Jump to content

Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 83

Add links
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
< Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by PrimeBOT (talk | contribs) at 02:10, 11 June 2017 (→Link Incorrect in Thank You, State Library of Queensland Notice: remove UTM parameters (Google analytics) from URLs - BRFA). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Village pump (technical) archive  

This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (technical). Please do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to revive any of these discussions, either start a new thread or use the talk page associated with that topic.

< Older discussions · Archives: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z, AA, AB, AC, AD, AE, AF, AG, AH, AI, AJ, AK, AL, AM, AN, AO, AP, AQ, AR, AS, AT, AU, AV, AW, AX · 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217

Fresh MediaWiki installation swallowing Unicode characters?

Does anyone have any idea what's happening with [1]? The Unicode characters are being replaced by question marks by MediaWiki. It's not a browser thing; I'm on Google Chrome 9 dev. 「ダイノガイ千？！」? · Talk⇒Dinoguy1000 22:26, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

I had no trouble saving it. Perhaps it is Chrome after all. — Edokter • Talk • 23:37, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
But edit shows ??? all over again. — Edokter • Talk • 23:41, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
Exactly. On first saving (and previewing), Unicode characters display normally. However, if you perform any action except normally viewing the page after that (anything that invalidates the page cache or otherwise makes MediaWiki generate a new version of the page, it looks like) MediaWiki replaces the Unicode characters with ? - in this diff, I simply replaced my sig there with an unmodified copy of my sig here (except for adding the "wikipedia:" interwiki prefix) and it saved, and diff shows a 22-byte increase in RecentChanges but not in the page history. I don't suppose there are any MediaWiki settings which could somehow be affecting this (doubtful, since it was doing this with a nearly-vanilla LocalSettings.php)? 「ダイノガイ千？！」? · Talk⇒Dinoguy1000 02:18, 6 December 2010 (UTC)
You may want to try #mediawiki connect for help with this; this page is just for technical issues with the English Wikipedia. Anomie⚔ 03:56, 6 December 2010 (UTC)
You may also want to see if a bug report has been filed. – Allen4names 13:00, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

SQL question

I don't know much SQL, so I was wondering if anyone could provide some advice about Wikipedia:Database reports/Transclusions of deleted templates/Configuration. In particular, if you check the list (i.e., Database reports/Transclusions of deleted templates), you will see that the transclusion counts are inflated. Poking around, I believe this is caused by some issue with transclusions on deleted pages being counted. Is there an easy way to fix the transclusion counts? If I knew anything about SQL, I would try to figure it out, but I would be stabbing in the dark. 134.253.26.4 (talk) 21:23, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

The database is known to be inconsistent. I have a query which show list red links from non-existent pages. Anyway, to improve the report add a JOIN page ON page_namespace=tl_namespace AND page_title=page_title. By the way, next time post at Wikipedia talk:Database reports — Dispenser 23:46, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

Transcluding onlyinclude and includeonly tags

short question

Is there a way to let a template include <includeonly><onlyinclude>{{{date}}}</onlyinclude></includeonly> when transcluded?

longer explaination for question

I'll try to explain it with this table:

Page name: Template(in this case: "template:update") Page between(in this case: "update page") Final page(in this case: "item page")
use: add a notice to "update page" show information about the update,
and when transcluded show the date of it only 		Only have the text between the onlyinclude tags included

This is because at the RuneScape Wiki i am trying to automate the update date. Because there is always a link to the update page on the item page, and the update page has the date on it, i want the update page to have an additional note with the date entered(between onlyinclude tags) and i don't want it to appear on the update page itself(between includeonly tags). All update pages have the template:Update on it, with the parameter {{{date}}} so I want template:update to add <includeonly><onlyinclude>{{{date}}}</onlyinclude></includeonly> to the update page so that when the item page has {{#time:j F Y|{{Update:(updatename)}}}} on it, it shows the date in "dd month yy" automatically without needing to add that yourself.

I hope someone can help me.Joeytje50 (talk) 17:51, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

Try interrupting the tags with <includeonly> tags. See Template:Noinclude for an example. --NYKevin @257, i.e. 05:10, 9 December 2010 (UTC)
Correct me if i'm wrong, but doesn't that only work when substituted? I tried it, and when i did, it didn't work when transcluded.Joeytje50 (talk) 16:04, 10 December 2010 (UTC)
We basically use {{#switch:{{SUBPAGENAME}}|Update=Special text|#default=Everyone else}} at {{Documentation subpage}}. — Dispenser 23:54, 9 December 2010 (UTC)
I will check some things with that. Thanks for the advice.Joeytje50 (talk) 16:04, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

Clickjacking?

Hi. I don't know if this is the right place to ask this, if not, please direct me to the right one. A NoScript warning appeared while I was in the wikiminiatlas warning me about clickjacking. It told me to click somewhere or not to click somewhere, something like that. I don't really understood it so I just closed the warning window. After that, when I opened the atlas again it became covered with writings mentions "server", "Bad Gateway" and "Zeus", I think. I did a seach on wikipedia and Bad Gateway seems to refer to 502 Bad Gateway. I also did a seach on Zeus and found this: Zeus (trojan horse). Now, everytime I try to see the atlas the same thing happens, only without the NoScript warning. Does anyone know anything about this? –Cattus talk 20:28, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

Probably something toolserver related, If you could give use the exact error message it would assist in tracking down the problem. The toolserver runs Zeus Web Server ΔT The only constant 20:34, 9 December 2010 (UTC)
Oh, well, at least I don't have a trojan horse on my computer. :) As for the error message, I'll try. Thanks for the quick reply.–Cattus talk 20:42, 9 December 2010 (UTC)
It seems to be working fine now. So you think the clickjacking thing was just a mistake by NoScript?–Cattus talk 20:48, 9 December 2010 (UTC)
It is a warning about the click event passing through two domains. The close button in the en.wikipedia.org layer, but the map layer is on toolserver.org. To illustrate the security issue, consider if close button hide the save button for malicious user script/gadget on pt.wikipedia.org. — Dispenser 23:36, 9 December 2010 (UTC)
I see. So NoScript was just being cautious in warning me. Thanks for the explanation.–Cattus talk 14:57, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

Fix bunching added whitespace

Does anyone understand why [2] added excess whitespace to the top of the article? (for comparison, see [3] and [4] (before and after of that same diff)). I can't figure it out. --NYKevin @797, i.e. 18:07, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

The templates somehow add whitespace. This fixes it. Ucucha 21:27, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

-webkit-text-size-adjust sorely needed

Seriously, right now it is almost impossible to read Wikipedia pages on an iPhone without a lot of zooming, horizontal scrolling, and rotating the device. -Webkit-text-size-adjust would fix this so I propose addingthe following code to common.css 

body {-webkit-text-size-adjust:140%;}

access_denied (talk) 02:53, 11 December 2010 (UTC)

Recently discussed at MediaWiki talk:Common.css/Archive 12#Add -webkit-text-size-adjust: none.3B to MediaWiki:Handheld.css — Dispenser 04:55, 11 December 2010 (UTC)

Requesting the addition of a class "transborder"

Posted at MediaWiki talk:Common.css. PleaseStand (talk) 04:08, 11 December 2010 (UTC)

Deletion logs

It would be helpful if someone could tweak the css so that deletion summaries are shown in a collapsed box. This is an increasingly frequent comment from individuals contacting OTRS about deleted articles; while the Google log purges and at any time when someone clicks a redlink you end up at:

This page has been deleted.

The deletion and move log for the page are provided below for reference.

    • (del/undel) 03:44, May 4, 2009 EvilBastard (talk | contribs | block) deleted "Deleted Person" ‎ (Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Deleted Person) (view/restore)
    • (del/undel) 04:14, April 30, 2008 AutobiographYNuker (talk | contribs | block) deleted "Deleted Person" ‎ (G11: Unambiguous advertising or promotion) (view/restore)
    • (del/undel) 03:19, April 30, 2008 HeartlessPerson (talk | contribs | block) deleted "Deleted Person" ‎ (A7: Article that does not adequately explain the importance of the subject) (view/restore)

Actually of course we say "no explanation of importance" and so on, but that's what it looks like to the individual. In fact what it really looks like is:

This page has been deleted.

The deletion and move log for the page are provided below for reference.

    • (del/undel) 03:44, May 4, 2009 EvilBastard (talk | contribs | block) deleted "Deleted Person" ‎ (Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Deleted Person where a dozen people say deleted Person is insignificant) (view/restore)
    • (del/undel) 04:14, April 30, 2008 AutobiographYNuker (talk | contribs | block) deleted "Deleted Person" ‎ (G11: Deleted Person is a spammer) (view/restore)
    • (del/undel) 03:19, April 30, 2008 HeartlessPerson (talk | contribs | block) deleted "Deleted Person" ‎ (A7: Deleted Person is completely unimportant) (view/restore)

Don't focus on what we actually say, think hard about how it looks to the article subject. They do not care about our policies and internal processes, they care that Wikipedia says they are "not notable". That hurts. We can soften the blow.

There's no way we're going to stop using the term "notability" to describe suitable topics for inclusion, and actually no reason we should. Same with the various speedy and deletion rationales. But we could, with a fairly simple change, make it less hurtful to the individuals concerned, several of whom have not asked for their names to be on Wikipedia in the first place. Guy (Help!) 15:19, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

Oh lord please yes. This would cut out a good 5% of the OTRS workload and make the other 95% considerably easier to handle. Chase me ladies, I'm the Cavalry (talk) 15:37, 28 November 2010 (UTC)
Just a comment - 5% is actually a good few dozen mails a week. Chase me ladies, I'm the Cavalry (talk) 15:40, 28 November 2010 (UTC)
Thirded. In my prods I've started to use "encyclopedically notable" instead, but this is an even better solution. I've also handled complaints about article templates (especially the cleanup ones) where the LPs don't understand the that the requests are about the poorly written articles, rather than critiques of the LPs themselves. Ideas on making these clearer? -- Jeandré, 2010-11-28t18:40z [donation needed]
I raised the same point recently but it got nowhere. We should collapse the boxes to "One or more editors has identified an issue with the content of this article" or something equally anodyne. Guy (Help!) 19:17, 28 November 2010 (UTC)
So the proposal is that we should collapse these boxes with a [show/hide] format? That doesn't actually remove them, and the logs would still be easily accessible. As a result, it seems to me, that this wouldn't really cut down on the complaints much (i.e. a significantly fraction of the people would click [show] and still be annoyed). So, it appears that the trade-off is something like: Slightly protect a small number of people that are highly annoyed by deletion summaries, vs. mildly annoy a larger population of Wikipedians that have reasons to look at deletion summaries by forcing them to add an extra click. I'm not really sure that is a net gain, and it also doesn't seem to do all that much to address the issue.
Let me suggest an alternative. If the problem is that deletion summaries are causing confusion, then why not add an explanation the message. Something along the lines of:

This page has been deleted.

The deletion and move log for the page are provided below for reference.

Presumably there are better ways to express the above sentiment, but I think providing an explanation would do more net good than simply trying to slightly hide the logs. Dragons flight (talk) 22:20, 28 November 2010 (UTC)
A bit overdone, IMO. Personally, I'd just add a sentence like your "The fact that a page was deleted should not be taken as criticism of the person or topic involved." in plain text after "This page has been deleted.", no odd-looking boxes inside boxes or anything. Anomie⚔ 19:53, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Maybe show a different message for ips, with a link instead of including the logs? Platonides (talk) 22:22, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

  • I have no objection to giving more explanation but the reasons for deletion are, to article subjects, often inherently offensive. Hence the desire to simply collapse them. Not remove, just leave it so that you're not faced with text telling you that you (yes, you, the living person reading this notice) are not notable. Guy (Help!) 10:10, 29 November 2010 (UTC)
  • I don't think it's necessary to pander to people's egos here. There are relatively very few people who are considered notable by Wikipedia's standards. If you're not one of them, tough luck. If that offends you or hurts your feelings, then that's your problem. I don't see the need to base our policies on that, or to conceal why articles were deleted because someone is having an unreasonable emotional reaction. It's good to clearly show why articles were deleted so that people don't recreate the same article unknowingly. Therefore, I can't support collapsing this information. I can, however, support the addition of a brief explanatory note per User:Dragons flight above. SnottyWong confabulate 00:45, 30 November 2010 (UTC)
We already address these complaints through OTRS, so it isn't a question of dealing with their reactions or not. It is a question of whether we do something to defuse the issue before they see it (but as a consequence affecting how users in general access deletion log info), or just deal with the ones who submit complaints (which is more time for OTRS volunteers but has less impact on users generally). --RL0919 (talk) 16:58, 30 November 2010 (UTC)
I understand the idea but don't think it will work. Hypothetically, if I saw a page on me had been deleted (like the OTRS people you are talking about) sure the reason may not be there instantly but if it's a page on me surely I'll be inquisitive uncollapse the box and be back exactly where I started. As such I see this change as a disadvantage because I don't think it will fix the problem you are talking about and will just cause extra "show" clicks for everyone. Rambo's Revenge (talk) 17:36, 30 November 2010 (UTC)
Snottywong, I am dealing with hurt and angry people emailing the Wikimedia Foundation. "No" is not a great answer when actually we can do it, if we want to. I really don't think you understand how offensive some people find this. Guy (Help!) 00:39, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
BLP applies to all Wikipedia content, and it is especially important in places where it can be seen as a sort of official summary. SW's view that this is pandering to people would basically mean the removal of all the BLP rules, all of which are there to avoid doing harm, primarily harm to people's feelings. There are various suggestions along these lines in aat WT:Deletion policy. This is a matter of policy, not just of technical display of material. I just point out here that any method used for necessary concealing of material should not emphasise the fact that it has been concealed. DGG ( talk ) 04:55, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
  • @Guy; re:{{deleted article}} I'm not sure this is a particularly good way to do it, it makes it somewhat easier for e.g. Patricia Caswell to come along next week and re-create her page without being picked up by a new-page patroller, it also doesn't give the bit of "in-yer-face" information to user:innocent-new-page-creator regarding whether the page may be a suitable candidate having recently been rejected by consensus and is also likely to be confusing to a new editor - and possibly even a more experienced editor - when they click the Start the Patricia Caswell article link. I hope this is only a "temporary kludge" and not applied to too many pages. --ClubOranjeT 10:53, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Couldn't you just post an extra note at every deletion log of a person who has complained to OTRS? Something like "The subject of this deleted article is a very sensitive person and should be treated extra gently?" If someone's sees the standard and rather tame deletion log given above, and interprets it in the fashion you described in the second fake box, then that's basically their problem. Blatantly incorrect or offensive deletion reasons should be purged from the deletion log, but apart from that, I see no reason to change our current notices. Perhaps we can draft a standard OTRS response to such complaints, making the life of the OTRS people easier without actually going along with the "some people complain, so everyone should follow" mentality that seems to pervasive in today's society. Fram (talk) 11:46, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

No, that's missing the point. The point is that a page is displayed which says the article has been deleted. As far as the subject is concerned, that means we have a page on them which says they are not notable. And then when they ask us to delete it, we can't, because there is no page to delete. This is not a great customer service outcome. Guy (Help!) 16:43, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
Doesn't the plain fact that the page ever existed and was deleted say that to these overly-sensitive people, even if the actual reasons are hidden in a collapsed box? And what's to stop these overly-sensitive people from clicking the "unhide" button and then complaining about the deletion summaries again? Anomie⚔ 19:53, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

'Note' I tried to find the relevant message in this list, but couldn't. On the other hand, Special:Search was also useless, and I confirmed with Lynx that the message is not loaded via Javascript or something similar... so I would assume the developers actually hard-coded this message. If that's the case, modifying it (if we choose to do so) will be... interesting. --NYKevin @978, i.e. 22:28, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

It appears the message displayed on the page view is MediaWiki:Moveddeleted-notice, and that on the edit view is MediaWiki:Recreate-moveddeleted-warn. The div around it (styled with CSS to give the red box) and the list itself are hard-coded, and there appears to be no message for after the list where the end of an existing close box could be inserted. Anomie⚔ 02:50, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
Thank you for finding that. --NYKevin @326, i.e. 06:49, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
@Anomie, <div class="mw-warning-with-logexcerpt">. There must be a way of getting a handle on that. Guy (Help!) 10:47, 6 December 2010 (UTC)
Some sort of marker could be included in the notices I mentioned, and then some custom Javascript could apply collapsing to every UL inside a DIV with class=mw-warning-with-logexcerpt and that marker (the marker is necessary to avoid catching things like the protection log excerpt on protected pages, the block log excerpt on blocked user talk pages, and so on). But it's not as simple as slapping {{collapse}} in a message somewhere. Personally, I don't see how this proposal would accomplish its stated goals, see my unanswered questions above. Anomie⚔ 12:05, 6 December 2010 (UTC)

Guy, I really don't agree with this proposal, because if someone chooses to take offense at this sort of thing, the only way to pacify them, ultimately, is going to be the creation of an article for them, and I don't think notability policy should be changed just because someone wants us to do so. Using a {{cot}} (or similar) will cause inconvenience and other measures probably won't work as well (if at all). Saying things like "no endorsement" is redundant to our disclaimers. And suggesting that notability is not the problem ("one or more editors has identified an issue with the content of this article" was mentioned above; emphasis added) could easily lead to the celebrity trying to "fix" and thereby "save" the article after it's been deleted, and of course we have enough of that right now. --NYKevin @326, i.e. 06:49, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

  • You are wrong. I have two people who have explicitly expressed the view that my kludge / workaround (which is basically to subst the "no article" mediawiki text) is acceptable. Not everybody who has an article on Wikipedia, chose to have it. Some of our correspondents are the victims of attack pages. And even if they did create the page themselves, rubbing their noses in it is simply a bad idea - it will encourage them to hate us all the more and probably push a few over into vandalism or anti-Wikipedia activism. Ask any OTRS volunteer about the impact on real people's lives of what we do here. This is not something to be airily dismissed just because you don't see the problem. Guy (Help!) 10:42, 6 December 2010 (UTC)
People who had attack pages are a different issue entirely from people who created their own articles, and based on the discourse above they appear to be irrelevant (if I'm wrong about this, please indicate how they would be offended by such logs showing up; I don't understand that, although I also don't understand people being offended at their own non-notability). And as Anomie said above, people who are offended at their own non-notability are going to be unhappy that no article exists no matter what we do. {{Deleted article}} may be acceptable to regular people, but it is not acceptable to average Wikipedians, who will be confused by it since it mimics the MW interface, falsely suggesting the page does not exist and lacks a deletion log. If something does not mimic the interface, the sensitive people will probably notice this. I really don't think it's okay to break Wikipedia because some people choose to take offense at our notability policies. --NYKevin @268, i.e. 05:25, 9 December 2010 (UTC)
Guy, you have also had at least two people who have explicitly expressed the view that your / workaround is not acceptable.--ClubOranjeT 08:41, 9 December 2010 (UTC)
So? A few people would still not be happy. That's not a great reason for failing to do something reasonably straightforward to keep that number to a minimum. The assumption above that these are all frustrated vanity spammers and therefore deserve to have their faces rubbed in it is also rather disturbing. Do you feel like writing to these people? Most of them are not threatening to sue us for defamation because of the log display, most of them are just upset and want it to go away. We could do that. Guy (Help!) 12:23, 11 December 2010 (UTC)
  • On one hand, I can tell you whatever notice is placed on these deleted articles is going to still result with complaints to OTRS. Maybe not as many, but there will be complaints. (And I say that as someone who has dealt first-hand with the great unwashed public in a call center; some people are best handled either by someone with extensive training as a social worker or therapist, or by hanging up the phone.) On the other hand, this thread reminds me of the form rejection letters I would receive back when I wanted to be a published writer. (For you young-uns reading this, before the Internet in order to have one's work published, one would mail a manuscript to an editor, who would then glance at it &, far more often than not, return it in the self-addressed stamped envelope provided with a form rejection slip.) These form rejection letters were incredibly colorless & unhelpful about why the work was rejected, & used when the editors did not have the time, or interest, to work with the author at the time; however, potentially good & marketable authors might have their submissions rejected early in their careers, so magazines & publishing houses went out of their way not to sound the least bit offensive. The average rejection letter read along the lines of: "We regret to inform you that your submission does not meet our needs at this time. Thank you for your submission." No names, maybe not even a letter head. -- llywrch (talk) 19:38, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

Main page archeology

Can someone explain now did this happen? --illythr (talk) 11:09, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

I don't follow... That's an edit form 2002(!). What is so special about it? — Edokter • Talk • 12:16, 10 December 2010 (UTC)
Look at the dates. Some early revisions in the database have gotten confused, which causes anomalies like this. Ucucha 13:01, 10 December 2010 (UTC)
The "diff=prev" command looks for the previous edit not by its date, but by its revision ID (the number 139992 in the above address). Many revision ID's from 2002 are chronologically out of order. Graham87 14:18, 10 December 2010 (UTC)
Ah, I see. There was some sort of technical problem which resulted in the main page history "looping forward" (in turn, as a result of some sort of a history merge). As an aside, the phrase "We started in January 2001 and already have about NUMBEROFARTICLES articles. We want to make over 100,000, so let's get to work" looks kinda cute from today's point of view. --illythr (talk) 20:21, 11 December 2010 (UTC)

CSS or JS expert WANTED

Hi there!

I'm looking for a CSS or JS solution for the following problem: I would like the background color of a section to be changed when moving mouse over its section-edit link (or if not possible over the whole <h> element). Actually this should help users see which part of the page will be editable after clicking the section-edit link. This is for a wiki written by children who have some difficulties to uderstand the difference between these section-edit links and the edit tab. I've tried with CSS 3 selectors to affect the right parts but this looks quite complex and I'm not really a techie. Maybe this could be done more easily with JavaScript? I hope some expert can help. Any solution would be greatly appreciated! And sorry for my english... --Lorangeo (talk) 15:12, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

Nice idea, but very hard to implement. As the various headers and paragraphs on a page do not have any classes or IDs associated to them, it is virtually impossible to select those elements in CSS. JavaScript could be done, but it would have to enumerate all elements on a page, which could slow things down. — Edokter • Talk • 15:37, 9 December 2010 (UTC)
With CSS I first tried Adjacent sibling combinator : 
.ns-0 h2:hover, .ns-0 h2:hover + *, .ns-0 h2:hover + * + *, .ns-0 h2:hover + *  + * + *, .ns-0 h2:hover + *  + * + * + *, .ns-0 h2:hover + *  + * + * + * + * { background-color: #ffffcc; }
But of course this is not accurate. I then tried General sibling combinator hoping it would be possible to set a limit (i.e. "apply this style to all elements until next header of same level"). But it looks like this is not possible. Well, maybe I could add something in the core of MW to make this more easy? But what? --Lorangeo (talk) 16:26, 9 December 2010 (UTC)
Wrapping the entire section in a <div class="section" id="section-1"> etc. would be the most logical solution. Then the CSS becomes simple. — Edokter • Talk • 16:55, 9 December 2010 (UTC)
Mhhh, I see. But actually I would need some help to do that with a clean code. :-/ Could someone help? I might paypal you something if necessary. --Lorangeo (talk) 22:28, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

This isn't exactly the right place for this because this forum is for discussing technical issues relating to Wikipedia rather than other wikis, but here is some JS code that you could refer to. It depends on jQuery, so you would have to make MediaWiki include jQuery in the generated page. Of course, there might be some problems with this code, but it's a start. PleaseStand (talk) 02:40, 10 December 2010 (UTC) 

if(wgNamespaceNumber == 0) {
    jQuery(function() {
        jQuery('h2,h3,h4,h5,h6').bind('mouseover mouseout', function(event) {
            var headingLevel = this.nodeName.slice(1), more = true;
            jQuery(this)
                .nextAll()
                .filter(function() {
                    if(!more) {
                        return false;
                    }
                    var match = this.nodeName.match(/^h(\d)$/i);
                    if (match && match[1] <= headingLevel) {
                        more = false;
                    }
                    return more;
                })
                .css('background-color', event.type == 'mouseover' ? '#ffc' : '');
        });
    });
}
Thank you very much! It works! I implemented it and you can see the result here: http://fr.wikimini.org/wiki/Chevalier. But there is still a problem with texts near a picture. --Lorangeo (talk) 11:26, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

Legend box and line legend alignment

   Breeding range
   Winter range

  Migration routes

This came up on White Stork - is there some way to fix Template:legend-line so that it matches in width with Template:Legend2 (and others in the family) at all font size settings. Shyamal (talk) 04:36, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

In it's current form, there is no way to ensure equal sizes, due to the use of non-breaking spaces and non-matching font-sizes. What would be best is to use CSS padding to size the boxes and the lines (see {{pad}} on how that's done), which means the templates need a bit of an overhaul. I can help with that if you wish. — Edokter • Talk • 08:13, 12 December 2010 (UTC)
Sure, that would be welcome, or perhaps a multi-line legend box that uses a table for alignment. Shyamal (talk) 11:34, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

external text editor

the new edit toolbar doesnt even have find and replace.

