Jump to content

Wikipedia:Village pump (technical): Difference between revisions

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Browse history interactively
← Previous editNext edit →
Content deleted Content added
VisualWikitext
ScudLee (talk | contribs)
9,389 edits
Advice needed for someone who'd like to write a useful bot
Line 518: Line 518:
...messes up if invoked on a username containing spaces (since in a single-bracket URL, a space is the delimiter between URL and description, part of the ULR will be turned into the desc). Any ideas on fixing that? [[User:Radiant!|R]][[User_talk:Radiant!|adiant]][[meta:mergist|_<font color="orange">&gt;|&lt;</font>]] 03:42, 20 December 2005 (UTC)
...messes up if invoked on a username containing spaces (since in a single-bracket URL, a space is the delimiter between URL and description, part of the ULR will be turned into the desc). Any ideas on fixing that? [[User:Radiant!|R]][[User_talk:Radiant!|adiant]][[meta:mergist|_<font color="orange">&gt;|&lt;</font>]] 03:42, 20 December 2005 (UTC)
:It would appear $1 is not expected to be used in an external link. Seems like providing the username in external link format (as, say, $2) this should be a reasonably trivial fix for somebody who knows what they're doing in the source. Have you looked in bugzilla? -- [[user:Rick Block|Rick Block]] <small>([[user talk:Rick Block|talk]])</small> 05:16, 20 December 2005 (UTC)
:It would appear $1 is not expected to be used in an external link. Seems like providing the username in external link format (as, say, $2) this should be a reasonably trivial fix for somebody who knows what they're doing in the source. Have you looked in bugzilla? -- [[user:Rick Block|Rick Block]] <small>([[user talk:Rick Block|talk]])</small> 05:16, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

==Bot advice==

I've seen the requests for bots on the community portal and would like to help. I'm pretty handy with Perl, which I understand isn't the ideal language for bots, but it's what I know. Are there any guides or tips out there for would-be bot coders? Or perhaps examples of bots written in Perl that I could crib from? Thanks. | [[User:Keithlaw|Klaw]] <small>[[User talk:Keithlaw|¡digame!]]</small> 05:45, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

Revision as of 05:45, 20 December 2005

 Policy Technical Proposals Idea lab WMF Miscellaneous 
The technical section of the village pump is used to discuss technical issues. Bugs and feature requests should be made at BugZilla since there is no guarantee developers will read this page.

FAQ: Intermittent database lags can make new articles take some minutes to appear, and cause the watchlist, contributions, and page history/old views sometimes not show the very latest changes. This is an ongoing issue we are working on.

Please sign and date your post (by typing ~~~~ or clicking the signature icon in the edit toolbar).

Please add new topics at the bottom of the page.

Shortcut

Technical archive

Discussions older than 7 days (date of last made comment) are moved here. These discussions will be kept archived for 7 more days. During this period the discussion can be moved to a relevant talk page if appropriate. After 7 days the discussion will be permanently removed.

Multiple saves

when you post using "action=edit&section=new", and there is a lag, you sometimes accidentally press "Save page" twice, two secions are created. There should be a protection against that →AzaToth 00:47, 11 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

What do you have to push to get a "new section" like that? Stevage 02:10, 11 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
its the + icon that appears in the talk namespaces only. Plugwash
This is bugzilla:1600; I think I've got it mostly fixed now. A dupe submission should now trigger an edit conflict, which will either resolve itself silently or toss up a conflict screen. It's still possible perhaps for something else to come in between the first and second submissions which would break the detection, but that should be pretty rare I hope. --Brion 12:17, 11 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
On a related note, I often just hit save instead of preview, and immediately correct any mistakes if there are any. I'm sure I'm not alone here. A good feature would be just to merge all edits made on a single article by a single person in less than five minutes into a single edit, assuming there is only one edit summary and no one else has made any changes in that period. Alex Krupp 18:39, 12 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Problem - unable to edit

A fellow Wikipedian is having a major editing problem. As he reports on my user talk page:

Since at least yesterday, I have been completely unable to edit pages on either Wikipedia or Wiktionary from the computer I've been using for the past two months. I can create new entries in Wiktionary, but cannot edit pages or sections on either site...even my User page! I have successfully logged in each time, so all I can figure is that the IP I'm using (128.32.154.69) must be blocked for some reason, though I can't think why. Each time I pull up an edit page and try to save the changes, the clock runs out and the "connection is closed by foreign host". Since I can't edit pages, I can't post to any page about the problem, though I have sent an e-mail to the help desk. I am using a friend's computer to try to get this message through. Without the ability to edit, I can't contribute. --EncycloPetey 08:23, 11 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The IP isn't blocked... so can anyone work out what's going on and help encyclopetey out? Grutness...wha? 09:33, 11 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks to Grutness for posting my concern. I'm currently posting from a different location. It seems to be working from here, but I'm geeting an odd error message when I post:
ERROR
The requested URL could not be retrieved
While trying to retrieve the URL: http://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?
The following error was encountered:
Read Error
The system returned:
(54) Connection reset by peer
An error condition occurred while reading data from the network. Please retry your request.
10.34.6.6
Generated 14/Dec/2005:01:08:21 +0000 by 10.34.6.6 (iPrism)

