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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This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (technical).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.

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Deleting an account

I saw a "how to" help headline on the subject of deleting a Wikipedia account, but I got disconnected from the page and now I can not find the topic anywhere. Please help me by letting me know how to delete my Wikipedia account or telling me where I can find the information. Thank you.

Wikipedia accounts cannot be deleted: this is a function of how Mediawiki works, and is intended to make it impossible for edits to be "orphaned". (It's a pain and a pest because there are heaps of bogus accounts which litter Special:ListUsers like a plague, but you have to take the rough with the smooth…) You can have your user page deleted and locked down, but that's as far as you can go. Sorry. HTH HAND —Phil | Talk 09:45, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

SVG files, borders and skins

Hi we're having a problem on Flag of Australia where SVG images in a <gallery></gallery> appear to have borders in the Classic Skin but not in Monobook. Is there a way to have the borders appear in both skins? Or can anyone offer advice on how to force borders to appear in a gallery?--nixie 03:00, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Redirect are acting weird

All redirects I am encountering are going straight to the 'no-redirect' version. --hello, i'm a member | talk to me! 00:50, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Redirects aren't working for me either :( - Hahnchen 00:58, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Confirming. Developers made a booboo! — Ambush Commander^(Talk) 00:58, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Same problem here, on both Firefox and IE. Dave6 00:59, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Problem is totally not browser related. Redirects are handled internally, not through HTTP status codes. — Ambush Commander^(Talk) 01:02, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Indeed, it's rather annoying. I guess I do get to realize just how many of the pages I visit are redirects. --Spring Rubber 01:00, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Appears to be fixed. Thanks for the fast response, developers! --Spring Rubber 01:17, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Red or Blue (or brown)

I've had a quick look through the source code documentation, (and a quicker look through the source code), to try and find out how Wikimedia gets the size of an article to decide whether it is blue, brown (stub), or red.

I'm moving my personal wiki to a MySQL database, but my red/blue decider is much much slower than when i used files. At the moment i am using a query like this:

SELECT LENGTH(`articletext`) FROM `articles` WHERE `title`=\"Page i'm looking up\""

And i'm doing this for every link in a page. Red (if no result), empty colour (also red) if the len is <4, or blue (length > or = 4). This is very slow, for a page with 1000 links, it is ten times slower than grabbing the filesize from a flat text file. (5 sec vs. 0.5 sec)

I was thinking of adding another column to the table, with a static length in it (saved at page save). I thought this would save mysql the calcution for every link that the user sees. Wikipedia doesn't seem to have a length field in the cur table, so I was wondering how it does this.

Thanks a lot, Tristan Tristanb 23:05, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

Actually we do have a page_len field. This is needed because our text storage is flexible, and may include compressed or offsite text storage. --Brion 00:21, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Oh, thanks for that. I was looking at the 1.4 information on meta and couldn't find it. I've seen the table now on the cvs.

Tried adding the new field containing the size of the article in bytes, but it takes just as long as calculating length at runtime. I think i'll have to try loading everything into an array, and reading from that to minimise the number of SELECT statements I make. (Or just cope with it :-D).

Thanks again for your help! Tristanb 03:37, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Table that autosorts

Not sure if this was asked before. It would be great if we could create tables of information that auto-sort on a mentioned column. Can it be programmed in the software so that when the page gets loaded it will always sort the list and load it? Would be very useful when maintaining lists. - Ganeshk^T/_C\^@ 22:51, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

I don't believe that's the case, but in terms of adding and removing entries when maintaining a list, if the list is already sorted, it is trivial to keep it sorted. enochlau (talk) 04:27, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

I'm sure I've seen somewhere some javascript which will sort a table in place: you have to couple it with some other stuff which places sort "buttons" in the headers, but I don't seem to recall it's too onerous. This looks like a good place to start; here's another. I found a bunch via Clusty [1]. Besides, if it's javascript, it's all client-side anyways, so won't place any discernable extra strain on the servers. HTH HAND —Phil | Talk 09:40, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Edit in place

Wouldn't it be handy if the Media-Wiki software implemented edit-in-place? Instead of looking for an edit button, one could just click a paragraph and extend it. Especially useful for correcting spelling errors. If the implementation is done cleanly, I think this could mean a decline in server load (no need to brew entire edit-pages)--Joris Gillis 10:50, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

It would probably mean an increase in the server load, if it meant saving more often (all saves must go to the master database host, while reads can come from the slave database hosts). --cesarb 15:07, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

I meant that, for an equal amount of changes, the edit-in-place technique would require less resources. Of course, the edit-in-place would stimulate all users to do changes more often. But I don't think that's a disadvantage;-)--Joris Gillis 15:21, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

If it was a javascript function, it would probably reduce the server load. Shardsofmetal 18:53, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

As I understand it, the server performance is mostly database-limited, so I don't think it would make much difference. Some, maybe, but nothing dramatic. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 19:36, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

Ok, apart from the server impact, is there no-one that likes the idea? Suppose you would just double-click a paragraph, and the paragraph transforms in an edit-box. No need to wait for the edit page to load. Just stay in the article and do your edit quickly. Demo: click the paragraph.--Joris Gillis 19:49, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

It's probably more like "the current way works fine, and nobody can be bothered to implement it; the developers already have their hands full". If, OTOH, someone made a working demo using only your user javascript and user CSS, and other people started using it, it would have more chance. --cesarb 21:21, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

This isn't a new idea, there's been discussion and even a few implementations over the last few years. It's generally thought to be a useful extension to wiki principles. Indeed, Ward Cunningham has said that he would have made wiki WYSIWYG from the start if he was able to. The main problem is round-trip HTML<->wikitext conversion. We can convert wikitext to HTML, there are plenty of WYSIWYG HTML editors around, but there is no way to convert the resulting HTML back to wikitext. -- Tim Starling 01:31, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

Ignoring server-load issues, you could set things up so that the wikitext for each paragraph was sent with the paragraph, as a hidden div or something like that. Templates would need careful handling though... Lupin|talk|popups 02:22, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia has a problem

Does anyone know what's up? I just got a string of these with and error unkown message. It said svr 3(2,3, or 4). Is this a server problem? WAvegetarian ^(talk) (email) ^(contribs) 19:22, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

Yes. It means (as the message should be saying) that it could not reach the database server. --cesarb 19:27, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

http://www.thewritingpot.com/wikistatus/ --Adrian Buehlmann 19:32, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

• Well, I don't know what is going on with Wikipedia but my user page Chef Clover doesn't show the user box pictures. And when I right click the picture, and then click show picture, and it wouldn't show the picture, no matter how many times i tried this! Does this have something to do with hackers or cookies or whatever? Please speak in normal English! Chef Clover 04:01, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

This appears to have been a temporary issue which is now resolved by the looks of it. Rob Church (talk) 15:31, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Okay. Great! Thank you! Chef Clover 22:02, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Using CVS

I read the page on meta about using CVS to download the most current MediaWiki version, but I did not understand. Can anybody simplify this for me. Thanks, Shardsofmetal 08:50, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

Is there a specific part you need clarification on? --TheParanoidOne 12:01, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

A couple of things.

• The program TortoiseCVS installed on widows XP, but did not add a link to start a program in the start menu, just the help and about links. Is there something I need to know in order to use CVS?
• Which files do I need to use MediaWiki 1.6?

Thanks, Shardsofmetal ^{[ Talk | Contribs ]} 16:52, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

TortoiseCVS integrates itself into the Windows explorer context menu, as mentioned on the TortoiseCVS page. Hence no application added to the start menu. Create yourself a folder to hold checked out code, and from within that folder, play around with the new TortoiseCVS context menu items. --TheParanoidOne 17:43, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

Concurrent Versions System — Ambush Commander^(Talk) 21:50, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

TortoiseCVS is a nice Windows wrapper for CVS. Once you've got it working, you'll want check out the phase3 module from (CVSROOT) :pserver:[email protected]:/cvsroot/wikipedia. Rob Church (talk) 15:28, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Special:DoubleRedirects bug

Look at it, then use an Offset of 500. It looks rather wacked out Sceptre ^(Talk) 18:22, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

Looking at the page, there are double listings, double redirects that aren't, etc. Someone has just fucked it up Sceptre ^(Talk) 21:29, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

Page is dead. I suppose a developer is looking into it. — Ambush Commander^(Talk) 23:36, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

Any way to contact a developer to fix the page? The redirects have been sorted, but it still gives (next 50) links Sceptre ^(Talk) 20:22, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

I recall Ashar did something with recaching special pages a while back, which might coincide with this. Page now shows no entries for me when I view it. Rob Church ^Talk 19:26, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

That's true, Robchurch, but look at the links on the page at the top. Although there are no DRs, you can see (next 50) as a link Sceptre ^(Talk) 20:58, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

Yep, that's borked. Rob Church (talk) 15:26, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Blocking

The current Special:Blockip page sucks just a wee bit. I'd like to improve it, but I can't just go off willy-nilly adding things, without asking you lot what you'd like to see. Asking for ideas? Yes, I have gone off the bat. Still, your thoughts, suggestions opinions will be welcomed at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Robchurch/Blocking - sign, please, so I know who to ask for more information on an interesting idea.

Ta, Rob Church (talk) 23:42, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

Contributions from before creation of account

On my talk page, User:Democritus claims that he created his account last month; this is confirmed by the creation log. Nevertheless, Democritus' contribution list shows four edits from 2002. How is this possible? Democritus would like these contributions to be removed from the list of his contributions. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 20:56, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

I believe that a user may have registered that address long ago in the dim and distant past. A software change, I believed, wiped out some of the records of names (or something along those lines), so a recent user could choose the same names and those edits from the history would be assigned to them. [[Sam Korn]] 21:04, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

/w/index.php doesn't check integrity of data before committing edit to article

• The problem: Here's how the bug can be recreated, and why it's actually a MediaWiki bug:

1. I started editing a section of the page.
2. At some point I wanted to "Show Preview". Obviously, I somehow clicked the "Save Page" button instead, unknowingly -- classic error.
3. However, right after clicking the button, I saw a typo in the (still displayed) edit window: so I had the reflex to immediately hit the ESC key (shortcut for the browser's Stop icon) in order to cancel the operation and edit a bit more.
4. But at this point, the browser had already started to POST the *first half* of the edit field's content, before it cancelled the sending operation (abruptly resetting the HTTP connexion).
5. When the POST was aborted (from my side), the partial edit that had been sent yet was commited to the article instead of being ignored, resulting in a corrupted (and apparently vandalized) section of the page.

IMO, MediaWiki should NEVER have accepted to commit to the database a half-sent contribution, whose POST operation was aborted and never completed, and thus whose integrity was undefined.

• A solution: Now, one really simple and reliable software solution is:

1. In the HTML code for the edit form, to add just before its ending </FORM>, a hidden field with a static "magic value", such as:
   <INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN" NAME="EndOfForm" VALUE="Commit"></FORM>
2. In the PHP code for "/w/index.php" that receives and processes our edits, to accept as a valid edit only an edit that did send the "EndOfForm" field and with the exact magic value "Commit".

The logic is of course that if/when the sending of the form is aborted by any mean before its full completion, then the server will never receive the last field, or its complete value (worst case scenario it would receive a partial "EndofForm=Commi"), and it should react by not writing to the database. Conversely, if the server did receive the exact "EndOfForm=Commit" parameter, then it can be sure to have received 100% of the data that was all before that, and it can safely commit it to the database.

• An example: I've already detailled the whole affair (with links to diffs) on the talk page of the admin who thought I was vandalizing a page (he saw the article corrupted by the half-sent edit-in-progress that was commited to the database):

User_talk:Sceptre#Your_overboard_reversions_at_Pink_Floyd_trivia

(I'm going to post this both at Wikipedia:Bug_report and Wikipedia:Village pump (technical) as per the advice on the bug-report's talk page...)

62.147.113.126 18:31, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

We have such fields already (or did have). Please confirm. --Brion 20:22, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

An HTTP post sends the character count before the data, so if the connection is interrupted before all the data has been transmitted the server can tell it didn't get all of the data. It's not clear to me where this should be detected, but at the protocol level enough information is already present to do so. -- Rick Block (talk) 21:38, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

Redirects to categories

I notice redirects to categories have stopped working again. Shortcusts like CAT:CSD or CAT:NS and such no longer work properly, the contents of the category is not visible. I though this very bug was fixed some time ago, at least ut has worked fine for some months, but not so anymore. Wassup! --Sherool (talk) 17:07, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

Fixed again. Domas is trying to make page loading more efficient but had managed to break redirect handling a couple of times. I've reverted the changes pending correction. --Brion 20:30, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

My Signature

My signature is supposed to look like this: ⇒ JarlaxleArtemis. Instead, it's just plain. JarlaxleArtemis 06:18, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:How to fix your signature. --cesarb 15:37, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

Javascript bug

Error: missing ; before statement
Source File: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=-&action=raw&smaxage=0&gen=js
Line: 280, Column: 58
Source Code:
    var menu = "<select style=\"display:inline\" onkeyup="chooseCharSubset(selectedIndex)" onChange=\"chooseCharSubset(selectedIndex)\">";

Looks like someone forgot to escape the quotation marks. howcheng {chat} 00:23, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

This should be fixed. I blame Brian0918. :P FYI: The file this was in is MediaWiki:Monobook.js. And you can really blame me, I wasn't literal enough in my suggestion, heh. =) —Locke Cole • t • c 02:34, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

Special character box

Somebody changed that special character box today. And now I have huge troubles contributing in my language (Lithuanian). So who should I contact? I would like to see Lithuanian language having its own section in the drop down meniu with these symbols: Ą ą Č č Ę ę Ė ė Į į Š š Ų ų Ū ū Ž ž. Please let me know who is in charge of these changes. Renata 18:17, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

• While i am glad to have the enormous box cut back to reasonable size, some change along those lines sounds called for. (The grouping by base character rather than by diacritic added is also much more workable; keep that no matter what the outcome.) I note that the AE and OE quasi-digraphs were included, but not the lower-case-only "Ess-Tzet" or ß in German (often mistaken for Beta, and the single-character title of an article ) and the two characters (each with upper and lower) from Icelandic and Old English whose sounds are roughly those of TH in "that" and "thin" (Edh or Eth, and Thorn, respectively). I make a brief for all of those 5 graphics (3 lower case, 2 upper), since (like Æ and Œ but moreso) 4 of them require wordy explanations such as i used here, and very wordy instructions to be sure people will recognize them beyond doubt when they see. (Upper-case Edh is the exception: "Capital D, with a bar crossing the vertical stroke" is not that wordy.) Even the Lithuanian chars requested can be described as one of the 26 English letters with "a tail hooked to the right" or a "dot" or "tiny V" on top, and similarly e.g. Polish has tails i recall and the "slashed L" for Lech Wałęsa's proper spelling. Finally, thanks for the Euro, but IMO the Yen is also international enough to deserve its currency symbol's inclusion. If a set of drop-downs or single-puprose pages for various languages is not feasible, how about at least a prefs option for the form the box takes, including the exhaustive one as an option?
  Jerzy•t 20:01, 13 January 2006 (UTC)
  
• Check out MediaWiki:Edittools (the talk page anyways), there's some discussion towards the bottom there. —Locke Cole • t • c 20:25, 13 January 2006 (UTC)
• what drop down manu i don't see any! Plugwash 23:46, 13 January 2006 (UTC)
  • You need to go to a page (almost any will do) and reload/refresh. —Locke Cole • t • c 02:36, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

Signatures

Has the sig code been messed with again? My four-tildes sig is coming out as just

• Asbestos 16:12, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

While it should be

• — Asbestos | Talk (RFC) 16:12, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

My preferences still shows my sig as being "— [[User:Asbestos|Asbestos]] | [[User talk:Asbestos|<span style="color:#808080;">Talk </span>]] [[User:Asbestos/RFC|<span style="color:#808080;"><small>(RFC)</small></span>]]", with "Use Raw Sig" clicked. Any thoughts? Asbestos 16:12, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Hmm, testing _→AzaToth 16:21, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

I just noticed it too, with my sig which should be "—Kmf164 (talk | contribs) 16:37, 13 January 2006 (UTC)". Not sure what's going on? Kmf164 18:56, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

It works for me _→AzaToth 18:59, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

It works now. But, an odd glitch. Kmf164 20:06, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Not for me — and not for you either if you sig is supposed to be the one you noted earlier. — Asbestos | Talk (RFC) 02:02, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

Don't know what's going on. My sig was working in the preview mode. I just tried modifying it without the — and it seems to work. -Kmf164 (talk | contribs) 02:17, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

There is some related discussion currently on Wikipedia talk:How to fix your signature. --cesarb 22:58, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

subst titlde includeonly breakage

Some reecent change of the mediawiki software has made the tilde expansion from templates errorious. Until today if a template contains ~<includeonly>~</includeonly>~~, it will expand the the current editors signature (used in {{tfd2}} for example). But now it will save it to four tildes, and expand it on the next editor, breaking everything up and put wrong signatures on the wrong place, and is also possible to use for abuse and etc.

