Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive H

Some additional wiki markup ideas
Some ideas for things that could be added to the available markup to keep it cleaner-looking (less HTML tags and entities). Mostly math related, I guess:

and so on. Some are not a big deal. Some (subscripts) would be much easier to type this way and provide cleaner markup. Yeah, the math tags are good, but no one wants to type the math for $$\mathrm{CO_2}\,\!$$ all the time. - Omegatron 21:16, August 2, 2005 (UTC)
 * 1) Obviously we should resurrect the old en and em dash markup so people see the markup:   instead of   for the output break in thought&mdash;a parenthetical statement.  There were two competing markup methods, and it was implemented for a few minutes, and then abandoned because it conflicted with table and comment markup and some titles.  Seems easy enough to fix and put back in place...  See Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dashes)
 * 2)  instead of   for &rArr;
 * 3) Super and subscripts: we could use TEX markup, but with mandatory brackets:   instead of   for x3, or   instead of   for CO2.
 * 4)  instead of   for 220±5%
 * 5)  instead of   for |x| &ge; 0
 * 6) Maybe even  instead of   for 3.5×102


 * btw now we are utf-8 you can just use proper dashes in the wikitext directly and we have "links" to insert them below the edit box. ± was in iso-8859-1 and could therefore always be placed directly in the wikitext. i agree that subscript and superscript are a pain but ² and ³ the most commonly used ones can be safely put directly in the wikitext using the links below the edit box (other numbers are also availible in that form but they have browser support issues). maybe it would be an idea to put the greater than or equal to and less than or equal to signs in that box below the edit box. Plugwash 23:03, 2 August 2005 (UTC)


 * What box below the edit box?? - Omegatron 19:32, August 4, 2005 (UTC)
 * Oh, that one. Why is it below all the template links?? - Omegatron 19:32, August 4, 2005 (UTC)

I will write up a feature request for these, but maybe people have ideas for better syntax? - Omegatron 23:52, August 8, 2005 (UTC)
 * Entering dashes by clicking on another box is almost as bad as typing them in, though it does fix the ugly markup problem. I still wish there were a shortcut for these.  Bug 1485
 * Super and subscript would still be useful. I hate the ² and ³ when used in the general case, since there are only the two of them (I hate the unicode fractions, too), and think they should only be used in units. Bug 3080
 * Also a wiki version of &lt;br clear="all"/&gt;, since it is hard to remember the exact syntax and it looks ugly in markup.


 * How about clear? See also clearright and clearleft. --cesarb 01:05, 9 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Hooray!
 * Good point. Maybe  and  or  and  for sub and super?   Still somewhat hard to type.
 * *Ponders -- and --- for en and em...*
 * People would scream and bite my head off. :-)
 * I'll try a feature request first. - Omegatron 03:46, August 9, 2005 (UTC)


 * I promise to write a really nifty template that solves a huge range of related markup problems, or at least provides a "dummies" solution to them -- but -- as most of these resolve to single characters (or a handful) I can't in good conscience do so as long as it is so difficult to employ the  atom. For once, I have to side with the server-load alarmists.


 * I have previously asked for this syntax to invoke recursive substitution rather than transclusion:




 * This would be even better:




 * By "recursive substitution" I mean to demand that all nested templates are fully expanded at the time the edit is saved. If I see this implemented, I will develop not only this really nifty template, but also others depending on nested templates but not justifying multiple transclusion.


 * Meanwhile, I offer this tool: markups. Stick it on your user page, which you then open in another browser window and copy from to your heart's content. If desired, I can cough out similar quick reference cards on request.


 * These days, I generally step to one side of the typesetter's barfight over dashes and spaces, but just for old time's sake: Emdashes must be surrounded by thin spaces! &mdash; Xiong &#29066; talk * 00:14, 2005 August 15 (UTC)


 * I like spaces around mdashes, too &mdash; even though some don't like it. I really would like the wiki markup to be updated instead of creating templates for everything.  Templates are a kludge in a lot of cases. - Omegatron 06:04, August 15, 2005 (UTC)

Lock out unsafe browsers?
 Dead Thread
 * This thread began:

A small minority of edits to Wikipedia are made using browsers such as Internet Explorer for the Macintosh and Netscape 4, which cannot cope with a full character set in edit boxes, and corrupt characters in the existing text, sometimes destroying links. Would it be a good idea to direct attempts to edit with them to a page explaining why they are unsuitable to edit wikis and how users can fix the situation? Susvolans (pigs can fly) 11:44, 27 July 2005 (UTC)


 * The concern raised was answered with this comment:

we do now have a workaround in place to allow browsers that can't handle unicode in the edit box to edit safely. However we need to know what those browsers are to make mediawiki use the workaround when it detects them. currently the list contains regexps for what appears to be some old version of netscape for linux (the regexp is "/Mozilla\/4\.78 \[en\] \(X11; U; Linux/") and IE mac (the regexp is "/Mozilla\/4\.0 \(compatible; MSIE \d+\.\d+; Mac_PowerPC\)/"). If you know of other browsers that screw up unicode text in the edit box please file a bug report asking for them to be added to $wgBrowserBlackList Plugwash 21:11, 30 July 2005 (UTC)


 * This thread is now dead, in the sense of a dead ball. You may still add your comments to the thread at the bottom of this section, but this issue has been resolved.

A small minority of edits to Wikipedia are made using browsers such as Internet Explorer for the Macintosh and Netscape 4, which cannot cope with a full character set in edit boxes, and corrupt characters in the existing text, sometimes destroying links. Would it be a good idea to direct attempts to edit with them to a page explaining why they are unsuitable to edit wikis and how users can fix the situation? Susvolans (pigs can fly) 11:44, 27 July 2005 (UTC)


 * I think this is too harsh, given that many people are unable to change browsers (just today my workplace has blocked non-IE browsers from accessing the internet). Seems to be a good idea to insert a warning on the edit page though... presumably quite doable without requiring changes to the MediaWiki software (the shipped JS already has some browser detection)? Pcb21| Pete 13:30, 27 July 2005 (UTC)


 * I agree blocking such users is too harsh, however I don't think a warning on the edit page is enough (what does a naive user do with such a message?). I've noticed what look like bots running around changing interwiki links to unicode characters.  Because of this, users may well run into this issue on pages that they wouldn't expect to be a problem.  I would suggest we immediately stop changing interwiki links from html entities to unicode (even consider changing them back) and request a software change to detect the unicode breakage caused by these browsers (and ideally simply silently fix it). -- Rick Block (talk) 15:15, July 27, 2005 (UTC)


 * The problem with entities is that it’s harder to read changes from the page source, which is what both the editing screen and MediaWiki’s diference function give you. This is a particular problem with link targets, which aren’t previewed. For instance, a change from &amp; to &amp; is little more than gobbledygook, but one from 東京 to 北京 is understandable to anyone who knows Chinese characters. Sometimes this happens in Roman script too; the Łódź article used to make repeated references to “&amp;#321;&amp;#243;d&amp;#378;”. Your suggestion is tantamount to letting a tiny minority hold maintainability hostage. Susvolans (pigs can fly) 16:06, 27 July 2005 (UTC)


 * I believe link targets are previewed for me (is this a skin issue? I use classic).  And, I'm not saying we should do this permanently - only until we have some way to prevent the damage that might occur.  I'd much rather the software detect and fix the breakage than block older browsers.  If we block older browsers, I'd prefer to block them only when editing pages that contain unicode characters that their browser will mangle than block all editing or (shudder) block any access at all.  I think what we're doing now is essentially creating a mess for ourselves that we'll have to straighten out.  As of the switch to 1.5, for 100% of the articles in the en wikipedia this was not a problem.  Changing all the interwiki links will make it so editing any article with a non-compliant browser is virtually guaranteed to break something.  Why would we choose to do this before we have something in place to handle the problem? -- Rick Block (talk) 22:42, July 27, 2005 (UTC)


 * I agree with Susvolans. At some point we have to stand up and say "Your actions are harming wikipedia" and insist that they correct the situation.  Based on statistics from my own websites and similar figures I've seen online, we are basically talking about 1-3% of all web traffic.  Most everyone already uses a recent enough version of IE, NS, or Firefox to not cause problems, but the small minority of editors who don't are both annoying and disruptive.  I find it to be unreasonable to continue using unintelligible html entities just to coddle the people not using unicode supported browsers.  I would support disabling editting for the oldest browsers almost immediately (the sub 0.05% market shares) and adding a strong warning for other noncompliant browsers that they will be blocked in the future.  Dragons flight 16:22, July 27, 2005 (UTC)


 * I don't think it's a good idea to block out people based solely on an easily forged User-Agent string. However, we could create some templates for talk pages explaining the situation to the people with older browsers and handle this as if it were a social issue, not a technical one. &mdash; Ambush Commander (Talk) 19:30, July 27, 2005 (UTC)


 * What is the advantage of tracking these people down by hand as opposed to redirecting them to a page that says there browser is out of date and incompatible with editting wikipedia and offering them information and links that way? Dragons flight 20:31, July 27, 2005 (UTC)


 * People who are able to forge their user-agent are unlikely to be using ancient buggy browsers. -- Cyrius|&#9998; 00:24, 28 July 2005 (UTC)


 * Maybe we should just block everything except IE? Pcb21| Pete 21:29, 27 July 2005 (UTC)


 * I'm hoping that was some kind of bizzare joke? IE is the worst browser...ever. The problems in question concern old browsers, including old versions of IE. Firefox, Opera, and Safari stand posed to replace Explorer...if people would only download them and give them a chance. Aren't you tired of downloading viruses onto your computer yet? ;-) Func( t, c ) 04:08, 29 July 2005 (UTC)


 * As far as I know the vast majority of browsers, be they IE, NS, Firefox, etc. are causing no problems. However there are a small minority of old browsers that kill all the unicode notations with their edits, and frankly on large and frequently editted pages, e.g. subpages of WP:RA, this is more than a little annoying, not the least of which is because the corrupted character codes left in their place is often unintelligible without sorting through the history to figure out who messed things up.  I'm all for designing websites to recieve the widest participation possible, but now that we have made a decision to go with Unicode, we ought to accept that this neccesitates shutting out non-Unicode platforms which do, in fact, damage wikipedia pages when editting.  Dragons flight 22:15, July 27, 2005 (UTC)


 * *spills drink coughing* Bought any Microsoft stock lately? I don't feel like starting a big "My browser is better than your browser" war here, but Firefox handles Unicode and the likes quite well, thank you. Last time I checked, market share and quality weren't the same thing. --IByte 21:15, 14 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Lockout Browsers = Bad idea, major screaming, my ears are hurting already. Possible good idea: Have a script that detects incompatible browsers, then perhaps sends them to a special page on their first visit to Wikipedia.  The page gives them a list of possible browser settings they can try to avoid problems (where applicable) or points them to download links for updated browsers from their manufacturer that will solve the problem. Xaa 04:33, 29 July 2005 (UTC)


 * we do now have a workaround in place to allow browsers that can't handle unicode in the edit box to edit safely. However we need to know what those browsers are to make mediawiki use the workaround when it detects them. currently the list contains regexps for what appears to be some old version of netscape for linux (the regexp is "/Mozilla\/4\.78 \[en\] \(X11; U; Linux/") and IE mac (the regexp is "/Mozilla\/4\.0 \(compatible; MSIE \d+\.\d+; Mac_PowerPC\)/"). If you know of other browsers that screw up unicode text in the edit box please file a bug report asking for them to be added to $wgBrowserBlackList Plugwash 21:11, 30 July 2005 (UTC)


 * Blocking is against the whole wiki concept, and won't work in any case. For example, I have an extension for Firefox that lets me determine what user-agent string is transmitted to sites (I pretend to be IE for some sites that block Firefox). If we block people because they have old computers (seems un-wiki to me) they will just use similar hacks to get round it (or use privacy features/firewalls to stop their computer telling WP the user agent in the first place) Cynical 15:50, 5 August 2005 (UTC)

Here's my idea: we add a module to the existing software that checks edits and sees whether or not Unicode characters were corrupted: it could be some sort of heuristic, and if it is, notify the user about the problem, and either let them submit their changes (in case the heurstic got it wrong), or explain why there's a problem and try to help them get a better browser. &mdash; Ambush Commander (Talk) 18:58, August 12, 2005 (UTC)
 * It might be an idea to do that both as a means of identifying problem browsers and a method of limiting such damage when its caused by other means like copypasting to a text editor. However its not too urgent now, the workaround in place for IE mac seems to have stopped nearly all of the bad edits. Plugwash 21:01, 14 August 2005 (UTC)


 * First, and instanter, block obsolete browsers from editing any page. This is extreme, but very fast to implement. By "obsolete", I mean any browser presenting a known unsafe user agent token. Direct such users to a friendly page that makes concrete and specific suggestions.


 * Second (optionally), check for Unicode in markup before imposing the block. Meanwhile, upgrade the redirect page and log hits to it, so we can contact such users individually. Don't worry about browsers presenting false tokens; it's a non-issue, statistically.


 * Third, and most complicated, write a module to quietly fix such corruption, and remove the block.


 * The last step might never become necessary if we make an honest effort to upgrade problem users -- not merely with a bland notice, but with individual, personal contacts.


 * There are very few of these users; they can be fixed; but meanwhile they cause damage all out of proportion to their numbers. &mdash; Xiong &#29066; talk * 21:26, 2005 August 14 (UTC)

This is not a purely Unicode issue by the way: there are some browsers that affect plain old ISO-Latin-1 (changing é to e, turning ü into ue, munging Icelandic letters). So the problem preceded Mediawiki 1.5. -- Curps 21:34, 14 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Xiong have you even read the discussion so far? !!!!a workaround for allowing known problem browsers to edit safely is ALREADY IN PLACE!!!!. 22:01, 14 August 2005 (UTC)


 * But see, there is a problem for some browsers. Some of them are fixed, but others are not. The reason why this discussion was brought up was because some Wikipedians got fed up with corrupted pages and posted to this page. Please don't shout. &mdash; Ambush Commander (Talk) 22:12, August 14, 2005 (UTC)


 * This section was started before the workaround was in place when there was a big problem with bad edits coming almost entirely from IE mac.


 * the workaround is pretty generic it just needs browsers to be added to the list (which sadly is something only a dev can do so it takes time to get it done). The only bad edit i've seen reported since then was caused by a user copypasting the text to a text editor. If you have other examples of bad edits from after 2005-07-29 10:16 UTC when brion declared the fix in place please post them. Plugwash


 * Erm, I was mistaken then. Sorry. Here's a logical extensions of this: a user preference that turns this fix on all the time, or the ability to get a unicode safe version of the text for just a certain edit. Perhaps that would be helpful. &mdash; Ambush Commander (Talk) 23:23, August 14, 2005 (UTC)


 * By the way... you should sign your edits. &mdash; Ambush Commander (Talk) 23:24, August 14, 2005 (UTC)


 * i usually do sign and i thought i did then. i've noticed sometimes the sig system screws up. btw i like your suggestions and i might try and code up a patch to do them. Getting it committed and put on the live site is another thing entirely though and can take weeks even for fairly urgent bugs. Plugwash 23:51, 14 August 2005 (UTC)


 * I missed, in the flurry of comments, the one apposite notice that the concern had been addressed. I grovel. &mdash; Xiong &#29066; talk * 23:51, 2005 August 14 (UTC)

I very occasionally edit from my WAP mobile phone. I know it uses IE something-or-other on Windows Smartphone 2003 (a version of Windows CE). I don't know whether this breaks unicode or not, is there a page where I can test safely whether it does or doesn't and the user agent can be easily identified if it does break? Thryduulf 00:46, 15 August 2005 (UTC)


 * you could try the chineese sandbox bad edits are kinda expected in sandboxes and there is bound to be some non-latin in there ;). If you find a problem we can then worry about getting the user agent but i don't think we will. Plugwash 00:53, 15 August 2005 (UTC)


 * There are (setting dependent) issues with Lynx, see Requests for comment/12.144.5.2, though this recent edit probably counts as vandalism. Susvolans (pigs can fly) 15:00, 15 August 2005 (UTC)


 * mmm that needs looking into and possiblly discussion with the lynx developers. can you be more specific about when it does and does not cause problems. Plugwash 15:46, 15 August 2005 (UTC)

Format of bulleted "What links here" list
I am confused about the meaning of the various bulleted lists one gets on a "What links here" page (and I might have found a bug). For example, suppose, on the "What links here" page for "AA", I get: I've understood this to mean that "X" and "Z" link directly to "AA", while "Y" links to "BB", which is a redirect to "AA".
 * X
 * BB (redirect page)
 * Y
 * Z

Is that the idea? If not, please explain. But if so, I've found a bug.

Explanation: A few days ago, I edited Template:R.E.M. to link to "Eponymous" (one of the R.E.M. albums) indirectly, through the redirect page "Eponymous (album)". Now, a number of pages that use the template, but include no other "eponymous" link, are listed in the position of "X" above, in the Eponymous "What links here" page, when it seems to me that they should be listed like "Y", with the "Eponymous (album)" in place of "BB". For example, the page "Bill Berry" is one of these.

(Note that this is different from the "Whatlinkshere problem" above.)

&mdash; Nowhither 21:00, 14 August 2005 (UTC)


 * I think this actually is related to the Whatlinkshere problem above. Articles edited after a redirect appear in positions "X" or "Z".  Position "Y" contains only articles edited before the redirect.  Thus "X" or "Z" may contain articles without the name of the template whose list is being displayed.  (SEWilco 21:22, 14 August 2005 (UTC))


 * Thanks; let me see if I understand. Apparently, entries for some article (say "X") are created in other articles' WLH pages when X is edited, and only then. Thus, X appears in the WLH page for AA if X referred to AA the last time X was edited. And how X appears in the WLH page for AA depends on how X referred to AA the last time X was edited. Therefore, when we change the way X refers to AA without changing X (by changing a template that X uses or a redirect to AA that X links to) we do not change whether X appears in AA's WLH list, nor do we change the way in which it appears. Is that right? If so, then I guess a quick do-almost-nothing edit to the mis-listed pages should fix things. &mdash; Nowhither 08:06, 15 August 2005 (UTC)
 * It depends what the definition of "mis-listed" is. And whether it is an index for which fixing is necessary.  At present, you can read the "Y" entries as being articles whose editors wanted to use the template BB and have not yet approved the AA appearance.  (SEWilco 18:48, 15 August 2005 (UTC))


 * The WLH page looks fine to me. I don't see any problems with it as described above. &mdash;Mike 23:42, August 15, 2005 (UTC)
 * An example of the redirected target linking is that Ancient Greece uses seemain and not main. WLH:seemain does not show Ancient Greece, but WLH:main does (about halfway down a list of 500).  (SEWilco 02:06, 16 August 2005 (UTC))

Whatlinkshere problem
It was noticed in Templates_for_deletion that some articles contained references to seemain, but Special:Whatlinkshere&target=Template%3ASeemain did not show those articles.
 * Are there known problems with What links here?
 * Is Whatlinkshere on a redirected template updated on the target template rather than the redirected template?
 * Because seemain is redirected, might Whatlinkshere:seemain be showing articles not edited since the redirect? (SEWilco 19:03, 14 August 2005 (UTC))
 * Running a replace bot on references to 'Template:main' does find pages which refer to seemain which are not in Whatlinkshere:seemain. (SEWilco 19:19, 14 August 2005 (UTC))
 * An example of the redirected target linking is that Ancient Greece uses seemain and not main. WLH:seemain does not show Ancient Greece, but WLH:main does (about halfway down a list of 500).  (SEWilco 02:07, 16 August 2005 (UTC))

link?
I made this suggestion at (proposals), and it was recommended that I bring it here. So, here it is:

Would the developers be willing to put in a link next to the edit button at the top of each ==Section== or ===Subsection=== ? I think most browsers now automatically predefine the top line of an HTML page as . Alternatively, it shouldn't be so difficult (I say, as I sit here coaching from my easy chair) to predefine all the article pages with a hidden #top.