I do know that the computer I'm sending from is running a different OS (Win 2000 instead of Win 98), but the really odd thing is that from my usual location (on the UC Berkeley campus), I have the same problem whether I'm using the browser Opera on a Win 98 PC (2 different machines) or using the Netscape browser on a Mac OSX. Either way, the connection times out waiting for the Wikimedia servers to respond. I've also noticed that someone has posted regarding a very similar problem on the Help pages. He is unable to edit pages longer than a few lines, even sections, and his problem began almost exactly at the same time mine. It sounds as though whatever the problem is, it's the result of some specific change at Wikimedia rather than at our ends. --EncycloPetey 01:19, 14 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It sounds like a networking issue, but I think it's likely to be your end (trust me: the vandals the last few days have had no problems at all connecting to wikipedia). You need to figure out what you have in common with your friend, and what the rest of us don't have. Some ideas:
  • It's a whole UCB thing. Try another campus computer. Also I think User:Jiang is (or was) at UCB. Perhaps some part of the network is behind a bad firewall; perhaps a common network segment is saturated by others downloading pr0n.
  • It's some piece of software you both run (some p2p thing, or chat client, campus-vpn thing, or, local firewall program (like zonealarm)
  • Can you access other websites that require posting - can you post to slashdot or flickr okay?
-- Finlay McWalter | Talk 01:40, 14 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The problem seems to have gone away (at least for the time being). I don't know what caused it, but it can't be specific to the computer I was using, since I tried three different ones (2 PCS and a Mac) and tried three different OS's and 3 different browsers. If the problem was a UCB thing, then I have no idea what it could have been. The MIS for our little corner of the campus hadn't changed anything at the time the problem began, and I hadn't had any problems at all for the previous 2 months. If the problem returns, I'll try some of your suggestions, though. Thanks, --EncycloPetey 13:25, 14 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

"Whatlinkshere" link on page you get after moving a page

I noticed that on the page you get after successfully moving a page, you get a link to check if anything links to the old name of the article, but this link instead points to the "Whatlinkshere" for the new name of the article. Shouldn't it point to the old name, instead? --Spring Rubber 01:09, 12 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The short answer is no. The point is to fix any double redirects (redirects to redirects) caused by the move, not every direct link to the old name. From "Whatlinkshere" for the new name, you can see which links are redirects (including the old name), and whether any redirects links to that name. Double redirects are a problem because the software only follows redirects "1-deep". If you click on a redirect, and it sends you to another redirect, you end up on the second redirect (not where it, in turn, redirects). -- Rick Block (talk) 02:33, 12 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Okay, I understand now. I never realized there was a "tree" system to indicate redirects before. Thanks for the help. --Spring Rubber 02:52, 12 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Incidentally, why don't redirects send you straight to the final article at the end of the redirect chain? This has been broken so long I can only imagine there must be some reasonable explanation. Deco 04:34, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
There isn't necessarily an end (redirects might loop), but arbitrarily cutting off the number of redirects that are traversed at a number a little larger than 1 seems reasonable to me. Do you know how to use bugzilla? -- Rick Block (talk) 05:01, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Yes yes, I'm just lazy. :-) Circular redirects really aren't a problem, as it's trivial to detect these. I searched now and couldn't find anything. There seems to be a running assumption that this is just the wrong thing to do, but I can't figure out why. Perhaps because it would necessitate database operations that are inefficient in the current relational schema. Perhaps I'll enter a bug and see how it gets resolved. Deco 05:14, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I think it comes down to, if the limit is 1, a whole class of problems just disappears. If you increase the limit, you need to check for loops, database strain, define a "reasonable" limit, and presumably people will be less encouraged to ever fix the double redirects. Stevage 03:20, 18 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Complaints of spam

Ernie has e-mailed the Wikimedia Help Mail list complaining of spam coming from Wikipedia IP addresses.

"I keep getting spam from what looks to be aol addresses, but the IP addresses are coming from you. I want this stopped, NOW. They range from 63.80.24.00 and up as well as63.80.31.00 and up. I would be glad to forward some to you. I recieve about 6 per day. AOL seems to not care, although they are probably phoney AOL accounts, I would like to forward these to you as I get them so you can shut these bastards DOWN.

I haven't heard anything about this. Is anyone else aware of such incidents?Capitalistroadster 09:51, 12 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I suspect that Ernie may be confused. CIDR range 63.80.24.0/21 (IP addresses 63.80.24.0 - 63.80.31.255) are, according to ARIN's whois, part of a UUNet range which UUNet have assigned to a company called Lightspeed. These IP addresses do not have anything to do with AOL, nor do they appear to have anything to do with Wikipedia. Has Ernie shown any copies of the spam he says is coming from Wikipedia, or said which specific IP addresses assoicated with Wikipedia are the problem? -- AJR | Talk 02:27, 13 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
If they just have "wikipedia.org" in the *From: address* there's nothing we can do about it, as it has nothing to do with us. The way e-mail works, the contents of the 'From' address can be completely forged at will; they are not verified in any way at all. If he's actually got some reason to believe they're coming from our servers, please email me an example of the full headers to brion at wikimedia.org and I'll check it out. --Brion 18:52, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
You could try using SPF. It might help. --cesarb 02:54, 17 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
SPF deals only with the envelope sender address, not the 'From:' line. --Brion 23:37, 17 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Category not working properly

I have created several navigational templates - Template:MOS CPU, Template:MOS Video/Sound, and Template:MOS Interface - that all include Category:MOS Integrated Circuits. This is done using the <includeonly> tag so that the category won't actually contain the templates, just the underlying articles. For some reason, though, only the Template:MOS CPU articles are actually showing up in Category:MOS Integrated Circuits. I can't figure out why; the same category code was copied and pasted. Can anyone help? Crotalus horridus 20:52, 12 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It's because you added the template to the articles and then later added the category to the template. Categories are only updated when you edit the article in the category, not when you change one of the templates. Basically you have to go to every article which should be in the category and do a null edit -- just click save, don't change anything. -- Tim Starling 22:29, 12 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
That seems to work. Thanks! Crotalus horridus 00:37, 13 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Help with Unicode

