Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)

 Policy Technical Proposals Idea lab WMF Miscellaneous 

• Table of contents
• First discussion
• End of page
• New post

The technical section of the village pump is used to discuss technical issues about Wikipedia. Bugs and feature requests should be made at the BugZilla because there is no guarantee developers will read this page. Problems with user scripts should not be reported here, but rather to their developers (unless the bug needs immediate attention).

Newcomers to the technical village pump are encouraged to read these guidelines prior to posting here. Questions about MediaWiki in general should be posted at the MediaWiki support desk.

« Archives, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215

TW watching pages

I have turned off all configs where pages automatically watch through TW, yet some pages are still watched. What did I miss so that no pages will be automatically watched??

This is what I have inserted into my monobook:

TwinkleConfig = {

       revertMaxRevisions              :       50,
       userTalkPageMode                :       'window',
       showSharedIPNotice              :       true,
       openTalkPage                    :       [ 'agf', 'norm', 'vand' ],
       openTalkPageOnAutoRevert        :       false,
       summaryAd                       :       " using TW",
       deletionSummaryAd               :       " using TW",
       protectionSummaryAd             :       " using TW",
       watchSpeedyPages                :       [],
       watchProdPages                  :       false,
       openUserTalkPageOnSpeedyDelete  :       [ 'g1', 'g2', 'g10', 'g11', 'g12', 'a1', 'a7', 'i3', 'i4', 'i5', 'i6', 'i7', 'u3', 't1' ],
       watchRevertedPages              :       [],
       markRevertedPagesAsMinor        :       [ 'agf', 'norm', 'vand', 'torev' ],
       deleteTalkPageOnDelete          :       false,
       watchWarnings                   :       false,
       markAIVReportAsMinor            :       true,
       markSpeedyPagesAsMinor          :       true,
       offerReasonOnNormalRevert       :       true,
       orphanBacklinksOnSpeedyDelete   :       {orphan:true, exclude:['g6']}

};

Adding more features

The currently available features are not sufficient to meet my needs. E.g., I want to implement proxy designation acceptance that can be done with two clicks, and the inputbox feature does not give me the flexibility to do that, because it won't take templates and such as parameters. Also, as mentioned above, I need to use {{CURRENTUSER}}, but it's not enabled. Bugzilla says, "Note that voting is nowhere near as effective as providing a fix yourself." How do I go about doing that? I know some Java, but is that applicable? Am I allowed to do it myself or do I need permission? Thanks, Ron Duvall (talk) 02:34, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

The feature request in question is marked WONTFIX. It doesn't matter if you implement it yourself, it still won't be put on Wikipedia. Think of another way to do what you want to do. For instance, the username is available to JavaScript as wgUserName. -- Tim Starling (talk) 03:34, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

If I read the use-case correctly, I think the idea is that Joe Schmoe user would be doing the two clicks, probably only a few times ever. Am I right in thinking that javascript is mostly helpful for a single user to add new features only for their own account, so is not likely to be useful to all users by default?

I suppose something could be added to some of the site's default javascript to change all a.href values to replace "User:CURRENTUSER" with "User:" + wgUserName, but where does one get consensus to do that sort of thing? JackSchmidt (talk) 03:55, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

But they have it on Uncyclopedia! See http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Template:USERNAME . Are we going to let those guys one-up us? Ron Duvall (talk) 05:00, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

I wrote the original (and a few followups) implementation of {{USERNAME}} on Uncyclopedia (which is now used on much of Wikia). It makes sense for Uncyclopedia, as they had 35% of all page views from logged in users (Wikipedia has like 1% or less?), and they use it for practical joking (not needed here). It wouldn't really work for much anyways, you couldn't use it for content modification, ie via ParserFunctions. If you need to link to a user's page, use Special:Mypage, eg Special:Mypage/monobook.js. If you need to talk to a user in wikitext, say "hey you!". If you need to control content based on the user's username, write the appropriate JS function and propose it. Note that {{subst:USERNAME}} is possibly going to be implemented someday (as this won't break caching). --Splarka (rant) 05:20, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

HIDDENCAT

A new feature has gone live on Wikimedia wikis: __HIDDENCAT__ . Adding this magic word to a Category: description page hides the category from all of the pages in that category. So if it were added to Category:Wikipedia and the Main Page were categorized in Category:Wikipedia, the category description page would list the Main Page, however, the Main Page wouldn't show the category at the bottom of the page, all without any nasty CSS hacks.

The magic word has the potential to help with maintenance categories, stub categories, and more. --MZMcBride (talk) 06:07, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Neat feature, it should unclutter a good number of articles. Can it be implmented selectivly. Like for Category:Wikipedia, could it not show on the Main Page, but show on the page WP:AFD? MBisanz ^talk 06:19, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

No, not with this syntax. __HIDDENCAT__ should only be put on categories that you want to be hidden from all articles. -- Tim Starling (talk) 08:32, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

What about Category:Living people? I think it would be useful there. Waltham, The Duke of 16:30, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

This would be undesirable. Content categories should always show up for viewing. How else can editors know whether an article or category has been placed or not placed in their proper categories. HIDDENCAT should only be used for admin categories. Use of HIDDENCAT in stub cats need more discussion. Are stub cats administrative only? Hmains (talk) 04:12, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

Nice. Is there a reverse feature where something can be placed on a page so it shows categories normally at the bottom, but the page is not displayed on the category pages? It could be useful for userfied articles and private sandbox drafts, but there would probably have to be a system so at least deletion categories could list the page. And while speaking of category manipulation, I miss a feature to say at a transclusion that the transcluded page should not be allowed to add categories (e.g. when showing what a template looks like). This can currently be achieved by adding a parameter to the transcluded page and code it to omit categories when the parameter is there, but that's often non-trivial. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:57, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

I thought this feature was discussed and rejected as being too prone to vandalism? We need to be able to generate a list of hidden categories to check that the feature is not being abused. Incidentally, if you can generate a list of all pages using the __HIDDENCAT__ magic word, could I repeat my oft-asked plea for a way to list pages that are using the DEFAULTSORT magic word? Carcharoth (talk) 03:32, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

Without WP:BEANS, should there be a centralized discussion on what categories and types of categories should be hidden? MBisanz ^talk 04:13, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

I've just been bold and added it to Template:MonthlyCleanupCat It should eventually affect all the categories that use that template. Graham87 13:02, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

One thing I just noticed is that the parent cat will not show up in sub-cats. This is not desirable. __HIDDENCAT__ should not affect Category space. --Farix (Talk) 18:55, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

Do you have examples? Hmains (talk) 04:12, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

I don't think it affects the display of pages in the Category namespace. It absolutely does not on a default install of current mediawiki. JackSchmidt (talk) 06:15, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

For example, Category:Articles lacking sources from February 2008 does not show that it is a subcategory of Category:Articles lacking sources.--Patrick (talk) 10:48, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

This fact seems to be quite ok; they are administrative categories, not main space categories. Hmains (talk) 18:21, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

So how do you navigate from Category:Articles lacking sources from February 2008 to Category:Articles lacking sources? Carcharoth (talk) 22:16, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

I have edited {{MonthlyCleanupCat}} to include a link to the parent category. Tra (Talk) 00:23, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

You are correct, my mistake. I created a patch and posted it to bugzilla:13140 (which has now been fixed). JackSchmidt (talk) 00:14, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! Any idea how to answer my question: How many categories has this tag been placed on? Carcharoth (talk) 03:16, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

I put HIDDENCAT on Category:Bridges to Rockaway, Queens and it does appear in the parents, and the parents appear on it. -- ☑ SamuelWantman 10:27, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

Fixed in revision 31250 by huji. Parent categories now show on category pages regardless of __HIDDENCAT__. JackSchmidt (talk) 13:15, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

It would nice if the HIDDENCAT would show visually on the category in which it is placed. As things are now, you always have to edit the [admin] category to see whether HIDDENCAT word exists where you want it. Hmains (talk) 04:12, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

I made {{hiddencat}} putting the tag and giving the message.--Patrick (talk) 10:57, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

That's a nice idea, but we will simply end up with the same situation as we had with {{DEFAULTSORT}}. Why use a template instead of a magic word? Carcharoth (talk) 22:16, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

As long as the use of HIDDENCAT is not visible on the rendered category page, this is a workaround.--Patrick (talk) 00:51, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

I see that this edit has replaced the template with the magic word, thus removing the wording you has put in that template. Carcharoth (talk) 03:15, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

How many categories has this tag been placed on? - until we have an automagically generated list of the categories that this magic word has been used on, it shouldn't be used. Period. Otherwise it will be used for vandalism. Carcharoth (talk) 22:10, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

I think discussion about using HIDDENCAT should happen at WT:CAT. I've started a discussion there related to using this on all category intersections and repopulating their parents. I understand Carcharoth's concern about this being a source of potential vandalism. I'd like to see some well defined guidelines on using this feature, and perhaps a bot to monitor its use. I think it is a wonderful addition that solves many problems (maintenance categories, category clutter, multiple intersections). One way a bot could patrol this is to require that hidden cats be "registered" by adding them to a protected list. That way, a bot could monitor recent changes to category pages and see if any unauthorized changes were made. -- ☑ SamuelWantman 10:27, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, but I don't really understand how or why this feature could or would be used for vandalism. Would someone like to carefully explain? Happy‑melon 11:38, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

Adding hidden categories that are inappropriate. If this gets missed in the initial addition, people won't spot the category tag at the bottom of the page because, well, it won't be there. Also, adding HIDDEN CAT to a category to "quietly destroy it", and nobody else noticing that the category tag has disappeared from a group of articles. I know this violates WP:BEANS, but magic word vandalism is nothing new. What is new is having such a powerful magic word to change the way things look. Carcharoth (talk) 13:28, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