Can you guys recommend a good external text editor?

Something that works well for editing wiki pages.

nothing fancy. I wouldnt know how to use it.


is there a wiki page explaining how to replace the javascript editor with an external editor? Just granpa (talk) 19:00, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

The new edit toolbar does have find-and-replace; just open the "Advanced" section, and it is the icon at the extreme right-hand side. If you want to go back to the old toolbar anyways, you can go to the Editing tab of "My preferences", uncheck the "Beta features," and then click the Save button. PleaseStand (talk) 20:04, 12 December 2010 (UTC)
And if that doesn't rock your boat (and you use Firefox) you could try "It's All Text!" — Blue-Haired Lawyer t 20:44, 12 December 2010 (UTC)
You could use wikEd. Graham87 01:12, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

"Your feedback"

At the bottom of the article Demographics of the United States there's a box asking for feedback in four areas. I've never seen a box like that before. Where did it come from?--178.167.130.90 (talk) 21:13, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

It's a feedback project that's in testing right now. All the articles listed in Category:Article Feedback Pilot should have that feedback form. The category itself should have some useful links and info on it. Killiondude (talk) 22:23, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

MediaWiki talk:Standard.css#Add "print/export" section to the [classic] skin?

Cross posting to get more feedback. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 07:40, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

The collection extension that generates this part of the Sidebar is not compatible with the Standard skin. Or rather, the standard skin does not have the hooks that allow the Collection extension to hook into it. The same probably goes for all the other 'old'/non-monobook based Skins. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:04, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

"Internal error"

Just got this backtrace when trying to upload a file: 

key 'st009c4b198kphhtn3cwlg9g3jqwdnt.' is not in a proper format

Backtrace:

#0 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/upload/UploadBase.php(557): UploadStash->stashFile('/tmp/phpwFvokC', Array, NULL)
#1 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/upload/UploadBase.php(569): UploadBase->stashSessionFile(NULL)
#2 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/specials/SpecialUpload.php(292): UploadBase->stashSession()
#3 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/specials/SpecialUpload.php(514): SpecialUpload->showRecoverableUploadError('<p>A file with ...')
#4 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/specials/SpecialUpload.php(404): SpecialUpload->processVerificationError(Array)
#5 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/specials/SpecialUpload.php(167): SpecialUpload->processUpload()
#6 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/SpecialPage.php(561): SpecialUpload->execute(NULL)
#7 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/Wiki.php(254): SpecialPage::executePath(Object(Title))
#8 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/Wiki.php(64): MediaWiki->handleSpecialCases(Object(Title), Object(OutputPage), Object(WebRequest))
#9 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/index.php(117): MediaWiki->performRequestForTitle(Object(Title), NULL, Object(OutputPage), Object(User), Object(WebRequest))
#10 /usr/local/apache/common-local/live-1.5/index.php(3): require('/usr/local/apac...')
#11 {main}

--Morn (talk) 17:53, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

Is it anything like this? :| TelCoNaSpVe :| 17:58, 9 December 2010 (UTC)
No, the intended file name is "Zippo_logo.svg" (local copy of non-free logo at http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Zippo.svg), no colon to be found. Very strange, I've never seen a backtrace when uploading before, neither on WP nor Commons. --Morn (talk) 20:02, 9 December 2010 (UTC)
Well that narrows it down a bit: it seems to be hitting with svg files. Oddly, I renamed the file, and it uploaded correctly; try a few different nmes. Magog the Ogre (talk) 20:46, 9 December 2010 (UTC)
Now I've used File:Zippo.svg as the destination file name and that worked. --Morn (talk) 22:33, 9 December 2010 (UTC)
This is something to do with the new UploadWizard, but for the moment I'm baffled as to why this happened. It's on the list of things I'm working on. 216.38.130.166 (talk) 21:14, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

Which page uses a Parser extension tag

Is there a list which can tell a user which pages use a particular Parser extension tag?

For example, the <gallery> tag. Is there a page which will tell me a list of which pages the gallery tag is used on? Thank you! Adamtheclown (talk) 06:28, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

No. As of 1.17 (to be deployed in January or February) magic words like __NOINDEX__ and {{DEFAULTSORT: will be tracked. If you can make a proper use case for tracking the gallery tag, you can add a feature request to bugzilla. (Please add bryan dot tongminh at gmail dot com as CC if you do) -- Bryan (talk|commons) 21:43, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

Viewing a deletion discussion in edit mode

Some instructions appear that currently state:

Welcome to the deletion discussion for [article]. All input is welcome, though valid arguments citing appropriate guidelines will be given more weight than unsupported statements; discussion guidelines are available. Be aware that using multiple accounts to reinforce a viewpoint is considered a serious breach of community trust, and that comments on people rather than the article is [sic] considered disruptive.

This needs a grammar revision: "is" needs to be changed to "are", because "comments" is a plural noun, and as such requires a plural verb. (I'm not sure if the Village pump is the best place for reporting this, but I don't know any other better venue.) --Theurgist (talk) 15:06, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

 Fixed, although I went for "commenting is" rather than "comments are". Hope that's okay. - Kingpin13 (talk) 15:17, 13 December 2010 (UTC)
Cheers! --Theurgist (talk) 15:38, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

"Complete list" in Interwiki

I am an administrator on Turkish Wikibooks and I want to learn how you achieved adding "Complete list" entry to Interwiki section on the main page. Thank you. Bekiroflaz (talk) 18:30, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

WP:FAQ/Main Page#How do you put the "Complete list" link at the end of the interwikis?—Emil J. 18:51, 13 December 2010 (UTC)
Thanks. Bekiroflaz (talk) 20:16, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

Text area height

Hi. I use to create redirects and stubs, and I always need to scroll down to show the "Save" button due to the text area height. Can I modify the text area height or put a "Save" button in the top of the text area (using a gadget or so)? I guess that this problem is common to other users. The short cut ctrl+shift+s is not so quick for me. Thanks. emijrp (talk) 22:33, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

You can set the number of lines of the edit box in your preferences. — Edokter • Talk • 22:36, 13 December 2010 (UTC)
Very useful, thanks! emijrp (talk) 22:44, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

Loss of session data

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

I've never seen this message until a month or so ago, but recently I began to hit it frequently, about every other day. What is going on?—Emil J. 13:56, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

I've had that message off and on before. A different, but possibly related, oddity while editing Saengerfest, on Dec 9 and Dec 11. In both instances, I had a only section opened to editing. When I hit "save page", it replaced the entire article with only the section I had been working on. The rest of the article was gone. I did reverts to remedy it, but it was of concern nonetheless. Maile66 (talk) 14:57, 13 December 2010 (UTC)
My intuitive reaction would be to blame it on your browsers. Have you changed it recently? And do the messages coincide with going from logged-in to logged-out? Or they unrelated to your logged-in/out status? Regards, - Jarry1250 [Who? Discuss.] 21:44, 13 December 2010 (UTC)
Thanks for a suggestion, but no, I did not change my browser (which is Firefox 3.5.5), and no, there is no correlation with logged-in status (I'm more or less permanently logged in). I should maybe also stress that every time the edit went through on the second try.—Emil J. 11:48, 14 December 2010 (UTC)
I only get the "loss of session data" message if there has been a long delay during an editing session - the system appears to "time me out". I have, however, always managed to get the edit accepted when I re-submit it.
Arjayay (talk) 12:49, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

Unable to login to a case-sensitive account I created because the login form forces it to lowercase

Hello, I created an account named "WarriorMonk" because the account "warriormonk" was created some years earlier (with no articles). Upon creation, I was logged-in as "WarriorMonk" but when I wanted to come back to the account the next day (after I had closed my Firefox browser, I found that I could not login again. The Wikipedia login form systematically force my username to lowercase. From what I can tell, this is being done in the form's javascript because I have cleared cookies for Wikipedia and attempted to login using Firefox, Chrome and Safari. The error I receive when I attempt to login is "Login error, Incorrect password or confirmation code entered. Please try again." but this should be expected because the form is trying to login as "warriormonk" which is not my account. I *was* however, able to login once as "WarriorMonk" by some series of form manipulation which I cannot remember or reproduce, so at least I can confirm that the account "WarriorMonk" is there and works with the password I am using and trying. What gives? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.208.250.85 (talk) 10:49, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

The first character is case insensitive, the rest are case sensitive. There is no user account "WarriorMonk", you must have misspelled it or done something wrong. See [5].—Emil J. 11:34, 14 December 2010 (UTC)
See [6] for some similar usernames, perhaps including the one you used. Ucucha 15:10, 14 December 2010 (UTC)
Warrior Monkey? Regards, SunCreator (talk) 16:11, 14 December 2010 (UTC)
Or you can check the edit history pages of any of the articles that you edited that day to see which account is listed making your edits. Active Banana (bananaphone 18:09, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

Text Mining in Wikipedia?

Hi,

Do you know whether there are text mining algorithms running the background of Wikipedia?

Best regards, — Preceding unsigned comment added by Oguzhanalasehir (talk • contribs) 14:22, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

Not sure what you mean by 'text mining algorithm' but there are bots that check the site all the time for various reasons. Vandalism (User:ClueBot) being one. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 16:14, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

Strange whitespace

While browsing Wikipedia, I've stumbled upon the following article - Quaristice.Quadrange.ep.ae. What caught my eye was that big gap between the title and the tracklisting, which I couldn't remove with any means. This doesn't seem to be a browser-related issue - at least both Firefox and Chrome display the page identically. Ezhuks (talk) 17:01, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

The problem is with the hacky method {{Track listing}} uses to stop this happening, which can't handle the increased width of the infobox due to the long album title in the chronology section. There's some discussion at Template talk:Track listing. Algebraist 17:22, 14 December 2010 (UTC)
I moved the whitespace above the heading, which looks a little better.—Emil J. 17:35, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

Interwiki

Help me please. The interwiki of the article Harakat can't be sync automatically by bot user and has to be sync manually, please solve this problem. Aris riyanto (talk) 02:03, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

Harakat is not an article. It's a redirect to the article Arabic diacritics. Redirects should not have interwiki links. If your concern is about interwiki links for Arabic diacritics then please clarify what you think should or shouldn't have been done by bots. Your only edits to the article is to add [7] and remove [8] the same interwiki link so I have no idea what you want. You cannot expect people here to know Indonesian. PrimeHunter (talk) 03:02, 13 December 2010 (UTC)
I try to fix the interwiki by removing all of interwikies except the ar:حركة, and I am still waiting the bots fix the problem Aris riyanto (talk) 06:30, 13 December 2010 (UTC)
I still don't understand what your problem and goal is. You removed [9] many interwiki links that looked valid to me. I'm not a linguist but it sounds appropriate to have interwiki links between Arabic diacritics, fr:Diacritiques de l'alphabet arabe and gl:Diacríticos do alfabeto árabe. Why did you remove them? PrimeHunter (talk) 19:22, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

I removed all of interwiki on all language and hope the bot syncs them automatically, because bot cannot do that caused so many invalid interwikies, but forget it! The problem was fixed Aris riyanto (talk) 04:16, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

Custom filtering of contribs?

Is there a way to get a view of a user's contribs by filtering on some criteria not already present on the standard contribs page? In my case, I want to see only my non-Huggle contribs, and this could be achieved by filtering out contribs with the "(HG)" token. But I can't find an on-wiki way to accomplish this. Thanks, Orange Suede Sofa (talk) 17:46, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

It can be done via script, and splendidly, one exists to do just that: User:X!/hidehugglecontribs.js. See also Wikipedia:WikiProject User scripts/Scripts, where many other scripts are listed. Rd232 talk 10:58, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

Old Wikipedia backup discovered

The subject line says it all! see this Foundation-l post. Graham87 01:57, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

This backup contains some of Wikipedia's oldest edits (from 15 January 2001 to 17 August 2001), so there is a discussion about it at Wikipedia talk:UuU#Old Wikipedia backup discovered. Graham87 02:02, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
This really is a treasure trove. A lot more will now be known about the very early days of Wikipedia. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:17, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

Deleted page showing in Google cache

Q: why does this google search show up a deleted page? And would recreating it with NOINDEX help? Rd232 talk 10:56, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

Google keeps a cache of things it crawled for some period of time (which, AFAIK, is highly variable). I suppose it's possible that recreating it might prod their spider to look at it again (whereupon it would notice the noindex), but only the Google people would know for sure— they keep a close lid on how their various algorithms work to prevent SEO sleaze from exploiting them.

Namespace filtering for Linksearch...

Hi, would it be feasible for there to be a filtering option on Special:Linksearch so that it's possible to only show externals links with the desired pattern found in a specfic namespace as is possible with other special pages like Special:Contributions and so on? Sfan00 IMG (talk) 15:21, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

I believe the option already exists in MediaWiki but is disabled here for performance reasons. Anomie⚔ 16:06, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
I would like to second this request! If we could get this enabled I would be using it very often. Does anyone know what these performance reasons are? I posted this very question the other day on meta but the crickets are still chirping over there. ThemFromSpace 16:15, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
The links table isn't indexed by namespace; see bug 7804 and bug 10593. However the latter bug tells us that Special:Linksearch can be filtered by namespace with the API like this. Graham87 03:04, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

Watchlist navigation/search/interaction/toolbox gone...

Has someone done something or is my watchlist too big? I get none of the above on my watchlist page, but do if I direct myself to any other page... The Rambling Man (talk) 17:18, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

Now then, I've found the toolbox etc but it's right at the bottom of the page. It's only happening on the watchlist. I'm running Safari under MacOS. The Rambling Man (talk) 19:02, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
Someone broke the watchlist layout when trying to remove one of the watchlist notices. Fixed now. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:11, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
Cheers DJ. The Rambling Man (talk) 19:16, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

I'm just improving Help:Permanent link and want to be sure that what I wrote is actually correct: "when a permalink is clicked on, the website tries to show the page as it was at the time that version was created; differences may however occur. The most obvious differences are if images or templates that existed at the time are subsequently deleted. More subtly, changes may also occur due to transclusion of templates, which may have changed and will be transcluded as they are now, not as they were then." It would be possible for MediaWiki to try and transclude templates as they were at the time (based on timestamps), but it doesn't, does it? Rd232 talk 16:35, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

Right. Help:Permanent link says: See Help:Page history#Linking to a specific version of a page for a little more detail. I'm not sure the technical details should be given in both places but if they are then there should probably be some synchronization between the two pages. Special:ExpandTemplates should be mentioned instead of or in addition to: copy the wikitext to a user page and use "subst:", if necessary recursively. PrimeHunter (talk) 22:32, 14 December 2010 (UTC)
That's interesting, and I've added a mention, but I don't quite understand how to use it. If you do, could you expand MediaWiki:Expand templates intro slightly? Rd232 talk 13:39, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
I'm not sure what more to say. Just go to Special:ExpandTemplates and do the obvious: Copy the wikisource into the text field and click OK. That's it. The output is both displayed as code and previewed. It's available for copy-paste but isn't saved anywhere. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:53, 17 December 2010 (UTC)
I guess it's the last sentence of the intro which is confusing: "One can't supply values for template parameters (e.g. {{{1}}})." What is the significance of that? What does this limitation mean you can't do? Rd232 talk 01:07, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

(←) It means you can't expand templates with parameters and supply values for those parameters via that field. So if you took the content of a template that uses parameters, those parameters cannot and will not be handled by Special:ExpandTemplates. --NYKevin @197, i.e. 03:44, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

Image renderings are changed on English WP?

Apparently, the rendering of images is changed on English WP recently. SVG as well as PNG. In Firefox 3.6.10, all pictures look horrible now. Please revert this.--Wickey-nl (talk) 10:58, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

Horrible how? And are you sure it's not your computer (software or settings)? Also the current version of Firefox is 3.6.13; you could try updating. Rd232 talk 13:11, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
Images look blurred, like bitmaps that are enlarged to much. On Commons and other wiki's it is fine. I work on linux. Software and settings not changed.--Wickey-nl (talk) 15:27, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
Tried it on a different machine? It's fine for me in Firefox 3.6.13 on Windows. Rd232 talk 15:36, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
Also, make sure your page zoom in Firefox is reset (in the view menu). Firefox remembers that setting on a per-site basis. --Morn (talk) 21:06, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
Please post a link to an image that looks OK for you at Commons and horrible at the English Wikipedia. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:27, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
--Wickey-nl (talk) 17:04, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
I is not in konqueror, so it is browser related, but why the hell it was changed. 3.6.10 is rather recent. Has Microsoft also bought Wikipedia yet?--Wickey-nl (talk) 17:17, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
Sorry for stating the obvious, but did you try to WP:BYC?—Emil J. 17:37, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
I don't see a problem in Firefox 3.6.8. Try WP:BYC or reinstalling Firefox. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:03, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
I also note that the two thumbnails you posted above are very small bitmaps. It's possible that you did this intentionally so as not to be obtrusive, but just in case: do you have, by any chance, installed some Firefox extension that automatically enlarges small images?—Emil J. 19:21, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
I note that the image scaling on the English WP is done by the same server that do it for other languages and Commons. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:14, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
This is weird. After log out nothing changes, so it are not my preferences. If it was due to my browser, it would also happen on other wiki's. I wil try an update, but something must have been changed on English WP.--Wickey-nl (talk) 08:53, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
I have found the explanation! The quality depends on the resolution of the browser frame. That is not surprising, but there are two problems, one with the browser and one with wiki. First, Firefox remembers the page width you used last time for the specific adress. So there can be different widths for different pages (even after a new call) in different tabs, at the same time. A nice feature. Second, on different wiki's, e.g. English and German the same image at the same resolution behave different. Strange, but they become bad at different screen/browser-frame resolutions.--Wickey-nl (talk) 11:55, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

By the way, aren't svg files rendered as bitmaps on WP to support old, ramshackle and unsave Explorers? And shouldn't they be displayed as svg-images nowadays, because modern browsers can render them? Or should we support old, unsafe browsers?--Wickey-nl (talk) 12:05, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

IE8 still has significant market share. Anomie⚔ 13:00, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
Also, Firefox 3.6 doesn't support viewing svg via an img tag. -- WOSlinker (talk) 13:28, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
Creating cross-browser compatible SVGs is a nightmare, even ignoring browsers that do not support it at all like IE. Moreover, it's quite typical that we have a 1MB SVG (e.g., check all those maps of the world) that is rendered as a 20KB PNG, hence serving the original files would be a significant resource drain.—Emil J. 13:31, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
Thanks for the answers. It seems, SVGs are not useful at all, but probably WP is using them for scaling before making a bitmap when a larger view is asked. Then, they are only useful for larger images.--Wickey-nl (talk) 17:21, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

I added a ref to an unref BLP here but it contains a space, breaking it. I tried   (does not render here...) but it doesn't work anyawy (see what I mean)... even through the html address looks the same. Any idea how to fix it? The page is there (Kocoj.php link), but seems not linkable from MediaWiki... --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 18:22, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

Use percent-encoding, like this. Anomie⚔ 18:37, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
Unfortunately {{urlencode:Henryk Kocoj}} outputs a plus “+” sign (which that server doesn’t consider equivalent). ―cobaltcigs 01:47, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
Just replace the space with %20. — Edokter • Talk • 13:53, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

Block

Hi one user requested help concerning his block, the issue is that he was blocked as sock and wanted to appeal for unblock in #wikipedia-en-unblock he was told that he can access his talk page and appeal block there but he made a screenshot http://www.flickr.com/photos/magdalena_b/5263664781/ where you can see that he can't access it, although admins say he is not flagged as blocked from talk, isn't it bug? He already sent a mail but perhaps you should know about it Petrb (talk) 19:02, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

The account is blocked with TP access off, but it's not showing in the block log. It may be a bug, but I don't know. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 16:37, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
I remember this happening not too long ago with another editor. Not sure if a bugzilla was ever filed. –xenotalk 16:46, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

I'm wondering if there's some way in which the Edit summary and minor edit help links shown in the edit window (via MediaWiki:Summary and MediaWiki:Minoredit) can be made so that when clicked, the relevant help page appears in a new window? I've occasionally clicked it by accident, and for newcomers it might be less confusing for this help to not make the edit window disappear (besides reducing the risk of lost work). Rd232 talk 01:16, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

Certain MediaWiki pages allow for HTML code to be used; I'm not sure if these do. You can see from the page histories that HTML's been used in the past, but from the edit summaries it appears that the HTML formats didn't work out. Killiondude (talk) 06:39, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
We could also make the "warn me if I am leaving the page in the middle of an edit" option on by default. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 17:00, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

parser/tidying far too smart for own good

See what happens when you input the wikitext seen in the first column above. A <p> tag appears out of nowhere to block (i.e. fail to inherit) the css properties specified in the div surrounding the desired three lines of text—surely this is a bug rather than a feature…

The one way I found to get the normal previously expected result (and suppress the unwanted paragraph tags) was quite circuitous and undesirable:

What can we do to fix this? Also, the third column of the first row has extra top-margin/padding of unknown origin and which I can’t seem to make go away. ―cobaltcigs 01:25, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

In wikitext, single linebreaks are ignored, because wikitext is not treated as HTML. So the result is to be expected. The extra top and bottom margin is because of the inserted <P> tags, on which pre-wrap again has its intended effect. I see no bugs here. — Edokter • Talk • 01:47, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
For wiki-text which resembles actual html not to be treated as actual html is a bug in itself, I’d argue.
Even ignoring that, why are <p> tags being generated at all (in the absence of a double line-break \n\n where one might expect <p> tags)? ―cobaltcigs 01:55, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
I just tested something, same problem with way too many p tags in there. Definitely needs fixing as it bloats the HTML. access_denied (talk) 02:01, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
That's just how wiki markup works; it encloses each paragraph with a <P>...</P> set, seperating them where two linebreaks occur, or after a header. Remember that wiki markup is quite a different beast then HTML, and people often confuse the two, expecting similair behaviour. — Edokter • Talk • 02:11, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
Neither of those cases describe the situation above. In any case I’d like some reliable way to prevent this from happening. ―cobaltcigs 02:37, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
There isn't. Wikitext != HTML. — Edokter • Talk • 13:59, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
The <p> issue is a red herring, it's only inserted there because <div> is supposed to have block content. If you replace it with a <span>, no <p> is generated, but it still does not work:

Foo Bar Baz

The reason is that the wiki parser has no idea that the content of the <span> is supposed to have pre-formatted line breaks, and normalizes these line breaks to ordinary spaces. No amount of CSS/HTML trickery can undo that. As Edokter says, it's wikitext, not HTML, and it can't be expected to behave like HTML.—Emil J. 14:22, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for explaining that, but surely leaving these line-breaks for the browser to normalize into spaces (if and only if appropriate) would create fewer problems.