I am having a lot of trouble with Unicode in a project on Wikipedia. I encounter a lot this kind of text: " Möbius strip" which should be instead "Möbius strip". Anybody knows at all how to convert the former to the latter? That would be really appreciated. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:45, 13 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Is this text in existing articles? If so, can you please provide examples? The incorrect form looks like UTF-8 data displayed (incorrectly) as ISO-8859-1 characters. The "conversion" is to display them as UTF-8 characters. If the characters are now labeled as UTF-8 characters an actual conversion is necessary. I've looked a bit and haven't found a program that will do this. I strongly suspect there is one, since this must be a fairly common problem (logically, it boils down to reading the bytes as 8859 characters and then "casting" them to utf-8). -- Rick Block (talk) 15:29, 13 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
First check you haven’t forced your browser’s character encoding; it should be UTF-8. Susvolans ⇔ 14:40, 13 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for your help. The issue was not with the browser. The issue was indeed with the encoding. If you have ISO-8859-1 data, you can encode it to unicode with the Perl "encode" function. However, if your data is already unicode and apply to that the "encode to unicode" function, you get garbage, like above. So I was doing overencoding.
You may think that applying the "encode to unicode" function to unicode data will not change the data, it turns out it does. The moral: always know what encoding your data is in. Thanks guys. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:19, 14 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Template:Click

I've shamelessly stolen from the Dutch and Vietnamese Wikipedias to create a new template, allowing an image to link somewhere other than its image description page. More info is on the talk page.

The main place this can be used is on the Main Page sister projects template, and there is a test version at Template:WikipediaSister/temp if anyone wants to check it before it goes up. the wub "?!" 12:02, 13 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry about that. I protected it since I was going to be bold and put it on the Main Page straight away, but decided to do a test run first just to make sure. It's unprotected for now. the wub "?!" 23:11, 13 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
This is a great idea. The featured article pic in particular should link directly to the featured article. God knows how many users make that mistake everyday. Deco 04:30, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
See also BugZilla #539 - Allow images that link somewhere other than the image page for the feature request which would make this template hack redundant. Rob Church Talk 03:47, 18 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Templates in edit summaries

Is it possible to use simple templates (eg {{test}}) in edit summaries? I realise that it can't be done for tables, but small ones it ought to be available?--TheDoctor10 (talk|email) 17:31, 13 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

lc, uc modifiers etc...

Was looking in the code and found this, works here:

{{lc:{{CURRENTDAYNAME}}}} sunday
{{uc:{{CURRENTDAYNAME}}}} SUNDAY
{{uc:{{main|Article}}}}
MAIN ARTICLE: ARTICLE
{{lc:{{main|Article}}}}
main article: article

lcfirst and ucfirst is also defined, as are grammar and plural.

→AzaToth 22:23, 13 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, where did my redlinks go? Bring them back! android79 22:34, 13 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Modifying Corporate Logos?

I am working on the article for GAMEY, and a friend of mine (and fellow Wikipedian) suggested that he and I take the first letter of each company, and paste it together to spell GAMEY (such has G from Google, A from AOL {or maybe the AOL Triangle}, etc. etc.) I told him this might violate the fair use policy, since we are modifiying the logos, and putting them together with their (sort of) competitors. What is the the ruling on this? CaptainAmerica 00:35, 14 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

IMDb Interwikis broken

I just updated Wikipedia:IMDb. Currently the interwiki links produce broken links, e.g. IMDbName:Jack Nicolson and IMDbTitle:Beetle Juice. Please fix them. -- User:Docu

Looking at how they're defined, it would seem the interwiki links are meant to take the IMDB name or title number, not the text name. For example IMDbName:0000197 links to Jack Nicholson and IMDbTitle:0094721 links to Beetle Juice. I don't know if there's a way to link to IMDB pages using text strings. Did this used to work? -- Rick Block (talk) 17:45, 14 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
No, there aren't any direct name-based links on the IMDb site (only search result pages). —Slicing (talk) 00:34, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Rick, thank you for your response. Indeed that's the way it's to work (I must have been a bit tired). BTW there used to be IMDB:Beetle Juice linking as http://us.imdb.com/Title?$1 , but there used to be a problem with the way spaces (" ") were converted. -- User:Docu

Finding out the number of users watching an article

Is there currently a way to find out how many users are watching a given page? If not, is there a bugzilla issue for this?

Thanks, nyenyec ☎ 18:52, 14 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

No and no. Note that being able to determine how many users are watching a page might be useful information for vandals. -- Rick Block (talk) 19:07, 14 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Yes and yes, though not on this mediawiki. Fixed using the Enotif patch. See meta:Share watchlists for more information. ∴ here…♠ 19:09, 14 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, I believe it would also be useful information for fighting vandals. -- nyenyec ☎ 19:41, 14 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
It could be both. If it existed, it would be interesting to show edits made by users to unwatched pages. Or, you could always group together low numbers of watchers to avoid giving the precise number to vandals Stevage 03:15, 18 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
"But how many people are watching RecentChanges?" -- Beland 09:07, 19 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Need a dev to clear a revision on a long page

This diff contains a great deal of personal information which probably doesn't belong here - I asked on #wikipedia and they tell me the page is too long for an admin to delete the revision without freezing the database, but a dev can just wipe that one revision. Any help would be appreciated... (ESkog)(Talk) 21:38, 14 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