Still concerned, but if carefully monitored, and if it is a useful step towards category intersection, then I'll stop objecting and worrying about vandalism. Carcharoth (talk) 13:36, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

There should be a way to see hidden categories on an article if you want to - either through a preference, or through the categories being rendered but hidden by default with CSS and can be overridden in user CSS. —Random832 17:47, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

This is being discussed at wikitech-l. User:Simetrical gave sort of a blanket no, already at [1]. I wrote some simple javascript to show the hidden categories on a line below the normal categories line. If people think this is useful, I can wrap it up for others to use. JackSchmidt (talk) 18:05, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

Then it needs to be made available in a javascript variable along with all the wg stuff - fetching and parsing the wikitext is an unacceptable solution, particularly since many categories are added by templates. —Random832 18:16, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

I just use mw:API, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php in my script. My script needs to be fixed up to handle internationalization, add some comments, maybe factor the major pieces into their own functions. It uses a helper script, and I haven't gotten around to figuring out a smooth way to cut down on load time and number of loaded pages. I was going to ask Lupin about his scripts at some point. At any rate, if there is interest I'll clean it up, but it works for me and my friends, so I'm happy with it right now. JackSchmidt (talk) 18:44, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

Is there a way to force a category to be displayed? Perhaps in a user's personal settings? -- Ned Scott 06:45, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

Just tick the box at My Preferences -> Misc -> Show hidden categories. —AlanBarrett 07:15, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

---

See rev:31262 and rev:31257 for new features related to HIDDENCAT. The version of MediaWiki that Wikimedia wikis are currently running is 1.43.0-wmf.26 (a37de05). --MZMcBride (talk) 07:20, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! Those are great changes. This is all so far-reaching it needs to go in something llike the Signpost and other places as well. I'm copying out the details from those changes you linked:

• Put both hidden categories and normal categories into the view page HTML, but with hidden categories being unconditionally hidden with CSS. A JS show/hide toggle can be added in user/site JS.
• Add user preference to always show hidden categories
• Add all hidden categories to Category:Hidden categories, localised by hidden-category-category
• Add wgVariantArticlePath and wgActionPaths to the JS variables script, needed to determine title from link href.
• For pages with hidden categories, add a list of these categories down the bottom of the "edit" page - underneath the list of included templates.

The Category:Hidden categories was essential, in my opinion, and will need to be carefully watched. Any way to see "recent changes" on what was added to that category? Carcharoth (talk) 12:16, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

Special:Recentchangeslinked/Category:Hidden categories sort of does what you want, as it shows all the changes to all the hidden categories. It does not however show any changes to templates or pages in other namespaces that use __HIDDENCAT__. Graham87 14:27, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

I'm really looking to detect edits that add and remove "HIDDENCAT". I don't think your suggestion does that, but thanks as I'd forgotten that option. Carcharoth (talk) 15:03, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

Can someone explain the objection the devs have to hiding it with CSS? It is in no way equivalent to hiddenstructure. It's being hidden as a stylistic choice, not because it's empty structure being shoved out of the way; and the page would make perfect sense with them not hidden. siteSub (that's "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia", if you're wondering) is hidden by default in mediawiki. —Random832 14:29, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

• Can/does the hidden magic word or the template automatically result in the category being placed in Category:Hidden categories without any category editing? This would be very desirable. Hmains (talk) 05:44, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

Incidentally, there is a discussion underway at Wikipedia talk:Categorization#Hidden categories concerning what kinds of categories should be hidden. For the moment it is proposed that hiding be applied to all categories which classify the article rather than the article subject (i.e. maintenance cats, stub cats, "Spoken articles" etc.) Please weigh in. --Kotniski (talk) 08:37, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

There is a proposal to restructure how we display and populate categories that uses HIDDENCAT as well at WT:CAT. --☑ SamuelWantman 09:29, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

• Comment: why is the hiddencat feature no longer working and admin categories showing up in articles again? Example: Armored car Hmains (talk) 06:36, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

• comment: See Category:Articles lacking sources from November 2007. This is like several dozen other categories. If the {{hiddencat}} is not placed in this category, this category still shows up in the Category:Hidden categories and this category displays 'This category is not shown on member pages.' If the {{hiddencat}} is placed in this category, then 'This category is not shown on member pages' displays twice (as is the case right now). Something is wrong somewhere. Please fix. Hmains (talk) 16:32, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

  {{MonthlyCleanupCat}} includes {{hiddencat}} currently, so Category:Articles lacking sources from November 2007 was including it twice. I deleted one of the calls to it. Note that both of those templates are being changed reasonably often. JackSchmidt (talk) 16:53, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

I have now made hiddencat optional for {{MonthlyCleanupCat}} - I will make it NAMESPACE specific (unless someone else does it first) and I will fix-up all the cats that use it to implement it through the argument call and not doubly. With wishing to WP:OWN... someone could have asked me for input? Rich Farmbrough, 10:11 5 March 2008 (GMT).

TFD

FWIW, {{hiddencat}} is currently at TFD: Wikipedia:Templates for deletion/Log/2008 February 28#Template:Hiddencat. szyslak 02:21, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

If hiddencat isn't working for you, it's probably because the code in the {{hiddencat}} template was commented out for a while. It's been fixed and should work fine now. If you're still having problems, try bypassing your browser's cache. szyslak 07:25, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Template messages/Image namespace is in too many categories

If you click on the above link, and scroll to the bottom of the page, you'll see that this list of messages is included in over a hundred categories. For example, it's in Category:Department of Transportation images while it is obviously not itself a Department of Transportation image. (I had noticed this problem when I saw this list of messages appear in Category:Contested candidates for speedy deletion, and I was pretty sure it was not a candidate for speedy deletion). Luckily no quick-fingered admin has yet seen fit to speedy delete it.

This problem doesn't occur for a similarly-named page, Wikipedia:Template messages/User talk namespace, which is only in one category. Does anyone know if this is a fixable problem? EdJohnston (talk) 19:18, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

The page includes samples of lots of templates. Those templates are meant to be used on pages in a corresponding category. They add a pretty little box explaining that this image is a so-and-so and add the page to the category. Since this page uses all of those templates, it is placed in all of those categories. JackSchmidt (talk) 19:25, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

There are ways to change templates so they don't do this. One way I've never seen implemented is to have a parameter for "display" being on or off. The default would be off, and the template would work as normal. The "display=on" parameter would be used when just displaying the template on a list page like the above, and the categories would be switched off in that "display" mode. But i don't know enough about templates to do that. Carcharoth (talk) 01:35, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

I could probably whip something up, if it would be useful. The main issue is just, oh my goodness, that is a lot of templates. What would you think about about the syntax:

{{add cats|Articles needing attention|Even-toed ungulate stubs|1973 in sports|display={{{display}}} }}

where you would add this to any of those tempaltes that add categories? You would just sort of list categories between pipes, and then include the magic words display={{{display}}} somewhere to make sure it knew whether it was being called to display an example or not. In display mode, it could just sort of give a short note

Better syntax? Worth doing? JackSchmidt (talk) 02:09, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

What I meant by "display" mode was a mode that showed what the template looked like (ie. same messages as normal), but just omitted the categories. Does that make sense? Carcharoth (talk) 02:23, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

Sure. I was suggesting a way for template writers to do this without learning complicated template syntax. Inside the template, instead of listing the categories normally as [[Category:Articles needing attention]], the template writer would use {{add cats|Articles needing attention|display={{{display}}} }}. Then when someone wanted to just show off the template as an example, they would say {{my favorite template|text=What it is|year=2008|display=on}} instead of {{my favorite template|text=What it is|year=2008}}. Then the template would display normally, except instead of including the categories on the page, it would (1) do nothing, or (2) make a pretty little informational box thing saying what categories it would have added the article to had it not been in display mode. JackSchmidt (talk) 02:31, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

Sounds great. I find with things like this, if you do it for some templates, it will catch on and spread. Well, hopefully. Or you could try and do it for all templates... Carcharoth (talk) 02:52, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

(←) I created the template in my user space at first, to make sure the idea is clear. The internal template for template writers is at User:JackSchmidt/TL_AddCats, and a sample template is at User:JackSchmidt/TL_AddCats/testcases, and a sample article using the sample template is at User:JackSchmidt/TL_AddCats/sandbox. If all looks good, I'll move these over to Template:Add cats tomorrow, and start doctoring up the image templates. JackSchmidt (talk) 04:01, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

A large number of templates already use the parameter |category= to override display of categories. Inside the templates, just replace the code [[Category:SomeCat]][[Category:SomeOtherCat]] with {{{category|[[Category:SomeCat]][[Category:SomeOtherCat]]}}}. To override the display of categories (or to manually specify a category), call the template as eg {{unreferenced|category=}} rather than {{unreferenced}}. I would beseach anyone considering adding category exemptions to templates to use this system rather than a new one. Happy‑melon 10:31, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

I agree. But whatever system is used, please make sure it is widely documented. It is no good if people don't know about it!! Carcharoth (talk) 11:59, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

If a system already exists, I am happy to use it. However, no such system exists for {{unreferenced}}. You can see at Commutant, that adding {{unreferenced|category=}} still adds categories to the article. Note that {{unreferenced}} is aware of what namespace it is used in, and only has effect really in the article namespace (or article talk). JackSchmidt (talk) 14:21, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

I just wrote down the first categorising template that came to mind (shows my gut reaction on the state of Wikipedia :D); I've added the necessary code to {{unreferenced}}, so have a look at my two edits to see how to implement this. {{db-g1}} would have been a better choice - all the CSD templates use this opt-out mechanism AFAIK. My knowledge of this system was derived from MediaWiki:"Unused" templates.css, which needed a method of preventing the page from being listed in every possible speedy deletion category. Category:Category suppression supporting templates holds a (very messy) partial list of templates supporting one or more methods of category opt-out. I would strongly support any attempt to standardise category opt-out, and would advocate this technique as the simplest and most elegant method of doing so. Happy‑melon 15:26, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

I prefer using #ifeq to detect namespace, as transcluders don't have to worry about remembering the parameter name. –Pomte 15:40, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

I think the parameter expansion is incredibly natural, and far superior to using a separate template (as I had earlier suggested). I also like the #ifeq to handle obviously bad placements of the tag. I suspect in most cases the #ifeq is enough, since lists of templates should probably not be in the article namespace. My guess though is that the article Talk: namespace could both reasonably expect to use templates "on purpose" and "for display", so that the category= method is useful to have too.

