Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)

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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.

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MediaWiki:Sp-contributions-footer

Would there be any objections if I were to create this particular MediaWiki: page? Examples of its use can be seen on Meta and Wikisource (see bottom of here and here) —Anonymous Dissident^Talk 08:56, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

I want it I want it I want it!! Happy‑melon 20:43, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

YES! Interestingly enough I was just thinking about this too after my recent editing on WB. - Icewedge (talk) 07:25, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

Nicely done. :) Is there a particular reason MediaWiki:Sp-contributions-footer and MediaWiki:Sp-contributions-footer-anon use different images and css attributes? In particular, Image:Wikipedia-logo.svg (38px) and Image:Information.svg (40px)... and the tables themselves seem to render with slightly different widths, on my browser. I favor consistency, but have no particular preference regarding which style we keep. – Luna Santin (talk) 10:07, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

Luna Santin: You are right. I'll update both to use our standard MediaWiki message box styles, thus they will look like the MediaWiki:Sharedupload. With 100% width, standard light grey background and so on.

I have coded up examples in my user space at User:Davidgothberg/Test30. I don't know which image to choose. I am leaning towards the Wikipedia logo (it looks good), or the icon tools image (since it says more about what content the boxes have).

Note! In my examples I also suggest a slight change in the MediaWiki:Sharedupload box. (The "This is a file from the Wikimedia Commons" box.)

--David Göthberg (talk) 22:49, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

Interesting. I definitely appreciate the consistency. As far as images, I believe I would personally favor Image:Information.svg or Image:Icon tools.png (though I believe you mentioned you liked Image:Imbox notice.png previously, which is also fine with me) -- they hint nicely as to the box's contents, as you said. – Luna Santin (talk) 09:09, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

Based on the two of us it seems the Image:Icon tools.png is the choice. But I think we need some more users to look at this. So please, can more people take a look at User:Davidgothberg/Test30 and comment here?

--David Göthberg (talk) 06:25, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

I also prefer this icon; it matches the purpose of the links much better. I'd certainly prefer not to see the Wikipedia logo. Waltham, The Duke of 12:20, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

Is there any way I can add the template to the bottom of my user page? Thanks! SharkD (talk) 22:12, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

SharkD: I see that you answered yourself by making the template {{sp-contributions-footer}}.

Everyone: I think I have found a much better image to use for these boxes: Image:User-info.svg

Perhaps we should use a more colourful version of that image, but you get the idea. But these boxes are interface messages so perhaps it is good that the image looks a bit neutral. See my example boxes at User:Davidgothberg/Test30 to see how it looks in the boxes.

--David Göthberg (talk) 08:21, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

I really think that "IP user" should be substituted for the three places that "anonymous user" appears, as everyone should know that most user names are far more anonymous than IP addresses. 199.125.109.90 (talk) 17:14, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I agree with the IP user 199.125.109.90, it is time we get rid of the misnomer "anonymous user" for the not logged in users.

--David Göthberg (talk) 17:48, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

The term "IP user" is terrible. It's incomprehensible jargon to practically anyone on the planet. Call them "unregistered users". —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 15:19, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Not specific enough. IP user is fine, and it is well explained. It's not something that would ever be used out of context. I know I would much rather be referred to as an IP user than as an un-something. 199.125.109.64 (talk) 15:40, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

IP user is not "well explained". It's incomprehensible unless you happen to be one of the tiny technical elite who knows what an IP address is, and even then it's incomprehensible unless you realize that MediaWiki names unregistered users by IP address (which is unheard of for web software). —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 02:15, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

I like the new image; I don't mind the discreet blue colour (actually, I think I like it), and I agree that the image should look neutral. In the sandbox I notice two additional new suggestions... As I've said, I prefer this icon to one with more colour (in this case, the one wearing a red tie). As far as the black one is concerned, I get the meaning ("shady" members), but I don't think it will be appreciated much, and it stands out too much anyway.

Although I might consider it if it were stroking a white Persian cat. Waltham, The Duke of 22:16, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

As most of you probably have already noticed: I have changed to the "user info" image I show above for all the related MediaWiki messages.

Waltham: Yeah, the black one looks scary. I bet some would like it for IP users! :)) The two coloured images were the only related ready made ones I could find on Commons. I have tried with softer green versions on my own computer, but didn't upload them since they didn't look as good as the grey-blue one we are using now.

Simetrical and 199.125.109.64: Both "IP user" and "unregistered user" sounds right to me. Both are way better than "anonymous user". I think we need input from more users to decide which one is best. So people, which do you prefer: "IP user" or "unregistered user" or something else?

--David Göthberg (talk) 11:15, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

I prefer IP user as it is both shorted and as 199.125.109.64 (I think) pointed out, unregistered could be seen as negative. —Atyndall ^{[citation needed]} 11:17, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

I am being pedantic about semantics, but maybe use "editor" rather than "user". All editors are users, but not all users are editors (some are just readers), and there is no purpose in having "IP user contributions" for IP readers-only. — Twas Now ( talk • contribs • e-mail ) 11:39, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Twas Now has a point there. Here are the first sentence of the message with the different namings. Version 0 being the old message:

0: This is the contributions page for an anonymous user, identified by the user's numerical IP address.

1: This is the contributions page for an IP user, identified by the user's numerical IP address.

2: This is the contributions page for an unregistered user, identified by the user's numerical IP address.

3: This is the contributions page for an IP editor, identified by the editor's numerical IP address.

4: This is the contributions page for an unregistered editor, identified by the editor's numerical IP address.

I think I prefer versions 1 and 2, but I am okay with 3 and 4 too. To me "user" sounds more friendly and welcoming than "editor". By the way, since these footer boxes are very visible I think that the naming we use in them is likely to become the standard naming we use here at Wikipedia.

--David Göthberg (talk) 15:48, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

I have no preference, but I'd like to make two observations:

• IP user/editor is more educational, as it makes the connection with IP address and shows the Wikipedian in question what an IP user/editor is without having to be a nerd or read any help pages.
• As far as Twas Now's point is concerned, he is right in that only those IP addresses with edits are relevant here, so it makes no sense to refer to plain readers in the toolbox. Furthermore, I think we can say that editor is a title automatically bestowed on anyone who's made an edit, not least because the two words are obviously related.
  • On the other hand, since only those who have made edits will have a contributions page (where the toolbox at the bottom appears), the IP user in question cannot be a plain reader anyway. The "this is the contributions page of an IP/anonymous user" message would only appear for editors, who do belong to the category of IP users.

Full circle. :-) Waltham, The Duke of 13:04, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Monobook Sidebar Menus

Does the left border on Monobook’s sidebar menus bother anyone else? It has bothered me forever.

The line down the side of the window should be clean, but instead it has lumps caused by the border on those side items. While, I’ve fixed it in my own stylesheet – I really think this is a nice simple change that should be pushed to the global style.

All it takes is this:

div.portlet .pBody {
    border-left: none;
}

Thoughts? — Mobius (talk) 06:46, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

I don't see any "bumps" - is this a browser-specific issue? – ukexpat (talk) 13:11, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

I tried this (monobook/FF 3.0) and didn't notice any change. –xeno (talk) 13:27, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

What browser do you use? I don't see any "bumps" either... EVula // talk // ☯ // 13:52, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Nor do I, but adding that code to the global sheet will fix a problem for some people so, if it doesn't affect anyone else, I propose we add it...... Dendodge .. Talk^Contribs 17:44, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

How do you get the idea that "it doesn't affect anyone else"? It would remove the left border from the portlet bodies at the left, giving them borders on only three sides. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 14:14, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

I should have posted a picture in the first place: [1]. This is from Firefox on the Mac, where it’s particularly noticible. Do you notice that the effective border along the left is thicker nearby the portlet boxes? Granted, as a graphic designer I’m more sensitive to this than *most* people, and even then it’s a minor annoyance—just sayin’.
— Mobius (talk) 07:14, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

I hadn't noticed this before... Thanks to Mobius, I shall be forced to endure it for who knows how long. Well, now we know who'll get the first taste of my new sword's sharpness. :-)

Simetrical, isn't the entire page bordered only on three sides? And, unless I am mistaken, the Wikimedia–MediaWiki footer only has two lines. Now that I think of it, a very long word or code-box can cause us to see the lack of a border on the right, but I have yet to see any empty space on the far left of the page. Unless other browsers display such space, there is no problem I can think of. Waltham, The Duke of 19:23, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

The content area has no right border, and the footer has no left or right border. However, the portlets on the left side (navigation, search, etc.) have all four borders, and the left border is clearly visible on Firefox 3 on Ubuntu (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008072820 Firefox/3.0.1). While I doubt I would notice if it were missing, and don't particularly care if it's removed, it's not true that this wouldn't affect other users. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 15:28, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

I see your point; I actually meant what EVula says much clearer below: make the boxes so that they stick to the left in the same way the content area sticks to the right. (Or at least is supposed to; right now, in edit mode, I see both the upper and lower line—of the content area and the footer—stop one pixel short of the right edge of the screen; my other tabs display the lines properly.) Waltham, The Duke of 21:02, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Ah, okay, now that I know what you're talking about, I see what you're saying (Safari 3 on a Mac). I'm a graphic designer too, but it doesn't bother me; the optimal solution would be to kill the left border and move the boxes left one pixel (or, alternatively, leave the border and give it enough left padding to match the space between the boxes and the main site). EVula // talk // ☯ // 19:35, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

As far as I remember, some year ago the sidebar menu boxes didn't have left side borders. I remember when I was new to Wikipedia that I was slightly disturbed that they had no left side border. It made it unclear to me if I was seeing the whole page or not. See, I use Firefox on Windows and it has no border itself to the left when the Firefox window is maximized.

But as I usually do when testing designs: I made a screen dump and edited it to see how it looks without the left side borders. Now that I am an experienced Wikipedia user and know there is nothing more to the left of the page it works both with and without those borders. But I think keeping the borders is more friendly to new users.

And sure, it would be nice with some space to the left of those boxes. But horizontal screen area is precious, especially for users like me who view Wikipedia in lower screen resolutions. So I think they should stick to the left side.

So I think it is best we leave it as it is now.

But hey, that the page content area has no right border has always disturbed me. So today I added this code to my personal monobook.css:

/* Setting a border to the right of the page content area. */
#content {
    border-right: 1px #aaa solid;
}

I think I like it. But I won't be sure until I have used it for some days.

--David Göthberg (talk) 11:40, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

I don't think I'll even try it; due to very long links and code boxes, it is often the case that the right border is not the right edge; I can scroll sideways. On the other hand, the left hand border is immoveable. I don't know if a pixel's space would be too valuable to spend, or even an improvement if spent, but it might be interesting to try. That said, I don't really care about what happens either way; I've realised that the border sticking to the side is not very obvious when I maximise my window. It's just that I always have my history tab open, and its grey border "merges" with that of the boxes.

(Actually, it's not very obvious anyway; I'm speaking in relative terms here.) Waltham, The Duke of 13:16, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Clock gadget eats CPU

Hi! Just turned off my clock gadget and CPU usage went from 10-12% to 0%. FF3.0.1 on WinXP. I can use all the cycles I can get! Saintrain (talk) 19:12, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

To those that don't know the clock gadget: It can be turned on at: "My preferences - Gadgets - User interface gadgets - [ ] A clock in the personal toolbar that shows the current time in UTC and also provides a link to purge the current page"

Saintrain: Yes, the clock gadget uses way too much CPU. I tried it some time ago and when I had several Wikipedia tabs open my computer became too slow to use. (Yes, I have a very old computer, and no I won't buy a new one just to run the clock gadget.)

Back then I asked the creator of the clock gadget if I could change the code in the gadget so it only shows whole minutes and only updates once per minute instead of once per second. (Who needs more precision than 1 minute to check what UTC time it is?) That would make the clock gadget use 60 times less CPU. But he refused to let me do that change.

So I had to resort to copy its code to my own monobook.js. While I was at it I made it so it only updates once every second minute to save even more CPU, since that is good enough for me. And then I improved it so it shows two clocks: One showing current UTC time, and one static that shows the time the page was loaded. Feel free to copy the code from my monobook.js page to your own monobook.js. (Note: There are several code snippets on my monobook.js page, be sure to copy the right part.)

I hope more users realise that ticking the UTC clock every second is silly, especially since it means that many users can not use the UTC clock gadget. So, what do the rest of you think?

• Should we update the clock gadget to only use whole minutes (and tick once per minute)?
• Should we add the second static clock that shows the time the page was loaded? (And if we do then I suggest we make both the clocks have normal text size like I did so it doesn't take up too much space.)

--David Göthberg (talk) 07:02, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

Heh, I use it myself, but I've never noticed a thing—of course, I'm running custom-compiled Firefox on a Pentium D, so that's not too surprising. Is this a noticeable issue for many people using the gadget? If it is, I'd say changing it to once-per-minute would be sensible, since gadgets should be aimed towards the general user (and you can always use a customized .js instead). --Slowking Man (talk) 12:44, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

Fine, but the old version with 1 second precision should also be retained as an alternative in the "Gadgets" section. I have just tested this on my computer and it eats away only about 5% of CPU power, definitely not noticeable, and I can't say I have the best computer available. Admiral Norton ^(talk) 13:10, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

Admiral Norton: Why do you need 1 second precision on the UTC clock? It's mostly used to compare times with the watchlist, peoples signatures and similar, and those only show time in minutes anyway.

