Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)

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Village pump technical   post
The technical section of the village pump is used to discuss technical issues about Wikipedia. Bugs and feature requests should be made at the BugZilla because there is no guarantee developers will read this page. Problems with user scripts should not be reported here, but rather to their developers (unless the bug needs immediate attention). Newcomers to the technical village pump are encouraged to read these guidelines prior to posting here. Questions about MediaWiki in general should be posted at the MediaWiki support desk.	Shortcuts: WP:VPT WP:VP/T
edit Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) (see also: Wikipedia:Technical FAQ) If something looks wrong, purge the server's cache, then bypass your browser's cache. That solves most issues. Intermittent database lags can make new articles take some minutes to appear, and cause the watchlist, contributions, and page history/old views sometimes not show the very latest changes. This is an ongoing issue we are working on. The search index is often out of date, sometimes taking weeks before it's updated. Because of that, recent changes are not immediately reflected on the search. Spell checking has been disabled on the Wikipedia search engine for performance reasons. You can use search engines like Google to search Wikipedia and correct mistakes in searches: include "site:en.wikipedia.org" with your searches. If all the links in the articles suddenly become underlined (or the opposite), or red links instead end with a red question mark (or the opposite), or paragraphs are fully justified instead of left justified (or the opposite), it's probably because your browser failed to load one of the stylesheets (or the server sent you a wrong one). Do a forced reload or bypass your cache. If you have problems making your fancy signature work, check Wikipedia:How to fix your signature. If you changed to another skin and cannot change back, use this link. If an image thumbnail is not showing, try purging its image description page (if the image is from Wikimedia Commons, you might have to purge there too). If it doesn't work, try again. Some ad blockers, proxies, or firewalls block URLs containing /ad/ or ending in common executable suffixes. This can cause some images or articles to not appear. Also, it's surprisingly common for people to accidentally block the image server (upload.wikimedia.org) on Firefox. If the section edit links are being pushed down by floated images, check Wikipedia:How to fix bunched-up edit links. If you are asked to download a file (index.php) when trying to edit, or your browser launches an image editor when trying to edit, disable "Use external editor" on your MediaWiki user preferences. On the most recent version of MediaWiki (as of 21-May-2007), this is found under the "Editing" tab. Some ISPs use transparent proxies which cause problems logging in. If you find that you are automatically logged out just after you have logged in, and removing all your Wikipedia cookies does not fix the issue, try using the secure server (much slower) to bypass the proxy. This happens most often with some satellite ISPs (particularly HughesNet/DirecWay/DirecPC). Numbers listed in parentheses in the "Recent changes" section and in your watchlist are the number of added or removed bytes. Versions of Internet Explorer prior to version 7 have problems displaying SVG images and some PNG images. If you are using an older version of Internet Explorer and are having trouble viewing PNG or SVG images, try upgrading to version 7 or using a different browser such as Firefox or Opera. Questions and suggestions related to www.wikipedia.org portal should go to Meta.
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[edit] How are hyperlinks copy-pasted with images from Wikipedia?

I was wondering if anyone might be able to answer this question I have...

Many-a-time have I copy-pasted images from Wikipedia pages into Microsoft Word. In doing so I have noticed that the images are hyperlinked back to the source location, i.e. if I right-click on the image once pasted in Word and select 'Edit Hyperlink', the address is listed as http:\\upload.wikimedia.org\wikipedia\en\...

What I was wondering is how the images retain the hyperlink, whereas other images I have copy-pasted from the web do not? Any information anyone can give with regards to this would be much appreciated.

I think the answer is the images on Wikipedia already contain hyperlinks, and the images you are copying from other sources do not. After you paste a picture into a Word file, you should be able to remove the Hyperlink; it should be an option when you select "Edit Hyperlink". --A Knight Who Says Ni (talk) 14:54, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] New suggested Improvement for the PDF export feature

I understand that Brion has been trying out some extensions for converting articles to PDF files, and the results are looking pretty pleasing. I just want to ask him and other developers to go one step further - is it possible to generate a PDF file from an article and e-mail it straightaway (i.e. a merge of pdf-export and EmailArticle)? This would be a feature especially useful for promoting Wikipedia in China - I understand that the current Internet Censorship conducted by the Chinese Government doesn't include PDF files. If there is a way to generate PDF from articles and e-mail them straightaway it would be a good way to let the Chinese population read the censored articles (e.g. Tibet) through their mailbox, as well as introducing the quality of Wikipedia to them.

I was hoping to make this suggestion on the MediaWiki development site but I couldn't find my way around there. If any developer is reading this I sincerely ask you (ALL of you) to relay this to Brion and consider building (or improving) this Extension!--Computor (talk) 05:38, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

File a bug request, since the devs aren't likely going to be reading this. MER-C 08:11, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

I think that one was already filed and rejected, on the basis that there was too much risk of people vandalising a page and then immediately hitting the email-article link. The odds of encountering a vandalised page are low, but are much higher if you've just vandalised the page deliberately. --ais523 08:30, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Vandalism aside, there's a problem with allowing the wikimedia servers to be used to send e-mail to someone who hasn't opted in to receiving it. --Random832 (contribs) 20:05, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Indeed, emailing stuff directly out of a user-generated site would be basically an invitation to spam. For this reason, we're very unlikely to add a general 'email this page to a friend' feature; you can always use your own browser's 'Email this page' feature or attach a file on your webmail. --brion (talk) 20:15, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Removing cell borders in a table

I have been playing around with my user page lately, trying to get a table from one of my user subpages into a NavFrame. The original table looks like this...

But things have gone slightly awry when I tried to place it in a NavFrame, as it became grey and all the cells suddenly developed grey borders. I have managed to get rid of the table border, but not the cell borders. The results so far:

If anyone could help me fix my problem, it would be greatly appreciated. It Is Me Here (talk) 16:46, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

Is this right (it looks right with Fire Fox)? MiCkE 17:51, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

Looks great, just one thing - how come the two "All my accounts" titles aren't quite lined up properly? They both appear to be centered but aren't quite in line. It Is Me Here (talk) 19:38, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

The two "All my accounts" titles aren't lined up because the top one does not center absolutely relative to the width of the table, but relative to the width of the table after subtracting the space for the [hide] button. Nihiltres^{t.l} 21:10, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

I see - is there any way to make the table centre after taking into account the button as well? It Is Me Here (talk) 22:02, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I've been wondering about that as well. It's one of the problems in creating collapsible succession boxes. Waltham, The Duke of 06:04, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

You don't need to have the heading inside the table, see what you think of it now? MiCkE 09:24, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm afraid I don't quite get what you're trying to say. It Is Me Here (talk) 18:06, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

As you can see if you click "show" above the two "All my accounts" are lined up, thats becauxe I moved I moved it outside (before) the table that makes up the "grid of wikis". MiCkE 07:17, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Blocked from editing notice WHILE READING

It would be very useful if blocked IP addresses got a notification of abuse while they are reading. With the way many proxies and school IPs use Wikipedia, the intended messages of abuse and new talk page messages never get seen by anyone with the authority (like the ISP or school teacher) to solve the problem.

A message in the site notice area has the capability of cutting down on a ton of vandalism. How possible is this? SchmuckyTheCat (talk)

If an account is blocked, a message is usually left in the talk page of the user, so even when reading he would get a "New message" notification (it may fail if there are multiple users, but so would the block notification). -- ReyBrujo (talk) 19:00, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

I am specifically not talking about accounts, and don't really care about the new message notice. I would like all users who are IP blocked to see a notice of the block. ISP administrators, corporate IT guys, teachers, etc would all see this notice when editing through their proxies - and maybe take action against the users who took up the block. Lots of these people read and never edit. We need to put their vandalism issue in their face. SchmuckyTheCat (talk)

That would be extremely annoying for readers who have rotating IP's from their ISP. And for those IP's that do trace back to a school, business, whatever, this will inconvenience many people to get a message to a very few. There is probably a better way to accomplish this, how about an email to the site admin? --Kbdank71 20:53, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

Well one thing that exists technically is the ability to prevent people from viewing a page when blocked (its a flag possible flag like rollback, etc), I imagine it could be replaced with a message "You are blocked from Wikipedia". MBisanz ^talk 20:57, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

re to Kbdank71, a small notice at the top of the page isn't "extremely annoying". I'm proposing something like the donation fund drive templates. "You are blocked from editing, but not reading: find out why by clicking here." SchmuckyTheCat (talk)

I suspect the intent is to annoy all the users routed through the IP into applying peer pressure to get vandals' fingers chopped off, or equivalent. I've worked at some large corporations where firewall access required individual user authorization. Perhaps such "big brother messages" would get such a result in some cases, but I expect most would be inwardly annoyed and nothing more would come of it. My attempts to contact the registered abuse complaint handler has never—not once—resulted in any visible action. —EncMstr 21:16, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

Why not keep it short and sweet... cross-out the "edit-this-page" links rather than using a banner. Only people who are going to notice are the people interested in editing. I can't think of a scenario this doesn't address while annoying those who casually browse significantly less. 76.174.214.191 (talk) 10:53, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

I think a simple message like "Your IP address is blocked from editing Wikipedia." that displayed instead of MediaWiki:Anonnotice would be a helpful feature. I don't think it's at all rude or distracting, and I think it would prompt network administrators / authority figures to discourage that kind of behavior (when, otherwise, they'd have no clue what had happened). Canderson7 ^(talk) 22:25, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

It's computationally quite expensive to check block status for every not logged-in reader (as opposed to simply sending cached pages), which I suspect makes this proposal unlikely to be implemented. Dragons flight (talk) 07:12, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Displaying a watchlist is certainly several orders of magnitude worse—Think of all the database rows that query has to access. WP:Don't worry about performance says we do what makes sense for the project, then someone gets to worry about limiting or optimizing it. —EncMstr 07:19, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

There are much fewer hits on Special:Watchlist than on every other page :). I'm not sure how the cache is computed, but that might invalidate it every time a blocked user reads a page. To be honest, just imagining the uproar of blocked AOL users that would never have edited otherwise would make me think twice before implementing such a notice. -- lucasbfr ^talk 08:30, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

How does it compare to checking for new messages, computationally? --Random832 (contribs) 19:13, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Tor question

I am struggling to work out what the prevailing approach is to Tor. I find Category: Tor exit nodes and Category:Blocked former Tor exit nodes. So I am confused: do we block them, or not? If so, why is there a category of 3000 not-blocked nodes, and a category of 150 currently-blocked nodes that should not be? They both are populated by bots for the most part. So do these two cats represent 'instant backlogs', or is there something I am not aware of? Splash - tk 22:56, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

The idea was to block then as open proxies, but there were people in China using it to evade firewalls so that they can edit here and possibly some other special cases, so it the collateral damage was causing problems. Voice-of-All 00:06, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes, hence the business of maybe softblocking, which confused me further. To be direct about it: should I go block the Tor node I just found editing Wikipedia, or are we letting them be now (or is this a function of whether they are vandalising or not)? Splash - tk 01:08, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm interested in this answer also. If I find a TOR node, should I always report it to WP:OP? Just if it's disruptive? If it's involved in suspected sock-puppeting? Is there any specific policy on this? Franamax (talk) 05:06, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

The current "let's please do not talk about it" practice is to hardblock the nodes that are abused with {{TOR}} for a long period of time. But we should really come to a clear policy one way or an other, one day... -- lucasbfr ^talk 08:06, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

That's unfortunate, because the whole point of onion-routing is that it is not the node doing the abuse, it is the originator of the traffic. Blocking the exit node ultimately blocks nothing at all, unless every single IP edit is checked for proxy and blocked, the onion will win by design. I've often thought about establishing a node myself, if I could convince myself that it would be for repressed-world and non-illegal use only, I might actually try it. If I interpret "hardblock" correctly, I would nuke my own self at the same time, right? Franamax (talk) 08:28, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes. My personnal opinion is to block all TOR and ip-block exempt the users that would make a legitimate use of it. Tor is widely used to abuse the system without suffering the consequences, here. -- lucasbfr ^talk 08:32, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Two thoughts here: 1) without comment on whether Stifle really is a stack of shit (I've seen no evidence of stacking or shitting :), wouldn't the best response be a relatively short block, say 31 hours, enough for the originating node to retry and find a new exit? In the case of active disruption for that matter, two hours? and 2) if one wishes to achieve ip-block exempt status on a blocked IP, is there a way to do that? From the experience of a chinawalled country, can I connect through a blocked TOR node and create a named account? Does the current unspoken policy accomodate this? It certainly should IMO. Franamax (talk) 11:10, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