 * Would this be worth the added clutter when you can just press Home? N (t/c) 22:31, 19 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Oh cool! Thanks ptar!  I dinna know you could do that!  :-p  /me makes note:  that was my one thing I learned today.  Tomer TALK  22:40, August 19, 2005 (UTC)
 * Glad to help. N (t/c) 22:44, 19 August 2005 (UTC)


 * The last part is in the code already. As to the proposal, I don't think it necessary.  There may be a piece of Javascript you could use to do your settings only.  [[smoddy ]] 22:33, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

Table rendering / display issue
Opera, at least on my machine, doesn't appear to display tables properly. Specifically, it doesn't display the lines which demarcate table rows. What could possibly cause this? I'm using Opera 8.2 on a Windows 2000 box. Mackensen (talk) 21:21, 19 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Opera 8.0 on XP shows the same problem (I checked it on monobook and classic). That table uses "prettytable", but removing that didn't fix it.  So I suspect it's a problem in the basic CSS stylesheet. -- Finlay McWalter |  Talk 21:33, August 19, 2005 (UTC)

IE 6.0 - How do I prevent this error message in IE 6.0?
"Warning: Page has Expired The page you requested was created using information you submitted in a form. This page is no longer available. As a security precaution, Internet Explorer does not automatically resubmit your information for you.

To resubmit your information and view this Web page, click the Refresh button."

I get this message when I am editing an article and then temporarily go to another article or an external link for reference. Upon returning to the editing page, I have to refresh as directed by this message, and it takes quite a while.

This doesn't happen with Firefox or my home IE, of which I'm not sure of the version number. I tried Tools>Internet Options>(Temporary Internet Files) Settings both to automatically refresh the page and to refresh every visit to the page. Is there some other setting somewhere?

Thanks, Spalding 19:01, August 19, 2005 (UTC)


 * One way is to open a second browser window to go to the external link or other article, then return to the original window, continue editing and save your results.  Paul Klenk 19:25, 19 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Thanks, Paul. It looks like I'm a victim of using two browsers.  Since Firefox is my favorite at home, and of course I have to use IE at work, I'm in the habit of using control-click to open links in new tabs in Firefox.  That same action in IE does nothing, it just opens the link in the current window.  Before Firefox, I was in the habit of using shift-click, which opens the link in a new window in both browsers.  But now I realize I have been trying control-click at work, and having a vague feeling that it used to work.  Ahhh, habituation.  I would like to find the root cause of this problem, though, even if for nothing else other than curiosity's sake.  Spalding 23:24, August 19, 2005 (UTC)

Why does my watchlist fail to show articles that were edited 1 month before current date?
When I select 'Show all', my watchlist only lists articles that were edited within the last month.

On 16 Aug, it only showed articles edited between 18 Jul and 16 Aug. When I select 'display and edit the complete list', the complete list included articles edited before 18 July. The list only had 174 pages.

Today (19 Aug), it only shows articles edited between 22 Jul and 19 Aug. When I select 'display and edit the complete list', the complete list includes articles edited before 19 Aug. The list only has 81 pages.

Am I the only one experiencing this problem? How do I fix it? Bobblewik 13:02, 19 August 2005 (UTC)


 * There's a cut-off. It prevents over-loading the server.   [[smoddy ]] 17:13, 19 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Aha. I thought it was unintended. Thanks for replying. I thought it was broken because it has the options: Show last 1 | 2 | 6 | 12 hours 1 | 3 | 7 days all
 * The term all is misleading. Could all be changed to a number of days as in Recent changes? For example: Show last 1 | 2 | 6 | 12 hours 1 | 3 | 7 | 30 days


 * Would it be possible to make it a rolling list just like Recent changes. That has very similar options, no cut-off, and permits me to go backwards in time page by page as far as I want. Bobblewik 17:48, 19 August 2005 (UTC)


 * I suggest you make a feature request on Bugzilla. Cheers,  [[smoddy ]] 18:27, 19 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Has this changed recently? It used to show changes back to year zero... -- ALoan (Talk) 18:40, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

Short Pages glitch?
When looking at the Short Pages page, a number of pages show up as zero length which have substantial content. For example, Our Gang was last edited on July 21, is 39K, and hasn't been vandalized to empty anywhere in the recent history. But it shows up as size 0 in Short Pages. Boojum 05:03, 19 August 2005 (UTC) (And the link is red instead of blue!)


 * That list is cached. It's not always up-to-date. --cesarb 17:53, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

Trouble displaying GIF files
I realize GIFs are not the preferred image format, but I am having trouble getting them to display. They seem okay on other peoples' pages.

I've scoured WP for help on this, but found nothing. Can someone please give me some help?

Many thanks,

Paul Klenk 05:00, 19 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Which image is causing you trouble? Also, see two sections up about the Eugenics image, and see my answer on the referenced talk page about why some images don't display for some people.-gadfium 05:08, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

"What links here"
Don't know if this is the right place to post, but I have a question about the "What Links Here" function. I use it often to find related pages to edit, but going through all of the links can be clumsy.

Is there any reason the "What Links Here" couldn't be organized into catergories for easier browsing?

Like a catergory for "References in other Wiki articles", "Redirects", and "References in non-article Wiki pages (like user profiles and help pages)". I'm really only interested in seeing references from other articles, and it seems a little clumsy to have to go through a bunch of links I don't care about.

Sorry if this was suggested before --Rc251 02:58, 19 August 2005 (UTC)


 * This would be nice. I don't have much hope of it happening, though, since it involves change to the software for a not-terribly-huge benefit.
 * Another problem is the handling of redirects. To avoid the necessity for huge searches, pages are placed in the what-links-here list for the articles they link to at the time the pages are edited. If the situation of a page changes, without the page itself being edited, then the list is not updated, and so the list is incorrect.
 * Here is an illustration. Suppose page "X" uses a template that links to page "AA". Then the template is changed so that it links to "AA" indirectly, through the redirect "BB". Until page "X" itself is edited, it will still be listed in the what-links-here list for "AA" as linking directly.
 * This is not such a big deal now, but if we were to do categorization, then I think we would want it to be reliably correct, which would require fixing this issue, which would increase the load on the server.
 * Sorry to be so negative. &mdash; Nowhither 12:36, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

images not showing for some browsers
images not visible in article or image page, but image itself is fine. problem described at Talk:Eugenics. seems to be a problem with some users of firefox. can you see this? i notice the style="visibility: hidden ! important; tag. --Rikurzhen 02:18, August 19, 2005 (UTC)
 * I see it, and I'm using firefox 1.0.6 &mdash; Il&gamma;&alpha;&eta;&epsilon;&rho;   (T&alpha;l&kappa;) '' 02:29, 19 August 2005 (UTC)
 * It's a known problem, and I've explained what's happening at Talk:Eugenics.-gadfium 03:47, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

Block list is rather big
The block list has become rather big, stressing both the server and client when retrieved. Could it perhaps be a good idea to check which indefinite username blocks are so old that they can be deleted, possibly in combination with deleting the account itsself? This is probably easiest for someone with SQL access. --fvw *  01:49, August 17, 2005 (UTC)
 * Perhaps the simplest thing is to scramble the password and blank the email address for any indefinitely blocked user accounts. No checking of the accounts' edits would be necessary; just a check that the block is indefinite. The block can then be removed.
 * I suggest that only accounts blocked a certain period of time ago - perhaps six months - be treated in this way, to make sure that no appeal against the block is in process.
 * I think there are a very small number of accounts which are blocked indefinitely but the block will be lifted after some condition is reached (e.g. legal action is resolved). If any of these accounts are scrambled by mistake, they can be restored to their rightful owners on application to a developer with proof of identity once the appropriate condition is met.-gadfium 03:47, 17 August 2005 (UTC)


 * The accounts I can think of which should not be scrambled are and .-gadfium 05:14, 17 August 2005 (UTC)
 * I wish there was a way I could be alerted if a user is already blocked at the special:blockip page. Checking is such a pain. But some offensive usernames have been blocked over and over again because no one looked to see if already was. Or if someone has been indef blocked for being a reincarnation/sockpuppet, and I block them for 48 hours for petty vandalism, it wipes out the prior block. So often it's importent to check, but quite annoying. Dmcdevit·t 05:45, August 17, 2005 (UTC)


 * Yeah, but what about those with automatic cookie logins? Dunc|&#9786; 13:40, 17 August 2005 (UTC)

Blocks on IPs have to be checked every time the "Save page" button is pressed. But theoretically, a block on a username should only need to be checked once, at login time, so that we could have a billion username blocks with no strain on the server.

Currently, I guess it doesn't work that way, since you can still login when you're blocked, to respond to messages and so forth. But could we make it so, somehow? Wikipedia has a zillion read-only mirrors out there... why not make it so that when a blocked user logs in, they get sent to a read-only mirror server, maybe with a different domain name (but ours, not a third party's).

Could something like that possibly work? -- Curps 15:15, 17 August 2005 (UTC)


 * HTTP is not stateful, so blocking only at login is not actually sufficient. This is the same reason all web applications must validate all fields on a submit whether or not the entered data was prevalidated in the browser using something like javascript.  In addition, if the user is redirected to a read-only mirror it seems like they wouldn't be able to write to their own talk page (which is currently allowed, even for blocked users).  -- Rick Block (talk) 22:44, August 18, 2005 (UTC)


 * It's a good idea to remove all old (e.g. half a year or more) indefinite blocks from the list, and scramble the passwords. It's also a good idea to change the software so that you cannot block a user that is already blocked (to fix the one-day-overwriting-indefinite-block thing). Radiant_ &gt;|&lt; 12:23, August 19, 2005 (UTC)

Article content in the edit summary when deleting a page
Why is it that sometimes the contents of the article shows up in the edit summary when I go to delete a page, and sometimes it doesn't? Zoe 07:56, August 18, 2005 (UTC)
 * I believe if it's a certain length it will include it in the reason field, but when it is longer, you have to fill it in yourself. Dmcdevit·t 08:09, August 18, 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia is slow
Wikipeid is getting really slow. My time is getting wasted. Edits are failing.SEE HERE 4.246.21.180 18:20, 17 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Does this link apply? (from the Viilage Pump - Technical box up at the top of this page)? Tonywalton [[Image:Pentacle-circumscribed.png|10px]] Talk 18:40, 17 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Well, it was good not so long ago, and that post is from January, so while it's probably correct, it's really general. &mdash; Ambush Commander (Talk) 21:43, August 17, 2005 (UTC)


 * The target of that link is barely relevant today -- as AC notes, very general. I, too, would like to know why we are having such terrible and persistent troubles. &mdash; Xiong &#29066; talk * 21:58, 2005 August 17 (UTC)


 * Sounds like the same comment reported on the VP miscellaneous page. Grutness...  wha?  05:58, 18 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Maybe we need another server? Tim Rhymeless (Er...let's shimmy) 06:19, 18 August 2005 (UTC)

Layout problems
I am getting several weird (and possibly related) layout problems the last day or so when I use IE (which is my only browser at the office). They do not apply to all pages, but on some pages: Any insights? -- Jmabel | Talk 17:08, August 17, 2005 (UTC)
 * I do not get the section edit links
 * The body of the left nav bar is all the way at the bottom of the page
 * the main body of the page is shifted left, so the upper part is partly covered by the Wikipedia logo
 * When I edit, my edit box is too wide, with no scroll bar, so I can't see anything I type in the righthand portion of it. It's as if the box width were calculated on just the screen width, ignoring the fact that there are page elements to its left and right.
 * What browser version and OS, and are you sure you’re editing the latest version of the page? Susvolans (pigs can fly) 17:13, 17 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Yes, I'm sure it's the latest versions of the pages. And even if it weren't that would hardly explain the bad edit box width. IE version 6.0.2900.2180.xpsp_sp2_gdr.050301-1519. XP (SP2). -- Jmabel | Talk 19:17, August 17, 2005 (UTC)

Google spiders a strange way...
Does anyone know how Google is spidering Wikipedia?

Recently I created a new article, James Harris Simons. I then posted a question about it at the Help Desk.

Now when I do a Google search for "James Harris Simons" Wikipedia, I noticed something curious:

The search results indicate that in almost no time, Google had cached the text appearing on the help desk -- including a link to the article -- but not the article itself.


 * Wikipedia:Help desk - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 * For policy and technical information see Wikipedia:Village pump. ... Note that
 * I've moved the article to James Harris Simons, and created appropriate ...
 * en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dead_ letter_office_(proposal) - 86k - Cached - Similar pages

Isn't this a bit odd? Just curious, really. Paul Klenk 10:23, 17 August 2005 (UTC)


 * I'm just talking out of my ass right now, but could it be because the help desk has a high page rank? I imagine those pages get updated alot more often than other ones. And if your article doesn't have that many links to it (which it appers it doesn't have) that would have a pretty low page rank? Although, I don't see how it can have a low page rank if it doesn't exist......As I said, I'm talking out of my ass (it's really quite a useful expression). What creeps me out the most, and this happens often with google is when it says 'Results 1 - 4 of about 8 for "James Harris Simons" wikipedia. (0.10 seconds)". Where's the other 4????? Scaaary!gkhan 10:48, August 17, 2005 (UTC)


 * I think I understand your point. But here's where I have a problem:  Let's say that the help desk page has a high page rank.  Fine.  But since my comments on that page have been spidered, including the link to the new page, then shouldn't Google have spidered that link and added it to its list of pages?  Anyway, this is just a question of pure curiosity, nothing else.  Thanks.  Paul Klenk 11:32, 17 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Yes, I realised that point myself, and honestly I don't know. They should spider the link pages. Maybe they have like two processes, one that updates pages and one that spiders, because spidering (I'm guessing here) is more computationally expensive. Maybe they hide pages with really low pagerank (ie. the "Showing 1-4 out of 8" thing). Anyway, someone with more knowledge into the arcane beast that is google should probably answer this. gkhan 12:14, August 17, 2005 (UTC)


 * We're getting large and important enough so we can speak directly to Google management and ask them to spider our site in a particular manner -- if we can agree on what we want. &mdash; Xiong &#29066; talk * 21:37, 2005 August 17 (UTC)


 * Either they omitted results which they deemed unuseful or they estimated (I get results on gmail searches that say '1-10 of hundreds' :-\ &mdash; Il&gamma;&alpha;&eta;&epsilon;&rho;   (T&alpha;l&kappa;) '' 01:25, 18 August 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Copyright_problems Page Needs Sectioned
I just displayed the Copyright_problems page to check for an image on August 22nd. Even though I have a broadband connection the page took at least 15 minutes to fully download, possibly longer since I was tired of waiting and did something else. I noticed the comment about Wikipedia being slow and took that into account but the Copyright_problems page is just too slow to download because of its size and gets bigger every day. Also, the Village_pump_%28technical%29 page is very slow too. I don't have any problems with much shorter pages.

My proposal is to separate each day on its own page with a link pointing to it from the main page. I know with regular coding this would be easy but with a table of contents and Wiki special coding to deal with I don't know if it can be done. If I knew how I would do this myself but I'm fairly new and still learning.

I'm using Firefox 1.0.6 and noticed the same results in IE 6.0 under Windows XP Home.

Rogerqcaz 07:26, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

Automated open proxy testing
When a block is applied to an anon IP address, the Mediawiki software should apply the block right away and then automatically queue an open proxy test to be done (either immediately or queued for later). If an open proxy is detected, the 24 hour block should be upgraded (automatically) to an indefinite block.

I believe such proxy checking software already exists and was running at one time. However, some ISPs objected to random, "unsolicited" probes of their address range to detect open proxies. But if it's one specific IP address that has visited our site very recently (ie, Internet traffic has been exchanged between our IP address and the ISP's) and has done something to warrant blocking, then a proxy check is perfectly appropriate and there would be no grounds for objection by the ISP. -- Curps 16:41, 21 August 2005 (UTC)


 * We can just scan every editor if we want to, the unofficial word from our colo is that they will stand up for us in the face of complaints. The only thing we're missing is software and a bit of system administration -- all proxy scans should be run from a single IP address. -- Tim Starling 23:27, August 21, 2005 (UTC)


 * Wasn't that already done before, and abandoned because too many IP blocks slowed MediaWiki down? --cesarb 23:56, 21 August 2005 (UTC)


 * It was abandoned because admins at other sites were complaining that we were probing them for vulnerabilities. -- Cyrius|&#9998; 00:17, 22 August 2005 (UTC)


 * As far as I can see, it was because it was slowing things down. See Jamesday's comment at Wikipedia_talk:Bots/Archive_5. (Other attempts: User:Proxy blocker and Proxy blocking). --cesarb 01:49, 22 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Don't pay too much attention to Jamesday's speculation. Maybe that's why he wanted it switched off, but it's certainly not why it was switched off. Proxy scanning was switched off because Jimbo asked us to switch it off, and not to switch it back on again without asking him. He did this because of the large number of complaints received, and he was worried that it would jeopardise our internet access. More recently, a colo staff member told us that our internet access was not at risk, and that they have no problem with us doing this, as long as we warn them first. -- Tim Starling 02:36, August 22, 2005 (UTC)

Random article bug?
I've been using the Random article link a bit and, with 2/3 million articles to choose from, the probability of seeing an artice twice should essentially be zero. However, I've just had Nacirema for a second time and am sure that a couple of others that I didn't make a note of have also repeated in the last few weeks. Has anyone else noted this behaviour? I presume the random number is intended to be from a Uniform Distribution? Dlyons493 16:03, 21 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Hmm... Birthday paradox? anyway, it's really impossible to get really good random numbers: I doubt Wikipedia uses external sources (i.e. webcam/audio/static streams) to generate its random numbers: it might still be using PHP's internal pseudorandom number generator. Who knows? You can always take a look at MediaWiki yourself.  &mdash; Ambush Commander (Talk) 19:51, August 21, 2005 (UTC)
 * Did some checking myself, it uses mt_rand called twice:

function wfRandom { # The maximum random value is "only" 2^31-1, so get two random # values to reduce the chance of dupes $max = mt_getrandmax; $rand = number_format( mt_rand * mt_rand		/ $max / $max, 12, '.', '' ); return $rand; }
 * Hope that helps. &mdash; Ambush Commander (Talk) 19:58, August 21, 2005 (UTC)


 * I damn well hope not. That random number function is demonstrably awful, and I thought I fixed it 6 months ago. I'll look into it. -- Tim Starling 02:45, August 22, 2005 (UTC)


 * It was fixed in 1.5. That function was introduced by someone who was worried about the 32-bit granularity of the previous random number function, a complaint which I ignored because of the extremely low probability of observing any related artifacts. Unfortunately, they replaced it with something far worse. I spent some time thinking about how bad that function is, as a mathematical game. There's two effects: firstly, the distribution is skewed towards zero because the probability distribution of X2 where X is uniformly distributed is not itself uniformly distributed. Secondly, the probability of the integer $rand*$max*$max having lots of prime factors is higher than the probability of it being a prime number. I seem to remember there's a simple relationship between the number of prime factors and the probability.