Thanks very much for the references. I have an interest in helping with template and mediawiki coding, but wikipedia is such a huge place it is hard to know where to start. Selectively including categories is quite easy, and I thought the ambox made a pretty display, so it seemed like a good project. JackSchmidt (talk) 16:10, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

"Intelligent" templates which switch the categories included based on which namespace the template is in are extremely useful, and I'm not suggesting that they be removed or replaced. I don't really count that as "category opt-out", as I see that as a pure "manual override". Currently we have some templates using the |category= system, some using various other override parameters. I would like to see these manual overrides standardised, and would support the "category" parameter as the means of doing so. Happy‑melon 19:01, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

JackSchmidt has edited the troublesome template {{Di-replaceable fair use disputed}} which I found to be causing the unwanted inclusion of the message list in a speedy deletion category. The message list is now out of that category, though it remains in some others. He used Happy-melon's method with the 'category=' to suppress unwanted inclusion in categories. I hope he will add more to this thread about how his fix works. EdJohnston (talk) 13:59, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Pages are loading really slooooooooooowly

This started yesterday and is continuing. I see the top half of a page immediately, then the whole rest of the page takes a long time to load. I can't scroll until the load is complete, so I just sit there and twiddle my thumbs until the page finally finished loading and releases it hold on the scrolling. Corvus cornix_talk 03:25, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

Get rid of the dial-up connection.--The Fat Man Who Never Came Back (talk) 03:37, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

It's probably your browser's fault. Browsers don't display the HTML of a page after a JavaScript script tag until after the JavaScript loads. This could be fixed by moving all the script tags to the bottom of the page, but that might break several existing user scripts. Gracenotes^T § 03:46, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

Why would this just start happening, and on two different computers, neither one of them a dialup connection? Corvus cornix_talk 03:50, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

It does look like it's an IE7 problem. When I use Firefox, I don't have the problem. Corvus cornix_talk 03:53, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

I've been having this problem all day, and I use Firefox most of the time. (It was occurring in IE as well, though - I checked both browsers on two systems.) Really long delays in loading, only for Wikipedia pages, and I've already tried restarting my computers, router, and modem. Mid-day today, I even encountered a "Wikipedia database error" message, along with some malformed edits (duplicates, text dropped, etc.) and long delays when saving edits. --Ckatz^chat_spy 05:55, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

This is exactly what I'm having happen. I'm using Firefox, on two separate systems, and have been dealing since yesterday with very slow load times on most pages (though this does fluctuate), one attempt to load this page that ended with just a blank page, and at least two edits where the page I was editing suffered a major chopping for no apparent reason. Witness Dave Grohl yesterday. oops. Tony Fox (arf!) 16:54, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

The same (top half ok, rest of page took the proverbial forever) on Safari for about an hour yesterday. — Athaenara ✉ 11:20, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

Do you have any elements on the page that fail to load at all ? There are several scripts hosted on toolserver or other foundation servers, if those error out, you could experience things like this and it might effect some browsers more than others. But element load failures should be easy to check with almost any browser. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:23, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

I've never noticed any failute to load completely, and never a blank page or an error message. But it's still happening on IE7 today. Corvus cornix_talk

(copied from "Wikipedia slowing down?" below) Is anyone else experiencing this? For the last two weeks or so, I've been getting frequent outages, where I either can't get into the site at all ("server not responding"), or where it's taking five-ten minutes for pages to load, especially around 10 pm UTC. Preview is so slow, it has become practically unusable. Even when the site is loading normally, everything is noticeably slower. I went on IRC to ask if this was affecting anyone else, and a couple said yes, but most said no. I'd guess it started about two weeks ago. SlimVirgin ^{(talk)(contribs)} 21:48, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Titleblacklist

I posted a comment on MediaWiki talk:Titleblacklist about whether it would be possible to use this page as a more elegant solution to the problem we have of people uploading images with titles like Image:Picture.jpg. Currently we have images uploaded and protected at titles like this, which is a pretty clumsy solution. Is this possible? Or is the title blacklist restricted to the mainspace? Happy‑melon 11:22, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Filename-prefix-blacklist provides the functionality you need. MER-C 11:35, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

Does that page work? Looks fake to me. --MZMcBride (talk) 11:31, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Oop. I guess it is real. Dunno when / how that got added into the software.... --MZMcBride (talk) 11:39, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

"Hermy"? "Hagger"? Whoever's idea it was, they have forgotten to black-list Grawp as well. :-D Waltham, The Duke of 11:50, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Why is it that DSCF, DSCN, and DSC_ were listed but not DSC (which is what every digital camera _i've_ seen uses) —Random832 15:29, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Help with Signature?

The code I have is: <font color="green" font face="Comic Sans MS">[[User:Stepshep|§tepshep]]</font>{{•}}<font color="green">[[User talk:Stepshep|¡Talk to me!]]</font>

Which makes: §tepshep • ¡Talk to me!

But when I put it in the four tildes I get: <font color="green" font face="Comic Sans MS">[[User:Stepshep|§tepshep]]</font>{{•}}<font color="green">[[User talk:Stepshep|¡Talk to me!]]</font> (talk) 19:45, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
When I try to set it to a raw sig, I get the red error.

Any help? Thanks. §tepshep • ¡Talk to me!

You have to use "raw sig" option, just remove extra "font" word immediately after "green". And please do not use templates in your signature. —AlexSm 20:08, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

It's a protected template and it'll be automatically substed when he signs anyway. —Random832 15:24, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

First, the template is already used in the (manualy added) signature above. Second, he might find a way to get around automatic substing in the future. —AlexSm 15:37, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, I removed the brackets too. §tepshep • ¡Talk to me! 20:59, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

Articles created

What's the easiest way to see or compile a list of all the articles a particular user has created?

The Transhumanist    17:53, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

That would be this tool. It's a bit slow, but you can just let it run for five or ten minutes while you do something else. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 18:31, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Perfect! Thank you. The Transhumanist    19:01, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

I was looking into why this was slow. Apparently whether the edit created the page is not stored in the user contrib/page history, but rather in the recent changes (which is cleaned out to only have a month or two of changes), so more or less for every page you've edited, the tool has to check the page history to see if you were the first. Does that seem reasonable? I hadn't noticed the big difference between recent changes and page history before, but I think this explains why some tools are slow. JackSchmidt (talk) 16:23, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

There is no efficient way with the current database schema to get a list of pages created by a certain user. A database schema change (coupled with a maintenance script) would fix this. The key is finding someone willing to do it. ; - ) --MZMcBride (talk) 20:28, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

formatnum

Someone asked on one of the Reference Desks about a population shown in E-notation at List of countries by population, and someone else "corrected" it via this edit.

Evidently, someone thought it was smart to have the page model the current population of China as increasing linearly and update itself automatically. (Seems dubious to me, but this is not the place to discuss that.) But they used something called "formatnum" to do it and round off the results, and this produced scientific notation.

Except it doesn't for me. When I view the previous version of that page, I see the population as an integer, rounded as requested: 1,322,720,000. When I view the edited version, I see the unrounded integer: 1,322,721,419. Is this number being formatted in my browser or what? That doesn't seem to make sense—I would have expected it to go into the Wikipedia cache in already-formatted form. And if I view the HTML source I just see <td>1,322,720,000</td> for the entry. So why are these people seeing scientific notation?

Also, where is this "formatnum" documented? Not at WP:Formatnum or Template:Formatnum or Formatnum, that's for sure.

--207.176.159.90 (talk) 01:30, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Formatnum: a magic word that inserts decimal seperators. See Help:Magic words#Formatting. The E notation however was caused by the "round -4" part that was embedded in the #expr: function. — Edokter • Talk • 01:41, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

I suppose it does not depend on formatnum specifically. See also m:Help:Calculation#Numbers as output, the format of the result of any computation may depend on the server, even within Wikimedia.--Patrick (talk) 01:59, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Okay, it seems to me that this should be considered a significant bug to be fixed (presumably by rewriting formatnum so it does not depend on system-dependent behavior like exactly what sprintf(buf,"%g",val) gives you). What is the point of having a utility like formatnum if it may produce output formats that are wildly inconsistent (in terms of human-readability) for the same value?

Thanks for the pointer to Help:Magic words. I've been contributing to Wikipedia for a couple of years, and this is the first I can remember even hearing the term used.

--207.176.159.90 (talk) 00:10, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

I find it confusing too. However, rather than using an improved formatnum as a workaround, it would be good if the result of #expr would be in a format independent of the server.--Patrick (talk) 10:03, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

Wikiproject newsletter - existing tool or would require new bot?