(outdent) It would be technically nice to be able to block an IP for an anonymus user but to allow an IP for a registered user. jmcw (talk) 08:01, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

This is possible. When blocking an IP address, admins are presented with two independent check boxes:

• Block anonymous users only
• Prevent account creation

which I think also answers part of Franamax's question. Splash - tk 12:22, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

It seems that it would be enough to block TOR IPs for these two functions. Registered users coming in over TOR could be individually managed with user name controls. jmcw (talk) 12:41, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

How does one change the powers that be to a new idea? This seems an improvement. jmcw (talk) 07:16, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Thumb parameter

Is the "thumb=" parameter option for image display temporarily disabled by a bug, or is it going away permanently? For example, this code [[Image:Smiley.svg|thumb=SFriendly.gif|right|Example]] should display SFriendly.gif at a reasonable size, but instead currently displays Smiley.svg at a huge size... -- AnonMoos (talk) 03:25, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

I don't think that was ever a feature... -- Ned Scott 08:18, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes it was -- it worked at least between early September 2006 and late March 2008. There's an article I converted to using "thumb=" image display in September 2006, and now I need to know whether I have to convert it back, or whether it's just a temporary passing bug... AnonMoos (talk) 10:31, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

If you wan't to display SFriendly.gif as a thumb you simply do this: [[Image:SFriendly.gif|thumb|right|Example]]. MiCkE 10:27, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

<imagemap> Image:SFriendly.gif|50px rect 0 0 50 50 [[:Image:Smiley.svg]] desc none </imagemap>

What are you trying to accomplish? Display Image:SFriendly.gif as the thumbnail but link to Image:Smiley.svg instead? You can use ImageMap to achieve that. --soum ^talk 10:44, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

The main use was actually because Wikimedia PNG thumbnailing sucks so bad (i.e. the hugely-bloated file length of PNG images whose pixel dimensions have been reduced). So you could say [[Image:Large.png|thumb=Presized-thumbnail.png|right|Example]], and the presized thumbnail image would display, but clicking on the "enlarge" icon would lead to the image description page of the original large unresized image version. At this point, I'm not really as interested in alternative solutions, as I am in knowing whether the thumb= feature has permanently gone away, or has only been temporarily disabled by a passing bug (since that's what I need to know in deciding whether or not to re-edit the abovementioned article)... AnonMoos (talk) 12:10, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

Hopefully resolved through Bug 13624 -- AnonMoos (talk) 16:03, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Changing e-mail address and unified login

So, I change and confirm the e-mail address in Special:Preferences. For the rest of the session, I can check back, and the new e-mail address will be listed. When I log out and log back in, however, the e-mail address has reverted back to the old one. This happens on other wikis with my global account, but not with an account not attached to a global account. Anyone else have this problem? Anyone know of a solution? WODUP 21:45, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

From what I've been told, to change your e-mail address for a unified account, you must change the e-mail address for every account that is unified, and then all new accounts will use the updated e-mail address. There's currently work being done to simplify this process a bit. --MZMcBride (talk) 19:27, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

So because I have an account on hz.wikipedia, a closed wiki with the database locked, I can't change my e-mail address right now. Is there a bugzilla bug that I can follow to know when it's fixed? WODUP 19:51, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Reported as bugzilla:13660. WODUP 18:04, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Expanded watchlist feature request

On the expanded watchlist, I want an option to hide multiple edits with "(0)" characters changed. Those are almost always vandalism reversions, and when they aren't, they rarely matter much. I already go out of my way to skip those, and I'm always upset when I accidentally click on one. Thanks! Listing Port (talk) 21:50, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

Note: Related discussion on VPR - Neparis (talk) 20:38, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Here you go: user:js/markZeroEdits highlights (and optionally moves to bottom) zero size collapsed edits that look like reverts. Comments are welcome at the talk page. —AlexSm 23:25, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] User rights

First of all, would it be possible for a dev to give me a copy, either publicly or privately, of the english Wikipedia's $wgGroupPermissions array? I'm currently updating Wikipedia:User access levels and, combined with mw:Manual:User rights#Default rights, having the raw settings should allow me to make sure I get everything right. Many thanks in advance, Happy‑melon 11:48, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Also, a few other questions about userrights on en:w:

1. Are Special:Makesysop and Special:Makebot deprecated by Special:Userrights, or are they still used by bureaucrats?
2. I believe that bigdelete is restricted to the developer group, but the developer group is deprecated and empty. Does this mean that bigdelete is actually unusable on the english wikipedia, and big deletions are carried out manually by the devs using shell/root access?
3. Which of the following permissions are explicitly revoked when the user is blocked?

   apihighlimits, block, checkuser, delete, deletedhistory, makebot, makesysop, markbotedit, oversight, renameuser, undelete, unwatchedpages, userrights

More to follow I'm sure. Happy‑melon 12:07, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

I can answer question one. Makesysop and Makebot are still available to be used, and haven't yet been deprecated. Bureaucrats can use either one. Majorly (talk) 13:57, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

http://noc.wikimedia.org/conf/ <-- Look for InitialiseSettings and CommonSettings. Nobody currently has the bigdelete right, and as of yet, nobody has needed it (to my knowledge). In theory, the only action that should be allowed when a person is blocked is self-unblocking. --MZMcBride (talk) 19:25, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

From testing on my own wiki, when blocked: block, checkuser, deletedhistory, oversight, hiderevision, userrights, unwatchedpages, mergehistory, deleterevision, renameuser, apihighlimits, nuke, and siteadmin all seem to work when blocked. delete, undelete, markbotedit, review, and stablesettings do not work (Wikimedia doesn't currently use all of these, some are related to the new revision deletion system and flagged revisions) Mr.Z-man 21:02, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

OK, thanks to you both. I never realised that all the wikimedia wikis were configured from the same config files - what a mess!! Thanks for that test, Z-man - I was half tempted to block myself for ten minutes and go on a whistlestop tour of the admin tools, but I didn't really want to impinge on my block log :D. mw:Extension:Nuke has such a cool name, even if it is of questionable utility!! Happy‑melon 21:09, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

A mess? Have you ever tried to maintain 500 LocalSettings.php files? -- Tim Starling (talk) 06:12, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

pwnt. ~Kylu (u|t) 06:32, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

You got me :D! I was thinking more of CommonSettings.php, complete with commented-out hacks from 2005 and fragmented manual additions to various black- and white-lists. But then again, you've got much better things to do with your time than tidy a config file that only a handful of non-devs will ever see. Happy‑melon 09:36, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

More questions:

1. How, if at all, are the "founder" group permissions different to "steward" permissions?
2. Bureaucrats can grant both sysop and bureaucrat flags, but only stewards can revoke them, right?
3. Although the chances of it ever happening are remote, if a user was promoted to bureaucrat without first becoming an admin, would they be able to delete/block/protect, etc? My intepretation of the permissions array is not, but I'd like to be certain

Happy‑melon 10:45, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

1. Not different at all (except stewards on Meta can desysop on any project; local founder can only desysop on the local project they are founder on.
2. Right. This can be fiddled with though, and the norm is actually to allow bcrats to revoke (on non-WMF wikis)
3. No they wouldn't be able to. Majorly (talk) 10:59, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. My rewrite is complete - do take a look at Wikipedia:User access levels and let me know if I've made any mistakes, or if there are things that could be explained better. Happy‑melon 14:52, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

The founder group exists because some people on this wiki wanted to give Jimmy some kind of mark of respect in the form of a group assignment, but were in conflict over which exact group that should be. I created the founder group as a compromise. The user rights are arbitrary since he generally gets what he asks for anyway. There's no such thing as a "local founder", Jimmy is a steward on meta and so can desysop people anywhere. -- Tim Starling (talk) 20:52, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

I think there is, since he desysopped Zscout370 locally. Majorly (talk) 21:02, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes he did, but you said "local founder can only desysop on the local project they are founder on", a statement which clearly does not apply to Jimmy since he can desysop anyone anywhere. Life is complicated enough without introducing such semantics. -- Tim Starling (talk) 21:14, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

Ok, thanks for that clarification. I did notice that the founder group was only assigned on enwiki; I was going to ask about that, but it all makes sense now. Happy‑melon 22:29, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Javascript included from external page

Hello, I want to get an external table editor working. When I included those lines to my monobook.js it worked fine. The thing is that I want to add some individual preferences and so I copied the code from [1] to User:Eneas/edittable.js and changed my monobook.js. The problem is that the script doesn't work anymore with those changes. Could anybody help me please? --Eneas (talk) 12:46, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Try doing importScript('User:Eneas/edittable.js'); instead. The reason is that it's not raw code (User:Eneas/edittable.js is a HTML page whose contents are a JavaScript script). There's a way to get just the raw code but I've forgotten it. x42bn6 Talk Mess 19:32, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Ah, scrap that, found it. Use this as the URL if you want to use your method: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Eneas/edittable.js&action=raw x42bn6 Talk Mess 19:34, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

Thx --Eneas (talk) 11:11, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Canton of Champagne-en-Valromey

Does anybdy have any reason this article looks like it does? Editorofthewiki 14:11, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

It sounds like something surprises you but I don't know what. Do you have a more specific question, for example involving what you see and what you were expecting to see? Maybe it's no longer relevant. PrimeHunter (talk) 20:52, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

I think it's an issue involving the right line of that huge table - it's got the background color but no borders or content. ~user:orngjce223 how am I typing? 04:25, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

Template Infobox Canton de France wasn't complete, so it swallowed the next table. Fixed now, I think. – Leo Laursen – ☏ ⌘ 07:38, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes, thanks, that was exactly what I was talking about. Editorofthewiki 20:49, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Popups and green Monobook

don't mix well, because cream color of (Lupin's) Popup background clashes with black background of the dark-screen Monobook. Any suggestions? (I find it useful, but can I change the color scheme?) ~user:orngjce223 how am I typing? 04:30, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes you can, using this code added to your Monobook.css, changing the hex colour values with your own:

.navpopup {
      background-color: #CCDFFF  !important;
      border-color: #204080 !important;
   }

Hope this helps.Harryboyles 05:20, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

Will try. Thanks! ~user:orngjce223 how am I typing? 02:59, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

If you remind me later, I will add it to the script for you. Prodego ^talk 22:31, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Time of orange bar

So I went to my university computer lab one day and decided to log into wikipedia (when I should've been writing a paper). When I clicked the login screen I saw a notice bar, which was weird since it was logged out. I clicked the view messages and it was a warning to the IP of the machine for vandalism from Feb 15. This was 2 days ago. What I'm wondering is: how long does the "new messages" message stay in the system, and should it expire at sometime after the last talkpage post. Would there be any longterm performance issues with Mediawiki tracking millions of talkpage notices to be put up, when the IP or user may never log in again? MBisanz ^talk 07:39, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

Wouldn't it just be the case that WP checks

• has the IP read the latest posting to its talk page
• what is the latest diff to show (not the text, just the diff numbers)

That isn't a lot of information to remember, and once stored can be saved forever. It might be more overhead to run some process to clean out 'old' information. Shenme (talk) 09:46, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

My thought was more that if the IP doesn't have messages, it would view a cached version of the page on the squid server. But if it has messages, it would have to regenerate teh page from the webserver. MBisanz ^talk 13:50, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

The new message bar is just a simple boolen varable stored in the user table along with the latest revsion time, and the time of the last view by that user. I dont have access to the API at the moment but you can get all that information for any given user via the API. β^{_{command 2}} 14:58, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Is there some way to keep Google off pages we don't want to be found easily?

A sockpuppet has just made it clear that google links to indef-blocked user talk pages. The question is, can we keep it away from the pages somehow? עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 11:43, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

If the mediawiki search tool wasn't so awful, we'd be quite happy to lock google out of everywhere but the mainspace - it can be done easily with robots.txt - but google is too useful as a search tool at the moment. Happy‑melon 14:28, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

See also Meta element#The robots attribute, but I don't think it's possible to use NOINDEX, NOARCHIVE, NOSNIPPET in Wikipedia. I have seen short discussions with no result about permitting exclusion of user space from search engines. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:40, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

While I understand the desire to keep some pages off of Google, I miss the days when I could search all of Wikipedia via google. The problem was that people were googling their names and finding their AfD(closed as a non-notable garage band) as their first google hit. It could be extended to talk pages, but I would rather it did not as it helps in tracking down things. _(1 == 2)^Until 14:52, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

Article talk is already excluded by Google (as the only namespace). It appears Google did it by themselves. See Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 19#Namespaces as subdomains. I don't think all userspace should be excluded but maybe there should be an option to exclude a given page by placing something there. It appears Wikipedia doesn't use mw:Extension:NoRobots. If that changes then maybe it should be ignored in article space. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:40, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Javascript LI menu

Resolved.