 * Dlysons493 may simply be seeing chance coincidences, you'd expect such coincidences after about &radic;700,000 = 837 requests. -- Tim Starling 03:12, August 22, 2005 (UTC)

Don't always get a notice when I have new messages
For the last couple of days, sometimes (and I can't figure out when it does and doesn't happen), I haven't been getting a notice at the top of the page when I have new messages on my Talk page. I only notice it when I am looking through Recent changes and see that somebody has edited my Talk page. But like I said, it isn't consistantly a problem. Zoe 06:23, August 18, 2005 (UTC)


 * I've been having the same problem&mdash;only I notice it when I see the edit show up on my watchlist. &mdash; Knowledge Seeker &#2470; 06:26, August 18, 2005 (UTC)


 * Exactly the same thing here. &mdash; Il&gamma;&alpha;&eta;&epsilon;&rho;   (T&alpha;l&kappa;) '' 02:31, 19 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Likewise... it's not consistent, and it developed within the last two days. Antandrus  (talk) 02:37, 19 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Users who concur with this summary sign with ~
 * Tomer TALK 02:52, August 19, 2005 (UTC)
 * In case it helps pin down the reason, this change didn't generate an alert. --RobertG &#9836; talk 15:24, 19 August 2005 (UTC)
 * BRIAN</b> 0918 &bull; 2005-08-20 16:46

Don't always want a notice when I have new messages

 * I have disabled my yellow message, and wish I could do so in a more straightforward manner than creating a separate account to redirect my talk page to. It irritates me no end, affects the page layout when it comes up while editing as you can't reach the bold text etc horizontal line without scrolling, doesn't switch off if you access your talk page through diffs (from the watchlist, which I always do after somebody redirected my talk page to an obscene picture). Does noone else feel the same way? Is there an easier way to disable it? If not could one be added to preferences, SqueakBox 02:47, August 19, 2005 (UTC)


 * You can simply change your user stylesheet (if you are using the Monobook skin, it's at User:SqueakBox/monobook.css) and add a rule to not display these messages. I believe the correct rule to do so is ".usermessage { display: none }" (without the quotes). See Help:User styles for more information. --cesarb 17:58, 19 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Fantastic. Works a treat. Cheers, SqueakBox 00:04, August 22, 2005 (UTC)

Blocks washing off in the rain?
I have a feeling that users are becoming unblocked without any admin action. For example, I know that an account of the Willy on Wheels vandal were blocked indefinitely several months ago, yet it was able to vandalize recently.

Also, on en-Wiktionary, the vandal "ConneI MacKenzie" (impersonating user Connel MacKenzie) was blocked indefinitely, yet he disappeared from the IP block list, and no record of him being unblocked could be found in the block log. --Ixfd64 22:23, 2005 August 16 (UTC)


 * When an account or IP is blocked more than once with differing lengths, it becomes unblocked when the shortest one expires. ConneI MacKenzie was blocked for one week and indefinitely; therefore his block ran out after one week. &mdash;Cryptic (talk) 23:19, 16 August 2005 (UTC)


 * That sounds backwards. Shouldn't it be when the longest one expires? &mdash; Nowhither 23:57, 16 August 2005 (UTC)


 * That's what I thought too. --Ixfd64 00:03, 2005 August 17 (UTC)


 * You'd think, but the software probably checks the database every x amount of time for expired blocks, and then unblocks those cases, causing this behavior. &mdash; Il&gamma;&alpha;&eta;&epsilon;&rho;   (T&alpha;l&kappa;) '' 00:06, 17 August 2005 (UTC)


 * I should probably fix Blocking policy then. --Ixfd64 01:15, 2005 August 18 (UTC)
 * No. This is a bug.  I'm posting it to Zilla. Superm401 | Talk 04:13, August 20, 2005 (UTC)
 * Please don't comment further here for any reason. Post your comments at the BugZilla bug report. Superm401 | Talk 04:21, August 20, 2005 (UTC)

Page move vandalism is still a problem
Pagemove revert helps, but only up to a point. It needs to be improved.

The latest User:FREE ZOIDBERG ON WHEELS pagemove vandalism script ran from 17:58 to 18:02 today. The final fix (moving Tabuk, Kalinga ON WHEELS back to Tabuk, Kalinga at 19:52 was not done until nearly two hours later. This was not two hours of continuous effort: the page move log shows that some users moved some pages back for a while, then gave up.

One suggested improvement:
 * Pagemove revert should have the option of NOT creating a redir back. We really DON'T need a redir from Tabuk, Kalinga ON WHEELS back to Tabuk, Kalinga. This redir makes Tabuk, Kalinga ON WHEELS a bluelink, making it impossible to tell from examining the page move log whether this page has been moved back yet or not. A second time-consuming sweep is needed to delete these useless "ON WHEELS" back-redirs, just to turn all the "ON WHEELS" links red in the pagemove log so we can be sure everything was moved back properly.  This would also avoid the dreaded double-revert bug (when two users pagemove revert at the same time, the article page gets turned into a redir to itself).

In fact, we should have a quick pagemove revert that automatically:
 * 1) does not create a back-redir
 * 2) does not detour through the Special:Movepage screen (prompting for a reason and requiring an extra click)
 * See 3185, 3231. Thryduulf 23:26, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

As long as pagemove vandals can create hours of disruption by running an automated script for a few minutes, they will keep at it. Worse, sooner or later we will get "ON WHEELS" pages that miss scrutiny and remain at the renamed title. -- Curps 20:27, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

PS, and how about throttling the rate of page moves... do we really need to allow a single user to move 25 pages per minute? -- Curps 20:29, 14 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Limiting page move rates for non-admins may help. But perhaps what's needed (admins+ only!) is "mass reversion" of a user's contributions (all or a defined subset) - a sort of anti-bot-bot. (Maybe this exists already?) Rd232 21:22, 14 August 2005 (UTC)
 * That's a damn good idea. If it doesn't already exist, it should be added.  For accounts which are created "indisputably" in bad faith and which commit only vandalism(and there are plenty), when blocking there should be an option to revert all edits for which they are last(and obviously if they have a chain of edits at the end, go to the last edit not from the bad account).  That's not foolproof but it would be very helpful.  If something similar already exists, forgive my ignorance(though I would like to hear more about the feature). Superm401 | Talk 03:57, August 20, 2005 (UTC)
 * I second the need for a single-click page move revert. In addition, we also need a way to see new user accounts (is there a way already I don't know?) since I think they need to age for a week or so before they can be used for page moves.  Or how about requiring a certain number of edits (10?  25?  100?) before the account can be used for page moves?  Page move vandalism is so much harder to deal with than the "regular" kind that I think some slightly higher bar must be reached for a new user before page moving is possible.  Antandrus  (talk) 19:47, 15 August 2005 (UTC)
 * I think that's reasonable. It's quite easy to get an admin or veteran editor to help and the need for page moves is much rarer than edits, obviously. Superm401 | Talk 03:57, August 20, 2005 (UTC)

(copied from WP:AN/I) [re imposing a contribution limit of 20 or so edits] If they just created nonsense articles that were speedied it would be their first edit. 100 or 200 would give a much greater chance of spotting a pattern of nonsense articles than just 25. A requirement for 100 or 200 non-deleted edits would be even better. They could use multiple users, but they would take time to register and log in to - particularly if it was impossible to be logged into more than one account on a computer at once. I don't know if this is the case at the moment, but if it isn't I think it would be triviially easy to implement with cookies. Perhaps also we could impose a limit that meant that you could only create one account per computer per hour - again maybe implementable with cookies. Combined these would mean that to move 15 pages would a require a minium of five hours of preparation just to create the accounts, then a significant amount of time to accumulate the 100 or 200 articles per article, especially if they had to be edits that were not deleted. Remember that if they are persistently making bad edits or creating nonsense articles then they would be blocked, likely for 24 hours at a time. Add all this up and just to go on a 15 article moving spree would take probably a week of preparation. A 100-article spree would require 34 accounts, taking a minimum of 34 hours to create, assuming a dedicated vandal working constantly for 8 hours a day this would take 4¼ days. Assuming that 100 non-deleted edits are required for each account would take an average of 5 minutes each to avoid being blocked and to allow for ones that are deleted, this is would take 17,000 mintues which, working constantly 8 hours a day every day, would take about 36 days. Assuming 200 non-deleted edits and a vandal working on average 4 hours per day it would take over 4½ months of preparation. With a mass-rollback option this 4.5 months of effort by the vandal could be reverted in less than 2 minutes; using normal move rollback it would be fixable by the community in less than 30 minutes I suspect. 4½ months work for less than an hour's glory would not be worth it for any human, and bots would be spotted long before they became an issue. Thryduulf 11:54, 16 August 2005 (UTC)
 * see also 3185 and 3231. Thryduulf 23:31, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

Better Upload Page to Get More Images Tagged
Over at the policy section, some people have crafted an idea for a better upload page to encourage people to tag their images or at least provide the information needed to tag them. You can go there for details, but basically we want a check box that says, "Is this a photograph you took yourself, or an image you created from scratch?" On the page where it says, "If you upload a file here to which you hold the copyright, you must license it under the GNU Free Documentation License or release it into the public domain. Alternately, you can upload your file to the Wikimedia Commons under a different free license." change it to "If you upload a file here to which you hold the copyright, you agree to license it under the GNU Free Documentation License, unless you specifically release it into the public domain. Alternately, you can upload your file to the Wikimedia Commons under a different free license." Then, say, "If not, do you have the image tag? If so, please enter it.". Then, "If you don't have a tag, please explain the source of this image in detail in the box below." Below can be the summary box that's always there. Server-side(not client JS) validation should ensure that either the first box is checked, the second contains text(preferably ensure there is a valid tag, but that's more difficult), or the third box contains text.

If the first is checked:

If there is nothing in the second, add GFDL-self to the summary. If there is something in the second, add

''The uploader owns the copyright to this image. By uploading it to Wikipedia, he or she agreed to license it under the GFDL, unless he or she released it into the public domain below.''

If the second is filled,

Check whether the form of the field is *. If it is, just add it to the summary. Otherwise, add to the summary.

If the third is filled,

Add it to the summary.

Can someone implement this, or at least provide feedback. If you are unsure what I am proposing, I can create an HTML mock-up. Superm401 | Talk 19:46, August 6, 2005 (UTC)


 * I think this is a great idea, and would urge others to show support/criticism so this idea can hopefully be acted upon. Martin (Bluemoose) 08:53, 7 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Great idea. - Omegatron 19:02, August 12, 2005 (UTC)


 * Good thought; an element of a larger effort needed to shift more work onto the engine, in part by using form elements other than one giant editable text field. &mdash; Xiong &#29066; talk * 21:07, 2005 August 14 (UTC)


 * Agreed. --Workman161
 * Okay, then. Developers, can this be implemented without a change to the MediaWiki software? Superm401 | Talk 04:26, August 15, 2005 (UTC)
 * Any objections from anyone? Superm401 | Talk 03:49, August 20, 2005 (UTC)
 * I appreciate the unanimous support from the entire Wikipedia community. With your support, I have created a new BugZilla bug at .  If for some reason you later decide discussion over major changes is beneficial, please post any comments there. Superm401 | Talk 21:41, August 22, 2005 (UTC)

Complex Article support
For complex articles (Such as is Sustainable energy) which by definition refer to a list of other articles, I would like to see Articlespace partial transclusion. That is the ability to transclude only the opening section of a referenced article. This in general would expand lists to be readable articles without creating duplicate and forkable information. Benjamin Gatti should produce the opening section
 * No. That just encourages lazy editing.  If you're going to include information about a secondary topic, summarize it yourself and relate it to the main topic.  You don't want the same information about coal power for the environmentalism article as you do for the fossil fuel article.  This is why transclusion is strongly discouraged.  Superm401 | Talk 16:12, August 21, 2005 (UTC)

How to send messages
I have received messages, but do not know how to respond. How can I send a message to someone? - NWOG
 * Go to their talk page. Superm401 | Talk 15:22, August 21, 2005 (UTC)

Special:Ipblocklist
The IP Block List has "expires expires" for every block that isn't indefinite. Zoe 06:27, August 19, 2005 (UTC)


 * This is fixed. And welcome back, Zoe. -- Tim Starling 01:36, August 21, 2005 (UTC)

Non-redirect spams Broken redirects
If you can get to Special:BrokenRedirects without timing out, it repeatedly lists Deletion log archive/November 2004 (1) at the bottom, although it isn’t a redirect page at all. Any ideas? Susvolans (pigs can fly) 11:19, 23 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Its not just that one, the first entry (actually the first four entries) has the same problem


 * 1) User talk: uriyan (Edit) → Israeli nuclear capability
 * User talk: uriyan is not a redirect, nor does it ever appear to have been. Thryduulf 12:40, 23 August 2005 (UTC)

Adding navigation links
In MediaWiki 1.5, how do you add links to the navigation bar?

Thanks, shardsofmetal 08:09, 23 August 2005 (UTC)


 * You start by asking MediaWiki-l. This isn't a support forum. -- Cyrius|&#9998; 11:01, 23 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Just edit MediaWiki:Sidebar. Angela. 14:00, August 23, 2005 (UTC)

Today's featured article
I was wondering how Wikipedia creates their featured article page. Is it an automated process, or does somebody write the page every day? (If it is automated, please tell me how this is done.)

Thank You, Shardsofmetal 03:24, 23 August 2005 (UTC)


 * The snippet from the featured article is prepared in advance and submitted to Today's featured article -- you can look at the past and future articles to be featured at Today's featured article/August 2005. The text corresponding to the day's featured article is then automatically trancluded on the Main Page. Note that there is one user responsible for preparing the blurbs and determining which articles to feature, but anyone can really help if they want. &mdash; Sverdrup 03:46, 23 August 2005 (UTC)

Link Spam blocking
How do I turn on the Link Spamming on my wiki? I know it has something to do with assigning a value to $wgSpamRegex in LocalSettings.php, but I don't know what the value is. I have copied the wikipedia spam list to spamblacklist.txt, but I don't know php. pstudier 03:10, 2005 August 23 (UTC)
 * Please direct questions about running other wikis using the wikimedia software to the wikitech-l mediawiki-l mailing list. Thanks. -- Rick Block (talk) 01:22, August 25, 2005 (UTC)
 * It should be mediawiki-l. Wikitech-l is about technical issues on our own sites. You need to install the Spam Blacklist extension. Angela. 14:02, August 23, 2005 (UTC)

Sandbox auto-purge
I was wondering, in MediaWiki, how do you set up a system to automatically delete the sandbox every 12 hours, like wikipedia does? If you know, could you please tell me here. Thanks, Shardsofmetal 01:45, 23 August 2005 (UTC)
 * this task is performed by a bot. if you follow the link from the history to the bots user page you should be able to find its owner and ask them exactly what they are running. Plugwash 01:48, 23 August 2005 (UTC)
 * It is User:Sandbot which is run by AllyUnion. Angela. 14:07, August 23, 2005 (UTC)

Where’ve my messages gone?
I’ve had two messages on my talk page, but I wasn’t notified either time. Any ideas? Susvolans (pigs can fly) 16:18, 22 August 2005 (UTC)


 * See above. --cesarb 17:18, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

search for ICE should give results
I just did a search that came up with no results. So I clicked Google and it brought up a Wikipedia page. What the ?????? What I typed in the search field was ICE and the page that I wanted to find was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_case_of_emergency Can you explain and/or correct this? Thanks!

I typed "ICE" into the search box and clicked on "Go" and it took me to ICE, which, right now, redirects to InterCity Express. We should probably make it a disambiguation page, if somebody wants to write an article on ICE (cell phone) or some similar title. Zoe 22:49, August 24, 2005 (UTC)


 * Clicking on "Search" instead of "Go" comes up with "You searched for "ICE" [Index]". If you click on Index, it will take you to a page, the first entry of which is ICE.  Zoe 22:51, August 24, 2005 (UTC)

InterCity Express has a top link to ICE (disambiguation) which covers all this. Dragons flight 22:58, August 24, 2005 (UTC)


 * Well, then ICE should redirect to the disambig page. I'll go and do that.  Zoe 23:23, August 24, 2005 (UTC)

Transparent infoboxes??
Section header underlines are now crossing through infoboxes (since yesterday evening) - it's never happened before on en wikipedia, tho' I have seen it on some other language wikis. Anyone any idea why this has started happening, and how it can be remedied? It looks awful! - MPF 13:47, 22 August 2005 (UTC)
 * The problem has stopped now, as mysteriously as it began. Thanks, whoever solved it! - MPF 12:37, 24 August 2005 (UTC)

Bot problems
I operate N-Bot. When an article it is editing is deleted while being edited (as happens occasionally), it fails on that article on that run, because it gets a "This article has been deleted while you were editing it" page, which it doesn't understand. This is just fine. However, when I restart it (minutes later) and it gets to the same page, it gets the same response and the same error, and I have to fix the page manually from my own account. Any ideas? N (t/c) 19:53, 27 August 2005 (UTC)


 * If you are using pywikipedia, you will get that error if the article has ever been deleted (even years ago). There was some change to Mediawiki 1.5 which broke pywikipedia slightly.  I think it has to do with the wpStarttime input which now has to be supplied.  I looked at the pywikipedia code briefly but didn't attempt a fix. -- Curps 20:12, 27 August 2005 (UTC)


 * It's actually a Perl script (User:N-Bot/listredir.pl) using LWP directly (no sort of bot framework). However, I bet you're right; I hadn't noticed the wpStarttime field. I'll have to add that. N (t/c) 21:15, 27 August 2005 (UTC)

Disallowing page redirects to self
A page should not be allowed to redirect to itself. This happens as a side-effect when two pagemove reverts happen closely spaced together, when the second admin doesn't notice that the button says "Delete and move" instead of just "Move". The page ends up as a redirect to itself, with all of the valid article history deleted, requiring a restore and content revert to the last good version. Doing a sanity check to disallow a page to redirect to itself might prevent this scenario. For an example of this, see the history of User:Tim Starling. -- Curps 16:01, 26 August 2005 (UTC)
 * see 3231. Thryduulf 16:18, 26 August 2005 (UTC)


 * I'm aware of that bug report, but I'm proposing something much simpler here: reject any modification which turns a page into a redirect into itself (this could happen as the result of an ordinary user edit as well). A page redirecting to itself is always an error, under all circumstances.


