Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)

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The technical section of the village pump is used to discuss technical issues about Wikipedia. This page is not for new feature requests. Bugs and feature requests should be made at the BugZilla or the Village pump proposals page 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

JavaScript watchlists

This suggestion is pretty unlikely to be implemented, but I thought I'd throw it out there anyway. As I understand it, watchlists constitute a large part of Wikipedia's bandwidth expenditure (I know I look at it more times than any other single page). I was thinking that since so much of the data is repetitive, much of the pages could be constructed dynamically using JavaScript based on a minimal set of input data. For instance, the "diff", "hist", "talk" and "contribs" links could be constructed simply from the page and user names. The same is true for much of the formatting. Also, this would open up opportunities to apply additional formatting (such as dynamic tables) that would ordinarily increase bandwidth instead of reduce it. Of course, such a feature would need to be toggleable as an option in user preferences so that the site doesn't suddenly break for users with JavaScript turned off. Again, I can see a lot of reasons not to do this, but I thought I'd present the idea anyway. SharkD (talk) 23:48, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

Don't worry about performance. :) EVula // talk // ☯ // 03:35, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

If you take a good look through that "don't worry" page, you'll see it's really more to make sure editing/policy/administrative decisions aren't made based on how they'd affect performance. I don't think there's anything wrong with discussing ideas for technical changes to the software that may save performance, especially when they might result in benefits for users, like more features. Equazcion •✗/C • 03:43, 10 Feb 2009 (UTC)

PS. I think this should probably be moved to WP:Village pump (proposals). Equazcion •✗/C • 03:49, 10 Feb 2009 (UTC)

On the contrary, this is exactly the right place for it; it's a proposal for a technical change that does not affect what we do here, only how we do it. Happy‑melon 13:48, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

No, watchlists do not constitute a significant part of Wikipedia's bandwidth usage. Remember that >90% of all page requests are anonymous article views. — Werdna • talk 03:10, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

It would be easy to make a "live" watchlist that continuously updates from the API without reloading the page. It would look and feel a lot like Gmail if you do it right. It could even color-code the diffs you've read . — CharlotteWebb 21:54, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

AJAX could be used for lots of stuff. I hope to see it used some day. SharkD (talk) 01:31, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Very recent discussion about making recent changes available via Jabber: see here. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:02, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

A lot of Wikipedia should be converted to use APIs on compatible browsers. Regarding Don't worry about performance, we should remember that Wikmedia's servers are not the only infrastructure involved here [in particular, I use a (very slow) dial-up connection, and so do some other people]. Brian Jason Drake 14:39, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Broken redirects

Resolved

 – ukexpat (talk) 16:34, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Broken redirects and all other special pages don't update anymore, maybe somebody here know, what a problem. Tat1642 (talk) 19:25, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

Er, could you give an example? I don't see how a broken redirect is supposed to update... EVula // talk // ☯ // 19:27, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

The pages have been disabled for performance reasons. --- RockMFR 19:43, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

• Can u give me link on discussion of it? Tat1642 (talk) 11:59, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

• There was an issue with the cron that periodically updates them. Afaik: this has been fixed and should update again soon. ^demon^{[omg plz]} 01:03, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

• Ok, thx for answer, i will wait. Tat1642 (talk) 13:28, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

List of manga licensed in English

There is just one article in the Category:Articles with invalid date parameter in template and that is List of manga licensed in English and I can't find the problem. Perhaps you can help? Debresser (talk) 18:13, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

Tags of type date=2009-02-14 are no longer supported and should be changed to date=14 February 2009. — Blue-Haired Lawyer 18:55, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

That is not completely correct. Not all of the templates have stopped supporting ISO dates, nor should they just be arbitrarily changed to international format, but to whatever the article is using. As there are many many many many articles still using ISO dates in their citation templates, that is not what is causing a problem on that page. -- Collectonian (talk · contribs) 20:02, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

Since the problem goes away when I delete either the first half or the second half of the article, my guess is that the breaking of the limit on expensive parser function calls is to blame. Algebraist 21:26, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

That is what I was wondering too, since it is also incorrectly showing as needing clean up, even though it isn't tagged for that. -- Collectonian (talk · contribs) 00:35, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

{{Nihongo}} was changed to use {{Lang}} in the last revision; since {{Lang}} uses #ifexist, calling it 639 times will break the page. Either it's time for a split or {{Nihongo}} should roll the language markup into the span element that's already there. Since {{Nihongo}} is used heavily on a fair number of pages, I believe the latter is the better option. —tan³ tx 02:40, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

A split of the list has been discussed and agreed upon; no one has done it yet, though. Regardless of that, though, streamlining the template is a generally good idea. 「ダイノガイ千？！」^{(Dinoguy1000)} 18:54, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Automatic text to SVG conversion tool?

Currently you cannot rotate table column headers vertically except using an IE-only CSS attribute. The cross-browser solution is to use SVG and image maps (see here for an explanation). Is there a tool or extension that will allow such text to be created automatically? SharkD (talk) 01:27, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

I'm envisioning that it would work somehow like MathML does on Wikipedia. SharkD (talk) 01:39, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Because SVG creates an image from a kind of XML markup, it would be pretty simple to do with php. Create an image containing text in whatever image editor you use and save as .SVG. Then open the file in a text editor. Make the content into a series of echo statements and replace the example text with a variable. You can then call the script by sending the variable in the URL.

(edit) - I have tried this - see example below:

<?php
header("Content-type: image/svg+xml");

/* this file is svg-text.php */

echo "<?xml version='1.0' standalone='no'?>\n";
echo "<!DOCTYPE svg PUBLIC '-//W3C//DTD SVG 1.1//EN' ";
echo "'http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/1.1/DTD/svg11.dtd'>\n\n";

echo "<svg width='100%' height='100%' version='1.1' ";
echo "xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg'>\n\n";

echo "<g transform='rotate(90)'>\n";
echo "<text id='TextElement' x='0' y='0' style='font-family:Arial;font-size:24'>".($_GET['text'])."\n\n";
echo "</text>\n";
echo "</g>\n";
echo "</svg>\n";

?>

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

/* this file is rotated-text.php */

<?php function rotateText($text) {
   echo '<embed src="svg-text.php?text='.$text.'" type="image/svg+xml">';
 }
	
?>

<html>

<head>
<title>Rotated text with SVG and php</title>
</head>

<body>

<h1>Using SVG to create rotated text with php</h1>

<p><?php rotateText("Hello World!"); ?></p>

</body>

</html>

See the example in use here. Every time you want a piece of rotated text to appear, insert

<?php rotateText("Whatever text you want"); ?> -=# Amos E Wolfe ^talk #=- 12:32, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Hello Amos, how many character sets "scripts" does this this support? If you can get it to select an appropriate font based on this it may be useful in the discussion above. — CharlotteWebb 12:27, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

The example above selects the font-family in the same way as CSS. If the font is not available it will not display in that font. It is always advisable to use generic font descriptions such as "serif", "sans-serif", "monospace", etc. which will display whichever font has been set for that type on the user's system. -=# Amos E Wolfe ^talk #=- 12:57, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

I was referring to the PNG renderer which (after experimenting with it) I discovered will not render any non-latin letters. I tried a Russian word and got a raster image with several squares in it. — CharlotteWebb 13:12, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Try using these fonts instead. SharkD (talk) 13:45, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