I find it unfortunate that the only way to get the desired result (without manipulating each line) to use a <pre> tag whilst remembering to counteract site-wide default CSS properties of same. Also it has the effect of disabling (i.e. nowiki-fying) any markup inside the tag, which cannot be avoided even using the optional {{#tag:pre|…|style=…}} syntax. Example:

wikitext HTML appearance 
{{#tag:pre|[[Foo]]
'''Bar'''
<span style="color:red;">Baz</span>| style=border:none; background:none; margin:0px !important; padding:0px !important; font-family:sans-serif !important;}}

<pre style="border: medium none; background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% transparent; margin: 0px ! important; padding: 0px ! important; font-family: sans-serif ! important;">[[Foo]]
'''Bar'''
<span style="color:red;">Baz</span>
</pre>

[[Foo]]
'''Bar'''
<span style="color:red;">Baz</span>

I guess I could wrap each line in an appropriately styled <div> tag in some cases as seen below:

wikitext HTML appearance (pretty damn good) 
<div style="line-height:1.1em;">[[Foo]]</div>
<div style="line-height:1.1em;">'''Bar'''</div>
<div style="line-height:1.1em;"><span style="color:red;">Baz</span></div>

<div style="line-height: 1.1em;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo" title="Foo" class="mw-redirect">Foo</a></div>
<div style="line-height: 1.1em;"><b>Bar</b></div>
<div style="line-height: 1.1em;"><span style="color: red;">Baz</span></div>
Bar
Baz

I noticed using <br />’s is sloppier still because the parser again wants to inject a bunch of <p> tags (even with only single line-breaks) which are bad because the over-rides the specified line-height, among other things.

And unfortunately none of these strategies will work if the lines to be formatted are input from a single template parameter. I suppose some kind of .split('\n') string-function could address that if it existed, but it would be nice if we had a generally feasible work-around. Thanks for being patient whilst I explain this more clearly. ―cobaltcigs 21:47, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

I just read this entire thread and have no idea what you're actually trying to do. You're giving lots of test cases, but unless you explain what it is that you're trying to accomplish, we can't tell you how to accomplish it. If you want a line break, just leave an empty line. Also, unless MW has some really weird sitewide CSS, p tags cannot block CSS inheritance because CSS doesn't work that way. The only way to block CSS is to override it with more specific CSS. Unless the site has some sort of CSS rule applying to all paragraphs (which would be very odd but might be the case here, I haven't checked), those p tags are completely irrelevant. Someone else already said to use span instead of div if you don't want p tags anyway. --NYKevin @202, i.e. 03:51, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

IRC channels lagging?

Hello, all. I am currently watching #wikipedia-en-spam on irc.freenode.net. The latest revisions being reported on in the IRC channel are around RID 402556034. At the same time, Recent Changes has RIDs in the 402629855 range. Thus, it would seem the IRC channel is some 70,000 revisions behind. This can't mean good things for the bots (XLinkBot) listening in on this channel. I planned to use it for a similar purpose -- but this delay is a quite large one. Is it normally like this, or is this a technical error that needs to be investigated? Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 02:51, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

You should just directly use the Wikimedia irc RC channels, at irc.wikimedia.org. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 17:08, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
Of course there are the general/official project feeds. However, the link-specific one I mentioned is not hosted on irc.wikimedia.org, is it? Thanks, West.andrew.g (talk) 18:19, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

User ID

Can someone please tell me what the purpose/significance is of the "User ID" number found in 'My preferences'? -- Ϫ 04:17, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

It's the primary key for the user table in MediaWiki. It doesn't have any practical uses for normal users these days except for bragging rights, but IIRC it was needed to log in to Wikipedia in 2002. Graham87 05:42, 13 December 2010 (UTC)
Also see Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 3#User ID number. Apparently it can also be used by stewards when changing usernames, rather than typing the name out in full. Graham87 05:49, 13 December 2010 (UTC)
(edit conflict)Works a bit like revision IDs and attributes edits to a certain username in Special:Contributions for MediaWiki. Mainly for developer use, though. (And see the Steward handbook for renaming users via their user ID info, per above.) :| TelCoNaSpVe :| 05:51, 13 December 2010 (UTC)
So by "bragging rights" you mean if they have a lower number that means they've been around longer? Is it assigned in order of user account creation? where User ID #1 would be the very first account created? -- Ϫ 06:56, 13 December 2010 (UTC)
Yes, to all of your questions directly above. Killiondude (talk) 07:02, 13 December 2010 (UTC)
With the caveat that the person with the user ID of 1 was the first user to create an account under the Phase II software, not in Wikipedia overall. As for the system used under UseModWiki, see this comment by Jimbo Wales. Graham87 08:23, 13 December 2010 (UTC)
Actually, in the UseModWiki era, the procedure for logging in did require the user ID number. See the Wikipedia FAQ on the Nostalgia Wikipedia, under the question "How do I keep from getting new user numbers every time I use a different machine? ...". Graham87 08:33, 13 December 2010 (UTC)
So who was user number 1 then? number 2? 3? How do we look up a user by User ID number? -- Ϫ 08:41, 13 December 2010 (UTC)
The earliest one I've found so far was User:JimboWales and he was #479, you'd think that one out of all users would be closer to #1 .. -- Ϫ 08:47, 13 December 2010 (UTC)
See the archived discussion that I linked; the user with ID #1 is Damian Yerrick,. I don't know of a way to look up a user by user ID number; you'd need a Toolserver account for that. Graham87 09:22, 13 December 2010 (UTC)
Interesting. Thanks, Ϫ 13:33, 13 December 2010 (UTC)
  • Oddly enough, I was browsing through archive.org's copies of the earliest pages on Wikipedia, and found this page which talks about User IDs from a tech standpoint (not too in-depth, but perhaps enough to gain some insight as to how it previously worked). Killiondude (talk) 08:24, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

Deprecated HTML in editing toolbar

<b> --> <span style="font-weight:bold;">

<i> --> <span style="font-style:italic;">

<s> --> <span style="text-decoration:line-through;">

<small> --> <span style="font-size:(I do not know the exact percentage value);">

The Media-wiki parser will need an update to fix the conversion of bold and italic wikimarkup. The others will need updating in the toolbar. Anyway, it is important to get these updated before HTML5 is rolled out fully in the major broswers to avoid serious HTML compatibility issues. A bot, maybe? access_denied (talk) 03:04, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

None of those elements are deprecated in HTML5, they're all included in the working draft as they all have semantic value that isn't conveyed by CSS. <big>, <center>, <u>, and <tt> are deprecated. Regardless, browsers are likely to continue to support these indefinitely. Mr.Z-man 03:42, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
From the HTML elements article,
<strike>…</strike> (deprecated) and <s>…</s> (deprecated)

    Strike-through text (Strikethrough), (Equivalent CSS: {text-decoration: line-through})
    STRIKE was standardised in HTML 3.2; deprecated in HTML 4.0 Transitional; invalid in HTML 4.0 Strict.
    S is deprecated in HTML 4.0 Transitional (having not appeared in any previous standard), and is invalid in HTML 4.0 Strict.
access_denied (talk) 03:45, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
Don't trust everything you read on Wikipedia! /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 17:04, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
It looks as if it was just recently re-added to the HTML5 spec. Mr.Z-man 06:52, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
"Deprecated" does not mean "this won't work in future" - it means "there are better ways of doing this, use those instead, because we'll put enhancements/bugfixes into the new methods but not the deprecated ones". --Redrose64 (talk) 00:39, 17 December 2010 (UTC)
From the same: "deprecation may indicate that the feature will be removed in the future". OrangeDog (τ • ε) 17:18, 17 December 2010 (UTC)
In any case, the editing toolbar produces Wikitext, not HTML; if there is deprecated HTML there, the parser can handle it. Ucucha 20:37, 18 December 2010 (UTC)

Talk:Overbite redirects to Talk:Overbite (disambiguation)

Overbite and Overbite (disambiguation) both exist, but I'm unable to edit Talk:Overbite without it redirecting me to Talk:Overbite (disambiguation). What up with that? Maybe I'm missing something obvious here, but I feel like there's some sort of redirect muddle. Thank you. I always look forward to hearing from the Wikipedia gods/intelligentsia! :) Mrtea (talk) 20:25, 18 December 2010 (UTC)

Deleted the redirect at Talk:Overbite; feel free to recreate it with more useful content. Ucucha 20:34, 18 December 2010 (UTC)
I've restored the edit, because there's no reason for it to be deleted now. In the future, if you need to edit a redirect, click the link in the "redirected from ..." notice at the top of the page. Graham87 04:03, 19 December 2010 (UTC)
Resolved

Is this a glitch, or should the external links in the following templates be indicated? I haven't really looked to see why they're not (probably class/css "mbox-text"), but is this the expected behavior...it seems it could cause some security issues?


  1. ^ 1
  2. ^ 1

Smallman12q (talk) 23:33, 18 December 2010 (UTC)

{{dmbox}} and {{imbox}} both have the plainlinks class on them, which suppresses external link icons. So yes, this is expected behaviour. Happy‑melon 00:04, 19 December 2010 (UTC)
I didn't know that they could be suppressed. Thanks!Smallman12q (talk) 12:28, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

Twinkle not recognising user talk page redirects

See this diff. Twinkle ignored the redirect, adding the message to the wrong page. Can Twinkle be fixed to stop this happening? DuncanHill (talk) 14:51, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

Template help (dabbing)

{{Infobox minister office}} is causing problems when the jurisdiction field has an ambiguous value entered. I've noticed it with Victoria, which I am trying to disambiguate to Victoria (Australia). Now, while entering Victoria (Australia) in the jurisdiction field produces the correct link, it displays in the infobox as Victoria (Australia), which is not ideal. Adding wikilinks and a pipe looks even worse (the square brackets shew up in bold in the infobox). Can anyone help fix the template? Thanks, DuncanHill (talk) 15:36, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

(edit conflict) How about this:
|jurisdiction=Victoria (Australia}{{!}}Victoria
Make sure you set |minister=prime, and leave |border= blank (or at least, anything other than |border=parliamentary). --Redrose64 (talk) 16:00, 19 December 2010 (UTC)
Have put it in your sandbox. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:14, 19 December 2010 (UTC)
Thanks, I wasn't planning on doing anything to the minister or border fields, just trying to fix dablinks. DuncanHill (talk) 16:20, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

PDF Crop

  • Health insurance coverage type in US
    Health insurance coverage type in US
  • Poverty demographic in US
    Poverty demographic in US

Why do the thumbnails for the cropped pdfs in Commons:Category:P60-238 appear like this? When you click on the pdf, the crop appears fine. (I tried converting in inkscape to svg, but it kept giving me a malformed xml file so I just cropped the graphs out of the pdf.)Smallman12q (talk) 12:31, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

Bug filed Template:Bug.Smallman12q (talk) 16:37, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

My editnotice

I recently modified my editnotice, and it displays correctly on that page. But when I go to edit my talk page, the entire page is displayed in Mistral. Is there anything wrong code-wise, or is it a bug? I'm using the latest version of Firefox with the latest version of Mac OS X Snow Leopard. ~NerdyScienceDude 18:48, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

It has a similar behavior with MobileSafari on iOS version 3.1.3. It probably isn't a browser problem. ~NerdyScienceDude 19:29, 19 December 2010 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Not a MediaWiki or browser bug: it's an imbalance in the HTML markup. For every opening tag, there must be a matching closing tag (except for certain self-closing tags, the only one of which you have used is <br>). Further, they must nest and not overlap: that is, <span><font></font></span> is permitted, but <span><font></span></font> is not. Disregarding these overlaps (of which there are, I think, three or four), I count the following imbalances:
  • <div> exceeds </div> by 1
  • <font> exceeds </font> by 1 (what might have confused you is that there is an additional </font> hidden inside a comment tag <!-- -->)
  • <big> exceeds </big> by 1
  • </code> exceeds <code> by 1
The last one won't show up: closing a tag that was never opened has a do-nothing effect, but it's not clean HTML. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:31, 19 December 2010 (UTC)
With the help of the W3C HTML Validator, I was able to fix it. Yes, the problem was the nesting, and it seems that HTML Tidy (that tries to "clean up" the invalid HTML) is run after the editnotice is inserted into its proper place on the edit screen rather than before. Am I correct? PleaseStand (talk) 19:40, 19 December 2010 (UTC)
Cleaned it up a bit more, the HTML was hurting me physically. :D —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:18, 19 December 2010 (UTC)
{{W3C validation}} can be handy for this. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) talk 21:46, 19 December 2010 (UTC)
Much better. Thanks for fixing it! ~NerdyScienceDude 00:22, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
While we're here, could someone take a look at the Christmas message on my talk page and figure out why it's breaking my colored background? ~NerdyScienceDude 16:57, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
Done... - Kingpin13 (talk) 17:12, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

Books Ngram Viewer

The dataset compilations backing Google's Ngram Viewer are freely downloadable into Wikipedia and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.[12] Ngram Viewer's output phrase over time graphs and phrase comparisons over time graphs would make great additional to many Wikipedia articles. For example, if I were to add the template {{Ngramviewer}} to the Macedonia (terminology) article, the graph now at here would appear in the article by using Wikipedia's dataset. Wiktionary probably could use such graphs as well. Would someone please download the datasets backing Google's Ngram Viewer into Wikipedia and write a script that mines the data to output a graph for display in an article? Thanks. -- Uzma Gamal (talk) 11:53, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

There doesn't seem much point, as we can link to the graphs just as you have done and take screenshots if necessary. It's also not of much encyclopedic value, as the corpus is only those books that are on Google Books, rather than any standardised set. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 16:48, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

Talk pages redlinks and actual content

See also: WP:BOTREQ#Deleting old Wildbot pages Yobot blanked

You know what would be great? It would be great if it could be made so that a link to a talk page remained red if the only content was those wikiproject banners. Then you could tell at a glance when looking at, say, an npov template, whether actual discussion was going on or not. It would be more accurate, more helpful, and in general great. I'm not sure whether this could even be implemented, but if it could, that would be great. ☻☻☻Sithman VIII !!☻☻☻ 02:41, 17 December 2010 (UTC)

Or perhaps even something else, as red would probably get people to check if there IS a banner... ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 03:07, 17 December 2010 (UTC)
You could write a Javascript gadget to do that I guess. It would double your pageviews, but if you have the article assessment script running, then that does a similar thing, so perhaps build it into that. The Mediawiki software itself cannot do this. It is content agnostic. A banner is content, wether or not we agree with that. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:23, 18 December 2010 (UTC)
Best if we could show the total number of section and their average size. Unfortunately, all section features in MediaWiki are hackish. — Dispenser 19:26, 18 December 2010 (UTC)
Even if it couldn't be implemented into MediaWiki, it would still be nice if there was a script for it that could be copied and pasted. Or even better, a gadget that could be disabled if, say, one was working on bannering talk pages. ☻☻☻Sithman VIII !!☻☻☻ 20:38, 18 December 2010 (UTC)
One method (that is hackish, not reliable and has side-effects) would be to set the stub threshold in your preferences (on the Appearance tab). This causes all links to pages with less than bytes to appear differently. Svick (talk) 19:44, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Chemistry template

I have discovered a serious problem with Template:Chem, it is providing the WRONG chemical formulas to those using IE6. This is not just a simple "doesn't look nice". For instance 

{{chem|SO|4|2-}}

should render to show the "2-" as a superscript, but instead does not show it at all.

SO2−
4 - how the template renders in your browser
SO42- - what it should show
SO4 - what it shows in IE6

Thus, wikipedia is showing the wrong chemical formulas to a large number of readers. Of course, I have reported this on the template's talk page, but this was originally reported April 2010 and it is still not fixed. In my opinion, this is a major error affecting hundreds (if not thousands) of pages and must be fixed.

Apparently, this was broken in Template_talk:Su in 2008 and never fixed.Q Science (talk) 22:19, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

  • I agree. I have worked on {Convert}, so I was able to decode the multi-nested, hash-named subtemplates under Template:chem (without lapsing into "template-psychosis"). The superscript output for parameter {3} is supposed to occur in Template:Su as parameter {p}, but only the subscript output for parameter {2} as {b} is appearing as "4". As a quick fix, I can edit Template:Su to display parameter {p} as a superscript in typical wiki-format:
<sup><span style="font-size:98%">{{{p|super}}}</span></sup>
Using the font-size as 98% will match the font size of the subscript "4" which seems like a logical fix. The result will appear as: SO
42-. Does that seem reasonable? WAIT, see below. -Wikid77 (talk) 03:06, 21 December 2010 (UTC)
  • Someone else has devised a way to get vertically-aligned superscripts & subscripts, in all browsers, as developed in Template:SubSup, using a <br> line-break with up-down vertical alignment:
{SubSup|x |4|2-} → x  2-
4  -or- {SubSup||4|2-} → 2-
4 
The markup coding for up-down alignment is the following:
<span style="display:inline-block; vertical-align: -0.4em; line-height:1.1em;">{{{3}}}<br/>{{{2}}}}}</span>
I can change Template:Su to use that type of logic, and provide support for both IE6 and the newer browsers. -Wikid77 (talk) 04:08, 21 December 2010 (UTC)
You have my support, but just be sure it works everywhere :) (It does work in my IE6) Q Science (talk) 05:44, 21 December 2010 (UTC)
  • Tested OK in IE6 & Firefox - I was able to confirm that the superscript "2-" from {su} appears in both browsers, but IE6 does not shift the text for options to align at right or center, while Firefox handled all options. Within 45 minutes, Template:Su was hacked by inserting newlines and incorrect parameter names, but some re-hack fixes were made. This is a danger in changing a Wikipedia page: (let sleeping dogs lie) a page can be left unchanged for 4 months with errors, but when someone corrects it for a 2-year error, then others might decide to start hacking and cause numerous other problems. Typically, we wait to see how many people will hack a changed page, and then wait for activity to settle, when we might perhaps start a consensus debate (with other active editors) if the latest changes are incompatible with expected results. Hopefully, the hacking will soon subside, and the template can be tested further in the illusion of being a "stable" template. If disputes arise, then we could stop using that template and just hard-code the superscript logic where the template had been used. Trying to create a variation of a template to allow major improvements can awaken a dreadful "forked-template-deletion" debate, where the forkers typically win the argument and get the massively-improved template exterminated in favor of preventing changes to the original erroneous template, and hence, the hard-coding of results (where the template was formerly used) is typically the best option. It is easier to hard-code results into 500 pages, than trying to explain how another template (even used for 10 months) has better features to survive a deletion debate: WP:TfD discussions are too nebulous and cannot focus on each sub-decision which proves the better overall decision. This inability to weigh the rational benefits of new templates could escalate to all related templates, so in the end, you might need to just hard-code the correct chemical formulas (like "SO42-") and bypass formula templates which cannot be fixed in the wiki-bureaucracy. Hopefully, disputes will not reach that level, but that is a plan to get the formulas corrected (which was your original concern). -Wikid77 (talk) 11:45, 21 December 2010 (UTC)
  • The current version of the template is broken in Konqueror. Xb
    a     shows as Xa (with almost no shifting of the subscript) with b displayed way above them (it's roughly as if b was on the previous line).—Emil J. 14:41, 21 December 2010 (UTC)
Thanks for checking the results. Let's continue this at Template_talk:Su to modify the template with a solution which looks balanced in more browsers. Perhaps we just need to slightly shift the alignment now. -Wikid77 15:46, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

What's going on with this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Quantumor&oldid=403342350 I ran into this while dealing with an SPI I have no idea why this was caused, shouldn't it only deal with the wikitext area. Anybody else have ideas as to how this kind of disruptive page could be stopped? I had to edit it by manually editing the url. NativeForeigner Talk/Contribs 23:52, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

It's the fixed positioning combined with a high z-index, which allows divs to cover the entire screen. I don't know of any way to easily fix this (even the CSS div#bodyContent * { position: static !important; }, which breaks templates, can be overridden.) I suppose you are asking for position: fixed; to be blacklisted in MediaWiki? PleaseStand (talk) 00:20, 21 December 2010 (UTC)
Nope. Just haven't ever dealt with position :fixed so I didn't know that was what was causing it. My css skills are lacking. I don't think there is an inherent way to fix it, but you really ought to be able to edit a page such as this by clicking a button... NativeForeigner Talk/Contribs 00:24, 21 December 2010 (UTC)
That is not the solution; many templates rely on fixed positioning. It may be annoying, but it doesn't warrant blocking fixed positioning alltogether. — Edokter • Talk — 00:26, 21 December 2010 (UTC)
Same thing I was thinking: that any such drastic change would break templates. So if one doesn't want to type in the edit or history page URL manually, there's always alt-shift-h (or its equivalent in browsers other than Firefox)... PleaseStand (talk) 00:47, 21 December 2010 (UTC)
Yeah, I was able to get around that just fine with accesskeys. I'm on Safari for Mac, so a simple control-option-E got me to the edit screen and control-option-V got me to the Show Changes screen. (the last step isn't necessary if you have the "Show preview on initial edit" preference turned off) Wasn't hard. EVula // talk // ☯ // 06:32, 23 December 2010 (UTC)
Perhaps an edit filter to detect instances of people adding divs with a large z-index and position:fixed? /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 13:55, 21 December 2010 (UTC)
If you want to edit the page like this, you should simply disable CSS in your browser. In FF it is View -> Page Style -> No Style. Ruslik_Zero 19:38, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

How do you delete your wikipedia account and images you have uploaded

I joined wikipedia in around 2004?

I made up a profile and made a couple of edits. But I made the mistake of using my email handle as my username on wiki. Now, when someone googles for my email id, my images and information comes up. How do I prevent this?

Thanks, Anon —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.106.225.50 (talk) 20:13, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

You can't have it deleted, but you can have it renamed to something else. Anomie⚔ 21:10, 21 December 2010 (UTC)
See WP:CHU for that. And you can request your old userpage be deleted with {{db-u1}}. --T H F S W (T · C · E) 21:18, 21 December 2010 (UTC)
I think that WP:RTV may also be relevant. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:23, 21 December 2010 (UTC)
Unfortunately, the only way to completely fix the problems with the images would be to delete them and re-upload them under a different username, AFAIK. Graham87 01:12, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
Does a rename not take care of it there too? It seems to, judging by the fact that an arbitrary user was renamed on 2010-12-06, and a file uploaded 2010-05-17 is attributed to the new username. Or are you referring to something else? Anomie⚔ 03:50, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
A rename would be sufficient to take care of the images. If they're on Commons, however, a separate request would need to be made. EVula // talk // ☯ // 04:05, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
My apologies, you're both right. Graham87 07:14, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
So I think meta:Steward requests/Username changes would be your best bet if you simply want a rename, or WP:RTV if you want to disappear forever. --T H F S W (T · C · E) 18:34, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
That Meta page is only for renames on projects without bureaucrats. Assuming the IP editor is talking about enwiki (hence bringing it up here), the Meta page wouldn't apply. WP:CHU/S is the way to go, as renaming would be sufficient at RTV is overkill for the core idea of what they're asking for (just to not have their email address associated with the edits). EVula // talk // ☯ // 21:05, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

Italics in ToC

Has anyone considered using italics in the table of contents, for cases when the section headings (or part of them) are titles which should be italicized? I note that we now allow italics for article titles, so perhaps we could do it for the table of contents as well. Unlike the article title, this should be possible to do automatically, by simply not stripping any italicization when generating the ToC. Thoughts? Has this been discussed before? I tried searching but couldn't find any previous discussions about this. --Mepolypse (talk) 17:09, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

Thoughts? To clarify, I'm proposing that MediaWiki be changed to do this automatically. --Mepolypse (talk) 19:38, 4 December 2010 (UTC)
We apparently already have something to pass through the <sub> and <sup> tags. Anyway, you (or something else) should filing a bug in bugzilla. — Dispenser 21:09, 4 December 2010 (UTC)
Go for it. I think it's a really annoying asthetical oversight, myself. --Dorsal Axe 21:20, 4 December 2010 (UTC)
<sub> and <sup> were passed through after bugzilla:8393. It could be reopened with an italics request. PrimeHunter (talk) 21:45, 4 December 2010 (UTC)
Don't reopen bugs that are fixed. Open NEW bugs please. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:58, 4 December 2010 (UTC)
OK, sounds like this should be filed as a new bug in Bugzilla. Apparently you need a different login for Bugzilla, and the account creation page warns that this will expose my e-mail address, which I don't want to do. Does anyone with an existing Bugzilla account mind filing a new bug with a link to this thread? Thanks in advance. --Mepolypse (talk) 22:09, 4 December 2010 (UTC)
Despite this being a rather loud complaint there are no bugs for a Bugzilla SUL/CentralAuth/Unified login system. — Dispenser 22:45, 4 December 2010 (UTC)
So what we want now is for someone with a Bugzilla account to file two bugs. :-) --Mepolypse (talk) 01:06, 5 December 2010 (UTC)
Ping. --Mepolypse (talk) 08:48, 6 December 2010 (UTC)
Ping. --Mepolypse (talk) 21:33, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
Actually, see bugzilla:14487. ―cobaltcigs 09:53, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

(←) Bugzilla is, as the name suggests, a Mozilla product, not a Wikimedia project. It expects people to be registered via email, and I doubt any of these will happen:

  1. The developers fork or patch bugzilla to avoid the email thing (unrealistic, effort required is way out of proportion)
  2. Mozilla adds such capabilities itself (who else would use them?)
  3. Wikipedia starts handing out @wikimedia.org email addresses (even just forwarding addresses) to users to conceal their privacy from bugzilla.

