User talk:Werdna

If you are here to tell me you replied to a comment of mine in a discussion, don't bother unless it's been a few days. I've probably got it watchlisted.

Talk:List of living supercentenarians not archiving

The archiving on this talk page was working fine until fairly recently. I've tried reducing the age and upping the increment but it's still not working. Any suggestions? Cheers, DerbyCountyinNZ ^{(Talk Contribs)} 03:43, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, it isn't working on my talk as well... —Ed (talk • contribs) 05:31, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

It's been disabled due to reported bugs. I do not intend to fix it, because Extension:LiquidThreads is just around the corner. — Werdna • talk 10:44, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Gotcha. Many thanks for your work :-) —Ed (talk • contribs) 18:44, 4 November 2009 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Werdnabot

Template:Werdnabot has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Thank you. Logan _Talk ^{Contributions} 21:08, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

GIF scaling

Hello. Can you have a look here:

• commons:Commons:Graphics village pump#GIF scaling (animated and non-animated) still not working --Timeshifter (talk) 15:46, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Happy New Year

Best Wishes for 2010, FloNight♥♥♥♥ 13:20, 1 January 2010 (UTC)

Flagged revisions

Hi Werdna, I understand you are working on the flagged revisions effort. Could you cast your eye over what's being proposed at the BLP RfC to help address the problem of unreferenced BLPs, just to check technical feasibility? See Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Biographies_of_living_people#Flagged_revisions.2C_comment_by_Nathan.

The idea, briefly, is that biography stubs that have never been sighted would be visible to logged-in Wikipedian, but would remain hidden from IPs (= general public), search engines and mirrors, to be displayed as an unsighted draft when someone tries to create the same article. Cheers, --JN466 17:18, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

I have nothing to do with BLP stuff. You should talk to Aaron Schulz or William Pietri. — Werdna • talk 00:43, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

Ok, thanks. --JN466 21:35, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

Pour toi

Wikipedia:Meetup/Wiki-train. Ironholds (talk) 14:37, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

Add a "public interest" clause to Oversight

A proposal to add a "public interest" clause to Wikipedia:Oversight has started at Wikipedia_talk:Oversight#Proposal_for_new_.27public_interest.27_clause. SilkTork *^YES! 10:46, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

Edit filter question

For the variable user_age, what is the measuring unit? Thanks, NawlinWiki (talk) 02:51, 21 February 2010 (UTC)

Seconds. — Werdna • talk 04:04, 21 February 2010 (UTC)ß

Sydney meetup

It's been a while since the wiki folk of Sydney had the chance to meetup - and there's quite a lot going on. If you've never been to a meetup before, you're especially welcome, and if you're an old hand, then please do make an effort to touch base :-) You can sign up here, or drop a note on my talk page if you have any questions or anything - hope to see you there! cheers, Privatemusings (talk) 02:57, 25 February 2010 (UTC)

Orphaned non-free image File:Luxlogo.png

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Thank you. DASHBot (talk) 04:40, 14 March 2010 (UTC)

Meetup in Cambridge, 27 March

See Wikipedia:Meetup/Cambridge 6 - much as before. We'd be glad to see you. Charles Matthews (talk) 19:43, 22 March 2010 (UTC)

Sorry, I'm back in Sydney. — Werdna • talk 11:41, 23 March 2010 (UTC)

Animated versus static GIF scaling

Later note. There is further discussion here: Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Re-enabled GIF scaling.

Static GIF scaling is currently working fine. Thanks for turning GIF scaling back on. I just checked commons:Category:Octave Uzanne. Around 11 kilobytes for GIF thumbnails versus hundreds of thousands of kilobytes per thumbnail when the browser does the resizing.

Also, browser-resized thumbnails are not sharp for images in this category. The thumbnails are grainy. MediaWiki-resized thumbnails are sharp. I like this category for showing the need for MediaWiki scaling of static GIFs.

Animated GIF scaling by MediaWiki seems to be problematic at the moment. I checked one animated GIF thumbnail:

It looks like a single frame is currently being used for its thumbnail.

