template2 contains simple template code to echo a named parameter
 * User:Andrwsc/sandbox contains test calls to these templates.

On my browser anyway (IE7), the call fails for the first template using my "modified" flag template (with the embedded ) as a positional parameter, but still works for the existing   template (that doesn't have the span).

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Andrwsc 17:12, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
 * The = sign has a special meaning in template markup, and it seems that it's being interpreted as parameter markup rather than as HTML in the second-level template calls. Replace it with eq in flagicon and similar templates and everything should be fine. --ais523 17:16, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Ah! I didn't think of that, thanks! Andrwsc 17:28, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Actually, it still doesn't work. Andrwsc 17:33, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
 * A workaround is to explicitly specify the parameter number, for example . Unfortunately, that means you would have to edit every page that uses flagicon as an implicit parameter value... Anomie 18:07, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
 * The problem definitely is with = having a special meaning (I've done various tests, including the 1= workaround; that one works, showing that the problem is with the = sign). Escaping as = or as eq both appear not to help, though. This is certainly an inconvenient behaviour of the software... --ais523 18:11, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I don't think I can manage any workarounds — these templates are literally used on tens of thousands of pages. Andrwsc 18:15, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

New PngFix script is live
The PngFix script, allowing IE 5.5 and IE 6.0 users to see PNG images with proper transparency, has just been updated. While it has been extensively tested (on Commons), bugs have a habbit of surfacing without notice. So if you see any problem with displaying PNG images in IE5.5/6.0, try bypassing your cache first. If the problem persists, please post it here. — Edokter  •  Talk  • 09:13, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Yikes! Corrupted database, perhaps?
Yikes! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:1632_characters is showing A LOT of article titles that have nothing to do with 1632 series or 1632 series characters (the "link to [list article]) of most content in [which is correct], which is the job of said template--putting things into there.

Can someone look into what's happening so the (links) go away in the list below (excerpt of Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:1632_characters):
 * "S-crossed" are OKAY results...

* Tollbooth Gallery (links) * 1634: The Bavarian Crisis (links) * Members of the Northern Ireland Assembly elected in 1982 (links) * Armagh (Assembly constituency) (links) * 1632 characters (links)

...

# Alexander MacKay (redirect page, transclusion) (links) * Canadian wikipedians' notice board/Dictionary of Canadian Biography/M (links) * Duncan Cameron (fur trader) (links) And there may be more! (fix these and we'll see). The last time I saw anything like this t'was database corruption. Let me know what you all find by pinging my talk. Thanks! Cheers! // Fra nkB 21:30, 4 October 2007 (UTC)


 * The behavior of whatlinkshere that you describe is correct. Those pages link to Mary Simpson which redirects to a page containing this template. 'tis not the fault of the software, but rather the users. Garbage-in, garbage-out and all... AmiDaniel (talk) 00:45, 5 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Ahhhh--That's a relief. Mary Simpson is a new page, so they'd have had redlinks. Thanks! // Fra nkB 17:31, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Seeing blanks in diffs
It may happen that an innocent-looking change can cause trouble, for example by replacing with </ ref>, which is a non-functional tag. WP's differencer seems to ignore most changes in the number of blanks, and does not highlight them in red. If you are looking at diffs, and need to see differences in blanks, is there any option that can be tweaked? EdJohnston 20:16, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
 * The CSS class of a change in text is . So you could add something like this to your monobook.css:


 * This will surround the diff change in a dotted red box (other appearances possible), which should accentuate spaces added/removed. Grace notes T <span title="Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)">§ 20:57, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Yes, thanks, this does surround an area already marked as a diff with a dotted red border. The problem remains that a difference in blanks is not highlighted at all, so it does not acquire a red border. The diff I'm trying to diagnose is at . EdJohnston 21:27, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Hm, you're right. I'd think MediaWiki's diff engine would put those spaces with the diffchange class. Maybe User:Cacycle/diff.js would work better? Or you could change the diff table's font into monospace, but this might decrease readability overall. Grace notes T <span title="Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)">§ 21:48, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Hmm, it doesn't work even you give it a background color instead, which is originally what I was going to suggest. EVula // talk // &#9775;  // 18:24, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
 * It turns out that the diff I was trying to diagnose was created on purpose by a 'ref tag vandal,' who is now blocked. Perhaps he knew that our difference engine does not highlight blanks. EdJohnston 21:46, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Userbox question
What's a good way to center an image horizontally within a userbox? I've just made four userboxes and three look fine but one ends up left aligned. Any advice is welcome. Kroyw 03:30, 4 October 2007 (UTC)


 * I think I fixed it. Cheers. --MZMcBride 04:43, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
 * That works perfectly. Thank you. Kroyw 13:41, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

need help starting my own wiki
I'm starting my own wiki at http://wiki.anamacha.net ... and I am not sure where to go next. I intend for it to be a repository of information both about me and things I might use later. It's to be something of an 'outboard brain;' it's a personalpedia, a place to write things down,  a place for brain dumps, and so on. This is all because I have problems with organization and my memory and such.

Anyway, I've got some content on my site, but I don't want to go too much further before my work starts creaking under its own weight. Would some of you more experienced Wikipedians take a look at my site and tell me what you think? Do some of you have your own wikis? If so, could you point me at them or at least tell me what you use them for and how they are organized?

I have a Suggestions page (and section on the main page) but you'll need to create an account in order to edit it. I have an account here, so you could easily mail me through that, I suppose.