 * I'm not aware of how the Mediawiki code is structured, but if the error condition get propagated upward in the calling function stack, this simple sanity check would also have the effect of preventing the double-pagemove-revert bug, without having to make any major changes to the pagemove revert functinality. -- Curps 12:54, 27 August 2005 (UTC)

"Name of page" variable and templates
I'm working on this template Template:History_of_the_DRC, and I want the main image in the template to change according to which page the template is on. For instance, when on the Congo Crisis page, the image would show the flag of that period in the template. The only way I can think of doing this (except editing each individual page which has the template) would be if there was a "name of page" variable which I could put into the template, which would in turn link to an image of the same name.

Sot the template would have something like: image=$NameOfPage$.png

Which on the Congo Crisis page would translate to "Congo Crisis.png"

Is this possible. Or is there another way?

- Xed 21:27, 25 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Is what you're looking for? --fvw<SMALL> * </SMALL> 21:33, August 25, 2005 (UTC)


 * All the available mediawiki variables are documented at m:Help:Variable. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 21:35, August 25, 2005 (UTC)


 * Template:History of Spain has a separate image for each page, you could always copy what was done there. - SimonP 13:13, August 27, 2005 (UTC)

"Activity level indicator" in watchlist is desired
I would be a very happy chap if each entry on my watchlist had some kind of "activity level indicator" which tells me roughly "how much" activity has been going on in that article recently. The current system is binary: either the article is on the watchlist, or it isn't. A simple improvement would be to give the number of edits to that article in the last 24 hours. A more complex indicator might be (say) a weighted sum of the size of the recent diffs to that article, the weight decreasing exponentially with age. The activity indicator could be a number, or a coloured box (red means very active, blue means pretty quiet), etc.

Opinions on the desirability and technical feasibility of this proposal are hereby solicited. Dmharvey Talk 18:12, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

Interwiki links in plain English
Interwiki links are of course, great. Despire the fact that I can rarely read any of the other languages, I'm often interested to see whether the other Wikis have more contents or better pictures on a particular article. However, because the interwiki links are given in their native language, I frequently find it dificult to tell what language some of the more obscure links are. That's fine - their main use is for people who can read that language. However, would it also be possible to label them with a tool tip pop-up showing the English name for each language. You can figure them out from the 2-letter country codes in the linked URLs, but this isn't particularly convenient. -- Solipsist 19:05, 25 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Um, when you're viewing the page you already see all the interwiki language links with their English names. When you're editing the page, you see the codes like de:, fr:, etc.  I don't think you can get a browser edit window to display popups when you cursor over any particular section of text. -- Curps 16:04, 26 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Really? When I'm viewing a page, I see interwiki links in their native language, such as Deutsch and Русский, and 日本語. Most of the other items on the left hand panel have tool tip pop-ups showing keyboard shortcuts and the like, so I would have thought it was feasible, although the interwiki links are more dynamic. -- Solipsist 16:12, 26 August 2005 (UTC)


 * You're quite right. I'm suffering from a severe lack of sleep.  The tool-tip sounds like a good idea. -- Curps 16:20, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

To Do List Woes
When using to-do lists with the script I've now encountered twice a situation where I can click edit on the to do list box, make changes and not have it appear in the list. If I click edit again, the changes DO appear in the edit window. Please see my user page for an example. Why is this happening and how do I fix it? Flehmen 17:27, 25 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Sigh, nevermind. It appears to be db lag as my edit appeared after 15 min., but it only strikes my todo lists. Flehmen 18:18, 25 August 2005 (UTC)

A photo on Wikimedia Commons seems to have been overruled by a photo uploaded directly to Wikipedia -- help!
Hello all-

I uploaded the photo here to the Wikimedia commons for an article I did on Charles Village, a Baltimore neighborhood. The photo is of Guilford Street.

Today, someone uploaded this photo of Lorne Calvert to, I'm guessing, Wikipedia, not the Commons. The two have the same filename -- Calvert.jpg. Now the image link on the Charles Village shows Mr. Calvert rather than Calvert St. (Or at least it did -- I commented it out pending the resolution of this issue.)

What's the best way to deal with this? Should I re-upload the photo to the commons and give it a more specific name? Should I contact the user who uploaded the second photo? Is there a syntax for making sure an image referenced comes from the commons? Aren't we supposed to be uploading all media to the commons anyway? Help! --Jfruh 05:25, 25 August 2005 (UTC)


 * I would say change the name to a more specific one. If, during an upload, it didn't prompt the user that an image already existed under that name, then we have a bug that should be fixed.  If it did, and the user chose to ignore the warning and overwrite the image, then that's rather rude behaviour on their part.  I'm not sure which is the case, however, so I wouldn't yell at them until you know.  A nicely worded inquiry to find out if it warned them might be appropriate, however. Alternatively you could do your own test, by uploading images with the same name to both places to see if you get a warning.  Once you know if we have a bug, then you will know whether it was a bug or just rudeness. StuRat 06:52, 25 August 2005 (UTC)


 * OK, reuploaded. I shall enquire with the other pic's uploader later. --Jfruh 16:11, 26 August 2005 (UTC)


 * I don't think you get overwrite warnings for Commons images unless they have had physical pages made here (for example to cat them), but I could be wrong. Regardless, a very descriptive filename ensures no clashes; I often end up using ridiculously long filenames like Image:Grand Theft Auto Liberty City Stories box.jpg. A bit too wordy, but it's an exact description of what it shows, and it won't ever clash. GarrettTalk 12:48, 25 August 2005 (UTC)

A longer name will certainly make it less likely that it will be reused, but it's still possible. This could happen if it's a picture of the same thing, but showing a different aspect of that thing. I also have a related problem dealing with images ... I added 3 images to Wikipedia and linked to them from inflection point, but afterwards realized I should have put them in Wiki commons. I loaded the 3 images there, under the same name, but I can't get rid of the images I uploaded to Wikipedia. How do I get rid of those and redirect the inflection point article to find the illustrations under the same name in Wiki commons ? StuRat 16:58, 25 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Put the template on the en.wikipedia copies, and (at some undetermined point in the future) they'll be deleted. -- Finlay McWalter |  Talk 17:16, August 25, 2005 (UTC)


 * Ok, I added that tag. Will the links to those images automatically be redirected to the Wiki commons versions of each image with the same name, once the en.wikipedia copies are deleted, or do I need to so something else ? StuRat 19:08, 26 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Yeah, as long as they're both exactly the same names. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 19:15, August 26, 2005 (UTC)


 * They are, so I'm all set, thanks ! I do wish there was a way to explicitly specify a Wiki commons image, say with "c:" in front of the image name, to avoid problems with different images in en.wikimedia overwriting the intended Wiki commons image.  I will propose this in a new section under proposals. StuRat 19:52, 26 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Ok, proposal has been made, please add your support: Village pump (proposals) (→Allow explicit links to Wikimedia Commons images). StuRat 20:55, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

TANS Peru Flight 204
someone changed the commons picture? Aleichem 20:59, 24 August 2005 (UTC)


 * It's fixed; clear your cache and it will be okay again. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 21:02, August 24, 2005 (UTC)

Vandalism by worms?
Is there any defense measure against a worm (like Code Red) that vandalizes random articles in Wikipedia from infected machines, for example by inserting (or replacing existing text with) random paragraphs generated with something like SCIgen? If you change the site layout, the worm writer might also issue "updates" that might spread or be retrieved by the infected machines in a distributed way. If you block the IP of infected machines, the man-power needed for identifying (vandalism may be very hard to identify when SCIgen-like tools are used and they can update themselves), de-vandalizing, blocking and unblocking may well be unaffordable when millions of machines become infected. We might have to disable editing and the registration of new accounts indefinitely if such a thing happens, which would change Wikipedia into a closed community.

I do not know whether such worm vandalism has ever occurred, nor do I intend to commit such :) I'm just curious. R6144 12:39, 23 August 2005 (UTC)


 * I don't think there is any defense in place. Probably we'll wait until it happens before establishing formal procedures. In any case, it's not like there is a disaster waiting to happen; all edits of all articles are backed up, so fixing even widespread damage is always possible. But it will be interesting to see how Wikipedia deals with such things once they begin to happen (and they will!). One possibility, which would reduce vandalism of all sorts, is to allow edits only by registered accounts, and only (say) at least 24 hours after they were registered. &mdash; Nowhither 18:41, 23 August 2005 (UTC)


 * It's basically pure, simple DOS with an extra spin that no site ever in the world has ever had to deal with ever before. If indeed millions of machines get infected, first thing we'll have to do is salvage a crashed system. ;-) &mdash; Ambush Commander <sup style="font-family:serif;">(Talk) 18:54, August 23, 2005 (UTC)

We'd cope. As pointed out, worst-case we can put the database in read-only mode and subtly change the edit page form so the worm no longer works. I think we have a lot more to fear from subtle vandalism than any sort of all-out attack. --fvw<SMALL> * </SMALL> 18:58, August 23, 2005 (UTC)


 * Just a little note: subtly change the edit page form so the worm no longer works wouldn't work if the worm is able to be patched by the writer, or if we set up an API (which was announced a while ago... although we could always disable the API too). I think we have a lot more to fear from subtle vandalism than any sort of all-out attack. Agreed. &mdash; Ambush Commander <sup style="font-family:serif;">(Talk) 19:10, August 23, 2005 (UTC)


 * Well, we could always introduce "captcha"s I suppose. Anyway, we'll burn that bridge when we get to it. --fvw<SMALL> * </SMALL> 19:13, August 23, 2005 (UTC)


 * I'm going to play the devil's advocate here: easy captchas have been broken before, and making our captchas hard will simply make editing more laborious. Captcha's also limit Wikipedia's accessibility. &mdash; Ambush Commander <sup style="font-family:serif;">(Talk) 19:17, August 23, 2005 (UTC)


 * an evil idea i had (which i don't plan to implement) would be a botnet that repeatedly re-vandalised a page and if it saw the page was protected checked the what links here for the page and added all the pages from it to its list of pages to vandalise.


 * in other words the more admins tried to protect pages from the vandal botnet the worse the vandalism would get. Plugwash 19:33, 23 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Shhh! It is in the opinion of the Cabal that discussions like this are counterproductive towards the future health of Wikipedia! About your "evil idea", it would be interesting because it leaves a small imprint at first but grows larger: subtlety always wins. &mdash; Ambush Commander <sup style="font-family:serif;">(Talk) 19:50, August 23, 2005 (UTC)


 * Any decent hacker could take Wikipedia down with nothing but a single computer and a fast internet connection. But no-one has ever tried it. I'm forced to conclude that hackers all love Wikipedia. Britannica, on the other hand, should watch out. -- Tim Starling 00:46, August 24, 2005 (UTC)
 * All hackers love Wikipedia - could that be our new slogan? Really, I think the only people out to get us are kooks and script kiddies. Alphax &tau;&epsilon;&chi; 04:38, 24 August 2005 (UTC)


 * I don't know about you, but I've not met many hackers (in the classic sense) who don't love Wikipedia... Shimgray 15:41, 26 August 2005 (UTC)


 * The Wikipedia community has contributes from all over the world, so no matter where and hacker/cracker lives they will be found and vigilante justice served. --Clawed 05:37, 24 August 2005 (UTC)

Unicode in Article Titles?
Sorry, clueless oldie question (too frustrated to keep searching for what i've seen before somewhere).

Zürich has a legible URL but Emperor Yūryaku has what i take to be "hex C5AB" in the middle; i take that to be Unicode for the char i thot was an umlauted U before i moved Emperor Yuryaku to Emperor Yūryaku, and then started gleefully byp'g the multiple dbl rdrs.

Are we trying to avoid such titles? The hex coding looks like a bad sign, and there are other places where my MS IE uses different ugly representations of the title. Seems like i probably should put them back like i found them.

--Jerzy•t 02:56, 2005 August 23 (UTC)


 * Emperor Yūryaku displays fine in my Mozilla browser. *Dan* 03:19, August 23, 2005 (UTC)
 * No, we should be happy that Unicode in titles is finally possible. A scrambled url is a small price for not having to romanize every other foreign word. (And eventually, even IE will extend its Unicode support.) &mdash; Sverdrup 10:44, 24 August 2005 (UTC)
 * The string "C5 AB" is simply the UTF-8 code for ü. Denelson83 22:20, 1 September 2005 (UTC)

If there were no redirect from Emperor Yuryaku, and someone searched for that article, would a match be done to Emperor Yūryaku? In other words, does a non-unicode search match a unicode title? BTW, it looks fine for me, using Firefox as well. Zoe 22:45, August 24, 2005 (UTC)
 * I'm not completely sure about Search, but Go doesn't find it without the redirect (see User:Rick Block/Yūryaku, a Go search for "User:Rick Block/Yuryaku" doesn't find it). My guess is that Search wouldn't find it either ("ū" is as different from "u", as "u" is from "v").  I'm further guessing that in a category listing, "ū" would sort alphabetically after "z".  There is a Unicode sort algorithm, which basically takes a character sort order as input (and, I think allows sets of characters, like "ū" and "u" to be treated as the same for sort purposes).  I'd be happy if I'm wrong, but I'd be surprised if we're currently using it which would mean characters will sort by their Unicode character number (i.e. any accented character sorts following "z"). -- Rick Block (talk) 02:25, August 25, 2005 (UTC)
 * The sort order is as I suspected. I just created an article Zzrich (perhaps speedy deleted by now) which I put in category:Cities in Switzerland, and it sorts before Zürich (i.e. "z" comes before "ü"). The sort order issue is a known bug, see 164. -- Rick Block (talk) 02:39, August 25, 2005 (UTC)
 * The workaround is to use in the Zürich article, to make sorting independent of diacritics. A bit of extra work, but we already have to do category sorting for personal names, as in:  at Fred Flintstone. -- Curps 03:32, 25 August 2005 (UTC)

font fiddling
did someone change something somewhere so that diffs are showing up in a different (and to my eyes, ugly) font? --jpgordon&#8711;&#8710;&#8711;&#8710; 22:10, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

From Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
I put the monobook.css page from wikipedia on to my wiki to test out some things. I was wondering how to change what displays under the page title. For example, if my wiki was named Wikipedia, how can i get it to display From Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, instead of just From Wikipedia?

Thanks, Shardsofmetal 20:32, 29 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Stuff like that is stored in the various mediawiki messages. You can see this wiki's versions at special:Allmessages.  Checking through that list shows that MediaWiki:Tagline is the relevant message. -- Finlay McWalter |  Talk 23:11, August 29, 2005 (UTC)

serious editing problems
When I click on the section "edit" button for the last section of this page, I get the following dreadful error message from PHP:
 * Fatal error: Call to a member function on a non-object in /usr/local/apache/common-local/php-1.5/includes/Parser.php on line 380

I can only edit here by editing the entire article. What's happening? Dmharvey Talk 01:56, 29 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Update: this is happening to me on all pages (any section edit button), on both safari and firefox (mac). Dmharvey [[Image:User_dmharvey_sig.png]] Talk 02:00, 29 August 2005 (UTC)
 * It was happening to me using Internet Explorer, but now it seems to be working again. -Aranel (" Sarah  ") 02:14, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

Likely some coder pushed a bad version of MediaWiki, and then reverted it to a stabler version. The question, however, is how long can they get away with these sorts of experiments? The last downtime was also caused by this sort of experimentation. &mdash; Ambush Commander <sup style="font-family:serif;">(Talk) 02:21, August 29, 2005 (UTC)
 * OK it's working again. I don't mind so much if they experiment on the live site, it's much more exciting that way :-) Dmharvey [[Image:User_dmharvey_sig.png]] Talk 02:23, 29 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Yeah, but edits to sections stopped working. &mdash; Ambush Commander <sup style="font-family:serif;">(Talk) 02:46, August 29, 2005 (UTC)


 * Should be working correctly. (By the way, this is a security update. I think you'd rather have it than not. :) --Brion 02:50, August 29, 2005 (UTC)
 * Aha. Good work. Hope it makes it to the stable branch soon so I can patch my MediaWiki installation. &mdash; Ambush Commander <sup style="font-family:serif;">(Talk) 19:38, August 29, 2005 (UTC)

Bug in "What links here"?
There seems to be something wrong with the "What links here?" feature. On certain pages, notably the one for the (non-notable, under VfD) blog IDoTheWondering.blogspot.com, it shows lots of things (mostly user talk pages) linking to it, none of which seem to have any actual links there that I can find. *Dan* 13:38, August 28, 2005 (UTC)


 * Yes, I've seen that. The "what links here" is occasionally frozen from an earlier pre-Mediawiki 1.5 revision and never got updated.  Doing an update at the "linking" page should clear it up (perhaps even an "edit this page" followed by immediate "save page", which won't enter into the page history but who knows, might fix the problem... at least that worked for a similar bug with categories some months ago). -- Curps 13:47, 28 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Furthermore, sometimes it seems to give links from pages that have a template that links to that page. This is really useless: when it comes to "Requested articles", sooner or later no one can figure out when it was "requested" in the first place: all there is is a ton of user page links. &mdash; Ambush Commander <sup style="font-family:serif;">(Talk) 14:01, August 28, 2005 (UTC)


 * "What links here" also can show pages which refer to a redirect which points to the page being examined. In that case the linking article does not contain mention of the WLH page, but rather the redirected page is mentioned.  WLH does show some redirects in a nested format.  (SEWilco 15:02, 28 August 2005 (UTC))

Edit Top v0.1 [MonoBook] released
Ever want to just change something at the top of a fairly long article, but don't feel like loading the enitre page again like the "Edit this page" link does? Well now you can do just that, using this wiki user script!