5% of the CPU? How many tabs did you open? You know, some of us edit Wikipedia with 10-15 tabs open at a time. (When I program templates I need to have a lot of reference pages open.) And some browsers have a slower javascript engine than others.

--David Göthberg (talk) 13:37, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

I have 4 tabs open (not counting Meta wikipedia, which also uses the clock). As for the 1 second precision, I just like having something not stationary in the browser. Too bad the Windows clock doesn't have that precision. Admiral Norton ^(talk) 13:49, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

I just wrote an optimized version of the clock script at User:Ilmari Karonen/liveclock.js. It defaults to showing hours and minutes only, but it can be made to show seconds by adding a line to your monobook.js. Even with seconds enabled, I'm hoping it might be a bit less resource-intensive than the original. I can't test this myself very well, though, since my CPU usage meter hardly moves even when I make it update 200 times a second. I'm hoping someone else (like David) could test it and see how it compares. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 16:54, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

Support, I don't need precision to the second. SharkD (talk) 22:21, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

Of course, the fundamental problem with the live clock and tabbed browsing is that the script keeps running even when the tab it's in is invisible. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any easy way for the script to detect that it's running in an inactive tab and stop itself; the closest thing I'm aware of are the window focus/blur events, but they don't quite mean the same thing. (And even then, there doesn't seem to be any way for the script to tell at startup whether the window already has focus or not.) —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 17:00, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

This would also make a useful change. However, the script would also need to keep track of local time, which I don't think it currently does, instead of simply incrementing some amount at every interval. SharkD (talk) 05:36, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

Actually, it does keep track of time (in JavaScript, "new Date ()" creates a Date object representing the current time), so that part is already covered. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 22:32, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

A third alternative which I would also support is to not use any JavaScript at all and only display the time when the page was loaded (e.g., a static display). SharkD (talk) 04:53, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

That would actually make sense - once someone sees it once they have a sense of what the hour is in UTC, and they can check their own clock after that. --Random832 (contribs) 18:37, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Ilmari Karonen: Sorry for not responding earlier. I will test how much your code loads my computer (when I get the time, probably today or tomorrow) and report back here. It seems to be neat and efficient code. But I think that all that rounding in your code is a bit excessive, especially for your seconds function. And even for minutes I don't see much of a need for it. To get precision you could make it tick exactly at the beginning of each minute, although having all the windows tick at the same moment probably is a bad idea for slow computers.

As I described above, personally I display two clocks: One in bold text that ticks each minute and one static with normal text that shows when the page was loaded. But SharkD and Random832 has a point, some perhaps only want a static clock. Ilmari: Could you perhaps add those options too? (I think I can do that myself but I am not really a javascript programmer.)

--David Göthberg (talk) 11:46, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Has this discussion continued elsewhere? I would really like the static clock. SharkD (talk) 21:29, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

SharkD: No, we are just busy elsewhere. I have put it on my to-do list to make a UTC clock with all the options we have discussed here. I have some neat ideas how to do that. But I already have the clock I personally need, so it is low priority for me.

I am thinking of making it default tick once per minute, and show two clocks (one static that shows page load time and one that ticks). And it will understand a variable where you set seconds between ticks. If you set say 10 seconds it will show seconds and tick once every 10 seconds. If you set 120 seconds it will show only minutes and tick once every 2 minutes. And if you set 0 then it will only show the static clock. (I think the static clock should always only show minutes.) If people really dislike seeing both clocks then I can make it so that if the parameter is negative then it only shows the ticking clock, like -1 means tick every second and not show the static clock.

It might sound a bit tricky to have only one parameter like that, but I think it will be more user friendly than using several parameters to set the different options.

--David Göthberg (talk) 10:47, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Edit history of two editors

Is there an easy way to do a merged or side-by-side comparison of the edit history of two accounts? Thanks, --Clubjuggle ^T/C 21:49, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

tools:~pietrodn/intersectContribs.php? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 23:23, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

That just gives a list of pages both have edited. Any way to get the edits and times in there? Thanks, --Clubjuggle ^T/C 05:23, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

If the edit histories were served in table format instead of as a list you could simply copy the tables into a spreadsheet and compare them there. This also goes for a lot of the other "Special" pages. SharkD (talk) 05:34, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

They are easily cut and pasted into a spreadsheet as is. I pasted them into notepad first to remove the ISO characters. 199.125.109.90 (talk) 19:06, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

02:04, 19 August 08 SharkD          m Chronology of console role-playing games ? (?Legend: fix alignment)
02:03, 19 August 08 SharkD          Chronology of console role-playing games ? (?Legend: add platform)  
02:00, 19 August 08 John Broughton  Wikipedia:Editor's index to Wikipedia ? (?W: changing name of one entry)  
01:58, 19 August 08 John Broughton  Wikipedia:Editor's index to Wikipedia ? (?T: changing an entry - renamed page)  
01:57, 19 August 08 John Broughton  Wikipedia:Editor's index to Wikipedia ? (?S: various changes)  
01:23, 19 August 08 SharkD          Talk:Final Fantasy (video game) ? (top)  
01:07, 19 August 08 SharkD          Template:Sp-contributions-footer/doc ?  
01:03, 19 August 08 John Broughton  Wikipedia:Coaching ? (Removing link to a page that is now a redirect) (top)  
00:59, 19 August 08 SharkD          User talk:Simetrical ? (?wikibits.js)  
00:58, 19 August 08 John Broughton  User:John Broughton/Citation options ? (Adding Q)  
00:57, 19 August 08 John Broughton  N User:John Broughton/Citation options ? (Goal: document all possible options for citations, and include examples.)  
00:18, 19 August 08 John Broughton  User:John Broughton ? (?Subpages: Adding link to a new subpage)  
23:10, 18 August 08 John Broughton  Wikipedia:Sandbox ? (Test)

How did you get everything lined up properly into columns? The individual items aren't delimited by a common character, such as a comma, tab, space, etc. SharkD (talk) 21:34, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Did some one damage my account?

"Sorry! We could not process your edit due to a loss of session data. Please try again. If it still does not work, try logging out and logging back in." that is the messege i get whenever i try to contribute. Ironically, i get the same messege when i tried to edit, while i was logged out! (One last pharaoh (talk) 20:16, 17 August 2008 (UTC))

You might be better off asking this at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical), where techinical issues of Wikipedia are discussed. Hopefully those there can give you a better answer about it. -- Natalya 21:07, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanx, Nataly. One last pharaoh (talk) 14:03, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

That happens when your browser is unable to process session cookies or you are using a bad proxy. What browser/proxy are you using? - Icewedge (talk) 21:40, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

Well, i donot know about that stuff :D incase it would be helpful, i was using windows XP and i had the same problem, now i am using windows vista and i still have it. i even got a new hard disk, and tripled the RAMs so the computer is in like-new condition. One last pharaoh (talk) 14:03, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

That happens to me, if I edit, go away from the pc, come back later and save. Perhaps copy and paste your changes in a refreshed version? weburiedoursecretsinthegarden 14:10, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

As a last hope, i write what i want in an MC word file, or write it here then copy-past it there so that i have the contribution saved on my hard disk and i can try again if it did not work the first time. the kicker here is that i would not work the second time or the third time or whatsoever so i just gave up. i even thought to be just a reader and stop editing, but some times u cannot help editing wikipedia :) One last pharaoh (talk) 14:18, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

I, One_last_pharaoh have copied that from wikipedia help desk taking Natalya's advice. hope to get helped soon. Thanx in advance. One last pharaoh (talk) 17:54, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

The cookie might have gotten damaged somehow (maybe in transit). Try deleting your browser's cookies and then logging in again. Titoxd^{(?!? - cool stuff)} 18:54, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

Note: I have re-done the copy paste from the help desk section, when you so such content moves please do them by copying the source not the output. - Icewedge (talk) 20:12, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

I experience this any time I hit "edit" and don't submit the changes until hours later. My way of combating it is to copy the entire contents of the edit window to the clipboard (or to a text file, if I'm paranoid about it being lost), hit the back button until I'm back to viewing the page (not editing it), hit "edit" again to start a new session, copy in my changes, and save it.--Father Goose (talk) 21:21, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

Same here. I haven't received this error any time else. SharkD (talk) 22:08, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

First i want to thank every one who tried to help. I do not know why, but now i do not have the problem, or at least that's what i think. i have just made a revert, and it worked normally !

I do not understand what happened, but happy that it did happen any way :D One last pharaoh (talk) 22:12, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

I don't understand what all this fuss is about. I also see the message when there's a great delay between clicking on "edit" and on "save", but I simply hit "save" again and my changes are saved properly (that is, unless there is an edit conflict). Why go back and refresh?

PS: I'm clearly not referring to One last pharaoh's plight of seeing the message constantly, though I still don't know if "trying again" (as the message itself recommends) ends up losing the changes in this case. Or, at least, used to. Waltham, The Duke of 11:24, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

Different browsers behave differently. I seem to remember a recent discussion about IE6 and IE7 being unable to restore an edit via the "back" button, while FireFox works as expected (the back button brings one back to the edit box with the edit in it). -- John Broughton (♫♫) 13:56, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

I am preparing a potent curse for all those Microsoft executives who use Wikipedia and yet leave Internet Explorer in this mess. I shall cast it on 1 September; expect some serious vomiting in Redmond. (sinister grin) Waltham, The Duke of 21:17, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

But you shouldn't even have to hit "back" at all - your submitted text appears again in the new edit box in the page with the error message; just like hitting preview. I don't see how that could possibly fail to work in IE. --Random832 (contribs) 14:47, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Signing posts

Why isn't it automated? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Lumarine (talk • contribs) 03:29, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

Because occasionally edits to talkpages don't need signing, and you need to sign on some non-talkpages too. But most of the time SineBot will sign it if you forget. Calvin 1998 ^(t-c) 03:33, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

It's as if when I send an email I have to put 4 tildas at the end otherwise the recipient can't see my e-mail address. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Lumarine (talk • contribs) 03:36, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

Hmm... but would you like it if the Mediawiki signed the edit it which, say, you reverted vandalism to a talkpage? There's just no way to figure out whether your edit is a message or some other edit. In any case, you can check the history to see who added a message. Calvin 1998 ^(t-c) 03:40, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

LiquidThreads. — Werdna • talk 04:05, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

Or try the right link. :-) Graham87 12:40, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

In general it is helpful to add any missing signing on talk pages so that they can be kept in chronological order, in addition to identifying who said what. 199.125.109.64 (talk) 15:28, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

"go" button in watchlist

Am I imagining it, or has the "go" button in the watchlist page been moved? It used to be next to the namespace box, now it is under that box. Garion96 (talk) 21:02, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

Er, now that you mention it, I think you're right. Dunno what would have changed; I just checked my watchlists on Meta, Commons, Wikisource, Wiktionary, Wikinews, and Wikispecies, and they all have the Go button on a separate line as well... EVula // talk // ☯ // 18:41, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

I viewed the rendered XHTML code. The MediaWiki software now inserts a <br /> tag between the "[ ] Invert selection" text and the [Go] button. Since that line is so short I too would like the [Go] button to be back on the same line as the "Namespace: [all] [ ] Invert selection" part. And it would make it clearer what the button is for.

I think someone who has a bugzilla account should file a report on this.

--David Göthberg (talk) 10:26, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

I've tweaked this in r39836, but I'm still not really satisfied with how it looks. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 15:29, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

I am glad I did not imagine it. Thanks for the fix~. When will that go live? Since it is indeed a waste of vertical space. Garion96 (talk) 19:37, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Software changes go live every few days. See meta:Software update process. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 02:16, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Would be nice if this <br> was removed from RecentChanges as well. —AlexSm 04:11, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

(unindent) The relevant bug is 15172. --MZMcBride (talk) 04:25, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Ah, thank you. Now, if we could also get rid of the new fieldset (rev:39839?), that is, a box with a blue border and huge 1em margins which take a lot of space... —AlexSm 04:48, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

You could add

#mw-watchlist-options{ display:none }

to your monobook.css , which would remove the box. Calvin 1998 ^(t-c) 05:03, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Well, of course I want to remove the container only, not the content. If the filedset stays in MediaWiki like this, personally I'll have to use something like the code below which makes the options part a lot more compact.

fieldset#mw-watchlist-options {border:none; margin:0; padding:0}
fieldset#mw-watchlist-options legend {display:none}

—AlexSm 05:32, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

I agree, the new blue box surrounding the "Watchlist options" takes up way too much space. Either its margins and padding should be decreased, or it should be removed altogether. (Of course keeping its content, the actual "Watchlist options".)

--David Göthberg (talk) 16:01, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

New edit tools enabled for everyone

After several months of preparation and testing, as of this writing the new, all-JavaScript implementation of edit tools — the links below the edit box that, in browsers with JavaScript enabled, let you insert all kinds of funny characters and wikimarkup into the edit box — is now turned on for everyone. This has the following advantages:

• Edit pages now load slightly faster, since the JavaScript is cached and doesn't have to be reloaded with every page.
• Users with JavaScript turned off no longer see a bunch of links that do nothing for them.