That's either been done, or something's screwed up which makes the revision unviewable. Either way, I guess it's the desired result. Rob Church Talk 03:54, 18 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Category:Long words

Is there any way to force Category:Long words to display in one column instead of three? Melchoir 01:42, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Nope, but it sounds like a great software suggestion. Deco 04:28, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
You might try a workaround using the category indexing function. Try forcing the longest words to the bottom with something like [[Category:Long words|z]]; the entries should alphabetize after being forced to the bottom, i.e. all in column three, which might change the column widths. I've not tried this myself, so this is a hypothesis rather than speaking from experience, and it's far away from a perfect solution. Courtland 01:16, 17 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think that would work. Large letter sections get split over multiple columns, see Category:User warning templates's "T" section, for example. And anyway, having everything in Category:Long words categorised under "Z" would just be confusing. -- AJR | Talk 12:13, 17 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I was suggesting that only the longest be categorized under "Z" so that there would effectively be two alphabetical schemes, one for shorter words and one for longer -- sacrificing clarity for format. Courtland 03:11, 18 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

AFD Help!

I am trying to put into the AFD list this page

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/GEN%40

but for some reason the list isn't accepting my change... can someone have a look and let me know how I can fix this? novacatz 03:26, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Remove / increase recommended article size limit

Right now WP gives a recommendation to keep article sizes under 32kb every time you edit an article larger than that.

I know it once was a technical issue, but that is no longer so. While it is also true that large articles are better off broken into different subsections with the main article only listing summaries, still, even then 32kb is too little for good articles.

Another former reason reasonably valid 3-4 years ago when WP started was that not everyone has fast internet (many people still had 14,400 baud and 56k was considered good), but internet speed (like other computer-related measurable quantities) has increased exponentially in the last years, and now over half of internet users have cable/dsl for which downloading 100kb is nothing, and 99% of the rest have 56k which can also load a 50-100kb page reasonably fast.

About 90% of featured articles are WAY over 32kb. Except for really specific topics where one can cover it all in a smaller article (such as the recent shoe wax article), an article of 50 to 100kb is pretty much required to have enough material for featured status. Whereas before a good broad article was pretty much a collection of subpages with short summaries, the present widely accepted definition is an article which is strong and sound by itself, which can be informative on its own, and subpages would further expand on the subject for those interested in the particular subtopic, rather than being forced to go there just to understand the material of the main article.

And large article sizes are even more essential now when there is a big initiative to include lots of references and links.

You may say that its still not a big deal to have the reminder, but I'd argue that it may actually discourage editors (especially new editors) to contribute new material to an article which already contains quite a bit, but is still far off from FA.

In light of that, I propose to, either,

- Remove the warning at all, as irrelevant on both technical and editorial grounds, or

- Increase the article size reccomendation from 32kb to at least 100kb. Elvarg 04:19, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that instead of recommending any particular size, we should instead recommend that articles that grow to unwieldly lengths be broken up, where this term is subjectively determined on a per-article basis. Deco 04:26, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I was under the impression the limit was first enforced because of a hard limit on the amount of text allowed in a editable text box in certain ld browsers. I think that that reason is now gone. I would support getting rid of the warning, and enforce common sense at the FAC stage. --Martyman-(talk) 09:30, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Somebody mentioned the other day on the extra-long AfD that this is still an issue on handheld devices. Even there it's probably not a big problem, since you can edit individual sections (until you hit an edit conflict). Zocky 09:49, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Monobook

Why is it that in certain foreign Wikipedias (French, Italian, and Spanish), the default theme has rounded tabs at the top (for Edit, Talk, and History pages)? No particular reason for asking, just curious. --Mark Yen 05:23, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Because people there made it so. --Brion 18:47, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

User:Bitcyh

Note: I have warned User:Bitcyh, who claims on User talk:Bitcyh he/she is an animal at the Okinawa zoo, that he/she may be blocked soon. I am not an admin. --Unforgettableid | talk to me 06:32, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I have blocked User:Bitych with the template {{UsernameBlock}}, a template that is also accessible to you. Sycthos 02:42, 17 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Edits by browser

I would like to do research that would be required for doing an offline Wikipedia (similar to a German "Wikipedia-CD"-like project, but for frequent editors) in English. What percentage of Wikipedia edits are made by users who use browsers other than IE, Netscape, Safari and Firefox releases? Firefox betas are ok to count. (I feel my set of criteria is an okay proxy for "at least somewhat-technically-inclined users" but the information is not accessible at Wikipedia:Statistics.) --Unforgettableid | talk to me 06:32, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Honestly. I use the betas, but in between releases and betas, I see no reason to rush off and get the nightly build. That's just a waste of time. Your criteria seems quite sketchy; I would at least include regular Firefox releases. Superm401 | Talk 04:30, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Watching pages

Why can't I add comments to my watchlist to note down for myself why I marked a page to be watched? --Unforgettableid | talk to me 06:32, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Why? Because that feature doesn't exist. If you want it, you should request it, either on the proposals page, in mediazilla, or find a friendly developer :) Stevage 03:12, 18 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Editing welcome template

Can the subst: anon template be edited to reflect the fact that anons can't create articles? I'd do it myself, but I'm unsure how. Thanks. Natgoo 12:52, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It's there by implication - starting new pages is listed as a benefit of getting a login. The page is at Template:Anon if you think it needs rewording. -- Rick Block (talk) 14:55, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. The template I saw that prompted the question was different though - must have been user created. I'll leave a note on their talk page. Natgoo 15:10, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Can't post

I've been trying to add an entry to Wikipedia:Copyright violations, using the boilerplate text from Template:Copyvio. However, every time I hit the submit button, I get a connection error. I believe the error results from something in the syntax. I've been able to edit several pages in different namespaces normally (including this one). At the same time, I've been unable to add that text to several pages in different namespaces. What's going on here? (Also, could someone please take care of the copyvio posting for me? It's for Shell sort.) --Smack (talk) 18:18, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Remove content warning on talk pages

The warning

Content must not violate any copyright and must be based on verifiable sources. By editing here, you agree to license your contributions under the GFDL.