Anamacha 04:10, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Edit History
I think there might be something wrong with the edit history. In this edit here I removed some vandalism, but in the edit here it says that I added the vandalism. If someone could explain what is wrong (or what I might have misinterpreted) that would be great! Icestorm815 22:58, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
 * removed a different section of "content" than you. &mdash;Cryptic 23:08, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks! Icestorm815 23:16, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
 * It is often easier to see changes if you view the page versions rather than the diffs (you can still shuffle through them for comparison).  Adrian  M. H.  23:17, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Image upload interface
Would it be possible for the MediaWiki image upload wizard to present the uploader with a blank Information template, the way that the Commons upload wizard does? I think this would be helpful in ensuring the correct copyright information is present, and in making sure a description of the image is present on the image page. Videmus Omnia Talk  19:03, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

False nags about empty edit summaries
Lately, I've been loosing edits -- making edits and then later not seeing them show up. I just noticed what I believe to be the cause -- I am being falsely nagged about not having provided an edit summary when I actually did provide an edit summary, at least some of the time. I just saw a case where that clearly did happen -- when I clicked save a second timein response tothe nag, the edit got saved, complete with the edit summary which was nagged to have been missing. I have apparently presumed on completion of page reloads that my edit (with edit summary provided) did complete, and have exited the page after it reloaded without reading the warning that the edit had not been saved because I was falsely believed not to have provided an edit summary. -- Boracay Bill 11:01, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I can confirm same behaviour. Agathoclea 12:33, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I have seen this for quite some time, but only when I use the undo functionality. --PEJL 12:38, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

If it happens too often, you can turn off "Prompt me when entering a blank edit summary" in Prefs/Editing. 1of3 14:12, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Overlap
Screencap in Firefox 2.0.0.6 ) There seems to be a pretty bad overlap between the Wiktionary template and the cleanup templates.--69.118.235.97 12:58, 14 October 2007 (UTC)
 * It's a known issue with most browsers. A solution is being considered. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:48, 14 October 2007 (UTC)
 * P.S. I think a good solution has finally been found. Let's hope we can welcome this in the coming week. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:00, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

User CSS for handhelds
I put the following CSS shown below in my user stylesheet. The purpose was to override monobook positioning of the page's elements when I view it in IE on Windows Mobile 5 on my Sony Treo.

If I remove the @media handheld {} wrapper, pages appear as I expect them to in a regular browser AND on my Treo, with the content at the top and the navigation at the bottom, and on the Treo the content fills the full width of the screen (which it didn't do in monobook before I added my customer styles).

With the @media handheld {} wrapper surrounding the styles, I get regular monobook on my computer. On the Treo, the links to jump to the navigation and search box at the bottom do appear underneath the page's heading, as I styled them to do, and the navigation does appear at the bottom. So I know that IE on the Treo recognizes that it's supposed to process the rules inside the @media wrapper. But I can't get rid of the left and top margins that offset the content from the upper left-hand corner of the screen. Even adding the !important didn't help.

Has anyone here had experience with this? &#8212;Largo Plazo 17:07, 7 October 2007 (UTC)


 * I came up with a work-around. I tried my own simple test case with a couple of general style rules, and then a couple more to override them inside @media handheld {}. Whichever was the first statement inside the media-specific set of rules successfully overrode the general rule, and the second one didn't, regardless of the order in which I listed them. So I've worked around the problem by wrapping each rule in its own wrapper. &#8212;Largo Plazo 18:32, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

A persistent problem
I hope someone can solve this problem for me. Whenever I try to count the number of edits on this page, an error answer comes up, being unable to show the number of my edits. However, as for other users, they can find the number of edits with no problems at all. For example, the number of edits for User:Blood Red Sandman is shown here with no problems at all. Can someone fix this for me? Thanks. -- S iva1979 <sup style="background:yellow;">Talk to me 13:11, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
 * There's also an edit counter in your preferences, though it tallies your total number of edits made, including deleted edits. Also, I was able to access your edit count just fine; not sure what the problem is. Perhaps you timed out? I run wannabe_kate in a different browser from my usual surfing so that it can churn on its own without slowing me down. *shrug* EVula // talk // &#9775;  // 13:53, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Firstly, allow me to state that I am aware of the edit counter in my preference, which I can access. But I still cannot access my edit counter in the above page! I am using Mozilla Firefox as my browser. An error message appears which states The connection was reset. The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading. This problem has been with me for months since July when I had over 7 000 edits for that month. I am still unable to access this page and it is just plain frustrating for me. I tried to access it by using a different PC, but it still shows an error message. Can anyone give a solution to my problem? -- S iva1979 <sup style="background:yellow;">Talk to me 14:10, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I am loading your count now and it's taking an age. That you made 7k edits in one month suggests that you have a very large count, yes? If that's the case, it will take longer than a small count because it scrapes through your contribs. So up your timeout on all your browsers (on all PCs) to cope with it.  Adrian  M. H.  14:17, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Yeah, it has just finished: 28,600! I think that the timeout limit may be to blame.  Adrian  M. H.  14:19, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the info. But I have another question to ask. How am I suppose to up my timeout? Please give me further light into this. Thanks! -- S iva1979 <sup style="background:yellow;">Talk to me 14:43, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Depends on your browser. Since you could be using any one or more of at least two dozen different browsers, I will have to leave that up to you. Quick tip for the two most common families of browser: IE will be tweaked from the registry for any settings that are not in the options menu, while Mozilla browsers use about:config in the address bar.  Adrian  M. H.  17:27, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Matching Email addresses with Wikipedia accounts
There was a recent case where someone sent a vulgar, harassing email to User:Wiki Raja from the email address netmongers@gmail.com pretending to be User:Netmonger (note the additional "s" in the email address). Netmonger was subsequently blocked, but after the consensus among admins on the case on AN/I was that it was a joe job intending to frame Netmonger, the blocking admin left a note on Netmonger's block log that the previous blocks were in error.

Is there a way to find which Wikipedia account has the email address netmongers@gmail.com attached to it? It's likely a throw away account, so check user may be able to confirm who the actual creator of the account was.--<font color="#9696A0" face="Tahoma">snowolf<font color="#0A0096">D4  ( <font color="#339966">talk  / <font color="#CC0099"> @   ) 16:06, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Only a developer (to be precise, shell-access developer) could do it, and even then you'd have to persuade them that the check was justified. --ais523 16:20, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Anyone with full SQL access should be able to do it. I personally would like to know who did that. (( 1 == 2 ) ? ((' Stop ') : ('<font color="Green">Go ')) 16:21, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks guys. Could you tell me how I could contact a developer? Wiki Raja continues to bring up the email in comments like this, so I too am pretty curious as to who actually sent it. --<font color="#9696A0" face="Tahoma">snowolf<font color="#0A0096">D4  ( <font color="#339966">talk  / <font color="#CC0099"> @   ) 16:34, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
 * IRC is fastest: irc://irc.freenode.net/wikimedia-tech. Or you can email the wikitech-l mailing list, or place a request at the bug tracker. --ais523 16:38, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
 * That may not be necessary. See WP:AN/I. Tito xd (?!? - cool stuff) 18:54, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

searching properly
I have a page on my wiki entitled "Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)" but when I search for "CSS" this page is not reported. How can I make a search on "CSS" find this page? What code do I have to put on the page? Thanks!