One WP I'm in is considering creating a "newsletter" to drop to all members of the project via talk pages to let them know where help is needed (as well as to let them know how to either remove themselves from the project or to just stop getting the newsletter). Delivery would be similar to the WikiSignpost that exists already. My question is, is there a generalized bot or existing tool that can handle such deliveries, say after some expected page is created or the like, or would a new bot be needed for this (and if so, likely we'd have it do some of the prep work for the newsletter). --06:24, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

WP:AWB is an automated tool that any user with more than 500 edits can use. If you used an opt-in list as the absis for distributing the newsletter, that would be a permissible use of AWB. You can either create a page and have AWB subst:transclude it or just have AWB append the entire content of the newsletter to a new section in the user's page. MBisanz ^talk 06:39, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Dur, of course , I completely forgot about that! The question that then comes up is, for it to be used in a bot-like manner, I would likely need to apply for a bot-account to use it, correct? If I have a list of 200+ users that I want to deliver to, even if it's just hitting the "process" button 200+ times, it can be a bit annoying. --MASEM 14:34, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

There are quite a few bots that have approval for this. I would ask at Wikipedia:Bot requests for anyone available to do it. It wouldn't even need a new BAG request I don't think. Woody (talk) 16:28, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Yea, to use AWB in that manner you'd need a bot-account. But given the bots we already have, I'd say to find one of them. MBisanz ^talk 20:07, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

You can find a long (but possibly incomplete) list of bots that do such a delivery in the Editor's index. Just be sure to check their user contributions to see if they're still in use. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 22:39, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

Masem Ill be glad to deliver your newsletter. β^_command 22:44, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

Special:Recentchangeslinked

How does the "Special:Recentchangeslinked" work? Or rather, will "Recentchangeslinked" show changes to either the article or to it's talk page? -- SatyrTN (talk / contribs) 06:41, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

It shows all recent changes for all pages linked to, from the current page. For category pages, it shows recent changes for pages in the category as well. --Splarka (rant) 08:30, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

But does it show recent changes to the talk pages of those that are listed? -- SatyrTN (talk / contribs) 14:04, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

No, have to add those separately. • Anakin ^(talk) 14:31, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Um. Is that something that can/should be changed? -- SatyrTN (talk / contribs) 15:19, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Probably better to leave the default behavior alone, but an &includetalk=1 parameter in the "related changes" url would be helpful for users who want it to behave exactly like Special:Watchlist. Of course this same option should also work the other way (to show changes of the corresponding article even if only the talk page has been linked to). — CharlotteWebb 20:03, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

One odd technical thing here is that the "watchlist" SQL table has rows for both the regular page the talk page. When SpecialWatchlist.php queries the database, it has no special code for talk pages. That means if someone does write an includetalk patch, it will have to have what is more or less a new idea. The standard namespaces all come in Main/Talk pairs, and DefaultSettings.php instructs one to do this for custom namespaces too, so it should not be too hard, but it might take longer to review the patch.

Does this feature sound interesting enough to implement? JackSchmidt (talk) 20:30, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Partially done as bugzilla:13202. I might need some help to make it work for Special:Recentchangeslinked/Category: since categorylinks does not include the page title or page namespace for pages in the category, just the page id. The obvious answer would then require joining a new table into the query, and I've never done SQL programming at the wikipedia.org scale, so I'm not sure how reasonable that is. JackSchmidt (talk) 20:57, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Two more things someone could help with:

• Someone familiar with Help/Interwiki: Where does one document this new flag? Is it in the source code, on mediawiki.org, both?
• Basic PHP coder: One should probably add a little checkbox on the default Special:Recentchangeslinked page so that people can just click away to find the feature.

Thanks, JackSchmidt (talk) 21:07, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

It would probably be just a regular hypertext link to go back and forth between the two modes (just like "hide minor edits" and any of the other options), not a check-box. — CharlotteWebb 22:07, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Yup, very true. I've done this as you suggested, and I think documentation is taken care of. The main thing left is handling categories. I'll give that a try tomorrow, but I don't have a dev account to test the SQL query on a giant thing like wikipedia. JackSchmidt (talk) 04:11, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

Protection against creation without log entry

I just deleted Creative web studio after deleting and protecting Creative Web Studio.

While I am not entirely displeased with the result I am puzzled though at the protection of Creative web studio as there are no log entries for it. All I can think is that the alternative capitalization does automatically protect. Agathoclea (talk) 16:09, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

It does protect against the creation of all capitalizations. Unfortunately, the logs will only show it if you get the capitalization exactly correct, which can make it harder to find out exactly why a page was protected. E.g., Creative Web Studio, not Creative web studio. • Anakin ^(talk) 16:42, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Bot flag on edits

Is it true that the bot flag b on edits is only kept for recent changes? In particular, for page histories or user contributions, there is no such thing as a "bot edit" (they are just like other edits)? JackSchmidt (talk) 16:15, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Yep it is. The "recentchanges" table in the database has columns "rc_minor", "rc_bot", and "rc_new", for the m, b, and N letters, respectively. The "revision" table only has "rev_minor_edit", so once things go off recent changes, information about whether it was a bot edit is lost unless you check who made the edit. Bug #11181 is a request to change this. Development on it seems to have stalled due to the required database change being a nuisance. • Anakin ^(talk) 16:54, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Excellent, thanks for the clear and thorough answer. Looks like changing the behaviour would be difficult. Right now I'm just working on changing my perception. JackSchmidt (talk) 17:01, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Assuming this change is desired for long-term statistical research on bot edits, the data would be useless unless it was 100% complete. Retroactively adding a "bot flag" to revisions in page histories would be complicated (though not impossible) as it would require examining each edit, identifying the user who made the edit, then checking not whether the user is currently a bot, but whether the user was a bot (at the time of the edit). The latter would involve comparing timestamps in the user rights log both here and on meta. Is there some reason this would be worth the trouble to obtain complete data (or some reason that partial data would be useful)? — CharlotteWebb 19:52, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

To be clear, I'm not suggesting a change in mediawiki. I'm just observing something that had not been so clear to me before: the pages that use "recent_changes" have access to a lot more information, but over a shorter time frame, than those that access "revision". JackSchmidt (talk) 20:22, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

How to change font size in a table?

I want to change all of the text in a table to small font ... how do I do that?

I have read through the Help on Tables three times and I can't find any mention of this. I know that I could add the small tags in each cell of the table, but that is a lot of tedious work. Can it be done globally in a table? - mbeychok (talk) 18:53, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

you can change the style attribute	of the table
like	this	–Pomte 19:30, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Try putting the following in the first table line:

{| style="font-size: 85%;"
(...rest of table)

— Edokter • Talk • 19:31, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Since you specifically mentioned <small> tags, I believe using "font-size:smaller;" will have the same effect (likewise "font-size:larger;" and <big>) though the actual change in size will vary from one browser to the next. Probably better to stick with percentages as a general rule. — CharlotteWebb 19:39, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, everyone. Using the style attribute in percentages does exactly what I wanted. - mbeychok (talk) 20:02, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Moving on watchlist

I watch several thousand articles (almost all being small communities in the USA that don't get edited very often), and I pay attention to my watchlist quite often. It's somewhat annoying, however, that a page is never listed in the watchlist simply for having been moved to a new name. Such a thing shows up in the article history as a modification (look at Middleburg, Logan County, Ohio for an example), but not on the watchlist. Is there a way to have my watchlist display when a page is moved? The only solution that I have is occasionally to look through my raw watchlist, and note pages that have improper titles (for example, US communities are supposed to have their state's name in their title, and occasionally people remove it), if I can see that. Nyttend (talk) 21:22, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Right: deletion, moving and protection are not shown in watchlist. I have a half-finished script that loads raw watchlist, loads recent logs and then shows you which watched pages were recently moved. I guess could find some time to finish and publish it. —AlexSm 22:11, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Yes please. Or any other solution to this problem. I share this frustration, with not being made aware of page moves. -- Quiddity (talk) 21:58, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

And I would very much like to see when a page on my watchlist is deleted. A deletion is about as big as a change could be. The watchlist shows other changes but not the really big change of deletion. Sbowers3 (talk) 23:17, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia slowing down?

Is anyone else experiencing this? For the last two weeks or so, I've been getting frequent outages, where I either can't get into the site at all ("server not responding"), or where it's taking five-ten minutes for pages to load, especially around 10 pm UTC. Preview is so slow, it has become practically unusable. Even when the site is loading normally, everything is noticeably slower. I went on IRC to ask if this was affecting anyone else, and a couple said yes, but most said no. I'd guess it started about two weeks ago. SlimVirgin ^{(talk)(contribs)} 21:48, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

See also: #Pages are loading really slooooooooooowly --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:59, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. I've copied this to that section too. SlimVirgin ^{(talk)(contribs)} 22:09, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Hidden category bug

When a page is only in categories that are hidden, the category box still appears. For example: [2] —Remember the dot ^(talk) 01:43, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

I noticed this as well when I was porting HotCat.js, It simply looks "wrong". The big problem is that even if Cats are hidden, you need to be able to force them to show (and you want them to be in the HTML for that). Perhaps the best thing would be to add an empty "Categories:" text. It wouldn't be ideal, but at least you would then know what that "weird empty box at the bottom" is for. It wouldn't be consistent with pages that have no categories at all, but I cannot think of a better solution. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:07, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

Perhaps have a bot look for all pages in only hidden categories and tag them with {{Uncategorized}}? –Pomte 03:07, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

?? {{Uncategorized}} is an admin cat and is thus a hidden category itself! What is solved? Hmains (talk) 04:23, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

How about if we ask the developers to make the "Categories" box invisible if it contains no visible categories? —Remember the dot ^(talk) 05:10, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