I've been trying to modify the Add LI Menu script, which turns navigation tabs into a drop-down menu, to make the toggle of the menus occur on click instead of on hover, but have thus far had no luck (I'm still learning JavaScript). Any attempts to root out the problem would be appreciated. Here are the scripts I'm relying on:

• User:Bob/script/addlimenu.js - a slightly modified version of the original
• User:Bob/script/portlets.js - the menu in question starts at the comment /* ======= DB MENU ======= */

I already know the menus work on hover, so there's really no need to check out the CSS. Thanks as always, — Bob • (talk) • 18:25, April 6, 2008 (UTC)

Nevermind, I got it working. I had incorrect syntax for adding events. — Bob • (talk) • 21:44, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Logged out while editing

It has happened to me a couple of times that I've been logged out while in the midst of protracted editing of an article, so my edits are saved under an IP. Is there anything I can do to prevent this (without having to think about it every time), and if not, is this something that is worth filing as a bug/enhancement? Ma^t_chups 01:12, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

You might want to use the secure server (https://secure.wikimedia.org), which may work. Try it! ~user:orngjce223 how am I typing? 03:01, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

This user script should prevent the submission of an edit if you're not logged in:

addOnloadHook(function() {
    var editform = document.getElementById('editform');
    if (!editform) return;
    editform.action += '&assert=user';
});

This uses the Assert Edit extension, currently enabled on Wikimedia wikis. It can be added to User:Matchups/monobook.js. Note that it won't work if you're logged out when you view the edit page; it only has utility if you somehow log out after opening the edit page but before submitting. If you're logged out when viewing the edit page, a message (MediaWiki:Anoneditwarning) will be displayed on the edit page (see also this wikitech-l thread). Gracenotes^T § 04:01, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. I've added it, but haven't had a chance to test it yet. I was thinking of putting in &assert=false as a test that the hook was being properly triggered and all, but realized that if I did so, I might not ever be able to get it off! So I will just wait and hope it does the right thing. Ma^t_chups 18:15, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Asking for advice

(moved to Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)#another_use_of_POV_tags_and_other per comment below, to discuss what policy says about using those tags. I hope this centers the debate on the actual use of the tags)

(ec) This is not the right place to raise issues like this: this page is for technical questions about wikimarkup, the MediaWiki software, personal settings, and the like. I suggest you move this thread to Wikipedia:Wikiquette alerts. Happy‑melon 20:34, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] New editors need better help with footnotes

Take a look at United States Naval Academy history for April 7 starting at 14:46. While it's funny to read from an experienced editors point of view, it must have been quite frustrating for the newbie who was quite exasperated trying to do things "right." I'm not exactly sure what needs to be done here, but I experienced the same sort of problem myself.

I suspect something under the edit page, maybe larger than the tiny helps that are there now.

For those not wanting to spend the time, the article above has the poor newbie trying to get his footnote to be numbered "correctly" by assigning a number himself and sticking it under "references." I mean, it makes sense, though I admit that most of us figured out the area was inexplicably blank when we went there to do the same sort of thing and that was a clue something was up.... Student7 (talk) 19:31, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

That's why something like this, discussed here, needs to be implemented - the cite.php extension was clearly better than its predecessor, but it also clearly can be improved. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 15:27, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

I think it's at appropriate that new editors can add in sourcing in stupid-simple style: <ref>http://www.example.com/citedpage</ref> and let both experienced editors and bots (there's at least one that seems to be able to replace the above with a {{cite web}} at a basic level). Let's put it this way: we should strongly encourage them to drop in links and sources when they can, but formatting and the ref system they should only start to concern themselves once they are comfortable with it. Improper use of citation templates by a newbie should not be a reason to bite them. --MASEM 15:50, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Lord knows, we're not biting them. The system is. The sequence above was interrupted by a kindly editor who gently asked the user what exactly was he trying to footnote (not exactly obvious, though we had the "footnote number" he assigned and could probably guess a range). John Broughton's suggestions may be worth considering. BTW couldn't read the example because of poor resolution on my screen but it sounds like a great idea. Newbie needs to be told something and not left guessing and fumbling around. Masem's idea is fine too, if we could convey that to them, maybe on the "welcome to Wikipedia" for those who have logged in? Would also emphasize the need for reliable footnotes which many users haven't quite "got" yet. Student7 (talk) 20:04, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Disappearing underscores in "C" code

Hi there; the following example (originally modified from Function pointer) illustrates a curious issue, evidently caused by iffy CSS, in which underscores on lines followed by a line extending at least to that point, disappear when wrapped in a <code lang="c"></code> tag. The following are all "M_PI" rather than "M PI":

Insert non-formatted text here

... M_PI/4 ... ... M_PI/4
... M_PI/4 ... ... ... M_PI/4
... M_PI/4 ... ... M_PI/4
... shorter line

I can testify that this happens in Windows in both Firefox 2.0.0.13 and IE 7.0.5730.11 (with the default Wiki skin).

Not critical, but slightly odd and irritating! I don't know who maintains this CSS but I imagine it's a line-spacing thing or something equally banal. Carl Turner (talk) 21:07, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

PS: If this is in the wrong place... sorry.

That is because you're doing something very weird there. <code> is a valid whitelisted html tag, so the contents of that tag are parsed. However, every line inside is indented, which means it gets parsed as a <pre> block. However, since <pre> is a block level element and <code> is inline, tidy cleans it up to:

<pre><code lang="c" xml:lang="c">... M_PI/4 ... ... M_PI/4
... M_PI/4 ... ... ... M_PI/4
... M_PI/4 ... ... M_PI/4
... shorter line</code>
</pre>

This means, the <code> block is inside the <pre> block, and <code> has a background style applied to it, which crowds up above the line above it, hiding the underline. Another way to visualize it:

... M_PI/4 ... ... M_PI/4
... M_PI/4 ... ... ... M_PI/4
... M_PI/4 ... ... M_PI/4
... shorter line

Perhaps you meant <source lang="c">? This is an XML parser hook, and the contents are not parsed by the wiki (code doesn't have a lang parameter, but source does). --Splarka (rant) 07:34, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

I just spotted the same problem at BSD Daemon#ASCII image. That one really looks like a hard nut to crack: the background color should be set on the <pre> tag, but this can't be done using indentation — and if one tries to use and explicit <pre> tag in the wikitext, MediaWiki helpfully decides to interpret the content as if it were CDATA. Setting the background color in a surrounding block-level tag won't work either, since the monobook style sheet overrides it. So it very much looks like there's currently no reliable way in MediaWiki to have a preformatted text block with a non-default background color and with multicolored text inside it. Aarrgh! Whoever came up with that stupid idea of changing the semantics of <pre> in MediaWiki from those it has in HTML anyway? —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 04:17, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Well, that specific instance is insidious, but you can do something like making it display:block;, for example [2]. I think what Carl wanted was <source> though. --Splarka (rant) 08:33, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Font/table style used by the image thumbnail template?

A McDonald's spray-molded vacuum-formed Molded Paper Pulp cup carrier. The open slits are punched out following the drying process.

I want my mini-table to be able to look like this template's formatting, using this font style and spacing.

Occasionally I don't like the formatting of the image thumbnail template, especially since it is limited to only one image. I would like to create my own little collection of images using the wikitable system.

However, when I do this I cannot figure out how to make my own custom design to have the same text styling as an official image thumbnail.

For some reason using <small>foo</small> is not good enough. This does shrink the description font as you can see in my example, but it still leaves a wide ugly whitespace between each line, and I cannot figure out how to remove that gapping.

I would also like to duplicate the single-line table border and the little "enlarge image" image to the right of my text so that it looks very much like a normal single-image thumbnail.

I don't yet know how to access the image thumbnail template used by the automatic thumbnail maker.

DMahalko (talk) 08:58, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

You can't use Wikitext to duplicate the appearance. But using HTML it is possible.

I made a test edit to include a single thumbnail in my userspace, and then used IE's "view source" command to view the resulting page and changed the code a little, because the HTML includes <a> and <img> elements which are not allowed in Mediawiki HTML. This is the code to replicate the look of a single-image thumbnail, using HTML wherever possible:

<div class="thumb tright">
<div class="thumbinner" style="width:122px;">[[Image:Maome.jpg|120x72px|Caption]]
<div class="thumbcaption">Caption</div>
</div>
</div>

Pegasus «C¦T» 11:58, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

See also {{double image}} and {{triple image}} --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:15, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Let's see if I can mimic the thumbbox... (see source) Maybe I could make it into a template? — Edokter • Talk • 00:01, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

A McDonald's spray-molded vacuum-formed Molded Paper Pulp cup carrier. The open slits are punched out following the drying process.

[edit] Where are the servers??

Has anyone else had major problems with logged-in edits the last hour or two? I see the search engine is currently down for performance reasons. Everything is hanging and erroring out. What is happening? 154.20.153.62 (talk) 09:03, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

I've been especially having trouble with Image Pages. Nimur (talk) 09:12, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Yep, I had some trouble editing and viewing articles not long ago. Seems alright now. - 52 Pickup (deal) 09:31, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

A change to the log viewers introduced a performance problem which bogged down the database servers for a while. Search was temporarily switched off to reduce load. The problem has been corrected, and search has been reenabled. --brion (talk) 16:53, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Hide particular pages from search engines

Can I ask a stupid question that I should probably already know the answer to? Isn't there a standard or semi-standard string that you can put at the top of a page in user space that tells Google, Yahoo, etc., etc. not to index it? It would need to be a tag I could add to an individual page myself, not some meta tag thingy that is added by MediaWiki. I've got an idea that will only work if there's a way to hide individual pages from search engines; feel like this should be easy, but am computer-illiterate enough not to know how. --barneca (talk) 12:56, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

See the earlier section #Is there some way to keep Google off pages we don't want to be found easily?. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:03, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Lazy of me not to check the archives or the TOC; thanks for the pointer to the earlier discussion. Pardon my density, but do I correctly understand that previous discussion to mean that if Wikipedia used mw:Extension:NoRobots, it would be possible, but it doesn't so it isn't possible? --barneca (talk) 13:12, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

That is my understanding but I'm not a developer, I have limited knowledge, and I don't know whether mw:Extension:NoRobots actually works. I just found it by searching MediaWiki. PrimeHunter (talk) 13:20, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

I just tried a test; the software doesn't recognize <norobots> and </norobots> as valid tags. So the extension isn't installed, it would appear. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 15:14, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

It is not, as it is not listed in Special:Version. Titoxd^{(?!? - cool stuff)} 06:25, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Category:Pages with too many expensive parser function calls

Resolved.

(copied here from WP:AN):

In editing Portal:Trains today, I noticed a redlink for Category:Pages with too many expensive parser function calls at the bottom. The subpages for this portal, as far as I know, are all on my watchlist, and I don't see any edits to those pages that would have added this category; furthermore, when I go to that category page, Portal:Trains is not listed there. Has any other admin been working on one or more of the higher-level protected templates behind the portals? Slambo (Speak) 12:59, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

It appears that a change was made to MediaWiki sometime yesterday or today that adds pages to this category if there are more than 100 parser function calls on a page. With the complexity of some infoboxes and succession boxes, it seems that this category will have quite a few more pages in it before the end of the day. I'm updating Portal:Trains to remove the category from that page, but I'm a bit disappointed as the parser functions there were being used to automate many of the updates to the page. Further discussion should take place on WP:VPT. Slambo (Speak) 13:20, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

(further discussion below)

Yes, this was added very recently. The most likely culprit is too many calls to ifexist during the parsing of the page. — Carl (CBM · talk) 14:02, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes, the variable was originally set to 500 for Wikimedia projects, but a recent change changed the name of the variable and it was apparantly not changed in Wikimedia's configuration (the default value is 100). This should be fixed soon. Mr.Z-man 16:12, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Been fixed. --brion (talk) 16:50, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Way cool, thanks! Slambo (Speak) 18:11, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

What counts as an "expensive" parser function? Is it currently only #ifexist: ?? Happy‑melon 19:37, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Its currently ifexist and the new PAGESINCATEGORY magic word. Mr.Z-man 20:13, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

PAGESINCATEGORY?? COOL!! Happy‑melon 16:17, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I saw this category on Special:Upload (possibly on Commons)!! :-) Carcharoth (talk) 19:58, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

In looking over User:David Kernow/List of terms for administrative country subdivisions, I'm not seeing either of the two examples above. Is it something else? (In looking over Field hockey at the Summer Olympics - another listed in the category - I suspect it has something to do with flags?) - jc37 18:11, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

The first of these two pages uses {{flag+link}} extensively, which itself calls {{#ifexist:}}. The second page makes extensive use of {{fh-big}}, which itself transcludes several other instances of {{country data}} variants. Slambo (Speak) 18:30, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Reflist broken

References section is broken, giving a message when an article has sources, but no given references for particular statements. [3]Londo06 13:53, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

bugzilla entry of this problem --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:07, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

I've changed the error message at MediaWiki:Cite error references invalid group so people can understand what the heck this is. --- RockMFR 16:25, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Just a thought, can we add a hidden category there ? Might be handy for maintenance. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:37, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

This warning is a really bad idea :( It will trigger the removal of <references /> tags from articles which are currently unreferenced, which is a very bad idea. A tag which generates no content breaks nothing for the reader, but if the &ltreferences />tag is missing when there are <ref></ref> footnotes, the footnotes don't display.