To install the script:
 * Visit your user page. In the address bar, append "/monobook.js" to the end of the URL and press enter, and click "Edit this page"
 * Copy/Paste the following script into the edit box, and save. The instruction say to bypass your browser cache so do that.

function editTopLink { // if this is preview page or generated page, stop if(document.getElementById("wikiPreview") || window.location.href.indexOf("Special:") != -1) return;

// get the page title var pageTitle = document.title.split(" - ")[0].replace(" ", "_");

// create div and set innerHTML to link var divContainer = document.createElement("div"); divContainer.innerHTML = ' [<a href="/w/index.php?title='+pageTitle+'&amp;action=edit&amp;section=0" title="'+document.title.split(" - ")[0]+'">edit top</a>] ';

// this is a hack so I can refer to the h1 by an id document.getElementsByTagName("h1")[0].id = "f1r5tH34d1ng"; var theH1 = document.getElementById("f1r5tH34d1ng");

// insert divContainer into the DOM before the h1 document.getElementById("content").insertBefore(divContainer, theH1);

}

// setTimeout does not need a string reference to work setTimeout(editTopLink, 0) // this is equivalent of onload Now go to any page on Wikipedia and the [edit top] link will appear at the top right. This link will load only the "zeroth" section of the article into the edit page. Cool huh? --pile0nadestalk 13:19, 28 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Here is a bugfix (replaces code beneath //if this is a preview page, stop):

if(document.getElementById("wikiPreview") || self.location.pathname.indexOf("title=Special:") == -1) { return; }


 * Remember: location is an object, you have to access the pathname string before you can IndexOf it. Furthermore, IndexOf returns -1 on failure, so a simple bool conversion won't work (-1 == true). &mdash; Ambush Commander <sup style="font-family:serif;">(Talk) 14:25, August 28, 2005 (UTC)


 * Irp. I forgot to say that this is extremely cool! I had no clue we could edit section=0. Awesomeness. Has this been added to Tools yet? &mdash; Ambush Commander <sup style="font-family:serif;">(Talk) 14:27, August 28, 2005 (UTC)
 * I can't seem to get the fix working. I still have the edit top link on my watchlist. And I did bypass the browser cache --pile0nadestalk 19:55, 28 August 2005 (UTC)

Meh stupid me. I didn't make a sanity check on what you gave me (I grabbed the version you posted before you corrected (by removing the conditional altogether) the syntactically incorrect one). Should be:

if(document.getElementById("wikiPreview") || self.location.pathname.indexOf("Special:") !== -1) { return; }

Which matches any occurence of Special: in the URL. This is really hackish, however, so we should do a better job on this. &mdash; Ambush Commander <sup style="font-family:serif;">(Talk) 20:23, August 28, 2005 (UTC)
 * OK, I got it to work using this code:

if(document.getElementById("wikiPreview") || window.location.href.indexOf("Special:") != -1) return; I had to use a for(in) loop to find which one had the URL, it was href. pathname only returned "w/index.php?", so it didn't work as it does not have the page title in it.--pile0nadestalk 21:25, 28 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Ah... then why not...

if(document.getElementById("wikiPreview") || self.location.pathname.indexOf("Special:") !== -1 || self.location.search.indexOf("title=Special") !== -1) return;


 * More precise, methinks. It's not really an issue though... &mdash; Ambush Commander <sup style="font-family:serif;">(Talk) 21:45, August 28, 2005 (UTC)


 * Sorry about the spacing, I broke your code. I just can't get over those long strings... and you can't break them either because JavaScript will try to make a new line. Grr... (still in PHP programming mode). &mdash; Ambush Commander <sup style="font-family:serif;">(Talk) 21:55, August 28, 2005 (UTC)

linked spelled wrong
Helloes this is Flatchestedmama writing to let you know that my link in the Mail Art article is incorrect. I am very pleased to have been included in the piece as I do love postal treats. Please correct the misspelling so people may link to my site.

currently reads with the ch in chested being switched please correct to read: www.flatchestedmama.com

Thank you!

Flatchestedmama
 * I fixed the link, but you could have done this yourself (about as easily as asking for it to be fixed here). Unlike a regular, boring, website that no one can change except the "owner", wikipedia is a collaboration among everyone in the world.  Anyone can edit any page, see Introduction.  Next time, please try clicking "edit".  Note that the syntax is not HTML. -- Rick Block (talk) 01:04, August 28, 2005 (UTC)

Create account / log in link
I was just wondering how wikipedia gets the login link at the top of the page to appear bold. I tried this on my MediaWiki, and you could see the code, whether it was ''' or <b> I would appreciate any input on this matter. Thank you, Shardsofmetal 02:29, 27 August 2005 (UTC)


 * This wiki uses CSS to style the login link.
 * Found in MediaWiki:monobook.css:

font-weight: bold; font-size: 110%; }
 * 1) pt-login {
 * &mdash; Sverdrup 11:37, 28 August 2005 (UTC)

does there exist a central linkspam-fighting server?
If not, shouldn't someone build one?

I imagine it would work like this:

Every time somebody inserts an external link into an article on Wikipedia (or any participating wiki), the wiki software notifies the central server. No blocking yet; just notification. The central server looks out for links which have been reported numerous times over short periods of time, and makes publicly available a list of "highly suspicious URLs". This would be a very useful resource for sites like Wikipedia to help them quickly update spam blacklists --- close to automatically. Dmharvey Talk 00:04, 27 August 2005 (UTC)
 * That seems like a wonderful idea. Are you able to make a test version?  I'd love to see it... JesseW 20:57, 27 August 2005 (UTC)


 * We do have Spam blacklist which is managed by hand. Dragons flight 21:01, August 27, 2005 (UTC)


 * I don't have the resources or the time right now to do it. I hope that someone else reading this does.
 * I'm aware of Spam blacklist. I'm not suggesting that we automate the management of the blacklist, that would be a bit dangerous. Rather, the central server would overcome the current problem that linkspam is difficult to spot if the perpetrators are making small changes to lots of pages from different IP addresses. When this happens, individual spam fighters are unlikely to recognise the big picture pattern. I suspect that a lot of time gets wasted this way. My suggestion would simply make such spamming easier to spot. Dmharvey [[Image:User_dmharvey_sig.png]] Talk 01:54, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

edit on double-click doesn't work on move-protected pages
For pages that are protected from moves only, editing on double-click doesn't seem to work. --Ixfd64 20:52, 2005 August 26 (UTC)
 * I don't understand (and, from the lack of replies, I'm guessing that no one else does, either). What is "editing on double-click"? &mdash; Nowhither 05:58, 28 August 2005 (UTC)
 * "Edit on double-click" is a preference you can set via your "Preferences" link. It lets you double-click an article and bring up the edit screen.  Joyous  (talk) 19:59, August 28, 2005 (UTC)
 * Ah, thank you! But now that I know what it means, it looks like I can't address the orignal post. :-( &mdash; Nowhither 08:29, 29 August 2005 (UTC)
 * This is probably one for Bugzilla. Thryduulf 09:28, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

Formatting problem
I use Win98, MSIE, Classic skin. Can anyone explain (or better yet fix) a template - see Template_talk:Honda. (It is ok on Win2000, MSIE6, Classic skin.) -- SGBailey 16:16:59, 2005-08-30 (UTC)

User interface transfer
Is there any easy way to transfer the user interface translation from one project to another. I've greatly improved its translation to Slovenian language on Slovenian WP and want to use it now in the English version and in Commons. Thanks very much. -- Eleassar  my talk 14:00, 30 August 2005 (UTC)

Special:Newimages can now be included
I changed Special:Newimages so that it can now be included like where int is an integer between 1 and 48 specifying how many images to show. For instance to the right here is the latest image to be uploaded to this wiki as of page loading. — 14:32:06, 2005-09-08 (UTC)

Postal Codes
Hello,

I was curious if there was a way to import the postal code table and insert it into an excel sheet. Or can it be purchased?

thank you


 * I haven't a clue which page you're referring to, but if copying and pasting doesn't work, then try saving the page as html, and then opening the html file with Excel. You should be able to manipulate the data using Excel. Bluap 12:11, 8 September 2005 (UTC)

Need help with subcategories
I've created disambig-cleanup, which adds a page to Category:Disambiguation pages in need of cleanup. That category is in turn part of Category:Disambiguation, so adding an article to the first should also add it to the higher-level cat automatically, right? The problem is, it doesn't seem to work. Articles get added to Category:Disambiguation pages in need of cleanup, but they don't automatically show up in Category:Disambiguation. The workaround we came up with is to just directly add both cats to disambig-cleanup, but that's not really the right way to do it (at least as far as I understand how subcats are supposed to work). --RoySmith 12:57, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
 * I think you might misunderstand the way the categories and subcategories work. The articles you've added to are in, but only insofar as  itself is in . You don't see that category on the first page of  simply because there wasn't a sort-key on it (I've added one). But rest assured, the articles are there - within a subcategory. Grutness...  wha?  13:11, 6 September 2005 (UTC)


 * Hmmm, something still doesn't make sense. For example, look at Vanity.  Shouldn't it be listed under, right between Vanilla (disambiguation) and Vančura?  --RoySmith 14:09, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Articles added to subcategories are not automaticaly visible in the parent category - presumably this would cause too much clutter in things like, oh, Category:Harry Potter. N (t/c) 14:34, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Remember there is no such thing as a "parent" category in the software. A category can itself have more than one category, and nothing requires that a category connect to more general categories.  (SEWilco 19:06, 6 September 2005 (UTC))

I see the problem. The template originally had only attached to it -  was added several hours later. Because of the way template assignment to categories works, any articles that were marked with this template prior to the change in the template will appear to be assigned to the extra category, but will need a null-edit in order for them to actually show up in the category's lists. I've performed a quick null-edit on the dozen or so articles in, and they should now all appear in the parent category. Grutness...  wha?  00:38, 7 September 2005 (UTC)

page-move protection error doesn't display properly
When a non-admin user tries to move a page that is protected from moves, the error message doesn't come up properly. I've addressed this at MediaWiki talk:Protectedpage. --Ixfd64 08:36, 2005 September 6 (UTC)
 * It would also be nice if the tab showed whether it was fully protected or just protected from moves. - Mgm|(talk) 11:20, September 7, 2005 (UTC)

Errors in header for main page
When I am at http://www.wikipedia.org, the following is displayed at the top of the page: Warning: main(./lucene.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /usr/local/apache/common-local/php-1.5/CommonSettings.php on line 712

Warning: main: Failed opening './lucene.php' for inclusion (include_path='/usr/local/apache/common/php-1.5:/usr/local/apache/common/php-1.5/includes:/usr/local/apache/common/php-1.5/languages:/usr/local/apache/common/php-1.5/templates:/usr/local/apache/common/php-1.5/extensions/wikihiero') in /usr/local/apache/common-local/php-1.5/CommonSettings.php on line 712

I have tested this in both FF and ie, but since this is an error in the code for the page, it doesn't matter.

I tried looking around for a webmaster@wikipedia.org account, but didn't see one listed anywhere.

Below is a screen shot of the error message.

Image:wikipedia.home.page.errors.png


 * Works fine for me right now. Dragons flight 04:14, September 5, 2005 (UTC)

1.6
Should MW 1.6 bugs exist? Does it already? (I actually haven't noticed any difference at all from 1.5, but now that we're running on the bleeding edge we definitely should have this.) N (t/c) 01:08, 5 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Can't we just handle them here? The 1.5 page was useful because we got a huge lump of bugs in one go. Now that there's just going to be a steady influx of bugs (or not, fingers crossed), I think WP:VPT can handle it. --fvw<SMALL> * </SMALL> 01:13, September 5, 2005 (UTC)
 * Then maybe we should take off the "1.5 bugs" notice. N (t/c) 01:29, 5 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Makes sense, I've removed it. If anyone disagrees feel free to put it back. --fvw<SMALL> * </SMALL> 01:33, September 5, 2005 (UTC)


 * Just don't forget to report bugs at http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/ so we have half a chance of keeping track of them! Remember we've got literally hundreds of wikis here, several dozen active. Not all of our developers are even on this particular wiki, whereas we get notification of bugzilla entries from several directions (including email and live IRC notices). --Brion 07:10, September 5, 2005 (UTC)

question about backups
Reading some recent posts on village pump (proposals) got me thinking. What procedures does WP have in place to recover from a serious attack, should one occur? The last available dump of EN at http://download.wikimedia.org/ is about five weeks old. Is this really the last available snapshot, or are they taken more often? Would it be technically difficult to roll back to a particular point in time if necessary? Dmharvey Talk 20:04, 31 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Each edit has a timestamp associated with it, so you can always roll back to a certain point in time, even without backups. With a little coding you could even hack up something that could have each edit after a certain timestamp only be commited after being approved. --fvw<SMALL> * </SMALL> 01:16, September 1, 2005 (UTC)
 * Well, a little coding. It's technically feasible anyway. --fvw<SMALL> * </SMALL> 01:16, September 1, 2005 (UTC)

Let's not get away from the question: Do we pull regular backups onto tape or CD-foo media and store them offline? Preferably, offsite in a fireproof safe. Or are we just winging it? If the next hurricane hits Florida, will we have to go around, hat in hand, to our mirrors to try to reconstruct the database?

I'd really like to ask that the Community allow this question to stand until answered by a member of the development team. Then, we can throw peanuts. &mdash; Xiong &#29066; talk * 19:12, 2005 September 2 (UTC)


 * Brion has been actively working on a script that will produce dumps more often and more reliably. So long as this happens, it's not really an issue of doing nightly tape backups because a lot of people download those dumps, effectively making backups all over the world. Incremental dumps have also been discussed, and now that we have xml dumps that wish may become a reality. If you are asking if Hurricane Katrina had hit Saint Petersburg, Florida instead of New Orleans, then yes we might have a problem with losing some data. Keep in mind though that we also have data centers in at least Amsterdam and France, with the Yahoo servers coming in South Korea. You can read the September archives for more information. Nothing I said should be construed as true or official :) --Alterego 19:28, September 2, 2005 (UTC)
 * i'm pretty damn sure that the lopar and knams machines are just squids. I don't think they have copies of the database there. Plugwash 00:41, 10 September 2005 (UTC)
 * knams machines also compute stats, and held (hold?) a mirror for the dumps. If you want a better answer, mail wikitech-l and ask. -- Jeronim 07:07, 10 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Last time a hurricane threatened, dumps and other important data were copied to developers' home computers and a few other machines. -- Jeronim 07:07, 10 September 2005 (UTC)

Make history less cluttered by reverts
Currently a large part of the history is cluttered by vandalism and reverts thereof. This is inconvenient when I want to simply look at the history in order to (for example) see where some inaccurate fact comes from. I think there should be a way for the history UI to show identical versions in the history, and a way to hide all the versions in between (in edit wars this would only help those agreeing with the current HEAD version, but it does no harm anyway). Of course, something similar to "svn blame" would be even better. R6144 05:14, 25 August 2005 (UTC)
 * An excellent idea. It would also be lovely to be able to see when a particular bit of text worked its way into an article (i.e. without needing to perform the manual binary search that I currently use). Dmharvey [[Image:User_dmharvey_sig.png]] Talk 17:25, 25 August 2005 (UTC)

What is "svn blame" ? StuRat 21:02, 26 August 2005 (UTC)
 * At a guess its a system for subversion for figuring out what edit is responsible for introducing a particulat peice of text. Plugwash 19:54, 31 August 2005 (UTC)
 * "svn blame" is similar to "cvs annotate". For each line in the file, it tells you the time and/or version number, as well as the author, of the most recent change that affected that line.  &mdash;AlanBarrett 09:30, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

Editing a page and the Insert Box causing saving errors
Several times I have been bitten by the Insert box at the bottom of the standard skin, edit screen. It is frequently very slow to form and so with a typical edit of
 * 1) Edit a section
 * 2) [show preview]
 * 3) Yes looks OK [Save Page]

If the save page is done before the complete skin has been returned the section being edited is saved on top of the whole page. Looking a page refreshes after a show preview, the major component of the page which seems to be the slowest to draw is the "insert box" by a large margin. As the number of characters in the insert box has increased, its rate of drawing seems to be getting slower and this is causing more page save errors.

When I had a dial up connection to my ISP I put it down to a slow line. But now I have a broadband connection and it is still happening so I guess it is server related.

It has happened to me a number of times and I have seen it happen to others. eg
 * First English Civil War
 * Wikipedia:Redirects for deletion

I suggest that the Insert box is turned into a link to pop-up page, for anyone needs these characters. After all for most page edits these additional characters are not used. This would have three advantages it would: --Philip Baird Shearer 12:39, 3 September 2005 (UTC)
 * 1) Reduce load on the server if it did not have to put out these characters for every page edit;
 * 2) Reduce load on the network;
 * 3) Reduce the likelihood of a section being saved as the complete page because the whole page is slow to download.
 * which apart from being annoying causes an unnecessary load on the database servers to save the large change and then save a large reversal for the fix.


 * The key technical problem is that the hidden tokens identifying whether something is a section or not aren't loaded till near the very end, so it is possible on a slow page load for someone to hit save before the token saying what section is being editted is available (it defaults to full page editting) I will report that as a bug.  Dragons flight 16:32, September 3, 2005 (UTC)


 * See 1181. Dragons flight 17:43, September 3, 2005 (UTC)

Greek characters
Can I put Greek characters into an article using the "alternative language" set up from Windows?