The new implementation also differs from the old in that the edit tools are grouped into alternative "palettes" that may be selected using a drop-down menu. This may feel unfamiliar and inconvenient to some people used to the old arrangement, but I've been using the new implementation myself for months now, and I find it quite convenient once one gets used to it. The major advantages of the drop-down menu system are that:

• The new system takes up a lot less space, allowing easier access to the other useful things below the edit box (such as the lists of transcluded templates and hidden categories).
• While the selection of palettes currently only contains the same set of tools as in the old system, a lot more character sets for various languages and for other specialized purposes can be easily added.

Also, as a cherry on top, the new edit tools work also work for the edit summary field. Ever wanted to use an em dash in your edit summary? Just put your cursor into the edit summary box where you want the dash and click the "—" button! Easy!

—Ilmari Karonen (talk) 18:45, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Huge thanks to everyone that wrestled this into shape. So much cleaner and less overwhelming. Good stuff! -- Quiddity 19:29, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Awesome. Edit form loads much faster now. I would like to personally recommend the desysopping of anyone who reverts this. — CharlotteWebb 20:20, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Although I liked the accessibility of the former design, the improvement in loading speed more than makes up for it (especially since I only rarely used the special symbols). "Show preview" for this page takes less than a second! :D –Black Falcon ^(Talk) 20:26, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Sure, why not. In fact, I just added it. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 20:31, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Previous comment is in response to a request to add "~~~~" into the default palette, which Black Falcon removed just when I'd done it. Now how's that for an edit conflict? :-) The change can always be reverted if we don't want it there after all.) —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 20:35, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Excellent, thank you. (It takes less than two seconds to load the edit window for the whole of WP:AN/I, currently 308 KB long!) Many thanks to everyone who worked on this. –Black Falcon ^(Talk) 21:01, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Woo! Going through the page source for an edit page now no longer requires scrolling past a jillion lines of edittools. Mr.Z-man 21:47, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

• It doesn't work with WikEd enabled. Every time I want to add a symbol or wiki markup I have to temporarily turn off WikEd. What a pain. Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 21:49, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

• Not sure if my problem is related to the above. I am also a WikEd user. None of the buttons on my regular (not the Wiked) toolbar work, and have not worked since this change. - ukexpat (talk) 21:52, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Mine too. And it isn't WikEd that's the problem. That was working fine this morning before the changes were made. Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 22:54, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

• Where has the Redirect option gone in Wiki markup? If the devs insist on making these changes, can they at least keep all the options we had before? Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 22:54, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Redirect is still in the toolbar above the edit box, where it was before — at least it is for me. —KCinDC (talk) 23:13, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

It used to be part of the Wiki Markup in the edit tools, but yes, I see it now. Still -- it doesn't work if you're using WikEd. Matthewedwards (talk • contribs • email) 23:24, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

The wikEd issue should now be fixed. Both wikEd and the new edittools were trying to redefine the insertTags() function; I simply changed the code to let wikEd win. The down side is that wikEd users won't get to enjoy inserting markup directly into the edit summary field — this could of course be fixed by adding an equivalent feature to wikEd. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 08:37, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

Since I use a very old and slow computer I welcome anything that makes the pages load faster. And loading the edit page used to be slow for me. So I like this new addition. (Funny thing is that just a day ago I had added some "display: none;" CSS to my personal monobook.css to turn off the rendering of most of those insertable symbols, which saved a lot of page rendering time.)

However, I think a basic set of symbols should be shown even for users that have javascript disabled. Since even if the symbols are not clickable they can be copied and pasted. I suggest showing the first three sets in that case: "Insert", "Wiki markup" and "Symbols".

And since this has come up, here is the code I use to make my page rendering of all pages much faster:

/* Turn off several things for faster page rendering. */
body {   /* Turn off the large page background image. */
    background: #f9f9f9;
}
#p-logo,    /* Turn off the Wikipedia logo. */
#footer {   /* Turn off the page footer. */
    display: none;
}
#column-one {   /* Move the left menus up since no Wikipedia logo now. */
    padding-top: 21px;
}
li#pt-userpage {   /* Turn off the small user image at top of page. */
    background: none;
}

If you want to use it then copy it to your personal monobook.css.

--David Göthberg (talk) 05:22, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

I'd suggest adding these to further minimize/simplify your experience. Also, you can use {background:none} instead of {display:none} for li#pt-userpage, if you want to lose the icon but keep the userpage link.

/* Hide stuff */
#minoredit_helplink {display:none}
#wpSummaryLabel {display:none}
#editpage-copywarn {display:none}
#editpage-copywarn2 {display:none}
#editpage-copywarn3 {display:none}
#siteSub {display:none !important} /* Hide sitewide subtitle (From Wikipedia, the...) */
li#pt-userpage {background:none}

Hope that helps. -- Quiddity 06:53, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

Well, I assume that this is useful for many, especially the changes that I (who don't use Java) don't see. But the "palettes" are actually a pretty disruptive change - ALL the one's I seem to use are on the "Wiki markup" palette, so you've just added two extra mouse actions to every edit I seem to make. Unhappy with that, to be honest :-(

Couldn't one at least add a "preferences" menu selection as to what palette is selected by default for every user? Thanks. Ingolfson (talk) 07:29, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

Quiddity: Gah, it's that kind of day! I have been inserting bugs everywhere today. I damaged my CSS code when I "cleaned it up" before pasting it to the code example above. Thanks for catching that one. I have now edited my example above to the correct "li#pt-userpage" code so others don't copy and paste the faulty code. And yeah, there are many more things one can turn off, but turning off the background image, the logo and the footer is what pays of the most. (That "li#pt-userpage" probably doesn't make any noticeable difference.)

--David Göthberg (talk) 15:29, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

Is this what I'm supposed to be seeing? No buttons, no links... nothing. SharkD (talk) 21:55, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

No, it should look something like this: Image:Wikipedia-edittoolsscreenshot.png. You are getting the inert version for non-js users (I don't know why). -- Quiddity 00:16, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

It seems to be working OK, now. However, in the interim all of Wikipedia looked like this. Weird. SharkD (talk) 00:26, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

I had that for a while too. Is it the #Temporary style borkage we were promised? Algebraist 00:45, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Minor performance quip

Note that the script will perform better if all for statements that take the following form:

for (var i=0; i<pp.length; i++)

are changed so that they take this form:

for (var i=0, n = pp.length; i<n; i++)

This goes for all JavaScript, not just this script. The reasoning is that the object pp.length gets evaluated each time the loop is traversed, when in reality there's no need to evaluate it more than once. SharkD (talk) 00:41, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

While we're at it, i++ introduces a temporary containing the old value, just in case we wanted to assign it to another variable e.g. a = i++; (which increments i, then assigns to a the old value of i). Since nothing like that is being done here it would be slightly more efficient to change it to ++i. — CharlotteWebb 02:28, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Such claims are worth little without a concrete benchmark, so I did some testing. I ran the following two scripts (on Firefox 3.0.1) a few times and compared the output:

var a = []; for (var i = 0; i < 1000000; i++) a[i] = i;  // set up array
var t0 = new Date ();
for (var j = 0; j < a.length; j++) ;  // loop over array and time it
var t1 = new Date ();
alert(t1.getTime() - t0.getTime());

var a = []; for (var i = 0; i < 1000000; i++) a[i] = i;  // set up array
var t0 = new Date ();
for (var j = 0, l = a.length; j < l; ++j) ;  // loop over array (optimized) and time it
var t1 = new Date ();
alert(t1.getTime() - t0.getTime());

I did indeed observe a roughly 15% speedup (115 ms versus 133 ms) with the optimized version; however, it's worth noting that I had to loop over a million-element array to get either loop to take more than a few milliseconds. Also worth noting is that neither of the loops did anything — in practice, the time taken to execute the loop body, however trivial, would most likely dominate. The speedup I observed appears to have been entirely due to the caching of the array length: changing between j++ and ++j had no measurable effect on the execution time by itself. On the whole, I'd conclude that the difference in execution time, though indeed measurable for sufficiently long loops, isn't really worth worrying about in most cases. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 03:19, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

I thought that the performance increase might be more substantial if the array were retrieved from a DOM object (such as document.getElementsByTagName('div').length), but even in this case I can't get the execution time to go above 0ms for ~10000 objects/iterations. SharkD (talk) 06:17, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

I've gotten in the habit of using for(var i=a.length-1; i>=0; i--) when the order of processing doesn't matter or when I can easily enough construct the array "backwards", after I once significantly sped up a slow script with that trick. As for preincrement versus postincrement, perhaps the javascript engine is noticing it's being done in a void context and not generate the temporary. Anomie⚔ 03:46, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes, this is good too. I keep forgetting about it. SharkD (talk) 06:20, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

It occurred to me that a guideline on JavaScript optimization could be made. This could include both performance and file size optimizations. However, I thought that it also might be made into an article (or integrated into an existing article, such as JavaScript or Optimization (computer science)). What are your thoughts on this? SharkD (talk) 11:22, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

This change makes the code uglier and almost certainly gives a trivial performance difference. Accessing the length of an array in JavaScript is (presumably) a constant-time operation, you're just hitting a member variable. Member variable access may be marginally slower than local variable access, but the difference is trivial here. Code readability is more important.

We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. ―Donald Knuth

—Simetrical (talk • contribs) 15:34, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Uglier? They're virtually identical! SharkD (talk) 23:31, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Removing the "palettes"

How do people that want all the "palettes" back to being being viewable all at once accomplish this? I find it annoying having to switch bcak and forth.--Rockfang (talk) 10:34, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Might anyone know?--Rockfang (talk) 08:16, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Substitution

Since we are in the subject of the character insertion... I've always wondered why one cannot select, say, a space and substitute it with a character (say, a dash) when clicking on the appropriate button. Right now, all it does is insert the character before the selected text, which I have to delete manually. I find the substitution function very useful and it is normally available in all text processors and Internet browsers (or at least the ones I use). Is its unavailability here a technical issue or a conscious choice? Waltham, The Duke of 20:37, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

It's technical in the sense that the insertTags() function, as provided by MediaWiki, does not support replacing selected text: it can insert text around the selection (as happens when you click one of the links or buttons for inserting paired tags) and even provide default text to put in between if nothing has been selected, but it has no parameter for replacing the selection. Of course, the new edittools code provides its own reimplementation of insertTags(), so that feature could be added. It would have to be done with some care in order not to break wikEd (which also has its own custom insertTags() implementation) again, though. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 02:06, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

I had forgotten about tags like <ref>, <sup>, <code>, <!-- -->, and <blockquote>. These are most useful in their current state. However, I still believe that most other characters should substitute. So, if there is the ability to apply this feature selectively, and without breaking wikEd, I think it might be a good idea. If it's too much trouble, then forget about it; the improvement I consider is not exactly crucial. Waltham, The Duke of 21:25, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Pallette of language characters gone

Suddenly the pallette of language characters has disappeared for me, it looks like coinciding with the introduction of this drop-down menu which is announced. The pallette just isn't there where it used to be and there is no drop down menu replacing it where I am informed it should be, below the "Save page" button, . So if it doesnt come back I will have to learn a new way of inserting French/Swedish/German accents and Polish barred l's / tailed a's for example, and Cyrillic letters, since I am fairly multilingual. Below the "Save page" button I have: (1) "Do not copy text from other websites ..." (2) a box which contains "Copy and paste: ..." (3) a box which contains useful things starting with "{{}} {{{}}} | [[]]" (4) "Once you click the Save button..." I have JavaScript enabled. Both my computers (Windows XP) are like this. Is there anything I should check? There must be others with the same problem. I thought being grumpy is only for characters in the "Thomas the Tank Engine" books, but I would like some way of doing what I used to be able to do easily. Please help. P0mbal (talk) 23:16, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

What you describe seeing (the box with "Copy and paste:") is exactly what I see when I disable javascript. When I enable javascript and reload the page then I get a drop-down list where I can choose among other things "Cyrillic". So I suggest you check again, it seems you have javascript disabled. Note that "java" and "javascript" are two different things and can be separately enabled/disabled in most web browsers.

--David Göthberg (talk) 01:29, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

For "security" reasons javascript has also been disabled at my computer. Since there seems to be a substantial population without javascript, can you possibly make it so that the "old" palette appears if javascript is NOT enabled? Because sometimes I do actually need accented/Greek/other bizarre and sometimes unidentifiable characters. ~user:orngjce223 how am I typing? 16:59, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

I agree with Orngjce223. The discussions here and at many sections below show that there are many users without javascript. Thus I too think that the full old palette should be shown when javascript is disabled.

Ilmary: Is there a way to make the full palette only render when there is no javascript, or must it first render and then be removed by the javascript? That is, can we prevent the palette from "flashing" for us that use javascript? (It would look better and save a lot of rendering time for us that have slow computers.)

--David Göthberg (talk) 10:26, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Looks like the problem I have in the very next comment. Timothy Perper (talk) 14:51, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Insert box doesn't work for me

What's with the "insert box"? That's the box under the window where we type in changes and so on (where I'm typing this right now) and immediately under the bold face Do not copy text... warning.