--Anamacha 08:47, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
 * That will depend to some extent on what search extension (if any) your wiki is using. Creating a redirect (see Help:Redirect) is likely to help no matter what search system your wiki uses, though (and it's the only way to help 'Go', rather than 'Search'). One hint: the word CSS is only three letters long, so some search systems won't index it. --ais523 09:30, 8 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Check FAQ; there's a section on the MySQL search engine and adjusting it so short words work. --brion 15:58, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Loading an old version
This diff clearly shows that I added a relfist and categories, yet the page still shows an oudated version. I've tried this in Opera 9 and IE6, so it's not a cache issue on my side...is osmething wrong wiht the server? hbdragon88 06:56, 8 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Fixed, a ref tag was not closed.--Patrick 07:06, 8 October 2007 (UTC)


 * (edit conflict) The problem was that the new Reception section had an unclosed (see for how I fixed it). Mediawiki was interpreting everything afterward (including reflist) as part of the reference. — TKD::Talk 07:07, 8 October 2007 (UTC)


 * I thought I fixed it, but you made the same edit less than a minute before me.--Patrick 07:17, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Wow that was dumb. I should have realized that from the beginning. I've seen that screw up pages before and fixed them. It just didn't click this time. Thanks for the help. hbdragon88 07:37, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Wide Screen
Hi all. Why is the landing page for Wikipedia.org so wide? It's been doing my head in my months because I can't figure it out. Thanks <font style="color: #FF0000; background-color: #FFFF00">Doyley ''' <font style="color: #0000ff;">Talk 13:03, 6 October 2007 (UTC)


 * The page Wikipedia.org isn't all that wide, it views perfectly with a window only ~540 pixels wide. If you use a wider window, however, it will dynamically expand to use the extra space. <font color="#275CA9">Nihiltres ( <font color="#000">t .l ) 14:54, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
 * It does view perfectly but if you look at the horizontal scroll bar you can only see about 1/3rd of the page. If you scroll across there is loads of white space for some reason.  <font style="color: #FF0000; background-color: #FFFF00">Doyley ''' <font style="color: #0000ff;">Talk  15:16, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
 * What browser are you using? EVula // talk // &#9775;  // 15:42, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
 * IE7
 * <font style="color: #FF0000; background-color: #FFFF00">Doyley ''' <font style="color: #0000ff;">Talk 16:07, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
 * And therein lies the answer. IE7 creates whitespace to the right side of pages with certain CSS configurations.  Adrian  M. H.  16:35, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Anyone looked into working around it? IE7's going to be with us for a very long time, I fear... —  SMcCandlish  &#91;talk&#93; &#91;cont&#93; ‹(-¿-)› 14:41, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Hm? I use IE7, and I don't see the problem.  Corvus cornix 17:20, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I've just had a look in IE7. The page looks fine, but it has a very long horizontal scrollbar for no apparent reason (which scrolls the page horizontally into nothingness). I don't know why. --ais523 17:43, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Ah, I see what you're saying. Yes, the scroll bar is there n IE7.  Corvus cornix 17:44, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Standardising links
I don't know how to go about this but thought it would be a good idea. Internal links currently look like this:
 * example

Yet external links currently look like this:
 * example website

It would be better to replace the space in external links with a vertical line to corrspond with internal links like this:
 * |example website

Anyone agree?-- Phoenix 15 17:22, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Some URLs contain the | character, which is why a space (illegal in URLs) has to be used instead. --ais523 18:03, 5 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Indeed. Consider |Main%20Page, which, by the proposed syntax, would produce Main%20Page, instead of the expected |Main%20Page link. By contrast, spaces are legal in page titles, but pipes are not, so internal links use the pipes to differentiate between the target and the text of the link; otherwise Foo Bar would produce the link Bar. AmiDaniel (talk) 19:04, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Jobque length
Are we running some database update in the background again or is the counter stuck somehow? I chekced yesterday and it was at around 2 mill, now it's around 3,2 - 3.1 million and fluctuating up and down with 100.000 every few seconds. --Sherool (talk) 04:42, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Nothing serious, its just the processing speed of the servers is constant, but the numbers of new jobs filed isn't. So it goes up and down a lot. Regards, The UserboxerComplain/ubx 19:44, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Subpage watching?
I don't have the technical savvy to know how to implement it, but would it be possible to enable watching of subpages (for example, individual topics in ANI) instead of an entire page? It would be very useful on pages where there is a single discussion out of many that one wishes to follow. ~ Eliz 81 <sup style="color:#1E90FF;">(C)  03:34, 10 October 2007 (UTC)
 * It isn't possible, to the best of my knowledge. For pages like AN and ANI, I just use the browser's Find feature to look for my username so I can quickly jump to the conversations I've participated in. EVula // talk // &#9775;  // 04:20, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

Black screen
It would be cool if there was an option to change the primary background color from white to black. This way poeple who spend long amounts of time reading and browsing the site wont get as much eye fatigue from reading off a brite white web page. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Hariziz (talk • contribs) 21:51, 9 October 2007
 * See Help:User style. You may not have to do all that work yourself: see if someone has already created a user style like what you want. TCC (talk) (contribs) 22:27, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Why is this happening
Wikipedia was working yesterday for me finely until I went on and tried to search for articles such as and. It came up with this error:

"WIKIMEDIA FOUNDATION           Fout Fel Fallo 错误 錯誤 Erreur Error Fehler エラー Błąd Errore Erro Chyba English The Wikimedia Foundation servers are currently experiencing technical difficulties.

The problem is most likely temporary and will hopefully be fixed soon. Please check back in a few minutes.

For further information, you can visit the #wikipedia channel on the Freenode IRC network.

In the meantime, you may be able to view Google's cached version of this page.

Wikipedia is now one of the most visited sites on the Internet by traffic and continues to grow, and as a result the Wikimedia Foundation has a constant need to purchase new hardware. If you would like to help, please donate.

If reporting this error to the Wikimedia System Administrators, please include the following details: Request: GET http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=Hybrid&go=Go, from 66.230.200.135 via sq31.wikimedia.org (squid/2.6.STABLE13) to Error: ERR_CANNOT_FORWARD, errno (11) Resource temporarily unavailable at Tue, 09 Oct 2007 21:30:38 GMT "

What does it mean and what do I do, I have some research to do.