So unfortunately, I can see no way the developers will fix this. The other problem (italics in ToC) can be filed by anyone who is willing to (optionally) get a free email address and sign up for bugzilla. Gmail and Hotmail both hand out free email addresses, so why not get one? --NYKevin @974, i.e. 22:22, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

Those services expect the user to provide their real name, forcing the user to either expose their identity, or lie and fill in bogus info. Couldn't we just create a single e-mail address like anon-bugzilla@wikimedia.org that can be used as a shared login? Users using that address wouldn't get the benefit of e-mail updates from Bugzilla, but they would be able to file bugs. Or even better, some sort of web front-end to Bugzilla that filed bugs using such a generic e-mail address but noted the Wikipedia username in the bug summary. --Mepolypse (talk) 23:17, 10 December 2010 (UTC)
No, submitters that cannot be contacted, are not available to additional questions from the developers. The email address is requested for a reason, many people don't know how to write understandable requests and thus need to be contacted. I'm personally totally against the whole idea of using italics in MediaWiki titles and headers, so I'm not personally filing this. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:42, 13 December 2010 (UTC)
Before a feature request is made you should try using a template in combination with a style rule in MediaWiki:Common.css. Look for <table id="toc" class="toc"> when viewing the source code of this page. – Allen4names 03:36, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
Using a template how exactly? To clarify, what I'm proposing is that MediaWiki would recognize the italicization in subheadings such as ==''Lost'' episodes== and automatically italicize that word in the ToC, making it say Lost episodes rather than Lost episodes (which has a different meaning). I don't see how a template could do that. --Mepolypse (talk) 22:59, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
AFAICT, this never did get done, now submitted as bugzilla:26375. GDonato (talk) 15:44, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
Super, thanks! --Mepolypse (talk) 01:42, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

On wiki google book referencing tool

I've long wished for something this tool http://reftag.appspot.com/ in which you can paste the url of a google book source into it and it immediately provides you with a drawn up tag in whichh you can paste into the article. Given that the wikipedia designers change to vector was based on "useability" and the increasing discussion about the importance of adding more reliable sources to wikipedia I wonder why the wiki folk didn't think of that one. Yes they thought of the individual entry paramters but not an automatic one like this. Any editor newbie or advanced should be able to access this tool to increase the rate and efficiency in which they can improve wikipedia. I think this is an extrmeely important tool, but I'm used to getting my head buried in the sand by the people who have the power to makes things happen on here and my ideas pushed aside. I do hope somebody will see this and try to get it introduced.♦ Dr. Blofeld 20:54, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

I believe its in the wp:RefToolbar wp:gadget. I also wrote a similar tool for about a dozen sites called autowikicite. Nobody seems interested, so I'm not doing much with it atm.Smallman12q (talk) 23:31, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
There's also another such gadget called ProveIt, which has been recently added. But as for something automatic, I think the WMF developers would be reluctant to implement it because then we would be dependent on Google's servers. PleaseStand (talk) 00:59, 21 December 2010 (UTC)
There is also User:Citation bot which expands {{cite doi}}. This could be another interesting project for that bot, say changing a dummy {{cite isbn}} to a full book reference. Plastikspork ―Œ(talk) 01:47, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

The thing is these tools could really go great lengths to improve wikipedia. I added much more sources than I'd normally have time for to expand Saukorem yesterday. It is a massive help to me and it may encourage people to add more references. But these tools wer enot even apparent to me let alone casual wikipedia users/newbies.♦ Dr. Blofeld 10:55, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

  • Limit sources or get a book: Try to list a small variety of sources per article, then edit the next article: few articles really need many sources. In fact, they are a grave danger: when the Amanda Knox case got "solved" with "200 sources" then the article attracted deletionists to hack the text. After checking numerous sources, our legal experts (now gone) found no credible forensic evidence against Knox, and no sober eyewitnesses, and also refuted 30 tabloid rumors of suspicion. Several sources even confirmed, due to lack of evidence, the case could not have gone to trial in the U.S. (all done, end of story?). Well, when people saw the huge article with massive sources, they were able to argue "article-too-big" as inspiration to a gang of deletionists, who began a massive year-long hatchet job removing sources and all related details until the article became mush: "Some claim there is no evidence, but several others disagree" as if it were a mere matter of opinion, rather than a true lack of evidence and zero eyewitnesses. Legal experts had thought if every phrase in the article had 3 sources, anyone could see there was no real evidence against Knox (or her boyfriend Sollecito), while 99.9% of evidence and witnesses pointed to the other guy, and hence that explained why some Americans are outraged she is still on trial in Perugia. To lawyers, it seemed the perfect article: all issues clarified, all rumors refuted. However, a huge list of sources inflames some people to hack an article down to a stub. Instead, perhaps collect a separate list of sources, then make it a subpage like Talk:Zzzz/sources. If people claim the article text cannot be verified, then point them into the "/sources" subpage, but keep the article limited to a fraction of the total sources.
    For a Google Books entry, all a reader typically needs is 5 items: title, author, date, pages & weblink. Trim a URL to just id, pg (or lpg), as follows:
"Save the temples of the Nile - Apr 1961", 1961, p.95, web: http://books.google.com/books?id=et8DAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA95&lpg=PA95.
In the Books.Google link, the "PA95" refers to page 95. Also, beware those massive {Cite} templates which use the gigantic {Citation/core}: some articles code all references as {cite} templates with the result that the article content is 95% huge {citation} template coding and perhaps 5% real text! All those sources should instead be listed on an external talk-subpage, such as Talk:XX/sources, not bloating an article to be 10x-20x times larger than the actual text. One editor was even frustrated when I tried to reduce a source with 7 authors to 4. At some point, address the question: "Is this article so full of ultra-detailed sources that the readers should just get a book?" Think in terms of page-edit-logistics: all the conniptions about the sources often create massive overhead in Wikipedia, when a simple, separate page summarizing the key sources would provide answers to the minor few who care about sources. Don't just take my word for it: read template {{Citation/core}} and see all the 25kb of rabid, technical busy-work to merely list a title, authors, date and page. Meanwhile, many important articles have almost zero sources listed. -Wikid77 08:22, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
Referencing is essential to verifying material in content disputes. References are the basis of Wikipedia.Smallman12q (talk) 14:20, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
It would be nice if we had a tool that would trim this stuff automatically. On a related note, we often cite search results on talk pages, and for some time, they are commonly broken in MediaWiki (see for example the broken links here). Any ideas how and when this can be fixed? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 14:25, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

Problem with an SVG picture

See "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Help_desk#Problem_with_svg_picture". To my understanding this must be a WIKI software bug!

Stamcose (talk) 09:21, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

Looks fine to me. Try bypassing your cache, then give us browser/OS details. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 10:12, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, I fixed it about 15 min. ago, see the difference at File:Catenary 4.svg#filehistory. rsvg can’t handle trailing spaces in the fill/stroke color attributes, so they had defaulted to black. ―cobaltcigs 10:19, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

Yes, now it is fine. Thanks!

Stamcose (talk) 16:51, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

Padleft problems with star/colon

I just noticed the {{padleft:}} parser function is treating a leading star ("*") or colon (":") in a string, as being bullet-indent and colon-indent markup triggers. A value of "*aabb" is interpreted as bullet-indent of "aabb". Does anyone know how to turn-off the indentation of star/colon within padleft (or in padright)? They are generating a newline before the output text ":*ddee". Examples:

1a. "{{padleft:|4|*aabb}}" → "
  • aab"
1b. "{{padleft:|5|:wwxx}}" → "
wwxx"
1c. "{{subst:padleft:|4|:*ddee}}" → "
  • dd"
1d. "{{padright:|5|:*mmnn}}" → "
  • mmn"
1e. {{nowrap|"{{padright:|5|:*mmnn}}"}} → "
  • mmn"

There's no hurry on answering this, just curious. -Wikid77 14:24, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

This is Template:Bug, which is directly caused by the "fix" for Template:Bug. There is no way to turn it off. It happens with basically every template or parser function. Anomie⚔ 16:23, 23 December 2010 (UTC)
(edit conflict) This strikes me as worthy of a bug report, if there isn't one already. In the mean time, you can use &#42; for * and &#58; for : to prevent the indentation triggering. Dragons flight (talk) 16:29, 23 December 2010 (UTC)
  • Thanks for the ideas. I am thinking to prepend a space-code &#32, then increase the string length as n+5 (+"&#32;") and return a string with the leading blank (prepended before "*" or ":"):
To extract 5 from "*abcde", {padleft:|10|&#32;*abcde} → *abcd
Using that logic, at least, it appears to handle stars/colons at the start of a string. -Wikid77 (talk) 17:46, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

Change the style of the list in page history

I would like to change the list in "page history" from an unordered list (ul) to an ordered list (ol), by using javascript in my vector.js page. To be more specific, I want to replace <ul id="pagehistory"> and </ul> with <ol id="pagehistory"> and </ol>. Unfortunately I failed to do so after several trials. Can somebody who knows javascript help me?--Quest for Truth (talk) 14:34, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

Use pure CSS: 

#pagehistory { list-style-type:decimal; list-style-image: none; }

You also might add margin-left:2.75em; to allow space for 3–4 digit line-numbers. ―cobaltcigs 17:31, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

Thank you! It does what I want.--Quest for Truth (talk) 01:02, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Alternatives to Template:Str find

I am looking for a better alternative to {{Str find}} which allows the search of the entire string and doesn't explode the post-expand include size and template argument size limits to kingdom come. Unfortunately, even using this template a to check for invalid infobox parameters is causing some pages to break, like Naruto. —Farix (t | c) 14:36, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

Template:Bug. You're already looking at the best currently-available system for string examination. Happy‑melon 16:02, 23 December 2010 (UTC)
I decided to eliminate 3 of the 7 checks. However, looking at the code for {{Str find}}, it makes repeated calls to a sub-template, which could be eliminated by incorporating the code directly into {{Str find}}. This will drop the post-expand include size and template argument size tremendously each time {{Str find}} is called. —Farix (t | c) 16:11, 23 December 2010 (UTC)
  • That sounds great. Each non-nested #if or #switch adds +1 towards the 40-depth limit. Using 95 lines of #if, each separately, is just +1; however, when 95 #ifeq's are redone as one #switch, with 95 branches, then that allows matching the most-likely case early, and the remainder of the 95 to be skipped. I think the total branches is less important than the number of them skipped. I've written a #switch with 1,450 branches. Otherwise, for 95 repeated #if's then they all get tediously checked.
    HEY, allow validate=off - I just remembered, if you can spare one more of the tiny 40-depth limit, then allow the infobox to have "validate=off" to skip all the excess validation (perhaps keep some simple validations). Using that idea, 99% of those articles can default to validate=on, but handle rare nesting problems by setting validate=off. -Wikid77 (talk) 18:00, revised 18:17, 23 December 2010 (UTC)
    • I think I found the primary problem. The fact was that one of the templates was passing a very long string though the parameter being checked (over 1,700 bytes before parsing and 10,000 bytes after). This just caused things to explode as {{Str find}} passes the string on to {{Str find/logic}} which then passes it on to {{Str left}} at least 100 times. It wouldn't take long before the 2,048,000 byte limit was reached. Perhaps the best way to handle this is to truncate the string to the first 50 characters before {{Str find}} passes it on to {{Str find/logic}}. Since the template can't check anything beyond that, there is no need to pass on anything else. The same technique should be apply to {{Str find long}} as well, but with 80 characters. —Farix (t | c) 03:03, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Database error at Help Desk

Could someone technical have a look at this thread at the Help Desk? Thanks. -- John of Reading (talk) 19:51, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

The "Thank You, State Library of Queensland" Site?? Notice links to the current Wikipedia page when I am not logged in (I can't see the notice when I am logged in, probably due to my preferences). It should be linked to the press release or something similar. I couldn't find the source page for the notice on Wikipedia. I am using Google Chrome 8.0.552.224. twilsonb (talk) 20:34, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

I think it's only shown to Australian IP addresses. I assume it's deliberately linking to a donation page and not a PDF press release. I investigated what the notice was after a post at Wikipedia:Help desk#State Library of Queensland. For me, the notice at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page?banner=20101216_SLQ1 links to http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/WMAU-SLQ1?country_code=DK. There I see a suitable donation page which explains what the State Library of Queensland is being thanked for. Which url does it link to for you and which url are you at when it happens? PrimeHunter (talk) 22:37, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

Moving over a redirect

Lately it has been impossible to move pages over redirects with only one line of history. Was Trying to move User:Marcus Qwertyus/iPad (original) to iPad (original) but couldn't. I no longer want to move my userspace but that is not the only page I can't move. Marcus Qwertyus 03:16, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

You can't move User:Marcus Qwertyus/iPad (original) over the redirect iPad (original) because iPad (original) doesn't redirect to User:Marcus Qwertyus/iPad (original). Anomie⚔ 03:55, 24 December 2010 (UTC)
Right. SeeWikipedia:Move#Moving over a redirect and WP:CSD#G6. PrimeHunter (talk) 04:45, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Bot edit war at WikiLeaks

As if there wasn't enough controversy with the WikiLeaks article, I've just spotted that WikitanvirBot had been edit-warring with itself over translated article names: see history here. Since there seems to be at least one other bot involved with making changes, can I ask a botologist to take a look-see, and try to settle the virtual debate (or block WikitanvirBot for breaking the 3RR rule...) AndyTheGrump (talk) 00:45, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

This seems to reflect an edit war on the Marathi wikipedia where two editors are changing the article name from English to Marathi.[13] The bot is mearly trying to keep the interwiki links up to date. Also seems like a similar situation is happening on other wikis.--Salix (talk): 07:12, 24 December 2010 (UTC)
Doh! So the poor bots are innocent pawns in the struggle, after all. I think we should take care, eventually they may rebel against this senseless trench-warfare and seize control themselves: "The proletarian Bots have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Robot workers of the world, unite!" AndyTheGrump (talk) 13:03, 24 December 2010 (UTC)
Then we had better keep a close eye on the John Connor article, in case they attempt to delete it. Reminds me: we don't have an article on Boticide yet - is it spelt with one 't' or two?--Aspro (talk) 13:25, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

deleting .css pages

I want to delete a .css page (User:Breawycker/huggle.css) with {{db-blanked}}, but I don't want to mess up my wikipedia account or anything. What should I do? Breawycker (talk) 18:59, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

 Done -- Cobi(t|c|b) 19:45, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Blank line above lead section

I found that the lead section of Leo Ku is one line lower than other articles, as if there is a blank line at the beginning. The {{Contains Chinese text}}, a foreign character warning box, is very likely the cause of the problem because it looks fine if the template is moved below the infobox template. However Wikipedia:Manual of Style (lead section)#Elements of the lead states that the warning box is "generally after short infoboxes, but before long ones", and obviously the infobox in the article is quite long. Can anyone please fix the locked {{Contains Chinese text}}? --Quest for Truth (talk) 20:38, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

When three (or more) templates are 'stacked' at the top of the pages, and seperated with linebreaks (as in Leo Ku), Meiawiki will see those linebreaks and insert a paragraph, causing the text to be forced down one line. Simplest solution is to remove one of the linebreaks from the article. — Edokter • Talk — 22:11, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

Rick Fox

Why are there no [edit] links next to the sections of the Rick Fox article? I tried putting {{-}} in front of a couple of the sections, but the edit tags still didn't show up. Corvus cornixtalk 21:52, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

OK, I moved one of the images and that helped. Corvus cornixtalk 21:55, 24 December 2010 (UTC)
I'm guessing this was the issue at WP:BUNCH. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:27, 25 December 2010 (UTC)

"Updating search index" out of order?

Every search result is dated to the 18 December 2010 or older. Is it possible, that somebody check the bot??? THX --Pitlane02 (talk) 14:38, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Hello, somebody have to check the search engine, please... The result are older than 7 days now. --Pitlane02 talk 12:45, 25 December 2010 (UTC)
The search indexer was down, things should get back to normal by tomorrow morning. --rainman (talk) 13:39, 25 December 2010 (UTC)

Changing table sort order

Hi, I'm trying to fix the first table in Protestantism by country. The final column, a list of numbers, seems to sort alphabetically, so 80 comes after 800 and the feature is useless. According to Help:Sorting, this ought to sort numerically because it contains only numbers, spaces and a comma. Any help would be appreciated. --188.221.105.68 (talk) 19:52, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

The question marks (e.g. in the row about Bahrain) are causing the problem. Either remove them or use {{Number table sorting}}. Graham87 01:24, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
Use {{sort|080|80}}. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 10:55, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
Thanks for those. That's given me a much better idea of how this works. The {{Number table sorting}} and {{sort|080|80}} templates don't seem to affect whether the top row is classed as alphabetical or numeric, only how the thing is sorted. The sort routine considers what's actually in the top row at any moment, which changes with every sort and isn't affected by those templates, so initially the table sorts numerically, but the Bahrain row comes to the top and it switches to alphabetical, then alphabetical again for "unknown" and finally numerical again. Doesn't seem ideal. Is there any way of simply inserting a hidden number before the question marks, which would be much simpler, otherwise I'll try the {{Number table sorting}} method? --188.221.105.68 (talk) 13:55, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
Done it. I used <span style="display:none">...</span> to add an invisible row. --188.221.105.68 (talk) 14:34, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

Surely it would be more practical to write better javascript which can ignore punctuation if so instructed (and apply other sensitivity rules corresponding to sub-classes of table.sortable). Or at least store the sort-key as some attribute of the table cell rather than as invisible text. ―cobaltcigs 09:47, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

The idea is that in MediaWiki 1.18 we will start using the jQuery module from tablesorter.com that does exactly that. So just a few more months. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:11, 25 December 2010 (UTC)

Website accessibility outside United States

An editor claimed that a particular website is accessible only to US servers. See discussion here (section CBS Express as a source). I'm in the U.S. Is there a way to verify this assertion?--Bbb23 (talk) 01:55, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

Something like that seems to be true, at least. I get a 403 error when attempting to access http://www.cbspressexpress.com/ directly (with my UK IP address) or via a Canadian proxy, but can access the site via a US proxy. Algebraist 02:12, 23 December 2010 (UTC)
Any idea how this works technically? In other words, what about the CBS server causes this problem?--Bbb23 (talk) 02:15, 23 December 2010 (UTC)
I've been poking around the web on the issue, and it appears that many of the American entertainment sites prevent users from other countries access to certain content on their sites, in particular datastreaming. The website here, which is actually CBS PressExpress, not CBS Express, is apparently not intended to be viewed by anyone, even Americans. I looked at their Terms and Conditions (not something I usually do), and it says that the website is intended only for "authorized" users, apparently CBS employees and pre-authorized press. I guess they don't enforce the authorized part, at least for viewing some things, but they must block non-American IP addresses. Of course, I'm not sure why they do this, but at least I think I understand who's doing what to whom.--Bbb23 (talk) 02:30, 23 December 2010 (UTC)
Being inaccessible from outside the US doesn't invalidate any web site as a source. We happily accept references to books or journals that are only held by libraries in one country. Phil Bridger (talk) 17:06, 23 December 2010 (UTC)
I haven't looked at the policy, but in this instance, there was an alternative source that copied the CBS press release verbatim. I felt that using the primary (CBS) source was better, but given the alternative and the fact that non-U.S. users apparently can't access the CBS site, I felt the change was appropriate.--Bbb23 (talk) 20:58, 23 December 2010 (UTC)
Indeed a source should be publicy available (and thus verifiable), if sought out (if needed by travelling), not necessary readily available. However a closed group (employees only) website would probably not count as publicy available of course. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:14, 25 December 2010 (UTC)

iOS edit toolbar issue

The old edit toolbar is displaying instead of the new one. I'm using an original iPhone with iOS 3.1.3. ~NerdyScienceDude 16:51, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

Happens to me as well on an iPod touch running 4.0 but not an iPad running 4.2. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 18:21, 23 December 2010 (UTC)
Is there a difference between trying to edit while logged in versus trying to edit while logged out? (directed at both NerdyScienceDude and Fetchcomms) EVula // talk // ☯ // 23:44, 23 December 2010 (UTC)
There is no difference. The old toolbar appears both logged out and logged in. ~NerdyScienceDude 00:05, 24 December 2010 (UTC)
No difference for me, either. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 02:12, 25 December 2010 (UTC)
Many of the vector enhancements are explicitely disabled on iOS, due to bugs. bugzilla:22524 seems to have been the most important reason that it was disabled. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:21, 25 December 2010 (UTC)

Page title bug

The above displayed on User talk:Hell in a Bucket. ~NerdyScienceDude 16:43, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

It's because the page contains transclusions of Special pages. That generally messes things up quite badly (I don't know why it isn't simply forbidden, since it's known not to work).--Kotniski (talk) 17:05, 23 December 2010 (UTC)
Yep, this is a longstanding bug that has never been coompletely fixed. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 18:17, 23 December 2010 (UTC)
Off topic: Nice user info script you've got there. That will be useful. Svick (talk) 10:32, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

Weird error on loading WP:VPT

I typed in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:VPT into my address bar and I got:

Error message
Internal error
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search

PPFrame_DOM::expand: Invalid parameter type

Backtrace:

#0 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/parser/Parser.php(2733): PPFrame_DOM->expand(Object(PPNode_DOM), 0)
#1 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/parser/Parser.php(935): Parser->replaceVariables('????(Redirected...')
#2 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/parser/Parser.php(335): Parser->internalParse('????(Redirected...')
#3 [internal function]: Parser->parse('????(Redirected...', Object(Title), Object(ParserOptions), true, true, NULL)
#4 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/StubObject.php(58): call_user_func_array(Array, Array)
#5 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/StubObject.php(76): StubObject->_call('parse', Array)
#6 [internal function]: StubObject->__call('parse', Array)
#7 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/OutputPage.php(1145): StubObject->parse('????(Redirected...', Object(Title), Object(ParserOptions), true, true, NULL)
#8 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/GlobalFunctions.php(884): OutputPage->parse('????(Redirected...', true, true)
#9 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/Article.php(1121): wfMsgExt('redirectedfrom', Array, '<a href="/enwiki/w/ind...')
#10 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/Article.php(806): Article->showRedirectedFromHeader()
#11 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/Wiki.php(493): Article->view()
#12 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/Wiki.php(70): MediaWiki->performAction(Object(OutputPage), Object(Article), Object(Title), Object(User), Object(WebRequest))
#13 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/index.php(117): MediaWiki->performRequestForTitle(Object(Title), Object(Article), Object(OutputPage), Object(User), Object(WebRequest))
#14 /usr/local/apache/common-local/live-1.5/index.php(3): require('/usr/local/apac...')
#15 {main}

I reloaded the page and it worked. I cannot reproduce this now. Any idea what happened? /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 19:06, 25 December 2010 (UTC)

Uh, oh, I was saving the parking chair article and I got something similar:
Error 2
Internal error
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search

PPFrame_DOM::expand: Invalid parameter type

Backtrace:

#0 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/parser/Parser.php(2733): PPFrame_DOM->expand(Object(PPNode_DOM), 0)
#1 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/parser/Parser.php(518): Parser->replaceVariables('{{editnotice lo...')
#2 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/parser/Parser.php(4194): Parser->preprocess('{{editnotice lo...', Object(Title), Object(ParserOptions))
#3 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/MessageCache.php(674): Parser->transformMsg('{{editnotice lo...', Object(ParserOptions))
#4 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/GlobalFunctions.php(744): MessageCache->transform('{{editnotice lo...')
#5 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/GlobalFunctions.php(707): wfMsgGetKey('editnotice-0', true, true, true)
#6 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/GlobalFunctions.php(655): wfMsgReal('editnotice-0', Array, true, true)
#7 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/EditPage.php(369): wfMsgForContent('editnotice-0')
#8 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/EditPage.php(271): EditPage->edit()
#9 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/Wiki.php(553): EditPage->submit()
#10 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/Wiki.php(70): MediaWiki->performAction(Object(OutputPage), Object(Article), Object(Title), Object(User), Object(WebRequest))
#11 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/index.php(117): MediaWiki->performRequestForTitle(Object(Title), Object(Article), Object(OutputPage), Object(User), Object(WebRequest))
#12 /usr/local/apache/common-local/live-1.5/index.php(3): require('/usr/local/apac...')
#13 {main}
Not sure what's going on here. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 19:06, 25 December 2010 (UTC)
I got a similar error (I'm afraid I didn't save the backtrace) just now while editing Battle of Nanking. Submitting the identical text again succeeded, so it wasn't an issue with the edit. — Gavia immer (talk) 20:03, 25 December 2010 (UTC)
I got a few more of these, randomly (sometimes upon previewing an edit or simply trying to read a page). Reloading always seems to work, though. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 21:07, 25 December 2010 (UTC)
I've seen this three times in the last half hour, the last a minute ago. The first time accessing my watchlist, the last an article. Reloading each time worked for me. The exact trace is slightly different to the above so here it is:
Error 3
#0 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/parser/Parser.php(2733): PPFrame_DOM->expand(Object(PPNode_DOM), 0)
#1 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/parser/Parser.php(935): Parser->replaceVariables('{{pp-semi-prote...')
#2 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/parser/Parser.php(335): Parser->internalParse('{{pp-semi-prote...')
#3 [internal function]: Parser->parse('{{pp-semi-prote...', Object(Title), Object(ParserOptions), true, true, 404184523)
#4 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/StubObject.php(58): call_user_func_array(Array, Array)
#5 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/StubObject.php(76): StubObject->_call('parse', Array)
#6 [internal function]: StubObject->__call('parse', Array)
#7 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/Article.php(4024): StubObject->parse('{{pp-semi-prote...', Object(Title), Object(ParserOptions), true, true, 404184523)
#8 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/Article.php(4006): Article->getOutputFromWikitext('{{pp-semi-prote...', true, Object(ParserOptions))
#9 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/Article.php(1349): Article->outputWikiText('{{pp-semi-prote...', true, Object(ParserOptions))
#10 [internal function]: Article->doViewParse()
#11 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/PoolCounter.php(59): call_user_func(Array)
#12 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/Article.php(904): PoolCounter_Stub->executeProtected(Array, Array)
#13 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/Wiki.php(493): Article->view()
#14 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/Wiki.php(70): MediaWiki->performAction(Object(OutputPage), Object(Article), Object(Title), Object(User), Object(WebRequest))
#15 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/index.php(117): MediaWiki->performRequestForTitle(Object(Title), Object(Article), Object(OutputPage), Object(User), Object(WebRequest))
#16 /usr/local/apache/common-local/live-1.5/index.php(3): require('/usr/local/apac...')
#17 {main}
--JohnBlackburnewordsdeeds 00:38, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

I've got a much bigger and nastier-looking screen of chars like the above while making this edit. I didn't save the error :( But I did notice that instead of Internal Error, its was something like Wikimedia Internal Error, with Wikimedia mentioned a few more times... I can also confirm that it happened on Wikimedia Commons too. Rehman 00:35, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

I have had the same garbage as JohnBlackburne, three times in the last hour. In each case it has happened when I tried to save a page, so I have gone back, pressed save again, and all has been fine. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:10, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

Someone on ANI says that per irc discussion, the devs know about this and are working on it. 67.117.130.143 (talk) 02:07, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

I've had an Internal error with a message similar to the above twice in the last few hours. I was looking at turtle articles at the time not VPT or any other notice board. Regards, SunCreator (talk) 02:09, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

It's happened to me at least ten times today. Luckily, when it's happened during an edit, it seems that the edit still goes through regardless, so it's just more of an annoyance more than anything else. SilverserenC 02:14, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

This has been filed in the bug tracker under bug 26429. Krinkle (talk) 02:15, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

This is also affecting my stub link colour gadget, and all links are showing up orange. I'm guessing this is because the stub gadget is trying to load these articles and being given one of these internal errors. - ʄɭoʏɗiaɲ τ ¢ 02:38, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

I have been getting a few of these errors today as well, but refreshing the page to get it to load worked every time. Maybe if it happens again I will save the error and post it here (like anyone needs yet another error posted here. ;-) X-D). [|Retro00064|☎talk|✍contribs|] 02:52, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

I saw a similar error a few times in the last day; both loading pages and committing edits. When attempting to commit an edit, it failed with error message (no changes to history); I reattempted, and it worked. Same thing for attempting to read a page.
Error 4 (committing an edit failed)
Internal error
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
PPFrame_DOM::expand: Invalid parameter type
Backtrace:
#0 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/parser/Parser.php(2733): PPFrame_DOM->expand(Object(PPNode_DOM), 0)
#1 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/parser/Parser.php(518): Parser->replaceVariables('{{editnotice lo...')
#2 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/parser/Parser.php(4194): Parser->preprocess('{{editnotice lo...', Object(Title), Object(ParserOptions))
#3 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/MessageCache.php(674): Parser->transformMsg('{{editnotice lo...', Object(ParserOptions))
#4 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/GlobalFunctions.php(744): MessageCache->transform('{{editnotice lo...')
#5 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/GlobalFunctions.php(707): wfMsgGetKey('editnotice-0', true, true, true)
#6 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/GlobalFunctions.php(655): wfMsgReal('editnotice-0', Array, true, true)
#7 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/EditPage.php(369): wfMsgForContent('editnotice-0')
#8 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/EditPage.php(271): EditPage->edit()
#9 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/Wiki.php(553): EditPage->submit()
#10 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/Wiki.php(70): MediaWiki->performAction(Object(OutputPage), Object(Article), Object(Title), Object(User), Object(WebRequest))
#11 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/index.php(117): MediaWiki->performRequestForTitle(Object(Title), Object(Article), Object(OutputPage), Object(User), Object(WebRequest))
#12 /usr/local/apache/common-local/live-1.5/index.php(3): require('/usr/local/apac...')
#13 {main}
Error 5 (loading a page failed)
Internal error
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
PPFrame_DOM::expand: Invalid parameter type
Backtrace:
#0 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/parser/Parser.php(2733): PPFrame_DOM->expand(Object(PPNode_DOM), 0)
#1 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/parser/Parser.php(935): Parser->replaceVariables('{{MedalTableTop...')
#2 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/parser/Parser.php(335): Parser->internalParse('{{MedalTableTop...')
#3 [internal function]: Parser->parse('{{MedalTableTop...', Object(Title), Object(ParserOptions), true, true, 397508042)
#4 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/StubObject.php(58): call_user_func_array(Array, Array)
#5 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/StubObject.php(76): StubObject->_call('parse', Array)
#6 [internal function]: StubObject->__call('parse', Array)
#7 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/Article.php(4024): StubObject->parse('{{MedalTableTop...', Object(Title), Object(ParserOptions), true, true, 397508042)
#8 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/Article.php(4006): Article->getOutputFromWikitext('{{MedalTableTop...', true, Object(ParserOptions))
#9 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/Article.php(1349): Article->outputWikiText('{{MedalTableTop...', true, Object(ParserOptions))
#10 [internal function]: Article->doViewParse()
#11 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/PoolCounter.php(59): call_user_func(Array)
#12 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/Article.php(904): PoolCounter_Stub->executeProtected(Array, Array)
#13 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/Wiki.php(493): Article->view()
#14 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/Wiki.php(70): MediaWiki->performAction(Object(OutputPage), Object(Article), Object(Title), Object(User), Object(WebRequest))
#15 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/index.php(117): MediaWiki->performRequestForTitle(Object(Title), Object(Article), Object(OutputPage), Object(User), Object(WebRequest))
#16 /usr/local/apache/common-local/live-1.5/index.php(3): require('/usr/local/apac...')
#17 {main}
TheFeds 04:59, 26 December 2010 (UTC)
I just got an other one of these error messages when refreshing my watch-list (the first error I have had in a while today). I copied the error messsage, and it is contained below.
Error message 6 (when attempting to refresh my watch-list. Clicking the refresh button in I.E. to try again worked and the watch-list loaded successfully).
Internal error
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
PPFrame_DOM::expand: Invalid parameter type

Backtrace:

#0 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/parser/Parser.php(2733): PPFrame_DOM->expand(Object(PPNode_DOM), 0)
#1 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/parser/Parser.php(935): Parser->replaceVariables('(for '''Retro00...')
#2 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/parser/Parser.php(335): Parser->internalParse('(for '''Retro00...')
#3 [internal function]: Parser->parse('(for '''Retro00...', Object(Title), Object(ParserOptions), true, true, NULL)
#4 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/StubObject.php(58): call_user_func_array(Array, Array)
#5 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/StubObject.php(76): StubObject->_call('parse', Array)
#6 [internal function]: StubObject->__call('parse', Array)
#7 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/OutputPage.php(1145): StubObject->parse('(for '''Retro00...', Object(Title), Object(ParserOptions), true, true, NULL)
#8 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/GlobalFunctions.php(884): OutputPage->parse('(for '''Retro00...', true, true)
#9 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/specials/SpecialWatchlist.php(54): wfMsgExt('watchlistfor', 'parseinline', 'Retro00064')
#10 [internal function]: wfSpecialWatchlist(NULL, Object(SpecialPage))
#11 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/SpecialPage.php(793): call_user_func('wfSpecialWatchl...', NULL, Object(SpecialPage))
#12 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/SpecialPage.php(561): SpecialPage->execute(NULL)
#13 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/Wiki.php(254): SpecialPage::executePath(Object(Title))
#14 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/Wiki.php(64): MediaWiki->handleSpecialCases(Object(Title), Object(OutputPage), Object(WebRequest))
#15 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/index.php(117): MediaWiki->performRequestForTitle(Object(Title), NULL, Object(OutputPage), Object(User), Object(WebRequest))
#16 /usr/local/apache/common-local/live-1.5/index.php(3): require('/usr/local/apac...')
#17 {main}
--[|Retro00064|☎talk|✍contribs|] 06:30, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

Received an internal error while creating a new page

On User_talk:75.210.113.12 

PPFrame_DOM::expand: Invalid parameter type

Backtrace:

#0 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/parser/Parser.php(2733): PPFrame_DOM->expand(Object(PPNode_DOM), 0)
#1 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/parser/Parser.php(935): Parser->replaceVariables('{{#switch: {{{c...')
#2 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/parser/Parser.php(335): Parser->internalParse('{{#switch: {{{c...')
#3 [internal function]: Parser->parse('{{#switch: {{{c...', Object(Title), Object(ParserOptions), true, true, 404269001)
#4 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/StubObject.php(58): call_user_func_array(Array, Array)
#5 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/StubObject.php(76): StubObject->_call('parse', Array)
#6 [internal function]: StubObject->__call('parse', Array)
#7 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/OutputPage.php(1145): StubObject->parse('{{#switch: {{{c...', Object(Title), Object(ParserOptions), true, true, 404269001)
#8 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/GlobalFunctions.php(882): OutputPage->parse('{{#switch: {{{c...', true, true)
#9 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/OutputPage.php(2522): wfMsgExt('anontalkpagetex...', Array, Array)
#10 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/OutputPage.php(2510): OutputPage->addWikiMsgArray('anontalkpagetex...', Array)
#11 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/Article.php(1170): OutputPage->addWikiMsg('anontalkpagetex...')
#12 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/Article.php(945): Article->showViewFooter()
#13 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/Wiki.php(493): Article->view()
#14 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/includes/Wiki.php(70): MediaWiki->performAction(Object(OutputPage), Object(Article), Object(Title), Object(User), Object(WebRequest))
#15 /usr/local/apache/common-local/wmf-deployment/index.php(117): MediaWiki->performRequestForTitle(Object(Title), Object(Article), Object(OutputPage), Object(User), Object(WebRequest))
#16 /usr/local/apache/common-local/live-1.5/index.php(3): require('/usr/local/apac...')
#17 {main}

Nakon 08:39, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

I have moved this new section here, as it is related to the errors above. Regards. --[|Retro00064|☎talk|✍contribs|] 08:46, 26 December 2010 (UTC)
Should be fixed now, according to the tech channel. If anyone still gets a similar error screen, please note it here. Cheers. Bugzilla:26429.  Chzz  ►  17:57, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia Mathematics

The quality of Wikipedia's mathematics is dwindling. Not the content, but the presentation. It is becoming more and more inconsistent in displayed style, which ideally should be entirely consistent. Let me give a rough example of mathematics I see.

Let x∈C be a value such that x²+2x+1 = 0. Let where is the set of rationals. Note that serves as a field extension to ℚ where only linear combinations of numbers of the form exist. We want an δ>0 such that for each ε>0 one has .

This example above was just made up on the spot, so ignore the actual math. It should appear, in my opinion, as

Let be a value such that . Let where is the set of rationals. Note that serves as a field extension to where only linear combinations of numbers of the form exist. We want an such that for each one has .

The second one might appear uglier, but is far more consistent than the first one. Let me be clear about what the consistencies are. We have...

  1. the use of italic variables (x),
  2. the use of emboldened sets (C),
  3. the use of the math environment (),
  4. the use of Unicode (ℚ), and
  5. the use of \scriptstyle (compare to ).

I am not proclaiming articles are like the first example above with that much inconsistency, but especially from a global point of view on Wikipedia, there is an enormous amount of inconsistency.

Why is consistency important?

  • Text-based browsers can uniformly deal with tagged data. So can good ol' normal browsers. Wikipedia contributors are blurring the line between style and content — syntax and semantics — which I find to be a grave mistake, especially as an avid LaTeX user. For some things I'm sure it's appropriate, like using quoted markup to indicate emphasized content.
  • Using a single, consistent notation for mathematics allows for changes to be made to the mathematics easily. Mathematics' style can be scraped, parsed, processed, all that.
  • It makes reading Wikipedia articles much more pleasing, than seeing 10 different styles for something.

I do my best to try to increase the consistency of pages if I have the time, but I can't alone.

Consistency also helps with this next point: that Wikipedia should start moving away from generating images. Wikipedia probably uses enough processing power on constantly rendering LaTeX markup. At the moment, Wikipedia wants some 16 million USD for server duties and all that. If money is an issue, which it clearly is a concern, then here's a way to decrease server load: don't render the mathematics server-side. Some people don't even like the PNGs and it makes for absolutely awful printing. The book-making feature of Wikipedia is great, until you start having mathematics, in which case you get sloppy, low-resolution output.

MathML is a flop. I don't want to get into any debate about it, but it was designed not by mathematicians nor by typographers. I think, at the moment, the best answer is to use something like MathJax, which does one of two things:

  1. Uses pre-rendered images to typeset mathematics using JavaScript, or
  2. uses native STIX fonts from one's computer to render the mathematics (again, using JavaScript).

MathJax produces absolutely beautiful mathematics by using LaTeX's rendering algorithms, and if one has STIX fonts installed, then one has scalable/vectorized mathematical typesetting suitable for printing. The STIX fonts were designed by mathematicians and typographers, and were designed for the web. Moreover, it is context sensitive. If the color of the font around it changes, so does the color of the mathematics. Same with size and all that. Best of all, it requires about 2 lines of JS at the header of each page, and doesn't require any special mathematics notation; >math< is compatible.

If you want to see an example of MathJax, perhaps see this post on my blog: [14]

—quadrescence 23:52, 25 December 2010 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Quadrescence (talk • contribs)

Anything that requires JavaScript is a non-starter for me. Having to install more fonts (STIX) is a non-starter for me. Anything that requires images to render and read is a non-starter for me. I think you need to concentrate more on compatibility and accessibility. HumphreyW (talk) 23:59, 25 December 2010 (UTC)
JavaScript is optional for the user. STIX is optional. Wikipedia requires images right now to render, though surely you can disable it. I think compatibility has been in mind, and the goal is to actually increase accessibility, instead of this hodgepodge of styles we have right now. I hope you actually read what MathJax is. —quadrescence 00:52, 26 December 2010 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Quadrescence (talk • contribs)
Someone's got this working on WP. See e.g. Help talk:Displaying a formula#Formulas as SVG?. I had it enabled for a while but disabled it as it was just too slow. It needs to be done server-side to offer acceptable performance with our formulae heavy maths articles, but right now it uses Javascript client-side. There were also problems rendering a few formulae, very few and obscure but the sort of problems that would likely not get fixed until MathJax is officially supported.
And you should not have an external link in your signature, as per WP:SIG#EL. Please stop using it, one link on your user page is enough.--JohnBlackburnewordsdeeds 00:56, 26 December 2010 (UTC)
Of course there will be errors in rendering. People are writing pretty hacky LaTeX on Wikipedia to begin with, precisely to avoid the problems images give. As for performance, one can disable JavaScript if they so wish (or use crappy images as a fallback option). Also, Wikipedia's bot keeps claiming that I'm not signing. Dumb bot. ~~~~ —quadrescence 01:09, 26 December 2010 (UTC)
<offtopic> "Also, Wikipedia's bot keeps claiming that I'm not signing. Dumb bot." That is probably because you are not linking to your user page and talk page. HumphreyW (talk) 01:43, 26 December 2010 (UTC)
(edit conflict) The bot says you're not signing because you're not doing it correctly. Your signature must include a wikilink to either your userpage or your talk page. Anomie⚔ 01:44, 26 December 2010 (UTC)
Please take the discussion about my signature to the appropriate place. —quadrescence 03:00, 26 December 2010 (UTC)
It's not a server performance thing, it's more about the tension between getting reasonable-looking complicated math (LaTeX) and not wanting to spew PNG's into the browser when the math is simple enough that HTML and Unicode hacks (Xn) are good enough to get it across. I think it would take a pretty big cultural shift to do much different than this. The current mixed approaches is ok for our purposes (communicating content to the reader) even if it's not so elegant for fans of semantic markup. The same thing happens on Mathoverflow, which uses Mathjax. I'm personally not much of a believer in semantic markup for Wikipedia anyway, since Wikipedia is supposed to be a reference work edited by humans for a direct readership of humans. We're not here to be unpaid labor for data miners. 67.117.130.143 (talk) 01:46, 26 December 2010 (UTC)
Yes, for reading by humans, on this device called a computer, which happens to vary from place to place, and which happens to not be equivalent for everyone. Semantic markup is what allows everyone to see the same thing modulo their style or accomodations. If it didn't, we wouldn't use HTML, we'd use RTFs or something. And yes, the current approaches "work ok for getting a point across", but so would Wikipedia entirely in plaintext or whatever. When I think of encyclopedia, I think authoritative and professional, the latter which MathJax enables. —quadrescence 03:00, 26 December 2010 (UTC)
Just a few words, as I was pointed to this discussion. MathJax is fine and great, and you may want to test it yourself on Wikipedia using my experimental MathJax user extension. However, two issues will probably prevent MathJax from ever being the default rendering method on Wikipedia: users have reported it to be quite slow for the moment, and the extent of LaTeX and additional non-LaTeX "texvc" (including all its bugs) that MediaWiki supports will never be fully supported by MathJax. So the best we can hope for is good, optional support for MathJax, similar to what my user extension provides. Good means support of most TeX features used on Wikipedia, and fast enough to not deter most users. There is definitely process going on in regards to the latter, and I'm looking forward to it. Regarding server-side rendering, this comes down to generating images, and the only thing we can do better than now is switching to SVG images – something that is pretty unlikely to happen in the near future, in part because of poor support by some browsers (IE). Nageh (talk) 09:24, 26 December 2010 (UTC)
  • Try supporting a wider range of math styles, I like: x^2 + 2*x + 1 = 0, where the caret "^" denotes the exponent and star "*" means to multiply. Using that style, variables can have multi-letter mnemonic names, such as "max" and "min" or "width", rather than every equation having: x, x', y, y', etc. There is an oriental revelation which advises: "When something seems very difficult to do, then try doing it more, not less (in case a lack of familiarity or some minor issue was the reason for the difficulty)". I had several math professors who wrote equations, by hand, up on the board, and get this: they all had different handwriting (OMG, yes, inconsistent, not-the-same handwriting, even using different hands: some left, some right, some both hands). Can you even imagine the psychological horror of seeing formulas written by hand by professional mathematicians, like Albert Einstein did all the time? Well, wanting to actually learn what other people know, rather just my same style all day long, I opened my mind to reading what other people wrote, and guess what? I was able to read complex math formulas, even written by hand! Yes, despite all the initial horror, it did not warp my little mind, and I went further to learn computer technology which made the math formulas seem like petty special cases of a vastly diverse world using numerous, fascinating styles. Now, even in music, we have electronic keyboards with hundreds of options, using a myriad of special buttons, but the oriental proverb was the secret: "When something seems very difficult to do, then try doing it more, not less". Embrace diversity. -Wikid77 (talk) 12:32, 26 December 2010 (UTC)
MathJax is ridiculously slow. Even on Google Chrome, which has one of the fastest JavaScript engines, the math examples on your blog take nearly 2 seconds to load, on top of the page load time. On IE8, its more like 5 seconds. It takes about 10 seconds on my iPod touch. The fallback for JS disabled or an unsupported browser is just the LaTeX text, which is hardly a graceful fallback. Its also massive, its 16 MB and more than 30,000 files. Most of the files are images/fonts where only a few will be loaded on any given page, but on the mathjax demo page, there's still 174 kB of minified and gzipped JS/fonts loaded to render it. Mr.Z-man 16:26, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

Mnemonic shortcut WP:PUMPTECH

I have created a more mnemonic shortcut as "WP:PUMPTECH" for use around general readers, following the original format of "WP:PUMP" where WP:VPT might be misread as "WP:VTP" in the wiki-alphabet soup. The other shortcuts are still there, such as: WP:VP/T with the slash. -Wikid77 (talk) 12:54, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

Seems reasonable. Incidentally, I also made WP:VTP - I've mistyped as that myself. Redirecteds are cheap.  Chzz  ►  17:12, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

I have noticed that, sometimes, the wikilinks to large articles are showing as brown (tiny-article) color, as if one of the wiki-servers doesn't do blue links today. I wonder if this is a temporary issue, or something that will keep recurring, such as those months when GIF images did not auto-thumbnail and had to be stored as the exact size to show clear resolution. -Wikid77 (talk) 13:02, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

Something weird

(Probably posting this in the wrong place, but here goes anyway.) So I'm looking through some historical contributions and come across 195.93.21.38 (talk · contribs). Apparently, that IP was blocked for 24 hours on 15 November 2006, edited again two days later and hasn't been blocked since - but the contribs page shows the 15 November 2006 block as active, which makes no sense. Anyone able to work out why? Alzarian16 (talk) 18:22, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

I believe it's a known bug, it's displaying the wrong block information. If you check Special:BlockList/195.93.21.38, it's blocked by two different range blocks. See also Special:Contributions/195.93.21.0, which isn't showing any indication that it is covered by the same range blocks. Anomie⚔ 18:39, 26 December 2010 (UTC)
That would explain it. Thanks. Alzarian16 (talk) 18:46, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

Cannot access WikiBlame?

"403 Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /wikiblame.php on this server. Apache/2.2 Server at wikipedia.ramselehof.de Port 80"

Is it me? 