The problem here (based on discussion with devs on IRC), is that the actual box is part of the monobook skin, so solving this issue poses some problems. Basically <div id=catlinks>(added by monobook) and <div class=catlinks>(skin core) need to be merged into one div, or there need to be 2 seperate blocks for the 2 types of categories, but this has obvious problems of course with existing tools/skins etc that might break if we change things like that. I was thinking that alternatively, we could add some simple JS to the monobook (and monobook compatible) skins that would work around it, but it's not really a fix of course. Still, it would be easy to do.

d1 = document.getElementById ('catlinks')
d2 = document.getElementById ('mw-normal-catlinks')
d3 = document.getElementById ('mw-hidden-catlinks')
if( d1 && d3 && !d2 ) {
  // Following should work for IE6, IE7, FF, Saf2, Saf3 and Opera)
  d1.style.cssText = "display: none;";
  d1.setAttribute( "style", "display: none;" );
}

Less than ideal, but something that might be considered if this issue remains on the table. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:52, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Uncategorized seems like a reasonable exception to the hidden admin category emerging consensus. I think it shouldn't be hidden. We want all users to know that the article is uncategorized, so it is the one case where a self-reference makes sense. I'm going to un-hide it. -- ☑ SamuelWantman 08:37, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

I didn't realize how many there are. I have to go to bed. Maybe someone else can un-hide them all... -- ☑ SamuelWantman 08:42, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Did anyone finish this. Where is the list? Is it all the subcats of Category:Category needed, or are there more than this that need fixing to show up? Carcharoth (talk) 13:50, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Still needs to be done. All the descendants of Category:Category needed. -- ☑ SamuelWantman 16:11, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Change "permission error" to Unauthorized

When a user without sufficient rights tries to preform an action they're not allowed to, the message Permission Error, is displayed. I think it should just say Unauthorized since permission error sounds kind of awkward. This is just a minor change so I didn't think it needed consensus for it to happen, but apparently so. I realize this is a dull topic so if no one objects in a week or so, I'll rerequest it to be changed. -- penubag  (talk) 03:19, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

While "Permission error" certainly sounds awkward, it is a wording that is very clear about the nature of the problem in terms of the way that the system handles it. Nihiltres^{t.l} 19:48, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

I'd express support for one side or other of this discussion, but I don't understand when that message is actually displayed. If an editor can't actually edit a page, then there is no "edit" tab; it's replaced with a "view source" tab. I was able (by attempting to create what is a salted page) to get a screen that is titled "Permission error", but that's not exactly a problem, because the text on the screen (This page is currently protected, and can be edited only by administrators. ... Some templates and site interface pages are ...' ) is pretty good at explaining the issue. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 22:32, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

The message usually comes up when someone uses a special page which they don't have permission to use. To give some examples, the message comes up when a non-admin tries to use Special:Blockip, a non-bureaucrat tries to use Special:Renameuser, or someone without oversight permissions tries to use Special:Oversight. I think "unauthorised" is a less technical term and is less awkward - signs saying "no unauthorised access" are common whereas signs saying "people with permission errors not allowed" are uncommon. Graham87 02:36, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Yes, that is where it usually appears. -- penubag  (talk) 02:50, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Thank's for the example. I tried Special:Blockip, and got "Permission error" as the title of the page, with text that said "The action you have requested is limited to users in the group Administrators." Seems fairly clear to me. It might be slightly clearer if the page was titled "Access restriction", but if there is no consensus on this, I don't think it's a particularly important problem. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 16:21, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

I personally think it would be a good idea to reword it into a more user friendly terms. Permissions in a computer sense is confusing to people without understanding. Now, as stated above, signs stating no unauthorized access or something of the like is fairly common place in my opinion and much easier to understand.Chrislk02 ^{Chris Kreider} 15:25, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

"Permission error" makes a lot more common sense than "unauthorized access". What is an "access" anyway when you are sitting still at a computer, not walking around some unfamiliar part of town? - Neparis (talk) 03:16, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

No, the title would just only display "Unauthorized", not "unauthorized access". I'd be like permission error. -- penubag  (talk)

So, can one of you admins here please make the changes, there seems to be enough support? -- penubag  (talk) 03:33, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

There is no consensus for such a change. - Neparis (talk) 21:03, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

I did it anyway, the best way to see if people don't like a change is whether they complain en masse when it is done. Since it is so minor, WP:BOLD is the way to go. Prodego ^talk 21:08, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Thank you Prodego. It gets irritating how every darn little change needs some mass consensus. -- penubag  (talk) 01:53, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

I don't like it, but my objection is already recorded. Happy‑melon 12:21, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, it should have been a big bold red ACCESS DENIED!!! :) — Edokter • Talk • 12:29, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Could a preference be added to disable the viewing of anything listed under badimages?

This seems useful for obvious reasons. That way if someone doesn't want to view any number of disgusting things, they don't have to. Jtrainor (talk) 07:40, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

You could file a request at Bugzilla. It could probably be done with Javascript as well, but it would probably slow down browsing Wikipedia as it would have to load the badimages page every time you visit a page and then compare all the images on that with the images on the page. Mr.Z-man 06:10, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

Couldn't it make a daily cache of the badimages page? αѕєηιηє ^t/_c 09:45, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

Okay, I might have come up with a more efficient way to do it with the API. Mr.Z-man 20:02, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

Script done. See User:Mr.Z-man/badimages. I've only tested it in the monobook skin with Firefox/2.0.0.12, and I make no guarantees it will work in all browsers (especially Internet Explorer) or other skins. Since it needs the whole page to be loaded before it can run, you should put it on the top of your user JS page so it loads first. Mr.Z-man 22:38, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

Pardon me for parroting my good friend Jtrainor, but this is a remarkably intelligent idea. It gives Wikipedia an intellectual high ground against those types of internet users who believe it is the obligation of content holders not to offend them (e.g. "You could have just hit the 'turn off bad images' button"), and could prove an excellent hedge against future demands for a "clean" (censored) Wikipedia. MalikCarr (talk) 03:02, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

If someone is willing to the script in other browsers (primarily IE6-7) and skins it could possibly be added as a Gadget and turned on through Preferences. (Gadgets also seem to load before site and user JS, so it would load sooner after the page loads) Though a software based preference would still be best. Mr.Z-man 06:03, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Uh, that user scripts downloads a large non-cached page every time you open a page on Wikipedia. It's a nice idea, but in terms of performance, I do advise changing its design. Gracenotes^T § 16:25, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

This is not fair !!! I demand a random-badimage.js userscript to balance this emergence of selfcensorship ! :D rofl --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:34, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

I don't object to this development, but we must not allow the function of the badimage list to be altered by it. It should still be used solely to stem image vandalism - if we start to put Muhammad images or all nudity pictures on the list just so they can be hidden with this gadget, we're back to censorship, albeit opt-in. Happy‑melon 10:12, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

The point is well taken; a similar user script should be written for each different set of images, such as those of Muhammad, where a significant number of editors would like to opt out of seeing such images. (Happy-melon, you're not really saying that opting in to such a restriction is in some way censorship? Particularly if this was a gadget, there would be no way for other editors to know whether a particular editor has or has not chosen to avoid seeing a particular type of images.) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 15:19, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

What's wrong with opt-in censorship? Its one thing to tell people that "we won't censor things by default", its totally different to say that "you can't censor it just for yourself." Mr.Z-man

No, I'm not saying that someone indicating that they, personally, would like to take steps to avoid seeing an image, represents censorship. I'm saying that if we now take it upon ourselves to add all Muhammad images to the image blacklist, we are censoring their use on other pages. If someone wants to add Image:Maome.jpg to their userpage, as User:Mohummy has done (I just picked the first userpage which inlines that image, this argument is in no way affiliated to User:Mohummy), then WP:NOT#CENSORED clearly indicates that they can do so, and that no one has the right to stop them. If Image:Maome.jpg is on the image blacklist, it is not possible for the image to be used in that fashion, which is a clear violation of WP:NOT#CENSORED. Consequently, it's fine to have an opt-in script to disable all renderings of images which are already uncontroversially restricted, but adding new restrictions to otherwise unrestricted images just so they can be optionally disabled, is counter to our policies. I hope that makes my position clear. Happy‑melon 12:19, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Image not appearing

Can anyone see Image:Funeral Marches and Warsongs Cover.jpg? I cannot, and neither can anyone I talk to. I have reuploaded it and it still is not appearing - the wikimedia server it is hosted on gives me a 404. Ideas? αѕєηιηє ^t/_c 09:45, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

I have the same problem. No idea? 79.112.24.4 (talk) 09:47, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

Also happening here. αѕєηιηє ^t/_c 09:50, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

Another one. αѕєηιηє ^t/_c 09:52, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

See also on ro.Wiki http://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagine:Grigore_Ghi%C5%A3%C4%83.jpg . What's happening? 79.112.27.163 (talk) 09:54, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

Fixed. -- Tim Starling (talk) 11:09, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

Help with 3RRR report

Would someone check over my 3RRR report for correctness of formatting :[3]?

Every time I have filed one it has been rejected as "malformed" because, for the life of me, I cannot understand the directions. Please help! Thanks, Mattisse 17:00, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

You didn't change [http://VersionLink VersionTime] to an actual version. On the history page of the article, each time/date represents a version; in most browsers, you can right-click one of these to copy the URL to your computer's clipboard, then paste it in, over the "Versionlink" text.

Also, you cannot use warnings posted on article talk pages as proof that the editor was warned; you have to post a warning on the offending editor's user talk page. If you post on an article talk page, there is no reason for admins to believe that the editor actually saw the warning. In fact, you should never post warnings about potential 3RR violations on article talk pages; they belong only on user talk pages.