Kenny Sullivan 21:43, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
 * The servers have been having some trouble recently, any problems should only be temporary. Consider donating to help buy more servers. Mr.  Z- man  22:33, 9 October 2007 (UTC)


 * What browser are you using? —Remember the dot (talk) 22:33, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

Esoteric template syntax
I've got a complicated template system for the Wikipedia Signpost (see Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Footer, Wikipedia Signpost/2007-10-08, and S-s). Essentially, what I'm trying to do is have it so that transcluding it normally produces what's generated at WP:POST/A (scroll down to see the example on October 1), but that transcluding it via the footer template produces what you see at the bottom of each Signpost page (see Wikipedia Signpost/2007-10-08/From the editor).

It's almost perfect, but note what the bottom of this page looks like -- the "from the editor" is on its own line, as the first link. I don't want that. There is an easy work-around -- by removing the line break in Wikipedia Signpost/2007-10-08 between the first and second line, this should disappear. But I don't want to do that, because it makes it tougher to edit. Is there anything I'm missing, probably in S-s, that would help me do that? Ral315 » 17:04, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
 * The problem seems to be that you end up with line breaks inside a table cell, and the first such line break renders as a line break rather than being ignored. One solution might be to change Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Footer to HTML table markup rather than wikitable markup; I can't think of anything else other than removing or commenting out the line breaks between every entry in the per-week summary page (removing the first line break would just cause the second line break to become active). (I used Special:ExpandTemplates to figure out what was causing the problem, by the way; it's a useful resource to know about.) --ais523 17:12, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Strangely, an HTML comment at the top and bottom of the page seemed to work. I can't imagine why that would be, but it worked (I tried one at the top only, and the last link was spaced badly, so I added one at the bottom to fix that).  Thanks for the link.  Ral315 » 19:35, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

500 Error
Hi all, Is there a problem today? I am patrolling recent changes and every 5 or so reverts I am getting a 500 internal error when submitting a page. Thanks Doyley <strong style="color:#fff;background:#000;padding:0 4px">Talk  15:40, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

Bug with the "new message" notification?
The .usermessage bar is staying active permanently for me, like it does sometimes for anons. Has anyone else had this happen? It's not a big deal for me, as I have hidden it temporarily, but it could annoy anyone who doesn't know how to do that (or want to do that).  Adrian  M. H.  13:45, 10 October 2007 (UTC)
 * After making a few edits to other pages, I unhid it again and seems to have cleared itself.  Adrian  M. H.  13:50, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

Uploading articles' Wikicode as text files
Hello guys.

Basically, I don't have an internet connected PC but I do have a phone with GPRS (which I'm using to write this message). A while ago I downloaded the source of several low-activity articles (Category:Sesotho language) and worked on them at home (being careful to include those few changes implemented by other editors). I need to know if it is possible to send my changes to Wikipedia but without using the usual edit box mechanism (eg by using FTP or uploading a file as with images, which my phone can do)?

Basically, I'm too lazy to go to an internet cafe and wondered if I could do this at home instead. Thanks for any responses.

Tebello TheWHAT!!?? 13:22, 10 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Nope, all editing is done through the browser interface. EVula // talk // &#9775;  // 15:43, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

It's okay. I finally took the plunge and decided to use my phone as a USB modem. It's actually cheaper than the (local) cafe as I'm only paying for data, not time (and implementing these changes is taking much longer than I thought it would). Tebello TheWHAT!!?? 16:41, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

Section editing links
Is there any way to disable the section-edit ([edit]) links on a per-section basis? --soum talk 10:56, 10 October 2007 (UTC)
 * No, but see also 8515 and 2795. --ais523 11:14, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

Email this user
The recent netmonger case got me thinking. If you use 'e-mail this user' to e-mail people, is this logged? Does the log include the contents e-mail that was sent? The way I see it, if you use the wikimedia servers to e-mail someone it should be logged. If there is some dispute about an e-mail then checkusers, on the request of one of the parties, should be allowed to check the logs to confirm an e-mail was sent. Preferably they should also be able to view the contents of the e-mail that was sent too. I don't think this violates the privacy of participants as if you choose to e-mail someone you are not entitled to deny it if the receivee takes offence at the e-mail. Some people may be unsettled by the idea that other people can read the e-mails but since checkusers are supposed to be highly trusted users and are only allowed to view the contents in restrictive circumstances (the participant who requests it can always reveal the contents of the e-mail anyway) this should not be a problem. In any case, privacy when sending unencrypted e-mails is never guaranteed and provided there is a warning that it is logged when sending the e-mail it should be fine. The checkuser does not need to see the e-mail addresses of either participant instead all the logs need to show is something like "user XYZ sent an e-mail to user ABC". It seems to me if we don't log e-mails, people can abuse the 'e-mail this user' function to send death threats and other extremely bad violations of policy and then claim they didn't send the e-mails. I believe this has happened before but the people who have received these e-mails have usually been one or more highly trusted users so it hasn't been a problem. I appreciate that this will require discussion on meta and changes to the privacy policy but I wanted to see what people here think before taking it there. Nil Einne 10:47, 10 October 2007 (UTC)


 * We would consider this a very severe violation of the reasonable expectations of privacy. Just as Yahoo or Google will not have an employee look up your Gmail account's Sent folder because someone claimed you were rude in an e-mail, we will not. --brion 13:29, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

IE warning message when playing video
At Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disaster I get the following IE warning when trying to play either of the videos: "The website wants to run the following add-on: 'Java(TM) Web Start ActiveX Control' from 'Sun Microsystems, Inc. (unverified publisher)...'

This is largely gobbledegook to me, but I usually have no problem running Java controls, and according to this, this message is "usually caused by the website trying to use older code". It goes on to say: "Once you approve a control, any site on the Internet will be able to script that control without prompting you again. You should NOT approve the control unless you have strong reason to believe that the control is safe [...] You should encourage site owners to change their web sites to check for the newer, safer versions of the controls."

Does this mean that Wikipedia is using some dodgy old control that may expose users to risks?