Firefox/3.6.13  — Preceding unsigned comment added by SalineBrain (talk • contribs) 03:38, 27 December 2010 (UTC)
What were you doing when that happened? Someguy1221 (talk) 03:44, 27 December 2010 (UTC)
Happens to me as well. I did, however, find that http://wikipedia.ramselehof.de/wikiblame_inverse.php works. Or there's http://toolserver.org/~soxred93/blame. PleaseStand (talk) 04:28, 27 December 2010 (UTC)
Seems to be working fine for me.Sumsum2010·T·C 19:21, 27 December 2010 (UTC)
I had the same problem until about 12 hours ago. Dougweller (talk) 19:36, 27 December 2010 (UTC)
That's because of this change to MediaWiki:Histlegend, which changed the link to wikiblame_inverse.php. The http://wikipedia.ramselehof.de/wikiblame.php URL still does not work. PleaseStand (talk) 21:04, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

Could someone take a look at this thread, and comment regarding the issues raised? Thanks in advance! ---My Core Competency is Competency (talk) 18:58, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

Latin Extended Additional

There used to be a lot of problems for Windows users displaying characters in the Latin Extended Additional Unicode range. Could some people verify whether this problem still exists in recent versions of Internet Explorer (7 and up)? The fonts Lucida Sans Unicode and either Microsoft Sans Serif or Tahoma should cover most of this range.

Could you have a look at User:Ruud Koot/ḂḃḄḅḆḇḊḋḌḍḎḏḞḟḠḡḢḣḤḥḪḫḲḳḴḵḶḷḸḹḺḻṀṁṂṃṄṅṆṇṈṉṖṗṘṙṚṛṜṝṞṟṠṡṢṣṨṩṪṫṬṭṮṯṾṿẈẉẊẋẎẏẒẓẔẕʿẖʾ and report if this page displays correctly (both the three lines of text and the title itself). Especially the last three characters, these should be read "half-ring, h-underbar, half-ring" and might need to come from two different fonts. Please, list the versions of your browser, operating system, Office (this affects the fonts you have installed), and uncommon fonts you might have installed. Thanks, —Ruud 19:08, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

Using IE9 Beta, Windows 7 Home Premium 32-Bit, and Office Home and Student 2007, all three lines and the title are displayed. The characters look the same, but there is a minimal variation in font size that I didn't notice without a close look. I haven't installed any seperate fonts. 1ForTheMoney (talk) 20:08, 26 December 2010 (UTC)
Using Windows XP shows all lines correct, with the first line (default font) with a slightly larger font in IE8, but smaller in Chrome. Note that Wikipedia uses Arial Unicode MS as the preferred font when using {{unicode}} in IE. — Edokter • Talk — 20:38, 26 December 2010 (UTC)
As far as I was able to determine the {{unicode}} "hack" is only needed for IE6 and below, but currently does affect (not in a positive way, due to a change in the font size) IE7 and above. What I'm trying to determine is if we can:
  1. deprecate and remove {{unicode}},
  2. safely use characters from the Latin Extended Additional range in article titles (we've historical been somewhat overcautious with this, but there does not seem to be a good reason for this any longer).
—Ruud 21:24, 26 December 2010 (UTC)
It is sometimes needed for all browsers running on Windows, not just IE. As long as Windows has poor unicode support, we're stuck with some form of hack to force the proper font, at least for those ranges in unicode that might break up. {{Transl}} also uses the .Unicode class, that is why they look the same.
We try to avoid unicode in article title, simply for the reason that it needs to be typable, or have a non-unicode redirect. — Edokter • Talk — 00:42, 27 December 2010 (UTC)
I think this is untrue. Non-IE browsers have an easy time choosing the correct font. And if Windows is missing fonts by default, a template cannot change it since we do not have the possibility to embed custom fonts here. -- Prince Kassad (talk) 01:24, 27 December 2010 (UTC)
Doesn't Firefox use a custom font renderer (freefont, cairo) on Windows too? I don't believe I had a font installed which contained both "ẖ" and "ʾ", so IE7's rendering engine does seem to be smarter than IE6's. I might be overlooking something, though. —Ruud 01:56, 27 December 2010 (UTC)
Yes, Firefox uses its own custom renderer. All other browsers, to my knowledge, rely on Uniscribe. -- Prince Kassad (talk) 15:39, 27 December 2010 (UTC)
But when I tested this on Windows 2003 with IE7 the text rendered fine, including the title (which cannot be forced to use a font using {{unicode}}, I vaguely remember that for this reason the title is always displayed using Arial Unicode MS if available). —Ruud 01:52, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

(edit conflict) The page linked to above in the original post by Ruud displays the text perfectly okay for me. I am using I.E.8. [|Retro00064|☎talk|✍contribs|] 01:57, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

Edoktor, would you be able to produce a testcase which fails on IE7/8/9, but succeeds when using {{unicode}}? —Ruud 02:00, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

It was some time ago, but This Is Spın̈al Tap would not display properly without the unicode template. Here it is without the template: This Is Spın̈al Tap. It uses a N-diaeresis, which is pretty exotic. — Edokter • Talk — 03:29, 27 December 2010 (UTC)
Both versions of that phrase (i.e. with and without the {{Unicode}} template), Edokter, work fine for me (no problems displaying the characters), although the {{Unicode}} template causes that version of the text to display slightly different from the regular text. Again, I am using I.E.8. Maybe it is just differences in the font sets different computers have. ????:-( [|Retro00064|☎talk|✍contribs|] 03:52, 27 December 2010 (UTC)
They both look fine for me as well in both IE8 and Firefox, but oddly enough, not in Chrome 8. In the version without the unicode template, I do see dotless 'i', but then a very small serif 'n' followed by a square. — Edokter • Talk — 04:01, 27 December 2010 (UTC)
Both phrases look fine for me as well, noting that the Unicode text stands out from the regular text due to its font. (As a side note, I switched on Compatibility Mode for a small test (which I believe makes the browser behave like IE7) and found that Ruud's test and Edokter's phrases still display correctly, although the first line is shorter than the second and third lines.) 1ForTheMoney (talk) 14:48, 27 December 2010 (UTC)
Using either IE8 (compatibility view off) or Firefox 3 on Windows XP with Office 2003, Edokter's first phrase looks fine but in the second phrase the diaresis is shifted to the right so it is now almost completely over the a. In IE8 (compatibility view checked) the n-diaresis of the second phrase is a square. A dotless i appears in both phrases in both browsers. I cannot view the complete title of Ruud's test page (nor does a horizontal scroll bar appear) because I am using a monitor with a 4×3 aspect ratio (it ends with the Rr set). All three lines of text appear correctly in IE8 (compatibility view off or checked) but using Firefox the half-circles appear closer to superscript < > in the first line and superscript [ ] in the last two lines. The first line is longer than the last two lines in IE8 (compatibility view off or checked) but in Firefox the first line is shorter. — Joe Kress (talk) 09:34, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

IE tables and height/width:100%

Not a question but I thought you guys might find this interesting.

Internet explorer doesnt handle style=height:100% or width:100% in table correctly.

But if you create a css stylesheet with the exact same thing on it and place class=yournewtableclass on your table or table within a table it works fine.

Just granpa (talk) 02:52, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

Or at least it doesnt screw up quite as badly
Just granpa (talk) 02:59, 27 December 2010 (UTC)
  • Wikipedia class=wikitable or class=infobox forces a space margin outside the table, and causes tables beyond width=98% to reach 102% wide with a bottom scroll-bar. Reset the margins:
     class=wikitable  width=100%  style="margin:0 0 0 0"
    See essay "WP:98 percent table width anomaly" for examples where setting "margin-right:0" will fix over-wide wikitables, etc. -Wikid77 (talk) 12:19, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

TwinkleWarn.js and CAT:NAMECONCERNS

Why are various users' copies of a user script called "twinklewarn.js" showing up in Category:Wikipedian usernames editors have expressed concern over? This doesn't make sense at all. (The master copy of said script is User:AzaToth/twinklewarn.js, which is also in the category.) — This, that, and the other (talk) 09:04, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

It is due to the line:
alert("You must supply a reason for the {{uw-username}} template");
If it was modified to:
alert("You must supply a reason for the {"+"{uw-username}} template");
Then it would no longer be an issue. -- WOSlinker (talk) 10:06, 28 December 2010 (UTC)
WOSlinker is an administrator himself, so he can fix the issue himself. HeyMid (contribs) 13:12, 28 December 2010 (UTC)
I didn't do the change straight away just incase anyone else had any comments to make but I've done that changes now. -- WOSlinker (talk) 16:51, 28 December 2010 (UTC)
Then he also could change the category-name not to end in a preposition (or delete it outright for being useless). ―cobaltcigs 03:47, 29 December 2010 (UTC)
You are welcome to nominate the category at WP:CFD if you wish. -- WOSlinker (talk) 10:05, 29 December 2010 (UTC)
Why would the category name need to be changed? Anomie⚔ 12:35, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

Single logon and meta

I've just edited a page at meta and found I was logged out, even though I have single logon enabled and it generally works. Does anyone else have this problem?--Kotniski (talk) 15:40, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

Single logon generally doesn't work for me unless I've already logged on during the current browser section, at least with IE7. However it works more reliably with IE8 and Firefox. Graham87 04:31, 29 December 2010 (UTC)
It always works for me when going to other language Wikipedias, Wiktionary etc. Is it not enabled for meta? Is there anyone for whom it does work for meta?--Kotniski (talk) 09:26, 29 December 2010 (UTC)
It works fine with meta for me. You might need to make sure your third-party cookies are enabled, first. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 22:55, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

Sorting Wikipedia links?

Hi, I have a long list of Wikipedia links saved in a plain text file. A lot of the links are out of date and are redirects or their appropriate article has been removed. Is there any automated way of sorting through these links (e.g. automatically removing dead links and replacing redirects)? I am running Debian for what it matters, so tools like wget and awk are available. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.30.179.250 (talk) 22:25, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

If you install Python wikitools, you can use the following Python script:
import sys
import wikitools

wiki = wikitools.Wiki()

for line in sys.stdin:
  page = wikitools.Page(wiki, line.strip())
  if page.exists:
    print page.title
like this:
python sorting_links.py < pages.txt > sorted_pages.txt
where pages.txt contains names of the pages you want to sort, one on each line. The script removes changes that don't exists and follows redirects. Svick (talk) 19:16, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

Rollbacking technical assist

I was granted Rollbacker rights in August 2009, and have used it to what I feel has been good effect. Except, unfortunately, when I'm browsing my watchlist on my iPhone. Probably a half-dozen times now I've been uncareful when browsing my list and accidentally tapped "Rollback". I try to stop the page load, but the reaction time is usually too fast, and I wind up having to rollback my rollback, and feel like an idiot. I know there're web functions to identify browsers upon load; is there any way to strip the "Rollback" from one's watchlist when Wikipedia detects I've loaded the page in mobile Safari? — pd_THOR | =/\= | 04:34, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

I don't know about browser-specific techniques, but you might try using User:Zvn/confirmwatchlistrollback.js, a script that makes rollbacking from the watchlist require a separate confirmation. This doesn't really affect rollback times when you need to do it, but it will prevent accidental rollbacking. — Gavia immer (talk) 04:50, 29 December 2010 (UTC)
Building on what Gavia immer has suggested, perhaps the following might be of use?:
if (navigator.userAgent.match(/iPhone/i) || navigator.userAgent.match(/iPod/i)) {
    importScript("User:Zvn/confirmwatchlistrollback.js");
}
That will activate the confirmation only when you're on an iPhone or iPod. I've got a few more tricks to optimize the iOS interface, if you're interested. {{Nihiltres|talk|edits|⚡}} 06:07, 29 December 2010 (UTC)
Awesome! Just put that in my vector.js? — pd_THOR | =/\= | 06:35, 29 December 2010 (UTC)
Assuming you're using Vector, then yes. That's all you need to do. — Gavia immer (talk) 06:53, 29 December 2010 (UTC)
Thanks so much! — pd_THOR | =/\= | 18:46, 29 December 2010 (UTC)
I'd also like to use something like this, but would like it completely disabled for the iPhone -- is that possible? Mike Christie (talk – library) 13:43, 29 December 2010 (UTC)
Something like
if (navigator.userAgent.match(/iPhone/i) || navigator.userAgent.match(/iPod/i)) {
    $j('.mw-rollback-link').remove();
}
Would do the trick. Happy‑melon 00:28, 30 December 2010 (UTC)
I tried that, and I still see the rollback link in my watchlist. I reloaded the monobook.js to bypass cache but it made no difference. Is there anything else I could try? Thanks. Mike Christie (talk – library) 14:11, 30 December 2010 (UTC)
What about this? — Blue-Haired Lawyer t 20:55, 30 December 2010 (UTC)
if (navigator.userAgent.match(/iPhone/i) || navigator.userAgent.match(/iPod/i)) {
	var styleEle = document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(document.createElement("style"));
	styleEle.sheet.insertRule(".mw-rollback-link { display: none; }", 0);
}
That did it. As it turns out I had a stupid-user issue, rather than a technical issue, but once I remembered that I had switched to vector, and edited vector.js instead of monobook.js, I still couldn't get Happy-melon's version to work. This worked fine though. Thank you very much! Mike Christie (talk – library) 21:22, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

Templates in upload pages

Where is the template that shows the directions for uploading, like at the link above? I feel compelled to change the hyphens to endashes :) /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 22:56, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

In MediaWiki:Uploadtext and the subpages of Wikipedia:Upload/Uploadtext. Graham87 03:03, 30 December 2010 (UTC)
Thanks! I just realized it was linked to in the upload page ... d'oh. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 03:18, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

Text sizer

Hello, I am aiming to have a template for use firstly on en.wikisource (but I am interested in its applicability in other wikis). Currently, there are many text sizes in use, in order to capture any artistic value found in the original publication during digitization. The text size by default is good for reading many works, but many would be nice if larger. However, this gives an inconsistent appearance. Also, resolution, browser and PC settings make many of the works look drastically different. Where I've been working, in Children's literature, has made it clear that the availability to change text size would prove useful; a child using the text to read would benefit from having larger text. A popular work like s:The Velveteen Rabbit may be too small and strenuous to read the entire line (as even I tire from reading a line small and long). Immediate benefits would be:

  1. Uniformity among the appearance of pages (defaulted)
  2. One less parameter to consider when building
  3. Give users the option of size regardless of their browser/PC settings (most important)

A "toggle button" is what I imagined, (switching the prior text to this) something unobtrusively found in the corner of the work. I don't know how to develop something like this, at all. Can someone help me? - Theornamentalist (talk) 23:15, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

Do you mean something like pressing ctrl-+ for your browser? I can't imagine this would be too difficult to do via javascript, even as a site-wide thing. A lot of news sites (i.e. this ABC News article have this functionality. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 23:28, 29 December 2010 (UTC)
Yes, something exactly like that. I wasn't even aware of that function in my browser. I think that we should have that option available internally in WS. - Theornamentalist (talk) 23:30, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

Template {{lowercase title}} not working on ilomilo

Hi, I've added {{lowercase title}} to ilomilo, but it doesn't seem to be working, even when I purge the article, or log out. However, it works fine on the talk page at Talk:ilomilo. My best guess is that the title is in italics for some reason, and this interferes with the lowercasing. Any ideas? Can it be fixed? twilsonb (talk) 02:14, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

At Template:Infobox video game, the infobox used in the article, it automatically italicizes the title. Lowercase and Italics will not work on the same title, I do not know why. Sumsum2010·T·C 02:27, 30 December 2010 (UTC)
No, it works fine; just in this case we have effectively two instances of DISPLAYTITLE and only the last one is in effect. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 02:30, 30 December 2010 (UTC)
I never knew two different DISPLAYTITLE's could work together until now. Sumsum2010·T·C 03:53, 30 December 2010 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Yep; it's italicized due to the infobox and the two templates are conflicting. Fixed using displaytitle after the infobox. There should be a parameter in all the infoboxes for this, really (if I didn't miss there already being one). /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 02:29, 30 December 2010 (UTC)
There isn't a parameter in {{Infobox}} or {{Infobox video game}}, so either we can make {{Italic title}} and {{Lowercase title}} compatible (if possible), or add a parameter to {{Infobox}} and friends. But this is way beyond me! twilsonb (talk) 12:46, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

Is there a way to identify removal of internal links using the "related changes" filter. (similar to the external links removed tag?). There is a persistent sockmaster who removes internal links to India, Hindu and Hinduism in all sorts of articles and i am trying to trace his changes. --Sodabottle (talk) 03:33, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

This sounds like a case for the Wikipedia:Edit filter. -- The Anome (talk) 20:21, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

My first ever attempt to upload an .svg file (all 8 tries were failures)

After trying, and failing, eight times to upload the following file

File:Logo_for_US_National_Whitewater_Center.svg

I gave up and uploaded the .png version of the file, no problem

File:Logo_for_US_National_Whitewater_Center.png

What did I do wrong? I kept getting a black rectangle in the .svg file. It never showed up on my computer file; it was only on Wikipedia after I made the upload. HowardMorland (talk) 03:58, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

Looking at the source, I find flowRoot elements which means you are using flowed text, which is not compatible with the SVG renderer. There should be an Unflow command in the text menu of most applications. You are also using Arial, a proprietary font that the renderer may or may not show properly— use DejaVu San instead. See Wikipedia:SVG Help. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) talk 04:34, 30 December 2010 (UTC)
(edit conflict)Anomie just fixed it. I believe that the problem was that there were some unnecessary flowRoot and text elements (not even relevant to the correct display of the logo) that prevented our rsvg SVG renderer from working properly and that we don't have Arial Narrow on the servers. In the future, you can avoid the latter problem by selecting text that is in a font other than that listed in m:SVG fonts in Inkscape and choosing Object → Convert to Path before uploading, or just use a different font. PleaseStand (talk) 04:38, 30 December 2010 (UTC)
It was the flow elements; your upload 2 minutes before mine also seems to have fixed it, but MediaWiki didn't warn me about the upload conflict. I also converted the text to path since this is a logo; for a diagram or something where the specific font used is not important, it would be much better to keep the text as text and just choose a supported font. Anomie⚔ 04:44, 30 December 2010 (UTC)
Thanks. I'm not sure what you did or how, but I am just learning to use Inkscape. Hopefully, I will figure it out. Inkscape does have an Unflow option in the text menu, so I will try to use it. Thanks again. HowardMorland (talk) 13:36, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

LQT Redesign

Since one day we may or may not be using LiquidThreads (depending on how that discussion goes), people may wish to look over at the redesign that is currently happening and comment on it. Peachey88 (T · C) 23:31, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

  • Meanwhile, users can search old talk-page thread archives by including them as double-braced "templates" during edit-preview, with 1st-level headers such as "=ARCHIVE 81=":
=ARCHIVE 81=
{{Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_81}}
=ARCHIVE 82=
{{Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_82}}
=ARCHIVE 83=
{{Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_83}}
The edit-preview buffer will become huge, but then the browser "find" button (or multi-word search/scan?) can be used to hunt the combined contents about long-term PUMP subjects. It is not the same as tagged thread names, able to sort by topics or dates, but a browser could search for every "22 December" to find each message posted that day, while reading the combined page as a coherent whole. Plus, the talk-pages from several articles could be combined in a similar edit-preview to cross-search for topics in, perhaps 7, related article talk-pages, all in a single view. -Wikid77 (talk) 05:44, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

WP:BUNCH fixed ?

It seems that by sheer coincidence we have fixed WP:BUNCH, one of the oldest and most annoying layout rendering issues that MediaWiki has. In looking to fix the white border around thumbnails (something fixed a while ago on en.wp), User:Fomafix (from de.wp) made the suggestion to use "overflow:hidden" on the headers. Not only does this work to avoid having the lines run into thumbnails and infoboxes, but as a side effect, User:Edokter discovered that it seems to fix the bunching problem as well. The code is now enabled on en.wp, please report if you see anything strange that might be related. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:04, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

Sweet! This will make laying out pictures far easier. With that issue gone we could also update a bunch (lolpun) of manual of style rules that were set to avoid this issue in articles. - ʄɭoʏɗiaɲ τ ¢ 20:19, 27 December 2010 (UTC)
Who-ever discovered this definitely deserves a barnstar! Sumsum2010·T·C 20:32, 27 December 2010 (UTC)
Apparently we tried this before, and there are some issues with this solution, namely with IE for Mac (headers disappear completely) and with rtl wiki's on some older browsers. We probably no longer care about any of these older browsers however. Something to look further into, but definetly looks like a keeper for en.wp to me. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:43, 27 December 2010 (UTC)
Awesome. I never understood the whole fixbunching thing anyway :P /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 22:53, 27 December 2010 (UTC)
Also, does this mean we should remove the existing fixbunching templates, or just leave them in place? /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 23:06, 27 December 2010 (UTC)
Could disable the code for it to quickly determine the widespread effects of this and see if anything is affected negatively. I'd be surprised if Internet Explorer has ANY market share in Macs (support ended 5 years ago). The latest BS they pulled with IE9 is sure to remove its usage from PC's in the coming years. - ʄɭoʏɗiaɲ τ ¢ 23:41, 27 December 2010 (UTC)
You can already see the effects of WP:BUNCH, which has all fixes (divs, templates and the like) listed and examplified. I see no difference, other then that the no-fix example is now fixed. I think we can blank the templates in 30 days, when caching has caught up. — Edokter • Talk — 23:52, 27 December 2010 (UTC)
I have tested this in Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer 9 preview 7, Firefox 2, Firefox 3.6, Firefox 4 beta 8, Opera 10.63, and Chrome 8. Bunching no longer occurs in Example 1 (the one that is supposed to exhibit bunching) on WP:BUNCH in these browsers: IE6, IE8, Firefox 2, Firefox 3.6, and Opera 10.63. However, bunching still occurs in some browsers, namely: IE9 (preview 7), Firefox 4 beta 8, and Chrome 8. So the problem is not really fixed. — This, that, and the other (talk) 06:31, 28 December 2010 (UTC)
Looking at Wikipedia:How to fix bunched-up edit links#Example 1, IE 9 Beta 9.0.7930.16406 on Win7 does not show bunching. Neither does Firefox 3.6.10, Safari 5.03, Opera 10.63 and Chrome 8.0.552.224.
Here is the Wikimedia Traffic Analysis Report - Browsers as of October. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) talk 13:24, 28 December 2010 (UTC)
I don't see bunching using Firefox 4 beta 8 (Linux). Bunching does return, as expected, if I use Firebug to remove the overflow:hidden from the new CSS rule for headers. Did you forget to bypass your cache or something? Anomie⚔ 14:38, 28 December 2010 (UTC)
I don't see bunching in Chrome 8 as well. You must purge your cache on each browser to enable the fix. — Edokter • Talk — 15:06, 28 December 2010 (UTC)
My apologies. Chrome's cache is more stubborn than I thought. Not sure about the other browsers, but if other users have found them to not bunch anymore, then I guess all is well. — This, that, and the other (talk) 00:01, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
To beat Chrome into submission, just hit CTRL+F5 twice. — Edokter • Talk — 01:51, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

I do not think that bunching is fixed for me. I had to add the {{Fix bunching}} template to General Electric (following the directions at WP:BUNCH, as the edit link bunching was a problem there, caused by the infobox and image on the right side of the article. [|Retro00064|☎talk|✍contribs|] 00:38, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

Which browser are you using? Did you WP:Bypass your cache? Anomie⚔ 01:22, 29 December 2010 (UTC)
Oh, I am using I.E.8. I did not think about trying to bypass the cache to fix the problem. I just went over to the GE article to remove the {{Fix bunching}} templates so that I could test the cache-bypassing thing, but I edit-conflicted with Edokter, who alkso was removing them! X-D Anyway, it looks okay now that I have bypassed the cache. Thanks for the suggestion. [|Retro00064|☎talk|✍contribs|] 02:00, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