Is good for article pages, but it should be removed from talk pages. Talk pages are discussion portals, not articles, and discussion should be as free as possible.

The only thing we can remove from that is verifiable sources, as discussion is supposed to be ones own opinion. Copyright violations and GFDL contributions all apply to talk pages as well however. WAvegetarian (talk) (email) (contribs) 20:17, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Clearly we cannot allow copyright violation, as this is against the law. However, there are some who have made a reasonable case that participants in discussions should, as on newsgroups or mailing lists, retain copyright to their original statements, particularly since we hardly ever edit the comments of others. I like it like it is though. Deco 20:43, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
You retain copyright on any talk page comments you make; you just implicitly agree to license them under the GFDL whenever you post to a Wikipedia talk page. AFAIK, this is non-negotiable. A user who wanted to not license his talk page comments in this way (User:Pioneer-12, I believe) has been banned indefinitely for disagreeing with this policy. android79 21:06, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Well, then at least remove the references part on talk pages. Elvarg 21:22, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I think the references part should remain as well. Talk pages are for discussing the article, and so all statements should be based on verifiable sources. Even on the talk page we should be saying "I think we should do X because Y", not "I think X". I do not think we shoukd seek to encourage people to post unverified statements to the talk pages, as they could then become a repository of false information which google can pick up and disseminate further. Wikipedia is not a discussion portal and talk pages are not for general discussion, and there should be an onus on us to source our opinions. Steve block talk 13:27, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

"Featured articles star"

Why is that that on the Foreign language Wikipedias featured articles have a small star on the top right corner of the Article (don't confuse with talk page), (for example see http://is.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6rfuknattleikur ), yet English featured articles don't have this star? On the other hand, links to FOREIGN feature articles on the English wikipedia (bottom left list of other languages) do have stars for corresponding articles, yet foreign articles don't have stars near featured English counterparts.

Is it due to different versions of the Wiki software, or is it made on purpose? (for example to encourage visits to lesser known languages)?Elvarg 21:22, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Because tht would be a self-reference. I don't like those featured article starts in the sidebar either, they're almost worthless because different projects have such drastically different standards on what qualifies as a feature article. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 21:35, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think a star on an english featured article (as already present on nonenglish articles) is self reference, rather it symbolises the featured status, distinguishes the article as exceptionally good, and reminds editors the article they may want to change is considered good as is, so large changes should reflect consensus).
My question however is not whether we should have them or not, rather why SOME wikipedias HAVE them and others DON'T.Elvarg 21:52, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
It's put there using a special template - [1] - which uses CSS positioning to put the star there. Personally I think it's a really good idea, in fact I was recently wondering if such a thing was possible and hadn't seen this template before. After all we put up big notices when we know there is something wrong with an article (e.g. it needs cleanup or there is an NPOV dispute), so why not highlight featured articles? Although I get the impression that Raul654, who is unofficially in charge of featured articles on en is strongly against including such stars. the wub "?!" 21:46, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
The stars missing from interwiki links on non-en wikis is probably just because the users there don't know or don't read English well enough to find out. I've added the stars on the en links on de for a couple rail transport articles that I know are featured here. Slambo (Speak) 21:53, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Personally I'm more concerned about the top-right starts currently present on other wikipedias but not english ones. I think we should do a community discussion to decide once and for all whether we want to include this kind of style (refer to the Arvalsgrein article I gave link to earlier to see how it looks). Personally I support it, as it would be another step forward in an article appraisal and community validation process. Elvarg 22:08, 15 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm, a blank page but with a featured star in the corner; since the history doesn't show evidence of vandalism, I'm guessing that Snið means Template (following What links here to Matarprjónar [boy, am I glad that all the languages put the site usage and navigation links in the same place!] seems to confirm this). The German wiki does it differently with a green star at the bottom of the article, as can be seen on John Bull (Lokomotive) (a translation of an article that I wrote and took to featured status here on en). Interestingly, someone deleted Vorlage:Link FA; I haven't found another template on de that would do the star on the interwiki link, and I don't know enough German to decipher the whole story there. I think I prefer having the star at the top of the article rather than the bottom. Slambo (Speak) 14:21, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Globalization

From the Wikimedia Help Desk:

When i try to view the article on 'globalization' on Firefox (ver 1.5), i get a bad layout in my browser where the containers 'Content' and 'Trade Series' overlap. Vik Nuckchady

WAvegetarian (talk) (email) (contribs) 01:40, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Using the same version of firefox, I don't see any actual overlaps, either in the Classic or Monobook skins. The article does feature rather an unfortunate number of floaty boxes which pile up horizontally in an ugly manner (something that also happens in IE and Opera). -- Finlay McWalter | Talk 01:47, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
If it's the pileup that is the problem, it's easy to fix with {{clearright}}. Fixed. --cesarb 02:50, 17 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

CSS errors

Results from attempting to validate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page with the W3C CSS validator