Matt 12:56, 9 October 2007 (UTC).
 * Are you sure you don't normally have problems with Java (note that this is distinct from JavaScript, which is more common on websites but is not powerful enough to play videos; as a test, you can look for a 'coffee cup' icon that will appear in your taskbar when Java, as opposed to JavaScript, is loaded)? You may also want to try asking at the technical village pump where you are more likely to find someone who can answer your question. --ais523 14:17, 9 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Yes, I am quite sure. On other Java sites I get the coffee cup icon and everything works fine with no warnings. I have moved the discussion as you advised. Matt 17:46, 9 October 2007 (UTC).


 * If I'm not mistaken, this is because the player specifically checks for Java Web Start, not just the JRE as most Java apps require. Java Web Start allows for the media player Cortado to be invoked directly over the net and then runs it in a separate environment from your browser. The only reason this would be unsafe (or rather, any more unsafe than any other control) is if you're running an old version. Go to java.com if you need to update. TCC (talk) (contribs) 22:16, 9 October 2007 (UTC)


 * I installed the latest version and the warning no longer appears. Thanks very much for your help and advice. Matt 00:26, 10 October 2007 (UTC).


 * We do not use Java Web Start at all, but note that probing for working Java is harder than it ought to be. The original poster may have non-standard IE security settings which cause unnecessary prompts during the probing; additionally it would help to investigate to know what OS, IE version, and Java version were present. --brion 13:32, 10 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Installing a new JRE doesn't seem to uninstall the old one, and AFAIK you can still see the old one in the control panel.


 * I understand the problem isn't straightforward, but surely there's some way to detect Java without loading a control that isn't otherwise needed. Comes out pretty ugly though. TCC (talk) (contribs) 23:55, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

Double-spacing when printing
I tried to get the main body text of an article to be double-spaced when in <tt>?printable=yes</tt> mode (really useful for copyediting articles) but I haven't gotten it to work at all. I've tried to play around with my monobook.css, with media @print rules, but nothing. Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong? Tito xd (?!? - cool stuff) 18:47, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Monobook's main CSS file http://en.wikipedia.org/skins-1.5/monobook/main.css specifies line-heights in lots of places, so you have to override them all individually. Probably most relevant is the  specified on the &lt;p> tag, which will override anything just set in #content for most of an article and set it to Wikipedia's default 1½-space; you may also need to set separate line-heights on ul, ol, dd, fieldset, and pre, depending on what you want to be doublespaced. --ais523 15:16, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
 * But doing that causes the regular page view to appear double-spaced. I'm only looking for double-spacing in the print view, as it is really useful to print pages double-spaced, and copyedit them by hand while off-line. Tito xd (?!? - cool stuff) 06:02, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

The problem is, that with <tt>?printable=yes</tt>, the only change to the page source is the link to <tt>/skins-1.5/common/commonPrint.css?100</tt> has its media definition removed, so the print stylesheet is also applied in-browser. So, for printing, in theory nothing really changes. What you could do instead is a dirty little hack: Apply the doublespace CSS rules you wish in your css without a media @print rule. Then try something in your js like: if(document.location.indexOf('printable=yes')==-1) { document.write('<style type="text/css"> /* css here to reset the spacing to de-facto */ '); } Then whenever you are not on a printable page, the text should be as you specify (and as it isn't waiting for document load, it is transparent), and whenever you're on a printable page, the text will be doublespaced per your personal css. Note that you could use importScript instead, but that would require an extra subpage (which you don't really need for just one or two CSS definitions). --Splarka (rant) 07:26, 10 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Umm.. simple  in <tt>monobook.css</tt> seems to work (at least in bowser print preview) in Firefox 1.5, Opera 9.2, IE6 and probably everywhere else. Note the *. And make sure your monobook doesn't have errors, such using // for comments ∴ Alex Smotrov 13:58, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

Certain articles very slow
Is there a reason certain articles are very slow to load? I don't think it can be text size alone, as I rarely have problems with articles of similar size. I'm speaking mainly of United States, which can take up to half a minute to load diffs, whereas other articles load them within 5 seconds. I just clicked 'last' on the most recent diff in history and it took 34 seconds to load; I then went to a similarly-sized article (149k vs 163k), World War II, and loading the most recent diff took only 7 seconds. This is odd, and I would like to know why the United States article in particular is suffering from this. Is it the number of references? The sheer number of versions in history? --Golbez 00:11, 5 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Hard to say exactly, but it's quite unlikely to have anything to do with the number of characters in the article (as long as it's reasonably sized), number of references, or length of the history. It most likely has to do with the size and type of images and other media on the page (images are of course the slowest thing for a browser to load), and the kinds and sizes of templates. United States, for instance, has quite a few very complex templates in it, and these can certainly slow down the loading of the page, despite the text of the template inclusion being quite brief. AmiDaniel (talk) 00:41, 5 October 2007 (UTC)


 * The amount of byte transfer is quite different. United States - "Post-expand include size: 746825 bytes". World War II - "Post-expand include size: 156493 bytes".  Voice -of-  All  00:48, 5 October 2007 (UTC)