If there had been a proposal to remove the <references /> tag from articles without footnotes, there would have been plenty of objections, and it's a real pity to see it being triggered by a software change. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:22, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

I agree. Maybe change MediaWiki:Cite error references invalid group to link to an explanation of all this? Could someone make sure the developer who did this (regardless of who it was) is aware of these concerns? Carcharoth (talk) 20:36, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

This is definitely a bad idea, and I agree with the points that have been raised above; namely, those concerning articles with no references but which use <references /> would benefit by keeping the tag silent rather than outputting an error message. I am also seeing this error message on thousands of articles, including ones I've been working on recently: Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; invalid names, e.g. too many Gary King (talk) 08:50, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

It's been fixed Happy‑melon 09:15, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Many thanks to whoever reverted this change :) --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:01, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Did I speak too soon? It's still showing the error message on Michael Morris, 1st Baron Killanin. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:45, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

We're still on r32995, so the errors won't go away until the next update (the fix was applied in r30003). --- RockMFR 19:31, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

You made a typo. The fix was in 33003]. It has taken effect now and is working. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:32, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Article changes not showing up

Regardless of where I am, my change a few days ago to the ODS article shows up in the article history. But it doesn't always show up in the article itself. The mirror in question is rr.knams.wikimedia.org. DrHydeous (talk) 14:50, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure I understand the question; are you saying that the change doesn't show in the mirror site? If so, that's an issue with whoever runs the mirror site, not Wikipedia; the change is certainly showing up when viewing the page directly, as I did just a moment ago. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 15:03, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Because of the wikimedia.org suffix, I suspect that address points to one of Wikimedia's servers. I've purged the article so it is updated on all the Wikimedia servers. Hope this helps, Graham87 11:37, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, looks good now - DrHydeous (talk) 11:09, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] New log format

After some objections on IRC, I would appreciate some wider opinions, especially regarding which of these three options is best:

1. Keep the new Special:Log format
2. Revert back to the old format pending review
3. Revert back to the old format forever

The difference is the grouping by day (see e.g. [4]), and the lack of bullet points in the new format. Tim Starling (talk) 16:16, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

The date headings are good for RecentChanges, where you have many entries for a single day, but something like this is silly. It has practically one date heading for each line. I assume Nikerabbit wasn't thinking of this when he implemented it, but it seems like a very common use case. I'd be in favor of reverting back to the old format forever, once Nikerabbit has had a chance to comment (since he apparently made the change). —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 16:20, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

I'd say revert back - it's much easier to follow date format. Ryan Postlethwaite 16:20, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

• Personally, I preferred the old log, particularly as the date was on the same line as the time. Majorly (talk) 16:21, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Same. WODUP 16:30, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

We're reverting back. --brion (talk) 16:48, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. I'll get the data I need before Nikerabbit decides to make any further changes without asking anyone's opinion. Majorly (talk) 17:07, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

I like the grouping by date. Why not adding the date per line too? a little bit redundant but it keeps the grouping. Raymond (talk) 18:01, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

+1, I also like the new format. It's somewhat clearer and very useful if you have larger logfiles. Adding the date to each line would be a possible solution. Another one would be to put a choice into the preferences (date headlines y/n, date in each line y/n). --Thogo (Talk) 18:05, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

This is not going to be a user preference, that's for sure. We have too many of those already. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 18:20, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Why are user preferences expensive? --Random832 (contribs) 19:47, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Well, some in fact are expensive, because it fragments the parser cache: we have to cache separate versions of rendered pages for people with different combination of date preferences, redlink handling, etc., etc. But the problem isn't that this would be expensive, it's that it would add clutter. If we add preferences for every little thing like this that comes up, it makes it that much harder for new users to navigate the preferences menu and find what they want. The general MediaWiki policy, enforced by Brion, is that new preferences have to meet a relatively high standard of usefulness. Personally I think this clearly doesn't meet it. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 14:33, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I prefer the old way. While the new format does change somewhat with user timestamp preferences, it doesn't fully use the preference (if that makes sense) and it looks somewhat strange without the bullets if an entry doesn't fit all on one line. Mr.Z-man 18:20, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

I prefer the old way as well, as I find it easier to use. I think there should be something added to Special:Preferences, though, because there's doesn't seem to be a unanimous decision regarding this.   jj137 (talk) 18:34, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Whitespace generated by template

I've just noticed that Template:Polish borders generates much whitespace, preventing text appearing next to it (as far as my Seamonkey can tell). I think this problem must have appeared recently; the template was not edited for a good few months and worked fine quite recently. If anybody could fix it, it would be much appreciated.--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 16:41, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm not really sure what you are expecting to see here, but i do think i know what is causing it. Recently new CSS for navbox was implemented. Since this "info-nav-box" uses class="navbox", i think your problem lies there. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:48, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

In Microsoft Internet Explorer the white space on the left-hand side (between body and template) is 5mm standard, but even Mozilla Firefox can produce different formatting results as far as I know. Please try to change "margin-left" from "1em" to "0.5em" and see what SeaMonkey makes of it. --Poeticbent talk 17:18, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

I am afraid it did not help. I just replaced the heading with that from a template that works and the problem is solved. Crude, but effective :) --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 20:04, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Block Log question

This probably has been answered several times before, but are block logs cleared on a regular basis? I was blocked several times in the past (once under my current account for a second, just when an admin provided a link to my old block log) under my old username "Davnel03", yet it doesn't show up in the block log. Why is this? D.M.N. (talk) 17:33, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Block logs don't get moved when a user is renamed. This is an ongoing technical limitation of MediaWiki, which might or might not ever get fixed. — Carl (CBM · talk) 17:48, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

That used to be the case, but the bug's recently been fixed. Nihiltres^{t.l} 18:23, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

That's wonderful news. — Carl (CBM · talk) 19:13, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes, but my previous blocks don't show up on either the Davnel03 or D.M.N. blocklog. D.M.N. (talk) 21:03, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Lucky you :) Prodego ^talk 21:24, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

I see them just fine. This may have been caused by whoever was changing the format of the block logs earlier (I should have taken a screen cap, as it's been reverted back). - auburnpilot talk 21:34, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Image stats

Can anyone help out with some media stats? The total number of media files (ie. everything in the "Image:" namespace) is given at Special:Statistics. The current total is 772,759 (there is also a magic word that I can't find at the moment). This also includes dupes of Commons images that are kept here and not deleted (for various reasons, though most are in fact deleted, I think). Trying to assess the split between free and non-free can be done if you assume that: (a) all images have license templates, and that the lists at User:BetacommandBot/Free Template Useage and User:BetacommandBot/Non-Free Template Useage cover all the relevant templates in use. I've pasted the data at those two pages into an Excel spreadsheet, and the total, as of 8th April 2008, are, 360,125 free images and 282,264 non-free images. Add those together, and you get a total of 642,389. I would like to know what the missing 130,370 media files are (whether they are all sounds and video clips, or whether there are lots of images knocking around without license tags or using license tags not tracked by BetacommandBot), so my questions are:

• (1) Is there a list or category of orphaned images, similar to Special:LonelyPages for articles? Answer: Special:UnusedImages.
• (2) What are the sound file formats and how many of these files are there on Wikipedia? Partial answer: ogg is the audio file format. Numbers unknown, as ogg includes both audio and video. Some numbers available below.
• (3) What are the video clip file formats and how many of these files are there on Wikipedia? Partial answer: ogg is the wrapper for the video formats. Numbers unknown, as ogg includes both audio and video. Some numbers available below.
• (4) More generally, what are the allowable filename extensions and what numbers are they present at in the 772,759 total? Partial answer: png, gif, jpg, jpeg, xcf, pdf, mid, ogg, svg, djvu. The split between the numbers is not known. Some numbers available below.

Any and all answers gratefully received. Thanks. Carcharoth (talk) 18:45, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

A good portion of the missing images are probably images using a License template that I am not checking. β^_command 18:54, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Does Category:Image copyright tags contain all the copyright tags (apparently there are 400 there), or will there be others? For example, I found Category:Image namespace templates, but that doesn't seem to include the sound and video stuff. Wikipedia:Media help and Wikipedia:Creation and usage of media files. The latter has the list of filenames I was looking for: "jpg, jpeg, png, gif, svg, and ogg". I now realise that .ogg is used for both sound and videos. It took me ages, but I also found Category:Ogg files. Only 72. Are there not more than that? Are the others on Commons? Carcharoth (talk) 19:10, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Also, the Wikipedia and Commons upload screens say the permissible filenames are: "png, gif, jpg, jpeg, xcf, pdf, mid, ogg, svg, djvu." Does that mean that Wikipedia:Creation and usage of media files needs updating to includes xcf, pdf, mid, and djvu? Carcharoth (talk) 19:14, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

What about image pages that only have the "featured" tag or something like that? ie. image pages with the actual images on commons. Are these counted by the stats perhaps ? --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:39, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

That is one possibility. Another is ones where the image is on Commons, but a local copy has been kept and not deleted. Anyone have any ideas how to count these two categories of "images" that will show up in the image namespace. Carcharoth (talk) 13:16, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I answered one of my questions. Special:UnusedImages. Anyone have answers to the other ones? Carcharoth (talk) 13:16, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks to Betacommand for running an SQL query to get an approximate answer. These approximate figures as of 10 April 2008, are

• png: 107,633
• gif: 50,158
• jpg: 498,505
• jpeg: 5520
• xcf: 16
• pdf: 1,557
• mid: 134
• ogg: 5,550
• svg: 7,880
• djvu: 0

For comparison, the total number of media files, at approximate the same time (within a few hours or so) was 775,671. The total from Betacommand's figures is 676,953. A discrepancy of 98,718. Anyone have any idea why there is such a big discrepancy? Finally, it is interesting to note that we have around 5500 audio/video files. Obviously Category:Ogg files is woefully incomplete. Carcharoth (talk) 22:23, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Carcharoth, I when I get a chance (~6 hours) Ill see what I can find out. β^{_{command 2}} 17:08, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks to Betacommand for getting the data. At the time he obtained the data, the total number of files, according to Special:Statistics, was 776,088. Betacommand's total was 784,623 - an excess of over 8,000. Not quite sure why that excess is there, but the breakdown by the filetypes listed above was:

• png: 127,514
• gif: 52,651
• jpg/jpeg: 588,902
• xcf: 16
• pdf: 1567
• mid/midi: 150
• ogg: 5,549
• svg: 7,947
• djvu: 0

Those are the allowed filename extensions, and total 784,294 files. There are a further 327 files with extensions that are supposedly not allowed. These are: pgn (3); dxb (1); dia (4); sgf (2); fig (4); bmp (26); sxd (0); wav (171); xls (83); sxi (0); graffle (8); and jpe (25). Not sure what some of those filename extensions mean - I've linked where possible, and left unlinked where I couldn't find any article. Carcharoth (talk) 21:48, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

the extra numbers could be caused by MySQL duplication with file extension capitalization. β^{_{command 2}} 22:09, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] All my edits getting an "N" tag

Why are all of my edits in my contributions list showing up with an "N" tag? I thought "N" meant that the edit was creating a New article. Corvus cornix_talk 21:26, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Me too, everyone's contribs seem to be getting this. Wassup? Franamax (talk) 21:30, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

I was just coming to ask the same. I also noticed there was a temporary change to the appearance of blocklogs, but it has been reverted back to the old style. Somebody must be messing about. - auburnpilot talk 21:32, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm also experiencing the same problem with my contributions don't know why, it maybe a problem with the Wikimedia server. Terra 21:34, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

It's fixed. --brion (talk) 21:40, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, Brion. (And for switching back to the old log style) - auburnpilot talk 21:44, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

A background update script will be ran sometime soon to show the N marks properly. Voice-of-All 21:46, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

I've always been proud of my ability to do open-heart server surgery where dozens of people could see my mistakes immediately. I can only imagine what it's like to roll out changes where th-th-thousands of people see it within seconds. (oh wait, I'm doing that right now :) Kudos and stars to the techs who keep this site rolling along! Franamax (talk) 21:53, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Heh. Thanks to Brion. Corvus cornix_talk 21:57, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Why does my table column not sort?