--Dfeuer 09:46, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Please see my comment here which suggests fixes to the two errors I was having at the time. There's yet another error now coming from a line-height with the invalid value auto, which I suspect should be inherit instead. I already made the change, failing to notice the (very clear) warning at the top, and reverted it; but if there are no objections, I would really like to reapply the change. —HorsePunchKid→龜 2005-12-17 03:42:11Z
Won't get any objections from me!
--Dfeuer 07:49, 19 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

List is somewhat broken

A lot of the examples in Help:List does not work. For example: 

#list item A1
##list item B1
##list item B2
:continuing list item A1
#list item A2
  1. list item A1
    1. list item B1
    2. list item B2
continuing list item A1
  1. list item A2

→AzaToth 09:51, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, as stated above, you need an extra #. See example: 

#list item A1
##list item B1
##list item B2
#:continuing list item A1
#list item A2
  1. list item A1
    1. list item B1
    2. list item B2
    continuing list item A1
  2. list item A2

Image upload licensing line broken for IE

If you try to upload an image with IE, the handy-dandy licensing template button doesn't work - or more to the point, only the top three lines can be selected (no license, unknown licence, "image found"). Any useful templates you have to enter by hand. Can this bug be fixed, please? Grutness...wha? 12:33, 16 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

No repro for me with IE 6.0.3790.1830 on Windows Server 2003 SP1 Standard. Deco 02:13, 17 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Well it's no go with 5.2 on Mac OS 10.2. Grutness...wha? 23:05, 17 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Please file it as a bug report on BugZilla if it's a reproducible bug, and provide clear information on the conditions under which it occurs, and steps for reproducing, if possible. Thanks. Rob Church Talk 04:00, 18 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks - now listed as Bug no. 4313. Grutness...wha? 06:11, 19 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Stabilisation of articles for general release

It seems to me the strength of the wikipedia is the editors. Particularly the well established editors with many good edits.

The other strength of the wikipedia is the users (these are people who aren't logged in). These make the wikipedia useful, and attract new editors to the wiki. These users need to see well established article versions, that have had a chance to be viewed and corrected by editors, and repaired as appropriate.

The main problem we have is low-edit editors. These users tend to 'test edit'/vandalise the wikipedia and this appears immediately to the users; but many of them also do good edits.

We need a mechanism for stopping the edits from low-edit editors from immediately appearing to the users.

My suggestion is an ad-hoc review process in keeping with the current 'esprit d'wikipedia'

I think that the wikipedia should follow the following rules:

An 'immature editor' is defined as any editor that has made less than 200 edits. A mature editor has made 200 or more.

No raw edit from an immature editor will be displayed to a non logged-in wikipedia user within less than 1 day. (Exception: users at the same IP address will have the article displayed immediately to avoid confusion after edits).

Modification within a day by another immature user resets the counter, and the article will only time out after another day The article displayed will be the newest article that has not been edited for a whole day, or has been edited by a mature user, or has been edited by the same IP address as the viewer. This rule can theoretically mean that a new edit never becomes visible, but in practice this will rarely happen, and the next rule helps avoid it anyway.

Modification of the article by a mature user makes the article immediately visible. This can make immature users edits visible- clearly the mature users are supposed to check to make sure that any previous edits are appropriate... the wiki software could help by pointing out if there had been recent changes...

Any mature editor caught making inappropriate edits has their account locked out. They have to start from scratch, this means that at most 0.5% of editors edits are bogus, even if an editor is a rogue.

Ok, my view is that these rules are not absolutely perfect, there's probably no such thing as perfect rules, but they are enormously better than what we have at the moment.

Comments? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wolfkeeper (talk • contribs) 2005-12-16 22:32:16 (UTC)

An m:Article validation feature is being actively worked on and will apparently be available in trial form in the not too distant future. I suspect similar ideas (like yours) will not be acted on until after this trial. -- Rick Block (talk) 04:40, 17 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I question the need for validation of articles. I claim that rejection of bad article revisions is far more important and normally does not require experts. The mechanisms proposed are a superset of what I propose, and the other features seem difficult to implement and at best of debateable value. A more general attempt at a solution is often not better since it is harder to use and harder to implement. WolfKeeper 05:02, 17 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I think requiring even the edits of mature editors to be reviewed is a good idea. We may not be vandals, but we still make mistakes. Probably the simplest scheme imaginable is that no new version would become visible until at least k other editors had approved it, with a user preference to view either the newest or most recent approved version. Deco 06:20, 17 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
The wikipedia has done pretty well so far, without such mechanisms. It would be premature to add such mechanisms, my contention is that there may be better ways to do similar things without heavyweight voting. I also disagree with the political aspects such voting can introduce, it can introduce horse trading on articles and such like. Also groups of users can conspire to push through edits arbitrarily anyway. But that isn't at all the point of my proposal anyway. It is only an antivandalism mechanism, not a validation mechanism.WolfKeeper 06:33, 17 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
200 edits would be a very high bar. I don't think I would have made it to 200 knowing that none of my edits were going to be public for a day. 10 edits would be plenty. But yeah, there are other proposals that go into a bit more detail than this. Stevage 03:08, 18 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
10 is much too small. Any vandal can do 10 edits typing with their nose. 50-200 should be workable. WolfKeeper 03:21, 18 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Any determined vandal can. But it would block the majority of vandals, including the "does this really work?" and "Johnny is gay" types. Nothing can stop a truly determined vandal.
I think 10 is too small; IMO there are too many vandals that are more determined than that. But it's irrelevant really, such a number is extremely easy to change up or down if the scheme has been implemented. My point is not that 24 hours and 50 or 100 edits are critical to the scheme working; my point is that the general scheme is lightweight from the users point of view whilst giving good protection to the wikipedia against vandalism.WolfKeeper 11:48, 19 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Fundraiser's progress bar is wrong