 * If you're using Firefox, type <tt>about:config</tt> in your address bar, then type <tt>network</tt> in the Filter box. Double-click network.http.pipelining and set it to <tt>true</tt>, then double-click ...pipleining.maxrequests and set it to 10. If you use Internet Explorer, go to Start &rarr; Run and type <tt>regedit</tt>, then ENTER. Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER &rarr; Software &rarr; Microsoft &rarr; Windows &rarr; Current Version &rarr; Internet Settings then click Edit &rarr; New &rarr; DWORD Value and name it <tt>MaxConnectionsPerServer</tt>, with the the value set to 10. Create another key named <tt>MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server</tt> and set its value to 10, as well.--Gnfgb2 01:12, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
 * No improvement, still exactly 34 seconds. In fact, that's curious, that it was the same both times. Perhaps some of these templates need to be simplified or pruned. I don't think it's the number of images. Note that this isn't the time for the page to actually finish displaying; this is just the time it takes for the server to begin returning the result. In other words, t takes the server half a minute to process all of the dynamic things on that page, and that is unacceptable. Once "United States" appears in the titlebar, it only takes about 4 more seconds to finish displaying. --Golbez 04:08, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
 * My computer doesn't take nearly that long to load the page. It still does take longer than other sites, though. Forgive me if you've already checked these things. To determine the problem, please (1) press CTRL + ALT + DELETE and load the page. Check to see how much CPU your browser is using. Also, (2) tell me what type of browser you use. Next, (3) right click on My Computer and select Properties, then read off what specifications are shown (i.e., your CPU and RAM). Also, (4) tell me what type of internet connection you are using. You can also check your RAM usage by clicking Performance after pressing CTRL + ALT + DELETE. You can check your bandwidth utilization under Networking. One thing that seems to help IE is disabling un-needed add-ons. If you click on Tools &rarr; Manage Add Ons and disable anything you don't need, like Sun's SSVHelper Class, you might get a boost.--Gnfgb2 05:16, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
 * It would be surprising if any of this had anything to do with the issue. TCC (talk) (contribs) 06:07, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I'm not following. Are you saying the issue isn't his computer? Or do you mean it is but my ideas wouldn't help?--Gnfgb2 06:17, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I'm saying that the description of the issue is not suggestive of a problem with either his computer or his browser. There's a latency problem. It's not difficult to observe incoming network traffic, so when he says, "this is just the time it takes for the server to begin returning the result" I assume that means he can see there's no incoming data for 34 seconds after he requests the page. Even if he's not looking at network traffic, browser behavior is not the same if it's receiving no data, vs. receiving data but delaying rendering. TCC (talk) (contribs) 20:53, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I wrote a response earlier but must have forgot to submit it somehow. Anyway I was going to say, it might be helpful if you specify precisely which browser you're using. As far as I'm aware there are differences in the way they handle page loads. For example I believe Firefox prioritises initially rendering or in otherwords it's faster at showing the page when it's started to load but slower at displaying the final result. IE6 on the otherhand I believe prioritises final display so it's faster at showing the final result but won't show the page when it's begun to load so fast. This link is one test which shows the variability of page load times depending on browser and site. This  (rather old admitedly) partially describes the complexity of page load times (struck this out as it may not be useful. It's talking about pages in the milisecond timeframes whereas you're talking about 34 seconds) Nil Einne 09:29, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I'm running Firefox on a far-more-than-enough modern computer that tweaking should not be remotely necessary. (Core 2 Duo, 2gb ram) If that computer needs tweaking to download the article quickly then MediaWiki NEEDS to be fixed, because that means most people are having problems. On the other hand, I disagree it has anything to do with my end. --Golbez 20:27, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
 * The US article took approximately 34 secs to load when I tested it just now, so you're not the only one.  Adrian  M. H.  10:23, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Same here. The United States article takes ridiculously long time to load. "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20061201 Firefox/2.0.0.6 (Ubuntu-feisty)". 10:35, 5 October 2007 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jeltz (talk • contribs)

Another problem that pops up because of this - any time I submit an edit to United States, I eventually get a Mediawiki error notice, I guess because it's taking so long to come back with a result. This is unacceptable, and can NOT be blamed on my computer. The edit still goes through but there's no indication of this unless you look at the article (another 34 seconds!) or history. --Golbez 20:27, 5 October 2007 (UTC)


 * I wonder if there's some network issue somewhere between you and the servers that only becomes noticeable in situations where template expansion is so dramatic. TCC (talk) (contribs) 20:53, 5 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Does this happen even if you only edit a section of the page? Corvus cornix 22:24, 5 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Checking... No, it doesn't, but the thing is, I don't have this delay when I'm *editing*, only when I'm getting the full article, either directly at the article or via a diff. When I hit alt-e or click an edit section link, it pops up in two seconds. --Golbez 00:26, 6 October 2007 (UTC)


 * I can confirm Golbez's experience from my own tests. Feel free to use User:Nil Einne/Sandbox for experimentation Nil Einne 00:37, 6 October 2007 (UTC)


 * I notice there is an animated image on United States, but on the computers which have been mentioned that should not be a problem...unless the PNG thing in the next section is related. (SEWilco 00:42, 6 October 2007 (UTC))

This is a cache size issue. The text alone from United States is 500 KB of meta-templated goodness, not counting javascript, stylesheets and of course images. I clocked five various diffs (with "time wget" from the shell) at between 43 and 48(!) seconds just now. The second try of each was about 5 seconds. When a particular version of an article with enough templates in it gets bumped from the caches, you wait. And wait. I disbelieve the developers when they say transclusion isn't a performance penalty. That depends on having an effectively much larger cache than we do. 1of3 03:40, 6 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Transclusion in general is not a performance problem; there's most likely a specific performance problem triggered by specific behaviors present on that page. We'll look into it. --brion 19:22, 8 October 2007 (UTC)


 * 47 seconds before I got a response on the United States article here (using Opera.) I don't think it's in his head. -- Blorg 22:16, 10 October 2007 (UTC)


 * I am seeing similar problems with, in particular, the United States article -- Boracay Bill 00:01, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

Is there a bug filled on missorting categories?
Category sorting system doesn't recognize various diacritical characters, forcing us to ignore them in category sorting - which can have small impact but also pretty major. Is there a bug filled on that we could vote upon? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus 17:08, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
 * This is actually the third-most-requested feature ever (after single user login and anon-only blocks): see 164. --ais523 08:07, 18 October 2007 (UTC)

"Revision history of .."
Is there a piece of custom css I could use to not have to see the words "Revision history of .." in front of every page history title?-- VectorPotential Talk 13:20, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
 * It can't be done in CSS, but it would be easy in JavaScript. You might want to make a request at WikiProject User scripts' request page. --ais523 14:17, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I created a Javascript to fix that the day they implemented it:


 * Works fine for me. Anomie 02:18, 18 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks! Works perfectly.-- VectorPotential Talk 17:35, 18 October 2007 (UTC)

JAnDbot
Why is User:JAnDbot being allowed to remove interwiki links? I have contacted the owner on the Czech WP, but it's still removing good iw links from pages. For example, see recent edits to Tincture (heraldry), where it removed links to the Catalan, German, and Dutch WPs. If allowed to continue, the bot could do serious damage to cross-pedia work. Could someone please STOP it? --EncycloPetey 21:30, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
 * This isn't a technical issue. I think you probably want WP:AN, which is where the bot policy page suggests you leave brief notes about misbehaving bots. TCC (talk) (contribs) 01:09, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

password protected pages?
How can I code it so that a password is required to view certain specific pages of my wiki? In other words, I want most of my wiki readable by all, but on a few pages I want the user to provide the password to see the full text.

thanks!