At Wikipedia:Core biographies/statistics the column called Occupation does not sort (click on the sort button and it will not work). The other columns do. Why is that? Gary King (talk) 22:14, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Fixed. One of the rows was missing a cell. Cheers. --MZMcBride (talk) 02:37, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Ah - how'd you manage to find it? Gary King (talk) 02:39, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

A regex, specifically \|-\r\|.*\r\|.*\r\|.*\r\|.*\r\|.*\r\|.*\r\|.*\r. --MZMcBride (talk) 03:04, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Logs not working

Logs don't seem to be working. DuncanHill (talk) 23:16, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Could you elaborate as to what is not working about it? They work for me. Gary King (talk) 23:33, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Should be all fixed now. --brion (talk) 23:34, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Working again now, thanks. DuncanHill (talk) 23:42, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Unable to access certain user pages - download file

I cannot access User Talk:Jagz. When I click on any link to get to that page, IE attempts to download an 'unknown file type' rather than going to that page. I also have the same problem attempting to get to User Talk:Raggz (this started back in Feb.). Is there any reason why that would happen and anything that I can do? Does it have to do with page names ending in 'gz'? (I am using IE 7 on Windows XP). I can get there when I am using other computers. TheRedPenOfDoom (talk) 00:25, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I think it is a local problem; the HTTP content type is correct when I download the page. — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:33, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

It works for me. I haven't heard of this problem and it's just a guess, but maybe your browser or other software on your end thinks it's a gzip file (file extension .gz), and tries to interpret it as such. Try to manually change the url to another ending, for example by adding ? as in [5] PrimeHunter (talk) 00:55, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks Prime - that worked! TheRedPenOfDoom (talk) 01:35, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] URLs

After the latest crapflood from off-Wiki, I noticed that the vandal edits used in these types of attacks always have "B" as their title. So, I have to ask: is "B" a wildcard in these edit links? -Jéské ^{(v^_^v X of Swords)} 00:44, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] watchlist?

On my complete watchlist (Special:Watchlist/edit), I now have separate listings for blank talkpages of pages I'm watching. Anybody have any ideas? — pd_THOR ^{| =/\=} | 02:26, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I think the developers have been testing out some improvements (check a few of the sections above this one regarding logs and contrib pages). It seems protections now appear in the watchlist, whereas they didn't before. (If any devs are watching, it'd be nice if Special:Watchlist/edit had a TOC) - auburnpilot talk 02:59, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I hope this is only a test, because I'm not a big fan of what pd thor is describing.--Rockfang (talk) 03:50, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I like the new style, but any watching devs please note that only non-existing talk pages are showing up in the "talk" section, which probably needs to be fixed. Happy‑melon 09:00, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I don't particularly care for it, but you're correct in elabourating my issue: only the red talk pages for are being listed separately. — pd_THOR ^{| =/\=} | 17:13, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I have to go now, but I'm almost certain this is an error. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 11:47, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, it was an error. Aaron fixed it in r33019. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 13:29, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm still having the issue elabourated upon above. Was 33019 something different, or would it not be working for me for some reason? — pd_THOR ^{| =/\=} | 17:13, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Software changes are not applied immediately. You can check Special:Version to see what version of the software is currently being used. Probably when you posted, it wasn't yet up to r33019; it's now beyond that and things work correctly for me at least. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 14:01, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Disambiguation: namespace

Brilliant idea no?

Struck me a little while back. All pages with (disambiguation) on them could be moved to this namespace. They aren't articles, therefore shouldn't be in the same namespace. The same might be a good idea for redirects (Redirect:) Thoughts? -- Anonymous Dissident^Talk 12:52, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Data users should get disambiguation pages and redirects together with articles. I think it would cause confusion and missing content for many data users if they were in different namespaces. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:02, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Disambiguation pages are still articles; they simply state that there are several other articles with similar sounding names. EVula // talk // ☯ // 15:35, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Oh no! Don't do that!! You'll open up the Georgia debate again! Hehe, but in all seriousness, disambiguation pages are useful to settle naming conflicts, because if two topics have (arguably :D) equally valid claims to a title, a disambig page is a nice neutral way to keep them both off the territory. And EVula's point is also valid: disambig pages provide useful, encyclopedic information, and hence should be considered part of the encyclopedic content. Happy‑melon 16:12, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Ok, scratch that idea, it appears I wasn't considering all possibilities... It was late over here... :P -- Anonymous Dissident^Talk 21:25, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Heh, I didn't even consider the conflict angle that Happy-melon mentioned; even if I had agreed with you initially, killing conflicts like that is definitely a worthwhile reason to keep them as-is. :) EVula // talk // ☯ // 16:14, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Recent changes -- Namespace: User

Is it new that sorting recent changes for the user namespace gives (User creation log) results? I don't remember it being like that before, and it pretty much takes most of the usefulness of the sort away. If it's going to stay like this, is there any way to choose to ignore log results? --Onorem♠Dil 12:53, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I seem to remember it always doing that. asenine ^t/_c 13:48, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

That is possible. Maybe it's just been an unusually active day for new accounts, or maybe I'm just completely off this morning. It seems like every time I've looked today, about 40 of the 50 results have been for account creation. Even if this isn't a new development, I think it would be nice to add the option to hide log results. --Onorem♠Dil 14:15, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I never check the RC page here (as it moves too fast for me to catch anything), but I know account creation shows up on RC pages elsewhere I check (primarily Meta and Wikispecies). EVula // talk // ☯ // 15:52, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Onorem: use Enhanced Recent Changes (option in Preferences). By the way, it's not sorting, it's filtering by namespace. —AlexSm 20:39, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. This looks like it will be much easier to look through. (I knew sort wasn't really the right word. Not sure how I didn't come up with filter though...) --Onorem♠Dil 12:39, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] No Edit Summary When Adding a New Section

This "feature" may be intentional: When adding a new section (using the "+" tab), there is no field in which to enter an Edit Summary. If that's intentional, then fine. What that means is whenever I issue a warning on some user's talk page (usually for vandalism), if it's the first warning of the month, then ordinarily I would use the "+" tab to create a new section. However, without being able to enter an edit summary, I won't use the "+" tab. Instead, I'll use the "edit this page" tab and create a new section using the double-equal sign trick.

The reason I always want to enter an edit summary is in case the vandal removes my warning (which is allowed under the rules), there is still a record of the warning, which I quote in the edit summary. Therefore I favor edit summaries even for new sections, but I can work around it if it's intentional that they are omitted. Thanks. --Art Smart (talk) 16:02, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I think it is intentional; when adding a new section, it automatically adds an edit summary with the section title you entered and "new section".   jj137 (talk) 17:12, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Indeed, the edit summary is whatever you name the section, in the form of a link to the section on the page and a "new section" declaration; makes spotting such edits much easier to find in contrib pages, histories, and watchlists. Here's an example of it in action.[6] EVula // talk // ☯ // 17:44, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the clarification. However, I'll just use my workaround, since user warnings are supposed to have the month and year as the new section heading. An edit summary of "new section - April 2008" isn't nearly as informative (to me at least) as

issued {{subst:uw-v2}} warning for *1991 - tony horrocks and james heeley, English school boys

as seen here for example. Also, the user is allowed to remove warnings from his/her talk page, but can't remove edit summaries, so I always want my warning in the edit summary itself. Thanks again for the clarification. --Art Smart (talk) 16:35, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] A protected unprotected page

Per discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#Portal:Kentucky/On this day.../April 9 protected?, for some reason it won't let me create new subpages for my portal. Some people are able to, some aren't. Some are having these problems with IE; I'm having problems with it on Firefox. Portal:Indianapolis/On this day.../April 9 is also affected by the problem.--Bedford 16:45, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Not sure what the deal is; I've created a blank page for April 9th so that it at least can be edited... EVula // talk // ☯ // 17:55, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Should be fixed now. There was a regex at MediaWiki:Titleblacklist causing this. --- RockMFR 19:13, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Moving a page on the watchlist

This is small but i think it is good now that when pages are moved, these show up on the watchlist as well. Btw, when did change happen? Simply south (talk) 17:05, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I think it was done at about 23:00 (UTC). It was part of this revision. Woody (talk) 17:13, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Improved diff gadget problem

I just tried the "improved diff view" gadget, but when I actually view a diff and click on the "view improved diff" thingy, it crashes my browser (Safari 3.1 on WinXP). Any ideas? DuncanHill (talk) 17:33, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I have experienced this crash as well. I have also tested this in the nightly build of Safari and there it is no longer an issue, so it seems that apple fixed the problem. So you will likely have to wait with using the Gadget until Apple releases a new version of Safari :( --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:27, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Well, I don't know what a nightly build is, but thanks - at least I'm not the only one affected! DuncanHill (talk) 18:56, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I just tried it with IE7, and it sent IE's CPU usage up to 100% and IE locked up (had to close it from the Task Manager). DuncanHill (talk) 19:06, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

As far as I remember this gadget also doesn't work in Opera. And I'm pretty sure it could be fixed to work with the current Safari version. This is what happens when gadget is added without prior discussion. —AlexSm 19:26, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Could a warning be added on the gadgets page, something like "This gadget will crash IE, Safari and Opera"? DuncanHill (talk) 19:29, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

This is what happens when gadget is added without prior discussion. WikEd was already, and had been for quite some time, a gadget at the time I added this (which is a subset of WikEd). --Random832 (contribs) 19:57, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

WikEd is 1) popular (i.e. tested by a lot of people), 2) is actively maintaned, and 3) has some real obstacles to make it compatible with other browsers. On the other hand, WikEdDiff is fairly simple (if we don't consider diff engine itself) and could be easily made cross-browser before becoming a gadget. And could have some other features (useful on diff pages) as well. —AlexSm 20:13, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Please could the users experiencing problems with wikEdDiff please give some more information about the "crashes" on User_talk:Cacycle/wikEdDiff in order to fix the tool. For example, what do you mean by 'crash' - freezing, terminating, or just throwing a JavaScript error message. Thanks in advance, Сасусlе 18:36, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

As the gadget is no longer listed on the gadgets page in preferences I am unable to replicate the problem. But as I recall, in Safari 3.1, it appeared to freeze and then I got a "Safari has encountered a problem and needs to close" message. DuncanHill (talk) 18:44, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Gallery tags

I asked on the help desk, but they suggested I ask here. Regarding the <gallery> tags. I noticed that on the commons, the gallery makes itself as wide as possible for your browser window, but on wikipedia, it is a maximum of 4 columns. I know you can modify the number of columns using the perrow parameter, but this just screws up the page if you use a lower screen resolution. Is there a way to make wikipedia gallery tags resize to the screen? -mattbuck (Talk) 18:28, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

At the moment I believe that's done with some custom JS on Commons. If it's reasonably reliable, we can probably integrate that into MediaWiki proper. --brion (talk) 20:10, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I hope it's soon. -mattbuck (Talk) 22:02, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] #ifexist limit

Is there a specific numerical limit to the number of uses of the #ifexist parser function in one page? Wikipedia:Template limits isn't clear on the issue. --Iamunknown 18:45, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes there is. If you open the source of a wikipedia page you will see it reported. It currently says:

NewPP limit report
Preprocessor node count: 59/1000000
Post-expand include size: 52/2048000 bytes
Template argument size: 6/2048000 bytes
Expensive parser function count: 0/500

That means you can use a maximum of 500 ifexist calls in ANY page (that includes all ifexists in pages that are transcluded into the article). Yesterday it was accidently set to 100 for a while btw. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:06, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

(e/c)The current limit of total expensive parser functions (currently defined as #ifexist and {{PAGESINCATEGORY}}) is 500. If you exceed the limit it will add the page to Category:Pages with too many expensive parser function calls and will display a warning on preview. You can see the number of expensive parser functions used on a page in the page HTML source - under the page content there will be a comment like "Expensive parser function count: X/500." Mr.Z-man 19:07, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Ok. Thanks for the info and for updating the page (and thanks too to Patrick). --Iamunknown 21:53, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Gadgets

There seems to be a certain tension between different people's views of what should be added as a gadget. Can we please all discuss and agree on whether gadgets that only work on a subset of browsers should be allowed or not? --Random832 (contribs) 19:59, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I don't really mind that some gadgets only work on some browsers (of course I would prefer if they all work on mine!) but I do think it is very important that on the gadgets screen in preferences that which browsers a particular gadget will work in is very clearly stated. DuncanHill (talk) 20:19, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Honestly, while I don't oppose the gadgets being integrated, I think I'd like to see the list on some other page (a "secondary" preferences page, of some kind). And along with them, all the "preferences" which are noted to require javascript.