And, again, technically, in the text Diff of 3RR warning: [http://DIFFS DIFFTIME], you should replace the URL with the diff for your posting on the user talk page. What you posted wasn't a diff, it was a link to a section on a page.

You should really compare the text that you create versus the text that other editors are posting on the page; for example, they are using a piped link to create diffs like this:

• 22:00, 28 February 2008

You're doing something like this (which does provide a link, but isn't as easy to read:

• [4] 22:00, 28 February 2008

Hope that helps. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 23:12, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

I don't understand what you mean. Do you mean a diff from the article's history? (I'v crossed out the report, but I would still like to know). Thanks, Mattisse 23:18, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

I am still interested in getting an answer to my last question - the link that I did not provide that I should have -- I do not undertand the jargon wording in the 3RR directions. Thanks! Mattisse(Talk) 15:03, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Answered on user talk page. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 15:12, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Deletion log glitch

I speedily deleted Eric crespo using twinkle, but there's nothing in the deletion log. Is there something wrong with the MediaWiki software? Spellcast (talk) 06:56, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Hmm. Strange. Not a clue, but that is worrying. Carcharoth (talk) 17:36, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

I'm not that familiar mediawiki database, but, I believe this has been known to happen sometimes, so you shouldn't worry about it much. Oysterguitarist 05:31, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

It happens occasionally with blocks and deletions. It has to do with using two transactions (for performance reasons) instead of one. What that actually means is beyond me. ; - ) Bugs have been filed in the past; known problem. Cheers. --MZMcBride (talk) 05:58, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Uploads image dimensions, but not image

I've had this problem a few times. I will decide to upload a new version of an existing image to wp, but when I hit the upload button, instead of uploading the new version of the image, it just appears to upload the dimensions of the new image but leaves the old image in place, resulting in a distorted image. Am I doing something wrong? Thanks, Gatoclass (talk) 11:16, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

The upload works when you do that, it just doesn't purge the cache of the old thumbnail versions right away - append '?action=purge' to the image page URL. —Random832 14:55, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Even purging probably won't do it, it's usually the cache. In Firefox, press CTRL+F5. αѕєηιηє ^t/_c 19:33, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Instructions for all major browsers. --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:42, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Sock library

From time to time I'll see a user pop up in several places at once in ways that seem strange to me (newbies who know to much, people missing obvious POINTs, etc). While we all recognize the top sockpuppeters by virtue of their mass production, a lot of the more minor individuals continue to be problems. It would be great if we had a sock puppet database that listed the MOs of all Socks. I know WP:BEANS so maybe make it a linked wiki that only admins can access (like the mediation/workinggroup wiki). For instance, if I see a user making certain types of proposals and being overly detailed, I could search "Proposals AND Wordy" and see socks with that profile. Or if I see someone !voting multiple times in Hindu-related articles. Just an idea. MBisanz ^talk 18:34, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Personally, I think a much easier way would be to clean out the sock categories, deleting all the old and useless ones. I would bet that most of them only have a handful of accounts created by people who have moved on months or years ago or who may have only made one sock account. Its mostly just clutter that will never be used. Alternately, we could abandon sock categories altogether and use manually updated lists. People would be less likely to waste their time creating a list for 1 sock and we wouldn't have to keep all the old userpages around. In list form they would also be searchable. Mr.Z-man 06:14, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Thats not a bad idea. Unless there is a way to search Cats in a comprehensive sense (push-thru), they aren't really that useful at IDing new socks. Maybe some sort of search engine that only searches SSPs? MBisanz ^talk 07:05, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

WP keeps signing me out

Is anyone else having problems staying logged in? WP will only keep me logged in for about 60 seconds. --207.206.137.71 (talk) 18:58, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Over on WikiSource, it isn't logging me out, but it's only allowing me to make edits sporadically. The rest of the time, it says "Sorry! We could not process your edit due to a loss of session data. Please try again. If it still doesn't work, try logging out and logging back in." Of course I've reloaded and logged out/in multiple times, but it only allows an edit to succeed rarely. – Quadell ^{(talk) (random)} 19:06, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

I had that too. About 30 seconds then, *poof* logged-out. But it's fine now. - 52 Pickup (deal) 19:08, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Nope, now it won't keep me logged in long enough to even make an edit under my username!--207.206.137.71 (talk) 19:12, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

OK, I shut down all of my browser (Firefox) windows and cleared the cache and it seems to let me stay logged in now (I logged out to make this edit, I may be dumb, but I'm not stupid).--207.206.137.71 (talk) 19:26, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

nbsp inside nowiki

I've noticed that <nowiki>&nbsp;<nowiki> does not render as &nbsp;, but rather as a plain space. Has this always been this way? —Random832 20:55, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

If you check the HTML source code for the page the mediawiki software outputs, "<nowiki>&nbsp;</nowiki>" does in fact render as "&nbsp;", but not as "&amp;nbsp;". In other words, nowiki only prevents the mediawiki software from doing strange things to to the non-breaking space before it sends it to your browser. Your browser is the software doing the strange thing to "&nbsp;" and turning it into a (non-breaking) space. Of course, this is not too strange, but rather just part of html. JackSchmidt (talk) 21:06, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Yes, it's always been that way. You have to use &amp; to get &action=view to work like that. --MZMcBride (talk) 06:26, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Why doesn't <nowiki> do the same to html entities as it does to html tags? that is, why doesn't it change & to &amp; like it changes < to &lt; in <span>? —Random832 15:14, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Problem with posting at Wikipedia talk:Mirrors and forks

I just tried to post some plain text at that page (with nothing even resembling a URL), as a test, and got an error message upon trying to save:

Spam filter notice

The following link has triggered our spam protection filter: h-t-t-p-:-/-/-w-w-w-.-g-o-v---c-e-r-t-i-f-i-c-a-t-e-s-.-c-o-.-u-k [Note: hyphens added to avoid triggering the filter when posting here.]

Either that exact link, or a portion of it (typically the root domain name) is currently blacklisted.

I have no idea where that is coming from; could someone else take a look? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 15:09, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

The problem is that the spam blacklist triggers if a link appears ANYWHERE in the page (even if it's not the section you're editing) - and the developers don't seem to know why this is stupid. —Random832 15:16, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Ah, thank you. And thank you for breaking the link so that editors can now actually post to that page. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 16:57, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

The message is from MediaWiki:Spamprotectionmatch and you are not the first to be confused. I suggest explaining that the link is not necessarily in the edited part of the page. PrimeHunter (talk) 17:38, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Empty Watchlist?

Is there another way to empty your watchlist? Evidently, when programming my bot, I didn't do something right because my bot now has 52,700 articles on its watchlist. I've tried going to Special:Watchlist/raw and simply deleting them all, but the request times out every time. Is there another way? -- SatyrBot (talk) 15:33, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Heh, I just found this, oh dear... - perhaps a developer needs to fix it manually.  :-/ x42bn6 Talk Mess 17:06, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

There is also Special:Watchlist/edit, but I suppose that might time out too... Arthena^(talk) 17:08, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

That page doesn't even load because there are too many :) How does one go about asking a developer to clear it out manually? -- SatyrBot (talk) 18:29, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Try this: open Special:Watchlist/raw from your other account (and save the list externally just in case). Open "log out" link in a new browser window, then sign in as a bot account. Switch back to the raw watchlist window, press "Update Watchlist" button, it should update the list for your bot account. I just tried it and it worked for me. P.S. Please do not participate in discussions from your bot account. —AlexSm 18:51, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

It surprises me that that would work as this form appears to, for potential security reasons, contain a token. Perhaps this is ignored when the form data is received by the server? (probably not good either). — CharlotteWebb 20:17, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

I don't see any security concerns at the moment, I guess token is a token no matter which account generated it. If a token was linked to user account, then I think a token from edit page (or API generated) would work, and then a little userscript to generate and submit Watchlist/raw form would do the job. —AlexSm 23:01, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, I didn't see this method. This seems far superior as a one-off fix for a crazy problem (than the api.php/index.php nonsense I suggest below). The clear button would be nice for casual users of course. JackSchmidt (talk) 01:20, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

I believe there used to be a Special:Watchlist/clear page containing just one button to clear the watchlist (without listing all of the pages). Apparently this now redirects to Special:Watchlist/raw, but I'm not sure this is ideal. — CharlotteWebb 19:20, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Perhaps your best bet is to get your bot's watchlist from the API, and unwatch a few (tens of) thousand(s of) pages by loading the html http://en.wikipedia.org/index.php?title=THEPAGE&action=unwatch from a script. And perhaps a dev ought to add a hook so that you can't make your watchlist so long that you can't load it (or just put a maximum limit on the number returned from Special:Watchlist/raw). Happy‑melon 20:13, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

You can also use http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?action=ajax&rs=wfAjaxWatch&rsargs[]=THEPAGE&rsargs[]=u to unwatch pages without getting a full page back, which should lessen the server load a little. If you need to unwatch a few thousand articles, check out User:JackSchmidt/JS_Watchlist.js which is designed for adding a few thousand articles to the watchlist. You should be able to change

["rsargs[]","w"]

to

["rsargs[]","u"]

to do the unwatch. The code does 1 AJAX hit per article, but maintains a queue so that only 1 request is active to the webserver at a time. JackSchmidt (talk) 20:58, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Still, a lot of queries to server, and I don't see API query to get one's watchlist anyway. —AlexSm 23:01, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=watchlist&wlprop=title should work well. The bot would only need 6 api queries and 50,000 almost-no-output index.php queries (but each one doing a database update). Certainly a simple clear page would be better, but I don't think a one-time use of this method would be too troublesome. JackSchmidt (talk) 01:15, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

1) action=query&list=watchlist gives you recently changed watched pages, so it has to be filtered for duplicates (when both base and talk pages are listed) and I don't think it can give you pages that were not edited in last 30 days. It can certainly be used to unwatch a lot of pages, just not all of them. 2) To mass-unwatch pages I would create a POST request imitating Watchlist/edit form. —AlexSm 03:58, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Special:Watchlist/clear can easily be added back, see bug 13250. Oysterguitarist 00:35, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

I have a script for doing just that, at one point BCBots watchlist had 80k items. if you can get on IRC,(freenode) I can walk you through clearing your watchlist. :P (PS give me 6 hours before getting on)β^_command 15:42, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the responses. I currently have a script running, but at 5 seconds per item, it's going to take nearly three days of continuous running. Other options? Beta, what channel? -- SatyrTN (talk / contribs) 21:28, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Hmm, 5th post in this section, which describes how to clear your watchlist in less than a minute? —AlexSm 21:34, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Hi, Alex - I tried that one, too, and it doesn't work. The call to clear the database is the same, no matter whether I started logged in as me or as the bot. The only option I haven't tried yet is the POST imitating the edit form, which I may have to try next :) -- SatyrTN (talk / contribs) 22:04, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

SatyrTN irc://freenode/wikimedia-tech is a good place to find me. β^_command 22:55, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Articles created by a user: is there a list?