That is a list of fonts installed for rsvg or ImageMagick or whatever Brion uses to convert SVGs to PNG. These may or may not be the same as fonts AmosWolfe's tool has. The link I tried was:

http://www.northantscamra.org.uk/signature.php?text=русский&size=24

And it gives me seven squares because the tool either does not have an appropriate font, one that includes the Cyrillic character set (the f'reign word is how one writes "Russian" in Russian), or it has one but fails to select it for rendering. I got the same result with all other non-Latin scripts I tried, which is bad because these are the cases where an image placeholder might be desired . — CharlotteWebb 17:55, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Er, what are you trying to do exactly? And, how were you able to manage to "switch" fonts using the above tool? SharkD (talk) 03:56, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Trying to get somebody to develop something that will choose the appropriate font before converting from SVG to PNG. Uh, I didn't manage to do anything—did you not notice PNG images had rectangles in place of non-latin letters? You can't tell me that problem is on the client side (and I know it isn't), as it is converted from vector to bitmap before being sent back. — CharlotteWebb 09:14, 21 February 2009 (UTC)

Italic titles for names

Example

Hello all. Just recently I've noticed that species are now using italics in the title see Gryllus veletis etc. It seems to be programmed into their infoboxes to produce an italicized title. What would anybody think about this for film, book etc titles? As a name which is italized in the article intro below and according to MOS is put in Italics in the article links, would this seem more consistent to also have the title of the page italicized in coordination? Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 18:02, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

Ugh. That looks bad. I can't see a reason they should be italicized when they are article titles. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 18:09, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

I'm not saying either looks better, just think it should be consistent thats all. For instance Gryllus pennsylvanicus is not in italics and makes it look completely inconsistent. Species are always in italics in the article, so are names of films. books etc but this new move towards changing the species page titles seems to have made it inconsistent. I wonder if somebody could find the discussion which gave consensus on italics for species titles?? Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 18:17, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

I'd prefer it if we didn't italicize titles as it is either inconsistent or precedent-setting, and the tools for formatting titles are inadequate. While some titles need manual fixing due to technical restrictions (e.g. "iPod" and not "IPod"), the range and diversity of page titles could break the formatting of certain titles. I'm just imagining someone adding a badly-written template bit to an infobox that results in something like "Examplemovie (film)" when the goal would be to get "Examplemovie (film)". {{Nihiltres|talk|log}} 18:33, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

I agree. Dr. Blofeld ^{White cat} 18:35, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

This is being done in Template:Taxobox name. --- RockMFR 18:45, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

I just left a message there pointing to this discussion. I agree with Melodia that it's a little clunky looking, but I don't mind too much. I agree though that this should only be implemented if we have the tools to make all titles correctly italicized (like Examplemovie (film)), which I'm not sure exist yet. Calliopejen1 (talk) 20:07, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

The manual of style, and indeed scientific practise, states that binomial names should be italicised wherever they appear. By displaying the title in plain-text, it creates ambiguity as to whether the article name is a common or scientific name, and is also technically incorrect. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 21:54, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

I'd like to see this implemented, personally. With regards to Calliopejen1's question, titles can use mixed formatting simply by marking up the text as desired within the style that modifies the page:

<span id=RealTitle style='display:none'>PAGE TITLE HERE</span>

To demonstrate with Calliopejen1's example,

<span id=RealTitle style='display:none'>''Examplemovie'' (film)</span>

would display the page title as:

Examplemovie (film)

This discussion began at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Films#Film article titles in Italics, where I have temporarily added a modifier to demonstrate the effect on the page title there. --Ckatz^chat_spy 02:06, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Something similar to that would be on a per-page modification basis though, right? That could end up with an extra param in the infobox that overrides the automatic text the infobox puts up. Would it be possible for it to detect if the page contains "(XYZ)" and not add the modification if it does? §hep^Talk 02:12, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

I don't think we need to apply our manual of style to the actual names of the articles; they're there strictly as an identifying marker for the article itself. EVula // talk // ☯ // 02:20, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

I agree with this. The header at the top of the page does not follow usual style rules. It is merely an identifier to indicate where we've decided to place a particular subject. I really don't think this is worth the trouble. --- RockMFR 03:42, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

If we are going to use this format, I agree this should not have to be specified manually on each page. Obviously we would want some kind of string/parser function to split "Foo Bar (film)" into the part which is the proper name of the subject and the part in parentheses which merely distinguishes it from other subjects with the same proper name. Maybe something like:

{{#titledab:Foo Bar (film)}} → "(film)"

{{#titlenormal:Foo Bar (film)}} → "Foo Bar"

Not sure what the best names or syntax would be. Maybe they would be best as extended features of {{#titleparts:}} which already exists as a limited way to say p1.split("/")[p2], mostly to help navigate between sub-pages (though there are other more esoteric uses). I can think of dozens of practical uses for splitting at the parentheses, hopefully enough to rebut anyone who says it would be stupid. — CharlotteWebb 03:19, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

I also think that the title does not need to be italicized. Frankly, some people will have trouble learning how to make the title italics, and if they want to change it from italics to non-italics, they won't know where to begin. Also, for some reason the italics removes the edit link from the lead section. Gary King (talk) 15:53, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

With parser functions to do what I explained above (separate the parts of the title in order to italicize only part of it it) it would be as easy as putting something like {{italictitle}} anywhere on the page. The "edit lead section" feature is a javascript gadget, so this is probably just an indicator that it was written poorly to begin with. I'll see what I can figure out about that. — CharlotteWebb 16:15, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Actually the problem is that the code in MediaWiki:Common.js, after changing the title, tries to delete an element with id "RealTitleBanner", which doesn't exist because it is not supplied by the code in Template:Taxobox. This causes an error which just says "RealTitleBanner is null" and causes the browser to stop executing any other scripts including the one that adds an "edit lead section" link. So there's nothing wrong with the gadget itself, which I found at MediaWiki:Gadget-edittop.js. — CharlotteWebb 16:44, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

I like the idea of italicising titles if and only if we can iron out all the bugs. It shouldn't be too hard for the devs to code something that can separate the qualifier from the rest of the title... Dendodge Talk^Contribs 17:50, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

I think italicizing titles is a good idea as well. Using templates also would be the way to go. Simply entering the correct title, including any formatting, as a parameter to the template would be the simplest solution from a user's prespective. It could be abused, but so can any other type of formatting anywhere on Wikipedia. SharkD (talk) 03:41, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Template loop

Resolved

 – ukexpat (talk) 16:31, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Hi, I managed to create a loop on Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/2009 February 15, just following the instructions on the template. AFD on Institute of Nuclear Materials Management. Template loop detected: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Institute of Nuclear Materials Management Any suggestions to fix it ? thanks Mion (talk) 23:08, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

The articles entry is Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Institute of Nuclear Materials Management, which might be wrong. Mion (talk) 23:12, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

The loop isn't fixed, but the second page is working Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Institute of Nuclear Materials Management (2nd nomination). Mion (talk) 23:40, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

All fixed. You transcluded the page onto itself by using the AfD3 template, instead of the AfD2 template. — Edokter • Talk • 00:14, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Ah, thanks for fixing Mion (talk) 01:54, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Links no longer work when discussions are archived

Since links to discussions cease to work once a page is archived, I was wondering if it might be a good idea to create the next archive beforehand and then redirect the main Talk page to it. For example, this discussion would be located at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 57 and Wikipedia:Village pump (technical) would simply redirect to it. SharkD (talk) 13:50, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

I think that would cause more problems than it solves, for example for watchlists. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:43, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Like my case, when I need to refer an archived topic, I just add "/Archive ##" in the link. No big deal right? People seldom refer to archived topics anyway. HУтaяtalk2mecontribs 21:47, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