Example: Here I subst tfd2, and the editor after me will get it's signature added here. ==== [[Template:{{{1}}}]] ==== [[Template:{{{1}}}]] ([{{fullurl:Template:{{{1}}}|action=edit}} edit] | [[Template talk:{{{1}}}|talk]] | [{{fullurl:Template:{{{1}}}|action=history}} history] | [{{fullurl:Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:{{{1}}}}} links] | [{{fullurl:Template:{{{1}}}|action=watch}} watch] | logs)
{{{vote}}} — {{{text}}} Nurg 02:25, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

Would be good if the previous behavour is restored, othervise a lot of template and procedures must be changed, and probably a lot of people will be angry when their singatures is placed where they didn't put them. _→AzaToth 23:04, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I'm angry already. I never put my sig there.  :-) Nurg 05:59, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

This is fixed now. -- Tim Starling 15:55, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

IMO this trick is a poor ideqa, because one can never be sure it will contiue to work. DES ^(talk) 21:50, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

If automated testing is performed, this should be added as a test-case. —Locke Cole • t • c 22:15, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

Image:Chloramphenicol.png

Hi, this image is without uploader info. --F. Cosoleto 22:22, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

Solved. --F. Cosoleto 23:42, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

Log of uses of CheckUser/IP address storage of users on database/Privacy policy

I have made proposal at Wikipedia:Help_desk#¬¬¬¬\_How long are IP addresses logged and stored by Wikimedia?_/¬¬¬¬ --168.131.46.80 18:34, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

ImageMagick for Linux

In order to use ImageMagick for linux, do you have to compile it? If so, is there a way to do so on a windows computer, and then upload it to a linux server? Also, in order for MediaWiki to use it, do you have to have all of the ImageMagick files, or just the convert file? Thanks, Shardsofmetal ^{[ Talk | Contribs ]} 15:52, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

Most Linux distributions should already have a precompiled version you can install. While it's possible to cross-compile it on Windows, it's not easy (as you'd first have to compile a cross-compiler). --cesarb 22:42, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

Special characters box

A lot of people have noticed the changes going on the "Special characters" box that appears below the edit box. There is now a line for special characters that are not alphabetic letters, followed by a drop-down menu that includes Wiki markup, math and TeX symbols, and several alphabets and special letters needed for writing in other languages, as well as IPA characters. If these aren't working as expected (e.g. you select "Spanish" but are given a set of Scandinavian letters to choose from), the first thing to try is a forced refresh (e.g. in Firefox 1.5, hit Control-F5). If that doesn't work, try purging your cache history and refreshing. If it still doesn't work, or if you have suggestions as to what special characters and letters should be added, please leave a comment at MediaWiki talk:Edittools. Thanks! Angr (tɔk) 09:36, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

Special Characters

My special characters box appears to malfunctioning; it has what appears to Vietnamese under 'Spanish', IPA (which it calls API) under 'Welsh', Old English under Maltese, Maltese under Italian etc. Does anyone know what's happening? I'm using FireFox. smurrayinchester^{(User), (Talk)} 15:17, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

It seems to be solved now. Thanks! smurrayinchester^{(User), (Talk)} 16:35, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Whoever wrote that (IMO superfluous) code should either use display: none or (for no good reason) visibility: hidden and not the former and visible: hidden (sic)! onclick="insertTags()" is also much cleaner than href="javascript:insertTags()". Christoph Päper 23:36, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

The changes to the special characters bar make it hard to get to characters needed for typing articles on Japan. Every time I edit an article, it's necessary to select from the drop-down menu before the characters I want appear. Worse, my selection doesn't remain in effect when I click on Show preview or return to editing after Show preview. Is there a way to get around this? I want the characters that are on the "Romaji" menu selection to replace the European special characters, which I seldom use. Fg2 07:11, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

The problem seems to have returned, with the IPA box containing Cyrillic instead. smurrayinchester^{(User), (Talk)} 11:21, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

There is an experimental code currently being discussed at Mediawiki talk:Edittools which saves the current selection in a cookie. --cesarb 04:48, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

edit window tool box

Hi ,In the hebrew version of wikiepdia the Java edit toolbox is much mroe extensive ,I was wondering how One could use a more extensive functional box in here?

morevoer it seems I can't get color html fonts to work as my signature ,although the tagging is correct(I tried t in my sandbox) ,i get an HTML errorr while saving my new prefrences. Procrastinator 15:28, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

Looking at your personal sandbox, I see you have an unclosed tag (you are using [[User talk:Diza|<font color="green">talk2me]], while the correct version should be [[User talk:Diza|<span style="color:green;">talk2me</span>]]. See Wikipedia:How to fix your signature for more information. --cesarb 18:45, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

Thank you cesarb ,I've already fixed it. Yet regarding to my open query about the seemengly simplified version of the Java box... -Procrastinator talk2me 12:58, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

As you might have noticed, some people have been playing with it recently (it's at Mediawiki:Edittools, if you want to follow the discussion). --cesarb 04:45, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

monobook.js rendering as wikitext sometimes?

Right after I save my monobook.js, it renders as wikitext. I saw this and thought, "hey, I'll put wikitext inside javascript comments and javascript inside <nowiki> tags, and it will be both a functional javascript and a well-formatted page at the same time. When I tried it, it looked like this:

But then I noticed that it doesn't stay like that. If I view it on a different (browser? computer? I'm not sure what has to be different), or log out and view it as an anon, it just shows plain text, and stays that way until I save it again. Now it looks like this:

Why does it do this? Is there a way to get it to always render as wikitext, or should I revert back to plain javascript comments for documentation? — Omegatron 03:53, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

I believe it has a feature which automatically renders both user js and user css as plaintext. Sometimes it doesn't work, for some reason. Perhaps the when saving it uses a different code path. --cesarb 04:18, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

It may not be a good idea to do that anyways, as it loads on every wikipedia page you visit, making you have to load invalid js. — Ilyanep (Talk) 06:04, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

I've found that purging the cache makes the page render correctly as plain text almost all the time. Titoxd^{(?!? - help us)} 19:09, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

It's not invalid because the extra stuff is just a comment as far as js is concerned. I thought it would be a neat way to combine the best of both worlds, but apparently the parsing of wikitext is a bug, not a feature. — Omegatron 04:09, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

Something strange with CSS styles

I just updated {{Policy in a nutshell}} to use the standard CSS class "messagebox" which specifies width="80%"; the template formerly specified this width explicitly. For some reason, this template is now displaying slightly wider than other templates using the same styling: see the top of WP:NOT for a salient example, where {{Policy2}} and {{Policy in a nutshell}} both use class "messagebox" with no further alteration of "width". What's happening? Has my browser thrown a gear? Or could it possibly be because {{Policy2}} uses table syntax whereas {{Policy in a nutshell}} uses <div> tags? —Phil | Talk 11:34, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

I've no idea what causes it, but I fixed it the obvious way — by wrapping the div in a table. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 14:57, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Why would you wrap anything with a table? We're 2006 now... --Joris Gillis 16:40, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

Deleted history permissions

A couple months ago the software got tweaked to display history info (but not contained text) of deleted revisions to any and all random visitors. In the last few weeks we've gotten a rash of complaints about edits being made with private, embarrassing, vandalistic, libelous, etc stuff in the edit summaries etc, and of course deleting the revisions from the wiki still shows them to everybody.

For the moment I'm shutting off this ability (restoring the pre-August behavior) until we get more fine-grained revision deletion / scrubbing in place. I've added a permission key to control it, 'deletedhistory', so if there's a need to turn it back on this can just be added to the '*' pseudogroup in the config to restore the previous behavior. --Brion 20:02, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

This really sucks. It was incredibly useful to be able to see who deleted articles (as well as their reasons why), and in cases where an article was moved (with the redirect being deleted), this was an easy way to track down where a page went. —Locke Cole 23:13, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

I agree this makes it harder, but you can still track down who deleted a page through Special:Log. For instance, searching the log for Musterbation allows you to see that I deleted it as a copyvio. I successfully did this while logged out. --best, kevin [kzollman][talk] 22:11, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the tip kzollman, that'll work, even if it is a little more clunky. =) —Locke Cole 02:02, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

Deletion logs show why a page was deleted, it does not however, show why images are deleted. Could we have a deletion log for images? - Hahnchen 00:30, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

The problem with Special:Log is it lists only the deletion reason, not any information about how many revisions there were between deletions, and who made the revisions before deletion, their summaries, etc. --Mysidia (talk) 06:34, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

Agreed. :( —Locke Cole • t • c 06:37, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

Was there any proper consensus or discussion about this? I've just found out about this, and have been looking around to find out why it had been changed. Anyway, I think this is a bad idea, because I do not think that the deleted history pages were libellous in any way. All it showed me was why the page was deleted, be it a CSD criterion or a link to an AFD discussion. I mean, all it showed were the edit summaries, and in general vandals don't concentrate their attacks on the edit summary, which was all that was displayed anyway. I would very much like this feature back, it may be minor, but it was useful having it there, and I'm sure Locke and I can't be the only ones who feel this way. - Hahnchen 02:45, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

We actually have been having a rash of vandals putting libelous comments into edit summaries, believe it or not. Things like people's home addresses and the like, too. —Bunchofgrapes (talk) 02:49, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

A very prolific vandal has been posting allegations of child abuse by Jimbo, along with his (more-or-less public) business address to various high-profile articles, leaving the nasty stuff in the edit summaries. This is a loophole that needs to be closed. I'm sure Brion will have a fix in place as soon as possible; consensus and discussion really don't apply to the devs as much as they do the rest of the project :-) android79 02:56, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

"Consensus and discussion really don't apply to the devs as much as they do the rest of the project" - that needs to change, and quick. Developers are quickly becoming the tail that wags the Wikipedia dog. In this particular case, why not just add the ability for admins to delete specific edit summaries, and those would then be replaced with a boilerplate phrase like "Libelous edit summary removed by User:Admin" or something of that nature. Firebug 01:10, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

Because your "why not just" is the "until we have more" part of my message above. That's the part that's more work than the temporary hack, which is why there's a temporary hack until that gets done. --Brion 23:23, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

This is ridiculous that just because of one vandal it ruins the site for everyone else. History of if an article has been deleted is an invaluable thing to see in articles - if something has been deleted you would think twice about recreating it and put more work into recreating it. If you dont show the histories articles will keep being recreated and deleted because no-one can see past reasons they've been deleted for. Isnt there a way to not show the edit summaries but still show the edits, or selectively delete some edit summaries where appropriate? -- Astrokey44|talk 12:35, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

1. "just because of one vandal" is false; multiple different issues led me to disable this new feature
2. "ruins the site for everyone else" is false; for the majority of Wikipedia's existence only sysops have had access to deleted history. Somehow we survived!
3. "isn't there a way" yes, when there's time to put in the work as stated numerous times above, this will be done.

--Brion 16:52, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

Now there's a problem. In order to enforce accountability, we need edit summaries. But if edit summaries are submittable by all, theres no way to get rid of them. But if we allow people to edit edit summaries, there needs to be an audit trail for that to. And ad infinitum. WP:BEANS. — Ambush Commander^(Talk) 02:55, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

I don't really see how it would be ad infinium; only admins would be able to edit edit summaries, and there would be no reason to have to edit and edit summary of an edit summary. Sure, it would be good to have an audit trail for the editing of an edit summary, but it would pretty much stop there; I don't see how you could possibly take any further audit steps. Also, to the argument that libelous edit summaries is a reason to restrict the undelete/log feature from regular users, we don't we delete major articles just because some vandal decided to vandalize it with a libelous edit summary? --Spring Rubber 05:18, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

I'd set it up like this - any user can "comment" (ie, append only) on an edit summary, admins can purge/replace an edit summary. An admin purging a malicious summary would basically purge the offending summary text (causing it to be replaced with "summary deleted" or similar text, and then comment on the edit with what it really was, therefore keeping the attribution/audit trail intact and keeping a meaningful summary. This implementation would also allow someone to add a summary to an edit which lacks a meaningful one - Triona 16:21, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

If this feature is to be disabled (which sucks) we should at least see the edit user account names (attribution) and dates of the revisions, (even without the edit summary reasoning text). It seems GFDL requires that attribution be made available, since the contents of any deleted article could have been copied to another article (this is extremely common, and no tracking is done or possible). Regardless of any legal requirements (which I don't know/understand) in principal, we should never hide who contributed to Wikipedia. Also, on a minor note, why the heck am I redirect to the main Wikipedia page after five seconds? This makes no sense. When giving the error message, please make it longer, and give me time to read it. --Rob 21:47, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

I thought seeing these histories was a really useful feature, it's unfortunate to see it disappearing like so; can we not have some method of flagging an individual edit as edit-summary vandalism, making the summary text invisible from that view, as a solution? Or limit it to registered users, with appropriate warnings about the possible nature of the Summaries to be accepted, and a well-hidden option in "My preferences" or a manual edit to one of those User-specific theme .js or .css files before being able to review any deletion history log: still better than nothing... --Mysidia (talk) 04:59, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

This appears to have changed again. Can not find an example, but it seems that when this was first disable non-admins could see if an article had been deleted or not before, by seeing the deleted edits message, even though it gave a permissions error; now it does not let you know if there have been deleted edits at all. I oppose this as it removes information regarding the article's history, making the fact that anything was deleted invisible; invalidating the comment above suggesting that if an article had deletions you could get some information from the deletion logs, now you would not have a reason to even begin looking in the logs. xaosflux ^Talk/_CVU 02:08, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

• It has changed again, and I implore the devs to fix this up. At least revert it so we can see that something has been deleted. If I'm thinking of writing a borderline notable subject article, I'd quite like to know whether it's been deleted before. - Hahnchen

I agree. It was a really useful thing to have there -- Astrokey44|talk 14:44, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

I'll look into adding some sort of "this page has been previously deleted" link to the deletion log now. Rob Church ^Talk 19:37, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

• I believe this hack is -- extremely undesirable, as for "the majority of Wikipedia's existence only sysops have had access to deleted history. Somehow we survived!"; for the majority of Wikipedia's existence, users weren't required to register to create articles either; just because a feature wasn't present at one time, doesn't mean it is in any way disposable or not extremely helpful. This feature is important for examining the use of Speedy Deletion, in particular; until this is fixed, the Speedy Deletion procedures ideally ought to be temporarily suspended and that all materials to be deleted must pass through a Vfd, Tfd, etc, so that the state of their history can be reviewed prior to deletion to establish a reasonable level of accountability, unfortunately the backlog could be a nightmare; Speedy Deletes are periodically erroneous though, and this feature provided the only easy way to see the deleted revision record of an article (Whether it was one of a repeat speedy, or something else...). --Mysidia (talk) 03:06, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

GFDL issue

It is possible to violate the attribution requirement of the GFDL by hiding deleted history, since edits that are deleted may have had text cut and pasted elsewhere. If user names are visible, but not edit summaries, this issue will be resolved. The issue of using user names to libel can be solved by showing only IP addresses instead of user names judges libellous. --- Charles Stewart 02:40, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

• Attribution information could in theory be placed in an edit summary, for instance, if a contributor was pasting a blurb of GFDL'ed content originally published elsewhere. --Mysidia (talk) 09:46, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

As an admin I didn't realise anything had changed since I can still see everything, but I think it's important for people to see which admin deleted an article. That might explain why I haven't been receiving complaints about deletions recently - your average user doesn't know to check the logs! I find it important for me to be able to explain to new users that it's nothing personal and that they can improve for next time. enochlau (talk) 04:44, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

After something was deleted, I would always click the link at the top of every deleted page just to see who deleted it and what their reason was, even if it was a completely obvious speedy deletion. I guess I'm just curious about those types of things. Now, when I tag something for deletion, I have to go to the deletion log, copy the article's title, and paste it in the deletion log; repeat ad nauseum for everything I tag (which, lately, has been images), but one thing the whole lengthy process has taught me is that you, Enochlau, have been the deleter of 90% of the images that I tag for deletion, and for that I am thankful. --Spring Rubber 05:52, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

How do you create and use backgrounds in Wikipedia?

Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

In this English version, started in 2001, we are currently working on 6,919,630 articles.

Art | Culture | Geography | Health | History | People | Philosophy | Science | Society | Technology

Almanac · Categories · Glossaries · Lists · Overviews · Portals · Search · Questions · Site news · Index

Does anyone know how to use a graphic as a background image in Wikipedia? I'd like to try an experiment and place the puzzle globe behind the 4 lines of text of the header above. Any help/guidance you can provide would be greatly appreciated. --Go for it! 06:09, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, but you need an admin (naturally). First, wrap the whole in a div with an id of EnWpMpHead (arbitrarily chosen). Then, go to MediaWiki:Common.css and have an admin add

#EnWpMpHead{background-image:url('http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/63/Wikipedia-logo.png')}

There's already a long list of stuff for your project. It can be placed at the end. Superm401 | Talk 10:01, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

I hate it when people post their questions in multiple places. As I said over there, it doesn't look good anyway. Lupo 10:13, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

Can the article title be disabled on a particular page?

Hi. I'm on the Main Page Redesign team. I'm looking into possibly turning off the title (H1 heading?) at the top of the page we are working on. We need to see what the Main Page Redesign Draft would look like without the page name showing up on the screen. What is the link to the the documentation on this? --Go for it! 20:25, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

You already have the answer: the same way you turned off the #siteSub, with a hack on MediaWiki:Monobook.js. There is no documentation, of course, since it's a hack. --cesarb 21:03, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

So then, how do we refer to the page's title in the source code? That is, what do we edit in the above hack to make it work on the page's title? --Go for it! 01:20, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

CSS hack reduces accessibility

I just learned about a CSS hack being added to a number of templates, to compensate for a changed policy on template transclusion. I understand that there is an alternative way of recoding these templates, but the CSS hack is being implemented because it is easier. This hack injects junk code into the body of the page, then hides it from most visual browsers using CSS. This is already in use for template:Journal reference, template:Taxobox, and many others, and is being added to more.

This makes Wikipedia less accessible for users of assistive technologies, like web page readers for the handicapped, and text readers. This is sloppy programming and bad practice from the point of view of web page accessibility, web page usability, and standards implementation. Wikipedia is an open encyclopedia; please lets not start treating the minority who has the most difficult time reading like second-class citizens. Main discussion on this is at Wikipedia talk:No meta-templates. Please make your opinion heard there. —Michael Z. 2006-01-16 17:51 Z

Comment: Example: look at the html of George W. Bush. You will find there:

<tr class="hiddenStructure">
<th>Died</th>
<td>{{{death_date}}}<br /></td>
</tr>

Due to the CSS trick used in template:Infobox President. Discussion is on MediaWiki talk:Common.css per Netoholic. --Adrian Buehlmann 23:01, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

Templates

Is it possible to have templates automatically "update" on every page they are utilized on once they have been changed? (sort of like how when a category is added/removed from a pages info the hyperlink to the page is added/removed on the Category page). I don't really know much about how Wikipedia works, so my apologies if this is a stupid question. --66.229.183.101 08:26, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

Templates do update on the pages they are used on, so the behaviour you describe already exists. --TheParanoidOne 10:33, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

Yes they do update and there is no way to say no to that besides making an own template for every new version of a template (For example version 1 of template:book reference could be made at template:book reference/1 and protected forever). Templates even break the promise of Wikipedia that you can always go back to an old revision of an article. Example: on article Bill Clinton, User:NetBot changed on this revision the parameters of the president box on the right side (diff). All revisions after that edit of that article now show a good president box on the right side. But all revision prior to that NetBot edit show a broken box (example: revision before that edit). See also this message on wikitech-l and my talk with Rick Block on this (User talk:Rick Block#Some toughts about templates). --Adrian Buehlmann 10:44, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

So do images. Superm401 | Talk 11:16, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

Actually, the template only updates once the page where the template is used is edited. i.e. Even if someone changes the president template, a president page itself doesn't change to reflect the new infobox until someone edits some aspect of the page in question. Thus, for pages that are less often edited, the alteration of a template used on the page often doesn't occur until much later. --66.229.183.101 18:34, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

I can't believe you. Can you provide any detailed examples and steps you have taken (with references to wiki pages). BTW: Please create a login for yourself. It does not hurt :-). --Adrian Buehlmann 18:45, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

That's only the cached version. Changing a template clears the cache of all pages linking to it. [[Sam Korn]] 20:30, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

There are some things in templates that aren't updated, like adding a category (if the template adds a page to a category, changing the category in the template does not automatically recategorize all referencing articles). So a more complete answer is formatting information is updated when a template is changed, but information contained in internal database records (categories, what links here, etc.) is not updated until the page is next changed. -- Rick Block (talk) 21:05, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

I see. Thanks for clearing that up. --66.229.183.101 01:00, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

Bad What links here

The what links here (WLH) is still very bad. Articles accumulate on WLH of certain templates. This makes the TfD process very difficult. For example we have substed and deleted template:ll after seen that WLH had stabilized. But obviously WLH of template:ll is still not stable as articles pop up now that really include the now deleted template:ll. Example: Al-Qanoon (permalink). Side note: WLH doesn't mark Al-Qanoon with "(inclusion)" even though it actually should. This makes the cleanup even harder. I'm working to fix now the newly appearing broken articles. --Adrian Buehlmann 09:31, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, it's clear {{ll}} was deleted too soon. There are still lots of pages using it. I'm going to be bold and restore it until it's really subst'ed everywhere. --Angr (tɔk) 09:41, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

It only takes a few minutes for me to find all the instances of the template from the database dump, unfortunately the newest dump is a month old so it isn't much help. If a new dump does appear I can sort it out though. Martin 11:43, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

Many thanks, Martin. I've fixed those newly popped-up articles on the WLH for now. I'm again watching that WLH. If that should be needed I will happily return to your offer. --Adrian Buehlmann 18:40, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

See bugzilla:4549 -- Netoholic @ 11:05, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the pointer. I've added also a warning note at the holding cell on the TfD page. --Adrian Buehlmann 18:40, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

I'm having some luck in finding links by adding "<includeonly>[[Category:Something]]</includeonly>", where Something is a short existing category. A bunch of entries will show up. Still won't be listed in What links here. We could use a standard Category:Temporary and maybe Category:Holding cell.

--William Allen Simpson 15:53, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

I added Category:Holding cell and some things showed up in it, and I orphaned them. However, according to "Rick Block" below, categories added by templates won't update article categories. So, why did some articles not listed in What links here show up in the new category? Were they already in some cache somewhere? Do we still have to wait for an edit to most articles before the rest of the changes are seen?

--William Allen Simpson 02:30, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

An excellent example is to compare Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:4LA with its Category:Ambiguous four-letter acronyms. I've eliminated virtually all What links here, but there are hundreds appearing in the category!

--William Allen Simpson 06:11, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia disables ALT-E?

(copied from Wikipedia:General complaints) I spotted a comment on the resolved complaints noting that Wikipidia disables ALT-E? I've been pulling my hair out for a while trying to figure out why I can't use ALT-E in Explorer when in Wikipedia to open up Explorer's Edit menu, in the same manner I do in hundreds of other applications. For people using a keyboard, rather than a mouse, this kind of remapping is very painful. How does one disable this on a user by user basis to return normal functionality? I can't find a mention to this except in that resolved comment. Nfitz 19:18, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

I think this can be undone by editing your personal css page, but that is not simple. i am copyign this to the technical section of the village pump. I have complained about the wikipedia take over of common shortcut keys on Bugzilla before this. DES ^(talk) 21:13, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

• A standard shortcut that still works is Alt key, then E, which still brings up the edit menu, by the way, and not both Alt and E at the same time. If the "Edit this page" shortcut is a problem, you could also change your theme to something other than Monobook, such as Classic. I think the Alt+E shortcut for Edit This Page is really, very useful; as a keyboard user, it would be a pain to use the Wiki without the benefit of this shortcut. Internet Explorer and Firefox don't even have much useful stuff on the Edit menu, and all those commands have their own shortcut keys. --Mysidia (talk) 06:31, 11 January 2006 (UTC)
  • As a data point, pressing alt, releasing and the E doesn't work on firefox for me under linux. Lupin|talk|popups 21:34, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
• I can see a shortcut for this would be useful. But I don't think that remapping the standard shortcuts that are already in use for basic Windows (which, like it or not, is the most widely-used browser), is sensible. Sure, there are work-arounds to still do it in Windows ... but this is just going to create problems for users who then have to remember different key-stroke combinations for different programs. No application should interefere with the basic shortcuts! How do we go about either remedying this on either a user-by-user basis, or for the entire site? Some of the other skins than the default do seem to not have this remapping - though all are horrendous, and look ancient! Nfitz 17:16, 11 January 2006 (UTC)
  • See Wikipedia:Keyboard shortcuts and Help:User_style#Changing_access_keys for help altering shortcuts; see bugzilla:477 if you have comments on the technical side of the problem. — Catherine\^talk 00:52, 15 January 2006 (UTC)
    • Ah, interesting. Shame there isn't a simple "Disable Wiki shortcut keys" option or something under preferences. If I understand correctly, I need to edit my User:Nfitz/monobook.css file in order to disable that ALT-E problem. I'm not clear though, after reading the instructions, exactly what I'm supposed to put in there. Can someone assist me? Thanks, Nfitz 17:22, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

Adding this to preferences has been requested more than once. To handle it in the meantime, you will need to edit your javascript, file, not your CSS file; go to User:Nfitz/monobook.js and copy in this line, then follow the instructions on the page to bypass your cache:

       ta['ca-edit'] = new Array('','Edit this page');

This line overrides the 'e' shortcut defined for "ca-edit" by the site-wide javascript file with the empty string ''. The lines to disable other common problem children, ALT-D (delete page or go to browser address bar?) and ALT-F (Find box, or browser file menu?) are as follows:

       ta['ca-delete'] = new Array('','Delete this page');
       ta['search'] = new Array('','Search this wiki');

Hope that helps....going to go add this to the Keyboard Shortcuts page now. — Catherine\^talk 03:15, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

Wonderful!! Much appreciated! Nfitz 19:59, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

History & Authors

Hi all. I noticed that some pages now have a "History & Authors" tab instead of just "History"--like Wikipedia:Community Portal. Does anyone know if this was discussed anywhere...? It doesn't seem to correspond to any particular pages, and I'm also curious what files were edited to make this change. Thanks! ~MDD4696 22:56, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

That would be MediaWiki:History short, and it's been reverted. --TheParanoidOne 23:33, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

NetBot and {{Further}}

This template may be the best new thing since sliced bread — or maybe not — but some NetBot went around converting See to Further, and it made a horrible mess of things!

The span class notice presumably caused the massive paragraph break in Israel at Zionism and Aliyah, through bad interactions with other templates. Note the differences using "Older edit".

I do hope this is being fixed, everywhere, and folks don't run Bots until they're thoroughly tested!

--William Allen Simpson 15:59, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

The last time Netbot edited that page was the 19th of May, is that really the edit you refer to? Martin 16:11, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

No, for Israel, they appear to be from Special:Contributions/205.196.208.21:

• 2006-01-15 09:21:44 205.196.208.21 (Robot: migrating See calls to Further)
• 2006-01-15 09:48:03 205.196.208.21 (Robot: Migrate See to Further (match displayed text))

However, others show up in Special:Contributions/NetBot, see the range:

• 2006-01-15 09:18:44 ... Canadian federal election, 2004 (Robot: migrating See calls to Further)
• 2006-01-15 10:07:07 ... Tank (Robot: Migrate See to Further (match displayed text))

Is somebody running the same Bot simultaneously from an IP address? Is that permitted?

--William Allen Simpson 04:30, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

There is a quirk in some bot interfaces which cause a logged-in bot to sometimes cause an anon edit. (SEWilco 05:32, 18 January 2006 (UTC))

Line breaks

Is there any chance we can get have a way to do a proper line break? Due to what I assume is a bug, pressing enter once does nothing, and pressing it twice skips a line entirely, meaning there is currently no way to go the the next line, annoyingly enough. --82.7.125.142 21:57, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Just use <br />.-gadfium 22:28, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Server Converting + into "+" Instead of White Space, in URL

Historically, Wikipedia's web server has taken "/wiki/Elvis+Presley" as part of the URL and converted it to "/wiki/Elvis_Presley".

This is, of course, as it should be, since "+" in a URL represents a whitespace.

But, as of the last week or two, the web server has stopped doing this properly, and the above string will end up coming out "not found" because it tries to send you to an article NAMED "Elvis+Presley", with the plus.

This screws up, for example, the Google desktop/toolbar/taskbar custom searches which most of us have installed and some of us, myself included of couse, have configured to go to Wikipedia's article.

In other words, I've added a "custom search" so that if I type "Elvis Presley" into the google taskbar, then hit control-E to search (instead of enter), it sends me to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvis_Presley.

But it encodes it with a + for each whitespace, as is required by the protocal.

But now, instead, it literally sends me to "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvis+Presley" -- Click that link and see...it SHOULD be converted to the actual article with the _ in the middle, but it isn't.

I suspect that other automated systems of generating Wikipedia URLs will be encountering the same problem.

What caused the sudden change in parsing, and will it be fixed?Kaz 19:01, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Actually, the convention that "+" represents a space in only standard in query parameters. Its use elsewhere in URLs is no more standard than the Wikipedia convention of replacing spaces with underscores. The proper encoding for a space, which works anywhere in an URL, is "%20". Alternatively, if you want to continue using "+" for spaces (or can't help it), try using an URL like http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Elvis+Presley. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 19:14, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

It was changed so links like C++ can work. It is a change in the Apache handlers, I think. It seems logical to me. [[Sam Korn]] 19:17, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

It would be logical if the percentage of entries which absolutely must have a "+" in them were not freakishly small. As it is, this is damned inconvenient for very little benefit.

Ilmari, the fix worked. There should be some announcement about this, though. Being able to add wikipedia to custom searches is really useful, and custom search tools are reasonably popular.Kaz 19:43, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Custom searches should go through Special:Search, which does still use "+". [[Sam Korn]] 19:46, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Well, I'd had Google set up with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/{1} as the search string, and that'd worked until this conversion. Now http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title={1} works, but I had been unaware of that, before. There could be other people in a similar predicament. --Kaz 20:29, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Try setting it up as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search={1}. That'll work even better. [[Sam Korn]] 20:40, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Nested wikitable possible?

Is it possible to nest wikitables? Also, can someone point me to a tutorial or list of options to use within wikitables? Many thanks. — Bellhalla 14:59, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Sure,	I see no reason	why
that	wouldn't	work.

As for the syntax, see Help:Table. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 16:21, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Problems with Template:Talk Spoken Wikipedia id

Hello all. I am having an enormous amount of trouble with the Talk Spoken Wikipedia id template. For some reason, it only works on certain articles. That is, the link to the specific revision of the article is not being generated properly. For example, Talk:Puff, the Magic Dragon doesn't work, but Talk:Ada Lovelace does. I've spent a good amount of time trying to figure it out, but I'm not making any headway whatsoever. Does anyone have any ideas? ~MDD4696 04:19, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Acoording to Help:Variable, {{PAGENAMEE}} should not be used as a parameter to {{localurl}}. I changed them to {{PAGENAME}} (without the extra E), and it seems to work fine now. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 08:02, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Processor

What is the first address of the processor?

The meaning of your question is not clear. This is a page for discussions about the technical workings of this encyclopedia. If your question is relevant, please try to reword it and give more context so we can understand what you mean. If you are asking a general question unrelated to this page, for example about the address space of a computer processor, please ask on the appropriate page of the Wikipedia:Reference desk, perhaps the science and computing one.-gadfium 03:04, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Polish characters in "edit" menu

Hi! Polish special characters that you can choose from the list below the editing window aren' t in fact Polish. Is there a chance to fix it? The Last V8 21:55, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

Please bring this up at MediaWiki talk:Edittools. -- Rick Block (talk) 01:59, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

What would be involved in...