It used to have a long list of symbols, including letters with macrons (which I use frequently since I contribute to several articles about Japanese culture), but not any more. Now it has a pull down menu and a list of a few symbols plus a lot of empty square boxes that don't give anything when you select them. Most of the pull-down menu items are just as bad, except for "Wiki markup," which has a list of Wiki markup symbols.

Timothy Perper (talk) 14:15, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

There should be a drop down menu which gives more options. Is that what you're referring to? Zain Ebrahim (talk) 14:21, 25 August 2008 (UTC) Scratch that. Zain Ebrahim (talk) 14:23, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

There is discussion about the changes at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#New edit tools enabled for everyone and elsewhere on that page. Do you have JavaScript? PrimeHunter (talk) 14:26, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I have Java Script and it's enabled right now -- and box is no good. When I disable Java Script, it's still no good. I'm sorry to say that the material at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#New edit tools enabled for everyone didn't help at all. I'm not sure I follow much of it anyway. I think I'll copy this discussion over to that page. But that won't solve the problem. Timothy Perper (talk) 14:38, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

OK, I just switched from my Safari browser to Firefox. Firefox shows the expected symbols, but Safari does not. No, the answer is NOT that obviously I should use Firefox -- for various reasons, I don't like Firefox and my Safari browser has all my bookmarks. I'm not going to switch merely because Wikipedia can't get some technical glitch fixed. Timothy Perper (talk) 14:48, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Table sort icon alignment

Normally in sortable tables, the sorting icon gets treated as if it were a character. I.e., it follows the alignment formatting of the text, and breaks onto new lines as if it were text. I find this very ugly, and as a result have been experimenting with somehow giving the icon its own style rules so that it behaves more like a cell than text (like what you find in many file systems).

You can find my changes to wikibits.js here: User:SharkD/Sandbox/wikibits_2 (edit talk links history). Simply add the JS code to your "monobook.js" file and load a page with sortable tables (here is a long one).

I was wondering what your opinions of these changes are. I think the aesthetic appeal is strong, but I am worried about performance. Is it too slow, or are there other performance issues that make it impractical? I would appreciate it if you would give the script a test-drive in order to provide feedback. Thanks! SharkD (talk) 21:54, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Nevermind. It only works in Firefox. If you have any other suggestions, I would be willing to hear them. Thanks. SharkD (talk) 22:18, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

I created another version, User:SharkD/Sandbox/wikibits 3 (edit talk links history), and it also doesn't work in IE. LOL! SharkD (talk) 00:51, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

Does anyone know how to get this to work in IE? Thanks! SharkD (talk) 06:21, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Bounty offered for code enhancement involving linker.php

I've offered US$100 for an enhancement involving linker.php; see http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Nathan_Larson/Bounties . If I don't hear from anyone in a few days, I'll probably make a different offer; you can also make your own offer. Nathan Larson (talk) 02:49, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

How do you expect this to work for external sites that aren't MediaWiki-based? Does it have to work for all external sites? How is it supposed to tell whether the page exists or not in general? What about for old versions of MediaWiki (that don't support the API, say)? Do you just want the feature to be written, or does it also have to be suitable for enabling on some particular wiki, like Wikipedia? —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 15:43, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Is applying it to only wikimedia-internal links sufficient? I've often wanted that feature. --Random832 (contribs) 20:35, 22 August 2008 (UTC)No, it looks like this is something different. He wants to check it against a list of pages that exist on the other wiki, so no API required. --Random832 (contribs) 20:42, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

I didn't spot the link to the lengthy description. After following various links to Bugzilla and so on, I infer it's meant for Wikipedia mirrors and similar. It looks to be a pretty complicated feature, anyway. Accessibility also sucks, if color is the only thing being used. A lot of people can't reliably tell apart so many different colors (but few people have much trouble with red vs. blue). —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 02:22, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

There are many ways the difference could be rendered, besides just a color distinction. Some people might opt for a different font, or something of that nature. Yes, this would be only for MediaWiki wikis. It would not really be intended for Wikipedia mirrors as much as Wikipedia complements. E.g., meta could use such software to detect whether a page exists on Wikipedia, and vice versa. I do anticipate that it may be a pain trying to get this to work. It's probably going to take a bot and perhaps some use of the API to make this useful. Nathan Larson (talk) 15:56, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Color Coding?

Sorry if this isn't in the right place, this is only the second time I have come to the village pump. I am curious to know if it would be possible to color code contributing anons and users so that the RC people could tell based on the color of the user's link how many warnings they have recieved in relation to being blocked. Would something like this be possible (or acceptable)? TomStar81 (Talk) 03:31, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes, and no. I don't think it could be integrated into the software without integrating the warning system as well. Doing this with JavaScript would be possible, but it would have to load and search the wikitext of every user talk page when you load the page, so it wouldn't work very well. Mr.Z-man 03:48, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

There's no way for the RC system to know what has and hasn't been posted to someone's talk page; even if it could recognize standard uw- templates, there's no way it could discern a random "hey, what's up?" in comparison to a non-boilerplate "hey, knock it off" from an admin. EVula // talk // ☯ // 05:37, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

Thats too bad, I think a system like that would increase efficiency here. Oh well, thanks for the answer. TomStar81 (Talk) 06:07, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

WP:HUGGLE does this. Prodego ^talk 06:36, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

As do some other external anti-vandalism tools (another I know of being VandalProof. If you want this for rc-patrol you might as well use huggle, which has nearly the exact feature you're talking about. Calvin 1998 ^(t-c) 04:03, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

If you change your goals the possibilities increase. For instance, with Toolserver database access its trivial to code up a script that could tell you how many times they were reverted (this recently used at BON#Statistics). — Dispenser 06:49, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

In Dispenser's above message, I think he meant to say WP:BON#Statistics rather than BON#Statistics. EdJohnston (talk) 13:32, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Of course, some work on automating vandalfighting within MediaWiki itself could help... — Werdna • talk 05:14, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

You're not seriously keen on the "reputation points" element are you? — CharlotteWebb 04:00, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Auto redirect to mobile version of site for mobile devices

This is a two part proposal: 1. WP should redirect to en.mobile.wikipedia.org if it detects a mobile browser. Currently this doesn't happen and trying to find the mobile url is frustrating and difficult. 2. An iPhone optimized stylesheet should be created. The potential for this is huge. It can even be read only. I am aware third party mirrors exist, however these are unreliable, and it would make sense for WP to serve the content themselves, given their mission of empowering people with information everywhere - this includes people who don't browse WP from a computer. Suicup (talk) 06:33, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

I'm a bit leery of a general redirect for a couple of reasons:

• First it's just hard to do. :) The HawHaw code in our current mobile gateway jumps through lots of hoops checking User-Agent, Accept strings, etc to try to guess what kind of mobile markup the client might want; it used to present a "simulated" view to unrecognized devices which would end up totally breaking them. Our general architecture is very heavy on sending most requests to a common HTTP cache, which would be much more difficult to handle with a mobile vs non-mobile check as well.
• Secondly, forcing people to the "mobile" site can be "user-hostile". I usually use the mobile gateway on my iPhone because it loads faster and is more convenient for most lookups -- but it simply isn't as capable, and I sometimes need to be able to get at the main site. I'd much prefer we make the mobile-friendly site easier to find, but still keep it distinct and keep the regular site accessible.

As for friendlier stylesheets, this is a bit in progress. As of a few weeks ago, we now have a cleaner style for devices that recognize the "handheld" CSS media type. (This mostly means those that *don't* accept "screen" styles.) You can switch this in for a single page manually by putting ?handheld=yes on the URL. In theory we can switch that mode in for iPhones/iPod Touches as well, but... then it's stuck in and you can't turn it off. It's cleaner than no style, but it's still pretty awkward for searching and editing and such, so I'd prefer not to do that yet. (It also doesn't help much with bandwidth issues.) --brion (talk) 17:45, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

I have a good suggestion: Could you try HayGo.com?

• 1. It supports all language of Wikipedia.org
• 2. It supports WML browser and HTML browser automaticly.
• 3. Its framework is beautiful, speicailly in iPhone.
• 4. Its index is powerfully.

Brion, could you use HayGo tech for WP mobile instead of HawHaw? --Wiki 2008 beijing (talk) 18:27, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

I most definately oppose the redirect at least until the mobile site has editing capibilities (I'm using my phone right now). It would be even better if there was a more mobile friendly version of monobook (and perhaps even a function to autodetect and switch to the skin) as I currently have to manually switch to the nostalgia skin as monobook appears horribly. —Atyndall ^{[citation needed]} 12:04, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Colon trick and articles

I looked at Help:Colon trick, and it didn't enlighten me, so I'm asking here. The colon trick "is a method of providing a link to a category or image without adding the page to the category or displaying the image." What, if anything, does it do to use the colon trick on article wikilinks? I've see a few templates (example, {{subst:spam-warn}} that put the colon in wikilinks to the articles (example, [2]). Does this do (or undo) anything? Phlegm Rooster (talk) 08:56, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

It does nothing to articles, but it allows templates to not break if someone passes an image or category to them instead of a regular article. For example, without the colon {{spam-warn}} would work fine for articles, but would begin "A tag has been placed on , …" if someone tried to warn about Image:Wikipedia-favicon.png and would display "A tag has been placed on , …" (and add the page to the category) if someone tried to warn about a category page. Anomie⚔ 10:57, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

Ah, thanks. Phlegm Rooster (talk) 11:30, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

It also allows you to transclude mainspace pages e.g. {{:Main Page}} --Random832 (contribs) 20:37, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Phantom words found on two articles

Resolved

[[Category:Ambox templates using deprecated types|Main:Caffè corretto]]

[[Category:Ambox templates using deprecated types|Main:Corretto]]

The above lines are found at the very beginning of Caffè corretto and Corretto respectively. I cannot see them in the source. Where are these phantom words come from? How to fix it? --Quest for Truth (talk) 13:26, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

I think it's a problem with the {{Mergewith}} template but I don't know how to fix it. – ukexpat (talk) 13:39, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

That redirects to {{merge}}, but I think you are right- it is on every page using the template. I started a new discussion on the talk page and noticed that there is already a discussion to fix it. --—— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk - 14:33, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

The reason you see that category is that we have added an error detection and reporting function to the {{ambox}} meta-template. And for instance the merge boxes use the ambox. We are detecting which templates and pages are using ambox in the wrong way and listing them in that category.

Unfortunately I screwed up my edit to ambox when I added that error detection so it got a bit too visible. (I added a line break too much.) So all my fault, sorry about that. I have fixed that now.

You who are admins will still see that hidden category at the bottom of pages that use the ambox in the wrong way. We are now (as planned) working through that category to fix all the faulty ambox usage. (About 3000 done, 58 left!)

We are planning to do similar error detection and fixing runs for the other mboxes too.

Anyone interested to help out or learn more can read more at Template talk:Tmbox#Deprecated ambox parameters.

--David Göthberg (talk) 18:58, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

Correction: You who have the preference "Show hidden categories" enabled will still see the hidden category. Silly me, has nothing with admins to do, any user can enable that in their preferences.

--David Göthberg (talk) 09:38, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Ludicrously, impossibly slow

For over two hours I have been unable to view Wikipedia pages - they appear to start to load, then just take forever and get nowhere (and I haven't had the usual "give us your money" error message). Oddly, by clicking on links to Wikipedia pages from other sites I have been able to view some pages. It has eased up a bit just now, but did that thing of making it look like I was logged out when in fact I was logged in. I am having no problems with other webpages. DuncanHill (talk) 21:11, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

:Post below originally a new thread. Algebraist 21:24, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

Apologies for making it a new thread, but I am unable actually to view or edit the bottom of this page (so am unlikely to see any replies or suggestions). The problem seems worst on pages such as this, or the ref desks, and the noticeboards, where there is a big load of instructions at the top The page appears to load slowly, but the controls down the left do not load, and the bottom of the page does not load, even when the browser load bar thingy has gone all the way to the right. Problem is the same in Safari and IE7. DuncanHill (talk) 21:21, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

This is typical of various types of network problem, and is usually ISP-specific. You can see on the request statistics that overall load has not been reduced, so it's not slow for everyone. I suggest you use #wikimedia-tech in the future if you want to discuss this kind of problem, rather than attempting to ask questions on the same glacially slow website that's causing you problems. -- Tim Starling (talk) 02:42, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

I tweaked my network settings, per the recommendations at dslreports.com, and performance seems to be much better. SharkD (talk) 06:12, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Installing IE7Pro (an add-on for IE7) also helped. SharkD (talk) 23:16, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Temporary style borkage

CSS will be broken for a few minutes during this software upgrade. Sorry for the inconvenience. --brion (talk) 23:07, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

Is this why the sidebar links are missing in diff view with the Classic skin? --Carnildo (talk) 01:18, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

IIRC the classic skin always removed the sidebar in diff view. --brion (talk) 16:43, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

I guess it's just that there's now a blank space for it to sit in, which made me think it was missing. --Carnildo (talk) 04:11, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

move page

Is it possible to move a page to rename an article (spelling error, title needed capital letters), and then once the page is successfully moved, to delete the old name/page so that on the new page, under the new title, a "redirected from ____ page" does not appear. My reason for this is that when searching in google, the old mispelled name appears, and onc you click on it, it redirects to the new page - I dont want to see the old mis-spelled name anywhere. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Infocentral2000 (talk • contribs) 01:52, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

