Wikipedia talk:FAQ/Technical

Editing Wikipedia articles using Firefox - difficulty with text search on editing page
I recently converted from Internet Explorer to Firefox, and have been very happy with Firefox for a number of reasons (the convenience of the tabs, the ability to change text size in any webpage, etc.)

Everything was wonderful until I tried to edit a Wikipedia article in Firefox. When I'm reading an article and find a part I want to change, I go to the edit page, and click CTRL+F to locate the sentence I want to edit. Firefox doesn't allow me to do this - i.e. the text search feature doesn't seem to allow you to search within text input fields. I've searched various internet discussion forums to find a solution to this, but with no luck.

Surely, surely, there is a way of doing this? I really don't want to have to go back to Explorer, but this is such a terrible flaw in Firefox that it looks like I might have to.

Does anyone know the solution?

Palefire 13:13, 22 September 2006 (UTC)
 * This page may not be watchlisted by too many people and I am an IE user myself. I'd suggest you ask this question either at the reference desk or the village pump. You are likely to get a quicker reply there -- Lost (talk) 15:18, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

What you seek is at Tools/Browser tools/Mozilla Firefox/Search within Textarea Extension with regex. Check also the parent Tools/Browser tools/Mozilla Firefox. jnestorius(talk) 15:21, 22 September 2006 (UTC)


 * And indeed see also Browser notes jnestorius(talk) 15:54, 22 September 2006 (UTC)


 * I installed the extension and it works perfectly. Thanks a million. Palefire 15:57, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

Reset Password Without Email Address
How can you prove that you are the owner of the username if you did not enter an email address with your username and are therefore unable to get a new password emailed to you?

download.wikipedia.org
There's a link to download SQL dumps from http://download.wikipedia.org/ -- is it down? Is it still (or ever) available?

Wikipedia Visitor Browser Statistics?
Where can browser statistics for visitors to the Wikipedia sites be found?

Can this be made available if not already so? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.36.147.96 (talk) 00:01, 9 June 2008 (UTC)


 * here.©Geni 14:58, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

Read Block?
Hi. I was recently blocked from Wikipedia for disruptive editing. Could that possibly have something to do with the fact that I often get a "could not connect to en.wikipedia.org" error? I mean when I try to edit logged in (or immediately after logging out), it says that I "can't edit", but "still read" pages on Wikipedia. But I get this eerie feeling that somebody doesn't want me to even read. Is there anyone in the Wikipedia power structure that can selectively deny access to the site? Or is it just something technical about Wikipedia's/my network connection? Thanks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 59.92.109.28 (talk) 05:05, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

P.S. If there's some rule that I should refrain from editing Wikipedia, don't waste your time telling me that. Cause I'll simply ignore it!.......59.92.109.28 (talk) 05:08, 8 April 2010 (UTC)


 * Could not connect is normally a hardware issue - e.g. your ISP or Wikimedia servers having troubles. This is unrelated to the concept of blocking which prevents users from problematic editing the encyclopedia, but not from reading it.  Please try to remain civil with your comments, because some people may be troubled by comments like "I'll simply ignore it".  Thanks.  7  06:15, 8 April 2010 (UTC)
 * p.s. - in the future please use this link to find out how to ask questions and get answers.  7  06:16, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

There is no facility that allows you to be blocked from reading Wikipedia, even by sysops or stewards. The only ones who can ban IP addresses from even reading Wikipedia are sysadmins, and they'll only do it if you're seriously draining Wikimedia's resources (e.g., running an aggressive bot of some kind that's reading tons of pages in a short timeframe). Some users will normally get error messages from time to time due to various system failures, not because anyone's blocked you. —Aryeh Gregor (talk • contribs) 16:51, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

TM's
please i need to know what is in TM's twitter,facebook,youtube channel What is the kind of posts ? What is the responses and the number of it? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 41.32.19.138 (talk) 11:51, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

Newer figures
Why don't you provide newer figures of the size of the wikipedia database? --112.198.82.168 (talk) 11:42, 19 July 2014 (UTC)

MariaDB or MySQL?
It was widely reported that the WMF replaced MySQL with MariaDB in 2013, yet this FAQ still lists MySQL only. Has MariaDB completely replaced MySQL or are they both used?Greenman (talk) 21:46, 10 July 2015 (UTC)

cookie to expire in 180 or 365 days?
Does Wikipedia use cookies? on the page says cookies expire after "180 days" but the login special page says "[k]eep me logged in (for up to 365 days)". That seems to be a conflict. If so, one should be edited. Elsewise, perhaps one should explain the other. Nick Levinson (talk) 22:54, 12 May 2018 (UTC)
 * I have updated it to say 365 days. I remember when it was 30 days. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:10, 12 May 2018 (UTC)

Which versions of software in use?
Is there a way to find out which versions of software are in use? I'm particularly interest in which version of WikiMedia.--agr (talk) 20:13, 27 November 2018 (UTC)
 * @agr: Wikimedia is the foundation which runs Wikipedia, or the community of contributors. I guess you mean MediaWiki. Special:Version shows the version of MediaWiki and some other software. Wikimedia wikis change version during three consecutive days. See mw:MediaWiki 1.33/Roadmap. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:53, 27 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the quick response. Yes, sorry, I meant MediaWiki. Any reason not to mention Special:Version in the FAQ?--agr (talk) 22:03, 27 November 2018 (UTC)
 * I have added it to FAQ/Technical[//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:FAQ/Technical&diff=870935508&oldid=867632812] PrimeHunter (talk) 22:10, 27 November 2018 (UTC)

Random article selection
I just read the description of how random articles are selected and, coincidentally, a similar process came up at the Math Help Desk, see Reference desk/Archives/Mathematics/2019 June 21. The upshot is that the probabilities of various articles being selected is very highly skewed toward 0, in other words most articles are extremely unlikely to be selected at all while a relative few will be selected over and over. It is implied in the 'Is the "random article" feature really random?' section, one of the uses of this feature is quality assurance, but the method isn't really suited for that. Now someone is going to say that section already says that some articles are more likely to be selected than others, but the difference is multiple orders of magnitude. In practice most articles will never be selected and the few that are will probably have already been selected, checked and corrected, giving a misleadingly optimistic view of WP's overall quality. I can think of a few ways that the algorithm might be tweaked to make the distribution more even, so it's probably not too hard to fix. For now though, the random article feature should not be used for QA. --RDBury (talk) 12:18, 3 July 2019 (UTC)