LyricWiki links

Assuming I got consensus to do so, would it be possible to block interwiki links to LyricWiki locally, or is that something I have to get done globally? They have stopped even bothering to try to get permission or pay royalties for the lyrics, so any links to them are forbidden by our copyright policies. Since the links are impermissible, I don't see a good reason to support the interwiki links.—Kww(talk) 16:14, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Better to pursue this request on mediawiki talk:spam-blacklist, methinks? --Izno (talk) 16:27, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Isn't that for blocking http style links? I'm not sure any of the blacklists work against direct links like [[Lyricwiki:Broken Social Scene|Broken Social Scene Lyrics at Lyricwiki]], do they?—Kww(talk) 16:32, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

There is a global proposal to remove it at meta:Talk:Interwiki map#lyricwiki. PrimeHunter (talk) 16:36, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

I've checked in on the meta discussion, and it is apparent that it is moving at glacial speed. So, back to the original question: if I could generate a consensus to block links of the form [[Lyricwiki:Broken Social Scene|Broken Social Scene Lyrics at Lyricwiki]] within English Wikipedia, would it be possible to do so, or does that change have to be made at a higher level?—Kww(talk) 16:52, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

I don't know, but meta:Interwiki map was last updated 28 December where an editor made multiple changes. The proposal to remove lyricwiki is from 30 December. Maybe it will get attention next time somebody updates the page. PrimeHunter (talk) 19:46, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Cite error: <ref> tags exist, but no <references/> tag was found

This message has recently started to appear in red at the bottom of pages. It's easy to fix in articles, but it often appears on talkpages as well. I am thinking of filing a Bot request asking that sections of talkpages with ref tages be appended with

References

{{refs}}
or similar coding so that references cited would show up in the relevant areas. I thought it might be prudent to ask for suggestions/comments here first. Skomorokh 17:59, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

That was fixed already, or should be (see Help:Cite errors). Where are you seeing this message in non-articles? Algebraist 18:04, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Because people will often make a comment on a talk page, and provide a <ref> for it. Or they may copy part of the article to the talk page to discuss it, and it might contain a ref also. — CharlotteWebb 18:06, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I know that happens, but it shouldn't be causing this message to display, since the message is now namespace-dependent. Algebraist 18:08, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

It's definitely a problem in the Wikipedia namespace. I'm sure I've seen it in Talk as well. Skomorokh 18:13, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

I'm not seeing that message on that page. Have you cleared your cache? Algebraist 18:17, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

I believe I have; how do I make sure? The message appears at the foot of the linked page for me. Skomorokh 18:24, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

WP:Bypass your cache. Algebraist 18:31, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, I've done that; I still see red at the above link and at Talk also. Skomorokh 18:36, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

I don't see the error messages either. It was removed from non-articles on 31 January [1] and the linked versions are from 16 February and 13 February, so I don't see how a users cache could cause the message to appear. Is it possible that Skomorokh is getting pages from a server which hasn't registered the MediaWiki edit? PrimeHunter (talk) 18:47, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

How peculiar. I tried the same page at secure here and the red warning still appears. Skomorokh 18:53, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

That would work well only if you also run a bot to continuously move the {{reflist}} to the bottom of the page every time somebody adds a new section to the talk page. Or get the devs to fix whatever bug causes all refs appearing after the <references/> tag to be ignored (they won't get picked by by a second <references/> tag either, as this will only duplicate the first one… I think). — CharlotteWebb 18:06, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

With the latest update to cite.php, you can now include multiple <Reference /> tags; they will list the references after any previous <Reference />. This is probably only useful for talk pages where you want to list the references, but not mess with groups. --—— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk - 19:06, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure I understand this. Rather than asking you to explain it, is it documented somewhere? mw:Extension:Cite/Cite.php doesn't seem to have any recent edits related to this. — CharlotteWebb 19:20, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Ah, you are right. Skomorokh 18:12, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Well you could set it to "lazy mode" and have it act only when it has to, which would be the small sub-set of edits where a <ref> tag is added below the reflist. Might not flood the edit history so much that way. — CharlotteWebb 18:58, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

FYI, multiple <references/> tags have worked for a while. Multiple {{reflist}}s don't work as you would expect, because MediaWiki caches the output of parameterless template transclusions; multiple {{reflist|1}}s will work as expected. Anomie⚔ 02:38, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

This problem is showing up in some articles as well. For example this version of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. There was a ref tag in the external links section (which seems a little odd, but I'm not sure there is any proscription against doing that). older ≠ wiser 00:11, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

How did they do it?

Resolved

 – ukexpat (talk) 22:17, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

I was just wondering how the developers did the whole WP: = Wikipedia: thing. I am interested in doing this for my own MediaWiki wiki. Thanks, Genius101^Guestbook 00:27, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

It's done using MediaWiki software. Have a look at Comparison_of_wiki_software to see the other types of "operating systems" for wikis.Smallman12q (talk) 01:48, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

mw:Manual:$wgNamespaceAliases. --Splarka (rant) 02:41, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks Splarka, that's just what I wanted! Genius101^Guestbook 21:51, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/ timing out

Occassionally, the encrypted version of wikipedia... https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/ times out too fast or I get a 404 message. Is the secure wikipedia experiencing technical problems of some sort?Smallman12q (talk) 01:36, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

I'm also getting a number of 503 messages lately to.Smallman12q (talk) 21:12, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Categories

It's nice how everything's in categories. I can find strawberry in category:berries if I wanted to. But is there a way to find articles by specifying more than one category? Like if I wanted a list of all articles under category:berries and category:All articles lacking sources. -- penubag  (talk) 08:36, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

The only way currently to do this is to use CatScan. Nanonic (talk) 15:02, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

According to Wikipedia:Category intersection#Using MediaWiki search to find category intersections it's possible to type +incategory:"category1" +incategory:"category2" in the search box also, but yeah that doesn't seem to rely work at all. You sometimes get a few hits but they seem to be the restult of a full text search rater than any category membership or some such... --Sherool (talk) 15:42, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

CatScan is probably the most efficient way to intersect cats online. For external use AWB has a list comparer that will compare 2 categories and show intersections. §hep^Talk 16:45, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

{{or}} stripping whitespace in some cases

Flagging this for wider attention: {{or}} appears to be stripping any following whitespace if the next paragraph starts with a link. This has the effect of concatenating paragraphs. Discussion. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 16:10, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

It's not special to that template. Any category link can cause the problem:

Blah blah[[Category:Wikipedia features]]

[[Blah]] blah

produces

Blah blah

Blah blah

Algebraist 16:18, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Ah, right. Can't this be compensated for in the logic of inline templates? I'm a little surprised this has never bitten me before... Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 16:34, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

This same issue came up a while back with {{fact}}. {{fix}} has a parameter specifically designed to hold the category link, people just have to use it. Anomie⚔ 02:14, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

What just happened?

I was sitting here, minding my own business, editing a page, everything going normal. When I hit "show preview", I was suddenly logged in as User:Chatsam. His links showed up at the top of the page, his contributions showed up when I clicked "my contributions", his signature showed up when I did the four tildes in preview. I logged out, logged into my own account, checked that all the edits I made today are shown in my contributions and that all contributions from my account are my own (they are), changed my password (because I'm a little freaked out now), but I'd really like to know what just happened.

I have absolutely nothing to do with that account. This is my own computer, it isn't shared.