It's possible to delete the redirect, yes, but it shouldn't be done in this case since it is not harmful and could be useful. Google will update its cache soon enough. Algebraist 02:03, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

That's Google's problem, but we can't say Google is wrong as a little bit time is needed for the bot of Google to notice the change and update their database. And if we just delete the redirect, one simply get a page say that Wikipedia doesn't have the article instead of being redirected to the right page. --Quest for Truth (talk) 12:32, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Actually, the way we do redirects doesn't provide Google with the information it needs to update and remove the old title from search results. --Random832 (contribs) 20:00, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Really? I've not seen redirects in Google search results before, and I don't get any when searching for 'george bush', which is in the title of a great many redirects. Algebraist 14:00, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

I have seen redirects in Google and this search finds a lot of them. Should the software add noindex to the source of such pages? PrimeHunter (talk) 22:35, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

None of those are actually redirects as such, they're redirect targets with 'redirected from' at the top. And the original page under discussion (Noble chummar) has dropped off the google search: [3]. Algebraist 23:09, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Weird External links

Do you know why the External links section is indented in a strange way in Kind of Blue? I can't figure it out. Thanks! —Mattisse (Talk) 13:00, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

It works when I remove the {{refbegin}} from the previous section. Zain Ebrahim (talk) 13:07, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Fixed. D.M.N. (talk) 13:08, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Or you could have used {{refend}}. I'm sure that would also have worked. Zain Ebrahim (talk) 13:10, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks so much for both suggestions! I will have to pay more attention to those things. —Mattisse (Talk)

Editing insert options

The menu with the insertion options under the editing window seems to have been changed. There is a drop down menu and an extra step to find everything. It works ok at my house, but on my work computer with windows 2000 running internet explorer 6, you cant click on anything to insert it. It only shows what the first drop down menu would and it is just text. I can't get to anything else like greek letters. Can we go back to the old way or fix this one? Grk1011 (talk) 16:25, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

I wonder if there's a way for registered users to personalize it how they like, using CSS or whatever. — Twas Now ( talk • contribs • e-mail ) 16:58, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

If it looks like this image, then you don't have JavaScript enabled. More info at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#New edit tools enabled for everyone and MediaWiki talk:Edittools. --—— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk - 17:15, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

It does, thanks. I'll just do edits like that at home since I can't download or install things here. Grk1011 (talk) 17:17, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Did the old version not also use JavaScript? It seems from his questions that it used to work on the other computer. SharkD (talk) 18:12, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Now that I think of it, I'm not sure, I just know that I could always see all of the options. Either way I could copy paste them before if necessary. Grk1011 (talk) 18:16, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

They changed how they display all the special characters. Before, they were all displayed in a large table; now there is the drop-box to select what kind of characters you want to insert: Greek, Cyrillic, IPA, etc. Grk1011 could see the large table as it used to be, but the drop-box is posing problems on his Win2000/IE6 work computer. — Twas Now ( talk • contribs • e-mail ) 18:19, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Pages showing up in CAT:CSD that shouldn't be there

Several internal pages in Wikipedia space that are maintained by a bot have just appeared in Category:Candidates for speedy deletion, even though nobody tagged them. One of them is Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Chicago articles by quality/1. I can't figure out how this page managed to get itself tagged for speedy deletion. Maybe it's transcluding some template that is missing a <noinclude>? The previous version of this page doesn't have the problem. The only 'person' who ever edits this page is User:WP 1.0 bot. EdJohnston (talk) 18:58, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

The pages transclude pages recently tagged for deletion. For instance, Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Biography articles by quality/19 transcludes Talk:Helen Keller/Comments. These will eventually clear - or you can open the page for editing, do nothing, and save to force it to clear. Gimmetrow 19:04, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

Two odd(?) template behaviors

Hi! Just created a template ({{HMS2Deg}}) and noticed some strange behavior:

1. Is "#sub" working in en:wp? It doesn't seem to be. The template page (which invokes itself for doc) just shows an echo of the expression, including the "{}"s. I've only looked on the template page after editing. (Also sub examples from mw:Extension:StringFunctions#.23sub: don't work in Special:ExpandTemplates.)
2. After I remove the #sub (including the enclosing "{}"s etc.) and save, the template page shows the above. After doing a null edit it shows up OK.
   1. The preview on the edit page shows correctly, but
   2. A new tab opened from the "Template" tab does not.

I've reloaded and cleared cache etc. several times. I even did it just now after composing this to see if it was some kind of db lag. I'm confused. Saintrain (talk) 22:12, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

This extension has not been installed, it is not listed in Special:Version. For rounding use round.--Patrick (talk) 00:03, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. I can never remember where to look. And I am trying to round, so thanks again.

Still wondering why edits don't show up. Saintrain (talk) 00:08, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Pie in the sky question...

Having done some work with templates, I find myself wondering whether it would be possible to create a general 'editor' preference - something that could be toggled so that cleanup templates (particularly inline cleanup templates) could be toggled on and off. this would have two advantages: first, it could default to 'off', so that general readers wouldn't be assaulted by cleanup tags that they don't understand and don't care about. second, it would allow editors to toggle between 'clean' and 'marked-up' versions of the article for easier reading and editing.

This would (obviously) require some work - there would need to be some consistent way to distinguish between cleanup and content templates, and it would need modifications to monobook.js (and maybe the monobook.css, depending on how the templates were hidden), but is the idea feasible enough to be worth putting some thought into? --Ludwigs2 00:55, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Oppose hiding tags per points at Wikipedia:Village_pump_(miscellaneous)#using_tags_on_stubs. Deamon138 (talk) 01:02, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Support - And technically this is pretty easy to achieve. All the article message boxes now use the {{ambox}} meta-template. And to turn that one off all you need is one line of CSS code: table.ambox { display: none; }

You can either manually add that code to your monobook.css, or we could make a gadget so you only have to click that gadget in your user preferences. If you only want to turn off the yellow and/or orange amboxes then we can do that too, here's the CSS code for that: table.ambox-style, table.ambox-content { display: none; }

And it seems all the inline cleanup templates now use the {{fix}} meta-template. Here's the CSS code to turn that one off: .Inline-Template { display: none; }

--David Göthberg (talk) 12:12, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Oppose hiding anything that assists our readers in knowing what to trust and what to take with a pinch of salt. Interpreting which Wikipedia pages are reliable and which are full of crap is not a particularly difficult exercise, provided you're presented with all the facts (ie warning boxes, inline fixmes, etc). I'd prefer to go the other way and enable the metadata gadget for all users by default. Happy‑melon 13:39, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Surely yhey should be "on" by default? That's how we turn readers into editors! Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 13:40, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Happy-melon: Please don't enable the metadata gadget by default. That will cost two page loads on each visit to an article page. Even if the Wikipedia servers would be able to handle that additional load it would make page load much slower for users with slow connections and/or slow computers.

--David Göthberg (talk) 15:26, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Far be it from me to decide whether to enable it for everyone, but I'm sure it could be managed. I'm sure there is some way we could use or abuse FlaggedRevs to get the information stored in the database so we wouldn't have to scrape it off the talkpages... :D And the people with slow internet connections are likely to have JavaScript disabled anyway, which would disable this along with all the other stuff they lose. Happy‑melon 15:44, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

catchpa not working with settings

When I turn off visual styles for buttons, I've noticed that the catchpa does not display, nor do many pictures. Are pictures, and the catchpa actually buttons? If so, that doesn't seem like it should be. This is on WinXP IE7 70.51.10.38 (talk) 11:09, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

No, they're regular ol' images. --brion (talk) 05:37, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Talk page text

By default, when editing a talk page, the message MediaWiki:Talkpagetext is displayed at the top. Is there a way to override this on a particular page? Thank you, MSGJ 19:18, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Is there a particular talk page where you think the message is inappropriate? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 21:49, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Well, if you use the editintro parameter, you can write your own instructions for the page. Therefore it would be nice to be able to override the default. In this example, which we are considering to use in the AFC process, it is not appropriate. (Using talk space is a workaround to allow unregistered users to create a page.) MSGJ 08:15, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes, it would make sense to be able to selectively suppress this message with some sort of magic word or similar. I doubt that this currently exists; you might try posting at MediaWiki talk:Talkpagetext, both to ask if something exists, and to see how other feel about creating such an option. (I notice that page has an April 2008 discussion talking about the decision to expand the message to all namespaces.) Another alternative is to post a request at bugzilla. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:15, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

The strikethrough button

I noticed that some formatting buttons are left out when editing some pages. I believe the strikethrough button should appear on all pages whose title begin with "Wikipedia:Articles for deletion". The strikethrough button allows people to change their comments in a discussion and clearly mark that they just changed their mind. Right now, the only way to do that is by manually adding the <s>...</s> code, something a beginner should not be expected to guess. -- Blanchardb -^{Me•MyEars•MyMouth}- timed 20:35, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

You mean the edit toolbar above the edit window? I don't believe any of the buttons are page-specific, except when editing a personal JS/CSS page where the he toolbar isn't displayed. Mr.Z-man 20:47, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

I noticed that the whole toolbar appears on some pages and not others. Until bugs like this can be worked out, I will only support a wholesale reversion of this change. -- Blanchardb -^{Me•MyEars•MyMouth}- timed 21:46, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Where, specifically, are you not seeing the whole thing? Algebraist 21:51, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

... either the reversion has been done since my last intervention, or there was a bug with the Wikipedia server which is now resolved. One of the pages where the absence of the entire toolbar led to a problem was Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Groovies, and I see that it is now resolved. -- Blanchardb -^{Me•MyEars•MyMouth}- timed 22:04, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

I also noticed this problem one time, but not again since. SharkD (talk) 06:26, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Sometimes it just takes a while to load, as it seems to load after everything else. — Twas Now ( talk • contribs • e-mail ) 06:31, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

It was probably your browser being twitchy, as nothing has changed for those buttons for a while. But anyway, as this is a technical forum, and not a policy forum, and because the strikethrough button is a non-core custom button, what you describe is easy with a change to MediaWiki:Common.js/edit.js. The second custom edit button definition there could simply be put into an if() check, like if(wgPageName.indexOf('Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion') != -1). Such suggestions should go to MediaWiki talk:Common.js or WP:VPP. --Splarka (rant) 07:39, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

No, it is a technical issue, as one might conclude from the discussion here. The problem seems to occur randomly. As a matter of fact, it is occurring as I am writing this. -- Blanchardb -^{Me•MyEars•MyMouth}- timed 18:33, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Blanchardb: As you can see most of us see all the edit buttons almost all the time. But there are some situations when you don't get to see all the edit buttons:

1: If the Wikipedia servers are too busy they seem to stop delivering images and only deliver page text. (Which I find is a good priority order.) This doesn't happen often. Note that the speed of Wikipedia is different depending on where in the world you are, since we get connected to different server clusters. For instance sometimes I can not edit Wikipedia since I am a European and get connected to the Amsterdam cluster, while the Americans and Asians still can edit Wikipedia fine. (Not saying that the Amsterdam cluster goes down more than the others, and it has a high uptime and usually is fixed fast, so our server admins do a great job.)

2: If you are using a wireless Internet connection you get more damaged IP packets and that is especially noticeable with images, that is you loose some image every now and then. Both 3G and WLAN / Wi-Fi has this problem. Apparently they use sucky error correction protocols. Then you should seriously consider to upgrade to use an Ethernet cable between your computer and your DSL or cable modem. Not all wireless users notice this as much since some simply doesn't have as much disturbances where they live. And some only have much disturbances during some part of the day.

3: And as Splarka noted: Your browser might be twitchy, sorry. Have you tried with another browser? I think most Wikipedia editors prefer Firefox.

--David Göthberg (talk) 10:07, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

4: Editing some types of user pages also has them disabled, such as your monobook.js. --Splarka (rant) 11:56, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Good to know. Thanks. -- Blanchardb -^{Me•MyEars•MyMouth}- timed 20:40, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

sidebar proposal

proposal here: MediaWiki_talk:Sidebar#add_to_navigation 86.44.22.174 (talk) 22:27, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Preference setting for the recently-overhauled character-selection area below editing box

Hi. Is there a preference I can set somewhere to specify which set of characters appear by default in the new dropdown-menu-driven character-selection area just below the editing box? I took a look at Special:Preferences but didn't spot anything.