There is some history of animated GIF scaling/resizing, related bugzilla links, some ideas, here:

• commons:Commons:Graphics village pump#Perpetual GIF resizing complaint thread (issue still unresolved)

Maybe a solution is for static and animated GIF resizing to be completely separated in MediaWiki. That way static GIF resizing would not need to be turned off due to this animated GIF problem. --Timeshifter (talk) 16:28, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

I purged the image, and that seems to have repaired it. I guess the thumbnail was still cached from the last time this GIF issue was present. Perhaps we should consider purging all gif thumbnails some way ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:04, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Thanks DJ. I had tried purging this page, reloading this page, ?action=purge to the end of this page's URL, Ctrl-F5, Ctrl-Shift-R. Nothing worked. I didn't think to try purging the image directly. What exactly did you do? Maybe this wasn't discovered or fully implemented the last time GIF scaling was re-enabled. I know animated GIF scaling is CPU intensive, and it may take awhile for MediaWiki to get around to scaling all the animated GIFs. --Timeshifter (talk) 19:27, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

I just made a null edit to the image description page on Wikimedia Commons, and I think you'll be pleased with the results. Reach Out to the Truth 19:51, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

I wasn't clear. I can see the animated GIF thumbnail here now after DJ purged the image page. I was just mentioning that I had tried purging this talk page, and nothing I did helped the image show up correctly here. --Timeshifter (talk) 20:19, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

That's why I had to purge the image at Wikimedia Commons. It doesn't work they way you're trying to do it. Reach Out to the Truth 20:34, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

I agree. I think DJ did what you did. DJ wrote: "I purged the image, and that seems to have repaired it." --Timeshifter (talk) 20:44, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Re-enabled GIF scaling

Werdna,

This is supposed to be a 300-pixel-wide, 398 KB, self-running animation. It had achieved FA status in January 2007 and is used on six of Wikipedia’s technology-related articles.

Click here to see what the animation is supposed to look like.

Many self-running animations, such as the one shown at right (and which is used on Thermodynamic temperature) worked fine for years but no longer do so. Note another self-running animation here on Non-uniform rational B-spline; same error. This is what it is supposed to look like in our articles. The animation on Thermodynamic temperature (and many other articles, including Equipartition theorem) was awarded FA status in January 2007. Now all one sees is a gray boxes saying “Error creating thumbnail: Invalid thumbnail parameters or image file with more than 12.5 million pixels.”

Please turn off whatever you did. Greg L (talk) 17:45, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

A limit was chosen (admittedly somewhat arbitrary), on what the scaler will allow (to prevent scaling servers from crashing, which some of these older animations WERE doing). I advice using a self generated thumb image, that links to the actual file in the mean time or to convert it to OGG. I have opened a bug ticket suggesting we find a way to still be able to use this, perhaps trough some sort of play button. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 19:08, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

For the origin of the 12.5 megapixel limit, see http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2005-October/019681.html -- AnonMoos (talk) 21:57, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

(unindent) This is weird. The animated GIF doesn't show up here at full size. Go to the image page:

• File:Translational motion.gif

and then click on the link below the error message. Here is the link for the full-size version:

• http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/Translational_motion.gif

It looks like the image is working perfectly at full size at that link. I tried purging the image page, and no improvement at getting the image to show up here or at File:Translational motion.gif. The animated GIF is only 398 kilobytes at full size. So I don't understand why it is not showing up. --Timeshifter (talk) 20:54, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Timeshifter -- "Full size" means that Wikimedia software is transferring the originally-uploaded image directly to your browser without manipulation, so of course it "works" (though sometimes such "working" has undesirable side-effects, as we've seen in the past). AnonMoos (talk) 21:57, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Why is MediaWiki trying to manipulate the full-size image (and giving an error message) when we try to get it to show up here? Why won't this wikicode work here:

[[File:Translational motion.gif]]

According to Greg it worked fine until today. --Timeshifter (talk) 23:58, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Because scaling was re-enabled as requested. But there are apparently too many pixels for the scaler to handle, so it just spits out an error message. Maybe it should just give us the original unscaled image instead of an error when the MediaWiki scaler fails. It's been giving us the original unscaled image until today anyway. Reach Out to the Truth 00:12, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

This animation has only 72 frames total and escaped this cluster-pooch

Update What I’m understanding from the 23063 Bugzilla is that turning on scaling was a way to permit pages with hundreds of thumbnails, like category pages, to display without ballooning a browser’s RAM limitations by sloughing off the scaling demands to the browser. In my opinion, totally barbaric methods have been used on Wikipedia as work-arounds. Take the example of the broken animation at the top of this thread. It has 160 frames but is only 398 KB because I used every trick in the book (like 2 bits of custom color data and frame optimization) to encode it. However, past thumbnailing techniques have taken really compact animations and, after generating a thumbnail for each and every full frame, resulted in preposterous RAM requirements.

Since thumbnails, like those shown here on Dhatfield’s sub-page tend to all be a fixed size, like 120 pixels, the best solution would be to take an off-the-shelf, open-source GIF-building application—think Linux—and put its functionality into the server engine to build thumbnails on the fly where needed. However, most developers on Wikipedia are volunteers and this is not an easy one-day task.