My main concern is, if this can happen to me with Chatsam's account, it could happen to someone else with my account. So, I ask again, what just happened? How could this possibly be? --Floquenbeam (talk) 17:46, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

p.s. I know you usually can't request Checkuser on yourself, but if doing so would help someone figure out what just happened, you've got my permission. --Floquenbeam (talk) 17:50, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

This is extremely unlikely as Wikipedia stores users as hashes on cookies. It would be extremely unlikely that even a corrupted cookie could produce that users account hash. Still, maybe you stumbled upon a wiki bug.Smallman12q (talk) 21:11, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, I almost didn't post here because I didn't want people to think I was crazy, confused, or trolling. If someone had asked me before today if this kind of thing was possible, I'm sure I would have said it was "extremely unlikely" (with "extremely" in bold :) ) myself. All I can say is:

• It happened exactly as I described: I was editing logged into my account, and when I hit preview, it looked like I was logged in as Chatsam instead. I didn't try to save anything while logged into his account (felt like I was trespassing, and I was kind of worried that someone else had been switched to my account at the same time), so don't know what would have happened then.
• It wasn't a matter of accidentally going to the wrong page and getting confused where I was; the actual headers at the top right of the screen were his data not mine, linked to his contributions not mine, had a redlinked talk page like he does, and in the preview window, the message I had just written had his signature appended to the end, instead of mine.
• There is no prior link between my account and his account at all. This has been my home computer for 2 years, so it's not like his cookies could have been left on my machine from a previous session. It looks from his French Wikipedia page like the guy isn't even on the same continent as me, so I don't think he's driving around with a little black box stealing my wireless signal (which is secure anyway).

Assuming I'm not dismissed as a crank, is the fact that this is possible of interest to anyone? I suppose, as extremely unlikely as it is, that maybe the cookie got corrupted, or (in way over my head now) a server hiccup sent me the wrong page, with the wrong links at the top (and the wrong signature?), by mistake. I'm hoping that someone knowledgeable can reassure me that they understand how this could have happened (even if they can't explain it to someone as clueless as me), and can tell me that it's a bug that's been dealt with, or at least being looked into. --Floquenbeam (talk) 01:42, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

I had something similar happen at college back in 1999; suddenly I was viewing other people's Excite homepages. Turns out we were all at the same college, and the IT department had started a new caching system, which somehow meant it was caching cookies and connections and the whole jazz. Now, true, things have improved in ten years, and certainly cookies shouldn't be that vulnerable anymore; but are you on a college network? I would wager a commercial ISP wouldn't pull that stuff, but colleges might. Of course it would only work if Chatsam was on the same network. --Golbez (talk) 02:37, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

I'm editing from home, on Verizon FioS. Not sure how my IP works with them, whether it's more or less static or hops all over the place, I haven't bothered to check before now. And I'm reading between the lines here, but it appears Chatsam might be in France, rather far from my location, or perhaps Quebec, closer but still highly unlikely to have this network. --Floquenbeam (talk) 02:47, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

User:Feen

Resolved

 – ukexpat (talk) 16:27, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Hello. I'm Feen, you may contact me here. I'm merging my accounts and I need the following user accounts to finish this.

en.wikipedia.org hu.wikipedia.org nl.wikipedia.org no.wikipedia.org

As I checked, at User:Feen, the user that registered this username isn't using it. So, I hope you can give me a hand with that.

Best. --189.47.13.78 (talk) 20:39, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

You need to add your request to Wikipedia:Changing username/SUL. Cheers, Amalthea 20:49, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Thank you very much. --189.47.13.78 (talk) 20:54, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

How to add listas sorting to a WPBM banner?

Resolved

 – ukexpat (talk) 16:29, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

In the WikiProject template: Template:Serial killer and many others, we cannot figure out how to make the listas parameter sort correctly in the WP's categories, like: Category:B-Class Crime-related articles. Could someone write out the syntax for us or add it to Template:WPBannerMeta/doc, so we can refer to it in the future? Thanks. --Funandtrvl (talk) 22:31, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Currently the listas feature is "under construction" AFAIK. The developers of the template watch Template talk:WPBannerMeta and will most likely be able to answer you the best with issues regarding the template. §hep^Talk 22:36, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Note to add that it appears they plan to have the listas functional after Template:Bug is dealt with. §hep^Talk 22:38, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, I'll keep watching it. --Funandtrvl (talk) 22:39, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

PNG compression

I'm aware that PNG is already a compressed image format, but I read that it can be compressed further. What programs should I use? Is the additional compression lossless?Smallman12q (talk) 02:27, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

pngcrush is a program for optimizing the compression of PNGs; it's lossless. --Golbez (talk) 02:34, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

I use PNGOUT. It only does lossless compression. It works very well and is easy to use. --- RockMFR 02:35, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

I think using these utilities is pointless, as Wikipedia will resize the images at some point anyway, thereby "undoing" your efforts. SharkD (talk) 01:02, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

As well as attempting to increase compression of a png, a utility like pngcrush can remove unwanted embedded data chunks in the png. A useful discussion of using pngcrush or similar to address the problems Internet Explorer has with displaying some pngs can be found here. --RexxS (talk) 02:14, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

{{sort}} diffuculty

This may or may not be the right spot for this, however I am having a great deal of difficulty with {{sort}} on the article List of Calgary Flames draft picks. To try and get around the bug where a blank cell is treated as a zero, I've used {{sort|0.1|0}} wherever a 0 is found to force it to sort above a blank space. However, I've run into a problem with the line for Matt Keetley (2005 - 5 - 158) where using the sort template in this way breaks numeric sorting and instead has it go to alphabetic. I can see no reason at all why this would happen as this row is no different than any other. I've spent far too much time contemplating this (as the edit history would attest), so am wondering if someone has an idea on why this would be? Also, as an aside, is there away to set the default to descending order then ascending rather than the reverse? Thanks Resolute 02:49, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

CSS problem

If you look at the bottom box here, you'll see that the header DIV is missing its top border in IE7. I was wondering if anyone knew of a fix for this. If I change the DIV's position to static then the border is rendered properly but the "hide" text becomes misplaced. I've also tried adding a top to the DIV, but it has no effect. SharkD (talk) 02:53, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Have a look at the NavFrame code in Common.css; I see a lot of styling code conflicts, especially in padding and margin. Have you tried without any styling (except color) to see how it comes out? — Edokter • Talk • 03:16, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

The style changes are intentional. Is there a way I can keep the hide/show functionality without using the NavFrame classes? SharkD (talk) 03:33, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Software update

A software update will be going live in the next few minutes. Please bear with us if some things are a little unstable while it shakes out. :) --brion (talk) 05:04, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Whee, I love a good ride! Are the archive links at top of this page now being shown to REAL*8 precision part of the fun? Franamax (talk) 05:14, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

And the help message for the edit summary box on the edit screen showing the raw HTML? Oh wait, is that why you asked for patience? :) Maybe I should try flushing my cache before I start bitching? LOL Franamax (talk) 05:16, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

I hope one of these unstabilities include the <span style="text-align: left;"><a href="/wiki/Help:Edit_summary" class='internal' title="Briefly describe the changes you have made" target="_blank">Edit summary</a> <small>(Briefly describe the changes you have made)</small></span> that's been showing up above the edit summaries. -- penubag  (talk) 05:18, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Both these problems are fixed in the first and second MW revisions after the current one. Wonder whether that's a coincidence... Calvin 1998 ^(t·c) 05:20, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Both fixed (yay werdna!) --brion (talk) 05:30, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

I've been noticing some wonky integers in the past few minutes. Glad to see that it's (hopefully) only temporary. My biggest worry will be that people will try to "fix" this by replacing the integers with something strange, like the number spelt out with words, etc. Gary King (talk) 05:25, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Please point out such issues as specifically as possible, otherwise we may never see them and won't be able to help fix them. --brion (talk) 05:30, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Every page that uses automatic numbering like what is found in {{talkheader}} for instance. Frankly, this is seen on nearly every page; check the top of my user page for instance. Gary King (talk) 05:32, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

What is "automatic numbering"? Do you mean number formatting, or perhaps arithmetic done with {{#expr}}? Can you point out what you're looking at and how it looks different from what you expected, exactly? Are you maybe referring to extra decimal points? Or something else? --brion (talk) 05:38, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I am referring to the extra decimal points. Hm, are you not seeing that? Gary King (talk) 05:39, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