Αθήνα which only needs one press for each letter and looks fine on my screen here

But the article on Athens for example has &# 913;&# 952;&# 942;&# 957;&# 945; (without the spaces) which looks like html and which takes a lot longer to work out/type

I have RTFM but cannot find anything definitive

thanks, John

Saltmarsh 11:37, 3 September 2005 (UTC)


 * Yes, you can add them directly. Before the upgrade to MediaWiki 1.5, they were automatically converted to the HTML character escapes you see in the article; but you still could add them directly (the conversion was done by the server). What you see is a leftover from before the upgrade (you can change them to the displayed characters, if you wish). --cesarb 16:23, 3 September 2005 (UTC)


 * In fact, I think that changing them is recommended: it allows for a much more intuitive reading of characters when editing. &mdash; Ambush Commander <sup style="font-family:serif;">(Talk) 16:41, September 3, 2005 (UTC)


 * Yes, but we already have a bot doing it, so there's no pressing need to do it by hand. --cesarb 18:28, 3 September 2005 (UTC)


 * User:Curpsbot-unicodify is currently working on Polish articles, but I ran it on Athens just now . Note that the bot only converts character entities that are commonly printable in default fonts, thus a few character entities (&amp;#7944;, &amp;#8134; etc) in the "Greek Extended" Unicode range (U+1F00 to U+1FFF) are left uncoverted. -- Curps 19:00, 3 September 2005 (UTC)


 * Saltmarsh 06:35, 4 September 2005 (UTC) thank you all - John

Deleting an article not in user contributions?
Is there a reason, technical or otherwise, that when an admin deletes a page it does not appear in their user contributions, I think it would be fairly useful if it did show up, then we could see what an admin has been doing, we (admins) would be more accountable. Martin - The non-blue non-moose 22:23, 2 September 2005 (UTC)


 * Special:Log/Delete serves this purpose. At a technical level, deleted content is removed from the article database and so shows up in no one's contributions.  This includes all past contributions as well, so your contrib list will never include deleted articles.  Dragons flight 22:30, September 2, 2005 (UTC)


 * Whoops sorry, i never noticed you could filter it out to see an individuals deletions. Mind you it would still be nice to see it in the contribs, but it isnt that important. thnks Martin - The non-blue non-moose 22:43, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

CSS style for no printing?
I belive there is a CSS style that allows e.g. a paragraph or part of a table to show on screen but not when printed. Which style(s) would that be? With such styles, is it possible to discriminate between colour printers and black/white printers? --Eddi (Talk)  09:39, 2 September 2005 (UTC)


 * All you need to do is find a style in the print stylesheet that has display:none and voila. It'd be a hackish solution though... &mdash; Ambush Commander <sup style="font-family:serif;">(Talk) 12:30, September 2, 2005 (UTC)


 * Thanks, but where do I find the print stylesheet so that I can look for the right style? --Eddi (Talk)  13:58, 2 September 2005 (UTC)


 * It's on MediaWiki:Monobook.css, the class is "noprint". --cesarb 14:34, 2 September 2005 (UTC)


 * Works fine. Thank you very much. --Eddi (Talk)  15:45, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

Invalid titles
I've run a process to find pages in the database with invalid/inaccessible titles and rename them. The ones with invalid characters or that conflicted with existing normalized forms have had 'Broken/' prefixed to their names, and are listed at Special:Prefixindex/Broken/

These are mostly leftover from old software bugs since fixed, and a lot of them are redirects created by page moves to corrected titles and can now be discarded. --Brion 01:33, September 2, 2005 (UTC)


 * Great. I will check them and delete the ones that do not need to be saved. --cesarb 02:06, 2 September 2005 (UTC)


 * I cleaned the first page. Will continue later. --cesarb 04:00, 2 September 2005 (UTC)


 * All done. --cesarb 22:04, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

Personal photo on user page, copyright?
If I want to add a picture of myself to my user page, what copyright selection should I choose? natsukigirl 23:10, 1 September 2005 (UTC)
 * This link should be useful: User:Vorash/Wikiusers gallery. Lots of examples. Sometimes they don't add any copyright notice at all, others, and  . It depends on how you want your picture to be distributed (personally, I'd not include a photo at all). &mdash; Ambush Commander <sup style="font-family:serif;">(Talk) 23:35, September 1, 2005 (UTC)
 * Thanks... well, I don't mind putting a picture... I just figured it might be fun... also, since I have a Japanese monkier, I wanted to have a picture showing that I'm caucasian (don't want to mislead anyone, lol). I suppose I'll just add a link to a picture instead. Thanks for the advice. -- Natsuki Girl\talk

Diff timeout
Was that big server slowness we just had related to the vandal who was posting very large pages? It might be worth lowering the CPU limit on the diff operation a little then. --fvw<SMALL> * </SMALL> 07:10, September 1, 2005 (UTC)

MySQL Binary values
I was wondering how I can get php to insert binary values into the database for the wiki. If anybody has the code for this, please let me know. Thank you, shardsofmetal 00:03, September 1, 2005 (UTC)

Account creation throttle
I've just found MediaWiki:Acct creation throttle hit which states that "Sorry, you have already created $1 accounts. You can't make any more.". Does anyone know what that limit is? Thryduulf 21:20, 31 August 2005 (UTC)
 * I don't have access to the mediawiki boxes, but the default is 0 (disabled). That may just be to avoid dependence on memcached (which it requires) though, if you want an authorative answer you should probably go to wikitech-l. --fvw<SMALL><;FONT COLOR="green">*</FONT></SMALL> 01:11, September 1, 2005 (UTC)


 * 10 per day -- Tim Starling 13:24, September 1, 2005 (UTC)


 * Do you think cutting it down might slow down Willy? N (t/c) 01:22, 2 September 2005 (UTC)


 * No, I think it would just annoy people using transparent ISP proxies. -- Tim Starling 02:02, September 2, 2005 (UTC)

Special:Movepage should refer to meta:Help:Renaming (moving) a page
It would be nice if the instructions that appear when you click on the "move" tab at the top of a page (taking you to Special:Movepage/PAGENAME) contained a link to meta:Help:Renaming (moving) a page. Possible wording:


 * WARNING! This can be a drastic and unexpected change for a popular page; please be sure you understand the consequences of this before proceeding.
 * Please read meta:Help:Renaming (moving) a page for more detailed instructions.
 * (form here)
 * (form here)

I don't know if these instructions can be changed by sysops, or if it takes a developer, or what, so I am posting here rather than filing a bug report.

Zack 20:56, 31 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Try MediaWiki:Movepagetext (protected). Bovlb 21:00:02, 2005-08-31 (UTC)
 * I've added the link as suggested at MediaWiki:Movepagetext. Messages such as this are contained in the MediaWiki: namespace, you can see all of them at Special:Allmessages. Almost all the messages are protected, but can be edited by admins. I've copied this discussion to MediaWiki talk:Movepagetext for reference, but for future reference the village pump is an apropriate place to propose changes such as this as the MediaWiki pages are not heavily watched. Thryduulf 21:06, 31 August 2005 (UTC)
 * And somewhere, Willy on Wheels is seeing the new warning and slowly realizing why he keeps getting blocked. Aquillion 01:21, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

Adding other users sigs
The only stupid question is one that isn't asked. How do other users go back and insert signatures for previous users? SchmuckyTheCat 19:35, 31 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Like &#123;{unsigned}}?  [[smoddy ]] 19:57, 31 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Or you can just do it manually. It's not that much more work, since the hard part is manually cutting-and-pasting the name and time in any case. Although, I suppose it's important to put something that indicates that the signiture was added later and not by the original user, so I suppose &#123;{unsigned}} is a good standard way of doing that.Aquillion 01:19, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

More efficient handling of indefinitely-blocked non-anon-IP user accounts
Very often a vandal sock user account is created, runs for a few minutes, and gets indefinitely blocked. 99 times out of 100, after realizing that it's been indef-blocked, that sock never even tries to come back, yet our block list gets cluttered up forever, taking up memory space and affecting performance.

Can we handle indefinitely blocked non-anonymous-IP user accounts a different way? Take them out of the block list and put them on a "banned-user login list" that only needs to be checked at login time, not with every edit. When a user on the "banned-user login list" logs in, an indefinite block is temporarily reinstated in the block list and the login proceeds, so they can read and edit their talk page, and so forth, while still being blocked. However, after 12 hours or so, the "banned user" gets logged out automatically and their block is removed from the block list (but they can log in again anytime). If setting a timer for each such logged-in "banned user" is impractical, we could just set a fixed time (once a day? once a week?) when every logged-in "banned user" get logged out, globally, and their blocks are purged from the block list.

The advantage is performance: nearly all of the time with nearly all indefinitely blocked user accounts, we only need to do checks at login time and only in relatively rare cases will we need to have them temporarily in the block list, where the checks get done with every edit.

At least this would work with user accounts. For indefinite anonymous IP blocks (open proxies, etc), there doesn't seem to be any way to avoid doing checks with every edit.

-- Curps 16:56, 31 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Even that is over the top, I seem to recall logins merely set a cookie that is a hash of the password, so users don't need to log in via the server if they have sufficient technical expertise. A more obvious approach would be to allow admins to set the password of an account to something that disallows logins altogether, with the appropriate loging (as a block). This could even be done transparantly, by storing appending a magic token to hashed password in the password column of the user table, which could be restored on unblocking.


 * Technical point, I believe cookie tokens are now randomized and unrelated to your password. If I recall correctly, this was changed after someone's password was found by brute force from a cookie.  Dragons flight


 * Block lookups shouldn't be that big of a deal though, they can be done O(1) or O(log n), so unless the block lookup still shows up in a big way in the profiling, I'm not sure this is as much a technical issue as a user interface issue (the block list is a pain to load, which could be easily solved by not displaying all username blocks older than a month by default). --fvw<SMALL> * </SMALL> 23:39, August 31, 2005 (UTC)


 * I agree, while blocks could be optimized it would be a pain to implement for little gain. By the way, in case no one has noticed, the block list is now paginated and searchable so it is much faster and nicer to deal with.  ;)  Dragons flight 01:26, September 1, 2005 (UTC)
 * So it is, and there was much rejoicing. --fvw<SMALL> * </SMALL> 01:34, September 1, 2005 (UTC)

How is the block list implemented? Is it in memory, or does it require a database lookup each time? Every single day brings a few more indefinitely blocked socks/vandals, and this will grow without end forever into the future. Can the current implementation handle that? -- Curps 04:57, 1 September 2005 (UTC)


 * The blocklist is cached so no database lookup is necessary most of the time. I believe the cache is only purged when the blocklist changes.  The key aspect is a match of user id numbers, which could logically be implemented as a quick search or similar (i.e. O(log n) time), though I don't know if this is presently the case.  The caching and opportunity for good time complexity suggest to me that it could be very robust to expansion.  Dragons flight 06:59, September 1, 2005 (UTC)


 * Where are you all getting this from? I optimised the block overhead on page saves a week before this discussion began, it now accounts for only 3% of save time. And I optimised Special:Ipblocklist, and Brion implemented paging and searching, so there's no problem there anymore. It's O(N) and there's no caching other than the MySQL query cache, but that doesn't make it a good optimisation target. I'll put up some current save profiling data on Profiling. -- Tim Starling 15:05, September 1, 2005 (UTC)


 * My apologies. I guess I conflated some knowledge about what BlockCache was supposed to do with the rest of blocking.  I realize now that this isn't even used for user blocking.  Even running as a SQL call though shouldn't it be better than O(N) in time complexity (not that it is neccesary implemented that way), but searching for a specific user id in a list of user ids (and other data) is the kind of thing that really ought not to require looking at every row, if there was any concern that it was slow (does SQL not optimize that kind of thing natively?).  I realize we may also be talking past each other.  My reading of Curps comment was with respect to how block check is implemented on user actions not how the Special:Ipblocklist works.  Dragons flight 15:23, September 1, 2005 (UTC)


 * The BlockCache class is still used, it's just that the actual caching part was commented out to fix a bug (much to my annoyance). So for a while, it was just loading the whole ipblocks table on every save, then discarding it. The reason we needed a block cache in the first place was for efficient handling of range blocks, which needed to be stored in memory in a particular format, different to the current schema. The optimisation I did recently was to have BlockCache load only range blocks, and to do a separate indexed query for IP and username blocks. The query to load only range blocks is currently not indexed, requiring a full table scan, hence the O(N). The next task for optimisation would be to change the schema to handle range blocks properly, and thus do away with BlockCache. It's probably not practical to cache block information in memcached, due to its poor reliability. -- Tim Starling 00:49, September 2, 2005 (UTC)

commas and dashes
There are a number of wikipedia articles where the title of the article uses a comma in place of a dash. For example, the television series Have Gun — Will Travel is listed in wikipedia as "Have Gun, Will Travel". Is there a reason to avoid using a dash in the title of a Wikipedia article? Rick Norwood 13:13, 31 August 2005 (UTC)


 * As of a few months ago, not any more. -- Curps 16:42, 31 August 2005 (UTC)

user page help
I am trying to add myself in the Category:Wikipedians in the United States and the ohio sub category, with no success. Can someone help me? You can edit my user page, the codes are at the vary bottom of the page. --Admiral Roo 11:38, August 31, 2005 (UTC)
 * Never mind. I got it.  --Admiral Roo 11:40, August 31, 2005 (UTC)

MS Publisher
I have written an article in MS PUblishers on WIndows XP. I want to switch to a Mac G4 - is there an equivalaent program for Mac where I can read what I wrote, not destroy the formatting and seeing the pictures? If this is the wrong forum please let me knwo where to post Thank you

Peter T Knoepfler tamas@u.washington.edu


 * you can get microsoft office for the mac that should be able to open it as probablly will openoffice but this isn't really the place to be asking such questions. Plugwash 19:58, 31 August 2005 (UTC)

lowercase #redirect directives just broke
Why did the #redirect directive become case-sensitive? I've been typing them in lowercase for months, and today someone broke them all. —Michael Z. 2005-08-30 16:06 Z 


 * They don't look broken to me, do you have an example? Note that redirects have the same case sensitivity as links, i.e. only the first letter is case-insensitive. For example, #redirect main page won't work. -- Tim Starling 02:32, August 31, 2005 (UTC)


 * I mean the word "REDIRECT" must now be in all-caps. If you type it in lowercase, Wikimedia treats the "#" as the first item in an ordered list.  —Michael Z. 2005-09-2 21:09 Z 


 * Doesn't seem broken to me, either. Could you link to a page where it's broken? &mdash;Cryptic (talk) 21:14, 2 September 2005 (UTC)


 * Well, look at that. It's been fixed.  I was confused because previewing a page still makes it show up as a list item.  Cheers.  —Michael Z. 2005-09-2 22:03 Z 

Can't load this diff
When I try to load this diff, Wikipedia fails and gives me a load of unprocessed wiki markup and the error Fatal error: Allowed memory size exhausted. Is it just me or is there a problem with Wikipedia (i.e. is anyone able to load it correctly)? --IByte 23:15, 29 August 2005 (UTC)
 * I get the following content, just if anyone gets anything different:

Line 159: Line 159: New Zealand's landscape has appeared in a number of television programmes and films. In particular, the television series Hercules and Xena were filmed around Auckland, the film Heavenly Creatures in Christchurch. The television series The Tribe is set and filmed in New Zealand as well. Director Peter Jackson shot the epic The Lord of the Rings trilogy in various locations around the country, taking advantage of the spectacular and relatively unspoiled landscapes, and Mount Taranaki was used as a stand-in for Mount Fuji in The Last Samurai. Other movies currently filming in New Zealand include King Kong and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. New Zealand's landscape has appeared in a number of television programmes and films. In particular, the television series Hercules and Xena were filmed around Auckland, the film Heavenly Creatures in Christchurch. The television series The Tribe is set and filmed in New Zealand as well. Director Peter Jackson shot the epic The Lord of the Rings trilogy in various locations around the country, taking advantage of  the spectacular and relatively unspoiled landscapes, and Mount Taranaki was used as a stand-in for Mount Fuji in The Last Samurai. Other movies currently filming in New Zealand include King Kong and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 52428800 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 35 bytes) in /usr/local/apache/common- local/php-1.5/includes/DifferenceEngine.php on line 1091

--Tito xd 23:22, 29 August 2005 (UTC)


 * That usually means that a vandal has overwhelmed the difference engine by instering lots of pasted material. --Golbez 23:25, August 29, 2005 (UTC)


 * That's what you get when you rely on technology invented in 1786. --R.Koot 01:03, 30 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Yes, I hope that naming coincidence was deliberate, not embarrassing. Superm401 | Talk 01:14, August 30, 2005 (UTC)


 * You can still see the revision itself: looks like the vandal added a couple hundred screenfuls of "balah" to the page. --cesarb 02:19, 30 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Fixed -- Tim Starling 02:26, August 31, 2005 (UTC)

Bots
Where should I go to ask questions about bots. I can't find software to build a bot, since pywikipedia only currently supports a handful of wikis. Did I miss something or will it work with any MediaWiki wiki? Also, would I just be able to program a bot into a php script (Will I be able to run a php script to perform an automated task?)

Thank You, shardsofmetal 21:35, August 29, 2005 (UTC)


 * Regarding which bots do what, you should probably ask on the wikitech-l mailing list. If it's your wiki, and you have console (and database) access then you don't need a bot at all - you can just write a script that manipulates the database directly. It can be in php or anything else you like.  Take a look at the scripts in the "maintainance" directory in your mediawiki install. -- Finlay McWalter |  Talk 23:16, August 29, 2005 (UTC)


 * Bots is generally the place to be for bot-related discussions. The mailinglists serve their uses, but shouldn't be required to do anything. --fvw<SMALL> * </SMALL> 01:18, September 1, 2005 (UTC)

How can WP use Squid?
I know that Wikipedia uses the Squid cache to cache some outgoing webpages, but I don't see how this can work. I mean, when I view an article, I see all kinds of things that I get to configure: the skin, my username and links at the top, configurable dates, thumbnail sizes, etc. How can the page content be cached but these not? N (t/c) 18:44, 29 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Stuff for signed in users isn't cached by the squids. Only anons get cached pages; as the overwhelming number of pageviews are from people who aren't signed in, this turns out to be a very effective optimisation. -- Finlay McWalter |  Talk 18:50, August 29, 2005 (UTC)


 * however the page content is cached in the parser cache even for logged in users. Squid is just used because it can serve up the anon pageviews with less overhead than the parser cache system. Plugwash 18:56, 29 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Cool idea, thanks. Is it the wikitext or HTML that's cached in the parser cache? N (t/c) 18:59, 29 August 2005 (UTC)
 * The HTML from article content is cached. &mdash; Sverdrup 19:13, 29 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Then how are date formats, image thumbnail sizes, and the like configurable? From my brief experiments, those are done through changing the article HTML. N (t/c) 22:37, 29 August 2005 (UTC)


 * I think what it actually caches is the tree of objects obtained by parsing the wikitext but i'm not totally sure. Plugwash 23:03, 29 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Those options that change rendered HTML are included in the hash key that cached output is stored under, so users with the same options share cached data with one another. --Brion 23:33, August 29, 2005 (UTC)


 * Ah-hah! Thank you. N (t/c) 23:38, 29 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Does the parser cache explain the "memcached" apaches on the server list? It appears the large-memory apaches are configured differently. – Fudoreaper 00:52:19, 2005-09-01 (UTC)


 * No, memcached's cache database hits. --fvw<SMALL> * </SMALL> 01:13, September 1, 2005 (UTC)


 * I beg to differ. Most of the memcached space is used by the parser cache. It also stores various other objects. Using it to store database results in the naive manner suggested by the memcached webpage would be a bit of a disaster for MediaWiki. -- Tim Starling 02:11, September 2, 2005 (UTC)

Is my password vulnerable?
Yesterday, someone I know told me that he uses Wikipedia but won't tell me his username because there's a vulnerability I could use to get his password, and that I could find more information in Bugzilla. He's very knowledgeable and qualified to make this statement, but also quite paranoid, so I don't know how seriously to take his statement. A Bugzilla search for "password" turns up nothing like this. Any comments? N (t/c) 04:36, 28 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Just the usual PW advice:


 * 1) Don't use anything obvious, like your username or real name.
 * 2) Don't use English words.
 * 3) Use a combo of letters and numbers.
 * 4) Make it as long as possible.
 * 5) The "remember password" option does store it as a cookie, which makes it more vulnerable.