I am trying to find ways to stop User:Gibraltarian. We've tried everything save one idea. I know that right now for AOL users, we have {{AOL}}. Is there any way that we can develop something similar for Gibraltarian? He uses the IPs 212.120.224.0 to 212.120.231.255. The thing is. I can write the template. But how do we get it on all pages on the IPs he uses? It would aid users. Right now, he's being warned several times before we're blocking him. It was for 30 minutes yesterday. He got 10-11 posts in. If we put a template up, he can be blocked faster. --Woohookitty^{(cat scratches)} 21:15, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

That'd be easy work for a bot. You could personally ask someone who runs one or submit a bot request. That said, please be careful with the wording for the template; you're talking about tagging the entire dialup IP range of an ISP as potential vandals. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 14:51, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

I created a template at Template:Gibraltarian. I think it's pretty clear. Thanks for the help. --Woohookitty^{(cat scratches)} 13:18, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Bold links in navigation bar

Why did somebody remove the bold links from the sidebar? Before, if you were on a page with a link in the sidebar, it was bold. Also, is there any way that I can still get it in my wiki (MW 1.6devel, taken from CVS at about 12:00am Jan 15 EST) Thank you, Shardsofmetal ^{[ Talk | Contribs ]} 06:33, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

The bold had to be removed in order to facilitate a cache for the sidebar, which helps to increase performance. You'd have to hack the core code to put it back. Rob Church (talk) 04:16, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Watchlist Changes

On village pump proposals, a consensus emerged to automatically add pages to their creator's watchlist and to warn (and preferably ask for confirmation) the last watcher of a page when they attempt to unwatch it. I've created a Bugzilla entry. Is anyone willing to implement this? Superm401 | Talk 19:05, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

Post further comments on the Bugzilla bug. Superm401 | Talk 19:10, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

That VPP link points to a non-existent location. --TheParanoidOne 20:05, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

The link has been fixed (I thought VPP stood for Village pump (proposals) but it actually stands for Village pump (policy)). Superm401 | Talk 21:17, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

On my to-do list. Will be assigned to self within 48-72 hours if nothing major crops up. Rob Church (talk) 04:14, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Access errors

I keep getting "Access control configuration prevents your request from being allowed at this time" messages about 80% of the time right now. Are there some maintainance work underway or is one of the squids having trouble? All the errors I get are generated by hawthorn.knams.wikimedia.org (squid/2.5.STABLE12). --Sherool (talk) 21:51, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

That message usually means your IP was explicitly blocked in the server configuration, and will not go away by itself. --cesarb 03:00, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

IIRC (and one of the other devs will correct/elaborate as needed), there were some problems with Hawthorne. AFAIK, they're now resolved, but do let us know if this persists. Rob Church (talk) 04:12, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Open proxy policy

This multipost removed. See Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Open_proxy_policy for discussion.

Template experts, please help with dead link wayback machine

Dear those of you who understand templates:

Please have a look at this problem with the {{dlw}} and {{dlw-inline}} templates, which are designed to make it easy to hook dead links into the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, used to fix Wikipedia:Dead external links.

Apparently, if a dead URL has a "=" equals sign in it, it screws up the argument passing.

Is this reasonably fixable? Please respond at Template talk:Dlw#Problems with '=' character in URLs. Thank you! --James S. 23:10, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Apparent solution: put url in nowiki tags; recommended for bot use. --James S. 23:26, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Page showing up as file

When I try to visit counter-recruitment my computer asks if I want to download a file. This isn't happening for any other page. Does anyone know why this is happening? Catsv 07:05, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Update: I am now having the same problem with Anthony Arnove; however, I am NOT having the problem with military counter-recruitment, which redirects to counter-recruitment. Catsv 07:12, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Sounds like you have excessive line noise, which is causing random html pages to be misinterpreted as binary. Are you on a dial up connection, and if so has something changed recently with your phone line or modem setup? If this is the cause, I'd expect you to see this problem on numerous web pages, but not on the same web page every time.-gadfium 07:55, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Once in a while, someone somewhere has seen compressed pages incorrectly marked or something. Try putting ?action=purge on the end of the URL to force it to rerender. --Brion 09:26, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Edit counter broken

Kate's Tool doesn't seem to be working properly now. I get the following error: onoes!! some kind of database error occured ((1044, "Access denied for user 'kate'@'login-services.zedler.knams.wikimedia.org' to database 'enwiki_p'"))... please try again later Any idea why? Crotalus horridus (TALK • CONTRIBS) 05:41, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

• Never mind, it seems OK now. Crotalus horridus (TALK • CONTRIBS) 05:58, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

What links here and colons

Has anybody noted that wikilinks to images which are preceded by a colon (like this: Image:ElectoralCollege2000-Large.png) don't appear in the "What links here" special page?

— DLJessup (talk) 03:25, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Aha, found the bug in BugZilla at bugzilla:00360#c4! I'll comment there.

— DLJessup (talk) 06:59, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Bug in diff?

This diff [2] looks like a blanking, but isn't, see these diffs: [3], [4]. Or does Wikipedia display the first diff as a blanking only for me? Kusma (討論) 23:01, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

Looks like a bug to me, too. I'll make sure there's a Wikipedia:MediaZilla bug report on it. -- Rick Block (talk) 01:50, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

This was reported and, as far as we know, has been fixed. --Brion 20:45, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Less than 24 hour turnaround! Thanks, Brion - you guys are awesome. -- Rick Block (talk) 02:23, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Great! The speed is really impressive. Thanks a lot! (And thanks to Rick for filing the bug report). Kusma (討論) 02:52, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

What about main page configurability?

I have some questions about the possibility of users configuring the main page to fit their own tastes, and was wondering what options were available to users right now for accomplishing this. Please click on the heading above to see my questions on this subject. I look forward to reading your replies. --Go for it! 23:54, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Call to function undefined error

This error seems to be popping up more and more today, first on the English site, and now on the Japanese site:

'Fatal error: Call to undefined function: dba_open() in /usr/local/apache/common-local/php-1.5/includes/Title.php on line 447

Any ideas what is causing it? --nihon 18:49, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

There was a misconfigured server; I believe it's been taken care of. --Brion 18:57, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

The Korean cluster, where the Japanese wikipedia is hosted, was also broken. I've disabled the interwiki cache feature there for the moment so they're working again. --Brion 19:24, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Thank you much. :-) --nihon 21:51, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia Time

Out of interest, what time source are the wikimedia servers synced up to?

UTC. They are physically located on the Florida peninsula, which is Eastern Standard Time, or UTC-5. --Golbez 12:11, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

We use NTP internally to keep servers synced. I'm not sure offhand which external server we're using as a source. --Brion 18:59, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

What Type of amplifier ?

What type of RF amplifier should I use to amplify an AM signal??

Garnet amps rock. —Michael Z. 2006-01-21 07:51 Z

Edit summary on rollback

There's no way to write an edit summary when doing a rollback. Is it possible to create that? - DavidWBrooks 18:07, 22 January 2006 (UTC).

The one-click rollback link exists to speed fixups of massive vandalism; an edit summary interstitial would destroy its usefulness. If you wish to add an edit summary, you are probably dealing with something other than self-obvious massive vandalism. Go through the usual history / old version / edit route; it's just two extra clicks. --Brion 20:37, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

What happened to the editpage template links?

I've always found these extremely useful to spot template use and quickly get to a box I needed to correct, or to use in anotehr article. Is there a particular reaon they were removed? It seems to be pretty inconsistent,sometimes showing up, sometimes not (maybe that is linked to the whatlinkshere bug?) Circeus 17:50, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

Due to software changes to better handle templates, some articles may not have had their database entries updated yet and may not show them temporarily. --Brion 20:38, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

Cursor in search box

can the main wikipedia page be modified such that when you first access it..the cursor starts blinking in the search box(so that you don't have to use the mouse to point at the search box to input a search term)— Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.42.6.177 (talk • contribs) 00:24, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Subpages

Is there a way to see a tree representation of any page, showing its children, etc.? - ElAmericano | talk 20:42, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

The only way I know is to use Special:Allpages and display pages starting at the one your looking at. - Trevor MacInnis (Talk | Contribs) 20:44, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

Pages on Wikipedia don't have children, as there is no clear hierarchy. You may find Special:Whatlinkshere useful, or [5]. The first shows all pages that link here, while the second allows you to browse the categories with ease. -- Ec5618 21:01, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

Wouldn't you do that with Special:Prefixindex?

That worked. Thanks for the advice, guys. - ElAmericano | talk 04:43, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Shortcuts for policy and guideline templates

I've just added optional shortcut parameters to {{policy}}, {{guideline}}, {{style-guideline}}, {{Wikipedia subcat guideline}}, {{proposed}}, {{rejected}}, and {{historical}}. To display a shortcut, just add the shortcut in an additional parameter: {{policy|WP:SHORT}} gives

This page is an official policy on the English Wikipedia. It has wide acceptance among editors and is considered a standard that all users should follow. Feel free to edit the page as needed, but please make sure that changes you make to this policy reflect consensus before you make them.

{{Wikipedia subcat guideline|subcat|sortkey|WP:SHORT}} needs the shortcut to be its third parameter.

If no shortcut is specified, the box is hidden by CSS. I've redirected {{policy2}} and {{guideline with shortcut}}, which were created by Stevage, back to {{policy}} and {{guideline}}, respectively; the syntax is backwards-compatible with these templates. æle ✆ 19:12, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Nice. Thanks. JesseW, the juggling janitor 05:49, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

The {{guideline with shortcut}} inclusions have all been changed to {{guideline}}. The Neokid 20:44, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Higher limit for special pages?

As I suppose is known, most (not all) of the Special pages will only display only the first and second batch of 500 (unless its just my machine?). This isn't a problem for ophans, widows, new pages, etc but it IS a problem for short pages, which are ranked by size rather than alphabetically or chronologically. Thus we can only see the shortest 1000 pages (right now, that takes me 69 bytes). I find short page patrol useful, but I think if I could get at pages up to 200 bytes or so I would find a rich vein of unstubbed, uncatagorized, deletable, and easily-fixable pages. I mentioned this as a bug report some time back.

Would it be possible to allow special pages, or at least short pages, to diplay more than the first two groups of 500? Thanks for your consideration. Herostratus 14:19, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Article needs fixed coding

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_grade Andrewdt85 05:50, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

I fixed the external link syntax. You get to fix the misplaced sentence fragment yourself. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 10:32, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

User Page = Tiny Text

All of a sudden, a few minutes ago I made an edit to my userpage and everything on that page including the stuff I have added AND the "navigation" panal to the right, tabs at the top etc (User interface) is now in extremly small text. I reverted to the last edit but everything is still teeny tiny, even microscopic in some areas. Somehow, this is linked to my user account because when I log out of my user account and veiw my user page, everything is normal. Also, this ONLY happens on the main user page. My discussion page, watchlist, contributions ..and every other wikipedia page (normal articles e tc) are fine. But when I'm logged in, my user page is so small I can't read most of it. Any ideas? --Naha|^(talk) 19:59, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Ok update: Right after I clicked "Save page" to the abvove edit, it happened again on THIS PAGE. Not only is everything teeny tiny but all the text scrolls way off the page and I have no horizontal scroll bar to view it. Something funny is going on :( --Naha|^(talk) 20:02, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Just to check, its me again, not logged in, and everything is fine. But still, soon as I log in - my UI and everything goes nuts. --24.250.139.148 20:04, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

I'm puzzled... are you using Firefox? IE? or what? -Kmf164 (talk | contribs) 20:05, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

I'm using IE 6 And, when I made the last comment above - it happened again after I clicked "save page" again. I've been editing on Wikipedia for months and this is just perplexing. Nothing like this has ever happened before. Basically it looks like, every time I edit any page, whatever user I am logged in as (Nahallac or my IP address) - everything on that page, especially the UI gets fudged up. --Naha|^(talk) 20:11, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Same thing happened to me when I added my previous comment on this page. Didn't matter whether I used Firefox or IE, either. Somebody must be fiddling with the monobook.css or something. -Kmf164 (talk | contribs) 20:15, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Happened again. -Kmf164 (talk | contribs) 20:16, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Well, as long as its not something *I* did. But now I have another problem, I was going to reset the "skin" I use (which is the normal one) in my preferences, and I changed it to mono something or other and hit save. And I hate this skin and now I can't change it back because when I hover over the link to "skins" in the preference section ..its not a link. I can't click on it. I have no way to get back into the skin settings to put it back. I feel so pathetic today :( --Naha|^(talk) 20:26, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Fixed the 2nd problem in case anyone cares, but I sure hope the fix the teeny tiny text thing soon. I can't read anything :( --Naha|^(talk) 20:46, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Good you fixed the skin preferences problem. I can't figure out what's causing the text size problem. -Kmf164 (talk | contribs) 20:51, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

If it's still happening, can you provide a screenshot please? I don't see any problems currently with IE 6.

Domas added an optimization to skip some HTML validity checks on user-interface messages. If people were writing bogus markup (especially unclosed tags) into the MediaWiki:* pages, this could now produce various ugly output. Hopefully they've been fixed by now. --Brion 02:24, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Recent changes ATOM/RSS feed window size

(I raised this on the wikitech mailing list, but didn't get any replies, so am posting here as well).

I've been fiddling a bit with the (Atom) recent changes feed at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Recentchanges&feed=atom. I'm interested in whether a tool like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:CryptoDerk/CDVF could use the feed, so that the diff for each edit could be quickly viewed inside the tool, rather than linked to externally.

It seems though that the combination of the default window size (50) and the apparent refresh rate of the feed in the cache (about 20 seconds) means that there are changes that will fall through the gap once you have more than about ~2.5 changes a second (which seems to happen fairly often now). This means right now it's not really usable in a tool like CDVF (and perhaps not usable in general).

What are the future plans for this feed? Can it (will it) be feasibly maintained in a useful state as the edit rate grows further? No doubt there are several approaches that could be taken (steadily increase window size, refresh cache more often, split feed out into namespaces, ...), but all involve placing greater load on the server. WhiteCat 20:05, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

The RSS/Atom feeds are meant to show a selection of recent items; a vandalism-review queue system really should be written from the ground up and is a completely separate matter. --Brion 02:19, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Redlinks with lineouts

Did something change for others that they are seeing redlinks with lineouts, or is just me? I checked monobook.css and didn't see a change but I'm just wondering if it is something one of the tools I used introduced (checked all the ones I could remember) or something else. Thanks! (I sort of don't like it but am not quite sure where to start digging on how to change it back for myself) ++Lar: t/c 14:13, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

What's a lineout? --Brion 02:25, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

A lineout (or maybe strikeout is the term?) looks sort of this:

• not lined out: some random redlink that doesn't really exist (shows as red text with an underline)
• lined out: some random redlink that doesn't really exist (shows as red text struck out in black, with an underline. What I was seeing looked like that except with no underline and the strikeout line was red...)

It stopped doing it by the way. Maybe it was just me since no one else said anything... so if so, sorry to bother! ++Lar: t/c 18:46, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Circular redirect?