It's on the top of the page....where all the archives are....seriously is there a test wiki for new versions of mw? If there isn't, there really ought to be one for obvious errors like this. ηoian ‡orever ηew ‡rontiers 05:41, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Ah, so THAT's the cause of the weird issues at {{Age}}. They should be whole numbers in that template (see eg Brendan Nelson where it's saying he is 50.0000000000000000 years old). Orderinchaos 05:44, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

This has been resolved by reverting changes to the arithmetic precision for #expr evaluation. We'll consider putting it back when we've got some better tests for it. --brion (talk) 05:49, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Anyone going to answer my question about a test wiki? There should be a sandbox of sorts for new mw versions, to iron out any potential wide-affecting glitches that have been overlooked like this. ηoian ‡orever ηew ‡rontiers 05:47, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

http://test.wikipedia.org/ and plenty of offline testing during development. The rest that aren't found get flushed out only with actual usage. Obviously we'd like more test cases under our belt before we get things to you, though. :) --brion (talk) 05:49, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

• I keep getting "active members" error when I click on a contribs link, and obviously the automatic numbering is being thrown off all over. Enigma^msg 05:33, 18 February 2009 (UTC)
  • What does an "active members error" look like, and which contribs list exactly? Please provide a link. --brion (talk) 05:38, 18 February 2009 (UTC)
    • User contributions. I got it twice within five minutes, and I imagine it's related to this. I forgot exactly the link, but I doubt it was a user-specific error. I tried to load up Special:Contributions and it gave me a long error message, starting with "activemembers..." I wish I had copied it. Add: searching my sleep-deprived memory, I finally came up with this as the link I was trying to load. Of course, it works fine now. Enigma^msg 05:46, 18 February 2009 (UTC)
      • Sounds like you might have been bitten by a transitory error with the magic words during the upgrade. If it happens again, please copy and save the exact error message but you shouldn't see it again. :) --brion (talk) 05:52, 18 February 2009 (UTC)
        • Will do. Anyway, I tried a full refresh and asked someone I know, but I'm still getting problems. See the infobox on Jason Hanson, for example. Enigma^msg 05:57, 18 February 2009 (UTC)
          • What's wrong with it? Please be as specific as possible -- do not assume we will know what you mean. Nothing appears to be problematic on a first glance for me; it may have been one of the issues which was already resolved (in which case a purge or null edit will clear it). Or, there might be something which is glaringly wrong to someone who knows exactly what it "should" look like but which someone else such as me might not be aware of. --brion (talk) 06:06, 18 February 2009 (UTC)
          • Purging the cache works for me. MER-C 06:07, 18 February 2009 (UTC)
            • Fixed now. Not sure why it took longer here, though. I did several full refreshes. Enigma^msg 06:09, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Coda

Brion and all the rest of the team making this happen with only minimal disruption (so far:) - thanks and nice work! I've been myself in the position of "a few changes to the software" that went systemically way more wrong, although to a few million less people. :) A few points though:

• "A software update will be going live" - if it's important enough that you feel the need to post a warning here, isn't it also important enough to all of us that you would post a link to the exact changes, or rather a summary of the changes and their expected effects? My practice has always been to 1) inform the users of an upcoming change; 2) explain in general terms what the intended change is, along with an optional detailed explanation; 3) explain what should be different tomorrow from the user point of view; and 4) make sure the users know how to report unexpected problems, and how to tell the difference between "expected" and "unexpected". You guys did most of 1) and 4), but did it in a somewhat context-free manner, i.e. the bits in-between where people could actually understand what was happening.
• Thinking a little more on this, if it's sufficiently major to post here, then perhaps in future you could think about posting a sitemessage 20 minutes prior? "We are in the process of updgrading software <link>, please purge your browser cache and be patient, please report ongoing problems <here>" Anything to increase communication and decrease confusion. I just got lucky seeing your post here right when the problems started, and purged and rebooted of my own accord. Franamax (talk) 06:17, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Or maybe a site message asking users to go to the test wiki and help beta prior to launch. ηoian ‡orever ηew ‡rontiers 06:32, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

This should cover it (autogenerated from log entries). As for beta-ing; we do solicit testing before launch. We're hoping to get a fuller staging infrastructure at some point though so we can get more people to bang at it. :D --brion (talk) 06:36, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Just a update, there's a few more AN postings with issues, although you've probably already seen them. ηoian ‡orever ηew ‡rontiers 06:44, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Twinkle issues

I'm not sure if this has to do with the new update, or if it is just because I have slow internet, but using Twinkle/Friendly (don't remember which it is) to rollback a edit seems to get stuck on the second step, ex.

"Grabbing data of earlier revisions: revision 271523724 that was made 1 revisions ago by Spoon!

Reverting page: data loaded..." Can anyone with faster internet test this? Undo feature still works. Thanks. (probably internet) ηoian ‡orever ηew ‡rontiers 07:23, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Hey, I've been noticing the "Twinkle gets stuck" errors here too. Not sure if I have a faster connection or not (somedays it's great, others... it crawls, but I suspect that's my computer). But you're not alone (was coming here to comment on the same thing. umrguy42 07:52, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

I've reported this at WT:TW/BUGS#TW-B-0255 (new). Firefox's error console reports "form.wpAutoSummary is undefined". 「ダイノガイ千？！」^{(Dinoguy1000)} 08:05, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

And indeed, it appears to affect Twinkle in its entirety. Haven't checked everything, but Twinkle won't revert, won't report vandals, and won't warn vandals either. All giving the wpAutoSummary error Dinoguy1000 mentions. -Lilac Soul ^{(talk • contribs • count)} 08:58, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

I'm having major problems with Twinkle, Friendly, and several other scripts (all of which were working fine earlier today). Any possibility of rolling back the "upgrade" until this is sorted out? --Ckatz^chat_spy 09:26, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Twinkle won't create XfDs either... _TalkIslander 09:41, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

I've had to disable Friendly because it was interrupting the load of other scripts... further to my earlier post, I am seeing (in Firefox) "api.query.logevents is null" errors for the drop-down menus gadget, "response.query.logevents is null" errors from User:Animum/easyblock.js, and "element is null" errors from mwsuggest.js. --Ckatz^chat_spy 09:49, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

• It's because $summaryhiddens isn't written into the page anymore, in rev:47202. Is there a reason for that that I'm not seeing, or can it be brought back quickly and Twinkle won't need adapting? --Amalthea 09:41, 18 February 2009 (UTC)
  • For some reason that I'm not seeing this also suppresses the no-edit-summary prompt if the preferences are set that way. I would have supposed that it won't allow a blank summary on a second try, since the wpIgnoreBlankSummary isn't being written anymore, but that's not what's happening? --Amalthea 09:48, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

We had a few "Server error" messages between 05:00 and 06:00 as well as the problem with some archives showing as .000000 Wikipedia:Helpdesk -Archive 1.0000000000000000 and dob tag giving lots of 00000000 Talk:Jimbo Wales - Dates of Birth & Height templates used in infoboxes and the twinkle issue - all related to the update ? --Chaosdruid (talk) 10:26, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

The number problem was definitely related to the update, but has since been fixed. Gary King (talk) 19:22, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Just to say the problem's still there. --Dweller (talk) 14:05, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

I'm thinking that Brion is still asleep, since he's from San Francisco. Let's give him another couple hours. --Amalthea 14:17, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Just another me too. I hope this gets sorted out soon, with Huggle not working for me, I'm back to Lupin's anti-vandal tool. It's been a while since I hit save page buttons on user talk pages, but it definitely is a humbling expirience. I guess you never know the true value of things until they're gone. Puchiko (Talk-email) 14:45, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