If there isn't any preference setting, any chance one might be implemented sooner rather than later? Sardanaphalus (talk) 04:12, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

I also would love to see a default setting implemented; I only use it for the characters menus to insert macrons, so now it's an extra pain every time I want to do that.--十八 06:21, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

The en.wikt version uses a cookie to remember your selection; whoever is doing this here might copy that? wikt:Mediawiki:monobook.js Robert Ullmann (talk) 17:31, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Sorry: wikt:Mediawiki:Monobook.js (WM s/w doesn't do the case hunt in Mediawiki space) Robert Ullmann (talk) 10:00, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

 Done. Should be working now. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 10:45, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Specifically, when you open an edit page, the drop down menu should now load with whatever palette you picked last time already selected. At least it does for me — it it doesn't work for you, please let me know (and tell me what browser you use). (It uses cookies, so things can get a bit confusing if you have multiple edit pages open in different tabs or windows at the same time. Basically, every time you load a new edit page (or click preview or diff) the menu will default to whatever value you last changed it to in any window or tab.) —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 14:53, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Syntax highlighting in edit pane

Is there any way to add syntax highlighting to the article edit pane? If not, is there a particular software you would recommend for editing articles (Notepad++ doesn't seem to support MediaWiki markup)? Thanks! SharkD (talk) 06:24, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Try WP:wikEd for the syntax highlighting (you'll need Firefox or anther Mozilla browser for it to work). mattbr 08:14, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

OK, thanks. Are there technical reasons for it not to work in all browsers? SharkD (talk) 08:24, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Nevermind, it's discussed in the page you linked to. SharkD (talk) 08:34, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Tool for category intersections

Is there a tool to list category intersections? Thanks! SharkD (talk) 08:23, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Is Wikipedia:CatScan what you are looking for? mattbr 09:37, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. And the article already links to a (lengthy!) article in the form of a feature request on implementing such capability within the MediaWiki software. (Saves me the trouble of having to ask again. :) SharkD (talk) 10:04, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

The existing MediaWiki software (and Wikipedia's search) now allows searching on two categories (and thus finding the intersection); it's just not as good as CatScan because it doesn't search subcategories as well. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 20:52, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Could you explain how this works, exactly? A cursory look at WP:S didn't result in any answers. Clicking on the "Advanced search" button on the search page didn't result in any additional options that weren't there before. SharkD (talk) 21:25, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Category intersection#Using Wikimedia seach to find category intersections. Algebraist 21:28, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

SVG bug?

Direct link to image: 1, should look like 2, instead I get 3. Anyone else see that? Deon555 (talk) 13:03, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Works fine in IE+ASV. SharkD (talk) 13:30, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

When I add xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" to the svg-tag, it shows in firefox. – Leo Laursen – ✍ ⌘ 14:04, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Beat me to it, I discovered the same. Anomie⚔ 14:06, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

So what exactly is going on? Am I doing something wrong, it doesn't sound very server-side? Deon555 (talk) 14:20, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes, you're doing something wrong, but it's easy to fix. According to the SVG specification, all SVG elements need to be in the SVG namespace. Adding the xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" parameter to the <svg> element takes care of that by setting the default namespace to the SVG namespace. Anomie⚔ 14:33, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Section edit problem

Resolved

I was trying to add an image to Highland Railway - Jones locomotives at the top of the article and used the "section edit" link to edit section 0 (which I believe is enabled by Javascript in each user's preferences).

In this case the link points to Highland Railway - everything after this part of the name is ignored. I ended up adding the image to both articles because it fits with both subjects. I'm sure I've seen this before where certain characters in the title cause it to be cut off. -=# Amos E Wolfe ^talk #=- 16:57, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

It works fine for me (FF 3.0.1 WinXP SP3, edittop gadget enabled in preferences). What's your browser? Algebraist 17:00, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Also fine here in IE 7.0.5730.13, Opera 9.51, and Safari 3.1.2. Algebraist 17:10, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

 Fixed I'm using Firefox 2.0.0.16 in WinXP. It appears I had an outdated script in my monobook.js - removing it and enabling the edittop gadget fixed the problem. -=# Amos E Wolfe ^talk #=- 17:38, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes, your previous script used a very dodgy way of finding out the page title: it just took the HTML title of the page (in this case 'Highland Railway - Jones locomotives - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia') and cut it before the first ' - '. The gadget is rather cleverer. Algebraist 17:47, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

An article title like this should use an en dash – like this – instead of a hyphen; without the hyphen, this entire problem would have probably been avoided (although it's obviously better that the culprit has been exposed). Waltham, The Duke of 13:40, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

While we're on the subject, the hyphen in ' - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia' should really be a dash, though it doesn't matter much for the moment since most browsers seem to render en-dashes in the title as hyphens. Algebraist 13:47, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Indeed. After the initial shock, I have managed to compromise with this stylistic abnormality. My psychologist is significantly wealthier as a result, I assure you. Waltham, The Duke of 20:07, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Advanced search is hard to find

I did not notice right away, but advanced search is at the bottom of the regular sidebar search results. Could a link to "advanced search" be put in the sidebar of all pages?

Or at the very least, at the TOP of the regular sidebar search results too, and not just at the bottom. --Timeshifter (talk) 23:05, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Hitting the "Search" button (next to the "Go" button) takes you to that page; a link already is on every page. EVula // talk // ☯ // 13:29, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, but very few people know that, I believe. I have been editing Wikipedia almost 3 years and have over 14,000 edits and did not know that until now. I have always entered a search term or phrase and then clicked either button. I don't remember clicking either the "go" or the "search" button without entering search terms. Or it was so rare that I did not remember where it sent me too.

Most of the time I use the Google toolbar to search the Wikipedia site anyway: the "Search only the current Web site" button. I would have liked to have used the advanced search more since there is more specificity in what it can search for in some cases. But I disliked the extra steps I had to take to hunt up the bookmark. So this is good to know. Many other people would probably like to know this.

No offense, but nerds who work a lot in an area (for example the Wikipedia sidebar and interface), tend to lose sight of how others perceive that area. They don't realize how unintuitive some things are. I have my areas I focus on in nerdlike fashion, and fresh perspectives have been very helpful at times. --Timeshifter (talk) 16:38, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

• Just to say I second the suggestion to add a Special:Search link somewhere in the sidebar ("toolbox", I guess). Sardanaphalus (talk) 21:18, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes, good idea to put it in the "toolbox" section of the sidebar of wikipedia pages. I hope it is named "Advanced search" since that is a search tool name people are familiar with. So the link could be in this form: Advanced search. That is also the name used on the submit button on that search page. --Timeshifter (talk) 21:45, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I too would like an Advanced search link in the toolbox since I want to be able to right click it and choose "Open link in new tab", and I can't do that with the [Search] button.

--David Göthberg (talk) 00:42, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

If this doesn't get implemented generally, anyone who wants it can easily do it with personal javascript. Algebraist 01:39, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

If whatever you search for doesn't exist, the "Advanced search" thing is at the bottom of the search results page. Mr.Z-man 01:47, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes, the OP said that in his first sentence. The issue is whether it should be more visible. Algebraist 01:49, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Best solution would be to make the word "search" (above the search box) link to Special:Search rather than adding it to the bullet list. — CharlotteWebb 17:54, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Hmm. I was wondering why there were 2 buttons, one labeled "Go" and one labeled "Search". I think one of them could be removed. Then a simple link labeled "Advanced search" could be put in its place. A link, not a button. A link can be right-clicked as David Göthberg suggested, and the advanced search page can be opened up in a new tab. I dislike having to open it over the original existing page. That wastes bandwidth and time if I have to go back to the original page. --Timeshifter (talk) 18:18, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

They serve different purposes. "Go" (a.k.a. "I'm feeling lucky") load a page with a title exactly matching your input, if one exists, and "Search" will give you a list of pages containing text similar to your input. I'm just suggesting that we change the text above the sarch box from:

<h5><label for="searchInput">Search</label></h5>

to

<h5><label for="searchInput"><a href="/enwiki/wiki/Special:Search" title="Advanced search">Search</a></label></h5>

— CharlotteWebb 18:55, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Is 'Random article' truly random?

I've been meaning to ask this for the last couple years; the 'Random article' algorithm isn't really random, is it? If I click it, say, 50 times, I get several communes in France, but no villages elsewhere. Or I might get several articles on genes, but no athletes. The next day, the situation might be reversed. The likelihood of this happening is very low, so I'm thinking it uses an article's ID number (given to it when it was created?), and since there are clusters of articles are created by bots in a short period of time, one draws "too many" from one these clusters. Please, don't comment on probability unless you happen to know the algorithm 'Random article' uses. Thanks, 129.252.106.201 (talk) 04:01, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Every article is assigned a random number between 0 and 1 when it is created (these are indexed in SQL, which is what makes selection fast). When you click random article it generates a target random number and then returns the article whose recorded random number is closest to this target. Any clustering by content that you think you see is purely in the eye of the beholder. Dragons flight (talk) 04:10, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Technical_FAQ#Is the "random article" feature really random? - Icewedge (talk) 04:14, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

In simple English, it's not totally random, but it's not biased towards anything in particular. --Carnildo (talk) 05:09, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Or rather, it is biased, but randomly so, if that makes sense. For example. if you had three total articles, and they were randomly assigned the numbers .5 .51 and .49, you would see the latter two far far more often. Prodego ^talk 21:25, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

It actually picks a random number and then chooses the page whose preselected random number is the closest one greater than the random number chosen. In the event that there's no suitable number found (if the random number is larger than all page_random values), it wraps around to the lowest values since r21371. This is no less random, but more efficient from a database point of view. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 13:40, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

I've tested this and it seems to choose the one with the lower page_id if the page_random values are equal, which isn't implausible on large projects (see Birthday paradox). — CharlotteWebb 17:43, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

<br>

I've seen many variations of <br>, <br />, <br \>, <\br>. Which is preferred? -- SGBailey (talk) 07:47, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

<\br> does nothing. I wasn't aware that <br \> worked, and I have never seen it used before this, so I assume people avoid that one. I prefer <br />, but I'm not sure it matters too much which you use. — Twas Now ( talk • contribs • e-mail ) 08:13, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Well, <br> is the correct "HTML wikimarkup". But MediaWiki was updated to also understand <br /> some year ago so that it would be easier to cut and paste text from other free sources without having to modify each br tag in those texts.

Remember that wikimarkup should be as easy as possible so that normal people (non-webmasters) can edit Wikipedia. Wikipedia then parses and converts the wikimarkup to whatever is the current standard for web page rendering. And today (2008) that happens to be XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

And note that the very similar <br \>, <br\>, </br>, </ br>, <\br> and <\ br> all are faulty variants. And the variant <br/> is a not recommended variant of the <br /> tag, according to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), since it breaks older web browsers.

So I suggest we stick to the simple wikimarkup <br> tag and not change all our 14 million pages every time the web standards change.

By the way, the "HTML tidy" function in MediaWiki's page rendering does fix some of the other faulty ways to write the br tag when it renders a page, that's why you get away with some variants like <br \>.

--David Göthberg (talk) 09:06, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Actually <br almost anything here but unpaired quotes and greater than sign> works fine (note the space after "br"), since most browsers just ignore any invalid stuff in tags. Some older browsers see <br/> (without space) as the non-existing tag "br/". Using just <br> is correct HTML, but incorrect XHMTL, since the tag is never closed. and consequently the page is malformed. Concluding: the safest choice is: <br />, being ok in HTML in old and new browsers and in XHTML. −Woodstone (talk) 10:14, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Technically, <br />some random text up to the next / character in HTML is equivalent to <br>&gt;some random text up to the next </br> character due to the "Null End Tags" feature of SGML (upon which HTML was based), although no major browser supports this. So nothing is truly safe. Anomie⚔ 11:10, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

The statement above looks a bit garbled to me. Can you recheck? Perhaps not completely safe, but officially recommended. Quote from the W3C XHMTL Compatibility Guide (see under empty elements): "Include a space before the trailing / and > of empty elements, e.g. <br />". −Woodstone (talk) 11:22, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

See SGML#Syntax. The W3C Compatibility Guide recommends that because, as noted, no major browser actually supports SGML NET, and the W3C HTML Working Group Charter specifically states they won't consider SGML features not in actual use. I also would not really worry about SGML NET affecting HTML except when being pedantic ;) Anomie⚔ 12:31, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

You guys have misunderstood it. Wikipedia doesn't use HTML or XHTML. Wikipedia uses wikimarkup. And wikimarkup was designed to be as simple as possible to use for non-geeks.

Are you aware of that the official W3C recommendation for bold text is <span style="font-weight: bold;">Bold</span>? I hope you don't seriously mean we should go by their recommendations and stop using the wikimarkup '''Bold''', right?

I think we should stick with our old simpler "HTML wikimarkup" <br> tag. Remember, this is the "encyclopedia that anyone can edit".

And don't worry, Wikipedia parses and converts the wikimarkup to whatever is the current standard for web page rendering. Wikipedia source pages are not the same thing as rendered web pages.

--David Göthberg (talk) 12:00, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Agreed. Anomie⚔ 12:31, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Meh. <br> to me screams "close me close me" to me, so I always use <br /> (and let's not even talk about </br>. As far as I'm concerned any angle brackets on a page should look like valid XHTML, even if the underlying engine processes them as wikimarkup. It's confusing to have to keep two different variants of angle-bracket markup in my head. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 12:34, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia outputs pages as XHTML - if you use your browser's "View source" facility, the first line is a DTD (Document Type Definition) that specifies XHTML. As input Wikipedia accepts both wikimarkup and also XHTML tags that are allowed in the BODY section of an XHTML document. Wikimarkup is generally easier for all editors to use, even "geeks". But there's no wikimarkup for some XHTML+CSS combinations, or it's so hard to find that "geeks" find it easier to use XHTML+CSS.