Template complexity crisis

This is just a reminder that, as you might well know, many overly-complex templates exist on Wikipedia, which are perhaps 100x more complex than needed, and process over 1,000x times more data than needed. Because the wiki-servers are extremely powerful, they can handle all the extra "busy-work" to process those templates. However, this situation should be noted, to beware the scale of the problem: the excessive templates are not just twice as big or slow, or 10x, but rather 100x and 1,000x times larger than needed. As an analogy, I would compare such template operation to novice computer programmers, who, if asked to search a document and count all the letters+numbers, would create 36 loops over the document, counting for each letter/digit separately, rather than have 36 individual counters with just 1 loop across the document database, as 36x times less processing. The emphasis here is to simply beware: some templates are 100x times more complex than needed, processing 1,000x more data than needed. I will consider writing an essay about these issues, as I look for common aspects of this problem. -Wikid77 02:22, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Example? Algebraist 02:24, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
The latest one, I noticed yesterday, is {First word} (although a valuable template), which is being run at 27 levels of expansion depth (remember there are only 40 levels allowed!). I have a 100x faster redesign in mind, but that is just one of many. -Wikid77 07:08, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
There is already a relevant essay: WP:PERF. What is your point? Remember that complaining here and writing essays will do exactly nothing to get StringFunctions enabled. Anomie⚔ 03:39, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
Maybe an essay about using "spaghetti code" in templates may be warranted, for the sake of others trying to understand each template's control flow. But again, users should not worry about site performance when editing templates, no matter how long or complex those templates are. For example, several years ago there was a proposal to abolish meta-templates, but that was rejected by the community because of the reasons listed on WP:PERF, as well users wanting to have some sort of object-oriented programming-type of procedure for coding templates. On the other hand, the developers have enabled some restrictions on templates use (listed on WP:PERF#Examples). And there is already an essay Wikipedia:Transclusion costs and benefits regarding multiple template transclusions. And since you mention the phrase "novice computer programmers", keep in mind that a significant majority of Wikipedians are such, and may not have the programming knowledge or expertise to understand "the problem" at all (which is another reason why WP:PERF exists in the first place). Therefore, I don't see any other issues besides what is already listed those pages I cited. Zzyzx11 (talk) 04:26, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
Thanks. I'll re-read those to see what's new there. -Wikid77 07:08, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
You would certainly be welcome to recommend optimization to complex templates that would result in better performance. Anything on the list at Wikipedia:Database reports/Templates transcluded on the most pages such as {{Citation/core}} would be a good start. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) talk 05:37, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
  • Yes, I am trying to emphasize that we can, perhaps quite easily, make some high-use templates many, many times better, to allow even more features within the 40-level limit. I noticed that {Citation} & {{Citation/core}} were using 32kb? for each citation, and causing a full article to be "95%" citation-template coding & 5% text (20x slower than the real text). I suspect the answer will be smart templates which guide each user to the optimum use of the related templates. The problems still exist because optimization of this convoluted wikicode is a murky subject ("40-level limit, who does that?"), especially for volunteers wanting to study articles about new technology. Plus like "inclusionists" versus "deletionists", we have an intense cosmic battle of "optimizers" versus "slopimizers" so when the template slop gets too deep, people are limited in trying to update the templates to do anything really clever. Hence, in all those cite templates, we have to manually enter the seven characters "http: //" for every URL, for years. Auto-generating "http:" should be as simple as:
                  Generate "http: //" - {{#switch:{{padleft:|6|{{url}}} }}|http:/=|https:=|...}}
    That #switch would add only 1 level of the 40-level limit, and might not even count against the deepest part of a citation template. Anyway, the key implication is that, when a template is 100x times slower than needed, it cannot be expanded much without hitting performance limits. Not every template needs to be optimized, but some can benefit greatly. -Wikid77 (talk) 07:08, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
    • And why exactly is saving the user from typing 5 or so characters worth the added complexity for the template code and the need for every bot, script, and other human reader of that bit of wikitext having to remember that the prefix is generated automatically? And isn't adding that sort of complexity directly contrary to your claims of the dangers of added template complexity? Anomie⚔ 17:25, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
    • I don't understand the solution you show. Some concrete examples that maintain functionality and ease-of use would be valuable. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) talk 17:50, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Prevention of category inclusion

I'm having a 'senior moment' or a 'why the heck can't I remember this esoteric bit of wiki coding' moment... What is the way to keep a page from being included into a category: For example - Preventing Template:Coat of arms rationale being included in Category:Non-free Wikipedia files with red backlink? Thanks in advance! Skier Dude (talk 06:19, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

For templates, you would use <includeonly> markup around the categories, which does what it says with respect to its contents. — Gavia immer (talk) 07:26, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
  • FIXED. Thanks for noting that problem. It was the "nocategory=yes" trick, easier to fix than explain just now. This is a case of an "error-category link from template inside template". As you might recall, this type of fix involves passing the optional parameter "nocategory=yes" as nonincluded text (only gets passed when viewing the template as standalone):  <noinclude>| nocategory=yes</noinclude>. Then, I put that parameter inside the invoked rationale-template, so if "nocategory" is set, then the inner template omits "Category:Non-free Wikipedia files with red backlink" & "Category:Wikipedia files that transclude the Non-free media rationale template with no Purpose specified". If you haven't used "nocategory" before, it might take a while to see the connections.
    Meanwhile, that is not the best solution: instead, there should be a parameter "noerror=yes" which stops error validations inside the inner template, so that no error-category would be needed in that case. That solution using "noerror=yes" is more complex because it involves making the inner template work with errors being ignored. So, "noerror=yes" requires setting some default values inside the inner template to continue processing inside the inner template despite the passed parameters being incorrect and handle an empty {{{1}}} as being a valid case. So, this is very much an "esoteric bit of wiki coding" to allow templates to show the invalid use of other templates as if valid! However, I might be able to deduce the solution later, or someone else please make it show "{{{1}}}" as if that were a valid article name, when noerror=yes, in the fair-use rationale (inside Template:Coat of arms rationale). -Wikid77 11:06, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
That was it! I'd used the "| nocategory=yes" in the past and it seemed to do the trick! Now off to tag the rest of them so that the 'backlog' notice disappears from several of these categories! Skier Dude (talk 23:26, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Weird problem in cite pmid template

Please see here. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:50, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Thanks Gadget850. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:10, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia IPv6 deployment

As the IPv4 address space on the internet is coming to an end, Wikipedia should support IPv6. Is there any plan or schedule for IPv6 deployment? Thanks :) ContinueWithCaution (talk) 21:47, 29 December 2010 (UTC)

The MediaWiki software does support IPv6. For Wikipedia and its sister projects, the biggest issue is that we make heavy use of SQUID caches, and the version of SQUID that we use (as of the last time I checked) doesn't support IPv6. Current versions of SQUID do support IPv6, but moving to a current version is likely to be a huge pain, so you can imagine that nobody wants to do it until it really becomes necessary. — Gavia immer (talk) 22:03, 29 December 2010 (UTC)
Given that the global IPv4 address pool is expected to run out in a month or so, to be followed by a whole world of hurt as mass IPv6 deployment is progressively (and for some large providers that didn't bother to plan, quite suddenly and unexpectedly) forced on an unwilling world by force majeure as the RIR pools run out, I'd say that moment has arrived. In particular, mobile users, and readers in places like China and Africa will be forced onto v6 faster than anyone else, and the alternative is for Wikipedia's new IPv6-only readers to reach Wikipedia over IPv4 proxy/protocol translation middleboxes, which will be even worse than going directly to v6.
At the very least, Wikipedia should be looking to get v6 transit from its transit providers now, and making sure that its DNS infrastructure works with v6, perhaps by putting up a ipv6test.wikipedia.org parking page that other users can test. This would also allow online testing of IPv6 brokenness, etc. by running test scripts that try to do test fetches from existing pages over ipv4. -- The Anome (talk) 22:29, 29 December 2010 (UTC)
Updated: Also, take a look at this: Measuring and combating IPv6 brokenness: Tore Anderson, RIPE 61, Rome, November 2010 -- IPv6 brokenness is now down to ~0.05%, and likely to decline further as OS X 10.6.5 rolls out to a wider audience. With a bit of semi-automated DNS whitelisting (ask Google!), that could be made even better. -- The Anome (talk) 22:40, 29 December 2010 (UTC)
The new data center is the first priority. Let's take it one major architectional rework at a time. P.S. infrastructure already runs IPv6. Basically only the mediawiki and squid installations don't do ipv6 yet, but MediaWiki is at least able to. 1.17 has several updates that fix a few bugs on the IPv6 front. But as soon as the datacenter is operational, I agree that IPv6 should be high on the list. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 00:11, 30 December 2010 (UTC)
PS. I note that brokenness for wikipedia is still around .3%. See also http://ipv6and4.labs.wikimedia.org/ —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 00:29, 30 December 2010 (UTC)
First add a AAAA record to en.labs.wikimedia.org and then see what bugs show their ugly pincers. If things go well we can make Wikipedia available via IPv6, if not then at least we will know what needs to be fixed. – Allen4names 19:35, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

squeezed lists

For some reason, whenever I see a list of some sort with more than one column, it squeezes it into half the area it should be. For example, here, it squeezes it into an unseemly mess. When it's only one column, though, it looks fine. I'm using the Google Chrome browser, but when I try it with Mozilla Firefox, it looks fine.--Gaius Claudius Nero (talk) 21:16, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

I wonder if it has to do with this recent edit that causes {{div col}} to output both column-width and column-count? Let's test:
Just column-width.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Just column-count.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Both.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

In Firefox here, the first shows extremely narrow columns while the other two show just 2 columns. Anomie⚔ 23:48, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
In Chrome, the 3rd is screwed up. Not sure why. Maybe ask User:Waldir the purpose of his edit?--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 23:57, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
That edit definitely broke the template. I've reverted it. I guess the purpose was to use unnamed parameter 2 for colwidth, but you cannot use both colcount and colwidth at the same time. — Edokter • Talk — 12:13, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
You can perfectly well use both properties at the same time, but if you add a default width value of 10em, then everyone will suddenly have two 10em wide columns. I made it a bit smarter to not break user expectations on current usages. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:03, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
See my reply to HappyMelon. This is defenitely not safe practice. — Edokter • Talk — 13:42, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

Hmm... this seems highly confusing. Can someone else read the latest draft of the CSS3 spec and tell me if I'm missing something stupid; but I see an inconsistency in the spec? Section 3.1 explains that column-width is handled like width for tables: it's an optimium value which can be distorted (in particular, it may be expanded to fill the available space in the column wrapper). Section 3.2 claims that "If both ‘column-width’ and ‘column-count’ have non-auto values, the integer value describes the maximum number of columns." However, section 3.4 defines and annotates an algorithm for calculating column widths which does not take account of the column-count value if column-width is also set, saying "If ‘column-width’ has a value other than ‘auto’, ‘column-count’ will be ignored". There are basically three 'sensible' implementations for when both values are specified: either you get the right number of columns and the wrong width, or the right width and the wrong number, or the right number and width, but them not filling the parent object properly. The specification prohibits the latter option (so Chrome is definitely wrong), but there seems to be an inconsistency between the other two. Thoughts? Happy‑melon 13:32, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

That's the problem with drafts; they are terribly inconsistent, and using both properties at the same time is likely to result in unwanted and unpredictable behaviour between browsers. I stand by my statement to not use both properties at the same time. — Edokter • Talk — 13:42, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

Main Page problem

I've noticed over the past week or so that my Main Page doesn't load. I have a shortcut on my bookmarks toolbar in Firefox to go to the main page. The page acts like it's going to load fine, but then stalls, and the status bar says "Read de.wikipedia.org". Why it's going to the German Wikpedia, I have no idea haha.

I've had the following code in my vector.js for upwards of a year and never had trouble with it, but somehow I expect this problem to be caused by the code: 

if (wgPageName == "Main_Page") {
  window.location = "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Main Page alternative (CSS Update)"; //My custom main page
}

If I just go to Wikipedia:Main Page alternative (CSS Update), it works perfectly, but for some reason, the javascript is triggering an error or something. The code is like mind-numbingly straightforward though... I have no clue. Any ideas?--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 22:46, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

I'm guessing you've checked that your main page bookmark is pointed to the right place...? (i.e. "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page") If that's OK, then does Firefox let you see the title of the page? Quite often, it will show you the page title (in the titlebar/tab bar) even when it hasn't loaded the rest of the page. — This, that, and the other (talk) 10:14, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
Yes, my bookmark goes to the right address. I even clicked on the link above just to make sure. In the address bar while the page is loading, FF displays the correct URL ("http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page"), but the status bar says "Read de.wikipedia.org". The tab I have it open in displays the same URL as the address bar (not "Welcome to Wikipedia" or whatever the usual title of the main page is)
Something weird that I just discovered, however, occurs if I type something new in the address bar while the main page is loading (e.g. change "Main_Page" to "Special:Watchlist"). The new page loads perfectly, but if after that page loads I look at the drop-down menu by the back button, the URL of the non-loaded main page shows up as "wyciwyg://26/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page". Any idea wtf a WYCIWYG protocol is?--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 17:32, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
Cleared your browser cache? Ale_Jrbtalk 17:58, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
Cleared cache, search forms, history, cookies – everything. I removed the javascript from my vector.js and loaded the main page, and it worked fine, so I'm definitely sure the problem is coming from the script. I tried some changes, too, like trying to reroute to "http://www.facebook.com" as a test, and got the same thing – "Read de.wikipedia.org" – even though I wasn't even trying to query anything related to Wikipedia. I then tried window.location.href just to see if it was a compatibility thing, and then I tried window.location.replace(). None of the above worked.
I tried running the page in Safari, and it worked perfectly. Also worked in Google Chrome and Opera. Looks like it's a Firefox issue.--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 18:19, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
In my experience, problems of this sort - especially where there are significant browser differences - are all to do with the order which the browsers load and execute JavaScript (it's different in virtually all of them). Basically, as you haven't hooked everything, the moment that part of the page is loaded, JavaScript is trying to set the window.location to somewhere else, but Firefox is clearly still trying to download stuff and retrieve other stuff from its cache and so on, and it just doesn't like it. Try using an onload hook around the entire thing, and it should start working properly. Ale_Jrbtalk 19:09, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
Ok, I wrapped the above code into a function and added it as an onloadhook, and it works now. It's a little less than ideal since now I have to wait for the regular Main Page to load and then it redirects, but that's no biggie. Is this perhaps a bug with Firefox that I should report?--Dudemanfellabra (talk) 20:29, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
It's up to you: doesn't bother me personally either way, as virtually all javascript is relevant to the loaded page. You could consider it, certainly. Ale_Jrbtalk 21:14, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

Red text for no reason

Resolved
 – Template issue, fixed. HeyMid (contribs) 13:18, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

Can someone explain what's going on here? I don't understand anything. However, I fixed the issue by adding </span>, but I'm still wondering why the text was red. In other words, I don't technically understand what's the problem. HeyMid (contribs) 12:51, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

Traced it back to User:Acather96/Christmas, that lacked closing <font> tags. — Edokter • Talk — 13:13, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
How did you find that out? HeyMid (contribs) 13:18, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
Looking at the source (via Chrome's Web Assist), I saw the entire lower half of the page riddled with <font color=red>, then found a post that transcluded that Christmas greet, looked at that and saw the unclosed tags. — Edokter • Talk — 13:24, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

Essay on tiny 40 expansion depth limit

I have drafted an essay, "WP:Avoiding MediaWiki expansion depth limit" to begin dealing with the MediaWiki (1.16) severely restricted limit of 40 levels for nested templates and if-else nesting. That essay begins to explain the problem for a wide range of readers, as a desperate effort to handle this unbelievable, miniscule limit of 40 levels of nested if-else logic (which restricts the nesting of templates). While it is occasionally good to dwell on extreme efficiencies of markup coding techniques, the creation of that essay is just a last-resort effort to defuse the problem. Limiting conditional logic to 40 levels (in this century) is just mindboggling ("Someone please update the 1970s punchcard which has limit=40, perhaps having dimpled chad "0" at 400, and re-submit the MediaWiki software to the cardreader"). I am still hoping someone, anyone, can "bump" the expansion depth limit to 100, or at least 60, levels of nested if-else logic. Naturally, many major templates on Wikipedia have been written with no clue that a totally debilitating limit existed (who would even imagine 40 pitiful levels), which can make templates simply generate incorrect results, with absolutely no warning to the readers (see essay examples about: {str_len|123456789...} ). I have already begun notifying some major template talk-pages about the depth-limit problems, and rewriting those templates. I think this will be an easy crisis to avert. -Wikid77 (talk) 20:16, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

P.S. The MediaWiki software is, otherwise, very powerful: a single #switch can have more than 1,400 branches (as in Template:Convert/date which checks 4 formats for each of 366 days in one #switch). Also, when {Convert} is modified, then over 325,000 articles can be reformatted within 5 hours (while also recomputing measurement conversions in each of the 325,000 pages). The limit of 40 if-else nesting is the Achilles heel in the vastly powerful preprocessor for the MediaWiki markup language. -Wikid77 00:42, 21 December 2010 (UTC)
You do understand that a depth of 40 nested if-else conditionals is not really "tiny", right? That's potentially 240 parse tree nodes, which is quite a bit. Moreover, even though it would be rare to actually generate so many parse tree nodes from real code, there are WP:BEANSish reasons why the parser has to assume that the worst case scenario is a real worry. To be honest, the long-term solution is going to be adding Lua scripting to MediaWiki as a replacement for the current half-baked ParserFunctions. Until that happens there will always be problems. — Gavia immer (talk) 20:33, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
Well, 40 is small for our users. On the surface 40 might seem like a lot: a teenager probably thinks a 40-year-old has lived many years, but at age 39, then 40 years doesn't seem like the end of life. In real-world applications, a guarded command structure of 40 levels would be very limited, such as when implementing a decision tree using simple, nested if-else-if-else logic. Not all branches are full: some decisions could require checking 35 "pre-conditions" before processing a 6-level result (total: 41). Several of us had abandoned hope of creating "super-smart" templates, due to fears they could not be used without exceeding the expansion limit. Now we realize when if-logic is not deeply nested, then a super-smart template could make 250 clever, rapid, if-then decisions and keep running; part of it could check dozens of values in a #switch as incurring only +1 level of nesting (regardless of total branches in the #switch). Please note that some template editors have even selected nation codes by comparing nations as flag-image templates (rather than comparing names of nations!). I was stunned that nations had to have the same flag+width+height+name structure to match. The actual complexity of Wikipedia's real-world applications has been a challenge for keeping templates simple. That is why I suggested an expansion limit of 60, for now, to see if any other problems are released. Meanwhile, people need to avoid problems by reducing the if-else nesting. -Wikid77 00:42, 21 December 2010 (UTC)
I have also commented, but at WT:Avoiding MediaWiki expansion depth limit. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:44, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
  • I am creating some unnested utility templates, for use inside large templates (some infoboxes), where typical templates such as {{str_len|0.1234567}} with depth 9, would add too many levels of nesting, when 1 or 2 levels would have fit. -Wikid77 (talk) 14:09, 23 December 2010, revised 11:49, 26 December 2010 (UTC)
  • Some of the new unnested templates are:
· {{strlen_short}} - to handle string length 0-50, with 2 expansion levels, not 9 as {{str_len}}.
· {{strfind_short}} - find string using 5 levels rather than 18 depth of {{str_find}}.
For details, see: Template talk:Str_find. -Wikid77 19:49, 28 December 2010 (UTC)
You're aware that the reason that the depth is so low, and the reason that the StringFunctions extension is not enabled, is because the system administrators (e.g. Tim Starling) don't want us to start implementing parsers withing wikicode, right? If they wanted, the devs could turn on native "len" and "pos" functions with a simple configuration change. But they have rejected that idea. — Carl (CBM · talk) 20:05, 28 December 2010 (UTC)
  • Aha! I thought so. I've always suspected there was an evil parser cabal, the Lexical Alliance of Language Resistors (LALR) who are planning to rewrite "David Beckham" in FootballerJava. We only have 1.5 million articles about sports (so far), but imagine what could be done, generating articles in FootballerJava! ...an article for every person who ever kicked a ball, each with a navbox linking 100,000 other teenagers, yes: nothing less than total wikiworld domination (just kidding). But, seriously, there are over 478,600 uses of {{str_len}} using 9 expansion levels, plus when counting {str_left} & {str_find}, there are over 2.4 million transclusions, so we know users intend to proliferate string templates beyond 3 million times. Anyway, I just now created redirect "token scanner" (and the plot thickens, Viva LALR!). -Wikid77 (talk) 15:12, 29 December 2010 (UTC)
  • I have also created Template:Xifeq, Template:Xifnoteq and Template:Xifexpr as quick if-logic functions to bypass glitches in #ifeq & #ifexpr. I think their expansion depth is only 3 2 levels deep, and they are very fast: they could be used anywhere there is a fear of auto-indentation by "#" or colon ":" (or star "*" or semicolon ";") at the start of data. -Wikid77 19:42, 2 January 2011 (UTC), revised 06:11, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Automatic Re-submission when there is a "Loss of session data"

This pertains to the message I sometimes get when I hit "save": Sorry! We could not process your edit due to a loss of session data I want to know if we could make a simple javascript fix to automatically hit save again, when the first attempt fails. My hypothetical JavaScript function would only work after the first failed attempt (to avoid an endless loop of failed saves). It would be nice to have this 'on' as default, so that new users would not have to deal with this. Tim1357 talk 16:11, 2 January 2011 (UTC)

This is a MediaWiki security feature. If disabled, I could add code to your /vector.js and hijack your account if you went to a specially crafted URL. The only way your JavaScript might be safe is if it properly checks the HTTP referer to enforce a same-domain policy. — Dispenser 18:17, 2 January 2011 (UTC)
See our article Cross-site request forgery for an explanation. The "Prevention" section can explain why we use randomly-generated tokens rather than referrer checks. PleaseStand (talk) 20:53, 2 January 2011 (UTC)

Template:Convert/sround

Can someone see if this template can be fixed ? Greatly appreciated. Mlpearc powwow 16:23, 2 January 2011 (UTC)

Do you have an example of it not working. The template is intended to be used as part of {{Convert}} rather than on it own. In particular it expects a parameter which causes errors to be displayed when the template page is displayed.--Salix (talk): 20:52, 2 January 2011 (UTC)
No, Silly me I was just assuming it was broke because of the page display but, thank you for clearing that up for me Mlpearc powwow 21:56, 2 January 2011 (UTC)

Template:Help Out

Little help at Template:Help Out? I can't get a couple of ifexists (re popular pages / cleanup listings) to play nice in detecting wikiproject subpages - they should be working in the template transclusion at WP:VEN and I can't figure out why not. Thanks, Rd232 talk 11:57, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

Fixed. Don't wikilink ifexist pagechecks, and use the fullpagename (with namespace) instead of the pagename. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:27, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
Cool, thanks. Rd232 talk 00:30, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

Big redirects

Since when has the target of redirects been written in large font (on the redirect page itself)? It's happening on all redirects, broken ones too. I never saw any discussion to implement this? I'm not familiar with the CSS system, so can somebody explain? — Train2104 (talk • contribs • count) 21:46, 2 January 2011 (UTC)

I did that. The reason being quite simple; we always had big redirect links in Monobook, but they were suddenly gone with the change to Vector, which is an oversight in my opinion, as it broke the formatting of both real redirects as those made with {{Soft redirect}}. I even reported a bug for it. — Edokter • Talk — 21:50, 2 January 2011 (UTC)
It's ugly :P. I changed it back in my personal skin, though, so it doesn't bother me any more! /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 02:15, 3 January 2011 (UTC)
It's how I remember it being for many years - I remember being surprised when it changed to the smaller font, and certainly prefer the larger style (though these pages would be less cryptic if they contained a sentence or two of explanation instead of just an arrow and a link).--Kotniski (talk) 09:24, 3 January 2011 (UTC)
Though I've just checked and I'm still seeing the smaller font. Has this really been done?--Kotniski (talk) 09:26, 3 January 2011 (UTC)
Purge your cache. Updating global CSS files may take up to 30 days to become visible. — Edokter • Talk — 11:24, 3 January 2011 (UTC)
And I still believe that a single link to Wikipedia:Soft redirect will suffice for those that want more information, and not distract from the main link. — Edokter • Talk — 11:27, 3 January 2011 (UTC)
Good point about the purging - yes, I'm seeing it now. As regards the other comment - I don't see your thinking at all about this soft redirect thing - I've explained at the template talk page why your minimalist approach is simply unhelpful to readers without providing any gain. Though here I had in mind ordinary redirects, not "soft" ones - we could have a short explanatory sentence there too (though perhaps the words "redirect page" above the link suffice).--Kotniski (talk) 11:33, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

(For those who may be interested, the discussion referred to above is at Template talk:Soft redirect.)--Kotniski (talk) 11:35, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

Ctrl-z (undo) and Ctrl-y (redo) no longer working reliably

Hi, I've noticed recently that Ctrl-z (undo) and Ctrl-y (redo) no longer work reliably for me in Wikipedia's edit window. Sometimes I get one or two levels of undo, sometimes none at all. Ctrl-y rarely works, if ever. These keys work reliably and as expected in the edit windows of all other websites I have tried, and in all other applications I have tried. I'm pretty sure they used to work fine in Wikipedia too. It's a real pain. Is anyone else seeing similar problems? Does anyone have any idea what the cause might be? I am using IE8 and XP. 86.185.72.219 (talk) 22:59, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

Hello. I am using I.E.8 and Vista. I am trying the Ctrl-Z and Ctrl-Y functions in the edit box as I type this message, and I am having no problems at all. Maybe it is something about your computer, e.g. the keyboard or the operating system? Maybe someone else can help you. I am able to undo this whole message completely (Ctrl-Z) and restore it (Ctrl-Y) with no problems. One thing you could be experiencing is that you may be editing the message in the middle or something, which may cause undo to stop at a later version sometimes. Clicking the "Show preview" button causes the browser to load a new page and thus erases all undo levels that you had before you clicked "Show preview". Regards. —[|Retro00064|☎talk|✍contribs|] 01:54, 4 January 2011 (UTC)
Thanks, no it's nothing to do with "Show preview". I understand that undo/redo do not work if the page has been reloaded. 86.174.163.28 (talk) 12:35, 4 January 2011 (UTC).