It's 8 AM in the west coast, hopefully solved soon. ηoian ‡orever ηew ‡rontiers 16:06, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Creation of xfd's/prods still isn't working. Ten Pound Hammer and his otters • ^{(Broken clamshells • Otter chirps • HELP)} 17:18, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

But I just saw a user revert vandalism with Huggle, so perhaps there's hope?--Fabrictramp | talk to me 17:33, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Huggle isn't affected by that problem. --Amalthea 18:26, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

No huggle doesn't seem to be affected by this (even though it should O_o shouldnt it?) But anyway huggle is still not working for maybe people as the squid errors arn't handled yet. ·Add§hore· ^{Talk To Me!} 18:50, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Probably my EditPage.php changes. Shouldn't these scripts be using the API instead of the UI? — Werdna • talk 18:52, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Yes, they quite certainly should, but don't always do (yet). As mentioned above, it's because $summaryhiddens isn't written into the page anymore, in rev:47202, from what I'm seeing. --Amalthea 19:03, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Isolated and fixed on svn. Will be synced in a few minutes. — Werdna • talk 19:08, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks a lot, works again now that rev:47457 is live. --Amalthea 19:28, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Not that this is Twinkle-related, but this is the active section - trying to create new talk page sections via the "new section"/"+" tab (or "&section=new" in the URL) without providing a section header in the appropriate box prevents the page from being saved at all - at least, that's what happened to me when I was trying to file the above-linked Twinkle bug report last night. For some reason, after I copied the header into the box, it also stripped off a pair of equals signs, moving the section up one in importance. anyone else experience these problems, or have any ideas on what may have caused them? 「ダイノガイ千？！」^{(Dinoguy1000)} 19:20, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Offhand that sounds like normal behavior. --brion (talk) 19:27, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Ordinarily, it is. If you try to do that, it returns you to the edit screen with the message that you didn't include a header, and submitting one more time will save it anyways. However, I clicked "submit" three or four times, getting that message every time. I finally had to copy the section header into the header box before it would let me actually save the page. 「ダイノガイ千？！」^{(Dinoguy1000)} 21:18, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

It seems to be fixed at any rate, I just successfully created a talk page section without having anything in the header box. *shrugs* 「ダイノガイ千？！」^{(Dinoguy1000)} 21:30, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

I'm still seeing a Twinkle-related error in Firefox's error console. The text states "Error: TwinkleConfig.showRollbackLinks is undefined", with a link to this code:

if( TwinkleConfig.showRollbackLinks.indexOf('diff') != -1 ) { (line 210 of the script)

This error seems to prevent Twinkle's "rollback" features from being displayed. As well, Friendly (which is Twinkle-based, if I recall correctly) is creating the error "FriendlyConfig.idsToRename is undefined", with a link to:

for(i = 0; i < FriendlyConfig.idsToRename.length; i++) { (line 26)

This error appears to cause subsequent scripts in the monobook file to not load, as every time I enable Friendly (either through Gadgets or monobook) I lose many other scripts. --Ckatz^chat_spy 21:30, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Are you by any chance using Safari? This seems to be purely an issue with Twinkle and Friendly in any case. Could you come to WT:TW and reply there? Thanks & Cheers, Amalthea 21:41, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

um...Ckatz said Firefox error console. ηoian ‡orever ηew ‡rontiers 00:32, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

That's a no then? Oh well. Ckatz, I'd recommend you try and remove the TwinkleConfig you have in your monobook, then activate Twinkle again, clear the browser cache with Ctrl-F5, and report back at WT:TW. That was previously only an issue with Safari, but it might help you too. If it does I'll give you a modified configuration that should work. Cheers, Amalthea 11:45, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Um actually the only thing he needs to do is define the variables. It should be as simple as adding

FriendlyConfig.idsToRename = [];
TwinkleConfig.showRollbackLinks = true;

Alexfusco⁵ 14:22, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

That's in principle correct, but should be done slightly different, to catch all those problems. It seems to be caused by the import of the twinkle.js, which on some browsers/configurations executes the imported script before it finishes processing the monobook.js itself (which so far I've only heard happening with Safari on a Mac). Since the TwinkleConfig object in the monobook is set up in a way that creates a new config object (as was recommended in the documentation for quite a while) it will overwrite any defaults that might have been created by the twinkle scripts themselves already. Switching the creation of the config object and the import usually fixes that, and changing the configuration to a way that doesn't simply create a new object fixes it, too, and also works with the gadget version.
I don't know that much about the different javascript engines that are around, no idea if there are potentially any multithreading issues that might play into it. --Amalthea 14:40, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the tips... it seems that the structure of the configuration for both Twinkle and Friendly has changed a bit since I first installed it some time back. Removing the old one and replacing it with the current versions seems to have done the trick. I'm still getting one error in Firefox - an "element is null" note regarding line 744 (if (element.addEventListener) {) in mwsuggest.js. Thoughts? --Ckatz^chat_spy 04:41, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

Glad to be of help. The default config was change in response to the problem I mentioned above, yes.
No thoughts on mwsuggest.js, I'm afraid. On which page are you getting the error? And is the ajax search suggestion in the search box working for you? --Amalthea 13:09, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

Template:Convert

Resolved

 – duplicate section ηoian ‡orever ηew ‡rontiers 05:43, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Something has happened to the {{convert}} template which is causing it not to work at all all across wikipedia. For example, {{convert|123|ft|4|in|m|2}} gives this result:- 123 feet 4 inches (37.59 m) This template is used in millions of Wikipedia articles. Mjroots (talk) 05:42, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Issue already noted, see above section, not one template. It is wiki-wide ηoian ‡orever ηew ‡rontiers 05:43, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Pelle Lindbergh messed up?

Can anyone else see the mess on this article or is this local to me? -- OlEnglish ^(Talk) 06:56, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

I did a server purge, looks good now. (It was seriously messed up! :) Related to the software changes above, if you see more, try adding "?action=purge" to the page address (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelle_Lindbergh?action=purge). Franamax (talk) 07:32, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Categories

Resolved

 – ukexpat (talk) 16:27, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

The page Before Christ redirects to Anno Domini. AD is in the category "Calendar eras" as "Anno Domini". Is it possible to additionally place it in Category "Calendar eras" as "Before Christ". This would be helpful when looking things up from the Calendar eras category list page. (If so, how?) -- SGBailey (talk) 14:20, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Eh....did you try adding a category to the redirect page? ηoian ‡orever ηew ‡rontiers 16:22, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

No, cos I didn't know you could do that. Thanks for the answering the question, even if indirectly. -- SGBailey (talk) 21:39, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

 Done. – ukexpat (talk) 16:51, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks -- SGBailey (talk) 21:39, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

pleasure Ridge Park High School

pleasure Ridge Park High School seems to think it is at the correct capitalization, and I can't get it to move. I tried moving it into my userspace and moving it back, but it slipped neatly into its old slot. Can anybody help with that? --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 19:03, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Done. ;) --Amalthea 19:10, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Ah! Thank you. Very tricky. :) --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 19:11, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Changing Monobook Logo

What do you post if you make a logo for your monobook? Raiku Lucifer Samiyaza 22:02, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

What do you mean? What do you want to do with this logo? Algebraist 23:03, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Make it so that it's in the place of the normal logo for my monobook. Raiku Lucifer Samiyaza 23:05, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

What normal logo? Algebraist 23:07, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

The globe. Raiku Lucifer Samiyaza 23:10, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Add

#p-logo a {background-image: url(full url of image goes here) !important;}

to Special:MyPage/monobook.css. Algebraist 23:30, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

wannabe_kate editcounter is broken

It says that I have 0 edits.... By the way, everybody, including myself, is leaving bug reports on User_talk:Interiot, but he hasn't edited since December 2007.... --Enric Naval (talk) 02:32, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