What happens if you make a circular redirect? I don't want to break WP:POINT to test it myself, but I thought maybe someone knows... -- stillnotelf has a talk page 03:38, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

MediaWiki only follows the first redirect, so nothing particularly bad would happen. I think all systems which support redirects either have a limit as to how many they'll follow, which is very cheap computationally, or have an algorithm to detect circular references.-gadfium 04:10, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Mediawiki only follows the first redirect. As (in case you were wondering) for circular templates (e.g, template 1 includes template 2, and template 2 includes template 1) - as of mediawiki 1.5 these are automatically detected and quashed. Raul654 04:12, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Categories are more complex. There are valid cases where category A includes category B which includes category A again, or where category C includes itself. With the current software, that poses no problems, but it does significantly complicate building a tool to display a view of a category and all its subcategories. It might be the reason why no such tool has yet appeared.-gadfium 05:25, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Can we assume that the template transclusion system is similarly protected? If {{A}} contains {{B}} and vice versa, what will appear? And what happens if {{A}} contains itself? (In the spirit of WP:BEANS I have no intention of finding out without a written disclaimer from every last developer and a promise that they will physically protect me should anything disastrous happen :-) HTH HAND —Phil | Talk 15:06, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

It is, as Raul654 wrote above. The software will refuse to let a page transclude itself, either directly or indirectly. See User:Ilmari Karonen/sandbox/foo for an example. This will happen even if the template call includes parameters. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 16:44, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Inside noinclude it works (permalink). --Adrian Buehlmann 17:56, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

That's true. It's a useful feature too, since it allows useful examples to be shown for parametrized templates, as in Template:Stars. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 19:58, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Categories and tags

Is it technically possible to make our category system work more like the tagging system used by flickr, for example. This approach seems to display the information better, and would alleviate a number of problems related to ethnicity, nationality, gender and sexual orientation, focussing the categorisation debate upon each article's talk page rather than on the system itself. Steve block talk 20:24, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

Ignoring display issues for the moment, are you thinking this is fundamentally different than the category intersection and union suggestions that have been floating around for quite some time? I suspect categories in Wikipedia are actually implemented pretty much like tags at Flikr (database record for each category/tag including references of some kind to each article/photo), but Flickr lets you do set intersection and set union quite easily. Calling it a tag rather than a category, and (significantly) allowing intersection and union operations likely would avoid much of the angst we subject ourselves to. Databases are pretty good at intersection and union, but I don't know if the 200 per page limit we use (for category displays) is because of the expense of returning a large search set (and with a tag based mechanism there would likely be lots of cases where far more than 200 articles would have the same tag). So, technically possible? I think almost certainly. Easy from where we are now? Not so much. Seems like it might be worth bringing this up with the developers and seeing what they think. -- Rick Block (talk) 03:10, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

See, I have no idea what intersection and union thingummy's are. It was just a thought that occurred to me whilst I was debating the pros and cons of sub-categorising. It seemed that the way tags work, like flickr and del.icio.us, where you have one tag, and then on that page are other tags by which you can better sort the tags, that would be better for categorisation. That way, everything in Category:Foo would be displayed, with the sub-categories allowing a reader to sort them. That sort of system would take away issues of sub-categorisation, although I guess another way around that would be to allow articles to be displayed in top level categories. Maybe another way to do it is to have nothing in top level categories but sub-categories, with one of the sub-categories being all foo. Sort of:

• Category:Foo contains no articles but the following sub-categories:
• Category:X-ish Foo
• Category:Y-ish Foo
• Category:Z-ish Foo
• Category:A-ish Foo
• Category:Foo in C
• Category:All Foo

I don't really know about display issues. Would that need to change beyond a 200 per page limit? Steve block talk 15:03, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Let's back up a bit. Wikipedia has categories that can include categories or articles. This leads to the structural issues we all know and love hate. I'm pretty sure Flickr doesn't actually have "subtags". The Wikipedia analogy would be articles can only have elemental categories (tags) and there would be no explicit subcategories. In Flickr when you add another tag to the list of tags (to "better sort") you're selecting to display only those photos that have all the tags in your list (in database terms, this would be an intersection, i.e. show only things with tag1 and tag2 and tag3 ...). In a sense, you're making your own "subcategory", on the fly. I haven't used Flickr much, but I imagine if you start with tag1 the other tags you can add (to filter the list) are any other tag applied to any of the photos tagged with tag1. Back to Wikipedia - if categories worked like tags, an article like Enrico Fermi would be "tagged" with elemental categories only, i.e. category:1901 births, category:1954 deaths, category:physicists, category:American people, category:Italian people (and some more), but NOT category:American physicists (or any other "intersection" sort of category). From this article, to get to other American physicists, I think you'd have to click on category:physicists or category:American people, and then add the other tag/category to what turns up from that display. Note that you could find physicists born in 1901 this way, too, without anyone ever having created a category:physicists born in 1901. Rather than have any explicit "subset" categories, you'd build your own subset criteria. The display problem is that most "elemental" categories in Wikipedia would have thousands of articles (imagine category:American people, for example). We could display the first 200 articles that have all the categories/tags you've selected, with a count of how many articles match altogether. There are some details that would need to be worked out, but I think this is an excellent idea and would be a far more useful feature to readers than the current category feature (and it would drastically reduce the workload at WP:CFD as well). -- Rick Block (talk) 16:06, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, that's the way I was thinking it would work, but from my experience tags can only be one word, so Category:1901 would be one, Category:Births another, Category:American another and Category:People another. It makes every word a category. Still, I think I'll mention it to a developer. Steve block talk 19:57, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

I don't think single word would be the issue so much as single concept. Tagging Enrico Fermi with Category:1901 and Category:Births loses the concept of "born in 1901", i.e. if these are individual tags their intersection doesn't mean "born in 1901" (could be someone who died in 1901). Note that categories/tags could be placed in categories/tags as a way of doing a "union" operation. For example, the category/tag 'physicist" might itself be categorized/tagged as "scientist" so from Enrico Fermi you might be able to select "scientist" (lots and lots of results) and then "Italian people" to find all Italian scientists regardless of their specialty. Any "second level" tag (like scientist) would be a potential performance nightmare, but I can imagine ways to structure the software so that this wouldn't necessarily be a huge issue. -- Rick Block (talk) 04:48, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

I posted it to wikitech, although I forgot to subscribe so I haven't followed up yet. You might be able to get your head around the responses better than me:

• Thu Jan 19 20:47:36 UTC 2006
• Thu Jan 19 23:20:00 UTC 2006
• Fri Jan 20 00:23:08 UTC 2006

I was also pointed to the following pages:

• meta:Del.icio.us-style Tags for MediaWiki
• meta:Using Ultimate Wiktionary for Commons
• meta:Multilingual MediaWiki
• meta:Semantic MediaWiki

They seem to come from the same angle but hit different targets, if you ask me. Anyway, I'll have to follow up back on the list, once I get my head around the information. Steve block talk 20:28, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Rich mentioned this discussion and invited me to comment. I'm wondering if we could create a system that would work this way, but also have structured categories as we have now. The problem with the system you've been contemplating is that there would be hundreds of tags, and you'd have to choose which one is important to the subject you are browsing. The advantage of our current system is that there is the editorial input of thousands of people deciding what articles go with each other and which paths through the infinite number of combinations of attributes make sense. I don't want to abandon this information, it is analogous to getting rid of an index in a book because you perform a quick text search. A good indexer makes decisions about what information someone will be looking for. Browsing through an index gives you a good idea of what is in the book. Browsing through our categories give a good idea of what is in Wikipedia. The system you describe doesn't inform the user about what is here, and what is important.

A combination approach might have the elemental categories we now have, but remove all subcategories. If articles are tagged, you could go to the elemental category and select some tags. So if you are looking at Category:Film directors (my latest obsession because it should not have been broken into meaningless subcategories by nationality), you'd see all the film directors there are, and be able to do a simple database selection using the tags.

If you do have these tags, how would they be controlled? If each article has hundreds of tags, it may be very difficult to select the two or three that are meaningful. I'm wondering about having a system that severely limits the number of tags, and they would apply to all articles. To create a new tag it would have to be nominated for creation. You could have geographical tags, chronological tags, etc... but If there were hundreds of tags with trivial information (e.g. appeared on The Simpsons) it might become a waste of time. -- Samuel Wantman 02:29, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

I don't actually see why such tags/categories would actually have to be treated differently at the user/editor end, they could still display as categories and be inputted as categories, the only difference would be that when you click on a category it would, as you and I seem to both desire, display all articles tagged with that category. The category page would also list all other categories articles within the category are tagged with, so that a reader could then choose to sort the category to those specific subcategories. I see this as solving problems of categories such as Category:Xian foo, which leaves Category:Foo stripped of all Xian foo and thus somewhat useless. As I read your response, that is also your wish. I would rather we did not create sub-categories like Xian foo, since they seem to disturb the categorisation structure somewhat, and they also introduce point of view observations into the classification system. If we merely have limited elemental or top level tags/categories, such as your suggestions, ones for geographical classification, for physical classification and so on, and allow the end user/reader to sort through these categories of their own volition. I would guess there would need to be some repositioning of the categorisation system, perhaps set it up as a classification system, and rename Categories for deletion to classifications for deletion, or perhaps create a classification WikiProject akin to WikiProject Stub sorting, where new classifications would need to be proposed and consensually agreed upon. Steve block talk 20:27, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

italic redirect in Special:Allpages

Could someone add the following line to monobook.css?

.allpagesredirect {font-style: italic}

It will cause redirect to be diplayed italic in Special:Allpages. Cheers, —Ruud 06:50, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Probably a safe bet to add to MediaWiki:Common.css. -- Netoholic @ 14:54, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Done. howcheng {chat} 00:29, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

CVS Problem

Is there a problem with the CVS? Last night I tried to download MediaWiki 1.6, and today I tried to download the extensions, and both times I got the following error:

cvs.exe [checkout aborted]: Error reading from server 
cvs.sourceforge.net: 0: No such file or directory

If this is just a problem for me, could somebody help me fix it? Thanks, Shardsofmetal ^{[ Talk | Contribs ]} 16:28, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

Sometimes sf.net anon CVS buggers out temporarily for some reason. — Ilyanep (Talk) 17:59, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

SourceForge's anonymous CVS servers have a reputation of being intermittent. Give it another go. Rob Church (talk) 07:53, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

Questions re server load from images in userspace

A policy is being prepared that may advise editors to remove templates with images from their userpages to lessen server load. Realizing that its hard enough to tune a system and near-impossible to explain it to civilians, still, I'm trying to understand this more. If anybody reads this who is familiar with the technical side of these issues and wants to reply that would be great, thanks. Herostratus 22:49, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

---

• To clarify -- I'm given to understand that the size of the image does not matter much, in other words a 45x45 image uses basically as much as a 450x450 image. Is this correct?

---

Replies:

A large image uses more disk space, takes more bandwidth when transferred at full size, and requires more resources when being resized. It takes no more resources to refer to an already existing image of large size other than the network transfer.

Generally, you should not worry much about little things like templates and "server load" at a policy level. If they're expensive, we'll either fix it or restrict it at a technical level; that's our responsibility. --Brion 01:01, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

---

• Does color depth make much difference? What about file format (jpg vs png)?

---

Replies:

At the moment, very large PNG images are more expensive than JPEGs to resize due to the memory usage of the converted program. This is a technical issue and can be improved; we already have technical measures in place to restrict very large such images. --Brion 01:01, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

---

• Is it advisable to delete all images from userpages? Recognizing that this is an intersection of policy and system capacity, would an advisory such as "no more than five images is recommended on a userpage, including those in templates" help reduce server load?

---

Replies:

Generally, if an image isn't usable in the encyclopedia you probably shouldn't upload it to Wikipedia. Remember that everything here must be freely licensed, and can and will be redistributed to and by third parties.

If you don't want the picture of you, your cat, or your girlfriend to be copied, modified, reused, and redistributed by commercial and noncommercial publishers, don't put it on Wikipedia. --Brion 01:01, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

---

• Recognizing that this is policy issue, would system capacity issues possibly be addressed by advising editors to go easy on image use in articles? (For instance, in a few articles I placed images more for page-design purposes than to illustrate a point. Should editors not do that? Only worry about it for likely-to-be-popular articles? Or not worry about it all?

---

Replies:

As a design and usability matter, you should avoid unnecessary images which don't contribute something to the article.

As a technical matter, it's our responsibility to keep the system running well enough for what the sites require. In other words: it's not a policy issue. If and when we need to restrict certain things, we'll do so with technical measures. --Brion 01:01, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

---

• What about images in community space (for example, the one at the top of this page). There aren't many but they are served often. Would it help to cut back on those? What about Images in signatures? (I know sigs are discussed somewhere but are the servers straining enough to make a crackdown advisable, I wonder.)

---

Replies:

Community space is a small fraction of total hits, and stock images that don't change much are not terribly expensive to serve. Definitely not an issue.

Signatures are a different matter because of the way they multiply; a bad sig can pollute thousands of pages and is hard to clean up. This isn't really specific to images, but generally we have been cracking down on too much fancy stuff in sigs due to their tendency to break when "clever markup tricks" rely on software bugs which get fixed. --Brion 01:01, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

---

• I suppose this is unanswerable, but is there any way to quantify image load vis-a-vis our server capacity in a way that a civlian could understand enough to contribute in an informed way to a policy discussion?

---

Replies:

"Policy" shouldn't really concern itself with server load except in the most extreme of cases; keeping things tuned to provide what the user base needs is our job. --Brion 01:01, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

I'm curious about something sort of related: have you seen WP:AUM? Is this not a case where a technical solution should be provided before we go off killing/changing tons of templates (in ways that increase bandwidth usage, or render poorly on certain browsers)? —Locke Cole • t • c 01:32, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

You should avoid metatemplates if they're ugly, hard to use, or fragile. That's just common sense; don't worry about "server load" for them.

For some very complex templates, people should probably be thinking about replacements for them such as proper data tables that will be easy for people to use and maintain, rather than hacking up ugly templates.

If someone's advising against "metatemplates" because they're ugly, fragile, and likely to break, listen to them. If someone's advising against them because they "increase server load", ask them for their benchmarks. I'd love to see them. --Brion 01:52, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Jamesday has been widely interpreted (or perhaps overinterpreted) as suggesting meta-templates should be eliminated and his comments are responsible almost entirely for making WP:AUM into policy. Though I don't know for sure, the above questions may have been provoked by other recent comments Jamesday made about limiting image use in templates. It seems like Jamesday plus a number of non-devs have been pushing for editting policies (such as WP:AUM) based on minimizing server load, but your comments above seem to indicate we should not be worrying about server issues. So which is it? Dragons flight 02:05, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

I have to date refused requests to advocate the AUM "policy" based on server load because nobody's yet produced any evidence for this server load claim. While in a basic sense, calling two templates will involve twice as many template data loads as calling one, I've not seen any indication that this is significantly burdensome at realistic levels. If you can get James to produce a solid test for it, we'll talk about it. --Brion 02:12, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Jamesday's concern in this area was more about invalidating page caches due to sub-sub-sub-templates being modified, and that change invalidating many pages. This, together with the level of complexity, fragility, and maintenance nightmare, are together why the WP:AUM is policy. -- Netoholic @ 02:26, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Since our software doesn't actually do that at this time, and to do it we'd first want to set up a background process for invalidations which will make it easy and inexpensive, I don't see that as a strong argument from the load perspective. --Brion 02:32, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

First of all, this is not policy. No consensus of Wikipedians agreed upon it, and clearly not even a consensus of developers agree upon it. Second of all, the sub-sub-sub templates you speak of (such as {{qif}} should never (or only rarely) be modified). If the issue is only with sub-sub-sub templates, then it's a non-issue as far as I'm concerned. And in any event, server/technical issues should not influence editorial decisions except in the most extreme of cases (which it appears this is not). —Locke Cole • t • c 02:33, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Just let me ask, what developer proposed this idea? How many developers have said it's a good idea? How can ordinary Wikipedians who nothing about the software deign to talk about making drastic changes to solve performance problems? You haven't made any measurements to evaluate the impact of this change and have no means of doing so, and so this is all just an elaborate theory that is more likely than not premature optimization in the wrong place. Deco 02:23, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

As far as I know, just Jamesday. If he's done any measurements he hasn't shown them to me. --Brion 02:32, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Brion: can you go tell that to the people on the talk page there and remove the policy tag then since its a policy pushed against any attempt at votes etc.

Netoholic took a vauge set of statements from jamesday that weren't phrased at all as a demand and that he seemed to have little interest in substatiating with more details and used it to push that "policy" and it seems managed to get sufficiant support from gullible members of the admin team to push it into getting the policy tag against the wishes of much of the wider community. Plugwash 02:27, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

I've said that numerous times in the past. --Brion 02:32, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

BTW i think you really need to consider some promotions, the reason we get stuck with hacks like the if templates (and now the arguably worse hiddenstructure css) and css and javascript hacks everywhere is because we have a lot of sysops and very few developers. The result is that its much faster to get things done in a way a sysop can do through hacks involving css and javascript than it is to actually get them done properly (moderately important patches can take weeks to get committed even if a patch is written, nice to have stuff takes even longer. Plugwash 03:23, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

We've had a couple new devs come on recently; Rob Church has been applying fixup patches and such. --Brion 19:01, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Wheee. Rob Church (talk) 07:48, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

---

• Avriette poked me after reading about the image load issues, and suggested I ping you guys about about [PhotoN]. Is there any interest in looking at pulling in something like this?