I think that the page is too long for the average user/reader, and the "tools" (even by just being listed) could be more confusing than helpful. - jc37 20:31, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Anything that doesn't work in IE should automatically be allowed, as it just provides a reason to ditch such a horrible browser. :) EVula // talk // ☯ // 21:23, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

People edited from, erm, restricted environments may not have a choice. =( Pegasus «C¦T» 23:22, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Maybe what we could try is putting some code in MediaWiki:Common.js to detect the current browser and hide or flag any gadgets that are known to be incompatible with that browser. Tra (Talk) 21:52, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Please see Wikipedia_talk:Gadget. Сасусlе 07:09, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Coordinates are overwriting the top line

This was brought up on 27 March 2008 but not answered and is still a problem. I believe from earlier discussion that the coordinates are located a fixed number of pixels from the top and end up being right over the Article name when there is a fund appeal. Did someone tweak the number of pixels recently and get it wrong? 199.125.109.88 (talk) 22:15, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I noticed that recently as well. It's rather annoying. -mattbuck (Talk) 12:30, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

This can be fixed with the following CSS:

#coordinates {
  top:4.5em;
}

Just place that in your monobook.css. — Bob • (talk) • 04:28, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, but IPusers don't have monobook.css pages. Howabout just fixing the glitch? 199.125.109.104 (talk) 17:15, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

I would if I could. You can see if someone else is willing to make the change, elsewise I suggest creating an account if it bugs you that much. — Bob • (talk) • 22:55, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

The problem is that no one has figured out so far WHY this suddenly started happening. Without understanding the problem people are a bit reserved about fixing it. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 23:04, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

I think the horizontal rule, the line, got moved down, or I guess that would be up, no down, no up, no down making them collide. Maybe the size of the graphic at the left got changed, or something else that contributes to the location of the horizontal rule? 199.125.109.88 (talk) 02:30, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Somehow the space allowed for the page title seems to be wider than it used to be, so the bar is lower than it used to be before. There must be some other images of Wikipedia pages that could be looked at to count pixels. 199.125.109.88 (talk) 02:39, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Yikes. 743 of them in no particular order at Category:Screenshots of Wikipedia. The width of the space where the page title goes seems to be the culprit though. 199.125.109.88 (talk) 02:53, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

• OK there are 2 issues:
  1. When the sitenotice is present, it messes up the alignment for coordinates
  2. When coord is included from a table that has "font-size: 90%" for instance, then this value is inherited by the coordinates element. On this fontsize the top alignment is based (3.5em) An em is directly proportional to fontsize, so the offset of the top will be too small and the element will not be "low" enough. I'm looking into some ideas that could be used to solve this issue. However, this is not a new problem really and it seems that almost every potential solution has its drawbacks. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:37, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

As I feared there is little that can be done to improve this. If we use monobook, we want to use that specific location and not rewrite the main monobook skin or the way coordinates are included, the only way to properly fix this is to use Javascript to move the DOM HTMLelement. See template talk page for an example of how that would work. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 23:03, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm confused. You've got about a centimeter of blank space to drop the coordinates into and still get it right. It's like saying, well when it is lined up perfectly when it is in a template it misses slightly when it isn't in a template. But you have the broad side of a barn to shoot at! How can you miss? Just move it down a bit. 199.125.109.64 (talk) 23:56, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

But I still think that what caused the problem is that the space where the title goes got wider. 199.125.109.64 (talk) 23:59, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

That wouldn't work when the sitenotice is active. You see, there might be a whole barn to shoot at, but as long as superman is randomly pushing the barn around on your farmland, you can still miss quite easily. This is the only way to guarantee where the element is drawn all the time, even when scaled and even when there is a (hypothetical) page long sitenotice. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 00:16, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Good point. One thing I will say it that it is better below the line than it was above the line - which looked all fine and good unless you had a really long place name, which happens a lot of the time, and it clobbers the coordinates. I would just like to see it tweaked just a little bit lower. Like 4.0 em or 4.5 em instead of 3.5 em. Also since the title space got bigger it could possibly even be located above the title - for some odd reason there is a new space above the title, and would mostly be above a long page title. Another thought, if sitenotice (whatever that is - is that the donation beg?) is active would that just mean that there are two locations that have to be aimed for, sort of like the side of the barn or the roof of the barn? 199.125.109.64 (talk) 01:03, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

I've been working on an extension that should make adding little icons up there more uniform and less buggy - hopefully we can convince the devs to install it when it's done. :) krimpet✽ 00:56, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Here's another better idea to fix the problem of the coordinates getting covered up - just make the horizontal line only go half way across the page - problem solved. 199.125.109.64 (talk) 01:09, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Moderation

Few quick questions that I was hoping someone would help me answer:

1. What, if any, tools are Wikipedians using to flag articles/submissions for deletion?
   
2. What kind of time expenditure per hour is spent filtering malicious (i.e., racist, hateful, pornographic, etc.) content?
   
3. Is there a desire among the editing community to sift through the garbage more efficiently? or is that just part of the "fun" of the editing process?
   
4. How frequently does malicious content get submitted (40 per 1000)?
   

Your help is appreciated. I'll be checking this periodically if you'd like to have more of a dialog.
Cheers. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Lootgrass (talk • contribs) 22:19, 9 April 2008 (UTC) Lootgrass (talk) 22:22, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Submissions don't get flagged, they get reverted by clicking undo. Articles get flagged with a number of tags {{db-bio}}, {{prod}} etc. 99% of time per hour is spent filtering malicious content. By some editors. None by others. They put it there. By the way Wikipedia is not censored so pornographic only applies if it violates the laws of the state of Florida. There are a host of Bots that do sift through the garbage and auto revert many junk edits. 40 per 1000, that would be pretty good. It isn't much higher than 400 per 1000. Click "Recent changes" a few times and see for yourself what you think the ratio might be. 199.125.109.88 (talk) 22:43, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

1. One tool I found in the the index was this one: Wikipedia:WikiProject User scripts/Scripts/Easy db
2. There are a lot of people who spend a lot of time deleting vandalism and spam, but they aren't required to fill out timecards. So there is no data on this. You could do some approximations using the data shown here, though it's limited to articles (vandalism occurs in other namespaces), to determine the number of edits per hour that are reverted, and multiply it by some factor (your decision) for the amount of time per edit. But that would be a guess.
3. Part of the fun of editing is doing things efficiently. There are hundreds of tools (again, see the index) to help editors be more productive. See Wikipedia:Counter-Vandalism Unit and Wikipedia:WikiProject Spam, for example.
4. Again, hard data is limited, but the problem seems to be growing (countermeasures seem to be keeping the effective rate of vandalism at a manageable level, though); 4% is probably low. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 15:56, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Image syntax interacts with wiki table syntax

Resolved.

I've encountered a difference in image syntax behaviour depending on whether or not the image is inside or outside a wiki table. I'm working on flag templates and would like to make the border conditional. Some flags (e.g. {{flagicon|Japan}}→) certainly need it, but others (e.g. {{flagicon|Nepal}}→) look goofy with it. I changed the template code to make the MediaWiki border tag conditional, but this solution does not work when the flag template is used inside a wiki table. For example, [[Image:Flag of Nepal.svg|22x20px||Flag of Nepal]] (note the double pipe, consequence of the border tag conditionally removed) results in but:

{|
| [[Image:Flag of Nepal.svg|22x20px||Flag of Nepal]]
|}

fails dramatically, as the size parameter is ignored and a full size image is displayed. This only happens when wiki table syntax is used; HTML tables work fine. That's not a viable workaround, and I think any solution that tries to make the pipe also conditional is likely to be quite awkward. Help appreciated. — Andrwsc (talk · contribs) 23:05, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I can see the problem; the table parser sees the || as a cell seperator. Making the pipe condtional seems the only logical solution... (if I only knew how). Have you tried {{!}}? — Edokter • Talk • 23:16, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

The table parser is broken if it "sees" the double pipe inside the span of the image syntax. I'm reluctant to use {{!}} for now, but that may change if the bug isn't fixed. — Andrwsc (talk · contribs) 23:25, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

I just found a simple solution—a space character (e.g. [[Image:Flag of Nepal.svg|22x20px| |Flag of Nepal]] or [[Image:Flag of Japan.svg|22x20px|border |Flag of Japan]]). — Andrwsc (talk · contribs) 23:32, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Edit summary focus change

Today, I'm noticing that when I tab from the edit window to the edit summary window, at least when doing section edits, my cursor has the /* section name */ part of the edit summary highlighted. If I start typing, I overwrite the section name. Previously, my cursor was simply at the end of the text and I could type and hit enter without thinking. Anybody else know what's going on? --Dhartung | Talk 23:38, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

This sounds like something browser dependent. Just hit end or right arrow before writing the edit summary. If you accidentally delete the section name first then you can probably restore it with Ctrl+z. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:18, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm using the exact same browser I was yesterday. Something here changed. And I know how to work around it. The point is that I didn't have to before. --Dhartung | Talk 05:06, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Do you use IE7? An update came out today, maybe that caused the change. I always click into the edit summary, so I can't tell you if it's changed for me or not. Franamax (talk) 06:07, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Stranger yet, it has now changed back to the way it was before. Earlier part of the warning "Do not copy text from other websites without a GFDL-compatible license. It will be deleted. / Your changes will be visible immediately." was coming before the edit summary, now it's back down the page where it was, I think, before. I am using Firefox (2.whateverthelatestis), and I closed Firefox in between my two comments above but not since. --Dhartung | Talk 06:41, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

I had this happen too, but it was after a Safari update. *shrug* EVula // talk // ☯ // 16:11, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] WikiProject_Stub_sorting/Stub_types

Alone amongst Wikipedia pages, this project page, WP:WikiProject_Stub_sorting/Stub_types, won't load into Firefox (2.0.0.13), for me at least. Is there any known issues here, please?

Same as above. Kathleen.wright5 23:14, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Won't load for me in Safari 3.1 DuncanHill (talk) 00:10, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

And its just got flaky loading into IE7 - sometimes will, sometimes won't ... :-( TerriersFan (talk) 00:16, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

It works for me but it takes time to load. The page I receive is 1313851 bytes so I'm not surprised by that. Maybe the large transclusions should be spread over multiple pages. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:24, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Fore those who cannot load it, the transcluded pages in section 2 are:

Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub types/General

Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub types/Culture

Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub types/Education

Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub types/Commerce

Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub types/Government, law, and politics

Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub types/Leisure

Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub types/Sports

Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub types/Religion, mythology, faiths, and beliefs

Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub types/Geography

Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub types/History

Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub types/People

Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub types/Science

Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub types/Technology

Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub types/Transport

Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub types/Military and weaponry

Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub types/Organizations

Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub types/Miscellaneous

Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub types/Footnotes

The edit link is [7]. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:28, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

It's been a bit flaky for a long time, due to its size - which is why it was split into the 20 or so subpages. They're still transcribed to a main list for ease of access for people and servers that can access them, but in practice the subpages are more useful. Grutness...wha? 00:49, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Lining up indentations

I'm pretty sure this is something that's brought up constantly, but no one does anything about it because it would be more trouble than it's worth. Nevertheless, I thought I'd try again. Right now, there are three different ways to indent a paragraph, through a bulleted list (*), through a numbered list (#), or through straight indentation (:). And right now, none of those indentations line up with each other.

• See? Here's a bullet.

1. And here's a number.

And here's an indented paragraph.

That example isn't really a big deal, because I can't see a situation where you'd use a bullet and a number in close proximity like that. Where it does become a problem is in threaded discussion on pages such as AfD, or polls on talk pages, or anything where the first level of comments tends to be set off with a bullet. For example:

• Here's what I think. -- User:Foo
  • I agree. -- User:Bar
    • I also agree. -- User:Kéiryn
      • I strongly disagree. Let me write a really long paragraph explaining why. For example, the population of African elephants has tripled in the past decade. I don't know how you can ignore this as irrefutable fact.