I contacted Interiot awhile ago and he responded by asking where I found the contact link so he could remove the link. (Assuming he) Interiot seems to be a determined non-participant and the tool is broken, at the very least it doesn't count File: space and I've found other major miscounts. wannabe_kate needs to be killed dead - we discussed this at WT:RFA a few months back. It's toast, unless someone wants to rewrite the code. Franamax (talk) 05:00, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Archived link. I can point out to anyone interested where the source is, and where the problems reside. Franamax (talk) 05:07, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

I've marked it as broken on WP:WPEC, for what that's worth. Algebraist 14:27, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

I also raised issues with this last month on the WPEC talk page. Lugnuts (talk) 10:48, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

Blocking & watchlisting

When an admin blocks someone, is the talk page of the blocked editor automatically added to the admin's watchlist? DuncanHill (talk) 04:00, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

No. There is a checkbox which has to be toggled to do that. It is clear by default. However, when adding the block notice to the talk page, my "watch this page" is on by default and I almost always leave it checked in case I made a mistake. —EncMstr (talk) 04:30, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the answer. Not all admins leave block notices, which is what spurred me to ask. DuncanHill (talk) 04:33, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

One article isn't updated in the search index?

Just under a month ago I went on a rampage against the misspelling "assymetric", and updated many files. This included, oh, 20 or so, which described various defendants vs. George W. Bush, and contained the exact same phrase "Camp authorities called the deaths "an act of assymetric warfare", and suspected plans had been coordinated by the captive's attorneys..." These all very rapidly passed out of the results when I do a search for "assymetric", and now Wikipedia searches are clean of the term, except for redirects --- and one article... Abdulsalam Ali Abdulrahman Al Hela v. George W. Bush. The article is fixed, has been fixed for a month, but it still indexes with an excerpt that includes the misspelling. It's not protected or anything... what's the story? Happy debugging... Wnt (talk) 10:02, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

A category that refuses to die

Can anyone explain why the deleted category Category:Icons for canal descriptions isn't empty, when the only file it allegedly contains is File:BSicon uWHARF.svg, which is a commons file not a WP file (the WP version having been deleted)? This was raised at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Archive183#File Data Linking to un-needed Category but as the problem is still persisting nearly a week later, I wondered whether there was a technical explanation. Bencherlite^Talk 15:14, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

I think you'll find your explanation here, here and here. -- Tim Starling (talk) 15:50, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Interesting, had no idea about that one (so no change there!) Category removed from the redirect. Bencherlite^Talk 15:56, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

I guess someone should delete File:BSicon whfSTR.svg. Algebraist 15:58, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Shot with a silver bullet, stake driven through its heart, garlic and crosses posted around its coffin. Should be safe now. Bencherlite^Talk 16:02, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Category redirects

Thanks to a recent fix, these now work much better than they used to, though there still seems to be a slight problem (in that you can't detect which pages are in the redirected category rather than the target one). Anyway, please join the discussion at WT:Categorization#Redirects now work!! to decide how to make use of the new possibilities.--Kotniski (talk) 16:53, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

30 seconds to load a normal page

It consistently takes 30-40 seconds to load a full-length article (try USA or Canada for example). What exactly is causing these long pages to take so much time to load (table layout? css? javascript? lack of server hardware? images? etc)? It's driving me insane, and causes me to use Wikipedia far less than I otherwise would. It breaks the flow of conversation when I try to look something up quickly, and horribly breaks usability standards.

"Research on a wide variety of hypertext systems has shown that users need response times of less than one second when moving from one page to another if they are to navigate freely through an information space." - http://www.usabilityviews.com/uv000116.html

"Note that the 1 sec. response time limit is required for users to feel that they are moving freely through the information space. Staying below the 10 sec. limit is required for users to keep their attention on the task." - http://www.useit.com/alertbox/sizelimits.html

Oh, and I couldn't find anything in the FAQs about this. Thanks.96.50.4.248 (talk) 18:35, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

The articles United States and Canada are veeeeery long. I'd recommend moving some of that content into more specific articles per Wikipedia:Summary style. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 18:46, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

30% of the html content is navboxes. (150kb of navboxes in the 650kb USA article (according to "view source")). That's a bit daft.

I have a reliable highspeed cable modem (600kbps standard download speed), so it's not a problem at that level. My browser is stock firefox, so everyone else with default setups is experiencing similar slowdowns. (I'll fiddle with pipelining/layout settings now, see if that helps.) 96.50.4.248 (talk) 18:33, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

Applying all the firefox about:config tweaks gets the load time down to between 15 and 25 seconds. Still not good. 96.50.4.248 (talk) 18:41, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

Took about five seconds for me to get United States shown, and I'm both logged in (wikipedia is much faster for logged out users, for much bigger cache arena, etc) and in some remote corner of the world. USA article has ~300kb of content (though rendering starts sooner) - so either you are using browser that is incapable of dynamic rendering, or you have very very slow network link. Wikipedia page opening times are way better than any web average, except for some rare occasions when huge articles have to be re-rendered (or simply people with slow slow links). Domas Mituzas (talk) 09:05, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

Approx 17 seconds for United States for me. DuncanHill (talk) 13:26, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

20 seconds. Someone who doesn't know about this might've given up far before then. ~user:orngjce223 how am I typing? 23:10, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

For me, if its already cached in the browser, it takes about 4 seconds, about 9.5 when purging the browser cache, and that's including all of my custom JS; with JS disabled, the browser cached version is <2 seconds and the uncached version is <4. Purging the parser cache (action=purge) of course takes a lot longer. Mr.Z-man 23:38, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

Logged in using Opera: 17 seconds before data transfer begins, followed by 8 seconds to download and render. Logged out using Lynx: 2 seconds total. --Carnildo (talk) 02:42, 21 February 2009 (UTC)

Job queue

Anyone know what is going on with the job queue today? Special:Statistics appears to indicate it is actually keeping up for a change. Watching it over the past ten minutes I have seen it go over 18,000 and back down under 4,000 several times. Problem is, it doesn't seem to be actually working. The 718 articles in Category:Canoer stubs for example have been waiting to get refreshed since the 7th. --Pascal666 (talk) 22:59, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

The last month there have been many reports about categories and WhatLinksHere not updating long after a template is edited. See Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 56#How long should it take for a task to get through the job queue? which indicates somebody may be working on it. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:09, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

They killed an entire class of job. Now the remainder is much faster, but that previous functionality is being shelved for the moment. Dragons flight (talk) 00:13, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

No, jobs queued before February 16 were removed, but jobs queued after that are working reasonably well, with a scaled-up and optimised job queue system. No functionality has been shelved. I'm planning on doing a complete link table refresh of all wikis, but this will have to wait until I've written the software for it. -- Tim Starling (talk) 01:31, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

Thank you. --Pascal666 (talk) 10:03, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

Is there a way of having bot edits show up as regular edits, on a per-bot basis?