--adam at phase-n dot com 15:51, 25 January 2006 (AEST)

---

Texvc patches

I don't know if this is an appropriate place to do so, but I'd like to draw attention to four texvc bugs that I wrote patches for a few weeks ago. Please could a developer review them and perhaps commit them? I'd especially like to see the colour patch in Wikipedia. Here are the bugs: #1663 (colour support), #2026, #3052, #4000. Lupin|talk|popups 01:42, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

You should have had four emails corresponding to four commits I made. Rob Church (talk) 15:24, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

For some reason I only got one, but I noticed that you'd commited the changes. Thanks! Do you know when these will take effect in wikipedia? Lupin|talk|popups 18:16, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Whenever someone compiles/updates/synchronises. Rob Church (talk) 23:36, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

Nested tables and wikitable

If you have a wikitable and have another table inside the wikitable, that table will inherit all attributes from the wikitable, and that's is seldom what you want (if you want the nested table to be a wikitable, you specify that one as a wikitable). Ther is a simple fix for the problem, just change the css for wikitable to:

            table.wikitable,
            table.prettytable {
                margin: 1em 1em 1em 0;
                background: #f9f9f9;
                border: 1px #aaaaaa solid;
                border-collapse: collapse;
            }

            table.wikitable > tbody > tr > th, table.wikitable> tbody > tr > td,
            table.prettytable > tbody > tr > th, table.prettytable > tbody > tr > td {
                border: 1px #aaaaaa solid;
                padding: 0.2em;
            }

            table.wikitable > tbody > tr > th,
            table.prettytable > tbody > tr > th {
                background: #f2f2f2;
                text-align: center;
            }

            table.wikitable caption,
            table.prettytable caption {
                margin-left: inherit;
                margin-right: inherit;
            }

_→AzaToth 22:45, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

Deprecating images that are used on templates

I've created a SVG version of the peace symbol, Image:Peace Sign.svg. I'm attempting to replace all instances of the old Image:Peace-symbol.png with this (since, as a vector image, the SVG version scales much better to different resolutions). But I'm running into some trouble. The "What links here" page doesn't seem to be getting updated properly. Many of the uses are on templates, but even when I both replace the image on the template and then do a dummy save on the pages that transclude it, the list is still not updated. What do I need to do to get an accurate idea of where the image is used, and have it updated as I change it? Crotalus horridus (TALK • CONTRIBS) 06:45, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

I think making null edits on the pages that use the template updates the what liks here list. Not that that sounds like a very acceptable way out for you. --Martyman-(talk) 07:48, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

I'd suggest just going through all the links in the what links here list, skipping the ones that already have the SVG version. A tabbed browser like Firefox makes this very easy. Or you could just add a note to the image talk page and leve it at that, letting people migrate to the SVG version gradually. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 12:17, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

search bug?

Please confirm this bug, then post it to the appropriate place (Bugzilla?).

When I type

   magnetotactic

into the little search bar on the left and punch the "Search" button (or the "Go" button), I get a page that includes

   ----
   Results 1-4 of 4
   * Lodestone
     ...cteria (Italian Wikipedia) had learned the trick. Magnetotactic bacteria build miniature magnets inside themselve...
     Relevancy: 11.8% - 1.3 kB (185 words) - 21:29, 12 January 2006
   * Sense
     Relevancy: 3.6% - 12.6 kB (1894 words) - 17:42, 14 January 2006
   ----

I expected it to *either* say "Results 1-2 of 2", then list 2 results, or else say "Results 1-4 of 4", and then list 4 results. But it seems to claim there are 4 results, and then only give 2 of them.

Another bug is that neither "2" nor "4" are correct. At least 5 articles (perhaps more) use the word "magnetotactic":

1. magnetotactic bacteria
2. bacteria
3. sense
4. lodestone
5. magnetotaxis

--DavidCary 06:17, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

Search indexes are a little out of date, and will be rebuilt/updated/improved/etc. soon. Rob Church (talk) 16:21, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

Vertical alignment bug in MediaWiki:Common.css?

The style definition in MediaWiki:Common.css doesn't seem to strictly adhere to the CSS2 specification. The germane part of the style sheet is as follows:

.infobox tr {
   vertical-align: top;
}

The CSS specification, in Section 10.8. Line height calculations: the 'line-height' and 'vertical-align' properties, states that the vertical-align style element applies to inline-level and table-cell elements. [Emphasis added.] Further, the vertical-align examples in the specification at Section 17. Tables are all applied to the table cell elements <td> and <th> rather than to the row-level element <tr> as is done in MediaWiki:Common.css.

The fact that some browsers allow applying the vertical-align style element to the <tr> tag does not mean that browsers are required to support this variation from the standard, and some browsers in fact do not do so. This leads to variation in appearance of the infobox text from that which was desired.

It appears that a standards-compliant style sheet should include the following styling in place of what's there today:

.infobox td,
.infobox th {
   vertical-align: top;
}

This change would seem to produce the desired consistent alignment behavior in a browser-independent way. I therefore propose it for discussion. — JonRoma 03:39, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Totally agree with this change, and more. We also need to add some padding to the cells, since that is done manually in almost ever infobox anyway. Please see simple:MediaWiki:Common.css and copy all of the Infobox template style section over to ours. -- Netoholic @ 14:49, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

JonRoma's request done. Adding padding to the infobox would mean that we'd have to go and change all the infobox templates on this end. Is someone prepared to go and do that? howcheng {chat} 00:29, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

Yes, where needed. The change is very subtle. -- Netoholic @ 05:44, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

Done. howcheng {chat} 22:24, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

Help with code

Hello, the following is for the Swedish Wikipedia's Main Page:

Välkommen till Wikipedia, den fria encyklopedin som alla kan redigera.

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How do you make the buttons lay next to the search box, not under (ex.)? MartinHagberg 12:39, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

There seems to be no option for this using inputbox (see m:Help:Inputbox), and since this is an extension in the MediaWiki source (and you can't include forms in raw HTML) to get it changed you'd have to file an enhancement request using wikipedia:MediaZilla. -- Rick Block (talk) 16:19, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

Looking at the page, I see the issue has been addressed. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 07:06, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

With a recently added "break=no" parameter to inputbox. -- Rick Block (talk) 14:58, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Which I've implemented above as an example. Rob Church (talk) 10:25, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

"Difference between revisions" page not working correctly

Normally when you compare two versions of a page (to see what changes were made or to revert vandalism etc) it shows all the text from both revisions in 2 colums with differences highlighted in red text. At the moment, when I tell it to compare 2 versions, its just showing the current version as is, with pictures and formatting etc, like the normal article. Any ideas? --Naha|^(talk) 20:38, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

Err, ok this HAD been happening for a good ten minutes or so at least, but it appears to be working fine now. Not sure what changed hehe. --Naha|^(talk) 20:42, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

If you see it again, please provide some specific links. --Brion 21:18, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

Infobox CSS change

Somebody just changed the CSS for .infobox and it looks horrible. Can we change it back? --Gareth Hughes 17:25, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

I've corrected the CSS so that the display isn't changed. Changing the CSS for infobox classes changes a whole lot of different infoboxes. Shouldn't this have been discussed beforehand? --Gareth Hughes 17:55, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

Please undo this edit, as it was not in the original infobox definition. TH cells are centered in most browsers by default, but some infoboxs are designed to left-align them as a design choice. Your edit overrides that at a cell level, and so is changing those appearances. For example, the Template:Infobox example template should show all cells left-aligned, but is not as a result of your edit. -- Netoholic @ 20:42, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

Markup bug

The headings for On this day and Wikipedia Community don't line up right in either Firefox nor Internet Explorer on the page Wikipedia:WikiProject Usability/Main Page/Draft B.

I've been over it with a fine-toothed comb, and I can't find the glitch. See the right hand column in the markup sample posted below. Please help.

Go for it! 04:37, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

Please ignore the "Did you know" and "In the news" headings, as that is just a bug on this page only. It's On this day and Wikipedia Community that need to be fixed. Good luck.

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Welcome to Wikipedia The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit 6,919,630 articles and growing

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Today's featured article KARE (channel 11) is a television station licensed to Minneapolis, United States, an NBC affiliate. Channel 11 began service as WTCN, an ABC affiliate, in 1953. It presented several notable children's shows in its early years. After Time Inc. purchased the station in 1957, ABC switched affiliates, leaving channel 11 to become an independent station that broadcast the Minnesota Twins baseball team, movies, and syndicated programs. By the late 1970s, WTCN was one of the nation's most financially successful independent stations. On March 5, 1979, channel 11 became an NBC affiliate but struggled with its revamped newscasts. Between 1983 and 1987, the station moved from last to first in late news ratings, battling WCCO for two decades. It changed call signs twice in that period, to WUSA in 1985 and KARE in 1986, when owner Gannett moved the WUSA call sign to its Washington, D.C., station. More recently, as of 2022, the station has been a second-place finisher in local news. (Full article...) Recently featured: PlayStation (console) Windswept Adan Benty Grange helmet Today's featured picture {{{caption}}} Archive More featured pictures   Marie Denizard ... that Marie Denizard (pictured) stood as a candidate in a French presidential election in 1913, thirty years before French women achieved suffrage? ... that The Crystal was one of few publications in early-20th-century China that regularly covered same-sex intimacy? ... that Hanif Kureshi transformed shadows cast by the Sun into street art? ... that Gigarta, a settlement mentioned by Strabo and Pliny the Elder, is believed to have been located on the slopes of Mount Lebanon, although its exact location remains under debate? ... that Al LeBoeuf was diagnosed with a rare condition in 2012 from an injury that he suffered in 1985? ... that the Swedish broadcaster organising the Eurovision Song Contest 1975 refused to allow the contest to be shown in Chile, as a protest against the country's military dictatorship? ... that the Polish manga and anime fandom arose in the 1990s and now numbers over 100,000 people? ... that Frank A. Kimball brought a transcontinental rail terminus to National City, California, in exchange for thousands of acres of land? ... that Aldous Huxley developed his "feelies" in response to the emergence of "talkies"?

Protesters in South Korea South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declares martial law (protests pictured) and lifts it hours later after a vote by the National Assembly. Syrian opposition forces enter Aleppo in the first offensive since the 2020 ceasefire. Israel and Lebanon agree to a 60-day ceasefire to halt the current hostilities. In motorsport, Thierry Neuville and Martijn Wydaeghe win the World Rally Championship. Ongoing: Israel–Hamas war Israeli invasion of Lebanon Russian invasion of Ukraine timeline Sudanese civil war timeline Recent deaths: John Stanley Pottinger Silvia Pinal Terry Griffiths Tom Hughes Peggy Caserta Siegfried Thiele On this day... December 4: Navy Day in India 2004 transit of Venus 1639 – Jeremiah Horrocks and William Crabtree made the first successful observation of a transit of Venus (example pictured) from Earth. 1872 – The American brigantine Mary Celeste was found apparently abandoned under circumstances that remain unknown. 1971 – Indo-Pakistani War: The Indian Navy launched a successful attack against the Pakistan Navy at Karachi, sinking three ships with no Indian casualties. 1980 – The English rock group Led Zeppelin officially disbanded. 2006 – Six black teenagers assaulted a white student in Jena, Louisiana; the subsequent court cases became a cause célèbre for perceived racial injustice in the United States. Maerten de Vos (d. 1603) Agnes Forbes Blackadder (b. 1875) Inder Kumar Gujral (b. 1919) Benjamin Britten (d. 1976) More anniversaries: December 3 December 4 December 5 Wikipedia community Every page on Wikipedia is a collaborative effort. But there are some special places reserved for specific types of discussion and assistance. Find what you're looking for here: The Community Portal — The center of community involvement. Learn about projects and activities you can join to help improve Wikipedia. The Help Desk — Come here if you need help editing. You can ask a question about using Wikipedia. Alternatively, you can find what you need at Help:Contents. The Reference Desk — For questions about any subject you're researching or curious about (not about Wikipedia itself), just like at a library's reference desk. The Village Pump — The main discussion forums of Wikipedia. The Signpost — Wikipedia's newspaper, where you can read and post news about what's happening on this website. Donations — Wikipedia is funded entirely by its users. We appreciate all donations. Thank you!

I've spent hours trying to find why the headings in the right-hand column don't line up. Are you an expert at markup? Can you fix this? --Go for it! 04:37, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

I've no idea what the root cause is, but I have to say that the DOM tree for that table is a mess. It looks like someone applied a sort of a shotgun approach to DIV placement to it. One difference I can immediately see is that the "In the news" section is wrapped in a DIV with style="float: right; margin-left: 0.5em;", while the other two sections in the right hand column are not. That could well be the cause, but I'm somewhat scared of actually taking a look at the Wiki source to test this hypothesis... —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 17:07, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

Please have a look into my sandox at this revision. I have replaced all div tags with span (diff). Don't ask my why, but I have had several very strange effects with div in the past, without being able to say what goes on. --Adrian Buehlmann 18:13, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

Custom version of MediaWiki:Edittools?

Is it possible to utilize the userspace Javascript/CSS files to create a custom version of the character insertion tools? I'd like to make it so that I don't see some of the foreign-language characters that I never use, and also add some macros for commonly used functions like *{{subst:test1}} ~~~~. I've managed to add a couple of options via hacks, but I'm not very satisfied with the results. I'd like to be able to replace the whole thing. Crotalus horridus (TALK • CONTRIBS) 00:32, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

My suggestion is to use the code #editpage-specialchars { display: none; } to hide the main one then copy the code from the main one over to your own css file and butcher it mercilessly as you see fit (making sure to remove or change the div id) and that should in theory at least give you your own custom special-chars box. Jtkiefer^{T | C | @} ---- 01:44, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

What about a setting in 'preferences', to allow users to choose a layout. I much the prefer the now reverted dropdown box, and since it works on my system, I'd like to be able to use it. -- Ec5618 10:09, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

12 hours watchlist

I have experienced a switch from default 3 days to default 12 hours watchlist at no: and nn:, but not at en:. If I select 3 days explicitly and then hit "hide my edits", I'm back to 12 hours. This happened to me and others at no: on 19 January and has not improved yet, and then at nn: on 24 January. I've not had any problems at en: so far. Have there been any software updates recently or any other changes that could explain this? --Eddi (Talk) 04:06, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

Here's a chunk of CVS Mediawiki code that seems to explain it:

  if( is_null($days) || !is_numeric($days) ) {
                $big = 1000; /* The magical big */
                if($nitems > $big) {
                        # Set default cutoff shorter
                        $days = $defaults['days'] = (12.0 / 24.0); # 12 hours...
                } else {
                        $days = $defaults['days']; # default cutoff for shortlisters
                }
        }

So if you would otherwise have over 1000 items displayed, it seems that it restricts you to 12 hours by default. Lupin|talk|popups 04:08, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

... although there is arguably a minor bug here, in that the link on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Watchlist?days=3 which says "Hide my edits" should probably keep the 3 day limit. Lupin|talk|popups 04:14, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

I have more than 1000 pages on my watchlists at no: and nn:, and I may incidentally have passed the limit on 19 and 24 January, respectively. But the number of items displayed for 3 days is far from 1000, even counting talk pages, so the 1000 limit is probably on the number of watched pages, not displayed items – or it may be an even bigger bug. --Eddi (Talk) 04:21, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

You're right. It looks like $nitems is the number of pages in your watchlist excluding talk pages. I'm guessing that things are done this way for performance reasons. Lupin|talk|popups 12:40, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

Had the same problem when my watchlist got up there. Simplest solution: set your watchlist the way you want it, with the proper "&" variables in the URL (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Watchlist&days=3&hideOwn=1, for example), then bookmark/fave it -- putting it on the "Bookmarks" toolbar in Firefox or the "Links" toolbar in IE gives you one-click access to your favorite watchlist view (and makes it that much easier to compulsively check for bad edits during your day....). Or you can set that URL as one of your browser's start page (Firefox allows multiple start pages) -- this will also get you extra points on the official Wikipediholic test.... — Catherine\^talk 04:25, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