      Also, Oregon is much more Idaho's Portugal than it is Washington's Mexico. -- User:Colbertfan000001

Note how Colbertfan's second paragraph doesn't line up properly with his first one? I've edited a bunch with each of the three most popular (I think) browsers, Firefox, IE, and Safari, and the problem is identical in each one. Can anything be done? -- Kéiryn ^talk 00:53, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

No I didn't notice. I thought that the one writing about the elephants forgot to sign and colbert was a different editor. Or yes I noticed that it made it hard to tell. In general it is often hard to tell.

When an editor splits their

Thoughts into separate paragraphs that they are all written by the same editor. 199.125.109.88 (talk) 01:51, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

The MediaWiki software produces simple clean html for these 3 things and then your browser controls the placement (I don't know whether there are html standards for that). I don't think the software should produce more complicated html in an attempt to get browsers to display it aligned, and I don't even know whether it's possible. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:20, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Pity, though; this has bothered me as well. Not to mention all these errors that are often made in bulleted, numbered, or hybrid lists; these items are often used incorrectly. I wonder if the creation of these lists is analysed anywhere beyond the level of "asterisks produce bullets, double asterisks produce indented bullets". Waltham, The Duke of 02:36, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

On second thought, there may be things going on I don't know about so don't trust my post. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:51, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

• If you're willing to have the paragraphs run together and look ugly in the Wikimarkup itself;

  Then you can line the paragraphs up on the displayed page.

1. It seems to work

   with numbered lists to.

2. And doesn't screw up the numbering. --barneca (talk) 03:12, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Huzzah! <p> tags! I knew the problem wouldn't be fixed, but I also had a feeling that if I asked, someone would show me the workaround. Thanks so much! -- Kéiryn ^talk 14:00, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

I use <p> tags. Keep in mind that : is not supposed to be abused as indentation, in principle. This is all just set by the CSS, anyway. The margins could be changed at MediaWiki:Monobook.css easily enough; it's been discussed before more than once. Note that the ordered-list indentation needs to be fairly large to give enough room for lists that run into two (or even three) digits. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 14:14, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Preferences - Prompt me when entering a blank edit summary

I would find the "Prompt me when entering a blank edit summary" much more viable to have enabled if it didn't prompt on an auto-generated summary such as /*Section*/ - If I want to replace that I will, but I do want to avoid submitting completely blank summaries. Also, an option for a javascript dialog triggered onsubmit would work better here - more immediate for the user and less load on the server. I often hit save then flick to another page, and several times lately have realised much later that an edit is still awaiting a summary or re-save. dramatic (talk) 03:52, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Why not just get in the habit of always entering an edit summary so people know what your edit was about? Franamax (talk) 03:57, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

I try to, but there are times when what I would type is exactly what the automated subject would say (with the exception of the /* */)dramatic (talk) 10:15, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

The /*Section about something*/ is a blank summary. It is just showing everyone what section you are editing. You are supposed to add your reason for the edit after that. 199.125.109.96 (talk) 21:08, 10 April 2008 (UTC)]

Was staying quiet, but thanx IP, just the section name is really not informative, what exactly were you doing in that section? Adding, removing, clarifying, categorizing? It really does help for those others reviewing the history and watchlist, eventually a trust situation builds - I recognize this user name and I recognize the task, I don't have to check 'cause I know that edit is reliable. Now I can concentrate my reviews on new arrivals and uninformative summaries. The more info the better! Franamax (talk) 23:58, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

I have found the option fairly useless for that very reason Dramatic. _(1 == 2)^Until 00:02, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

So when you click to edit a section and the wiki software automatically supplies the section name in un-bold purely as an indication of the particular section you clicked on, you consider that to be sufficient collaborative notice to everyone else as to what your intentions were? Why not just go with an automatic summary "Changed wikipedia article"?? Franamax (talk) 00:51, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Love it. Most of my edit summaries are "add". Seriously, as a frequent recent change patroller, what I focus on are the edits with no edit summary, so I would not want any way of automating an edit summary other than what section someone was messing with to be implemented. When I am looking back through history to find out when and why and who changed a particular factoid it is very helpful to have the section listed in history. 199.125.109.104 (talk) 17:23, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Error in Template?

Resolved.

{{OH-Project}} has something strange about it which is causing every talk page it is placed on to appear in Cat:WikiProject banners with quality assessment (which should only contain template description pages). dramatic (talk) 10:15, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Fixed. Happy‑melon 13:34, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks dramatic (talk) 17:50, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Adding SimpleTable Extension

I propose adding SimpleTable extension to Wikipedia.

I think that the syntax of wikitable is not so easy, and feel pain when inputting wikitable. Persons who think similarly might be not a little. If this extension can be used in wikipedia, inputting tables will be easier. So adding this extension will help wikipedians. Please examine this positively. J8takagi (talk) 15:37, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

This could be useful, but to me there is little reason not to go further and set up a separate table namespace, with a specialized WYSIWYG table editor. Other wikis have this, and there is already a precedent (the Image namespace behaves differently than other namespaces). Then editing tables would be very, very easy. (For more on this proposal, see the "Tables" topic in the editor's index.) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 15:33, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for the reply. I am interested in Wikipedia:Table: namespace and editor. it would be wonderful if this feature is added to wikipedia and editing tables become very easy. But adding it takes long time and there may be many problems when adding it, I think. Adding SimpleTable extension is easier and takes shorter time. Is this the major reason not to go further and adding SimpleTable Extension before setting up a separate table namespace? J8takagi (talk) 14:13, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

I don't see any harm in the SimpleTable expansion, though I doubt that most editors will become aware of it, if implemented, and of those that do, relatively few will do so. It's really more a matter of energy - if you can get this implemented without much discussion, fine. But if the community is going to spend a lot of time and effort debating it, then that time would be better spent on a solution that would benefit the vast majority of editors who are faced with editing tables, not the small minority who are adding information already in CSV form. -- John Broughton (♫♫)

[edit] Search trivia

Ok, I'm finally fed up with the new(ish) lump of text that appears at the top of Special:Search when no exact match is found. It's the bit that goes "no page with that title exists / you can search again... or you can request that the page be created". What need I add to my monobook.css to get rid of it? Happy‑melon 16:08, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

In the HTML source, it looks like that text is not enclosed in a -div- and has no id or name tags or any other unique attributes, so I'm thinking you're out of luck... Franamax (talk) 18:46, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

That's what I feared. Any chance a passing dev could wrap it for me? </follorn hope> :D Happy‑melon 18:55, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

You can ask on MediaWiki talk:Noexactmatch. --Splarka (rant) 07:34, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Added '<div id="msg-noexactmatch">'. --Random832 (contribs) 14:07, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks!! Happy‑melon 17:22, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] version of {{PAGENAME}} that shows redirects

It would be useful if there was a version of {{PAGENAME}} which gave the title of the page as based on the URL before any redirection was applied, i.e. in the case that you accessed the page via a redirect then it would give the name of the redirect itself rather than the page that it pointed to.

The reason for this is that templates could then be written which test for it, and produce different results depending on what title had been used to access the page. I am thinking in particular of use with some of the disambig link templates. To give just one example, template {{redirect}}, as used in article United Kingdom, will tell you:

"UK" redirects here. For other uses, see UK (disambiguation).

but this is essentially only relevant to you if you have used the title UK to access the page. If you have used United Kingdom in full, then you are very unlikely to be looking for other meanings for "UK". I am not very familiar with template syntax myself, but I presume that if the software were to provide a variable called {{PAGENAMEORIG}} or whatever, then it would be fairly trivial to modify templates such as {{redirect}} to make it so that these sort of disambig links only appear if you have actually gone via the redirect in the first place.

Many thanks, — Alan^✉ 16:20, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

This doesn't seem likely to be implemented. It would require fragmenting the parser cache unnecessarily. You'd have to cache the parsed text separately for every separate redirect, if someone used this, and inevitably it would get used everywhere. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 14:20, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Correct me if I am wrong, but the squids cache pages based on URLs, and mediawiki redirects are not HTML redirects, but content transclusions. So Oxford University (that redirects to University of Oxford), will have a URL of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_University, while the destination page has a URL of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Oxford. There shouldn't be a squid-level problem with having separate versions of the page based on a magic word like {{NOREDIRECTPAGENAME}} (although... memcaches and other internal caches might be afllictified?). --Splarka (rant) 07:15, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

I said parser cache, not Squid cache. The Squid cache would, as you say, not be affected. I don't know how bad the parser cache fragmentation would be, but I doubt it would be considered warranted for a feature like this. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 15:42, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Monobook

I just used my account for the first time in two years and found a warning on my Monobook page. History seems to be clean, is there something else I should watch out for? --Yooden ☮

It's a boilerplate warning so unsuspecting editors don't get lured into trouble. You've done your due diligence and it looks fine anyway. Franamax (talk) 18:39, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the quick response! --Yooden ☮

We like using four tildes to sign nowadays, so the date of your posting shows up with your sig btw. Franamax (talk) 18:48, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

That's not new, I'm a signature rebel. Thanks for the tip anyway. --Yooden ☮

Oh yeah? Well maybe I'm a wrong-answer-on-VPT rebel, you never know ;) Franamax (talk) 19:01, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

I have full trust in the decent and respectable VPT users to point out such follys. --Yooden ☮

If signature rebels (like yourself) post comments to Talk pages archived by MiszaBot, like this one, it will probably not be able to archive the threads in which you participate. Misza depends on seeing a date on *every* comment to know whether the whole thread is stale enough to archive. EdJohnston (talk) 04:46, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Won't it just archive slightly sooner, as if Yooden's comments weren't happening? It doesn't strike me as a huge problem. rspeer / ɹəədsɹ 05:22, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Good point, I assumed that the bot would use the actual change dates, not the one found in the page. Let me think about this. --Yooden ☮

I've seen before, not sure where, advice to not-date a post to prevent archiving by MiszaBot, I'll be interested in the answer. (And I'll try 3 tildes now to see what happens :) Franamax (talk) 06:30, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

OK, try again, counting one-two-three tildes! Franamax (talk)

Thinking about it, relying on the dates within the text would be pretty difficult. Every paragraph would prevent archiving if only the date would matter. Or the bot would have to recognize signatures but avoid archiving if they are undated. Using actual change date is much more straightforward.

Anyway, I just activated archiving on my /Talk, and I have threads with only dated messages. Let's see what happens. --Yooden ☮

The bot does not search the edit history to find the dates for anything. It merely scans the text looking for signature and date strings. It can't remove unsigned comments, and I understand that undated comments, or those that have dates that don't use the '(UTC)' date format, will hang around forever until someone manually archives them. The closest to an online explanation of this behavior is at [8], at the bottom of the page. EdJohnston (talk) 13:21, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

As long as there's at least one timestamp in the thread, though, it will get archived. --Random832 (contribs) 14:04, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Right on the mark, only threads entirely without date were unmoved. So only monologues are affected, I can live with that. --Yooden ☮

I'm a signature rebel. No, you're not - your an inconsiderate editor. You don't care that omitting the time and date makes it more difficult for other editors to follow the discussion, or to decide whether to respond or not (because old comments often aren't worth responding to). If omitting a single tilde somehow benefited you significantly, I could see the rationale - but it looks like you're just after attention, or that you get some sort of perverse delight out of irritating other editors. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 15:13, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

At least you make it easy to decide whether or not to repsond to your posts. Thanks! --Yooden ☮

[edit] Image formatting

[edit] Renaming the Image: namespace

$wgExtraNamespaces = array(
        NS_IMAGE            => 'File',
        NS_IMAGE_TALK       => 'File_talk',
);

20:45 < brion> thedj: no need to propose it for enwiki, that's in my queue to do in the software
20:45 < brion> just remind us eh :)

[edit] Logs appearing on watchlist

Hats off to whatever developer (group of developers) pulled this one off.--VectorPotential^Talk 23:53, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks :D Voice-of-All 01:02, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Good job, I agree. However, in enhanced expanded watchlist (imho, the only type of wathlist worth using) log entries are inconveniently grouped by log type, like 03:43 (Move log) (Page history) [User1; User2; User3]. Since I'm not really interested in users who made the moves, I'll have to uncollapse this pretty much every time. Also notice useless «page history» part. And last thing: I understand that logs entries are shown the same way as in Special:Log, but having article name first would be more convenient and more consistent with Watchlist/Recent Changes look. I hope this can be somehow improved later. —AlexSm 04:19, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

I had them grouped by page, but someone changed it. I'll bring it up. Voice-of-All 16:10, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes thanks tremendously. Can I ask what triggers the display of user-right entries? I assume watchlisting the user's talk or userpage? Happy‑melon 17:51, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Correct. The "target" field of userrights is just the user page, basically. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 15:45, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Strange error on page

On Peekskill (Metro-North station), a weird error message Expression error: Unexpected > operatorExpression error: Unexpected = operatorExpression error: Unexpected < operator shows up in the infobox. It seems to go away if you edit out the number of passengers, but I see no reason why this is the case. *Dan T.* (talk) 00:50, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

I tried this and put in pass_pct=0 just to give it a number. Now it's put in a green bar, but the red seems to have gone away. Please fix! Franamax (talk) 01:06, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

It appears to be a problem with a template used (probably as part of the infobox template) to present the percentage change in ridership, which is unable to cope with the absence of a figure there. On another unrelated issue pertaining to rail station articles, some of them, including Yonkers (Metro-North station), have a really awkward overlap of their various infoboxes and route boxes, at least in my browser (Mozilla SeaMonkey under Windows XP). Is there anything that can be done about this? *Dan T.* (talk) 02:17, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Expression error problem fixed now (Template:Rail pass box). The overlap problems can be fixed by adding {{clear}} (or maybe {{-}}?) before the route box templates. --- RockMFR 02:30, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] eddy current sensors and optical sensors

Hi,

   I want to know about Eddy current sensors and Optical sensors in detail.