I ask because there's are a few bot unusual work descriptions. Specifically I have ArticleAlertbot in mind, which updates special reports called Article Alerts for subscribing wikiprojects. I understand that you can show/hide bot edits because most of these edits are page maintenance, placing dates in {{fact}} and other cleanup templates, page archiving, etc... However, for bots like ArticleAlertbot, which updates pages that are for the most part only edited by bots, hidding bot edits seems counterproductive. The only way you can see the page was edited is enabling ALL bot edits to show up, and then you get watchlists full of Cluebot vandalism reversions and the like. This also applies to bots which deliver newsletters like User:Ralbot. These bots aren't making maintenance edits, these bots are posting actual content which is meant to be read. Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 01:07, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

The obvious solution is for the bot to not be in the group 'bots'. This would also strip it of other rights it might need, however. Algebraist 01:09, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

What would those rights be (typically)? If ArticleAlertbot runs on the toolserver, does that make any difference here?Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 01:24, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

According to WP:User access levels, the rights of the group 'Bots' are the rights of autoconfirmed users plus apihighlimits, autopatrol, bot, markbotedit, and nominornewtalk. The only one of these ArticleAlertbot might need is apihighlimits. Algebraist 01:32, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

Use the edit API. MER-C 01:29, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

Deleted edits under "my contributions"

Occasionally I check my "Edit and action count" summary on the SQL's Tools page, and I find that my total number of "Deleted edits" is decreasing. I have also found some people have a negative number of deleted edits. Could someone explain all this to me? How does SQL's Tools' deleted edits tally work? kilbad (talk) 03:23, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

It's the number of edits according to the API, which includes deleted edits, minus the number of edits according to Special:Contributions, which doesn't include them. The problem is that a single page move can count as up to four edits, if you move the page and talk page, and all the old redirects still exist. Because I do many page moves, according to SQL's edit count tool, I have -4,222 deleted edits. I brought this problem up with SQL once by email and he said that there wasn't an efficient way to check a user's actual number of deleted edits. Graham87 14:37, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

Bunching In Year Articles

I have been fixing the bunching problem in some of the year articles such as 216 BC. Could someone please program a bot fix the bunching problem in all of the year articles? Flaviusvulso (talk) 03:55, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

You need to go to Wikipedia:Bot requests, but when you do try and be a bit more specific, I not sure what you're talking about. — Blue-Haired Lawyer 13:23, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

The bunching problem is described here: WP:BUNCH. Flaviusvulso (talk) 03:13, 21 February 2009 (UTC)

Improving the Diff

(Diff is the difference between two versions from the page history of a wikipedia article. I frequently use it to view the latest changes in articles on my watch list, by clicking the "compare selected versions"-button.)

In some cases the Diff is inadequate, as it does not clearly show the actual change:

• If a user removes a comma or a space in a paragraph, the Diff will highlight the entire paragraph background yellow/green, but the actual change is hard to find, and multiple changes are easily overlooked. It would be better if the removed character was highlighted by a special background color.
• Similarly, if a user removes an new line command between two paragraphs, the Diff will highlight the background of both paragraphs, and it will apply a red font color for all text beyond the new line. The actual change is barely visible, and multiple changes are easily overlooked. It would be better if the location of the removed new line character was highlighted by a special background color.

Examples:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Floater&curid=179636&diff=271967533&oldid=271426981
• http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Flyswatter&curid=1003932&diff=272039255&oldid=271980271
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Diff

Is this the right place to report it as a suggestion to improve the software? Ceinturion (talk) 12:45, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

You know, I vaguely remember a short period of time where there was a little box around the changed part, which made such edits easier to spot, but it must have been turned back off pretty shortly after (and I remember it being pretty annoying looking for substantial edits).♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ (talk) 14:07, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

Are you joking, do you say that the current Diff makes looking for substantial edits easier? Take a look at my second example, where the new line was removed. Ceinturion (talk) 14:48, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

I *think* you're talking about a change that spurred this discussion on Mediawiki talk:Common.css. IIRC, there were other discussions related to it elsewhere, but I don't have a clue where they are any more. But yeah, it got reverted pretty quickly. 「ダイノガイ千？！」^{(Dinoguy1000)} 18:58, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

I've never used it, but you might find User:Cacycle/wikEdDiff helpful. Algebraist 14:17, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, WikEdDiff is just what I needed, and it works fine. Problem solved. Ceinturion (talk) 14:48, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

Personally, I use User:Js/diffs. It's got a number of nifty features beyond better diff hilighting (but then, I can't say it's better than wikEdDiff, having never used that one). 「ダイノガイ千？！」^{(Dinoguy1000)} 18:58, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

Random text, can't remove it

Resolved

 – Template problem --—— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk - 19:27, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

Can someone help with John Sedgley Homestead? This article has the random text "Homestead from the East in 1975" at its very top, which isn't in the article text. The only template at the top of the article, moreover, is an infobox that is used on tons of other pages, and none of them have this text, so I'm confident that it's not a template. Nyttend (talk) 19:15, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

It was in {{Infobox nrhp}}. It appears that if you have a caption without an image, it throws a fit. --—— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk - 19:23, 20 February 2009 (UTC) Left a note on the template talk page. --—— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk - 19:27, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

Math rendering error

I had a momentary math rendering error on the Water, gas, and electricity page where the math was rendered as:

Failed to parse (Cannot write to or create math output directory): n=6

Failed to parse (Cannot write to or create math output directory): m=9

It returned to normal shortly afterwards. Dcoetzee 21:19, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

That's the sort of error a purge normally solves. Algebraist 22:45, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

Pages moved from userspace to the mainspace should be included in Special:NewPages

It has occurred to me that a vandal who's familiar with the mechanics of Wikipedia could easily create a hoax or an attack page in his personal userspace, then wait a few days, then perform a page move to the article space. This is a very simple way to make a page virtually invisible to newpage patrollers. I'm not saying it is done on a regular basis, just that it can be done. And there is a simple way to fix this problem: Special:NewPages should include, in addition to pages newly created in the article space, any page move to the article space from any non-article namespace, listed at the time of the page move and not that of the page creation.

And, uh, before you throw WP:BEANS at me, please be aware that I am quite aware of it. Somehow, I don't think vandals come to this page very often. -- Blanchardb -^{Me•MyEars•MyMouth}- timed 23:21, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

NewPages isn't designed to catch any and all subtle vandalism. That's what RC is for. --- RockMFR 02:43, 21 February 2009 (UTC)

At 160 items per minute, RC is not adequate for this purpose. -- Blanchardb -^{Me•MyEars•MyMouth}- timed 05:04, 21 February 2009 (UTC)

This is already on bugzilla somewhere, actually. Someguy1221 (talk) 03:06, 21 February 2009 (UTC)

Glad to hear that, but I went there, and the place looks rather... dead... -- Blanchardb -^{Me•MyEars•MyMouth}- timed 05:04, 21 February 2009 (UTC)

It's bug 12363. Bugzilla is most certainly not dead, but progress on individual bugs there can be glacial. Graham87 05:48, 21 February 2009 (UTC)

Wiki Traffic Statistics Tool

I know that there is a number of Wiki tools out there that functions as search engines that can show you the traffic statistics of articles on various wikis, but I have yet to find any that can provide me with results for specialised wikis such as Commons or Wikisource (all language wikisource, not just the English version). Can anyone provide me with a link for such search tools? --Saddhiyama (talk) 00:36, 21 February 2009 (UTC)

Downtime

We had some site downtime from about 00:50 to 01:50 UTC February 21 due to a combination of a failed fileserver and some sloppy old configuration entries which caused the web servers to stall waiting for the file server. Service has been restored; web servers are no longer as dependent, plus the fileserver is back online. --brion (talk) 02:31, 21 February 2009 (UTC)

Outlet for PHP/MySQL skills

I am fairly well skilled in PHP and MySQL and wanted to know if there were any outlets available on Wikipedia where I could use my coding skills? I would be willing to provide samples of my code if necessary. Thanks in advance! kilbad (talk) 05:11, 21 February 2009 (UTC)

See How to become a MediaWiki hacker at MediaWiki.org for info about writing code for MediaWiki. Graham87 05:44, 21 February 2009 (UTC)

Article history cross outs

What is this cross out in contibution histories→[2] and what does it mean?—70.19.73.184 (talk) 09:21, 21 February 2009 (UTC)