<br/> and <br /> are the correct forms of the BR tag in XHTML. <br /> (with space before /) is recommended as some older browsers can't process <br/>. However AFAIK the main older browser of which this was said is Netscape 4, which now has effectively zero market share - in fact all versions of Netscape are now officially unsupported.

The template {{clear}} forces the next item to start after the end of all floating items, e.g. images or infoboxes and text that runs alongside them.

Occasionally editors need the ability to force a line-break without the full effects of {{clear}}. In these situations <br /> is useful and real "geeks" can also use the "clear" option of the BR tag - but had better know what they're doing. -- Philcha (talk) 12:38, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

David, you're a bit off about the bold/span tag comment from; the optimal method for bolding content is to use <strong>text</strong> when actual emphasis is required; using bold CSS is just for when it's a cosmetic bolding that is needed. EVula // talk // ☯ // 13:26, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

The wiki source code A<br>B is automatically converted to A<br />B during the rendering process. The trailing / is important only so that the generated HTML can be validated as meeting certain W3C standards. Either the slashed or non-slashed form can be used in wiki text, as they produce the same result. — Carl (CBM · talk) 15:50, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Perhaps routinely converting other formats to <br /> is a job for SmackBot (talk · contribs · blocks · protections · deletions · page moves · rights · RfA) to do, as and when it edits those pages? Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 15:58, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

There's no reason to standardize the formats in wiki text. The mediawiki system ensures that the output is correctly formatted XHTML regardless of how it is typed as wiki code. — Carl (CBM · talk) 16:06, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

No need for a bot. I change it when I see it, but that's because I'm obsessive like that... EVula // talk // ☯ // 18:04, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

We don't need a bot to convert things to <br /> as long as they still work. I personally use <br />, but <br> is fine. -- Imperator3733 (talk) 20:23, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

I rather think AWB general fixes does fix this up. But not worth a special run since nothing is broken. Rich Farmbrough, 20:58 25 August 2008 (GMT).

• David Göthberg has kindly explained to me the distinction between <br /> and <br/> before, but, for the record here, I'll just add that I find the technically-correct <br /> a pain to use, thanks to that space between the "r" and the backslash that so helpfully linewraps. I guess I've got used to seeing a backslash there, however -- probably thanks to other HTML tags -- so I continue to use <br/>, old browsers notwithstanding. Sardanaphalus (talk) 21:07, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Quotes around single-word values

• I have always used <br> both here at Wikipedia and in my basic web pages. In my web page editing I use WYSIWYG tools most of the time anyway, so I hate complicated coding rules in general. In furtherance of "why the hell do we need to make things more complicated than necessary" I would like to know if the quotes are necessary for table wikicode such as border="1" and colspan="2". Why bother with the quotes if the MediaWiki software makes everything OK anyway? I understand the need for the quotes when there are 2-word values, etc., but habit does not seem to be a good reason to use quotes around single-word values. We want to make wikicoding easier not harder, so more people get involved. --Timeshifter (talk) 21:56, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

The quotes are only necessary for attribute values which contain whitespace. you can even use bgcolor=white or whatever without the quotes. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 22:07, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, Cap'n. By the way, who wore that hat originally on your user page? You set me straight awhile back on not making {{skiptotoctalk}} unnecessarily complicated through unnecessary substitution. Slackers Unite! --Timeshifter (talk) 00:20, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

• Whether or not they're necessary, I've got used to seeing the quote/speechmarks and nowadays find values without them can seem to merge into the code around them, i.e. I find, for example, things like

|align="right"| Blah blah blah

easier to work with when scrolling around code than

|align=right|Blah blah blah

(Meanwhile, something like

|style="padding:1.0em 2.0em; background:something; font-size:90%;"| Blah blah blah

is easier for me than

|style="parameter: 1.0em 2.0em; parameter2: something; font-size: 90%"| Blah blah blah

as each "parameter:value" in the former forms a "visual unit" (a gestalt?). I include the semicolon after each -- even just before the closing quote/speechmarks -- as part of these "units". Also, [fade out]) Sardanaphalus (talk) 23:18, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Override NOEDITSECTION ?

Is there any way that I can customize my monobook to always override "NOEDITSECTION" ? –xeno (talk) 16:00, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

The only way I can think of is to write a JS script that checks for the existence of the edit-section link and puts a link there if it doesn't exist. The MediaWiki seems to remove the link altogether from the rendered page-source, so you can't override using CSS. Calvin 1998 ^(t-c) 18:30, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

D'oh. Thanks anyways =) –xeno (talk) 10:54, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

This cannot be reliably done with javascript because it is impossible to determine (from the HTML) whether the page directly contains the ==sections== you wish to edit or whether they are part of a transcluded sub-page. For example the last "[edit]" link on yesterday's AFD list points to Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Sam Sullivan, not to section 108 of the log page (which doesn't exist).

Also if a page does contain some sections of its own, any transcluded sections would throw off the count for these and make some "[edit]" links point to the wrong section.

If you are able to ignore erroneous links or disable the script where this is a known issue, all other pages should work fine with the following code:

function naive_section_edit(){
  a = getElementsByClassName(document, "*", "mw-headline");
  for(i = 0; i < a.length; i++) a[i].insertBefore(document.createElement(
    '<span class="editsection">[<a href="' + wgScript + 'title=' +
    wgPageName + '&action=edit&section=' + (i + 1) + '" title="Edit section: '
    + a[i].innerHTML + '">edit</a>]</span>'));
  }

addOnloadHook(naive_section_edit);

— CharlotteWebb 17:16, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Hi Charlotte - thanks a bunch , but that doesn't seem to work for me. Does it have a dependency or something? I threw it in my monobook , cleared my cache, and added a NOEDITSECTION to a page of mine but I don't see any section edit links? –xeno (talk) 01:08, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

Global contribs

Hi guys. Could you possibly explain how in my contributions page when I click "Global contribs" from the following menu at the bottom of the page:

Subpages · Edit and action count · Interiot · Edit summary usage · Images uploaded · SUL accounts · Global contribs

A full list appears from the various projects I've been contributing to. How does the system know, for example, that I contribute to the Greek Wikipedia since my username is not the same as in the english Wikipedia? Also in the French Wikipedia I use the same username as here, but it could easily have been someone else using the same username. How do all these global projects know that the user is connected to all these other projects for certain? Thanks. Dr.K. (talk) 17:01, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

BTW I have not set up a global account yet. Dr.K. (talk) 17:02, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Are you sure that your contributions under another account name are being picked up? The tool just does a very fast scan of the contribution list for "Tasoskessaris" on every wikimedia project, and adds the numbers together, AFAIK. Happy‑melon 17:08, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

(ec) That tool just lists all contribs from accounts called 'Tasoskessaris'. The Greek edits are from the Greek user Tasoskessaris. Algebraist 17:11, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks Happy-melon. Yes. Amazingly here is part of the output for the Greek Wikipedia: (My user name is not the same there, but I do use the "Dr.K." nickname). Dr.K. (talk) 17:13, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

el.wikipedia.org (talk | Block log | Logs | User contributions | Replag: 5 sec | 16 User contributions )

• 2006-12-12T13:20:40 ( hist ) ( diff ) Κόρκυρα (602 Bytes) (added cat)
• 2006-07-18T12:48:00 ( hist ) ( diff ) m Κόρκυρα (583 Bytes) (bold name)

I know what happened. User:FocalPoint who is an admin at Greek Wikipedia imported my contribs from here and some articles. This account "Tasoskessaris" is simply a mirror of my english wikipedia account, not the account I use in the Greek Wikipedia. Thanks anyway. Take care. Dr.K. (talk) 17:18, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

I've had that happen before as well; I can't remember what project (and what language) at this point, but in looking at my contribs, I saw edits that were dated several months before I'd registered my account. Very, very strange. EVula // talk // ☯ // 18:10, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

It's wierd though, the imported edits don't seem to integrate completely with the database: the editcounter in my preferences at www.mediawiki.org clearly says I have six edits there, but look at mw:Special:Contributions/Happy-melon. Come to think of it, that's probably a bug... Happy‑melon 19:52, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

I guess it's a new system, things like that are to be expected. Thanks again. Dr.K. (talk) 20:00, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Edits that are imported, where the username doesn't correspond to any existing user, are given rev_user=0, same as anonymous revisions. This is, of course, severely broken. With SUL, what it should do is create the local account if it doesn't exist already, then use the local user ID for rev_user. (And preferably refuse to import if one account is unified but the local account isn't part of the unified one.) —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 13:43, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Sounds like it needs a bug... Template:Bug :D Happy‑melon 14:07, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

But the account did exist on the wiki before the import was done - I asked on-wiki for an admin to do the import! Admittedly the timestamps of some of the imported edits were before the account was created, but surely that shouldn't matter? Happy‑melon 14:12, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Linking other language wikipedia articles

I am working through Category:Motorcycle manufacturers of the United Kingdom correcting errors and adding infoboxes etc. I noticed that the nl wikipedia has a number of stubs (often containing errors) that may have been translated from the original articles - but I'm not sure how best to link to the correct version - if at all. Any suggestions? Tony (talk) 17:08, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Interwiki. --NE2 20:31, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Images aren't showing up

Resolved

I'm looking through image description pages here on Wikipedia, but I cannot actually see the image or picture. When I click on the upload.wikimedia.org link at the bottom of the image, it shows up with a 404 ERROR message. Every time I've looked at an image, I could see it in plain sight on the computer, but for me, somehow doesn't seem to be working. SchfiftyThree 21:43, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

• The same thing is happening to me too, but only in article space. All the images on my userpage load just fine. Ten Pound Hammer and his otters • ^{(Broken clamshells • Otter chirps • HELP)} 21:44, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

I can only see the thumbs on the pages. --Enric Naval (talk) 21:57, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

I third this. L337*P4wn 21:58, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

(This is a reply for TenPoundHammer) -- Yeah, I was viewing the Todd Field page, an article I created. There was an image of him in the actor infobox, but I did not see the image. And, the images are working in my userspace. SchfiftyThree 21:59, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

File uploading isn't working either. Error message "The upload directory (public) is missing and could not be created by the webserver" is showing. Gr1st (talk) 22:01, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Scratch that - everything seems to be back in order now. Gr1st (talk) 22:04, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Bad update to the configuration system. It's been reverted. --brion (talk)

Are we sure that's the whole thing? I'm still getting this on Margaret Downey. JoshuaZ (talk) 23:14, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Fine here. Have you cleared your cache? Algebraist 23:15, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

That worked. Disregard me. I'm stupid. JoshuaZ (talk) 23:28, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Popups no longer showing histories

The popups tool is not longer displaying histories of articles or contribution histories of editors when I hover over the appropriate links. These features have worked for me for well over a year but this breakage appears to be persistent for me across multiple browsers. I've looked in the usual places for help or updates that might explain this and done the usual things (cleared cache, restarted, cleared monobook, etc.). Any ideas on what may have changed and, more importantly, how to fix it? --ElKevbo (talk) 00:32, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Popups uses the obsolete query.php interface to get data. That interface was turned off today, since it is unmaintained. Someone will have to change popups to use the newer api.php interface. — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:39, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

So functionality used by one of the tools all users can opt to turn (in fact, the very top tool in the entire list of "Misc" tools) on has been disabled? WTF? --ElKevbo (talk) 00:41, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes. The developers figured it's better to remove something entirely than to let it mess up scripts, and I'm inclined to agree. It should be a menial task to incorporate the API into popups, but it is doable. —Animum (talk) 00:54, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

(e/c)User:TheDJ/apipopups.js is an API-based version, not sure how extensively tested it is. Any objection to replacing User:Lupin/popups.js and MediaWiki:Gadget-popups.js with it? Mr.Z-man 00:46, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

(ec)Previous discussions here and here. No-one's reported any problems. Algebraist 00:52, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

If the tool is unmaintained and no one but me has noticed that parts of it are now broken, how wise is it to have the tool available for use by all editors? It's still listed, at least for me, at the very top of the list of "Gadgets" in my preferences. --ElKevbo (talk) 00:55, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

And the alternative script above does appear to have fixed the problems. Thanks Mr.Z-man! --ElKevbo (talk) 00:56, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Is there a way to set preferences for gadgets? I had used

popupFixDabs=true;
popupFixRedirs=true;

in my monobook.js. --NE2 01:00, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

The Gadget and the version in Lupin's userspace have both been updated. Mr.Z-man 01:03, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

OK, thanks. --NE2 01:15, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Four simple steps to create a map that shows places with pictures missing

Hi, I'm Peter Brodersen and I'm mostly active at the Danish Wikipedia with technical implementations. I would like to tell about an implementation that could easily be ported to other countries' wikis.

The Result

Let's jump to the conclusion: I have utilized data from wikipedia by combining categories of "Missing pictures" and "Geotagged article" to create a list and create a Google Maps Mashup: http://www.findvej.dk/wikipedia?nopic=1 (data from Danish wiki only)

All the markers on the map represent an article where we are missing a good photo.

This could make it easy to get help from people travelling around in Denmark (on their way to job, walking in the woods, geocaching hunting and so on) to see where photos are missing in their area. If people are in the area of missing photos after all they might just be persuaded to take some photos.