The Fundraiser's objective is something around 500'000$ - the green line suggests 100'000$. The reasoning: there are 10 little grey vertical lines, 20'000$ has been raised until now which is 2 grey lines, that means that 10*10'000=100'000$ is the goal. This is wrong. Please, correct it. I will try to contact User:Brion for this, but anyone with the correct permission, please do something. Thx, Msoos 22:26, 17 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Seems like its not a bug (according to Brion), but is like that on purpose. I do not see the idea behind it, but if others agreed, than let it be! Msoos 22:32, 17 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
There actually isn't a formal target amount for this fundraiser, which makes it a little confusing. In further tweaks to the bar, the scale has been upped to show a $500k scale by default though. The small ticks are at $25k intervals, with larger milestone ticks every $100k. --Brion 23:35, 17 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Exteded syntax

Because if the reecent war against/for the usage of logical templates, I made a simpple extended syntax that could be used, the code is located at m:User:AzaToth/Logic, and if incoorperated into wikipedia it could make a lot of people happy →AzaToth 23:45, 17 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

These do not work for me. I have date preferences set to yyyy-mm-dd. Looking at the HTML "view source" I see the link is to 

<td><b><a href="#10_December_2005_.28Saturday.29" title="">11</a></b></td>

where the date is in dd_monthname_2005 format.

At the destination end, I see 

<p><a name="2005-12-10_.28Saturday.29"></a></p>

where the date is in yyyy-mm-dd format.

Thus the link doesn't work. -- SGBailey 00:02, 18 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Linking to headers with wikified dates is simply not a good idea. I've made an experimental fix, adding an explicit anchor defined with an id attribute attached to blank lines before each header. I'll bring this up at Talk:Current events. -- Rick Block (talk) 02:04, 18 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Multicolumn lists

Value#Personal and cultural values has a long list of values which would be well-served by a multicolumn display. Is there a nice way to get the list to wrap, say by 3 or 4 columns?

Thank you, --Ancheta Wis 00:19, 18 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

One way to do this is using a table - I arranged the entries in three columns. Please take a look to see how it was done. -- Rick Block (talk) 01:24, 18 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Yep, use {{col-begin}},... {{col-break}}..{{col-break}}..{{col-end}}. Stevage 03:05, 18 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
I brought in a couple of templates from Wiktionary a while ago that do this. Take a look at {{Top4}}, {{Mid4}} and {{Bottom}}; the page Template talk:Mid4 presents information on their origin and how to use them. Courtland 03:16, 18 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you all. --Ancheta Wis 10:39, 19 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It seems that while external links to IRC servers (e.g. - [2]) and FTP servers (e.g. - [3]) link correctly, links to telnet servers (e.g. - [4]) do not get handled properly. I'd like to think this is a simple thing to fix, hence my posting it here. Comments? —Locke Cole 12:13, 18 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

telnet is an obsolete protocol, and should not be encouraged to be used, there shouldn't be any links to telnet-servers from wikipedia at all →AzaToth 13:33, 18 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
IRC and FTP are obsolete as well, so the "it's obsolete" argument doesn't really hold a whole lot of weight for me. As for links to telnet servers, while they continue to disappear, there are still bulletin boards (for example) that operate on the internet that may be worth linking to. —Locke Cole 13:51, 18 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
So we shouldn't be linking to servers that only support HTTP/1.0 either? How is whether or not the protocol is considered deprecated at all relevant to anything? (and AFAIK IRC at least hasn't been deprecated by anything) —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 14:03, 18 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Some might argue that IM has largely replaced IRC (especially where the IM protocol supports having groups of people together ala an IRC channel). But that's really besides the point and not something I want to debate: whether or not it's obsolete is irrelevant. Afterall, I note that the old gopher protocol is supported: [5]. So can something be done for poor old telnet? :P —Locke Cole 14:15, 18 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Define obsolete... Telnet is still is use, remote Linux shells, finantial institutions MUD games etc still use them, as well as remote administration of routers, printers and what not. Now granted there are no longer a huge number of public telnet services available, but still. It's usefull if you want to provide a direct link to for example a MUD like telnet://discworld.imaginary.com or whatnot...--Sherool (talk) 14:43, 18 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Google Web Accelerator causing problems?

I recently gave UrineForGas (talk · contribs) a {{usernameblock}} and managed to inadvertently block several other users.

It seems that they are using Google Web Accelerator and this seems to be acting as a IP proxy. As our article says it seems to cause administrative websites such as ours problems.

IP addresses mentioned are 64.233.173.85 and 72.14.194.19 -- both belong to Google web accelerator. See http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl

Do we have a policy of blocking proxies on site because they cause problems with IP addresses? I know you can't edit through Babel Fish (website). Or not? — Dunc|☺ 17:02, 18 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

If anyone from anywhere on the Internet can use it as a proxy, even if it requires installing a specific program, it should be considered an open proxy, and indefinitely blocked. --cesarb 23:07, 18 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Open proxies are blocked when they allow editing, not when they simply read pages. It's very common for ISPs and countries to use read caching proxies and those are harmless. The potential for harm from the Google Web Accelerator is that it goes and loads pages which the user hasn't clicked on. It's proably insignificant at present. Jamesday 22:32, 19 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
The official FAQ says it can be disabled for specific sites, which means it might be possible to block it with a message asking people to add wikipedia to the list. But this should probably be discussed at WP:AN first. --cesarb 23:10, 18 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Editboxes are slow?