 * StuRat 04:57, 28 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Yeah, I know, this question is about a technical bug in MediaWiki. And I'm pretty sure the "remember password" option only stores a session ID in a cookie, which would allow someone else to use my account (temporarily) but not read my password. N (t/c) 05:01, 28 August 2005 (UTC)


 * We used to send out the MD5 hash of the password in a cookie, if you selected "remember me" checkbox as you logged in. This, combined with a few XSS vulnerabilities that we hadn't bothered fixing, is probably what led to the compromise of some passwords by a brute-force attack on the hash. All the XSS vulnerabilities are fixed now (we hope), and contrary to what StuRat says, we no longer send out the password hash under any circumstances, so arbitrary HTML is not really a problem anymore. We've also had some very weak passwords (most often blank) broken by dictionary attacks against the server. This attack is only feasible if the target password is one of the few hundred most common passwords used. -- Tim Starling 05:17, August 28, 2005 (UTC)


 * Well, how about an SSL login then? That's still a major sniffing vulnerability. -- Curps 06:26, 28 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Not one that's specific to MediaWiki. Our cluster design makes SSL difficult to implement, although we may do so concurrently with SUL support. JavaScript password hashing would be much simpler and would provide reasonable security. -- Tim Starling 08:21, August 28, 2005 (UTC)


 * I hope it can be done one way or another, reasonably soon. Sooner or later, vandals exploit every vulnerability they can find. -- Curps 08:34, 28 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Vandals are teengers who barely know how to use their own browsers, maybe you mean hackers. And it's only an issue if your network is insecure on your end, which is increasingly rare these days. It's far more likely that a breach will come via unauthorised code running on the user's computer -- we often get spam posted from legitimate user accounts due to spyware infections. -- Tim Starling 10:26, August 28, 2005 (UTC)


 * It's perhaps a little too complacent to assume that all vandals are clueless. Wikipedia is a very high-profile target and seriously compromising it would be worth major bragging rights.  Passwords could be sniffed at any hop, no?  Maybe some vandals have day jobs.  It would be nice to have SSL. -- Curps 11:57, 28 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Not to mention, a lot of people probably use the same password for WP as for everything else, so cracking one could be quite profitable. N (t/c) 17:01, 28 August 2005 (UTC)

Worst possible scenario is that a Sysop's account get's compromised and then the vandal uses a bot to wreak all sorts of administrative havoc on the project. Of course, this is a problem for any system... &mdash; Ambush Commander <sup style="font-family:serif;">(Talk) 17:12, August 28, 2005 (UTC)


 * Nickptar, please ask your friend to e-mail me with details of this vulnerability. If there really is one, obviously we'd prefer to fix it. (He can PGP-encrypt the mail if he likes; I PGP-sign the release announcement mails so he can do a sig check against one of those to confirm that I really am the MediaWiki release engineer.) --Brion 03:54, August 29, 2005 (UTC)


 * Update: all he's heard is that there are widespread rumors of such a vulnerability, which he found out about from a Slashdot comment. Doesn't sound very credible. N (t/c) 22:17, 31 August 2005 (UTC)


 * More info: the /. article was about a month ago and linked to a Wikipedia article. Some clueless person saw that the linked article had been vandalized and thought WP had been hacked. This started a serious discussion of WP vulnerabilities and prompted the comment about the password issue. Hopefully a regular /. reader will remember this. N (t/c) 01:44, 1 September 2005 (UTC)


 * Any website that requires password login and doesn't use SSL is pissing in the wind. If you have to type in your password during a normal login, anybody who controls a computer between yours and the host computer can see your password as plain as day.  It passes unencrypted and they just write it down alongside your username.  For practical purposes, on sites such as Wikipedia, this is not a problem.  But if you ever pass sensitive information across a network that you do not totally control you may want to rethink what you're doing.  Even SSL isn't uncrackable, but it's better than walking around with your pants around your ankles, which is how most web transactions are carried out. --Tony Sidaway Talk  02:07, 1 September 2005 (UTC)
 * IMO this is overly alarmist. If SSL (really TLS) is properly implemented, it's very close to uncrackable.  Various browsers' implementations of SSL have been cracked (seems like this might be worth an article, off hand I can't find one), but I think all the current versions (when using 128-bit or greater keys) are essentially uncrackable.  Of course, most users don't understand enough to know whether or not to trust a "secure" web server (many such servers shouldn't be trusted), but I think claiming SSL is crackable in general simply isn't true. -- Rick Block (talk) 04:13, September 1, 2005 (UTC)

What else links here?
In preparation for the probably deletion of the stub redirect template uk-geo-stub, I've gont through that template's "what links here" and emptied it of all articles, as can be seen here. However, although there are no articles shown there, several articles still use the template - Campsea Ashe, for one. Why aren't they showing up on the "What links here" list? Grutness...  wha?  06:31, 13 September 2005 (UTC)


 * This is a recurring bug related to how Whatlinkshere interacts with redirects. Since your template was previously a redirect to UK-geo-stub some of the pages that added uk-geo-stub while it was a redirect and have not been editted since it was changed to its own template will show up in the linkshere list for UK-geo-stub and only there, even though they have always been using uk-geo-stub.  Note that your example, Campsea Ashe, is in that inappropriate links list.  So you could go through and check the 700 or so articles reportedly using UK-geo-stub and see which ones are actually instances of uk-geo-stub, or you might just recall that redirects are cheap and decide it is not worth the effort, which is what I would be inclined to do.  Dragons flight 06:48, September 13, 2005 (UTC)


 * P.S. Dumb as it is, I just ran a test with another template that suggests that if you restore this to a redirect and then look at the links list for UK-geo-stub you'll find a section there for the pages coming from uk-geo-stub as a redirect. This may allow you to finish this cleanup if you think it is worth doing.  Dragons flight 06:55, September 13, 2005 (UTC)
 * Thanks - that should do the trick. It'll be easier to delete soon anyway - is becoming less populated since the stubs have been split into England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. Grutness...  wha?  07:37, 13 September 2005 (UTC)

Section editing issue
Try editing using the following link. The section appears blank, adding to it appends the additional text to the end of the section. Does a developer want to look into this? - 203.134.166.99 02:25, 13 September 2005 (UTC)


 * He was using explicit H1 tags on his talk page. The use of any explicit header tags causes bugginess for section editting in Mediawiki.  I have editted his formatting to avoid them.  Dragons flight 03:00, September 13, 2005 (UTC)

Permanent link missing from Classic skin
It seems that there's no "Permanent link" link in the Classic skin. Please could this be added? (Also, it's not a terribly good name for the link, as it's inaccurate (someone can delete or move the page) and doesn't convey the meaning that say "Link to this revision" does). Lupin|talk|popups 23:48, 12 September 2005 (UTC)

Missing bar on search box
I've noticed that the bottom bar of the search box is missing on my computer. It only seems to affect me when I'm using firefox and at normal text size. Does anyone else notice this? tommylommykins 21:33, September 12, 2005 (UTC)


 * This is a known problem in some versions of Mozilla/Firefox; due to a rounding error, sometimes borders are not drawn. --Brion 00:02, September 13, 2005 (UTC)

Text disappearing under an image in transcluded section
I'm not too hot on this stuff, but at Portal:Comics the text disappears under the image in the top section, even though when viewed seperately at Portal:Comics/Intro it doesn't. Any ideas how to fix this? Steve block talk 20:16, 12 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Whilst the thumb tag might have worked, it didn't look right, and it also creates a blue shadow, which is another problem. Any other ideas? Steve block  talk 21:44, 12 September 2005 (UTC)

Issues With Abortion Debate
If I search for Abortion Debate, I get an adult film actress. Also, my logged in info is not displayed, though if I navigate away it comes back on the very next page. Anyone else experiencing this?


 * Hmm, when I put "Abortion Debate" into the wikipedia search box and hit search, all the links are highly relevant to the subject; there's nothing about actresses. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 21:35, September 12, 2005 (UTC)

Problem has resolved itself. No idea...thnaks. Daemon8666 20:56, 13 September 2005 (UTC)

Has anyone else noticed how quickly this page gets Googled?
I have noticed that if I want a new article to show up on Google, the best way to make that happen is to make an oblique reference to it on this page (as a link, of course). Even one or two days after I post here, my page gets spidered and shows up at the top of Google. Nothing else seems to work.

Are there any other help/technical pages that get googled this quickly? paul klenk 13:36, 12 September 2005 (UTC)

Namespace selection in "What links here"
Why doesn't namespace filtering work in the "What link here" section. I've tried putting in the url, but it doens't work. Is it reasonable that this feature will be introduced soon? We at the Dab's with links project would be much appreciative.--Commander Keane 03:51, September 11, 2005 (UTC)
 * AFAIK, it has been disabled on purpose due to performance issues. --cesarb 04:33, 11 September 2005 (UTC)
 * What does "performance issues" mean exactly? --Commander Keane 05:42, September 11, 2005 (UTC)
 * The overall system architecture is outlined at Wikimedia_servers. In this architecture the Apache servers and the master database server are generally the most loaded, and where most of the editor-visible delays occur.  As these servers become overloaded, an ongoing analysis is made to determine what can be done to improve responsiveness while continuing to serve an increasing load with a finite number of servers (and finite hardware budget).  Wikipedia is among the top 50 highest traffic web sites in the world (see Wikipedia.org_is_more_popular_than...), with ever expanding load but with no revenue source related to its popularity (and, hence, no way to expand capacity to meet increased load except by requesting donations).  The technical staff is largely volunteer.


 * This is what "performance issues" means. -- Rick Block (talk) 19:06, September 11, 2005 (UTC)
 * "Performance issues" means whatlinkshere requires a lookup on our reverse index of links and it being expensive for namespace filtering. --Alterego 21:30, September 11, 2005 (UTC)
 * Might it be that the 20 new Yahoo-based servers have not been completely set up, causing the current glitches in service? Ancheta Wis 22:28, 11 September 2005 (UTC)

Verification Proposial: Academic Subculture
I sent an e-mail to info after reading the article in wired magazine about the criticism that wikipedia is not taken seriously as an academic source. I wrote up a proposal to add academia controled pages in parallel with the publicly contributed pages.

Please take a look at tell me what you think:

Academic Verification Proposal

I am sure this is an issue being addressed elsewhere an I would be happy to discuss this matter with other people.

I am also posting this on the technical comment page

Idea to combat "Sneaky" Vandalism: Crackpot or Clever?
Perhaps all of the active WP'ns should "adopt" 15 or 20 pages which are not being watched or edited. This way, someone is babysitting them quietly, and they come up on the radar if edited. The highly edited articles are the least susceptible to "sneaky" vandals. The more they are watched, the more likely they undergo scrutiny without extra help and get reverted right away.

The idea occurred to me when I found "slutty stripper" comments on a little disambiguation page for Non sequitur (disambiguation). It is clear that vandals try to target these kind of pages.

The value of this idea is not to protect these pages; since they are rarely looked at, their value is not very high. The value is to catch the really sneaky people and get rid of them before they do serious damage.

It wouldn't require much time, because these pages are not going to show up on our watchlist pages very often anyway. When they do, we can take a quick look.

Whaddy'a think? paul klenk 15:45, 10 September 2005 (UTC)
 * At this point, I think most vandalism is caught in near real time by folks doing "recent change" patrol (see RC patrol). Augmenting this with every page being watched is certainly not a bad idea, but ensuring all pages are watched (or that some minimal set of users are always watching recent changes) requires a degree of coordination that I think makes it unlikely to happen.  Note that there are currently more than 1000 new articles created every day . -- Rick Block (talk) 16:30, September 10, 2005 (UTC)


 * The matter of finding unwatched (or ill watched) pages and adding them to people's watchlist has been moved before, but it hasn't proceeded. The problem is that it entails producing a list of unwatched articles; that list itself is clearly a problem in itself, as it's an inviting target list for vandals.


 * Your comment got me to thinking, however. It would be possible (if someone were to write a mediawiki extension for it) to compile that list and have the list accessible to a trusted bot.  The bot would automatically administer the "lost sheep" scheme.  To participate, users would put a specific template on their user page.  Over a period of time the bot would assign ten random articles to each person who had expressed an interest, and add them to their watchlist.  There would be lots of issues to work out (how many people should be watching an article, when to ignore watches by inactive users, how to avoid gaming by watch-only sockpuppet accounts, etc.).  And it's quite a lot of work to code the thing (and keep it from eating too much server resource).  It would be easier if the bot was client side; in that case it couldn't maniplate a volunteer's watchlist, but would leave them a message listing articles for them to add to their watchlist themselves. -- Finlay McWalter |  Talk 16:34, September 10, 2005 (UTC)


 * I agree that manually attempting the plan would raise prohibitive admin overheads. A bot run by one or two trusted users with access to a Special list sounds good and I can't imagine the bot being a lot of coding &mdash; though the server bit might be if there's no way yet implemented to track watches on a page. The only way to assess whether it's practical though would be to get some figures... just how many pages are we talking about handing out?  If you want to avoid vandals using their watchlist as their source of pages to scribble on you'd have to give the same page to three users simultaneously, minimum I'd say. And only let users with 100+ edits (or a higher threshshold) sign up or you'll have dozens of sockpuppets just waiting till three of them get the same page simultanously... ~ Veledan • Talk + new 17:39, 10 September 2005 (UTC)


 * FWIW, I often find even blatant vandalism to pages related to the French Revolution and fix them, often as much as 8-12 hours after the fact, clearly not a lot of people watchlisting these. -- Jmabel | Talk 18:24, September 10, 2005 (UTC)

Thanks, everyone, for some great thoughts on this. I think something could be done, if the right person takes an interest in it. Some pages never get attention, some, like Being There sit for a while and then suddenly someone takes an interest in them. You never know. paul klenk 13:28, 12 September 2005 (UTC)

Isn't this a non-issue? If vandalism targets often-viewed pages it gets quickly dealt with by anyone who cares to do a revert. If OTOH vandals target little used pages, it doesn't matter very much, precisely because few people ever get to see those pages anyway. I'm of the opinion that dealing with vandalism via the quick occasional revert is a small price to pay for the mass of knowledge one can find here. Let's not make things more complicated that they need to be.--81.42.154.112 19:07, 13 September 2005 (UTC)


 * I disagree that it's a non-issue. In fact, I think it's among the most critical that WP faces. WP is an encyclopedia, and its reputation and worth as a resource lie in accurate, NPOV treatments of the subjects it covers. Many more people probably look up George Bush than, say, pneumonia; that this is so is no reason that pneumonia need be any less accurately treated. Someone finding a pair of testicles dangling on the page where pneumonia is supposed to be is unlikely to think highly of the encyclopedia (and other articles in it). WP might gain a reputation (it already has, perhaps) for being moderately trustworthy for a small number of common topics but quite unsatisfactory for everything else; in that case, the stated goal of WP to be (and be seen as) a compendium of the sum of knowledge is roundly defeated. A scheduling system is unlikely to work; I think constant improvements to RC patrolling, such that we can reduce the time between vandalism to reversion to something approaching 0, is important. A real problem is patrolling specialized articles: I've sometimes spotted small changes being made to articles outside my own area of expertise whose accuracy I've absolutely no idea of. I'm not sure how this will be solved.— encephalon έγκέφαλον  18:50, 17 September 2005 (UTC)

New feature idea: super-watchlist
The "you have new messages" thing is a very effective way of grabbing my attention, much better than trying to find a page in my bloated watchlist. Could a new "super-watchlist" be set up where changes in pages on that list trigger "thepage has changed" appearing in the "you have new messages" banner? The idea would be that this super-watchlist is a place to put pages you really don't want to miss changes on, so it would supplement rather than replace the existing watchlist mechanism. Also it would get pretty irritating if you have lots of pages on the super-watchlist, so it should contain very few pages. (Such a limit could be enforced by the software if a large super-watchlist was resource intensive to maintain). Lupin 15:42, 10 September 2005 (UTC)

still can't edit move-protected pages on double-click
I know that MediaWiki bugs are fixed fairly quickly, but it seems that this particular bug has not been fixed yet. It doesn't seem like a big deal, but it does get annoying when I'm trying to edit large move-protected pages (such as Copyright problems). --Ixfd64 09:28, 2005 September 10 (UTC)


 * I'll poke at it. (Don't forget to report probs at bugzilla.wikimedia.org... I don't see it in there, so probably nobody but you knows about the bug!) --Brion 22:28, September 10, 2005 (UTC)


 * Works for me with MonoBook skin, but on Classic it's failing. Will see about fixing... --Brion 04:39, September 11, 2005 (UTC)


 * Fixed. --Brion 05:04, September 11, 2005 (UTC)


 * Thank you so much! :) I guess that only a few people noticed this bug, since most people use MonoBook. I probably should have specified that I was using the Classic skin. --Ixfd64 05:29, 2005 September 12 (UTC)

Need tech help
I keep getting this message all day today when I try to post:

Sorry- we have a problem... The wikimedia web server didn't return any response to your request. To get information on what's going on you can visit #wikipedia. An "offsite" status page is hosted on OpenFacts.

What is wrong, and how can I correct it? --Admiral Roo 03:24, September 10, 2005 (UTC)

Frack, it did it to me when I tried posting this message. --Admiral Roo 03:24, September 10, 2005 (UTC)

And it seems it posted my message twice. :( --Admiral Roo 03:25, September 10, 2005 (UTC)
 * Hi Roo, it isn't your fault when this happens. It's just the servers being a bit overloaded.  When you get the 'no response' message on submitting an edit, the system has usually made your update successfully.  It's best not to submit again straight away, as it's usually unnecessary and only increases the server load, although it's only when you are adding a new section to a page such as this that you'd actually see the duplicate edit.
 * My tactic when this happens is to carefully click 'Back' so I have my completed editbox still available and in front of me, then right-click on the 'Article' tab at the top of the page and open it in a new tab/window. When the page comes up, if your edit is already there you can safely close your editor.  If not, give it a minute and re-save your edit. ~ Veledan • Talk + new 14:31, 10 September 2005 (UTC)

This does happen quite often. What I usually do is keep a separate "my contributions" window open, so I can refresh it to see if my edit went through.

It might be nice if the server could somehow flash a "successfully saved your change" message before attempting to display the newly-edited article, so that you'd know that the "no response" means that it was the page display that failed and not the save. -- Curps 18:05, 10 September 2005 (UTC)
 * mmm judging by the title bar it seems it doesn't even get to the point of reqesting the new page (if it did refresh wouldn't cause resubmit). My guess is that mediawiki completes the request to the db successfully but doesn't do it fast enough to serve the redirect to the browser before the squid times out.