This might be a ridiculously simple question, but: Is there a way to list the pages created by a given user? 52 Pickup (deal) 15:51, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Actually a fairly frequent question. Yes, there is a tool - here. May run a bit slowly (or not; someone was looking at that in the last couple of days). -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:00, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Just what I was looking for. Thanks! 52 Pickup (deal) 18:30, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Yet it seems not to be working. According to the tool in question, either I do not exist or I have no edits. Although it is true that I have never created a mainspace page (with this account), the returning message is not something that really makes sense. I tried with a couple of other editors, including Mr Broughton here, and the result was the same in every case. With the "English" selection having already been made, I cannot find what on Earth I could possibly have done wrong. Unless, of course, someone's been doctoring the edit records, in which case our problems are way worse than a simple tool glitch. And the plot thickens... Waltham, The Duke of 15:25, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

try [this β^_command 15:36, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

When I ran it, it only listed mainspace creations (including redirects). Since that was all I was interested in at the time, I wasn't so worried. If the tool can be modified to cover other spaces, that would be nice too, I guess. 52 Pickup (deal) 15:33, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Betacommand's link is an interesting one; although it's not exactly relevant (page creations are not mentioned), it provides links to every single edit. That's novel—for me, at least.

As far as the initial link is concerned, the tool's problem must be mostly related to my rather slow Internet connection; 52 Pickup appears to have no mainspace creations either. (Hey, now that you mention redirects, I realise that I actually have plenty of mainspace creations, therefore I ought to see pages appear for me as well. In a perfect world, that is...) Waltham, The Duke of 17:12, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Look near the bottom of the page, it gives a list of non-talk, non-user, non-redirect pages you have created. β^_command 17:16, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

I hadn't bothered to go that far down... This is most useful. Thank you very much, βcommand. Waltham, The Duke of 22:41, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Call for MediaWiki hackers

From Brion:

The last couple of years we’ve had limited success with [Google Summer of Code], in part because we’ve been so shorthanded on mentors that we can’t support more than one or two students. I’m looking for a few MediaWiki hackers who’d like to help out this time around.

If you're interested, please see Brion's web posting.

For background:

• m:Summer of Code 2006
• m:Summer of Code 2006/ideas

-- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:25, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

wantedcategories

Special:Wantedcategories only goes to 1000, which means it omits all categories that have only one call to them (the ones most likely to be easily fixable typos). Is there any chance this query could be altered to allow more entries to be shown? —Random832 20:01, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Most Special: pages are limited to the first 1,000 entries. Some have been cached for years, others update once every three days. The easiest way to get a full list is to use the Toolserver. There may be a tool already written, but probably not. You can use the tswiki:Query service to request DB queries. Cheers. --MZMcBride (talk) 21:03, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Correction: there are "live" and "cached" Special pages, and most cached ones are limited to 5000 entries, see m:Help:Special page. —AlexSm 22:35, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

I ran the query for you. Results are on JIRA (a little big to put on a wiki page). Let me know if you have any trouble/need another run. - AWeenieMan (talk) 01:31, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Wow 26,684 entries. Would there be anyway to bot-notify the talk-page of the pages they appear on to check for a typo or create a categoy? This makes the 4,000 user pages without registered users look small. MBisanz ^talk 02:43, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Definitely possible, but I think we are a ways away from that at the moment. For example, there are currently 2366 redlinked categories of the format "Suspected Wikipedia sockpuppets of Example." Now it would seem silly to tag such talk pages, because a chunk like this could benefit from one decision being made for all of them (should they be created and put into Category:Suspected Wikipedia sockpuppets, should they all be left redlinked, or should they be depopulated (and admins trained on when to create them) the {{sockpuppet}} template be altered not to create them by default?). This is just an example of some of the category work that needs to be done beforehand. - AWeenieMan (talk) 05:06, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Current age in info box is out of date

I assume that the "birth date and age" tag in the info box of biographical articles is meant always to give the current age? Well it appears that it doesn't - I was just looking at the entry on Patsy Kensit and it says Born March 4, 1968 (age 39). Clearly it should have updated to "age 40" by now. 143.252.80.100 (talk) 22:14, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Says 40 to me.↔NMajdan•talk 22:28, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

This is probably because anonymous viewers may receive a cached copy of a page, even if the page contains templates which contain variables whose changes should have affected the content of the page. Page views aren't cached for logged-in users as the page content includes, among other things, links which depend on their user-name. Either way the "age" in the {{birth_date_and_age}} template will display properly for everyone after the next edit (on or after the subject's birthday) is submitted. — CharlotteWebb 14:55, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

I think it has to do with the day being (technically) different on the server, depending on where you are; for example, someone 12 hours away would be in a different timezone, thus in a different "day". The Wikipedia server is set to UTC, which is probably the cause. If you register, you can set your own time delay; there's one more benefit to having an account. ;) EVula // talk // ☯ // 05:55, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Actually, the IP address above appears to be in or near London, UK, so local time and server time would probably be equal. — CharlotteWebb 16:07, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Someone semiprotecting a page made it dissapear from my watchlist

The userpage User talk:Alison was protected and then stop appearing in the recent changes of my watchlist. Viridae^Talk 23:13, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

As with moves above, I think protections don't usually show up until someone edits on them again. At least that is what I have had since I have been on Wikipedia. Is there a bug open for this? Woody (talk) 23:16, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Bugs: 5546 881 3067 3465 4898 5912 7181 7790 8804 8969 9189 9452 9689 10986 11750 12046 12062 12375 12376. --Splarka (rant) 09:25, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Do you mean that all edits (also editing the text) disappeared from your watchlist? PrimeHunter (talk) 01:01, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

If you don't use the expanded watchlist, you only see the last edit. If that last edit is a log event (move, protection), the page is not listed in the watchlist until a subsequent edit is made. Gimmetrow 10:04, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

New pages

What has suddenly gone wrong with Special:Newpages? I click 500 or 250 and it shows me only 50. I edited the URL directly to set a limit of 500 and it showed only 50. (I just tried 20 and 100 and they set the right limit. 250 and 500 set the URL to request an appropriate limit but the page still displays 50.)

My normal practice on New pages patrol is to hide patrolled edits, view 500, then start at the bottom, which usually give me pages created early in the day so they've had plenty of time to revise it. Right now I can't do that but I suppose I could edit the URL to an offset of 500 and the limit of 50 would be okay. ... Yep, that works. Sbowers3 (talk) 05:29, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

It looks like the highest number it can display is 200. Setting the URL to 201 makes it display only 50. – FISDOF9 05:42, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

That was done because somebody used an exploit relating to the page setting of Special:Newpages to take down the Wikipedia servers. -- Prince Kassad (talk) 06:23, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Specifically, this is one of the special pages that can be transcluded, and someone added {{Special:Newpages/5000}} to German WP's main page (through an unprotected template). --Dapeteばか 11:37, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Glitch

Does anybody see the stray text at the top of Rathcoole, Dublin? Where is it coming from? (I'm using Firefox, if that makes any difference.) Paddy Simcox (talk) 07:54, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

It was from a missing right brace ("}") in this edit to Template:Expand. I've fixed the problem - if it still happens on an article you're viewing, purge it. Graham87 08:21, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, it's gone now. Paddy Simcox (talk) 08:42, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Edits do not show up in IE (NOT CACHE problem)

In the article Free electron laser#Medical applications, in the Medical applications section, I added two paragraphs above the paragraph starting with "At the 2006 annual meeting of the American Society for Laser..." This shows up fine in Firefox on Linux, Safari and Firefox on Mac, but not IE6 on Win2000 Pro (and other IE's it appears). However, from IE6 if I click on Edits for that section I see my two paragraphs fine. Quintuple checked about the cache clearing, so I do not believe that is the problem. Gabella (talk) 16:30, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Image linking to other pages

Hello, I wasn't sure where to ask this but techical seemed to apply the most. I was wondering how does one go about posting an image that links you to a different wiki page when you click on it instead of sending you to the image page? I tried a few things like [[randomwikipage|[[image:randomimage]]]], but nothing seemed to really work. Thanks for the help. Cbale2000 (talk) 17:45, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