Our problem: Missing photos

The Danish Wikipedia is about to reach 100.000 articles. However a lot of places (airports, universities, parks, shopping malls, train stations and so on) does still not have a photo of the subject. We have tried to raise some awareness of this but it is pretty hard just to ask people to go out and take pictures of random stuff.

People might be helpful or wanting to participate but it is easier to tell volunteers to perform specific tasks instead of more generally ask them just to "participate".

Since GPS is pretty widespread and there are also a bunch of friendly geocachers as an "untapped resource" we would like to create a resource to make people aware of our needs.

Step 1: Marking articles

We have to start somewhere. At first we would just add articles of different locations and buildings to a category, e.g. "Picture Needed". This was a labour-intensive task. It would also be pretty random which articles we added to this category. And it would require a bit of maintenance to remember to remove this category when pictures are added.

[[Category:Picture Needed]]

For good measure we could want to add __HIDDENCAT__ to our category as not to pollute the articles with these "flags"

Step 2: Making Templates Work for Us

We use infobox templates a lot as it is the case here on the English wiki. There are templates for cinemas, airports, rivers, lakes and so on. Most of these templates has a field for adding a picture.

As a rule there is no reason not to have a picture of a given location. Therefore I have updated these location specific templates to add the current page in the category equivalent to "Picture Needed" if no picture is present.

This is pretty easy. Let's say a template take {{{picture}}} as an argument. We would then add the following condition:

<includeonly>{{ #if: {{{picture|}}} | | [[Category:Picture Needed]]}}</includeonly>

The idea is basically to quickly put a lot of existing articles into this category where it tend to make sense and furthermore have a system that maintains itself. Whenever a new article is using this template the it would be added to the category (without any extra work from the author).

In our implementations I have used subcategories such as [[Category:Picture of church needed]]. This category would again belong to [[Category:Picture Needed]]. But this isn't that important.

Step 3: Cross reference with coordinates

All Danish articles with geocoding information added in a template resembling {{Coord}}. This template adds the article to a hidden category; "Geocoded Article".

We can then use existing tools to get the intersection between lists of articles in "Picture Needed" and articles in "Geocoded Article". If the last category is not available we could create the list based on which pages transcludes the {{Coord}} template or a similar template.

I'm currently using AutoWikiBrowser to manually create the intersection list but I'm pretty sure this intersection could be created with automated tools - perhaps the API?. The goal is to have this step automated as well.

Step 4: Creating a mashup

With the intersection list from Step 3 we can create a map with these articles marked. In my case I have used the Google Maps API myself but I suppose it would be fairly easy to create a KML output with the title and the coordinates of the articles.

Some of our users have requested the list of articles and coordinates as POIs in different GPS device friendly formats. This would be our next task. Simply put, we would like people to recieve data the way they like. We can't expect people to spend time getting familiar with Wikipedia and search functions. But if we just put up GPS files the GPS using community the task is pretty clear: We need pictures of these places. Please take one if you happen to pass any of them.

Conclusion

We now have a process where templates are used for more than just uniform look and content. We also have a system where data added from people in one end of the process (e.g. authors writing a new article) is helping other people in the other end.

There is no extra work for people who already use these templates. Their effort is not being complicated at all by this system. It's baiscally just a way of utilizing any bit existing information.

The goal is to have an automated process that is based on the existing flow and usage of templates and therefore requires no maintenance.

I hope this idea of utilizing existing features and content is interesting for other countries as well.

- Penguin (talk) 01:58, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Comments

I basically have a script to do this half written already (was a script for something else). I have a list of all transclusions of Template:Coord and Template:Coor URL, along with a script and regexes to get the latitude from articles, getting the longitude too would be easy. I could also get a list of transclusions of Template:Reqphoto and friends. I have a copy of the last completed enwiki database dump. Making a KML file should be easy enough. Mr.Z-man 02:53, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Hey look, Category:Articles needing images! — Twas Now ( talk • contribs • e-mail ) 10:11, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

We also have Wikipedia:Requested pictures. But that doesn't address the issue of an automated approach that (at the end) results in a map that photographers can use to see what subjects in their vicinity need a picture. In short, the above sounds like a great idea. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 12:40, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Broken image (copied from help desk)

Resolved.

Help! I'm a new user, and am having trouble with an image I uploaded.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:1917_-_New_Rockland_Trust_Bank_Bldg_288_Union_St.jpg

(sorry for the URL - I don't know how to do Wikilinks yet)

Why doesn't this image appear on the page? If I make a gif, it shows up. Otherwise, the JPG doesn't seem to work. I've uploaded other JPGs -- most, but not all -- are just fine

Any suggestions welcome!

Pames (talk) 13:52, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Image:1917 - New Rockland Trust Bank Bldg 288 Union St.jpg is displaying fine for me in the gallery in Rockland Trust Company. Have you tried clearing your cache? Algebraist 13:54, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

It's not working for me after clearing my browser cache and purging the server cache. When I click on the raw image link here I get a message about errors in the image. – ukexpat (talk) 16:01, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

This seems to be browser-dependent: it's fine in Firefox and Opera, broken in IE, and appears in black and white for some reason in Safari (all on WinXP). Should probably take this to the village pump, or somewhere where they know about jpgs. Algebraist 17:02, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Weeeeeell, I use Firefox and it's still broken... – ukexpat (talk) 19:27, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

So much for that theory, then (unless you don't use 3.0.1). Algebraist 22:46, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

There was a broken configuration setting on the last software update, should be fixed now. Mr.Z-man 22:54, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Still broken for me on IE and Safari. Bypassing cache doesn't fix it. Algebraist 00:23, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

And still broken for me in Firefox 2.0.0.16. – ukexpat (talk) 02:40, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Ok, time to take this to WP:VPT. Algebraist 02:42, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

<--- Outdent: any news on this one, it's still broken for me in Firefox 2.0.0.16. – ukexpat (talk) 14:30, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Have you tried downloading and updating to Firefox 3? I'm using Firefox 3 and it works fine for me. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 16:06, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

I fixed it. Hehe, this was an easy one. I downloaded the image file and opened it in my really old image editor who isn't as forgiving as the more modern ones. And as I expected my image editor said: "Unsupported Start of File marker". That means the file was damaged or doesn't follow standards. So I opened it in one of my more forgiving image editors and resaved it. (I saved it at fairly good jpg quality so it looks almost exactly like before.) I uploaded the new non-broken version. Now it renders fine in all my browsers.

--David Göthberg (talk) 16:24, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Oh, I just noticed there were one more "damaged" image in that article. I downloaded, fixed and re-uploaded that one too. And I took a closer look at the "image information" of the old images in my image editors: Apparently the old versions use "Progressive CMYK" colours, which is not supported by most browsers nor by MediaWiki's image rescaling function. The new versions I uploaded use the standard RGB colours.

--David Göthberg (talk) 16:41, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Well done that man - Thank you! – ukexpat (talk) 16:49, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Thank you!! I don't know where the weird settings came from, but now I know where to look to fix them if they appear again! Pames (talk) 01:24, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

I have delayed installing Firefox 3 because initially it did not support my favourite add-ons (usually I am the first to upgrade, being an upgrade junkie). Perhaps I need to take another look at it. – ukexpat (talk) 16:49, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Actually, it is a good thing if we as Wikipedia editors use older more buggy web browsers, since then we immediately notice when things break in the older browsers. Thankfully Wikipedia has many editors so if one editor doesn't notice a problem some other do.

--David Göthberg (talk) 17:55, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Constant freezing when accessing wikipedia using Windows 2000 IE 6

Question moved from WP:RD/C -- Consumed Crustacean (talk) 02:54, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

We constantly encounter issues with page freezing when accessing Wikipedia (English) using Windows 2000 workstations and IE6. Please let me know if this has been escalated before? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 192.193.1.6 (talk) 01:18, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

WAIT. I have the same problem with IE6. --mboverload@ 02:42, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

I have no trouble using the combination of Windows 2000 and either Firefox or Opera, so I suggest changing browser. -- Hoary (talk) 09:30, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Bogus site?

Note: Do *not* click on any link below before reading the entire posting. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 12:45, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

https://developer.berlios.de/projects/hocr/ is a link given on page for HOCR where I get a certification warning. A site offering this hocr gives a file called 31.exe which www.prevx.com identifies as malware —Preceding unsigned comment added by Roscolbar (talk • contribs) 09:24, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

No article titled HOCR has existed since early July. I guess you mean HOCR (software). This links to http://hocr.berlios.de which looks normal and doesn't attempt to feed me any .exe file. The article hasn't been edited since July so I don't know why you mention https://developer.berlios.de/projects/hocr/ , an address the article doesn't link to. -- Hoary (talk) 10:46, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Getting a lot of http 503 "service temporarily unavailable" errors

The wikified content of the message:

Service Temporarily Unavailable

The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.

Does anyone know why this is happening? (note, I used <big> '''...'''</big> in place of <h1> or = ... =)--Thinboy00 @760, i.e. 17:14, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Strangely enough I just got the same error for some reason. ~user:orngjce223 how am I typing? 20:26, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Problem of "editing own talk page while being blocked"

When a user is blocked, he/she/it can still edit his/her/its own talk page right? But if the person insults another user, or threatens another user, on the own talk page, is there any way to prevent the person to edit the own talk page? Now I'm suggesting to enable the editing talk page while being blocked function in the Malay Wikipedia, but an admin brought up this problem of enabling the function. Can anyone please help? Thanks a lot! --אדמוןד ואודס_{自分の投稿記録} 17:24, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Standard procedure is to protect the talk page if necessary. This will prevent them from editing it (unless the blocked user is an admin). — CharlotteWebb 17:49, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. But if the user is an admin, he/she/it have to unblock him/her/itself - this is an abuse of power. --אדמוןד ואודס_{自分の投稿記録} 17:52, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Here at least, a blocked admin unblocking themselves or performing any admin actions will send people screaming for a steward. I think the admins-can-unblock-themselves feature is protection against someone compromising an admin account and running a script to quickly block every other admin on-wiki, which would (if blocked admins couldn't use unblock) make them pretty hard to dislodge. In the 'post cold war' era with stewards, throttles, and various other anti-end-of-the-world checks and balances, it's not such a problem, but the effect lingers. On en.wiki a blocked admin knows that if they touch Special:BlockIP it'll be the last unblock they ever make, so it's not a problem. If a blocked admin is abusing their talkpage, then again that's probably a situation when their ability to handle the admin tools has to be questioned. I don't know if you have an Arbitration Committee on ms.wiki, but here that's where I'd bump that problem. Happy‑melon 18:06, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Actually, if $wgBlockAllowsUTEdit = true; a blocked admin can edit their own talk page, even if it is protected. Blocked admin can also change the protection settings of their own talk page and even delete/undelete it (but they can't move their talk page to another title or take any action on any other page). Arguably a bug. — CharlotteWebb 18:08, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Table style issue

I managed to get the changes to sortable tables described here to functionally work. However, I am now encountering style issues. These are described here. I was hoping someone might take a look. SharkD (talk) 17:31, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Unexplained lack of Google search pickup of Wikipedia page

Back Alley John page and lack of Google search pickup

I created a page for the late Canadian blues artist Back Alley John. This was developed over a period of days in the last week or so. Initially, when I did a Google search to see how the page came up, Google picked up earlier versions of the page--in other words, the Google search would reference text that was no longer current in the initial listing, but when one clicked on the Google hit, the current Wikipedia version would come up. Now the page doesn't seem to get picked up at all on a Google search. For example, when I search "Back Alley John" combined with "Wikipedia", the Google result is a Wikipedia categorization page, relating to year of death. Have I done something wrong in the setup, such that Google is not picking it up? Raising this in the event that more than one Wikipedia page might be affected by something that is beyond me.

If someone has a moment to address this, that would be very much appreciated.

Dreadarthur (talk) 18:46, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

I've never been one to know or care how Google calculates page-rank but part of the problem could be that no articles link to this one. — CharlotteWebb 19:00, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Merge contributions?

Is there any way I could have account contributions from one account merged into a different account? D.M.N. (talk) 19:08, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

No, this isn't possible with the present software. — Carl (CBM · talk) 19:19, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Multiple Categories Search

It would be great to search for articles in multiple categories. There is actually a MediaWiki extension that does this: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Multi-Category_Search It would be great if that could be implemented.

--helohe (talk) 20:51, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

There is also Wikipedia:CatScan. — Twas Now ( talk • contribs • e-mail ) 21:36, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

What would also be awesome is to be able to pipe the results of such a search into a list or table so that no manual labor would be involved in maintaining/updating such lists. SharkD (talk) 22:06, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Question: are there external sites that track intersections of categories on Wikipedia for particular topics and then serve them to visitors? SharkD (talk) 22:11, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Delete log in watchlist

Hi! I created Bev Oke as a redirect but it got deleted before I could save the target article. (Fast work!) (It was later undeleted by the deleter.)

1. I couldn't recreate the page myself. Is that normal/expected behavior?
2. Instead of the article showing up on my watchlist, only it's "delete log" did! Purged etc. When I removed Bev Oke from my watchlist the delete log disappeared. Thought that was interesting. Saintrain (talk) 00:48, 27 August 2008 (UTC)