Their construction,working,features,advantages. Now it's not available in wikipedia. So anybody pls help me.

A quick look at the Eddy current article led me to the Eddy-current testing article, which led me to an outside page titled An introduction to Eddy Current Testing theory and technology which has some info on that. -- Boracay Bill (talk) 01:57, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Database dump

What is the benefit of using the database dump? I tried downloading it to find out but cancelled it because was taking a very long time (many hours). I presume that you can search and replace much faster but how do the edits get resolved with other new edits when you upload? Lightmouse (talk) 12:29, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

The database dump is for if you want to set up your own site based on the content of wikipedia pages. (or if you want to run various statistical tests on the data) --Random832 (contribs) 14:10, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Also, by using the database dump to do statistical analysis, it takes a major strain off of the servers, which would collapse if every single venture/test ran off the live servers.Harryboyles 15:49, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. Lightmouse (talk) 14:30, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Extension:BypassSearch

I popped out Extension:BypassSearch, which adds a checkbox under the "misc" tab of "my preferences" to allow individual users to Go directly into editing a non-existent page instead of waiting for a search to complete (which can take seemingly forever during peak load) when using the left-hand search box. I figure it would definitely help in cases when someone knows that they want to create a new page or access a deleted page directly without messing around with the URI or adding to the load of the search servers.

Anyway, I wanted to see if people were interested in enabling it here. Cheers =) --slakr^\ talk / 14:26, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

I wouldn't use it, but it seems fairly harmless. Happy‑melon 19:25, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] I'd like a button to see "Most edits by" for each article

When looking at an article's revision history, It would be useful to me to click on a button to see which editors have edited the article the most.

When I come upon an article that needs cleanup, for example, sometimes I want to create a dialog with the editors that have worked on the article the most. Kingturtle (talk) 15:23, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

The external script page history statistics is helpful. –Pomte 15:38, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

TDS's Contribution Counter also does this, and uses the Toolserver. A user script could insert a button to the script in article history pages, or a link could be put into the MediaWiki message (a possible detraction to this is the load it might put on the toolserver). Gracenotes^T § 15:40, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Also, consider that this might encourage people to own the articles and make lots of trivial edits instead of a few good ones. --slakr^\ talk / 15:46, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

"Contributors" tool on toolserver provides more info than the other toolserver tool, and can be linked directly (not sure this is possible with vs.aka-online.de). —AlexSm 15:59, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

I'd hate it. Yes, in itself it would be mildly interesting, but it would definitely cause ownership. --Yooden ☮

I'd like to see more done to discourage or even block ownership, like if you have edited an article 50 times you would be blocked from editing it until 50 other edits had been made. 199.125.109.104 (talk) 18:03, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

199., that's a dire solution in search of a dire problem. -Jéské ^{(v^_^v X of Swords)} 18:11, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

http://wikidashboard.parc.com/ does this. --Random832 (contribs) 18:13, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Out of the thousands of active Wikipedians the SPAs are a small but very bothersome few. I've run into only three so far. I'm sure they mean well, but they are an absolute nuisance. I would guess there are less than 100 all together, but then I rarely edit any of the fluff articles that would be most likely to attract them - all the pop articles. 199.125.109.104 (talk) 18:24, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

SPAs attack more than pop-culture articles; see WP:ARBMAC. -Jéské ^{(v^_^v X of Swords)} 18:25, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

This would be a fantastic addition to the Toolbox section on the left, but only if it's in the form of a user script (and not a gadget). I don't know where the concerns of ownership are coming from; we're talking about contacting editors who potentially have much experience with an article for the express purpose of helping to improve said article. That's a very positive collaborative feature; I don't think anyone would be using it to say "oh, look at me, I've edited this a lot!" Aside from the fact that nobody would care, let's look at the two ways this could happen: they are making positive contributions, or they are vandalizing. If it's the former, it's a net gain for the project; if it's the later, they'd get blocked anyway.
However, it's not the sort of thing that the average user would need, which is why I don't think it needs to be a gadget. EVula // talk // ☯ // 18:30, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

You have a very optimistic view on your fellow editors. Even without the widget discussed here I had three very ugly encounters where editors defended their articles beyond reason. In one case, the former owner quit Wikipedia after his article has been blemished by me. --Yooden ☮

For some reason I'm never sad to see them go. The dashboard above is fun to use. Loads very slowly though, like Wikimap. Interesting that the dashboard is a product of Parc. Pretty notable research group there. If I'm not mistaken they invented the mouse (computer mouse). It's interesting that they find Wikipedia useful to work on, instead of say inventing something else new. 199.125.109.104 (talk) 19:32, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Optimistic? Wow, of all the things I've been called, that certainly isn't one of them. :) Problems with ownership are totally separate from this tool; it has existed long before the script was set up, and it will continue to exist regardless of whether the tool gets a shortcut or not. I'm not saying that the script will end ownership; I'm only saying that its primary use can be for collaboration.
Oh, and if we lose combative editors, we're better off. EVula // talk // ☯ // 20:41, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] friendly/twinkle not working

I can't get either to work, and i followed the instructions to the letter. Anyone care to look at my monobook and see if they can find my rookie mistake? merci! Jepetto (talk) 17:00, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

what browser are you using? β^{_{command 2}} 17:09, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

firefox 2. i mean, i understand whats going on and all, just can't get it to come up. its as if wiki is just overlooking monobook. Jepetto (talk) 18:18, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Are you using the monobook skin ? Otherwise adding it to your monobook.js won't work :D --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:38, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

See? i knew it was a rookie mistake. thanks for the help! Jepetto (talk) 18:55, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] "Edit lead section" button disappear after purge

I have chosen to add an [edit] link for the lead section of a page through "my preferences". I found that whenever I purge, the "Edit lead section" button disappears! I am using Firefox 2.0.0.13, and hope that somebody can solve this problem. --Quest for Truth (talk) 17:59, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

I just noticed that it happens for me, too. I'm using Safari 3.0.4 on a Mac. I'd say it's something to report to the author, rather than it being a browser issue. EVula // talk // ☯ // 18:32, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for your reply! It confirms that it should not be a browser issue, but rather a "bug" in the system. I report the problem here simply because I do not know to whom I should report. If anyone knows the author of this button please tell me or just help me to report this problem to this author. --Quest for Truth (talk) 18:38, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Fixed, thank you for brining this to my attention. Don't forget to WP:BYPASS. —AlexSm 20:02, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Looks like it works. I just used the purge link at User:EVula/admin (which is also what I used in my testing above), and while it still disappeared on the first click, all I had to do was shift-refresh on the purged page and voila, there was the link. Thanks! EVula // talk // ☯ // 20:43, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Deletion log missing

Copied from WP:AN

Has this image been deleted or not? It looks like it has, but no entry in the log! Issue complicated because the italics ('') markup appears in the filename. Carcharoth (talk) 23:37, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Looking at the user's upload log, I'd say that it has... I have no idea why there's no entry in the deletion log. Black Falcon ^(Talk) 01:20, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Would the italics markup thing have confused the log. I would have thought not, as it should represent it as %27. I'll drop a note over at VP:T. Carcharoth (talk) 20:51, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Anyone have any explanation for the above? Carcharoth (talk) 20:52, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Well, I just tried it myself here - deletion log appears. So the existence of '' in the title alone is not enough to cause an issue. Or it might be an entirely different cause altogether. --- RockMFR 23:26, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Seems to be the same problem shown some topics above. --Oxymoron⁸³ 23:57, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Undelete acts funny - The following consists of deleted revisions of [[:Image:South Park - Major Boobage - time 03'03.jpg]]. - but the deleted revisions show up and can be accessed. --Random832 (contribs) 23:43, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Does it show up in the deleting admin's log? Do we have any idea who the deleting admin is, or when it was deleted? --Random832 (contribs) 23:48, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Occasionally events are not logged as they should be. I have yet to hear of any smoking gun that anyone has found for this phenomenon. It's not reproducible, so it's kind of hard to track down. There's a bug open on it somewhere, but I can't seem to find it. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 15:56, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Account Creation

There is a discussion taking place regarding the possibility of adding a MediaWiki extension to the English Wikipedia to aid in Account Creation. Please see the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Request an account#Account Request extension. Feedback is appreciated. - Rjd0060 (talk) 22:10, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Article names ending in "/"

Hi!

When navigating up from [Wikipedia:Centralized_discussion/Image_placeholders] (using the firefox extension "uppity" (handy==lazy)), I was sent to [Wikipedia:Centralized_discussion/] which doesn't exist. No problem, I knew what to do!

Is there an advantage to allowing "/" to end an article name? I don't see one.

It doesn't seem to be a big problem though , only ~71 article name end in "/" (from [http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20080312/enwiki-20080312-all-titles-in-ns0.gz]) and the few I checked were properly redirected. Just curious. Saintrain (talk) 02:05, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Problem with rollback script

This is most likely some annoyingly simple error on my part, but I'm having an issue with JavaScript. I'm trying to write a modified version of a rollback script; my modified version is located at User:Pyrospirit/rollbacksummary.js. What I'm trying to do is have the string $u be replaced with the username of the editor being reverted, whose name is found in the &from= part of the rollback link. Here's where I run into problems. To get the username of the editor, I use the following code:

var from = this.href.match(/&from=[^&]+/);
var user = from.replace(/&from=/, '');

The problem is, that line generates the following error (from the Firefox 2.0.0.13 error console):

Error: from.replace is not a function
Source File: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User%3APyrospirit%2Frollbacksummary.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript
Line: 22

Now, I am admittedly quite inexperienced with JavaScript, but replace() used on a string? I'm pretty sure it is indeed a valid function. So what am I doing wrong here, and how can I get this script to work? If you happen to notice any other bugs while looking at the script, please let me know as well. Thanks, Pyrospirit (talk · contribs) 04:55, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

User:Gracenotes/rollback.js does do a $user replacement, btw. Check out the MDC documentation for String.match. That returns an array of strings if a match exists. Arrays don't have a replace method, but the members of that array (strings) have the method. You can use capturing groups to select certain parts of a regular expression, by the way: this guide (also from MDC) explains regular expressions in JavaScript. Gracenotes^T § 05:07, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, that information helps a lot. I was looking for your script to see how you did it, but for some reason I couldn't find it. I guess I'll just do it the same way you do in your script. Now that you mention it, I think I've seen that technique before, but I just forgot about it. Pyrospirit (talk · contribs) 15:32, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Search result page text

This seems to be the right place. When you search something and no results come up it says:

unsuccessful searches are often caused by searching for common words like "have" and "from", which are not indexed.

This is incorrect, when you search 'have' or 'from', many results appear. Surely this needs to be changed? George D. Watson (Dendodge).Talk^Help 17:17, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] URLs going to wrong places

Just a second ago, I C&P'd a URL in a prot log purported to go to an old WP:AN revision into my browser window. I was instead taken to an old revision on HMS Hermes (R12). Out of curiosity, is this deliberate? -Jéské ^{(v^_^v X of Swords)} 19:36, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

When you go to an oldid, the "title" field is actually irrelevant: it takes you to the page where the revision happened, wherever that may be. For instance, the last edit to this page is http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3AVillage_pump_%28technical%29&oldid=205362565, but if you change it to http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3AVillage_pump_%28technical%29&oldid=205362564 you end up at Agrostis capillaris. I suspect, therefore, that there was a simple typo on someone's part in the oldid value. Happy‑melon 20:05, 13 April 2008 (UTC)