--Anamacha 03:49, 10 October 2007 (UTC)


 * See something like mw:Extension:Hierarchical_Namespace_Permissions. But be aware there are several ways to accidentally leak the contents of 'hidden' pages/namespaces sharing access with a public wiki, such as transclusions, edit summaries (like auto-creation summaries), and the search function. You're probably better off creating a separate wiki (with a shared user database) and restricting the global 'read' user right to the sysop usergroup -> mw:Manual:Preventing access. --Splarka (rant) 07:37, 10 October 2007 (UTC)


 * could I perhaps stick the pages in question in a different namespace and then restrict the viewing of that? Pardon if that seems like an ignorant question; I don't fully understand the concept of namespaces.  --Anamacha 04:38, 11 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Yes, that is normally how one would go about restrivting read access to a certain group of pages. There are numerous extensions written that will do this for you, such as mw:Extension:Lockdown and PrivateNamespaces. Note that this method should not be used to protect sensitive information. It will accomplish what you need, but with a level of fragility. AmiDaniel (talk) 10:21, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

Links in - slightly confused
Sorry to be vague, which I suspect is the case, but I want to link to some wiki pages and need to use a complete URL. I have looked at all the policy and help I can find on links but haven't found what I need. In order for my app, a PDF printer driver, to recognise a link it must contain “.htm”, “.html” … etc which Wiki url,s don’t. I tried adding various extensions directly and also /index.htm but can't get anything to work. Please help, I only need a document name, default or otherwise and I am feeling a little silly now, after all links are hardly complicated.
 * To automatically generate links to wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=name%20of%20page (where you replace name%20of%20page with the percent-encoded name of the page) is the easiest method. The links don't end in .html; one workaround you could use to make a page name that did end in .html is this: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main%20page&fakeparameter=.html (which is a somewhat cheeky way to do it, but a similar method has been used to fool other programs in the past). --ais523 18:04, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

Make this software!! PLEASE!!!

 * 1. something like mediawiki. but it is not mediawiki
 * 2. need not apache, psp, mysql (stand alone)
 * 3. windows xp, linux version
 * 4. oneclick install
 * 5. private database software
 * 6. use commons image server
 * 7. oneclick auto download (copy and paste) from wikiproject each article (include template, image, etc auto download)
 * 8. oneclick auto download (copy and paste) from wikiproject certain category (such as american history, NASA project, Franch Law, etc)
 * 9. I have some articles. My friend have some articles. via internet connect, I download by oneclick My friend download by oneclick.
 * 10. it is not web server. it is stand alone software. but, it have onclick download upload features
 * 11. auto cd dvd burning
 * 12. I send to dvd to my friend and he load dvd and oneclick copy and paste.
 * 13. article history feature is off
 * 14. I can download mass articles from wikipedia en: fr: de: etc.
 * 15. I can download mass articles from cd, dvd
 * 16. I can download mass articles from my friend pc
 * 17. I can make my own data cd, dvd
 * 18. I can upload mass articles to my friend pc -- <font face="Arial" color="teal">WonYong <font color="1F860E">Talk  09:57, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
 * There you are. Go nuts. TCC (talk) (contribs) 01:33, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Don't want much, do you?! <font color="Gray">Adrian <font color="Gray">M. H.  03:15, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I don't know. On the off-chance he's rich, maybe we should put together a design, give him an estimate, and see if he'll pay. TCC (talk) (contribs) 08:48, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Indeed. I am sure some software that will do this exists, but you will probably have to pay, probably a lot, since it will likely be intended for corporate clients. On a side note: how is a PHP tutorial going to manage points 2 and 4? :) Prodego  talk 23:39, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
 * He'll need it if he plans this as a MediaWiki fork. Somehow. I'm actually not too sure what he's asking for with some of this. TCC (talk) (contribs) 00:12, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

Database server lag?????????
What is up w/the watchlists??? -- Pupster21  Talk To Me  11:58, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Hmmmmm... That's interesting, a lag lasting 30 seconds... -- Pupster21  Talk To Me  12:00, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
 * It was probably my fault - I was doing a history merge of the philosophy article at the time. Sorry about that, but it had to be done eventually. Graham 87  14:33, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
 * It's happening quite frequently. I wonder why. In the past it was always traceable to us bureaucrats doing renames, but that isn't the case anymore. --Deskana (talk) 14:40, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
 * It's possible we're pushing the system near it's capacity limits again. From this graph you can see we are back up to the traffic levels from before the Northern Hemisphere summer lull and that appears to be without the yaseo (Korean) cluster. But the hardware purchase and server updates don't come as often or detailed now it seems, so it's hard to tell from the outside. - Taxman Talk 19:39, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

Keeping code or templates at the bottom?
Can someone please help me figure out how to add a template(or even a wrapup script) to my talk page so that it ALWAYS remains on the bottom of the talk page regardless of new edits being added? For instance a template such as or a script wrap up such as. I would like them to stay at the bottom of my talk page, even if new edits are added. Is there a code that can do this? Thanks.  Wikidudeman  (talk) 17:10, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I don't think it's possible. You could make things appear to stay at bottom (i.e. they would stay at bottom on HTML page) with the "not closed table" hack, but not in wiki code ∴ Alex Smotrov 18:25, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I just tried a quick experiment by placing a div with  below my talk page header; the last content cleared it OK. Whatever you want to place in there, it should work. But as Alex says, it is sort of an illusion because it's not actually at the bottom in the edit window.  Adrian   M. H.  18:38, 11 October 2007 (UTC)


 * It doesn't seem to be working.  Wikidudeman  (talk) 18:44, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
 * See this version. It works there. You might want to change  for   !! Adrian   M. H.  18:50, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

That's not it. I changed that myself to test colors to see if I could make it colorful or something. I'm saying the initial one doesn't work. It obscures the bottom comments. I want it to be spaced away from the bottom comment for instance perhaps with.  Wikidudeman  (talk) 19:09, 11 October 2007 (UTC)


 * There must be something different on your talk page. If you got the code right, I can't explain why it wouldn't work for you.  Adrian  M. H.  19:30, 11 October 2007 (UTC)


 * It goes to the bottom, But the problem is that it obscures the last comment on the talk page. Is there a way to add a space between the template and the last comment?  doesn't work.  Wikidudeman  (talk) 22:00, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
 * No, the break tag would not have the desired effect; as I said, it worked for me and I can see no reason at all why it should not work for you if it is set up in the same way. The only obvious difference is that your intended div was bigger than my temporary example, but that should make no difference.  Adrian  M. H.  22:11, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Looking over your diffs, I see that you didn't substitute the template; try that and see if it helps. That way, the displayed content matches the code rather than calling the template. Might work.  Adrian  M. H.  22:15, 11 October 2007 (UTC)

Nope :User talk:Wikidudeman. Feel free to edit my talk page to see if you can get it to work.  Wikidudeman  (talk) 22:28, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I just saw it. The only other difference that I can see is the category; I'll have a look at it for you, but I won't promise anything.  Adrian  M. H.  22:29, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Nope; no change. It must be something to do with the content from the template or the content of the page.  Adrian  M. H.  22:36, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
 * This is a z-stacking issue. Basically, what Wikidudeman wants isn't possible. Positioned elements are always on top of inline, non-positioned elements. This is true even of floats, but in that case inline elements are flowed around it. That doesn't happen for absolute positioning. If the surrounding div had only block-level elements in it, there wouldn't be a problem.