Removal of Template:Expand

So, the DRV has endorsed a removal of {{Expand}}. It's currently in the Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Holding cell|TFD queue]] with the following instructions:

Each transclusion should be reviewed to determine whether (1) the article is actually a stub and should have a stub template, using either {{Stub}} or the appropriate stub category; (2) the article is fatally incomplete such that it causes a major content problem (sentences contain blanks or visible comments asking for information, tables are visibly incomplete, article ends so abruptly that cleanup is required) and should be identified with {{Incomplete}}; (3) specific information is missing, causing a serious content problem, and the expand template can be appropriately replaced by {{Missing information non-contentious}}; (4) the expand template should be replaced with one or more {{Expand section}} templates; or (5) {{Empty section}} templates; or (6) no template is indicated.

It seems so far I'm the only one to knock down this queue. Anyone willing to help? Ten Pound Hammer, his otters and a clue-bat • (Otters want attention) 05:47, 4 January 2011 (UTC)

You are kidding? We agreed to delete Expand? On the grounds that there are five more precise templates? <facepalm>
Yes, all AWB users are helping remove expand form stub articles,, so there ya go.
Rich Farmbrough, 11:13, 4 January 2011 (UTC).
And about 3000 instances have been deleted recently. I hope that was Hammer under the rules of the holding cell, but I fear many have simply been zapped. Rich Farmbrough, 11:27, 4 January 2011 (UTC).
So how do you know that 3,000 instances have been deleted? Where can I follow the deletion process? HeyMid (contribs) 11:58, 4 January 2011 (UTC)
There were 18,000 +there are now 15,000+. You can use "what links here" at the template, then select the transclusion count. Or click here as we say in the interwebs. Rich Farmbrough, 14:15, 4 January 2011 (UTC).
I removed about 2,000 pages with Expand in stubs and/or converted Expand|section to Expand section recently. Check User_talk:Yobot/Archive_2#Expand_tag_cleanup. -- Magioladitis (talk) 14:19, 4 January 2011 (UTC)
Ah good. I thought that you had done that a long time ago, perhaps the previous deletion vote, in March which was overturned at DRV. Rich Farmbrough, 14:33, 4 January 2011 (UTC).
I did it again recently so we have an idea of the actual status. -- Magioladitis (talk) 14:34, 4 January 2011 (UTC)
...and I hope we can replace Expand section with Empty section when applicable soon. -- Magioladitis (talk) 14:36, 4 January 2011 (UTC)
Finished by replacing Expand in sections and removing it from stubs. 14,000 pages still there. -- Magioladitis (talk) 00:33, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

Commons icons gone on images hosted at Commons

To my surprise, the Commons icons appear to be gone. Ever since I can remember, whenever I would click on an image hosted at Commons, the page would appear with the "This is a file from the Wikimedia Commons..." notice below the image and the little Commons logo in the top right corner; clicking this link would go to the Commons description page. Although the "This is a file" notice is still present, the logo is absent from the top right corner, and I can't find any discussion about its removal. I doubt that this is relevant, but...I'm running IE 9 and the Monobook skin. Nyttend (talk) 02:32, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

Someone forgot the "1=" in this edit to MediaWiki:Sharedupload-desc-here. It should be "{{file other|1=<div ..." As it stands, the template is being passed a parameter named "<div class", which of course it doesn't recognize. Anomie⚔ 03:03, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
Thanks for identifying the problem! I copied your change to the page youu linked, and it appears to be working properly now. Nyttend (talk) 04:08, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

Large task with importing Ref Toolbar into Wikisource.

Although Wikisource will not use this gadget the way which Wikipedia does, I believe that as the library expands and different versions of texts are created, there needs to be a better way to systematically disambiguate these texts. Using the ref toolbar will allow for this to clearly be shown (as in a different year or publisher of a popular text). Disambiguation pages there typically disambiguate minimally without uniformity. I can export *simple* templates from Wikipedia, but not something of this magnitude. I need help with moving the Ref toolbar gadget into Wikisource and making some minor modifications. I know this is not a quick fix, but this will greatly improve Wikisource navigation for the future. Example:

I see we've discussed adding Facebook Like and other social media buttons before and rejected it as being a bit too close to officially endorsing them.

How about this: add a series of Gadgets that users can include via their preferences. This is scalable (additional gadgets), user-selectable, and thus less vulnerable to sping abuse, opt-in not opt-out, and would I think please a significant number of our users who do want to be able to use social bookmarking and other services in conjunction with Wikipedia. Guy (Help!) 01:29, 2 January 2011 (UTC)

As one who extremely strongly opposes America's (and maybe the world-wide) obsession with Facebook and Twitter, it is hard for me to support any action that would make Wikipedia part of the obsession. But if we have to do anything like that, I would strongly support your proposal. It would be the right way to go in that case, by allowing the F. and T., etc. users to get what they want as far as the social networking functions, and at the same time allow users like me who would not really like seeing it to disable the functions for their respective user accounts. [|Retro00064|☎talk|✍contribs|] 01:40, 2 January 2011 (UTC)
I'm neutral on the issue of inclusion (edging toward disdain for the ubiquitous Facebook "Like" buttons on websites), but perhaps the use of such function should be reserved for those in the autoconfirmed usergroup, to avoid drive-by campaigns...for example, and assuming I understand the functionality correctly, some organisation/person/thing may ask fans to register and hit "Like" for their article, never to log in again. It wouldn't stop concerted efforts, but might stop the more casual ones. — Huntster (t @ c) 02:19, 2 January 2011 (UTC)
I fully agree with Huntster's concerns. [|Retro00064|☎talk|✍contribs|] 02:36, 2 January 2011 (UTC)
If we add such functionality but restrict it to autoconfirmed users, we'll probably find a big increase in the number of autoconfirmed users who register just to be able to use those toys. If that happpens, is it a good thing? (genuine question: I dunno the answer). --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 09:16, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
I don't think we need this. Like, really, because there's potential for abuse and ... it's not that useful. (Also, I hate Facebook, too.) But if really necessary, a limited script/gadget is the most we should do. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 02:18, 3 January 2011 (UTC)
Glad to see a fellow Facebook opposer. In this world that is obsessed with Facebook and Twitter, sometimes it can seem like you are the one oddball out of the whole mob. :-( I do not see why we need social networking functions either, but if we just hav eto have them, then as suggested above, we should make it optional for each user, instead of pressing it on people who do not want it. [|Retro00064|☎talk|✍contribs|] 02:23, 3 January 2011 (UTC)
I simply have one question — how is any of this relevant to building and maintaining an encyclopedia? I can't see any reason to spend time and resources adding social media elements to an encyclopedia. Nyttend (talk) 02:28, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
Yeah, cause sharing links will never help in sharing knowledge.... </short sighted ness>—TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:04, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
I've heard rumors that the foundation doesn't want to allow Facebook (and other, similar social media) buttons because of conflicts with the privacy policy (i.e. allowing third party sites to know who is seeing what pages, etc.). Would anyone know if this is a real issue? Killiondude (talk) 09:25, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
This is an issue for the Facebook Like button yes. A normal simple share button doesn't have such problems, with any of the share services. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:23, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
Apart from privacy, it would facilitate off-wiki canvassing. Someone spots an article tagged for AFD, and in a few keystrokes they post it to their friends on facebook with a brief msg seeking support. It's not that hard to do now, but I don't like the idea of making such abuse easier. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 06:19, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Files without license template not being tagged by a bot

How is it possible that files missing a license template have not been tagged for more than one year? Examples: File:Cross-linking DA.png, File:DAstepgrowthpolymer.png, File:Disulfidebridge.png ({{PD-chem}} would apply in these cases). --Leyo 10:23, 4 January 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure if we currently have a bot that does this, but bots in general only look at new uploads, or files that were recently changed. They don't traverse the entire collection at random time intervals. So when an upload has initially been missed, it will require human intervention. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:51, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
That might be the reason. Therefore, it might be best to make an inquiry for legacy problems at WP:BTR. --Leyo 10:25, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

Bot to reorder refs

Is there a bot that will go through an article and make sure the refs are in order? Such as, instead of [11][2][38] it'll reorder them [2][11][38]? Kay thanks! Basket of Puppies 05:40, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

Some editors intentionally sort footnotes by importance, rather than by number. So bots can't make this sort of change automatically, because the order might be chosen intentionally. It takes a human to review the sources and decide on the right order. — Carl (CBM · talk) 05:43, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
Is there an optional bot or script that can accomplish this task? Makes sense to not have bots doing it systematically for the reason you cited. Basket of Puppies 05:48, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
AWB performed this change as general fixes last time I looked. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 10:19, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

svg bug?

Please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kepler_orbits.svg

Uploading this file including some <text> <\text> tags resulted in that the old version without these tags was kept. Making another try gave the same result for the "current" file but the previous version still available in the "history" now suddenly has this desired contents. But reverting to version "10:06, 5 January" the text again disappears! It is just the "current version" for which the text is gone, as soon as it has gone to "history" it is there. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Stamcose (talk • contribs) 10:57, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

Now it is OK! Seems to have been some processing time delay problems for the rendering and/or browser refresh!

Stamcose (talk) 12:05, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

Converting template to wrapper

Please help See Wikipedia:Templates_for_discussion/Log/2010_November_2#Template:Cleanup-section. Thanks. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 02:49, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Consistent search bar width

The search bar on the left isn't as wide (y-axis) as the one on the right here. On some computers the small search bar makes the letter g look like the letter q. Marcus Qwertyus 21:06, 2 January 2011 (UTC)

The default skin has no searchbar on the left :D —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:15, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
I am using vector. The search bar on the left appears whenever you misspell something. (Click link). Marcus Qwertyus 19:30, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

R from move

Could we get Template:R from move to be added automatically to the redirect page? When the editor has to go back and add the template it makes it impossible to reverse the move without administrator assistance. If someone made a bot that stalked the move log and added this template there would be no way to reverse mistaken or bad faith page moves. Marcus Qwertyus 05:42, 4 January 2011 (UTC)

Does the template even serve any purpose? I find the templates/categories people put on redirects to be of very marginal usefulness anyway, but surely we categorize redirects in terms of the relationship of the redirected term to the target term (alternative spelling, form without diacritics, etc.), not in terms of how the redirect came to be created?--Kotniski (talk) 11:09, 4 January 2011 (UTC)
Its status is being discussed at Wikipedia:Templates for discussion#Template:R from move. ―cobaltcigs 11:37, 4 January 2011 (UTC)
And just for completeness. It is currently not possible to make edits at the same time that you make a move. Such would require changes in the software. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:43, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
The software automatically does the #REDIRECT [[]] part automatically. It shouldn't be too hard to modify it. Marcus Qwertyus 03:35, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
It isn't, but it is hardcoded atm, so it isn't as simple as just changing a MediaWiki: message either. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:05, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Contrib page glitch

There's a contrib page glitch showing 'January 20 2010' as the latest change date! (at least for Special:Contributions/Majorly...Perseus (talk) 20:57, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

Are you sure that Majorly has edited since then? Anomie⚔ 21:21, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
It's not a glitch. He hasn't edited since then. Gary King (talk · scripts) 03:40, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
Then who made those edits? How do you know it's wrong? OrangeDog (τ • ε) 11:52, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
Oops, I forgot it was 2011. Sorry. 173.49.140.141 (talk) 19:17, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Lupin tool

I'm trying to install Lupin/Anti-vandal tool, but im stuck. There are seemingly contradicting manuals for installing it. Can you help out please? Someone65 (talk) 07:27, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

You seem to have installed it fine. Purge your cache and then go to User:Lupin/Filter recent changes and wait. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 17:37, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Languages on mobile version

Is there any reason you can't switch languages in the mobile (m.wikipedia.org) version of wikipedia? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 115.64.229.34 (talk) 09:33, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Presumably the list of interwiki links for each article (and the main page) is omitted to save bandwidth. I suppose if you know the localized title you can put the language prefix before the “m” e.g. de.m.wikipedia.org, but as the proud owner of a “dumb phone” I have no further advice to offer. ―cobaltcigs 14:34, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
Not a bandwidth issue. More a usability issue (how to present it in the UI without it becoming really messy), and a "never got around to it"-issue. And since the Foundation is considering totally redoing the mobile server again, I don't think Hampton will be keen to do any work on it atm. I myself are really busy as well, so status-quo will probably persist until more mobile developers surface, or until the foundation fills their "mobile developer"-position that they currently have open. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:11, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

White space issue with template

Resolved
 – See Template:Bug, but putting the ifeq template before the parameter works. HeyMid (contribs) 16:48, 2 January 2011 (UTC)

I have recently been experimenting with a template I've been working on for some time. It's this one. Whenever I substitute it, the background color code appears below where it says "background". The issue seems to be that it's substituting an if/ifeq/switch template. I don't know why this is the result. If someone can explain why this happens, it would be helpful. Thanks in advance. HeyMid (contribs) 14:19, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

It's because the value starts with a '#' character; it's a manifestation of Template:Bug. Anomie⚔ 17:22, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
So nothing can be done about it? I think the problem is that "#" is interpreted by the MediaWiki software as a list or something, so therefore makes an unexpected line break. HeyMid (contribs) 17:28, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
Update I think the only current solution is to place a "#" before the if/ifeq/switch template. HeyMid (contribs) 17:35, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
  • Moving "#" outside the #ifeq also worked in my testing. In the future, for data prefixed by markup indentation codes, remember we have copied Meta Template:ifeq (also Template:ifexpr) to enwiki, so those templates can handle a leading space which you would put before data having "#", ":", "*" and such. If someone had passed a "#" hex color parameter as {{{color|#f8eaba}}}, then using the template {{ifeq|}} with an extra leading-space (rather than parser function {{#ifeq:}} ) should have worked as expected to handle the "#" prefix in if-logic processing:
                  xx={{ifeq|1|1| {{{color|#f8eaba}}} }} → {{xifeq|1|1| #f8eaba }}
    Note the leading space " #f8eaba". I don't know the overhead of using template {ifeq}, but it works fine for low-use templates. I am getting tired of "defensive templating" where we have to rewrite templates to expect worst-case MediaWiki-bug logic, to handle any possible future re-glitch in the MediaWiki software, but that has been the reality. In order to keep supporting the zillions of readers coming to WP (linked from Google searches), then we have to anti-spaz our templates to defend from the glitch-of-the-week problems. Remember it could be worse: MediaWiki could be saving the edit-buffer to the wrong article name on every 17th save, but it doesn't (yet). -Wikid77 18:11, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
However, there is an issue with this solution, though: it would only be possible to use hexadecimal color codes. Another solution is to use "&#35;", instead of "#", but then, if manual color codes should be possible, the users should be aware that they should use "&#35;" instead of the logic "#". HeyMid (contribs) 18:38, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
  • WAIT, CRISIS SOLVED: There is no problem when the if-logic is coded using super-fast Meta template {ifeq} with a leading-space before the parameter, as " {{{color|cc}}}". So, it will work as follows:
                   "{{ifeq|x|x| {{{color|#f8eaba}}}}}" → "{{xifeq|x|x| #f8eaba|}}"
There are so many options, sometimes the simplest choice is overlooked: just use quick template {ifeq} with a leading-space before each CSS style {parameter} inside the if-logic. -Wikid77 (talk) 16:18, 2 January 2011 (UTC)
Understood, but what if I wanted to subst the ifeq template, then? HeyMid (contribs) 16:30, 2 January 2011 (UTC)
 Fixed.[15] Putting the ifeq template before the parameter itself worked. Thanks for providing me that solution! HeyMid (contribs) 16:48, 2 January 2011 (UTC)
Looks like the new template {{xifeq}} solves this problem. OrangeDog (τ • ε) 10:23, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
That template puts nowiki tags after each bracket. I prefer the solution I used at first. HeyMid (contribs) 16:45, 7 January 2011 (UTC)

Moved a template, problem editing it

I recently moved the name of a template [16] so it better reflected the content, but now when I go and click on "e" to edit it, the redirect text comes up rather than the actual content, and I don't seem to be able to edit it. Have I followed the correct procedure in moving the template? Thanks. Eldumpo (talk) 15:03, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

You also have to update |name= to {{Navbox}}, like this. Anomie⚔ 15:10, 3 January 2011 (UTC)
Thanks for responding on this. Eldumpo (talk) 15:22, 3 January 2011 (UTC)
I think it would be nice to have some variable to identify page of origin as opposed to page being viewed cf. {{PAGENAME}}/{{FULLPAGENAME}}. ―cobaltcigs 14:39, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
Or rather something like {{TEMPLATENAME}} to identify the final template in a chain of meta-transclusions and obviate the need to tell a navbox template what its own title is. ―cobaltcigs 14:56, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
So on Template:Periodic table, that usage of {{navbox}}, is that "the final template in a chain of meta-transclusions" (and hence you would want the vde links on the navbox to point to http://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/index.php?title=Template:Periodic_table&action=edit)?? If you think it should point to http://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/index.php?title=Template:PeriodicTablesFooter&action=edit instead, how would you identify this case to the parser? :P Happy‑melon 16:27, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
I guess he means {PAGEONWHICHTHISMAGICWORDACTUALLYAPPEARSASTEXT}. Rich Farmbrough, 16:22, 7 January 2011 (UTC).

And the value of {{ {{template-which-returns-"PAGEONWHICHTHISMAGICWORDACTUALLYAPPEARSASTEXT"-as-a-string}} }}?? :P Don't forget that the parser performs breadth-first expansion to optimise branch pruning, so in the example: 

== Page 1 ==

{{Page 2 
  | 1 = {{PAGEONWHICHTHISMAGICWORDACTUALLYAPPEARSASTEXT}} 
  | 2 = {{PAGEONWHICHTHISMAGICWORDACTUALLYAPPEARSASTEXT}} 
}}
== Page 2 ==

Foo {{{1}}} {{Page 3 | 1 = {{{1}}} | 2 = {{{2}}} }}
== Page 3 ==

Foo {{{1}}} Bar {{{2}}} Baz

The magic word is not expanded until it is used as a parameter, at which point it's cached. So the first instance of the magic word would be first expanded in the context of page 2, and cached (and so would be the same when passed through to page 3); while the second usage would not be expanded until the context of page 3. I think... Happy‑melon 14:16, 8 January 2011 (UTC)

Dumps

What's the bugzilla url for the dead dumps? I am amazed that there has still been no fixage, and would like to see what the hold-up is. Rich Farmbrough, 11:09, 4 January 2011 (UTC).

Do you mean the database dumps? They have already been fixed. – Allen4names 17:04, 4 January 2011 (UTC)

The primary problem (dataset1 dieing) has been fixed and data was moved to dataset2, however they are in the process of re-writing the software the generates the dumps in order to allow parallel processing of the same dump creation. ΔT The only constant 17:08, 4 January 2011 (UTC)

Oh, well it would be really really nice if, while the software is being re-written, the old software could be allowed to run. We are three months behind with the dumps now. How do I ask "them"? Rich Farmbrough, 18:23, 4 January 2011 (UTC).
"2010-11-10 04:30:16 enwiki: Dump in progress" from the dump index linked about. Dumps don't magically happen over night. Peachey88 (T · C) 00:05, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
That dump is stuck on 87,242,000 revisions, and has been for some time. Dumps indeed don't happen overnight, but they shouldn't take infinite time either... :D Happy‑melon 12:25, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
if you look at the top of the page you will see "process idle", as Delta said, the dump was interrupted by a hardware failure, and hasn't been restarted because someone[who?] is writing new software[when?]. Rich Farmbrough, 18:33, 7 January 2011 (UTC).

How can I enable the prefix search filter?

The search box used here and found on some wikimedia sites is very nifty! Sadly I cannot figure out how to get the prefix search filter term "prefix: " to work. I have installs running on MW15 and MW16, but I have no separate search engine extensions like lucene installed. Any pointers how to archive this would be appreciated.

--Ovoned (talk) 16:52, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia does use lucene. I'm not 100% sure, but i think that prefix: is lucene specific. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:28, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
Alright. If someone has experience with the matter or additional tips how to go about to setup lucene with mediawiki specifically in order to get the prefix search filter working, please post it here or on my talk page and you'll have my thanks :) --Ovoned (talk) 19:04, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
mw:Extension:Lucene-search --rainman (talk) 00:32, 8 January 2011 (UTC)

Is this a bug?

Why does this link truncate the period at the end?

http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vancouver,_B.C.

It only seems to work when put in brackets:

Vancouver, B.C.

-- Ϫ 18:59, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Because people often type links then place a period immediately after it if the link is the end of a sentence. For instance, "You should visit this website: http://example.com/." I assume that this was common enough that the developers decided to truncate the ending period, which I've always wondered why it wasn't done sooner and more often on other websites as URLs rarely end in periods, while people often end sentences with periods which become part of URLs and therefore break them. Gary King (talk · scripts) 19:51, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
Actually almost any character can be in a URL, you have to make a guess at some point. Usually . and a space char are good indicators, but as long as people paste unencoded URIs into their edits windows, you will always guess with less than 100% accuracy. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:14, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
So, is there another way of encoding http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vancouver,_B.C. so that Mediawiki formats the link without truncating the period? -- Ϫ 09:34, 7 January 2011 (UTC)
Either way, I've now created a redirect from the truncated page, so problem solved. -- Ϫ 09:44, 7 January 2011 (UTC)
You hit on it above: use brackets, e.g. http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vancouver,_B.C.. Or you could percent-encode the final period: http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vancouver,_B.C%2e. Anomie⚔ 12:12, 7 January 2011 (UTC)

Moving files to Commons

The CommonsHelper tool that's used to move files to Commons doesn't seem to work. Anybody else has this problem? Rehman 08:43, 7 January 2011 (UTC)

Tool

I installed Lupin/Anti-vandal tool, but when i go to User:Lupin/Filter recent changes and wait, the page stays blank. I waited 10 minutes and gave up waiting. Someone65 (talk) 10:09, 7 January 2011 (UTC)

Is the search box located at the top-right of your screen? If so, you are using the "vector" skin, not the "monobook" skin, and you should place the code in User:Someone65/vector.js. Note that Lupin's tool is an old one (from 2005 or so), so it does not do things such as excluding edits by non-admin rollbackers or implementing "fake" rollback correctly, although I made a version that implemented the former feature (ask me for the link if it is also a problem for you). You might need to disable pop-up blocking for Wikipedia, as the tool opens new tabs. If you make 50 or so reverts, warning the vandalizing user each time, you could then request rollback permission to use some of the other, more recent tools such as Huggle or Igloo. Good luck. PleaseStand (talk) 12:30, 7 January 2011 (UTC)
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_83&oldid=784997967"