What has me upset is I’ve taken great effort to keep my animations compact. Take the example of the animation shown here. It has only 72 frames total because in addition to all the other tricks I described above, I also used variable frame timing. Some frames last 5 milliseconds and others go to as much as 3000 milliseconds. This animation is only 261 KB and avoided this cluster-pooch because it has so few frames. But this NURBS animation went over the critical threshold (number of unique frames times frame size) and fell victim to this.

Given that all these animations have been affected for well over 24 hours now, it seems to me that whoever decided to throw the switch on this one has found himself in deeper waters than he planned and should have simply backed out and regrouped rather than plow forward with thousands of articles adversely affected. This is not the way things should be done; that much is certain. Greg L (talk) 00:07, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

I've resolved this today by not applying the limits to images that don't need to be scaled by the server. You can resolve this on pages by purging them. Other images that would exceed the limit will have only their first frame shown. — Andrew Garrett • talk 03:00, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Hip-hip, HORAY!! Thanks. I would hate to be a developer because of precisely this sort of stuff. Congratulations and thanks for stepping up to the plate and doing the heavy hitting. Anyone who fully appreciates what you guys do would sweat bullets just thinking about the magnitude and ramifications of what happens when you encounter a bug (or two). The problem is not made any easier when content-creators like me jump in like back-seat drivers and tell you how you’re doing it all wrong. Good job. Greg L (talk) 03:52, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

• 
  One that doesn’t work (as of 04:09, 8 April 2010 (UTC))
• 
  One that does work (used on Solid modeling)

P.S. It appears that I spoke a little too soon. A quick check reveals that 120-pixel thumbnails that would otherwise be subject to the 12.5 million pixel issue are no longer animated. But at least they appear as a fixed image. I’m sure you’ll have a fix for this as soon as you can. In advance, thanks for that too. Greg L (talk) 04:01, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Must be native width to work, as shown here

At any other non-native size, like 266 pixels (I guess that makes them a “thumbnail”), they won’t currently play. You can readily see how the dithering is less apparent when slightly scaled.

P.P.S. Also, I see that one of my animations, as shown in Equipartition theorem must be native-width to work. I had originally slightly shrunk this particular image to 266 pixels (from 280) to lessen the visible appearance of the color dithering. Many others just copied that size when they planted the animation in their articles. I’ll fix this in a few articles I shepherd because it will be easy to restore it to 266 pixels once you have a fix. Greg L (talk) 04:23, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Non-megapixel animation doesn't display as animated thumbnail

I'm very thankful that non-animated GIFs now thumbnail, but wonder why the image File:Triple-Spiral-Labyrinth-animated.gif doesn't display animated as a thumbnail, even though it doesn't approach anywhere near the 12.5 megapixel limit.. AnonMoos (talk) 21:53, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Never mind -- ordinary purging didn't work, but http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/thumb.php?f=Triple-Spiral-Labyrinth-animated.gif&w=120 did work, so I guess it's fine now... AnonMoos (talk) 22:04, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

How did you get that URL? That is different from anything that I have seen with ordinary purging (Wikipedia:Purge#For images). Is that from a purge "gadget"? Ordinary purging may be working, but it sometimes may be taking a very long time. See:

Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Category:Animations of geometry --Timeshifter (talk) 00:11, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

I got the method from old discussions at Commons:Village_pump. Sometimes it works when other things don't... AnonMoos (talk) 00:20, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

User:Sap.prabhu

As discussed,

en:User:Sap.prabhu was renamed through CHU process to en:user:Ashok_Prabhu on 2010-03-21

Their latest contribs are showing under the old name, eg http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rajapur_Saraswat_Brahmins&diff=354894261&oldid=354893894

Their older contribs have been renamed. They have about 1000 contribs combined.

The user asked me about this, so I'd like to let them know the conclusion - please let me know. If the final result is "it is broken and cannot be fixed" that's fine, but I want to provide them with an answer of some kind.

Best,  Chzz  ►  13:17, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

Apparently, it was because their Internet Explorer settings automatically logged them in as the old ID, after the name change. So, that explains why there are edits listed under both. I'm guessing that, following the CHU, new edits performed logged in as the old name will not be merged.

So - is it possible to fix this dual-history, or shall I advise the user that they'll have to live with it?

Thanks,  Chzz  ►  20:21, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Hello Werdna, Do you have any update on this topic..? Chzz is talking about my user old id Sap.prabhu. Thanks for your time. --Ashok Prabhu (Talk) 10:12, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Extension:LiquidThreads in he.wiki

hi, can LiquidThreads be enabled in he.wiki (a rtl site)? if so, is it possible to enable only in certain pages (for testing)? thanks, Yonidebest Ω Talk 18:25, 27 April 2010 (UTC)