 * It only appears to work for Adrian because the box he used to test with happened to fit neatly into the bottom padding of the bodyContent box, which is 1.5em. If the box were larger, it wouldn't work there either. TCC (talk) (contribs) 01:29, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

I have a working version of this (as far as I can see, at least) on my user talk page, transcluded from my talk page header. The code used is, and the text seems to always display after the close of the main (background) div of the page - I'd recommend consulting the code of my page header. I'm not sure of the stability of this hack, and I know it probably doesn't work for all skins (in fact, I'm pretty sure it breaks nastily in cologneblue), but it seems to work fine for monobook. <font color="#275CA9">Nihiltres ( <font color="#000">t .l ) 01:13, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
 * It works in your case because you left enough room for it. If there were any inline elements on that part of your page, the "table of contents ~ top of page" text would obscure it. TCC (talk) (contribs) 01:31, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I'm not 100% sure, but it seems like it works because of the unclosed div element present on the page (see test) - I've never had trouble with inline elements. <font color="#275CA9">Nihiltres ( <font color="#000">t .l ) 01:40, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I would have been surprised if it were the case, but I closed the div just to be sure and it looks the same. TCC (talk) (contribs) 01:48, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
 * See the last couple of versions for an illustration. A one-line absolutely positioned box works fine because there's enough room in the padding for it. Anything larger, whether you close the div or not, will overlap. TCC (talk) (contribs) 01:54, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Yes, of course, you're right. I wasn't giving it my full attention and completely forgot that that particular combination of elements would not work as desired. I blame tiredness and wikistress.  Adrian  M. H.  03:11, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Maybe you could use an unclosed div with a large bottom margin to leave lots of space at the bottom of the page to absolutely position something in? --ais523 13:43, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

Nihitres, Can I steal your talk page code for my own? I want something similar to that for my own talk page. Perhaps you can help me get it on there.  Wikidudeman  (talk) 13:37, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Ais, Can you show me what you mean? How would that be coded?  Wikidudeman  (talk) 13:56, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

I've used an unclosed div trick (originally from user:Interiot) for a "not here" box that floats at the bottom. See, for example, user talk:John Fader. -- Rick Block (talk) 13:57, 12 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Looks like it works!  Wikidudeman  (talk) 14:26, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

Infobox
Template:Infobox_neon is having issues with its "Triple point" entry. Someone more wiki-savvy might want to have a look at it. Aaadddaaammm 02:24, 14 October 2007 (UTC)
 * The problem was that the template was trying to perform a calculation to convert the value from Kelvin to Celsius, and the reference interfered with that. I've moved the reference into the kPa parameter (which doesn't need any calculations done to it) so that although the ref is in the wrong parameter, at least it's on the correct line of the infobox. Tra (Talk) 02:37, 14 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Infoboxes with automatic unit conversions like that should probably have separate parameters for references and such. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 03:18, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

Template alignment
Regarding Template:MexPostRefPresidents, could someone please help me get "<< Post-Independence Presidents" and ">> Post-Revolution Presidents" on the same line? Same with Template:PMPortugal1926, regarding "<< First Republic" and ">> Third Republic". Thank you. Biruitorul 16:37, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
 * I cleaned up Template:MexPostRefPresidents. --MZMcBride 20:45, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

Problems with images
I seem to have a problem with some images on here. Some images, not all of them, load properly at first, but then become a one-pixel wide line. (See this example) This may have to do with the previously mentioned New PngFix; but I'm not so sure. Anyone else getting this?

Mr. Matté 14:12, 13 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Hit CTRL-F5 to see if that fixes the problem. Which browser are you using exactly? — Edokter  •  Talk  • 14:24, 13 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Ctrl+F5 doesn't do anything different. Note, this happens to pages I view for the very first time as well.  I.E. 5.50 is what I have.  Yes, I'm that old. :)

Mr. Matté 14:30, 13 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Back to the drawing board... Meanwhile, until we have this fixed, you can disable PngFix by putting this line in your monobook.js:
 * <tt>PngFixDisabled = 1</tt>


 * Also, what do you see here when you open the collapsed table at the bottom. You should see icons in the expanded table. — Edokter  •  Talk  • 14:44, 13 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Bah, can't people just install a browser created sometime within this millenia so we won't have to do all sorts of crazy hacks to make basic images work properly... --Sherool (talk) 14:50, 13 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Yeah, it's working again. Just let us know when this the PngFix will be completed so I can turn this thing off.  Thanks a lot!

Mr. Matté 16:02, 13 October 2007 (UTC)


 * There's no easy fix for IE5.5; we might disable it for 5.5 alltogether. — Edokter  •  Talk  • 16:17, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

multi-language articles
Lisa_del_Giocondo on left under "navigation, interaction, search, toolbox" there is "in other languages" and you see yet when clicking into Nederlands you then see that this article is also available in Spanish, yet this was not picked up on english wiki. <font color="#00FF00">Matthew <font color="#00FF00">Yeager  03:10, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Deutsch
 * Suomi
 * Nederlands
 * Just needs the Spanish interwiki link added here, in that case. Feel free to add it if you spot that again.  Adrian  M. H.  03:13, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
 * whoops didnt realize that was user config. i thought the page actually searched for other pages : ) thanks, <font color="#00FF00">Matthew <font color="#00FF00">Yeager  03:16, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Yep the interwiki bots havent found that article yet or they would do that. βcommand 20:30, 13 October 2007 (UTC)