The protection message is wrong

Until yesterday, when editing a semi-protected page, there was, quite correctly, no warning message at all. Now, it says that it has been locked so only admins can edit it, which is really very very wrong indeed. Has someone been entertaining themselves in MediaWiki: space again, or has something changed in MediaWiki itself? Either way, could the relevant person/people try to fix it? I've alredy seen a couple of confused talk page messages regarding this, and the problem is something like 24hrs old. -Splash^talk 02:11, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

It looks like MediaWiki:Protectedpagewarning is being used for semi-protection as well. I'd strongly suggest using a seperate message for semi-protection (something like MediaWiki:Semiprotectedpagewarning maybe). —Locke Cole • t • c 02:17, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

Yes. But when/why was this changed. Like I said, until yesterday, there was no warning at all. And no warning at all is the right move, since why do people care if it is semi'd and they can edit it? If they can't they get a "view source" button and a message anyway, and there's no need to tell people already editing it that they are allowed to do so! -Splash^talk 02:21, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

I don't think it's inappropriate to remind people the article is semi-protected. I'm sorry we disagree on that. But at least we seem to agree that using MediaWiki:Protectedpagewarning is the wrong idea.. —Locke Cole • t • c 02:33, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

We have a tag warning about the protection, and I don't see why anyone who can edit the article cares, really, since they are still encouraged to edit it, unlike admins in the case of a full-protected page. What should we do about the message anyway: clearly, it can't stay in the broken state it is. -Splash^talk 02:49, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

I think we should compromise: add a new message for semi-protection warnings but have it default to blank. If/when it comes up, we can add the message later (but it should probably be in MediaWiki regardless so other MW users can customize it to their liking). —Locke Cole • t • c 05:00, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

You realise the software has no concept of "semi protection", right? It's just our name for a specific configuration set that allows us to add a protection level that requires an account to be autoconfirmed. I have a feeling this problem has arisen in response to a bug fix I committed last week, so I'll get onto providing some sort of solution. Rob Church (talk) 07:52, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

All right, here's what we have. It is my fault, but I'm not sure exactly how best to fix it, so I want some user input. The problem is this; there are an indefinite number of levels of protection given site configuration. So what is it you want to see? Separate notices would be a mess, and be quite unfeasible. Would you prefer to see no warning, or perhaps just details on who can do what - i.e. print out the current protection level, with a link to the protected page guidelines. I'm in your hands, metaphorically, so let's hear it? Rob Church (talk) 11:59, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

Previously there was no message when the page was semi'd and the usual message when it was full'd. I thought that was working ok, it having stood without comment for a month or so. If we feel we absolutely can't go back to that (and we should, imo, because "no message" is what autoconfirmed users get when they execute a move) then a human-friendly message giving the current level(s) would be better. Since there is no software concept of semi, though, human-friendly might be impossible, in which case nothing at all is probably better. At present, we have a both-ways message, which I suppose is kind-of alright too. That's not terribly helpful is it? -Splash^talk 12:08, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

The technical explanation for the change is that I fixed the function which checks for protection of any nature so that it works with the new protection system. As a side-effect, the message now shows up for all. I'm tending towards a brief reminder of the page's current editing restrictions unless there are objections. Rob Church (talk) 10:24, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

Ideally, I think the warning message would list the restrictions:

The following protections have been applied to this page:

• Editing: Block new and unregistered users
• Moving: Block all non-admin users

Demi ^T/_C 16:08, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

That seems ok to me (i.e. what Robchurch proposes with the kind of info that Demi suggests). It would be nice if we can avoid "autoconfirmed" turning up and confusing newbies. -Splash^talk 15:09, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

Userpages on Special:Wantedpages

Is there a way to block user pages from being on this list? --Revolución (talk) 17:20, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

For what definition of "user pages" ? —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 04:39, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

I suspect the plea is in response to the huge number of links generated by anonymous users actually remembering to sign their contributions when they haven't created a user page. Would it be possible to add the now-familiar namespace-dropdown to this list? —Phil | Talk 15:46, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

At some point in the not-too-distant future, I'll look into adding a namespace selector to some query pages. Rob Church (talk) 14:49, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

Bug report: search box

It appear that the nowiki-tag produces quite undesireable results when used in conjunction with this search box:{{search wikipedia}}

For example, see four tildes: ~~~~. Oddly, when transcluding the template, the problem seems to go away, though. The Reference Desk currently uses the code in the standard header, which means transclusion wouldn't be practical there. Any thoughts? -- Ec5618 23:36, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

It's definitely a bug; you should report it on bugzilla. --cesarb 23:42, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

I've commented-out the template call in your example here, because it's affecting the whole page; to see what's happening, uncomment and do a preview. --cesarb 23:46, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

Right, thanks. I'm not quite comfortable submitting bugs, to be honest. I can tell you that it seems to affect math-tags as well: $l$. -- Ec5618 23:47, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

Well, I'm comfortable submitting bug reports, and I will submit this one. --cesarb 00:02, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

bugzilla:4785. --cesarb 00:08, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Images at "Wikipedia:Copyright problems"

The instructions at WP:CP currently state that {{article-cv}} should be used to list images on that page. However, if one follows this, the entire image is displayed because it isn't prefixed with a colon ( : ). Is there another template that should be used for images? There is no {{image-cv}}. -- Gyrofrog (talk) 16:09, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, that'd be nice. When I created article-cv I didn't create image-cv to avoid cries of "instruction creep" (and also I'm willing to bet large sums of wikimoney that it will be overlooked 60% of the time anyway — who ever reads the instructions?). But taht doesn't mean we couldn't try — I wonder if a Template God is able to use those wacky things that templates can do to 'sense' if the 'article' name begins with "Image" and automate the process within a single template (then creating a redirect from image-cv to article-cv for simplicity's sake)? -Splash^talk 17:44, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

Well, it wasn't always like this, but I'm not sure how to put things back the way they were. I went to add an image and noticed that soneone had added the images directly into the listing. I figured this was a mistake and prefixed them with colons. But after I added my listing I noticed the same thing had happened. I (briefly) checked the histories of both WP:CP and {{article-cv}} but couldn't tell when something relevant might have changed. -- Gyrofrog (talk) 17:51, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

{{article-cv|:Image:Phase Modulation.png}} works fine for me. The colon has always been necessary. -Splash^talk 18:08, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

I guess I forgot (as did the person before me). When adding {{imagevio}} to the image itself, it generates the text for that particular image and does include the colon. But the instructions at WP:CP omit the colon (I have gone back and added a colon). -- Gyrofrog (talk) 19:17, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. In my defence, when I created those instructions, I did include the colon (e.g. [6]), but someone helpfully removed it later... -Splash^talk 19:34, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

Brackets in links

Often I notice brackets () inside wikilinks represented by %28 and %29 e.g. Tom Jones (singer) [[Tom Jones (singer)]] and Tom Jones (singer) [[Tom Jones %28singer%29]], these are obviously the same. Is there any reason for this and is it ok to replace the code with the actual symbols? I assume it is but I don't understand why people do this in the first place. Martin 13:35, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

Such links have been copied-and-pasted fgrom URLs. It is fine to change them back. - IMSoP 14:15, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

ok thanks Martin 21:42, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

See also Percent-encoding for why the %'s are there in the first place. --PeruvianLlama^(spit) 03:53, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

Spam protection filter

I was unable to close the VfD discussion for Mofunzone, which gave me a new, unfamiliar message on both the discussion page and the article itself :

The page you wanted to save was blocked by the spam filter. This was caused by a link to an external site.

See the spam blacklist on Meta for a full list of blocked sites. If you believe that the spam filter is mistakenly blocking the edit, then please request that it be fixed on the spam blacklist talk page. The following is the section of the page that triggered the filter:

The following text is what triggered our spam filter: (EN Wikipedia's address)

Anyone have any idea what is actually going on here?

- Best regards Mailer Diablo 09:25, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

It's broken, don't know why. Disabled for the moment. --Brion 09:30, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

Thanks! It works fine for me now. I suppose the filter script needs more off-site testing? :) - Cheers, Mailer Diablo 09:34, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

The problem was not enough on-site testing. It had already been tested on my computer and on Wikicities with no problems, a few minutes of careful observation after deployment on Wikimedia would have picked up the problem. -- Tim Starling 04:36, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

<noinclude></noinclude>

<noinclude></noinclude>

Is there anywhere in Wikipedia where there is a complete description of how <noinclude></noinclude> are supposed to work? Also, the other special Wikipedia HTML codes (such as <nowiki></nowiki>)? Thanks. ⇒ _normxxx| ^talk ⇒ email 18:17, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

I don't know of any complete list of extensions. The purpose of noinclude tags is to include markup in a template which is shown on the template page itself but not on the pages into which it is transcluded. It is often used to add descriptive text on how the template is used, or to add it to a category for certain types of templates. Similarly, text marked <includeonly> is shown on pages the template is transcluded into, but not on the template page itself, and is useful for categories (since you usually don't want the template itself in the category). Deco 19:29, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Include and noinclude are described in the "Noinclude and includeonly" section of m:help:template. nowiki is part of the wikimarkup syntax, described at Help:Editing. Extensions in general are described at m:MediaWiki extensions, although not all extensions are installed at all mediawiki sites. I'm not sure where the list of extensions installed at, say, en.wikipedia.org is. Perhaps someone else who watches this page might be able to help out. -- Rick Block (talk) 02:22, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

There's Special:Version which, I think at least, speaks only about enwiki. -Splash^talk 05:48, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

<noinclude>, <includeonly> and <nowiki> are not extensions, they are part of the core parser. There's also <onlyinclude>, <center>, <gallery>. <math> and <html> are optional, the former is enabled on this wiki but the latter isn't. Wikipedia runs on the bleeding-edge development version of MediaWiki, so documentation may occasionally lag behind features. We rely on users to watch wikitech-l and bugzilla and keep it up to date. -- Tim Starling 02:18, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

What is Wikimedia's energy source?

What energy source powers the Florida data HQ and by which power company? The lorax 20:09, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

No idea, but you could call them and ask. http://www.powermedium.com/ --00:18, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

Do they provide their service in exchange for that giant advert about Wikipedia? Martin 00:22, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

The energy source for Wikipedia article content, on the other hand, is traditionally caffeine. (SEWilco 05:34, 18 January 2006 (UTC))

I disagree. I say chocolate. [[Sam Korn]] 12:16, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

Chocolate contains a small amount of caffiene! --Aussie Evil 21:52, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

Meanwhile, the developers are dosed up to the nines on whatever Jimbo's auntie's cousin's younger nephew's dog's half-brother's owner's sister's ex's parents can get hold of. Rob Church (talk) 08:05, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

Ultimately, Wikimedia's energy source is Sol. --Aaron 23:16, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

AOL IP ranges

One of the AOL IP ranges has been given as 202.67.64.0/18. It was first listed as such all the way back on October 12 2004 by User:Jamesday. However, a whois check shows it's managed by APNIC and they report it as allocated to Primus Telecom Australia, which is not a subsidiary of AOL.

Can we clarify this? Did it get reallocated? Or is this a typo and the real AOL range is something else? And if it's Primus Telecom does it need any special handling at all or should we just drop it from the list? -- Curps 06:29, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

AOL's own webmaster info page lists this range (or a subset of it), but ARIN says it's managed by APNIC and APNIC says it's allocated to Primus Telecom. Hmmm... -- Curps 06:44, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

http://www.primusonline.com.au/about_primusaol.php ? --Brion 08:04, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Monobook tabs

I noticed that a while ago you changed the format of the monobook skin so that there was no indentation between the edge of the page and the article tab. However, you changed this back to the previous format. I was wondering what the reason for this is, because I liked the other one better. Also, if I update my mediawiki installation, and don't update the css files (to keep the different tab formatting), are there any other css changes that I need that I would be missing?
Thank You, Shardsofmetal ^{[ Talk | Contribs ]} 04:34, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

That was a patch I applied (authored by a third party, Chris Ware); a couple of devs made light protest, and there were a few user complaints, so I reverted. Rob Church (talk) 23:30, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Raw Wikitext & Categories

Hi all. I have two questions:

1. Is there any documentation regarding query string variables on Wikipedia/MediaWiki? Specifically I'm curious about raw output (for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Mdd4696/monobook.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript)
2. Is there any way to get raw output from a Category that includes the articles linked there?

I'm trying to find out if I can use some of this functionality on my monobook.js for an image tagging tool. Thanks! ~MDD4696 23:49, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

As far as I know, the actions are "history", "edit", "submit", and "raw". Raw just outputs your js as js rather than an HTML page. I don't think you can get raw output from a category. Superm401 - Talk 03:10, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

What about other query string variables, like "dontcountme"? Anybody know what that is? For example, there's the link when my monobook.js is included. ~MDD4696 18:56, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

That doesn't appear to do anything, looking at the code; it may just be something to do with "tricking" the cache in some way. - IMSoP 19:43, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Question about the new Cite.php feature.

Take a look at the newly featured article Krazy Kat. Specifically, this edit here and this one here. Notice how there are problems with the footnoted reference to Kramer in either version. In both cases the numbering of the footnotes is wrong; in the former there is only one link next to "Kramer" in the Notes section despite the two references to him, whereas in the latter there are two links as there should be, but the name "Kramer" is completely missing from the Notes section! How do I resolve this issue? Andrew Levine 02:44, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

Hmmm...I tried playing around with it, but was unsuccessful. I'd be interested to find out what's wrong. — Knowledge Seeker দ 03:23, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

This seems to be a new problem with all pages currently using cite.php I think it is a bug in the code. Hopefully a developer will fix it soon. --Martyman-(talk) 04:30, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

Cite.php bug

What hapened? It was working fine until yesterday, Now there is an obvious bug, see List of charismatic leaders. How do we alret the developer? ≈ jossi ≈ t • @ 04:54, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

Try User talk:Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason or Meta:Talk:Cite/Cite.php. — Catherine\^talk 06:09, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

I've reverted the buggy version of the extension. Use ?action=purge or edit to fix affected pages you may find. --Brion 10:17, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

Cheers. What happened? —Phil | Talk 10:37, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

I made an oopsee;) —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 08:44, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Audio links with loudspeaker

Can I get some comments on this proposed addition to the css? I want to add an .audiolink class to put clickable loudspeakers next to audio files (only where desired, of course).

The current implementation looks like this:

• pronunciation

Clicking the loudspeaker goes to the loudspeaker image page instead of the audio file. (Try it. See the big warning?) With the addition of this audiolink class, the loudspeaker would be added as part of the link through css, and would be clickable as expected.

I don't think it could possibly hurt anything, but "Any changes to Monobook.css or Common.css should be first proposed to Wikipedia:Village Pump." — Omegatron 20:15, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

I think {{click}} does what you're asking for. æle ✆ 22:15, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

1. It doesn't work.
2. A css class is superior to a kludgy complex template. — Omegatron 05:46, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

Look at bugzilla:539 if you haven't already; there's work on allowing images to link somewhere other than the description page. æle ✆ 21:18, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

Also bugzilla:1578 and bugzilla:3726, which I think is a little different. — Omegatron 03:39, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Support. Sounds good to me. (And yes, it should be a system image. Go ask a dev about it, I'm sure they wouldn't mind.) —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 07:13, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Some people wanted to change it, though; saying a blue loudspeaker would be better, etc. So maybe we should leave it editable for now? — Omegatron 03:30, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Is there a standardized loudspeaker symbol somewhere in Unicode? If so, could we use that? --DavidCary 06:17, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

I don't think that's a very good idea for accessibility by many browsers. They were using the music note symbol before, but people didn't like it.

I tried adding the code above to both the monobook.css and common.css. It didn't have any effect, so I assume it's being overridden by something else, despite the !important tags. Can someone help? — Omegatron 19:37, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Password security

I've disabled the ability to use blank passwords. Accounts which had blank passwords will have to reset them by e-mail on the login form. [7] --Brion 23:54, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Tracking Anonymous Users

I find it very annoying that there is no easy way to communicate with anonymous users of shared IP addresses. I was thinking about a method involving with session cookies. This would make it possible to make sure that comments and warnings go out to the correct user of a shared IP address and possibly even make it possible to selectively ban users of shared ip addresses (not perfectly as they could always remove the identification cookies). Has this been suggested before, and would there be any major technical issues with it's implementation? --Martyman-(talk) 22:32, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

History Page Problem

I keep finding a problem that something that was not changed is marked as changed, when comparing different user edits, for an example see the Zero Hour history page. --The1exile 17:18, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Are you sure it was not changed? Looking, for instance, at the link you provided, we can see that the first revision has a non-breaking space (800 MHz, 1.8 GHz) and the second one doesn't (800 MHz, 1.8 GHz). It's very hard to see, since it's the actual non-breaking space character that was used, instead of its character entity. In that case, some browsers change them to spaces when the article is edited (it's a known bug), which explains the change. --cesarb 18:15, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Linking to Wikipedia

I'm pointing readers to wikipedia articles from my webpage, and the wikipedia page won't let the browser go back to my page... how do I fix this? (I'm using MS Word to write the page.)