Does anyone else have this problem... since a couple of weeks, the 'edit this page' function performs extremely slowly on my computer when dealing with lengthy pages - by that I specifically mean the edit box that appears. It feels like some complex function is called for each letter I type, the keyboard rate literally goes down to one letter per second! Radiant_>|< 21:53, 18 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Donations may be elsewhere?

In the User: namespace, the fundraising message reads "Donations are tax-deductible in the U.S. and may be elsewhere." I guess it's funnier that way, but someone might consider changing "may be" to "maybe". Dmharvey 22:35, 18 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Ah yes. Someone should change my "en" to "en-0". Dmharvey 23:10, 18 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
In any case, it changed to "Donations are tax-deductible in some countries (like the U.S.)" and quickly changed to "Donations are tax-deductible in some countries". Stevage 01:02, 19 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Problem with an old account?

My girlfriend created User:Southpaw some time ago but ended up never using it. Now, she wants to revive the account to upload some photos she took, but she couldn't remember the password and I had her click the "email me a new password" button. However, she never received the email, nor does she receive emails from the "email this user" link, so I suspect that she never initially supplied her email address (sigh). Is there any way for her to revive this account? Her email was <email removed> and is now <email removed>.

Thanks for any suggestions.

—Steven G. Johnson 00:00, 19 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I've taken out the emails (they're still available in the page history) because making it public here makes it very public across the Internet, and we don't want her to get spammed. Since there are no contributions on that account, might I recommend creating a new one? That ended up happening to me too when I came here (see User:TitoXD), and I just made another one and made sure I didn't forget the password. Titoxd(?!? - did you read this?) 00:57, 19 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Short Articles

Hi folks, as part of my efforts to clean up wikipedia, I've been hunting around looking for short articles that are suitable to be WP:CSD. The way I have been looking for them now is to just repeatedly click random article until I bump into something unsuitable. This is a inefficient process since I hit a lot of good articles (and a lot of 'town' articles which I think should go... but that is another issue...). I was wondering - is there a good way to browse through the shorter articles or to browse through the articles? novacatz 04:04, 19 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Neglected articles and Special:Shortpages might help.--Sean|Black 04:24, 19 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Session data problems?

I'm having a lot of problems not being able to make edits due to "session data being lost". Anyone else? Stevage 14:36, 19 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

You are not alone. I've gotten quite a few of them today. It's almost like the cookie is expiring in under one minute. Slambo (Speak) 14:47, 19 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Possible commiting fraud using signatures

If enabling raw signatures, and add to the signature ~~~~ and/or {{subst:template}}, then those will get expanded by the next editor, not the editor whose signature contains given strings →AzaToth 16:17, 19 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

IP Administrator?

We at the CVU have been pondering... Is it possible (and by saying possibly I mean techinically possible) to give an IP address admin privilages? The IP in question is 68.39.174.238, who does a lot of work in the CVU but won't create an account. It's a static IP - it doesn't change - but it'd be interesting to see if it would be possible for them to get admin privilages, and if the rules could be bent a bit. FireFox 21:59, 19 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Nope, can't be done, won't be done. --Brion 22:01, 19 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
It is technically impossible. Rights are related to accounts and an IP address has no account to grant rights to. With apologies to the IP user, some form of account is mandatory. Jamesday 22:17, 19 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Added to which, an IP isn't as secure as an account. I'm not sure whether it could be spoofed, but imagine if one day the user's ISP reassigns his IP, and some random stranger suddenly has admin rights. Goodie! :) Stevage 22:18, 19 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Trouble with Template:Ref

I have burned way too many hours trying to figure this out -- it is definitely time to ask!

I am using mediawiki, but for some reason, couldn't get Template:Ref to work using {{NAMESPACE}} or any other generic tag, therefore, I cannot use the same template across different pages.

I first employed template:ref on this page. (at [5])

The Template:ref that I tried to appropriate: <span class="reference"><sup id="ref_{{{1}}}" class="plainlinksneverexpand">[{{fullurl:{{FULLPAGENAME}}}}#endnote_{{{1}}}]</sup></span>

Would not work in any way shape or form, so I had to resort to this:

<span class="reference"><sup id="ref_{{{1}}}" class="plainlinksneverexpand">[http://wiki.uscpublicdiplomacy.com/index.php/European_Commission_Policies_and_Initiatives#endnote_{{{1}}}]</sup></span>

How can I fix this so my Template:Ref can work across different pages on the wiki and not have to make a new Template for each page?

Try: <span class="reference"><sup id="ref_{{{1}}}" class="plainlinksneverexpand">[{{SERVER}}{{localurl:{{NAMESPACE}}:{{PAGENAME}}}}#endnote_{{{1}}}]</sup></span>
The fullurl stuff is probably newer than your version of mediawiki. - Lee (talk) 05:38, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

MediaWiki:Blockipsuccesstext

...messes up if invoked on a username containing spaces (since in a single-bracket URL, a space is the delimiter between URL and description, part of the ULR will be turned into the desc). Any ideas on fixing that? Radiant_>|< 03:42, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

It would appear $1 is not expected to be used in an external link. Seems like providing the username in external link format (as, say, $2) this should be a reasonably trivial fix for somebody who knows what they're doing in the source. Have you looked in bugzilla? -- Rick Block (talk) 05:16, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Bot advice

I've seen the requests for bots on the community portal and would like to help. I'm pretty handy with Perl, which I understand isn't the ideal language for bots, but it's what I know. Are there any guides or tips out there for would-be bot coders? Or perhaps examples of bots written in Perl that I could crib from? Thanks. | Klaw ¡digame! 05:45, 20 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)&oldid=32068099"