SVG uploads
I finally got a rasterizing tool installed that does a better job than ImageMagick, so SVG uploads are now enabled. They'll be automatically rendered to PNG when included inline. (Some day in the future we may also support including the raw SVGs inline for browsers that support it, but that remains unreliable today.)

For now rendering is being down with rsvg. Note that the few SVG files that were uploaded long ago might not render correctly at the moment as their metadata is stored incorrectly, I'll try to fix this. (You can work around it by re-uploading the file if necessary.) --Brion 02:25, September 10, 2005 (UTC)


 * Brion, is it safe to assume that SVG files which import other files (such as PNGs or other SVGs) will not work, due to the directory structure in which mediawiki places uploaded files? -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 22:56, September 10, 2005 (UTC)


 * They won't work because we specifically disallow that for security's sake. (Embedding images within the file in data: urls should work.) --Brion 00:06, September 13, 2005 (UTC)

Why Exif data for old images isn't working
Exif data for old images is not showing up due to memcached entries for them needing to be cleared, see bug 3410 and commons:Commons:Village pump, in the meantime you can action=purge old images to refresh the metadata for them. — 21:45:46, 2005-09-09 (UTC)
 * The issue should be fixed now. — 14:48:50, 2005-09-10 (UTC)

Current two-digit day of month
How do we specify a variable for the current two-digit day of month, not the one-digit day of month given by 29 ? It's impossible to form the ISO international standard date format without a two-digit day of month variable. If not available, could the Wikipedia programmers please add a new variable that gives the day of month always as two digits, naming it, e.g., ? Since Wikipedia is for a worldwide audience, it should only be using the ISO 8601 international standard date and time format for signature time stamps and logged-out skin, instead of inconsistent, mixed formats based on arbitrary user preference. Thanks. --Simian, 2005-09-09, 17:47 Z


 * Please add your comments to http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2522 — 21:41:45, 2005-09-09 (UTC)

Editing problems with Compton, California
I just made several edits to Compton, California. There's something strange going on, as each of my edits incorporated one change or another from a previous edit to the article. If you go to the page history and compare the last six edits, you'll see changes that were not actually part of the edit I was making, but they were the same as someone else's edits from one time or another. At the same time the page has dropped from my Watchlist. Not sure if this is a bug related to recent developments or what. Thanks, -- Gyrofrog (talk) 16:49, 9 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Not that I've looked I wonder if this might be related to Bug 1150. The symptoms are similar, though I wasn't using the browser's "Back" button. -- Gyrofrog (talk) 17:04, 9 September 2005 (UTC)

Image
If anyone knows technical markup for photo layout, I have a question. There's a photo or two at New York's Village Halloween Parade I may want to flip horizontally. paul klenk 15:38, 9 September 2005 (UTC)


 * That's not something the imagemarkup can do (it can only resize images). You'll need to upload a flipped version (flipped in some external program like Photoshop or Gimp), either to the same name as the original or to a different one. -- Finlay McWalter |  Talk 17:42, September 9, 2005 (UTC)


 * Thanks, I'll give it a shot.   paul klenk 17:45, 9 September 2005 (UTC)


 * Obviously, those apps will work(if you can find the right option), but even MS Paint can flip images. Superm401 | Talk 01:48, September 10, 2005 (UTC)


 * Last time I used it (admittedly several years ago) it couldn't save in any sensible file formats like png or jpeg though. Lupin 15:33, 10 September 2005 (UTC)
 * I remember that(the bad old days :) ), but now it can save to JPEG, GIF, and PNG. It's good for quick changes. Superm401 | Talk 04:10, September 13, 2005 (UTC)

using mIRC scripting to access wikipedia
I am trying to write a mIRC script that searches Wikipedia for the requested search parameter. Unfortunately Wikipedia's search scripts go through several redirects which confuse mIRC. I'm wondering if I can get any kind of assistance in terms of determining the easiest way to send a query to Wikipedia and then recieve the results of that query whilst ignoring the redirects in the middle. Help from someone familiar with mIRC script would be fantastic. Thanks


 * I don't see that &mdash; the search box POSTs to Special:Search, with arguments like

search=yourqueryhere&fulltext=Search


 * and gets a 200 response, not a redirect. &mdash; mendel &#9742; 02:33, September 10, 2005 (UTC)

Where can I get a list of all pages in the User namespace?
There is a list of all pages in the article namespace, but I want to index my User pages. Is there a list of all user pages that I can grep? Lupin 03:02, 9 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Is Special:Allpages (from "special pages", then "all pages") close enough? From this page you can select to display pages in the user namespace and, if you start at "user:Lupin" the display starts with your pages (and then continues for quite a long time :) ). -- Rick Block (talk) 03:14, September 9, 2005 (UTC)


 * That's pretty much exactly what I wanted. Thanks! Lupin 03:35, 9 September 2005 (UTC)


 * What you want even more is Special:Prefixindex/User:Lupin. — 17:08:00, 2005-09-09 (UTC)


 * Sweet. Lupin 18:17, 9 September 2005 (UTC)

Typo in Special:Categories
There's a typo on the Special:Categories page. Browse doesn't wikilink. Can someone fix it? Thanks, RDF  20:54, 8 September 2005 (UTC)


 * I tried, but I don't see how. I think the page to edit is Mediawiki:Categoriespagetext, but the wikilink is OK on that page. Maybe this is a bug. Lupin 03:59, 9 September 2005 (UTC)


 * Does it help to revert to the 2 May version? &mdash;Cryptic (talk) 04:25, 9 September 2005 (UTC)


 * No, sadly it doesn't. Both html and wikicode are displayed verbatim in the Special page regardless of what I tried. Lupin 12:25, 9 September 2005 (UTC)

CSS problem
Recently we copied the todo to ta:வார்ப்புரு:Todo in Tamil Wikipedia and translated it. However, it doesn't have a neat box enclosing the links. Apparently, the s/w didn't recognise "class = "Talk-Notice"" directive. So, I copy-created MediaWiki:Common.css and MediaWiki:Monobook.css there at ta:மீடியாவிக்கி:Common.css and ta:மீடியாவிக்கி:Monobook.css respectively, but the problem is not solved yet. Can someone help us out? -- Sundar \talk \contribs 07:13, September 8, 2005 (UTC)

The problem is solved now--Ravishankar 11:54, September 9, 2005 (UTC)

Editor watchlist
I was thinking how great it would be if there was a function that is cosmetically similar to the present special:watchlist, but rather than watching pages, it watches users. Everytime they make an edit they go to the top of your special:EditorWatchlist. It would be great for monitoring potential vandals and also for seeing when friends are online etc.

Probably too technically difficult to be worth implementing, but it would still be great. Martin - The non-blue non-moose 21:01, 7 September 2005 (UTC)


 * There is an IRC channel which tracks recent changes. I can't find it right now, but I'm sure someone has written a program that monitors it, and can do stuff like you want. -- Finlay McWalter |  Talk 21:08, September 7, 2005 (UTC)


 * It's CryptoDerk's Vandal Fighter. -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 21:09, September 7, 2005 (UTC)


 * Downloaded and installed. damn this program is good! thanks Martin - The non-blue non-moose 21:25, 7 September 2005 (UTC)


 * Hmm. The people who are proposing Stalking might not be in favor.  Personally, I'm all in favor of wikistalking, though. Superm401 | Talk 01:13, September 10, 2005 (UTC)

Phantom Redirect
Can somebody tell me how it is possible for Conestoga_wagon to redirect to the French Wikipedia's article on Islam without anything showing up in the page's code or history? More importantly, how do I fix it *when* I see it in the future. --Adamrush 15:58, 7 September 2005 (UTC)


 * Conestoga_wagon works fine for me, showing the english language article. A look at the history of the article shows no sign of any redirect having been there ever. -- Finlay McWalter |  Talk 16:11, September 7, 2005 (UTC)


 * I just clicked on that link in your text and it gave me the same error. Fuck, I hope I don't have some virus.  One other thing, I am using Firefox (no extentions) --Adamrush 16:23, 7 September 2005 (UTC)
 * It works for me, and I'm using firefox. Zoe 21:26, September 7, 2005 (UTC)
 * Problem solved, but only after clearing my cache. No amount of refreshing did the trick.  WTF, mate? --Adamrush 19:59, 8 September 2005 (UTC)


 * Works for me. Firefox 1.0.6 with extensions. &mdash; Ambush Commander <sup style="font-family:serif;">(Talk) 02:14, September 8, 2005 (UTC)


 * Just know that you're not alone. I was redirected from 2005 in rail transport to de:Konzern yesterday.  Something weird was going on and I haven't seen anything to indicate what happened or what resolved it.  slambo 17:22, September 8, 2005 (UTC)

Conestoga wagon looks fine to me. Can't a admin hide a reverted edit in the page history? mrholybrain 15:32, September 10, 2005 (UTC)

Back-button editing weirdness
Up until recently, if I saved a file after editing, then noticed a slight glitch, I'd just click to back button to get back into the editer, make the change, and re-save. No problems. In the last week or so, though, each time this happens I find I'm in edit conflict with myself. What has changed in the last few days that would have caused this, and is there any way of fixing this apparent new bug? Grutness...  wha?  07:54, 7 September 2005 (UTC)


 * Are these section edits or full-page edits?


 * I've disabled the conflict-ignoring for section edits as it has a very nasty habit of corrupting data when doing multiple section edits, and this seemed the lesser of various evils. --Brion 10:30, September 7, 2005 (UTC)

From memory, they've been section edits, but I could be wrong about that. Grutness...  wha?  07:05, 8 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Further to that - it's happening on both sections and full articles. Grutness...  wha?  01:03, 9 September 2005 (UTC)

error on image load
Whenever I try to load the following image page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Parthenonnashville1.jpg I get this error: Error in numRows: Lock wait timeout exceeded; Try restarting transaction or the image page with a blank image, or occassionally it will load fine.

This image page used to work, but then it was vandalized and reverted and has been acting wonky ever since. For example, even when the image page loads fine, if you click on the initial revision, it shows the vandalized version instead. How can I get this image back to normal? Kaldari 20:21, 17 September 2005 (UTC)


 * It works fine for me. Perhaps bypassing your cache will help. -- Finlay McWalter |  Talk 20:23, 17 September 2005 (UTC)


 * I ended up just deleting the image completely and reuploading since it was so messed up. I tried reverting it first, but then it gave me the correct image at the resolution of the vandalized version (and file size of the vandalized version). Something was definitely screwed up. Kaldari 20:48, 17 September 2005 (UTC)

There were a lot of problems with this image yesterday. Somehow, somebody managed to upload an obscene image over it, and even when reverted, the image kept showing up, despite several people's attempts to correct it. When you went straight to the image page, the image looked good, but when you went to the Parthenon page, the obscene image showed up. Finally a new version of the image was uploaded and, I believe, an image was uploaded to Commons. See WP:ANI for the discussion on this. User:Zoe|(talk) 23:28, 17 September 2005 (UTC)


 * As a reminder: we have the capability to disable overwriting of existing images with new versions. If the community would like to enable this as a measure against image-vandalry we could do that. --Brion 04:53, 18 September 2005 (UTC)


 * Brion, if that feature is enabled, does it still allow the original uploader to overwrite the image? -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 18:13, 18 September 2005 (UTC)


 * An "original uploader" has no special privileges anywhere in the software, no. A fundamental part of the wiki way is that being there first doesn't give you special rights over those who come next. --Brion 20:39, 18 September 2005 (UTC)


 * Would the feature work inter-project - i.e. could I upload an image:BrionIsCool.jpg to Commons if such an image existed here (or vice versa)? Thryduulf 22:22, 18 September 2005 (UTC)


 * Currently you cannot upload a new local image if there's a conflicting image on Commons. --Brion 01:52, 19 September 2005 (UTC)


 * Another possible solution to image vandalism would be to change the software so that uploading new versions of an image automatically made a trivial edit to articles and templates which are directly linked to it (ie not articles which only include the image through a template). Then people with that page in their watchlist could check the change just like normal changes/vandalism. I don't know if this is technically feasible, though. Lupin|talk|popups 12:30, 19 September 2005 (UTC)

Attempt to create link using '[[' makes text disappear
I attempted to create a link using '[['. Instead of the text turning into a link, the text disappeared. See the attempt at What did I do wrong? [[User:Bobblewik|Bobblewik]] 11:37, 17 September 2005 (UTC)


 * When linking to categories, you have to prefix it with a ":", ie Category:Whatever . Otherwise you just add the article to the category gkhan 12:41, 17 September 2005 (UTC)


 * That is a surprising requirement of the software, I would not have guessed it. Many thanks for letting me know. The request for comment now reads correctly as:
 * "Articles in Category:New York City Subway passenger equipment. How should specifications be displayed. Should they include spelling errors, non-standard capitals and tautology such as Length <xx> long. Editors appear to be engaged in a slow revert war with edits from anonymous addresses across all the articles in the category."


 * Bobblewik 14:39, 17 September 2005 (UTC)

External links in the status bar
Not sure why it's been changed, but external link URLs are no longer shown in the status bar (at least on IE). We now have to wait until the tooltip appears in order to see the link, which takes too long for us impatient types (and those trying to check for improper links). Anything that can be done to fix this? violet/riga (t) 08:09, 17 September 2005 (UTC)


 * Yeah. Switch to Firefox. OK sorry, I know that was very unhelpful. It still works in Firefox though; I'm not sure what's going on. &mdash; Knowledge Seeker &#2470; 13:35, 17 September 2005 (UTC)


 * If only. They refuse to install Firefox on the computers as it's "non-standard and too much work".  violet/riga (t) 17:59, 18 September 2005 (UTC)


 * I have the same problem at work, however I installed Firefox anyway (and the user agent spoofer so the proxy doesn't complain about a lack of NTLM authorisation). Two different techs have seen it on my machine and not commented, despite us not being allowed to install any software on the machines. One of the other people in the office (who is at the same level as my boss) even commented that he wasn't aware it worked - so I explained about the user agent spoofer. Whether he installed that or not I don't know. I still have to use IE for some pages on the intranet that just don't work at all with firefox, though. Thryduulf 18:26, 18 September 2005 (UTC)


 * Works for me (IE 6.0 on XP SP2) --Brion 21:28, 17 September 2005 (UTC)


 * IE 6.0 on XP SP1. Oddly the links in the header template at the top of this page (post) show it fine, but when it's any other part of the page it just flashes up briefly before returning to "Done".  It does the same on the link I just wrote even as I'm previewing this section edit.  violet/riga (t) 17:59, 18 September 2005 (UTC)


 * Works OK in Mozilla (Seamonkey) Suite. *Dan T.* 18:36, 18 September 2005 (UTC)

unbearable lag
Has anyone been experiencing severe lag lately? Sometimes, it takes several minutes for a single page to load, and it's extremely frustrating. --Ixfd64 23:26, 16 September 2005 (UTC)


 * YES. YES. N (t/c) 23:44, 16 September 2005 (UTC)


 * See above. --cesarb 01:23, 17 September 2005 (UTC)

linking/accessing articles from software applications
Hey guys,

I am a software developer currently working on a new project. I'm writing an index card application that is to help students learn and prepare exams with the help of the computer.

From my own experience I know that while studying it can be very handy to access reference works quickly to look up technical words or refer to a lexicon entry. For that matter, I'd like to implement a function that allows the user to click a word in a textbox that they want to look up in wikipedia. So I get the keyword from the user, but what wikipedia link do I have to use to call up any article available in your free encyclopedia? I want to hand the keyword over as a link parameter in the browser's address bar. It might be a good idea if wikipedia could handle those keywords that are not listed yet and offer a list of similar or related keywords. I need to look up lexical entries in English and German.

I'd appreciate if you could give me some information on how to implement this function.

Best regards, Sebastian Felling


 * That's pretty simple; just fill in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ with the search string appended (with spaces converted to underscores, and other non-alphanumeric characters encoded under UTF-8 using percent signs and hex digits). (de.wikipedia.org for the German version, and you can also do something similar for Wiktionary if you want dictionary definitions.) *Dan T.* 12:12, 16 September 2005 (UTC)

New contributions
How do you view a users contributions, and filter the list so you only see what New pages they've created? - Xed 15:31, 15 September 2005 (UTC)


 * Special:Contributions/Xed - simply change the username as appropriate. However, I don't believe there is any way to filter out new pages; sorry... Shimgray 16:13, 15 September 2005 (UTC)

Editing on a PC?
Is it possible to use Mediawiki on a PC for off-line editing? I am involved with Wikisource, editing for the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica project. Tbis involves some heavy-duty coding to get accents and foreign characters included, and it would be useful to do all this on my PC before uploading it. This save me the hassle of dialup costs and also delays when Wikisource is slow to respond. If this is not possible, can anyone suggest a suitable download. What I am after is to be able to view the results of my work before uploading in case I made a mistake. Thanks Apwoolrich 10:30, 15 September 2005 (UTC)


 * It's straightforward to run a personal mediawiki installation on your PC. You can make your edits there and later cut'n'paste into live wikisource edit windows when you're online. -- Finlay McWalter |  Talk 14:05, 15 September 2005 (UTC)

Linking to an article version as of a particular date
I note that Wikipedia assigns a unique ID to each revision of an article. The URL to a particular revision is http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php followed by a query string with the article's title and revision ID. Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Aristotle&oldid=22376284. This gives me the article Aristotle as at 05:00, 2 September 2005.

Is there any similar way of linking to an article as it appeared at a certain date and time, given only the article title and the date/time? For example, is there some query string like http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Aristotle&revdate=2005-09-02-0530, which will resolve to the same link as above? (Since Aristotle was not modified between 05:00 and 05:30 on 2 September 2005, the link should resolve to revision 22376284.) —Psychonaut 00:18, 15 September 2005 (UTC)


 * No, I don't believe so. &mdash; Knowledge Seeker &#2470; 05:52, 15 September 2005 (UTC)

I recently posted a MediaWiki bug/wishlist report for this feature. Someone responded and apparently, it's already semi-possible to do this with the following URL syntax: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Aristotle&offset=20050902053000&action=history. The first link returned is the right one; a simple page scraper can extract this link. —Psychonaut 18:50, 17 September 2005 (UTC)

Wiki access via PDA?
Hello, Would this be a place to ask about what developer options are available for building solutions to accessing Wikipedia via a handheld PDA. Options like XML (XML-RPC)?

Thanks, Eric


 * User:Erik Zachte has done some work on Wikipedia for PDA's. His user page has some useful links. --Commander Keane 05:43, 15 September 2005 (UTC)

Slow Going?
Is it me or is the server running very slowly lately? --Doug O'Connell 14:45, 14 September 2005 (UTC)


 * No it's not. See discussion above at Extreme server slowness -- Ian &equiv; talk 14:55, 14 September 2005 (UTC)