Please email me if possible to fix. Thanks.

Removed email. Reposting this to the Help Desk. -- Ec5618 16:18, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Focus

When creating a new article the focus automatically switches into the edit box, whereas it doesn't when editing an existing article. This auto focus switch is new and somewhat irritating, as it also brings that browser window to focus if you're looking at another window. I'm not sure when this change was made, or indeed which bit of code was changed. Any chance of it being removed or do people like it?

Also, if you make your edit before the page loads and are typing in the summary box when it does finish loading, you get switched to the main edit box and end up typing your summary in there. I think this feature should be left to individual users to install and deleted from the site-wide monobook.js. The best solution would be to have a shortcut key which focuses the edit box in my opinion. Lupin|talk|popups 13:03, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Very irritating and inconsistent. I already know how to operate my computer, please don't try to do it for me. I'm going to hunt this down and kill it, slowly. —Michael Z. 2006-01-30 17:57 Z

That field already has an accesskey assigned: control-comma works in my browser. —Michael Z. 2006-01-30 18:00 Z

I removed it. Purge your cache (shift-reload), or load the style sheet in your browser window and refresh. —Michael Z. 2006-01-30 18:03 Z

Nice work - thanks. violet/riga (t) 23:59, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Another small step towards MathML support in MediaWiki

Jitse Niesen is running a test wiki at wiki.blahtex.org. Please come for a visit.

There's also www.blahtex.org, where you will find

• source code and manual for blahtex 0.4 (the underlying TeX-to-MathML converter)
• interactive demo of blahtex
• every equation from wikipedia with MathML and PNG image side-by-side

Please direct all discussion to our page on Meta.

Dmharvey 01:44, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

I've copied this question to the meta page:

Will this allow us to enter equations directly in MathML, or do we still have to work with the LateX code?

HTH HAND —Phil | Talk 10:03, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Common.css ammendment proposal

I would like to add the following two rules to MediaWiki:Common.css

#toc::before { content: "The following section incorrectly uses id=\"toc\" instead of an appropriate class. Please amend this by editing the relevant template or page. "; }
#toc[summary="Contents"]::before { content: ""; content: none; content: inhibit; }

No user agent that supports double‐colon notation for pseudo‐elements does not support attribute selectors, according to the Wikipedia CSS support page, so it should work fine.
Should one be inclined to raise objections, speak now, lest for ever hold thy peace! — Nicholas 01:10, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

I'm sure you know what you're talking about. -- Ec5618 01:19, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

well, yes. Which bit would you like explaining? – Nicholas 02:10, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

But why do you have to beat the browser over its head with different forms of content until it reacts? --cesarb 01:46, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Well 'inhibit' would probably be the most correct, and if that isn't supported, it falls back to none, and then back to an empty string. No particular reason other than that. – Nicholas 02:10, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

"toccolours" is not the only replacement for "toc"; and "toc" is often appropriate, like on Template:CategoryTOC. Among other uses, toc is used often where the infobox, messagebox, and wikitable CSS classes should probably be used. I'd really prefer someone with a database dump to run a query to find which pages use id="toc" so that they can be edited without this sort of message appearing. I don't support the change. -- Netoholic @ 08:54, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Any replacement contents boxes should have a summary attribute too, so they would not show the message (see my user page for just such an example). As to whether 'toccolours' is the right class, well that's context dependant, and I wanted to keep the message short. Of course it would be better to make all these changes via a database dump, but that option is not available to me, and this will help coerce and educate page maintainers into fixing pages they watch over. The desired goal is valid XHTML. Perhaps, Netaholic, you would be happier with this alternative from my own monobook.css:

#toc { border-color: #8A8; background-color: #F8FFF8; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; }

It makes the ToC an aesthetically appeasing green colour and also makes incorrect usages of id="toc" stand out like a sore thumb, whilst avoiding any messages (but not educating people either). — Nicholas 13:19, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

new "reference:" namespace

Apparently the french wikipedia has added this space. Where is the best place to learn more about it and foster discusssion on whether adding it here would be a good idea? (why? see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Pghbridges.com and Wikipedia_talk:Articles for deletion/Pghbridges.com) ++Lar: t/c 20:51, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

I don't support this. Normal notability guidelines should apply. If the reference plays an important role, it deserves an article. If it's only valuable to Wikipedia editors, it can be in Wikipedia space, like Wikipedia:Using the Wayback Machine. Creating a separate namespace will only muddy the waters. Superm401 - Talk 07:02, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

PHP errors on meta

I'm getting intermittent PHP errors on Meta, when I hit "edit". For example, "Fatal error: Undefined class name 'parseroptions' in /usr/local/apache/common-local/php-1.5/includes/MessageCache.php on line 45". Dmharvey 06:40, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

I saw one of those here as well (may have been a different script but same class name). I almost forgot to add it to my extensive collection of them. :) Superm401 - Talk 07:42, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

Almost without doubt, a one-off. Happens sometimes. Managing an Alexa top-20 website with ~100 servers and a lot of hits per second; developers who, with one exception, aren't paid and do it out of the goodness of their hearts...mistakes are going to occur, and should be excusable. Rob Church (talk) 02:09, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

From what I can see, these are artifacts of the way we push updated code to the servers. Sometimes you just at just the wrong microsecond and the file's halfway through being copied. The code cache then sometimes gets confused with the bogus file in its memory, so occasionally they stick around on one server until it gets restarted. We're poking around at ways to do this more cleanly. --Brion 03:53, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Request for recompilation of texvc

Rob Church kindly committed some patches to texvc, but it hasn't been recompiled for wikipedia so they have no effect here. Please could texvc be recompiled and wikimedia wikis updated? Lupin|talk|popups 04:51, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

I suggest filing a bug at Bugzilla. — Ambush Commander^(Talk) 03:54, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. bugzilla:4795 Lupin|talk|popups 23:27, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

I think Brion's looking into recompiling and updating now. Rob Church (talk) 02:07, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

And has now finished it. Rob Church (talk) 03:51, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Random Page

Is there anyway to get a random page generated from a single category? I am thinking about for use in Portals.--Birgitte§β ʈ Talk 16:46, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

It's been requested, but I can't remember which bug number at the moment. Rob Church (talk) 02:06, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Icons on the Help page need help

I've been working on the help page and I've run into a slight problem that I don't know how to fix...

In Internet Explorer, the icons on the help page show up with white backgrounds. In Firefox, the background for the icons is transparent, and so matches the surrounding background (light purple) - like they're supposed to.

Does anyone know how to fix this so that the icons appear correctly in Internet Explorer?

--Go for it! 05:41, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

As a side, the icons appear transparent in Safari, too. - ElAmericano | talk 06:17, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

meta:Fixing transparent PNGs --Brion 06:18, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

@!#?@!

I'm having a problem creating a page with the title @!#?@!. (This would be a redirect to Q*bert.) Whenever I try, it truncates to @!. Any idea why this is happening? Crotalus horridus (TALK • CONTRIBS) 05:40, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

It's probably the pound sign, which is used for marking anchors within a page (for example, History of Earth#Origin. — Knowledge Seeker দ 05:49, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Naming_conventions_(technical_restrictions)#Excluded_characters. Dragons flight 05:54, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

Heh...nice demonstration! — Knowledge Seeker দ 05:57, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

Ah, that makes sense. So it's the presence of the HTML anchor that makes it impossible. Too bad. Crotalus horridus (TALK • CONTRIBS) 06:10, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

User page look

How do I make the h1-level heading on my user pages disappear (as someone did on a Main Page draft)? - ElAmericano | talk 04:30, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

You don't. --Brion 04:43, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

Image Licensing Drop-Down Change Request

Hi all. Currently the Image Upload Licensing drop-down has a "Movie or TV screenshot" selection that tags an image with {{film-screenshot}}. This needs to be split up into two different selections: "Movie screenshot" which corresponds to {{film-screenshot}}, and "TV screenshot" which corresponds to {{tv-screenshot}}. Thanks! ~MDD4696 03:37, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

Done. — Catherine\^talk 05:13, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

Search glitch?

I'm not sure if this is the right category, but it seems it is some kind of technical problem, so here goes...

I am trying to figure out the size of an article I spend a lot of time editing. I want to keep an eye on the size so I can know in advance when the article might be getting too long and need to be divided up. When i search for it, though, it does not show up in the search results no matter what combination of kewords I use, or even if I use the exact title. However, if I type the title and click "go", it does go to the article just fine! The article name is Dextro-Transposition of the great arteries (actual capitalization: dextro-Transposition of the great arteries), I have searched using "transposition", "dextro", "Dextro-Transposition", "arteries transposition", "d-TGA", and many more. Yet nothing yeilds the proper article in the results! I even tried copying and pasting the article contents to a subpage of my user page and searching for that, but it still doesn't work. I'd like to find out if this is an issue on my end, and if so, how I can fix it; or if it may be an issue with the search function, and hopefully it can be looked at. In the meantime, it would be great if someone could find out the size of the article for me...thanks in advance. bcatt 03:12, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

The search index is a couple months out of date for the moment. --Brion 03:36, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

Discussions areas need layout revision

Hi Folks

I've noted that in discussion areas, where people are having various edit wars, conversations, etc., it's not easy to see who's making what comment, who's quoting someone, when one person stops talking and when another begins, and so on. After a few edits and replies, it becomes an indecipherable hodge podge. This isn't really adequate for constructive resolution of questions and conflicts.

The comment title and author should automatically be be placed at the beginning of every post and automatically separated from any comment content by a complete line space. Each person's discussion comment should then be automatically followed by two line spaces to cue the reader that this author's commentary is finished and the next author's entry begins.

TGD

The problem is that talk pages are treated almost exactly like articles, so such formatting would be difficult. There's an idea to replace talk pages with threaded forum–type systems at m:LiquidThreads for MediaWiki 2.0. æle ✆ 22:17, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Yes please. Kaldari 22:26, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Have you seen how the French Wikipedia lays out their discussion pages? See Le Bistro, their equivalent of the Village Pump. I think it's all done with CSS; perhaps we could adapt something similar here. — Catherine\^talk 00:20, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

It's a rather simple hack. only need css. :) _→AzaToth 00:36, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

What links here not accurate

Sometime in the last week or so, the What links here page for the Persondata template stopped accurately listing all the articles that included the template. Whereas previously it was reporting around 300 inclusions, it suddenly dropped to about 150, and I know of several examples of articles that include the template which are no longer being listed on the page, for example Ross Winn. Am I missing something or is there some kind of bug here? Kaldari 20:05, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Nevermind, it looks like it is a bug: [8]. Kaldari 20:08, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

I'll slap a bot onto it. Rob Church (talk) 23:31, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Bah, some bugger's already done it. Rob Church (talk) 23:48, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

I wonder if you could reveal how one bots this problem, and who one asks for their bot's help? The WLH bug is jamming up TfD something chronic. I wonder if the devs might nobble the bug soon, or press their big "Update all template inclusions" button (they have one, right?). -Splash^talk 02:19, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

On a related note, for the purposes of manual orphaning, someone suggested searching for {{name}}, but this turns up every article containing the string between the {'s so is a pain to trawl. It does at least highlight the actual occurences of the full string, so is usable. How complete is this search likely to be? -Splash^talk

It turns out Tim's been running the refreshLinks maintenance script on all wikis, and as far as I know, this one's now been done. That should have sorted most, if not all, template links out. My method used the pagelinks table to pick up pages still pointing to the templates and then null-edits them to update the templatelinks table. I must also point out that this was not a bug - it was the result of an update to the software. Rob Church (talk) 03:54, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

That's encouraging, but it certainly hasn't come close to fixing the issue. A case in point is Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:MonthN which claims to be included in only 3 articles, but is included in at least all those (ten) in Category:Timeline of Afghan history, 2004 and probably more. Has Tim stopped his script, or does it really take literally weeks to run? -Splash^talk 18:14, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

I'll answer the last bit first. At last estimate from Domas Mituzas, we had some 50 million rows in the link table for this Wikipedia alone. You do the math. As to the former bit, I'll see about running a manual check on that template and throwing a bot at the results to see what happens. Rob Church (talk) 17:31, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

Wikifetcher

Devs might already know about this, but is there anything we can do to block remote loads from this new "Wikifetcher" gadget? (http://www.wikifetcher.com/wf/index.php) It's basically a "steal content for your adsense site" mechanism. The site says "IMPORTANT NOTE: Wikifetcher uses a method called "Remote loading", which means that the mirror loads a page from the Wikimedia servers directly every time someone requests a page from them. This method is forbidden by Wikipedia, so you may not use wikifetcher on Wikipedia." I don't think this is going to stop your average SEO/Adsense site builder unless there's some technical measure, though. Just stumbled across this and thought an FYI was in order, anyway. — Catherine\^talk 23:07, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

It might be possible to block by user-agent, if it uses a distinct one. If it doesn't, it would be a good thing to ask them to use a distinct one. Even then, it's easy to change, since the source is available. --cesarb 23:39, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

Sounds like classic Bandwidth theft to me. What's the legality of using this thing in the US? Raul654 06:41, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Just to point out this Wikifetcher is nothing to do with the Wikifetch project I am spearheading (which hasn't kicked off much). :-) Rob Church (talk) 23:28, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

As to the actual issue, sites which don't want their content remote loaded can block the IP addresses of servers doing so using their preferred method; at the proxy level (e.g. for sites using Squid, which is what we do when we catch the buggers) or directly in Apache using a swift DENY FROM. Rob Church (talk) 23:29, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

The problem I see is that this person is selling this PHP gadget, which means that he's making it easy for his many different customers, using many different servers, to leech off our bandwidth. I was just curious if there's any way (via user-agent or something else) to block the fetcher itself, and not the particular IP, or if somebody has to watch for these and block them one by one. I am just guessing that if this became popular it could have a relatively significant impact on our servers (or Wikicities', or Wookiepedia, or any of the other popular Mediawiki installations). — Catherine\^talk 23:54, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Anyone who pays money for that is a moron: it takes about 30 seconds to write one, like hundreds (perhaps thousands) of others already do. --Brion 04:46, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

Possible Signature Vulnerability

Forgive me if this has been mentioned before, but it appears to me that there is a severe security problem in letting users choose their own signatures. This is because people in Wikipedia use the links in the signature. However, using javascript and AJAX, I believe that an attacker could take the user to the desired location as well as load a webpage in the background. For instance, a vandal could change his/her signature to load Special:Makesysop with the proper parameters in the background to make a vandalbot username an admin while loading the desired page in the foreground. If that user then left an incendiary comment on the homepage of a bureaucrat, prompting the bureaucrat to click a link in the signature, then there could be quit a bit of damage done to Wikipedia. Where (talk) 20:33, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

Sigs are wikitext, not HTML, and thus cannot do anything disallowed in wikitext. --Brion 20:35, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

Even if possible, Special:Makesysop requires that a HTTP POST request is sent to the server to process form output. So the exploit as described would not produce a result. Rob Church (talk) 07:55, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

It's largely academic here, but it's worth pointing out that you can submit POST requests with AJAX. Lupin|talk|popups 05:15, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

AJAX-schmajax. You can submit POST requests with classic DHTML. --Brion 04:48, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

Consistent list alignment

I propose indenting bulleted lists so that they align consistently with numbered lists. Please see the proposal with examples at MediaWiki talk:Monobook.css#Consistent list alignment. —Michael Z. 2006-02-1 21:14 Z

It turns out that the list misalignment only happens under Monobook and Chick skins. I'm proposing fixing these two to conform to browsers' default rendering, and to the other Wikipedia skins. —Michael Z. 2006-02-01 23:55 Z