See mw:Extension:ImageMap. —Random832 19:06, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Is there any other way to go about doing it? I ask because I'm trying to add the function to a different wiki I don't think has the ImageMap extension. Anything simple that just makes the entire image link to some other location? Cbale2000 (talk) 05:51, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

mw:Help:Linked_images --Splarka (rant) 08:29, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Background color in {{test6}} block message spills into next section

Why does the background color in this post-block message using {{test6}} spill into the next section, and how can it be prevented? - Neparis (talk) 04:11, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

It would appear that when NawlinWiki placed the block message a while back, the message did not have a closing </div> tag [5]. I added the closing tag and it looks fine now. - AWeenieMan (talk) 04:34, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for fixing it. - Neparis (talk) 20:58, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Watchlist view in IE8

The watchlist is kinda rendering funny, spiking up the cpu and stuff. (See here: http://cid-b24d2193d45b2df2.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public/iWiki.PNG ) Could someone take a look at what is breaking the page, and fixing / hacking whats necessary. Or at least use the IE7 rendering mode (for that specific page , using <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />) so that it becomes at least usable. --soum ^talk 05:16, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Script wanted for measuring article sizes within a cat

Hello I was looking for a script that can go through a list of articles, or a category, and calculate the mean and median article size of the articles on the list or cat. Specifically, I was wanting a program so that it could look at a cat of Start/B/Stub class articles, eg Category:Start-Class_Vietnam_articles, and then calculate the mean and median size of the corresponding articles (not the talk page that is tagged) in this category. Note that Dr pda (talk · contribs) had created a similar thing at User_talk:Dr_pda/generatestats.js which may be used as a model; his script works only on articles that have transcluded a given template, rather than having membership of a category. Thanks. Blnguyen (vote in the photo straw poll) 07:11, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Unfortunately Dr pda is no longer active. Blnguyen (vote in the photo straw poll) 07:12, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Here is a dinky test-version: User:Splarka/genaverage.js. You can try it with importScript('User:Splarka/genaverage.js'); (purge cache, and then go to MediaWiki:Generatestats).

Example

An example, this:

Foo
Bar
Baz
Nosuchpagelalala
Traffic lights

generates :

Number of counted pages: 3
   mean = 2870.33 bytes
 median = 3969 bytes

Counted pages: 
 * [[Bar]] (4133 bytes)
 * [[Baz]] (509 bytes)
 * [[Foo]] (3969 bytes)

Uncounted pages: 
 * [[Nosuchpagelalala]] (no such page)
 * [[Traffic lights]] (too old)

--Splarka (rant) 10:33, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Image

I cannot insert the Image:Meda-Stemma-New.jpg in the Meda (MI) page, as coat of arms. The new link is correctly written, but in the template there is still the old image. Thanks, --DoppioM 14:25, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Purge the server's cache, then bypass your browser's cache. That solves most issues. Stifle (talk) 14:33, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Search engine

I have had a curious problem with the search engine interface in Firefox (that little box to the right of the address bar). I added Wikipedia some time ago and it was added as Wikipedia (English) to the box. Recently the drop-down menu turned blue (to signal the possibility of adding a search engine) and it suggested adding Wikipedia (en), which I did and removed Wikipedia (English).

Now when I view a few pages (Reading (disambiguation) being one of them), the box turns blue again and suggests adding Wikipedia (English) again.

Seems like a technical error with the server (I have no idea how it informs Firefox of the search function, nor of how it works), but it could just as easily be at my end.

If you need more information about this please drop me a line at my talk page as I am likely to forget about this and not come back. Stifle (talk) 14:33, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Essay Categorization and/or Classification - need pointers on how to develop macro/script/whatever

Hello, as part of the upfront research for the categorization effort, I would like to create a list of all Wikipedia pages that link to Template:Essay (and/or are in Category:Wikipedia essays, and find out what other templates and (more importantly) categories apply to those pages. However, I don't feel like sitting there and doing it manually; moreover, I want to gain the programming/other technical experience that will come from finding a way to automate this. Any tips? I am taking Computer Science III (and have learned Java, C++ and Visual Basic at the beginning level), if that helps you assess my proficiency level in a way that will be helpful in offering me appropriate advice. Thank you. Obuibo Mbstpo (talk) 21:16, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

I think you basically have three choices:

• You can use a specialized editor (AWB and wikEd come to mind, but there are others). I'm not personally familiar with what each can do (or even if any can do what you want); you might ask at the talk/discussion pages.

• You can use a bot. You can either create your own or request the assistance of someone who already has a bot (or will write one for you) - see WP:BOTREQ.

• You can use a data download (dump) and/or query Wikipedia as if it were a database - see WP:EIW#Query. (Note, for example, the request below.) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 22:11, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Main Page Down!

The Main Page is messed up. The navigation bar to the right is missing as are the discussion, view source, and history links at the top. It can be accessed properly at Main page (different capitalization), but the "English" link on http://wikipedia.org/ goes to the messed up "Main Page". —137.186.165.215 (talk) 23:03, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

I don't see any problems. Try bypassing your cache. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:08, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Never mind. Sorry. —137.186.165.215 (talk) 23:15, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Template categories

(Cross posted from Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Judaism#Aharon_Kotler) Sometime in the past few days I noticed that categories that are included in templates are being included in articles to which the templates are transcluded. This is a problem because some of those categories are supposed to apply to templates only. For instance Template:Antisemitism topics is in Category:Jewish navigation templates. This is a category for templates only. But the category now includes all pages that include the template, such as A Protocol of 1919, Anti-Defamation League, Anti-Judaism, and many others. This is clearly erroneous and has only been true for, I believe, less than a week. This must be a recent change to the Wikipedia source code (correct word?) because I noticed it change a few days ago. --Steven J. Anderson (talk) 04:26, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

The change was caused by [6] which moved the category outside <noinclude> ... </noinclude>. See Help:Template#Noinclude, includeonly, and onlyinclude. PrimeHunter (talk) 04:46, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks a million. That was driving me nuts. There's at least one other that I know of, let's see if it was the same editor. --Steven J. Anderson (talk) 07:02, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Nope. different issue entirely. --Steven J. Anderson (talk) 07:12, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Articles I've created

I've neglected to keep good track of my WP activity. Is there an easy way to get a list of articles I've created? Thanks. -- Boracay Bill (talk) 07:44, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

http://tools.wikimedia.de/~escaladix/larticles/ Gimmetrow 08:05, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Inline cropping of images

In the Wikipedia, it would be most useful to be able to crop images by means of optional parameters in a [[Image:example.jpg|...]] statement. This could be done by four additional parameters which specify the extent of the viewable image. One way of doing this would be to have four "crop margins" which would be the number of pixels from the edge of the source image to the edge of the rendered image. Such a facility would remove the need for the external cropping of images in third-party applications software, be far more flexible for editors and eliminate the need for separate uploading of the same image. Eg. the following could be avoided:

• 
• 
• 

Greenshed (talk) 11:27, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Already on the buglist: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7757 --TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:22, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Searching wiki markup?

Can someone search en.wp, or their copy of the 2008-03-01 dump, for a list of articles with {{DEFAULTSORT:X* or {{DEFAULTSORT|X* ? -- Jeandré, 2008-03-07t12:57z

log link

Does anyone else think that adding a link to http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&user=&page={{PAGENAME}} to the toolbox for articles (or indeed all pages where it's not already displayed)? If not for everyone, what do I need to add to my monobook.js or monobook.css to add the link to my own display? Happy‑melon 14:47, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

It's the same link as "View logs for this page" on top of the history page. I would guess that most users would first want to look at the history anyway. As a for your own display, add the code below to your monobook.js, it should add "Page logs" link just before "Upload file" link. —AlexSm 15:41, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

if (wgNamespaceNumber >= 0)
addOnloadHook(function(){
 addPortletLink('p-tb', wgServer+wgScript+'?title=Special:Log&page='+wgPageName,
 'Page logs', 't-pagelog', 'View logs for this page', '', document.getElementById('t-upload'))
})

Thanks, that's exactly what I wanted. Happy‑melon 15:59, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

ISBN

I installed something in my monobook some time ago that allowed me to click on ISBN numbers and go directly to Amazon.com. Now, it takes me here. There's instructions there to install certain language to make it automatically go to a given site. Since the language is different than what i had, I tried it, but to no avail (I've reverted to the previous monobook version). Does anyone know why this feature stopped working?

Yes, I bypassed the cache. Coemgenus 21:38, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

I'm guessing that you got the code from User:Lunchboxhero/monobook.js. And even if you didn't, you might want to look at this modification to that page, done on March 3rd. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 21:54, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure where I gotthe original code, but I tried Lunchbox's today. This comment on his talk page suggests people aren't crazy about the automatic link to Amazon. Is that what the 3/3 changes were meant to alter? I guess I'll just work around it. Thanks for your help, John. Coemgenus 22:18, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

New messages question

You know that orange template that's displayed when usertalk pages have been edited? Is it possible to make that message appear when other pages are edited well? Maybe adding something in one's monobook? -- penubag  (talk) 05:11, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Yes, User:Ais523/watchlistnotifier.js will do this. Copy that code to Special:Mypage/monobook.js, save, and empty your browser cache. It will then leave such a message whenever a page on your watchlist is changed. If you only want specific pages to trigger the message then maybe you can leave a note on User talk:Ais523 and see if Ais523 can make something for you. -- Ned Scott 05:37, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Wikia interlink is down

It seems an update on Wikia's main wiki has broken the Wikia interlink, [[Wikia:Name of wiki:Page name]]. I've let people know on irc:wikia, and someone there said they'd pass the message on to a dev. Leaving a note here incase anyone is wondering what the status is on this, since we have a lot of Wikia interlinks. -- Ned Scott 05:31, 8 March 2008 (UTC)